by A. R. Shaw
“Mom!” Ben yelled and ran partway into the room. His eyes were on the rifle.
“No, stay back!” she yelled, crying out while she reached her arms toward the rifle. Ben tried to run inside to retrieve the rifle but each time he attempted to do so, she waved her right hand at him and screamed, “Please stay back!”
Another piece of the wood broke free, and his mother screamed out as another hand reached around and grabbed her around the neck. She fought them, trying to pull away, but they scratched and tore at her skin. There were three arms through the hole in the wall, and Ben didn’t know what to do.
He had to do something. He looked back at Louna screaming on the bed behind him and something in him snapped. He ran for the rifle as his mother’s eyes widened and she screamed in horror. Time seemed to have slowed down. He scrambled for the rifle and shook as he lifted the heavy weight of the Ruger Mini 14 rifle with his small arms and pointed the barrel end beside his mother’s head.
In the hole, a man’s face appeared, sneering at him and laughing. He levered the rifle against his slight shoulder. His mother kicked and screamed but couldn’t pull free. She was choking with the effort to free herself.
Ben aimed at the man like he’d seen Bishop do trying to balance the weight of the barrel. His mother’s red hair flew all over struggling—he pulled the trigger.
A blast shuddered behind the wall. Suddenly all the screaming ceased with the loud explosion. Then his ears began to ring loudly. One of the arms dropped down.
Another blast sounded, though Ben wasn’t aiming at all this time. Then another and the sneering man disappeared from view. His mother then fell to the ground. Ben dropped the rifle and skittered over to her side. She clutched her son in her arms. Blood trailed from scratches in her neck, and suddenly he realized he must have shot her. “Did I shoot you?” Horror spread over his face. He was confused. He heard the shots but never felt the blast.
“Hey, you guys all right?”
Ben stood up. “Bishop!”
He’d unlocked the door and quickly come through. “I saw their trail. I came as soon as I could.”
Ben watched as Bishop looked from his mother on the floor to the hole in the wall and dropped to his knees. Bishop picked up his mother easily from the floor and brought her into the cave. “Ben, get some water and a towel.”
He put her down gently on a cot and then picked up Louna, who was hysterical, and brought her over to his mother’s side. She automatically began soothing the girl.
Ben brought the water and towel to Bishop. The big man soaked the rag and wiped his mother’s neck and chest where they’d left gouges in her skin. “You’re going to be all right, Maeve,” Bishop said.
“I couldn’t do it,” she said, looking at him and then at Louna. “They would have killed us all.”
“Yes, they would have, but they didn’t.”
Ben felt guilty he hadn’t been the one to stop the men from hurting his mother after all. The rifle didn’t work. He didn’t know how to use it, and that was something he never wanted to happen again.
He couldn’t use the words. His throat felt thick and dry suddenly. He patted Bishop on the thigh.
“What is it, buddy?”
“I…I want to use the gun. Show me.”
Bishop regarded him for a second.
Ben looked to his mother and then back at Bishop. He needed to help protect them. They’d almost killed her. He’d have to know these things to survive.
“I’ll teach you. Don’t worry.”
27
“Come home, please!”
“I…I am. I feel like I need to stay here and supervise, though.”
“I’m sure Roman has it under control, dear. There’s nothing you can do there that you can’t do from here. He’s only a phone call away.”
Geller’s wife was frantic after she’d heard the news broadcast. Everywhere there was a news blitz about the coming winter storm and unusual weather activity. He watched the television as a scientist tried to explain the Maunder Minimum.
“But if this was such a big deal, why are we just learning about this phenomenon?” the news anchor asked.
The scientist pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “That’s a good question. The science has been around for decades. This phenomenon just wasn’t a popular notion.”
“What do you mean? Are you saying most scientists didn’t believe in the Maunder Minimum?”
“What I’m saying is that since climate change is accepted science the theory of Maunder Minimum just didn’t sell. I mean, we went from global warming to climate change, and the Maunder Minimum was at the other end of the explanation. That the world was not getting warmer but in fact getting colder due to the lack of sun activity was less popular than the notion that man was destroying the earth’s atmosphere.”
“So, though we know this has happened in the past, the theory was disputed in favor of climate change.”
“Well,” the scientist said, “climate change is something that encompasses the Maunder Minimum. The earth heats some years and cools inexplicably during others. We’ve had years without a summer in history as well. The notion that overall the earth is heating instead of cooling is just more popular without muddling society’s take on climate change. We just don’t try to confuse them with things like the Maunder Minimum.”
“This is crazy,” Geller said and switched off the TV. His wife was still talking on the phone, though he had no idea what she was going on about. “I’m coming home, dear. Apparently, I have no choice. The decision was made for me. Roman ordered the helicopter, and the plane is waiting. I’ll be there in a few hours.”
“They said it will snow here too. Here, in November, in Arizona?” his wife said.
“Well, it won’t stick for long. We might as well enjoy it. I’ll see you soon,” Geller said as Roman came through his bedroom door.
“Ready, sir?” Roman asked as Austin picked up Geller’s packed luggage and headed out the door ahead of them.
“Yes, though I wish you’d consulted with me first, Roman.”
“I thought it was important, sir, to make sure you were safe. They may not allow planes to fly in a few hours—that’s what they’re saying at the airport.”
“I’m leaving Austin here. He has family nearby. I want you to look out for him. He’ll use my office to work on my memoirs while I’m gone.”
Roman nodded that he understood.
They walked the short flight of stairs to the roof where the noise became deafening. The helicopter’s engine roared in the high winds; it was suddenly very cold when Roman opened the door. Though the day was beautiful before with the sun shining on the lake, Geller was shocked now to see formidable gray skies looming in the distance.
He looked toward the lake with his hand shading his eyes. The waves were choppy. Geller’s forehead creased. He had never seen such a swing in conditions in one morning. Where he’d sat earlier in the morning, the chairs were turned over and lying on their sides. The table lay at an angle.
“This way, Mr. Geller.” Roman urged him toward the helipad.
He walked against the force of the wind, his shirt rippling against his skin. Geller stopped before getting into the helicopter. He’d suddenly realized how drastic things were. He looked at Roman’s determined face and grabbed his hand. “You’ve got everything under control?”
“I do, sir. You go on. I can handle this.”
Their hands parted, and Geller nodded and then scrambled inside the copter. He knew he was more of a hindrance than a help and trusted that Roman had everything under control. He should get out of the way so the man could do his job.
Roman cleared the helipad and watched briefly as the helicopter lifted and flew west toward the airport. Hopefully Geller would reach his destination, but then again, Roman didn’t give a damn if he did or didn’t.
28
“What’s it like down there?” Maeve asked the man who had saved her life yet again as he app
lied antibacterial ointment to the many scratches around her neck.
“It’s a mess. The lake is completely frozen over, which is good and bad. We can cross the ice more easily, but I’m pretty sure the nonnative fish are most likely dead since it froze over so fast, and that limits our water sources.”
“Well, we have all this snow we can melt for water,” she said as Bishop slid ointment with his finger over a long scratch. She sucked in a quick breath.
“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything to apply it with, but my hands are clean.”
“That’s OK.”
He continued applying the ointment and talked as he did to distract her from the pain. “It’s true that we have water, but the town’s in danger. I don’t know who’s taken over, but the police are not running things. There’s a lot of shooting and bodies in the streets. I have to go back there, Maeve.”
She grabbed his wrist when he said those words she dreaded.
“Please. Please don’t leave us here alone.” She shook her head. “Please don’t,” she begged him. She shuddered at the memory of the men who’d attacked her.
He looked at her elegant hand wrapped around his wrist and placed his hand over hers. “Maeve, I have to go back. In order to keep you and the children alive, I have to get down there and stop whoever has taken over. People are dying down there. We can’t stay here forever. This is only the beginning. The weather is going to get much, much worse than it is now.”
Her eyes widened with fear. “How much worse can it get?”
He pulled away from her and stood. “The temperature will drop further, and it will stay that way for a long time. I doubt we’ll see another summer for a few years, in fact. There will be no crops next year to harvest, nothing to sustain people. They’ll starve to death after they run out of supplies. There’s not enough insulation here. I need to get you and the kids into a safer fortified building.” He turned away from her with his hands on his hips. “It might take me a few days, Maeve.”
“Can’t we come with you? What if…what if you get killed?”
“I won’t. I can’t,” Bishop said and grabbed his coat and went outside. He’d already disposed of the bodies of the three men who had tried to break in. He’d also repaired the hole in the wall from the stable side.
The snow had briefly subsided, so he took advantage of the visibility and went to the cliff’s ledge with his night vision binoculars to get a brief glimpse of the troubled town below. He couldn’t tell much from here, but the fires would tell him that either things were continuing to deteriorate or they’d stabilized.
By the time he made it to the cliff, he’d found that there wasn’t a big difference from the last time he’d checked. Where one house fire was out, another had begun. He could only imagine the pain and turmoil the people were in. Not only did they have to contend with this natural disaster, but some criminal faction had taken advantage of it as well.
“Not for long,” Bishop swore. “I’m coming. Your days are numbered.”
A twig snapped behind him, and Bishop turned on his heel, weapon drawn and crouched all in one fluid motion. A man dressed in furs stood just inside the tree line, also armed and aiming. It took Bishop less than a second to see the man dressed in furs from head to foot was none other than Jax.
“You’d be a dead man.”
Bishop stood. “So would you, Jax. Maybe a hair later.” His heart pounded a little less, but the sudden adrenaline rushing in his veins without an outlet made his hands shake.
“Came to tell you…too many people in these woods.”
Bishop walked half the distance through the snow to meet him. “Yeah, I’ve seen them too. Found a dead man just a mile west yesterday.”
“Like a spigot been turned on. Needs to stop,” Jax said and spit a large wad of saliva into the snow beside where he stood.
Jax was agitated, and Bishop worried how the old man would handle the change in the woods. He wasn’t like most men. Handling society at large wasn’t in Jax. He needed solitude to survive.
Nodding his head in the direction of the troubled town in the valley below, Bishop explained the situation to him. Giving him a reason why the people were now invading his forest.
Watching Jax’s hardened eyes change, Bishop wasn’t sure if the old man had sympathy for humanity at all, but his expression told him that if he did he kept the sentiment veiled.
“You going down there?”
Bishop nodded.
“Stop them.”
“I’ll try.”
Jax’s menacing eyes shot daggers at him now.
“Don’t come back till you do.” He turned then, and Bishop watched the cranky old buzzard disappear into the forest as silently as he’d come.
He thought it odd that Jax never inquired about the girl’s health or, for that matter, his own. He could never figure him out, but that’s why he lived out in the forest to begin with—no one could figure out Jax. He was an anomaly in society, and if he had to live among men, he would do so only in a padded room—that much Bishop was sure of. And what a tragedy that would be.
The real question was, could he leave Maeve and the children again and expect them to be safe with so many people fleeing the town? Images of Maeve’s red hair in the hands of the attackers flashed before him. His stomach clenched when he couldn’t help but think of what they would have done to her had he been delayed for a minute longer. Oddly, it was their smell that had first alerted him. He’d seen many tracks through the snow, but there was something about a man who hadn’t bathed in days, that rotted reek, that alarmed him as he approached his own camp knowing they were there.
“Bishop.”
He’d heard the door open when he neared the camp and wasn’t surprised to see her outline in the doorway. “I heard you talking to someone and saw Jax. I…didn’t want to come out then. Can I please talk to you about going into town?”
Visibly shaking, Maeve’s red hair, so vibrant, stood out like a wild rose in a desert. The marks on the tender skin of her slender neck made him ache in a way that made him want to murder the three assailants all over again. How dare they lay a hand on her?
With a rough voice, he said, “He’s gone now.”
She stood near him. The wind gusted into her face, almost taking her breath away. Taking a step to shield her, he said, “You should go back inside.”
“I have to ask you, Bishop, please. Don’t leave us here alone again. Please bring us down with you. I promise we’ll stay out of the way. Can’t you leave us somewhere nearby? There are too many desperate people now.”
Lines etched her forehead. Trembling, she begged him. She looked utterly terrified. And she was right. There were too many people haunting the woods, too many looking for shelter away from the dangers of the town below. They were capable of anything. She’d nearly died.
He looked past her to Ben’s image in the doorway. “I have a place. I have to go there anyway. It’s just a storage unit. Heated, but not heated enough. It’ll be hard to keep warm, and it’s not safe either. But…I can put you and the kids there while I do what I need to do.”
She nodded and even smiled. Relief relaxed the tension on her face. “Thank you,” she said, and he ushered her inside the cabin, built in front of a cave, once again as another gust of cold, hard wind howled through.
29
Roman quickly called a meeting of the hotel managers in the largest conference room before Geller had even left. There was little time to prepare. The storm was coming fast. They were waiting for him, seated in soft leather chairs around an enormous oblong table. When Roman walked in, they turned in his direction.
“Get these people out of here!” he yelled to the hotel manager. “All of them if you can.”
“What should I say, sir?”
Roman took a frustrated breath. “Tell them Armageddon is coming. Hell, I don’t care. Tell them there’s a weather emergency and they have a window to get home now or they’re stuck here. That’s the truth.” He l
eveled a steely gaze at the manager. “Now go!”
Everyone watched as the suit scrambled out the door.
Roman turned his attention to the newspaper. “Andrew, put out all the emergency services’ contact information. Link any information you can find about emergency preparedness. No one goes to work, to school—”
“Sir, it’s up to the superintendent to call off school.”
“Has he?”
“Uh, no. There was a two-hour late start today.”
“Tell that jackass school is out for the foreseeable future. What does he think he’s doing? Kids will freeze to death walking home.” Roman shook his head in disgust. “Schools are shut down now! Make sure you stress the seriousness of the weather situation. This is going to be extremely dire. The city needs to shut completely down.”
“Yes, sir,” said the editor and left.
There was always a man at the table the others didn’t know. He never answered when asked what his position was, but he was dressed like them and sat with them anytime a meeting was called. He’d become Roman’s right-hand man, and he was always the last to leave the room.
“I want this city totally halted.”
One manager leaned up in his chair. “What about the mayor, sir? Isn’t he supposed to deal with this kind of thing?”
“Do you see him preparing for anything?”
“Well, no, I…but he’s the mayor. He said it’s going to be a little freak storm. Nothing to worry about—it’ll blow over in a day or two.”
Roman rubbed his chin and said with increasing intensity so that he was nearly spitting on the man who’d asked, “I don’t give a damn what he said. We protect Geller’s interest. That means we shore up this building, the marina, the golf course, the newspaper, and all the other little businesses under Geller’s name. Understand?”
