Five Suns Saga [Part III]

by Jim Heskett

  Five Suns Saga III

  Jim Heskett

  Contents

  Offer

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  A note to readers

  Books by Jim Heskett

  About the Author

  Afterword

  Offer

  ______________________________

  Want to get the Micah Reed prequel novel Airbag Scars for FREE? It’s not available for sale anywhere. Check out www.jimheskett.com

  for this free, full-length thriller.

  ______________________________

  Prologue

  Kellen - Denver

  The morning after, he rolled over on his cot and nearly tumbled out onto the floor. He rarely fell out of bed, but the day before had been anything but usual. His ratty blanket had somehow slipped off during the night but hadn’t awoken him.

  The shivers brought him from prone to seated. He rubbed his arms up and down and shook his head a few times to clear the dust from his brain. From the window of the second floor at Denver’s Union Station, shafts of light blazed across the floor. Morning. Daylight. Late fall’s piercing cold.

  With two feet on the ground, he immediately snatched his socks and shoes. The left sock took some adjusting to raise over his still-tender ankle. It probably wouldn’t ever be normal again, but he was pleased not to have lost it. After everything George Grant had done to him, it was a miracle he could still walk.

  Kellen often wondered if he would ever think less frequently about George. In some ways, the resentment drove him and offered him a reason to continue. Gave him the will to succeed. Kellen sometimes envisioned himself smacking George in the head with the baseball bat, over and over again. And how Kellen’s sadistic captor and torturer had deserved so much worse.

  Once on his feet, he quietly shuffled over to the window on the north side and peered toward the airport. Whatever the grumbly old man had done out there, the explosions and noises had carried this far, twenty miles away. A thin trail of smoke still puffed into the sky. Were Anders and LaVey dead, or had they repelled Boss Chalmers and her advancing army? Would it matter if they were lying dead or celebrating right now?

  What mattered more was that Kellen had loaned the old man Coyle his car and half of his arsenal stash to march off to Denver International on his fool’s errand. Kellen would probably never see any of his possessions again.

  No matter. Helping the old man had been the right thing to do. If LaVey and Anders were gone, he might not need his arsenal any longer.

  He checked the clock hanging in the main hall. Quarter to seven. He was supposed to meet White for a trip to the trading post at Mile High Stadium in an hour. Plenty of time for him to take an expedition across the street and collect Hector Castillo’s head. If Coyle had told the truth, that was. If Edward LaVey’s chief military strategist, the architect of the Colorado Springs Air Force bombing, had indeed died yesterday in the condo building on Wynkoop.

  The man’s severed head would be worth a month of food and supplies. Maybe two. It would make a nice trophy in someone’s house. Kellen didn’t want it, but he sure could make use of it.

  He returned to his bedroom and took up a spot by the window to check the street. Next to Union Station, the body of Coyle’s young traveling companion was still sprawled in the street, his head in pieces. Shame, really. Years ago, the gore would have bothered Kellen.

  And, that Coyle had not returned to collect this young man’s remains likely meant he’d died in his assault on LaVey and Anders’ compound out at the airport. No surprise there, either. With the Chicago army clashing at the same time, they were probably all dead. Only some superhuman secret agent would have survived that mess.

  But soon, someone else would rise from those ashes and make a claim to the throne. Everyone would shudder and scurry like rats, and there would be some sound and fury, and then life would go on.

  Something across the street shifted.

  Kellen snatched his rifle and pointed the nose out the window, then peered down the scope. From a pile of rags emerged a man with a shopping cart. Standard items inside it: plastic, aluminum, bits of copper. You had to work hard to find people interested in trading junk, but sometimes, that was all you could do. The man was missing several fingers on his gloveless hands. He lifted them to his lips and blew steamy cold breath on them.

  Kellen sighed and relaxed his grip on the rifle. No need to put a bullet in this vagrant. He had expressed no interest in Kellen’s Union Station home. Hardly anyone did, because, from the outside, it seemed shot full of holes, knocked out windows; the kind of place overrun with stray cats and dogs. People wanted to live in buildings up off the ground, to look down into the streets and see danger coming. Especially with those thugs calling themselves the Eighteeners everywhere, acting like they were they new government.

  Maybe they would become the new contenders to rule this waste of a country.

  Union Station was too big, too open, too obvious. And that’s why Kellen loved it. He could hide in plain sight. And as long as he entered and left via the train tracks, he could keep it all to himself. Well, him and White, who sometimes slept over.

  The man in the rags was kneeling, doing something to the wheel on his shopping cart. Trying to fix it, probably. The funny thing was that the man kept checking behind him, expecting something to happen. It made Kellen uneasy.

  He held onto his rifle.

  Kellen continued to observe the vagrant because he wouldn’t be able to leave until this man wandered off. He was probably harmless, anyway, but no sense in being foolish.

  Why did he keep looking around? It’s as if he was waiting for a break in the action to try something, but there was no action to be had on this quiet morning street.

  And then, the man stood up. He gazed up at the brick building Coyle had entered yesterday to have his showdown with Hector. And the man cocked his head. He looked at the front door, then up at the windows above. Surveying it.

  “No,” Kellen whispered as his heart pumped.

  The man sighed and checked behind him again. It was really freaking Kellen out. He held his finger above the rifle’s trigger. “Don’t even think about it,” he whispered. “That’s my building.”

  The man took a couple of steps toward it, and Kellen squinted down the sight. Blinked away some morning blurriness.

  White would probably have tried for the headshot, but Kellen wasn’t so bold. He aimed his crosshairs right at the man’s midsection.

  The man took another step toward the building. Kellen touched his finger pad to the rifle’s trigger. Gritted his teeth. “Don’t do it.”

  The man turned his eyes up to the rising s
un, setting alight the glass on the buildings on Wynkoop Street. Put his hands on his hips.

  And then, he grabbed his shopping cart and headed east.

  Kellen exhaled and rolled his head around his shoulders. He’d had no desire to begin his day by shooting someone over possession of a dead body. Kellen had no desire to shoot anyone, in fact, but sometimes, he didn’t have that choice.

  And now, rather than wait for someone else to come strolling along, he donned a coat and then raced out of the back of Union Station. He skipped a half block up and then darted between two buildings, so no one could track him back to his home. No one was looking, but being careful had kept this place safe and secure for this long.

  He hustled back down toward the brick building as quickly as his gimpy ankle would allow. Stowing the rifle over his shoulder, he darted inside and up the stairs. A trail of blood began on the steps outside the fourth floor, then faded down the stairs. Fresh blood. Within the last couple days. Exactly what he was expecting to find.

  Kellen threw open the door and swung the rifle around all four corners. A little trick White had taught him. Not that he expected to see anything but a dead body on the floor, but no reason not to be careful.

  He didn’t see the body in the immediate hallway, but plenty of blood marked the walls and the floor. Still looked wet. This had to be the place.

  Rifle up, Kellen eased along the hall and then opened the first door on the right. Bathroom. No blood. Then, the second door after that. An office, with tons of broken furniture and glass shattered everywhere, but no bodies in here, either.

  You will not find a corpse, a voice in Kellen’s head mused. Hector will pop out of one of these doors, healthy and spry. He’ll stab you in the forehead before you get a chance to defend yourself.

  “Shut up,” Kellen said. “You’re not welcome here.”

  Each door he opened on the right side of the hall gave him the same result. No corpse of Hector Castillo. At the end of the hall, he worked his way back, opening the doors on the left.

  Nothing. No corpse. No sign of the man.

  He stood outside the last door on the left, with a few spots of blood in front of it. Last chance. He kicked the door in and found a barren and dark maintenance closet looking back at him.

  If Hector Castillo was dead, he wasn’t here anymore.

  Chapter 1

  Alma - Virginia

  Three years later, she and her companion stood outside the wreckage of Fort Lee, frowning at the crumbling walls, the collapsed turrets, the empty guard towers. Pathetic. She’d been here once before as a teenager, two decades ago. She and her father had toured the facility, for reasons she hadn’t understood at the time. Her dad was a military man, someone important, although she hadn’t appreciated him until much later. When she thought of all the things he’d tried to teach her back then, she couldn’t help but curse the younger version of herself. What wondrous heights she might have achieved if she had taken the revolution seriously when she’d been that age.

  Her journey began in earnest with manipulating the fool Logan so she could escape Oklahoma and make her way to Canada. Hiding out, feeling useless. Then, making the arduous trek all the way back to Texas. Years of careful planning, watching Peter Anders and Boss Chalmers and the Infinity rise and fall. Make mistakes. Underestimate their enemies. Become sloppy. Become dead.

  She zipped up her jacket against the cold and turned to her companion. “Stay here. Or, if you must come, let me talk to him first. Please do not sneak up on us. He’ll be paranoid enough as it is, and we didn’t come all this way to be shot dead like trespassers.”

  Her companion nodded and kissed her on the forehead, and she left him there under cover of the trees. The fort still had barricaded walls near the entrance that appeared sturdy at a distance. But, a section of wall thirty feet down had crumbled enough that she could clear a path through it by moving a few chunks of stone aside and then ducking through the hole. Wasn’t the most secure hideout she’d ever seen.

  On the other side of the rubble, she surveyed the buildings. Three of them were still standing with no damage, so that’s where she expected to find him. The center building was tall, with the best vantage point. Easiest to defend. Most of the rest were piles of brick and stone, collapsed in on themselves into puddles of devastation. Several vehicles—appearing long inert—sat with layers of dirt caked. Birds lined the turret of a tank like perchers on telephone lines.

  To her right, something whipped through the air. Alma caught a flash of red hair disappearing around the corner of a building. A blip of black jacket. The scuffle of boots along dirt.

  She wasn’t alone.

  For a moment, there was silence. Alma’s hand drifted down to her hip, having forgotten she had brought no gun with her today, on purpose. She hadn’t wanted to appear threatening to the resident of this abandoned fort.

  But, if she were shot before she had the chance to show how little she meant to threaten him, her good intentions wouldn’t matter.

  Thirty more seconds passed in silence, so she decided to take a few steps toward the building. Test the waters. A crack echoed across the sky as a bullet struck the ground five feet in front of her.

  “Don’t move!” shouted an older man’s voice.

  She raised her hands and eyed the buildings in front of her, trying to locate the sniper. The shot had seemed to have come from up high, so it would do her little good to run. “I’m unarmed.”

  “Then that’s your mistake,” said the man. “The first one was a warning shot. The next one goes between your eyes. This is private property, and I am not in the mood to accept callers today.”

  “I’m looking for Alias.”

  The man paused, and she used the time to locate him. He was on top of the building dead ahead, and she could see the reflection of sun on the scope of his rifle. Perched at the edge of that building. She could see his sizable gut from here. In the pictures, he hadn’t ever been slim, but he was much heavier than she had expected.

  “What do you know about Alias?” the man said.

  “My name is Alma. I’ve been looking for him for quite some time. I mean no harm. Like I said, I’m unarmed, and my intentions are only to discuss how we can make a difference.”

  “Discussion?”

  “I have a business proposition for Alias.”

  The man on top of the building stood. Thick glasses and a long salt and pepper beard further obscured the image she was expecting to see. With all that camouflage, it was hard to tell, but it had to be him.

  “What do you want?” he said.

  With her hands still raised, Alma said, “only to talk. Inside. Not out here in the open.”

  He lifted the scope to his eyes and waited. She kept her hands high but did not flinch. “If you intend to shoot me,” she said, “please do it now. It’s too cold out here for me to keep standing like this, waiting.”

  The man lowered his weapon and pointed at his feet. “Fine. Come in downstairs. Meet me at the third floor.”

  And with that, he spun and disappeared. Alma turned back to look past the wall, and her companion was leaning into the entrance she’d made, nodding at her. She waved him back but didn’t expect him to obey.

  From the far side of the building, more shuffling came. The red-haired man, perhaps? He didn’t make himself known.

  In the quiet of the morning air, she heard laughter come from the building in front of her. Up high. Had to be Alias. A bolt of unease struck her spine. He’d been out here in this fort for years. Who knew if he’d gone crazy in that time?

  His mental state didn’t matter. He was important to the plan.

  She pressed on and entered the building. With a breath to calm her nerves, she huffed up two flights of stairs to reach the third floor of what looked like offices. She opened the door into a hallway to find him at the other end, a hundred feet away.

  Rifle raised and pointed at her.

  “I don’t like people making unannounce
d visits. Especially ones who are looking for me. You can see how that might freak me out, right?”

  “How did you fight back the Infinity?” she said. “I heard they’d razed this fort and killed everyone here.”

  “Not everyone,” he said, shaking his head. “None of those bastards were as smart as they thought they were.”

  “I see.”

  “Who are you?” he said.

  She took a few steps forward, and he jumped back and jiggled the rifle, still pointed at her head.

  She halted, held her hands out. “I’m Alma Castillo.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, smiling through the thick beard.

  “And I know who you are, Alias. Your pseudonym was a little obvious, don’t you think?”

  His head jerked to the side, eyes narrowed, but he lowered the rifle a few inches. “What does that mean?”

  “I know who you used to be. The name you were born with. I know all about Edward LaVey, Peter Anders, and the betrayer, Beth Fortner. I know how you fled from the rest of them and came out here to hide in Virginia. But what I can’t figure out is: how did you survive the Infinity attack on this fort?”

  He paused again, chewing on his lip. But, he still kept the rifle low. Before he could answer, someone stepped out of the shadows to his left. Pistols in his hands. A kid, no more than twenty, that mop of bright red hair atop his head.