At Any Cost Box Set: Books 1 - 3

by K. M. Fawkes

  He knew it was the right suggestion when Alice didn’t even argue. She just nodded and turned the bike to the right, to skim along the outside of town.

  “They left from right behind the schoolhouse, so we might be able to follow their tracks,” she shouted back at him in explanation.

  He gulped. Would tracking them be that easy? And if it was, did that mean the bikers from Helen Falls might have used the same tactic to find them, trap them, and rob them of their goods?

  Ten minutes later they were at the point where the desert reached up to the road that led away from the schoolhouse and into the wilderness, and Alice and Garrett were climbing off the bike and putting their noses toward the ground like bloodhounds.

  They moved through the rocky area, desperately looking for anything that might be a shoe print or stack of rocks that had been kicked over—anything that indicated human presence. Garrett focused on the ground, but also kept his eyes on the barrel cacti in the area, looking for scraps of clothing that indicated someone had walked too close to a cactus. The two of them circled the area for fifteen minutes, calling out to each other every so often when they found something that looked promising, but eventually they stopped walking and simply looked at each other.

  “I don’t think any of this means anything,” Alice said quietly.

  “I agree,” Garrett replied. “Definitely nothing we could reliably follow. Let’s head for the cave. If they followed directions, maybe we’ll find them there.”

  “It’s already long past time when they should have left the cave,” she countered. “If they followed directions.”

  Garrett stopped himself from pointing out that any footprints they’d found would have most likely led right to the cave, and shrugged. “Maybe they only followed some of the directions. Or maybe we’ll find their trail there and be able to tell where they’ve gone. There was more sand in that area. Better for making footprints.”

  Alice nodded and went back to the motorcycle without answering, Garrett two steps behind her. He climbed back onto the bike, cringing when his wound connected with one of the bags, and settled himself into what was left of his seat, making as much room as he could for Alice in front of him. She was a small woman, but this was still a tight squeeze, and he wondered momentarily if they should have taken two of the bikes instead of just the one.

  Only to have him crash one of them when he hit a bump in the road and hurt himself, he knew. It would have endangered his life, and potentially hers as well. No, better that they were on one bike—regardless of how uncomfortable it was.

  He sat back and tried to push the bags backward, then looped his arms around her middle, and she hit the gas, sending them shooting forward into the desert.

  Their friends weren’t at the cave, either, though they did finally see signs of them there: the wrapper from a candy bar, blood against one of the walls. The cave was awash with footprints and the smell of people, and Garrett breathed out a small sigh of relief at it. If nothing else, then, they’d made it this far. Or at least some of them had. If they’d stayed together, then it should have been the entire group. What was left of them, in any case. Where they’d gone from here…

  He and Alice moved quickly from the interior of the cave to the group of cacti that sat above the entrance.

  “Do you see anything that looks likely?” Alice asked, walking back and forth, her gaze on the ground.

  Garrett was standing still, using only his eyes and storing up what energy he had, but he shook his head. There was nothing there.

  “It’s just as sandy as I remember, but they could have moved on hours ago,” he said quietly. “The wind will have erased any trail they left.”

  Alice looked up at him, and he could see the knowledge in her eyes. The more time passed, the less likely they were to find their friends—and they were even less likely to know what might have happened to them. With luck, the group would have moved on to a town and found shelter there. It was what he’d hoped they would do, and what he would tell himself had happened. But she wasn’t willing to let it go yet. Truthfully, neither was he.

  “Concentric circles?” she asked. “At least for a little while?”

  He nodded. “Concentric circles. But only for an hour or so. We might come across them, or we might find someone who’s been separated from the group and needs help. But—”

  “I know,” she interrupted.

  Right. He didn’t have to tell her that they couldn’t search for much longer. They had limited supplies—only enough for the day—and though fuel had been plentiful back in Trinity Ranch, they’d only taken as much as they could carry. Wasting it all searching for the people of their community would be incredibly stupid, no matter how much their hearts were crying out to locate and potentially save their friends. They had to save enough to get themselves… well, someplace.

  They managed to get back on the motorcycle in record time despite the complication of the bags, having done it enough times to have come up with a process now. Seconds later they were shooting through the desert again, the cacti flying past, sand streaming up behind them in a dust-filled cloud.

  Garrett swept his gaze to the left and to the right again and again as he looked desperately for any survivors, leaving the directions to Alice, who seemed to have some sort of compass built into her conscious mind. A part of his brain warned him that any survivors they found might belong to the Helen Falls gang, and that they should be more careful about how much noise they were making, but the larger part of him knew that they couldn’t stop searching. Not until they were forced to. Yes, his group had been given specific instructions. Yes, they’d had food, water, and weapons, and yes they’d been in a large enough group that they should have found safety in numbers.

  But he was their leader, and he’d never taken that responsibility lightly. Never stopped worrying about them or what might happen to them. And he wasn’t going to give up on reuniting with them until they’d exhausted all their options.

  The problem was, there was nothing out there. He and Alice stopped time after time for a drink of water and a bite of protein bar, and to give Garrett’s wound a break from the constant bouncing of the motorcycle. Between those stops they drove relentlessly, Alice’s eyes on the road ahead of them, Garrett’s on the desert around them. Garrett trusted that they were indeed traveling in larger and larger circles around Trinity Ranch, and he could tell by the position of the sun that the day was progressing quickly. More quickly than he would have liked.

  When they finished the water in the last jug, he met Alice’s gaze with grim acceptance. They were out of supplies, and out of time.

  “I guess that’s our expiration date on this search,” Alice said quietly.

  “It is,” he agreed. “It breaks my heart, but I don’t see what we can do about it. We have to get out of here and find a place where we can get food, water, and shelter. We’re not going to be able to do anyone else any good if we die of thirst out here in the desert. How much gas do we have left?”

  Alice leaned over and checked the gauge on the bike. “Half a tank left in the bike itself, plus one five-gallon tank in the back,” she answered.

  Garrett stared into the distance, trying to force his brain to do the math and figure out how far that would take them. Then he frowned. Something about this area…

  “Alice, how far have we traveled from Trinity Ranch?” he asked.

  She laughed. “It wouldn’t surprise me if we’d come hundreds of miles at this point,” she answered. “It’s hard to tell when we haven’t been moving in a straight line. Why?”

  He bit his lip, trying to realign his current reality with a memory from over four months ago. He squinted, seeing if that would help, and suddenly it did. It was as if two identical pictures had just finished their transition into a perfectly overlapped position, and he could see that they did, indeed, match each other.

  “Because I recognize that patch of cacti right there,” he said, pointing. “Which means I know
where we are. And I know how to find shelter. And plenty of water, and plenty of food. I would never have imagined…” He trailed off, too shocked to continue, and paused again. Could it be that he was actually wrong? After all, groups of cacti…

  But no, when he looked to the left he could distinctly see the long, sweeping driveway running up to the succulents. And that could not be a mere coincidence. There just weren’t that many driveways in this part of the world.

  He pointed her in the direction they needed to go. Maybe another five hundred feet or so and they’d be in the midst of the stand of cacti. The vegetation he’d spent so much time looking at from the front step of the old silo he’d been converting, back before everything went straight to hell in a handbasket. He knew what he’d left in the silo, and though there wouldn’t be electricity there, he knew there would still be food and water. And most importantly, shelter.

  Which meant that once again, he would have safety here in his silo… and the people he cared about didn’t.

  He shoved the thought out of his mind. He couldn’t do anything to help them if he didn’t know where they were. But he could help Alice. And for right now, for tonight, that had to be enough.

  Chapter 16

  The front door was still locked—of course, because Garrett had locked it when he last left. As if someone was going to be out in the middle of the desert and try to break into a door that looked like it led into little more than a small warehouse.

  Still, when he’d left the silo he’d still been thinking like a functional human being, and locking the door had been second nature. He never would have dreamed of leaving without doing just that.

  Unfortunately, he no longer had the key. It was probably sitting somewhere in a locker in the military base General Green had taken over, subject to a seizure by his men. Most of Garrett’s things had never been returned to him, and he’d taken from that base only what he’d been able to grab of the things the soldiers had stored in the room that held the cells.

  He pressed his lips together and stared at the door, wondering what the hell he was going to do about this problem. He’d been far too excited to see the silo to really consider the workability of getting back into it. Now that he was here—and standing right above a fully stocked kitchen and a warm, dry space for them to recover—the lack of a key was like a knife straight to the gut.

  “Dammit,” he breathed, searching his pockets—and coming up with nothing more than a gun. A gun that would do little against the bulletproof steel he’d used to build the door to the silo.

  Because this silo had, of course, been designed to protect his client from people who might be coming to try to seize that fully stocked kitchen and dry, safe place to sleep.

  “What is it?” Alice asked, practically dancing from foot to foot in excitement.

  She’d been beside herself ever since he told her where they were, and he couldn’t blame her for that. This was the most unlikely of coincidences, and he could have laid down and kissed the very ground for the luck.

  All of which made the lack of a key even more frustrating.

  “The key,” he said simply, “is somewhere in Green’s base, most likely in the drawer of someone’s desk. I never got it back after his men took my stuff. And I never thought to even look for it when I had access. Never in a million years thought I’d be back here.”

  Alice pressed her lips together in a grimace that indicated without words how ironic this was. “And of course you locked the door the last time you left here,” she observed.

  Garrett breathed out in what would have been a laugh in a less serious situation. “Of course I did. What rational person leaves their house without locking the door behind them?”

  Alice leaned forward and rested her forehead against the door. “And I’m betting there’s food and water down there. And a bed. Or at least cots. With blankets.”

  This time Garrett did chuckle. He couldn’t help it. “Of course there are. I stocked the damn place. And I brought out enough food and water to keep my client and his wife safe and alive for years to come. Just in case the government crumbled. Or nuclear winter happened. Or the zombies attacked.”

  She slid her gaze over to him, one eyebrow raised. “Zombies?”

  Shrugging, he gave her a crooked grin. “He was a tech guy. So he watched a lot of movies. It was on his list of potential end-of-the-world scenarios, and I never contradicted him. It seemed as likely as anything else. And when it comes down to it, look at what actually happened. Death by nanorobot.

  “That’s not that much different than death by zombie. But none of that is opening this door. It’s bulletproof, so we’re not going to be able to shoot it out, and there’s no other way in. I made sure of that when we started the project.”

  At this, she gave him a full-fledged smile—one that almost made him stagger. He’d never seen so much joy in her face, and had certainly never seen her let down her guard like that. It made her… beautiful.

  It was also distinctly out of place.

  “What?” he asked, immediately suspicious.

  With a shrug, she went to her knees in front of the door and started pulling things out of the pocket of the jacket she was wearing.

  “Nothing. I find it amusing that you went to the effort of putting in a bulletproof door but didn’t bother with an electronic lock. You know, one with a keypad so you could just key in a code to open the door.”

  “Too easy to break the code,” he replied quickly. “It’s one of the things I always avoid when I’m doing something like this. The whole point is to make it at least somewhat difficult for thieves—or whoever else might be coming—to get in.”

  She shot him a quick look. “But the lack of electronic lock also means that you’ve got an old-fashioned lock here. One that operates on the same old system of tumblers. Not much in the way of security.”

  “I made sure that the bolt wouldn’t move unless the lock was engaged,” he argued. “So there’s no chance of anyone doing that stupid slide-the-credit-card trick. And the chance of a thief knowing how to actually pick a lock is minimal in this day and age.”

  “Maybe,” she agreed, turning back to the lock. “Fortunately for you, I’m no ordinary thief. And I do know how to pick a lock.”

  Without explaining any further, she set the pack she’d taken out of her pocket on the ground and flipped it open to expose what looked to be a fully stocked lock picking set.

  “Where on earth did you get that?” Garrett asked.

  “Picked it up on a raid,” she said simply, sliding two of the more decorative pieces out of the set and inserting one into the lock with practiced ease.

  “Okay… And how exactly do you know how to pick locks?”

  She chewed at her lip in concentration, her hands still busy shuffling the metal rods in and out of the lock, in an up-and-down motion.

  “My kid,” she said. “Jesse liked to lock himself into the house while I was outside taking out the trash or getting the mail. I wouldn’t have worried about it when he was older—or at least not as much—because he would have been able to take care of himself until I managed to get back in the house. But he started doing it when he was three years old, and at that point he could have gotten into anything and killed himself pretty easily. I couldn’t take the time to go around the house finding out whether any windows were unlocked, or calling a professional locksmith. So I learned how to do it myself.”

  There was a sliding sort of crunch in the door, what Garrett could only describe as a snick, and a pop, and Alice withdrew the rods and looked up victoriously.

  “Lucky for you,” she said, turning the doorknob and pushing the door inward, “I got pretty good at it. And I got fast.”

  Garrett stared at the open door, half-surprised and half-jealous, and then shook his head. The woman, it seemed, would never stop surprising him.

  “Brilliant,” he said.

  He stepped forward into the entryway and glanced from the elevator—which would
only work using the pulley system—to the trapdoor that led to the ladder. It would be a long, dark descent down the tunnel, especially with his wound, but he thought he could reach the bottom and find his collection of candles and lighters without any light to see by. The locked door indicated that no one else had been here, which meant that there should be plenty of food and water down there still.

  He hoped.

  “Now I get to show you my magic trick,” he said over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  They shared a dinner of canned corn and beans, cooked over a campfire that they built in the fire pit next to the driveway at ground level. They had agreed that they’d rather be under the open sky with a fire than eating cold beans in the bunker itself, by candlelight.

  Garrett stared at Alice as they ate, considering everything that had happened. He was sitting across the fire from a woman he had met in a jail, and then escaped with. A woman he had seen kill men—and a woman he knew he would kill men to protect.

  She wasn’t what he would have imagined, if he’d taken the time to imagine who he might have with him in a situation where the world had turned upside down, and the vast majority of the American population had died. In fact, he didn’t think he’d ever known a woman like her in his entire life—mostly because he had associated with people who did things like build and design fancy houses for rich people. She would never have run in his crowd.

  Well, maybe the old version of her would have. He couldn’t know what she’d been like in her life before. But definitely not this version of her.

  At the same time, he didn’t think he would have chosen anyone else to be with him right now. She’d charged into his life and made a place for herself, and then somehow burrowed into his heart as well, with her sharp eyes and even sharper words.

  He smiled to himself, thinking of how angry she’d been at him back in that prison, when she thought he’d sold her and the other prisoners out for a shallow alliance with Green. How brilliant she’d been in their escape afterward—even when she hadn’t known for sure that she could trust him.