Nathan couldn’t answer. It was true that Lucy had lost everything of her previous life. Yes, she was building something with Free, but he wasn’t from her world. He was a good man, but in another world, he’d have been the man fixing her limousine, not riding in it alongside her.
Nathan had never seen Lucy look more vulnerable than she did now, either. Hair tied back severely. Hollow-cheeked, gray around the eyes. For a woman who, even in this horror show of a world, had often managed to keep her external self appearing as she would have wanted, right now she looked like she’d aged fifteen years. Nathan wanted to do nothing more than hug her where she stood.
But she beat him to it, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. Her tears were hot on his neck, and her shoulders shook. Over the top of her head, he could see Free watching them, his face set but calm.
Freeson had never been someone who Nathan would have called in touch with his emotions—Nathan had always been the more open of the two of them. He put that down to Cyndi’s influence again, and how in almost every respect, over the years, she’d made him a better, stronger, and more approachable person, and it seemed it was that which Lucy had eventually succumbed to under the harsh yoke of their situation. Her grief and loss at the changes of her life bubbling out through her eyes as tears and mouth as deeply felt sobs.
“Hey, come on, Lucy. We got this far.”
“Yes,” she said, not lifting her head from his shoulder, “but how much further do we have to go, Nathan? How far?”
Nathan couldn’t answer the question other than with platitudes or diversions, so he said nothing and held her until she stopped crying.
Free just got on with butchering the deer. Meanwhile, Tommy took Tony and Rapier off into the woods to collect water from the river they’d seen beyond the picnic area as they’d come driving down into it. They took guns, too, and Tommy said he’d continue ‘Tony’s education in the art of shooting.’ Nathan was fine with that. He was just an interested amateur where that was concerned, and Tommy knew way more than he did.
Nathan looked around and saw that the youngsters were sitting in the Land Cruiser, working at the laptops and keeping Brandon occupied, but Syd… Syd was nowhere to be seen.
When Lucy finally unhooked herself from Nathan, wiping her wet cheeks on the heels of her hands, she went back to join Free, grabbing him by the cheeks and kissing his forehead when she reached him. Nathan heard her saying, “God, I needed that cry,” and he was pleased to see the ghost of a smile playing across both their faces. It wasn’t just Lucy, he thought, grinning sardonically—they could probably all do with a good cry right now. So much was being pushed down inside and left unspoken.
Which brought him back to Syd.
Syd had dropped back into the group well enough after the battle and earthquake at Caleb’s wind farm, almost as if she hadn’t been away. Tony had been pleased to reacquaint himself with her; they’d been firm friends before, bonding over her malamute, Saber, and because they were the nearest in age in the group—although Syd, due to the circumstances in which she had found herself and the things that had happened to her, had had to do a lot more growing up in the last few months than even Tony, who himself was nothing like the boy who’d started out from Glens Falls.
Since leaving the wind farm, though, she and Tony had been pretty much inseparable when in and around the campsites they’d made.
Syd had never hooked up with Saber again, she’d told them, not once she’d lost contact with him in Detroit. She was pleased now to be forging a strong bond with Rapier, who was a slightly smaller malamute than Saber had been. However, being smaller made him faster and able to travel longer distances without getting tired. Syd and Tony could often be found playing catch and fetch with the dog around the cars and now the tents. But even before he’d gotten caught up with Free and Lucy, Nathan couldn’t remember seeing Syd before Tony and the dog had eventually gone off with Tommy.
Dave and Donie shook their heads when Nathan asked where Syd had said she was going and told him that she hadn’t said a thing. They’d just assumed she was going off into the trees for necessary privacy to attend to a call of nature.
Donie looked at her watch and bit her plump red lip. “But that was over an hour ago.”
Syd was a hardheaded kid, with a clear sense of what she wanted and where she wanted to be, but she was also a mess of emotions when things got on top of her. Back in Detroit, when she’d found out the gang leader Danny had fetched up in the city, Nathan had eventually found her on top of the grand Masonic Temple where they’d made their home with Stryker, contemplating whether or not to throw herself off into the night. He’d talked her down and that had pushed them together with the same closeness she’d shared with Tony, but now Nathan was kicking himself. Realizing that, in his attempts to keep the bigger picture together, he’d let a few of the smaller details slip through his fingers—and Syd was one of those details.
There were three lines of tracks in the deep snow, leading away from the campsite and into the woods, and one which was from Free and Lucy returning with the deer. Tommy, Tony, and Rapier’s tracks were easy to distinguish from the lone trail heading northwest through a break in the trees at a rise in the land pointing toward the razorback of the Front Range.
Telling Free he was going to see where Syd had gotten to, Nathan took an MP4 and a night-sight from the Cruiser and took up Syd’s trail.
There were probably only thirty or so minutes of twilight left in the sky, and as he headed up the incline through the trees, he heard Tony laughing as Rapier barked excitedly, letting him know that they’d returned and giving Nathan the necessary focus he needed to get after Syd.
Syd was the kind of person who, if you didn’t make the effort to connect with her, would disappear from your life like smoke in the wind. This was evidenced by the fact that no one except Nathan had thought it was unusual that she’d been gone more than an hour. Nathan had expressly told everyone, in these now dangerous badlands of central Colorado, where gangs were operating with near impunity, that no one should go off alone. It was the only sensible course of action to take, but Syd was not someone who always took the sensible option.
And although it was great to have her back in the fold, it was easy to forget she was just a sixteen-year-old kid who was trying to make her way in the middle of a world gone insane. Lucy had begun showing the effect it was having on her, and Nathan had sure felt some of his lowest points on the trip to and away from Casper. Syd had been through the mangler, too, and unlike the grown-ups around her, she might still not be fully emotionally set up to cope.
Nathan shook his head at the situation as he walked—not only was he having to make decisions and keep the group together, but on the side, he was both social worker and med-psych. Yet again, he thanked whatever powers of fate that had brought Cyndi and her father to Nathan’s daddy’s auto shop all those years ago and had smitten him on the spot. Without that input into his life, he reckoned he’d have been in the funny farm a good few months ago.
The air was cold, and his breathing still wasn’t how it had been before the pneumonia, so he found it hard going to follow Syd’s prints. They were wide and deep. She’d fair marched up the rise with a determined stride. She might even have been running at some points, or at least jogging. There were handprints on the trunks of some of the trees where she’d pulled herself forward, and sights of her presence in snapped branches where she’d tugged herself up out of a ditch.
A frozen streambed cracked its ice beneath Nathan’s foot, but there was hardly a trickle of water beneath. His chest was hot now, and his breath left a trail of white behind him as the rise flattened out and led to an even steeper one.
The tracks continued unabated.
What had made Syd so determined to get this far away from the camp, and at such speed? Had she seen something that was too important to even tell the others about before she left? Something passing or ephemeral that, unless she got
to it immediately, would be lost to the night?
Nathan couldn’t guess at where she was heading. The darkness was almost nailed down over the surrounding hills at this point. He took the Armasight Nyx-7 Pro GEN Alpha Night Vision Goggles from his backpack and slid the elastic webbing across his forehead, clipping on the chin strap as he went. He turned the mechanism on, and as the world became a ghostly green, he picked up Syd’s tracks again, deep black against the eerie Herman-Munster-green tinged snow, and carried on.
He only got another ten strides before something hard smashed into the back of his skull and sent him sprawling unconscious into the snow.
15
On the plus side, Nathan woke warm and on a soft mattress. On the downside, his hands and ankles were tied, and the back of his skull was resting on a painful bruise the size of a duck egg.
The room lay in semi-darkness, but there was enough light from a dim oil lamp in the corner to show him rough, ancient clapboard wooden walls, stained with both age and tobacco. The room smelled dry, and of a hundred years of working men coming into the space to rest before working themselves hard again.
Nathan hadn’t picked up all that information from the smell, though, in all honesty. There was a brass plaque on one of the walls marking this room as one of those which had been used as a bunkroom in a modest flophouse, where gold miners and prospectors, tired from their exertions, would come after an honest day’s toil.
And there was an 1850s miner standing in the corner of the room, too. Handlebar mustache, shirt off, britches held up over his naked torso with suspenders, boots thick with dust and caked mud. A pick and a gold-panning dish leaned against the wall. His sightless eyes stared through Nathan and his frozen hands were held out in front of him, draped in a towel.
He was a waxwork.
Not the best construction Nathan had ever seen, like those in the museums of the big city, but this particular miner was a creditable stab at representing a hardworking man after his backbreaking day, just aching for a hot bath and a beer.
A stove in another corner of the room, black iron pipe thrusting up through the ceiling, was putting out some much-needed warmth into the room, but looking through the grate, Nathan could see that whatever wood was inside was burning down rapidly. Someone would need to come in soon and put some fuel on the fire, or Nathan would soon start to feel the cold. There was a quartered window behind the waxwork, and through it into the blue-black night, Nathan could see the myriad flakes of a swirling blizzard. Wherever he had woken up was gripped already in the teeth of a storm.
Nathan tried to sit up and shift position, but along with the ropes around his ankles, there was a chain threaded through the cord, which was shackled tightly to the bed frame. Nathan was going nowhere.
The last thing he remembered was putting on the night vision goggles, picking up Syd’s trail, and then being bushwhacked from behind. Whoever had done that had come out from the shadows or from behind a tree with such stealth and speed that Nathan had known nothing about it.
It was all very well, telling everyone to be extra vigilant. It would have been a good idea to have followed his own advice.
But of all the places he could have imagined he’d be waking up after being poleaxed, a Colorado Gold-Mining Museum would not have been high on the list of possibilities.
Nathan heard a creak outside the door and strained his hearing to see if he could pick up any voices that might give him a clue as to what had been going on, where he was, and why he’d been tied to the bed. The wooden-slatted door opened on mechanisms that sounded like a cross between a Halloween sound effect and a hinge that hadn’t been used for over a hundred and fifty years.
The figure who came in was wearing a long, stained leather duster with a black Stetson on his head that had seen better days. His jaw was square, grizzled with peppery stubble, and his blue eyes darted across his face, quick and bright. There were crystals of snow layered on his shoulders and on the brim of his hat. He’d just come in from outside.
And so had the guy in the parka, standing behind him.
“Yeah, that’s him,” Free said, pausing to blow on his cold hands. “That’s Nathan Tolley.”
The soup was chunky, with fresh vegetables and generous cubes of chicken. It had been seasoned to near perfection, and Nathan ate it greedily while Free, sitting across from him at the rough-hewn wooden table, made a stab at some explanations.
“Greg Larson, the guy who came in with me, he’s head guy around here. He and a couple of his men took you down in the woods.”
Nathan’s duck egg bruise throbbed like he was living next door to a nightclub breaking all local public nuisance ordinances. He touched the hard mass and winced. It was warm and painful. There was dried blood in his hair, too. “Couldn’t they have just said hello?”
Free grinned. “Larson asked me to convey his apologies. They thought you were the sniper.”
“Me?”
“Yup. Whoever’s shooting up the locals around here isn’t just taking out the military. He, or she—they really don’t know—has been picking off their animals, as well as taking out two of their guys who they’d put in place to guard the barns. They heard you crashing about and took no chances.”
Nathan shook his head at the news. These were dangerous times indeed. He turned his gaze to Syd.
“And what about you—what was all that about? Leaving the camp on your own without telling anyone? Did they take you down, too?”
“Hardly,” Syd said with all seriousness. “You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to sneak up on me. No, I saw they’d knocked you out and were dragging you over to the museum, so I went back to get Free and the others. Donie found the road leading here on the laptop and we came up.”
“Where is here?”
“Drymouth,” Free said. “Well, technically, we’re a couple of miles outside Drymouth, in their old gold-mining town. Before the Big Winter, it was a tourist attraction. ‘Come pan for fake gold!’, ‘Go down the mine and see how things were done during the gold rush!’ ‘Sweat like a miner!’ You know the kinda thing I mean.”
“Yeah. I met one of the waxwork miners. He was a little stiff and not at all talkative.”
Free and Syd laughed.
The room they were eating in was lit with more of the oil lamps, and there was a roaring fire in a grate. There were furs on the floor and hanging from the walls, and there were plaques all around the place, giving information on exhibits that were no longer there; the place reeked of history. As the latest storm raged outside, though, there was a warmth and a safety to the place that felt more than comforting.
Tony, Brandon, Lucy, and the others had met up with Nathan after he’d been released by Larson. The big man, taking off his Stetson to reveal close-cropped blonde hair that didn’t at all match the graying stubble on his chin, had led them here to where they could rest and eat. He’d left them in the room and said he would be back later, with all the information they might need.
The kids and Rapier were already asleep on furs near the fire. Lucy had laid down with them and been asleep in moments. Dave and Donie were on the far side of the room with their soup, discussing whatever was on their laptop, and Tommy was at the end of the table where Nathan and the others ate, keeping his own counsel.
“So, come on,” Nathan said as he pointed his spoon at Syd. “Why did you leave the camp?”
Syd set a defiant angle to her chin. “Saving everyone’s hide.”
Nathan raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, all of you. Everyone was so busy bellyaching about the situation, going off to hunt, or wasting their time on their ’puters, no one was paying attention.”
“Go on.”
“The camp was being watched from above the ridge. I saw a figure moving through the trees. I made an executive decision.”
“Oh, you did, did you?”
“Yes. I found where whoever it was had dug in and hid myself, waiting for him to return. If you hadn’t come bl
undering after me, making all that noise, he might not have been spooked and stayed away. Larson and his boys heard you crashing about, too, and came out to get you!”
“I still don’t know why you didn’t come and tell me first.”
“Because you move like a baby elephant, old man. If I was gonna get shot, it was gonna be because I made the mistake, not you.”
Free’s expression grew priceless—he obviously thought Syd was hilarious. Nathan only felt his cheeks reddening. “Okay, point taken. But you shouldn’t be putting yourself in danger like that.”
“Yes, I should. I might have caught the sniper, and that would have made us all a whole lot safer. As it is, you galumphing up there after me and sending him away means we’ve lost him. The fresh snow will have covered all his tracks.”
Nathan knew there was no point arguing with Syd when she was in this kind of mood, and so he let it drop, finishing his soup and coffee instead of arguing.
He drained his mug just as Larson returned. The tall man had fresh snow on his shoulders. He untangled himself from the duster, then warmed himself by the fire before joining Nathan and the others at the table.
Tommy still hadn’t said anything, and Nathan, while not concerned about it right now, at least felt it was unusual enough to remark to the Texan that he was being extra quiet.
Tommy shrugged. “Got nothing to add right now, so I’ll just listen. Scourge of the age, people opening their mouths before they’ve thought about what they say.”
And that was that.
“So, let me apologize again for the bump on the head,” Larson spoke up. “I’m sure you realize that with things the way they are, we’re not going to be taking any chances.”
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 65