The Survivor Chronicles: Book 1, The Upheaval (22 page)

His eyes lingered on Bobby’s arm before he turned away. “I think I just pissed him off though,” Bobby muttered.

Riley shrugged. “You’re my friend, Bobby.”

“Yeah, and he’s my friend too.” He dropped his arm from around her shoulders.

She didn’t like this whole new dynamic they had thrown into her life, and though she understood Carol’s reasoning for it, she would have preferred if her friend had just stayed silent. There was enough going on right now without having to worry about this strange new undercurrent too.

Lee had climbed to the top of a small hill. He stared over the side of it before turning to wave frantically at them. “Hey, come check this out! I think we’ve got a problem.”

Riley forgot about everything Carol had told her as she hurried up the hill to join him. She took a small step back from the giant gash that had opened in the earth below them. The heat of it was like a slap in the face as she took another step back. No wonder the day had seemed so unreasonably hot, especially if there were more of these gorges spread throughout the woods. She glanced up at the sky, a chill streaking down her back as she thought about all the horror stories she’d heard about the results of global warming.

She didn’t want to be anywhere near that thing anymore. She wanted out of these woods, out of this town, and she wanted her parents. She felt like a child, but she really and truly, one hundred percent, wanted her mother more than anything right now. “We’re going to have to find a way around it,” Lee muttered.

Xander glanced up and down the hill as Riley took another step back. Now that she knew it was there, she could see the steam shifting across the trees in a misty wave that shimmered across the wilting leaves.

Lee and Xander turned away from the hill coming back toward her with Bobby and Carol close on their heels. Riley felt, more than saw, what happened next. It was as if a screen of the future descended over her mind, and she knew that something bad was going to happen, that something wrong was about to occur, seconds before it did. Perhaps it was déjà vu, perhaps it was just simple primitive instinct, but either way she was already lurching forward when the earth gave way. A scream lodged in her throat as the ground dropped with a heaving crack that she felt deep in the marrow of her bones.

Time seemed to slow; the horrified look that crossed Carol’s face was vivid, and would forever be seared into Riley’s memory. Pain flashed through Carol’s gentle hazel eyes, and warped her features as a wail of anguish tore from her. Riley’s fingers brushed over Carol’s, she could feel the smoothness of Carol’s skin, the warmth of her flesh, before the hill collapsed and Carol disappeared. Riley fell to the ground, screaming as she fought to pull herself to the hole, as she struggled to get to her friend.

Arms wrapped around her waist, she was pulled back as more of the hill buckled and more of the earth was eaten by the steaming canyon. She was dragged and pulled backwards as whoever held her scrambled to escape the erosion spreading toward them. Screams echoed in her head, she thought they might be Carol’s screams still, but she dimly began to realize they were hers.

The person who held her collapsed and they fell to the ground together in a gasping, breathless heap of entangled limbs. The erosion of the ground finally eased, stopping fifteen feet away from their feet. She was wheezing, choking on the stifling air trying to get into her lungs, sobbing so forcefully that her back and stomach ached from the strength of her cries. Hands clenched around her waist, she was pulled back against a firm chest as agony entrenched her. She came back to life, fighting against the restraining hold as she thrashed to get back to the spot where her friend had vanished.

“Carol!” she cried. “We have to help her!”

“She’s gone Riley, she’s gone.” Xander’s words were tender against her ear, his voice choked with tears as he pressed his dampened cheek to hers. “There’s nothing we can do.”

His arms tightened around her as she began to cry harder. She hurt; she hurt so bad that she wasn’t sure she would survive it. Her heart twisted and lurched as misery slithered through her belly, into her ribcage, and clenched around her heart. Carol, her best friend, the person who had been more than a sister to her, the person she loved as much as she loved her own family, the person she’d planned her future around and with, was gone. Like that, in the simple blink of an eye, Riley was never going to see her again. She was never going to laugh with her again, or stay up late talking, or see Carol’s dazzling, beautiful smile, hear her wonderfully carefree laugh.

A moan of suffering escaped her; Xander rocked her against him as he held her close. His chest, pressed against her back, heaved and shook with the force of his tears. Bobby collapsed on the ground beside them, his mouth opened and closed, forming silent words, his face deathly pale. The right side of his body was raw and red; his jeans were frayed from the heat that had seared them. Lee remained unmoving, frozen as he stared at the place where Carol had stood.

“We’re all going to die,” Bobby muttered before he turned and vomited on the ground beside him.

CHAPTER 16

Carl

Somewhere in Mass.

He was getting tired of driving like a lunatic. It made his throbbing back ache even more and set his teeth on edge. He supposed it was better than being engulfed by a ball of flame and bar-b-qued alive, but he still wished they could catch a break. Wished they could have one hour where things weren’t completely insane, so he could actually take the time to see where he was going instead of just hoping that they didn’t end up plummeting over the side of one of the new craters.

John was not helping, his sharp intakes of breath, his slamming of his hand on the dashboard, and his constant chatter to “do this” and “don’t do that” were driving Carl insane. It took all he had not to scream at the kid, but he knew it wasn’t John’s fault. He’d be backseat driving too if the roles were reversed.

“Left!” John shouted as he slapped his hand on the dashboard. “Right!" Another slap. "Fence! Fence! Fence!”

He could see the fence; it didn’t mean the truck turned on a freaking dime, though. In fact, it most certainly did not. The right front fender clipped part of a pole as he jerked the wheel. The girl let out a small cry and grabbed the handle over her head. John was thrown up against her, they were pinned to the door as the tires skidded and the wheels sought traction. Something screamed – or hopefully someone – Carl prayed it wasn’t the truck that had made that noise.

It wouldn’t be good for any of them if it was.

Carl sprayed some washer fluid; he turned the wipers on in an attempt to get rid of the dirt and mud that had pelted the windshield. He leaned forward, peering through the smears that now streaked his line of vision. He strained to see the field he had driven across in an attempt to outrun the fast moving inferno. He drove parallel to the fence, searching for an opening, praying for some way through the wooden rails. He’d run it over if he had to, but he was hoping to avoid it if he could. The last thing they needed to deal with was a hole in the radiator.

“There! There!” the girl cried, pointing toward a metal gate in the middle of all the wood. Relief filled Carl as he swung the truck toward the gate and threw it into park far more abruptly than he normally would have. The girl was lurching out of the truck before he could open his door.

He was still five feet from her, but she already had the chain deftly unwound and the gate thrust open. “Come on! Hurry!” she yelled to him.

“She sure told you,” John said laughingly.

Carl scowled at him as he ran back to the truck and drove it eagerly forward. He understood John’s reasons for staying out of the truck when he gestured for the girl to get in the middle, smirking slightly when she did. “Really? It’s an issue now?” Carl demanded of him.

John shrugged his shoulders and hopped into the truck. “If I’m going to die, I’m not going to be sitting bitch when it happens.”

“Excuse me!?” the girl demanded, her face twisted into an expression that made Carl think she just might haul off and punch John.

John colored as he began to sputter. “Not you, I wasn’t calling you that! It’s what we call the middle seat. No one, ah… we just don’t like sitting there. It’s for the third person on a crew.”

The girl’s eyes narrowed, she didn’t look at all appeased by John’s answer as she folded her arms over her chest and glared at him. “He really didn’t mean any offense,” Carl assured her. He wasn’t looking to help John out. In fact, he thought it was amusing to watch him squirm, but she was young, she didn’t know them, and the last thing Carl wanted was for her to be frightened of them. There was enough to fear out there right now. “It’s just a term we use to annoy the newbies on a crew that we make sit in the middle.”

“I see.”

Though she appeared a little mollified she was still eyeing John as if she were tempted to shove him out of the truck.

Carl glanced in the mirror as he drove through the open field. The flames were still back there, still eating up the earth, but they had gained some distance between them and the hungry inferno. “Are those… horses?” John wondered.

Carl turned to see where he was looking. Nausea twisted through his belly, unease wrapped through his chest as he stared at the mound gathered in the far corner of the field. It was difficult to tell exactly what they were, and if it hadn’t been for the shoes he saw glistening on some, he might have assumed the already bloating carcasses were cattle.

“It looks like they herded themselves together to… to die,” Carl muttered.

The girl was crying silently as she took in the remains. It seemed impossible to Carl, and if he wasn’t looking at it, he never would have believed it. The horses had piled one on top of the other in some kind of twisted King of the Mountain game. He’d seen a lot of crap today, a lot more than he’d ever thought he’d see in his lifetime, but that pile was probably the most unnerving thing he’d ever seen.

He didn’t understand why they would just stack on top of each other like that. The birds he had assumed had been affected by the quakes and that their inner homing system had gotten messed up and they’d lost their bearings. But this? Well, this he didn’t even pretend to have an explanation for.

His breath rushed out of him. He reached for a cigarette with trembling fingers but glanced at the girl sitting beside him. She was staring out the window, oblivious to him, but still he took the butt and tossed it back into the pack. He normally didn’t care about smoking in front of other people but he’d never liked to smoke around children.

Carl studied the pile of dead animals. There was no way a human would ever have the strength to do that, and he didn’t think they would have taken the time to do it with some sort of machine. That was if this farm even had the equipment to lift dead horses and stack them high like that. He was sure some farms did, but it seemed improbable this one did, and it seemed as if it would easily be a daylong project to accomplish.

He didn’t believe that these animals had died before today and been placed there over time either. No, he knew that this was the result of whatever was going on, and that these poor creatures had done this to themselves. Every hair on his body stood on end. The cold chill that crept over his spine reminded him of when he’d been a child, afraid of the dark and terrified to put his feet down because the monster living under his bed would grab his ankle and pull him into the dark underworld he knew existed just beneath the dust cover of his Star Wars sheets.

He didn’t know much about horses, but from what he did know they didn’t have the homing instincts of a bird, instincts that would be messed up by some event or another. In fact, he could only think of one thing that could have driven the horses to this act.

Fear.

The landscape was quiet now, still in the ever-rising sun. But something around there had been so frightening that it drove those animals to trample each other in their attempt to escape it. Perhaps the approaching fire had driven them mad.

His breath hissed out of him, his heart did a knocking the likes of which he hadn’t experienced since he’d consumed too many drugs, cigarettes, and booze and stayed up for three days straight in his early twenties. He’d thought he was going to die then, and hadn’t touched drugs or booze since. Though he still enjoyed a cold beer and smoked a pack a day, but everyone had their bad habits and he enjoyed his.