States of War

by Kevin Partner

  "Sarge, ATC reports that they're approaching runway two."

  "Get us over there," Quinn responded. Typical. A fifty-fifty chance, and of course they were waiting at the wrong one.

  The plane came to a halt, silence falling like a blanket as its engines cut out. Quinn's squad gathered around the nose and he walked forward, megaphone in hand.

  "Occupants of the plane. You are surrounded and ordered to surrender immediately."

  There was no sign of any movement inside, so, after repeating the warning, Quinn carefully approached the nose of the aircraft. It was too high to see directly in, but there were no moving shadows. His ears strained to hear the sound of weapons being readied. Nothing.

  He gestured to Grant. "Get the door open."

  Private Grant examined the instructions, placed his hand over the release, and looked to his sergeant who raised his weapon and nodded.

  Grant flipped the handle then pressed the stud release and the door raised itself a few inches. He grabbed the sides and, in one fluid movement, stepped back, allowing the door to drop down and the steps to emerge.

  Quinn put the carbine to his eye and stood on the bottom step and, with infinite care, raised himself inch by inch until he could look along the floor of the passenger cabin. "This is your final warning. Drop your weapons, raise your hands, and come out now."

  No response. The members of the squad was now gathered around the plane, waiting for his next action. He took a small canister from his belt, pulled the tab, and lobbed the tear gas into the cabin before stepping back down to the tarmac.

  "There's nobody on board, Sarge," Grant said, though he kept his rifle to his shoulder.

  "Planes don't land themselves," Quinn responded, though he had no explanation. Perhaps they'd killed themselves to avoid capture.

  Once the smoke had cleared, Quinn ran up the steps, swept the interior and then went into the pilot's cabin as his squad checked the small passenger compartment.

  "You really shouldn't be here."

  The voice was coming from the instrument panel in front of the pilot's seat.

  "Who said that?"

  "I have opened a valve in the fuel tank and aviation fuel is now spilling onto the runway. In twenty seconds, I will cause a spark to ignite it. This is your only warning. Nineteen, eighteen …"

  It took a moment for his brain to process what the voice had just said, and then he thought he could smell the pungent aroma of gas spilling.

  "Evacuate the aircraft, immediately!" he called, "Now, I said!"

  The men began running back along the fuselage and down the steps. Quinn felt his guts tightening as he kept a running count of the seconds remaining.

  "Get as far away as possible!" he called. "No! Not in the APC, it's too close. Run!"

  Suddenly, the sky lit up and he felt the roaring heat on his back as he threw himself to the ground. With a whoomf, the plane was lost in a curtain of flames.

  It had been a desperate last throw of the dice, but it had paid off. So far. It had been Solly's idea to have Alison pilot the plane to Rickenbacker after her human friends had disembarked at Springfield-Beckley airport, which was along the same flight path. They'd been lucky that Springfield had been completely abandoned and they were able to quickly find a pickup and drive to an uncertain welcome at Wright-Patterson.

  Scott's shoulder and head were both wrapped in bandages, but his eyes were bright and he was now well enough for his anger to surface.

  "We had no choice," Solly said. "We were low on fuel and we knew they'd be waiting for us at Rickenbacker. And, besides, you'd lost a lot of blood. If we'd waited any longer, you'd be dead."

  "Then you should have let me die rather than bring Alison here," Lee said, though Solly suspected his heart wasn't entirely in it. He was angry, certainly, but he was also grateful to be alive.

  "How is the patient?"

  Solly turned to see Colonel McBride as he entered briskly and took up station beside the bed.

  "He thinks I made a huge mistake coming here," Solly said.

  "And what do you think, Mr. Masters?"

  Solly shrugged. "How does the saying go? ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend?’ I figured that after your encounter with the Lee Corporation, you might be prepared to help us."

  "Well, it's certainly very irregular, but then what isn't these days? Will you walk with me?"

  Solly followed the Colonel into the sterile corridor of the military hospital.

  "I'll be quite clear with you," McBride said, "I nearly shot you down when you were on approach and when you identified yourself, my finger was itching to pull the trigger. We lost a lot of good men that night and Wright-Patterson is only just returning to normal operations. And on top of that, there's the new D.C. government."

  "I'm glad you chose to help us. This is bigger than either you or me, or even this base."

  They walked out into the sunshine, heading for the colonel's office in the administration block. "That much I understood when their helicopter landed. I had no idea the Lees had a paramilitary force of their own."

  The colonel gestured for Solly to take a seat in front of his desk. "Look, I'm no fool and I'm a good judge of character. Now, I think I can trust you, and if that sheriff's bent then I'm a quarterback, but Scott Lee is another matter. He co-founded the company. And he's supposed to be dead!"

  Solly leaned back in his chair and gazed out over the base through the office window. It was late afternoon and figures walked briskly in the distance, occasionally standing aside for a vehicle to pass them. It looked like the epitome of organized efficiency.

  "You have a point, Colonel. I'm not sure I trust him entirely, either, but then I've barely spoken to him since we broke him out of the Lee building. Sheriff Ramos knows him better and even she's not completely convinced, though he'd have to be a master manipulator to have gone through all he endured at the hands of his former colleagues."

  "Well, I'll be keeping an eye on him," McBride said.

  "Have you heard from D.C.?" Solly asked.

  McBride stiffened a little, though he tried to hide it. "We have indeed. I had a call from the president," he said with a tone that suggested he'd be giving that last word air quotes if he wasn't a colonel. "They've re-established limited satellite communication and we're ordered to send a detailed report to the White House and in person."

  "Will you be going yourself?" Solly asked, though he could tell from McBride's reaction that he was walking on dangerous ground.

  "No, I can't leave the base. We've only just reestablished order and I've got both military personnel and civilians to think of. I'll send a detachment under a trusted officer. I'll rely on the reports I receive back before deciding on our next move. Now, talking of next moves, what are your intentions, Mr. Masters?"

  "I'm leaving. As far as I'm concerned, the only good thing to come out of the last few days is that I'm now 2,000 miles closer to where I started from. Ross and I are going home." He realized as he said that word that he meant it—the farmhouse was his home now. He would have to head south soon enough as he knew now that Bella, Jake, and Maddie might not have died that night, but all he wanted right now was to see Janice and the others. Especially Janice. He hated himself for it. Blood is thicker than water? Not in this new world.

  "And you'll be taking that machine with you?" McBride said, gesturing at Solly, who nodded solemnly.

  "I will." Truth to tell, he'd had mixed feelings when Alison had transferred successfully back into her cylinder from the plane's avionics. She'd known there was a risk that the distance was too great and yet she'd accepted the mission anyway. She leaped into the ether in the hope of finding her way back home and he should have been grateful to see the cylinder light up again. But he felt burdened by responsibility. To the people at the farmhouse, to his family in Texas and, now, to the whole world. And that was the obligation he felt most resentful of.

  "Will the sheriff go with you?"

  Solly shrugged. "I doubt it.
Her daughter and her home are both in the west."

  Colonel McBride got up and held out his hand. "I deal in practical reality, Mr. Masters, and I have quite enough of that to manage here. I don't pretend to fully understand or, indeed, to entirely believe what you've told me of your mission …"

  "You and me both, Colonel."

  McBride smiled as they shook. "But I wish you a fair wind and a star to steer by."

  #

  Christine Blaise slumped over her desk and buried her head in her hands. Every last ounce of gratitude she'd felt for surviving the Long Night had been wrung from her soul by the events of the past weeks. She'd been woken by a call from her assistant that night and had spent the following hours watching the apocalypse unfold before her eyes.

  She'd been driven to her office along roads crowded with the terrified and the dead until her driver had collapsed at an intersection and she'd been forced to complete the journey with his corpse curled up in the passenger seat. She still couldn't work out how she'd managed to move his body across, putting it down to the adrenaline of sudden and complete terror.

  Over the following days, she'd felt herself at the center of a fragmenting web until, finally, she'd been forced to abandon her post and seek shelter at one of the government facilities out in the country.

  President Kowalski died on the first night as had the next eleven people in the order of succession. Ryan O’Reilly, Secretary of Transporation then inherited the hotseat before dying mysteriously three days later. Finally, the blood letting was over. And she was the last person standing. The poisoned chalice was hers.

  She'd never expected, when she was appointed Secretary of Homeland Security, that the nineteen people ahead of her in the succession would all die either on the Long Night or shortly afterwards. Yet here she was, behind the famous desk in the White House, backed by the authority of the Constitution. But she knew well enough that her power stemmed entirely from the support of General Melrose, who was now the head of the three branches of the military which, at that time, amounted to the surviving service personnel who'd been based in the area under D.C.'s control when the Long Night had happened. Not exactly a functioning military force.

  "Madam President?"

  Blaise looked up to see her Chief of Staff—again, not the position of power it once might have been—holding a cup of tea and wearing a worried expression.

  "What is it, Joel?"

  "They're here, Madam President."

  She took a wet wipe from her desk drawer and ran it over her face. It was a futile attempt to freshen up, but it was better than nothing.

  "Show them in, please," she said.

  Moments later, two people entered. One was a tall woman of Oriental appearance, the other a man whose only exceptional feature was his averageness. She'd remember nothing of him once he'd left and she instinctively knew that the power lay with the other.

  "Madam President, it is an honor," the woman said. "I am Administrator Chen of the Lee Corporation, and this is my assistant, John Galloway."

  "Please, sit down," Blaise said, gesturing to the ornate chairs in front of the desk.

  Her Chief of Staff entered with a pot of tea on a silver tray and placed it on the desk before leaving again.

  "Thank you, Madam President. I didn't receive such hospitality the last time I was in this office."

  This caught Blaise off her guard. "You've been in the Oval Office before?"

  Chen nodded. "I met with your predecessor a year or so ago. He was somewhat unfriendly. He seemed to believe that we were avoiding paying our full measure of taxes."

  "Ah, yes. There was quite the public stink about that." She couldn't think of anything that demonstrated how much the world had changed more than a squabble about taxation.

  "I was forced to remind him of the generous contributions the Lee Corporation made to his presidential campaign."

  Blaise lifted the teacup to her lips and sipped the hot, sweet liquid. "That was another time. Now, why did you request this meeting?"

  "Good, to business then," Chen said. "You, Madam President, have a refugee problem."

  Blaise tried desperately to conceal her surprise. "Do we?"

  "This is not the time for political maneuverings," Chen said. "We have our methods of gathering information and we know that people are approaching Washington, D.C. from north, south, east and west. You have established camps, but they are descending into chaos. You cannot feed such an influx, at least not in the short term. When order is restored, you will, I'm sure, find a way to access and distribute the nation's emergency food reserves—if they still exist, but for now you have a crisis on your hands. We can help."

  "Are you telling me that the Lee Corporation is a functioning entity, even after the Long Night?"

  "Indeed we are."

  Blaise slammed her fist on the desk and leapt to her feet. "And yet it was you who designed and built the implants that killed nineteen out of twenty Americans. I have a good mind to have you tried for treason!"

  For a moment, Chen's mask slipped and a flicker of emotion—was it fear?—passed across her face. And then it was gone. "If a terrorist shoots a police officer, do you blame the maker of the gun he used?"

  "Are you saying you had nothing to do with what happened that night?"

  "I am saying exactly that, Madam President."

  "Then how do you explain that Lee Corporation employees survived when so many others died?"

  Again, Chen froze momentarily. "We have theories," she said, speaking so quietly that Blaise had to lean forward to hear her. "We always introduce new models into our workforce before they go into the mass market. We believe that they were resistant to the attack."

  "How very convenient."

  "Madam President, we can sit here and argue about the past, or we can deal with the here and now. You have thousands of people starving in makeshift refugee camps. We have a cargo ship full of supplies waiting to be unloaded. We will feed your citizens and, thus, stabilize your government."

  "And what do you want in return?" Blaise asked, preparing herself for the hammer blow.

  "The continental United States is yours to govern," Madam President, "except for New York and Seattle. They belong to us. That is our price."

  Chapter 16

  Bella handed the binoculars over to Skulls and rolled onto her back. They were hiding behind trash cans on a small rise overlooking their target. Al sat uncomfortably at her feet, and Maddie was slouching in the shadows with Father O'Rourke.

  "I can only see one guard," she said.

  At least they now had a plan. One way or another, they needed to get Luke released and the mayor was the key to that. And to get to her, they needed inside help. The challenge had been to get their hands on someone who'd know enough to be useful without giving themselves away and that meant isolating their target.

  O'Rourke had said that there was a storage facility on the edge of town, so they'd driven over the previous night to check it out.

  "Okay, this is our chance, I reckon," Skulls said, sitting up. "Al, are you sure you want to be the decoy?"

  The old man smiled. "Sure. I got the least to lose, and I don't reckon he'll feel threatened by such a frail old man."

  "Well, you be careful, Pop," Bella said, kissing him on the cheek. "And don't overdo the frailty, it doesn't suit you."

  She watched as her father slipped off along the road that ran parallel to the storage plant, feeling a lump in her throat borne of pride and fear that she'd never speak to him again.

  "I'll take care too," Skulls said, leaning down and kissing her cheek.

  "Oh, I know you'll be okay; you're indestructible."

  He gave a tiny smile and then ran off in the opposite direction to Al. He was going to get as close to the gates as he could without attracting attention—speed was going to be of the essence.

  Minutes later, Bella watched her father walking slowly along the road looking for all the world like he was going to collapse at any momen
t. She could see him looking to his right, into the facility from time to time, and then he stopped, as if wanting to be sure that he wasn't mistaken, before continuing to stumble on.

  The guard brought his weapon to bear and Bella could hear his warning call. Al raised his hands, swaying a little. Don't overact, Pop, Bella thought as the guard waved him forward. She winced as, with his free hand, the guard pulled on Al's coat, causing him to stagger before, satisfied that he had no weapons, he relaxed a little and began questioning him.

  Like a cat stalking its prey, Skulls slunk out of the shadows and he was on the guard before he could bring his weapon round. The guard's body went limp as he felt cold metal against his temple and Skulls prodded him up the slope to where the others waited.

  "This is Greg," Skulls said when they arrived. "He's agreed to help us."

  The guard was a stocky man who looked as though he wore a car tire around his waist. He was sweating, though Bella couldn't tell whether that was out of fear or simply because he'd been forced to jog for a hundred yards.

  "Look, I don't want no trouble, but if the mayor hears I've left my post, it'll be the noose for me."

  "Why do you work for someone so brutal?" Bella asked.

  "’Cause not working for her ain't an option if a fella wants to see another sunrise. Hey, Father O'Rourke! Is it really you?"

  The priest stepped out of the shadows and embraced the fat guard. "Gregory, my friend," he said, before shaking his head sadly. "What have you become? Are you truly one of the guards of Golgotha?"

  "I’m sorry, Father. I am weak," he said. "Say, does that mean you're the fella who rescued him from the gallows?"

  He stuck out his hand and strode over to Skulls, who stepped back, keeping his gun on the guard.

  "Oh," Greg said, as if suddenly remembering that they were on different sides. "Well, I'm sure grateful you did that, and I'll help if I can."

  "Hold on a minute," Al interrupted. "This is all well and good, but what's going on in that so-called storage facility? I saw folk in there, plenty of folk. Looked as though they were crammed in like sardines."