Get Out of Denver (Denver Burning Book 1) (2 page)

He laughed in response to whatever the news anchor had said, and the cameraman turned back to the mayor, grinning himself. The producer smirked at McLean and thumbed him the signal to make tracks.

That was all McLean could take. He wouldn’t have made a scene if it would have caused trouble for Carrie, but since she had already been forced out…

“This is a bunch of horse pucky,” he called out, stepping into the camera’s view and standing next to the mayor. “Your mayor here doesn’t have permission to film on these premises, and he doesn’t know a thing about this shelter because he hasn’t set foot inside. He hasn’t spoken with the people who get help here, and he doesn’t know the dedicated, hard-working people who sacrifice to provide care here.”

“Oh, and you do?” the mayor asked in a tone of disgusted disbelief.

“That’s right,” McLean replied. He suddenly felt very foolish in front of the camera, but still had enough rage and adrenaline in his system that he wasn’t about to back down. “I’ve delivered here off and on for five years now. I know these people, both the good people of the church that runs the place, and the clientele they serve. They’re doing a wonderful thing here, and they’re doing it much better than any faceless, bankrupt federal program could.”

The mayor sputtered and snorted, thrown off by this hijacking of his interview. His eyes demanded that the producer do something, but she seemed hesitant to approach the tall man that had butted in, and the cameraman was hiding behind his viewfinder.

“And let me guess, you’re a member of this church, am I right?” the mayor asked in a condescending voice, grasping for leverage against his suddenly public opponent.

“No, I’m not. I’m just a guy that works for a local, small business. A guy that appreciates the hard work and service of Christian people. And a guy, I might add,” he raised his voice, “that doesn’t believe government meddling has improved anything, not a darn thing, since the Constitution was signed in 1787!”

The producer let out a horrified gasp, and the mayor physically recoiled from McLean’s side, stepping away and turning to face him in an aggressive posture.

“Just who are you to come barging in here and prattling about your political views?” the mayor half-yelled. “This is my town, pal. And you and your right-wing nut-job friends are going to
get it
soon. You’re going to see, once we pass our next municipal ordinance on social reform, how we feel about your type around here!”

McLean had had enough. He could see that this wasn’t going anywhere good, for him or for the ideas he believed in. There was just no sense in talking to people who were so obviously corrupt and ideologically backwards that they couldn’t even conceal their open hatred.

“Bring it,” he said, and turned on his heel and walked to his truck. The producer probably would have throttled him if she was physically capable of it, but one look from McLean made her stagger backward.

“Excuse that unfortunate interruption, Dawn,” the mayor said, straightening his tie. “As you can see, the kinds of people that this shelter draws are not exactly who we want in our city.”

McLean started up his truck and revved the engine as loud as it would go, totally drowning out the rest of the interview. He rolled out past the mayor, causing him to step aside to avoid being clipped by the F-250’s side mirror. Then he peeled out, leaving a cloud of acrid smoke framing a nice view of his “Don’t Steal - The Government Hates Competition” bumper sticker.

McLean drove hard. He was steamed. He realized he was tailing the poor guy in front of him too closely, and slowed down, but he still tore away from the next stop so abruptly he left tire marks behind. Annoyed, he headed for the freeway so he could open up on the way to his next delivery without all the little smartcars getting in his way.

He pulled up to a light, the other side of which was the on-ramp to the freeway. While he waited for the light to change, he angrily tapped his thumb on the steering wheel and played back the TV crew run-in in his mind. He had no doubt he’d look like a complete fool when the incident got replayed during the nightly news. He wouldn’t be watching, and nobody he cared about would either. But he wondered if he’d done more damage than good by speaking up that way.

The light turned green, but just as he moved his foot to the accelerator and reached for the stick, a funny thing happened. McLean felt a shiver run through his bones, from head to toe and everywhere in between, and the traffic light blinked. He paused, his foot still hovering over the gas pedal, senses on high alert.

The truck’s radio had gone silent. He could hear his own heart-beat as he looked around, wondering if he was the only one experiencing this strange moment.

As he watched the green light overhead, however, it faded and died out completely. Three circles of black stared back at him.

His radio wasn’t even picking up static, and the digital display was blank. Punching the power button did nothing. But the engine of his ‘76 Ford was still running as smooth as ever.

The other cars at the intersection were all still waiting. It was his turn, and no one behind him could go until he did. Probably, the traffic light would start blinking red in a moment. But as he looked ahead at the on-ramp to the freeway, he got a bad feeling in his gut. So he turned right instead, and rolled on up Bailey Street away from the freeway overpass and on-ramp.

As he went, he noticed one man in the line getting out of his car with a puzzled look on his face. McLean saw another car coming down the street toward the line at the intersection, but instead of joining the other cars at the red light, it coasted to a stop on the shoulder. A hundred feet in front of him on Bailey, another car was braking hard but McLean couldn’t see its brake lights. He knew something wasn’t right; there were too many odd, out of place traffic failures on this stretch of road at once. But confusion still fogged his brain as he struggled to understand what was happening.

Then he climbed far enough up the rise to be able to look back and see the interstate. As he began to catch on to what he was seeing, and he pulled to a stop himself.

Traffic had come to a near standstill on the freeway, but it wasn’t bumper-to-bumper like rush hour. Cars were spaced out as he would have expected at ten o’clock on any Tuesday morning. Moments before, they had obviously been careening down their lanes at high speed. But every single one had come to a stop. Many had made it over to the shoulder, but some had stopped right in the center of the freeway. None of the stationary cars’ brake lights could be seen. It was as if they had all simultaneously turned off their ignitions.

Two cars had been unable to handle the incident as gracefully as the rest. One had scraped along the barrier for several yards and was now resting crookedly across two lanes with a smashed side mirror and dented door. The other had gone nose-first into the median ditch and was making no effort to get out again.

Farther up the freeway, an old beater was slowly nosing its way between the stopped cars, still running and probably too freaked out to go any faster, but too confused to stop. Across the median, a semi going the other direction was also still rolling, but it soon had to stop because it couldn’t get past a cluster of cars that were blocking the lanes.

This strange scene stretched as far up the interstate as McLean could see. Hundreds, probably thousands of cars had all stopped in unison, and now that he looked up and down Bailey, he could see that it had fared no better. The cars at the intersection were all dead, and the ones ahead had stopped moving too. He shivered again, this time at the thought of how close he had come to entering the freeway that was now a hundred-mile-long traffic snarl. He poked at his radio again, and then at the digital VHF two-way he had installed underneath it. That was dead too.

“This isn’t supposed to happen,” McLean breathed. “Not this way, not all the cars at once. What’s going on?”

Instinct told him to get moving, to not stop until he got where he was going, in case his car joined the lifeless state of the others around him. Before he could move, however, a flash of sunlight and movement in the distant sky caught his eye. It was a passenger jet, long and white with a window-punctuated blue stripe along its fuselage. It was descending rapidly, and its nose was pitched too far down. As McLean watch, the gigantic airliner swirled around and around as it neared the ground in a classic death spiral, and then impacted not far from the interstate. He flinched as it hit the ground, and the orange fireball that went up snapped him out of his fascinated trance.

There was another plane falling from the sky farther away, but McLean ignored it. He closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath. Double-checking his observations, he oriented himself in his mind. He was in his truck, in the middle of Denver, and the thing he had feared worst was happening around him, right now. Even a powerful electromagnetic pulse wasn’t supposed to be able to cause disruption on this scale. But whatever the cause, it was happening, and he needed to get out of the city, fast.

The time had come to act, and he knew what to do. Hundreds of hours of forethought and just as much practice kicked in, and he switched his mind into go-mode. He opened his eyes and reached down to the two-way radio under his dash. Flicking the switch from digital to analog mode, he tried to hail someone on the frequency that he and his friends had agreed on for emergency communications. No one responded right away, so he transmitted a message and repeated it, speaking slowly and clearly: “This is number one, White River number one. I am in downtown Denver. I am observing power failure, widespread traffic failure, and multiple downed aircraft. If anyone can hear me, I think it is time to call a Code Red. Some kind of EMP is my guess, and it looks like a worst-case scenario. Code Red. I am heading for Rally Point D. Hope to see everyone there.”

Then he reached back and pulled out the shotgun he kept behind the truck’s seat, a 12-gauge Mossberg pump. Checking that the chamber and the buttstock shell holder were full, he put it back with the butt propped up close to hand. Next he reached into the glove compartment and pulled a map out, setting it on the seat beside him. He knew he needed to get over to Colfax or a smaller street that paralleled it, but he’d have to be flexible depending on the traffic situation.

Thanking God for his reliable old truck, he carefully eased the big vehicle out into the road and continued up Bailey Street toward the next intersection. He turned left onto a quieter residential street, ignoring the people gathering outside their broken-down cars on either side of the road. All the traffic lights were out-- not flashing,
all
the way out-- so he rolled through slowly, watching for any moving vehicles or pedestrians. So far he was the only one still running in this part of town.

How far could he make it, he wondered, until conditions in the city became so bad he’d be forced from his truck? He doubted that he would be able to drive all the way out of Denver. But he was well prepared to make the journey however he needed to.

He got onto Colfax and rolled steadily westward, speeding up when he could but slowing for intersections and obstacles. So far he had no reason to suspect that anyone would try to stop or pursue him, and it would be much wiser to go cautiously. Wrecking the only working vehicle he had access to would slow him down far more than playing it safe.

But that line of reasoning was soon betrayed by much harsher realities. The businesses and storefronts on his left gave way to an open, grassy area overshadowed by well-manicured trees, and the state capitol building loomed against the skyline. Ahead on Colfax, a delivery truck and an SUV had collided and were hanging halfway out into the intersection by the Capitol’s parking lot, forcing McLean to thread the needle between the crash and a planter box on the corner. As he slowed to navigate these obstacles, he looked over at a group of people on the Capitol steps, and for a moment he didn’t believe what he was seeing.

Beyond a statue with a black and red flag draped over its head, six men in black fatigues stood on the steps. Some carried tactical rifles and at first he thought they might be SWAT, but then he saw one of them with a red bandana over his face waving a pistol in each hand at some civilians cowering nearby. A body was lying on the steps in front of him. In the parking lot a police officer lay lifeless next to his patrol car, its door still hanging open. The man in the red bandana was shouting at the people, who looked like Capitol staffers and visitors. Near the front door, two of the black-clad attackers were rigging some wire to some boxes at the base of the pillars that supported the Capitol facade.

All this, McLean took in as his truck rolled past. Then he saw the leader with the pistols make eye contact with him, and realized his engine noise and the motion of his vehicle had drawn all eyes to him. In the instant it took for the masked man to point and scream a command at him, McLean stepped on the gas and aimed his truck at the only opening that could take him through the intersection.

His reflexes saved his life, but he almost didn’t make it. As the truck smashed the rear fender of the SUV and got him through the blockade, a barrage of gunfire rang out and three bullets tore through the cab, one of them shattering his radio and A/C controls on the dash. Even more plinked into the truck’s bed and into the other vehicles around him, ricocheting into store windows and signs all around.

Swerving out onto the cross street, McLean abandoned Colfax and gassed it hard to put a building between himself and the Capitol. He had to weave around stalled cars, but adrenaline was surging through him and he didn’t slow back down under fifty until he had several city blocks behind him. It took him ten more minutes after that to notice blood on the seat and realize he’d been hit.

A stinging accompanied by a dull ache in his shoulder revealed the source of the blood. Unbuttoning his shirt collar, he satisfied himself it was a minor flesh wound, probably a ricochet fragment, and wasn’t going to affect his ability to drive. There was a spot of blood showing through his shirt, but it had already started to clot. He decided to wait to treat it until he was out of Denver.

As his breathing slowed, his mind swirled over the possibilities. Were the gunmen behind the EMP attack as well? Or were they merely opportunists, a group of unprofessional anarchists having their heyday while law enforcement was crippled? It had been mere minutes since the cars went dead, so they must have known it would happen. Either way, McLean did not want to be around to see the culmination of their plans. It was past time to get out of Dodge. He knew the first hour of this crisis would be the most crucial window in which to act. After that it would only become harder to get away.

He passed a strip of upscale businesses, and saw another shooter, this time in camo pants and a gas mask, blasting away at the outside of a bank, shattering windows and threatening the people that were running out. His partner in crime was headed inside with empty money bags and a handgun. Neither of their faces were masked.

McLean still didn’t know why or exactly what was going down, but the gunmen had to be coordinated somehow. They had to have been in on what was happening. It was the only way to explain the near instantaneous transformation from peaceful mid-week morning to bloodshed in the streets. This was definitely not a “normal” disaster. Only a high-altitude nuclear detonation could have wiped out power so suddenly, and the combination of armed terrorists on the ground made this way, way worse than 9/11.

As McLean neared another intersection and slowed, another airplane fell from the sky. This one was closer, and he heard the boom as it tore into an office complex several blocks away. He didn’t see the fireball this time, but a column of black smoke went up immediately. He rolled his passenger-side window down an inch. Screams echoed all around him, and he saw several people on the sidewalks pointing in horror. Some people started to run, and he rolled quickly forward to get past a man dashing across the street.

There would be fires, he knew, started by jet fuel and spreading rapidly to buildings and homes. Crowds would start to flee in panic. Who knew what emergency response times would be, if there were any? Would fire hydrants even have pressure without power? And the fires would just be the beginning. With gunmen running loose the citizenry had little hope of getting emergency assistance everywhere it was needed.

McLean turned south and reached 6th Avenue. This street was mostly clear in the left lane and would take him westward as fast as any other. As he neared the river he reached for the map again, but his hand came to rest on something else, something smooth and cylindrical. Looking over, he saw that it was the Maglite Carrie had given him. He recoiled his hand as if it had been burned, shame hitting him like a bullet in the heart.

Carrie was back there in an undesirable part of town. She might be in danger, might not have a safe place to get to, or a means of traveling there. He knew she didn’t have family in town, or a significant other to come for her. And now she didn’t even have so much as a flashlight to defend herself with, because she’d given it to him.