by Alex Irvine
“I wish,” Amelia said.
“Me, too, Amelia. We all wish. But it takes hard work to make wishes come true.” Sebastian straightened up. “Hey, you mind walking us over to the Castle? We’d like to talk to Junie and Mike about some of this stuff. Plus, you probably don’t want to stand around talking to grown-ups when you’ve got cool kid stuff to do.”
The kids looked at each other. They couldn’t really say no. “Um, sure,” Violet said. “Come on.”
* * *
• • •
The Castle grounds were full of people working in the garden as Violet, Saeed, and Amelia led the group of men around to the Independence Avenue entrance. “Beautiful garden,” Sebastian commented. “You’re going to be eating well in a month or so.”
Remembering Darryl and Dileep’s conversation, Violet just said, “Yeah, we helped plant everything.”
“Good,” Sebastian said. “It’s good for you to know how to do that. Plus, food tastes better when you know you helped make it.”
Everyone in the gardens had stopped what they were doing to observe the group of armed strangers. Junie stepped out from behind a row of bean vines growing up a lattice that Violet had helped put up. The beans were already flowering. “Children, go on inside,” she said.
“Hello, ma’am,” Sebastian said. “My name is Sebastian. The kids here told us we should look for Mike or Junie.”
“I’m Junie. What is it you want?”
Violet, Amelia, and Saeed moved toward the door, but they didn’t go inside just yet. They saw some people up on the Castle’s balconies, watching the strangers. She felt a lot of tension in the air, but she wasn’t sure what it was about.
“Well, we’d like to talk,” Sebastian said.
“You don’t need eight men with rifles to talk.”
Sebastian nodded. “That’s true. But sometimes you need eight men with rifles to get to the place where you want to have a conversation.”
“Huh,” Junie said. “Well, you’re here now. Would you like some water?”
“Thank you,” Sebastian said. “It sure is hot. You mind if my men rest out here while we talk?”
“Of course not,” Junie said. “Come on inside.”
She gave Violet a look as she and Sebastian passed by on their way inside. Violet had no trouble interpreting the message: We are going to talk about this once these strangers have gone, and your story better be good.
Violet exchanged glances with Saeed and Amelia.
“What were we supposed to do?” Amelia asked.
“I don’t know,” Violet said.
“I know what we should do now,” Saeed said. “Stay way out of the way until Junie decides to come find us.”
That seemed like a good idea. They went inside, straight up to their room, and told the whole story to the rest of the group. Then they played cards and backgammon and Chinese checkers for the rest of the day until it was time to go to dinner.
24
AURELIO
The first thing Aurelio did in the morning was try to run Ike Ronson’s location via ISAC again. Last Known Location: Stroudsburg, PA.
Damn it, Aurelio thought. Why wasn’t ISAC tracking him? And why hadn’t it processed his actions in Duane Park and marked him rogue? Calling in a false alarm that knowingly endangered a fellow agent, plus deliberately leaving civilians to be massacred, was more than enough to put a red circle on an agent.
Something else was going on, and Diaz not only didn’t know what it was, he hadn’t yet figured out what the right questions were to ask.
The day got even more confusing when ISAC notified him of an after-action report filed by the JTF garrison in Stroudsburg. A Division agent identifying himself as Ike Ronson had gone on a solo night mission to disrupt a band of terrorists who were plotting to destroy an interstate bridge with stolen C-4. The mission was successful, with eleven confirmed kills and all but a small amount of the C-4 recovered.
And along the way, he had saved a five-month-old baby girl and brought her back to the garrison.
How did that square with what Ronson had done the day before in Manhattan?
He put a call in to the Post Office and got Lieutenant Hendricks on the line. She didn’t sound happy to hear from him. “I was hoping you’d peeled back some more of the layers on that encrypted conversation,” he said.
“Nope. The only reason we got as much as we did was that we had raw voice from a remote listening device we had in place to monitor that location. I haven’t been able to do anything with the rest.”
“What about Michigan? Anything in any internal briefings about something going on there that might have gotten his attention?”
Hendricks sighed. “I can do a search. But Michigan’s a big place, and there’s a heavy JTF presence in all the cities there, especially close to the Canadian border. Our friends up north got serious about border security when the virus hit. So it’s going to be a lot of sorting, and I don’t have a lot of time.”
“How about the person Ronson is looking for? I’m thinking of the ‘left Manhattan’ bit.”
“We don’t even know for sure he’s looking for anyone,” Hendricks answered. “All we know is he’s probably going to Michigan, and along the way he diverted to break up a terrorist plot and save a baby while he was at it. I have to tell you, Agent Diaz, I’m not convinced anymore that he’s a bad guy.”
“It’s great that he saved a baby,” Aurelio said. “That doesn’t bring the people in that building down on Duane Street back to life. And it doesn’t explain why he’s trying to hide conversations with unknown parties whose orders he appears to be following.”
“Directive 51,” Hendricks said. “There’s nothing I can do.”
“You can keep monitoring his traffic. In fact, I’m asking you to do just that. Please.”
“I’ll do that as I can, Agent Diaz. But you have to understand, I do not have the operational bandwidth to run down possible wild-goose chases.”
“I do understand. I appreciate any time you can put into it.”
“I’ll update you when I have more. Anything else?”
“Not right now. Thanks, Lieutenant.”
Hendricks ended the call and Aurelio stifled the urge to shoot something just so he could vent his frustration. Instead he started walking. He already had the map in his head: Route 22, snaking up and over the mountains to catch 322, steadily bearing northwest to State College and then on to catch I-80 at Clearfield. That was about a hundred and thirty miles, with a lot of up and down along the way. Three days if he pushed hard.
Then it was another hundred and twenty miles to the Ohio state line, and maybe two hundred from there before he got to a city of any size in Michigan. Good thing the SHD issued excellent boots as part of each Division agent’s gear.
On his way out of town Aurelio stuck his head into a convenience store to see what snacks might still be on its shelves. There wasn’t much, but he did score a Washingtown Spears baseball cap. It was getting warmer and he didn’t need a watch cap anymore. He spent a few minutes getting the brim curved to his preference, then settled it on his head and headed out.
He saw lots of deer and small animals along the road, but Aurelio didn’t see another living human being until he was crossing the Susquehanna River and spotted a boat drifting with the current. A man and a young girl were fishing. Aurelio watched them for a while, wondering where they lived. How they lived. He’d been born and raised in Washington, DC, and spent his entire life there until the past three months in New York. He didn’t know anything about life outside a big city, pandemic or no pandemic. Had the virus hit small towns as hard as big cities? It was easy to imagine that the countryside was depopulated, as people congregated in bigger cities following the failure of electricity and other infrastructure.
On the other hand, if you could make it through the win
ter and you had tools to fish and hunt, it might be easier to survive in the country. Grow a garden, learn to preserve what you grew and caught, and you could become something close to self-sufficient. At least until you had an accident or got sick, and the closest doctor was fifty miles away.
The boat drifted away around a bend in the river. Just before he lost sight of it, Aurelio saw the girl haul in a fish, its scales catching the sunlight as it thrashed on her line. Her dad leaned over to unhook it, and then they were gone. He kept walking.
By nightfall he’d seen only a few other people, and no groups larger than four or five. When the sun dropped behind the hills, he let himself into a farmhouse off the main road near a small river town called Port Royal. Once inside, he took a look around to make sure he wasn’t intruding on someone. The house smelled dusty. Nobody had cooked in it recently, or lit a fire. The downstairs was empty.
Aurelio flicked on a small flashlight and went up a staircase from the foyer. He found a bathroom and three bedrooms. Two were unoccupied. In the third he found two bodies, one adult and one child. They were mostly skin and bones, partly worked over by animals, but Aurelio didn’t see any weapons. It looked like they had died together, lying in the bed. Just one more sad story among millions.
Back downstairs, he looked through the kitchen cupboards and pantry. Mice had destroyed everything but the canned goods, which still stood in neat untouched rows. Aurelio opened himself a can of peaches and another of tuna. He ate them in the dark, looking out the window. Clouds blew across the night sky, covering and uncovering the stars. There was a half-moon.
Thirsty, he tried the faucet. Nothing. So he drank the last of his water and decided he would check out back for a well in the morning. Until then, there was nothing to do but stew over Ike Ronson and whatever he was planning to do in Michigan.
Sitting there looking at the moon, it occurred to Aurelio that he could do the Michigan search himself if he could get access to the JTF’s mission logs. ISAC did not seem robust out here in the country, in the deep valleys of central Pennsylvania. But Aurelio went out on the farmhouse’s long porch and tried to access those logs. No dice. He wasn’t sure if the problem was access or bandwidth, so he settled for sending Lieutenant Hendricks a message asking her if she would mine the logs for mentions of Michigan.
If he hadn’t heard from her by the time he got closer to Pittsburgh, Aurelio decided he would try to do the search himself. But he wasn’t a trained forensic data analyst. Lieutenant Hendricks was. Also, she would have access to JTF operational and intel logs that Aurelio didn’t even know existed. So all in all, it would be better if she did it.
He found a rocking chair and sat, feeling the day’s miles in his feet and the small of his back. He took his boots off and stretched out his legs. His ankle was still swollen from the shoot-out at the High Line, but it was hurting less. This would be a good time for a beer, he thought. The idea spurred him up out of the chair and back into the kitchen, where he was delighted to find two beers on the top shelf of the fridge. Ignoring the mold spreading across the bottom shelves and lining the crispers, he took one of them and went back out on the porch. He didn’t recognize the brewery. Must have been local. But the beer tasted good, and he let its cold on his tongue turn into warmth in his belly.
It occurred to Aurelio that he didn’t have to worry about anyone attacking him. No matter where he’d been in New York or DC since Black Friday, he’d lived with the constant knowledge that he had to be on his toes. Any relaxation of his guard could end up being fatal—to him and possibly to a lot of other people. But out here, he would see a light a mile away. Even if he was asleep, the sound of porch boards creaking would snap him awake in a split second.
He was safe. It was a strange feeling.
On the other hand, part of the reason he was safe was that everyone who had once lived around here was either dead or gone. If that was the trade-off, Aurelio guessed he would rather live with a little bit of constant danger. He wasn’t cut out to be alone. He wanted other people around.
He wanted his children around. Graciela was gone, but he still had Ivan and Amelia. Every step he took west, away from them, felt like a step in the wrong direction.
But he had a duty. He’d sworn an oath. He would fulfill that duty and that oath, and then he would go to Washington. Right then Aurelio hated Ike Ronson, not because he had a full understanding of what Ronson had done but because Ronson was drawing him out into Pennsylvania and probably Michigan, prolonging by weeks or months that day when Aurelio would finally be able to look after his children.
He couldn’t protect them from here. That ate at him. He’d chosen to go to New York because there was a need, but now there was a need in DC, and instead of being there to help meet it Aurelio was in goddamn Port Royal, Pennsylvania, sitting in a dead man’s rocking chair.
Who was he looking for? What was so important that a Division agent would go rogue and chase someone six hundred miles?
Those questions were still chewing at him when he got to Clearfield, three days after leaving Harrisburg. He hadn’t heard back from Hendricks. In fact, he hadn’t heard anything from New York. There seemed to be some kind of problem with ISAC. Comms were unreliable, and the HUD was useless. Aurelio saw people in Clearfield, most of them hanging around a restaurant called Dutch Pantry just off I-80. There were horse-drawn carriages in the parking lot.
Pennsylvania Dutch, he thought. This was Amish country, too. The Amish wouldn’t have been as affected by the loss of electricity; they didn’t use it anyway.
He looked at those wagons again, and had an idea.
25
IKE
Seventy-two hours after presenting the baby to the JTF officer in Stroudsburg, Ike Ronson was in Ohio.
After filing an after-action report with the JTF officer, Ike caught four hours of sleep and was on his way the next morning. He’d asked the officer about a possible ride to Michigan and was told that their whole detachment was staying there until the situation with the I-80 bridge was definitively solved. Anything beyond that was above the officer’s pay grade.
“Best I can do is get you down the road to Bloomsburg,” the officer said. “We’ve got a truck running to pick up a load there.”
“I’ll take it,” Ike said. “By the way, what happened to the baby?”
“We’re looking for someone to take care of it in town here,” the officer said. “Her, I mean. It was a little girl. Lots of people lost kids to the virus. I’m sure someone will take her in.”
So that had Ike feeling a little better about himself as he climbed aboard the truck and headed west across bridges he had saved from being blown up. By oh eight hundred he was on foot, putting Bloomsburg behind him. Stroudsburg, Bloomsburg . . . Pittsburgh. Seemed like every town in Pennsylvania was Somethingburg. He stayed on I-80 as it rose and fell over the Appalachians—or was it the Poconos here? He wasn’t an expert on geography. He did, however, know where Michigan was, so he started walking. By the time the sun went down and he had to look for a place to hole up for the night, he’d covered nearly forty miles.
He was on the outskirts of a town called Mackeyville and had seen fewer than a dozen other human beings since the JTF truck driver that morning. This sure wasn’t New York. At midnight in New York, he would likely as not be on an operation, trying to contain the chaos and violence that seemed to erupt every time the Division turned its attention away from one location to focus on another. Part of that was the collective trauma everyone had experienced being ground zero of the virus. Part of it was the blockade, which had driven already stressed people around the bend. And part of it was the pure fact that without the constraints of law and civilization—or some kind of power greater than themselves—some people just turned into barbarians.
This was what had first made him open to Mantis’s approach when she’d contacted him through an intermediary six weeks or so before.
She was the voice of a new rising power, gathering itself outside the East Coast megalopolis. They saw the damage chaos was doing. They saw how the current government and the JTF weren’t up to the task of restoring order and keeping people safe.
They saw another way. It would be a harder way, at least at first, but if Ike signed on he would be part of a new, stronger America. Was he interested?
Ike had lost his girlfriend and one of his children to the virus. His other two children and his ex-wife had been murdered by a group of lunatic arsonists called the Cleaners in early January. The JTF hadn’t protected them. The Division hadn’t, either. So, yeah, Ike was interested in something better.
Six weeks later, he still was, but he was getting jumpy because he still didn’t know who led this group or what their specific plans were. He believed in their goals, so he had bought in, but he felt like it was about time they started telling him more about who they were and how he was going to fit into their plans. He’d turned his back on the Division for them, and he had civilian deaths on his conscience because of it. They owed him something for that.
Mantis saw it differently, as he found out when he pinged her the morning after he got to Mackeyville. It was forty-eight hours almost to the minute since she’d called him into action back in Manhattan.
“Mantis, this is Sentinel.”
“Mantis here. What is your status, Sentinel?”
He updated her on his current location and the diversion to keep up his cover with the Division. “Probably a good idea, Sentinel,” she said. “But do not divert again. Intercepting and assisting April Kelleher is your only mission now. Conclude it successfully and you will be in a position to take on greater responsibility.”