Will to Survive

 

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To those who survive against all the odds

 

1

“I … I killed them,” I stammered. “They were going to take me and … I shot them.”

I was standing in a parking lot, in the dark, in the middle of the night. Beside me, inside the plane, were the two people I'd shot.
The two people I'd killed.
That rattled around in my head.

I'd killed them. Shot them dead before they could shoot me.

“Adam … what happened?” my mother demanded.

She, my father, and the twins were there with me. We stood in a huddle, with my family trying to calm and comfort me.

Howie, my mom's lieutenant, stood nearby.

My whole body had started shaking, as if I were standing out in the freezing cold. But it was actually just a cool late-summer night.

In the lights cast by the several patrol cars that had gathered, the whole scene was now as bright as day. Here I stood in the parking lot of the strip mall—the mall where I used to go to get an ice cream or to run an errand and pick things up for my parents at the grocery store or the drugstore, or the bakery. The place I'd come to get a slice of pizza.

Although the stores were mostly abandoned, the mall looked pretty much the same as it always did. The differences were the nearby high fence that marked one edge of our community, the armed guards at the gate, and of course the airplane with the two bodies inside it.

Those things were more different than anything I could have even imagined a few months ago, before the blackout hit.

I tried to gather myself.

The twins—my younger brother and sister—were holding on to me, crying.

“I didn't have any choice,” I said. “I shot them. I had to.”

“You shot who?” my father questioned.

“Two of the prisoners, Owen and Tim. They were trying to force me to fly them away.”

“Oh my lord!” he exclaimed.

“They killed the guards and they all escaped and—”

“Brett has escaped?” my mother asked.

I could tell by her expression how shocked she was. More than that, there was fear.

“Yes, all of the prisoners. He and the others are probably already over the walls and gone.”

My mother launched into police-captain mode, barking out orders to Howie, who rushed off to notify the guards on the walls.

She turned her attention back to me. “But why were you even out here to begin with in the middle of the night?”

“It was Brett,” I said. “He was in our house.”

My sister gasped.

“In my room. He had a knife.” Even as I said the words it didn't seem real, more like a bizarre nightmare. “He told me if I didn't come along quietly he'd kill me and everybody else in the house. I had to go with him. There was no choice.”

“But why? Why did he want you to go with him?” my father asked.

“He didn't want me. He wanted the plane. Once we were outside the house, we met up with six others, and he ordered two of them to come along with me. They tried to make me fly it out for them and—”

Then I remembered.

“We have to get to Herb!”

“What?” my mother asked.

“They shot Herb … We have to get help … We have to bring the doctor! He could still be alive!”

I broke free of my family and started running.

I heard them shouting out after me, but I couldn't stop.

I raced through the parking lot, dodging the abandoned cars, and ran out into the street. I pounded down the hill back toward Herb's house, where I pictured him lying in a pool of blood, having been shot in his bed by two of Brett's militiamen.

My feet and legs, which moments before had been so shaky that I could hardly stand, were now pulsing with power, carrying me over the pavement like I was really flying.

Coming up the hill toward me was one of the community go-carts, its converted lawn-mower engine roaring as one of the mobile sentries raced to investigate the gunshots from my battle with the prisoners. I jumped out in front of him, waving my arms in the air, and the driver skidded to a stop, fishtailing as he just avoided hitting me.

“I need your vehicle!” I screamed to the guy, whose name I had forgotten. “Please!”

Before he could react I grabbed him and pulled him right out—the adrenaline giving me superpowers. I jumped into the seat and slammed my foot on the gas pedal, squealing around and tearing down the street.

*   *   *

There was a slideshow going on in my head—Brett in my room, the knife to my throat, the blood and smoke and explosions in the cabin of the Cessna.

Then I pictured Herb in his bed, bleeding from the assassins' shots. While he held me hostage out on the street, Brett had sent two men into Herb's house to kill him, and they'd run out saying they'd shot him while he slept.

There was no chance that he was still alive.

Why hadn't I done something quicker?

If Herb died, it was as much my fault as that of the prisoners who had fired their automatic weapons stolen from the guards they'd killed.

I swerved onto my street and felt the go-cart tip onto two wheels. Forcing myself to lift my foot off the accelerator, I steadied the vehicle, then bumped up the curb and across the sidewalk, ripping a path through recently harvested soybeans where the front lawn used to be. I slammed on the brakes before I smashed into Herb's garage.

Leaving the engine on, I leaped out and burst through the front door, which Brett's men had left slightly ajar as they'd fled.

“Herb!” I yelled.

The house was dark. I hurtled up the stairs, only to trip and fall, but I kept going on all fours, clawing my way up.

“Herb!”

In the dark I could make out a partially open bedroom door. I crashed through it.

I could see him … in the bed … under the covers … not moving … a dark shadow.

And all at once the adrenaline rush disappeared, leaving me shaking.

Slowly I eased forward. Reaching over, I grabbed the covers, afraid of what I knew I was going to find. I'd seen enough dead bodies over the last four months, but not one of somebody I considered family.

I pulled back on the covers and in the dark could make out a lump on the bed. It didn't move.
He
didn't move. My heart skipped a beat, but I had to do more than just stand there. My arm reached out, as if of its own accord, and touched the shape. It was soft, almost like—

A light came on, suddenly blinding me, and I spun around, my hand shielding my eyes.

“Adam.”

It was a voice I knew all too well.

“What are you doing?”

He was standing there, a pistol in his hand, a look of mild surprise on his face.

I blinked, staring at the gun, and then at the man himself.

Herb.

Before he could say anything more, I staggered forward, burst into tears, and collapsed into his arms.

 

2

I held on to the mug with both hands and slurped down the coffee. Coffee was in short supply, and when we ran out that would be the end of it. Knowing that made it taste even better. The shaking had mostly subsided, but I still had flashes in which my whole body seemed to convulse—fear, shock, disbelief all combining to make me feel like I'd been dumped into a pool of ice water.

So much, so sudden, so enormous, so immense, and so deadly. It was that same slideshow but now on fast-forward, a lifetime's worth of nightmarish images rushing at me in an endless loop as I sat sipping sweet, warm coffee at my kitchen table.

Herb sat with me. Somehow he had managed to get me down the stairs of his house—I think he had to practically carry me. Then when my family arrived we'd all gone over to our house, next door. I had only been able to tell them bits and pieces of what had happened.

Now my father was upstairs with the twins, trying to settle them down, and my mother had gone back to the scene of the killings to do the things she needed to do as the neighborhood's commander.

Four months ago, before our world had gone dark—my mother had been a police captain at a nearby precinct. Now she and Herb were our leaders, in charge of the safety and well-being of all sixteen hundred residents in our fortress neighborhood.

“You need some more food in your stomach,” Herb said.

“I'm not hungry.”

“Hunger isn't what this is about. You need to line your stomach. Just have a piece of bread.”

He walked over to the counter, opened a much-used plastic shopping bag, and sliced off a piece of bread. The bakery was in full operation now and was producing some strange-tasting but still wonderful breads. They were made of various grains and seeds that were being harvested from the woods and fields outside our walls.

He handed me the piece.

“It feels like I'm being served by a ghost,” I said.

“I guess if Brett had gotten his way that's what I'd be.”

“I still don't understand,” I said. “Why weren't you in your bed?”

“I've been sleeping in my safe room,” Herb said.

“Is that the little room with the one-way glass in the basement?” I asked. I'd been in that room but didn't remember it being big enough for a mattress.

“Any room with a glass window isn't very safe. I have another room, hidden—steel door, cinder-block walls, with a separate ventilation system. Bulletproof and so solid it's practically soundproof. Remind me to show it to you.”

“And that's where you've been sleeping?”

“Call it paranoia, but I've been unable to get to sleep in my room for the last few weeks, ever since we took Brett and his rebels prisoner … Been worried that somebody might try to harm me.”

I couldn't help but laugh. “Somebody did try.”

“A little paranoia goes a long way. I thought that if Brett escaped he'd come looking for me first thing.”

“It wasn't him,” I said. “He sent in two men to do his dirty work. They told him that they
had
killed you.”