Countdown: The Wasteland Chronicles Book One Read online

  “So the screen over there is outside.” He pointed at an LCD monitor that showed nothing, but blackness. “Get comfortable, we’re gonna be here for a while.

  ~~***~~

  AFTERMATH

  December 23, 2012

  The roof shook violently and the iron beams rattled like a wind chime. Rocks and dirt fell to the ground like raindrops. It felt like the entire structure wanted to cave in and swallow them.

  Lenny glanced over at Rebecca. Her long hair dangled from the dark, green cot as she snored loudly. That woman can sleep through anything, he thought.

  It had been a full twenty-four hours since he’d gone underground and left the crumbling world behind. If his first day in the shelter was any indication, Lenny didn’t think they’d survive a week.

  The main generator had already faulted, one of the CO2 scrubbers was taken offline by the vibrations and a busted heating coil had caused the temperature to bounce up and down between Antarctica and Hell.

  Lenny broke the cap off of a Miller Lite and guzzled it, one of the many luxuries he had in his little dungeon. He tossed the empty bottle into a heavy, gray trash can and burped loudly.

  Scratching his head, he thought of the countless tasks he had to do and couldn’t figure out where to start. Aside from the numerous things that needed to be fixed, he had to start preparing for plan C, the possibility of being underground for several months. He’d stockpiled enough supplies to last two years, but like much of his life he had things all over the place.

  Lenny checked to make sure Rebecca was still asleep then headed off down one of the hallways. The arch-shaped corridor only ran back twenty feet, before splitting off into three rooms. Lenny opened the door to the first room and walked inside.

  “Fuck!” he screamed as a rush of water swept past him and spilled into the hallway.

  The room was where he stored the main pump for his water filtration system. Over one thousand gallons of water was filtered every hour, from an underground reservoir Lenny had tapped into. Without the filter he could survive no longer than a week.

  In the center of the room was a plastic, blue cylinder, nearly the size of a Volkswagen Beetle. Water spewed out of it from a hole in the side, shooting into the air like a geyser.

  Lenny frantically darted across the room and pulled the red handle of the shut-off valve. The water started to gurgle then slowly the flow trickled to a stop.

  On the ground next to the tank was a rock the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. Lenny shook his head and picked it up. Screaming, he hurled it across the room and banged his hands on the broken tank.

  “I don’t think that’s gonna fix it,” a voice called from behind him.

  Lenny turned around to find Rebecca grinning at him with her hands on her hips. Her long, black hair was frazzled and dirt was smeared across her face.

  “You look better,” he smiled.

  “Yeah, well I figured I could’ve been up there,” Rebecca said and pointed at the roof.

  The shelter shook again and a few pebbles fell to the ground. Eyeing the crumbling roof, Rebecca cautiously made her way to the broken tank.

  “If you slide over I’ll take a look,” she said.

  Lenny glanced at her with a confused face. He chuckled then rubbed his fingers through his hair. “You’ll take a look at it? This isn’t some easy bake oven.”

  “Yeah I know. It’s a second gen Res-Kem water filter with a GE Aquamatic diaphragm valve. Not sure why you got the plastic tanks when the epoxy-coated steel tanks are the same price. You wouldn’t have the hole in there for starters.”

  “They…they didn’t tell me that,” Lenny stuttered as he looked at Rebecca with a new sense of astonishment.

  “Guess you would’ve been better off with an easy bake over huh? But if you got one I’ll go make us some cookies while you fix this big man.”

  Lenny didn’t respond. He felt his tongue curl up and slink down the back of his throat. It wasn’t that he was sexist, at least that’s what he told himself. He’d known plenty of capable women, but Rebecca’s level of looks didn’t generally come with a brain.

  “Oh yeah…when I’m not dicking around at the feed store I’m a mechanical engineer,” Rebecca said with a grin.

  “So what the hell are you doing there?”

  Rebecca let out a little giggle. “I told you, Neil is a family friend. I was helping him out while I was down handling some of my family’s affairs. My father just passed.”

  “Sorry,” Lenny said lowly and looked at the ground.

  “No problem, he was a bit of an ass anyway. Do you mind?” Rebecca asked as she pointed at the spot where Lenny was standing.

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Lenny moved to the side and Rebecca stepped next to the tank. She measured the hole with her fingers like she’d done it a million times. Clicking her teeth she bent down and picked up the broken piece of plastic.

  “If you’ve got a pretty good heat source and some spare plastic bottles I can probably close this up. You’ll have to run it at half speed though. And we need to do something about these falling rocks.”

  Lenny was still standing in the same spot, his eyes wide with disbelief. Rebecca snapped her fingers at him and he shook his head. He wiped his face and smiled.

  “Yeah…yeah I can do that.”

  December 30, 2012

  Rebecca had proved to be quite the capable companion. Within a week she’d fixed the water filter, heating coils and just about every other broken piece of machinery. Lenny had been resigned to cooking meals and feeding Rango.

  “So what’s next?” Rebecca asked as they sat down to eat hotdogs and green beans.

  “What do you mean?”

  “After this, where do we go from here?”

  “Haven’t given it much thought. From the monitors and the damn Geiger counters we’ve got nothing but time to think about it,” Lenny said as he jabbed at his plate and picked up a hotdog.

  Rebecca stared at the floor. Her face showed that she hadn’t heard the answer she wanted. The isolation, the lack of sunlight, it was all starting to get to her.

  “Sooner or later we have to leave; we can’t stay here forever. We have to find out what’s going on up there, what happened in the first place,” Rebecca mumbled.

  “What could be so good up there?”

  “Up there,” she said and pointed her finger at the ceiling. “Up there is where we live. Did you forget that?”

  Lenny nodded his head and tossed a hotdog to Rango. He had grown quite skilled at ignoring her “day after tomorrow” questions. Rebecca made a face and rolled her eyes at him.

  “Where does that dog use the bathroom anyway?” she asked, conceding to his avoidance.

  “You don’t wanna know,” Lenny snickered.

  Rebecca suddenly jumped up and knocked her chair over. She lunged forward, scrambling to get to something behind him.

  “Hey calm down. It was just a joke,” Lenny said.

  “No, look at the screens!”

  Lenny turned his head toward the control station. Where there was once nothing but a black screen, there was now gray smoke slowly swirling like a miniature cyclone. If you stared hard enough you could see the ground as the cloud of smoke started to clear.

  “They must’ve just come online,” Lenny said as he stood up and walked next to Rebecca.

  She turned to him with an enormous grin on her face. Without warning she jumped on him and started kissing him hard. He immediately started kissing her back, thinking he should’ve fixed the monitors on day one.

  “So this is what turns you on?” Lenny stammered in between breaths.

  Staggering, with her wrapped around his waist, he tumbled onto the floor and fell on top of her. He tugged at her pants and started to slide them down as she moaned and grabbed the sides of his face.

  “Might as well,” she whispered and kicked her pants off. “You’re probably the last man on Earth anyway.”

  January 17, 2013

>   “No let me do it,” Rebecca giggled as she swatted at his hand.

  She grabbed the lever and turned it counter clockwise. Little gears hummed as the camera on the electric car spun around.

  “See, that’s too fast,” Lenny griped and reached back for the controls.

  Looking at the screen he could see broken images of the outside world. The remote control car had gone as far as his perimeter gate, which was now a melted heap of metal. It was unrecognizable as was everything else the camera found.

  The landscape was what Lenny envisioned hell looked like. It was a wasteland of wreckage where not one living soul remained. Rebecca thought it was their life up there, but more than likely they would only find death.

  Lenny looked at the Geiger counter and sighed. “Maybe a few more weeks,” he said.

  Rebecca handed him the controls and walked off. Lenny stared after her for a few minutes and then went back to operating the radio controlled car.

  They’d been doing this every few hours for the last couple of days, trying to get an idea of the damage on the surface. So far they couldn’t find the feeblest of signs that anything or anyone had survived. Topside no longer looked like Earth and they’d suddenly become aliens on their own planet.

  Lenny drove the car back into the small tunnel and pressed the button that sealed it off. Spinning in his chair he gritted his teeth and watched Rango chase his tail. To his left a string of monitors fizzed as metrics and graphs detailing air quality popped up and down.

  “Rango?” Lenny called as he stood up and headed down the hallway.

  He walked into one of the circular rooms and grabbed two empty gear bags from a metal shelf. With Rango shuffling behind him, he headed into another room that had been dubbed the armory by Rebecca. The room not only stored guns, but knives, climbing gear and basically any type of outdoor equipment you would need to…survive the apocalypse.

  “Now where’s that harness?” Lenny mumbled to himself.

  He rifled through a pile of straps and hooks until he located the small black harness that read “Rango,” across the side.

  “Here boy,” Lenny whistled and Rango obediently knelt beside him.

  He bent down and wrapped the harness around the panting German shepherd. He stood up and looked down on him. Rubbing his chin, he surveyed the harness and nodded.

  “Looks like it’ll work,” Lenny smiled.

  He took the harness back off and started tossing supplies into the two bags he’d taken from the other room. He stuffed a few treats into the harness then looked around the armory to consider his weapon choices.

  “What are you doing?” Rebecca called from the door.

  “Sooner or later we have to leave here…right?” Lenny grinned.

  Rebecca rolled her eyes and walked off. She had her hopes up to leave time and time again, only to find out the readings outside were wrong. She saw this time as no different, just another anti-climactic moment with Lenny in the driver’s seat.

  March 22, 2013

  “Don’t move, stay right there!” Lenny snapped.

  Rebecca froze, one hand over her head, the other gripping a red cord that ran across the room. Lenny crouched on the floor holding a small, silver box next to his head. He frantically pressed his ear to the speaker and listened desperately.

  A garbled broadcast seeped through, showering them with the first outside voice they’d heard in months.

  “Shelters have been created as far South as Tennessee. Survivors in the Southern region are encouraged to head there. With the increase in violence and unstable air quality, security can only be guaranteed in one of the shelters provided earlier in this message. This broadcast will now repeat,” a male voice crackled, in between the snap and pop of static.

  Rebecca smiled and relief flowed across her face. There were survivors, there were people still out there and shelters that were safe. They weren’t alone, the end hadn’t come yet.

  Tears started to stream from her eyes as she giggled with joy. “Did you hear that Lenny? Did you hear him? There’s a shelter,” she gasped.

  Lenny smiled back at her. He sat the hand held radio down and rubbed Rango’s head. Rebecca knelt down on the floor in front of him and rested her arms on his knees. She stared into his face, grinning from ear to ear.

  “How much longer do you think? Do you think we’ll have to walk the entire way?” Rebecca rambled.

  Lenny nodded. “We’ll see.”

  The nights continued to pass like one long, never ending string. Their routine had become so monotonous that Lenny moved through the motions like a robot. If he wasn’t watching monitors and radiation readings, he was fixing something or trying to keep it in working condition. Rebecca constantly voiced her displeasure with living like a troll, but silently Lenny was going crazy as well.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rebecca asked, contorting her face and raising her eyebrows.

  Lenny was on the floor on all fours. He was naked and engaged in a furious game of tug of war with Rango.

  “What? I’m playing with the dog,” he looked up at her.

  “Lenny, you’re fucking naked,” she spat back.

  Lenny stood up and scratched his head. “Yeah, yeah I am. What’s the point? I’m not wearing clothes again…ever.”

  Rebecca huffed and stormed off. “You know you’re not the only one stuck down here,” she yelled back to him. “Cover up your balls…they look gross.”

  For the next few weeks Lenny marched around the shelter wearing nothing more than a watch. It wasn’t until he spilled bleach on himself that he decided clothes may still have a purpose in the new world.

  “Dumbass,” Rebecca grinned at Lenny as they sat down to dinner one night.

  “You don’t get it. It was liberating,” Lenny smirked.

  “Yeah, I bet. More like you’ve gone crazy since the lunar timers broke.”

  For more than two months they’d been living with the lights on one hundred percent of the time. Lenny had purchased a rather expensive set of lights and timer that simulated natural lighting. In the morning the lights would slowly grow brighter like the sun coming up, and in the evening they’d do the opposite. When a fuse blew on the timer, the lights were stuck in the on position.

  Lenny slowly brought the thick, gray slop to his lips and sucked it off of the spoon. While they had enough food to last for many more months, the good stuff was all gone. Only Rango was still living in heaven as he crunched on a bone.

  “Holy shit!” Lenny jumped from his chair and darted across the room.

  Rebecca followed him with her eyes, unsure of what he’d seen. He stopped in front of the monitors and gazed at them with his mouth wide open.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he mumbled to himself.

  “What? What is it?” Rebecca asked.

  “Somebody’s outside!” Lenny yelled back.

  Rebecca jumped to her feet and ran to the control station. She stared at the screen with him, watching the shadowy figure march back and forth across the yard.

  Whoever it was, was wearing some type of gas mask. They were dressed in all black with a military style pack strapped onto their back. They walked slowly, deliberately across the gravel, like they were searching for something.

  Lenny watched them in silence, his mind churning away like the gears in a clock. What were they doing? Who were they? Why were they here? Questions zipped through Lenny’s mind before he could even consider them.

  The mysterious intruder walked from side to side, their eyes scanning the ground like they’d lost something. They seemed familiar with the place, but that couldn’t be.

  The fence that once surrounded the hidden staircase to Lenny’s shelter was destroyed, but the slab of pavement was still there. The stranger walked onto it and stopped. Rebecca gasped then covered her mouth.

  “He can’t hear you,” Lenny said and shot her a look.

  The obscure drifter knelt down and pulled the bag off of their back. They withdre
w a small square object and held in in the air. After a few minutes they stuffed it back into the bag and slowly removed their gas mask.

  Lenny took a deep breath, expecting the stranger to choke to death on the toxic air. The monitors still showed the radiation levels at over three times the acceptable limit. That’d be enough to kill anyone in seconds.

  The man held his head back and sucked in the air like it was some kind of aromatherapy. He held it in for a minute then breathed out and grinned. He looked like he’d never tasted air before.

  Lenny was glaring at the screen, confusion contorting his face like a blurry video. Rebecca leaned over him and pressed a button on the console. The camera zoomed in on the man’s face as he snapped around and looked behind him. Lenny shot her a look and she shrugged her shoulders.

  “You said he couldn’t hear me,” she retorted.

  The man had dark hair and a graying beard. Lenny guessed he was somewhere in his forties and judging from his hardened looks and methodical movements, he must’ve been military.

  The man reached back into his bag and pulled out a long, silver rod. He walked to the end of the slab and started to poke around in the gravel. Suddenly, he stopped and began to brush the rocks away, revealing the sand underneath.

  He raised the rod high over his head and then jabbed it into the ground. Immediately the lights in the shelter flickered and went out. The CO2 scrubbers hummed to a stop. The monitors they were watching went black and the red glow of emergency lights flooded the hallways.

  Lenny panicked. He punched at the control panel furiously. Rebecca grabbed the flashlight from the wall and turned it on.

  “What the hell is going on?” Lenny stammered as he flicked and banged on every button.

  Just as quickly as everything went off it suddenly came back on. The monitors hissed and oxygen started to flow out of the vents.