The Burst [A YA Apocalyptic EMP Survival Novel] (Barren Trilogy Book 1)

by Harley Vex

  Already, she was learning how to navigate this mess and not lay blame on David. I was so grateful to her.

  David nodded and motioned me out of the SUV. "We'd never know what's in there. I saw that building earlier. And I say that we check it out." But the dark gleam in his eye warned me that Alana’s fear might be more realistic than I thought.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  David gathered everyone with his hand motions after he took the flashlight back. I could imagine his military father in his head, barking orders, and his need to look strong. It was no wonder he sent others to do anything that might make him look vulnerable.

  I didn’t dare complain. Hanging close to Alana and Jerome, we headed around the Visitor Center and to the back of the complex. It turned out there was another long building like the Center, but the door refused to budge, and it was full of boxes. David tried to shine the light in the windows, but it landed on papers, spare wires, plugs, and other useless stuff. I stood on my tiptoes to look inside, but I found nothing, either.

  Alana called over everyone else, “The hangar-looking building. It’s metal. Maybe it acted like a Faraday cage. I think that’s what they’re called. I heard about it somewhere, when I was doing a report on solar flares.”

  All heads turned to her. “You did?” Jerome asked.

  “Please explain,” David said, circling the second building and shining his light on the metal hangar. It looked like a metal tube on its side, shoved halfway into the ground.

  Alana shifted on her feet. “A Faraday cage is a container made of metal that’s also attached to the ground. It has to have metal on all sides, I think. It takes the energy from an EMP and puts it into the ground before it can fry any electronics inside. That’s why some cars can survive if they’re not full of computers. Of course, it depends on how strong the EMP is. I think houses with metal roofs can protect electronics inside of them, too. And if we’d wrapped our phones in tin foil, that might have helped.”

  My heart soared for one vulnerable moment.

  The bus.

  I had left my phone inside the bus and inside my metal lunch box. Of course, it might reach no one. I had the feeling the EMP had fried all the satellites in orbit, or most of them. But it might be worth a check.

  “Then why doesn’t anything here start?” David asked, letting a nasty tone slip into his voice.

  Ugh. Alana bit her lip, and I knew I had to stand up for her. “She said that ‘some’ cars can survive. Not all of them. And if the guy on the radio was right, we had a strong EMP.”

  “The Visitor Center has a metal roof, too,” Alana said. “I think that might be why the receptionist’s computer didn’t go out right away, and the lights were still working. They were fed by the underground generators or whatever they have here.” Then she was quick to correct her course of action. “And I didn’t mean to say that every car would make it. Probably, most of them didn’t. You’re right.”

  David just nodded. Crisis averted.

  I eyed the metal hangar as we followed behind David, who shone the light on an open garage door. Someone had taken a vehicle out from what it looked like, and I thought about the broken front gate. Dr. Shetlin. She must have found something big that survived the EMP, something that was tucked into just the right place. Once we all circled around, we saw a large, open garage big enough for two of those big industrial tractors. One space was empty, letting David shine the light on plenty of tools on counters, but the other—

  “We have a tractor,” Jerome said.

  He was right. It was yellow, said CAT on the side, and had a giant scoop on the front for moving hard soil. But it had only one seat, and the back was two massive tires and a small metal platform not meant for carrying human passengers.

  “It’s not enough to get us all out of here,” David said. “At least, not without some work. And only the seat for the driver has a roof over it.”

  He had a point. There was a small cabin to shield the driver from dust and other debris, but nothing to hold out the sun. I knew these tractors didn’t move fast, and this one had one of those orange triangles on the back. Even if we got this to start, then it would be slow going to the next town, or any other shelter.

  And then the sun would come up.

  “But does it even work?” Mina asked. “There have to be keys in there. Let’s look.”

  “Yeah. One thing at a time,” Tony added. “If it works, then we can figure out gas and transport. It might even be possible to tow another vehicle behind it, just to shield more people.”

  “Good idea,” I said, glad we were drowning out David.

  We all piled into the garage, and the smells of dust, metal, and oil surrounded us. It was a good thing none of the distant fires had come close, because I could smell gas, too, probably diesel.

  Gina and Christina started looking around the counters for keys, and it turned out that someone working in the area had left them next to a pile of pipes and what looked like a gray schematic of the Collider buildings. The buildings looked like blue squares on top of wavy blue lines that had to signify the surrounding landscape. But before I could look at the map in more detail, David took it and rolled it up.

  “Would the food in here be safe?” Eric asked, opening a safe that was under a counter. He motioned to lunch bags stashed inside, along with plastic containers of sandwiches and soft drink cans.

  Alana slowly turned as everyone looked at her, standing near the tractor. “I don’t think so. The radioactive particles that came down were different from the EMP. An EMP can’t hurt people directly, but there might still be, you know, nasty particles that got absorbed into that food.”

  Eric slammed the safe. “Well, that’s out.”

  Then Jerome motioned for Christina to toss him the keys, and as David watched, she did. He got into the tractor and tried them one by one, and at last, the tractor’s motor burst to life.

  And the headlight did the same, casting a lively glow on the flattened, dusty earth outside.

  “It works!” Jerome said. “We’ll be riding like farmers and getting dust in our eyes, and we’ll need to find some country music to jam to, but it works!”

  “Are you serious?” David asked, backing away. I couldn’t read his expression.

  Alana ran over and grabbed my arm. “We can get out of here!”

  “You’re the man,” Tony said, giving Jerome a high-five.

  My heart fluttered. Maybe we could just board the tractor and leave, but we weren’t there yet. As Eric took Tony’s place to high-five Jerome, David held up both hands and let Christina take the flashlight. “Hold up!”

  Silence fell. Everyone froze.

  “There’s only enough room on that for maybe two people, and maybe two others, if they don’t mind being dirty,” David said, motioning to the scoop on the front. “And no protection from the sun. If Laney got burned earlier, and we all know she slathers on the sunscreen, then we’ll need an actual barrier between us and the sun. Because there’s no way this thing would get us to the next town in one night on a single tank of gas.”

  I flinched.

  He had laid out my family’s tragedy in front of everyone. I balled my fists, but I kept my mouth shut after a warning glance from Alana.

  “Dude, we know that,” Jerome said. “This thing probably has a max speed of five, and it needs diesel. There is a gas station close to here we could fill up at, if it’s still there, so there’s one pit stop we could take. And Tony had a good idea. This thing must have the power to tow another vehicle behind it. There are our seats. That minivan is an excellent candidate.”

  Alana cleared her throat. "There might be a map somewhere in the Visitor Center. We can see how far it is to the next town. Then we can make plans for getting out of here. They've got to have one, probably inside the desk.”

  David appeared to think. “We have one hurdle cleared. Now, we just need to figure out how to make it work. Everyone, back into the Visitor Center.”

  CHAPTER TH
IRTEEN

  Jerome turned off the tractor. We had to conserve fuel, after all.

  The hope monster rose inside of me again, and I walked with the others back to the Visitor Center. Alana had a point. Any kind of tourist trap had maps for people who got lost or needed to know where the next bathroom was. My parents and I had gone on plenty of trips when I was younger, and a map was a staple in those places. Even a lot of restaurants had them.

  And we didn’t have phones right now, or at least ones that connected to the Internet.

  With the flashlight in tow, David ordered Christina and Mina to go back out and check the guard’s sedan. That meant reaching into the dead man’s pockets. And I gulped as they argued and finally went off to look at the remaining vehicles. The rest of us gathered around the reception desk again, and I placed the computer monitor aside and opened drawers, searching for any more clues.

  “We need the rest of the food up here,” David ordered. “Gina. Alana. It’s your turn to go down the ladder and bring stuff up. Put it right there.” He motioned to the safe food stash near the elevator.

  I gulped again as I went through pencils, notepads, and even an MP3 player that still turned on, thanks to the metal roof of the Visitor Center. Alana didn’t argue. Her policy would be to keep David happy, but for how long? One of us would need to stay on his good side at all times.

  Was I doomed to be on his nasty side, right along with Jerome?

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered to Alana, as she went to join Gina on the ladder. “It takes several minutes to get down, but the rails are sturdy.”

  “I guess we all have to go at some point?” She shrugged before Gina, with a frown, took the ladder and vanished down it with the backpack. Alana took the laptop bag. Then she nodded. It was okay.

  The rest of us left the door cracked. What would come and get us? David shined the flashlight back on the desk to give me light while everyone milled around, trying to find anything that could be a map. The elevator doors remained open, and the light shone on the elevator for a second, revealing the cage and the bloodstain still on the floor.

  It was easier to dig through the desk now. At last, I pulled out a tattered map that looked as if it dated to before the invention of cell phones. Then I straightened it out. I knew the general area, of course, but not the roads this far south.

  “It’s a map of Arizona. We’ll probably be in this corner.” I eyed a barren, tan region with few roads.

  “Laney. Great,” Jerome said, motioning for me to place it on the table.

  But, of course, David took the map instead, and he reached into another open drawer and pulled out a set of keys that I had missed, too.

  The receptionist’s keys.

  They were the keys he must have put back in the drawer after unlocking the door to the ladder. And David was making one thing clear. He would control access to them.

  I remembered Alana’s warning and kept my mouth shut, but I couldn’t resist shooting him a dirty look. His throwing my family’s tragedy around was callous and thoughtless, and I would not be his punching bag.

  Everyone pushed close to the desk. I smelled someone's armpits. No one had bathed. I doubted there was a shower around here or even baby wipes. All we had was the unisex bathroom with one toilet and a sink, both of which thankfully still worked.

  The map was a scramble of tan splotches, national park borders, and multicolored lines. We took a while to figure out where the Visitor Center was. David found Rocky Falls, which was a tiny dot on the map, surrounded by nothing. Colton was about twenty miles north of that.

  We had few options out here.

  I watched while David traced his finger to the legend, and then back to the map, trying to keep the same distance in between them. He frowned. "Rocky Falls is about twenty-eight miles away, right down this road. That’s farther than I thought it was. There doesn’t seem to be anything but open desert for this entire stretch.”

  My heart forced its way into my throat, but I forced a groan, as if this were just an annoyance. A few other people did as well. We’d have to start that tractor, get everyone on, and shield them from the deadly sun in the meantime. And we had to do it before the food ran out and we all shut down from the lack of calories.

  And not to mention, any food we’d find out there might carry radiation, at least for some time. Until we got out of the main blast zone, almost nothing might be safe for our consumption.

  Then we would have problems. “How are we going to eat?” I asked.

  David looked around at everyone, and it bummed me that Alana wasn’t here to come up with some good ideas. But Bethany spoke. “Old Mr. Connors was a doomsday prepper. He still owns the Connors mine.”

  Mutters went up, and then I remembered. Mr. Connor’s father, Walter Connors, owned the local iron mine that had shut down a decade ago. He was always going around Colton, talking about hoarding supplies for the upcoming solar storm in his mine. How had I forgotten? Everyone thought of him as the local crazy guy, but I had the feeling that no one was about to laugh at him behind his back anymore.

  He might be the one laughing if he was still alive.

  But either way, there might be some supplies in Colton, and they might be deep enough in the ground to have escaped most of the radiation.

  “The mine. That’s brilliant,” Tony told Bethany. “We can go there for a while.”

  David said nothing. His cheeks flushed, and he returned to the map.

  The flashlight, now held by Eric, stayed on the map as David continued to mutter. I pulled away from the crowd and walked to the small pile of water bottles and food bags on the floor, the ones in the safe zone. Everything from the vending machine had gone behind the desk as a last resort deal.

  “That’s great. But how long will the supplies we have right now last?” Jerome asked beside me. I hadn’t realized he was there.

  On the other side of the room, David, Christina, Eric, Tony, and Mina still huddled around the map, talking in low voices. Well, someone had to figure it out. I counted the water bottles. I didn’t know if the surface water was poisoned or not. I imagined that anything flowing would be safer than anything not flowing, but I couldn’t be sure. “This package is open, so some water bottles are already missing. That leaves us with twenty-seven bottles. And there are how many of us? Nine? Ten?”

  “Dr. Shetlin was the eleventh.” Jerome nodded to the darkness outside.

  Easy math. “So that’s three water bottles per person,” I say. “Three days, if we’re super careful. We can drink from the tap if we have to, but I’m not trying that until it’s the last resort. I think food would absorb those muons or whatever they were better than water would.”

  “I think so, too.” Jerome eyed the collection of food. “That’ll be harder to figure out, but once we bring everything up, we’ll know.”

  The low conversation continued near the counter, while Jerome and I waited for the sound of Alana and Gina to come back up the ladder. After what felt like an hour of waiting, they finally did. First, I heard the sounds of their feet clicking against the rungs, and then I pulled Gina, then Alana, out of the ladder shaft.

  They both flopped to the ground, gasping, as the others gathered to see what they’d brought in those bulging bags.

  “Is that everything? You couldn’t have grabbed more?” David asked.

  “That’s everything,” Gina said, spilling the backpack on the floor. Boxes of candy bars, granola, and other snack staples spilled onto the floor. “Alana and I cleaned out the break room. Some of the stuff has expired, but we got that, too.”

  I didn’t do any calculations in my head as I eyed our supplies, but I knew instantly that this meant we had just a few days to find another food source. First, we’d deplete the safe supply. Then we’d have to risk radiation sickness. And after that—

  The bodies outside would probably dry out under the intense UV rays, and then we’d have to—

  "This is all enough to keep us going for a few days
, and no more," I said.

  I turned to Alana, hoping that she would agree with me and do the walking on eggshells that would placate David. "We need to shield ourselves from the sun and do everything possible to get to the next town. There could be more supplies there and maybe better vehicle choices. The army might even come out looking for survivors, and they’re going to check the towns. Maybe someone will do a flyover just to see the damage."

  That sounded too hopeful, but we’d have to roll with something. Flyovers weren’t impossible, if any aircraft still worked within a few hundred miles.

  “We won’t find anything happy in the next town,” I warned. It was better to face the elephant in the room now, well before we reached Colton. If we ever got back to our hometown.

  David looked at all of us, waiting for someone to come up with an idea. Jerome just stepped back, exhaustion forming bags under his eyes. He’d had enough of the king for one day, and frankly, so had I. But I had to say something. Again.

  “Maybe if we had a tarp? That would be better than sunscreen, and big enough to go over all of us.”

  “But transportation,” David said. “If we walk, we’ll burn calories, need more water, and get exhausted.”

  More mutters went up in the crowd. Sadly, he had a point.

  “We still haven’t finished checking all the vehicles,” Tony said, stepping up. He was almost as big as David, but still a few inches shorter. At least Tony was also on the football team and had a chance against David, if Alana was right and the worst happened. “Eric and I can go out and do that. If we assign teams, we can get something done faster.”

  “I’ll assign teams,” David said.

  I thought about the flimsy awning outside the visitor center, the one hanging over the front of the building like it used to be a simple diner. It was thin and would let the sun in. I shuddered.

  "Okay," David said at last. "Tomorrow, we will look for a way to get to the next town. If we rush between buildings, the sun shouldn’t have time to burn us. We have supplies to last us the next few days. Tony and I will look into towing that minivan behind the tractor. That’ll give us some seats. Mina and Christina, you unhook the awning and look for anything else that we can use to keep the sun off us. Everyone else will check that second building for more supplies we can take. And stay out of trouble.”