by A. R. Shaw
Bishop pushed layers of snow over Mike’s body. It was the least he could do for the man. He’d given him information, but unfortunately, he was as good as dead when he found him. There was someone down there making life much more difficult in these tough times, and after Bishop found out who that was he would make a plan from there.
After retrieving Jake, he continued down to the lake and crossed Albion Road. The snow had piled in drifts in the opened areas between the trees. The wind picked up and made traversing the terrain even more challenging, and yet there was no end in sight.
He came to a stop near an old pier, looking out cautiously in the open. To his left, the lake widened substantially toward the marina. Gray skies coupled with the snow and thick gray smoke from fires made the area on the ice look like a war zone. He heard more sporadic shooting, but the smog was so thick in that area he couldn’t make out anything.
The ice looked thick enough to traverse, but those were the famous last thoughts of many dead individuals. A small fishing boat stood captured in the center, the ice so thick it piled up around the hull as it expanded.
When Bishop typically crossed the lake, he took the beat-up metal rowboat he kept tied to the pier, but it had sunk and half frozen into the ice under the pier. This was the narrow end of the lake, and unless he crossed here, he’d have to circle the lake and follow the highway down to the town, which would add hours to his trek. He shifted in his saddle, looking all around him. This place, once peaceful, now seemed haunted.
Bishop dismounted and took a few steps. The ice was rough, and there were a few human tracks in areas. “Come on, Jake,” he said and nudged the horse out onto the ice. He watched for any fissures as he went.
Crossing the lake in November was never done. Not in his lifetime, and he was sure it hadn’t happened since the last Maunder Minimum in this area. Midway through, they passed the boat frozen in time. There was no one aboard, though Bishop didn’t look deep inside. The faint tracks on the ice showed that someone else had checked out the boat and continued on to the other side.
Constantly vigilant of cracking ice, Bishop kept moving and led Jake behind him, never standing in one spot longer than the time it took to take the next step. Continuously transferring his and Jake’s weight kept them from gambling against the ice’s strength.
They reached the other side of the lake, and Bishop remounted while keeping watch for any other living person. Desperation hung heavy in the frozen air, and with the occasional shots ringing out in the distance he didn’t think it would be long before he saw much worse than human desperation. Human despair was the next step. He’d seen the signs in the South Pacific seas; humanity still strived in desperation, but in despair, they gave up entirely and no longer fought for the need to survive. Those in despair were already dead men, like Mike packed in the snow on the mountain.
Bishop stayed to the shoulder of Coeur d’Alene Lake Drive, or rather the area right above where the road should have been because the road itself wasn’t visible. As he continued into more populated areas, the houses that lined the streets looked deserted. If there were people inside of them, they were hiding out. To the north, several more shots rang out only a few streets away, and before he realized it, he had his AR out by his side. “Come on, Jake. Just a little farther,” he urged. “Let’s get you to Tubbs Hill.”
Tubbs Hill was the area’s requisite hiking trail region. The tall pines there were left intact, growing on a large round rocky peninsula covered in trees that seemed to float out from the mainland. Once in the wooded area, Bishop continued to the other side where he could stand and watch the south side of the resort area and still be hidden from view. The wind picked up off the south end of the frozen lake, and Bishop shuddered. Inside of his coat’s inner pocket, he broke open a large warming pack and shook the ingredients around, then replaced the thin bag inside of the nylon of his inner pockets. He wouldn’t freeze, at least. When he lifted the binoculars to his eyes, he found expensive boats haphazardly frozen in the ice. It seemed no one had had enough notice of the storm to stow them away properly. Then he saw something dark lying on the pier. And then there was another one. There were bodies out there lying in the open. Their clothes on their backs rippled in the wind, which was now coming in sharp gusts.
A sudden flash of a weapon’s fire came from around the east side of the tower. A man in uniform shot at someone on the west side of the building, and then behind him a group of men all dressed in the same black uniform began shooting at the uniformed officer.
Bishop watched as he lost his cover and ran out onto the ice and made it as far as the boardwalk of the main pier, but then he was out in the open with no cover at all. Bishop’s gloved hand squeezed his rifle, but not knowing who the bad guys were, he held back. More shots rang out as three men pursued the man running out on the ice. Rat-tat-tat…the man dropped down after shots stitched through his back. His weapon skidded out several feet in front of him.
“We got him!” one of the men yelled to someone near the shore. “Tell Ramsey he’s the last of them. The town’s ours now.”
Bishop moved his binoculars to the south as the three men patted down the body of their enemy, took his firearm, and walked back. Their voices traveled easily over the frozen ice. They took short steps in an effort to not slip. One guy gave orders to the others, saying, “We’ve got this now.” Another man asked, “What about Spokane? When they hear, they’ll send someone.”
“Spokane has their own problems. Ramsey knows what he’s doing.” He put his arm behind the other guy’s head. “Dave, don’t question him. Not if you want to keep your family alive. Understand?”
The younger man hesitated for a moment but then nodded. They followed the third guy, walking back to the resort as another gust of sharp, cold wind blew by them. Bishop tightened his coat around himself.
There was something screwed up in the way they were behaving. They wore black uniforms, but they were different from the police officer that they killed. Bishop returned his view to the body on the ice again and magnified the binoculars to get a closer look at the dead man. His uniform was also black, but stitched across the shoulder in gold thread was spelled Coeur d’Alene Police Department. “Damn.”
He focused on the retreating men again, who were just entering the building. Were those guys just hotel security? Bishop wasn’t sure, and he’d never known them to carry arms before. The door closed hard. It was impossible to see inside of the hotel’s glass, but he knew they’d have an unobstructed view of him if he broke his cover.
Now the streets were quiet. Bishop felt like he’d come at the end of a battle, and from the looks of the bodies lying in the open, he was probably right. Bishop wasn’t prepared for this. He knew now who controlled the city—their leader was a guy named Ramsey. Though he had the information he came for, he had to return to Maeve for now. Bishop needed to head back to camp before the short day turned to night so that he could keep her safe…and so that he could plan how to take back the town.
Chapter 22
Louna coughed from the cave room, and when she did, the jagged sound of it made Maeve cringe while she kept watch at the doorway. Then Louna coughed again and couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
Maeve had no choice but to leave her post to aid the child. Panicking because she couldn’t breathe, Louna began hyperventilating and coughing in intervals. Maeve rushed to her and pulled her up from the pillow where she was lying. “Louna, it’s all right,” she soothed as she patted her back. Ben sat up, whipping his eyes toward Louna and looking worried. “Get a cup of water, Ben,” Maeve said, and he scampered out of the room.
Louna was now crying through the coughing fit, and Maeve picked her up quickly and swung her around to cradle her in her lap. “Louna,” she said sternly, “calm down. You’ll make it worse. Breathe…breathe…that’s it. Just calm down,” she encouraged in a soothing tone. She had to get the girl’s attention. She was leading into hysterics, and nothing good came from hyst
erics, or at least that’s what Maeve’s mother used to say. “That’s it. You’re doing better,” Maeve said when the girl’s breathing slowed. Ben stood at her side with a cup filled with water. He stood tentative, casting worried glances at the girl in his mother’s arms.
“She’s fine, Ben,” she said as she took the cup and held it to the girl’s lips. Louna had to slow her breathing even more as she took sips of the water.
“See, she’s better now.”
“I want…my…mom,” Louna cried, and large pools of tears filled her eyes.
Maeve held her close. Louna’s voice still sounded rough and raw, and she was warm from a low temperature. “I know, sweetheart, but you’re fine now. Why don’t you try to sleep a little longer?”
The girl cried for a bit more, and when she settled down, Maeve moved her to the cot again, and she buried her face into the tearstained pillow.
Maeve patted her back as she fell back to sleep.
“Mom, why can’t we bring her back to her family?” Ben whispered.
Maeve motioned for her son to come closer to the front room. “I don’t think her family made it out of the fire, Ben.”
He looked back at the girl lying on the cot in the back room. “So she’s an orphan?”
Maeve shook her head. “I don’t know. We’ll find out in a few days. Bishop went to town to check out things down there. We’ll return there when it’s safe. Hopefully we can find her relatives when we do.”
Ben nodded as if he understood. She wasn’t certain he did, but then again, her son had already lost one parent; maybe he understood more than she gave him credit for. Adults didn’t have a monopoly on pain, which was something she needed to keep in mind.
A gust of wind rattled the door then. She and Ben both shuddered, and then she realized she needed to get back to her post.
“When’s this going to stop, Mom?”
Maeve moved back to the doorway and held the rifle in her hand. “I don’t know, son. Bishop believes this will last for years to come. He said we’re in a mini ice age now. It’s the same thing that the weatherman referred to as the Maunder Minimum.”
“Why can’t we go into town?”
“Because those men that burned down Louna’s house also burned down ours. You remember that?”
He nodded. Maeve hated that the memory would be etched in his mind—armed men blowing out their front window as they fled into the night. If it wasn’t for Bishop, she and her son would likely be dead by now, she realized.
The door racketed in the wind. When she looked outside, the snow blew so hard she couldn’t even see the trees across the small clearing. Not long before, she’d seen them waving in the wind. To think that Bishop was out in that mess…She worried about this stranger because he’d kept her and the children alive over the past few days. She needed him…and that thought alone scared her more than anything else. She was a grieving widow. That had been her identity over the past year, and now here she was worrying about another man, a friend of her dead husband’s.
Ben wandered into the cave room again to check on Louna. He’d become protective of the girl since the moment he had to check her pulse. She thought it was sweet in a way but awful in another. What if this world was one where you lost your loved ones more so than their old reality? She couldn’t bear her son going through the grief she held for his father.
Ben pulled the covers up over the girl’s shoulders and tucked them in around her. When the wind blew again and the door rattled, Maeve watched her son. Then suddenly, she felt the door rattle deliberately harder, and a strange man’s breath leached through the cracks and onto her neck.
“Let me in!”
Chapter 23
On a crisp fall morning, the sun shone bright, and David was enjoying his morning as he read the local newspaper, which was a luxury. Newspapers were a thing of the past and to purchase a printed subscription cost quite a high fee now, but he loved the feel of the paper between his fingers and sorting through the pages rather than swiping on a screen.
Of course, he also owned the local newspaper, and because it was one of his family’s many businesses he still demanded the printed format despite the lack of cost effectiveness. He reached for his orange juice and took a sip. The sun warmed the back of his neck. He looked out over the marina, watching a few of the boats heading out for a day on the lake. It would be one of the last nice days of the season.
At sixty-three, David Geller II had stopped trying to live up to his father’s name. The mogul who built the empire by Lake Coeur d’Alene proved to be a man impossible to emulate, and yet the best David could do was uphold all his father had achieved. That was the way of things in his mind. He would never be as great a man as his father was, but then again, he loved the man and was proud to call him Dad.
He’d died peacefully in his sleep a decade before, but David still thought of the man every single day, and why not? Everything about his life now revolved around what had taken a lifetime to accomplish. He was merely the caretaker now. The caretaker of the Geller dynasty.
David brushed away an errant fly as he sat on the balcony of his penthouse at the top of the resort tower. He was only going to be there for a few days on business. He and his family called Arizona home now. David was never in favor of having his children grow up in Coeur d’Alene among the shadows that he contended with even now. He wanted his children to grow up somewhere where their mistakes weren’t reported in the daily small-town paper. Where if they went over the speed limit occasionally it wasn’t reported by everyone who was watching them. No, he had men to oversee everything now. They were capable and so was he…from afar. The gem by the lake was in good hands, and though he was still CEO of the private company that owned the family’s entities, Roman was the true man behind the machine.
“Sir.” Austin Sanchez, David Geller’s personal assistant, stepped out of the door from the penthouse and onto the balcony. “You have a nine-fifteen with Mr. Roman, sir.”
David checked his platinum watch on his wrist, not quite believing he’d been sitting out there enjoying his morning for quite that long. “Sure, send him in.”
Austin disappeared inside the penthouse, and a few seconds later Roman stepped outside onto the patio and walked toward David. Though Roman ran things with precision, David found him to be a difficult man. He often disagreed with him over minor changes and had to reprimand Roman by reminding him who was actually in charge. He overlooked the challenges because Roman did the job well, even in spite of him questioning his authority too often.
That’s why David was here, to check on Roman. Overseeing that his decisions were, in fact, being put into action.
“Good morning, Mr. Geller,” Ramsey Roman said.
David flipped his sunglasses up onto the top of his head. He wanted to see the man before him clearly. Roman was dressed in a shirt and tie. His black hair always combed back straight, his face clean shaven, and his dark eyes drilled into whomever he looked at. David often found the younger man intimidated most people. He looked like a mob boss, and perhaps that’s why things were done so efficiently. No one questioned him. His voice was booming and relentless, and he had no qualms about using it to thrash insubordinates.
David hated yelling. He wasn’t suited to arguments. He paid people to do that kind of thing.
“Good morning, Roman. How are things?”
Roman took the opposite seat at the table and pulled out the tablet he carried around with him always. He flipped through a few apps.
David folded up the newspaper and set it down on the table. Watching Roman with feigned interest, he then wiped his mouth on a napkin. Another boat caught his attention as it left the marina and sailed out to the south side of the lake. David longingly thought what a great afternoon it would be to feel the cool spray against his skin while the sun beat down and the refreshing breeze came in off the lake.
“There’re a few things we should discuss, sir,” Roman said to recapture David’s attention.
>
“Well, go ahead. I’m listening.”
Roman nodded. “The hotel is at eighty-three percent capacity this morning. Not unusual for this time of year as the weather changes. The golf course is being readied for the end of the season. The newspaper is reporting steady revenue. In all, nothing out of the ordinary except…”
“Except?” David asked.
“Except that there are weather reports coming in saying that there’s a big snowstorm on the way. Very unusual for this time of year.”
“Snowstorm? At the end of October?”
“Yes, sir. The meteorologists are scrambling. It might impact the resort’s weekend.”
“I’ve grown up here, and I only remember it snowing a few times in October, but not an actual snowstorm. Besides, it’ll blow over in a few days. Nothing we can’t handle. If we lose a few bookings that’s nothing to worry about.”
Roman looked at him with those dark eyes. He wanted to say something more but held back.
“Winterize the hotel early if you must.”
Roman clipped a quick, resolute nod at his boss.
“Is that all?”
“Yes, sir,” Roman said and stood.
“Let me know if anything changes.”
Roman nodded again and took his leave.
David gazed out at the water as the midmorning sun reflected on the placid waves. Even if there was a snowstorm coming in, the boaters still would have this last glorious day of the season. Though, currently, there wasn’t a cloud in sight.
Chapter 24
“Go away!” Maeve screamed through the door. There were three men on the other side, and they continued to push against the gate. The sky had darkened after a brief period of gray, and for over an hour now they’d begged her to let them enter.