by David Lucin
“This is the Militia’s job: keeping you safe.” He sounded confrontational, not what he intended, and he regretted speaking as soon as he opened his mouth. Wincing, he prepared for Barbara’s inevitable retort.
To his surprise, it never came. Instead, she began to cry. “Where’s Sam?” she asked through a sniffle. “Where’s Jenn? Why aren’t they home? They’re supposed to be back by now.”
Gary hadn’t told Barbara that Sam and Jenn would be taking part in the delaying action against the White Horde, only that they were continuing to track its movements along I-40. Yet he empathized with Barbara, felt that familiar pain of loss. Better than anyone, he understood the stress that came with having a child on the front lines. Barbara faced the added complication of mental illness. Without her medication, she had more aggressive mood swings than ever. Only Jenn and Sam’s wedding kept her going. If she lost them, she would have nothing.
Maria, bundled up in her sweater and scarf, appeared at his side, oxygen compressor in tow. She touched his hand, gave him a look that said, Let me handle this, and approached Barbara, arms open.
Barbara hugged herself, eyes full of tears, a few streaking down her face. She shivered dramatically, like she was freezing, even though the fireplace roared only a few feet behind her.
“It’s okay,” Maria said so quietly Gary could barely hear her over Barbara’s continued sobbing. “They’ll be home before you know it.” She took Barbara’s arm and gently guided her toward the door. Barbara resisted at first, but when Maria made a soft shushing noise, she relented and shuffled forward, through the mattresses, pillows, and blankets strewn about the living room floor. “The reason Jenn and Sam are out there is for you, to keep you safe. I’m sure they’re just as worried about you.”
Kevin held out Barbara’s jacket, and she allowed him to help her put it on.
Maria added, “When they get back, they’ll come see you. I promise. Nicole will, too. Right, Gary?”
“Right,” he bumbled out, realizing with some regret that in the chaos of the day, he hadn’t given a single thought to Nicole. “She’ll be helping evacuate the field hospital, so she’s probably at the Skydome already.”
With shaky fingers, Barbara zipped up her own jacket. It occurred to Gary that she hadn’t traveled farther than a block from the house in weeks. Her apprehension about leaving tonight suddenly made much more sense.
“Okay,” Barbara conceded. She sat on the chair by the door and put on her boots. Wholly impractical things, they rose almost to her knee and had a two-inch heel. Gary assumed they would have cost a few months’ worth of his pension payments. Next, she found her mask and secured it over her mouth and nose. “We can’t let up on safety now, can we?”
Maria’s smile glowed with motherly warmth. “No, we can’t.”
Barbara rose to her feet and pulled Maria in for a hug.
“We’ll be right behind you,” Maria said. “Just need to finish packing up here.”
Gary shook Kevin’s clammy hand and cracked open the door. A blast of frigid air rushed inside, chilling him to the bone. Kate, Daniel, and Ashlee had packed into the Chevy twenty minutes ago. The driver waited patiently by the curb, hands tucked into his pockets.
Barbara hugged Maria one final time before slipping into the night. Gary shut the door behind her, then pushed aside the towel over the window so he and Maria could watch Barbara and Kevin climb into the truck. When it drove away from the house, Gary let out a long, relieved breath.
Maria had retreated toward the living room and sat on the couch. He sat beside her, pulled a blanket over them, and watched the flames dance in the fireplace. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?” Maria repositioned the hose to her oxygen compressor so it lay atop the blanket.
“Calm Barbara down like that. She was bordering on hysterical until you jumped in.”
Maria took his hand with cold, bony fingers. “A handy trick I learned from Allison Findlay.”
Allison, Jenn’s best friend and a refugee from New Mexico—yet another person Gary hadn’t had time to consider. He’d see to inviting her and her household into the press box as well. “Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“She says that whenever Barbara has—and this is her word, not mine—an ‘episode,’ we should play to her insecurities, which Allison thinks revolve around a fear of not being loved or cared for. As soon as I made her feel like Sam and Jenn were out there thinking about her, her stress levels dropped and she could think more clearly.”
“Wow. I’m impressed.”
“She’s quite the smart girl, you know.”
“I believe it.”
The fire crackled and popped. Wind howled outside, rumbling the house and drowning out the hum of Maria’s compressor. Every few seconds, the machine would beep.
“Your battery’s running low,” Gary said. “I’ll change it for you.”
He planted his feet and began to push himself up, but Maria’s grip on his fingers tightened. “No, sit with me.”
“Are you sure? It’ll only take a minute.”
“I know, but listen.” She lifted her chin, shut her eyes, and inhaled deeply. “It’s so quiet. No screaming toddler, no Barbara chattering away about where she thinks Sam and Jenn should get married. Just me and you, like it used to be before we had Camila.”
He took in the silence, expecting to find it peaceful, but a sense of loneliness overcame him. “It’s not the same in this house. Camila was fourteen when I retired and we moved up here. We only lasted a couple years with her gone. Then we signed up for the school’s billet program and Jenn started living with us. There’s almost always been someone else here.”
“True.” She raked her fingernails across his chest. “Thank you for everything you’re doing with the press box and the extra safety measures. I know you don’t like special treatment, and what with my oxygen and the flu, I don’t want to be a burden, so if—”
“Stop,” he interrupted. “Never call yourself a burden. Ever. If anything, you’re an asset. Look at how you handled Barbara or how you keep Jenn even-keeled. We all would have broken a long time ago if not for you.”
“You don’t need to say that. I’m just trying to help however I can. Sometimes I feel like I’m not contributing as much as I could be. You’re at city hall, Jenn’s out with the Militia, and I’m cooped up in here.”
Her voice quavered, almost cracked. Every day she regretted smoking e-cigarettes for the better part of four decades. Gary partially blamed himself; he’d done next to nothing to help her quit. For the first while, they were young and invincible. Later, as the economy worsened, her smoking became an important mode of release, a way to relax as each of her freelance writing gigs paid less and less until they paid nothing at all.
He put his arm around her, aware of every protuberance and contour in her collarbone through her sweater. They rarely sat together like this anymore. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he feared this could be one of the last times, if not the last, so he cherished the feeling of her closeness, etched it into his memory so he wouldn’t forget.
“I’m scared, Gary,” she squeaked out. “Scared for Jenn out there in Holbrook, scared for us here, scared what’ll happen when the White Horde finally shows up.”
Fear clawed its way up Gary’s spine. It had niggled at him since last night, but only now that he had a moment to reflect did he realize how much the Great Khan truly terrified him. The more Gary tried to understand the man, the stranger he became. All of the worst war criminals of the past 150 years had earthly concerns: Stalin wanted to thrust the Soviet Union into modernity; Hitler wanted to create a Germanic ethno-state that would endure for millennia; Yao wanted to restore China’s ancient hegemony and topple the United States as the world’s greatest superpower. But the Great Khan? There was nothing rational about his motives. He sought to forge a utopia free of mankind. Not even he, as its architect, had a place in that future. It made no sense.
“I am too
,” he admitted. “But Jenn will be fine. She’s with Dylan and Courtney, two of the best in the Militia.” Pressing his teeth together in determination, he thought of spring, the sun, a sky clear of the smoke, of walking Jenn down the aisle, of grandchildren in this home. “When it comes to the rest of us, I can promise you we’ll do what we can to make the Khan regret the day he picked Flagstaff as his next target.”
13
The White Horde spent a full day loading supplies and charging vehicles in Window Rock, which meant another night in the house in Holbrook. Captain Townsend had said residents were now being moved into the Skydome, along with as much of Flagstaff’s food as possible. Jenn worried the flu would spread like wildfire with so many people in such close confines. She only hoped Maria was given a safe place to stay, away from others, particularly strangers. Gary could make that happen, right? Being mayor must come with some perks.
This morning, just after sunrise, Dylan deployed a drone on an autonomous recon flight. When it returned a few hours later, the battery nearly depleted, video footage showed the horde heading down Indian Route 12, toward I-40. Presently, the other drone circled above the interstate at a distance of fifteen kilometers, the maximum range at which it could transmit live video. Dylan would know as soon as the horde arrived.
Which should be any minute now.
“Are you sure that’s right?” Quinn pointed at the pad of ruled paper in Jenn’s hand.
They were crouched in an empty, snow-covered lot behind a two-story hacienda-style motel caked in dust and dirt. Sam and Willow waited in the Honda and the Ford, respectively, ready to peel out of here, hook up with the interstate, and gun it westward, away from the horde.
“Yeah,” Jenn said, feeling slightly defensive, then double-checked her calculations. They looked fine. “Why wouldn’t it be right?”
Quinn poked the paper. “For starters, you haven’t factored in the wind variable.”
“There is no wind,” Courtney said. “At least not that I can tell.” She and her team stood near the mortars, which had been propped up on adjustable bipods, their back ends anchored against metal plates set firmly into the earth. The tubes, rusty and scratched, appeared to be old pieces of plumbing, and the welding work was crude at best. Jenn would be shocked if they both didn’t explode when the first shells were dropped inside.
Dylan licked his finger and held it in the air. A second later, “Can confirm. No wind.”
“There you go,” Jenn said. “It’s fine.”
Quinn scrunched up her face and snatched away the notepad. “I don’t know. You’ve got delta y as zero. What if there’s an elevation change?” She traced her finger along Jenn’s crudely drawn diagram of a parabola. “If the ground rises or falls by even a few meters, theta could vary by, well, enough to miss.”
Jenn rolled her eyes. The plan was to shower a section of interstate—marked by a stalled Jeep in the westbound lanes—with mortar fire when the White Horde’s lead vehicles passed over it. Ideally, the explosions and ensuing chaos would cause a pileup. Then the mortars would be adjusted slightly so they could strike vehicles farther back. Once most or all of the shells were expended, the team would huff it to the trucks and drive away. Simple. Or so Jenn had thought before Quinn began mentioning these additional variables.
“Look.” Jenn jabbed the tip of her pencil into the paper. “The only values we know for sure are distance x, 3880 meters, which the drone measured for us. Captain Townsend said the muzzle velocity of a shell is 230 meters per second. That’s v naught. I put delta y is zero because I have no way of measuring the elevation change and it feels pretty flat out here. If you can figure out how to do that, let me know, and I’ll factor it into the equation. Actually, while you’re at it, why don’t we consider Coriolis forces, too, huh? Or maybe air resistance.” That came out snarkier than she intended. The pressure of being put in charge of the math was beginning to take its toll on her nerves. One arithmetic error or oversight and this whole ambush could wind up a bust, giving the White Horde a free pass straight into Flagstaff.
“Okay, okay.” Quinn returned the notepad and held up her hands in defeat. “I’m just coming up with possible explanations for if the shells don’t hit their mark. That’s all.”
“I appreciate your attention to detail, but elevation is the least of our problems.” Jenn smacked her pencil’s eraser on a clear plastic protractor glued to the underside of the nearest mortar tube. A piece of string weighted with a metal nut hung from its center point, showing an angle of sixty-seven degrees. “This is the equipment we’re working with here.”
“True. It’d be a lot easier if we didn’t have homemade mortars, hey? I assume the military would normally have apps to figure out this kind of thing.”
Dylan continued focusing on his tablet as he spoke. “We sure did. Or we just googled it, if there was Internet around.” Now looking up, he added, “I hate to put too much pressure on you guys, but if we miss our first few shots, we’ll lose the element of surprise.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Jenn grumbled to herself.
She reviewed her calculations, double- and triple-checked the angle of the mortars, then went over her numbers yet again while Courtney and Townsend ran Yannick, Sebastian, Nicolas, Beau, and Quinn through operating the weapons. After a few minutes, Dylan announced, “All right, people. I’ve got movement.”
Courtney’s lessons ceased abruptly, and Jenn glanced up from her legal pad, her mouth suddenly dry. This was it: the moment she’d been anticipating for the past two days. Now that it had finally arrived, she wanted some more time—a few hours, ideally—to review her numbers yet again. Dylan’s point about missing the first couple of shots lingered in her mind, causing her to doubt every sum, difference, product, and quotient. Her writing hand twitched nervously as she fought the temptation to start her calculations from scratch, just to ensure she didn’t screw anything up.
Trust yourself, Jenn. She rarely, if ever, double-checked her solutions during tests and consistently scored A’s, so she did her best to go with her gut. Besides, this wasn’t some complex multivariable integral; it was simple Newtonian physics. High school stuff.
“Is it the horde?” Courtney asked.
“Yeah,” Dylan said. “Coming down both the eastbound and westbound lanes. There’s two trucks about a mile in front of the main column.”
“Scouts?”
“Looks like it. I’m guessing the horde doesn’t have drones if it’s sending out advanced trucks.”
A measure of relief washed over Jenn; since Window Rock, she’d worried about the Great Khan having recon drones.
But the feeling quickly receded, giving way to alarm. The road adjacent to the motel was the only thoroughfare through this part of town, so the scouts would drive right past. Dylan had taken a risk in setting up the mortars in advance. Jenn had agreed, preferring extra time to align the tubes, but now their decision might bite them in the backside.
Panic tried to climb up her throat, but she swallowed it and asked, “What do we do? Do we move our gear?” She really hoped they wouldn’t have to, but what was the alternative? Leave the mortars in this field and hope the Khan’s scouts didn’t notice them?
Townsend turned to Dylan, who tapped his finger on the edge of the tablet for a painfully long second. Finally, into his radio, “Sam, Willow, we have scouts inbound. Get out of view of the main road. Head southwest, turn right, drive up a block or two. Park behind something. Any trouble comes your way, I’ll let you know.”
“Copy,” came the reply from Sam, and the trucks rolled forward and turned out of the parking lot.
Dylan pointed toward the mortars. “Pack it up. Bring them to the motel.”
Jenn cursed under her breath and stuffed her legal pad into her jacket pocket. As Courtney and Yannick reached for one of the mortars, she shouted, “Wait!”
Courtney froze, hands hovering above the tube like it would shatter if her fingers made contact.
With
the heel of her boot, Jenn traced lines in the snow, marking the direction the mortars had been pointing. They weren’t perfectly accurate, but crude was better than nothing. “Okay. Go ahead.”
Courtney, Yannick, Sebastian, and Nicholas grabbed the two mortar tubes. Jenn took off her beanie and dropped it where one had been standing. Quinn laid her own beanie in place of the other, then helped Jenn with an ammunition box. Townsend hefted the second with Dylan, who said, a twinge of fear shortening his words, “One of the trucks is turning off the interstate. Hurry it up!”
The ammunition box between them, Jenn and Quinn hustled for the motel. It stood at two stories, and the doors to the first-floor rooms were built into an exterior corridor, providing extra cover from view—assuming the driver of the Khan’s scout truck didn’t spend too much time looking in his rearview.
As soon as she reached the corridor, she set the ammunition box on the ground. Townsend and Dylan laid theirs down as well, then hid behind two of the many pillars supporting the second-floor overhang. The rest of the team did the same. Jenn knelt next to hers, slung off her M4, and toggled the selector switch to semiautomatic as the Honda and the Ford drove between a row of single-story warehouse buildings.
“Incoming,” Dylan said from three pillars over. “Get ready.”
Jenn pushed herself tight to her pillar, watching the road. There were two more motels across the street, both long-abandoned, and a water tower farther down. She heard tires on pavement. The sound grew louder and louder until a jacked-up black pickup zoomed past with a Doppler-distorted whoosh. It was going forty miles per hour, if not faster; the driver must not have expected to find anyone in this ghost town.
Cold sweat slid down her cheek. She dried it with the sleeve of her jacket when the pickup left her line of sight. She wanted to run out and replace the mortars right away, but if the scout truck turned around, she’d be caught in the open.
After a minute or two, Dylan said, “Both trucks are on the interstate, heading east. Looks like they’re rejoining the horde.”