“So we go?”
“Being out at night could be deadly, for us and them. Let’s get the trucks in the garage. We leave at first light.”
Giovanni spoke to Raffa and Lucca in Italian, and they nodded in unison and strode to the front door, opening it cautiously and looking around, their headlamps flashing in the darkness, before heading out.
Jess clicked her flashlight on again and shone it on Roger. He sat on the wood-beam floor, rubbing the red, flayed skin where his wrists had been bound. Giovanni had started on helping free the women.
“Who the hell were they?” Jess took a step toward Roger. “And how are you even alive?”
Roger squinted into the glare of her high-beam light. “You don’t know how happy I am to see you.” His voice trembled. His face was caked with blood. He held up a shaking hand to shield his eyes.
He raised his right arm, even though she knew he was left-handed. His left shoulder was still wrapped in the same dirty bandage that covered the wound from where Jess had accidentally shot him with a crossbow. At Castello Ruspoli, when they had confronted Nico in his deranged, final attempt to bring closure to a centuries-old vendetta. A bloody feud between his family and the Ruspolis, into which she and her mother had been mistakenly dragged. The whole incident seemed like a long-ago dream. A surreal juxtaposition to the violence and terror of Nomad’s passing.
But it hadn’t been a dream.
Her mother and father were dead.
They weren’t killed by Nico, not directly, but only because Jess had managed to save them, and save the young boy Hector from the lunatic in the final moments as Nomad tore the Earth apart. Her mother and father had died trying to recover her father’s data, the information he’d collected as Harvard’s preeminent astronomer.
Her father had been convinced that his data was the only surviving evidence of Nomad from more than thirty years earlier. He risked his life to recover the backpack containing the data—a collection of old tape spools and CDs, along with his laptop—and had died in the process. Why he’d risked his life, the reason he thought the information was still so valuable, Jess could only guess.
Did it pinpoint some future cosmic collision? Perhaps with Saturn in eighteen months, as Jess had been able to recreate on the simulations on his laptop? Or was it something else, some other event? Or something she couldn’t even guess at?
The only person who might be able to answer this question now sat before her—Roger Hargate, who was her father’s student, and who she had her own relationship with back in New York before any of this began. She knew a lot about Roger Hargate, more than she wanted. How long until he asked if they had any pain medication? Then again, she had impaled a wooden crossbow bolt through his shoulder only a week ago.
Jess clicked her full-beam flashlight off, throwing the hallway into a near darkness illuminated only by their red, low-power headlamps. A gale howled outside, and in her mind’s eye Jess saw her father’s crushed body, frozen on that mountaintop, his face mottled blue. This man had gone out with them. He must have been the last person to see her parents alive. She knelt and looked him in the eye. “What happened, Roger?”
He winced and stared at the floor. “We went out to get his backpack. Just as we got outside, something impacted the castle walls like a bomb. I was knocked out, Jess, and when I came to, everything was black. I was screaming for help. For hours. Somebody found me. They dragged me into a shelter.”
“Who are they? What shelter?”
“At first, I thought they were rescuing people, but it wasn’t like that.”
Jess waited. “What do you mean?”
“They were collecting people, rounding them up.”
“For what?”
“We were loaded onto trucks. I don’t know what they were going to do with us.” He covered his eyes in the crook of his elbow. His body shuddered.
“What are you saying, Roger?” It seemed impossible that scavengers had organized themselves to traffic in human beings, not in a little more than a week, but then, she’d already seen some of the horrible things people could do to each other. Her skin crawled. “How many of them were there?”
“A small group. Five or six men.”
“And they’ve already modified their cars like that? For snow?”
Giovanni sniffed. “Italians and cars, no big surprise.”
“They saw you on the road,” Roger added. “They had me tied up in the back.”
“So they followed us?” Jess said. “They were hunting us?”
The front door swung open and Jess spun on her heel, bringing her rifle up. Leone’s bald head shone ghostly gray, with wisps of white hair floating above it. At waist level, a small white face. Hector. She lowered her rifle, kneeling as he ran toward her, scooping him up into her arms. His little hands dug into her neck, squeezing her tight.
“It’s okay,” she whispered.
Leone followed, loaded with backpacks and carrying a crate in his arms. The old man must have started unpacking before Jess had even decided to stay. She felt some relief with the decision being shared, and she smiled at Leone.
“Chi è?” he grunted, squinting at Roger and the two women still tied to the radiator.
“Ah, this is Roger, un amico del professor Rollins,” Giovanni said. “The women, we don’t know.”
Leone stopped mid-stride. “Amico de professore Rollins? Who came with him from Germania?” He spoke only broken English. His eyes narrowed.
“He was kidnapped by those men,” Jess added, swiveling her body around so Hector could see Roger.
“Okay.” Leone dropped the crate and backpacks to the floor. The edges of his mouth stretched down. Strange, his face said. “And her?” He pointed to the front door, at Massarra, the slender, brown-skinned, blue-eyed woman. She stood by the front door, seeming halfway in and out at the same time, jumpy perhaps but somehow not frightened.
“She was the woman you followed, the one who drove me to the castle, you remember?”
“I never saw the face.”
“That’s her.”
Leone shrugged, and seeing he had nothing else to add, exited to the garage.
Jess had first met Massarra in Rome, when the woman had helped her after she was locked out of her apartment. It was just before the Vatican was bombed, just when all the madness had started, and Massarra had perhaps saved her and her mothers’ lives by driving them from Rome to Castello Ruspoli. Without Massarra, Jess might not have been here, might not even have survived. She’d already had a brief word with Massarra, who said she’d tried to return to the castle when she became trapped in Italy.
“Who are they?” Jess gestured to the women with Roger. They huddled together silently, their eyes skittish, darting from her to Roger and back again.
“I have no idea.” Roger struggled to his feet. “They don’t speak any English.”
Giovanni knelt beside one of them, whispering in Italian. She sobbed and wrapped her arms around his neck as he freed her.
The walls shook as the Humvee rumbled into the garage next door, followed by the softer growls of the Range Rover and Jeep. Car doors opened and slammed shut. The double doors to the hallway swung open, spilling reflected headlight into the room. Jess cast a long shadow over Roger and Giovanni and the women. Lucca and Raffa started unloading the cars to pile equipment in the hallway.
Jess put Hector down. “Get some blankets,” she said softly, nodding at the women, now untied. Hector followed her eyes, then ran off to the boxes Raffa and Lucca were stacking.
“Did you come to rescue me?” Roger pulled two chairs from a stack near the wall and motioned for the women to sit.
Shaking her head, Jess shouldered her rifle. “I had no idea you were alive.”
Helping the women onto the chairs, Giovanni exchanged a few words. He looked at Jess. “They’re okay. I’ll set up the radio.”
“Get the boys to see if they can find anything of use in the Euromobile next door.” The gas station. N
ot everything from the old world had been scavenged. Not yet.
Lucca unfurled the sleeping mats, while Raffa set up the cooking table. Leone worked on venting the wood stove he’d dragged from the back of the Humvee. Three days on the road, and everyone knew their jobs.
“So what are you doing here?” Roger asked, getting two more chairs.
Hector came over with blankets and bottles of water for the two women, which they accepted, mumbling, grazie, grazie. Tears streamed down their faces.
“We’re…” Jess paused.
“They don’t speak English, trust me.” Roger dropped a chair beside her, and sat heavily on one himself.
She shifted from one foot to the other, still keeping her eyes on the women. “We’re going south. Giovanni has family in Tunisia, in the Atlas mountains. Beyond that, into Libya. It’s still warm there. There’s rain in the Sahara.”
“How do you know?”
Jess nodded in Giovanni’s direction. “Shortwave. Most electronics were fried, but shortwave works for long distances. We’re in touch with dozens of survivor stations. A lot of people left alive out there. At least for now.”
Roger brought one hand to his mouth to chew on his thumbnail. “Did Ben get his data?”
Jess took a long look at him. “I got it.” She felt the weight of her father’s tape spools and laptop in her backpack. She never took it off, even when she slept.
He rubbed the back of his neck. “At least you have what he wanted. Can’t imagine it’s of any use to anyone now.”
“What was so important?” Her voice cracked, despite her best efforts to remain calm. Roger had worked with her father for years. Maybe he knew something more than she did.
“Ben tried to publish that paper thirty years ago, the one hypothesizing about Nomad. A lucky guess.” He grimaced. “Maybe not so lucky. Nobody paid attention at the time.”
“But they have now.” Giovanni finished setting up a folding table and unspooled the radio’s antenna, draping it over pictures along the wall. “It’s been all over the radios. The famous Dr. Ben Rollins on TV, saying to stay calm, but somebody dug up that old research paper.”
“They’re saying it proves he knew about it.” Jess spat the words out. “But it’s not true.”
Roger held her gaze. “It wasn’t true. He didn’t know. But the information in that old paper wasn’t accurate. He made mistakes calculating Nomad’s position thirty years ago. That’s why he thought what was in the bags was so important. Those are the originals.”
Maybe it was important, maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it was just her father’s guilt. For Jess it was an act of faith. Her father had died for this bag. She swung the backpack around and cradled it in her lap. “It’s all tape spools and CDs, stuff from twenty or thirty years ago. Can you decode it?”
“Maybe. But we should go back to the castle and wait for help. It’s too dangerous out here.” He pulled the blanket tight around him, his body shaking.
“Help?” Jess understood what Roger hoped for, understood the terror, but this new world wasn’t forgiving, and she was fighting for more than just her own life.
“There’s no help coming,” Giovanni said, sitting in front of his radio. He switched it on, pulling out a sheaf of papers. “We’re getting broadcasts from many survivor camps, but nothing from governments.”
“But traveling through that”—Roger held one shaking hand toward the front door—“is madness. How do we even go south?” He turned to Giovanni. “Do you have a ship?”
Giovanni was busy tuning the shortwave, but managed a shrug. “We drive. We walk.”
Roger’s eyes grew wide. “Across water?”
“Across ice.” Jess shouldered her backpack. “It’s going to get colder, maybe for years, maybe decades. Maybe forever. If we don’t go now, we die.”
NOVEMBER 2nd
Nine Days A.N.
3
FOUR BODIES HUDDLED together in terror, a mother cradling two children, a man with his arms around them, all their faces turned in toward each other. Their bodies glittered in the cold light of Jess’s LED flashlight, their features softened by a frosted coating of ice crystals and ash. Frozen in time forever. Even before Nomad, Jess had seen bodies crouched together like this when she had visited Pompeii, Romans that had been trapped by the rushing mud and gasses of the explosion of that ancient volcano. Jess took a moment to say a small prayer, to let herself feel sadness at this lost family, but at least their struggle was over. Death’s unbroken winning streak now littered the entire world with frozen corpses.
“What should we do with them?” Giovanni wasn’t referring to the four dead souls. He stroked his chin, purposely not turning to look at Elsa and Rita, the two women they’d saved the night before. They were asleep, curled up under a pile of blankets near the wood stove, next to the double doors leading into the garage.
It was five a.m., still pitch black outside.
Flames flickered in the hearth of the stove, radiating warmth, the comforting scent of burning wood struggling to overcome the pervasive stench of sulfur. The women slept under the improvised ductwork vent Leone had built from the back of it into the garage outside. A dim brown light seeped in through the high arched windows in the front of the hall. Massarra stood by the front door, peering out the window. Jess hadn’t seen her sleep, although Jess hadn’t really slept herself. Roger sat on a crate near the wood stove. He fiddled with the controls of the shortwave.
“Non abbiamo scelta. We leave them,” grunted Leone. The old man had stood watch over their new arrivals all night.
“Si,” agreed Giovanni. “We leave them some food, some water.”
“We need Roger,” Jess said, her gaze still fixed on the frozen corpses. She squeezed the remainder of a ration pack of chili into her mouth. Some breakfast. At least it was warm. “And I won’t leave Massarra.” The woman had probably saved her and her mother’s life in Rome, so bringing her was the least she could do to repay some of this debt. Giovanni had said what she’d done didn’t matter, that it was ancient history and they had to look forward to survive.
“You need Roger?”
“I said we.” Jess clicked off her flashlight and turned to Giovanni. “He has a degree in astrophysics.”
“Say again, Jolly Roger. Do you read me?” From across the hallway, Roger’s voice echoed as he tried to make himself heard over the shortwave.
Giovanni had told him about the survivor groups he’d contacted on the radio and the logs he kept, shown him the shortwave and explained the trouble he had keeping in touch with them. Roger had explained to Giovanni how shortwaves bounced off the ionosphere, and theorized about how Nomad might have altered the upper atmosphere, explaining the static as ionization, the day and night cycles.
“We have food for five adults for four months,” Giovanni said as he watched Roger play with the radio’s controls. “Maybe six if we ration. For nine people we last three months at most.”
They had five hundred more miles of overland travel to the south of Sicily, and then a walk of a hundred or more across sea ice, and who knew what beyond that? The drive here, fifty miles, took three days—often negotiating twisted knots of frozen magma that they had to winch the trucks over.
“And in cold weather we are consuming even more energy,” Giovanni added. “Maybe four thousand—”
“Our mission is to figure out what’s in this bag.” Jess cocked her thumb at her backpack. “Anything that helps me do that, is what we need to do.”
“No.”
“What do you mean, no?”
“Our mission, if you must put it like this, is to stay alive. Only if we are alive do we figure out what’s in that bag. To stay alive, we need to get south. Doubling the number of people in our party risks our lives.”
Jess clicked on her flashlight again to illuminate the corpses. “I’m not saying we take all of them.”
“So we leave the women, just take Roger and Massarra?” Giovanni said. “You believe their s
tories?”
“Something is not right,” Leone grunted, gesturing to the women, but not saying any more. Instead, the old man shrugged and shuffled away toward the stove where they slept.
“A lot of things aren’t right.” Jess clicked off her light again. She turned to face Giovanni. “Massarra came back looking for help, our help, and without her I wouldn’t even be here.”
“This is no time for—”
“For what? Abandoning someone who risked her life for me? And I need Roger. Maybe this is finally some good luck.”
“It is a risk. That is all I am saying.”
“If we come across any big encampment, any kind of survivors’ commune or trace of organized activity, we’ll drop them off. At least Massarra. The two women, we leave here with some food and some gear to help them get by.”
Giovanni’s face remained blank. Eventually, he nodded and walked away to join Leone and begin packing.
The night before had turned heated during a discussion of the plan to head south. The layer of snow and ash covering the ground grew steadily deeper each day as temperatures plummeted. It was ten below freezing at midnight, and barely a few degrees above that inside the room, even with the wood stove going. Roger had been adamant that they should go back to the castle and dig in, wait for the outside world to get organized. Giovanni was equally as convinced that such a course would be disaster.
Either way, the odds were against them surviving for long.
For Jess, back at the castle, part of the deciding factor in going south was to find someone to decode her father’s data. He’d sacrificed his life to retrieve it. It might be the only surviving record of the Nomad’s trajectory from thirty years ago. Was it valuable? Her father had been desperate to retrieve it, and she trusted that it therefore had to be more important than they could know. Jess needed to go south, to the growing city in the Sahara desert, at an oil refinery in Al-Jawf, Libya, the only place they’d contacted that still had some technical capacity. They were in nearly constant contact with Al-Jawf. It was raining there every day. Life might be possible in the south.
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 2