All alone.
Just how she liked it.
She propped her SBR in a corner, then placed her pistol and Gerber on the dresser next to the television. Next, she shrugged off her coat and hat, tossing both on the overstuffed leather pub chair angled into the corner between the west-facing sliding door and a narrow window overlooking north Springs.
The blackout curtain on the slider was ajar just enough that a sliver of failing light from the westering sun could be seen peeking around one edge.
For a split-second she was inside the farmhouse east of Woodruff, staring at the papered-over picture windows. There were slivers of light there, too. Only when she had peered out, she didn’t see her park and bench and the perimeter wall beyond; instead, her dad had been out there, rifle trained down the narrow gravel drive and trading fire with men on motorcycles. Brass shell casings arced away from the stuttering M4. As the soldiers fell, more were arriving, and with them came the sense of foreboding that had been with her ever since that awful day.
As the growing feeling of dread threatened to take her to dark places she didn’t want to revisit, a loud bang in the room next door spared her the pain of doing so.
Ignoring the smartly made king bed beckoning to her, she skirted the centrally located coffee table, made her way to the shared interior door, and pressed an ear to its cool surface.
Listening hard, she detected a low murmur of voices, hollow thuds of footsteps, and snippets of laughter.
Having decided to just show her face before retiring to the solitude of her room, she unlocked her interior door, pulled it open, and knocked hard on the door to the Founders Suite.
Chapter 13
No sooner had Raven dropped her hand to her side and stepped back from the walnut-paneled door, did all conversation cease and someone’s approach was announced by a bustle of heavy footfalls.
There was no Who is it? or Raven?—instead, without warning, the door sucked open and she was staring Tran in the face. The slight Asian American was smiling wide and there was a certain twinkle in his liquid brown eyes. On his head, covering his new high-and-tight haircut, was a red hat decorated with Ferrari’s prancing horse logo.
Parking his hands on his hips, he asked, “Why are you back so soon?”
Raven noticed he was wearing what had come to be his new uniform: ‘80s-era BDU pants in a woodland camo pattern, the cuffs of which were tucked into black combat boots and smartly bloused. Worn over a black thermal underwear top was a black North Face vest. He wore the vest unzipped, which allowed easy access to the Beretta riding in a paddle holster at about four o’clock on his right hip.
“I’m pretty beat,” she said, staring at the man’s unlined and clean-shaven face. There was no consensus among the younger crowd concerning his true age. Because Tran had once mentioned coming to America as a teenager after the Vietnam war, Wilson insisted he had to be closer to fifty in age than sixty—which was exactly the opposite of how Duncan described his own age when the topic was broached.
When asked, much to everyone’s chagrin, Tran would coyly say: “Older than Daymon, but younger than Old Man.”
Tran tipped his hat to Raven. “Come in,” he insisted. “Everyone is just waiting for dinner.” The smile was back as he told her he had a pot of rabbit stew warming on the stove downstairs in the kitchen.
Raven shook her head. Craning to see past the door jamb, she said, “Thanks, Tran … but I’m not hungry. Just checking in. That’s all.”
Turned out Duncan was mostly wrong about what he thought Raven would find upon coming home. He was spot-on about the peace and quiet component—that was nowhere to be found and would only become more elusive after dinner when the board games came out. Conversely, his prediction that either Wilson and Sasha would be at each other’s throats, or Peter and Sasha would be French kissing, was all wrong.
Sitting on the loveseat across the room, twenty-one-year-old Wilson and nineteen-year-old Taryn were the ones making kissy face.
Across from the recently married couple, Sasha lounged sideways in a pub chair identical to the one in Raven’s room. She had one pants leg rolled up to the knee and the leg propped on a plush pillow.
On bent knee and rubbing on the redheaded teen’s slow-to-heal ankle some kind of salve no doubt touted to have therapeutic and restorative qualities, blond-haired, blue-eyed Peter Dregan stopped what he was doing long enough to flash a smile at Raven.
Tamping down a flare of jealousy, Raven reciprocated and quickly broke eye contact with the recently orphaned thirteen-year-old.
“Come in,” repeated Tran.
“Looks like everyone is busy,” Raven said. She looked left and right, then made a face. “Where’s Max?”
Upon hearing his name, the brindle Australian shepherd rose up from a second pub chair, yawned, and jumped to the floor. Stub tail twitching a mile-a-minute, Max threaded his way between the furniture spread about the finely appointed room. Arriving at the threshold between rooms, he sat by Tran’s feet and looked up at Raven.
“Sasha walked him around noon.” Tran looked at his watch. “Peter took him to the park to do his business … oh, about an hour ago.” He reached into a pocket and brought out two baggies. “Kibble for Max. Venison jerky for you.”
Taking both baggies, Raven pointed to her room, then made a fist.
Following the commands, Max padded past her and sat on the carpet, his gaze locked firmly on the two baggies.
“Yes,” Raven said, tossing him a couple of treats. “Good boy.”
“You trained him well,” Tran said.
Nope, she thought, the family I used for target practice at Schriever trained him well.
She said, “That was all his old family’s doing. We just had to learn what they taught him and the commands he understands. My mom did most of the work.”
Wilson called out from across the room, “You playing Monopoly tonight?”
Raven stood on her toes to peer around Tran and wagged her head. “I’m beat,” she lied.
Tran said, “Well, he’s a good boy,” and scratched Max behind the ears. He regarded Raven again. “Want me to bring you a bowl of stew when it’s ready?”
She shook her head. “I’ve got some stuff to snack on.”
Tran tilted his head to one side. “You’re not going up to Penrose today?”
Raven said nothing. Just hit him with the thousand-yard stare.
“All right,” Tran said, his sing-song voice taking a serious tone. “If you need anything, you know where you can find me.”
It was precisely the response Raven was expecting. She was used to the man looking out for her. After all, it was one of her dad’s last requests. And Tran was taking it seriously. In fact, all of the adults had rallied around her and become a sort of extended parental unit.
As Tran was closing the door to the Founders Suite, Sasha began shouting expletives at Wilson.
With zero regret about her decision to isolate instead of listen to that for the next couple of hours, Raven backed into her room, shut the door, and threw the lock.
Sighing, she peeled off her gloves and shrugged out of her plate carrier and tossed them on the pub chair with her coat and hat. After doling out some more kibble for Max, she took a strip of jerky for herself and began taking off the rest of her gear.
She removed the empty drop-thigh rig and belt it rode on, stuffed the Glock back in the holster, scooped up the Gerber, then slipped it and the gun belt underneath one of the pillows on the bed. The SBR—round chambered, safety on—went against the wall between the bed and knotty-pine nightstand nearest to the window. Unlacing her Danners, she put them at the foot of the bed, toes facing the door to the unused room.
Every piece of kit got put in the same place.
Every time.
No deviation.
Duncan had come up with a theory as to why, when arriving at Springs together, they found the top floors of The Antlers uninhabited. He figured people were afraid of getting t
rapped in the building should a horde breach the wall. The one thing the thousands of survivors inside the walls shared was the collective horror they’d endured to get to Springs. No doubt the majority of them spent time hiding from the dead. Maybe on the upper floor of their home or trapped in the stifling heat of their attic.
Lord knows she’d seen her share of furniture choked stairways during her travels outside the wire. Hell, she remembered seeing on more than one occasion entire runs of stairs removed completely, some kind of easily deployable ladder taking their place.
Raven wasn’t too worried, though. Before spending one night on the thirteenth floor, she had located all of the stairwells. By day two she had attached to the deck railing two hundred feet of Petzl 10mm climbing rope Daymon had helped her acquire. Stuffed into the slider handle was a pair of thick leather gloves she’d found in the groundskeeper’s closet downstairs.
The gloves and rope were her insurance plan should the worst-case scenario came to fruition.
No way she was getting trapped up here.
Staring at her reflection on the television’s blank screen, she undressed down to her thermal top and bottoms. She folded the sweater and black BDUs, then placed them on the floor next to her boots.
Max had been watching her the entire time, head cocked to one side, taking it all in.
Getting down to the dog’s level, Raven said, “You’re lucky … all you have is your fur.” She gave him a kiss on the head then planted her palms on the rug.
With little effort and barely breaking a sweat, she performed fifty near-perfect push-ups, fifty so-so sit-ups, and fifty textbook crunches. All of this she did with Max looking on with canine indifference.
After rising from the floor, she went to the closet and took two articles of clothing from their hangers. She slipped the green sweatshirt over her head. It was threadbare, stained with something that no amount of washing would remove, and still a half size too big for her. None of that mattered. That it still carried Brooklyn Grayson’s scent was all that did. The second item was so big that she was nearly lost in it the one time she had tried it on. The nearly new Crye Precision top bore MultiCam pattern on the neck and sleeves and still had her dad’s scent all over it.
Wadding the top into a ball, she climbed onto the bed and invited Max to join her.
As she lazily stroked his coat, her face buried in fabric that reminded her of better times, the idea of dragging the sat-phone from her pack and placing a call to Penrose came to her.
Almost instantaneously coming to the conclusion that she would just hear a variation of the same old story, she instead switched off the lamp, crawled under the covers, and closed her eyes.
Chapter 14
For Raven, for once in a long, long while, her dreams were good. So good that she subconsciously cursed the electronic trill trying to drag her from a deep REM sleep.
“No,” she cried, half in, half out of consciousness. “Mom, Dad … don’t go.”
She came to with the sensation of hot breath tickling her cheek. Then there was a blurry snout entering her field of view. Before she could mount a defense, Max was planting a sloppy, good morning dog kiss right on her mouth.
The trilling continued even as she was wiping the dog spit on a sleeve and shoving Max back over to his side of the king bed.
Sitting up, Raven saw that the sliver of light around the window had changed from a pus-like gray to a shade of purple closer to lavender than that of Barney, the goofy dinosaur on the television show she used to watch as a kid.
A quick glance at her watch told her it was close to five in the morning. A simple computation in her head told her she’d been asleep for nearly twelve hours.
Her first thought once the cobwebs of a good night’s sleep began to drift away was that she needed to get to her backpack to answer the noisy phone. Her second priority, she quickly decided, was that Max had better be taken outside to do his business before he went on the floor.
As Raven’s stockinged feet hit the carpeted floor, the phone went silent. She hustled over to her pack and jammed her arm in.
Her fingertips brushed the Iridium handset’s smooth case at the same moment the trilling started anew.
Stabbing a finger on the green Talk key, she answered the call with a curt, “What?” Her eyes suddenly narrowed and she listened for fifteen long seconds.
Ending the call without the normal pleasantries, she made like a dervish: throwing on her clothes and gear. Gunning up, she strapped the Gerber to her belt and stepped into her boots. Finished lacing the Danners, she approached the slider and pulled the curtain aside. Downstairs in the park, her bench was still awash in shadow. Though nothing new had fallen overnight, the coverage from several days’ worth of snowfall remained.
Beyond the perimeter walls, Garden of the Gods’ majestic rock spires were glowing red and orange after having just been hit by the first direct light of morning.
Hoping to rouse someone whose nature leaned more toward malleable than prying, she opened her interior door and banged a fist on the Founders Suite door.
A minute later the door opened.
At once Raven learned her harried knocks had summoned a person who fell into the malleable category.
Surprise in her voice, she said, “Peter?” Before the teen could break sleep’s hold and posit a greeting, she was placing Max’s leash in his hand and ordering him to get dressed so he could take the dog outside.
Voice barely a whisper, Peter said, “It’s happening again … isn’t it?”
Granite set to her jaw, Raven simply nodded.
Peter pinched the bridge of his nose and looked down at the carpet. “Anything for you,” he said. “I still owe you for saving my butt.”
“Thank you,” Raven said. “Pretty soon we’ll be even.”
Peter rubbed his eyes and yawned. Without another word, he turned and led Max away.
Raven closed both doors and pulled the slider curtains shut. Leaving the SBR, her plate carrier, and the MOLLE rig behind, she stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her.
While waiting for the elevator, she slipped the phone into a pocket, took the time to press check the Glock, then stuffed the extra magazines for it into a cargo pocket.
For once the elevator was reliable, depositing her at the lobby without stalling or stopping between floors.
A twenty-something tenant Raven recognized was pulling guard duty at the lobby desk. She put down the Dean Koontz novel she’d been reading, stood up from the rolling chair, and met Raven in front of the desk.
“Going to school early today?”
Not in the mood for chit-chat, Raven said, “It’s Christmas break,” and picked up her pace.
Sitting just outside the locked doors and taking up a good portion of the loading area was a purple GMC dually pickup. Wisps of exhaust floated over the pavers, ghosting around the big tires and wending their way underneath the jacked-up 4x4.
Inside the warmth of the idling GMC, with a Hank Williams Jr. standby playing softly over the high-end sound system, Duncan was draped over the wheel and staring in the direction of the dimly lit lobby.
Seeing a pair of silhouettes flit across the lobby, one of them small of stature and walking with purpose, Duncan rolled the volume down and popped the passenger door lock. Then, going against all noise discipline protocols in place, and not giving two shits about waking anyone, he laid on the horn.
As the guard called Eve worked her keys in the lock, she said, “Who is this asshole?”
Raven said, “My crazy uncle.”
“Duncan?”
Raven nodded.
“That’s not like him,” Eve said.
The honking stopped abruptly only to be replaced by the rising rumble of the pickup’s high-revving V8.
Eve shoved the slider aside and made a sweeping gesture. “Stay safe out there.”
Raven simply nodded and pulled her collar up against the below-freezing temperature. As she hustled to her
awaiting ride, her eyes were drawn to the row of buildings two blocks to the east. Backlit by the rising sun, the structures looked to have been honed from black obsidian.
The door hinged open in front of Raven, the handle at chin-level. As it continued a slow sweep by her face, she trapped it with one hand. Taking hold of the strategically placed grab bars, she stepped up onto the deployed powered running boards and monkeyed her way into the cab.
Duncan had the GMC rolling before Raven was buckled in. As he steered onto Cascade heading north, he hit her with a serious look. “Things are going to be different this time.” There was a brief pause, during which Duncan looked away. With the truck eating up the blocks toward Penrose, he added, “I promise.”
Though twelve-plus years of conditioning dictated Raven smile when presented with good news, all she could muster was a slight head bob.
Chapter 15
Colorado Springs Northern District
Trusting the combination of the GMC’s four-wheel drive and its meaty all-weather tires to handle the packed snow covering Jackson Street, Duncan slewed right off of the plowed boulevard without a thought to applying the brakes. Powering through the turn, he stayed on Jackson until reaching the nearest parking lot, where he slipped his rig between a pair of Chevy Tahoes belonging to the Penrose security force. From the looks of the foot of snow atop the rigs, their last patrol had taken place long ago.
Raven had unbuckled her seatbelt and was out the door before Duncan had brought his monster of a pickup to a complete halt. She had sprinted across the road and made the sidewalk before Duncan had shut down the V8.
Someone had taken the time to shovel the sidewalks and driveway leading up to the nearest entrance. With the liberal application of rock salt crunching underfoot, Raven bounded up the stairs and came to a halt in front of a pair of lightly tinted glass doors. Unlike the sliding door at the main entry to the hotel, this one was operational and parted the moment she triggered its motion sensor.
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