Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5

by Isherwood, E. E.

  Looking back, several of the horse-drones were unleashing streams of machine gun fire, but it appeared as if a few of them were fighting against a larger group still closing in. Ted glanced over to Kyla, who was smiling impishly.

  He pointed behind them, then pointed at her. “You did that?” he mouthed.

  She gave him a thumbs-up.

  There was no time for celebration, however. They were riding two motorcycles across the flattest state in the union. The air base fell behind them, but knee-high grasslands and endless wheat fields surrounded the other three directions. Any competent Air Force pilot would zero in on them in about ten seconds. The jets previously parked on the airstrip had to be somewhere up there.

  Ted accelerated. He took at close look at the Victory Hammer 8-ball bike he was on, noting how the speedometer went all the way up to 200 miles per hour. He intended to test every bit of that, but when he hit 120, he could barely withstand the wind blasting his chest, and his eyes were nearly sealed shut by the onrush of air. He glanced over to Meechum and found her lagging behind.

  Damn.

  He came back down to match her speed, which was a little over 100 on the speedometer. Emily gripped him tighter. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “West!” he shouted.

  The entire base was probably gearing up to look for them. He was convinced of that. Their ultimate goal was to the south, in Colorado, but he planned on going into Montana before making the turn in the proper direction. If they could put some miles between them and the pursuit before they really got started, it would give them a better chance of escape. However, much to his surprise, the land dipped ahead of him.

  They cruised into a low valley filled with clumps of trees, and a large, meandering body of water. It looked more like a swamp than a river, with gravel roads going off into the woods to the north and south.

  He chose to keep going west, over a berm running from one side of the marsh to the other—a span about a half-mile. If they could get to the other side, he planned to detour into the woods. They might be able to lose them that way.

  “Oh, crap,” he said to Emily as he slowed.

  At the very end of the berm, the road ended at a gap where a bridge had been removed. The slow-moving river flowed to the south through the fifty-foot opening.

  Ted and Meechum were forced to stop their bikes. Behind them, beyond the length of the berm and a few trees, he once again imagined a pursuit force hunting them down. Minot Air Base was only five miles back there.

  “I could use suggestions,” he stated dryly.

  Emily hopped off and ran to the edge. The reeds and water were only a few feet below the level of the road, and she seemed to walk back and forth, studying the water.

  Kyla came over with her tablet in hand. “Uncle Ted! I almost blew it. I tried turning the drones off, but someone came in behind me and restored them in seconds. I figured out there’s a maintenance mode. The robots take five minutes to run through the cycle, which can’t be interrupted.”

  “You figured that out while on the motorcycle?” he asked with both surprise and pride.

  “Yeah. The tablet is super intuitive. It’s the complete opposite of the coding inside the defense systems, which are old and crusty.”

  “Like me,” he laughed.

  “Yeah, like you,” she said with a wry smile. “I also disabled the beacons on these bikes, but I can’t say how long that will last. These guys are really fighting back.”

  “So they can’t track us at this moment?” he asked.

  “Correct.”

  He smiled. “Awesome work, young lady!”

  Emily waved him over. “I was hoping we could push the bikes across the river, but it isn’t shallow enough.”

  Ted studied the area. Knowing nothing about North Dakota, it was hard to draw conclusions from the small slice of the valley he could see, but he figured they’d have a lot better chance of survival if they stuck around the river and got into the trees. However, enemy forces were looking for a pair of motorcycles. If he ditched them, his team could blend into the landscape.

  The motorbikes were very nice, so throwing them away was difficult, but safety was his priority, not getting cool stuff. If they did manage to avoid detection, there were a million other vehicles they could borrow. He told himself not to get attached to any equipment.

  “We’re going on foot,” he said.

  “What? Why?” Kyla asked, still happy from her programming victories.

  “We have to get into cover. This place might have the only trees we find in this whole state. It will give us a chance…”

  “We should ditch the bikes if they’re being tracked,” Meechum suggested.

  “Push them in,” he advised, pointing to the end of the road.

  Each bike had two saddlebags. One was crammed with what looked like cleaning gear for the flamer, and the other contained a sleeping bag and some of the previous riders’ personal effects. That was a major score, since they had no other supplies. He’d left his prized backpack and rifles in the stolen car at the grocery store, figuring they’d be back through there. After pulling out everything useful, they watched in silence as the metal hogs disappeared into the murky stream.

  “Kyla, you have to ditch the tablet, too.” He nodded to the black device in her hand.

  Kyla was crestfallen. “We can see all the enemy movements with this. We can tap into their systems. With time, I might even be able to access their mainframe.”

  Ted understood her reluctance. “But you said it yourself: they can track it. We have to ditch every piece of tech that belongs to these rebooter assholes—I’m not calling them rebels.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I thought this was over. I thought we were home free.”

  “We are. We know what we have to do to beat them. We’ll find a way to communicate with the outside, share what we know about the remaining defense infrastructure, and hopefully they’ll send an ICBM from a submarine right through the front doors of David’s NORAD base. If they can’t, we’ll walk in and take it out ourselves. We’ll be home free after doing all that, and after a short swim.” He pointed across the river.

  All three women groaned, though Emily was the loudest. It surprised him to such an extent that he had to turn to face her.

  She chuckled in a good-natured way. “I bet you could get us into a lake even if we were in Death Valley. You should know, Major, that the President of the United States is tired of getting soaked.”

  It wasn’t his first choice, either, but abandoning the bikes and crossing the river was the unexpected thing to do. The men and women operating the pursuit back at Minot would spend their time looking for two impossible-to-miss motorcycles driving the open highways. They wouldn’t waste time searching reed ponds and streamside forests without good cause.

  He rose to her challenge. “Look at the bright side. You’ll need another set of clothes. I don’t know about you guys, but I’d like to wear anything besides the uniform of the enemy.”

  “Amen,” Meechum replied. “If I’m killed, I don’t want to be seen in this thing.”

  Ted brightened. “Hey, that’s the nice thing about this war. They’re here to kill us no matter what we’re wearing, so we might as well be comfortable.” If Emily happened to find another nice dress, instead of the unflattering black jumpsuit, he wouldn’t complain.

  Eyes on the prize, Ted.

  “Come on, I’ll lead,” he said, to prod Emily. “Keep your pistols above the water, if you can. The sleeping bags, too.”

  “Last person across has to sleep in the weeds,” Emily taunted, seemingly unable to give Ted the last word. “The winners get the comfy bags!”

  It was the middle of the day, but he intended to hunker down in the woods until tomorrow. Meechum was injured, Kyla had a neck wound, and the pair of them had been on watch all night. They needed to rest. The group had won a major victory, but as a fighting force, they were all at the breaking point. Still, Ted never himse
lf pushed harder than to get across the river first.

  He already planned to give his sleeping bag to the president. If anyone asked, he’d say it was because she was his commander-in-chief.

  But he knew the truth.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Odd Place

  Deogee woke up and sniffed for the expected smell of kibble. Melissa always gave her a big bowl before she went out jogging in her bright yellow, and tasty, running shoes. Today, however, there was no kibble smell.

  I had a puppy dream.

  The wolf in her immediately went into a guarded posture. Not only were the expected scents not there, but she didn’t recognize where she was, either. However, her memory came back a little. She thought Melissa was gone. Her outer pieces of fur had been left somewhere…in leafy bushes. There were no leafy bushes anywhere in sight. She was inside an unfamiliar house.

  She barked. “Where am I?”

  “Where are we?” Biscuit replied from close by, as if reminding her she wasn’t alone.

  Deogee nosed the other dog appreciatively, and her memory came rushing back. Melissa was indeed gone. So was her other friend, the human who dressed funny and was called Sister Rose. The fire had gotten her at the Bad Place.

  It looked like they were still inside the giant house where the newest of her human friends had brought her. The alpha, Tabby, had been yelling and screaming. There were also much louder noises she could not identify. And Deogee had been chewing on one of the metal monsters.

  “Where are my humans?” she asked Biscuit.

  “I saw them,” the black lab replied. “They were right over there. An annoying sound came next. Then, they weren’t over there.”

  Her friend’s simplistic retelling matched her own experience. The humans had been there a moment before, but a sudden pain had caused her to shut her eyes. Everything went black for less than a bark. When her vision came back, the humans and the metal machines had disappeared.

  “Does anything smell familiar?” she asked.

  Biscuit nosed at some trash on the floor, but managed to say no.

  “Follow me. I know where we can see everything.” She ran for the stairs to the roof and started up.

  “I’d love to play, but the stairs are broken,” Biscuit replied, climbing the first few steps. “Well, they were broken, honest. I had to jump when I came down them.”

  Nothing felt right to Deogee. The air didn’t smell right, either. The world around her had changed in the handful of barks since she’d been with the humans. Was it the air? The light? Did Biscuit notice it, too?

  Deogee came out on the roof but didn’t recognize where she was. The feeling of waking up from a puppy dream overcame her, but she wasn’t waking up.

  “Whoa!” Biscuit barked.

  It had been nighttime when she arrived there with the humans, but now it was day. She knew the connection between the time of light and the time of dark, but the daytime sky was all wrong. It was no longer the usual shade of blue, as she’d heard Melissa describe it many times. To Deogee’s eyes, the color was closer to those yellow shoes.

  The sky is sick.

  The rest of the world wasn’t much better. The stones standing up on the other side of the river were still there, as was the tall, silver arch, but many of those rocks were broken. Some had fallen over. Smoke rose from some of them, like the fire had been trapped inside.

  Closer to her, an incredible number of the small houses on wheels were strewn over the ground below her. In fact, looking around, she found some of those houses had been tossed on top of the building. She went over to sniff one of them but turned away when the smell of death came out of it. The human was still stuffed inside the house, but he’d been squished.

  Deogee barked incessantly, trying call out to her missing pack. Trying call out to anyone within the sound of her voice. Someone had to know what was happening. “Biscuit, where are we?”

  The lab ran in circles, misinterpreting her excited manner of speaking. “Who cares? Let’s play!”

  Upper Souris Wildlife Refuge, ND

  Ted stood watch over the three ladies, content they’d done the right thing by ditching the motorcycles and hiking into the wildlife preserve. They’d heard drones overhead a few times, but they seemed to go to the west, where his team was last seen riding. Once darkness fell, he knew they’d managed to give the enemy the slip.

  Until tomorrow, he thought.

  He’d taken a big risk flying Kyla and Emily across the country, and he’d made some mistakes along the way, but he’d been proven right. The trip saved lives. They’d fought back. They gave the rest of the American population a small victory, even if no one knew about it yet. Passing on the opportunity to take over the entire NORAD system remotely had been the right call to save Kyla. As it was, they’d only made it out with seconds to spare. If they’d gone back inside the “maintenance” building, they’d be sitting in an enemy detention center right now. Or they’d be dead.

  Ted looked over at Emily. She was supposed to be asleep on the sleeping bag he’d given to her, but, at that moment, she was sitting up with legs crossed. The bag was fully spread on the ground, making it a large, square blanket. All was quiet in the marsh, so he crept back to talk to her.

  “Can’t sleep?” he asked.

  Even in the middle of the night, he noticed the ring she’d been manipulating with her fingers. The big diamond seemed to gleam in the moonlight. She glanced up at him. “I’ve been holding onto this ring since I last saw Roger back in my apartment. Once, it meant the universe to me, but not for a long time. For several years, I mostly kept it in my nightstand.”

  He got immediately uncomfortable. “I’ll leave you to it…”

  “No, wait,” she pleaded quietly. Kyla and Meechum were asleep about twenty feet away. Close enough for protection, but far enough away to give the prez a little privacy. “You misunderstand. I’m holding the last piece of my old life. The life I had before I was President Emily Williams…”

  Ted saw an opening. “So, you’re calling yourself the president. Does that mean you accept your promotion, finally?” They’d been haggling over whether she was legally the president almost since they’d first met. She tolerated being called the top dog, but she always kept something back, like it wasn’t real. Her admission seemed like a huge concession.

  “The NORAD system asked for my biometric data. I saw the words ‘President of the United States’ by my name. I figure that sealed the deal. I can’t refuse it any longer.” She sighed deeply. “And, if I’m making life-altering changes these days, I might as well take this a step further.”

  She tossed the ring over her shoulder into the tall grass.

  “Wow,” he replied. “I don’t know what to say, Madame President.”

  Meechum stirred across their camp site, standing and stretching as he and Emily remained by her sleeping bag. A few seconds later, the Marine called out, “I’m on watch.”

  Ted was happy to hand it over, though he was never going to stop his amazement at the pain threshold of the warrior woman. A bullet had sliced through her shoulder a few hours ago. She should be out cold, not out on patrol.

  Emily tapped the empty half of her sleeping bag. “I saved you a bit, so you don’t have to sleep in the weeds.”

  He crouched next to the bag, not sure if it was proper to sit down with his boss, but when he looked at her in the nighttime glow of the moon, he was flooded with emotions. She’d lost a husband. He’d lost a sister. The nation had lost everyone else. But there, in that quiet patch of forest, the two of them were just people. Living people.

  He plopped down next to her, accepting it was just a sleeping arrangement, not an engagement proposal. However, before he let himself get too comfortable, he realized her earlier statement had an obvious flaw.

  “Emily, you said the computer system listed you as the President of the United States. Are you positive that’s what it said?”

  She leaned back on her elbows. “Of course.
I told you, it was at that moment I finally accepted the title. Why?”

  His stomach hardened as his mind rolled over to anti-conspiracy mode.

  One side of his brain said, “Don’t ruin the moment, Teddy, old boy.”

  The other side thought, “How did the hacked NORAD system know she was the president? She was supposed to be dead, along with everyone else. Van Nuys knew she was alive, but he died before he could report it to anyone else. Did someone intercept the captain’s radio chatter with the two sailors who almost killed Kyla and Emily? And even if someone did, how could they have known she would end up at an air base at the ass-end of an empty America?”

  Emily waited, but he’d taken enough time it became a concern to her. She reached over and touched him on the arm. “What is it?”

  He sighed heavily, almost as she had done a moment before. “I have a theory about what’s happening at NORAD. Remind me to tell you about it in the morning.”

  She seemed impressed. “What? You aren’t going to hash through all the bad things facing us tomorrow? Haven’t you been chewing on a million different problems in the time you’ve been keeping watch over us?”

  He chuckled softly. “I guess you’ve taught me how to let go a little bit, at least when people need to get some sleep. Everything points to Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and NORAD. Tomorrow, we’ll make our way to Montana. You said your parents have property there, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “We’ll stay as far away from there as humanly possible. That’s your only hint about what I’ve been thinking.”

  “Sounds interesting,” she replied matter-of-factly. Emily patted the sleeping bag again, clearly urging him to lay back and make himself comfortable. He did as she requested, mindful of how difficult it was to shut down his brain. Sure, he’d told her he wasn’t going to talk it all to death, but the fact was his officer’s mind didn’t have an off switch.

  He was shocked when she put a hand on his chest and rolled to face him.

  “Ted, thank you for making this all possible. I owe you my life several times over, and I’m grateful at all the expert decisions you’ve made to get us here, but there is one piece of intel you seem to have an enduring blind-spot about.”