Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  “That wouldn’t surprise me.”

  “And ten million stupid ones, and a hundred million cowards. The evil men are the power—the politicians, the rich, the fanatics of religion. The cowards are the bureaucrats and paper pushers who are just doing their jobs. The billions of others that existed here were just cattle herded, but I fear the cattle are gone.”

  “So much for the meek inheriting the Earth.”

  “When we spoke of Nomad, around the fire, do you remember?” Massarra asked. “You said your father knew of Nomad, years ago.”

  Just weeks ago, but in a different world. “I was mad at him,” Jess admitted after a pause. “He didn’t know about Nomad.”

  Massarra laid a hand on Jess’s arm. “But you said—”

  “He was supposed to meet us, but he got dragged to Germany. It was stupid, what I said. I said he lied, but I wasn’t speaking about Nomad.” Jess shrugged away from the woman. “What does it matter? I shouldn’t have said it.”

  Massarra watched Jess ski off ahead of her. She waited a long time before following.

  The Humvee roared, wreaths of smoke rising from its engine. The new rear-wheel tank treads clattered against ice clinging to the ruptured spur of earth they were trying to cross. A haze rolled in from the west on a breeze, the sun a weary smudge in the orange pall over their heads.

  Jess watched the action from a distance. Hector nestled beside her as he finished off the last of the stew they’d made with the rabbit Roger caught on his hunting trip the day before. It had redeemed him a little in the eyes of Giovanni, and Elsa had fawned over him when he returned.

  “Start the winch!”

  Lucca leaned out of the driver side window of the Humvee and gave a thumbs-up. The winch’s high-geared electric motor whined, and Lucca gunned the engine again. The wheel-tracks tore into the ice, and the truck clawed its way up a foot, slid back two feet, then juddered up three. Jess looked left and right, at the rocky spine rising from the ground, a deep fracturing of the earth that stretched north and south as far as she could see into the murky distance.

  They’d spent a day camped at the intersection after making the decision to convert the Humvee. That whole day it snowed—or something resembling snow—a flesh-colored ice-dust that covered everything in a putrid blanket. Giovanni thought it would only take a few hours to make the modifications, but it had taken most of one day just to use the sleds to pull the tractor rims and tracks from the garage.

  Jess got her first taste of what it would be like to haul equipment and supplies across ice and snow, pulling the gear across the less-than-half-mile open field. Giovanni had an easier time of it, more accustomed to sleds and skis, but it was torture for Jess. The constant pulling-pressure of her stump against the ill-fitting prosthetic made it excruciating.

  Sitting in the warmth of the castle caves a week ago, the prospect of sledding a hundred miles on foot seemed like a challenge, but reality had set in. Maybe by themselves, Jess and Giovanni might be able to manage some distance, might be able to cheat death in the snow and ice—but with Hector, and with their one-and-a-half tons of supplies? She couldn’t even imagine how it would be possible, but it didn’t stop her resolve from pushing forward.

  After finishing and testing the modifications the night before, they left at first light. The new tank treads worked beautifully for the first few miles, but the snow deepened. In low gear, the Humvee ground its way forward and managed walking speed, but at least it worked. The sled-skis raised the truck off the snow enough, and the new tank-tread rear wheels crunched into the ice beneath, driving the truck forward, compacting the ice-slurry enough for the Range Rover to follow with its chained wheels. The Jeep followed in their tracks.

  When they encountered a crevasse, they went around. When they really got stuck, they winched. This was their third winch-stop of the day. Night was falling. Jess stood on the tailgate of the open rear of the Range Rover, digging through the boxes and packsacks while she waited for the Humvee to crest the ridge. She’d just finished emptying supplies from the Humvee so it could climb easier, and had totally cleared out the Jeep. It kept getting stuck in the snow, its clearance not quite high enough.

  “Are there any more tents?” she asked Roger. Hector got up from beside her and fished a handful of snow to clean his plate. A trick Giovanni had shown him. He presented her his handiwork, dropped the plate in the kitchen box, and scuttled off to join his uncle.

  “Just the three on top,” Roger replied from the front seat, headphones on, cycling frequencies on the shortwave.

  She added them to her inventory. At each stop they’d scavenged anything and everything they could, so she wanted a clearer idea of what they had, but more importantly, she was certain things seemed to be missing. A whole box of truck parts was gone.

  She scanned her growing list: six tents, eight sleeping bags, four sleeping mats, twelve blankets, nine fleece tops and sweaters and three complete sets of outdoor wet gear. Keeping things dry, never mind clean, was almost impossible, and the wetter and dirtier it got, the less it kept out the cold. And it was getting colder by the day. Minus twelve Celsius the night before.

  Four ice axes, their two semi-automatic AKs, a Remington .308 caliber rifle with scope and four handguns as defensive weapons. A few boxes of cartridges and shells, plus four grenades, squat gray tubes swaddled in foam packing. Add to that a two-hundred-year-old crossbow with a dozen bolts, a sword and three daggers that they’d salvaged from the castle armory museum. Weapons that had already saved them once.

  “So if Civitavecchia has ships working, what about jets, helicopters?” Jess asked. On the shortwave, she’d talked to the people running the sea rescue operations, a stitched-together patchwork of emergency workers.

  “The ash in the air would melt the turbines of jets,” Roger replied. “Same with turboprops, but older-model propeller planes work, and maybe non-turbine helicopters. A few of the survivor camps have them.”

  “Any near here?”

  “Not for a thousand miles.”

  Jess stacked two backpacks of clothing to one side, and counted one, two, three parachutes. She was a skydiver and BASE jumper—but she couldn't imagine they would be doing much of either. The silk fabric could be used for bedding or shelter, and was well packed. The parasailing kit was another matter. Giovanni had thought they might be able to pull him along behind one of the trucks, to get an aerial view if needed.

  Wishful thinking, given the limited visibility, but Jess wasn’t ready to throw it away yet. Instinct made her want to keep it around, just in case—in case of what, she didn’t know, but then they were facing the unknown. A set of scuba tanks rested beneath it, with three regulators and masks but no flippers. Not for the water, but in case of noxious fumes. A compressor was lashed to the sidewall.

  “Why are you asking?” Roger pulled his headphones off.

  Jess wasn’t ready to talk about the smudge in the sky she thought she saw. She looked up from her inventory sheet. “Just curious.”

  Roger switched off the radio.

  She sat next to him on the Range Rover’s tailgate and watched the Humvee scrape its way up the ridge. At the base of the ridge, beside the Jeep, they’d stacked the fuel canisters and food. She looked at her inventory. They kept a reserve of a hundred liters of distilled water, and tried to use the water filters as much as possible. Melting snow was a long process, but Giovanni insisted they all stay properly hydrated as much as they could. Ninety liters of distilled water remained after five days on the road.

  At least they’d never be in the dark: a hundred packs of twelve AAA batteries meant they could run their ten headlamps at full power for half a year uninterrupted. They had a full toolkit of spanners and wrenches, vise grips and anything else they’d need to fix the vehicles, along with a thousand feet of yellow nylon cordage, and eight hundred-and-fifty-foot climbing ropes and six harnesses. Add to that the high-tensile steel cable on the two winches on the fronts of the truck, three hundre
d feet on the Humvee and two hundred on the Range Rover. They packed all of Giovanni’s expedition gear onto the roof of the Range Rover. Four sleds, two of which were now on the front of the Humvee itself.

  They carried with them two thousand pounds of fuel, half of it for the trucks and the other half for humans.

  After Jess had warned of Nomad, Giovanni had converted the caves under Ruspoli Castle into a survival bunker. They couldn’t take everything he’d stored there, but for their expedition they packed three hundred pounds of rice in thirty ten-pound sacks, two hundred cans of spam, ten twenty-pound bags of chickpeas, a hundred pounds of beef jerky and a hundred liters of olive oil. Add to that two hundred and forty pounds of emergency food bars, nearly three thousand of them with three hundred calories each.

  This half-ton load of food added up to over two million calories, enough for five people to eat for six months. Jess wanted to pack lighter to move faster, but Giovanni had insisted they plan for the worst. While a human needed about two thousand calories a day, arctic explorers sometimes used up three times that, he’d explained, in exertion and fighting off the cold.

  Then came the diesel and gasoline.

  They filled the trucks up before they left, of course; twenty-three gallons into the Range Rover, twenty-five into the Humvee and twenty into the Jeep. Their fuel consumption varied; just seven miles-per-gallon for the Humvee, even modified for high mileage, with up to eighteen miles-per-gallon for the Jeep and the Range Rover in between.

  The drive was five hundred miles to the tip of Sicily, so Giovanni had made a rough guess and packed about enough to refuel each vehicle twice; using twenty-liter German-style military canisters, they filled eight with gasoline, eight with diesel and nine with kerosene. The kerosene could be used for heating and light as well as fueling the diesel trucks, although it would burn hotter and might damage the engines over a long time, but they didn’t need more than a week or two.

  Twenty-five canisters, at forty pounds each, made a thousand pounds of explosive petrochemicals strapped to their roof racks. So far they had so much fuel they hadn’t even bothered to check cars they passed.

  More or less, it should have given them a range of a thousand miles, but the deep snow and constant back and forth driving had used far more per linear-mile traveled. Even so, by ditching trucks and lightening their load as they went, they could consolidate everything and everyone into the Humvee and still make the distance. With the new tank-treads, Jess thought they might even be able to cross sea-ice with the Humvee, but Giovanni insisted it would be impossible.

  “I don’t see why? We can try,” she’d protested.

  “You’ll see. Walking is the only way,” he’d replied.

  Screeching metal tore against rock, the Humvee’s engine growling a staccato roar, like hammers hitting sheet metal.

  “Brutto figlio di puttana bastardo!” Giovanni unleashed a torrent of expletive Italian from the top of the ridge, and Lucca answered back something.

  The engine noise stopped.

  “Everything okay?” Jess called out. The truck, two hundred feet away, was almost lost in the blue haze.

  The engine turned over, wheezed once, twice, and roared back to life, but now a weeping squeak whined from somewhere inside it.

  Giovanni didn’t answer. The tank-treads clattered against the ice and the Humvee disappeared into the gloom, climbing to the top of the ridge.

  Jess noticed Leone doubled over next to the stacked gas canisters, his face contorted. “What is it, Leone?” She took a closer look at him. He looked ill.

  Leone noticed her watching him, and he straightened up and smiled at her, lowering his head and shaking it. He was fine, his expression said.

  Suddenly, Giovanni yelled at her from the top of the ridge. “Jess! Jess! Come up here. You need to see this!”

  The high-pitched whine of the winch’s engine pierced the fog with a hollow clinking sound that echoed. He was lowering the winch harness, with three hollow aluminum tubes lashed to the hook with yellow cord. It slid down the slope toward her. Jess tossed her inventory papers onto the sacks in the rear of the Range Rover.

  “Roger, come with me.” He’d just turned the shortwave back on.

  He looked up, his headlamp blinding her. “Why?”

  “Just come.”

  He clicked the radio off after a second of hesitation and shrugged.

  They trudged through two feet of blue snow, picked up the aluminum-rope harness and stepped into it, first Jess, then Roger. “Okay?” she asked.

  Roger nodded. “Good to go.”

  “Pull us up!” Jess yelled.

  The winch’s engine whined to life, the steel cable going taut, almost pulling Jess and Roger from their feet. They regained their balance and stepped up the slope with the winch hauling them.

  “I can use the shortwave to transmit data,” Roger said. “Pretty sure I can code up something to use the laptop’s microphone as an audible modem.”

  Jess quick-stepped forward, watching for patches of ice.

  “I talked to one of the engineers at Al-Jawf,” Roger continued. “He has old software, x86 code, for decoding the LZW compression format on your dad’s CDs. I think I could unpack the 1980s data.”

  “So let’s do it.”

  “You need to give me some time to work.”

  The ground flattened out as they crested the ridge, the Humvee coming into view through the fog. Only a dim glow was visible on the horizon now—the sun hiding behind the cloudbanks. The winch stopped, Lucca waving from the driver seat, while Giovanni stood behind him, staring into the darkness, his back to Jess.

  She stepped out of the harness and approached him. “So what’s so important?”

  “That.” He pointed at the glow on the horizon.

  “The sun?” Jess squinted and took a better look. On the other side of the ridge, the soupy atmosphere cleared.

  In the distance, the fog glowed bright, but it didn’t come from the sky—dots of light spread across the plateau, electric lights, fires burning. In rows and lines.

  A city.

  NOVEMBER 4th

  Eleven Days A.N.

  7

  “I’M NOT SURE this is a good idea.”

  Jess studied the dark circles under Giovanni’s eyes, the speckled stubble on his cheeks. “We need to.” She looked away, toward the chimneys of fire-smoke rising into the fog-orange sky. Taking a step forward, the ground crackled and shattered. Her foot sank two inches through fine shards of ice crystal.

  “Pipkrakes,” Giovanni said.

  Jess took another unsteady crunching stride away from him and glanced down.

  “That’s what it’s called, what you’re stepping on.” He pointed at her feet. “Gives the crunch to frozen ground in early winter. Some call it needle ice or mush frost, kammeis to the Germans, shimobashira to the Japanese. Ice that grows within the soil, from the bottom up, when the temperature drops below freezing. The freezing water sucks more water up from beneath and vertical crystals grow.”

  Jess didn’t know it had a name. The slopes of the hills just visible in the distance looked almost skiable. It was late afternoon. Shadows dusted the mountainsides, and a breeze carried the cold air downward onto them. Up above, the sun was almost visible, a patch of waxy brightness behind a semi-translucent crimson shade. Every day they were transported into a different world. At night the thundersnow had crackled again, with tendrils of cold lightning that snaked through the blackness above.

  “I’m trying to say I know a lot more than you about cold weather survival. I should go.”

  “And that’s exactly why you should stay here,” Jess replied. “It’s better if I go with Raffa. We go as man and wife. Less threatening than two men. Raffa knows what we need. You stay with Hector.”

  “Then I should go with Elsa, or Rita.”

  They reached the open back of the Humvee. “We don’t know them, or how they might react in a fight—and you don’t know cars like Raffa.”<
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  Giovanni reached into the truck and picked up a wooden crate of food, grunting at its weight. He set it down and sat on it. “Then let’s not go in at all.”

  “I want to drop Massarra and the women here. Maybe even Raffa and Lucca and Leone too, if it looks good. We don’t all need to go south.”

  “You know they wouldn’t want that.”

  They spent the night on top of the ridge, waited until the brick-red dawn came so they could watch the city they’d found. What was it? A camp this size, they should have heard about it on the radio. They tried cycling through all the VHF and emergency frequencies to see if someone was broadcasting. But nothing. Jess argued that maybe they didn’t have any communications gear, but it looked like thousands of people were camped there. To Giovanni it seemed too strange, and strange meant dangerous.

  At first, they’d decided to give this strange city a wide berth. They lowered the Humvee back down on the side of the ridge away from the lights before crossing it again a mile further down. By midday, as they finished winching the Jeep over the ridge, the Humvee’s engine had gone from a smooth roar to rough and jittery, sometimes surging, sometimes coughing.

  Raffa said it could be the spark plugs getting gummed up. They tore through all the supplies the night before, but couldn’t find the spares. Worse, when Jess confided in Giovanni that Leone looked like he was in pain, he replied that the old man couldn’t find his heart medication. Leone had made him promise not to tell Jess.

  They’d covered less than a hundred miles in the week since they left the castle, and they’d ground to a halt. Still more than four hundred miles to go on land in Italy, and that was before the walking began.

  “Raffa said the Humvee’s engine might overheat. And the Rover’s, too.”

  “Jessica, please—”

  “We’ve never seen a camp as big as this. They might have meds, or car parts we can trade for.” Jess dropped the last of the crates from the back of the Jeep and motioned for Raffa to come over. She bent down and kissed Giovanni on his stubbled cheek. “I can take care of myself.” She took off her precious backpack and stared at it for a second before giving it to Giovanni. “Don’t ever take it off.”