by Stone, Kyla
Jonas had dared to confront the militia in front of his parents’ hardware store. For his troubles, he’d gotten punched and would’ve been shot—if Liam hadn’t intervened.
Quinn liked to think that she’d helped, but Liam Coleman was more than capable, his own one-man army.
After that day, she’d seen Jonas in a different light. He wasn’t just an idiot football jock like the rest of them; he actually had a brain. A hot-headed, impetuous one, but still.
She respected him for that. Liked him, even.
He and Whitney had both aided in fighting the community distribution center fire, sprinting into the burning, smoke-filled middle school again and again to recover supplies, pushing themselves past the point of exhaustion along with Quinn.
Quinn, Jonas, and Whitney shared little in common, except for one thing—the militia had killed one of their parents.
They lapsed into silence for several minutes, Quinn worrying at her eyebrow ring as she stared at the water. Only the boat broke the reflection of the trees and sky, shattering and refracting the images into thousands of pieces.
The air was brisk but windless. The barren trees still.
“My mom is like that, now.” Whitney gazed across the far bank, where several geese glided along the shoreline. She didn’t look at Jonas or Quinn. “She’s too depressed to get up and just lays in bed all day. Our house is…it’s filthy. There are bugs everywhere. Spiders and flies. It stinks. I hate it.”
People wanted the world to go back to the way it was. They wanted the distractions of Netflix and social media, the ease of fast food and restaurants and Starbucks, the comforts of music and grocery stores, delivery services and Amazon on demand. Jobs and church and bars, movie theaters and bowling alleys.
Hell, everyone wanted cars that worked and hot showers. A house that wasn’t freezing. Electricity was an amazing invention; living without it sucked hairy coconuts.
But some people wanted what they’d lost so badly they couldn’t adjust to now. They couldn’t wrap their heads around their new reality, and it was screwing with their brains.
With no shrinks standing by to dispense anxiety and anti-depressant meds, things were getting worse.
Quinn understood it. She understood it better than she wanted to. The temptation to crawl into bed in your sweatpants and bury yourself beneath a mountain of blankets, to tune out the broken world and sleep the rest of your miserable life away.
To make the pain stop.
“That sucks,” Jonas said. “My mom’s a wreck, too. My dad…my dad dying really hit her hard.” His voice caught as he jigged his fishing rod listlessly. “It’s like, she’s so angry. She hated the militia, and hates them even more now, but there’s nothing else she can do about it. Nothing will bring him back. The house is just so quiet without him.”
During the weeks the militia had controlled Fall Creek, they had killed nineteen townspeople, including the police officer, Owen Truitt and Wayne Marshall, Jonas’s dad.
Desoto had shot and killed Whitney’s father when he’d attempted to steal a Winter Haven house. Just like Sutter had shot and killed Quinn’s mother.
Noah had died too, right in front of her. She’d tried to warn him, to save him, but she’d failed.
She blinked hard, fighting away the sudden flood of wetness behind her eyes.
This was the part where she should open up, to share her innermost feelings, but she couldn’t do it. It was too much, too real, too close to the surface.
Her stomach knotted, suddenly queasy. She’d agreed to come out here to forget, to escape her own head for a few hours. It wasn’t working.
She was clinging to the side of a cliff, holding on by the tips of her fingers, and she didn’t know how to keep herself from falling.
“At least they’re all dead,” Whitney said. “I’m glad they’re dead. Sometimes I wish I’d killed one of them myself.”
“Careful what you wish for,” Quinn muttered.
Jonas shot her a confused look.
She said nothing. What was there to say? They didn’t know she’d been the one to kill Rosamond Sinclair. They didn’t know she had been seconds too late to save Noah.
Whitney sniffed. “I’m glad Mrs. Sinclair is dead. And Chief Sheridan, too. If they’d never let the militia in, our dads wouldn’t have died. Your mom either, Quinn.”
Quinn’s brain played a vicious game of Russian Roulette: Noah, dead on the floor. Rosamond sinking to her knees, grasping at her bloodied throat. How the woman’s hands fluttered helplessly, like white moths against the bright red blood.
How dark it had looked splattered across the polished Brazilian wood planks, dark like oil. So slick and wet, almost like the paint Gramps used to buy her. How she’d slipped in it as she fell by Noah’s side, begging him to live, to come back, to earn another chance to make things right.
A black pit opened in her stomach. It was hard to breathe. Everything was close, too close. The water on every side, lapping against the sides of the boat, trapping her.
Abruptly, Quinn stood, the boat rocking. “I need to go.”
Jonas set down the fishing rod. “You okay?”
She wasn’t okay. She was so far from okay it was on another planet. “I want to leave. Take me back.”
Whitney scrunched up her beautiful, too-thin face, already contrite though she hadn’t done a thing wrong. The wrong was inside Quinn.
“Did I say something? I didn’t mean to—”
“Take me back!” She was shaking. The boat rocked precariously beneath her feet. “Now!”
If Jonas didn’t start driving the damn boat, she’d jump in and swim to shore, never mind that the water was still freezing and she’d catch hypothermia.
Jonas saw it in her face—she would do it. “Okay, okay! We’ll go back.”
“Head to shore. I’ll walk.”
Whitney balked. “Why would you want to walk? We can take you home in the boat.”
She’d have to hike at least five miles through the woods in the cold, but that beat another second stuck in this tin can with other people. She had her Berretta pistol, along with her trusty slingshot and three flechettes, each sharpened to a razor edge.
Quinn’s hands curled into fists at her sides to keep them from trembling. To keep herself from hitting something—or someone. “Just do it!”
Jonas gave her a look like she was some alien creature he’d never seen before. Like she’d disappointed him. “Chill out. We’re going—”
Whitney let out a gasp. “Quinn.”
Something in her voice stopped them both.
Whitney pointed behind them, her wan face going bone-white, her red freckles standing out like droplets of blood. “There’s a body.”
Quinn twisted around and raised the binoculars. The bluff wasn’t so steep here; the houses crowded closer to the river. An enormous stone three-story mansion featuring a tiered deck and an elaborate outdoor kitchen rose above them.
Quinn had seen a lifetime of corpses in the last four weeks alone.
This body, though.
An overweight, middle-aged man hung listless, strung from the rafters of the deck, a yellow nylon cord throttling his neck. His hands were bound with yellow cord. His mottled, purplish skin made it impossible to make out identifying features.
Something was tacked to his chest, a water-logged cardboard square with letters scrawled in black spray paint.
“I can’t make out the words.” Whitney’s voice squeaked in panic. “What does it say?”
“‘Death to Power’.” Quinn’s chest turned to ice. Saying the words aloud sent a chill tunneling straight through her. “We need to go. Now.”
They might have defeated the militia, but that didn’t mean they were safe.
Something else was out there. Something bad.
9
Liam
Day Eighty-Eight
It didn’t take Liam long to find FEMA Center #109, a hastily constructed facility near the grounds of
Willard Airport in Champaign, a mid-sized university city in central Illinois.
It took far longer to find the people he was searching for.
Ghillie suit in place, he’d spent the last two days reconning the camp—glassing the area, climbing trees before dawn to get enough elevation to see clearly, and moving positions every few hours to get eyes on a different section of the camp.
FEMA had constructed the facilities upon wide-open fields; only a few positions allowed him enough tree cover to gain close access.
He tracked patrols, security shifts, and stationary guard positions, and studied the movement and daily schedule of the civilians.
The old man was right. FEMA Center #109 was as large as a city. Dozens of huge white tents plus hundreds—thousands—of modular buildings like single-wide trailers were set in a grid pattern and surrounded by a tall chain-link fence lined with concertina wire.
The Syndicate thugs carried long guns and wore BDUs, the name tapes and patches removed from their uniforms. They looked like soldiers, intentionally preying upon a civilian’s natural inclination to respect and obey American armed forces.
Guards patrolled the perimeter on an hourly circuit. Two sentries were posted in static positions every five hundred yards. Dozens more maintained order within the fence.
They were well-armed and organized, but they lacked the rigorous discipline of the military. They were not soldiers. Liam would exploit that.
The civilians looked tired, weak, and worn out. They edged out of the way when a guard stomped past, many flinching. They feared the Syndicate.
He witnessed several guards beating and tormenting civilians. One struck a man who responded slowly to an order. Two others knocked a tray from a woman’s hands and laughed when she knelt to pick the food off the ground.
Leering guards harassed women and teenage girls. Once, a guard yanked a woman into a nearby storage building. From the slump to her shoulders, the bruises on her face and arms, and the way she shrank from him, he could tell that this was not the first—or last—time.
Every hour he watched, Liam’s anger grew, rage simmering just beneath the surface of his tightly controlled demeanor. If he’d had his Spec Op team with him, he’d already be storming the camp, putting an end to this brutality. Or burning the whole place to the ground.
But he couldn’t do any of that. He was just one man, and so he forced himself to focus on his mission, on saving who he could save.
He took breaks only to answer the call of nature or open a can of beans and inhale the contents cold. He’d refilled his water bottles at McPherson’s house from a hand pump attached to his well.
Liam had left four MREs with the old man. The rest, he needed for himself. It was a good thing he’d brought supplies for several days; he would wait for as long as it took.
Mid-morning on the third day, he found them.
He was tucked in the fork of a thick oak about twenty-five feet off the ground, glassing another section of the endless grid. He’d rewoven his ghillie suit to include leaves and branches.
He froze mid-scan down a row between the tents, which led to a section of showers and bathrooms. A woman shuffled along the path. Slim build, warm brown skin, short black hair streaked with gray.
Pulse thudding in his throat, he followed her with the binoculars until he was certain.
The last time Liam had seen Mrs. Brooks was the day of the EMP when he delivered her grandson. She’d been smartly dressed, her graying hair stylishly bobbed, her makeup perfect. More than that, she’d stood tall and confident.
Now, she shambled in her oversized sweatpants and wrinkled khaki jacket, her shoulders bent with an air of despair. Her hair was mussed and ragged, and dark shadows rimmed her eyes, her face worn with exhaustion and stress.
In her arms, she cradled an infant dressed in a little blue coat and a long-sleeved onesie printed with footballs and helmets. His nephew.
Liam’s heart clenched like a fist. Memories of that terrible day seared his mind. The plummeting plane, the careening wreckage, the dead bodies everywhere.
His twin brother lying in the street, unmoving. Jessa on the bed, blood staining her legs, her chest, the sheets beneath her.
Save him, Liam. Save my baby…
It had been the right thing to bring the infant to his grandparents, but Liam should have escorted them to Tuscola himself and ensured their safety.
Relinquishing his nephew had felt like a giant hand tearing a hole in his heart. Shattered by grief, loss, and regret, he’d made a foolish decision; he’d allowed them to leave Chicago on their own.
His courage had never failed him in a moment of combat. Not once. But when it came to people and relationships and their messy complexity, he was not brave. He’d allowed that grief—that fear—to sever his connection with his nephew.
Liam couldn’t do anything to change the past. He’d lost what he’d lost. Lincoln and Jessa weren’t coming back.
Jessa’s voice no longer spoke to him from beyond the grave; he didn’t need her like he once had. He felt her, though, felt the love she’d had for this child burning inside him.
With the binoculars, Liam followed Mrs. Brooks and memorized the location of the modular building she entered. A pole with a sign scrawled “Quadrant 4: Zone C: Row 15” helped orientate him. The Brooks’ trailer was located five buildings directly south of the pole.
He waited and watched a while longer. At 1900 hours, both Mr. and Mrs. Brooks emerged from their trailer. Mr. Brooks carried the baby in a sling, facing inward. Liam couldn’t get a good glimpse of the child’s face before they disappeared between the buildings.
He’d seen enough. What he needed now was a few hours of rest. Lights out was at 2200 hours.
He retreated until he’d put a good half-mile between himself and the camp before unzipping his pack again and pulling out a tarp and spreading it on the ground beneath a tree. He used his pack as a pillow, his M4 resting across his chest.
The waiting was the worst. The fighting, the adrenaline-fused battle—that wasn’t the part he dreaded. He was made for that.
It was the quiet. That unnamed dread, the unknown. Those were the things that messed with his head. His pulse thudded against his skull.
His thoughts turned again to Hannah. With her, the nightmares didn’t go away, but they lessened. Without her presence, his ghosts haunted him with renewed and relentless fury. She was his lifeline back to the world of the living.
He didn’t sleep but allowed himself to drift into a state of half-awareness, almost like meditation. He imagined her smile, the way the light lit up her green eyes, and then he forced himself to shut down every thought.
He stilled his body, aware only of his physical senses, alert only to a potential threat.
Time passed. He rested.
At 2245 hours, he sat up. Drank some water. Packed his things, adjusted his plate carrier, and did a systems check.
He would get them out of that hellhole tonight. Sneak in, grab them, and sneak out.
He was only one man. One man with three souls to protect and defend.
This time, Liam would not fail.
10
Hannah
Day Eighty-Eight
The second town hall meeting was worse than the first.
Hannah hadn’t thought it was possible, but she was wrong. Clearly.
The newly appointed town council had declared the historic Greek revival courthouse located in the center of town as the de facto town hall location, as it had been before Rosamond had shuttered public meetings and moved the council to her own home.
Daylight streamed through the tall windows along the rear wall, providing enough light without electricity in the large two-story room featuring gilded arches, white pillars, and distressed wood plank floors.
The air was chilly but not freezing, though people packed together and wore coats. They had pushed the historic memorabilia and museum items into one of the side rooms to make space.
Earlier, Dave had organized volunteers to set up a couple hundred metal folding chairs. Every seat was taken, with a few dozen people wedged in the back and more cramming the aisles.
The council members sat at two side-by-side rectangular tables on the wooden platform at the front of the room.
Dave Farris, Annette King, Jose Reynoso, Mike Duncan, Officer Hayes, and Darryl Wiggins were original members of the council.
With the deaths of the superintendent along with her son, Julian, and the loss of Chief Briggs and Noah, the council had voted to add Hannah, Bishop, and Samantha Perez, also a Fall Creek police officer.
Hannah sat on one end between Dave and Bishop. Dave had brought a battery-operated megaphone, but sound carried well in the historic building, so as long as folks were quiet and respectful of the speaker, they didn’t need it.
Few acted respectful, however. Or quiet. The expansive room echoed with the buzz of angry murmuring, muttering, and complaining. The townspeople were restless, their hungry faces tense and glowering.
They’d already spent well over two hours hashing out the fate of the fifty-one Winter Haven houses recently vacated by the militia—fifty after Noah’s house burned to the ground.
The small, self-sufficient neighborhood ran on solar panels hardened against the EMP attack, outfitted with separate communal well water and septic systems.
As far as anyone knew, this was the only community in Southwest Michigan that still had power. Possibly, all of Michigan. Which made it a pretty prize—and a target.
Everyone in Fall Creek wanted in. They wanted working washing machines, hot showers, flushing toilets, stoves and ovens to cook what little food they had left, and lights that turned on at the flick of a switch.
All the things society had taken for granted for decades—suddenly gone. Whatever negatives electricity had brought with it—toxic social media and the ubiquitous, addictive nature of technology—life was extremely hard without it.