by AR Shaw
“You don’t think I know that? Do you have any idea where they might be? I mean, there’s quite a distance between here and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.” He stopped suddenly, realizing that he was almost mocking her.
She stared blankly at the concrete floor in front of him.
He realized then that she seemed on the verge of tears. He’d known that she and Yeager had developed some kind of close bond. Of course, she must be worried about him, just as Alyssa was ready to mount her own search and rescue mission for her husband, Walt.
She looked up at him then. “Can I please have permission to check Yeager’s quarters? There must be some kind of tracking device. You know how he is…maybe he took a radio with a beacon or something.”
“I doubt he did, but hey, if searching makes you feel better, knock yourself out. Search all you want.”
She turned around and headed down the hall past the nursery, which was another problem. The baby that had arrived on the last flight had yet to stop crying. He was in terrible pain and rarely slept for more than an hour at a time. The one thing they didn’t have and could not get was any sort of painkiller, such as morphine. But Alyssa and Carmen had worked on that in the greenhouse before they’d even arrived. He wasn’t sure how far along the homemade laudanum was in development, but he hoped for the infant’s sake they had the painkiller ready soon. The child’s wailing was weakening in intensity, and they all thought that was a very bad sign.
Alyssa said she thought the problem was worse than a busted eardrum, but she couldn’t really give a proper diagnosis without the right equipment. They just did their best to keep the baby as comfortable as possible, and that meant holding him and bouncing him day and night, around the clock. It was amazing how heavy a three-month-old was after holding him for six hours straight. The last time Bishop took a shift, he felt as if he was holding a wailing anvil by the end of his stint—this coming from a soldier who carried around equipment for a living. The poor little man was in misery, and Bishop had never felt more helpless to relieve someone’s pain. As he listened to the baby’s wails, his relief from guard duty came up the hall. In step with her was Alyssa. She looked at him the way she did every morning, with expectation, hope, and despair in her eyes.
“Anything?” she asked.
He just shook his head, the unsaid words cloaked in silent guilt.
“How are we doing on the morphine?” He gestured toward the obvious sounds of suffering with a dart of his chin.
“It’s technically a homemade laudanum. It’s what they used in World War II when the opium shipments from Japan ceased. It’s made out of miner’s lettuce seeds instead of from the poppy plant. The problem is that the serum is toxic in large doses. I’m just unsure how much to give him. We’ll start small and work our way up until he shows signs of relief.”
“What kind of toxic symptoms will it cause? The drug won’t kill him, will it?”
“From what I’ve read, you get the worse headache of your life and maybe nausea and vomiting. Nothing really life threatening. It’s all we’ve got beyond the usual, and nothing has touched his pain so far.”
“Jax would probably know what to do.” He hadn’t meant to say the words aloud. He knew that Alyssa was an emergency-medicine nurse. She only knew so much. This was, however, an insensitive remark on his part. He couldn’t take back the slight now, though.
“Yeah, but he’s not here. So, all you’ve got is me,” she said in an irritated tone.
“I just meant…he knows a lot of unusual techniques.”
She just nodded. He wasn’t doing a good job of this; it seemed with Alyssa, he never would.
Trying to change the subject, he asked her again, “How did you make the morphine? I mean laudanum?”
Knowing his ploy, she pulled in a deep breath, tilted her head, and put her hand on her hip. “We grew the miner’s lettuce in five-gallon buckets in the greenhouse under a UV light spectrum, and then when the plants bolted enough to produce little yellow flowers, we cut off all the stocks, including the flowers, chopped them up, and packed them into mason jars. Then we filled the jars with vodka and placed them under UV lights for a month, which ended yesterday. Today, we’re straining the liquid, and we’ll test the drug.”
“I had no idea that’s how it works. How do you know how much to give an infant?”
“We don’t. This is not exact science; we’re feeling in the dark here. For an adult, you administer two to three teaspoons every six to eight hours. So…we’re going to start with one drop every six to eight hours and increase that until he doesn’t cry out like he does now. Then we’ll stop there. It’s all very hit or miss.”
“Okay, when are we going to try that?”
“Later tonight. We have to let all the liquid drain from the plant material. And each batch can vary in strength, so this is trial and error. We’re shooting for an average.”
“Better than nothing, I guess.”
“Yes, and now I have to ask you. When are we leaving to search for my husband?”
It was his turn to take a deep breath—sans the attitude, though. She’d asked him every day since Walt and the rest went missing. “We don’t have any idea if they were blown off course, had engine trouble, or hell, even shot down. They could be anywhere, Alyssa. And we’d risk our lives and the lives of those we brought with us to search for them.”
Her fair skin flushed like the Red Sea from her neck up to her cheeks; if the Red Sea were actually red. Please don’t start crying, he thought.
“There were infants on that craft too, Bishop. Teenagers, just babies. We can’t just leave them out there. Their parents trusted you to make the arduous trip easier by taking the chance with the Osprey. Now sending them from Coeur d’Alene to Deer Trail was the worst decision they ever made.”
Putting his hands on her shoulders, he said, “Alyssa, I want to go out there as much as you do; believe me. But I need, at the very least, an area to search. The radio beacon we had on the Osprey isn’t working. Right now, Cassie is down in Yeager’s quarters, looking for something, anything that might lead us to them.”
“Why?”
“She thinks that maybe Yeager had another radio with a tracker or something. It’s a long shot, but I told her to go ahead and search his room. He’s known for unusual tactics. Maybe she’s right, and she’ll find something that will help us locate them. Or at the very least narrow, the search field. They might even be in the middle of Yellowstone National Park, for all we know.” That’s when he saw the fear and loss of hope in her eyes.
“I’m sorry…I want to find them, Alyssa, just as much as you do. Please believe me. I just can’t jeopardize anyone else at the same time when we don’t even know where to look between here and there.”
She took a deep breath, reached up, and brushed the moisture from her eyes. At the same time, Bishop took his hands away. Her movement wasn’t a brush off as much as it was an attempt to keep herself from breaking down—a diversion of her too-raw emotions.
“I know, Walt. He’s not dead. I know he’s alive. And he’s out there.” She pointed to the small window in the door, the blackened window. “He’s out there with babies and young girls, with only Yeager to help him.” She turned then. “I’ve got to go and get the pain medicine ready. Please let me know if you hear anything.”
“Alyssa, you know I will. You’ll be the first to know.”
She nodded then and hurried away.
At least now, he was free to go and get some rest. At least for a few hours. But that meant passing by the nursery, where the little man inside screamed out in sheer agony. He couldn’t help cringing as he passed the doorway. As he looked through the window, a woman they’d taken in from Deer Trail calmly rocked the boy in her arms. Just a routine sway, back and forth, as the baby cried.
4 JAX
Anyone who’d ever visited the grand hotel would remember the labyrinth bathrooms with the dim, golden lighting—like something out of the fictitious Hogwarts—only now the circular was
hstands were lit by oil lamps, enhancing the wizardly image. Standing before the mirror, Jax pulled the padded gloves off his frozen hands. His fingers felt like nothing more than stumps affixed to the ends. They were frozen numb, and he knew what was coming next, the unavoidable, stabbing, needlelike pains in his fingers as they regained feeling in the warm water.
A thin string of drool trailed from his mouth. “Dam…mit,” he said. Slimy snot began to drain from his nose as he held his hands in the steaming water with no way to stem the persistent, elastic flow. Then the stabbing needle pains began. He stared straight ahead into the grungy mirror, his reflection barely viewable between the smudge spots. His pale-blue eyes looked gunmetal gray in the dim lamplight. In fact, he didn’t even recognize himself. Not at all. His beard was unrulier than ever, but it was the demented eyes that he didn’t recognize. The man looking back at him was a stranger. Someone beyond the nightmares of the past had emerged into the normal dim light of day. In a way, it was like waking in a nightmare.
Her gravelly voice, the one that ate a human and tried to apologize for her crime, emerged again. She was the last person he killed. The obligatory, “I’m sorry,” when she knew it was too little too late. Then the loud burst of gunfire that he himself ignited. His ears rang even still. And he didn’t care. She could haunt him if she’d like. He’d never give a damn. “Get in line with the rest of the monsters.”
The biting pain began to subside then. He chanced moving his stiff joints around a bit. Guarding against the threat of frostbite was a constant struggle now. There was no way around the constant worry of losing appendages—the tips of them, at least. And as time went on, conditions only became worse. Yet, as he stared at himself in the clouding mirror, the one lingering question and constant challenge arose again: How in hell was he going to get people to Deer Trail alive? Many would die, he conceded. Probably half…at least half, he suspected. As his nose drained past his lips and into his beard, he stared at the old man in the mirror and wondered if he was capable of getting at least some of them there. Even just a few.
He doubted that the jackass in the mirror had it in him. He’d bet against him, even. Hell, mercy would be better served by executing every single one of the parents who longed to join his or her children, just as he had the wretched cannibals who attempted to haunt him. Let the woman try…he’d welcome the demented company.
With full sensation in his fingers finally, he let the cooled water drain in a cyclone below and dried off with the available towel. His joints were stiff and painful, each swollen knuckle hell to bend. Now, though, he was finally free to grab his handkerchief and wiped the snot accumulation from his face. He rinsed the cloth in warm, soapy water and then did it again. Snot never failed to flow as soon as you stepped indoors. That was a constant annoyance, if you asked him. One often saw its crusty remains frozen to beards. No one gave it a thought anymore; it wouldn’t even get a cringe from a passerby.
Hardly anyone bothered with normal hygiene. It was just too damn cold to risk frostbite. He was used to living alone and in the woods, but these people…he had to remind them of the pitfalls of dysentery. Water was a constant issue, though living through an ice age presented deceptive conditions. Most people associated dysentery with warm weather conditions. Yet, here they were, living in what used to be a resort hotel in Idaho’s gem, Coeur d’Alene. Though a gem, it was no more.
The lake, frozen over, lay bare. There were endless snow berms, charred remains of fires, holes from fishing, and oxidized blood from murder or death of some sort, the snowscape resembling something out of a bloody war gone by. Hell, they’d fought a war for the Osprey. Bodies were stacked like logs at the lake’s outer edge, near Echo Bay. Some of them were bent at odd angles from animals’ attempts to haul them off. Remains were scattered everywhere. Nothing in recent memory was more horrible. Not even the carnage of North Korea or the endless war with China prepared him for the naiveté of society now. Utter denial is what he dealt with day in and day out. If it wasn’t for Cook, he wasn’t sure he could keep from murdering each one of them himself.
She was the only one who kept the monster at bay these days. And a monster was what lay beneath his mountain-man facade. Nothing more than that was the truth. He wanted to walk away from them all and nearly had until one night, Cook had laid down her armor. And he found there a soul to gather in.
5 BISHOP
With her boots stamping out a quick cadence on the concrete floor, Cassie hurried down the hall to Garrett Yeager’s locked apartment door. Looking both ways, she waited and listened for anyone approaching. Even though Bishop had given her permission to do what she was about to do, she couldn’t find Alyssa, who had the master key code, and she wasn’t about to waste time looking for her in the silo maze when she was perfectly capable of besting any locked door on her own.
In fact, there were few locks she couldn’t manipulate, and in the event that she encountered one, she had other methods in her mental toolbox. “Never let morality get in your way,” her father once said. Cassie blew out a quick breath with thoughts of her father. He wasn’t a bad man, necessarily; he just had a warped sense of control. Meaning that he let nothing control him…certainly not locks.
Looking both ways again, she listened intently for footfalls. Then she reached into her pocket and pulled out a screwdriver and a small locking wrench. Twisting the door handle to the right, she uncovered the tiny hole that was a reset connection for the thumbprint scan. With the screwdriver in place, she gave it several hard whacks and then used the locking wrench to torque the lock. She replaced Garrett’s thumbprint scan with one of her own, removed the screwdriver, stepped back, and scanned her thumb again. Voila. The handle opened the doorway. Quickly stopping inside, she locked herself in the tidy room she’d visited more than a few times in the past.
She couldn’t help but feel him there with her. His scent surrounded her. Her heart ached. She missed him. She was so scared to have suddenly lost this man whom she couldn’t help but love. Two people taking a chance in the dark when she never thought she’d trust again—especially at world’s end. He had somehow made it through her shield.
“Okay, if I were you, Garrett Yeager, what would I have done? There must be something. Anything…”
Starting on the left side of the room, Cassie began to search the closet starting at the top. A methodical search was what it would take. She knew the man…knew his heart. If anyone could find a link to where he was now, she could. He was nothing if not a tech wizard. There must be something here, she told herself.
6 WALT
With the thrumming in his head beating a tune in time with his pulse, Walt heard nothing, but when he opened his eyes in the dark, the most bizarre sight made him think that he was witnessing a nightmare. In the dream, a man with a torch pulled his handgun out, aimed, and fired repeatedly. At first, Walt thought he was crazy. There was nothing there but the black night—except when there wasn’t, and the head of a wolf suddenly appeared in the golden blaze of a fire. His muzzle open wide, his head low to the ground, he crouched forward.
The man aimed beyond him and fired again. He swung the torch in a half-moon arc, and then there were more—many more. An entire pack of wolves faced the single man trying to keep them at bay. Then the first wolf took advantage of the man’s divided attention and leaped at him, catching him in the thigh. The man fired again and again, and then Walt’s vision faded away.
He was shivering enough to make his teeth rattle against one another, and the clacking sound became a rhythm. And then it stopped as Walt opened his eyes, somehow forgetting the cold as he gazed upward through the boughs of an evergreen. Snowflakes fell in a mesmerizing pattern, never ending, sounding like static as they landed on his metallic blanket. Even those tiny collisions met his ears in the void of noise.
Moving his eyes around without moving his head, he took in stark whites marred by the deepest ebony. Never before was the world cast in such extremes of black and white, good and
evil, life and death.
Feeling a sudden movement by his arm, he quickly directed his attention to his right side and lifted the blanket under his chin to peer below. Tucked against him was the half-naked form of the little girl from what? A few days ago? He had no idea how long she’d nestled at his side.
“It’s okay, Walt. I put her there for warmth. Is she breathing all right?”
With sleepy eyes, she mashed her forehead against his side. He assumed she was breathing just fine. “I think so.”
He tucked the blanket back over her little head and looked up at Yeager. Turning his head just a bit caused him to yell out in pain.
“Yeah, don’t do that…don’t move anything,” Yeager said as he knelt down next to Walt.
“What are my injuries?” He was almost afraid to ask, steeling himself for the bad news.
Yeager wiped his upper lip with the back of a gloved finger. Walt had noticed that the younger man did that when he was nervous.
“Um, I put your left leg in a hare splint. Your femur’s broken.”
“Crap. Compound fracture?”
“No, but it’s fractured, for sure. I set the leg the best I could, but you’re not walking out of here on your own.”
His throat suddenly felt too thick to speak. “Anything else?” he asked as he tried to swallow.
“I think your ankle’s pretty much obliterated, too.”
“Same leg?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that the worst of it?”
“Of your injuries? A concussion, I suspect. Yeah, I don’t really know. You’re in and out of it.”
Walt took a deep breath. “Okay, what about the rest of them?”
His eyes met Yeager’s when he didn’t answer right away.
Yeager looked as if he’d hadn’t slept for days, and there was something else there, too, not just despair but terror. Walt suspected that would remain with him from now on. He brushed his roughened chin with his hand in thought.