by David Lucin
Just do it, Jenn. Rip off the Band-Aid. What’s the worst that could happen?
He could flip out on her in front of all the troopers, for one, but she had thick skin. Or so she thought. Her brothers might disagree.
Screw it.
“I’m going to go talk to him.” She politely pushed away Sam’s spoon.
He craned his neck so he could see the trucks. “Dylan? It doesn’t look like he’s in the mood to chat right now.”
She began to stand but hesitated. Just ask him how he’s doing, then go from there. Two friends, talking. Easy.
“Nope, I’m going.”
Sam grunted and returned to his soup. “It’s your funeral.”
Jenn shot him a glare. He was too busy eating to notice. Quinn and Beau were still rambling nonsense about video games, but Courtney caught a glimpse of her and must have figured out what she was doing. She mouthed something, but Jenn couldn’t tell what. Don’t be you, maybe.
Discreetly, Jenn gave her a thumbs-up, then threw on her hood and crossed the parking lot.
Perched on the middle of the tailgate, Dylan didn’t look up from his tablet as she approached. “Anything?” she asked him. “It’s almost 11:00. Drone’s gotta be getting close by now.”
“Nothing yet.” Finally, he lifted his nose from the tablet and saw her standing in front of him, so he shuffled over and made room for her to sit.
Don’t be you.
“You get any sleep since yesterday?” she tried. He hadn’t, as far as she could tell, but this felt like an appropriate segue.
“No, not really.” With his finger, he tapped the screen again. Jenn suspected he was hitting the refresh button in hopes that the drone’s data transfer would magically appear, even though the tablet should ping him when it came through, as it had outside Window Rock earlier this morning.
“What’s that mean? Yes, you slept a little, or no, you didn’t sleep at all? Allison says I have an annoying habit of saying yes when I mean no and—”
“Then no, I didn’t sleep.”
She bit back a snarky reply. Dylan clearly didn’t want to talk, but she was tired of him acting moody, post-traumatic stress or not. Had their roles been reversed, he would have called her out a long time ago.
“What’s going on with you?” she asked. “You’ve been . . . off ever since yesterday. It started when we were walking through Window Rock. Then you saw those bodies and shot the Khan’s people out of nowhere.” She should stop and give him a chance to speak, but now that the words were flowing out of her mouth, she couldn’t shove them back in. “Trust me, I’m happy they’re dead, but we were totally exposed. What if the Khan had snipers? He might have, for all we know, and they didn’t shoot because . . . I don’t know why, but we got lucky. Then you wouldn’t listen to me when I said we should leave or strip-search the Khan. You just wanted to interrogate him. That’s not like you. It’s more like me. I do dumb stuff like that, not you.”
The chatter from the fire and the Honda had quieted, and a few of the troopers were watching her now. Embarrassed and somewhat ashamed, she pulled her hood lower over her face in a futile attempt to hide.
So much for tact and not being herself.
She chewed the inside of her cheek and waited for his response. Surprisingly, he answered without vitriol: “I’ve just been tired.” He laid the tablet on the tailgate between them. “Not tired as in I-need-a-nap tired. Tired as in I’m running on two percent battery.”
Every muscle in her body relaxed at once. Crisis averted. “I get it. Quinn said the same thing yesterday.” Had it only been that long? Yes, less than a day. Window Rock felt like a week ago. “I think we’re all in that boat right now. This winter sucks.”
“Those bodies,” he continued. “They set me off, I guess.”
Don’t mention West Ukraine. Don’t mention West Ukraine. Don’t mention West Ukraine. “Did they remind you of what happened in West Ukraine?”
She chomped down on her tongue, wishing a meteor would fall from the sky and wipe her clean off the Earth. So far, this talk couldn’t have gone much worse, and it was entirely her fault. Why hadn’t she been born with a filter?
Dylan’s posture stiffened. “No,” he said quickly—too quickly, like he was lying not only to her but also to himself.
“I’m sorry,” she said in desperation. “I didn’t mean to bring it up.” She should leave the conversation at that, but again, her mouth moved faster than her brain. “I’m here for you, you know, if you ever want to talk about it. I might not understand, but I’ll listen. Even Sam would admit I’m a good listener.”
He glared at her from the corner of his eye. “You think, Jansen, that if I wanted to talk about West Ukraine, I would’ve mentioned something by now? We’ve known each other for nine months, and you’ve been working for me for almost eight. I had plenty of opportunity.”
Working for me? Ouch. Yes, Dylan had been her boss at the farm and then her platoon leader in the Militia, but they’d always been more than colleagues. Way more. Dylan didn’t think of her like an employee, did he? Or like a grunt? No, he’d told Sam that he thought of her as a sister. She tried convincing herself he was tired and hurting and that his remark was nothing but a cheap shot, but it cut deeper than she cared to admit. So deep, in fact, that she couldn’t come up with a sassy retort.
“Okay, sorry,” she said. “I get it.”
He deflated, his features softening. “I realize you’re just trying to help, but I’m fine. Really. It’s just hard, with me staying at the barracks while Charlie’s at home, and it feels like this winter is never gonna end. I slipped up yesterday, that’s all. There’s nothing to worry about. It won’t happen again.”
More lies—or at least not the whole truth. But it was progress. The employee remark still hurt, though, a lot, so she was done trying to help him for today. “All right. I’ll leave you to it.”
As she made to hop off the tailgate, his tablet buzzed, then dinged. A notification popped up on the screen: Data packet received.
“The drone,” Dylan said. “It’s back.”
He snatched up the tablet and navigated through a series of menus. Jenn irrationally hoped the drone found nothing unusual, just an empty, decaying city. At the same time, not finding the White Horde might mean it had taken a different route west and could sneak into Flagstaff without anyone noticing.
Her insides twisted themselves into knots as Yannick and his grunts wandered over. The others from the fire had likewise broken their circle and began to approach.
“What do you see?” she asked, her voice a nervous squeak.
A final tap to the tablet brought up a bird’s-eye video recording of houses and winding roads atop a backdrop of white mixed with patches of brown. Trails of dark smoke rose from several structures within the frame.
She wrung her hands together, reminded of the smoldering building in Window Rock.
The image centered on what must have been the interstate. Movement on the road caught her eye. Thinking her brain might be playing tricks on her, she blinked hard, but when she focused again, it was still there. “Look!” She pointed to what she’d seen. “You see that? Is that a truck?”
Before Dylan could respond, the image zoomed out and shifted, revealing a single-file line of vehicles that stretched across the width of the screen. Jenn tried counting them all, but there were too many. A hundred or more, plus trailers covered in orange, blue, and gray tarps.
All the air left her lungs. It felt like someone had dropped a bowling ball on her chest from ten stories up.
The line of vehicles continued to grow. It was impossibly long. Intuitively, she understood that a thousand-man army would require an obscene amount of transport, but the scale of this convoy was truly staggering.
How could the Militia possibly stand up to this?
“You guys all right?” Quinn asked. She and the rest of the team had crowded around the rear of the Ford. Sam stood on the far left, chewing a fingernail. “Is the drone bac
k? Did it find anything?”
Dylan laid the tablet on his thigh. “The Great Khan was telling the truth,” he said ominously. “The White Horde is real, and it’s coming this way.”
10
Jenn paced the length of the Honda, her bowels cramping. She’d tried using the bathroom in the restaurant in hopes of making the pain go away, but to no avail.
For the past hour, she’d been thinking about the White Horde. When the rest of the drone’s data packet arrived, the AI provided a count on the number of vehicles: 113, plus 84 trailers of various shapes and sizes, all of them loaded down with supplies or passengers. There was even a semi in the convoy. Many trucks had solar panels attached to their roofs, and fifteen trailers were covered in them. Others besides Sam, it seemed, had come up with the idea of building solar-powered vehicles and mobile chargers. Jenn could glean a single positive: the horde drove slowly; the drone’s AI clocked the lead vehicle—an actual snowplow, she was shocked to see—at twenty miles per hour.
Where did the Khan find all this equipment? What kind of weapons did he have? He claimed to have destroyed a National Guard unit outside Denver. Did that mean he had drones? She peered into the gray sky. Could one be watching them right now? The fire caught her eye. Yannick and his grunts sat around it, taking their turn to warm up. Maybe they should put it out and hide beneath the canopy, where a drone couldn’t spot them. Her rational brain reminded her the horde was still a hundred miles away, but her lizard brain wasn’t interested in listening.
Her thoughts turned to Flagstaff and the Militia. Last night, after his meeting with Liam and Gary, Dylan briefly mentioned the plan to move supplies, and eventually people, into the Walkup Skydome. Could the entire population of over thirty thousand take refuge in there? The stadium had a capacity of ten or twelve thousand, though she supposed more could fit on the field, in the locker rooms and offices, and on the concourse. So maybe twenty thousand, tops. No doubt Gary would find a place for Maria and the rest of the family, but what would happen to the ten thousand who didn’t make the cut? If groups of the White Horde’s vehicles broke into Flagstaff and spread out, how would the Militia stop them? Hunt them down one by one? The Militia didn’t have the numbers to fight everywhere at once, not even with the support of the police.
Her bowels cramped again as she imagined groups of raiders on a rampage, breaking into winter shelters, shooting the inhabitants without mercy, and setting the buildings ablaze. Somehow, the horde had to be stopped before it entered the city. Yet now that she’d seen the Khan’s army firsthand, she doubted the Militia could win a pitched battle; the White Horde could crush it with numbers alone.
Sam appeared from around the side of the travel center, zipping up his fly. “You need to sit down,” he said as he sauntered toward the trucks. “Try to relax.”
Jenn hated being told to relax. Sam was only worried about her, though, so she ceased her pacing at the back of the Honda. The drone now rested in the bed, a cord running from its charging port to the black box-shaped battery unit. “Fine.” She plopped herself down on the open tailgate. “There. Happy?”
“Very.” He sat beside her, fetched a blanket from beneath the drone’s wing, and draped it over their laps.
She tried resting her head on his shoulder, but sitting here made the pain in her bowels worse. “I feel like we should be doing something,” she said after a while. “Not just waiting around.”
“We’re not waiting. Well, we’re waiting for Dylan and Courtney, I guess.” Soon after the drone sent its complete data packet, they retreated into the Subway, where they’d been discussing the team’s next course of action. “But the horde’s moving at a crawl. It’ll have to stop and charge all its vehicles at some point, too. From what I saw, some of them are a bit older and probably only have a range of a few hundred miles. It’s gonna take days to reach Flag at this rate. Another hour or two of us not doing anything won’t make a difference.”
Sam’s logic made sense, but her lizard brain wasn’t interested in listening. “I’m just worried. How are we going to stop them?”
He played with a strand of her hair, coiling it around his finger. “No idea, but we have home-court advantage, remember? Guerrilla warfare, like in Mexico City.”
“The U.S. Army wasn’t trying to exterminate Mexicans, and we held the city until the bombs fell.”
“Okay, maybe not the best example. All I’m saying is, we know what’s coming and we can plan for it. Liam will come up with something.”
An image of the horde’s convoy flashed in her mind, and she once again doubted the Militia’s ability to stop it. “I hope so, but we should be getting back to tell him what we found.” The pain in her bowels became even more intense. It felt like someone had jabbed a hot fire-poker straight into her intestines. She tried to distract herself by kicking her legs and picking her fingernails, but it didn’t work. Only action would make her feel better. “Screw it. I’m gonna go see where they’re at.” She threw off her half of the blanket and jumped off the tailgate.
“Are you sure that’s a good idea? Dylan might not like you barging in there while he’s in the middle of talking with Courtney.”
After her disastrous chat with him earlier, not likely. “Whatever. They’ll get over it.”
Sam scratched his beard but said nothing, though Jenn could tell what he was thinking: When you get in trouble, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
She made it fewer than ten steps to the Subway before Quinn asked from the box of the Ford, where she sat beneath a blanket with Beau, “Are you going in there? You want me to come with you?”
Jenn waved her off. “No, stay here. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
A bell above the door to the restaurant dinged as she went inside. The air smelled old, musty. Plastic yellow booths with matching yellow tables lined the right-hand wall. On the left, a self-ordering kiosk, its touchpad dark and lifeless, rose from the floor like some sort of ancient stela, and a fishbowl of plexiglass encased four mechanical arms that dangled over the prep station. When Jenn was little, she loved coming to fast-food restaurants, watching sandwiches and burgers get whipped together with speed and precision no human being could match. Only later, in her late teens, did she come to understand that machines like these had put millions out of work.
At the booth closest to the washrooms at the back of the restaurant, Courtney and Dylan sat side by side, facing the front door. Dylan, apparently having heard the bell, looked up from his tablet and said, “Jansen? Perfect timing. We were just going to come get you.”
His cordiality threw her off guard; she was prepared for him to bark at her for interrupting his meeting. Had he forgotten his remark about her only being his employee? Maybe he didn’t mean it as an insult. She took it as one, regardless, and couldn’t simply forgive what he’d said, but now was not the time to bring this up, not with Courtney here.
“Really? I thought you’d be mad at me for coming in and bugging you guys.”
“Nope. Come have a seat.”
The plastic booth squeaked under her weight as she sat across from him and Courtney. “So what’s up?” She gestured to the tablet on the table. “You got a plan?”
“We do,” Courtney said. “We want to run it by you first, though.”
“By me?” Jenn put a hand to her chest and feigned embarrassment. “I’m flattered.”
Dylan rotated the tablet to face her. The screen showed a map with Flagstaff on the left and Albuquerque on the right. A red pin had been dropped halfway between them on I-40. “We’re falling back to Holbrook. Courtney and two grunts will take the Honda and head to Flag with the tablet and all the drone footage. The rest of us will stay in Holbrook and wait for the horde.”
“What? Why? So the Militia can meet us there and we can fight the Khan?”
“Not quite.” Dylan put the tablet to sleep. “We can’t face those kinds of numbers out in the open or in a town that small. The horde could just surround us, and we’d
be done.”
Jenn’s thoughts exactly. She was glad Dylan shared her concerns about strategy; that meant Liam would, too. But of course he would. He was commissioned as an officer in the U.S. Army before she’d learned basic algebra. Sometimes she had to remind herself to trust the experts.
“But we can’t let the Khan cruise straight into Flagstaff,” Courtney added.
“So . . . what?” Jenn picked at a worn patch of tabletop. “What’re you thinking? A trap or something?”
“Exactly,” Dylan said. “Technically a delaying action to slow the Khan down and give Flagstaff some extra time to organize a defense. It’ll also let him know we aren’t going down without a fight.”
Interesting. She liked the idea of landing the first punch in this war instead of retreating to Flagstaff and turtling at the Skydome. “Okay, great. Love it. But how are we supposed to do that? I don’t think taking potshots at those trucks with rifles will do much damage.”
The corners of Dylan’s mouth curled upward in something of a half smile. “Let me just say this, Jansen: I hope you were paying attention the other day when Murphy showed you how to use the mortars.”
* * *
The Navajo had wonderful taste.
Dark, richly colored wood dominated the president’s office: the walls, the floor, the desk, the chairs. The desk itself was a work of art, with ornate hand carvings along the aprons and legs. Paintings done in the Navajo style breathed life into the room. One depicted a desert of blue sand beneath a fiery red sky. A second comprised four circles arranged vertically—one white, one half white and half black, one red, and the other yellow. Representations of the sun and moon, presumably, though the exact symbolism was lost on the Great Khan.
My children are capable of creating such beauty, Gaia said into his mind, her voice soft, smooth, motherly.
“Yes, they are,” he agreed aloud and moved to the rug in the middle of the room. It burst with color and geometric shapes. At first glance, the design lacked order, but the longer he admired the piece, the more patterns emerged from the chaos. “I will spare the president’s building and the council chamber so they may serve as a reminder of our potential.”