Wall: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 3) (31 page)

Sawyer put his hand on his mother’s shoulder. “The other four left,” he said. “They didn’t want to wait for us while we tried to break back into the tunnel. They were afraid a patrol would find them.”

Battle pointed east, past Lola and Sawyer. “Like that one?”

A black Jeep was headed for them, blue lights flashing as it bounded along the riverbank between the water and the wall. They were armed.

Lola looked back at Battle. The tears had stopped. “What do we do?” she asked. “We can’t outrun them.”

“We’ll get caught,” said Sawyer.

“We’re not getting caught,” said Battle. “Give me the baby and climb in.” Battle motioned to the open trapdoor. “We’re heading back.”

“Heading back?” asked Lola, helping strap Penny to Battle’s back. “Where?”

Battle smiled at her, took her face in both of his hands and kissed her on the lips. He pulled away and looked into her eyes. “Home, Lola. We’re going home.”

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

OCTOBER 29, 2037, 1:20 PM

SCOURGE +5 YEARS

EAST OF RISING STAR, TEXAS

The SUV was running on fumes when Battle decelerated into his driveway. It had only been a few weeks, but it felt as if he’d been gone for years.

He rolled down the windows to listen to the crush of the gravel underneath the tires. Next to him, with her window down, was Lola. She was holding Penny, who Battle had decided was maybe an angel from Heaven. No baby had ever been as even tempered and easygoing as she was on their three-day trip back from the wall.

They’d taken back roads through abandoned towns to avoid any run-ins with the Dwellers. It was best that way.

His momentary joy at arriving back on his land was tempered by seeing the blackened shell of the main house when he pulled around the front drive. Battle took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, pressing the brake and putting the SUV into park.

Lola put her hand on his leg. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. If I hadn’t—”

Battle put his finger to her lips. “Don’t,” he said, shaking his head. He checked the rearview mirror. Sawyer was asleep, lying across the entirety of the backseat.

Battle lowered his voice to above a whisper. “All those years alone in that house, all I had were my guns, my movies, and my thoughts. I was going crazy. I didn’t know it. I couldn’t see it. But I was.”

Lola choked back tears and raised her hand to Battle’s cheek. “You’re not crazy,” she whispered. “You’re my hero. You’re my boy’s hero. You’re going to be this little girl’s hero too.”

“I’m no hero,” Battle countered. “For five years I killed anyone who came on my land. That didn’t take guts. I almost killed you.”

“You didn’t though,” she said. “You saved me.”

“You saved me,” Battle said. “I’ve always believed that God only gave me what I could handle. In the end, he gave me you.”

Battle shut off the engine and hopped out of the SUV. “I’m going to put this in the garage in a few,” he said, shaking free of the emotion of the moment by changing the subject. “First, I want to make sure everything is good in the barn. If it is, we’re golden.”

He left his new family at the SUV and trudged the familiar path from the driveway to his barn. He opened the wide doors and slipped inside. The first thing he heard was the familiar hum of the freezers. He reached beside him and flipped on one of the switches. The overhead lights flickered and clinked to life. The solar cells were good. He’d check the gas backup generators later.

The wall-to-wall shelving opposite him was stocked with everything he’d left earlier in the month. There were clothes, toiletries, medicine, and plenty of food. He even had baby formula, which he’d purchased as protein supplement if they ever ran out of meat and couldn’t hunt.

They could live in the barn, he thought. He’d take the seating out of the SUV to piece together some bedding for all of them. There was enough timber out back he’d be able to build some furniture with Sawyer’s help.

They’d be okay.

He walked out of the barn, turned left at the edge of what used to be his house, and walked to the backyard. The garden was a mess. It needed tending. He might have to rip up what was left, cover it with black plastic sheeting to kill everything, and start fresh. He had seeds. It would be good to grow new crops.

He passed the garden and looked to the far end of the backyard, near the woods that crept close to the house. Lola was there, her back to him, swaying with Penny in her arms.

Battle stopped and listened.

“I need your help,” she said to the headstones in the ground in front of her. “I want to love him. I want him to love me. I want us to be a family. I truly believe he wants that too.”

Lola stopped swaying and carefully lowered herself to her knees. With one hand she wiped the black soot and ash from atop the headstones.

“I’m never going to replace you in his heart,” she said. “But I need his mind now. I need you to help him see that.”

She started whispering and Battle couldn’t hear her. He started walking again.

“Hey,” he said, startling Lola. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“Hi,” she said and pushed herself to her feet with one hand, holding Penny tightly in the other. “Just saying hello. I hope that’s okay.”

“It’s good,” he said. “It’s okay. We’re gonna be okay.”

“What if Paagal comes looking for us?” she asked. “What if she finds us?”

“She won’t find us,” he said. “If by chance she does, I’ll shoot first. I won’t ask questions.”

THE END

AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER:
THE NEXT BIG ADVENTURE.

EXCERPT FROM SPACEMAN: A POST-APOCALYPTIC/DYSTOPIAN THRILLER

MISSION ELAPSED TIME:

72 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 5 MINUTES, 31 SECONDS

249 MILES ABOVE EARTH

The alarm sounded without warning.

It was shrill and echoed though the station until Clayton Shepard typed a series of commands into the computer to disarm it.

He ran his finger across the screen, not believing what was he was reading, what the alarm was warning. It was outside the bounds of what was reasonable or even possible.

WARNING: GEOMAGENTIC K-INDEX 9 OR GREATER EXPECTED

SPACE WEATHER MESSAGE CODE: WARK9<

SERIAL NUMBER: 476

ISSUE TIME: 2020 JAN 25 0225 UTC

VALID TO 2020 JAN 25 2359 UTC

He pressed a button that keyed the microphone nearest his mouth. “Houston,” he said, “station on space-to-ground one. Are you seeing the alarm?”

“Station, this is Houston on space-to-ground one,” the call replied. “We see it. We have a team looking at data. Stand by.”

He rolled his eyes. “Are you kidding me?” Clayton said, keying the mic. “Houston, this is station on space-to-ground one. I don’t think we have time for that. I’m asking we abort the EVA now.”

He looked through the window to his left. Astronaut Ben Greenwood stopped his work, turned around to face Clayton through the mask on his helmet, and joined the conversation.

“Shepard,” said Ben, “this is Greenwood station-to-station one. What alarm?” Greenwood’s helmet reflected a fisheye view of The Cupola in which Shepard was monitoring the first spacewalk of their expedition.

Clayton read the alert again. A severe magnetic storm was coming. He swallowed and cleared his throat. “Greenwood, this is Shepard on station-to-station one. The onboard coronagraph is giving indications of large, transient disturbances on the Earth-facing side of the Sun.”

“Shepard, this is Greenwood on station-to-station one. You mean solar flares?”

“Station,” the radio call from mission control interrupted, “this is Houston on space-to-ground one. We’ve checked with SELB in Boulder. They confirm the alarm, as does Marshal in Huntsville. Loops are growing in intensity. There is a CME within striking distance. Our original assessment may have been incorrect.”

The third member of the expedition, Cosmonaut Boris Voin, spoke through his mic. He was ten yards from Greenwood, tethered to the exterior of the station. “Shepard,” he said, his English barbed with his native Russian accent, “this is Voin, station-to-station 1. Are we killing EVA?”

Shepard took a deep breath before answering. Two days earlier, they’d seen evidence of a coronal mass ejection, what they’d believed was a part of the corona tearing away from the Sun. After looking at the data, and considering the urgency of the spacewalk, Mission Control determined the reading was an anomaly. CMEs, as they were called, happened nearly every day. This one, they concluded, was no real threat. Despite the coronal halo visible around the sun forty-nine hours earlier, the numbers seemed so far beyond anything they’d ever seen they concluded there was a system malfunction and the sensor was offering incorrect data.

They were wrong.

Clayton keyed the mic. “Houston, this is station on station-to-ground one,” he said, knowing the spacewalking astronauts could hear him. “It’s my recommendation that we immediately kill the EVA.”

“Station, this is Houston on station-to-ground one. We agree that out of an abundance of caution the best course of—”

The line went dead. The station went dark.

Clayton pressed the mic. “Houston,” he said, a hint of panic in his voice, “this is station on station-to-ground one. Do you copy?”

No answer.

“Greenwood, this is Shepard one station-to-station one. Do you copy?”

Nothing.

Clayton tried Voin. He tried Shepard again. He switched to channels, two, three, and four. He tried the Russian channels. None of them replied. He wasn’t even sure his radio was working.

“This cannot be happening.”

Astronaut Clayton Shepard was ten weeks into his first mission in low Earth orbit when the impossible happened.

The CME experts thought couldn’t exist carried with it sixteen billion tons of hot plasma and charged particles. It outraced the solar wind at an astonishing two million kilometers an hour, creating a blast wave ahead of its impact with the Earth and its orbiting satellites. The cloud, larger than any ever recorded, collided with the Earth’s magnetic field and created an enormous surge.

High energy protons peaked at over two-hundred and fifty times the norm and slammed into the Earth where the effect was instantaneous. Electrical currents in the atmosphere and on the ground surged repeatedly at varying degrees.

Within ninety seconds of impact, chain reactions had begun to shut down power grids and damage oil and gas pipelines across the entirety of the planet. Satellites orbiting the Earth absorbed the electrical surge and those that had not shut down the high voltage on their transceivers were destroyed or significantly damaged.

Unlike solar flares, the CME had left the Sun slowly, gathering speed as it accelerated outward and away from the star’s surface. It traveled nearly twice the speed of any previously recorded CME and carried with it sixty percent more material than the typical value of a CME cloud.

By the time it hit the ISS, the station was in the worst spot possible, racing above the Atlantic Ocean in a highly magnetic region of the planet called the South Atlantic Anomaly. It only worsened the impact on the station, which was radiation hardened to withstand minor event upsets. It couldn’t handle anything like the invisible tsunami that had just surged and crashed over it.

Without knowing exactly what had happened, Shepard knew what had happened.

He steadied himself in the darkness of The Cupola, a dome shaped module with seven panoramic windows, and pressed his hands against the glass. It was almost five feet tall and a little more than nine feet across, but it felt like a coffin.

He looked to his right, out window three, and saw the Canadarm 2, the station’s large robotic arm used to build parts of the station and to grab incoming cargo vehicles. Beyond the arm was his home planet.

From the underside of the station, the Cupola was the perfect spot from which to watch the Earth as the ISS moved at five miles per second around the globe. He was speeding past North America.

It was dark. The familiar spider webs of lights that marked large metropolitan areas across the continent were missing.

Like the ISS, the planet was virtually powerless.

“Jackie,” he said aloud, looking toward the area he thought was Texas. A thick knot grew in his throat as he suppressed his emotion. “The kids.” His lips quivered, his eyes welled, but Clayton Shepard, the mechanical engineer and astronaut, steadied himself. He’d have to worry about them later. His own survival and that of his crew were paramount.

Shepard gripped the sides of the laptop display directly in front of him. The screen was black. He thumped the spacebar with his thumb. He hit the power button as if he were trying to score a point on a video game.

Nothing worked.

To his right, facing the Canadarm2 underneath window three was a joystick. It controlled the arm. He jockeyed it back and forth and then slapped at it with his hand. Nothing. Not that he expected it.

Shepard spun one hundred and eighty degrees. Cosmonaut Boris Voin was still there. He was tangled in the tether than connected him to the ISS. Feet away was veteran Astronaut Ben Greenwood. Ben had his hands up in surrender. He couldn’t know if they were dead or barely clinging to life.