Crisis Event: Gray Dawn Read online

  Ten or twelve? Fourteen?

  She couldn’t be sure because all her daydreaming and past-pondering had made her miss any mile markers or road signs that would have kept her aware of her location.

  After double-checking her back trail, she turned her scope forward.

  The road ahead descended gently, curving toward what the compass on the red paracord loop around her neck told her was south.

  The skyline of Youngstown was right there, framed by the dead gray trees that lined the road. Thousands of empty buildings and houses awaited her passage.

  This was the milestone that marked the end of the first leg of her journey—six hundred or so miles of the eighteen hundred miles she needed to travel.

  She estimated a two mile walk to the city limits. She knew she could make that much distance easily today, but if she could get over the river she’d feel a little safer—and a little more hopeful.

  On the other side of Youngstown she’d have a fairly straight, flat road to Columbus—and then to St. Louis. Then the hills and mountains and rugged terrain and cold weather that had slowed her progress for the last four months would be behind her.

  “Maybe I’ll get a toothbrush today,” she said, and shrugged a shoulder through the rifle strap. “Hell, maybe I’ll find a hot guy my age, a shower, and a clean bed.

  And champagne.

  And fresh roses.”

  Her grin lasted all of two seconds.

  “Might as well dream big,” she said. Then she set her mouth into a grim line and stepped forward.

  Chapter 4

  A strong breeze was blowing and the gray sky was darkening when the descending road carried Sadie out of Hubbard to the Youngstown city limits. The never-ending lightning seemed more prevalent and menacing.

  In reality it was time to start looking for shelter again. But if she did that, she wouldn’t make it past the city today.

  She glanced at her watch, saw that it was already 3:44. Unless she really picked up the pace she’d be sleeping on the north side of the river.

  “Through or around?” she pondered for the millionth time on this trip.

  She hated the dilemma. But she had to weigh her options every time, because every time was different.

  She was low on food and there was always a chance she’d find something to eat or drink in the city. But going around was usually safer.

  Unless you factored in the river.

  The Mahoning wasn’t that wide, as rivers go. But a half mile was more than she wanted to swim or row—if she could even find a boat or canoe. Besides. Swimming across with her pack and rifle wasn’t a real option.

  She decided, finally, on the middle option: she would scout the town and if nothing spooked her too much, she’d creep right through it, keeping to the shadows, disturbing nothing, wrapping rags around her boots to muffle them if necessary, covering her tracks with some carefully applied dust painting, and trying to be invisible in the gray twilight.

  Unless someone was hunting her with night vision goggles, she’d most likely be okay.

  Most likely.

  Youngstown was probably empty anyway. It was the reason she’d taken this route in the first place. Most of the small towns and cities in the northeast were half abandoned before the Crisis even came.

  Small steel towns and auto towns like this one had been dying since the ‘60s. They couldn’t compete with cheap Japanese cars and cheap Chinese steel or the private equity raiders from New York. But when the 2008 real estate crash came, things got really bad.

  It was the real estate crash that got her grandfather into prepping. She’d visited him over the Christmas holidays during her sophomore year at MIT and he’d given her the “tour.” He’d buried four 20 foot long sea containers underground in the middle of his land. Each container had been full of supplies to help him weather the next big crash—which he was convinced would come within a decade.

  A crash came all right, but not in the form he’d expected. He’d died of lymphoma less than two years later.

  He’d left his land—and his larder—to her.

  The tallest buildings of Youngstown were black shadows against the sky by the time Sadie had gotten eight blocks into Youngstown.

  It was getting dark, despite all the lightning strikes tearing into the tops of the buildings—and she was getting closer to her goal.

  The dead gray trees lining the road were giving way to open parking areas in front of looted stores and restaurants. On her right, a dust-covered golf course and country club stretched out to the west for as far as she could see—the third one she’d seen since leaving Hubbard.

  Somehow, the pins were still standing on the greens, though the flags had turned from red to a horrible dark gray.

  Sadie sighted on the clubhouse to see if it might be a good place to take shelter, but what looked like fresh human tracks in the dust around the clubhouse door sent a spike of fear into her guts and made her hair stand on end.

  “Breathe,” she whispered, and ducked down between an abandoned pick-up and a Hyundai. She sighted through her scope again, scanning the area ahead.

  On the southwest corner of an intersection half a mile away, she saw a sign coated in gray dust. She could just make out the giant 7, though the ELEVEN was unreadable.

  Next to the sign was a small canopy to protect the now useless gas pumps and the dead customers who’d never use them again. The lot in front of the store was full of cars, but the building looked dark and dead.

  Beyond the 7-Eleven on both sides of the road stood other buildings, their iconic brands and symbols now giving the appearance of having been deep fried in a fuzzy gray batter.

  Three quarters of a mile away the buildings began to get taller, their roofs seeming to chart an imaginary an arc toward the tallest building downtown—an eighteen story art deco skyscraper almost a century old.

  Sadie kept scanning ahead, seeing what appeared to be a college campus. Youngstown College, she guessed from what she remembered when she was researching her journey route.

  The campus was covered in gray dust, and the open spaces between buildings that had likely once been full of happy, rambunctious college students were now as silent and peaceful as a graveyard.

  Sadie considered heading to the college first, trying to find the chemistry department to see if she could pick up anything useful. When she reached her grandfather’s land, she intended to set up a laboratory.

  She grinned at the idea.

  At how silly it probably was.

  It relied on her maintaining two things she didn’t appear to have a lot of right now: hope and sanity.

  Nevertheless, if things ever settled down again, and the weather cleared a little, and people began to grow crops in what was left of America, some kind of return to the life she’d known might be possible. After all, the rest of the world hadn’t ended just because of the weather crisis hovering over the United States.

  Sadie intended to be one of the people who rebuilt society over the remains of America—with a better, less corrupt system than the one they’d had before.

  Everything looked still and quiet ahead, but Sadie knew better than to accept appearances. If a town had lookouts on all the roads coming in, the 7-Eleven would be a perfect scouting location. The lookout would likely be inside that building, under cover, or on its roof—with a rifle.

  Sadie went down on her belly and crawled out from between the two stalled vehicles. She slithered down into the ditch beside the road, and then turned toward the 7-Eleven.

  Crawling on her elbows and knees was excruciating, but she didn’t have far to go. A dead gray tree stood next to the ditch and its trunk gave her the cover she needed to slide out and stand up.

  Sadie stood behind the tree and shoved her rifle through the convenient fork in its trunk. She had to stand with her legs wide apart and bend at the knees to sight through the scope, but now she had great cover.

  She stared at the entrance of the 7-Eleven, scanning the wind
ows an inch at a time, looking for a hole that might have been cut to allow for a sniper port.

  She saw nothing.

  No lights, no sounds.

  Lightning struck several buildings in the downtown area and a strong wind rustled the dead branches over her head, knocking dust into the air. Then the wind calmed a little, back to the slow steady breeze she’d felt before.

  She was about to relax when another cluster of lightning bolts hit—a full-on electrical assault that tore into the downtown buildings just south of the 7-Eleven.

  Thunder boomed in her ears, and even through her t-shirt she smelled the burned air. As soon as her retinas had cleared and she could see again she looked at the buildings the lightning had hit. One of them was on fire. Orange and red flames were leaping from the roof of the building, and a plume of black smoke had begun to rise.

  “Beautiful,” Sadie said of the conflagration, grateful for the addition of color to her dull gray world.

  Sadie was tempted to step out and walk up the street toward the building. Maybe some other bored and lonely person would come out and stand with her to watch. Maybe they could put aside their mutual distrust and terror of the unknown and be humans again, even if only for a short while.

  She shrugged, the beginning of acceptance of the fact that she was not going to get out of Youngstown today. There was no way she was going to risk a river crossing tonight. The darkness would be coming fast—despite the fire atop the building—and soon it was going to be cold.

  Besides.

  Something didn’t feel right about the city ahead of her, and her wandering attention and weakened physical condition were a life-threatening liability at the moment.

  She needed to rest.

  To sleep off some of the day’s weariness and regain a little mental clarity.

  She pulled her rifle out of the tree fork and slowly began to move from dead tree to dead tree, working her way toward the convenience store, stopping every few feet to listen.

  Twenty minutes later she had made it to the windowless side of the building. She leaned her deer rifle against the bricks and slipped out of her pack. Once she’d leaned it against the building she opened the top pocket and pulled out her 9mm, an 18th birthday gift from her grandfather.

  Sadie had held onto the pistol the last eight years, despite the small hassle of obtaining a legal permit for its possession, and despite her last boyfriend’s irrational fear of it. Still, she’d rarely fired it, and doubted she could do much with it unless she could get some practice in.

  The only problem with that was the lack of ammunition—and the likelihood that letting off a bunch of shots was likely to bring people looking for the source of the gunfire.

  As the last of the light began to fade and the coldness began to settle on her, she put her ear against the brick wall.

  All she could hear was the beating of her own heart.

  “Okay,” she whispered, and took a deep breath through her MIT t-shirt.

  She moved along the brick wall until she reached the back of the building, then dropped to her knees and peered around the corner into the rear parking lot.

  The back door was wide open.

  “Crap,” she said.

  Sadie hated scouting buildings. Some gung-ho G.I. Joe moron might like it, but she couldn’t stand the way her guts cramped and her hands shook and the bitter taste of fear and adrenaline came into her mouth.

  She stepped softly, making sure to step on the balls of her feet as she went. A yard from the open rectangle, she pushed herself flat against the building and listened.

  She forced herself to count to a hundred before moving her nose to within an inch of the door frame. The slice of the room she could see was empty. The floor was filthy, covered with crumpled paper and overturned and crushed cardboard boxes. She moved forward to see more of the room and saw the entire floor was covered in dust. She could see no footprints, though that didn’t mean someone hadn’t tossed dust over where they’d stepped.

  Sadie dropped down to a squat and scooped up a handful of dust in her free hand. Then she straightened up and stepped quickly inside, ready to throw the dust into the air and spray bullets across the room.

  It was unnecessary.

  The back room had been trashed and looted. All that remained was the garbage she’d noticed, along with a few overturned metal shelves and a dozen bottles of various chemicals scattered over the floor: Clorox, Pine Sol, Liquid Plumber, and several others she couldn’t identify in the dim light.

  A yellow mop bucket lay on its side in a corner. Next to it was the roof access ladder, a steel contraption attached to the wall.

  Sadie didn’t see the mop that belonged to the bucket, and wondered briefly where it could be.

  Next to the bucket was a white gallon bottle with a label that read “Black Swan Manufacturing.” Despite her taut nerves, she couldn’t resist nudging the bottle with her foot so she could read the label better. It said “Muriatic Acid.”

  Sadie shrugged, not understanding why a convenience store would need a rust remover. Then she caught a whiff of old urine and her mind registered the hundreds of little black blobs scattered over the dusty floor: rat turds.

  A door leading into the store’s interior stood open in front of Sadie. She stepped quickly through it, half-expecting a thundering “boom” to go off and a bullet to slam into her chest. But the thundering boom didn’t come, and the only thing she felt in her chest was her hammering heart.

  Breathing deep and trying to calm herself, she walked along the empty shelves, checking the spaces in between them for any packaged food that might have fallen to the floor and been missed by looters or starving scavengers.

  There was nothing.

  The store was as empty as her belly.

  Lightning kept flashing outside, lighting up the store’s interior for microseconds, then quickly going out. Some of the windows in the front and around the door had bullet holes in them. Somehow water had gotten in and soaked the walls, causing mold to grow. The whole store smelled like a freezer that had been left open to thaw out.

  On the cashier’s counter at the front of the store the register was open and empty.

  “Wonder what they spent their wealth on,” she said, examining the cardboard someone had taped over the small smashed window down where the cashier’s feet would be.

  It was the only broken window in the place, and she considered trying to drop the cash register down next to the cardboard to make it harder to enter there.

  She’d already set her gun down and put her hands on the register when a rustle at the back of the store made her snatch her gun up and spin around to aim at whoever was coming at her.

  But no one was coming at her. Instead, as she took a few steps toward the rustling, she heard scurrying feet.

  “Hi,” she said to the rats. “Thanks for having me.”

  Then she continued onward to the cold cases.

  The cold cases’ sealed glass doors had kept the dust and mold and rats out, and since the access door had remained closed and locked with a heavy padlock, the cold case was about as as close to a five star hotel as you were going to get in an apocalypse.

  Sadie quickly retrieved her rifle and pack from outside, and sat them beside the open back door. She took a few more seconds to check out the other side of the building and get a look at the burning building.

  The flames atop the building had grown, and black smoke was billowing upward to the sky. She could smell the smoke now, which was heavy and bitter. The lightning was still dancing around the rooftops across the city—a fact that further reinforced her decision to seek shelter.

  She’d seen lightning clusters like this before—had in fact almost been killed by one in the hills of central New York. The best thing to do when the lightning turned vicious like this was to find a hole in the ground and crawl inside it.

  Sadie was just about to run back inside when another flash of lightning struck the burning building again. She thre
w her arm up to shield her eyes—too late—but in the second that the world turned white she saw fresh blood in the dust out near the edge of the parking lot.

  Lots of blood.

  And drag marks.

  Then she was running, choking down a scream as the thunder exploded behind her. She streaked to the back door, scooping up her rifle and pack and leaping into the building.

  She spun quickly and slung the door closed. The thunder was still rolling, so she barely even heard the door slam in its frame. Since the lock was still intact, she shot the deadbolt home and leaned against the door.

  She was shaking. Grinding her teeth to stop them from chattering.

  It had been a lot of blood, and it had been fairly fresh.

  The drag marks had lead in several directions. At least four, as if whatever had been killed had been carved up or ripped apart and carried away.

  “Why didn’t I go around?” she moaned, then began to take deep breaths.

  The rat turd stench finally got her moving again, and she grabbed her pack and gun and carried them to the front of the store. Without looking around she went straight to the cold cases. She gave one of the doors a jerk and kicked upward at the wire and plastic shelving where soft drinks, bottled water, flavored teas, and beer had once been displayed.

  The shelves gave way easily, coming out of the metal posts that held them in place. When she’d kicked out the bottom four shelves, she bent low and stepped over the lip of the cold case, dragging her pack and gun in behind her.

  Once inside, she fit the wire shelves back where they’d been. It wasn’t much camouflage for her position, but she was too sick and freaked to do much else.

  If she was feeling sane—if she wasn’t shaking with fear and malnutrition—she would crawl back out and toss dust over her foot prints. She’d also set her rat trap out and try to catch some protein.

  But she wasn’t feeling sane or healthy.

  She was losing it.

  She had underestimated what this long trip was going to take.

  She had underestimated how horrible the effects of the Crisis would actually be—despite the time she’d spent hiding out on the outskirts of Boston.