After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  “I was told by General Carter that you were the best! I was told that you’re his best pilot! What a crock! You couldn’t fly in an itty-bit of snow. You’re a disgrace. A damn disgrace! I could have been killed! Do you realize what that might have meant? Me! The Mayor of Detroit killed because some useless fly-girl couldn’t handle a bit of snow! Where did you get your pilot’s license? From a damn fortune cookie?”

  Nathan was at the end of the bed now, three feet between him and Brant as the man stabbed his fat little finger at Champion. For the pilot’s part, she was not responding. The pain was still swimming in shoals of suffering across her face and her eyes were fixed on Brant. His finger came ever closer. Spittle flying from his mouth as he shouted.

  “I’ll make sure you never fly again, fly-girl! You mark my words!”

  Nathan unscrewed the cap from the bottle of Demerol and poured 20mls—the same dose he had given to his daddy—into the cup.

  Brant was getting more and more irate, and seemed to be doing so because he wasn’t getting the reaction from Champion he wanted. Nathan winced as Brant poked his finger down on the break in Champion’s arm.

  She screamed hard, trying to turn away, but Brant was enjoying the reaction now. He stabbed at her again with his stiff little index finger, flecks of white saliva at the corners of his smiling mouth. Champion screamed again and pulled the broken arm across her body in an attempt to get it out of Brant’s reach, but he just leaned further in. Poked her again.

  No one else in the room moved. Not the soldier. Not Grubby.

  Not Nathan.

  If he intervened, he would be a dead man. But there was also no way he could stand by and watch as Brant tortured Champion for his own amusement.

  “Not so confident of your abilities now, are you? Not so smart and clever now, are you, you worthless piece of scum! Not willing to risk it all now, are you? Ha! You know your place now! You know your place!”

  Then Brant made a fist.

  Nathan broke.

  He couldn’t just watch the poor woman be hammered like that by Brant. Brant, the man who had made his friend betray him. Brant, the man who had been the driving force behind the death of the love of Nathan’s life. Brant, the man who had tracked them across the states, willing to put whatever resources it took to catch up with Nathan into fulfilling his sick desire for squalid revenge.

  Brant raised his fist above his head, ready to bring it down on Champion where she cowered, desperately trying to protect herself from the mayor’s imminent onslaught. And Nathan dropped the bottle on the bed, took a step forward and, in his mind, kissing both his sons goodbye, grabbed Brant’s wrist.

  23

  Brant roared and ripped his hand smartly from Nathan’s grip.

  “How dare you touch me…!” Brant began, but that was just before the mayor’s eyes seemed to spin in his head like cherries in a slot machine, and the jackpot of recognition paid out in his head. His mouth opened slightly. His gasp was audible. He was summoning up the words, and the fist he was about to bring down on Champion became an accusatory point.

  Nathan hit Brant.

  Hard, fast, and with unstoppable force. His fist connected with the point of Brant’s chin and the man’s head snapped back on his neck. Brant fell like a cartoon.

  He crashed back onto the floor, his toes turned up, his arms outstretched, and a near comical grin of unconsciousness on his face.

  “Stay where you are! Do not move!” the soldier was screaming at Nathan, his M-16 pointing directly at his head. “Raise your hands. Now!”

  Nathan did as he was told.

  “Doctor!” the soldier yelled at Grubby. “Get out there, and tell my guys to get in here now.”

  Grubby, face slick with sweat, nodded and headed for the door.

  “Belay that order!” came a voice from an unexpected direction. It was Champion on the bed, cradling her broken arm and struggling to sit up. Grubby stopped in a half-turn, unsure what he was supposed to be doing now.

  “Ma’am?” the soldier asked, a look of confusion on his face. “I need to secure the room and get this man into custody.”

  “No, you don’t,” Champion said.

  “Ma’am?”

  “What’s your rank, soldier?”

  “Private first class, ma’am, and I…”

  “Be quiet, soldier. I outrank you by about thirty-seven stripes. Are you going to argue with a superior officer?”

  “No ma’am, but…”

  “But me no buts, soldier!” Champion was sitting up now, struggling with the pain, but she had a steely look of determination on her face. She turned her attention to Nathan. “Get out of here while you can.”

  Nathan lowered his hands. “I…”

  “Ma’am!” complained the soldier. “You can’t just…”

  Champion screwed up her eyes, and then flicked them open at the soldier. “You stood by while that man tortured me in front of you and the doctor. Tortured me. How about we make a deal? You let the only guy in the room who tried to stop him go, and I won’t have you court martialed where you stand!”

  The soldier licked his lips, flicking his eyes from Nathan to Champion and back again.

  “Lower your weapon and stand down, soldier. That is a direct order!”

  The muzzle of the M-16 wobbled, wavered, and then came down to point at the floor.

  Champion returned her gaze to Nathan. “Now, get out of here. Run and don’t stop running. And, sir…?”

  Nathan looked back at her even as he began turning.

  “Thank you,” Champion said. “There’s not enough people like you.”

  And then Nathan ran.

  Tommy’s bed was empty. Of course, it was empty.

  Nathan had jogged between the beds, white coat flapping behind him—looking, he hoped for all the world, like a doctor on his way to an emergency, not away from one. For all the reasons he had to get out of the pavilion as fast as he could, he wasn’t going to leave Tommy behind.

  He’d staggered to a halt by Tommy’s bed. The covers were drawn back, the pillows askew.

  Nathan cursed under his breath and looked around wildly. He couldn’t see Tommy anywhere, and there was no time to search. Champion might be able to hold off the soldier and Doctor Grubby by pulling rank, temporarily anyway, but pretty soon Brant was going to be awake—and he outranked everyone in the building.

  There was nothing else for it; he was going to have to get out now and formulate a plan later to come back and find Tommy and the others. No point in being dead right now. The current plan had worked out okay as it stood, but now he had only minutes to get out of the City Park Pavilion and away from Brant’s impending ire.

  Nathan broke for the main entrance, nodding to a duo of soldiers as he went and ignoring the calls of several patients on their beds who thought he was the real thing. He made it through the door and onto the snow-covered forecourt, and dashed toward the RAV4—which, thankfully, had not taken any damage from the downed Black Hawk still steaming and cooling in the increasing intensity of the blizzard.

  He was mere yards from the RAV4 when two things happened. First, his heart leaped upon seeing through the blizzarding snow that not only were Free and Dave waiting for him in the car, but sitting on the back seat, gesturing to Nathan to get a move-on, was Tommy. But, second, all around the camp, alarm sirens started up, cutting through the air like wailing animals.

  Perhaps Brant was already awake.

  Nathan climbed into the RAV4 beside Tommy. “You took your time,” the Texan said.

  “No time for explanations, we’ve got to get out of here.”

  Free, in the driver’s seat, turned his head. “Not without Lucy and Syd.”

  “Brant has seen me. The sirens are going off now, and that might be for me. We cannot stay—we’ll have to come back for them.”

  Tommy shook his head. “We can pick them up on the way out. I know exactly where they’ll be right now.”

  Stymied, Nathan said, “Ok
ay. But if they’re not in this truck in five minutes, we’ll have to come back.”

  Nathan could tell, from his hunched shoulders and ever-tighter hands on the wheel as Free slew the RAV4 around, heading in the direction Tommy had indicated, that his friend was not at all on board with Nathan’s ‘five minutes’ pronouncement. But that was something Nathan would have to deal with if they didn’t find the women immediately.

  Two minutes later, Nathan’s relief was total. They found Syd and Lucy in a wooden kiosk on the south side of the park. They were doling out thin soup to a group of mainly male laborers who were working to clear more areas for tents and dig sewage lines.

  They didn’t need to be told twice to abandon their posts and squeeze into the RAV4. One of the laborers called to Lucy as she sprinted toward the car. “What about our soup?”

  “We’ve downsized. It’s now a self-service restaurant!”

  Snow flecked their hair and skin. And while their lips were blue with cold and their teeth were chattering, they were glad to see Nathan and the others.

  “It was either the soup kitchen or the FEMA brothel,” Lucy said pragmatically. “We both chose soup.”

  Nathan filled everyone in on what had happened with Champion and Brant as Free pointed the truck toward the entrance to the City Park. Although the sirens were still going off all around them, there didn’t seem to be much activity in the park itself to suggest that a manhunt was underway.

  “Could be just a drill,” Tommy suggested.

  If it was only a drill, the soldiers at the checkpoint onto York Street were treating it with extreme seriousness. Free brought the RAV4 to a halt seventy yards away, surrounded on both sides by row after row of sad refugee tents.

  The air fizzed with flakes, making everything gray and indistinct. In happier times, this would have been a day for warming your toes in front of a good fire, waxing the runners on your toboggan, and waiting for the snow to stop so that you could take the kids outside for a crazy afternoon of sledding. But not today.

  Through the snow, Nathan could see that two APCs had been placed nose to nose beyond the checkpoint, and there were at least double the number of soldiers there than before, all of them looking like they were waiting for trouble.

  “We’re not getting out that way,” Free said grimly. “It’s a lockdown.”

  Nathan nodded. “Plan B, then.”

  Free reversed the RAV4, turning it around as innocuously as he could without wanting to raise suspicion, and they trundled back toward the pavilion.

  “Keep it steady,” Nathan said as they sailed past the building and the crashed Black Hawk. There were now sentries at the door, and other soldiers were manning the broken windows shattered by the crash, but it still didn’t seem that the FEMA forces were going crazy trying to find them.

  Yet.

  Please be a drill.

  Perhaps they were so confident that the new, high metal fences around City Park, and the closed-off main checkpoint, would keep anyone inside, and it would just be a case of systematically searching the camp tent-by-tent to find interlopers. There was no panic, so the sirens must be to put everyone on alert. They certainly weren’t checking any of the vehicles moving around the inner roads, and it was that kind of sloppy complacency that might get Nathan and the others out of the City Park camp in the next five minutes.

  When they reached the southern tip of Ferril Lake, Free turned the truck off the road and began bumping across the snowy grass and between the trees, toward the razor wire-topped metal fence.

  Refugee tents hadn’t been set up in this area yet, but if the influx of desperate people continued, it wouldn’t be long before they were. It was fifty yards across the rough ground to the wall, and Free pulled to a halt twenty yards from it.

  The snowfall was heavier now, if anything, making the air more dense and difficult to see through. It might not cover their activity completely, but a FEMA patrol would need to be pretty close before they’d be seen. Nathan jogged to the tightly grilled fence while the others hunkered down behind the truck.

  He’d explained briefly to Lucy, Syd, and Tommy what was about to happen, and now he was looking for the lines he’d set earlier, which were going to make what he’d explained happen.

  He found the wires poking through the view grill in the fence after a minute of anxious searching. He looked desperately over his shoulder to see if he was being observed from the road or the distant machine gun tower, itself almost lost in the blizzard. The sirens had cut out as they’d traveled around Ferril Lake, so maybe they weren’t about them and were just a drill.

  Maybe.

  Nathan gathered the five wires in his hand, counted to three, and pulled them hard.

  He had seven seconds to sprint back to the RAV4 for cover before the grenades he’d laid as his Plan B would explode against the fence on the other side.

  The crump of the explosion was loud, but possibly deadened enough by the snowfall not to echo all the way across the camp.

  But there was no point taking any chances. Nathan looked over the hood of the RAV4. As the smoke cleared, he could see that there was a hole in the fence big enough for a man to crawl through—just—but not to get the car through.

  “Grab what you can and go!” Nathan ordered everyone as he reached into the truck to get an MP4 and a spare couple of grenades. Around him, the others also gathered what they could and headed toward the hole in the wall.

  Tommy was moving awkwardly after what he’d told them on the drive had been ‘Civil War level sawbones surgery,’ but at least he could move.

  Nathan pushed Syd and Lucy through first, and then he waited until the others had gone through before throwing the gun to the snow beyond and crawling through himself.

  Donie, who had heard the explosion from the house behind which they’d parked the F-350, was waving from the other side of the street as they ran across the snowfield to her.

  “We need to get on the road, now!” Nathan shouted.

  It was jam-packed in the F-350.

  Dave and Donie traveled in the utility shell with Tommy after they’d dumped some equipment, while Lucy and Syd crammed into the Crew Cab with Tony, Brandon, and Rapier. Free rode up front while Nathan drove.

  The fresh snow was making the roads treacherous, but that would be the same for any FEMA soldiers who might already have investigated the hole in the fence and called for reinforcements. And though a ten mile an hour getaway wasn’t the most exciting of escapes, the tension in Nathan’s gut was absolute. They had to get out of the city, and fast.

  Tommy was in pain, but he was coping, and Lucy and Syd were warming up in the cramped space with the dog and the kids.

  “We’ve got about seventy miles of gas,” Free said, checking the gauge. “After that, we’re screwed.”

  Seventy miles wasn’t going to be enough of a space between Brant and the party for Nathan. Seventy-thousand was more acceptable.

  They headed south through the Denver suburbs, the storm building and becoming dirtier. At least the falling flakes would be covering their tracks and making it more difficult for them to be followed, but it was slowing them down even more. The weight of the F-350 gave it good traction, but progress was still hard going.

  The wind was also becoming more brutal, whipping snow into whorls and gusting sheets. Snow blew down off the roofs around them, sometimes dumping buckets’ worth of the stuff with a thud on the hood, or thickly on the windshield. Several times, Nathan or Free had to get out and clear the windshield by hand because the wipers couldn’t cope. It was a war of attrition, so that if the storm didn’t abate soon, they would surely lose.

  It seemed like the entire North Pole had been lifted into the sky, glaciers and all, and was being dumped, dumpsterful by dumpsterful, onto Denver in general and the F-350 specifically.

  Visibility was so difficult now that the nose of the truck almost clanged into the roadblock before they saw it.

  “Whoa! That was close!” Nathan shouted as
he slammed on the brakes. If they’d have been traveling at more than the pace of a crippled snail, they wouldn’t have been able to avoid a collision.

  Nathan squinted through the windshield to see what was what. A green Lexus NX 300h and a white Jaguar F-Pace SUV were nose to nose across the street, making forward progress impossible. Nathan put the F-350 into reverse and thought about backing up, but Free put a hand on his arm. “No, wait. Look.”

  Nathan followed his finger.

  Through the swirling flakes, Nathan could just make out the outline of a body laying facedown in the snow. A spreading pool of blood seeping out around the head. As he looked closer, he also saw there were two bullet holes in the door of the Lexus, and behind the door was a slumped figure. Behind the Jaguar, there were two more bodies, and then, resolving out of the whirling snow, balaclava in place and sniper rifle up, and rested on one hip, was a figure who looked to be Arctic. The person who had saved their backsides in Drymouth.

  Nathan jumped down from the truck and approached the figure who was standing stock-still, seemingly waiting for him. “Are you following us?”

  Arctic shrugged. “I was here first. Perhaps you were following me.”

  The voice was still little more than a hiss, but Nathan had at last convinced himself of what he only could have suspected before. Arctic was a woman.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Killing bad guys. Why aren’t you killing bad guys? The less bad guys there are, the better for everyone, no?”

  “I’m no executioner.”

  “Then you will die. You will be executed.” Arctic turned and began to walk away.

  “Wait! Please. The man you helped, the one who was stabbed. He’s in the car. I’m sure he’d want to shake your hand.”

  Arctic paused, and then turned back. “I don’t want thanks. I’m just doing what I should do. I have a gift. I’m using it.”