Lit by Tom Abrahams

Author:Tom Abrahams [Abrahams, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Dystopian
Publisher: Piton Press LLC
Published: 2018-07-16T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

Friday, October 17, 2025

Santa Monica, California

Danny held his phone up above his head and against the smoke-filled sky. He couldn’t get a signal. The phone was useless. That meant he wasn’t getting updates from his news apps. He was riding blind, or he would have been had Gilda’s truck moved more than a foot in the last twenty minutes. They were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic as bad as any he’d ever seen. He scooted forward in the truck bed and stood.

He brushed soil from his pants and the backs of his arms and held up his phone again. Even the added height didn’t make a difference. He glanced around at the drivers and passengers in the other cars around them. Most of them were doing some variance of the same thing, checking their phones for a connection.

The passenger-side door to Gilda’s truck opened, and Arthur hopped onto the pavement. He squeezed between the side of the truck and the Volvo station wagon in the next lane and leaned on the side of the bed, folding his arms on the liner and rapping it with his knuckles.

“Not exactly a quick escape, is it?” he said.

“Nope,” said Danny. He squatted down onto his heels in front of Arthur. “Not at all.”

“I’m not sure how safe it is for us to be sitting here,” Arthur said. “You see what’s happening?”

Danny followed Arthur’s eyes and spun around. His jaw dropped. “Whaa…?”

He’d been so focused on searching for a cell signal, he hadn’t noticed the deteriorating conditions they’d left behind. The sky, much darker east of them, appeared post-apocalyptic.

The underside of the black smoke throbbed red from the flames that occasionally reached above the manmade horizon. Helicopters moved swiftly, their noses tilted downward, racing in and out of the chaos. If he strained his ears and focused on the frequency, he swore he could hear a chorus of sirens.

“It’s bad,” said Arthur. “It’s a good thing we left the diner when we did. We might be running for our lives if we didn’t.”

“As opposed to being sitting ducks?” Danny asked absently, his focus on the burgeoning disaster behind them, farther from shore. It didn’t seem real.

A sensation of familiarity washed over him. He’d seen this before, in a dream or in that not-quite-lucid moment between sleep and consciousness.

He swallowed against a surprising knot in his throat, and a vision of water flashed in his mind’s eye. So much water. Rising faster than it could drain.

Arthur was talking to Danny, suggesting alternative modes of transportation: bicycles, their feet. Danny was still lost in his thoughts and images that whirred through his mind like he was looking through an old red View-Master, pulling the orange plunger to spin the photographic disc from one three-dimensional image to the next. It was a vintage toy his mother had once purchased for him at a thrift shop. He’d loved the concept then. He didn’t love it now.

The apocalypse in his mind shifted from water, back to fire, then to drifts of gray ash, and men in orange biohazard suits blocking his path.

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