Crashing Down - A Post-Apocalyptic Novel (The Ravaged Land Series Book 3) (16 page)

It was like when you look into the flash of a camera, only worse. I felt like crying. If I lost my eyesight, I’d be as good as dead.

The ground shook. It actually felt like the earth below us was moving. The sofa we were sitting on seemed to wiggle a little across the floor. But maybe I had only imagined it because of what I was experiencing with my vision.

After a minute or so the movement faded, and I was even less sure that it had happened. I pressed my fingertips above my eyelids and started to massage the delicate skin.

“Was that an earthquake?” I asked squinting my eyes as part of the room started to look a little clearer. Since I hadn’t ever experienced an earthquake I had no idea what they were like.

“I think it was just the ground shaking from the lightning strike,” Dezzie said looking out of the side of the window. It seemed as though he was trying to see if there were any clues as to what had just happened. “But it sure did last a long time.”

In the back of my mind I couldn’t help but wonder if somewhere further away maybe HOME was testing a new weapon. That would be the next thing they do to eliminate their enemies, shake the ground below their feet. Buildings would collapse. It could be disastrous. Food supplies that were already limited in gas stations and grocery stores would be buried in the rubble. Even more people would die. The only ones that would survive would be those locked up in their safe, secure and secluded little world inside the HOME base.

I was willing to bet that everyone in this room would rather take their chances with the earthquake than be with HOME. I knew I most certainly would.

T
he storms raged
on through the night. I woke frequently at the fierce and unrelenting blinding flashes of lightning. Or sometimes it was the noisy booms of thunder that shook the earth that would wake me. My body would jerk and my eyes would be wide open. But other than the unusual volume of the storm it seemed like any other normal thunderstorm as far as I could tell.

Could HOME have unleashed it? It sure was a possibility, but it could have been the work of Mother Nature. We might never know, and as long as we lived through it, I didn’t really care how it had started.

We all took turns keeping watch as we’d always done. Only this time we had two other people to add to our rotation. Even though the house was locked up, it didn’t matter. Someone needed to be awake just in case.

With the six of us the shifts spread out nicely, but it was difficult to trust Dominick and Dezzie. All things considered it was a little easier to trust Dezzie even though he was ex-HOME. After all, he had endured the torture of having his tattoo burned off, someone wouldn’t just do that for fun. He was out of the cult just like Penn, but Dominick on the other hand was far more difficult to trust. There was just something about him that I had never liked. And never would. But for the night, given how tired I was, I gave in and I let myself sleep during his shift.

* * *

T
he next morning
it was still raining, but we were alive. We had made it to see another day. The storm hadn’t blown us away and HOME hadn’t attacked us during the night.

We’d survived on the water we still had in the back of the truck and the few items we had taken from the gas station. But it hadn’t been much.

Of course we thoroughly checked the house for food, but it had likely been cleaned out a long time ago. Drinking the water only made me feel hungrier, but I did it anyway. My stomach rumbled so loudly I was sure everyone in the room could hear it.

“We should be there in a couple hours,” Dominick announced, his voice still thick and gravely from sleep. He cleared his throat and turned to me after my stomach growled again, “We’ll stop to check for food along the way if we can.”

He looked at me as if he was annoyed with my loud stomach rumbles, but it wasn’t like I could control them. The world ended, we lost everything, and he was frustrated by my loud stomach noises.

I rolled my eyes and decided to look through the kitchen cabinets one last time. Maybe I overlooked a hidden stockpile of food.

“What about the rain?” Sienna said looking out the window as the clear droplets of water beaded up on the glass. The pitter-patter noises were almost soothing.

“What about it?” Dominick asked sharply.

“They’ll get soaked riding in the back of the truck,” she answered ignoring his harshness. Sienna narrowed, her eyes at him looked him up and down and then returned her gaze to what was going on outside the window. I could tell she was just as sick of him as I was.

“So? It’s just water,” Dominick said, but then looked at Dezzie. Something made him change his tone. I couldn’t tell if it was the way Dezzie looked at him or something else. “Check the garage for a tarp or something,” he ordered, and Dezzie, Penn and Dean left together.

“There. Now doesn’t it feel better to be kind?” Sienna said with a tight-lipped smile. I had no idea how Dominick would react to her words. If we could go back in time I would have so I could stop her from saying them.

He looked at her for a moment and I worried about what he was going to say… or do. Especially since the other three were out in the garage. But a smile I’d never seen appeared on his face. He seemed happy, almost playful.

“No,” he said his eyes crinkling up to match his new smile. I raised my eyebrow and looked back and forth between the two of them.

I almost wanted to puke. I had no idea what had just happened. Instead of him murdering her for having an attitude with him, he was smiling. Happy even. Joking. Teasing. Whatever. I had no idea what to call it, but whatever it was… well, it just made me want to vomit.

“Ugh,” I said throwing my hands up into the air and stepping over to the window. I wished I could have seen what the boys were up to in the garage from my vantage point, but since I couldn’t I paced the living room impatiently. Just as I was about to check the kitchen cabinets for the tenth time, they came through the door.

“Found something we could use… let’s roll,” Dezzie said, exiting the house leaving the door open behind him. We followed him out leaving the empty house behind.

The rain was soft and cool as it hit my skin. It quickly beaded up on my face and rolled down onto the ground below. I saw they had found a huge blue tarp, but I didn’t know how they planned to keep it up over themselves. If they had to hold it up their arms would get very sore.

I climbed up into the pickup truck and Sienna sat down next to me. Dominick took his time walking to the driver’s seat. By the time he sat down he was pretty soaked. Water dripped down from his hair, landing on his already soaked clothing. It didn’t seem to bother him. I hated being in wet clothing but maybe Dominick had been used to it from living out in this soggy area of the world.

I looked out the back window, and they had propped the tarp up on something that made it like a small teepee over themselves. It looked rather silly but at least they were staying dry. Or so I assumed.

We hadn’t traveled far when Dominick turned into a nearly abandoned parking lot. He parked next to a car, “Hope there’s some gas left.”

I figured since he had been this way before he knew places he could stop for gas. Eventually they’d run out of places to get it from. Hopefully, this wouldn’t be that time.

“Should we go in? Look around?” I asked before he closed the door.

“No,” he said and slammed it shut.

I watched him as he lifted a corner of the tarp to talk to Dezzie. As he walked around to start to siphon the gas Dezzie and Penn jumped out of the back of the truck and ran inside.

After several minutes there was a knock on Sienna’s window. We both jumped at the same time. Penn was standing there waiting for Sienna to roll down the window.

“Here,” he said handing us a box of cereal and a bottle of water. “Sorry.”

“Better than nothing,” I said, and I heard my stomach agree. He smiled and got back into the bed of the truck clutching his own box of cereal.

Dominick opened his door and spit on the ground before he got back inside. He wiped his hands on his jeans as if he was trying to get rid of the smell of gasoline. But it didn’t worked. Now his pants just smelled of gas too. For a second I worried I might not be able to eat with the strong odor filling the air, but it turned out my stomach didn’t care.

He reached across me and shoved his hand down inside the box. I sighed as I lowered my head. “Now they are going to all taste like gas,” I said hoping he could tell exactly how annoyed I was.

“Oh, sorry,” he said, as if he hadn’t even considered it. He actually seemed authentically sorry. “I didn’t even think about it. My stomach made me do it.”

I turned to look at him. He had to have been feeling sick. The old Dominick would have been a far bigger jerk about it. Like dumping the box on the floor or maybe even demanding we hand the whole box over to him.

“You OK?” I said looking at him out of the corner of my eyes.

“Yeah, fine… why?” he said and his half-smirk reappeared. All was right in the world again.

I glanced over at the fuel gauge and noticed it hadn’t even reached a half tank of gas. “Will that be enough?” I said pointing at the dash.

“I sure hope so. Or we’ll have some walking in our future,” Dominick said as we drove on down the highway once again.

The rest of the ride was quiet. We finished the box of cereal in probably less than five minutes. The gas smell hadn’t transferred to the O-shaped pieces, and even if it had, we didn’t notice. We probably wouldn’t have cared either. The cereal would have tasted better with milk, but that wasn’t going to happen. Any milk left would be undrinkable. It probably would have expanded the jug or box so far until it exploded all over everything. I’d probably never have cereal with milk again as long as I lived. Plain cereal would have to do, even if it was a little stale.

“We’re almost there,” Dominick said as he looked in the rear-view mirror. The rain was still falling, but it had slowed. He turned the truck down a side road that you could barely even tell was a road at all.

He drove for what I guessed to be about a half mile before I saw the tall, rickety wood fence around the rows of trailers. They had taken over a trailer park.

Dominick pulled right up to the fence and parked the truck. I looked around and besides the trailers and mountains in the background we seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

The camp was out in the wide open. Anyone venturing out this way would easily see it. It wasn’t hidden at all, but how often would someone even come out this way? Probably not very often. And if they did, the camp probably had a procedure in place. At least that’s what I guessed considering the camp was still here.

“This location seems a little, umm… out in the open,” I said making eye contact with Dominick. He looked away and stepped out of the truck.

“See those little markers? Right there and… right there,” he said pointing to a few small flags that were on either side of the road we drove in on. The flags stuck out of the ground, but there weren’t many of them. There were just a few sprinkled here and there that seemed to be on either side of the road. “They mark the driveway, meaning the safe path to the camp. Anything outside of that area is part of the minefield.”

“Oh,” I said, wondering if he had ever planned to tell us that. I was extremely glad I had asked, considering the information would help for planning our escape.

“This camp is probably safer than mine was,” Dominick said closing the door. He walked up to the fence and knocked on the gate. I couldn’t tell, but I wondered if it had been a secret knock because the door was almost immediately opened for him. He disappeared inside leaving us on the other side of the fence.

After several minutes he reappeared and got back inside the truck. Someone on the inside slid a large portion of the fence to the side. Dominick drove inside and parked the truck next to their vehicles. The only vehicles they had were a dented red car and a motorcycle. I guessed that whenever they left the camp only a few people could go at a time. At least they didn’t have to worry about keeping a lot of gas tanks full.

We left the truck behind and followed Dominick through the trailer park. It was obvious he’d been here before. He knew his way around and even a few people nodded in his direction.

He walked up the steps to one of the trailers and opened the door. I didn’t know if we were supposed to follow him so I stopped and waited.

Dean, Penn and Sienna stopped next to me, but Dezzie kept going. He turned around and smiled. “You can come in,” he said motioning for us to follow.

I stepped inside the trailer and felt like I was invading on someone’s personal space. Nothing made me feel welcome about the place. Especially not the eyes that were looking back at me. I couldn’t tell if they seemed friendly or not. All I could tell was that they were on me and my friends.

The inside was very plain. It almost looked as though whatever had been there before had been stripped out. At the small, round table near the kitchen sat a slender, dark haired girl. She looked like she was older than I was, but I wasn’t even sure I could tell anymore. Everyone looked older. It was as if living this way aged everyone.

Next to her stood a tall, lanky man who was definitely older. He wore lopsided glasses that looked like they had been super-glued back together more than once. His hair was slicked off to the side. He wore a huge smile, but there had been no warmth, nor a welcoming feel to it.

“I’m Mira. Welcome to my resistance camp,” she said standing up and taking a step closer. She paced back and forth, looking us all over as if trying to find a reason to send us on our way. But after her inspection she stretched out her hand to each of us. “I think you’ll like it here.”

“That’s Ros, Sienna, Dean and Penn,” Dominick said as he pointed us out to her. I was a bit surprised he remembered all of our names. For some reason I just assumed he hadn’t ever bothered to even learn them.

“Hi,” she said as the smiled dropped off her face. It was as if her friendly face was on a timer and time was up. I could tell this Mira girl wasn’t one to beat around the bush. She wasn’t going to bother with small talk or pleasantries. It was all business. “Let me show you where you’ll be staying.”