by David Lucin
A chuckle broke free from Gary’s belly. “No, she really doesn’t.”
“I’ll have a talk with her.” Maria nodded toward the living room, where Kevin and Barbara were busy slipping beneath the sheets on their mattress. Barbara was unusually chipper, chattering away at Kate and Daniel and giving them advice, surely unsolicited, on how to put Ashlee to sleep. In a whisper, Maria added, “Although I suspect Barbara might beat me to it.”
“She’s a different person since the engagement,” he whispered back. “It’s good to see, but I do wish she would’ve asked us before inviting the Roericks to stay here for the winter.”
“Don’t be like that. You were going to ask them anyway.”
“Yes, but still. It’s the principle of the thing.”
A knock came from the door, causing Gary to instinctively reach for his belt line in search of his Smith and Wesson .38 revolver. It wasn’t there. At home, he kept it locked in a safe in the kitchen. His Mossberg 500-series 12-gauge shotgun, though, lay atop the fridge, along with ten shells of double-aught buck.
Barbara and Kevin had sat up on their mattress, facing the door, while Daniel and Kate stood defensively in front of Ashlee’s crib. Maria was on her feet as well. Gary nearly told her to fetch the revolver from the safe when a muffled male voice from outside called, “Mayor Ruiz? It’s Terrence. Terrence Nielsen. From the Militia.”
Gary realized he’d been clenching his jaw, a nasty habit he picked up forever ago while on the force down in Phoenix. He relaxed and blew out a shaky breath, feeling silly. If someone wanted to break in and hurt him or his family, they wouldn’t have knocked first. Even so, he expected Maria to insist that he reconsider hiring bodyguards.
“It’s all right, everyone,” he said to the tense room. “There’s no need to worry.” And then he started worrying. Why would Terrence drop by unannounced at—he checked the analog clock he’d hung by the front door—9:40 at night? He saw the same question on Maria’s face, so he told her, “I’m sure it’s nothing. I’ll go see what he wants.”
Another knock. “Mayor Ruiz? Are you home?”
“Coming, Terrence. Be out in a minute.” He spun around and made for the gun safe on the kitchen counter. It had an old-fashioned dial combination lock, no fingerprint scanner or facial-recognition system that required a battery or an electric outlet.
“What are you doing?” Maria asked, hot on his heels. “You said there’s nothing to worry about.”
He opened the safe and pulled out his revolver. Before the bombs, he would have kept it in his bedroom closet, not in the kitchen, but these were special times. In the back of his mind lingered the memory of how Vincent Grierson and CFF kidnapped Mayor Andrews and her husband last spring. He confirmed the weapon was loaded, saying, “There isn’t. I’m just being cautious.”
She folded her arms defiantly, but he could tell by the way she stood, loosely with one knee bent, that she agreed with his decision. The fact that he’d fetched his gun didn’t bother her; what did bother her was that he’d had to fetch it at all.
Barbara and Kevin eyed him closely as he crossed the room. He anticipated an outburst from Barbara, or a flurry of questions at the minimum, but to his surprise, she remained quiet.
“Need a hand?” Daniel asked.
“I’m fine, thanks. I’m sure it’s nothing.” Gary pulled on his boots and his coat, then put on his mask, one of the N95 respirators he’d bought a few years ago when smoke from a forest fire in Coconino County rendered Flagstaff’s air quality some of the worst in the world. Conveniently, the material filtered out airborne particles as small as a virus.
Daniel brushed his mustache with his thumb and forefinger. “Holler if you need anything.”
“Will do.” Gary’s right hand, along with the revolver, went into his pocket. With his left, he unlatched the deadbolt and undid the newly installed bar lock. A blast of frigid air numbed his face as he opened the door.
Outside stood two men and one woman, all of them clad in heavy winter jackets. They were barely visible in the dark, but enough light from the fireplace inside illuminated Terrence’s angular features. He joined the Militia as a radio operator but had since become Liam’s principal errand boy. He appeared unarmed, but both the man and the woman on his flanks carried semiautomatic rifles. Gary didn’t recognize either of them; the Militia had grown rapidly in the past three months, and he had a hard time keeping up with all the new faces. On the road waited the solar Dodge, its chained tires partly concealed in three or four inches of accumulated snow.
Shutting the door behind him, Gary released the revolver but kept his hand in his pocket. “Evening, Terrance. What brings you by at this hour?”
“I’m sorry to bother you, sir,” Terrence squeaked out. “But Commander Kipling said it’s urgent. He’s asked me to bring you to the police station for a meeting with him and Chief Morrison.”
Gary caught himself grinding his teeth again. Something serious must have happened, but what? Crime in Flagstaff declined as the Militia expanded and winter worsened. The most noteworthy incident of the past few weeks involved a dispute over firewood between two winter shelters downtown. “Is everything all right?”
“I don’t know,” Terrence said, as much to the ground as to Gary. “They’re keeping pretty tight-lipped, so it must be important. Commander Kipling only told me to get you and not take no for an answer.”
In his peripheral vision, Gary caught Maria pulling aside a towel over the living room window and peeking outside. She wasn’t going to like the idea of him slinking off to work at this hour, and neither did he. Nothing good could come of an urgent late-night meeting with the head of the police department and the commander of the Militia.
“All right,” he said. “Give me a few minutes to explain to my wife and change out of my pajamas.”
* * *
“We left him in the middle of the road and drove away,” Dylan Baker said, seated at the head of the long, oval table in the police station’s conference room. “As we’d agreed, we were not pursued. We returned to the convoy and came home immediately.”
Gary tried to digest Dylan’s report, to make sense of it all: the massacre in the council chamber, the shootout in Window Rock, the White Horde, the Great Khan and his mission of Vernichtungskrieg, a war of extermination. It brought to mind the Einsatzgruppen, SS mobile killing squads and key tools in Hitler’s Final Solution.
He began to feel sick, and he was having trouble breathing, like his lungs were too small. Thirty minutes ago, he was talking to his wife about Jenn’s wedding. In those few blissful moments, he’d almost forgotten how dangerous this world had become, how merciless and how cruel. Dylan’s debrief served as a brutal reminder of that reality, a firm slap in the face.
Questions swirled in his mind. Who was this Great Khan? How did he come to believe he was Gaia’s representative on Earth? Where did he find his followers, and why did they do his bidding? How many had he already killed? He nearly asked about all of this, but Dylan had shared everything he knew. As much as he would like to understand the Khan’s motives and know more about his people, at this juncture, he had to focus on what he could control. Otherwise, he might spiral into hysteria.
An electric lantern buzzed, bathing the walls and the large, wall-mounted LED screen at the front of the room in cool white light. Like at home, the windows had been covered with towels. Beneath them, the baseboard heater clicked and groaned as the metal absorbed energy and expanded. It radiated pleasant warmth—one of the many comforts afforded by reliable solar power, though Gary didn’t necessarily believe this was a good use of electricity.
He sat on Dylan’s left. Across from him was Chief Craig Morrison, who wore pajamas and a housecoat beneath his heavy winter jacket. As he did before the bombs, Craig kept his hair short, but signs of balding showed through. His graying mustache curled upward at the ends; Gary had always suspected the man used wax to give it shape. Liam paced behind Craig. He seemed anxious rather th
an surprised, so he must have heard Dylan’s report once already.
Belatedly, Gary realized he was the only one wearing a mask. In the rush to start this meeting, the others had likely forgotten to don theirs. None of them appeared sick. No coughing, no telltale pale faces, no cold sweats. He was confident they weren’t infected, but he kept his N95 on regardless.
Craig let out a weak, shaky laugh. “So allow me to recap. You’re saying you traveled to Window Rock because your escorts didn’t show up at the agreed-upon time. There, you found smoke rising from the town. You moved in to investigate, discovered the council chamber was full of dead bodies, and then encountered a man wearing a crown of deer antlers and an animal pelt. You then proceeded to kill this man’s bodyguards and interrogate him. He told you he worships an ancient Greek goddess and commands an army of over a thousand called the White Horde. With this army, he intends to destroy Flagstaff and murder us all. Is that correct?”
Dylan’s stone-faced expression remained unchanged. “Yes, that’s correct.”
Another laugh from Craig, this one more incredulous. “Okay, good. Just wanted to make sure we weren’t dealing with anything too serious.”
Liam ceased his pacing and gripped the backrest of the chair next to Craig. He’d lost so much weight over the past few months that Gary hardly recognized him anymore. His hair had gone a shade grayer, too, notably in the temples.
“What evidence do you have?” Craig asked. “I don’t mean to question the accuracy of your information, but it sounds like the Khan’s cheese has slid off his cracker. How do we know he doesn’t have a few dozen men and this White Horde isn’t a fabrication of his imagination? He could be using it as a way to intimidate us so we don’t move in and wipe him out.”
Dylan’s mouth twitched, possibly in frustration. “With all due respect, Chief, you weren’t there. You didn’t see his eyes. This guy wasn’t lying.”
Craig crossed his arms over his chest, his jacket crinkling. “All I’m saying is, we need more than the word of a madman here. I’m not keen on causing a panic without knowing for certain this White Horde exists and is as strong as the Great Khan says it is.”
“I agree,” Gary said. “Morale is already lower than ever. News about the White Horde could send the whole town into a frenzy. We should keep this hush-hush for now.”
Liam pulled out a chair and eased himself down. “We’re way ahead of you. The team that went to Window Rock is under strict orders to stay quiet.”
Trusting Jenn to stay quiet was not, in Gary’s estimation, a particularly wise idea. Fortunately, she had Sam to act as her emergency filter.
“Okay then,” Craig continued. “Back to the issue of intel.”
“I’ve already got a proposal.” Dylan folded his hands on the table and leaned forward. “I take a team with two trucks and both recon drones. We’ll do a quick flyby of Window Rock before following the interstate into New Mexico to check out Santa Fe. We can leave tonight if there aren’t any objections.”
Gary ran a hand over his head. Albuquerque was some three hundred miles away, Santa Fe another sixty or seventy past that. In spring, when the first refugees began arriving in Flagstaff, scout teams in gasoline-powered vehicles traveled east toward Albuquerque and west toward Las Vegas. The latter team never returned, while the former reached the outskirts of Albuquerque, where they were fired upon by local survivors and forced to turn around. To Gary’s knowledge, no one from Flagstaff had ventured that far since. “It’s a long trip. Will the drones have enough battery?”
“They can fly for three hours at top speed,” Liam said. “Six if they’re coasting.”
“It’s four or five hours to Albuquerque from here, in ideal conditions. I assume you’ll want to screen your approach with a drone so you don’t bump into anything unexpected. You might run out of battery before the drones even reach Santa Fe.”
“Bring a spare battery, then,” Craig offered while twisting one end of his mustache into a sharp point. “Off a charging trailer. Just disconnect it from the solar panels and load it up. They aren’t very big, and you should get a full charge for each drone out of it.”
“Good idea.” Dylan snapped his fingers. “If we have two fully charged trucks, we’ll have enough juice to drive most of the way there and back.”
“Probably best to stop short of Albuquerque,” Liam said. “We don’t know what it’s like in there. Keep your distance and send the drones out on autonomous recon mode to Santa Fe. They’ll be too far away to transmit live video, but the AI will snap photos and take footage of anything it thinks is valuable.”
Dylan produced a pencil and palm-sized notepad from his pocket and began writing.
“You’ve got a team in mind?” Liam asked.
“Jansen,” Dylan said immediately. He continued to write, then abruptly stopped before looking toward Gary, as if asking permission to take Jenn.
Of course, Gary would prefer that she remained in Flagstaff, where she was safe; he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her as well. Yet he wouldn’t try to stop her from carrying out her duty. She wouldn’t listen even if he did. That girl might be the most stubborn person he’d ever met.
“She would have volunteered anyway,” he told Dylan. “And you need your best people.”
Dylan wrote her name and a few others in his notepad. “I’ve got a few ideas of who else I want to bring. I’ll run it by you later, Commander.”
“Sounds good,” Liam said. “Now for some positive news: I don’t see the horde showing up here for a few days. If it’s really a thousand strong, moving that many people and enough supplies for all of them would take a hundred trucks and trailers. From front to back, a convoy that big would stretch a couple of kilometers, and it’ll move slow. No way it’s coming down the interstate at sixty or seventy miles per hour. But we should start thinking about defense right away. I’ll brainstorm some potential battle scenarios with Murphy and Townsend. The Militia’s too small to cover everywhere at once, though, so we should also figure out how we’re going to protect thirty thousand civilians and the food we need to survive the rest of the winter. For all the Khan’s talk about rebuilding the world for Gaia, I’d be willing to bet my monthly protein ration that his followers are interested solely in what we have to eat.”
Unexpectedly, a memory of an NAU Lumberjacks football game popped into Gary’s head. “What about the Walkup Skydome? There’s room for ten thousand or more in there. The Lumberjacks haven’t played since ’57, so most of the place is empty already. As far as I know, it’s only used for graduation ceremonies and exams anymore.”
Craig switched to twirling the other end of his mustache. “Not a bad idea. Stadiums get converted into emergency shelters all the time, like when that hurricane hit Houston a few years back.”
“Tactically, it’s perfect.” Liam tapped his thumb against the edge of the tabletop. “The place is built like a bunker, with most of the field below ground. If we barricade the entrances, an attacker would have to force their way in, and with enough supplies, we could withstand a siege for weeks.”
“We should start moving food in there immediately, then,” Gary said. “If anyone asks, we say we’re consolidating rations at a more centralized, convenient location. Once we have confirmation the White Horde is coming our way, we could switch to moving civilians inside.”
“I’ll put some of my people on it.” Craig pushed out his chair and slapped his thighs, apparently ready to end this meeting and get to work.
“I can spare a full platoon to give you a hand.” Liam began to stand as well, adding, “Anything else we need to discuss?”
Gary thought of the Navajo. Should he send envoys to warn them of the horde’s advance? What was the point? Tuba City, the nation’s largest and arguably most powerful community, had rejected all of his efforts to establish regular diplomatic relations and was actively raiding its neighbors. In any case, Tuba City might not be in danger; if the Khan was to be believed, Flagstaff was the W
hite Horde’s next target.
“Prescott,” he said. “The White Horde’s a threat to them as well, especially if Flagstaff were to fall. First thing in the morning, I’ll make the drive down there, speak with Sheriff Wilson and Mayor Bonelli. Maybe they can contribute some manpower and equipment to the defense, should it come to that.”
Liam wore a wide, satisfied grin. “If I’m not mistaken, the sheriff owes us a favor.”
In September, from the exact chair in which Craig now sat, Sheriff Jordan Wilson had opined, I hate asking for favors and hate owing them just as much. He’d asked for a favor, all right, and Flagstaff had delivered. Now it was Flagstaff’s turn to ask for help. Gary didn’t know Jordan very well, having only met him on a few occasions, but he seemed like the type of man who would keep his word.
“Indeed he does, and I fully intend on calling it in.”
* * *
Jenn slipped on the footpath leading from the road to the front doors of Militia HQ. It had been shoveled, but not well enough to prevent a patch of black ice.
Her reflexes took over. She dropped her armful of firewood to steady her balance, but it was no use. Letting out an embarrassing yelp, she fell backward, landing hard on her tail bone.
A laugh came from Quinn as she strode down the path, duffel bag in hand.
“I’m fine, by the way.” Jenn brushed off her backside and set about picking up her downed pieces of firewood. She could barely see them in the dark. Without streetlights, darkness dominated nighttime in Flagstaff. The moon, a red sliver behind the smoke, was of little help.
Quinn passed her and continued toward two trucks parked along the curb: a white Honda Mountaineer and a charcoal-black Ford Lightning, both of which formerly belonged to the Major. In each bed rested a medium-range recon drone. Both were fully charged and ready to find the White Horde.
“Everyone’s bailed on this path,” Quinn said. “It’s like a rite of passage.”
