Crisis Event: Gray Dawn Read online

  Part of her wished she’d gone west toward Akron. At least I-80 might have allowed for faster progress. But after her experience with Youngstown, she wanted nothing to do with any cities anytime soon. She might be heading toward Columbus, but she’d be skirting it from twenty to thirty miles out. There would be no more cities in her immediate future.

  When her nerves could no longer take the intense stress of her nighttime ride, she pulled off the old highway into an open field full of tall dead grass and shrubs.

  She killed the engine.

  The headlamp gave her a good look at what was out in the field ahead, and she tried to memorize the landscape in the glow of the light.

  Then she cut the headlamp, climbed off the bike, and rolled it forward.

  The silence was unnerving after the hours she’d spent with the hum of the Honda’s engine in her ears. Even with the ringing sound echoing in her head, the black and silent darkness made her feel as if she was the last person alive on earth. The only sound left in the world was an occasional wind gust, and the soft rustle as the Honda’s tires, and the thump of her boots crushing the dusty dry grass.

  After rolling the bike out into the darkness she found a clump of bushes she’d seen in the glow of her headlamp. The clump would give good cover in the unlikely event anyone came cruising down the road and spotlighting the fields in the middle of the night.

  She unslung her pack and pulled her rifle loose. Her arms felt rubbery, and she had to exert a lot of energy to keep from dropping it. She pulled out her 9mm and tucked it into her waist band. A quick walk away from the bushes led her to the short dead tree she’d also seen before she’d turned out the lights. She stood behind the tree and waited as her eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  After a few minutes, Sadie could make out the shapes of the bushes where the bike was parked. She settled down to wait, scanning the landscape and road out of the corner of her eyes so that her night vision was enhanced. After ten minutes she felt sure no one was going to come walking up on the clump of bushes. Even if someone had heard or seen her, the likelihood of them being able to find her in the darkness without making noise or showing a light was slim.

  She began to relax.

  She was in the middle of nowhere—her favorite place in the world—and despite the dead world surrounding her, she could almost imagine what it was like to be out on her grandfather’s land, walking among the mesquite trees and sage plants and dandelions, or resting beneath the tall Live Oaks with their twisted, creepy boughs and branches.

  Like all nights these days, it got cold quickly, so after another ten minutes of no movement or light on the landscape, Sadie returned to her bike, spread an old camo tarp over it, and using her multi-tool, hacked branches from the surrounding shrubs and bushes.

  She removed the dead leaves and tossed them beneath tarp, creating a pile next to the bike. Then she sharpened one end of each stick and made stakes to hold the tarp in place.

  The bike became the ridgeline in her makeshift lean-too, and she hammered the stakes into the ground with the blunt end of her folding hatchet. After folding down the tarp and closing up the back of the bike with another pair of stakes, Sadie threw her pack into the entrance of her motorcycle tent and climbed in. The hot engine warmed the tent quickly, and after she spread a silver thermal sheet over the leaves to provide ground cover, she sat down.

  Her legs were sore, she realized, and she would be stiff tomorrow after a night of sleeping on the ground. But she felt content. She dug into her pack, feeling around until she found the can of beef stew. It was a big can, but she was starving. She knew the squirts would be coming anyway, so she opened the can with her P-51 can opener and devoured its contents, swallowing big gulps of the cold fatty meat.

  “The things you get used to,” she said.

  Soon her shrunken belly began to feel full. Still, she kept eating, enjoying the feeling of eating beyond what she needed to eat, and finished off the entire can of beef stew.

  Her full belly soon brought on a wave of drowsiness, so she lay down with her feet next to the back wheel and put her head on her pack.

  She closed her eyes and thought about the chemical process the brain stomach started up to aid digestion. She remembered a course she’d taken as an undergraduate, one that had taught her all about the body’s various chemical processes. She heard the voice of a young professor she’d enjoyed listening to, and soon she slipped into that barely conscious dream state where you’re aware of your surroundings, but aren’t quite ready to fall into the black oblivion beyond awareness.

  She thought about her grandfather, using her imagination to escape the scary gray reality her life had become, and to picture exactly what it was like to be inside the living room of his house when the lights were out except for the blazing fire in the fireplace.

  Soon she was asleep.

  Chapter 8

  In Meadville, Pennsylvania, no one was sleeping. That was because all of the humans who hadn’t killed themselves or been murdered or executed or forced to evacuate the area by FEMA were now packed tight inside three military Humvees.

  The Humvees crawled along the shoulder of the road, sometimes dipping down toward the ditch to bypass abandoned vehicles, occasionally slamming a bumper into an abandoned car or truck to nudge it toward the center stripe or send it toppling into the ditch.

  As the column slogged forward, a string of lightning bolts streaked down from the sky in front of them, passing from left to right across the dusty horizon like an electrical monster stalking north toward Lake Erie.

  A sudden Bam!-Bam!-Bam!-Bam! sounded as the gunner in the lead Humvee sent a burst of bullets slamming into the cars ahead.

  “Whoooooooweeeeee!” the gunner screamed, and waved an arm in the air as he swung loose on the sling seat.

  Inside the cab of the second Humvee, General Titman ground his teeth.

  “Goddamn idiot reserves,” he muttered. Then he asked, “Who is that man, Corporal?”

  “Private Sakris, Sir,” the communications specialist in the front seat said.

  “Remind me to tear him a new asshole the next time we stop.”

  “Yes sir,” the corporal said with a grin. His name was Riley Kane, and he didn’t really want to grin at the general since private Sakris was his best friend. But Kane wasn’t sure if the general was making a joke or not, and one thing he’d learned during his time in the Army was that when you were dealing with officers it was best to assume they thought they were being cute or funny or both.

  When the lead Humvee lurched suddenly left for the sole purpose of bouncing over a motorcycle and sending it spinning back toward the second Humvee, General Titman had to clench his fists and look down at the map he was studying just to keep from screaming.

  Sergeant first class Ben Blakely glanced at Titman, suppressing his desire to pull his pistol out of his hip holster and make a hole in the jumped-up general’s left ear drum. From the moment the general had come over to Meadville from Greensburg a week earlier, he’d made himself an absolute menace. His first question to Blakely had been, “You got any women to screw?”

  It had gone downhill from there.

  In all of Blakely’s twelve years of regular army service he’d never met a less qualified, less dignified officer than Titman. Sidelined on an Okinawan base forever, stuck at the rank of major in a Quartermaster Battalion, the only reason Titman had jumped to general was attrition: he was one of the last bastards left standing when much of the U.S. military and population no longer were.

  “I guess that counts for something,” Blakely said to himself. “That, and the fact that he knows where all the supply depots are located.”

  The convoy rolled onward, and Blakely sat in silence, watching the lightning dance across the gray sky ahead. In no time he’d slipped into a daydream about his cabin in the mountains of West Virginia—a cabin he never expected to see again. Not with what had happened to D.C. Certainly not with Titman running the show. After this d
umb mission, the maniac would probably order them to invade what was left of Canada.

  “You got something for me, corporal?” Titman asked corporal Kane, for at least the sixth time that day.

  “No sir, not yet, sir,” Kane said, struggling to keep the frustration out of his voice. He wasn’t frustrated that he couldn’t pick up a transponder signal from seventy miles away. That wasn’t unusual when you had a wall of volcanic ash and dust between you and the transmitter you were trying to catch a signal from. He was frustrated that the general was harassing him about it. “I’ll check it more often, sir. Make sure I don’t miss it.”

  “Much appreciated, corporal,” Blakely said, a passive indictment of Titman’s impatience and unwillingness to let people do their jobs.

  “What the hell is he doing up there?” the driver of the second Humvee asked, suddenly, interrupting Blakely’s inventory of the general’s long list of character flaws.

  It was a good question.

  Without warning, the lead Humvee slammed on its brakes and swerved right, sending its rear end slewing around to the left.

  Duck, the driver of the second Humvee, had no alternative but to brake and swerve right as well—unless he wanted to slam into the side of the vehicle ahead of him.

  After skidding to a halt with his own ass end now sideways, Duck looked back through the right rear end of the Humvee and gripped the wheel hard.

  As he was in the habit of doing when he was scared or excited, he made a quacking noise and yelled “Brace up!”

  The third Humvee was coming fast, but at the last second, it swerved slightly and slammed on the brakes and slewed sideways.

  When the dust settled a few seconds later Sergeant Blakely jerked his M4 carbine up to the ready. He reached for the door handle but the general said, “Sit tight.”

  “We got hostiles, sir,” Blakely said, and sat staring at the scene developing before them.

  “You heard me, sergeant,” the general said.

  Doesn’t want to lose his personal bodyguard, Blakely thought

  Up at the front of the first Humvee, an obviously crazy man in a bloody t-shirt was standing astride a pink, girl’s bicycle in the middle of the road.

  “Slip inside my Sleeping Bag!” the man yelled. Then without warning he reached behind his back and pulled out a big, nickel-plated revolver.

  Before the lead vehicle’s gunner, Reggie Sakris, could respond, the crazy man pointed his pistol and fired.

  The big slug tore into Reggie’s face, slicing between his helmet and the top edge of his heavy-duty respirator mask. Reggie’s head snapped backward and his body followed, his fingers clamping down on the .50 cal’s trigger mechanism and sending a burst of bullets and sparking tracers into the side of an old brick building from the 19th century. The giant slugs tore great gaping holes into the structure and opened its interior to the gray outside world.

  The heavy gun quickly shook the dying man’s hand off the trigger and Reggie bounced off the back of the gunner’s chair and slumped forward. On his way down, his bloody face smashed into the twin handles of the .50 cal, sending the barrel skyward.

  As soon as he’d shot Reggie, the man on the pink bike shuffled his feet, sending himself and the bike rolling forward. He steered with one hand and pointed his pistol at the driver of the lead Humvee with the other. He fired shot after shot at the driver, each slug bouncing off the Humvee’s bullet resistant glass until the last shot shattered it and sent the slug through.

  “Shit!” Sergeant Blakely said, gripping his M4, his finger on the trigger. He reached for the door handle again.

  “Why in the fucking name of Jesus are we stopped?” the general suddenly bellowed.

  Sergeant Blakely had already popped the door open when the general said, “Ass in the seat, Sergeant.”

  “Yes sir,” Blakely said, wishing he’d put that hole in the general’s ear drum.

  “And you,” the general said to Kane, “tell that asshole up there to get that patrol vehicle moving!”

  “Yessir,” Kane said, and tried to radio the lead Humvee. But by then, the crazy man on the pink bike had run out of bullets. He tossed aside the shiny revolver and jumped up onto the pedals of the bike. His legs powered up and down like pistons, quickly pushing him forward toward the second Humvee.

  “He’s coming at us,” Blakely said, and got ready to die.

  He’d seen this kind of thing before, on a rotation through the Middle East, when he’d seen friends blown up by suicide bombers. He took the breath he expected to be his last, but then the crazy guy on the pink bike jerked his handlebars left and raced into the gap between the first and second Humvees.

  This was the moment the gunner atop the third Humvee decided to fire. He swiveled his gun around to his right and aimed downward. When he opened up, bullets slammed into the rear end of the first Humvee, punching holes in both tires and denting the hardened steel body. Sparks flew in all directions as the tracers in the belt ignited and burned.

  The crazy man on the bike came out from between the vehicles and steered left, putting two Humvees between himself and the gunner. Then he jumped his bike up onto a sidewalk and turned right and pedaled hard, racing along the side of a dust-coated building.

  The gunner never stopped firing. He was in the zone. He kept the bullets spraying, blowing out the windows and shredding the tires of vehicles parked on the side of the road, then shooting holes in the building next to the crazy man. A few bullets came near hitting the crazy man, but soon so much dust was billowing up it became impossible to see. The gun chattered on until its belt ran out and silence returned to the dead, gray world.

  “Pop goes the weasel!” the man on the bike shrieked into the silence. Then he fired six times at the convoy with another gun he must have had holstered somewhere out of sight. The bullets banged off the third Humvee’s protective plate armor and went zinging off in all directions--including through the glass window of a barber shop. When he was out of bullets the crazy man threw the gun away.

  Sgt. Blakely, no longer willing to sit idly by, jumped out of the Humvee and ran around the back of it, his M4 at the ready. As soon as he saw the pink bike through the haze of dust that had been kicked up, he fired, sending a three bullet burst toward the crazy man. But the crazy man had put too much distance between them and was already turning down an alley.

  Blakely’s bullets smashed into the corner of the gray building, narrowly missing the crazy man as he disappeared from sight. Chunks of red dust erupted from the brick exterior, adding a small splash of color to the gray world. But then Blakely was in action, too busy to worry about his near miss.

  “Get Sakris down from there,” Blakely shouted, not knowing whether or not it was too late for the corporal behind the .50 cal. He sprinted for the alley, hoping to catch up with the crazy man and put him down.

  As sometimes occurred when he was in a firefight, Blakely imagined himself from above, his mind detached and cold as his body obeyed its training and experience.

  He reached the mouth of the alley and slammed against the edge of the gray building, then following the instructions of his self-visualization, whipped his rifle around the corner and let go with another three bullet burst, aiming low to compensate for the excitement and adrenaline rush of battle.

  The crazy man on the pink bike was there, three quarters of the way down the alley, not seeking to evade pursuit, not worried about Blakely’s impending retaliation.

  Blakely’s bullets smashed into the pink bike’s rear wheel and sprocket, exploding the tire and shattering the cheap metal beneath it and tearing teeth away from the gear so that the chain quickly slithered off the big sprocket and fell useless to the dusty ground.

  “Pop goes the weasel!” the crazy man yelled as his bike wobbled and toppled over onto its side.

  Joy surged in Blakely’s chest he watched the lunatic slam head first into the ground, flip sideways, and roll hard into a dust-covered dumpster. The dumpster made a “whoomp” so
und and dust fell to the ground, exposing the dark green paint beneath it.

  The man lay crumpled and unmoving, moaning and twitching, occasionally whining, “Slip Inside My Sleeping Bag!” as if repeating the old ZZ Top song lyrics like a mantra could save him from his impending death.

  It couldn’t, since Blakely had already decided he was going to capture him, take him back to base, try him, and hang his ass from the flagpole.

  With that in mind, he ran down the alley, rifle at the ready. He covered the forty yards between them in less than ten seconds, his boots digging into the dust and spraying it out behind him as he ran. He skidded to a halt less than six feet from the crazy man, his rifle pointed his face.

  “Hands up!” Blakely said, ready to fire if the man didn’t comply immediately.

  The crazy man didn’t comply. Instead he started shrieking with a sing-song voice.

  “Army strong. Dicks are long. Drink the water. Rape the daughter. Laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh laugh!”

  “Shut up!” Blakely said.

  His finger, already squeezing the trigger, eased up.

  The man was insane. Probably so far out of his mind he didn’t even know he’d just shot two U.S. soldiers.

  “Taking lives, raping wives, being all they can be!”

  “Shut up,” Blakely yelled. “Put your hands on your head.”

  Surprisingly, the crazy man complied while rolling up to his knees and standing.

  “Greensburg’s not the same since the tit man Army came,” he said. Then while Blakely stood with his mouth hanging open, the crazy man saluted Blakely and executed a left face. He marched forward and when he got six steps across the alley he performed an about face and marched back across toward the dumpster, his shoes stomping the gray dust. He began chanting the words to “Sleeping Bag” again.