Minus America Box Set | Books 1-5

by Isherwood, E. E.

  “This isn’t me,” he complained. “I just want a bottle and a warm place to sleep.”

  Bernard and the others were out there, probably looking for him. A remote section of his brain registered that as dangerous, but he’d been without his fix for over twenty-four hours. His body no longer cared about danger or rules. It simply knew what would happen if he didn’t have his drink.

  He went down the aisle until he found a glass bottle. It was a 750-milliliter of gin. It didn’t matter to him what was inside, he’d have drunk cough syrup if it was all he could get. He took the bottle to the front of the store and smashed the neck on the checkout register.

  “Open up!” he demanded.

  His first strike didn’t break it, so he had to do a second one. When the bottle cracked open, it sent gin spraying all over the register and counter.

  Poppy complained as usual, but he wasn’t listening to her.

  He lifted the broken bottle to his lips but happened to look at the front door. Bernard had found him and stood there quietly observing his breakdown. Poppy spoke again, and that time, he listened.

  “I see him now,” Dwight replied to her. Somewhere in his subconscious, he remembered he could get into trouble for being inside a liquor store. The words wanted to come bubbling out of his fuel-starved brain, but it remained mired deep inside. If there was a price to be paid, he was willing to pony up, as long as he could taste alcohol one more time.

  He lifted it close to his lips but hesitated. Bernard still hadn’t moved. It was unnatural.

  He slammed the bottle on the counter, nearly breaking down into tears. “I know what you’re going to say, but I don’t care. I didn’t come here to burn things, man. I don’t think I can do it again.”

  Bernard stepped closer. “It’s your call what you want to do. I can’t babysit you around the clock, and there’s a whole country of liquor stores ripe for the picking. However, you might want to hold off until you see the big event. Once you know what our true goal is, and how fast we can achieve it, you might think twice about going back to your old habits.”

  “Something big is happening?” he asked.

  The other man nodded.

  Poppy flew to the back of the store, but she whispered in his ear as she went by. She asked if he would at least let her out the door before he killed himself. Her blunt assessment of his actions made him reconsider, or at least delay.

  “All right, for her sake, I’ll check out your big surprise.”

  Bernard tilted his head like he’d heard him wrong, but then relaxed and waved him out. Dwight set down the bottle of gin, opened the door for Poppy, then walked out to his bike. He rolled it into the middle of the street, intending to hop on and follow Bernard, but the other man stayed back. In one smooth motion, Bernard kicked on his flame thrower, shot a stream of gas into the liquor store, and lit it up.

  The resulting explosion knocked him backward off his bike. It hurt nothing but his pride, but the jarring hit knocked some sense into his crippled brain.

  Bernard and his people played for keeps.

  CHAPTER 19

  Minot, ND

  Ted woke up in the front seat of a strange car. The world outside was flat for as far as he could see, and the starry sky met the line of the horizon wherever he looked. The driver had the car at a high rate of speed, but the headlights weren’t on, adding a strange element of danger to his spot in the front seat. For a moment, he had no idea where he was or who he was with. He’d been having a weird dream he was traveling with the President of the United States, a female Marine, and, strangest of all, his niece. None of which could be true.

  “Hey, sleepyhead,” a woman cooed softly. It sounded like Nancy, but he’d had a dream he was divorced from her.

  What?

  He sat up in the seat, sure his eyes weren’t working right. He focused on the road, which was whipping by in the night with barely more than the parking lights of the car he was in. And it was the president. Emily was behind the wheel. Ted looked into the back seat. As expected, Kyla and a Marine woman were back there, each asleep on their side.

  He whispered, “I’m awake.”

  She kept her eyes forward, which seemed to be a necessity. As they sped along, she shifted lanes, and he saw a dark shape as they passed it on the interstate. As the world settled back to reality, he figured out what she was doing. “Keeping our profile down by not using the headlights, huh?”

  Emily glanced over for a second. “We’re lucky the moon was almost full. We’re also lucky there aren’t many vehicles on the highway in the middle of North Dakota. I’ve been able to make good time.”

  “How long?”

  “Seven hours,” she replied. “Including one fuel stop.”

  That surprised him, and he couldn’t hide his expression from her.

  “Yep, you were so tired, you didn’t wake up when I went into the hardware store, got a siphon, and took gas from a second car there in the parking lot. I’d planned to use another car, but you all were zonked, so I tried not to wake you.”

  He was happy to be at the target city, no matter how they got there.

  “Were we followed?” he asked. When they abandoned the airport tug, he’d been on the alert for aerial reconnaissance aircraft, certain they’d track them down and take them out with missiles, guns, or the thing that zapped everyone else, but none of it came to be. They found the fuel-efficient sedan and had apparently avoided detection all night, given they were still alive.

  “I haven’t heard a thing, and the sky has been quiet. If anything was up there, we’d see it. The skies are so clear up here. It’s easy to forget how beautiful it is out in the country when you spend so much time in Washington, D.C.”

  He figured she was talking about herself.

  “Where are we?” he said, getting back into the proper mindset of the mission.

  “The signs took us through the town of Minot. It was completely dark, like power was gone. However, you can see the lights up that way.” She pointed out the windshield. “The signs for Minot Air Force Base have been coming hot and heavy the last few miles. We’re almost there.”

  The base glowed like a circus tent, lit up to draw patrons from miles around. However, now that he was awake and aware, he had Emily exit at a cross-street and pull to the side of the road without using her brakes. “Let it roll to a stop, then jam on the emergency brake.”

  He half-turned to the back. “Hey, Kyla. Wake up. Lance Corporal Meechum, wake up.”

  The Marine woke up with her pistol already in her hand, though it wasn’t pointed at anything. He held up his hands anyway and tried to be friendly. “Don’t shoot.”

  “Are we there yet?” Kyla mumbled. A second later, she glanced over at Meechum and her gun. “Wait. Where are we?”

  The Marine stowed the weapon in her holster, then sat up straight, yawning. Kyla gave him a bleary-eyed thumbs-up sign as Emily stopped the vehicle.

  “All right, guys, we’re going to leave the car here, but remember where it is for when we come back. I think we’re far enough away not to be noticed, even when the sun comes up. The airport has to be at least two miles away.” There wasn’t a hill in sight, but Emily found a fallow field with some high grass that shielded them from being spotted.

  They all carried their weapons as they walked through the high grass toward the airport. The runway was closest to them, while the rest of the buildings on the base were behind it. If they’d come in from the north, it would have been a lot harder to see what they were dealing with. As it was, he had the perfect angle to see the planes on the three-mile-long runway.

  Ted was proud they’d made it to the air base, but it was out of his knowledge as to where to go from there. “Well, we made it, Marine. What do we do next?”

  Everyone looked to Meechum.

  East St. Louis, IL

  Tabby and the two teens ran to the roof’s exit door with plenty of time to spare before the airborne drone arrived. However, after making sure Audr
ey and Peter went through and headed down the stairs, she turned to see Deogee and Biscuit running in circles all over the rooftop.

  “Come!” she cried out.

  Deogee seemed anxious to go to her, but the other dog wasn’t cooperating. She knew the puppy crazies when she saw it. Biscuit had been spun up by all the running, and she thought it was a game. Instead of going into the dark staircase, the dog instead chose to stay on the roof where it was lit by the fires across the river.

  The whirring sound of the drone came from somewhere nearby, probably close to the door and top of the staircase. She didn’t think it was safe to go out and try to chase the dogs, but she wanted to take another shot at calling them over.

  “Deogee, come!” she hissed, afraid being too loud was going to give them all away.

  That time, the wolf almost made it to the door, but Deogee looked back at the black dog, still running in circles. Biscuit wasn’t going to come over without someone grabbing her collar and dragging, and the wolf wouldn’t leave her.

  Tabby decided to let the dogs stay on the roof. If the drones found it odd, then so be it. Her primary concern had to be for the kids. She left the door open for the pups but chased after Audrey and Peter. They were somewhere down in the darkness of the old warehouse.

  “Guys? Where are you?” she asked, turning on her little wrist light.

  “Over here,” Peter replied from not far away. “We can’t see anything.”

  Her small flashlight helped her pick a way through the debris on the floor of the abandoned building, but she turned if off when they met up. “I know. Let’s stay here until we know what’s going on.”

  “Where are the dogs?” Audrey asked with concern.

  She sighed with disappointment. “I couldn’t get them to come down from the roof. They’re running around in circles.”

  “Maybe they’re scared,” Audrey added. “We should go get them.”

  “No,” she said sternly, “we have to stay here. If those things find us, it’s all over.”

  A metallic clang resonated from the far side of the warehouse floor, like someone had taken a big sheet of aluminum and pushed it over. After the noise settled, the distinctive fan-blade sound came from the enclosed airspace above them. She reached over and found the shoulders of the teens and guided them down. “Stay low,” she whispered. A second later, the drone turned on a small red laser light that swept back and forth across the room.

  Tabby looked up the steps to the dim light coming through the doorway thirty feet above. There were drones on the roof and drones inside. If they were going to escape, it had to be by getting outside the warehouse, or below it.

  “Look for a sewer lid,” she suggested. They’d used the same method to escape from the buildings in Chicago, so she hoped their luck would hold with a second escape. It bummed her out to leave the dogs, but they still hadn’t come down the steps. In fact, as she looked back up, the barking became noticeable.

  What are you crazy dogs doing up there?

  A second ripping noise came from across the warehouse, and a car-sized hole opened in the wall, as if a section had been torn out. The airborne drone remained in the rafters above them, but two of the horse-drones appeared in the new gap. They had red lights too, and the beams seemed to be part of their search mechanism.

  “Come on, crawl this way,” she advised. There were no obvious sewer lids by the steps, but she was forced to turn on the flashlight when they got away from the stairway. She used her T-shirt fabric to block most of the beam, leaving only enough to see the floor ahead. It seemed like she was playing it safe, but she’d not even gone ten feet when the red beam appeared on the hand holding the light.

  A female computer voice spoke from above. “Warning: This area is off limits by order of the Illinois State Police. Please confirm name and social security number to improve chance of rescue.”

  Her stomach turned to iron. “Back,” she hissed anxiously at the two teens behind her. They turned around in half a second, but the light split into three beams, one for each of them.

  The drone spoke again. Its voice wasn’t encouraging. “Warning: Avoidance is not advised. Your safety is our primary concern. Please stand by for security intercept.”

  The clops of the horse feet echoed from several places inside the dark warehouse. She believed the sounds kept getting closer, but it wasn’t until one of them turned on a spotlight that she realized where it was.

  “Ow!” she cried out. The source of the light was almost in her face.

  “Security inquiry: Please state your name and social security number. This is a non-human restricted zone.”

  “Non-human?” she replied.

  “Correct. Human inhabitants are confined to local headquarters. This area is off limits. The penalty for repeated noncompliance is termination.”

  “That’s harsh,” Peter jibed. He had his shotgun at the ready, as if looking for the proper target. However, the horse-machines had guns bigger than anything short of a tank. Vinny and Gus hadn’t been able to fight off one horse. Now, there were two. Their shotguns would be useless against them.

  More lights came on as the two horse-robots closed the distance. The big canons weren’t exposed on top of their framework, but she knew they were there. It was enough to keep her from doing what she really wanted, which was running like hell.

  A drone floated about ten feet above the scene, providing a small cone of natural light. “New directive: Please state the nature of your presence here inside this facility. How did you survive the National Reboot?”

  “National Reboot?” she asked.

  “Affirmative. This area was inside the reboot footprint. Please explain how you avoided detection and termination.”

  Peter laughed. “Yeah, because we want to help you improve your operation. If you expect us to answer that honestly, you’re pretty stupid.”

  One of the horses pushed up against her arm, seemingly wanting her to go somewhere. The floating machine offered a clue. “Advisory: Please stand against wall for positive identification.”

  As they walked the short way, mechanical squeaks and shuffles came from the framework of the robot horses. Though they were behind her, she figured out the sounds were caused when the chain guns came out of their backs. When she got up against the wall, the two robots had their guns at the ready.

  “We want to talk to our parents!” Audrey shouted in outrage. “You can’t do this to us!”

  Peter looked at Audrey and caught on. “Yeah, we’re just kids. You can’t hurt us. It’s against Geneva’s convention, or whatever it’s called. That thing about war. We learned about it in school. Look it up, assholes!”

  “Warning. By order of the Governor of Zone 21, you have been found guilty of trespassing, property destruction, security interference, impersonating new citizens, and willfully avoiding the National Reboot. How do you plead?”

  Tabby stood up straight, ready to go for her pistol. “If you mean we willfully avoided getting killed, then we’re guilty as charged. Who wouldn’t—”

  The machine cut in, “Sentence will be delivered immediately.”

  Both horse-drones braced their feet.

  She knew what came next…

  CHAPTER 20

  Minot Air Force Base, ND

  “What are all those aircraft?” Emily whispered from close by. The four of them had snuck across a field, so they could scout what they were facing at the base. The dark gave them cover, but he worried about infrared sensors. However, if they were able to drive a car across the lonely state without being spotted, he thought they simply weren’t looking for strangers.

  “They sure make it easy to see them, don’t they?” he replied. “It’s like they don’t even know a war’s going on.” The long runway was designed for the heaviest and biggest aircraft in the United States’ arsenal. He guessed it was every bit of three miles long. In a wartime scenario, the base would have all its lights off and the valuable aircraft would be spread out or st
owed away in hangars. The neat rows of fighter jets suggested it wasn’t a fluke they weren’t detected. Whoever was running the base apparently had no fear of being attacked.

  Meechum slid over to him. “I count fifty jets, twenty of the big transports, and at least seventy-five private jets. There’s likely more in the hangars, but the doors are closed.”

  He privately thought of how much damage he could inflict if he could steal a fully-loaded fighter. It would only take one strafing run along the row of parked planes to destroy a good part of the air fleet. The Imperial Japanese Navy did the same thing to the USA back at Pearl Harbor. It was almost a textbook example of what not to do. He was wary about underestimating a military opponent, no matter how inept they seemed at face value, so he continued his observations.

  “And you should know,” Meechum continued, “most of those planes aren’t ours.”

  At first, he thought his eyes had played a trick on him, or Meechum was wrong. The Air Force C-5 Galaxies were right in front of him, obvious to all. However, as he looked behind the first of the four-engine transport jets, there were similar cargo haulers from other nations. A big Antonov Condor sat in the line, as did a Chinese Y-20 Chubby Girl. Twenty of the largest transport aircraft in the world were lined up as one juicy honeypot.

  “You’re right. Many of the heavies are from other nations. The fighters aren’t all ours, either,” he added. “I recognize the Russian and Chinese airframes, but there’re some on the end I’ve never seen before.” He reflected on what it all meant. Were they there to protect the nuclear arsenal of the United States, or were they there to capture it? If the call had gone out asking other countries to help, any of the planes could have flown over the North Pole and landed in North Dakota within twenty-four hours of the attack. Why they were Russian and Chinese, rather than allies like Great Britain or Germany, he couldn’t say.