Here is an excerpt of my next paranormal release!
“It was an accident. You didn't do anything wrong. He probably would have killed me, this time. Or made me lose the babies. I was leaving him.”
She was having twins. In this awful new world. I needed to do right by her. “What should we do now? I don’t have a cell phone. The law….”
“No! You shouldn't have to be involved any further. Please. Can't we just...leave him? What with the earthquakes and all the dying….” She turned her back on the dead man. “Cell phones aren’t working.”
“Do you know what that lightning bolt is?”
“No. I heard on the radio they are calling it a rift.” She went to her child in the car.
If the earth’s atmosphere was torn or something, there was nothing I could do to fix it.
“Yeah, all right.” I didn't want any trouble with the law. And it had been self-defense. “Will your car start?”
It wouldn't. It was an old beater, with a paper tag in lieu of a license.
“Well, let’s get your stuff transferred. Is your little kid okay?”
She got the child out of her car seat and rained kisses on her tear tracked face.
“Marie is fine, I think she'll go back to sleep once we're driving again. But why don’t we take the truck? It is in really good shape.” It was, a big four-wheel drive with double tires and a king cab.
“Good idea.”
After the toddler was buckled in the carseat in the back seat, the woman gave her a cookie and a sippy cup. That seemed to make her happier. I helped the woman transfer all her belongings.
“Okay then. Where are we going?” I asked.
“I was on my way to my Aunt's place, Shepard’s Creek. Where were you going?”
“I don't know. Seems I got injured in the earthquake. Can't remember a thing. But my license says I'm David Green from Boise.” The lie came easily. Now, that was kind of a worry.
“I'm Emma Starnes. My daughter Marie is not quite one and a half.”
She was young, dressed in a denim jumper and faded pink t-shirt. Big blue eyes in a round baby face, honey-blond hair pulled back in a long braid, dark lashes and brows. A bruise on her jaw. Pretty, probably very pretty when she wasn’t strained and beaten, delicately made with small, fine bones. I figured her to be about five foot two or so. She didn't look very old.
There were bruises around her neck, from the dead man, I surmised. Didn't feel so bad about killing him, now.
“When are you due?”
“Twins are known to come early but I’m due in three months. Do you...do you think you have family?”
“I looked through all the papers here in the car. No wife on the car title, or on any of the bank stuff. Apparently, I'm single.”
“And you're British.”
“I am?”
“Well, sure. I can tell by your accent.”
“Oh. You would think I would remember that. Well, I’ll take you to your aunt’s. I have no idea where we are except in Montana. No map.When I woke I was right by a big crater. I looked for people. I thought maybe I should see a doctor.”
“Maybe we can find one. Something bad happened. That lightning bolt showed up. People just died. I don’t know why. We lived in the country and it seemed like the whole town was dead. Poison, maybe. Or a virus.”
“The radio said something about space particles.”
“Weird. Until you, Boyd, Marie and I were the only people I saw alive.”
“Why was he trying to stop you?”
She shrugged. “I wanted to go to my aunt’s. He wanted to go to this survivalist camp in the mountains. Lots of paranoid men with guns. I didn’t want to go there.”
“Well, let's head to your aunt’s.”
She gave me directions to the small town of Shepherd's Creek, which was in far west Montana, in the mountains. Just where I wanted to go.
She fell asleep soon, as did the child. I passed roads, small towns, ranches. Cars with bodies. Occasionally the radio played the earthquake-polar shift announcement.
“I don’t think it was really an earthquake,” Emma said later when we made a stop at the side of the road for some food for her and the kid. “There may have been an earthquake somewhere, but none where I lived. I have heard of a polar shift, but there must have been something else. Some kind of weapon, maybe. Poison or a virus. That thing in the sky, I’ve never heard of something like it. And my husband and his buddies were survivalists who talked about disasters all the time.”
“Weapon of mass destruction?”
“Maybe.”
