He taxied down the runway and took off smoothly. Banking east, he headed toward his cabin. He had made that flight so often, he thought he could have made it blindfolded.

  On this flight, he was very much alert, though. He felt on edge and that focused him. He couldn’t push down the gnawing feeling that he had done something wrong by taking off for home without delivering his client to his new place.

  Forty-five minutes later, he saw the small airstrip that ran in front of his cabin. He started to relax, but only for a moment.

  Something caught his eye. Something that shouldn’t be there.

  Dark smoke curled up out of the chimney of his cabin.

  That was a problem. Cam hadn’t been to the cabin in weeks. He banked left and came around for a better view before he landed.

  As he did, he had almost convinced himself that his eyes were playing tricks on him. There was no way there was a fire in his stove.

  When he took his second pass, he saw the truth of it. The smoke was real.

  He dropped down low enough that he could get a better view and saw something that chilled him. Alongside the cabin, there were two snowmobiles partially covered in tree limbs in a half-hearted effort to camouflage them.

  At that moment, he saw the cabin door swing open and a man stepped outside. Cam was low enough to see that he was holding a rifle. Then he saw that the man wasn’t just holding the rifle, he was aiming the rifle upward.

  Cam reacted and banked left again, moving away from the cabin and then gaining altitude. He circled overhead, keeping his distance while he tried to think. He couldn’t tell if the man had fired or not. The noise of the engine would have covered the sound of the gunshot far below.

  Superstitiously, he reached down and patted his calves, his thighs, his torso, looking for a bullet hole.

  Nothing. He was whole.

  He didn’t want to fly lower and give the man below another shot. He fumbled through the box beside him and pulled out his binoculars. He angled the plane so he could once again see the cabin.

  Now there were two men. Both holding rifles, both pointing up at the plane.

  “Shit.”

  Cam flew due east just to put a little distance between him and the guns.

  Now what, he wondered. There’s no way for me to land. They’ll already have the drop on me when my wheels touch down. At least, there’s no way to land where I don’t take a lot of heat. And if I do manage to get down, there’s no cover around the airfield. I can come out shooting, but they’ll be firing from cover. I’ll be dead before I make it ten yards.

  He glanced at his fuel gauge. Still in good shape, but of course that was subject to change the longer he was in the air. His watch told him he only had a few hours of daylight left. He could fly at night, but in the wilderness, especially in areas he wasn’t familiar with, that was not ideal.

  Guess I’ve got to go back to Fairbanks.

  His rational brain continued to work, to try and give him options. Meanwhile his anger rose.

  Once I get back to Fairbanks, then what? Call the cops and tell them someone is squatting at my cabin? They’re not responding to shootings in the city, they’re sure as hell not going to come out here. The nearest other airstrip from my place is twenty-five miles away. What if I land there, walk to my place and try to pick them off one by one?

  Without realizing it, Cam was heading east-southeast, leaving his cabin behind. He started to turn back toward town, when the right thing to do became obvious.

  Kent Townsend. Probably dead somewhere in California.

  Cam let his mind wander over what a sweet setup the man had.

  What do I do if he eventually makes his way there? Do I become the guy standing below with the rifle? No way I could do that.

  A small voice in the back of his head said, You won’t have to. He’s dead.

  It was easy for Cam to listen to that voice. A man who has few options and none of them are good is easily convinced, even by himself.

  He looked around, took note of where he was, and set a course for the lodge.

  Chapter Seven

  Dust to Dust

  Marshall Benton moved awkwardly forward. He hadn’t walked far on his broken leg and was still getting accustomed to the crutches. Getting to the funeral was the farthest he had managed to hobble since Dust City had fallen under attack.

  His left leg was encased in a cast from his ankle to just above his knee, which forced his leg to stay straight. He wasn’t the most graceful person under any circumstances. Leaning on crutches and doing his best to keep his weight off his broken leg, he looked somewhat like a baby giraffe on roller skates.

  This day wasn’t about him, though, in any way. As injured as he was, he was among the lucky ones who had survived the helicopter attack on Dust City. One moment, he had been staring, gaping really, as the helicopter approached. Then, he woke up with medics around him, dragging him out of the way of a collapsing building.

  Marshall was brilliant. Brilliant with code, with organization, with drawing intelligent conclusions from minimal information.

  He had always felt he was not built to be in a war zone, and that had proven to be true. Dust City had been attacked twice. Marshall had been badly injured twice.

  And still, he was lucky.

  Lucky to have been standing next to John Steele, who people invariably called General. Steele was trained for exactly those kind of split-second decisions that stand between the quick and the dead. Steele had grabbed Marshall and thrown both of them thirty feet to the hard ground below.

  In the air, they had somehow gotten twisted and Marshall had landed on Steele. Marshall had broken his fibula. Steele’s injuries had been less obvious. Three broken ribs where Marshall had landed on him and a dislocated left shoulder that had to be painfully put back in place. Where Marshall had his cast, Steele had only a sling to partially immobilize his left arm.

  Marshall’s cast was still a pristine white. Dust City was a place where the citizens—called Dusters—rarely took anything seriously. If he had broken his leg under other circumstances, that cast would have been filled with obscene drawings and dirty limericks.

  Instead, he had broken it in an attack that had killed hundreds of the good people of Dust City.

  All sense of spitting at the devil, railing at the fates, had been quieted.

  The damage to Dust City and its big brother to the north, the domed city of Altor, would have been much worse if not for the arrival of the calvary in the form of a wandering group that was a remainder of the US Army.

  The unnamed but well-armed force that had attacked both of the desert cities had fought them to a standstill. After most of the damage had been dealt out, when both sides had exchanged whatever haymakers they possessed, both Dust City and Altor had been essentially weaponless, while the attackers still had units that could inflict damage.

  The domed city withstood the direct shelling of the tanks, but its outer surface had begun to crack. The city might very well have been knocked wide open, giving full access to the attackers.

  That was all stopped by the US Army, led by Lieutenant Dan Forster and Sergeant JT Brewster. They had turned the tide of the battle, and though one attacker helicopter got a final shot in at an unprotected Dust City, the two cities had survived.

  But not without casualties.

  The final count of the dead in Dust City, including those brave people who had rushed to the aid of Altor, setting up their shield wall, was two hundred seventy-nine people.

  That left the terrible work of finding the bodies, digging them out of the wreckage, then burying them. Dust City still had a functioning backhoe, one of the many pieces of heavy equipment left over from building Altor.

  Adrian Pierce, who had a reputation as a ne’er do well and raconteur in Dust City while the dome was being built, manned the backhoe and dug the long grave outside the fences of the city. Any citizens who hadn’t been badly injured in the attack dug out bodies and carried them to the grave.

  There was an organization of sorts in Dust City. That meant that there was a list of every Duster. It took a few days, but eventually they were able to determine the name of everyone who had died in the attack.

  There would be a giant headstone erected at a later date. For now, it was enough to get the bodies in the ground and note their passing.

  And so Marshall limped along on his crutches, John Steele once again beside him as they walked out through the gates of the fence.

  When Marshall saw how long the grave was, he shook his head. He had been with Quinn Starkweather from the beginning. From the time when the program that would eventually be known as Janus was just a fun project to see if it could be done.

  When Janus had started making eerily accurate predictions, it had all seemed a little removed from reality. No one ever expected to create a Nostradamus machine, but that was exactly what they had done.

  Then, in 2018, it had projected that a pandemic would sweep across the world. That was challenging enough, but on the heels of that projection, Janus stated that there would be a societal upheaval unlike anything seen in the modern world. It predicted that there would be an apocalypse that would destroy the very fabric of society.

  It had come to pass in the summer of 2033.

  Even then—while bringing the domed city of Altor to reality, while watching the Rage Wars from afar—it had all felt a little unreal. Something seen from a distance.

  The grave in front of him, holding the bodies of two hundred seventy-nine people—the tiniest fraction of the total population who had died since the Rage Wars started—was no longer distant. These were people who Marshall knew. The medic who had tended to him when Marshall had been badly wounded in the first attack on Dust City was now in that grave. People who he had known well were now underground.

  The weather around Dust City seemed in tune with the occasion. The skies, which were typically cloudless in the area, were completely clouded over.

  The bodies of the attackers themselves had been left exposed. Immense California Condors had been circling the area for days. They fed on the bodies sprawled across the hardpan first but now were landing on the twisted wreckage of the vehicles, reaching their long necks through shattered glass and open doors, pulling at the exposed flesh.

  That was the only funeral service any of those faceless, nameless soldiers would have.

  All the people of Dust City—with the exception of those on guard duty and those manning the observation drones—gathered around the grave. There were no religious officials in Dust City. It was a hardscrabble place, and although there were certainly people of various faiths, there were no organized gatherings.

  As such, it fell to Adrian Pierce to say a few words.

  There was a dirt pile at one end of the grave. He didn’t have anything to amplify his words but that didn’t seem to matter.

  “These are our friends,” he said, pointing to the long mound in front of him. “People we have worked beside, played beside, gotten blind drunk beside. Our friends.” His voice trailed off. Pierce was not an emotional man or much given to making speeches, but the enormity of the moment seemed almost to overwhelm him. “They’ll be missed, but they won’t be forgotten.”

  He looked up, almost as though seeing the large crowd gathered for the first time.

  “It’s been a hard few days. Let’s go get drunk.”

  Normally, that would have resulted in a huge cheer, but today, it brought only solemn nods of agreement.

  THE WAKE FOR THE FALLEN of Dust City lasted two days. Enough people would sober up to keep the city running and the defenses up, but the rest of the city had a good bender to help themselves past the tragedy.

  When it was done, a meeting was held in one of the portable buildings. Dust City had been relatively full before the attack, but with so many deaths, there were a lot of empty buildings within the fence line.

  Sitting around the table were most of the powers that be in Dust City. That included the triumvirate of Pierce, Steele, and Marshall. On this occasion, they had invited Lt. Forster and Sgt. Brewster to sit in. After their key role in the previous battle, they had earned a seat at the table.

  Steele, who had spent decades in the armed forces, looked at the two Army men and said, “This has to be a weird position for you to be in.”

  Brewster never spoke much, but Forster nodded and said, “When we were last at base, Colonel Brandt gave us open orders to do what we thought was right. It took a while, but even the US Army has had to admit that things have changed.”

  “What are your plans from here?” Pierce asked.

  “Can’t say we have any just yet,” Forster said, glancing at Brewster, who nodded slightly. “We—and I mean all of us, not just Brewster and me—are in agreement that we’re still bound to our initial pledge to help people, to protect America as best we can.”

  “Going back to your base then?” Steele asked.

  Forster shook his head. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like there’s much we can accomplish there. It’s pretty safe, with all the firepower on the base, but those who stayed behind are people who had families there with them. I don’t blame them. If I had a wife and kids, I’d have wanted to stay behind too. But all the men who came with us either don’t have family out there or know there’s no way they survived.”

  “My family lived in Hollywood,” Brewster added, which didn’t require any more elaboration. Everyone knew about the nuclear device that had gone off there. At the same time, it felt a little odd to hear that the no-nonsense Brewster came from somewhere like Hollywood. He seemed like someone who might come from Kentucky or Oklahoma, not Southern California.

  “I don’t know if you’d be interested,” Steele said, leaning forward, “but we’d like to invite you to stay here with us.”

  He could have elaborated on that but chose not to, at least not yet.

  Forster and Brewster exchanged a look and that told Steele, Marshall, and Pierce that this was not a brand new idea to them.

  “That’s an attractive proposition. With everything going on, Altor feels like a likely target. Not necessarily from people who want to destroy it like we just saw, but perhaps people who want to find their way in, take over the place. I don’t know of any other place in America where we can potentially do as much good as here.”

  Steele adjusted his sling, wincing a little. “We think your presence here, people just seeing your tanks, will dissuade them from coming after us. We’re not quite as impressive as Altor, but that would help.”

  “But we can’t really afford a full-time army here,” Pierce said, “even if it is the US Army. If you stay here, you’d be more than welcome, but everybody in Dust City works.”

  Forster waved that concern away. “Everyone in my unit works. We’ll have to try to match people up with the best jobs for them, but no one thinks this is a place to hide and get drunk.”

  “At least, not only that,” Pierce said. He grinned a little, the first sign of his old personality to come back since the attack.

  “Our tanks have pretty good surveillance systems,” Brewster said. “We’ll be able to see a group of Scorpions coming toward us if we want to set the controls fine enough.”

  “Fuel has got to be a concern, though, hasn’t it?” Marshall asked.

  “If we want to actually move them, yes. But these units have solar panels we can put out that will allow all other systems to be operative—A/C, surveillance, even the microwave oven. What I’m saying is, I think it would be worthwhile to have the men who are trained in their operation assigned to them in eight-hour shifts.”

  “Absolutely,” Steele said. “Defense is where we are weakest. Anything you boys can do to help with that is appreciated.”

  The five continued to go over details, trying to anticipate any problems before they arose.

  When the meeting broke up, Dust City had a new army.

  Chapter Eight

  Nyx, Now Zari

  The operative known to the world as Nyx pulled on the fishing pole. Her name was Zari, but only her family called her that. To the rest of the world, she was Nyx, a name she shared with the Greek goddess of night.

  A fat brook trout cut through the water toward her, struggling. It wasn’t enough. Nyx patiently pulled and reeled, pulled and reeled until she yanked the trout glistening on the shore.

  She reached down, removed the hook from its mouth and walked to a boulder a few feet away. Keeping a firm grip on the body of the trout, she slammed its head down against the rock. It quit twitching and struggling to pull in oxygen.

  Nyx dropped it in the creel on top of five other nearly identical fish. Three would be dinner tonight. The other three would go in the smoker to be preserved for later in the year when the fish went deeper and stopped biting. The gunmetal gray skies and increasingly cold temperatures told her that wasn’t far away.

  She and her small family were fixed quite nicely for the winter. Even if she didn’t take down a deer or a black bear—and she planned to do both—they had plenty of food to get them through.

  Nyx had known hunger, both as a child and an adult, and that meant she always planned ahead and never took anything for granted.

  She looked out over the water, which was somewhere between a pond and a lake. It was the most idyllic setting she could imagine. A path led around the water and at the far side, there was a bench that sat under the shade of a weeping willow.

  Nyx and Chaya, her niece, kept the offshoot branches cut short enough that they never touched the ground. She wasn’t superstitious, and if someone had asked her if she thought that those branches touching the ground would mean the tree’s owner would die, she would have laughed. She kept them trimmed up anyway.

  There was a grassy area between the cabin and the small lake. Nyx would have liked to have planted a garden there already, but it was too late in the year. Instead, she and her family had done hours of backbreaking work turning the soil, hauling rocks away, and preparing the ground for the next year.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32