Apocalypse Weird: Genesis (The White Dragon Book 1) (7 page)

It took her a while to put Officer Carpenter’s belt around her waist. All she wanted to do was cry. There was a bridge between her current location and the exit. It had a guardrail and no emergency lane. If she got stuck there, it would be impossible to continue unless she wanted to backtrack and find a way down the steep incline to another road. To try to do that in the dark would be suicide. When she looked through the shattered windshield, the green shapes of the car roofs were now fractured and even less recognizable.

She thought about kicking the windshield out of its frame but decided against it. It would be too loud and possibly alert whoever else was out there. So she stuck her head out the open side window and continued to drive. After about three hundred feet, she came to a straight, washed-out, green line to her right. The bridge. Five car lengths ahead, she reached a dead-end.

She sat there for a moment, listening to the low gurgle of the engine.

“You sure you want this car?” her dad had said a few weeks back when they stood at the car dealership in Lindenhurst.

“Yes!” she’d replied. “That’s the one, dad!”

“You know the gas mileage on this thing is gonna stink. And you’re gonna have to pay for the gas yourself.”

“I don’t care. I can babysit some more.”

“Well… if you’re sure, I’ll get it for you.”

I might die.
The thought cut into her memory. She had thought about dying before. But it had never occurred to her that her life would end in complete darkness, killed by some thugs in the middle of a highway on Long Island.

It was as if her hands acted on their own when she put the Jeep in reverse and backed up. There had been a gap in the row of cars just when she’d entered the bridge. She’d noticed that most of the cars were left standing in the direction of the non-existent emergency lane. As if the drivers, the moment the blindness hit them, instinctively steered their cars to the right. Maybe the left lane was relatively clear.

She found the opening and drove into the center lane and from there to the left. For a moment, she wished her dad had given her a Mini Cooper for her birthday. The Jeep was hard to maneuver around the other cars and much wider. But she had liked the fact that her seat was higher up than that of most cars, even large SUV’s.

A few car lengths ahead, on the other side of the bridge, it looked as if a car had smashed into one of the concrete dividers that was so common for the highways around here. Even the largest highways on the island didn’t have a median, except some that were close to the water. In its place, there was only a low concrete divider wall separating the two directions. When Casey got to the car, she could make out that all four doors were open and its left front wheel was on top of the divider. The driver must have slammed into the wall with great speed. There was a car to its right, three, maybe four feet away. No way she would fit through there.

She thought that if she could push the car to the side with the Jeep, she might be able to get past it. But there was another concern she had not even thought about until just now. She had no way of knowing when the gas tank would be empty. She had a full tank yesterday morning. Since then, she had driven to school, home, to the beach, home, and now here. Forty miles maybe? She had no idea how long a tank of gas would last. She felt safe in the Jeep and leaving it was not an option.

They didn’t make a noise when they approached the car. At least, Kasey didn’t hear anything. She was thinking about what to do next and wasn’t aware of the men approaching on the other side of the divider. Her window was open but the engine noise canceled out anything from the outside.

She let out a scream when the hand grabbed her upper arm and pulled her toward the side window. Panicked, she held on to the baseball bat that leaned against her thighs when one of the men pulled her through the window. She landed hard on her hands and knees. The pain in her left side, where her ribs had scraped along the window frame of the Jeep, hit her full force at the same time.

One of the men yelled something at her. She didn’t understand what he said but was sure he spoke French. Another, to her right, pulled her up. For a moment, she felt his breath on her face.
They can see,
she thought. He pushed her toward the French guy who caught her, screamed something at her and pushed her back toward the other one.

Kasey swung the bat out of sheer reflex. She hadn’t thought about it. Hadn’t even felt it still in her right hand. But she swung it nevertheless. She recognized the impact through the bat into her shoulder, similar to when she hit the baseball on the field. She had never given much thought to the fact that she was one of the best batters at her school. Her coach had assured her that she could get a softball scholarship, should she want to. But what she had really wanted to do was surf. She had won some local competitions over the years but decided a few months ago that she wanted to travel for a year or so, to surf the big beaches in Hawaii and Australia and go to college after.

She didn’t hold back when she swung the bat. The smacking sound, the impact she felt and the sensation of warm blood on her face, all happened at once. She swung it again, this time in the opposite direction, but only hit empty space. Someone hit her in the face and she fell, the back of her head slamming into the asphalt. Her right hand found the holster. She didn’t think, didn’t feel anything. Just moved backwards in the dark, hopefully away from her attacker. Small rocks that littered the side of the highway cut into her elbows. She didn’t feel that either.

The gun was in her hand. She slid backwards and hit the divider. “Putain d’amateur!” someone said. It came from straight ahead. There was a sound on her right. Body movement, maybe. She registered a third guy. She felt the trigger below her finger and pulled it. The deafening sound made her ears ring. The recoil pushed her arm upward. She brought it back down and shot again, then moved her arm to the side. Another shot. A body fell to the ground. She couldn’t tell if it was the French guy or the third one. She pulled the trigger again. And again. She realized that she still held the bat in her left hand. She scrambled to her feet, half fell over the divider, found the Jeep and climbed in.

She aimed for the barely visible gap between the two cars and pushed the pedal down. The Jeep hit the car to her right and pushed it to the side in a screeching noise. She found another gap twenty feet ahead and drove into the middle lane. The guardrail stopped. She was past the bridge. From there, she pulled to the right and onto the grass. The ringing in her ears blotted out all the other noises, including the engine. She rolled up the window on the driver’s side hoping that would protect her from another attack, realizing at the same time that this wouldn’t do.

She didn’t remember if she had heard two or three bodies fall. She doubted that the first guy, the one she hit with the bat, was dead. Unconscious maybe, and possibly waking up in a little while. If she was still here then, he might spot her. She wasn’t sure of the other two either, and could only hope that they were injured enough not to follow her.

She vaguely remembered the road parallel to the parkway. When she was young and sitting in the back of the car, her parents in the front seat arguing about something, she’d always imagine riding a horse next to the car. She’d follow the landscape in her imagination, jump over streams and bushes and ride, fast as the wind, holding the same speed as the car she was in.

There was a steep drop from the highway down to the other road. Sylvan Road, she believed it was called. She saw a few cars down there — not more than mere shapes approximately forty feet below. She doubted that someone could drive up that steep incline and onto the highway. And although she had thought before that it was suicide to drive down, she was so desperate that she thought it possible now. Better than to stay here and be attacked again.

She turned the steering wheel and drove onto the slope. All she could see was the fragmented outline of a single car all the way down. She fixed her eyes on it and let go of the brakes. The weight of the Jeep pulled it downward and after a few seconds she was going too fast and hit the brakes again. The tires locked and the car began to slide sideways. It now moved at an angle, no longer straight down. She tried to adjust the steering wheel but the Jeep slid too fast for her to do anything. She knew she had to let go of the brakes if she didn’t want to turn over.

When she was halfway down the incline, she took her foot off the brake. The Jeep rattled and shook as it flew through the underbrush and down the hill. The windshield broke out of its frame and slid off. When she reached the road and hit the brakes, the car slid to a stop in the front lawn of one of the houses that lined Sylvan Road on the other side.

Whenever something had been too stressful for her in the past, she’d tried to concentrate on one single thing, like a word or an image. Right now, the storm of raw emotions that washed over her made it impossible to blot anything out. All she could do was try to stop her hands from shaking.

She let the tears come. She knew she shouldn’t stay here. She had no idea how many of the men she had shot at were actually dead. She wasn’t even sure if the one she hit with the car was alive or not. The thought of possibly having killed someone sat at the threshold of her mind. It had no emotion attached to it yet, it was simply part of the mosaic of insanity that had been her day.

She felt the sickness come on and opened the car door. When she climbed outside and knelt on the ground, feeling the cold grass under her hands and knees, part of her wanted to crawl under a tree somewhere and pretend nothing had happened.

She heard a broken string of words, a left-over echoing fragment of a sentence. It came from up top, across the street and up the incline. She didn’t know what it said. It was French.

At that moment, she made her second mistake of the day. Maybe because she heard the footsteps coming down the hill and through the underbrush — two sets of footsteps — she didn’t think she could make it back into the car and drive away in time. Instead, she crawled past the hedge and toward where she thought the house was. The grass changed to pavement and soon she hit the corner of the house.

She’d hoped that the car would shield her from being seen and the men would be too busy navigating the hill, that they wouldn’t look in her direction. At that moment she recognized her mistake. Fear gripped her. Before, she’d been caught off guard by her attackers and didn’t have time for fear. Now it crawled up inside her like a snake coiling around its prey.

She went along the side of the house toward the back. She didn’t know how many bullets she had left in the magazine. A few. Two. Maybe three. At the back corner, she hit a fence. She didn’t even try to find the gate latch. She climbed over it and landed half on top of two garbage cans. One was open and her leg went three quarters of the way into it before it fell over.

She knew she was making far too much noise. She held her arms in front of her and low to the ground to get at least a little warning of what was coming next.

A garden chair. A round table. Another garden chair. This one was lying on the ground. She stubbed her toe on something hard and unyielding. There was a metal door. Her parent’s house had a similar one in the back yard. Bilco door. She found the latch, opened one side and climbed down the stairs. She closed the hatch behind her.

The door into the basement stood open. Thank God. She entered, slowly making her way through the room. She took the gun out of the holster and stretched out her other arm to get an idea where she was going. Instinctively, she felt that she should hide in the darkest part of the basement. Maybe behind the furnace or under the oil tank, but she knew that wouldn’t work. In order for her to survive this, she knew she had to stop moving right now. She had to turn and face the open door. She had to wait until there was movement, hopefully a green shadow in the dark to show her that someone was there.

She stopped and turned around. The concrete floor felt cool under her bare feet. She lifted the gun with both hands and pointed it at the spot where she thought she’d just come from. Her arms shook so much she had to lower them again. She could always lift them back up, she thought. The fear Kasey felt was unbearable. All she could hear was her own breath echoing through the silence. She knew they must’ve seen the car by now, probably even saw her climb the fence. There was no way out for her from down here, even in the best of circumstances.

Sometimes when she was younger, and throughout the years when she woke up at night, covered in sweat, burning up from a fever that had no cause, she’d go down into the basement and stand on the concrete floor. Maybe that was why she remembered the dream now. This was the basement from her dream. There was a low tunnel and the rough surface of the rock she walked on, piercing the soles of her feet like needles.

When she reached the top, at the end of a steep incline, she found herself in the center of a massive cave. The surface of it was glowing lava. Up ahead, a piece of black rock jutted out of the red liquid. Its top lay in fog so thick it was impossible to penetrate with the eyes. This was where she’d always woken up in her dream.

Now, standing on the concrete floor with the memory flooding her mind, she saw something there that she hadn’t seen before. Below her feet lay a piece of rock. It was black and razor sharp and slightly bigger than a baseball.
I need to throw it
, she thought. She lifted it up. It was lighter than she thought it would be.