“And we can’t outrun ‘em, either,” Jack said, gripping the steering wheel tight as he tore at breakneck speed through another corner. “Not until we prevent them from pursuing us.”
“Prevent them from pursuing us?” Kate asked anxiously. “Short of blowing up their car, I don’t see how we can do anything like that.”
“There’s where Nick’s going to come in,” Jack said as he floored it down a long stretch of road that was free of dead cars. “And I’m pretty sure it’s gonna work. At least I hope it will. You’re an athlete, right, Nick?” he asked before Kate could raise any more objections. “You ever play any baseball? Got a good pitching arm, by any chance?”
“I’m a rower now, but I played Little League for years,” Nick answered, “and I played baseball all through junior and senior high. I’ve got a good arm, yeah.”
“You’re going to need it,” Jack said, allowing a glimmer of a grin to come across his face, despite the circumstances.
“Are we going back to the same place where those army guys spotted us?” Susan asked, frowning. One of her friends lived in this neighborhood, so she was somewhat familiar with these streets.
“We are, yes,” Jack answered.
“Jack, honey, have you lost your mind?” Kate asked. “Why are you going back to where they almost caught us earlier?”
“Because there’s something I need there, and also because I’m playing a little game with them,” he answered, his grin broadening slightly. “A game up here,” he said, tapping his head. “A game I intend to win. Susan, one of those heavy-duty sleeping bags in the back is white. Find it and get it out, Nick’s gonna need it.”
Jack explained the plan as he sped back to the house from which they’d first fled from the army Humvee, and when he finished speaking, everyone’s worries were put at ease for the most part. They knew the plan was risky, of course, and a lot of it counted on Nick’s ability to throw and hit a relatively small target, but under the circumstances, it was the best chance they had to escape from their relentless pursuers.
Ten minutes later, everything was ready, and Jack, Kate, and Susan were waiting for the inevitable arrival of the army Humvee. They were parked at the end of a cul-de-sac, with no possibility of escape, close to the house they had first fled from. There was no way out except straight, which was the way they were facing—and that was the way the army Humvee would surely be coming very soon.
“Are you sure this is gonna work, Jack?” Kate asked anxiously. Like her husband and her daughter, she had her gun in her hand, ready to fire, should their desperate plan fail.
“They don’t know who we are,” Jack said. “We’ve got that on our side. They’ll approach us with caution … and that’ll be their downfall.”
Sure enough, just as he said that, he saw the enemy vehicle's ominous headlamps shining a path through the driving snow. They had found them, as Jack had known they would, and now the army men had cornered them, trapping them. Jack watched intently as the enemy vehicle slowed down to a crawl and started inching closer to them. There were only fifty yards between them, a distance that was slowly but surely being closed.
“What if they get out now?” Kate asked anxiously. “Then we’re screwed, then we’re really screwed!”
“They won’t,” Jack said. “They’re not idiots. They know we might be a threat; they know we’re probably armed. They won’t want to risk their lives unnecessarily. They’ll get closer. Watch.”
He flashed his bright beams at them, once, twice, then three times, taunting them to come closer. He also gave the motor a few good revs.
“I hope this works, Dad,” Susan said, and her voice was choked with fear.
The army Humvee continued to approach, slowly and steadily. Jack was sure that they would come close enough to block him from escaping completely; after all, that was the logical thing for them to do. And it was what would win him this game.
The other vehicle kept rolling closer, doing exactly what Jack had predicted: attempt to cut off any route he might have for escape.
Then, as the army Humvee got within twenty yards of Jack’s SUV, a pile of snow suddenly exploded near them. It was Nick, who had been hiding under the snow-covered white sleeping bag, and in his hand was a can of house paint that he’d salvaged from the debris of the shed Jack had plowed through earlier. He flung the can of paint at full force at the army Humvee’s windshield, and his aim was on target, although he didn’t stick around to double-check. As soon as he’d thrown the projectile, he sprinted over to Jack’s Humvee, where Kate flung open the door for him just as the enraged soldiers were piling hastily out of their vehicle.
The paint can hadn’t smashed or even cracked the army Humvee’s bulletproof window—but that hadn’t been the point of the attack. The thick enamel paint had splashed and sprayed all over the glass, effectively blinding the vehicle. And, as Jack had said, if they couldn’t see him, they couldn’t pursue him.
Nick dove into the Humvee, and Kate slammed the door shut just as the soldiers opened fire, peppering the vehicle with bullets. Jack floored it, launching the massive vehicle forward and aiming it straight at three of the soldiers, who had to toss their rifles aside and dive desperately out of the way to avoid being flattened.
He sped past the enemy Humvee, missing it by mere feet, as bullets hammered his vehicle. For a few tense seconds, all everyone could do was hang on and keep their heads down as bullets drummed across the back and sides of the Humvee. However, soon enough, they were out of the range, and this time they knew they would be safe, for the enemy vehicle was incapacitated.
“Brilliant pitch, Nick, amazing work!” Jack exclaimed, an ear-to-ear grin pasted across his face.
“That was awesome!” Susan cried. “You painted their whole front window!”
“They’re not going anywhere now,” Nick said, grinning proudly, “at least not faster than two miles an hour with the driver freezing his face off by sticking it out the window to see where he’s going!”
They chatted some more, congratulating Nick on his precise and devastatingly effective throw, but although the mood was buoyant for a while, it soon deflated. The blizzard was getting steadily worse, and they still had a very long way to go. If they couldn’t get to Jack’s parents’ house, just outside their hometown in the mountains, they would have to find somewhere to shelter overnight, too.
“All right, everyone,” Jack said somberly, after a more serious mood had settled in, “into the mountains now. Into the mountains we go…”
23
“You’ve been driving for over eight hours, Jack,” Kate said, yawning and struggling to keep her eyes open. “I think you need to take a break.”
Jack, who was fighting sleep and barely managing to stay awake, glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was three o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t stopped driving since escaping from the army Humvee back in the city. Nick and Susan were sleeping, and Kate had almost drifted into the realm of sleep herself, despite the weather. The blizzard had gotten even worse, and the howling winds were now reaching speeds of upwards of sixty miles an hour. Even the heavy Humvee was being battered and rocked on the road like a flimsy rowboat in a storm out at sea, and snow had piled up in tall banks on both sides of the winding mountain roads.
Because of the intense weather, Jack hadn’t been able to drive faster than twenty or thirty miles an hour, and in some sections, he’d had to crawl forward at a mere ten or fifteen miles an hour. A journey that should have taken six hours was now taking more than double that, and, he guessed, would probably take triple the time, ultimately.
“Come on, Jack, you can’t go on much longer without sleep,” Kate urged. “Find a spot to pull over, and just rest for a few hours. If you insist on pushing on like this, we’re going to go over a cliff or something. You know how dangerous some sections of these mountain passes are.”
Jack nodded wearily. Kate was right; he needed to sleep. He was losing his ability to concentrate, and out here, on these wi
nding roads, some of which had vertical drops off the sides that plummeted hundreds of feet down, even a small mistake could end up causing the deaths of everyone in the vehicle. “All right, all right,” he said, unable to suppress a yawn. “I’ll find a sheltered spot where we won’t get buried by snow while we stop.”
He drove on through the wind, snow, and darkness, and after around twenty minutes, he found a suitable place where a rocky overhang created a natural shelter over a bend in the road. Here, there was at least a little protection from both the incessant wind and the ceaseless snowfall. He pulled over, put his seat into a reclining position, and then was fast asleep in seconds.
When he awoke, he wasn’t sure whether he had opened his eyes to reality or some strange dream realm. Dawn had broken and everything was white, almost glowing in the light of the new day. Despite the protection the overhang had provided, plenty of snow had piled up on the Humvee. There were a few inches of it on the hood and plenty on the windshield. The wind had stopped, and the snowfall was light, and everything seemed almost magical and fairytale-like. Jack knew that this was, however, a temporary state of affairs. This was just the eye of the storm, and it would certainly be raging at full strength soon enough. However, he allowed himself to enjoy this temporary haven of calm serenity for the next few moments.
He was just about to drift back off to sleep when he picked up movement out of the corner of his eye. He tensed as he scrambled for his rifle, but when Jack saw what was moving, he relaxed and breathed out a slow, soft sigh. He reached over to Kate and gently shook her awake.
When she opened her eyes, he pressed his fingers against his lips, signaling to her to remain silent, and pointed to what he had seen. She saw it, and her eyes widened with surprise, but she managed to restrain herself from letting out a yelp of surprise.
A few feet from the Humvee, a big male mountain lion was walking by. He had taken a battering in the storm and looked quite haggard, but his baleful eyes still burned with primal defiance. He paused in his loping, looked up, and made eye contact with Jack. For a few moments, man and beast locked eyes, but there was no aggression in the gaze of either of them; instead, there was merely a respectful acknowledgment of the other’s presence. After a few seconds, the mountain lion padded away, scrambled down the slope on the opposite side of the road, and then was gone.
“He’s just trying to survive like we are,” Jack murmured softly. “And I hope he makes it.”
Before he’d noticed the mountain lion, Jack had been feeling groggy and had been planning to sleep a little longer, but now, after seeing the magnificent wild creature, he was wide awake, as was Kate.
“We should get going,” he said to her. “It’s gonna be a long, slow, and difficult drive. Should we wake those two up?”
Kate looked at Nick and Susan, who were still fast asleep. “No, let ‘em sleep a little longer,” she said.
Nick was snoring. His head was tilted to the side so that there was no pressure on his injured ear. Kate and Jack shot each other a glance of concern; the dressing on Nick’s ear was dark with blood, but there were also splotches of yellow discharge that had come through the gauze. There was no doubt that his wound was now infected.
“That doesn’t look good at all,” Jack said. “I’m worried about this kid. We’d better get him started on a course of antibiotics.”
“We should have done that yesterday,” Kate said. “I hope we haven’t left it too late.”
“Arthur will be able to help him when we get there.”
“The problem is, Jack, it may still be days before we get to Arthur. I don’t like how bad this is already looking.”
“There’s nothing we can do but put him on a course of antibiotics and pray that they’re effective,” Jack said grimly. “Give him some as soon as he wakes up.”
He set off, and the drive was now at a snail’s pace because he could barely see the road, which had been coated with a few feet of snow overnight. It was easy enough to follow the course since it hugged the mountain curves, but even so, the going was painfully slow.
It didn’t take long for Nick and Susan to wake up. Susan felt good after having had a long and restful sleep, but Nick was looking pale and sick. “I don’t feel good,” were the first words he croaked out after he woke up. “My ear feels like … it’s on fire.”
Kate gave him some antibiotics; it was about all she could do for him at this stage. After about an hour of driving, Jack pulled over. The wind was starting to pick up again, and the snowfall was getting heavier once more. The four of them got out of the Humvee to stretch their legs, move around, get their blood flowing, and cook a basic breakfast on a gas stove. Aside from the sound of the wind, everything was eerily silent, and white blanketed the entire landscape. The episode in the city felt like a strange and disturbing dream they had woken up from. Considering how badly the blizzard had hit these mountains, which were many miles from the coast, they knew that the superstorm had to have devastated the city. They didn’t talk about it, but each of them was feeling grateful and relieved that they had managed to escape from the city before the blizzard had struck in earnest. There would be difficult challenges to overcome out here, of course, but at least being stuck in a warzone and having to worry about being shot by soldiers or other armed predators on the streets wouldn’t be one of them … or at least, so they thought.
Just as they were packing up and getting ready to get back into the car, a brief flash of light from higher up in the mountains caught Jack’s eye. He turned and peered through the falling snow and thought he could make out the silhouette of a person up in the peaks. He grabbed his binoculars from the car and took a look through them. It took a while to dial in the focus, but when he did, he caught a glimpse of a man with a rifle on his back racing away on an old snowmobile. Then, sure enough, the faint echo of the snowmobile’s roar came floating by on the breeze.
“What are you looking at, Jack?” Kate asked. “Was that the sound of a motorcycle, or am I hearing things?”
“Snowmobile,” Jack muttered. “We’re not alone out here … and something tells me that the mystery man who was spying on us is no friend.”
They got back into the Humvee and resumed the long, slow journey, wary of who and what they might encounter on the road ahead.
24
As the day wore on, both the weather and Nick’s condition grew worse. The wind and snow picked up, and soon vicious winds were battering the vehicle again, and visibility was reduced to a mere few yards. Jack couldn’t go faster than ten miles an hour, or occasionally fifteen or twenty when the wind died down a little and visibility became temporarily better.
In a way, Jack was at least partially grateful for the inclement weather. While it hampered his progress and made going slow, it also guaranteed that he wouldn’t be walking into some sort of ambush because he knew nobody would be stupid enough to be outside in weather like this. The temperature was likely under twenty degrees, perhaps even close to ten, and with the wind chill factor and the deep snow, anyone staying outdoors for more than a short period of time would be putting their lives in serious jeopardy.
When there was a temporary lull in the severity of the storm in the early afternoon, Jack found a spot to stop, and the four of them had lunch and stretched their legs. Just to get out and do this for a few minutes, though, required getting dressed in their heaviest winter clothing. As good as it was to move around and stretch after being stuck in the car for hours, it was almost unbearable to be outdoors in the cold for more than a few short minutes, and it didn’t take them long to pile back in.
Jack didn’t see the stranger on the snowmobile again, but he wasn’t about to allow himself to become complacent about the man. His sixth sense had sounded alarm bells in his mind when he’d first seen the stranger. Now, he couldn’t shake the feeling that some sort of danger awaited them ahead.
In normal conditions, the journey to his old hometown would have taken six hours, but by the time darkness start
ed to fall, they were still a long way from their destination. Everyone was stiff and achy after having been stuck in the vehicle—as spacious as the interior was—for over twenty-four hours, and the prospect of having to stay another night in the Humvee was a dreary one.
What was more, Nick’s condition was worsening. It was too early to tell if the general-purpose antibiotics would have much of an effect, but it was clear that for the moment, he was going downhill rapidly. He had developed a fever, and despite the cold, was sweating profusely and complaining about being too hot. Kate took his temperature and found that he was running a fever of 105 degrees.
She changed the dressing on his ear, and it looked even worse than she’d expected. His ear's remaining part was red and inflamed and hot to the touch, and yellow pus oozed from the wound. When she tried to clean it with antiseptic, Nick howled almost maniacally with agony. Jack watched on grimly, feeling impotently helpless, and Susan watched with tears in her eyes. Nick’s face was pallid and sallow, and his eyes had a yellowish tinge to them.
Jack knew he had to get Nick to Arthur as quickly as possible, but there was only so fast he could go with the conditions being what they were. He pushed on as fast as he could safely go, and once again kept driving well into the early hours of the morning until he was so exhausted that he could barely keep his eyes open. Even so, when he glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Nick shivering with a fever and looking like he would soon be at death’s door, he did his best to push on and fight through the exhaustion, and only agreed to stop and take a rest when Kate insisted on it.
Jack felt like he had only just closed his eyes for a few seconds when he woke with a jolt, physically jerking in his seat. The darkness had melted away, and in its place was morning light, but the arrival of dawn hadn’t been what had woken him up. Instinct and his sixth sense kicked in, and he snatched up his pistol. Everyone else in the vehicle was still sleeping. Outside, the wind was howling, and the snow was falling, albeit not with the same vengeful fury it had been during the night.
EMP Survival In A Powerless World | Book 22 | The Coldest Night Page 12
