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Prep For Doom Page 23


  The boots were really too hot for mid-summer in the city, but they looked tough, and they covered her hack job of a prosthetic leg. Plus they were awesome for collecting and concealing—extra space everywhere.

  She slid her Beretta from the pocket of her pillowcase and tried to be quiet as she eased open her door. Still nothing from Bas, but no sounds of anything else either. That was a relief, at least. Looters had been through the neighborhood several days ago, but Bas had emptied a few clips into the street, scaring them off. Now that someone knew they were here, though, she had been expecting a second attempt.

  Her steps thudded along the bare plywood floor as she peeked into the bedroom across from hers. Uncle Bas wasn’t in there. The bathroom was empty. Kitchen too.

  Finally, she found him in the living room—slumped across the armrest of his recliner. He probably needed the sleep, but he’d be stiff and grouchy if she let him stay that way all night.

  “Bas,” she whispered, shaking his shoulder. “Wake up. You dropped your computer again.” No response, so Arie bent down to pick up the laptop before shoving him harder. She bit down a scream as he slumped forward and toppled to the floor. His face rolled up and she could see the blood leaking from his nostrils.

  Arie cursed softly as she backed away, the laptop clutched in her cramping fingers. Specks of dried blood stippled the screen. How long had he been in here, dying? Alone…

  “Not this… God, Bas. I thought you were safe. We…”

  Then he blinked at her and she dropped the laptop, kneeling beside him.

  “Bas? What can I do?” She cradled his head as his eyes tried to focus. Oddly, the familiar panic was gone from his eyes. The PTSD had retreated, and he seemed to be lucid.

  “Key,” he whispered, the sound barely discernible from his raspy breathing. A trickle of blood was gathering at the corner of his lips. Arie tried to push down her own panic—how could she function without Bas? Everybody was losing everything, but she had stupidly thought maybe she would be allowed to keep just one person in her life. Maybe she’d lost enough already.

  But apocalypse or not, the world wasn’t interested in changing her luck.

  “Key…crossroads,” Bas tried again, then shook with weak coughing that did nothing but bring up more blood.

  “Shh,” Arie said, smoothing the creases in his forehead. She blinked away tears—she hadn’t cried since her father died three years ago, in the car crash that took her leg.

  Bas’s hand clutched at her fingers, pulling them from his face. His eyes remained closed, but he brought her palm to his neck, where his old military tags hung. “Key!” he tried again.

  “Okay, Bas. Okay—I’ll take your key,” Arie said, trying desperately to keep her voice reassuring. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about, but obviously the necklace meant something to him. He was dying—she’d say anything he wanted.

  “Go…crossroads,” Bas whispered, then fell silent. She continued brushing his cheek with her hand, skirting around the blood. She had thought they were both immune—it had been weeks and everyone around them was dying, but not Bas. Not her.

  What did it mean that he had caught the virus now? Would she catch it too?

  Her stomach lurched as she looked down. He was gone. Her fingers still clutched the tags and blood smeared one palm where it had held Bas’s cheek.

  Her stomach rolled with a new knife-twist—guilt. Did she bring the virus home with her, hidden in the folds of her clothing? Did she collect the germs that killed him? Stumbling to the bathroom, she hunched over the toilet. At the sink, she scrubbed fiercely at her face and hands. As though it would help. If she had the virus too, it was only a matter of hours and she’d be choking on blood.

  She stared at her reflection in the mirror. Pale face. Reddish hair that needed to be washed. Sunken brown eyes. She could be sick already and not even know it. Arie tried to remember what Bas had been like yesterday, but she’d gotten home late, tired from picking carefully through the dying neighborhood. And he had been in the shower.

  She hadn’t even said goodnight. Her only living family member, and she hadn’t even said goodnight.

  Emotions are just chemicals, she reminded herself, pressing her shaking hands flat against the bathroom counter. Eventually they would run out.

  After her dad died, she’d learned this sit-still-and-wait strategy from her therapist. Bas used a similar method, but neither of them was good at being still. So she collected for the pawn shop, and he collected for the end of the world. She trolled the neighborhood, and he trolled the internet.

  Bas had always been paranoid about conspiracies and all that. But he’d barely left the apartment since that news story broke about the crazy death counts in Africa. Then that truck accident and the driver and paramedics dying from the same symptoms—Bas had gone nuts, spending all his time online in his prepper forums, trading advice and outlining possible “hunker-down” plans. Being a realist, Bas had never expected to escape the city. Just survive it, like he’d survived Afghanistan and PTSD.

  Her pawn shop and the apartment above it were crammed with the kind of stuff people wanted in an apocalypse. They’d been so prepared.

  Fat lot of good that did Bas now. Not to mention that dumb prepper website.

  She blinked at herself in the mirror as her chemicals shifted from shock and grief to an adrenaline-infused need to stay alive.

  The website.

  There had to be something useful somewhere on there—surely some of those overachievers had made it through this alive. She stumbled into the living room and lunged for the laptop, turning her back on Bas. The browser loaded slowly, but sure enough, there was his obsession: Prep for Doom.

  Arie scrolled through the main website, which was full of generic articles even she could have written. Then she noticed a second open tab: Members Only. Luckily, Bas’s password completion was turned on, and she skimmed as the emotions she saw rewound from panic and grief to outright glee that they had been right. After all these years and dollars and sealed buckets of rice and bricks of water.

  They were right.

  She flicked the page back up, where the newest threads were. She clicked on one, barely registering its news that a bunker had been secured in Kingston, New York. Good for them, but who the hell was in Kingston? Everyone here was dead. Another message warned people away from the Staten Island safe area. Staten Island was close, but Bas had just laughed when she told him about it a couple of weeks ago.

  “Conspiracy!” he had said, automatically dismissing any plan that wasn’t his own. But she’d heard something similar on the streets a couple of weeks ago, when people were still moving in the daylight, looking for shelter.

  A shattering noise sounded from downstairs, and fear surged in her gut. The sound was muffled, but undeniably coming from within the shop below their apartment. Almost like the looters somehow knew that Bas was dead, and she was alone. Arie palmed the gun and stepped over Bas to the door.

  She moved down the back stairs as quietly as the clunk of her leg would allow, stopping before the thick wooden door that separated her home from the storeroom. She looked into the peephole, gripping her gun more tightly.

  Nothing but dark shadows and darker shapes. She flipped the deadbolt and opened the door, feeling her way through cabinets and furniture to the showroom door. For at least two days, she had been the only one coming and going in this neighborhood. She paused and took a deep breath before pressing her eye to the next peephole.

  A flashlight beam nearly blinded her, and she instinctively ducked, pressing herself against the lower half of the door. She heard heavy footsteps, and the doorknob rattled. She breathed through her mouth, forcing her chest not to shake.

  Before the virus, nobody would have dared touch her pawn shop. When she inherited her dad’s business at fourteen, Arie had quickly become known as a ruthless collector of others’ treasures. Bas and his two Marine buddies they had hired for security were always around to ba
ck her up when a customer didn’t take her seriously—which happened less and less as she grew into the role of shop owner.

  But as skilled as she was at making money out of misfortune, Arie protected people’s treasures as well as she collected them. Four years later, the whole area had known Silver Lining was the best place to deal and the last place to steal.

  But that was before the virus, and before both her security men succumbed to it. Before the looters, she thought with another burst of anxiety. People who would kill to get what they wanted—not collectors like herself.

  The doorknob twisted again and Arie thought she heard a muffled curse. Then the wood behind her head shook, and her grip on the gun slipped. Someone was trying to kick down the door.

  Why were they trying to get inside the back room? There was plenty to steal in the showroom. How many were there? She had sixteen bullets in the clip, one in the chamber. She’d been practicing with Bas’s Marine buddies for a few years now, but she didn’t exactly have experience with live targets.

  Then she realized: if they had a gun, they would have shot the lock.

  The door shook again, and Arie grimaced. Time to talk.

  “Hey!” she yelled, and the kicking stopped. She stood on shaky legs and pointed the gun toward the door. “I’ve got a loaded Beretta aimed at your heart, and my kill shot ratio is better than your average cop.”

  Silence, then, “Arie?”

  She froze. Who was out there? Everyone she knew was dead. Was it a trick?

  “Arie? Is that you? It’s Enrique!”

  Her heart pounded as she looked through the peephole one more time. Enrique. She hadn’t thought of him in weeks. Okay, that was a lie. She’d thought of his teasing smile way more than she’d ever admit.

  The flashlight beam swung up to illuminate a form and face she hadn’t ever expected to see again. She bit down hard on her bottom lip, more than a little ashamed of the flush of warmth that flooded her cheeks and filled her lower belly. It was the freaking apocalypse, and she was blushing.

  She fumbled with the lock and pushed the door open. “Aw, crap, Enrique. I could’ve really hurt you.”

  He gathered her immediately into a hug, his tall frame wrapping around her. The gesture undid her completely, and she sank into him, hating herself the whole time for her weakness.

  “I can’t believe you’re still alive,” he whispered.

  “Takes more than the end of the world to kill me,” she answered, slipping automatically into the tough-girl role he would expect. Then her fingers brushed the barrel of a gun at his waist. She leaned back and narrowed her eyes. “Why didn’t you just shoot the lock?”

  He shrugged and an embarrassed half-smile tugged at his lips. “I don’t have any bullets.”

  She blinked at him and finally managed to push him away. “You’re such a damsel,” she murmured, a smile twisting her lips. He grinned back, not denying their standing joke.

  “So you’ve been out on the streets without a functioning weapon?” she asked, sliding her own gun back in its holster.

  He ran a hand through his wavy brown hair. “I didn’t know where to go. Thought if you were…if Silver Lining was still here I could, you know, stock up or something. Make this my compound.”

  “Compound? Like with red Kool-Aid and everything?” she found herself teasing him. It felt good to smile a little—forget what was really happening. Beautiful boys were historically bad news for her, but if it came down to it, Enrique wouldn’t exactly be a bad choice for the last man on earth scenario.

  “What? I could so defend us! You’re not the only one who can shoot a gun, yeah?”

  She grinned wider, thinking of their target practice together, only a few short weeks ago. It could have been a first date, although she never would have admitted that to him. Dinner in the city at a tiny, authentic Italian place, then an adrenaline-filled shooting session where he left more holes in her resolve than in the paper target.

  Those butterfly feelings had intensified on the drive home. Waiting at a stoplight, Enrique had turned his bedroom eyes and insane dimples on her, trying to smirk his way into a first kiss.

  But that was the night the PFD truck was hit—emergency vehicles had streamed by them, breaking apart the moment. She’d watched the news footage over and over—less than a mile from their stopped car, the truck had smashed into the concrete barrier before catching fire. The virus had been released, and the world had been smashing and burning ever since.

  Arie sank to the floor, leaning against a case holding handguns and knives. The room was gradually growing lighter as the sun began its slow climb. Enrique joined her, his legs stretching more than a foot past hers.

  “Bas is dead. Virus.”

  Enrique’s brown eyes widened, and he muttered something under his breath.

  After a few minutes, he said, “My mom, too. I found her phone in the clinic.” Arie leaned her head on his shoulder. He reached in his jeans pocket and pulled something out. He opened his fingers as if it was physically painful, and she saw the shattered screen of a cell phone. His thumb flipped it over to reveal the photo on the case—Enrique grinning as he hugged a woman with caramel skin and the same floppy, dark hair that was now hiding his eyes again.

  The picture was smeared with dried, brownish blood.

  “I’m sorry, En.” She remembered his mother had been a nurse—all the local medical personnel had gone down quickly. Killed either by the virus itself or by desperate people looking for medicine and supplies.

  “We gotta get out of this city, Arie. Like now.”

  “I know. There’s this place… Bas had some contacts in New York.”

  A few seconds passed in silence. Then, “Okay. I came here to find you, so I’m in. Tell me what to do.”

  Her heart pounded double-time at the idea that he actually came for her. Nobody did that kind of thing for her. “Do you have a car?” she managed to ask.

  He nodded. “My mom’s old Blazer. It’s got most of a tank, though.”

  “Okay. I’ll get my stuff from upstairs,” she said. “You take some weapons and gold from the cases. Not more than we can carry, though.”

  She punched the code into the safe behind the counter and retrieved the display case keys, tossing them at Enrique. He glanced around, looking a little lost.

  Upstairs, Arie kept her eyes averted from her uncle, willing herself to shut down. There wasn’t time for grief, despair, or fear.

  Her basics bag was already packed—Bas had taught her about those bags years ago. A change of clothes, select personal items, med kit, a canteen with a water-filtration straw, and a few dozen of Bas’s homemade MREs. Everything you needed to survive, pre-packed in case you had to run immediately. She also grabbed Bas’s bag from his room—Enrique wouldn’t own anything like that.

  There were a few more options to consider. She rifled quickly through her stash, opening each drawer and cupboard methodically. She chose carefully. Packed light. Certain items went into the hidden pockets inside her left boot, where the metal below her knee left plenty of room: gold coins, a second handgun, and spare ammo.

  She braided her long red hair and shoved it under a ball cap. After zipping up the ballistics vest she’d collected from an abandoned police cruiser last week, she cinched the basics bag across her chest and added one of Bas’s loose shirts to hide it all.

  The last item she chose was a single picture from her narrow dresser. Arie removed the paper from the frame—her parents, before she had even been born, backlit by the best sunrise God had ever pulled together.

  Taking a deep breath, she knelt next to Bas one last time, driving the tailspin of emotion in the other direction. Bas would tell her to keep moving: the chemicals would run out soon. She’d lost people before. She’d make it through this. Find new people.

  Humanity was just one big lost and found now.

  Saluting Bas’s slumped form, she muttered his favorite prayer—his only prayer, really. “We pray for our siste
rs and brothers who fell. They lived the good life, and we’ll see them in hell… See ya, Bas. Hopefully not too soon.”

  God, she hoped not too soon. Forcing herself to turn and leave, she shut the door on the only home she’d ever had.

  Enrique had chosen several different weapons and piled jewelry on the counter. Arie checked to make sure he had the right ammo for each gun. She popped open the register and dug out the short stacks of cash, then did the same with the safe. She had no idea if cash would even be used anymore, but it seemed silly to leave it here.

  She turned to Enrique. “We make one trip. Only what you can carry. Got it? I don’t want anyone seeing us and getting stupid.”

  Enrique nodded, his eyes shifting away from her. He emptied his duffle bag onto the counter, replacing clothing with the guns and gold.

  Arie eyed the stacks of designer jeans and pressed shirts. “Wow, En. I never realized the apocalypse would be so fashionable.”

  He offered her half a smile, and lifted a shoulder. “Didn’t know what to bring,” he said softly.

  She handed him the basics bag. “Put it on.” He buckled the strap across his chest obediently.

  “So how were the roads up north?” she asked, changing the subject. She knew he lived near the medical clinic where his mother had worked.

  Enrique shrugged. “Pretty open, I guess. But I came through a while back…”

  Arie narrowed her eyes. “How long ago?”

  “Um…four days? Five, maybe?”

  “You’ve been on the streets for five days? Looking for me?” Her voice was too sharp so she tried to soften it with a smile. In her gut, though, she wasn’t sure she trusted his story.

  Enrique scowled. “Look, Arie, I know you’re better at this stuff than me. That’s why I’m here. My mom is gone. My aunt and uncle never came home from the medical center either. I can’t find any of my friends. Everyone I know is dead or missing! So yeah, I came here. And yeah, I wandered around too long, but I’m here now, right?”