Night Before Dawn

by David Lucin

  Jenn balanced the last piece of firewood atop the pile in her arms. “Believe me, this isn’t my first time.”

  “It’s too bad there’s no salt left in the whole town.” Quinn set her bag on the Honda’s open tailgate. “It’d be nice to melt this ice.”

  “Yeah, but I’d rather use salt to preserve meat. I’ll suffer through the occasional fall for a piece of jerky once a week.” The thought of jerky made her stomach growl and her mouth water. She dropped her firewood beside the duffel bag and pushed it deeper into the box, beneath the drone’s right wing. “Speaking of which, I don’t think I’ve eaten since this morning.” She curled her fingers in a grasping motion. “Come on, I know you always keep snacks in your jacket. Got anything good?”

  “If by good you mean stale bread, then yes.” Quinn pulled a clear plastic baggy from her pocket but paused. Gazing past Jenn, toward HQ, she muttered, “Crap, here comes trouble.”

  “Trouble?” Jenn spun around to find Tanis and Wyatt, both in sweatpants, boots, and winter coats, marching down the path. As Tanis crossed the patch of black ice, Jenn began to say, “Watch out. There’s—”

  Tanis slipped, but Wyatt reached out and caught her before she fell. Once she’d found her balance, he pointed to the ground and told Jenn and Quinn, “Hey, just so you know, there’s ice here.”

  Quinn elbowed Jenn in the side. “You hear that? There’s ice. Better be careful.”

  “Thanks,” Jenn said with her fakest smile, then asked Wyatt, “What are you guys doing up? Come to help me load firewood?” She slapped the nearest log. “How nice of you.”

  “Um, no?” He kept his hand on the small of Tanis’s back. Jenn suspected they were sleeping together. As far as she knew, the Militia had no rules about squadmates dating. If their performance at work didn’t suffer, she had no problem with their relationship. She did, however, wonder what Tanis saw in Wyatt. His thin, scraggly beard alone should be enough to turn off most women, Jenn included. Maybe Tanis had a thing for goofs.

  “What are you doing out here, then?” Quinn asked. “It’s like midnight, and I’m pretty sure you guys are on roadblock duty at five.” She held up a finger. “Wait, no, don’t tell me. You’re out here asking why we’re leaving in such a hurry and why we’re taking drones.”

  “Well—” Wyatt began, but Quinn spoke over him.

  “For the last time, we can’t tell you. All I can say is that it’s important and we’ll be gone for a couple of days.”

  Tanis pushed some dark hair out of her face. “Can you tell us where you’re going? You don’t need to tell us what you’re doing.”

  “The what should be obvious.” Jenn waved a hand toward the recon drone in the Honda. “So should the where.” She wiggled her eyebrows. Sure, Dylan had given her direct orders to keep all details of the mission under wraps, but Tanis wasn’t dumb. Wyatt was a little dumb, but even he should be able to figure out the broad strokes.

  “You’re doing recon in the Navajo Nation,” he said. “Right?”

  Tanis added, “Which means you saw something out there.” She leaned into Wyatt’s touch, and he fully put his arm around her waist. So yes, sleeping together. Tanis’s questionable taste in men notwithstanding, Jenn was happy for them.

  “See?” Quinn shut the tailgate with a bang. “You already know what’s up, so you can stop bugging us.”

  Wyatt scratched his chin. “People are talking. They have theories.”

  Theories. This should be interesting. “What are they saying?” Jenn asked.

  “That Tuba City attacked Window Rock, the Navajo are in some kind of civil war, and we’re getting involved.”

  If only that were the truth. She’d easily take a hundred skirmishes with Tuba City’s raiders over a fight against a genocidal maniac at the head of a thousand-man army.

  Quinn made a show of glancing around in search of eavesdroppers. She moved closer to Wyatt and cupped her hand over one side of her mouth as if she were preparing to tell a secret. His eyes widened. He took the bait and leaned in, only for Quinn to say, “Go to bed, Wyatt. You too, Tanis. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but since Courtney and Dylan are both coming with us, Lieutenant Dhaliwal is in charge of the platoon while we’re gone. If you think Courtney’s bad, try showing up to work tomorrow all glassy-eyed and tired. You’ll be running laps of the quad until you chuck.”

  Wyatt’s mouth hung open. “Dhaliwal’s taking over?”

  “Sure is,” Jenn confirmed. “And if I were you, I’d want to make a decent impression on day one.”

  Tanis tugged on the sleeve of his jacket. “She’s right. Come on. Let’s go.”

  He lingered for a moment longer, then stood up straight and gave an awkward salute. “Good luck doing whatever you’re doing. See you when you get back.”

  “You don’t salute NCOs,” Jenn said. “We’ve been over this like a million times. We don’t even really salute officers. Only the Guard do that.”

  “Right, sorry.” He let his hand fall to his side. After clearing his throat, he added, seriously, “Be safe, okay?”

  Emotion tightened her chest. At some point since August, her squad had come to mean the world to her. When, exactly, she wasn’t sure. In Sunset Point, probably, where they went through so much together. Regardless, she felt like a big sister to her troopers. They looked up to her for leadership and guidance the way she once looked up to Andrew and especially Jason, and she watched out for them like her brothers used to watch out for her. The Jenn Jansen of a year ago could count on one hand the number of living people she cared for: Mom, Dad, Gary, Maria, Sam. About as few cared for her in return. Today, Sergeant Jenn Jansen would need a fourth or fifth arm to include everybody. Strange how that happened, how the apocalypse could make such a positive change in her life. Now the Great Khan, with his White Horde, threatened to take it all away.

  She curled her toes inside her boots. I won’t let him.

  “We will,” she told Wyatt. “See you in a day or so.” To lighten the mood, she thought about ending on a joke but decided against it, preferring to leave her troopers with words of assurance.

  Wyatt slunk up the path, arm still around Tanis. When they were out of earshot, Quinn said, “They’re definitely hooking up.”

  “Oh yeah. Not even being subtle about it.”

  Yannick came out through the front doors of Militia HQ with three of his grunts. They would be riding in the Ford with Courtney, while Quinn, Beau, Jenn, and Sam would ride with Dylan in the Honda.

  On their way down the path, Wyatt and Tanis bumped into Yannick’s team. They could try asking the same questions they’d asked Jenn and Quinn, but they wouldn’t get answers; nobody who knew about the Khan and the White Horde wanted to incur the wrath of Dylan and Liam.

  Quinn opened her baggy and offered it to Jenn, who plucked out a fingernail-sized piece of bread. “It feels like we just got back. Can’t believe we’re leaving so soon.”

  “We pretty much did just get back,” Jenn said and took a bite. The bread had all the flavor of sawdust, as she’d expected, and it was so dry it cut the roof of her mouth.

  “At least your fiancé’s coming with you.” Quinn picked out her own piece of bread and then returned the baggy to her pocket. “Gotta be a bonus to have him tagging along all the time.”

  “Bonus” was an understatement. Jenn counted herself lucky that Sam had carved out a job in the Militia. She still didn’t like the idea of him following her into danger, and she would never stop fearing that he would get hurt—or worse—but they were a team. Together, they were infinitely stronger than when they were apart.

  “Yep, it’s a pretty sweet deal.” She swallowed the rest of her bone-dry bread. A piece of fresh, moist bread would taste like heaven. Even moldy bread would do the trick. Anything that didn’t scratch her throat on the way down. “You ready for this? The mission, I mean.”

  Quinn bit into her bread with a loud crunch that made Jenn’s teeth ache. “Absolutely not. You?”
r />   Jenn almost said yes, but she recalled what Maria had mentioned about the value of being open. If Jenn couldn’t be open with Quinn, one of her closest friends, she should consider seeking help from Allison, the unofficial therapist of her crew. “Nope. It’s funny, I was thinking earlier when we were hanging out in the office that driving out to track down the White Horde was not what I wanted to do. Now here we are, doing exactly that. I want to find them, obviously, but at the same time, I don’t. That probably doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” Quinn replied as she chewed. “I feel the same way. Like, if we find the horde, then we can start figuring out how to deal with it, but if it’s not real, we don’t have to deal with it and it’s all good.”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  Simply the thought of the White Horde meandering through the desert, sacking and razing everything it came across, sapped the heat from Jenn’s fingers and toes. How many other cults or armies of crazies were out there, wandering the country? The White Horde couldn’t be the only one. After all, as food supplies continued to diminish, survivors would only grow more desperate and become more likely to follow a man as deranged as the Great Khan. Why couldn’t they prey on each other instead of on towns like Flagstaff? Then again, wolves didn’t eat other wolves; they ate sheep.

  “Except we’re not sheep. We’re wolves, too.” She still feared the White Horde, but fear wouldn’t destroy it, so she pushed that feeling aside to make room for the determination clogging her veins.

  Quinn’s brow crinkled. “What was that?”

  Only then did Jenn realize she’d whispered those words out loud. Heat rushed to her cheeks. “Nothing. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I talk to myself sometimes. In the shower, mostly.” Quinn crunched on another piece of her bread. “Anything you want to share?”

  “I was just thinking about the horde. We can take it. No matter what it is, we can handle it. This is what the Militia’s for, right?”

  “Yes, but the horde has, what, triple our numbers? How are we supposed to fight that?”

  Jenn had no idea. She couldn’t even imagine a battle involving a thousand soldiers; no more than thirty or forty had fought at the Battle of the Farm. If she tried picturing anything larger, her mind immediately latched onto the only frame of reference it had: Gary’s stupid World War Two movies. Jenn was pretty sure the White Horde didn’t have tanks or airplanes, though if it had M4s, it could have legged combat drones as well. She did her best not to think too hard about that possibility. Good thing the Militia had two LCDs of its own.

  “I honestly don’t have a clue. I guess that’s why me and you aren’t officers.” She used her tongue to fish a crumb out of her teeth. “Come on. Let’s load up the rest of the stuff and get out of here. Before we start thinking about beating the White Horde, we’ve gotta find it first.”

  8

  “I’m sorry he’s taking this long,” Sheriff Jordan Wilson said. He wore an N95 atop his bushy gray beard and a heavy black jacket over his tan sheriff’s department uniform. “It’s quite embarrassing, to be honest, especially after you jumped on your horse to meet with me and Sergeant Murphy back in the fall.”

  He and Gary sat in a conference room in Prescott’s city hall. Morning sunlight crept through the cracks between the towels covering the east-facing windows, drawing orange lines across the walls and the rectangular table in the center of the space.

  Gary rubbed the sleep from his eyes. At 4:00 a.m., he and three Militia troops, all of them former National Guardsmen decked out in ballistic vests and armed with M4s, left Flagstaff in a heavy-duty four-wheel-drive Chevy with chains on the tires. They arrived five hours later, at a few minutes after nine. Three or more inches of snow covered the interstate during the first leg of the journey, slowing their progress to a crawl. Several times Gary feared the truck would get stuck. Once they descended the mountains, the road conditions improved, if only marginally. As a precaution, they brought shovels, as well as bags of sand.

  Really, Gary should be thankful the highways were passable at all. He could only imagine places in the Northeast or even the Pacific Northwest, where the drop in temperatures would turn winter rain into winter snow. Communities there might be totally isolated. Here, contact with Prescott was maintained and trade continued, albeit infrequently.

  “It’s all right,” Gary said and slowly extended his knee to keep it from seizing up. “I understand. To be fair, we did show up unannounced.”

  “That’s no excuse.” Jordan glanced at the door before adding, his voice barely audible through his mask, “Between you and me, I think Mayor Bonelli is a bit of a dolt. Bungled more than a few things since this all started. Rationing, defense, you name it. I feel like we’ve been two, three months behind Flagstaff on everything we do.”

  “But your police department has stepped up, hasn’t it? Not to mention your deputies. That roadblock we came through on the way here was set up well. As good or better than anything we have.”

  “It took a while, but we finally got things straightened out in that regard.” Jordan planted his elbows on the table and tapped his thumbs together. “I shouldn’t complain, but you know how it is with bureaucrats, even in small towns like this.”

  Gary chuckled and adjusted his N95 to keep the seal tight around his cheeks. “In my experience, it’s worse in small towns. Politicians try to please everybody because they bump into them on the street the next day, but in the end, they end up pleasing nobody. I’d say I’ve managed to please about half, which is good enough for me.”

  “Amen to that. We’ve got an election coming up this fall, so we’ll see.” Jordan furrowed his brow. “Unless what you’ve come here to discuss means we won’t be surviving that long.”

  Gary hadn’t told him about the White Horde, only mentioned he’d become aware of a threat to both towns. Selfishly, he didn’t want to explain twice. Telling Maria in private last night when he returned from his meeting at the police station had proven more exhausting than expected, and twelve hours later, he was still laboring to make sense of it all. So far, Jordan hadn’t prodded, and Gary was thankful for that.

  The discussion turned to the mundane. Well, mundane by comparison. Prescott was struggling with the flu as much as Flagstaff. Fewer here had died of the virus, however: under four hundred. Gary felt a twinge of envy. Or maybe he regretted not having done more to save lives.

  Jordan radioed for updates about the mayor’s status five times over the next thirty minutes. Finally, two hours after Gary arrived, the door to the conference room swung open, and in came a short, stocky man with tan skin, a clean-shaven face, and thinning black hair styled in an unsightly combover. Like Gary and Jordan, he wore an N95 mask. Mayor Theodore Bonelli. Immediately, Gary took note of the extra weight in the man’s jowls and neck. He wasn’t overweight by normal standards, but in a world where nearly everyone was clinically underweight, the sight aroused some suspicion.

  Theodore hadn’t allocated himself additional rations, had he? Often, when it came to food, Gary was urged to make an exception for himself on account of his position as the town’s leader, but he always refused. He would consume the same as every other male of his age, not a calorie more. The simple possibility that Theodore didn’t share that sentiment drew Gary’s ire.

  Next into the room was a Caucasian woman in a high-vis police parka. Amelia Stewart, chief of the Prescott Police Department. Strands of graying hair poked out from beneath her black beanie. Her sharp cheekbones and deep-set eye sockets hinted at Eastern European descent. She, too, sported an N95.

  Gary rose to his feet, wincing as fiery pain lanced through his knee. Jordan remained seated, arms crossed, making a show of being put out.

  “Mayor Ruiz,” Theodore said in a surprisingly high voice as he pulled out the chair nearest to the door. “I’m afraid I have to insist that we skip the customary handshakes. You can never be too careful with the flu.”

  “Not a problem.
We do the same. Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice.”

  Amelia gave Gary a friendly nod and took the seat between Jordan and Theodore. “It’s good to finally meet you in person. Sheriff Wilson’s told us so much about what you’ve been doing up there. It’s a shame your idea to have some of our people train with your Militia never got off the ground.”

  “I blame the winter,” Gary said and returned to his chair. “It came faster than any of us were expecting, I think, and getting here was no pleasure cruise. I do regret not having made the trip until now. Us working together is—”

  Theodore cleared his throat. “My apologies, Mr. Ruiz, but I presume you haven’t come all this way first thing in the morning and in the middle of the winter to talk about the friendship between our two towns. What can we do for you today?”

  Jordan jerked back in disgust, and Amelia’s eyes widened. Theodore’s callousness plucked a nerve. Yes, Gary was here on urgent business, but diplomacy required a degree of tact, a soft touch. He couldn’t well show up in Prescott and demand help in fighting off the White Horde. First, he had to butter up the town’s leaders, didn’t he? Perhaps he was wrong.

  “What Mayor Bonelli means,” Amelia said while staring at Theodore, “is that we value our partnership. But I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we’re quite concerned.” She turned to Gary and asked, “What brings you here today?”

  He opened his mouth to reply but found himself at a loss for words. Where was he supposed to begin? At the beginning, with the trading expedition to Window Rock? With the capture of the Great Khan? Good Lord, how was he supposed to describe him?

  Theodore rapped his fingers impatiently on the table. The tick-tick-tick of his nails on the faux mahogany set Gary’s teeth on edge, so he laid it all out, deciding on a whim to tell the whole story, start to finish. The preliminaries seemed to bore Theodore, who on two occasions yawned loudly, but Amelia and Jordan maintained eye contact for the duration. When Gary came to the bodies in the council chamber, Amelia gasped. Theodore made a sound as well, as if he thought Gary was overexaggerating. Jordan remained quiet and still, though Gary could hear his knee bouncing up and down.