Get Out of Denver (Denver Burning Book 1) Read online

  “Hey!” she shouted. “Get away from my car!”

  Most of the teens ignored her, but a burly one with an earring and long hair turned toward her with a feral grin and held up a broken beer bottle in one fist. “Want to stop us, lady? Hey, I like your purse,” he added, starting toward her. “Can I have it?” His speech was slurred, either by the alcohol from his bottle or something more potent.

  Carrie tucked her purse under her arm and started to back away, but wasn’t sure where she could run. The hoods had her car, and the crowd outside the police station up the street was starting to sound more like a rioting mob.

  Back on 6th Avenue, McLean had to stop his truck. A car was blocking his way forward, with kids inside. The young father was outside his car trying to push it out of the way, but there was no one to steer. Two police cars whizzed by in the other lane without even slowing, probably headed toward the Capitol. They were still running well enough to achieve sixty miles an hour on this street built for thirty. One swerved hard to get around the man’s car and its tires screeched loudly.

  McLean jumped out and ran to help the guy. “Get in and steer!” he shouted. The man jumped in and grabbed the wheel while McLean heaved at the bumper. The car rolled toward the curb and parked, safely out of the street. Its owner started to get out to thank McLean, but the sound of shattering glass nearby made him duck down again. McLean swiveled his head and saw a big, tattooed guy pulling items through the window of an Escalade he’d just smashed with a brick. Then, before McLean could even think of stopping the guy, two gunshots rang out in an alleyway behind him.

  “Stay in your car!” McLean yelled at the man with the kids, and ran for his own. Inside his cab he felt safer with a hand on his shotgun. But there was no more gunfire, and he wasn’t going to blow away the tattooed guy for looting someone else’s car. The city was going crazy, but he wasn’t Batman. He just wanted to get Carrie and get out.

  The roar of jet engines directed his gaze to the sky, and he saw a flight of F-16’s climbing quickly upward in formation. He felt a surge of adrenaline and courage at the sight of the powerful military aircraft, and thanked heaven that they, at least, were still operational. But his heart sank just as quickly as he realized what they meant.

  If the local air base was launching air superiority fighters, it clinched the EMP deal. It was no solar flare or bizarre accident that had touched off this disaster. The jets were headed up to deal with an air threat, which could mean more strikes were imminent, and they might not be limited to a single non-kinetic EMP the next time. He needed to get out of here, and fast. But first he needed to find Carrie.

  McLean threw the truck into drive and peeled out, feeling every lost second like a needle as he hurtled toward the rescue mission.

  Outside the parking lot, Carrie was backing away from her attacker. She checked behind her quickly, to make sure she had a clear path of escape, and just hoped she could run fast enough to get away from these criminals that suddenly seemed to be coming out of the woodwork. First, though, she had something in store for the guy with the beer bottle. She didn’t want to turn her back on him and risk getting run down from behind. Another of the hoodlums had left her car to move toward her as well.

  “You want my purse? Sure, come and get it,” she called, and when the first one rushed at her she brought her canister of pepper spray out of her purse and let him have in the face. He leaped back before she could hit him a second time, but the one behind him rushed at her with an arm up to block her spray. She emptied the canister at him and managed to get enough on him to slow him down, but now two others left the parking lot to come after her and she had nothing left to stop them.

  “You asked for it,” one of them called, adding some vulgarity. “Now we’re going to give it to you!”

  Carrie turned to run, but she only got three steps away before a large Ford truck screeched to a halt right in front of her. The man inside couldn’t have been more welcome at that moment.

  “Get in,” McLean said. Then he poked the barrel of a shotgun out the window at her pursuers. “One step closer and you’ll lose half of your ugly faces,” he told them. They all backed away while Carrie ran around the front of the truck and climbed in. “Buckle up, this ride could get rough,” McLean said, revving the engine.

  “I am so unbelievably glad to see you,” Carrie said, fumbling with her seat belt. Her voice was shaky.

  “Likewise,” McLean replied. “I thought I’d have to hunt for you.” They roared down the street away from the thugs and the car wreck in the intersection. “Where should I take you?” For an instant, he hoped she’d ask to come with him. But instead she told him the address of her apartment.

  “Will you be safe there?” McLean asked.

  “I have a roommate, Shauna. We’ll be all right.”

  “Okay.”

  They drove around a string of dead cars on one street, hopping the curb to get past the last one.

  “Those guys were getting really unfriendly fast,” Carrie said. “What is happening?”

  “Well, for starters, the power’s out, probably for good. It’s not just a blackout; there is some bad stuff going down. Jets are crashing.”

  “Jets? Is this a terrorist attack?”

  “It must be. I saw some gunmen shooting up the Capitol, and a few minutes ago some fighter planes took off from the air base. Whatever hit us, it’s wiped out the power grid and most electronics. My truck’s radio doesn’t even work.”

  “But the engine sounds like it’s running fine,” Carrie said.

  “It’s older, so it doesn’t rely on electronics as much as recent models. Or maybe I just got lucky. I don’t know. I’ve seen one or two other cars that are still running.”

  They each fell silent as McLean maneuvered around another cluster of dead cars in the middle of the street. As he slowed down, a bullet whizzed past them with a high-powered crack, and another struck the truck bed with a loud plunk. “Head down!” McLean yelled, and Carrie ducked. He couldn’t tell who was shooting at them, so he just gunned it, clipping the side mirror of a van as they broke free of the blocked road, and soon they had put several blocks behind them.

  “Are you okay?” he asked Carrie when his heart slowed down enough to get the words out. She nodded, face pale, and slowly sat up again.

  “That’s the second time today I’ve been shot at,” he said. “I don’t like it at all.”

  A man lurched out from the curb in an attempt to wave them down, but McLean pulled away from him and accelerated, shaking his head. He wasn’t about to stop for anyone now.

  “Oh my gosh, you’re hurt!” Carrie said, noticing the blood on his shirt.

  “I’m okay. That’s from earlier, it already stopped bleeding.”

  “No it didn’t, it’s spreading. Keep driving, I’ll take care of it.” Carrie pulled some tissues from her purse and used a couple of hair elastics to form a makeshift bandage. “Thank you for coming back for me,” she said. “I’m really, really grateful.”

  McLean nodded. “I knew you’d be in a bind without a car, and it wouldn’t have been very gentlemanly of me to hightail it back to my ranch and leave you in the lurch.”

  “On a day like today, a lot of people wouldn’t stop to consider being ‘gentlemanly’,” Carrie replied. “But I can’t say I’m surprised that you did. I’m deeply in your debt.”

  “There’s no debt,” McLean said. “Let’s just get you home and make sure you’ll be safe through all of this.”

  The black smoke from the downed airliners filled the skyline, but the neighborhood they were now entering was much calmer than where they had come from. Turning into a subdivision on an upscale street, they saw only a handful of people talking with their neighbors on their front lawns and pointing to the columns of smoke.

  “Here,” Carrie said, pointing to a nicer-looking six-plex with landscaped grounds and a trendy sign that said ‘Bristol Heights’. “I’m upstairs on the right.”

  “I’
ll come up and make sure you’re going to be okay. It looks like we made it out of the worst of it, but I’m afraid it’s not over yet.”

  McLean backed into a parking space and turned off his engine. Before getting out, he started it up again to make sure it would turn over, and then turned it off again. “Best purchase I ever made,” he told Carrie, patting the truck’s wheel affectionately. “This truck is a couple years older than I am! I wish they still made them like this.” He locked the doors behind him and they went up the stairs to Carrie’s apartment.

  “I don’t see Shauna’s car. I hope she can get home all right,” Carrie said. “Maybe her boyfriend picked her up.” McLean didn’t mention how unlikely that was; judging by what he’d observed since the EMP, the chances were probably one in a hundred. Cars weren’t supposed to be as susceptible to electromagnetic pulses as power lines and antennas, but something had obviously overloaded them all.

  Carrie unlocked her front door and they went inside. Everything was in order, just without power. McLean looked around the tidy, homey apartment.

  “Do you have any food and water stored up?” he asked.

  “A little,” Carrie replied, dropping her purse on the kitchen table and checking for any notes her roommate might have left. There were none. “Why? You think it’s going to take a while for the authorities to get things under control?”

  “Yes,” McLean said. “Remember, their phones and cars probably aren’t working any better than most. I did see two cop cars, but they sped away without stopping to help anyone.”

  Carrie frowned at him, then came over and peeled back his shirt collar to check how her improvised bandage was holding up. “It looks like the bleeding stopped all right. Sit down over here by the window and let me clean this up.”

  As Carrie gathered peroxide, gauze and tape, McLean analyzed the apartment as a bug-in location. He was getting an uneasy feeling in his gut. He didn’t like the idea of leaving Carrie here without any real preps to speak of, and probably alone. “Would your neighbors help you out if you needed anything? Do you know them well?”

  “Um, not terribly well, no,” Carrie said as she sterilized a pair of tweezers with a match from the kitchen drawer. “I’m at work all day. I mean, I’ve met some of them, but I don’t know…”

  McLean was noticing that the place had no alternative exit. It would be a real fire trap when the water pipes and hydrants lost pressure. It was only a block and a half removed from a fairly major thoroughfare. And the lock on the front door could be easily defeated by a determined intruder.

  He got up and checked the water heater in a closet just off the front room, knocking on its side with a hollow boom. “Well, there’s probably thirty or forty gallons of clean water in here. Are you on any can’t-live-without-’em medications?”

  Carrie gave him an uncomfortable glare. “No. But Shauna’s got a heart condition. Why?”

  “I don’t mean to pry,” McLean said. “It’s just that without power and transportation… a lot of people are going to be in a real bind, soon. Pharmacies are going to be really hard hit. This country runs on drugs; you know that as well as anybody. You see the ugly side of it at the rescue mission, I’m sure.”

  Carrie’s frown deepened. “Sit down,” she said, scooting a chair next to the kitchen window where sunlight streamed in.

  McLean sat quietly as she sponged the blood off his shoulder with a clean, wet washcloth and then examined the wound, gently poking at it with her tweezers. The scent of her hair and the touch of her fingers on his shoulder were maddeningly pleasant, but he pushed his feelings away and tried to concentrate on practical matters.

  “Nobody went without medications on 9/11,” Carried remarked, pulling a tiny fragment of metal from the wound. “Nobody starved to death then. Aren’t you being a little alarmist?”

  “The power grid didn’t go down on 9/11,” McLean replied. “Carrie, we both saw criminals springing into action downtown as if they were waiting for an excuse to run rampant. I saw bad guys shooting up the Capitol, and fighter jets launching. This city isn’t safe anymore.”

  “But this neighborhood should be okay. Nobody has any reason to come here except for those of us that live here.” Carrie looked to McLean for some comfort.

  “For the time being,” he said, shrugging and refusing to elaborate.

  “Hold still! I got two little pieces of metal out of here. There might be more, but if I dig any deeper I’ll probably reopen the bleeding. I’m going to bandage it up and you’ll have to get it looked at by a doctor later.”

  “Thanks. You’re quite a surgeon yourself.”

  “Two years of nursing school, thank you very much. And I help the physician’s assistant that serves in our rescue mission with basic wound care sometimes. But this is actually the first time I’ve ever treated a gunshot victim.”

  “I’m not a gunshot victim. I got dinged by some shrapnel, that’s all,” McLean snorted. “Those might be fragments of my truck, actually,” he added, peering at the metal bits Carrie had dropped into the bloody water bowl on the table.

  “Well, here you go,” she said, smearing what felt like half a tube of antibiotic ointment on the wound and plastering his shoulder with gauze and medical tape. “I’ll leave you some freedom of movement with this tape, but try not to rotate your shoulder too much, it might start bleeding again. What hospital or clinic do you go to?”

  “Haven’t been to one in ten years, and I certainly won’t be starting today,” McLean replied.

  “That’s a little risky,” Carrie said. “Don’t you think--”

  “Not nearly as risky as going to one of those places right now,” McLean said. “It’ll be utter chaos at every medical facility in Denver right now. And anyway, we have some work to do. I think we should fix a few things up around here to make this place more… secure for you.” He had almost said ‘defensible’, but didn’t think Carrie needed to consider that possibility just yet. One could always hope that the violence remained downtown and didn’t spill into the residential areas. But he wasn’t going to bet Carrie’s life on it.

  McLean spent the next few hours preparing Carrie to shelter in place. He scrounged some supplies for her from a gas station nearby that was still conducting cash transactions. He shut off the gas and electric lines to the apartment, got what water he could from the pipes, which were already losing pressure, and covered the windows with thick blankets that would insulate the interior and prevent candlelight from acting as a beacon to anyone who might pass by.

  He also reinforced the front door with a makeshift cross bar made from a coat rack and two L-shaped pieces of a disassembled nightstand. He had to borrow some tools from the neighbor downstairs, the only other guy that was home in the six-plex. Carrie and her roommate were apparently more into cooking and art than woodworking and didn’t have so much as a screwdriver. The guy downstairs was pretty skeptical when McLean told him what he wanted the tools for, but McLean noticed him pulling his bike inside later and reattaching a ‘Beware of Dog’ sign that had fallen in the grass by his patio fence.

  The news of the extent of the day’s attacks would soon spread by word of mouth, McLean knew, along with a lot of inaccuracies and rumors. But he didn’t say more than necessary to the neighbor or to the gas station attendant. People would soon be desperate for news, advice, and conversation, but he wanted to fly as low under the radar as he could for as long as he could. There was no upside to being known as the knowledgeable guy, not at the moment anyway.

  “Thanks again for all this,” Carrie said as McLean came back from returning the tools. “It was really sweet of you to stay and help.”

  “I couldn’t turn my back on you,” was all McLean could think to say. ‘Sweet’ wasn’t the word he’d have used. They were way beyond sweet now; on a day like this a man simply had to do what was necessary.

  Now that it came to it, he was surprisingly reluctant to leave. He realized he’d been finding excuses to stay longer, little thing
s to do that Carrie probably could have managed on her own. Where had all his intentions gone to get out of Dodge and never look back? He wondered how his little ranch was faring, and he felt eager to get home, but at the same time he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep his mind off of Carrie once he left.

  “I hope Shauna gets back soon,” Carrie said. “I’m worried about her. Are you headed back to your ranch?”

  “That’s right,” McLean said. “Half the reason I started it was to be a refuge during disasters. And today definitely qualifies.”

  “Well, I hope you’ll be safe there, and during the drive. You probably better take two-eighty-five, to avoid downtown.”

  “Actually I need to plot another route that avoids all the highways. They may not be passable. I’ve got a map in the truck.”

  As McLean walked toward the door to go for his map, a flash from outside pierced through the crack in the heavy curtains he’d put up and lit up the windowsill. McLean felt the same strange feeling go through his body that he’d felt earlier near the freeway. Carrie gasped.

  “No, no, no!” McLean cried. He ran to the door and looked out, Carrie trailing after him.

  Checking the sky, he saw nothing unusual, no mushroom cloud or anything nightmarish. He ran down the stairs three at a time and dashed to his truck. He unlocked it and slid into the driver’s seat. Inserting the key into the ignition, he offered up a prayer and tried to start the engine.

  Nothing.

  He tried again, and got no response at all from the starter.

  Carrie came and stood outside the truck, looking nervously around. McLean reached over and picked up the Maglite she’d left on the passenger seat. He clicked the button to turn it on, but it was dead, its twenty-four-inch length apparently sufficient to conduct the EMP and fry its circuit. Everything electronic was now a useless and inert.