Final Dawn: Season 1 (The Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Series) (15 page)

Nancy Sims

1:10 PM, March 31, 2038

The basement where Nancy and James were trapped was cold and moist and it smelled heavily of mildew, dirt and unwashed bodies. It was mostly dark, with small pinpoints of light leaking through what Nancy assumed to be the ground floor above her. A light was still in her face, and her vision was filled with Joshua’s grin as he held her ropes, bringing his knife closer to her face.

A clatter came from above, somewhere in the distance, and both brothers froze, looking upwards and then back at each other. Richard licked his lips nervously, still crouched behind his brother, waiting in expectation for an instruction that was quick to come.

Joshua hissed. “Get up there now!”

Obeying, Richard immediately darted up the stairs, mumbling incoherently to himself as he went. Joshua sighed deeply and sheathed his knife, a look of disappointment etched on his face. “So sorry to leave you hanging, little missy, but we’ve got some new sheep coming in, from the sound of it.” With a wistful look back at Nancy, Joshua ascended the stairs after his brother.

Nancy breathed a heavy sigh of relief after the two disappeared, struggling to hold back her tears. James spoke softly to her from across the room. “Are you okay?”

Nancy closed her eyes and nodded, still in shock from how close she had come to whatever vile plan Joshua had in store for her. James spoke again, determination at the edge of his voice. “We’ll get out of this. I don’t know how, but we have to.” Nancy didn’t respond and they both lapsed into silence, feeling the hours drag on, wondering what the two criminals were doing and where they had gone.

With a sudden burst of activity, the door at the top of the stairs was flung open and a muffled scream came as the two brothers dragged another person down to the basement. Nancy and James both squinted, struggling to adjust their eyes to the sudden light. The figure that the brothers dragged behind them was a woman, short, thin and shapely, with her head covered in a burlap sack. She wore a business outfit, with a blouse and knee-length skirt. Her feet were bare and dirty, presumably from walking for a long distance without shoes. 

A few steps from the bottom of the stairs, they hurled the woman to the floor, her head smacking into a support beam at the base of the staircase. The woman’s body went limp and her screams stopped, and Nancy and James looked at each other nervously. Joshua motioned at his brother. “Well go on, get her strung up!” Richard cowered from his brother in response to the gesture and scurried over next to James, rigging a thick length of rope from the ceiling supports.

Within a few minutes, the woman was strung up along with James and Nancy. Joshua walked over to the woman and pulled the sack off of her head, putting his ear next to her nose. “Good. She’s still alive. It’d be a shame to lose one as nice as this.”

He turned to face Nancy, neatly folding the sack up as he spoke. “My apologies to you, little missy, but it looks like you’ll have to wait your turn. No offense intended, of course. We’ll get to you soon enough.” Joshua gave Nancy a cold, wide smile, baring his white teeth at her again, then turned and walked up the stairs.

“Let’s go, Richard!”

Richard turned from where he had been watching the new captive and ran after his brother, still giggling and mumbling to himself the whole way. A few seconds later the door at the top of the stairs closed and they were once again enveloped in silence and darkness.

Marcus Warden

5:15 AM, March 30, 2038

Marcus groaned as he climbed down from his perch. His shoulder was aching from where he had thrust himself against the creature, making it difficult to climb both up and down to retrieve his backpack. His brief struggle with the creature had left him energized instead of tired due to the adrenaline pumping through his veins. He was in no mood to rest; he only wanted to get out of the cavern and back on the move again.

He glanced down at the creature’s remains as he walked by, passing the beam of the flashlight over the corpse. Even with the damage done to the body by the removal of the silvery metallic structure, there was no mistake: it was definitely human. Altered and changed somehow, yes, but still unmistakably human. Marcus shook his head as he stared at the face of the creature. Though it resembled a deflated balloon more than a man, he still felt sympathy.
What happened to you, you poor bastard?

The cold night air surrounded Marcus as he exited the cavern, momentarily taking his breath away. After the events of the night, Marcus felt like he was waking up from a dream. If it wasn’t for his aching shoulder and slightly bent and chipped machete, he wouldn’t have believed that any of what had happened was real.

Marcus slowly began to walk up the trail, his gaze vacant as he stared at the night sky and the dark trees around him. Marcus was not a violent man in any sense of the word. Even so, growing up he – like many others – imagined what it would be like if he were face to face with someone who was trying to kill him. His imaginings grew more mature as he grew older. His first thoughts were that he would use an incredible set of self-defense and martial arts skills to tear the person apart. A few years later, it would be guns that he would use. Then, in his college years, he briefly imagined that he would converse with the person rationally, convincing them to choose the moral high ground instead of resorting to violence.

These imaginings, as deranged, delightful and distracting as they had been, were nothing compared to reality. Every time Marcus closed his eyes, he could still feel the imperfections in the grip of the machete as his hands tightened around it, preparing to lunge at the creature. His legs tightened involuntarily with each step. Worst of all, he could still see the smile on the creature’s face, with the silver smoke curling out from its mouth.

Every time Marcus began to feel guilty, picturing the face of the creature after he had killed it, he remembered two simple facts.
It wasn’t human. And it was trying to kill me.
Memories of his dreams the night before came back, too, mixing with the events of the night. The creature in the dreams was, after all, the same creature that he had seen and killed in the cavern, right down to the last detail. The face, body and limbs were all the same. Of course, he had glimpsed it running through the field and again on the mountain, but to see it up close and in person was completely different.
How or why I dreamed that thing up, I don’t know… maybe I got a better view of it through the binoculars than I remembered.

Marcus snapped out of his musings at the loud call of an owl from a nearby tree. The long cry of the creature sent a shiver up his spine and he hastened his climb. Of all the animals in the world, Marcus disliked owls the most. Something about them had terrified him as a child, and he never felt completely comfortable around them as an adult, either. Leaves and branches strewn on the trail snapped and crackled underfoot as Marcus jogged ahead. Dim shadows from his flashlight bounced on the trail as the owl sounded again in the distance.

Rachel Walsh

6:11 AM, April 1, 2038

After a few miles of walking, Rachel was relieved to find that the road became passable and intact. She and Sam had no trouble picking up their pace to reach the nearby rail station. Though a North/South rail line had been in place in the area from decades ago, this one that she was planning on following was more recent. It was put in place in the early 2020’s in response to the severe infrastructure problems that the country faced. As part of a congressional mandate, both freight and high-speed passenger rails were installed along the Eastern and Western Coasts, with two main arteries connecting them through the center of the country, with one along the Southern Coast and one passing through the Midwest.

Once the infrastructure was in place, companies of every facet jumped at the opportunity to use them and a rail revival of sorts took place. It grew to be so large, in fact, that many airlines petitioned congress and state legislatures to increase fees and taxes on the rails due to how many passengers and cargo were traveling by rail instead of air. Fortunately for the airlines, though, the revival of the rail only lasted a few years as passengers grew tired of the increasing lines and cramped quarters associated with rail travel. High-speed rails could get you from Washington to Miami in two hours, and so many people took advantage of the rails that they began to overwhelm them. This critical oversight in the expected demand came as a shock to the rail companies, who began to raise ticket prices in response. Through a combination of poor planning and greed, though, these price jumps ended up being too much for the fledging sector, which began to die off almost as quickly as it had grown in the first place.

In the end, by the late 2020’s and early 2030’s, passenger rail travel was back to the levels it had seen in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. The only saving grace for the rail companies were the freight lines. These managed to stay afloat and make enough money that the rail companies didn’t go out of business. Thousands of trains crossed the country, carrying raw materials from seaboard to seaboard at a miniscule fraction of the cost of air or road travel. Some experiments were done in combining high speed rail travel with freight loads in an effort to generate money from the high-speed rails that were built, but this experiment was quickly put to rest after the first train nearly exploded due to improper handling. Hauling hazardous chemicals at 400-600 MPH wasn’t, in hindsight, the best idea that the rail companies ever had.

Rachel had no expectations of finding any working trains at the rails. Even if she did find one, she had no idea how to operate one. The only thing she wanted the rails for was to increase her travel speed on foot. A combination of private and public dollars had poured into the upkeep and maintenance of the rails, unlike the highways and interstates, which depended solely on public funds. This, combined with the relative newness of the railroads meant that the rails were better maintained and more structurally sound than even the best highway or interstate in the country. Thus, they would – hopefully – be easier to follow, since there was a better chance of them being intact, even on the few occasions that they passed through large cities.

After several hours of walking, Rachel was about to find out if this assumption was correct or not. Off in the distance, past a stand of trees, Rachel could see the telltale sign of the railroad. A red-roofed building sat next to a line of telephone poles that stretched off into the distance to the north and the south. A large swath of trees had been cleared from around the track, leaving a gap that could be spotted from miles away. Rachel smiled as she drew closer. The rail station looked completely intact, with the glazed windows unbroken and all of the shingles still on the roof.

As Rachel stepped out from the grass and gravel onto the thick wood and steel of the railroad track, she grinned. As she had hoped and suspected, the rail was completely intact for as far as the eye could see. Even towards the south, where there was more damage to the area near Charlotte, the track still looked to be in perfect condition. There was no guarantee that it would be this good farther north, but the condition of the track combined with the complete lack of obstacles and debris meant that she and Sam could easily increase their speed, cutting their travel time to Richmond down by as much as a few days. Even when they reached the more damaged areas, Rachel figured that it would still be easier on the tracks than on the road.
Less debris to kick up, the rails are sturdier than the roads and even the trees are cut back so far from the line that they shouldn’t be much of an issue, either
.

Rachel desperately wanted to get started north right away, but the sun was starting to set and Sam had flopped down at her feet, worn out from the day. “All right,” she sighed, “Fine. We’ll stay here tonight and get going at first light tomorrow.”

Leonard McComb

9:15 AM, March 31, 2038

After a quick breakfast of energy drinks and chips, Leonard filled the gas tank of the Jeep from the cars parked nearby and started off again. Driving through the city was a different experience than he had gone through so far. While driving on the highways was a challenge, driving through a city that had been destroyed was a unique challenge. Depending on where he was driving, he would have several minutes of clear pavement made by the vaporization and disintegration of entire blocks of buildings. This would be immediately followed by an hour or more of slow crawling through mounds of wreckage, some of which required that he get out and move it himself before taking the Jeep through.

Out in the water, to the left of Leonard as he wound through the city streets, he spied the masts of a ship jutting out. He paused and shut off the Jeep, jumping out to see what it was. After a few moments of staring out into the water, he recognized where he was standing. Years ago, Leonard took a vacation to Baltimore, and one of his stops had been the National Aquarium. In front of and surrounding him, he realized, was the main area of the aquarium. The foundation of the building was still intact, but the building itself had been blown apart, with most of it washing out into the bay.

Along with the sunken ship, there were huge chunks of steel and rounded plastic that formed some of the tanks used to hold the creatures in the aquarium. Sadness rushed over Leonard as he remembered his time at the aquarium. He had wanted to go back and visit, but many other things took priority and it gradually slipped so far down on his list that he forgot about it.

With a shake of his head, Leonard got back in the Jeep and continued on. The area near the bay was clearer than the rest of the city, so he stuck close to it, winding around down towards the south until he linked up with the highway again. It was mid-afternoon and the tank on the Jeep was still full, so Leonard decided not to stop again until he got into Washington.

While the two cities were only forty miles apart, Leonard didn’t make it in until well after dark. Unlike the areas between New York and Baltimore, the entire region between Baltimore and Washington had suffered heavy damage. On more than one occasion, Leonard wished he could have just turned around and tried to go around the city. Based on how far in he was, though, it would have taken an inordinate amount of time to do so, so he pushed on.

In the middle of the night, Leonard finally spied what he was looking for: signs marking exits branching off into different parts of Washington. As he approached the main part of the city, a shadow rose out of the earth, blocking out the small bits of starlight and moonlight that filtered through the cloud cover. Only when Leonard got close to it did he realize what he was seeing. Off in the distance, shattered, leaning to one side and consisting largely of the steel skeleton stood the remains of the Washington Monument.

Once again Leonard parked the Jeep and decided to stop for the night. This time, though, he was happy to see that at least one familiar sight was still standing, despite all of the destruction. Although the monument was barely standing, just seeing the remains brought him relief and the hope that maybe, just maybe, things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed.