A tear began to stream down Michael’s face; he made no motion to clear it. “They came at night. I don’t know, two nights ago, maybe. Or the night before that. I don’t know anymore.”
“And they knocked on the door. Then what?”
Michael swallowed and took a breath. “The sensors kicked on but...by the time we could see what was happening, who it was on the property, they were already at the door. I told my dad we should both go to the safe room. I pleaded with him! I still don’t know why he opened it.”
Danielle waited a few seconds, allowing the boy to steady his emotions a bit, and then she asked, “Why did he? Why do you think?”
Michael shrugged. “I could see it in his face that he knew it was the wrong decision, but he just looked at me and said, ‘We can’t stay here forever.’ And then he smiled at me. It was the first time I’d seen him smile since all of this happened.”
Danielle wanted to cry now also, but a surge of fury blossomed inside her instead, replacing the pangs of sympathy.
“Then he told me to get to the safe room and lock it. There’s food and water in there for a month, and it was built so that it would take a bazooka to get it open without the key.”
“And you didn’t hear anything? There was no fighting or guns or anything?”
Michael just shook his head. “I could hear them trying to force their way into the room, but I didn’t hear anything that sounded like fighting. They probably tried to make him open the door, but I know he would have died first.” He paused and then looked at Danielle again. “Do you think he’s dead?”
Danielle met Michael’s eyes, lowering her chin to impart an air of assurance. She then shook her head. “No, I don’t.”
Michael looked away, down at his lap now, considering the answer. “Then why didn’t he come back for me?”
Danielle frowned. “Look, I’m not saying he’s not in trouble. He almost certainly is. But I believe he’s still alive. At least for now.”
“Why do you think that? What do you know? Who was that man back there?”
“I know enough that we don’t have much more time in here. And your dad probably has even less. We need to leave. Later today, before it gets dark.”
“How? How are we gonna get out?”
“It won’t be easy, but I’ve got a plan. And we have guns now. And a giant truck.”
Michael gave the hint of a smile.
“You saved my life today, Michael. And now I want to find your dad and help save his.”
Michael nodded, having no real choice but to trust this woman who appeared from nowhere only days ago.
“What’s in the bag?” Danielle asked.
Michael shrugged. “My dad has always had it. Said everyone should be ready to go at a moment’s notice. Passports. Cash. Things like that.”
Danielle nodded, agreeing that was a wise way to live. At least it used to be. She didn’t see much use for passports and cash anymore.
“We’re gonna go back to my place for a few hours and rest. And then later, a few hours before sundown, we’ll head for the cordon.”
2.
Goal 1. Map the Cordon
Goal 2. Find a Rifle
Goal 3. Kill a Crab
Goal 4. Kill a Soldier
Danielle folded the list and stuffed it back in her pocket and then glanced over at Michael who was slumbering in the far corner of the Flagon, his entire body buried amongst the cushions and blankets that Danielle had amassed over the months and formed into rather comfortable sleeping quarters.
Kill a Soldier.
Technically, it was Danielle who had executed McCormick, so she would take credit for the kill, though it wasn’t due to any need to feel fulfilled or to satisfy some nagging sense of closure on the fourth item on her list. Mainly, it was to absolve Michael from any guilt or trauma he may have felt for his part in the soldier’s death. The boy had delivered the lethal shot, there was no question about that, and had Danielle simply let the wound play out, the soldier would have been dead within minutes.
But it was Danielle who had squeezed off the round that freed McCormick from his pain, and that was the truth. She hadn’t told Michael the specifics, of course, only that she had shot the man who tried to kill her and that he was dead. Danielle knew of the potential for Michael to feel remorse about the man’s death—though, if he never saw his father again, that would likely dissipate quickly—so in the event there was some residue of blame in his young mind, Danielle wanted to shoulder the responsibility that came with taking another human’s life.
Besides, she couldn’t have guilt and hesitation clouding the boy’s thoughts; she would need his head clear and his finger steady for her next goal. If it came down to killing another of her captors, she now had someone who had demonstrated acumen and composure under pressure. Michael was a child, of course, Danielle could never forget that, and she would do what she could to prevent him from having to put another bullet in someone’s neck. But if it came to that, she felt confident he’d be willing. Escape was all that mattered now.
Escape the Cordon.
She had already mapped the perimeter and found the vulnerabilities, and if McCormick had been telling the truth about the army’s dwindling resources (which Danielle decided to assume he was; it was the only real choice she had), then escape was a possibility. Perhaps not a fantastic one, but a possibility, nevertheless.
Her second goal of finding a rifle she had accomplished ten times over and was now equipped with enough guns to arm a street gang. She wouldn’t come anywhere close to needing them all, but they’d be in the back of the truck just the same. Just in case.
Her stressful day atop the Mazda dealership had ended in the deaths of five crabs—another overachievement of a goal—and her subsequent skirmishes with Davies and McCormick gave her a proficiency for battle that would guide her through the challenges that still awaited her.
McCormick.
She’d been wrong to trust the man—that was obvious—and despite an Oscar-worthy effort to convince Danielle he was on her side, she’d always known there was something wrong about the scenario. There was no upside to him helping Danielle, aside from the pretense he’d used to ease his own conscience. It was the same bullshit act Stella and Terry had given, the moment when they finally fessed up to knowing about the experiment.
But Danielle had a trustworthy partner now, a prisoner like herself whom she would protect with her life.
Danielle checked the clock on the wall. Three o’clock. She’d give the boy another half-hour and then they would head toward freedom.
3.
The best chance at escape, as Danielle saw it, was west along the rocky riverbank of the Maripo River tributary, a once-scenic section of waterway that was now unruly and overgrown with trees and shrubbery. Though nearly impassable, the area had still been secured on either side of the shoreline, but instead of the high cement wall the predominated most of the cordon’s perimeter, this section of the western border had been reinforced with fencing. Danielle assumed the alteration in material was due to the fact that metal fencing was far quicker and easier to install in such terrain, with the cost of erecting a concrete wall no doubt a factor as well.
When Danielle had first mapped the far western section of the boundary, she thought it unmanned, that it had simply been fenced off and forgotten about, that perhaps the engineers and superior officers had calculated that any crabs who came to the barrier would be sufficiently blocked from escaping, and that any civilians who were still inside—like herself—would never venture into the hostility of the western brush to begin with. And, even if someone did trek that far down the tributary, there was still an eight-foot-high fence that had been reinforced with prison-style barbed wire.
But she had been wrong in that initial assessment; in fact, two guard towers had been constructed amongst a pair of spruces that rose on the opposite side of the fence—one on the north side and one on the south—and had been built into the tree tru
nks, allowing the guards to maintain their posts mostly camouflaged, essentially hidden from view to anyone who was more than a hundred yards away.
Danielle herself hadn’t noticed the towers either, not until she was nearly upon them, and had the guards on duty been carrying out their watch with steadfastness that day, she would have been imprisoned weeks ago and likely dead by now.
But apparently the lack of activity around the perimeter had caused complacency amongst the ranks, and Danielle felt like she was in the same room with the soldier when she had first heard the voice drift down from the canopy above. The soldier was a woman, and she had been talking casually, laughing, engaged in what was clearly a personal conversation with a husband or boyfriend. It was luck that Danielle hadn’t been spotted, but it also meant the effort to breakout would be a bit trickier.
Still, though, of all the spots on the perimeter, this was the one where escape showed the most promise. The second tower—the south tower—Danielle had yet to see occupied on any of her scouting missions, and this, she now assumed, was due to the dwindling resources that McCormick had alluded to the night before.
The north tower was never vacant though, and Danielle had kept watch on it for several days in a row, timing the guard changes, listening for the crackle of the radio that would signal when the transitions were to occur. As long as she visited at the end of the day and kept close to the bank, she figured she’d be nearly invisible to the guard above. There was no roaming spotlight across the area or drones flying above, and any noises she made as she walked across the leaf-litter would be dismissed as either fauna or stray crabs.
At the top of the southern bank was a cluster of large rocks—about a hundred and fifty yards east of the guard tower—which appeared to be the perfect position for Danielle to take the shot. It would be a long one, and Danielle—her ghost hunting atop Maripo Mazda notwithstanding—was no deadeye; but the view from the cluster was clear, and she would simply have to step up and make the shot.
From what Danielle had observed, the soldiers worked in six-hour shifts, which was plenty of time to take out the soldier—if she made the kill within a half-hour or less of the transition—and then find her way to the other side of the fence. Five plus hours was a long time, but Danielle knew if she struggled to find a tree to climb over the barrier, the hours would fly like bats from a cave. And if she didn’t make it out before the casualty was discovered, another escape would be nearly impossible.
There was a lot that could go wrong with the plan, no doubt about that, but it was the plan she had, and it was solid enough to allow her to cling to hope.
Danielle parked the Silverado in the driveway of an abandoned rambler near the base of a footbridge, and she and Michael sat silently there for several minutes as Danielle reflected on the plan again and again. She visualized the snipe from the top of the riverbank, and then her retrieval of Michael, at which point they would scramble back to the border and the cluster of surrounding tree branches. From there, they would pull themselves up and climb like orangutans, high enough until they could clear the fence.
At that point, they would be free of the cordon. Danielle didn’t know exactly where they would go from there, but that was a problem for a different goal.
Goal 5: Escape the Cordon.
It was all feasible, if not easy, just as long as her shot was pure, and they could stay relatively hidden and quiet as they scaled the trees.
The factor Danielle was dismissing was the second guard tower, that it would be empty, though she had no reason to believe it would be manned on that day. It had been vacant on every occasion prior, and if McCormick had been correct about the pulling back of security, then, if anything, at least one tower should have remained vacant, if not both. The latter scenario would have been a giant bonus, of course, so Danielle certainly couldn’t go off that assumption.
“Are you ready for this?”
“Why can’t I come with you?” Michael asked, not yet convinced of the general plan. “This doesn’t seem like it will work.”
“It will. And I’ll come for you when...when the first part is over. I don’t know exactly when the transition will occur—when the guards change—so I need you to stay here.”
“What does that have to do with anything? I’ll just wait there with you.”
Danielle was hoping Michael would accept her illogical explanation on its face, assuming it too complicated for him to understand and thus take it as a given. But the boy was smart, and he listened attentively; he wouldn’t be brushed off that easily.
“I’m sorry, Michael, that’s the way it has to be. Try to rest in the truck until I get back. You’re going to need your energy.”
“I already rested back at the bar. I’m not tired.”
“I’ll only be a few hours at the most.”
“It’ll be dark by then. I don’t want to be here in the dark.”
“It might not be, not if the change happens over the next couple of hours.” Danielle paused and leaned close. “But even if it is, you’ll be fine. You have a sack full of guns in here—which you obviously know how to use—and a tank of a truck that you will keep locked the entire time. Just stay low in the back and wait for me.”
Michael’s face was full of protest and discouragement, but he seemed to recognize the futility of arguing and simply nodded in agreement.
Danielle nodded back and then hopped from the truck, her new-model rifle slung across her back like a big-game hunter. She wished she had the original gun though, the one Scott had allowed her to take from his stash, and she now believed it had been a mistake not to retrieve it from the Mazda. She didn’t need it for the extra firepower, of course, but it was the rifle with which she’d prepared for this moment, and it was a model she’d known her entire life.
Oh well, it was done, and she wasn’t risking a trek back to the Jenkins’ household for a gun, not when she had a couple dozen in the back of the truck. She would be fine, she thought. Just look through the sight and shoot.
Within minutes, Danielle was crunching across the pebbles that lined the shore of the tributary, heading west toward the perimeter.
She looked over at the steady flow of shallow water, noting the level was as low as she’d ever seen, probably not more than two or three feet high. Another week or two and the riverbed would be completely dry, she thought, though she had no plans to ever see it.
By then she’d be well into Goal 6.
The receding tributary made for an easy passage from the bridge, the firm ground of the riverbed allowing for solid footing and dry feet.
Then, as if the very thought of drought were a trigger to the sky above, or perhaps to the storm divinities who controlled it, a raindrop plunked down and landed at the top of Danielle’s forehead, just below her hairline. It then rolled down across her left eye, blurring her vision for just an instant.
She stopped suddenly and wiped the drop away, and then looked up in confusion, squinting at the dark clouds overhead as if seeing such a spectacle for the first time.
“No,” she whispered.
She had never factored weather into her plans, and as she stared in dismay at the sky, she couldn’t remember the last time it had rained. Perhaps it hadn’t since the snows came, she thought, and now considered there was a connection to be made there.
It was strange that she hadn’t noticed the lack of precipitation over these several months. She had always been conscious of the temperature, of course—snow in May will do that—but not of the rain or lack thereof.
But perhaps it wasn’t so unusual after all. Her world was consumed by survival now—food and shelter and protection—and whether or not she would need an umbrella at the bus stop or to turn on the sprinklers for the lawn over the weekend were luxuries long since forgotten. And since the only water she drank was bottled, which she scavenged from a variety of sources around the cordon, rain, for that purpose, was never considered.
But rain today was not to be ignored. She bar
ely trusted her acumen with the rifle in the best of conditions, and in this drizzle—let alone in a downpour, if that was in the forecast—she trusted it not at all.
Danielle shook the pessimism from her mind and continued her steady trot toward the border, now feeling the pressure to reach it before the clouds opened and released a deluge.
But her hopes of that accomplishment were shattered within another two hundred yards or so as the drops began to fall in large, steady pellets. By the time Danielle reached the ridge across from the north tower and hunched behind the rock that would serve as her sniper’s perch, a steady rain was falling.
She flipped the hood of her jacket over her head and pulled the drawstrings tight. The thin windbreaker wasn’t completely waterproof, but the material was somewhat resistant and hopefully would keep her dry for a little while.
But if night fell before the soldiers transitioned and the cold set in, her neck and shoulders would become a racket of quivers and shakes, introducing yet another element to an already difficult rifle shot.
But there was another problem. The noise.
She had counted on being able to hear the sound of the radio from her den, but with the air now thick with moisture and the rain splattering in constant rim shots against the thick foliage, the crackle of the radio would be drowned in the commotion. The voices and whirring of the broadcasts that had carried so well before, transmitting clearly from the canopy of the trees down into the valley of the tributary, would be all but lost.
So Danielle would have to rely on her eyes, and with that thought, she pulled the binoculars from her bag and focused on the soldier’s nest above, trying to find the shift in movement or the color of skin that didn’t quite camo with the lush green and brown of the forest.
And she found it quickly, the figure, just under the awning of a sprawling oak. It was of a man, and he was cloaked in a hood that covered his mouth and nose, hiding his features almost entirely. But he was active in his perusal, leaning over the dark metal rail that surrounded the overlook, giving a steady surveillance of the area. It was more attention than Danielle had ever seen from a guard (a result, perhaps, of the spread of crabs that had occurred, she imagined), and had she continued all the way to the barrier fence as she did that first day of mapping, he would have spotted her easily.
They Came With The Snow (Book 3): The List Page 12
