by Dana Fraser
Reaching the top of a small bluff with densely packed trees, Cash stopped and shed his pack and the puppy sling once more. Beyond the safety of the bluff, the view to the east turned to farmland once more. Trees still cut through the landscape, both bordering country lanes and hugging the banks of the river now that he knew its location.
About half a mile out, he spotted two semi-trucks, one midnight blue and the other bright yellow, stalled at the bend of a narrow two-lane road. Both rigs had been traveling in the same direction, the driver side of each truck facing Cash’s position.
That there were two big rigs stopped on an out-of-the-way road confused him. One semi could be an owner-operator who had run out of gas on the last stretch of his journey home. But what were the chances of two owner-operator vehicles stranded at such a remote location?
Lifting the rifle, he peered through the scope.
Sure enough, the midnight blue rig was an owner-operator out of nearby Louisville, IL. With the scope, he could see that the yellow rig was blocking enough of both lanes to make the road impassable. He could also make out that the owner-operator’s trailer had been rummaged through, the uniformly sized boxes all bearing the marking of a paper company. More of the same boxes littered the area behind the yellow truck, too, their presence seeming all wrong to Cash.
He knew the company — not so much as a trucker but as someone who had listened to his Army buddies complain about how their household goods had been delayed, damaged or stolen.
Quartz Trucking was a one trick pony with only one customer as far as Cash was aware — the federal government. They wouldn’t be hauling paper products, especially the same exact boxes as the truck parked behind them.
Uneasy with the set-up, he used a length of paracord and leashed Grub to the trunk of a tree, the roping not so snug that the puppy couldn’t work his way out with some extra effort if anything happened to Cash. Then he walked the perimeter of the bluff with his rifle at the ready, using the scope to peer at the surrounding fields and opposing tree lines.
Something wasn’t right. The Quartz truck should be full of household goods, which was definitely worth checking out. But the identical boxes meant someone might have messed with the scene — like it had been staged.
Returning to the puppy, he sat down and watched the truck, his mind spinning with indecision as the hours slowly ticked by and twilight approached.
Cash debated whether he should leave Grub and his gear on the bluff while he investigated the trucks. The start of a mournful howl as Cash worked the makeshift leash around the dog’s neck changed his mind about leaving the puppy behind. As quiet as the world had become since the power went out, an out and out howl would be audible for half a mile or more with the wind blowing in the listener’s direction.
With the farmland across the way, folks were attuned to any noise that suggested a coyote might be near their henhouses.
“If you get shot, it’s your own fault,” he whispered, rotating the purse so that the dog was slung across his back, letting Cash handle the Browning and the M&P45 without obstruction.
He stuck to the cover of the trees as far as he could, spending several long minutes looking through the scope once he reached the wood’s end. Approaching the vehicles on the passenger side from high ground, he could look down on the scene.
A body lay on the asphalt near the yellow rig, the chest full of buckshot and the back of the skull broken. The eyes had been plucked out. The semi’s passenger door was wide open.
Seeing no sign that anyone was waiting in the field to ambush him, Cash slid down to the road, and walked up on the vehicles from behind.
He stepped up to the cab of the blue rig to find the interior empty and obviously picked over. Going around to the back of the trailer, its door rolled up, a wall of boxes faced him. Entering the trailer, he eased one column out of the way, then the one behind it to find a hollowed out area.
Not just one or two columns were missing. It had to be at least six wide by six deep that were gone.
Cash slipped out of the trailer and crept to the next truck, crouching low and running close to the vehicle’s body to reach the passenger side of the cab with its open door. He popped his head up, the barrel of the rifle sweeping left and right.
Corpse number two filled the driver’s seat. The eyes had been picked out on this one, too. A foul odor emanated from the bloated body. With the belly swollen too big for the man’s frame, Cash didn’t need to see the dozen or so stab marks in the lower gut to know he was smelling intestine.
Pulling back, he spotted a fixed blade open and covered in gore on the floor mat on the passenger’s side. His mind started to piece together what had happened. The Quartz driver must have stopped, whether because he was out of gas, having other mechanical issues or had been hit hard by a plain old panic attempt as the world reached its end.
The driver of the blue rig was so close to home he probably could have smelled his wife’s cooking if the wind was blowing in the right direction. But Big Yellow blocked the road. Things had become heated between the two men. The Louisville driver had pulled the knife and stabbed the Quartz driver, who unloaded with buckshot.
Only one problem — where was the shotgun?
Stepping down, he scanned the area. He couldn’t look behind every corn stalk and tree trunk. But there was one obvious place left to check.
He just hoped an ambush wasn’t waiting for him.
Cash stealth walked his way to the back of the trailer, keeping out of view of the one open door. Crouching low, he duck walked to the opposite side where no one could shoot him through the closed door and he could pop up with the rifle. The open door also provided a layer of protection for his back if someone tried to shoot through the trailer.
Depending on the shotgun, it would punch through the side of the trailer, but the door was heavier, thicker.
“Unless you want to get yourself dead,” Cash started, his voice low and ominous, “You’ll stand up with your hands above your head.”
No response greeted him, not words, not the shuffle of feet, not even an uptick in someone’s breathing so that he could hear it.
“It was a nice trick,” he continued, changing the pitch of his voice so it sounded like he had moved further along the side. “Getting the paper boxes from the other truck, spilling some on the ground here and making a little wall in the trailer so it looks like more of the same — just a whole lotta worthless cargo unless you gotta wipe your ass.”
He paused again. Waited, ears straining.
For all he knew, he was talking to a bunch of boxes, the best of the trailer’s contents already scavenged.
But — for all he knew — he was talking to someone with a shotgun who would fill him with buckshot if he crawled up into the trailer or tried to tuck tail and return to his gear before bugging out.
“I know you’re carrying,” he said, making the rifle click as he moved from cocked to half-cocked and back again, letting the sound effects sink deep into the bones of any listeners. “So am I. Three-oh-eight with hundred eighty grain soft point. It’ll drop a horse at this distance.”
With tension running through Cash’s voice, Grub emitted a frightened whine.
“Shh,” he gently admonished, the response instinctual after so many days traveling with the injured pup.
“Shh,” he repeated softly before his pitch changed again.
“First shot, might not hit you, but it’ll ricochet. Fifty-fifty chance, I’d say. Second shot, second ricochet?”
He let the question settle over the dark interior. “I’d say you have a twenty-five percent chance of not getting hit. Third shot, well—”
“Don’t shoot,” a voice called out.
Leading with the barrel of the rifle, Cash peeked around the corner and into the trailer. Just enough light remained for him to see two delicate hands rise above one of the columns of boxes, followed by a dirty tangle of pale blond hair and a woman’s face sculpted with the same fragile li
nes as her hands.
“Don’t shoot,” she repeated. “Please.”
Cash smelled a honey trap.
“Tell your partner to come out,” he growled, ignoring Grub’s whine when it sounded at the fresh danger in Cash’s voice. “Now!”
“I…it’s…”
She was panicking, or making a damn good show of pretending she was.
Cash aimed the rifle to her right.
“Please, no!” she yelled.
Boxes collapsed in Cash’s direction.
His finger already resting on the trigger, he began to pull.
One pound, two—
Up popped a male teenager, his hair as dark as the woman’s was fair. One hand squeezed the barrel of the missing shotgun, the other gripped the receiver. The shadows had grown too thick to see if the boy’s finger was on the trigger, but his arms vibrated with the effects of adrenaline.
Cash kept easing the Browning’s trigger toward him. He was up to four pounds on a five and a half pound trigger weight.
“Drop it, kid,” he ordered.
The male’s arms shook harder.
Cash increased the tension on the trigger.
Four.
Four-point-five.
Five.
His body instinctively bracing for the rifle’s kick, he drew a final, deciding breath.
Exhaling, Cash swept the rifle back in the woman’s direction, stopping when he reached center mass on her small frame.
It was time to call the kid’s bluff.
If the kid was bluffing.
Down Shift
Long Haul Home
Prologue
“Top of the hour, folks, and the hits keep coming,” Bob Gallows announced seven days into the end of all things American. Pausing, he took a sip of whiskey.
It was early in the day to indulge, high noon, to be precise, but he’d had a long morning of bad news coming in from the other ham radio operators who had a strong enough signal to reach him.
Some of the larger cities in the northeastern part of America had brought the hammer down heavy on minorities, acting in a way that amounted to a citywide genocide with shoot on sight orders. In the South and through the Southwest, all the way to Los Angeles, there were cities where the pattern was reversed.
Whites were being slaughtered.
Far more complex than a well-timed series of terror attacks, a race war had begun. The colors were not solely black, brown and white. Blue and green were mixed in — cops and the military seizing supplies and forcing people to abandon their homes and take shelter in community buildings like schools, airports and malls that had been seized as staging areas.
“I wish I was talking about music, folks,” Gallows warned.
With a heavy sigh, he started to recite the bad news.
Memphis was on fire, its residents fleeing into the suburbs, breaking into homes, and killing anyone who opposed them.
Los Angeles was reportedly under the rule of a Mexican cartel, only the area’s military bases offering the barest defense to citizens.
Canada had closed its borders. Skin color didn’t matter. Anyone trying to cross over bled the same color as everyone else.
The imaginary line where one sovereign nation brushed against another was no longer imaginary. It was painted bright red.
“Yeah,” he murmured into the microphone. “Those nice Canadians are mowing down unarmed Americans of every age, race and religion.”
Entire neighborhoods were gone in Detroit, Philadelphia, New York City, Atlanta, Houston, Cleveland…
“In case you don’t know it,” Gallows editorialized. “Those are some of the biggest Muslim centers in America. Right now, though, I don’t know who’s doing the killing and who’s doing the dying.”
Flipping over the page with his notes on it, he froze as a warning tone softly beeped in his studio. His head jerked left to the small bank of monitors on the wall.
Security cameras on a remote feed were scattered around his homestead. He’d been working on setting them up and improving them since he moved in a dozen years ago. Other than helping him track game and keep his belly full, they’d only been of use twice before.
A group of teens had vandalized his radio tower, spray painting it before using a big four-by-four diesel truck none of them could afford without their daddies’ money to pull it down. After those rich daddies saw the recording of their little angels’ misdeed, Gallows had received a bigger, nicer tower with solar panels and battery banks.
The other time, he’d spotted trespassers, waited until they were gone and tracked where on his land they’d visited. After cutting down a few marijuana plants, he’d called the cops and watched them burn the rest of the field.
He had no objection to the plant, but he wasn’t about to have his entire homestead confiscated and his ass in jail for a grow operation on his property.
This time, a bunch of stupid kids or stoners would have been a welcome sight. Instead, his gaze darted between two of the eight monitors.
Armored vehicles approached, one line coming up the paved dirt road, the other splashing through a shallow creek bed.
He had eight minutes maximum before the first line would be knocking at his front door — if they bothered to knock.
Moving swiftly to his feet, Bob Gallows wrapped one hand around his microphone while his other hand picked up a small bible on his desktop and shoved it into his breast pocket.
“There’s more, folks, but I won’t be back on the hour. Keep checking in and don’t stop the signal.”
Holstering his handgun, he took a deep breath and uttered his familiar closing line, hoping it wouldn’t be the last time he said it. “Until then, keep your bible close but your guns closer.”
Dropping the microphone, he ran out of his broadcasting room and toward the back of his house. It was a berm construction, the earthen covering added around the sides and on top after he had fortified the exterior to support the extra weight.
He’d used the heavy equipment for more than shoveling dirt on his home. He’d dug a tunnel, a long one, and dropped in factory rejects of solid-wall PVC sewer pipes big enough for him to crawl through on his hands and knees, pulling a pack tied to a rope behind him.
Reaching the spare bedroom, he grabbed the foot rail on the platform bed and heaved upward. In the center, between the shallow drawers that worked to keep his secret, there was a hole, the top of a ladder visible a few inches down.
Stepping carefully, he made it to the ladder, one hand gripping a rope pull attached to the bottom of the bed. He started down, pulling the platform closed.
When everything below the top of his shoulders was out of sight, the house shook hard. The glass windows at the front shattered. The bed’s platform collapsed. Feeling the heavy wood smash against his skull, Gallows plummeted into darkness.
Chapter One
Her five-foot-three frame curled into a club chair in the women’s second floor restroom of the SHWG corporate research facility, Hannah Carter woke to darkness and the sound of someone crying.
She straightened her legs, forgetting where she was and landing hard on the polished marble floor. She rubbed at her bottom, soothing the impact site with one hand while the other pulled the sleeping mask from over her eyes.
Her gaze unwilling to focus, she reached into her lab coat for a small bottle of eye drops, flooding each eye until her vision cleared. Dropping the bottle back into her pocket, she chuckled.
“I should buy stock in the manufacturer — or get a life.”
Her good humor faded as she remembered why she had rolled out of the chair and onto her ass.
Standing up, she left the relaxation section of the restroom, passed under a wide arch and entered the lavatory area.
“Who’s crying?” she asked as she approached the stalls.
It was a woman; she knew that from the quality of the sobs and not just because they were in
the ladies’ toilet. She also knew there was only a handful of women who worked on the second floor, their ratio to male employees no different than the ratio in place throughout the rest of the STEM industries.
Women didn’t belong in laboratories — or so the majority of her male colleagues insisted.
“It’s Hannah,” she offered, moving toward the stall at the back right of the room, where the crying seemed to be coming from.
“I know, I had to walk past you,” the woman sniped.
Great. The crier was Acid Emily, so named for her personality. That she was also a chemist who worked on battery design was a mere coincidence.
“Is there anything you want to talk about?” Hannah asked, a wince stretching the words as they left her mouth. She didn’t really want to lend this particular woman a shoulder to cry on.
The source of the tears was probably nothing, anyway. It was crunch time at the research facility. The fiscal year was turning over and many projects still jockeyed for funding to cover the next twelve months. Tempers always flared this time of year at SHWG and someone had probably blasted the woman. Considering Emily’s reputation, they probably had a good reason for doing so.
The door flew inward. The towering red head took two steps and froze, her ice blue gaze shredding Hannah.
“Is that some kind of joke?”
Hannah rubbed at her eyes. Her own project was funded, but she was in a race to file a patent. She’d spent the last two days in her lab, sleeping on the floor at one point. She had been on her way down to her car, hoping to spend an actual night in bed, when she realized there was no way she was in any shape to drive.
She brought her wrist close to her face and calculated how many minutes had passed since she crashed in the chair.
Whoa — hours, not minutes, seven of those bad boys.
“Jokes on me,” she answered, no longer caring if Acid Emily needed a friendly shoulder to cry on.
