Blackout: A Tale Of Survival In A Powerless World- Book 1 Read online

  It would take us roughly a day and a half to reach the city on foot. We jogged lightly most of the way, trying to shave a few minutes off the total time, but when twilight fell, we had not even reached the bottom of the mountain. We stopped to camp for the night, eating a dinner of beef jerky and lighting a fire to keep warm. The city was visible from our campsite, but instead of the usual bright lights and bustling automobiles, the buildings were all dark and brooding.

  “Tell me something,” Eirian said as he stretched out in his sleeping bag and chomped on another strip of jerky. “Why go this far to help Jacob’s mom? It’s one thing to comfort Jacob and Pippa like I suggested, but you didn’t have to risk your life for hers. You and Jacob aren’t engaged anymore, so technically you don’t even have ties to Penny.”

  “That may be true,” I agreed, “but if I let Penny die without trying to do anything about it, that means losing a part of my humanity that I’m not ready to let go of yet. This whole EMP blast has been terrible, but if we forget who we are, it could be a lot worse. We got lucky at Camp Haven. It’s a group of people who already understood how to work together to survive before it became a necessity instead of an option. Sure, I could just say fuck it and leave Jacob to deal with his mother’s death on his own, but what kind of person would I be if I did?”

  “You’re very moral.”

  “It’s common decency,” I said. “Besides, the camp needs these supplies anyway.”

  “Jax would’ve eventually realized that when people started getting sick,” Eirian said, finishing off his jerky and rolling onto his back to gaze up at the stars through the trees. “She would have sent a salvage team them.”

  “How long would that have taken though?” I asked. “It could have been weeks or months, by which time the hospital might very well have been ransacked. As it is, we don’t actually know if it has the supplies we need now.”

  “We’ll find them,” Eirian promised, his eyelids drifting shut. “Get some sleep. We’ll need our strength for tomorrow.”

  AT DAWN, we were woken by a terrible inhuman scream. The birds that had yet to migrate south took flight from the trees, scared out of the branches. The sun was blood red on the horizon, like an omen of impending doom. The screams continued, one after the next in terrifying succession. Eirian and I tore through the forest, trying our best to follow the yells as they bounced off the trees from every direction. I slipped down a patch of icy dirt and fell, bruising my tailbone, but the pain was nothing in comparison to whatever excruciating torture elicited the screams of terror. Eirian helped me to my feet, and we skidded to a stop at the edge of a small clearing to find a bloody scene. A gray wolf had its muzzle buried deep in the abdomen of a large man.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “It’s Jove.”

  Eirian fired his rifle into the air above the wolf’s head. The animal, unconcerned, withdrew from Jove’s mauled stomach, its gray fur stained red, and stalked toward us. Eirian fired again, this time clipping the wolf’s pelt. It yelped and bolted away, and I rushed to Jove’s side. He’d stopped screaming at long last. Shock had set in.

  “Jove,” I said, lightly smacking the man’s cheek. “Hey, look at me. It’s Georgie.”

  Eirian knelt beside me, examining Jove’s injuries. The wolf had done too much damage. Jove’s intestines were spilling out of his torso. Blood seeped into the damp cold ground at an alarming rate.

  “He’s as good as dead,” Eirian muttered close to my ear so that Jove wouldn’t hear. I had a feeling it wouldn’t matter anyway. Jove was hardly present with us. His eyes darted back and forth, never focusing on anything.

  “I’m surprised he made it this long,” I said.

  “Georgie!” Jove gasped suddenly. He seized the front of my coat and pulled me closer. Warm blood dripped onto my hands. “Georgie.”

  “Yes, Mr. Mason. It’s me.”

  “Jacob.” Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth. “Pippa.”

  “They’re okay,” I replied, wanting more than anything for him to let go of me. “They’re safe at Camp Haven.”

  “Penny?”

  I hesitated, looking across at Eirian. He shook his head. “She’s fine too, Jove. Your family is safe. It’s okay.”

  His grip on my coat loosened until his hands fell limply to his sides. “Thank you.”

  Then his mouth went slack, and his head lolled back on his neck. He was dead. I scrambled away from the fresh corpse, scrubbing the blood off my hands with the hem of my shirt. It was everywhere, on the ground, on my shirt, on my hands.

  “Hey,” Eirian said, as I rubbed my hands until the skin was red and raw. “Georgie, stop.”

  “He’s dead,” I muttered, unable to tear my gaze from Jove’s ruined body. “He’s dead. Oh God, he’s dead.”

  “Hey!” Eirian snapped his fingers in front of my nose, redirecting my attention to him. “Look at me. Listen to me. We can’t let this slow us down. I know that sounds crass, but it’s the truth. Jacob’s dad is dead. We need to make sure that his mother doesn’t meet the same fate. At least not anytime soon.”

  His level-headed speech permeated my panic, filling my brain with practical plans instead. I closed my eyes, trying to expel the image of Jove’s ruined body from my memory. “You’re right. Let’s go. We need to go.”

  Eirian turned me around by the shoulders before I opened my eyes again, and we left the bloody clearing behind us to return to our camp. It occurred to me that we should have given Jove some sort of send-off. We should have said something nice or crossed his arms over his chest or laid flowers for him. But all the flowers were dead, and I couldn’t form words to say much at all.

  We picked up our belongings at camp, scattered the ashes of the campfire, and proceeded along our route in silence. The trees began to clear as we neared the bottom of the mountain, where the roads were asphalt instead of dirt. It was quieter closer to the city. No birds chirped. No wind blew. No dogs barked. The absence of sound played with my voice of reason.

  “There’s the hospital,” Eirian said, pointing. The building rose from the wreckage of the city, a few miles away from our lookout spot. A section of it had been burned down, but the rest remained standing.

  “Let’s go.”

  We held our rifles at the ready as we emerged from the woods and onto the roads of the city. Denver was deserted, or so it seemed. It was a dead city, full of dead bodies and dead hopes. The stench of rotting corpses had yet to clear. I doubted it would take several months or years before I forgot that smell completely. It was the scent of despair and grief. It was the end of the modern world as we knew it.

  A loud crash startled us both as we crept through an alleyway near the hospital, looking for the safest way in. We both swung around, aiming the nose of our rifles toward the noise, but it was only a tin trash can that had fallen over. It rolled across the alley, spewing putrid garbage across the street. I lifted my sweater to cover my nose and looked up to the burned side of the hospital, which was the obvious way in.

  “Too dangerous,” Eirian muttered, reading my thoughts. This section of the building was a maze of demolished hallways. “The floor’s probably unstable. Let’s keep looking.”

  We circled around, keeping our eyes peeled for an alternate entrance as well as for anyone else in the vicinity. We made our way to the back side of the hospital, where the road opened up to let the ambulances drive in and out as quickly as possible. Giant sliding doors led from the dock to the emergency room, but they were automated. No good without electricity.

  “Maybe we can push them open,” Eirian suggested. We each took hold of a door and tried to force them apart to no avail. Eirian wiped his forehead. “Damn it.”

  “Got a window over here,” I said, wandering farther away from the ER bay. I peered inside. “Looks like some kind of office. The door’s open to the hallway. Looks like this is our way in.”

  I slammed the butt of the rifle against the window. The glass cracked. I hit it again, and the window shatt
ered. Eirian used one of his thick gloves to clear the rest of the jagged pieces from the opening.

  “Ladies first,” he said.

  I maneuvered the gun through the window first then climbed in after it, careful not to cut myself on any of the glass shards. Eirian followed suit. We brushed glass from our coats, regripped the rifles, and left the small office.

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Eirian asked as we crept through the first floor hallways.”

  “Storage rooms, nurse’s carts, that sort of thing,” I replied. “Cabinets or refrigerators that might have medication in them.”

  He nudged open a door to a room marked Hospital Staff Open and peered inside. “Here’s storage. Looks like this place has already been hit though.”

  I took a look. The room had been ransacked. There was nothing left, other than a few bedpans and a couple trampled boxes of safety gloves. We moved on, sweeping the entire floor for anything that we could use.

  “Damn it!” Eirian turned over yet another empty rolling cart in the emergency room. “Still nothing. Georgie, what if this trip is a total bust?”

  “Relax, Eirian.” I found an unopened package of gauze and shoved it into my bag. “We’re only on the first floor.”

  We moved upstairs, searching level after level. Here and there, I found something useful like unsoiled blankets or wholesale boxes of Band-Aids. I even found topical antibiotics for small cuts and bruises.

  “Too bad we can’t smear this all over Penny’s leg,” I said, holding up the little yellow tube for Eirian to see.

  “If only it were that easy.”

  In the operating rooms, we stole scalpels and clamps and other medical instruments that we didn’t know the names of. Jax could no doubt make use of them. In the patients’ rooms—some of which still housed those who were unable to move themselves from the hospital when the EMP blast went off—we collected clean sheets, blankets, clothes, and simple medications like ibuprofen and acetaminophen. Still, there were no signs of anything that could help save Penny. We had one more floor to search. Then we had to face facts and return to Camp Haven with what little we had. We took the stairway up to the top floor, but Eirian, who had taken point, stopped short when he looked through the window into the last hallway.

  “What is it?” I whispered, my pulse quickening.

  “People.”

  “Survivors?”

  “Of sorts. Addicts.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Because they’re all hanging out near a drug cart,” he said in a hushed voice, eyes fixed on the hallway. “And they’ve got track marks on their arms.”

  “How many are there?”

  “Three by my count.”

  I climbed the last few steps and joined him at the door. Sure enough, a trio of two men and one woman loitered in the hallway, slumped against the wall. The only reason I could tell that they weren’t already dead was because their chests rose and fell with their breath.

  “I think we have a pretty good shot of sneaking past them,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  We inched open the door and snuck into the hallway. The trio did not stir, even when our boots squeaked across the linoleum flooring.

  “Must be good, whatever they’re on,” Eirian muttered as he stepped over one of the men’s legs.

  “Let’s see if we can find some of it,” I said, opening the door to the drug cart. It was by far the fullest stocked one we had found so far. I pulled out vials of morphine, epinephrine, atropine, and a few others with names that I didn’t recognize. I carefully loaded it all into my bag.

  “There’s a fridge in here,” Eirian announced, sliding into one of the rooms that branched off of the main hallway. I followed him in, where he opened the fridge and extracted a vial. “Penicillin. That’s what we need, right?”

  “Yes!” I took the bottle from him, studied the label, then pumped my fist in triumph. “Oh, thank goodness.”

  “Don’t drop it,” Eirian warned, rifling through the rest of the fridge. “That’s all there is.”

  “It’ll be enough.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  We whirled around to face the owner of the slurred speech and found ourselves face to face with one of the men who had been sleeping in the hallway. He had yellow teeth and drooping eyelids, and he held a standard-issued Glock that didn’t match his wayward, careless appearance, as if he’d stolen the weapon from an unlucky police officer. I tucked the vial of antibiotics safely into my pocket then lifted my rifle toward the man.

  “Easy,” Eirian warned, aiming his own gun. “We’re not here to hurt anyone.”

  The man’s sleepy eyes flickered to our loaded bags. “You took all the drugs, didn’t you? The morphine? I need that, man!”

  “No, you don’t,” Eirian replied. “You just think you do.”

  “Don’t mess with me, man.” He stumbled forward, and the Glock flopped wildly in his grip. Eirian and I both stepped away from each other. The man looked from me to him and back again. “There’s two of you?”

  “Sheesh,” Eirian muttered under his breath. “He can’t even see straight. Let’s get past him and get out of here.”

  “Easier said than done,” I replied. “An addict with a gun is even less predictable than a cop with one.”

  “Are you talking about me?” the man sputtered. “I don’t appreciate that. Give me the morphine, or I’ll shoot!”

  He didn’t give us a chance to consider his ultimatum. Without preamble, he fired the Glock. The bullet whizzed so close to my ear that I heard it go by. I reacted instinctively and pulled the trigger of the rifle. The gun hammered against my shoulder. The man with the Glock fell to the floor. I stopped firing and stared at the man, the rifle drifting out of position to hang loosely at my side.

  “Georgie?” Eirian said.

  I checked my pocket to make sure that the penicillin had survived the ambush. “I can’t think about it, Eirian. Let’s go.”

  We stepped over the body to leave the room. I refused to look down, but it was impossible not to catch sight of the man riddled through with bullet holes in my peripheral vision. I had killed him. It was the second time that someone had died at my hands for the sake of my own survival. I knew I’d never get used to the feeling of emptiness that taking someone else’s life left in my soul.

  “Are you okay?” Eirian asked as we headed down the stairs to the main floor. “You had to do that, Georgie. He was aiming for your head, but I know it’s hard—”

  “You’re not scared of me?”

  Confused, he looked back at me. “Why would I be scared of you?”

  “I just killed someone.”

  He stopped on the next landing and took my hands in his. “This isn’t real life, Georgie. This isn’t how things are supposed to go. That means we have to do a lot of things that we wouldn’t normally do. It was either him or you. I’m glad it was him.”

  We spoke nothing more of it, but I was grateful that Eirian reacted rationally. It helped clear my mind. We made it out of the hospital without meeting anyone else, and when we left the city and climbed back into the mountains, the trees welcomed us back into the relative safety of their shadows. We trekked upward in silence, heavier than we had been on the way down, both in physicality and in spirits. When the sun sank below the horizon and the moon lifted itself into the sky, Eirian turned back to make sure I was still following him.

  “Should we stop for the night?” he asked.

  “Do you mind if we keep going?” I said. “I know I won’t be able to sleep if we stop, and I figure we might as well get back to the camp as soon as possible.”

  So on we went through the night. We arrived at Camp Haven hours later, shoulders slumped and feet aching. The night watch security team was thin. A few of them had been reassigned to the breach in the wall. One of them, Peters, held up a lantern to illuminate our faces.

  “You made it back,” he said, not bothering to hide his note of surprise.

 
“Sure did,” Eirian said. “Can you open the gate?”

  “You got it,” Peters replied, using hand gestures to communicate the order to his troops. “Did you find what you needed?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Peters said. “It’s only getting worse. You two haven’t heard, have you?”

  “Heard what?” I asked him.

  “The Masons’ daughter. What’s her name? She went into labor a few hours ago.”

  9

  We ran to the med bay despite our aching feet, but Pippa, Jacob, and Penny were nowhere to be seen. Most of the guys who had been hit by the explosion near the wall were gone, having recovered from their injuries enough to get back to work. Kirsch was the only one left. He lay upside down on his cot, his feet propped up against the wall as he tossed a rubber band ball into the air and caught it again.

  “Kirsch!” I said, snatching the ball out of the air to get his attention. “Where’s Pippa and Penny?”

  He pointed down the hallway to the exam rooms. At the same time, someone let loose a shrill scream.

  “Stay here,” I told Eirian. I wrestled the penicillin from my bag and ran into the back. I found Jacob, Pippa, and Nita in the first exam room. Pippa squeezed Jacob’s hand so tightly that his fingers were white and his eyes threatened to pop out of his skull.

  “Another contraction,” Nita said, wiping the sweat off Pippa’s forehead with a damp rag. “You’re doing great, sweetie.”

  “Don’t tell me how I’m doing!”

  Jacob caught sight of me in the doorway and pulled his hand free of Pippa’s to meet me. “You’re back! Thank God.” He threw his arms around me and hugged tightly. “Did you find the medication?”

  I held up the vial.

  His face fell. “Is that it?”

  “It’s better than nothing. Where’s your mom?”

  “In the next room over,” he said. “Jax is trying to keep her alive. We’ve had to resuscitate her twice since you’ve been gone.”

  “And she’s still hanging on?” I asked in disbelief.