The Changing Earth Series (Book 2): Without Land

by Hathaway, Sara F.

  “I’ve heard that story too, kid. No one really knows what happened to her,” one of the mercenaries said stepping into the light. He was a medium-build guy and very muscular. Even though he had a soft look in his eyes, he did not appear to be someone you would want to mess with. His bald head shown in the light of the lanterns.

  “We’ve all heard that story. It’s just a myth,” another shorter guy said. He was very drunk and stumbling rather obviously.

  “It’s not a myth. I heard she got abducted by aliens after she made it over the mountains,” another mercenary with a buzz cut chimed in. He laughed loudly and the short guy joined in. They fell into one another, chuckling.

  The first guy never took his eyes off Dexter. He walked over to the boy and stood over him. Dexter, intimidated and buzzed, stumbled backward a little. “So, where is she, or are you feeding me a line, son?”

  “No, sir,” Dexter said proudly, “she’s right over there.” He pointed to where Erika was sitting quietly, engaged in a conversation with a married couple from Team A she and Vince had met.

  The crowd parted, revealing her location. Erika shot Dexter a look, and he knew she was pissed. She hated talking about the quake and hated telling her “legendary” story even more. She would be fine with letting the rumors fly and staying hidden in the shadows. Dexter saw the look in her eyes and looked down to the floor.

  “Really…the lone survivor from Sacramento,” the man said in wonder as he strolled over to her.

  “I’m Erika, sir, and you are?” Erika wanted to introduce herself so he would quit calling her “the lone survivor.”

  “My name is Cole Virgis. It is very nice to meet you. I have heard your story around many camp fires, and I would love to hear it from you. If you don’t mind, Recruit?” Cole said very politely.

  Erika was caught off guard by his display of manners. It was apparent this man had been raised well. She thought it would be easy to tell off some drunken idiot but how to counter his eloquent request was another matter. The alcohol was also playing with her mind. She was relaxed and not as tense about respecting the order of things in this new role. “I usually don’t tell that story but if you insist…” Erika started to say, trying to sound cute. She thought maybe he would back off.

  “Oh, I do insist,” he said cutting her off. He snatched a stool from one of his soldiers and set it up across from her, never once breaking eye contact, “And I want to hear the real story, not the fairy tale that the story has evolved into.” Everyone else gathered around; to hear the tale from the actual hero of the story was a rare treat indeed. The room hushed in anticipation of her voice.

  There was something about the way that this man held himself and projected his energy that intrigued Erika, and even in her drunken state she felt hesitant to challenge his authority.

  Erika began to relive her nightmare. Time has a funny effect on memories: boring parts get deleted and exciting parts get dramatized for the listener. Cole had mentioned that he was interested in the reality of the moments. Having told this story many times, Erika had become a good judge of the crowd she was addressing. If they needed more excitement, she would provide it, but Cole’s request was unique and she told the story to him rather than the crowd and deleted the fluff.

  “It was a warm day. I had actually been out coon hunting with Dex that day,” Erika began.

  “Really? You hunted prior to all this mess?” Cole questioned her.

  Erika felt surprised by his interruption so early in the story. She eyed him steadily, trying to judge his character. His translucent blue eyes seemed to be gauging her as well. What was his angle, she wondered, why was he so interested? Erika tasted the burning flavor of the alcohol in her mouth, as she sipped from the cold tin cup she was holding. She stared at the scars that marred her hand wrapped around the cup, and swayed back and forth slightly.

  Returning her gaze to Cole’s eyes, she continued: “Yes sir, I did. I liked to bow hunt most of all.”

  “A bow-hunter, even?” He seemed to calculate everything she said in some unknown plan.

  “It just seemed more sporting to me. It’s not bang, the deer’s dead; you have to take the shot, track and sometimes do a final kill. Of course some people say that when you hit the deer with an arrow the animal runs more, driving all that adrenaline into the meat. They said it made the meat gamier but I didn’t think so, not enough to make me change my mind at least.” Erika paused, realizing she had gone off on a tangent. She hadn’t thought about hunting in a while. Each daily ration had been carefully allotted and provided to her.

  “Where was I?” Erika pondered. She felt a little annoyed, but the pungent alcohol in the cup was working hard on her now. The small crowd that had gathered to hear the story had wandered off into side discussions. They were bored with Cole’s questions as well. They quickly brought their conversations to an end when they noticed Erika was ready to continue.

  “Although I lived in the foothills, I worked at a restaurant in Sacramento called El Primero…”

  “No way! I have eaten there many times. Spectacular chile reños at that place,” Cole interjected again. Some of the folks that were trying to hear the story moaned and rolled their eyes at him, but he seemed to take little notice of that. He was searching for something.

  “Seriously?” Erika was surprised he knew the place, but why not? It was rather popular and had been featured in the Sacramento magazines.

  “Sure,” Cole kept on, “used to visit with one of my buddies from Sacramento…God rest his soul.” Cole mumbled the last part under his breath.

  “The restaurant was an old Victorian home.” Erika was telling the story verbatim, the drunkenness taking over. She forgot this particular man would already know that part.

  “Sure, sure,” Cole agreed, urging her on.

  “Well, back during the Cold War the owner put a bomb shelter under the kitchen,” she explained.

  “Really? I had no idea that existed,” Cole admitted.

  “Not many patrons did, but the owner used to use it to store wine and restaurant supplies.”

  “Makes sense,” Cole confessed again.

  Erika kept going with the story, realizing he was going to make the telling of it a real challenge if she responded to every comment he made.

  CHAPTER 28

  “I WAS DOWN THERE when the quake hit, getting a bottle of wine.” Cole was quiet now, waiting to hear more, so Erika continued, “I was trapped for God knows how long under the wine rack itself, waiting for help that never came. I finally freed myself and got to my phone, but it was dead.”

  “Sure, yeah…” he said, analyzing the moments from the event. “The quake took down most of the transceiver posts. It was a nightmare trying to get them back up and running, plus signal to our satellites was lost with the power outages, and they started to smash into one another as their orbits began to overlap,” Cole interjected again.

  “Well, mine was dead, the screen frozen on the date of the quake,” Erika replied. “I survived on the restaurant stocks, waiting for help that was never gonna come,” Erika added spitefully. She had mentioned the lack of help again on purpose. Now, so many years later, she knew the government had shut down the California border and had already given up on the people for months before the ocean wave had come. The scientists knew exactly what was going to happen. They knew that the countrywide devastation was going to be so unimaginable that it would be total chaos if they tried to rescue all those people. They thought they had no choice. They thought they were doing it for the good of all the people. The Californians were never warned.

  “You must know why by now?” Cole’s voice was soft as he said this. He had friends there too and knew of the government’s decision before the orders had been given to execute the plan. He had wrestled with the idea himself of trying to go in and find his friends but people would ask questions, and how do you save some and not others?

  “Yeah, I know,” Erika replied, seething with hatred. “Th
ey closed the border, those bureaucratic pricks.” She paused for a moment to regain her composure. Smelling the smoke from the fire thick in the air, she sipped from the cold cup again. She noticed that someone had refilled it. Looking up, she saw Vince staring back at her. She loved him completely, and it was always a welcome comfort to have him nearby, supporting her emotional being.

  “Right, so where was I?” Erika announced, trying to focus. “Oh yeah, I realized no help was ever, ever, never, ever coming, so I devised a way to get the door open. That’s when I figured out ever so painfully that the city was now a toxic sludge lake.”

  “I had heard that,” Cole asserted curiously, “something about the dams failing.”

  “Oh yeah,” Erika chuckled, “they failed alright. Each one smashed to shreds all the way down the river. It must have been some wave. Once I did make it out, the buildings in the city were annihilated. Most busted right in half!”

  “Crazy! How did you make it out of the shelter?” Cole asked, realizing he had made her skip ahead in the story.

  “I devised an insane idea to protect my skin from the water with a layer of cellophane and duct tape outside of my clothes,” Erika explained, laughing in her drunkenness at the desperate situation that drove her to such an interesting conclusion.

  “And that worked?” Cole questioned.

  “It did,” Erika replied. “It wasn’t like I was planning on going swimming in it, or so I thought. I made a raft from an old table and empty five-gallon water jugs to float on.”

  “Very resourceful,” Cole commented with that pondering look in his eyes again.

  “I rowed my way home with a PVC pipe and a spatula,” Erika said sarcastically and laughed drunkenly.

  “Rowed your way? That much water stayed in the whole valley?” Cole was dumbfounded that the water did not drain off.

  “Oh no,” Erika confirmed, slurring her words. “The Sacramento Valley was sludgeville as far as the eye could see.” She stopped for a moment for a breath of air. The images of the horrors she had experienced there flashed through her intoxicated brain. “I just set my sights on the mountains and went for it.”

  “What about the coastal range eruptions? Did you see that?” Cole was on the edge of his seat, along with so many others who had heard the stories but never had met anyone who had experienced it firsthand. Most survivors had been from the East Coast where the government had tried to mobilize some type of concentrated rescue effort on key areas. By the time the Great Quake was done, even the rescuers needed to be rescued.

  “I’m getting there,” Erika proclaimed slowly, feeling the excitement of the moment and the power of having everyone hanging on her every word. “So I paddled for days and then saw the smoke in the west. It was weird because usually the wind blows east in California not west, but what wasn’t unusual at this point? I figured it was just a wildfire out on that edge of the lake somewhere until my water jugs started to melt.”

  “So the lava heated the water?” Cole wondered.

  “I guess so. That’s all I can figure, but I was so close to shore at that point. I jumped and swam for it. I forgot about the cellophane all over my body though, and it burned the crud out of me.” Erika was in the moment now. “I guess I passed out because I woke up in a barn, burned from head to toe.” She lifted up the front of her shirt, exposing her belly and the twisted terrain of skin that existed there. She usually didn’t show them to anyone, but the alcohol and heat of the moment made her drop her guard.

  “A great couple, Henry and Carol Duncan, rescued me and brought me back to life. Their son and his family are right over there.” She pointed out Harold and Betsy on the edge of the crowd. They knew the story well and didn’t need to relive all the details.

  “And, how did you make it out of California? Most people stayed put,” Cole remarked matter-of-factly.

  “I still needed to find my family at that point and I did, thank God. You know my loud-mouthed son, Dexter. My daughter, Star, was orphaned and I adopted her.” Erika took a breath, looking at Star. She wasn’t going to delve into that painful memory right now, “and my husband, Vince, is right here.” Vince came up and knelt down to hold her hand. “Once I found them, with the help of my good buddy Greg over there,” she pointed out Greg, not wanting to leave him out of the story. “We went and found my mom, Nancy, over there,” Erika pointed again, “and we got the heck out of Dodge!”

  “So…the gang’s all here,” Cole replied, taking it all in and surveying the crew in front of him.

  “Almost,” Erika declared. “We all have eight-year-old family members being held at the camp as ‘insurance policies.’” The spite had returned to Erika’s tone of voice.

  “Of course they did,” Cole contested thoughtfully. “But come on, you would have brought your eight-year-old child out here, on this mission?”

  Erika chuckled a little at his question. “Sir, Dexter was only five when we had to leave California. Granted, he didn’t go on the raiding party with us, but he saw a lot of things that no one needs to face, let alone a five-year-old boy. This is life. Like it or not, this is it. We can go on living or give up, and I, sir, will never give up.”

  Cole paused for a moment. He was impressed with the tenacity of this little lady. She stood no more than five feet tall and had her brown hair pulled back into a simple ponytail tied with a piece of rope. The richness of her brown eyes always met his gaze evenly. Cole was weighing his words very carefully.

  “A raiding party?” he questioned flatly. He had heard the stories of the battle connected to her tale of survival many times, but she had not brought it up until now in a fit of spiteful emotion. “Tell me about that,” he pressed her. The request was really more of an order.

  Erika was a modest woman. This was a part of her life she was not proud of, and she had to relive it each time a traveling entertainment group would roll into town. They would glorify the story and the crowd would marvel at her bravery. She felt totally different about it. She had no idea what she was doing back then. Before she had been plunged into that situation where she had to kill for survival, she had hunted, trained martial arts and tried to prepare herself for a day that she hoped would never come. The Day after Disaster, the day her skills were tested for the first time. Now that the day had come and gone, she didn’t feel like a hero. She just felt she did what she had to do when she needed to do it.

  Erika stammered a little and Vince put his hands on her shoulders. He was standing behind her and Cole met his gaze. Vince’s gold stars shown out of the hazel outline and glared at this demanding man. Vince had a medium build and was pure muscle as well, but he doubted he could take on this man physically. Cole looked as if he had seen many battles before this one.

  Cole could feel Vince trying to engulf Erika in a protective bubble, and it seemed to settle her nerves. He took the opportunity to demand the story from her again; he wanted to know everything. Just how far had this ordinary couple gone? “Please don’t make me pull rank here. What happened, Recruit Moore?”

  CHAPTER 29

  ERIKA WAS A LITTLE shocked that he would go to rank. She thought they were just having a friendly conversation. She thought he was just curious but she should have known. Cole was a soldier, always trying to gather as much information as possible to calculate possible scenarios and outcomes.

  “Oh, it’s like that, is it?” Erika had forgotten herself in her drunkenness. For some reason she had fought authority all her life. There was no particular reason for it. She was a good person and tried to do the right things, but she hated being made to do anything.

  Cole stood up; it was obvious all of his movements were purposeful. His blue eyes met hers as he leaned down. The firelight danced off his bald head. “Yes, ma’am, it’s like that, if you want it to be. But it doesn’t have to be.” He asserted very calmly to her, “Let’s have another drink.” He filled his cup and then came over and filled Erika and Vince’s cups.

  “Thank you, sir,” Vince s
aid. He had felt Erika’s tension and knew why she didn’t want to talk about this. He had almost lost his life that day, too, but Vince hadn’t drunk as much tonight and was steadier than Erika. He also didn’t tend to get so emotionally involved in situations and tried to keep reality in clear focus. He felt this man was not a man to be trifled with. His wife had a tendency of acting without thinking, but Vince knew he and his wife had willingly taken positions on this team and now they were under orders. Orders that must be followed in order to get their son back when they got home.

  Vince looked down at Erika and squeezed her shoulders. Erika met his gaze and immediately knew what the look meant. A love as strong as theirs hardly needed words anymore. They knew each other inside and out. His gesture meant she should honor Cole’s request, and Erika did not deny her man.

  Cole took in all the body language as he sat back down in his chair. With all this woman’s tenacity, she obviously loved that man, and he had a control over her that he could tell nobody else in the world had. She was a wild one and he found her very captivating.

  Erika acquiesced and began the story: “There was a guy, Doug was his name. He got a group of survivors in Auburn and they were pillaging the town, enslaving people and raping women. I told you Harold’s dad, Henry saved me from the sludge.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” Cole retorted.

  “Well, Doug took Henry and his family captive, and Harold found me again once I had already made it to Cool and found Vince. We had a guy there, Rob, who was a former military man. He led a party to get Harold’s family and raid supplies. All I did was follow his directions.” Erika really didn’t want to go on.

  Cole, upset by her sudden lack of storytelling skills, looked at her sharply. “That’s not what I heard, tell me what happened.”

  “That is what happened!” Erika was letting the alcohol talk for her again. She was irritated and tired of his questioning. “We went there. It was horrible. Those men were animals, treating people like dirt.” Her anger was now fueling the energy of the story. “We got the people out. They were in piles of their own filth. We got clear but Vince and Greg were stuck in the supply room. I was so naive; I thought I could take on the world. I went in to get them by myself and ended up tied to a chair with this dreadful man in my face. He left me at one point to get Vince, and I barely escaped.” Erika was now in tears. Thinking back to how helpless she had been, she was breathing hard and gripping the arms of the chair so hard her knuckles were white.