After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Nathan was breathing hard and sweating enough for streams of it to roll down his face and into his eyes, but none of that deterred him from allowing himself a few slivers of elation because his plan had worked out—so far.

  He tried the handle of the Lexus and the door came open on smooth hinges. The gang members in the store fighting their battle with those guys across the street in the condo were not expecting to get robbed like this, and hadn’t taken any precautions with their security.

  It took Nathan less than twenty seconds to search the glove compartments and side pods and look behind the sun visors for the Lexus’ electronic door opener and ignition key. These guys might be the top dogs in this territory, but like dogs, they only thought about the moment, about how fast they could eat the latest meal that had been put in front of them, and not about looking after their supplies of food for tomorrow.

  Nathan eased himself into the driver’s seat and clicked the door shut with a satisfying thump. The Lexus wasn’t more than five years old, and it was a solid piece of machinery. Nathan had always enjoyed working on them when they’d come into the auto shop in Glens Falls, and the idea of stealing one from the bad guys made him happier still. He waited for another burst of gunfire on the other side of the hardware store, and then he started the engine.

  Back where they had parked the Cruiser, Free and Dave were already waiting. Free had scored a late model Toyota RAV4, green and a bit beat-up. There were three bullet holes in the rear fender and it didn’t have a spare tire, but it was sound enough. Dave hadn’t managed to come back with anything, so Dave drove the Cruiser, Nathan the Lexus, and Free the RAV4 back to the ranch house where Donie was waiting impatiently with the kids.

  Her eyes were wide with admiration as the small convoy pulled up to the drive.

  “It worked!”

  “Yes, indeed,” Nathan said with a wide grin. “So, Free, reckon this haul will get us in and out of the camp?”

  Free was standing at the tailgate of the Lexus and pulled out a metal-cornered flight case on silver wheels. It thumped into the snow and Free bent to undo the two latches. The lid came up, but because of the angle at which everyone else stood, only he could see inside.

  Nathan saw his friend’s eyes widen with shock, though, and then recompose on his face into something like avarice tinged with genuine joy. Free reached into the box and pulled out something from within.

  “Oh, I think we’re going to have no problems at all getting in or getting out,” he said with an edge of triumph in his voice as Nathan and the others stared with awe at the M67 fragmentation grenade Free held in his hand.

  “And there’s about twenty more of these suckers in the case,” Free said. “We hit paydirt, Nate. Freakin’ paydirt!”

  They made it through to the perimeter of City Park unmolested by FEMA or any of the Denver gangs.

  The sleet had turned into a heavy, fat-flaked snowfall, which kept all but the hardiest people off the streets in even the sturdiest of SUVs. The experience Nathan and the others had gained in driving across the snowy wastes of the Midwest stood them in good stead when the conditions were like this. They took it slow but steady. Winding through the streets, avoiding FEMA checkpoints, they made it to their destination in a little under two hours.

  Nathan, and Tony, with Brandon, took the Lexus. Donie and Dave had the F-350 with the trailer and Rapier in the crew cab, and Free drove the RAV4.

  Once they reached the high, razor-wire-topped fence, Nathan could see how it would be impossible, under normal circumstances, to scale or break through the impenetrable barrier.

  Under normal circumstances, indeed.

  Before they moved around the other side of City Park to the FEMA entrance, Nathan put the other piece of this plan into action. In case of emergency, he wanted to ensure there was a way—in abnormal circumstances—to break through the fence. Once that was set up, they parked the F-350 and the trailer behind a row of low houses. They were as derelict and dead-eyed as any of the others in the city but would afford cover for the vehicle from all eyes unless such eyes were already looking for them.

  What was left of the provisions and weapons were removed from the Cruiser, leaving only a meager amount of fuel in jerry cans, and just a sniff of canned food. Donie would again wait here with Brandon, Tony, and Rapier, and yet again she wasn’t at all happy about it.

  “Both my arms work, and I’m not a damn nursemaid,” she said with blazing eyes as Nathan and the others prepared to leave.

  “Neither am I,” Tony said with all seriousness, “but I have to look after Brandon most of the time. Donie, to be fair, I could really do with a break.”

  Donie’s face melted into a smile at Tony playing the adult, and Dave stepped forward to hug her. “Please, this could still all turn to crap, and I’d rather you were here if we need to get us out. I’m sorry, baby. This isn’t about your gender. It’s about how I feel about you.”

  Nathan and Free hung back, giving the two lovers some space to hug and kiss. Tony, holding Brandon to his chest, looked on sagely as if he completely understood what had been said and what was happening.

  Nathan ruffled the boy’s hair and hunched down so he was face-to-face with his boys. “You look after Brandon and Donie, you hear? All being well, we plan to be out of there in less than twenty-four hours. I need you all to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, okay?”

  “Sure, Daddy. You got it.”

  Nathan kissed Tony’s forehead and stood up.

  “Let’s roll.”

  21

  Snow, their constant companion, blatted against the windshield of the Lexus, and the wipers on full power squashed the flakes out of the way in smeary clutches of ice.

  The near blizzard conditions sucked all of the color out of the city as they rolled around the perimeter of City Park, turning north from East 17th Avenue, where they’d found the edge of the park, onto York Street, and from there they approached the entrance to the Denver City Park-cum-Refugee-Camp-cum-FEMAFIOSA swindle.

  The wide expanse of York Street was just layering up with more and more snow, with no vehicles moving along it save for Nathan’s Lexus and Free’s RAV4.

  The snowfall was so intense, they could just about make out the sides of the road, and maybe twenty or thirty yards ahead of them at any given moment. At least the street had been cleared of broken-down cars at some point in the past, and so their way wasn’t impeded by wreckage.

  They pulled into the entranceway where eight soldiers manned the checkpoint in their oilskin capes topped with Advanced Combat Helmets and goggles. A soldier came forward, waving Nathan to bring the Lexus to a standstill and wind down the window.

  “Is he one of the soldiers you saw before?” Nathan whispered through thin lips. Next to Nathan, Dave was already leaning back in his seat, groaning.

  “No. Shift’s changed, I guess,” Dave replied, wiping at the moisture on his face. They’d poured a little water on his forehead to make him look feverish, and he’d been rubbing at his eyes with the heel of his good hand all the way from where they’d left Donie, to make them look painful and bloodshot.

  “Good,” Nathan hissed. “Or this might be a very short conversation.”

  “State your business,” the soldier said as the window came down on smooth motors.

  Nathan leaned forward. “My buddy here is in a lot of pain; stomach’s tender and he’s running a fever. Might be his appendix. We don’t know. They said you guys had a field hospital here.”

  The soldier nodded and wiped at the silt of snowflakes building up on his goggles. “That all depends on what you got to pay for your taxes and health insurance, sir.” The sir was said with the same sound as someone treading in a morning gift a dog might leave on the floor when he couldn’t get access to the yard. It was the least respectful sounding use of the word sir Nathan thought he’d ever heard.

  “We know. The RAV4 behind me, you can take. We have a couple of guns and a crate of tinned ham inside.”


  The soldier studied Nathan’s face and eyes through his goggles. “This Lexus is mighty fine, sir.”

  “It is, but we need it for all our people. Please take the RAV4. I’ve got an MP4 you can have, too, if it’ll help.”

  Dave groaned some more, looking for all the world like he was delirious with pain, the fingers of his good hand working at his thigh, then making a fist and thumping it. The soldier saw all this, but didn’t look like he gave a damn. All he was interested in was what he could score in so-called taxes.

  “I’ll need to check with my commanding officer. Wait here.”

  The young soldier trudged back through the blizzard, his shoulders and helmet covered in white like the peaks of the Rockies Nathan might have been able to see if the graying snowfall hadn’t been erasing all views of the city, flake by flake.

  Nathan wound up the window so that, when he spoke, no one outside the car would hear him.

  “Good work. You can have an Oscar when this is all over.”

  Dave winked surreptitiously at Nathan and whispered, “I’d like to thank the members of the Academy…”

  The soldier had checked with whoever he had to and was on his way back. Nathan took the window down again. “Lexus, or you can turn around and find the other hospital in Denver that doesn’t exist.”

  The soldier was smiling at his joke, and Nathan would gladly have reached through the open window and shaken him warmly by the throat.

  “Okay, okay. He needs a doctor.”

  In actuality, Nathan had predicted the soldiers would want the Lexus rather than the RAV4, and that’s why he’d hidden the majority of their firepower within the beat-up Toyota, gambling that the soldiers wouldn’t bother to look for contraband in a vehicle given up willingly.

  When Nathan, supporting the Oscar-worthy Dave, made the transfer into the smaller RAV4, Free whispered under his breath that Nathan was a goddamned genius, and that he’d made every single right call they’d needed that day.

  The checkpoint barrier was raised, and the soldier, who’d taken the Lexus’ key fob and ignition key, waved them through with a cursory gesture. He was more concerned with his new wheels.

  The roads inside the park, although now receiving a heavy fall of snow, had at least been cleared recently, and that made traversing the tree lined avenue a lot easier than the roads approaching the park. The City Park Pavilion was easy to spot up ahead, too, even though its red tiled roof was covered in snow. It was the biggest and tallest building in the park, with two sixty-foot towers reaching skywards, the warm yellow of its brick walls showing through the white snow in plenty of places.

  The approach to the pavilion, however, was like a journey through another world.

  Row upon row of white, square, pitched-roofed tents ran away from the road in every possible direction, like the headstones in Arlington National Cemetery. The Denver Zoo and the local golf course were covered in the serried ranks of tents, some of them heavily bowed down under the weight of snow. Thousands of dwellings. Thousands of refugees from the Big Winter.

  Tent flaps moved as the RAV4 crunched slowly by, showing children with dirty faces, mothers with hollow eyes, and broken fathers—the very corruption of the American family unit peering out with hungry stares. Meager cooking fires sputtered as the snow fell.

  There was a pile of body bags at one park trail junction, which rose like an accusatory pyramid of defeat. And soldiers were unloading yet more stiff body bags from the back of a small electric truck. Their faces were grim, their work silent.

  Three more bags were thrown onto the pile. The outline of the contents of one that slithered from the peak, bumping lazily back to the base, was no larger than Tony.

  The sight made Nathan heartsick.

  “I had… I had no idea… it would… man.” He ran out of words.

  They passed another truck where soldiers were handing out sodden bags of rice to a queue of silent women with blankets wrapped around their shoulders, all speckled with snow. Their feet stamping in the cold, their breath hanging over the line like a pall of despair.

  Nathan scanned the faces of the women in the line, expecting at any moment to see Lucy or Syd holding out their hands, waiting for the insult of one small bag of rice to be gifted to them by the FEMA soldiers. It was like something from a TV report on the aftermath of a war or a tsunami, not a scene from downtown America.

  They rolled around a small lake as they crawled forward toward the pavilion. Fish cages held up with flotation tanks dotted the surface of the water. Men wrapped in blankets, like the women they’d seen before, were walking along jetties, pouring food into the cages for the fish beneath. Nathan saw one man reach into the bucket he was holding, take a look around, and then eat a handful of whatever was being given to the fish. His cheeks were sunken, his eyes so far back in his head that they’d need a telescope to see beyond the end of his nose. His balding head looked like the worst case of alopecia Nathan could imagine. Patches of raw skin showed next to what was left of the tufts of his hair. His thin jaw worked methodically at whatever he’d put into his mouth, and it was clearly an effort for him to swallow, but it was an effort he was prepared to make.

  Nathan had to look away in the end. It hurt too much to watch.

  They were stopped by a soldier outside the pavilion who told them to park on a concreted area some fifty yards away from the entrance. Dave put on his best appendicitis act again, and Nathan and Free supported him to walk toward the building. In the periphery of his vision, Nathan could see the soldier checking out the windows of the RAV4, no doubt wondering what had been left by his guys at the gate that he could ‘tax’ himself.

  If they hadn’t had a mission to complete, to find Tommy and the women, Nathan would have run headlong from this hellish vision of governmental exploitation.

  He remembered back to when he and Cyndi had been considering whether or not to leave Glens Falls, and how she’d pretty much laughed in his face when he’d said with all seriousness that the government wouldn’t let the population fend for themselves—that they would have a plan to deal with the Big Winter, and that everything would get back to normal.

  Cyndi had been a prepper through and through. If it hadn’t been for her, they wouldn’t have had their initial supplies and bug-out provisions to get them on the road in his daddy’s old Dodge coupled to an Airstream trailer. Cyndi had understood perfectly that the only person you could rely on when push came to shove was yourself, and maybe family and friends if you were lucky.

  Denver City Park illustrated that attitude he’d originally had, writ large.

  Thousands upon thousands of people had trusted the government—such as it was—and it had let them down in the most spectacular of fashions. Fleecing and robbing them blind in return for minuscule handouts, an opportunity to breakfast on fish food, and then to finally end up slithering down a snow-slick mound of body bags.

  Mentally, Nathan apologized to the memory of Cyndi. Without her foresight, planning, and determination, they wouldn’t have made it fifty miles from their house, and he would have died with his kids in the snow.

  The pavilion had once been a wide open exhibition space and rentable venue for conventions and seminars, back before the Big Winter. It was high-roofed and thick-walled. But if the smell of Denver had been bad coming in, then the stench inside the FEMA field hospital was a dozen times worse.

  Like the rows of tents outside, the space had been filled with rows of metal-framed beds that looked like they’d come from a 1930s film set.

  The frames were white-painted tubular metal, topped with thin mattresses and threadbare blankets. It seemed that every bed was occupied. Many people were laying as still as death, their eyes open and looking listlessly at the ceiling; some were sitting, throwing up violently into bowls. Everywhere, people were coughing or groaning. In an area across the floor, there were cots and beds filled with children. The keening wail of youngsters in pain drifted across the space as Nathan and the others wal
ked through, looking for some sort of doctor or authority figure.

  “I’m feeling a whole lot better,” Dave whispered. “This looks like the kind of place where you wipe your feet on the way out.”

  Free’s grim face was set to avoid breaking. “Never seen anything like it, buddy. Never.”

  Nathan shook his head as they walked on. “We just need to find a doctor and locate Tommy and the others. We are not staying.”

  “Amen,” Free and Dave replied.

  “Yes? What?”

  The voice was harsh and cut through the sounds of wailing and vomiting. From a tiny office, a small, bearded man with oily hair and a grubby white coat, a stethoscope around his neck, had begun marching toward them.

  The doctor pointed at Dave. “Have those damn soldiers let you in through the wrong entrance again? God almighty, it doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that triage is at the other end of the building! Do they listen? Do they, hell!”

  “Umm…” Nathan began, but Grubby held up a finger and wagged it.

  “I’m not interested. He’ll have to get in line with all the others. Unless you have more taxes to offer up, of course. That’s if the robbing monsters outside have left you with anything. I don’t suppose you have any cigarettes, do you? I’d kill for a smoke right now.”

  Nathan shook his head. “We just…”

  But Grubby wasn’t having any of it; he shooed them along the rows of beds “Get yourselves along to triage. I don’t have time for this. Other end of the building. They’ll try and get you seen within the next seventy-two hours.”

  Nathan felt his eyes bulging with shock.