After thirty seconds, it became very clear that the door was not going to be opened.
Nathan was now at something of a loss as to what to do with his time now. He looked at his watch. He wasn’t due in the plant room for work for another hour, though then he’d be there for as long as he could before he became exhausted, working on some circuit boards in the lighting system that had failed. There were plenty of spares, but the work was difficult, fiddly, and Nathan found it challenging.
What to do with this spare hour?
It was an obvious decision to go to the chapel and spend an hour in silent contemplation and prayer. Members of the community often went there for devotional moments outside of the three regular daily services that Mr. Grange or one of his deputies would perform. It was open to the community at all times. Nathan walked towards the elevator, heading off along the near deserted corridors, and wondered where everyone was again. It was impossible to tell what time of day it was in the silo without reference to a clock, and Nathan found himself checking his watch again to ensure he hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night by mistake, in which case everyone was still asleep! But no, it was just after 8 a.m. in the morning. The place should have been buzzing, and it just wasn’t.
A man Nathan didn’t recognize, who was not dressed in the regulation blue boiler suit, appeared around the curved corridor ahead. He was tall and wild-haired. Perhaps a little older than Nathan, with a full black beard, intense brown eyes, and a baseball cap worn backwards on his head. There was something incongruous about the man’s features—and not just because he wasn’t wearing a boiler suit. He had the high cheekbones, the broad nose, and the bearing of someone with Native American heritage, but it looked like the man had deliberately hidden this behind a mask of pure redneck.
Nathan stopped in his tracks as the man, who he didn’t recognize but who certainly seemed to recognize him, yanked Nathan sideways by the collar and slammed him into the wall.
“You Nathan Tolley?”
The man’s voice, which Nathan wouldn’t have expected to come out of this mouth in a thousand years, was a broad Texan drawl, and he smelled of tobacco mixed with fresh sweat. There were beads of it standing out on his forehead, and the man was breathing hard, as if he’d been running.
He slammed Nathan into the wall again. “I ain’t gonna ask you again, boy; who are you?”
“I’m Nathan.”
The man smiled and yelled back over his shoulder. “I got him! Hallelujah, Cyndi! I got your boy!”
22
Nothing could have prepared Nathan for what happened next. He fell to his knees as the sheer thud of the vision slammed into his head and his heart with equal ferocity.
Cyndi, who was dead and yet alive, walked around the same corner that the Native American dressed as a redneck had come around, and she crashed to her knees next to Nathan and threw her arms around him.
“Touching as this is,” Baseball Cap said, “we gotta get out of here.”
Cyndi’s face was buried in Nathan’s neck, the shock of it kicking him all around his sensibilities and wrenching apart all of his certainties.
“I… I…”
“Don’t speak,” Cyndi said—and then real Cyndi, not photograph Cyndi, not Cyndi in Heaven at the side of the Lord—pulled Nathan to his feet. His muscles were trembling, there was so little strength in them, and he was sure he’d forgotten how to walk. There was something he remembered called balance, which he had no idea how to do anymore. He thumped sideways into the wall, almost collapsing again. Baseball Cap held him up. He was strong and powerful, and he put Nathan’s arm around his shoulder and dragged him off down the corridor.
Cyndi walked beside them, her eyes sharp, with a machine gun—a machine gun!—in her hand. How had she gotten a machine gun in? Weapons were not allowed. Mr. Grange would be so angry.
“Cyndi… I…”
“Don’t talk. I know it’s hard, but just concentrate on walking and getting out of here.”
They passed the elevator and kept on walking. “But…” Nathan said, pointing at the door as they went past.
Baseball Cap’s voice was a low rumble, vibrating his chest, where Nathan, half stumbling, half being carried was resting his head. “That’s not how we got in, and that’s not how we’re getting out.”
Nathan’s legs were starting to give way again, the wave of exhaustion hitting in full force and the confusion in his mind overwhelming him.
Was he dreaming?
Was this an illusion?
Mr. Grange had said that Cyndi and Tony and Brandon—the chain of litany he repeated so often when he thought of his family—were dead. Why would the vessel of the Lord on Earth…
In Jesus’ name, blessed be.
…lie to him? And yet, here she was alive and talking.
In the end, Baseball Cap gave up on dragging Nathan and just hefted him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “Boy, you sure are heavy.”
And, like that, they moved down the corridor at a much faster pace. All Nathan could see was the horizon of Baseball Cap’s backside, and his and Cyndi’s feet clicking down the corridor between Nathan’s swinging hands.
They stopped at a door and, without preamble, Baseball Cap kicked it open. The door clanged open onto a red metal emergency stairwell which they began to climb.
Three floors later, with Nathan’s head still spinning from shock, and the nausea of his head swinging while he was being carried, Baseball Cap kicked open another door and they emerged into the chapel—which Nathan ascertained only because of the pattern of the carpet.
The room smelled odd.
It was a sharp… gunpowder smell… like fresh cordite, as if guns had been fired here recently. As Baseball Cap’s feet moved across the carpet, Nathan was anguished to see there were shards and slivers of smashed stained glass on the floor, crunching beneath Baseball Cap’s feet.
Jesus’ face stared up from the carpet, the screaming face from the station of the crucifixion almost shouting its rage and anger at being smashed.
Nathan made fists and thumped them into the bottom of Baseball Cap’s spine.
Either the man was immune to the pain or Nathan was badly overestimating his own strength, but the Texan with the redneck mask over the Native American body just laughed, heaved Nathan off of his shoulder, and dumped him down on a chair.
The chapel was a mess of broken glass, overturned chairs, and bodies. There had been a fierce battle here in the last few minutes. Three boiler-suited figures lay dead in the chaos, their eyes wide with the shock of dying and their chests ragged with bullet holes. One of them was Pamela, one of them was Graham, and the other Nathan couldn’t put a name to.
A group of other boiler-suited members of the community had been corralled in the corner of the chapel, against the curving wall. They all had their hands on their heads, and two people—a plump, pretty young woman and a young black boy, whose names Nathan couldn’t find in the mess of his head— were pointing the muzzles of more machine guns in their direction. A taller, grizzled man with a hungry look and a limp was moving among the crowd, patting them down and checking for weapons.
On the dais, Nathan saw that Strickland Grange was on his knees, but he wasn’t praying. His hands were on his head and a woman who Nathan recognized but couldn’t name—thin-faced, beautiful, and wearing a thick fur coat—was covering Strickland and Michaela with a pistol. On seeing Nathan, she smiled and waved to him.
A name swam up through the murk of his memory.
Lucy…?
Yes. Lucy. That was it.
Where do I know her from?
But then the carnage in the room took hold of Nathan again as he looked around the chapel. Not a single Station of the Cross stained glass frieze had survived. He felt compelled by mixed feelings of anger and sadness to try to get to his knees and save what pieces he could, but Baseball Cap just put a hand on his shoulder to keep him seated, and because of his kittenish weakness, Nathan found he coul
dn’t move.
His eyes, however, could, and he looked to Strickland Grange on the dais to see what divine power could be transmitted from the man to Nathan to help him navigate a righteous path through the misery overwhelming him, but there was none.
All there was, was the crunch of broken glass, the stench of cordite, and the overwhelming sense in Nathan that nothing he’d thought was certain just a few minutes before would ever be certain again.
His name was Tommy Ben. He was of the Diné people—a Navajo by birth—but it was a heritage he didn’t ascribe to. “I’m a Texan, number one, number two, and number infinity, Nate. Everything else is secondary to being a Lone Star Statesman as far as I’m concerned.”
The wagon pitched, yawed, and rolled like a small boat tossed on a stormy sea. Lucy, up front and outside of the canvas, shouted at the oxen to “Whoa!” and, thankfully, the wagon stopped moving.
The further they moved into the thaw, the muddier and more difficult the land had become.
Nathan lay back on the blanket roll and tried to settle his head. He’d woken in the camp that morning in the grip of a nightmare so vivid he’d woken Cyndi and Brandon with his yelling. He’d sat up, heart racing, guts knotting, and reached out in the still dark to make sure the cries of the baby and the concern of his wife were attached to real, tangible people and not the dregs of a tattered nightmare.
But they were real.
Real as they’d ever been.
They’d left the silo behind some five weeks before, but the nightmares still came, and Nathan’s recovery had been slow. The pieces of his memory that had been drowned by Michaela Grange’s electro-convulsive-therapy had been swimming back to the shores of his mind slowly, putting themselves back together in his head.
The recovery process had begun after the initial shock of finding his family, plus Lucy, Freeson, Dave, and Donie were alive if not well, and had teamed up with the blunt Texan, Tommy Ben, to lead an assault on the silo and rescue him from the lies, deceit, and mental torture of Strickland’s heinous regime.
The story of what had happened over the two months Nathan had been held captive in the silo was difficult to hear, but Cyndi had done her best to give it to him in digestible chunks. This had given him time to process the information and understand how thoroughly he’d been abused.
In short, Nathan had been the only one from their group whose DNA had proven his lineage was pure enough, Aryan enough, to join the Calgary community. His looks and his bearing had already alerted Strickland to his suitability, and a series of surreptitious lab tests by Michaela had confirmed the leader’s guess. The rest, Lucy had been utterly and incandescently angry to find out, had been termed to be a variety of half-breeds and mixed-up genealogies. Nathan had been the only one who’d checked out, so when they’d realized Nathan was about to leave, they’d drugged him—Michaela holding his shoulders in the chapel had given her the opportunity to give him enough fast-acting tranquilizer to drop him almost immediately, all through a hypodermic concealed in her hand. The rest of the group had been thrown out of the silo and told that if they tried to return to get Nathan, he would be executed immediately.
The blast doors had been impossible to get through, and the whole silo had been full of redundancies in its food and power systems. They really could have waited more than five years before they could be forced to open up.
Nathan’s re-education had started almost immediately. He’d been given ECT on a regular basis, and without anesthetic. This process had suppressed memories and thoughts, and his food had been laced with drugs to keep him compliant and malleable, which was why he’d felt exhausted most of the time. They’d kept up a consistent web of convincing stories about what had happened to convince him, in a very short time, that his family was dead, that he was a willing participant in the Calgary community, and that he loved and believed in God with his whole heart and soul.
“They did a number on you, sure enough,” Tommy had said one day when he’d found Nathan outside the wagon, on his knees and starting to pray.
That had been some time ago now, and Nathan, now that he knew what had been happening to him, and now that he was free of the drugs and the ECT, was nearly getting back to how he’d been before. He was still more tired than he expected to be, but at least he was free of Strickland Grange’s malevolent influence.
It was another salutary lesson in how the Big Winter was causing people to behave towards their fellow men. Brant had seen it as an opportunity to make himself rich, and Strickland had seen it as a way to spread his thoughts of eugenics, with the silo to become a breeding tank for a new class of Aryan. And then there’d been Danny, who’d seen it as a chance to become all-powerful and lead a gang of slaughterers. Conversely, there were people like Rose, leading a rebellion to make things better for everyone in Detroit. And Elm, who’d never taken everything, leaving supplies for the people who would come next, and gifting his ledger of remedies and medicines to Cyndi so she could spread the word. And now there was Tommy Ben.
Nathan’s faculties, even as they’d slowly returned, still couldn’t get a handle on the man.
Was he a hero by circumstance, or by design?
Cyndi and the others, after many failed attempts to get into the silo, had met Tommy in the nearby town of Carlton. Tommy had been farming cattle, but the animals hadn’t been thriving, and Tommy was not a natural farmer. He’d connected with Freeson, and had an eye for Lucy—Cyndi had told Nathan with a wink—which Lucy had rebuffed immediately. While they’d stayed in the town and gotten to know Tommy better, planning a new assault on the silo to rescue Nathan, Tommy had told them he’d worked on the silo conversion years earlier, long before Strickland and his “loopy hoo-hahs” had acquired it. Of course, a missile silo didn’t need a fire and emergency escape route when it was a missile silo, but when it became a residence, to comply with the federal regulations, it did.
“Gotta have a back door, ain’tcha?” Tommy had pointed out.
The back door, as he’d called it, was under nine feet of earth, with three feet of ice on top of that. The idea for the escape was that it would be triggered from inside the silo if there was an evacuation needed, so the soil would be shifted with explosive bolts on the shoring holding it in place, and then channeled into a waiting pit that allowed the people down there to climb out safely if the need arose.
When Tommy had worked construction on the site, he’d been one of the gang who’d dug the pit.
All it had taken was the appropriation of a digger. It cut down through the earth in less than an hour, revealing the escape hatch. A bit of work with crowbars and sledgehammers, and they’d been inside the silo, rounding up the community and taking them to the chapel.
There had been some light resistance, but Freeson, Donie, and Lucy had dealt with that while Cyndi and Tommy had searched for Nathan.
From the moment they’d taken the fire escape hatch up to the moment when they’d begun climbing out of the silo, with Nathan and zero causalities, they’d required less than fifteen minutes. The time it had taken for Nathan to have his breakfast, find the door to the medical unit locked, and make his way towards the chapel.
Since then, Nathan had been resting where he could, in the back of Tommy’s covered wagon, steering the oxen when he felt up to it, and generally trying to get his mojo back. He was living out of the wagon with Tommy, Cyndi, Brandon, Tony, and Rapier. They had been sad to leave the dogs behind, but Tommy’s two wagons would provide shelter and a modicum of comfort that the sleds did not.
In the other wagon came Freeson, Lucy, Dave, and Donie. Freeson had taken to the pioneer lifestyle so well that he’d begun wearing a white Stetson in the same way that Elm had back in Chicago. It made Nathan’s heart warm to see his friend in the wagon behind them, too, smiling more than he’d ever seen him do before, enjoying life as the weather changed from a bitter freeze to a more manageable, shivery cold.
Tony was thriving on Elm’s rooibos tea recipe, too. He’d not
had an attack of asthma in many weeks now, and the good food he was getting was packing on muscle and strength.
They’d traveled for five weeks now, and last week, Dave’s cop-maps had showed them that they’d crossed from Nebraska into Wyoming. They were on the last leg of their journey to Casper. Nathan was near back to his old self now as well, and apart from the nightmares, he was finding it easier to succumb to fatigue than he had in the past; and as they neared their destination, it became more and more comforting, to feel that they had made it safely across the plains, through the weather, and towards a city of new hope.
23
The first sense of trouble came on the outskirts of Lost Springs. They’d been making good progress in the wagons now. The oxen were moving faster through the thaw than they had over the snow, where footing hadn’t been so sure and obstacles had often been disguised beneath lumps of snow.
Nathan had felt up to steering that morning after they’d broken camp. The turn in the weather, although not yet above leaving the earth glittering with hard frosts and billowing mists, made the lands eerie and the air ghostly. They’d had to take to traveling by roads because cross-country routes couldn’t be trusted without Dave’s satellite uplink.
The first sound of the engines didn’t concern Nathan unduly. They’d gotten more used to finding the occasional vehicles with enough fuel to keep running now that they were only on the fringes of the new Arctic Circle. But it wasn’t a daily occurrence, and the people in the cars still kept mostly to themselves.
It was odd, he thought, that back in the areas harshest hit by the Big Winter, fellow travelers hadn’t been willing to meet and talk. Nathan had noted that a paranoia was spreading across the country. People weren’t so quick to trust. He guessed they’d been burned too many times by others who were motivated by their own greed, just as he’d been burned himself.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 48
