And the shooting stopped.
Chapter 17
“Don’t stop!” Pete screamed, dragging Marie forward when he felt her pausing at the sudden shaking of the earth under them. “Keep running!”
Yes, the ground was still shaking under their feet, throwing them this way and that as they stumbled forward, but that same shaking had stopped the soldiers behind them in their tracks—and along with them, their bullets—and Pete wasn’t stupid enough to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.
He hadn’t thought they were going to make it out of that courtyard alive. Now, they actually had a chance at it.
“An earthquake?” she screamed back. “Now?”
“Right when we needed a distraction!” he noted, staggering to the right several steps as a piece of pavement jolted up into the sky. “Don’t complain! Just run!”
They jerked and stuttered forward, their steps unsteady on the rolling ground, and he could hear, above the rumbling of the quake, the screams and shouts in the city around them.
It had seemed like a ghost town before, courtesy of the soldiers and their insane rules. But now he could hear the people of the city shouting to each other and yelling in absolute terror. They still weren’t used to the earthquakes, he realized.
They weren’t getting into sheltered positions like they were supposed to. Instead, they were trying to run from the thing like it was a monster they could outpace.
He and Marie got through the gates of the campus and out onto the street, then, and Pete, taking advantage of the lull in bullets, made a sharp right, skidding through the deeply piled snow in the street, and headed directly for the old Boys and Girls Club building he knew was in this neighborhood.
He didn’t think many boys and girls would be using it right now. And they badly needed a place to hole up and rest for a moment while they decided what they were going to do. Preferably a place that he knew.
One he’d already mapped a way out of, just in case someone came rushing through the front door after them.
He sprinted down the street, racking his memory for how far away the building might be, and remembering vaguely a time when he’d done some sort of community Easter egg hunt that had included both the City Hall buildings and the Boys and Girls Club.
It had started at the Boys and Girls Club, he thought. And they’d headed for City Hall, where they’d been told there had been eggs and candy galore.
He’d been young enough at the time that his mother wouldn’t have let him walk any more than two blocks. Which meant the building should be—
Yes! He saw the big, two-story brick structure right in front of them, its gabled roof rising up into the gray sky, snow clinging to the red tiles. The building had never exactly fit into this area of Anchorage, which was a whole lot more utilitarian, and he would have recognized it anywhere.
“There!” he shouted, jamming his finger out toward the building. “It’ll be deserted, I’m sure of it!”
Marie didn’t answer, but he could feel her strides get longer as she fought to keep up with him. She was limping, though, and it was getting worse, and he remembered again that she’d sprained her ankle when she’d jumped over a railing before being captured by David Clyde and the prisoners he’d managed to convert into followers in Mueller. Pete wanted to shoot himself for continually forgetting about it.
Shit, she’d been going on a sprained ankle this entire time, though she’d never once complained. And now he was asking her to sprint through an earthquake toward a building that may or may not give them shelter.
The woman deserved a goddamn award. Maybe when this was all over, he’d see about finding her one.
He swerved around another big block of concrete, which looked like it had actually fallen off a roof, and then sped across the street to the building he wanted. When they arrived, they found the door unlocked—luckily—and he threw it open without bothering to think about looking around first.
There was a freaking earthquake going on, though. He was pretty sure everyone else had more important things to do than wonder where two refugees ended up.
He grabbed Marie and shoved her through the door, following her just as a group of tiles fell from the roof of the Boys and Girls Club and shattered across the stone wall behind them.
He slammed the door, grabbed Marie again, and shot across the foyer of the building, coming to rest once they were safely under the doorway into the gym.
And now, finally, the ground under them stopped shaking.
“What…” Marie huffed. “…The hell was that?”
Pete stared at her, wondering if she’d been living under a rock for the last four years. “Weren’t you at Mueller for a while? Didn’t you noticed that Alaska is now getting earthquakes on the regular?’
“I noticed. But I’ve never felt anything as big as that one,” she muttered.
Pete bent over and leaned on his knees, his breath heaving in and out of his lungs and his ribs doing their level best to stab him.
Running with broken ribs, he thought. Not such a great idea.
“It was bigger than I expected,” he replied. “Then again, I’ve never tried running through the streets during an earthquake. Maybe that’s how it always is.”
“Next time an earthquake is happening, let’s try just sitting still,” she said. “See if it changes our opinion of them.”
Pete snorted out something that might have been a laugh under different circumstances, and then turned right to business. “Right, well now that that’s over and we’re out of the military’s grasp, I’d say it’s time to figure out what we’re going to do next.”
“Go for Clyde’s warehouse,” Marie answered immediately. “It’s the only choice.”
“And the reason we’re in Anchorage in the first place,” he agreed. “Or at least the biggest one.”
“Well, since they don’t have the power we were looking for here and the military thing ended up being a bust, I’d say it’s the only reason, at this point,” Marie replied.
Another huff of a laugh from Pete. “Right. The only reason. Guess that means we’d better figure out how to get there. Near the airfield, right?”
He turned to the door, scowling and trying to remember how to get there from here. He’d never had much to do with the airfield, and didn’t have a good grasp of the geography of that area of town, but if he could just grab onto the right memory…
“Think this might come in handy?” Marie asked, yanking something out of the small bag she was carrying with her.
She held it up, grinning, and Pete saw that it was a folded packet.
Grabbing it, he opened it up and saw a map of the city and its surrounding areas.
“A map?” he asked, surprised. He looked up at her, frowning. “Where the hell did you get this?”
She shrugged, though she was obviously proud of herself. “It’s the one I found in the Hummer. Figured it might come in handy once we were in the city. Of course, I didn’t know we were going to be kidnapped by the military before we got to use it.”
“Never occurred to me, either,” Pete said, turning his face back to the map and holding it up to the light. He took some time to figure out exactly where they were—easier once he remembered that they were near City Hall, which was clearly marked on the map—and then ran his gaze over the map until he found the airfield.
“All the way on the other side of town,” he murmured.
No wonder he hadn’t been able to pin it down in his memory. He’d never gone to that side of town. It had seemed boring when he was young, and he hadn’t had any business over there when he was older.
Without this map—without Marie’s quick thinking—they never would have found it.
“Going to be a long walk,” he said quickly. “We’d best get started.”
He headed back toward the door they’d entered through, his eyes on the map again as he tried to sort out the best way to get to Merrill Field Airport.
“And what are w
e going to do when we get there?” Marie asked, hurrying along after him. “We don’t exactly have an address.”
Now this, he had an answer for. “It’s a big district, but everything in Anchorage is precious. Nothing goes to waste up here. So you’ve got to count on it being pretty well-used,” he said quickly. “There are going to be lots of warehouses, since this is a shipping hub, and I’m betting almost all of them belong to one big company or another. They’ll have labels on them. Clyde’s won’t. We’re looking for a smaller warehouse that doesn’t belong to any name we know. One that’s unmarked. It should stick out like a sore thumb.”
She put a hand out and yanked him to a stop. “How the hell do you know that?” she asked, frowning.
He gave her a quick, cocky grin. “Didn’t I tell you? I used to live here. I know a lot of Anchorage like the back of my hand, and what I don’t know well, I still know at least a little bit about.”
She pushed her lips out at him. “Pete, if we’re going to be partners, the first thing you’re going to have to do is stop keeping things like that from me.”
He reached out, grabbed her hand, and then turned for the door again. “Marie, if I told you everything about myself, I’m afraid you wouldn’t want to stick around with me anymore. Besides, what’s the fun of just exposing all my secrets? I have to keep at least some of them for you to find out later. It keeps you on your toes.”
They ran for the door, and the world outside—where, he hoped, they’d have an easy time finding the warehouse that Clyde had supposedly packed full of EMP-proof goods.
He didn’t know why the man would have kept stuff like that, but he was hoping to God that his acolyte hadn’t been lying when he’d said there was a warehouse full of goods. Because he and Marie needed those goods, and he was starting to think that their lives might actually be depending on them.
Of course, the good luck of having figured out how to get to the warehouses, and the further good luck of Pete himself being able to predict that they’d find the right one just by looking at which warehouses were actually marked and which ones weren’t, didn’t last long.
Because the moment they stepped back out of the Boys and Girls Club, the ground started rolling again. And this time, it felt like it was shaking a whole lot harder than it had before.
Chapter 18
Pete’s first thought was that they needed to get back into the building, where they could find shelter.
His second was that he’d spent enough time on the West Coast, where earthquakes were the norm, to know that Anchorage hadn’t been built for this sort of action. Those buildings might look all sorts of stable and safe, but that didn’t mean they were.
The truth was, they were probably the opposite. Because they’d been built to stand up to snow falling and weighing heavily on their roofs.
Not the ground rolling out from underneath them.
He grabbed Marie, slid his arm around her shoulders to keep her as stable as possible, and dashed out into the street instead, dragging her away from the building behind them while she literally kicked and screamed.
“What are we doing?” she shouted, her voice breaking hard in the chaos that now surrounded them. “Aren’t you supposed to take shelter when there’s an earthquake? Duck and cover or something like that?”
Pete did duck—lower over his feet as he ran, tucking her into his body and forcing her to duck as well, to try to keep them both safe from the debris already falling into the street around them.
“That only works if that shelter is actually shelter!” he shouted back. “Run!”
They hit the middle of the street and Pete thought about taking shelter right there, out in the open. This was an area of town where most of the buildings were one or two stories, max. No high-rises to do things like tip over. They might be safe here.
But roughly three seconds later, the Boys and Girls Club gave in to the earth acting like an enormous rattle and collapsed, the entire thing sounding like it went down in one crashing explosion. Pete and Marie were enveloped in the dust and debris of what had once been the building, pieces of tile and plaster flying past them as the cloud of dust swallowed them whole.
Right. That answered that question, then. Running it was.
Pete ducked further over his feet and ran for all he was worth, dashing through the dust and between the now-rocking buildings and praying that they wouldn’t fall right as he and Marie were passing them. Around them, he could see roofs falling off buildings, porticos collapsing. The world was literally falling down.
The sky as well, as far as he knew. At this point, he wouldn’t have been fucking surprised. He also wouldn’t have been surprised to find himself and Marie right in the fucking middle of it. Together, they seemed to be magnets for trouble.
Trouble no one had ever seen coming.
“Where are we going?” Marie asked, coughing and running and squeezing up against him, her hands over her head and her face to the ground.
“There’s a large field at the end of this road!” he shouted back. “Open. No buildings. Safe.”
“Safe,” she gasped, “sounds awfully good.”
Suddenly, though, their path was blocked by a building—or what was left of a building—actually sliding into the street, and Pete recognized what had been the local carousel. Colorful horses littered the road now, surrounded by the ruins of the brick building that had housed them, and Pete had one second to think about how weird this all was before his brain turned to figuring out how to get the hell through it.
Luckily, carousel horses lying across the street are a whole lot easier to get around than an entire building, and he started scrambling over the bricks and through the horses, counting on Marie to follow him. Over a pile of bricks. Dodge a couple of horses. Skip around what looked like it had once been the engine of the thing. Brace against more earth-shaking action. Slog through some especially deep snow. Dodge more bricks.
They got through it without anything else going wrong, somehow, and then there was open road in front of them. Yes, the ground was still shaking. But he could see the field he had in mind for shelter. And that felt a whole lot like salvation.
He reached back and grabbed Marie’s hand, counting on her to be right behind him—which she somehow was. They sprinted forward, coughing in the dust and dodging the random pieces of plaster that were still coming down around them, and after what felt like five years, Pete finally felt the change from snow on asphalt to snow on grass under his feet. He pulled Marie right to what he judged to be the middle of it—at least two hundred feet from the end of the street and the last building—and then pushed her down into a crouch.
Then, doing what he’d always known he’d do in a disaster, even if he didn’t like it, he covered her body with his own.
Now, when it came to buildings raining down on them, this wasn’t going to do much good. If they were going to get crushed by a building, it would crush her just as easily through his body as it would have without him here. But being out in the open like they were, he had a better chance of protecting her from the random shit that might be falling down.
“What the hell is going on up here?” she gasped from underneath him. “I didn’t think Alaska got earthquakes.”
“Not like this,” Pete answered, his mouth close to her ear, his eyes on the collapsing city. “That’s why the buildings are all falling. They’re not built to sway with a moving earth, like they are down on the West Coast. But this isn’t new. It’s why I was up here in the first place. Clean-up duty in Anchorage.”
“The world,” she said sharply, “has gone mad.”
“Sure has. And I suspect these earthquakes have more than a little bit to do with that weather issue that caused the blackout.”
She didn’t answer him. She didn’t really have to. Because there was no answer for the world to have tipped right onto its ear, the way it had.
At that point, though, the earth finally stopped shaking, and Pete was able to start breathing a
gain. They’d made it. Somehow, against all the odds, they’d made it through the quake. At least that one.
He’d been through enough of these now to realize that there was probably another one on the way, so they were definitely going to stay in this field for a little while, just to make sure they weren’t in the path of any falling buildings. But at least they’d made it through that quake. Safe and relatively unscathed.
He blew a slow breath out, thanking the universe for that much.
And that was when the screaming started.
Chapter 19
Pete almost got up and started running toward the noise before giving it two seconds of thought, his muscles tensing in readiness for jumping up and sprinting back toward the city. Or whatever was left of it.
People were screaming, and his entire body was responding, everything in him telling him to go help.
And this, too, was something he should have expected of himself. This need to play the hero every time the opportunity fucking arose. The need to save other people, even when he didn’t know them and shouldn’t have given one single shit about whether they lived or died.
He was a hero, dammit.
He’d just never expected that from himself, and it sort of pissed him off that it was suddenly so obvious—and so driving. Where in the world had it come from, to start with? Sure, he’d joined the National Guard, but that hadn’t been because he wanted to save people. It had been because he didn’t know what else to do with his life. He’d needed direction, and he’d figured he might as well get it from someone who knew what the hell they were talking about. Maybe that way he’d end up in a place that was actually worthwhile.
Instead, he’d ended up in Mueller. Where he’d found Marie and stumbled upon a plot and experienced the biggest natural disaster ever, which had all led him to right here and right now.
Crouching in a fucking field, covering Marie’s body with his own and getting ready to run hellbent for leather toward whoever was screaming to try to save them.
Stone Cold Fear | Book 3 | Ice Burn Page 10
