The Day After Never (Book 4): Retribution Read online

  “Generator’s failing, Doc,” the engineer said, hat in hand.

  “Same as last time?”

  Craig shook his head. “Worse. I jury-rigged it last time. That held for a while. But ever since that pump failed, it’s been operating on fewer than it was designed for. It’s just a matter of time until that damages some of the other components.”

  “Is it overheating?” Michael asked.

  “It’s more complicated than that. These were experimental units, not final designs. They were never intended to provide round-the-clock power like we’ve been drawing.”

  “Would shutting it down during the day help?”

  “Maybe for a while, but the basic problem is that the plant needs some parts replaced, and we don’t have them.”

  “They must have had spares,” Michael said.

  “You’d have thought so. But so far I haven’t found any.”

  Elliot reached for his hat and walked to the door. “You looked everywhere?”

  “All the places I’d have expected them to be.”

  “Let’s go have a peek. Michael, you can lend a hand, too. Three sets of eyes are better than one.”

  They made their way down the main street and crossed over the river swollen from the increasingly frequent rains. The bite of the cold was sharp in their lungs, and steam puffed from their mouths with every breath. At the door of the plant, Craig was reaching for the handle when an anguished scream from inside pierced the silence.

  Craig heaved the door open and ran to where Miles, his assistant, was lying on the concrete floor in a spreading pool of steaming water, his hands on his face, every exposed area of his skin already beginning to blister with first-degree burns. A scalding stream of water gushed from one of the pipe connections, and Craig leapt toward it, twisted the shutoff valve closed, and then powered down the big turbine two stories below them.

  Elliot and Michael stood stunned by the door for a moment and then rushed to Miles, their faces grim. As a physician, Elliot knew there was little he could do other than get the man to the hospital so Sarah could manage his pain and the inevitable shock that would follow burns of that magnitude. Elliot did a quick examination of Miles’s face as he quivered like a beached fish, noting the man’s eyes swelling shut. The steam had literally cooked his head, and it would be a miracle if he lived.

  “Let’s get him to the hospital,” Elliot said. They lifted Miles carefully by his arms and dragged him to the door.

  “Just when we could use ice, of course, it isn’t snowing yet,” Michael grumbled, and Craig frowned.

  “I’ll get a horse. We can’t carry him all the way there.”

  “Be quick about it,” Elliot warned. “He’s already fading.”

  Craig showed up a minute later with an equipment cart pulled by a palomino stallion, and they lifted Miles gingerly onto the wooden bed. Elliot turned to the engineer, who was puffing from the sudden exertion.

  “Ride as fast as you can. I’ll stay here until you can get back.” Elliot glanced up at the sky. “Warn Sarah that there won’t be any power tonight, so prepare the candles and torches.”

  “Don’t touch anything,” Craig warned.

  “I won’t.”

  The engineer rolled away, leaving Elliot and Michael to consider their next step. The geothermal generator was a small one, an experimental take on an age-old concept: to use the earth’s naturally heated water or steam to drive a turbine, creating electricity much like a dam, except using the pressure from the steam to drive the turbine rather than rushing water. It was reliable and stable under normal circumstances, but as the system degraded with time, the lack of replacement parts had taken its toll, and it was apparent that they were facing a significant problem. When winter hit, they’d need power to survive; and at the rate they were going, there would be none available.

  Elliot eyed the system of piping and pumps that carried the superheated water from the hot spring beneath his feet to the pressure tank that drove the turbine, and his expression darkened. What would have been an annoyance in the summer months could be an existential threat to their survival after the first snowfall.

  Elliot paced back and forth near the entrance, mulling over their options as Michael sat quietly, his eyes on the pipes. They were both deep in thought when Craig returned, his face grim.

  “Sarah says it’s bad,” he reported.

  “I know,” Elliot said. “I could tell by looking at him.”

  “If he survives, he’ll be blind, and he’ll look like a science experiment.”

  “Poor bastard.”

  “And he’ll lose some fingers. Not that it’s likely. She says she doesn’t think he’ll make it to morning.”

  Elliot exhaled noisily. “I’m sorry, Craig.”

  “Me too.” He gestured to the pumps. “And now we’ve got this mess to deal with. Looks like one of the seals ruptured.”

  “Where have you looked for parts already? We can eliminate those areas and concentrate on the most likely.”

  Craig described his search, and they each took a surrounding building. When that yielded no results, Michael asked Craig whether the technicians who’d monitored the system had an office elsewhere.

  “I don’t know. But we can look.”

  An hour later it was apparent they weren’t going to have any luck, and they headed back to the station and studied the generator with dour expressions. Craig rubbed a weary hand across his brow and eyed Elliot and Michael.

  “I can probably cannibalize some other equipment and make this limp along, but we’re on borrowed time. We need a permanent solution, or there’s going to be more c.”

  “Can the machine shop make you any of the parts you need?”

  “I have them working on a few, but you know how that goes. Trial and error. These are precision pieces; you get one thing even slightly off and they won’t function.” Craig surveyed the damage again and shook his head. “I’ll mop this up and see what I can cobble together, but I’m not hopeful. We’re going to need more than duct tape and chewing gum to keep this running through the winter. And you know Murphy’s Law.”

  Elliot nodded. “If I didn’t, this is one hell of a reminder.” He glanced at Michael and then back to Craig. “Do what you can, and we’ll put on our thinking caps. There’s got to be a solution. We just aren’t seeing it.”

  Michael snapped his fingers. “What about using the river water to drive a turbine? Wouldn’t that work?”

  Craig shook his head. “The problem is you need a lot of pressure to turn one of any size – assuming you could build one designed for that. A river won’t do it. You’d need a reservoir, and then the pressure of the water backed up, released through a narrow gap, would drive it. The river’s current alone won’t do it. Sorry.”

  “Windmills?” Michael tried again.

  “Sure. In theory. But where are we going to get a bunch of wind turbines to generate power? Not to mention the storage problem. See, with geothermal, you have power twenty-four seven because you always have steam. With wind? You need a really windy area, and it isn’t that windy here.”

  “Worst case, couldn’t we use wood to heat water, and the steam could drive the turbine?”

  Craig opened a door and removed a mop. “Great solution. But the problem isn’t that we don’t have a limitless supply of hot water, Michael. So that would be perfect for a different issue.”

  Elliot touched Michael’s arm, reacting to the annoyance that was creeping into Craig’s voice. “Come on. Let’s leave Craig to his work.” Elliot nodded to the engineer. “Radio me if you need anything. We’re going over to the hospital.”

  “Will do.”

  Chapter 19

  Lucas led the group along a trail that paralleled the highway to Tulsa, periodically sweeping the landscape with his binoculars. He hadn’t seen any riders or travelers on the road, which struck him as ominous this close to a sizeable metro area – generally, if people avoided travel near a hub, it was because safety w
as an issue. In the post-apocalyptic world, many were nomadic by necessity, either fleeing danger or pursuing opportunity, and Tulsa was large enough that he would have expected at least a little traffic.

  “Why didn’t the Crew take over Tulsa, too?” he asked Sierra in a low voice. “It’s not that far from Oklahoma City, and then they’d have almost the whole state.”

  “I’ve never been to either place, but when I was in Dallas, I heard that there wasn’t anything worth taking over. They don’t devote men to an area if there’s nothing to steal. Sort of like Pecos – not worth their time.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “They don’t do anything that isn’t about power or profit.”

  Arnold grunted from behind them. “Kind of like the last government.”

  Lucas chuckled humorlessly. Even though he’d worked for the Texas Rangers, he hadn’t been blind to the inequity of the society he’d sworn to protect, where oil billionaires drove past tent cities of the homeless, insulated from unpleasantness by bulletproof glass and run-flat tires. There had been a long-running joke among his peers that if your skin was brown and you robbed a bank, you went to prison; whereas if you were white, you likely owned a bank that robbed everyone around it, and they made you the governor.

  Of course that was a wild exaggeration, but it had been difficult not to see the results of a criminal justice system that was operated for profit, where the prison population was used as effective slave labor, and the vast majority of those incarcerated were minorities. Not much had changed from the days when Jim Crow laws targeted minority populations, only victimless crimes like drug possession replaced racism as the pretense for locking a large percentage of the targeted demographic behind bars.

  In the old days, lawmen like his father had reacted to crimes that had victims – violence or property crime. Somewhere along the line that had shifted to where most of the arrests were for violations of laws where there was no victim, only a perp. It had skewed the role of the police to where they no longer protected and served, but rather arrested to improve their career record, and often the easiest targets were those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale – which usually meant people of color. He’d encountered it every day on the job, and it was one of the aspects of law enforcement that he had been glad to put behind him. Now everyone was the same, discrimination a luxury few could afford in a survival-mode world where starvation and disease were greater concerns than the color of someone’s skin.

  Tulsa’s skyline came into view as they neared, but there were still no people in evidence. The usual carcasses of rusting vehicles abandoned on the roads were everywhere, as were the ruins of homes looted in the early days before everything had run dry, but no signs of life.

  “You’d think there would be farms or something, huh?” Colt said.

  Lucas didn’t respond. The whole area was sending a shiver of anxiety up his spine, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. He was no stranger to devastation or danger – so why was the alarm going off?

  Arnold pointed ahead at several columns of smoke rising from within the city limits. “At least we know somebody’s home.”

  They fell quiet as they neared a suburb that had been flattened – by a tornado, Lucas guessed, based on the destruction: only slabs remained on many of the lots, the houses blown to the four corners.

  Once they had run the gauntlet of wreckage, they arrived at the edge of the city, where three men with filthy hair and grimy skin, dressed in clothes little more than rags and holding weapons as dirty as their shirts, manned a sandbagged guard outpost on the western side of the Arkansas River.

  “Whoa, there, cowboy. Hold up,” one of them called. The others raised their weapons, and even at a distance Lucas could make out that their arms were so thin they were nearly skeletal. “Where you think you’re going?”

  “We’re looking for a trading post. Something with a radio,” Lucas said.

  “Yeah? Where you coming from?”

  “Texas.”

  “Why you coming this direction? Nothing here but misery, and I hear tell it gets worse the further east you go.”

  “Maybe so,” Lucas said agreeably. “But it can’t be any worse than Texas these days.”

  The men took in Sierra with hungry looks, and then the lead sentry’s eyes narrowed. “You gang affiliated?”

  “No. Just looking for a trading post.”

  “What you got to trade?”

  “That’s between me and the trader, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t get all uppity. Just curious,” the man snapped.

  “Weapons and ammo. The usual.”

  The man’s stare roamed over Tango and settled on Lucas’s M4. “Nice gun you got there.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Horse looks like a winner, too. You gonna trade either of them?”

  Lucas shook his head. “Not likely.”

  “Keep your eyes on him. Way things are these days, lot of folks would eat him just as soon as ride him.”

  “I intend to.”

  Lucas waited for the guard to decide whether to let them pass, having exhausted his questions and having no interest in discussing the weather. The man coughed a phlegmy hack and stepped back. “Well, come on in, then. It’s your funeral.”

  “Anything we should know? Any rules?”

  The sentries exchanged a glance and then laughed, treating Lucas to a view of rotting teeth and blackened gums. “Not really. You kill anyone, better have a good reason or enough to buy your way out of it. Other than that, you’re on your own.”

  “Where’s the nearest trading post?” Arnold asked, his voice flat.

  “Over by the university. Can’t miss it.”

  “Does it have a radio?”

  “Did last time I was up that way.”

  “How do we get there?” Lucas asked.

  “Cross the bridge, and then head east on Eleventh Street. It’ll be on your left a ways up.”

  “How do we know when we’re at Eleventh Street?” Sierra asked.

  “It’s the street right before that hospital tower,” he said, pointing to a gleaming building in the near distance. “Still got street signs. But you might want to put on a jacket or something. We don’t get a lot of young women as good-lookin’ as you these days.” The man offered an oily grin. “Wouldn’t want to see you come to a bad end.”

  Lucas led them across the long span over a rushing brown and frothy river, and they found themselves on a broad freeway clogged with junked cars. The horses picked their way between the vehicles until they reached an off-ramp near the base of the hospital, which they veered down before finding Eleventh Street.

  They rode past a pair of men with long, matted hair and faces spectral from malnutrition, who were shambling down the cracked sidewalk, pushing a rusting shopping cart filled with detritus. They looked up at the riders with the uncurious eyes of those close to death, their skin yellow and hanging loose from their skulls, and then resumed their task.

  Sierra sidled closer to Lucas and whispered over the clomp of the horses’ hooves, “Tell me that isn’t creepy.”

  “This whole place is.”

  They passed several more pedestrians, all obviously without anything to their names, and reached an intersection where a man with a long black coat and a shabby top hat was reciting biblical verse in a loud voice to a crowd of none. When he spotted them approaching, he brightened and held up a soiled piece of paper. “Woe be to those who fail to recognize the sign! The Savior has been sent, but we have rejected our salvation, for which we are now paying! We brought this upon ourselves!” he announced, waving the paper like a talisman.

  Lucas ignored the man and continued past. On the next corner, another preacher was offering his spin on the end-times to a small gathering of women and children. Sierra leaned toward Lucas. “Awful religious, aren’t they?”

  “Maybe this is the district or something.”

  “Neither Dallas or Lubbock were like this.”

 
; “These people look like they’re starving. How was it in Texas?” Colt asked from behind her.

  “It was bad, but nothing like this.”

  “Maybe that’s your answer,” Arnold said. “When you’re out of hope and you have nothing to eat, suddenly even the worst sinner becomes a believer.”

  Lucas nodded. “Could be.”

  A child, no more than six or seven, spotted them and ran toward Lucas with a pamphlet. The boy looked feverish, his face a patchwork of scabbed sores, and Lucas recoiled when the child tried to thrust the paper into his hand. Seeing that Lucas wasn’t going to take it, he held it to Sierra, who waved him away unsuccessfully. When he didn’t give up, she reluctantly took it from him and he scurried back to the preacher, who looked like a mad hermit with his gray beard and dreadlocked hair, now gesticulating feverishly at the sky.

  Lucas shook his head and sighed at the spectacle of so much misery. Sierra interrupted his introspection, her voice alarmed.

  “Lucas!” she hissed from beside him.

  “What?” he demanded, reaching for his pistol.

  “Look at this.”

  He relaxed. “Look at what?”

  “The paper that kid gave me.”

  “I’m a little busy right now, trying to keep an eye out so we don’t get killed. Why don’t you read it to me?” he said.

  “You need to see it.”

  “Not now, Sierra. What is it?”

  “It’s…it’s a picture of Eve. From Lubbock.”

  “We know they were searching for you. That’s no surprise.”

  “No. But it’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “It says she’s the…that Eve’s the second coming.”

  Chapter 20

  New Orleans, Louisiana

  It was the dead of night when the destroyer idled to a stop in Lake Borgne several hundred yards from the distressed brick ruins of Beauregard’s Castle, near the mouth of the channel that led to Shell Beach and its private marina, now a black hole in the shoreline. Lightning flashed within a phalanx of plum-colored clouds over the Gulf of Mexico. The air was heavy with the smell of ozone, the wetlands beyond the cut redolent of brine and decaying vegetation as the big ship drifted, its huge engines nearly silent against a background of distant thunder.