Riker's Apocalypse (Book 1): The Promise

by Chesser, Shawn

  She turned back to the computer and pulled up the CHASE bank home page. “What’s your login and password?”

  “I just call and use the automated thingy.”

  “Really, Lee? I bet you still write checks at the grocery store.”

  “Chase gives me free checking,” he said sheepishly.

  “Tell you what. So as to keep the suspense, you get dressed and go outside and check with your phone. While you’re out there, I’ll check mine on the computer. We’ll do it at the same time and then compare notes.”

  “Mom would approve.” Riker shrugged on his sweatshirt and donned his cap.

  From across the room there came a snort. Then the box springs squeaked and Steve-O sat bolt upright with a where the hell am I look on his face.

  “Morning, Steve-O. Want some coffee?”

  Steve-O grunted something that sounded like yes, swung his legs off the bed, scooped his clothes up off the chair, and charged into the bathroom.

  “Clearly, our friend Steve-O is not a morning person,” quipped Riker. Forgoing the fresh underwear and socks, he pulled on his jeans and cinched the belt tight. Under Tara’s watchful eye, he slipped his good wheel into his boot and laced it tight. Next, he smoothed out the liner meant to keep chafing on the residual limb inside the carbon fiber socket to a minimum, maneuvered the prosthesis into place, and stood on it to achieve suction. After making sure the bionic was going nowhere barring an unforeseen Chuck Norris leg sweep, he leaned over and tightened the laces on the boot.

  Tara sat forward in the chair. “Why bother with the laces?”

  “Because I won’t feel it if the boot starts working loose. You think getting a flat tire where you can feel the shoe coming off your heel is bad, try it happening when you can’t. Results in me falling on my face, usually. Doing this daily is one of the first tricks I learned after the long rehab process.”

  The shower cut on. Then the singing commenced. And it was damn good. Something by Willy Nelson about mommas and letting their babies to grow up to be cowboys. Fitting, thought Riker as he edged past Tara and slipped out the front door.

  Inside, Tara reopened the Edge browser and pulled up her bank’s website. A few keystrokes later she was in and clicking a dropdown menu. She paused, letting the white arrow hover over the Checking Balance option for a three-count. Finally, she drew a deep breath and brought her finger down on the touch pad.

  Outside, Riker was shivering against the morning chill. The neon No Vacancy sign was casting an eerie red pool on the damp parking lot entrance. From a distance it looked like lava encroaching on the office door. Sure would suck to die doing that job, thought Riker as he flipped open his phone and thumbed it on.

  Casting a furtive glance at the seam in the blinds, he saw Tara at the laptop. As he looked to the keypad, from the corner of his eye he saw her go rigid and an expression he couldn’t decipher ghosted across her face.

  Riker dialed up his bank. Once the feminine robotic voice answered and started rattling off the prompts, he thumbed in his PIN and waited to hear what digit on the keypad he needed to press to let him hear his checking balance.

  “Come on, come on,” he said aloud as the tinny voice droned on.

  Through the curtain seam he spied Tara cradling her face in her hands. Her eyes were now wide open, the image from the computer screen reflecting off of them.

  For your checking balance, press six, said the bank’s unpaid help.

  Riker thumbed the appropriate key, replaced the phone to his ear, and turned toward the window.

  The robot voice emanating from the phone’s earpiece recited the balance to Riker then offered some options. Hand shaking, he took the phone from his ear and punched the star key to listen to his balance again.

  As he stood there with the phone to his ear and heard the balance repeated, he saw his own reflection in the window to his fore. And when he heard the amount in his ear, he witnessed an expression identical to the one that had crossed Tara’s face appear on his and stay there for a beat.

  Riker stood there for a moment with a million thoughts racing through his mind. Heart racing, he dug his wallet out and retrieved the dog-eared business card from inside. Holding the card in one hand, he punched in the number on the back, area code first.

  A person picked up on the other end after two rings and with a pronounced drawl said, “Whatcha need?”

  Riker held a lengthy conversation with the man, dropping somewhere in the middle that Jack “Chaos” Ross had given him the card and urged him to call if he needed anything. After going over times and places related to the surprise Riker was setting into motion, he accepted the price quoted and memorized a phone number recited to him by the voice on the other end. Finally, to ensure everything would go smoothly, Riker paid in advance with his check card and then greased the skids by adding an extra thousand-dollar tip on top of the included gratuity.

  I’ve always wanted to be able do that, thought Riker as he closed his phone slowly and slipped it into his pocket. Experiencing a strange out-of-body kind of feeling, all the while fighting the urge to belt out a war whoop, he pushed through the door, eyes ahead and mouth shut, and closed it covertly behind him.

  Riker met Tara’s gaze immediately. She was standing between the bed and table with a pinch-me look of astonishment parked on her face.

  He blinked first.

  Then the door to the bathroom swung outward and a fully dressed Steve-O broke the plane amidst a roiling cloud of steam.

  Tara screamed. Not a shred of terror in it.

  Near simultaneously, Riker let go a throaty, Tarzan-like howl complete with a few chest thumps.

  Ala Buckwheat in nearly every Little Rascals episode, Steve-O’s eyes bugged from his skull and a 7.0 tremor transited his body head to toe, causing him to drop an armful of underclothes and the Stetson to slide off his head. “Buttholes,” he blurted. Then, softer, he said, “You scared the bejeezus out of me.”

  In unison, Tara and Riker faced Steve-O and said, “Swear cup.”

  Chapter 59

  “You first,” prompted Riker.

  “Six zeros,” replied Tara.

  Riker looked at the ceiling, a smile creasing his face. “Me, too,” he said, leveling his gaze on her. “What number is in front of yours?”

  She looked him in the eye and held contact.

  Having calmed down, Steve-O retrieved his hat from the floor and snugged it back on his head. He stared at them in the mirror as he straightened and leveled the brim. “What’s wrong with you two?” he finally asked. “You look like crazy people. Or cousins about to kiss.”

  Suppressing a smile, Riker said, “You mean kissing cousins, right?”

  “No, Lee. I say what I mean and mean what I say.” He turned from the mirror and fixed them with those watery blue eyes. “Quit breaking my balls.”

  Hands up in mock surrender, Riker said, “That was not my intention.” Changing the subject, he asked, “Where to for breakfast?”

  Tara looked a question at Riker.

  He held up both hands, made fists, then flashed them open and closed twice.

  “Twenty?” mouthed Tara.

  Shaking his head, Riker smiled and said, “I was breaking your balls.” He revised his count by holding up both hands palms facing her and slowly making a peace sign with one of them.

  “Seven?”

  He nodded.

  A look of relief flashed across Tara’s features. “Me too,” she said. “I was hoping Mom wouldn’t play favorites with one of us. Drive a wedge from the grave.”

  “She already has,” replied Riker.

  Tara looked to Riker’s bag. “Does that mean you’re going to tell me where we’re going today? Remove the wedge, so to speak.”

  “It doesn’t bother me that you don’t know.”

  “You little shit.”

  “Lee is not little,” remarked Steve-O. “I bet he can touch the ceiling with both hands.”

  Riker reached up and placed both
palms flat on the ceiling. “Steve-O wins. Pay up, Sis.”

  Tara was already packing up the computer. Finished stowing the cables in the box, she policed up the trash and tossed it into the wastebasket. She donned her new coat, trapped the computer box under one arm, and scooped a stack of envelopes off the table. They all bulged slightly and bore a couple of bucks worth of Forever Stamps emblazoned with Old Glory.

  Riker shouldered the bag containing the urn and gun and plucked the key fob off the dresser top. Pausing by the door, he asked, “What’s with the outgoing mail?”

  “I downloaded some of the footage from the Deep Web and copied it and the roadblock attack video from my phone onto six thumb drives.” She held up the uneven stack of envelopes. “These are getting mailed to a number of different news outlets.”

  “Why not just post it on social media? Cut out the middleman?”

  “I tried.”

  “Denied?”

  She nodded.

  “I’m starving,” said Steve-O. “Can we go?”

  Tara tore the tags from a pair of all-black Columbia jackets and passed them to Riker. “Double XL is yours. Steve-O gets the medium.”

  “Perfect color,” noted Riker.

  “Perfect color,” declared Steve-O. “Thank you, Tara.”

  “Figured it would float both your boats. You’re welcome.”

  Room 13 was a mess when they left. So Tara turned back, peeled a hundred from the diminishing wad in her pocket, and flipped it onto the table before closing the door behind her.

  At Steve-O’s behest, they hit a fast food drive-thru and ordered breakfast sandwiches.

  Protesting on the grounds of cruel and unusual punishment, Riker decided to fast until they stopped for lunch.

  At the first window Riker paid the teenage worker and was told to pass the second window and pull into the parking spot designated specifically for customers waiting on drive-thru orders to be filled. When the Suburban came to a halt, Tara said, “Be right back,” and jumped from the truck. Envelopes containing the thumb drives tucked under one arm, she dashed across the wet parking lot to a big blue U.S. Postal Service mailbox on a nearby corner and dropped them inside.

  As Riker sat there waiting for Tara to return, he caught sight of the fast food joint’s flagpole. Old Glory was at half-staff and popping and snapping before a glass cube home to a pit of colorful balls and two stories of playground equipment. The sight of a kid moving between platforms in a see-through tube reminded him of a gerbil scurrying through a Habitrail.

  Tara’s return coincided with the food being delivered to Riker’s window. A beat later he was pulling from the lot and hanging a right with the noise of wrappers crinkling and lips smacking filling the cab.

  Traffic was lighter than Riker figured it would be as they left South Akron. Much lighter than it should have been on a Monday during rush hour, he noted, as he circumvented the downtown core by sticking to Interstate 76 east.

  I-76 became I-80 forty miles east of Akron. After transiting ten more miles of laser-straight freeway, Riker exited at Girard and stopped at a Shell station visible from the tangle of elevated ramps where I-80 merged with Ohio State Route 11.

  Figuring that if the MIBs were chasing them, their Monday morning would have already started with a broken motel door, cordite-reeking gun barrels poking in their faces, and culminated with biting zip ties being cinched around their wrists, Riker threw caution to the wind and paid for a tank of gas, a six pack of Diet Coke, and eight pieces of greasy fried chicken with his debit card.

  As soon as Riker returned to the rig, Tara pulled a pair of drumsticks and a wing from the sack. She passed a leg to Steve-O, then dangled the other one in front of her brother. “You didn’t ask for my prepaid. You’re not worried about us being followed anymore?”

  He took the leg and shook his head. “The quarantine is blown up. You watched more videos than me. What’s your assessment of the situation?”

  “I want to get as far away as possible.” Mimicking Riker, in a deep voice, she added, “That’s my assessment of the situation.”

  Riker nodded agreeably. As he devoured the savory skin and substantial chunks of dark meat from the leg, he imagined a map of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio. On the map he plotted the cities and townships from which the Deep Web videos shot over the last forty-eight hours had emerged.

  It was one hell of a large footprint.

  Thousands of square miles, he surmised, sucking the last morsels of flesh from the drumstick. Needles in a haystack were what he and Tara and Steve-O amounted to. And it heartened him.

  Addressing Riker, Steve-O said, “Yesterday, you said I would be able to see Lake Erie from the road. Where is it?”

  Riker tossed the bone in the bag. He reversed from the parking spot and nosed them onto the street and toward the runout feeding the Route 11 on-ramp. Once he merged in behind a sleek red import and accelerated to make room for the big rig coming up fast on the Suburban’s bumper, he leaned onto the center console and pointed out over the hood. “Somewhere beyond those clouds is the lake, Steve-O.”

  Tara tossed the remnants of the wing in the bag and licked the grease from her fingers. “Let me see what the navigation thingy has to say.” Tapping lightly on the touchscreen, she zoomed the map out and manipulated the image until the pixelated length of SR-11 North stretching from Girard to the lake’s southern shore was centered on the display. At the bottom, Girard was a tan irregular shape crisscrossed by a mishmash of streets and freeways. A horizontal blue blob representing Lake Erie dominated the top edge of the rectangular display.

  SR-11 was a straight run between the two for most of the way until it took a gradual jog left and merged with I-90 a couple of miles before reaching the Great Lake.

  After comparing the green line with the inches-to-miles conversion key, Tara said, “One inch equals twenty-five miles. Looks like two inches of Route 11 to me.” She regarded Riker and asked him for his take.

  A quick glance at the navigation screen had Riker agreeing with her assessment.

  “Looks like fifty miles or so, Steve-O,” Tara said as she leaned over the console and noted the needle was pegged on seventy-five. After quickly working the equation in her head, she added, “We should see Erie filling up the windshield in about forty minutes.”

  “Can’t wait,” replied Steve-O. He rolled the chicken bone up in his McMuffin wrapper and fished the last sandwich from the bag. He held the item up so Riker could see it. “You going to eat this?” he asked.

  Riker took another leg from the bag. “I’m good.”

  ***

  Tara’s estimate of forty minutes didn’t hold true. An hour had slipped into the past by the time they came upon a road sign with three different entries listed one atop the other.

  Astabula 8 and a white reflective arrow pointing straight capped off the stack. Below that was Cleveland 60 and a white left-turn arrow with the blue and red I-90 W shield next to it. The bottom entry read Erie, Pennsylvania 50. Beside it was a white right-turn arrow and the same blue and red shield labeled I-90 E.

  Riker pointed to the map scrolling slowly top to bottom on the navigation screen and let Tara know they were going east at the cloverleaf a few miles north of them.

  “What landmark is east of there?” said Tara in a voice that made Riker think of someone mulling over a geography question on a Trivial Pursuit card.

  “Mum’s the word. Besides, what makes you certain we’re going to continue east?”

  “Bastard,” she said playfully.

  Riker reached across and patted the bag on the floor by Tara’s feet. “Mom would disagree with that statement.”

  Tara said nothing to that. She turned her attention to the colorful landscape outside her window. Fall was in full swing here, that was for sure. The groves of trees scrolling by off to the right were ablaze in yellows and reds. Closer in, the expanse of grass flanking the freeway was beaten down by recent rains and home to shimmering pools of standing wat
er.

  ***

  Ninety seconds after passing the ODOT sign, Mother Nature made a liar out of Riker. Though they were within spitting distance of Lake Erie and the series of piers Astabula was known for when they came upon the city limit, all that was visible to the north from the cloverleaf’s elevated ramp was an impenetrable veil of clouds and sheeting rain.

  Riker said, “I lied to you yesterday, Steve-O. I’m no weatherman. Hope you find it within yourself to forgive me.” The last part was delivered in a joking manner as he flicked on the wipers and prepared for the merge with I-90 East.

  “No problem,” said Steve-O. “The lake isn’t going anywhere.”

  Chapter 60

  The convoy of desert-tan and army-green vehicles stretched for as far back as Riker could see. Behind the half-dozen Ohio National Guard Humvees that had suddenly materialized in the Suburban’s blind spot as he steered from the ramp and onto I-90 were at least a dozen tractor trailers hauling Jersey barriers, mobile electronic signage, boxy MRAPs, Humvees configured for command and control, and pieces of tracked armor Riker recognized as Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Behind the loaded-down tractor trailer rigs was a trio of tan, low-slung multi-wheeled vehicles. Even viewed in the tiny side mirror and through eyes charting way less than 20/20, Riker had them pegged as Oshkosh Defense fuel servicing trucks.

  “More Army trucks,” said Steve-O as he buzzed his window half of the way down and flashed the soldiers staring back at him a double thumbs up.

  “So-called Operation Romeo Victor is in full swing on day two,” proffered Riker. “I know exactly where this element is going, and from the looks of the fuel trucks bringing up the rear, they’re definitely planning on an extended mission profile.” Out of the corner of his eye Riker saw a grim-faced soldier steal a glance at him, then promptly return his attention to the road ahead.

  First impressions being what they are—everything in Riker’s opinion—he concluded the young twenty-something was scared shitless and carrying some kind of an unwanted responsibility on his wide shoulders.