* * *
0330 HOURS - ZERO DAY +146
Taggart stood in his command post, in the makeshift “radio room” under the street, while Eagan sat at the desk with half a dozen hand-held radios set up on it. They would intermittently squawk some bit of information from one of his units in the field, and Eagan responded without being told what to say or do. He was a great staff sergeant, even if he refused to wear any rank insignia. Private Eagan was now more his name than his rank, and Taggart’s troops all knew it.
“Are we about ready for Operation Screw the 20s, Eagan?”
Eagan grinned, but didn’t turn to look at his C.O. “Is that what we’re calling it now? You really should ask for collateral input from the troops before making such important decisions, sir. Mission nomenclature is vitally important for troop morale, you know.”
“Answer my question, shitbird. Are we all in position? Our mark is in thirty mikes. You-know-who will be watching. Stop fucking around.”
“Sorry, sir. Yes, we’re in position. Per General Houle’s orders, by way of the 20s, by way of Dark Ryder, by way—”
“For fuck’s sake, Eagan.”
The enlisted man, whom Taggart now thought of as a little brother, or even his son, made a great show of letting out a deep sigh. Taggart grit his teeth but didn’t say anything—it would only slow down the process to get into their usual banter right now.
“Major, sir, yessir. Your troops, who are in the field while we sit here sipping delicious, freshly brewed coffee at this fine IKEA desk, are in position. We’ll hit General Ree’s positions in four places. Our ordnance was put in place an hour ago without incident or hostile contact, and should still be a go.”
Taggart nodded and took a sip of his half-burned, tarry coffee—slurping at it, to make damn sure Eagan heard him doing it. Messing with the young man was one of Taggart’s few pleasures in life these days. Then he glanced at the hand-sketched map his people had compiled from recon reports.
The 20s were sure to be watching from their drones, which they’d promised to send in as support for the mission, support that Dark Ryder had clandestinely informed him would not be coming. He had no damn clue why the 20s would try to send him on such a suicide mission, but Dark Ryder had assured him he was trying to find out. Without the 20s’ armed drones, and without the promised offensives elsewhere to draw off Ree’s troops beforehand as the mission orders had promised, they would have marched into a lethal ambush.
“May the Flying Spaghetti Monster bless you and keep you, sir,” Eagan said, breaking into Taggart’s thoughts. “May you be touched by his noodly appendages.” He snorted, and his shoulders shook in silent laughter.
“What the hell are you laughing at, numbnuts? Pay attention to the radios.”
“Yes, sir,” came Eagan’s reply, and Taggart suppressed a grin at the sound of Eagan’s voice. Bless him, he was at least trying not to laugh out loud.
“Alright. So three mikes from actual contact, flash-bangs in building windows en route are rigged to go off one second before our emplaced demolitions go off in buildings opposite those windows, yes?”
“Correct, sir. With any luck, the drones will believe they have tanks or maybe field guns emplaced in cover within those flash-banged buildings. Our troops—sorry, your troops—will then retrograde the hell out of there when faced with ‘tanks’ and will exfiltrate via subway and sewer tunnel entrances, obscuring 20s intel on where they’re going. They’ll then rendezvous here in our Batcave.”
“Our HQ”
“As you wish, sir. Our Bat HQ”
Taggart had to smile. “Hm. So, what do you think are the odds we’ll get away with this little charade without alerting our mysterious overlords, Eagan?”
“Flip a coin, sir. If we pull it off, don’t forget you promised me a shot of your rotgut bourbon.”
Taggart grinned. “Yeah, if we get away with this I’ll even give you two shots. And how many times must I tell you, Wild Turkey is—”
“…the finest mass-produced bourbon in America, yes sir. The C.O. is always right, of course.”
“Don’t forget it, either. Alright… It’s showtime.”
- 5 -
0500 HOURS - ZERO DAY +146
NESTOR SAT BOLT upright in his cot, drenched in sweat and shivering at the same time. Breathing hard, trying to catch his breath, he noticed that he could see his breath cloud when he exhaled. So it was cold, but he was damp with sweat.
The nightmare’s remnants still rampaged through his mind, but part of him recognized the danger his evaporating sweat put him in. He quickly wrapped his thick woolen blanket over his head and around his shoulders like a parka. Hypothermia wasn’t something he needed in his life just then. He glanced at the woodstove and saw that it had died during the night. He’d get that going again once his pulse slowed and his mind cleared away sleep’s cobwebs. Let the others, still sleeping, wake up later in a warmed space.
As he waited for his body and mind to calm, he tried to piece together whatever he could of that night’s dreams. Writing them in his journal would have been his next step, normally, transferring the terrible scenes from his mind onto paper where they couldn’t bother him anymore. Cathartic, that was the word. But just like his old life in Scranton, the journal was gone—burned up during events that had been at least as terrifying as Nestor’s dream-visitors. Nestor was reduced to mock-writing in the air as though it were his journal. Better this half-measure than to be visited by the Other again. He shuddered at the thought, and shoved it away in his mind. To think about the Other was to invite him to come, and no one needed that right now. Least of all Nestor.
No. Already too late. Damn. He felt the Other clawing at the edges of his mind as he sat in the darkness one minute after the next, trembling and again sweating from the exertion, but slowly he pushed the Other back. Back into the dark recesses of his subconscious. Soon, he’d forgotten all about that foul being. He’d buried it well, and now his mind was again as smooth as glass. Untouched. Unbroken. Serene.
Nestor looked around in confusion for a second as he emerged from struggling with the Other, then realized he was still cold and the woodstove still unlit. He climbed off of his cot and padded over to light it. His body clock suggested that dawn was still an hour or two away, so it was almost time for his pre-breakfast morning chores anyway. No point going back to sleep. Hopefully breakfast today would be eggs and sausage rather than the “constant stew” that seemed to make up half of these people’s meals. The stew wasn’t great, but it wasn’t terrible either, plus it was always available and it beat going hungry. His pa’s burgoo had been a tasteless porridge, while the Clan’s constant stew had meat and vegetables and such. It had taste. Accept the blessing, he chided himself.
After lighting the fire for the others to wake up to, he slipped on his shoes and headed toward the Clan’s kitchen—which was outdoors, of all places—to find something useful to do before breakfast.
* * *
Two hours later, Nestor polished off his breakfast. A hearty bowl of stew and some fresh bread that tasted like nothing he’d had before. He was ravenous from helping move cattle out to pasture before breakfast, but the Clan gave him as much stew as he wanted. They really were good people, even if they had harder eyes than the people he’d known in Scranton. No one still alive had gotten through the last few months unscathed, but these people had been through more problems than anyone had a right to suffer and had still come out on top with their basic decency in place.
“What’s with the bread?” he asked with a smile, speaking to the man next to him. They all ate at communal tables, sitting on benches, so conversation was lively at meal times. The bread was sort of sweet, a flatbread that was almost like dense pancakes.
The other man grunted, then said, “It’s cattails. Or the pollen, anyway.”
“What, like those swamp weeds?” That didn’t make any sense, but from what little Nestor had seen so far, a lot about how this farm ran didn’t mak
e sense to him. Their ways seemed to work, though.
“Yeah. We have about an acre of them, total, at our retainer ponds. I heard we get about three tons of pollen a year from just that one acre, and we cut our flour with it. Healthier than flour by itself, and you get way more food value out of cattails than just about any other crop I ever heard of. More than potatoes, even. Crazy, huh?”
Nestor tilted his head to the side. “Three tons, huh? Is that a normal conversation around here?” He then scooped up what remained in his bowl with his last slice of bread. He was full, but he’d never let food go to waste. Not ever again. He’d known real hunger, and it changed his view on food altogether.
“Yep,” the man replied. “Cassy set this place up as a permaculture farm, which I hadn’t heard of before I came here. It’s completely different than any farm I ever did see before, but can’t argue with results. Everybody wants to learn how it works.” The man, done with breakfast, said a friendly goodbye and left the table.
Nestor looked out over the breakfast crowd, feeling comfortably full, and took the time to watch how these people interacted with each other. There were no public arguments or fights as there had been daily in Scranton. He could see there were people who didn’t like each other, just like anywhere else, but here in Clanholme they just seemed to stay out of each other’s way. Almost like they respected each other even if they weren’t friends. All eating cattail swamp weeds together. It made his head spin some—but it obviously worked.
He spotted Cassy and a couple of the others he had identified as Clan leaders. They always ate with everyone else, usually not even at their own table but scattered about, talking to other people. And although the people seemed to give them a lot of respect, there wasn’t any sign of fear. They weren’t afraid of their dictators… Maybe they weren’t dictators at all. That would be a nice change from what he’d been used to. Every place he’d seen so far had a dictator. Some person with more power than anyone else. They didn’t call themselves dictators but that’s what they were, sure enough.
One of the girls he’d saved from the dogs, the older one, walked through his view with a bowl and sat at a table with other teenagers, and Nestor smiled at the memory of the girls’ look of gratitude when he saved them. It made a man feel good to—
A vision superimposed itself over the entire scene. The light was suddenly red, full of ominous shadows promising doom. The girl, Kaitlyn, was covered in cuts. Cuts, and blood. Everywhere, blood. Just like his nightmares, he suddenly recalled. When had he had those dreams? He couldn’t tell, but knew that he’d dreamed this before.
Kaitlyn looked a lot like his daughter now. No—she suddenly was his daughter. She screamed and cried. There was a demon inside her, poisoning her soul. Nestor clutched the hilt of his knife, tucked in his belt. There was only one way to get the demons out of people. Cuts and blood. His heart began to race, singing joy at the thought of the good thing he would do. The thing no one else could do, because no one else could see the problem. Hell was real, and here.
Nestor felt a hand on his shoulder, and jerked in surprise. Abruptly, the demonic scene was gone, the vision fading in an instant. He looked up and saw Michael standing next to him, hand on his shoulder. Beyond Michael, Cassy watched, eyes narrowed and staring. They couldn’t see the demons, he realized. No one else could.
Michael’s mouth moved, but all Nestor heard was a buzzing noise.
“What? Sorry, I… What?”
Michael frowned. “I said, what’s going on? Don’t much like how you’re looking at people, stranger.”
Nestor realized he had his hand on his knife. When had that happened? He hastily moved his hand to the tabletop where the Marine could see it and felt Michael’s grip loosen. Nestor tried to remember what he’d been looking at, but it was like grasping at a dream that fades faster the harder you try. Something about a dream? No…
“Sorry, I was just remembering the dogs attacking those girls.” That had to be it, he knew, though he didn’t remember looking at anyone. “Lost in thought, you know? I’d never want anything bad to happen to kids, girls especially. I didn’t mean to freak anyone out.”
Michael nodded once. “Just be more careful, friend. One might misunderstand your intention, and my reflexes sometimes make me do things before I think it through. Understand me?”
Nestor nodded and realized he’d finished his breakfast. “Yeah, I get it. I understand. Thank Cassy for the breakfast for me, will you?”
Michael pursed his lips but nodded, then walked away. Cassy turned away from him and back to whatever conversations she’d been having.
As Nestor stood, he glanced around the room. These sure were nice people. Hard, but nice. He saw Kaitlyn nearby, one of the girls he’d saved from the wolves, and got a sense of déjà vu. It was confusing, since he didn’t remember her coming in.
Abruptly, the daylight seemed to get brighter. Some weird memory faded from his mind before he could grab onto it. Well, whatever it was, it couldn’t be that important if he’d forgotten about it already. He took his bowl to the dishes barrel—a 55-gallon drum everyone put their dirties into after eating—and walked toward the cattle enclosure for his after-breakfast chores. It was a pretty day for being mid-winter, and he whistled happily as he went. This sure was a nice place, and he hoped they’d let him stay.
* * *
Eagan ducked down, chips of cement raining down over him and Taggart both. “Dammit, Eagan,” shouted Taggart over the din of small arms fire all around them, “keep your fool head down.” Damned idiot was pulling hostile fire their way.
“I don’t get it, sir,” Eagan shouted back. “The OpFor is twice what our intel reported!”
Taggart clicked his radio, ordering his north flank to pull back toward a rubbled building for better cover—they’d provide suppression fire to help the rest of the unit when they pulled back. “We keep running into that. Operation Backdraft didn’t do much to help, did it?”
“Seems that way.” Eagan popped his head over the cement barricade they were using as cover and fired two bursts before ducking down again. “I thought our revenge EMPs would level the playing field.”
The radio crackled, reporting the north units had fallen back and were in place. Taggart confirmed, then ordered his other units to begin falling back. “I wish we knew where they were getting their supplies. We’re struggling not to starve, and they’re making it tougher now for us to just take some from them. They’re wising up to us.”
Eagan grunted. “Makes me miss dealing with the gangers, earlier in the war.”
Taggart had to agree with that. The gangers were the biggest threat, early on, but they’d also been the biggest help. Now most of them were gone, blended into the populace or dead.
The south flank reported in. They’d reached their fallback emplacements. Taggart then shouted orders to the other soldiers with him in the center of their crumbling line. They bugged out, and the lines crumbled completely.
An hour later, the headcount showed they’d lost half a dozen soldiers. Debriefing suggested they’d given the invaders as many as two dozen casualties but Taggart still counted the encounter as a loss—his men couldn’t be replaced, and the enemy seemed to have an unlimited supply of troops. Yeah, a tactical loss. Especially since they didn’t get the supplies they’d gone out for.
“We can’t keep this up, Eagan,” Taggart said when they got back to the privacy of his “office.”
Eagan, face still dirty from battle, nodded. “We’re on the ropes, sir. We need a miracle. But either way, we can’t keep raiding for supplies like this. We need a new plan.”
Definitely a staff sergeant’s comment—and confidence. Taggart realized they were now firmly in the role of guerrillas and it felt foreign to him. How did Eagan swing so easily into thinking like a guerrilla? He’d have to ask. Meanwhile, Eagan had become something like Taggart’s reality tester. He wondered when he’d slipped through that particular looking glass.
* * *
Ethan decrypted the latest intel from the 20s and tried to reconcile that with the information he had from his contacts in the field. Survivalists, preppers, lucky groups, militias, guerrillas. He had dozens of such contacts, none of which he had shared with the 20s. He had never fully trusted the secretive group, and after the debacle with Taggart and his troops in New York City, he was pretty damn glad he’d kept the information to himself.
He wished Amber was there with him in the bunker. He just felt more centered, more functional with her around. Although she and her daughter, Kaitlyn, slept in the bunker, they spent much of their day aboveground doing chores or socializing, unless Ethan needed to divert them to the bunker during a crisis. Ethan himself emerged only at meal time, most days. He’d like to take his meals in the bunker, at his terminals, but Amber insisted he at least come out for meals so the others “can see you’re still alive and kicking.”
She had a point. In a small survival-based group like theirs, integrating with the group was an essential survival strategy.
His monitor beeped, and the last of the reports came in. It was Taggart, via the back channel the two had set up some time ago. Taggart never went through normal channels anymore, not since the 20s had basically set him up for a slaughter—he now let Ethan filter that info for him first. It made sense but Ethan felt like he’d turned into some kind of spymaster. It felt weird. Well, somebody had to make sense of the welter of channels, where he had somehow wormed his way to the center, and he knew he was good at it. It felt familiar, like he’d practiced his whole life for it. Okay, back to work.
After decrypting the last few files, the big picture did become a lot clearer. Everywhere, the invaders were solidifying their territories into cantonments, self-sufficient enclaves that were more or less secure. The Americans still held most of the territory they’d had at the start of winter because the invaders hadn’t tried to expand much since then, but those increasingly secure cantonments were becoming impossible to raid effectively. It had begun to shift into bloody guerrilla warfare, focusing on those who submitted to the invaders’ yoke or, worse, actively supported them. As always, civilians were the easier targets. Anyway, those who submitted or actively supported the invaders weren’t really noncombatants, not in the larger scheme of things. Mao and Ho Chi Minh had known that. Taggart—and the dozen or so other survival groups he coordinated without the 20s knowledge—clearly realized it, too.
Dark New World (Book 4): EMP Backdraft Page 8