Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 4): Gathering Storms

by Wohlrab, Jeff

  The heavy door swung closed with hydraulic assist and moments later Jensen climbed into the cab beside him and started the vehicle forward. As Brent checked to make sure he wasn’t sitting on the clear fluid line, Jensen began to speak.

  “You look like shit, brother.”

  The bluntness caused Brent to smile. “Don’t hold anything back,” he said through his scratchy throat.

  “Okay, you look like shit that got trampled into the ground by a herd of buffalo. How are you feeling?”

  “I think you captured it pretty well. That’s about how I feel.” His chest heaved with a laugh which never made it to his lips. “I don’t think I felt this bad when I got the virus, and I almost died, then.”

  “You almost died, now, too.” Jensen glanced his way before returning his eyes to the road ahead of them. “Actually, I’m not totally sure you didn’t.” The younger man slowed the vehicle and turned right, ignoring a stop sign at the intersection. “You’ve got an angel watching over you, I think.”

  Brent thought back to the laugh he’d experienced or imagined and remembered the words, “You don’t get to choose this. Not now. I won’t let you.” He let his head rest back on the seat and remembered his vision of Rebecca as he answered Jensen. “I think you may be right.”

  Chapter 11

  In the makeshift radio room, Daniel Benton keyed in another frequency as he tried to call out to any friendly forces in the region. He was flipping through typical emergency or police frequencies in the VHF range, hoping to luck into one which was being monitored.

  Daniel sighed in frustration. If he stayed too long, he’d die here. If he didn’t stay long enough to get on the radio, they’d probably get killed during their retreat from Snead’s forces. He listened carefully for more gunshots between each call, dreading the sound, but hoping to hear them far away. With each passing moment of silence, he grew more and more nervous.

  He keyed the microphone again, saying the same thing he already had dozens of times. “This is Daniel Benton broadcasting in the clear. U.S. military forces are under attack near Highlands, North Carolina. Please respond.”

  The sound of a door opening behind him caused him to spin quickly and grab his rifle. Benton’s stomach clenched with the rush of adrenaline surging through his body, preparing for a showdown with Snead’s men. Instead, a blonde head poked through the door. “Daniel? Thank God I found you. We need to leave.”

  As he lowered his rifle, he said, “Marcy! What the hell are you doing here? You were supposed to leave with the wounded!”

  She finished opening the door and entered. “I’m not leaving without you.” She suddenly looked a little uncertain. “I don’t know why you’re so mad at me, but I’m not going to just run off and leave you here to die.”

  His first reaction was irritation. Why the fuck would she put herself at risk to be here with him? He wasn’t worth the risk of dying. But that said more about him than it did about her. Those were his thoughts about himself. She clearly didn’t share them. She didn’t know him as well as he knew himself, either.

  Daniel held her eyes for a second. Her gaze didn’t waver. She was allowing herself to be vulnerable, but not weak. His initial irritation turned to shame. He knew he had wanted to put distance between them, but she wasn’t privy to his thoughts. Did he want that distance to protect himself? Or her?

  Now wasn’t the time to delve too deeply into his feelings. If he delayed too long, he was putting both of their lives at risk. He could make that choice for himself, but not for Marcy. Despite his attempts to put a wall between them, he cared for her. The looming danger of the distant gunshots suddenly seemed much more imminent.

  The choice was clear; it was time to go. “Okay, babe. Let’s get out of here.” Her gaze softened a bit at the pet name. If it had been anyone else, she would have kicked their ass into next week, but with him it was different. She held out her slender hand, which was engulfed in his big mitt as he tugged her toward the door. “Let’s go meet up with the others.”

  The door had barely closed before a faint voice came through the static on the radio. “Daniel! This is Dave. Are you okay? Where are you?” Daniel and Marcy had already reached the old pickup truck she had parked outside when the voice came again. “Daniel! Can you hear me?”

  After a few more attempts, the voice fell silent and only soft static filled the vacant room.

  Marcy slid behind the wheel of a small Chevy sporting a snorkel near the passenger A-pillar, while Daniel clambered into the passenger seat and immediately reached for the seat lever to push it all the way back. “Couldn’t have found a bigger truck?”

  She smiled as she moved the shift lever into drive. “Not everybody is sasquatch-shaped.” The slender woman unconsciously checked the mirrors before pulling out into the road to make sure it was safe. “Anyway, the only good fuel they had left was diesel, so I had to find what I could. They didn’t have enough stabilizer to treat gasoline, too.” Pointing the nose of the pickup north, she said, “I wanted one of these when they came out, but I couldn’t afford it.”

  Daniel looked at the black air snorkel just outside the windshield in front of him. “What is it, a submarine?”

  He couldn’t resist being at least slightly sarcastic; it was too deeply ingrained in him. The four-door pickup truck clearly had no business being in the water, but the snorkel seemed weird to him. It looked like something he’d seen on old Land Cruisers used for safaris. Outside of documentaries, he’d never seen one.

  “No, it’s a Bison! It’s an upgraded Chevy Colorado. They only made this model for a couple of years, and most of them were gas engines.” She patted the dashboard softly. “This one was right down the road. It’s even the color I wanted!”

  Benton glanced at the color of the hood as he surveilled their surroundings for Snead’s men. “Gray? What’s so exciting about gray?”

  The truck accelerated gently onto Franklin road, heading northwest. “It’s not gray. It’s graphite metallic. It’s darker. I wanted to black out the lights, too. It would look so cool!”

  “Mine was a bright red RAM turbo diesel. It was huge. Looked like a fire truck.” He glanced back toward the town to check for followers. “I had to leave it in Helen when Jensen and I were attacked by a bunch of rednecks north of town. We got pinned down in a cabin at the top of a mountain and had to bug out in his tub. They managed to tag Jensen as he was getting in. We barely made it.”

  This was the first Marcy had heard of the truck, or gotten these details about the battle at the mountain cabin. “You think your truck is still there?”

  Daniel thought for a minute and shook his head. “No way. They either figured out how to hotwire it and took it or set it on fire. They were a little pissed off after we killed a bunch of them. I gave Jensen a hard time about owing me a life debt because I pulled him into the tub just as he got hit.” After looking behind them yet again, he said, “Now I don’t know who owes who. We’ve saved each other so many times since then I’ve lost count.”

  “Will you let me save you?”

  Daniel looked at Marcy as though he didn’t understand what she was saying. “Save me from what?”

  “From yourself.”

  Benton’s eyes lost focus as he looked down the road in front of them. He told her, “I’m not worth saving.”

  He looked down as he felt a hand on his leg. “Is that what you think? Is that why you’ve been like that lately?” She looked over, “You’re a good man, Daniel.”

  “No, not anymore. I was a good man, once. Never as good as my brother. Now I don’t know what I am, but it’s not good.”

  “What happened to your brother?”

  Daniel pulled his phone from his pocket and looked at the screen as the facial recognition opened it up. He didn’t answer the question, just clicked a few icons to the last message he’d received from his brother. The message that said he was really sick and if he didn’t hear from him again, he didn’t make it, but he wanted him to
know he loved him.

  “He was a good man.” Daniel’s voice caught slightly as he continued, which was his only admission of pain as he talked about his brother. “Matt was part of a nonprofit program in Tennessee helping kids. It was a really poor part of the country. He worked nonstop to try to get them proper nutrition, vaccinations, and keep them in school. The teen pregnancy rate in his area dropped over 60% in two years. While he was saving people, I was killing people.”

  Marcy squeezed his thigh and kept her eyes on the road. “I’m so sorry. It sounds like he was a wonderful man. “

  “He was.”

  “You have that same thing in you, too. You care. I think that’s why you hurt so much.” She glanced over at his profile as he looked far down the road. “I think that’s why you’re afraid for me to get too close to you.”

  The big man squeezed the pistol grip of his rifle to center himself before he responded. “I don’t want you to get hurt, Marcy. I’m not good enough for you.”

  She slowed slightly, not wanting to run into their people as she talked to Daniel. “I don’t believe that, and I don’t think you believe that either. I don’t know what this place is that you’re in right now, but something has changed since we got here. I want the old Daniel back.”

  He sighed as he searched his mind for his true feelings. This conversation was difficult. He wanted to tell Marcy everything, but he didn’t want to open that floodgate. Certainly not while they were being pursued by Snead’s men.

  “I’ve killed a lot of people, Marcy. A lot of people who didn’t deserve to die. I did that for a job, for money. What kind of a person does that?”

  “I think it’s the kind of person who cares. The kind of person who was trying to protect his brothers from violence.” She looked at him with kind eyes. “Do you think the people you were protecting were good people?”

  “The best.”

  “Then you can’t be bad. If you were trying to save good people, then you have to be good. Even if people died.”

  She dug her fingers into his leg, as though trying to hang on. “And I love you.”

  Daniel didn’t answer, he only gripped his rifle more tightly with his right hand and covered her shaking hand with his left as they drove in silence.

  Chapter 12

  Analiz Vela dipped her oar in the water as silently as possible. She didn’t want to draw any attention to herself as she crossed the Savannah River toward Evans, Georgia. The land behind her in South Carolina was very rural, and the locals had proven to be extremely defensive about intruders on their property. She’d been shot at more than once.

  Though there were more people on the Georgia side of the river, it had proven to be far less dangerous. There were huge subdivisions around Greenbrier High School, which was a mile from the river’s west bank. It was surrounded by housing on all sides as the city continued to expand to fill the county. That had all ended last year, though. The newer neighborhoods to the north hadn’t been completely built out yet when the virus swept through the country.

  She was most visible while out on the water, so she tried to cross in the evening when the sun was sinking below the horizon. Analiz had come up with a routine. Cross the 500-foot-wide river when the light was dim, stash her canoe in the underbrush, and work her way through the woods to a power line easement. She would then follow the power lines to the first neighborhood and forage at night.

  When she was finished, she would find her canoe and paddle back upriver near the South Carolina side until she found the small dock she’d built. Then she’d wait in the darkness, listening for any noises which might indicate her hiding place had been discovered while she was out. A partially destroyed home near the river was her home, now.

  She’d sometimes spend as long as an hour at the edge of the water, ready to bolt if she heard anything out of the ordinary. Then she would return to the crumbling structure which had been mostly washed away by the floods when the dam a few miles upstream had broken.

  Contrary to what she’d thought at first, it was much safer to be out at night. Most survivors had some way of lighting their homes, so it was easy to see which homes were occupied early in the evening. As people dimmed their lights and went to sleep, she could slip through the homes toward those which were unoccupied and search them for food.

  Most nights she went hungry. Tonight, she knew she was going to have to range out even further than she had before. In the last week, she’d managed to find nothing more than a partial sleeve of stale crackers. She wasn’t the only one out looking for food, and she could only guess the people gathered together in these neighborhoods had already taken almost everything edible.

  Stale crackers would be fine if she could find any. The texture was terrible, but it was nice to have something with a little bit of salt. Analiz would even be happy to find some more canned dog food. It had nutrients and protein she hadn’t been able to get any other way. The young woman drew the line at cat food. Clearly, humans loved dogs more than they did cats, because the pâté she’d tried to eat had smelled and tasted like she imagined rotten fish would taste. She had lost the contents of her stomach the one and only time she’d tried to eat some.

  Her stomach grumbled again as she slowed the canoe near the shore. This part of her journey was always the most frightening. She would be distracted as she tied the canoe to a tree to prevent it from floating away downstream, and the dim lighting made it difficult to see a threat unless it was too close to her to get away.

  As quiet as she had learned to be, there was always some noise involved in getting out of the canoe and onto shore. A splash from her feet. A breaking branch. Perhaps the paddle touching the aluminum canoe as she tried to guide it in. Each time brought a new uncertainty and a new terror. In her head, each noise sounded like a cannon shot, though it would be difficult to hear more than a few feet away through the trees.

  Analiz checked her thigh one more time for the long-bladed hunting knife she always had with her before she stepped out of the canoe. If she were attacked, the 5” blade would be her only defense. After stepping out of the canoe, she stood with her feet in the water. She gripped the hilt of her knife with one hand and steadied the canoe with the other.

  The wait was terrifying. Not only could there be someone on the bank, but she had the added terror of alligators. She hadn’t seen one yet, but just down the river were alligator signs, and the area was known for having alligators up to twelve feet in length. It would be just her luck to survive this long just to have an alligator drag her under the surface of the river at night.

  After waiting a few minutes to listen, she lifted the rope and slowly climbed the short bank. With no obvious threats, she hurried to loop the rope around a tree and tie it off before hastily standing back up, hand on the knife once again. An early evening breeze blew gently through the trees, chilling her wet legs under the thin sweatpants she was wearing.

  Her body trembled with a slight shiver, brought on as much by the release of tension as by her sodden feet. Alligators and men, both were dangerous. She didn’t think about the event as she hurried down the powerline easement, but the memory of being attacked by two men in her apartment was always just below the surface. It was the reason she’d left her apartment just off Blue Ridge Drive and headed north.

  The two men had been coworkers at a facility where she worked. Her job had been to test batteries and hook them up to golf carts before they were transported to golf courses around the world. Until the factory had closed, both had been nothing but gentlemen. Once society started to break down, they decided to act on the fantasies they had hidden so well in civilized society.

  They were waiting in her apartment in the middle of the day when she came back. Analiz regained consciousness bloody and bruised after the attack. She cleaned up the best she could, put on sweatpants and an oversized sweater to hide herself, and started walking north.

  In the intervening months, she had spoken to no one and only encountered other peo
ple rarely. That was how she wanted it. People sucked. If it weren’t for hunger, she would have no problem avoiding other people forever.

  It was hunger driving her towar civilization, or what was left of it, now. Analiz didn’t know how to set a trap and didn’t have a gun to shoot animals with, just her knife. She was sometimes able to net a fish out of the river, but that had become more difficult over the past few weeks. The fish seemed to have moved somewhere else.

  The young woman slowed when she could see the roof of the first house under the partially moonlit sky. This one had been abandoned, either because the owners died or moved. She had been through the home from top to bottom; there was no food there. Next to it was a vacant lot. Construction workers had poured a concrete foundation, but no further work had ever been done.

  Along the street, some of the homes had been burned, leaving charred lumber barely visible in the dim light. Analiz didn’t know how it had happened. The buildings had already been destroyed the first time she came through this neighborhood. Her intent was to prowl behind those buildings and move eastward toward the river.

  The vacant buildings and destruction reminded her of her home in Puerto Rico, which her family had abandoned after Hurricane Maria. The storm had destroyed much of the infrastructure throughout the island, and her family had settled in Orlando when she was eleven years old. She couldn’t shake the feeling that destruction was following her, as irrational as it was.

  She was lost in thought, remembering those first years in the United States and the tensions around their flight from Puerto Rico. The parallels with her current situation, living in a home destroyed by a flood, were too strong to avoid it. As depressing as it was, the thoughts helped keep her mind off of the hunger growing in her belly.