The Hike (Book 1): Survivors

by Quentin Rogers

  Sawyer turned his head and spit again before continuing. “They talked about the bomb pretty much the whole time the counter was on the screen. They had a press conference from some talking heads at the Whitehouse that talked about the two stages of the bomb, without really saying anything about it. The newscasters then just kept saying the same things that they had talked about at the press conference over and over again. Finally, they cut to a live satellite feed just before the counter reached zero.” Sawyer spit again, and then shook his head for emphasis. “Nothing happened. It was almost three minutes later before the video cut back to the newscaster and he said that he wasn’t sure what had happened, but they were awaiting word from the military. Then – the power went out. The whole place was dark. Just the exit signs were lit up. You could feel the tension that was already as thick as that cloud get thicker. People were starting to panic and think that it was the end; just when the lights came back on.”

  “So, there’s still power back east?” Stuart asked.

  “Well, the casino had a backup generator that came on,” Sawyer replied. “I think that the power went out everywhere for a while, but it is back up on the east coast now I think.” He turned his head and spit once more. “We stayed and watched the television for a couple of hours, but they really didn’t say much more. They did say that the bomb was a success, but they wouldn’t show anymore satellite images for some reason. My brother, mom, and me headed back to the camper and crashed while Dad stayed and watched the television. In the morning, Dad was back early and said that he had found someone to sell us some gas for a reasonable price. We got gas and headed back home.”

  “Back home?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Yeah,” Sawyer said understanding her concern. “We’re farmers. The cloud was gone and we had fields to plant and critters to take care of.”

  “Hadn’t the animals died?” Mackenzie asked.

  “Yeah; they had,” Sawyer responded. “But when we started back we were hopeful. The front edge of the cloud didn’t look like it had made all the way to our place from the last satellite images we saw.”

  Patrick stood up and put some more water on to boil so they could make some more coffee. He could tell that there was a lot more conversation to be had. Sawyer continued to tell them about the trip back and how there wasn’t hardly anyone moving west by the time they headed back. Also that all of the radio stations were off the air or replaced by the emergency broadcast system message that told people to stay away from the areas that the cloud had covered.

  “I’ve only seen my dad cry a couple of times, and that was one of them” Sawyer started as he was telling them about how their farm looked when they pulled up the drive. “The house; tractor; barn; everything was just as we left it, except the animals. They had just fallen over where they lay. The pigs had all gathered in one corner of the pen like they had been trying to get away from the cloud. Most of the cows were just spread out in the pasture. The calves were laying right next to their moms.”

  Sawyer was getting choked up some, and took a second to collect himself before continuing, “We all went in the house and rested a while. The power was still out and there was no school, so my brother and I spent the next day helping Dad load all the carcasses up with the front-end loader on the tractor, and piled them out in the bean patch. We thought that the worst was behind us. If only we had known.”

  “It’s okay son,” Patrick told Sawyer. “We’ve all been through some pretty dark days and seen a lot of evil things in the last few weeks. Take your time and tell us at your own speed”

  Sawyer collected himself for a little while longer. He spit to the side a couple of more times before starting his story again. “Well, with the power being out; several of our neighbors were trying to cook up all of the meat in their freezers before it spoiled. The Rancombs had almost a full deer left in their freezer that they were trying to consume before the warm days ruined it all together. They gave my folks several packages of meat when we were over there visiting one of the first evenings. They had made it as far as Minnesota before they turned around and came back.”

  Sawyer reached up and wiped his eyes again as he tried to relive what had been so dreadful for him. Mackenzie stood up from the opposite side of the fire where she had been sitting and walked around to where she could sit next to Sawyer. She put her hand on his forearm in an offering of comfort.

  “Well,” Sawyer said as he sucked some snot from his nose, turned and spit again. “I told you that whenever that cloud touched meat and people ate it, they turned into scaveys. Well, that’s what happened. We had been eating on food that we’d gotten in the camper and all of Mom’s canning stuffs. We were going to eat some of that deer that night when we got home, but the meat had gone rancid and Mom just threw it in the trash. Early the next morning though – the Rancombs came…” Sawyer hung his head and sobbed a couple of times. Mackenzie rubbed his forearm.

  “Uhhhhhhh, well,” Sawyer said again when he lifted his head. “I guess that I’ll have to tell you the rest of that story some other time.” He turned his head to spit again. “My brother and I made it though. We hopped back in the truck with nothing but a shotgun and this pistol,” he said as he patted the holster on his waist. “We drove east until we ran out of gas, which wasn’t very far. We weren’t sure what we were doing, but we thought that we’d try to get to Minneapolis to find our Aunt Julie. Neither of us cared for Aunt Julie very much; she was kind of a city mouse and never liked coming out to visit us. But we didn’t know what else to do.”

  Sawyer continued to tell the others about how he and his brother survived in those first few days. He said that he wasn’t proud of some of the stuff that they did, but it was either that or starve to death. Nobody seemed to believe them at first about the scaveys, until more reports came waffling in from others that were headed east. The radio and television stations were useless and continued to broadcast repetitive messages from the emergency broadcast system, but never provided any news or real information. Cell phones were useless and didn’t work even if you could find a generator to charge them. There were a few landlines that were operational, and people would pay large amounts of money and stand in line for hours for a chance to try to call a relative. Other people were the only way to get information about things that were going on elsewhere, and Sawyer and Aaron weren’t sure who they could trust.

  “My brother is fifteen, and quite a bit smaller than me,” Sawyer told the others as the first light of the morning started to peak over the horizon. “He could get into places and hang around within earshot without looking conspicuous. There was a group of men that always huddled up and talked at night at the YMCA we were staying at. They got Aaron in on their conspiracy theory that the whole thing was a ploy by the government. They had all kinds of reasons and notions about what they thought and what so-and-so had heard, but it all sounded like gibberish to me. Idle hands and all. Against my brother’s wishes, I had decided that we needed to go someplace else because I was worried about the load of manure they were filling his head with. We were fixing to leave the next morning; just walk out. But that night, a huge convoy of Humvee’s, tanks, and armored personnel carriers rolled through town heading West. You can imagine all the things those conspiracy kooks were spewing by the next morning. I was still bent on leaving and dragging my brother out of there by the scruff of his neck if I had to; but then the President came on the television, and I changed my mind.”

  Sawyer told them about the live presidential address. How the president told the nation that martial law had been declared. There was to be a curfew at dark and anyone not obeying military orders could be arrested and tried by the highest ranking local official. He said that it was all temporary until they resolved the issue of the cloud and scavengers, and then life would return to normal.

  Sawyer spit again and the others could see the look of vile on his face as he continued telling them about the address and the days following it. “That’s when he told eve
ryone about the Stafford Line. He said congress gave the power to quarantine the portions of the country that the cloud had affected, and the television showed a map with a red line on it. He said no one was allowed to cross the Stafford Line under penalty of treason, and that there was no reason to cross it as there were no survivors. I never liked or trusted the president to begin with, but listening to him that morning about made me puke. You could tell that he was lying about everything other than the martial law; and that he was covering up something big.”

  “Like what?” Stuart asked.

  “I don’t know,” Sawyer answered. “You could just tell. If you ask any of those conspiracy nuts, they’d give you a handful of different stories to pick from. I don’t really know what he was lying about, I just know he was lying. That’s why I’m headed to the Park.”

  Sawyer told them that he and his brother left to go see what the military was doing on this imaginary Stafford Line. Aaron brought a new friend along named Howard who was a scrawny college freshman who had lost everyone he had known as well. The three of them traveled south along the Stafford Line stopping in towns and encampments along the way talking with the locals and trying to find out whatever they could. Their little band grew in numbers as they went, and ended up being around sixteen people by the time they made it to New Yankton.

  “New Yankton?” Stuart asked bewildered.

  “Yeah – the town of Yankton, South Dakota is inside the Stafford Line. So a lot of the locals made an encampment just outside of town and call it New Yankton,” Sawyer explained. “That’s where they started calling us the ‘Truthers’.”

  “Who did?” Patrick asked.

  “The town’s folk,” Sawyer answered. “Some people in our group didn’t have a problem telling others why we were there and that we didn’t believe in the martial law. There was a ruckus one evening when a lady was walking across the ‘street’ to get her teenage son that was in one of the large tents where we were staying. He had been listening to some of the rhetoric when a squad of soldiers stopped the lady. Evidently, they tried to arrest her for being out past curfew when some of the towns people told the soldiers that they weren’t going to arrest her. We all went out and took the lady back from the soldiers and brought her in the tent with us. The crowd cheered, and our numbers doubled that night.”

  “How did you get the lady away from a whole squad of soldiers?” Stuart asked.

  “We just grabbed her and brought her back into the tent,” Sawyer said as a matter of fact. “The squad could have mowed us down if they had wanted to, but I don’t think that they really signed up for shooting their friends and family. We just grabbed the lady and brought her in with her son. Anyways – after that, they called us the Truthers.”

  Sawyer stood up and stretched with his arms above his head before he began talking again from a standing position. “Aaron kind of became the leader of our little group. Nobody voted on it or anything. Everybody just knew that he was sharp and they trusted him. He came up with the vision for us to get across the Stafford Line and go to the Park to see what really happened. It took a little while, but he sold me on the idea hook, line, and sinker. The day after the ruckus, a couple of guys found us and told us that they had just came up from Norfolk, Nebraska. He said for whatever reason, they had seen a spot just north of Norfolk where the standard troop spacing between each other left a small ravine open to where he thought some scaveys could sneak through. That was just what Aaron had been waiting for. He schemed up a plan for six of us to slink up the ravine while the rest of the group made diversions for the two squads north and south of the ravine. It was a good plan. It almost worked.”

  Sawyer was so tired he was having difficulty standing, and he began shifting his weight back and forth on each leg to keep himself awake. The others were compassionate with him, but they were too enthralled with the story to offer him to tell it later.

  Sawyer continued. “Howard and I snuck out of the encampment that night and walked down to scope out the hole in the line that the others had told us about. Sure enough, it was just as they had said. There was a mostly dry creek bed that cut a small hill in two for almost a quarter mile. We took lots of pictures on cell phones and hoofed it back to show Aaron and the others. Our whole group left the next day and walked down to Norfolk. We made final preparations, and it was decided that Aaron, Howard, myself, and three other guys would be the ones to get across while the rest of the band split and would go cause trouble for the soldiers on either side of the hill. Once it was totally dark, we crawled on our bellies towards the ravine and stopped just short of it and waited until the diversions started. Once they were going full stream, we GI Joe’d fast down into the ravine and started hoofing it as stealthily as possible through the creek bed. The creek bed was only a few feet wide and a couple of feet deep, so we had to go single file. I had been the quickest, so I was out front when I heard a soldier yell ‘Halt!” Sawyer mimicked the soldier yelling and all those around the campfire jumped a little.

  Sawyer held an imaginary rifle out in front of him as he continued to impersonate the soldier. “’Halt I said!’ the soldier screamed out to us. I just froze where I was at. I could just barely see him out of the corner of my eye standing at the bank to the creek bed. Howard was not too far behind me, and after a second he clamored up out of the ravine and took off sprinting away from the soldier. The soldier yelled again at him, and when Howard didn’t stop; he fired. I could see in the muzzle flash that he had on night vision goggles. The soldier cursed a couple of times and then directed us to get up out of the creek with our hands up. We all stood up one by one, except Aaron and I. The others got out of the creek bed with their hands-on top of their head and walked back to where the soldier was standing. ‘You too!’ he yelled and Aaron finally stood up. I don’t know why he couldn’t see me with those goggles on. I must have just blended into the creek bank good enough to not be seen. The soldier took all the others back towards their Humvees at gunpoint, and I just laid there. I laid there until it hurt. I didn’t know what I should do. Then I made my mind up that I was getting to the Park, and that a hundred soldiers with night vision weren’t going to stop me. I crawled on my belly, just moving inches at a time away from the line. By the time it was morning, I was worried that I wasn’t far enough away and that they would spot me so I picked up the pace a little. When I got far enough away that I couldn’t see them, I figured they couldn’t see me and I hightailed it away from there.”

  Sawyer stretched one more time with a big yawn before saying “I’m sorry guys, but I’ve had it. Can I crash in one of these tents and we’ll finish the story tomorrow?”

  None of them wanted the story time to end, but they all finally conceded and divided up who was going to take what watch.

  Chapter 20

  Stuart had collected more firewood and had water warming on a small campfire again when Sawyer climbed out from Stuart’s tent. It was mid-morning and Sawyer stretched and yawned before exchanging quiet morning pleasantries with Stuart. Sawyer left camp for several minutes, then returned and joined Stuart by the fire.

  “Do you have any of that coffee made? That sure hit the spot last night,” Sawyer asked in a low tone as not to wake the others.

  “No, not yet,” Stuart answered. “It’s working on it though.” After a few minutes of silence, Stuart asked “Why don’t animals turn into scaveys?”

  “Not sure,” Sawyer replied.

  “I mean, it’s kind of weird that people turn into these creatures after they had eaten the tainted meat, but the same meat doesn’t affect animals,” Stuart said half as a statement and half as a question.

  “Well, it affects them all right,” Sawyer offered. “It just kills ‘em. It doesn’t just have to be the meat that was tainted by the cloud. If you get some of the scaveys’ blood or saliva in you, it’ll get you just as well.”

  “Really?” Stuart asked.

  “Yeah. I hadn’t ever seen it first hand, but they have strict
orders on those soldiers that man the Stafford Line,” Sawyer answered. “Whenever they rotate back off the line, they are quarantined for four days to make sure they don’t have any symptoms.”

  They both sat quietly for a while thinking about things that they had heard and learned talking with each other the day before. When the water started boiling, Stuart made both him and Sawyer a piping hot cup before sitting back down in the spot that he was in before.

  “So how did you plan on getting gas for that four-wheeler without any electricity?” Stuart asked, respectfully keeping his voice low for the other two that were sleeping.

  “Siphon hose,” Sawyer replied before sipping on his coffee. “I had to do it a few times by the time I got here.”

  “You just go up to cars and suck out the gas?” Stuart asked confused.

  “Yeah. I made a siphon hose from some clear tubing I got at a hardware store when I ran out of gas the first time. It took me a while, but I also figured out that I needed to carry a long screwdriver too. The newer cars have something down there that you have to knock out of the way before you can get the hose down in the tank.”

  Stuart sat quietly and thought about Sawyer siphoning the gas along the highway. Stuart started talking again, but this time he had forgotten to keep his voice low. “You know, there was one thing different that I heard between the story that you told and the Kincaid’s version.”

  “What’s that?” Sawyer asked intrigued.

  “Mackenzie told me that the cloud had left them on the mountain, and then the bomb had exploded,” Stuart said and then paused to make sure that he had what he was thinking right in his mind. “Remember? I think Patrick talked about it yesterday too. He said that a strong wind came up, and by the next morning the cloud was gone. But the bomb wasn’t dropped until that night when they were driving down the mountain. Why would they have needed to drop the bomb if it had already stopped and was going away by then?”