Night Before Dawn

by David Lucin

  Sam replied with a wave of his own and then ducked, disappearing behind the GMC’s cab.

  They continued toward the front of the convoy, where Sergeant First Class Courtney Hiroyuki stood by the Toyota’s open passenger door. She wore a sleek black jacket with matching black jeans, black snow boots, and a black headband that covered her forehead and ears. When Liam reorganized and expanded the Militia after the mission to Sunset Point, he dispersed the National Guard NCOs throughout the unit. Dylan had requested that Courtney, specifically, be promoted and assigned as his platoon sergeant, his second-in-command. For what it mattered, Jenn approved wholeheartedly. Courtney was a good woman and a brave soldier. She’d also helped rescue Jenn from the Major. In a way, Jenn owed Courtney her life.

  Dylan sat shotgun, his faded Arizona Cardinals hat beneath the hood of his brown jacket. The rear passenger window had been rolled down, revealing Rebecca Nez, a Flagstaff city councilmember and an envoy to the Navajo Nation, probably due to her Navajo ancestry. She had a round face and black hair neatly streaked with gray. Her dark, thick-rimmed glasses seemed to magnify her almond-shaped eyes.

  Courtney noticed Jenn and Quinn approaching and gave them a quick nod. “We were just about to radio you guys.”

  “Figured we’d stop by to see what’s up,” Jenn said. “Do we think Tuba City’s the reason our escorts aren’t showing up?”

  Dylan pulled a road atlas from the glove box. “No way to tell for sure, but we should operate under the assumption that Window Rock didn’t just forget about this meet and something happened.” He flipped open the atlas and leafed through a few pages. “I want to take a team up there in one truck and find out what’s going on.”

  Not a chance, danced on the end of Jenn’s tongue. A fight between Tuba City and Window Rock had nothing to do with Flagstaff, and risking Militia lives by getting involved in the Navajo’s internal affairs sounded like a terrible idea. Yet she’d seen firsthand the consequences of ignoring outside threats. She grimaced, feeling the barrel of the Major’s gun against the base of her skull. To this day, she had nightmares of him pulling the trigger. He should have been put down long before his gang grew desperate enough to kidnap her, and if Tuba City’s forces were raiding as far as Window Rock, soon they might try attacking Flagstaff as well. Jenn refused to stand by and let them get away with it.

  “You’re right. We should check it out. I volunteer to go.” She said the words without much thought, but she didn’t regret them. Yes, she could potentially face danger, and yes, she could potentially face death, but she’d faced both so many times already that she no longer feared either. If anything, she feared hurting Gary and Maria by not coming home. Sam, without a doubt, would be tagging along if Dylan agreed to let her come. She took a great deal of comfort in knowing he would always be at her side.

  “Good,” Dylan said, “because I was taking you anyway. You, me, and Novak, with Sam driving. Sergeant Hiroyuki will stay behind to babysit. We need one more. Novak, pick one of your grunts or ask for volunteers.”

  “Beau,” she said.

  That took Jenn aback. “Really? After that spat you two just had?”

  “He’s a dink, but he’s my best guy, and it never hurts to have a medic around.”

  “Hard to disagree with that.”

  Dylan, having found the page he was looking for, stopped flipping and folded the atlas so the front and back covers were touching. “Perfect. We’re taking the Toyota. Go tell Sam what the plan is so he can unhook the trailer and prep the truck.”

  Jenn took a step away, ready to find Sam, but Quinn asked, “This might be a stupid question, but why just one truck? Why not bring the whole convoy? If Tuba City did something to our escorts or Window Rock, you think they’d be dumb enough to attack a platoon of Militia? Strength in numbers.”

  Rebeca spoke for the first time: “I’m hesitant to send in a small army. It could be misinterpreted as a declaration of war.”

  “But they’re expecting us,” Quinn said. “Or they should be.”

  “The authorities in Window Rock are expecting us, but the people who live between here and there might not know about us coming. If they see a line of trucks without a Navajo escort, they could open fire in self-defense. Imagine how you’d react if you saw a strange convoy of armed soldiers driving down Route 66.”

  Jenn would have a panic attack. Then she’d grab her rifle and start shooting. Maybe not even in that order. Possibly she could do both at once. Her teachers in high school did always compliment her ability to multitask.

  “Rebecca’s got a point,” she told Quinn. “Plus, if Tuba City has some sort of ambush planned, the last thing we want to do is send the whole convoy into a trap.” Obviously, she would have preferred crossing into Navajo territory with forty armed soldiers—heck, a full company—but she would have to suck it up; the success of the mission trumped her feelings every time.

  The maturity of that mindset impressed her. You’ve really grown up, Jenn.

  Quinn adjusted her beanie, pulling it down farther over her ears. “Touché. One truck it is. I’ll go get Beau.”

  Dylan had begun tracing a route on his map with a pencil. “Jansen, talk to Sam and grab your stuff. I wanna leave in fifteen.”

  3

  Wedged between Quinn on her left and Beau on her right, Jenn rode in the box of the Toyota, her back to the cab. All three had blankets on their laps and scarves over their mouths and noses. Like a million tiny daggers, icy wind prickled at the exposed skin around her eyes. She would have preferred riding inside with Dylan and Sam, but it was easier to protect the truck from out here, where she could bring her weapon to bear in any direction.

  Cautiously, Sam drove eastward down I-40, never exceeding about thirty miles per hour. Only a skiff of snow covered the road. In Flagstaff, all but the most-traveled roads were impassable to vehicles without four-wheel drive or tire chains.

  Jenn didn’t expect trouble until they left the interstate and went deeper into Navajo territory, but she kept a keen eye on her surroundings regardless. She’d had too much bad luck in vehicles to do otherwise: the thieves on the way to Payson, the spike strips outside Prescott, the car chase in northeast Phoenix, the kidnapping at Sunset Point. What would happen this time? A hundred of Tuba City’s raiders rising from the desert and swarming the truck like locusts?

  Okay, that might be a bit extreme. Still, she remained vigilant, prepared for the worst.

  Sam navigated around a sleek, aerodynamic white semi, one of the new, fully autonomous models with no windows and no doors. Jenn thought it was creepy, like a person with no face. Behind it loomed an idle freight train, its cars blue, red, orange, yellow, and white. Several had been defaced with spray-painted graffiti. Jenn had heard about this train. In the early weeks after the bombs, teams from Flagstaff looted it for anything of value, finding food, clothing, some medicine, and many of the oil drums that had become so valuable as barrel stoves this winter.

  A few miles later, Sam exited off the interstate, heading northward on Indian Route 12, a secondary two-lane highway that would take them to Window Rock. The desert plateau gradually gave way to rolling hills layered with stocky deciduous trees, their branches bare. There was even an occasional pine. Jenn’s brain invented movement behind every single one of them.

  She sat up, clutching her rifle close. With her elbows, she nudged Quinn and Beau and lowered the scarf around her mouth. “Keep your eyes open,” she said over the wind whipping past them. “If Tuba City’s planning an ambush, it’ll be through here.”

  Quinn gave her a thumbs-up. Beau merely dipped his head.

  A grueling ninety minutes passed. Eventually, the hills became rockier, the vegetation sparser, until the road spilled out into desert once more. Jenn’s neck was sore from watching the truck’s flanks, and the muscles in her stomach cramped with apprehension. Worse, despite her scarf, her nose had gone numb from the cold. If they didn’t arrive soon, it might fall off.

  How clo
se were they, anyway? She twisted around to check but spotted trails of smoke rising from the horizon, in the direction of Window Rock.

  Fires. Tuba City’s raiders must have set them.

  A bolt of adrenaline warmed her extremities. Heart racing, she scanned the desert: a downed telephone pole, a mobile home with a rusted pickup in the driveway, a half-collapsed farmhouse surrounded by a rickety wooden fence. She saw no one, but there were a lot of good hiding places out here.

  Sam and Dylan must have seen the smoke, too, because the Toyota began to slow. Both Quinn and Beau had already thrown off their blankets and shouldered their rifles. Confident they had defense well in hand, Jenn slid open the rear window and called inside, “You guys see that?”

  “We see it,” Dylan said as the truck rolled to a stop.

  In the rearview mirror, she caught a glimpse of Sam, his expression full of worry.

  “We’re going back, aren’t we?” Quinn asked. “To the convoy?”

  Jenn’s instinct screamed, Get out of here while you can! Quickly, though, rationale won out. She and her team had come to reconnoiter Window Rock, so they couldn’t turn tail and run at the first sign of trouble. Five of them might even be able to help, depending on the situation in town. “No, we have to find out exactly what we’re dealing with here.” And then, through the window in the cab, “What’s the plan, boss?”

  “Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves by assuming this is an attack?” Beau asked. “Who’s to say these fires didn’t start by accident?”

  “By accident?”

  “Yeah, by accident.” He pulled his cheek away from the stock of his rifle. “Like that big fire on Milton.”

  Around Christmastime, a winter shelter in an old fast-food restaurant had caught fire, and the entire building burned to the ground. Jenn remembered the smoke; she could see it from HQ. Had the Militia not rushed over to help contain the inferno, it would have spread to adjacent structures. Could something similar have happened in Window Rock? Were these plumes of smoke rising from accidental fires?

  She recalled Occam’s razor: the explanation requiring the fewest number of assumptions usually proved correct. An accident presumed a screw-up with a woodstove. Her theory, on the other hand, presumed that raiders from Tuba City had traveled across half of the Navajo Nation to steal supplies from the capital. The scientist in her favored the first hypothesis; it was neat, simple, and highly probable. But the survivor in her refused to listen.

  “Sure, it’s possible, I guess, but that doesn’t change anything. We still need to figure out what’s going on and treat this like it’s an attack.”

  “What’s Beau saying?” Dylan asked.

  “Nothing,” Jenn said through the window. “We headed in or what?”

  “Affirmative. We’ll park the truck, then check it out on foot. Stay sharp back there.”

  “Will do.” She shut the window and explained the plan to Beau and Quinn.

  Beau brought up his rifle and rested his support arm on the bedrail. “I still think it was an accident.”

  “Oh, well, then it must be an accident,” Quinn scoffed before mirroring his stance on the opposite side of the truck.

  Sam continued forward. At a set of dark traffic lights, he turned right, onto a four-lane road with no median. They passed a dollar store, the windows and doors boarded up, followed by a three-story office complex, its parking lot empty. Trees with snow-covered branches lined the street. To the north, mobile homes dotted the landscape, seemingly at random. Jenn scrutinized every one of them, waiting for a hail of bullets to emerge from a window or for ambushers to storm out a front door. But all appeared abandoned and lifeless.

  The plumes of smoke loomed ahead. She counted four—no, five, all coming from the same part of town.

  Sam took a left onto a dirt road covered with a thin layer of snow and followed it into a residential neighborhood of squat houses with peaked roofs. Here, the roads were paved, but the asphalt was cratered like the surface of an asteroid. Each bump sent Jenn bouncing on her backside. She was tempted to ask Sam if he was hitting every pothole on purpose.

  He parked in the empty driveway of a derelict house, its white siding scuffed and caked with dirt. The front door had fallen off its hinges and lay in the yard nearby.

  Jenn hopped out of the box, and Sam rolled down his window as she approached. Inside, Dylan was saying, “Wait here with the truck.” He passed Sam a radio. “Keep this on you. Channel two.” With his pencil, he circled a location on the map. “If we need a pickup, meet us here. Got it?”

  Sam took the radio and the map and set both on the dash, behind the steering wheel. “I got it.”

  Dylan gathered his rifle and backpack and climbed out of the truck. Jenn asked Sam, “You good by yourself here?”

  He reached under the seat. After a second of awkward twisting, he pulled out her—their—Glock. He racked the slide to chamber a round, then set it on the dash next to the radio. “I’m always good.”

  She rolled her eyes before leaning through the window to kiss him.

  “Jansen!” Dylan called from the rear of the Toyota, where he waited with Quinn and Beau. All three carried their weapons in the low-ready position.

  “Okay, be back soon.” She kissed Sam goodbye and fell in line behind Dylan as the four moved out, away from the truck and toward the plumes of smoke. They kept off the roads, sticking to yards. They had to scale a few chain-link fences, but Jenn didn’t mind; she preferred it to the alternative of being caught in the open. The last time that happened, when the Major’s people attacked her team on the way to the hospital in May, she wound up shooting a man in the chest. She’d like to avoid killing someone today, if possible.

  After fifteen or twenty minutes, two large reddish-brown rock formations appeared ahead. They stood over three stories high, poking above the roofs of houses and the tops of leafless trees. Could these be the eponymous window rocks? They didn’t look much like a window. More like animal ears. Two of the five plumes stretched into the air behind them. Jenn could smell the smoke now: a harsh, acrid scent that stung her sinuses and reminded her of Phoenix burning.

  Dylan held up a fist, signaling for the others to come to a stop.

  “What’s the plan?” Jenn pointed toward the rocks. A gentle bank rose between them, concealing what lay beyond. “We headed this way?”

  “Yeah, the map says the Navajo council chamber should be right there.” He slung off his backpack and pulled out a pair of binoculars. “Me and you will go check it out.” Next, he found a second radio, switched it on, and held it toward Quinn. “Novak, take this. You stay here with Davis. I’ll call if anything happens. Channel one.”

  Quinn took the radio and clipped it to the waistband of her pants.

  “Okay, Jansen,” Dylan said. “Let’s get moving.”

  Side by side, ten paces between them, they crept up the bank. The smell of smoke grew more pungent with every step. Halfway up, Dylan went prone, and so did Jenn. They crawled the rest of the way, bellies in the snow. At the crest, she peeked over. About fifteen feet down and a hundred feet ahead, between the two rocks, stood an octagonal structure built of red sandstone, its footprint no larger than that of a mid-sized house. Eight wooden beams radiated outward from a central clerestory, connecting to tall buttresses rising from each point of the octagon. The council chamber.

  She breathed out in relief; it wasn’t on fire. The structure on its right was, though. Or had been. All that remained was a heap of blackened rubble that formed the base of the nearest smoke plume. A second, larger plume rose from somewhere across the street, behind a long sandstone building, its entrance flanked by empty flagpoles.

  Two snow-covered pickups graced the parking lot to the rear of the council chamber, but there were no signs of life. Had Tuba City set these buildings ablaze and driven out of here? And where were the residents of Window Rock? The fire on Milton at Christmastime attracted dozens of onlookers, not to mention the platoon of Militia tha
t helped contain the flames.

  The alternative made her mouth go dry. Tuba City’s raiders wouldn’t force civilians into these buildings and then burn them down, would they? Why do that?

  Unless their goal was to kill.

  Suddenly, she regretted coming out here. Every cell in her body demanded that she turn around, run to the Toyota, and drive as fast as possible to the convoy before it was too late.

  “We need to get closer.” Dylan tucked the binoculars into his jacket pocket and gripped his rifle with both hands. Without waiting for a reply, he descended the bank in a low crouch.

  Jenn hesitated, overcome with doubt about what they were doing. She tried calling out to Dylan, tried telling him they should head back, but her lips and tongue couldn’t cooperate enough to form words. By the time she uttered a sound, he was already halfway to the council chamber and moving fast.

  Crap. She could stay here while he forged ahead, but she dismissed that idea immediately; he needed her help, and she’d be there to give it, no matter what.

  Steeling her nerves, she worked up the courage to move. As she crept down the bank, a light breeze rustled the branches of a skeletal tree and blew some reflective plastic wrapping across the parking lot. Save for the low howl of the wind and the crunch of her boots on the snow, the silence was absolute. It made her skin crawl.

  Dylan waited for her at the rear of the council chamber, in front of a metal utility door. Gripping the handle, he pulled, but the door didn’t budge. “Locked.”

  She gave it a light tug. “Okay, so maybe we should think about calling this off.”

  “Not until we know who did this.” He tried the door again for good measure, then proceeded clockwise around the building. At a tall rectangular window, he paused and took a knee. “Have a look inside. I’ll keep watch.”

  She pressed her teeth together, annoyed by his persistence. And a little concerned. In Camp Verde, when they scouted the bridge on I-17, he knew when to relent, when to withdraw. But today, he pushed on, toward these smoldering buildings. Why? Pure determination? Before now, she hadn’t known Dylan to do anything without a good reason. He was supposed to be the rational one, not her.