Unarmed: A Post-Apocalyptic Thrill Ride (The Main Event Series Book 1)

by Russ Munson

  “Not pretty,” I said.

  The cop was on one knee now, groping blindly at the air. “What’s going on? Everybody freeze and sit down.”

  I ignored him and stooped beside the pharmacist. “Which shelf has the antibiotics?”

  “One B,” she said.

  I vaulted over the counter and dumped pills into my duffle bag until I had emptied most of the containers.

  There was more crunching by the door. It was time to go. I slid over the counter, knelt by the pharmacist, and shoved a few bottles of antibiotics into her pockets.

  “These are the new gold,” I said. “Protect them with your life.”

  Then I ran for the broken door. On the way out, I grabbed a bottle of water and stopped at a carousel of clothing. I pawed through it and grabbed two T-shirts. Both were black and had pictures of wolves howling up at the moon on the front, the wolf-snouts like arrowheads.

  I pulled one over my head and tied the other one around my mouth like a desperado. It was no gas mask, but it was better than nothing.

  “Hey! What you got there?” someone said. He was a black shape in the cruiser’s lights.

  I didn’t wait around long enough to size him up.

  I jogged down Route 29. The duffle bag jostled against my back. My taped feet were stiff, but my ankles liked the extra support, and I could run faster through the debris.

  Half of the sky had turned orange and the air I was sucking through the t-shirt was hot and warm in my lungs. I tried not to think about the tissue damage. The human body was resilient, I told myself. It could take a massive blow to the head and heal up as if nothing had happened. It was the repeated blows that gave you problems. Same with radiation, I hoped.

  I’d get to my destination and then go back and grab my father, head back to the mountains where the air was cool and fresh, and we’d hole up on the ranch and stake out our territory. I’d grab the compound bow I used to play with as a kid and we’d hunt the woods and go fishing in the lake.

  But what about the winds? They would contaminate everything. We’d need to switch to canned food. We’d need to rob the local food-drive pantries, maybe the church. My mind went to every place that might have a stock of food, even our neighbor’s basement, those crazy preppers Mike and I had always mocked.

  But what if there were other blasts?

  Keep running, I thought. Don’t stop. Take one problem at a time.

  I passed a head-on collision. On a spreading puddle, a crescent moon of shattered glass was floating away from the middle of the road. An SUV heading toward the city had swerved out of its lane and struck a little Honda right in the nose. The driver of the SUV had been ejected through its windshield and lodged in the Honda’s windshield like a spear. His body was face-down on the hood, his head inside the bloody hole, his broken eye sockets peering into another family’s life.

  There were muffled screams from inside the Honda. Someone was pinned in the driver’s seat and fighting a big white marshmallow of cloth.

  I kept running. Then I saw the child. She was screaming in the back seat of the Honda. She quieted as I ran past, her big swollen eyes following me instead of a tree that had been felled by another crash.

  Keep running. Don’t stop. It’s not your problem.

  I ran ten yards past the Honda. Dammit.

  I stopped. It smelled like a gas station out there.

  I ran back to the Honda. The child was still quiet. She was in a rear-facing child seat on the passenger side. She was maybe two years old and looked too big for the seat, but the doors were crushed and the seat had saved her life.

  This family was all about safety. They had bought a practical car, used seat belts, and kept the child facing backward as long as possible. But now the mother, still wrestling the airbag, was trapped under all that safety.

  I dropped my duffle bag and stepped through the puddle of floating glass. It was cool and wet on my exposed toes. The SUV must have driven over something, must have ripped open its gas tank.

  I tried the Honda’s door handle. It was still hot from the blast. The door was jammed from the dent. I yanked it, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “I’m gonna get you out,” I said. I climbed up on the hood and rolled the dead man out of the way. He landed on the asphalt with a thump and a splash in the gasoline. Then I cleared out the safety glass and ripped the airbag away.

  The woman yanked at her seatbelt. “My baby,” she gasped.

  “I need to get you out first.”

  “Get her. Please.”

  “No, she needs you. I can’t take care of her.”

  She swatted at me.

  “Seriously. Stop,” I said. I kneeled on the hood and leaned through the broken windshield and wiggled my hand between the seat and the crushed frame, looking for the button to unbuckle her belt.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I think I found it.”

  Then another boom and a hard crunch took my knees out from underneath me.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I landed hard on the pavement. Flames roared up around the Honda. Another car had struck the SUV. Then the SUV had struck the Honda again and the force of it had swept my knees out from underneath me.

  I stood on the pavement, my neck sore from the whiplash of the collision. I was still wearing my gloves and they had protected the heels of my hands from the fall. The Honda had swung around and I was now facing the little girl. A shorn gas line, a spark, a flaming scrap of debris, or whatever, had ignited the spilled fuel. The little girl was crying and the light from the flames was hitting the coils in the back window and casting dark bars across her face.

  She was trapped. I had seen a car fire like this once before. A few years ago, my brother and I had been driving up Route 95 to go to a Cap’s game and we had passed a toll booth with a stranded car. It was on fire, its metal black. But what I remembered most about it was the heat. We could feel it from fifty yards away, our window glass hot to the touch.

  Even worse was how fast the flames had devoured the vehicle. The fire had been small from a hundred yards away, but twenty feet high by the time we were driving past it.

  Which meant this Honda would go up fast too. Less than a few minutes. The little girl would be cooked alive.

  I stepped back and closed my eyes. The fire was already raging loud enough to drown their screams. The little girl’s face was imprinted on the red of my eyelids.

  I could leave her. But her face, crackling and melting in the heat, would haunt me forever. Still, I couldn’t take her with me. She’d be as good as dead if I couldn’t save her mother.

  It was a twofer.

  I stepped a few feet back, inhaled the hot air, psyched myself up, and ran at the car. I was fully committed. I leapt onto the trunk, onto the roof, and down onto the hood. The flames roared around the sides. I reached into the windshield, grabbed the woman’s armpits, and pulled her out.

  “Leave me. Get my baby,” she said.

  “I told you before. It’s a twofer,” I said. “Climb over the SUV. Get out of here.”

  “No.”

  “I will get your girl,” I said. “But you need to save yourself so you can save her.”

  The woman pawed blindly for the other hood. On the ground, the dead man was popping and sizzling. The woman squinted, trying to see what was making the noise.

  “Get off this car!” I said.

  Then I crawled into the Honda and in between the seats. Thanks to the rear-facing child seat, I couldn’t get at the kid’s straps.

  I crawled all the way into the back seat. The heat through the windows felt like I had climbed into an oven and my face broke out in heavy sweat. I unhooked the girl’s chest strap and the strap at her crotch and pulled her out of the seat.

  “Teddy,” she said.

  “I’m not your daddy,” I said.

  “Teddy,” she screamed and squirmed in my arms. I looked to where she was pointing. A stuffed bear had fallen to the tortured floor mat. Its fur was matted like a wet r
at, either from tears or sweat, I couldn’t tell.

  “We have to go or we will cook.”

  “Teddy!”

  “No.”

  I ignored the toy and cupped her head to my chest and crawled back out through the windshield. The jagged metal on the roof caught my shoulder and tore my shirt, but I didn’t stop.

  With the girl pressed to my chest, I crawled onto the crumpled hood of the Honda and then stood and jumped onto the hood of the SUV, the flames high and groping from both sides.

  I climbed onto the roof. The woman was on the other side, trying to help another man. I held the girl tight and jumped from the roof to the asphalt. It was a hard landing, but I kept the girl close, and we were okay.

  The woman saw me and came running. “Thank God!”

  I glanced at the man lying on the pavement. He was cradling his forearm. It was bent in the middle. I was thinking we had escaped the devil, but without God’s help. If anything, He was the one who put us here.

  I handed the girl to her mother she smothered her with hugs and kisses.

  When she came up for air, she looked at me. “You’re bleeding.”

  I touched my shoulder. My fingers came away with red. The metal from the roof had snagged my skin and torn it open.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You’re barely breathing. You’re calm. You need to lie down. You’re in shock.”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  I picked up my duffle bag and slung it over the other shoulder. The little girl still had her faced buried in her mother’s chest.

  I looked at her tangled hair. I was never any good with kids. I always felt as if they could see right through me or something. As if I were some kind of monster because the flames didn’t scare me.

  “Tell her I’m sorry about the teddy,” I said.

  Then I ran.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I still had a mile to go. The road was lined with crashes, rubble, telephone poles lying across the street like fallen crosses. Folks screamed from their million-dollar townhouses, hoping to be heard over the competing alarms. The closer I got to the blast site, the more I saw collapsed roofs and broken windows like a giant had stomped on dollhouses. Blind people reached from their car windows and begged for help, but I couldn’t stop for them. I had already wasted too much time. I kept my eyes straight ahead, fixed on the smoldering horizon, and kept moving.

  Ahead, I turned off the road and took a short cut through a cemetery. I didn’t want to see any more crashes and I didn’t want to hear any more screaming. I hoped the dead would be quieter. This wasn’t the famous Arlington cemetery from the war movies with its rows and rows of white crosses, but a smaller, neighborhood graveyard, the associated chapel now a pile of white kindling.

  The air was getting hotter, the ash thicker, and the rows of headstones flickered orange in the airborne cinders. I kept jogging. I thought about the dead beneath my feet and all the dead I’d see as I neared the blast radius. Along the edge of the road, the trees were uprooted and the headstones were lying face down like dominoes. The grass was scorched and brown and the earth was bulging where the blast concussion had forced the caskets to the surface.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement. A shape lumbered between the cracking crypts. It was large, but swift, and vaguely familiar in its movements. I stopped.

  “Who’s there?”

  No answer. A breeze of sparkling dust came off the crosses and the angels. It looked like a wind had whipped the embers from a grill. I went back to running. My heart was at its same, even pattern. There were a million explanations for the darting shape and none of them ramped my heart. I had taken a philosophy class once at NOVA, the community college near home. The teacher had said she knew the human mind was quick to see a shape and call it human. It was in our DNA, she’d said, an instinct to evaluate threat. She said it was the very thing that made most of the world believe in some kind of higher power. It made sense, I thought. Like faces in the clouds.

  I shrugged off the shape. It was just a misfire in my brain.

  I reached the end of the graveyard path and made a left on Patrick Henry Drive. There, the trees had been uprooted. The autumn branches were squashed against the ground and the leaves were as black as skewers left on the grill too long. Their roots were black and groping with tortured fingers at the fire on the horizon.

  Now I was close enough that the air blast had completely leveled the smaller buildings. The larger ones were blown down to their bones. People were climbing over the pyramids of rubble and picking through the debris and looking for their friends. Their faces were red and blistered.

  The parking lot I was looking for was up ahead. I made a right and jogged between the cars. They were buried under the rubble, under piles of concrete, under tepees of jagged girders. Their roofs were flattened and their headlights were popped out of their eye sockets like a giant had stepped on their hoods.

  Sirens were wailing and the night was blue and red. Mostly red. I stopped and looked up at what was left of the adjacent building. The backside of it had been blown off and its face was sagging, every window frowning.

  “I need something. Tell me something,” I whispered to myself. “Tell me I didn’t waste this trip. Tell me you made it here.”

  I prayed a silent prayer—nothing really, just a wordless whisper—to the same God who had tried to smite us. Without forming the thought, only feeling it, a brief yearning, I asked him for help. Then I climbed over the rubble and pushed away the fallen bricks and looked for that familiar paint.

  It took me twenty minutes, but I found it parked in the handicap spot near the emergency entrance. It was a late nineties Jeep. Blue. A girder had landed on the roll cage and crushed it and an EKG heart rate monitor had blown out an upstairs window and landed on the windshield and put a hole in it. The monitor must have had a battery backup because there was a low steady beep and the green line was still glowing flat. The rest of the Jeep was drenched in pink sludge. Bags of medical waste had gone flying when the nearest dumpster went airborne.

  There were no bodies in the Jeep. Thank God. And for the first time that night, my heart did a little tap dance. Not much, but enough for me to notice its patter on my rib cage.

  She had made it here.

  Boss Three - The Brain

  Chapter Fifteen

  She had bought the Jeep with her own money, bought it from the side of the road in Ashburg and kept it running far past old age. Seeing its blue paint made me suddenly remember late-night runs to the video store, mid-day excursions to the grocery store—before Brian made me stop eating sugar—and early morning dashes to the drug store. There were way too many of the latter. Enough runs that I could make a training routine out of them. And every single time, that hick pharmacist would roll her eyes at us and suggest that we take preventative measures, not reactive ones.

  Good times. I gave its hood a pat. One day, when all this mess was settled, we’d give the Jeep a proper send off to the big junk yard in the sky. I imagined God driving it around with the soft top down, his gray hair whipping through the clouds, and having the time of his life.

  I headed for the emergency entrance. An ambulance had landed on its side and skidded into one of the pillars for the concrete overhang. The overhang was cracked and slumping like a pancake slid off a stack. The ambulance’s siren was still blaring, the lights were still spinning, and the driver was trapped in the cockpit, the windshield crushed and red. The back doors had popped open and the foot of a stretcher was sticking out like a dead tongue.

  The next closest entrance was on what was left of the other side of the building. The hospital was thirteen stories high, its whole backside ripped open, and the concrete and the girders were exposed like ripped fabric. I didn’t know what I’d find on the other side and thought it better to try this front entrance.

  A few feet ahead of me, I found a gap under the collapsed concrete. It was the shape of a keyhole. There was nothing
safe about it, but it was the only chance I could see of getting inside. I slid my duffle bag into the gap and then crawled underneath. It was like going spelunking in the cave on my parent’s property. My mother hated it when Mikey and I would go. Prospecting we called it. Looking for the gold from the Beale ciphers in the heart of the mountain.

  I tried to imagine that I was still that kid. Mikey would always stop and inch his way back out. He never had the guts to go deeper. Me, I was stupid. I would keep going deeper and deeper and my heart would never pound against my ribs and tell me not to.

  The collapsed roof over my head moaned. It wasn’t done breaking. I crawled faster. The cut on my shoulder scraped against the ceiling and the bumps on my spine rubbed until they were raw.

  The farther I crawled, the thinner the space got. Soon, I was slithering in an army crawl. Ahead, I could still see a hair-wide gap of light.

  Another groan. The concrete moved. The darkness shifted. There was a rush, a crash, and a puff of dust and the hole behind me snapped its maws shut.

  Total darkness. I blinked and rubbed the dust from my eyes. When it settled, I could still see the thin strip of light ahead. A yellow light. It must have been from the hospital’s generator.

  I pushed my duffle bag toward the light and prayed it would be large enough to fit through. But the closer I got, the more it shrank. It kept getting farther away and smaller, evading me.

  I paused and closed my eyes. I counted to three and took a deep breath.

  Then I opened my eyes. The light was no longer there. It was not real. I realized the moon on the shirt over my mouth was fluorescent and it had been tricking me into thinking there was light at the end of the crawl.