Runner Boy | Book 2 | Rider Kid Read online

  Rider Kid

  Book 2 in the Runner Boy Series

  Jay Mackey

  Copyright © 2020 by Jay Mackey

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Pulse Anniversary, 4:17 p.m.

  Chapter 2

  104 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 3

  104 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 4

  104 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 5

  103 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 6

  102 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 7

  102 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 8

  Pulse Anniversary 5:23 p.m.

  Chapter 9

  101 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 10

  87 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 11

  86 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 12

  83 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 13

  Pulse Anniversary, 8:09 p.m.

  Chapter 14

  83 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 15

  80 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 16

  80 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 17

  80 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 18

  79 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 19

  74 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 20

  66 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 21

  59 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 22

  59 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 23

  Pulse Anniversary, 8:23 p.m.

  Chapter 24

  59 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 25

  58 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 26

  57 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 27

  56 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 28

  49 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 29

  49 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 30

  48 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 31

  Pulse Anniversary 8:42 p.m.

  Chapter 32

  41 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 33

  32 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 34

  27 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 35

  22 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 36

  14 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 37

  Pulse Anniversary, 9:39 p.m.

  Chapter 38

  14 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 39

  14 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 40

  8 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 41

  2 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 42

  1 day until the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 43

  Pulse Anniversary 9 a.m.

  Chapter 44

  Pulse Anniversary 10:59 p.m.

  Chapter 45

  Pulse Anniversary 11:12 p.m.

  Chapter 46

  Pulse Anniversary 11:27 p.m.

  Chapter 47

  The day after the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 48

  The day after the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 49

  The day after the Pulse Anniversary

  Chapter 50

  The day after the Pulse Anniversary

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1

  Pulse Anniversary, 4:17 p.m.

  I’m lying on a concrete floor. My head hurts. Not headache hurts, REALLY hurts. It’s my nose, I quickly discover. Someone, or something, has hit me, smashed me in the nose. I can feel the dried blood clogging it up, and even in the dark room there’s enough light to see that I’ve bled on my shirt. It’s my colonel shirt, my favorite for no other reason than it was given to me by an old man who really was, is, a colonel, and who gave me a hand and a kick in the butt when I really needed both, although I’ll never admit that to anyone. The shirt is red and black flannel, well-worn before I got it, and I wear it when the weather is cool. I’ve got the sleeves rolled up, and now there’s blood all over the front of it.

  I can remember something, maybe the butt end of a rifle, coming at my face. And now that I’m fully awake, or conscious, really, I seem to recall a face behind that rifle butt, and a uniform. Militia? Cop? I can’t remember details. Jesus, he really hit me good.

  I stand and look around, trying to get my bearings. The room is small, square, maybe ten feet by ten feet. No furniture. There’s a small window high on one wall letting in just a sliver of light, just enough to make out the room size but not enough to tell what color the walls are. Not that I care.

  There’s a door opposite the window, a big, metal door with a panel that I assume slides open from the other side so they, whoever they are, can look in at their prisoner. Because that’s clearly what I am. A prisoner, in a cell. I know why I’m here. And I know I’m truly fucked.

  2

  104 days until the Pulse Anniversary

  I’m riding my bike into West Lafayette, about twenty miles from where I live in Juniper, Indiana, hoping to pick up some medical supplies and medicines to bring back. Nobody on this continent is making medicine, I’m pretty sure of that. We’ve long since used up what medicine we had when the pulse hit. Lots of people have been sick. Heck, everybody was at least a little sick this winter, including me. I was lucky though; I had a mild case of what we call the Pulse Flu. I don’t know if that’s a real thing. It may just be what we called it when people were sick from whatever ailed them before they ran out of medicine to treat it. Or whatever they caught from being malnourished and living without clean water to drink and with poor sanitation and all the rest of the things that come from having your civilization wiped out.

  It was almost nine months ago that we had what I called the flash-bang, but what is now more commonly called the pulse. As in, before it, we had a pulse, and now we’re on life support. It was actually an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, and it wiped out all things electronic in the United States, and in most of North America. That means no communications, running water, power for heating or cooling, and very limited transportation. Basically, it knocked us back about 200 years. It wasn’t the end of civilization, as my old neighbor once said, but it was close.

  I’m not saying that we haven’t gotten any help from outside the country. We have. Some. And I get it. We were a huge country, so it’s not like England or some country like that can blanket the whole of what used to be the USA with planeloads of aid every day. Or week. It would have been nice to get something every month or so, though.

  My friend Jake tells me that we didn’t have that many friends around the world anymore when the pulse hit, so that contributes to the lack of aid.

  A lot of people have died. A lot of people.

  Back a f
ew years ago, there was a virus that killed a few hundred thousand people in the US. Multiply that by a few hundred, and maybe you’ll be close to how many died after the pulse. So far.

  I make the trip into West Lafayette a couple times a week. I can do it in about three or three and a half hours when I run, depending on how much stuff I’m carrying in my backpack. So you’d think that doing it on a bike, even pulling a bike trailer like I’m doing today, would be a lot faster, but it still takes me a couple hours, usually. I’ve done it in a little over one hour, but I didn’t have the trailer that day and I was in a hurry, because some idiots were chasing me on horseback.

  Horses can run a lot faster than I can ride a bike, but it requires that the horse rider knows how to ride. And the riders that day, two of them, were clearly beginners. They’d stopped me on the road, intending to rob me. They may have been beginners at that, too. For one thing, I didn’t have anything worth stealing that day. Except maybe the 9mm Glock handgun that they didn’t notice until I pulled it out of my ankle holster when I got off my bike. I fired a shot into the road, scaring the horses, which reared up and threw the two riders to the ground. By the time they got to their feet I was way down the road. The two idiots tried to shoot me with their handguns from a distance that required a decent rifle. They tried to chase me, too, but couldn’t keep the horses running long enough or fast enough to catch me.

  I’ve learned a lot of safety tips on these trips. Like that one: beware men on horseback.

  Another lesson I learned the hard way. I was tackled off my bike by some guy who leapt out at me from behind a tree one day. My mistake was that I had my 9mm Glock in a holster attached to my bike. When the guy knocked me off the bike, my weapon was too far away to reach. The guy pounded me pretty good, ripped my backpack off my back and ran into the woods. That’s when I decided to put the holster on my ankle, so I’d always have it with me, and it’s out of the way so it doesn’t interfere with my riding. Or running.

  So now I’m getting a little uneasy. There’s a horse coming toward me on the road. He’s pulling something. As it gets closer I can see that there’s a man sitting in a wagon, a farm wagon of some sort, and he’s figured out how to hook up his horse so that it can pull the wagon, which is metal with rubber wheels, meant to be pulled by a tractor, I’m sure. The man looks like he’s sitting in a chair. Still, I don’t know him, and bikes and horses don’t mix well, so I stop and get off my bike.

  The man stops when he reaches me. He nods at his horse and says, “Old Rooster didn’t know he was going to be a draft horse when he grew up.”

  “I bet he didn’t,” I say. “But he’s big enough for it.” The horse is huge. Not draft horse huge, but big for a regular horse.

  “You headed into Lafayette?” He’s a big man, tall and broad. Based on the way his coat hangs on him, he’s lost weight. He had probably been a giant when we all had enough good food to eat.

  “Yeah. I heard they might have some medical supplies from the aid plane that came in last week.”

  “They might. But the food is pretty limited. I was hoping they had more of that baby formula like they had on the last plane. What was that, five or six weeks ago?”

  I nod. Sounds about right. Early June. Right before we were hit with huge rainstorms that went on for days. Made it hard to get to town, and it took even longer than usual for the aid workers to get things sorted so it could be distributed.

  “Yeah,” he says. “But anyway, I was there yesterday and they didn’t have any.”

  “I hope they didn’t bring any more lightbulbs,” I say, and grin. That’s the big joke around here. There are stacks of cases of light bulbs in the hangar at the airport that serves as the aid office. One thing you don’t need after your electricity is destroyed is light bulbs. But somebody somewhere thought they’d be really helpful and ship us a bunch of them.

  He smiles back. “So, what medicine you looking for? Something you need?”

  “I don’t know if you know Mrs. Hazelwood. She’s diabetic, and needs insulin. Lives in Juniper. Hasn’t had insulin for a while, and she’s just too nice to let die, which will probably happen if she can’t get it. That’s my biggest need. But anything like that—blood pressure medicine, nitroglycerin—the doc in Juniper gave me a list and a bunch of prescriptions, if I need them. If not, he said to just get some of whatever they have.”

  “I don’t know Mrs. Hazelwood. My place is just down the road here, and I don’t get out to Juniper much. But good luck.”

  “Thanks. I’ll double-check for baby formula for you.”

  He starts to leave, but then stops and says, “Say, you’re the delivery kid, aren’t you? The rider kid?”

  “Yup. That’s me. I deliver whatever you need. Not big things, no crops or farm animals or anything. Mostly mail, and packages that fit into my little bike trailer. Since there’s no US Mail, or UPS anymore, it’s up to little guys like me. I call my business PedEx.”

  He laughs. “You could probably get sued for trademark infringement.”

  “Yeah, if there’s a way for people to get sued, or if there’s still a FedEx somewhere that cares.” I point to my bike trailer. “Today, among some letters and things, I’m carrying a big box of candles to a shop in West Lafayette.” Candles are a big thing now, because, well, no electric lights.

  I pull a piece of red ribbon from my saddle bags and give it to him, explaining that if he ever needs anything delivered, to just tie it on his mailbox and I’ll see it when I pass by again. He seems pleased with the arrangement. We shake hands and introduce ourselves. His name is Jerry Pospisil, and he and his wife live near where we’re standing, about halfway between Lafayette and Juniper.

  When I get into town I first go to drop off the candles in West Layfette, and then head to the airport. I’m able to get a healthy supply of insulin, and bottles of about half of the rest of the list the doc had given me. I load up my trailer with boxes of bandages, gauze, alcohol, surgical instruments, rubber gloves and other miscellaneous medical supplies. I can’t find any baby formula.

  My next stop is to have lunch with Jake. He used to be a professor at Purdue. He still gives free lectures there sometimes, but no one has come up with a way to get the university going again, since every healthy body is busy trying to find ways to stay alive, mostly. College is kind of a luxury that no one can afford.

  But Jake is tapped into the main rumor mill, as he calls it. He usually knows more about what’s going on than even the newspaper. They still call it a newspaper, but it’s really just a flyer with rumors and gossip about what’s happening in the world. The sources are generally travelers, people who have been other places, or people passing through. Sometimes they’re able to get the flyer printed at the university print shop, but sometimes it’s just hand-printed. They post the flyers at a few locations around town. I like to try to get a few copies to bring back to Juniper so my neighbors get the news too, but I often have to copy it down on a piece of paper, if I can find any paper. Nobody in this country is making paper anymore, and it’s not exactly a priority item for the aid shipments.

  I meet Jake at the cafeteria on Purdue’s campus, still the best place for a warm meal in town, mostly because the university has a big ethanol production facility which they use to run a big generator, so they have electricity. They don’t run it all the time, but they bake things and cook things and it’s pretty good.

  People were cooking on propane grills for a while, but the propane eventually ran out, so now it’s mostly cooking over wood fires, either inside on the fireplace, or outside over a campfire. We do both at home, or what I call home. We live on a farm owned by a friend of my older sister Chrissie. We help out with the farming in return for shelter, basically.

  A few people have wood burning stoves. They’re basically antiques now, but if you have one, you’re lucky.

  Jake is waiting for me at a table near the door. I swear he has less hair on his head and more on his face every time I see him. To m
ake matters worse, his hair, what there is of it, is white, while his beard is speckled with white and dark spots. I point and laugh when I walk up, and say, “You know, if you just turned your head upside down, you’d look pretty good.” I always try to make him smile. He’s been having a tough time since his wife got a bad case of the Pulse Flu and died a few months ago.

  “You know I look good just the way I am, Brady.” He tries to seem happy, but I know he’s struggling. He’s about my dad’s age, maybe a little younger.

  We chat, catching up, and eat bowls of chili, and then he pulls a folded poster out of his old briefcase. It’s the latest from the newspaper. To call it a poster is a bit of a stretch. It’s the size of a legal pad, with small print.

  “I thought you might want to take this back with you,” he says. “Post it in that little town of yours.”

  I take the poster and thank him. “Anything good in here?” I ask.

  “The big news is that Pounds is coming to town.”

  “President Pounds? Here?” It seems unreal.

  “He sent some underling to town the other day to let us all know. He’s going to be making some big speech here at Purdue the day after tomorrow. So you might want to make another trip down here.”

  “Why? What’s he going to say, anyway? Vote for me? We don’t even have elections anymore.”