No Normal Day

by Richardson, J.

  NO NORMAL DAY

  J. Richardson

  COPYWRIGHT

  All Rights Reserved

  Copyright © 2013 by J. Richardson

  The author holds exclusive rights to this work. Unauthorized duplication is prohibited. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  DAY ONE

  Chapter Two

  THE PLAN

  Chapter Three

  OFF BASE

  JASON and DIANNE

  Chapter Four

  TRISH and ERIC

  Chapter Five

  THE COMPOUND

  Chapter Six

  BEFORE AND AFTER

  Chapter Seven

  SURFING THE THIRD WAVE

  Chapter One

  DAY ONE

  BETH

  A smallish hand somewhat lined with age, lifted the slat of the blinds. Beth scanned as far as her eyes could reach for the hundredth time in the last few hours, she held on to hope that she would see the familiar stocky form of her husband Jack making his way home. Her heart sank as she saw the same empty view that had been there for hours. She repeated the worried search at each of the only other two windows that gave her a view of the neighborhood, nervously made sure the windows were latched and the blinds were closed. If she just glanced at the comfortable brick homes it appeared to be another bright Spring day. With a tight and queasy stomach, she fought back tears that had been building...this was no normal day.

  The sub-division was built about 30 years earlier. When it was all new it was a good five miles out from the businesses and homes of town, the suburbs. The last twenty five plus years the average size town that Beth and Jack had grown up in, had sprawled out in all directions and became a large, modern city. Not being dependent on any one big industry, the city prospered through good and bad times. It was a clean and pretty oasis in the Northeastern part of the huge state of Texas. Surrounded by lakes and woods, with mild winters and blazing hot summers, it was a popular retirement area. The medical facilities claimed to be some of the biggest in the state. There was a Junior College and a State University branch, a multitude of twentieth century chain retail stores and restaurants filled the miles of streets. There was a church or a bank it seemed on every corner. With 100,000 residents, thousands more commuting in daily, the well kept city was over flowing with housing. There were hundreds of apartment complexes, rentals and duplexes, thousands of private homes that ranged from modest to multi-million dollar. Beth and Jack's approximate two hundred home neighborhood, once a bit rural, had become surrounded by the oozing expansion.

  Only two streets entered the division, with numerous streets branched off but no throughway. That made for light traffic, mostly the residents and their visitors. During the day the school bus growled along a couple of times a day and the yard crews, trash men and repairmen that serviced the homes came in for a purpose and left when their jobs were done. It wasn't very common to hear of trouble or break-ins, in general the neighborhood was safe with a slow bustle of daily activity. The towering old hardwood trees shaded the green lawns and spring flowers bloomed in beds and hanging baskets. On this day, the sun was bright and the US flag whipped around on the pole that was mounted at the corner of the house. Most garage doors were down. Beth saw one in the next block, up and displaying the normal collection of “things we store in the garage”. As usual, some driveways had cars and trucks parked in them, a few vehicles were on the side of the narrow paved streets. A slower look revealed the plumber's van stopped at an angle to the curb and further up, a car was right in the middle of the street. A couple of houses down, the neighbor Mike's truck sat silent, halfway in the street and halfway in his paved drive. There was an unnatural quietness. The only time that there was anything even close to this stillness was when a rare snow storm hit the area, bringing down power lines, stilling the hum of traffic and muting the everyday noise of life.

  Earlier when everything first went silent, Beth had stepped outside and joined the neighbors and “day folk” scattered about. She was immediately embarrassed to realize that she couldn't remember the last name of the elderly folks across the street. She nodded to the man, asked him if he was okay? “We are fine, what the heck happened, you think?”

  Mike walked across the street to them, his head shook with disgust, “I was just leaving and suddenly my damned truck went dead,” he grumbled.

  “Well, everything is out at my house,” Beth said. They stood for a moment, looked around and noticed the stalled van and realized they were hearing no traffic whizzing by on the four lane highway, that was only about three blocks east.

  Mike jerked around and grabbed the elderly man's arm, “Mr. Carpenter, what about your wife, her oxygen?” Carpenter, Carpenter, Beth was trying to make herself remember the name.

  Mr. Carpenter's face showed obvious concern, he replied, “We have a back up generator, so we are fine for now. Thanks for asking.” The plumber waited beside his truck, he punched angrily at his cell phone. One of the yard crews was huddled up next to the long trailer filled with mowers and weed eaters and various tools, they looked confused and were speaking to each other in Spanish. The mower was stopped at the edge of the yard, one young man walked away towards the highway.

  Beth noticed several people milled around in yards and the street, some stopped and talked in small groups. A real knot of fear started to form in her stomach, “Think I'll go home now. Let me know if you need anything, Mr. Carpenter”. If she said a name sometimes it helped her remember. Mike walked back across the street and leaned on the back of his truck.

  When Beth got back inside the house she immediately checked again that the windows were all locked, the blinds down and closed. On the front door, the dead bolt lock and door lock always stayed secure, she checked them anyway. The back yard had a tall wooden privacy fence, houses were on each side, their yards enclosed with similar fences. Across the back barrier was the parking lot and several buildings belonging to the Baptist Church. She closed the tall wooden gates that blocked the opening between the house and Jack's garage/shop, slid the heavy metal latch into place. She walked back into the house, secured the back door dead bolt. Her feet padded down the short hall to the bedroom, she opened the drawer in the bed-side table and carefully picked up the revolver. There were no longer kids in the house to create worry about the numerous guns. Jack liked to say, “The good thing about the revolver, you just point and shoot”. The pistol went with her, she laid it on the dining table next to the window where she had been keeping her tense vigil.

  The streets and homes were pretty quiet now. Everyone had finally given up on figuring out what was happening and started to drift away to their homes or out of the neighborhood. She wondered if the school buses were dead, how would all the children get home? How would her grand children that lived all the way across town get to their home? This was not the time to allow herself to start panicking about that. She would not think about the “worst is happening, the S---hits-the-fan scenario” that she had been increasingly worrying about for the last several months. It would all be fine when Jack got home. He had been gone about five hours now, his destination was about twenty miles away. Beth was trying to stay calm and to distract her mind, she began to figure out how fast he could walk, how many hours would it take to make his way home. Because she and Jack always had a plan, together they could tackle anything.

  JACK

  Jack raised the garage door, backed his pick-up down the drive and headed out of the pleasant neighborhood. He waved to the neighbor, Mr. Carpenter, as he picked up his newspaper from the yard. He enjoyed the fact that he d
idn't have to get up and hurry any where these days. Unless of course, it was something real important like golf or fishing or hunting season. He smiled to himself. Most days, he could sip a couple of cups of coffee, read the newspaper and fix himself a little breakfast. Beth didn't dobreakfast, didn't eat it or cook it. Lunch was also you're on your own. He had been lucky to retire a lot earlier than most of their friends, even though most were now catching up. Since that retirement, the two of them had fell into some solid habits and rarely strayed from the routine. Supper was always at 7:00, prefaced by what they laughingly called their “cocktail hour” which stretched from 5:00 until supper. Beth unfailingly had supper on the table at 7:00. The kids...the three daughters now being age 40 to 45 but forever his “girls”...joked to their friends, “If you need something from Momma and Daddy, call between 5:00 and 7:00, the happy hours, never call during the holy dinner hour. Funny.

  The steady traffic zoomed by, flying North and South. He reached the intersection that exited his neighborhood, he intended to pull out and move with the traffic anyway. His destination was the liquor store just over the county line, a “booze run” as Beth said. The trip took about twenty minutes and they didn't sell whiskey before 10:00, so he was in no big hurry. Maybe, he would buy an extra bottle or two and some extra of Beth's wine. Her paranoia the last few months amused him, she had talked a lot about doomsday type events. She had been washing and filling the empty whiskey and big soda bottles with water. I bet we've got a hundred gallons out in the storage building. Over the years, she had never been much into storing up extra food or supplies but in recent months that closet next to the office had become flat full. She even had asked him to build her a couple of more shelves not long ago.

  Jack muttered to himself, something he did quite a lot of lately. Hey, he didn't doubt the possibility of weird things happening on this earth. The old US of A was not real popular around the world and that nut case in the East was always threatening and just crazy enough to nuke us. Things could just fall from the sky. Cheez-us, if you had ever visited Yellowstone National Park, you could see that it looked like it was ready to blow any minute! Stuff could happen. He was willing to take a few precautions, make a few preparations for disaster. He just couldn't spend a lot of time pondering on things that might happen. He laughed as he pulled up to the liquor store, just at that moment the doors were being unlocked. Another truck and a couple of cars were pulled in and parked. He nodded and said, “Good morning” to a couple that approached the door and held the door open for them. Inside, the lights flickered on, the clerk welcomed Jack, he was a familiar face. He knew just where his brand of bourbon lived and went to the shelf at the end of the third row, picked up three bottles, took them to the check-out counter and returned to get 3 bottles of Beth's favorite wine. By 10:15, he had his little haul loaded in the back seat and was headed back over the long bridge that spanned the huge lake flowing around the county line. He had barely cleared the bridge when things went way crazy up ahead. “Damn, what the hell is the problem?” Even in his rearview mirror, traffic came to a stop. One or two vehicles fishtailed a little, one or two stacked up and coasted into the car ahead. By the time he realized that his truck had died, he barely eased it off the road and onto the shoulder.

  There was an instantaneous bee hive of activity as far as Jack could see. Drivers and passengers piled out of vehicles, some cursed, some were looked around for an answer. Nearly all poked frantically at cell phones like chickens on a bug. People drifted out of businesses and houses near the highway. Gas pumps at the two or three stations were dead, no blinking signs, no brightly lit cold drink cabinets, no music floated around. There was only the clamor and wondering chatter, a couple of dogs barked in someone's back yard.

  Jack didn't have to think very long. If the lights went off and all digital display flashed, that could be a dozen causes. If the electric went black and every vehicle on the road stood dead still, that was something all together different. He needed to think, needed to take action. This was not going to get fixed in a short while, he dug around in his console and thought about what he could use. He had attended classes and got his Concealed Weapon permit about a year before. Not that he hadn't known how to use a gun since he was just a teen. Practically every young man from his generation grew up hunting. A Marine vet, he knew about guns. A legal Smith and Wesson .380 Automatic in a small canvas case was on his belt, in the truck door pocket was a .45 Automatic. There were extra ammo clips for both. The problem was he hadn't put a back pack or bag in his truck today. That .45 was heavy and what about that booze? He was not going to leave it here on the side of road to be looted. He checked out the highway behind him, he spotted the top of his golf bag in the bed of the truck. Of course, that's it, he could empty the clubs into the back seat. The bag and the wheeled caddy, he could fill with what he needed and pull it home.

  A very few folks moved back into their houses and returned to the convenience stores. Mostly they just loitered around and questioned each other, they waited...waited for help that Jack was pretty certain would not be happening anytime soon. The truck was a two seat, four door model, he manually reached around and locked the two passenger side doors, locked the driver's door as he pulled it shut behind him. Lots of assorted characters were moving around, he thought, time to get my head in this and pay attention. He went to the back, dropped the tail gate and pulled out the golf bag with clubs and the caddy. He opened the back side door and started unloading the clubs into the back floor board. “Aay mister, ya got a cell phone that's working?” The voice right behind him nearly made him piss his pants. Before he turned, wanting to bite some fool's head off, he told himself, just take it easy, these people don't have a clue what's going on and you don't want any problems with anyone. He turned to see a slim young man pushing his longish curly hair behind his ear and standing with his hands stuffed down in his jean's pocket. The kid wore a tight T-shirt, the logo on it was way beyond Jack's savvy of current trends and his scruffy tennis shoes kicked at the gravel.

  Jack let his breath out slow, “No son, I don't think anybody's cells are working”.

  “Well, that sucks!” the young man just stood there and looked around, kind of lost. “You gonna walk to the golf course, mister?” He had spotted Jacks clubs and bag.

  “No, I am going to load this bag up, put it on that caddy and head out. I have to get into town and I am pretty busy right now,” impatiently answered Jack.

  “Uh-huh,” and he still just stood there.

  Jack rubbed his hand across his stubbled jaw, scoped out the milling crowd, “Kid, who are you with?”

  “Names' Cody and I'm not with anybody. See that piece of crap little car over there?” he pointed at a faded green compact, “I was just going to get a six pack of beer and....”

  “Beer!” said Jack.

  Cody stood up straighter, “Yeah, I'm twenty one”.

  “Uh-huh”, said Jack. He looked the boy up and down and saw that uncertainty that youth often adorns all of us with. The older man just didn't have any patience for pinheads but something about Cody softened him a bit. Maybe, he reminded him a bit of his oldest grand son. “Tell you what, kid. You go on over to that convenience store and when I get packed up, I'll come over and buy you a cola or water.”

  The whiskey bottles came out of the sacks and he put them in the bottom of bag, also Beth's wine. He opened the driver's door, checked to see that no one was really paying attention. Nope, folks still milled around, held useless phones in the air and waited for the Calvary. He removed the .45 in it's soft case and the extra ammo clips for the .380 and zipped them up in the side pocket of the bag. In his console he rummaged around and found a small flashlight, some strike on anything matches, his pocket knife, some chap stick and his ever present headache pills. He also grabbed his glasses, the ones he wore when his contacts irritated him beyond his endurance and a pair of sunglasses. As much as he despised those slimey perfumey wipe things that Beth insisted on having in
the vehicles, he stuck the package in the bag. The sun was pretty bright and they might come in handy before this adventure was over. He pulled out a bag of tobacco. “I know, I know” he mumbled to himself, should have give this up a long time ago. Years ago, he had some heart problems and he had to give up the cigars but he just never was quite able to one hundred percent ditch that nicotine habit. The old compass wedged against the side of the console, that could be useful. He added the “chew” and compass to his pile in the bag. He looked once at the cell phone that mostly stayed in the truck, the one he never remembered to charge. No matter, he had this gut feeling that they were all just going to be door stops for a long time.

  He checked his cash and pulled his cap down, closed and locked the doors. One last look at his truck, if things were going down like he thought they were, locks were not going to make a tinker's dam bit of difference. He tried to mentally click off, was there anything else in this vehicle that he did not want to lose forever? He opened the truck back up, pulled up the back seat and removed the rolled up pouch of hand tools. Two of the heaviest golf clubs he poked down in the bag and dropped the pouch in, turned and locked all the doors again.

  With the loaded bag strapped to the caddy he moved towards the convenience store. Cody sat out front and smiled as he walked up. “Aay, what's your name, mister?”

  “Jack”, he pulled on the glass door of the store.

  “Well, Jack, they said nobody comes in because they don't have any power,” said the young man.

  “Oh, Bulls—t!” he pounded on the door and yelled at the guy he saw behind the counter. The man came to the door, he did not unlock it. “Hey, man, I got cash. Just bring me 3 bottles of water and a Snickers bar and some of those cheese crackers and a jerky stick...wait,” he looked at Cody, “What cha' want kid?”