End Days Series Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Isherwood, E. E.

  She hoped he’d get bored and leave, but that turned out to be wishful thinking.

  Faith would have to make a public statement soon, but she’d do it on her schedule, not Bob’s.

  Supercenter Walmart, Modesto, CA

  Buck thought the Walmart Supercenter looked like someone had kicked the roach motel. Shoppers poured out of all the exits and ran for their cars in the huge parking lot. Even as the gunshots faded behind him, he looked to his right to see if the storm was getting close.

  Finally, a piece of luck.

  The storm appeared in the sky to the north, but it was still far away. He stopped kicking himself for taking too long inside the store.

  He jogged down the long center aisle of the parking lot while carrying his basket of treasure. Cars and trucks pulled from the spaces and sped away. He’d parked at the edge of the lot, so he had a long way to run through the chaos, but no traffic to drive through.

  Some of the shoppers managed to get their carts outside, and he wondered if they’d paid for their contents. It gave him a feeling of pride he didn’t steal the leashes or jerky, but after passing more carts of fresh fruit, canned foods, and cereal, he realized what a missed opportunity he’d just had.

  Every piece of survival gear he’d ever need was less than a hundred yards away, and he couldn’t go back and buy any of it. There was no way he’d tangle with people shooting guns. Lots of supplies were worth fighting for, but nothing was worth dying for. There were other Walmarts. Modesto probably had six.

  “Mac, I’m home!” he yelled when he was a few parking spaces away from his black Peterbilt.

  As he said it, a silver SUV crossed from another aisle and sped right for Buck.

  “Shit!” he screamed as he jumped aside.

  The truck squealed its tires as it came to a stop. The driver jumped out and walked around the back with long strides. Grungy tennis shoes. Dirty blue jeans. A black t-shirt of a heavy metal band. He carried a small wood axe in one hand.

  “Give me your fucking stuff,” the guy said as he crossed behind his ride.

  Buck had no time to think of a response, so he defaulted to his Marine persona.

  He set down his basket and reached behind him like he was going for something in his belt. Then he spoke in his military voice. “Stop! I’m authorized to carry a concealed pistol. I don’t want to pull it out and kill you, but I will!”

  The axe guy skidded to a standstill about ten feet away.

  Buck tipped his head toward his belongings in the see-through basket. “My treasure here is a couple of leashes for my dog and some meat sticks. Is that worth dying for?”

  The man was about the same age as Buck, but that was where their similarities ended. The other guy’s face was ravaged by pockmarks and blemishes that Buck recognized as caused by chronic drug use. He stood a little hunched over and his eyes were bloodshot pools of hatred.

  The man lunged forward a couple of steps, but Buck reacted by stiffening his arm behind his back like he had the gun in his hand.

  Both looked at each other across one 8-foot-wide parking space. The man’s forehead and neck were waterfalls of perspiration. The afternoon was warm, but his problem seemed unrelated to the weather.

  “Guy on the TV says rioters are at the Walmart.” He half-turned to the store behind him. “But they must have meant the other store. I came to get in on the action.”

  The man’s smile was almost black, like he had chewed too much tobacco. He cackled and swung the axe around in a threatening manner, but his sense of space wasn’t good. He bashed his own taillight on one of the backswings.

  The guy screamed in apparent agony. “Fuck!”

  Instead of acting like a normal person who made a mistake, he used the axe to take several more chops at his light to make it worse. It cracked the remaining plastic, but his blows missed the light a few times and also bent the thin metal of the rear quarter panel.

  The guy had issues.

  Buck changed positions and held both hands in front of him. He heard and felt his heartbeat in both ears, and his hands wanted to shake with that same anxiety, but he forced himself not to quake in front of the other man. He had to project confidence.

  “Look, man, I don’t want to shoot anyone today. It doesn’t look like it from the outside, but this Walmart is crapping the bed right this instant. People are shooting guns in there, and all the workers have left. You can go in there and take whatever you want. Just leave me and my leashes, okay?” He purposefully didn’t mention the storm. With a little luck, the man would get caught inside the store when it arrived.

  The druggy tapped his axe in the broken plastic where the taillight used to be. “Yeah, I could get a new light in there. Hell, I could get a new flat-screen TV. Then I could watch the riots in high def.”

  The guy looked at Buck. Perhaps he was figuring out if he was worth the hassle.

  Buck played the part of a non-threatening but still dangerous man. Like a coiled snake that wanted to be left alone.

  The man stepped back a few paces, then side-armed the axe toward Buck. It clanged off the rear bumper of the SUV because his throw was terrible. The axe only made it about halfway across the parking space.

  Buck held his ground.

  The unarmed fool ran to his driver’s seat, put it in gear, and peeled out.

  “Go crazy, buddy,” Buck said with relief. People tended to lose their minds when big winter storms were expected back on the East Coast, but he’d never heard of people rioting over a rainstorm. Sure, it was dangerous and windy, but it wasn’t worth going on a shooting spree or fist-fighting in the motor oil aisle.

  He picked up the leashes and figured he’d better grab the axe too, but soon realized the SUV’s engine noise got louder, even as he drove away.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  The silver SUV went up the aisle next to the middle one. The guy had no regard for people in his way; they jumped aside. He smashed into a few carts.

  Drug man laid on the horn as one car tried to back out, but that didn’t even slow him down. The SUV was doing at least fifty when it smashed into the blue safety pillars in front of the store. The vehicle also tagged a stone column next to the entryway, causing it to collapse.

  Screams came from all over the front of the parking lot, but there was so much smoke and debris, it was hard to see what happened.

  “I’m out of here,” Buck said aloud.

  He climbed into his cab, making certain Mac couldn’t get out, locked his doors, then went into the sleeper area.

  “I hope you appreciate these,” he said as he tossed the leashes onto the bed. He set the axe on the floor. “I had to go through some trouble to get them.” He removed one of the jerky treats and kept the rest of the bag to hide in a compartment above the windshield.

  He laughed as he scratched behind Mac’s ear.

  “But there is one thing I need to do.” He sat up on the bed and reached to the rearmost corner. He carefully pulled off the plastic sheeting of the cabin’s wall. It was designed to be removed in case he needed to service any of the wires back there, but he used the secret space as a place to store some extra cash and a few other valuables.

  He reached into the hole, brought out an item, and set it on the bed. When the axeman threatened him, he reached behind his back like he carried a pistol in his waistband, but that was all a ruse. Buck didn’t like to carry his sidearm because he crossed so many state lines. Some states frowned on concealed carry; some made it illegal. It was safer to keep it hidden and only pull it out when it was necessary.

  Like now.

  “Next time someone pulls an axe on me, I’ll actually be able to defend myself.”

  The dog sniffed the gun, not sure what to make of it.

  Manhattan, NY

  Garth watched the last of the basketball players go into the library. “You know what? I say screw this shit. Let’s go to the park and get away from people for a while.”

  Sam nodded agreement. �
�I’ve got nothing going on.”

  They both laughed, but Garth didn’t wait for Sam to change his mind. His buddy was too unpredictable to expect him not to get distracted. He had to get them to Central Park in a hurry.

  “This way,” he said as he fast-walked west along the sidewalk. “The park is close.”

  “I know,” Sam replied.

  They caught the light at Park Avenue and crossed with other pedestrians. Park was one of the wider streets in Manhattan. It had four lanes going in each direction, and the north-south roadway was split by a flower-filled median.

  “Come on. Keep up!” Garth jogged across the street and back into the narrow canyon of the side street. They walked against traffic because the road was one-way toward the east.

  They’d gone another block before Sam began to catch on.

  “I need a break. Let’s see what’s around us.”

  Garth tried to keep walking. “Not yet. Almost there.”

  Sam kept pace for a short time, and they crossed another wide street, but that was it. “What’s your problem, dude? Got to use the john?” He pointed to the next building on their walk. “Go in there.”

  They stood next to a twenty-story building that looked like a jail cell. Tall steel girders alternated with jet-black windows from top to bottom. The odd-looking structure was almost as long as the entire block.

  Garth didn’t think he could get him to the park without more of an explanation.

  “Look, man, I love you like a brother, but sometimes I need to get you away from everyone so I can relax.”

  “What the hell?” Sam chirped.

  “It’s not a bad thing, dude,” he said to stave off any hard feelings. “I’m down with all the trouble we get into, but it’s all this other stuff that has me worried. The plane. The subway. You know?”

  “Maybe,” Sam allowed.

  “If we can get to the park and sit under a tree for ten minutes, I think I’ll recover, and we can go look for something else to do after that.”

  Sam brightened. “We’ll be closer to Times Square. We can go mess with tourists.” One of their favorite things to do was pick up tossed maps and stand around like they were lost. Then they’d go up to pretty girls and ask for directions.

  “Yeah, sure,” Garth replied. “Give me ten minutes of peace, and you’ve got me all afternoon.”

  The park was only one corner away. Garth was confident they could make it there without incident, but the day had a weird energy to it. Trouble seemed to find them everywhere. He wasn’t so sure the park was going to be any better.

  “To the park!” Sam shouted as he took the lead.

  Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station, Pennsylvania

  Carl looked at his control room and felt impending doom, even when surrounded by twelve top-notch professionals and a thousand blinking lights calmly assuring his safety.

  “Is it just me, or did we have a system-wide failure on our monitoring equipment?” The others in the control office gave him troubling looks. “Does anyone have a sensor that is working inside or near containment?”

  He looked over to the containment department. Two men hunched over keyboards as if magically willing something to work. One of them looked up and shook his bald head. “As best we can tell, all the sensors have been shut off in there. Even the cameras.” That was Ken.

  The news raised his hackles. “Was this a terror attack?” Taking out a nuclear reactor would be a formidable achievement for a terrorist group. Doing it at Three Mile Island would have some significance, given its famous history.

  “We’re trying to find out.”

  Carl fell back into his chair. He briefly thought of issuing orders to put everyone into the spacesuits to protect them from radiation, but his badge hadn’t made a peep since he’d seen Pete up close. Even if a terrorist took out all the other sensors, they couldn’t have tampered with every badge worn by the employees, nor could they get inside the concrete bunker that served as containment for the nuclear fuel.

  They were still safe.

  “Get me the tortoise,” he said with finality.

  Ken looked up again. “Sir, we’ll get a camera working before we need that. I can see the power feeds are online. That means the cameras should be sending something back. We have to be close.”

  “This ain’t horseshoes, people. I need an answer right now. We’re sending in the tortoise.”

  Twenty-One

  Wollemi National Park, New South Wales, Australia

  Destiny had just survived a forest fire, climbed a dangerous ridge, and fought off a Tasmanian tiger. She was committed to staying alive and tried to project the image of Wonder Woman. The strong naturalist stepped out of the brush to bravely face the oncoming truck and its two occupants.

  She waved and got their attention right away.

  When she got a better look at the two bearded men, her superhero mentality took a big hit. They could have been twins. Their heavy-set frames seemed to fill the entire volume inside the cab of the truck. She suddenly felt like a ninety-pound weakling, soaking wet. Since she’d just climbed out of the creek, that was exactly how she would have appeared to them.

  “Where ya’ headed, sweet-cheeks?” the burly driver said as he pulled up next to her. His black beard was at least a foot long and dotted with dry grass, like he had dragged it through the weeds. He was probably in his thirties. “Getting away from the fire, are ya?” His accent was total Ocker, which made him sound like he’d never seen pavement in his life.

  “I’m here with my mates,” she said, feeling distracted.

  The man looked around. “Where are they?”

  She hardly looked at him. “I don’t know.”

  Her uncertainty came with seeing the men and their ride. The old Holden utility truck looked like something out of the nineties, with dinged-up hubcaps and tires that seemed too thin. The body of the truck was tiny and narrow, which gave the impression of the large men filling the entire cab. Their load of firewood was stacked high and in a jumble. If there was any other vehicle on the dirt track, she would pass on this one immediately.

  Destiny met the man’s eyes, but not before she saw him looking at her soaking wet clothes. “I think they left me. I almost died in the fire and came over the hill to find my team has gone and pissed off. I’m mad as a cut snake.”

  “You look it. Well, there probably won’t be many cars behind us. Nothing but fire up there. We’re heading down to the bottle-o to get a slab of four-X Gold. We can give you a lift if you don’t mind two blokes with a little extra beef.”

  She leaned down to look at the second man. He was equally as large as his mate and sported the same messy beard and disheveled appearance. They might have woken up in a ditch not ten minutes before they pulled up.

  Her mind was torn with indecision. If she didn’t get a lift, it was a long way to blacktop, and fire was unpredictable. She tried to work through the logic of the situation, too. If the men were up to no good, they could jump out right now and attack her. If they just looked like a couple of bogans but were actually good guys, she would have turned them away for no good reason.

  Don’t judge them by the cover, she told herself.

  “I guess it is a long way to the police station. I need to report this fire and find my lost friends. They could still be out there.”

  “We didn’t see anyone up the valley. No cars, for sure. I think your mates might have gone down that way.” He pointed down the valley, to her right.

  “Okay. Can I ride in the bed?” She pointed to the pile of split logs.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t,” the driver said with a laugh. “You might tip right out. We’ve already lost several pieces where it got bumpy. You’d be a lot safer inside, with us.”

  “Yeah, we’ll protect you,” the passenger added.

  She clicked her tongue in rapid succession as she thought about it. If she took too long to decide, the men might get the idea she was asking herself whether they were rapists and mu
rderers, rather than two guys who looked like they lived a bit too long in the bush.

  She spoke in an even tone so as to not betray her misgivings. “Thank you for the ride.”

  The passenger opened his door and stepped out. The little red truck rose a few inches off the ground as the shock absorbers took a break. She walked around the front of the truck in order to get in on the far side.

  “My name is Christian,” the big guy said as he cleared some beer bottles from the floorboard and threw them to the side of the road.

  Every ounce of her being wanted to complain about littering.

  Don’t do it, Dez.

  “My name is Destiny.” She wasn’t going to give them an ounce of information about herself, besides her first name. After she said it, she realized she should have used a fake one.

  She slid in on the bench seat but paused when her hand felt sogginess in the cloth. Since her clothes were already soaking wet, they seemed to absorb whatever was in the fabric where the big man had been sitting.

  Oh, god, this is disgusting.

  She slid more to the right and got as close to the driver as she dared. While dutifully ignoring the warmth on her back and bottom, she noticed the stick shift was going to be between her legs.

  “My name is Stephen Irwin,” the driver drawled in his exaggerated backwoods accent.

  She brightened up. “Like the Crocodile Hunter! I love that show.” As an animal lover, it truly was one of her favorites, though she admitted it was hard to watch the episodes after he passed away.

  “Don’t know about that.” He tugged at his beard like it helped him think. “I don’t fight the crocs, though. I steer clear.”

  “Or we fill ‘em with lead.” Christian slid next to Destiny and physically pushed her more toward the middle. It wasn’t done in a rude way, but he was so large, it was necessary for him to fit on his seat. Once inside, he pulled the door closed with a grunt.

  “That’s what this is for,” Christian continued as he pointed to the rifle behind her.