Five Suns Saga [Part III]

by Jim Heskett

  Lincoln popped up, the smile underneath his mop of red hair lighting up his face, and then ducked down. The guns all withdrew and disappeared. For a few seconds, Quentin’s ears rang from the aftershock of gunfire. When it settled, the parking lot shifted into silence.

  “What happened?” Kellen said.

  “They must have gone back into the lodge,” Quentin said.

  Kellen cocked his head. “Not into the trees?”

  “I don’t think so,” Quentin said. “They want us to go into the lodge. It’s a trap to force us to open the bunker for them.”

  A vision of his young son trussed up with ropes around his hands and feet flashed in front of Quentin’s eyes. Why had he sent them away this morning? He should have never let them out of his sight.

  Quentin took a few hesitant steps through the snow toward the lodge, but Kellen grabbed him by the arm. “Are you crazy? You just said this is a trap.”

  Quentin checked the magazine in his pistol. “I know, but what choice do we have?”

  After everyone had reloaded their weapons, they all marched toward the Timber Lodge, guns up, ready to fight.

  Quentin paused at the back door leading into the kitchen. He seized the handle and jerked it open, then leaped inside. The non-slip mat covering the hatch to the bunker sat in place, seemingly undisturbed. The room was quiet. As his three companions entered the room behind him, Quentin eased to the mat and lifted it. The fake tile panel underneath was unmoved, with the lock in place underneath that. Had Lincoln and his crew not found it? What were they doing at the lodge if not trying to access the bunker?

  It didn’t matter now. They had to find Farrah, Willam, and Dave, and deal with this raiding party.

  Quentin pointed at the exit leading out of the kitchen. He crawled to it and pushed the swinging door open a few inches. On the other side, he found the back of the stainless steel food serving line on the outer rim of the dining hall. Tile floor, a sneeze-guard topped display case next to it. The food in the bins in the case was long gone, but the sneeze guard remained in perfect condition. From here, he couldn’t see the cafeteria-style dining room of the lodge. But, that also meant anyone out there couldn’t see him either.

  Quentin crawled toward the display case and then to the edge. Waved the others forward to join him behind the table. He leaned around it, with a view out into the dining hall. There, he spied a collection of tables that had been shoved together and placed on their sides, forming a wooden wall barricade.

  But no Farrah, no Willam, and no Dave. Where was his family?

  “I can hear you over there,” cried Lincoln, sounding giddy. “Come on out, now. George Grant is very excited to meet all three of you. Well, not you all personally, but your heads, when I bring them back to Denver.”

  Quentin turned around to face his companions. He motioned at his chest, then made a half circle through the air. He pointed at the three of them, then pointed over his head, out into the dining hall, and mimed shooting a gun. Kellen looked confused, but both Isabelle and White nodded.

  Quentin scooted out of the way so they could nestle up against the back of the serving line. Then he pushed toward the edge of the display case. There was a twelve-inch gap between that display case and the next one over. Adjacent to that was the cashier stand.

  Time to go.

  He turned around and nodded at Isabelle. She raised her gun and fired through the slim space between the display case and sneeze guard. Spit a half dozen shots in quick succession, and their enemies immediately returned fire.

  Quentin lunged across the exposed gap between the display cases. Then, Kellen and White started firing too, so he raced forward again past the display case and crouched behind the cashier stand. Heart racing, making him lightheaded. An empty box of peanuts sat on the floor next to him, something skiers used to grab as an impulse buy before checking out with their trays of over-priced hamburgers and chili bowls. For some insane reason, his stomach yawned with hunger.

  No one was shooting at him yet, so he set his sights on the next destination: five feet ahead was the open door out to a hallway. The hallway wrapped around the exterior of the dining area. He could take the hallway to the left and then dip back into the dining room, behind Lincoln and his crew.

  But five feet of open space was a long way to go.

  Behind him, the shooting had died down, the room now quiet.

  “Come on out,” said a voice, but not Lincoln this time. “Give yourselves up, and you can each have a single bullet to the back of the head. Make us work for it, and you will seriously regret it.”

  “Fuck you!” Kellen shouted before he resumed blasting. When they returned fire, Quentin raced forward. He sprinted through the open door out into the lodge’s wood-covered hallway adorned with tall paintings of snow-capped mountains and skiers in parkas. Smiling faces whooshing down the mountain. Yellowing posters advertising lift ticket combo deals and discounted bus passes from Denver.

  He took a moment to catch his breath and check the distance to his desired dining hall entrance. Several open doors along the hallway poured back into the main room. He’d need to reach the third one to get far enough down so he could sneak up behind the barricaded attackers.

  When the next round of shooting began, Quentin raced forward, holding his pistol high. At the third door, he paused, then rounded it and raised the gun. Five bodies crouched behind the overturned tables. One person writhed on the ground, blood oozing out from a hole in his chest. Eyes glazing over as the life escaped him.

  Quentin raised his pistol and squeezed until the clip was empty. He shot all five of the remaining attackers and then fell back into the carpet to dodge a stray bullet. His arm broke his fall, jostling the bullet wound in his bicep. A flash of pain raced through his whole body.

  Quentin snatched at the spare magazine in his back pocket while he counted the living and the dead. One or two of them were still alive. Barely.

  But none of them was the redheaded man named Lincoln.

  Something moved behind him, and feet shuffled across the carpeted floor.

  “Hey, dude,” a voice said.

  Quentin spun to find Lincoln standing behind him, a huge handgun raised toward Quentin’s temple. Lincoln’s finger wrapped around the trigger.

  Quentin swiped his arm a half-second before the gun went off. He felt the edge of his palm connect with Lincoln’s forearm just as something bit him on the side of the head. It was like being smacked with a lead baseball bat.

  His eyes shut involuntarily, and then something wet ran down his face. The closeness of the gun blast scrambled his brains, his ears instantly ringing. His knees wobbled, and he tumbled to the ground.

  When his eyes opened, he watched Lincoln’s body twist above him as bullets pelted him from multiple angles. Then, Quentin’s attacker slumped to the ground, a couple feet away from him. His mouth moved, slower and slower, until it stopped. Staring at him, wide-eyed and blank. Dead.

  Kellen stood nearby with his arm extended, pistol shaking in his hands. Tears streaming down his face. “Son of a bitch. Asshole. Redheaded freak.”

  Arms pulled Quentin to his feet, shouting at him, but the words were like whispers against the ringing of his ears. Blood dripped into his eyes, and he tried to blink it away.

  “They’re dead,” Isabelle said, from right next to him, but also far away. “We’re safe.”

  But, if the attackers were dead, where was Quentin’s family?

  Chapter 38

  Helen - Boulder

  Helen Rappaport kicked over a boot on the battlefield as she strolled along. Her scarf was barely keeping the cold out. As much as she enjoyed the mountains, the middle of winter was a poor time for a visit. She was much too old to bear this frigid weather.

  She’d spent part of her honeymoon at Aspen, way back when, but it hadn’t seemed as cold. Maybe she’d been too smitten at the time to notice such things.

  A lieutenant approached from behind and cleared his throat. Sh
e turned and hefted a hand to block the rising sun. The young man was frowning, casting a shadow over his features.

  “Yes?”

  He shook his head.

  “Nothing? No sign of any of the three of them?”

  “Sorry, ma’am. If the Castillos and George Grant are here, they must be in pieces.”

  Along the battlefield, blood marked rivers across the rippling hills. Many of the bodies had been cleared away, but hundreds remained. Mostly Eighteeners, because her people wore uniforms. She didn’t have a count of her casualties, but they numbered only in the dozens. It had been a slaughter.

  But for Grant and the two Castillos to be among the dead, they would have needed to be on the front lines. Shooting guns with the rest of them.

  “Not likely,” Helen mumbled as she waved the lieutenant away. She moved on, her boots sweeping through snow tainted red with the blood of these local gang bangers who aspired to call themselves an army. Whatever they had been, they were nothing now. Just another nuisance; a bump on the road to putting the broken pieces of this country back together.

  With a sigh, she headed back toward the command tent when a rumble in the distance caught her attention. Her escort guards pulled close as a muddy Honda Pilot appeared over the ridge. Her men trained their weapons on it, but she held up a hand.

  “Hold your horses, boys. Let’s see who it is first.”

  The car stopped across the field and out tumbled two men and a woman. In a moment, Rappaport recognized the woman as being Isabelle, one of her generals.

  A smile crossed her face. She hadn’t wanted to let Isabelle and Dave go, but they weren’t her indentured servants. She’d expressed her doubts and then let them make their own choice. They weren’t the kind who would blindly obey a direct order, anyway. Part of the reason she valued them so much.

  “Well,” Rappaport said. “About time she showed up.”

  They were clearly frazzled, dirty, and one man was wearing blood caked all down the side of his face.

  From the other side of the field, among the sizable group of survivors, a man, a woman, and a child stood, waving at the three who’d arrived in the car. Rappaport squinted.

  “What the devil?” she said as the two groups locked eyes. One of the men was Dave Carter, her other general who had come out here to Colorado a week ago. Odd. He’d been cloistered among them and hadn’t come to see her yet.

  Isabelle’s group and Dave’s group rushed toward each other, most of them limping.

  Rappaport hustled across the snow just in time to see all six of them meet in the middle, each of them wrapping their arms around the other. Like an old family reunion.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Dave? Isabelle? What’s going on here?”

  “Morning, ma’am,” Dave said as he drew back from his wife. “We were with these people last night and were separated. We had to run to safety, but it all worked out.”

  Isabelle pointed at two of the strangers, who were kneeling by the small child, hugging him. “This is Farrah and Quentin. They are the council of the settlement up in Nederland. Some of the council, anyway.”

  A light went off inside Rappaport’s head. The settlement in Nederland. Some mythical bunker she had heard only in whispers. The one purported to contain so many of the leftover weapons, ammunition, and ordnance.

  “Excellent,” she said. She studied both Farrah and Quentin, and didn’t like what she saw in Farrah’s eyes. The woman was scowling, permanent distrust written on her face. She would not be receptive.

  “I do love a happy reunion,” Rappaport said, adopting a broad smile. “I’m glad to see you were all able to find each other. Now, Quentin, do you mind if I speak with you for a moment?”

  After a quick glance to the others, he nodded. She waved him on, toward the east where the sun was cresting the plains and highlighting the breadth of destruction on this battlefield.

  “Walk with me.”

  They turned away from the farmhouse and began to march up a hill. “Nasty injury on your forehead there.”

  Quentin patted it. “We went up to Nederland to find my wife and son and ran into some resistance. This one only grazed me.”

  “Glad to see you made it out okay. And you’ve now found your wife and child again, I presume?”

  He beamed. “Yes, ma’am. I thought they were dead, but they got away from the same people we faced off against. Eighteeners.”

  They paused to allow a truck carrying the wounded pass in front of them, then Quentin cleared his throat. “Mrs. Rappaport? What you did here for us at the eleventh hour was amazing. You’ve saved our future.”

  She stopped and squared up with him so he would understand the importance of what she was about to say. “You are welcome, young man. With the Infinity mostly defeated and the Red Streets and Eighteeners soon at bay, it’s time to rebuild and salvage what we can. I had to think about it for a day, but I can’t claim to be the leader of this country if I’m not willing to come to the aid of its citizens.”

  “Citizen,” Quentin mused. “I haven’t heard that word in a long time.”

  “Which is why I wanted to ask you something. I am told that up in Nederland, there is an underground bunker, leftover from the cold war era.”

  He stared blankly at her, made a hmmph sound. “A bunker?”

  She breathed to steady herself. “It is your duty as an American to turn over the contents to me.”

  He frowned, his brow knitted together. “Are you sure about your information? I hear rumors about things like this all the time, and it’s usually not true.”

  Helen tried to keep her face neutral, to hide her annoyance. “Yes, there is a bunker. Filled with weapons and supplies. The only one the Five Suns traitors apparently missed when raiding the others across the country. You know about this bunker, yes?”

  A slight hesitation crossed his face, then he shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard there’s something beneath the Denver airport, but that’s what the conspiracy theorists used to say.”

  She bit her lip. “You are sure there’s no bunker underneath your settlement?”

  This time, no hesitation. “I’m positive, Mrs. Rappaport. There’s nothing up in Nederland besides some people who want to live their lives in peace.”

  Chapter 39

  George - Denver

  Traveling cross the skybridge at the Denver International Airport, they met their first obstacle. The middle of the bridge was missing, exposing a dangerous drop to the ground below. A ten-foot section had been removed, and nothing but open air connected the two halves. A bomb, or tank shell, or RPG blast had torn this bridge in two at some point.

  Alma and Hector leaned against one of the statue pillars that lined the skybridge hallway. Defeated, small, shivering from the cold coming in via the hole in the floor.

  Yes, their army had been destroyed by the savior Helen Rappaport, riding in on her white horse of a tank. But they were alive, couldn’t they see that? Their slumped shoulders and dejected faces made George loathe them. Everything was black and white with these Castillos.

  “We shouldn’t be here,” Alma said. “We should search for the bunker.”

  George scoffed. “Once we have the box, the bunker won’t matter one little bit.”

  “Anders left it somewhere past this broken bridge?”

  George nodded. “One of the last sat phone conversations I had with him, he said he was living in the TSA office in Terminal A, which is on the other side of that divide.”

  Alma looked past the gap, to a rotting corpse on the floor. No way to know whose body it was, just one of the hundreds here. In the main atrium where the TSA security lines had stood, scores of the dead were piled up. An untrained Eighteener army facing off against the Chicago army, slaughtering each other. Such a stupid waste of life.

  Two of those anonymous bodies had to be Edward LaVey and Peter Anders, the men responsible for this mess. Now they were only hun
ks of bones and rotted meat. At one point, George had deified the two of them; had come to believe they could do anything. Given that they hadn’t made it out of this airport alive, he’d been about as wrong as possible about that theory.

  “Do you have another idea?” Alma said. “We can’t jump that far.”

  “I do,” George said. “We just need to grab a ladder from somewhere. Hector, want to help me out?”

  Hector nodded absent-mindedly, and he and George wandered back down the skybridge to find a maintenance closet. George liked that Hector didn’t talk. A slashed throat had done wonders for the old military man’s charisma. The old man looked depressed enough that George didn’t want to hear him say anything, either. Probably nothing but self-pity would come out of his mouth.

  George wished Lincoln were here. To feel his positivity and admiration. The young man hadn’t returned from Nederland, and was likely dead. A pity. George’s protégé had shown a lot of promise, and he’d grown rather fond of the kid over the last couple of years.

  They found a closet with a telescoping ladder and then carried it back to the skybridge. When George raised it to full length and then dropped it across the divide, it landed with a foot to spare on the other side.

  “Perfect.” He grinned, but the other two didn’t share his enthusiasm.

  Alma’s eyes grew wide. “I’m not crossing that.”

  “Do you want the missile codes or not?”

  She sneered. “You’re not even sure if this black box has the missile codes.”

  “I was sure enough to cross the country to get it,” George said, and then he beckoned them forward. Hector went first, on his hands and knees, staring directly down the sixty-foot drop to the ground as he crossed the divide. Wind whipped the old revolutionary’s hair as he inched forward.

  Alma waved George on, and he obliged. He tried not to look down but did anyway, and it sent his heart into a rapid-fire speed. He had to remind himself that getting that box back would make it all worthwhile.