Brace for Impact

by Harley Tate

  Leah couldn’t take it. Here she was in this death trap on wheels, trying to get them somewhere safe and he was what, taking a smoke break? She shouted. “Andy! We need to get out of here!”

  He didn’t respond and Leah put the car in park and shoved open the door. The squeak of unused hinges sounded like a scream. She stomped up to the doctor.

  “Hey! Wake up!”

  He blinked at her. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

  “You think? You’ve been smoking like a chimney ever since the blackout. I can’t believe they lasted that long.”

  He brought the pack down and stared at it in his hand. “I need more cigarettes.”

  “No, you need to get this garage door open so we can get out of here. Bombs, nuclear explosions, death to thousands?” She waved her arms in a circle, imitating a cloud. “Big boom, remember?”

  “What’s the point? We’ll all be incinerated.”

  “You told me yourself if we get far enough away, we’ll survive.”

  He looked up. “We’re in midtown. Any blast will kill us where we stand. We’ll be vaporized.”

  Leah threw up her hands. “Then let’s get out of here!”

  Andy scratched behind his ear. “You think the old guy smokes? I could go back up, see if he’ll sell me some.”

  Something inside Leah snapped. She couldn’t stand there wasting time, trying to convince a doctor of all people to get in the car. Leah wasn’t a violent person. She didn’t believe in corporal punishment. She volunteered for a local animal rescue. She had never thrown a punch.

  But anger and fear coiled low in her belly like a pair of vipers. Andy wasn’t going to derail them and she wasn’t going to leave him here, standing in a parking garage in midtown, waiting for a bomb to turn him to ash.

  Her hand flew out like someone else was in control and her open palm collided with the doctor’s cheek. The smack echoed though the garage, louder than the Buick’s sputtering engine and the thundering of Leah’s heart.

  Andy staggered back. “What the hell?”

  Leah’s hand reddened before her eyes, but she didn’t shake it out. The sting gave her clarity. She looked up at Andy. “Focus. We’re getting out of here and I need your help to do it.”

  He held his cheek where she hit him, covering up the fingermarks spreading across his skin. After a moment, he nodded. “What should I do?”

  “Get over there and find the garage door handle. I’ll see if I can disable the tension rod. You’ll need to pull the garage door up.”

  Andy nodded and walked over to the garage door. He found the handle thanks to the beam of the Buick’s headlights. “Ready.”

  Leah turned back to the gears on the floor. A manual pull-chain with a red handle stuck out from the top and she yanked on it. Something in the gearing shifted. “Try it.”

  Andy gripped the handle and tugged. The door wobbled and screeched. “It’s too heavy.”

  Leah hurried over to help. Squatting low, she got her hands under the rubber pad on the bottom of the door. They lifted on the count of three. The door shuddered and protested, but together, they forced it open.

  Andy staggered back, heaving.

  “You lay off the cigarettes and you might be useful after all.”

  He smiled at the ground, but Leah could tell he was barely hanging on.

  She walked over and gave his arm a squeeze. “Just keep it together until we make it to your place, okay? I need you to direct me.”

  He nodded. “It won’t happen again.”

  Leah held back most of a smirk. “It better not. Because next time, I’ll close my fist.” She tugged open the driver’s door and slid into the seat as Andy hurried around the other side of the car.

  He got in the passenger side and groaned. “It smells like something died in here.”

  “Forty years ago, something probably did.” Leah put the Buick in drive and bumped and bounced out of the garage, around the dumpster, and down the alley. The steering wheel felt loose and wobbly in her hands, but she managed to keep from smashing into a wall. “Do you know a back way to your house?”

  Andy thought it over. “There’s a few. I’ve gotten creative in rush hour.”

  “Good, because with all the cars stalled on the major roads, we’ll need a miracle.”

  He pointed at the nearest cross-street. “Turn left and then take the second right. We’ll run parallel to the highway as best we can.”

  Leah nodded and followed his directions, white-knuckling every turn. The car shuddered as she spun the oversized wheel. She glanced at Andy with a grimace. “I’ll get the hang of it eventually.”

  He held up his hands. “I drive a Fiat. It’s the size of the backseat and turns on a dime. I wouldn’t have been able to back this thing up.”

  “It wasn’t easy.” Leah lapsed into silence as she concentrated on driving.

  With every mile, her confidence behind the wheel grew, but their progression slowed. Andy pointed out where to turn and gave her alternatives when the road ahead became too congested to make it. They crawled out of midtown at a snail’s pace.

  Leah drove over a curb to avoid a solid wall of stalled cars. A woman stood inside the doorway of the closest building, staring with an open mouth. It wasn’t the first time. So far, they hadn’t run into any serious trouble. A couple of kids followed them for a while, racing and shouting down the street until Leah lost them, but that was all.

  If someone with bad intentions heard the car, she didn’t know if they would be so lucky. Thankfully, the farther they drove, the nicer the neighborhood became. In the last mile, they traded commercial buildings and strip malls for brick colonials and grass front yards.

  Andy pointed at another street and scooted forward as they turned the corner. It was the entrance to a newer subdivision, filled with craftsman-styled houses bunched together like sardines in a tin. He bent to peer out the windshield. “See the yellow house on the left, four down?”

  Leah nodded.

  “Turn in there.”

  “That’s your place?”

  He nodded.

  Leah took stock of all the houses. Neat and tidy with little flower beds around the mailboxes and newer cars in the driveways. All new construction, not more than five years old. She crossed her fingers as she asked a question. “Do any of these houses have basements?”

  Andy’s face fell. “No. They’re all on slabs.”

  Leah nodded and pulled into Andy’s driveway. They would need to find somewhere else to hide.

  As she put the car in park, the front door to the house flew open. A redhead in athletic wear rushed from the house. She stopped in the driveway as soon as she spotted Andy.

  Even inside the car, Leah could hear the woman’s tone as she pointed and shouted.

  “Who is that?”

  Andy winced. “My wife.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  GRANT

  Rural South Carolina

  Saturday, 1:00 p.m.

  Grant tapped the gas gauge for the tenth time. The needle hovered on the E for empty. Cursing himself, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before looking around. He was in the middle of nowhere.

  No houses. No little towns. No gas stations.

  When he ran out of map, Grant thought he could manage by street signs and follow the state roads through South Carolina and into Georgia. It wasn’t that easy. The signs claimed this was a state road, but it wasn’t getting him anywhere fast.

  For all he knew, a town could be just over the next rise or forty miles to his west or east. He stared out at the wire fencing separating the scrabble on the side of the road from the pasture beyond. Someone owned these fields, but who?

  Farms had gas for their tractors and other equipment. If he could only see a house. Grant leaned forward, squinting into the distance when the car sputtered. Oh, no. Not yet. He pumped the gas pedal.

  The car coughed and the engine died. Grant coasted over to the weeds and put the Cutlass in park. He rested h
is head on the cracked steering wheel.

  I’m never going to make it home in time. He pulled out his phone. No service. He stared at the picture of his wife he used as a background and almost lost it. Tears pricked his eyes and he snuffed back a storm of snot. Please get out of the city. Please make it somewhere safe.

  If the bombs went off before he could find her, it might take weeks to track her down. Months, even. Grant didn’t know much about nuclear bombs apart from what he remembered reading about in high school history class. Vague terms like fallout and radiation clung to him, but the details were too sketchy to recall.

  He sat back and sucked in a breath before wiping at his face. Giving up now wasn’t an option. If he couldn’t drive to Atlanta, he would walk. Walking was only a setback, not a death sentence. He would find his wife.

  Grant moved to shove his phone back in his pocket, but stopped. He pulled open the services section and moved to cellular. The phone searched for service, but it came up empty. He scrolled to Wi-Fi. He knew the odds were a million to one, maybe worse, but as the little wheel turned looking for signal… He prayed.

  A single Wi-Fi network appeared. Dueling Banjos. Signal strength, one bar. He tried to connect. It prompted him for a password. Grant looked up. Somewhere near him, someone had power.

  He clambered out of the car and held the phone up to the sky. Still one bar. He walked ten paces and waited; the signal didn’t improve. Pulling the phone down, Grant spun in a circle. Trees and pasture all around. He would need to hunt.

  Grant set the phone on the roof and tugged open the back door of the Cutlass. After rooting around in his suitcase, he pulled out a drawstring bag he used for carrying his gym gear when he traveled.

  He dumped out the sweatbands and little bottles of shampoo and filled it with the two bottles of Gatorade he had left and the three Power Bars. They would get him through today, even if he spent the majority of it hiking through the fields of South Carolina.

  Grant grabbed the shotgun and the car keys before locking the Cutlass. Then he took his phone, swiped it open again, and went on the hunt.

  Sticking to the road, he hiked north the way he came, stopping every hundred yards to check the reception. When the network disappeared, he turned around and backtracked.

  He passed the Cutlass and kept on going over a hill and down the other side. The network disappeared again about three hundred yards south of the Cutlass. Grant cursed and ran a hand through his hair.

  If the signal wasn’t coming from somewhere on the road, he’d have to traipse through the fields. It meant trespassing and poor visibility and the risk of walking into something he couldn’t walk out of.

  Some people chose to live in the middle of the country because they didn’t like interlopers. If he ran into one of them, he might never make it home. Grant checked the shotgun he’d lifted from the kid in the gas station.

  Four shells, pump action. A solid defensive weapon with good stopping power. But four shells wouldn’t go far. He hiked back to the Cutlass and stood beside the front fender.

  Leah needed him. He stared at the field in front of him and shrugged out of his jacket. He laid it across the wire and used it as a shield to climb over without snagging his skin. A cut from a jagged barbed-wire spike could bring anything from staph to tetanus. He couldn’t risk it.

  After easing through, Grant slipped his jacket back on, slung the bag over his shoulder, and set off. He rested the shotgun on the hollow between his shoulder and clavicle, securing it with his arm as he held the phone out in front of him.

  The pasture lands were two or three years fallow, with occasional shafts of renegade wheat dried and decaying amongst the weeds. He walked due west, following the afternoon sun. The land rose ahead of him, cresting in a ridge line with oak trees and shade.

  In the summer months, cows would congregate beneath the branches for shade, but on this cold January day, no animals roamed about. Grant reached the top of the rise and stood beneath the largest tree.

  The wind chilled his hands and he took a moment to warm them. Ahead, fields stretched out in a patchwork sea. It was the epitome of rural America. Farmlands and tranquility and not a high-rise or traffic jam in sight.

  Grant thought about his job back home and his frenetic day-to-day living. He married Leah five years before, but only now were they seriously discussing kids. It had seemed impossible before. First she needed to finish nursing school and he needed a stable job. Then it was overtime and unpredictable shifts and travel two out of every six weeks. They couldn’t even manage a dog. And now what? Now that the threat of an attack loomed in Grant’s mind, he wished he’d made different choices.

  He grew up in a little farm town with a handful of kids his age and a single elementary school for the entire county. Now he lived among millions of people and sat in traffic and flipped radio stations and never sat still.

  His days were filled with computer software and technology conferences and flights halfway across the country. If he’d stayed in his hometown, he’d never have met his wife. But now they were about to be torn apart.

  A pain lodged in his chest and Grant turned back to his phone and waited as the Wi-Fi networks populated. Dueling Banjos appeared with two bars.

  Grant jerked his head up looked around. He was headed in the right direction.

  He navigated down the hill and through another fence line and section of forest. The signal remained steady.

  Half an hour of plodding through mud and dirt and fallen leaves, he emerged at yet another fence line and a dirt road. Grant clambered through the fence and stopped in the middle of the track. The signal had to be close. He squinted into the distance. Something shimmered in the descending sunlight.

  Loping ahead, Grant stopped at a narrow, paved road. This must be it. To his left, the road stretched back up over the hill where he’d come from. To his right, it dipped down into another valley. Something stood beside the road at the edge of his vision.

  Grant hustled to it, squinting until it came clear. A mailbox.

  He almost whooped for joy and took off running. It was a rural box, made of dull metal and shaped to slough off snow. Grant stopped beside it. A gravel road connected to the pavement just past the mailbox.

  The signal strength on his phone jumped to full strength at three. He held a hand up to shield his view from the dipping sun. A gate stood twenty feet down, shutting off access to the gravel. A sign reading No Trespassing was lashed to the wooden cross-bar.

  Grant stared at it. He needed to trespass. It was the only way to find help. But he didn’t want to be shot at, either. He set down his bag and thought it over. Only one idea came to him.

  He slipped off his jacket and sweatshirt and long-sleeved T-shirt before tugging his white undershirt over his head. He tied the stinky thing to the end of the shotgun and redressed before grabbing his bag.

  With the shotgun held high and the white shirt waving like a flag in the wind, Grant approached the gate.

  Chapter Seventeen

  GRANT

  Rural South Carolina

  Saturday, 3:00 p.m.

  After easing under the wood crossbeams, Grant made his way down the well-maintained gravel road. As the road bent to the right, a blue South Carolina flag came into view. It waved atop a flagpole in front of what could only be described as a rustic mansion.

  With full scribe log walls, solar panels covering the entire roof, and what looked to be a massive well beside it, the home had it all. As Grant stood and stared, a terrific barking sounded from around the back of the house.

  A ball of fur and speed raced around the far side of the building and Grant backed up a step. A huge German shepherd closed the distance between Grant and the house, barking with every leap.

  Grant loved dogs. He’d lost his golden retriever a year before and hadn’t had the heart to replace her. A friendly lap dog until the end, Sage spent her last night snuggled up against Grant’s leg on the couch.

  The dog running a
t him wasn’t friendly. If it got close enough to Grant’s lap, it would take a bite out of it, not sleep against it. Grant didn’t know what to do. Running would be worse; he’d become prey. He wouldn’t shoot it.

  All he could do was stand there and hope it didn’t maul him. Grant braced himself for the attack when a whistle cut the dog’s bark in two. The dog collapsed in a crouch fifteen feet away. It focused on Grant, waiting.

  The front door of the house opened and a man stepped out, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt made for tough winter labor. He eased off the porch and approached Grant, shotgun of his own in his hands.

  He stopped beside the dog. “Can’t you read?”

  Grant waved the white shirt.

  “Unless you want a window in your middle, I would put that weapon on the ground.”

  Grant set the shotgun down and stood, hands up in surrender. “I need help.”

  “Obviously.” The man’s beard twitched. “Only an idiot would traipse onto my land with a shotgun and expect to stay alive.”

  The dog growled and Grant nodded. “You’re right and I apologize. But I’m lost and I ran out of gas out on Route 81.”

  From the distance, Grant couldn’t gauge the stranger’s age, but it couldn’t have been much older than Grant. His arms bulged with hard work’s reward and he squinted as he spoke. “Don’t see how that’s my problem.”

  “No, it’s not.” Grant swallowed. “But I’m hoping to buy some gas and directions. I can pay.”

  “Money’s no good here.”

  “I can work.”

  The man glanced down at the dog and said something Grant couldn’t hear. The dog advanced.

  “I don’t want any trouble!”

  “Layla will decide that. Put the bag on the ground, too.”

  Grant did as instructed. The dog trotted up, nose working overtime. She sniffed his track pants and sneakers before turning to his bag and finally the shotgun. She trotted back to the man and resumed her place by his side.