Bitter Cold Apocalypse 2 (A Post-Apocalyptic Survival Thriller) Read online

  I’d spent years in Afghanistan, building up my loyalty to the men around me and risking my life time and again for them. Leading them into the most impossible situations anyone could think of, and then fighting with every ounce of my being to bring them back out again. But since I’d been home, I’d been changing my allegiances.

  The people of the town were my company, now. They were the ones I would risk my life for, and that meant the men on this outing with me were some of the most important people in my life.

  I didn’t want to see a single damn one of them hurt.

  I turned my gaze quickly toward the town at the thought, and let my eyes rove along the row of buildings that backed up to the forest. Then I searched the alleys between them, straining my eyes in the semi-darkness for shapes or flashlights. Movement where there shouldn’t be movement. Shadows where there shouldn’t be shadows. The lighting made it damned hard to see anything, particularly when it started bouncing off the snow, and everything looked flat and artificial.

  But I didn’t see any movement in there. I didn’t even think Randall had bothered with sentries. There were men walking the streets of the town, but not the outskirts—which didn’t make one damn bit of sense.

  Unless Randall had decided that we were too afraid to come after him.

  I stifled a grin at that, because it fit so perfectly that I wasn’t sure how I could have missed it. Randall was an odd duck, there was no mistake about that, but he was also one of the cockiest, most overconfident people I’d ever met. And him deciding that we were too afraid of him to come after him?

  Well, it fit his personality perfectly.

  And at that thought, I started creeping forward again. If there weren’t any guards back here, it would make our journey quicker. And the quicker we could get through the journey, the quicker we could get into town—or whatever it was Marlon had in mind—and get this thing over with.

  The men crowded into the clearing right outside of the edge of town, their eyes on Marlon, their mouths hanging open in outright shock—and doubt.

  “What do you mean there’s a tunnel into town?” Bob finally asked, finally taking his eyes off Marlon and looking at his town like it somehow betrayed him. “A tunnel that none of us has ever heard of or even suspected?”

  Marlon rolled his eyes. This was the third time he’d been through this, and I could see that he was getting just as frustrated as I was. True, we didn’t have an exact timetable for this attack, but we also couldn’t stand here all night convincing the townspeople that Marlon was telling the truth.

  “As a member of the CIA and military, I had to have a way to communicate with the government,” Marlon said again. “A foolproof way. A way that wouldn’t be vulnerable to anyone cutting the wires that led to the town. A way that wouldn’t be vulnerable to anything going wrong with the larger electronic grid.”

  The men stared at him for so long this time that I finally lost my patience with the entire situation. I wanted to get this done. And I wanted to see with my own eyes what Marlon was talking about.

  “Let’s go,” I told him quietly. “They’re not going to believe you until you show it to them. And the longer we stand out here discussing it, the more time Randall and his goons have to accidentally happen upon us.”

  Marlon met my eyes, nodded, and started walking quickly toward the town. “Follow me.”

  I turned back to the group of men. “Right, we’re going to be crossing a clearing, and that means we can’t all go at once. Two by two, and keep your guns at the ready. Walk normally, don’t try to be sneaky and don’t try to be quick. Quick or sneaky looks unnatural, so anyone watching will be more likely to see it. If you see any movement in the town, tackle them, cover their mouths, and then use your gun to knock them out. No firing. No unnecessary noise. I’ll cover you from back here. Got it? Go.”

  I watched as the men broke themselves into couples and started striding across the large, open patch after Marlon, who was now standing up against the outer wall of the school house, looking back at us. I organized from the forest, telling the men when it was safe to go and keeping an eye on the rest of town, watching for anyone to suddenly materialize there with a gun.

  After several minutes, I realized that this was going to take far too long.

  “Four by four,” I muttered to the group, increasing the number of men who would walk together.

  I cast my eyes back toward the town and kept them there as the remaining men made their way into the open and toward Marlon. As the lookout, it was my job to be the eyes and ears and protection for the group. It was my job to see anyone who shouldn’t be there and take care of them.

  True, we weren’t supposed to be shooting. But I’d made sure that my gun had a silencer on it, just in case I had to.

  30

  The moment we were all sheltered behind that outer wall of the school house, Marlon took out a minuscule flashlight and started searching the base of the wall, walking back and forth with his nose down like he was some sort of hunting dog.

  I joined him, wondering what the hell he was doing.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed. “Do you not know where to find whatever it is you’re looking for?”

  “Believe it or not, I’ve never actually accessed it in this way,” he hissed back. “This wasn’t exactly meant for this purpose. But it’s our best bet for getting into town without being caught. It’s our best bet for taking them by surprise and getting our town back. Ah. There it is.”

  He doubled down and yanked at something I couldn’t even see and some sort of door started to crack open at the bottom of the wall.

  “Help me with this,” Marlon muttered, trying desperately to clear the snow from around the bottom of the door. “We have to get this open, and the sooner we do it, the sooner we can get out of the cold and on our way.”

  “And the sooner I can stop worrying about getting caught,” I answered, moving quickly to start scooping snow away with my hands. I had on the thickest gloves I could manage, and they were waterproof to boot, which made them perfect for things like moving snow.

  In the past, I’d worn them whenever Sarah and I decided to built snow forts, igloos, or snowmen. Now I wondered if we would ever do anything that normal again.

  We definitely wouldn’t if we didn’t get through this door and into the tunnel Marlon had promised us, and the thought made me put even more effort into moving the snow.

  It took us about five minutes to clear out enough that he had room to drag the door open, and once he did that, we both tipped down and forward, our eyes on the blackness in front of us. Marlon slowly reached out with his flashlight, and I held my breath, trying to guess at what I’d see when the light infiltrated the gloom.

  To my surprise, it was a fully formed tunnel. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. The thing was…well, it looked like an underground drainage pipe, more than anything else. The walls were made of concrete, and it was neat and very tidy. Small, certainly, and we’d have to be hunched over to get through it.

  But it was clean and dry, and, from what I could tell, safe.

  There was also a ladder leading straight down into it from the door we were currently looking through, and it didn’t take a genius to guess that we were going to be going down that ladder.

  I backed out of the opening and looked at Marlon. “Is there room for all of us down there at once?” I asked.

  He nodded. “There is, though it’ll be tight. The main control chamber is right underneath us, so there’s a larger room where we can group together. The tunnel is smaller. We’ll have to go one at a time. But it’s a hell of a lot safer than going above ground.”

  “Right.” I turned to the people around me. “Okay, everyone, we’re going down. Marlon will go first with the light. Everyone else, follow one-by-one, and do it quick. I want to get out of the open as quickly as we can. Once you’re at the bottom, move as close to the walls as you can, and wait for my orders.”


  The people shuffled forward and were descending the ladder in no time while I did the same thing I’d done in the forest: keep my eyes on the buildings and alleys around us and my gun at the ready, in case someone showed up to interrupt us before we were finished.

  When it was finally my turn to get down the ladder, I took the shortcut, grabbing the outer bars with my hands and squeezing them from the outside with my feet, and sliding right down rather than using the rungs.

  No, I wasn’t showing off. I just wanted to get this show on the road.

  When I got to the bottom, I found a nearly packed room that was already growing stuffy with the presence of too many people. Marlon was standing right next to the ladder, waiting for me, and grabbed my arm as soon as I landed.

  “What the hell is this place?” I asked.

  “The tunnel they built for the wire to my communication device,” he said, dragging me toward the start of the tunnel.

  I paused for long enough to give a few short commands to the people of the town—move quickly, don’t make any noise, keep your heads down—and then I followed him into the narrow gap, bending over at the waist so that I would fit.

  On the bottom of the tunnel, I could see what looked like a very standard cable pinned to the ground.

  “How the hell does this work?” I asked, frowning. “They built an entire tunnel just for this cable?”

  “Had to,” Marlon threw back at me. “We needed it to be completely secure, and that meant no one else could have access. And we needed it to keep working even if the energy to the town was cut. Or if something happened to kill any electrical circuits in the wider world.”

  “But if there was an EMP—”

  “The tunnel is protected,” Marlon interrupted.

  I breathed out in sheer appreciation of the amount of thought that must have gone into this construction. “You have a Faraday cage,” I said, all admiration.

  “Precisely. It’s outside these walls, and means that there’s double protection for the cable. Which means my communication device—”

  “And that’s how you knew exactly what had happened, when you found us,” I guessed. “Because you could actually ask. You knew how big an area the EMP had affected and what the government was doing about it.”

  “And what I was meant to do with you,” he finished for me. “Because I hadn’t only come to ask about the EMP. I needed to know my orders when it came to you. They’d told me to find you and protect you. They hadn’t told me anything more than that.”

  And there we were talking about how they supposedly had a top-secret mission for me again. I still wasn’t sure I believed that part. Mostly because Marlon hadn’t been able to give me any further information yet. Was he about to?

  “And they said…” I said, hinting at getting the end of the story.

  “They said that I would be given that information when I needed it,” he said, and I could hear both the smile and the frustration in his voice.

  A smile and a frustration that I knew all too well. “Typical military orders,” I answered.

  And then we were in another larger opening and Marlon was pulling me up against the wall, his finger to his lips in the universal sign to be quiet. He looked up at the ceiling, his eyes incredibly intense in the dim lighting of his flashlight, and we waited for the rest of our group to arrive.

  31

  I stared at the ladder in front of us, knowing exactly what that had to mean. The tunnel ended here, and the cable we’d been following snaked into a smaller room, which looked like it held something large and boxy.

  “The communication device?” I asked, gesturing to it with my chin.

  “It is,” Marlon answered. “This is the only room of this entire tunnel I’d seen before. I’ve only ever needed the device before.”

  I let my eyes travel up the ladder to the door at the top of it, and frowned.

  “And what exactly is up there?”

  “The library,” Marlon answered, and I could hear the triumph threading through his voice. “That door leads right into the library.”

  “Which is only three doors down from Town Hall itself,” I said.

  It meant we were already nearly at our target. Three doors down—three buildings down—Town Hall held Randall and most of his men.

  And they had no idea we were this close. Hell, they didn’t even know that we were coming.

  “We’re going to come up right in the middle of their camp,” Bob said in wonder, looking upward as well. “I never even knew this was down here.”

  “You were never supposed to,” Marlon answered quickly. “This has been here for years. The government chose this town specifically for this purpose and did this construction before many people lived here. They knew they wanted one of their recruiters in the area, and they knew it would be an ideal place for people who were recovering from being in the service. They just needed a town. So they…built this one.”

  Bob shook his head again, but let that particular piece of information go, and though I had questions on the tip of my tongue, I knew that I wouldn’t get good answers. The truth was, this town hadn’t been here for as long as the towns around it. It was relatively new in the area—meaning it had only been here for twenty years or so.

  The timeline worked. The reasoning worked. As fantastical as it seemed, I thought that Marlon was probably telling the truth.

  And that was unimportant right now. Because right now, we had bigger fish to fry. Like figuring out how we were going to get up that ladder and out into the town without emerging right in the middle of a group of Randall’s men.

  And further, what we were going to do once we were up there.

  “If we come up in the library, like you say we will, then we won’t have to worry about Randall,” Henry said suddenly from the crowd.

  I whirled in his direction, having forgotten that he was with us at all, and felt a sudden surge of relief at his inclusion. Out of all of us, he knew Randall the best. He would be the one best positioned to tell us what he thought Randall was doing.

  “Where do you think he is?” I asked quickly. “What do you think he’s doing?”

  “Drinking, most likely,” he said wryly. “Partying. Celebrating that they took over the town. I’m sure he has a few men out keeping an eye on things, but I’m betting there aren’t as many of them as there should be, and I’m betting he didn’t give them any specific commands.”

  “You don’t think much of his intelligence,” I noted, a bit confused. I’d thought Randall to be more clever than that. I’d assumed he’d be guarding the town jealously, like a new girlfriend.

  Henry shrugged. “He’s plenty smart. But he likes to celebrate, if you know what I mean. And he doesn’t generally bother to keep his eyes open when he thinks he’s already won a battle.”

  Well that was interesting. I turned to Marlon, my eyebrows lifted in question, and he nodded.

  “If that’s the case, then it would appear we have a green light to get up top,” he said, agreeing with my unspoken thought. “I agree that Randall and his men will be giving the library a very wide berth.”

  “Then let’s get this over with,” I grunted. “Okay, folks, we’re going to be going up, grouping in the library, and then heading out. Our target is Town Hall. We capture as many people as we can. We shoot the ones who insist on making it a fight. Got it?”

  I didn’t like putting any of them in that sort of position, but I didn’t think we had any choice. Once we were up there, bullets were going to be flying, and their lives were going to be in danger. Far better for them to know that right now, and to know what I expected them to do about it.

  And to my surprise, as I looked around, I saw faces that were confident in their ability to handle it. Faces that weren’t quite keen or eager, but were definitely ready.

  My townspeople, I thought with pride. My friends. My allies. My soldiers.

  “I’ll go first,” I said firmly. “Marlon, you bring up the rear.”r />
  The ladder led us out into the back of the library, but I didn’t wait for the rest of the group to join me. The minute I was in the room, I was running for the front of the building, ready to figure out exactly what we were up against out there. With luck, Randall didn’t have any men in this part of the town. With even more luck, we’d have a clear path from here to Town Hall.

  After that, it was going to be every man and woman for themselves. But I’d be a whole lot happier if I could send them out there with a plan rather than a set of vague instructions.

  I came sliding to a stop against the front wall of the building, right next to a big picture window, and leaned back against the wall, bringing to mind a picture of how this street was set up. Across the street, I knew, was a large restaurant. Well, large for this town. Between here and Town Hall lay the post office, a bakery, and the hardware shop. After the hardware shop, we’d come to the town square right in front of Town Hall.

  It was a quick, easy path. But there would be almost no cover. Our best bet would be to rush it. Get to Town Hall before they knew what was happening. Take out anyone we found on the way to keep them from shooting and giving away our location.

  I slid my head around the edge of the window and looked through the glass, my gaze sliding to the left and the right as I tried to figure out whether we would see anyone on the way. I didn’t want to, if I was being honest. Far better if we got to Town Hall without having had to hurt anyone. Better if we went in there with our guns still fully loaded.

  And as I stared out the window, I started to think that we might actually be able to do that. Because I didn’t see a single soul out there. No one guarding the corners. No one walking the street. I ducked down and angled myself a bit more so I could see all the way into the town square, and almost to the door of Town Hall.

  Randall didn’t even have any guards in the town square. Hell, it looked like they’d all just…gone to sleep.