by Stone, Kyla
The governor of Illinois, Jim Strawn, and the new governor of Indiana, Susan Wright-May, were the only players in the Midwest who posed any kind of threat. The mayor of Chicago was on vacation in Cancun when the EMP struck. He was as good as dead—his city burning.
The General didn’t care about Ohio, Wisconsin, or Missouri; he could deal with them later.
“Sometimes it is better to undermine your enemies covertly rather than hitting them straight on.”
Governor Duffield scratched at his sagging jowls, frowning. “What does Lauren think?”
The General struggled to contain his disgust. He imagined throttling the woman’s pale white neck with his bare hands. Instead, he smiled, immensely pleased the woman was absent, unable to throw a wrench in his machinations.
“The Secretary of State has many strengths. How to navigate this brave new world and come out on top is not one of them.”
“Defying the federal government is a crime. It’s political suicide…isn’t it?”
Governor Duffield wanted to be convinced. So the General would convince him. “The White House doesn’t understand the local forces at play, or the increasing threats facing us. They have their own war overseas to fight. But this fine state will no longer exist if we do not act now to salvage what we can.”
“How?”
“Let me be clear, Poe is coming. And he will bring devastation in his wake. If we go out to meet him under federal or Illinois jurisdiction, we will lose our men—and the advantage. Then Poe will roll over us like a tsunami, and we too shall fall to him.
“However, I propose a different tactic. We shore up our own resources. Strengthen our forces. Choose when and how to meet him when he crosses the Michigan border.”
Let Illinois waste its resources on weakening Poe and his Syndicate—then he and the governor would sweep in and mop up the stragglers and cement their control of the Midwest.
The General took a step toward Governor Duffield and rested a benevolent hand on his forearm. “Don’t worry about this. You have enough to deal with. Give it to me. I will ensure the safety of this state. Give me the authority, and you will not regret it.”
“I can’t do that. Congress would need to—”
“Congress is dead. The old ways of doing things are dead. You have the power. You get to decide.”
A hint of doubt lingered in the spiderwebbed lines of his face. “Tell me you have a plan.”
“Give me soldiers, and I will save Michigan. Be assured, your name will go down in history—how future generations remember it is one hundred percent determined by what you do now.”
Reluctantly, Governor Duffield nodded.
And then it sank in, and his wrinkled lips stretched into a thin garish smile. He was old, but he wasn’t senile. He craved power.
Henry Duffield wanted the promise the General was dangling before him. In exchange, he would give the General whatever he wanted.
“Tell me what you need,” the governor said.
The General thought of his dead daughter. He thought of his legacy. For a little longer, he would keep his cards close to his chest. Then, and only then, would he spring his trap.
He smiled.
45
Quinn
Day One Hundred
Things were different than Quinn thought they would be.
They drove in a caravan of twenty-five vehicles, infiltrating the outskirts of St. Joe, stopping at a lighting store to smash ten-thousand-dollar chandeliers with razor-studded maces. Knocking over clothing racks and ripping silk dresses with spears at a boutique clothing store. Smashing computers and laptops with hammers at an electronics store. Shredding paintings in an art gallery.
With each new shop or business, the group worked themselves into a frenzy, inducing themselves into a feverish state. Their eyes glazed, their movements jerky and unhinged, they hollered and shrieked in frenetic glee.
They seemed to love savagely destroying everything within sight for no reason.
Maybe that was the allure of it.
No reason, no meaning, no right or wrong.
It liberated you, Xander had told her. Everything society had taught them was a lie—tear down the lie, and they were free to do and be whoever they wanted.
They slammed through a fancy coffee shop called the Roasted Bean, the kind that offered chai lattes, gluten-free brownies, organic muffins, and fair-trade coffee roasted by hand.
They demolished whatever they could get their hands on, wrenching stainless steel appliances from walls and counters and hurling them through the plate-glass windows before desecrating every wall with graffiti.
“Death to Power” was scribbled and scrawled and painted over and over on every surface.
As she watched them, Quinn couldn’t help but shudder. She remembered the ransacked mansions along the river, the body swinging from the tree, those same words painted on the cardboard sign pinned to the corpse’s chest.
This part was stupid, silly. Pointless and asinine.
They were capable of much, much worse.
Quinn glanced around, feeling jumpy, her nerves on edge. She scanned the entrance to the Roasted Bean for Sutter as she pounded a booth with a sledgehammer.
Last she’d seen him, he’d joined up with Jett and Rocco down the street, shattering the windows of a carpet and tile flooring store.
She had to keep her eyes peeled. Couldn’t let herself get distracted for even a second. At any moment, he might sneak up behind her and slide a blade between her ribs.
If she wasn’t careful, she wouldn’t see him coming.
She gritted her teeth as the Formica table caved beneath her blows, the cheery yellow booth shattering into jagged chunks.
Her arms were shaking, and not from the weight of the sledgehammer.
She thought of Gran, of Milo, Jonas and Whitney, and Hannah, Liam, and Bishop—all the people she cared about back home.
Were they worried about her yet? Had they even noticed that she was missing?
She shoved that thought down deep. They’d get over it. They’d understand when she returned, when she’d accomplished her mission and made Fall Creek that much safer.
Sutter had kept his distance since she’d joined the group. She’d barely had a moment to herself. If Dahlia wasn’t stalking her with a look that implied she’d like to impale Quinn on a spear, Xander was demanding her complete attention.
“Hey.” She stifled a flinch as Xander appeared at her side, materializing out of nowhere as if she’d conjured him up just by thinking of him.
He eyed her up and down with a grin, something maniacal in his gaze. “Just wait until you see what’s next.”
“Xander.” Rocco jogged up to them, exuding a rank stench. Though he was young, he had a brutish look about him, with a wide squat neck and a sloping forehead, his ruddy skin spiderwebbed with capillaries.
Rocco hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “We’ve got movement on the corner of Fifth and Seventeenth. Armed individuals amassing. One of the gangs. The Gangster Disciples, it looks like.”
Despite their brash posturing, even Xander wasn’t insane enough to tangle with the gangs that waged territorial wars over Benton Harbor—which often spilled into the neighboring city of St. Joseph. For that reason, Xander had set up scouts to warn them well in advance.
Xander turned to his people. “Head to the beach!”
They whooped in response, dropped whatever they were doing, and streamed from the coffee shop like ants from a kicked nest.
Rocco spoke into his handheld walkie, and the rest came running, jumping into their trucks and gunning their engines. Xander sent a large contingent to the marina a few blocks away, including Sutter.
“Ride with me,” Xander said to Quinn.
She nodded. The more Xander trusted her, the sooner she’d be able to move among them with ease. Stepping over jagged glass shards as she exited the building, she searched the street for Sutter, but didn’t see him.
Frustrat
ion mingled with relief. In his presence, she was all nerves, her senses on high alert, apprehension fraying her concentration. It was necessary but exhausting.
Two minutes later, they headed for Silver Beach in downtown St. Joseph. The beach was nestled between the Lake Michigan shoreline and downtown, with the mouth of the St. Joe River winding like a snake at the north end of the park.
They roared past the quaint downtown with its brick street lined with cute coastal tourist stores, beachy boutiques, and specialty dessert shops like Kilwins, her favorite destination for ice cream—the windows now broken, trash strewn everywhere, the stench of sewage clotting the air.
“You still have gas,” Quinn said, impressed.
“It’s getting harder to get ahold of,” Xander said, his eyes straight ahead. “Teddy told us about the motherlode stored at the power plant. He didn’t tell us about the soldiers stationed there. We keep getting driven back.”
“Oh.”
“There’s another place, too, in case this one doesn’t work out. Teddy’s working a plan. He’s got military experience, you know.”
Quinn said nothing, not trusting her voice.
They passed the children’s museum, the glassed-in carousel, and the famed Silver Beach Pizza, a popular restaurant that was once an old train depot. She’d eaten there a dozen times. Now it was silent and dark.
They took Broad Street to the beachfront parking lot. Jett and three guys remained at the lot, guarding the car, while two trailed behind them, acting as bodyguards.
“Come on.” Xander beckoned to her without bothering to make sure that she would follow. He expected her to. She did.
The wind whipped her hair into her eyes, sand spraying her face as they hiked over a small dune between the parking lot and the north half of the beach. Beach grass swished beneath her boots.
Gulls squawked above her, wheeling into a sky the color of burnt umber. She inhaled deeply, the scent of dead fish and campfire smoke filling her nostrils.
Ugly graffiti defaced the bathrooms, picnic pavilions, and concession stands. People slumped in the bathroom doorways, wrapped in blankets. The women’s entrance was covered with a tarp, “Do not enter” scrawled in red paint across the wrinkled fabric.
People were living inside the bathrooms.
Without speaking, Quinn and Xander crested the dune. Quinn halted, taken aback. She’d visited this beach a hundred times. Never had she seen it like this. Never had it felt so vast, so incredibly beautiful.
Lake Michigan spread before them in all her glory. Blue water stretched to the horizon as far as the eye could see.
To the north, the pier stretched into the lake, a long concrete catwalk ending in two towers, the rear tower a three-story square steel structure with a red pyramid roof, circular lantern room, and a black iron parapet.
Above the lighthouse, the sun was a red ball of fire descending into the great lake, licking the water with flames, streaking the clouds with ribbons of pinks, reds, scarlets, and tangerine.
Her fingers twitched with a sudden desire to paint this, to draw it, to capture some tiny fragment of its majesty. Like attempting to catch a cloud or rainbow in a bottle, an impossible task, but one worth attempting.
Her eyes stung. She blinked, pretending it was the sand in her eyes, pretending her heart didn’t feel like that smoldering sun, igniting, combusting, burning itself into oblivion.
“It’s something, isn’t it?” Xander breathed.
She didn’t trust herself to speak around the lump in her throat.
Xander pointed. “Now look closer.”
Quinn dropped her gaze from the horizon to the shoreline.
A couple hundred tents of various sizes and colors littered the beach. Trash and refuse dotted the sand, plastic bags caught in the sea grass, fluttering in the wind like ugly flags.
Dozens of fishing boats, inflatable rafts, and kayaks bobbed in the shallow waters, tied to either side of the pier. People crowded the concrete catwalk, slouched in camping chairs, five-gallon buckets at their sides, fishing poles in hand.
“They do that all day,” Xander said. “All day, every day, just for a fish or two.”
As the sky darkened, campfires sprang to life, dotting the beach as far as she could see, dark shapes surrounding them, their shoulders drooping, defeated and miserable. The sound of babies and children crying drowned out the seagulls.
Silver Beach looked like the shanty towns from third-world countries she’d read about in social studies class. Depressing as hell.
The sun sank below the horizon, twilight descending. The magic of only moments before faded like a cheap trick.
She felt deflated, cheated somehow.
“Is this it?” she whispered, her throat tight. “Is this all we have to look forward to?”
“You see it, don’t you? You understand. It’s all pointless. It’s all meaningless.” There was such rage in his voice, a bottomless, unquenched fury that mirrored her own.
She met his gaze. There was a haunted quality to his eyes, something unmoored inside him.
Startled, she recognized herself. An emptiness inside her yawned into a deep void. Pain and anger festering in her heart, like something rotting.
Above them, gulls screamed at each other, wheeling and swooping. One fluttered, wings flapping with a frenetic, awkward desperation as it veered to one side. The other birds dove, hurtling straight for it, and attacked it. It tried to escape, but the attempt was futile.
The seagull fell from the sky and crashed to the sand as thirty gulls descended in a frenzy of beating wings and snapping beaks.
Quinn looked away, touched her eyebrow ring, and tried to think of something, anything else.
She felt the pull, the darkness, the utter pointlessness of it all. You worked and fought and struggled only to watch it disintegrate, the people you loved the ones who turned Brutus and tore you to pieces.
Maybe Xander had a point after all.
46
Quinn
Day One Hundred
“Do you know why we’re out here? What happened to us?” Xander asked.
He was sober, abruptly serious, with a humming intensity behind his eyes. The jittery, half-unhinged boy had disappeared, replaced by something else, something she couldn’t quite figure out.
“No, I don’t.”
It was all a version of the same story—parents who never came home, family members deceased in plane crashes and car accidents, brothers and sisters and grandparents dead from starvation, dehydration, from disease, from hypothermia. From heart attacks, strokes, and accidents.
And from violence.
Rocco’s parents were killed when they broke into a neighbor’s house to steal a grill. Tyrell’s father was shot six times in the belly when thieves ransacked their home for a case of Ramen noodles. Dahlia lost her brother and mother in a gang fight over control of a Home Depot.
Listening to the individual tragedies, she had a sense of each tale of desperation and heartbreak mingling together, merging into something vast and incalculable, a devastation too large for words, too overwhelming for a single person to comprehend.
But she could feel it, a tremendous pressure, a clot of grief coalescing in her chest. It was gone forever, the life they’d known. The world they’d lived in, dead and gone.
And they weren’t getting it back.
“I had a dog. Ringo,” Xander said. “The best German Shepherd you ever met. Smart as a whip. He could turn off the bedroom light if I told him to. Flicked it on or off with his nose. He went everywhere with me. Would’ve come to college and stayed in my dorm if GVSU had allowed it.”
“You went to Grand Valley?” she asked, meaning the state university in Grand Rapids.
He nodded. “A senior. Studied business and loathed every second. Would’ve been on campus when it happened if it wasn’t Christmas break.”
“What about your family? Where were they?”
“Everyone was home. My parents, my two old
er brothers. Our phones and the lights switched off, but no one realized what was happening. Dad wanted to run to the grocery store to get some ice for the freezer to keep our Christmas turkey from going bad, but the Camry wouldn’t start.”
His lip curled. “We finally walked to the store, but they wouldn’t take anything but cash. My parents only used credit cards. Only three bucks and some change between us. At the store, someone said FEMA would come by shortly, that they’d take care of us like any natural disaster, that we had to sit tight and wait. After that, my parents did just that. They sat in the house, waiting for the government to come deliver food to their door. For weeks, shivering and freezing, no power, no water, everything frozen.
“They wouldn’t even go to the neighbors or the gas station down the block to take what they needed by force. Kept saying someone would come.” He shook his head in disgust, in bitter indignation. “By the time they woke the hell up, every store had been stripped clean. Hell, there wasn’t even a candy bar left at the movie theater.”
He was breathing hard, nostrils flaring, eyes going distant like he was seeing a scene play out in front of him that had nothing to do with the beach. “We were out of dog food. My mom, she just said, ‘There wasn’t nothing for it.’”
Quinn stared at him, aghast. “What?”
“I knew you’d understand,” he said in a strained voice. “The way you fought right alongside your dog. I saw that bond. That’s what I had with Ringo. I would never have done it. I would rather have died. They knew it, too. That’s why they sent me out to scavenge, even though I knew there wasn’t nothing left to find. I went, and when I came back, they had dinner waiting.”
Her stomach churned, acid rising in her throat. Of course, it would happen. If you were starving, and it was a choice between your family pet and your children…
She set her jaw. She couldn’t imagine sacrificing Ghost. Couldn’t do it. The dog would gladly lay himself down for his family, offering every noble, chivalrous bone in his body. He’d demonstrated his selfless loyalty again and again.
