The Alt Apocalypse: Books 1-3

by Tom Abrahams

The force of the water diminished the farther he slid from his car, and as he gathered himself, coughing out water, he realized he was in somebody’s front yard a few feet from the porch.

  He looked back, trying to find the car. It was gone. Either it had washed away or was wholly submerged now. He couldn’t be sure which. It didn’t matter though. He did try to remember if he’d purchased the accident insurance when he’d rented it the day before.

  Kneeling in muddy grass, the water up to his chest, Dub pushed himself to his feet. The taste of grease and rubber coated his tongue. He spat into the water, trying to rid himself of it. It didn’t help.

  Standing there drenched and shivering, water bubbling and rising toward his waist now, he reached in his pocket for his phone. It was gone, lost in the missing car. The tension in his neck returned. In his panic, he’d forgotten to unplug it from its charger. Now it was a sunken, useless treasure somewhere out of reach.

  With each heave of his chest and heavy breath outward, the foul-tasting water that coated his body and mixed with the icy rain sprayed from his lips. He spread his feet shoulder-width apart to steady himself against the water, which was now bringing the current he’d experienced a block or two upstream.

  The heavy rain made it hard to see much more than ten or twenty yards in any direction. Some of the streetlights had flickered off. It was darker, colder. He was lost.

  Wait. He wasn’t lost. He’d been so focused on the GPS and the difficulty of the drive, he forgot he could find his way to the convenience store. He took a tenuous step forward, and then another, and another until he’d reached a street sign at the nearest intersection, which was only two houses from the one where he’d skidded to a stop.

  Dub recognized the name of the streets, but he wasn’t sure which way was north. He was disoriented. He tried looking up to the skies. The rain and clouds made it impossible to see any stars. He couldn’t see the sliver of a new moon either. Then he remembered his wristwatch.

  It was an analog watch, perpetual motion with a sweeping second hand, with its numbers that were luminescent. He unstrapped it from his wrist, holding it horizontally in his palm. He wiped the face of it with his thumb and checked the time. Before he recognized it was after midnight now, he cursed himself again. It was nighttime. He couldn’t check the sun in reference to the time.

  He spit rainwater from his lips and clenched his jaw. He wasn’t altogether there. The combination of exhaustion and stress was making him loopy. He took two steps then leaned on a tree. His hand slipped from its slimy surface, but he caught himself before he stumbled forward into the water face-first.

  He touched the tree again, lightly running his fingers across the slimy surface of the bark. He looked up at the towering and wide-reaching branches of a grand magnolia tree. The slime wasn’t slime. It was moss. Dub slapped the tree and laughed.

  “Moss,” he said. “Freaking moss.”

  He shuffled beside the tree and faced in the same direction as the mossy, northern side of the tree. Now he knew where he needed to go.

  Wary of open manholes or water-sucking gutters he couldn’t see beneath the rising water, Dub carefully waded north as close to the flooded houses as he could get. He occasionally stepped on popped sprinkler heads or decorative lawn ornaments, but managed to stay above water. It was painstaking, and with each successive inch forward, he couldn’t be sure what he’d find when he reached the convenience store. Worse, he couldn’t know what was happening a couple of miles away at Keri’s house.

  Trudging the final stretch, he came across three separate families, all of them wading with varying degrees of difficulty toward higher ground. Dub helped one family, whose belongings had spilled into the water when a large plastic tub had tipped.

  He imagined that what these people wore and what they carried encompassed the whole of their salvaged belongings. He tried not staring at what looked like refugees as they passed him or moved more quickly in the same direction.

  But one family, a mother and father and teenage son a couple of years younger than Dub but taller, didn’t leave his side. They trekked with him toward the store.

  “We don’t know where else to go,” said the mother through chattering teeth. “We don’t know where is safe.”

  “I don’t either,” admitted Dub. “I’m not from here. I’m visiting.”

  He thought of two men who long ago had saved him from a similar fate. He had to help. He had to pay it forward.

  “Our house is gone,” said the son. His eyes were swollen, and even in the dim light, Dub could tell he’d been crying.

  “Everything,” echoed the mother. “The water is halfway up the walls. It’s over the tops of our beds.”

  The father was almost catatonic. He was slogging silently forward at a pace equal to his wife—a water-logged zombie of a man, balding on the top of his head and empty in his countenance. Twice, when Dub glanced at him, he thought the father was mumbling to himself.

  “He’s a veteran,” the wife said when she noticed Dub looking. “He suffers from PTSD. This isn’t good for him. I’m just glad he came with us. At first I thought it might be a struggle, but he came.”

  She smiled weakly and moved closer to her husband, looping her arm in his and holding it with both hands. He glanced at her for a moment, then turned back to the watery path ahead.

  “I can take that,” Dub said, taking the floating plastic bin from the son. “You worry about your dad.”

  The boy nodded and thanked Dub. The four of them fought against the rising water another several blocks before they reached the convenience store, where they found a half-dozen people and an aluminum jon boat with a running twenty-horsepower engine rumbling and spurting water and smoke from its stern. The water thinned here. It was at most ankle deep, and the convenience store still had power. From the looks of it, the interior hadn’t yet flooded. There were more people standing inside, gathered around the service counter, appearing as though they were in no hurry to go anywhere.

  A half-dozen cars were as close to the storefront as they could get, parked at odd angles to one another to avoid the water. None of them had flooded yet, though Dub imagined it was only a matter of time. They were on an island that was surely sinking. One of the people loitering by the boat emerged from the others and sloshed a couple of steps toward Dub and the family he’d accompanied during the last part of his journey.

  “Dub?” asked Barker, narrowing his eyes and peering into the rain. “Dub? Is that you? Holy crap. Seriously? Dub?”

  He splashed through the water like a kid in a baby pool and extended his arms toward Dub. When he reached him, he wrapped them around his friend and grunted.

  “Man, it’s good to see you. I got so worried. These guys here in this boat, they’re so cool. They’re giving us a ride. They were going to go look for you.”

  Dub pulled away. “Well, I’m here.”

  Barker eyed him up and down. “You look like hell, dude.”

  Dub wiped the newly replenished sheen of water from his face, shook the excess from his hands, and nodded. “I feel like it. The car’s gone.”

  “I figured.” Barker glanced over Dub’s shoulder. “Who are these people?”

  “A family whose home is underwater,” he explained. “They needed some help.”

  “That’s my Dub,” said Barker. “You’re a hero, dude.”

  “Hardly,” Dub scoffed.

  “Seriously,” said Barker, with a level of excitement Dub imagined had to have been born from nerve-fueled adrenaline. Or alcohol. “You’re the kind of dude who’d run into a burning building when everyone else is running out.”

  “I doubt that,” said Dub. But as he pushed the floating tub toward the teenage boy, he knew in his gut that Barker was right. He couldn’t help but be nice to others, even when it was at his own expense.

  Barker motioned toward the boat with his head and lowered his voice. “Look, I think I can get these guys to take us back to Keri’s house.”

&n
bsp; “Really?”

  “Yeah. They’re looking for people to help. Half of those people inside the convenience store came here in their boat.”

  “But we’re three miles from her house,” protested Dub. “What makes you think they’ll go that far out of their way when there are other people much closer they can ferry over?”

  “I gave them the twelve-pack I bought,” said Barker. “Cheap stuff, but they were thrilled. It was payment to go find you. Now they don’t have to find you, so they can take us to Keri’s. If there are others on the way, there’s room for four other people.”

  Dub started counting. “So two guys with the boat, you, me, and your new friend.”

  Barker nodded.

  “Which one is she?”

  “The cute one in the overalls,” said Barker, shooting a glance toward the woman without obviously trying to be obvious.

  Noticing Barker’s attempt to be sly, the woman high-stepped through the water toward him. She wore her hair in a scrunchie-affixed ponytail, and her face had the wide-eyed look of a person who knew they were the subject of conversation.

  “I’m Gem,” she said, offering her wet hand to Dub. “You’re the famous Dub?”

  Dub’s brow furrowed with confusion. “Famous?”

  She squeezed the water from her ponytail and wiped her hands on her overalls. Her mascara had run, giving her the appearance of an overdone smoky-eye. Even in the rain, her scent carried. It was an oddly enticing mixture of essential oils and wood.

  “Barker talks about you a lot,” she said. She nudged Barker with an elbow. “I’m thinking you’re his hero.”

  There was that word again. Hero. He didn’t much care for it.

  “Well,” said Dub, “I’m sure that’s overstated.”

  “Probably not,” she said, talking to Dub as if they’d been longtime friends. “Dude has a man-crush. No doubt.”

  Dub clenched his jaw. He didn’t know Gem from pyrite, but she rubbed him the wrong way. Barker was smiling at her, mouthing her words as she spoke. He was entranced and appeared oblivious to Dub’s disinterest in small talk. He started to move toward the man at the back of the jon boat. He was smoking a cigarette in the rain, blowing the smoke upward into his own face, contented.

  Gem edged into his path, eyeing him with arched, meticulously waxed eyebrows dewy with rain. “Your girlfriend, Keri is it? She’s at her house?”

  “Yes.”

  “We should totally go get her. Barker paid the boat dudes with beer. He was saying we could get them to take us to her.” She lowered her voice and leaned into him. “It’s the worst beer. Cheap. I wouldn’t drink it. But it’s beer, right?”

  He exhaled, wiped the rain from his face with the back of his arm, and faked a smile. Whatever he might have found cute or exotically attractive about her had washed off of him as soon as it had stuck.

  Fortunately, the mother of the family he’d escorted interrupted them.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, touching his arm. “I don’t mean to interrupt. I wanted to thank you. The store clerk is going to let us rest here for a while. They think the National Guard is on its way with some big trucks.”

  She squeezed his arm and offered him a grateful smile peppered with sadness he imagined was tattooed onto her face. Dub placed his hand on hers, returned the momentary affection, and wished her well.

  Gem began to speak again. Dub held up a finger and winked at her politely, suggesting she hold her thought, and he sloshed to the boat. He waved as he approached, drawing a suspicious blow of smoke from the man at the motor.

  “My friend Barker said you might be willing to take us to my girlfriend’s house,” he said. “Would that be okay?”

  The man, who at first seemed wary, softened. He smiled under the steeply curled brim of a purple and gold baseball cap. Then he nodded, took a final drag from the cigarette, sucking in his cheeks, and flicked the butt into the rising water.

  “I’d be happy to help.” He exhaled, his words swirling the smoke that seemed like mist in the rain. “Sure thang,” he said with a Southern drawl as pronounced as any Dub had ever heard in Houston. “Your buddy paid us up with a case, so we’re good. You hop in and we’ll make a run. You just give me turn by turn on the way and we’ll figure it out.”

  Dub stepped forward with his hand extended. “I’m Dub. Thanks so much.”

  “Not at all,” said the man. “I’m Louis. This is Frank.”

  Frank, a wiry man with close-cropped hair, was sitting in the front of the boat and finishing a pull on a can of beer. He nodded, swallowed hard, and raised the can. “S’up.”

  “Hey,” said Dub. He turned and called to Barker over his shoulder, “Let’s go. It’s only going to get worse.”

  Dub, Barker, and Gem climbed into the boat, each of them taking seats on the wide benches that braced the shallow-drawing aluminum craft. Frank stepped out and held onto the bow, turning the boat around and tugging it out away from the parking lot. When he was knee deep, he hoisted himself back into the boat. It was then Dub noticed both of their hosts were wearing hip waders.

  Louis took the rudder stick on the motor and pulled it toward his body as the fourteen-foot boat jerked forward. They were under way.

  “You tell me where to turn,” said Louis, thumping Dub on the shoulder. “I ain’t much for street names. Some I know; some I don’t.”

  Dub had taken the seat closest to Louis. Dub was in front of him and to the left. Barker and Gem sat next to each other at the center of the boat. Frank was in the front on the right.

  “You’re going to go straight for a while,” he said, trying to recall distances. He remembered street names, but in the dark he couldn’t see them any more than he could see the street under the black water.

  “Hey,” said Louis, as if reading his mind, “take this. It’ll help.”

  Dub took a flashlight from Louis’s outstretched hand. It was cold from the air and wet from the rain. He ran his hand along it to strip away the beads of water clinging to its metal battery compartment. He punched the button on its handle and, without thinking about it, looked directly at the bezel. A bright collection of LED lights nearly blinded him.

  Dub squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head from the blinding error.

  Louis chuckled. “I’ve done that,” he said affably. “Stings, don’t it?”

  Dub rubbed the afterimage from his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. He nodded and readjusted his eyes to the night.

  The rain hadn’t subsided or given any hints that it might be letting up. It was a steady shower emanating from some invisible faucet high above without anyone to shut off the tap. It had gotten to the point, despite the discomfort and cold, the rain wasn’t annoying anymore. Dub was so soaked through that more rain wasn’t even an issue. He aimed the light up and out, away from the boat. He scanned the night, the sheets of rain the only thing visible at times, searching for street signs.

  Occasionally he’d lower the white beam toward the water. From his seat aboard the jon boat, he couldn’t determine how much higher the flood had risen. As the beam skipped across the black roil and bounced off the rounded tops of mailboxes or the fogged windows of curb-parked cars, it was apparent the tub was filling and the drain was stopped.

  The farther they traveled in the murk, slowly advancing along the streets-turned-canals, the oil-burning odor of the puttering motor became more overwhelming. It consumed Dub’s senses: the mix of fuel and grease, cold rain and stress.

  “Straight?” asked Louis as they approached an intersection.

  Dub angled the beam up to find the sign. He didn’t recognize either name. “Keep going, please.”

  Barker and Gem were sitting against each other now, hip to hip. She leaned into him, and he had his arm around her waist. They were talking to each other, their voices inaudible over the sputter and gurgle of the motor. Frank was on his knees with a flashlight, checking for any obstacles in the water ahead.

  “Turn up here,” Dub sa
id, spotting the right street. “Left.”

  “Got it.” Louis maneuvered the boat, cranking the rudder handle hard to the right.

  The boat’s bow slid to the left, and the intersecting street came into view, as much as it could have given the rain and the dark. Frank’s light, aiming directly in front of the boat, cast a dim cone into the inky distance. Ahead of them, another boat came into view. It was more of an inflatable pontoon, its engine whirring and its bow pitched out of the water, carrying eight people on its cramped deck. The pilot nodded at them as they passed each other. None of the shivering passengers, no doubt waterlogged survivors leaving behind their homes, said a word. Although none even looked up, Dub could see the shock and horror in their blank faces. They were a half a mile from Keri’s house.

  “Surprised we ain’t seen more like that,” said Louis. “I figure—”

  “Help!” The voice was distant but close enough that the call was clear. It sounded like a young woman. “Help!” she cried again, her voice warbling through the din of the rain.

  “That’s just ahead,” Frank said. “I can see someone waving a light stick.”

  “You mind?” Louis asked Dub.

  “Of course not,” said Dub.

  Frank held his light toward the glow stick he could apparently see. Louis directed the boat in the light’s path. The closer they got, the higher Frank aimed the cone of light. The glow stick, which was waving back and forth, was elevated high above the ground.

  “Help!” called the woman excitedly. “Do you see me? Can you? I’m up here. Up here!”

  Dub narrowed his focus, following the beam of light until he saw the woman. The shape of a woman, that was, waving her arms above her head, the bright pink glow stick waving, became clearer. He thought at first she was on her roof, seeking a perch above the water that was now at the eaves of single-story homes in this part of the city. But as they drifted closer, the boat pitching up and down from the current, he saw she wasn’t on the roof. She wasn’t anywhere near a house. She was in a tree, straddling the wide, strong branch that extended perpendicular from the thickly aged trunk of a commanding oak.