Fallen Earth | Book 2 | Aftermath

by Morrow, Jason D.

  Jeff stepped forward. “And who gave the store to the McClures to guard? You have about as much right to it as I do.”

  The whole group of them started talking over each other, all of them trying to make the best point but none of them were getting anywhere. They were interrupted by a set of footsteps behind them, and when Gwen turned around, she saw a man standing behind them with a rifle slung over his shoulder.

  She knew who this man was. At least, she had seen him before, and someone had told him her name. His name was Trent, and he didn’t live within the city limits. He was the kind of outsider type who would show up to City Council meetings and give a speech every now and again about his grievances against the city, but other than that he didn’t say much and didn’t have many friends. His beard reached the middle of his chest and he licked his upper teeth as though trying to get a hunk of meat out of the yellowed gaps.

  “You all don’t have a clue what you’re doing,” Trent said, shaking his head. “Didn’t you all talk about these ideas just a day or two ago?”

  “I’m sorry, what’s your name?” Alex asked.

  “My name is Trent. I don’t know what sort of committee you’ve formed here, but you all sound like a bunch of imbeciles who’ve never faced any kind of a crisis in your lives. You have to look at what’s most obvious.”

  “And I’m sure you’re going to be the one to enlighten us on what the most obvious thing is?” Alex said.

  Trent nodded and continued picking at his teeth with his tongue. “It’s pretty simple, really. Lone Oak prison just emptied of prisoners and tried to tear this town apart. And it nearly succeeded. What does that tell you?”

  No one answered, though he waited several long seconds. He shook his head again. “You have an entire prison just five miles away that is more or less empty except for medicine, supplies, and food. Now, I’m no expert on prisons, but I do know that Lone Oak Prison was quite a big one, and they typically feed each of those hundreds of prisoners three square meals a day. That means they have storage full of food. It also means that they have medicine somewhere that they had to administer to a lot of people. And with our median age being about ninety years old, I figure Hope could probably use some of that medicine. So if you ask me, the place to go right now is to the prison before any of that food spoils so we can preserve some of it and at least feed the town for a little while until we can figure out what we need to do next.”

  Nobody in the group said anything for a long moment. Gwen looked at the others and couldn’t believe that the thought hadn’t come to her first.

  “Well, what if there are other people still there?” Jeff said. “For all we know, half the prisoners didn’t escape.”

  Trent shook his head. “I don’t suspect that’s the case, but I would say with the dilemma we are facing, we don’t have much of a choice other than to check. We are the closest town to that prison, and it won’t be long before other towns start to think the same thing. So, we can either try and hopefully find some success, or we can go with your method and run out of food by Wednesday.”

  Lone Oak Prison was the last place Gwen wanted to be.

  She felt her wrist where Savage had burned her when he questioned her about where her father was. It seemed Leland was always gone when they needed him the most. Yet, he had shown up to save the day. Of course, he hadn’t saved the day on his own.

  She saw the whole situation flash before her eyes: the men would decide to go to the prison to look for supplies and deny her the chance to do anything useful. She could already hear the condescending tones coming her way. “You stay back and make sure no one tries to do anything dumb while we’re gone. Let the men do the real work.”

  She resented her dad for not letting her go to Chicago. She wasn’t about to let the others tell her she couldn’t go five miles away to an empty prison. Even if it was the last place on earth she wanted to be, she wasn’t going to be left behind only to have nothing else to do. She hated waiting. So, against her better judgment, she almost shouted for the opportunity.

  “I want to go!” She felt relief flood through her body even though that was probably the opposite of what she should have felt. The thought of going to the prison should have terrified her. On some level it did, but the thought of being left behind with no responsibilities other than something meaningless terrified her even more.

  It looked like Uncle Frank was about to protest, but Alex got to it first. Gwen thought he was going to tell her that she couldn’t go, but he smiled.

  “I would’ve expected no less from you,” Alex said. “I’m going too. Mom, Dad, I would prefer if you stay back and watch over things, but you can do whatever you wish.”

  “I don’t think it would be best for us to go to the prison,” Linda said, and Jeff nodded in agreement.

  Bryson was the next to speak. “Sounds like fun. I’ve been to jail a few times, but I’ve never really been to prison.”

  Alex rolled his eyes at Bryson. “It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, let me assure you.”

  Alex was no longer wearing his prison guard uniform, but he still carried with him an authority that showed he knew what he was doing. It was obvious Alex had to go. He would know the prison better than anybody else.

  “Well, it was my idea, so I guess I’ll go too,” Trent said. “If you’ll have me.”

  “It’s the best idea, even though I wish it wasn’t,” Alex said. ”If other people haven’t gotten to it yet, then Trent is right. There will be a lot of supplies. That said, all we are doing is buying some time, which isn’t a bad thing, but when we get back we have to come up with a more sustainable plan.”

  “Any idea how much time this buys us?” Grandma asked.

  Alex shook his head. “It’s hard to know. As far as food goes, there is a lot of frozen stuff and a lot of refrigerated stuff, which won’t help us a lot. If this had all happened two months from now it would be better because we could just leave things outside to freeze. As it stands, things are going to spoil. But there is medicine there. There may even be some weapons left.”

  Gwen felt a terrible thrill at the thought of going to the prison.

  It would probably be several days before her father came back, and they would likely be done with the trip to the prison tomorrow. They needed to find something good. They needed to find food. They needed to find medicine. If they didn’t, people were going to start dying.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The man who had pulled Henry from the Jeep lay unconscious on the ground. Their scuffle had been brief but intense. In the fight, Henry had managed to slam the man’s head into the ground and knock him out. It would have been nice if Henry had had a gun to at least scare the man away, but all his guns were in the Jeep.

  Henry wasn't sure what to do now. Leland and the Jeep were nowhere to be found. He walked up to the plane wreckage and felt entirely alone. This place had been crawling with people not five minutes ago. Now, they had either run off into the woods to take cover from the gunfire or up the road to get away. Henry looked down at the plane debris and briefly wondered what it must have felt like to feel the power get zapped from the airplane. Did the people know they were going down? It had happened in the middle of the night so most of them might have been asleep. Still, what a bad way to go.

  Henry walked up and down the wreckage trying to find a path cut by the Jeep. He knew Leland had driven off, and he knew the reason wasn’t to leave Henry behind but to pull away from the people trying to steal the Jeep from them. He had heard gunfire, but how far away had it been?

  He found a small path next to one of the jet engines. It was probably big enough for a Jeep, but he wasn’t sure. Whatever the case, Henry feared the worst. Was it possible that the men had taken it and driven off? If so, they would have either left Leland behind or killed him. Either way, Leland shouldn’t be that far away.

  He walked down the small path only to find more debris. He couldn’t tell what most of the stuff on the ground was. None
of it was useful. He was sure the good stuff had been taken already—if there had been any good stuff. Most people wouldn’t have stuck around very long. People wanted to get home to their families.

  Henry felt so lost. He was in the dark like everybody else. Even if he could confirm that this was indeed an EMP attack, he still didn’t know why it happened or who was behind it. And given the nature of the attack, it wasn’t as though he would be able to find out either. Information could no longer be shared. He wouldn’t be able to just open his phone and read an article about the attack that happened near Chicago. Their best chance of knowing what was truly going on was to get as far away from this place as possible to where there was still power and information. It was unlikely that an attack like this was on a national scale, much less a global scale. But given the lack of emergency services or response from the government, it would seem that they were at the epicenter of it all.

  When Henry reached the other side of the path, he saw more vehicles stranded on the road and a few bystanders some distance away. Then, to the left, he saw the Jeep smoking and smoldering almost as badly as the airplane behind him. Henry sprinted toward the vehicle.

  The front tires were flat. The front door was open and the entire front of the Jeep was riddled with bullet holes. The only thing that kept Henry from feeling despair was the fact that Leland was nowhere to be found. A man was lying about twenty feet away. Henry suspected that if he got closer he would be able to see bullet holes all through the man’s chest. There was no way he was alive.

  Henry got into the driver’s seat and tried to turn the engine over using the keys, but the Jeep wouldn’t even make a sound. It had been shot up so badly that it was beyond repair.

  His stomach dropped at the thought of failing his brother already. They were still an hour and a half away from Chicago and already they had lost their vehicle. With terrain like this and enemies all around, it would take days if not a full week just to get to where his brother was. And by that time, his brother probably wouldn’t be home. He would’ve tried to get out of Chicago.

  Going into the center of Chicago by foot wasn’t going to be an option. So, they either had to turn back or find another vehicle. Of course, everyone was looking for another vehicle. He looked in the back of the Jeep and noticed that everything had been taken. The gas, their bags, their extra guns, everything. Not only did they not have gas to get back home if they found a working vehicle, they also didn’t have any food or water left. It didn’t matter if they found another car. If they didn’t have food and water, they weren’t going to survive the trip. One small misstep and they were facing the end of their lives already.

  Henry shook his head, knowing that he had to take this one step at a time. This wasn’t the time to think about a vehicle, and it wasn’t the time to think about food and water. His task right now was to find Leland. If he could find Leland, then he might find their things as well. Leland might have seen something that would help them get their stuff back.

  Henry took a deep breath and clenched his teeth.

  There was a part of him that wished he could say all of this was too unbelievable to be true. But he had spent too long in prison to think that way. People could be pigs. Desperate people were even worse. When it came to survival, people would do anything to stay alive. They would become monsters.

  Henry spotted some blood near the Jeep, and he saw a trail through the grass that led toward the woods. Every couple of feet, he would find a little bit more blood. It didn’t seem to be enough blood to indicate that Leland had been shot, but he could’ve been stabbed or beaten. Henry certainly didn’t understand why he had been taken. There was no reason for anyone to want Leland. Especially since the Jeep was no longer working. Across the embankment, Henry saw a clearing in the woods. The blood trail led that way, and he knew what he had to do. Weaponless, he walked toward the woods in hopes of finding Leland.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “You don’t think he knows what happened, do you?”

  “Of course not. He’s just some lucky guy who figured out how to start a car.”

  “Maybe his Jeep wasn’t fried. Maybe not everything was knocked out like we thought it was.”

  “I have no idea. We just need to figure out how to get out of here.”

  Leland knew he was in trouble. The conversation was taking place about fifteen feet away. His face was wet with his own blood. His head was exploding, but he knew he would be okay. He shouldn’t have stopped. He should’ve just plowed through the rubble and run over anybody who tried to stop him.

  He wasn’t ready to open his eyes. The moment he opened his eyes, the two men would start hounding him with questions. His lack of answers might lead to violence, and the truth was, he wasn’t ready to be beaten in the head again.

  He thought about Gwen and Cora. Inevitably, he thought about Travis. He hadn’t been able to save his son. Travis was taken from him before the world had been thrown into darkness. Now, as the world was falling apart, he was grappling to keep the remnants of his family together.

  Had he really saved Gwen? When he had gotten to Hope, she seemed to have been taking care of herself pretty well. In fact, she had been the first one to shoot Savage, knocking him backward onto the floor. Sure, Leland had dealt the deathblow so Gwen didn’t have to, but could he really say he had saved her? Was it possible he had put her in more danger by trying to rescue her? Had she survived despite him? He hoped he wasn’t about to do the same thing with Cora.

  Maybe the best thing Leland could do was to step back and do nothing. No, that couldn’t be the answer. That’s what he had done his whole life. He had always taken a step back. He hadn’t been there for them when they needed him the most. When Travis needed him the most.

  “Was that a 747?” one of them said.

  “Hard to tell. The wreckage is all spread out. It’s a big plane though.”

  “Yeah, I bet a lot of people died on that plane.”

  “How many planes do you think were in the sky when all this happened?”

  There was silence for a moment then one said, “I suppose there were a lot.”

  Leland clenched his fist and pushed himself off the ground. His vision swam at first, but the two men came into focus. They trained their guns on him after he yelped in surprise.

  “You’re awake!” one of them said.

  “We want to know how you got the car,” the other said.

  “I’m just trying to reach my daughter, and all you’ve done is make it where I can’t get to her. That means you’ve endangered her life as well as mine, and that really pisses me off.”

  “I’d watch yourself,” the man on the right said.

  The other man stepped forward. “We just want to know where you got the working car.”

  Leland shook his head. “A mechanic fixed it.” The man who had stepped forward reared back to swing his gun at Leland, but Leland held up a finger.

  “You take another crack at me, you’re gonna have to shoot me.”

  The man hesitated. “Well, he asked you a good question. Where did you get the Jeep?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” Leland said, “but I’ve been driving for an hour and a half because I had a working vehicle that a mechanic fixed. In the next few days, you’re probably going to see a lot of vehicles moving around, particularly older vehicles that don’t rely on electronics as much. From what I understand, this whole thing is an EMP attack. It’s not a good thing, but it’s not something you can’t survive. Only we aren’t going to survive it if people like you keep trying to steal things from people like me.”

  “We didn’t shoot up your vehicle,” the man standing back said.

  “Were you the ones that knocked me unconscious?” Leland asked.

  Neither of the men said anything.

  Leland looked past both men and saw a motorcycle resting next to the bushes.

  “Does that thing work?” Leland asked, pointing. “If you’ve already got a mot
orcycle, what did you need my jeep for?”

  The man standing further away looked behind him, and then he looked back at Leland and smiled. “Your stuff.”

  Something boiled within Leland, and he wished he was the one with a gun in his hand.

  “We just wanna know where you got the car.”

  Leland shook his head again. “I’m telling you I’m from Wisconsin. I don’t know where you can get a working car. I suggest you take your motorcycle and go find one.”

  “Do you realize how much money we could make if we get a fleet of working cars?”

  Out of the corner of Leland’s eye, he saw movement in the trees. When he realized it was Henry, his breath caught. Suddenly, he had an idea for getting away. This would be their only chance.

  “You know what? You’re right,” Leland said. “I know where you can get some vehicles and extra supplies.”

  Both of the men looked at each other. Leland tried to suppress a grin, but he couldn’t help it.

  “The thing is, you’re gonna have to fight us first.”

  Leland nodded at Henry, who then sprang forward out of the trees with a scream. Leland jumped at the man with a rifle in his hands and wrestled him to the ground while the other man tried to steady himself against Henry, but Henry was already on top of him. Leland wrenched the rifle away and slammed the butt of it down on the man’s face. He hit him again and again, then when the man fell unconscious, he moved to help Henry, but Henry had already incapacitated the other guy and had a gun pointed at him.

  Leland froze for a moment and watched Henry. It wasn’t easy to forget the fact that Henry had been put in prison for life for murdering someone. Sure, these men had threatened and kidnapped Leland, but the fight was over. There was no more threat. Was Henry really going to shoot them?

  There was something in Henry’s eyes, something that wanted to pull the trigger and end it.

  “The fight’s over, Henry,” Leland said. “We got it.”