by Barry Napier
“In a facility about half a mile behind us. We’re keeping them there, with some of the most modern equipment to make sure they stay that way until we can get a handle on everything that’s happening. We have plenty of room for the three of you as well. We’ll need to do a quick medical evaluation first, but…we’d love to have you.”
“Is there anything you can do to help us get Joyce to her father?” Olivia asked, placing her arm protectively around the girl.
“I don’t know, right off hand. Sorry, but I’m just being honest. But I’ll try to coordinate with some of the other outposts. Minnesota, you said?”
“Yes.”
“That area hasn’t been touched yet, so maybe there’s a good chance.”
“And what if we decided to just give it a go ourselves?” Paul asked. He wasn’t necessarily skeptical, but he did not like the idea of staying at an Army-operated facility and giving up control of the situation.
“Well,” Bryant said, “I think that would be foolish. We can ensure your safety at our facility. As you have no doubt seen coming from New York, there aren’t many that are spared from this thing. So we want to keep those that seem to be immune from it alive and out of harm’s way. However, if your medical evaluation checks out and that’s what you want to do, we won’t waste our resources or our time trying to stop you.”
Paul looked to Olivia and shrugged. “I know her father placed her in your care. I’m just here to help. This is one hundred percent your call.”
“I say we take them up on it,” Olivia said. “I haven’t gotten reception on this phone since we left Brownstone. If the power is out everywhere and there’s no phone service, I think they might be our best bet.”
It made perfect sense to Paul, though there was still a small part of him that did not want to give up the control. Still, he turned back to Lieutenant Bryant and gave a nod. “So what do we need to do?”
Bryant looked back to the eight men and gave a thumbs-up sort of salute. Instantly, half of the men started pulling back the sawhorses. Behind them two of the trucks cranked to life and started to slowly back away. This revealed a smaller truck, marked with a little orange triangle on the back.
“Follow that truck down the road a bit and the medical team will look you over. After that…it’s your call.”
“Thanks,” Paul said.
He rolled the window up and started pulling forward through the barricade.
“He was nice,” Joyce said in a deadpan sort of way.
“Yes, he was,” Olivia said. “And he’s going to try to help us get you to your Dad.”
Joyce smiled, but it did not last long. Paul pulled through the barricade and the truck with the orange triangle started forward. Paul looked into his rearview and watched as the suited men placed the barricade back in order. And as he watched, one thought occurred to Paul that suddenly made him wonder if this was the best idea after all. Bryant had said there had been many sick people trying to get through, and a few healthy ones as well. But if that was the case, where were all the cars? And what had they done with the bodies of the dead?
These were alarming questions and he could not help but focus on them as he continued to follow the little truck down the road. Several other army vehicles were along the sides, as if guarding the area from anyone that might change their minds at the last minute. And suddenly, Paul started to feel less like they were being saved, and more like they were being trapped.
Chapter 6
Katherine heard water trickling from somewhere nearby. She supposed it could have been what woke her up but that did not make sense. She tried to open her eyes but it seemed like too much effort. She wanted to keep sleeping, never mind the sound of the water. She’d sleep until her alarm clock went off, until she could smell coffee brewing from the auto-brew in the kitchen. She could already taste the coffee, her sleep-fogged mind anxious for the daily caffeine jolt she provided it in the morning.
Only…it wasn’t coffee she was tasting. And that trickling sound was more like a gushing. Something about both of them together was terrifying and they worked together to pull an image to the forefront of her brain. A bright white light, and then a world of deadly orange. She’d flown for a moment, saw the world tilt and spin and come apart and—
She opened her eyes and gasped. She would have probably screamed if every nerve in her body wasn’t already preoccupied with trying to figure out exactly what the hell was going on.
She was still in the car, in the bureau sedan she and Luis had been in when the bright light came. The sound of water that had woke her up came from the water that was currently filling the car. It was coming in at a peculiar angle, though. As she tried to make sense of it, she tilted her head and the taste reached her mouth again. Not coffee at all, but blood.
It surprised and disgusted her. She spit it out and this time she did let out a little scream. As it came out, she finally started to understand where she was and what had happened. Yes, she was still in the car, but the car was upside down. Her hair was hanging down, not in her face, but dangling just beyond the sides of her vision.
The sedan was also apparently in the James River or, at the very least, along the banks of it. Murky water was coming in through the cracked windshield on Luis’s side of the car. She could feel it rocking slightly against the current, something grinding and scratching along either the sides or the overturned roof. It was inching closer and closer to her head, soaking her hair as it hung down, and if she didn’t act soon she would—
Luis.
She looked to her right, beyond the water coming in through the window. The way the car was tilted, his side of the car was under more water. It had come up to the top of his head, his thick black hair starting to soak.
“Luis, are you…”
The question she’d meant to ask was “Luis, are you okay?” But she could tell instantly that he was not. The dashboard on that side had fractured and been violently skewed inward. It had slammed into the right side of his chest, pinning him there and pushing his shoulder back at an awkward angle. She doubted he’d felt it, though. His neck had also been horribly broken, his head turned violently to the left. She assumed he’d also been struck on the head, as his entire face was covered in blood. It ran down his forehead, towards the gathering water. Or is it running up his forehead, given that the car is upside down? she wondered. She pushed the question away though, because she could sense lunacy lurking behind it. Luis’s eyes, blank and wide open, stared at her as if in judgement of the question.
A low moan started to creep out of Katherine’s mouth. As she started to accept the situation, she heard Rollins’s voice in her head. She heard the last thing he’d said on the phone before the world had seemed to shift and tilt, and it was as if he was right there in the car with her.
“There were explosions. We had a few agents find a—”
She felt something like desperation sinking its fingers into her thoughts. It was an invitation to lose her mind, to scream and weep and give in to the absolute absurdity of the moment. How was this even happening? Why was this happening at all?
But she knew. It was the white flash, the orange light, the flying car. Rollins had told them a bomb had been found in Atlanta. Apparently there had been one in Richmond that had not been found.
She thought of Richmond, of the city she had been born in, city she’d attended college in and where she had served as an FBI agent for over five years. She thought of that city she loved destroyed in one violent flash and something inside of her folded up. But behind that, there was another thought, one that seemed to pry away those fingers that wanted to massage a bit of lunacy into her.
If that was a bomb, it was a huge one, she thought. And based on the timing of Rollins’s call, it wasn’t the only explosion. Something happened before the big blast, and that big blast was nuclear. You and Luis were apparently just outside of the blast radius and only got the outer push of it. If you’d left Terrence Crowder’s old townhouse five mi
nutes later, you’d likely be dead. But you’re not. So get your ass moving.
Looking at Luis, that was easier said than done. They’d been good friends for the better part of her time with the bureau. And just like that, in the blink of an eye, he was dead. He was less than two feet away from her and that could have been her. Seeing his condition made her check herself over as her frantic eyes continued to watch water pour in through the bottom of the cracked passenger side window, slowly pooling up.
The water was coming in at an angle and she supposed there was maybe four or five inches separating her own head from the gathering water on her side of the car. She still tasted blood in her mouth; she assumed that was from the pain in her tongue. She ran her tongue along the top of her mouth and found that she’d apparently bitten into it quite hard during the crash. Elsewhere, there was a dull, throbbing pain along her left leg. Her head was also hurting, but not any crippling way; she’d had hangovers that were worse. She tested her arms and legs. All moved just fine except for that pain along the lower half of her left leg. Somehow, it seemed she’d gone through the blast and the aftermath mostly unharmed.
We were on the parkway, heading to Chesterfield, Katherine thought. Crossing the James. That’s got to be at least a forty or fifty foot drop from the road to the water. There’s no way I should have survived that.
She knew it wasn’t impossible, though. Still, the miraculous nature of it made her all the more motivated to get out of the car before the stupid thing flooded. Now that she had an inventory of her injuries, she took stock of the car and her surroundings. When she looked out of her window and the windshield in front of her, she saw only surging, dirty water. When she looked to Luis’s side, there was obviously the water surging in—now reaching Luis’s eyes and only inches away from touching the top of Katherine’s head. But past that partially broken door, she was fairly certain she could see the muddy floor of the river just a few yards shy of the bank. That made sense, she guessed; if Luis’s side of the car had been so badly damaged, it was probably because it had been the side to strike the ground. Even if they’d landed in the water, anything remotely shallow was not going to do much to break their fall from fifty feet.
It was nearly impossible to tell through the shattered glass and water, but she also thought she could still see daylight out there. So apparently she had not been knocked out for very long. Yeah, but that could just be some sort of nuclear glow from the fallout, a pessimistic side of her stated. Maybe don’t start assuming things until you’re out of here.
Katherine reached for her seatbelt buckle. Doing so while upside down was a surreal experience. She thought of Alice, falling through the rabbit hole and watching everything falling up. She’d watched the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland at least fifty times in her childhood and that had always been her favorite scene—endlessly falling while other items moved up beyond Alice, a bottomless hole that…
Is that really where you want your mind to go right now? she asked herself.
No. It wasn’t. She dashed the imagery away, sensing that focusing on such things was an excuse to freeze up and not have to face the situation. She found the seatbelt buckle and grasped at it with trembling hands. There was a terrible moment when she felt absolutely sure it would be stuck. Wasn’t that how those things usually went in movies? But she felt the click, the buckle letting loose from the clasp. The seatbelt pulled away from and back into its original place as if it were totally unaware the car had been wrecked and was currently in the James River.
She slid upward (or was it down?) in the seat and her head was submerged in the water up to her eyebrows. Her hands found the center console and pushed upwards, keeping her head out of the water. With her left hand, she reached for the door handle and realized she could not quite reach it. Letting go of the console, she allowed her head to go mostly underwater. She grabbed the handle and pushed. She’d been expecting it to be hard to open, and she was not disappointed as the water churned against it.
She took a deep breath, lowered her head under water, and pushed against the door with her shoulder. It opened a bit more, but she had to fight against the current. Her one saving grace, she supposed, was that they were close enough to the bank that the car was not getting the entire force of the water. With one more monstrous slam of her shoulder, the door opened enough for her to slip out.
She was only underwater for about two seconds. It was quite warm, having been an intensely hot summer through most of Virginia. The current, while strong, wasn’t quite as bad as she’d expected, so she had no problems swimming against it. She positioned herself so that the current carried her to the back of the car. When she grabbed the back bumper, her fingers nearly missed. But even then, as she grasped desperately for purchase before the river pulled her away, she realized that her foot could touch the bottom. She felt the sludgy surface under her shoes, the water coming up to her nose. She used her leverage holding to the back of the car to propel herself towards the bank. The current took her a bit, sweeping her legs off of the bottom, but she remained safe. Before the current could grasp her too tightly, her own force had carried her close enough to the bank.
She stumbled up onto the sand and looked back to the car. It was several feet away from the bank, the roof apparently caught in some sort of crevice or on a large log under the surface. She could see Luis’s lifeless shape through the water-covered window. Looking at him, something in her chest tightened and threatened to snap. Instinct told her to rush back to the river to free him, but common sense told her it was useless. Just pulling up the image of what he’d looked like was enough: snapped neck, head at an impossible angle, mask of blood, and wide, dead eyes.
Instead, she turned her eyes up the bank. She stood in place, frozen by what she saw. First of all, the world seemed to have gone a peculiar shade of orange-tinged beige. It took her a while to recognize it as dust—as if someone has thrown an immense piece of stained cloth over the world. But scattered within that shade, she saw multiple vehicles thrown alongside the banks of the James River. Three cars, a Budweiser delivery truck, and a few others further to her right, obscured by piles and piles of deadfall and debris. Trees had been scalped and knocked over; pieces of the protective concrete walls from the parkway were littered all over; what looked like the backside of a pair of storage units lay embedded in the ground about thirty yards away.
Katherine looked in all directions trying to get a better grasp of how bad it was. To her right, there were the crashed vehicles and scattered debris. Behind her, there was the river. And though it was also tinged with the color of dust, the water made everything seem clearer somehow. She saw other cars in the water, along with more rubble and the ruins of what had been objects of everyday life less than a few hours ago: the roof of a house, a large rectangular object she thought might have been a billboard, countless scraps of wood and metal, all floating down the river or lodged in it. To her left, there was a grove of trees that, while still standing, had clearly been tossed hard by a sudden violent gust of wind. There were all kinds of litter plastered into the branches, mostly chunks of wood and paper, though she saw a smoldering car tire in one.
As her brain worked overtime to process all of this, she looked towards the parkway. She could see it up ahead, about forty or fifty feet in the air a short distance from where she currently stood. The shape of it was quite clear through the dust and the haze but her mind was too bogged down with the madness around her to come up with any solid plan on how to get up there—or, for that matter, why she needed to get up there at all.
Panic started to boil up inside of her, that tightness in her chest growing more and more intense. She found it hard to breathe and not because of the dust; the dust actually wasn’t all that bad, though she could now smell something that was almost like a mixture of burning ozone and charred plastic.
“Gotta calm down, gotta calm down,” she chanted to herself.
As if on some sort of technological autopilot, her han
d went to her pocket. The cellphone she’d been hoping to find wasn’t there, though. She assumed it had likely fallen out during the crash. The crash…which had been caused by the blast she’d barely seen before the car had been pushed hard and then gone airborne.
A bomb. A bomb like the one in Atlanta, only no one found this one in time. She made her brain focus on that reality, taking a few shallow breaths to center herself. She then made herself mold it into a more factual statement, as if she were writing up a report for Rollins. A nuclear bomb went off in Richmond sometime around eleven o’ clock in the morning. The fact that I’m still alive and surrounded by this sort of debris indicates that I was a good distance away from ground zero when it happened.
Oddly enough, nailing it all down in such a logistical way helped to steady her mind. The tightness in her chest loosened up as she looked up to the parkway. “Okay,” she said. “So now what?”
The answer was easy. She started walking, making her way up the bank. She knew the geography of the parkway well enough to know that the bank was going to lead to a thin strip of forest that gave way to an industrial lot. From that lot, there were connector roads that led to the parkway and Interstate 95. She had no idea what she would do when she managed to get back on the road but for now, that one goal was enough to keep her going.
Katherine scrambled up the sandy section of the bank, her wet shoes slipping a bit as she came to the weeded and grassy area. The further she climbed up the gradual slope, the more litter and debris she saw from the blast. A few more cars, a storage shed that had been warped and twisted, a neon yellow barrel that was usually found around toll booths. As the ground leveled out and she came to the first signs of the small section of forest, she passed under the parkway. Small rivulets of water worked their way down through the ground, heading for the river. When she reached the trees, she saw that these had also been blown inward, pushed by a tremendous force. There were snapped branches and uprooted saplings everywhere. Among it all, she saw several dead animals: a few deer, a fox, countless birds on the ground as nothing more than little tufts of feathers.
