“Hey, girl, you need a hug?” Jenna helped her up from the bucket.
Jacquelyn threw her arms around Jenna and began crying again.
“I’m so worried about my family…” she muttered between the sobs. “My sister’s in Galveston and I’m pretty sure they don’t have any food or water at all.”
“I’m so sorry,” Jenna consoled her. “We need to hope and pray for our families. We need to pray for them to be clever and strong. There’s a chance they can figure this out and pull through. There’s a chance, Jacquelyn. We need to hope and pray they’ll make it.”
Jacquelyn and Jenna stood there for a long time holding one another, two women crying in a stumpy forest of white buckets amidst the death throes of America.
Road 199A
Outside Lewellen, Nebraska
His former father-in-law’s binoculars were the crappiest binos he’d ever used, but Chad was glad to have them. He had been watching the bridge over the North Platte River for half an hour. He had already reconnoitered and rejected three other bridges—all of them being used as choke points for local towns to control ingress into their areas.
Chad knew if he went through enough roadblocks, someone would steal his supplies. He figured it would be best to avoid human interaction at all costs, and roadblocks were the worst kind of human interaction.
He hoped that the bridge on Road 199A had been overlooked by the town of Lewellen. He had already rejected the bigger bridge to the east, since the town had placed a roadblock of concrete barricades and a couple of trashed-out recreational vehicles.
This bridge looked like it had been built by drunken teenagers compared to that bridge, and Chad hoped against hope it was open, as unlikely as that might be. He glanced at his watch and decided to observe the bridge for forty-five minutes and then take a shot at crossing.
A few minutes later, he had run out of patience and hopped back in his Jeep.
“Keep down across this bridge.”
Chad and Audrey communicated for survival and nothing more. Audrey shifted in her seat, slouching down.
Chad gunned the Jeep and careened onto the road, making a hard run at the bridge. Before committing, he slammed on the brakes, hoping to sucker someone out into the open.
Sure enough, an old pickup truck jumped the gun and popped out onto the road trying to catch him in the open on the bridge.
“Dumbass rednecks,” Chad said aloud.
He yearned to pull out Robert’s 30-06 and kill the man in that truck. Chad felt no compunction about opening a dude’s melon if that dude meant to ambush his family, as this asshole clearly meant to do. But Chad had overcome the unchecked compulsion to attack long ago. This situation was no “close ambush” where he had no choice but to fight. He could back out now and live to fight another day.
In the SEAL teams, the mantra went something like this: “Any time you find yourself in a gunfight that you didn’t plan, you are being ambushed. Never fight the other guy’s ambush unless you have no other choice.”
This time, Chad had a choice. He threw the Jeep into reverse and boogied backward onto Road 44.
Just five days after two nukes and the stock market destabilizing, the Midwest turned feudal. Every town had walled itself up to prevent enemy ingress. After today, Chad would travel only by night.
In two days, he had covered only two hundred twenty miles, a third of the way to Salt Lake City. But that wasn’t his biggest problem. They had slowed down. With all the barricades and probable ambushes, Chad couldn’t run in his favorite mode—speed over security. They barely crept along, making time-consuming detours to avoid the interstate and population centers.
The shit had undeniably hit the fan. Even tiny towns had hardened their chokepoints and were pointing guns at the highways and byways.
Chad couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to move on foot with his pissed-off ex-wife and their three-year-old daughter. Moving overland on foot four hundred miles with two dependents penciled out to certain death, if not from evildoers, then certainly from the elements. No matter what, they needed a vehicle in order to make it to Salt Lake City.
His second biggest problem was fuel. Even with the extra gas cans Audrey’s dad had given him, they would be lucky to make it half-way to Utah. Chad would be forced to steal gas, and gas theft could get him killed faster than trying to outdrink an Irishman.
With that said, he had squirreled away two secret weapons in the back of his Jeep: NVGs and a GasTapper.
The world thought of American operators like gods of the battlefield. Chad wondered how much of that perception depended on the shit they pulled off thanks to NVGs. Always operating at night, teams of SEALs, Rangers and other cheating bastards of the USA could catch the suckers sleeping. Rolling up the bad guys wasn’t nearly as difficult when they were sawing logs, dreaming about their seventy-two virgins.
Chad expected the same applied to Midwesterners, except they would be dreaming about Budweiser, and Chad Wade would be the guy stealing their gas.
The GasTapper completed his plan. While internet survival experts droned on about siphoning gas or spiking gas tanks and draining fuel in the Apocalypse, neither of these approaches worked for a good goddamn. Chad had tried both those methods on a video he shot for ReadyMan and they had been forced to scrap the video. Auto makers made it nearly impossible. Fuel tank necks had become engineering works of art, with an endless number of ways to keep folks from stealing gas. Siphoning a tank was easier said than done.
Even though most gas tanks were composed of plastic, it was always heavy plastic and close to the lowest point on a vehicle. Working under a low-slung car with a screwdriver and a catch basin required skills worthy of a Chinese contortionist. Then, after wedging your cranium, hammer and spike between the tank and the ground, you would have to bang away at the tank for a dangerously long time to pierce it just to see if the damned thing had any gas.
But all was not lost. The GasTapper hacked the anti-siphon system of almost every modern vehicle. With a series of tubes and a twelve-volt pump, Chad’s field tests convinced him this was the ticket for stealing gas during a Zombie Apocalypse.
He never imagined it would really happen―he thought all that talk of a collapse was akin to fantasy football for outdoors guys―and the GasTapper was only in his Jeep because he forgot to give it back to Jason after running product tests. The catastrophic mess in the back of his Jeep made such an oversight entirely plausible.
The same couldn’t be said for the NVGs. Those he had straight up stolen from Jason’s vault. Considering the situation, he felt confident Jason wouldn’t mind.
Better to ask forgiveness instead of permission, another informal mantra of the SEALs.
Federal Heights
Salt Lake City, Utah
The meeting crammed the chapel and the cultural hall, filling every seat and along the walls.
Jimmy McGavin noticed that half these people didn’t show up for church on Sunday. Otherwise, Sunday services would be full to the gills. Now, with their rear ends in the proverbial sling, everyone in the neighborhood was suddenly a Mormon.
Attending Sunday services wasn’t the only commandment. Storing a year’s supply of food was also the holy word of the prophets and he had ignored it, just like most of the people in this chapel. Thinking again of the shrinking supply of food in his home, his throat constricted. They had enough canned goods for about three days and a bucketed “two-weeks’ supply” that Jimmy bought from the Boy Scouts three years ago. The contents of the bucket read like something out of the Great Depression: five pounds of wheat, some dried milk, dried pinto beans and a bit of dried macaroni. He didn’t own a wheat grinder or yeast, so the two-week supply added up to just a few days of food for his wife and four children.