“What’s your name?” Pete asked.
“Everyone calls me Wrath.”
Oh, boy.
“Okay, Wrath. I’m going to level with you. I do not intend to free a bunch of convicts today. What I want is access to the men in that rec room.”
“So do we,” Wrath said. “We’ve got some payback to dole out.”
“Not to the men in there,” Pete said. “They’re National Guardsmen. Our unit was assigned to prisoner transport. They’re my men. They don’t work here, and they don’t take orders from Andersen.”
“They sure don’t,” Marie said. “That prick killed my brother.”
Pete nearly rolled his eyes. He wanted to tell her to shut up, but showing discord to a bunch of convicts was not in their best interest.
“That’s why we want out,” one of the prisoners standing at the back of the group said. “To get away from that son of a bitch. Not everyone in Mueller is here because they should be. I wound up here because Anchorage Correctional was overcrowded when I was sentenced.”
“You see what I mean?” Marie hissed.
Wrath turned and glared at the guy who had just spoken, until the guy broke eye contact and stared at the floor. Turning back to face Pete and Marie, Wrath said, “How about we trade? We’ll take the cutie in blue as collateral until you can bring us Andersen.”
Pete saw something he hoped Marie hadn’t noticed, and frowned.
“Give me a minute,” he said to Wrath. He turned Marie so their backs were to the prisoners. He wanted them to think he was trying to convince her to be their hostage.
“I don’t have a problem with it,” she said quietly. “I’d like to see Andersen pay for what he did. Besides, I can interview a few of them while I wait. Get more info for my story.”
She was talking brave, but even she couldn’t be that stupid. Besides, he could hear the shaking in her voice.
She was bluffing.
“Lady, you’re going to get us both killed if you don’t rein it in. The fuck is wrong with you?”
“Fuck you,” Marie hissed back. “I don’t have to justify myself to you.”
That should do it, Pete thought, and raised his gun as he whirled. He shot Wrath in the chest, while his men, who had snuck out the far door, grabbed the remaining seven prisoners.
Marie punched Pete in the arm. “You should have told me what you were planning!”
Pete had and had not meant what he said, so he didn’t comment and strode toward his men instead. The more he said to her right now, the more trouble he was going to get himself into.
“Was this your idea?” he asked Ryan as he gave him a back-slapping hug.
“You bet,” Ryan said. “I knew you’d come for us. We were just waiting for the right time.”
“What’s going on, Lieu?” Lark asked. “We weren’t down here long, and the power went, then emergency lighting kicked in, but the friggin’ cell doors opened.”
“We’re thinking a solar storm created an electromagnetic pulse that knocked out all the electronics,” Pete said. “As for the cells, there was another one of Clyde’s followers working in security. The cells were supposed to stay closed during any power outage. Looks like he probably overrode that particular command.”
A few of the men cursed.
“Could it have been a nuclear detonation?” Olowe asked.
“I think we would have had some kind of warning,” Lark said. “What with all the high-tech tracking satellites keeping an eye out for that kind of stuff. And we should have been high up on the list of people to notify, given where we are.”
“You’re right about that,” Marie said. “I did this piece once—”
“This was completely sudden,” Pete said, interrupting her.
“What do you want us to do with these guys?” one of his men asked, jerking a prisoner’s arm up a little higher behind him.
“Hey,” Marie said. “Is that necessary?”
Ignoring Marie, Pete pulled the keyring out of his pocket. “I’m thinking there’s a mechanical locking system for the cells. As a backup.”
“Let’s go take a look,” Ryan said.
Pete and Ryan set out, heading in the direction of the cells on the solitary confinement row. The other men followed behind them with the prisoners. And somewhere back there, Pete assumed Marie was following along. Probably full of ideas. Probably arguing.
“That one’s a pistol,” Ryan said, and Pete didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.
“She’s a journalist, if you can believe it. Came in here posing as a nurse.”
“Jesus. There are guys I know who wouldn’t have had the balls,” Ryan said.
“Yeah, well, she’s like a dog with a bone, hell-bent on burying the thing even if it tears up its paws and rips through a powerline in the process.”
Next time, Pete was going to leave her locked up somewhere safe.
“I wonder how many pairs of black shoes she has,” Ryan said, then laughed.
Chapter 9
The keys worked on the secondary locking system on the cells in solitary, and Pete and his men quickly secured the remaining seven prisoners in their cells, with Marie dogging their every step to quiz the prisoners about their treatment while in Mueller.
As Pete closed the door of the last one, the man inside said, “What about food?”
“We really drew the short straw on this one,” Ryan muttered.
“I don’t know,” Pete said to the man. “One thing at a time.”
“You’re going to have to feed them,” Marie said. “Anything else is inhumane.”
“Can you please climb out of my ass?” Pete muttered, and she stomped away in a huff.
Ryan shook his head. “Have you considered just blowing this popsicle stand? This is way more than we signed up for. You’ve handed Clyde over. Job’s done. Sure, we missed our flight, but that doesn’t mean we have to ride out this mess here.”
“You haven’t seen what it’s like outside,” Pete said. “There’s a full-blown blizzard in progress. We could go out there, but we wouldn’t survive it. Not for long. And there’s no way we can drive out of here.”
“Figures.”
Marie returned, hands clenched at her sides. “You won’t believe what that asshole has been up to. Not only has Dean been assaulting prisoners, but Andersen arranges fights between the men for his own amusement. That’s how my brother died.”
Pete sighed. Yes, it was horrible. He totally agreed. But now was also not the time to deal with it. Now was the time to figure out what they were going to do about saving their own lives.
He tried to keep his tone gentle when he answered her. “I get it, Marie. You’re out for vengeance, and you want your story, but there are bigger things at stake right now. I promise you that when the time is right, I’ll make sure Andersen pays for his crimes. You’ll get your revenge for what happened to your brother. But don’t you think we’d better try to get out of here alive, first?”
The men watched this exchange with interest, enough so that Marie finally noticed and blushed.
“What next?” Yu asked, covering her embarrassment.
“Since we don’t know how long it’ll be before the authorities come to sort this out, I’d say we have to secure the rest of the prisoners,” Ryan said. “It’ll be safer for us in the long run.”
Pete wondered who those authorities were, and how they were supposed to communicate with them when everything was down, but Ryan was right; they couldn’t leave a bunch of rapists and killers and who-knew-what-else running loose, especially since they were stuck here with them until help arrived. Or the weather cleared.
“The first thing we need to do is get our rifles from PM2,” Pete said.
Ryan glanced meaningfully at Marie. “What about the warden and the guards?”
“The prison is badly understaffed,” Pete said. “The warden has been spending his budget building himself a man cave and using shock collars to control the inmates with as
few guards as possible.”
Ryan whistled.
“Yeah,” Pete said. “And if there was an EMP, which is what I’m going to assume until someone tells me otherwise, neither the collars nor the controllers are working anymore. It’s better to work under the assumption that we won’t have help. We’re on our own here.”
“Then PM2 it is, Lieu,” Lark said.
“At least we’re on ground level,” Ryan said.
Pete asked Marie to give Ryan her Glock, which she did begrudgingly, and they made their way toward the loading area, with Pete and Ryan in front, weapons raised. Marie, seemingly subdued by Pete’s promise that he was going to do something about Andersen—and the reminder that they had to worry about their own lives right now—stayed silent on the journey.
Ryan leaned close to Pete so no one else would overhear. “Do you really think the government is giving any thought to the transportation and containment of one criminal, no matter how infamous? A big chunk of the country is melting down. If there was an EMP, there’ll be looting. Transportation, banking, finance, and government services will be disrupted. Basically, everything we take for granted as part of civilization is up for grabs.”
“Look, buddy, I can only worry about one thing at a time. And that thing is going to be what immediately affects my life. But hey, Marie says it’ll make the auroras amazing, so I guess there’s that.”
Ryan grunted and opened the door to the outside world.
Snow had been falling steadily since the power had gone out, and it was still coming down. Drifts, between three and four feet deep, had built up against the vehicle and the side of the building.
“At this rate,” Ryan said, “they won’t find us until the spring thaw.”
As soon as Marie saw what it was like outside, she said, “I’ll wait here.”
“Good idea.” Pete wondered if he’d hurt her feelings, but wasn’t sorry for what he’d said. Then a twinge of remorse poked as his conscience. I will not apologize. He’d been right to tell her what he did, and she was safer if she hung back rather than insisting on coming with him everywhere he went.
Her story would have to wait. She’d become part of his team, and that meant he’d do anything he had to do in order to save her life. Story be damned.
There were bigger fish to fry at the moment. David Clyde, for instance, was loose in the prison somewhere, and he was an instigator. Given enough time, he’d have an army of prisoners ready to do his bidding, if he didn’t already.
Pete and five others dashed out of the prison and high-stepped through the snow toward PM2. Pete, whose nanotech suit had definitely stopped working, tried hard to control the shivering. This was a colder storm than he could ever remember having experienced, and he’d grown up in this state. There’d been a time when he could have guessed the outside temperature plus or minus five degrees based on the creak of his boots as he walked through the snow. Now, he wasn’t so sure. It was damned cold outside, and he was feeling every bit of it. His ears stung and the wind drove granules of snow into his face, forcing him to blink constantly.
“We look like toads in a hailstorm,” Olowe said.
“I guess we do,” Pete replied, trying to conjure up a laugh.
A few of the men swore, but Pete figured that most of them didn’t have the energy to do anything more than run for the bus.
“These clothes are done!” he said, yelling to be heard above the howl of the wind. “We’ll need to grab our packs, too. If you see something you think you might need, grab it! We’ll sort everything out once we’re in the prison again.”
They hit the PM and Pete threw open the door, which was somehow still free of snow. Then he was inside the vehicle and hurrying to the rear, where he opened the locker and began passing rifles to the men.
Yu tried to start the vehicle, but it wouldn’t turn over. “Go figure,” he said. “We end up with one of the five military vehicles that aren’t hardened to resist an EMP.”
He’d been trying to be funny, but his tone had fallen flat. The magnitude of what they were up against was daunting. And even with the cold, the sickly sweet smell of death was starting to fill the inside of the vehicle, a constant reminder that those bodies under the tarps were their friends.
Since the six of them couldn’t carry everything, Pete sent the men ahead with the rifles, then grabbed one of the mini shovels and headed outside to start digging out the hatch, which was where they’d find their packs. A moment later he was back in the vehicle, grabbing as many shovels as he could carry so the others could help him when they returned.
If he was even still alive by then. The shaking was so exaggerated now that he was surprised he was able to hold onto the shovels at all.
He dropped them in the snow next to PM2, took one, and started digging. Faster than he expected, his hands started to feel like aching blocks of wood. He’d forgotten how unforgiving the cold could be. A moment later, more of his men joined him, and in just a few more minutes they had cleared a space large enough to open the storage compartment.
Yu slid the key into the lock… but it wouldn’t turn. He moved his mouth close to the lock and breathed warm breath onto it until he got some movement, then lifted the hatch.
“Human chain, boys,” Pete said.
The men spread out, forming a line from PM2 to the door of the building, and passed the packs from one man to the next until they’d emptied the compartment. Pete tried to hurry back inside after the last pack, but his limbs were stiff and sluggish from the cold. When he got there, he found most of his men bouncing up and down and blowing into their hands to warm them.
They divvied up the rifles and shouldered their packs as they thawed out enough to move easily.
“What about me?” Marie said.
“Ryan, give her back the Glock.”
Ryan frowned, but he didn’t argue, and Marie took the gun with a grin and tucked it into the waistband of her scrubs.
“Use your ammo wisely,” Pete said, looping his arm through the extra pack. Sadler’s, he assumed, though there were several extras that matched the bodies in the PM. “We weren’t supplied for the current situation and we don’t have any extra.”
The men nodded to let him know they’d heard, and Pete went ahead with outlining his plan. He’d been thinking about the easiest way to go about the next hour or two, and thought he had a pretty clear idea.
“We’re heading back to the control room. Got to check on Andersen and his men. See if they made any progress with the comms. Once we know whether anyone’s coming to help us, we can figure out what to do next.”
The men swiveled and started walking, Pete in the lead, and he wasn’t surprised when Marie showed up at his side.
“You again,” he muttered, giving her a glance through the corner of his eye. He noticed the gun sticking out from her waistband and remembered how expertly she’d checked it after Andersen handed it to her.
“Where’d you learn to use a gun, anyhow?” he asked.
If nothing else, knowing her history would tell him how and when he might be able to use her. Because he was positive that there would be more gunfights in their near future.
She gave him a sly grin. “Impressed, were you? I did a piece on a neighborhood known for drug dealing and forced prostitution, and I thought I’d better have protection. I trained at a gun range.”
“You don’t seem to mind taking risks for your job,” he observed.
“Neither do you.”
“Fair enough. I guess I’m having a hard time understanding why you’d put yourself in harm’s way to get a story.”
“Maybe I have trouble understanding why you put yourself in harm’s way to serve your country.”
Pete was just opening his mouth to reply when a gunshot sounded out. The entire line of men froze in place, then ducked as one back toward the wall, Pete pulling Marie with him.
That gunshot had come from a fair distance, and wasn’t repeated. Whatever it had meant, it wasn’t
anything to do with the riots he was sure were going on. Pete gestured to keep moving.
Once they were walking again, Marie continued their conversation as though it hadn’t been interrupted. “Anyhow, you asked why I do this. I guess it’s because this is the only way I get to see the other side of the coin, you know? Get to actually get in there and get my hands dirty. Find out the truth.” She paused, and he could almost hear her hesitating to put the next line into words. “People are too willing to lie about what really goes on. I feel like it’s my job to force them to give up the truth.”
They arrived at the hallway where Pete had killed the two prisoners, then, and the whispered conversations stopped.
Ryan grimaced, then raised an eyebrow at Pete. “One of them do that”—Ryan tapped his forehead—“to her?”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “The one who’s missing most of his head now.”
Ryan’s mouth quirked like he knew something Pete didn’t, but then he shook his head. “Did you ever think when you signed up for the NG that you’d actually fire a weapon at anyone?” he asked. “I always thought of my rifle as a showpiece. A little prevention that went a long way.”
“That guy snuck up behind her,” Pete said defensively—not sure what he was getting defensive about.
He still wished he hadn’t made it a head shot. That had been too much, even in this situation. And he was sure he’d never be able to get it out of his mind.
At the door to the control room, he entered the manual code, cracked the door slightly, and called out that it was him. Andersen replied that everything was okay and Pete opened the door all the way.
There was barely standing room inside. While they’d been gone, several guards and some of the kitchen staff had made their way to the control room.
“Warden,” Pete said. “Can we clear the room?”
“I’m not going out there,” one of the non-guards said.
“You’ll be safe out here with my men,” Pete said. “We’re National Guard and we’ve served in the same unit for years.”
Stone Cold Fear | Book 1 | Powerless Page 8
