Sanctuary (Nomad Book 2)

by Mather, Matthew

  Jess closed her eyes.

  She was constantly faced by a discipline of necessity. One moment fighting, the next calm. An amount of force or violence was needed one moment, then a gentleness and caring to ease the emotional pain the next. What was necessary? This was the reality of her life. Before it had always been: what do I want, what is my desire? Now it was what do I need to do to survive? What will I be forced to do to ensure the survival of those I love? And it was the same for everyone that surrounded her, for everyone they met. It didn’t mean an end to kindness, but it was the beginning of a savagery according to the new discipline of necessity.

  She opened her eyes and looked toward the fire. “Where’s Rita?”

  Giovanni turned to the hangar. “I haven’t seen her in an hour, maybe two. I think she is gathering wood.”

  17

  THE DIMPLED GRAY plastic of the old shortwave radio was chipped and cracked. A yellowing lump of cardboard displayed vertical lines of frequency bands. Underneath it, one large knob was surrounded by a family of smaller ones, with a column of switches to the right of that. Each had a red and a black side. Giovanni had scavenged it from a crushed Dash-8 aircraft at the side of the runway.

  “It’s analog,” he explained to Jess. “Survived the radiation blast. Now we have two.” He’d propped it on top of an improvised table off to one side of the Range Rover, away from the rest of the group. “This is the main frequency dial.” He grabbed the fat knob in the middle and twiddled it back and forth.

  “Am I fooling myself?” Jess didn’t look at Giovanni as she said the words.

  He stopped playing with the dial. “We all fool ourselves, Jessica.”

  “I’m being serious. Is this that important?” She swung her backpack off and dropped it on top of the shortwave.

  “You were in Vivas. You said they were looking for you. That means it must be important. Why else?”

  “Maybe it was something my father did. Or they think he did. Maybe it’s not this.”

  “And they want to punish him? Humanity has more pressing concerns.”

  “But—”

  “Do you want to wait for them and find out? Because that would be much easier.” Giovanni adjusted himself to lean against the door of the Range Rover. “Massarra was the one who said you had to leave Vivas. Did she tell you why?”

  “She heard them saying I was to be killed.”

  Giovanni folded his arms. It wasn’t much of an answer.

  “She saved me,” Jess added. “More than once.”

  His expression remained blank. “So you are to be killed for what’s in that bag?”

  “I know I’m risking all our lives.”

  “You think because it will tell us if Saturn will hit the Earth?” He held his hands wide. “If so, what is the point?”

  “Maybe they don’t know anything about Saturn.”

  “Someone wants your father. Very badly.”

  “But he’s dead.”

  “But you’re not. So I think what we’re really doing is keeping you alive.” A thin smile crept its way onto his grim face. “Which is good enough reason for me.”

  Static crackled. “Target is moving,” said a disembodied voice.

  Jess looked at the radio before realizing it was her walkie-talkie. She picked it out of her pocket and thumbed the talk button. “Moving?”

  “Affirmative,” crackled the voice again. It was Massarra. She was ten minutes down the road, watching their man. “He is packing up.”

  “Tell me when he leaves. Out.”

  “We can hide,” Giovanni said. “We can—”

  “He’ll see the tracks in the snow if he comes this way.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “One of us needs to stay with Hector, and you need to work on the flight plans with Roger. I can’t help with that.” Jess grabbed her backpack. It was frayed and worn. She opened the Range Rover’s back passenger door and took out another backpack with the medical supplies and emptied it into the seat. “Are we able to fly yet?”

  In two hours the feeble light of the sun would fade, leaving the glacial night to return. “We have fuel, and shoveled enough snow and ice away to get out of the hangar. The crust of ice over the snow may be hard enough, but the skis aren’t ready.”

  “I need a straight answer. Can we take off?” Jess unzipped her father’s backpack and gently took out the wrapped package of her father’s laptop and box with the CDs and tapes in it. “Turn that radio on, we need to speak with Al-Jawf.”

  He ignored her request. “We might be able to take off, but we can’t fly at night, Jessica. That is madness. There are no city lights to guide us, no roads to follow. We’d have no way of landing.”

  “Turn on the radio,” she repeated as she pushed half the medical supplies into her father’s backpack and gave it to Giovanni, putting the rest in the pack that she slung over her own back. Taking a steady look at Giovanni, she took her father’s laptop and data box and put them into a plastic bag. She handed the other backpack to Giovanni. Now they each wore one, but her father’s data was in a plastic bag she was going to hide.

  “Are you sure? We agreed it was dangerous to talk over the radio.”

  Jess reached past him to click on the radio’s power. The display glowed to life. She picked up the sheaf of papers beside it and shuffled through them. “Seven-four-four-two kilohertz, yes?” She clicked off the sideband switch and cycled the main dial, turning up the volume.

  Giovanni unclipped the attached microphone, his eyes on Jess. “Station Saline, this is Station Saline. Do you read me Station Al-Jawf?” The radio hissed silence. He clicked the talk button again. “This is Station Saline, do you read me, Station Al-Jawf?” He clicked off the talk button. “End of day is usually a good time for—”

  “Station Al-Jawf, reading you five by five,” warbled a voice over the radio, with a heavy, Middle Eastern accent. “It is good to hear your voice, my friend. We were getting worried some. Over.”

  “Ain Salah, is that you? Over.”

  “Affirmative. We have new sightings for you, last night was clear in the desert. We are sure we saw Venus last night, but the disk is fading. Rains have returned. Did you reach your ship?”

  “That’s a negative.”

  Radio silence hissed. “I am sorry to hear this, my friend. There are many boats arriving in Tunis. Perhaps further south?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Giovanni clicked off the talk button and held Jess’s gaze. “What did you want to say? Do you want the new sightings?”

  She opened the plastic bag, the one with her father’s laptop now in it. She inspected the metal case of CDs and tapes, wrapped in foam. In the middle of the pile was her father’s circular star chart, the one he taught her to use as a child, to identify constellations. He always brought it with him when they were supposed to meet. He never missed an opportunity to stare up at the heavens with her. She closed the bag.

  “Station Saline, are you still there?” came Ain Salah’s voice over the radio.

  “Jess?” Giovanni whispered. “What are we doing?”

  She took the microphone from him. “Mr. Ain Salah, my name is Jessica Rollins. I’m traveling with Giovanni.”

  “Ah, copy that, Miss Rollins.” His voice sounded confused.

  “Tell me your situation there, Mr. Salah?”

  The radio whistled for a few seconds. “Many people are coming from the north.”

  “What’s happening in Tunis?”

  “Very dangerous. African Union forces have come here, are trying to help.”

  “Government forces?”

  “What is left of them. Many problems. But we are doing our best.”

  “Do you have aircraft?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Airplanes. Do you have airplanes?”

  “Some old transports. Some that have come from the north, some from the east. But the situation is very chaotic—”

  “My father is Benjamin Rollins,
Mr. Salah.”

  “Say again?”

  “Dr. Benjamin Rollins. The Benjamin Rollins, of Harvard University.”

  Jess looked at Giovanni. They hadn’t revealed her name before. Before the Nomad disaster, her father’s name had been all over the news and Internet, claiming that he knew about Nomad more than thirty years earlier. Conspiracy stories and death threats had flooded the airwaves and news channels. He became perhaps the most infamous man on the planet. Maybe that was why they hunted Jess.

  The radio hissed an accusatory blank static, and she was about to repeat herself when—

  “I know of your father, Miss Rollins.”

  “Mr. Salah, what you have heard is not true. We’re in possession of critical information. We are in Civitavecchia, just west of Rome, and I need to know if you have some way to come north.”

  “Miss Rollins, as I said, there is chaos here. I do not think—”

  “This is not for us, you understand. This is important. Let me explain…”

  Ain Salah clicked off the shortwave radio. He stood and rolled up his shirtsleeves, then wiped one hand across his chin. Could this be true? What this woman told him? How could he be sure that she was whom she said? But then, who would lie about something like that?

  He paced back and forth in the communications room, a small concrete bunker with metal shelves overflowing with stacks of notepads and dust-coated, aged electronics.

  What difference could it make if what she was saying was true?

  A squall of rain hammered against the window. A stream of people slogged along a road of mud outside, through a gap in a chain link fence topped with barbed wire. The Sahara desert. The word literally meant desert in Arabic. So it was the desert desert.

  But it was a desert no longer.

  Massive lakes were already forming in the basins, and not the salty oases that dotted the Sahara before, but deep, fresh water reservoirs. Water. Too much water, it felt like. The rain stopped for a moment, and a break in the scudding clouds revealed a fat orange sun, a reddish glob behind a waxy sky. He watched the tired and filthy procession along the road, their backs bent, carrying what possessions they could. Refugees.

  As a Coptic Christian who grew up in Cairo, he knew something of oppression, of living in fear. Not that long ago, it was refugees from here, from the south and east, that had swarmed into Europe and the West. Now the tide had reversed horribly. Those who survived the terror in the north and braved the freezing water of the Mediterranean had landed on these shores and wound their way through the soaking sands. Beside the stream of refugees was a truck, a khaki tarp spread over a metal frame with a gold-and-green African Union insignia on its door.

  Ain Salah stopped pacing and stood still. “Mustafa,” he yelled.

  Shuffling in the next room. The metal door creaked open an inch. A young man appeared, the scraggly beginnings of a beard clinging to his cheeks.

  “Get me General Ugava.”

  “Now?”

  Was it worth the risk? It wasn’t Ain Salah’s decision. “Why else would I ask?”

  “Sorry, I am sorry, Ain Salah. Of course.” Mustafa’s head disappeared back through the door.

  Beyond the barbed wire, rows of metal holding tanks of the refineries loomed through the mist. They had precious little food, but oil, they had a lot of oil. That made this place strategically important. The pipelines were burst, so there was no way to get the oil out, not for now.

  But he was sure oil would remain important in this new world. As would this information the young woman told him.

  Past the rows of metal tanks, he could just make out the airfield. An Otter had arrived from the north, it’s pilot in debrief right now with the General. Perhaps this was to be a lucky day for Miss Jessica Rollins.

  18

  WISPS OF FOG eased their way over rubble piles and misshapen skeletons of buildings. A graveyard, but not just for people. The fog was layered, horizontal bands staggered against the red-orange sky, but near the ground it collected in hollow pools, soothing the fractured cityscape. Somewhere behind the clouds, the sun was setting.

  Jess imagined she could see it, imagined its hot warmth on her face, tried her best to ignore the sting of cold against her cheeks. She balanced an open ration package on her knees next to the walkie-talkie, waiting for the call from Massarra to tell her if their interloper was coming this way.

  A set of eyes watched her from the shadows of a corrugated tin roof leaning against a crumbling wall of bricks. A foot of snow, crusted in yellow ice, frosted the tumbledown structure.

  “You can come out.” She motioned with her hand and held out the ration tin.

  The eyes moved back and forth in worried circles before a snout emerged tentatively from the gloom.

  “It’s okay,” Jess said gently, holding the ration tin further out.

  The dog took three tentative steps toward her before retreating. It re-emerged with a small boy, the one that played with Hector down by the ship. His cheeks were ruddy, the dog scrawny. They both hesitated.

  “Is that your dog? È il tuo cane?”

  The boy nodded. His eyes darted back and forth.

  “It’s okay. Leone isn’t here.” She knew that he meant well, that he was just trying to protect their own dwindling supplies, and she saw the pain in the old man’s eyes, his stolid determination to protect Giovanni and Hector. Even if it meant going against his nature and piling suffering upon others.

  “Take it,” Jess urged. She put the pack of rations on the ground and retreated to her plywood seat.

  The boy darted forward and picked the food up, in the same motion taking out a cracker that he fed to his dog.

  “Jessica, do you read me?” whistled the walkie-talkie. It was Massarra. “He’s coming this way.”

  Startled, the boy withdrew into the shadows of the tin hut.

  Jess thumbed the talk button. “On my way.” She shouldered the AK. “Hide,” she said to the boy. “Nasconditi.”

  Behind her, Raffa stood quietly and followed. Giovanni had insisted that she take the teenager, but he wasn’t a child anymore; his expression taut, his rifle slung across his back. They were two hundred yards down the main road leading from the hangars, halfway to the waterfront. She didn’t want this fight, but the day was clear, or as clear as days came now.

  If this scout came past the airfield, he’d see the tracks in the snow. Had he seen the airplane two days before? She didn’t know.

  She didn’t know a lot of things.

  Were the Vivas people coming this way? Was it destroyed? What did they want with her? They only needed another day, and they could be away south. Jess had them dug in defensively at the hangar. Everyone was given a weapon, even if just a knife.

  Keeping low, Jess and Raffa did their best to jog along the edge of the road, slipping on patches of ice, crunching across the granular hard-packed snow. In the distance came the whine of a snowmobile’s engine. Reaching the wide boulevard by the water, she held up one hand to stop Raffa. Sweat trickled down her back. Her chest heaved. The engine noise warbled but grew louder.

  “He’s coming your way,” crackled Massarra’s voice over the walkie-talkie.

  Jess thumbed the talk button. “Do you have a shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not yet.”

  Jess turned the volume all the way down and pointed at a snow-covered gazebo to one side of the main road. She flicked her fingers at it, gesturing for Raffa to take position there. She hunched over and limped to a snowdrift by the seawall. Her prosthetic dug into her rubbed-raw stump. The snowmobile’s whine pitched higher. Each breath pulled a rush of cold air into her lungs. Adrenaline flooded her bloodstream. A single snowflake drifted in front of Jess’s eyes and hovered in space.

  “Massarra!” screamed a voice.

  A man, dressed in khaki, appeared through a hummock of rubble between two buildings a hundred yards from Jess.

  Crack. Crack. Gunshots echoed.

  Bursts of i
ce and snow erupted next to the man as he jerkily ran forward. He yelled something. Jess couldn’t make it out. Another shot. The man fell face-forward and skidded to a stop.

  Behind Jess, another roar, but not from a snowmobile engine. A car swerved along the road she just had just come down. It was white, with skis on its front. A Volkswagen Beetle. Its engine gunned and it slid sideways trying to negotiate the curve to the boulevard, skidding and crashing into a debris pile of metal rods and tumble-down brick.

  “Raffa, get back, go back!” Jess yelled, pointing up the road.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw what looked like Massarra running toward the man in khaki. Another burst of gunfire, the tat-tat-tat of an automatic. Ice fragments exploded around Massarra. Jess looked toward the snowmobile. The man was visible now, his weapon centered over the handlebars, the engine revved high. A buzzing whine echoed above it all. Two more engines. Dots appeared in the distance, from behind the hulk of the beached cruise liner.

  More snowmobiles.

  The door of the Volkswagen swung open.

  “Go!” Jess screamed at Raffa.

  He took one last look at Jess and turned to scramble across the snow.

  The fire crackled and popped, sent up a spray of red embers. Giovanni threw another stick of wood, the leg of a chair, onto the pile and held his hands out to warm them. His pistol lay against crates beside him.

  Roger sat to his left, with his back to the Cessna. He had his foot propped up on the improvised plywood ski Raffa had attached to the landing gear. Hector sat on the floor to Giovanni’s right, leaning against his leg. Lucca was curled in a pile of blankets near the fire. He had a bad fever, and the antibiotics didn’t seem to be doing anything for it. Elsa had found sausage in a larder in one of the houses on her scavenging. Giovanni had a wedge of particleboard balanced on his knees as a cutting board, slicing the sausage into chunks.

  He offered one to Roger, saying: “So our flight plan is good enough for—”