Arnold sat inside his house, watching the flames dance in the fireplace as he sipped a warm cup of instant coffee – one of the few staples they still had, which, like rice, never went bad. His two-way radio crackled on the table, and the voice of Loren, on guard duty at the eastern end of town, emanated from the tinny speaker.
“Got three riders approaching. Over.”
Arnold leapt to his feet and moved to the device. “How close? Over.”
“Couple hundred yards. Over.”
Arnold swore. There had been no incidents or encounters yet. The town was so far off any path that travelers didn’t realize it was there; the signs at the highway intersection had been taken down by Arnold’s security detail and the road leading into town removed with picks and crowbars and replaced by felled trees and sod. He’d thought that with the snow and the subterfuge, they might remain hidden indefinitely, but he’d just been proved wrong and would have to deal with it.
“I’m on my way. Over.”
He scooped up the radio and pulled on a heavy jacket, a size too big but stuffed with down, and made for the door. He was halfway to the checkpoint when the radio crackled again.
“I recognize them. Over.”
Arnold paused. “Who is it? Over.”
“Lucas. Over.”
Arnold picked up his pace at the news and rounded the corner and made for the Humvee that blocked the road. Lucas, Sierra, and a small boy on a chestnut mare were ambling down the street and stopped when they saw Arnold. Arnold put out a call to Elliot as he approached them, alerting him that Lucas had arrived safely. Lucas gave Arnold a wave with a gloved hand and Arnold mirrored the gesture.
“The prodigal returns,” Arnold announced as he neared.
“Better late than never, right?” Lucas said.
“Suppose so.” Arnold peered at Tim. “Is this who I think it is?”
Sierra beamed at him. “Arnold, meet Tim, my son.”
Tim smiled shyly, and Arnold held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Tim.”
Tim took it after a slight hesitation and mumbled a greeting, and Lucas adjusted the hat he’d acquired outside of Shreveport, along with Tim’s horse. “See you made it back in one piece,” Lucas said.
“Yeah. But it looks like St. Louis got taken down, so we might as well have stayed home.”
Lucas’s brow furrowed. “You sure?”
“Haven’t heard a peep out of them since a few days after we gave their guy the goods.”
“What does that do to the distribution plan?”
“It’s not positive, but we’ll manage. Just means we need to find someone else in the Midwest who can help. But nobody’s going anywhere until spring, so we have time.”
“Anything change around here? Did the other groups make it back?”
“They did. No casualties.” Arnold’s face clouded for a moment. “Except for Aaron, Duke’s friend.”
Sierra’s hand flew to her mouth. “Aaron? How?”
Arnold recounted the story of their trip and finished by telling them about Duke’s trading post. When he was done, Lucas nodded. “Always figured he’d go back to that. Man loves to dicker.”
“But why Luis as a partner?” Sierra asked.
“Maybe because I wasn’t around,” Lucas said. “He made me an offer earlier; then I got…sidetracked.”
She smiled and looked over to Tim, his face serious as he listened to the adults. “Well, I for one am glad you got sidetracked.”
Elliot rounded the corner with Ruby and Eve in tow, the older woman’s long gray hair billowing in the breeze and her body swaddled in layers. They dismounted and Ruby hugged each in turn, and Sierra introduced Tim, who looked increasingly uncomfortable with each new arrival. Eve approached him and smiled, her eyes blazing blue, mirroring the cobalt sky. “Is he my new brother?” she asked Sierra.
“Yes,” Sierra managed between laughing and blushing. “Yes, he is. So be nice to him.”
The two children sized each other up. Eve looked at Lucas. “He’s awful skinny,” she said. “But you kept your promise. You’re back, and everyone’s safe. I knew you would – I knew it.”
Lucas suggested they get out of the cold and paused before speaking to Elliot in a low voice. “Need to talk to you and Arnold. Got some stuff to fill you in on.”
Elliot looked confused, but amenable. “Certainly. You know where I hang my hat.”
“Be by once we get settled.”
“Of course. Take your time.”
They walked the horses the rest of the way and found the house exactly as they’d left it.
“I’ve been stopping by every week to dust and make sure nobody’s squatting or anything,” Ruby said.
“Where’s Terry?” Sierra asked.
“Oh, that man spends every spare minute at the airport, fussing with one of the planes.”
“Has he gotten one running?”
“Not yet.”
“He does enjoy flying,” Sierra observed.
“He enjoys trying to fly almost as much.”
“You’re getting along?”
“Oh my, yes,” Ruby said, color flushing her cheeks. “He’s a fine man. Just a little quirky.” She took a deep breath. “But at my age, quirky’s just what the doctor ordered.”
“Thank you for taking care of Eve.”
“She’s an angel. You’re very lucky.”
“I know.”
“And you got your boy back! You must be walking on air.”
“I am. It’s like a dream come true. Or the end of a nightmare.”
“All’s well, right?”
Sierra looked through the back doorway at where Lucas was standing beside Tango, removing his saddle as the big horse nuzzled Eve, to her delight, with Ellie the pig a few feet behind her, just out of range of the stallion’s hooves. “It couldn’t be better. I just took the long way around.”
Sierra stepped from the house, walked to Lucas, and planted a kiss on his lips, taking him by surprise.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“Just ’cause.” She smiled at Eve and Tim. “I’m just really, really happy to be home, to have my family together…to be safe.”
Lucas hoisted the saddle and made for the back porch. “Can’t ask for much more.”
Sierra watched him disappear into the house and shook her head slowly. “No, I really can’t.”
Lucas showered off the road dust in icy water as they waited for the electric water heater to warm some and, after a meal of eggs Ruby had procured for them, made for Elliot’s on foot. When he arrived, Arnold, Michael, and Elliot were waiting inside, the room warm and inviting after weeks on the trail.
“Have a seat, Lucas,” Elliot said.
Lucas pulled up a chair and Elliot gave him a welcoming smile. “So, tell us all about your adventure.”
Lucas adjusted his hat and started his account at the rum factory, giving them an abridged report until he arrived at his encounter with Zach. He detailed the story Zach had told him, watching Elliot for any reaction. He didn’t have to wait long. Elliot half rose out of his chair, his face red. “That’s preposterous! The man was lying about everything.”
Lucas swallowed his doubts and continued. “I didn’t believe him. I just thought you’d want to know what you’re up against.”
“These scoundrels are absolutely diabolical. They’ll stop at nothing,” Elliot proclaimed.
Lucas eyed him. “No, I don’t expect they will.” He hesitated. “Which brings me to Whitely.”
Elliot’s ruddy complexion blanched. “Whitely!”
Lucas nodded. “That’s right. He was there. The new head of the Crew sent him. He helped us escape, but he compromised himself in the process.”
“He must have had good reason. They must know the vaccine’s made it into distribution, so he doesn’t need to stay on site any longer.”
“Could be. But I got the impression that this is all bigger than the vaccine. Zach’s group is playing for keeps, a
nd they’re in the big league. I don’t know what the real agenda is, but that part of the story rang true.” Lucas told them about Zach’s claim that the Illuminati had at least one enclave that had survived the collapse.
Arnold’s face tightened with a frown. “Doesn’t surprise me. We’ve all heard the rumors. Figures the scum that ran the world into a ditch would look out for themselves first.” He sat forward. “Duke radioed in a few days ago. Said a rider with Crew markings was nosing around. So they haven’t given up.”
Michael shook his head. “But the real question is, what’s the Illuminati’s end game? What’s their objective? Any ideas?”
Lucas shook his head. “World domination? The return of the antichrist? Who knows?”
It was Elliot’s turn to frown. “You’re not far off. Perhaps all of the above. Those people are the epitome of evil, make no mistake.”
Lucas’s eyes narrowed. “You seem to know a lot about them.”
Elliot’s demeanor changed back to his jovial self. “Oh, it used to be an area of interest of mine back before the lights went out. I collected conspiracy theories like boys collect baseball cards. Many had the same theme – a secret group that engineered outcomes to achieve their goals and ran the governments of the world from the shadows. There’s some truth to it, that I can tell – all the world’s central banks, with only a few exceptions, were owned by the same people, and so were the media companies and the arms manufacturers and drug companies. I used to say that if it was a conspiracy, it was one hidden in plain sight.” He eyed Lucas thoughtfully. “Their aim was always to create a one world government they controlled, where the world’s population were their serfs. It’s not that odd that at least some of them survived with their megalomania intact.”
Lucas finished his account with the story of their trip back. When he was done, Michael looked puzzled.
“Back to Whitely. The last you saw of him was in the forest?” he asked.
“That’s right. He told me not to worry about him – to mind my own business, basically.”
“That sounds like Whitely,” Elliot agreed.
Lucas was going to ask how Elliot knew him, but Arnold interrupted his train of thought. “All of this underscores the importance of finding another hub, though. The sooner the vaccine’s in widespread national distribution, the sooner nobody’s going to much care about where we got to.”
Michael nodded. “I never thought I’d say this, but I completely agree.”
The meeting broke up, and Lucas returned to the house to find Tim and Eve helping Sierra make it livable again, both children smudged with dirt and Eve holding a plastic dustpan, a look of distaste on her face. When she heard him come in, Sierra looked up from the kitchen sink and pushed a lock of hair out of her eyes.
“There’s spiders everywhere,” Eve announced.
Sierra smiled and raised an eyebrow at Lucas. He considered the tableau, and for a moment a memory of his wife flitted through his mind, nodding as though everything would be fine. He blinked the mirage away and then removed his hat and closed the door behind him before coming over to them with his fiercest scowl in place.
“Spiders, huh? We’ll just see about that.”
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Excerpt from
The Day After Never – Insurrection
Chapter 1
Ezekiel “Zeke” Winthrop had grown to hate the spring rain that inevitably followed the winter storms in the Pacific Northwest. Before the collapse, it had just been a gray sameness that he’d become inured to, an inconvenience if he had to drive somewhere, nothing more. But now that much of his time was spent outdoors as one of the leaders of the Astoria, Oregon, security detail, the rain was a punishment, the icy sting of it on his face like needles, the water a conspirator that outsmarted his best efforts no matter how he secured his slicker and which managed to leave him soaked by the end of a patrol.
His pony, Starbuck, didn’t seem to mind, and Zeke leaned forward and patted his mane reassuringly with a gloved hand, a well-used AR-15 clutched in his other. The twenty men accompanying him were watchful in the drizzle, weapons at the ready. They’d ventured beyond the secure area maintained by the enclave in Astoria and were skirting the road to Clatskanie, roughly thirty miles east of their little port town.
A report had come in that morning over the shortwave radio from a trading post along the road that a band of heavily armed marauders had been spotted headed Astoria’s way. Zeke’s team had mounted up, their directive always the same: to send a clear and unambiguous message that raiding wouldn’t be tolerated in their territory and would incur a massive and immediate display of overwhelming force.
“Probably from Portland,” the gunman on Zeke’s right muttered, his voice a low growl. “Seems like it’s getting worse there by the day, don’t it, Zeke?”
“Doesn’t much matter where they’re from, does it, Burt? It’s where they’re going that counts,” Zeke said. “Be nice if the sky stopped pissing on us for a while, though.”
“Maybe we should move to Arizona. Or Southern California. I hear there’s some big sales going on down in Beverly Hills, and you won’t see water for two days’ ride.”
Zeke grunted. “Thank the Lord for small favors that we didn’t live there, huh?”
“Little rain never hurt anybody,” Burt agreed, the wet sucking of the mud as his horse worked its way along the trail as regular as a heartbeat.
Los Angeles was infamous after the collapse that had ended the world as they’d known it; the city’s masses had become a panicked swarm when the grid went down and the virus spread like wildfire. The various criminal factions previously kept in check by the police were emboldened by the lack of law enforcement, and even good neighbors turned on one another once the food ran out. Everybody had a gun or three, convinced that would save them when things got ugly, but even in the grimmest projections nobody could have predicted millions dying slowly of thirst and hunger, desperate to survive for another few days. The worst of the initial crime spree had petered out after the first few weeks as the virus had turned the L.A. basin into a charnel house, and then it had been a grim war of attrition, the freeways gridlocked, even church-going pacifists growing trigger-happy when anyone neared their home.
Within six months, the majority of the damage had been done, and almost ninety percent of the population south of San Francisco had died of disease, starvation, or violence. The army never did arrive to rescue them, instead focusing its limited resources on locking down its own facilities and securing assets deemed vital to national interests. But the virus played no favorites, and soon even the most dedicated members of the armed forces had succumbed to the forces of entropy, either dying at their posts or starving with the rest of the population as the distribution systems failed.
Stories had reached Astoria early on as drifters made their way north, braving adversity in search of somewhere, anywhere, with food and water. The accounts were always the same: whole families left to rot in their homes, now worthless, their six-figure electric cars as useless as their big-screen TVs and their credit cards. Those whom roving gangs hadn’t murdered languished with whatever they’d been able to scrounge until thirst drove them mad, the pumps that carried water from the aqueduct many miles away silent. Pestilence, starvation, and sudden violence were the new norm, and many had committed suicide after taking their children’s lives, the prospect of agonizing death too much for even the bravest. For weeks whole communities were uninhabitable due to the stench of decomposition.
Eventually drifters stopped coming from the south, and the grim accounts were limited to chatter on the shortwave radio. Zeke had weathered the collapse better than most, his background in the military essential to surviving in the new world. His family hadn’t been as fortunate: the virus had taken them along with most in the coastal ha
mlet, leaving him the last man standing in his little neighborhood. He’d kept to himself for the first year, but had run into other surviving members of the town when fishing or heading to one of the streams for water, and ultimately agreed to join forces with the rest and work for the common good, applying his specialized skills to keeping the tiny fraction of the townspeople who’d made it past the challenges of the first year safe.
Zeke checked his watch and wiped the rain from his face, his gaze returning to the trail. Marauders were uncommon these days; Astoria’s reputation as able to protect itself discouraged all but the most desperate. Occasional groups out of Portland still made attempts to loot outlying areas, but most who’d survived had learned to be deadly since the collapse, and there was no longer such a thing as easy prey for raiders or scavengers, even in the boonies.
The report they’d received had triggered alarms with the town council, therefore, and now Zeke and his crew were chartered with hunting down the marauders and executing them, no questions asked. Astoria’s approach was both brutal and effective, and as a result it was one of a number of communities that had escaped the ravages of the criminal warlords who ran the larger cities – Seattle and Portland both controlled by a particularly vicious bunch of ex-bikers who’d established order with an iron fist. Astoria was too distant and too dangerously self-reliant to be worth attacking, so the town had forged a cautious truce with its larger neighbors, relying on its strategic location at the mouth of the Columbia River for ocean fishing and the coastal trade initiated by a few intrepid souls with sailboats liberated from marinas up and down the waterway.
Zeke squinted at a clearing ahead and signaled to his men. They halted their horses and dismounted in silence. These patrols were a regular occurrence for them, their training born of discipline and real-world experience that had forged them into effective fighters. Most were ex-military, hardened vets who’d seen combat before the collapse. Those who had been virgins before the virus had since seen more firefights than the average Special Forces soldier in an entire career.
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