“That’s what he said anyway.”
“You think he was lying?”
“I saw a soldier in the woods with a serious injury and a gun to his head,” Dad replied. “He would have said anything to placate you as long as you didn’t shoot him.”
“I thought you said I didn’t have a shot.”
He huffed and squinted up, suddenly interested in the moon’s position. “It could have gone either way.” He caught the look on my face. “Don’t smirk at me. Do you want my help or not?”
The snow crunched beneath my boots as I sat back on my heels in surprise. “You’re going to help me?”
“Like I said, you haven’t changed.” Dad pulled a scope from a bag over his shoulder, mounted it onto his crossbow, and lifted it to eye level, scanning Base One from one end to the other. “I know that if I don’t help you, you’ll come up with some harebrained scheme of your own to get in, which will probably not go the way you planned it to, and you’ll end up hurt or dead, alone without your friends.”
“Wow. Such faith you have in me.”
“On the contrary, I have the utmost faith in you,” he said. “I don’t doubt your abilities. After all, I taught them to you, though I am slightly surprised you didn’t brain dump all of that information when you left the mountains for the city. Proud of you, George.”
My cheeks and neck grew warm. I cleared my throat, grateful that the cover of night hid my pink color. I had grown accustomed to living without parental approval. I’d even tricked myself into thinking that I didn’t need it, considering I didn’t have parents around for most of my life, but the moment invoked memories I’d forgotten about, ones from happier times before my mother died.
“Here’s the deal,” Dad said, lowering the crossbow and returning his gaze to me. “First things first, we need to go back to Camp Haven. Weigh the circumstances for me, would you? You know that your friends are at least alive. I have no idea if Sylvester made it out of there. Besides, there could be other survivors that the Base One soldiers overlooked. My responsibility, first and foremost, has to do with taking care of Camp Haven. Can you understand that?”
I looked my father over. Even in the dim light of the moon, I could make out his genuine concern. It was etched into every line on his weathered face. Maybe I’d been wrong before. Maybe he had changed. After all, he had built an entire compound to take care of a group of people that he considered similar to himself. He cared about them, and the fact that so many of them had been lost to such an act of violence was sure to be hurting him on the inside.
“Fine,” I agreed. “We’ll go back to Camp Haven. We’ll find Sylvester. Then what?”
“Then we can deal with Base One,” Dad replied. “Three heads are better than one anyway. Maybe Sylvester will have a few ideas about how to get an advantage over these guys.”
“You think a sixteen-year-old could take down a military fortress?”
“Don’t underestimate him. He’s a savvy kid,” he said, packing up the scope again. He patted me on the back. “Remember what you were like when you were sixteen? He’s ten times worse.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“Come on, George. Let’s get back to the house. We hit Camp Haven at daybreak.”
At first light, after a sturdy breakfast of leftover trout and dried fruits, we layered up, armed ourselves, and headed out. This time I paid attention to the terrain, noting our path down the mountain just in case I ever had to make it back up on my own. It was a decent use of my time considering my father and I ran out of safe conversation topics within five minutes of our departure. There was plenty to talk about. The problem was that anything and everything dredged up moments from the past that we weren’t keen to acknowledge.
“Cold up here, isn’t it?” Dad grunted as he hopped down from a rock ledge. “I always forget how cold it gets every winter.”
I jumped down and landed with my knees bent. “Freezing.”
Dad tugged on a lock of lilac hair that had escaped my hat. “So tell me about this hair. I’m curious.”
“Like I said, it was a dare,” I replied, repositioning my hat so that it covered more of my ears. “I hosted a talk radio show in the city. You have to find some way to get listeners to tune in. We were trying to raise awareness and cash for a campaign that focuses on treating mental illness.” We hiked on together, our boots crunching through the snow in unison. “So we came up with this plan. For a donation, listeners could dare us to do whatever they wanted. The amount of the donation matched the severity of the dare. Once the dare was complete, the listener donated the cash. I got a hundred bucks for the head shave and another thirty for dyeing it purple. Then I kept the crazy style because I liked it.”
Dad chuckled and ran his hand over the short buzz cut that he maintained himself with a straight razor. “I gotta hand it to you, George. You always knew how to get a conversation started. A radio show, eh? What did you talk about?”
“Everything,” I said. “But mostly I wanted to inform other people my age. My generation isn’t the type to turn on the news or read the papers. We like to be entertained and informed, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I talked about politics, current events, elections at every level, and a little bit about whatever was happening in Hollywood at the time to keep everybody on their toes.”
“Hollywood,” my dad muttered. “How do you think all those famous actors and actresses are faring now?”
I stepped over a large, loose root that protruded from the snow. “I’m sure some of them had bunkers somewhere. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“Did you ever talk about something like this on your show?” He made a controlled slide down a steep but short hill, landing on his feet at the bottom. “What to do in the event of an apocalypse?”
“Once or twice.” I slid after him, using one gloved hand to keep myself on course as I slipped across the snow at top speed. “Most listeners weren’t interested in it. Our numbers dropped during those shows. We don’t have a whole lot of preppers tuning in. I guess most people like to ignore the possibility of this sort of thing actually happening. We all figure that it won’t during our lifetime.”
My father swept ice from the back of my jacket, shaking his head. “Ignorance.”
“Blissful,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, until the whole world has gone dark, and you’re out here in the wilderness all alone without the faintest idea of how to get a fire started.”
“Not everybody thinks the way you do, Dad.”
“I thought the city might have changed you,” he said, his shoulder bumping against mine as we continued our hike. “I thought you might have intentionally forgotten the things that I taught you. When the EMP hit, my first thought was you. I thought you’d be dead.”
“Still kicking.”
“You made it up here on your own,” Dad said. “And you brought five other people with you to safety. That’s an impressive feat.”
My mind wandered to those five people. Four of them were dead from one calamity or another. It made me all the more eager to rescue the remaining fifth.
Dad cleared his throat. “So… were any of those people particularly, er, special to you?”
“Uh.” I side-eyed him, but he kept his gaze forward. “You mean like romantically special?”
Even with a scarf and a hat and the collar of his coat turned up, his blush was visible. “Well, I mean, sure, if that’s what it was, but you know, special in the general sense of the word too.” He wiped his brow and heaved a sigh. “I’m just interested in what you got up to during these past several years, but if you don’t feel like telling me, I guess that’s your right.”
His stooped shoulders encouraged me to share. He just wanted to know what his daughter had been doing with her life for the nine years that he’d missed.
“Jacob Mason,” I said. The name already had a weight to it. He was gone now, leaving only his name for people to remember him. “We met in college. We were never quite r
ight for each other—we came from different worlds—but we were together long enough to get engaged.”
“You’re engaged?”
“Not anymore,” I replied, scratching my left finger out of habit. I’d left the ring behind in our apartment in the city. Now, I wished I still had it, if only to commemorate Jacob. “The stress of getting out of the city was too much for us. Jacob saw me shoot a man, and he realized that he didn’t know about a huge chunk of my life. It disintegrated from there. By the time we made it to Camp Haven, we had already broken up.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that.”
“It’s okay.” I kicked a mound of snow and watched it splatter everywhere with a simple sense of satisfaction. “It was hard at first. We were both mad at each other, but I think we were actually kind of friends toward the end there.”
“Were?”
“He died,” I said, trying not to picture that moment in my head. “He jumped on a grenade during the attack to protect us. Next thing I knew, he was just gone.”
There was a moment of silence. Dad didn’t say he was sorry for my loss. I was glad for that. If he apologized for every person that I’d lost in the last few months, the word would lose all meaning.
“The other people were Jacob’s mother, father, and little sister,” I rushed on. I ticked their names off on the fingers of my gloves. “Penny, Jove, and Pippa. And my friend Nita. Pippa and her baby were the only ones that survived the attack.”
Dad ducked under a tree branch but didn’t quite clear it. It dumped a load of snow down the back of his jacket. “You mentioned Eirian too, but he was already a member of Camp Haven when you arrived here.”
“He was one of the first people that I met here,” I explained. “I liked him right away. You know when someone simply has good vibes? It was like that. He was always working hard but never lost his positive attitude. He made me laugh, and he helped me build the radio tower for the camp without knowing anything about it.”
“Seems like a good guy.”
“He was—is,” I corrected myself, remembering that I hadn’t lost everyone in the attack on Camp Haven. “That’s why I can’t leave him at Base One. He’s too important to me. Pippa too. I have to get her back for Jacob.”
I stopped short when another glance through the trees offered me a look at the charred remains of Camp Haven. The thick barrier that protected the compound had been blasted apart. Most of the buildings were torched. The Bistro and DotCom had survived the worst of it, most likely because Base One hadn’t wanted to ruin the supplies stored there. The med bay, where I’d witnessed most of the attack, had a huge hole in the side where the grenade had gone off. The entire camp was littered with rubble and bodies. The dead wore expressions of shock and terror.
I emptied my stomach off to the side. My father waited patiently several feet away, and when I’d finished, he pretended not to know what I’d been doing. He did, however, hand me his canteen. I took a swig of water, rinsed my mouth, and spat on the ground.
“Good to go?” he asked.
“Let’s do this.”
We stepped over what was left of Camp Haven’s outer wall and into the compound itself. I forced myself to look at each face that lay on the ground. They defended each other as best as they could, and they deserved recognition for that sacrifice. I took down their names in a small notepad that I’d borrowed from my father’s house. If there were bodies missing, the survivors might still be out there somewhere, whether at Base One or in the surrounding woods. Wherever they were, I was determined to find them.
“I haven’t been down here since we first started welcoming other people in,” Dad murmured, turning over a collection of roof shingles with the toe of his boot to check beneath them. “Back then, the only buildings here were the cabin and the Bistro, which also doubled as the community center. Everyone slept in tents they had brought with them from the city. It was breathtaking to see them build this place from the ground up. Sylvester brought me all of the plans for approval. Every time they proposed something new, I doubted that we could find the material to get another building up, but they always managed to make it happen.” His eyes glistened with trapped emotions. “I knew them all from afar, through Sylvester’s stories. They were my family, my responsibility, and I allowed this travesty to happen.”
“You didn’t know,” I said, kneeling beside a woman to check her pulse. Nothing. I moved on. “Base One didn’t have any reason to attack us like that. It was a power play by a mad man. You couldn’t have predicted that.”
“I should have put more security measures in place,” Dad said. “I should have suggested that they build a reinforcement barrier alongside the outer wall. I should have—”
“Dad.”
“George, I’m at fault—”
“No, it’s not that,” I whispered, yanking him behind one of the walls of the women’s dormitory that was still standing. “I think I heard something.”
Both of us went still, hardly breathing as we peeked around the wall, Dad’s head stacked on top of mine. There, near the doors of the med bay, two Base One soldiers poked around in the mess.
“God damn it,” Dad growled. “These bastards are everywhere.”
“What are they still doing here?” I said. A bubble of rage inflated in my chest as one of the soldiers flipped up the shirt of a woman on the ground and made a rude gesture. His friend’s raucous laughter echoed eerily through the demolished campground. “Shouldn’t they be back at Base One by now?”
“I guess Buddy Arnold wanted to make sure no one slipped through the cracks,” Dad replied. “Maybe he doesn’t want people like you out here looking for revenge.”
“Too damn bad,” I muttered.
Dad brought his crossbow up. “Say goodbye, boys.”
“Wait!” I hissed.
He lowered the bow an inch. “What?”
“Is this who we are now?” I asked him. “Are we going to kill everyone that crosses our path?”
“George, are you seeing these guys?” he said. “They’re out here picking through our remains, disrespecting the dead. They murdered our people.”
“Yeah, they suck,” I agreed. “But if we kill them point blank, then we’re just as bad as they are.”
Dad ground his teeth together. “Fine. You have a point. Let’s get close enough to take them out… gently. But they’re damn lucky that you have a finer conscience than me. Ready?”
“Ready.”
At the same time, we darted out from behind the wall to run to the next bit of cover, splitting up. Dad went right, and I went left, but when I crouched behind a fallen support beam, I knew that something was wrong. I glanced around the beam. The two men weren’t standing near the med bay anymore.
“No visual,” I whispered to Dad. “You?”
He checked. “Nope. Stay alert.”
A gun cocked near my ear. “Hello, darling.”
It was the soldier that had mimicked violating the dead woman. He had managed to sneak up on me and now stood with his feet planted on either side of my figure as though to make sure I had the perfect view of his crotch. His friend stood over Dad, the nose of his rifle against my father’s ear.
“Little tip,” he said. “Next time you’re planning to ambush someone, don’t discuss tactics within earshot. Your voices carried.”
“This one’s old,” the second soldier said as he prodded my father with the gun. “Buddy won’t want him. We should just kill them both.”
The first soldier leaned down and took my chin. “And waste such a pretty face?”
“Do whatever you want with her,” said the second soldier. “But I call dibs on this guy’s crossbow.”
The first soldier’s head snapped up. “If he has a crossbow, he’s got to be the guy that killed the unit in the woods. Oh, this is too good.” He looked down at me again. “Don’t worry, honey. I’ll be gentle.”
“Little tip,” I said. “Don’t stand with your weakest parts exposed.”
/> I drove my foot up between his legs. The soldier dropped his gun and crumpled to the ground with a groan, but the dirty hit wouldn’t keep him down for long. I grabbed a piece of concrete from the rubble and slammed it into his temple. He immediately blacked out.
“Don’t move!” the second soldier shouted, still aiming his gun at Dad. “Don’t come any closer, or I’ll shoot him!”
I raised my hands above my head, showing him that my gun was not at my disposal. “Come on, man. It’s two against one now. Let him go, and run back to Base One before Buddy realizes that you’re missing.”
The soldier’s mouth went slack. “How did you know—?”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence. Dad grabbed the nose of his gun and yanked him forward. The soldier lost his footing, and Dad easily flipped him onto his back. Then he took a cue from my book and knocked the soldier out with a piece of rubble. He dusted his hands off and sat back on his heels.
“Thanks for distracting him,” he said. “I wouldn’t have made it if I was out here on my own.”
“Thanks for not killing him.”
“You asked nicely. Let’s keep moving.”
We combed through the buildings, on the hunt for trapped survivors, but found nothing but more death. I recognized every face. Ludo and Jax had left this world hand in hand, both of them splayed out near DotCom. Nita’s body still rested in the hallway of the med bay, where a shooter had taken her out from behind. If she had been positioned a little bit off center, the gunner would have taken me out instead. I closed her eyes before catching up with Dad.
“We need to clean this place up if we’re ever going to rebuild it,” I said, wiping moisture from my eyes. “All of these bodies are going to poison the ground and the water supply.”
“Let’s focus on what’s in front of us for now,” Dad said, leading the way out of the med bay. Outside, he gazed up at the cabin on the hill. Unlike the other buildings, it had survived mostly intact, with the exception of a few bullet holes that ripped splinters from the logs.
Blackout (Book 2) Page 4