Blackout (Book 2)

by Clarke, Alexandria

  “I knew something was up with Sylvester. No one had ever seen him before. God, I can’t believe it’s been some kid living in my old house this entire time.” I kneaded the bridge of my nose between my fingers. “Wait a second. You knew, didn’t you? If Sylvester tells you everything that goes on at the camp, you would have heard about me showing up. Well?”

  Dad bowed his head. “He did tell me. Georgie Fitz shows up at Camp Haven’s gates with five other people. I would be lying if I said that I never hoped you would return here after the EMP hit. I knew you would be safe here.”

  “I asked for a meeting with Sylvester,” I remembered. “To ask him about you. He denied it.”

  “Ah, yes, I’m afraid that was my fault as well,” he replied. “I told myself that it was because I couldn’t risk blowing my cover, but the truth is that I wasn’t ready to face you quite yet. Not after everything that had happened between us. I was simply happy that you had returned to where you belonged.”

  “Where I belonged?” I scoffed and crossed my arms over the bulky vest of the tactical jacket. “Dad, you practically held me hostage here. Don’t you remember what it was like?” I deepened my tone in my best impression of my father’s voice. “Always be prepared, George! Get in the bunker, George! Don’t make a sound, George! If you do, you’re dead. You hear me? Dead!”

  The word hung in the air between us, spoiling the brisk freshness of the falling snow. My father, stunned, studied my eyes, the only part of my face that was still visible from beneath the balaclava. I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned away from him.

  “Georgianna,” Dad began. My full name sounded foreign to me. No one had called me that since my mother had died. “Is that really what I was like?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “I remember being vigilant,” he replied. “I remember doing my absolute best to make sure that you were always safe. I remember teaching you how to survive on your own.”

  “But you don’t remember the yelling and the terrifying life lessons. Of course not.”

  “I know I was strict with you,” he said. “But I never had any idea how it was affecting you. Is that why you left?”

  “I left because I was eighteen, and I wanted to go to college. I wanted to see a part of the world that wasn’t the inside of that damn cabin.” I scuffed the toe of my boot in the snow, sending a flurry of white plummeting over the ridge’s edge. “And you told me that if I went into the city, I would get murdered just like my mother.”

  “Jesus, George.” His chin trembled, and he covered his mouth to hide it. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. You have to understand what it was like for me back then. Your mother’s death—”

  “I understand now,” I said. “I thought about it—what my disappearance must have done to you—every single day that I wasn’t up here in the mountains. And I’m sorry too. I was selfish back then. You needed help, and I never showed up to give it to you.”

  “It’s a father’s job to take care of his daughter, not the other way around.”

  “You take care of the people who take care of you,” I corrected. “It doesn’t matter who they are. I should have done a better job taking care of you.”

  Silence fell as we returned to gazing out over the ridge. Once again, the burning embers of Camp Haven drew my eye. Darkness clenched around my heart and squeezed tightly. That land was home to a thousand stories, only a fraction of which belonged to me. Some of them belonged to Eirian, who was probably on his way to dead at Base One by now. Other stories belonged to Jacob and Nita and Ludo and Penny. Their stories all had one thing in common. They had all died at Camp Haven.

  “This is what’s left,” Dad murmured, following the black smoke as it rose into the sky. “Years upon years of hard work and dedication. Years of protecting a group of good people. All gone in the blink of an eye.”

  “You should understand why I have to go to Base one then,” I said. “Some of your people are still alive. My people are still alive. We have to find them.”

  “Have you seen Base One?”

  “No.”

  “It’s an old abandoned military base,” my father said. “I found it long before the EMP hit, before those idiots took up residence there. The place is a ghost town. It’s like whoever was assigned there up and left for no reason. There were still cans of food in the storage closets when I checked it out. The thing is it’s a ghost town in a fucking fortress. If you thought Camp Haven was hard to get into, you have no idea what you’re up against.”

  “Base One brought down Camp Haven with a couple of souped-up cherry bombs,” I reminded him.

  “Exactly,” he said. “I’ll regret not taking that threat as seriously as I should have for the rest of my life, but my point is that they made flattening Camp Haven look easy. And the guy who runs the place is a ruthless motherfucker.”

  “Buddy?”

  “Yeah. Sergeant Major Buddy Arnold.”

  “Dad, no one named Buddy can ever be as intimidating as they want to be.”

  “Believe me,” he said. “This guy can. You don’t want to take a shot at bringing him down.”

  “I’m not trying to bring him down,” I argued. “All I want to do is get my friends back. Eirian and Pippa and Pippa’s baby are there. I have to go, and I can’t do it alone. Please come with me. Please help me.”

  He refused to look at me. “I can’t do that.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because Sylvester was in the cabin when Base One attacked Camp Haven,” Dad said. “And I have to go find out if he’s still alive.”

  Chapter Two

  There was no point in going anywhere or doing anything in the state that we were in. Besides, we couldn’t come to an agreement on a course of action anyway. Both of us wanted to conduct rescue missions of sorts, but what was a rescue mission when you didn’t know if your targets were alive or dead? The blow to the side of my head was catching up to me. I swayed at the edge of the cliff side, taking hold of a skinny tree to steady myself. My vision swam, and the sight of Camp Haven, ashy and barren below, blurred into abstract shapes of fire and ash. I stumbled forward, dangerously close to the edge. My father caught the back of my new jacket, took my arm over his shoulder, and led me to the little stone house in the clearing. Though it was smaller than the cabin we lived in before Camp Haven existed, it had the familiar touches of the place I used to call home. One of the perks of living off the grid was an excessive amount of free time. Dad had spent his decorating his home with hand-sewn rugs and blankets, crafts carved out of wood or deer antlers, and books that he appeared to have bound himself. There were two beds, each with a fluffy fur comforter, as well as a living space and a tiny kitchen complete with a tap for running water. Dad set me down on the smaller bed and went to tend to the fire. The embers crackled and hissed as he prodded them with a steel poker. He added kindling, and without striking any kind of kit, managed to get the blaze going strong once more. When he stood up, he flinched, groaned, and put a hand to his back.

  “Getting old, are you?” I asked.

  “I keep in decent shape.” He peeled off his raccoon-pelt coat and hung it on a hook behind the door of the house. Beneath, he wore the familiar plain garments that I’d grown used to seeing at Camp Haven, another reminder that he was always closer than I’d imagined him to me. He lifted his shirt, twisting around to see his back. “One of those goons clubbed me with his gun when everything was in chaos. How’s it look?”

  A solid purple bruise stretched across the lower middle part of his back. I tried not to wince. The injury wasn’t a small one. If I’d been hit like that, I would have already been in bed.

  “It looks like it could be a kidney injury,” I told him. “Are you feeling okay?”

  He waved aside my worried look. “I’m fine. Just sore. You hungry?”

  I was, but food was the last thing on my mind. I lay back on the bed, running my fingers through the thick furs. This must have been where Sylvester s
lept when he wasn’t working in Camp Haven. My father had adopted a surrogate son while I was away. I wondered if Dad’s second child appreciated him more than the first.

  “How old is Sylvester now?” I asked him.

  “Sixteen.”

  He busied himself in the kitchen. I heard the faucet run and reminded myself to check out his plumbing system later. His house even had a stove with two burners. He lit them from below, and flames licked the bottom of the pot of water.

  “Chicken or fish?” he asked.

  “Fish.”

  “Good call.” He put a hat on and pulled on a sweater. “I’ll be right back. The ice box is outside. You know, in the ice.”

  When the door closed behind him, I rolled off the makeshift mattress and stood up to admire my father’s handiwork. It was amazing what he could do with limited resources. The house and everything in it was proof of that. I ran my fingers across the rough stone walls, studying the stucco he had mixed to cement everything together. I turned the faucet in the kitchen on and off then ducked under the sink to check the pipes, which appeared to have been appropriated from the salvage at Camp Haven. They led through the stone wall and outside, and I was sure if I followed them, I would find a water tank nearby. Dad had honed his survival skills to a sharp point. He was completely self-sufficient, more so than he had been when he raised me in the woods as a child. Back then, we fetched water from the river in buckets and boiled it over the fire to purify it. Now, my father had his own damn plumbing system.

  “It’s decent, isn’t it?” he said, having returned from his mission outside. He held two fresh trout. How he had found them in this climate, I didn’t know. Then again, I knew better than to question my father’s proficiency in the woods.

  “It’s pretty damn impressive,” I told him. “How do the pipes work?”

  “Gravity.”

  “Funny.”

  “It’s true,” he said. “Gravity and pressure. Took me a while to figure it out. I swore a lot and threw some things, but I got it eventually. I never realized how much I missed indoor plumbing until I saw that faucet flow for the first time.”

  “Got toilets that flush too out here?”

  “Afraid not.” Dad chuckled as he began preparing the fish, expertly slicing through the belly and pulling out the entrails. He pointed through the window above the kitchen sink with his knife. “The outhouse is several paces into the woods that way if you need it.”

  “I’m good.”

  He continued working, deftly dismantling the trout. He heated another pan, tossed some kind of oil into the bottom, and threw the fish in. The pan hissed and sizzled as Dad took a container from a wood cabinet.

  “You still like tea, right?” he asked, peering into the container. “Or did Denver turn you into a Starbucks coffee kind of girl?”

  “Tea’s fine.”

  “Oh, good.” He scooped a mixture of leaves and herbs from the container, transferred them to the pot of water, and began to stir. The aromas of cinnamon and cloves filled the cabin. “I grew this stuff myself. Did you know you have to wait until a tea plant is three years old before you can harvest the leaves?”

  “Yeah, I was there when you planted the first one, remember?”

  “Right.”

  I wandered over to the mantel above the fireplace. Two pictures, each housed in a handmade wooden frame, rested on either end. I picked up the first. It was faded and worn, the colors bleached by the sun that found its way inside through the window, but I recognized it anyway. It was taken a few weeks before my mother’s murder. The three of us—Mom, Dad, and me—stood in front of Denver’s Downtown Aquarium. It was the last trip that we ever took as a family. I brought the photo closer, squinting at my mother’s features, wishing that the picture wasn’t so washed out. After all these years without her, I’d forgotten what she looked like. Dad had abandoned all of our photo albums when we’d left the city, as if he didn’t want the reminders of his wife’s tragic end. Now I saw that my mother and I shared the same oval face shape, arched eyebrows, and inquisitive lips. Other than my purple hair, I was a mirror image of the woman in the photo. No wonder Dad looked at me like he was seeing a ghost. To him, the two dead women of his family had come back to haunt him all at once.

  The next picture over was newer, less affected by the sun. It was a Polaroid—strange considering my father had never owned the camera. In it, my father posed next to a young boy who was about ten years old. The boy was tall for his age and impossibly thin, as if he’d hit a growth spurt the second before the photo was taken. He had dark olive skin, deep brown eyes, and curly black hair. He wore cargo shorts and a threadbare T-shirt with sleeves that hung past his elbows. I recognized the shirt, a Big Dogs graphic tee with the slogan “If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay off the porch!” printed on the back. Originally, it belonged to my father.

  “Is this him?” I asked Dad, brandishing the picture. “Is this Sylvester?”

  He wiped his hands and tossed the dish towel over his shoulder. “That’s him.”

  “He doesn’t really look like a Sylvester.”

  “Yeah, I named him that,” Dad said, jimmying the fish pan over the burner so that the trout slid back and forth. “He wouldn’t tell me his real one. Said he didn’t want to be that boy anymore. And Sylvester—”

  “Comes from the Latin adjective for ‘wild,’” I finished. “I remember. Years ago, you told me that’s what you would have named me if I had been a boy.”

  “Much to your mother’s chagrin.”

  I carried the picture over to him and placed it on the counter next to the stove, right in the line of Dad’s eyesight. “Tell me something. If you care so much about this kid, why are you up here filleting trout instead of down there looking for him?”

  The lines around his mouth deepened into a frown, but he kept his gaze peeled on the fish. “Don’t start, George.”

  “We’re wasting time. They could be dying. Sylvester, Eirian, Pippa—”

  “And we’ll be dead too if we don’t rest before we go down there,” Dad said. “Look at you. You nearly fainted outside a few minutes ago. That was one hell of a crack that you took to the head. And when was the last time you slept? By the looks of it, you haven’t gotten much shut eye in the past several days.”

  He was right. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept for more than a couple fitful hours at a time. At this point, I was running on pure determination.

  “Take a nap,” he said, nodding at the bed. “The food will be ready when you wake up. Then we can come up with a plan. Being tired and hungry isn’t going to get us anywhere.”

  As he said it, my eyes watered and burned from exhaustion. Each blink grew heavier than the last. I drifted toward the bed. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “I am right.”

  I sat down on the fur blankets, kicked off my boots, and cozied up. “Just an hour or two. Then we go look for them. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  The house was dark, except for the fire in the hearth, when I woke up. Night had fallen. The stove burners had been extinguished. A single cooked trout waited for someone to eat it on the counter next to the sink, along with a mug of tea that I assumed was now cold. I looked at the next bed over. Dad was dead asleep, ensconced beneath the blankets. He had not woken me when dinner was ready, and while I felt more rested than I had in several days, resentment left a bitter taste on my tongue. He had never intended to rush out of his cozy campsite to check on the people that we’d abandoned after the attack. Once again, his own fears stopped him from being a decent person.

  I slipped out from under the covers, grabbed my boots, and tiptoed across the room. As I passed the coat hooks, I grabbed my tactical jacket and balaclava, gently collected the rifle, and snuck out through the front door. The hinges creaked, but Dad snoozed on. I sat on the stoop and laced up my boots before my toes could freeze together and fall off. The snow kept falling, as if it magically never stopped in this section o
f the mountains. When I was all wrapped up, I shouldered the rifle, checked the compass on my watch, and started on my way down. No matter what Dad said, it was my duty to check out Base One for myself.

  It was slow going, especially without a flashlight or a torch. The light of the moon led the way, glistening off of the snow. Most of the ground was untouched. The rabbits, raccoons, and other woodland creatures were all holed up out of the cold. The farther I walked, the more I wished to be back in my father’s stone home, warm and safe beneath the blankets. Out here, as I navigated the sharp rock ledges, I was more likely to break an ankle or catch pneumonia. I mis-stepped, skidding over the edge of a rock face and landing flat on my back several feet below. The snow did nothing to cushion the fall, which knocked the wind out of me.

  “I am an idiot,” I muttered to no one in particular as I groaned, rolled over, and pushed myself up to my feet again. “Watch where you step, Georgie. You’re no good dead.”

  Great. Now I was starting to sound exactly like my paranoid father.

  As I continued on, I realized I had made another rookie mistake. When my father had led me up the mountain to his home, I wasn’t paying attention to our route. I had no idea where Base One was in relation to my position anymore. Every tree looked the same. Every rock was a copy of the one I’d just passed ten minutes ago. Base One was south of here, west of Camp Haven. That was all I had to go.

  I wandered on through the woods, this time clocking my path so that I would remember how to make it back to my father’s camp. After an hour or so, with no sign of Base One in sight, I turned around to look at the trail of footsteps that I’d left. Maybe it was safer to go back. Getting lost in an unfamiliar part of the forest was one of the easiest ways to get dead.