Push Back: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (The Disruption Series Book 2) (55 page)

“You all right?” Wiggins asked.

“I think so. You think they’ll chase us?”

“No clue, but we need to disappear as soon as possible,” Wiggins said.

He pushed the truck as fast as track conditions would allow, and less than five minutes later they rolled under the interstate and into the industrial park. There were multiple places to exit the rails where entrance drives crossed the track. Wiggins overshot the first one, but got the truck stopped at the second.

He raised the front guide wheels, freeing the front tires from the rails, but when he hit the control for the rear guide wheels, there was no response. He cursed and they both got out. Oily hydraulic fluid dripped off the back bumper, and a quick inspection found a bullet hole near the bottom of the hydraulic tank for the rear unit.

Wiggins cursed. “We can’t raise the wheels without hydraulic fluid.”

***

“What are we going to do?” Tex asked, but Wiggins already had the back door open and was pulling out empty water bottles.

“Drain oil out of the front unit and transfer it to the rear. We only have to get enough in to cycle the rear wheels once.”

“But the hole—”

Wiggins started toward the front of the truck with an armload of water bottles. “One problem at a time. Grab a bunch of those bottles and give me a hand.”

He squatted down and located the drain plug for the front unit and loosened it with the multitool.

“Okay, Tex. There’s no valve on this thing, and when I pull that plug, it will be slick as hell. I doubt I can screw it back in without dropping it, especially with hydraulic fluid gushing out. We’ve only got one shot at this, and if we don’t catch enough, we’re screwed.”

“What can I do?”

“I’m gonna have a bottle in each hand and swap them out one after another. I need you to take the full ones, set them out of the way, and feed me empties. You ready?”

Tex nodded, and Wiggins pulled the plug. Fluid gushed over his fingers and ran down his elbow as he jammed the narrow neck of the plastic bottle under the stream. It filled in seconds and he swapped bottles, trying and failing to capture every drop. They ran out of bottles before they ran out of fluid, and though he tried to get the plug back in, most of the remaining hydraulic fluid ran onto the pavement before he managed to do so.

“Well, let’s just hope we have enough,” Wiggins said and started toward the back of the truck with an armload of bottles. Tex did the same.

“What about the hole?” Tex asked as Wiggins opened up the fill cap for the rear unit.

“Let’s find a plug. It’s only got to hold long enough to fill the lines and cycle the wheels once,” Wiggins said.

Tex jammed her index finger in the hole.

“Seriously?” Wiggins asked.

“Got a better idea? We’re sort of in a hurry here, right?”

“I can’t argue with that,” Wiggins said, and started pouring hydraulic fluid into the tank.

He finished quickly and moved around to the driver’s side. “Let’s just hope there’s not too much air in the system, because bleeding the lines could take forever,” he said as he got behind the wheel.

He hit the switch and was rewarded with the expected whine, followed a long moment later by a clunk as the rear guide wheels locked into their stowed position. He called to Tex, and she crawled in the passenger side, wiping greasy hands on her clothes.

“I feel like a damned engineer,” Tex muttered, and Wiggins laughed despite the situation.

“Intelligent?”

Tex smiled. “No, greasy and irritable.”

***

There was no need for maps now, and Wiggins pressed the pickup through the inky darkness with a confidence born of familiarity. They took two-lane blacktops and one-lane gravel roads through farm land and forest and across country bridges. At one point they pulled onto a dirt track, and Tex gasped as Wiggins plunged across a wide dark stream of unknown depth. Or unknown to her, anyway, for Wiggins seemed to have no doubts.

They were speeding down a county road through thick forest when Wiggins began to slow. Tex saw two mailboxes beside a driveway, and Wiggins turned up the gravel track and followed it a hundred yards through the trees. He spoke for the first time since they’d left Biddeford.

“My folks have a hundred acres, but they gave half of it to Karen and me. We built our house two years ago, or I guess I should say we started building it. We’re doing most of it ourselves, and my mom says you never really finish building a house,” Wiggins said.

They’d come to a large clearing in the woods, and the gravel driveway diverged into two separate lanes, each serving a tidy, rustic home built of logs and native stone. They had an honest look about them, and Tex thought they looked like homes Wiggins might build: neat, sturdy, practical buildings.

Wiggins stopped at the split between the driveways.

“What’s the matter, Bill?”

Wiggins didn’t answer right away, and when he did, there was a catch in his voice. “I’m scared, Tex. For over a month I’ve been telling myself everything was gonna be okay, but now I have to find out. What if it’s not okay? I … I think I just want to sit here a bit.” He nodded toward the lightening sky. “It’ll be daylight soon anyway. No need to wake everybody up just yet.”

***

They sat there silently for almost an hour as the gloom turned to gray. A light flared in a window of the house on the right, the flickering of a flame lighting a lantern. It seemed to be what Wiggins was waiting for.

“That will be Dad,” Wiggins said. “He’s always the first one up.”

He started the truck and turned toward his parents’ house. They got out in the driveway, Tex suddenly unsure what to do. She hung back as Wiggins climbed the short steps to the porch and knocked on the storm door. There was the sound of footfalls inside the house.

“Who is it?” asked a cautious voice.

“It’s Bill, Dad,” Wiggins said.

There was the sound of locks being turned; then the inner door opened and an older man burst through the storm door and enveloped Wiggins in a hug. Then he saw Tex and flushed red, obviously embarrassed by his display of emotion. He straightened and released his son.

“It’s sure good to have you home, son.” The man looked at Tex. “And who is this—”

“Dad, is Karen here or at our house?”

The joy on the elder Wiggins’ face morphed to anguish, and Tex had no doubt as to the cause.

The Wiggins Property

Near Lewiston, Maine

The lights had been out almost two weeks when Karen Wiggins went into labor early, the same day Tex and Bill Wiggins had left North Carolina. By that time, the Central Maine Medical Center in Lewiston had closed their doors for good, having exhausted not only the fuel for their emergency generator, but all medicine and supplies.

Ray and Nancy Wiggins used the last of their gasoline and braved the chaos of the city to get their daughter-in-law to the hospital, where they’d found the doors shuttered. Desperate, they’d returned to their home ten miles out of town and done the best they could. It had been a breech presentation, and neither mother nor child had survived.

Ray Wiggins told the story in a flat monotone, as if hoping his unemotional presentation could wring the anguish from the tale. Bill’s mother, Nancy, sat beside her son and held his hand, mixing her tears with his own on the kitchen table. Tex, feeling very much an outsider, took it upon herself to entertain three-year-old Billy in the living room.

The days took on a sameness after that. The Wiggins’ homes were well off the beaten track, and they’d had no problems with marauders as of yet. Tex was made welcome, and the supplies they brought meant no immediate hardship.

The Wiggins were both avid gardeners and home canners, and Ray and Bill were hunters, so they were generally self-sufficient in the way of rural people. They had no electricity for the well pump, but a spring in the woods behind the homes and a few drops of chlorine bleach provided their drinking water. Tex volunteered for water-hauling chores, eager to pull her own weight.

Bill Wiggins became lethargic almost to the point of catatonia and went about his chores with a listlessness that was heartbreaking to anyone who had known him even two months earlier. Ray and Nancy had buried Karen and the infant on a gentle slope overlooking the two homes, and Bill moved a picnic bench from their patio up to the graveside. He was spending more and more time there, sitting alone by the graves and thinking thoughts to which only he was privy.

The elder Wigginses grew equally morose, their joy at Bill’s homecoming sapped by the enormity of their son’s loss, and their own guilt they’d been unable to prevent it. The only bright spot in the house was little Billy, who viewed life with the wonder and irrepressible optimism of a three-year-old. He took an immediate liking to Tex, and she to him, and he followed her everywhere.

Her chores done for the day, Tex was playing hide-and-seek with Billy in the backyard late one afternoon. She flushed him from his hiding spot and chased him squealing across the backyard before picking him up and tickling him. She set him down on the picnic table and was about to resume her tickling when a solemn look crossed his face.

“Will Daddy always be sad?” Billy asked.

Tex turned to follow Billy’s gaze and saw Bill sitting at the top of the knoll on the picnic bench, staring down at the twin crosses.

“He just misses your mom and your baby sister, that’s all,” Tex said.

“But he never met the baby, and she and Mommy are happy in Heaven and that’s a good place. Nana told me so,” Billy said. “Doesn’t he want them to be happy?”

“Sure he does, honey, but when someone you love goes away, you miss them a lot.”

“But we’re here.” Billy’s lip started trembling. “Doesn’t … doesn’t he love us?”

Tex felt as if her heart would break. She blinked back a tear and folded Billy in a fierce hug. “Sure he does, baby. He just needs a little time, that’s all.”

“You’re smushin’ me,” Billy said.

Tex laughed. “Sorry,” she said, releasing him and holding him at arm’s length. “What say we go in and see if your nana might have a little snack for you?”

***

Bill looked up as Tex sat down on the bench.

“Like some company?” she asked.

He shrugged, and they sat in silence.

“What’s up, Tex?” Bill asked at last.

Tex took a deep breath. “You have to move on, Bill. Karen and the baby died, and that is truly heartrending and tragic, but there’s nothing you can do about it, and there are three people in that house who love you and need you very much.”

Bill Wiggins bristled. “You don’t get to tell me when it’s time to move on. You don’t understand—”

“You’re right I don’t understand. MY family is gone, and yours is right here in front of you, being dragged along to your pity party whether they like it or not. If my folks were still alive or if I was blessed with a great kid like Billy, I sure as hell would be counting my blessings instead of my losses. Do you honestly think KAREN would want this? Do you know Billy thinks you don’t love him?”

“You leave Karen out of—” Wiggins stopped mid-sentence. “What do you mean Billy thinks I don’t love him?”

Tex took another deep breath and told Wiggins about her exchange with Billy. When she finished, he turned his head away, but not before she saw a tear leak down his cheek. She reached over and took his hand.

“Bill, this is tough. I know that, but you were there for me, and I’m here for you. We all are.”

Wiggins squeezed her hand. “I … I just don’t know what to do, Tex? Everything is so screwed up.”

Tex shrugged. “We do what people have always done. We live, and if we’re lucky, we love and laugh a little. Fundamentally, the world hasn’t changed that much as far as the basics go, except nobody is hooking up with total strangers on an iPhone or getting their panties in a bunch because someone dissed them on Facebook.”

Wiggins laughed and wiped his eyes with the back of his free hand. Then he stood and pulled Tex to her feet and wrapped her in a hug.

“So are you going to hang around to kick my butt when it needs kicking?” he asked softly into her ear.

“I sort of have to,” she whispered back. “You got my choo-choo train shot up.”

Wiggins threw his head back and laughed again; then he and Tex walked down the hill hand in hand.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The Cave

15 miles northeast of Buena Vista, Virginia

Day 35, 7:20 a.m.

Anderson sat on his makeshift log stool in his skivvies, pants around his ankles, examining his left knee in the flickering light of the torch. A few days’ rest had done wonders; the swelling was down, and it hardly hurt at all now, at least if he was careful how he put weight on it.

The last days seemed like paradise compared to the ordeal of his escape and flight. Concerns about food eased somewhat on the second day when the chickens made themselves at home in a corner of the cave and began laying again. Likewise, both Cindy and, under her instruction, Jeremy had proved surprisingly proficient at woodcraft. By the third day, their snares and deadfalls were producing at least one meal a day, the protein supplemented by edible greens Cindy foraged from the forest. Between nature’s bounty and the water source at the back of the cave, they wouldn’t starve or die of thirst anytime soon.

In fact, Anderson’s only real complaint was boredom. Cindy insisted he stay off his knee, a prohibition enforced with the rigidity of a drill sergeant. The result was days of boredom, stretched out on his mattress of evergreen boughs or sitting in the sun in front of the cave, waiting for Cindy and Jeremy to return from checking their traps or gathering firewood. His only pastime was digging insects out of cracks in the rock face, which he tossed to an appreciative audience of chickens.

The evenings were better, sitting around the fire. Jeremy inevitably began to nod and retired to his mattress to snore until sunup, but Cindy, like Anderson, was by nature a night owl. They talked long into the night about everything, and nothing. The more he learned, the more he admired her; and she was definitely easy on the eyes.