The day after: An apocalyptic morning (2 page)

              It had been a mudslide that had taken Carl, his best friend. Carl was a San Joaquin Sheriff's deputy, just like Skip. They had met six years ago, when Skip had still been working uniformed patrol. Carl had been like a brother to him, closer in fact than Skip's own brother had ever been. Their wives socialized together, their children attended the same schools. The night before the impact, he and Carl had driven up to nearby Castle Point in Carl's Toyota Four-Runner to set up camp for their annual deer-hunting trip. They had been happy, full of life, contemplating bagging a nice trophy to take home to their families. That first night of the trip they had stayed up late, often staring at the night sky, which had been overly bright with the beautiful, gossamer tail of the approaching comet. They drank beer and cooked their simple meal before retiring to their tents for the night. At 6:00 AM the next morning, they had set off into the woods to make their kills. That now seemed a different lifetime. Had that really only been five days ago?

              After the earthquake, and after the barrage of flaming rocks and mud had fallen throughout the forest, setting it ablaze in many spots, they had immediately started back towards camp, concerned not so much for their own safety as for the safety of their wives and children back in Stockton. They had intuited that the comet had struck the earth at that point but they had been completely clueless about just what the ramifications of that were. Global catastrophe is on a scale that mere humans can hardly fathom. As they huffed and puffed their way through the woods, dodging fires here and there, hearing the impacts of rocks slamming into trees, they saw the clouds to the west of them for the first time. A thick, black, angry front was swelling into the sky, moving rapidly towards them. By the time they made it to camp, the wind and the lightening had started, toppling trees and igniting more fires.

              They dove into the Toyota, not bothering to pack up camp, terrified at the fates of their loved ones, and started to head back to Auburn, which would in turn lead them back to Interstate 80. The road they were on curved slightly upward from Castle Point before twisting and turning its way down to the foothills below. From the summit of this peak was a clear line of sight out over the Sacramento Valley. Usually it was one of the most impressive views that Skip could imagine. This time it was a glimpse through the gates of hell itself.

              When they first topped the rise they were able to see the city of Sacramento and its suburbs some fifty to sixty miles away. Already they were able to see huge areas of flooding caused by the breaking of Folsom Dam and the release of nearly a million acre feet of stored water. This first glimpse of isolated devastation was horrible but it did not destroy all of their hopes like what happened next. From the southwest, in the direction of the San Francisco Bay area, a huge wall of water appeared. It moved forward at what seemed a slow rate from their vantage point in the mountains but it advanced steadily. It swallowed up everything in its path, burying the valley and turning it into a brown, muddy sea. They watched in horrified fascination as the city disappeared and the water reached the fringes of the foothills twenty miles below them.

              Any illusions they might have had about the possible survival of their families disappeared at that moment. Though Stockton was forty miles south of Sacramento and well out of their line of sight, it was in the same valley and at the same elevation. It had been slightly under an hour since the earthquake had occurred. That was nowhere near enough time for Julie and Summer, Skip's wife and daughter, or Sandy and Kevin, Carl's wife and son, to get to ground high enough to save them. Nor was there any way any human could have lived through what they had just witnessed.

              Soon after this, while they were still staring at what had once been the home of more than a million people, the clouds overtook them. The sun was blotted from the sky, making the early afternoon daylight fade to an inky twilight. And then the rain began. It did not gradually develop from a drizzle to a downpour like a normal rainstorm, it simply started. One moment it was dry and the next it was raining harder than either man had thought possible. Visibility dropped to less than ten feet and the dirt road quickly turned to an impassable sludge of running mud. As they'd sat there, trying to cope with the loss of their families, wondering what to do next, the Four-Runner began to move on its own, propelled along by a river of mud pouring down the hillside above them. They picked up speed and finally fetched up against a stand of trees, at which point the mud began to pile up against the driver's side.

              Skip made it out, climbing through the passenger side window and up a small rise to safety. He didn't stop to help Carl out of the car, not out of fear, but because he hadn't thought it necessary. The situation had seemed under control at that point. It was a decision that would haunt him later. When Carl was halfway out, a huge glut of mud suddenly buried the truck like a breaking wave, knocking the trees it had been resting against flat. The entire mess had continued down the hill and over the edge of a ridge, landing in a creek bed that was already raging with brown runoff. Tons more mud quickly landed atop it, burying Carl and the Four-Runner for all time. Skip had not even bothered trying to rescue his friend. It would have been beyond futile.

              That first night, while the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to blast and the lightening continued to explode against the ground every ten to fifteen seconds, he had huddled against the base of a tree on the upside of a ridge. This had put him at high risk for a lightening strike but kept him safe from being buried alive by a mudslide. Though he was even then seriously considering ending it all with his Remington, he had no wish to endure the same hellish death that Carl had.

              Since then he had been walking north, inching along through the mud, keeping as close to areas of thick vegetation as he could to avoid the rivers of mud that continually washed down from the mountains. Despite these precautions he had almost been swept away several times when slides passed over a spot where he had just been. As the lightening strikes grew fewer and farther between, he worked his way onto higher and higher ground, staying out of potential flooding. He lived off of nothing more than the two candy bars and the small bag of trail mix he had in his shirt pocket and his body began to grow weaker and weaker.

              At night, with the thick cloud cover blotting out the moon and all the stars, the blackness was absolute, broken only occasionally by the odd flash of lightening. During the day it never got brighter than early dusk or late dawn as the clouds blotted out most of the sunlight. He sensed that, survival instinct or not, the end was near for him. Either hypothermia or starvation would soon cart him away to join his family and the billions of others that had undoubtedly died with them. This was not a particularly unpleasant thought. He almost welcomed the coming oblivion.

              Now, five days after the end of the world, running on the very last reserves of strength he had, he sat down on the leeward side of a pine tree and ate the last of his trail mix. It was unsatisfying and unfulfilling but it was all he had. Would it be safe to end it now? Could he concede that further survival in this terrible new world was an impossibility?

              The sound of a gunshot startled him out of his suicidal thoughts before he could bring them to a conclusion. It was not terribly loud but with the damping effect on sound that the wind and the rain inflicted, he knew that it had to be close. He looked around him, trying to gauge just where it had come from. He wasn't sure, and what real difference did it make anyway? So someone was nearby, shooting at something? What of it? Granted, it triggered his cop's instincts, but he wasn't a cop anymore, was he? There really wasn't any such thing as a cop anymore.

              Another shot rang out, a sharp crack void of any echo. This time he was able to tell where it had come from. It had issued from just over the ridge above him - a ridge topped with a stand of old growth pines that had so far managed to survive all that the comet had thrown at them. Two more shots quickly followed and then a prolonged burst of what could only be an M-16 rifle on full automatic. He knew that sound from his basic training days in the army. It was very distinctive. Another, shorter burst followed this and then, faintly though clearly, came a blood curdling scream of anguish.

              It was the scream that got him moving. That had been a woman! Though he was weak and on the verge of ending his life, though he was no longer a cop in a suddenly lawless world, he could not deny the cries of a woman in trouble. What the hell was going on over there?

              He pulled himself to his feet and unshouldered his Remington, checking to make sure the safety was off. It was. Next he checked the .40 caliber pistol strapped to his waist. It was his duty weapon, issued to him by the Sheriff's department to carry at work. He had packed this pistol through five years of service on the streets and through four years as the pilot of the northern San Joaquin valley's primary law enforcement helicopter. On hunting trips he carried it both for self-protection and to finish off any deer that might have managed to live through the initial rifle round. It was a weapon he was much more comfortable with at close range than the bulky rifle. It was seated neatly in its nylon holster. He gave it a pat and then put the rifle at port-arms position. He began to move up the hill.

              He moved tree to tree, rock to rock, keeping a close eye before him and to his flanks as he moved. He saw nothing unusual and heard no further gunfire although he did hear a few more faint screams and once a barked male voice telling someone to "shut the fuck up, bitch."

              As he got closer to the top of the ridge he dropped down to his belly and began to inch his way forward, crawling along the ground as he had been taught in the army. He wedged himself against the base of a tree on the summit of the hill and let his head edge slowly to the side. What he saw down there made him forget his hunger and his fatigue.

              About sixty yards down the hill, resting against an outcropping of large rocks, was a camping trailer. It was about thirty feet long and sitting upright, almost perfectly level, with only a small mound of mud pushing against the uphill side. That it had come from the public camping area two hundred feet up the next hill was obvious. Also obvious was the fact that it had been swept down there when that portion of the hillside had given in to the erosion of constant rain bombardment. Just beyond the trailer was the telltale swatch of bare, torn-up hillside that bespoke of a recent mudslide. But how had this single trailer been separated out and spared? Looking at the path it had made in its journey it appeared it had somehow become aligned forward during its trip down the hill and had managed to roll out of the flood of mud, where gravity then propelled it downward until it encountered the rocks.

              But the trailer itself, despite its almost miraculous existence in the first place, did not hold Ken's attention for more than a second. In front of the trailer was a group of four men and two women. The men had M-16s in their hands and sidearms attached to their muddy clothing. They had long hair and beards and looked, to Skip anyway, like methamphetamine snorting biker types. He had seen such people many, many times in his career and had taken many of them to jail for various offenses. They could be very dangerous even when living in a society ruled by civilized law. Now that the factor of civilization was removed from the equation they had become infinitely more dangerous, as was evidenced by what he was seeing below him. He wondered where they had come by automatic weapons? It wasn't like fully automatic M-16s could be found just lying around.

              The bikers were training these weapons on a group of two women and a young boy that were cowering in fear before the trailer. The oldest of the women looked to be in her late-thirties. The youngest looked to be a teenager. The resemblance in the facial features of the two told him they were mother and daughter. The boy, who had his arms protectively around the younger woman, was about fourteen and obviously a son. The father of this particular family was no longer in the picture. This was apparent by the fact that he was lying lifelessly at the foot of the trailer, a pistol next to him, his body riddled with bullets and covered with blood. That must have been the bursts of M-16 fire.

              "I'll give you anything you want," the mother of the group pleaded with the men. "I'll do whatever you want. Just let my kids go. I'll... I'll go with you."

              This struck the bikers, and even their women, who were unarmed and lagging in the rear, as deliciously funny. They laughed for the better part of thirty seconds before one of the men said, "Oh, you're both coming with us, mama. We might get around to doing somethin' with you after we're done with this little sweet piece." He jerked the barrel of his rifle towards the teenager.

              "I'm gonna tear me a piece off a that shit right now!" one of the other men declared. "Look at that shit. I bet she got some nice titties!"

              "No," the first one to have spoken said after a moment's reflection. "I get her first. Y'all can have sloppy seconds. Let's all take a quick piece of her and then we'll see what kinda goodies they got in that trailer for us."

              "No!" screamed the woman, trying to get up. She was forced to sit back down again by four rifles swinging towards her.

              "Take it easy, baby," the apparent leader of the group warned mildly. "We wouldn't want to have to kill you before we had our fill now, would we?"