As the captain’s launch approached, Floyd made a heroic leap after one overly bold seagull, sending the half-wolf into the ocean. He sputtered and started dog paddling, but I didn’t see anywhere he could get out. He started paddling slower and slower, sinking deeper and deeper into the water, confused and unable to find a way out. I panicked and jumped in after him, finding out why he was having problems. The water was barely above freezing.
The cold shock seized my lungs and I couldn’t breathe. Terri started screaming for help. I heard her as if she was far in the distance. My hands and feet quickly turned numb as Floyd tried to find some respite from the cold on my shoulders, which served to drag me under. I pushed him away and got back to the surface for one more breath, before I could no longer tread water.
My breath came in short gasps. I had no air to hold. I was hit by a wave as the captain’s launch angled sideways to stop. It threw Floyd and me into a barnacle-encrusted piling. I felt the skin on my head split and the sting of salt water in the cuts on my head. I didn’t feel anything below my neck. A line attached to a long pole wrapped over my arm. I tried to support Floyd with my other arm, but a second line swung out for him. He was terrified and half-frozen. The sailors dragged us both aboard.
We were unable to stand. They covered us with Navy-issue wool blankets.
“You jumped into freezing water after your dog? You must be some kind of lunatic,” a man who was wearing a captain’s uniform said.
“But he’s a good dog,” I mumbled, shivering uncontrollably.
A WINLOCK PRESS BOOK
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-68261-419-8
END TIMES ALASKA: FURY
Book 4
© 2017 by Craig Martelle
All Rights Reserved
Edited by Monique Happy Editorial Services
Cover art by Christian Bentulan
Cover photography by Dr. Wendy Martelle
This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.
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CONTENTS
Glossary
A Bad Landing
The Daily Grind
It’s Just a Bear
Meeting of the Minds
A Minor Scuffle
The Council
The Ghost in the Dark
A New Direction
Begin the Search
What the Hell Did You Do?
Hunting a Fellow Human
The Next Chapter
Making Phone Calls
Meeting of the Minds
Time Flies By
The Wedding
The Road to Valdez
Valdez
A Return Home
The Vitriol
One More Winter Down
A Partnership
Pogo Mine
Is it War?
The New Council
A New Pain
Five Years Later
Dedication
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by Craig Martelle
Other Winlock Books You’ll Love
GLOSSARY
Alaskan Term: Definition
Break up: Spring thaw in Alaska where the ice breaks apart on the rivers. During this transition, most snow is melted but much remains in the shaded areas. The mud is horrendous as the ground beneath is still frozen.
Generator: Backup power source; burns gasoline to generate a limited amount of electricity
Green Up: When the tree blossoms bud – usually happens in a single day, turning the wilderness from the brown of winter to the green of spring
Dog team: Consists of two lead dogs, two swing dogs, six team dogs, and two wheel dogs. The lead dogs are the smart ones. They pick out the trail and they set the pace. They lead the dog team. The two swing dogs are trained to form an arc around a corner. If the dogs just followed the lead dogs, then they’d dive off the trail. Everything has to be done smoothly. A good team flows behind the lead dogs, taking the weight of the sled with them, allowing the leaders to focus on the trail ahead. The team dogs are the work horses, pulling the majority of the weight. The wheel dogs are the strongest as they have to deal with the constant jerking of the sled. They are responsible for getting the sled moving. They pick up the tension if the sled pulls back. The wheel dogs are calmer. They have to be.
Mush: To drive a dog team
Musher: The one who drives the dog team
Pellet stove: A stove designed to burn pellet fuel versus cut firewood, but used in the same manner as a wood-burning stove; you can’t cook on a pellet stove
Permafrost: That part of the ground that never thaws. There are places in Alaska where the ground is frozen to one thousand feet deep
Quad: An All-Terrain Vehicle (ATV)
Rigging: Attaches dogs to sleigh. Includes tug lines, tow line
Sled: A snowmobile
Sleigh: A trailer towed behind a snowmobile
Snow machine: A snowmobile
A BAD LANDING
The airplane crabbed toward the recently repaired runway. The winds were kicking up again. The pilot fought valiantly with the cargo version of the Boeing 737. It hit hard, bounced once, then the landing gear on the left side dug into the pavement and was ripped from the airplane. The wing dropped and the engine hit the concrete. It slid for a while, but then the engine was ripped free and the wing followed it into the wake of fire and destruction spreading behind the aircraft.
It was the second crash in two months. If they couldn’t fix the problems, the cargo flights would stop. I couldn’t have that. The people had a tenuous grip on life as it was. They’d done with less, but we had lost people that way, too. I didn’t want to lose any more, not this winter. I couldn’t.
The plane slid to a stop. One firetruck raced to it, stopping to spray foam into the fires that threatened to find their way to the remaining on-board fuel. The volunteers, acting as firemen on this day, fought to a victory and stood between what remained of the airplane and the wreckage strewn down the runway. The body of the craft was intact. At least this load of supplies made it. No clue when or if any more would come.
One of the firemen looked at the truck where I sat, watching. He gave me the thumbs up. I waved back, not wanting to discourage him after they’d done what they had to in order to save the aircraft. I put the truck in gear and drove to where the flight attendants already had the emergency slide activated. They were shoving people and bags out the door quickly. The crew collected themselves and their personal bags, throwing everything into the back of my truck. Two climbed into the bed and the other two climbed in with me.
“Any idea what happened?” I asked.
The pilot looked at me and shook his head as he tried to gather himself after walking away from the crash.
“I’ll drop you off at the clinic so Colleen can look you over. Temp billeting is right next door, but not sure how temporary it will be. I don’t know when the next ride out will happen. The trains stopped a year ago. The road isn’t closed, but we don’t have a vehicle that we’re sure will make it. Everything
is kind of duct-taped together at this point,” I told them. I don’t think it registered. They were still in shock.
The offload team was at the plane, starting to unload it, even while the firemen were still making sure it wouldn’t burst into flames. The supplies were too precious to lose. Spare parts mostly, fuel, lubricants, those little things that made life possible in a Fairbanks winter.
I dropped the aircrew off and watched them troop into the clinic. I took their luggage next door and put them in the narrow hallway outside the small rooms. This had been a work trailer before the fall, but we’d commandeered it to use as a temp billeting. It was self-contained, but heat was based on the availability of electricity. That meant it was of no use once the river froze, unless the natural gas generator parts were in the load. We never received confirmation of our order via HAM radio.
I hoped they would be, but hope was a lousy plan. That meant I needed to find other accommodations for these people. At least there were only four of them. I’d float that in the next meeting of the governing council. There was always something that needed done just to keep our heads above water.
Crap, I thought. Cut off from the rest of humanity once again. I felt the weight of a thousand souls crushing the life out of me. Before, it was just the Community, and we were self-sufficient back then.
THE DAILY GRIND
“Would you snap out of it?” Charles yelled. I looked at him, wondering if he was talking to me. His twin sister stood nearby. She shrugged.
“What?” I asked my son.
“She’s gone. It’s been a year and she’s still gone. There’s only two months to winter and we aren’t ready!” the young man exclaimed.
It had been ten years since the triumphant return of the settlers to Alaska and nine years since the UN recognized Alaska as a new nation under United States protection. It was good at the start, but then the money and support tapered off. Now everything we received cost us an arm and a leg, in time and effort. The United States was in the grips of a new depression. There was no money to support the fledgling nation state. Hostilities, even non-violent ones between the U.S. and Russia, cost everyone. The whole world suffered.
No money. And now, this would be the last flight. No one could afford to keep throwing planes at New Fairbanks, if they weren’t going to return home.
I looked at Charles. He’d become quite the young man. At sixteen, he was an exceptional hunter, dog musher, survivalist. He was everything I was not when our journey started fourteen years ago. And it wasn’t just Charles. Aeryn was all of that, too. Either of them could mush their dog team into the bush for a week, and I didn’t worry.
Maybe I should have worried more.
A year ago, their mother, Madison, took the quad out and didn’t come back. She wasn’t as adventurous as our kids, so we didn’t have to search for long. The quad had rolled and she had been pinned underneath. The fact that she died quickly from a broken neck was no consolation. The death of your life’s partner was something that no one wants to go through. It’s not easy for the one who survives. Ever.
I had never thought about life without her, but here I was, a year later. All I wanted to do was disappear into the woods and not come back. Maybe that wasn’t all. I needed to be here for my kids, for the settlers, a thousand strong. We stopped getting new people about five years earlier, when they realized what a hard life they were signing up for. Every day was a work day. Every day was a struggle to survive.
And every one of the people had a story like mine. They’d all lost someone, but we were in Alaska trying to find ourselves while making peace with our pasts.
“What do you need me to do?” I asked Charles, trying to get my heart into it. Aeryn put a hand on my arm and took over the conversation as her brother hung his head and left.
“You need to get down to the warehouse and end that feud,” she said evenly. “Kasparoff and Jones are at it again. As long as they’re fighting, our trade and supplies aren’t being managed. There’s a bunch of people and a whole lot of nothing getting done. Come on, Dad. I’ll go with you.”
With such people in my life, how could I fail them? It was time to stop the pettiness. We all had something we needed to accomplish for the good of the rest.
I missed my wife, and the fact that the others weren’t doing what they had committed to made me furious. I wanted to mourn, and they wouldn’t let me. Petty people, not stepping up.
“Let’s go,” I growled while pinching my eyes shut to keep the tears from starting. “I think I’ve had enough of this. Let’s get this settled today, shall we?”
Outside, our bicycles awaited. Within the downtown of New Fairbanks, fat-tire bikes were the best form of transportation. They were easy to maintain and broadened our reach. We didn’t live close together as we had in the past. Some did, but not many. We had our own place now, a house that had been abandoned, but was set up for the subsistence lifestyle with an outhouse and a wood-burning stove.
Riding helped me stay in shape so I could breathe. Time had taken a toll on my lungs. Immediately following the stem-cell treatments, I felt like a champ, but without continued medication my asthma was seeking to gain a foothold. Carrying no extra weight helped. I was down almost forty pounds from the day the nuke detonated.
“Come on, Floyd!” I yelled as we rode away. He had been lounging in the sun on the porch and hadn’t realized we were leaving. He was always up for a good run. Besides the twins, the half-wolf, half-Alaskan Husky was the other reason I was still alive. Although barely a year old when Madison died, he remained by my side, kept me company through it all, and slept next to me every night. In the summer that made things a little hot, because he was a shaggy beast and took a large chunk of the bed. I figured he was well over a hundred pounds, but had never weighed him. I could only guess by how much my chest compressed when he rolled over on top of me.
I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The airport was a couple miles from our home. The warehouse was the main receiving and distribution point of the Community. It had previously been two hangars, side by side, but with a little ingenuity and a bulldozer, the planes were cleared away, the space put to good use, and a natural gas heating system installed. It was as self-sustaining as we could make it, but the natural gas production from the only active well was limited. The warehouse used it all, not leaving anything for others.
The initial hope for the well was that it would help power an entire grid. That didn’t work out. Our plans for central power rested on a hydro system, which only worked when the river flowed. It was far from optimal. At least it helped bring the processing plant to life for canning and freezing. By the time the river froze over, meats could be stored elsewhere, using the Alaskan cold to keep things frozen for the winter. When the ice thawed, electricity would be generated and the freezers would start running again. It was a workaround that required a certain amount of manual labor and attention to detail to keep the perishables from rotting.
The processing facility was a communal property. One Russian-Alaskan couple ran the facility, kept it clean and functioning for a small portion of the food that people brought there. It was a bartering arrangement that worked for everyone. Some might call it communism. Others would call it free trade. No one was forced into using the facility. The price was food. Only one person balked. After last winter, he hadn’t been seen again. Either he took off for the great unknown or died from misprocessing his vegetables. I suspected the latter.
When we arrived at the warehouse, we saw a line of unhappy people lined up outside the door. Most had a cart of some sort or other. I waved to them and tried to reassure them, “We’ll have this resolved in no time. You have my personal guarantee!” I tried to smile, getting angrier by the moment. Aeryn followed closely, unsure of what I was prepared to do. She wanted me to keep my .45 holstered, checking that it was before opening the door. She raised her eyebr
ows at me, just like her mother used to do. It almost broke my spirit.
Almost. I gripped her shoulder for a second before going through the door. Nikolai Kasparoff was a younger Russian, one of those imported to establish the Russian community in hopes of winning approval from the UN to colonize Alaska. They didn’t win because they burned their building down, killing half their number before the Community came to the rescue. The other man behind a makeshift counter was Bill Jones, a newcomer, but older than most and a workhorse. They had different ideas about how the warehouse should run. Neither was wrong. Both were convinced their vision was the most correct.
Neither was willing to compromise.
“This man is impossible!” Nikolai shouted with a mild accent.
“Don’t you two know the meaning of the word ‘compromise?’ Please, just fix it!” I didn’t have anything better at that moment. I didn’t want to be there. Floyd growled.
Nikolai reached a hand across the narrow counter and grabbed me by the collar. He tried to pull me closer, probably to make the point that his opinion was correct. I snapped.
With a quick turn, I wrapped my hand at the back of his head and yanked forward, smashing his face on the counter. When he pulled back, his nose was broken and blood streamed from both nostrils. I wasn’t finished. I hadn’t let go of his head. I tried to pull it toward me, but he resisted. With a quick jab, I punched him in the mouth. I let go and started to move around the counter, but Aeryn wrapped two arms around my waist as she fell to the floor, acting as an anchor to keep me from continuing.
Fury (End Times Alaska Book 4) Page 1