After the EMP (Book 8): Hope Stumbles

by Tate, Harley

  COLT

  Mountain Way

  Truckee, CA

  10:00 a.m.

  Why the hell does it have to be this freakin’ cold? Colt hunched down behind the remains of a car torched back when the sun could fry an egg on the hood and he didn’t have to wear a ridiculous parka with a scratchy fur hood.

  He adjusted the sight on the binoculars and peered into the ransacked grocery store across the street. So far, apart from his stupid self and Walter Sloane, they hadn’t seen a single person. Not that he blamed anyone for staying home.

  Of all places for their plane to land on a trek from Sacramento, California to Hong Kong, it had to be Oregon. Between the landing site and Truckee, California where he now crouched, spanned endless forests, mountain ranges, and a metric crap-ton of snow. Not a single beach chair, tropical sunset, or gorgeous woman in sight.

  If they’d made it all the way to Hong Kong, he’d be living it up right now: an ex-pat in paradise with running water, hot food, and lights that still turned on. Instead, he was huddled in the freezing wind, butt in the snowdrift, ten minutes away from freezing his junk into a popsicle and a pair of snowballs.

  But it wasn’t all terrible. Thanks to a chance run-in with a soldier and a tough teenage girl, Colt had a reason to keep breathing. Dani was the closest thing to a daughter he would ever have. Family made the cold almost worth it.

  With a shift in his squat, Colt scanned the rest of the strip mall. The grocery store sat back from the road with a sizable parking lot in front and a handful of businesses on the side. Everything had been pillaged. Not a single window remained in any of the shops and half of them were burned into sooty-black caves.

  He didn’t understand what drove people to loot and destroy. Didn’t they know what the future held? Instead of torching the running shop, people should have been loading up on shoes and gear. It wasn’t like the UPS guy would show up next week with a shipment of new Nikes. Hell, FEMA wasn’t even showing up with food or water.

  Whatever was left of the government, it didn’t stretch to the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas, that was for damn sure. For all intents and purposes, Colt, Dani, and the rest of their group were on their own. Which suited them just fine. After escaping the clutches of a crazy man and his ragtag group of defectors, Colt wasn’t about to walk into another organized city and lay down his weapons.

  Nope. They were off-grid and off the radar for good. Not that either existed anymore, but still. He was beholden to no one except Dani and a fluffy little dog who didn’t have anyone else left. Lottie didn’t weigh much, but she made up for it in personality. He’d trust that dog over a stranger any day.

  Colt pulled a handwritten note from his pocket and ran over the list one more time. Pain medicine. Sutures. Antibiotics. Band-Aids. Gauze. Tampons. Bourbon.

  The last one might have been his own personal addition, but it didn’t make it any less critical. He could only stomach so much dehydrated venison and highs in the thirties before he needed a stiff drink to take the edge off. In a pinch, he could even use it for antiseptic.

  In all likelihood, they wouldn’t find anything. But every once in a while, a treasure would be hidden beneath the broken shelves and trampled displays.

  Footsteps shuffling through the snow caught Colt’s ear and he turned. Walter Sloane trudged up behind him, eyes shielded behind dark ski glasses and graying head hidden by a thick hood. Thanks to Walter, Colt was not only alive, but healthy, and Dani had survived more than her share of injuries.

  Bullet wounds, cuts, bruises, concussions, and burns. You name it, they endured it. Most men would have taken one look at them and walked away. But Walter didn’t. He’d remembered Colt from the emergency landing all those days before and welcomed him into the fold. Months of hard work later and Walter’s age shone in his deeper wrinkles and tired eyes.

  Colt nodded hello. “Find anything?”

  Walter crouched beside him, hidden from the street by the same shell of a car. “Not a soul.” He nodded at the grocery store. “Any movement?”

  “None. The whole street is abandoned. We’re too far from houses for anyone to hear us and it looks like this part of town was ransacked a good long while ago.”

  Apart from the grocery store and attached shops, a bank sat empty across the street, with a derelict building beside it and an express oil change place farther on.

  Walter nodded. “The bank is empty. Car place, too. Nothing else is close enough to bother with, although I canvassed the two closest blocks.”

  “Then I say we go. The sooner we check this place out, the sooner we can move on down the road.”

  “There’s a pharmacy a few blocks south. If the grocery store is a bust, it might have something.”

  “Agreed.” Colt pulled off a glove and reached inside his jacket for a handgun, his service piece from his job as an air marshal that felt like another lifetime ago. The Sig Sauer had never let him down. He motioned toward the store. “I’ll go first. You cover me.”

  Walter nodded as he readied his own gun, a pistol-grip shotgun loaded with six shells. It might not have high capacity, but no one ever had to empty an entire shotgun into a single assailant. Walter could hold his own unless an army came out of nowhere.

  Colt eased around the car’s darkened fender and hurried across the street.

  The edge of the building loomed and he ducked around it, pausing to catch his breath. So far, so good. He glanced at Walter still crouched behind the car before sneaking through the shattered window.

  Although the brick facade protected the inside of the store from the wind, it did nothing against the cold. If anything, the lack of sun made the air even more frigid. Colt pushed back his hood and his breath fogged as he eased down the far wall.

  Thanks to the clear sky and the busted windows, Colt could reliably see half of the store. He tracked along the edge, past empty refrigerator cases long since looted of beer and milk. According to the signs still hanging above the aisles, medicines sat in the far corner, in the darkest section of the store.

  Colt ground his teeth and kept walking, gun out, sweeping every aisle as he approached, working in a full 180 as he eased closer to the dark. By now, Walter should have made his way inside. They worked as a team. Walter watched the front of the store while Colt surveyed the back. Whatever he found went into his empty pack. If he hit the mother lode, they would work together to get it back to the Jeep parked securely in a grove of trees at the edge of town.

  After waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim light, Colt kept walking past destroyed shelves and crushed boxes of package goods and on toward the far corner. He reached the aisles for medicine without incident. They were trashed.

  One shelving unit was ripped almost clean out of the floor and twisted over on its side, like Godzilla had smacked it on his way through the store. Another was warped and bent as if the entire local football team had used it for practice.

  Colt squeezed between them and squinted. Boxes littered the floor. He tugged a small flashlight from his pocket and flicked it on. Finding Nemo Band-Aids. He snorted. Better than nothing.

  He eased his pack off his shoulders and unzipped it before dumping every box inside. The shelves crowded in around him, but Colt kept going, shuffling through ripped-open boxes of gloves and torn bags of Epsom salt and glucose meters for diabetics.

  Using the flashlight, he swept the shelves until a bottle caught his eye. He reached in, straining beneath the warped metal to pull it out. Vitamin D. Could be useful in the winter. He tossed it in the bag along with a bottle of kids gummy vitamins and a box of gauze. Not the worst expedition in the world.

  Colt slipped through the last of the aisle and stood up. In front of him loomed the feminine hygiene section. Half a dozen boxes sat on the shelf, some broken, a few unharmed. He grimaced. This wasn’t really his thing. But the list was the list and bringing Dani or Brianna or another one of the women along just because he didn’t know the first thing about it was stupid and s
elfish.

  He opened the pack wider and cleared the shelves, sliding every box inside until it bulged and he struggled to close the zipper. All he needed now was the pharmacy. Like most stores, the pharmacy jutted out from the corner in a blunt-cornered box. Colt approached with caution.

  The siding metal door was propped up, half off its track. Colt ducked beneath it. If the store was chaos, the pharmacy was a full-blown riot. Not a single shelf still stood. A fridge for antibiotics sat in the middle of the room, door smashed and hanging by a single hinge. The cash register was bent and dented, the drawer carelessly thrown on the floor.

  Colt inhaled. Searching would take forever, but he couldn’t leave until they made sure. Even one blister pack of Z-Pak would cure a nasty infection. Aisle by aisle, Colt searched, losing himself in the job.

  Halfway through, he stripped out of his jacket and dumped it on the floor before holstering his weapon. Two hands and no gear would speed up the search. As he bent to read the label of a forgotten orange bottle, he jerked his head up.

  There was no mistaking the sound.

  Someone fired a gun in the front of the store.

  Chapter Three

  COLT

  Mountain Way

  Truckee, CA

  12:30 p.m.

  Colt clicked off the flashlight and hurried to shove his things into the corner. A pack and parka would only slow him down. He pulled his Sig from his holster behind his back and gripped it with two hands. From back in the pharmacy, he couldn’t tell if the shot was from a shotgun, a rifle, or even a handgun. It could have been anything.

  He eased toward the metal door and ducked beneath it. No lights canvassed the back of the store. No shouts sounded from down the street. Maybe Walter found a stray elk or deer wandering in the road and took advantage.

  The hairs on the back of Colt’s neck disagreed, standing at attention like his world was about to crash down. But he kept the hope alive as he crept toward the light from outside. Over the last few months, whenever he’d expected bad results, he’d always stumbled across something worse. Maybe if he hoped for the best, whatever he found wouldn’t be so bad.

  Part of him wanted to run toward the entrance, but he had to take it slow. If someone else was inside the store, Colt needed to stay silent and invisible. He couldn’t risk getting injured or caught off guard. He had to immobilize the threat by whatever means necessary.

  Half crouching and half walking, Colt eased past each aisle, coming up on the cash registers and the front of the store. Pain lanced through his thigh in protest where a knife had stabbed deep a few months before. The skin healed with only a mild scar, but Colt’s quad never regained full movement without pain.

  He shivered as a blast of wind hit his chest. Christ. I’ll never get used to this weather. Without his jacket, the front of the store would send the cold straight to his bones, but he couldn’t go back for it. He needed the visibility and the freedom of movement a sweatshirt provided. He would just have to suck it up and hope the shivers didn’t wreck his aim.

  The front windows gaped ahead and Colt eased up behind the last checkout lane. He couldn’t see Walter anywhere. He scanned the street, looking for any sign of life. Nothing.

  Damn it.

  Colt clenched his jaw and sneaked forward in a quick crouch, skirting the bottom of the windows. He stopped five feet shy of the broken automatic doors.

  In the kicked-up dust and snow in front of him, three drops of blood no bigger than a dime each glistened in the light. Deep red and glossy, they were fresh.

  Colt crept closer. Too much disturbance to make out footprints. He turned toward the street. Another drop of blood, this time closer to the sidewalk. Whoever was injured didn’t stay inside the store.

  With a deep breath, Colt tightened his grip on the handgun and stepped over the debris. The outside air blasted through his sweatshirt and he shivered.

  Scanning first left then right, Colt squinted against the glare. Not a single person. Not a flutter of fabric or hint of lights or even a whisper of conversation on the breeze. It was like Walter disappeared.

  Had he been shot? Had he shot someone else? It made no sense. Colt checked his watch. One o’clock already. With the sun almost directly overhead, now would be the best time to search. But he couldn’t do that without his gear.

  Colt took a handful of steps toward the road and spun in a circle looking for more blood. There was none to be seen.

  He frowned. Whoever was bleeding didn’t just take to the sky and fly off. There should be more blood. Colt checked the road and other businesses again before crouching at the edge of the road. A set of tire tracks were etched into the fresh snow. Had they been there when he crossed the street?

  Colt couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so. How had he not heard a car? Did it coast into the road? Was it running barely above an idle?

  A wave of shivers almost knocked him off-balance and Colt took a final look around. He would have to search, but that required gear. Rushing back into the store, Colt once again ducked into the pharmacy and tugged on his jacket and pack.

  He zipped up the front of the coat as he eased back through the broken windows. Without reliable tracks or a blood trail to follow, he was hunting blind. Walter could be anywhere.

  Colt cupped his hands and shouted. “Walter!” He paused and tried again. “Walter!”

  His cry echoed and died in the street with no reply. Colt was faced with two choices. He could set off on foot and canvass the street as best he could, or he could head straight to the Jeep and cover more ground in a vehicle.

  One was slow and thorough, the other was loud and fast. He glanced up at the sky and opted for a middle course: an hour of searching by foot before turning to the car. If Walter was holed up somewhere, hiding from mystery assailants, he would find him. If they were tucked away in a nearby building pumping him for information, Colt could ferret them out.

  He kept those options in the forefront of his mind as he set off on a search. Please let him be nearby. Please let me find him.

  If Walter had been kidnapped via car, Colt knew the chances of finding him were slim to none.

  2:30 p.m.

  Colt caught a bead of sweat with the back of his hand before it dripped off his nose. A solid hour of searching and all he’d come up with was a feral cat, a pile of empty PBR cans in an alley south of the store, and a sweat-soaked undershirt.

  He leaned against the wall of what used to be a frame shop and inhaled. No matter how much he hated to admit it, he couldn’t deny the obvious: Walter was gone. He couldn’t believe the man would run off in pursuit of someone or something without letting Colt know. He’d have written a note or given him a clue somehow. Walter wouldn’t disappear.

  That left nefarious motives and unidentified strangers as the only rational explanation. Colt rubbed his face and pushed off the wall. The Jeep was three quarters of a mile away at this point and he needed to find it in a hurry. Colt planned to drive the street with the last few hours of winter daylight, searching for any sign of Walter.

  Only then would he head home to break the bad news.

  He eased out of the store and took off at a slow jog toward the south, hoping to reach the alley three buildings down without incident. First up, an abandoned restaurant. Vandals had torn the place apart, dragging tables and chairs out into the parking lot and setting them alight in massive bonfires. Only burnt scraps remained.

  The next building housed a dry cleaner. Racks of clothes in plastic still hung in the windows, fluttering as the wind passed through the broken panes. Last up, the pharmacy Colt and Walter intended to search. From the front, it appeared secure. Metal sliding gates were lodged across the front doors and the windows were too high to climb through.

  It would have been a good spot to investigate if Walter were still there.

  Colt slowed. In the middle of the road up ahead, something caught the light, sparkling brighter than the snow. Colt crouched to pick it up.

&
nbsp; A gold watch. His brow knit as he brushed off the clumping snow. How would someone lose this on the road? Colt turned it over and squinted. An inscription.

  WJS: Congratulations on your retirement. Go get ‘em, pilot.

  A burst of air whooshed past Colt’s lips. Walter. It had to be.

  He slipped the watch into his pocket and stood up. The same tread from in front of the store cut through the snow down the middle of the street. The tire tracks were fresh; this time Colt had no doubt.

  Without another thought, Colt turned west, ducking down the closest alley at a full-on run. The watch didn’t guarantee Walter was still alive, but it filled Colt with hope. If Walter were conscious enough to drop it from a moving vehicle, it meant Colt had a chance. But he had to hurry.

  Retracing their trek in from the edge of the woods, Colt crossed the next street and picked up the pace, running with his head on a swivel as he closed the distance between him and the Jeep. It wasn’t impossible. As long as the snow didn’t pick back up or turn into a blizzard, he could follow the tracks. He could find Walter.

  Colt reached the Jeep out of breath and running on adrenaline. He started it up and peeled out of the cover of trees, intent on finding the trail and not letting Walter down. What took fifteen minutes to run only took three to drive and he turned onto the street where he’d found the watch.

  The tire tracks ran straight down the road and Colt followed them, driving slow enough to make out any disturbance in the snow. Five blocks later, the tracks turned the corner and Colt followed. They joined in with a few older tracks, but thanks to the snowfall in between, he could still make out the fresh imprints.

  He couldn’t tell what make or model car, but based on the depth of the tread, he guessed an SUV or pickup. Following them led him a half a mile down the road. The tracks wobbled.

  Colt slowed. Signs for the highway stuck up like green sentries to his right and the road widened to four lanes across.