by David Lucin
“After Lewis was shot, Thibault goes nuts. Rounds up a bunch of villagers in this central square area, starts demanding answers, and says the spies have twenty-four hours to turn themselves in. Long story short, it backfires. He thinks his little speech is gonna spook the villagers, make them complicit, but they flip out and start throwing rocks at us, food, whatever they can find. We’re NATO, freaking Canadian Forces, the good guys, so they think we won’t do anything.”
He paused, sucking air through his teeth. It occurred to Jenn that she hadn’t questioned Dylan’s innocence, not once. She’d been led to believe his hands were clean of blood and he was blamed for a massacre after the fact. Even now, she had no reason to presume otherwise. Dylan was a brave, selfless man. He took her under his wing, taught her how to fight and survive. Without him, she wouldn’t have become the woman she was today. He couldn’t be a killer. It simply wasn’t in his nature.
After sweeping some snow off the table, he went on. “There’s only twelve of us and like a hundred villagers. I didn’t see any real weapons, but a few of them had shovels. One had a butcher’s knife, but I’m pretty sure he was the actual butcher. They understand full well we can’t do anything to them, so they’re getting bold. A teacher, he speaks half-decent English, and he’s telling us to leave the village. Before I can figure out what’s happening, one of our guys freaks out, opens fire. I don’t know who it was. Not the lieutenant, but I know for a fact he fired second. The next minute’s a blur. When it was over, there were fourteen bodies on the ground.”
Jenn saw the corpses in Window Rock, the little girl with her horse. The image brought a chill to the air. The White Horde committed that atrocity, though, not her friends and colleagues. Dylan had watched his squadmates, people he trusted, gun down civilians in cold blood. She couldn’t begin to comprehend how that experience must have changed him.
“Thanks for not asking,” he said.
She pushed her eyebrows together. “Asking what?”
“If I shot anyone.” He returned to drawing lines in the snow. “For the record, I didn’t. I checked my magazine after, and it was full.”
“I know.” She put a hand on his wrist. “I never doubted it, but it’s a relief to hear you say that.”
He gave her a wan smile, but a second later, it vanished. “A few of them were still alive. There was a woman. She was holding her son, rocking him in her arms and screaming. Kid was covered in blood, dead.” He grunted to clear his throat and looked away. “When I saw the council chamber, something in me just snapped. When Thibault got his daddy’s help pinning the whole thing on me and a couple other NCOs, I spent the next eight years wanting to get back at the little prick for what happened. I guess shooting the Khan’s guards was my way of trying to make it right. I’m not sure.”
“It’s not fair.” The thought of the true perpetrator—Thibault—walking free while Dylan paid the price made her insides hot. “But thank you for telling me. I know it must not have been easy.”
“Figured it was overdue.” He collected a gloveful of snow and compacted it into a ball. “And it goes without saying this stays between me and you. Nobody else knows, not even Charlie.”
She was honored but also relieved. Never had she seriously questioned their relationship, but she hadn’t forgotten his off-hand remark about her being his employee. Now she knew for certain he hadn’t meant to insult her.
“Secret’s safe with me,” she said and made a show of zipping up her lips.
“Thanks. And apology accepted.”
“Apology?” She twisted her mouth to the side. “Oh! Right. Yeah, like I was saying, I—”
“Don’t worry about it.” He tossed the snowball into the street. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have snapped at you the other day in New Mexico. We’ve all been pretty high-strung lately.”
“That’s an understatement. Speaking of which, what’s the plan? I’m itching to get back at the Great Khan.” And get back to my husband.
His expression hardened, stripping away any sign that he’d just relived an emotional trauma. “The briefing should be starting soon. I think you’re gonna like what the commander has in mind.”
* * *
What remained of the Militia, about two hundred bodies, crowded into the baggage claim area in the airport terminal. Atop a wheeled platform ladder brought in from the hangar, Captain Townsend waited next to a whiteboard she’d removed from the wall of an office upstairs. With the sun beginning to set, almost no light streamed in through the tall, east-facing windows, so a trio of electric lanterns had been strategically placed throughout the room. Townsend also held a flashlight. Jenn, along with the platoon and squad leaders, stood at the front of the crowd, where they had the best view of the whiteboard, while the grunts piled in behind them.
She tapped her foot, eager to hear how Liam planned to relieve the Skydome. The man had a decade of military experience, and she trusted him, even after the defeat on I-40. But there were no second chances now, no do-overs. The Militia had one last opportunity to win this war, and Jenn had one last opportunity to save her husband, so what Liam and the other officers came up with had better be good.
“What’s taking him so long?” she said to Quinn, who munched on something beside her. “We’ve been waiting for like twenty minutes.”
Quinn took out her bag, now full of dried bread. How? A half hour ago, she was down to only crumbs. “Have a piece.”
“I don’t want any. I want to figure out what we’re doing and do it, before it’s too late.”
“Seriously,” Quinn said sternly. “Eat. I can tell when you’re hungry. You get all irritable and grumpy.”
“That’s not—” She stopped herself, hearing Sam say, Don’t be a Jennifer. He once joked that Jennifer’s kryptonite was the calorie, so she forced her foot to sit still and snatched away the baggy. “Fine. I’ll eat, but if he’s not down here in five minutes, I’m going to get him.”
She plucked out a piece of bread and nibbled off a corner. After she finished her first bite, suddenly, tracking down the commander of the Militia and telling him to hurry up didn’t sound like such a brilliant plan. Still, she would prefer he didn’t dawdle; every minute away from Sam felt like a needle to the heart. At some point, likely soon, she wouldn’t be able to tolerate them anymore. What she would do then, she had no idea, but she wasn’t keen on finding out.
Two pieces of bread later, Liam finally ascended the ladder, his boots clanking on the metal steps. At the top, he popped the cap off a dry-erase marker. Townsend switched on her flashlight and aimed it at the whiteboard.
“I’ll get right to it,” he began. “As you know, the White Horde has moved on the Skydome. Our drones are out of battery, but our scouts got a half-decent look at the enemy’s position.” He drew a circle. “This is the Skydome.” Next, he drew an arrow pointing upward. “This is north.” After he added a large square below the circle and a few smaller ones to the left, “This big square is the parking lot. These over here are residence buildings.”
“Pine Ridge Village,” Jenn said. “Those residence buildings, they’re part of Pine Ridge Village.”
“Thank you.” He labeled the cluster of squares Pine Ridge, then drew a dotted line in the shape of a U, its arms anchored on the Skydome and its bulge extending into the parking lot. “The White Horde has erected a barricade of vehicles here. The bulk of its forces are inside. We assume the Khan will concentrate on breaching the building at the front entrance.” On the circle, he drew an X corresponding to the main gate.
“How many people we talking in total?” Yannick asked from somewhere on Jenn’s left. In the dim light and among the crowd, she couldn’t find him.
“After Holbrook and I-40,” Townsend began, “the Khan’s down to maybe seven, eight hundred.”
Someone whistled. Yannick added, “Oh, good. Only eight hundred.”
“That’s a rough estimate,” Townsend said. “We’re basing it on the number of approximate casualt
ies we inflicted during our two prior engagements. The scouts weren’t able to get close enough to do an accurate head count.”
The numbers no longer surprised Jenn, but she still found them terrifying, even more so now, with the Militia down to two-thirds of its full strength. When she pictured eight hundred armed men and women concentrated in the Skydome’s parking lot, behind a barricade of vehicles, the position seemed impregnable. How were a mere two hundred troops supposed to crack it?
“The Khan’s clearly expecting a counterattack.” Liam returned the cap to his marker with a click. “He must realize not all of us withdrew to the Skydome, but he obviously doesn’t know where we are, either. If he did, he would have attacked already. So the good news here is that the element of surprise is on our side.”
“So what are we waiting for?” a Spanish-accented female voice called out. It made Jenn think of Val. She moved her hand toward the cross at her neck, wishing her friend were here. “Let’s go get him!”
Cheers of support erupted from the crowd. Jenn didn’t join in, not yet. So far, Liam had only laid out the challenges. She was still waiting for a real plan.
“Okay, okay.” Liam pressed the air, signaling the room to quiet down. “I’m glad you’re all eager to take this scumbag out. I am, too, trust me, but if we launch a counterattack now, while he’s not otherwise engaged, he can concentrate all of his numbers against us, and we won’t stand a chance.”
“Are you saying we need to time our attack with when the horde assaults the Skydome?” asked someone on Jenn’s right.
The troops broke out into worried chatter, but confidence began to tickle her chest. How had she forgotten about the police and armed volunteers in the Skydome? She didn’t like the idea of using them as a distraction, yet she understood Liam’s logic. It would take a combined effort to defeat the White Horde. The Great Khan might have the bigger army, but he didn’t have the most bodies. Flagstaff had thousands who would fight and die to save this town.
“That’s exactly what he’s saying.” She took a step forward, away from the group and closer to the ladder. The chatter subsided, so she added, “We’ve got a few hundred cops and armed civilians in there.” And Sam. “If we include them, the numbers don’t look so bad. Instead of seven or eight hundred against two hundred, it’s a few hundred against a few hundred in the Skydome and a few hundred against us outside.”
On the whiteboard, Liam began jotting down numbers that represented the size of the forces involved.
“What makes you think he’ll attack the Skydome at all?” a new voice asked. Jenn recognized it as belonging to the Guardsman Quinn had briefly dated in the fall. “Why doesn’t the Khan just wait us out? The Skydome will run out of water in less than a week. We have even less with us here. Surprise is on our side, yeah, but time isn’t.”
“It is, though.” Liam tapped one end of the marker into his open palm. “He knows we’re out here somewhere, so the longer he waits, the more time he gives us to regroup and attack. If he takes the Skydome fast, he can hold it, and there’s no way we can force him out or besiege it ourselves, not with our numbers. I fully expect him to launch an assault within the next twenty-four hours.”
He infused his words with vigor, and the confidence tickling Jenn’s chest spread from head to toe, stamping out any last vestiges of fear or apprehension. She still worried for Sam and Maria and everyone else, but now she had a plan to save them. Hang on, she sent to them mentally. I’m coming.
She checked on Quinn, happy to see her standing tall, chin held high. Freddie, the same. Aiden, too. Jenn thought back to their first time practicing bounding overwatch in September, when they attacked imaginary enemy positions at Coconino Community College and Freddie couldn’t figure out when to drop for cover. Since then, the squad had trained together countless times, even rehearsed the same scenario. Most recently, Jenn didn’t need to give her team leaders a single order; Quinn, Freddie, and Aiden knew exactly what to do, as if their minds were telepathically linked with Jenn’s and with each other’s. The unit had ceased to be a collection of soldiers. Now it was like an organism, something greater than the sum of its parts. Jenn was proud of what it had become, of what the Militia as a whole had become, and she had faith it could destroy the White Horde and put an end to the Great Khan’s mindless reign of terror.
Murmurs filled the terminal. They grew louder and more excited by the second. Dylan leaned against the base of the ladder. His form was a silhouette against the tall windows, but Jenn saw him nod and tip the brim of his hat. She was lucky to have him as her platoon leader. Now that he’d explained his behavior in Window Rock and opened up to her about West Ukraine, she once again trusted him implicitly. In her opinion, he was the best soldier in the Militia. Who better to follow into battle?
A sharp whistle cut through the noise. Jenn instinctively threw up her hands to cover her ears, but the sound gave her an instant headache.
Townsend took her fingers from her mouth. “Hey! Quiet down and listen up!”
All at once, the troops went silent.
Liam stuck a finger in his ear and stretched his jaw. “A little warning would have been nice, Captain, but thank you.” He turned to the whiteboard and lifted his marker. “Now, let’s go over the details of the plan so you know exactly what you’ll be doing when we make our move. And pay attention, because this is more complicated than anything we’ve done in training, guaranteed.”
21
Beams of white light crisscrossed the otherwise pitch-black Lumberjacks’ locker room at the Walkup Skydome. Occasionally, Gary glimpsed a body on the floor or in a cot. Some rested quietly, their wounds minor, but many writhed in pain. A few wailed or cried. One soldier, a man in his thirties, was being attended to by a pair of nurses more than twice his age. A makeshift sling supported his arm, the shoulder wet with blood. A woman no older than Jenn was missing a leg; it had been amputated above the knee. Soaked, blackened shirts held in place with duct tape and a belt covered the stump. She lay motionless on a blow-up mattress. Asleep, Gary hoped. Then the light shifted and she was swallowed by darkness.
As a police officer in Phoenix, he had developed a stomach for violence, but not once in his thirty-year career did he see anything like this. It felt as if he’d been teleported two hundred years into the past, to a time before the invention of penicillin, when battlefield medics often had no choice but to amputate limbs in order to stave off infection. Flagstaff ran out of antibiotics months ago, so although the battle against the White Horde was being fought with the weapons of World War Three, the Militia was forced to make do with the medicine of World War One. The results were predictably gruesome.
A flashlight lit up a young woman clutching a blood-soaked patch of her shirt, then a nurse delivering CPR to an unresponsive body. Another illuminated a doctor checking a man’s pulse, shaking his head, and then moving on to his next patient. Gary searched the chaos for Nicole but couldn’t find her among the sea of distressed, exhausted, and terrified faces. He feared seeing Jenn in here, even though he’d heard via radio that her platoon had withdrawn to the airport and suffered no casualties in the failed ambush on I-40.
The screams and shouts and cries continued, blending together and becoming an incessant buzzing in his ears. The smell of blood, vomit, and death permeated his N95 mask. Wooziness washed over him in waves, and he felt lightheaded. He’d come down to the locker rooms to offer his assistance, but he could hardly stand, let alone help save lives.
At the same time, the sight of the wounded, the dead, and the dying served to harden his resolve. These young men and women had given themselves to defend Flagstaff. They knew the risks, knew they might not come home alive, yet they marched into battle anyway. Their sacrifice could not be in vain. The White Horde had to be defeated.
No, not just defeated. Destroyed.
“Are you okay, Mr. Ruiz?” asked Tim Wagner, a rookie officer Chief Craig Morrison had assigned as Gary’s escort and bodyguard. Gary didn’t
think he needed a bodyguard, not with his .38 on his belt, but with twenty thousand hungry, frightened people crammed into the Skydome, he supposed caution was warranted. Besides, Maria had insisted.
“Yes, Tim.” Gary turned his back to the scene of the carnage. “I feel like we’re just getting in the way down here.”
Flashlight in hand, Tim led him out of the locker room and up the service stairwell that connected with the concourse. Twenty-four, maybe twenty-five, Tim was a good kid, as far as Gary could tell. He kept his black hair cut short and neat. Thin stubble adorned his bony cheeks, but his mustache left something to be desired. Thankfully, his mask covered it most of the time.
Their boots echoed off the concrete enclosure. Each step sent shooting pains through Gary’s knees. After the first flight, he had to stop and catch his breath. He’d slept for no more than a few hours over the past three days, and he was running on empty.
Finally, he made it to the concourse, where dozens of police lingered with armed volunteers behind makeshift barricades of wood, food-service carts, wheeled laundry bins, anything. They were arranged in layers, each fifty to a hundred feet apart, and staggered so as to break up lines of sight.
“Mr. Mayor,” a jovial voice called out.
Tim’s flashlight lit up a group of men and women wearing Yavapai County Sheriff’s Department uniforms before settling on Sheriff Jordan Wilson himself. He carried a shotgun and wore his N95. Actually, all of his people wore N95s.
“Evening, Sheriff,” Gary said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
“I could say the same.” Jordan gave Tim the elevator treatment. “And who’s this dapper young man?”
“Tim Wagner, sir.” Tim stuck out his hand but quickly retracted it; a full day with Gary had drilled flu protocols into his brain. “I’d shake your hand, but Mr. Ruiz—”
