Earth's Survivors, page 131
“Major?”
“Here... Read you. Okay, Pierce, let's shift gears... How does this bank look to get me to the surface?”
“No way, sir. That bank is probably going to return here soon, in fact. It does that when it's damaged, returns to control, and control for that unit is sub level sixteen. There is no surface above it, just debris. I have no camera shots at the exit, but I have red lights across the board from sub level four to the surface. I have one camera on the surface that looks toward the entrance. The entrance is gone, though. Nothing but churned up dirt. “
“What do you mean this will return to the bottom once more and stay there?” Major Weston asked.
“It's a safety mechanism, Major. It comes back and stays until the error messages are cleared. Major, you should probably decide soon on whether you'll be making a trip to the surface or joining us down here. I'm over riding the error procedure. I can get away with that for a few minutes, but then the status will change and the elevator will freeze there,” Pierce told him.
The major swore, turned away from the camera, looking back out of the elevator. Pierce saw little. The camera angle caught only a corner of the open doors. The major looked back up at the camera, and a second later the door slid shut as he removed his foot. “Bring me down, Pierce,” he said quietly. Pierce saw the elevator lurch as he removed the over ride to allow the error sequence to repeat. He watched the levels increase as the elevator dropped in to the bowels of Project Bluechip.
Plague Day Two
March 2nd
Grocery King Supermarket:
Watertown, NY: Early Morning
The old Chevy idled roughly at the curb across from the Grocery King market.
“Murder...” He waited until Murder gave him his full attention. “I want you to go in... See what's what... Buy some beer, make sure they really are letting everyone in and out. When I see you walk out I'll know it's all good. We'll be on the side,” Calvin finished. He turned more fully to the back seat and looked at the others. “Joe... Marva,” he said after a slight pause. “And Crappie. Outside on the sidewalk” He levered his handle and met them on the sidewalk.
“Joe you take the lead... He comes out, you three go in... Cappie, you're on the bag. Register to register... Get the fuckin' money and get out fast.”
“Yeah, but what if...” Cappie started.
“What if my ass. There are no what ifs. You don't shoot nobody, unless. You don't talk, unless. In and out,” Calvin told them.
“Yeah, but I'm sayin',” Cappie said again.
“Look. Why don't you just get back in the fuckin' car, Cappie. I don't have time for your bullshit questions,” Calvin told him.
Cappie looked hurt. “Okay, Calvin. Okay. I got it. I was just askin' is all.”
“Yeah? Well you ask too fuckin' much.” He turned to Marva and Joe. “Anything?”
“Nothin',” Marva said in a low voice.
“Good,” Joe agreed.”
Calvin had turned away and was looking over at the grocery store where Murder had just walked out and waved at him.
“Retards... It's all I have,“ Calvin said. He shook his head as Murder walked over to them.
“It's all good,” Murder told him as he offered Calvin a beer. Calvin debated and then shook his head. “Get in the fuckin' car, Murder. You three,” he turned to the others. “Get it done fast.”
Joe nodded, slipped a black ski mask from his coat pocket, slipped it on as the others followed suit and then pushed a cheap pair of mirrored sunglasses onto his nose that he had pulled from the same jacket pocket. He said nothing, looked both ways and then walked across the wide, empty street to the Shop and Save, the others following.
Route 40
The Southwestern Desert
Day One
Sammy Black
The truck began to rattle deep in the engine block and a second later a loud wheeze rent the air, bringing the smell of hot motor and burned oil with it.
Sammy Black's eyes shot up to the mirror and he saw the dark spray of oil behind him on the highway, the trail coming away from that, following the now coasting truck. His eyes came down and the rear tires on the truck suddenly locked up and he had to fight for control as the pickup skated across the wreck dotted interstate and plowed into the side of a burned out SUV. The airbag was in his face before he could even react, and a second later the truck slammed back down to the ground from the bounce the rear end had taken at impact, and the quiet began to creep back in to the roar in his ears.
He pushed himself slowly away from the steering wheel, flexed his jaw experimentally and felt blood go trickling away, running across his chin and then down his throat as he laid his head back against the headrest and waited for his blood pressure to drop and the roaring in his ears to taper off.
The silence of the desert came back a few moments later. How long he didn't know, but he had flexed his left leg and the pain had made him scream. The next thing he knew his eyes were opening to the late afternoon sun and the desert quiet.
His fingers scrambled across the seat top and he found the bottle of water he had been working on. The whole back of the pickup was full of water and packaged food. Camping stuff, the things that hikers ate. Freeze dried this and that. Jerky. Protein cakes. It was the first thing he did after he had set off the last canister in Houston. He had driven south and then began southwest. He found the bottle, lifted it to his lips and drained it. He had not realized how thirsty he had been.
He had started in North Carolina, worked his way into Georgia, then Alabama before the shit had really hit the fan, and he had barely managed to keep the truck on the road when the first quake had hit.
He had just left the tunnel that passed under the Mobile Bay when the quake had hit with such force that he had bounced off the road, skipped over the concrete rail and found himself rolling slowly down a grassy median toward the highway below. He had managed to get the brakes on and get turned around back up toward I10 above, but he couldn't get the truck back over the concrete rail, so he had left the truck to see if there was some other way to get back up onto I10. When he stepped through a break in the concrete rail, and back up onto the highway a few seconds later, he turned his eyes back to the Tunnel he had just come through. Water lapped at the roadway. The tunnels swept down into that water. The whole bay had seemed to be boiling, agitated, but as he had watched the water had suddenly dropped, receding, leaving the Bay a muddied mess. All around him there were screams of panic, calls for help, and he was torn. If the water went out that fast it was a… He couldn't make it come, but it was bad. A hurricane could suck the water out like that, he had seen it once, but so could a tidal wave, a tsunami... His breath caught in his throat as he realized it could very well be a tsunami. He ran back down to the truck and got it moving. A few miles down the road he had managed to work his way through a field and back onto I10, running in the night for the Louisiana border.
The trip had been harder from there on. He had one vial left and he had decided on Houston as the best possible place to use it. Getting there had been tough, but he had made it late noon four days back. Far too late to do much good in his opinion. The city was devastated. Gunfire sounded everywhere, fires burned out of control. He had triggered the canister and dropped it into Galveston Bay a few hours later.
From there he had headed north west. Interstates when he could find them, desert when he could not. He had found route 40 and he was now somewhere in between New Mexico and Arizona. He looked down at his leg after a few moments. He looked quickly away.
The leg was a mess, and he was not going to be able to get it out from under the dash, and even if he did he would probably bleed out once the pressure came off the leg. He sighed. His hand searched along the top of the passenger seat, not finding what he wanted. Movement was painful, but the sun was sinking, albeit slowly, and he did not want to be in this truck flinching at every movement or sound in the night. He did his best to lean forward and keep his leg from moving. His gun was wedged between the very edge of the seat top and the pushed in dash. He closed one hand around the grip and pulled. It was wedged tight, but it did pull back a few inches. Something on the gun was catching on something under or on the edge of the metal lip of the dash. He pushed the gun forward and then pulled back again. Almost, but a grating sound reached his ears, and he could feel the vibration in the weapon as it ground to a halt, once again hung up.
He pushed it back and forth lightly, realizing it was the seat cushion that was forcing the gun up into the dashboard. If he could get his fingers wedged in there, over the gun, push it downward, then pull back, maybe... He jammed his fingers into the tight space, ignoring the skin that scraped off on the sharp edge of the dash. A second later he was forcing them past the edge of the barrel and taking a deep breath. In his hurry to pull the gun free he forgot about his leg and pressed down on it as he suddenly yanked back.
The pain was like fire, a live wire straight to a circuit in his brain. The circuit overloaded and he slipped instantly into darkness.
Route 40
The Southwestern Desert
Day Two
Sammy Black
The sweat trickled across his eyelid and then slipped into the eye as it opened, stinging. He squeezed his eyes shut and felt the pain flare slightly in his leg as he moved it in his reaction. He kept his eyes closed, trying to remember. It came to him after a brief second. He was in the truck. Wrecked... Night was coming... He opened his eyes slowly, ignoring the stinging from the salty sweat.
No... The sun was low, in the wrong place... Morning, he decided. Somehow... Somehow he had slept the night through. It was gone. Morning was here. He remembered why he had slipped away, moving the leg. He looked down at it now. It was much worse. Swollen, pushed hard against the dashboard, black and purple where he could see the skin through the shredded and ripped cloth of the pants. He could feel the metal lip of the dash embedded into the long bone of his thigh like a hatchet, he thought.
His leg stank, he stank, like urine and spoiled meat. Maybe he had been out for days. He had no way to know, just laying here rotting in the heat. It was morbid, but he couldn't get the mental picture out of his head once he had thought it into being.
He closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. It did seem to help clear his head, but a low buzz came right back, if it had ever been there. He wasn't sure. Maybe it had, but it settled in as though it belonged there. He remembered the gun. The gun he had reached for that had started it all and he felt the cool metal under his right hand. He curled his fingers around it, they were stiff, unwilling. He looked down at his hand. Scraped skin, dead and black clung to his fingers. The bone showed through in places. Black blood flaked off the fingers as he forced them to close around the grip.
~
The wolf was fifty yards away, hidden in a slight dip in the desert, an arroyo that cut through the hard pan, dry now, but it could change in an instant out here. The bare rock that lay against his belly cool, an escape from the heat. Nevertheless, he panted. Already his body was overheated in the desert morning.
He had smelled the man a few hours before light and followed the scent. He knew the scent of man. It had always meant fear, flight, but lately it often meant food, sustenance. He wondered, as he lay, which one this would be.
It was quiet in those hours before sunrise, still he had been afraid to follow it to its source. He had heard it breathing... Whatever this man was he was not dead yet. The wolf could wait. Waiting was something he understood.
The roar took him by surprise and he whined deeply in his throat, flattening himself against the cool stone. Crying in his fear, but time slipped by and the noise did not come again. He waited, listening, watching the sun lift further into the pale blue of the sky, but he heard nothing more. He lifted his head from the ground, stood on gaunt legs, and howled into the quiet of the morning. He sank back to the cool rock and waited. Nothing answered him. A few minutes later he raised from the rock and made his way up onto the highway.
THREE
Present Day: Plague Year One
September 28th
New York: Manhattan
The Night was black and cold. Winter was coming, there was no doubt about it. Fires smoldered and burned in the nearby park.
Behind her, thousands of the dead stood quietly, shifting in and out of the shadows cast by the tall buildings.
Donita stood silently, glancing from the dead to the park ahead of her, as the cool night air flowed past her and told her its story...
The Nation
Josh looked over the high meadow before he lead the sheep and goats down into the first Valley. The dogs went with them and refused to leave them. The male dog seemed to be determined to mark every square foot of what he considered his new territory with his scent.
Down below the notch, with its entrance to the cave and the ledges, the trucks were unloaded with care. It was still early morning, quite some time until the mid day meal, so they had begun unloading the trucks first.
To the children it was like Christmas. Not only were there new and exciting things to see, touch and feel-Rain had ended up with a handful of wool as she had grabbed at a passing sheep-there were also new people to meet. A lot of new people.
They decided to use three large, dry rooms off the main meeting room to store the materials from the three big trucks, but they quickly filled up. Everything else that was easily transportable went into one corner of the huge living area of the main cave instead.
Bob spied the harvester and asked whose idea it had been. Mike pointed him to Josh and told him that Josh had been a farmer. Bob walked up to him and shook his hand heartily.
"Man, do I want to have a few dozen conversations with you," Bob told him.
Josh laughed. "Good to meet you, Bob." He turned and looked down the length of the valley. "Nice... Very nice," he said.
In the distance the horses, cows and bison could be seen. The barns. The stone houses set back close to the sloping valley walls.
Bob smiled as Josh looked around. "When you're settled in I'll show you around," he told him.
"Well, Bob, I don't have a thing to myself... Nothing to settle in," Josh told him.
"Well, let's go then," Bob told him. He turned and Josh followed him down the ledge and into the valley.
Mike stood next to Candace and watched them walk down toward the valley floor. Ronnie and Patty stood nearby. "Looks like the bridges are up... The corn's in too?" Mike asked her.
"Yep and yep, Baby," Candace told him. She had his hand in her own two critically examining it. She sighed and looked up, meeting his eyes. "We've been busy. Me and the babies have missed you so we've had to stay busy. Sandy grounded me though because I've gotten so big," she added. She watched his face.
"Grounded," he asked, and a split second later. "Babies?"
Candace grinned. "Babies," she agreed.
His mouth hung open. "I don't even know what to say," he told her.
"Say, I love you," she told him.
"I love you," he told her and pulled her to him. He kissed her hard.
"Wow. That was nice. Maybe you should go away more often," Candace told him. She plucked at his hand. "Except this." She looked at the bandaged hand and shook her head. "You have to let Sandy see this."
"No... No more going away. I'm never going back out there," he assured her.
Patty and Ronnie moved over closer to them. Patty's eyes were bright and she held Ronnie’s arm tightly to her.
Candace looked at Ronnie’s nose. "Nice," she said, and cut her eyes back and forth between Ronnie and Mike. "Him short a finger and you with a smashed up face."
"Man meets dashboard," Ronnie told her.
"Looks pretty bad," Candace told him.
"Yeah? Well, you should see the dashboard," Ronnie said.
"I believe I owe you an ass kicking, my man tells me," Patty said to Mike.
Ronnie pretended to look up at the sky.
"How come you have an ass kicking coming, Baby," Candace asked him.
"Uh, I'm the guy that broke his nose," Mike asked?
"You're not sure if you were the guy that broke his nose," Candace asked? "Maybe it was the Nose Fairy?"
Mike laughed. "No... It was me. I confess, but, it was an accident. I'm sorry for it... Truly."
"Good for you," Patty said.
"Yeah," Candace agreed. "You do not want to mess with a hormonally unbalanced woman."
"I think she can take you," Ronnie said.
"Oh, good, soup her up, Ronnie. Soup her up," Mike said. He laughed and the others joined in. "But, really, Pats, it was an accident. I'm sorry about it, but it was an accident."
"I know," Patty told him. "I just had to see you crawl."
"Hello," a strikingly beautiful woman said as she hobbled up. She was leaning on a stick. Her black hair was straight and long, hanging well below her shoulders. She was no more than five feet tall. Her face unlined, concealing her age, a smile resting on her full mouth. Her skin a light brown.
"Oh, Jess, you shouldn't be up," Mike said, turning to her as she walked up.
"I gave myself permission," Jessie told him.
"Jessie Stone," Mike said as he turned and looked from Candace to Patty. " Jess, my woman, Candace. And my friend Patty, Ronnie's woman. Ladies, this is Doctor Jessie Stone."
Sandy over heard the introduction from just a few feet away and hurried over with Susan.
"This is Sandy and her woman Susan. Sandy is our nurse. She's been doing all of our Doctor stuff," Mike said.
Everyone said their hellos and Jessie turned to Candace.
"I wanted to meet you, Candace. I have heard so much about you. You're a very lucky woman, you know... Your Mike, he saved my life. Truly and completely," Jessie said.
Candace sensed that several things were being said at the same time. It made her slightly uncomfortable, but she took Jessie’s hand and clasped it in her own. "It's nice to meet you, Jessie. Mike told me all about you," she said. She was suddenly disconcerted. She felt she had missed something. Something simple, yet serious
