No. Nathan owed her for his life, many times over.
So, there was no way he was going to leave her behind.
As he emerged into the wan sunlight and began the climb out of the gulley, there was only one thing on his mind.
Cyndi.
And he would prove worthy of her if was the last thing he ever did.
Stryker was nothing if not predictable.
As Nathan had thought, he’d taken Cyndi back through the woods to the Black Hawk on the road where it sat like an exhausted dragonfly, right next to the still burning wagons and the dead oxen.
Nathan was glad he couldn’t see the form of Rapier among the bodies. Perhaps Tony’s new pet had escaped the bullets and the conflagration. The thought offered a rare moment of positivity amid the understandably horrific scene being played out in front of him.
Cyndi wasn’t the only captive from Nathan’s clan. She knelt on the ground by the open side door of the Black Hawk with her hands zip-tied behind her back. Next to her was Freeson, his face covered in mud and blood. He looked as if he’d resisted being taken like a lion, and had suffered mightily for it. Next to him was Donie, covered head to foot in mud, on her knees, and with no shoes or jacket against the cold.
The mist, once blown away by the Black Hawk when it had first landed, had come back in now, making the air glassy and opaque. Nathan was deep in the undergrowth, but had a good line of sight to see the forces ranged out against him. Next to Stryker, who was sitting on the edge of the Black Hawk deck, idly swinging his leg like a kid on a jetty, were two other men in uniform.
Brett from Chicago, and Harmsworth from Detroit.
They were talking near the cockpit of the Black Hawk. The pilot and co-pilot inside, Nathan didn’t recognize, but apart from them, it was a regular reunion. He half-expected Strickland to jump plumply and primly down from the helicopter to join the band of Nathan’s nemeses.
But that didn’t happen.
What did happen was the press of the cold steel of a gun muzzle against the back of his head, and the cold, precise voice of Tasha saying, “Come and join the party, Nathan; we’re tired of playing Waiting for Godot.”
Nathan was made to kneel in front of the rest of his already captured band.
Natasha was in charge, clearly, and the men gladly deferred to her as she spoke.
“Knew you couldn’t resist if we put them out on a platter for you, Nathan. You’re so much the gold-hearted hero, aren’t you? Me, I would have left them behind. Cut my losses and run. But not you, eh, hero?”
That bit into Nathan, sending memories of almost leaving Syd to be taken by Danny across the ice to Windsor.
“You’ve worked pretty hard at screwing things up for all of us, haven’t you? Killing Danny and wrecking the Greenhouse. Danny was my brother. You didn’t know that, did you?”
Nathan could find no words.
“Yup, so this little bug hunt isn’t just because you’re a certified P.I.T.A., Nate, which I’m sure we’ll all agree you are. Let’s just say there’s a satisfying gloss of familial revenge on my part. It’s not just Chicago and Detroit deciding to join forces with each other. Trade, food, and firepower. Oh no. This is… personal.”
He’d underestimated the situation again. Natasha was calling him a hero, but what he really was, was an idiot. Yet again, his rashness had led him into a situation where there seemed to be absolutely no escape.
“Have you hurt Syd?” he finally asked.
“Why should I tell you anything, Nathan? She’s where we can keep an eye on her. Leave it at that.”
Nathan’s guts curled around her words, but there was no point digging any further. She wouldn’t tell him anything, and would just enjoy his anguish.
“Where are the kids, Nate?” Stryker swung himself off the lip of the Black Hawk deck, putting his pistol into the belt of his uniform. “You haven’t left them in the woods, have you, man?” Stryker looked off into the trees, miming a telescope like he was a captain on a poop deck.
“Be dark soon, Nate. You realize these woods are full of animals, yeah? Hungry animals. The baby, well, he’ll just be a snack. But Tony, I can imagine he’ll feed a family of starving wolves for a week. Nicely National Geographic, don’t you think?”
Nathan knew Stryker was trying his hardest to make him react. Maybe he needed to build up to shooting Nathan in the face, or maybe he needed one last manipulation to complete the set in readying Nathan for the coup de grâce.
“How long have you hated me, Stryker? These guys, I can understand. Natasha and Harmsworth, I get. Her brother is dead and I screwed their operations up pretty good. They killed your wife…”
Stryker threw his head back and howled thick laughter at the sky. “Wife! Wife? When did you get so stupid, Nathan? I don’t have a wife. Never did. And yeah, okay, I did feel bad about tricking you here. Maybe you should have left me to burn in the Masonic—but you didn’t, and I saw how I could get back in with Brant by playing you along. So thanks for that. Really appreciate it. Look. They gave me my own helicopter as thanks.”
The words were a buzz saw running through Nathan’s head, ripping through his thoughts, killing memories, and driving up splinters of betrayal.
Focus. Focus.
Keep your mind on getting out of this.
Okay, Daddy. Okay. Nathan swallowed. Shook his head. Focused his eyes on Stryker.
“I’m assuming Rose is still alive or it would have been her body you kicked out of the chopper, right?”
Stryker shrugged noncommittally.
Nathan continued, knowing that the longer he kept Stryker from firing, the longer he had to save everyone. “But you. Man, you must harbor some pretty deep resentment to come with these people to hunt me down. What did I ever do to you to make you want me dead this much, Stry? Why make up a fake wife? Why carry on working for Brant after I’d stopped you from burning yourself to death when you had an attack of conscience? Come on. If you’re going to kill me, you can at least tell me that.”
Stryker limped forward and placed his hand on Cyndi’s shoulder. Her body recoiled and her eyes bulged as Stryker moved his hand over her shoulder and then down the front of her coat, feeling all the way.
“Isn’t it obvious, Nathan? You got the girl, and I… well, I didn’t.”
“But…” Nathan stopped, trying to understand. “Stry… you didn’t even know Cyndi before me. You only met her through me.”
“And you still don’t know why I left Glens Falls, do you?”
“No. I really don’t.”
Stryker squeezed the front of Cyndi’s jacket again and then moved the back of his hand to her cheek, where it gently caressed the skin. “Tell him, baby. Tell him now, and then I can shoot him.”
Cyndi’s eyes welled up with tears, but then she spoke. “The night before he left Glens Falls, Stryker came to me while you were working late at the auto shop. He begged me to come with him. Start a new life. And I… I…”
Nathan felt the dread rising in his throat. Was she really going to tell him about a first betrayal? The ultimate betrayal?
“And…” she continued, “…I told him where to go, threw him out, and told him if he didn’t leave town, I’d tell you what he’d done.”
The relief didn’t take away from the danger of the situation, but in the oddest way possible, it lifted Nathan’s spirits one notch.
“But when he offered us Detroit, I thought maybe the years would have lessened his feelings for me. But they hadn’t. It was clear from the moment we got there that he wasn’t going to leave me alone until you were either gone from Detroit or dead. I thought I could handle it.”
“That’s why you didn’t tell me?”
She nodded. So, her withdrawal and anger after Brandon had been born hadn’t just been about Brant using Stryker to bring them to Detroit. It had been the constant drip-drip pressure from Stryker, as the man he’d thought had been his friend had tried to worm his way into Nathan’s marriage.
; Stryker kissed the top of Cyndi’s head. “But hey, that’s over with now. Tonight, I get the girl. Whether she likes it or not. And you, Nathan, you get a bullet in the head. Fair exchange is no robbery.”
Harmsworth made a signal to the pilot with his index finger, and the rotors above their heads started to power up. Natasha walked up from behind Nathan and turned towards Stryker. “Shoot who ya gotta shoot, Wilson, but I want this bird in the air if we’re getting back to Detroit tonight.”
“Okay, baby, don’t get your knickers in a knot. I just wanted Nate to know exactly why it was I wanted to kill him so bad for so long.”
“Just get on with it,” Nathan said as Stryker lifted his gun to point it at the mechanic’s head first, flicking off the safety with his thumb.
Cyndi looked directly into Nathan’s eyes.
The connection made once more on that high bridge of love they’d walked towards each other across every day of their marriage. If it had to end now, then it would end with them both on that bridge, however high, however far the fall down.
“Nathan. I love you,” Cyndi said.
25
As she finished speaking to Nathan, Cyndi pushed up and back, crashing into Stryker. A shot blasted past Nathan’s ear and he heard the slug thud into a trunk somewhere behind him in the treeline.
The spatter of a machine gun clip being emptied stitched hot lead across Harmsworth, who’d been halfway to pulling his own pistol from his belt. He spun away, crashing into the Black Hawk, a line of ragged bullet holes stitched across his back.
Tasha had raised her own pistol, but one bullet from another direction had opened up her side and sent her flying sideways; as she’d hit the ground, her jaw exploded as a round from yet another direction burst through her face, almost ripping the entire mandible away from her skull.
Lucy walked and fired. Coming out from behind the Black Hawk, from where she had already killed both pilots through their open window.
She’d stepped, fired, stepped, and fired. Brett collapsed under the weight of his own death, falling to his knees and pitching forward as Lucy, her aim brutal and true, put round after round into his chest and head. Brett’s skull opened to the air, brain matter churning like oatmeal in a bowl, spattered up across the fuselage of the helicopter.
Dave appeared last, from the rear rotor section of the Black Hawk, and began firing an MP4 at Stryker. First up his side, across his chest, and then up past his ear. Stryker had rolled over, his dead eyes wide as if the last thing he’d expected was to die right now. His jaw had lolled open with a click, and Nathan heard the last breath hissing from his lungs like the sound of a terrified snake.
It seemed apt.
Lucy ran to Freeson, using a knife to cut his bonds, and hugged him. Donie, who had thrown herself to the side as the firing had started, was being helped back out from under the helicopter’s tail section by Dave.
Tommy put his hand on Nathan’s shoulder and hauled him to his feet, and then cut the zip-tie holding Nathan’s wrists together and left him to go to Cyndi.
The bullet meant for Nathan from Stryker’s pistol hadn’t missed him because Cyndi had pushed his hand out of the way. The bullet had missed Nathan because it had drilled through her back, blowing out a considerable chunk of her sternum; it had been diverted by her bone and then her flesh.
Nathan knelt down by the side of his wife, blood running from her mouth, dots of it smattered on her flickering eyes, their pupils alive and moving, wet and vital.
“Cyndi… I…”
Cyndi’s chest was open. Nathan instinctively tried to close the gaping wound over his wife’s exposed heart. There was too much damage. So Nathan held his wife’s heart beneath the palms of his hands as she died.
The organ was warm, pumping fitfully, the surface slippery and pitted with fragments of bone. Cyndi’s mouth moved, but no sound came out.
Nathan, the crust of his own world slithering off its axis to freeze and die, just like the Earth’s had, felt like it ended in that moment. He bent his head to Cyndi’s lips, his eyes hoping to lock onto hers, but they were too febrile, shivering and shaking in their sockets.
All he was able to do as he held her heart was to whisper into her ear, “I love you.”
The simplest words for the most complicated feeling he had ever had. Crushed beneath the weight of sadness, hollowed by the sight of the woman he loved, open to the air, the last beats of her punctured heart ticking down like the seconds on an unwound clock.
When it was over, Nathan waited with his hands in the wound as the first snow he’d felt in many weeks started to fall.
He stayed still because he didn’t want the snow to fall onto her heart.
When the flakes had stopped falling, he’d gotten up and led the others back to where he’d left Tony and Brandon.
They buried Cyndi with a view over the Esterbrook, towards Laramie Peak.
The mountains were purple and dark blue, with fast-moving shadows of winter clouds moving over the rock faces. The river running along the valley floor had broken free of ice, and there was melt water tumbling down, frothy and white. There were buds on the cherry trees, and even if this were a faux spring, at the very wrong time of the year, at least nature was trying.
Nathan had tried to be strong for Tony and insisted on digging his wife’s grave alone, but he’d collapsed as he dug, half because of tears and half from the physical impossibility of the action. Tommy and Freeson had finished the hole for him, and Cyndi’s body, wrapped in one of Tommy’s Diné-patterned blankets, had been laid in the ground and slowly covered.
Lucy had tried to speak a few words, but her voice had been so choked with emotion that she couldn’t get past saying Cyndi’s name. They’d left Nathan on his knees at the graveside, holding Brandon, with Tony at his side and hugging his daddy for a full hour before the cold whipped up a fine rain, and then Lucy had taken the baby from Nathan, and Tony’s hand, while Freeson had led Nathan back to the surviving wagon to get out of the drizzle.
In saving them all, Cyndi had given her own life. She’d laid the groundwork, made the plan, and executed it when the time was right, just as Stryker had pulled the trigger, meaning to send Nathan to his own oblivion.
After the funeral, Nathan told the others he wanted to go the five miles back to where Cyndi had died.
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Freeson asked gently.
“Leave him be,” Lucy said, rocking Brandon gently in her arms. Tony was sitting on a rock with Rapier, looking down into the valley. When Nathan made his intentions clear, he looked up and spoke simply, in a voice that was clear, assertive, and would accept no argument. “I’ll come with you, Daddy.”
And so he did.
Nathan and Tony walked together into the milky fog of the Wyoming morning. The group had made camp as best they could in an abandoned roadhouse at the head of the valley, about a mile from where the wagons had been attacked.
Truth be told, Nathan would rather have made the trip on his own, but he didn’t have the strength to argue with the boy, and he also had no reason to argue. They fell into step together, the mist and the cold making them walk a little faster than was comfortable in order to build up some warmth in their bones and bodies.
For Nathan, the night before had been one of twisted anguish and zero sleep. They had decided that they would bury Cyndi, rather than cremate her, and where—knowing the view over Esterbrook towards the mountains was spectacular, Nathan had agreed with Lucy that it was the perfect spot. But even now, Nathan felt he could probably never close his eyes again without seeing a repeat image of his hands, holding what they had held.
If he ever slept again, he thought it would be a miracle.
It wasn’t just a feeling of sadness or grief that he felt right now, this numbing emotion washing up and down his body at every step—it was a feeling of being cast adrift.
Cyndi had been his anchor. Not his rock.
A rock was a dumb thing to be to someon
e, Nathan had always thought. A rock was solid and solitary, and it didn’t move; it was steadfast, a heavy weight to slow someone down.
An anchor was wholly different. An anchor allowed you to move around, and it could be wound up and carried with you, and when you needed to stay somewhere, you could drop anchor; you’d be safe in the currents of life, you wouldn’t drift away, and when you were ready to go somewhere else, it would always come with you. You never wanted to be separated from an anchor, especially when the storms were coming, and since the arrival of the Big Winter, Nathan’s life had been nothing but storms.
But now he was truly adrift. The chain to the anchor had been cut by the man he had once called his friend, and he couldn’t see himself ever being attached to someone like Cyndi again.
He would have to become the anchor now for his two sons, though. He would have to learn to tether them but let them play out on the chain—holding them not too tight because, in heavy waters, a chain pulled too stiff could buckle or snap. The trick was to leave enough chain to allow movement, but to know the ship would never go so far as to be lost completely.
Tony looked up at Nathan as they approached the road from the track to the valley. “What are you thinking, Daddy?”
“About ships and anchors.”
“Why?”
Nathan thought for a moment, and then answered earnestly. “I think I’ve just stopped being a ship. And now I need to become an anchor.”
“Will that help you not feel sad about Mom?”
“I dunno, Tony. I really don’t. But you and Brandon are this family’s ships now, about to sail, and Daddy will be your anchor.”
The boy rubbed at his chin. “I… think I get what you mean. It was like Mom… Mom was the center of everything. She kept us all together. It’s like, when the center goes, something has gotta take its place, or everything will fall apart.”
Nathan looked down at his boy, who was nodding along to his own wisdom, as if he were testing the limits of his own grief. Looking at the map of it. Instead of being so close to it that he couldn’t see anything but a cartographer’s lines and dots, Tony was already learning to fly above the whole thing. Seeing what the lay of the land was, and what direction he should go in.
After the Shift: The Complete Series Page 50
