by A. M. Geever
But this… This was like stepping into a James Bond movie at the part where the villain’s secret lair is revealed. She stood in a hanger bay, with a ceiling so high it was lost in shadow. There were blast doors at the far end bigger than a house. A row of vehicles lined the walls at this end, but it was what sat near the blast doors that stole the show. She roused herself, following the others to the helicopter.
“This is military,” Alec said as she joined them.
Kendall nodded. “It’s a Sikorsky S-61R. The Air Force and Coast Guard used them. Grendall had a contract with the D.O.D to develop an alternative, renewable power source, so they wouldn’t be reliant on fossil fuels. Across the board, I mean. This was the second prototype. When we went on to the third, well…” He shrugged. “I shouldn’t have it, but you know how it is.”
Miranda barked out a laugh. “I don’t think we do. It’s huge.”
Kendall grinned at her. “It’s seventy-three feet long and eighteen feet high. The rotor diameter is sixty-two feet.” He jutted his chin at the blast doors beyond the helicopter. “We modeled the blast doors on Cheyenne Mountain.”
“What’s that?” Phineas asked.
“How old are you?” Kendall asked.
“Twenty,” said Phineas.
“Never mind,” Kendall said, shaking his head.
Miranda walked along the helicopter, the metal of its body cool under her hand. She turned back to Kendall. “How big is this room?”
Kendall pursed his lips and squinted his eyes, which looked up and to the left while he thought. “I don’t remember,” he finally said, shrugging his shoulders. “There’s a pad outside that’s big enough for taking off and landing.”
Alec had climbed into the helicopter through the open side door. He turned around and said, “How the hell did you build this place?”
“It took a long time,” Kendall said.
“I meant who did you pay off, to do it so close to a major metropolitan area?” When Kendall didn’t say anything right away, Alec added, “Reporter. Remember?”
“You probably don’t want to know,” Kendall said, looking sheepish.
The sly smile stole across Alec’s lips. “I probably do. Does it still work? Can you fly it?”
Kendall shrugged again. “I don’t know if it will still work. I can’t fly it, but the fuel cell we developed still works. I’ve maintained it… It gave me something to do. But the rest…” He waved vaguely at the helicopter. “I’m sure it needs maintenance, maybe some repairs, after sitting so long.”
“All we need is a pilot!” Phineas called, excited. “This thing’s dope!”
Miranda looked around, trying to see where Phineas had gone. Alec hopped down, out of the helicopter, and jutted his chin toward the cockpit. “He’s in there.”
When she stood on tiptoes, Miranda could see Phineas in the pilot’s seat. He looked like a kid on a free toy shopping spree.
“Don’t touch anything, Phineas!” she barked at him. “Christ,” she said to Alec. “It’s probably got missiles. How much you wanna bet he’s pressing buttons?”
Phineas appeared in the open side door a moment later. “I heard that, Miranda, but now I’m wondering.” He smiled hopefully, his dark eyes flashing. “If I learn how to fly this thing, will I get that date?”
Miranda laughed. “Sure. If you can fly it, you’ve got it.”
Phineas’ mouth fell open. “Really?”
“Of course not,” she said, laughing harder.
“I’d go out with you, Phineas, if it meant you could fly it,” Alec said. Then he added, “Where the hell are we going to find a pilot?”
Miranda looked from face to face, wishing one of them had an idea. They all seemed to be doing the same.
“There’s got to be someone who can do it,” Phineas said.
“There must,” Kendall agreed.
Miranda glanced at Alec. The doubt in his eyes reflected her own.
“You can still use the trucks. To get home,” Kendall said. “And as many as you need to get the food there.”
Miranda straightened up. The helicopter was impressive, and if they could use it… Her mind raced with the possibilities. Then, reluctantly, she dismissed them for now. Spending time thinking about how to use this helicopter was like wasting the day planning how to spend your lottery millions.
“C’mon,” she said. “Let’s check out the trucks.”
23
“The bridge is just ahead,” Phineas said. “Looks locked up tight.”
“Good,” Miranda said.
The rush of relief felt good, even though they weren’t really home yet. They’d spent two days getting a truck in working order. Even though the truck they now drove needed the least amount of work, they’d still had to replace deteriorated hoses, drain and refill fluids, and replace rusted brake rotors. It had taken a while to track down the parts, since Kendall had moved things around when he moved the armory, but not kept track of where he’d put what. Traveling to Portland from the bunker hadn’t been so bad with a vehicle. Portland east of the Willamette had been trickier, but manageable. They just needed to get through the rest of the city on the other side of the river, and they’d be golden.
“Sorry,” Alec said, when he hit a pothole hard enough that it jarred the truck.
Miranda winced, her wrist flaring when Delilah jostled it. She looked over her shoulder as much as she could to check the bed. It was filled with crates of food, plus one or two of booze from the liquor store they’d discovered on the way to the bunker. They’d had to cool their jets for a few hours because there were so many zombies moving around, and hideouts might as well have booze.
“Nothing fell off,” she said, nudging Alec with her elbow. “I guess you can stay.”
He gave her the sharp edge of a grin, and the flash in his eye made her pulse speed up. Alec slowed the truck to a halt, then Miranda and Phineas and Delilah got out. She peered through the bars and mesh of the barricade. The barricade at the other end of the Ross Island Bridge was similarly intact. They were stopping because everyone had to pee. Unlike Delilah, the people were waiting to get inside the waypoint to do it.
“What do you think, Phineas?”
“Looks good to me,” he said.
They opened the gate. Alec drove the truck through. As soon as the gate was closed again, Miranda squatted beside the truck to pee.
“That’s better,” she sighed, wiggling her foot out of the way. She didn’t need boots that smelled like piss.
Alec rejoined her when he finished his business, looking similarly relieved, but Phineas stayed by the steel and concrete parapet overlooking the Willamette River. Delilah trotted from one spot to another, sniffing things.
“There’s a boat on the river. Looks like they’re mooring at the island,” Phineas said.
Alec took Miranda’s hand as they went to join Phineas. She felt a little self-conscious, even though she and Alec had been openly affectionate—a little bit—since they’d returned to the bunker. Phineas turned at their approaching footsteps.
“I can’t believe you moved in on my girl,” he said to Alec, amused long-suffering suffusing his voice.
“Believe it,” Alec said, giving her hand a squeeze before releasing it.
Miranda looked down to Ross Island, a tear-shaped atoll in the middle of the river. It was where she, Doug, and Mario had moored their yacht when they arrived in Portland last year. She saw the boat, on the western side of island, and gasped. Her heart leaped out of her chest, pounding so hard the guys had to hear it.
“Miranda, what’s wrong?” Alec asked, his voice laced with concern.
She gripped the parapet like it was the only thing holding her up, the concrete’s nubbly surface biting into her fingers. It wasn’t a boat on the river—it was a yacht. The bow pointed north, toward them, so she couldn’t see its name, but the size and color were right. There was no canopy over the cockpit, but that didn’t mean anything. It could have been taken down for
any number of reasons.
Mario’s back, she thought, a rush of emotion hitting her so hard she felt dizzy. Was he okay, and were Doug and Skye? What were they doing here? She was dying to see them—see him—with everything in her, which brought her up short. She was still…indifferently angry with him, if that was even possible, yet awash with anxiety, needing to know if he was all right. Coming back hadn’t been the plan, so something was wrong. Something had—
“Is it them?” Phineas said.
Miranda nodded, then said breathlessly, “Yeah. I think so.”
The dingy was thirty feet from shore when she realized it wasn’t them. The anticipation and anxiety collapsed in on itself, pulling the glimmer of hopeful surprise with it.
“It’s not them,” she said.
They stood on the riverbank, a silent trio as the dingy rowed closer. When it was twenty feet out, one of the people opposite the person rowing called out, “Ahoy!”
She looked at the people in the dingy, people who were not Mario or Doug or Skye or Tessa. Since there were only three of them, that was maybe a good thing. Whoever they were, whatever their story was, the disappointment tasted bitter in her mouth.
Alec crouched down and grabbed the rope the people tossed. A minute later they had disembarked. The man, who’d been rowing, introduced himself as Hussein. He was middle-aged and slim, with dark eyes and dark hair. He introduced the two women with him. The older was Fatima, his mother. She looked to be in her seventies, which apart from the priests at SCU wasn’t so common anymore. She and her son shared a strong resemblance, except that her black hair that peeked out from under her headscarf didn’t have any gray. She had an accent that Miranda couldn’t place, apart from Middle Eastern. The younger woman was about thirty and Hussein’s daughter, Salma, who’d interrupted her father to say, “Call me Susie.” Her face was rounder than her dad’s, and her eyes were blue. Like her father, Susie’s accent sounded as generic North American as they came.
“You’ve come from British Columbia?” Miranda said, repeating what Susie had just told her. “Vancouver?”
“I wish. Farther north, from Mackenzie.” At their blank looks, she said, “Yeah, we’d never heard of it either until we ended up there. We were on vacation. Dad wanted to see the Canadian Rockies.”
Hussein smiled as his head dipped in acknowledgement of his responsibility for ending up in small-town Canada.
Alec said, “Where are you headed?”
“Here,” Susie said. “We heard about the vaccine in San Jose a couple years ago. We finally decided to go, but we met some people who told us San Jose was pretty awful, and we’d be better off coming to Portland.”
“Beaverton,” Fatima said, a note of correction in her voice.
“Yes, nene. Beaverton,” Susie answered. She pointed to the bridge behind them. “That is the Ross Island Bridge, right? Doug said if—”
“Doug? Doug Michel?” Miranda interrupted, her heart leaping. She held her uninjured hand above her head. “Really tall and skinny?”
Susie’s face lit up. “Yes! You know him!”
Then everyone talked at once, but eventually they learned that Susie, Hussein, and Fatima had crossed paths with their friends in Eureka, California.
“And they’re okay?”
“Yes,” Hussein said. “When we saw them. That was…” He looked to his daughter. “Six or seven weeks ago?”
“That long?” Miranda said. “Then they’ve made it to San Jose by now.”
“I’m sure they did,” Hussein said. “They stopped in Eureka because Tessa and Mario were unwell—”
“Mario was sick?” she asked, anxiety spiking through her. So many things could go wrong when traveling long distances. Or short ones, for that matter. What had been so serious that they’d had to interrupt their journey? “Sick with what?”
“Pneumonia,” Susie said. “Dad checked them out. He’s a doctor.”
Hussein said, “They did everything right in terms of treatment: getting off the water for a while to get somewhere drier and warmer, antibiotics, but they didn’t have the right ones.” He shrugged, grinning. “We did. They were recovering nicely by the time we left.”
Miranda nodded, biting on her lower lip as she fell silent. She had no reason to doubt anything they were saying. All they could relay was what they’d known weeks ago, not what had happened since.
Alec said, “But you just got here. It doesn’t take six weeks to get here from Northern California on a rig like that.” He waved in the direction of the river and the yacht.
Hussein nodded. He crossed his arms and gave his daughter a serious stink eye, his voice arch with reproach. “Unless someone insists on eating questionable sardines and gets so sick she almost dies.” He looked back to Alec. “That set us back three weeks.”
“She’s learned her lesson,” Fatima said, patting her son’s shoulder.
Susie looked chastened. Her illness had clearly rattled her father and been as bad as he said.
“All’s well that ends well,” Alec said, smoothing over the awkwardness.
Within the half hour, Fatima and Hussein were sitting in the cab of the truck with Phineas. Miranda, Alec, and Susie sat in the back, the crates rearranged to accommodate them and the belongings of their new acquaintances. Delilah sat between Miranda’s knees, since Fatima was nervous of dogs. Alec held on to Miranda’s hand, and even though they both wore gloves, his thumb stroked over the back of it. He glanced at her often and, able to see that she was distracted, carried most of the conversation with Susie.
The roar of Miranda’s thoughts was deafening, ricocheting until they circled back to their starting point, only to begin again. Just like her tongue had poked at the empty spot of a fallen out tooth when she was a girl, her mind kept poking at the news they’d just received. Mario, Doug and Skye, and Tessa had been on track six or seven weeks ago, which meant they must be back in San Jose for several weeks now. She’d managed to put their journey out of her mind after they left, except for when she had nightmares. It didn’t pay to think too hard about where anyone who was traveling might be at any given time, given the danger it always entailed. Better to believe it had gone well.
But this time, arriving safely at their destination didn’t mean the danger had passed. Mario’s brother Dominic was the head of the City Council now. He’d ordered the attack on LO that had contributed to the possibility of starvation before Kendall’s aid was secured. She didn’t even know if the Jesuits still held SCU, since they’d been gearing up for a conflict with the Council when she’d left.
All of the anxiety of not knowing surfaced, jumping up and down in her head so hard that she couldn’t ignore it. Mario was going after his brother. He’d needed to be ruthless during his years undercover, but it had been for survival—to execute his mission to steal the vaccine. He still felt guilty about the things he’d had to do, the people he’d had to stand by and watch die, and the ones he’d killed himself to keep his cover intact. Dominic was ruthless in a different way. It came naturally to him and was centered in self-interest. Dominic never lost a wink of sleep because of the things he’d done. Dominic might get a pang of sorrow about killing his brother, but it would be only a pang, and would be about what he’d lost, not what he’d done.
Maybe Rocco hadn’t been wrong to let Victor work on the ham radio, not that she trusted Victor any more than she ever had. Maybe they’d heard something while she’d been away this time.
Even though she shied away from it, she needed to know what had happened to Mario, and if he was okay. It was over between them—for good—not like before. She didn’t want another chance any more than she wanted something serious with Alec. But for the first time since he’d left, she wasn’t thinking in terms of how Mario had wronged her, but of his welfare. However she spun it, she was worried.
It had begun to rain almost as soon as they got on the road after picking up Hussein, Fatima, and Susie, which shifted the weather from cold to creep-into-y
our-bones chilling. So Miranda wasn’t surprised that the group waiting for them in LO’s parking lot was small.
Immediately, Miranda picked out Rocco at the back of the group. He was talking to Mathilde. Miranda could barely move her limbs to climb out of the truck bed. Her body felt leaden and at the same time, filled with anxious energy. She could see Mathilde searching the group, trying to find Rich.
She hated this, fucking hated it—another wife widowed, more children left fatherless, a hole punched into the lives of so many people that would never be filled. She knew for a fact that Rocco had been talking to Rich about splitting up the responsibilities of commander between the two of them and River. In addition to losing a good friend, he was losing a partner in running LO and keeping everyone safe. Rich had been here almost from the start. He’d earned the community’s trust. His absence would leave a void that couldn’t be filled.
She took a deep breath and caught Rocco’s eye. He blinked, and she saw recognition in his eyes almost immediately that something was wrong. Mathilde had stopped and stood shivering as she searched the group for Rich. She only wore a shirt, with a thin cardigan sweater over it that didn’t look very warm. She must have dashed over from wherever she’d been without bothering with her coat. A confused hesitance had drawn her eyebrows together and pursed her lips. When she saw Miranda coming toward her, her china-blue eyes went blank, and her jaw slack.
“No,” she whispered.
When her hand dropped to her abdomen, Miranda missed a step. Oh Jesus, she’s pregnant, she thought, heart plummeting. Mathilde wasn’t showing yet, but she knew instinctively what the gesture meant. Rich hadn’t said anything… He probably hadn’t known yet that he would be a father again, maybe a girl this time after two boys. Mathilde took another step back, her head shaking back and forth, as if she could change what was coming if she refused to believe it. The people around Mathilde had realized something was wrong. They rippled away, as if misfortune were contagious.
