THE COLLAPSE: Seeking Refuge

by Frank Kaminski

  Carrie witnessed Hal catch up to Julia and Sydney on their way to the gate. They were both carrying Dutch oven sized pots. “Hmmm, I guess they weren’t lying about the food. At least that part of their story was true,” Carrie thought as she snuck as close as she could to the group without being seen and hid behind a tree. Carrie was a decent-sized woman, broad and muscular, so the tree she chose needed to accommodate her accordingly.

  Carrie eavesdropped as the group argued. She heard Hal demand an answer as to where the women had been all afternoon. She even heard her own name being dropped, as Hal told them that he knew exactly what time Dakota was left at site 72.

  Julia screamed at him, “You don’t appreciate anything I fucking do for you!”

  Sydney chimed in, too, saying, “Do you know how long it takes to cook up this much rice? Stop being an idiot, Hal!”

  The soap opera in the middle of the road was getting good, and Carrie was savoring each moment. But then a series of gunshots at the bridge had to go and ruin it! She watched the group turn silent as they listened to the explosions, then Hal ordered the women to return to their campsites. He removed a pistol that was lodged between his jeans and his back, then bustled toward the gate.

  “Shit! Those whores are going to see me now!” Carrie thought as the women approached her direction with their Dutch ovens in hand. So, she did the only responsible thing she could do at that moment, and bounded out from behind the tree and ran past the women in the same direction as Hal.

  Sydney had yelled, “What the fuck is this bitch doing here?” as Carrie’s powerful frame propelled her forward and past the two surprised women. They turned their heads and made ugly faces at the nurse as she skirted between them, but Carrie refused to give them the pleasure of an acknowledgment. She knew that if there were any injuries at the bridge, a vehicle would be on its way down at any second, and she intended on meeting it en route.

  *****

  Tarra was thinking fast and gathering up what she thought would be necessary to patch up the wounded man when she heard the sound of an engine approaching in the distance. Engine sounds were crystal clear during The Collapse, as vehicles were rarely used. Nobody wanted to waste their precious fuel when walking would suffice. But the sound of the truck and the consumption of the fuel was necessary in this case, it was an emergency!

  Tarra had her hands full of medical equipment when she heard the Kays yelling outside.

  “Dakota, get back here!” one yelled. “Get back here, now! Get away from the road!”

  Tarra’s heart leapt into her throat and her eyes popped opened wide with alarm. The worst dread she had felt in a long time settled over her like a dark cloud. The kid had probably heard the truck approaching and went into the road to check it out. His mother had never taught him any better. The sound of the truck was even closer now, so Tarra had no choice but to drop everything she was carrying and plummet out of the trailer. She looked toward the sound of the engine, which was much closer now, and saw a white Chevy S-10 screaming around the corner toward Carrie’s site, and, goddamnit, Dakota was in the middle of the road and walking toward the sound! Would the driver see him in time? Unlikely, since the driver would be traveling as fast as he possibly could. One of his buddies was shot!

  Tarra needed to grab the boy. She went forward, but felt as though she was running in slow motion as she sprinted to the child. Her thigh muscles burned with each step as she launched herself closer to the child. She prayed that she would make it in time, “Dear lord, please let me get to him in time, PLEASE!”

  Just as the truck finished the corner and was yards from the boy, Tarra felt as if she was going to make it. She dived head first, as if sliding into home plate during a playoff baseball game, and while airborne, managed to grasp a handful of the boy’s jacket as she rolled to the side of the road, forcefully jerking him with her.

  The man driving the truck had spotted Tarra running toward the boy in the road and slammed on the brakes. The tires screeched and skidded on the dusty, pine-needle covered pavement as the truck hurtled past Tarra and the boy laying on the side of the road.

  Carrie had been riding in the bed of the truck. She had ripped off the injured man’s shirt and was applying pressure to the wounds with the shreds when the driver hit the brakes. She was catapulted forward, and her head hit the truck’s rear glass pane with enough force to shatter it completely as she damn near entered the cab of the truck with her entire body.

  The driver and the other man who had been escorting the wounded man to Carrie’s site instantly thought that Carrie was dead. She had hit that glass wayyyy too hard. Tarra scurried to the rear of the truck and saw Carrie’s body half-in, half-out of the truck. She cursed at herself, “This is all my fucking fault! How could I have let this happen?”

  The man that had been riding in the back of the truck yelled, “Carrie! Are you alright?”

  But…he was too afraid to touch the body. The driver exited the truck and frantically asked Tarra, “What should we do now?”

  Tarra began to think. Now, there were two injuries, possibly one of them a fatality. Maybe even three injuries, since Dakota was bawling on the side of the road in the fetal position. Which one does a medical assistant attend to first? The bleeding gunshot victim or the child? What if Carrie was still alive? With a serious head or neck injury as well? What if she actually was dead? Then what? Think, Tarra, THINK!

  Suddenly, to everyone’s absolute astonishment, Carrie’s arms began to move. She pushed herself out of the truck and shook the fragments of safety glass out of her short hair as she stood up. Even as blood trickled down the left side of her face, she pointed towards her RV and hollered, “Get him to my trailer, now!”

  *****

  Fish had retrieved Pharaoh from site 199 and was walking along the forest trail toward the beach when he heard the shots. He knew they didn’t come from the beach, because they would have been much louder. Must have been somewhere else, probably the bridge or the main gate.

  Pharaoh had looked at Fish with confused yet enthusiastic eyes after the gunshots had ceased, as if to say, “Master, I have no idea where those shots just occurred, but I would absolutely LOVE to go find out!”

  Fish was much too far away from the bridge or the gate to make any difference, it would take him too long to get there, especially on foot. He did know, however, that Alexis had a radio. The same radio that would be passed on to him once he began his night shift on the beach. He decided to hustle over to the beach to find Alexis. She could inform him of what was going on.

  “Come on, Pharaoh! Let’s double-time it, soldier!” Fish bellowed to the dog as he picked up his pace and began to jog down the trail.

  Pharaoh happily obeyed.

  *****

  Tarra had asked Carrie if she required any assistance with the gunshot patient as the two men assisted him into the RV, but Carrie declined. Instead, she ordered Tarra to check on the crying little boy on the side of the road. The Kays were crying too. What they had witnessed had been too much for them. Plus, they both knew that they were in serious trouble for letting Dakota wander away like he did.

  Tarra picked the boy up from the road. He only had a few scratches and scrapes from the accident, nothing else appeared to be wrong. He did, however, have a fresh red raspberry on the right side of his forehead. His mother would see it and freak out. “Oh, great…that’s wonderful. Just one more thing to add to an already-shitty afternoon,” Tarra muttered to herself.

  Tarra took Dakota over to the picnic table and screamed at her daughters, “I’m SO mad at you two right now!”

  She sat the boy down and then continued to scold the cowering Kays, “Why in the hell did you let him walk away from the table? I asked you to do one simple thing, and that was it! One simple thing!”

  “I’m sorry, mommy!” Katrina bawled. The other one was crying too hard to say anything.

  “Also, why didn’t you grab him and bring him back to the table after he walked away?”
Tarra yelled, demanding an answer. Neither of the Kays replied. Tarra boomed at them, “Look at me! Why? Answer me!”

  Katrina cried out, “Because you told us not to leave the table under any circuma-stances.”

  Tarra promptly felt like a horse’s ass. She remembered that she did yell at her girls not to leave the table under any circumstances. They were just following her orders. But Tarra felt as though they should have had more common sense than that. Six year olds should know better than to allow a little boy to wander into a road, shouldn’t they? And why did they let him walk away from the table in the first place?

  The driver of the truck walked over and said to Tarra, “C’mon, mom. I think everyone’s had a rough day, including them.”

  Tarra looked at the driver and wanted to bark at him to mind his own damn business, but the guy was right. He was just trying to help. Instead, she took a deep breath and decided to ask him about what happened on the bridge.

  The man explained that an SUV had approached, but stopped about a tenth of a mile away from the bridge. It just sat there, doing nothing. The men thought that the SUV was going to turn around and head back to Oak Harbor, but it didn’t. After a few moments, it barreled toward the bridge, and shooters emerged from the passenger side and the window behind the driver. One of them had a pistol, the other had some type of automatic firearm with an extremely high cyclic rate, like an Uzi. The man said he’d never seen a gun like that before, except on TV. He said that everyone on the bridge was forced to take cover. Some of them managed to get a few shots off before the huge SUV smashed through the two-car roadblock. It was unfortunate that the SUV had gotten away, and that Kip Fingers (the gunshot victim) had to get hurt.

  The man also told Tarra that he hoped the SUV full of bad people wasn’t heading to the Bowman camp across the bay.

  Chapter 6

  After Gerty disappeared with Cynthia behind the tarps of the provisions area, Stephen used the opportunity to ask Victor what he knew about the outside world.

  Victor exclaimed, “I knew it! That’s why you really came here, isn’t it? You’re a news junkie, ain’t ya?”

  Stephen was guilty as charged, and happily admitted that he was. Victor walked him back over to his Land Rover as he spoke.

  “You want the good news or the bad news first, son?” Victor asked.

  “Bad first, why not?” Stephen replied, anxious to hear about any news.

  “I’ll summarize it for you. The country’s fucked. Not just us, either. I’ve heard reports that after the shit hit the fan in the United States, a whole laundry list of countries including the big bad ones; Russia, China and North Korea tried to use the same type of oppression that our government attempted here. Needless to say, it didn’t work over there, either. They should have known better,” Victor stated.

  Stephen nodded in agreement. He was actually somewhat happy that those “big bad ones” were out of commission. He said to Victor, “I guess that’s good, right?”

  “Were you worried about them attacking us?” Victor asked.

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “Well, don’t be. The way I see it is like this; nobody wants to mess with a chaotic, disorderly, heavily armed and pissed off populace such as the United States right now. Especially with natural land barriers on both the eastern and western sides of the country, hell, it would be a hundred times worse than Afghanistan for any country that tried to invade,” Victor said with a chuckle.

  “Good point,” Stephen agreed.

  “I did speak with a man down in Oregon that said he saw a freighter not far off the coast with some Asian words written on the side of it. He wasn’t sure what country it was from. Smaller boats were dragging logs out to the freighter. He said that after a while, some of the citizens had attacked the smaller boats as they came ashore, and the freighter disappeared.”

  “Ah, I get it. They were trying to rape us of our natural resources while our guard was down.”

  “Indeed, son. Indeed. Everyone I manage to speak with has a different story to tell. Mostly I hear about how devastated the major cities are. Lots of people are using their radios to call for help as their families dehydrate or starve to death. It’s sad. Sometimes I just turn the radio to a different frequency. I know it’s cold, but what the hell I am supposed to do about someone starving to death in Oklahoma or Michigan?” Victor shrugged and then changed the subject, “Want to hear the good news?”

  “Of course!” Stephen replied.

  “Planting season is here. Communities just like this one are popping up all over the United States. People are banding together to survive. Not just to consolidate food sources and planting efforts, but for protection as well. There are only two types of people left alive, now. Good guys and bad guys. We’re the good guys, son. Don’t you forget that!”

  “That is correct,” Stephen agreed.

  “I think we’re rather lucky, here at The Park,” Victor began, “we’ll never run out of clean, drinkable water, and we have the lake and the ocean to provide us with something to eat.”

  Stephen nodded vigorously as if he totally agreed with Victor’s synopsis. He was right, they were rather lucky to be there. The Park was a sanctuary, it was protected by well-organized, armed sentries. It also had the very thick wall of trees to provide protection and privacy from the outside world.

  Stephen kept those comforting thoughts in his head until he heard the gunshots. The same gunshots that would almost cost a man to lose his arm in Carrie’s RV.

  *****

  As Fish and Pharaoh emerged from the forest trail and onto the beach to find Alexis, they came across a kid sitting on a large piece of driftwood. He appeared lonely and aloof, but brightened up once he had spotted Fish and the dog. The kid had been messing around with a Wrist Rocket, which is a powerful slingshot if you’ve never heard of one before.

  Fish’s curiosity got the best of him and he walked toward the young man. Alexis would have to wait. The kid immediately got up from the log as Fish approached and said, “Hi, mister. Is your dog friendly?”

  “Actually, yes he is.”

  “What’s his name? Can I pet him?” the kid asked, excitedly.

  “Sure, go ahead, he likes it. His name is Pharaoh,” Fish answered. He initially had planned to tell the kid to stay away from the beach because it could be dangerous, but for some strange reason the kid reminded Fish of himself at that age, which couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old.

  The kid introduced himself as “Wolf”. Fish asked if that was his first or last name, and he somewhat embarrassingly replied that it was his first name. “Wow, this kid was named after an animal too, just like I was!” Fish thought to himself. He was never any good at introductions, and had forgotten to give the kid his own name.

  After a couple of minutes of Pharaoh-petting and small talk, Wolf asked Fish a serious question.

  “Do you know if seagulls are edible?”

  Fish pondered the question for second, then replied with, “Honestly, I have no idea. But…I have a friend who would probably know the answer to that question.” Then he laughed and asked, “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I’m a really good shot,” Wolf replied proudly while brandishing the slingshot.

  “I had one of those, too, when I was a kid,” Fish told him with a huge grin.

  “See those birds over there?” Wolf asked his new friend, and pointed at a large colony of seagulls milling about near the waterline. Fish nodded and watched as Wolf dug a steel shot out of his pocket and held it up so that Fish could see it.

  “I save these for special occasions,” Wolf said. “I usually just shoot with rocks.”

  Fish agreed with, “That makes sense.”

  Wolf armed himself with the steel shot and pulled the band back.

  *SNAP*

  One of the gulls at the edge of the colony jerked. It had hopelessly attempted to lift its wings as the quarter-inch steel round impacted with its body, but it ended up
spinning out onto the pebbly beach. Its wings twitched for a quick moment, then the bird lied motionless.

  “Holy crap! Nice shot!” Fish complimented. He was never that good with a Wrist Rocket. This kid was either a pure natural or had been practicing a lot. It must have been a neck or head shot for the seagull to die so quickly.

  Most of the birds that had been near their fallen comrade took off into the air, but a few remained on the beach. Some of the birds that had flown up into the air had gone straight back down to where they had been after a few seconds of flight. Right back into the kid’s line of fire.

  “They’re dumb,” Wolf proclaimed. Fish nodded in agreement. Wolf took aim once more, and dropped a second bird not more than a few feet from the first one. Fish was amazed.

  Wolf laughed, “I could do this all day! They’re so stupid!”

  “Yes, you could,” Fish agreed, rubbing his chin in thought. He wondered if seagulls actually were edible or not. Fish subconsciously reached into his jacket for his cellphone so he could Google it, but then realized what he was doing and stopped. There was no phone!

  But it was an excellent question. If those birds could be eaten, Stephen could smoke them up along with all the fish.

  Fish instructed the boy, “Wolf, here’s what I want you to do, little buddy. Take those two birds with you to site number 199 and talk to my friend. His name is Stephen. If nobody is there, just sit there and wait until he arrives. If anybody else shows up and asks you why you’re there, tell them ‘Fish’ sent you.”

  Wolf nodded in acknowledgment, but then cocked his head curiously at Fish and said, “You’re name is Fish? That’s a pretty cool name!”

  Fish realized he hadn’t given the boy his name earlier and smacked himself on the forehead. Then he said, “Sorry about that, I forgot. But listen up, once Stevo…I mean…Stephen, gets there, ask him if seagulls are edible. If they are, tell him that you can easily get more.”