After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  They faced hard, backbreaking work for the next four hours as Nathan, Tommy, and Syd uncovered the snow and levered up chunks of brickwork and collapsed metal structures, all to see what they could find beneath. It didn’t take them long to find where the kitchen had been behind the bar. There were plenty of cans of soup, corned beef, and dried milk that had survived the earthquake. Plus sacks of rice, dried fruits, and packets of beef jerky which would last until the next ice age if kept right. In the end, they found more food than they could comfortably take along and still leave places in the vehicles for them to sit.

  “We’ll leave some of the guns behind,” Nathan said as the pile of provisions grew—testament to Caleb’s sound, if eccentrically applied, management skills.

  “Leave some weapons behind?” Tommy asked incredulously.

  “We've got more than enough for one each, plus some spares. I don’t think Brandon’s ready to learn to shoot yet.” Nathan smiled. “We’re not an army. We can take the ammo for the weapons we’re keeping, but I’d rather have food than a gun I don’t have enough hands to use. Make sense?”

  “I suppose so,” Tommy answered as he reluctantly put an M240 machine gun into the snow to make room for tins of chicken soup.

  Next, they searched for where in the infirmary Miriam might have kept her drugs and first responder equipment. And there they discovered that Miriam and the others had been through the wreckage already during the night, before the snowfall had become too treacherous.

  The crushed cupboards and metal cabinets Nathan had seen Miriam go to for various drugs and medicaments were near empty, apart from a few packs of aspirin and indigestion relief liquid.

  “They cleared this out in a blizzard?” Tommy whistled. “They musta really wanted to get away from us.”

  Nathan nodded sadly. He picked up the damp packets, the three remaining bottles, and the thin, black rubber snake of a stethoscope they’d found, and put these meager things together with Elm’s ledger and the bags of Native American remedies in the back of the F-350. Elm’s recorded knowledge and Cyndi’s application of it had kept them alive and well pretty much this long—not exactly curing Tony’s asthma, but certainly keeping it at bay—so they would continue to use and learn. Aspirin and bottles of indigestion liquid were great as they were, but they were processed, made in factories and distributed by a system that was no longer operational. Yet again, it was brought home to Nathan how important it was to disseminate the information contained in Elm’s ledger to as many people as possible. Lives would depend on it in the years to come.

  Nathan felt some regret that part of their mission had become somewhat sidetracked, and then derailed with the death of his wife and the issues they’d come across in Casper, but perhaps the further south they got, they may well be able to spread some of this knowledge around again.

  It would be a fitting monument to his wife.

  “Yes!” Donie’s shout was dulled by the surrounding snow, but as the morning ground on toward afternoon and the threat of a cold night spent in the trucks impacted everyone’s mood, the sound of it offered a bright spark in an otherwise bleak day.

  Dave and Donie had set up their small, wind-powered trickle chargers and satellite uplink station on top of the remaining Land Cruiser. They were sitting in the back seats, the chunky black cop laptop with its thick rubber corners and one of their own Windows machines linked by cables, USB port to USB port.

  Dave’s metal tube arm made two-handed operation of his machine difficult, even with his arm out of the sling, so he worked one-handed but was making progress anyway. As Nathan looked in through the window Donie had wound down to shout their triumph to the world at large, he saw that her fingers were flying over the keyboard of the cop laptop with incredible speed.

  This was where Dave and Donie’s expertise with computers, alternative energy sources, and tech in general came to the fore. Their use of the cop internet—which was still operating, if in a hugely reduced capacity—had given them up-to-date tracking and mapping abilities, allowing them to stay off the main highways when they’d needed to avoid gangs on the way to Detroit. It had also given Nathan a number of options of places to search when Cyndi, Free, Lucy, Syd, and Tony had been kidnapped by members of a gang. Dave and Donie’s equipment had provided enough of a distraction for Nathan to rescue everyone and neutralize many of the bad guys in Marty’s Diner.

  Not being able to use the cop laptop any more would be a serious blow, so Nathan was coming around to the idea of the machine being used to fight back, rather than just have it be dumped and them be done with it.

  Donie’s face was alive now, though, eyes dancing across the screen.

  “You found it?” Nathan asked.

  “Yeah.” Donie nodded without looking up. “It’s a sneaky one. Military grade, by the look of it. Russian, possibly, but it could be one of ours just made to look like one of theirs. The payload of the spyware has been hidden in an always-on portion of the RAM. From what we can see, it turns itself on at random intervals to see if we’re using the uplink. But it comes into its own when the uplink is operational. It bursts data quicker than you can turn the machine off, and it had a portion of code that makes you believe the machine is off, but it actually stays on for another thirty seconds and sends the data at a more leisurely pace. It’s witchcraft, Nate. Pure witchcraft.”

  “If I had any idea what you were talking about, I’m sure I’d be impressed. I can just about turn a computer on and use a search engine. Cyndi was the whiz.”

  “All you need to know,” Dave said, as he tapped one-handed at his laptop, “is that it knows exactly where we are, and it’s talking to Detroit right now.”

  Dave pointed at lines of letters and numbers moving across his screen. Nathan was surprised how innocuous it all looked. Just a scroll of text. No blinking Skull-and-Crossbones or flashing danger signs. Just numbers and text, in no discernable pattern, telling Brant where they were right down to the square yard.

  “And can you fix it?”

  “Yes,” Dave and Donie said together, emphatically.

  So, Nathan left them to it.

  It made him seriously antsy to know that even in this new world, where almost nothing was how it had been before, that a computer could be the thing that would lead the enemy to them surer than a trail of blood particles leading a great white to an injured fish.

  The world was decidedly low-tech now. It was survive or die, and with the laptop screaming, “Here we are!” all the way back to Michigan, they were ever more vulnerable.

  Nathan found himself scanning the horizons for a second Black Hawk coming through the air. Price had given the impression that the one they’d destroyed had been the only one Brant had had access to, but that didn’t mean that, in the intervening time, Brant hadn’t managed to locate another.

  Nathan shivered at the thought and went back to warm himself by the fire.

  As the night locked down on them, dropping an iron frost over the land, they let the fire die out and moved back into the vehicles. Tommy joined Nathan and his boys in the F-350. Both the Ford and the Land Cruiser had been repacked and stuffed with as much food, fuel, and equipment as they and the trailers could take. Tommy and Lucy had made an extra trip into the wrecked maintenance building to see what they could salvage from Caleb’s Bar, as well. Lucy had scored two unbroken bottles of vodka, and Tommy three bottles of Laphroaig, along with two shot glasses.

  “I’d have preferred Kentucky bourbon, but this is a close second,” Tommy said as he poured generous slugs of fire water into the glasses he’d placed carefully on the dash of the Ford. When he’d recorked the bottle, he passed one to Nathan.

  “Shouldn’t we save the alcohol to use as antiseptic?” Nathan asked half-seriously.

  “I’d rather you sawed off my leg, compadre,” Tommy said, and drained his glass with a loud smack of his lips.

  Nathan was more circumspect with the whiskey, and sipped at the peaty, smoky liquid, letting the alcoho
l burn off on his tongue before sending it down to bring a welcome warmth to his belly.

  Tommy was ready to pour them both another, but Nathan shook his head. “I’m good.”

  Tommy shrugged and poured himself one. This one, he sipped at while they talked.

  “Did I get the impression that Free and Lucy are going to stick around? Come south?”

  “Yup. They both apologized. Knowing Free as I do, I know that didn’t come easy.”

  “I guess my apology is in the post.”

  “Give them time, Tommy. Like you, they’re assets to the party. It would be all the poorer without any one of you.”

  Tommy shrugged again, his eyes squinting off into the darkness. Nathan couldn’t see what he was looking at. Maybe he wasn’t looking out at all; maybe he was just focusing on the reflection of himself in the windshield. “They’re not gonna follow me, and I’m not gonna follow them. Which is why, I guess, you’ve taken the reins again.”

  Nathan hadn’t thought of it like that, but yes, he had taken charge again. He hadn’t made the conscious decision to put himself forward to tell the others what they should do, and how they should do it, but an unconscious process had led him once again to be the fulcrum over which the group pivoted. At least for now.

  “Just me spouting a bit of common sense, Tommy. Anyone can do that.”

  “Yeah, but they look to you, compadre. That’s a good position to be in.”

  “They? What about you, Tommy?”

  Tommy thought for a long time. Time enough to pour himself another slug of Laphroaig.

  “Don’t ask me to take sides, Nate. If you do, we might have a problem, but right now I’m happy to follow you. If that changes, and that woman starts calling the shots again, then I may have to reconsider.”

  Nathan knew he shouldn’t have been shocked to hear such pushback from Tommy. He wasn’t a natural follower, and being told what to do by Lucy must have screwed with his sensibilities big-time. “Lucy’s heart is in the right place. She’s not the easiest person to get on with, but she, like you, has been good for all of us.”

  “May be, Nathan, but I have a sense for these things, and she is trouble. One hundred percent, twenty-four carat trouble. You can listen to me or not, but when she and her boyfriend make us all dead, don’t come running to me.”

  13

  “Trouble up ahead,” Tommy said, looking through the windshield as he drove the F-350 ahead of the Land Cruiser.

  There hadn’t been any more fresh snow in the three days since they’d left the ridge and the wrecked wind farm, so that had been a plus, but there had been a whole raft of negatives.

  The snows that had swept over this part of Colorado, north of Denver, had been so deep, and the night frosts so severe, that they were having to drive at speeds somewhat less than fifteen miles an hour to stay safe—and that was when they could actually find the highway. In some places, where there were no road signs to tell them there was blacktop somewhere beneath the frigid white, they had to resort to the trick Nathan had implemented on the road from Glens Falls. Someone would take turns walking ahead of the vehicles with a pole, testing the drifts for hidden obstacles before allowing the trucks through. These were cold, hard yards to make progress over, and the days were shortening again after what had proved to be only the briefest of respites from the Big Winter.

  It was far too dangerous, Nathan had decided, for them to travel at night now, which allowed them just about six hours of daylight to get anywhere. But even during the day, the landscape through which they moved was a dim twilight, the sky bruised with dust. Dave surmised that there had been more volcanic activity along the Pacific coast, which had itself pumped more pyroclastic debris into the upper atmosphere—perhaps it had all been linked to the two earthquakes they had experienced.

  They’d made camps where they could but had stayed out of towns even where they’d looked safe and deserted. Being in a building when the earth was trying to shake it to pieces had made them wary of even looking into them for supplies to augment what they already had. And the constant near-twilight was affecting everyone’s moods, too. Conversations were sparse and perfunctory, camaraderie at a premium, and their hope for a settled future, while it still seemed to signal what everyone wanted, had never seemed so far away.

  “What’s the point of finding somewhere to live if it could fall over and crush you in the middle of the night?” Lucy had asked one evening as they’d made camp. No one had argued with her, not even Nathan. It had seemed like she was just saying what everyone else was thinking.

  “What is it?” Nathan asked now, picking up the sense of dread in Tommy’s voice.

  Tommy was acutely aware and focused the majority of the time. Even when driving, he constantly scanned the bleak, open landscape ahead of them for threats and hazards. Today, they had made better progress than yesterday. The road was clear enough to see and traverse without anyone needing to walk ahead. Still not allowing them to go faster than twenty, but it felt like they were zooming around the Indianapolis Speedway compared to how things had gone the day before.

  Tommy brought the truck to a slow stop to give the Land Cruiser behind them enough warning to stop, too.

  “Military, by the look of it.”

  Nathan’s breathing quickened, and he picked up the field glasses from between his legs and brought them up to meet his eyes.

  Maybe a thousand yards ahead of them was a highway roadblock and checkpoint. Across both lanes, in very much a repeat of what they’d seen on the outskirts of Casper, five ultra-light DAGOR A1 all-terrain vehicles were parked nose-to-tail across the snow-covered highway. The vehicles, tubular in construction, fast and ornery, were painted in military browns. Each one was topped with a large and ugly M2 .50 caliber machine gun and manned by soldiers in full winter tactical gear. Behind the A1s, perhaps fifteen soldiers were waiting, their weapons ready.

  Nathan took the glasses from his eyes. “We can’t turn off now; they’re bound to have seen us.”

  “What’s the betting that they’re Brant’s men?”

  Nathan shook his head. “I don’t know. Dave and Donie say they’re sending signals back to Detroit that make us look like we’re traveling back east instead of south. I mean, I could be wrong… but this might be something else altogether. Well, I hope so, at least.”

  “What we gonna do, boss?” Free had jumped down out of the Land Cruiser and joined the F-350 on Nathan’s side, and he’d wound down the window as Free had approached.

  “We’re gonna have to front it out. Make sure everyone back in your truck hides anything that might immediately identify us, and for God’s sake make sure the cop laptop is out of sight.”

  Free nodded his assent and jogged back to the Cruiser.

  Four soldiers and a lieutenant came out from behind the A1 roadblock to stop them as they approached. The lieutenant—a broad woman in her forties, with a lined face and a name tape that declared her as ‘Toothill’—walked forward with a couple of men and waved them to the side of the road.

  “Engines off, please,” she said.

  “How can we assist you, ma’am?” Tommy asked, winding down his window and flashing a smile that could have illuminated a dark room.

  “We’re stopping all vehicles along here. There’s been a spate of gang-related murders and thefts in the Denver metropolitan area. We’re warning people to stay off the road as much as they can, and secondly, we’d like to make sure those we do stop are not involved. Would you mind clearing the vehicle, sir, so my boys can take a look inside?”

  “Of course,” Tommy said, opening the door and climbing out. Nathan exited out of his door. “Lieutenant Toothill?”

  “Roger.”

  “My boy and my baby son and our dog are in the back here. Is it okay if they stay inside out of the cold?”

  Toothill peered through the glass into the crew cab. “I don’t see why not.”

  She waved at Tony, and like the good boy he was, he waved right back.r />
  Free and the others got out of the Cruiser as two more soldiers came forward to look inside.

  Nathan’s heart had begun fluttering. What would they make of the weaponry, and the provisions? What would they want to know? And would any of this information get back to Brant?

  “Do any of you have any identification?”

  “Not me,” Tommy said, and Nathan shook his head, too.

  “We lost pretty much all that stuff over the last few months. Sometimes we forgot who we are.” Tommy was trying to make light of the situation, but Toothill seemed like a woman who didn’t have much of a sense of humor. She took out a small tablet computer from her thigh pocket and fired up the software.

  “Names?”

  Nathan threw a look to Tommy, which Tommy caught. “Now, I don’t mean to be a P.I.T.A. here, Lieutenant, and we’re all for cooperation, but roadblocks, taking names, and searching vehicles doesn’t seem very American to me.”

  Toothill stared squarely at Tommy, and a grunt behind her stiffened. “Name?”

  Nathan spoke up. “Callum Grieves. But everyone calls me Cal,” he added, not really sure where the name came from that he’d just pulled out of thin air, but if there was any chance of this getting back to Brant, it was better to go with a lie than with the truth.

  “Sonny Monk,” Tommy said as Toothill tapped at her screen.

  The soldiers finished rummaging in the back of the Ford and came back to the lieutenant. “Guns, food, ammo. Usual things. Nothing that we’re looking for.”

  Toothill noted this down on her screen, too. “Okay, Zimmerman, go help Ventura and Blake with the Toyota.”

  Zimmerman saluted and turned.