Hell Released (Hell Happened Book 3) (17 page)

There’s cells inside we can lock these two up in there for the night. We’ll be safe and they’ll stay out of trouble and not kill anyone….”

“We didn’t kill anyone!” the first man said as he struggled with the captain.

“We were just defending ourselves,” the second one said. “That bitch pulled a gun and was going to shoot us.”

“Shut up, stupid,” said the first kicking out at his buddy.

The captain had one prisoner and Russ grabbed the other by the arm and escorted them both into the building. Headlights from the truck lit the inside corridor, but when they turned to take the prisoners to the cells, Myles was glad Russ had gotten the flashlights.

Two hallways later they got to the cells. The prisoners struggled a little, but Russ and Myles had them totally under control. Myles put his flashlight under his arm and held onto both prisoners while Russ checked the keys he’d picked up off the desk when getting flashlights.

The fifth key opened the first cell and Russ shoved “General” Mason in, slammed the door and re-locked it.

“Go ahead and put him in the other cell, captain, I forgot the water for them. I’ll be right back,” Russ told Myles and handed him the keys and walked back down the corridor. Myles thought it was a little strange, and he fumbled with the keys until he found one to the second cell. It was difficult to hold onto the prisoner and the flashlight and the keys, but he finally got the cell open and pushed the man inside. When the man was clear of the door, Myles slammed it shut.

“How ‘bout you take these cuffs off man. They hurt,” Mason whined.

Myles hadn’t been told to take off their cuffs, but the men were confined and he couldn’t see any problem with uncuffing them. He put the cell keys in his pocket and told each one to back up to the door so he could take their cuffs off. He wondered what was taking the colonel so long and was just getting the cuffs of Mason when he saw Russ coming back with the water.

Russ handed one bottle of water to each prisoner and told them they’d be back tomorrow to check on them.

He took Myles by the elbow and walked away without looking back. Both men started hollering and swearing at the two officers. Russ didn’t stop and he kept Myles from going back and shutting the two men up.

They drove back to the armory and parked the truck. From there they walked the rest of the way back to their houses. “Out of sight, out of mind, captain,” was all Russ said as they walked.

Chapter 3

C
J woke up on the ground. He was covered with dust and his mouth was dry. His shoulder hurt and he had a headache that pounded behind his eyes. He sat up and looked at his watch. He’d been asleep for almost three hours.

He looked around. The house of his friend Jack was on the ground. It had been knocked off its foundation and shaken hard enough for the walls to collapse.

Behind him, the building where Jack built survival shelters had also been shaken and tossed around enough to collapse upon itself.

But even that wasn’t the worst of it. Through the middle of the yard, there was a gully more than 20 feet deep and four feet wide. The opposite side of the gully was four feet higher than the side CJ found himself sitting on.

“How the hell did I live through that?” he asked himself. “No more dope for me, no hell no!”

CJ slowly got to his feet. He still felt shaky and a little sick. He looked around and saw nothing but destruction. He’d lived through smaller earthquakes before, nothing like the one that had wrought the chaos around him. There was no building still standing untouched. No telephone or electric pole was still standing upright. In the distance he saw smoking, burning and smoldering businesses and houses.

The gully caused by the shifting of the tectonic plates stretched in each direction as far as CJ could see.

He sat back down on the ground. He was mentally exhausted from everything that had happened to him in the past month. His parents were all dead, his relatives and friends, everyone he knew was dead.

CJ had nothing left in his life. He shouldn’t be alive and he didn’t want to be. His depression had led him to try smoking weed for the first time and it had done nothing to improve how he felt now except make his throat hurt and stomach upset.

The earthquake was just one more disaster in his life that hadn’t killed him. He no longer knew what to think. His brain refused to think. He’d cried until tears would no longer fall and still he was alive and his reality was that he was breathing when he knew of no one else alive.

“Maybe I’m not alive,” he said to himself. “Maybe this is dead.”

CJ stood up and started to walk. He stumbled once or twice before getting his balance. He didn’t know where he was going. He was just going to walk until something changed.

He walked to the highway and started in the direction of his home, but the crevasse created by the earthquake had split the highway keeping him from walking back south.

CJ walked north. He walked on the highway, pasts wrecked cars, some with bodies still in them. Interstate 5 was a mess. The concrete was torn up and cracks left broken chucks of the road bed scattered. Some were small enough for CJ to kick, other pieces of the highway were the size of small cars.

CJ’s mind was blank while he walked. He heard the winds crossing the fields and the sounds of animals in the distance. Some sounded like they were in pain. CJ didn’t care. He walked with no destination in mind. He walked without care.

Just before sunset CJ trudged up an incline and saw the Sacramento water tower he’d seen a thousand times on the way into the city. Eight of the 16 pylons on which supported the huge reservoir were bent and misshapen. The tank itself looked on the verge of falling and water was spraying out through leaks in the plumbing.

CJ stopped and watched the water flow from the tank. Something about the water fascinated him. Eventually it made him realize he had to go to the bathroom.

A Chevy Cobalt’s tire looked like a good place to go so he did.

It was almost dark and all the cars and trucks on the road that were still upright had dead bodies in them. Through the trees to his right he saw some houses. He walked off the highway and down the hill to them. The first ones he walked by were damaged to a greater or lesser extent to where CJ didn’t want to go inside.

The fourth one had a broken porch but otherwise didn’t look overly damaged. He walked up to the front door and turned the knob on the double doors. They creaked but opened. The place was empty.

CJ walked inside the darkened house. It had a large sectional in the living room and CJ lay down on it and fell asleep. He didn’t think about the oddness of just walking into some strange house and falling asleep on the couch. He didn’t think at all. He was tired, it was getting dark, and it was a house.

His sleep was troubled. He had nightmares about the corpses he’d seen in the family cemetery, mixed with destruction of his friend’s place by the earthquake.

His mind was playing with him while he slept. He saw the faces of his parents and his friends and the girls with whom he’s shared a bed. He saw his manager and trainer, opponents and teammates. It was a cacophony of faces and sounds all rushing at him in his dreams. His exhausted, tortured and hungry body needed sleep after the abuse he’d put it through the previous day, but his mind was filled with the memories that were fighting to push him over the precipice of the chasm of insanity.

His nightmare became more real to him when he felt he was in a storm, one of the many that rushed in from the Pacific Ocean and would bring torrents of rain and wind to the estate he lived on with his parents.

In his dream, he felt himself lifted by a wave of water that washed away the bodies of his parents and other family members that had been buried in the cemetery out back of the house in which he grew up. He could feel himself floating away with the bodies of the dead and in his dream he screamed.

His screaming woke him up. He sat up in the dark, strange house. He remembered vaguely breaking into the house and falling onto the sectional and falling into his fitful sleep.

His feet hit the floor and water soaked through his tennis shoes and socks. He was in water up to mid shin.

Clarity came to CJ slowly when he stood up. More water was coming into the house through the open door. He wasn’t hearing any heavy rain and didn’t think river which flowed from Sacrament to Sherman Lake out to the west would be over its banks.

CJ stood up and waded through the living room to get out of the house. It was still before dawn outside, but there was enough light for CJ to see the yard and the street in front of the house. They were flooded with murky water and floating bodies and cars. The smell of the water assaulted his nose and the sight sickened him.

The water was quickly getting deeper and CJ’s only escape was to head back up the embankment he’d stumbled down the previous night. The water hadn’t gotten to the road height and it was the only place that looked safe.

It took 15 minutes of slogging through the brackish water to get to the roadbed. Twice he was almost pulled under by the flow of water, but he was able to use trees in the yards to help pull him through.

Once he got to the road, the sun was just cresting the horizon. CJ looked over to where he’d spent the night. The houses were being flooded and pushed off their foundations. The house he had spent the night in was being twisted and demolished by the rushing water.

He was glad the morning wasn’t as cold as the previous mornings and took off his wet shoes and socks.

Sitting on the side of I-5, CJ watched in muted awe at the raw power of the water. He was 35 feet above the water level as it was now, but it was still rising. He looked back the way he’d come and the road, while torn up from the earthquake, was still above the water level.

Looking up toward Sacramento, he saw the direction he had been headed was also still above water.

CJ looked at the sky. There were a few high clouds, and he could see some leftover dust from the earthquake and early morning fog off to the west. Looking straight up he saw a few stars that hadn’t yet been overwhelmed by the sun that would soon come up over the horizon.

“Hey God!” CJ hollered. “You missed me again! I’m still alive and didn’t drown.

“What’s the matter God, can’t kill me? You’ve tried pretty hard but I keep living. I’m not going to die now. I’m going to keep living just to piss you off, God. You’re not so powerful if you can’t kill a little guy like me.

“Come on, God! Is that all you got? Plagues and earthquakes and floods?”

“Come on, God is that the best you can do? Why not blow up the whole frickin’ world and be done with it?

“Face it, God,” CJ screamed skyward, shaking his fist at the sky. “I beat you again!”

CJ started laughing a faux jovial sound to the heavens. “You’re a joke, God. You’re not so tough if I lived through all your shit.”

At the top of his lungs he screamed one more time, “You’re just a joke!”

The echo of his scream could be heard over the rushing water off to the side of the road. CJ stood there and listened to the echo die in the distance.

God must have been a woman, because the next voice he heard was “Hey, over here!”

CJ was startled by her voice. She was so far away he could barely see her. She was waving some piece of clothing at him.

CJ squinted. “Over here, mister! Hey! Over here!” she hollered again. “Hey.”

It was the first voice he’d heard, besides his own, since his dad had died. In his state of mind, he wasn’t sure if she was real or not. He’d been hollering at God, challenging Him, and the woman might be just another rug to pull from under him.

He squinted again in her direction. There were more people than just her at the base off ramp where he saw the woman. She was the only one who was hollering but he could see in the gaining sunlight that there were others.

CJ looked back at the sky. “Good one, God. Who is she? Some psycho?”

The sky didn’t answer.

CJ reached down and picked up his shoes and socks. He could stay where he was or go see who the lady was, or just walk the other way. He shrugged to himself and began walking toward the voice that was calling him. He had to be careful because of the debris on the roadway, but he was in no hurry.

As he got closer to the group of people, he could see there were 20 or 30 people on the ramp. They were clumped into groups of four or five each but it was the woman who was coming forward to meet him. She must be the leader of the group.

She met him a few hundred feet from the rest of the people. She was a large woman wearing clothes that were cleaner and dryer than what CJ was wearing. He could tell she was also armed.

“Hey, mister,” she said when she was about 15 feet from him. She stopped in the road and made hand motions that he too should stop.

“Tired. Hungry. Flood. God is pissed at me,” was all he could think to respond to her greeting. He squatted down on the pavement. His feet were hurting from walking on the roadbed.

“Oh you poor dear,” she said, slinging the rifle she carried over her shoulder. “Come on. We got some food. Not much, but some.”

CJ struggled to get his wet shoes on. She helped with the second shoe and helped him to his feet. “I’m Jocelyn, but everyone calls me Josie or just Jo,” she said, putting his arm over her shoulder and helping him to his feet. “How in hell have you survived the earthquake and flood all by yourself?”

CJ shook his head. “I’m not sure I did. I’m not sure you’re not still the bad nightmare I’ve been having.”

Jo laughed as they got closer to the others. “I might be a nightmare, but I’m not yours.”

“Hey, come here and give me a hand, you guys,” she said to the people on the ramp. “What’re you waiting for?” No one moved with alacrity. If they were anything like CJ, they were feeling beaten and knocked down, but a few moved to help.

It was a girl about 17 years old who thought she recognized him. “Aren’t you that tennis player…what’s his name…AJ or RJ or something?”

CJ smiled a real smile for the first time in almost a month. “Close. CJ. CJ Perry.”

“Welcome to hell, CJ,” the girl said plainly as she and Jo helped CJ find a comfortable place to sit down.

“Thanks, but I’ve been in hell for the past month. This isn’t much different.”

Jo pulled three Slim Jims out of her vest pocket for CJ. “Here you go kid. You look like you need these more than me.” It was true, thought CJ. Jo, CJ figured her to be in her late 30s, had quite a few extra pounds on her, but CJ didn’t say it and was grateful for the food.

As he was eating, Jo and a few others in the group that were sitting on the ramp talked about their fates. They had been a group of nearly 200 who had survived the plague from the Sacramento area. When the earthquake hit, most of their group had been killed in the buildings they had taken refuge in.

Jo told how she didn’t have a home to go to. She’d been an independent truck driver with no close family. She’d been living in her cab when the plague hit and had no place to go. “My life, for the past 15 years has been on the road,” she told him. “If I was going to die like everyone else, I wanted to see everything I could of the U.S. of A.

“I was driving up I-5 when I came across this group.” She waved her hand at the people sitting on the ramp, looking broken and beaten down…just like CJ presumed he looked.

“They had food and water and were making the best of the worst situation when the earth started shaking. My rig was swallowed whole just after I climbed out of it,” she told him, wiping her short black hair out of her face. “We all ran away from the buildings and watched as the building in and around Sacramento fell. Fires started and there were explosions everywhere.