Surviving The End (Book 2): Fallen World

by Hamilton, Grace

  Maybe I should have driven away while he was digging the extra hat out of his trunk, he thought. He’s liable to get us killed.

  13

  Even with a bright moon overhead, the road was far more treacherous at night. The headlight on Jodi’s motorcycle didn’t seem particularly strong, and there were no other headlights on the road. Obstacles seemed to emerge suddenly out of the gloom like pop-up spooks in a haunted house. When Jodi almost drove into the back of a flatbed trailer, it was enough. Heart racing, she pulled off the road into the parking lot of a small storage building.

  One more night, she reminded herself. I’ll reach home early tomorrow. There’s not much farther to go.

  It made her feel a little better about stopping. The storage building had a gate arm blocking entry, but without electricity, there was no alarm system to worry about. She hopped off the bike and approached the gate arm. She tried to raise the gate arm and found that it had just enough give that she could walk the motorcycle underneath it at the far end.

  She tried the door to the storage building’s office but found it locked. It was a glass door, and she briefly considered trying to break it. The risk and effort of doing so seemed too great, so instead she drove down the line until she found an unrented storage space with no lock on the door. When she opened it, she discovered a dusty room full of cobwebs. The air inside was like an oven, but she walked the bike inside anyway.

  In the small, silver motorcycle trailer, she found a filthy old wool blanket. She spread it out on the warm concrete floor. At first, she pulled the door shut, but the absolute darkness and stifling heat were too much. On top of that, she was paranoid that someone would come along and set the latch in place, effectively trapping her inside—if such a thing was even possible. It wasn’t an entirely rational fear, but it was enough to make her slide the door open again.

  Lying in the dark on the uncomfortable floor, she tried to remind herself of how close she was to home. It helped, if only a little. Mostly, she felt utterly alone, exhausted beyond the ability to sleep, and her arm hurt like hell. Still, beneath it all, she felt that little spark of satisfaction that she had freed herself from Talon and his gang.

  He got what he deserved. He got what he deserved. This kept running through her mind like a mantra.

  All of these jumbled feelings kept her awake most of the night. Sometime just before sunrise, she finally slipped into a restless sleep, but she awoke not long after to a ruthless heat and the terrible hard concrete pressing against her. With a miserable moan, she rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up with her good arm. Daydreaming about downing a couple of strong codeine or Percocet pills, she hoisted herself up on the bike, pain surging up her arm into her shoulder. She grabbed the wool blanket and crammed it back into the trailer.

  After climbing onto the seat, she had to sit for a few minutes until her mind cleared enough to handle the bike. The storage room seemed to trap the heat, and she was soaked in layers of sweat. Finally, when enough of the sleep had fallen away that she could think clearly, she walked the bike backward out of the storage room. The trailer made this tricky as it kept rolling to one side, forcing Jodi to pull the bike forward again to realign it with the open door. By the time she managed it, she was furious and muttering curses under her breath. She put the bike in gear and across the parking lot. She had to struggle with the gate arm again, but then she was on the road and headed home at a good clip.

  Jodi had started to feel more confident on the motorcycle. At first, she’d felt like she was fighting to maintain control every second. As it turned out, the twenty years that had passed since she’d last ridden a motorcycle had caused her abilities to atrophy, but after a couple of hours she felt good. It was a bigger and more powerful bike, and she had to keep it in check.

  At one point, she came around a bend in the road and spotted a huge pileup of charred vehicles blocking both lanes. As she drew near, she thought she spotted a dead body still trapped in one of them, someone pinned between steering wheel and seat. If Jodi had been driving a car, she would have been forced to stop and try to find a way around, but the motorcycle easily squeezed through on the half-blocked shoulder.

  The darkness of the past days began to fall away as she dared a little more speed. She started seeing signs for Macon, and it was like a dream. Though the wind was blasting in her face, the heat burning her exposed earlobes, and her arm still aching, all of her troubles began to drop away.

  Mike, you’d better have listened to me, she thought. I’d better find you and Owen at home. For once in your life, please be exactly where I asked you to be.

  Finally, she came over a hill, passed a dead semi by the side of the road, and saw a big green roadside declaring, “Macon 15 mi.” Since Jodi’s mother lived east of the city, her house would be even closer. Jodi checked her speed. At sixty miles an hour, she would be home in fifteen minutes. It seemed too good to be true.

  When she looked up from the speedometer her gaze fell immediately over the great mound of debris spread across the lane in front of her. It looked like a car had crossed over from the eastbound lanes and hit another car head-on. Both of the vehicles were crushed into almost unrecognizable shapes. They’d been moved to the shoulder of the road, but a large amount of debris from both vehicles remained.

  Jodi had about two seconds to react. She swerved to avoid the pile, aiming for a gap between the debris and the crumpled cars. When she did, her tires hit the loose pieces of a shattered window, and the bike went immediately out from under her. It happened so fast, she had trouble processing it. Suddenly, the motorcycle was sliding away, and she was falling toward the road. Realizing she didn’t have a helmet to protect her head, she let go of the handlebars and raised her arms to protect herself.

  When she hit the asphalt, the sudden friction pulled her left arm away from her head, and she felt the side of her face strike the road. The whole world went dim, but in the darkness, she felt her body sliding, heard the leather of her jacket grinding away. It felt like she slid forever, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. She slid past the shoulder and went into the ditch, coming to a jarring stop at the bottom. When she hit the far slope, it knocked the wind out of her.

  And then the world went still. Jodi lay on her back, her right arm folded over her stomach, her left arm stuck behind her. Her left sleeve had ground down to the thin inner lining, but she realized it had almost certainly saved her arm from being shredded. As she lay there, she tried to gauge if she’d suffered any serious injuries. She had a splitting headache, but nothing felt like it was broken. In fact, she felt almost nothing at all, a profound whole-body numbness.

  Get up, she told herself. Make sure the bike is okay.

  Pushing herself with her left arm, she managed to sit up. When she did, a fierce dizzy spell hit, and suddenly the whole world seemed to be spinning around her, as if she were trapped on an out-of-control carnival ride. Just before she blacked out, she felt herself falling back into the ditch, covered in shade and well hidden from the highway.

  14

  Mike’s directions were easy to follow: straight down Interstate 16 to the Allentown exit and then north. Shane and James wound up on a back road that cut through a small town and wound through forested hills. Shane drove slowly, afraid he might overlook some detail that would lead him to his wife. This area was like so many areas—dead cars scattered here and there, people lingering outside like lost souls. The heat was stifling, so he cracked his window to let the wind blast into the van, but the air was muggy.

  “Now, if we come upon this gang, don’t just go in there gun blazing,” the sheriff said. During the drive, he had proved to be very fond of talking. “This isn’t the Wild West, and that kind of approach rarely works. I know of some good officers who lost their lives that way. I say keep driving past them, circle around, try to surprise them. Never let them know you’re coming.”

  “Let’s hope Jodi got away from her kidnappers,” Shane said. �
�I’d rather not have to deal with them at all. She’s our priority, so keep your eyes out for a woman on an Indian Scout motorcycle.”

  “What does an Indian Scout look like?” James asked. “I’m not all that informed about the different kinds of motorcycles. I’d know a Harley if I saw it, but other than that…”

  “I don’t really know either. Just look for a woman on a motorcycle.”

  “You got it.”

  Shane was just thinking about using the radio to contact Mike and confirm directions when he saw a break in the trees on his left. A large storage shed with brown aluminum walls stood at the back of a small dirt parking lot, and there in the middle of the lot, four deflated tents had clearly been abandoned. One of the tents had been pulled out of the ground and lay like a large deflated balloon. Behind the tents, Shane saw a nice black motorcycle lying on its side.

  “There!” He said it a bit too loudly, startling Sheriff Cooley, who flinched and put a hand against his hat, as if to keep it from flying off. “That must be the camp Mike talked about.”

  Shane pulled the van into the parking lot, grabbed the AR-15 off the floorboard, and checked to make sure it was loaded. Then he opened the door and stepped out.

  “Stay in the van,” he told the sheriff. So the sheriff would accept the recommendation, he added, “One of us needs to be close to the radio, just in case we find something.”

  Sheriff Cooley put his holstered service revolver on his lap and nodded. Shane shut the door and moved toward the tents, the AR-15 held at the ready. He reached up and flicked off the safety. The camp looked like it had been hastily abandoned. There was an empty bottle on the ground, some cans off to the side, sleeping bags still in the tents.

  Then he spotted the body. Feet stuck out of the end of the last tent in the row. Shane approached, aiming the rifle at it, but the stench of blood was strong. Mike’s story was all true—not that Shane had doubted him. There was every indication that Jodi was long gone, but he walked through the camp anyway, even peeking into the storage building, which was empty and looked like it had been unused for years.

  Finally, he set the safety on the rifle, got back in the van, and put the gun on the floorboard.

  “She’s long gone, just like Mike said.” Shane started the van and pulled out of the parking lot. “She must’ve headed south.”

  “The way we came from,” the sheriff said.

  “Yes, but maybe we drove past her without realizing it. We’ll double back and check the other roads,” he said.

  As he headed south, Sheriff Cooley resumed his small talk, prattling on about evidence and things to look for, delving far too deeply into various minutiae of crime scene investigations. Shane only half-listened, his attention fixed on the passing landscape, as he looked for any sign of Jodi. He checked various side streets, even wandered through Allentown for a while. Eventually, as the afternoon approached evening, he turned toward the interstate. By then, he was growing increasingly frustrated, and he couldn’t respond to the sheriff, afraid he might snap at him.

  “The smallest thing that is so easily overlooked can break a case wide open,” James was saying. “It takes a trained eye, but it also takes a patient eye. I’ve sat on stakeouts for ten hours at a time, just staring through the windshield, not saying a darn word to anyone. Do you know how great it feels after sitting for ten hours to finally see something? ‘Ah, there he is. There’s the guy I’ve been looking for.’ I tell you, sometimes I can just about cry—mostly from relief, because my butt is numb by that point.”

  Shane wasn’t even sure what he was talking about at this point. He’d long since given up trying to follow the sheriff’s meandering chain of thought. Driving west on the interstate required constantly changing lanes. At one point, they passed a large wreck that forced them onto the shoulder. Even then, Shane clipped the edge of the van’s sideview mirror on one of the wrecked cars in passing and cracked the glass.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” Sheriff Cooley said. “The support rod is bent. That thing’ll fall off before we get home. With these old vehicles, you can’t fix the mirror when they get bent like that. You have to replace the whole thing, and it won’t be cheap either, I can tell you that. You can’t just go to the dealer, and it’s certainly not under warranty.”

  The sound of the man’s voice was putting his nerves on edge, and the descending fuel gauge was pushing him ever closer to a breaking point. He didn’t want to head back home, but if they didn’t find Jodi soon, he wouldn’t have a choice.

  Jodi, where the hell are you? What happened to you? Please, give me some sort of sign that you’re out there somewhere.

  He was just about to tell James, as gently as possible, to please shut up for the rest of the evening when his headlights caught a big pile of debris in the middle of the road. He hit the brakes and eased over to the shoulder, but then he spotted the charred husks of vehicles that had been parked there. Flicking on the high beams, he saw the long curve of tire marks that suggested one of the vehicles had crossed over the median and hit the other head-on.

  Shane pulled the van in behind the wrecked vehicles and put it in park. Sheriff Cooley stopped rambling mid-sentence and leaned forward to gaze out of the windshield.

  “You see something?” he said. “Why’re we stopped?”

  “We have to clear this debris from the road,” Shane said, opening the door. “There’s no room to get past it. It’ll just take a moment. You stay here with the radio, okay?”

  As he got out, he drew the Glock.

  “Keep an eye out for other vehicles,” the sheriff said. “They can come up on you real fast.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “A state trooper got walloped by a Chevy last year. Before he got out of his cruiser, he looked for traffic, but it only took a few seconds for the car to come over the horizon and hit him. The guy he was writing the ticket for drove away. Can you believe it?”

  “I got it,” Shane said, tightly. “I’ll be careful.” Would you please, please shut up, James. Oh, God, the sound of your voice, it’s driving me crazy!

  Shane grabbed one of the larger pieces of debris, which appeared to be a chunk of the quarter panel from one of the wrecked cars, and dragged it toward the ditch. Turning, he kicked it across the shoulder. When he did, he saw Jodi lying there. The moment was so startling that he stood still for a few seconds, convinced he was seeing a mirage brought on by the extreme shadows cast in bright headlights.

  “James, get out here,” he called over his shoulder, as he picked his way down into the ditch. “I need your help. Hurry.”

  As he reached the bottom of the ditch, he heard the passenger door open and shut, Sheriff Cooley still muttering under his breath, as if he’d continued the meaningless conversation with himself. Jodi lay at the bottom of the ditch on her back, both hands folded on her belly. She was wearing an old leather jacket with padded shoulders that was at least two sizes too big for her, but the left sleeve had been shredded. As Shane ran toward her, he called her name, but her eyes were closed.

  God, please don’t let her be dead. He screamed this thought over and over, feeling tears burning in his eyes. Please don’t let her be dead, not after I spent so long looking for her.

  Other than the bandages on her right arm, which were soaked with blood, she didn’t seem to have any obvious injuries from far away. He took that as a good sign. The bike she’d been riding had slid into the ditch about ten yards past her, and it looked trashed. What had happened to her became clear.

  Shane knelt beside her, pressing his fingers against her throat, and felt for her pulse. It seemed strong. He leaned in close and heard her breathing.

  “Thank God,” he said. “She’s alive.”

  He gently patted her face, and she moaned softly but didn’t open her eyes. When he examined her closely, he found a rather large bump on her left temple, road rash on her cheek and left arm. The left leg of her jeans was ripped open, a long abrasion down the side of her leg.

/>   “Either she hit the debris or she tried to avoid it,” Sheriff Cooley said, kneeling down on the other side of her. “Either way, looks like she went right into the ditch.” He pointed at the crashed motorcycle a few yards away. “At least we now know what an Indian Scout looks like.”

  “That’s not important. We need to get her in the van, but I’m afraid to move her. She might have a neck or back injury.”

  “We should use a neck brace,” Sheriff Cooley said.

  “I didn’t happen to bring one,” Shane muttered bitterly. “In retrospect, I should have thought of it, I suppose. It crossed my mind that she might be hurt.”

  “With the right materials, we can fashion something suitable,” the sheriff said. “Stay here with her, and I’ll see what I can find. Maybe some of that debris, or maybe something left behind in one of the vehicles.”

  He clambered out of the ditch and shuffled off toward the crashed cars. After a moment, Shane heard him rooting around either on the road or in the vehicles. As the sheriff did that, Shane checked Jodi for further injuries. No bones seemed to be broken, though he knew such injuries might not be obvious. When he gently squeezed her hand, she moaned again.

  “Come on, honey,” Shane said, leaning in close to speak softly in her ear. “Wake up. We found you. We’re going to get you home. Open your eyes.”

  He thought her eyes fluttered for a second, but they didn’t open.

  “This’ll work,” James said, carefully stepping down into the ditch.

  He sat down next to Shane and revealed the items he’d scavenged: a couple of belts and some kind of large plastic makeup case.

  “Where did you get those?” Shane said.

  “Well, the belts came off the dead bodies crumpled up in the back seat of the Volvo,” James replied. “It was one part of them that didn’t burn.”