Summer Lane
STATE OF CHAOS
For Rocklin, my best friend.
Prologue
I remember when I had a life. Sure, it wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but at least it was something. I had a nice house, a car, and a stack of books in my closet that rivaled the leaning tower of Pisa. I didn’t have any friends, but I had a father. I didn’t have any money, but I was working on that.
It was normal.
I don’t know what “normal” is anymore. Before an electromagnetic pulse disabled the country, I thought the worst crisis that could possibly hit my world was my parent’s divorce or accidentally draining the battery in the car overnight.
I was so wrong.
Life is nothing like it used to be. Things used to be easy. Flip a switch? On goes the light. Press a button? You’re calling your parents. Swipe a credit card? You just paid for lunch. Easy, simple, convenient. Nothing is like that anymore. People are dying, starving. They’re being executed on the streets. A shadow army called Omega is rolling its forces across the country, imprisoning and killing everybody or anything that gets in its way. I don’t know where our military is, but there are rumors that they’re fighting Omega on the East Coast.
So what does that mean for the folks in California? Folks like me? It means we’re on our own. I would be dead right now if it weren’t for the help of Chris Young, the most amazing guy I’ve ever met and a Navy Seal to boot. But we’ve lost our families. They’re imprisoned somewhere in the city, arrested as war criminals for committing one simple crime: They survived the EMP.
Chris’s family — his parents and brother, Jeff — were kind to me. My own dad was taken along with them, and what happened to my estranged mother is anybody’s guess. We lost a friend of ours to Omega, too. Isabel, a twelve year-old girl we rescued from an abandoned McDonald’s.
Yeah. Things kind of suck right now.
It’s just me and Chris, toughing it out in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, trying to stay off the Omega radar. Because according to them, we’re wanted fugitives. They tried to take us down a couple of times and they failed, so that makes us America’s Most Wanted, I guess. We’ve nearly been killed more times than I care to count.
So what happens now? Do we give up? Do we live the rest of our lives sleeping in the dirt and eating grubs or plants for dinner? Do we let Omega take our families and rip everything that’s important to us out of our lives?
No. Chris wants to fight Omega — literally and figuratively speaking. I just want to find our families and get the heck out of Omega’s crosshairs. But to do that, we have to find our folks first. And so far there’s only one place we can think of that Omega would bring war criminals:
The city.
We have to go back.
Chapter One
If you’ve ever tried hiking in the mountains, you know that it doesn’t take long for your leg muscles to start burning and your hand to start reaching for your water bottle. After a couple of hours of climbing uphill, you’ll take a rest, contemplate heading back and renting a motorcycle, and then decide to tough it out.
You’ll reach your destination, eat a picnic lunch with Cheetos and Gatorade, take a few random pictures of the carpenter ants that have crawled up your arm, and hike back down. You’ll get in your car, drive home, and that’s the end of it.
For me? Not so much.
My life has been a perpetual walk-a-thon since December of last year. And considering it’s now February, I wouldn’t mind pigging out on a picnic lunch with a bunch of fried chicken and a few gallons of Sprite.
But I never get a break. Even now, I’m pushing my way through a big field of golden grass in the foothills right below what used to be Sequoia National Park. It’s freezing — there’s ice on the ground — and the sun is just coming up over the horizon.
“Could you slow down for two seconds and let me catch my breath?” I pant, placing my hands against my waist. “I’m shriveling up back here!”
Chris turns around. He shoves stray pieces of hair away from his face, looking more than a little annoyed with my complaining. He’s wearing a wool shirt under a thick leather jacket, pants tucked into his combat boots. His hair is pulled tight into a ponytail, accentuating the angles of his face.
“Sweat it out, Cassidy,” he says, not sympathizing. “We’re almost there.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re like a fitness maniac.”
He snorts, unconsciously flexing the muscles in his arms, and starts walking again. At six foot four, he towers over me by more than a foot, which makes it even harder for me to keep up with his pace. One of his steps is like three of mine.
“Could you at least not take gigantic strides?” I ask, jogging beside him. “I can’t keep up.”
He rolls his eyes. Even in the near darkness he looks handsome, his goatee thicker than it used to be, his green eyes bright against his dirty blonde hair. He’s also ten years older me, and I like to think of him as my boyfriend.
Technically, labeling someone your “boyfriend” at this point in time is about as worthless as paper money, but I like to pretend that at least one thing about our situation is normal. Chris is twenty-eight, I’m just nineteen. He’s a former Navy Seal with a serious reputation for kicking butt.
I, on the other hand, am an abandoned teenager with a reputation for whining about cold temperatures and suffering obscene taco cravings. And trust me, since there’s no such thing as Taco Bell anymore, I’ve been left with serious withdrawals.
“It’s totally insane anyway,” I mutter. “We’ll never make it there in one piece.”
“We don’t have a choice.” He shoots me a stern, disciplinary look. I get that a lot from him. “You know that.”
I exhale, creating a small white cloud over my mouth.
“Yeah. I know.”
And I do. I just didn’t think we’d be able to come to a decision to pull it off.
Rescue our families from Omega, I mean.
When the electromagnetic pulse hit in December, the world pretty much died. The modern world, that is. An electromagnetic pulse, or an EMP, is an invisible energy wave that disables all forms of technology based in computer mechanics. Your cellphone, your laptop, your television, your cars, your generators, your radios. Everything dies instantly. Nothing works. Helicopters, airplanes, buses, trains, trucks, satellites, you name it. Anything with a computer chip. And the worst part of it is that once something’s been hit with an EMP, it’s fried forever. You can’t revive a computer once it’s been killed. It’s gone.
An EMP hit the entire United States. For all I know, it could have hit the whole world. I was in Culver City, California when it happened. Right down the street from Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevard ordering Chinese takeout. Planes started falling out of the sky like nuclear bombs. Everyone panicked. I only got out of the city because my dad, as a military guy and a doomsday prepper (yeah, I had one of those parents), always insisted that we be prepared in the case of a national emergency.
I threw a bunch of emergency go-bags in the back of my old Mustang — which is EMP-proof because it doesn’t have a computer based electronic ignition — and booked it. I was separated from my dad, but we’d had a plan in case anything like this ever happened: Meet at our family cabin in the mountains.
Plans rarely pan out. Especially for me. I’m like a bad karma magnet, something Chris can attest to. I met him when I was escaping the city. He was wounded, I helped him, and in exchange for a ride to his family’s home in the foothills, he helped me survive.