by Jim Heskett
Civilization. Hope in the air.
White pulled off to the side of the road as soon as it came into view. He didn’t have to say anything; Kellen immediately understood how they both felt the change. It was like walking across the edge of the path of a rainstorm, out onto dry land.
They left the stolen car and hopped up onto the hood to get a cleaner look down into the valley.
“How many do you think?” White said as he slid on his jacket.
“Dunno. Ten thousand, maybe? I haven’t seen this many people gathered together in… in a long time.”
“Now we have an answer to Farrah’s question of whether it’s one thousand or ten thousand. This is the real deal.”
Kellen hadn’t thought about Farrah in a couple days. Leader of the council of Nederland, mother of Willam, wife of Quentin. Doing everything she could to ensure safety for those people in the mountains. Seeing all of these troops—these American troops—before them, Kellen had a feeling things might turn out okay. For the first time in years, positivity cut through the murky outcast of the future.
White pointed to a line of cars that rimmed the edge of the troops, like a mobile border wall. “We’ll have to enter through there. I think I see a gate to the northeast.”
Kellen sniffed the cold and damp air. “If they don’t shoot us on sight.”
“You think they will? These are the good guys, or at least that’s what we’re supposed to believe.”
“Good guys, bad guys… anybody can shoot you. I’d like to think the good guys might use smaller caliber bullets, though.”
White gave a polite grin at Kellen’s weak attempt at gallows humor. They hugged, their first real touch today. Kellen sometimes forgot how much he needed it. Too easy to think being an island was okay.
They returned to the car and drove into the valley, slowing when they could see the faces of the men at the gap in the car-wall. The troops were wearing actual army fatigues, carrying clean-looking assault weapons. This was a real army.
Even anti-war Kellen felt a lurch of something in his chest at the sight of something so normal. Something so… patriotic as a US soldier. He used to watch Army recruiting commercials on TV with such disdain for the whole machine of war. That was before he’d ever killed anyone. Had ever thought it possible. Even when Beth Fortner was destroying his career to further her own, he never thought he could actually kill her.
Now he wished he had. Maybe none of this would have happened.
His trips down memory lane and the patriotism faded when a dozen men around the gap pointed those assault rifles at them.
“Stop the car,” Kellen said.
One man at the front of the group marched forward, the snout of his rifle held high. He was white, with a bright orange mohawk like a racing stripe. He shouted something Kellen couldn’t hear from inside the car. Kellen and White raised their hands.
The soldier shouted again, and Kellen assumed they were supposed to get out, so he kept one hand hoisted while he opened the passenger door. White joined him, and the Mohawk Man swerved his rifle back and forth between them.
Kellen cleared his throat. “Morning, boys. It’s good to see you. Good to be back in something that feels so… American, I guess?”
“State your business,” Mohawk Man said.
It doesn’t matter what you claim, the voice in Kellen’s head whispered. None of them will take you seriously. They will expose you as the fraud you are and send you back to obscurity in Colorado.
If he’d been alone, Kellen would have told the voice to shut up, but he knew better than to do that around other people. So instead, he closed his eyes and breathed through it.
“We’d like to talk with Rappaport,” he said. “We have an important message from Colorado. Something she’ll want to hear.”
The man swished his lips around, then leaned over and spat a jet of tobacco juice on the ground. “Never heard of her.”
For a second, Kellen panicked. Maybe they had wandered into some other encampment that wasn’t the American army. Maybe Rappaport had died, and these men were a non-affiliated militia. Hell, maybe they’d usurped her in a coup.
White’s gaze drifted back to the car, to the pistol in the space between the two front seats. Kellen tried to catch his eye to warn him off, but White wouldn’t look at him.
The Mohawk Man was paying lots of attention to White, probably because he was twice as beefy as Kellen, with bicep muscles that protruded even through the thickness of his jacket sleeves. If something bad happened, this Mohawk Man would shoot White first, then maybe keep Kellen alive for questioning.
He cleared his throat. “My name is Kellen Richter. I used to be known as the Soothsayer, so you might actually know that name if you were paying attention right around the time the last real president died. I knew Edward LaVey and Peter Anders. Now, I’ve come to ask for Helen Rappaport’s help.”
Mohawk Man didn’t seem amused by Kellen’s speech. “Soothsayer, huh? Wait here.”
He vanished, leaving Kellen and White to stare at the others, smirks on their faces and guns pointed at the sky. For good guys, they sure were paranoid. In this waiting period, they had little to do besides stare at the guards, who stared back and said nothing.
Ten or fifteen minutes later, the Mohawk guard came walking back through the line of cars, escorting an important-looking man. This man had on nice clothes and a clean-shaven face, an oddity for most males. The important man put a hand on Mohawk’s shoulder. “It’s okay, Bobby, I got this.”
The man addressed Kellen. “Bobby says you claim to be the Soothsayer? How do you know that name?”
“It’s me,” Kellen said. “I know the name because that’s who I am.”
“You wrote about me,” the man said. “I was the truck driver in Colorado Springs, and they made me famous. You helped. You put my name on the internet on your blog.”
Kellen’s brain churned. Truck driver? He hadn’t ever blogged about any truck driver he could remember. He didn’t associate with too many truck drivers in his personal life, and why would he blog about one?
Wait. Colorado Springs. The connection dawned on him. The truck driver who’d been blamed for The Air Force Academy bombing.
“You’re Dave Carter,” Kellen said.
Dave nodded, and Mohawk Man seemed satisfied enough to lower his weapon.
“Mr. Carter, we need to speak to Ms. Rappaport, if she’s here. Please, it’s urgent.”
Dave blew air out between his teeth and then put his hands on his hips. “Well, okay then. Come on.”
Inside this structure that Kellen figured was once a convenience store, he and White sat across from Helen Rappaport. Awaiting her answer to their plea for help.
She was older, at an advanced age Kellen was unaccustomed to seeing. Without hospitals and drugstores, the elderly often succumbed to their illnesses. This woman was in her late 60s, or maybe even older.
Next to her stood the truck driver Dave Carter and a gorgeous brunette named Isabelle. Dave’s wife, or girlfriend, or something.
Isabelle was some sort of Tomb Raider badass with blades and guns strapped to various parts of her body. In some ways, she reminded Kellen of Beth Fortner, but she had no stink of deceit on her. No, Isabelle seemed like the type to stab you in the face, not the back, and there was something pure about that. Also, she said little, and Kellen liked that about her.
White rocked back and forth on his feet while Kellen stood at attention next to a row of shelves that had been picked clean of everything except for the rearview mirror air fresheners.
Kellen looked at Rappaport, eyebrows high, awaiting her response to his question. She sipped from a water bottle before answering.
“No,” she said.
Kellen’s chest constricted. “What?”
She sat back, sighed, and checked the reactions of both Isabelle and Dave. Kellen didn’t know if they were her generals or what, but they were clearly important people to be in this command room w
ith only her and a small smattering of guards.
“I’m sorry, son. You seem like a sincere young man, and I wish I could send the army out west, but I can’t. We’re making headway in the Midwest, but the Infinity and other local gangs are dug in deep. It’s not been easy going. Too many losses.”
“I don’t understand,” Kellen said, feeling his frustration rise. “There are now two significant sets of Eighteeners, and they’re probably going to merge in Colorado. I’m not talking about a hundred or two hundred scattered gang bangers. This is ten thousand, maybe more. We came here to beg for help for Nederland, but it’s become something a lot bigger than that. We’re talking about saving the country from these people before they can meld into one unified force.”
The old woman frowned and gave a little shake of her head. Kellen knew what it meant; she didn’t believe him.
Two decades ago, back in his political career, Kellen would have figured out what leverage he could gain on Rappaport to bend her to his will. That was how politics worked. The art of “compromise” in Washington meant you figured out how you could manipulate someone to make it seem like they were getting what they wanted, but you were the one who came out on top. But, like an atrophied muscle, he didn’t know how to do that anymore.
His palms grew sweaty and his mouth dry as he saw his chance at doing something useful slipping away from him.
“Please,” Kellen said. “Thousands of lives are at stake.”
“Again, I’m very sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”
“George Grant and Hector Castillo are still alive,” Kellen said. This earned a momentary reaction from everyone in the room.
“How do you know?” Dave said.
“I heard it second-hand.”
Rappaport grinned. “I was told by a man in New Jersey six months ago that he saw Edward LaVey riding a horse, with the heads of his enemies tied to strings rattling behind the horse like cans on the back of a newlyweds’ car. He wasn’t joking.”
“This is different,” Kellen said.
She shook her head. “I don’t know that it is. It’s not that I don’t believe you… the LaVey on the horse example was harsh, and I apologize for that. I’m not calling you liars. But I have to focus on what’s in front of me at the moment.”
“You’re sentencing everyone in the Nederland community to die,” White said. “You’re allowing this Eighteener army to grow and gain influence. They’re going to swallow up the country if we don’t do anything to stop it.”
Kellen reached out to put a hand on White’s shoulder, but he didn’t relent. White was gritting his teeth.
“Maybe so,” Rappaport said, “but I have to keep the path ahead in mind. Until the Infinity is under control, I have more immediate matters to attend to. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have to plan our move into Chicago.”
With that, the old woman waved them out, and Dave and Isabelle stepped forward to escort them out of the building.
Chapter 20
Alma - Colorado Springs
She stood at the ruins of the Air Force Academy Cathedral in Colorado Springs, pride welling up inside her. When Hector had detonated the bombs to bring this building down, Alma had been stuck in Oklahoma, trying to escape before anyone found out who her father was. If they had, she would have become the government’s hostage, for sure. Nothing but bloodthirsty crooks were running the country back then. Even at that age, Alma knew it to be true.
To her left, Hector stood, hands on his hips, a rare smile on his face.
“We did a bold thing here, on this campus,” Hector rasped. “We poked the sleeping giant.”
While her father barely spoke anymore due to the knife slash across his throat, when he did speak, she listened intently. Decades of experience thrived inside that brain of his. She hugged him, feeling the love in his arms as he gripped her.
George and Jarvis, the other members of the privileged group allowed to enter the ruins of the cathedral, picked through bits of steel beams and drywall that still littered the ground. Two decades had passed since that day, and the building seemed largely untouched. Compared to other structures, rubble maintained a timeless quality to it.
“Too bad your bold thing didn’t work out,” George said as he dug through a collection of half-burned pamphlets scattered across the floor.
“It’s not over yet,” Alma said. “We should always remember what this cathedral represents.”
George stood and opened his palms. “What’s that?”
“The future. The ability to take big actions and small actions to send fear into the hearts of the powerful. Every revolution began with a single gunshot. Every coup began with an idea.”
George nodded and pushed out his lower lip, chewing on her words. He could be a surly man, but a rational one. She didn’t yet know what place she would give him in the new government. Something worthy of a skeptic, for sure. If his black box promise came true, that was. If he couldn’t deliver on the missile codes, she might not find a place for him at all.
“If there are any old bodies here,” Jarvis said, “I don’t smell them. You’d think something rotting this long would have a nasty stink to it.”
Alma sneered at Jarvis’ comment. In many ways, he reminded her of the beer-swilling redneck teenagers she knew back in Oklahoma. Lacking in class, but overflowing with bravado.
From the other side of a pile of rubble came the sound of shifting metal. Alma and Jarvis both spun to face it. Through the fading sunlight, she couldn’t make out anything in the pile, but those sounds were definitely real.
Her first thought was to call for a group to investigate, but the Eighteener army was back in town, at least a half mile from here. None of them had been allowed to travel with the leaders to view the wreckage.
Who was in the pile? Was it Red Streets, some other gang, or maybe even skunks and raccoons?
No, this was scavengers.
She lifted the pistol from the holster on her belt. The cathedral was her newfound sacred place, and anyone disturbing it would get a bullet in the brain for bothering her.
But, before she could even see what happened, something whiffed through the air, and her shoulder pinched like a wasp had stung it. Her body twisted back a half step from the surprisingly strong blow, then the other shoulder pinched, and she sunk to her knees. From out of nowhere, she ached. Lines of pain shooting from her shoulders and into her chest.
She looked down to see sticks jutting from her body. No, not sticks, more like skinny metal rods. Blow darts. On top of the rubble pile, four round tubes hovered in the air, and more whistling came as new blow darts sailed across the room. Then faces and heads appeared behind those blow darts.
Not just scavengers. These were opportunists. She would cut off their fingers one by one and shove them down their throats.
Gunshots and shouts littered the air. Confusion. Chaos. Her head swam, and she couldn’t think straight. Couldn’t get her arms and legs to respond the way she wanted. Around her, Jarvis and George were shooting at the figures on top of the rubble, but she couldn’t raise her gun. It was like a lead weight in her hand.
The darts. Poison. They had shot her full of poison, and she was losing control of herself.
Wispy remnants of the past danced through her head. She had a distinct memory of being in Toronto, infiltrating the hideout of some thieves’ guild there to pilfer their food and weapons. Getting caught by someone in that guild, and them dragging her before their leaders for punishment. Alma talking her way out of it, joining their guild, becoming their leader six months later.
Another memory from long before that, in Hastings, Nebraska. Not long after she’d left Oklahoma for the first time when they’d enacted the laws about border crossings. She’d had to fight her way out of custody after being detained on suspicion of lacking a firearm, which was apparently a crime in many states.
The world was now muddy, like watching it through a steamy shower. She saw people scrambling over a pile of garba
ge, like monkey men but with hairless limbs. The pops of gun blasts jarred her ears and forced her eyes shut each time one went off.
Strong hands grabbed her by the armpits, and she felt herself being dragged away among the shouts and deafening clatter of gunfire. She opened her fluttering eyelids to see George Grant removing her from the building. Weary eyes blinked again and observed stars above in the night sky. So many stars, an infinite number. Each of those stars was a world away, looking back at her world, through endless distance and limitless time.
And then she passed out.
Chapter 21
Lincoln - Lebanon
From his lookout spot behind the building next to the convenience store, Lincoln watched his two targets disappeared inside it. Kellen and White had gone to a lot of trouble to make their way through this camp to speak to whoever was in there. A little part of Lincoln was curious, but not enough to follow them. No, there would be guards in there. He’d nearly exhausted himself by sneaking through this camp while there was enough daylight for someone to spot him. His clothes were too different from the uniforms of the soldiers. Plus, he didn’t have their official-looking assault rifles.
But, he’d sneaked through the camp, just the same. Using a combination of tiptoeing from cover to cover and simply keeping his head down, he hadn’t ever let Kellen and White leave his field of view.
“What are you doing?” asked a scratchy voice behind him.
Kellen spun to find a soldier with a mohawk eying him. The soldier was holding an assault rifle across his chest, not yet pointing it at Lincoln. He was grateful for that. It meant he would at least have a chance to talk his way out of this situation.
“Nothing,” Lincoln said. “Meeting a friend here in a few minutes.”
The soldier’s eyes danced all around. They were standing in the alley between two buildings, for no good reason. Nothing but a dumpster back here. It was a terrible place to meet a friend, and the soldier had to know that.