by Angela White
Angela breathed a sigh as the tall brick walls of the weather-beaten dorms fell out of sight in her mirror, but she didn’t let her guard down as she drove past reeking slaughterhouses and burnt frames of homes and businesses. There were still other people around here, and they were all a threat to a woman alone.
Her gaze flicked over body after body as she drove, determining the cause of death: gunshot, knife wound, the sickness, gunshot again. Death came in many ways, and it wasn’t only to the humans. Deer and cats were the most common corpses to represent the losses that the animal population was taking, but there were also squirrels, dogs, and even birds mixed in. Angela forced her mind away from it all. Maybe it wasn’t as bad wherever Charlie was right now.
Very little in the city where pigs fly had survived the riots, and as she drove, Angela heard no sparrows calling, no engines revving, no lawn mowers rumbling, no pets yapping, no voices shouting, and no horns blaring. There was only the occasional scream or gunshot to break the silence, and the destruction that grew worse the closer she got to downtown Cincinnati.
Debris crunched under her tires as she rolled past dark, reeking restaurants full of rotting food, and she winced at the sounds of glass breaking as she neared the library, where shadows shifted inside, trying to learn to fend for themselves. If she got a flat tire, she planned to abandon her car for another. There was no way her body was able to break the lug nuts loose. What she needed was a set of those new tires that would go an extra fifty miles even on a flat. Self-sealing or something, maybe even armor-plated if she could find it.
Her broken heart clenched at the thought, and she felt a tear slide down her cheek. What she needed most was to find the fourteen-year-old son she’d been apart from for months. It was killing her not to be with him, not to be able to hold him, and she wished with all her heart (along with almost everyone else on the planet) that the war had never come.
“Hold on, Charlie,” she whispered roughly. “I will come for you!”
Angela tried to push the sadness away, flipping on the heater and defrost. She jumped as lightning forked wildly, the glare almost blinding. She drove a little faster around the telephone poles, burnt-out cars, busted furniture, and rotting corpses, feeling awful that so many people would never have the peace of being laid to rest.
She jumped again as the wind slammed against her car and a barrage of black hail pinged off the hood in nerve-wracking blasts, pulling her attention once more to the weather. The sky was a dim, grayish-brown, thick with layers of dust and smoke. The storm clouds racing toward her went through the grit easily, and fat drops of rain pelted her hood and windows.
Following her instincts, Angela took refuge under the concrete viaduct as the storm bore down on the riot-ravaged city. It released sheets of black flakes that covered the streets, and torrents of rain that slowly began to wash away another layer of the dirt and blood that the end of the world had left behind.
Angela put the car in park and lit a smoke as the stench of fishy-shit from the nearby mill creek invaded the vehicle. She searched the crumbling, trashy buildings on either side of her, and her hand stayed near the gun between the seats. Now that she was alone again, her courage had deserted her and she was glad she had disobeyed Kenny and gotten a weapon on her last trip out.
You disobeyed Kenny? You’re in trouble! You’re in trouble! her fear screamed.
Angela nodded, blowing out rings of smoke. The entire world was in trouble now. These last weeks had been full of things she hoped never to tell her man. Kenny wouldn’t understand her helping these people. If he had been here, things would have been different, but she’d been alone when the bombs fell, alone when the first desperate survivor had pounded on her door, and she’d made her choice alone.
The suffering was too great for her to deny them what little help she could give. Kenny would have turned them away with intimidating gestures and icy threats, but he was AWOL, and she couldn’t sit by and let people die without trying to prevent it. She would face him with the entire list of rules she had broken when he found her, or when she found him, but for now, she wasn’t done adding up crimes to be punished for. The two biggest transgressions, one of which he might kill her for, were still to come.
The storm flew by, the threat disappearing as quickly as it had come. Angela eased the car up Queen City’s steep, narrow pavement, trying to avoid the big chunks of debris sliding through the ripples of muddy water. Abandoned vehicles and wrecks had been pulled to the side of this winding hill, looking like lined-up dominoes waiting to be pushed over.
As with the rest of this broken city, Angela saw no signs of life trying to continue like normal as she drove through her own neighborhood, but she could feel people examining her from their barely cracked blinds. She was disappointed by it. She had hoped people would come together, but these survivors wanted nothing to do with her, only desired her to be gone, and she sped up, more than willing to comply.
She understood how they felt. She, too, hated going out; hated leaving the small security of her den, but Warren had cleared this hill so she could make the trip rather than forcing her to live with them. Saying no after that wasn’t an option. When they called for her on the CB, she always answered, would have anyway without his threats and innuendos. Her Oath hadn’t vanished with the war, but she sighed in relief when her three-story, yellow brick building came into view. Coming out was dangerous.
Angela swept the nearly identical rows of red brick duplexes that surrounded her, their matching mailboxes and light poles beaten, dented from enduring man and nature’s fury. It was all the same.
Parking in the rear lot, next to the small flower garden, she sought the tiny grave tucked amid rows of purple violets, and grief enveloped her.
Her tiny, premature son had come in the dark, early morning hours after the war, lungs not ready to work on their own. Wrapped in the red, white, and blue quilt she had brought her first son home in, she had placed her baby in the cold, wet ground herself as an ugly dawn broke. Angela had never felt more pain than when she had covered him with the earth. Despite all her abilities, she hadn’t been able to save her own child. Repairing grave damage was possible for her kind, but she couldn’t replace what hadn’t been given time to grow.
Barely registering the harsh wind gusts, the woman forced herself to go to the grave, to mourn and keep feeling the awful pain so that she could make peace with it. The blackness lurking in her mind wanted to block it and everything else out, but she knew it would take over completely if she let it, and then she would never be with her teenage son again. The darkness was too familiar, too comforting and consuming. She had already spent a decade in it as her life flew by, unable to change the awful mistake she had made by saying yes to Kenny.
The wind swelled, but she paid no attention, broken fingernails digging into the cold skin of her palms as she sank to her knees in front of the unmarked grave.
“My baby,” she whispered, tears spilling from dark lashes.
Four weeks had gone by, but it still felt like yesterday. She had wanted him so much! His father hadn’t, but she had.
Pain tearing through her battered heart, Angela let the darkness have its way for a while, her grief unbearable.
2
Bands of pain were clamping down on her stomach when Angela became aware of her surroundings again, and she eased down the thickly carpeted hallway stairs and unlocked the basement door. She slipped inside the pitch-blackness with a fearlessness that sometimes still surprised her. Angela had been terrified of the dark as a young girl, but she had spent so much time down here since the war that she didn’t need the penlight anymore.
Not reacting fast enough to stop it, the heavy door to the storage area slammed shut behind her, locking automatically. Angela winced at the noise, even though there was no one left here to tell on her and get her punished. Her entire building had emptied out rather quickly when the draft trucks had come through.
Listening intently, Angela scann
ed for intruders, but the witch was silent. She slowly started climbing over the debris to her hole-up with the same thought she always had: Hate it here! Can’t wait to roll!
Angela proceeded toward the small wooden room hidden behind plastic-covered mattresses and box springs, sliding inside the warmth with an unconscious sigh of relief. She locked the door, and stepped carefully over the bags and boxes littering the eight-by-six-foot storage room that was her den.
Angela’s legs were trembling as she lit the lantern on the floor in the rear corner. She was almost shivering despite the warmth of her blanket-covered area, and her body’s reaction confirmed her decision. It would be at least three more weeks before she could leave. Her body wasn’t strong enough to make the trip yet.
Angela tightened her grip on her emotions, heart screaming at how long it was taking. She swept the circled date of 2/12 on the calendar, and scowled at it in frustration. Twenty-five more days of not having even a picture on her walls. Warren was watching for her men, and she wouldn’t make it easy for him.
Shivering and hurting, Angela pushed off her muddy shoes and socks, then replaced her wet, dirty clothes with clean. She lit the propane stove at her feet, very glad of the extra cylinders she had found with the handy appliance. It, along with a few other useful survival items, had come easily enough from the basement room of a Goodwill store, but she was daunted by the size of the list she’d prepared for her trip. She wasn’t sure she would be able to find it all.
“At least I’m not starving,” she muttered, thinking of the first few agonizing days after losing her son, when she’d forced herself to use the power and water while they still worked. She had cooked and dehydrated weeks of food, and frozen large chunks of ice that had lasted for days in her coolers when the utilities finally went off for good on New Year’s Eve. The hour-long blackouts before that had warned her to hurry.
Cramps exploded in her belly as Angela bent down to pour the boiling water into her mug, and she clenched her teeth.
Suck it up! Her mind tossed out one of Kenny’s favorite responses to her discomfort…
Pain, the witch insisted. He caused us pain.
Angela settled herself on the knee-high stack of cushions. She had been living down here since burying her baby boy and had to actually force herself not to clean the plush, two-bedroom apartment above her despite how angry Kenn would be to discover it messy. It needed to appear abandoned to anyone who might wander in.
The doctor swallowed two pills, grimacing as they went down awkwardly. Gun in her robe pocket, she set the portable radio/TV on the pillows next to her. She sipped and flipped through stations, trying not to be disappointed when there was only static. She hadn’t expected anything else. It was obvious that normal life was gone. For how long, was really the only unknown.
The last sad voice she’d heard had been on B105 last week, telling of hundreds of millions dead and dying, advising people to go into the caves and mountains. Angela had a good plan, but she also knew the witch she had been born with was right about her needing help. She had little chance of making it all the way on her own, no matter how many delusion spells she could cast. It didn’t work on everyone, and it was a long trip. Over twelve hundred miles straight through, with detours, it would be more like fifteen hundred or even two thousand miles with no outside energy to feed the witch. She would have to rely on her natural strength.
Sighing, Angela switched the radio to the TV setting. She had hoped to make at least fifty miles a day at first, putting her on base in a month, but after a four-hour trip to get to the local store, which had already been cleaned out, she understood that making even twenty miles a day would be hard. It now came to roughly three months on the road, and her mother’s heart cried out again. So long and so many of the odds are against me!
Gets better when you call the boy’s real daddy, the witch seduced, sending her memories of cool Harrison nights and the softest, blackest hair she’d ever felt until their son was born.
Angela shut her eyes as pain filled her as if it had happened yesterday. She’d never forgotten how it felt to belong to Marcus Brady.
Call him. He’s restless, adrift. He will come, the witch insisted.
The woman huddling in the nicely warming storage room gave the idea serious consideration this time, instead of pushing it away in fear. Marc was also a Marine, had been for a long time, and she had no doubt he could make the trip. More importantly, he owed her.
You can’t! fear warned. Kenny will kill you both!
Angela stretched carefully, wincing at a bolt of pain in her gut. He would probably try. Kenny would think they had been having an affair all along, even though she hadn’t seen Marc in almost fifteen years. There was an undeniable spark between her and Marc, and Kenny would detect it right away.
Not that it mattered. She’d made her choice, and she would face the consequences when the time came. Nothing would keep her from her son, not after all that she had lost, and maybe, just maybe, Kenny could be surprised into making a mistake not only by Marc’s presence, but also by how much she had changed. The witch inside was awake. She was a slave no more, and Kenny would find out very quickly that she wouldn’t resume her old life of bondage.
First, she had to have time to heal. Angela was scared that even if she managed to leave Ohio without Warren and the others stopping her, she wouldn’t be able to handle the trip itself. If surviving in one place was now this hard, how bad would the three-month journey across this broken land be? She needed help, and there was no one else she could call. Marc had to come.
But not yet, she told the witch and the heart that had both jumped eagerly. She would call out to him when she was ready, and that wasn’t today.
Angela lit a cigarette and blew out thick smoke rings that stayed intact until they hit the big brown blanket hanging over the thin wooden door. She had been an abused animal in a luxury cage, and it had happened fast. Her gift (curse, Kenny always called it my curse) was the end root of their fights: what he wanted her to do with it. After a while, the demon inside had gone to sleep, locked behind a thick steel door to prevent Kenny from using the power to satisfy his own selfish, petty desires.
And Angela had spent a decade in hell because of it. There had only been two things she had kept from him during their long, hard years together–her abilities and the name of her baby’s father. Everything else had been under Kenny’s unforgiving control each waking moment and many of the sleeping ones too.
Until the war.
Being alone while her world was blown away had ripped off the locks on the witch and the old Angela. The twisted, slotted cell door was barely standing, and the dark, shifting spirit behind that thin shield whispered almost constantly to her now, guiding her.
Angela found it easy to listen; still surprised to look inside and discover the courage she had been forced to lock away. She was suddenly allowed to be her own person again, to make her own choices based on what she wanted and needed, including exploring these things that she could do…and of that, there was a lot.
Her gifts had aged well in storage. Most of it was random, coming and going without control, but she was learning to direct it again, to concentrate and get what she needed–to trust the powers inside. When the demon voice spoke, she listened.
The witch said it was fated for a new, more careful world to replace the old, but when Angela asked if her own small family would be a part of that peaceful population, there was only darkness.
Chapter Five
Marc and Dog
January 28th
West Virginia
1
“Hell...”
Marc knew it was a bad idea as soon as the front tires of his muddy SUV eased out onto the mostly clear suspension bridge. He could feel the way it vibrated in the heavy wind, but the waters had risen while he slept and left only this way out.
The iron grates under the Blazer groaned, their supports completely covered in slushy, menacing debris as he neared ha
lfway…then they gave.
Crack! Rreeennttpp!
The solidness under his wheels tilted suddenly, and one of the two foundations slid enough to pull the bars out of the other bank, rocking the bridge like a child’s racetrack.
The Blazer tilted violently and the guardrail began ripping away with horrible grinding noises, cables snapping like string.
Marc hit the gas, aiming for the end that was now dropping heavily toward the shallow side of the dammed-up Black River.
“Semper Fi!”
Dust and debris flying, the Blazer leapt off the bridge’s lowered side and dropped into the foot of rushing water like a lead ball. It crushed the front bumper and tossed up a spray that drenched both driver and vehicle.
Pulled along with the swift current, Marc rolled the front windows down; surprised the engine hadn’t stalled yet. Slinging his kit over one broad shoulder, the grunt ignored the water rushing inside and aimed for the steep bank he knew he had no chance of climbing with his vehicle.
Wincing at the cracking sounds of the bridge behind him, the furious yapping of the big animal in the passenger seat confirmed what he already knew. They were in trouble.
“Dog, out!”
Marc shoved his six foot, two hundred twenty-five pound frame through the window an instant after the wolf did. They jumped down into the icy water as the bridge finally collapsed, and the wall of liquid death lunged forward.
Marc scrambled up the slick, muddy bank, taking rope from his kit and working it into a lasso. He threw it as the surging water hit the slowly moving Blazer and rolled it like a White Castle box in the wind.
The thick rope sailed over a charred pole, and Marc hoped it was anchored deep enough into the ground as he quickly tied the rope around his waist. Then the water came thundering like an army, and submerged him.
Unable to breathe or protect himself from all the debris in the nasty liquid that slammed into him mercilessly, Marc controlled the panic. The pole trembled under the pressure of the rushing Black River, wood vibrating against his hip and he used it to shield himself from the bigger chunks. Lungs hurting, Marc drew his knife, ready to cut free if the pole came out of the ground.
