by Lindy Ryan
Contents
Defy and Persist
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Operation Black Mariah
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About this book
Season 1, Episode 3
After her wife’s death, Rachel Mason wants to grieve in peace. But when the place she’s sought for sanctuary becomes another site in a series of strange events sweeping the nation, she’ll have to brave the Alaskan wilderness to survive.
Former cop turned mystery novelist, Rachel Mason wasn’t ready to live without her wife Ruby, but that didn’t stop the hiking accident that claimed Ruby’s life from happening. Heartbroken, Rachel left behind the noise of the East Coast to hide away in her parent’s guest house in Juneau, Alaska with nothing but her grief, her memories, and her two dogs.
When she is startled awake during a weekend camping trip by the sound of a low-flying plane, Rachel returns to town to find her parents and her dog have disappeared—along with everyone else in Juneau. The only clues to the disappearance of over thirty-thousand people are a strange white dust, the tail end of a ferry in the distance, and a caravan of blacked-out military vehicles she’s never seen on the island. Concerned that all of her late wife’s “doomsday predictions” are coming true, Rachel is forced to lean on the knowledge Ruby taught her if she’s to find her family, and—as the first hints of snow arrive in the mountains—stay alive.
Operation Black Mariah has begun.
Black Mariah
Season 1, Episode 3
Lindy Ryan
Juneau, Alaska
Defy and Persist
Every day, we killed them by the millions. We controlled, eradicated, exterminated, and culled them, because to us they were unnecessary.
They were problematic.
They were pests.
To eradicate something is to pull it up by its roots and do away with it completely.
Never in a million years did we think it would happen to us.
Never did we imagine that one day someone or something would do the same thing to us. Never did we imagine we would become the pests.
When the first wave began, like a black wind of death they filled our skies with trails of chemicals our bodies could not fight. They put poison into our rivers and oceans and lakes.
They attacked our cities, our suburbs. They even came to our doors, thousands and thousands of them, and sprayed toxins.
We didn’t know who they were or what they were or where they came from—or why they were doing this to us—but as we stood on the brink of extinction enough of us decided to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and find a way to organize, to defy, to persist.
And that is exactly what we did.
On a quiet Thursday afternoon in the year 2025, the eradication of the human race began…and so did our fight for survival.
–Jolene Riley, “Defiance”
Indiana
To Cowboy and Lucy, two of the best dogs I’ve ever known.
And to Finn, who follows in their pawprints.
1
Sounds of soughing wind and birdsong slid beneath the open windowpane, breathing the hazy brightness of early morning into the bedroom. The wooden slats exhaled, clacked in time against the glass.
Two women moved between the bedsheets, their limbs entangled in a mess of skin and sweat and satin. Their moans were heavy with desire, their bodies cast in shades of scarlet and gold like watercolor passion spilled across a canvas’s blank surface. Ruby’s slender fingers painted dusky strokes of desire along Rachel’s fair skin, her auburn hair tender flames that melted into her wife’s honey-blond curls. In turn, Rachel’s knuckles shone white-hot where her hands clasped Ruby’s flesh, freckles of pale on the coat of a newborn fawn.
I love you, Rachel whispered onto her wife’s waiting lips. My Ruby. My red bird.
And I love you, Ruby returned.
Ruby’s hand slipped beneath the covers to trace electric brushstrokes down Rachel’s ribs. Her hips. Her thighs.
Rachel sighed, her back arching under the pleasure of her wife’s touch. Sensation built within her, swelling through her limbs as it filled her heart, stoked the fire under her skin. She bucked, her fingers grasping at the bedsheets, pulling in, in, in—
“Rachel!”
Rachel’s left hand reached instinctively for the sound of her wife’s panicked voice, her right dropping to the place on her hip where her holster should be. Her eyes flashed open. There was no bed. No gun.
No Ruby.
There never was. Not anymore.
Shit.
A large shadow flickered on the other side of the thin canvas roof of Rachel’s pop-up tent. Wings, she recognized the sound now. Not her wife’s voice, but the noise of a large flock of birds erupting into flight, passing over. Flying away.
Red birds, she thought before remembering there were no red birds here. There had been cardinals with feathers as scarlet as Ruby’s long red hair in Boston, but after Rachel had packed up what was left of her life and moved to the remote wilderness of Alaska, all she’d seen had been ravens—big, black, screaming birds as large as house cats and just as clever.
A flock of ravens was called an unkindness, and they’d been that just now, hadn’t they—unkind? Their sudden flight had woken Rachel from the dream, the same dream she’d returned to nearly every night in the four months and seventeen days since her wife had died. It was a fantasy and nightmare rolled into one; a constant, cyclical haunt of everything she had loved.
Everything she had lost.
Rachel closed her eyes, desperate to fall back into the precious memory of her dream. She forced herself to recount the exact details of the unforgettable mornings she and Ruby had shared—the tangle of fur at the foot of the bed where two dogs, one rusted copper, the other a collage of blue and silver, curled together, still asleep. Ruby’s survival gear piled high against the wall, towering over the stack of true crime novels Rachel would never get around to reading. The three picture frames lined on the wall—Ruby’s doctorate, Rachel’s rookie headshot from the Boston P.D., their marriage license. Precious moments preserved behind glass.
For one fleeting moment, the images were crisp, almost tangible, but then they began to blur. When the last remnants of the dream dissolved, Rachel opened her eyes. She allowed herself to take in the slick green nylon above her, the purple sleeping bag cocooned over her body. Lucy, Ruby’s speckled Queensland heeler, lay sleeping to her right.
The dog’s tail twitched, and Rachel smiled. She pulled one hand free of her bedding and reached for Lucy, drawing her fingers over the dog's soft fur, then pushed into her downy undercoat. Lucy’s heartbeat pulsed under her hand.
Solid. Her wife was gone, but pieces of Ruby were still here.
The heeler had been Ruby’s constant companion on wilderness treks, and though Rachel would have loved to bring her silly golden retriever along on their weekend camping trips, too, Cowboy had more silver in his snout than Lucy had in her fur. Though the two dogs were only a few years apart in age, Cowboy’s days of frolicking were long behind him now that his hips had begun to lock. The time felt better shared just with Lucy anyway, as if by going into the woods together the two brought Ruby’s spirit along with them—a sort of incantation of what had once been.
So, Cowboy stayed behind with Rache
l’s folks in the valley while she and Lucy took to the wild. They would hike, set up camp, and honor the things Ruby had taught them both about surviving in the remote Alaskan wilderness. It was a ritual.
It was memory.
Rachel’s hand had grown heavy in her ponderings and Lucy stirred, waking. The dog turned her head and licked at Rachel’s fingers.
“Good morning, girl. Ready to head home?”
Lucy’s tail wagged. Yes.
Rachel untangled herself from the sleeping bag, unzipped the tent, and slid outside to meet the gray dawn. The cold nipped at her skin and sent a shiver through her body. The thermal temperature on her bag was rated three-season, but spring in Alaska often ran into the single digits, and the thin base layer undergarments she’d slept in offered little insulation against the cool morning bite.
Ignoring the snarled snake’s nest of her untamed curls, Rachel pulled a wool sweater over her head and wrapped her arms around her waist. She hopped from foot to foot, a trick Ruby had taught her to force blood to channel through sluggish limbs, warm her from the inside out. When the numbness had faded, Rachel snatched up her jeans from the ground where she’d discarded them the night before. She pulled the denim over her legs, then slipped her feet into a second pair of wool socks and pushed both into her hiking boots.
Rachel growled as she dressed, biting down so her teeth wouldn’t chatter. Cold. It was always so cold in Alaska. Why hadn’t she moved somewhere warmer to grieve? Somewhere she could sweat out her misery rather than feel it freeze in her bones.
“Stay quiet,” the phantom echo of Ruby’s voice chided her. “Otherwise you’ll miss what you need to hear. Listen, and be ready.”
Be ready. Ruby always told Rachel things would go south one day. When they did, they both needed to be ready and prepared to manage the consequences that went along with the end of the world. Rachel had thought her doomsday wife had been preparing her for life without civilization, without things like online shopping and air conditioning, not life without her.
But in the end, it was the same, wasn’t it? Time marched on, and Ruby was gone, and she was alone.
Rachel had made it through the police academy easily enough, but her wife’s survivalist training sessions were intense, unforgiving. After a while, when Rachel’s blisters had healed and she’d learned how to filter enough water to drown her complaints along with her thirst, she’d begun to enjoy the rigorous exercise, the patient taming of the wild. Eventually, she’d fallen in love with the silence and solitude of the forest. She had not, however, gotten comfortable with the cold.
Rachel blinked. The motion hurt. She tugged a beanie down over her hair and blew hot air into her palms before pulling on a pair of gloves.
Lucy stood half-hidden in the tent’s flap. Full attention, shivering, ears on alert.
“Go on, girl,” Rachel said. “Go take care of yourself.”
Lucy beelined toward some brush, performing a precursory sniff of the campsite perimeter before squatting to relieve her bladder. Then, she spun around, rutting circles into the frosty ground as if to say, This is mine, my spot. Stay away.
Rachel laughed, ignored the prickling sensation in her bladder. If only she had so much energy in the mornings. Her night owl proclivities had suited her just fine when she’d been a police officer. Before she’d learned shady criminals and midnight vigilantes weren’t the only ones prowling in the dark.
Some of the worst predators, she’d discovered, had been her brothers in blue. They were mostly men who couldn’t wrap their minds around the fact that a beautiful woman—their words, not hers—could be both a lesbian and a cop.
Early retirement hadn’t been her plan any more than swapping careers to become a novelist had, but such is life.
Rachel had traded in her badge for a pen, but she was still every bit as lost staring at a blank page as she’d been when her former partner forced himself on top of her the day before she resigned.
She had one of two choices: Quit the job or shoot to defend herself. Rachel sometimes wondered whether she made the right choice. Writing about crime wasn’t exactly the same as solving a case, and she wasn’t so much a survivor of sexual assault as she was a victim of fearing to speak out against it. Some hero she was.
Rachel pushed the memory away. Cleared her throat.
“Come on, girl,” she called.
Lucy raced over, already panting despite the frigid temperatures.
After double-checking that none of her few camping supplies—Ruby had often preached the importance of scarcity, as opposed to the avarice of glamping—had disappeared overnight, Rachel walked to her pickup parked inside the dense foliage of evergreens. She opened the door, popped over the glove box, and pulled out a ratty pack of Camels.
Lucy watched with scrutinizing eyes as Rachel put one of the long tobacco sticks between her lips. The dog’s wagging tail fell limp.
Rachel sighed around the cig. “I know, I know. This is where Ruby’s lecture would start.”
A memory flared of Ruby—Professor Butler-Mason—at her podium on campus, delivering a lecture with the authority wielded by someone who’d earned her doctorate in record time and with honors.
“One cigarette is one cigarette too many,” Ruby had been fond of reminding Rachel every chance she got. “You put in cancer, and it’ll take root.”
Now, it appeared her faithful canine had taken up the scolding in her mistress’ absence. Lucy’s keen eyes stared into Rachel’s, the dog’s gaze as intelligent as any human’s.
Rachel averted her gaze, lit the cigarette, and sucked until half the cylinder was ash. A slow, cancerous death would be an ironic twist beside the sharp, instant death her wife had received. Perhaps Rachel could die long enough for both of them.
Lucy barked as another unkindness shot across the sky.
Then, everything went silent. Still. The sudden calm was not peaceful silence, but the eerie kind—the kind that slips under your skin, makes you wonder what’s coming next. The cold stabbed through Rachel’s sweater, pricking at her skin. Her coat—where the hell was her coat?
The hair on the nape of Rachel’s neck rose as she rubbed the cold from her arms. Her instincts burned hot against the freeze hardening on her flesh. She looked at the sky. Clear pale blue. Normal.
It’s too quiet, she thought. Too still. The only sound was Lucy’s panting, the cigarette crackling in her fingers. No birds. No wind. No squirrels. No signs of life in the middle of one of the wildest places on earth. She knew the feeling, felt it every morning for the last four months.
“Listen, and be ready,” Ruby had said.
Then—Get home.
The thought came quick, urgent, and Rachel snubbed out her cigarette. Dread crawled up her spine, hurrying her on as she stuffed her sleeping bag in its sack, gathered up the few other accouterments of her short-term stay. The three-man tent came down in a series of snaps and folds, and she tossed it, along with her pack, into the backseat of her extended cab. She held the driver’s side door open and motioned Lucy in as her eyes swept the campsite.
Nothing. All packed, all clear.
The stillness barreled toward Rachel as she slid into the driver’s seat and slammed the door shut against it, wincing at the squeal of the old truck’s rusty hinges that screamed into the eerie silence. She pulled a set of keys from the visor, jammed one into the ignition.
“You got this, old gal.” Rachel patted the dash of the old pickup with her free hand while her foot pumped the gas. The truck’s engine turned over, sputtered. Died.
Panic pressed against the dashboard. Shit.
Rachel pumped the gas and turned the key over a second time. Nothing. She leaned back, combed her hand through her hair, and exhaled.
Lucy’s head cocked hard to her right, pulling Rachel’s attention with it. A rumbling in the distance, loud enough to be heard in the insulated silence of the pickup’s cab. The sound thrummed under Rachel’s skin. Something was approaching, lumbering down
the road, at great speed. But the sound was unfamiliar, inconsistent with the sorts of noises common in small-town Juneau.
Close.
Rachel slid down in her seat, tugging at Lucy’s collar. The dog grumbled, but she crouched.
“Quiet, girl.”
Listen, and be ready.
Rachel watched through the veil of dense green foliage as a camouflage Humvee rounded a bend in the road, followed by another, and then another. Dust and dirt rose into the air as the vehicles’ large tires trampled the asphalt like a herd of angry cattle past Rachel’s concealed truck. Tucked into a cluster of spruce, the pickup was parked far out from the road, near where the last strip of asphalt ended and the wilderness began, and there were no visible roadways on any of her trail maps. Juneau was famously disconnected from the road system—where had the Humvees come from?
No license plates. The thought twisted her curiosity into fear. Even military vehicles were required to have plate identification.
Another Humvee passed, and this time the driver noticed the truck stationed in the evergreens. The driver locked eyes with Rachel, and she logged his description. Caucasian male. Short black hair parted down the middle. Dark blue jacket.
Cold eyes.
The Humvee passed and the man was gone in a cloud of dust.
Rachel shook herself and straightened in her seat. Her fingers ached when she let go of Lucy’s collar.
