After the Shift: The Complete Series

by Grace Hamilton

  “Please…”

  Arctic shook her head, sighed loudly with a tinge of frustration, and moved back to the F-350 and looked inside. Nathan followed and spoke up first.

  “Tommy… this is the woman who saved you at Drymouth.”

  Tommy’s eyes widened.

  Arctic pulled back her hood, tore off her balaclava, and shook her brunette hair free. She was perhaps thirty-five, with a face that was thin, dark eyes, and a nose that had been broken several times in the past. Her chin was scarred with thick red chunks of flesh.

  “I saw your fight, mister. You would have beaten them if they hadn’t stabbed you in the back.”

  Arctic held out her hand and Tommy took it.

  “You can have the cars if you want. I can get another easy enough. The gangs here are very stupid,” she said.

  Nathan didn’t know where it came from, but he said it anyway. “Come with us.”

  Arctic looked at him as if he were talking in Swahili. “Why?”

  “We have some bad guys on our tail. We could do with the help. We can offer food, and some shelter and company.”

  “What makes you think I want them?”

  “I don’t. But I’m offering anyway.”

  Before Arctic could answer, Lucy made a sound, retched, and scrambled out of the truck into the snow. There, she bent forward, putting a gloved hand on the side of the truck, and began vomiting copiously.

  Nathan’s heart sank.

  Here he was trying to get Arctic to join the group, and he hadn’t been paying attention to the members of the party he already had. He was transported back in his mind to the patients in the pavilion hospital, retching just as Lucy was now and throwing up into bowls. The smell of illness and death in the place came rushing back to his nostrils, and he felt his guts turning over at just the memory of it.

  “Lucy… my god, I didn’t think. Could you have come into contact with whatever was making the refugees sick in the FEMA hospital? Are you ill like them?”

  “Oh, now you wish you’d left us behind?” Lucy asked, bringing her head up for a moment and fixing Nathan with a tear-smeared stare before bending over to vomit again.

  “No, of course not. I just… we should have been more careful, is all.” Nathan caught sight of Brandon and Tony through the open door, through the flurrying snow. Had he failed to protect his kids, and keep them away from a potential plague?

  Family first, son.

  “Careful is a luxury these days,” said Arctic, as if nothing else needed to be said on the subject.

  Nathan felt like a heel. He sketched an apologetic expression on his face as Lucy uncurled and stood up, wiping her hand across her lips. “The only physically infectious thing I’ve come into contact with is Freeson, and I’ve caught his disease, Nate. I’m pregnant, you doofus.”

  24

  “Carmel Mackintosh,” Arctic said once she’d gotten into the Jaguar with Nathan, Tony, Brandon, and Rapier, and once they’d rolled off into the snow. The Lexus had been full of bullet holes and blood, so they hadn’t taken that. The Jag’s occupant gang members had been killed outside the vehicle, though, and it had just been a case of dragging their bodies to the sidewalk while Free, stunned to find out he was going to be a father, had siphoned the gas from the Lexus to complement what was already in the Ford’s tank, all the while breathing curses and blowing out his cheeks and shaking his head as Lucy’s news sank in.

  Nathan led the F-350 through the storm, south down the spine of the city, sticking to suburban roads where he could but, when they became impassable, doubling back onto the highway. The storm was keeping the FEMA APCs and A1s off the streets for now, and they hoped to make it out of the city as soon as they could.

  Carmel had agreed to come along ‘for the time being’—but didn’t think it would be a ‘permanent thing.’

  “Why not?”

  “I guess you guys are looking for a place to settle down, right?”

  “That’s the plan, yes, if we can keep out of Brant’s way and stop him tracking us down.”

  Carmel shook her head. “Settling down’s not for me. This world—this Big Winter world—has afforded me an opportunity I never thought I’d be presented with when I got back from Iraq.”

  “I figured you’d be ex-forces. No one shoots like that for a hobby.”

  “Special forces, yes. Five tours, zeroing bad guys doing bad things. Cold, clean kills.”

  Nathan couldn’t imagine what it was like to have that kind of job description. “Give me a hot, dirty engine every time.”

  Carmel shrugged. “I don’t ask you to like what I do, Nathan, just to understand it. If I hadn’t been around back at Drymouth, neither would you.”

  Nathan knew she was right, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Maybe he wasn’t built for this world. It had been an odyssey, that’s for sure, and he’d defended himself when he needed to, and he was pretty sure he would always step up to the plate when his children or his friends were threatened, but Carmel’s life seemed so removed from his own.

  Even now.

  “I came across that gang last night. They’d stopped a woman and her teenage boy at their roadblock. They didn’t give them the opportunity to just walk away and leave their gear for the gang. Nope. They raped the woman on the back seat of the car in front of her son. I couldn’t get a clear shot without hitting the woman or her boy. The gang had a laugh, a smoke and a drink, and waited for the next car to come along. I could only make the shot after the gang had killed the woman and her boy in the car. I wish I’d had it sooner. God. This place.”

  “You make a compelling argument.”

  “I’m just looking at the facts, Nathan. The gangs are bad, FEMA’s bad, and the guy chasing you down, Brant, is bad. Who’s good anymore? I’m not good in the classic sense, but someone has to take a stand.”

  They drove on in silence for a while, the houses rolling by on either side, the Jag buffeted by the wind. A street blocked with a burned-out, overturned Mack semi sent them back the way they had driven, looking for a cross-street that would get them back up onto the highway.

  The route and the progress were torturous.

  At every turn, Nathan scanned the road ahead for FEMA vehicles, but there were none… which made Nathan a little suspicious. Sure, the storm was raging, and no one in their right mind would be traveling right now unless they had to, but to see no FEMA vehicles or checkpoints was more than a little odd, compared to what he’d seen in the city already.

  “Don’t say it,” said Carmel unexpectedly.

  “Don’t say what?”

  “Don’t say it’s too quiet. You know what a screw-up that can be, tempting fate.”

  Nathan decided that he liked Carmel.

  He may not like her making herself Colorado’s self-appointed executioner, but her demeanor was comfortable, and she seemed unaffected and genuine, not someone who would screw you over at the first opportunity they got. Like Stryker Wilson had. Like Harvey Brant had. Carmel was a bitter pill to swallow, but she was an antidote to some of the horrors the Big Winter had thrown up.

  Like Free and Tommy and Lucy and Syd, and more recently Donie and Dave, he felt she would be a good person to have around when the ordure hit the rotating prop.

  The suburbs gave way to the plain between Denver and the first risings of the Rockies. Nathan only got occasional glimpses of the distant mountains as the 36, designated Daniel’s Park road, passed through the suburb of Shadowbrook and left the city behind. They weren’t traveling any faster, as the snow had put paid to that, but there was a definite freeing of Nathan’s concerns about still being in the city. A journey that should have taken twenty minutes or so had, with detours and double-backs, taken nearly three hours.

  There was about an hour of daylight left, but Nathan had already turned on the headlights of the Jag to try to make the I-36. Out here, that road was no more than un-metaled farm track carved into the flat land, stuffed with fresh fluffy snow getting deeper a
ll the time. If the storm continued like this for much longer, forward progression would be almost impossible.

  Nathan stopped the Jag and jumped out into the knee-deep powder. The F-350 pulled up behind them, and Nathan, windblown snow stinging his eyes and scouring his face, trudged back to the window as Free pressed for it to go down.

  “Nearly dark,” Nathan said. “I’m not happy with the idea of carrying on during the night, but I don’t think we have any choice.”

  Free considered his friend’s words, and then flashed a concerned look at Lucy beside him. Lucy’s eye blazed. “Don’t start that, Freeson Mac! I’m pregnant, not made of glass. You don’t need to make decisions based on my passenger, and if you don’t want a punch in the nose, you won’t start now.”

  Nathan smiled inwardly. Cyndi had said much the same thing to him when they’d left Glens Falls—“Pregnancy isn’t an illness, Nate. For thousands of years, babies were plopped out in the field, in between the mother scything the wheat and then grinding it into flour.”

  Nathan felt good about having the ghost of Cyndi’s words in his head. It was the first time in a while that he’d felt comfortable with her memory. Perhaps Lucy’s pregnancy would do more than cement her relationship with Free. Maybe it would have a positive effect on Nathan, too.

  New life from old.

  Free began to argue with Lucy, but she waved a finger in his face. “No. Nathan, we’re good. We’re not making more than ten miles an hour anyway; I’m in more danger of breaking my fist on Free’s face than I am of having a miscarriage because of the conditions. I vote we go on.”

  And so they did go on, into the dark.

  “Wait,” Carmel said, peering through the Jag’s side window at the mirror. She wiped condensation from the glass and peered closer.

  Nathan brought the SUV to a halt and pulled on the parking brake. They were pulling up a slight incline in the plain, another fifteen miles from Denver. The snow was pattering and blattering against the bodywork. It was endless.

  Even though it could only be seen in the cones of their headlights, the sense of having it all around the car made it feel like they were being held in the grip of the Big Winter, and like it was letting them know that they would never escape.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dave appeared out of the gloom and Nathan lowered the window. A gust of flakes washed into the car, peppering his skin and twanging his spine at the base of his neck.

  “You saw it, too?” Dave asked. Nathan was nonplussed.

  “Yeah,” Carmel said. “We’re high enough here to see back along the plain. Headlights. One, possibly two cars.”

  Nathan looked into the mirrors—he could see nothing.

  “Maybe they’ve turned off the road,” Dave said, shielding his eyes against the snow and looking back down the trail.

  “Or they’ve seen us stop and turned off their lights,” Tommy said, appearing at Dave’s shoulder.

  “We’re miles from anywhere out here. Who would be traveling at night, in this filthy weather, unless they had to?” Tommy continued, checking the magazine in the MP4 he was carrying.

  “I told you not to say it,” Carmel told Nathan.

  “I didn’t.”

  “Yeah, but I bet you thought it.”

  Nathan got out of the Jag and hiked up the incline at the side of the road, Tommy and Dave following. Nathan had pulled the binoculars out of the door caddy, and now he used them to scan the snow-flickering darkness as best he could.

  There was nothing to see. No cars, no lights, no houses suggesting a dwelling where whoever was following them could be heading. The dark landscape was, to all intents and purposes, a desolate wasteland of snow.

  He turned his attention toward the direction in which they’d been traveling, south. They were near enough at the top of the rise, and there was a gentle slope ahead—as far as he could tell from the Jag’s headlamps down into a valley, anyway. A light twinkled through the mess of snowflakes. He couldn’t make out if it was a building or a vehicle heading toward them. The one thing Nathan did know was that they were stuck on the road. Going cross-country over unknown, snow-covered terrain was suicide.

  “We can’t go back, and we can’t go sideways. We have to go on,” Nathan said. “That might be a farmstead down there. There’s a light and it’s not moving. We might be able to get the vehicles off the road there; get some cover and see what turns up. And if we’re dug in already, we might at least have a chance of fighting them off if they want to engage in gunplay, whoever’s coming.”

  The others agreed. Tommy moved up to the Jag with his MP4, getting Tony and Brandon to hunker down into the footwell behind Carmel’s seat. Rapier lay down next to Tommy, nose on his paws.

  Carmel had two Colt semi-automatics in holsters on her belt. She checked them over, put a round in each chamber, and held them on her lap as Nathan drove forward through the effervescing flakes swirling down from the night clouds up above.

  The storm was a constant presence around them, its wind rushing over the SUV and the trucks, snaky and buffeting, wearing down their resolve and making the bodywork rattle and the chassis vibrate.

  They didn’t see a light behind them again, but that didn’t mean they were not being followed.

  The twinkling light ahead grew and stayed steady. It had the warmth and glow of an oil lamp rather than one produced by electricity. Nathan thought that it being a farmstead had perhaps been a good call, and as they got closer, the road began to run along a low, chain-link fence on the same side as the light up ahead. It was a definitely a farm fence, the kind used to keep stock in the correct area. There were no signs of cattle, but he saw his hunch had been right when a sign came up for ‘The Lazy Q Ranch and Bison Tour.’ Nathan pulled the Jag through an open gate, and the F-350 followed.

  The oil lamp was burning in a window of the ranch house, but there was no other light coming from the building, and certainly not from the windows on this side that Nathan could see. Nathan got out of the Jag, followed by Carmel and Tommy, guns ready.

  “Don’t say it,” Carmel said, repeating her mantra.

  The front door to the property was up on a short veranda behind a rusted screen. Snow had drifted up against all of the walls three or four feet high, and the wind was still cutting across the plain as sharp as tomahawks.

  Tommy and Carmel covered Nathan as he pulled at the screen, kicking away a pile of snow that had gathered at its base. The screen door squealed open on protesting hinges, and he saw that the mahogany door beyond it looked rotted at the base with damp and age. This was not a building which had been used in a long time.

  And yet, there was an oil lamp burning in the window.

  Nathan touched the door handle with his gloved fingers and paused.

  “No. I don’t like it. Let’s get back in the cars and go on. If we’re being followed, let them do their worst. This place doesn’t feel right at all.”

  “Agreed,” Tommy said.

  “Yup,” Carmel added.

  “Daddy!” screamed Tony.

  Floodlights came on all around them. Five FEMA soldiers were pointing their M16s at the occupants of the F-350. Lucy, Free, Dave, and Donie got out of their vehicles with their hands raised. Syd got out of the car last, keeping one hand raised while shushing and placating Rapier. She closed the door on the dog’s wet black nose and raised her other hand.

  The Jag was surrounded by several soldiers, and standing with them was Harvey Brant.

  Brant was holding Tony in front of him, pulling the boy’s hand up behind his back with cruel intensity. Another soldier was pulling Brandon from the back of the Jag and cradling the baby in his arms.

  “Hello again, Nathan,” Brant said. “Nice of you to drop in.”

  “Once we cracked your ineffectual little hack on our system, and found you, we thought we’d be able to get you back to Detroit with minimum fuss. Lieutenant Price always was an overachiever, but I’m a man who l
ikes to see himself as an enabler, Nathan. So, I gave him a shot. Mea culpa. My bad.”

  There was a laptop open in front of him, with a wire running away under the rotting door to a satellite uplink outside. Brant turned the screen around. The screen showed an infrared picture of the Jag, the F-350, two APCs, and the farmhouse. The picture was fuzzy, but the hot engines of the vehicles showed up fine.

  “Once my boys got in touch with FEMA here in Denver, and they let us have access to their live keyhole satellite imagery, we just followed you out of the city. We saw which way you were heading and got here before you. It’s not rocket science, but it sure feels like it.”

  Nathan sat across the table from Brant. Apart from three soldiers, they were the only ones in the room inside the old farmhouse. There was still only one oil lamp, and it was making black hoods of Brant’s eyes.

  Brant had pushed Tony into the arms of a soldier and marched up to Nathan. Nathan had thought he was going to pay him back for the punch in the pavilion hospital right there, but Brant had just smiled. “Shall we go in?” he’d asked, and then he’d motioned Nathan inside, to be followed by the soldiers.

  “Your problem, Nathan, is that you really didn’t know what you were up against. You thought too small. You thought I was just a small-time hoodlum who’d got lucky and taken over a city. But, I have to tell you, Nathan, that my skillset is something more… useful. Not only am I an enabler, but I am also a facilitator. And what I’m starting to facilitate is the Reunited States of America. Can you imagine it, Nathan? Little old me, a Kissinger? A Washington? A founding father of a new nation? I really like the sound of that. What do you think?”

  Nathan said nothing. The wind was battering the house, howling around the roof and walls with a banshee wail that could have chilled hearts to a standstill, if Brant hadn’t already had that covered.

  “Well, okay, you don’t want to play, so, Sergeant Perry?”

  The nearest soldier to the table, pointing his M-16 at Nathan’s face, answered, “Sir?”