“It was the Seven-Ones. They shot you and left you for dead. Donie and me were in the back bedroom unpacking when we heard the commotion and the shots. We went out the back window and dove into the bushes; we crawled under cover.”
Nathan swallowed. “My family.”
“Yeah. Sorry. But I had to save my family, too.”
That cut Nathan, but he couldn’t fault it.
“There was a lot of screaming and shouting, but no more shots. When we heard them driving the trucks and the trailer away, we came back. Found you half-buried in the snow. Guess they figured shooting you in the head was the end of it. You have a thick skull, Nathan. Either that or you’re the luckiest sonovabitch ever. The bullet just grazed you. Tore a hole in your skin, and it probably needs stitches, but that’s not something we’re equipped to do. And considering it should have killed you…”
Nathan thought of the Reynolds nurses. Miles away, heading south, with their medical skills and their medical equipment. Heading to the warmth of the south, away from the cold.
“They took everyone?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
The screwdriver had finished its digging and left a hollow in Nathan that felt a mile wide and ten miles deep. He reached out and grabbed the edge of the sofa to stop his body collapsing into itself.
And then Saber licked his hand.
The dog had been sitting next to the sofa. Nathan hadn’t even noticed. The huge Malamute got up and walked around so that she could put her head in Nathan’s lap and get some fussing. She was limping on her front left paw, causing her head to bob and her shoulders to rock. There was a muddy mark on her flank’s fur, too. The mark could have been the shape of a boot. Saber slid her head along his knees and pressed her nose into Nathan’s belly.
They’d both lost their family.
Nathan used the last reserves of his strength to scritch at the dog’s ears before sleep rolled over him like a cloud on a summer’s day.
“We can’t. Look at the sky!”
“I don’t care!”
“Nathan, you won’t last an hour out there. You’ve got no transport and the weather is closing in!”
“I can’t just wait here while they get further away!”
“They’ll get as far as they want if you’re dead!”
The porch was being whipped by the wind as snow blew off the surrounding trees and the glowering clouds overhead promised more of the same. Nathan was too weak still to shake Dave’s hand from his shoulder, and Donie stood in front of him, her hands stationed on his chest and stopping him from walking off the porch to trudge off into the encroaching storm.
“We can’t just do nothing!” he wailed, his heart cracking and his stomach churning. “I want my boy! I want my wife!”
Donie grabbed hold of the material of his jacket. “If there’s a blizzard coming, they’re going to have to hunker down, too. They won’t be able to travel. They won’t get any further, and we will be able to find them. Killing yourself now helps no one except the Seven-Ones!”
That stopped Nathan pushing forward, the clarity of Donie’s argument finally crashing through him like a wave of logic. If there was a blizzard coming, then yes, the Seven-Ones would have to stop and batten down the hatches. They wouldn’t be able to pull the Airstream through that kind of weather. They were as stuck as Nathan.
He relaxed and let the two kids guide him back inside the hunting lodge.
The fire was working better now, but other than melted snow for water, they had no food or other supplies.
Dave and Donie had both copped shotguns, plus two boxes of shells they’d managed to get out of the back of the lodge when the Seven-Ones had attacked. But that was it as far as weapons were concerned.
Apart from the usual cutlery you’d find in any kitchen drawer, they had nothing other than four steak knives and a marble rolling pin to use in any offensive capacity.
Beyond weapons, Donie and Dave had two high-energy survival bars in their packs, as well as a small amount of first aid materials. They also had laptops, walkie-talkies, and the satellite base station. But nothing left to charge any of it.
Nathan had the clothes he stood in.
In the hours Nathan had slept, before waking up and immediately throwing himself at the door, Saber had been licking at her paw and was now able to put some weight on it.
It boiled Nathan’s sensibilities that these assholes would hurt a dog like that, but then, if they’d not think twice about shooting people dead and carving their initials into their foreheads, he had to accept that hurting an animal would be considered small potatoes.
The awful of image of Tony dead in the snow, with 71 carved into his pale skin, vomited up from Nathan’s imagination in all its Technicolor abhorrence. Nathan screwed up his eyes and tried to make it go away, but all he succeeded in doing was replacing Tony with Cyndi.
The storm came in hard from the north, snow flurries obscuring the view from the windows, bringing visibility down to three or four yards even before night fell and the storm dumped its belly of ice and snow into the clearing and the surrounding trees. The lodge rattled in the intense wind and, at times, Nathan thought one of the walls might crack down the middle and open them up to the maw of the storm. The two lanterns swayed on their ceiling hooks as the building rocked in the brunt of the gale, casting crazy shadows. It made Nathan think of being lost in a boat on a storm-ravaged sea. The sickness of anxiety he felt about his lost family mirroring that vast ocean out there, all of it waiting for unwilling mariners. And that was exactly what Nathan felt he was now. Adrift and far from harbor—either in Detroit or Glens Falls.
Man, how he wished he’d fought harder to stay home, to convince Cyndi that they’d be able to survive in their own town and in their own valley, with their truck and their son and their hopes.
And now, Nathan was too tired even to sleep. The exhaustion weighed him down to the sofa, but fear kept clawing at his eyes to stay open. In truth, he was afraid to shut them, as they then became the screen on which his imagination projected constant horror movies of his family cut down, cut open, and carved like meat for the psychotic amusement of the Seven-Ones.
Nathan needed something to distract himself from the horror of it. Normally, if he felt out of sorts, he’d have gone to work on the Airstream or another project. Two years ago, as the extent of the world’s ills had become known to people, he’d started a project on the Dodge to convert the engine so that it could run on any kind of fuel oil. From diesel right down the line to the oil used in industrial fryers in canteens. The sudden shift of the Earth’s axis, and then the tectonic catastrophes on the west coast of the United States, had become apparent, and made Nathan turn his background anxieties about the state of the world into an exercise in pure distraction, ostriching his fears deep into the sand of hobby mechanics.
Cyndi’s instincts had been to redouble her efforts to make sure they had enough supplies. She’d wanted them prepped to survive anything. Nathan’s instinct had been to put his head into an engine and make it do something it wasn’t supposed to.
Thinking back on it, on how differently they’d reacted, Nathan’s mind settled on the razor edge of his failure as a husband and as a father. What had he done to protect them, other than to disassociate himself from the trouble while Cyndi had made sure they had food, supplies, and weapons?
And Nathan really needed something to distract his mind now.
Dave and Donie weren’t sleeping, either, but they were sitting at the table, both working on their laptops. Both typing furiously and intent on whatever they were doing. Were they really only eight years younger than Nathan? What a gulf those years represented—a gulf in life experience and maturity. Nathan had the years on them, but it had been Donie who’d had all the maturity to stop him from going after the Seven-Ones alone, into the teeth of the storm. They’d had the presence of mind to get out and hide when they knew the odds were too great, because sometimes it’s better to live to fight anot
her day than to become a dead hero.
Nathan wasn’t used to getting life lessons from twenty year olds, but here he was, learning that his failures had put his family in danger, and that he didn’t have the skills and smarts to rescue them on his own.
It was a salutary lesson. Now, when there wasn’t an engine to absorb his attention, Nathan had been forced into some cold, hard self-reflection through a mirror he held up to himself unwillingly. Nathan didn’t like what he saw there.
Distraction.
Nathan pushed the blanket from his legs and got up, stretching. Dave and Donie might as well not have noticed he was there, so intent were they on their screens.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
Donie stopped typing and looked up with some annoyance. “Playing White Hats.”
“I don’t know what that is. Is it like a PlayStation game?”
Donie rolled her eyes. “Go back to sleep… old man.”
Dave answered, “It’s a game hackers play. We set up security systems on our ’puters and one tries to hack the other. It’s like capture the flag, except it’s in machine code.”
Donie’s fiery ire spat at Dave from her molten eyes. “Concentrate on the game!”
Dave pushed his laptop lid down with a slam. “You’re winning anyway. You always win.”
“That’s because you’re too distracted.”
“Well, I’m glad you two feel okay enough to play a game. Isn’t there something more important you could be doing?”
Donie closed her laptop down, too. “A) you’re not in charge of us, and, b) we already have done something more important.”
“What?”
“Yeah, we did,” Dave said. “We’ve found where the Seven-Ones are holed up with our stuff, and your family.”
15
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Nathan demanded.
Donie rolled her eyes and Dave pointed to the swinging lanterns casting their crazy pirate ship shadows around the room.
Nathan simmered.
Maybe if his daddy had told him to Think First, none of this would be happening and he wouldn’t look like a tantrumming toddler in front of a Goth hacker and her boyfriend who was almost still too young to shave.
Donie met his eyes. “We couldn’t get the uplink working, so we don’t know how long the storm is going to last, so if you want to help your family and help us, you should force yourself to get some rest,” Donie said sharply. “If we’re going to go after those assholes and not screw this up completely, we all need to be ready. You’ve got a hole in the side of your head the size of a golf divot. Why don’t you just sit the hell down and wait for the storm to blow over? That’s what we’re doing.”
Nathan stood there staring at them, wanting to ask a million questions, but knew Donie was in no mood to cut him any slack.
“She gets cranky when she doesn’t eat,” Dave said simply.
“I do not!” Donie screamed, thumping the table so hard that the laptop jumped half an inch off the table.
Dave looked at Nathan. “See? Cranky.”
Donie screeched her frustration, kicked the chair she’d been sitting in back, and then stormed off to the bedroom. “I’m only going so I don’t kill you, you jerk!”
She slammed the door hard behind her.
“She loves me really,” Dave said with a smile.
“No, I do not!” the bedroom door yelled.
Nathan retuned to the sofa, shaking his head.
Nathan’s stomach ached. He couldn’t tell if it was from hunger or from anxiety, and truth be told, it was probably a combination of both.
He still hadn’t really been able to sleep, so as the storm raged outside the lodge, Dave showed him on the digital cop maps where he figured the Seven-Ones would have to have gone to shelter from the worst of the blizzard. He’d even worked out how long they’d had to get there before the storm hit. For the first time since he’d awoken from being shot, Nathan felt that at least they had a credible idea about where the gang had taken his family.
There were three possible places within five miles of the lodge where the Seven-Ones might have gone to. The furthest was just how far Dave figured they could have traveled before they’d have had to park and camp in the Airstream on the road.
Two other possibilities included, first, a farmstead three miles from the lodge that had a barn, two rows of battery chicken farm buildings, and a ranch house, while the second and the nearest rested at the head of a freshwater reservoir; a large pumping and filtration station that would provide great cover if the Seven-Ones had known where to find it.
“What makes you think they did?” Nathan asked Dave.
“Logic, Nathan. Logic. They have local knowledge, or they have the same cop maps we do. This lodge isn’t on any of the civilian maps. Too new. So, one of them must have thought to check for us here because he knew it, or they’ve been systematically checking everywhere, ticking off buildings as they go. Whatever the reason, dude, you and your stuff are special to them. This wasn’t just about a supply grab.”
Nathan’s throbbing head made his thinking even more muzzy. “Explain.”
“Why didn’t they just kill everyone?”
The thought hit Nathan like a train at a level crossing. Yes. The attack they’d seen from the ridge above the highway had been a straight kill-and-steal. This had been something altogether different. “Why would they want hostages?”
“Exactly,” Dave said quietly. “Why would they?”
Nathan flashed back to the conversation he’d overheard between Syd and Tony about her lighting out if the gang got anywhere near her. Maybe they were looking for Syd. Maybe she was the focus of their hunt, and they’d scored the rest of Nathan’s family and friends as a bonus.
“Why didn’t they just stay here if they knew the storm was coming?”
“I guess they’ve got somewhere they want to be, so it was better to set off and get a few hours down the trail before the storm stopped their progress. They got out of here fast. Seems like they were on a clock.”
As soon as the storm broke, they would head out.
Dave had retired to a bedroom after that exchange, and Nathan didn’t know whether to be horrified or embarrassed as he heard him and Donie making love vigorously and noisily behind the door. Whether they’d become engaged in a hate-screw or make-up sex, Nathan couldn’t be sure, but it was loud enough to be either, even with the storm still rattling the lodge. In the end, he covered his face with a blanket and buried the uninjured side of his head under a pillow.
In the morning, Donie pulled the blanket from Nathan’s face and put half of a high-energy nutrition bar in his hand. “That’s breakfast and lunch, and probably dinner, so make the most of it.”
The storm lasted a couple more hours while Nathan pensively stared out the window, willing it to stop. When the blizzard was finally done, the square of clearing outside the lodges looked to be covered in whipped cream, with the trees surrounding it bearded like ancient men crowding around a post office on pension day.
The day was bright and razor cold and the blizzard had obliterated any chance they might have had of following the Seven-Ones by tire tracks alone, and even Saber, whose limp had all but disappeared, didn’t seem to know which direction they might have gone in, but they suited up and left the lodge. They walked in silence down the trail to the road and struck out east towards the pumping station.
The reservoir was frozen over, and a thick blanket of snow lay across the ice. They hung back in the trees, having approached the area through the woods rather than via the service road, worried about meeting the Seven-Ones leaving their bolt hole in the process if they had. Even without binoculars, looking across the ice-stilled body of water, they could see the pumping station hadn’t been used to shelter the gang from the storm.
There were no buildings large enough to hide the trucks and the Airstream, and Donie came back from checking the service road to tell them that there were no tire t
racks leading away from the pump station to suggest the gang had already left in the two hours of hard walking it had taken the three of them to get there.
“The farm then,” Nathan announced, pushing off without waiting for Dave or Donie to answer.
They let him walk ten yards before shouting to him that he was walking in the wrong direction.
Donie caught up, flipped open the clamshell case on her phablet, and showed Nathan the map. “I get you’re in a hurry, Nate, but we lead. Okay?”
Nathan nodded, cursing himself silently. How many lessons were these kids going to teach him before the day was out?
Think first.
Yeah, Daddy. Thanks for that.
Two hours of exhausting, stiff-legged, cross-country, snow walking later, they broke over the ridge above the farmstead. What the map hadn’t told them, however, was that it had been raided and burned out some time ago. One of the barns still sat undamaged, but the main ranch-style house had been gutted. The chicken sheds, which had been unharmed on the satellite images of the cop maps, had been razed entirely to the ground.
No activity could be seen around the farm and Nathan saw no point in looking further. “Let’s go,” he said.
“I need a rest somewhere warm-ish,” Donie replied. “We’ve been yomping for nearly five hours. I’m wasted.”
Without another word, she struck out over the five hundred yards of open country from the ridge to the farmstead. She’d left two dozen footprint dots on the perfect white of the field before Dave followed. Nathan, knowing that he’d never be able to find the gang without his young companions, reluctantly followed.
And in the end he was glad he had.
The double-doored entrance to the large clapboard barn was open, and Donie made for it directly, her trajectory firmly set. She clearly wanted out of the wind, and to sit down somewhere that wasn’t “covered in snow”—as she called back while Dave and Nathan struggled to catch up. She may have been carrying a few extra pounds, but when Donie set her mind to it, she wasn’t easily deterred from any path.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 17