The colonel tilted his head back the way they’d come and explained. “We split up into companies before we left. This is a resort town, so there are a bunch of hotels up and down the lake. We’re using three of them.”
Jensen looked up at the massive building. “I’m pretty sure we could all fit in here. There have to be close to two hundred rooms in there.”
“One hundred and thirty-one,” the colonel told him, “and we were planning to set up shop here, but we had a change in plans after the bombing run. Better survivability if we’re not all clustered together.”
“Makes sense,” Jessica said. “What company are we?”
“You and your friends aren’t in a company just yet. I think you’ll stay part of HHC,” Strenke told her.
She looked at him with confusion. “What’s an HHC?”
“Oh, that’s right, you were Air Force.” He smiled, “HHC stands for Headquarters and Headquarters Company.”
“So, it’s like a Squadron?” she asked him.
“Sort of like a Squadron,” he answered. “It doesn’t really translate directly from Army to Air Force.”
Jessica smirked. “I can’t wait to tell Daniel.”
Strenke perked up. “Why?”
“I’m pretty sure your HHC is about the same as our Commander’s Support Staff, and he just loved dealing with CSS,” she answered.
The colonel chuckled. “I’m pretty sure THAT translates directly. Nobody likes dealing with bureaucracy.”
Chapter 26
Jensen clicked on the light and looked around the little room with appreciation. It wasn’t particularly grand, but it was a hell of a lot better than sleeping on a cot with a wool blanket and no air conditioning. At least this place had regular sheets and blankets—and pillows. His neck still ached from sleeping without one.
“Which one do you want?” he asked Jessica.
With a confused look, she said, “We’re going to be in separate beds?”
He donned a serious expression as he said, “Of course. Gotta leave room for Jesus.” He couldn’t hold it though, and quickly broke into a smile. “I just want to know which one we’re going to be using so I can dump my stuff onto the other bed.
“Watch it, punk,” she told him, “or the space we leave for Jesus is going to have a wall and your only girlfriend will be the one that’s in a splint right now.”
He gave her a quick kiss. “We’re on the second floor, so the one by the window?”
Jessica agreed. When she was on her own in a hotel, she tried to get a room on anything except the ground floor. She was paranoid about a man coming through the window in the night. If she was stuck on the ground floor, she slept as far away from the window as possible. If she was on anything except a ground floor, she slept as far away from the door as possible, even going so far as to sleep on the opposite side of the bed so she could slide off the edge and use it as a barrier if she had to.
She doubted that was the reason Jensen had selected the far bed. “What made you pick that one?”
He pointed at the window first. “Second floor: less likely to have attempted ingress from the window.” Then he pointed at the door. “Further away gives me more time to react if someone tries to come through the door.”
“Solid rationale,” she said. “I was thinking along those lines, too.” She dropped her backpack and rifle onto the near bed. “I’m going to see if there’s hot water. I’m dying for a real shower.”
Jessica walked through the door and clicked on both switches, which turned on a light and the fan. Instead of reaching for the water, she reached back and closed the door. Jensen could hear the click as it locked.
He snorted and shook his head as he dropped his own gear and reached into his pack. Probably the right thing to do. If she hadn’t locked it, he probably would have joined her in the shower. Now he was pretty sure she was going to use the toilet, first. Better not to walk in on that.
Jensen shifted some STANAG magazines around and retrieved a brown package from the depths of his pack. It looked like an MRE package, but the print was different. Instead, it said XMRE 1300XT. He’d been holding off on this one since he didn’t know how it would be. MREs were bad enough, but this seemed like a civilian version.
Maybe it would be better? Civilians weren’t forced to eat them, so it was possible they might actually taste like food. Free market and all. Jensen tore open the package to get to the contents. Inside, everything looked like a regular MRE. This one claimed to contain chicken pesto pasta, which sounded pretty good.
Jensen didn’t remember having that entrée before, so things were looking up. The rest of the package was standard fare: crackers, jelly, dried-fruit mix, electrolyte drink, and a chocolate chip cookie. He immediately tossed the crackers and jelly back into his pack. He was hungry, but not that hungry. He’d have to be legitimately starving to attempt to eat those.
The package with the instant coffee and sugar he put aside for the morning after removing the salt packets and the spoon from the plastic. Jensen pulled out his water bottle and carefully tipped it over the heating pouch. He scrutinized it carefully and saw that the water level wasn’t up to the bottom fill-line. Another tip and the water level barely moved.
The third splash seemed like too little, but when he looked, the water was slightly above the top fill-line. Son of a bitch. Every fucking time. It didn’t matter, the heater would work anyway, but it seemed like he was outside the lines every time. After sliding the entrée pouch into the heater, he set it on the bed with the heater side down and picked up the cardboard sleeve.
It was the military version of reading the cereal box at breakfast. Chicken breast with rib meat and pasta in pesto sauce. 370 calories. 29g of protein. Well, lots of protein was good. Maybe not all the fat and carbs, or the sodium, but definitely protein.
Jensen was well into the ingredients list and munching on the dried fruit before he was startled by the toilet flushing. It sounded like extremely loud in the quiet evening air. He tried to calculate how long she had been sitting there and failed. It was definitely a while; her stomach must have been on fire.
Jensen finished the dried fruit and checked the entrée. The bottom third was nice and hot, but the rest of it was still ice cold. He opened up the sleeve and flipped the entrée before starting in on the cookie. It wasn’t moist and chewy like the chocolate chip cookies his mother had made, but the sweet and crumbly cookie was still better than what he’d picked up at the shoppette back at Fort Benning.
He almost laughed when he heard the toilet flush again. Poor girl. She must be going through something like Benton had back in the tub after he had the beef patty MRE. Jensen stuffed the empty plastic from the cookie back into the XMRE back and walked over to the window. There was no balcony outside their room, so he unlocked the windows and pulled them up. He didn’t trust the fan to protect him from the horrors going on inside of that small room.
Deciding to give her some privacy, he snatched up the spoon, and now mostly heated entrée pack, and headed for the door, stopping only to pick up the electronic keycard from the nightstand. After the recent days with no electricity, Jensen swore he’d never take it for granted again. Electricity was glorious. The sounds of a shower started as he walked past the bathroom. He was looking forward to his own hot shower after she was done.
Jensen quietly pulled the door shut behind him and started down the hall toward the historic section of the building. The air still felt a little damp, probably because the air conditioners hadn’t been going when they arrived. One benefit of air conditioning was removal of some of the humidity from the air. Since they were next to a decent-sized lake, it could take a while.
It was strange having nothing to do and nowhere to be. Colonel Strenke had told them to go to their rooms and relax. He’d talk to them in the morning. A younger man had assigned them to rooms near each other and swiped plastic cards through a machine to give them access. They each had their own rooms on the second floo
r of the east wing of the hotel.
Both Marcy and Jessica had thanked the man and refused their own rooms, but Analiz had kept her room between Brent and Dave. The look on Dave’s face had been priceless. He’d clearly been hoping she would choose to share a room with him, and when she didn’t, his crestfallen expression was evident.
Jensen and Jessica had the room closest to the 1921 structure and the stairs. Next to them were Marcy and Daniel. Further down the hall, Brent, Analiz, and Dave each had rooms. As he spooned the pesto mixture into his mouth, he walked down the stairs to the first floor to explore. This time, there was nobody at the front desk. It felt like the hotel was deserted.
This new place felt strange, almost hallowed. It seemed extraordinarily peaceful after the events of the previous weeks, which had been spent on the run or engaged in short battles with Snead’s men. He stopped near the edge of the dining room and just breathed in and out as the shadows started to stretch across the room.
Garlic, definitely garlic. Jensen admonished himself for not finishing the ingredients list before he started eating. He was going to have to be careful making out with Jessica later.
“It’s peaceful here, isn’t it?” a voice said. Jensen recognized it as Brent’s after a moment. The older man was sitting near the windows.
“It really is,” he agreed. “It feels like it’s insulated from the rest of the world.” Jensen moved over to the table and sat down across from Brent. “We haven’t really had a chance to talk. How are you doing?”
Brent smiled with a hint of sadness. “I’m good. Really good.”
The statement surprised Jensen. When he had departed from the group near Clayton, they had been convinced he was going home to die. He had said he was going to be ‘with his wife’ back at home. They all knew she had died.
“Really? We were worried about you. We thought you were, you know, planning to move on to the next life,” Jensen said delicately.
The older man chuckled. “Oh, you were absolutely right. I went home to die. I didn’t want to spend another day separated from Rebecca.”
Jensen put the spoon into the empty pouch and set it down on the table. “And now?” He looked up into Brent’s eyes. “Something has changed?”
Brent sighed. “That hasn’t changed. I still want to be with her as soon as possible. It breaks my heart to be alive in this world instead of in the next. What has changed is that I’m no longer going to try to speed up the process. I placed my life in God’s hands, and God decided it wasn’t my time just yet.”
Jensen thought back to his conversations with Daniel and Colonel Simmons. Brent had been saved by a combat medic on a Blackhawk helicopter, probably just in time. It didn’t seem like a miracle, just a really lucky circumstance. Simmons had wanted to ask him about what happened to his friend, Aaron, who had killed himself back in Dahlonega.
“You think it was God’s work?” Jensen asked.
“I think it was.” He paused. “I know what it must look like from the outside, but I feel like it was God who saved me by sending Madison and Brinkley.”
“Madison?” Jensen asked. “Isn’t she one of the women who left the cabin at the beginning?”
The older man nodded in confirmation. “She is. I didn’t recognize her at first because I was mostly dead, but Madison was there when Brinkley arrived. She told me Madison had been giving me water and had likely saved my life.”
“How was she involved in all of this? I thought they were going to South Carolina?” was the response.
“I have no idea,” Brent said as he shrugged his shoulders slightly. “She was at my house giving me water when Brinkley arrived.” He smiled again. “Quite a coincidence, don’t you think?”
Jensen could see how a man of faith would believe so. It really was quite a coincidence. A woman who wasn’t supposed to be there had somehow happened upon a dying man and tended to him, keeping him alive long enough for a trained medical team to arrive on a Blackhawk at the direction of a man who wanted to ask him a single question about what had happened to his friend. But it could be just that, a long series of coincidences which resulted in Brent’s survival.
“You don’t think so?” Jensen asked him, cringing as he said it. He wasn’t religious, but he didn’t want to cast doubt on Brent’s belief. People who attacked other religions were just assholes. “Sorry, that came out wrong. You think He had a hand in it?” he said, pointing surreptitiously toward the ceiling.
“Oh, I’m sure of it,” Brent said. “This is going to sound very strange, but I had a conversation with Rebecca while I was dying. She told me it wasn’t my time and she wouldn’t let me make that choice. It was up to God, not me. And I woke up in Highlands.
“I think Rebecca is with me. Even though I want to pass on to the next world, I feel like she’s keeping me company until my time comes,” Brent continued. “I won’t try to change your faith, but mine is firmer now than it has ever been.”
Genuinely curious, Jensen asked, “How does it feel? You know, to find your faith again?”
“It feels amazing, like I’m filled with light and energy, yet remarkably calm. I can’t explain it.” He grinned. “You’re not even going to ask me about my conversation with my dead wife?”
“I didn’t want to be disrespectful of her memory,” Jensen told him. “I know how much you love her.”
“I understand. Sometimes I thought of her as a memory, but that’s wrong. She’s still very much real, just not as a physical being.” He looked around the room. “She’s here, all around us.”
Jensen didn’t know how to continue the conversation, which was so at odds with his own beliefs. He pushed back his chair as he stood up. “I’ll leave you here with her, then.” He picked up the spent MRE and started to walk away, then had a thought. “Did you see a bathroom down here? I don’t want to blow up the toilet in my room with Jessica there.”
Brent almost doubled over with laughter at the unexpected comment. He pointed toward the other side of the room. “Over there. Good luck to you.” Then he grew more solemn. “And, Jensen?”
“Yeah?”
“Treasure her. Jessica is special. She can bring you out of the darkness.”
Jensen stopped abruptly. The comment caught him completely off guard. He turned to look back at Brent as he tried to figure out what he meant. “I know she’s special,” he said. The eyes looking back at Jensen suddenly seemed full of some knowledge he couldn’t comprehend. “I don’t think this darkness inside of me is going anywhere though, no matter how special she is,” he finished.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Brent said softly. “There’s no darkness inside of you. Only around you.”
Jensen looked for a moment longer. He had no idea how to respond. Either Brent was going crazy or he had insights into something Jensen couldn’t comprehend. He didn’t know which. When he saw no further comments were coming, he turned slowly and found his way to the bathroom. When he emerged, Brent was gone.
It felt surreal. A conversation in a silent hotel in the aftermath of the apocalypse about being saved by God and having conversations with someone long dead juxtaposed with his bodily functions and funky breath after the garlic in the chicken pesto pasta. Surreal, the different planes of spirit and body. So hard to reconcile sometimes.
He walked back upstairs for a shower and fell into bed with Jessica as the sun set. She was special in any number of ways, but was there even more to her than he could sense? Jensen remained awake far into the night with his arm around her, enjoying the warm glow of their lovemaking and simply enjoying her company.
Brent’s statement replayed itself over and over in his mind. “No darkness inside of you,” he’d said, “only around you.”
Chapter 27
The following days were a blur of preparations. Jensen schemed with Colonel Simmons to blockade or set up checkpoints at every paved road into the town. When the equipment arrived from Alabama, they scrubbed the original plans and started over.
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The former soldiers who recovered the tubs had also found an assortment of towed artillery, which had been hooked onto the rear of the tubs and brought back to Lake Junaluska. There were several low mountains in and around the town, which provided excellent fields of fire for artillery pieces.
Jensen had two of them targeting Crabtree road, just east of the Lambuth Inn. Although access was primarily from the north and Snead was far south of them, the easy approaches from Interstate 40 had him worried. The highway was only three miles away, and if it was anywhere nearly as accessible as the Great Smoky Mountains Expressway had been, enemy combatants could be on them before they even knew they were there.
Another was poised to strike North Lakeshore Drive, which was in the opposite direction to the west. The lake itself shielded their southern flank from easy attack, so their focus was on barricading the roads through the mountains and maintaining armed forces to the east and west.
Against Jensen’s pleas, Colonel Simmons took the rest of the artillery to the northwest to defend the Walters Dam and Waterville hydroelectric plant, which was their only source of power. Unlike the majority of hydroelectric dams and generators, the two locations were about six miles apart from each other, which made defense infinitely more difficult.
Any damage to either the dam or the generation facility would leave Lake Junaluska in the dark once again and increase the danger from attacks. It would only take about forty-eight hours without power to diminish the fighting capability of forces during the hot and humid summer on the horizon. Lack of comfort meant lack of sleep. Tired and miserable forces would be at a significant disadvantage.
The damn and generation building were far more strategically important to the small town’s new leaders than the hotels and residences near the lake. The dam itself was twelve miles away from the new headquarters, while the power plant was even further away along the Tennessee/North Carolina border. It was a lot of ground to defend, and it made Jensen very nervous.
Tomorrow's Dawn (Book 4): Gathering Storms Page 14
