Prep For Doom Read online

  Though it was only mid-morning, she took the carton and a spoon back to the couch. She glanced at the coffee table, strewn with trash. Her dad’s Wall Street Journals were piling up. She’d finally stopped taking them in, and there was another pile outside the door, along with the remains of the eggs someone had thrown the previous week. At least they hadn’t graduated to graffiti, not yet anyway. After people started to talk, all bets were off as far as vandalism went. The lawyer went ballistic about that, but there was nothing her parents could do. Especially since they were on another business trip, she thought with an inward roll of the eyes. The company her parents both worked for, Peter Franklin Donalds, was always more important than things at home. At least they asked if she would be okay this time. They even offered to get a babysitter. As if.

  Her cell phone buzzed under all the newspapers and Pop-Tart wrappers, vibrating the table. Sierra switched on the TV to The View and tried to ignore it, but there was another news flash on. She swore and pushed all the garbage to the floor, grabbing the phone at the last minute to save it.

  She looked at the number and froze.

  Part of her wanted to give in and talk to Jake. At least he probably knew what was going on, but she couldn’t bring herself to answer. He might have had some crazy theories, but he was sexy as all hell, and right now he was her only friend. He’d always been that weird, goofball kid that could make her laugh, ever since they were kids. But those last few months, his obsession with conspiracies became intense and she had to break it off. She didn’t deserve his friendship, anyway.

  As the phone stopped vibrating, she wondered where her life would be if she’d stayed with him. A lump formed in her throat as she looked up to the TV, where a reporter was standing outside a hospital, ambulances flying back and forth while she interviewed some military official who was trying to remain calm. The same kind of bullshit Jake could see from a mile away. She could almost hear him saying that when the government says things are all right, it’s time to get out of town.

  Before the reporter could finish her question, there was a loud bang at the door.

  “Sierra, I know you’re in there! Open the door.”

  Sierra glanced down at the phone still in her hand, as if the noise were coming from there. Jake must have called from the front step. She smiled. That was just like him. He knocked again, louder.

  “I’m not leaving!” he said. She got up and shook her head. The reporter was saying something about casualties and death rate. Jake would have a field day about it. She swung the door open just as his hand was in mid-knock.

  “Quiet down!” She looked past him to the family across the street who was frantically packing their belongings in their minivan. Not just suitcases, but crates of food and boxes of supplies. She froze in the door, watching the toddler crying on the front step as his parents stepped around him. The same toddler she used to babysit before the accident. Before she became untrustworthy. What was happening?

  “We need to talk,” Jake said. He dropped a backpack inside the door, pushed past her, and closed the door. Instinctively, she tucked a stray lock of her brown curls behind her ear in an attempt to look decent. How he could still affect her like that, she didn’t know.

  “Sierra.” He grabbed her arm, but he didn’t seem to know what to say after that. Maybe too much time had gone by, after all. Maybe there was nothing left to say. After all, ‘you and your friends are a bunch of crazy freaks’ speaks volumes.

  “What are you doing here?” She pulled her arm out of his hand and took a breath when she walked into the living room, kicking trash aside on the way by. She cleared off a place to sit on the couch, brushing all the crap to the floor, but he didn’t sit down.

  “I’ve been trying to call you,” he said, his tone somewhere between accusatory and sad.

  “Yeah. Well.” She picked up the ice cream carton and twirled the spoon in her fingers. “My parents have been out of town on some emergency business trip. And Mason broke up with me after the accident, so I’ve kind of been wallowing. I guess you were right about him after all.”

  “He’s an idiot.” Jake shook his head, and took a step toward her. He gently pulled the carton out of her hand and placed it on the table. “I’m not sorry to hear about the breakup, though.”

  “Jake—” she began.

  “It’s happening, Sierra.”

  “Your apocalypse?” she said, a hint of the old incredulity in her voice. Jake frowned.

  “Have you been watching the news?” He gestured to the TV and Sierra was startled to see a line of gurneys on the street in front of the hospital. The bodies were covered in sheets.

  “Not…really,” she admitted.

  “My parents got a tip,” he continued. “There’s a safe zone. They left already, but I snuck back for you.”

  Sierra’s head swam. Reality crashed into skepticism. That was the thing about Jake. There was always a certain amount of sense to his madness, until it pulled you under.

  “No.” She sat back on the couch, paper crinkling under her. There were so many reasons she couldn’t go with Jake, but her disbelief turned to fear. If there were some kind of emergency, surely she would have heard from her parents? Why hadn’t she heard from them?

  “You don’t have a choice. It’s getting bad out there. Look.” He took the remote and cycled through the channels. All showed the same thing. How long had it been like this? She flipped through her text messages, but she hadn’t heard from her parents in days. She tried to call her dad but it went straight to voicemail.

  This is Richard Brook, Vice President of Marketing at Peter Franklin Donalds. I can’t take your call right now, but please leave a message after the tone.

  She didn’t realize she was crying until she left the message.

  “Daddy, I’m scared. What’s happening? Please call me back.”

  She tried to count the days since the accident, since Mason broke up with her, and her parents left. They all melded into one, and some days she hadn’t even bothered to get out of bed. She was only just coming around, and that was because she had to eat.

  “How long has it been like this?” she asked.

  “Not long,” he said. “It’s fast moving, and it’s airborne. We should be in masks, but I don’t know if we need them.” He looked away. Airborne, she thought. She knew what that meant. They were dead.

  A laugh escaped her mouth, hysterics, she supposed, as Jake retrieved his backpack from the hall. He unzipped it and pulled out a facemask, the kind they ask you to wear at the doctor’s office when it’s flu season.

  “It’s not the best, but it could help,” he said. She took it from him and held it up: a tangible, concrete item to show that she had gone crazy.

  “I’m not supposed to leave the state, Jake.” She tried to hand it back to him. “I can’t do this right now.”

  “That doesn’t matter anymore, Sierra. If you don’t come with me, you won’t even make it to next week.”

  She’d heard him talk about the end of the world before, and she’d always brushed it off and laughed at him. He knew what it sounded like, and he’d laugh right along with her, even while attempting to convince her to buy a bunker with him when they graduated and go off the grid. This time, there was no laughing. Even with the end of the world pending, the accident weighed heavily on her mind.

  “It was my fault,” she said. He sat next to her on the couch and put an arm around her. “I was texting Mason. I didn’t even see her.” The words came out as muffled sobs, the last ones almost unintelligible. She cried into his shoulder as he smoothed her hair back.

  He didn’t attempt to make her feel better by changing the subject or telling a stupid joke, which Mason used to do. Jake just held her. She didn’t know how long she cried. Time was something that had lost meaning after the accident. She finally lifted her head to see the destruction on the television. The reporter her parents always watched, Amy Savino, was almost frantic.

  “It’s really hap
pening?” Sierra sat back and wiped her eyes. “You were right about everything.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he answered. He pulled his arm back and met her eyes. “There were some things I screwed up on.” The last statement hung in the air, and Sierra’s thoughts turned to her parents again. She pulled out her phone and dialed both of them, but she couldn’t get a signal and the phone’s charge ebbed down below twenty percent.

  “I should pack, I guess.” She stood up and looked around the living room. The mess was everywhere, and she couldn’t begin to think about what she needed. The biggest baggage she had was coming with her whether she wanted it or not: guilt, sadness, regret.

  “Just a backpack. A few changes of clothes,” Jake slipped into his planning mode and Sierra couldn’t help but think how quickly her world had turned upside down. She thought back to all his disaster talk, and seemed to remember him talking about taking weapons. If that’s what he was expecting, he’d be disappointed. The only weapon she had was a nail file.

  “Okay.” She followed his orders, and went upstairs. She dumped her schoolbag and filled it with clothes, slipping in a photo of her and Kelsey from drama club the year before. Sierra ran her hand over their faces with their innocent smiles, and swore she wouldn’t forget her. She’d spend the rest of her life paying, one way or another.

  “Let’s go.” She came down the stairs and handed the backpack to Jake in the kitchen. He took a couple jars of peanut butter—the only thing left—threw them in the pack, and zipped it closed. Before they reached the front door, he pulled a mask over his face, then adjusted hers. He let his hand linger by her ear for just a minute before he turned and opened the door.

  The neighbors had packed their van so full that their kid looked pressed against the window in the back. Sierra gave them a sad wave as the dad swerved out of the driveway and took off down the street. Around them a couple of other families looked in the throes of packing and leaving, but other than that, the street was mostly silent. It was late afternoon, but there were no kids outside playing.

  “Where are they going?” Sierra asked.

  “Out of the city,” he said. The minivan stopped at the end of the street and honked, but whatever was in the road didn’t move. The van drove up and over the sidewalk, but still hit part of the object with a loud thump. The familiar noise made Sierra want to gag.

  “Is that—”

  “A body. Let’s go.”

  The SUV had always been cluttered, but now it was filled to the brim; there was just enough room in the passenger’s seat. Jake let them take the masks off in the car. She let hers hang on her neck, like a piece of costume jewelry.

  “Is that where we’re going? Out of the city?” She placed the backpack with her meager possessions by her feet. Once, she would have prized so much more than what was in the bag. Stylish clothes and jewelry were left behind, even the diamond earrings her dad had given her for her sweet sixteen. A consolation prize, as he’d been away on a business trip that week. She picked up her phone and tried to call them again, then sent a text, which remained undelivered. She sighed as Jake pulled away from the curb, keeping her eyes away from the body as they turned the other way. They reached the top of the hill, and smoke rose like a plume from the direction of downtown Greenwich, Connecticut.

  “We can follow my parents into the safe zone. I copied their map of Staten Island.” He leaned forward and concentrated on the road. She opened her mouth to ask another question when he stopped short, holding her back from the dashboard even though she was wearing a seatbelt.

  A police car swerved around them, zigzagging up the street. Jake held his breath as it careened straight into a telephone pole. Sierra screamed at the sound of the crash, as the hood crinkled and smoke rose from the cruiser.

  “We have to help!” She reached for the handle, but Jake stopped her.

  “We can’t,” he said, sadly. The officer shouldered the door open, and stumbled out. He was covered in blood and yelled something incoherent. The noisy siren had shut off, but blue lights flashed and made him look like a nightmare come to life. Sierra sobbed and looked away as Jake inched the car forward.

  “We’re going as far as we can by car, then we’ll head out on foot.” he said. “It’s not far. The safe zone is on Staten Island.”

  “How are we going to get there?” she asked. Already the streets didn’t seem safe. A gun went off in the distance.

  “Leave it to me,” he said.

  New Haven wasn’t far from Staten Island, and the car ride was filled with things that they didn’t say. Sierra wondered where Mason was, and fiddled with her phone as she thought about warning him. Then she thought about the snide comment he’d made about Kelsey the last time she’d seen him. It was the lowest point in her life. She called him anyway, thinking she could use the karma points, but her phone wouldn’t connect. She managed to get through to her mom’s phone, which went right to voicemail, and this time she left a message. She tried to control the panic in her voice when she told her mom where she was going, and asked her to please call back. As she disconnected, she realized she didn’t even know where they had gone this time. Peter Franklin Donalds sent them everywhere, so they might not even be in the country. They weren’t close, but she had an ache in her chest at the fact she might not ever see them again.

  Jake crept slowly through trashed suburban areas. They tried to keep the radio on, but it was all depressing newscasts. Sierra switched it off.

  “Back at my house, you said something about the masks,” she said. The closer they got to Staten Island, the more people they saw headed the same way, in cars and on foot, a slow shuffle of refugees.

  “I don’t think we need them,” he said. He drove past a suburban convenience store. The front glass had been broken and people were taking armloads of stuff out. Jake slowed down as someone ran across the street carrying cases of soda balanced one on top of the other. Sierra trembled and slid down in her seat as one kid pointed to their car and started shouting, but Jake sped past them.

  “Why don’t we need the masks?” she asked, once they’d passed all the commotion.

  He risked a sideways look at her, and the corner of his lip pulled up into that familiar half smile.

  “You’re going to think it’s crazy,” he teased.

  “I think we’ve gone past that,” she said, a mixture of humor and guilt in her voice.

  “I think we’re immune.”

  “Why would you think that?” He looked at her with that sideways smile again, so she knew what he was about to say would be out there.

  “Spit it out,” she said with mock anger.

  “Some people just are,” he shrugged. “I took care of my uncle Nick, in the beginning. He was one of the first ones to come down with this thing. I stayed with him the whole time, even went to the hospital with him. They were overflowing by then.”

  “Did he make it?”

  “No.” Jake paused for a minute. “They made me leave the hospital, eventually, but he was out of it by then. That’s when my parents got serious about leaving for Staten Island.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Sierra said. She liked his uncle, and remembered that Jake was really close to him. Jake cleared his throat.

  “Anyway, I never came down with it. I got some mild cold for a couple days, which is why we didn’t leave right away. My parents kept an eye on me but none of us got it.”

  Sierra let his story sink in. Nick was dead, and how many others?

  “Do you remember when your dad started working at PFD?” Jake changed the subject.

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “All those tests they put your family through? I think that was some kind of experiment, for a cure or something.” Sierra had to fight an urge to roll her eyes. Old habits die hard.

  “They were for a physical,” she argued. Her parent’s employer had been a huge source of tension between them. Jake was convinced that PFD was up to no good, then his family joined the prepp
ers which fueled his paranoia. Sierra had to admit, the company took up all her parent’s time the last few years, but that didn’t make them evil.

  “I think it was more than that,” Jake said, becoming animated. “What if PFD knew this outbreak was going to happen? What if they were already testing people for it before? Like to find natural immunity or something. Or maybe they tested something on you? There are rumors of an inoculation—”

  “Jake—” she began. It was an old argument between them.

  “They have the contract for the vaccine!”

  “What?” That threw her off kilter. She was used to his arguments, but he rarely had facts to back it up.

  “They announced it a couple days ago,” he said. “They say it’s not finished—but…” He trailed off.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “My parents were part of this. They could be involved.” She rolled the phone back and forth in her hand, but even if the charge weren’t dead she couldn’t get a hold of them.

  “It’s not your fault.”

  The words were a trigger. Maybe that wasn’t her fault, but there were plenty of things that were. She tried to focus. They’d driven off the main road on to an abandoned side street in a residential neighborhood.

  “You think we’re immune, then?” she asked. Jake put the SUV in park and let the engine idle while he took a CB radio out to fiddle with the dials.

  “It’s possible,” he said.

  That didn’t sit well with her. As he worked with the CB, she laced the mask over her face and got out to get some fresh air. He reached someone on the CB, one of his parent’s friends. She strained to hear the conversation, but only heard something about a bridge. She’d only gone off a couple of paces when he swung the door open behind her.

  “They’re screening people,” he said spoke through the mask. “At the bridge. As long as you’re healthy, you’re in.”

  “In where? Is anywhere really safe?”