Last Hope: Book 5 in the Thrilling Post-Apocalyptic Survival Series: (The Last City - Book 5)

by Kevin Partner

  "What is happening, Jorge?" the man who'd given the sermon said once the doors had been closed behind them.

  "It is insurrection!" Mendoza roared. "Do you not see now how Scriver's vision of ruling by consent is a mere fantasy?"

  "Well, I'm not sure I'd go quite that f—"

  "Fools! We have a choice. Do we continue with that delusional path, or do we take control? Do we live in fear or do we command? Who is with me?"

  "But how is Marshall?"

  Mendoza slammed his fist on the desk. "Make your choice! All those who wish to help me in building a secure future through military means, join me here. Those who do not, will stand beside the mayor of this town, who quite obviously knew of this planned attack."

  Devon didn't bother to respond. Didn't bother to point out that he had tried to save Scriver's life. If the man was to survive, it was because of him. He somehow suspected that this wouldn't cut much ice with Mendoza.

  "Choose!"

  The fat priest, after glancing at the others, stepped behind the desk to stand beside Mendoza, his face pale, cheeks trembling. Five more followed him.

  "Well?" Mendoza said. "Have you made your choice?"

  "I believe we should wait until Marshall has recovered before making a decision like this. Surely there is no hurry?"

  "No hurry? That was the first shot in a civil war. If we allow it to go unpunished, then we will lose control entirely. Now, choose, Julianna."

  With obvious reluctance, the woman moved toward Devon, followed by the final three.

  Mendoza shook his head, as if unable to comprehend her decision. "I am sorry. I truly am. But the future belongs to the decisive."

  He drew a handgun. The woman only had time for a stifled cry of alarm before falling to the floor.

  The gun swept left, then right and the sharp bang of the firing weapon mixed with the screams of the victims as Devon threw himself to one side. Finally, Mendoza brought the weapon around, the rectangular profile of his handgun moving relentlessly toward where Devon lay, propped up against the wall. "You will die slowly," Mendoza said, "one bullet at a t—"

  Shattering shards showered Devon as the glass of the door exploded outward. Mendoza shrieked and fell sideways and Devon caught movement as a guard rushed toward him. The muzzle of a pistol emerged through the hole where the window had been and first one guard then the other fell to the ground as the surviving committee members cowered against the opposite wall.

  The door opened and Marianna stepped in, surveying the carnage. She saw Devon, sighed with obvious relief and barked, "Come on! We've got to get out of here."

  He didn't need to be told a second time. Jumping to his feet, Devon glanced over to where Mendoza lay moaning on the ground.

  "No! We've got to go NOW!" Marianna yelled as he made to go toward the general. The dead guards both had weapons, and Devon wanted to finish him off once and for all.

  "Devon!" It was Lynda Strickland's voice. "You've got to help us get him away. Scriver!"

  For an instant, Devon froze, caught between the need for immediate justice and the wish to survive. Then he thought of Jade. And he strode out of the office. The big man who'd given the sermon called out to Marianna, but she turned her back on him. "You've made your choice, now I'm making mine."

  Marianna had propped Scriver up against a wall and Devon put the man's arms around his shoulder and helped haul him along. Guards ran toward them, but Marianna refused all offers of help. These were all, it seemed, Mendoza's men.

  As they reached the entrance of the community center, which was now alive with soldiers running back and forth, Marianna turned to Devon. "Where are we going?"

  "I thought you had a plan?"

  "A plan for what? Escaping my own organization?"

  Devon grunted and nodded along the road leading to the intersection. "My apartment. I'm not going anywhere without Jade."

  Every second step seemed to cause pain to lance through his ribs, and the half-conscious Scriver was barely any help as they shambled along the road. To the soldiers running toward the community center, they must have looked like victims escaping an atrocity and so, aside from offers of help, they made their slow way unmolested until they reached the crossroads.

  Devon glanced up at Bowies' Stores, half expecting to see Martha waving from the window, and his heart sank as he realized, for the first time, that the security forces would surely have found her after the shooting and, in all likelihood, shot her on the spot. There was no sign of Joe, and nothing Devon could do to check whether he was even still alive.

  "Come on, Devon," Marianna said. "We've only got minutes. As soon as Mendoza regains consciousness, they'll be after us and I don't need to paint a picture of what he'll do."

  "Maybe you killed him," Lynda said as she supported Scriver's other side.

  They moved around the intersection toward Devon's apartment. Marianna gave a grim laugh. "No such luck. He's like a cockroach; he'll survive anything short of having his head blown off."

  It was a bright day, and Devon guided them into the narrow shade, hugging the walls and fronts of the buildings until they reached the apartment block. "You stay here with Scriver, I'll go fetch Jade," he said, praying that she would be there.

  She was.

  "Devon! Oh, thank God. I thought you got caught up …"

  He disentangled himself immediately, ignoring the surprise and disappointment on her face, as Toto the dog licked his leg. "No time, we gotta go, now!"

  "Stirred up a hornet's nest, have you?"

  "Gert!"

  The Dutchman emerged from the living room, swinging his pack over his shoulder. They shook hands, and Devon ran into the kitchen and pulled the Glock from its hiding place before following Gert and Jade down the stairs.

  "Hey, you!" someone shouted at them as they slipped around the back of the building.

  "Go!" Gert snapped. "There is a white SUV on Park Street, north of the church. I will catch up if I can, but do not wait for me. Head for Tolland's Farm, northeast of where we last met."

  Not waiting for any response, the Dutchman turned away and peered around the edge of the apartment block. As Devon helped Scriver, he heard a crack, crack as Gert took calm and measured aim.

  "Leave … me …" Scriver whispered.

  Marianna spun around. "No, they'll kill you. We have to get you to safety, then we can contact your people."

  "I hope he's worth it," Devon said, grunting with the pain and exhaustion of pulling the man along.

  The gunfire stopped as they passed the LDS church and ran across the parched grass of the small tree-lined park that lay alongside it. Scriver stumbled, his leg catching on an exposed root, and Devon fell beside him. He would have given anything to just stop here and rest, but he knew they had only minutes—perhaps even seconds—before they'd be discovered.

  With help from the others, he got Scriver up. "Leave …"

  "I would, but Marianna says we've got to save you. Make no mistake, if they close in on us, I'm dropping you like a stone."

  "There!" Jade ran ahead to where a grimy white car sat beside the road. "The keys are in the ignition!" she called. Gas was in such short supply that people had stopped stealing cars.

  She pulled open all the doors. "Who's driving?"

  "You'll have to," Devon said, forcing a groaning Scriver onto the back seat. Marianna jumped in on one side, Lynda on the other as Devon ran around to the passenger side. Toto leaped into the seat and looked up at him expectantly.

  Crack.

  A round fizzed past Devon's ear and he ducked so he could peer around the hood of the car. Three figures with rifles ran across the park.

  "Start the car!" he yelled, before standing again and returning fire. The soldiers scattered, seeking cover. Shots emerged from the bushes. "Go!"

  "Not without you!"

  "Go! I'm going after Gert!" He stepped back, slammed the door shut and ran for cover behind a rusting truck. "Go!" he screamed.

  Finally, he
saw what looked like a weapon inside the car. Marianna was pointing her revolver at the back of Jade's head. The car careened off, back tires slipping left and right as Jade tried to get it under control. Devon kept firing until it was out of sight, and then, with one final glance in the direction it had gone, he ran for the cover of a dilapidated ranch house set back from the road.

  Chapter 17: Meanwhile

  "Fella here says he knows you, Hick."

  Paul Hickman was bent over a desk looking at a handwritten list, trying to reconcile the inventory with what he could see with his own eyes. He sighed. He rarely wanted to meet people who claimed to know him. In general, they were folks with a grudge.

  Hick straightened up and turned around. Kaminski stood in the doorway, looking more and more like Buffalo Bill every day. Rusty stepped to one side and a slight young man limped forward. The newcomer had what appeared to be a thousand miles of road dust covering every inch of him. His hair was plastered onto his head like a helmet and a wispy beard dropped from his chin like a pointing finger.

  "I told him to get cleaned up 'fore he came to see you …"

  Squinting, Hick stepped forward. "Jeez, you stink! Who the hell are you?"

  "Oh, so you don't know him. Sorry, Hick, he's prob'ly just some bum …"

  "It's … it's me, Mr. Hickman."

  Hick had heard the voice before. Even his flint heart realized the young man desperately wanted to be recognized, though Hick suspected that when they'd last met, he'd looked very different.

  "J … Jake? No. Jay? Is that you, boy?"

  White erupted from between the creature's lips as he smiled. "It's me."

  "Oh my God. Sam, where's Sam?" Hick's heart skipped a beat as he peered beyond Jay's emaciated frame, as if his daughter might be hiding there, waiting to spring out in surprise.

  "Don't worry, she's fine. At least, she was when I last saw her."

  "You left her? What the f—"

  "I had to! But she's safe. On the West Coast, like you told me. I came back cos I thought you'd want to know."

  Hick sighed with relief, putting his hand down on the table to steady himself. "Listen, son, you need to clean up and you need to eat. Thanks, Rusty, I'll take it from here."

  The former sheriff gave a reluctant nod and disappeared.

  Hick occupied one floor of a newly built house in Springs that shared communal bathroom facilities—something that would have horrified him before the firestorm. As with Hope, the landscape offered just enough of a change in gradient so the water system could operate by a combination of a gravity-fed well beside each house and a sewer pipe taking the waste away to be dumped into the river downstream.

  Gritting his teeth together—Hick was a fastidiously clean man by nature—he helped Jay get out of his grime-ridden clothes. He then filled buckets from the well and handed Jay some old rags to wash himself down with. After a few minutes of scrubbing, one of the neighbors came out with a kettle of boiling water. She put it down, nodded to Hick and smiled as she caught a glimpse of Jay's nakedness. "Needs feedin' up," she said, heading for her door at a pace that was slower than necessary.

  "Here, put your foot up here," Hick said, turning the bucket over. "Jeez, that's …"

  "Disgusting, I know."

  It had been fully three months since the Sons of Solomon had amputated Jay's toes, but the wound had never had the rest it needed and now blood, both fresh and old, leaked from the rough seams made when the Amish medic had sewn it together.

  "Did you walk the entire way?" Hick asked, turning the foot over and wincing at the blisters lining the heel and the point under the amputation.

  Jay shrugged. "Most of it. Not easy to find working cars with gas in anymore. Met one couple who let me ride on the back of their pickup, but they were heading south, so I had to walk the rest of the way."

  Hick handed him a towel and a spare set of pants, underwear and T-shirt. He'd acquired most of his personal possessions in the days since he'd returned to Springs to plan the mission to Salt Lake City and he had very few spares, but he could hardly have Jay walking around butt naked. The clothes the boy had arrived in were only any use as fuel for a bonfire.

  He went back to his little kitchen and found a packet of ramen, so he set the kettle to boil on the hearth and went back to his list. Of Gert's militia, only Mara Gruman had volunteered to come back to Springs and plan this wild goose chase. He'd been disappointed that Kris Ritter had opted to stay with Gert's people, to be honest, but one female with an opinion was probably as much as he could handle.

  So their commando squad would be made up of one trained soldier; Duck Dale; a computer engineer and Brain. He groaned. If only Gert had agreed with their mission and assigned a half dozen of his best fighters. But the Dutchman was the sort of person who believed in fighting the enemy in front of you, not plunging down a rabbit hole.

  The kettle whistled and Hick lifted it off the iron bar it hung on—remembering to use a cloth this time—and poured it into the bowl with the noodles. He was just mixing it with a little of his precious ketchup reserve when Jay hobbled in.

  "Here," Hick said. "Not exactly haute cuisine, but it'll take the edge off ahead of dinner. We eat as a community at 6:00 p.m."

  Jay eagerly took the bowl, and sat down to consume the ramen. It was like watching a starving dog. When he'd finished, he looked up guiltily. "Sorry, man. I used to think I knew what being hungry meant, but boy was I wrong."

  Hick waved away the apology. "Now, you're cleaned and fed. Tell me about Sam."

  And so Jay told him about their journey east, what had happened when they'd been captured by Azari, and Zak's community in the redwood forest.

  "She's still there?"

  "As far as I know. She seemed pretty much at home."

  They were sitting on a couch Hick had liberated from the brothel. It creaked a little as he leaned forward as if to speak confidentially. "So, why did you leave?"

  "I told you," Jay said, "I didn't like it there. And I wanted to report back to you."

  Hick shook his head. "Well, I'm mighty grateful to you for that, but I know a half-truth when I see it. You forget who you're talkin' to. I'm a master of deception."

  Perhaps it was his natural charm that disarmed Jay, or the crooked smile, but the young man seemed to loosen a little, visibly expanding as he relaxed. "I was a moron."

  "Now you're talkin'," Hick said, slapping Jay on the knee. "I guess this is about Sam, is it?"

  Jay nodded. "You know I love her, Mr. Hickman."

  "You can call me Paul," Hick said, "for now."

  "I'm not sure I can do that, sir," Jay said.

  He was certainly a long way from the cocky youth Sam had described. But then a firestorm, the loss of family, traveling across the continent and back again, and being tortured and maimed … well, if that doesn't change a person, what would?

  Hick knew he'd changed. It was only a few months ago when he cared only about himself, Sam and the dog in that order. Now, here he was, empathizing with a young man he barely knew. A young man who also loved his daughter, no less. The sort of person the old Hick would have hated on principle.

  "Suit yourself," Hick said, settling back again. "So, what happened between the two of you?"

  He drew in a deep breath. "She fell in love with someone else."

  "This Said fella?"

  Jay gave another nod. "How did you know?"

  "You made it pretty clear you don't like him. But what's he got that you don't?"

  "Nothing!" Jay said, slamming his fist into a cushion. Then he threw himself back like a twelve-year-old. "Oh, I can't blame her too much. I'm damaged goods, after all."

  "We're all that, son. And I still don't think that's the entire story."

  "I guess I'm not exactly lovable anymore. Maybe I needed that time on the road to figure that out."

  "Are you gonna go back?"

  Jay shook his head. "Can't. Zak'd shoot me as soon as look at me. He don't want nobody knowing where hi
s settlement is, and I don't blame him. He's kept safe that way. I only got away cos Sam led his hunters in the wrong direction."

  "Doesn't sound to me like someone who don't love you no more, Jay."

  "I think she cares for me, but she don't love me the way … the way I want."

  The conversation having strayed into choppy waters, Hick got up off the couch, filled the kettle from the pitcher and hung it over the hearth again. He kept the fire pretty low in the warm weather, so it was going to take some time. Busying himself in the little kitchen, he looked over at the young man who'd walked a thousand miles. Jay was sitting on the couch, looking into space. The poor kid had been through more in the past few weeks than most could bear in a lifetime. What he needed—once he'd rested up and gotten some more food in him—was a purpose; something beyond brooding on Sam. Though, heaven knew, Hick knew what it was like to have that girl on his mind and to know she was out of reach.

  Jay must have sensed that Hick was watching because he turned around. "This place has changed a lot since we left."

  "Yeah. Rusty's been the man behind most of it. There's still plenty of exiles from Hope here to help build. Some of the locals have helped too, though their leader ain't exactly cooperative. But, say, how'd you get into town without bein' stopped?"

  "It weren't hard. I came in along the highway, but when I saw the barricade, I got off the road and went around it."

  Hick took the boiling kettle from the hearth and poured steaming water into two mugs. Coffee was one of the few commodities that wasn't in short supply, owing to a chance discovery of a truckload of the stuff on the highway north of here that had been stockpiled in the basement of the brothel. Thank heavens for that—civilization really wouldn't survive a caffeine famine.

  "No, stay where you are," Hick said as he saw Jay heaving himself up.

  "It's okay. I don't like bein' a burden. Never have."

  Hick shook his head. "You even talk different, now. D'you know that?"

  "Maybe I'm growin' up at last." He sat on one of the mismatched chairs at the crude kitchen table that was, in fact, Hick's pride and joy as he'd made it himself.