After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  Rose had taken Nathan and Syd to the old Detroit Zoo to meet John when Nathan had asked her if she could get them a truck to use. “No. I can’t,” she’d said. “But man who might help is not too far. He a good man. Hate Brant almost as much’s I do.”

  So, while Dave continued his recovery, Rose had brought Nathan and Syd, by circuitous route, to the north of the city, avoiding going anywhere near the Masonic or the Greenhousers. The city zoo, with its purple-painted water tower, was deserted. The animals had been shot, and those that could be had been taken for food. The city governors had considered it the most humane thing to do under the circumstances. Rose had told them that Brant and his buddies had had a shootin’ party in the lion and bear enclosures. “Not ‘zackly humane, if you ask me. Drunk and unable to shoot straight. It’s what turn man against Brant.”

  “I should have shot him there and then,” John said now. “I had the opportunity and I didn’t take it.”

  John explained that he had been a volunteer keeper at the zoo as the city had wound down, and it had become increasingly clear—as the winters got harder and the situation more desperate—that the zoo had become a luxury the city could no longer afford. He’d built the fish farm to generate what food he could for the big cats, the wolves, and the bears, but in the end, food had been needed for the people of the outer city much more than it had been needed for the lion enclosure. So, the cull had been ordered… and enjoyed far too much for John’s liking.

  A lifelong malamute breeder, he’d moved his home operation to the zoo. No one had seemed to mind once the zoo had been out of commission, and he’d been left for the last few years to breed his dogs, make sleds, and trade them with anyone who might want one. He traded the salmon, too, and Rose offered his produce on one of her stalls under the canvas of Trash Town.

  “Of course, you’ll need some training.”

  “We will? Don’t we just say mush and off they go?” Nathan asked, trying to bring a much needed tone of levity to the proceedings.

  “Sure,” said John. “But what do you say to stop them?”

  And that question stumped Nathan completely.

  “Oh, and no one says ‘Mush’, either.”

  “Okay,” Nathan said, warming to the man considerably. “What do you say?”

  “That’s why you need the training. The dogs are trained, but you—well, you ain’t.”

  “When do we start?” Nathan asked, wanting to get this done as quickly as he could.

  “Well, that depends on the gold,” John said, raising an eyebrow.

  Nathan felt his fists balling, but he kept his cool. “I told you. Plenty of gold and rocks at the Masonic. Once we’ve got them, you can have the lot.”

  John grinned and pointed at Nathan’s wedding ring. “I was thinking more of collateral…”

  The cold on his hands was nothing compared to the emptiness around Nathan’s ring finger. His hand felt wrong, lighter, colder and lesser than it had before. In the end, the negotiation with John had led to Nathan in effect pawning the ring to John in lieu of future riches, albeit with the promise that, when they returned to the zoo after the mission, the ring would be returned.

  But, oh, the ache on his skin and in his heart, now that it was gone. However temporarily.

  But John had been good to his word of offering dogs and training, so after three days of intense training at the zoo, Syd and Nathan were ready to take their sleds out of the two-acre field attached to the wolf wilderness enclosure, and onto the streets around the zoo.

  “Hike!” Nathan yelled to his team of four, and off they went on the command. Learning that ‘Hike’ was the correct command and not ‘Mush’ had been Dog Sledding 101. John was a good trainer, though, and now he could enjoy the feel of being pulled by the dogs, skimming over the fresh snow at speeds of, John said, twenty miles an hour over flat ground—the dogs couldn’t maintain that for long, but John claimed it wasn’t unheard of for dogs to pulls a fully laden sled cross-country nearly ten miles in an hour. And if the route-planning Dave was doing back at Rose’s house was any indication, they would make a fine getaway if luck was with them.

  Hopefully, Nathan thought to himself, they’d get in and out of both targets without being noticed or followed away, but he’d been burned by not anticipating the unthinkable before, and there was a good chance that their idea might go to manure at the first attempt. Who was it who’d said that no battle plan survived the first engagement?

  But sledding. Man! Nathan thought as the skis hissed over the snow, the dogs pulled obediently, and he steered with just the sound of his voice. Not having reins or a steering wheel had been thoroughly freaky to begin with, but the kissing sound to encourage and make them go faster… And then, Gee! to turn right and Haw! to turn left. Easy! to slow down, and, of course—Nathan kicked himself for not getting it—Whoa! to stop.

  The dogs liked praise, they liked salmon, and they liked Nathan. These were working dogs in the true sense of the word, and he’d been getting a deeper sense of the connection Syd had had with Saber, her malamute.

  For Syd, the days of training appeared to Nathan to be a fully bittersweet experience. She didn’t talk about Saber, but the way she looked at the dogs in her team and stroked them and played with them when they were free of the sled’s rigging told Nathan that the girl was hurting even more than usual. How much more would this young woman endure before he found her up on the roof ledge of the nearest tall building?

  Nathan had his own aching heart to deal with, though. He tried not to dwell too much on Cyndi and the boys—getting ready and being prepared to get them out of the Greenhouse had to be his priority, and a little bit of Dave’s pragmatism had started to seep into his thinking. But at four in the morning, tossing and turning instead of sleeping on the sofa in Rose’s taxidermy lounge, when Nathan couldn’t settle because he was too close to crying, he would picture Cyndi, Tony, and Brandon, each in turn, and reply in his head, and the words his daddy had told him— that bluff but kind auto shop owner who had taught Nathan almost everything he knew about fixing stuff—would all come back to him. The thing he’d drummed into his son from the earliest of ages.

  Family First.

  No ifs, nor buts.

  Family First.

  Nathan had to keep focused and sharp, but at four in the morning, when sleep was refusing to wash past his memories and drown him, it was near impossible.

  Nathan pulled the team around, off the street and down a narrow alley that was thick with fresh snow. The dogs barked and yelped, steering around any obstacles like overturned trash cans or crates, snaking the sled out of danger with faster reactions than Nathan could have mustered in his old Dodge wrecker, which he’d reluctantly left with an Amish community a hundred and fifty miles from Detroit and now missed terribly.

  He’d left Jacob’s farm with donkeys pulling his Airstream trailer, but oh, now he wished he’d left there with dogs. They would have covered so much more ground, more quickly, and been able to carry most of their possessions with them in the bargain.

  If the Big Winter had brought nothing but misery until now, it presenting the opportunity to learn how to drive a dogsled might have been worth it.

  Nathan and the team burst from the alley, snow carving up like the spray from a speedboat in a summer bay.

  “Whoa!” Nathan called out and the dogs did exactly as they’d been told as Nathan applied the brakes to the sled.

  He was ready.

  It was time.

  Family now.

  Dave was still not well enough to travel with them, but when Nathan and Syd got ready to leave the Detroit Zoo on their sleds, he insisted on coming with Rose to see them off and make sure they understood the maps he’d drawn.

  “There’s no guarantee these are totally accurate. Without access to the cops’ maps, I’ve had to use one of Rose’s copies of the Detroit street plan. The book is about fifteen years old, and I don’t know Detroit, and while you’ve been playing Nanook of the Nor
th, I’ve worked with Rose to give you the best route plan I can from the book and Rose’s memory—which, to be honest, was pretty good.”

  “Man, dem is right,” Rose growled in her best Jamaican bass. And then, when Dave might have thought her feelings were hurt, she gave him a wink and a smile, and he relaxed.

  The maps had been pinned to boards under transparent plastic and attached to the crossbar between the sleds’ handles. The routes marked out between the Detroit Zoo and the Masonic Temple seemed counterintuitive, bordering on the insane. But when you looked at them closely, they moved through areas of narrow streets and, where possible, across parkland and through trees. Anyone following in a police car, even a Humvee, simply wouldn’t be able to catch up, even if they’d gotten a good head start. Their only way to track them would be from the air, and according to John and Rose, Brant and the Greenhousers had no drones or helicopters. Going through the spaces between blocks, down rarely used thoroughfares, would also mean the buildup of snow and ice would be considerable… again giving an advantage to the sleds.

  “The biggest fly in the ointment is if they have Ski-Doos, but they won’t be an advantage even if they do, just an equal, and you’ll both be armed.”

  “Hopefully for the Masonic, we won’t arouse any suspicion anyway,” Nathan said. “We’ll go in underground, through the basement the way Syd got out.”

  Dave nodded. “And you know where the schematics are?”

  “And I know where Lucy’s jewels should be,” Syd said.

  Nathan looked at his watch. “Sundown in an hour; that’s about how long it’s going to take us to get there at a steady pace. You ready, Syd?”

  Syd produced her SIG-Sauer, checked that the mag was full, and put the pistol back into her shoulder holster. “I am now.”

  Nathan felt the sudden thud of a flashback to when he’d allowed Dave to go off to Trash Town, where he’d run into Danny. “You don’t have to come, Syd. This is going to be dangerous, even if we don’t run into any resistance.”

  “Try to stop me.”

  Nathan’s instincts rode the tension between wanting the young woman to be safe and needing her to make the plan work. Dave’s hands and chest were still in no condition to travel on the sleds, and if they waited for them to be ready, they might be too late. Nathan didn’t want to think about getting into the Greenhouse only to find it was already game-over for his family and friends.

  John, who’d been feeding the dogs chunks of salmon from a bucket, came back to the group and raised his hands. “I’d shake, but I stink of fish and you wouldn’t want to smell like me right now. Good luck. Bring back lots of gold.”

  Rose hugged them both, and Dave followed suit.

  And then they could wait no longer.

  “Hike!” Nathan cried out to the dogs, and they were away.

  10

  The Masonic Temple was burning.

  “Whoa!” Nathan brought his sled to a halt and looked at the hell before him. There was smoke rising from the very top floor, five floors above where their apartments were situated. It was coming from only one broken window so far, but there were licks of orange flame flickering through the smoke, made all the more bright now that night had fallen.

  The one time he’d want the weather to rage down like falling angels on Detroit, to work on the flames and keep them at bay, seemed to be the one time when the weather had decided it was going to kick back and watch the fun.

  The sky was almost clear, and although it was very rare to see the stars because of the ash in the upper atmosphere, a blurry, near full moon spread wan moonlight over the apocalyptic scene.

  “It never rains,” he said as Syd’s sled came in beside him, the dogs in both teams panting and welcoming the rest before they would set off again. Some chewed at the snow to slake thirst and others just pawed the ground, happy to get going again as soon as possible. “You have got to be joking me,” Syd said.

  “I think someone is having a huge laugh at our expense, yeah. But right, if we’re doing this, let’s do it. Hike!”

  The trip along Dave’s intricately penciled route through the maze of backstreets, rat runs, half-streets and waste ground had gone entirely to plan. The derelict buildings they’d whooshed between, throwing up arcs of snow and ice at a steady lick, had nearly all been silent and dark. The dogs’ eyesight was good, and the moon had provided just enough detail for Nathan to read the map without resorting to using his flashlight. They had caught a few shadows of people behind windows in the occasional building, sure, but hadn’t come across any vehicles at all, let alone any of Brant’s police.

  They hadn’t seen the Masonic Temple as they’d approached because the walls and buildings around them had closed down all perspective. The smoke, Nathan had caught sight of in the sky ahead of time, but it could have been from any of a hundred different fires from buildings left to their own devices in the Big Winter—it could have been from Windsor across the water, even. Nathan was used to seeing columns of smoke rising constantly into the Detroit sky, but never in a million years would he have expected it to be coming from their destination. Never would he have thought that there was a race against time accompanying their trip across the city.

  They skidded to a halt two streets away from the Masonic Temple. The building was a solid thing there on the air. Wide and stony, like a face set to be stubborn—but the flames licking out now showed in three windows on the south side of the building. The tinkling of falling glass suggested that the proverbial thoughts behind that face were all afire.

  As fast as they could, Nathan and Syd unhooked the dogs from the sleds and, while Nathan covered their vehicles as best he could with snow, Syd took the eight dogs into an abandoned warehouse and tied them up inside. She’d also taken in bowls full of snow and paper-wrapped chopped salmon from John’s farm to feed the dogs and quiet them down.

  Barely five minutes later, both of them were jogging towards the basement entrance of the Masonic. As they approached, they could hear voices shouting from within the building—there was mild panic, but such was the height of the flames, away from most of the occupied apartments, that the voices were of concern rather than terror. They were the sounds of people packing what they could and getting ready to get out.

  The outer city didn’t even have its own police force, so it certainly didn’t have a fire department. The toothless and rubber-stamping outer city government that met once a month in the auditorium of the Masonic Temple, only sometimes attended by Brant or one of his deputies, didn’t have the resources or the powers to set up a fire department. When a building went up in flames, as they did on a regular basis in the broken city, the occupants knew they could only save what they could carry, and many had been through the process of having their places razed to the ground several times already.

  Nathan wondered if the fire had been started deliberately, but there was also every chance it had just been a coincidence, especially when one considered the lash-up of electronics, old inverters, and makeshift cabling it had supported.

  People were already coming out of the building through the front doors of the temple. If Brant or Harmsworth’s men were in the vicinity awaiting Nathan or any of his people to come back to the temple, there might be enough confusion in the street to give them some much needed cover or distraction.

  It’s an ill wind…

  It took Syd some little time to remember exactly where the place they were looking for was in relation to the temple. The last time she’d come out, she’d been in a blind panic, just trying to get away from Harmsworth and his band of killers, and so she hadn’t really looked back to see where she’d come from. Now, she eventually found what she’d sought as grated doors clanged dully beneath the heel of the boot she’d been shoving down into the frosting of ice and snow.

  The basement doors were heavy, made of plate steel painted blue. There were several inches of snow on top of them and it made their hands cold and wet as they picked it away from the doors, letting
it seep through their gloves. But Nathan felt the pressure of time running out as they chipped away at the ice on the doors; up above them, the flames grew stronger and more windows kept bursting out with smoke.

  The basement was deserted, other than the machinery of the boiler. The fuel oil tanks were down here, and if eventually the fire reached them, before Nathan and Syd did after their trip up top, then it might be an impossible space to traverse.

  “We don’t have any time. If you can’t find Lucy’s stuff, just get out. Don’t take any more risks than you have to,” Nathan said as they reached the basement door at the top of a short flight of steps which led into the service corridors just below the ground floor.

  “I’m not planning to. But what do we tell John if we go back empty-handed?”

  “We tell him to rejoice that we’re not toast, and then we’ll take it from there. Ready?” Nathan put his hand on the door.

  “Ready.”

  The service stairs at the back of the building were thankfully clear of both stored items and fleeing people. They were rarely used by anyone except Stryker.

  Syd and Nathan went up three flights before they started to smell the smoke from above, and then something else struck Nathan which should have immediately raised his suspicion even before the two of them had begun their ascent.

  Nathan paused on the steps heading to the fourth level.

  Syd looked back, five steps beyond him. “What?”

  Nathan pointed at the ceiling of the stairwell and along the walls.

  Syd narrowed her eyes and looked nonplussed, “What? I don’t know what you’re pointing at.”

  “The emergency lighting is on.”

  “So?”

  “So, these stairs are very rarely used, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the lights are fed by batteries in the basement, which are charged from the roof turbines.”