Against the Fading of the Light (Action of Purpose, 3)

by Stu Jones

  Dagen set the binoculars next to him on the seat and leaned his head back against the headrest. Was he really going to do this? Was he really going to try to make contact with the Coyotes? Did he really want to see Malak again? The endless questions tumbled through his mind and threatened to drive him mad. He looked at the unopened bottle of Blistered Pig whiskey on the seat next to him. He’d found it by accident at the army base, stashed behind a crate by someone who likely would no longer be alive to drink it. He’d decided to save it for a day like today. Just one sip…Dagen pulled his eyes from the bottle and pinched them shut, screwing his face in painful contortions.

  Jenna.

  He loved her for what she’d done for him. He loved her for who she was. But he never should have allowed himself to pretend he was worthy of such a love. How foolish he had been. He didn’t deserve to love or be loved by a woman like that. He could never repay her the debt he owed. Not in one hundred billion lifetimes. He had done unspeakable things throughout the course of his life—things a person shouldn’t have to remember—but what he had done to her had been the worst. It was his curse, and there was nothing he could do to lift the weight of it from his shoulders. There was nothing God could do for him now. He was a monster. Why was he trying so hard to not be one? Better for him to accept the nature of what he was than to try to pretend he was something he clearly wasn’t.

  Dagen looked at the station again. He couldn’t just drive up empty-handed. They would murder him without so much as a question. He had to first do something to ingratiate himself to their cause. The only way for him to do that was for him to turn on Kane’s people. To show Malak that he didn’t belong with them and never had. It wouldn’t be easy, but if he shut himself down inside and remembered the old him, if he refused to remember that he knew these people personally, he felt he could do it.

  Dagen allowed a blanket of vengeful anger to smother his spirit. He knew he could do it. Kane and most of the other survivors had all loathed him, avoided him, and ridiculed him. Why should he have any loyalty toward them? He looked over his shoulder at the massive .338 Lapua long-range bolt-action rifle in the back of the Humvee. He had procured the weapon and two hundred rounds of ammunition for it. The killing would be done from a distance, as was his skill set. He would set up his hide and wait for the festivities to start. Then he would pull the trigger on each of them, Jenna included, with Kane and Courtland the first to go. After all this, after all their talk of Jesus and redemption, they were really just like him—just like everyone else out there. Broken. Ruined. Floundering in an unsavable world.

  If he could do this one thing, Malak would take him back—he was sure of it. Then he could finally return to what he was good at. He’d shrug off all this useless fear and emotional garbage for the mantle of power he deserved.

  Dagen licked his lips and looked at the bottle filled with beautiful, caramel-colored liquid next to him. Before he did any of that, he would just take one sip. Just one. He unscrewed the cap and with trembling hands pressed the bottle to his lips. Gulping deeply, he slipped the whiskey down his throat and felt it burn its way into his belly. Soon Dagen was lost in the hypnotic combination of sloshing whiskey and crystal glass, his anxiety and traitorous shame disappearing into it with each upward tilt.

  Saxon didn’t know much, but he did know the end was near. He could sense the electricity of it in the air like an approaching tempest. An end to everything they understood. Maybe even an end to all things.

  “Bah,” Saxon spat, turning to see Malak pacing restlessly back and forth like a caged lion, halfway down the dam road. The men before him were bringing up the Machine, as he had called it. Saxon watched as the man carried a locked case that looked impenetrable. Malak stared holes through the thing, pacing on and on. To say their leader had ever been truly stable would be laughable, but Malak was growing crazier by the hour. His obsession with this Machine was nothing short of sheer insanity.

  Maybe the thing was what Malak said it was. If that was the case, he had the sneaking suspicion that they all were going to be in for a few surprises. If it wasn’t, well, then shit hadn’t changed. Regardless, it was not something he was going to worry about now.

  He turned back and saw as the nerdy electrical engineer who called himself Nick worked diligently on the roof of one of the towers that jutted vertically from the sloping upper wall of the dam. This one was the tallest structure on the dam itself, and it had been Saxon’s idea that the experimental high-powered-microwave device be set up and made ready on the roof of the tower.

  HPMs were a concept that the US military had tried to develop for years. Essentially an HPM was a nonnuclear radio-frequency energy field. It had the ability to be used as a weapon when a powerful chemical detonation was instantly transformed by a special coil device, a flux compression generator, into a strong electromagnetic field of microwave energy.

  The idea behind HPMs was the strategic use of a device that affected electronics in a very similar fashion as an electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, could. Where EMPs affected entire areas or regions depending on the altitude at which the pulse was initiated, an HPM was a constantly generated field with a conical antenna for precise, focused delivery of the microwaves into electronic systems, causing catastrophic destruction.

  As far as the general public was concerned, this device never successfully did what it was created for or passed the numerous safety inspections required for such a device. What researchers did discover during the creation of this particular device was that the focused microwaves were so powerful they inflicted injury on humans caught in the radiation cone. Furthermore, it continued to prove lethal to the “gunner,” who had to manually operate the aiming of the antenna. This forced the weapon to be controlled by remote and added to the already-enormous cost.

  Since a weapon that caused people’s skin to blister and slough off while delivering a lethal dose of radiation would never make it onto the civilized battlefield, the prototype was abandoned, and another was developed on a much-lower power scale for civilian crowd control. It too was quickly abandoned when the radiation levels ranged from no effect at all to cancer-causing lethal. In the end, anyone who ever tried to weaponize an HPM came to the same abrupt conclusion: it was too risky of a device to use in any capacity.

  Saxon watched Nick work for another moment and wondered if the poor bastard had figured out yet what was going to happen to him. Climbing the exterior ladder, Saxon stepped onto the roof of the tower to inspect the device. Before stepping closer he shouted over to the engineer. “Hey, is this thing on yet?”

  “No, no, of course not; I’m still working on it.” Nick breathlessly looked around. “Why?”

  “Just making sure.” Saxon smirked.

  “So, uh, I’ll just finish up here, connect the power source, and then we just need the remote—”

  “There is no remote,” Saxon said coolly, the blue-painted designs across his face twisting into an ugly smile.

  Nick wasn’t getting it. “So if I can just make sure it’s working, then I can go?”

  Saxon shook his head but said nothing. Nick looked on bewildered.

  “I don’t see what you need me for up here—”

  “There’s no remote,” Saxon said again, sneering malevolently.

  Suddenly the notion dawned on Nick Corvaleski in a wash of disbelief. “Oh, you mean you want me to…No, wait; I can’t aim it. We don’t have the protective equipment.”

  “You’re the low man on the proverbial totem pole, my friend.”

  “It’ll kill me.” Nick gulped.

  “Maybe so, but if you displease Malak, you’ll face a fate worse than death,” Saxon said matter-of-factly.

  “What is all this for?” Nick whimpered, gesturing at all the barricades and mounted weapons.

  Saxon checked himself before answering and took a breath. “Look, some people want the power Malak has. They’re bad people. They want the artifact we picked up in the basement lab. They want it all fo
r themselves—so they’re going to come and try to take it from us. We can’t allow that”—he looked down at the man’s name tag— “right, Nick?”

  “Uh, well, uh…OK, but what am I supposed to do about that?” Nick shook when he spoke.

  Saxon strode forward and grabbed the thin man’s hair with a jerk.

  Nick groaned and spasmed as Saxon shoved him toward the edge of the tower. Under him, the wall of the dam sloped away toward the greenish water nearly eight hundred feet below, pushing and churning away from the massive concrete fortress.

  “What you’re supposed to do is kill as many of the intruders as you can before you succumb to the radiation yourself,” Saxon snarled.

  “I can’t!” Nick struggled fruitlessly in Saxon’s grasp, the toes of his shoes clinging to the surface of the roof as Saxon pushed him farther out into open space.

  “You will! If you don’t, I’ll make you wish I’d tossed you over. Do you get that?”

  “I get it! I get it!” Nick shrieked.

  Saxon turned and drew Nick back in, setting him next to the HPM device, an overwhelming look of despair flooding the man’s features as Saxon proceeded to loop leg-irons through one of the supports and clamp them onto Nick’s legs. “Look, we can’t have you just running around—but if you do a good job and survive? Well, that would earn you a place in Malak’s army. Maybe a high place.”

  Nick said nothing.

  “Finish working on it and have it ready by nightfall. Malak wants everything ready to go,” Saxon said.

  “And then what?”

  “Stay here with it and be ready.”

  “Ready…” Nick mumbled.

  Saxon sneered. “Ready to power this baby up and watch your skin fall off.”

  The train loaded with Kane’s group, now down old Sam and Winston, chugged into Page, Arizona, in the inky black of a moonless night. Beside Kane, Ari clicked her rifle safety off and on, off and on. As the train slowed, the grinding of steel shrieked in the silent night. Kane begged for it to stop. Surely Malak would have heard the train coming into the old rail yard in the center of town. At this hour and just over two miles away from the dam, Kane might as well have been knocking on the front door.

  Locking the brake lever down, Kane motioned for the two men helping him to shut down the furnace. Kane turned to Ari and motioned with his chin to the door. “Come on; let’s get this stuff unloaded.”

  Ari nodded silently and followed Kane off the train.

  Kane hopped down from the train and stopped as a strangely familiar, shadowy form wandered soundlessly toward him from out of the dark. Ari was nowhere near as comfortable or curious as she shouldered her rifle and aimed it at the large shadow. “Who are you? Identify yourself!”

  The voice spoke, still encased in shadow. “I see you’ve made some new friends.”

  Kane recognized the voice immediately and smiled. “But we never forgot the old ones.”

  The large shadow before them separated into two parts as Tynuk and Azolja stepped forward from the shadows. Ari immediately stiffened at the sight of Azolja, her rifle still up, her finger moving to the trigger. Kane stayed her, pressing the barrel of her rifle toward the dirt.

  “They’re friends, Ari. Don’t worry. Everyone has the same reaction the first time they see Az.”

  Ari muttered something in Hebrew and then said, “What is it?”

  Kane stepped forward and extended his hand to the boy. “If you can figure it out, you let me know,” he said to Ari. “How you been, Tynuk? You guys are a sight for sore eyes.”

  Tynuk took the offered hand. “A lot has happened since.”

  Kane nodded. “Yeah.”

  Out of nowhere, Courtland grabbed Tynuk in a giant bear hug. “My friend! It’s so good to see you!”

  Azolja, flinched and nearly lunged at the giant, but upon seeing him cocked its head and nuzzled it against the big man’s side in an open display of affection. Courtland laughed deeply, rubbing deeply into the creature’s jet-black mane. “So good to see you both!”

  Jenna and the others had gathered around now, most wearing big, tired smiles at the return of a few familiar faces.

  The strangeness of the reunion was now sinking in with Kane. He raised his hands, shrugging his shoulders. “What is going on? I mean, how are you guys here? What are the chances?”

  “There are no chances. Like I told you before: it is fate, and our paths are intertwined.”

  “Of course they are!” Courtland beamed, his hands still upon his friends.

  “The visions I had directed us. We knew to go toward the dam, and on the way we saw the train. So we followed a hunch and found you here,” Tynuk said, opening his hands.

  “You knew to come?”

  Tynuk bobbed his head. “The vision must be for all who are in the service of the Great Spirit. We had to come—to see this finished.”

  “Tynuk,” Kane said and inclined his head, “I never thanked you two for saving my life that day in the woods.”

  Tynuk smiled. “I assume you did finally kill that ugly creature— the one that was controlling the mutants?”

  “Courtland did.”

  “Good. It was an abomination.”

  “Well, you are both unmatched warriors, and we would gladly accept your help here in this battle,” Kane added.

  Tynuk beamed at the praise. “You shall have it and much more.”

  “More?” Courtland furrowed his brow.

  “Yes, my friend,”—Tynuk straightened with noble purpose— “one hundred fifty warriors from the New Comanche Nation are at your service, battle bred and ready to fight against these savages.”

  Kane’s surprise couldn’t have been greater. “A hundred and fifty…” Kane couldn’t find the words to finish.

  Courtland raised his palms. “You found your people! Your family!”

  “I did. It was not without its bumps, but they are now with me and at my command.”

  Kane was still reeling. “Yours to command?”

  “That’s correct. I am now the war chief of the New Comanche Nation,” the boy said with unfiltered pride.

  The entire group wordlessly stared at the boy, waiting for him to crack a smile or let on it was a joke. He didn’t.

  “Where are they?” Courtland asked, hesitant.

  “They will be here before dawn. They are traveling on horseback.” “How did you get here so fast?” Kane asked.

  Tynuk glanced and tilted his head toward Azolja. “My friend here moves faster than the wind driven across the open prairie. He is my mount.”

  “Will you be staying? Do your men need any weapons or supplies? I know they will have traveled all night.”

  “We don’t require much, though we may accept a few rifles if you have any to spare. My people are hardened and used to difficulty, but as a result of years of self-induced isolation, they are not the most social people—especially with outsiders.”

  “I see. So they will not be coming here?” Kane looked around.

  “I think it is best that they don’t. They will fight and die for our shared cause, but they may not be too accepting of formal relations with your group.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend—that sort of thing?”

  “Something like that.” Tynuk inclined his head. “We will wait for your signal, and we will meet you in the battle. What is your plan?”

  “We’ll look to make our assault at first light. I’ll send the bulk of our force down the plateau, where we will try to draw Malak’s forces out and into the open, so you can flank them. Do you have enough men for that?”

  “We are speaking of the proud people who single-handedly brought the might of the Spanish war machine to a grinding halt as it pushed into North America.”

  “Oh?”

  “After conquering, murdering, and enslaving every group of indigenous peoples they came across in their northward push, the Spanish believed nothing could stop them. They were wrong.”

  “I’ll take t
hat as a yes.”

  Tynuk gave a wry smile. “But you do understand that no Comanche plan of attack in the course of our long history ever involved sacrificing large numbers of warriors to take a single position, don’t you?”

  Kane said nothing.

  “Historically, it was also our greatest weakness—the inability to press our advantage. It is of no consequence. My people will ride with me against our foes.”

  Kane paused. “Well, I can’t say how humbled I am that you would devote your people to this fight. You must have really gone through the wringer to have already earned their unwavering trust,” Kane said in astonishment, noting Tynuk’s bandages.

  Now it was Tynuk’s turn to smile, as he stepped forward and put his hand on Kane’s arm. “We have all been through one ordeal or another. It is the ordeal that forges us into the person that the Great Spirit intends us to be. It would be my honor to finish this fight the way that I started it, side by side with my friends.”

  Kane nodded, smiling warmly as he placed his hand on the warrior boy’s muscled shoulder. “I can’t think of any way I’d rather do it.”

  25

  UNDER A MOONLESS sky, the hulking warlord checked the last of the dam’s fortifications. Having been carefully monitored by Corvaleski, all of the dam’s systems were now up and running. At full capacity it produced more than enough power for his purposes. He noted each weapon placement, including the experimental electrically powered rail guns that had been found in the deepest levels of the dam’s research facilities, along with the HPM device. Everything was in position. If Kane were to come in search of his children or to fulfill some greater oath of vengeance, they would be ready.

  The glow sparkled across his plane of vision, a remnant of his previous dose of Z that was still working to calm his nerves. Shana had never returned, just as he expected. He could only hope that she had somehow injured or demoralized Kane’s team by going out to meet them head-on. She herself was no real loss, as long as her life had bought them some more time to prepare for the coming assault.