Free Springer, Jan - The Pleasure Girl [The Desperadoes 1] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) by Jan Springer Page B

after.”
    She swallowed and waited.
    “I was with my daughters when it happened. We’d gone on our annual dad-daughters camping trip. My wife hated camping, so she always stayed home. But my girls…” His voice thickened with emotion.
    “How old were they?”
    “Jenny was twelve. Lynn was eleven. They loved to go to a new camping place every year. So this time around, we decided on a group of caves two days’ drive from home. We were going to make it a weeklong trip. We were actually inside the caves when it happened.”
    Horror raced through her. He must have seen them disintegrate.
    “We had no idea anything was wrong until we returned to the campground and realized there weren’t any people around.”
    Relief swept through her. “The girls survived the solar flares.”
    He nodded. “My daughters survived the Catastrophe. I wish they hadn’t. It would have been a much easier death.”
    Uneasiness snapped through her. Obviously, his kids had died.
    “I couldn’t get the car started, couldn’t find a soul to help. Not one person. It was eerie, and I could tell the girls were getting uneasy. There was nothing but static when we tried to use our cell phones. I knew something was seriously wrong when we went to the campground office and found the door unlocked and no one inside but a whimpering dog who was lying beside a pile of what looked like ashes on the floor.
    “I thought maybe some nutcase was on the grounds and had maybe tried to build a fire indoors and everyone had been evacuated. That’s when I also noticed there was no electricity. The coolers full of food and drinks weren’t humming. The air conditioner wasn’t going as it had been the couple of times we’d gone in during the week, and it was pretty warm inside the building. Things were just off, you know what I mean?”
    Teyla nodded. Yes, she understood. All survivors understood the desolation they’d experienced after realizing something of cataclysmic proportions had happened.
    “We found a car with a key in the ignition and piles of ash on the front seats and back seats. I sat on the ash, turned the ignition, nothing happened.”
    He sat on the ash. On a dead person.
    “How did you get home?” She didn’t have to ask if his wife had survived. She knew instinctively she hadn’t.
    “We stayed at the campsite that night. Realized we were totally alone. Realized something bad had happened. We spent the next day outfitting ourselves with knapsacks, filling them with non-perishable foods from the store. Bottled water. I had a gun, and we found some hunting knives for the girls. My youngest, she wasn’t handling it too well. Crying. We were worried about Ann.”
    “Your wife?”
    He nodded.
    “We started walking. You know kids that age; they can’t walk as long as an adult, so after a few hours, they were pretty tired. We noticed a farm with grazing horses. Helped ourselves to four of them, and of course, no one was around at the nearby farmhouse or barn. My oldest daughter had a passion for horses and knew all about saddles and bridles and what horses ate. Don’t know what we would have done without her. She showed us how to ride, and we followed the highways home. We saw no one. Just abandoned cars and trucks—ashes in them. I kind of got the idea they were people, disintegrated.
    “Checked out a couple of houses for more food. It was the same story. Unlocked doors. Pets going hungry. We left the doors open so they could get outside. We couldn’t take them with us. When we got home, we found Ann in the bed. Nothing but a pile of ashes beneath the covers. She was probably taking an afternoon nap. She did that sometimes after working in the vegetable garden. We buried her out back and tried to make do the best we could.”
    “And your daughters?” she asked softly as they turned and headed back to her farmhouse.
    “I made the mistake of leaving them home alone one day while I went foraging at some neighboring homes for more food.