Chapter 5
Deb was shocked at how quickly people were deteriorating. Opportunists began to pour into the streets, smashing the windows of shops and taking off with what they could. The Phoenix police were out in force trying to regain order, but they seemed overwhelmed and disorganized.
Deb quickly realized that a modern police force would have a difficult time in an environment like this. Their radios and police vehicles would be useless in the wake of the EMP blast, and many of them would be lost in such a situation.
Deb held Jimmy with one arm tightly wrapped around him, the other gripping the reins of Clomper, one of the two horses they had arrived in the city to sell. Sean rode beside her on Buttercup, the second of the two horses.
As they made their way through the city, there were many who glanced in their direction.
In the hour and a half since the EMP went off, Deb had witnessed muggings and beatings and battles pitting police officers against civilians.
But while many of them looked over at the couple traveling with a child on horseback, no one dared approach.
That was because Sean had pulled a hunting rifle from the truck before they had set off and was threateningly holding it as if daring these people to try something.
None dared, and Deb was thankful for that. She was aware that both Sean and Vin were well trained, obviously. However, save for the occasional bar fight, she had never seen either of them have to use their skills in an actual skirmish. She didn’t enjoy violence or savagery.
Her father had been a simple man, a man of peace and kindness. She hadn’t seen much violence growing up, and Sean had once told her that was a rare and precious gift that she should treasure for as long as she could.
She had never really appreciated those words until today. After just a short time, she had seen scenes of utter brutality, where people gave into their basest desires and just…turned on one another.
How could that be? How could the human mind just snap like that? Just turn on a dime and start savaging your fellow human beings? Weren’t we all brothers and sisters in this world? That was what her father had always believed, what he’d always said.
And she had believed him. She had believed him when he said people were mostly good and decent. She had said that to both Vin and Sean in the past, and while their reactions were different, they were telling.
Vin had merely grunted and looked away from her as though he didn’t have the heart to level with her. He hadn’t responded verbally, his silence just hanging in the air between them. She had felt foolish at that moment and embarrassed. But she refused to give up on her father’s ideals so easily.
The day she had told Sean, he had laughed in her face.
It seemed genuinely amusing to him, and he might have even thought she had been joking.
When his laughter subsided, he remarked about how innocent Deb was, living out on the ranch all her life, getting homeschooled, and never having to experience life as it is.
He hadn’t gone so far as to call her father a fool, but Sean definitely seemed to insinuate it at that moment. She’d hated him a little bit on that night. However, he later apologized and leveled with her seriously, telling her about how lucky she was to have lived the way she had.
In the face of both of these reactions, Deb had held onto her beliefs. Now, however, her beliefs were completely shattered.
“Give me that!” a man shouted.
She looked over to see a large man knock a woman to the ground, grabbing at her bag with both hands.
“No, stop!” the woman screamed, desperately trying to fight off her much larger assailant.
“Shut the fuck up!” the man yelled, kicking out with one leg to hit the woman in the side of the head.
She pitched off to the side, smacking her torso onto the sidewalk. She reeled there, too disoriented to rise or climb to her feet as the man ran off, leaving her with a now-broken bag.
“That woman,” Deb said, motioning Clomper to move toward her.
“Stop,” Sean said simply from atop Buttercup.
“But she’s hurt!” Deb insisted though she righted her pace to continue straight ahead with Sean.
“I get that, hun,” he said sympathetically, looking over at her and tipping his white cowboy hat up to gaze at his wife with compassion. “But that ain’t our problem and stopping to help her in this is gonna make it our problem real damn quick.”
“But,” Deb started to say before the objection died on her lips.
She could imagine her father in this situation.
He would have rushed over toward the woman, helped her up, even given her the shirt off his back if it would help.
And then someone might have attacked him as well.
Some opportunistic sneak like that large man might have blindsided her father and left him bleeding on the pavement.
Sean was right. Loathe as she was to admit it, he was totally right.
“I get it, Deb,” he said, trying to make her not feel entirely foolish. “Really, I do. Your daddy was a good man, the best man I ever knew.”
Deb smiled at the memory of her father. He had left a little light in the lives of everyone he touched, and Deb always appreciated hearing things like that.
“But he wouldn’t have lasted an hour in this city right now,” Sean said, snapping Deb from her reverie. “He was kind and generous and trusting. But in a warzone—and make no mistake, darlin’, this here is a war zone—that kind of mentality will get you killed.”
“I get it,” Deb said, nodding her head if only to get Sean to stop talking.
But he saw right through it. “No, you don’t,” he replied. “Look down, sweetheart.”
She did. She could see the back of Clomper’s neck and the top of baby Jimmy’s head as she held him close on the saddle.
“You try to stop and help someone,” Sean continued, “and you’re not just putting your life in danger. You’re not just putting my life in danger. You’re putting Jimmy’s life in danger.”
Sean’s words had the desired effect. An involuntary shudder moved through her body as she held the baby closer to her.
She could see it now, clear as day. She would have ridden her horse over to help that poor woman, and someone would have taken the chance to pull her roughly down, taking her backpack and running.
Perhaps they’d steal her horse. Perhaps they’d even rip the baby from her arms.
That wasn’t going to happen.
“I get it,” she said again, more assured this time.
Sean nodded, seemingly satisfied with this development. “All right, good.”
For the next twenty minutes, Deb kept her eyes forward, hearing the sounds of society eating itself but not daring to look. The idea of stopping to help someone never crossed her mind again.
Had it been two hours yet? Two hours and that was all it had taken for her to let go of all of her father’s ideals.
How flimsy were they? How minuscule was the old man’s memory in her life?
Letting go of that compassion felt like letting go of him, and Deb had to swallow an anguished sob at the thought of it.
She didn’t have long to stew on it, though. The sound of a massive booming explosion tore through the white noise of chaos around them. This wasn’t like the EMP blast that had seemingly changed everything. This was a true explosion. A shuddering, booming, shattering conflagration lit the sky.
It was several blocks away, but Deb could see the smoke and flames erupt into the air. Clomper reared back in a blind panic at the sudden noise as people all around them flooded into the street, running from the burst. Jimmy started screaming and thrashing in her arms.
But Deb had ridden atop spooked horses before, and she knew what to do. She clutched Jimmy against her and loosened her grip on the rein. She then calmly directed Clomper to walk in a circle, redirecting his nervous energy. Within a few seconds, the horse was calm once again.
Sean, however, was having an altogether different experience with Buttercup. He was pulling back on the reins as the horse bucked, trying to wrestle it into submission. But that was never going to work.
She rode up beside him, letting go of Clomper’s reins and reaching out to grasp at Buttercup. She pulled the reins out of Sean’s hands and held them loosely in her grip.
“Calm,” she said in a gentle but authoritative tone, repeating the word over and over again. Even competing with the sound of a screaming and fleeing populace, Buttercup was able to distinguish the voice of his owner and trainer above all.
It took longer than it had taken with Clomper, but eventually, Buttercup started to calm himself down. Sean looked over at her, clearly impressed with her handle on the animals.
“Thanks, hun,” he said as Deb tried to quiet the screaming baby. “You saved my ass there.”
She wanted to make some kind of comment about how it’s good to help some people sometimes, but it died on its way to her mouth. There was too much going on here. People were flooding into the street in a frenzied panic as Lord knows what had caused that explosion to go off.
“We need to move,” Sean said, cutting through her thoughts. “We’re not far off now.”
“Right,” she replied, nodding to him.
Together, they took off down the road, plowing ahead at a slow gallop. Any faster and they would have plowed into the people who were fleeing.
They were moving toward a piece of property Sean owned in the city. It was a garage that belonged to his family. Sean had inherited it years ago and kept it around as a base of operations within the city, should something like this ever go down.
Deb found herself thankful for what she used to think of as paranoia in both Sean and Vin alike. It was certainly coming in handy here.