Stormbreak (The Serenity Strain Book 1) Read online

  “We’ll look for him, but your grammy’s more important at the moment,” Mark told her. “We have to make sure she’s safe first.”

  They stayed on I-45 proper for the most part. Though clogged with cars, the feeder roads paralleling the interstate were at a lower elevation and still running with flash flood waters. I-45 by comparison was almost dry.

  Megan began complaining about her feet after they’d barely made eight miles. Mark wondered if it wasn’t her way of, literally, dragging her feet because she missed her dog.

  They needed to be making better time. Conroe was at least another ten miles away. And once they got there, they’d have to wend their way through the city’s grimy streets, no doubt thick with drowned carrion and the random refuse of anything that hadn’t been tied down. Lauryn too was getting used to the commonality of death, but she wasn’t sure she could take Megan’s whining all the way to her mother’s house.

  “Want to stop for a drink of water and rest our feet?” asked Mark.

  “Yes, please!”

  Megan’s voice was all teenager.

  Lauryn nodded. Anything to stop the complaining. “Wait, though,” she said. She reconnoitered the car Mark was about to lean on. She looked in the front and back seats, but no one was home. Perhaps its former owner was one of the bodies lying on the feeder road below, Lauryn thought. She indicated it was clear, and Mark hopped up on the back of the car’s trunk and sighed out the hurt in his feet. Megan climbed up next to him as her dad took out a bottle of Evian, took a swig, and handed it to her.

  Lauryn made her way over to the concrete barrier separating the northbound and southbound lanes of traffic. During the evacuation, all lanes were converted to one-way, heading north. All eight mainlanes and the two emergency lanes were clogged bumper to bumper with vehicles. It made I-45 look like one long, north-to-south parking lot.

  She surveyed the row of stores beyond the service road paralleling the interstate. Letters were missing from the signs of storefronts with broken windows. CH IR KING. HOM EPO . Empty restaurant parking lots.

  Survivors were no doubt sitting in their homes in the neighborhoods behind those stores and restaurants. Waiting for rescue. Listening to radios powered by batteries. Maybe the odd survivalist powering up his widescreen from a generator he’d sunk a paycheck into for just such an occasion. Watching snow, waiting for word from the government he’d just damned a few days earlier on Facebook. No one made widescreens that could be powered by a package of D-cells. Maybe some inventor somewhere had thought of it, then asked himself the question: What’s the point of that?

  “Daddy, can we please stop and look for Jasper?”

  Mark sighed. “Honey, I know you want to find Jasper. But your mom’s really worried about your grandmother.” He stared at Lauryn’s back. “I know it’s hard to tell what she’s thinking sometimes.” He put his arm around Megan. “We’ll find your dog—we’ll find our dog. I promise.”

  Lauryn heard a crash of glass somewhere along the storefronts. Her eyes tracked the sound using her ears. She scanned the strip center for the cause of the crash.

  There.

  Two youths, one white, one black, were exiting the Home Depot. Both carried what looked like hand tools. Yes, hand tools. One had an electric skill saw, the other what looked like three or four drills in their cases, strung on a belt slung over his shoulder. One was wearing a hoodie, the other dressed in khakis and a Polo shirt.

  “What are they doing?” asked Megan, wiping her eyes. “Are they stealing those?”

  Four more young men climbed gingerly through the window cleared by the first two, carrying more DIY materials and tools. They jogged around behind the store with their booty. The youth bringing up the rear looked around as he ran and caught Lauryn’s eye. With his free hand he shot her the bird, but moved faster away from her just the same, disappearing with the others into the neighborhood behind the strip center.

  Lauryn wondered what Darwin would think of all this. If maybe he’d think this was Mother Nature making an adjustment. Clearing out the DNA chain for the benefit of future generations. The inane thought came to her, You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

  “I wonder what they’re planning to do with those tools,” said Mark curiously. The fact that the youths had just stolen them seemed to not even register on his radar.

  “Won’t they get in trouble?” asked Megan.

  Lauryn loved her daughter. Maybe the most she’d ever loved her right in that very moment. “Not today,” she sighed.

  “We should keep moving,” said Mark. He handed Megan the bottle of Evian to finish off.

  “Do we have to? Maybe Jasper will find us if we wait for him here.”

  Lauryn closed her eyes against the fingers scraping a chalkboard in her head. So much for the fleeting moment celebrating the maternal bonds of love.

  Mark pointed up at the sun. Bright, the clouds clearing, it was almost directly overhead.

  “I want to be at Grammy’s house by dark,” he said. “That’s around eight o’clock. We’re walking two, maybe three miles an hour?” He looked at Lauryn while calculating. She glanced at their daughter’s feet, then back to him. “Okay, two miles an hour,” he allowed. “That puts us at Grammy’s pretty close to dark already.”

  Lauryn shared a look with Mark that said, Maybe we should move faster.

  His eyes answered, Yeah.

  They trudged along through the early afternoon, occasionally passing a lucid motorist walking the other way. Some waved. Some didn’t. The interstate was elevated here, and the strip centers gave way to untamed trees and foliage kept at bay from the service roads by the department of transportation. Still, cars stretched as far north as the eye could see.

  They crossed the San Jacinto River about three p.m., then a church on the outskirts of Conroe around dusk. Amazingly, it was still in one piece, though the power and phone lines were down around it. It stood there, in the middle of nowhere, like a defiant beacon of hope. Stretched across the side of the building facing I-45, letters spelled out CAPSTONE CH RCH.

  “I can’t go any further,” said Megan at last, stopping dead in her tracks. Since the water stop earlier, her voice had long passed whining and now simply demanded they stop.

  “Megan, for the last f … for the last friggin’ time, we have to get to Grammy’s by dark,” said her father. “And we’re almost there.”

  “But I can’t walk any further!”

  “Megan, by God, if I have to carry you—”

  “It’s too late for that,” Lauryn said. She was looking south, the way they’d come.

  “What do you mean? I think we can still make your mother’s if we just—”

  “It’s too late.”

  Mark followed her gaze southward. Megan walked up beside her and lightly placed her hand on her mother’s back. “What’s that?” the girl asked.

  A cloud bank stretched from east to west across the southern horizon. Tinted with the orange and red and purple brushstrokes of near-dusk, the line of clouds rolled forward. As it moved northward, the foggy bank consumed the ground it passed over. Buildings disappeared. Lightning lit the clouds from inside, and a low growl of thunder inched its way toward them.

  “What is it?” asked Megan again. “Daddy?”

  “Maybe it’s the third storm?” His voice was tentative, unsure of itself. He’d been out of the loop with TranStar for too long.

  But what else could it be? It must be Tropical Storm Ilene, maybe a full-blown hurricane now. He tried to recall every conversation he’d ever had with Frank Baines. He fingered through the index cards of memory, trying to recognize the kind of storm front he saw coming at them. The color of the clouds he wrote off as sunset haze. The fogginess was strange enough, but the rolling clouds? It looked like a horizontal storm front expanding forward. Almost flat, like a disk, moving at ground level. But that was impossible. Wasn’t it?

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Lauryn. “It doesn’t
matter what it is. We need to find shelter.”

  Mark pried his eyes away from the storm. He joined Lauryn in scouting for a nearby refuge. But all they could see was the asphalt of the interstate, cutting through the Texas landscape, in both directions.

  “That church,” Megan said. “Over there.” Her mother followed her finger pointing at the building with the damaged lettering on the side. It was only a hundred yards or so behind them.

  “Beats standing in the middle of the interstate when that whatever-it-is hits,” said Mark.

  Lauryn looked back at the approaching cloud bank. Or fog bank. Or whatever it was. The sun in the west cast an eerie, ever-deepening red glow along the length of the storm front. It seemed to seethe and pulse as it advanced. As if the further it moved, the hungrier it got.

  “Get to the church,” she said. “Move!”

  Without protest, Megan climbed over the concrete median, zigging and zagging between the cars stuck in the northbound lanes. Mark followed closely behind her, eyes wary as they hopped off the asphalt and into the still-waterlogged weeds beside the roadway. Soon they were both vaulting over the rusty train track separating the interstate from the church’s parking lot.

  Lauryn saw someone stirring behind the driver’s side window of a vehicle on the roadside. She slowed her pace a moment, then sprinted past. Cursing at herself, she turned around and returned to the car to rap on the passenger window. The driver, a man in Bermuda shorts and t-shirt for a sports team she didn’t recognize, looked startled by the unexpected noise, then scared to death when he saw her face staring at him through the dirty window.

  “Hey! Get out of there! There’s another storm coming!” she shouted, pointing south. The man merely stared at her, pulling a blanket he’d been sleeping under over his legs, as if embarrassed how lily white they were.

  “Hey, can you hear me?”

  He gestured for her to go away with one hand. He moved the other beneath the blanket.

  Lauryn banged on the glass again. “You have to get out of there! Hey!”

  She saw his eyes travel down her breasts and torso and widen as they found her pistol, still stuck in the front of her jeans. He backed further against the driver’s side door, fumbling with both hands beneath the blanket now.

  “What the hell’s wrong with—”

  Bermuda Shorts Man pulled a Beretta from beneath the blanket. Lauryn barely had time to duck away before the window shattered, raining glass down on her.

  “Jesus!”

  “Get out of here!” she heard him scream. “Leave me alone! Get out of here!”

  Fine, you want to die asshole, have at it, she thought. She rolled away from the car, keeping low, and followed the trail of flattened weeds and muddy grass made by Mark and Megan before her. She could see them opening the front door of the church now.

  “Just leave me alone!” came the distant voice of Bermuda Shorts Man.

  “Sure thing,” she yelled back over her shoulder. Dancing over the train track toward the church’s parking lot, she thought, Maybe Darwin really is behind the whole damned thing.

  Chapter 14. Sunday, morning.

  The first thing they needed was wheels. It’d been a while since he’d seen the outside world, but Marsten knew there were plenty of dealerships out on the interstate. But with the washed-out and impassable roadways, a car wasn’t an option.

  “What about at a pawn shop?” suggested Juggs.

  “Too small,” said Smack, leaning on a statue of Sam Houston. “Even if we find one, we won’t find six bikes there.”

  “What we need is a local bar,” said Maggie, picking jerky out of her teeth.

  Marsten grunted. “Maggie’s right.” She flushed a little when he said it. “Question is, what bar?”

  “The Hog Trough out on 190,” said Franklin.

  They all turned to look at him.

  “What? I used to own an Indian. I used to cruise the campus. On dry nights, I’d pull in to the Hog Trough. Bikers stop there all the time.”

  It was the most any of them had ever heard him speak at one time.

  “Hog Trough it is, then,” said Marsten. “How far is this place?”

  Franklin shrugged. “Couple of miles?”

  Marsten nodded. “Let’s quit wasting time, then. Anyone needs a crap, take it now. Once we mount those hogs, we ain’t stopping till we find her.”

  * * *

  The church stank to high heaven.

  That was the first thing Lauryn noticed when she opened the huge front door. She almost slipped and fell as she walked into the foyer. Its faux marble floor was covered in standing water, though from the still-damp waterline on the walls, it seemed to be draining to somewhere.

  The stink came from the combination of someone’s best intentions to protect the inside of the church by locking it up tight, and the failure of the now-damaged roof to keep out the water. Several days of humidity and almost constant rainfall had baked the odor of ruined carpet into the church’s foundation.

  “God, it’s awful in here.” Megan’s voice had a nasal, tinny quality as she held her nose.

  Crinkling her eyes against the smell, Lauryn said, “It’s about to be worse out there.”

  Mark walked across the sanctuary to stand at one of the southern windows. Amazingly, most of the windows in Capstone Church were still in place, perhaps by virtue of its essentially rural location off the interstate. Less manmade bric-a-brac blowing around. The roof too was almost whole, though a few bare spots allowed a bright star or two to peek in from a dusky sky. Despite the reek, the church’s structure was essentially intact. Mark tracked the fogbank as it swept toward them.

  “It really is orange,” he muttered.

  “What?” Lauryn asked.

  “It really is orange,” Mark repeated over his shoulder. “It wasn’t just the sunset making it look that way.”

  “That’s creepy,” said Megan.

  “Yeah, it is,” her dad replied absently. His attention was focused on the unnatural storm, which seemed to be rolling faster the closer it came. He tried to remember how the Doppler effect worked with sound and wondered if it worked the same way with light. With sound, faster waves made the pitch higher as they were coming toward you; longer waves made it lower as they moved away. Did light waves make things look faster the closer they got as well?

  Lauryn and Megan moved up next to him. “What kind of weather phenomenon could cause that?” asked Lauryn.

  “I have no idea,” Mark shrugged. “Frank might know. But he’s not here, so …” Thinking of Frank made him think of Iris. He wondered if she were still locked down at TranStar. If she were okay. His eyes flitted at Lauryn. Thinking about Iris instead of her unexpectedly made him feel guilty as hell.

  “We should get away from the window,” said Megan. She began walking backward.

  “Yeah, good idea. They’ve held up pretty good so far, but—”

  Megan’s butt thumped into the end of a pew. “No, I mean, away. Now, Mom!” Her voice suddenly carried a quality Lauryn had never heard before. A weight of command beyond its normal tenor of teenage entitlement.

  Lauryn grabbed Mark’s arm and pulled him after Megan, who led the way. Their feet squished on the carpet as they lugged their backpacks through the sanctuary toward the pulpit. The darkness beyond the windows deepened as dusk gave way to night. Too early for moonlight, the trivial sunlight penetrating the depths of the church had the storm front’s orange sheen to it.

  Megan screamed and jerked to her left, slipping and falling on the wet steps of the pulpit. Lauryn launched herself after her daughter, who was scrambling backward across the wet wood.

  A thick, blackish-brown shade slithered from the shadows, riding the wet surface of the preacher’s platform straight for Megan. Lauryn jumped between them and stamped her foot hard once, twice, and again. Water splashed each time, and the snake recoiled, turning away to make a circle.

  “What the hell is that?” asked Mark through squintin
g eyes.

  “Water moccasin,” said Lauryn, pulling the pistol from her jeans. Mark was already helping Megan to her feet, keeping himself between his daughter and the snake. “Take her back there,” she said, gesturing toward the dark offices behind the choir loft. “I’ll take care of the snake.”

  “Mom, be careful!” Megan was almost in tears. The moccasin was dangerously close to being a final straw on a camel’s back.

  “Go.”

  Mark led their daughter past the baptistery and down the stairs at the back of the dais. Lauryn turned her attention back to the moccasin, which warily moved toward her. Outside, queer yellow lightning flashed, quickly followed by a crackling of air. The snake jolted at the sound, becoming more agitated, but its focus never left Lauryn.

  She thumbed the safety off the pistol. The moccasin was dark. The church was dark. She glanced over her shoulder quickly to make sure Mark and Megan weren’t around.

  “I name thee, Irissss,” Lauryn said with a smug smile when the brackish serpent briefly became visible. Yellow lightning again, this time answered by a single gunshot. A drumming of thunder, louder than before, was dwarfed by the dying echo of the .40-caliber ringing around the walls meant for a choir’s praise.

  She walked over to the dead snake, its body in two pieces, severed just behind the head.

  “Well, that was satisfying as hell,” she said. A glance toward the southern windows of Capstone Church refocused her attention. The orange fogbank crawled around the windows of the church. Looking up, she watched as the few stars visible through the holes in the roof were obscured by an auburn, smoky veil. “Moving on then.”

  She jogged across the dais, missing her footing in the dark and stumbling down the steps leading to the offices in the back. Mark caught her before her knees hit the floor.

  “I heard the shot. You okay?”

  She let him help her back to her feet. “Yeah. The snake wasn’t armed.”

  He stood her up and looked at her for a moment. Thunder boomed right over their heads.