Breakdown: Season One (5 page)

Chapter 4 – Barbeque

John set his shoulder against the doorframe of the car.

“Okay, just like last time…
push
!”

He had awoken long before the muted rays of dawn pierced the smoke-filled sky, and he was working with several men and women from the neighborhood to create a wall of cars to surround the block. One of the men had an old diesel tractor from the early 70s that still ran, and they were using it to flip cars over onto their sides. They’d already blocked one of the four intersections leading into their neighborhood.

The car rolled into place, the tractor lifted it, and the wheels were removed. Next, the tractor flipped the car, and men used poles from street signs to help stabilize it. They would use the cars like the Native Americans used buffalo, not wasting a piece. Every bit would have its job. They could use the tires to build potato towers, or they could pound them full of dirt to build a watchtower resistant to small arms fire. Windshield glass would be cobbled together to create makeshift greenhouses to extend the growing season.

An honest-to-goodness dinner bell rang, cueing the men to stop their work for the morning. “Great job, ladies and gentlemen! Let’s get some grub.”

Workers lined up and pulled paper cards from their pockets. The cards were sort of a makeshift ration program, designed to help keep the people in the neighborhood accountable. Each day, workers would volunteer for two five-hour work shifts. After each shift, the shift manager would punch their card with the specifically-shaped punch for that crew for that day.

Breakfast and lunch were covered. Dinner was up to the individual to provide for himself. This was done for a couple of reasons. Mostly it was done to encourage community. Working, cooking, and eating together created a bond among neighbors. That bond was what a person would rely on to get them through this mess. Another reason dinner wasn’t covered is that it gave the members of the community time to pause and reflect. If they wanted three meals a day, they’d need to have their own gardens.

Seed potatoes, tires, soil, and seeds for plants like corn, carrots, and onions were shared readily, for free, the idea being that by feeding your neighbor now, and giving them the means to feed themselves in the future, you’d have one less enemy when the starving time hit and one more ally if the neighborhood came under attack.

John was happy they’d started working on this a couple of years ago. It meant a lot of the groundwork had already been laid. Committees were already in place for building defenses, cooking community meals, neighborhood watch, and, most importantly, community outreach.

They were about ten families strong at this point. They all had differing amounts of supplies laid back, but the overall consensus was that they could make it through a year on what they had stored. Of course, they’d be trapping, planting, and eventually scavenging to try and supplement what they could grow, but ultimately they’d need to be providing for themselves.

Stepping up to the chow line, John smiled at his wife, Talia, and daughter, Juliana, as they worked to feed their neighbors a simple meal of bread, beans, and rice.

It was a good feeling. They’d worked as a neighborhood to put together basic staples; wheat, white rice, dried beans, salt, sugar, honey, spices. They’d use these to create simple meals that the community could live off of. They’d supplement meat into their diets as they caught it.

Dinner would be a time for the community to get some vegetables into the mix.

Men and women both walked through the neighborhood openly armed. They’d all received training on weapon safety. Several were currently or had recently been in the military, and there were a couple of other law enforcement officers as well. They’d hit the jackpot when they had their first community block party a couple of years back and started forming these relationships.

It had taken work to get all of them on board, but after the events of yesterday, John knew it had all been worth it. He just wished they’d had another year or so to prepare. Adding another ten or twenty prepared households to their “family” would do a lot of good.

One day at a time.

John hoped in his heart that his community could connect with a community of prepared folks farther north to help establish an eventual trade route. They’d take an inventory of skill sets and barter them, along with supplies.

John uttered a quick prayer of thanks, then tucked into his meal. It paid to have a wife from Honduras when you were talking about how to make beans and rice taste this good. He smiled at the thought. They’d met when he was on a mission trip fifteen years earlier and had fallen in love fast.

A man rushed up, one of the newer arrivals named Clay.

“Um, John, I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch, but one of our recon crews just got back. They were scouting the airport. Found a survivor among one of the crashes. Still unconscious.”

“Well, don’t stand there gawking, man, grab Talia. She’ll take a look at him.”

John and Talia followed Clay to a nearby house. The man was laid out on a cot, his suit badly tattered and scorched.

The smell of charred meat mixed with disinfectant filled the room.

“Burnt up pretty good, but it looks like it’s mostly surface stuff, hands look pretty rough, and there’s a nasty gash on his head.” Talia shook her head, frustrated, “Why is this man still dressed? I need to assess his injuries.”

“We tried to take his suit off, ma’am, but parts of it were grafted to his skin.”

Talia started cutting away pieces of his suit that weren’t melted to him, and then she began to gently remove the bits of fiber that were stuck to his skin. He awoke and let out a raw, pained scream.

“Relax. We’re the good guys,” Talia smiled, dabbing some ointment on the burns.

“What’s your name?”

“L…L…Linus. My name…is Linus.”

Chapter 5 — Breakfast of Champions

When Thom awoke, he almost wished he hadn’t. He hurt like hell all over from the night before. Running around the city in hiking boots and a pair of dress socks wasn’t doing him any favors, but most of it was from the couple of times he’d run into trouble.

Well, that, and sleeping on slimy bricks with only his arm for a pillow. It could have been that, too. At least his lungs felt better. Breathing clean air was great.

Herbie must have heard Thom stirring, because he started talking not long after. “Takes some getting used to, but it’s not too bad after a few nights. First night I slept down here, I was too sore to climb out the next day. Thought I’d die down here.” He laughed heartily at his past misfortune.

“Glad someone thinks this is funny. Give me a hand?” Thom reached out, and a weathered old hand found his in the darkness. There was strength in that hand, and it held true as he helped Thom haul himself to his feet.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.”

“So let’s get out of here. Long walk and all that.”

“Hold on, hold on, breakfast first!”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

There was the sound of some scraping, and then Thom saw that Herbie had started a small fire and had some coals going. On the coals was a tin can with the paper peeled off and a couple of holes poked in the top.

“Hobo cookin’.” Herbie grinned toothlessly.

“What’s for breakfast?”

“Well, I thought about eating you, but figured I’d wait. Besides, I had a can of little smokies and thought I’d share.”

Thom laughed. “Sounds great, Herbie. Thanks.”

After a minute, the feast was ready. Herbie used a can opener on an old Swiss Army Knife and removed the lid.

“Guests go first,” he said earnestly.

Smiling, Thom reached toward the can and was met with a sharp rap on his knuckles for the trouble.

“Prayer first! Ain’t your momma teach you that much?”

Thom shook his hand, his pride wounded more than anything else, and he willed the pain to subside. Herbie was right, though, so he bowed his head.

“Lord, thank you for my friend Herbie. Please bless the meal he’s provided for us and the hands that have prepared it. While you’re at it, Lord, please watch over the innocents that are out there. They need a shepherd now more than ever. Amen.”

Thom nodded his thanks and reached in, thumb and forefinger ready to grasp the tiny sausage. His fingers touched the sauce and burned instantly.

Herbie laughed uproariously. One would have thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen.

“Ow! Hey now, that’s not funny!”

“You say a longer prayer, you wouldn’t have gotten burned so bad! ’Bout the funniest damn thing I’ve seen since the 70s. Damn, I miss
Sanford and Sons
,” he laughed. “Sorry…you live on the streets as long as I have, your humor’s bound to get a bit warped. Watch, I’ll show ya how it’s meant to be done.”

He flicked the knife’s blade out and jabbed it into the can, spearing a weenie. Gingerly, he took it in hand and popped it into his mouth, doing that weird inhale/exhale thing that comes so natural when eating something too hot.

“Woooooooo, you weren’t kiddin’, boy! That’s hot!”

Now it was Thom’s turn to laugh.

Taking a cue from Herbie, Thom got his pocketknife out, and the two of them began to eat.

After a taking a minute to clean up his cooking area (“Never know, might head back this way after we pick up your daughter from school. Always leave your home tidy so when you get back you don’ have ta clean!”), both men climbed up the ladder and into the hall.

The steel door was untouched. The guys that were after them must not have seen them slip by. Daylight streamed in as Herbie cracked open the door. It seemed like the brightest light Thom had ever seen.

Herbie stood there, waiting.

“What’s wrong? Let’s get out of here.”

“Hold your horses and let your eyes adjust. Look at the light. Last thing you want to do is step out there and be blind for thirty seconds when someone could be out there ready to take your head off your shoulders. Don’t you have a lick of sense?”

Thom stuttered, trying to come up with a witty retort, but the old man had him beat. Thom smiled after a moment. It was sort of nice to be the “young pup” of the group. He was always a good ten or fifteen years older than his peers at the cube-farm, some of them fresh out of college. He could have been their dad. Thom hoped those kids were doing all right in this.

Their eyes finally adjusted, and the two of them headed out into the alleyway.

Scanning left and then right, and then left again, like a child getting ready to cross the street, Herbie finally motioned for Thom to follow him.

The city smelled of fire and brimstone. Thom’s best guess was that the sewers had begun to back up. To make it worse, the smell of stringent smoke hung thick in the air. From the smell of things, he guessed the fires were still going strong in other parts of the metro.

Between the sewage, decomposing bodies, and lack of clean water, Thom thought, this place was outbreak ground zero waiting to happen. They needed to get far away before that happened. Making a mental note, Thom gave himself 48 hours to be out of town and somewhere a bit more rural. It was an aggressive schedule and likely meant they wouldn’t get any sleep tonight.

Walking farther into the alley, Herbie grabbed a piece of cardboard that had been resting against the wall and yanked it out of the way to reveal…a shopping cart.

“Still here. Good deal. Let’s go.”

Thom stood there, a bit confused, but followed behind as he pushed the cart into the street.

“We’re headed north. Broadway Bridge gonna be clogged with cars…not to mention it runs right by the downtown airport. Your friend was right about the rail line. That’s our best bet at this point. No train gonna be running just yet. Too many computers on those things these days. Diesel engines, though. Might be they can get some replacement parts somewhere that managed to avoid the magnetic pulse. Would do this country a lot of good to get a train up and running.”

“How do you figure, Herbie?”

“Well, we get a train running from the wheat fields of Kansas to the granaries downtown, we save a lot of lives and keep good wheat from rotting in the fields. If we can get enough folks to harvest it. Gonna take whole communities to keep one another alive. Lone wolf stuff ain’t gonna cut it for too long. Those folks may have a year or two of supplies stocked up, but what happens when they get sick? No one to take care of ’em. What happens when they need to start growing their own food? Ain’t enough hours in the day to trap, hunt, garden, harvest, preserve the food, cook the food, eat the food.”

“I gotcha. So, trains are important. I’ll keep that in mind if we run into any engineers.” Thom grinned, thinking he’d made a joke, but Herbie just nodded.

“That’s the most sensible thing you said all day.”

Thom just couldn’t win.

The streets were nearly deserted; not even the birds were chirping. The two men continued on, passing through a couple of blocks of completely burnt-out houses, where the rubble was still too hot to even get close. It was like someone had dropped a bomb on the city, which was true, in a way.

“Herbie, I gotta ask. When do we need to start worrying about radiation? Fallout, all that stuff?”

He laughed. “Thom, there won’t be any fallout from this. Maybe some political fallout. No radiation, though.”

Thom was confused. Again. Obviously.

“The EMP was set off by a nuke exploding over us, though, right? Isn’t that what happens? I’m young, but I remember seeing those old duck-and-cover videos from the tail end of the Cold War.”

“Thom, you’re going about it wrong. Fallout is what you get when a nuke detonates at ground level. Basically, it irradiates all of the debris and dust and dirt, and the superheated air lifts it up into the lower atmosphere where it can mix with water droplets and be carried hundreds of miles away to rain down on the land, causing all sorts of horrible things.”

Thomas nodded, understanding.

“So no ground level explosion, no fallout?”

Herbie smiled and clapped Thom on the back.

“Now you’re following. So, thankfully, that’s not what our attacker intended to happen, or you and I would have never seen it coming. We’d have been vaporized, or burned to a crisp, or just suffered lethal radiation poisoning and died a relatively slow and painful death.”

“Cheery. Thanks, Herbie.”

“No problem, Thom. But you’re missing the big picture.”

“Big picture?”

“Someone goes to all this trouble to nuke the United States to cause as much havoc and loss of life as possible. Those opening minutes probably killed more than Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined, but they left our land radiation-free.”

It dawned on Thom then. “You’re saying there’s going to be an invasion.”

Herbie nodded.

“Afraid so, son. Afraid so.”