Escape The Dark (Book 4): Caught In The Crossfire

by Fawkes, K. M.

  “That’s a good point,” Adam said. He turned to Julie. “Do you know why they wanted their camp at the nuclear plant? I’m assuming the military didn’t already have a presence here before the EMP?”

  Julie’s face was pale. She stood absolutely still. She was terrified, Adam saw, and he felt suddenly horrible for what he was putting her through.

  “They have my son,” she whispered. “Can’t you understand that? They have my child. And they’ve told me not to talk about it. God only knows what they’ll do to him if I disobey.”

  She dropped her face into her palm, and Adam thought she might be crying again.

  Ella wrapped an arm around her sister. “It’s all right,” she said quietly. “You don’t have to tell us anything tonight.”

  And that was well and good for now, Adam thought, but what were they going to do in the long run if they couldn’t depend on Julie for details about this gang they’d fallen into?

  This just goes from bad to worse.

  Now he had to break both women and the little kid out of here, and he couldn’t even take advantage of his best available source of information. He could understand Julie’s unwillingness to talk, of course—while the militia held her son, she would never feel safe. But one thing Adam felt sure of was that as soon as they recovered the kid, they would have to make their escape right away.

  Which meant there would never be a safe time for Julie to talk.

  He was going to have to learn about this place from someone else.

  Maybe Clay would be a reliable source. The guy did seem eager to please. Adam wondered if he could get answers to his questions there without making it obvious what he was after. I’ll have to tread lightly.

  As if summoned by Adam’s thoughts, Clay poked his head in.

  “Guys? I hate to interrupt, but the general’s asking after you. I was supposed to have you to him by now.”

  Julie scurried back into position behind her lab table, as if afraid that Clay might punish her for having set aside her work. She picked up a pen and bent over a notebook. Adam glanced over and saw that she was scribbling down complex equations.

  Ella’s gaze lingered on her sister, worry etched across her face.

  It’s going to be up to me to act normal right now, Adam realized.

  “Sure,” Adam said, hooking his arm through Ella’s and pulling her to his side. “We’d like to meet the general too. Does he always take the time to meet with new people like this?”

  “He tries to,” Clay says. “It’s important to him to know what’s happening on the base, so he tries to stay involved as much as he can.”

  That could be good news or bad news, Adam thought. If the man was so preoccupied with trying to keep up with the affairs of everyone on his base, it was possible that things might be slipping through the cracks. We could be one of those things.

  Clay led them across the yard to a large tent. “You wait here,” he said. “I’ll go in and announce you.”

  Adam relaxed his hold on Ella’s arm as Clay ducked into the tent, but she didn’t pull away from him. If anything, he thought, she was pressing closer, as if she was taking comfort from having him near.

  Adam couldn’t deny that he was comforted by her nearness, too.

  “It’s going to be all right,” he said quietly, hoping his voice wouldn’t carry into the tent. “This is good news, Ella. We know where Julie is. We know what we need to do.”

  She nodded, but he could tell she was having trouble believing him.

  Clay reappeared before he could say anything more. “The general is ready to see you now,” he said, and held back the tent flap so that they could duck inside.

  Chapter 5

  The man in the tent was at least fifty years old, with steely gray hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a military uniform. Some of the stiffness that Adam imagined had probably been present in the old days had gone out of his clothes, but they were clean and obviously well taken care of. He sat behind a desk, but when Adam and Ella entered, he rose to his feet.

  “Welcome,” he said. “I’m General Eugene Thompson. Welcome to New Edwards Military Base.”

  Adam shook the man’s hand. “I’m Adam Parkhead, and this is Ella Martin. It’s good to meet you, sir,” he said. It wasn’t hard to pretend that he felt comfortable with General Thompson—the man looked like somebody’s grandfather.

  Ella stepped forward to receive her own handshake, looking a little more hesitant. “We’re happy to be here,” she said. Adam could hear the lie in her voice, and he hoped it was only the fact that he knew her so well that was giving her away to him. Maybe the general wouldn’t be able to tell.

  “Have a seat,” Thompson said, waving a hand toward two folding chairs that had been positioned in front of his desk. Adam and Ella sank into them. “Lieutenant Harris, you’re dismissed.”

  Clay nodded and ducked back out of the tent.

  Thompson sat back down in his own seat and examined Adam and Ella across the desk. “So,” he said, “you two are our new recruits.”

  “I suppose we are,” Adam agreed.

  “Well, we’re always glad to have extra hands here at New Edwards,” Thompson said. “I’m sure you’ve noticed that we’ve got a pretty big operation going, but if this base is going to be the governing body of the future, we need to continue to grow our ranks. So we’re very happy to have you with us.”

  So Adam had been right. Martial law did still apply, and this militia considered itself a governing body. But that thought was no longer a comforting one. If these people were the law, that meant there was nothing to protect against the violence that had been done to Julie and her family. There was no higher authority that could intercede and tell General Thompson and his people that what they were doing was wrong and that they had to stop.

  “Part of what we’ll be doing during your first weeks here is getting to know you better as individuals so we can figure out how you can best contribute to the effort here,” Thompson was saying. “That’s a process, though, of course, and I’m sure you’ve both been through quite an ordeal to get here. Am I right?” He gave them a paternal smile that made Adam shudder. It would be so easy to forget what he knew, to trust this man. He could see how a person like this gained power.

  “Yes,” he managed. “We’ve had quite a journey.”

  Thompson nodded. “Is there anything I can answer for you right off the bat?” he asked. “Any questions you have about our operation, or the role you might come to play in it?”

  “I did have a question, actually,” Adam said. “The man who was showing us around before, Clay—”

  “Lieutenant Harris,” the general corrected pleasantly.

  “Lieutenant Harris,” Adam amended. “Well, he told us you had been a part of the Air Force back in the day. But obviously this isn’t the Air Force.”

  Ella shot him a warning glance. Adam guessed that she was probably worried he would ask too many questions, that he wouldn’t control his curiosity and that he would give away the fact that they were mistrustful of the militia. Adam wished he could tell her not to worry. He was choosing his words carefully.

  I definitely won’t be asking this man any of the questions we tried to ask Julie, for example, he thought wryly. Just the fact that she told us she’d been ordered not to answer those questions told me most of what I need to know about how General Thompson would answer.

  But he couldn’t see the harm in showing a little bit of curiosity about the militia’s history. And every bit of information would help them out going forward. The more they understood about this strange organization, the better able they would be to make their escape when the time came.

  “There’s not much sense in an Air Force now,” Thompson said. “Even if we could get planes flying, which we can’t, nobody else has any planes. The only war worth fighting is on the ground these days.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Adam said, filing away the fact that they had no planes. “Incidentally, can you
tell me how it is that you have working vehicles at all? We were very impressed by that.”

  Thompson smiled. “We got lucky,” he admitted. “At the original Edwards Air Force Base, where I was stationed before any of this happened, we had a facility that was reinforced against the effects of the EMP. It was built to protect military assets in the event of a nuclear attack, but…well, the crisis came in a different form.”

  “So you weren’t the ones who set off the EMP?” Ella blurted.

  Adam froze. And she was worried about him giving away their mistrust?

  But Thompson nodded gravely. “That’s a fair question, and you aren’t the first to ask it,” he said. “But no, it wasn’t us.”

  “Do you know who it was?” Ella pressed.

  “We’ll come to that,” Thompson said. “I promise.”

  Ella looked as if she wanted to push the issue further, and she was making Adam nervous, so he cut her off. “So you were a general in the Air Force?”

  “I was a major, actually,” Thompson said.

  “How’d you get promoted?”

  A shadow crossed Thompson’s face. “I’m sure you can guess,” he said. “A lot of members of the armed services have been promoted since everything happened.”

  “The people who were ranked above you died,” Adam realized. He had been callous not to make the connection right away, and now he felt foolish. “I’m sorry. I should have realized.”

  Ella nudged his foot with hers and he took the message. Don’t turn sympathetic. This is still the enemy.

  She was right. Thompson might have lost people too, and Adam was sorry about that. But he was still the man commanding the militia that had robbed Julie of her family and, in all likelihood, committed the brutal murders he and Ella had seen the evidence of.

  And yet, for a moment, he felt a pang of doubt.

  We've all had to do terrible things to survive, he thought, remembering the man and woman he had left stranded at sea because he couldn’t take the risk that they were infected with the virus. If some of the people I’ve left behind were here right now, they could tell some twisted stories about me, too.

  But that was different. Adam knew it was. Every time he’d had to kill, or even failed to save another person, it had twisted him, warped his soul. He felt the damage to himself caused by every death on his hands.

  This militia seemed to kill dispassionately. And if Adam’s fears were true, some of them seemed to kill for fun.

  That’s not something you do to survive. Nobody has to do that to survive.

  So he steeled himself against the sympathy he felt for the general. “Major to general is quite an increase in responsibility,” he commented.

  Thompson nodded. “It’s been difficult, of course. And the circumstances we’re all living in have made things even more difficult. But I’ve done what was necessary for my people to thrive. Every member of the armed services knows that one day they might have to step up to a challenge. It’s nothing I wasn’t prepared for.”

  “That’s very noble,” Ella murmured. Adam had to hand it to her—he didn’t hear a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  “Not nobility,” Thompson said. “Just duty. I’m the highest ranking commissioned officer left in the state of California, as far as we know. So there’s nobody else to assume command.”

  Adam frowned. “California?”

  “Son, you must know we’re in California,” Thompson said with a chuckle.

  “No, I know that,” Adam said. “What I meant was…if you’re the highest ranking officer in California, why does that mean you’re in command? Wouldn’t you be reporting to a superior officer in some other part of the country?”

  “Traditionally, yes,” Thompson agreed. “But with things being as they are, the chain of command changes a little bit. Obviously I can’t receive orders from anywhere else in the country. There’s no means of communication that still works.”

  “You didn’t have a telephone in your EMP-proof bunker thing?” Ella asked.

  “We did, actually,” Thompson said. “But it didn’t matter, because the telephone lines themselves went down with the EMP. So the phone at Edwards still works, technically, but you can’t make any calls on it.”

  Ella shook her head. “That figures.”

  “Yes, ma’am. That base was designed decades ago, and the bunker was installed right after the Cold War. No one knew what the technology was going to look like in the next few years—this was right before we put a man on the moon, and everything was changing at the speed of light. I suppose whoever originally installed that phone thought that the rest of the world might catch up and create a situation in which it would be useful. But that’s not what happened.”

  “At least you have the vehicles,” Adam pointed out.

  “That’s right. And it’s a good thing, because the original Edwards Air Force Base is in the middle of the desert. Not a good place to try to rebuild society after the apocalypse. We loaded up all the survivors—a couple dozen of us—and drove down here.”

  “Only a couple dozen?” Adam asked. “But you have so many here.”

  “We were joined by the California National Guard not long after we arrived,” Thompson said. “And a few Navy and Marine patrols found their way in, too—of course, we’re all ground troops now,” he said again. “But most of the personnel here are like you—they’re not military at all.”

  “Where do they come from?” Ella asked.

  “Where do you come from?” Thompson countered.

  “All over, I guess,” Adam said. He couldn’t begin to think what would be the best way to explain the checkered history he and Ella shared. “We’ve been a lot of places since all this began.”

  Thompson nodded. “‘All over’ is a good way to describe where everyone here comes from,” he said. “I’ll admit a large contingent of our group consists of convicted prisoners. We rescued them from their cells—those who were still alive—with the caveat that they would fight for us.”

  Adam nodded. “I guess that’s a sensible thing to do,” he said. The idea of working alongside felons didn’t feel good, but neither did the idea of leaving anyone in a prison cell to starve to death. Maybe this group was capable of decency, too.

  Or maybe they had just seen the potential to bring a large fighting force on board. Their interests could be entirely self-serving.

  “I’m still wondering about the chain of command,” Ella admitted. “Why didn’t you try driving to another military base instead of starting your own in the middle of nowhere? You must have some idea of where other survivors might be.”

  “You’re a clever one,” Thompson said, but the smile on his face was directed at Adam. “She figures things out quickly, doesn’t she? I bet you’ve got to keep an eye on her.”

  Adam didn’t have to look at Ella to feel the blaze of her anger.

  “You’re exactly right,” Thompson said. “There are bases not too far away that we could have tried to drive to. We could have seen if there were other survivors, other people who could take command. But in the end, we decided not to do that.”

  “Why not?” Adam asked.

  “It wasn’t a desire to keep my rank,” Thompson said. “One problem we faced was fuel. Yes, we could have driven to Idaho or Nevada, but what if we hadn’t found anything? What if we’d run out of fuel before we could get back? Our vehicles work, but our fuel supply is limited, so we need to use it sparingly and judiciously.”

  “That makes sense,” Adam was forced to admit.

  “There are other reasons, too,” Thompson said. “For one thing, setting up a permanent base was our top priority, and that’s hard to do when you’re on the road.”

  “You had that other base,” Adam pointed out. “Near where we were picked up.”

  “We have temporary encampments now and then,” Thompson said. “But never too far from here. If we were to attempt a long trek, like what you’re talking about, we would need to divert a bigger force and more
resources into making it successful. It would take away from what we’re trying to build here.

  “And this base has to be our priority,” he went on. “We’re a military unit, yes, but we’re also trying to rebuild society here, and our citizens need the reassurance of consistency. They need a place to call home, the comfort of sleeping in the same place every night. They need familiarity and routine. Bringing them into an army to stand guard or go on short missions is one thing. Committing them to a long-distance maneuver would cause them too much stress, and most of them have been through too much already.”

  He isn’t really this kind, Adam reminded himself forcibly. He isn’t this understanding, fatherly guy who just wants to look out for everybody. This is an act. I know it’s an act, because he gave the order to kill Julie’s husband, and a kind person could never do something like that.

  He clung to that knowledge. Thompson was doing a damn good job selling himself as the benevolent patriarch of the new world.

  Adam wouldn’t be taken in.

  “But the primary reason we never left California is actually one I wanted to talk to you about,” Thompson said. “You see, we’re unhappy with the actions the US government has taken since the outbreak of the virus. We think things have been mismanaged from the start. And even though martial law is in effect, we’re perfectly aware that whoever is in command out there was the primary decision-maker on some of the choices those of us still here don’t agree with.”

  “Choices like what?” Adam asked.

  “That’s a complicated question, and we can certainly get into the answer tomorrow,” Thompson said. “But what I’m getting at is that we don’t trust the potential survivors at other military facilities. With the exception of a few stragglers, like yourselves, our group has been together for quite some time now. We are the only ones we trust.”

  “So you’re just planning to ignore anyone else who might be out there?” Ella asked.

  “Not exactly,” Thompson said. “Our goal is to declare our independence. We want to make California a sovereign state.”