Pilgrimage: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Story Read online

  They’d swung south of Cushing Island, hugging what was now its coastline at Ottawa Avenue. James figured it to be the quickest shot, and if they ran into trouble, that small part of Cushing Island could serve as a temporary port.

  From the position of the sun peeking out from behind the thickening clouds, he guessed it was around ten o’clock in the morning. They still had a good hour to go, he figured, before hitting the mainland. Then they’d have to reassess.

  Max and Leigh were at the southernmost point of Cushing Island, floating with the paddles out of the water, when James heard what sounded like a high-pitched motor struggling to churn through the water. He looked around and didn’t see anything. There was only post-tsunami flotsam and jetsam bobbing around them as he stroked closer to his wife and son.

  The whining motor got louder, and as he approached the other kayak, James could tell Max and Leigh had heard it too. They both looked to the right, toward the bend in the island.

  James was maybe twenty yards from them when he saw the boat. It was a skiff, maybe even a johnboat with a small outboard churning off the stern, emerging from the western edge of the island. There were three people aboard, but he couldn’t tell if they were men or women. But they were headed straight for Max and Leigh’s kayak.

  “Who is that, Daddy?” Sloane twisted in her seat to try to look at her dad.

  “I don’t know.” James felt a wave of nausea roll through his gut. He sucked in a deep breath of the humid air, coughed against it, and then dug deeper against the chop, propelling the kayak toward his wife and son. The dual-bladed paddle pushed against one side and then the other. The bow of the boat shifted to the opposite side of each pull as James willed the kayak to close the gap.

  He saw one of the boaters wave at his wife as another pointed toward him. The two people at the stern of the boat seemed to be conspiring while the one at the bow was the greeter. As they drew closer it appeared the skiff sat awkwardly on the surface, as if it were taking on water.

  Leigh waved back, but with Max’s help, turned the kayak in a more southerly direction. She was still working her way toward South Portland, but was turned away from the boat. Her gut was warning her too.

  James stayed his course. If he could speed up just a little bit, he’d be able to split the difference between his wife and the other boat, intercepting the path and serving as a blockade of sorts.

  But the boat, despite its awkward position, chugged through the water at five times the speed of the kayaks. James was still a good ten yards from his wife’s kayak when the boat pulled alongside her, the person in the front grabbing the side of her kayak.

  James could tell all three were men. They looked haggard, worn from the morning’s event. They were talking to her, saying something James couldn’t hear. He dug deeper against the water, the lactic acid building the burn in his biceps with every pull. He was wheezing, having trouble breathing, as he chugged forward. He couldn’t comprehend what he was seeing. How could this be happening? They were hours into…whatever this was…and people were acting as if the world had come to and end?

  Or was it that bad people saw an opening and took advantage of it? Was this a violent crime of opportunity? Was the boat stolen? He couldn’t know the answer to any of these questions as they raced through his mind. None of it made sense.

  “Leigh!” he called as one of the men reached to grab his wife’s arm. “The paddle!”

  Leigh took her paddle, pulling it from the water, reared back, and launched the blade into the man’s face. He fell back, cupping his hands over his nose and mouth. Leigh screamed as one of the conspirators in the back lunged forward, trying to grab her paddle.

  Max pulled his from the water and swung it like a baseball bat, catching the man on his back between his shoulders. He fell forward onto the kayak, grabbing for it as he tumbled into the water.

  James was closing the distance. He was five yards from his wife and he thought about jumping into the water and swimming to help. But he couldn’t leave Sloane, who was now crying, calling for her mother.

  Instead of comforting her, he stopped rowing, the boat slipping forward with momentum. James pulled his pack off his back and swung it in front of him, on the deck of the kayak between the two cockpits.

  The man in the water was tugging at Max. Max was struggling, trying to fight him off as Leigh turned to punch the man in the head.

  The first boater, the one who took the blade to the face, was back in play. Blood streaming from his nose, he jumped from the boat into the water and grabbed onto the front of the kayak. He started rocking it, trying to tip it over.

  James unzipped his pack and pulled out the pistol. He calmly told his daughter to lie down as he aimed the weapon at the bleeding man on the bow of his wife’s kayak.

  POW! A single shot echoed against the water, ripping through the man’s forehead, his neck snapping back with the force. He floated from the kayak and slipped beneath the surface as James turned the gun to the second man. He’d stopped attacking Max at the sound of the shot. That gave James the opening he needed. He leveled the pistol.

  Pow! Pow! Two shots found their mark in the man’s neck. He let go of the kayak, grabbing at his throat as he lost the ability to stay afloat, bubbling to the bottom of Casco Bay.

  The man at the rudder tried to steer his boat away from Leigh’s kayak, turning the handle on the lower power Evinrude hard to the left.

  He heard the final shot from James’s gun at the moment his world turned black. He slumped over to the right, and the skiff made a circle back for the kayaks.

  “Hang on!” James called to his wife and son. Putting the gun back in the pack, he dropped his paddle into the water, and with four quick strokes he was aside them. The boat, motoring in a circle, just missed them as it swung north again.

  “Take Sloane!” James ordered his wife. “Take her!” he repeated. Leigh was in shock, her gaze a world away until he told her a third time to grab their daughter and pull her into the kayak. Leigh shook herself from the daze and reached for her crying daughter.

  “I’m getting that boat,” James said. He handed the pack to Max. “Take this. I’ll be back in a second.”

  James waited for the boat to circle back around and he jumped. His footing slipped from the wet fiberglass of the kayak, preventing him from making the leap he’d hoped.

  Instead he landed in the water, his hands holding on to the left side of the boat, being pulled at ten miles per hour through the cold, salty water of the swollen bay.

  Exhausted and having difficulty breathing in the spray bouncing off the surface, James gathered what strength he had in his upper body and kicked with his legs. Ignoring the sting of the salt in the wound on the back of his thigh, he managed to propel himself over the edge of the boat and onto its aluminum deck. He rolled over and, pulling himself to his knees, crawled to the stern. He grabbed the dead pilot by the lapels of his thin windbreaker and, without looking at him, heaved his body into the water.

  James spun on his heels and sat on the thin bench in front of the tiller. He grabbed it and turned the propeller straight, moving parallel to his wife’s kayak. When he got within ten feet or so, he killed the motor and drifted alongside the kayak.

  He helped his family into the boat. Nobody said anything, and aside from his daughter’s whimper, the only sound he could hear was the lapping of the water against the side of the skiff.

  He set the choke and pulled the outboard to life. It smoked and hummed before whining to full speed. The boat did have water in it. But it wasn’t sinking. Something was damaged somewhere. That accounted for odd list of the vessel’s hull. Still it moved. They’d be ashore in minutes.

  James wasn’t sure whether or not that was a good thing. Less than five hours into some sort of cataclysm and people were already losing their minds, their sense of decency. He’d always read in dystopian books that the civilized world would peel away slowly, like layers of an onion. But as he motored toward shore, he remin
ded himself that nobody could know how fast those layers would slough off until the catastrophic really happened. Nobody could say how fast or slow things would devolve, how quickly everyone would revert to their primal survival instincts.

  He wasn’t so much worried now about a lack of help from others as he was about those base instincts. Civilized society always hung by a thread in the best of times. People were always a power outage or water shortage away from anarchy.

  For a high school physics teacher, his was as basic a principle as atomic fission. It was science and sociology wrapped into one warped reality: natural selection. Only the fittest survive. The weak are picked off and devoured.

  CHAPTER 11

  EVENT +6:15 Hours

  South Portland, Maine

  The Rockwells had never been to South Portland, Maine. On their drive north from Maryland, Highway 9 and Interstate 295 took them west of the city. But even if they’d lived in the small coastal city their entire lives, they wouldn’t have recognized it.

  Much of the coastline was underwater. Even with the tsunami surge receding, there was muck and standing water a good mile inland. The family trudged through it, shirts pulled up over their noses to minimize the horrible odor of death and excrement.

  James was wheezing, but kept walking. He knew if they worked their way west, toward the interstate, they’d eventually find dry land. They’d come across the occasional loner amidst cars and SUVs abandoned on the silt-covered streets. As best James could tell, there was no electricity.

  They were walking southwest on Broadway when Leigh stopped walking. She looked behind her and then squinted back in the direction they were headed.

  “What is it?” James asked. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “But I don’t get it.”

  “What?”

  “We’ve seen at least four cars of different makes and models on this street alone.” She ran her uninjured hand through her hair, pulling it from her face. “They’re dead. But then we saw that one Subaru circling around. The gray one. It was working just fine.”

  “You mean, why are some cars working and others aren’t?” James took a step closer to his wife, lowering his voice and checking the pistol in his waistband. He didn’t want to attract any unnecessary attention.

  “We can’t keep walking forever, Rock,” she said. “The kids are exhausted and frightened. I’m about to have a nervous breakdown. We need a car. And I just don’t see us getting one. Not one that works.”

  “There’s no rhyme or reason,” James explained. “If there was an electromagnetic pulse, which I’m pretty certain there was, it’s all theory as to which electronic or motorized devices will fail.”

  “It’s not theory now,” she replied. “This”—she stretched her arms wide in frustration—“is not theory, Rock!”

  “I understand.” He tried to calm her, keep her from making too much noise. “We’ll find a car. I’ll find a car.”

  “What about that Subaru?” she pressed. “It was working? Is there a Subaru dealership around here?”

  “It’s not because it was a Subaru,” he said. “At least I don’t think that’s the reason it was working. Plus,” he said, “that Subaru was being driven by police officers. They probably had it in a garage and—” James’s face lit up with an idea.

  “What?” Now it was Leigh’s turn to ask the question.

  “The Faraday effect.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Faraday?” she asked. “Wasn’t he a guy on the TV show Lost?”

  “Yes.” James nodded. “But that’s not who I’m talking about. Faraday was a nineteenth-century physicist. He worked with light. He was the first to observe the rotation of the plane of—”

  “Dumb it down, Rock.” Leigh sighed. She plopped herself on the curb, took off her pack, and waved over the kids. They were all beat tired. Leigh handed them both a bottle of water and they sat next to her on the concrete, in the muck.

  “Okay.” James stood over his family, explaining his revelation. “There’s this thing called a Faraday cage. We use it all the time to protect our electronics. It’s basically a protective shell that prevents electromagnetic radiation from getting to whatever is inside the cage.”

  “So?” Leigh took a swig of water and gulped it down. She’d pulled her hair into a ponytail. “What’s that have to do with our issues?”

  “The EMP is electromagnetic radiation,” James said, squatting at the curb to look his wife in the face. “While I can’t predict what kinds of cars it’ll kill, I know it can’t effect any car inside a Faraday cage.”

  “Who keeps cars in Faraday cages?” asked Max.

  “A lot of people,” explained James. “A concrete garage with a solid rebar frame could work. A chain carport with a chain-link fence might work. They trap the energy and distribute it around the cage. A car inside of it would be unaffected.”

  “Where are we going to find one, Rock?” Leigh’s voice hinted at hope, but was soaked in exhaustion and doubt.

  “A car repair shop?” he guessed. “There’s gotta be one close by.”

  “A gas station?” Max suggested. “One with a garage?”

  James snapped his fingers and pointed at his son. “Yes! Perfect! There’s bound to be several of them along the highway before we reach the interstate. That’s not far from here.”

  “I feel like we’re in search of the wizard,” said Leigh, “but we’re surrounded by flying monkeys.”

  “I don’t like the flying monkeys,” said Sloane.

  “Neither do I,” agreed James. “But we’ll be okay. Remember, the monkeys never really hurt Dorothy.”

  “She had ruby slippers, though,” reasoned the eight-year-old. “She just had to click her heels to get home.”

  “True,” said James, “but if your brother’s right and we find a car in a garage, it might as well be like ruby slippers. And we’ll be home before you know it.”

  James didn’t remind his daughter that the entirety of Dorothy’s adventure was a dream and what they were living was Technicolor reality.

  CHAPTER 12

  EVENT +7:42 Hours

  South Portland, Maine

  The gray Subaru pulled alongside the Rockwells as they marched along Broadway. They’d just crossed over Main Street, a cemetery was to their right and Dairy Queen across the street to the left.

  “Sir.” The passenger-side window buzzed open as the Subaru slowed to match the family’s pace. “I’m gonna need you to stop for us.”

  The South Portland police officer was young, maybe in his mid-twenties, James thought. He looked over at Leigh, who shrugged and stopped walking. The kids stopped too. James waved at the officer and put his hands on his hips, awaiting further instruction.

  The officer and his partner, who was driving the Subaru, hopped out of the car and walked over to James. They both suffered from dark circles under their eyes and stubble on their chins. It was obvious they’d been up as long as the Rockwells.

  “Could I please see some identification?” asked the driver. “Do you have any on you?”

  “Did we do something wrong?” asked James. “We’re just walking.”

  “I understand that, sir.” The officer inched closer to James, his right hand resting on the top of his service weapon. “But given the circumstances, I’ll need to see your ID.”

  “What are the circumstances?” asked Leigh. “What happened?”

  “ID?” asked the younger officer, holding out his hand.

  James and Leigh looked at each other and then removed their packs, tossing them onto the sidewalk. Inside the front pocket of both backpacks, they kept waterproof bags with their driver’s licenses, a credit card, and some cash.

  They both handed over their licenses to the younger officer. He glanced at them and then handed them to his partner.

  “Maryland, huh?” said the driver. “How’d you end up here?”

  “Vacation,” offered James.

  “Some vacation.” The
younger officer chuckled. Neither of the Rockwells found it humorous.

  “So, Mr. and Mrs. Rockwell,” said the driver, handing back the licenses to James, “the Department of Homeland Security has declared a national state of emergency.”

  “Why?” James asked, handing his wife her license. “You still haven’t told us what happened here? Did it happen elsewhere too?” He looked at the driver’s name badge. It read HARKER.

  “We don’t have a lot of details,” said Officer Harker. “We’re just doing what we’re told to do.”

  “What is that, then, Officer Harker?” James was growing suspicious. These officers didn’t stop them to serve and protect.

  “Do you have a weapon?” Harker said, his hand tightening around his weapon. “If so, I’m gonna need to take that from you.”

  “Yes,” James said, thinking better than to reach for his waistband. “I have a small handgun in my waist. But it’s—”

  The younger officer pulled his weapon and leveled it at James. “Please put your hands above your head.”

  “Whoa!” James backed up, raising his hands above his head, revealing the small nine millimeter handgun tucked into his waist. “What’s this? I have a permit for it. It’s legal.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Rockwell.” Harker approached slowly. “But given the circumstances, I have to relieve you of the weapon.” He reached for the gun and took it.

  “That’s not legal,” James argued. “It’s my second amendment right to carry that weapon. I have a permit for it.”

  “Not in Maine you don’t,” said the younger officer, his gun still trained on James.

  “I’m sure there’s a reciprocal agreement,” James said, his hands still above his head.

  “Not with Maryland, I’m afraid,” said Harker. “We have agreements with eight states for a concealed handgun. Maryland is not one of them. But it wouldn’t matter. The state of emergency trumps that.”

  “It trumps the Bill of Rights?” James was agitated, on the verge of an outburst. “Nothing trumps the Bill of Rights!”