Burning Skies (Book 2): Fallout

by Druga, Jacqueline

  “And the biggest invasion ever known has made landfall.”

  “Yes. Yes, it has. But this is no Hollywood movie. No Red Dawn where we come from the sky and the Americans cower and obey.”

  “We have the largest army, combined with North Korea, we are preparing more soldiers than there are civilians in the United States,” she argued. “Three hundred and fifty thousand are mobilized.”

  “Ah, yes, the biggest invasion, and another three quarters of a million waiting at sea and airfields, but in doing so, and having them ready, you have now left our homeland vulnerable. The guard dog is away.”

  “Vulnerable to whom?” she asked. “Who is it that you fear you cannot defeat?”

  “Anyone and everyone … combined. Not only are we about to invade and control the foremost food source of much of the world, you and your imbecilic plan have now contaminated at least thirty percent of that food supply. And when the rest of the world who rely on that food find out, the sleeping giant that awakes will be unimaginable.”

  Fen fumed and her face showed it. “You will not speak to me as such. I will have your position, General.”

  “Good,” he said smugly, turning from the rail. “Take it.” He then walked away.

  With an angry growl, Fen smashed her fist against the railing, then reached into her pocket and pulled out a cigarette. She’d calm herself, she had to. The general was wrong. All the naysayers were and they’d all see that very shortly.

  Chapter Two

  Ohio River, WV

  It seemed as if the boat had stopped moving all together. The river was still and the boat drifted center of the body of water at a painstakingly slow pace.

  Perhaps if the boat was smaller. Not that it was large, but the twenty-two-foot Cuddy Cabin had some weight to it.

  There were four of them in that boat, and the engine had long since died. It had sputtered to an end shortly after the four of them made their escape from a war-torn area. They were battered and beaten not only from the destruction they had witnessed for twenty-four hours straight, but from the car accident as well. An accident that occurred when they were fleeing what they believed to be foreign invaders on their land.

  The four of them were wearing down.

  Owen Calhoun, or Cal as every called him, imagined his life had he not left England. He thought of his friend, Nick, back home. How Nick was supposed to be the best man in Cal’s wedding that never happened. Honeymoon to New York bought and paid for, Nick told him it was going to be a mistake to go.

  “It’s gonna hurt,” Nick said.

  Cal supposed Nick hadn’t a clue how bad that solo honeymoon would end up hurting … physically.

  As he sat on the floor of that boat, Cal rotated his arm to work the kink out of his shoulder. He watched as Jake handed Ricky his rations for the day. Jake had been a cop in New York and Ricky was a Pennsylvania store owner.

  The four of them were all so different, but in the same boat physically and metaphorically.

  As Jake handed Cal his rations, he seemed to freeze mid transfer.

  “What is it?” Cal asked.

  “That shack over there,” Jake replied, then pointed. “It wasn’t that far ahead of us yesterday evening. Maybe a hundred feet.”

  From his seat in the covered cabin area, Ricky laughed. “You’re mistaken. You’re saying we drifted a hundred feet in one day.”

  “Yeah,” Jake said.

  “No,” Ricky argued. “We drifted more than that.”

  “The water is not moving … at all,” Jake said sternly. “And I …” He took a moment and seemed to catch his breath. “I may be wrong.”

  “You alright?” Cal asked Jake.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Jake nodded. “Just not feeling too well.”

  “Me either,” Ricky said. “None of us are. We’re dehydrated. All of us. We’re going to need to get off this boat soon.”

  “How?” Jake tossed his hands out. “How?”

  “Blow the horn,” Cal said. “Next town, we start sounding the horn.”

  “And what? Summon the bad guys. Shoot at us? Take us prisoner,” Jake said, irritated.

  “Easy.” Cal lifted his hand. “We haven’t seen any signs of foreign soldiers or anyone dropping from the sky in a while. No, I think we’re in a good place. Just we need to alert someone. She …” He nodded his head to Louise. “Needs us to.”

  Louise barely moved. She sat on the floor of the boat, her body leaning against the side. She only moved to sit up and lean over the boat to vomit.

  “She doesn’t look good,” Jake said in a whisper.

  “I’m right here,” Louise’s voice cracked.

  “Think it’s her diabetes?” Jake asked.

  Cal shrugged and looked down to his rations. There wasn’t much water left and he offered what little he did have to Louise. She shooed his hand away. “I don’t know.” Frustrated, Cal ran his fingers through his hair. “I just don’t …” He paused. “No, it’s not her diabetes,” he said with eerie confidence, staring at his hand. “It’s something else.” The revelation hit him the second he saw his fingers covered with his own hair. Since the bombs fell, they had been in the open and exposed. Cal didn’t verbalize what it was, but he knew. The sickness, vomiting, headaches. It wasn’t dehydration … it was radiation.

  Chapter Three

  Cleveland, OH

  The security room was their bunker, their haven. It had two rooms; one was the main security room, the other, slightly smaller, was the kitchenette. Even though it was two rooms, each hour that passed, each day, it seemed to Harris that it shrunk, and he started to second guess letting one of the strangers into the shelter.

  Tobias, or Toby, or even ‘The Big T’ as he referred to himself, was all about five foot six and Harris would describe him as a hundred pounds soaking wet. He was no older than twenty-five, probably closer to legal drinking age, with long blonde hair that he pulled into a man bun.

  Toby wasn’t a bad person, probably wouldn’t hurt a soul, however his ability to be unnerving was out of control.

  He only seemed to bother Harris. Marissa, the thirty-something woman from accounts payable, chuckled at the young man. She even told Harris she found a distracting amusement in him.

  In fact, Harris had no viable reason to get angry and want to throw him out. Yet, he felt that way quite a bit. He cherished the hours when Toby slept and dreaded when he woke up.

  It was almost that time.

  Harris tapped his fingers on the counter desk fast and furiously as Toby slept on a couch five feet away.

  Marissa placed her hand over his to stop him. “You need to approach this differently.”

  “How?” asked Harris. “Tell me how?”

  “You are looking at him from your position here at the firm. Security, tough guy. That’s going to be fantastic when we leave here, but we’re here and you aren’t security. In fact, you don’t project anything else.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to have a life outside this job.”

  “No, not really. I go home, eat, sleep, play some video games.”

  “You don’t claim dependents, so I take it you don’t have children or a spouse.”

  Harris just stared at her.

  “Let’s see …”

  “Where is this going?” he asked.

  “I am trying to get you out of the security guy mind-set because I think that is the key to not getting annoyed with Toby.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “You have to make it possible,” Marissa told him. “We’re in this together.”

  “No.” Harris shook his head. “We are not.”

  “Harris, you opened the door and let us in.”

  “Yes. Into this room.” He stood and paced. “Not into my life, not into my world. When I open this door and it’s safe according to the survival manual, I’m out of here and you can deal with him.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “Why wo
uld we separate?”

  Harris shook his head. “Why would we stay together. Safety in numbers? Because Hollywood movies tell us to fraction off into groups? No. It’s survival of the fittest. Look around, who do you think is the fittest? When push comes to shove, I won’t have weakness pull me down.” He opened the door to the kitchenette, walked inside, and closed the door.

  Swall, CA – San Joaquin Valley

  A name he once painfully associated with childhood bullies became a very profitable trademark. Most people in the area or who bought his product thought ‘Fat Joe’ of Fat Joe’s tomatoes, corn, and other vegetables was a fictitious name.

  It wasn’t.

  Joseph Garbino had been Fat Joe for as long as he could remember. In fact, he was ‘Fat Joe’ long after he stopped being husky. He wasn’t thin, by any means, but he was a far cry from being fat. His work was far too physical. He was a farmer and that was the only way of life he ever knew. He grew vegetables. Although he had chickens, a few horses, and a pig, they weren’t for business, they were more so for his own personal needs.

  He inherited the farm from his father when he was twenty-eight. By the time he was thirty, he created his own mixture of fertilizer and his tomatoes ended up being the ripest, sweetest tomatoes in the valley. When he canned them, they were a precious commodity and in high demand at flea markets and local restaurants.

  Before the Fat Joe vegetable business became really lucrative, a high school friend of his drove a hundred miles to his farm one day just for his freshly canned tomatoes.

  “You ought to take these tomatoes and go national,” he said to Joe. “’Cause these Fat Joe tomatoes are the best around.”

  He had never thought about going beyond local, so when he did, just on the off chance he was successful, he named them Fat Joe’s so those who picked on him in school would get a whiff of his success.

  Within a few years, everyone knew him. Well, almost everyone. His distribution was still small, but mighty.

  He worked so much he didn’t have time for a social life. Let alone to get married. His fun was limited to cold beers on the porch with his friend and neighbor, Saul. He was also single, but due to divorce. And together, they’d hit the once-a-month bingo at the volunteer fire department.

  He’d joke that he’d find that special one when he turned thirty. That didn’t happen and he so moved it to forty. Then when he turned fifty and that special one never came, he said, “The hell with it.” He had a nephew that he adored. He was a father figure to him when his brother, the boy’s father, had died.

  For the most part, Fat Joe worked. From sun up to sun down, no exceptions. Not even when the war broke out. He was motivated even more so, because people were going to be needing food.

  There was no Fat Joe’s factory. He had built a large barn on his property that served as a canning division.

  When the bombs fell, his ten workers never showed up for work. Wouldn’t make a difference, there was no power, no phones to call.

  Joe worried about radiation and fallout from the bombs, so he rode over on horseback to Saul’s, who owned the farm next to him.

  When the Japanese Fukushima nuclear reactor melted, and the news came that radiation would arrive in California, Saul invested in the gadgets to test the air and ground. He learned them and educated himself on radiation.

  Saul was younger than Joe by ten years. It wasn’t that Joe was old, he wasn’t, but he never bothered to learn technology the way Saul did. Following the Japanese incident, Saul checked Joe’s land and gave it a clean bill.

  “If mine’s fine, yours is fine,” Saul had said.

  “Can you just check?” Joe asked.

  “We’re talking two nukes,” Saul said. “You have to look at the wind. We’re smack in between, we aren’t getting anything. Plus we’re protected by the mountains.”

  “I don’t know about that stuff,” Joe said. “I have tomatoes I can pick early, I don’t want them contaminated.”

  “They won’t be. If they were, they’d be no good and you’d have to skim at least the top ten inches of your soil to grow anything.”

  “Can you check?”

  “Fine. Fine. Let me grab Spot and I’ll be right over,” Saul said, referencing his horse.

  Joe was grateful, and Saul did come over, run some tests and everything was good.

  Still feeling uneasy, Joe worked to pull what he could, just in case.

  The bombs fell on a Friday night California time, and Joe, along with everyone else, was plunged into darkness. On Sunday he went to church, prayed for those poor souls in the affected area, then picked tomatoes and beans the rest of the day. By Tuesday, it was as if nothing ever happened.

  He was getting into his new routine, wake up to the rooster, wash his face, light a Sterno stove and put on the percolator to make some coffee. While that brewed he went out, checked the water and feed for the animals, came back in, poured a cup of coffee then went to the coop to get some eggs.

  By the time he finished that, the lights were on. Every light in his house.

  Joe rushed back in and the television was on, complete with cable.

  The news was playing and he was glad about that. He and many others had been in the dark about the happenings in the world.

  Mind full of questions and coffee in hand, he sat down to take in the news.

  However, nothing, absolutely nothing was mentioned on the news about the bombs or the war.

  He lifted the remote and switched the channel, there was some cartoon, another switch, a cooking show, another click of the remote and there was one of those morning shows. The cutesy hosts were laughing, sitting on a sofa while sipping from their coffee mugs.

  Joe would have believed he dreamt the bombs or was hallucinating, had it not been for the fact that even with cable, those four programs were all that were on.

  “What the hell?”

  Joe kept pressing the ‘up’ channel button on the remote. News, cartoon, cooking, talk show … news, cartoon, cooking, talk show …

  No empty channels, no blue screen. Those four shows took up all two hundred plus channels Joe had.

  Joe dropped the remote on to his chair and walked to the phone. He lifted it. There was a tone. Immediately, he called Saul.

  Two rings, Saul answered.

  “Hey, Saul, did I wake you?” Joe asked.

  “No, not at all. I was just about to call you.”

  “So, I take it you noticed we have power again?” Joe asked.

  “Yes, I did. It’s splendid.”

  Splendid? Joe thought. That was an odd word choice for Saul to use. “Listen Saul, I put on the television—”

  “When you should be putting on the eggs,” said Saul.

  “Huh?”

  “I can really go for an egg, I know you have them.”

  “I do. But …”

  “I’ll be there in a jiff. Thanks for the invite.”

  Click.

  Scratching his head, Joe stared at the phone for a few seconds. He really didn’t understand anything that was going on. Everything seemed off. He did know one thing, for some strange reason, Saul was on his way over at the crack of dawn for some eggs, and Joe had better get cooking.

  Holly River, WV

  Senator Gus Howard was a badass. Even though his name didn’t sound it, he was. Everyone who knew him respected and feared him. A former marine, Gus ran an impressive grassroots campaign during a special election and trumped the favorite by a long shot. He was rough and rugged, showing up to events on a motorcycle, and even making no bones about his drinking and smoking pot.

  As a senator he had visited war zones so much he garnished the nickname Golden Gus Cash because he always brought the troops special gifts and was constantly playing Johnny Cash.

  He had made friends with Steve Tanner, husband of Speaker of the House Madeline Tanner, despite that he and Madeline were on both sides of the political aisle.

  Typically, he joined Steve the entire time on those f
ive-day fishing trips to Holly River, and encouraged them to be longer, especially after his wife passed. But on the weekend of the attack, he had an appointment for a root canal and didn’t want to reschedule it. He trusted only his dentist in his hometown of Union, Pennsylvania and had returned there. It wasn’t that far from the fishing sight, shorter distance than Washington.

  Steve left for Holly River on Thursday, the day of his dentist appointment. Gus told him he’d head down Friday some time. He couldn’t call him if there was trouble, that was why they picked Holly River.

  There wasn’t a signal for miles.

  It was set so deep in the mountains that once you went into the valley, there was no contact with the outside world.

  Old man Bear Grayson was a radio operator eight miles away. If there was an emergency, he got word. Plus, his phone worked because Bear was out of the valley.

  Feeling better after a rough night following his root canal, Gus packed up a bag and headed for the three-hour trek to join his buddy at Holly River. He got a late start and was half way there when all hell started to break loose, first in New York.

  He thought about bypassing Holly River and heading straight to Washington like many in congress and senate were doing. After all, it was one terror attack he’d need to be there, but he changed his mind and headed back to Union, to his home state, where his constituents were. He reached out to Bear, leaving word for him to find Steve in the morning and let him know about the attacks.

  By morning though, all had changed.

  The United States had not only been thrust into war, it was thrust into chaos.

  Communications were down and so was most of the power.

  Pittsburgh, forty miles north of him, was hit with a nuclear weapon. His small town of fifteen hundred was a ghost town.

  Gus had to figure out a plan. Where was he needed. Washington was hit, that meant the president. It came so quickly, out of nowhere, no indication of war.

  His next thought was to head to Holly River, get Steve, and help him find his wife.