Red snow drifted through a pink fog that settled in the hummocks between the hills, the air aglow as the sun set over the cloudbanks. Raffa turned on the Jeep’s windshield wipers. The engine’s heat melted the ash-snow into blood-red rivulets that streamed off the hood. In the distance, a beacon shone above the scattered dots of flickering firelight from a villa on a hilltop in the center of the encampment. Bolts of light streamed away from it and stabbed the darkening sky.
Jess held one hand over the passenger-side heating vent, more as a distraction than to push away the cold. Something to take the edge off the tension. There had been no way to gain any insight into what they might find down here. Her whole body was tensed. She tightened her grip on the AK, drawing only small comfort from its presence. If something happened here, if things went bad, getting out would be tricky.
Entering the outskirts of the village, the truck filled with the smell of charred wood and the noisome stink of open latrines. Ragged people, wearing misshapen mountains of frayed clothing, huddled and hunched around feeble fires. Some turned to watch Jess, the firelight reflecting hunger in their eyes. On the outskirts, the huts were pitiful structures made from scraps of wood and plastic, even cardboard, erected over trampled earth.
What made them want to come here? There were plenty of destroyed villages they could be rebuilding.
Raffa followed tire tracks through the crowd as it opened before them. Empty, the Jeep’s cabin felt strange, the engine’s howl echoing up and down in pitch as Raffa gunned it and turned the wheels back and forth to control sliding through the frozen muck. They’d emptied the Jeep out, then piled in some diesel and food they felt they could afford to trade.
A figure appeared through the haze and raised one arm. A rifle dangled from his shoulder. He was wrapped from head to foot in black. Raffa eased on the brakes and the truck slid to a halt. More men with rifles manned a barricade of upturned barrels and cinder blocks.
“Facciamo affari,” Raffa yelled as he rolled down his window.
The guard approached. “Cos'hai?”
“Diesel.” The teenager pointed over his shoulder at the four twenty-liter canisters in the back seat.
“Nient'altro?” The guard clicked on a flashlight and peered through the back window, craning his neck up. He stepped beside them, shone the light in their faces.
“Sì, abbiamo del cibo.” Raffa squinted but tried to smile. He had to be even more nervous than she was, but he held it together well.
The guard shone the light into Jess’s eyes, then down at the AK she gripped. He stepped back and yelled, shouldering his rifle. Raffa held up his hands, palms out, to the guard in surrender. The other men ran over, their weapons raised. Raffa and the guard exchanged a stream of Italian Jess couldn’t keep up with.
Raffa turned to Jess. “Put the gun down,” he said, his voice low.
“What do they want?” She’d raised her weapon on purpose, to show them they were armed. Men encircled the Jeep, their own guns pointed at Jess.
“They want our weapons.”
“No way. Tell them no way. We’ll leave.”
Raffa exchanged more quick words with the guard, back and forth, gesticulating and waving his arms. The man shook his head and turned away. He spoke to another beside him. Jess licked her lips, dropping her finger onto the trigger. The guard turned back to the truck and spoke again.
Raffa leaned toward Jess, his hands still up. “They’re not happy about it, but they agree. Two men will come with us, and we can only enter the outside.”
Jess nodded first to Raffa and then to the man holding the flashlight, lowering her AK at the same time. Raffa clicked the unlock button. Two of the men opened the back doors and slid in behind them, bringing with them the stench of tobacco and sweat.
Raffa put the truck back into gear. “I said we were from a camp to the north, that we want spare truck parts and medicine, but we won’t give up our weapons. I told him we have the Jeep and a hundred liters of gasoline if they help us.”
If they could drop Elsa and Rita—maybe even Leone and the boys here, if they wanted, if Leone could get the medicine he needed—they wouldn’t need three trucks. She was keenly aware that Raffa and Lucca had their own families just south of Rome, if they could find them. She knew she would. In her mind, Jess saw the voyage south as one of attrition, shedding supplies and weight as they went, getting lighter and faster the further south they went.
The guard walked forward and swung open a gate, motioning for Raffa to follow him in the Jeep. Red snowflakes drifted through snaking tendrils of cooking-fire smoke. Inside the compound, the road was plowed-clear asphalt, and the structures went from thrown-together shacks of scrap to pre-fab shelters and tents, with electric lights shining from windows. A black and red flag draped from a wooden pole just past the entrance. Jess didn’t recognize it.
They trailed the guard into a low corrugated metal building, past a depot piled with green camouflage cases. Chickens squawked in slatted wooden crates stacked at the entrance, and inside were parked four trucks, one of them a Humvee. Raffa pulled beside it and turned off the engine. The men in the backseat opened their doors and immediately started to unload the diesel.
Jess jumped out of her door. “Tell them they only get it when we agree to a trade.”
She hit the concrete floor, slipped on a patch of grease and had to steady herself, her prosthetic leg clanging against a metal post supporting the roof. Maybe she was more tired than she realized. Raffa made to help her, but she waved him away.
The guard walked over, and she thought he intended to offer her a hand, but instead he tapped her leg with the muzzle of his rifle and pulled back the fabric.
“Hey!” Jess swatted him away. Beside her, Raffa tensed, said something curt to the man in Italian. She laid a hand on his arm and gave him a don’t-say-anything-stupid smile.
The guard ignored Raffa and turned to his men. Said something in a language Jess didn’t understand, then looked at her. “You come with us,” he said in halting English. Gently but firmly, he took hold of the muzzle of her AK. She tried to pull away, but the two other guards raised their weapons.
“Raffa, what’s going on?” Jess held her rifle firm.
The teenager fired off a series of quick back-and-forth questions with the one holding Jess’s gun. “He says we need to come with him, to talk with someone.”
“I’m not giving my weapon up.”
More men streamed in from the open door to the garage. At least six, Jess estimated, seeing them from the corner of her eye as she held her gaze on the guard in front of her.
“I don’t think there’s a choice.” Raffa held his arms up.
At least a half a dozen rifle muzzles now pointed at Jess. Exhaling, she let go of her weapon. What just happened? The atmosphere in the room changed the moment the guard saw Jess slip.
“That way,” the guard said to Jess, motioning with his rifle muzzle for Raffa to come as well.
Maybe they wanted more information about their camp. Jess had a story ready, using the Bandita town as her fictional camp-base. Shuffled forward by the pack of men, she and Raffa were walked outside and into a cinder block building next door. They pushed them through the front door, down a flight of steps and into a corridor.
Jess’s stomach lurched.
It was a jail cell, crowded with people. The guard shoved them forward into an empty holding cell, ten foot square. Green paint peeled from the rusted metal bars. The other prisoners watched them silently.
The door swung shut behind them. The lock clinked. She’d given up without even a fight, but as gentle as they had been, they must want something. Raffa sat on a wooden cot against the wall, and she slumped next to him.
Swearing softly, she pressed her face into her hands and closed her eyes. “Sorry, this is my fault.”
“This is an unexpected pleasure, Miss Rollins. Welcome to our home.”
Jess opened her eyes. She must have fallen asleep. What time was
it? She pushed herself up on the wooden bench, startling Raffa who was curled up beside her. A man stood smiling at her from behind the rusting metal bars of the cage. The other cells had been emptied.
“Excuse me?” Jess managed to groan, squinting at the man.
He had perfectly-parted blond hair, translucent pale skin, his nose thin and almost effeminate—a surgical beauty—but his eyes were hard and blue. His accent was well-spoken, educated British.
“Bring her,” he said to two guards flanking him. He walked away without looking back.
The prison door squeaked open. One of the guards motioned at Jess.
“We go together,” she said, pressing her back against the wall and reaching for Raffa, who’d bolted awake to stand in front of her.
The guard shook his head. “Only you,” he said in Italian-accented English.
“Together, or we go nowhere.”
The blond-haired man stopped at the stairs leading up. The guard holding the door open turned to look at him. Blond-hair paused to consider, then nodded.
Sandwiched between the two guards, they followed up the stairs and back out of the cinder-block jailhouse. The air outside was biting cold and sucked the wind from Jess’s lungs; the sky an impenetrable black. She gasped, using one arm to hold her parka tight around her, and keeping the other arm behind her to clutch Raffa’s hand.
The Englishman led them up the hill a hundred yards, toward the central villa with its shining beacon, but just when Jess thought that was where they were headed, he took a sharp left into an entranceway carved into the ground.
Uniformed soldiers guarding the door snapped to attention. One of them opened the door. Inside, the tunnel was brightly lit, with a curving, sweeping marble floor that angled downward. Glowing picture frames lined the walls, scenes of glistening old growth forests and quiet ocean bays dotted with seaweed covered rocks. A soft hiss, and a door-panel opened in the wall ahead of them. The blond-haired man strode through the opening as lights blinked on inside.
“Please, sit.” He indicated a white plastic chair to one side of a brushed metal table in the middle of the room. He sat at a matching chair on the other side.
The room was spotlessly white, smelled antiseptically clean.
Jess became aware of how filthy she was, of her own fetid stink. She hadn’t had a shower, or even properly cleaned herself, in more than a week. She had on the same clothes she’d worn for almost that time. In front of her, smiling, the man looked freshly shaved, his blond hair coiffed, blue eyes clear, his polished leather shoes gleaming in the overhead LED lighting. And was that…cologne she smelled?
A large mirror dominated one wall of the twenty-by-twenty foot room. Jess guessed they were being watched. She sat. Behind her, the guards pulled Raffa back and stood him by the wall.
The man’s smile widened, revealing a perfect row of white teeth. “Miss Rollins, it is a pleasure.”
Jess frowned, looked at the glass mirror-wall, then back at the Englishman. How do they know my name? “And you are…?”
“Who I am is not important.”
“And how do you know me?”
“You’re famous, Jessica.” He glanced at the mirror-wall. “Or perhaps I should say, infamous. A lot of people are looking for you.”
“Me?”
“Your father, where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ll find him, you know. We have scouts out looking. Right now.”
“We got separated.” Jess turned to check on Raffa. “We just came to see if you had some medication. His uncle is sick.” She cocked one thumb over her shoulder. “And some car parts. We have our Jeep, some fuel we could trade.”
The man tapped a stack of file folders on the desk. In way of reply, he opened one of the file folders and spread a set of glossy eight-by-ten inch photographs on the table in front of Jess. She leaned in to look. They were pictures of her and her mother, in Rome. Grainy and in black-and-white, as if captured from a security camera. One of them was a partial image of her sitting under awnings, to get out of the rain, talking to Massarra’s uncles.
She fought a surreal sense of vertigo. What the hell was going on? “So you have vacation pictures of me and my mother. What do you want me to say?”
“Do you know, before this, I made a living from being able to tell if people are lying?”
“You’re a cop?”
The man laughed, baring his teeth in a flash of white. “Nothing so pedestrian. More of a…businessman, and you are going to help me with some business.”
Jess sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. She held his gaze, the calm expression on her face betraying nothing of the whirlwind in her mind. What did he want? They didn’t have much of value in their possession. Maybe the gold bars? But how would that relate to her father? The only thing that made sense was the backpack. Her father’s data. But how could this guy know about it? She glanced around the room, then at the file on the desk. Was this some sort of government bunker? Why would they have dug up surveillance pictures of her? In all the survivor groups they’d contacted, everyone was struggling to get basic power, to survive, but here…
“What is this place?” she asked.
The man nodded, keeping the high-wattage smile at full-beam. “I could say that I’m the one asking the questions, but that would be tiresome.” He held his hands out. “You could describe this as a luxury disaster retreat.”
“You built this to survive Nomad?”
“It could have been a pandemic, an asteroid, a nuclear war. Nomad was a surprise to all of us.” He eyed her merrily. “Almost all. This is Vivas Twelve. Kind of a billionaires’ preppers club, in your American vernacular.”
His words flashed through her mind. “So who’s looking for me? Is it Ufuk Erdogmus?” She said this before she thought it through. It was one of the last things her father said to her before he died: find the billionaire Ufuk Erdogmus.
The man straightened. “Interesting.”
“So he is looking for me.”
The Englishman’s face remained smilingly blank, but said everything by saying nothing.
“Is he here?”
The man shrugged. “First, you help me. Then we’ll see about me helping you. Where is your father?”
“I told you, we got separated.”
For the first time, the smile slid from his face. “Jessica. You must understand the landscape ahead of you. There is the world out there—the sick, the hungry, the dying, the diseased.” He paused to linger on this last word. “And then,” he continued brightly, “there is the world in here; safe and warm. Each Vivas shelter is a tiny self-contained underground city, hundreds of us at each location. Bury us, and we have equipment to dig ourselves out. Attack us, and we can seal our doors for two years without needing to breathe the air above or drink a drop of contaminated water. Would you like to see a garden again? Plants? Perhaps”—he crinkled his nose—“take a hot shower? We have movie theaters, swimming pools…”
“I don’t know where he is.”
Closing his eyes, the man sighed. He flicked one hand at the guards. “Take them back to the cell block.”
NOVEMBER 5th
Twelve Days A.N.
8
“SEE ANYTHING?”
“Nothing coming our way,” Roger replied.
Giovanni cupped his hands and blew on them. “Give me the binoculars.”
“All yours.” Roger handed them over. “Should we haul the Range Rover?”
Giovanni shook his head and tightened the straps on his backpack—Jess’s backpack. “I’m going to get them.”
He looked through the binoculars, the two circles of vision merging into one. The twinkling glow of the encampment separated into dots of light. He focused on one fire near the edge, then looked further in. The shacks seemed to merge into a more regular pattern of buildings toward the center, all surrounding a central villa, illuminated by what looked like searchlights blazing into the sky. Jess was suppo
sed to be back last night, but she wasn’t. At first light, he climbed a ridge above their tents to watch. All day he’d been up here, waiting for any sign of the Jeep.
Roger stuffed his hands back into his mittens. “If we take the Humvee, and we get stuck…”
Giovanni focused on what looked like a barricade at the interface between the outer and inner circle of structures. “I don’t need lessons from you.”
He lowered the binoculars. Night was falling again, the weak glow in the sky fading back to darkness. Today the mists were pink-orange, but clear enough to see the encampment, about two miles away across a snowed-in valley. “I’m going to get her. On foot.”
The cold numbed Giovanni’s fingertips. The first stages of frostbite were painless, but he knew the warming up afterward was excruciating.
“Leave the backpack with me. I can work on the data while you’re gone,” Roger offered.
“I don’t think so.”
Roger exhaled, a plume of white vapor shooting into the pink ice crystals shimmering in the air. He looked at the encampment glowing in the distance, then back at Giovanni. “If I don’t have anything to do, I’d better go with you.”
“And we’ll take Lucca. He’ll want to find his brother.” Giovanni stuffed the binoculars into the pocket of his parka, cupped his hands and blew on them again. “We leave at first light tomorrow morning.” He glanced around. “Where’s Massarra?”
“Jessica!”
The young man’s face stared accusingly at Jess. I’m dead, his eyes said to her. He wasn’t more than a teenager, his face smooth, pink, fresh. You killed me.
“Jessica, wake up!”
Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2) Page 6