by Ryan Husk
Jeb nodded. “If we weren’t on the bikes, we couldn’t have shot around them. They fuckin’ screamed and shouted at us. One pig even shot his pistol in the fuckin’ air, but I just shot him a bird an’ I guess he figured that was a fair trade, cuz he forgot about us and we kept on a-movin’.” He turned and hollered at Harland and the others, ran to them. “Yo, Harvey! You get anything else on that radio yet?”
With him gone, Wade turned back to Edward and the others. “Well, now that you folks know what’s what, where are you thinkin’ about headin’ to now?”
“Not sure. You?”
“Harland’s uncle owns property up this way, and it has a few dirt roads that cut across it. It don’t show up on no maps or anything, but it’ll take us straight through.”
“That’s where you’re headed?”
He nodded. “Me, Marshall, Margery and Jeb,” he said.
“What about the others?”
“They all got folks back where we come from. I know Harland an’ Milton were talking about checking on their folks—”
“They’re going back?” Edward said with a snort, and shook his head derisively. Doesn’t have patience for stupid. An’ he figures anybody ain’t thinking like him is stupid. “They’ll get caught up in more traffic. This is just the beginning. Roadblocks are the least of their worries now. They’ll never get out if they go back. It’s amazing any of us have made it this far, what with two bombs going off.” He turned and indicated the other mushroom cloud, slowly expanding.
“You’re welcome to come follow us,” said Wade, looking at the wee girl, who was trembling now something fierce.
Edward didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take you up on that. I’d recommend your friends do, too. If they go back now, those black SUVs won’t ever let them come back. A hard perimeter’s being set up, one harder than I ever thought.” He watched Edward closely. The younger man was ponderous. He cogitated but never appeared to fret, a squirrel frozen and calculating a snapped twig in the woods.
“What is it?” Wade finally asked him.
Edward turned to him. “What is what?”
“What’s buggin’ you? Did you see something on the way up here?”
“Yeah,” he snorted, “a thermonuclear explosion.”
“Not that.”
At that point, the two of them exchanged glances. Having worked in some of the worst areas of Atlanta, Wade Winchester knew when he was being sized up, and that’s exactly what Edward was doing right then. He’s clever. Reevaluating me. The two of them shared a secret then, one animal fully realizing the limits of the other. “If those vehicles you saw weren’t FEMA, then who were they?”
Gordon, who had been preoccupied talking with the girl and asking to see her pale, quivering hands, now spoke up. “I thought you said it was all part of…what’s it? COGCON?”
“Wade here says they’re setting up roadblocks. COG vehicles wouldn’t stop to assist roadblocks, they’d just bulldoze their way through to get to the important civilian leadership.”
Who the fuck is this guy? thought Wade. “So, who were they?” he tested.
“I don’t know,” Edward said, germinating on something. “And I don’t wanna hang around to find out. Gordon, Janet, back in the jeep. Wade, you and your people ready?”
“Just as soon as I snap my fingers an’ whistle,” he said, doing exactly that. “C’mon, boys! Those o’ you comin’ with me an’ Jeb an’ Marshall, saddle up. The rest o’ you, godspeed an’ watch your butts! Remember the rendezvous spot in the mountains! Let’s go, boys, times a-wastin’!”
Marshall hollered at his woman. “Margery, move that fat ass, let’s go!”
“You take the lead, Detective,” Edward said.
“I always do,” said Wade, thinking, How did he know? A moment later, he put it together. Wade was still wearing his black jacket that Liz had given him years ago for his thirty-fifth birthday, with the Blue Knights patch on the right shoulder. Not many people knew about the Blue Knights Law Enforcement Motorcycle Club, and the fact that Edward recognized it and deduced it pointed to a mind constantly at work. But how did he know I was a detective?
“Yo, Wade!” hollered Jeb. “We rollin’ or not?”
He turned away and mounted his hog. The Harley’s engine responded quickly. He pulled onto the road. Jeb and Marshall followed close behind. Wade waved to his fellow road warriors and they waved back. He looked in his rearview mirror, saw the black Wrangler pulling out of the yard and moving right behind. Might be able to use a fella like him. Might also be the kind of go-ready fella you don’t want anywhere near you. Guess we’ll find out. But Mama always said you make strange friends when times are tough.
He looked to his right at the mushroom cloud in the south, then left at the cloud in the north, then up at the demon in the sky.
Reckon these are those times.
* * *
Janet tried texting again, this time to her mom: Where r u guys? Whas happening? U ok?
No response. She tried Jesse again…and paused to look at her hands. They were still shaking. Janet rummaged around inside her purse. As she did, she noticed Edward glancing at her in the rearview mirror with a look she equated to the look Mrs. Palmer sometimes gave her whenever she was caught whispering to her friends in class; disapproval. Dude, you seriously need to fuck off, she thought, but didn’t say.
The jeep slowed down rather quickly. She looked up, saw that the three motorcycle guys up front were turning off onto a gravel road that led up past another farmhouse, around the back, and then cut directly through the back yard where a tractor and two lawnmowers were parked. The motorcycle guys led them slowly around a shed, to a narrow dirt road that went about a hundred yards across a flat, green field and into a forest of pines.
She rummaged until she found her box of fast-acting insulin pens. A quick injection, then she popped a lisinopril pill and swallowed it. After a bit more rummaging, she found her blood-glucose meter…but it was in the wrong part of her purse, the wrong pocket. Something wasn’t right here…No, wait, that’s right. Yeah, that’s the right pocket. What was I thinking? A moment later, realization dawned. That wasn’t good, that short bout of confusion. It meant she was close to having her blood-sugar bottom out.
Taking deep, steadying breaths, she tried to take her blood-sugar. In the front, Gordon was craning his head and looking up at the sky. “It’s getting a little dim out there,” he remarked. “But I don’t see any clouds, none besides the big mushrooms.”
“Thin dust clouds,” Edward informed him. “That’s partly why it’s getting dimmer out. Dust clouds pushed into the sky, winds are carrying them every which way.” He glanced at Janet in the rearview mirror. She looked away. “These things weren’t just any big bombs, they were Big Ivans.”
“Big Ivans?” Gordon asked.
“The Tsar Bomb tested by the Russians in 1961. Biggest explosion mankind ever made. A yield of about fifty or sixty megatons, give or take. There’s nothing left of Atlanta. At least, nothing that will be safe enough to be left standing. Everything will have to be demolished, rebuilt, redone.” He shook his head. “Georgia as a state is finished.” Janet glanced out the window at the dimming sky. “It’s going to get darker by the hour,” Edward said, and looked out the window.
Janet followed his gaze. The Face had disappeared behind those gathering clouds. She hoped it never returned. She hoped it had all been a dream.
Edward glanced at Janet again through the rearview mirror.
This time, Janet looked right back at him. “What?” she said challengingly.
“How long?”
Janet looked at the screen on her meter: 72. Not too bad, not too good, but she was probably in the clear. After her last shot, it would climb, and the lisinopril would lower her blood pressure; her heart and liver functions would normalize. “Two years,” she said, watching her hands slowly return to her control.
“Not how long have you had it,” he said as they passed into the dim, c
laustrophobia-inducing forest. “I mean how long do you have before you’re out of the stuff you need?”
Janet blinked. “I…”
“Look through your purse, see what you’ve got.”
She did so. After a minute, she came back with, “I, uh, I have, like, one pin of Humolog left, and, like, half a bottle of lisinopril.” Janet put the bottle by her ear and rattled it. “Yeah, half a bottle,” she confirmed. She felt a little dizzy. The stress was taking her blood-sugar in another direction again.
“And you average what, about five injections a day?”
“Yeah, so?”
“And the lisinopril. Once per day, right?”
She blinked a few times, feeling a little dizzy. “Yeah, so?”
“And you’re basically running low right now?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you need to—”
“Man, why’re you asking me all these questions? What the fuck does it matter?” The words burst from her mouth before she could stop them. Without knowing it, the stress had started getting to her, the lack of response from everyone, but mostly it was her blood-sugar. Janet was typically very levelheaded, and could deal with what a lot of others her age could not—she had dealt with the news that she was a diabetic pretty well, for instance, admittedly because she was so young, and she was told by doctors that she hadn’t yet experienced enough of life to know what it was like to go very far from home. Therefore, the knowledge that she would need to carry around a bag of insulin supplies for the rest of her life as a lifeline really hadn’t sunk in when she was told.
“Is that the low blood-sugar talking?” Edward said, glancing at her again.
Like anybody else, whenever Janet’s blood-sugar wavered high to low, or low to high, she became irritable, angry, and sometimes dizzy. “Yeah,” she said, looking at her hands. “Yeah, I’m just…I’m between spikes right now, riding the wave. Sorry.” Janet put the bottle of lisinopril down and picked up her cell, checked it for messages. None. Zero. Zilch. “Damn it, nobody’s answering!” The jeep slowed to a stop. “Why are we stopping?”
“Looks like they need to open the gate,” Edward said. Janet looked out the front window, and watched as the big, fat bikers parked their hogs and unsaddled. The gate was wrought-iron and covered with snarls of brambles and briars.
Looks like the kind of thing you’d find outside of Count Dracula’s home, she thought.
“That thing looks heavy,” Edward said. “Come on, Gord-O, let’s see if we can lend a hand.”
Gordon made a face. “Looks like they got it—”
“Can’t hurt to help. I think I heard either Jeb or Marshall say something about having a hernia. C’mon, let’s make sure they don’t hurt themselves.”
Janet watched Gordon, who looked a little confused for a moment, but when Edward got out, so did he. They shut their doors, leaving her alone in the jeep with Atlas, who she hugged close. As she watched them go lend a hand, Janet got a creeping suspicion, but discarded it quickly when she got a chime from her phone. Excitedly, she touched her pad. It was a text, but not from her parents or Jesse. It was from Connie, her cousin. Janet tapped her screen and read the message.
It was very bad for her stress levels.
* * *
Once out of the jeep, Edward glanced back at the mushroom cloud in the north. It seemed to be expanding faster than the one from Atlanta, for whatever reason. Stronger winds from up that way, maybe, he thought, walking backwards until he got up to the gate with the others. Wade asked what they were doing out of the jeep. “Just thought you guys might need a hand,” he said, never taking his eyes off the cloud and the sky all around. Gordon’s right, it’s getting darker. It may be time to take the pills.
The wrought-iron gate was no problem whatsoever. But as Edward approached Wade and the others, he snapped his fingers and waved them over for a palaver. When Gordon and the four bikers were surrounding him, he said, “I want all you guys looking away from the jeep.” They did so. “Look at the trees.” They did so, although Wade was watching him very carefully. “I just don’t want you looking at the jeep when I say this, so as Janet doesn’t get suspicious.”
“Suspicious what?” Gordon asked.
“We need to talk about what we’re gonna do about her. She’s diabetic. Type one.” He looked at Wade, knowing that if anybody would know what this meant, it would be him. He had the look. He saw much and missed little. As a cop, he’d probably dealt with diabetic prisoners, probably took a few courses throughout the years on what to do about them.
It was Jeb who commented first, though. “Gawd damn,” he said, hawking out a loogie and wiping his mouth.
“That changes things,” said Wade.
“I don’t understand,” Gordon said. “How does this change things? We’ve still got to get clear of all this. The girl has supplies, she said so—”
“Long-lasting insulin, like Lantus, lasts about a month for most diabetics,” Edward said, moving his hands to gesture at the forest ahead, miming a discussion about the road through the forest. “Five vials of fast-acting Humolog lasts them about a month, too. Janet says she’s got one vial of Humolog left, and she’s stressed. Stressed to the limit.” He shook his head. “She won’t survive.”
Gordon took a step back. “Won’t…?” He shook his head.
Edward snorted. “Relax, Gord-O, I’m not throwing her to the curb. What I’m saying is she and her kind aren’t made for a post-apocalyptic world.”
“What do you mean?”
“Diabetics require modern civilization and modern technology to produce insulin. Without a steady supply of insulin, she could be dead by the end of the week. Hell, depending on how much stress she takes, she might be dead by the end of the day. She may have already lost her whole family today, I don’t know, but she’s not able to contact any of them and she just said she’s hit a spike already, or at least riding the line.”
“Post-apocalyptic?” Gordon chuckled. “What do you think this is, Mad Max?”
“That’s exactly what this is, man,” said Margery. “Just nobody’s had time to collect enough debris to build the goddam Thunderdome yet.”
Edward looked this woman up and down, reevaluating her. Margery wore a blue-jean jacket, and underneath it a black shirt with TEAM JACOB written large across the front. Her tiny sleeves were rolled up, revealing a black, bleeding Superman (or Supergirl?) symbol on her left shoulder. Below that, two naked demon women were tribbing. Her face was riddled with studs and piercings, her pants hung low to reveal a bright pink thong, and a Magnum was strapped at her right hip.
“Two bombs don’t mean the world’s coming to an end,” Gordon argued back. “We’re not wandering the deserts in search of fuel.”
“Naw,” Margery said. “But we’re the ones that need to get as much o’ that gas as we can now, so that when the world is a big fuckin’ desert we’ll have our reserves.”
“Then we’re exactly the kind of people who’ll make it a post-apocalyptic world, by losing our heads and forgetting about the government institutions that brought us all together in the first place.”
“Lemme guess. Liberal, right?” said Margery.
Gordon started to retort, but Edward waved a hand before the conversation could get away from him. “The point is, we just got hit twice. Twice. Now I don’t care how you define that, one thing I think we can all agree on is that hospitals are about to get slammed, and so are Walmarts, Targets, Publixes, K-marts, and Krogers. People who are thinking about survival but were too lazy to build bomb shelters or have viable bug-out plans are storming those places right now. Wade, you said you guys have already seen some of that.” The big biker nodded.
Gordon looked between them, and said, “Well, what do we do?”
“The future’s gonna be hard for her. If we keep getting hit, there won’t be enough insulin to support all the diabetics in this state, much less the country. Who knows how many more cities will be hit.”
Wade nodded. “That means we need a plan to save her right now, day one, starting right this second.”
Edward sighed. “It’s gonna put us even further behind schedule, but we need to conduct a raid.” He looked at the former police officer. “Which were you? County? City?”
“Atlanta PD.”
“APD, huh? Well, since you’re either retired or quit, what do you have to say about a shoplifting gig?”
“Little girl’s life is at stake,” Wade said, scratching at his great mane of a beard. “Long as there’s no violence, I don’t see a problem.”
“You know this area well. You know of a Publix, an Eckerd Pharmacy, anything?”
Marshall, the largest and quietest one of the group, snapped his fingers. “Once we’re through here, there’s a CVS east on…er…shit, what’s the name…Huffington Road!”
“How far?” Edward asked.
“Two miles, maybe two an’ a half. There’s a gas station right across the way, too. We could all top off there before we get going.”
“I’m all gassed up,” Edward said. “And I have two full gas cans in the back of my jeep.”
“Yeah, but me an’ Jeb are sittin’ at a quarter of a tank.”
Gordon looked at everyone. “Wait, what are we talking about? We’re actually going to rob a pharmacy?”
“You got a better plan? You got spare insulin stashed somewhere close?”
Gordon said nothing.
Edward nodded. They convened with the understanding that Marshall would take the lead and show them the way to the pharmacy. Edward and Gordon turned back to the jeep. “Not a word about this to Janet.”
The older man gave him a look. “Why not? Shouldn’t she know she’s in danger of—?”
“Absolutely not. If we get to this CVS and find that it’s already been raided or they only have enough vials and pens in stock for another month, she may start to panic, anticipating running out.”
“All right, but I need to ask you something.” Gordon lowered his voice and said, “Molly, my wife, I’ve got to find her—”
