by Jim Heskett
“It’s okay, Lincoln,” Alias said, pushing his hand toward the floor.
“Who is she?” Lincoln growled, his eyes bright and vivid. Alma knew the type. He had that certain crease to his brow, the one that said he enjoyed pulling the trigger and hardly gave it a second thought.
Alias nodded at Alma. “Daughter of an old friend, or so she says. Alma, this is Lincoln, my assistant.”
Lincoln said nothing, but he did lower his guns.
“You were saying?” Alias said.
“How did you survive the Infinity attack here?”
“I let them in. Didn’t have a choice. They spared me because I convinced them they would need me to run this place. Then, that first night, I dropped a couple grenades inside the building where they were sleeping. Had to track down a few who were out patrolling, but that wasn’t too hard. Clean up a little mess, and no more Infinity.”
She took a few more steps forward, and he did nothing. From the stairwell behind her came the faint footfalls of her companion drawing closer. “My father, Hector, told me all about you.”
He lowered the rifle, then slung it over his shoulder. “Your father was a good man. A patriot.”
“So were you, George Grant.”
He actually laughed a little. “How in the world did you find me? Seriously.”
“I had help.” She turned her head a little and whistled.
George raised the rifle but didn’t shoot. His eyes grew wide as Alma’s companion spilled out from the stairwell and into the hallway. He smiled across the empty space between them.
And, for the first time in many years, George Grant and Hector Castillo reunited.
Chapter 2
Quentin - Nederland
He and Coyle stood in the open space of a ski run, near the top of the former Eldora ski resort, gazing down over the pre-dawn valley that used to be named Nederland. Quentin hadn’t ever been here when this little hamlet had officially owned that name. But, some of the residents were from the old world, and they still called it that. He preferred Quentinburg or Quentinville, but the townspeople weren’t receptive to his branding strategy.
He stuck the butt of his rifle in the snow and breathed in the chilly mountain air. Stung his nostrils on the way in and plumed out like fog on the way out. Texas born-and-bred, the cold still held a little novelty for him.
Next to Quentin, Coyle huffed and puffed, trying to catch his breath.
“You okay?” Quentin said.
Coyle nodded and sank into the snow. The old man grabbed a handful and shoved it in his mouth, then chewed. “One good thing about winter.”
“There are a lot of good things about winter.”
No one ordered Quentin and Coyle to come up here several mornings a week to act as watchers for the town. They did it because they liked it. Because they thought the town needed it, and as council members, they wanted to make sure someone in charge owned it.
And in some ways, it reminded Quentin of patrolling the wall in Chicago. Not that he maintained any good memories of the wall in Chicago, but he liked to think he was atoning for his actions there, in some small part.
“Your boy,” Coyle said. “How does he like the cold?”
Quentin shrugged. “He doesn’t. Not at first, I mean. Once we break out the sleds and make snowmen, he’ll change his mind. He has for the last few years, anyway.”
Coyle got that wistful look in his eyes, as he often did when discussing Quentin and Farrah’s son. Coyle’s own son would have been in his twenties now. Maybe even his thirties. Coyle didn’t like to talk about him.
“Farrah keeps him plenty busy, though,” Quentin said. “There’s always something to do around the house.”
“I don’t know how she manages it all.”
“Me either. But, it’s why I married her. I used to barely keep my checkbook balanced.”
Coyle grunted. “Hah. I haven’t thought about checkbooks in a long time. That’s one thing I sure don’t miss.”
Amid the silence, they watched the burn of sun poke its head above the mountains. A sliver of light fighting back the darkness over an endless sky. During the last few months, this town had actually felt peaceful.
“I don’t miss online banking either,” Quentin said into the silence. “Overdraft fees. IRS audits. Hackers stealing your passwords all the time.”
From over Tungsten Mountain, Quentin observed a flicker of motion. Like a tiny blur of black among the slices of trees against the snow. He pointed. “You see that?”
Coyle stood, grunting as he brushed snow off the back of his pants. The old man liked to grumble about reaching a day when he wouldn’t have to sit or stand anymore, but Quentin hoped that day wasn’t coming anytime soon. He and the community still needed people like him.
Coyle squinted. “That’s smoke, isn’t it?”
An itch of memory brushed the back of Quentin’s head. Many years ago, living in Austin, going on scavenging hunts with Barry. When they’d seen a pillar of smoke rising from the St. Edward’s campus, only an hour before Barry had betrayed Quentin for a slab of cocaine, and Quentin had bolted for Chicago.
He shuddered through the memory. Hadn’t thought of Barry-the-betrayer in years. Not since after Chicago.
Quentin lifted his binoculars and adjusted the focus. Hard to see anything through the web of trees. “Campers, you think?”
“I doubt it.”
In November at eight thousand feet, you didn’t see too many people out camping, unless they were desperate. Most people clung to the lower elevations, and for a good reason. “Yeah, I doubt it too.”
“We should go tell the rest of the council. Organize a greeting party.”
Before Quentin could respond, gunshots echoed across the valley. From the trees above Barker reservoir, a hundred lights blinked on in the scant morning glow.
Coyle pointed. “There. Someone fired from the hills, down into town.”
Quentin’s heart raced. No one had tried to invade their camp in months. No one would be ballsy enough or have the numbers to go against this community, which was five thousand strong. Not with the defenses they’d installed in the mountains surrounding this valley.
Only a group with enough firepower would even try.
“Who do you think it is?” Coyle said. “Infinity? Red Streets? Some new group? Could be any of those sons of bitches.”
Behind and up the mountain from them, footsteps crunched through the snow. Close by. Quentin spun to find a man and woman, both of them wrapped in jackets and scarves around their heads, hustling through the trees.
Fifty feet away. Sneering, raising shotguns at Quentin and Coyle.
Coyle raised his pistol and squeezed off a shot, punching a hole in the woman’s chest. No hesitation. She dropped and tumbled, rolling down the hill. A snaking trail of red followed her as her body twisted. Coyle tried to fire again, but his gun jammed.
Quentin raised his rifle and pulled the trigger, but the shot missed wide. The man flinched and then grinned as he checked himself for bullet holes and found none.
The lone invader was making huge leaps down the angled mountain, then he planted his feet and wrapped a finger around the trigger of his shotgun.
Behind them, from down in the valley, more gunshots echoed toward them.
While Coyle was still fumbling with his pistol’s slide, Quentin wasted no time. The man thirty feet up the slope was eying along the sight of his shotgun. At this range, he could pepper both Quentin and Coyle with holes with one pull of that trigger.
Quentin took the shot, and the rifle cracked thunder across the mountainside. The bullet tore a hole in the man’s cheek. He sunk to his knees, his arms dropping to his sides, which sent the shotgun into a bank of soft powdery snow.
The female attacker ceased rolling as she came to a stop a few feet in front of them. Tongue hanging out, eyes glassy.
“Damn it,” Coyle said as he finally opened the slide on his pistol. “I’m so sorry about that. Stupid
thing jammed.”
Quentin ignored him and approached the dead woman. She lacked burned flesh, which meant she wasn’t Infinity. She had no black bandanna, which meant not a Red Street. But, she had familiar tattoos on her neck.
Quentin snatched his rifle and slung it over his shoulder. “It’s the Eighteeners. Let’s go.”
Chapter 3
Alma - Virginia
She watched Alias/George Grant turn the knob on the gas grill. She hadn’t asked him how he had procured propane in a world where fuel was one of the top commodities. Also, she hadn’t asked him what sort of meat was cooking on that grill. Whatever it was, there wasn’t much of it. Dog, probably, or worse.
Alma had eaten raw meat from still-warm animals. She had burrowed in dumpsters. She had stolen food from children. The people who weren’t willing to do these things hadn’t survived for this long.
They were huddled around the grill, half waiting for their food, half letting the heat from it warm them. This building at Fort Lee was like a classroom building, and they were among clusters of chairs with the built-in writing desks. Her, George Grant, and her father, Hector Castillo.
George flipped the meat and then sat in a desk, opposite Alma and Hector. The chair creaked as his weight settled into it. His redheaded lackey Lincoln hung back, a few feet away, arms crossed, glowering. The weirdo was holding a tooth in his hand, rolling it between his thumb and forefinger. She tried not to ponder if it was a human tooth.
Many of the desks were stacked close to the windows. They wouldn’t stop a stream of bullets or a rocket launcher from breaking the glass, but their presence probably made George feel a little more secure.
“Okay,” George said, “so you found me. What do you want?”
“What we’ve always wanted,” Hector said, his voice a raspy whisper.
George pointed at Hector’s throat. “What happened to you?”
Hector eyed Alma, and she spoke for him. “Bar fight in Texas. Knife from some Infinity zealot.”
“Is that how everyone thought you were dead?” George asked.
Hector shook his head, and again, Alma spoke. “No, that was in Colorado. A man stabbed him, left him for dead. That man was looking for Anders and LaVey. He found them, the same day Chalmers and her army attacked and killed everyone.”
George flipped the meat, nodding. “I heard about that. Real shit-show out there in the mountains. Anders should have known better than to think he could take a cluster of thugs and turn them into a real military.”
Hector scowled at this but said nothing. Alma knew what the scowl meant. Those thugs had been his army, not Peter Anders’. Hector had trained them. Disciplined them. They’d only disintegrated after Anders had sent Hector away on a fruitless mission that ended with a knife attack in a Denver condo building.
“How do you know?” Alma said. “How have you heard anything? How are you still alive?”
George pursed his lips, sighed, and sat again. Stared at the sizzling meat. “We were in Alabama, tracking Beth Fortner. We had no idea she’d already been killed at that point. If information travels at all, it travels slow, but you know about that.”
“Why in Alabama?”
“We moved around a lot back then. We were tracking power fluctuations along the east coast, trying to figure out where Beth and her Infinity followers would go next. It was all pointless, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know our asses from holes in the ground, to be honest. I was supposed to join Anders and LaVey in Denver once I’d found her.”
“You had a team?” she asked.
“Yeah, I had a team. Some willing helpers, some not. I had one main guy doing the hard work for me. A former staffer named Kellen, and he escaped, but not before kicking my ass with a baseball bat. He had help from one of the hired guys. I faked a heart attack, and they left me there. Gathered up anything of value, then I made my way up north and found this place.”
Alma and Hector sat in silence for a moment, watching the meat on the grill sizzle and smoke.
“You said you want what you’ve always wanted,” George said. “Care to explain?”
“Taking the country back,” Alma said. “Ending all the lawlessness and restoring order. The people need it.”
George laughed, a deep and guttural sound. Lincoln laughed too. Alma couldn’t stand this sycophantic shadow, hovering on the edge of their circle. He was like a bee buzzing around, ready to strike at any second.
“That’s cute,” George said. “You’re young; I get it. You still think we can salvage this mess and rebuild America into the new world order. That ship has long sailed, my little idealist.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve studied all of them. Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, Napoleon, Thomas Paine. With order restored, we can unify everything. We’ll do it right, just as the Five Suns intended.”
“Okay,” George said, nodding. “Let’s think about it logically. Helen Rappaport and her army are dominating the east coast, rounding up and killing the Infinity cult. She’s winning, but her army is dwindling. The Infinity are some ruthless bastards. Eventually, they’ll all kill each other. Out west, you’ve got two gangs with all the power: the Red Streets and the Eighteeners. None of them give a shit about anything other than controlling territory. They don’t want to build roads or set up city councils. They’ll all kill each other too. Everyone is too interested in survival to worry about making babies, so in another two or three decades, there won’t be anyone left to restore order to.”
“I know of the Eighteeners,” Alma said.
George cocked his head. “What does that mean?”
She flicked her eyes to the door. “I brought five hundred of them with me. They are camped a mile from the fort. There are five thousand more in Kansas who remain loyal to us. You are wrong about them. They all want to clean this mess and rebuild.”
George sucked through his teeth and twiddled his thumbs. Considering.
“You haven’t seen the world the way I have,” she said. “There is still time to fix it.”
“What are you proposing?”
“War,” Hector said, his meek voice breaking.
Again, George laughed. “Five thousand—if you can actually get them all to fight for you—is admirable, but there are as many Red Streets and Infinity out there. I’m not sure what war accomplishes.”
“The leader of the Eighteeners in Kansas says there are twenty thousand Eighteeners west of the continental divide. We sweep that way, collecting them, then we travel back east and destroy the Red Streets, the Infinity, and the former vice president’s widow. Sowing the seeds as we go. We will make this country ours, just as Edward LaVey intended.”
The meat on the grill crackled, and George turned down the heat. His jaw swished back and forth as he stared at the two Castillos. “Okay. Might be the last dumb decision I’ll ever have to make.”
She felt herself smiling but shut it down. “You’ll come with us?”
“I will. And I agree going west is the right idea. But not for the reasons you’re thinking.”
“What does that mean?”
He leaned in close, as if about to share a secret, and wagged a finger. “We should go to Denver. To recover the black box.”
“The what?” Hector said.
George addressed Hector directly. “When you got the missile codes from Ian Rappaport, you didn’t get all of them, did you?”
“No,” Hector said, shrugging. “Beth Fortner told me a few of the silos were non-operational and useless.”
“Not true. And Peter Anders knew the codes to those remaining silos. I imagine they’re still in that box, clutched in his dead hands at the bottom of the rubble out at Denver International Airport. The failsafe.”
Alma and Hector shared a look. “You’re sure about this?” she said.
“Oh yes. The black box is real, and if you want to start a war, finding the contents of that box is the only way you’re going to finish it on the winning side.”
C
hapter 4
Quentin - Nederland
Quentin and Coyle raced down the ski run, their boots sinking deep into the powder. The car was at the bottom of the hill, five hundred yards below them. Thoughts of his wife and son thundered through his head. Farrah would be coaxing Willam out of bed right now. She’d still been sleeping when he left her to meet with Coyle and slog up this ski run hours ago.
Through the town, more gunfire erupted from various places. Didn’t seem to be a full-scale invasion, but there were at least four or five pockets of disruption. Hard to see it all from this distance.
What surprised Quentin most about this invasion wasn’t that it was happening; people knew they had supplies, people knew the mountains provided a healthy protective barrier. This was a desired spot of land. It was the fact that the invasion wasn’t coming up on the main road. Usually, infiltrators tried to break through the barrier to bring in their vehicles. No, this group was coming in over the mountains.
Ballsy. Or suicidal, if the attackers knew about the defenses the town had installed. If they didn’t, they would find out soon.
By the time Quentin and Coyle reached the Jeep at the base of the mountain, he could see lights flicking on all across the valley. Of the five thousand residents in this former town of Nederland, almost a third were considered soldiers. They didn’t have enough guns for everyone, but the unarmed would still stand up to protect their homes.
They sped back toward town, with Quentin at the wheel and Coyle selecting from a box of armaments in the back seat. Coyle settled on an AR-15, which he assembled with the ease of a man not riding in the passenger seat of a Jeep scrambling over snow-covered mountain roads. Quentin envied Coyle’s skills. War came naturally to the old man.
Returning from the ski resort was a ten-minute drive, but Quentin was trying to cut that in half. Eldora Road was icy, but nothing this Jeep couldn’t handle.
