In the valley below, snow lay on the ground from a moderate fall that had come down two days before. It hadn’t thawed any, and although it hadn’t been near as bad as some weather events Nathan had experienced in the last few years, the snow was still thickly laid and showing no signs of dissipating. The all too brief respite from the bite of winter, afforded over the trip into Wyoming and then down into Colorado, was definitely over now. The air cut into Nathan’s cheeks as he stuffed his hands into the pockets of the parka.
It was clear that the world was still changing, and that the Arctic Circle was either expanding or shifting both downward and westward. Maybe in a few years, if the crustal displacement continued, the area of the Earth that had once been the North Pole would be tropical seas, and where once the equator had been would be only frozen desolation.
There was no way of knowing if the fate of the planet would continue this slow apocalypse for all time. Maybe they’d never find a place to rest; maybe they would need to keep moving ahead of the cold zone for the rest of their lives.
What a world for the young to be born into.
The sky was a thin blue, and the clouds in the ragged tangles were speeding west fast. Nathan hadn’t seen a bird in the sky since they’d left Glens Falls. Those that could leave had flown south and stayed there, and the others perhaps had died when their food chain had been interrupted by the lack of seasonal advance. The world was a huge screw-up now, and Nathan wondered if there would ever be any balance or equilibrium to be found for any of them.
For the first time, he felt a pang of envy that it had been Cyndi who’d taken Stryker’s bullet and not him.
It shocked him to the core, even thinking it momentarily, and it dragged his mood down, which—since getting on the road to recovery—had been a lot better than it had been before the earthquake. Now, it felt like a yawning pit of cold opening up in his gut for the black dogs of depression to howl up at him from.
It didn’t matter that the sun was shining and he could see for miles in unusually clean air. It didn’t matter one little bit. All that mattered in this moment to Nathan was that he wished he’d gone with Cyndi —away from this never-ending winter.
The rage overtook him then, and he stood there trying to make his trembling legs move, and his useless hands into fists. He didn’t need this now. He hadn’t needed it ever. He didn’t want to be the leader of a bunch of adults acting like kids and fighting each other like cats in a sack as soon as he wasn’t around to bang their heads together.
He just wanted to be with his sons, and damn the rest of them.
Damn them all to…
The bullet sang out from many yards away and smacked into the wall behind him, blasting up chips of brick before he heard the retort of the shot.
Nathan ate dirt and began crawling backward toward the open doorway. Two more shots tchannnged off the metal doorframe, and another shattered Caleb’s neon sign, turning it into a spray of ice-glass. Nathan felt the sleet of shards peppering his hair as he pushed his face further into the snow.
Geez.
Was this going to be never-ending? Who the hell was firing at him now?
Running footsteps, more shots, and the crunch of boots across the crust of snow approaching fast.
Nathan was unarmed and exposed, so if those boots belonged to whoever was shooting at him, then he was going to be dead in seconds. There was nothing for it; he was going to have to get to cover, either in the building or somewhere else. He just hoped that whoever had been firing would be less accurate with their shooting if they were running, and with that thought in his mind, Nathan leaped to his feet and began to run toward the door.
The entrance hall to the maintenance building exploded with gunfire, shards of brick, and pieces of torn metal and shattering glass, sending Nathan spinning to the corner of the building. He spun around the brickwork and sprinted blindly. His chest wasn’t ready for this kind of exertion. It was still silted up with old phlegm and pneumonia scarring, but if he stayed where he was, he’d be dead in seconds.
The closest piece of cover on the exposed ridge was the base of the nearest turbine. The access hatch at the bottom was open, and Nathan made for that, keeping his head down and hoping against hope that the corner of the maintenance building would give him enough respite to make it to the turbine housing before whoever was firing rounded the corner.
Nathan crashed through the access hatch at full speed. The floor inside the circular turbine tower was made of aluminum, though, and the metal was covered in ice.
Nathan careened four feet across the space and smashed into the aluminum ladder which led up to the next floor some fifty feet above. Nathan threw himself out of the line of sight through the hatch as soon as he was able, crashing now into the red based step-up-transformer. The transformer took the energy created by the turbine and turned it into usable electricity for the facility—and beyond, back when it had been part of the power grid.
The crunch of the footsteps was still approaching and the sound of gunfire seemed to be increasing. Thankfully, it didn’t seem that anyone was firing at the turbine. There was a chance that whoever was hunting Nathan was waiting until they got a clear shot before shooting at him.
Perhaps the plan of the attackers had been to take over the turbines for their power-generating capacity, and it would be a stupid thing to shoot them up and destroy them in the process.
Nathan’s hand brushed against a wrench that had been left leaning against the step-up-transformer. It was thirty inches long and made of steel. It was also the nearest thing he had to a weapon, so he picked it up and a held it like a baseball bat.
The running footsteps were almost upon the access hatch now. Nathan got ready, trying to keep his ragged breathing steady and his feet firm on the slippery metal floor.
If the gun arm came in first, he was ready to break it, and if a head appeared, he was ready to brain it. In the end, what came in was neither.
It was a whole girl, all at once.
She’d been running as fast as Nathan, if not faster, and as she came through the door and slid past, Nathan scythed the wrench into empty air because she was already through and crashing into the ladder in the same way he had. He swung the wrench at her form and it bounced off the rungs of the ladder. The impact jarred his arms all the way to his shoulders as the tool thudded down into the place where her head had just been.
“It’s me!” the girl shouted. “Nathan, it’s me!”
Nathan dropped the wrench—he recognized the voice. As the girl came up from her panicked duck, she held her small black Beretta Cheetah in her fist toward the ceiling and pulled down the scarf that was covering her face.
“Syd? Syd? My god. Is it you?”
“Yah. Now get back. I’ve got people to kill.”
It was Syd B4, the teen who Nathan had left behind in Detroit with the man who had eventually shot Cyndi in the back, Stryker Wilson. Her hair was still black and spiky, and her skin white like the snow on the ground, albeit with two red doll spots of color from running after Nathan.
The B4 part of her name, she’d taken from the address of the apartment she’d shared with her now deceased mother. She’d gotten on the wrong side of a vicious gang in New York, who’d followed her to Glens Falls, where she’d met Nathan, and then traveled with them on to Detroit. The city where, in a desperate ski-doo chase, Nathan had almost left her to be taken by the gang leader Danny—before Syd had gotten the better of him and strangled him in the snow.
Syd was a force of nature who had loved Tony and had formed an uneasy alliance with Nathan. To see her here was the very last thing he might have expected.
Now, she pushed Nathan back away from the door and fired three shots from the Beretta out at two figures who were approaching, each of them holding Heckler & Koch MP4s and wearing arctic camouflage uniforms.
They dived for cover and returned fire.
Syd danced backward as bullets crashed into the confined space, embedding themse
lves in the walls and tinging off the metal.
The step-up-transformer took a shattering hit right in the center of its kilowatt gauge and spat glass in every direction. Nathan pressed his back against the metal wall of the tube. “What the hell is going on?”
“Umm,” Syd said, snapping a new mag into the Beretta and loosing off four indiscriminate shots through the access hatch without looking, “they’re alive and they want me dead.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m here trying to warn you that they’re coming.” She fired off another couple rounds through the door. “Sorry, we kinda all got here at the same time. Bit of a mix-up, to be honest. Next time, I’ll try to be ahead of the bad guys.”
Nathan’s head was swimming and his chest was a hot lump of molten iron. There were plenty of questions he wanted answered, but this wasn’t the time to ask them. “How many of them are there? More than just these two you’ve got pinned down?”
“I dunno—seven, maybe eight. I ran into them on the road below the ridge. Tried to make it up here before they cottoned on, but I guess I wasn’t lucky enough.”
The news of the enemy numbers sent an icicle of fear between the molten infernos of his lungs, right into his heart.
“Tony. Brandon. The rest of them. The other attackers will be in the building right now.”
Bullets zinged back from outside, dinging the turbine walls and ricocheting in. Syd emptied her mag and snapped in another.
“Yeah. It seems likely.”
“You got a weapon for me?”
“Backpack. Middle pocket.”
Nathan waited for the next barrage of shots to end before he leaped across the space of the open hatch, landing behind Syd. Her North Face pack was Special Ops Black and was a mess of damp snow and mud. He pulled the zipper on the middle pocket and pulled out a SIG Sauer P226 and a bunch of mags held together with rubber bands.
He loaded the weapon and pointed it over Syd’s head, through the door. If he had to fight his way out of here to get to his sons, then that’s what he’d have to do.
But before he could even pull the trigger to send the first bullets out through the access door, the room exploded.
10
“I don’t necessarily want to shoot you. However, if I have to, I will. Now I come to think about it… there’s several of you I would thoroughly enjoy shooting, I have to say. You, for instance, Miss B4. I would very much enjoy putting a bullet right between your eyes.”
Lieutenant Price placed the business end of his Colt Government M1911 semi-automatic pistol, with its chunky wooden grip and gunmetal blue barrel, against Syd’s forehead.
She didn’t blink.
Syd looked hard at Price from her kneeling position and asked, “Do you think you could speak up? The thunderflash your boys threw into the turbine housing has left me with an awful ringing in my ears.”
Price tapped the muzzle hard against the girl’s head. “A smart mouth is a dead mouth today… I’m sure you heard that.”
The ringing in Nathan’s ears was subsiding enough now for him to pick out most of what the thick-set lieutenant was saying. There was blood drying stickily on Nathan’s face, and one ear—the one that had been nearest to the stun grenade Price’s men had lobbed through the access hatch—was nearly deaf, but even that was an improvement over an hour ago, when it had been completely deaf.
They were on their knees in Caleb’s Bar, spread in a long line across the floor. Caleb’s crew, even Rosa, looked like they had all taken a severe beating. Caleb’s nose was busted, for sure. A thick double-line of blood had streamed from his nostrils over his lips and chin, and was drying now on his bow tie and shirt.
Lucy and Free were next to each other. Free’s head was bowed, and the one eye that Nathan could see was growing a pulpy bruise. Lucy had a red handprint still stinging one cheek from where someone, probably Price, had slapped her.
Donie, on her knees, had tears bulbing on the end of her nose, and Dave’s arm had been cut from the sling to make sure he wasn’t concealing any weapons—he was cradling the injured arm and metal tube like a baby.
Tony was the only one not on his knees. Price had allowed him to sit on one of the benches holding Brandon. Nathan ached because neither of his sons were within arm’s reach, but at least he could see them.
That left Tommy Ben.
Tommy Ben was not in the room, which meant one of two things. Price’s men hadn’t found him yet, or he was dead. The way the attackers had loosed rounds off toward Syd, in particular, and the building in general, it was a miracle that none of the people on their knees in the bar had gunshot wounds.
It was entirely possible that Tommy was lying in a pool of his own brains, right there in the gym where Nathan had last seen him.
“So, Mr. Tolley,” Price began, “this is how it is going to be. There is a storm coming in. My men and I are going to hunker down here with you all tonight, and then we will head out tomorrow morning.”
“Where to?” Nathan asked, not making eye contact with Price. Price was the kind of man he didn’t want to give any reason to feel antagonized, especially with all those guns and his children in the same room.
“Detroit, of course, Mr. Tolley. You have an appointment with Mayor Brant in the Greenhouse, which he is very keen you should keep.”
Nathan and his people had lit out of Detroit after assisting in a mini-revolution that had overthrown the elite ‘Greenhousers’ in their hermetically-sealed, glass-covered streets, where they lived a comfortable existence by exploiting the general population of the city. When Nathan and the others had headed west, they’d left a city with a new government and the bad guys captured. When they’d been attacked by a stealth helicopter on the road in Wyoming, by Stryker Wilson and others of Mayor Brant’s people, it had led to the death of his wife. Mayor Brant was obviously back in charge, and it would seem that Brant was in no mood to give up his ideas of revenge. What Nathan couldn’t work out was how the helicopter, and now Price, had found them in the wilds of Wyoming and Colorado. But that was a mystery which didn’t need solving right now. There were more pressing matters.
“You caused Mayor Brant a hell’a lot a trouble, boy, and he charged us with tracking you down and bringing you home. He is, shall we say, more than a little upset by the way you repaid his generosity with insurrection, and he’s definitely… miffed… to have lost his helicopter. In these days of extreme shortages, people can be replaced, but a highly-modified MH-60 Black Hawk stealth helicopter is a little harder to come by. And by destroying it, you added insult to injury. Which, if I’m reading Mayor Brant correctly, are the two things he is going to visit upon you at the moment we get back home.”
“It seems an awful lot of trouble to go to, just to settle a score,” Lucy said, looking up.
“Mayor Brant doesn’t like loose ends, my dear, and you people are the loosest of ends.”
Price stalked the line, looking at the group of kneeling captives. “One of the things I recognize in the vanquished is that you may all seem to be cooperating, and doing as you’re told, but right now, I bet you’re seething inside with plans and schemes. Especially you, Miss B4, hmm?”
Syd didn’t respond, but Nathan could see the set of her jaw tightening. Syd was showing creditable restraint.
“I admire you. I do. That might come as a surprise to a scrawny waif and stray like you, Miss B4, but I do. I surely do. To get away from Brant’s men, and get here just enough ahead of us to raise the alarm, makes you something special. It would be a shame to end all that potential now, but I need to counteract the scheming and planning that’s going on in all your heads at the moment.”
Price waved his arm expansively. “Right now, you’ve all got hope. You might be on your knees, and you might be giving the impression of being a bunch of good little captives. But I know… I know what is going on in your heads.”
“We won’t give you any trouble,” Nathan whispered. “You have my word.”
Pri
ce threw his head back and laughed long and generously. “I can see why people follow you, Mr. Tolley. You got a sense o’humor. People love a sense of humor.”
Price scratched the side of his temple with the muzzle of his pistol as he thought for a moment. “I myself do not have one. I am a cold-blooded killer, who has come into his own in this changed world. Men like me don’t need a sense of humor when we have enough bullets.”
Nathan looked directly at Price now. He could see where this was headed. The thought of what was coming curled in his guts like a shivery shoal of cold fish.
“So, it’s time for some instruction. I want to put an end to any plotting or scheming you might be considering in your rebellious little heads.”
“You don’t need to. Please…” Nathan’s voice cracked with fear. He knew that he was safe. Brant wanted him back in Detroit. But that left everyone else at terrible risk. “I’m begging you, Lieutenant Price. There will be no plots, no schemes. Nothing. We’ll stay here with you tonight without any trouble at all, and tomorrow we can begin the journey back to Detroit with you. Once the storm has passed.”
As if to underline the mention of the storm, the roof of the maintenance building rattled in the increasing wind. The promised storm was about to roll over the ridge and complicate the outburst that was already erupting inside the building.
“You sound so reasonable, Mr. Tolley. So reasonable, in fact, that I almost believe you. Almost, but not quite.”
Price’s stroll along the line had brought him to Miriam, who was kneeling next to Larry. Sweat was standing out on the engineer’s forehead, but Miriam’s face was stoic.
“Look at this one, for instance,” Price said, indicating the nurse. “She’s not going to give me the satisfaction of showing me how scared she is. This is a woman who would go to her death rather than break down and beg for mercy. Is that right?”
Price was ratcheting up the sadism, and enjoying it judging by the smile on his grizzled face. His seven men in the room, their weapons at the ready, stood by at the same time—to a man, not showing distaste or disgust on their faces. Their expressions only showed that this was Price’s thing, that it was a speech they’d all heard before and, in the final analysis, they were okay with it.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 60