His ears turned bright red, but he held Mitch’s gaze.
Dani stepped toward him. “We’re a family. Our place is with you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
Dani glanced at Eddie and nodded. “We do. We want to help.”
“You don’t owe these people anything.”
“What do you mean? We have a chance to start over. A place to call home. Do you really want to go back to salvaging? What’s going to happen when we run out of boats to loot? When we run out of luck?”
Mitch shrugged. “We’ll figure it out like we always have. We’re a team.”
The corner of Dani’s mouth lifted. He saw his mistake too late. She went in for the kill.
“That’s right. And that’s why you’re going to let us crew for you.”
Outmaneuvered by his own daughter. He didn’t know if he should be proud or ashamed.
* * *
ENTRANCE TO THE COOK INLET, SOUTH CENTRAL ALASKA
MAY 18, CHANGE YEAR 1/1999 AD
The deep groan of the alarm call seemed to reach into Mitch’s rib cage and give it a sharp tug. It was time, but until that moment, he didn’t realize how much he had been dreading what they had to do. Armed with mirrors and a month’s worth of rations, Dixon sent his hardiest men east along the coast to camp and keep watch for the Haida. And now they were finally here.
Dani and Eddie joined him on the deck, blinking back sleep. The Windfall, and the four other sailboats they’d managed to build or cobble from cannibalized remains of other ships, all waited at the entrance to the Cook Inlet, barring the way to the Homer Cooperative and the settlements beyond.
“Get the anchor up. Let’s see what we got.”
Eddie started reeling it in while Dani unfurled the sails, both working in near silence. Mitch closed his eyes and listened for the wind. He rotated until it ruffled his hair and slid into his ears with a persistent sigh.
When he opened his eyes, he swore to himself. The Haida schooner was running downwind straight toward them. Double-masted, just like before.
The plan was to approach the ship, launch the trebuchet, then circle back around. Meanwhile one of the other sailboats would take their shot, giving them a chance to reload. But the Windfall couldn’t sail directly into the wind. They’d have to tack like crazy and take their shots when they could. As it was they had limited mobility because of the weight of the trebuchet mounted to the rear deck. So much for strategy.
“We’ll keep her close-hauled as long as we can.” It was the best they could do given the conditions. He just hoped the captains of the other boats could keep up.
Dani and Eddie made the adjustments to the sails. The Windfall crept closer to the schooner at a slight forty-five degree angle. Mitch glanced back. The rest of the “fleet” followed. Good.
“Dani, take over.”
She took hold of the tiller while Mitch and Eddie manned the trebuchet. The basket was already filled with petroleum-laced bombs. Rocks and cement blocks wrapped with foul-smelling fabric. Light, let it go, and make sure the sailboat doesn’t catch fire.
It sounded simple enough on land. But with the sea heaving under his feet, his two children, ever trusting, even in this, he wished far away from the concerns of men.
“On my mark,” Mitch called.
Eddie had the torch lit, his body shielding it from the breeze. Mitch could make out cries of alarm from the Haida, carried on the wind. The Windfall edged closer, and something told him they wouldn’t get a better shot.
“Now!”
Eddie plunged the torch into the basket. The flame gutted, then a soft glow crept over the contents, growing in intensity.
“Get back!”
Eddie flinched away, nearly knocking over a bucket of sand they had on hand in case of fire. Once he was clear, Mitch loosed the lever. With a deep-seated groan, the trebuchet released its flaming contents. Like fireworks, the bombs separated in a glowing display before they smacked into the schooner.
The Haida loosed arrows in response, but they pelted only the water around them.
“Away, away!” Mitch cried.
The Windfall kicked up spray as she hit the first wake wave from the schooner. Dani turned the ship around, and the sails started to flap. They couldn’t lose speed now. Mitch and Eddie worked to get them rigged properly so they’d be out of the way when the rest of the fleet made their approach.
“Another hit!” Eddie cried out.
A few more adjustments to the sails, and Dani had them pointed back at the schooner, which had slowed its approach. The wind had shifted so they didn’t have to tack so hard to get back into position. Once the Windfall was lined up, he and Eddie lit the basket and let it fly.
By now, flames licked up the hull and had caught the sails. Haida warriors lowered a dugout canoe onto the water, the men recklessly following after it.
Time to go. “Dani?”
She got the Windfall turned about, taking advantage of a strong crosswind, only to find one of their sister ships on fire. Arrows had fouled up the trebuchet’s launching mechanism, and its basket of flames had spilled out across the deck.
Dani steered the Windfall as close as she dared, and two of the crew dove into the water and swam toward them. When the first one got close, Mitch leaned out and helped him on board. Tom, sputtering and coughing.
“Dad, hurry!” Eddie pointed at the Haida dugout speeding toward them.
Shit.
The other man was still a ways out. Mitch slung the life preserver toward him, and he hooked an arm through it. That would have to be good enough.
“Dani, get us out of here.”
She’d maneuvered the Windfall into the wind so they’d slow down enough to help the other crew, but she’d sacrificed their momentum in the process. Now they were in irons. Dead in the water. But not for long.
The scariest thing about being in irons was that you had to go backward in order to get moving again. It felt unnatural, like you weren’t in control and losing ground, but really it was the boat and the wind setting everything back to rights again.
“Dani, you need to—”
“Back wind to port!” she cried out.
Eddie was already moving, swinging the boom to port before Mitch could do anything. Then they waited. The silence on board the Windfall was interrupted by chants as the dugout closed in on them.
A few boat lengths away and gaining. “High-dah. High-dah.”
Mitch tried to ignore their cries as the sails slowly filled, pushing the Windfall backward, but ultimately around.
Eddie brought the boom back over the centerline, tightening up the mainsail and adjusting the jib so they could take full advantage of the wind and outpace the bastards. Dani, hunkered down in the cockpit, already had them back on course and picking up speed. All without his help.
“Dad, watch out!” Eddie cried.
Mitch spun about. He caught a Haida war club in the chest, knocking him back over the jack line.
Eddie helped him up. “You okay?”
He’d have a wicked bruise but . . . “I’ll live.”
Mitch glanced back. Thankfully, they’d finally outstripped the dugout and were out of range of their weapons. In the distance, the Haida’s schooner blazed higher, wood creaking and popping, backlighting the warriors’ canoe, still tailing them. At least there was that.
Working together, Mitch, Eddie, and Tom managed to haul in the life preserver. Thankfully Harrison had managed to hold on as the Windfall surged forward. He clung to the railing as he cleared his lungs of seawater, then straightened. He whooped for joy at the sight of the flaming schooner and kissed the inside of his wrist, where his “H” brand lay.
Mitch’s own wrist itched. The kids would have gotten theirs months ago if it weren’t for him and his refusal to take what was offered
. Maybe they’d been going against the wind for too long. Dani kept them pointed toward land. As the Kachemak Bay came into view, it didn’t feel like they were going backward.
It felt a little like they were finally coming home.
* * *
With the schooner lost, only a dozen Haida warriors survived. They refused to speak, but the anger buried in their eyes told them they understood Dixon’s pronouncements that they’d be allowed to live so long as they pledged never again to plunder the Alaskan coast.
“You would let them go without a verbal agreement?” Tom hissed.
“Better to let them slink home with tales of this battle than to silence them forever.” Dixon lifted a shoulder. “That way they’ll know what it’ll cost them to return here.”
Mitch rubbed his chin. “If this didn’t cripple them, then we must hope it’ll force them south to other targets. Make them someone else’s problem.”
“You think it’ll be enough?” Tom asked.
Dixon gave him a grim nod. “If not, we’ll be ready.”
The Demons of Witmer Hall
by M. T. Reiten
M. T. Reiten
M. T. Reiten lives and writes in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where he also works as a research scientist at the lab bearing the same name. Before grad school, he served in the U.S. Army and had tours in Bosnia and Afghanistan. M.T.’s stories have appeared in Writers of the Future XXI, All the Rage this Year (Phobos Books), and Jim Baen’s Universe. He and his wife have welcomed a beautiful baby girl to their home and are trying to achieve a new equilibrium. Although M.T. spent an inordinate amount of time in Witmer Hall at the University of North Dakota as an undergraduate, he doesn’t wish the apocalypse on the building or any of its former occupants and must emphasize this is a work of fiction. Thus the characters are neither real nor purely imaginary, which means they’re complex (math joke).
GRAND FORKS, NORTH DAKOTA
MARCH 17, 1998—CHANGE DAY 0 (8:25 P.M. CST)
“This has to be a mistake,” I said, flipping the light switch.
Nothing happened. The tiny flame from a single candle barely cut the darkness in the large office space.
“Mistakes that don’t go away become facts.” Kirk Vandermeer turned the thick Acer laptop on his desk, revealing the black display. He stabbed the power button several times for my benefit. “It’s not just a blown transformer in a substation, Jason.”
His office was on the third floor of Witmer Hall, the physics and math building at UND. Minutes earlier I had experienced a blinding flash of light and an intense pain. I had thought it was a migraine, but as quickly as it hit, it was gone. I had groped through the dark stairwells from my lab in the basement. My flashlight had stopped working—I assumed just old batteries—so I couldn’t check the breakers in the complete blackness of the mechanical room.
No one was around on the first or second floors. Not too surprising for after-hours during spring break. When he went home at six, the physics department head, Dr. Murali Rao, kicked out the few faculty and students who hadn’t taken vacation. He had forgotten about me in the Radon Monitoring Facility, trying to catch up on the backlog of test kits. Candlelight shone from Kirk’s office when I reached the third floor. Kirk would have deliberately hidden from Dr. Rao, so he could keep working undisturbed.
Now Kirk pointed out the window toward Columbia Road. I bent to peer through the half-closed blinds. The traffic signals and streetlamps were off and the vehicles were motionless dark lumps. Stopped on the railroad overpass behind the industrial tech building. Stopped on University Avenue. Stopped in the parking lot outside the Memorial Union.
“Nothing is working.” Kirk, again at his desk, held out the phone handset. Silence.
“Sweet. Just what we need,” I said.
Grand Forks had just survived the flood of ’ninety-seven, billed the flood of the century during a slow national news period. The town had been evacuated as the Red River overflowed. The whole Valley region was flat as a pool table. The highest point between Grand Forks and Fargo was the Buxton overpass on I-29. So the north flowing river ran into impassable ice in Canada and had consumed the town with nowhere else to go. A year later and we were still recovering.
“Wonder how long this will take to fix?”
Kirk shrugged. Kirk Vandermeer was a wiry, short guy. At five-four, he stood about a head below me, but he was always hunched over something—his desk, lab equipment, or his coffeepot—making him seem shorter. His ever-present narrow leather tie constantly dangled into things. I would have thought a Texan would wear a bolo and cowboy boots, not secondhand eighties fashion.
But what did I know about fashion? I still wore sweats, though my main exercise had been physical therapy since I blew out my knee early freshman year. No NFL contracts in my future. But as grad students in the physics department, no one cared how we looked, and my sweats were comfortable.
“EMP?” I asked.
Electromagnetic pulses could knock out the power grid and electronics, just like in Moore’s Dark Knight graphic novel.
“Something hitting the Air Base?”
Grand Forks had always been ground zero, due to the SAC base and Minuteman missile silos scattered throughout the farmland.
“That could do it.” Kirk smoothed his thin moustache with a finger as he thought.
“For computers, certainly, but . . .”
“My dissertation!” I had made backups to the point of paranoia, 3.5 inch floppies at my apartment, in my car, multiples in the drawers of my desk, labeled with dates and revision numbers.
“Wait.” Kirk stopped me before I could run toward my dark office in a panic. “If it’s zapped, you can’t fix it. If it’s safe, you can’t work without a computer.”
I took a deep breath and ran my hands across my smooth scalp. I shaved my head since I started balding during my junior year in high school. Passing for thirty when I was seventeen made me popular with friends who wanted me to buy them beer, but it had been hard on my nonexistent love life. Acing my ACTs didn’t help either even though I made the all-state defensive line.
“Whoa. This is crazy. What do we do?”
“I want to check my car to test your EMP theory,” Kirk said.
We grabbed our coats and took the north stairway to the loading dock entrance. The weather had warmed from the previous week when it had dropped into the negative teens. Still it was crisp enough outside to wear my hood up.
Kirk had “borrowed” a staff parking tag from his advisor who had gone on sabbatical, so he had snagged primo parking nearby. His car, backed into the spot, was a ’seventy-two Plymouth Duster, baby blue and rust speckled with balding tires. Kirk opened the hood for me and climbed behind the wheel.
“Let me know what happens,” he called after cranking down the window. He turned the ignition.
Exactly nothing happened. No turn over. No clicking. No faint flicker of dome light inside.
“Didn’t think this old heap had computers,” I said.
“It doesn’t. The battery is dead, too. Strange.” Kirk climbed out and stared with me into the oily blackness of the engine compartment.
He shivered. “Let’s try a push start.”
I looked around the mostly empty parking area. My eyes had adjusted to the faint moonlight. The worst we could hit was the Dumpster or the half-melted snow mound at the far end.
“I guess. You want me to push?”
“Well, I could push you, but all that will accomplish is give me a hernia.” He hopped into the car with a derisive snort.
“I wouldn’t want you to strain your milk,” I grumbled as I leaned onto the trunk and heaved against the cold metal.
The Duster rolled forward, refrozen ice crunching beneath the tires. Kirk popped the clutch, but the car didn’t even buck. It just slowed to a squeaky stop.
“What? You have it in fif
th?” I asked.
“Only have three gears. It’s like the pistons fell out of the engine.” Kirk rubbed his moustache with a knuckle.
As he thought, I pulled back my hood and listened. As dead as campus normally was in the evenings during breaks, an eerie silence permeated the night. No distant rush of traffic heading to Columbia Mall. No crash of freight trains from the nearby tracks. No blasting music from the frats along University Avenue.
“We might as well stay put,” Kirk said, warming his hands in his armpits.
Three years up north and he still hadn’t acclimated to the cold.
“Let the confusion die down.”
“What confusion?”
“You’ll see.”
Kirk got out of the Duster and opened the trunk after fiddling with the lock. He retrieved a large black case that looked like a soft-sided golf bag and slung it over his shoulder.
“Blackouts do strange things to normal folks.”
“An excuse to play some D&D on a work night, huh?”
“Don’t have enough candles for that,” Kirk said as we abandoned his car to return to the warmth of Witmer Hall.
We stopped at the double glass doors at the west entrance and searched for the right keys.
“Hold it right there!” came a command from behind us.
The campus officer’s uniform looked bulky with his jacket and a bulletproof vest beneath and his voice was hoarse from heavy breathing. He wore a white bicycle helmet perched on his large round head. He dumped the mountain bike he was straddling into the dirt-laden snow next to the sidewalk. Probably hadn’t exercised this much since he joined the university police force.
“This is my lab,” Kirk said, pointing to the third floor.
“Me, too,” I added.
“No one is allowed into evacuated buildings until physical plant gives the go ahead,” the campus officer said. He sounded young to be a cop and had an odd, clipped accent. “Too many hazards. Can’t allow looting.”
Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Page 14