While to the north the enemy might be the cold and the snow, further south, the heat was an adversary no less deadly. Technology was what we used to ease our discomfort. Too cold? Crank the heat. Too hot? Throw on some AC. He swallowed hard, thinking of Amy. Funny how even the most random trains of thought had a habit of leading back to her. By this time tomorrow, she would be back in his arms. Nate didn’t simply want to believe that. He needed to. Anything to keep pushing back against that freezing arctic wind.
Speaking of which, since changing direction, the blowing snow was now coming from right to left, numbing that side of his body. He winced, not from the cold this time. The constant act of arching his legs around Wayne’s generous torso was pushing against his knee. Three operations later and the thing was no less defective. That was something they didn’t tell you growing up—that your parts wore out and needed replacing. Made him feel like an old jalopy sometimes, a Model T in a world of Teslas. Maybe Dakota’s colorful description of him hadn’t been that far off after all.
Up ahead, the road curved gently to the right, hugging the frozen Rock River. On the other was one farmer’s field after another, fenced off and stretching to a range of nearby hills. It would be this way for much of the journey to Rockford. More importantly, any sign of tire tracks had long since faded. Whoever intended on fleeing Byron had already done so. At least, that was how it seemed.
Dakota was riding next to him, moving in the saddle as Sundae worked her way across the challenging terrain. Just past her, something in the field caught his attention—a dark figure, working its way through the deep powder. This guy wasn’t giving up.
Nate pointed and Dakota turned her head to see.
“Shadow,” she said, sounding pleasantly surprised. “I had a feeling we’d see him again.”
The feeling brewing inside Nate was far from pleasant or surprised, however. This was a wild animal, one that had been following them since they left the middle school. He recognized that it could have attacked them then and it hadn’t. That had to mean something. But can you ever really trust a wild creature?
“He isn’t a poodle or a stuffed animal,” Nate reminded her.
She spun and scrunched up her face. “Uh, duh.”
“Did you know that every year dozens of people around the world are killed at zoos climbing into polar bear enclosures or lion cages? The ones that survive, you know what they say?”
“‘I wanted to pet Simba?’”
“Exactly. They just got done watching Lion King for the hundredth time and wanted to get his autograph.”
She laughed. “No way.”
“I’m serious,” he replied, his gaze periodically moving past her. Shadow was still visible, navigating the weather with impressive ease. “You can’t make this stuff up.” Nate wasn’t out to denigrate such a majestic creature. Nevertheless, he hoped Shadow wouldn’t do something stupid and force his hand.
He decided to change the subject. “I noticed you got a bit funny back there at the farm when your mom’s job came up.”
Dakota’s gaze was focused down the road, her face an impenetrable mask.
“I understand you didn’t get along with your folks, but I’m sure, given all that’s happened, they deserve to know you’re all right.”
“It’s complicated,” she said in return, an unstable ice shelf of emotion building behind her normally soft voice. “Frankly, I don’t think they give a damn whether I’m alive or dead.”
“All I know is if you were my daughter and you were taken, I’d be heartbroken. I can’t imagine they’d be any different.” Although he said the words to Dakota, he might as well have been talking to his long-lost sister, Marie.
The girl looked at him, her eyes gleaming. “You would come find me, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure I would.” Nate quickly realized he had probably said the wrong thing because Dakota bent forward, her body convulsing. With one hand on the pommel of his saddle, he leaned over and rubbed her back. “I’m sure they love you, even if they don’t have a clue how to show it.”
“It’s not that,” she said, the tears still in her throat. “The stuff about my parents…”
“What about it?”
Dakota’s eyes were sullen and downcast. “I lied.”
Chapter 29
Nate stared at the girl, not entirely sure what to think. “Then I take it your father isn’t an entrepreneur and your mother isn’t in real estate.”
Dakota fidgeted with the reins, refusing to look at him. “The only way my dad could be counted as a businessman was hawking the pain pills my parents didn’t take themselves. They weren’t successful or brilliant. You couldn’t even say they were ordinary. Subpar. Losers. Take your pick. One is as good as another. When they weren’t whacked out of their minds on drugs, they were usually fighting. Throwing things. Hitting each other with whatever was around. Ashtrays, cans of Coke, you name it. A real battle royale, just like the videogame. You know, the one all the kids are playing.”
Yeah, Nate knew a thing or two about that. “You were ashamed. I get that. Although I don’t like that you lied to me.”
“I don’t know why I did it. At the time, I guess it somehow felt like the right thing to do. I didn’t want you to hate me.”
“Hate you for having lousy parents? Do I look like that big a prick?”
The hint of a smile. “You did look a little frightening when I first met you,” she admitted. “I wasn’t sure if you were freeing me or whether I was simply changing captors.”
Nate’s eyes returned to the road. “You’re free to go whenever you’d like.”
She looked down again. “I know. I’m thankful. It’s partly why I thought you deserved to hear the truth.”
“Sooner or later, I would have figured it out on my own,” he said before tapping the side of his nose. “Call it a cop’s instinct, but I could tell back at the farmhouse something wasn’t adding up.”
“I know. I wanted you to hear it from me, rather than finding out some other way.”
The horses struggled to blink away the fat blowing flakes coming at them. Ahead lay a sea of white, broken only by a screen of trees to their right, a mix of old elm and evergreens. There was no sign of any cars or trucks anymore, except those buried under several inches and in some cases feet of snow. Nate’s thoughts circled back to the fib Dakota had told him. “And your folks. Your real folks. Where are they now?”
She shrugged. “No idea. Dead for all I know. The state eventually came and took me away. Sent me to live with my uncle Roger, the only known relative we had. He had a house in Rockford. He was older than you by at least ten years and never had kids. It was a big adjustment for the both of us, is probably the nice way of saying it. Though I will say he taught me a lot in the short few months we lived together. He was one of those survivalist types.”
“What happened?”
Dakota made the international sign of a bottle with her thumb and pinky and tilted it at her lips.
“Oh,” Nate said, getting the implication. “Addiction runs in your family.”
“It’s why I try to never touch the stuff, even if I’m not allowed to do so legally. When he was sober, Uncle Roger would bring me fishing and hunting. Taught me how to survive in the wilderness and make my way around if I ever became lost. Learned more in my short time with him than I did in all my years of formal schooling.”
“I don’t doubt that one bit. The education system needs to be seriously reformed.”
Dakota couldn’t disagree more. “Reformed? I think the whole damn system needs to be torn down and remade, the way some people gut the inside of their house and rebuild it from the ground up.”
Nate’s eyebrows did a little dance. “Looks like you may have gotten your wish.”
A light flashed behind Dakota’s eyes. “That’s what Uncle Roger always hoped for. He had a room at the back of his house and sometimes I’d hear him in there talking. He had one of those old-school radio thingies. You know, th
e ones with the wires and the mic.”
“A shortwave?” Nate asked, turning in the saddle, his eyes intense and staring right at her.
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“What was his call sign?”
“Call sign?”
“His nickname over the radio. His moniker.”
“Oh, I thought it was Ranger, but I was wrong. He called himself Renegade.”
Nate snorted with a burst of laughter.
“Why are you laughing? I’m telling the truth,” Dakota said, sounding defensive.
“I know you are. I spoke to your uncle the day after the lights went out. He left me with the impression that he was very knowledgeable.”
“He is. You know, he wasn’t a mean drunk at all. I guess the booze meant he wasn’t very…” She looked up, scanning for the right word.
“Resilient?” Nate inquired.
“No, dependable. I was sent to foster homes not long after. Try being bounced between every small town in a fifty-mile radius. Landed in one house where the husband liked to let his hands wander, if you know what I mean. Tried to put his thumb in my mouth and I bit down hard enough to hear the bone crunch. Another family would send me around to babysit and steal the money I earned. And if I tried to fight back, they’d keep me locked in my room without food or water for hours. The last family I was with, they weren’t cruel, not in the same way. All they wanted was the government check. And when the lights went out, they skipped out faster than green grass through a goose.”
Nate’s eyes widened. “They left you behind?”
Dakota nodded, the corner of her mouth turned down in an ‘are you really all that surprised?’ kinda look. “I woke up to find myself alone. On the kitchen counter was a note telling me to get myself to Rockford.”
“Wow, that’s cold.”
“If the government was done paying, they were done caring, I suppose. They had a crap car for winter. I’d hear the man—Greg was his name—complaining about not having enough to buy a new one. A Nissan hatchback or maybe it was a Honda.” She pointed at a passing snow mound. “Anyway. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was them under one of these frozen heaps.”
An image of the dead boy sticking out of the snow drift flashed before Nate’s eyes. In normal times, the melting snows in springtime might only reveal a mountain of dog turds. But he had a sinking feeling the next spring something far more ghastly than turds would litter the streets and sidewalks.
“I had been up for a grand total of three minutes,” Dakota went on, using her hand to block a sudden gust of cold wind, “still trying to figure out whether or not I was being pranked, when I heard the door open. Only it wasn’t my foster parents come back to get me. It was my foster mother’s lowlife brother, Marvin.”
“Marvin,” Nate repeated, his expression a mask of distaste.
“Came in with three of his lowlife friends and grabbed me along with a few of my things and threw me in a cage. Then you showed up and put two in his chest.”
Sudden understanding flashed on Nate’s face. Marvin was the guy he had nicknamed Ugly. “Did you ever find out what they’d intended to do with you?” he asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.
Mercifully, Dakota shook her head. “I heard them talking about a guy they worked for. Someone named Jakes. Left me with the distinct impression they were going to try to sell me.”
“That won’t happen,” Nate assured her. “Not as long as I’m around.” He would have liked to have said she believed him. But he also understood getting bounced around from one foster home to another had a habit of eroding a person’s faith in their fellow man much the way water could eat into a cliffside. Once gone, it was darn well impossible to get it back.
“I hope we never need to test that promise,” she said, thoughtfully.
“It took guts to come clean,” Nate told her. “That’s quite a life you’ve had. I don’t blame you for not wanting to share the full truth.” He tried to grin, but his frozen lips refused to budge. “Looking down the barrel at my fortieth, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve done a few things I’m not terribly proud of. Most of it’s just stuff a person has to deal and get on with. That’s life, right? But there’s one that I can’t shake. Something big I can’t help feeling responsible for.”
“Please tell me you didn’t pull the wrong switch and shut the power off by mistake.” She looked annoyed and that made Nate laugh.
“No, hackers did that. No doubt very skillful ones too. What I’m getting at is that I feel responsible for the meltdown.”
“Responsible how? Do you work there?”
“I did for a number of years. I was in charge of cyber-security. It was my job to spot potential vulnerabilities and plug those holes before the bad guys could exploit them. When I discovered that the Byron plant’s anti-hacking protocols were lacking, I tried to address it, but the company wouldn’t let me.”
“How on earth is that your fault?”
“The weight might not rest entirely on my shoulders, but I can feel it pressing down nonetheless. It happens whenever I see a dead body. It happened at the farmhouse too when Harold started coughing up blood. I could have done more. Gone to the local news station maybe. I don’t know. Somehow, I should have forced the company’s hand, even if doing so would have meant getting sued into oblivion.”
“You’re talking about a suicide mission,” Dakota said, compassion filling her young face. “Guys like that can sue you for everything you’re worth. Leave you and your family penniless. If your only choice is a kamikaze mission, that’s not really a choice. You see what I mean? All of that blood is on the hands of the people who refused to listen. I say that as I sit here on Sundae’s hard, incredibly uncomfortable saddle, freezing my butt off. You did everything any reasonable person could be expected to do. You’re not the bad guy in all this. The jerks who hacked in and shut everything down, they’re the ones who will need to answer for what they’ve done.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he told her, feeling a little more convinced. “It’s our job to survive long enough to rebuild what we once knew.”
Dakota held the pommel with both hands and straightened her back. “Or maybe something better.”
Chapter 30
They were a little better than halfway to Rockford when the light began to fade.
“We’ll need to stay out overnight,” Nate told her. “Give the horses a chance to recover and hopefully catch some shut-eye ourselves.”
Dakota scanned their surroundings. “You have something in mind?”
“Well, I figured we could dig out one of these cars and use them as shelter. Assuming, of course, it’s empty.” His comment had a gallows quality he hadn’t intended.
“What about Sundae and Wayne? We can’t just leave them on the road.”
Nate pointed to the deep snow. “They won’t get hit by a car, if that’s what you’re worried about. Nothing short of a main battle tank could make it through a dumping this heavy.”
“I think I have a better idea,” she said, her gaze wandering to the forest that stretched along this part of the highway.
After considering it for a moment, he quickly concluded that if her idea proved to be a waste of time, they could always come back and camp out in one of the abandoned vehicles.
They veered off the path, leading the horses up a small incline and into a cluster of trees. The snow here was untouched and much deeper. The horses grunted as they struggled to place one hoof in front of the other. Fifteen yards in, they reached a small clearing. Dakota pulled Sundae to a stop. “This is where we’ll build it,” she said enigmatically.
“Build what?” Nate wondered, more confused at this point than worried.
“A snow hut,” she told him nonchalantly. “Uh, Natives call them quinzhees.”
Ah, yes. Nate remembered reading something about them once on a survivalist website, but in all his years of prepping, he had never actually bothered to make one.
“Couple years ago, Uncle Roger and I made one on a winter hunting trip in the Adirondacks. Takes a while to get started, but you’ll see it’s well worth it in the end.”
After dismounting, they tied the horses to a nearby tree and marked out a circular section in the snow about twenty feet in diameter. Afterward, they began piling snow into the center. Nate went into his go-bag and produced a small tactical survival shovel he’d purchased online. The compact size made the work feel even more backbreaking than it was, but it certainly increased the speed. Within the span of an hour, they had created a pile eight feet tall.
After they were done, Nate and Dakota stood, admiring their handiwork.
“Now we let it sit for at least two hours.”
She was right. It would take time for the snow particles to rebind into an ultra-hard dome. But once the two hours had passed, Nate and his spade would get to work once more, carving out the inside in order to create a living space.
Dakota’s arms were folded over her chest. “If we make the entrance right, it should block the wind and provide a really comfortable shelter.”
“In the meantime,” Nate said, “I’ll gather some wood for a fire.”
Less than twenty feet away, a fallen birch tree sat at a forty-five-degree angle, a fortuitous discovery since birch made great firewood. Likewise, the paper-like quality of the tree’s bark made for terrific kindling. For this task, he employed a small hatchet, another online purchase. After scanning the area around him for threats—the wolf was still around here somewhere—and finding none, Nate got to work, collecting what he could.
Meanwhile, back at camp, Dakota was busy clearing out a section for the firepit. Once she was done, she layered it with evergreen branches. This would keep the wood dry and also make it easier to light. She then collected another, larger bundle and set it aside for later use inside the snow hut.
The insulating quality of the forest reduced the gale from the highway to a cool, gentle breeze. Nate marveled at how quiet it was here, maybe even serene, a sense tainted whenever the sharp end of his hatchet dug into the birch tree. Already he had set aside a generous portion of kindling and was working on adding a few larger pieces. He had camped out in summer long enough to know how much wood a fire could consume in a single session. Taking a moment to glance over at Dakota’s firepit, he appreciated how she had dug down into the snow to create a sitting area. This would not only reduce visibility to any passersby on the highway, digging the hole would also prevent the campfire from collapsing as the snow melted from the heat.
America Offline (Book 1): America Offline [Zero Day] Page 14