Hell Released (Hell Happened Book 3) (18 page)

“We’ve been walking since yesterday. We don’t know where we’re going, but Sacramento is gone,” she told him. She spoke with deep sadness at the loss of life and the situation everyone here was in.

“Where were you all going then?” he asked Jo, taking the bottle of water offered to him by the 17-year-old girl.

“Don’t know,” the girl said. “My mom and dad were two of the first to die. That was almost a month ago and I’ve been waiting to die ever since.” She sat down next to Jo and leaned against the larger woman. Jo put an ample arm around the girl. CJ thought the girl looked ready to cry but after all the tears she’d probably shed over the past month, she’d probably cried all her tears out.

“Where were you headed?” asked Jo after comforting the girl.

CJ ran his fingers through his blonde hair and wiped his face. “Honestly, I don’t know. I was at my dead friend’s house yesterday and the quake hit. I just started walking and fell asleep in a house back that way.” He pointed with his head. “I woke up this morning to find a river flowing through the house.”

One of the older men wobbled down to where they were sitting. “It is probably a tidal wave that was caused by the earthquake.” He sat down next to Jo and looked at her. “We’re going to need food and water and shelter before the end of the day Jo,” and then looking over at the girl, “and Teddy is looking for you Chloe.”

Chloe’s shoulders dropped, but she slowly got to her feet and walked back up the hill to who he presumed was Teddy, a young boy about eight or ten years old and the youngest in the group.

Jo pointed with her chin. “Teddy lost two brothers and three sisters along with his parents. Chloe found him sitting somewhere and he’s kind of adopted her.”

CJ nodded. The boy was wearing nice, but dirty clothes, and had probably been a normal kid that could be seen in any city or town in the United States when there had been one. Now he looked like a frightened child who had no idea about why the world was treating him as it had and had latched on to the first person who could provide him some security – Chloe.

“What do you know about earthquakes and tidal waves, mister?” CJ asked the older man before finishing the bottle of water Chloe had brought him.

“John, John Smith. I used to be a fifth grade teacher at Crocker Riverside Elementary, not far from here. I know a little, just enough to teach fifth graders about tectonic plates and how we’ve been expecting this earthquake since 1989. That was when San Francisco was hit during the Loma Prieta earthquake. Remember the World Series that was interrupted?” Everyone who was listening nodded.

“What’s that got to do with the flooding?” CJ asked, flipping the empty bottle in his hands.

“I’m just guessing, but I bet part of the tectonic plate that runs under San Francisco, part of the San Andreas Fault Line, slipped into the ocean yesterday and displaced billions of gallons of water and left a big hole in California. When the land pushed the water out to sea, the waves probably raced across the Pacific and then came rushing back.

“Depending on where the epicenter of the quake was and how much of California fell into the ocean, water could have washed up as far as the mountains. This water probably came up through San Francisco and San Pablo Bay, between Vallejo and Concord. If water is rushing up this far, I’d guess Oakland and Fairfield, Travis Air Force Base and Rio Vista are probably wiped off the map. Stockton probably suffered the same fate as Sacramento. If we go back that way, we’ll probably find the city in flames.”

“So, where do you suggest we go, Professor?” CJ asked the older man.

The man chuckled. It sounded hollow and a little forced. “I was never smart enough to be a professor.”

“Right now, you’re the smartest man I know, and probably the smartest man on earth,” CJ told him.

“I’m not in charge here. I’m just a follower who hasn’t had the good sense to die yet. Ed was in charge of this group, but he and his sons died back there in Sacramento.”

Jo put a hand on Smith’s arm. They’d lost more than two-thirds of their group who had survived the plague. The people, with whom they had bonded and came to depend on with the death of millions of others, had been killed by the quake and all of them were feeling like God had slapped them down.

“We were headed south to get away from the city. We didn’t have any destination in mind,” Jo said. “We were thinking there were probably some people from the LA area who might be still alive. We really don’t know where to go.”

CJ thought for a few moments in the silence. He heard one of the kids in the group say he was hungry.

“My folks owned a lot of property south of here. I was there yesterday when the quake hit. All the buildings were knocked down and the highway between here and there is wrecked beyond driving on, but I bet we could be there by this afternoon.”

“Why go there if all the buildings were knocked down?” Jo asked. “Shouldn’t we go farther inland away from the water?”

“Jack, a friend of mine, was the manager of one of our companies called Survival Shelter, Inc. I’ll bet some of the shelters survived the quake and I bet they’re still above the water level. It’ll give us a safe place to stay out of the weather and someplace warm. I know the place had a lot of generators so we can have heat and lights when the sun goes down.”

“Why would you leave there if there were survival shelters?” Smith asked him.

CJ pursed his lips and looked down. He didn’t want to tell them he had been stoned out of his mind and not thinking correctly when he left the place. “I was looking for anyone else who might have survived the earthquake,” he lied.

Jo asked him how far it was and CJ told her they could probably reach the property by mid-afternoon it they didn’t run into trouble. “We’ve had nothing but trouble, CJ. All we can do now is walk the path God has laid out for us.”

“If there is a God, He must be pretty pissed at me because my ‘path’ is one hell after the next,” CJ said getting to his feet. Jo and John got to their feet too. The others in the group started standing up and walking over to them.

“CJ here says there might be some survival shelters a few miles from here. They might be our best bet for getting out of the weather and protect us from the beasts of the night.” There were mumbles and grumbles, but everyone got to their feet and picked up their back packs or whatever they were carrying their worldly belongings in.

The group started back the way CJ had walked the previous night. It was slow going. The oldest person in the group was in her late 50s and the youngest was the young boy who had attached himself to Chloe.

The first obstacle was the water flowing over the highway. They’d walked about a mile and crossed the bridge over Freeport Boulevard and the flooding had crossed the highway into the housing development east of the highway. The topology of the land forced them east into the development at the highway sign that said 37 miles to Stockton.

“A 30-minute drive on a good day,” Jo observed. The waters had pushed all the vehicles on the highway against a wall around the development. “I wonder if we’ll be able to walk around this.”

“There are a few hills on the far side, opposite the golf course a few miles down,” CJ told her so they continued to walk.

All of the houses they encountered were damaged to a greater or lesser extent to make them unsafe for even brief habitation. Fire had consumed hundreds of the houses and water damaged the ones that hadn’t been consumed by fire.

CJ had thought about settling in for the afternoon when they found a food store that was not so badly damaged that they couldn’t find some food and refreshments. Jo’s repeated warning of beasts kept them all moving. “We still have four or five hours of daylight, how much farther are these shelters you talked about?”

“There’s the treatment plant,” CJ said pointing. “A couple two or three hours and we’ll be there.”

“Tell me more about the beasts you keep talking about,” CJ asked her.

It was the professor who answered. “They’re some kind of mutant and you don’t want to meet one of them. Two of them were able to kill six of our group before we killed them about two weeks ago.

“They’re bipedal like us, but they’re extremely strong and fast. They have oversized eyes and a protruding brow like the Neanderthal of earth’s history. They are extremely vicious and feed on human flesh for some reason. You don’t want to run into one because they’re the sickest thing heaven ever put on this earth. There’s nothing good about them,” the school teacher explained with vehemence as they walked.

“I think I’ve encountered some of their work. Something tore up the cemetery where my family was buried. Whatever it was tore the bodies apart, even pulling them out of the ground,” CJ recalled to those listening to him. “I guess I got lucky.”

“Can any of us still alive call ourselves lucky?” asked Chloe.

“I’m still alive,” Jo said, putting her arm over the younger girl’s shoulder. “And after what we’ve all been through over the past month, I’d say we are all lucky.”

CJ didn’t agree with her. He didn’t feel lucky and his life was nothing but one step in front of the next.

The 20-plus people crossed a few more fences and skirted the fields that were filled with water, vehicles and decomposing bodies. The water was receding, but the smell was horrific. Two of their number lost what little food they had eaten and CJ was close to losing his before the wind changed directions.

It was late afternoon before CJ saw the driveway he was looking for. The gully made from the earthquake must have re-routed the water that had rushed through the area because while the house and construction building were on the ground and demolished, seven of the 12 survival shelters that had been completed but not shipped were still in the quality control area on the back hill, which meant they were habitable without any work from the survivors.

Jack had designed his survival shelters as 18-foot-in-diameter, two-piece octagons that were 21 feet long.  The two sections could be transported on a standard flatbed trailer for shipping. When onsite, most often buried in a hillside, the two pieces were locked and sealed together like Ikea furniture, but with rubber seals to prevent leaking.

According to the marketing brochures, when the Apocalyptic Survival Shelter was properly erected and plumbed, it would “give six people enough room to live comfortably until the crisis abated.” The entire system came complete with air and water filtration, a built-in five kilowatt gas generator, rechargeable lithium batteries, storage space for six months worth of MRE-type meals, canned and dry goods, bathroom and shower, a 100-gallon water bladder, on-demand hot water heater, two-burner stove, refrigerator, beds and furniture which folded into the walls to allow more room during the day.

The higher-end models also came with flat panel monitors and external cameras, communications gear, tablets filled with books, movies and other entertainment, environmental suits and an extra generator.

The focus group that had tested the A.S.S. executive model, said they felt no isolation issues with the communications and surveillance gear to the outside world, comfortable and able to keep busy with the stationary bikes and treadmills that re-charged the lithium batteries if the generator failed. It wasn’t a perfect solution and Jack had been looking at more ways to improve his design, but it had been a solution that was marketable.

“ASS Executive Model?” Jo asked. “Isn’t that a really vulgar name? After all, who wants to live in an executive ass?”

“Brand-name recognition,” CJ explained. “It was a name you couldn’t forget when you heard it and Jack was all about name recognition.

“I had to get special permission from the Professional Tennis Association to sew his logo on the side of my sweatband, and even then, some people balked.”

Some water had flowed across this area, but the gully from the earthquake and the different heights of the two sides of the yard kept the area where Jack ran through his quality control checklist dry.

CJ had heard about the executive survival shelters but hadn’t even seen or been in one, but he was the only person in the group who had an idea how they might work. None of the generators had any fuel in them and it took more than a half hour for them to find something to put fuel in and then a vehicle from which they could siphon enough to fill one of the generators.

While some of the other men went searching for more fuel for the other shelter generators, CJ, Jo, Chloe and the boy Teddy entered the first of the shelters. There was a heavy steel lever that needed to be lifted with both hands to open the heavy door.

The inside of the shelter was stark and utilitarian. It was also very dark except for the light that came through the door. CJ knew the control panel for the generator was in the middle area of the shelter.

Jack had showed him how easy the control panel was to use on the prototype model, and there was just enough light still coming through the doorway for him to see. The executive model had more switches and gauges, but the layout was similar. CJ closed the connection between the batteries and the generator, primed the motor and turned the key. Through the thick reinforced concrete and insulation, CJ could barely hear the motor turn over and start up.

There was a panel of eight electrical rocker switches and CJ pressed the four on the right to the on position. The lights in the shelter all came on and Jo patted CJ on the back. The pitch of the motor also picked up.