She looked in the backseat. “There’s barely any room.”
“I know it’s tight, so make up your mind because this bus is leaving.”
She tossed in her backpack and slid into the tight space between the door and the electric inverter. “This thing is on, should it be?”
Reid was behind the wheel and engaging the drive. “Yeah, it’s what helps power this thing all the time.”
“This is one of those Tesla cars I heard about before the war,” she said.
He pulled out of the driveway, saw a directional sign that read INTERSTATE 40 WEST, and turned towards it. “Yeah, it’s a Tesla, and it’s now powered by solar power as we go along.”
“That’s cool,” she said.
Reid heard Hannah breathing and gave her a look.
She was slumped down in the seat, her chest rising up and down with her breathing, which itself sounded labored.
“How far along is she?”
“Three days if my count is right. Getting tangled with them back there has thrown me off a bit,” Reid said. He turned the car hard to the right and swerved around a large chunk of debris in the road. Up ahead he spotted the on-ramp for the interstate.
“You don’t seem concerned. Are you immune too?”
“Yeah, I got sick; it never progressed past the third day. She’s getting worse,” Reid replied. “Ah, what’s in Mexico?”
“A safe zone, I hear,” she answered. “What’s in California?”
“I guess you could say it’s the same thing you’re going to find, but where I’m going they might have a cure for my girl,” Reid answered. “There’s an island off the coast; there might be a place there.”
“I’ve heard those rumors too, but I also heard that the place is now gone.”
He shot her a look in the rearview mirror. “You heard it was gone?”
Seeing that he was stressed about her comment, she retracted it somewhat. “You know how rumors have been over the years. It’s hard to know what’s real or not. I heard a rumor that the dog flu was really a bioweapon created by extraterrestrials to thin us down so there’s fewer of us when they attack with their main force.”
He turned onto the on-ramp and sped up. He raced onto the freeway and immediately saw a sign that read ALBUQUERQUE 118 MILES. He quickly calculated how long it would take him and came up with two hours easily if he had no issues.
“Why are you helping me?” she asked.
“I normally wouldn’t. You could say I’ve had a mixed track record. But I looked at you, and you, well, you seem nice enough. Please tell me I’m correct,” he joked.
“I’m harmless,” she said with a sweet smile. “I just need to get to Mexico via Yuma.”
“Yuma, eh? Have someone in Yuma?”
“Yeah, you could say that,” she replied. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Reid and this is Hannah.”
“My name is Emily. Nice to meet you.”
FIVE MILES WEST OF LOGAN, NEW MEXICO
From left to right, the dining table was full of Brienne’s gear. She rarely had opportunities to lay everything she owned out and do an inventory, so given the chance, she was going to do it. Knowing she had many miles ahead of her, she wanted to ensure that when she departed the farm, she’d have most of what she needed.
Michael walked in to find Brienne wiping down her rifle. “Is this all your stuff?”
She smiled. “Hard to believe, but yeah.”
The flames of several candles set sporadically around flickered and danced, casting multiple bouncing shadows on the walls.
“I don’t want you to leave.” Michael sighed. He pulled a chair out and sat down.
“Even if your mom wanted me to stay, I can’t. I need to go find my family,” she said as she opened the receiver of the AR, pulled back on the charging handle, and removed the bolt carrier group.
“Have you always known how guns work?” Michael asked. He found her knowledge of firearms fascinating.
“No, I learned along the way. My first winter after landing back in the States, I settled down in the mountains of North Carolina. It was there I met an old Marine living up there. He was a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to make it across the country just on my good looks, so I had him teach me the skills and knowledge I was missing.”
“That sounds cool,” Michael said, his eyes wide at the marvel of it all.
“I never gave much attention to knowing things like this before. I was like most people, who thought our way of life would never come to an end. Well, it did and I was left flat-footed. I managed to survive living in Europe and during the sail across the Atlantic because of my mindset. The mind is a very powerful thing.”
“Nana has talked about that,” he mused as he recalled little snippets or phrases Nana would say, and even some of her sage advice.
“Old Sam said that survival is built upon four pillars, think of it as the four legs of a chair. You have skill sets, that’s stuff you know or have learned. Then you have resources, that’s stuff you acquire, like food, water, gear like this on the table. Then fitness comes into play, and I’m not talking about fitness from before with bikini bodies or six-pack abs; I’m talking about having the physical ability to do something. And finally there’s mindset, and do you know what mindset is?”
“It’s how you view things?”
“Yeah, that’s it. It’s an established set of attitudes or beliefs. Take, for instance, if your attitude to do something is so engrained, I guarantee you will find a way no matter what the obstacles are,” she said then paused for a moment to gather her thoughts. “My mindset is I’ll never quit trying to get to my family. I can have nothing, but I’ll keep pressing forward. If someone had a defeatist mindset, then they could have the gear, skills and be a stud, but they’d fail to achieve what they were after all because they chose to opt out. They quit because their mindset was fixed on failure right from the start. As Old Sam used to say, mindset is the key to survival.”
Michael sat fixated on her, mesmerized by the conversation.
Giving her attention back to the bolt carrier group, she carefully, using her fingernails, pulled the firing pin retaining pin, set it on a napkin, tipped the bolt carrier group up, and shook it. The firing pin dropped out into her hand. Like the retaining pin, she set it on the napkin. She rotated the bolt and pulled out the cam pin then removed the bolt assembly and set all the pieces on the napkin.
“What is that?” Michael asked.
“My memory may not be that good, but that is the bolt housing—no, it’s the bolt carrier. This little silver dart thing is the firing pin; the tip of this little bad boy is what strikes the round and creates the explosion, for lack of a better word, that ignites the gunpowder in the cartridge, which then propels the bullet.”
“Cool,” Michael cooed. “I wish you were staying so you could teach me all this stuff.”
“Can I ask you a question, a personal one?” Brienne asked.
“I suppose.”
“I’ve heard you mention a few times that you think you’re weak. Why do you look at yourself that way?”
His enthusiasm evaporated. He recoiled and sat silent.
She sighed and said, “I’m not here to pick on you. I want to help.”
“’Cause I’m different,” he muttered.
“When you say different, what does that mean? How do you define that?”
“My brother, Chase, is…was tough. He liked to play ball and do rough stuff. I liked to play, but I was more focused on computers, puzzles, stuff that involved, I don’t know, not rough stuff.”
“So you look at this rifle here disassembled and that gets you excited?” she asked.
“Yes, very much.”
“And when you showed me the plane earlier today, you probably helped your dad take it apart?”
“I did.”
“Did your brother?”
“Yeah, he was there, but he always gets distracted. He�
��s just more physical than I am, sorry, was more physical. I’ll never get used to talking about them in the past tense,” Michael said.
“I still don’t understand the weak thing.”
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“Michael, we don’t have to talk about anything, but if I can help you get rid of that negative view of yourself, your mindset—and remember how important that is—will be enhanced.”
“I’ve always liked to tinker, play games, and I even used to help, I suppose I still do, help my mom cook because I loved to follow recipes. I always found it fun to look at something, look at a bunch of ingredients, parts like that rifle, put them together and create something.”
“That’s sounds really awesome, but still I don’t get why you think you’re weak.”
He crossed his arms and grunted.
“Someone has told you that that stuff was weak, didn’t they?” Brienne asked.
He shook his head.
“Someone did, right?”
Tears welled up in his eyes.
“Who?”
“Everyone, they all used to say things; most of the time it was just joking, but they kept going on and on. My dad was a really good football player, and he wanted me to play, but I was never really that good. I never could throw the ball just right, but Chase always could. My dad would praise him—”
She interrupted him and said, “And he’d put you down?”
Michael wiped the tears from his eyes and answered, “No, it wasn’t like that. He was always nice, he just would say that I’m special, to me that said I was different but in a bad way. He never really took interest in the stuff I did.”
“And your mom?”
“Sometimes, but she was always so busy. Then Nana came to live with us, and she got even busier taking care of her. So I just spent more time being me and doing my stuff. There was this one time when they had to put down one of our horses. I begged my dad not to, but the horse had broken its leg. I get now why, but my heart broke for Maggie, she was so beautiful. Chase made fun of me and called me a little girl for crying, but I swear when I looked into Maggie’s eyes, I could feel her pain.”
A cascading wave of emotion began to build in Brienne as she sat and listened to Michael tell his story. She wanted to give him a hug but knew that now wasn’t the time for such a thing.
“My dad said Maggie needed to be put down and told me to be strong, but I couldn’t be strong. I cried and cried. So I took that as being weak. And after I added up all the things my family always said to me—even recently my mom said I needed to be strong, as if I’m some wimp. I’m not a wimp. I just look at things differently.”
“Would you like me to teach you how to reassemble this rifle?” she asked with a smile.
He sat without saying a word.
She picked up the Glock 19 and waved it. “And I can show you how this works too.”
He wiped his eyes dry and said, “Yeah, I’d like that.”
She put the Glock down, pointed at the rifle disassembled on the table, and said, “First let’s talk about what we have here, and then we’ll go into the nomenclature. This is an AR-15…”
THREE MILES EAST OF GALLUP, NEW MEXICO
Reid was happy to reach the outskirts of Gallup. The trip since leaving Santa Rosa had been uneventful, with the pass through Albuquerque easier than he imagined it would be.
He and Emily had chatted, but didn’t cover much in the way of a substantial conversation. They talked mainly about life before, the things they missed, like music, food, drink and a common longing for the world to return to some sort of resemblance to what it was.
He enjoyed the casual banter with Emily; he found her smart, witty and charming. And he felt happy that he’d asked her to come. He even found her to have an uncanny resemblance to Evelyn now that he’d had a better chance to look at her. Evelyn had had brown hair while Emily had dirty blond, but they both had slight dimples and a crooked smile at the end of their mouth that gave them cuteness and character.
Hannah, though, was not doing well. She had been slipping in and out of a deep sleep. Her fatigue had become crushing, and the rash on her belly had now spread to cover her entire chest and back and was creeping down her arms. Her temperature was elevated, and at one stop just east of Albuquerque, he gave her some ibuprofen to ease any pain she might be experiencing and to reduce her fever.
“How far can this car go?” Emily asked.
“The guy who retrofitted said that it had a range of five hundred miles, but to be honest, I don’t know. It does slowly recharge as you drive but not enough for what it uses. We’re going to have to make a stop for some time to get it fully charged again,” Reid replied, then remembered the map of charging stations.
She looked around the car and said, “This car is really cool.”
Hannah’s body went rigid and her jaw clenched so tight her teeth began to grind.
Reid watched in horror as she was having the first of what would be many seizures.
“What’s wrong with her?” Emily asked.
Reid pulled the car over fast. The tires hit the loose gravel, causing the car to skid hard to the right. Reid countered by turning the opposite way, but the car’s rear end swung out the other way. He again corrected and came to a full stop. He immediately gave Hannah attention.
Her body was still rigid, and the grinding of her teeth sounded awful, like nails on a chalkboard. “Get me something to put between her teeth.”
Emily looked around in the back and found a line of rope. “How’s this?”
He snatched it from her and carefully pried open Hannah’s jaw and placed the one-inch nylon rope. He opened her eyelids to see her pupils were rolled up into her head. Saliva streamed from the side of her mouth now that it was open slightly due to the rope.
“What can you do for her?” Emily asked.
“Just wait now. This should subside shortly,” Reid said, his voice cracking with emotion. Seeing Hannah’s latest symptom filled him with terror that she was progressing fast, maybe too fast for him to reach California.
Emily sat back and watched Reid caress Hannah’s arm and sweetly talk to her. She didn’t know what to expect when she’d hit the road after life in the compound, but finding a man like him, who appeared kind, wasn’t on the list of what she expected.
Hannah’s body went limp and relaxed back into her seat. The rope dropped from her open mouth.
Reid opened her eyelids and could see her pupils. “Thank God, it’s past.” He turned to Emily and said, “There’s a small bag back there; hand it to me.”
She did as he asked.
He opened it, found the bottle of Artane, removed two small white pills, and held them in his palm.
“How are you going to get her to swallow those?” Emily asked.
“That’s a good question.”
“What are they for?”
“They’re supposed to help with the tremors,” he replied.
“Try lifting her chin, opening her mouth and dropping them on the back of her tongue, then dump water in,” Emily said.
“I’ll try to wake her,” Reid said. He shook Hannah, but she didn’t move. “Hannah, wake up, honey, c’mon, wake up.” He shook her some more, but she still wouldn’t wake.
“Hannah, wake up!” Emily shouted.
Reid recoiled from the loud shout and gave her an annoyed look.
Hannah stirred.
“Hannah?” Reid asked. “Honey, I need you to wake up just a second and take something.”
“Daddy,” she said, her voice barely audible.
“Honey, open your mouth,” Reid said.
Hannah did as he asked, her eyes half closed.
Reid placed the tablets on her tongue and poured some water in her mouth.
Not expecting the water, Hannah coughed and choked. She spit up the tablets.
“Damn it,” Reid snapped.
Hannah’s eyes widened. She looked at Reid and said, “I’m sorry. I
’m…” Tears started to flow.
“You made her cry,” Emily said, as she felt sorry for Hannah.
“Stay out of this,” he snapped at Emily. “Hannah, honey, I need you to take these pills.”
“Daddy, I don’t feel good. I don’t…” Hannah stopped talking, her eyes rolled back into her head, and her body again went rigid and began to convulse.
“No, no, no,” Reid cried out. He took the rope and, like before, slid it between her teeth.
Hannah convulsed for a minute before it subsided again. When she was done, she opened her eyes, looked at Reid and sobbed, “Daddy I don’t feel good. It hurts, it hurts real bad.”
“I know, sweetheart, I know,” Reid said, tears now streaming down his face. “Honey, I need you to take these pills and…” He looked through the bag and removed the bottle of Roxanol. He opened it and dumped a pill into his hand. “And take this too. This one will help with the pain.”
“I don’t want to die,” Hannah cried.
“We’re about halfway to the ocean, honey. We’ll be there soon,” Reid said. “Open your mouth for me.”
She did as he asked.
He put one tablet of Artane on her tongue instead of both. “I’m going to pour a little bit of water; please swallow it.”
When he poured a cap full of water into her mouth, she focused on what she was doing and swallowed the pill.
“Good girl,” Reid said. He proceeded by giving her the rest.
She took the other tablet and pill with no issue, then asked as she looked outside, “Where are we?”
“New Mexico still, but we’re almost in Arizona.”
“Wake me when we reach Arizona,” she said then closed her eyes.
Exhausted from the drama, he melted into the seat and sighed. Tears trickled down his cheeks.
Emily too felt the wave of emotion. She reached over the seat and touched his shoulder. “You’re a good dad.”
Reid wiped his tears from his face and said, “I don’t know about that.”
“How many dads would do what you’re doing? Most would have probably been resigned to the fact their kid would die.”
“Maybe so.”
“Sorry for being rude a bit ago,” she said.
Seven Days: A Post-Apocalyptic Novel Page 16