by Riley Flynn
With that, the professor leaned back in his seat and stretched his long legs out in front of him, crossing his arms over his chest.
“Gentlemen,” he said. “I sincerely meant my offer to shine your boots, or anything else my meager skills might offer, in return for what you’ve done for us today. As for right now—” His mouth widened in a herculean yawn that showcased the old silver fillings in his teeth. “It’s been an extremely long day, and Morpheus is calling me.”
Jax smiled. Hutch was the last hold-out—the rest of the group was now asleep. “Settle in. We’ve got about an hour to go, and we’ll try to keep it down.”
A moment later, Hutch’s breathing was deep and even. Jax turned his seat back so that he was facing forward with Ruben.
“Quite the character,” he said in a low voice.
Ruben nodded. “Gotta say, the way he put it, it does sound like we’re already rebuilding the government.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know if government can really be a bad or a good thing. It’s just a thing, and most of the time before the collapse, it didn’t really seem to work all that well.”
“Never heard you complain when you got your pay,” said Jax. “Uncle Sam gave you a career. A family.”
“I know that,” said Ruben. “But I also know I’m not the only one wondering what he’s done for me lately.”
The pair didn’t speak for the rest of the ride to Colorado Springs, leaving only the rumble of the engine and the rhythmic clank of the Sno-Cat’s tracks to fill the silence.
3
Carol Firth’s husband, Phil, had been no prize; she could admit that to herself now, finally, at the end, along with a great deal of other things she’d actively avoided thinking about for the past six months. He’d constantly harped about the thirty pounds she’d been trying to lose ever since their son Josh was born thirteen years earlier, even though Phil himself was pear-shaped and had high blood pressure. He smoked cigars, which meant he stank, and he never went with her to visit her family. Overall, outside of giving her Josh, Phil Firth had turned out to be a losing bet.
But he had been smart enough to buy a pistol when the banks started to close last summer. He’d gone to their credit union one morning to empty their accounts in cash (this was after he and his fellow insurance sales drones had showed up at their office to find a yellow legal sheet taped to the door with “CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE” written in big Sharpie letters) and had come home with a Glock 42 instead, because the bank was locked tight. Phil told her that he was going to put up with zero shit if things started to get ugly; nobody was going to take what belonged to him.
In the end, Phil had taken a lot of shit. So much shit that his hospital bed had been steeped in it like a used tea bag. Less than ten days later, Eko had finally taken what belonged to them both—Josh, the reason she had gotten out of bed every day for thirteen years.
For the last six months, Carol had gritted her teeth and swallowed the pain whenever she thought of her son. That, along with healthy doses of anti-depressants and volunteering with Alfred Skolnik at the High Sierra depot, had seen her through. But now she let the tears flow freely, embracing the cold, aching hole in her chest as if it were a child itself. A rictus grin had been her coping mechanism since she was a girl, when her mother would tell her that nobody liked a gloomy puss, for Christ’s sake, so just smile. No longer. Here, at the end, she wondered if anyone in her life had ever truly known who she really was.
She noticed absently that the snow had finally stopped outside the big front room window. The moon was almost as bright as the streetlamps that used to shine in this neighborhood, back before the world collapsed. The army had renamed it New Haven and sent all the good doo-bees there to live as reward for helping them haul dead people out of their homes. It was a fine house—far nicer than she and Phil had been able to afford—with five bedrooms, and three full bathrooms that didn’t work.
“Urngh.”
Carol closed her eyes and let out a long breath. They weren’t even trying to be quiet now.
Her housemates had been on the same crew with her during what she now thought of as the Great Corpse Cleanup back in the fall. Troy and Deanna were still in their thirties, a few years younger than her, but they’d seemed to have a lot in common. The three of them would drone on about their lives before the collapse, or the weather, or anything that would keep their minds off the job of dragging oozing bodies from stinking houses and out onto driveways or brown lawns, where soldiers would hoist them into the back of big cube vans. All three of them had been sports nuts in their previous lives, so they would reserve the Broncos and Avalanche and Rockies chatter for the times when the corpse was a child. It helped them to focus on stats, and who deserved their salary and which trades had ruined the franchise, rather than on the horror of the task at hand.
“Oh. Oh yeah. That’s it. Right there.”
Carol drew the Glock’s slide to chamber a .380-caliber round from the magazine. It was small and light for a pistol, which she liked.
The first few months had been good, or as good as could be expected, given the outrageous circumstances they all lived in now. The three of them had volunteered to share this house when it came available in November, and Troy and Deanna had proved to be excellent roommates—far better than Phil had ever been, even right after they were married.
They kept the place clean, and they didn’t use up all the supplies that they picked up weekly from the army depot that had been set up at High Sierra Elementary School. Troy had pilfered a huge cache of ancient DVDs from the storeroom of a downtown convenience store after he discovered an old player in a bedroom closet, which afforded them the luxury of watching movies on the big Samsung screen every night instead of lying awake in the darkness, thinking. Deanna was a fiend for board games, and often whiled away hours with Carol playing Monopoly and Life. All three of them had lost spouses and children to Eko.
“There. Uh-huh.”
She gripped the Glock’s trigger and squeezed it lightly, which took it out of its safety default and put it in quick-firing position. No point in screwing around anymore.
Things had been good until Christmas Eve. It had been a postcard-perfect night, with light snowfall and a bright moon, just like tonight. A few of their neighbors had come by and everyone had drunk themselves into a sobbing stupor as they reminisced about holidays past and their dead loved ones. Later, after everyone had left, Carol had ended up in bed with Troy and Deanna. None of them had expected it; at least Carol didn’t think they had. It seemed at the time to be an extension of their grief, a mutual desire for connection, a suspension of pain, however fleeting.
The next morning, the three sheepishly discussed what had happened. Carol had woken up mortified, but Troy talked about how old norms didn’t have to guide society anymore. Who was to say that three people couldn’t share a loving experience? In the post-collapse world, anything that made you feel better couldn’t be wrong. She and Deanna had agreed, and for a few weeks, it was good. Carol was surprised with how comfortable she’d become with it; Phil had been her first and only lover, and she got so much more pleasure out of this strange new arrangement than she ever had with him. She began to think maybe things wouldn’t be so bad from now on; ready access to anti-depressants had helped, too, and she had upped her dosage considerably.
Then came the first night she’d heard them. The three had their own rooms, saving the master suite and its California king for their trysts, but that night, the sounds had come to her from Troy’s room across the hall. Sighs and moans, followed by whispers and soft laughter. At first, Carol thought it was just a variation on what they had agreed to, that she and Troy would have their own nights together. But that never happened, and she was always too timid to initiate anything on her own. And really, how could she ever hope to compete with Deanna? Not only was she younger than Carol, she had that natural blond hair and the kind of trim fi
gure that Carol had dreamed of having her entire life.
She heard them a few more times over the next couple of weeks, getting louder each time, and no amount of Zoloft seemed to be enough to dull the pain. Troy’s talk about society and change and how they were in a brave new world all rang hollow now. Every day was the same, trapped in a house that wasn’t hers with people who didn’t love her. Bland, colorless days of never-ending winter, sitting next to Alfred at the school and screwing a grin onto her face as she jabbered manically about nothing. Endless nights lying awake in the dark. And always, always, always the pain of memory, the bleak realization that there was nothing to hope for.
The world hadn’t changed for Carol Firth: she was still sad. So very, very sad.
She took one last handful of pills from the bottle and popped them in her mouth, washing them down with the vodka from a bottle of Grey Goose on the coffee table. The sounds from Troy’s room were reaching a crescendo as she walked down the hall toward his door. The Glock in her right hand, light as it was, seemed to be made of concrete.
She would wait until it was over; she wasn’t a monster.
And then she would finally see Josh again. Hot tears streamed down her cheeks as the image of his lopsided grin filled her mind’s eye.
I’ll see you soon, my sweet boy. Just a few more minutes.
4
“Why do I have to be here?” Hayley griped as Jax led her to the door of the comms room that sat at the end of one of the featureless white halls of Cheyenne Mountain base. “This is boring.”
Jax sighed. “I told you, it’s a surprise. If you knew why you had to be here, it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”
The girl rolled her eyes under her ash-blond bangs. It was her new thing, and she knew it would get a rise out of him every time. She seemed to be doing it more frequently these days as the snow and cold forced her to stay inside. There wasn’t a lot for kids to do under the mountain.
A wide smile spread across Loralee Brown’s freckled face as the duo entered. “There’s the girl of the hour! Come on in.”
Hayley returned the smile. Jax couldn’t help but notice she had no problem being civil to everyone who wasn’t him. “Hi, Cpl. Brown,” she said. “Are you part of the surprise?”
“Actually, it’s sergeant now. I got promoted when I managed to mesh the new radio system with our old one.”
“So I heard,” said Jax. “Congratulations. Well deserved.”
The equipment had been salvaged after the battle in the mountains in November. A group of people who had been living in the woods since before the collapse had been using it, along with a series of unknown radio towers, to communicate with others in areas far beyond the reach of the short-range radios that the army had been using. So much of their tech had been based on Internet and cellular connectivity that, when the cyber weapon hit around the same time as the Eko virus, they were left scrambling to find anything that still worked.
But thanks to Brown and her uncanny ability to make the advanced tech under the mountain play nice with older analog counterparts, they were now able to communicate with the outside world.
Assuming anyone was still out there.
Brown shrugged. “Thanks, I guess. I mean, it’s not like I got a bump in pay or anything, right?”
Jax picked up an undertone of irritation in her voice. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, but he was hearing it more and more often these days, from a lot of people. It had been in Ruben’s voice when they were bringing home the latest group of survivors a couple days earlier during the big blizzard.
“Anyway,” Brown said, brightening, “we’ve got a surprise to deliver. Have a seat, Hayley.”
She motioned to a molded plastic chair in front of a table of electronic equipment. Hayley glanced up at Jax before sitting down in front of what Jax recognized as an old analog microphone.
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked with mild suspicion.
“Just one second.” Brown flipped a toggle and the room filled with the white noise of radio static. “See that black button? Press down on it and say hello.”
Hayley’s brow furrowed, but she did as she was told, putting her mouth next to the wire mesh of the microphone. “Hello?”
The static crackled for a moment before a tinny but familiar voice cut through the static. “Hello,” it said. “This is me. Is that you?”
The joy in Hayley’s face was more satisfying than Jax would have believed was possible, and he suddenly realized why parents would do anything to make their children happy: that look right there.
“Val!” Hayley squealed before realizing she’d forgotten to press the button. “Val! Where are you?”
“I’m not sure,” said the voice of Sgt. Val Cruz. “I’m surrounded by snow. Does that help? Over.”
Hayley looked up at Jax. “Why did she say ‘over’?”
“It’s radio talk; it means that it’s your turn to talk now.”
“Oh.” She pressed the button again. “You’re not funny, Val. Over.”
“Don’t make me come back there and paddle your butt, missy. Over.”
Jax smiled. A year ago, he was stalking through rat-infested alleyways in Sudan, looking for bomb makers. If someone had told him then that such a simple exchange of words would make his heart swell like this, he would have laughed in their face, or called for the medics, because surely that person had a head wound.
“This is cool.” Hayley grinned. “It’s like Facetime but without the video.”
His laugh came out as a snort. “Just answer. But remember: don’t talk about what they’re doing, okay?”
Hayley nodded; she didn’t know all of what had happened in the mountains, but Jax had made sure she understood that some people might not be who they said they were, and that was the reason for the mission.
“I’d like to see you try!” Hayley blurted into the mic. “Over!”
“Don’t get her mad,” said another familiar voice. “When she gets mad, she takes it out on me. Over.”
Hayley’s eyes widened. “Carly!”
Jax folded his arms over his chest and leaned against the wall as the three continued their wonderfully inane back and forth. It was the first time they’d spoken since Cruz left Colorado Springs with a pair of Special Forces soldiers and Lt. Carly Grant almost a month earlier. Brown had jury-rigged a portable radio system for the team to follow the series of towers that Stuart Adler and his group had been using to communicate. The mission was twofold: to root out the people Adler had been talking to and report back, and to let other survivors out there know that the republic was being rebuilt in Colorado, and that they were welcome here.
Jax had been dead-set against Carly joining the team, and not just because her combat experience was limited to witnessing the battle in the mountains. She and Val were two of the key people helping him raise Hayley, and to have both of them gone on a long-term mission wasn’t ideal. But she’d insisted, saying she needed to prove to herself that she was worthy of the black bar on the shoulder of her uniform. She eventually appealed her case directly to the president himself. Raines agreed that the team needed someone who could act as a diplomat, especially since they wouldn’t be in uniform. Gen. Archer had pointed out that wearing fatigues would be like wearing a bulls-eye on their backs outside of Colorado.
Brown had alerted Jax earlier in the day that the team had finally reported in. Cruz had been sending coded, single-word messages at every tower they found as they followed the list of coordinates that Adler and crew had left behind. It wasn’t an easy task, since they had to use analog equipment to navigate, but it had led them west along Interstate 70, until they finally stopped to regroup in Kansas City, which is where they were now. After some six hundred miles, they had yet to hear another voice over the radio, so Cruz had decided it was safe to report in—without specifics, of course. No need to tempt fate.
“I heard a joke in school today,” Hayley said into the mic. “Why do gorilla
s have big nostrils?” She let go of the button, then suddenly pressed it again. “Over.”
“I don’t know,” said Carly. “Why do they have big nostrils? Over.”
“Because they have big fingers!”
Brown giggled as Hayley mimed hysterical laughter. Cruz’s voice came on the radio: “That’s it, I’m coming back and you’re gonna get it. Over.”
Hayley pressed the button and let loose with a raspberry, followed by: “Over.”
Brown and Hayley broke into howling laughter. Jax sighed as he acknowledged for the umpteenth time that he would never understand females. He hadn’t even understood Hayley’s mother, Rachel, and he’d been ready to marry her.
Later, after Hayley and Brown had given him the room, Jax began the debriefing, or as much as he could, given the semi-coded nature of the conversation. They talked about the towers—four so far, about one every hundred and fifty miles, all of them powered by the kind of industrial-sized Tesla batteries that had cost upwards of fifty grand apiece before the collapse. No one home at any of them.
“We’ve met some…interesting people,” said Carly. “Spreading the good news about what’s happening out west. You just might see an exodus come spring. Over.”
Jax made a mental note to talk to Raines and the advisory council about that, though getting through this bitch of a winter was the obvious priority. Which reminded him…
“How’s the weather been? Pretty ugly here. Over.”
“Better than we had any right to expect. Haven’t seen snow since our second day on the road. Over.”
“No problem finding transportation? Over.” Since the cyber weapon had knocked out power, there were no operable charging or gas stations anywhere, so the team would have to change vehicles whenever the power or fuel ran out. They knew to forage for full-petroleum models when they could because of the extensive range.