Night Before Dawn

by David Lucin

  “So we’re good to go?” Jenn asked.

  He watched the tablet for a few seconds. And then, “Move it. The convoy’s almost at the target site. Go, go, go!”

  All at once, everyone rushed into the field. Jenn and Quinn carried the same ammunition box between them. As they dropped it, Jenn huffed out, “How long do we have?”

  “Two minutes,” Dylan said. “Three, tops. Get those mortars ready to fire.” Into his radio, “Sam, Willow, you’re clear. Back here, on the double.”

  Jenn kicked her and Quinn’s beanies out of the way, and the mortars were set down in their previous positions. Carefully, she angled them to align with the boot marks she’d made in the snow.

  “They’re going around the Jeep.” Dylan lowered the tablet and met Jenn’s eyes. “We good to go?”

  She nearly pulled out her notepad to run through her calculations one final time, but Quinn gave her a confident nod, so against every instinct in her body, she said, “Let’s blow the horde to hell.”

  The troops broke into two teams: Courtney, Beau, and Sebastian in one team and Yannick, Quinn, and Nicholas in the other. Townsend stood behind them, with Dylan and Jenn, and ordered, “Sergeant Hiroyuki, please fire a ranging shot.”

  Beau hesitated, like he didn’t understand what Townsend was asking. When Courtney pointed toward the ammo box, he snapped into action and fetched the first shell. He pulled out the safety pin, then handed the shell to Sebastian, who dropped it into the tube before throwing his hands over his head and ducking, as Murphy had instructed during training the other day.

  Jenn turned her back, ready for the tube to explode when the propellant inside the shell ignited. Astonishingly, it didn’t, and after a loud thud and a metallic ping, the shell burst out faster than she could see it move.

  She began counting in her head: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . . According to her calculations, the shell should spend forty-three seconds in the air. A lifetime in the midst of battle.

  “It’ll work,” Quinn said, kneeling next to her box of ammo.

  Jenn caught herself chewing her cheek. “I hope so.”

  Twenty Mississippi, twenty-one Mississippi . . .

  Someone sniffled. Another coughed. The Honda and the Ford appeared on the main road, heading for the motel.

  Thirty-nine Mississippi, forty Mississippi, forty-one Mississippi . . .

  Jenn drew in a breath and held it until Dylan called out, “No hit!”

  Her stomach dropped. What had she messed up? Could the muzzle velocity be less than what Townsend thought because the crappy mortars weren’t perfectly airtight? Had she angled the tubes improperly after setting them down? Or was Quinn right about the elevation variable?

  “Range is good,” he clarified. “The round landed about three hundred meters to the left. I don’t know if the horde saw the explosion, but they definitely would’ve heard it.” As if to emphasize his point, a quiet boom rumbled in from the northeast.

  Diagrams and formulas rolled through Jenn’s mind. She needed to figure out how much to rotate the mortar tubes so the shells struck the highway. Within a few seconds, a solution presented itself, but although she could handle the algebra with ease, she struggled to compute cosines on the fly.

  She snatched away Dylan’s tablet. The drone’s camera feed showed a near-endless line of vehicles barreling toward her down the interstate. She tried to ignore it as she opened the calculator app and punched in numbers. Adrenaline made her hands shake, and she accidentally hit divide instead of multiply.

  Growling, she almost threw the tablet away in frustration. The success of this ambush had, somehow, come to rest on her fingers’ ability to follow her brain’s instructions and land in the right place. In the moment, this simple task felt as impossible as swimming from Los Angeles to Tokyo. Yet she couldn’t help but smile inwardly at herself. If only today-Jenn could travel into the past and tell junior-Jenn that in four years’ time, what she learned in math class would prove critical to winning a battle against a horde of bloodthirsty raiders. Oddly, acknowledging the humor in this situation, the ridiculousness of it, helped steady her hands and sharpen her focus.

  Again she tried the calculator, pressing the buttons slowly. She almost cheered when she hit equals and a string of digits popped up as her result. After instinctively rounding to the nearest decimal place, she called out, “Four and a half degrees clockwise!”

  Courtney used a protractor to shift the base of the mortar into position. When she was finished, she said to Beau, “Ready.”

  He armed a second shell, and Sebastian dropped it into the tube. With a thud and a ping, the shell was sent sailing toward its target.

  Jenn held onto the tablet for now, prepared to run through another set of trigonometric calculations in about forty seconds. As she nervously tapped her fingernail against the hard plastic case, she watched Sam and Willow turn around and park on the street.

  Dylan peeked at the screen over her shoulder. “The horde knows something’s up. You see those brake lights coming on? Looks like they’re stopping.”

  “Yeah, I see them,” she lied. In truth, she couldn’t bear to look at the video feed. If this next shell missed, she might not get the opportunity to fire a third. Also, how many seconds had passed since the last ranging shot was fired? Thirty? She hadn’t been counting. It could—

  “Direct hit!” Dylan shouted almost directly into her ear.

  “Fire at will!” Townsend ordered.

  Two thuds and two pings rang out, followed by two more. On the tablet, a cloud of dust and debris rose from the front of the White Horde’s column. Jenn pinched the screen to zoom in, only to find it was already magnified to its maximum. From this altitude, she couldn’t make out much detail, but she swore a vehicle lay hidden beneath that dust.

  Her grip on the tablet loosened; she’d been holding it so tightly her knuckles were turning white. As the mortar teams loaded a third volley of shells, she passed the tablet to Dylan, who slapped her on the back and said, “Nice work. You probably never thought you’d be using those math skills for this.”

  “Nope. I don’t know if my high school physics teacher would be proud or horrified.”

  The firing continued, the two mortars not quite in sync, until there must have been ten rounds in the air. At that point, Townsend said, “Hold your fire!”

  Jenn returned to watching the tablet. Most of the dust from the first shot had cleared, revealing the twisted and deformed remains of a small car flipped onto its side. A body lay a few meters away. Well, pieces of a body. Or bodies. There might have been more than one.

  Intuitively, she understood that dropping explosives on the White Horde would result in deaths, but before now, she hadn’t given this fact much consideration. Actually, if she was being honest with herself, she’d given it no consideration at all. In her mind, the Khan’s soldiers weren’t people; they were inhuman savages. Blowing them to pieces with mortars inspired less guilt than stomping on bugs with her boots.

  The entire convoy had come to a stop. What would the Great Khan be thinking right now? Did he regret letting her, Dylan, and the rest of her team in Window Rock go free? Hopefully he was fixating on that day, wishing he could have killed them when he had the chance.

  A flash lit up the tablet’s screen: an explosion on the highway median. A miss. Then one of the pickups in the eastbound lanes vanished in an orange fireball. Two quiet booms rolled across the desert as a third explosion erupted near the front of the convoy. The force shattered a sedan’s windshield, likely spraying those inside with shards of glass. A fourth shell detonated between a trailer and an SUV.

  To escape the pandemonium, several vehicles veered off from the main convoy and drove into the desert. Others began to reverse, but without the whole column moving as a unit, gridlock ensued—the outcome Jenn was counting on.

  Another pair of shells missed, one landing too shallow and the other too wide, but a third struck true, blasting a
part a white van and a trailer full of supplies. Food and water, hopefully. Or weapons. It didn’t really matter. To Jenn’s eyes, every explosion was beautiful, like art. Her masterpiece of destruction.

  When the final shell landed atop an already-wrecked pickup, Jenn released a pent-up whoop. She’d given the White Horde a bloody nose and thrown the column into chaos, but her work remained unfinished. Time for the finishing touches. “Adjust downward to sixty-five degrees,” she told the mortar teams. “Let’s hit them farther back.”

  Courtney and Townsend began adjusting the legs of the bipods on their mortars. Giving them orders felt strange, but Dylan had put her in charge of the calculations for a reason, and everyone seemed to trust her judgment. That filled her with no small amount of pride.

  With the mortars in position, Townsend directed the teams to continue firing.

  Thuds and pings sounded as shells arced toward their targets. Dylan had zoomed out on the tablet, showing a longer stretch of interstate. Vehicles at all angles clogged the roadway. The scene reminded Jenn of rush hour in Phoenix. Several more trucks had driven into the desert. Some appeared to have gotten stuck.

  “Hold your fire!” Townsend called as an explosion lit up the screen. It erupted among a cluster of trucks. Doors flung open, and people leaped out, scurrying in every direction like cockroaches fleeing the light. Dylan centered the image on a group of fifteen or twenty men and women clambering out of an open-bed trailer. Then a shell struck it directly. In the blink of an eye, the trailer ceased to exist, replaced by charred asphalt and blackened debris. And blood. So much blood. When Jenn saw a man with one arm stumbling through the detritus, she had to look away.

  Something bit at her ribs. Remorse? Not quite. Certainly not guilt. She couldn’t put a name to this feeling, but it bothered her all the same. How many had just died? Whatever the number, in part, she was responsible. She might not have armed the shell or dropped it into the tube, but her calculations guaranteed it landed on target. This morning, when she crawled out of bed, she could say definitively that she’d taken six lives. Now? It could be six or thirty-six. Worse, she’d never know for certain. Did that make her a monster?

  No, she wasn’t the monster here. Unlike the Khan’s followers, she hadn’t shot helpless, unarmed civilians. Every person in that trailer either had blood on their hands or was guilty by association. One of them might have fired the bullet that killed the little girl with the stuffed horse. The Khan had declared war; Jenn was merely answering his challenge. As far as she was concerned, she had done the world a favor by killing those men.

  The low rumbles of explosions continued drifting in from the northeast. Townsend asked, “We have four rounds left. Do we fire?”

  “Negative.” Dylan shoved his tablet into his jacket pocket. “A few trucks are starting to drive around the convoy through the desert. They’re coming this way. Time to quit while we’re ahead. Pack it up and let’s get out of here.”

  14

  “There’s no sign of ’em in town, sir.” Johansen stood outside the Great Khan’s pickup truck, speaking through the open window. Specks of ice clung to his long beard, and his ponytail blew in a soft breeze. The look brought to mind the fearsome Norse warriors of the Viking age. “They must’ve gotten away.”

  “Could they be hiding somewhere?” the Khan asked from the back seat. His vehicle, a mid-forties Kia, was no more or less extravagant than the others in the White Horde. His position demanded a certain degree of pomp and circumstance, but he would live and travel like his followers. One of his honor guards sat behind the wheel, while a second rode shotgun.

  “It’s possible.” Johansen sniffed, then made a gargling sound and spat to his right. “My guess is they went west, but I’ll get teams organized to start searching buildings.”

  The convoy remained parked along the interstate outside Holbrook. In every direction, the landscape was flat, desolate, not unlike in Minnesota, but it was drier here, with fewer trees and almost no farmland to speak of. “Thank you, Captain. If you find the perpetrators, please endeavor to capture one of them alive.”

  “You got it, sir.”

  The Khan caressed his headdress on the seat beside him. When the first boom reached his ears, he’d hesitated, confused and surprised. The sound had inspired foggy, incomplete memories of a spring storm, and he saw the woman with the blue eyes, her face illuminated by orange candlelight. The boy as well, though he was younger, a mere toddler. He shook with fear as thunder cracked and flashes of lightning slashed through the darkness. Soothing whispers from the blue-eyed woman put him at ease. Put the Khan at ease, too. Deep in his soul, he held great affection for this woman—love, even—but he couldn’t begin to explain why.

  For a minute, maybe two, he lived in that vision, reluctant to leave. He found peace there, a happiness he hadn’t known in his life as the Great Khan. Only the frantic shouting of his driver could pull him away. It had dawned on him then: somehow, the warriors from the west had ambushed his horde with what he presumed were mortars. He ordered the trucks to press forward, through the hail of fire, but it was too late. The convoy had fallen into panic and disarray.

  Gaia had chosen not to chastise him, as there was no need; the Khan recognized his failures. Despite her warnings, he’d succumbed to the temptation to remember, and it had cost him dearly. How dearly, he did not yet know.

  “Do you have a casualty report?” he asked his captain.

  Johansen dug around in his jacket pocket until he found a folded-up sheet of loose-leaf. “Eighteen dead, forty-four injured,” he said as he passed it through the window. “Doc Dougherty thinks about half of those will heal up just fine with what we got. Some of the others . . .” He sneered, running his hands over his hair. “Some are pretty messed up, sir. Everything’s on your list.”

  The Khan scanned the page. It had been divided into three columns. The left-hand column listed names, none of which he recognized. The second column was labeled simply ALIVE/DEAD, with each name given a corresponding A or D. The third column described injuries, if applicable. They ran the gamut from minor scratches to missing limbs. A woman named Rosaline Simpson apparently had a piece of shrapnel in her thigh. William Hartford had lost an arm at the elbow.

  “Speak to Doctor Dougherty,” the Khan said. “Have her conduct triage. Waste no medical supplies on those who are maimed and cannot fight. Instead, give them a quick, painless death. We will send them to Gaia tonight, when we rest and recoup.”

  Johansen stroked his beard, shifting his weight from one foot to another.

  He sympathizes with the wounded, Gaia said into the Khan’s mind. And so he questions your orders. He is testing you, probing you, seeing how far he can push without being bitten. To waver now would show him weakness. Stand firm.

  Yes, Mother, the Khan replied silently before saying aloud to Johansen, “Do you object to the will of our Great Mother, Captain? Must I deliver her orders myself? Or perhaps you require the encouragement of my honor guards?”

  The threat, thinly veiled, made Johansen’s brow twitch, and he nervously tugged at one of his earrings. The Khan’s honor guards were his most loyal followers, true believers in Gaia and her mission. Most came from a single prison outside Saint Paul, and their aptitude for violence was both feared and respected among the horde. More than once had they quelled attempted usurpations, preserving the Khan’s life and his link to the Great Mother. The last ended with the conspirators quartered, nailed to crosses, and left exposed to the elements. Surely, the image wasn’t far from Johansen’s thoughts now.

  The captain coughed into his fist and stood tall, feet together, saying, “No, sir. I’ll make it happen.”

  “Excellent. Then you are dismissed.”

  Johansen waited until the Khan had shut his window, then trudged toward the front of the convoy.

  You handled him well, child, Gaia said. He will think twice before testing you again.

  Thank you. The Khan continued speaking directly to Gaia
so his honor guards would not hear their conversation. He trusted them as much as he could trust any of his followers, but not even they should be privy to all his musings. I begin to question his loyalty. Shall I have him replaced?

  No. To act so rashly would lead the other captains to infer that he threatens you. They may in turn become emboldened. Bide your time, but watch him closely. Gaia paused briefly, long enough for the Khan to sense what she would say next. The warriors from the west, they possess great armaments.

  They do indeed. He picked dirt from beneath his thumbnail. Weeks had passed since he last bathed. We cannot match the firepower of mortars.

  Our delay in capturing the safe zones may prove to have far-reaching consequences.

  The contest for the relief camps outside Denver had been hard-fought and bloody, like Scipio Aemilianus’s siege of Carthage in the mid-second century BC. Three hundred warriors perished, yet the horde’s superior numbers prevailed. When the outcome of the battle became clear, the National Guard defenders, in a final act of defiance, destroyed their equipment and munitions. Lost were recon drones, legged combat drones, grenades, mortars, and countless rounds of ammunition. Only a handful of M4 rifles and a single .50-caliber machine gun were recovered.

  Possibly, but our true strength lies in our manpower, the Khan boasted, not in our materiel.

  Careful, Gaia said. Morale is fickle, and our fighters are weak, hungry. Proceed with caution. Rest and refit. Then, when we are ready, strike hard and without mercy.

  * * *

  Jenn was still high on adrenaline when the trucks pulled up outside Militia HQ in Flagstaff. A little euphoria, too.

  The first half hour after leaving Holbrook was tense. Dylan had kept the drone in the air, watching the road behind them, but the vehicles the Khan had sent toward Holbrook didn’t leave town; most likely, they were searching for who’d fired the mortars. By the time Jenn and her team reached Winslow, about thirty miles to the west of Holbrook, the drone’s battery had fallen to two percent, so it was grounded and loaded into the Honda.