After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  As sleep claimed him once more, the painkillers kicking in, the warmth of the bed seeped through his aching body and Nathan’s last thought was for the city spread out before him. The extent of his world had become the craggy buildings and the frozen wilds beyond.

  His island of troubles set in the sea of winter.

  3

  Nathan was woken by the sound of Brandon coughing. The baby was in the makeshift nursery Nathan had created under Cyndi’s instructions before the baby had even been born.

  The room wasn’t entirely ready yet, but Cyndi had taken Brandon there over the last two nights so that Nathan, still full of pain, could get some undisturbed sleep. The pain from his cracked ribs had begun lessening as the bones began knitting their cracks together, but it was going to be a good few weeks before Nathan would be entirely pain free.

  Nathan heard Cyndi shushing the boy gently and he imagined her soothing the sickly infant against her breast, willing him to suckle. The boy would only intermittently feed, and this had long been causing plenty of concern. They did have a small supply of newborn infant milk formula. They’d traded it from the Greenhousers’ hospital when the baby had been born there—before they’d been sent on their way from the relative safety of the Greenhouse Zone and back to the Masonic building.

  The birth, thankfully, had been a straightforward one—as straightforward as these things could be, anyway—and Cyndi, now that she wasn’t constantly on the road and was getting adequate food, had recovered quickly. Nathan hadn’t bothered telling her to take it easy in the weeks after the birth because he’d known the answer she would give him. “Pregnancy is not an illness, Nate; stop treating it as one.”

  Cyndi had suffered preeclampsia during her first pregnancy with Tony, but whatever bad luck they’d had with the journey to Detroit, that specter hadn’t raised its ugly head for her second birth.

  Cutting off his thoughts of luck, or a lack thereof, the door to the bedroom opened and Tony came in with a cup of ginger tea for Nathan.

  “I made it myself, like Mom showed me.” Tony conscientiously walked towards Nathan, his eyes on the surface of the tea so as not to spill a drop. The Markstein’s, two floors below, grew ginger as well as other healing and useful herbs and roots in their own hydroponics setup. Cyndi had become firm friends with them, sharing recipes for poultices, balms, and healing teas. Ginger, she’d told Nathan, was a great anti-inflammatory and would aid healing. Cyndi constantly made the point that access to FDA-approved medications was going to be more difficult than getting food in the Big Winter. People were going to loot hospitals and pharmacies first in order to stockpile medications against future ailments. So, a return to the old ways of preparing medicaments from natural sources was going to be the way forward. At least hydroponic set-ups like Stryker’s and the Markstein’s would provide fresh ingredients as they found their way. Cyndi was never far away from her Culpeper herbal handbook, and even if she didn’t have it at hand, Nathan was convinced she knew it by heart anyway.

  “How are you feeling, Dad?” Tony asked, setting the steaming cup down on the dresser. His face was earnest and stiff with concentration.

  “Better.” Nathan winced as he sat up and the pain cut across his chest in a whiplash. “Well, some.”

  He sipped the tea. “How’s things with you?”

  Tony gave the answer some serious consideration before replying. “I’m okay. I wish Stryker and Uncle Free would stop arguing, though.”

  Talk about alarm bells.

  “Arguing?”

  “Yeah, Syd and me are getting mighty… bad word… off with it.”

  Nathan couldn’t help smiling at his son’s cute self-censorship.

  Syd B4 was what the teen Tasmanian devil called herself, and she’d been the first straggler Nathan had picked up along the way—Nathan knew she wouldn’t have provided the same censorship his son had, either. She’d said her age was in the upper reaches of teenhood, but Cyndi had reckoned she was nearer fifteen than nineteen. Nathan had found her on the road in Glens Falls even before they’d made the decision to leave for Detroit.

  Syd and Tony had grown to be strong friends, mainly through their great love for Saber, but Nathan guessed because they were youngsters adrift in a crazy world. That kind of deal throws people together hard, and sometimes they stick, whereas sometimes they bounce right off. Syd and Tony had stuck.

  Nathan drained his tea and stood up, trying hard not to show the shock of pain that lanced through his torso.

  “Come on, son. Let’s go see what the kids are arguing about.”

  “Well, I say if Brant won’t come here, let’s go to him!”

  Nathan could hear Freeson’s raised voice before he was halfway along the corridor to Stryker’s apartment.

  “It doesn’t work like that, Free, and you know it. We can’t just turn up at the Greenhouse and ask to see him. There are procedures!”

  Stryker’s voice was almost a whine. The doors to the apartment, which had been repaired by Freeson and Nathan in the months since Stryker had blown them up in his methane still accident, were ajar. As Nathan squeezed through them, with Tony in tow, he could already feel the tension in the place Stryker shared with Freeson, Lucy, Syd, and Saber.

  There were enough rooms for them all, as Stryker’s hydroponic and living space was vast, with rooms that in a previous life had been storerooms and staterooms. There had been enough spare capacity in the apartment for Nathan’s family and Dave and Donie to live there, too, if they’d wanted that, but each had chosen nearby sets of room in which to live. Sometimes there was only so much Stryker you could take—especially after he’d led them to Detroit with such an economy of truth.

  Why Freeson, Lucy, and Syd had decided to stay there was less about their history with Stryker and more about company. Nathan kind of understood that, but still wasn’t ready to fully forgive Stryker for his deception.

  “He could send men out. Like he did with the snipers! Find this woman and her crew.”

  “Why should he?” Stryker asked as he kept stalking up and down the hydroponic stands, fiddling with water runs, rubbing leaves between his fingers, and squinting at stems, but his back was ramrod straight and Nathan could see that the Hawaiian-shirted, blond-haired twenty-nine-year-old was spitting blood, he was so angry, and he wasn’t going out of his way to not show it.

  “Fellers. Come on, what’s the beef?” Nathan stepped in between Freeson and Stryker. They weren’t yet ready to come to blows, but it wasn’t a far-off occurrence if he knew anything about testosterone charged situations like this one. Freeson’s face was twisted as ironmongery on a filigreed gate. He’d taken off his baseball cap and was scratching at his head in lieu of thumping Stryker.

  Both Freeson and Stryker looked up at Nathan’s interjection. “You should be in bed,” they both said, together enough that it came out comically, as if they were twins.

  “Yeah, well, when my son comes in and tells me he wants the two of you to stop arguing because it’s upsetting him, I guess I’m not going to be staying in bed, am I?”

  Freeson’s eyes dropped and Stryker looked sheepish.

  “I didn’t mean to tell on you, Uncle Free,” Tony said, obviously realizing what he’d done.

  “Don’t apologize, Tone,” Freeson said. “You did the right thing. It was a stupid argument anyway.”

  “Yes, he did, and yes, it was,” Lucy said, wafting by with her morning pick-me-up of a Bloody Mary in one hand and, in her other hand, another Bloody Mary. She was wearing a silk gown that made her look like a film star. “Perhaps you can knock some sense into both of them, Nathan? Lord knows they need it.”

  Lucy sat on a nearby sofa and crossed her legs with the intricacy of someone making an origami swan, and there she began sipping her first drink.

  Lucy was a piece of work, and rubbed Nathan up in all the wrong ways, but sometimes she was so amazingly and precociously above it all that it took Nathan’s breath away, so that he couldn’t help lovin
g her a little bit for that one quality, at least. He wished he could rise above it and skate like Lucy, but Nathan wasn’t that guy. He was an up to his elbows in engine grease kinda guy, and the guts of this machine needed serious attention.

  After a little head banging and rank pulling, Nathan got Stryker to explain the problem. Freeson wanted Stryker to go to the Greenhousers to make the representation that their police and guards should come out and take the gang down.

  Stryker thought it was pointless, mainly because they only had just about enough food and Bloody Mary ingredients to support themselves – Lucy raised her second glass and said “Cheers” with a wink to this – let alone pay Brant the tithe in goods and services he would demand for his goons to come out and make a sweep of the area.

  “The snipers were a special case. They’d been attacking the Greenhouse as well as the people in the outer city. Brant had good reason to have them stopped—but a few protection racketeers getting heavy with the people in the Masonic? It’s not worth the steam off his morning leak”

  Freeson appealed to Nathan, “We don’t know how many of them there are. They might be getting ready to attack the Masonic now. If Stryker hadn’t blown one’s brains out…”

  “Maybe they’d have blown yours out, but they probably didn’t have the precision skills to find something that small!” Stryker shouted, throwing down the towel with which he’d been wiping his hands free of dirt.

  “Shut up. Both of you!” Nathan roared.

  Lucy clinked both her glasses together, “Seconds out, round three,” and giggled.

  “Look, you’re both right. We could come under attack at any moment, but right now, according to Cyndi, we’re well defended, yes?”

  Stryker nodded. “There’s a guard rota. Everyone who can use a gun is covering the entrances to the main building—front, back, and side—and we have a lookout post on the top floor below the roof. They’ll see anyone coming and raise the alarm.”

  “They’re not trained. They’re not like Brant’s people,” Freeson said, anger on a steady simmer.

  “No, they’re not,” said Nathan, “but then, neither are we and we got here.”

  “Look, Nathan,” said Stryker. “There’s only one thing we can offer to Brant to give him the motivation to help us.”

  “What?”

  And so Stryker told him.

  “Good luck with that,” Freeson and Lucy said at the same time.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Hear me out, Cyndi. Please.”

  Cyndi was feeding Brandon from a bottle and had him wrapped in a shawl in the crook of her arm. The baby didn’t drink greedily—his sucking was listless and weak—but at least he was swallowing something.

  “I’m not saying we throw in with him completely, but he wants your skills. He wants you on that committee. He knows that you’re invaluable to the Greenhousers.”

  “Nathan, I can’t believe what you’re saying. Brant put a bounty on my head to get Stryker to trick us into coming here! He then reneged on letting Stryker into their cozy, hermetically-sealed elite world because I wouldn’t play ball. And now, because we have a problem with a two-person gang, one of whom got shot in the leg, you and Stryker think I should go to Brant and roll over? Should I let him tickle my tummy at the same time? Just for good measure?”

  Cyndi paced, a curl of anger on her lip, shaking her head and, Nathan thought, getting close to stamping her feet.

  “I don’t want to join their stinking elite, Nathan. It goes against everything I stand for. To go in there and help them while everyone in the outer city scratches out an existence on the edge of starvation. Is that who you think I am, Nathan?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Then stop the crazy talk. I’ll only work on Brant’s committee if they start to give their resources to everyone, to spread their wealth around and stop using the people in the outer city like serfs to their kingdom.”

  “You sound like Robin Hood.”

  “Better that than being the Sherriff of Nottingham, Nate.”

  Nathan had gone back to their apartment to put Stryker’s idea to Cyndi, that maybe a bit of give-and-take with Brant and the other Greenhousers might get them some leverage. So far, it hadn’t gone well.

  Cyndi had been up and feeding Brandon already, which had initially made Nathan hopeful that she would hear him out with less irritation than if he’d gone in and woken the pale-faced child from a sleep. But no, if anything, Cyndi had been more willing to raise her voice and give Nathan both barrels because avoiding waking the baby wasn’t an issue.

  “Will you at least think about it? Please. Right now, we’re defending this building with people who’re more used to growing root ginger or mending socks. They’re good people, but if that gang comes back with twenty others, in numbers like some of the other gangs we’ve seen since we got there, we’re going to be royally screwed.”

  Cyndi considered this for a moment, but didn’t look convinced. “I’ll think about it, but my gut instincts tell me no. I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror, knowing what was going on out here while I was holed up in there. You know I’d have to take Brandon and Tony with me, don’t you? And I’d be worried sick if you were still out here. Not knowing how you were doing.”

  “I’ll press my nose up against the window and wave at you, like a monkey in the zoo. How does that sound?”

  Cyndi snorted as Brandon fed, and then she turned to the window, silhouetted against the clouds and the fizzing snowflakes. “I’ll think about it. But that’s all I’ll do for now.”

  Nathan, Freeson and Syd walked along Michigan Avenue towards the largest of the Greenhouse Zones. In the center of the city, in the streets around the Campus Martius Park, as the Big Winter had worsened over the years, Detroit had decided to adapt instead of die.

  Girders had been raised down the center of streets. Panels of aviation-strength glass had been bolted between them, to a height of nearly thirty feet. The roads had been pedestrianized, and open gardens of the campus had been turned into areas for growing produce and tending farm animals. The Greenhouse itself, as it had become to be known, abutted several of the towers around Campus Martius Park—surrounding several, so their lower floors were inside the new climate-controlled zones.

  Outside this Greenhouse, those not lucky enough to be invited into the hermetically-sealed worlds had struggled to find survivable purchase. As the winters had worsened exponentially, inside the glass had come to amount to a whole different world. The mirror image of Trash Town in some ways, sure—offering a covered area where people could trade and commune—but the Greenhouse was permanent, warm, and safe.

  Nathan had only been allowed inside once before, to visit Cyndi in the hospital. The change from outside to inside had brought home to him the vast differences in quality of life, and done so almost immediately. It had been too warm in the pedestrianized street to keep his jacket on, and sweat had broken out on his brow. Nathan hadn’t felt that warm in a month of Sundays… a year of them, even, it seemed.

  “How the other half live,” Cyndi had commented as she’d held their blanket-swaddled baby up so that Nathan could meet his new son for the first time.

  Even though it was inside the Greenhouse, and warm, the hospital still had the feeling of being a makeshift affair. It was housed on the four floors of the Chase Tower. Equipment had been looted from surrounding hospitals and medical centers, displaying yet another example of how the people outside of the Greenhouse were being left to fend for themselves. The hospital’s medical services were available to them, but the cost in tithe was high, and one thing was universally true… if you couldn’t work because of illness, then you couldn’t generate tithe to give to the Greenhousers. It wasn’t a problem Nathan had faced up to yet. Their position in the Masonic Temple wasn’t precarious enough for that—but if Tasha and her gang came back in force, then that might all change.

  Nathan wanted to get out of Detroit at the earliest opportun
ity he could, but until Brandon was able to travel, that was impossible.

  As they approached through the snow, they saw a group of four black Humvees used by Detroit PD parked across the road at the entrance to the Greenhouse Zone on Michigan Avenue. Armed officers were on duty in their winter combat uniforms and parka hoods, fringed with fur and pulled up against the cold. Arctic camouflage across their bodies, guns unslung from their shoulders and at the ready.

  Nearby, two braziers burned fiercely with wood liberated from houses in the surrounding buildings. “I wonder what they’ll burn when all the wood runs out,” Syd said, pulling her puffy anorak more tightly around her as they approached the Humvees. “Don’t stand still too long in one spot, is all I’m saying.”

  “Okay, that’s near enough. Papers?” The lead officer had peeled away from the hottest brazier, his Beretta drawn but by his side.

  Nathan reached into his pocket. “We’re still waiting for them. Still on probation. But I have Stryker Wilson’s authority to approach here. Signed and dated.”

  The officer’s expression, hidden deep in the hood, was difficult to see, but what was revealed was an African American with quick eyes who flashed good teeth as he spoke. “I know Stryker. Why didn’t he come himself?”

  “He didn’t want to leave the Masonic unguarded. We had some trouble with a gang.”

  “Not our problem,” the officer said. “Local disputes, you deal with yourself; that’s how it goes. We don’t have the resources to come out and fight every petty little war.”