by James Kiehle
But now it was morning and what was done was done.
It was her scheme, her devious seduction of the handsome Roger Lind that got them on board the Oahu Queen. Batted eyes and no no, a thousand times no pretense of shock helped Judy pay the price of salvation—morally high, but not without some dark inner corner of her that truly wanted it. Roger, no Snidely Whiplash but a near-gentleman, surprised her with kindness, deference, and manners out in the open, where they could be seen, another thing altogether perhaps when alone.
So when Lind offered to share his cabin and sleep on the floor, Judy played along. Her crime so far was a marital misdemeanor, not a felony. And when the sun had set and the ship was quiet, Roger Lind, trying to find comfort on chilly steel, heard her say, “There’s really no reason for you to sleep there. This cot is big enough to almost share.”
Thinking back, it seemed the right thing to do. He had, after all, probably saved their lives.
Now the sea was rocking and the porthole suddenly banged her chin—she yelped “Ow,” waking Roger up.
“Sorry, I got bonked,” she said, rubbing her face.
Roger, naked, leaned on an elbow and said, “If you play your cards right, you might get bonked again.”
•
The lost blonde felt sick.
None of the food that Daria found was anything she could easily cook, though she had three boxes of cookies and ate one of them. Oreos. No milk. And no water. The tap was dry.
Daria had tins of generic-brand tuna and cans of vegetables and refried beans and soups, but didn’t have an opener, though she found a knife that broke off when she tried to use it. In the morning, she’d look for an opener—if she could stand the stench of the bodies. She hadn’t noticed any cookware. Maybe in a trunk?
She’d deal with it at dawn. Maybe her memory would come back by then.
She crawled into a smelly sleeping bag under an indigo sky that seemed sprinkled with millions of stars, though the mountain obscured part of it and thick, wafting clouds the rest. The woods far off were apparently ablaze; the horizon, a line of golden fire. There was a continual low rumble in the sky to match her empty belly’s.
In the morning, Daria would salvage what she could from the vehicles and find some way to transport it, a back pack or something; then she’d have to start heading down the mountain. It seemed her only option.
Daria fell to sleep humming a familiar song: South of Sunset, she thought it might be called.
Catchy little number.
Who recorded this? Daria wondered.
•
Peter Grant looked up.
Sky.
Burnt umber clouds rolled above him, wispy and light. Around him, the wreckage of the Gulfstream that crashed on approach to an airfield in the middle of nowhere; the aircraft’s power failing at just 350 feet above the tarmac and the pilot couldn’t avoid slamming into the ground at 120 mph. The plane’s nose was squashed and the wings ripped off—the pilot and five of the crew were killed instantly.
Also dead: Herman Locke, the American Secretary of Defense, who would have been next in line for the vacant presidency had he lived, but he was impaled by a shard of plastic and his bloody, mashed head lay feet from Deborah Lansing—herself bleeding from a head wound—as the plane settled and anything not bolted down had flown through the air like in a tornado.
The until-recently White House chief of staff shrieked loudly enough to wake an unconscious Peter Grant, sprawled in the aisle, dazedly peering up at the torn airframe roof like it was an open sardine can and he was a fish.
Peter tried to roll over but his ribs were on fire. He peered up at Lansing.
“Did we kiss?” he wondered, wincing in pain, and saw her attempt to grin.
“I think that’s what caused the plane to crash.”
Grant managed to sit up, holding his side. He took Deborah’s hand and she lifted him to a seat beside her where he breathed as deep a painful breath as he could. The passenger cabin was obliterated. Everything was everywhere. Two crew members’ lifeless bodies were twisted grotesquely in a yawning hole in the wreckage. God knows how they ended up there.
Sniffing the air, Grant smelled an acrid smoke and looked down the aisle. One of the crew, a tall, slender guy wearing a black vest and a once-white shirt now stained crimson looked dazed and disoriented. He perched his butt on the arm rest of a seat and smoked a Marlboro. With blood seemingly syphoned from his head, falling in streams down his cheek and turning his shirt collar a shiny liquid red, he slumped over and lay dead in the aisle, the cigarette still burning in his hand.
“We’re damn lucky to be among the living,” Grant told Lansing, then looked at Herman Locke’s mutilated head laying feet away. “Poor Locke. Jesus.”
“No, he was an egomaniacal asshole who should have stayed in the private sector. I had to deal with him almost every day, so now I know what a prick is.”
“Why sugar-coat it?”
“I tend to speak my mind, especially when the subject is dead,” Lansing laughed half-heartedly. “Let’s get out of here before we are, too. I need some air. It’s smoky in here.”
They made their way around and over the dead man and the debris of scattered seats, computers, bottles, bags, all kinds of stuff, until they squeezed out a side door that had been ripped from its hinges and hung precariously over the side of the aircraft. Peter jumped five feet, then helped Lansing down as she dropped hard onto clumps of mud.
Smoke was drifting up from the opposite side of the plane. Small black clouds wafted and rose. Then a mini-fireball erupted as an explosion boomed from the other side of the aircraft and they ran. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” Grant gripped Lansing’s hand as they raced across dry grass to the other end of the field, coming to rest near some trees. His ribs were killing him.
They watched as the plane was blown apart in a jarring blast. Shrapnel flew over their heads and peppered the field, narrowly missing them. The lingering fire burned hot for what seemed like forever, but the billowing clouds of smoke were sent north and away from them.
Grant and Lansing looked at the burning wreckage and then at each other. Their expressions reflected a shared fear: they saw no future.
“So let’s get a grip,” Deb Lansing said. “We’re in the middle of Idaho. No food or water or way to get anywhere. I’d say we are—what’s the word?—royally fucked?”
“That’s two words, but why quibble,” Grant said, now looking east, seeing dust. “Besides, there is sometimes a silver lining to nuclear holocaust.”
Lansing’s eyes tightened. “What?”
“The cavalry just arrived.” Peter wagged a finger towards the horizon.
Three US Army Humvees tore through an wide opening in the forest and lurched up a dirt road. They screeched to a halt, and soldiers hopped out of the rigs to assess the situation—burning airplane, check; survivors unlikely—
Grant and Lansing stood up and waved their arms, hollering loudly until they got the army’s attention. The Humvees roared forward and fanned out around them; one was towing a really large green boat. The doors opened on the lead vehicle and three soldiers in full gear jumped out, weapons raised.
Then a female officer emerged from the Humvee, a trim blonde with a librarian’s taut hairstyle, minimal makeup and a professional demeanor, though Peter thought that if she’d reveal a Pepsodent smile, you’d see a Ms. Rodeo America pageant winner.
“Colonel Grant, I assume? I’m Lt. Colonel Janine Hitchcock,” the officer said, not saluting. She wore no insignia on her camos, not even a US flag—they’d all been removed. She displayed all the emotion of a statue.
“Colonel,” Grant replied, shaking a chilly hand. “This is Deb—”
“Deborah Lansing,” Hitchcock finished, now reaching for the chief of staff’s hand.
“Thank you for coming to our rescue. Are you our liaison from the Compound?” Lansing asked.
“I would be if the Compound still exists,” Hitchcock sai
d.
“You have doubts?” Peter said. “This place is so secret, even I didn’t know about it.”
“Speak for yourself,” Lansing said, and poked his sore rib with her elbow by accident and he winced. “Oh, sorry.”
Hitchcock walked with her hands behind her back and pursed her lips.
“I’ll have the medic take a look at that. In the meantime, a lot has happened in the last few hours,” she told them. “We were on a patrol when there was a blast in the direction of the Compound, probably targeted by Chinese or Russian missiles. We were heading back there to assess the situation but then we saw your plane go down and detoured.”
“How long ago?” Peter asked.
“Over that hill, less than an hour ago.”
“Do you think it was nukes?” Lansing asked. “Grant?”
Peter shook his head. “If it was, we don’t want to go anywhere near there, at least not for another few months. The radiation levels would cause us problems. Anything more than Nagasaki-sized, it’s dangerous.”
“It might not have been atomic,” Hitchcock countered. “It’s a mystery.”
“So, what do you suggest we do, Colonel Grant?” Lansing asked.
Peter noticed that Hitchcock was standing at ease, a cool, curious look on her face, almost amused, waiting to hear his answer.
“Skirt the site and head south,” he replied. “Colonel, what’s your plan?”
Hitchcock looked genuinely bemused.
“Perhaps you don’t understand the dynamics here, people,” she said. “It’s a brand new world out there and I anticipate some changes.”
Lansing frowned, “Meaning?”
Hitchcock stepped forward, close to Deborah’s face. “Meaning that I’m the big cheese now”
27. Off The Bus
Fury unleashed, payback in spades.
What had really bothered Edgar Bolton was the ‘cartoon’ comment that first asshole guard joked about. This in front of the other convicts? Not cool.
“You’re like, who, Brutus? No, no, I know: Spike. That big bulldog from the old Warner Brothers cartoons?” the guard said to Bolt, but more to his partner, another asshole. “Got all your little dogs running around you saying Can I Spike? Huh, can I can I? And you whack him across the kisser and say Ehhh, Shad-dup.” The guard used the animated Spike voice and his buddy, the driver, laughed.
Later, Bolt thought: Not laughing now, are you asshole?
Honestly, where did they get these characters? How many Rent-a-Cop gene pools did they have to dredge through to wind up with those clowns as guardians of the law? Small matter. Gone the way of the world now. Dead as unseen ants beneath his prison-issued work boots.
Bolton supposed he could have let him live, but where was the fun in that? Besides, killing was pretty sexy when he got right down to it.
But the atom bomb—or whatever the hell it was—did the big kill anyway. The blast sent the high-security bus careening off the road and over an embankment. One second his lover Enrique was telling a joke to fellow convicts Wire and Burgess, the next they all felt a sharp jolt and heard an ungodly roar and then the bus tumbled over and over until it came to rest on its side at a lower-elevation logging road beneath the main highway.
The bus was a riven twist of metal, tires on fire and smoking black clouds; the back door hung on hinges. Stumbling outside, momentarily—maybe for the first time in his life—confused, Bolt took quick stock of the situation, saw a chance, and lunged towards the annoying Help me bleat of the prone joker guard laying on the damp grass—the other one dead ten feet beyond. After relieving the guard of his sidearm, Bolton beat in his skull with two-cuffed-hands and with the gun butt until the joker stopped breathing.
Sated, Bolt stood, checked to see if the guard’s uniform might fit—not a prayer—then rifled his pockets and found spare ammo, a lighter, a knife and a pack of smokes. Bolt snagged the handcuff key and stood up to see which of the cons was alive and what, if anything, could be salvaged. Nothing but a carbine with a few shells.
“Click these off me,” Bolt told Burgess, holding out his handcuffs.
Burgess, Wire, Calderon, and Cassidy were all in pretty good shape, aside from bleeding cuts and Wire’s broken rib. There was another guy who Bolt didn’t know, the lone convict to laugh at the guard’s Spike joke. One check mark jotted on Bolton’s Shit List. The loudmouth had been annoying Bolt the entire trip, talking left and right about girls. Girls this, girls that. Not one of Bolt’s interests. The dude had a major thing for blonde pop singers. Britney, Christina, Rebecca—who gave a shit? Like one of those bombshells was going to ask him to an after-party at the Grammy’s?
Served the fucker right to get something metal lodged in his neck; still, the man did try to gurgle some words, but with all the blood evacuating his throat, Bolt couldn’t understand him.
“This prick is a liability,” Bolt announced, and the other cons just stayed silent. They could guess the outcome here based on what they knew of Edgar Bolton and his reputation in the penal system. Bolt slit the man’s throat without hesitation, ending speculation. Still, his move was so quick, so lethal, that no one had time to react or protest. Calderon, lone among them with a close history with Bolt, felt secure in asking, “He wasn’t worth saving, boss? Couldn’t we have voted—”
Bolt cut him off, saying, “I don’t leave decisions to a vote.”
•
Russ spotted a sign for the turnoff to the lodge, coming up in two miles. The logging truck was moving cautiously and he was close enough to read the bumper sticker on the back: Old truckers never die, they just get a new Peterbilt.
Abruptly, the truck’s brake lights flared and the rig came to a screeching halt, its tires smoking. Russ swerved right onto the narrow shoulder, heard a loud crunching sound and his van was peppered with glass. He zoomed along the tight lip of the shoulder alongside the semi. The Peterbilt had smacked into a Ford, its front end squashed hideously, and the driver had flown through the front windshield. The trucker continued to press forward, sparks flying, pushing the wrecked Ford backwards, then disappeared around the bend.
Russell raced on, hugging the edge of the road, dodging other cars and trucks and SUV’s negotiating the wrong lane as if they lived in England. He managed to pass them along the gravel edge, driving at a 10° angle, and knew that one car too close and he could easily topple over. After several long and anxious minutes, his lane was again free, so Russ lurched back onto the asphalt and sped away.
Then he saw the sign: WELCOME TO TEMPLE MT.
As he prepared to turn off the highway, Perry heard a low rumble. He looked in the rear view mirror but could see nothing. At the turnoff, he swerved hard to his right and then quickly stopped when he found himself stuck behind a long line of cars, apparently also headed for the lodge. Perhaps aware of what had taken place far upriver, they were trying to get to higher ground. Or maybe they were just smart. Or tired from the drive and wanted a room.
Russell didn’t know exactly how long it would take the flood to reach their location but assumed it wouldn’t be more than an hour or two; if his imagined flood even existed or came his way at all. He didn’t know the speed of the presumed racing waters.
It could take more. Or less.
As it was, Perry was almost wedged in, though he left a few feet between his van and the car in front. Vehicles lined both sides of the road, all parked on an incline, their engines running, but clearly going nowhere. Then an old Chevy pulled up behind him, leaving less space. Perry didn’t know whether to stay with the line, find another route, or abandon the Dodge and try to make it on foot. He decided to put the van in reverse and backed onto a road blocked by a
Though it was June and warming, the mountain air was still crisp and patches of snow were scattered here and there. Perry waited as other people left their cars. Some were speaking to each other, though most just tried to peer ahead and see what the holdup was. A few of them marched up the road.
Russell co
uld still hear a low rumble from far off and hoped it wasn’t the flood. He had no idea of the altitude, but guessed they were at around two, three thousand feet, maybe more, perhaps halfway up the mountain.
Surely the waters wouldn’t reach that elevation.
Then, all at once, he knew they would.
The roaring sound became sharply louder and the air carried a wet mist. Perry heard trees snapping and metal crunching far away, a hideous combination of wrenching sounds.
The flood was close.
Behind him, Russell caught a blur of movement and swung around as birds filled the skies. Three deer raced across the road and into the woods. A raccoon appeared and scooted into the forest. His heart pounding and his hands damp; perspiration dripped off his face and soaked his clothes. He hit the gas and maneuvered the van backwards, through the gate and onto the logging road, headlights on bright, horn blaring, and drove up the steep and rocky incline in reverse with a handful of vehicles following behind him.
The noise was like a freight train or a tornado, and Russ drove the bumpy road as fast as the van would allow him, amazed that his instincts let him drive so well, then entered a clearing where Douglas Firs had once held sentry, but where now only stumps and weeds prevailed. An official-looking sign proclaimed a picnic area was under construction. It read: Temple Park. Your Tax Dollars at Work.
Turning back, looking through his front window, Perry glimpsed the raging waters tumbling through the forest. He rolled up his window, his entire body vibrating, his face a mask of pure terror. “Holy hell—”
The flood hit as a hard rush of freezing water swiftly and violently broadsided the Caravan. Though secured by a seat belt, the jolt was severe and the van tumbled. His vehicle flipped over and over again, his body flailing within. His head smacked hard on the driver-side window and Russ wondered if he would drown or be bounced to death.
