Thunder and Acid: A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller Read online

She should have paid more attention, been a better shot, acted more decisively. If she hadn’t fallen off that ledge, if she’d kicked harder, if she’d been a better shot.

  If she’d done anything differently—even one little thing—Jessup might still be alive. Maybe she would have told him that she loved him. Maybe she would have loved him.

  Now she’d never know. He died for her, because of her. And she had left him in the ash.

  But that will never happen again. She stood and waved to the mat in front of her as Derek’s speech trailed off. “Again. I need to get it right.”

  He tugged the knife from his belt as he rose. “Alright. So, just remember—twist, trap, hip. Then we’ll work on the throw.”

  Derek attacked. Lana twisted, trapped, and slammed her hip into Derek’s. Over and over and over. She worked until the movement was automatic. Until she didn’t hesitate.

  All the while, Jessup watched her, dying again, and again, and again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  CALEB

  Horse Creek Base, New United States

  Thursday, June 17th, 9:43 am EST

  “Shopping list for Friday.” Caleb read from the booklet he’d been given that morning into the radio receiver. “The kids are headed to the pool by noon. Pick up soda, white bread, pool noodles, transformer toys. Uncle John will be watching the kids. Aunt Mary has a cold. Over.”

  There was no response. There was never a response. But someone outside the base was listening. Obviously, it was some kind of code, but what it could possibly mean was beyond him. A reference to time, an event, possibly a contact. A supply drop of some kind?

  If so, it was one of the more direct messages. Some of the transmissions were far more arcane in nature—from passages of fairy tales to strings of completely unrelated words. One message he’d read three days prior involved playing a cassette tape at specific intervals—an Aerosmith album, Nine Lives.

  He’d been trying to figure out what he was actually doing; or, more specifically, what General Thomas was doing. As best he could tell, there were multiple operatives in the field, each with their own code scheme. If that was the case, it meant at least two things: no team was authorized to know what the others were doing, and the general was concerned operations might be observed.

  All of it made him increasingly uncomfortable.

  It had been a little over two weeks since he’d arrived at Horse Creek with his family. Two weeks since he first heard General Thomas say three words that turned Caleb’s guts to ice. New United States. He’d half hoped the ice would thaw in time, but since he made repairs to the base’s radio array and became the base’s main comms officer, it had only grown harder, colder, and more jagged around the edges.

  He glanced at his watch, waited another five minutes, then moved to the next message, adjusting the frequency and amplitude on the dials of the old machinery to the numbers listed by the text. “Little Red Riding Hood was walking in the forest, headed to her grandmother’s house, when a wolf crossed her path…”

  Could be a warning to a particular team—Red Riding Hood. Maybe it’s a warning that they’ve been compromised or need to look out for something. Supply line?

  Ruminating on what the messages might mean was compulsive, and made worse by the fact that he’d never intercepted a communication coming in. He’d scanned frequencies while unobserved, but he suspected his job was only to send the messages out. Private Carson likely worked the other half of the job taking down responses.

  There were only a handful of reasons to keep the incoming and outgoing messages from ending up in the same place with the same person. None good.

  General Thomas might be concerned about an intelligence leak, which meant the base could be compromised, and that was bad for everyone. On the other hand, controlling intelligence was a good way to keep one hand from knowing what the other was doing—only a small number of people saw the full picture. There were plenty of good reasons for that, but a lot of bad ones, too.

  Once upon a time, Caleb had trusted his commanding officers, trusted the chain of command all the way to the top. Then the sky had fallen, and the government had downplayed it. He’d had to flee with his family, escaping the destruction that the chain of command had chosen to abandon half the United States to.

  Maybe that had changed him, made him less trusting. Made him doubt whether the people in charge were really looking out for their people. But if anyone else in Horse Creek felt that way, he couldn’t tell. For the most part, they all seemed to idolize General Thomas.

  There was a knock at the door to the comms room, which was about three times the size of a closet. Caleb checked the time. His shift was over, the last of the messages conveyed. He closed the booklet and slid it off the console before standing and moving to the door to switch out with Private Carson.

  Except, when he opened the door, it wasn’t Carson on the other side. He frowned at the unfamiliar face of a young man with a corporal’s patch on the chest of his fatigues, the name L. Masterson printed beneath it. The kid had a round face, and eyes that were just a little too far apart. His nose was crooked, broken badly in the past. His hand snapped up in a salute. “Staff Sergeant.”

  Caleb saluted in response. “At ease, Corporal. Where’s Private Carson? He normally relieves me.”

  Corporal Masterson shook his head. “Can’t say that I know, sir. I was just assigned.”

  Caleb glanced back at the comms station console, then looked Masterson over. “I had to train Carson myself. You know how to work the console?”

  “Yes sir.” Masterson peered past him. “All due respect, sir, my shift is meant to start in about three minutes.”

  “Right.” Caleb quickly stepped aside to let the corporal into the room. Once he was past, a more familiar face greeted him, and he handed his booklet to Lieutenant Mackie, taking a clipboard from him in return.

  Mackie was a burly guy, about Caleb’s size, with the sort of face that could be mistaken for a pile of rocks if it was the right color. He rarely spoke, and always wore an expression like he was about to hit someone. Caleb tried to talk to him a few times, but never got much back and so just stopped trying. He signed, dated, and time stamped on the custody record for the book and handed the clipboard back without a word.

  Mackie glanced over it, nodded, and then reached past Caleb to close the door to comms. “You are relieved, Staff Sergeant.”

  Caleb exchanged salutes and held his tongue when the instinct to ask about Carson arose. If Mackie knew anything, it was doubtful he would say. So he turned and left, keeping his posture and expression casually neutral.

  It had taken him a few days to train Private Carson. After that, they’d only seen one another when they traded places. There was always a fifteen-minute gap between when Caleb finished and Carson started. That had been what made him think that Carson’s job was to take down the responses; operatives in the field would have been told to listen for communications at a particular time, then wait a specified length of time before responding.

  The thing was, he’d asked Private Carson whether that was what he did during his shift. He’d asked him about it two days before, when he thought they were alone. Carson declined to answer, and Caleb let it go without argument.

  Now, this Corporal arrived to take his place.

  Coincidence, maybe. As far as Caleb knew, he wasn’t being replaced. Then again, he was the only competent comms engineer on the base. Now that the comms were up and in good repair though, he could easily train someone to replace him. But the windstorms worsened recently, and there was no telling when the arrays on top of the base would need repairing. So he wasn’t expendable.

  The thought made him miss a step. Was Carson expendable?

  Don’t be paranoid. Carson got reassigned, that’s all. It fits the pattern, keeping intelligence spread out so no one sees the whole picture. They just rotated him out, that’s all. It isn’t like there are enough people on base to…

  To what? Disappear
someone?

  He shook the thought off. He’d see Carson at mess, probably.

  When he reached his quarters, he half hoped to see Liz waiting for him, but she’d already left for mess duty apparently. He imagined Lana was out on janitorial.

  He sighed as he tugged his boots off before sinking down onto Liz’s cot, the metal creaking loudly in the small room. Her pillow smelled like her. Not like her shampoo, or whatever perfume she’d worn that day, the way her pillows used to smell. They didn’t have anything like that on base, so when he breathed in the smell it was just her.

  Lately, they hadn’t seen enough of one another. Caleb started his shift in the comms room around three in the morning each day, and she started the breakfast shift at five. Sometimes, they’d gotten up around the same time and been able to grab a moment to themselves before they went to their duties. But Liz wasn’t used to living on less than eight hours of sleep, so most mornings he did his best not to wake her.

  Still, he saw more of his wife than he did his daughter. Lana spent her mornings training with PFC Derek Walker, her days on janitorial, and her nights avoiding Caleb. He’d been trying to give her space because Liz seemed to think she needed it. Time to process, to grieve, and to do those things in a place that didn’t offer much of anything in the way of helping.

  He worried for his family. They’d made it to safety. They were supposed to be together now but had been basically separated as soon as the opportunity arose.

  Was there a reason for that? Part of some grand plan the general had in mind? A way of isolating anyone with connections to anything other than the general’s big plans?

  Paranoid thinking, sure.

  But it was only paranoia if he was wrong. And he was starting to feel like maybe he wasn’t.

  The thing was, though… What the hell did they do if he was right?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ELIZABETH

  Horse Creek Base, New United States

  Thursday, June 17th, 9:55 am EST

  Elizabeth never imagined a day when she’d enjoy the smell of baked beans quite so much. Maple and brown sugar filled her nose, sweet and savory, triggering a memory of Lana’s graduation party. A cookout with many of her friends and neighbors, Elizabeth decided to go all out and make a batch from scratch.

  She’d soaked the beans overnight in salted water but forgot to rinse. One bite an hour before dinner and all she tasted was salt. In the end, she’d rushed to the store, brought back about ten cans, and heated them in a baking dish.

  Caleb had told her how good they were, and said he was impressed. She’d let him be, and never told him they were store-bought. They’d been a hit with Lana’s friends, too.

  She glanced over at Marta—her third kitchen partner since she’d started mess duty—and smiled. “Never thought I’d appreciate a can of beans this much. If I never smell canned tamales again, it’ll be too soon.”

  Marta was a narrow-faced woman, fine-boned, and pretty, with long dark hair that was probably always flowing and shiny before the meteor. Now, it was pulled back into a tail, like Elizabeth’s own hair. She glanced up briefly, her eyes dropping to the can she held, and she nodded. “Yeah.”

  “I used to love these as a kid,” Elizabeth went on as she poured the contents of the can into the big soup pot on the stove. “I thought beans with hotdog pieces in them were something special. Of course, then you grow up.”

  “True,” Marta agreed without looking up from the frozen hamburger patties crumbling in her hands. Not exactly hotdog pieces, but it was the same principle, and it was what they had to work with this time around.

  “Did you have something like that?” Elizabeth wondered, watching the woman.

  Marta only shrugged. “Not really.”

  Three days she’d worked with Marta, and for three days Elizabeth had tried to start conversations. Anything at all—where she was from, what she’d done before the disaster, if she had family somewhere. Like the other two women, she seemed almost afraid to give more than a one-word answer to most questions.

  Yes. No. Maybe. Not really. Sure. And that was when the answers were words instead of grunts of acknowledgment.

  She’d had a therapist once, who’d said that if you keep having the same problem with people, then maybe the common denominator is you. She was starting to think there was something to that, and that her kitchen partners didn’t want to talk to her because she was boring, or somehow upsetting.

  But in fairness to Marta—and herself—it wasn’t just the people Elizabeth worked with. And it hadn’t just been her experience. Lana managed to make something of a friend, or maybe something more, with a young man who was teaching her self-defense, but other than that she’d found everyone on janitorial duty to be similarly tight-lipped. Caleb was uncomfortable talking about it, but seemed to be having the same experience.

  No one on the base talked to them. No one on the base responded when they tried to start a conversation. The only time anyone said more than a few words at a time, was when they talked about the general.

  And, frankly, Elizabeth was tired of hearing about the man as if he were some kind of hero. She dared not say it out loud, though. Not after seeing the way some of the soldiers acted around him.

  The way they hung on his every word at meals, when he gave speeches about the good work they were doing and how everything was going to be better, greater, stronger. The country the United States was always meant to be. They cheered him when he gave those speeches. Elizabeth cheered as well, but not because she was moved. She was just afraid of what would happen if she didn’t.

  No one trusted her family. Not even enough to talk about their lives before all of this. It had begun to eat at her, gnawing away at her insides to make a hollow pit that kept whispering to her: something is wrong here. This was a mistake.

  She thought it just then, as she watched Marta’s flat expression, and the almost mechanical way she processed the frozen meat. Who didn’t want to talk while they worked? What was wrong with the woman? For that matter, what had been wrong with Selena or Roxanne, the two other women who’d been rotated into mess duty with her? What made them so nervous to talk to her?

  Elizabeth wasn’t a soldier. What was she going to do with any information she gleaned from talking casually about their lives? Did they think she was a spy? And if so, a spy for whom? She’d seen the people outside.

  If they were even still alive, somehow surviving the ash fall, and the windstorms that Caleb said had scraped parts of the mountainside down to the rock in places, and the violent earthquakes that had almost certainly devastated every building in hundreds of miles. Even if they were still out there, they weren’t organized. They were just bandits and worse.

  Caleb was a marine. She was a marine’s wife; Lana was a marine’s daughter. What was there to be so cautious about with them?

  Not for the first time, she thought about leaving. About going to Caleb and telling him that she didn’t feel safe, and that they shouldn’t have come here. They could keep going west, see if there was some place out there where things were better. It was still summer, and even if it was getting colder, it wouldn’t get deadly cold until the winter, surely. They could make it.

  Unless they didn’t.

  And that was what stopped her every time. If it were just her and Caleb, she wouldn’t have hesitated. But there was Lana to think about. They’d saved her. If it hadn’t been the ash or the desperate people, it would have been the wind, or the ground falling out from beneath their feet at the wrong time that would have killed them.

  Or worse, only taken Lana. Or Caleb. She didn’t even know what was out there, what they might have to fight just to make it another day.

  At least inside this hole in the mountain, they had something like security. Tenuous, sure, but a lot more predictable than anything the world outside might throw at them.

  So, like all the other times she’d considered it, she pushed the thought away. They were doing this for Lana.
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  “Do you have kids?” she asked Marta.

  “No.”

  “Guess it’s probably better that way these days.” Elizabeth opened the last can of beans. “One less thing to worry about.”

  “I guess,” Marta replied.

  Elizabeth shook the last of the beans out into the pot and adjusted the burner to a simmer. “That’s the last of those. The boys must have found a grocery store or something. Wonder if they managed to bring back anything else.”

  Marta shrugged. “No telling.”

  “I’d kill for some tomatoes,” Elizabeth mused. “I’d even settle for canned. And some pasta. I bet we could turn some of the beef patties into meatballs.”

  Marta gave a shallow nod but said nothing as she tapped a blunt knife between two more patties and shifted the frozen meat to the large pan to cook.

  Alrighty then. Elizabeth had hit her limit of awkwardness for the day. She gathered up the empty cans and stripped them of their labels. Nothing was wasted here: cans were melted down, labels mulched for paper.

  After a quick rinse, she deposited the cans and their labels into their respective containers, which were nearly full. “Are you fine finishing up? If so, I’ll empty the cans for recycling.”

  Nothing. She wasn’t even sure Marta heard her, but the kitchen wasn’t loud, and she didn’t whisper. Maybe she’s sick of me, too.

  With a sigh, Elizabeth shook her head and closed the lid on the trash bin before hauling it away from the wall. She turned it around, tipped it onto its wheels, and pulled it toward the kitchen’s back door and into the hallway that ran down the base’s south side.

  We’re doing this for Lana. If it means being uncomfortable for a while, it’s not like I’ve never had to keep my head down.

  She pulled the trashcan along the hallway, turned left at the end, and pushed through a pair of double doors into the part of the complex housing the recycling area.