Jay sighed again. "As I'll ever be. Let's go before someone wakes up and sees us standing out here talking."
"Agreed. The last thing we need is people to figure out we left. They'll clean us out before sundown."
Jay looked to the glowing heavens for support. "Really…? Good grief, Mac, we know these people. Our houses will be fine—you'll see."
Mac was quiet for a moment as he watched Jay. The man's eyes were unsettlingly steady. Jay felt like his entire body vibrated in time with the lights above, but Mac looked calm as a block of granite.
"It's not Mad Max…" Jay offered.
The old man nodded. "Yet."
* * *
As the sun crested the horizon and finally pushed back the curtain of nauseating colors in the sky, Jay got his first glimpse of just how bad things were in the world, two days after the impact.
They were on the northeast side of Champaign-Urbana riding hard on I-74, the road that skewered the upper half of the metroplex. From their vantage point, the entire northern half of the conjoined city looked on fire.
Jay first spotted the conflagration when they were still several miles west of the city. He'd been following Mac's massive military surplus vehicle, like a duckling chasing its mother, for six mind-numbing hours.
The big truck took up most of the eastbound lanes but Mac drove it like a Formula One racer, nimbly swerving around abandoned and wrecked vehicles. He kept the big rig moving at its max speed of 50 mph, only slowing when the road was too littered with the remains of a day's-old accident that caused backups for miles.
Even then, the old man tried hard not to slow down. Every time he roared off-road and rumbled down the snow-kissed shoulder, Jay cursed as bits of rock and ice flew up against his windshield. But he refused to drop back too far—the eerie pink tint imparted to the world filled the librarian with an inescapable fear of being left behind.
Jay knew by the end of the day Mac would peel north and head for his cabin in the woods of northern Michigan, but it would be full daylight by then—they'd have to traverse Indianapolis before they could split up. Once past Indiana’s capital, Jay would only be about 6 hours from Leah.
He grimaced as a good-sized rock grazed his windshield with a loud ping. "Dammit!" Before he could reach for the radio to chastise Mac, the big truck's brake lights flickered and the massive vehicle swerved to the left, rocking as it rejoined the road.
Jay struggled with the wheel of his Ford Escape and forced the little SUV to return to the blacktop as well. He caromed off a car that had been rear-ended into a row of parked vehicles and cursed. As he flew by in a mist of chipped paint and snow, he stared at the frost-covered, glittering windows of dozens of abandoned cars.
"Gonna have to slow down…there's a shit-ton of cars on the road ahead of us," Mac announced over the radio.
Jay hit the steering wheel in frustration as they slowed to a crawl. That was when he saw the glow. He'd almost become accustomed to the constantly moving pink lights in the sky—sometimes sprinkled with green stripes—so the orange wall of light directly ahead of them on the horizon drew his eyes immediately. He grabbed his radio from the center console cupholder.
"What's that?"
After a moment, Mac's voice crackled from the little radio's speaker: "Too early for sunrise—gotta be a fire. Big one." He paused for a moment. "I think that's Champaign."
As they crept closer, the congestion increased. Several off-ramps just outside the city were nothing but parking lots, covered in cars. It only took a few impatient drivers to cause an accident which locked up the ramp, forcing the others off on shoulders—who from the looks of it, promptly got stuck.
At the closest approach to Champaign-Urbana, Jay confirmed the city’s fate. Darkened buildings and homes stretched off on either side of I-74, but to the north the sky remained so bright the aurora vanished from sight. For a brief while, as they carefully navigated the choked interstate, Jay was happy to be surrounded by solid, orange light. The fire must have been truly awful, but its light was still as comforting as it was to cavemen trapped in the long ice-age nights thousands of years before.
"What's your fuel status?" Mac asked after they'd emerged from under the light dome back into the pink-tinged realm of the aurora.
Jay glanced at the dash before reaching for his radio again. "I've got about half a tank. You?"
"A quarter. All this speed-up-slow-down crap is killing my fuel economy," Mac said, the smile evident in his voice. "Looks like the eastbound traffic is thinning out. We should stop and refuel soon."
Jay nodded. "It'll be sunrise soon, too. We may as well stretch our legs now."
"Glad to see my lectures are paying off."
Jay gripped the steering wheel tight with one hand while he replied. "I'm still not taking that gun."
Mac laughed. "Looks like a deserted intersection coming up. It's 49. Let's take this and try to find a spot to pull off for a few minutes."
"Sounds good," Jay replied, suddenly anxious to get out of the car and stretch. His shoulders ached from the tension of post-apocalyptic driving and he couldn't wait to get a mouthful of warm tea from his Thermos.
"Whoa, hold on—I got something here," Mac warned as he slowed the big truck to a stop.
Jay squeezed around the Deuce and a Half on the off ramp and parked his Escape on the left shoulder. A sedan sat cock-eyed in the road just shy of the intersection with 49. A thick-set figure crouched near the front left tire.
As Mac slowed his truck to a stop, he turned just enough to illuminate the broken down car and a very pregnant woman swaddled in a bright pink winter coat. She shielded her eyes with a mitten and struggled to her feet by the flat tire.
"We need to help her," Jay said into the radio.
"I don't like it. Could be a trap."
"Look at her, Mac—she's pregnant," growled Jay as he ripped off his seatbelt and threw open his door. He sucked in air through his teeth as the frigid pre-dawn wind slammed into him. "It's not a trap, she's got a flat tire."
"We'll see…"
Jay was halfway to the woman when he heard the creak of the Mac’s door. The old man called out for him to wait a moment but Jay lost Mac's words in the wind.
"Are you okay?" Jay called out as he approached, both hands up.
"Thank God!" the young woman cried. She dropped the tire iron with a clang and stumbled toward Jay. "You've got to help me. I—I got this flat tire, I'm trying to get home and I'm so cold…I'm worried about the baby—"
"Don't worry about it—I'll fix the tire for you. Just relax, okay?" Jay said in his most reassuring voice. "My name's Jay."
"Sheila. Thank you so much…" she said, hugging herself as she kept a wary eye on Mac, jogging to catch up.
"That's Mac," Jay announced as he surveyed the offending tire. "He sounds pretty gruff but inside he's really a teddybear."
"Ma'am," Mac said as he grew close. "Are you okay?"
"Yes, thank you," Sheila replied, absently holding her protruding belly. "I'm—do you think the radiation is bad for us?" she asked, her eyes flicking to the brightening sky. “Are you with the army? I heard they weren't coming to help anyone outside the cities…”
Jay knelt by the tire and glanced up at the last vestiges of the pink aurora. "No we’re not with the army. And the aurora isn't radiation. It's ionized oxygen." He set to loosening the last of the lug nuts holding the busted tire.
"What?" she asked.
"What my overly-educated friend means to say is, the lights are pretty but harmless. Unless you were a radio plugged into a wall outlet when the lights went out."
"What?" Sheila repeated. "The lights caused the blackout?"
Jay shared a look with Mac. "Sheila, where are you headed?" He grunted as he pulled the tire off and accepted the spare from Mac.
"Kankakee," she replied, tightening the thick downy jacket around herself.
"Why are you taking 49?" asked Mac.
"I tried to go through Champaign-Urban
a a few miles back," she said, gesturing toward the doomed city, "but a traffic jam blocked the road. I couldn't get through. So I figured I'd come back here and take 49 north, get around the mess and jump back on 57. I just don't know why so many people left their cars—I can't get my radio to work and my phone's dead," she said rapidly, her voice wavering.
Jay recognized she was about to break down into tears. He tightened down the first of the nuts to secure the spare. "Well, you'll be back on your way in a few minutes. Just hang in there. I'm almost done."
"I just want to get home. Craig must be worried sick. I should have been home hours ago!"
Jay attached another lug nut and pulled on the tire iron when Mac whispered an alarm.
"Heads up, we got company."
"What?" Jay asked, grunting with effort. Two more nuts to go and he could drop the car from the jack. He winced as headlights crossed his field of view. Jay stood, still holding the tire iron and shielded his eyes from the new lights as two men exited a car and walked over.
"Ma'am, you know these two?" asked Mac with a hard edge to his voice.
"N-no, I don't. Oh God…he's got a knife!" she whispered as the sound of boots crunching on gravel grew louder.
"S'up?" asked one of the two men who approached. "Car trouble?"
"Whoa, hey baby," added his partner. "You wanna take a ride?"
"Thank you for your concern, gentlemen, but she's fine," said Mac, his voice cool as ice.
"Ain't nobody talkin' to you, abuelo."
"Hey guys, we don't want any trouble," Jay said. "We're just trying to fix her tire."
"Uh huh, I bet. That your truck, amigo?"
"What you got?" asked the second one. He licked his lips, eyes on the Deuce and a Half. "You got some food? All the stores 'round here closed."
The first one stepped around the front of Sheila's car and she uttered a little squeak as she backed into Jay. He tried to step around her when all hell broke loose.
The man closest to him lashed out with a big knife that flashed like lightning in the headlights. Jay flinched and tried to pull away. A fire ignited in his hand as he attempted to protect his face and he grunted in pain.
Behind him, a canon roared and the other thug grunted and dropped out of sight.
Jay ducked, narrowly missing another swing from the knife. He tried to move back again but tripped on a now hysterical Sheila. Throwing his other hand up for balance, the curved end of the tire iron struck his attacker on the side of the head with a sickening crunch. The impact sent a shockwave up his arm and Jay dropped the tire iron.
He spun, ears ringing, and saw Mac slip around the far side of the car. The old ex-soldier had both hands on his massive pistol and aimed at the ground. His neighbor moved like a man thirty years his junior to inspect Jay's attacker. He dropped to one knee and ripped his left glove off to feel for a pulse at the young man's tattooed neck.
He stood and relaxed his shoulders, but kept the gun trained on the thug. "Well, he's alive, but he's going to have one hell of a headache when he wakes up. I suggest we not be here when that happens."
"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…"
Jay reached out to comfort Sheila and winced as he saw his bloody hand in the reflected headlights. "Oh, he cut me," he announced, his brain not believing what his eyes were telling him.
Sheila saw the blood and screamed, flung herself into her car, and started the engine.
"Wait—there's still two lug nuts to tighten!" Jay shouted. Mac pulled him back just in time to avoid the jack that whipped out from under the car when she hit the gas.
Tires chirping, the sedan fish-tailed back and forth across the intersection before clipping their attackers' car. She hit the gas again and peeled out, heading north on 49 and disappeared under the overpass.
"You killed him!" Jay said, pointing with his bloody right hand at the body of the first attacker. "Jesus, Mac!"
"He had a gun," the old man said matter-of-factly. "Now I have two."
"But—"
"If I hadn't shot him, he'd have shot us, raped that girl, and probably shot her too. Same for that one,” Mac said, pointing at the unconscious thug at Jay’s feet. “He tried to fillet you."
"Now what do we do?" Jay asked, his teeth chattering. He was suddenly freezing, despite the raging fire that engulfed his lacerated hand. "I think I need to sit down."
"You're going into shock. I need to patch you up and we need to make tracks."
"But," Jay said as Mac turned him toward their waiting vehicles. "I thought you needed gas."
"It can wait. That hand can't. Now come on, we need to hurry before your friend wakes up." The old soldier grunted. "I never knew you had it in you. A tire iron…but you won't use a gun. That's just barbaric, son.”
CHAPTER 6
KATE RUBBED AT HER eyes and tried to stop yawning. An oncoming car honked and she pulled back into her lane in time to catch an angry shout as the other car roared by.
“Same to you, buddy,” she muttered.
They’re starting to understand what’s going on…
She checked the review mirror again and spotted the growing black cloud of smoke over downtown Los Angeles. Her gaze shifted to an electronics store she passed as a group of young men with bandanas over their faces threw rocks and cinder blocks through windows.
Kate gripped her wheel tight and faced forward again. Focus. You need to get the hell out of here. She reached down and took a swig of lukewarm bottled water kept in the console.
A car sped through the intersection in front of her and smashed into oncoming traffic. At her speed, Kate didn't have time to react as she plowed through the bloom of broken glass and plastic that filled the air and kept going. The two cars behind her stopped as she checked the mirrors, heart pounding furiously in her chest. When she observed people rush the stopped cars from the alleys between the buildings, she floored the gas.
Over the roar of her car’s engine, she heard shouts as more and more people emerged onto the sidewalks lining the street. The driver in front of her tapped his brakes and swerved to the right, avoiding a pedestrian. Kate pulled hard to the left, letting her pilot's instincts take over. Just like she was back in the cockpit, juking and diving to throw off the Iraqi MIG that tried to shoot her down on her last deployment.
The twisting maze of streets, completely unfamiliar to her, became labyrinthine in appearance as she struggled to free herself from the tangle of overpasses and never-ending traffic. At that moment, she would have given anything to hit the afterburners and ride a column of fire and smoke straight up into the stratosphere, leaving all the chaos far below.
But that wouldn’t be happening for a long, long time if things were as bad as they appeared. Kate knew she was witnessing the collapse of civilization as she tried to escape a city that didn’t know it was already dead.
At last she turned down a palm-lined street, and the cramped, claustrophobic little squat buildings of the barrio gave way to open roads and manicured lawns. The looks people gave her as she sped down the largely deserted roads were not much different from the desperation on the faces of those trapped closer to the inner city. She kept her eyes on the road and started looking for a place to rest—she’d been up for 27 hours straight and knew adrenaline would only keep her going for so long.
“Sure as hell don’t want to be driving when I pass out…” she muttered to herself to stay awake.
Kate squinted up at the noon sun. Southern California in the middle of winter wasn’t all that cold, nor the sun too hot. All she needed was a safe place to park and a few hours of rest.
Scanning the horizon, her eyes fell upon a four-story building in the distance. A hotel. She raced ahead, regardless of her diminishing fuel supply and focused on the beacon of hope before her. She almost didn’t see the carjacking until it was too late.
Along the side of the road ahead of her, a Land Rover had pulled almost all the way up onto the curb. Two men—the older one wielding a golf club—f
ought to gain entry into the vehicle. The silhouette of another person in the passenger seat resolved into a woman, screaming and frantic.
The smaller, younger man pummeled the older man with a flurry of rapid-fire punches, forcing the presumed driver to drop his club. Kate roared by the scene but had time to glance over and see the pleading look on the woman’s face. She had one hand over the seat, protecting an infant carrier in the back.
Kate told herself it wasn’t her problem and she shouldn’t get involved. She cursed as she found herself slamming on the brakes. The car fishtailed, tires squealing on the asphalt. She threw the car into reverse and looked over her shoulder as she sped backward.
“Move you stupid son of a bitch,” Kate shouted when the younger man looked up and saw her car barreling toward him.
He dropped the golf club but didn’t move fast enough. Her car jerked, and Kate heard a sickening crunch before the kid flew out of her peripheral vision. She checked her side mirror and saw the attacker writhing on the ground, groping at his right leg, screaming something in Spanish.
Kate rolled the passenger window down.
“Thank you—” the woman in the car shouted.
"That kid came out of nowhere," the man tried to explain, holding his bleeding head.
“Go!” Kate replied. “Don’t thank me, don't worry about him, just get the hell out of here!”
“He jumped out of the bushes, I had to stop,” the man continued as he struggled to his feet, mopping at the blood on his face.
“Don’t stop for anything or anyone. Keep moving,” Kate said. She ignored the final round of thanks and shifted into drive. A minute later she was pulling into the parking lot of the Best Western she'd spotted and her heart had almost stopped trying to claw its way out of her chest.
She drove around to the back side of the building and found a spot under some tall oaks. Her eyes sagged under the weight of exhaustion as the adrenaline of the day from hell began to fade.
A wide expanse of verdant green—a golf course—opened up beyond the trees. She was about as safe as she could be without going inside the hotel—which looked deserted even though there were a few cars in the parking lot. Kate didn’t care. She hid the supplies in the back seat as much as she could, then lowered her seat and gripped her knife in one hand.
Solar Storm: Season 1 [Aftermath Episodes 1-5] Page 15
