Stone Cold Fear | Book 1 | Powerless

by Fawkes, K. M.

  Powerless

  Stone Cold Fear Book One

  K. M. Fawkes

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  K. M. Fawkes Mailing List

  Also by K. M. Fawkes

  Copyright 2021 by K. M. Fawkes

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the explicit written permission of the author.

  All characters depicted in this fictional work are consenting adults, of at least eighteen years of age. Any resemblance to persons living or deceased, particular businesses, events, or exact locations are entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  There was something wrong with the sky.

  Well, less the sky and more the clouds, he supposed. Those clouds, to the east of Anchorage. The ones that were crouching above the mountains, graphite in color and rising up in such bizarre shapes.

  The rest of the sky above Lieutenant Peter Marshall was clear and blue. And those clouds probably just meant there was another snowstorm brewing, though these days, the weather could up and decide to do just about anything. Pete took off his cap and wiped his sweaty face with the sleeve of his filthy National Guard uniform.

  Having moved out to Oregon years before, he had at times dreamed of returning to Anchorage, where he’d been born. Now though, cleaning up after the third quake in four years, he packed that ambition away and started thinking about places where the ground was more stable. Of course, it was nearly impossible to find a city where some sort of disaster wasn’t waiting to pounce—or had already—but some things were easier to deal with than others. For example, he’d take a broken, bloodied body over a burned or drowned one any day.

  Burned or drowned meant they too often came back, making unwanted appearances in nightmares.

  And at this point, earthquakes were starting to feel about the same. The sudden rolling pitch of them. The moment you braced yourself, wondering exactly how bad it was going to be—and whether you should run for cover or not. The outright destruction that no amount of cover could prevent.

  The fact that they shouldn’t have been coming as hard and fast as they had been over the last year.

  “Marshall!” his captain bellowed suddenly—and unnecessarily, since he was standing only a few feet away.

  “Captain,” Pete answered in a neutral, barely respectful tone.

  “You enjoying your daydream?”

  “No, sir. Just taking a moment to rest,” he muttered.

  The truth was, he’d been working nonstop for over seven hours, stopping only to drink water and eat a few of the military-issue food bars. Captain Sadler, on the other hand, had been standing around slurping coffee and looking for opportunities to appear in the post-disaster media coverage.

  Pete had watched him, wondering how actual coffee tasted. Only the rich could afford the real thing, and he was far from rich.

  “Rest time is over,” Sadler said. “Gather the men. We’re being reassigned.”

  Instead of answering, Pete glanced at the heaved pavement, cracked buildings, and window glass that lay everywhere. They weren’t exactly finished with this cleanup job yet. Was it really the right time for a reassignment?

  “An offshore earthquake has New Yorkers swimming to work,” Captain Sadler said. “It took out part of their grid. The Army’s disaster control team has been called in to keep the peace, so we’re taking over their assignment. Going to be transporting David Clyde from Anchorage Correctional to Mueller Maximum Security.”

  Pete’s stomach dropped at the name. “Jesus, sir. Are we even qualified to do that?” This was certainly the cherry on the sundae of crap assignments.

  “Of all the units posted up here, ours has the most experience,” Sadler answered. Then, since he must have remembered that he was an asshole, he added, “You afraid of one man, Lieutenant Marshall? I never took you for a pussy.”

  Pete clenched his teeth. Sadler was uglier than a bulldog and had one of the worst cases of short-man syndrome Pete had ever encountered. He would bet his life that if something went down, Sadler wouldn’t hesitate to push a civilian into harm’s way if it meant saving himself.

  “And we’re under a tight timeframe,” Sadler continued. “Air traffic has been grounded into Anchorage, with an exception for military planes. Command is sending one back for us six hours from now. Which gives us six hours to get this thing done. Then we’re out of here.”

  Pete looked at his watch and started doing calculations. It would take them about thirty minutes to get from where they were to Anchorage Correctional, if they didn’t hit any snags along the way. From there to Mueller was about an hour and a half, but only if they didn’t encounter problems. How long would the prisoner exchange take? One thing was certain: He didn’t have extra time to stand around contemplating the timing of the mission.

  He shouted at his men and, when they’d formed a loose circle around him, explained their new assignment.

  “This gives new meaning to the word ‘voluntold,’” Private Osborn muttered. He was the only new member of the unit and had come in when one of their longtimers, Riggs, broke his leg so badly that he’d been retired to a desk job.

  It still galled Pete to have had a man injured under his watch. He missed Riggs, who was funny and could make the men laugh, even during the grimmest situation.

  The new recruit hadn’t exactly filled his shoes.

  Pete stared Osborn down. “Do you have a problem with our orders, Private?”

  “No, sir. It’s just… Everyone calls Mueller ‘Muerte,’ which is Spanish for death.”

  “I know what ‘muerte’ means,” Pete snapped, trying to maintain his patience. Yeah, he had misgivings about the mission, but he also had to maintain the rank and file. If he could boost morale along the way, that was a bonus. “It’s where the worst of the worst are sent, some of them to be offed, courtesy of Uncle Sam.” Then, in a jovial tone, he added, “You afraid of ghosts?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well, then. You heard the man,” Ryan O’Connell said. “Gather your gear. We’ll meet at rendezvous Delta Five in five.”

  There were sirs all around and the men split off to collect their packs.

  Pete nodded at Ryan, grateful for the backup. The orders had the men anxious, and if just one more of them had shown hesitation, it could have tipped the emotional balance of the whole unit in the wrong direction.

  Ryan always seemed to sense when it was time to step in. There’d been many times over the last few years when Pete was sure Ryan was the one who should have been promoted to lieutenant. He and Ryan had joined the National Guard on the same day, had been in the same training class, and served in the same unit together for the last eight years. They’d become good friends. And Pete was lucky to have him here.

  At that moment, his stomach howled, and he started thinking about which of the food ration bars he was going to devour once they were seated on the transport. At the same time, he doubted he’d be relaxed enough to eat. David Clyde�
��a genius and former university professor turned domestic terrorist—was one of the century’s most notorious criminals.

  But that wasn’t the real problem with Clyde. The real problem was that he had charisma coming out of his ears, and had used it to gather one hell of a following. Worse, those followers weren’t only the usual nutjobs who couldn’t wait for the end of the world, but also highly placed, well-educated people like CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, heads of charitable organizations, and, it was rumored, people from within the highest levels of government.

  Not the president, though. She was scrambling to maintain order during a time when Mother Nature was doing her damnedest to shake the parasite known as man from her back. She was, from everything Pete had been able to gather, on the up and up.

  And the last thing she needed was David Clyde, alive and kicking, encouraging his followers to make her job harder than it already was. No wonder the guy had been sentenced to death.

  “Fubar. As usual,” Pete muttered.

  “Lieutenant?” one of the men said.

  “Nothing. Carry on.”

  Folly. Captain Sadler should have argued that they weren’t qualified for the mission. David Clyde should have been executed on the spot by the guy who caught him. It sure would have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Except the president had wanted him alive, to make a show out of the myth that due process still worked. And Pete, well, as long as he was making arguments in his head, he should never have signed up for the Guard. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, a way to make some extra money during tough times, but now…

  Now he was seriously rethinking that. Because moving this prisoner from one place to another was going to be extremely dangerous. Clyde’s followers were certifiable nutjobs, and Pete didn’t think it was a stretch to say they’d do whatever it took to free their leader.

  Pete shivered, though he was still overheated from moving debris. They needed body armor and more weaponry. Standard-issue rifles weren’t going to be enough if they came up against a band of lunatics set on freeing a madman. He looked to the cloud formations hunkered above the mountains and thought that they were a perfect reflection of his state of mind, which could only be described as unsettled.

  As though to show it too was unsettled, the ground suddenly began to move, accompanied by the earthy groan of shifting tectonic plates.

  Knees bent, head on a swivel, Pete stood in place, waiting for the quake to finish. His heart beat hard, not thudding so much as clapping in his ears. Luckily, there were no civilians in the area, because the spot where the roadway had been heaved out of place earlier rippled in a way land never should. A couple of guardsmen lost their balance and wound up on their hands and knees.

  Captain Sadler, who’d been posing with his chest puffed out at the edge of a crevasse created by the first quake, was now in imminent danger of actually falling over the lip as the aftershock bucked and heaved.

  Pete began to move but, in a voice so low Pete couldn’t be sure he’d heard right, Ryan said, “Leave him.”

  The idea caused a blip in his stride, something anyone observing him might take as an easily explained stumble, given the circumstances. But in a blink, he was moving again with his usual sure-footed athleticism. Advancing like an expert parkourist, Pete jumped from one place to the next, and took a rolling dive when the ground under his feet shifted again. Captain Sadler was pinwheeling his arms and trying to lean away from the growing gap in the road, but he was going to lose the battle.

  “Leave him.”

  But Pete wasn’t that sort of man, and was surprised to learn that Ryan was, if he’d even heard right. For all he knew, Ryan had said something else, and he’d misheard. Tiredness brought on all sorts of misfires.

  Just then, Sadler’s weight teetered past the point of no return, and Pete caught hold of the back of his shirt just as he was going over, hauling him backward and away from injury, if not death.

  Then something exploded in the distance. Probably a gas line.

  Enough, Pete thought. Just stop.

  A crunching roar, and then a strange, breathy sound, like a sigh, and the land finally stood still.

  Captain Sadler’s eyes were wide, almost comically bugged out, and Pete fought the urge to laugh. And again, having to try harder the second time. Then Sadler jerked his shirt out of Pete’s grasp and moved, making space between them, which killed any desire to laugh, stress-induced or otherwise. Right away, Pete went to help the other men who’d fallen, and though he tried not to, he muttered, “You’re welcome,” to Sadler as he hurried away.

  He also checked his watch, already thinking about the delay and how it might impinge on their ability to get back in time for their flight. Sometimes he wanted to find the guys higher up the food chain and give them a shake. Too often, the men giving the orders sat behind desks and had little understanding of the reality on the ground. It was like they figured out the exact minimum amount of time needed to complete a mission and then shaved half an hour off that, just to see the peons scramble.

  By the time two PMs—people movers—arrived, Pete and his crew had dusted themselves off and gathered their packs. They climbed on board, Sadler on the front vehicle and Pete on the one behind it. The vehicles looked impressive—big wheels, camo paint, dark windows—but really, if you took away the armor, they were glorified buses with less comfortable seating. The men seated themselves on the benches on either side and started to talk as soon as the wheels began to roll.

  They’d only been moving for five minutes when something hit the side of the PM. Pete jerked his attention to the windows and saw that a mob had gathered on either side of the street. Protesters waved signs and shouted slogans decrying the government’s response to the climate emergency.

  Pete breathed a small sigh of relief. For a terrible moment, he had expected the protest to be about David Clyde, which would have meant that any secrecy had been blown. This kind of protest was ubiquitous these days.

  Captain Sadler’s voice came over the radio. “Don’t stop for any reason.”

  Zabinski, who was driving, said, “Lieu?”

  Pete could see the man’s eyes in the rearview mirror, desperately searching for his commander.

  “You don’t have to run anyone over.” Pete went up to stand behind Zabinski so he could see through the front windshield. During a recent protest, a woman had thrown herself in front of a police vehicle and been crushed under the wheels. Afterward, graphic photos of the incident circulated on the Internet so widely that even if you tried not to look, you wound up seeing at least one of them.

  Pete didn’t want the same thing happening here. He didn’t want the responsibility of more blood on his hands.

  Then a glass jar filled with red paint splattered the side of PM2 and coated half of one of the windows.

  “Crazy bastards,” one of the men said. “We were just doing what they should be doing—cleaning up their city.”

  Pete guessed that the same sentiment probably being echoed throughout the two people movers at that moment. And then he noticed two men and one woman moving through the crowd with a different sort of intensity than the others. A surge of adrenaline dried his mouth and tightened his stomach.

  “Go, go, go,” Pete said. “Radio PM1. Tell them to hit it.”

  Zabinski did as he was told, nearly rear-ending PM1 as he hit the gas and delivered the message at the same time. Their convoy of two surged forward with only six inches between them, and within seconds, something exploded behind them, sending debris raining down on the back half of PM2. Pete ran to the back of the vehicle to see what had happened, but between the smoke and the dust, he couldn’t be sure of anything except that a bomb had gone off.

  “Jesus, Lieu,” Zabinski said, voice a little shaky. “You just saved our asses.”

  Pete went to answer but found his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. He grabbed a water bottle from one of the men, took a swig, and said, “I saw something in the crowd. A couple of peopl
e didn’t look right.”

  “Good instincts, buddy,” Ryan said when Pete sat back down next to him.

  “Blind luck,” Pete replied.

  “I’ll take your blind luck over Sadler’s focused observations any day of the week.”

  They continued rolling, but it took a few minutes for the men to shake off the near-miss, and the sheer, stupid destructiveness of detonating bombs in what was a disaster zone.

  Finally, someone said, “I heard it’s bad in New York.”

  Pete was pretty sure that had been Olowe, but he and Sing sounded similar, especially with the noise of high tread tires on asphalt, and it didn’t really matter who had said it. He’d heard the same thing.

  “It wasn’t great to begin with, and without power—” Ahead of him, Yu shook his head.

  The vehicle hit a pothole—pothell, as the men had taken to calling them—and jounced violently enough to elicit curses.

  Ryan, who was seated on Pete’s left, said, “I think this one is it for me.”

  Pete passed him one of his food bars, but Ryan waved off the food.

  “That’s not what I meant. I meant this.” He gestured to the inside of the vehicle. “And that.” He pointed out the window to a building with a huge crack running up its face.

  “Can’t control earthquakes,” Pete said. “At least not yet.”

  Ryan elbowed him and then said in a low voice, “It doesn’t take a genius to see that we might as well be full military. The pay’s better and so’s the gear. The Guard doesn’t have any business transporting David Clyde to the bathroom, let alone to Mueller Max.”

  Pete agreed. Wholeheartedly. But he wasn’t about to say so.