by James Hunt
“I knew you’d go and find them when all of this shit started to happen,” Matt said.
Jim helped Matt off the ground and onto the cot, gently. “Matt, what happened?”
“Did they tell you what they want?”
“Some kind of security data. They think it’s on a hard drive and that you know where it is.”
“They’re not as dumb as they look then.”
“Matt, if you know where it is, then just tell them. If you don’t tell them, they’re going to hurt Sam and Annie.”
“You don’t understand, Jim. The project I was working on handled all of the security codes, clearances, and firewalls for all classified military documents. Those documents had intelligence information on terrorist groups, covert agents, missions, and nukes. It had fucking everything. I was meeting with a group of military personnel every week for status updates on the project and any updates they needed to add. The week before the attacks in San Diego, I found a hole in the firewall where documents of classified information were being sent from secure servers to ghost files with no known source. When I approached my superiors about it, they said that it would be handled internally by the military. The morning before the attacks, I was at the office and saw that the hole was still open, so I checked to see what had been sent, and there was an encrypted order with a list of times and locations all around the country. I think there’s a high level security leak in the military that caused these attacks.”
“Did you tell them that?”
“No, I don’t know who’s involved, but I figured if they tried to go after Sam and Annie, they’d eventually run into you. And I was right.”
Jim thought for a moment. If there really was a high level mole in the military ranks, then whatever information was on that drive would be toxic. It’d destroy anyone who touched it, but Jim didn’t see any other way to get his family out of here safely. “If I get you that drive, can you track down the source of the orders that were sent?”
“Yes, but I’ll need enough processing power to do it.”
“Where is it?”
“There’s a safe in the basement of my office building. You can only get to it through the vault behind the guard station. The code to get in is 4-2-8-5 and you’ll need to use a guard key. They keep spare ones in a lock box in the bottom left drawer of the desk. That’ll be locked too, but it should be easy enough to get inside. Once you’re inside the vault, there’s a red filing cabinet. Pull the cabinet out and open the panel in the wall. The combination for the safe is 12-1-22-58. The hard drive is inside.”
“So once you have it, you’ll be able to figure out who’s been behind all of this?”
Matt nodded his head. Jim paused for a moment and weighed his options. Could he pull this off? Could he get into the city and back without them knowing? Would it be safe to leave the girls here while he was gone? He wasn’t sure who he could trust.
“I’m going to take the girls with me,” Jim said.
“What? Half of Phoenix could still be rigged to blow. Whoever did this just might be waiting for more people to come back into the cities to kill!”
“If I don’t make it back with this drive, then you’re still locked in here and the girls are at the mercy of whatever asshole gave you those bruises. I’d rather keep them close. If this drive has everything you say, then it could go very, very deep.”
“Jim, I can’t—” Matt’s voice choked off.
Jim knew those girls were Matt’s lifeline right now. He couldn’t lose them, and neither could Jim. Jim placed his hand around the back of Matt’s head and held tight. He looked him dead in the eyes. “I’m not going to let anything happen to them. You hear me?”
A pounding at the door signaled that their time was up. Jim walked back down the hallway, and everything that had just happened started to sink in. Someone, or a group affiliated to that person, was helping cause all of this. All of his theories started to connect. It was well organized. They knew how the military would react. Whoever was behind this had been one step ahead since the start.
All of Jim’s emotions since the bombings in San Diego started welling back up. He recalled the chaos of getting out of the city, fighting off muggers and roadside bombers who were trying to kill him. He thought of all those things he went through to find his family.
Coyle and Brett were outside the building when Jim exited. Sergeant Hult was hovering around, keeping an eye on them. Jim waited until they were out of Hult’s earshot before speaking. “Brett, do you have extra ammo and weapons in your trucks?”
“Yeah, I’ve got some,” Brett said.
“And anyone else you know you can trust?” Jim asked.
“Twink. He’s quiet, but I’d trust him with my life. Jim, what the hell is going on?” Brett asked.
“I think Jim wants to do something stupid,” Coyle said.
“Hell yeah,” Brett said.
“Coyle, I need you to go and get the girls and have them meet us back over at the truck. No gear. Just bring them. Got it?” Jim asked.
Coyle took off at a sprint, and Brett nudged Jim with his elbow.
“I love stupid things as much as the next guy, but you want to tell me what’s going on?” Brett asked.
“We’re going into the city. There’s something in there we need to get, and we’ll need to get it fast. As soon as we leave, Hult will be hot on our tail. We’ll do it during supper tonight. That’ll give us a few hours to get everything together.”
“You want to break out of here when the sun’s still up?”
“Those guard towers have men stationed in them around the clock. I want to take the truck with us, and we’re never going to be able to get that thing out during the middle of the night without them noticing. There’s still traffic from personnel coming and going during the day. We’ll use that as cover.”
Jim motioned over to the front gates where there was a decent flow of jeeps, trucks, and other military vehicles entering and leaving. “We’ll slip out right under their noses,” Jim said.
Jim found Coyle, Samantha, and Annie at the truck and filled them in on the plan. Annie asked if she could bring Tigs, and much to her dislike, it looked like Tigs was staying put.
“We need somebody to stay here with Daddy, right?” Samantha asked.
Annie nodded her head but wasn’t very convincing in her agreement.
Once the camp started dinner rotation, they had planned to go in with the first group and eat while Twink stayed with the truck.
Jim and Coyle would suit up in Brett and Twink’s spare fatigues, and Samantha and Annie would hide under the cargo gear. If they were stopped, Brett would just show them their return orders, since they were supposed to leave by then anyway.
When the first dinner call went out, Jim thought Coyle was going to puke. There was a green tinge to his face.
“Nervous?” Jim asked.
“Yeah,” Coyle replied.
“It can’t be worse than when we were getting out of San Diego,” Jim said.
“No, it’s not that.”
Coyle put his hand over his stomach when the food tent came into view.
“I can’t take anymore of this military food,” Coyle said.
The five of them entered the mess hall together. The plan was to have Annie and Samantha finish their meals first and leave. Then Coyle would finish next, followed by Brett and Jim.
Coyle reluctantly ate half of his “mush” while Brett shoveled his down a little too eagerly. Annie and Samantha finished and set off for the truck, where Twink was waiting for them. Jim gave Annie a hug and a kiss on the cheek and told her to remember what he said.
“I have to stay invisible until you tell me it’s safe,” Annie said.
“Right.” Jim kissed the top of her head one more time and squeezed Samantha’s hand before the two of them disappeared out of the tent. Jim leaned over to Coyle, who was still staring at his tray of grey and white. “If they’re not there when you get to the truck, you find me
right away, got it?”
“If I die from malnutrition on the way to the truck, will you bury me in a coffin of cheeseburgers?” Coyle asked.
“Make sure I’m invited to that,” Brett chimed in.
“Hey, did you hear—” Jim started.
“Make sure I find you if they’re not at the truck when I get there. Yes, I heard you, Jim,” Coyle said.
When Coyle went to get up, Brett grabbed his tray before he could throw it away.
“For Twink,” Brett said. Brett folded up the meat blobs in aluminum wrapping and tucked it in one of his jacket pockets.
Jim and Brett waited another ten minutes before heading out. They tossed their trays in the wash line. Jim turned the corner and was met by Hult staring him in the face with his rifle over his shoulder.
“Locke told me about you, Farr. He said that with your record that you could have been a general yourself, but instead you threw it all away when you were discharged,” Hult said.
“A file doesn’t tell you everything,” Jim said, walking past him.
“Your father’s file seemed to say everything that needed to be said,” Hult replied.
Jim stopped dead in his tracks. Brett started to go back after Hult, but Jim stopped him. He approached Hult slowly and with calculation. He looked Hult dead in the eye until they were nose to nose.
“Brian Farr was a deserter, coward, and all around piece of shit Marine who didn’t have the balls to save the men in his unit. How many men died that day? Twenty?”
Jim’s entire body tensed up. His teeth grinded. He drew a deep breath, trying to keep his rage from rushing over him. He’d heard the stories of his father since he was a boy. When he first joined the Navy, his superior officers always looked down on him with a sense of pity and disgust. Everyone thought that Jim would be like his father. He looked like him. He spoke like him. But Jim wasn’t him. Jim told himself he would never be him.
“Come on, pussy. Let’s go,” Hult said.
Jim thought of the girls. If he did something stupid now, he wouldn’t be able to keep them safe. He had to stay the course. He had to finish this mission. Jim stepped back slightly. The distance between him and Hult grew. With each step back, Jim felt the tension leaving his body until finally Hult was out of sight.
When the two of them got back to the truck, he saw Coyle in his fatigues looking incredibly awkward. He kept fumbling with sleeves that were too long. “I look like a camouflaged bed comforter.” The only thing that didn’t look awkward on Coyle was the rifle. He was a better shot than Jim had ever been.
Jim peeked into the bed of the truck and flipped the cargo lid up. Samantha and Annie were crammed in. Annie looked up at Jim with big pouty eyes.
“Can I get out yet?” Annie asked.
“Not yet.” Jim saw Samantha crammed into the small box with her daughter. He caught her eye before he closed the lid. She looked pissed.
“Just so you know, I don’t want to be the one that lets mamma bear out of that box,” Coyle said.
Brett threw Jim a pair of fatigues. He dressed, checked the weapon for ammo, and jumped in the back of the truck. They bobbled along the dirt road to the front of the gate. The closer they got to the gate, the whiter Coyle’s knuckles turned.
An MP stopped them at the gate and Brett handed him the orders.
“Stay right there,” the MP said.
The MP marched to the guard station. Jim watched him pick up a phone through the window and mouth something into the receiver. The MP put the phone back down, walked out, and handed the papers back to Twink. “Okay, looks like you guys are good.”
The gate lifted and they rolled out onto the highway. The base behind them got smaller and smaller until Jim couldn’t see it anymore. Jim knelt and lifted the lid to the cargo trunk as Annie climbed out, followed by Samantha.
“Next time you can ride in the box,” Samantha said.
Back at the camp, Hult sat in a tent re-watching the footage of Jim and his crew leaving the front gate. He turned to one of his men at a small control panel.
“Is the homing beacon on?” Hult asked.
“Yes, Sergeant,” the soldier replied.
Hult cracked a smile. The sound of magazines clicking into rifles filled the tent around him.
CHAPTER 3
Jim had only visited Phoenix once before last Christmas. Up until then Matt, Samantha, and Annie had lived in San Diego. Last year, Matt had gotten a job offer that he couldn’t refuse and relocated the family, although Jim assumed he now regretted the decision.
Jim didn’t remember too much of the city, but he did remember that it wasn’t this rundown when he visited, and from the look on Samantha’s face, she wasn’t thrilled about what the current residents had done with the place either.
Trash littered the streets. Fires from trash cans burned down alleyways and street corners. Windows were smashed and stores were looted. Cars were flipped onto their sides or roofs. The people they came across scattered at the sight of the military truck. Jim wasn’t sure if this was because of something they’d encountered with the military or because they were the ones doing the looting.
Brett slid the rear window open so Samantha could help with directions. She pointed further downtown where the skyscrapers were. “It’s about three more miles on the left. You’ll see the PamTech sign,” she said.
“How do we even know that the drive is still there? I mean what if it got looted with the rest of the city?” Coyle asked.
“From what Matt told me, you wouldn’t be able to find it unless you knew where to look,” Jim’s confidence began to dissipate the further they rode into downtown. The conditions just kept getting worse, and the number of people they saw along the street started to increase. They didn’t scatter when they saw the military truck.
Jim pushed Annie’s head down behind the walls of the truck bed. He scanned the people on the sides of the street. The truck wove in and out of random parked cars that were abandoned during the evacuation. Suddenly, he could see them. Hidden at their sides or around their backs were guns. His eyes lifted towards the buildings above them. He flipped the safety off his AR-15 and slowly brought the butt of the gun up to his shoulder. “Keep an eye out for the top floors.”
Twink pointed ahead. “There it is.”
“Thirty seconds, Jim,” Brett shouted.
The people alongside the street were growing in numbers. Bats, crowbars, rifles, guns, knives; most everyone that was outside was armed. Jim kept his finger just over the trigger and looked into the scope. He must have counted at least sixty people on his side alone.
“Coyle, how many you have on your side?” Jim asked.
“At least forty,” he shouted.
The truck was moving slower now that the thickened cars were piling up. Brett turned around and saw Jim and Coyle with their rifles at the ready when the truck finally came to a stop.
“We’ll have to hoof it from here, boys,” Brett said.
Jim jumped out of the truck and helped Annie down. He told her to stay behind him. Samantha piled out next and grabbed one of the ARs. Jim looked at her with his brows raised. “You remember how to use that?”
Samantha racked the chamber and checked the scope. “It’s not my fault Dad wanted another boy.”
Twink jumped out of the driver side and kept his rifle on the circling crowds. They met up at the front of the truck, and Brett motioned up ahead. “There it is.”
Jim felt the adrenaline coursing through his veins. His heart beat faster. The heightened sense of awareness that allowed him to see and feel everything around him was coming back; it was like riding a bicycle. “Samantha. Coyle. You two keep Annie between you. Brett and Twink, you two take point. I’ll bring up the rear. Let’s move.”
The crowd moved towards the truck, and once Jim and his group were safely inside the lobby, the crowd tore it apart. They took whatever they could find and swarmed it like ants piling on top of crumbs left on the ground.
�
��Well, there goes our ride,” Coyle said.
Jim jumped over the security desk, dug into the bottom left drawer, and pulled out a guard key. He walked over to the door and entered the code: 4-2-8-5 and slid the card key through the reader. Samantha, Annie, and Coyle followed Jim inside while Twink and Brett stood watch at the door.
Jim pulled the red filing cabinet from the wall. There was nothing behind it except concrete. He ran his hands along the cold grey to look for any creases but couldn’t find any. Jim dropped down to get a better look. He ran his hands along the baseboard and found a small groove. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it. He dug his nail into it and pried a section of the paneling off the wall. The piece of wood concealed a small safe no larger than a book. Jim typed in the code and it sprang open. He was met with the sight of a small hard drive the size of his index finger.