“Last I heard his fever was done for good,” I said. “That was last night. He’s better. A lot better.”
“Did they say how long until he can be mobile?”
“A couple more days.”
“Then what?”
I growled in frustration.
“What? What was that about?”
“That two word question. Then what? Now what?” I huffed. “I hate it.”
“Because you don’t know?” he asked.
“I don’t know, you’re right. I’m supposed to know, right?”
“That’s the general consensus.”
“This whole, Martin, from getting stuff, running from the storms and making it here, this whole thing is like going to the grocery store, buying all this stuff and not knowing what you are going to make for dinner,” I said. “All the stuff and not knowing what to do with it.”
“Meal planning is always easiest when going to the market.”
“Exactly.” I held out my hand.
“Just like long term survival planning is best when preparing for the apocalypse. What is this job or responsibility the General wants you to take?”
“She needs to get this country back on its feet before chaos hits, if it already hasn’t. People need to know there is support. She wants me and others to take an area, be like the liaison to the resources they need to rebuild.”
“Are there resources?” Martin asked.
“I guess. I mean, she wouldn’t have someone there saying, ‘hey we’ll get you wood’ if there was no way to get wood.”
“She wants to rebuild to get the country going again in some way.”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“And where does she want you to go?”
“I get to pick, and if I can’t, if this is what I decide to do, she’ll put me somewhere.”
“What is the problem?” Martin asked. “Why is this so hard? It sounds like something you should do, something we all should do.”
“The problem is it isn’t just me. Or me, you, Lane and the kids. A lot of people followed me here. Followed me to be safe, to have some sort of safe life after everything died and got screwed up. And now they have to be thinking just like me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean they followed me here and a part of me is thinking … Why? Why did we even leave? Why did we leave and lose so many when Ares, the big bad storm, never happened?”
“But it could have,” Martin said.
“It didn’t.”
“It could have. It was a gamble either way. The correction worked, but what if it didn’t? I mean, that last storm wasn’t even part of Ares and look what it did. I don’t even want to think about what would have happened if that correction didn’t work. And, besides, you heard Alice, things were bad, we may not have survived if we stayed.”
“It’s all theory at this point.”
“We’re alive. And I just don’t get where you’re having problems with this,” Martin said.
“I have more to consider than just you, me, Lane and the kids. Like I said, I dragged them out there, they have to be a part of what I decide to do. Do they want to stay where we go? Or stay here? Is it fair to drag them somewhere? If they go, they aren’t just rebuilding, they’re starting from scratch in a new place, a new area.”
“Jana, your solution is really simple. You’re making far too much out of this. In fact, it’s a great opportunity.”
“What are you talking about, Martin? How is it simple?” I asked.
“Find out from the general if this liaison and access to supplies extended to the other side of the Mississippi.”
“Okay.” I said slowly, trying to figure out where he was going.
“If so, then let’s go west. If you can get the resources out there, then let’s load up the group and go back home.”
“Martin there may be absolutely nothing left out there.”
“That may be true. Houses, any business, expensive bottles of bourbon, they may all be gone. And yep, we may all have to start over from scratch. But, Jana, it’s not a new place or a new area. It’s memories, it’s a lifetime of living there. And more than that,” Martin said. “It’s home.”
TWENTY-SIX – HOMEBOUND
Lane looked at me sort of sideways. I knew he was looking at my eye, not wanting to say anything.
After agreeing to spend some time in West Virginia, get acclimated on how things worked, get to know the people I would be communicating with, I had made all arrangements with Nel to go back home, at least to Texas. They would supply us with a bus, a horse trailer and fuel for the trip.
I hoped the trip wouldn’t be as eventful as when we went east. Something told me it wouldn’t be.
My husband had to be on antibiotics a full ten days before they gave him pills to take for another five. The infection was worse than first anticipated, the main goal was to stop him from becoming septic.
His lungs had finally cleared, but I was told that cough would be around a long time if not forever.
I alternated my nights between staying in Beckley and at the resort or as they were officially calling it, Olympus. I had to learn how Nel wanted things done, the procedure to get things back up and how to get the supplies we needed.
Martin and the kids opted to stay in Beckley. While there they gathered clothes we would need, a pair or two of jeans and shorts each, along with some shirts.
None of us really had any clothes.
Everything we had and we brought was lost.
For me, personally, the positive aspect was I was able to have my patch removed along with my sutures.
It was still healing and tight, my vision was slightly blurry, and I really didn’t think I looked all that good.
That was confirmed when my husband kept staring at it as we readied to leave.
“What? Say it,” I told him.
“It looks like you got an eyelid lift on one eye.”
“I probably did. That splinter was in the corner of my eye through the lid. Kind of like pinned my eye partially shut.”
“Huh.” He nodded. “How did I not notice that?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You were pretty sick.”
“Yeah, I was. I kept having weird dreams,” he said.
“Like what?”
“Like throwing up shoes.”
I laughed. “Probably because they pulled a shoestring out of your lung.”
“What?” he asked shocked. “No way!”
“Oh, yeah, pulled it right out. You gagged and all this water came out. It was really gross. The doctor said she never met a cowboy who was as big a baby as you.”
“I acted that badly?”
“No.” I smiled. “You were really good.” I kissed him. “I’m glad I didn’t lose you.”
“Me, too. So ...” he sighed out. “I know we’re leaving. You haven’t told me much. What now?”
“Ha!” I pointed.
“What?”
“I can answer that question,” I replied. “We’re all ready to go. We have a small shipment of supplies, but we need to assess what all is needed to rebuild. Assess meaning we look for people that have survived and are displaced in our zone.”
“Then what?”
“Then we get supplies from headquarters. First order of business is food, water, shelter and medical. Anita is gonna handle medical until we get a doctor. After that, we figure out what we can contribute as a community and go from there.”
“And then …”
“Oh, stop.” I playfully smacked him. “Now you’re pushing it.”
“You know what, Jana? We made it through literal hell and high water. This survival stuff and rebuilding is going to be a piece of cake.”
I didn’t think it would be exactly a ‘piece of cake’, but we had a plan. It would be a long road, with no certain outcome. I was up for the challenge, what else was there to do?
Alice was designated driver of the bus. She had charted our course based on infor
mation she had gotten from teams that had left a few days earlier.
She wanted us to make one overnight stop. A full night’s stop so we could rest and be ready for what we faced when we arrived home.
The horse trailer was hitched, and the horses loaded, in fact, Lane and I were the last to get to the bus.
It wasn’t fancy, it certainly wasn’t going to be comfortable, but it would get us home.
“Got that fancy schmancy radio hooked up,” Alice told me. “But you’re gonna have to figure out the other radio thing once we get situated.”
“Skip said he would,” I told her. “Plus, if we can get the landlines hooked up, we’ll be golden.”
“Good luck with that. Let’s head out, we’re wasting daylight.” She called out an ‘all aboard’ and got on the bus.
Rosie’s grandkids ran by me. Rosie looked sad; she had finally processed she was never going to see her daughter again.
They had looked for her back before Alice brought them to Martin’s property, way in the beginning when the first funnel hit.
Her daughter was never found. That didn’t mean she wasn’t alive and looking for Rosie. That was on my list of things to do, people to look for.
My sister was also on the list.
I wasn’t sure when I would ever be able to make the seven hundred mile trip to look, maybe one day. The general told me once they had teams in Wyoming, she’d let me know.
I wasn’t giving up on seeing her again. I knew the chances of finding Eloise alive and fine were slim, until then I envisioned her far away, happy and smiling.
It was time to leave. Time to hit the road under better conditions to venture back home, to face what was unknown.
None of the teams from Olympus had made it that far west. We would be the first.
Our attitude was, if it was impossible to make work, to rebuild, then we would just find somewhere else.
Everyone was given the option to stay. Stay at Beckley or even work at Olympus Headquarters, but everyone like me, wanted to go home.
We had faced so much heading east to Olympus, dire circumstances that took people from us, but it never broke our spirit.
But we kept forging ahead, despite it all.
It is said you can never go back. That was true, especially in our case of going home. We weren’t going back; we were going forward.
TWENTY-SEVEN – IN CASE YOU WANT TO KNOW
Across the country, the twelve hundred mile journey we came across many places that could be rebuilt and many that could not.
Amarillo was one of them.
We saw evidence that reiterated that it was in our best interest to go east.
So many places were just destroyed.
I imagined future generations would go through the burnt remains of Amarillo, one day overgrown with foliage, a symbol of what once was and what happened. A visual history lesson. In fact, the entire country was a visual history.
There were many survivors we came across. Some had already been contacted by the teams, but the closer we got to Amarillo, the survivors were clueless there was even a rebuilding effort. They were far too focused on the numerous places just buried in three feet of mud.
I took down the locations and shared them with Nel.
While Amarillo was out for restructure, the small outlying communities were not.
Places like Vega, Wilderado and Bushland. Places that Martin, Liza, Skip and the others called home.
When we arrived, there was a sense of defeat. I don’t think a single person didn’t look around and say, “What’s the use?”
Odd things remained untouched. Little things like mailboxes and the farmer’s market fruit stand. The fruit stand was how we knew we arrived near Martin’s ranch.
Liza’s diner was a shell, the inside was a swamp of thick, muddy dirt. Skip’s Automotive was a pile of bricks.
The old phone booth, like the fruit stand, was fine.
The ranch was hit hard. The barn had finally fallen, at least half of it, the roof and two sides scattered about the property, a few posts from fences poked out.
It had been weeks since we had been there, waters had receded, mud dried up. I couldn’t even imagine what occurred, what slammed into the towns and how bad it was.
Then Martin saw his well, and with a smile said, “Will you look at that? With all that rain, we will have a full well.”
He found the positive.
Then it began. Each person seemed to find a bright spot in their loss.
It would be like that for a long while. The simple things would make us happy.
Life would be less complicated eventually.
But it wouldn’t be easy.
There was no electricity, not for a while. No way to get news unless by word of mouth and there were very few mouths that remained. Medical care was basic, no surgeons.
After two weeks back in Texas, things looked up. We did things differently. We focused on one project at a time.
The country … the world had been hit by an anomaly of nature caused by man’s arrogance to dominate.
It backfired.
Or did it?
Things had returned to basics, a reset.
Eventually, once people rose from the ashes, there would be power struggles on large and small scales. There would be lawlessness and chaos in some areas. I held no fantasies about a perfect world.
We would take things one day at a time.
That’s all we could do.
Nothing in the future was set in stone. It was now all unknown. I knew that.
We were alive.
I had my family, my friends and with them, I did have a future.
That was a start and was good enough for me.
From the Author
Thank you so much for reading this book. I had fun writing it and hope enjoyed it, as well.
Please visit my website www.jacquelinedruga.com and sign up for my mailing list for updates, freebies, new releases and giveaways. And, don’t forget my Kindle club!
Your support is invaluable to me. I welcome and respond to your feedback. Please feel free to email me at [email protected]
Winds of Ares: An Apocalypse Thriller Page 19
