Nathan had squeezed Tommy’s hand, and then closed the doors to the utility bed of the Ford as Free pulled the truck away.
Nathan didn’t like splitting up the party like this, but he had to find his boys, and there was no time to be wasted in getting Tommy to the FEMA field hospital in Denver.
The Drymouth adults put up no resistance as Donie and Nathan searched the museum and its buildings, ready with their Glock and the MP4. With the death of Larson, all of the purpose seemed to have drained from the settlers. As if the hold Larson had had on them had immediately been dissipated as soon as he’d taken both bullets from Arctic’s sniper rifle.
They found Tony and Brandon locked in the equipment shed with the other older children.
Tony ran at his daddy as he was released, hugging him tight and burying his head in his stomach. They found Brandon in a cradle, in a room with the other youngsters. Sally, the woman they’d met at breakfast a dozen lifetimes ago, was looking after them. She said from behind the door that she wouldn’t “give them any trouble,” and added, “Don’t shoot me… please.”
The boys were none the worse for their ordeal. Brandon looked like he’d slept through the whole thing. Tony cried, but insisted he was okay when Nathan quizzed him.
Within the hour, Nathan and Donie had the surviving Drymouth residents up in the main building with the children. There were only three men left alive, and they had given up without a fight. Like Sally, left to look after the children in the equipment sheds, they didn’t want no trouble.
It was astonishing to Nathan to see the change in them, now that the iron grip of their guru had been released. They looked lost, vulnerable and bereft. The children were quiet, obedient and sitting quietly as if they were in the presence of a disciplinarian teacher and dared not talk out of turn.
All ears and eyes were trained on Nathan, both the upturned faces of the children and the adults looking at him with rapt attention. The expression on their faces said the same thing with one voice—“tell us what to do.”
Tell us what to do.
Nathan was shaken by the lack of agency in the room. It was as if they had all been programmed to be unable to think for themselves. He wondered if they felt the same way he once had, when he’d been brainwashed in the silo owned by Strickland Grange. Back then, the man and his people had been able to convince Nathan, by use of drugs and electroshock therapy, that Cyndi and his children were dead, and that he was giving up his life to Jesus. It had been a horrific situation—which had only been reversed by the shock of seeing that Cyndi was still alive when she and Tommy broke into the silo to rescue him.
It didn’t seem that these people before him now had been brainwashed with drugs or electric shocks, though. They had been willingly led by the nose by the charismatic Larson, and now all they wanted was for someone else to fill the gap his ending had left in their lives. Nathan had prepared a speech in his head, that was going to tell them he was going to make contact with the authorities in Denver and tell them what had happened here, and that maybe the FEMA forces there might be able to help them, but the words just stuck in his throat. He didn’t want to meet their mindless anticipation to be told what to do, and what they should think.
He didn’t want to be their new Larson.
So, he left them to it, and walked out of the room without a word.
The Cruiser was exactly where Tommy had said it would be. There was still half a tank of gas—easily enough to get them to Denver to meet up with Free and the others.
On the driver’s seat, Nathan found what he assumed Tommy had left the settlement to go find, back when Dave and Donie’s satellite uplink had failed to connect to the internet. Tommy had been to the library in the town of Drymouth, the one that had given the museum its name. There were newspapers in the Cruiser, stamped with the Drymouth library mark. They were stained and damp, obviously having been taken out of a weather-compromised building. Each had a story about the arrest of “Cult Leader” Greg Larson some five years before. He’d been charged with false imprisonment of children, and of unnecessary cruelty to adults, all perpetrated in his farmstead up near Boulder.
There were lurid stories of people being forced to give up their children to Larson’s weird project. And reports of how the children were ‘re-educated’ with sensory deprivation tactics, their parents sucked dry of all their cash—this to be put into Larson’s mission to build his “Transubstantiation Craft.”
There were also blurry pictures of the silver saucer-shaped construction, which Nathan immediately recognized as the craft he’d seen in the mine’s chamber.
A trial had taken place, but in the end, Larson had been acquitted when all of the prosecution’s witnesses—the people who’d lived on the farm with him—had withdrawn all their statements and changed their stories to support him.
Larson had gone back to the farm with his ‘people’ to carry on waiting for their “Transubstantiation to Calisto One.”
Nathan read over everything, realizing that Larson and his people must have moved it to Drymouth as the Big Winter had worsened, to enable him to carry out his sick and twisted rituals.
There was plenty of background about Larson. A former drug addict, thrown out of the teaching profession for taking science classes and turning them into discussions about Calisto One and the aliens who would come to save humanity one day. His mental illness—and that was what the newspapers decreed it must have been, perhaps being a psychotic condition which had been induced by drug taking—had not robbed him of his faculties to persuade or convince the gullible, the lonely, the paranoid, or the emotionally needy. It all told a story that was all too familiar, and one that, because of the privations and horrors of the Big Winter, was all too ready to suck up anyone vulnerable in its wake.
Nathan sighed, shook his head, and threw the papers into the snow.
“Let’s do this. Denver, here we come.”
19
Denver was an open sore.
It was a shame that the threatening weather was still holding off, Nathan thought as they rolled through the suburbs of the city, because a fresh fall of snow would have hidden much of what was making the city so hard to take in.
The first thing that had hit them was the smell.
In the crew cab, Tony, with Brandon and Rapier, had started sniffing at the baby’s diaper to see if he needed to be changed. But it hadn’t been Brandon making the smell, and even with the windows closed, and the air vents’ plastic covers snapped shut, the F-350 had filled with a wrenching odor that made Nathan’s eyes water and his guts turn over.
Donie put her hand over her mouth and nose, finding it difficult to breathe.
“What’s that smell, Daddy?” Tony asked as the 85 going north from Castle Rock took them through Littleton and onto the city beyond.
“Death,” Nathan said quietly, and after that, no one remarked on the stench. They just let it get on with darkening the mood and turning their stomachs.
They passed many dead bodies, some half-covered in snow which had been there a long time, at least since before the last storm. Other bodies were fresher, much rimmed with frost and flakes, but also with sprays of blood on the snow where they’d been shot.
There was a burned-out bus on an off-ramp, with the driver half in and half out of the cab. He’d been forced through the windshield by an impact, or pushed himself through in a desperate attempt to escape. His arms were held out stiffly in front of him in a frozen mockery of pleading, his Regional Transit District cap skewed on his decomposing skull.
The streets lay beneath thick blankets of snow, and the buildings that abutted the road were either burned out or burning. Plumes of smoke rose into the gray, burgeoning clouds. On the horizon, to the west, the rising slopes of the Rockies bit into the sky like teeth. It was as if the whole rotting city was being consumed in a troll’s mouth like carrion.
With the heaters blowing as hard as they could, Nathan still felt the shiver of disquiet as they rolled on
at ten miles per hour. The roads were clogged, not just with corpses, but with vehicles on both sides of the highway. They would occasionally see a Jeep or a 4x4 moving off into the distance, and at one point, Tony pointed up at the sky as the black dot of a military helicopter moved off into the distance.
They had to stop several times to check snow drifts on the highway, which were blocking their way, to see if there was anything more solid than just the snow beneath them—and when they did, the rat-a-tat-tat of small arms fire seemed to echo around them from all directions. There were many small, dirty battles going on in the city, it appeared. Whoever was fighting, Nathan had no idea, but a rapidly increasing feeling of dread and an encroaching sense of doom assailed his thinking like the reek of the dead city.
It looked like the buildings they could see had been deliberately torched, perhaps to discourage people from trying to live in them.
Nathan got the sense that if you were going to stay in Denver, then you were going to be herded to where you could best be controlled by whoever the ascendant authority was—whether that be FEMA or a City Baron like Brant in Detroit. The uneasy feeling within the city limits was all-pervading.
“Roadblock,” Donie said as Nathan’s eyes flicked from the road to nearby burned-out buildings.
Bringing his attention to what was up ahead, he saw that the road was closed by a succession of concrete blocks with red and white striped poles between them. Soldiers—well, he assumed they were soldiers, but anyone these days could get themselves a uniform and be anyone they wanted—patrolled behind the blocks on both sides of the road. Two stubby-looking APCs were parked alongside them, and there was a camouflage-painted, demountable knock-down cabin with dark windows and a porcupine of antennae on the roof.
It looked official, but appearances could be deceptive.
A soldier came forward, ducking under the central pole, and raised his hand for Nathan to slow the truck.
Nathan had vivid flashbacks to the Arctic Sniper—who he’d assumed was the same person to have taken out Toothill’s men at that other roadblock, and with vicious efficiency. He was surprised to find himself wincing in anticipation as the soldier came forward, expecting a high-velocity round to smack into him at any moment.
Composing himself, and pushing the thought from his mind, Nathan wound down the window.
“Business in Denver?” the soldier asked, looking through the window at Nathan and then past him to the crew cab.
“We have a friend who was brought to the FEMA hospital. We wanted to see how he is, if that’s okay?”
The soldier’s face was set, his mouth thin and bloodless. “That’ll be five hundred dollars.”
Nathan blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“You want to go on through here, that’ll be five hundred dollars, or the equivalent in gold.” The soldier was completely matter of fact in what he was requesting, as if it was something that he said a dozen times a day.
“But, we want to go to the hospital—that’s all. I don’t have five hundred dollars.”
The soldier looked past Nathan, and his eyes rested on Donie. Nathan could see her leg trembling in the periphery of his vision, as the anxiety created by the soldier’s salacious expression bled out through her frame. “There are other methods of payment we might consider.”
He pointed directly at Donie. “Three hours in the cabin with her. But that’s the best I can offer.”
Nathan stared, appalled at the level of corruption that was so baldly on display here. If the soldier’s uniform, and that of his comrades, was a legitimate expression of government authority in the city, it wasn’t just Denver that stank.
The soldier shrugged. “Take it or leave it. You can try and find another way into the city if you want, but right now the Clancys and the Ramirez gangs have got their sides of the city sewn up tighter than a dead nun’s holy of holies. And trust me, their tolls won’t be as generous and accommodating as ours. Up to you, buddy.”
The vertigo in his gut almost stilled his mouth, but Nathan had to check. “We’re not interested in that. But we do want to know if an F-350 came through here in the last day or so. Had an injured man.”
The soldier shrugged and met Nathan with a steely gaze. “Information is extra, too.”
Nathan wound up the window, a foul taste in his mouth. He turned the truck around, bumping over the central reservation and going back the way they had come. The stunned silence in the cab lasted a considerable time. Donie’s knee didn’t stop shaking for an age.
After all that they’d been through, Nathan hadn’t thought there was anything shockworthy left that that Big Winter could throw at him.
How wrong he had been.
His horror at the soldier’s suggestion mixed with anger and grief for the country and civilization Nathan had lost. He didn’t think he’d ever stop grieving for it. Nathan took an off-ramp into a built-up suburb and pointed the truck east along the road. Rows and rows of houses that had once been neat and presentable stared out on them with dead, black eyes.
Like those on the highway they’d left, many of the buildings had been burned out or half demolished. Bodies littered the snow in places, and at one point they saw a small pack of perhaps half a dozen dogs pulling at a body that was mostly covered in snow. Rapier’s ears pricked up and he stared through the window as if he disapproved of how far his cousins had descended into the same barbarism as the humans.
When Nathan felt they had traveled far enough east, he turned to go north again, to see if they could find a route in. The houses on the east side of Denver were low, ranch-style dwellings surrounded by trees and small parks. Before the Big Winter, this would have been a well-appointed neighborhood, with all the amenities, schools, and facilities any family could wish for. Now, the atmosphere was one of deep foreboding, chill silence, and a very real sense of unease.
There had been fewer cars traveling along these streets, and consequently, the snow here was much deeper. Nathan was forced to slow the F-350 down to a snail’s pace, which only added to his sense of vulnerability.
“Keep your gun close at hand,” Nathan whispered to Donie, and she nodded, lifting an MP4 from the footwell and holding it ready. Nathan had no idea why he’d whispered, really. They were grumbling through the suburb in a huge F-350, belching exhaust and crunching through three feet of compacted snow. It wasn’t like he was going out of his way to conceal their presence in the truck.
Nathan paused the forward momentum of the Ford for a moment and checked the magazine in his Glock. It was full, and he knew he had three more mags in the side pockets of his pants. The last thing he wanted to do was get into a firefight with whoever the Clancy or Ramirez gangs were, but it was better to be prepared for all eventualities.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Donie said, craning her neck up through the windshield to scan the sky. “Those clouds aren’t going to be holding onto their loads for much longer. Should we stop for the night? Get some food into us and see how things are in the morning?”
The subtext from Donie was that she’d had more than enough today. The horrific state of Denver, the soldier’s unalloyed suggestion of sexual exploitation, and being separated from Dave were taking their toll. Nathan could see that she wasn’t making a suggestion about what they should do—this was more of a plea than an idea.
Nathan nodded and pulled the truck into the driveway of a ranch-style property that was almost entirely enclosed in a pen of cockspur hawthorn—the broad, flat trees were denuded of all leaves by the winter, but their bushiness and abundance in the house’s yard would give the F-350, with its attendant trailer, at least some semblance of cover.
Nathan got out of the truck, Glock in hand to check over the house after telling Tony to stay where he was until told it was safe to come out. Donie sat in the truck also, just staring ahead through the windshield. Nathan got the notion she was mightily relieved to no longer be playing Russian roulette with the Denver streets.
The front door to the h
ouse was open and scraped back on broken hinges. From the street, the roof had looked intact, and a good bet to offer shelter outside the claustrophobic confines of the truck. Now, he’d see the inside. Nathan made a quick reconnoiter of the rooms. The lounge area with its broken windows was a write-off, shelter-wise. Snow had gusted through the windows over many months, and the room was as chill as a freezer store. Out back, in the kitchen and utility room, away from the street, the house had fared a little better. Although it was cold, and Nathan’s breath hung in clouds around him, the kitchen was dry and the windows were intact, and it was the same with the utility room which led, through a white UPVC door, out to a yard glutted with snow and a surrounding barrier of hawthorn.
They would be able to set up the camping stove in here, and cook some warm food, and huddle together in sleeping bags on the camping mattresses they had stored in the trailer. It wouldn’t be a five-star residence for the night, but it would give them the chance to stretch out, and as the house wasn’t overlooked by any other properties, Nathan thought they could at least allow themselves to have a little light to go with their warm food.
Tony and Donie, now seeming more like her old self now that she’d spent some time in the truck getting her head together, helped Nathan bring the provisions and equipment they’d need into the house for the night.
Rapier had proved to be a good guard dog since he’d joined the party, and he was happy to sniff around the yard and do his business before joining the others in the house.
In relatively short order, as night fell over the city, they had the stove set up and Nathan began warming beans and sausages while Tony made coffee.
Donie had the satellite uplink running to the laptop on a wire leading through to the yard, through a cat flap in the back door. She’d had to pick the ice from it before she got it open—it hadn’t seen a cat through for many a month.
“Yes!” Donie made a fist as the laptop linked to the satellite, and suddenly they could again pull information from the severely compromised but still limping along internet. There wasn’t a lot of information about the FEMA operation in Denver that Donie could access, but one page told them the field hospital and refugee camp had been set up in the City Park Pavilion—the pavilion’s Spanish architecture showed yellow walls, red roofs, and two towers overlooking Ferril Lake.
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