The Uncharted Series Omnibus

by Keely Brooke Keith

  “Just one, thank you.” Lydia grinned. Connor shook his head at her and then laid three cards on the table. Levi took Connor’s discards and dealt three more.

  “One for the dealer.” Levi examined his new hand—four kings and an ace. A favorable hand occurred with such infrequence that it required considerable focus to suppress his astonishment. He controlled his expression and looked at Mandy for her play.

  She blew out a heavy breath and laid her cards facedown on the table. “I fold.”

  “I’m in for three.” Lydia reached to the small bowl of wooden marbles in front of her, took three, and set them near a larger bowl in the center of the table.

  Levi picked them up and dropped them into the large bowl. “Connor?”

  “I’ll call.” Connor added three marbles to the bowl, one at a time.

  Levi tried to conceal his confidence as he set three of his pieces into the bowl. He looked at Mandy—though she was out of the round, it was natural for his eyes to move to her. She leaned back and scanned Lydia’s cards. Her eyes grew wide.

  Levi waited for his sister’s move. “Lydia?” She shook her head.

  He looked at Connor. Connor glanced at Lydia and then at Levi and raised one eyebrow. His countenance reminded Levi of the first few weeks after Connor’s arrival in the Land. Levi had been suspicious of the strange warrior then and—though it was in a friendly, competitive way now—he was equally suspicious. Connor slid three more marbles to the center of the table. “I’ll raise.”

  Levi matched then looked at Lydia. She was looking at Mandy as if expecting advice. Mandy shrugged and Lydia tossed her cards onto the table. “I’m out.”

  Levi and Connor sat glaring at each other with their cards concealed. Mandy and Lydia both giggled. Levi moved first. “Let’s see them, brother.” Connor spread his cards on the table, revealing a flush of diamonds. Levi grinned and displayed his four kings. Connor laughed and shook his hand. The women laughed. While Connor took the large bowl and poured its contents into Levi’s bowl, Lydia picked up her empty water glass and walked to the sink. Mandy got up and followed Lydia. The two women stood near the sink whispering. Levi collected the cards, shuffled the deck twice, and set it in front of Mandy’s chair. Then he glanced over his shoulder at her.

  Connor nudged him. “Why don’t you do something about that?”

  “About what?” He kept his voice down.

  “Obviously, you’re in love with Mandy. Why don’t you ask her out?”

  “I tried to court her once. She rejected me.”

  “Yeah, when you were both, what, seventeen?” Connor lifted a palm. “That was six years ago. You’re a man now. I think you have a chance.”

  “If I have learned one thing about Mandy Foster in the past six years, it’s that no man has a chance.” He started to push his hands through his hair then stopped and turned when he heard Everett Foster’s voice at the door.

  Lydia welcomed Everett inside. Mandy took her brother’s arm and led him to the table. “Come, join our game.” Her voice sang in excitement as she picked up the card deck and sat in her chair. “We’ve only played one round—Levi won. I’m sure you won’t mind if Everett joins us, will you, Levi?”

  Everett remained standing and put his hand over the cards. “Actually, I didn’t come here to play cards. There is something I need to discuss with Levi and Connor.” His young face was wrinkled with worry. Mandy and Lydia glanced at each other and left the room. They went into the parlor and started talking with Isabella.

  “What is it?” Connor asked Everett as soon as the men were alone.

  Everett lowered his voice. “Where is Bethany?”

  “She’s at a friend’s house tonight,” Levi answered. “What’s wrong?”

  Everett glanced at the open doorway that led from the kitchen to the parlor, then he leaned toward Levi and Connor. “Last week I had two lambs go missing. I had all but given up my search, and then today I decided to ride out to the western portion of our property. I went to the creek near the boulder outcrops and found a campsite.”

  Levi glanced at Connor, who lifted both hands gesturing his need for more information. So Levi looked back at Everett. “Possibly your father’s farmhands?”

  “No. We only had two men help with the shearing this year, and they moved on to Southpoint weeks ago.” Everett’s dark hair dropped onto his forehead and he gave his head a quick jerk to send it back. “It looked to me as if someone had camped there for a while. There were wheel marks in the dirt, probably from a wagon. I could tell they had horses and… I found the bones of the lambs.”

  Connor’s brow furrowed. “I’ve only been in the Land a couple of years, but most people here seem to live by a fairly strict code of ethics. This sounds like vagrant behavior.” He looked at Levi. “Do you know anyone in Good Springs who would steal a lamb for dinner?”

  Levi shook his head. He felt sorry for Everett but was more concerned for the safety of the Fosters and the village. He could still hear the women chatting in the parlor. He looked at Connor and whispered, “It could be Felix and his sons.”

  Connor nodded. “Maybe they have come to return your wagon.”

  Everett’s eyes bounced from Levi to Connor and back. “Felix and his sons? The men you fought outside of Northcrest when you were traveling?”

  “Yes,” Levi answered. He thought of the robbery during his journey with Connor—and the home invasion a decade prior that caused the death of his mother. “Everett, what did your father say when you told him about the campsite?”

  “He said to tell you and Connor—and your father, if he is here.”

  Levi shook his head. “Father is counseling a family in the village this evening.”

  Everett pointed to the parlor. “He also said not to tell the women.”

  “Of course—no need to frighten them,” Levi agreed. Then he looked to Connor. “Do you think it could be someone from the outside world?”

  Connor picked up his water glass and made the liquid inside it swirl; he stared at the glass and clenched his jaw. “If someone from the war came into the Land, I doubt they would drive a wagon and roast lamb over a campfire. The way the world is right now, if the Unified States or any other military force invaded the Land, there wouldn’t be a lamb left… or a drop of clean water for that matter. In my two years here I have only heard of one group of outlaws in this land—Felix and his two sons.”

  Everett’s gaze continued to shift between Levi and Connor. Though Everett was not yet nineteen, Levi had noticed his growth in strength and maturity. “Everett, you have been sparring with Connor and me for over a year. If it’s Felix and his sons who are lurking around your property, I have full confidence in your ability to defend your family.”

  Everett nodded and looked up at the doorway to the parlor. “Let’s hope it does not come to that.”

  Connor lifted the deck of cards and tapped it on the table as Mandy and Lydia stepped back into the kitchen. “Anyone up for another round?”

  Everett stood. “Another time perhaps. Come, Mandy, I will walk you home.”

  Mandy crinkled her forehead at Everett. Levi expected her to protest being ushered home by her younger brother, but she simply said her goodbyes and left with Everett.

  Connor stood and carried the empty glasses to the sink, and then he turned to Lydia and caught her hand. “We should be going, too.”

  Levi followed them to the door and closed it behind them. He walked back to the table and put out one of the oil lamps but left the other lit for his father. The sudden silence in the house seemed unusual. He was glad his days of living there were soon to end. He stood above the kitchen table with both palms resting upon it and stared at the stone hearth around the fireplace. The stones had a hypnotic effect on him, forcing him to think of his mother—not the warm sentiment of her life but the traumatic event that led to her death. Ever since that day the house felt tainted to him. He remembered those few horrid moments vividly: he and Lydia were play
ing in the parlor. His mother and father were in the kitchen. Someone entered the kitchen through the back door. He heard men’s voices, their volume raised in argument. Lydia ran to see what was happening and he followed her. Three angry looking strangers were rifling through the kitchen cabinets. His mother tried to stop the oldest man, and he shoved her. She fell onto the hearth and her head hit the stone. She did not move. Lydia rushed to her. Levi envisioned his twelve-year-old self, staring up at his father, expecting him to do something to the man for that, but his father simply stood there as the men ran away.

  The bitterness born in that moment still shrouded his life. He thought of the one chance he had to fight Felix since then—on the road near Northcrest when he and Connor had traveled the Land. He had not been prepared to fight then; when he recognized Felix and his sons, he had been overcome with anger and lost his focus. He thought about the campsite Everett had found and wondered if he would get another chance to fight Felix Colburn and his two sons. If he did, he determined this time Felix would not get away.

  * * *

  Justin Mercer locked the deadbolt on the door of his room at what was once a tourist lodge near Stanley Port on East Island in the Falklands. He stepped into the bathroom with the fresh bar of soap he had spotted in the back of the hotel’s looted custodial closet. Regardless of the direction he turned the faucet, the temperature of the water remained the same. After nearly a year in Antarctica, lukewarm water felt like a luxurious thermal spa. He scrubbed his hands and fingernails with passionate vigor. The only problem more daunting than starvation in the current state of the world was infection.

  With the disintegration of all satellite communications for the Unified States military and most of its allies, Mercer’s time in Antarctica had stretched from a three-month assignment to a yearlong nightmare. He was one of the few men at McMurdo Station on Ross Island who made it to the icebreaker in time to leave before winter. But due to the rumor of an enemy vessel in the Drake Passage, the ship stopped at Palmer Station and wintered there.

  After six months at Palmer Station, with no military communication, orders or pay, he had decided the other men were right—it was every man for himself. After much persuasion, an exasperated officer of the fragmented British Forces agreed to grant him passage to the Falkland Islands in exchange for technical assistance in refitting the nuclear-powered icebreaker for military use. He no longer reported for duty and no one called him Lieutenant, but he was fortunate for the opportunity to exchange work for a room in an ally-controlled port town in one of the only places left on earth with clean drinking water.

  Mercer used the soap to wash his face and then reached for the stained hand towel beside the sink. After ten hours on his back beneath a computer panel in the hull of the icebreaker, he was tired and hungry. He looked in the mirror—his black hair lashed out in every direction. The thick beard he had grown during his time in Antarctica begged for a shaving. He reminded himself of an ancient maritime sailor rather than a twenty-eight year old naval flight officer. He reached for his razor.

  After shaving, Mercer dried his face then dropped the towel on the bathroom counter and walked to the rumpled bed. On his way, he picked up a file containing every note he had printed on actual paper before they lost power at McMurdo Station. Now three months out of Antarctica, he still grappled to find a way to get back to the uncharted land he had spotted after being ejected from a fighter jet nearly two years before. Every piece of information he had about that mysterious land in the South Atlantic Ocean was in the file he held.

  Perched on the edge of the bed, Mercer flipped through the file’s pages. Though no actual image of the land ever appeared on the satellite feeds he had closely monitored, he held several printouts of data indicating slight atmospheric discrepancies over the precise location. An occasional glance at those readings was all it took to bolster his faith in the existence of a pure and peaceful land. His focus on finding that land had thus far sustained his will to survive and still gave him hope that one day he would fulfill the innate desire for a peaceful life. The war had left a world devoid of hope, and he would have succumbed to the same despair as everyone else if he had not spotted that one piece of uncharted land.

  During his winter in Antarctica, Mercer had determined he would to do whatever it took to return to those coordinates at sea and confirm with his own eyes the land existed. If his plan with the repurposed icebreaker worked, he could be on his way to the coordinates within weeks.

  As he began to replay a favorite fantasy of his new life on the uncharted land, a knock at the door jarred him from his mental theater. A fish-eyed glimpse through the peephole revealed an unknown man with spiky gray hair, thin arms covered in faded tattoos, and a triangular patch of whiskers below his bottom lip. The man knocked a second time. Mercer kept the chain locked on the door and slipped his hand around his back to the loaded sidearm tucked into the waistband of his pants. With the other hand he unlocked the deadbolt and cracked the door. “Who are you?”

  “Can I come in?” The skin of the man’s forehead looked like leather, and his Commonwealth accent hinted at a South African origin.

  “No. What do you want?” Mercer had mastered the petulant tone of the war-torn world.

  “Are you Mercer?”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’ll not say out here.”

  “You’ll stay out there unless you say.”

  The man leaned close to the crack in the door. “If you’re Mercer, I know about the land you’re looking for.”

  Mercer pulled back—not only from the rancid combination of garlic and alcohol on the man’s breath, but also from shock. He had not mentioned the uncharted land to anyone since he was at McMurdo Station months before. “What land?”

  The man snickered and looked down. “The land you saw after you and your mate crashed in twenty twenty-five.” His barely audible voice drew Mercer back to the crack in the door. “If you’re still looking for that land, I might be able to assist your efforts.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  The man’s gaze shot to Mercer’s. He looked serious and desperate. “A chance to get off this disease-infested island before I’m hacking up blood like the rest of these poor buggers.”

  Mercer closed the door with a dull thud. He swallowed hard and slid the flaking brass chain off the door. The chain dangled from its screw in the doorframe and swung a couple of times while he paused with his hand on the doorknob. He could not operate the ship without a crew, so he opened the door.

  The man stepped into Mercer’s room and scanned the space with rapid eye movements. He stood several inches shorter than Mercer and wore a sweatband on one wrist. “They call me Volt.”

  Mercer recognized the name but had never seen the man in person. Volt’s reputation for technological and seafaring genius contradicted his washed-up beach-punk appearance. Mercer closed the door then locked the chain and the deadbolt. “I’ve heard of you. What’s your real name?”

  Volt’s eyes shifted to the side and then back to Mercer. “I haven’t given a real name since o-eight when my freshman hacking skills ticked off the Maritime Bureau.”

  Mercer lifted his papers from the bed, closed the file, and motioned with it to a wicker chair near the foot of the bed. The chair’s cane creaked when Volt sat down. Mercer sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the infamous mariner. He thought Volt looked more like a man who would sleep at a beachside bus stop between stints in court-ordered rehab than a man known for outsmarting the best navy captains on the high seas.

  Volt pointed at the manila file folder in Mercer’s hand. “Is that your location proof?”

  Mercer wasn’t sure he appreciated Volt’s knowledge of his work. He tucked the folder beneath his leg. “How do you know about me?”

  Volt laced his fingers behind his head and leaned against the high back of the wicker chair. “A bloke at the pub in town claimed he was at McMurdo with a Yank jet jockey who was obsessed with some unchart
ed land in the middle of the South Atlantic. The bloke had a few in him and mouthed off about the emergency eject that sent you just close enough to paradise to make you crazy.”

  Mercer smirked at hearing himself described that way. “So what—you came to hear my crazy story for yourself?”

  Volt shook his head. “The thing is—I already knew about your work. You spent months observing the coordinates through the secure satellite network.” When Mercer simply glared, Volt shrugged. “I linked into the monitoring unit the U.S. Navy left at the rescue site. It was part of a previous engagement.”

  “Let me guess… you’re responsible for taking out the entire ally satellite communications networks.”

  Volt raised both palms. “I’ll neither confirm nor deny my employment contracts, mate. The important thing is—I noticed your work and when I heard that bloke at the pub, I made some inquiries to find you.”

  “Because you want off this disease-infected island?”

  “That’s half of it.”

  “Here we go.” Mercer wiped a hand over his freshly shaven face. “What’s the other half? I don’t have some Swiss bank account you can run dry, so what could you possibly gain from helping me find the land?”

  “I want the same thing you want—a chance to live in peace.”

  “I find that hard to believe.” Mercer stood. He paced to the window but kept his eyes on Volt. He did not trust Volt, but if he was going to make it to the coordinates, he had to trust someone at some point. He studied the man called Volt—stupid moniker, but he did have a reputation. “If I did believe you, what could you do to get us there?”

  Volt grinned, emitting the kind of satisfaction he should have known to conceal. He leaned forward resting his elbows on his knees. “You’ve got access to the ship—I can get the ship to the coordinates without being caught.”

  “What ship?”

  Volt narrowed his eyes. “Come on, mate, you know it has crossed your mind.”

  He knew exactly what Volt meant—the thought of stealing the icebreaker had more than crossed his mind—it was his plan. However, assembling an able crew willing to commit to that level of idiocy was another thing. Since it appeared Volt already knew everything about him, Mercer decided to level with him. He returned to his seat on the edge of the bed. “How do we get a crew, steal a nuclear-powered icebreaker, and cruise to the middle of the South Atlantic without being caught?”