Leland rushed forward and embraced Cora. He held her tightly and could feel her limbs shaking, her breath unsteady.
“We have to get out of here,” she said.
“I know,” he answered.
The trip back to Henry and his brother might as well have been a thousand miles.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” Leland knew there was nothing he could say to make his daughter feel better. She would relive this moment every day for the rest of her life. He wondered if there would be more of these moments ahead of them. He hoped not. He hoped that once they got out of Chicago, life would simply be about getting food and water. There was no way to know what the future held for them, but if they could make it back home, they would survive.
Cora wiped the tears from her face. Leland looked up the road in the direction where Henry and Sam should have been. The plan was to hijack the truck, but would that put them in unnecessary danger? He thought to himself for a moment and then shook his head. No. The soldiers had tracked him down through a crowd of rioters. Trying to blend in with the crowd wasn’t going to work. At least not until they got far away from here. And if they were looking for three of them—Leland, Henry, and Sam—then they would be that much easier to spot. They needed that truck, and they needed it now.
Leland was not a man of faith. He typically rejected all notions of fate or blessings. But when he saw the truck come into view in the distance, he wanted to shout praises to someone. Water filled his eyes and his heart leaped as he recognized the two people in the truck. Henry almost looked dumbstruck when he came across Leland. When they stopped the truck in front of them, they looked wide-eyed at the bodies on the ground.
“We don’t have much time,” Henry said. “If they were coming after us before, they’re really going to come after us now.”
Leland wasted no time. Henry stayed at the wheel, while Sam remained in the front seat. Cora got into the back seat, and Leland climbed to the bed where the gun hung down on its tripod. He studied the weapon to check if it was loaded and ready to fire. It was. He looked back at Henry.
“Do you know which way to go?”
Henry nodded and hit the gas pedal. Leland had to steady himself in the standing position. He latched his belt to the tripod so he didn’t fall off the back of the truck.
For a moment, it seemed like no one was going to give chase. It seemed like they had managed to kill the soldiers who were after them, and the rest were busy with the rioters. When they hit the interstate, however, the enemy showed up again.
Just as it had been with their approach into Chicago, maneuvering through the dead vehicles on the road proved to be a challenge, especially with such a large truck. There were moments where Henry pushed the speed up to sixty or even seventy miles per hour, but for the most part, he was relegated to about thirty and sometimes even less.
Three other vehicles were chasing them, but they were far less worried about hitting or sideswiping them. Soldiers hung out of the sides of the windows, while others stood, firing their weapons from the top of the open sunroof. The vehicle was swerving and maneuvering so much that Leland had a hard time training his gun on their pursuers. He let off a few rounds, but they went wide by a large margin. Still, with every shot he let off, he noticed that the soldiers ducked down into their SUVs for cover. Leland and company weren’t going to make it very long before the soldiers overtook and surrounded them. They either had to pick up their speed on a long stretch, or they needed to take the soldiers by surprise.
Leland knew what he had to do. It was a risk, and it could get them all killed. He swallowed and took a deep breath, then turned his head toward the others.
“Henry! Stop the car.”
Each of them looked at Leland, but nobody questioned him, even though they probably wanted to. Leland turned back to their pursuers and held firm. Henry slowed to a stop in the middle of the interstate. The SUVs behind them didn’t slow down. Leland wasn’t sure if they thought that they had run out of gas or if something was wrong with the truck, but when the soldiers noticed Leland and his group had stopped, they hit the gas as hard as they could to catch up with them. They were probably a hundred yards away when Leland held up his hands in the air. He told the others to do the same. About fifty yards away, the SUVs started to slow down, and the soldiers hung out of their tops with their guns pointed. The three vehicles got in line with each other and began their slow approach to Leland and his crew. But Leland wasn’t about to give them a chance. As quickly as he could, he reached for the gun, pulled it upward, and didn’t let up on the trigger. The soldiers ducked in the SUVs, but they were too close and too late.
Leland fired and fired and fired. Glass spit in every direction, blood shot up, and all three of the SUVs that had been chasing them simmered with smoke billowing out the front.
Silence hung in the air for almost a full minute after Leland ran out of ammunition.
They watched the wreckage for any of the survivors to move. Either there were no survivors, or they were too afraid to poke their heads above the dashboard. Whatever the case, the vehicles were probably inoperable and there was no one left to chase them. Leland turned his head back toward Henry. “Go.”
Henry hit the gas, and the group of them were on their way home.
Chapter Fifty-Three
The sun was barely inching its way over the trees in Hope as Gwen watched the road into town from the south. Last night, they had brought the truck in with a supply of food that she was sure wouldn’t last more than a few days. The effort had hardly seemed worth it. The two prisoners who had helped her and Bryson get the food onto the truck had been true to their word, and Gwen had left them with the truck to find their own way through this new messed-up world. Bryson had been reluctant to give them the truck but didn’t put up much of a fuss.
She might have offered them a place to stay and a way to live among the townspeople, but given what Hope had been through in the past few days, she couldn’t expect the town to take fresh-faced prisoners among them.
Gwen was a failure, she knew. She shouldn’t have gone to the prison. Trent had been killed, and Alex was injured. He had woken, but he was in a lot of pain. The consensus was that he would make it, and he had already been given pain medication from what she and Bryson had gathered in the prison.
Bryson’s hearing was mostly back, though there was still some ringing.
The town had wanted to know what happened to them, but Gwen wasn’t ready to sit around and talk about it. She would let Bryson and Alex relay the story. Without a word, she left the truck full of supplies and had made her way to her dad’s office to sit and be alone. Now, she was on the hill away from the town, watching the road. Waiting. Hoping.
The thought that her dad and sister might not come back was an even worse horror. She couldn’t imagine being in this town alone. She didn’t want to be the last of her family. The world was crumbling around her, and all she wanted was her family beside her. Even if they didn’t always get along. Even if she sometimes hated her dad and resented her sister, she wanted nothing more than to see them.
If she had learned anything from this tragedy in the prison, it was that she had no power to prevent her world from falling apart. None of them did.
She hated that they had gone to the prison. It was a mistake. It was a decision that her dad would have never signed off on. He would have taken a much larger party, or not gone at all. Given the risk, and given the consequence of what had happened, he probably would have never sanctioned it. He was the kind of leader who could make those hard decisions. He could see far enough ahead to know a good idea from a bad one.
Maybe they had saved lives by going to the prison. The food would barely sustain the town, but they had gathered enough medicine to help a handful of people, surely. She hadn’t stayed long enough to find out. She hoped it hadn’t all been in vain, though.
From her vantage point, she could see the road for miles. Hope didn’t get a lot of traffic in and out, b
ut it was odd to see this road without any movement at all.
She rested her chin in her palms as she sat on a rock on the side of the road. The Wisconsin wind chilled her, but she didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to miss them coming. There was something inside of her that was motivated. She would sit here for days and days to wait for them if she had to. She wished there was a way for her to call her dad. To text him. To have some message from him telling her that they were okay and that they were on their way back.
The movement in the distance was like a speck of dust in her eye. She wasn’t sure if it was a trick of the light or if she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. But it was moving too consistently, too fast to be some trick. And it became bigger and bigger. Then the truck was in full view.
She expected to cry. To feel elation. Yet, nothing happened. She simply stood in the middle of the road until the truck stopped in front of her.
Her dad got out of the back and wrapped his arms around her.
Then she melted into him, tears flowing from both their eyes.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Leland was in his office, looking through his ammunition to see if he had any that matched the gun on the truck tripod. They were going to have to build walls around the town, and an armed truck would make a good deterrent for anyone thinking of approaching.
Their trip back from Chicago hadn’t been painless, but it was relatively safe. The truck had run out of gas about halfway there, and it was a chore to find tubing, a container, then enough gas to siphon out and put into it. Every time they had to stop, there was the threat that someone would try to take their vehicle, but each of them stood with guns ready. One would stand guard on the tripod gun even though it had no more ammunition. It was intimidating enough to keep most scavengers at bay.
Leland hadn’t let up his guard until they started seeing signs for Hope. Then, once he saw Gwen, his relief was complete.
He had come back to a Hope, however, that was broken and still leaderless. He didn’t know what he had expected. He had hoped that in his absence, someone would have taken the reins and whipped the town into survival mode. But instead, he had learned of an expedition to the prison for supplies that got people killed. And worse, Gwen had been a part of it.
He didn’t spend any time admonishing her for her actions. It had been a bad call, and he blamed himself for being so dismissive of her desire to help them on their way to Chicago. Given what they had been through, he still wouldn’t have allowed her to go with them, but he might have tried assigning her a different task—a less dangerous one.
More and more Leland saw that what everyone in Hope needed was direction. Someone to tell them how to proceed. It had been preached over and over that this wasn’t a normal power outage, and that it wasn’t something to wait out. Perhaps now, they were ready to take it upon themselves to prepare for the storm that awaited them.
Food would run out. Water would dry up. And if they were surviving, people that weren’t would come after them.
Leland wasn’t going to let that happen. He had lost so much already, even before the world plunged into darkness. He wasn’t about to lose his two girls. And he wasn’t going to lose Hope.
They were in this for the long haul. And Leland, as much as he didn’t want to, was going to have to lead them through it.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Sam flipped the SD card over and over in his palm. It would take some effort, but he needed to find a computer that wasn’t fried, and one with enough processing power to scan through the copious amounts of data he had on this thing.
There were answers there. Answers about the Horsemen and what they were planning to do. Whatever this EMP attack was, it wasn’t over. And it seemed that they were planning to do something even worse. What that could be was anyone’s guess.
A word formed in his mind and repeated itself over and over.
Keystone. Keystone. Keystone.
He didn’t know its significance. He wouldn’t know until he had a few weeks with a computer.
“You doing okay?” Henry asked.
The two of them had gotten a small house on the edge of town. It had been empty for some time, apparently, but given Henry’s past, everyone thought it was best to keep him away from the main group. At least until they got used to seeing him or forgot that they had a former prisoner in their midst.
“I’m fine,” Sam said. He was glad the fire serum had no lasting effects. He was just tired from the full night and constant surge of adrenaline.
“So, is all the stuff with those soldiers over?” Henry asked.
It was a simple question, but the answer was complicated. Leland had checked the truck for trackers, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t overlooked something. The Horsemen didn’t necessarily need trackers. They had gotten Leland’s name. They knew who he was. They could find out where he was from. And they knew he had been working with Henry and Sam to some capacity. Essentially, if the Horsemen wanted to, they could trace Sam back to Hope, and they wouldn’t be in a confusing, riotous place like Chicago. They could destroy this town. And he didn’t put it past someone who had set off a national EMP to simply kill everyone just to get what they wanted.
They could only hope Elias hadn’t been able to report Leland’s name to anyone else before he died. It had been a horrible error on Henry’s part to name Leland, and his brother didn’t even know it. Still, it wouldn’t be impossible for them to find Sam, even if they didn’t know the sheriff’s name. They certainly knew about Henry, and they knew Henry’s past. They even knew that Henry had taken the fall for Sam. Given that the prison was only five miles from Hope, it wouldn’t be crazy to see some mercenaries poking around the town over the next couple of weeks.
“Maybe,” Sam said. “Maybe not. I wish I knew.”
Henry nodded. “We have a lot of work to do here.”
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“But you need to work on that,” Henry said, nodding at the card in Sam’s hands. “We can probably find you a computer. Or the parts to build you one.”
“That’s the more likely scenario,” Sam said.
“We’ll do it. We need to find out what they’re planning.”
“Though I agree with you,” Sam said, “I don’t know what it would do for us. We aren’t in a position to take on the Horsemen.”
“Well,” Henry said, “it might tell us what we need to prepare for.”
That was true. The Horsemen had made it clear they did not want their plans known. Sam knew they had even bigger catastrophes in store for the world.
It may take days. Maybe weeks. But Sam was going to figure out who the Horsemen were and what they were planning.
Nothing was more important.
Epilogue
The four of them rarely met in person like this. It was dangerous to their cause, but Camden found it necessary.
They sat in the darkness even though Camden knew each of them. Camden had been scanned for electronics and searched for weapons. They were supposed to trust him. He wasn’t one of the four, but he made more decisions in this operation than they seemed to.
Things had changed so much since they had first brought him on. But they had hired him to be the one who could take the fall, who could get his hands dirty so they didn’t have to. Things had gotten so much bigger. Now, the four Horsemen were in the midst of what they had always planned.
All of it, from the world going dark to what would follow, could only be decided upon by the four of them, and Camden would carry it out. It could be any one of them, but outside of the four, Camden was the only one with full knowledge of their mission. None of the four could be replaced. This would ensure the mission wouldn’t waver. With other people came other ideals. Other ideals couldn’t be tolerated.
Camden knew their mantra. We are four and we are one. We are one and we are four. They had their own thoughts, but they were of one mind. No council in history was so in sync with what they wanted to accomplish, and n
one had been so powerful. Camden was like them. Though he was disposable in the end, he believed in what they were doing.
They were paving the way.
The world had been brought to its knees, but that wasn’t the central purpose. That was more a consequence of something bigger they had to accomplish.
“Is the situation in Chicago really worth the meeting?” one of them asked.
Camden cleared his throat. “Possibly,” he said. “There is still a chance we can be discovered, though it is a small chance.”
“Weren’t you in charge of this, Camden? Why is it not dealt with?”
I’m in charge of it all, he thought.
“That’s why I called the meeting,” Camden said. “I need to know how to proceed. Samuel Tash faces a lot of challenges trying to figure out our plans, but it isn’t impossible. His computer was destroyed, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t have a backup copy of the data. I also know that our focus needs to be on the main mission.”
“The boy is part of the main mission,” one said. “If there is a chance our mission is halted because of this, then we need to deal with it any way possible.”
Camden’s cheeks flushed, but none of them could see it. He had hoped they would say that Samuel Tash was just a fly that could be swatted away. He didn’t want to deal with him. He wanted to focus on their mission ahead.
“You know how important this is,” one said. “You know how we have never left a loose end. That is why we are where we are today.”
They were right. They were right, and Camden hated them for it. He always felt like the weak link. He always felt that if there was any contention, it was with him. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t among them, an outsider. A person they could piss on if this all went to hell.
Fallen Earth | Book 2 | Aftermath Page 26
