Crisis Event: Black Feast (6 page)

“Hey!” someone shouted at her.

Instantly, she revved the throttle and shot forward, not bothering to look for the source of the shout.

She raced down the street, peering ahead for any sudden blockage, bumping along the dust-covered asphalt, afraid to go any faster. If she wiped out now she didn’t think she’d be able to get back on the bike.

Sadie saw a small gray hump in the center of the street, and she slowed to circle around it, noting the shape of a bicycle beneath a thick layer of gray dust.

“That would’ve been bad,” she said, imagining what would’ve happened if she had hit it at high speed.

Seconds later she reached another intersection and turned without consulting her compass. The road curved, and the houses changed from old wood frames to more modern, brick and stone houses, with multiple stories and wider lots. She didn’t focus on the details of these houses. She was too busy trying to distance herself from the “hey-shouter” somewhere behind her.  

She turned south. Rolled past a darkened grocery store and a block of various-sized buildings that had once been shops and stores.

Less than thirty seconds later the 7-Eleven she’d seen appeared ahead and to her right.

“Oh, thank heaven!” she mumbled, remembering some silly TV commercial she’d once seen on Youtube.

It reminded her how much she missed the internet.

But she didn’t have long to pine for it. For the first time since she’d started the Honda the day before it began to show signs of trouble. The air filter was clogging and the engine had begun to hesitate. It would run fine for a five or six seconds, then lose power for a second or two, then run again.

When she reached the entrance to the college, she turned in.

Almost immediately she passed a brick-bordered sign whose stone-veneer letters spelled out “Blaine Technical College.”

Off to the left were dust-covered soccer fields. The soccer goals had become fuzzy mounds at either end of each field.

Overhead, lightning was flashing constantly, as if the world had become a dance club with one kind of lighting effect—strobe lights.

Thunder boomed overhead, a constant loud rumble now, and she could barely hear her own engine.

The dust-enveloped road reached a three-pronged fork and Sadie stopped.

She put her feet down in the soft ashy dust. The road to the right was well-travelled. Dozens of tire tracks lead off toward two six-story tall buildings. The road crossed a bridge, then curved away and disappeared behind a stand of dead trees and a cluster of buildings.

The road ahead lead to what looked like an administrative building. It wasn’t as well-travelled as the road on the right, but enough tire tracks were grooved into its dust to make her wary of it.

The road to the left showed little sign of traffic. It curved around behind three brown-bricked buildings, squat and rectangular and from the fifties—most likely residential halls.

Beyond the buildings the road continued toward the back of the campus, where a baseball stadium stood. The stadium was surrounded by a gray belt of dead trees covered in light-blocking dust.

Sadie scanned the entire campus, sniffing the air.

The smell of cooking meat was strong now, making her mouth water. The column of white smoke she’d seen was several hundred yards away, on the other side of several buildings. If she wanted to know what was causing it, all she had to do was look.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what was causing it.

She was trying hard to ignore the dread in her stomach.

There was nowhere to hide here, and she was out in the open, way too exposed.

If someone was sighting on her, she could be killed before she even knew a bullet had hit her.

“Maybe that’d be better,” she mumbled, though she instantly told herself to shut up. She wasn’t just going to lie down and die. Her grandfather would never forgive her.

Not that he’d know. It wasn’t like he’d believed he would get to sit up in a cosmic skybox somewhere and watch his loved ones struggle through their lives.

“Do something,” her mind told her with her grandfather’s voice, so following some intuitive feeling, she turned her bike around and headed back to the street in front of the college.

She went slowly, giving anyone who might’ve been watching time to follow.

No one did.

When she looked back the campus looked as quiet as it had before—except for the white smoke.

Sadie cruised slowly, watching the dusty soccer fields fall behind her and give way to a gray tree line. She assumed this tree line had once marked the edge of the campus and provided separation between it and the now-looted shopping center next door.

Several parts of the shopping center had collapsed under the weight of the dust. The front windows had been blown out at some point.

Beyond the shopping center was another road, and when Sadie reached it she turned right.

She drove along the side of the shopping center, weaving in and out of abandoned cars, and looking at damage to the residential area next to the campus.

Dozens of nice houses sat back from the road on both sides, with heavy gray dust coating them. Windows were shattered in most of them. A few had been burned to the ground. Others had imploded.

Three hundred yards down the road Sadie found what she’d expected: a bridge.

She stopped next to the curb and eased the Honda up onto the sidewalk.

Once again, the constant rumble of thunder replaced the sound of the engine, along with periodic booms and pops and crackling lightning strikes that lit up everything around her.

Sadie clicked the bike into neutral and got off, then rolled it across the dusty front yard of some long-dead or departed resident.

A chain link fence separated the yard from a stair-stepped retaining wall keep that had kept the land from washing out and the house from collapsing into the creek below.

In an attempt to keep the retaining wall from looking industrial, they’d mortared a stone veneer onto it.

Sadie took the bike to the edge of the yard and parked it next to the fence, facing up toward the street. She slipped off her pack, opened it, and pulled out the tarp she’d used to make a tent her night before.

The tent fell loosely over the bike, and she used her toes to push its edges down into the dust.

Her back and arm were now screaming at her, but she wasn’t ready to stop. The black rain was coming in again, splattering her hair and face shield with mud. Lightning struck repeatedly less than half a mile away—based on the count she kept after the flashes.

Sadie untied her rifle from the pack and slid it under the tarp. She hated to leave the 30.06 behind, but she didn’t want have a choice. The hike she was about to take was as dangerous as anything she’d done in the last nine months and if anything went wrong she needed to be able to run like hell.

Before leaving, Sadie scooped up handfuls of dust and tossed them all over the tarp, repeating the process until it looked as if it had been sitting there since the Crisis began.

She found a few river rocks in the flower beds near the abandoned house and carried them back to weigh down the tarp.

Grinding her teeth against the pain in her back and arm and legs, Sadie climbed the chain link fence, dropped onto the stair-stepped retaining wall, and climbed down the stone veneer until she was next to the black sludgy water in the creek.

She wasn’t sure how long of a hike she had. All she knew was the storm was here, and the lightning was striking the land around her with the rapidity of a machine gun, and she was about to wade through a creek of gray sludgy water.

“Just go,” she told herself, imagining her grandfather’s voice, and before she could talk herself out of going, she went.

Chapter 5

Ten minutes later, Sadie was on the campus of Blaine Technical College, hiding under a bridge that spanned the sludgy little creek running through the campus.

Her pants were soaked and stained with black sludge up to the knees, and she was shivering in the cold wind.

This was the second bridge Sadie had hidden under since she began her approach to the college—the first having been part of the barely travelled road she’d seen earlier. Now she was beneath the bridge that spanned the middle road—the road that would take her to the fire if she wanted to go there.

She didn’t want to go there.

Because of the bodies.

She’d come across dozens in the creek: corpses missing heads and arms and legs, gnawed feet and hands and ribcages, bones picked clean of meat.

Her heart was racing now, and her teeth were chattering, and she was so scared it took all her will to not turn and run back to her bike.

She reminded herself that fear was good. That if she stopped being afraid, she’d stop being careful.

Thus far she’d been careful: staying down in the creek bed, wading through the sludgy water, doing everything she could do to remain out of sight.

But now she’d reached the jumping off point. The place where she had to expose herself and risk it all for possibly no reward. The terror she’d felt on the edge of town had returned, and once again she wished she’d never driven out from under the overpass earlier in the day.

But she had.

Now she needed to make the most of it.

She climbed out of the creek, ran for the closest building, and begged the lightning storm blasting around her not to strike her dead.

The building she reached was modern—all glass and steel. Its front doors had been shattered, and the entryway was now covered in spears of glass and huge drifts of gray dust. It took Sadie only a few seconds to identify the building as the library—not the building she was looking for. But it was a building with information in it—and a wealth of paper.

Surprisingly no one had raided it. Most of the books were all on their shelves, except for the shelves closest to the door—which made sense, if you were taking the books only for toilet paper and tinder.

Sadie found the information desk and used her flashlight to find a campus map. Then she took a few seconds to browse the “End of the World” display near the information desk. A small set of decorated shelves held dozens of paperbacks and hardbacks popular in the years before the Crisis:
The Hunger Games
,
One Second After, The Stand
,
Oryx and Crake
.

Sadie laughed.

She wondered what her neuroscience professor would have thought about how focused on the end of the world people had become in the years before the “end of the world.” Zombies, aliens, nuclear war, super viruses, EMPs…on and on the mechanism for our end went.

“She’d laugh her ass off,” Sadie mumbled, “then say it was negativity bias.”

But Sadie knew her professor would have appreciated the irony. There’d been so many end of the world scares over the centuries humans had existed, and finally the end of the world—or at least the possible end of humanity—had come.

Sadie picked up one of the books she didn’t recognize, a paperback called
The World Without Us,
and slipped it quickly into her backpack. Then she was out the door and sprinting through the black rain and heavy wind and lightning strikes.

She circled around behind a building that the map identified as the Student Union Building, drawing ever closer to the smoke at the back of the campus.

The sidewalks around the Student Union Building had been covered, probably to keep them clear of snow. Now they protected Sadie from the black rain that had begun to splatter the ground.

Sadie ran along the sidewalk next to the Student Union Building, pausing when she reached a corner, then sprinting across the gap between it and the Allen Science Building.

The science building was four stories tall, and looked like a long rectangle. All four of its main entrance doors were intact, and when Sadie tried the one on the right it swung open easily.

Sadie stepped inside and looked around, noticing instantly that even through her respirator she could detect the smell of vinegar. Dust had drifted into the entryway, and Sadie paused to study the tracks in it. Most of the tracks were from work boots.

Big work boots.

At least a size twelve. There were also tennis and running shoe tracks, but they were much smaller and there were fewer of them.

It wasn’t the tracks that scared her, though. It was the drag marks. And the ropes and spatters of blood that covered the floor.

When Sadie looked closer she saw a huge spray of blood covering a plate glass window. Blood had run down to puddle and dry on the floor next to the wall, as if someone had been gunned down and died right there a few feet from her.

She peered down the dark hallway and saw bloody drag marks next to the left wall.

Her stomach clenched. Her hands shook and the barrel of her 9MM jerked and quivered so bad she doubted she could hit anything with it.

Sadie tucked the pistol into her waistband and pulled her new shotgun out of its holster. She gripped it with both hands and pointed it down the hall. She couldn’t believe she was about to scout an empty building with the full knowledge that someone had been killed here not long ago.