Bill snorted in my ear. “No, man. I told you, my gig dried up weeks ago. I’m a free agent now, just looking for a way to survive, like you assholes.”
“I have money,” I said, desperate to turn this around somehow.
“Oh yeah?”
“In that bag.” I pointed to the laptop bag I’d been carrying. It was out in the open with the rest of our luggage. Hopefully Richard would be able to get a good angle to shoot at Bill if he tried to reach it.
“Nice try.”
“It’s true!” Kate said.
“Shut it! Richard! You have one minute to surrender and come down here. After that, I start shooting.”
“No,” Richard said. “If I go down, you’ll just shoot us anyway. I need a guarantee that you’ll let us leave.”
“How’s this for a guarantee?” Bill asked.
His gun left my head, and I saw him aim it at the ground. I realized what he was doing just a split second before I heard the muffled plip. Blinding pain tore through my toes, and I screamed.
“Logan!” Kate cried out, sobbing, but I heard her as if from a great distance. Between the pain and lack of oxygen flowing to my brain, I was just about to pass out.
“The next bullet goes through his head!” Bill screamed beside my ear. “You have thirty seconds left!”
Chapter 26
“Ten seconds, Richard!” Bill called out. “Maybe the next bullet should find little Rachel, what do you think? Maybe that will motivate you!”
“All right! Enough! I’m coming down.”
“You better hurry!”
Adrenaline sparked through my veins, keeping me conscious. I fought Bill’s hold on me, but he just tightened his grip until I couldn’t breathe again. “Don’t do anything stupid!” Bill muttered in my ear.
My heart thundered in my chest, and my lungs burned for air. There had to be a way out of this. Maybe if we all made our move at the same time, we’d have a chance. It would be five against one—four if we didn’t count Rachel.
But no, that wasn’t right. There were only three of us. Bill’s arm eased and I sucked in a deep breath. Alex was still with Celine. Bill had forgotten about him.
Hope stirred inside of me even as the door at the bottom of Richard’s tower opened with a rusty screech, and Richard came out with his hands up.
Bill shuffled to keep me between him and Richard. “Stop right there, and turn around slowly,” he said.
Richard did as he was told.
“Stop!” Bill said again as soon as Richard’s back was turned. “Pull up your shirt—slowly!”
Richard hesitated.
“Come on!”
Richard did as he was told, revealing a pistol tucked into the waistband of his pants, hiding between the folds of fat at the small of his back.
“Nice try. Pull it out slowly and throw it in those bushes over there. You make any sudden moves and Logan gets an earful of lead.”
Richard pulled out the pistol and threw it into the bushes. My heart sank. Now Alex was our only hope.
“Turn around and get over here,” Bill said.
Richard walked over very slowly. “Stop dragging your feet, fat ass! You think I don’t know what you’re playing at? Trust me, your nephew isn’t going to save you this time. By the time he gets here, you’ll already be dead.”
That hit me like a bolt of lightening. Bill knew about Alex going to see Celine. He must have overheard us talking. And Richard’s suspicions were right. Bill had no intention of letting us go.
“Please. Don’t do this,” Kate sobbed. “We won’t report you to the police. I promise we won’t. Just let us go!”
Bill snorted. “Sure you won’t, because you’re not going anywhere, sweetheart. But don’t worry. You and your daughter will live.”
“She’s just a child!”
“What kind of sicko do you think I am?” Bill demanded. “She’s insurance. You’re the entertainment. You behave, she lives. Simple as that.” Richard came within five feet of us, and Bill took a quick step back. “Stop right there.” Then he released me and gave me a shove. My foot erupted with a sharp spike of pain, and I stumbled and fell in front of Richard.
Before I could try to get up, Bill said, “Get on the ground, face down beside him.”
“You’re going straight to hell,” Richard said as he sank to his knees.
Bill snorted. “A godless scientist like you trying to send me to hell? That’s rich. Kiss the dirt, heathen.”
“Fuck you,” Richard spat.
“You’d rather die on your knees? No problem.”
I pushed off the ground, coming up to a sitting position. Bill’s aim shifted to me. “You want to go first?”
I hesitated. I’d just caught a glimpse of the gate in the chain-link fence swinging open behind Bill. It was Alex. I watched him creep through, holding a pistol in both hands, and I held my breath. Where had he found a gun? Then I remembered—the glove compartment of Richard’s truck.
Bill seemed to notice that I was looking at something over his shoulder. His brow furrowed and he began to turn. “What are you...”
“Alex, shoot him!” Richard said.
Bill tucked and rolled. Alex tracked him with his gun, but nothing happened.
“What are you waiting for!” I screamed as Bill came out of that roll in a crouch, his own gun sweeping up to aim at my son’s chest.
“I can’t pull the trigger!”
Bill jumped up and lunged. Alex backed away hurriedly, still trying to shoot. Bill snatched the weapon away from him and held it up sideways while covering Alex with his own gun.
“It’s a Beretta, like mine. Thing is, kid, Berettas have safeties, and you forgot to turn yours off.”
“Shit,” I muttered.
Richard sprang off the ground with a sudden roar, and I stumbled to my feet, limping toward Bill with gritted teeth. Startled, he spun around and took aim, dropping Alex’s gun at his feet so that he could use both hands.
That was when Alex made his move. He tackled Bill from behind and clawed at his eyes. Bill’s gun went off with a muffled plip, but the shot went wide and dug into the dirt. Rachel screamed in terror, and Bill cursed viciously as he tried to throw Alex off. Then Richard reached him. He grabbed Bill’s wrist and wrestled with him for the gun.
Still limping toward them, I bent down and picked up a rock. Bill elbowed Alex in the gut and he fell off Bill’s back, landing with a crack on top of something in the long grass.
Bill’s gun inched ever closer to Richard’s head. “You’re fucking dead!” he roared.
I tried to run, but my injured toes wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t going to make it.
But Kate did. She ran in and slammed Bill in the side of the head with her own rock. He stumbled away, his eyes wide and gun waving around blindly as blood streamed down the side of his face. We all just stood there, frozen with horror and wary of the gun in his hand. Bill blinked, and his eyes appeared to focus once more.
“You bitch!” His gun swept into line with her. “Say good—”
I lunged, but Alex was faster and cracked him in the head with a broken branch. Bill stumbled again, his gun tracking toward Alex. Kate screamed and slammed her rock into his head one more.
This time Bill’s eyes rolled up, and he collapsed, limbs flopping like a rag-doll.
I limped the rest of the way to reach him, arriving just in time to see Richard stomp on Bill’s face with a sickening crunch. The man groaned, blood running in rivers down his cheeks. His nose looked like a smashed tomato.
“Feel good, doesn’t it?” Richard bent down to retrieve something from the ground, and he came back up holding Bill’s silenced Beretta.
“Look away,” he said, but didn’t wait for me to do so. He pulled the trigger twice—plip, plip. Bill’s head jumped in time to each impact. The rock in my hand fell from limp fingers with a thump. There were two dime-sized red holes in Bill’s forehead.
“You killed him,” Kate said in a shakin
g whisper.
“Damn straight,” Richard replied.
“We should have tied him up and called the police!” she said.
“Why? So they could come poking around here and see my setup? Or maybe so they could investigate a little deeper and find out about his contract to watch your family and my government pay-off.” Richard shook his head. “No, it’s better this way. Trust me, Kate. Grab his feet. We’re going to bury him under the wood pile.”
To my surprise Kate did as he asked. I watched, nauseated and shaking with spent adrenaline as she and Richard dragged him over to the wood pile.
“Lean on me, Dad,” Alex said as he came over and wrapped my arm around his shoulders on the side of my injured foot.
“Thanks.” I heard a familiar sniveling sound and looked around quickly. “Rachel?”
“Daddy!” she cried, but I didn’t see her pop out of hiding. I tracked her voice to one of the greenhouses and limped over with Alex. We found her sitting in the long grass, wiping her eyes with dirty hands and leaving muddy streaks behind.
I tried to crouch down beside her, but my injured foot wouldn’t let me, and I fell on my ass instead.
“Mommy—” Rachel broke off to suck in a shuddering breathe.
I pulled her into a hug and kissed her head. “She’s fine, Rachie. So is Uncle Richard.”
Alex came and made it a group hug.
“Everyone’s fine,” I said, rubbing Rachel's back. She went on sobbing. “Shhh.” I rocked her back and forth. “You’re safe now.”
“What about the bad man?” More sniveling.
I shook my head. Not seeing the point of sugar-coating it and keeping her fears alive, I said, “He’s dead, Rach. He won’t be bothering us again.”
To my amazement, Rachel’s sobbing quieted at that, but we kept on holding each other, anyway.
“How’s your foot?” I withdrew from my kids, to see Kate on her haunches beside us.
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “It hurts. Where’s Richard?”
“Digging. I’m going to take your shoe off, okay?”
I winced at the thought of that.
“If the bullet’s still in there, we’ll have to take you to the hospital.”
“And tell the police how I got shot?” I asked. “They’ll find the body and arrest us for hiding it.”
“Why do you think I need to see your foot?”
Kate tugged my shoe off, and I bit back a cry as the movement disturbed my injured toes. Kate gasped at the sight of my blood-stained sock. She took that off next, revealing an ugly, blood-crusted and swollen mess around my big toe and the one beside it. Kate gingerly touched my big toe, and I cried out in pain.
“Damn it, Kate!”
“Sorry... you’re lucky. None of your toes is missing. It looks like the bullet just grazed them both. We’ll be able to fix you up here.”
Nodding slowly, I blew out a shuddering breath and leaned my head against the side of the greenhouse with a hollow-sounding thump. At least there was some good news in all of this.
I caught a glimpse of something gleaming in the grass beside us and turned to look at it—long metal poles arranged in a crosswise pattern.
“Is that Richard’s shortwave antenna?” I asked.
Alex went to retrieve it and held it up for us to see. “Looks like it,” he said.
“Hopefully Richard can re-attach it,” I replied.
“I’m sure he can,” Kate said. “If not we’ll buy the parts he needs. I’m going to go get something to clean your foot. Stay here.”
I nodded along with that and laid my head back against the greenhouse again. Rachel curled up against me, and Alex sat down on the other side of me, holding the antenna. The sun beamed down from a bright blue sky. A breeze blew, feeling hot on my skin, but cold in my sweat-soaked hair.
This whole mess with Bill just underscored the need for us to find a safer place to live. If we had this much trouble repelling one invader, what would we do when the desperate masses found us?
Not to mention aliens. But somehow the thought of their arrival inspired more hope than fear. Maybe Massey was wrong and they would turn out to be friendly. If they’d found a way to live around a dead star, then surely they could help us live here on our soon-to-be frozen Earth. Hope swelled in my chest, and I sighed.
“Are you going to be okay, Daddy?” Rachel asked, her eyes on my foot.
I squeezed her shoulders. “Don’t worry, Rachie. I’ll be fine. We’re all going to be just fine.”
Part 2 - Arrival
Chapter 27
—TEN MONTHS LATER—
April 25th, 2032
7 DAYS BEFORE THE ROGUE’S ARRIVAL
I sat at a desk in the shelter’s utility room, nestled between the giant batteries for the solar array, and the shelter’s dormant gas boiler. On the desk in front of me was Richard’s shortwave radio. Static hissed and buzzed from the radio, mingled with the muffled voices of dozens of different radio sources, most of them speaking in urgent tones and relating horrors that I could only guess about. The world was in chaos, but we were in a bubble of relative ignorance—no Internet, no TV, not even a connection to the electrical grid for us to keep track of outages.
The only ways we could learn about the outside world were via reports that came to us second hand from Alex’s girlfriend, Celine, and via the radio I was listening to now.
After burying Bill under the woodpile and fixing his antenna, Richard had shown me and Kate how to work his radio. He’d given us a list of emergency channels to listen to between waiting to hear from him at Haven, and we’d done plenty of listening in the months since he’d left.
When spring never came and the snow didn’t melt, all the people who were still clinging to their lives up north began a mass exodus to government housing projects in the southern states. And some of them didn’t stop there. Last I’d heard, armed convoys of American refugees were waging a war on the Mexican border. Meanwhile, the actual war in Venezuela was on-going, and no one could move down there yet. Their infrastructure had been in shambles even before we’d invaded. As far as I was concerned, that made it a dubious option in the first place. There was bad, and there was worse. Texas, with its food shortages, power outages, shanty towns, tent cities, and government projects that slept twelve to a room was bad, but Venezuela was infinitely worse. It was a bombed-out war zone. The situation in the rest of the world wasn’t much better either. Russia and Europe were battling over the Middle East and Africa, while China had almost fully occupied South East Asia and Indonesia.
As all of the news filtered in through my radio, I’d been tempted to ask for more information, but Richard had warned me not to transmit unless it was an emergency. He’d explained that our location could be derived from our signals, and HAM radio operators were prime targets at a time like this. People would assume that anyone with a HAM radio was a prepper with a cache of supplies, and they’d go looking for those supplies. It was a dog eat dog world out there.
“Hey there, handsome,” a warm voice said. I turned to see Kate come in with a steaming cup of coffee. “You probably need this.”
Smiling I held out a hand for the cup. She sat on my lap before reluctantly prying her hands away to give it to me. I didn’t have to wonder about her reluctance. The cup was a source of warmth. April in southern Texas should have been hot, but here we were at nine o’clock at night, wearing jackets inside our shelter. I was trying to save our firewood, so the wood stoves weren’t running, and the only other sources of heat we had were the in-floor systems. The electric one drained our batteries too much at night, and I was saving gas for the hydronic system until we really needed it.
“Still nothing?” Kate asked, while running her hand through my hair. It was growing long. So was my beard for that matter.
“Not yet,” I said, and raised my cup for another sip. She went on playing with my hair. She’d encouraged me to keep it long, saying it made me look dangerous. At a ti
me like this I supposed the more dangerous I looked the safer she felt. That, or she’d meant her comment in purely carnal terms.
Kate and I were closer than ever. It had taken me a few months to finally get over myself and forgive her, but now the biggest issue keeping us apart was that Richard, being a single guy, had forgotten to stockpile birth control in his shelter. In the beginning I’d risked driving without a license to get to the nearest pharmacies and buy out their supplies, but now that it was too dangerous to venture out, we had to ration ourselves.
A sudden burst of noise issued from the radio, pulling me out of my thoughts. I waited for it to pass, my ears straining for a discernible message.
Going in, I had zero experience operating shortwave radios, so Richard had simplified the process for me. Haven Colony’s frequency was set to channel one. All I had to do was keep the radio turned on and tuned to that channel, and of course, stand by all day to listen.
Kate and I had already been listening for twelve hours straight, taking turns to give each other a break, and we hadn’t heard a peep from Haven Colony. The day was almost over and our hopes had already died with the light, but Richard made us promise not to leave the radio until the clock struck midnight, and maybe not even then. Bouncing radio waves over the horizon could be elusive, he’d explained, and there were a lot of false positives in the form of muffled broadcasts from other stations. Thankfully, we were listening for something very specific—one of two messages that I had written down on a pad of paper I kept on top of the radio. The first message was: This is T95C calling M1ARC - code QRV.
That was the message we really wanted to hear. The last part—QRV—was the key. Richard had told us it meant are you ready? If for whatever reason Haven wasn’t ready for us, then we’d get the second message—the same one that we’d received back in December: This is T95C calling M1ARC - transmitting 73.
Seven three was radio code for best regards. That seemed like a sarcastic message to get when we were waiting anxiously for the green light to get out of this hell hole, but Richard had explained that messages were best kept brief, since there was no guarantee that our connection would last, and longer messages might lead to unwanted attention.
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