Killing Frost (After the Shift Book 2)

by Grace Hamilton

  The blast doors had been impossible to get through, and the whole silo had been full of redundancies in its food and power systems. They really could have waited more than five years before they could be forced to open up.

  Nathan’s re-education had started almost immediately. He’d been given ECT on a regular basis, and without anesthetic. This process had suppressed memories and thoughts, and his food had been laced with drugs to keep him compliant and malleable, which was why he’d felt exhausted most of the time. They’d kept up a consistent web of convincing stories about what had happened to convince him, in a very short time, that his family was dead, that he was a willing participant in the Calgary community, and that he loved and believed in God with his whole heart and soul.

  “They did a number on you, sure enough,” Tommy had said one day when he’d found Nathan outside the wagon, on his knees and starting to pray.

  That had been some time ago now, and Nathan, now that he knew what had been happening to him, and now that he was free of the drugs and the ECT, was nearly getting back to how he’d been before. He was still more tired than he expected to be, but at least he was free of Strickland Grange’s malevolent influence.

  It was another salutary lesson in how the Big Winter was causing people to behave towards their fellow men. Brant had seen it as an opportunity to make himself rich, and Strickland had seen it as a way to spread his thoughts of eugenics, with the silo to become a breeding tank for a new class of Aryan. And then there’d been Danny, who’d seen it as a chance to become all-powerful and lead a gang of slaughterers. Conversely, there were people like Rose, leading a rebellion to make things better for everyone in Detroit. And Elm, who’d never taken everything, leaving supplies for the people who would come next, and gifting his ledger of remedies and medicines to Cyndi so she could spread the word. And now there was Tommy Ben.

  Nathan’s faculties, even as they’d slowly returned, still couldn’t get a handle on the man.

  Was he a hero by circumstance, or by design?

  Cyndi and the others, after many failed attempts to get into the silo, had met Tommy in the nearby town of Carlton. Tommy had been farming cattle, but the animals hadn’t been thriving, and Tommy was not a natural farmer. He’d connected with Freeson, and had an eye for Lucy—Cyndi had told Nathan with a wink—which Lucy had rebuffed immediately. While they’d stayed in the town and gotten to know Tommy better, planning a new assault on the silo to rescue Nathan, Tommy had told them he’d worked on the silo conversion years earlier, long before Strickland and his “loopy hoo-hahs” had acquired it. Of course, a missile silo didn’t need a fire and emergency escape route when it was a missile silo, but when it became a residence, to comply with the federal regulations, it did.

  “Gotta have a back door, ain’tcha?” Tommy had pointed out.

  The back door, as he’d called it, was under nine feet of earth, with three feet of ice on top of that. The idea for the escape was that it would be triggered from inside the silo if there was an evacuation needed, so the soil would be shifted with explosive bolts on the shoring holding it in place, and then channeled into a waiting pit that allowed the people down there to climb out safely if the need arose.

  When Tommy had worked construction on the site, he’d been one of the gang who’d dug the pit.

  All it had taken was the appropriation of a digger. It cut down through the earth in less than an hour, revealing the escape hatch. A bit of work with crowbars and sledgehammers, and they’d been inside the silo, rounding up the community and taking them to the chapel.

  There had been some light resistance, but Freeson, Donie, and Lucy had dealt with that while Cyndi and Tommy had searched for Nathan.

  From the moment they’d taken the fire escape hatch up to the moment when they’d begun climbing out of the silo, with Nathan and zero causalities, they’d required less than fifteen minutes. The time it had taken for Nathan to have his breakfast, find the door to the medical unit locked, and make his way towards the chapel.

  Since then, Nathan had been resting where he could, in the back of Tommy’s covered wagon, steering the oxen when he felt up to it, and generally trying to get his mojo back. He was living out of the wagon with Tommy, Cyndi, Brandon, Tony, and Rapier. They had been sad to leave the dogs behind, but Tommy’s two wagons would provide shelter and a modicum of comfort that the sleds did not.

  In the other wagon came Freeson, Lucy, Dave, and Donie. Freeson had taken to the pioneer lifestyle so well that he’d begun wearing a white Stetson in the same way that Elm had back in Chicago. It made Nathan’s heart warm to see his friend in the wagon behind them, too, smiling more than he’d ever seen him do before, enjoying life as the weather changed from a bitter freeze to a more manageable, shivery cold.

  Tony was thriving on Elm’s rooibos tea recipe, too. He’d not had an attack of asthma in many weeks now, and the good food he was getting was packing on muscle and strength.

  They’d traveled for five weeks now, and last week, Dave’s cop-maps had showed them that they’d crossed from Nebraska into Wyoming. They were on the last leg of their journey to Casper. Nathan was near back to his old self now as well, and apart from the nightmares, he was finding it easier to succumb to fatigue than he had in the past; and as they neared their destination, it became more and more comforting, to feel that they had made it safely across the plains, through the weather, and towards a city of new hope.

  23

  The first sense of trouble came on the outskirts of Lost Springs. They’d been making good progress in the wagons now. The oxen were moving faster through the thaw than they had over the snow, where footing hadn’t been so sure and obstacles had often been disguised beneath lumps of snow.

  Nathan had felt up to steering that morning after they’d broken camp. The turn in the weather, although not yet above leaving the earth glittering with hard frosts and billowing mists, made the lands eerie and the air ghostly. They’d had to take to traveling by roads because cross-country routes couldn’t be trusted without Dave’s satellite uplink.

  The first sound of the engines didn’t concern Nathan unduly. They’d gotten more used to finding the occasional vehicles with enough fuel to keep running now that they were only on the fringes of the new Arctic Circle. But it wasn’t a daily occurrence, and the people in the cars still kept mostly to themselves.

  It was odd, he thought, that back in the areas harshest hit by the Big Winter, fellow travelers hadn’t been willing to meet and talk. Nathan had noted that a paranoia was spreading across the country. People weren’t so quick to trust. He guessed they’d been burned too many times by others who were motivated by their own greed, just as he’d been burned himself.

  Nathan didn’t like it, but he understood it.

  He whoa’ed the oxen and called back to Freeson, who’d done the same. “You hear that, Free?”

  The engine noise was far off, but it was definitely there. Tommy stuck his head out of the canvas and listened.

  “That doesn’t sound right, does it?”

  There was a note to the sound that Nathan, a veteran of a thousand engines, didn’t recognize. Perhaps the foggy air was doing something to the acoustics in the platte valley they were bisecting.

  But no, this was an engine signature on the air that Nathan could not recognize. And the sound was getting closer.

  Tommy grabbed his shotgun and passed an MP4 to Nathan. “Forearmed is fore-readied, or something, Nate.”

  Tommy and Nathan jumped down from the wagon and walked swiftly back to where Freeson and Lucy had already disembarked with their weapons at the ready. The four of them then walked past the second wagon, taking up a line. Guns raised, they waited there as the engine noise came closer and resolved itself.

  They couldn’t see far down the road because of the mist, but as they looked on, something strange began happening to the foggy air. It was clearing. Gusts of it were moving apart like the parting of the Red Sea, and they could see the road now, and hear
the engine that was almost upon them, and yet they still couldn’t see any vehicle to go along with the attendant noise.

  Until they looked up.

  The black shadow moved through the air, slowly and deliberately following the road.

  The sound came from the suppressed engine notes of a military helicopter. That’s what had turned it weird in Nathan’s ears, and it had been so long since he’d seen anything flying that he’d not even thought of looking up into the sky.

  “Holy…” Tommy breathed out as the helo hovered overhead. “You know what that is?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “No idea,” Freeson added.

  “That, my friends, is a highly-modified MH-60 Black Hawk stealth helicopter. Which is why it sounds so dang weird.”

  The Black Hawk was hovering fifty feet above them now. The downdraft was huge, dissipating the mist completely. But still the engine sounded off. Nathan had been close to helicopters in the past. They sounded like one set of metal stairs falling down another set of metal stairs. This thing was loud, but it felt wholly suppressed, like you would only know it was near you when it got to be fully overhead.

  “These are the beauties they used to fly the guys who took out Bin Laden. My God!” Tommy shouted suddenly, lifting his baseball cap and scratching at his sweaty black hair.

  “And what’s it doing here?” Nathan shouted back.

  Before Tommy could answer, a door on the side of the Black Hawk slid open and something huge was rolled out.

  It fell towards them, a dead weight with the clothes around it fluttering with the acceleration and the draft from the rotors. When the body hit the road ten yards away with a sickening thump, they heard the sound of its bones snapping and a line of gore humped out of its side as the belly split open.

  Freeson and Lucy turned around in disgust.

  Tommy swore.

  Nathan could say nothing as one of the Detroit memories he’d been missing came flooding back into his head and he looked down upon the body of Horace, now as dead as dead could be.

  They abandoned the wagons, the oxen, and all of their supplies to run into the woods. There’d been no time to look after Horace’s remains. There was just the blind panic of making sure they got into the trees with everyone safe before the Black Hawk landed and disgorged the authors of Horace’s horrific death from within. Nathan yanked on Tony’s arm as the boy looked wildly back for Rapier, who had seemingly disappeared when the helicopter had arrived.

  It was as if whoever was in the Black Hawk waited for them to get away before both wagons and attendant oxen were ripped apart in a hail of cannon fire. It was obvious to Nathan that whoever was in the helicopter didn’t care that he and the others were now in the woods. Cyndi ran with her babe in arms, and Nathan resorted to throwing Tony over his shoulder in much the same way that Tommy had carried him out of the silo.

  Nathan didn’t have time to think about who it might be in the Black Hawk, but the dumping of Horace’s dead body onto their path had been a clear enough indicator that it was someone from Detroit who was looking for a slice of hot revenge.

  You didn’t drop a calling card like that if you were going to just sneak up behind someone and shoot them in the back of the head. No. This was an action designed with one purpose—to cause terror in the hearts of Nathan and his people. To put his children in a state of absolute panic and to enjoy doing it.

  Whoever had dropped the body had a sense of humor, and a sense of the theatrical.

  The trees were Douglas firs, and although they were cold and frosty, there wasn’t much snow at their bases. The ground around them was instead heavy and wet, the mulch sticky and cloying. The chill air burned in Nathan’s lungs as he ducked beneath branches, following Cyndi as she ran on, dodging tree trunks with the baby in one hand and a SIG-Sauer in the other.

  No one spoke; even the baby refused to cry. All they heard was the desperate crash of their feet through the undergrowth, the harshness of their breathing catching on the air, and the winding down of the Black Hawk engine as it landed and extinguished its stealth-baffled engines.

  Nathan kept his eyes locked on Cyndi’s back. The others were fanning out of his peripheral vision as they moved in random directions. Then they came to a steep slope that surprised Cyndi and she slid onto her backside with an explosive breath before slithering down through the cold mud, using her legs as brakes and digging up furrows with her heels. Nathan brought Tony around to his chest and held his face close to his jacket as he launched himself down the slope.

  At the bottom, Cyndi was getting to her feet, her face red with exertion and her mouth barred with spit, her eyes full of the fear that whoever had come in the helicopter would have enjoyed knowing they’d engendered.

  Cyndi didn’t have the breath to speak and Nathan didn’t have the energy to climb up out of the mud-caked gully on the other side, so he pointed along the floor of the natural ditch to a clump of bushes that were seventy or so yards away and might allow them some cover and time to recoup their lost energy.

  Cyndi nodded and, keeping her head low and Brandon tight against her breast, ran along the deepening puddles of the gully floor, splashing dirty mud stains up her pants.

  Nathan was all but beat when they reached the scrub. It was leafless and thorny, but also thick, and there was enough room for them to crawl elbow over elbow into the welcoming darkness beneath it. Nathan pushed Tony forward wordlessly, pointing for him to follow his mom. Tony, his face white with fear and dotted with cold flecks of wet mud, nodded and followed Cyndi into the gloom.

  Nathan came last, sinking his chest into the freezing water. It was only inches deep, but it soon seeped through all of his clothes and into his boots. His elbows barked painfully against stones and brackish, dirty droplets splashed up into his mouth, making him spit out grit.

  His heart was thumping. This was the hardest he’d exerted himself since before the silo. His muscles had started to feel like rusted iron, and his soaked skin seemed to be shrinking against his bones into a chill, tight covering that made movement near impossible.

  Nathan wanted to wake up. Wanted this to be one of his nightmares where his wife and children were lost to him. He wanted to wake up in the warm blankets of the wagon and hug his children and Cyndi close.

  Please be a dream.

  Please be a damn dream.

  But it was neither a dream nor a hallucination, and as Nathan settled into the wet, animal stink of the hollow beneath the bushes, just next to his terrified family, that’s when the shooting started.

  They were being systematically hunted down through the thawing forest.

  Nathan could hear footsteps crashing not far enough off to be safe, and the clatter of small arms fire smacking into wet wood and smashing into the sodden earth. He had no idea if the shots were being fired at actual targets or were—like so much else of this episode—designed just to terrorize them to the edge of true madness.

  They still hadn’t spoken a word to each other since leaving the wagons. Still hadn’t formulated a plan of action or seen how they could fight back. How could they, though? They were holding their children in their arms. How could they fight back?

  And if they surrendered, then what? There had been no attempt from anyone in the helicopter to give them the opportunity to surrender.

  This wasn’t just revenge; it was sport.

  Nathan had an MP4 and one spare magazine, plus his knife. Cyndi had the SIG and he didn’t know what else. It wasn’t much of an inventory, even if they did want to fight back. How long would they last? Nathan had no idea how many people had exited the Black Hawk to follow them into the woods. Weapons’ fire seemed to be coming from five or six directions at once, echoing through the trees. There would be a pause in the firing and then they would hear bodies crashing through the undergrowth, and then more firing.

  If their pursuers were smart, they would be quartering the areas now, and the lack of ready cover would mean that places like this d
ark, wet, and dirty bolt-hole at the bottom of the gully would be an obvious place to hide. It stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb now that Nathan thought about it.

  They couldn’t stay here.

  But now they also couldn’t move, because as Nathan looked out, back along the gully, two pairs of boots slid down into it and then stood up in the puddles at the base.

  Nathan couldn’t crane his neck high enough to see their faces, but they seemed to be in the same black uniforms as the National Guardsmen he’d encountered with Elm in Pinkersville.

  Surely, though, they weren’t hunting Nathan. Why would they bother? That exchange had just been a little local difficulty months ago, which should have been over once they’d taken their revenge on Elm.

  It just didn’t compute.

  Cyndi’s eyes implored Nathan for a solution. The legs were mere yards away now. They were firing into the air wildly. All it would take would be for them to try target practice on the bush and it would be over. For all of them.

  Nathan had nothing, though. No idea why they would be doing this, why they had dumped Horace out of the Black Hawk, or why he and his friends and family were being hunted through the forest.

  No idea… until it all became clear.

  “We know you’re here somewhere, Nate! Why don’t you just give yourself up and make it easier on yourself?”

  A band saw of frozen fear cut Nathan’s heart from his chest.

  That voice belonged to Stryker Wilson.