The Last Winter (The Circle War Book 2)

by Matt King

  “Go on, check it out.”

  Molly opened the folder. Inside was a black and white glossy photo, mostly of something that looked like a bunch of swirling clouds. She was about to ask what was so special about it when she noticed something—a dark ring near the center.

  Eve tried to peek over her shoulder. “Molly, what is it?”

  “Shh.” She looked more closely at the circle. Inside the ring was more white matter, but it didn’t look like clouds. It seemed brighter and more solid, like a star.

  “Look at the next one,” Max said.

  Underneath the first photo was a second black and white, this time zoomed in on the ring. Her mouth fell open. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Land,” Max replied, smiling full force now. “The clouds are starting to break.”

  Jerrod threw his arms around Eve in a bear hug. She grunted with disgust.

  “But what’s that stuff in the center?” Molly asked. “It’s not clouds.”

  “That’s why I wanted you here. The brass are ready to go all-in on this one. The Brits are planning on sending another recon flight out soon, but we’re going to do one better.”

  “What do you mean, ‘one better?’” Eve asked.

  “I mean I want us to go in there.”

  Eve recognized his meaning right away, judging by the wideness of her eyes. Molly did, too, but she couldn’t believe he was suggesting such a thing. “You want to take us with you?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “As an embed. You’d fly out with a small group of us and record the whole thing.”

  “This is crazy,” Molly said.

  Jerrod pulled up his sagging jeans. “I agree with Mol. We still don’t know what happened there.”

  “That’s why we’re going, doofus,” Eve said, swatting him on the arm. “You’re a news cameraman. This is where the news is.”

  Max took the folder and held up the picture. “We need to get down there and find out what’s happening. If we can show the rest of the world that things are getting better, maybe the resupply boats will start up again.”

  That was bullshit and he knew it. Or maybe he didn’t anymore. Max wasn’t acting like his normal cynical self. The South American countries were too scared of running out of food to give any more away. Same with the rest of the world. Every news outlet she talked to had some story going about the coming food shortage. Outage is more like it. Sending out a few videos of clear skies over an irradiated wasteland wasn’t going to change things.

  “What about the thing in the center?” she asked. “It might be dangerous.”

  Eve’s mouth hung open. “Molly Nguyen, what’s wrong with you? The Molly I know would trip her own grandmother to get a story like this.”

  “It’s a suicide mission. Nobody knows what caused the event and now you want us to go running back in there.”

  “Do I have to paint a picture for you? We can’t know until we investigate. Jesus, it’s like I’m working with a couple of rookies again.”

  “It’s up to you guys,” Max said. “But if I get the okay, we’re taking off before dawn, with or without you.”

  All eyes fell to Molly, who took the folder back from Max. There was still some part of her that hungered for the opportunity Max offered, but it was only a whisper in a sea of warnings. She ran her finger around the ring of exposed land. Were the clouds actually parting, or was something else parting the clouds? Maybe the exact same thing that had caused it all in the first place. What if it is? What difference does it make? Either way, they were dead. In the end, she preferred a quick death over withering away, slowly and painfully. As she looked around at the excited faces of her crew and Max, she realized that she was the only one who thought of it as an ending rather than a beginning.

  “How are you planning to get in there?” she asked Max.

  He stepped back to the wall, where a map of North America hung over the bookcases. “We land here,” he said, pointing to the middle of the former U.S. Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. “Part of it was visible in the photograph and it looks like at least one runway is clear. That’s our play. We go in, take a look around, and get out. Full protective gear and everything. Guaranteed radiation-free or your money back.”

  Molly smiled despite herself.

  “So,” Max said, “does this mean you’re in?”

  Eve gave her an expectant look. Come on, it said. Don’t screw this up.

  Molly shrugged her shoulders. “We’re ready when you are.”

  ■ ■ ■

  The plane, Max assured her, was shielded from the radiation still lingering in the atmosphere and on the ground. He said this through the radiation suit’s speaker system. His yellow hood stood out like the end of a highlighter beneath his black down-lined coat. They all wore heavier coats than usual in anticipation of temps on the ground, but it didn’t hurt to have them on inside the plane, either. The interior was spartan, containing only a few rows of seats in the Officer’s cabin. Back in the section normally set aside for soldiers, things resembled the inside of a warehouse.

  “How soon until we land?” Jerrod asked. He had to tug on Max’s arm and ask again before he was heard.

  “Shouldn’t be too much longer,” Max answered.

  Based on what she saw outside the window, it was hard to tell if they’d ever left Jericho. Max said they had to reach altitude quickly to avoid clogging the engines with ash. She assumed that meant they might get above the clouds, but she’d seen nothing but gray passing over the wings ever since the ascent and it was going to stay that way. The ash stuck mostly to the clouds below 10,000 feet. The ceiling ran much higher than that, though. If she wanted to see the sun again, she was going to need a rocket.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to say in the lead-in yet?” Eve asked from behind.

  Molly swung around, drawn from her thoughts in a start. “Huh? Oh, right. I don’t know yet. I’ll probably…think of something.”

  “I’m brimming with confidence.”

  “Don’t worry,” Max said. “Remember how famous she got after the event? She’ll nail it. Hell, some of the greatest news broadcasts in history were ad-libbed, right? And this is going to be one for the record books.”

  “You shouldn’t get your hopes too high. The clearings might not be the healing sign you think they are.”

  “It’s gotta be, Mol. It’s gotta be.”

  For some reason, the way he said it—full of confidence, but also desperation—made her feel like she wanted to cry.

  A sudden, shrill whistle sounded, overpowering the drone of the engines. Red lights flashed on the speaker boxes running lengthwise down the ceiling of the cabin.

  “What do those lights mean?” Jerrod asked.

  Molly and Eve traded glances through the plastic shields of their suit helmets.

  “We’ve got activity on the ground!” the pilot said as his voice came booming through the speakers.

  Max unbuckled himself and half-walked, half-shuffled as he tried to maneuver across the floor while the plane bucked like an angry bull. He eventually made it to the call box on the side of the cabin. “Say again!”

  “Activity has been registered on the ground, sir.”

  “What kind of activity are we talking about?”

  “I’d call it an earthquake, but if it is, we’ve never seen one like it.”

  “How bad?”

  “Base is looking into whether the instruments are broken, but right now it’s an 11.3 on the Richter.”

  Max hesitated. “That’s impossible.”

  “11.3. I had them repeat it twice.”

  He took his hand off of the call button momentarily. The number meant nothing to Molly, other than it sounded pretty big. She tried to remember what the Thai earthquakes had been, but she was pretty sure it was only five or six.

  “We’re getting an order to turn the bird around, sir,” the pilot said.

  Max jammed his finger on the button again. “Don’t reply to that.
Have there been anymore quakes?”

  “Well, no, but they just ended.”

  “How far out are we?”

  The pilot didn’t answer for a few seconds. “We were about to begin our descent,” he said finally.

  “Then descend.”

  “Sir?”

  “You can lose the ‘Sir,’ Drew. We’re landing this thing at Offutt.”

  “Max, what are you doing?” Molly asked. “This is too dangerous. There could be aftershocks. Major ones.”

  “We’re too close, Mol. We can’t turn back now.”

  Eve steadied herself as the plane lurched. “I want this as badly as anyone, Max, but let’s not get crazy here. We might die trying to land.”

  “We’re dead for sure if we go back,” Max replied. He said it in an even-tempered voice a doctor might use to break bad news to a family. He looked between the three of them. “There’s nothing to go back to. The food supply is gone. The water is gone. This is our only chance. Whatever’s down there, we have to see it.”

  Jerrod’s hand slipped off the seat in front of him. He leaned back into his seat, staring in disbelief at the front of the cabin.

  Eve shook her head inside her helmet. “Whatever? Max, this is nuts. What do you think you’re going to find down there?”

  “Hope,” he answered.

  Eve might not have understood, but Molly did. There were a million theories about what had caused the event, and no small number of them involved alien worlds. Every government claimed ignorance of the cause as soon as the news of the blast came in. Outside of some small cells grasping for the spotlight, even the major terrorist groups were silent. The devastation was far beyond any single weapon that anyone knew about, so it was only natural that people started looking for extra-terrestrial sources. A lot of the church-going crowd saw it as the beginning of Armageddon. Even the most cynical of scientists had to agree that something off-world could have been to blame. If something alien had caused the event, it meant that Earth was helpless to defend ourselves. People started looking to the skies not just for an attacker, but also a savior.

  That’s what Max wanted—to meet his savior. Molly found part of herself wanting the same thing.

  “Land the plane,” Max said into the speaker. He took his seat again without looking at the rest of them. He pulled the seatbelt across his lap and snapped it tight.

  The left wing of the plane dipped, and they took a sharp, diving bank that sent Molly’s stomach into her chest. Outside, the clouds rushed by, thick to the point where she couldn’t make out the engines through the haze. The wind shear toyed with the plane as they made their turn, causing a nauseating fishtail motion that felt like it might rip the cabin in two. She closed her eyes briefly, but it didn’t help. Beside her, Eve was audibly praying, repeatedly asking God to save her. Molly had always known her to be a staunch atheist. Seeing her act of prayer felt as much like a defeat as anything.

  Eventually, the plane leveled out and the captain’s voice filled the cabin. “Wheels down in 15 seconds.”

  As soon as he spoke, the clouds outside Molly’s window began to thin. She saw land for the first time since they’d left Vancouver. My God, where is the snow?

  “Brace for—”

  The Captain’s words were cut off as the wheels touched down and the plane rocked sideways. Molly’s hands grasped for something to hold onto as she was thrown from side to side. Her seatbelt cut into her stomach each time she was wrenched back in the opposite direction. Eve was screaming. So was Jerrod. There was a piercing screech from the hull as the plane took an extended swing to the right. Air rushed into the cabin in a cold gust and she sensed a bright light through her clenched eyelids.

  The plane came to an abrupt halt with a final lurch back to the left. Outside, the wind howled over the hum of the engines. When she opened her eyes, she saw a rip in the side of the cabin. The plane had nearly fractured in two.

  Max stood up gingerly. “Everyone okay?”

  Eve doubled over in her seat, sobbing heavily. Jerrod stroked her back.

  “Mol?”

  “I’m okay,” Molly answered, even though she didn’t have her wits about her yet to say for sure. She looked through the gap in the side of the hull. Other than the lack of snow, it didn’t look any different from Vancouver—low gray clouds, swirling bits of ash, and no sunlight to speak of. Were they too late? Had the anomaly already passed?

  “What are we supposed to do now?” Eve said, her voice quivering as she looked at the ruined hull. “There’s no way back.”

  Max grabbed the backpack from beneath his seat. “Let’s get going.”

  “Max, can’t they have some time?”

  “It’s not going to get any better in here, Mol. We should go.”

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” Eve said.

  “I’d advise against that,” Max replied, pointing to her mask.

  Molly took the reins to get Eve back on track. “Eve, is the equipment okay?”

  Eve perked up and looked over at Jerrod, who clutched the camera bag to his chest. He unzipped the bag and searched through the contents. “Looks okay to me.”

  “Don’t forget the sat-comm instruments,” Eve said, sounding a little more like herself. “We’ll try to establish a signal once we get to the clearing.”

  If there is a clearing.

  Max jumped the small fissure in the floor on his way to the front exit. A spray of ash blew through the doorway once he got it open. He pulled away something on the carpet next to the door, springing an inflatable slide that extended from the exit. “Come on!” he called back, waving them forward. “Daylight’s wasting!”

  Molly was the first to jump down, followed by Jerrod and Eve. Max stayed behind long enough to talk to the pilots. He came down without them. “They’re going to look for another plane,” he informed her once he joined the group. The look he gave her echoed Molly’s feeling—there was no point to looking. Machinery was as lifeless in the blast zone as everything else. They probably just didn’t want to leave the safety of their shielded cockpit.

  As Max instructed, they all took a few sips of water from the tube inside their masks to make sure everything worked. The water was painfully cold to her throat, but it was good to drink again. They were going to need to ration the water they’d brought along. Two bottles per person, per day. She tried not to think about how they were going to return home, or how they were going to find food, or anything else that would happen after they found out what was in the circle. All that mattered now was getting there. She looked down at the radiation meter on the left sleeve of her suit. The bars along the electronic readout were all the way to the middle of the red zone. Deadly. As the wind blowing behind them gusted faster, the reading spiked even more.

  It wasn’t until they walked around the front of the plane that they saw the ruptures in the runway. Asphalt slabs looked as if they had been broken apart and jammed back together in the earth, like a puzzle pushed from both sides until it started to break. A huge gulf ran down the middle where the earth’s crust separated. It was no wonder the plane nearly split apart. They were lucky to be alive.

  “What’s that on the horizon?” Jerrod asked.

  Running as far as they could see in either direction was a long black wall. They could only see part of it due to the low-hanging ash fog, but it looked like a tsunami of ink closing in from the west. There was a collective silence as they waited to see if it moved. It didn’t, not so far as Molly could tell anyway. A bank of fog rolled in, masking it behind a wall of gray clouds.

  “Maybe that’s it,” Max said as he turned to her with a grin shining through his clear mask. “It’s really here, Mol.”

  “Let’s take a closer look to make sure.” Molly had to admit his enthusiasm was contagious. It stirred a small pool of hope inside her, one she moved quickly to bury. It’s too early for that.

  The countryside was charred, bleak and dead. They walked through a mist of lightly falling ash that
skittered along the ground before it was whisked back into the air by the swirling winds. She could feel the chill against her skin, even with the layers of insulation. They passed by empty school buildings, offices, parks, and yet stopped at none. There was no need. Most were skeletons of their past lives, hollowed-out and poisoned forever by the event. Anyone inside was long since dead, their possessions worthless. When the wind died down long enough so that they could listen to their surroundings, all she heard was the blood rushing through her ears. Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound. She was walking through countryside that was little more than a corpse.

  After an hour of hiking, the group slowed noticeably, mostly because of Jerrod. He hadn’t been able to stomach any food on the flight, and now they were at least another hour from making it back to the safety of the plane to eat what little food they had left. He managed for another half hour until Molly and Max had to help him along.

  “Should we turn back?” she asked Max.

  Jerrod answered. “No. No. I want to keep going.”

  Maybe Max’s optimism was rubbing off on the others, too.

  Nightfall threatened early. She had hoped that maybe they would be able to see until at least four in the afternoon, longer than they normally got light up in Vancouver. The cloud cover was thick, though, and light struggled to get through. How much longer until they were forced to use flashlights? Her shoulder ached from supporting Jerrod’s weight. She didn’t think she could manage to light their way and carry him at the same time.

  “Mol! Look at this!”

  Eve’s voice traveled back from up ahead. She was barely visible through the fog. After a few steps, they caught up to her. Molly let Max take over supporting Jerrod. She rested her hands on her knees and bent over at the waist to catch her breath.

  Eve tapped her shoulder. “Come on, you’re gonna miss it. It’s right there. Right there!”

  Molly looked up. The black wall was right in front of them—but it wasn’t the kind of wall she was expecting. Her mouth hung open in disbelief.