Dark New World (Book 3): EMP Deadfall (22 page)

Cassy didn’t respond. Her face just went blank, and she lowered her gaze to the ground again. Frank’s heart went out to her. Clearly Peter’s “you led them to their deaths” remark had scored a hit. It’s what he thought when she called out her surrender, and she still must think there was some truth to what Peter said, but any Clanner would tell her it was total bullshit. Firstly, because many more of Peter’s people had died than Clanners. And secondly, Cassy had done all she could, more than anyone had thought she could, and everyone knew it. She was being harder on herself than anyone in the Clan would be. Even Choony, with his insistence on total honesty, would tell her so.

He paused. Where was Choony, anyway? Frank tried to look around without being obvious about it, but he still didn’t see any sign of their new Korean Clanner. Maybe he died. The thought made Frank somehow terribly sad. Amber and Ethan were missing too, but he suspected they were safe for the moment. Everyone else was present, either sitting down before Peter or laid out somewhere in the pile. A goddamn pile! Peter was a monster.

* * *

1300 HOURS - ZERO DAY +29

Ethan sat with his head in his hands, elbows resting on the desk. Amber sat next to him, staring blankly at the screen as it cycled through one camera view after another, over and over. Neither had said much all day, nor touched, though they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms crying, long after the battle had ended.
 

He didn’t much believe in God, but he’d silently thanked Him for the blessing of having Amber in the bunker with him when the attack began. Otherwise, she’d be out there, either with the single women or in the pile. As it was, she’d tried to leave the bunker when bullets began to fly, but Ethan had remotely locked down the bunker door. She’d been more pissed than he’d ever seen her, but shit, there was nothing she could have done to help against those odds beyond catching a bullet for someone else. He’d worried she would stay angry since she wanted desperately to rescue her child, but as they had watched the Clan surrender, Amber, shaking, had reached out, took his hand, and started to weep.

Ethan was still in shock. How far things had fallen in such a short amount of time. One minute he and Amber were racking up sack time—and boy had that been amazing—and the next minute they were scrambling to the Comm Center naked, their interrupted lovemaking all but forgotten. Even now, their overly enthusiastic, much-repressed sex seemed like it happened long ago. Not exactly irrelevant, but his perspective had changed. There were definitely more important things than getting to lay some pipe with a gorgeous woman, even if he’d been more certain every day that he was in love with her. He still was in love, but now protecting her meant something different. Now it meant keeping her a virtual prisoner, hopefully without her realizing it.

“Anything new?” Ethan asked. His voice sounded strained and thin in his own ears.

“No,” Amber replied without looking over. Her voice was flat, emotionless. She must still be in shock, too. “Cassy’s chained to the basketball hoop out in the hot sun, just like before. I don’t think that’s her own blood, though, she’s moving around just fine. When she moves at all. Frank has spent most of the day giving Peter the Great a guided tour, or in the house talking with Peter, I guess. The audio is partly out in the house, though, so we can’t hear very well unless they raise their voices. They’ve been speaking quietly…”

“Super. Single men still in the livestock pen? Single women still in the second house? Families still working the fields under guard?” Ethan knew the answers, of course, but he had to ask. It was maybe the tenth time in the last two hours. He kept hoping for a crack in Peter’s control. The situation was too unstable to stay as-is for too long. But when it broke, it might break in any direction, and that had him sweating.
 

“Yes.” Amber’s reply broke through his tension and she continued, “Michael’s fine, but Sturm and Mueller are both in the singles groups. I hope they don’t get singled out for their experience, but at least they were in civilian clothes. All of the kids are okay. Thank God for Grandma Mandy—she’s been looking after them for the most part. Just knowing that is helping me not go crazy. And I haven’t seen a visual on Choony yet, so that’s promising.”

“I hope he got out,” Ethan said. “If he did, and if we can get some sort of communications to him, then we have an unknown X-factor to work with us in freeing our people. Too bad he won’t kill these shitheads.”

Ethan glanced down at the paper between his elbows. It was a list of the Clan dead, so far as he could tell, and his best guess at a tally of Stag dead. He was trying to get a force count, or whatever Michael had called it. It seemed the Clan had lost ten adults, but he couldn’t be positive. Some might only be wounded, though he doubted it. His best estimate was that the Stag force lost at least twice that many. Good, the bastards deserved that and worse.

The problem, however, was that it left the Clan with
maybe
twenty adults, while the Stag people still numbered about twice that. No doubt about it, the battle had been bloody on both sides. But in the end, Peter had the numbers to throw warm bodies at the Clan knowing someone would get through somewhere, eventually. He didn’t seem to care about his own dead. How could his control not be tenuous? The Stag people’s fear must be pretty powerful.

Another thing Ethan had noticed was that the attackers had clearly known where the kids were, but he didn’t want to think Jaz would have revealed that. Peter could just as easily have gotten that intel from a scout with binoculars. Hard to know. But Jaz was solid, she acted like someone who had finally found her family after a long search, and he decided to believe the scout theory.

Amber continued, “They’ve been bringing Clanners into the main house one at a time. I think they’re questioning everyone. Only a few people even know there’s a bunker here at all, so we should be safe in that regard. He’s going to wonder what happened to all the stored food, I bet. Most of it’s in here with us.”

Ethan asked, “When the Clan people come out, do they look like they’ve been beaten up or anything?” Frikkin totalitarian governments everywhere, even now at the end of the USA…

“No. He’ll probably get around to that, if we’re right about the kind of person he is, but Peter’s people haven’t tortured anyone but Jaz so far, that I can see.”

Yeah, Jaz. The first time Ethan had seen her on the cameras, he cringed. Not just because she looked so terrible, what with blood and scabs and bruises everywhere, but her body language. She had looked broken. Given what she’d been through before she came upon Frank’s group when Zero Day came, it would take a lot to break such a resilient woman. But now Jaz kept her eyes downcast, her shoulders slumped, and from what Ethan saw she didn’t bother moving at all unless someone prodded her or led her somewhere. And yet, when no one was looking, the camera caught her staring at the Stag people with a gaze that creeped Ethan out. It was cold, and deadly, and if there was any mercy in that stare, Ethan couldn’t see it. That look should never have been forced onto Jaz, of all people. Good thing she was being careful not to get noticed when she did that.

“Okay,” Ethan said. “Keep an eye out for Choony. If he lives, we’ll need his help. He’ll be a wild card—think a bit about how he can help. I’m going to go check my email and do a HAMnet broadcast. At least Peter’s attack didn’t take that away. As far as I can tell, the whole country’s future has a lot to do with what I’m rebroadcasting.”

Amber said nothing in reply. Ethan nodded, then turned and walked away. Yeah, she was in as much shock as he was and neither had spare emotional energy to give one another just yet. At least they still reached out for each other.

* * *

Steven Wallace sat in a cramped office at a desk that was too big for the space. There was little room to move around. But it didn’t matter. His family was well-fed now by the ’vaders. He looked out the tiny, dirt-covered window and thought about the others like him, the ones who’d traded their freedom for slavery, to get food for their families. By the seventh day since the lights went out, only ten of Steven’s original group of fellow slaves had survived. Steven shuddered as he remembered his old foreman blowing Mark’s brains out for being too exhausted to work. It was a lesson Steven never forgot. He’d begun to take food from the other weary slaves that very day, so he could eat more. Keep his strength up.

And thinking of those other ten slaves, his companions, a chill ran up his spine. He quickly stuffed the feelings it brought up deep down inside. They’d all died by now, of course, those other ten. Without enough food, it had taken only a few days to burn through them. But then more had come, prisoners of war or criminals or volunteers. As more people ran out of food, there was no shortage of people looking to trade work for food. And the foreman had eventually put him, Steven, in charge. Steven Wallace, the accomplice. Steven the traitor. He hated himself for it, at least as much as the other slaves hated him. But their hatred made it easy to do what the foreman asked. Whip this one, work that one to death.
 

Eventually he’d been ordered to beat someone to death with a rock, and he’d done as he was told. No way was he going to be the one taking blows from a rock, which was all that would have happened if he refused. The ’vaders rewarded him for that with a desk job.

Now Steven spent his days serving the needs of his old foreman’s boss. Filing paperwork or running errands. Passing messages that meant death for someone, but Steven was long past the point where he considered doing anything about it. His fate was sealed. He was a quisling in everything but name.

The only bright side was that he had been able to quietly let the foreman’s boss know about all the theft of “People’s goods”—with a capital “P”—which the foreman had been managing to do for weeks. Yesterday was a good day. Seeing the foreman’s boss—Lt. Chin or some such—get red-in-the-face pissed off, yeah, that was worth it. Screw the foreman. That one was for Mark. Because Steven had done nothing as the foreman murdered the young man, and that guilt had burned into his soul. Dropping the hammer on the foreman did a lot to heal that particular mental wound.

And then the door flew open. Steven looked up in surprise, only to see several soldiers with guns at the ready. One had kicked in the door, but they didn’t even wait for the door to stop moving before the next guy in line had darted in. The soldiers aimed their rifles at him. Steven tried to speak, but his throat closed up with fear and no sound came out.

“You betray foreman,” said a young soldier in broken English. “You say for good of People’s Army, but foreman your leader. Not the lieutenant. Foreman. Weak American mind, you don’t know honor. Foreman is good… Sergeant. Good leader. He want us to tell you, before you die, you family. They now work for him, for your foreman. They good workers, not to be poison by you false loyalty. Goodbye, Steven.”

Well, he’d known this day had to come sooner or later. You couldn’t be an American and go up in rank without pissing off a Korean, and that rarely worked out. “It seems his boss doesn’t know what my foreman’s doing, yeah? Just get this shit over with, asshole. Someday your little cocksucker leader is going to take an American bullet right up his ass.”

Yeah, saying that felt good. Real good. Might as well go out on a high note. He didn’t have long to wait for their response.

- 12 -

1800 HOURS - ZERO DAY +29

CASSY SAT CHAINED all day to the post of the basketball hoop. Dinner had finished up, but from what she could see the Clanners hadn’t been given much more to eat than she had—bread and a little bowl of stew—while the White Stag goons ate everything in sight, laughing and joking. It had been a rough day to be stuck there, people-watching.
 

The single women of the Clan had been paired off to men in Peter’s group “for their own safety,” which didn’t bode well. The Clan’s single men, meanwhile, were being kept in the incomplete house for now. They’d been brought food, but hadn’t been allowed out, and Cassy was worried about their fate. Peter was the kind of guy who would have little patience for a group of hostile men with no kids to leverage. Meanwhile, the children were locked into the unused horse barn. It was visible but out of the way, and guarded at all times. Their parents would definitely give in to whatever Peter demanded of them. Right now that included serving all those new arrivals who came with Peter.

Cassy heard a noise behind her, footsteps, and she shimmied around to get a look. There stood Jaz, and Cassy nearly wept to see her again. Jaz had several bruises on her face, a torn lip, and a distinct limp. And yet, Jaz smiled when Cassy made eye contact. That poor, poor girl…

“I didn’t see you at dinner,” Cassy said simply.
 

“Your friend, Jim, was questioning me again,” Jaz replied, and Cassy cried inside to see the traumatized, far-away look in Jaz’s beautiful eyes.

“I stabbed him once. If only I’d finished the job. I just couldn’t murder him in cold blood. Not back then. Different time, different world. How are you holding up, Jaz?”

Jaz slid with a grunt to the ground next to Cassy, wincing from pain. “It ranks right up there with the day I decided to leave home. I’ll live, if they let any of us live. Don’t beat yourself up about Jim. All of us have changed a lot since the lights went out. All your friend keeps asking about is where our stockpile of food is. They figured out we don’t have enough out here to survive the winter, not with all these people. But don’t worry, I didn’t tell the bastard about your bunker—I figured Ethan was down there, like, doing something with his radios or whatever.”