After The EMP Box Set [Books 7-9]: The Hope Trilogy

by Tate, Harley

  “Pick up that rifle and I’ll put a bullet through your temple and watch it turn your brain to mush.”

  Madison froze, hand hovering a few inches above the stock. As she twisted back to look at Silas, he pulled out a handgun. Her hope crumbled. I should have gone for the Glock. At least then I’d have a chance.

  Silas rested the full-size piece on his knee, hand perched on top, finger easy on the trigger. “Tell me what happened.”

  She curled her fingers into a fist to quell a tremor and sat back up. “I saved your life. If it weren’t for me, you’d be frozen out there in the snow.”

  “That’s the only reason you aren’t dead yet.” He grimaced as he shifted his wounded leg’s position. “Now spill it.”

  She exhaled and told him everything she knew. “At some point the roads intersected. The car running along the side road entered the intersection at the same time as the pickup. It T-boned it at a high rate of speed. The pickup flipped a bunch of times.” She swallowed, remembering how Dani wrapped her arms around her middle when she told the story. “Two of the passengers died on impact, a third died a few hours later. The driver was thrown through the windshield and lived.”

  “What about the car?”

  Madison sniffed. “It was wrecked. Had to be going a hundred when it hit the truck. No way anyone could survive.” She left out the part about Dani finding the driver wheezing out his last few breaths. Madison tried to soften the blow. “It was a car accident. No one could have seen it coming.”

  Silas pressed the fingers of his free hand to his temple. “So it was a muscle car, traveling on some small road, somewhere near here. That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?”

  “I wasn’t there. This happened months ago. Way back in the early days.”

  He shot forward. “When exactly?”

  Madison looked up to the roof of the Jeep, trying to remember when her father came back with Colt, Dani, and Larkin in tow. “We were still clearing the field for the farm, so it had to be spring. Maybe a month after the power went out? It couldn’t have been much more.”

  Silas shook his head. “You’re lying. There’s something you’re not telling me. Something you remember.” He reached forward, trying to grab at her shirt or hands.

  Madison shied back. “That’s it, I swear.”

  Silas rose up from the back seat and Madison reached for the Glock. Her fingers wrapped around the cold metal as Silas charged through the two seats. He slammed the butt of his gun on her fingers and bones snapped.

  Madison screamed and yanked her hand back as he lifted the Glock from the console.

  Brianna moaned and rolled toward her in the driver’s seat. Words lolled out of her mouth, thick and syrupy. “What’s… the… big… idea?”

  Pain radiated out from the center of Madison’s index and middle fingers. She inhaled through her nose and out through her mouth as her vision ringed in black. “Brianna, wake up!” She needed her friend’s help or they were both going to die.

  “I don’t wanna.” Brianna’s blonde curls fell across her face as she rolled over. “Wake me when the movie’s over.”

  Madison cursed. “It’s not a movie. I need you to wake up.”

  Brianna didn’t move. The blow to her head and the injury to her leg had rendered her useless. Madison knew that modern medicine recommended letting concussion patients sleep, so that’s what she’d done. But now she wished she’d tried to wake her up.

  “Your friend can’t help you.” Silas pointed his gun straight at Madison’s face. “Tell me everything or I’ll shoot you both, right now.”

  Fear closed Madison’s throat. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. She’d helped this man and now he was going to kill her for a car accident she didn’t see with people she didn’t meet until after it happened. It was crazy. His finger tightened around the trigger and Madison blurted out the first thing in her mind. “If I had been there, I could tell you more, but that’s all Colt said about it!”

  “Who’s Colt?”

  Shit. Pain radiated out from her hand and she couldn’t think. If she’d had more control of her faculties, she would have used a fake name or come up with some lie to throw him off, but the pain rendered her incapable. A faint ringing sounded in her left ear and her vision dimmed even more. She was on the verge of passing out.

  Madison forced out the words. “One of the members of my group.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “I don’t know. He was in the U-Haul.”

  Silas leaned back and Madison shivered. Whatever was going through his head couldn’t be good. She needed a way out and fast. Madison gritted her teeth and fought off the impending blackout. She had to stay conscious.

  The rifle still sat on the floor behind her. If she could reach it… She lifted her hand and groaned. The only hand that could reach the rifle had two smashed fingers. It was hopeless.

  She struggled against the pain as the ringing in her ears intensified. Her vision narrowed to a circle, fuzzed out to black around the edges. She swooned and fell back against the dashboard. It was all she could do to blink and breathe.

  That’s when she saw it. A light.

  Small and round, it could only be a flashlight beam. She struggled to focus on the little circle of light. Sooner or later, the person attached to it would see the Jeep. They had to hear the engine by now. A surge of energy pushed back against the pain and dizziness threatening to pull her under.

  Please be my dad, please. Madison almost smiled in relief at the thought and let her eyes slip closed. The darkness enveloped her and the ringing in her ears rose to a crescendo. The throbbing in her hand settled into a one-two-three, one-two-three rhythm like a bad waltz she hadn’t tried since dance class in the fifth grade.

  “This could be our way out.” She didn’t realize she said the words out loud. She rolled to the side, reaching for Brianna. “This is it. We’ll be saved.” They could finally go home where it was warm and safe and someone loved them. She slumped over when a blast of cold air jolted her out of the haze of pain.

  Madison blinked. Reality came back into focus: the front seat, Brianna’s unconscious form, the angry man in the back seat. Fear launched a fresh wave of adrenaline through her bloodstream as she looked up at the open door, but it was too late.

  The butt of a gun slammed into her temple and she fell against the steering wheel. Not even the sound of the Jeep’s horn could keep her from passing out.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  WALTER

  Woods north of Truckee, CA

  2:00 a.m.

  Damn it. Snow slipped under the waistband of Walter’s ski pants and into the top of his boots. He shivered as the ice crystals melted on his bare skin. Thanks to faulty batteries, his flashlight ran out of juice hours ago. Ever since then, he’d been walking blind.

  He’d tried to stay in the tire tracks from the Jeep, but every once in a while, he’d list to the left or right. After the second run-in with a tree trunk, he’d taken to holding his hands out in front of him and waving them about every four paces.

  The chances of finding Brianna and Madison without even the moon for light were slim, but he couldn’t stop. Hunkering down meant death. Walter had to keep his blood flowing and heart pumping through the freezing night. If he didn’t come across the Jeep before dawn, he planned to backtrack to the road and hope Colt left another snowmobile intact and drivable.

  Walter pulled himself out of a two-foot-deep snow drift and stomped on the ground. Melted snow trickled down his ankle and welled in the front of his boot. His toes didn’t react. He tried to wiggle them. Nothing.

  Fear of frostbite couldn’t stop him now. He shoved the images of chopping off dead toes out of his mind and scrambled back onto the hard-packed snow of the Jeep’s tracks. Madison needed him more than Walter needed a few toes. They weren’t good for much, anyway.

  On he trudged, more careful and slower than before. The tracks seemed to curve as trees crowded against the dark
night sky, deepening the blackness in front of him. A single sound cut the stillness.

  A car horn.

  Walter spun in a circle. Was it the Jeep? One of the men who ambushed them? Colt and Larkin in trouble? Thanks to the topography and the denseness of the forest, he couldn’t pinpoint the direction of the noise. Left? Right? North? South?

  It could have come from anywhere. He stood still, straining to listen for any further clues. He was concentrating so hard on his ears, he almost missed the sight in front of him.

  A tiny prick of light danced across his vision. At first he thought he imagined it, so he shut his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them again, it was back, bobbing and weaving and growing larger by the second.

  A flashlight. Walter hurried toward the trees. He didn’t know if the light came from the direction of the horn or how many people were headed his way. Without a light of his own, he was at a massive disadvantage. He unslung the rifle from his shoulder and yanked off a glove. The cold air bit at his chapped skin as he slipped his finger around the trigger.

  Shooting blind would get him nowhere. What if it was Madison, hurt and trudging through the snow? He had to get a visual on the person holding the flashlight, but he had to do it from the protection of the trees. His free hand made contact with a sturdy trunk and Walter ducked behind it.

  Minutes ticked by and the light grew larger, eventually flattening out into an oval on the snow. It kept to the same tracks Walter had tried to follow, every so often panning into the trees and back down. His shoe prints were mostly invisible in the portions where the Jeep’s tires hard-packed the snow, but on the edges where he stumbled, they had to be obvious.

  The flashlight beam rose, sweeping across the trees where Walter hid. He held his breath. The beam of light passed him by.

  After a few more minutes, it came to rest on a bulky shape in the snow. A rock or something buried. Walter squinted, trying to see what the other person found. The flashlight beam grew smaller and more focused, stopping on something black and mechanical. It took Walter a moment to place it: a caterpillar tread stuck up in the snow.

  The shape wasn’t a rock; it was a snowmobile.

  Walter would never have seen it in the dark. He stayed still, watching as the person wielding the flashlight dug the vehicle out of the snow. After a few minutes, the flashlight beam wavered and shifted, changing from a concentrated beam to a dim lantern.

  Thanks to the flashlight’s position handle-down in the snow, the light reflected in a wide circle and Walter could finally see the person hunched over the rig. It wasn’t Madison. The man was large, easily outweighing Walter by fifty pounds or more, and he moved like he was accustomed to hard labor.

  His oversized shoulders bunched as he rocked the snowmobile back and forth. One, two, three, four. The arc of the snowmobile increased with each grunting effort.

  At last, it flipped over onto the skis and tread. Walter exhaled. This could be my chance. Walter crept forward, careful to keep to the cover of the thicker trees, as the man brushed the snow and ice off the controls.

  Walter paused. The snowmobile was Walter’s best hope of finding Madison. He needed that rig, but he needed it running. He slowed, waiting as the man turned the key and reached for the choke.

  The man yanked the cord a handful of times and cursed. Ten feet of snow and trees separated them. Walter held his breath. Any second now. The man reached for the cord pull again and yanked.

  The snowmobile engine sputtered and groaned to life and Walter took a step out of the tree line, toward the rig. He hadn’t moved more than a foot when the barrel of a gun jabbed into his temple.

  “Take another step and I blow your brains all over the snow.”

  Walter ground his teeth together. He’d been so focused on the snowmobile, wanting so badly for it to start, that he’d lost perspective. Rule number one of any encounter was to maintain situational awareness, and he’d failed. The cold had turned him sloppy and desperate.

  He side-eyed the man holding a gun to his head. From the corner of his eye, all Walter could make out was a bulky shape much like the man now standing beside the snowmobile holding a handgun of his own. He pointed it at Walter.

  Even if Walter had been able to take out the man holding the gun to his head, he’d never be able to take out the one by the snowmobile, too. He was caught and didn’t see a way out.

  The gun pressed against Walter’s temple inched in harder as the man holding it called out. “That thing gonna work?”

  “Hell if I know, but it’s runnin’ now, ain’t it?” The man standing by the snowmobile reached down and lifted the flashlight out of the snow. He pointed it straight at Walter’s face. “Where’d he come from?”

  “Found him lurking in the trees watching you work. You should be more careful, Donny. If I hadn’t spotted him, he’d have taken you out.”

  “Like hell he would have.” Donny spat on the ground. “I can handle myself all right.”

  “Get the snowmobile over to the Jeep.”

  “What are we gonna do with him?”

  “Depends on who he is and what he’s got.”

  The gun eased back enough for Walter to turn his head. Thanks to the flashlight beam in his face, he couldn’t see a thing. His rifle was snatched from his grip and a pair of meaty hands patted him all over before removing his handgun stashed in an appendix holster.

  “He’s clean.”

  The flashlight beam lowered and Walter tried to blink away the spots.

  “Start walking, buddy.”

  “I can’t see.”

  “You don’t need to see. You need to walk.” A gun barrel poked him again in the shoulder. Probably his own rifle. “Move.”

  Walter took one step and then another. Every so often, the rifle’s barrel would poke one of his shoulders and he would correct his path. The snowmobile revved behind him and darted out into the clearing. The single headlight lit up the tracks in front and Walter’s chest seized.

  The Jeep.

  It couldn’t have been more than two hundred yards ahead. Even from that distance, he could see the damage. Mangled hood. Broken axle. For all he knew, neither Brianna nor Madison survived the crash.

  He forced his feet to keep moving even though his heart willed him to stop. He didn’t want to know if his daughter was dead. He didn’t want to face that future. It was all his fault. He was the one who told her to go. He was the one who put her in harm’s way. If she and Brianna had stayed with the U-Haul, they would all be home now, safe and sound.

  But he told them to run. He’d been scared and foolish and now his daughter might be dead.

  The snowmobile pulled up alongside its twin and Donny swung his leg over the seat. He turned and waited for Walter and the man holding him at gunpoint to catch up.

  The man behind him jabbed the gun into the small of Walter’s back as they entered the headlight beam of the snowmobile. “That’s far enough.”

  Walter stopped. The man eased around him and Walter got a look at him for the first time. As big as Donny, but older. Bushy beard, skull cap pulled down tight over his head. Blood coated one leg and as he took another step Walter noticed an obvious limp.

  The man was injured. He turned to Walter. “You from the U-Haul?”

  “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” Walter clasped his naked hand with the one still wearing a glove. His fingers burned from the cold.

  “You ever seen this Jeep before?”

  Walter shook his head. “Nope.”

  The man looked him up and down. “I don’t believe you.”

  “Believe what you want. I was just out here, looking for something to scavenge. Saw the snowmobile and thought I’d take it.”

  “You got a cabin near here?”

  Walter shook his head. “I’m a nomad.”

  “No one scavenges in the middle of the night in the woods when it’s this cold.”

  “I do.”

  “Bullshit.” The man turned to his buddy
. “Donny, drag ’em out. If he won’t admit to who he is the easy way, maybe we can change his mind.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  WALTER

  Woods north of Truckee, CA

  2:00 a.m.

  Donny yanked open the driver’s-side door to the Jeep. A shock of blonde curls fell out of the seat, followed by the slumped-over body of Brianna. She landed in a whoosh of snow.

  Walter swallowed. He couldn’t tell from that distance if Brianna was unconscious and alive or already dead. A purpling bruise spread out across her forehead and a goose egg the size of a tennis ball swelled above her temple.

  “Recognize her?”

  He leaned in. “Can’t say for sure.” His voice warbled and Walter bit the inside of his cheek. He had to keep them guessing. “I see a lot of strays in the woods.”

  “Bring out the other one.”

  Donny reached out and grabbed Brianna by the wrists. He dragged her over to the idle snowmobile and dumped her in the snow. Walter strained to listen. Was that a groan? He couldn’t hear over the rumble of the engine.

  He watched as Donny huffed back over to the Jeep and reached inside. Madison’s brown hair spilled over his arm as he dragged her headfirst out of the vehicle.

  Walter hissed. His daughter was injured. Blood clotted in her hair and stuck to her cheek. He wanted more than anything to rush to her and check for a pulse, but that meant death for both of them.

  Donny tilted her body toward him and let him stare at Madison’s face. She wasn’t pale or slightly blue and her body showed no signs of rigor. But that didn’t mean she was still breathing.

  Walter turned to the man with the gun. He hoped the sweat beading across his forehead didn’t give him away. “Don’t know her either.” He chose his next words carefully. “You found them like this?”

  “If you don’t know them, what do you care?”

  “Just curious.”

  Donny dragged Madison over to the snowmobile and dumped her next to Brianna. “Ain’t you ever heard of curiosity killed the cat?”