After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Dave took up where Stryker had left off. “And it’s those water pipes that are going to give us access into the Greenhouse. Here, there’s an access hatch, fifty yards from the river. It’ll be under a lot of ice and snow. We’re going to have to find a way to open it—we don’t know if it’s alarmed—and that will get us, through here, to the main tunnels under downtown, here and here. I suppose they just use them for storage now, or as emergency panic rooms if the Greenhouse is overrun. The tunnel will bring us up right in the hospital building, and near the plant room where the power from the windmills is inverted and streamed to the whole facility.”

  “Well, that gets us in,” Syd said, “which is all well and good, but how do we find Cyndi and the others? Six acres of buildings and glass walkways is not something we’re going to be able to search quickly without being discovered, right?”

  Nathan approached the table, carrying the bag he’d taken from the dead woman in the tenement. He pulled out the keycards and handed them to Stryker. “That’s where you come in. Literally.”

  Stryker took the cards and studied them. “Yeah, they’ll get me in. But there will be guards. I can’t just walk up and let myself in.”

  “You’re not going to use them to get in. You’re going to use them to get out.”

  “I don’t understand…”

  “Then let me explain,” Nathan began, but before he could, a voice floated up from the bag. “Nathan Tolley? Nathan… is that you?”

  Everyone in the room looked from the bag to Nathan and back again. Nathan reached into the bag and brought out the walky-talky and held it as if he were handling a rattlesnake. He looked into the bag—there was a SIG that may have shifted at some point and flicked the device on. Whatever had caused it, it was live now.

  “Nathan? Nathan… come back,” the walky-talky crackled and spat. “It’s me. Freeson. Come back. Freeson Mack to Nathan Tolley, come back.”

  They couldn’t say anything meaningful over an open channel like the one on the walky-talky, so Nathan resorted to saying, “Freeson, we’ll meet at the Detroit version of that place where you-know-who threw up all down your shirt.”

  “10-4, good buddy.”

  If anyone was listening, which seemed unlikely since the radio hadn’t made any sounds for a few days, there was no way they could have worked out that Nathan was talking about the Detroit Zoo. He was alluding to a time when Freeson and Marie had taken toddler Tony to Adirondack Animal Land in Gloversville, NY. to give Nathan and Cyndi a break and a ‘date day’ for themselves. Freeson had, against Cyndi’s advice, given the boy too much candy, and had ended up with an epic chocolate stain down the front of his new shirt. The memory made the clue, and within the hour, Nathan took the sled to the zoo and met up there with Freeson in the Humvee.

  Freeson hobbled out of the truck, displaying that his car wreck injury was acting up, as it sometimes did in the cold and damp with harsh rheumatic pain. He embraced Nathan and Nathan hugged him back just as hard.

  “You remembered.”

  “How could I forget, man? You still owe me a new shirt!”

  They laughed and went into John Crown’s cabin for coffee and salmon.

  “I just put the pieces together, Nate,” Freeson said as he drank and chewed. “Stryker was all over you talking to Brant, calling you here, and like you said, about him picking the route… he was adamant that we went a certain way back to the Masonic. I wanted to go through the back streets, staying off the highway. But he was insistent. Then I saw him playing with the radio in the Hummer as I was going up the steps to the building. I took no chances that he wasn’t sending a message. I decked him and took the truck.”

  “What have you been doing all this time?”

  “Surviving, best I can. Causing trouble where I could, and… er… kidnapping. I mean, if they can kidnap, so can I, I figure.”

  Freeson led Nathan to the back of the Humvee and popped the door mechanism. The tailgate flipped up, and there among the cop gear, ammo boxes, shotgun cases, and riot gear was Frank, the gang member who had been shot by Stryker. “Say hello, Frank.”

  Frank spat at them.

  “How, what, why?”

  “I ran into him, literally. Hit him with the truck. Wasn’t going too fast, so I don’t think I broke anything. Maybe a headlight.”

  Nathan grinned.

  “He was with a bunch of scumbags beating on a couple on their way back from Trash Town—trying to steal their stuff. I… what do they call it… intervened. The gang ran, I gave chase, and sonny-boy here, because of his bad leg, didn’t make it. Quite enjoyed myself, Nate, I admit. So, I thought I’d find some place to interrogate the nasty piece of work and see if he knew what had happened to you and the others.”

  “Plan,” said Nathan. “Plan, indeed.”

  Freeson followed the dog team and Nathan back to Trash Town and Rose’s place. While Horace took the Humvee to hide it in a garage on Rose’s orders, Freeson and Nathan carried Frank into the kitchen and dumped him on the floor. After brief explanations regarding Frank’s presence, and hugs and backslaps with Dave and Syd, Nathan filled him in on Stryker and his wife Rachael.

  “Sorry to hear that, man,” Freeson said as Nathan came to the end of the story.

  “Thanks,” Stryker said.

  “But you still shouldn’t have sold us out!” Freeson lunged on the statement and had to be held back from hitting Stryker by Nathan and Syd.

  “Calm down!”

  “Okay! Okay!” Freeson shrugged off their hands and stood back, pointing at Stryker. “You’re okay… for now, but if those boys or those women are harmed, ain’t nothing gonna stop me. You get me?”

  Stryker nodded sadly.

  “You can get in line behind me!” Frank said from the floor. It had been the first thing he’d said since Freeson had shown him to Nathan in the back of the Humvee.

  “You shot Billy. You shot him in the face! You were only supposed to shoot over our heads!”

  All eyes fixed on Stryker. “It was an accident. I panicked. I’m sorry. I aimed to miss you, too… but I’m a lousy shot.”

  Nathan shook his head at the revelation of how deep he’d been played by Stryker. He felt like going for the blond traitor himself now.

  Stryker made an admirable job of changing the subject, as the tension in the room could have been cut with a chair leg, and Nathan could see that Stryker wasn’t enjoying being the subject of so much ire. “Nate, before you went to meet Freeson, you were going to tell me what you wanted me to do.”

  Nathan picked up the keycards from the table and handed them to Stryker again.

  There were three feet of compacted snow and almost a foot of solid ice on top of the hatchway into the pipe tunnels down by the river. The calm weather of the last few days was over. A wind had begun ripping off the ice from the direction of Windsor, cutting around their legs like whips. The clouds were playing atmospheric Jenga, filling the sky from horizon to horizon with fat snow clouds that were soon to drop their cargo.

  After tying and leaving the sleds and dogs half a mile from the front entrance of the Greenhouse, well out of sight, where they could be left to sleep off a good meal, they’d taken the Humvee towards the river. In the back, Nathan had taken the walky-talky from the bag, as well as the one Freeson had liberated from Frank—who was still not enjoying being tied up on the floor of Rose’s kitchen—and set them both to a new frequency. They made one more stop to drop off Stryker, and to give him one of the newly re-tuned walky-talkies. “This is your chance to pay me back for everything you’ve taken. Don’t let me down, Stry. You help me get my family back and you will have my gratitude forever… don’t, and, well… I don’t need to spell it out.”

  “No, you don’t,” Stryker said grimly, and then he turned and went off into the dark.

  Freeson, Nathan, and Syd took turns hacking through the ice sheet with shovels and soon the metal of the door below was exposed to the air for the first time in what must have been many
months.

  It was a circular hatch with a heavily padlocked bar across it. The first snow from what was promising to be the filthiest of storms started to flurry around them as Nathan, and then Freeson, tried to break the bar with the shovel blade, and then its handle, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “This crazy plan gonna fail at the first hurdle?” Freeson asked, breathing heavily and resting on the handle of the shovel. Nathan shook his head.

  “I’m not beaten yet, compadre.”

  He picked up one of the three cop shotguns they’d brought with them from the back of the Hummer.

  “You can’t use that!” Syd hissed. “We’re too exposed here next to the ice—they’ll hear us in Canada.”

  “Relax.” Nathan put the barrel of the shotgun against the padlock, then took off his coat and packed it down on the door and bar, and as the wind started to saw into his back and his shoulders, he used rocks and snow to smother the coat and hold it down in the wind.

  “Ready?”

  Syd and Freeson shrugged. Nathan sighed, and then gave the padlock both barrels. The sound was muffled to a dull ‘crump’ and the shotgun bucked in his hand, and when the coat and snow were kicked away, the padlock was broken and twisted, and they wrenched off the bar by hand.

  Nathan put his coat back on, even though the back was riddled with shot and there was a double-fist-sized hole in the front of it over his heart.

  In this cold, some coat was better no coat.

  The storm fell upon them then as if on cue. A blizzard fizzing down from the sky with fat, sleety, stinging flakes. Freeson pulled the door the rest of the way open and climbed down the ladder he found just below the lip. When he was down, Nathan stuffed the bag of equipment through the hole and sent Syd on, and when she called up to say that she was at the bottom, Nathan climbed in and pulled the hatch shut behind him.

  Nathan was already soaked from the sleet and snow, and if he’d been hoping to warm up in the water tunnel, he was disappointed. The tunnel was freezing cold and unlit. Once they were all in, though, Freeson turned on his flashlight and they got a better look at their surroundings.

  The tunnel was roughly four feet in diameter, so there was no opportunity to stand up, and most of the space was taken up anyway by two plastic water pipes running the length of the tunnel. There were pools of stagnant water running as far as Nathan could see, and Freeson’s flashlight beam caught the skittering of a rat from thirty yards ahead as it raced to get away from this strange new threat.

  “Okay,” Nathan said. “Let’s get this done.”

  On their hands and knees, half on and half off the pipes, following the crazy swinging of Freeson’s flashlight, they began to inch up the tunnel.

  Nathan, pulling the equipment bag behind him, checked his watch when he could. They had an hour before Stryker was supposed to send them the information they needed. They would be in this crawl space for nearly three quarters of that time as they made their way towards the Greenhouse. That would leave them a scant fifteen minutes to take the larger tunnel to the area beneath the hospital and then get out to carry out the act of sabotage Nathan had planned.

  No pressure, then.

  Forty-seven minutes later, exhausted and cramped, their knees barking and bleeding, Nathan, Syd, and Freeson made it out of the water pipe tube and into the main service tunnel that led to the Greenhouse.

  Here, they could stand up and stretch their aching backs, but there was no time to rest. Nathan consulted their map as they stepped out into the concrete bifurcation. Dave’s precise hand and detailed drawing told them to take the opening to the right. It was dark, and echoey, but at least it was dry. And as Syd said as she walked, checking her gun as she did, she was “happy to no longer be crawling through rat crap.”

  Nathan checked the walky-talky as they moved forward. There was no reception yet; even though the last hundred yards of the water tube had felt like a steady incline upward, they were still too far below the surface to get a signal. Nathan checked the illuminated dial of his watch next. They were cutting it finely. If Stryker didn’t get through, they’d be coming out of the tunnel with no idea of where to go in the whole facility. The twist of anxiety in Nathan’s gut had begun flexing and squeezing, and he could feel the effect it was having on his breathing. Placing his trust in Stryker again was a real challenge, but it was the only option they had if the plan was going to have any chance of success.

  “You want me to what?” Stryker had asked in Rose’s kitchen, the incredulity in his voice causing it to squeak at the back of this throat.

  Nathan had drawn a deep breath and told Stryker again what he wanted him to do. “You go to the Greenhouse. You ask to speak to Brant. When you get to him, you tell him that I’ve come to you, and you tell him I’m willing to give myself up, to work with him—if you can check that Cyndi, my kids, Donie, and Lucy are safe and well. But here’s the thing; once you’ve found out where they’re being held, you tell him where we’re holed up, offering a double-cross… tell him to send Harmsworth out to neutralize us. Tell him we’ve got gold, lots of it. That’ll get him interested. Doesn’t matter where you say we are, but tell him I’m just waiting on his word—that I wasn’t going to tell him anything about the gold. Once Harmsworth is out of the way and you’re finished with Brant, go to the john or wherever, whatever, but get out of sight and call us. Do it on the hour. If you can’t do it then, wait until the next hour. But the longer we wait, the less chance we’ve got of getting this done.”

  “If he finds that walky-talky on me, he’ll kill me.”

  “Make sure he doesn’t find it.”

  Stryker had been dropped off over an hour before. It was coming up to 11 p.m., and if all had gone to plan, Stryker was just waiting to give them the signal now. Nathan sped up and the other two followed in his wake. He knew that Stryker was the weakest of links, but there was no other way Nathan could think of to get at least some of Harmsworth’s men away from the Greenhouse to reduce their numbers.

  Freeson’s hand fell on Nathan’s shoulder, breaking him out of his thoughts. “Listen…” he whispered.

  They had reached a bend in the tunnel and couldn’t see more than twenty yards ahead now. Nathan strained his hearing, and there, some way ahead around the corner, Nathan could hear the indistinct sound of someone talking. Freeson turned off his flashlight and the presence of other people up ahead was confirmed by a weak light.

  Nathan motioned the others to stay quiet, and to stay back. He pressed his back against the cold concrete of the tunnel wall and crabbed forward as far as he dared. Within ten yards, he could see a fair way down the tunnel to a smear of yellow light that was static and unwavering. He leaned his head around, and there, perhaps another sixty yards ahead, were two Detroit PD officers guarding the exit from the tunnels.

  Dammit to hell. Had they been compromised, or was this just a routine security detail?

  But it took just another minute of listening to determine that these voices seemed calm and even good-humored. These were no cops on high alert. As Nathan dared to lean out further, he could see that both officers were facing the exit gates. Both had their weapons, Heckler & Koch MP4s, on their shoulders and swinging freely. Only one of them was wearing a tactical helmet. The other was taking his off and about to use it as a stool. Then the other officer did the same and then reached into his pocket to bring out a small packet—once he’d opened it and started to shuffle, Nathan could see he held a deck of cards.

  The officers began to play on the concrete in front of them. Nathan looked at his watch again. They were not going to make it.

  Damn.

  “You there, Nathan?”

  Stryker’s voice from the walky-talky echoed down the tunnel as Nathan scrambled for the radio, grabbing at where it was hanging off his belt and turning it off. But the damage was done. As Nathan had thrown himself back against the wall, he’d seen the officer who had taken out the deck of cards looking straight down the tunnel towards him.

/>   At the very best, they were busted, with those cops coming to investigate.

  At the very worst, the cops wouldn’t even bother with that, and were going to radio for reinforcements immediately.

  Nathan shook his head and motioned to the others to stay back. He threw his gun to Freeson and said one word to his friend. “Carlton.” Nathan’s eyes implored Freeson to understand, and as the realization blossomed on his face, Nathan knew the message had gotten home. He turned, dumped his equipment bag on the floor, and, taking a breath that was so ragged with fear that he could have sawn wood with it, he stepped out into the full view of the cops, raising his hands as he did so.

  13

  Five.

  “Do not move! Stay where you are!”

  Nathan did exactly as he’d been told as the guards pounded down the tunnel towards him.

  Carlton Seeger was a bully. A certified nasty piece of work butthole who’d beaten his wife and anyone else who’d gotten in his way in Glens Falls. Trouble was, he’d known what he was doing in a fight. You couldn’t get to him in a toe-to-toe. He’d gut you.

  Four.

  This was the best that Nathan could hope for. The cops coming to him rather than them calling him to them.

  Carlton’s wife, Ingrid, had been a teaching assistant at the same school that Tony had attended before the Big Winter. She’d loved Tony and been friendly with Cyndi. One day, she’d turned up for work with both eyes blackened and a split lip. Cyndi had taken her back home and gotten the whole sorry story.

  Three.

  If the latter had happened—the cops calling Nathan on—this could have been a lot messier, and Nathan would have needed to at least try to deal with the cops on his own, in the first instance anyway. This was better.

  Ingrid had wanted to leave Carlton, or get Carlton to leave her, but had been too terrified to do anything about it. She’d been terrified that he would kill her. Nathan, working on a selector switch for the house boiler that had jammed, had heard everything. The anger had risen in his gut the whole time. Very few things made Nathan angry enough to blow, but the idea that a thug like Carlton would beat on his wife and carry on as if nothing had happened had sent his simmering ire into overdrive. He’d left the house without a word about what he was doing and driven off to collect Freeson from the auto shop.