Salvation (Rise Book 2)

by Nathan Hystad

  “I want to know what you’re really doing in Alexandria,” Tubs said, shoving Dex again.

  “I told you,” Dex said.

  “Whose side are you on?” Tubs asked.

  “What? I’m on the same side I’ve always been on.”

  Tubs’ eyes narrowed. “I followed you here.”

  “How?”

  “I added a tracker to Cleveland’s truck years ago. Didn’t want the guy catching me while I slacked off. I usually find the Roamers a day or two before I log them. I like the quiet time on the road. Is it really that bad of an offense to take a few extra days to myself?” Tubs asked, and Dex wondered if there might be a way out of this after all.

  Dex tried to compose himself. “Why follow me?”

  “I heard about you getting shot. Didn’t buy it. Figured you were hiding something,” Tubs said. “I also heard about Kathy. I’m sorry.”

  Dex swallowed hard. “Yeah, the bastards killed her. I tried but couldn’t do anything to stop them,” he lied. Tubs nodded, his gaze falling on Dex’s chest. “You want to see the gunshot, don’t you?”

  Before Tubs admitted it, Dex lifted his shirt. The wound was still pink as it healed, and Tubs had the courtesy to look surprised. “That’s that,” Tubs said.

  “That’s that?” Dex asked.

  “No. I don’t believe any of it. I’ve seen some crap, Dex. Hunters being killed with no witnesses. I found Gunner decapitated along the side of Route 66 a week ago. Other stories are leaking in. I’m sure Cleve told you about the mysterious fires at our agri-centres. They’re ramping it up. We’re boned, buddy.”

  Dex relaxed slightly. He had one shot at this. “We can do something about it.”

  Tubs stiffened, the cords of his muscles tensing along his bare forearms. “Is that so?”

  Dex wished he had some water, but pressed through his dry mouth and spoke. “What if I told you we could hit them where it hurts? What if I said there are wheels in motion as we speak to end the Occupation? What if I told you… we could rise above this and reclaim ourselves?”

  Tubs leaned closer, his voice low. “I’d say keep talking.”

  Dex wasn’t one hundred percent sure he had the guy but didn’t see many options. He’d kill the man if he had to. Now wasn’t a time to grow a previously hidden moral code.

  “Are you alone?” Dex asked, peering outside over the man’s thick shoulders.

  He nodded again. “Of course. You know I don’t play well with others.”

  “How about we change that? I could use your help.” Dex watched the smile spread over Tubs’ face.

  “I could be convinced.”

  “Good. Did you have any idea that the aliens are building a gate in Detroit?” he asked, moving deeper into the room. Tubs let the door close, the handle clicking as it shut all the way.

  “A gate? Like to keep people out?” Tubs asked.

  “Not like that. A gateway to their home world.” Dex said it slowly. His flashlight cast a glow over the floor, which was lacquered concrete. A thick layer of dust told Dex no one had been here in a long time. Tom hadn’t been kidding when he said they’d been prepared for years.

  “That’s not good. It makes sense, though,” Tubs said. Dex had never pictured the man being very intelligent. He seemed to be picking up Dex’s points quickly today.

  “Sure does. They bring in their friends, and we’re goners.” The room was extremely plain. There was a couch along the far wall, a coffee table with old magazines piled on its surface. The kitchen was nearly empty, a few cups were spread out along the countertops, but Dex was sure they were staged to look like someone had left in a hurry along with everyone else two and a half decades ago.

  He could almost see himself living in a home like this in another life. He liked the industrial feel of it. Given the opportunity now, he could imagine living in a cabin with a view of the mountains, at least ten miles from another living soul.

  “What is this place?” Tubs asked, but Dex wasn’t ready to divulge all his cards yet.

  “A pit stop.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Didn’t you hear me? We’re going to their hangar. The one that is supposed to hold half of their North American fleet,” Dex told him.

  “Fleet? How many of those badass ships do they have?” Tubs asked, walking around the living room. He ran a finger over the coffee table, staring at the dust on the tip of his index finger.

  Dex shrugged. “I hear somewhere around forty in total.”

  Tubs went rigid. “Forty? Of those things? No wonder we were screwed from the start. We didn’t stand a chance.”

  “What about now? What if we sabotage them?” Dex asked.

  Tubs cracked his knuckles, grinning hard. “How are we going to do that? You hiding weapons of mass destruction somewhere in there?” He pointed at Dex’s leather jacket.

  “Nothing like that, nope. But…” Dex made for the rear of the unit. There were metal stairs leading to an upper level open air bedroom loft, and the windows on this side were at least twenty feet tall. Rain splattered against the panes, scattering in long lines as his flashlight beam lingered.

  Tom had given him explicit directions, and Dex found another hidden compartment in the fireplace’s stonework. Tubs was over his neck, breathing loudly as Dex fiddled with the keypad. He entered the same code and the fireplace glass tilted forward, unlatching.

  “Hold this.” He passed Tubs the flashlight and pulled the access panel open. The flashlight clanged to the ground as Tubs dropped it in shock, but he quickly recovered.

  “What the hell are we going to do with all that?” he asked, the beam of the light shaky as it surveyed the tucked away explosives. It was more firepower than Dex had ever laid eyes on, and he swallowed nervously. He no longer wanted a drink of water. He needed some whisky.

  “Follow me, Tubs. We’re going to bring this to their shipyard in DC and destroy their fleet.” Dex leaned up, his spine cracking as he climbed to his feet.

  Tubs smiled again. “Good. I’m tired of having a boss anyways.”

  Chapter 30

  Cole

  “Marisol here will show you around,” Renata told Cole. She gave him the same sarcastic, arrogant smile she’d been treating him to since she’d walked them into the underground city that was one big surprise after another. Cole turned to the young woman who eyeballed him the entire time, using her free hand to brush the same errant strand of dark hair away from her face, and glanced at Soares to see if he was being sent away so the grown-ups could talk.

  The older man gave him a nod, dismissing him kindly but giving him a look that Cole understood as an instruction to learn everything he could. He returned the small gesture, turning to follow the woman while reaching down to retrieve his shotgun from beside his chair.

  “You won't need that,” a man told him, pointing with an uncovered stump to stop him from picking it up. Cole stared him in the eye with a cold, blank expression until the stump was slowly withdrawn and he hefted the weapon without letting the triumph show.

  The young woman chuckled in amusement. If she was concerned about leading an armed stranger around their underground home, she didn’t show it. She left her own weapon, a rifle with worn wooden furniture, and walked with such confidence that Cole thought the strut was deliberate and for his benefit.

  Also, he realized as he found himself unable to lift his gaze upwards, he liked the way her hips snapped from side to side.

  “This level is mostly accommodation,” Marisol said in a strong accent he’d heard a lot when he was further south. It carried an implication that she spoke another language and made her words roll in a melodic way that he reckoned he could listen to all day.

  “Directly below us is water recycling and storage, hydroponics, and services like laundry and waste management.” She moved fast, taking the metal stairs two at a time and forcing Cole to hurry if he wanted to keep up. As if connected to her by line of sight, he followed, mirroring her speed and
enthusiasm with far less grace than she displayed because she could probably navigate the underground city in the dark.

  “Below that,” Marisol said, “is more storage and engineering stuff.” She stopped at a doorway and pushed her way through, not bothering to see if he was following.

  “What was this place?” Cole asked, his words rushed as he was short of breath from the brief exertion.

  “Subway,” she said, pausing to see if he understood the word, “and maintenance stuff for it. The levels were repurposed before my time, but people are always doing something to expand or improve.”

  “Where do you put the dirt?” he asked. She stopped, turning to give him a quizzical expression.

  “You mean from the expansion?” she asked, Cole nodding in return.

  “That’s easy. There’re so many tunnels in the system that we’ve blocked them with the rubble.”

  Cole lapsed into silence, as he’d made himself feel foolish with his opening enquiry. He wasn’t uncomfortable in the quiet usually, but the young woman who led him through the subterranean maze made him feel as though he had to fill the emptiness in the conversation.

  “So… what do you do down here?”

  “Do? What do you do up there?” she shot back, lifting her eyes to the ceiling and treating him to a mocking smile.

  “Well, I… I wasn’t doing much until a few months ago,” he admitted, “I was…surviving, I guess.”

  “What changed?” she asked, leading them into a room and opening a chiller to pull out two glass bottles with her one hand. He watched with undisguised interest as she tucked them under her arm to pin them against her body and twist off the caps.

  The bottles bore no labels and had clearly been refilled more times than could be counted, and Cole realized how she coped with her disability until he caught himself and turned away.

  Marisol passed him one of the bottles and lifted her stump as she picked up her own drink.

  “Price of freedom,” she said, using what Cole guessed was a well-worn line in their society.

  “Where were you?” he asked her quietly.

  “Detroit,” she answered unashamedly. “As soon as I finished the basic education grades, they put me to work for two years doing the jobs suited to tiny hands. Then, when I hit sixteen, they shipped me out to a breeding facility.”

  Cole suppressed a shudder and hoped she didn’t notice.

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Five years now,” she answered, watching his face as he clearly did the rapid sums to guess her age.

  “What…” He cleared his throat as if embarrassed by what he was about to ask. “What was it like? My brother told me what he went through, how the Overseers and the supervisors treated them like slaves and…” He trailed off as her saw her features darken and then glaze over as if her soul had vacated briefly.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she reminded him after she shook off the sensation that had overcome her.

  “Oh, yeah, I found someone. Her whole village had been wiped out and she was wandering on her own. We were heading for one of the last places I thought might be safe and found the…” He hesitated before saying the word in case he came across as some kind of true believer nut job. “…the Reclaimers.”

  “The prodigal son returns,” Marisol said with evident amusement before taking a long pull on the bottle’s neck. Cole did the same, mirroring her actions as his brain spun. He coughed, not expecting the liquid inside to bubble in his mouth and threatened to come out of his nose. Marisol watched as he coughed and spluttered before trying to hide a burp of trapped air behind his hand.

  “What do you mean by that?” he asked eventually.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “Would I be asking if I did?”

  She shrugged as if to accept his logic and drank again before speaking.

  “You weren’t expecting to find this, were you?” she asked as she waved a hand around the cramped room as if to encompass the entire underground facility.

  “Honestly, no. I wasn’t sure I was even expecting to find anyone. When the Tracker found people, we—”

  “The what?” she interrupted sharply as if she didn’t believe her ears.

  “Oh, don’t worry, it’s totally safe. It’s on our side now.” She said nothing; instead, she held his eye contact as if she wasn’t convinced. “I guess you’re the one not answering the questions,” Cole said with a smirk.

  She stepped close to him and he held his breath involuntarily as she tucked her bottle under the arm that ended abruptly before the wrist and took hold of his hands in turn with hers. She turned them over, studying them as though he was the freak to have both, and even more so that he’d never lived under the tyranny of their own kind turned traitor.

  “Well, Prince of the Revolution, that’s not my story to tell.”

  Renata poured two measures of a clear liquid into a pair of grubby glasses and expertly restored the cap to the bottle before lifting her own to toast her guest.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  “May it not be our last.” Soares returned the gesture and added his own toast as they both tossed back the drinks and grimaced in unison. Renata thumped the stump of her left arm on her chest as she swallowed the fierce liquid before letting out a whoop and shaking her head.

  “Wooo! Damn, they’re brewing this crap strong these days.” She shuddered again and poured herself another, offering Soares a top up but restoring the bottle to the table when he shook his head and held his hand over the glass. “Suit yourself,” she said.

  “So, old Tom thinks he’s ready to fight now, does he?”

  “It’s time,” Soares said. “It has to be. Both of the Mason boys turning up at once? You believe in fate, Renata?”

  “I prefer to call it God’s will,” she countered with all the calm confidence of a believer.

  “Call it whatever you want,” Soares said. “We’re heading for Detroit to destroy this gateway, and we need your help. We need numbers.”

  Renata swallowed her second drink and held her breath as her eyes watered. She coughed once before answering by standing and waving for him to follow her. He stood, following wordlessly. She led him out, passing through the main entrance into their underground sanctuary as she shrugged herself into a thick shawl that made her appear like a bundle of rags. Soares, unprepared for the cold outside, zipped his jacket up to his neck and hunched his shoulders to try and keep out the chill air.

  “You see,” Renata called out over her shoulder, “you might’ve guessed we ain’t exactly been sitting on our hands, if you’ll forgive the bad joke. We aren’t waiting for Tom to ride in on a white horse, and we’re not ignorant about what’s happening in Detroit.”

  She turned to walk through a doorway where two armed men roused themselves from the shadows. She waved them away, going through another door where she pulled a switch in the wall and waited as a buzzing noise started up.

  One by one, floodlights burst into life in sequence to reveal a train. The carriages came into focus from the rear, with each light introducing his eyes to another two carriages until a long train stood in all of its post-apocalyptic glory before them.

  Soares let out a low whistle of appreciation.

  “That covers the transportation to Detroit,” he said.

  “Oh, sweetie, it does more than that,” she answered as she walked towards the front of the train. “The first six cars are loaded.”

  “Loaded?”

  “Yeah, it’s not just god-awful moonshine our people have been cooking up. That beautiful son of a bitch is carrying twenty-six tons of boom. Reckon that’ll mess up their little portal?”

  Chapter 31

  Alec

  “Your dad’s a coward,” Alec said, still angry that Zhao hadn’t helped Tom.

  Izzy glanced at him from the driver’s seat of the truck and shook her head. “You have to understand something. He only wants to keep us all safe. These are his people.”


  “Whatever. That won’t matter when the war is over,” Alec said.

  “The war has been over for twenty-five years,” she told him.

  “I don’t think so. I was there. It’s only just begun, because to have a war, you need two opposing sides. Since the incursion, it's been nothing but boot licking and subservience.” Alec stared out the window as they drove away from the hidden fortress of Zhao’s group.

  “He’s right, you know,” Becca said from the seat. The doctor had been against them taking Becca for a walk outside the facility, but Izzy had distracted them while Alec had pilfered some medical supplies. She was on the mend and looking better with each passing day.

  Alec was proud at her reaction when he’d asked her to return to Las Vegas. If someone had suggested he return to Detroit, he didn’t think he’d act the same way. Then he recalled that he was revisiting the place of his captivity, because it was what needed to be done. He and Becca were a lot alike. Except she’d been willing to chop off her hand to escape, and Alec hadn’t left because of Beth.

  The truck was beat up but ran well, and Izzy was confident it would make the trek. They’d stolen some of the Overseers’ fuel replacement technology and had adapted it to a handful of their vehicles. This was one of them.

  “I know he’s right, but I hate being wrong,” Izzy said, breaking the silence.

  “Can’t anyone admit this is crazy?” Becca asked from behind them. It was cramped there, and her knees were turned slightly to the side.

  Alec nodded. “It’s crazy, all right. But what other choice do we have? Tom’s going to call the troops to Detroit sooner rather than later.” He ran a hand absently over the tablet his uncle had left behind. “And when he does, he’s going to need all the help he can get. We have no clue if Lina and Monet succeeded, or if Cole and Soares found this hidden enclave of Roamers in Chicago. And Dex might be dead.”