After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  The City Park Pavilion was about a mile east of downtown and three miles from where they were now. Donie was able to work with the cop maps on the laptop and at least approximate a route for them to take in the morning. What the internet wasn’t telling them now was what gang territories they would have to traverse in order to get to the FEMA camp. It also didn’t tell them what they would be expected to offer up of their provisions or themselves to get into the camp.

  “That’s something we’ll deal with when we get there. Maybe we can offer some of the weapons as trade. I dunno… or maybe find a way in without needing to go through whatever passes for official channels these days.”

  Beside Nathan, Donie typed furiously at the keyboard. Due to the atmospheric conditions, they often didn’t know how long they’d be able to maintain the patency of the uplink. These sessions generally had to be intense, fast, and packed with only salient information gathering.

  “Damn it, Nate, there’s almost nothing here. Nothing that’s going to help us find a safe route in, that’s for sure. FEMA isn’t bothering to update its pages with anything approaching useful.”

  “I guess they have a vested interest in not making sure people get through safely,” Nathan replied sadly. “How will they take their tolls otherwise?”

  Donie sighed, and then gave a little yelp of surprise. Her hands flew off the keyboard as if she’d been stung.

  Nathan looked up from the stove. “What is it?”

  “Oh my god,” was all Donie said as she turned the screen of the laptop around so that Nathan could see what she’d just seen.

  There in the center of the screen, blocking out everything else, was a still picture of the Mayor of Detroit, Harvey Brant. The picture had been taken when Brant had been displaying the widest of grins on his face. There was text running beneath his jowls, and the words Nathan read there almost stopped his heart in his chest.

  Hello, Nathan. Thanks so much for logging back in! You think you’re the only man with his own hackers? We’ve cracked your code, and we know where you are. Be seeing you very soon!

  Nathan and Donie didn’t sleep.

  Nathan held Brandon in his arms, sitting up in his sleeping bag. Tony rested his head on Donie’s thighs and she stroked his hair while he drifted away into a restless, broken slumber. Even Rapier was restless, picking up on the tension created by Brant’s message on the laptop.

  “Should we leave here now?” Donie had asked as they’d left their meal uneaten and the coffee going cold.

  “I have no idea,” Nathan had replied truthfully. “If he’s got another helicopter like the last one, he could have men here in three or four hours. Otherwise, it’s over a thousand miles of hard roads and Arctic conditions between us.”

  “I shouldn’t have turned the laptop on. It was stupid, but I wanted to see if there were any messages from Dave. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize. I’d have done the same in your position, and it made sense to look for routes into the city.”

  Donie let out a long sigh. “I guess our coding skills aren’t what we thought they were.”

  “I don’t think any of us are quite as good as we need to be,” Nathan said slowly with a sad smile, squeezing her shoulder. “We just do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

  “I don’t know how much I’ve got left, Nate. I’m all used up.”

  They sat in silence for nearly an hour, until Donie checked her watch. “Still five hours until dawn. I’m not going to sleep. I don’t think I’m ever going to sleep again.”

  “I hear you.”

  If Nathan could have run at the wall and knocked himself unconscious, he would have. He was dog-tired and beaten, and now he was going to have to find a whole galaxy of new reserves to fight the battle that he knew would come next.

  Brant was not going to let them go. This could only end in one way, with Brant ended or Nathan gone. There was no middle ground—no deal that could be made that Brant wouldn’t go back on or double-cross. Brant wasn’t a chess player; he was a demolition charge. He really would use a hammer to crack a nut, as he had the demeanor of a school bully given the opportunity to wield real power, and that was the most dangerous of combinations. Nathan could feel a battle preparing to be fought in his thinking. Should he stick with the others, or would he be better off running with his children? His friends would be safe from Brant and he would have the opportunity to get as far away from Denver as he could.

  If Brant was on his way there, though, as the message had implied, then this city would be the ground zero of his revenge.

  Nathan was so lost in the moment of his thoughts that it took Donie’s tight grip on his wrist to alert him to the fact that someone was pushing open the front door to the house, and forcing their way inside.

  20

  Nathan woke Tony by shaking his shoulder gently. The boy was about to grumble something, but Nathan put a hand softly over the boy’s mouth and pointed to his ear to make the boy listen.

  Rapier was up, sniffing at the kitchen door, which Nathan was already glad they had closed before settling down for the night.

  Outside in the corridor, Nathan could hear two sets of footsteps. They were being made by intruders who were trying to be stealthy. But in the acute silence in the house, with Nathan’s now significantly heightened senses marbled with shots of fresh adrenaline, he heard every shuffle and creak.

  Nathan put Brandon in Tony’s arms and prayed to the god of infants that he wouldn’t wake up and start to cry. Donie was already reaching for the MP4 and Nathan slid the Glock from beneath the spare sleep roll which he would have used for a pillow if he’d gotten any closer to sleeping.

  They both pushed back the sleeping bags and stood up. Nathan went to the door and stood by the side it would open toward and readied himself to shoot. Donie hung back, the machine gun at waist height, her finger in the trigger guard.

  The noise of the two people making their way stealthily toward the kitchen door continued unabated. Nathan’s throbbing heart boomed in his ears and his mouth dried like a creek bed in high summer as the handle began to turn.

  Nathan’s eyes sweated with anxiety, his tongue traveling the brick-dry surfaces of his lips.

  The door began to open, and the muzzle of a pistol pushed through the gap. The angle it was at pointed it directly at Tony.

  Nathan pulled the trigger of the Glock and the round crashed out of the gun. The invader’s gun dropped, there was a scream, and a body fell back.

  Nathan was preparing to fire again when he heard a voice he knew—“Christ, Nathan! It’s us! It’s me and Dave!”

  The voice belonged to Free.

  The irony that, in this moment, Dave’s life had been saved by Nathan weeks before, was not lost on the group. The bullet Nathan had fired had slammed into the metal tube encasing Dave’s arm, still strapped across his chest in a tight sling. The bullet had then ricocheted harmlessly up into the ceiling.

  Dave had been propelled backward by the force of the bullet hitting the tube, and he’d crashed into Free, sending them both sprawling.

  “How many times have I told you not to lead with the gun!?” Donie yelled at Dave as she checked him over in the weak light coming from the oil lamp in the kitchen. The report from the gun had startled Brandon to almost inconsolable crying, which took Nathan many minutes to deal with—walking up and down with the child, whispering in his ear, and rubbing his back to soothe him. Tony just kept rubbing at his ears, as the gunshot in the confined space had caused a painful concussion for everyone in the room to deal with.

  Nathan was glad to be holding the baby and dealing with the crying because, left to their own devices, he knew that his hands would be trembling over the notion that he had very nearly killed Dave where he’d stood. Free had picked himself up and taken the gun from Nathan’s frozen hand, telling him to go and deal with the baby because Dave was going to be okay.

  Donie’s anger at Dave soon dissipated and she wound up taking him bac
k to the sleeping bags and hugging him tight, resting her head on his shoulder, but she also told him, “You do that again and I’ll kill you myself.”

  When Brandon had settled and Donie had stopped squeezing what life there was left in Dave, Nathan asked them how they’d found them.

  “We were waiting for you to log on. We figured that if you spent another night on the road, Donie would try the uplink. It was us that triggered Brant’s message the first time. Once we realized that he knew we were in Denver, there was no point trying to hide that fact. So, once you logged on, I managed to get a GPS reference on your signal before you cut the uplink. We got it down to about a square click in the area, and it was just a matter of searching the streets until we found the truck. But we couldn’t tell you we were coming, and we had to check the house quietly in case it was a Clancy or Ramirez gang trap.”

  The words had tumbled from Dave’s lips like he couldn’t get them out fast enough—probably because he was still coming down off the rush of surviving being shot at point-blank range. Nathan still felt the electricity and relief coursing through his frame. It was going to be a good while before Nathan came down off his own plateau.

  “So, where’s Lucy and Syd, and how’s Tommy?”

  Free’s face fell and, for a horrible second, Nathan thought that Free was going to tell him the worst news possible about one or all of them, but Free just shook his head and said, “They’re okay…”

  Nathan felt the relief flooding through him in a warm wave, even before Free finished...

  “…I think,” he said.

  Nathan looked at him hard. “What do you mean, you think?”

  It was then that Nathan noticed how red-rimmed Free’s eyes were, and how his skin had lost three or four tones of color. He looked hollowed out and on the very edge.

  “They’re in the camp. We haven’t seen them for two days. We can’t get in and they can’t get out. It’s not a refugee camp, Nate. It’s more like a prison.”

  This wasn’t what Nathan had expected to hear, let alone what he’d wanted to hear. They needed to get out of Denver and they needed to get out of it soon—there wasn’t a moment to waste.

  “What? A prison?”

  Free nodded sadly. “FEMA’s running the place like no refugee camp I’ve ever seen on TV, man. They take your money, your weapons, and your gear for themselves. Call it tolls and taxes. If you want to get to the hospital, they call it your medical insurance, but it’s just a massive exercise in criminality.”

  “We saw some ourselves on the highway coming into Denver,” Nathan said. “They wouldn’t let us in unless we could stump up five hundred dollars. Told us we’d have to go through gang territory if we didn’t have the cash… or…”

  Donie flashed Nathan a look that told him she didn’t want it to be common knowledge what they’d asked for instead of money, but Dave caught the look and touched her arm. “It’s okay, baby, they tried the same with Lucy and Syd. They told them where to get off, too. We made it through the Clancy quarter. Cost us most of our guns and food, but we figured we’d be okay for food when we got to the refugee camp. We couldn’t have been more wrong. They let Tommy and the women in for the last of the food, spare fuel, and all but the last of our guns. If we’d have stayed any longer at the checkpoint, they’d have taken the Cruiser, too—I’m sure of it. After that, they wouldn’t let us back in, and they haven’t let the others out.”

  “Lucy and the others are trapped in there?” Nathan asked, incredulous. A feeling of dark horror had begun building in his heart.

  Free nodded, his eyes raking the floor like lasers.

  Nathan felt like he was being hit from all sides as the sheer awfulness of the Denver situation became clearer. “Is this what the government has become? Just another bunch of hoodlums and scum?”

  “There is no government,” Dave corrected him. “All systems have broken down, and FEMA’s become just another shade of the mafia. Denver is just a place for them to generate income based on the lie of trying to help people. There’s no guarantee that Tommy has gotten the medical treatment he needs now, but whoever that was who shot down Larson and his crew really did save his life. By the time we got to Denver, he was awake, eating, and feeling a whole lot better. Lucy treated him with wild opium lettuce juice from Cyndi and Elm’s stock for the pain, and by the time we got to the City Park camp, he was feeling a whole lot better. How he is now… that’s anyone’s guess.”

  It was four hours until dawn now, and Nathan wasn’t going to rest until they were reunited with the others, whatever it was going to take.

  “We need to find a way to get into the camp. Any ideas?”

  Free shook his head. “You think we didn’t try? It’s locked down tighter than a can of beans. They’ve got the whole park surrounded by a ten-foot fence covered in anti-climb paint and razor wire. There are guard towers with machine gun posts, and there’s only one way in or out. We can’t fight our way in. We’d be dead before we got thirty yards.”

  Dave’s face was grim. “There’s no way through the perimeter that we’ve found. The only way in is to buy your way through the main gate. And then when you’re inside, you’re put to work. Unless you have the dough to buy your way out, you’re pretty much an indentured slave.”

  Free made a fist and thumped it gently against the wall. “Nathan, I guess there are ways for a woman to buy her way out… but…”

  “It’s hopeless. I wish I had better news, but I don’t,” Dave finished.

  Nathan rubbed his temples, trying to think. “If they aren’t going to let us in without the ability to pay, I guess we’re going to have to find ourselves something to pay with.”

  “What?” Free, Dave and Donie asked in unison.

  And when Nathan told them, they thought he had finally gone completely crazy.

  Dawn came with a slow but heavy sleet on the wind that splashed and spat into the snow. Nathan worked until dawn making things ready. Donie wasn’t happy about being left behind in the house to look after the kids with Rapier, but it was going to be way too dangerous to bring Tony and Brandon along—especially if Nathan’s plan went south.

  Now, the men drove slowly through the suburb, stopping every five minutes or so to wind down the windows and listen to the city. It didn’t take more than half an hour to get a fix on the sound they needed to follow. Dave had enough grip in his healing fingers to drive the Cruiser and operate the gears as long as they were driving this slowly. Any faster, or if they needed to make a quick getaway, and Dave would need to slide out of the driver’s seat and give up the wheel to either Nathan or Free.

  Nathan had the MP4 ready, Free had an A-15 with a bump stock, and they both had backpacks with extra ammo in case they needed it.

  The sound of gunfire got nearer, and when they felt they were close enough to approach whoever was fighting on foot, they parked the Cruiser and got out into the sleeting air.

  There was a block of low one-story residences, which backed onto a four-story condo with views over downtown, right up to the Rockies. The mountains were just picking themselves out of the night with weak dawn light, their white peaks becoming visible first and floating in the near black like the sails of a mighty armada.

  The crackle of gunfire around the condo was sporadic, but it gave Nathan and the others enough cause for concern. They went in low, running fast through the bushes beneath the trees and on through the backyards of the derelict buildings.

  Free had told Nathan there were turf wars going on all over the city. The Ramirez gang would get a toe-hold in one area, steal what they could from the Clancys, and retreat. The Clancy gang, in turn, would move in on Ramirez territory, find one of their weapons or food stores, and attack. The battles sometimes went on for days as both sides dug in and tried to outwit the other side. FEMA troops were just happy to let them get on with it. If the gangs were fighting each other, FEMA could get on with screwing the steady stream of refugees who were being told they would be safe in Denver an
d were making their way there, full of the hope that was going to be cruelly lifted from them in the same fashion as their money and food.

  Nathan and the others hunkered down below a low garden wall. Flashes of muzzle fire were coming from a window high on the fourth floor of the condo. That fire was being returned from what had once been a hardware store on the other side of the street.

  “Ready?” Nathan asked.

  Dave and Free, their faces intense and their weapons gripped tight, both nodded.

  “Take no chances, remember. If we don’t get away with it today, there will always be tomorrow and the next. All we need to do is make sure we’re not seen.”

  They split up then, Free and Dave going toward the condo with Nathan doubling back the way they had come through the snow, sleet dampening the outside of his jacket and getting in through his hood to sliver with an uncomfortable chill down the back of his neck. He sprinted hard in a wide semi-circle, across the street and through an alleyway, and leaped a fence into a backyard behind the hardware store.

  There behind the building, in the back road between two blocks on the estate, was what Nathan was looking for. A midnight blue Lexus RX 4x4 parked behind the store. It had been used to take whoever, from whatever gang, to this location, and as those in the store were busy fighting their little battle, it stood to reason that they might not have the manpower to post a guard on their car.

  Nathan’s call had been a good one.

  The Clancys’ Lexus was parked tight against the wall on the far sidewalk. He vaulted the fence at the front of the yard and hurried across the road toward it, keeping as low as he could. If the houses in this area of east Denver were anything like the others he’d seen, then there wasn’t going to be anyone left to watch his streaky attempt at espionage and thievery. That certainty, however, didn’t stop him from checking underneath and around the huge metal pig of a car parked at the back of the abandoned hardware store.