Remaining standing, Cade uttered their new family mantra. “Stay frosty,” he said while bugging his eyes at her with one brow cocked awkwardly.
The antics produced the result he’d sought earlier and Raven closed the door like she’d opened it, wracked by a case of the giggles.
Once the dainty footfalls receded into the distance, Cade pulled up a folding chair, straddled it backward, and looked at his better half over steepled fingers.
After a few moments of uneasy quiet, Brook blinked first. “What?” she blurted, shrugging, her arms outstretched.
Cade said nothing. Just matched her stare, unblinking.
“She was wrong holding back that information.”
“Agreed,” said Cade, dropping his chin, gaze settling on the floor near his boots. “But attacking her over the radio? Two wrongs do not make a right. Don’t forget ... Raven’s learning everything that she’ll be taking forward, right now, by watching you ... me, and all of those we choose to surround ourselves with. She doesn’t have the luxury of learning from her mistakes like we did. There is no more trial and error. Best case scenario ... error equals a quick and final death. Worst case ... she’ll get bit and suffer a stint in purgatory before someone grants her final rest. So we’ve got to be extra careful the messages we send and what and how we say things when she’s within earshot, however explosive or subtle those may be.”
Now Brook remained silent, lips pursed, a solid set to her jaw.
“Just for the record. I’m glad you didn’t go off on our forgetful friend.”
The silent treatment continued.
Straightening up, Cade placed his hands on his knees and asked, “Did you?”
“Of course not. She’s still breathing, isn’t she.”
“Good point. What’s on the phone?” he asked, gesturing at the slim black device that didn’t appear quite so small clutched in her tiny hand. “Is it a text or voice message?”
“It’s a voice message. Three guesses who it is. The first two don’t count.”
Goose flesh breaking out on his ribs and running up his spine, he said, “I have a good idea already just going by the number itself. It’s Nash ... isn’t it?”
Narrowing her gaze, Brook nodded and mouthed, “Bingo.”
“What’d she want?”
Swallowing hard, Brook passed the phone over.
“Well?”
“I have no idea,” she said. But I have a feeling it means you’ll be leaving us again, is what she was thinking.
Thumbing in the unlock code to the metaphorical Pandora’s Box, Cade asked, “You listened to it, right?”
Nodding, Brook said, “Nash wants you to set up the laptop and the accompanying dish and follow the same procedure as before ... whatever that means.” Then for the third time in as many minutes she went silent. Biting her lower lip, she looked at the floor. After a few seconds she swept her eyes up to meet Cade’s and added quietly, “Apparently in order to find out what she wants you’re going to have to peel some layers from the onion. And if you do it in my vicinity Mister Grayson, I’m liable to break down and start crying.”
“Looks like you already have been,” he said, going to his knees.
“Guilty as charged,” she said, watching him extricate the rigid Pelican case from under the bunk.
“I noticed back at the clearing. Didn’t want to call attention to it in front of the Kids.”
“I didn’t cry in front of Raven.”
“Must have been tough.”
“Don’t keep her waiting any longer, Cade Grayson.” Brook inched towards the end of the bunk and wrapped both arms around the support. Rested her cheek on the cool metal there. “Now I’ll do a little praying that she isn’t trying to steal you from me again.”
“No one is stealing me away from you. It’s duty to country and the future I want our daughter to enjoy that keeps making my mouth say yes. Even when I want to stay with you really, really bad.” He went silent for a moment.
For the second time Brook lost it. She looked up at him through teary eyes and said, “Please go by and tell Raven to stay with the Kids for a while longer. So I can compose myself.”
Cade rose to his feet and hefted the Pelican container in one hand. He nodded an affirmative and kissed Brook atop her head. Said, “I’m sure everything will work out for the best. For all parties involved.” He pulled the rugged laptop from his rucksack and left without another word.
Brook waited until she could no longer hear Cade’s footfalls. She glared at the ceiling and growled, “Stay the hell away from my family, Murphy.”
Chapter 13
“Hold it. Right there ...” said Jimmy Foley, who was standing on the top rung of a teetering twenty-foot ladder, biting his lip in concentration, his upper body contorted into a shape rarely found outside of a yoga studio. Fighting gravity and his forty-one-year-old joints that were clearly not used to this kind of manual labor, he strained mightily at full extension and finally succeeded in threading the nut onto the galvanized bolt.
“Third times the charm,” said Tran, smiling and looking up at Foley. “Glad that’s the last one. I was getting tired of holding this ladder and having to find all of your fumbles.”
Sweat dripping off the tip of his nose, Foley looked down and said sharply, “Give me a break, Tran. I’m an IT guy, not a building superintendent. If I had my druthers, I’d take troubleshooting and rebuilding a roached office network over this kind of work ... any day.”
“Yeah, but once this array is up and running we will only have to rely on the generator when it’s really needed. That means fewer gas runs. And without the constant mechanical noise all of those rotting demons out there will leave us alone. Duncan promised as much.”
Foley said nothing. He descended a few rungs, took the socket wrench from Tran, and looked closely for the first time in at least a week at the slight Asian man’s face. Save for the puffiness in Tran’s left ear (cauliflower was what he’d heard Brook call it), the rest of the swelling had left his face entirely. The deep scratches on his cheek and neck had healed, leaving behind a roadmap of white scars. When Foley had first met Tran three weeks ago his eyes were still mostly swollen shut from a beating suffered at the hands of Bishop’s henchmen. And a week ago the whites were still bloodshot and jaundiced. Now they were nearly wide open and harbored a knowing twinkle. A spark, is what first came to Foley’s mind. Embarrassed at the realization he’d been staring, Foley grabbed the tool and climbed back up the ladder. He called down, “How tight do the bolts have to be?”
“Duncan said a quarter turn past real tight,” answered Tran, still bracing the ladder two-handed.
“Figures,” muttered Foley, his bald pate an angry shade of red. “That guy wouldn’t know specific if it bit him on the butt.”
“Says the scatterbrained IT guy,” quipped Tran, suppressing a chuckle.
***
Ten minutes later the unlikely duo stood back to admire their handiwork. There were eight gleaming black three by five-foot rectangles bolted securely in two rows. The solar array, thought to produce roughly two and a half kilowatts per hour, sat atop a jury-rigged metal frame that resembled scaffolding put together by a team of blind men. The entire setup, liberated from the quarry compound, would provide enough juice during the day to power the lights and closed circuit system while charging the reserve batteries sufficiently to last throughout the night. A given during the summer when the sun was prominent in a cloudless sky most of the day—an entirely different proposition during the late fall and winter months when the sun could stay away for weeks on end.
But that was not this IT guy’s department. Besides, thought Foley as his foot touched the soft earthen forest floor, by the time the clouds roll in permanently, Daymon will have finished blocking the road at points both east and west and using the high output generator taken from the quarry will be a non-issue.
“I’m done up here. What do you say we take a break and get us a beer?” Foley said.<
br />
Shaking his head, Tran sighed and said, “I still don’t drink. My religion frowns upon it.”
“Doesn’t hurt to ask. I just hate to drink alone.” Foley pocketed the wrench and asked, “So the Dalai Lama doesn’t ever hoist a cold one?”
In an unusual display of humor, Tran quipped, “Not anymore.”
“I meant didn’t, past tense ... before everything went to shit and all of this became necessary,” Foley said, gesturing toward the giant wood and metal housing that, despite its cobbled-together nature, somehow remained standing.
“Help me with the ladder,” Tran said, ignoring the question. “Only the easy part remains.”
“Yep,” agreed Foley. “Wiring up the invertor. That this IT guy can handle.”
Chapter 14
Eager, yet reluctant, to see what surprise Nash had in store, Cade strode purposefully across the clearing, the dried grass swishing against his smartly bloused MultiCam pants. The sun was warm on his face and the breeze present earlier had tapered off. Tilting his head back as he walked, he drew in a deep breath through his nose. Nothing. The carrion stench present earlier had gone along with the bodies. From somewhere west of him, deep into the property and well away from the State Route, he heard the soft chug of the excavator working hard digging a grave for them. He imagined Seth at the controls, with nobody to talk to, the engine noise drowning out his thoughts.
“All in the name of survival,” he said to himself, halting near the phony crop circle. After depositing the heavy gear box on the matted-down grass, he knelt and popped the latches. The inside was mostly thick black foam with each component of the small satellite dish snugged into its own form-fitting compartment.
He extricated the parts for the stand first and quickly assembled them. The dish went together rather easily and when he placed it on the stand the whole thing came up to just above his kneecap.
The low whine of a straining gearbox got his attention. Looking west towards the noise he saw a Chevy pick-up driven by Daymon, branches scraping its side and whipping the air as it emerge from the tree line. From the passenger seat, Duncan waved a greeting as the rig nosed in near the other vehicles.
Cade waved back then shifted his focus to the task at hand. Using the compass feature on his Suunto, he found due south and fixed his gaze on one gnarled tree in particular, a victim of a past lightning strike, and rotated the dish until its center post was aimed at the blue sky about twenty degrees above its pointy top.
The rest of the setup took but a few seconds. However, booting up the laptop and getting it to recognize the connected dish was a test in patience, of which Cade had vast stores.
Still waiting, he looked up and saw Lev and Chief trudge from the forest to the east. Each man had a black rifle slung over one shoulder, and perched on the other was a hewn length of lodge pole pine supporting a field dressed deer carcass. With each step the buck’s head jerked and lolled, the four-point rack carving a meandering path through the knee-high grass.
Waving a greeting to them both, Cade heard and felt his stomach growl. Clearly, he thought, the reptile part of his brain was now aware of the prospect of fresh meat. And in his mind’s eye he could already see the fire-braised flesh and hear the white noise of the venison sizzling on the spit.
Shielding the laptop screen with one hand, Cade squinted against the sun, waiting to see the pixelated wheel stop spinning and the cartoonish clasped hands replace it showing him the Panasonic was ready to receive the coded transmission from the satellite orbiting somewhere high above him. Through technology he didn’t entirely understand, nor care to, a message from Nash containing what might be a life-altering proposition began downloading onto the laptop.
A short while later an audible chime told him the download was complete, but the glare from the sun prevented him from seeing the file name let alone read it, so he disconnected the cable and hinged the screen closed. Leaving the dish and cables on the grass, he rose and set off to find a patch of shade.
Nearing the motor pool, Cade noticed Duncan puttering around under the open hood of his newly acquired Dodge Ram. When he got within earshot he couldn’t help but throw a quip at the master of all quipsters. “What ... Jiffy Lube closed?”
After pushing off of the truck’s fender, Duncan sauntered over and squared up with Cade. “What’s with the toys?” he asked, nodding towards the crushed grass where only the top of the gray dish was visible. “Trying to pick up DirecTV? Cause if you are, I hate to break it to ya ... there ain’t no more Sunday Ticket.”
“Breaks my heart,” said Cade, which happened to be a lie. Save for his beloved Portland Trailblazers—the only game in town—he could take or leave professional sports. College games, he conceded after a second’s thought, he would most definitely miss. The large scale choreography between the cheerleaders and marching bands were a sight to see in person. Yet one more thing stolen from Raven’s future by Omega.
“Not a big sports fan?”
“Not so much.”
Nodding at the laptop, Duncan asked, “What’s with the computer?”
Ignoring the question, but thinking ahead, Cade asked, “The Black Hawk ... how much fuel is she holding?”
“She’s sittin' almost half full.”
“Perfect,” replied Cade. “That’s more than enough to get us to Morgan.”
Duncan nudged his oversized orange-framed glasses back to their proper resting place. “Whatever’s on the computer is need to know. I get it.”
“I don’t even know what’s on it,” Cade said. He passed in front of Duncan’s truck and climbed inside the F-650 sitting beside it and locked the door to ward off any and all distractions for the near future.
Cracking open the computer, he said aloud, “Alright, Freda, this better be what I think it is.”
***
And it had been—sort of. In the file labeled FUBAR he discovered more than thirty minutes worth of footage shot mostly from very high altitude and, since jet fuel was in very short supply last he’d heard, Cade assumed it was captured by the sensitive optics aboard one of Nash’s Keyhole satellites. Every city the bird passed over—of which there were many during the compilation’s run time—had one thing in common: all of the freeways and arterials leading away from their downtown cores, where skyscrapers cast their shadows, commerce took place, and thousands upon thousands of people lived cheek to jowl, were choked with static vehicles. No matter the size of the city, he saw rivers of multicolored sheet metal, the sun glittering off glass and chrome. People’s worldly possessions: colorful jumbles of furniture and art and suitcases heaped high in the beds of pickups or lashed atop passenger cars. And judging by the roving herds, those same unfortunate people, who had either sheltered in place initially or were trying to escape the outbreak via those vehicles, now roamed the jams and concrete jungles in search of living prey.
New York was exceptionally bad. From altitude the streets were mostly taxi cab yellow with a smattering of other colors breaking up the solid hue here and there. And when Manhattan Island slid by and the optics zoomed in Cade got a closer look and saw that a gridlock of biblical proportions had taken place when panicked residents fled the security of their three thousand dollar a square foot digs for the already overrun safe zones authorized by the DHS and set up and run by massively overwhelmed FEMA workers.
Strangely, the streets of downtown Chicago were mostly free of vehicles. However, there were roadblocks made of stacked sandbags all up and down the famous Magnificent Mile from the Chicago River to Oak Street. All were now unmanned, but clearly whoever had been there had retreated in a hurry, leaving behind heavy machine guns, ammo boxes, and dozens of their fallen, chewed on bodies in MultiCam fatigues, and all, Cade presumed, head shot in order to keep them from reanimating and joining the burgeoning ranks of the walking dead.
Throughout the grim documentary, Nash narrated in a voice bereft of emotion, calling out each city by name followed by the estimated casualties suffered there,
which were nothing short of staggering.
After twenty minutes of this, when Cade had seen more of the destruction wrought by this Extinction Level Event than he cared to, Nash’s voice abruptly changed and a measure of empathy crept in as she said: Cade, your hometown is next. I’m pleased to announce that it has fared better than most, and then sure enough, Portland, Oregon, the Rose City, known for its bridges and quirky citizenry, got its sixty seconds of fame. And though the brief flyby was shorter than most Super Bowl commercials, the information he gleaned from it was priceless. The once vibrant city, home to nearly one million, now resembled the pictures he’d seen of Detroit before the Omega outbreak.
The main difference between Portland and the previous two dozen cities was the flotilla of watercraft anchored dead center in the slow-moving river. There were small pleasure craft with Bimini tops deployed. A few dozen gleaming yachts, likely in the forty-to fifty-foot range, strained against their anchor chains in what used to be the shipping channel. The RiverPlace Marina on the west side of the Willamette River was deserted, the empty slips now useless pickets of rust streaked I-beams resembling mechanical fingers reaching from the depths. Up on the west bank rows of million dollar condominiums seemed battened down against the dead, their windows darkened and uninviting.
In stark contrast, on the opposite bank of the Willamette River nearly all of the recently renovated warehouses constructed of old growth timber around the turn of the last century had completely burned to the ground, taking with them dozens of restaurants and bars and coffee shops. South of the scorched concrete pads and blackened rubble, sitting in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge where Interstate 5 crossed the river, Cade recognized the block-long Oregon Museum of Science and Industry building—one of Raven’s favorite places.
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