The Hike (Book 1): Survivors

by Quentin Rogers

  Patrick handed the torch to Mackenzie and unshouldered the sling of his rifle. He left the safety on it and didn’t point it at anything, he just kept it at the ready. Patrick slowly began the rest of the decent of the stairs and motioned Mackenzie to follow him. They could see light from Stuart’s torch coming out from the entry way, and they could hear him moving around and busying himself.

  “Ughhhh. What is that smell?” Mackenzie whispered to her dad when they reached the doors lying on the stairs. There was a distinct stench wafting up the stairway that made them both pause.

  “I’m not sure,” Patrick replied quietly. “From the looks of this guy, it may just be teenage boy stench.”

  Patrick awkwardly stepped on and around the doors, and then held a hand out to Mackenzie to help her balance. As she stepped out across the doors and down the stairs the torch light caught shiny parts of the door where you could tell that something had mangled the hinges and had been seriously scratching at the center latch between the doors. She stooped a little and held the torch closer to the doors while she inspected them closer for just a second.

  As Patrick and Mackenzie stepped into the entryway of the Dungeon, they became more at ease; but the stench became stronger and almost unbearable. Stuart had placed his torch in a makeshift holder on one wall and was in the opposite corner of the one large room bent over picking up things from the floor.

  It was apparent that Patrick’s guess about the stench was correct as their eyes scanned the room. You could tell that the room had been sparsely furnished before the cloud, but now had garbage and refuse from canned meals, cans of pop, milk jugs, potato chips, and numerous other wrappers from consumables heaped in piles around the room.

  They stood in the doorway for a few seconds before Stuart realized that they were inside. He quit what he was doing and walked across the room towards them.

  “What is this place?” Mackenzie asked clearly dumbfounded.

  “It’s a bomb shelter isn’t it?” Patrick asked Stuart.

  “Yeah; my family calls it the Dungeon,” Stuart told them as he reached out and grabbed the other torch from Mackenzie.

  “Come in,” Stuart said and gestured for them to sit in the folding chairs arranged next to the cot. He went over to the large post in the center of the room and hung the torch in the holder there.

  Patrick and Mackenzie sidled across the room clearly uncomfortable, and each sat in one of the chairs. Mackenzie tried breathing through her mouth to try and tolerate the stench. Stuart joined them and flopped down on the army style cot that had a few blankets on it that looked like they were just as dirty as his clothes.

  “So, you survived the cloud by staying in this place?” Patrick asked.

  “The cloud? What cloud?” Stuart asked perplexed.

  “Maybe you should tell us your story first and we can try to fill in the blanks,” Patrick suggested.

  Stuart stood up and grabbed three cans of pop and handed two of them to Patrick and Mackenzie before sitting back down and starting his story. He lounged on the cot and took the next several minutes to tell them about the night Mary had come to the Dungeon, but he left out some of the more personal parts of the story.

  “So, they locked you in here?” Makenzie asked still trying to only breathe through her mouth, so that made her sound like she had a cold.

  “Yeah. I didn’t know what they had done at the time, but they had hung a crowbar through the handles on the outside of the doors. I laid on the floor for a couple of hours before getting up and trying the door. When I realized that they’d locked me in here, it was pretty late so I decided that I would just sleep on the cot wait until the morning when I could text my dad to come help.” Stuart paused for several seconds reflecting about his decision and steeling his nerves so that he wouldn’t cry in front of the two-new people.

  “When I woke up the next morning, I texted my dad; but he wouldn’t answer. I sent texts and tried to call my mom, my aunt, people from school, anyone I could think of really; but none of them would respond. I thought that my phone was screwed up somehow,” he reached into his pocket and pulled out an older flip phone to show them. “So, when I got tired of banging and beating on the doors, I tried to fix the computer over there to see if I could e-mail someone to come get me. The monitor was trashed from it falling and I started to panic because I wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Not only did I miss school, but I was going to miss my shift at work too; and I couldn’t deal with getting canned right before college.”

  Stuart shifted on the cot and became noticeably uncomfortable. They sat that way for several seconds with Stuart trying to get the courage to continue with the story. When the tears started flowing down his cheeks, Patrick reached out and grabbed Stuart’s knee. Patrick looked him in the eye and said “It’s okay son. We have some of these same stories that we’ll share when you’re done.”

  Stuart took a few moments to compose himself, then he continued. “Just when I thought it was bad, it got worse… Everything went dark.”

  Stuart hung his head for a few minutes, and just when Mackenzie thought that he wouldn’t be able to continue, he suddenly stood up from the cot and wiped his eyes. The tears had streaked clean stripes through the grime on his face, but his rubbing them just smeared them all up again. It appeared that anger had replaced his sadness and he began to walk around the room with giant strides from one pile of garbage to another pile of refuse, stopping long enough to pick up or rearrange some of the contents. He began talking as he was walking to finish his story for them.

  “I don’t know if you realize how dark it can be in a bomb shelter with the doors locked and no electricity, but the word ‘utter’ comes to mind,” Stuart said as he stood up from a pile in the corner and walked over to a shelving unit to put something round up on it. “After struggling to find the generator and fussing with it in the dark for what seemed like a day, I realized that there wasn’t any chance of getting lights on in here. The light on my phone didn’t even work. So, then I began to work on the doors. I don’t really know how long it took me, but I guess that it took four days to pop the hinges enough on the right-hand door for it to fall partially down and let some light in. Once I got some light in here, during the day at least, I was able to look through the shelves and find some food and get better tools to work on the other door with.”

  Stuart continued inspecting the piles and moving from one to the next, stopping every once in a while at a shelving unit to put something on it. His mood seemed to improve somewhat as he continued his story. “The crowbar in the door handles didn’t let the right-hand door open even after it was off the hinges, so I had to pop the hinges off the other one as well. That took the better part of two days. As soon as the second door fell to the stairs, I sprinted outside so excited that I had finally escaped the Dungeon. I ran to our house to tell my folks that I was alright.” He stopped for just a moment and stared at something on the shelf in front of him, lost as if he was somehow reliving the moment again. “For those days sitting here in the dark, I couldn’t believe that my parents hadn’t come out here to look for me. I made myself so angry about it. For all those days that I had gone over in my mind time and time again about how I would righteously tell them where I had been trapped; how I had escaped; and ask them why they didn’t care enough to come find me. But when I finally escaped, I wasn’t angry at all. I just wanted to see them, hug them, and tell them that I was all right.” Stuart was moving again, but this time he wasn’t taking big fast steps as he had before, he was more mulling around and shuffling his feet. “But then I found them and understood why they hadn’t been looking for me. Both of them were lying in their bed. Their corpses already rotting.”

  Stuart paused again with his story, but this time the flood works had let loose. He tried to continue straitening up, but he couldn’t help but wipe the tears from his eyes and cheeks every few seconds. Mackenzie couldn’t stand it any longer. She sat her pop can down on the ground next to the chair
she had been sitting on and went over and put her arms around Stuart. Stuart seemed appalled at first of the human contact and didn’t know how to react, but Mackenzie just stood there. After a few moments, Stuart put his arms around her and let all of it out.

  Patrick sat awkwardly and watched the two embrace and share their feelings of hopelessness from the last couple of weeks. With the way that Stuart reacted when Mackenzie hugged him, he thought that Stuart may run from the Dungeon never to return if Patrick stood up to hug him.

  After what seemed like twenty minutes or more, Mackenzie and Stuart returned to their prior seats. The mood was still solemn, but this sharing of information felt like it needed to continue.

  “I have a lot more questions for you Stuart, but what if we tell you our story of how we got here first?” Patrick asked what felt like a rhetorical question. Stuart nodded as he looked sideways over to Mackenzie and asked if she wanted to start out.

  Mackenzie did a good job of telling the story and highlighting a few of the details that she thought was important, with Patrick only chiming in a few times with things that she had forgotten or omitted. This was the first time that either of them told their story to someone else, and it was very interesting to Patrick to hear the story from Mackenzie’s perspective. He remembered some things differently, and hadn’t thought that some of the things that Mackenzie brought up were important at all; but for the most part he just listened to Mackenzie’s portrayal of the events. He was most amazed at how much of the silly language they’d made up while boulder hopping that night had made an impact on her. She couldn’t help but smile and beam with pride while she told that part of the story, even though it didn’t seem like a major event to Patrick compared to all the other stuff they had been through.

  Stuart asked a few questions about the cloud, and both Patrick and Mackenzie found it difficult to explain what they had saw. They both vividly remembered that opaque cloud rolling across the landscape, and the colors that had danced in it; and they found that they could use the words to describe it, but they couldn’t convey the ominous feeling that they had just watching it from the mountain top. They could tell that Stuart wasn’t completely satisfied with the depiction of the cloud, but Mackenzie continued anyways and went through almost comical detail of finding the body along the trail and then the body in the outhouse.

  Stuart became visibly excited when they got to the part of the story with the EMP event. “I thought that it must have been EMP as well. Do you think that it was from a nuke?”

  “I’m not sure,” Patrick replied. “We haven’t seen any fallout or evidence of radiation damage, but I guess that doesn’t mean much.”

  “My uncle; you know, the one who built this place” Stuart said rather rapidly as he waved his arms around to make sure they knew he was talking about the Dungeon. “He used to tell me to be careful of the water if there was a nuclear attack. He said that the water would hold the radiation in it much stronger and longer than anything else. That’s why I haven’t drank any water or bathed since it happened. The Dungeon has a five-hundred-gallon recyclable daily water storage tank, besides the drinking water tank; but I haven’t touched a drop of it. You can even use wood or whatever to burn and heat the water for a shower!”

  Even though Stuart beamed with pride at his ability to withstand taking a shower for the last couple of weeks, Mackenzie was sitting on the edge of her seat. “What? You mean that we can take a hot shower in here?” Makenzie exclaimed?

  “Sure,” Stuart replied, “but you take the risk of getting radiation poisoning if you use water.”

  Mackenzie stood up with excitement “I’ve been taking frigid showers and baths in streams, creeks, and what’s left of motel water tanks for over two weeks! If you have a warm shower, I’m in!” Mackenzie offered to trade her binoculars, her .22 rifle, and several other personal things that she had on her; but Stuart said that wasn’t necessary.

  Stuart gathered stuff to burn and started the fire under the boiler while Mackenzie walked back to get her bike and bags. It took a little while for Stuart to figure out how to run the shower system, but he finally got it going and Mackenzie wasted no time jumping in. Stuart returned to the cot where Patrick was sitting to finish hearing about the story.

  “So, what happened to you guys after the EMP?” Stuart asked almost impatiently.

  “Well, we made our way down the mountain on foot for a while and crashed at a cabin. Mackenzie had the idea that we coast down the mountain on a motorcycle that we found, and it worked pretty good. It was almost kind of fun riding the motorcycle down, but when we made it down to the town it was a different story. Nothing but death,” Patrick paused with that last statement. He hadn’t recounted the events to anyone since they happened, and without Mackenzie here with him, he wasn’t having to guard his thoughts.

  “I know man,” Stuart said.

  “Yeah, I bet you do kid,” Patrick solemnly replied. He pushed the ugly memories to the back of his mind and continued with the story to Stuart. “In the town there we got some bikes and other equipment and headed east. We’ve mainly been staying to the interstate and stopping in towns along the way for supplies and to rest sometimes.”

  “Where are you going?” Stuart asked.

  “Nebraska,” Patrick said with finality. “A little town called Columbus, Nebraska. That’s where our family is.”

  “What if it’s like this when you get there?” Stuart asked.

  It took Patrick a moment to respond as he was imagining what it would be like to find his wife and boy lying in their beds as lifeless as Stuart had found his parents. “It won’t be,” Patrick said matter-of-factly.

  “Sorry man, not that I’ve ever been good at it; but I ran out of wishful thinking a while ago,” Stuart said with little feeling.

  Instead of debating the merits of their quest and how Patrick ‘knew’ that this family was okay, he thought for a moment and changed the subject as he heard Mackenzie banging around in the small bathroom. “So, do you know where we can get you a different bike?”

  “What are you talking about?” Stuart asked.

  “The bike that you had up at the top of the stairs is pretty cool, but it only has one gear and won’t go near as fast. There are some times that we make up time by cutting the right-of-way fence on the interstate and going cross-country, but for the most part we try to make time on the paved interstate” Patrick explained.

  “I still don’t get it,” Stuart responded.

  “You’ll be wore out riding that thing and you won’t be able to keep up. It’s a dirt bike,” Patrick said beginning to wonder if he had misjudged Stuart’s intelligence.

  “Oh,” Stuart said between chuckles.

  Mackenzie came out of the bathroom running a comb through her wet hair. She didn’t appear to be wearing anything except a long t-shirt. She asked what was so funny as she walked back over and sat in the chair where she had been sitting before.

  “Nothing really,” Stuart responded. “It’s just that your dad thinks that I’m going to go with you guys on your bike ride east.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” Mackenzie asked continuing to comb her hair.

  “Why would I leave the Dungeon?” Stuart asked.

  “What is there for you here?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Shelter. Food. Water,” Stuart replied. And after a second he added, “Even warm showers.”

  Mackenzie giggled at that and told him that she wasn’t sure how to shut off the water so it was still on. Patrick asked if he could use it to since it was still running. Stuart had no problem with it, so he climbed the stairs back out of the Dungeon to get his bike and the bags from it.

  Mackenzie and Stuart talked and chuckled for some time while Patrick was in the shower. When Patrick came out clean and in fresh clothes he found Stuart and Mackenzie sitting next to each other on the cot with their backs to the wall looking through comic books and talking in low voices.

  “You know Stuart,” Patrick suggested,
“you really should jump in the shower while it’s hot.”

  “Yeah, you really should,” Mackenzie said plugging her nose as she said it. “I think that I’d rather the radiation in the water get all of us instead of your smell slowly killing me and my dad.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said as he got up from the cot and headed to the bathroom.

  “If you don’t mind, Mak and I will set our tents up on your lawn up above while you’re in there,” Patrick said.

  “Yeah, no problem. Just don’t put them on my mom’s peonies, those are her pride and joy” Stuart replied without really thinking about what he was saying.

  While Patrick and Mackenzie were helping each other setup their tents underneath a couple of pine trees in the corner of the back yard of Stuart’s house, Patrick thought that he would press Mackenzie a little about Stuart.

  “So, you two seem to be really hitting it off,” Patrick said with his voice reflecting more of a question than a statement.

  “Yeah, he’s pretty cool,” Mackenzie responded rather nonchalantly.

  “Whew; that’s a relief,” Patrick said in an acting voice as he pushed the last stake for Mackenzie’s tent into the dirt.

  “What do you mean?” Mackenzie asked with a smile in her voice.

  “Well, the way you two were acting I thought that you were thinking he was cute too and not just cool,” Patrick cajoled her.

  “Yeah, I don’t think so Dad. You are so clueless…” she said in a playful way.

  “Hey, listen Darlin’; I don’t mind if you think some kid is cute. It’s just that he’s a little bit old for” he started but Mackenzie stopped him short.

  “He’s gay Dad!” Mackenzie said with a tone that a parent sometimes talks to a preschooler when they just aren’t getting a concept.