After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

“Do you think we can trust them?”

  “All of them?”

  “Well, Lucy I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw a Buick full of bricks—and the jury is still out on Syd, but Dave and Donie…” Nate trailed off, and then asked, “What do you make of them?”

  Cyndi considered the question for a moment, and then asked in return, “What can we make of anyone right now? Who knows how any of us will react in any given situation, and this is absolutely not a usual situation. If you’d told me a year ago that we’d be on the run from a group of forehead-carving scumbags, trying to get to Detroit so I can have a baby, I’d have been on the telephone to the nearest psychiatrist and pouring Rohypnol into your coffee…”

  “Well, I’m glad you have it already worked out how to deal with me if my brain breaks down.”

  “It’s what prepping is all about, baby. Think the unthinkable, and then plan for it.”

  Nathan had been living the unthinkable for a while now, but was glad that Cyndi had done something about it. If it had all been left up to him, his head would still be stuck in the sand, thinking summer would come and business would pick up...

  He’d let go of almost everything he’d thought of as certain, but he certainly wasn’t letting go of Cyndi.

  The track up to the hunting lodges was worse than Dave had indicated. Maneuvering it in the dark added an extra layer of terror that Nathan could have done without.

  There had been no more Ski-Doos, and they’d left the head of the spur without incident although they’d had to back up on themselves again, as the start of the route up to the lodge had been two miles back in the direction they’d already come from.

  Cyndi had felt antsy about wasting more fuel but getting out of the way of the Seven-Ones and their murderous intents made sense for a couple of days, at least.

  In the Land Cruiser, in touch with Nathan via Dave’s digital walkie-talkies, Cyndi drove with Dave while Donie sat with Nathan in the Dodge. She’d flat-out refused to get into the back with the dog and others. This had caused the atmosphere in the cab to fall below the already freezing one outside. Nathan saw Syd visibly biting her lip to keep from giving Donie a roasting. Nathan kept looking back into the cab while he could at Syd’s stony face, her eyes drilling into the back of Donie’s head. Nathan had hoped he’d be able to get some more helpful information about the Seven-Ones from Syd, but she’d clammed up again, and from the looks of things, he thought she maybe wouldn’t open up again until Donie and Dave were either gone or traveling permanently in another vehicle, out of her sight.

  The track was rutted badly from previous vehicles coming and going, but because of the overhanging pines and the rise of the hills on both side, it had escaped more a cursory layer of snow, which the Dodge’s tires carved through with a sure-footedness that belied the vehicle’s weight.

  They heard occasional little crashes from the Airstream as it bounced along behind them, but everything that could be tied down had been. And when they’d look in later, they’d see that they had only lost a few bits of easily replaceable crockery and some glasses.

  The hunting lodge, when they reached it at full dark, just on the evening side of 9 p.m., was a welcome sight. Three low, one-story pine buildings, their outside faces painted black. The roofs were pitched gently and there was more snow on them than had made it down onto the track. As the Land Cruiser and Dodge’s headlights scythed across the front of the buildings, the crenelated gables, wood fronts, and snow-caked roofs made it look less like a hunting lodge than a Swedish Christmas scene.

  The middle cabin was the largest, and Cyndi decided that they would all bed down in there. Yes, that would be less private, but it would also allow everyone to be kept an eye on, and simultaneously conserve warmth and energy.

  There was no working electricity inside the cabin, which had a main living area of paneled wood and Indian design rugs, as well as plenty of sofa throws. The center of the living space was a stone hearth which, when lit, would allow everyone to sit in a circle around it. There was even a rotisserie for hunters to roast their gutted catches over the fire. It was the sort of place Nathan’s dad would have loved to have visited, but he’d never had the kind of money to afford a stay somewhere like this. This was a rich person’s playground, and Lucy, once the place was illuminated and the fire lit, fit right in.

  “Oh, we should stay—we really should. We’ve got guns, we can hunt, and we can keep the fire lit. Have you seen the beds? They’re to die for. Literally. To. Die. For. We shouldn’t just stay for a few days until the bad people have moved out of the area; we should stay here forever!”

  Nathan saw no point in arguing with her, as Lucy’s selfishness was a force of nature. She’d even begun asking if Freeson could drive into the nearest town in the morning to locate some champagne and caviar. When he declined, she suggested, “Maybe we could go out and shoot a deer. There are deer in these woods, aren’t there, David? Please say there are deer.”

  Dave shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not a hunter.”

  “Oh, you must let me teach you, my dear. You can be the dear who gets the deer.”

  Lucy was the only one who laughed, and it made sense when Nathan discovered later that she’d been filling a discrete flask in her purse from his whiskey in the Airstream when she’d been in there on her own.

  Now, though, Nathan didn’t see the point in making a scene, because Lucy was the kind of person who would shrug off the disappointment of others as the concerns of lesser mortals. She was on a roll, and it was best to let her get on with it.

  Syd prepared to go outside with Saber, perhaps to let the dog have a run and stretch her legs, but maybe just to get away from Lucy and Donie, who Nathan could see were both winding Syd up tighter than a clock spring.

  “Can I go, too, Mom?” Tony asked as Syd put her coat on, called Saber, and headed for the door, going out like the cold she let in when going through the door.

  “No, you can help me prepare food.”

  “Awww, Mom,” said Tony, Cyndi, Nathan, and Freeson all at once, and with that moment of collective levity, the atmosphere in the cabin lightened.

  “How are you doing, bud?” Freeson asked Nathan.

  “I should be asking you the same thing.”

  It was the first time he’d been alone with Freeson since he’d pulled him and the Land Cruiser out of the hole. Lucy had been stuck to Freeson like a limpet. Not that Freeson had seemed to mind any. Now, Lucy was away choosing beds like Goldilocks on amphetamines. Her voice drifted into the living area on a gust of delight as she found one that was “Just right!”

  Freeson grinned at Nathan, then shrugged in a what’s a guy supposed to do? manner at Lucy’s antics. “I’m getting there. Head looks like an alien baby and I’ve got a headache that sounds as if Metallica’s moved into my skull, but I’m on the mend, compadre.”

  “Glad to hear it. Cyndi and I could use a break from the driving.”

  “I hear you, man, I’m getting stir-crazy getting driven. I’ll be more careful crossing bridges in the future.”

  Nathan grinned, secretly happy that his friend wasn’t buying into Lucy’s near drunken rants about staying in the lodge forever.

  While the others had been unpacking, cooking, and sorting where they were going to sleep, Dave had been setting up the satellite uplink outside, and he came in just as Free finished assuring Nate that he’d be driving sooner than later.

  Before they’d heard the Ski-Doos that morning, Nathan had been about to tell Dave that the price for getting to travel with them would be access to the internet whenever he needed it with the uplink to the cop tech laptop. The boy had agreed readily when they’d finally gotten to talk about getting in touch with Stryker again, but Donie had just sucked her teeth with displeasure. She might be the comms expert of the pair, but she was leaving it to Dave to build the bridges.

  Dave was falling over himself to help, though, which made him the polar opposite of Donie, and Nathan planned to use that
attitude to his advantage.

  Sitting up on a table in the open-plan kitchen area of the lodge building, Dave’s cop laptop was chunky, with metal corners like those on the flight cases. It was utilitarian in design, with a smaller than average LCD screen that made it look like the workhorse it was meant to be. The keys on the pad were white and red, giving it a Fisher-Price indestructible feel that made Nathan appreciate it as an old-world thing, even though he knew it was a new and pokily powerful piece of kit.

  It took some time for Dave to get the uplink connected, and he had to go outside in the cold to reposition the base station, hoping the clouds of ash and dust obscuring the stars in the night sky would thin out enough for him to get a connection. After an hour, however, the laptop told them it was connected to the satellite, and it handshook and downlinked to the police service VPN in a matter of seconds. Once in the internet area of the police system, Dave turned the laptop around to Nathan.

  There was no webcam, so he didn’t bother with Skype, sending Stryker an instant message and hoping that, as it was the end of the day, he’d be near his computer.

  He was. Almost instantly.

  NATHAN: Don’t you ever go outside?

  STRYKER: I’ve been out all day. Doing man’s work. What have you been doing? Driving and sightseeing?

  NATHAN: I wish. It might take us longer to get to you than advertised.

  STRYKER: You always were the slowest driver in school. I remember Daisy Henning complaining that you were too busy watching the stop signs to even look at her!

  NATHAN: This is serious, Stryker.

  STRYKER: Okay, okay. What’s up?

  NATHAN: We’re holed up in a hunting lodge, somewhere in Coulthard State Park.

  STRYKER: Vacation. I knew it!

  NATHAN: Shut up. We can’t travel on the highway. Too dangerous right now. There are gangs out there, holding up evacuees, killing them and stealing their stuff.

  STRYKER: No kidding?

  NATHAN: None. We’re in a dicey situation right now, but we’re gonna have to take our time, travel when we can, and keep our heads down when we can’t. We’re still coming and we still want that house.

  STRYKER: You got it. If I say it happens, then it happens.

  NATHAN: That’s not what Daisy’s sister Lacey told me LOL.

  STRYKER: Hardy har har. Just get your ass here so I can whup it.

  NATHAN: In your dreams. Have you heard anything about this gang? We’ve been told they’re called the Seven-Ones on account of the way they carve their initials into the heads of the people they kill.

  There was a long pause before Stryker replied.

  STRYKER: Man. I’m sorry. You didn’t need me giving you a hard time. No, I never heard of them, but we’ve been hearing some pretty scary stories from New York and Boston. Food riots. Inter-city battles. The police have evacuated south like everyone else. We haven’t had any guidance from the government for five days. Washington’s dead and no one knows where the president is. It’s anarchy in the other cities. Windsor is burning. We figured out in the country it would be OK.

  NATHAN: Nothing’s okay, Stryker. Nothing. You having riots in Detroit?

  STRYKER: Don’t worry. It’s cool here. Someone stubs a toe, it’s news. We got food and shelter, and we’re warm. Look.

  Three photographs appeared in the window with musical pings. They showed broad city plazas that had been glassed in, people walking around in shirtsleeves. Banks of hydroponic gardens and a swimming pool, azure blue, under glass. The windows looked out over a dense snowfield—the people in the pool warm, playful, and happy.

  NATHAN: What Cyndi and Tony wouldn’t give to be there now!

  STRYKER: Not you?

  NATHAN: Family First.

  STRYKER: Amen.

  The chat window went dark. The pictures had been saved to the desktop, but Stryker was gone.

  “Sorry, we lost the uplink,” Dave said. “Ash.”

  He went back outside to noodle with the base station, but the link couldn’t be made again, however hard Dave tried. “We’ll have another try in the morning,” he said, about to close the lid of the laptop when Nathan stilled his hand for a moment.

  He stared at the pictures, not able to reconcile the serene, warm, happy people in the pool with the horror that was going on outside the city.

  Tony brought Nathan a bowl of stew, balancing it carefully on a tray with a glass of Coke. His eyes were steady on the bowl, making sure not to spill any, but when he saw what was on the screen of the laptop, the tray wavered and Nathan had to reach out to steady it. “Wow! A swimming pool! Is there a swimming pool where we’re going, Daddy?”

  Nathan put the tray down on the table next to the laptop and ruffled Tony’s hair. “The way Stryker was talking, we’ll all have a swimming pool.”

  Tony’s face like up like a supernova. And then he thought, and turned to Syd, who’d just come in. “Hey. Can Saber swim?”

  Nathan lifted his boy before she could answer and laid him flat on his arms. “Swim, Tony! Swim like a dolphin!”

  Tony twirled his arms and Nathan ran him through the fire and lantern-lit ground rooms as fast as he could. They darted around furniture and pretend-splashed past the laughing adults. Tony wailed with joy, did an excellent breaststroke, and made splashing noises with his mouth.

  Even Syd smiled, and some of the tension even seemed to dissipate from Donie.

  “This is just the pool, Tony!” Nathan announced. “Are you ready for the ocean?”

  Tony pushed his arms and kicked his legs even harder. Nathan ran towards the door, and Freeson, who was by it, helpfully pushed it open so that Nathan could sidestep through, out onto the porch below the smearily moonlit sky.

  The dust in the heavens had turned the fat new moon blue across its face. As if the Man in the Moon had caught a cold. But Nathan didn’t mind. He was high on his son, and high on the idea of Detroit now that he’d seen pictures. Real pictures of where they would be living in just a few short weeks.

  He was so intent on the memory of the photographs, and his brilliantly swimming boy, laughing and splashing and giggling in the cold, that when the bullet came from the woods and slammed him in the temple, Nathan was still smiling as he hit the snow.

  14

  It was the pain that woke Nathan, not the cold. Digging into his skull like someone was twisting a screwdriver through the flesh and scraping it along the bone. He tried to open his eyes, but his right eyelid was stuck, and what he could see through his left eye was a lot of blurry wood—lit not by lanterns, but by a dull, blue, morning light seeping in from somewhere.

  One side of his body felt freezing cold, and both damp and stiff. The other side of his body was chilly but seemed workable. He lifted his right hand to his face and felt the sticky presence of a drying liquid that had welded his eye shut. Above the eye was a crumbly mass of material crusted around the area being assaulted by the proverbial screwdriver.

  The wound seemed to be a wide furrow, its bleeding edges starting to form into scabs around the center where all the pain was pulpy and soft. Gingerly, he pressed down. The bone beneath seemed closer to his fingers under the flesh than he would have liked, and the bolt of pain that coursed across his head like hot lightning made him wince, but his skull was intact, at least.

  “He’s awake.”

  A voice he recognized, but not one of the voices he wanted to hear. Donie. She swam into the view of his left eye and, through the film of tears in his vision, resolved into a concerned face covered in mud. Her red hair was streaked with it, and her Basque top/t-shirt combo had gone ragged with tears.

  “Any movement?” Donie asked someone Nathan could hear walking around on the wooden floor, but he couldn’t see who it was.

  “No, they’re long gone.”

  Dave. That was Dave.

  The pain in Nathan’s head dug in deeper and he gasped. These were not the voices he needed. He wanted to hear Cyndi. Tony. Even Freeson. Someone familiar. Someone he
trusted. He tried to get up on one elbow.

  A hand pressed down on his chest and he didn’t have the strength to resist. “Stay still. You’ve been shot.”

  Shot?

  Nathan reached up to his head again, and Donie tugged his wrist away. “Don’t touch. I’m going to clean it and put something on it. You’ve been laying out there in the snow for an hour. Anything could have gotten on your hands or in the wound. Unless you piss antibiotics, we’re going to have the Devil’s own job of preventing an infection.”

  Nathan let his hand drop and closed his eyes while Donie wiped at his face with a cloth that had been dipped in warm water.

  “Where are the others?” he croaked as Donie worked.

  “We don’t know.”

  The digging screwdriver moved to Nathan’s heart and twisted there for some time.

  Family First.

  “I need to find my family.”

  “And we need to find our stuff. So let me fix your head, and then we’ll work out how we’re going to do both those things. Okay?”

  No. It wasn’t okay. It was never going to be okay until Tony and Cyndi were back in his arms.

  Family First.

  When Donie had finished cleaning the wound, both she and Dave helped him up off the floor and onto the sofa. Dave had thrown too much wet wood on the fire, and so the room was smoky, the wood popping and cracking noisily. The morning light coming through the windows illuminated the smoke more than anything, filling the room with a milky incoherence that matched the fog in Nathan’s brain. He was having all sorts of trouble processing what had happened, but he felt so groggy and fatigued that he had difficulty forming words.

  The cold side of his body, the one that he assumed was the half that had lain in the snow for an hour, was warming now that he’d gotten in out of the cold, but he still wanted to change into dry clothes—he just didn’t have the strength to take off even a sock.

  Donie had rummaged in her mud-smeared pack and pulled out a wound pad, which she took from its peel-away plastic sheath, stuck to Nathan’s head, and adhered there with tape. As she worked, Dave told Nathan what had happened.