At Any Cost Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by K. M. Fawkes

  “Supervising,” she said simply, striding toward him and taking his arm. “And then we’re going to go to our respective houses, pack our stuff, and then get as much sleep as we can. None of this is going to work if we’re running around trying to do it on a lack of sleep.”

  “Are you sure about all of this?” he asked, going to something that had been on his mind since he suggested the plan. “Sure you’re okay with leaving here?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” she asked.

  “Well, Fawn…” he said, trailing off as he realized that he didn’t want to say out loud what he’d been thinking.

  “Ah,” she replied with a nod. “You’re wondering if I’m okay with leaving her here. The thing is, Garrett, I’m not actually leaving her. She’s coming with me. As I’m sure you realize.”

  She gave him a knowing look and he half-smiled, wondering if she’d seen the memorial in his backyard.

  “They never leave us. Not really,” she murmured.

  She was right, he thought. As long as there was someone to remember them, the dead never really left. Which made it even more important that he make it to Mexico with this new version of a family. Because if his life ended here in this town, who would go on remembering his sister?

  They didn’t go to sleep until five in the morning, but when they finally allowed themselves to rest, most of the packing was done. The food was organized and already in the trucks, the fuel was packaged as Elisa had dictated, personal belongings were stacked in the garage, waiting to be loaded, alongside the bicycles which would be ridden in shifts, alongside the trucks, by those who were able to, since there weren’t enough seats for all those in the community. Garrett and Greyson had chosen the team that would go on the recon mission—them, plus Shane—and who would be on the tanker-delivery team—Garrett, Alice, Bart and Riley. Elisa had protested at them taking the two teenagers, but Greyson had quickly pointed out that they looked relatively harmless, and would therefore draw little attention. They couldn’t go marching into that meeting with their designated warriors—that way, the bikers would immediately know that something was up.

  Taking the teenagers gave them a bit of cover. Taking Alice ensured that they would still be able to do exactly what they had in mind.

  Garrett followed that up by observing that Bart had lost a finger to these people and deserved the payback of helping to take them out.

  At those points, Elisa had sealed her lips and nodded, and they’d gone to their various houses to try to get some sleep.

  Garrett, of course, quickly found that he couldn’t actually rest. Not with all the things they were about to attempt. His mind was rushing from one idea to the next, hardly taking time to consider any of them, while at the same time worrying about all of them. After about thirty minutes, though, knowing that he needed the rest if he was going to make it through the next two days successfully, he closed his eyes, forced his mind to go clear, and demanded that his brain allow his body to go to sleep.

  Finally, exhausted at the amount of stress he’d been under since he last slept, he drifted off into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  He woke up some time later to a banging on his door, and a quick glance out the window told him that it was around noon. A relatively good amount of sleep, then, and if he was right, whoever was banging on his door would be a messenger from either Alice or Elisa. It was time to get up and get ready for the first steps of his plan.

  Garrett rose from his bed and stumbled downstairs, not bothering with a change of clothes or even a wash. They were going to be going out into the dusty desert on a recon mission where they had a 99.9 percent chance of getting even dustier. Washing now or putting on clean clothes would be a waste of time.

  When he opened his door he was unsurprised to see Bart, deep shadows underneath his eyes. The boy had lost weight in the days since he’d lost a finger, and Garrett wondered how he was doing mentally. He hadn’t asked for the story of how it had happened, but he assumed it was an ugly one. And that memory would be a hard one to forget. This kid was just another reason they had to get the hell out of there. Garrett wanted him to grow up and have some sort of normal life. Maybe go back to school. Maybe even get a girlfriend.

  Hell, he wanted Bart to have a life at all. And this town certainly wasn’t going to provide it.

  “Sorry to wake you, Cap, but Elisa says it’s time to get up and get going,” Bart said bashfully.

  Garrett put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “No reason to apologize, Bart. I knew it was coming. And if Elisa said it, I suspect that means it’s right. I mean has she ever been wrong in her entire life?”

  This brought a bright grin to Bart’s face, and Garrett grinned back, enjoying the moment of levity before they launched themselves into life-threatening situations.

  He thought this would all work. He really did. But he would feel a whole lot better once they were on the other side of that border and were remembering how it had worked.

  He and Bart made quick work of the walk to the schoolhouse, where Bart said the rest of the town was going to be meeting. Evidently Garrett had been one of the last ones to wake up—orders of Elisa, no doubt—and most everyone else was already awake. When they arrived, Garrett saw a sea of hopeful and nervous faces. Determined faces… and those that didn’t yet know whether to believe in this plan or not.

  God, he hoped he didn’t let them down.

  Greyson was the first one to approach him. “We’ve got the Ford gassed up and ready to go,” he said quickly. “We’ve got two rifles and three stun guns in it, just in case. I figure you’ll be taking the Glock, same as you always do, which will give us each a weapon and plenty of ammo. Not that we’re hoping to use it.”

  He added that last phrase as an afterthought, and Garrett smiled at him.

  “No, this isn’t the time to fight. Just doing a little recon, is all,” he confirmed.

  The entire plan was to get to Helen Falls without being noticed—a tricky enterprise if they were truly being watched—and scout out how many people the biker gang had and what Garrett and the second team would be getting into when they walked right into the viper’s nest. The more they knew, the better they could prepare. And with luck, the more successful they’d be.

  Shane strode up then, his long legs bringing him quickly through the crowd. “You two ready?” he asked sharply. “I’d rather get this out of the way, if you don’t mind.”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Garrett answered. “Let’s ride.”

  Two minutes later they were climbing into the truck, Greyson behind the wheel, Garrett riding shotgun—with an actual shotgun in his lap—and Shane in the back with the rest of the weapons and the extra ammunition. They’d located Helen Falls on the map the previous evening—it had in fact existed before the EMP devices went off—and set off on the road to get there.

  “How long do we think this is going to take?” Garrett asked, feeling his stomach rolling with more than just the action of the truck.

  “They weren’t lying about how close they are to us,” Shane answered. “I reckon twenty minutes maximum. We’re lucky that the road we’re taking is the same as the one we’d take to a number of other towns. We look like we could be going anywhere. Also looks like there’s a system of canyons right outside of Helen Falls. Any luck, we can get into those and lose whoever might be following us.”

  It was a firm plan, and Garrett still liked it. They’d known from the start that they couldn’t just drive into town to have a look around—and that anyone who was watching Trinity Ranch would have seen them leave, and perhaps be following them. They couldn’t risk those followers catching up to them, either. The plan was to ditch the truck and approach Helen Falls on foot. Without being seen. Or caught.

  It wasn’t going to be easy. But it was their best bet at figuring out what they would be up against tomorrow.

  “Shane, eyes on the road behind us,” Garrett said, staring out his window into the distance.

  There was
nothing in the landscape here to hide anyone else, so if anyone was following them, it would have to be on the road. He was hoping that Kraken had been bluffing when he said they had eyes on Trinity Ranch. But there was really no way of knowing.

  Chapter 20

  Shane had been almost exact when he’d estimated twenty minutes, and they arrived at the canyons he’d pinpointed without drama—and without any sign of the Helen Falls gang. A quick swerve of the wheel and they were in a canyon, flying through the dust and rocks at a speed that wasn’t good for the truck or its shocks, but would get them out of sight quickly. About five minutes in, Garrett put a hand on Greyson’s arm.

  “Slow down,” he said quietly, as if someone was listening to them. “You’re throwing up a lot of dust right now, and though they might not think anything of it if they see it, we don’t want it sticking in their head.”

  Greyson nodded and dropped his speed to around 5 MPH, crawling forward through the sand of what must have once been a riverbed—and would perhaps be one again, in the winter. When Garrett saw a canyon breaking off to the side, he nodded to it.

  “Let’s park in there and get this over with.”

  Greyson pulled out of the main canyon and came to a quick stop, throwing the truck in park. Two seconds later they were all out of the vehicle, guns up and at the ready, legs in a crouch as they listened with everything they had in them.

  All they heard was the sound of the wind through the walls of the canyon. There weren’t even any birds chirping here.

  “Nothing,” Greyson murmured. “You guys got anything?”

  “Not a thing,” Garrett confirmed. “Let’s move.”

  They walked back through the canyon they’d just driven down, keeping close to the walls and doing their best to stay hidden in the shadows cast by the rocks. Once they got to the mouth of the canyon, Garrett put up a hand to let the others know to stand still, and crept forward on the balls of his feet, crouched over and heading toward one of the largest cacti he could find. Once he reached it, he leaned out around it and gazed into the distance.

  Helen Falls was about half a mile from them, if that. Garrett could see the buildings rising up from the horizon into the pale, bleached-out blue of the New Mexico afternoon, and when he narrowed his eyes a bit, he could see the moving dots that indicated people there. He cast his gaze around the town, looking for the guards he thought they must have posted, and before long he found them. One to the north of the town, and one to the south.

  Garrett and his friends would be coming from the west. And no matter how hard he looked, he didn’t see anyone set up in their direct line of travel. Maybe the bikers were confident enough in their ability to defend themselves that they thought they didn’t need it.

  Maybe they were just stupid.

  Either way, it had just increased their chances of success.

  He turned and gestured for Greyson and Shane to join him, and then looked toward the town and started building a map of the steps they could take that would give them the best possible cover.

  “Looks like twenty-five men max, from what I’ve been able to count,” Greyson breathed from his spot next to Garrett.

  They’d been watching the town from behind a patch of prickly pear cacti for about twenty minutes, observing the comings and goings of the gang and their numbers, and at this point Garrett figured they’d all started to recognize the individuals in the gang.

  “Those guys sure don’t believe in staying in their houses, do they?” he answered.

  “Typical for a biker gang,” Shane said. “It’s all about the social aspects for them. These guys might not have started out as bikers, but I’m guessing that guy Kraken did. And he’s taught them all about the culture.”

  He nodded to the leader of the gang, who was holding court on the patio of what looked like one of the biggest houses in town. The rest of his gang had been coming and going throughout their time there, though they didn’t seem like they had any specific goals in mind.

  “I’m guessing he’s orchestrated the whole thing,” Shane continued. “Built this up to be his ideal gang. Including—”

  He cut his speech off and ducked slightly as a shot rang out, and they all narrowed their eyes as they saw what the man had been shooting at. A dead jackrabbit lay on the ground in the street, all the men cheering its death from the patio.

  “Including their rules,” Shane finished. “Which seem to be that they shoot anything that moves.”

  Garrett pulled his eyes from the sight of the dead animal and started to count the motorcycles parked in a row in front of another house. It looked like they all had at least one, and though the bikes were old-fashioned, they all appeared to be in running order. A few of them were even shined up and polished, as if they were ready to go to a show.

  No, they wouldn’t be able to outrun those. The sight just confirmed that they need to knock those guys out of commission before they made their run for the border.

  A sudden shout of glee went up from the men on the patio, and Garrett turned back to them to see several of them passing bottles around, and several more leaning over tables and snorting up what he could only assume was cocaine.

  “Where the hell are they getting drugs and alcohol in this version of the world?” he breathed.

  “Guess no one else is trying to hang onto it,” Greyson answered. “And if you want something badly enough…”

  Another shot rang out, and a man stood and staggered off the patio… then fell dead in the street. Kraken blew the smoke off the end of his gun, and Garrett heard his next words quite clearly.

  “Let that be a lesson to you boys. The next one of you who talks back to me will get a whole lot worse than that.”

  Garrett felt his shoulders grow tense at the fact that Kraken had just shot one of his own men.

  “Think we’ve seen everything we need to see here, guys. Let’s get home and tell the others.”

  As they were running back to the trucks, fearful of a bullet in their backs the entire time, Garrett started revising his plan. They weren’t just going up against people who would beat and maim them—they were going up against a man who wouldn’t hesitate to shoot them. And that was going to require more finesse—and speed—than he’d planned for.

  Chapter 21

  When they arrived back at Trinity Ranch, they found that the rest of the residents had been busy in their absence. The other truck was now fully packed, and the townspeople had started going through and cleaning out the houses, eliminating any sign that they’d ever been there.

  This time, it was Alice who was leading the action. She and Elisa seemed to have come to some sort of agreement about who was in charge of what, though Garrett thought there must be some sort of ulterior motive for that as well.

  “She wanted to spend some time in the cemetery, and I told her she should spend all day there, if she wanted to,” Alice noted as she escorted Garrett from the garage and toward the first house on the street. “Told her she should make a freaking campsite next to her little girl’s grave and soak it all in, build it up like a layer of protection around her.”

  Her voice broke and she stopped speaking suddenly, then stopped walking and stared off into the distance. “Told her to gather all the memories she could and put them into a safe place in her heart. A place that she’d be able to go when everything went pear-shaped. A place that she’d never ever let fade.”

  Garrett stood next to her, at a complete loss for what to do. He knew Alice had lost her son to the nanovirus. He knew it had changed her irrevocably, and that she’d become a different person after that—a harder, more defensive person. A person who wasn’t going to let herself be hurt again. He’d seen that version of Alice in his time as her friend and compatriot. The version that didn’t take any mouth from anyone and was always ready with a plan B. The version that didn’t hesitate to shoot General Green—the man who had threatened to have her raped and enslaved—in the head when the opportunity presented itself.

/>   He’d never known the other version of her. But he saw a flash of it right now, in the way her face seemed to melt and grow fuzzy at whatever memory she was holding in her brain. Whatever story she’d taken out of her own safe place.

  A layer of protection around her. He wondered how often she allowed herself to think about it. How often she allowed herself to remember her little boy and actually feel any emotion about what had happened to him. He knew it had to be dangerous for her; with the way the world had changed, none of them had time to be sentimental, or let themselves be caught off guard. None of them had the luxury of letting their guard down at all—and that was what memory did to you. But that didn’t mean it was okay to forget.

  It certainly didn’t mean any of them should forget those they had lost.

  He was just about to put a hand out and touch her shoulder in a show of solidarity and support—fully admitting that it might actually get him punched—when she shook herself and started forward again.

  “So she’s in the graveyard,” Alice continued, as if there hadn’t been a moment there where she lost herself in her own mind. As if she hadn’t allowed herself to be vulnerable in full view of someone else. “And I think she’ll be there all day. If we’re leaving tomorrow night, it means this is the last chance for her to be in Fawn’s physical presence, even if that presence is somewhat… altered. I’ve taken over with the organizational stuff until she’s ready to pick it back up again.”

  “Makes sense,” Garrett said, falling into step beside her again and happy to ignore their pause. “What are we doing now?”

  “Making the houses look as if we haven’t been here at all,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to be able to come in here and find out anything about us. We’ll have the map with us, of course, so they won’t exactly be able to figure out where we’ve gone, but if we leave anything behind they might use it to figure out what our goals are. And I don’t think I’m the only one who wants to leave them far, far behind.”