Flight (4 page)

The empty highway bothered Jayla
and she sang louder.

Had this area been evacuated and
she simply hadn’t got the word? The mountain cabin lay in such a
remote region that it was possible. Plus, with the electricity out,
she’d had no contact with the outside world for a few
days.

Or were they simply still in a
remote area where no one lived?

She saw no houses or buildings
along the highway, but she knew there had to be some up ahead
somewhere. They’d passed through a community on their way to the
cabin. She also saw roads with signs leading off the highway. They
had to go somewhere where people lived.

They passed an abandoned
car.

When Jayla finally saw a house
just off the highway, she pulled to the side and turned her phone
back on. She had been without power for a long time, had let it
play music too long, and now the battery was almost dead. She only
turned it on long enough to check for a signal. Still
nothing.

She stared at the house, wondering
if she should be brave enough to go knock on the door and ask where
the nearest hospital was. The place looked abandoned.

What would her Daddy tell her to
do?

Don’t talk to strangers. That was
the number one rule.

Think.

That was always number two. Or was
it number three? It didn’t matter.

Think through the problem
logically.

So, what was the logic of her
problem? She needed to find a hospital. She was in the middle of
nowhere still, even after a couple of hours of driving down the
mountain. But there was a town somewhere. She remembered it. Jada
had made her stop. The girl wanted to use the restroom and buy meat
sticks, as if they hadn’t had enough food in the SUV already. Jayla
had plugged the SUV in at the station to top off the
batteries.

If you were building a hospital in
the middle of nowhere, where would you put it? It would have to be
in a town, right? And wouldn’t you put it close to the highway? And
have signs?

All Jayla had to do was keep going
and watch for signs. She could do that. That was less scary than
approaching an abandoned looking farm house sitting down a long
driveway.

She got back in her SUV and
started driving.

She rounded a bend on the highway,
going around some hilltop or another, it probably had a name that
only the locals knew, and Jayla found herself back in civilization.
She saw a sign for a campground, a visitor’s center, and homes and
trailers dotting the sides of the highway. She breathed a sigh of
relief. There would be a hospital or a clinic nearby and she could
get Jada tested and checked out.

Getting Jada tested was a
priority. Everyone had to believe her that she had fought the old
man in self-defense, that he had abused her sister and would have
done the same to her. There were probably other victims, and they
could get the old man to confess and the police would find them
also. It was a grisly crime, Jayla thought, and she didn’t know how
police officers dealt with that sort of thing, finding decomposed
bodies in the woods. It wasn’t for her.

While she thought about that, she
didn’t pay much attention to her surroundings.

She and her sister had been
isolated for so long that the lack of other cars on the road didn’t
register until later.

Along the way into town she read
street signs and began thinking about how tiny communities like
this were formed. The names of the roads held a clue. Big Wood
River Road, Fox Creek Drive, Dip Creek Way.

The thing that finally got her
attention was a large rock in the middle of her lane. She slammed
on the brakes, jerking against her seatbelt. Jada flopped around
like a rag doll.

When the SUV stopped, she stared
at the thing sitting in the road. How would a rock like that get
there? It would have taken a mighty huge crane to put it there. How
could that have happened? And why?

Think Jayla, she told herself in
her father’s voice. Think. Observe. It’s what scientists
do.

She knew her father wanted her to
be a scientist, but her grades weren’t that good. She didn’t know
what she wanted to be when she grew up. But she knew she had to be
smart now. Something was seriously wrong. A big rock like this
shouldn’t be in the middle of the highway.

There were more rocks in the
highway ahead. The words ‘a debris field’ came to mind. She looked
around at the houses and now she saw rocks all over them. Rocks in
the yards, rocks on top of smashed cars, rocks near downed trees.
Houses had holes in them, in the roofs and the walls, and some
buildings had collapsed completely. None had windows, as if someone
had intentionally gone through and removed every pane of glass from
every building around. Most of the trees were blown
down.

Jayla had been driving through a
scene of intense devastation and all she had thought of was the
funny street names.

What had happened?

She finally realized that there
weren’t any other cars on the highway and now she knew why.
Something serious had happened here.

She suddenly worried that it could
have been a nuclear bomb. Was she exposing herself and her sister
to massive amounts of radiation right now? Nothing looked
radioactive. But then, how did radioactive look? If it was glowing,
it was probably so radioactive that Jayla would be dead already.
She shook her head. There was nothing she could do if that were the
case.

She started to drive slowly,
negotiating the SUV around chunks of rock strewn everywhere, and
she prayed she could find a hospital. They could test her for
radiation.

Her tires began vibrating on the
highway surface. The sound grew louder and she had to stop. There
were ripples in the road.

Gray clouds darkened the sky and
it must have been late afternoon. It was getting harder to see at a
distance, but just ahead she could tell the highway was more and
more broken up.

She reluctantly left her sister in
the SUV to scout ahead on foot. The rippled highway grew worse,
until it was almost like a series of small walls. She crawled over
them, knowing there was no way she could drive any farther in this
direction. But she kept going. There had to be something past the
walls of highway material that would explain what had
happened.

She could see buildings on either
side of the road that had been completely ripped to shreds. If
anyone had been in them, they would be dead. No one could have
survived that much destruction.

A car lay upside on top of a
downed tree.

She climbed the catastrophically
formed walls, up one side and down the other, up the next wall and
down it, until they were so close she could hop from the top of one
to the next. She could see nothing over the walls but sky and hills
in the distance.

Then the walls ran out.

When she saw what was past the
walls, she thought she should have thrown herself on the ground in
despair, tearing her clothes up and her hair out like they always
did in the Bible. But she couldn’t react that way. It was as if the
scene in front of her were meaningless, like looking at a picture
and not a real thing. She simply couldn’t believe what she
saw.

Jayla had seen pictures before
that were like what she saw in front of her now, but only from one
place. And she knew why those things existed in that one place. She
didn’t know why it existed in front of her right now.

The only time she’d seen something
like this before was in pictures of the Moon.

The crater in front of her was
huge, although not by geological standards. She knew craters on the
Moon could be more than fifty miles across. Less than five miles
diameter was considered small.

This crater wouldn’t have even
been noticeable on the Moon. She could see the other side of it
just a couple of hundred yards away. But there was nothing left
inside of it. Everything had been vaporized or pulverized, and
there was nothing left but a big moon crater.

With a tiny amount of guilty
relief, she knew that nuclear bombs would not have created damage
like this. It had to have been created just like the craters on the
Moon had been created. A meteor strike.

But how would a meteor this big
have struck the Earth? Didn’t they burn up in the atmosphere? This
couldn’t be happening. What she saw with her own eyes still didn’t
look real.

She returned to her sister in
disbelief.

She drove the SUV back until she
found a major road that turned off the highway. Signs lying on the
ground said there was a ski resort that direction. Maybe there was
a clinic up there.

Jayla didn’t have much hope. If
anyone had survived this destruction, they must have evacuated to
somewhere safer.

As she drove slowly in the dimming
light, she observed that anything higher than three or four feet
off the ground had been leveled, and she wondered if she could even
trust the signs that lay on the ground. How far had some of them
been blown?

She always hated it when reporters
described natural disasters as war zones. As she looked at the
wreckage around her, she knew no military would ever, or could
ever, destroy a town as thoroughly as the meteor strike had
destroyed this town. No war zone ever looked this bad. She had no
hope of finding survivors.

Jayla followed the signs to the
ski resort anyway, not knowing why, just knowing she needed to
follow something. Her sister still sat unmoving in the passenger
side. Jayla worried about her not having eaten anything, tried to
remember when the last time she ate was. Jada would swallow water
when Jayla forced it into her mouth, but Jayla hadn’t succeeded in
feeding her.

She tore her attention away to
look at a sign that still stood, pointing to the right. Why was
this sign still standing?

It was getting hard to see in the
twilight, but she stopped, opened her door, and stood up on the
sideboard to see what had changed.

The small mountain where the ski
resort was located had shielded this area from the meteor
strike.

The road she was on went through a
valley and she could see debris littering the slopes on the other
side. Rocks must have been thrown high enough to go over the
mountain, but the mountain had protected this bit of
road.

She got back inside and took off,
heading towards the resort.

Her hunch paid off. There were two
ways to the resort. The road she had just taken, and one that
headed south, the direction she wanted to go. Always count on
commercialism. Any other location would have only had one way in
and one way out.

She continued gratefully on the
road, driving slowly to make sure she didn’t slam into any debris.
It had grown dark and she could only see by her headlights now. She
turned the brights on although that made her fret about how long
her batteries would hold out. She whined to Jada about it and grew
increasingly agitated, her earlier positive feelings at finding a
road south gone. She finally became so upset she simply had to shut
up.

Jada never responded.

Signs pointed her back to the main
highway and she followed them, guessing that she would come out
past the crater. She did.

She turned left onto the highway
and immediately started having to pick her way through more rock
and debris. At least the highway hadn’t buckled here. She wondered
how far south of the crater her detour had taken her.

Then she saw something that gave
her hope.

A little blue sign with a white
reflective ‘H’ on it.

A hospital.

12

“Back from the dead, are
you?”

Wolfgang opened his eyes. His head
still felt groggy with sleep and pain.

He awoke in a sitting position.
Someone had moved him over next to the back of the truck, sitting
him up against a tire. He put his hand to his head and felt
bandages. His face had been cleaned of blood.

He tried to get up but a hand held
him gently in place.

“Woah there tiger. You probably
got a concussion. You just take it easy a few minutes. We found
some drugs for you. Just give me a sec to dig ‘em out.”

“No drugs,” Wolfgang mumbled in
German.

“Oh, it ain’t nothin’ that good.
Just some Tylenol for the pain. It’ll help clear your head a
bit.”

Wolfgang recognized Tylenol but
otherwise couldn’t keep up with the American’s English. Tylenol was
okay. He didn’t want anything making him pass out again. He
remembered he was worried about an ambush. He wondered how long
he’d been unconscious.

“Ambush?” he asked in English.
There was a German word for ambush, but like so many other words,
Germans used a germanized version of the English word.

“We ain’t seen nothing yet. The
Colonel and your girl are checking out the area, but it seems like
the bomb was left behind. Pressure activated, or
something.”