Desolation (Book 2): Into the Inferno

by Lucin, David

  They passed a sign that said “Spring Lane” with an arrow pointing right. “How far to the interstate?” Dylan asked Jenn.

  She laid the map across her thighs. With her finger, she followed Highway 69 from Prescott until she came to a town called Spring Valley. “Close. A few miles.” Then her heart skipped a beat. “There’s a bridge coming.”

  Almost before she finished, Dylan braked so hard it threw Jenn forward in her seat.

  Carter braced himself against the dash with both arms. “Whoa! Careful!”

  The Nissan pulled onto the shoulder. “Where’s the bridge?”

  “Cordes Lakes,” Jenn said. “On the interstate. Just south of town, I think.” She blinked and inspected the map more closely. It was as she remembered: a bridge on I-17 after the junction with Highway 69.

  Dylan retrieved the radio and told Sophie to stop. Then, one hand on Carter’s seat, he turned to face her. “You figure we can scout it out again?” he asked. “On foot?”

  “We might not need to.” Jenn brought the map closer. “There’s a back road. Doesn’t look paved, but it goes west around Cordes Lakes and then hooks up with the interstate a few miles later.”

  Something in her chest let go. This route would take longer, but she couldn’t handle another bridge crossing already. Two of those were enough for one lifetime.

  Dylan dropped the radio into her lap. “Call the boss. Tell her the plan.”

  “Me?”

  “Yeah,” Dylan said. “Chief navigator, remember? With great power comes great responsibility.”

  Remembering to turn the device on this time, Jenn called Sophie and explained the situation. Sophie didn’t object to taking a detour, though she complained about how much longer it would take. As before, the Dodge would stay a mile behind to guard the rear.

  “Nice work,” Dylan said. “Way to be heads up.”

  She allowed herself a smile. Someone who willingly took part in a massacre in West Ukraine wouldn’t compliment her like that, would he?

  They turned off the highway and onto a two-lane road with a median. On the left stood a long-abandoned gas station. Across the street, a building with a terracotta roof had its windows boarded up.

  Jenn studied the map. “Follow this for a while. Then it’ll be a right.”

  “Copy that,” Dylan said.

  The road twisted through a residential area comprising single-story houses on wide lots. Jenn didn’t see any people or running vehicles.

  The truck rumbled across a cattle guard and left the pavement. The tires scratched against dirt now, spraying rooster tails of dust behind them. The landscape resembled that around Phoenix: miles of sand peppered with clumps of wispy grass and squat bushes. The smoke still hid the mountains on the horizon, and above, the sky remained dark. It looked like storm clouds during monsoon season. That usually happened in July or August, and it was only the first week of May.

  Dylan navigated the back road for ten or fifteen minutes before he slowed the truck to a stop.

  “What’s wrong?” Jenn asked. “You see something?”

  “Yeah,” Carter said. “Is there another bridge?”

  Dylan pointed through the windshield. “There’s a body up there.”

  Jenn reached for her pistol and pulled it free of the holster. There was already a round in the chamber, so she readied it and peered through her window. Was this an ambush? Was someone out there, waiting and watching the Nissan? Had Jenn led them into a trap?

  “I’m going to take a look,” Dylan said and fetched his rifle.

  “Are you insane?” Jenn asked. “We should leave. Right now.”

  Dylan opened his door and reached one foot out. “I think that’s José.”

  “José!” Carter fumbled with his seat belt. “We need to go get him!”

  The radio in Jenn’s lap crackled. “Don’t tell me Carter had to stop for a piss,” Sophie said. “Make him use a bottle so we can keep moving.”

  Before Jenn could respond, Dylan swiped the radio from her. “Hang on,” he said to Sophie, his voice calm. “There’s something on the road I want to check out.”

  “Something?” Sophie asked. “Care to be more specific?”

  Dylan ignored her and spoke to Carter. “Wait here. Hold down the fort.”

  Carter unbuckled his seat belt. “I can help. If José’s there, then that means Ed could be, too.”

  “If Ed’s out there,” Dylan started, “think he’ll be happy with me letting you come? Gotta stay where it’s safe, remember?”

  If Ed was out there, Jenn thought, he was most certainly dead.

  Carter crossed his arms. “Okay. Fine.”

  “Keep watch on the truck,” Dylan said. “Jansen, let’s go.”

  He landed on the dirt with a crunch. Jenn went next. Outside, she shivered in the chilly air. Despite the temperature, her hands were sweaty.

  Dylan inched forward, sweeping his rifle left and right. Her Glock up, Jenn followed a few steps behind. Bushes dotted the desert on both sides of the road. Someone could be using one to hide while aiming his gunsights on Jenn and Dylan. They were too exposed, but Dylan pressed on, seemingly unfazed.

  Sunlight reflected off something—something metallic. “Hold up,” she said, then knelt beside it and brushed dirt off the top.

  “What is it?” Dylan asked.

  It was shaped like a hockey puck. When she took it in her fingers, she recognized it immediately. Her brother Jason used to chew this stuff. He made Jenn try it once when she was only fourteen or fifteen, and she threw up.

  “A tin of chewing tobacco,” she said.

  Dylan continued toward the body. His AR was still scanning the horizon. Good. If someone decided to open fire on them from two hundred yards away, Jenn’s Glock wouldn’t be much help.

  “What brand?” he asked.

  “Copenhagen.” Jason always preferred Skoal.

  “Short or long cut?”

  “What does that matter?”

  “Is it short or long cut?” Dylan repeated, sounding annoyed.

  Jenn brushed off some more dirt with her thumb. “Long.”

  Dylan swore.

  “What?”

  “Ed only chews Copenhagen long cut.”

  Jenn tucked the can into her pocket and followed Dylan to the body. He’d lowered his weapon. That bothered Jenn, but if someone was going to shoot at them, they would have done it by now, right? Why wait?

  José—if it was really him—lay on his stomach, his blue jeans and yellow windbreaker caked in a layer of brown. Dylan rolled him over. Sand covered the corpse’s face. His hair was buzzed, and dirt clung to a wound in his chest. The stale granola bar Jenn ate for breakfast this morning threatened to come up.

  It wasn’t Yankees Hat, she reminded herself.

  “José?” she croaked.

  “Yeah,” Dylan said with an emptiness in his voice. “It is.”

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  Jenn heard the door to the Nissan slam shut. She spun around to see Carter lumbering toward them. His limp had mostly vanished. “Is it him?” he asked. “Is he okay?”

  She made to intercept the big man. Dylan had told him to stay in the car, probably more to keep him from seeing a dead friend than to keep him out of harm’s way. Jenn held up a hand and said, “Wait. We got it,” but he wasn’t slowing down. “Dylan wants you to—”

  Carter pushed past her. When he saw the body, he froze. Jenn braced for him to fall to his knees, break into tears, or run for the truck, but all he said was, “It’s him.”

  “Yeah.” Dylan began unbuttoning his overshirt.

  “He’s dead.”

  Jenn’s hand tried to place itself on Carter’s arm, but she stopped it. That kind of gesture from a relative stranger might frighten him more. “I’m sorry,” she said instead.

  He wiped his nose with his knuckles. “It’s okay.”

  Down to his white undershirt, sweat stains in the armpits, Dylan laid his button-up over José�
��s face.

  “What happened to him?” Jenn asked, although it was obvious. “Where’s the truck?” She knew the answer to that question, too. Ed, José, and Tess were probably ambushed by attackers hiding in the desert. When they came through, the smoke would have been worse, making it more difficult to see. Their vehicle was stolen and José was killed. But why had they come this way? Had Ed taken the same route to avoid the bridge in Cordes Lakes? And where was he? Had he escaped with Tess?

  Dylan shifted into a crouch and bounced on his heels, then picked something small and cylindrical off the road. A shell casing. “This is a .45 ACP. José carried an old Remington 1911 chambered in .45. He put up a fight, at least.”

  A fly buzzed away from the hole in José’s chest.

  Jenn couldn’t look anymore. She spun around and breathed deep, expecting to cough, but the air tasted cleaner. It almost smelled right, too. She focused on that instead of the corpse lying behind her.

  She holstered her Glock and walked to the edge of the road. Three seconds in, hold, three seconds out.

  Dylan was recounting a story about José: something about him trying to teach Carter how to play soccer. They both laughed.

  Four or five breaths later, Jenn opened her eyelids and scanned the horizon.

  A second corpse lay in the sand.

  Her eyes flitted left and right in search of movement, but they found nothing.

  “Dylan,” she said. “There’s another body out there.”

  More cursing from Dylan as he came up beside her. “It’s Tess.”

  The crunch of tires on the dirt caught Jenn’s ear. The Dodge. The passenger door opened before the truck had fully stopped, and Valeria hopped out. When she saw José, she gasped and rushed forward. Dylan ran to her. Tears in her eyes, Valeria shouted something in Spanish and tried to dart past him, but he bear-hugged her. She made two fists and beat them on his back while she struggled to gain purchase with her feet. Dylan was too strong. Soon, she relented, then buried her face in Dylan’s chest.

  Sophie climbed down from the driver’s seat. “Ed?” she asked, fingers on her necklace. “Is he—” Her voice cracked. She took out a package of cigarettes, but it fell and landed in the dirt.

  “It’s Tess and José,” Carter said.

  Sophie’s posture relaxed, but her hands still shook as she reached for her smokes.

  Dylan led Valeria toward José. Together, they knelt beside him. As Dylan lifted the shirt off José’s face, Jenn expected Valeria to recoil, but she didn’t. Rather, she held his hand and made a cross symbol over her chest.

  “Looks like an ambush,” Jenn said. “Whoever did this took the truck.” She pulled out the tin of Copenhagen and handed it to Sophie. “I found it on the road.”

  Sophie ran her fingers along the edges of Ed’s tin.

  Jenn experienced a sudden urge to comfort Sophie. She was an abrasive woman, but here, holding this can of chewing tobacco, she looked vulnerable. “He’ll be okay,” Jenn said, though she didn’t really believe it. Could he have escaped when José and Tess were both killed? Doubtful, but not impossible, she supposed.

  Sophie’s jaw tightened. “Take Dylan and grab Tess,” she said to Jenn. “We can’t leave our people to rot in the desert. Then we need to check the entire area for Ed.”

  Jenn followed Dylan to Tess. Sand found its way into her shoes, scratching her feet. It wasn’t hot, as she’d assumed. Even the ground was cool.

  Dylan rolled over the body. Dried blood coated Tess’s stomach. She had dark hair, and her limbs were contorted in unnatural directions. Dirt covered her face. He brushed it aside, revealing an exit wound below the eye socket.

  More vomit filled Jenn’s mouth, but she pressed her lips together and kept it from bursting out.

  “She probably got hit in the gut and tried to run away,” Dylan said, closing Tess’s remaining eyelid. “Take her ankles.”

  Jenn steeled herself and did as Dylan asked. As they shuffled toward the truck, she couldn’t see Tess hanging between them: she saw Yankees Hat. She swore he was smiling at her. The stink of liquor found her nose. Whiskey. It was whiskey on his breath, she realized. Cheap, too, like the stuff Gary and Liam sipped when they had barbecues at the Ruiz house.

  It occurred to her that she’d seen four dead bodies in as many days. Before Payson, Jason was the first and only. When Jenn was fifteen, her maternal grandmother died, but she was cremated before the funeral. Her other three grandparents all passed away before she was born: her mother’s father from cancer and both of her father’s parents in a car accident when he was only twenty.

  They laid Tess on the road beside José. Valeria returned from the Dodge, a shovel in hand. Carter followed her into the desert.

  Not sure how to help, Jenn rolled up her shirt sleeves. “I’ll start looking . . . for Ed.”

  Sophie lit her cigarette and held up Ed’s tin. “I always told him to give up this garbage. You know what his answer was?”

  “That he’d quit chewing if you quit smoking?”

  “Not even close. Try again.”

  “You got me.” Jenn wrapped her arms around herself. Talking about Ed made her skin crawl. Soon, they would find his body. Knowing less about him would make the inevitable easier to swallow. “What’d he say?”

  “That he couldn’t quit.” She turned the Copenhagen over in her fingers. “Because I’d never quit smoking. And if one of us was going to die young, we both needed to.”

  Jenn struggled to force out a smile.

  Sophie shoved the tin into her pocket. “You need to take a dump, Jansen? You’re making a face.”

  “No,” Jenn said. “Sorry. It’s just a little—”

  “Morbid?” Sophie kicked a stone on the road. “Cringe-worthy? You bet. I vaguely remember threatening to punch him in the balls if he ever said something like that to me again. But that’s Ed.” Present tense. Was she optimistic about finding her husband or in denial? “He always wanted to be a romantic, but God he was awful at it.”

  Jenn tried to imagine Sophie being romanced. She pictured her and Ed sharing a bottle of cheap tequila and skinning a deer. “It’s cute,” Jenn lied.

  Sophie spat into the dirt. “Don’t you start now.” She adjusted the ponytail poking through her hat and stepped closer to Dylan. “What’s your expert opinion on the situation?”

  He ran his boot along a tire track in the sand. “These are fresh-ish. Looks like two sets. I bet Carter could tell you if either of them belonged to Ed’s truck.”

  Sophie tapped ash from her cigarette. “So Ed comes this way. Why?”

  “Probably the same reason we did,” Jenn said. “To avoid the bridge.”

  “All right.” Sophie knelt and touched a line of tire treads. “Why? Why do that? If someone’s out here, they have their own wheels. Why attack our people out in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Leviathan,” Dylan said.

  Sophie brushed off her pants. “What does a giant whale monster have to do with this?”

  Dylan opened his mouth to explain, but Jenn cut in. “They do it because they can. Name something more valuable than a running car after the EMP.”

  “Water,” Sophie said like it was obvious. “Food.”

  “All of which Ed had, right?”

  Sophie didn’t say anything. She was trying to rationalize the attack when there was nothing rational about it. After losing the Tesla, Sam and Jenn had done the same thing. Jenn even tried again after Camp Verde. In both instances, it was pointless. In a world without laws, Leviathan was the only answer to explain human cruelty. People did terrible things because they could or because they wanted to. It wasn’t any more or less complicated than that.

  “Okay,” Sophie said. “Enough dicking around. Let’s pan out. Us three. Scope out the area. Leave Val and Vladdy to work on the graves.”

  Jenn hoped that she wasn’t the one to find Ed, but better her than Sophie.

  As Sophie rose to her feet, Jenn heard buzzing. She stuck a f
inger in her ear and pulled it out, but the buzzing continued, loud now. A bug, maybe? Or maybe her concussion was worse than the doctor thought.

  Dylan lifted his rifle.

  More buzzing.

  Someone gripped Jenn’s arm and tugged her toward the Nissan. Sophie.

  “Val!” Dylan shouted.

  Jenn tripped and fell into the dirt. The buzzing grew closer as Sophie pulled her up. “What are you doing? What’s going on?”

  Out in the sand, Valeria stopped and leaned on her shovel, then held out one hand to ask something like, The hell do you want? Carter scratched his head and looked into the sky.

  Dylan cupped his hands over his mouth. “Drones!”

  12

  Valeria dropped the shovel and ran for the Nissan.

  Leaning against the passenger side door, Jenn was wedged between Sophie and Dylan. Above hovered two drones, four propellers on each. Both were small and likely contained only cameras, not machine guns like the weaponized models the military used.

  Dylan’s head twisted and turned. So did Jenn’s, but only miles of sand surrounded them. Her pulse quickened anyway, and her hand reached for the gun, but Sophie touched her wrist to stop her. “Don’t,” she said. Then, to the group, “Everybody, weapons on the ground.”

  “What?” Jenn asked. “You can’t be serious.”

  Sophie plopped onto her rear and rested her elbows on her knees. Valeria led Carter to the truck, and they crouched beside it. After a long second, Sophie pulled out a cigarette—her last one—and lit it. “In a few minutes, I’m expecting to be greeted by a branch of the U.S. military.”

  “The military?” Jenn asked. Both drones hovered, motionless. “How do you know?”

  “She’s right,” Dylan said. He laid his rifle on the ground and rose to his feet. “Recon drones. I can tell you what model they are, if you’re curious.”