The Ruin - Solar Crash Book 3: (A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Series)

by E S Richards

  “That’s true,” Giles jumped on Amy’s mention of the city where his parents were. He was eager to get to them and was already nervous about the state he might find the city in. Saugatuck would be a good starting point and it would allow Giles to better prepare himself for the road into Grand Rapids, a road he imagined he would have to travel alone.

  “That’s settled then,” Amy smiled and turned to her son. “Not long to go then James. We’ll have you something to eat in about an hour, okay?”

  James nodded but didn’t say anything in response; it was obvious he was drained and that he was focusing his efforts on keeping moving. Amy had never felt prouder of her son for everything he had been through so far on their journey. It was much more than an eight-year-old should have to deal with, but James had handled every situation valiantly and Amy knew she wouldn’t have half the confidence or determination if he weren’t still by her side.

  Forty minutes later the three of them were leaving the freeway they had been walking beside for several hours and making the final turn towards Saugatuck. The sun was slowly setting in the sky as they traveled the final part of their route for the day and Amy desperately wanted to get James inside before it was dark. Even if they didn’t find food and water that night, she just wanted a safe roof over his head, which would then allow her to start the next morning off on a higher note.

  It wasn’t long before signs of civilization began to appear, an Office Depot looming up from the side of the road, the first sign of the previous normality that had once occupied the area. Both Amy and Giles could tell immediately that it was pointless trying to enter the building in search of supplies. The front doors had been smashed and broken in, while several vehicles lay burned out and destroyed in the parking lot.

  Continuing down the street, still several minutes from crossing the bridge into the center of Saugatuck, more signs of destruction started to appear on their way. A large fire burned through what had once been an industrial complex, the factories and warehouses providing enough kindling to keep the fire both contained but also burning furiously. Amy automatically sheltered James from the fire as they walked past, the heat reminding her of being trapped within the country club and causing the burn on her hands to sting at the memory.

  “What about here?” Giles spoke as they passed by a building that looked awfully like the old country club, the memories of it still very fresh in Amy’s mind. “Dunes Resort? I actually visited here once when I was younger for a long weekend. It should have everything we need, and it means we can avoid the middle of the town, too.”

  “Dunes Resort,” Amy repeated under her breath, analyzing the building in front of them. “It’s worth a try I suppose; should hopefully have something we can use.”

  Amy couldn’t tell why, but she felt slightly suspicious of entering the building. Perhaps she was just being paranoid because of how much it reminded her of the country club, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were making a mistake by going inside. Still, James needed food and water and it would definitely be a place that should have ample supplies of each. If it still didn’t feel right to her when they got inside, they could gather what they needed and leave, but she couldn’t stop them from giving it a chance.

  “Stay close by,” Amy warned when she held her hand out for James to take as they started up to the entrance of the resort, quickly realizing it was a lot larger than she had originally thought.

  Aside from the road-facing outdoor design, Amy quickly realized the resort was nothing like the country club. It was absolutely huge, with different buildings scattered all over the place, outdoor pools, cabanas, bars, and more. It was like a small community with hundreds of places for people to hide. Very quickly Amy’s feeling of unease increased.

  “So you’ve been here before?” Amy asked Giles as she looked around the resort, trying to determine where to go. “It’s huge!”

  “Yeah,” Giles let out an awkward laugh, running a hand through his hair. “A long time ago now, and it’s definitely expanded since then. I think the lodges are this way though; they should be a good place to start.”

  Amy shrugged and squeezed James’s hand. “Lead the way.”

  The further into the resort that the three of them moved, the more relaxed Amy became. She couldn’t see anyone else around and the place definitely looked deserted. Even more reassuringly, it didn’t look like any damage had been done, just that the place had just been completely abandoned when everything happened. Perhaps it had been empty when the EMP struck; Amy didn’t want to dwell on it. If Dunes Resort could provide her with food, water, and shelter, then that was all she was truly concerned about.

  After about five minutes of walking through the large resort Amy caught sight of the lodges Giles had referred to. Lodges, she thought, was perhaps the wrong word for what she was looking at. Some of them were larger than her own home in South Haven, most two stories high and several with large balconies overlooking the lake. Amy almost had the breath knocked out of her as she looked at them and her pace automatically quickened, another bout of hope swelling inside her at what might be within the lodges.

  Giles tried the front door of the nearest one to find it locked, a damper to Amy’s spirits which thankfully only lasted a couple of seconds before Giles reached up to a lamp above the door and retrieved a key.

  “It’s what we do at the club,” he grinned at Amy before pausing and looking down at the ground. “What we used to,” Giles corrected himself quietly, the fact that his country club had burnt to the ground still a very fresh wound for the young man.

  Amy placed a hand on Giles’s back silently, offering him a look of compassion when she couldn’t think of any words to fill the silence. After a moment Giles shook his head as he tried to push all thoughts of the country club and what had happened there out of his mind. The memory of Mel taking her life was still too fresh to think about, so much so that he hadn’t even had the courage to share the truth with Amy yet. In fact, Giles wasn’t sure if he ever would, if he ever could.

  Glancing at the mother beside him he turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door to the lodge. Standing to one side, Giles let Amy and James enter the room first, their gasps putting the slightest bit of a smile back on his face. As he followed them inside and locked the door Giles nodded as he saw the lodge exactly as he remembered it. It had been spring break in his second year of college that he and a friend had come to Dunes Resort, four days and nights he would never forget. Now the memory felt like a lifetime ago, and in a way, Giles realized it was.

  “This is amazing,” Amy couldn’t hide the surprise in her voice, spinning around the room they had entered to take it all in. Plush sofas with elegant silk cushions lined the walls and pointed at a large flat screen television mounted on the wall beside a wood fire. An open archway led through to a kitchen, which Amy could see was kitted out with stainless steel pots and pans, each hanging delicately from a hook on the wall. James had already entered the kitchen and was pulling open cupboard doors in an attempt to find something to eat.

  Looking back at Giles, Amy smiled before following her son into the kitchen, her eyes growing wide as she saw the contents of the cupboard he was looking in. It was filled with canned goods, dry pasta, rice, spices, and much more. Plenty to make a decent meal with even without electricity to heat things up. Any doubt she had been feeling before about the resort faded from Amy’s mind as she started digging things out of the cupboard, her mouth watering at the promise of food.

  “Here,” Giles spoke up beside her from behind the open refrigerator door. “At least the water is still good.”

  Amy stood up to her full height from where she’d been crouched over the cupboard and took two bottles of water from Giles. Looking into the fridge she saw plenty of now rotting food, but copious bottles of water that they could put to good use. She eagerly drank, ignoring the droplets of liquid that spilled down her chin. She could forgive her lack of manners as she quenched her incredi
ble thirst. James and Giles drank silently beside her, each of them relishing the water as it graced their stomachs.

  “Thank you,” Amy spoke softly as she withdrew the bottle from her lips and smiled at Giles. She didn’t want to jinx anything, but it seemed to Amy like her luck was finally turning. An uncomfortable niggle in the back of her head reminded her that she’d had that same feeling when they entered the country club, but somehow this felt different. Perhaps it was her desperation, perhaps it was merely due to exhaustion, but whatever it was she didn’t want to question it.

  Chapter 6

  “Whoa! Cory! Pablo! Hold that end steady, lads.”

  Andy fought against the wind as he struggled to keep the polyester sheet gripped firmly in his hands. It had never been used before and he wasn’t even certain of how to attach it, but that hadn’t dampened the relief Andy felt when Brett reminded him The Mako had a backup sail tucked up safely in the hull.

  His boat had only ever run off the powerful engines that rested silently beneath their feet, now nothing but a hunk of metal and gears, waiting to one day be given life again. Despite that, Andy had spared no expense when he was kitting it out and had invested in almost every add-on he could get with the boat. That meant the mast that stood proudly in the middle of the deck was equipped to hold a sail and the large polyester sheet Andy and his young trainees were wrestling with should be able to guide them home.

  “Right,” Andy spoke again as he laid his end of the sail down on deck and looked up at the mast with his hands on his hips. “You sure you’re up for this, guys?”

  Cory and Pablo nodded, although Andy could see a glint of fear in each of their eyes. The only issue with turning The Mako into a sailing boat was attaching the actual sail. Climbing steps sat at indented intervals up the 25ft mast, however with the wind already picking up on deck Andy knew it would be even worse higher up. He was ashamed that he didn’t have any proper harnesses on board, the young boys would have to rely on their own skill and the safety lines Brett had been able to adjust for the climb.

  “We got this Andy,” Pablo spoke up first, swallowing his fear and turning to face his captain. “We’ll be sailing home in no time.”

  “Yeah,” Cory added once he’d pulled his eyes away from the mast. “Up and down in 20 minutes. Tops.”

  “All right,” Andy smiled, turning his head slightly as Brett approached with the modified safety lines while Bryan and Lucas set about preparing the sail to be hoisted. “Let’s get you both fastened in.”

  Stepping back, Andy allowed Brett to loop his modified safety line through the clips on first Pablo’s and then Cory’s pants. He knew it wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, but it would at least allow those of them who remained on deck to keep the boys suspended in the air if they slipped, rather than them falling straight back down to the deck. Effectively it was just the reverse of how they normally used the lines underwater, but instead of pulling someone out through the ocean they would be gently lowering them through the air back onto—relatively—dry land.

  Looking at the other members of his crew, Andy nodded when he saw that Bryan and Lucas had managed to rig the sail onto the hoisting pulleys. While the rest of The Mako was flawlessly designed, it was obvious the sail mechanisms had merely been an afterthought for Andy, albeit one he was currently very pleased he’d entertained. Still, although the sail could be hoisted from the deck, it still needed to be attached by hand to the splitters—the bars that ran horizontally off the uppermost part of the mast—and that was where Pablo and Cory came in.

  “Ready?”

  Brett slapped Cory on the back in a reassuring manner. “They’re both strapped in, aye. These lines will work just the same as they do in the water, absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  “All right then,” Andy nodded and then paused, uncertain of what he should say to the two young boys who were about to risk their lives climbing the mast of his boat. He felt like he should be the one to do it really, but couldn’t deny the younger men were faster and more nimble than he was, plus they weighed much less and Brett had reminded him it was best not to put too much strain on the mast. Especially as the boys needed to edge along the splitters to clip the sail in place.

  “Don’t worry, Andy,” Cory spoke up instead. “Twenty minutes tops, remember?”

  Andy laughed and smiled at Cory, the fear he had previously seen in the boy’s eyes vanished and was replaced with a determination to complete his task and set The Mako on its journey home. It filled Andy with admiration and pride to have the young man on board and he felt confident that by the end of the day his boat would indeed be sailing back toward the mainland.

  “Good luck then,” Andy replied, stepping back slightly to let Cory and Pablo move closer to the mast. “We’ll see you in twenty minutes.”

  Cory looked back over his shoulder slightly and laughed before moving closer to the wooden mast and wrapping his fingers around the third climbing step, located just within arm’s reach. The climbing steps looked a little like old horseshoes, carved from metal and sticking out of the mast in a semi-circle shape which allowed the boys to both loop their fingers through them and have their feet flat. The steps were evenly spread out along the mast right up to the fork where the splitters stuck out—from there, Cory and Pablo would have to rely on their own climbing skills to attach the sail.

  Andy watched with a lump in his throat as Pablo set off after Cory, neither of the boys looking down as they climbed but constantly focused on where the next metal step was, their bodies tightly hugging the wooden mast for protection from the wind. Andy took up his position beside Brett on Cory’s safety line, Pablo’s manned by Bryan and Lucas just to the right of them. All four men who remained on the deck gripped the rope firmly but carefully in their hands, not wanting to create any tension that could affect the two climbers. Andy had always thought it was a strange feeling to hold somebody’s life in your hands while you couldn’t see them under the water, but doing it as he watched the boys scrambling higher into the air with his very eyes felt even stranger. One wrong move and he would be responsible for bringing them back to safety, a responsibility he wasn’t going to take lightly.

  “We need to get the sail up soon,” Bryan’s voice came from the right of Andy, forcing him to pull his eyes away from Pablo and Cory as they climbed. “The wind’s picking up so it’ll be harder to hoist.”

  “Right,” Andy agreed, slightly concerned by how bad the wind was getting. “Brett, do you and Lucas want to do it? Bryan and I will stay on the lines.”

  “Sure thing,” Brett’s voice sounded behind Andy, his position on the back of Cory’s safety line keeping him out of the captain’s eye line. “Brace for added weight.”

  Andy shuffled his feet slightly wider apart and bent his knees, allowing for his body to take the additional strain that Brett had been supporting on the rope. It wasn’t that Cory was a difficult lad to support, or that they were even trying to hoist the boys up with the safety lines; it was more the increased pressure of holding Cory’s life now entirely in his own hands which weighed on Andy.

  This had to be done though, and out of the two of them on each line Andy had made sure himself and Bryan—the marine biologist equally as strong as Andy was even for a man of science—were left taking care of the ropes. Out of the corner of his eye Andy watched Brett and Lucas begin hoisting the sail, the polyester fabric running up alongside the shrouds, which held the mast in place during bad weather.

  It was hard work for everyone aboard The Mako and Andy was reminded for a moment how the generations of fishermen and sailors in his family who had come before him must have struggled with these tasks on a daily basis. In the modern era, every task was made simpler with the aid of technology, so much so that people had almost forgotten how to survive without it. They would have such a tale to tell everyone back at home when they made it into port and Andy wondered if his friends would even believe them. To lose all power and electricity this far out t
o sea was surely a death sentence in some people’s eyes, but with the strength of his crew, somehow Andy knew they would make it back to shore.

  “You ready, boys?”

  Brett’s shout brought Andy’s focus back to the task at hand and he blinked hard twice before focusing on Cory and Pablo, positioned at the end of either splitter. Brett and Lucas themselves were straining against the weight of the sail, the emergency sheet being battered by wind as they held it almost in place, just waiting for the final clips to be attached by the two climbers high above.

  No response came from either Cory or Pablo, but Andy saw them look to one another and nod before slowly starting to creep along the wooden splitters, moving away from one another and along the horizontal poles. This was undoubtedly the hardest part of attaching the sail: nearly twenty-five feet in the air Cory and Pablo had to rely on their own balance and climbing skills to stay in place, no more metal steps to guide them along their path. Meanwhile, on deck Andy and Bryan knew that one wrong move would leave them waiting to catch the boys whereas Brett and Lucas had to remain as still as possible with a gale-force wind effectively in their hands.