Ravaged Land - A Post-Apocalyptic Novel Read Free Page B

I’d seen him around before, mostly hanging around with Owen, and he was crazy hot. His brown hair was messy, but that kind of messy that probably takes a half hour of styling to perfect. What stood out to me most of all were his eyes, they were the color of chocolate syrup. I wondered how I hadn’t noticed him more in school, but I never cared about things like that. Under other circumstances I might feel shy around someone this attractive, but considering what we had just escaped it didn’t seem to matter.
    “Seth,” the pale boy with the blonde hair said. I knew of him only because he stood out at school, it was nice to finally put a name to his face. There was a short time where some of the other kids tried to get the nickname ‘albino’ to stick but he didn’t let it get to him and it was short lived. I couldn’t even remember the last time I had heard anyone call him that.
    “I’m Ros,” I said lifting my damp tangled hair in a pretend ponytail.
    Ryan turned the radio dial so slow you could barely see his hand moving. There were a few stations had that annoying buzz but instead of them saying, “This is only a test,” they were saying “this is not a test” and to stay tuned for further instruction. But those further instructions never came and Ryan continued searching. When he hit the end of the dial, he switched the power off out of frustration and hit the table with his fist causing a few stacked coffee cups to rattle.
    “How will we know when we can leave?” Sienna quietly asked the group.
    “Cameras.” That was all Ryan managed to spit out after his frustrations with the radio.
    “What do you mean?” I asked not understanding.
    Ryan flipped a switch on the wall and clicked a button on the remote control. The picture on the TV worked but what it showed wasn’t what any of us wanted to see.
    “Jesus Christ.” Owen choked and swallowed hard, “Is this some kind of joke?”
    The screen was divided into four panels, one for each of the cameras that had been placed in various strategic locations outside. Camera with a number one appeared to be underwater, I couldn’t quite figure out where it was located outside and why they’d need an underwater camera. Camera two wasn’t working and showed just a solid black box. The third camera showed what the weather was doing the best. It was difficult to see but there were huge chunks of ice falling from the sky. It looked like it was snowing jagged melons. Dancing along the background was a bouquet of several tornadoes. It wasn’t just a tornado or two, within the frame of this particular camera, it was at least four, and what looked like another two or three even further back in the distance. I wasn’t sure if the ones further back were actually tornadoes or not due to the low visibility from the rain, hail, and misty fog. I wondered how many more there might be outside the viewing range of the camera. Was the whole state just covered with tornadoes? The thought was terrifying.
    Camera four was my least favorite. It was the camera that I assumed was pointed at the shelter, or more accurately, the ground above the shelter. It was the worst of all three because it showed the ground above us wasn’t actually ground, it was a large pond. We appeared to be at least four feet under the water by my guess. Not only were we already trapped underground, but now we were also trapped under a small body of water, and the rain didn’t appear as though it had any intention of letting up anytime soon.
    Sienna plunged her face into her brother’s shoulder and sobbed. He almost looked as if he could do the same.
    Ryan quickly flipped the switch. “OK, so who wants to see the place?” He hopped up on his feet with half a grin. He seemed proud of this shelter, or perhaps he was just good at hiding how terrified he was from the rest of us, for our sake.
     
     
    * * *
     
     
    He started the tour, “as you know, this is the living room… couch, chairs, DVD