Alec watched the tablet, noticing a few Seekers in the state, but heavily concentrated around Las Vegas. He zoomed out enough to see a cluster of Trackers and drones near Los Angeles. He was grateful they weren’t heading in that direction.
“Why is there so much land unspoiled by the Occupation?” Alec asked. It was as if they’d freely traveled halfway across the country. At home, he’d assumed the aliens were everywhere. Now he saw their footprint was inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Alec wondered what other countries might be experiencing.
“They focused on the major routes for their logistics. Preparation was key,” Tom said.
“For what?”
“The final countdown. Alec, I have it on good authority they only want our resources, but they reside an awful long way from here,” Tom said.
“That’s why they are building the gate?”
Tom nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. Alec heard the woman mumble something incoherently and he turned to see her moving her lips.
“Why didn’t they bring one with them?” Alec asked.
“If you figure it out, let me know. We have some theories on that.”
“Being?”
“They were in a hurry. Otherwise, they would have sent more ships. If you’re taking over a world, would you only have this many vessels?” Tom asked.
Alec shrugged. He really had no idea. “It seems to have worked for them.”
“Because we helped them. If we’d united…” Tom gripped the steering wheel tightly and Alec noticed his knuckles turning white.
Signs littered the sides of the road, even on the quiet backroads.
“What’s Reno?” Alec asked Tom.
“It's the biggest little city in the world,” Tom told him.
“The what? It looks big to me,” Alec said.
“It isn’t small.”
“But you said…”
“We’ll hole up here for the night, check on our new friend, and we’ll arrive by nightfall tomorrow.” Tom pressed the pedal harder, and they picked up speed, moving through the streets on the outskirts of the city. It was nearly dark, but Alec saw some buildings in the core of the city. He’d never visited a metropolis’ downtown and was okay with that. It felt safer on the edges of their old civilization. The skies were more open, the height of the buildings less overwhelming.
Tom headed south before turning west, purposely staying away from town. They drove through a warehouse-lined street, reminding Alec of Detroit, and Tom finally stopped at a two-story motel. “Screw it,” he said, going in reverse.
“Where we going?” Alec asked.
“It’s a surprise.”
Tom turned around and drove on, coming to a halt ten minutes later. The building was huge, the parking lot full. For a second, Alec thought they might have stopped at a church. Monet had told him that at the end of times, people had flocked to churches in the hope of salvation. They hadn’t found it.
He saw the words on the side of the massive structure and read them aloud. “Casino.”
“Yep. I remember coming here with Travis once when he turned twenty-one. We lost our shirts.” Tom laughed, and the sound seemed foreign from the man’s lips. It reminded Alec of the good-natured man he remembered, not this newer version of his uncle.
“Lost your shirts? Did someone take them? Did you spill something on them?” Alec asked, not following the phrase.
“This was a spot for gambling. Placing bets on games? God, sometimes I forget how much of us has been lost to our younger generations. Come with me. We’ll stay in the hotel. It’s a hell of a lot nicer inside than the dive I was heading to.” Tom shut the ignition off and moved to the rear door where Alec joined him.
A few minutes later, they were inside the casino, carrying the unconscious woman through the main floor. Alec stared at the strange rows of machines, his flashlight beam jostling over tables with green felt as they wound their way to the hotel lobby.
The floors were shiny, and Alec could almost picture the place with the lights on. It was opulent, far nicer than any place he’d ever visited.
“Was this for the wealthy?” he asked Tom.
Tom laughed again, nodding to the door handle. “Hold the door. No, but they wanted to make people feel pampered when they came here to spend money they didn’t have. It was a bit of a trick.”
They stopped in a hallway, Tom lowering his half of the mumbling fever-addled woman to the carpet. He pulled a pry bar from his bag and set to breaking through the door jamb. “We’ll stay in here.” He walked inside, setting a lantern on a desk, illuminating the room enough to see the layout. Tom opened an entry on the side. “Good, adjoining rooms. You can stay in there with your patient.”
Tom’s use of the word your was clear enough. Alec didn’t argue.
They moved the woman to the bed nearest the bathroom, and Tom began rummaging through his pack. “What are you doing?” Alec asked.
Tom pulled a red satchel out, a white cross on the front of it. “Giving her a shot. It will help mitigate the infection, break the fever, and help her sleep.”
Alec watched as Tom injected her in the arm with the needle, and he flinched as she groaned.
“Get the bandages.” Tom tossed the pack to him. “We need to clean this wound up.”
Alec got to work, listening to Tom direct him along the way. By the time they finished, her stump was covered in white bandages, ointment placed where necessary, and she’d already begun to regain a little of her color.
He was sure she was going to make it.
“Time for bed. If she wakes up, call me.” Tom shuffled away to the adjacent room, leaving Alec alone with his patient. He lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling, and let her even breaths lull him to sleep.
Chapter 17
Cole
Cole bumped along on the back of Soares’ quad, resisting the urge to lean his head against the older man. His own ride had broken down during the previous night’s journey when he’d missed seeing a twisted, gnarled tree root in time to avoid it and ended up taking a trip through the air over the handlebars.
He wasn’t injured, which Soares told him was a miracle, but the quad had suffered a fatality with the front left wheel being twisted so far out of shape that it was no longer usable. The metal parts connecting it to the steering had sheared off, and with no way of fixing it, they were forced to drag it off the road to hide it.
Now, overloaded and travelling slower than they had been before, they had the added stress of avoiding the red and green dots that never seemed to be too far away.
As though Soares could sense Cole’s discomfort, he released the throttle and let the quad roll to a stop under a thicker patch of trees. He said nothing, forcing Cole to lean around his shoulder to see what he was staring at.
The tablet showed a green dot heading in their direction with three red dots jumping around erratically every thirty seconds. They spent minutes like that in tense silence, hoping that the green dot would turn and go in a different direction. It was too close to start the engine again and drive on. Even if the noise wasn’t detected, they’d recently learned from the one Cole had damaged that the Tracker drones had highly sophisticated olfactory processors, which linked to a database where odors had been catalogued into so many ones and zeros. When he’d asked what that meant, he’d been embarrassed to be told that it could smell them a mile off.
Something attracted the attention of the Tracker that was set to pass within a couple of miles of them and it veered sharply north. The Seekers went the same way, their red dots shooting ahead of the green one, and Soares started the bike up without another word.
Keeping the revs low, not that the bike could reach high speeds on the rough track carrying two men and their equipment, they headed towards the outskirts of Sioux Falls.
As the dull gray of the pre-dawn began to light up the sky, Cole felt more exposed than he had ever felt in his life.
The landscape was flatter than anything h
e’d seen since the dusty plains in New Mexico, and without the cover of trees to hide them, panic began to rise in his chest. When he thought his nerve could hold no further, Soares steered a sharp right and led them down a street that had once been a light industrial area by the look of it, pulling into a vacant warehouse with the shutter door raised just enough for them to drive in and duck under it. The engine sound died, and the two men stiffly got off and raised their weapons to search their hiding place.
“Not like that,” Soares whispered, speaking to Cole for the first time in hours.
“Not like what?”
“Step away from the corner before you go ‘round it,” Soares explained. You put the barrel of your weapon where you can’t see, and it’ll be taken away from you. See, like this.” Soares took position on a corner and stepped out to open up his view ahead.
“Tilt and look,” he said, demonstrating the technique for Cole to copy. They cleared the building together, finally relaxing to sit and drink from their dwindling supply of water.
“You have a split second to make the call,” he told his young companion. “Literally a split second. That’s where there’s no substitute for training. Never has been, never will be.”
“Did Tom teach you this?” Cole asked him, earning a mocking chuckle from Soares.
“No, I learned how to do this when I was younger than you are. I did it in a country a long way from here, with the most beautiful mountains I’ve seen in my life. Not that I was able to enjoy the view much on account of expecting every goatherder we saw to try and kill me.” He shook his head.
“After that, when I moved home, I trained at a Federal facility where they taught this stuff from the ground up. There were people who’d never served before, so we had to go at their pace. Me, well, I found it hard to unlearn the shit I’d had drilled into my brain and learn it the way the instructors wanted it done instead.”
“And that’s where you met… my father?”
“No,” Soares said, sadness creeping into his voice. “I finished my training and moved to D.C. Your father was one of my first assignments, and I found myself on his detail two or three times a week. I was with him on the day… I was with him when it all went south, and I got him out of there. Him and your mother, and you and Alec too, if you think about it.”
Cole said nothing.
“Your dad was a real nice guy. One of the good ones. Always had time to talk, always knew the names of everyone around him and never forgot. He was one of those dudes who made you feel like you were the only person in the world when he spoke to you.” He shrugged, as though he’d run out of words to describe a man he’d loved to the son who’d never met him.
“And… and my mom?” This made Soares chuckle almost mischievously.
“Elaine, well, she was something else. She had twins, in a bunker, in the middle of a war with a vastly superior alien enemy, and she was out of bed in a couple days looking like nothing had happened, to get her face on TV behind Travis.” He shook his head again, only in wistful admiration this time and not sadness. “I’m pretty sure she was the fuel to his fire most days, especially after you were born.”
“TV?” Soares waved a hand dismissively as though the explanation would take more energy than he had available.
“So how come…” Cole began, shaking his head to try and wipe away his words.
“They didn’t leave you,” Soares said reassuringly. “They were taken.”
“How?” Soares sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Your dad was shot and killed by a traitor who led the enemy right to our bunker. Your mom… your mom was taken when you were little.”
Anger burned inside Cole like acid, and it threatened to find a way out in the form of hot, furious tears. He sniffed once, cuffing a dusty sleeve over his face, but it wasn’t enough to force it down.
“I was a lot like you,” Soares told him. The suddenness of the change in subject made him pause and stalled the anger. “In some ways, at least. I was always quick to get angry about stuff I couldn’t control. Can you guess what helped me with that?”
“Let me think,” Cole said with heavy sarcasm. “Tom?”
“No,” Soares answered with his usual little chuckle. “Serving my country. Joining up to fight and do my part in the war on terror.” His voice had changed to sound like he was mocking himself, but there was seriousness behind the words, Cole could tell.
“I didn’t have a lot growing up. Spent most of my time outta the house because it was safer than being home. My mom didn’t have much to her name, but whatever came her way, well, she drank it instead of… anyways, I grew up on the streets of South Salt Lake with a whole lot of nothing in my pockets. But I was a smart kid.
“I started hanging with a couple older kids who’d already dropped out of school, and I made some money with them doing some stuff I shouldn’t have done.” He shook his head to ward off the question he could see forming on Cole’s face. “Point is, these dudes were using me, my smarts, and my anger, for themselves. When one got shot and killed, my mom came to her senses long enough to convince me to escape that life, so I signed up. I had a clean record, even though I’d done plenty of shit, but I was accepted into the US Marine Corps and eventually became a cop. That chain of events led me to assist your father on the day they came, and now I’m able to be here with you, right now.” He shrugged, as if unsure he’d made his point or not.
Cole leaned his head back, considering the man’s story and thinking about the ball of hot anger he kept deep inside himself.
This was his war now, and he’d use that anger to do whatever he could to be rid of the bastards who had taken his parents away from him.
They didn’t sleep much as they had little in the way of comfort, so they headed out as soon as the sky began to darken and resumed their journey for what they hoped would be the final leg.
Entering the outskirts of Sioux Falls, Cole tried to read the numbers telling him how many people had lived there before he was born. Soares turned left and right, constantly glancing at the tablet set on his handlebars, until he finally slowed on a road that the green sign said was Duluth Avenue. Soares turned the bike again and took it down a narrow alley between two buildings. Stopping it under cover again, always with one eye on the sky, he killed the engine and set about unstrapping everything from the quad.
Cole did the same, following him as he approached a dark door at the rear of a building with more paint peeled off it than was left on the door.
He ran his hands around the frame, seeming to take much less precaution than he had every other place they’d stopped at, eventually finding what he was searching for and half turning to smile at Cole.
He pressed a button, making the door pop open to reveal a clean interior in spite of how run down the exterior seemed. Cole followed, gun raised and eager to practice the skills he’d been shown by the older man, but Soares walked in like he owned the place.
“Check the freezer,” Soares told him, smiling. Cole did, lowering his old shotgun and reaching out to grasp the large handle of the walk-in freezer. He pulled, hearing a hiss and pop as the door swung towards him. Bright white strip lights flickered on, illuminating a short staircase leading down. He turned to Soares, his mouth open in shock.
“Go on in,” he told Cole. “I think you’ll like what you see.”
Cole did.
Racks of weapons lined one wall, beside which was a rank of comfortable-looking folding cots with a roll of bedding on each one. The hum of electricity—a sound he’d only recently learned to live with in their bunker at Cripple Creek—caught his attention and led him to open a refrigerator filled with bottles of water next to a shelving unit filled with pouches of freeze-dried food.
“What?” Soares asked as he dropped his weapon and stripped off his pack. He turned to the rack and ran a finger along the weapons until he located the one he had his sights on. Picking it up, he turned and offered it to Cole.
“You
think we’re scratching in the dirt for a living?”
Chapter 18
Dex
Dex placed one foot in front of the other, stumbling more than walking. He needed to take a break, but his brain was running on autopilot. His hand clenched an old water bottle, the plastic crumpled, the lid no longer staying threaded on. He licked his lips, wondering when he was going to find water again when he spotted the reflection of the moon in the ditch a hundred yards farther down the road.
He’d been traveling for four days. Four long, excruciating days. His chest hurt, but when he peeked at it behind the bandages, it wasn’t swollen and angry. Not infected. That was a good thing. He had changed the wrappings yesterday and was confident that the wound wouldn’t kill him. It would likely be his own guild that ended his life.
What was he thinking? Heading on foot, on the highway to Kansas City, seemed like a good idea when he’d left Omaha, but now he seemed to be second guessing himself with each step. The water in the ditch was murky, runoff from some distant rainfall, but he didn’t care. He pulled an iodine pill Tom had supplied him with, filled the bottle by tilting it sideways, and dropped the capsule inside. He shook it, doing his best to not spill, and drank deeply.
He added more water, shaking the bottle again, and sat beside the pool. This was what he’d become. He used to have a car, a purpose, and now he was trudging around like a Roamer; only he was trying to find the Occupation rather than evade it. He missed his car and hoped they’d be reunited one day, but doubted that he’d ever see her again. He’d be lucky to survive the coming week.
He stood with the full bottle and returned to his ceaseless walking. This was a major route. He figured he’d eventually find someone from the Occupation and he was right. An hour later, right as he was about to stop for a brief sleep, the headlights shone from the north. A truck was finally coming. It was the weekly delivery to the Kansas City warehouse. There wasn’t much manufacturing there, but they did have breeding facilities. Dex clenched his fist thinking about how horrible the facilities were. This needed to stop. All of it.
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