“I would, thanks.” I took the flask and sipped, feeling the raw spirits scorch my throat. I suspected that my ‘bots would help with poisons, but I wasn’t really concerned with Rowan dosing me this late in the game. Based on the flavor of the lizard, I could survive most anything. I drank again and handed the flask back with a thankful nod.
“Salyers, we’ve got a room for you too. The last two doors on the right, side by side. You’ll find what you need in there, and don’t be afraid to ask for anything you don’t see,” Rowan said.
Lyss faded silently into the shadows, and the various young women began to tidy up without a word. I stood, repeated my thanks, and went to my room, with Salyers following alongside.
“Stay alert,” I told him in a low voice, to which he merely grunted, slipping into his room even as he drew his weapons. We were in for a long night, and a longer day, but there was no real reason to trust anything about Rowan, except that part of his story was true. He’d found an old facility, inexplicably in the heart of old Oklahoma, and that set wheels spinning in my head about why there seemed to be so many secrets in an area known for farming.
I also began making a list of goals, starting with finding and seizing every single pocket reactor that had been manufactured. Every other issue fell to the wayside in the face of such an incredible possibility. Endless, portable power based on the one thing that we could count on—water—and based on the manual, simple enough to operate that I could build a network of them, given enough time.
The pages I saw told me something else about the hydro-reactors. They were tough. Designed for hard use in, under, and along water, their casings and mechanism were the kind of design that computer wonks had dreamt of for decades. I mulled all of this while arranging myself on the cot, fully clothed with my shotgun comfortably across my hip, barrels facing the door in an unhealthy greeting should anything go wrong.
When I was a kid, I had the ability to mark time in my head, a sort of hidden talent that never really went away. I wasn’t accurate enough to track minutes, but for hours, I was spot on, knowing the hour I woke up regardless of outside light. I let myself doze lightly, the back half of my brain ticking down as the night wore on, with only occasional sounds disturbing the peace of the hallway. A low thrum told me the storm still raged outside, the punctuation of bass rumbles penetrating the walls at intervals that told me whatever was happening in the skies, it wasn’t going anywhere for a while.
I heard her before I saw her, and my eyes adjusted to the gloom courtesy of my ‘bots and a lack of outside interference. I didn’t raise my gun, but I didn’t put it away, either. She carried a small candle, the flame throwing dancing shadows on the bland concrete walls of my room as she slipped through the door.
“Jack?” she asked.
“Chloe.” It was a statement and an invitation to explain herself, delivered in a single, low word.
“I’m coming over to your bed. I have something to tell you, but I have to be quiet,” she said. Her blue eyes were enormous in the low light, face tight with nerves.
“Come over. Keep your hands on the candle, okay?”
“Okay.” She came closer, kneeling by the bed. My knee pushed against her breasts, which were soft under the rough clothing she wore. “This place is a lie.”
“I know, but go on,” I said.
Surprise spasmed across her features, but she recovered quickly. “Something is wrong with Rowan.”
“The needles?” I asked.
“Yeah. He gets sick, sort of, then he’s better, and each time, he’s changing. Same with Lyss, but she’s less—she’s more stable. They keep us here, and act like we can go if we want to, but no one tries. Two girls tried to run. We never saw them again, and he says they’re fine, but I know that’s bullshit,” she said.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“About three weeks. I came from the north, some of the other girls too, but some are from places I don’t know. Rowan was a trader, or at least that’s what he says. I don’t know where Lyss came from, but I know she’s bad. She listens to Rowan like she’s afraid of him, when she isn’t scared of anything at all, least of all the scumbags who ride patrol,” she said.
“The bowls of food you set aside? Those were for another group?” I asked her.
“The patrol. Three men, bad guys. They come and go, bringing things in and out. I think they need the needles too, but mostly, they come back with goods and to fuck the girls. I’ve avoided them so far, but I can’t avoid Lyss. She’s got a mean streak in her that the patrol will never have. I think Rowan’s just crazy, but at least he doesn’t rape us. That isn’t the way with Lyss and the patrol. It’s never our choice, even though Rowan makes it seem like we’re just helping out by giving up our bodies.” She shuddered, part from anger and part from disgust. I touched her hand, and she gave me a sad smile. “They’re going to kill you just before dawn. I heard them.”
I considered the time, and knew we had three hours to go. “I don’t think so.”
“But you’re trapped in here, and there are five of them?” she asked, hoping I would explain away their advantage.
“I have Salyers. And myself, if you want to know the truth. We’re not trapped. They are.” I edged up on the bed, sliding to a sitting position. “Do you want to leave here, Chloe? I won’t force you to do anything, not ever, but you can come with me. You can bring whoever you’d like, too, and they’ll receive the same promise. Freedom and choice. It’s what I offer, and what you’ll find at the Free Oasis.”
She smiled, and her beauty was a physical wave in the candlelight. “I accept. Let me tell the—”
The door burst in, two figures coming through in a shadowy rush. I fired my shotgun, taking the first shape full in the chest, rewarded by a hideous scream as he fell in a wet spray. Chloe rolled away, her candle doused as she shrieked, but I was already moving in a blur.
My fist took the second man in the gut, collapsing his belly far enough to feel my knuckles crunch against his spine. He spun, and I lost contact with him in the dark, then he fell back into me, howling in anger as I felt his knife score my arm in a long, shallow gash that didn’t end until it hit my elbow. I grabbed his hair and twisted, feeling his neck separate with a muffled pop as he went limp. I dropped him, leapt through the gaping hole where the door had been, and saw Salyers in a life and death struggle with two people.
Lyss had him around the neck, and the second man was driving a knife into his lung. He bellowed in rage, kicking the man full in the face. He fell back into me and I brought my elbow down on his collarbone in a savage arc, shattering the bones as he tried to spin free, but my grip was solid. He was going nowhere except to hell.
With one arm behind his skull, I drove him into the wall, face first and at such speed that his face was pulped into a mass of bone shards. He slid down, strangling on his own blood as I jumped yet again in the low light of the hallway. Two lanterns threw faltering glow that jumped around, turning the scene into something straight out of a nightmare. Salyers was bleeding heavily, trying to shake Lyss free, but she released him and rolled back, slamming a heavy steel door behind her that left me with no one but corpses, Salyers, and Chloe. Silence fell like a hammer, then Salyers took what I knew would be his last breath.
“Heart,” he said, and I saw the second wound.
I nodded, easing him down to the cool floor as his lifeblood pooled down his ribs, their motion slowing even as I watched. “Easy, friend. Easy.”
“It is easy,” he said. “Easiest thing I ever did.” Then he died.
I felt a new kind of rage building in me, but the time for grief would be later. “Can you shoot?” I asked Chloe.
“Yes,” she said.
“Take this.” I handed her Salyer’s weapons, then slid his knife into my belt before grabbing his pack. “Come with me?”
“I’m not staying here, that’s for damned sure,” she said, and we pelted down the hall to the only sure way out of th
e facility. Up.
The main room was quiet, though I could feel the rumbling storm outside. “When we get out there, keep your hand in mine, no matter what. We go to the path, hit open ground, and get the fuck away from here until we can find shelter. All that matters is getting away to fight another day, okay?”
“I know of shelter, if you can head due south,” she said as we moved in swift, quiet steps toward the door.
“Good enough for me. It’s going to be brutal out there, but we have no choice. Where are the other girls?” I asked her.
She shook her head in grim resignation. “I don’t know. They’re not in our rooms.”
I cursed and looked around, finding the second hallway. “We have to look. What else is down that hall?”
“A locked room. I don’t know what’s in there, but I know we weren’t allowed in,” she said, pointing to a double door at the end of the space.
A pair of heavy locks gleamed in the lamplight, but I accelerated and launched a kick at the door, tearing it form the hinges to rattle inward in an explosion of wood and concrete.
“Holy shit,” I breathed in the still air.
It was a lab. Or it had been at one point, and I knew what the needles were for. “He found nanobots, but he doesn’t know how to use them.”
“Nano—what?” Chloe asked.
“Machines. In the blood. Hightec, from my time. It’s why he looked like shit when I saw him. He doesn’t know the doses, but he found them. That means there are more,” I said, tearing through the lab, but expecting to find nothing. Rowan was too smart to leave anything exposed to theft, no matter how slim the chances. “Nothing. Okay, let’s go. Where are the girls?”
“Not here, not there,” she said. “Up top?”
“Maybe. Up we go.” We went back to the doors, braced ourselves against the fury of the storm, and stepped out into an apocalypse of wind and rain. The shock was like a slap to the face, the rain stinging and cold, coming in near horizontal in gusting sheets that scoured at my face in painful waves. Chloe was young and strong, but she faltered in the face of such wind, dragged along by my iron grip as she struggled up the concrete stairs that were now a waterfall, covered by several inches of gushing water. Lightning cracked overhead, followed by a peal of thunder so deep it rattled the air in my chest.
I said nothing, climbing in grim determination as Chloe valiantly tried to keep up. When we got close to the top, she faltered under a savage downgust that pushed her to the steps, scraping skin from her knees and elbows as she slid out of control, her feet careening out over the thirty foot drop. Without thinking, I swung her up and over my shoulders, moving my legs from sheer spite as the rain continued to lash me without mercy.
We reached the top, and the storm’s power was fully revealed. How we would travel, let alone survive such an event, was beyond me, but I knew it started with me going to the sanded path and sliding down it like a flume. It was too risky to walk or fall a hundred feet in such conditions, so I staggered to the trail head and sat down, pulling Chloe close to me as the ground began to give way under my legs. In seconds, the flow of water began pushing us downward like a slide in some demonic amusement park, our speed increasing until we hit a turn some twenty feet above the desert floor, sailing into the air as Chloe screamed into the chaos of the storm.
We landed in a sodden heap, the pooled water helping to break our fall. I pulled her to me and shouted in her ear to look for the guns, but I saw her smile in a flash of lightning.
She had them both in knuckles so white they would look good on a corpse.
I said nothing, merely pulling her along again as we careened southward, leaving the wind shadow of the outcropping only to be hammered by the full horror of a desert hurricane.
“South,” Chloe barked, her mouth close to my ear as we struggled to hear anything at all over the constant symphony of thunder.
“Got it.” I held her to my side, on the lee of my body as pellets of hail began to hit my skin, their frigid impact adding to my misery as I concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, south, south, always south.
My sense of time abandoned me in the storm, so we walked, crawled, and stumbled until a darker shape began to loom in my vision, the cracked rock face illuminated by the storm flashes, guiding us south toward a dark slash in the rock that I knew to be a cave.
We collapsed inside, crawling forward to escape the storm. The cave was warm and dry, rising slightly as it grew wider, until it was a channel some four meters wide, sanded on the bottom and free of anything more harmful than a cricket.
“Told you I knew about shelter,” she said, falling down on the sand as water streamed from her hair.
“I’ve never been so happy to see a cave in my whole life,” I said. “Here. Get undressed,” I told her, pulling thermal blankets out of my pack. Salyers had three, which gave us five. I shucked my soaking clothes and stood, naked and dimpled with the cold before her, as she did the same. “I know we just met, but I’m going to have to ask you to get under the blankets with me, or you might die.”
She sneezed, wiped her face, and began to undress. Her body was a maze of tiny marks, already bruising from the punishment of the storm, but when she was done she stepped onto the blanket I used to line the cave floor, managing a weak smile. “If you wanted to see me naked, you could have asked. No need to end the world in a flood.”
I settled next to her, smiling at her strength in the face of our situation. Pulling her to me, I layered the blankets over us, but not before checking my shotgun and putting it right by my side. The storm might fade, and that meant Rowan and Lyss could move on us, if they could find us. How they would track us through this was unknown, but it was always best to expect the worst.
Chloe’s lithe body was stippled with cold and pushed against me in a soft curve. She exhaled, her muscles relaxing, and in seconds, she passed out, hair dripping on my shoulder as her breathing became deep and regular. I could feel the blankets go to work, a gentle heat growing between us, and then, when I was sure the storm was still in full gallop, I slept.
8
We slept the night away, and part of the morning. A slight graying of the rain-drenched sky was the only indication it was a new day, but the storm was still going strong.
“We’re not going anywhere in this,” I said with disgust. Even as I was bitching, part of a cactus streaked by in the hurricane-force wind. “Do these happen often?”
Chloe looked up from our makeshift bed, her expression pained. “I—uh, sometimes. About two or three a season, though this one is really early.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked her. “Are you in pain?”
She looked sheepish. “Kind of?”
I knelt by her side, looking for obvious injuries, but she waved me off with an embarrassed grin. “Kinda have to pee. Okay, I really have to pee.”
I laughed in relief, then pointed to the back of the cave. “If you don’t want to get your bum wet, then go back there. I’ll stand watch and make sure no one sees,” I said, waving gallantly toward the gloomy space behind us. When she didn’t move, I raised a brow. “What is it?”
“Can I have a torch?” she asked.
“Oh. Sure,” I said, rummaging in Salyer’s pack. He had small torches, wrapped in skin to keep the heads dry. I struck a tinder and lit one, handing her the torch with a little bow. “This will keep the giant bloodsucking cave spiders at bay while you—”
“I could do without the commentary, thank you very much.” She made a face and retreated, the torch lighting walls that glittered with crystalline deposits and occasional fractures.
After a long moment of silence, I saw the torch move forward, and back, and then to the side in a slow, deliberate arc. “Jack? Can you come back here?”
“It’s not a spider, is it?” I asked her, but her voice was too subdued.
“No. There’s someone here,” she said, again in the kind of voice that meant she was trying to stay calm.
; I stalked back into the space, gun out and knife in my left hand, but when I came in sight of her, she motioned that I should lower the weapons. “I don’t think he can hurt me.”
It was a mummy, and he was wearing a uniform that I knew very well. Unites States Air Force.
“Holy shit. One of my people,” I said, kneeling to look at the corpse. The cave kept him in good condition, but his uniform was frayed at the edges, as if he’d gone in here after a prolonged period of hardship. He’d been dark haired, about six feet tall, and an officer. His skin was sunken parchment, the teeth yawning up in a death’s head grin that gave him an oddly cheerful aura. He didn’t have a name on his uniform, so I turned him gently to begin searching for identification.
I found something far more important. A key.
Around his neck, he wore a metal key, the design somewhere between skeleton and tumbler design. I counted the ridges and found nine distinct variations along the swooping edge. The only variation on the smooth metallic surface was an embossed name that sent everything I knew about my world into a whirlwind of doubt.
Fortress: Cache
“What does it mean?” Chloe asked.
“Can you read this?” I pointed to the lettering, clearly done by hand with a sharp instrument. There was no way the military would have compromised operation security by giving away a project name, but that’s what the words felt like. It was his dying wish; a secret to be passed on by someone who had run until he couldn’t run any more, and the new, terrible world had killed him, here in this forgotten cavern.
“I think the first word is . . . fort?” She pronounced it with the hesitancy of someone not using their primary language, but who understood the letters of a different alphabet. I wondered, not for the first time, how much language and writing had shifted since my time, then said yet another quiet thank you to my ‘bots.
“It is. Fortress, but in this case, I think it refers to a plan instead of a building. My military was addicted to riddles when it came to naming secret plans, and I don’t think they broke their habit in the few years since I was—since I’d been out of the service,” I said.
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