The Survivor Chronicles: Book 1, The Upheaval (5 page)

He looked her over with concern, seemed to decide that she was okay and broke into a grin. “What’s the matter, Dumbo?” he said, bringing up her hated childhood nickname; a nickname that he had given her. “Those ears can’t help you fly out of the way?”

He just saved my life, she thought. I should be thankful.

Instead, she hauled off and punched him squarely in the jaw.

CHAPTER 4

Carl

Cape Cod, Mass.

7:32 a.m.

His hands were shaking like a baby’s, so much that he could barely light his cigarette, and he wasn’t even using a lighter. He’d never really been a chain smoker. A heavy smoker, sure, but never a chain smoker. Now he lit one up right after the other, barely tasting them as he sucked them down with enough force to make his lungs ache.

His heart was hammering, not so much from the effects of too much nicotine, but from the growing certainty that they might not survive whatever was going on around them. In all of his forty-one years he had never imagined he would see anything like this, let alone live through it.

The scientists, news media, radicals, religious zealots, and every loony with a story to tell had prattled on and on about this stuff, this moment, right now. They urged people to recycle, preached about global warming, spouted about calendars, recited passages from The Bible, and talked about looming prophecies of doom. All of which Carl had never actually believed a whit. Not one iota.

Oh, he’d kidded about it, joked about what he’d do if the prophecies and calendars ever came true, but as far as he was concerned it was never going to come. That day was for future generations to worry about, it wasn’t going to happen in his lifetime, he thought.

Carl did his bit to help by returning bottles, but he did so mainly for the deposit, and he didn’t dump things into the water supply, at least not anymore. When he was younger no one cared about gas and oil and paint, or littering, and he’d left his fair share of pollution around. To be fair, though, he’d never really known what it could do back then. None of them did. Now he was more careful, but he still wasn’t a fanatical member of the pollution police.

Yet he realized that what was occurring now didn’t have to be a result of global warming. It could be the calendar thing or some prophecy or Bible verse he didn’t know about.

It could even be all of those things occurring at once, or it could simply be a single, isolated incident. He could be dead wrong about his unspoken, unshakable certainty that today actually was the end of the world as he knew it. Two hours from now he could find out that only the Cape had been affected by whatever was going on, that they were the only ones experiencing it, but he didn’t think so.

The radio offered only static broken up by a strange whistling noise. At one point he’d thought he’d heard some kind of voices coming through too, but he wasn’t entirely sure they were there, or that they had even been human. Frankly, the noise had creeped him out. The hair on his neck had stood on end as the noise had hissed over the airwaves before returning it to the unnerving silence again. It was like eavesdropping on a CB conversation in another country, and not having a clue what the speakers were talking about. He’d turned the radio off with the silent vow not to turn it on again.

His shaky hands lit another cigarette and tossed the spent one out the window. He’d crushed the filter in-between his clenched fingers. “Jesus,” John whispered in the driver seat next to him. “Jesus. What the hell?”

The kid had been uttering the same sentences repeatedly for a few minutes now. It was beginning to grate on Carl’s nerves. But then again, the kid was right, this was a Jesus and What the Hell kind of situation they were in. Carl couldn’t take his eyes off the window as they drove sluggishly through the town. Some of the buildings had crumpled, literally just crumpled like dominoes one on top of the other.

It was the heart of tourist season and Sandwich was a picturesque town. There were always tourists meandering the streets and checking out the shops that Carl himself had never once stepped foot in, even though he’d lived here for eight years now. It was still early, but there had still been plenty of people on the streets looking to beat the crowd of sightseers, antique hunters, and candy fanatics who would mob the streets later in the day.

The ones that had escaped the crumbling buildings were staggering dazedly down the street. He thought they should help, but John crept steadily onward and Carl didn’t tell him to stop. He didn’t know where to begin to help. A young boy was standing in the middle of the street, crying loudly as blood ran down the side of his face. Carl had no children of his own, but he did have a heart and he couldn’t just leave the kid.

“Wait,” he said sharply.

John seemed not to hear him over his tenth What the Hell, but finally Carl’s command pierced his haze and he slid the truck to a stop. A woman emerged from the drifting dust of the debris. She lifted the child high, holding him in her arms before she disappeared into the dust and rubble once again.

“Never mind.”

John didn’t move. His hands twisted on the steering wheel, his knuckles had turned white. Even his suntanned face was three shades lighter than it had been at the start of the day. What dark hair wasn't plastered to his forehead with sweat, stuck out at odd angles from his narrow face.

“Go on, John.”

John stared at him, his brown eyes nearly bulging out of his sockets as he blinked rapidly at Carl. “What is going on?”

Carl shook his head as he lit another cigarette. “I don’t know, but you gotta move, John. We can’t just sit here.” He didn’t know why, but he felt that staying still was the equivalent of death.

“Try the phone again.”

That was the last thing he wanted to do again, but he grabbed hold of it as John drove down the road once more. There were other vehicles on the road, inching steadily onward, the drivers looked just as flabbergasted as Carl felt. He hit the buttons on the phone and received the same response he’d received before.

“Still nothing.”

“The radio?”

“No,” he said.

John was rocking subtly back and forth as he stared out the window. Thankfully the birds had stopped plummeting from the sky, but their bodies crunched under the solid tires of the truck as they rolled down the street. “We should go to the shop,” he said.

Carl inhaled smoke deeply and pondered the idea of returning to their workshop. “We should get off this island,” he decided.

“We’ll get our cars…”

“No. We’ll take the truck.”

“What? No, we’ll lose our jobs...”

“Do you honestly think it matters anymore?”

John blinked rapidly at him again before turning his attention back to the road that had become rutted from the upheaval of the earth. “What are you talking about?”

Carl waved a hand at the windshield. “Look around, John. This isn’t exactly normal circumstances. I think keeping our jobs is the least of our worries right now. We have to get off this island. We’re trapped here. When people begin to realize they should escape the bridges are going to be a nightmare. We’d never get off, and that’s if the bridges are even still standing.”

More rapid blinking from John, he was growing steadily whiter by the second. “We... we have to get our cars,” he protested.

“How much gas do you have in your car? A quarter, possibly half a tank? John, we filled up the truck this morning; we have the gas card…”

“It’s stealing.”

It was stealing, and right now Carl didn’t care. “If all of this ends up being nothing but an isolated, freak incident, then I’ll take the heat for it. I will personally pay the company back. Hell, I’ll even go to jail if it comes to that. But for now we’re taking this truck – full of fuel – and we’re getting off of this damn sandbar while we still can.”

“I’d still go to jail too…”

“Then hop on out and go get your car, but I’m taking the truck. ‘Cause I have a feeling it’s going to come in handy.”

John blinked rapidly again, he swallowed heavily as he managed a nod. “Okay. Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. My mom and dad work on the other side. I want to see them and make sure they’re alright.”

Of course he did. Any normal person would want to make sure their family was safe right now. Carl, on the other hand, had no family to worry about. “Maybe I should drive.”

He’d thought that John was going to argue with him. Instead he stopped, shifted the truck into park and they exchanged positions quickly. Carl put his cigarettes away and drove onward. The going was tedious, simply because of the sheer amount of people crowding the streets and staggering around in an aimless daze.

Every single apocalyptic movie he’d ever seen ran through his head as he watched the scene unfolding before him. He’d seen plenty of them, but none of them seemed to be the same as what was happening here. He kept waiting for a big explosion, waiting for something more and he wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if people started suddenly jumping on each other and trying to eat brains. However, after the shaking there seemed to be a collective inhalation, a waiting expectancy in the air. An inexplicable, communal pause as they all waited to see what would happen next.

And there would be a next. He didn’t have a freaking clue what was going on, but there was more still to come. He knew it. He could feel it.

Power lines had crumpled, their poles snapped like toothpicks. A police car drove unhurriedly past, its lights were flashing but its siren was off. The officer behind the wheel was young; the poor guy actually looked like he might be a rookie. There were some obstacles in the road, but for the most part Carl was able to navigate around them with relative ease, and the truck was big enough to drive over the worst areas of the jutted pavement.

They passed more crumpled buildings, there were areas were people were screaming incessantly. The screams were heartbreaking sounds that made Carl wish the radio worked again. But as much as he longed to drown out the screams, he wanted to hear the sounds on that radio even less.

The birds hadn’t been the only animals that seemed to have gone crazy. Dogs were barking and howling; they ran through the streets, nearly plowing into the truck a few times. He spotted a pair of foxes racing around the buildings, a few raccoons and skunks as well. At any other time they would have seemed out of place, would have even been a cause for concern, but Carl found it almost fitting to see them now.

There were cars in telephone poles, on front yards, and abandoned by the side of the road. He was thankful it was a Monday and that this had occurred so early, otherwise he didn’t think he would have been able to navigate the small roads in the center of town. As it was, there were a few abandoned vehicles he had to nudge out of his way with the bumper of the truck. A cat zipped in front of them and into the branches of a large locust that had been half uprooted by the force of the tremors. A house was on fire to his right but there were no rescue crews on site.

How would they even know about the blaze unless they saw it? Carl realized with a growing feeling of unease. For the first time since things had hit the fan, he became acutely aware of the fact that they were on their own, isolated, cut off. All he had to rely on right now was John, and the kid was still muttering Jesus and What the Hell’s with alarming, and annoying, frequency.

Carl made the turn onto the highway ramp not knowing what to expect. He thought the highway would be littered with people trying to escape. However, other than a few vehicles on the side of the road, in the median, or crashed on the side, the highway was eerily empty. John stopped muttering. He leaned forward in his seat, his fingers resting on the dashboard as he stared out the windshield with bug eyes and a gaping mouth.