As Darkness Falls

by David Lucin

  “You should be with your team, not by yourself in this trailer,” Jenn blurted out, then winced. So much for tact.

  Like someone had pressed the pause button, he froze, pencil touched to paper. Then he checked over his shoulder, searching for his grunts. Finding them, he said, “I think Yannick’s entertaining them just fine.”

  “It’s not about entertaining. They need to see you as a leader. As their leader. I’m not an expert in this leadership stuff, obviously, but I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that coin, to be the person who looks up to someone.” Her hand found its way to the cross around her neck.

  He bookmarked his page with his pencil and shut his notebook. Finally. “Your friend Valeria?”

  At first, she was surprised he’d heard about her, but she shouldn’t be; after all, Vincent Grierson had used Val’s name to further his agenda, making her famous for all the wrong reasons until Gary set the record straight. “Yeah, she was good at what she did, and she taught me a lot, but there was more to it with her. I respected her because she made me feel like I was important, if that makes any sense.”

  “Sure, I get it.”

  “I would’ve taken a bullet for her without thinking twice about it.” Even now, a part of Jenn wished Philip Grierson had shot her outside the Go Market, not Val. “That kind of loyalty doesn’t come out of nowhere. It takes work.” She pointed at Yannick. “Like that. You don’t need to smother them. Just be there, get to know them, let them get to know you. Be their friend, or in Wyatt’s case, pretend.”

  They shared a laugh. When Freddie was done, he brushed his nose with a thumb. “You’re right. I never thought of it that way.” He pushed himself up, the trailer creaking and shifting under his weight. “You know, it’s funny. My dad’s obsessed with old war movies, especially Saving Private Ryan. You ever seen it?”

  “Oh my god, my billet loves that movie, but I could never get past the first scene. It was too scary.” Ironic, she thought, considering how she’d killed and seen battle firsthand.

  “Still holds up as one of the best.” He tucked his notebook into the pocket of his jeans. “But in all those movies, there’s the whole band-of-brothers trope. I never really figured it was a real thing.”

  “Band of brothers. I like that. We’ll have to change it to band of brothers and sisters, though. Or band of siblings. Sorry, those don’t really roll off the tongue.”

  Freddie held out his hand to help her up. “Nope, they don’t. I’ll try to think of a better name.”

  He hopped out of the trailer and sauntered over to his team, earning a friendly slap on the back from Yannick.

  Jenn smiled to herself and returned to the Dodge. She might not have learned the truth about why Freddie volunteered, but she’d gotten through to him about the importance of being with his troops. All in all, she counted their chat as a success.

  Break ended at 12:15 sharp, and the convoy continued its painfully slow trek south. With each mile, the landscape became more arid, the grasses more yellow, the foliage less thick. To the west and the east, the mountain ranges showed as silhouettes against the orange-gray sky, and the air smelled of sagebrush. Jenn was reminded of home.

  The interstate bypassed Cordes Lakes proper, a tiny town of only a few hundred before the bombs, but as the convoy passed, she spied the truck stop Sam had mentioned. Eight miles and twenty minutes later, at ten after two, a sign reading SUNSET POINT REST STOP crawled by on her right. Ahead, the Nissan, with Ed driving and Dylan riding shotgun, exited off the highway and drove along a service road.

  By rest stop standards, Sunset Point was deluxe. In addition to bathroom facilities, it included several shaded picnic areas with tables and benches, as well as a walking path that straddled the edge of the valley to the west. Jenn counted two cars, a pickup, and a van in the long parking lot. All but the van were still plugged into charging stations.

  The brake lights on the Nissan lit up. An instant later, the radio in the console crackled to life with Dylan’s voice. “All vehicles, full stop. Watch your flanks and rear. We got bodies up here.”

  “Bodies?” Sam said.

  A bolt of adrenaline narrowed Jenn’s vision. Mostly without thinking, she snatched Espinosa and flung open her door.

  Her boots landed on the asphalt with a crunch. Quickly, Quinn’s team hurdled the sides of the trailer and joined her outside. Farther back, Freddie and his team had exited the Toyota.

  On a knee, Jenn scanned the rest stop: a utility shed, a gazebo, a line of trees with browning leaves, but no signs of movement. Tall lights not unlike those in a baseball stadium rose above her, casting no shadows.

  Although her heart raced, her breathing remained steady, her mind sharp and focused. What had Dylan meant by bodies? Bodies of the soldiers who were supposed to meet them here? Or travelers on the highway? If so, where were the soldiers?

  “Jansen!” Dylan called out from ahead of the Nissan. “On me!”

  She rose to her feet and scurried forward, keeping low, her rifle up and her attention on the washroom facilities, a brick structure with a line of empty vending machines out front. As she rounded the Nissan, she noticed a soldier lying motionless on the asphalt.

  Dylan held his weapon in the low-ready position. Alert but clearly not expecting an imminent firefight. “What happened here?” she asked him, likewise letting Espinosa drop a few inches.

  He knelt next to the body, which, Jenn now saw, belonged to a woman. Strands of dark hair flowed out of her helmet, and blood seeped from a terrible wound in her neck. More dribbled from her lip. Wide, empty eyes stared into the overcast sky until Dylan closed them. He touched some of the blood with his fingertips and said, “It’s still damp. This didn’t happen that long ago.”

  A slow, deep breath kept the rising panic at bay. Unlike the last time Jenn found bodies in the desert, today she had a full platoon of armed men and women behind her. “So a raid.”

  “Looks that way.” He pointed to a shell casing as big as her hand. “That’s a .50-cal.”

  “So they had a Humvee. Stolen, you think?”

  “That’d be my guess. Could be a drone, but I doubt the Guard would pull one away from New River just yet.”

  Jenn scanned the parking lot, noticing smaller shell casings among the .50-cals. Those, she knew, came from 5.56-caliber rounds, what military M4 rifles used. “You said bodies. Plural.”

  He angled his head toward the washroom facilities. From her perspective, she could only see a pair of boots poking out from behind a pillar.

  Who could have done this? And how? Was it the Major? No, his forces stuck to northeast Phoenix. Then again, with half of the National Guard deserting after the coup, there might not be enough manpower to both contain New River and patrol the highway, so he might have snuck northward.

  Before she could consider the question any further, Quinn’s voice sliced through the air: “I got a soldier over here! He’s still alive!”

  Alive?

  Among shin-high yellow grass near the utility shed, Quinn waved her arms above her head. “I just checked his pulse,” she gasped out as Jenn and Dylan ran up to her. “I could barely feel it, but it’s there.” She dropped into a crouch beside the wounded soldier. The name tag on the right breast of his uniform read PEMBROKE. Eyes closed, his complexion a ghostly white, he looked dead already. He was young, too—eighteen or nineteen. A few feet away lay a rifle. Did the other soldier in the parking lot have a weapon? Jenn couldn’t remember seeing one. The raiders must have taken it.

  Dylan felt around Pembroke’s torso. After his hand touched an area of his abdomen just above the left hip, it came back red with blood.

  “It’s not his liver,” Jenn said, remembering that Val had been shot on the right side.

  “He’s ice cold.” Dylan held his palm to Pembroke’s forehead. Jenn expected the man to move or otherwise react to the touch, but he remained completely still.

  “We have medical equipment in the trailers,” Quinn
said.

  Dylan pulled off his hooded sweatshirt, rolled it into a ball, and pressed it hard against the wound. “There’s too much blood. He needs a real medic, probably surgery.”

  “Surgery?” Jenn repeated, not because she didn’t believe him but because she doubted Pembroke would survive the trip to Flagstaff. Prescott was closer, but—

  “New River.”

  Sam’s voice sent her whirling around. He stood a few yards away, chewing on a nail. Her first thought was to scold him for leaving the safety of the truck, but instead, she said, “He’s right. The National Guard hasn’t abandoned the place yet, so they should have medical facilities. Better than we have in the convoy.”

  “We can unhook the trailer and take the Toyota,” Sam added. “We’ll burn some charge on the way, but I can punch it without the solar panels slowing us down. Ten minutes. Fifteen, tops.”

  Dylan glanced up at Jenn, silently asking, or so she thought, What do you think?

  “It’s our best option,” she said. “It’s over an hour to Flagstaff, even in the Toyota. Prescott’s maybe forty-five.”

  “Do it,” Dylan ordered. “Sam, get that truck ready. Novak, we’ve got a few stretchers packed away in a trailer somewhere. Find one and bring it over here. Grab a few grunts to help us carry him.”

  Both she and Sam responded with quick nods, then sprinted toward the convoy. Jenn shouted, “Sam, get some water and a med kit so we can wrap the wound!”

  Without slowing down, he lifted an arm and gave her an awkward thumbs-up.

  Jenn took over holding the sweatshirt to Pembroke’s stomach while Dylan continued checking his pulse. Horrible memories of the Go Market flooded her mind. Whenever she glanced at the soldier beneath her, she saw Val, that sad smile creeping across her lips as she slipped away and went limp.

  “Will he make it?” she asked Dylan.

  “Pulse is faint and erratic, but if we hurry, maybe.” He pulled off his hat, ran his fingers through his hair, and let out a long, frustrated sigh. “Why does nothing ever go according to plan for us, Jansen? Once. That’s all I ask.”

  7

  According to the clock on the Toyota’s dash, Sam made the drive from Sunset Point Rest Stop to the National Guard camp two miles north of the New River Outlet Mall in eleven minutes. His max speed, Jenn noted, topped eighty-five miles per hour. On the way, she worried Guard troops on the highway would think she and her friends were raiders and begin shooting. To be safe, she held a white T-shirt out the window. The Guardsmen on duty let the truck approach, and upon seeing the wounded Pembroke, they guided Sam to the medical tent.

  Jenn sat on the truck’s open tailgate. This camp hadn’t existed when she first traveled to New River in May. Judging by the layers of sand caked to the tents’ weathered canvas exteriors, she assumed it was set up not long after she left. Everywhere soldiers loaded supplies into trailers and civilian vehicles. Like the residents of Flagstaff, all had thin, lean faces, and their uniforms hung off their frames. And they looked tired. Defeated. Jenn didn’t blame them. They’d been guarding New River for months with almost no relief.

  For the past thirty minutes, Quinn had been walking in tight circles. Every so often, she’d lock her fingers behind her head or try peeking inside the medical tent, only to be shooed away by the soldier standing guard.

  “Relax, Quinn,” Sam said from beside Jenn on the tailgate. “We’ve done everything we can do. It’s out of our hands now.”

  She threw him a wicked scowl, made a grunting sound, and continued her pacing.

  “All right then,” he mumbled to himself.

  “Cut her some slack,” Jenn whispered so Quinn couldn’t hear. “This is her first time outside of Flagstaff after the bombs.” She also wondered if Quinn’s nervousness had something to do with being so close to New River.

  “It’s only my second.”

  She began to correct him but remembered he hadn’t left town since they traveled to Payson in search of his family. “That makes you a seasoned veteran now, huh?”

  “If I’m a veteran, what are you?”

  “An all-star,” she bragged. “Or a legend.”

  He scratched her back through her jacket. “Always so humble.”

  The flap to the medical tent opened, and out came Dylan. He was followed by, to Jenn’s surprise, Sergeant Murphy; she thought he might have been busy preparing for the Guard’s withdrawal, but as she’d learned so far in the Militia, good leadership meant effectively delegating, not micromanaging.

  “How’s Pembroke doing?” she asked.

  “Too early to tell,” Dylan said. “They’ve got him sedated and stabilized. He’ll get taken up to the hospital in Flagstaff as soon as possible.”

  Murphy stifled a yawn. “Thanks again for bringing him down here. If he pulls through, it’s because of you.”

  “No problem,” Jenn said. “Sorry about your other people. I told my squad to take good care of them until you can come pick them up.”

  He dipped his head and ran a hand over his disheveled hair. “Valentine and Farman. It was Farman’s twenty-first birthday last week.”

  Valentine and Farman. Jenn tried to commit their names to memory. It felt like the least she could do; both of them died while waiting at the rest stop for the Militia. Had the platoon left an hour earlier this morning or not taken a break outside Camp Verde, they might have still been alive.

  Dylan leaned an elbow on the bedrail of the truck. “You were right about the Humvee, Jansen. Murphy confirmed they had one at Sunset Point, so whoever attacked them must have stolen it.”

  “Any idea who it was?” she asked. “The Major?”

  Quinn had ceased her pacing and now awaited the sergeant’s response with wide eyes. Sam tensed at the mention of the mysterious gang leader—or whatever the Major was. Since Jenn’s initial brush with his forces in May, she’d heard little about him. “Ian,” the captive she and Val took during their trek to the hospital in northeast Phoenix, had unfortunately never met the Major, or so he claimed, nor did he know the location of the Major’s headquarters or how many thugs he employed.

  Murphy crossed his arms and ran a tongue over chapped lips. “We’re not sure. It could be, but there’s no way to tell. For the first few weeks after learning about him, we received sporadic reports from surviving civilian communities in the city about attacks and raids, but all we can say with much certainty is that he’s operating somewhere in the vicinity of the north Scottsdale or Carefree area. Most of those communities are gone, so gathering intel is difficult without actually sending in armed scouting parties, which we haven’t had the manpower or supplies to do in months.”

  His use of “gone” hung heavy in the air.

  “Gone?” Quinn asked. “You say these communities are gone. Gone where? To New River?”

  Dylan and Murphy exchanged glances with Jenn, who said, “He means they’re dead, Quinn.”

  A tendon in Quinn’s neck went taut. “Dead? What do you mean dead? The whole city? How?”

  Murphy explained, “The water ran out within the first two days. Fires continued burning for weeks. Food supplies were critical to begin with. Despite the smoke dropping temperatures, southern Arizona is one of the hottest places in the country. This is a desert. Without power, it’s largely uninhabitable. There are certainly still some groups of survivors, but we haven’t been in touch with any for a long while.”

  Jenn thought of her parents. She’d known they were gone since her first trip to New River, but now she hoped they were killed in the initial explosions. No pain, no suffering. Morbid, yes, but the alternative was slow, drawn-out death by smoke inhalation, dehydration, or starvation. If she had to choose for herself, she’d pick the former without hesitation.

  “So it could be the Major,” Sam said, steering the conversation back onto its original course. “Or not. What you’re saying is you have no idea.”

  Murphy only frowned.

  “Knowing someone—the Major, some other guy,
whoever—is out there raiding the highway again,” Dylan said, “adds a complication, but that’s it. We do our jobs. Nothing changes for us.”

  Except it does, Jenn thought. Raiders might not attack the position directly, but shipments of supplies to and from Flagstaff would be vulnerable, not to mention trucks shuttling troops between the roadblock and Cordes Lakes. All of a sudden, the Militia’s lines of communication were at risk, a possibility Jenn hadn’t seriously considered until now.

  “We should get going,” Dylan said, then shook Murphy’s hand. “I guess we’ll be seeing you at Sunset Point shortly.”

  “The withdrawal’s scheduled for tomorrow, starting at midnight.” Murphy shook Sam’s hand as well, then Jenn’s. “Have a safe drive.”

  He offered his hand to Quinn, who said sharply without taking it, “I want to see them. The people we’re abandoning. I want to see them first.”

  Jenn didn’t like that idea. Before leaving Flagstaff, Quinn questioned the morality of this mission. She’d accepted what had to be done, but seeing the refugees in person might break her. “I don’t know if we should. Let’s get back to the rest stop, do this, and go home.”

  Quinn shook her head fiercely, purple ponytail swaying from side to side. “No, I won’t just ‘do this and go home.’ It’s a lot easier to think of these people as not really being people, isn’t it? As the bad guys? Well, they aren’t. The worst crime they committed was surviving long enough to become a problem for us. If we’re going to knowingly let them die, we should look them in the face first. Will it make what we have to do harder? Yeah, absolutely. But it should be hard. I want to wake up every night thinking about them, because if I don’t, I’m no better than Vincent Grierson.” She spoke the man’s name as if saying it aloud burned her tongue.

  The thought of being anything like Vincent Grierson made Jenn’s stomach churn. Yes, going to the camp might test Quinn’s commitment, even cause her to second-guess what she was doing down here, but Jenn was willing to take the risk. As long as it helped make her feel like the good guy in all this.