Crisis Event: Black Feast (13 page)

The saddle bag filled up before she’d emptied the box, so she hopped around the bike and did the same with the other bag, dumping in another dozen cans from a brown paper sack she’d used to carry them off.

Sadie’s admiration for the girl shot up like one of her grandfather’s skyrockets.

“How the hell did you carry all that?” Sadie asked.

Callie didn’t have time to answer. The two Rottweilers had reached the retaining wall and were scrambling up the stairsteps, their claws scrabbling at the rocks and concrete.

When they got to the top of the wall the two dogs leaped for the fence, both hitting the chain link at the same time. Sadie was relieved when the chain link held.

“Ooof! Ooof! Ooof! Ooof!” they both barked, and their jaws snapped at the air between barks.

Sadie pulled out her 9mm and sighted on one of the dogs. But she couldn’t bring herself to kill the animal. It was no threat to her if it didn’t jump the fence. Besides that, if it was vicious it was likely that way because of the jerks at the college.

“Go!” Callie said as she climbed onto the bike behind Sadie. “Go!”

Sadie nodded and tucked the pistol back into her parka pocket. She kicked the bike into gear, let out the clutch, and the two of girls went rocketing out of the yard and onto the street like the devil Sadie didn’t believe in was two steps behind her.

Chapter 10

What’s the fastest way to the square?” Sadie asked. They were stopped at the intersection in front of the abandoned shopping center next to the college. The Honda rumbled quietly beneath them.

“Left,” Callie said, and pointed.

“Is there a slower way?” Sadie asked. She had come down this road less than three hours earlier, when she’d decided to approach the campus on foot. She didn’t want to go anywhere near the campus now.

“Straight ahead,” Callie said. Sadie nodded and released the clutch, and they rolled slowly forward, dodging abandoned cars as they entered a residential neighborhood much fancier than the one with the “old people” houses in it.

Sadie turned up a driveway, then rolled onto a sidewalk and accelerated, trying to put some distance between the two of them and the college.

“Anyone alive in those?” Sadie asked as they rolled along a street of mansions.

Many of the big houses had collapsed roofs, but not all of them had succumbed to the heavy blanket of dust. Some were fairly free of dust, while others were layered with varying gradations of the stuff.

“I don’t know,” Callie said, just in time for the two of them to see the flash of white and hear the near-instantaneous roar of thunder, which went on and on as they turned the corner at the end of one block and started up the sidewalk of another.

Sadie was relieved when the thunder began to fade, but her relief was replaced by terror when she saw the dust leap up a foot from the Honda’s front tire. She heard the crack of the gun. Then the roar of two speeding motorcycles came echoing down the sidewalk behind them.

“Crap,” Sadie said, and cranked the throttle back.

The Honda hesitated at first, giving a sick lurch that scared Sadie so bad she thought she was going to vomit. But then the machine leapt forward and picked up speed, and she zipped across the grass between the sidewalk and the street, jumping off the curb and onto the asphalt.

A quick swerve to the left took the bike through a narrow gap between two abandoned cars in the middle of the street. Sadie felt Callie’s arms tighten around her and she ground her teeth against the pain from her injured back and sore kidney.

She didn’t quite make the swerve as sharp as she should have and her right knee dragged along the dusty bumper of one of the cars. Something jagged caught her pants and the flesh beneath it and tore a chunk right out. But then they cleared the gap and Sadie turned the bike so hard both of them were nearly thrown off.

Sadie fought for control of the bike, got it, and straightened up and raced along between the rows of stalled cars in the middle of the street, down a valley between mansions that had collapsed or burned to the ground.

People went crazy even in the rich part of town.

The swerve maneuver bought Sadie and Callie a few seconds free of gunfire, but then bullets began to smack against the windshields and fenders of the cars they were passing. Off to the right and slightly behind were two men on Harleys. They were racing along the sidewalk.

The man in front looked a lot like Big Jim had looked—huge and vicious.

“Bryce, I take it,” Sadie said to no one. Behind him was the boy who’d chased her out of the kitchen.

The man steering the second bike wore a buzzcut and a beard. The boy behind him was the other kid from the cafe. His hair was singed down to the skull and he was glaring at Sadie with so much hatred he didn’t look human.

“Get my gun!” Sadie yelled. Cassie let go of Sadie’s waist with her right hand and dug into Sadie’s parka.

Sadie felt the pistol slide out and she saw Cassie’s arm extend and she heard the shot when Cassie pulled the trigger. She glanced right in time to see Bryce squeeze the brakes and drop speed quickly, forcing the bike behind him to slow as well.

“Yeah,” Sadie yelled, and grinned as she got low on the bike and turned the throttle. The Honda shot forward, and Callie leaned down so that her cheek was against the rifle scope tied to Sadie’s pack.

Three blocks later the road made a long, sweeping turn to the east, and Sadie had to slow down to keep from spilling them onto the asphalt.

“Turn right!” Callie yelled once they came out of the curve, and Sadie slowed further, looking for a gap in the row of abandoned cars.

The two Harleys gained on them, and when Sadie blasted through the gap between a pickup and a giant SUV, Bryce’s sons sprayed bullets at them.

Dust leapt up from the road around them and a slug slammed into Sadie’s backpack. She felt as if someone had punched her hard in the back. A second later whatever had stopped the bullet from killing her began transferring the heat from the bullet to her skin.

“Jesus!” she yelled, unable to do anything about the hot lead burning into her back.

She cranked the throttle back almost as far as it would go. The Honda hesitated only an instant before blasting forward onto the new street—a street with a cul-de-sac at the end.

“That way,” Callie yelled, and she pointed over Sadie’s shoulder. Behind them, the Harley riders gained quickly.

A bullet whizzed by Sadie’s ear, and `she cranked the throttle to the max. The bike raced up the street, hit the end of a driveway, and angled off across the dust-laden yard between two McMansions.

Sadie zinged over a narrow alley and between another pair of houses. The Harleys roared after them, but Callie kept them back with several shots.

They emerged from between the houses a second later, and Callie pointed Sadie toward another road, this one a four lane thoroughfare with cars jammed in both directions.

The road rose steeply to the top of a hill and then curved around toward the center of town.

Sadie raced along the center line, dangerously fast and horribly close to the abandoned cars, but soon they crested the hill and zoomed toward the heart of the town—the square—and the wall of double-wide trailers surrounding it.

Dread filled her guts when she looked at the rows of offset cars at the bottom of the hill. She would have to slow to a crawl if she didn’t want to slam herself into one of the cars like a bug on a windshield. They’d be easy prey for the maniacs on the Harley’s then.

“Whoooo!” Callie yelled as Sadie cranked the throttle and the bike leapt ahead.

Sadie glanced at the speedometer.

Her head began to feel light as she realized she was moving at over ninety on a sheet of dust and ash. If she didn’t slow soon, she wouldn’t be able to stop. She’d have to lay down the bike and slide over dusty asphalt with no helmet or leathers.

Callie fired again, and almost immediately someone on top of a building or trailer down in the square fired too.

The shot took out the rider of first bike. Sadie saw him slump sideways in her mirror, and the bike went sideways with him. The boy behind him was flung up and over a car parked on the side of the road. He seemed to hang in the air forever, arcing down and skidding over the dust that coated a parking lot next to the street.

The driver wasn’t so lucky. He went head first into the back of an abandoned car, and was crushed as the motorcycle followed him into the bumper.

For a second Sadie thought it was Bryce who’d gone down, but then she saw him. His younger son was firing over his shoulder. Callie fired again, and Bryce flinched as a bullet whizzed by him.

Then another rifle opened up from the top of the trailer house wall they’d surrounded their square with.

Bryce fell behind Sadie, and she saw him turn his bike and head back to where his son had been thrown off the bike.

Sadie let go of the throttle.

It was a good thing.

She was only thirty yards away from the offset cars blocking the entrance to the square.

The Honda slowed quickly, and Sadie clamped the brakes hard. The Honda stopped less than six feet from the side of the first car.

“Hands up!” someone yelled, and Sadie put her feet down and raised her arms.

“Don’t shoot!” Callie yelled, “It’s me!”

She stepped off the back of the bike with her hands raised, the pistol pointed into the air.

“Callie” someone shouted, and rushed out through the zigzag path of cars.

“Professor!” Callie yelled, and then there were half a dozen people around them, pointing guns at Sadie and hugging Callie like she was their long lost kin.

Two hundred yards away, Bryce stood astride his bike screaming curses and threats as his youngest son helped his older brother limp to the Harley.

“Should we go get them?” someone asked, but the man who’d run out to embrace Callie shook his head.

“No,” he said.

“But he’s vulnerable,” someone else said.

“Which means he might be more dangerous than usual,” the professor said. “We can’t act without information. He could have an ambush set up out there.”

“He doesn’t,” Sadie said.

No one listened to her.

“The professor’s right, in this case,” a woman said.

She wore a blue cop uniform exactly like the man who’d attacked her that morning. Fear hit her in the chest and she reached for her pistol. She wanted to run. But then she asked herself exactly where she’d run to.

She realized the cop didn’t have a gun out, and didn’t look crazed, or sound like she wanted to rape or kill or eat anyone.

“Let’s see who we got behind the respirator,” the cop said, and nodded at Sadie.

Sadie lowered her arms and pulled down the respirator.

“Everyone,” Callie said. “Meet Sadie.”

Chapter 11

The fire inside the courthouse was small and contained, burning in a fire bowl at the center of the building, beneath the domed roof. The fire bowl was surrounded by stacks of bricks on three sides. Heat radiated from the bricks, and smoke rose up into a galvanized funnel eight feet across.

The funnel hung suspended from the ceiling, ten feet above the fire, and it constricted down to a chimney tube a foot wide. The tube made a ninety degree turn and ascended in a low-angled spiral that carried the smoke and heat once around the entire room before it made another turn and exited through a hole in the wall.

Rich Landry, the man who’d owned the hardware store a block off the square, had built the thing, along with a wind turbine and solar array on top of the jailhouse and several other stores.

The solar array didn’t bring much power in with all the dust in the air, they’d told her. But it brought in a little, and with the wind they were able to build a grow room for fresh tomatoes.

Sadie noted the six glowing LED lights strung around the room and for the first time in a long time began to wonder if humanity might be able to avoid extinction.