Paul couldn’t believe his ears as everyone in the cantina let out a cheer.
“Settle down, settle down,” he continued. “Bad news. Prob’ly ain’t gonna be no parties when we get there.”
The crowd went silent.
“First stop’ll be Cali-Sur. Anyone who’s been told to get battle ready, we’re gonna double-time that, so buckle up. Green wristbands, you’ll follow me along the green stripe on the floor to your PT room for your assignments.”
Paul looked down at his wrist, having not paid attention to its color. His heart sank at seeing green, and he half-hoped there would be a mutiny as the cursing and grumbling rose among the soldiers getting up from their tables and shuffling toward the doors.
“Purple wristbands, follow the purple stripe to deck three for PT. Orange wrist bands—you guessed it—the orange line to deck 4 for PT. You ain’t gonna be ready by sitting on your asses, so let’s move.”
Johansson looked admiringly at Paul as he shuffled past. “Just when you think your outta the shit,” he said. “You eat?”
Paul nodded that he had.
“Good. I’ll take you over there. I’ll ask Marisol not to kick your ass too hard.”
Paul had no idea what to make of that, so he just gave a cursory smile and held his breath and gripped his cane. Whatever crown of heroism had been bestowed upon him on the Coit, it clearly wasn’t going to get him out of this nightmare.
Chapter 45: Ambush in Arlington
(Emily Goldbloom)
Emily Goldbloom wearily made her way down the center of the cargo hold and through the small door to the autovan’s cabin. She sat down next to Dorian Lee, who was plotting their route to Arlington. She wasn’t keen to go, and she would have declined if it weren’t necessary. But Arlington was a strategic point for the Mid-Atlantic Province, and it was teetering. Senator Thomas Baumgarten himself asked them to go.
With the storm far north now, the mass-riots had relented somewhat, giving way to more low-grade street battles and score-settling among gangs, while the most desperate of the dispossessed fought amongst themselves over scraps in looted and burned-out shops, warehouses, factories, and vehicles. Two community compounds were still occupied in Baltimore, a number of local bougie and lesser-Ellie inhabitants being held for ransom.
The Provincial Militia had retaken the Arlington Command Center two days before, and Baumgarten wanted to ensure it was fully able to defend itself. That meant power, automation, water, and infrastructure repairs. The city still had no power or running water and very little fuel, food, or medicine. Baumgarten’s aid and security forces were entirely overwhelmed, as were the hospitals and relief centers. Much of the local police force had disintegrated, and even some units of the Provincial Militia had abandoned their posts, presumably to look after their own families.
Baumgarten asked Emily and Dorian to lead a small crew to bolster the command center and help set up strongholds around the city. Her misgivings, she knew, were irrelevant. He’d seen Patrick in two days, though he sent her messages every day, sending his affection. He had told her she wouldn’t be sent into uncontained areas, and she didn’t dare tell him where they were, since the orders came straight from his father. She didn’t know if Patrick already knew, though, and that uncertainty weighted on her. His wholly inadequate reassurances of their safety, she also knew, were likewise irrelevant.
Senator Baumgarten needed the job done, and he’d merged one of his building subsidiaries under them—quintupling the size of their small business—to sweeten the pot. There was really no discussion to be had, especially after Shay and her father had left so suddenly on their quest to retrieve her family.
Jasmine insisted on coming along to start the process of delivering relief supplies, thinking the bastions they established would make ideal depots and distribution points. Baumgarten agreed, recognizing the time to open his notoriously tight fists. Emily and Dorian both thought this was foolish, given the circumstances, but Emily secretly wanted to have Jasmine along for the companionship. Plus, where Jasmine went, her bodyguards—Nanner and Billy Washington—followed. With Nanner tied to her cousin Victoria, Emily had some confidence he would defend her at least as strongly as he would protect Jasmine.
Jasmine and Dorian were also the closest thing she had to family at the moment, and she was desperate to keep them close. She still couldn’t reach the rest of her kin, though she tried to call on the V-plat every time she heard a rumor that comms were up again. She knew the Baumgartens had some ability to communicate, but she didn’t dare ask too much of the Senator or even Patrick, as they both were burning candles at both ends trying to keep the province together. She tried to be grateful for any update Patrick could give her.
“Your father and Shay have made it to their first cache,” Patrick had offered her hours before. That was all he had, though, and she couldn’t decide whether to hug him or punch him. Instead, after a moment spent shaking where she stood, she excused herself so she could find a hall closet and cry.
There wasn’t much news about her family in Troy Township either. Just that the region was engulfed in some kind of upheaval—mostly directed at migrants. Her mother, brother, Uncle Joshua, Aunt Nessa, and Cousin Victoria were certainly safe inside the township walls. Troy was far enough from the nearest MAC that she had some luck burying the visual of them huddling scared in their small apartments, windows covered and doors locked. Her mother’s bipolar disorder, always volatile under stress, had to have kicked into a manic or depressive episode by now, neither of which would be helpful for her brother Tim. She had no idea how her Uncle Joshua would respond under stress; she feared cowardice, but hoped it was strength. Her Aunt Nessa—not one to mess with—would keep it together. All this, of course, assuming the township hadn’t been overrun and they weren’t already dead in a ditch or sold into slavery.
Emily couldn’t help but wonder how Grimm Lockheart, her erstwhile boyfriend, was faring, though she had long since lost interest in him, and his image was immediately eclipsed by more thoughts of her mother, brother, and father. Her cousin Paul was equally fleeting in her mind, in part because she was more confident he was dead in some jungle god-knows-where, and she couldn’t bear the thought of it.
As the autovan wound down the mountain roads, she stared out the window, checked-out from the meandering conversation between Dorian and Jasmine.
Such odd company, she reflected, as the autovan jerked and rocked.
She had lived through the cycles of upheaval before—the lock-downs, looting and banditry, riots and rebellions—and the inevitable crush by the Ellies to restore order. Every few years, the dramatic shift from warm, fierce storms to polar blasts would trigger outbreaks of flu, killing-colds, pneumonia, and whooping cough. Sometimes cholera and dysentery when clean water became too scarce. Even the burning of her home in Paola and their flight through the shells of the Desert Plains.
Up to now, though, she had always weathered it with her family, and she had started to feel a modicum of safety with the addition of Nessa, Paul, and Victoria—and even Uncle Joshua. Shay too. In the back of her mind she knew the upheavals could easily take it all away, as they had when her father was separated from his brother and sister. Every day, the joy of seeing him reunited with his family—what he had wanted most, apart from the safety of his children—reminded her of how fragile it all was.
What she had pieced together of Shay’s life, and the sequence of tragedies that defined Dorian’s life, reinforced her gratitude for what they had been building together—and the lingering worry of losing it all. Victoria and Paul had lost their father along their journey. Still, there was safety in numbers, and comfort in being around so many people who loved one another.
Now, they were all scattered, and she felt she was standing on a precipice with people who were neither Lancasters nor Goldblooms. Dorian, the genius drug addict who was her ward. Jasmine Goodwell, the daughter of a traveling holy roller. Nanner and Billy, hard luck mercenari
es with a background of—if not propensity for—violence. All of them now at the disposal of the Baumgartens, a family of cut-throat Ellies.
Emily had learned from Dorian and Shay that the Baumgartens were among the most powerful of the Ellie families, with strong ties to the International Energy Consortium, as well as Caliphate Energy and Imperial Russian Petroleum. They controlled large stakes in coal mines and nuclear fuel. Rail, air, and shipping transportation. Agriculture, food processing, and textiles. De-salination and water purification. Chemicals and pharmaceutics. Nano-computing and space-based systems. Public construction. Manufacturing. Of course, they advertised their support for a host of relief and humanitarian missions, especially following conflicts, they also made and sold the weapons that drove the upheavals. Their empire employed tens of thousands in the Mid-Atlantic Province alone, giving them immediate leverage over large parts of the population.
They financed politicians in the Congress of the Commonwealth and loyal Ellie houses in many of its provinces. They subsidized food, water, and energy to their network of supporters, as well as men and matériel for force when the largess was not enough. Of the Commonwealth’s Twenty-Eight Families, they dominated the Mid-Atlantic and had pull in Appalachia, Ozarks, and Great Lakes Provinces. They competed with other Ellie families in regions further afield. Sometimes peacefully. Sometimes less so.
What she still didn’t completely understand is how her family’s sponsors, Dorian and Shay, had led them into this relationship.
“Explain to me again how we ended up tied to the Baumgartens,” she asked Dorian as the hours on the road dragged on.
“You don’t believe it’s ‘cause of my high upbringin’?” Dorian joked, his crow’s feet crinkling. She shook her head in an exaggerated way.
“Me and Shay was workin’ a job for Thomas Baumgarten, way before we come across your family. Near one of the aid centers he’d set up—after a Cat-3 tore it up pretty good.
“Anyhow, turns out Thomas showed up there, tryin’ to show his love for the people, I reckon. They brought their big, fancy cars into a disaster area. …So, naturally a mob forms up. The crowd pulls his men from their cars and kill ‘em. Thomas barely escapes by plowing through the crowd. His car was so banged up it weren’t gonna get him back to a strongpoint. No comms, ‘course, so he couldn’t call for reinforcements neither.
“Me and Shay saw him stuck, so we brought him into where we was workin’. Shay ditched the car, and I fixed up Thomas to look like us—plain ole workers. Coveralls, grease on the face, work belt—the whole bit. Figured the mob wouldn’t wanna kill three urchins just tryin’ to get the lights back on. Anyhow, took him out the back way to our truck and got away before the crowd knew what’d happened.”
“Jesus, you saved his life.” Emily inserted. “How come I’ve never heard this story before?”
“Whad-I tell ya ‘about using the Lord’s name, Girl?” Dorian turned to Jasmine, who was listening intently. “Ain’tchu learned nothin’ ‘bout showin’ some respect for God?” He didn’t wait for a reply.
“Anyhow,” he sighed, “we was given a fair amount of work after that. But, you know, work comes and goes, and we ‘ventually set off for greener pastures. Ended up with this contract with Sherman. But we still know a whole lot ‘bout the Baumgarten empire—even some stuff he’d rather keep secret. ‘Course, we never say a word, and we do good work, so I reckon he needs us. Sends us word, and we do what we can. Trust is really what he’s paying for. An’ now he trusts we’re gonna pass it all along to you. So he ain’t gotta worry, even after we’re long gone.
“That said, Mr. Baumgarten’s an important man. He runs in important circles. So we just try’n be grateful that we can live good. …have a decent life ‘cause ‘a him an’ his business.”
For reasons she couldn’t decipher, Emily felt uncomfortable knowing how eagerly Jasmine was listening to Dorian’s story, so she didn’t ask the hundred or so questions that were on her mind. Plus, the trip was bumpy and unnerving to the point of being nauseating, so she turned to look out the window and let the conversation drop.
The remaining hours on the road to Arlington were slow and boring, and she was thankful when the small caravan finally arrived. They slipped like thieves through the Route 50 gate in the city walls, where they were met by Baumgarten’s Provincial Militia, who escorted them eastward to an old convergence of roads and suburban strip malls from the High Times. Most of the bridges had been blown along the way, and even some within the walled city. The once-broad highway narrowed to two lanes—the rest having eroded and succumbed to neglect. Many of the old buildings around the intersection had been razed long ago, and the conspicuous absence of squatters and shanties made her think the Provincial Militia was intent on keeping an expansive perimeter around their command center.
They came to a stop just inside the barricade of the command center, where a tall, muscular woman with brownish-red hair waited stiffly. Emily looked at her name badge: Lt Col. McDermott. She handed a small cartridge to Dorian, who plugged it into the V-plat console in the autovan. New glowing dots layered onto their map.
“You’ll start here,” she stated flatly, pointing.
[Dominion Hills Security Post]
Emily didn’t dare ask why they were being deployed to revive a strongpoint at a location labeled “Security Post.” She tried to keep her imagination from exploring the issue, distracting herself by focusing on the other dots, color-coded by priority.
[Minor Hill] [Clarendon Plaza] [USAF Memorial Hill]
[Baily’s Crossroads] [East Falls Church Metro] [Sleepy Hollow Park]
“Your escorts will take you there and set up a security perimeter while you work. We have advance teams in place to meet you. Any questions?”
Dorian shook his head and pulled out of the driveway behind their armored escorts.
[Wilson Boulevard], read the rusty, faded street sign. Their convoy rolled through the blighted suburban landscape. Ancient trees lay half decayed on the side of the road, while volunteer trees poked through the dilapidated roofs of the houses still standing. The typical rabble of scavengers milled through the crumbling streets and what was left of the bougies’ extravagance from the High Times.
The sun was waning toward dusk when their work on the Dominion Hills Security Post had gone as far as it could for the day. They stood on a high point overlooking a small ravine, and from the roof of the repurposed house, she could see for miles. Next to their position, she made out the remains of a large, fire-scorched concrete foundation through the overgrowth. She gazed past the broken and overgrown backstops of abandoned ball fields, over the splotchy rolling hills, to the hollowed-out sky scrapers—glowing a somber purplish-pink in the fading sun—and she took a deep, melancholy breath, swallowing the anguish she sometimes felt in seeing all that had been lost. From the roof, she looked down on Jasmine and her guards, who were still handing out supplies at the small relief stand they had set up at the bottom of the hill, and a tinge of hope punched back at the lament that often occupied the pit of her stomach.
That’s when the first shot echoed from the ravine below, followed by more clitter-clacks and shouting. Two guards burst onto the rooftop and took up positions, shewing her back inside for safety. One last glance over the rooftop and she saw Billy Washington down the hill, firing wildly into the brush-covered ravine, while Nanner scrambled up the hill, carrying Jasmine by the scruff of the neck.
Emily met Dorian in the stairwell, and the two flew downstairs to the convoy vehicles for a hasty escape. The soldiers on the lower level stopped them at the door, and she noticed one of them laying on the tile floor in a pool of blood. A new volley of gunfire sank holes in the walls around her, and Dorian fell to the floor next to the dead soldier.
Emily knelt down beside her ward and mentor, examining him for wounds. She mopped the blood from his face with her shirtsleeve, relieved to find only small lacerations from broken glass. She pressed a cloth to the wounds on his foreh
ead, amazed to find them both alive and under decent cover. She lay flat beside him, staring at the determined soldiers positioned at the windows, and she began to worry about Jasmine, Billy, and Nanner still outside.
“We’ve called for back-up,” one guard said to them. “Sit tight.”
They’ll be fine, she reassured herself.
But after an hour punctuated by furious trades of gunfire, there were still no reinforcements and no sign of Jasmine. The room was a deep and eerie luminous cobalt as the sun cast its last light, and Emily doubted they could hold out all night if their attackers were as brazen and determined as they seemed to be.
Then the walls shook, and it sounded like the air itself was ripping apart. Engines roared overhead, ebbing and flowing as they circled the makeshift outpost, and she could made out the sputtering buzz of machine guns with each pass. At last, with a deafening thunder, a bull-shark jump-jet landed in the steeply sloping street outside.
Emily stared in disbelief as a handful of assault troops leaped from the airship, followed by a handsome young man in slacks and a brocade waist coat.
Patrick! she thought, her heart excitedly trying to escape her chest.
Patrick walked fearlessly to the front door of the outpost and rallied his men to move to the vehicles. Looking around the room for a moment, he finally found Emily, paced over to her calmly, and offered her his hand. His dark coiffed hair was uncharacteristically disheveled, and his clean-shaven cheeks dusted with ash and dirt. His fancy, color-coordinated ensemble was damp and caked with grime.
He pulled her to her feet, and she leaped into him, clinging, as his men moved Dorian to a stretcher inside the rumbling bull-shark. Patrick practically carried Emily to the ship, where he pried himself free from her grip, lifted her into the arms of a soldier, and pulled himself aboard.
The jets roared in her ears again, and the ship swayed and rocked into the air. With a terrified exhilaration, she watched the door gunner send streams of fiery bullets into the darkness below, and she leaned forward, trying to get a glimpse of the fighting beneath them.
Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga) Page 50