Last Light (5 page)

He pulled out into the street, dodging pedestrians and stalled cars, and headed for the interstate.

He tried to remember the last time he’d been in a fight. Must have been the tenth grade, when he’d given his brother a black eye for tripping him in the school assembly. They’d both gotten a three-day suspension after that. His dad grounded them both for a month. What would he think of him now?

Doug made it a mile down the road and saw the interstate overpass crossing up ahead of them.

“Oh, my gosh!” Deni’s fingers gripped his shoulders. “It’s like when the power went out in New York City, and all those people were walking home.”

He looked toward the overpass, but instead of the people, the steep on-ramp caught his attention. How would he pedal the bike uphill, with his weight and Deni’s? They might have to get off and walk it. He should have been using the stationary bike he had in the exercise room at home. There was no excuse for him being this out of shape. He headed for the ramp, and stood on the pedals, pumping with all his might.

“You okay, Dad? Want me to get off ’til you’re on the road?”

“Might be a good idea.”

He felt her slide off, and was relieved at the lighter weight. She walked beside him as he pulled uphill.

“I should have used my gym membership,” he panted. “Every-one’s thinking I’m in the shape of an eighty-year-old man.”

“No, they’re not, Dad. They’re too busy envying your bike.”

He reached the top and merged onto the interstate, then stopped behind a stalled car and let Deni get back on.

He hugged the road’s shoulder, every push of the pedals sending fire through his thighs. Sweat dripped into his eyes, and he breathed like an asthmatic.

Cars were stalled almost bumper to bumper, and hundreds of people walked in both the east- and westbound lanes. He stayed on the shoulder, hoping to bypass the hiking crowds and avoid the stalled vehicles.

Deni’s hands on his waist made him sweat more. “Maybe in a mile or so we’ll see that the power is back on. It can’t be the whole city. Maybe then we can get a ride the rest of the way.”

Doug didn’t answer. He panted like a thirsty dog, and his soaked clothes clung to his body. His legs strained to keep moving the bike forward, but his scraped knees were beginning to sting with every push.

He wondered if his attacker had been a thief before today, or had the man’s actions been out of the ordinary, as Doug’s had? Maybe the man was a deacon in his church, just like Doug. Maybe he had kids at home he was trying to get to. Maybe he was worried about his wife.

They couldn’t be blamed for reacting to this bizarre situation the way they had, could they?

He wanted to think that there was some very interesting explanation for what was going on here, and that it wasn’t far-reaching. But he feared that was wrong. Nothing he knew of that could cause such an event would be short-lived.

Along the road, hundreds of people still sat on their cars, unwilling to abandon them just yet. A stalled beer truck had its back doors open, and the driver was apparently selling beer to anyone who had cash.

Another hill. Doug made his way over it, gritting his teeth with the effort. At forty-seven, he’d never felt old until today. Now when he needed his muscles they rebelled like lazy teenagers.

He got over the hill, then saw with almost ecstatic relief that the next few miles were downhill or level, so he could move more quickly.

“Dad, do you see that smoke up ahead?”

He scanned the horizon, saw the plume of smoke. “Yeah, I see it.”

“What do you think that is?”

“No idea.”

“Maybe it’s a plant of some kind that knocked out the power grid.”

“Wouldn’t knock out cars and watches.” His tone was almost sarcastic, though he knew it didn’t help. But the stupidity of this whole situation was beginning to get to him. What in the world was going on?

He kept looking toward that plume as he rode, trying to avoid the pedestrians in the street and spilling off onto the shoulder.

Then, from out of nowhere, something whacked him from the side. His tires slid out from under him, and they went over.

Deni screamed as they fell, and his flesh scraped across asphalt again.

He was getting tired of this.

A man with a shaved head and a goatee grabbed the bike and pulled it out from under them.

Doug yelled and shot to his feet. He swung at the man, but the thief kicked him in the chest, knocking the breath out of him, and got his leg over the bike.

“Oh, no, you don’t!” Deni got up, her arm bleeding, and tried to wrestle the bike away. But she wasn’t strong enough. The man slipped out of her grasp and pulled out of reach.

Doug launched out after him, racing beside him, grabbing the bike, trying to stop him. The man kicked him again, this time doubling him over.

“Thanks for the ride, bud!” he shouted back.

“Dad, he’s getting away! Go after him!”

Pain shot through his stomach, but he forced himself to rise up. Breathless, he shook his head. “He’s too far. There’s nothing I can do.”

He dropped to the grass on the side of the highway, draped his arms over his knees. “Are you all right?” he asked Deni.

“
No
, I’m not all right. I’m bleeding!” She kept staring after that bike. “Why did you let him take it?”

Had she missed that Chuck Norris kick that almost took him out? “I tried to stop him.”

“But you didn’t fight hard enough!”

He ground his teeth. “Deni, I really don’t need your attitude right now. A bicycle is not worth killing someone over.”

“I didn’t say
kill
him. But you practically handed it over.”

He didn’t want to talk about his defeat. “Walking won’t kill us. It’s better than a knock-down-drag-out over something I didn’t even care about three hours ago.” He looked down the long road. It was growing crowded as more and more people abandoned their cars and joined the exodus to the suburb. “It’s only another six miles or so.”

Her face twisted. “Come on! That’s absurd!”

“No, it’s not. Do you have any better ideas?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s trade a $10,000 Rolex for a bike, and then hand it over to some thug.”

He wanted to throttle her. “How about some of that water?”

She grunted and pulled the bottles out, thrusting one of them at him. He took it and gulped the water down.

Deni stood there, staring in the direction of home. She opened her own water and began to drink. “This stinks,” she grumbled between gulps. “We should have just stayed in D.C.”

Doug’s mind wandered back to the flight they’d been on a couple of hours ago. Ten minutes later, and they would have fallen out of the sky like the other planes. They might be dead. He looked back at that plume of smoke. Was it another plane that had missiled into the ground?

He supposed they had a lot to be thankful for. Even if there had been a terrorist attack of some sort, knocking out the power was a lot better than a nuclear explosion that killed millions.

Trying to take solace in that, he drew in a deep breath, got back up, and dusted himself off. “Come on, Deni, let’s go.”

They abandoned their bag with the empty bottles and Deni’s high-heeled shoes, and joined the thick stream of people heading east.

They walked at a brisk pace, people around them laughing and talking like comrades.

“Remember everyone crossing the Brooklyn Bridge when New York’s power grid went out?” Deni asked again.

“Yeah, but the cars still ran.”

“I know, but it’s similar. It’ll probably make national news. I bet NBC is already covering it. I’ll be an authority. Maybe I could contact the affiliate here and they could let me do the report.”

“They have their own reporters at the affiliate here.”

“Well, yeah. But I could try.”

“Deni, what makes you think the TV stations have power?”

She trudged onward for a moment, not answering, then finally said, “Maybe they do. They did in New York.”

He decided to stop shooting her down. Let her dream. What would it hurt?

“That smoke is a small plane that crashed,” someone next to them was saying to his walking partners. “I talked to someone back a ways who watched it fall out of the sky.”

Deni jumped in. “My dad and I just came from the airport. We saw two planes crash right after our plane landed.”

The group around her slowed, captivated by her story of what the surviving pilot had told them about the power going out. There she was, a reporter in tennis shoes.

Speculation bred around them as they walked, but no one knew what had happened. No one had a clue.

At least the conversation helped Deni as they walked, distracting her from the drudgery, keeping her from grumbling and taking potshots at her father’s poor excuse for courage.

Doug used the time to mentally work through the different possible scenarios. He kept going back to war—or some major terrorist attack.

Whatever had caused this, he feared it was only the beginning.

five

A two-hour walk later, Kay reached the road to their subdivision in the small suburb of Crockett, her children in tow. Jeff had finally convinced her to leave the car. They’d put it in neutral and pushed it onto the side of the road. She prayed it would still be there, intact, when they went back.

As they walked home, they saw a plume of smoke coming up over the trees several miles away. Someone on the road claimed they’d seen a small plane go down just as his car had stalled. Kay had quenched the urge to bolt off toward the smoke, to make sure it wasn’t Doug and Deni’s commuter airliner. They could be lying there dying, waiting for help to come.

But she didn’t know how to get there, and it wouldn’t pay to frighten her children that way. Still, as she walked, she kept looking back toward that smoke, praying that God would come to their aid.

Most of those walking home had reached their neighborhoods long before the Brannings. Those last three miles, she had rued the day they decided to live so far out in the country. But Oak Hollow was a neighborhood in high demand, its beautiful new homes beckoning those who could afford them. They’d tried to get one of the homes on the small lake at the center of the subdivision, but those had all been taken. Still, they were thrilled to find the home of their dreams, never yet lived in. And the extra driving time was worth it.

Living so far from town, she worried a bit about her children’s safety driving home at night down the long, dark road. Doug convinced her they would be all right, and Deni and Jeff had agreed. But in her wildest dreams, she never anticipated
walking
here. The long country road seemed to stretch farther with each step. Pastureland stretched for miles on one side of the road, nothing but forest on the other.

Even though she knew the cars were dead, she couldn’t escape the sense that everything would power back on as they journeyed up this road, and some teenager’s car would come flying by and take out her children. She kept them on the side of the road as they walked, something they thought absurd.

Others walked up ahead of them, and some walked behind them. Most of them she recognized to be her neighbors, even though she didn’t know them by name. They’d lived in the neighborhood for six years now, but she had yet to meet more than a few of her closest neighbors.

Beth and Logan trailed behind her, their hair wet with sweat and their cheeks mottled red. Jeff hurried ahead, refusing to be encumbered by his embarrassingly out-of-shape family.

When they finally reached the entrance to Oak Hollow, she looked up the street to their house—fifth from the entrance—and saw that Jeff already waited in the driveway. She wondered why he hadn’t gone inside.

“Mom, do you have a key?” he called as she approached. “The code doesn’t work.”

Her heart sank. “Oh, no. I didn’t even think of that.” It was
her
bright idea to set the burglar system with an outside code for opening the garage door. That way the kids would never have a key to lose—all they had to do was punch in the code to get in. The door that led into the house from the garage was unlocked at all times. It had worked out perfectly.