Page 26

chapter twenty-five

Tuck

At the look of alarm on Emily’s face as she stared over my shoulder, I grabbed the gun next to me, stood, and whirled around to face whatever threat she’d obviously seen. A man had just stepped through the trees and was heading toward us, his gait slightly staggered as he held his arm across his chest. “Stop!” I shouted. “I have a gun and I’ll shoot.”

The man did, raising one arm. “I’m injured,” he shouted back. “I’m n-not armed. I don’t mean you any harm. I just need to get w-warm. Please. I saw the fire…”

“Tell him to fuck off,” Charlie hissed.

“He’s hurt,” Emily said. “He needs help.”

“So he says,” I muttered. Or it was a tactic to get us to trust him and let him get close. “Walk slowly and keep your arm raised. Spread the fingers of your other hand.”

The man did as I asked, spreading his fingers but keeping his obviously injured arm bent across his chest. He had some thing wrapped around it and a pack hanging on his shoulder. “Stop,” I commanded when he got close enough that I could see him well. He looked to be in his twenties, his clothes filthy, feet clad in muddy running shoes.

“I was sh-shot.”

“Show me.”

“Tuck…” I heard Emily say from behind me, but I gestured my hand low to tell her to shush. She might think I was being harsh to an injured man looking for help, but I wasn’t going to take chances.

The man hesitated but then lowered his arm slowly and unwrapped whatever fabric he’d used as a bandage, showing me the bloody portions of material underneath, and then exposing the wound in his bicep.

“Where are you coming from?” I asked.

A shiver racked the man. “St. L-Louis. It was hell t-trying to get out.” The man was shivering so badly, he was having trouble speaking. I lowered the gun.

“Come on over and get warm,” I said. I had no way of reading his mind to know his intentions, but it was clear he was weak and freezing, at the very least, and posed little physical threat. Plus, he’d come from St. Louis. He’d have some information. “What’s your name?”

“Isaac.”

“I’m Tuck. And that’s Charlie and Emily.” I moved aside as he stumbled forward, the sole of one shoe flapping, each step making a squelching sound so that it was obvious his foot was soaking wet. He sagged down on the crate I’d been sitting on. I moved around the fire and pulled another one over and set it next to Emily. She and Charlie had stood as I’d had the exchange with the man, but now they were seated again too.

We waited a few minutes as the man reached his good arm out to the fire, his shoulders lowering as the warmth calmed his shivers. After a minute he closed his eyes and exhaled a breath. “Thank you,” he said weakly.

“You need to get those wet shoes off,” I told him. “Let them dry before you start walking again. Where are you headed anyway?”

“No fuckin’ clue,” he said. “I just fuckin’…ran. Lots of people did. I was walking with several others for a while but… I don’t know, we got split up. I hitched a ride yesterday and then walked some more… It’s just, a blur.”

“I wish I could offer you some food—”

“Thanks. It’s okay. I had some food with me. Finished it off, but I ate a few hours ago. I’m not so hungry, just thirsty if you have some water?”

I reached down and picked up the half bottle of water near my feet and handed it to him. He tipped it back, finishing it in three swallows. “Thanks,” he murmured.

“What’s happening in St. Louis, Isaac?” Emily asked, before she pulled back slightly as though bracing for news she didn’t want.

He shook his head, gaze focused on the fire, expression slack as though he was mesmerized by the dancing flames. “The first day the power went out and all the cars stopped working, we knew something was very wrong. The sky, man. First it was like everything turned bright white overhead. And then it melted into all these crazy colors… Well, shit. You had to have seen it too. No one knew what the fuck it was. A bomb? Aliens? Some strange lightning strike? All we knew was the whole damn city had shut down. People ran to the stores. They couldn’t take cards, only cash. A lot of people didn’t have cash, so they went home to make do, but even so, the store around the block from me was out of water and lots of other things within an hour.”

Emily rubbed her head. “My God.”

“The air started smelling like smoke from fires burning in different parts of the city. Someone said they’d seen a plane practically fall from the sky and that the wreckage landed in the Mississippi. Apparently, the whole area around the Gateway Arch was burning and people were jumping in the water to get away from the spreading flames.” He looked up and met my eyes. “As the city grew dark, we could see all the fires, still burning. But there were no sirens, not a single one.”

Emily, Charlie, and I all exchanged looks, obviously in silent agreement that there was no need to bring up our own plane crash. But our experience certainly added merit to what Isaac was telling us. My head spun. How many aircraft were in the air at any given time? And how many of those had “practically fallen from the sky” like ours had? The number of lives lost both on the aircraft and on the ground as a result was too staggering to even imagine.

“My neighbor had a few of us over to his place to use the meat in their freezer, so it didn’t go bad. We each brought something to share. The water stopped running soon after the six of us gathered though and the mood, it just…got real somber. We knew this was nothing like other blackouts and it was only the first day. Cars littering the streets, blocking roads, no way for emergency vehicles to get through if those were even still running at all. But like I said, we couldn’t hear any…even far away. It was eerie as fuck. Then this dude, he said he’d heard from someone else that the MetroLink had come off the rails and people were injured and dying inside the wreckage in one of the tunnels. Everywhere, all over the city, people were stuck and no one was coming for them.” He gave another small shiver, which I thought was more from whatever he was picturing in his head than from the cold. “Anyway, the next day, people started taking what they needed from the stores. Then others started taking what they wanted. By the third day stores were empty. Fuckin’ empty. The neighbors weren’t sharing anymore by then. Restaurants started being looted too. And still no sirens, no National Guard, nothing. People panicked and that panic spread faster than the fires. Everything…it all crumbled fucking fast, man.”

“Who shot you?” I asked.

“I don’t even know. I had some canned food, but I didn’t have enough water to stay put.” He lapsed into silence for a moment. “I never knew how quickly things could break down. I figured if people were looting restaurants for whatever food they had, pretty soon they’d be busting down any and every door. I saw others packed up and walking out and knew I had to too. Things were only going to get worse. It was already starting to stink. Garbage piled up in the street, the toilets weren’t flushing. And that damn smoke that was only getting thicker. I packed up what I could carry, and I started walking. Met a few people who only knew they were getting out, and then formed a small group. We got robbed before we’d even left the city. I tried to run and got fired on. The guy next to me got shot in the head.”

“Jesus,” Charlie muttered.

“Luckily, I’d stuffed some beef jerky and protein bars in my pants pockets,” he said, pointing down to his filthy cargo pants. “I’ve lived on those for the past few days.”

My head was swimming. This was the worst possible scenario I could have pictured. I’d been worried at the gas station near Springfield, Illinois, and now I was downright scared by what was happening in St. Louis, Missouri.

Society was collapsing.

And if it was happening in those places, it was happening in other towns and cities too.

“Do you want me to look at that wound?” I asked. “I have a first aid kit and some essentials. I’m no doctor, but I can at least clean it up for you.” I needed to do something with my hands, and I might as well be helpful. The guy had just talked for fifteen minutes when he probably barely had the energy to do so.

“Yeah, sure. Thanks. Thanks a lot.”

He grimaced as he slowly removed the flannel shirt he was wearing.

I walked the short distance to the barn, ducked through the opening, and retrieved the first aid kit from my backpack and then once outside, picked up the crate I’d been sitting on, and moved it next to Isaac.

It only took me five minutes to clean the wound and apply antibiotic ointment. As I did so, I thought back to doing the same thing to Emily’s wound in that clearing in the forest the night of our plane crash. We’d been lost and cold and shaken to our cores by what we’d experienced, but we’d had no idea what was happening to other people not that far away. In fact, despite the circumstances, I’d momentarily gotten lost in the satiny feel of Emily’s skin under my fingers and the way goose bumps had risen when I’d touched her.

I yanked my mind from those thoughts and back to the present. Isaac was lucky in that the bullet appeared to have gone straight through his arm without hitting bone. But the wound was swollen and red around the edges and if it wasn’t infected yet, it was dangerously close. I slathered it with antibiotic cream and pressed a bandage over it. “You’ll need oral antibiotics too,” I told him.

He let out a huff. “Where the fuck am I gonna get those?”

“I don’t know. But you’ve gotta make it a priority.” This kid was young, probably in his early twenties, and he was obviously alone and directionless, but I was already tasked with taking care of myself and two other people. I couldn’t collect more along the way if the three of us were going to survive. As it was, tonight we’d only had the meat of one rabbit between us, and still had thousands of miles to travel. It’d get warmer the farther west we headed, but for now, it was winter and cold as hell, at least at night.

“Maybe one of the farms around here has some medicine they’d give you,” Emily said. “Even animal antibiotics would help, right, Tuck?”

“Farms,” Isaac murmured as I picked up the crate to move it back where it’d been, and he started putting his heavy flannel shirt back on. “Lots of people will be coming from the cities looking for farms,” he said. “I’m sure many who left sooner than me have already made it to some.”

“Too many, and those farmers will have to start shooting,” Charlie said. Charlie could be a real useless dick, but he wasn’t wrong on that count. And what this meant was that we were far from the only nomads on the road, looking for food, shelter, and any help that might be extended. We were competing now for limited resources.

And we still didn’t know exactly what was unfolding everywhere, but now we knew enough to understand that this was a big fucking catastrophe.

Conditions had just gotten a hell of a lot more dire.