by Jim Heskett
Dave would be smart about that, wouldn’t he? Farrah’s and Willam’s lives depended on it.
Despite the surrounding chaos, Quentin felt his world shrink. Felt the pressure build all around him, until the barrage of gunfire and the shouts and screams of the people became distant, like a television at low volume.
His eyes shut when something smacked him across the face. For a split second, he was sure he’d been shot in the jaw, that he would soon crumble to his knees.
But, he blinked to see Isabelle standing in front of him. She slapped him again. “Wake the fuck up! We have to get off this porch. This house is too big a target.”
A young man named Marcus came running out of the house, dragging a duffel bag behind him. He popped it open and began handing out assault rifles. Quentin snatched one and popped in a magazine, then he grabbed Marcus by the collar of his shirt. He pointed at a cluster of townspeople, standing together, shooting toward the mass of Eighteeners.
“Marcus,” Quentin shouted. “Get over there, to those people. Tell them to lie low, spread out; to make themselves smaller targets.”
“I’m on it,” Marcus shouted back, and raced off the porch toward them.
The Eighteeners were now forming ranks, with a row of them on their knees and a line behind them, standing and firing. Not even twenty percent of them were engaged in battle. The rest were standing around, watching, laughing. It made sense; no reason to waste the ammo on such a pitiful force.
As Marcus approached the cluster of people, the side of his head exploded in a mist of red. For another second, he continued running, his arms swinging as he carried his rifle. Then, like a pile of sticks knocked over, his limbs folded and he slumped onto the snow.
Quentin stared for a moment. Marcus had been a good kid. Played guitar on warm nights out in front of the hardware store and was most interested in learning old songs. The older, the better.
Now he was dead, as they all would be, within a few minutes.
Kellen smacked Quentin in the arm as more bullets pelted the house, and they raced toward a tree while White and some others found a low spot in the ground to drop prone. Their guns crackled and spit bullets, but it didn’t seem to matter. For every man they shot, two more appeared in his place.
“This is insane,” Quentin said amid the din. “We should surrender. Try to save the women and children.”
Kellen turned his head toward Quentin in between gun blasts. Squinted as bullets flew over his head. The snow around them had turned to red and white polka dots. Bodies collapsed and the cries of dying men mingled together.
“What did you say?” Kellen shouted.
Quentin shook his head. It didn’t matter. The Eighteeners wouldn’t let them surrender, even if they tried. Even if they begged and pleaded, these monsters would kill every last one of them. How could they fight an army several times larger than theirs?
Quentin and all his people would die out here today.
Chapter 35
Kellen - Boulder
There were about twenty of them left inside the house. Kellen and White, Quentin, Isabelle, and some soldiers from Nederland. They’d been the lucky ones who had managed to dodge the bullets and explosives to retreat into the farmhouse when the Eighteeners decided to stop playing and advanced across the battlefield. Hadn’t taken long. The invading force had spared some of the woman and children, had allowed them to flee on foot, but many others had been slaughtered.
The ones who hadn’t fled or been killed were being rounded up and collected into groups. Kellen stared out through the front door peephole at the soldiers directing them. The Red Streets gang bangers used to capture people and sell them into slavery. Would the Eighteeners do the same? Or were they only waiting to kill the townspeople? Savoring it? Maybe they were trying to think of a way to eliminate them all without spending more bullets.
Kellen and the others were sprawled around the living room, half of them nursing wounds from shrapnel or stay bullets. White had caught a piece of shrapnel in his chin, but he seemed okay.
Although they were lucky to be alive, none of them was whole.
Outside, there were thousands of Eighteeners, surrounding the house in concentric circles. Waiting. At any second, they could storm the place and kill all inside. Compare a few thousand guns versus twenty in the house.
What were those bastards waiting for? The survivors had been trapped in the house for hours. The sun was setting. Kellen expected he would never see a sunrise again and was ready for it to be over. Saw no point in delaying the inevitable any longer. He crept across the floor, settling next to White, and rested his head on White’s stomach. White stroked his hair and said nothing.
At least Dave had rushed Farrah and Willam away. Kellen had watched the car flee over the hills without taking any bullets. They’d been given a good chance at a real escape.
Kellen could see on Isabelle’s face that she didn’t think their chances were so hot. Her brow had remained creased for the last several hours. She sat alone in the corner, rubbing a massive bruise on her thigh where her pants had torn. The thing was like a puddle of bluish oil from her knee to her hip. She had to be thinking that even if her husband had left Boulder successfully, she would never see him again.
And Kellen had no comforting words.
From outside, a car engine revved and then stopped.
“You there!” a woman’s voice shouted.
Kellen and Quentin sat up. Kellen flicked his head toward the stairs, and a deflated Quentin staggered to his feet. White joined them, grimacing as blood dripped from the cut on his chin. Isabelle, limping, brought up the rear. The rest of the people clustered in the living room were either too hurt or too defeated to join them.
They all lumbered up the stairs and ducked into a bedroom with a window that faced the front of the house. Kellen huddled next to it, staring at a Jeep driven by Hector Castillo. George Grant rode shotgun. Seeing him made Kellen’s blood boil. To think he was about to die at the hands of this man sent his heart rate into the stratosphere.
Also in the back of the car was a woman who could only be Alma Castillo, standing up, holding a megaphone. She looked just like her father. There was also some beefy guy sitting in the back of the Jeep with her. Furry mustache. A local Eighteener Kellen had seen before, but couldn’t remember his name.
Kellen raised the window a few inches, letting the cold air rush in. The outside world smelled like death.
He leaned down, pointed his mouth in the open space. “If you’re going to kill us, come on in. The least you could do is not drag this out any longer.”
“We don’t want to kill all of you,” Alma said. “We only want Quentin. Is there someone in there named Quentin?”
All eyes turned on him. Quentin’s face went as white as a ghost.
“The bunker,” he said. “They know about the bunker.”
He dug a hand into his pocket and removed the key, then turned it over in his palm.
“Don’t do it,” Isabelle said. “Don’t give them what they want.”
Quentin tilted his hand to make the key flip over in his palm. He passed it from one hand to the other and back. “Maybe they’ll let you all live if I give them this.”
Every single person in the room shook their heads. Obviously, they knew it was a pipe dream. One of those five stages of grief, or something like that.
Quentin swallowed. “Farrah still has her key. Maybe she…” he drifted off.
Kellen wanted to interject, to give Quentin some hope. Yes, maybe Farrah had been able to reach Nederland and access the bunker, but to what end? If whatever was in there interested these people so much, they would certainly have people already stationed in town, ready for a visit. Maybe that’s why they hadn’t set up camp in Nederland… they’d been unable to find the bunker and needed someone to lead them to it.
“Don’t do it,” Isabelle said again.
Quentin breathed, shoulders rising and falling. “I don’t see any other
way out of this.”
“They'll kill us anyway,” White said. “Swallow the key. Don’t let them have it.”
Setting sunlight glinted off the hunk of metal in Quentin’s hand. It jiggled in his palm from his skittish arm vibration.
Then, it bounced.
Kellen squinted. The key was literally bouncing in Quentin’s hand. That wasn’t a nervous tic. The whole house was shaking. Was that an earthquake? Did those even happen in Colorado?
From somewhere nearby came the sound of churning earth. Like a bulldozer scraping over the land.
“What the hell is that?” White said.
They all peered out of the window, and toward the south as something materialized from over the hill. At first, they couldn’t make it out, with the fading light and the remnants of battle smoke still fogging the area.
Then Kellen could see it.
A tank.
An American tank, the same as the ones Helen Rappaport kept in her quiver. The tank’s snout erupted, and a cluster of Eighteeners flew into the air as the surrounding ground exploded.
Next, over the hill came the troops. Thousands of them, sporting automatic weapons, lobbing grenades at the Eighteeners. The gang army turned their focus from the house, to face the oncoming army.
Alma and her Jeep sped away, but not before she grabbed the local Eighteener boss and tossed him out of the Jeep and into the snowy muck of the farm land.
Kellen seized Quentin. “We have to go. Now.”
“Where?”
“You and Farrah have the only keys to your bunker, right?”
Quentin nodded.
“Then we need to get up to Nederland and defend it. Alma left, and you know where she’s going. We’ll use Rappaport’s attack as cover.”
With heavy eyes and bruised bodies, they all rose to their feet and raced down the stairs to extend their lives a little longer.
Chapter 36
Quentin - Boulder
Finding a way to the car wasn’t easy. While most of the Eighteeners had turned away from the house to gawk at Rappaport’s army descending on them like a swarm of locusts, plenty were still running around in a panic. Many were too harried to care about the survivors in the house. Now that Alma and her father had left and their leader Bulldozer was dead on the ground, crushed under the wheel of Alma’s Jeep, they had nothing to fight for.
Some, though, still raised weapons, firing, hoping to kill anything they could before their own inevitable deaths.
On the other side of the road, rapidly approaching, Helen Rappaport’s war machine showered bullets and tank shells in their general area. They weren’t shooting at Kellen, White, Quentin, and Isabelle, but they weren’t making efforts to avoid them, either. Hard to tell friend from foe on the snowy plain of this battlefield. So many frantic bodies running in every direction.
The clusters of former Nederland residents who’d been held captive by the Eighteeners were now free, hurtling in one mass toward the mountains. The American troops were not actively targeting them.
If they could get out of range of the oncoming tanks, they would be fine. Nothing Quentin could do about it. They needed to leave for Nederland, as soon as possible. Still, he felt the pull to chase after his people, to be with them and aid their passage to safety.
But he couldn’t do that. He had to reach Nederland and protect the bunker. If there was anything left to protect.
“There!” Quentin shouted, pointing at a junky old Honda Pilot behind the house. He had no idea where the keys were, but one of the tricks he’d learned back in Austin from Barry-the-betrayer was how to hot-wire a car. Useful data, from time to time. The four of them made it to the car, but Quentin didn’t have to worry about fussing with the wires under the steering column. The keys were already sitting on the dash.
He started it up as an Eighteener holding a single pistol set his sights on them. He had multiple streams of blood cascading down his face, like red dreadlocks covering his cheeks. The soldier fired several shots, and one of them cracked the windshield, while the rest missed in all directions.
A second later, a nearby explosion from a tank shell launched the soldier into the air.
Quentin navigated the car over the rolling hills to the south until he’d passed the army and made it back to the road. On the way, one of Rappaport’s tanks briefly pivoted its turret to track them, but it didn’t fire. One blast from that thing and they would have been torn to shreds.
“Everyone okay?” he said, once they were on Highway 36, a mile north of Boulder.
He checked the rearview for heads nodding.
The sounds of the war faded into the distance as they drove through town to find Canyon Road. All of them panted, stared blankly out the windows. The insanity of the day hadn’t fully caught up yet. For now, only exhaustion and weariness floated in the air among them.
“I thought you said Rappaport wasn’t coming,” Quentin said, eying Isabelle in the rearview.
She shrugged. “As far as I knew, this wasn't supposed to happen. She gave us no hint she’d be on her way.”
“Odd,” Kellen said.
“She’s an honorable woman,” Isabelle said, “but this seems out of left field.”
They spoke no more on the subject as they raced up Canyon for the twenty-mile stretch to find the outskirts of Nederland. The bodies of the town residents who’d been unable to flee still littered the sides of the road. Many of their corpses wore a thin layer of new snow to act as a grave.
Quentin paused outside the barricade and let the car idle.
“Here’s the plan,” he said. “Farrah, Willam, and your friend Dave should be up by the ski resort past town, if everything went well.”
The next sentence stuck in his throat for a moment when he realized they might not find his family. Or, worse, they might find the remains of his family somewhere on the other side of this barricade. Why had he ever let them out of his sight?
“We find them,” he said, “then we secure the bunker, to make sure no one can come near it.”
“Where is this bunker?” Isabelle said.
Quentin paused, gripping the steering wheel. He didn’t like to tell anyone, even those he considered on his side. But, if he were going to ask these people to risk their lives to defend it, they would have to know sooner or later.
“At the base of the ski resort. There’s a hatch in the kitchen of the Timber Lodge that leads to an underground structure.”
Isabelle nodded. “That’s random.”
“We think it was former government storage,” Quentin said. “Something forgotten about when the bombs started going off. We’ve been expecting—for years—for someone to recapture it. Up until now, it’s been the town’s secret.”
He lifted a finger, pointing at the white strips that marked the former ski runs of the resort, five miles in the distance. “I’m not sure what we will find when we get there. Could be nothing, could be dozens or hundreds of Eighteeners.”
White raised his pistol and tapped the barrel against his forehead. “It’s okay, Q. We’ll be ready.”
Chapter 37
Quentin - Nederland
Quentin drove on, through the broken and bruised town. Too many structures had been damaged when the Eighteeners first raided more than a week ago. Too many of the commune’s residents had been unable to escape. He couldn’t help but feel he should have done more. Should have saved them.
Traveling the short distance through town took longer than usual, with the abandoned vehicles and debris everywhere. They did not encounter a soul in town. No former residents, no Eighteeners, no sign of Dave, Farrah, or Willam.
When they finally reached the base of the ski resort, something felt off. Too quiet. The snow-covered parking lot was empty, no sign of tracks. If Dave had come here with Farrah, there should have been tire tracks on the ground. Unless they’d approached on foot, which would have been strange. Plus, with only a light amount of fresh snow on the ground, their footprints might also
have been visible.
“Feels empty,” Kellen said.
Quentin opened his car door. To their right was the Timber Lodge, with the inert ski lift beyond the building. Dead ahead was the billboard-sized terrain map, twenty feet wide and ten feet tall, hovering just above the snow on the ground.
Quentin aimed his gun at the terrain map, and his three companions did the same.
“What’s happening here?” Isabelle said. “Why are we pointing our guns at a sign?”
“Come on out,” Quentin said.
Bullets showered the air, but not from the sign. For a moment, all was chaos. The prickling of gunfire disrupted all other thoughts in his brain.
“Move!” Quentin shouted, but he didn’t know where to go. The shots appeared to be coming from all directions, and he couldn’t pinpoint anything in the scrum. He settled on hiding at the back of the car, and the other three joined him there.
Quentin popped up from behind the car as a flash of silver over by the lodge caught his eye. His head pivoted toward a snow-covered retaining wall a few feet to the right of the front door. Saw six guns peeking out over the top of that wall, and a few heads of hair.
“There,” he said, pointing. White and Isabelle immediately began firing in that direction. They all shifted to the passenger side of the car to place it between them and their attackers. Bullets pelted the car, punching holes in the doors and rear bumper.
“Hey, Kellen!” shouted one of the voices.
Quentin checked him as Kellen’s jaw plummeted. Quentin’s eyes lifted to Isabelle, giving her a questioning look.
“That’s Lincoln,” Isabelle said. “The man who attacked us in Illinois.”
The rear window of the car exploded in a thunderstorm of glass.
Kellen freed a few shards of glass from his hair. “He followed us all the way back here. I don’t believe it.”