Blackout (Book 2)
Table of Contents
Blackout: A Tale Of Survival In A Powerless World
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Five Years Later
Blackout: A Tale Of Survival In A Powerless World
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Chapter One
I stared at the dead man. Ten seconds ago, he was alive and well, ready to drag me all the way to his own survivalist camp, where the residents there would use my knowledge for their own needs. Now the man had a crossbow bolt through his eye. His legs had crumpled beneath him when the bolt punctured his brain. They lay folded beneath his limp body at sinister angles. His remaining eye was still open wide, as if his abrupt end was such a surprise that he carried the shock with him into the afterlife. The other men, or most of them anyway, were dead too. The ones that had gotten away from the crossbow’s deadly fire didn’t deserve it. They had taken my friends. Eirian, a man who meant more to me than most everyone else even though we’d only known each other a few short months, and Pippa, the seventeen-year-old sister of my now-dead ex-fiancé, were gone, and there was a damn good chance I was never going to see them again.
Another man stood above me, the crossbow resting over his shoulder. Layers of fur made him seem larger than he actually was, but underneath all the coats, I knew that his frame was lean and strong. His face had hardly changed over the last nine years. He bore the same downward tilt to his lips, the same steely eyes with their steady gaze, and the same aura of a man who was not quite flush with the rest of humanity. Flat on my back in the snow, I gazed up at my father. Nine years. It had been nine years since I’d seen him last. I was at a loss for words. He, much to my surprise, was not.
“What the hell have you done to your hair?”
My hat had blown off in the fight. I brushed my fingers through my hair. I hadn’t seen myself in a mirror in months, but there was no doubt I looked ridiculous. I could tell from my dry split ends that the violet dye had faded, leaving a blotchy lilac tint in its wake. The side shave grew out in uneven patches. Under my father’s scrutiny, I suddenly felt unbalanced. I plucked my hat from the ground, brushed the snow off, and jammed it on over my cold ears.
“It was a dare for my radio show,” I explained, ignoring his outstretched hand and pushing myself up from the damp, cold ground. The dead man’s good eye watched me as I left him to rejoin the living.
“One hell of dare,” my father—Amos—said.
“Are we really going to talk about my hair right now?” I asked, eager to put a few paces between me and the dead man. “You just took out half a platoon with a crossbow, my home is gone, and my friends have been captured by a rather shitty branch of the military. This doesn’t seem the time to discuss my stylistic choices.”
My boot slipped in the snow. Automatically, he reached out to steady me by the shoulders but left his hands there after I’d regained my balance. We were almost the same height now. Our eyelines were nearly level. The sad lines around his eyes and mouth trapped my attention. He had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on the difference between this man and the one that had raised me to fear everyone and everything. I had left him. Nine years ago, I had left him alone in the woods because I thought I knew better. What did he think of me now?
He pulled me into a rough hug, my cheek against the soft furs of the hand-sewn coat over his shoulders. Raccoon pelts. The gray and black hairs tickled my nose, and I convinced myself that they were the reason for the moisture collecting at the corners of my eyes.
“I’m so damn glad to see you, George,” my father said.
The tears leaked over and dropped onto his wild coat. “You too, Dad.”
Our emotional reunion didn’t last long. My father pushed me out of his embrace, grabbed the front of my winter jacket, and yanked me behind the wide berth of a nearby tree trunk.
“Get down on the ground,” he hissed, peeking out from behind the tree to aim his crossbow again. From what I could see, it was the only weapon that he had on him.
A flurry of footsteps crunched through the snow, on our way toward us. More men from the camp that had destroyed mine. My father couldn’t take all of them alone. I left my cover and darted across the snow.
“George!”
I pried the rifle from the dead man’s stiffening fingers, stole the extra ammunition from his utility belt, and shoulder-rolled to the cover of a tree opposite my father’s, where I gave him the thumbs-up. Not a moment later, the owners of the footsteps marched into view. There were five of them, all dressed in military grade tactical gear, each touting a slightly outdated weapon. They came from the direction of Camp Haven, the compound that I’d called home for the last few months before these men had set fire to it.
“Damn, that was too easy,” one of them said. “I almost feel bad.”
“Don’t,” said another. “Remember the motto. Base One comes first. They were hoarding a ton of supplies. We had to do that in order to survive.”
“I know, but—shit!”
The footsteps shuffled to an abrupt halt. I chanced a look around the tree. The men had discovered the bodies of their dead comrades.
The one who’d touted the motto used the barrel of his gun to nudge the dead man with the crossbow bolt through his eye. “It’s Stiles.”
“And Andrews,” one of his comrades, tall and skinny with bright orange hair, added as he eyed another body. “And Hogan and Klein and Killips. Holy shit, this guy with the crossbow nailed everyone. We shouldn’t have split up. Buddy’s going to be pissed.”
The motto man grabbed his friend by the straps of his body armor and pulled him down to his own height. “Listen up, Kalupa. When we get back to Base One, you don’t say a damn word to Buddy about this. We never saw these guys out here, understand?”
Kalupa shook free of the other man’s grasp. “He’s gonna find out, Wood. He takes attendance before and after every raid, remember?”
“And when Stiles and Andrews and the rest of these guys don’t answer, you’re going to keep your mouth shut,” Wood replied. He looked around at the other three men in their group. “Here’s the story, boys. We got separated from the rest of the unit during the raid and stayed behind at Camp Crap to make sure that everything was taken care of. We figured we’d meet up with everyone else back at Base One. We had no idea that they were killed in the woods. If any of you so much as lets slip the fact that we purposely fell behind, I’ll make sure Buddy has your guts for garters.”
“It was your idea,” Kalupa muttered.
Quick as a flash, Wood jammed his rifle up under Kalupa’s jaw and clicked off the safety. “Say again, Private?”
My father stepped out from behind his tree and fired the crossbow. The bolt landed at the base of Wood’s skull before he could even hope to pull his trigger on Kalupa. As he dropped to the ground, joining those amongst the afterlife, the four other men panicked. Three of them raised their weapons as they spotted us behind the trees, firing at random. A bullet ripped through the sleeve of my coat, and the cold seeped in. I switched shoulders, looked out from the opposite side of the tree, and picked off a guy at the kneecaps. My father didn’t play by mercy rules. The other two soldiers went down like the first, each with a bolt in the brain. Kalupa was the only one left, cowering behind a dead bush, his rifle slung pointlessly over his shoulder. He wa
tched as my father and I emerged from our cover, hands lifted over his head.
“Please,” he said, lips trembling. “I have a little brother. Our parents both died in the blast. I’m all he has left now.”
“You killed my people,” my father said.
“I didn’t,” Kalupa replied. “I swear I didn’t. I don’t have it in me. You can check my gun. I haven’t fired it once.”
My father’s crossbow remained prepared to fire. His finger neared the trigger.
“Dad, don’t shoot.”
“George, now is not the time for pity.”
“He’s telling the truth,” I said, lowering my rifle as I watched Kalupa shiver in the snow. “And I know how he feels. Most of the people that I care about are dead too. You do what you have to do in order to keep the rest of them alive. In his case, it’s marching around with these idiots. Am I right?”
Kalupa nodded furiously.
“Go,” I told him. “Don’t tell anyone else that you saw us out here, but you damn well better remember my face. I saved your life today. If there comes a time when mine needs saving, I expect you to pull through, no matter the consequences.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Kalupa scrambled up and stumbled away from us. “I promise. Thank you so much.”
He disappeared through the dry, dormant trees, his clumsy, panicked footsteps fading as the snow swallowed his noisy retreat. Dad finally shouldered his crossbow.
“You can’t do that, George,” he said. He lowered himself to a crouch and patted the pockets of the nearest dead private. “You can’t feel bad for the enemy just because he’s got a sob story. Everyone’s got a sob story.”
“If I killed everyone on sight, I would be a shell of a human being,” I told him. “Besides, that’s not the only reason I kept him alive. I needed someone to track back to Camp Havoc—Base One—whatever they call it.”
Dad paused in his search of the dead man. “Excuse me?”
“They took my friends,” I said, taking stock of my current state. My head throbbed from the blow I’d received when one of the soldiers had attacked me. My camo winter coat, the one that I’d had ever since an ill-fated ski trip with my ex-fiancé’s family, was torn to shreds. Getting dragged across rough terrain was the easiest way to wear out a good coat. “The man and the girl that I was with before you found me. Those assholes took them back to their camp. I have to find them.” I shook off my ruined outer layer, then peeled the tactical coat off of the man with the bolt through his eye, rolling him over to his arms from the sleeves. “Sorry, buddy. This belongs to me now.”
My father pocketed a few packets of freeze-dried snacks that he’d found on one of the bodies. “You can’t be serious.”
“Don’t tell me you’re opposed to stealing from a dead man,” I said, sweeping my long hair out from under the collar of my new jacket. The sleeves were slightly too long, but the heavy-duty Kevlar patches on the front and back would do me some good if I got into a spot of trouble. For good measure, I took another man’s balaclava—one that wasn’t stained with blood—and wormed it on over my head.
“Not the jacket,” Dad clarified. “I can’t let you go to Base One.”
I paused in swapping the empty magazine in my new rifle for a full one. “Excuse me?”
“George, I just got you back,” he said, finally abandoning his search of the fight’s casualties. “Base One isn’t some little camp that you can sneak into in the middle of the night to rescue your friends. If you try, you will die.”
“They’re the only people I have left,” I told him. “I can’t leave them there.”
“Yes, you can.”
“Jesus, you haven’t changed, have you?” In the silence of the woods, my voice was louder than I meant it to be. I took a deep breath and tried again. “Ever since that fucking explosion went off, I have been trying my hardest to keep the people I love safe. Most of them are dead now. Only two are left, three if you count a baby that deserves to grow up in a world that’s better than this one. Now I didn’t ask you to come with me. You have no obligation to me. You haven’t for a long time. You can go back to whatever hole you’ve been hiding in, scared shitless, for the last decade, but I refuse to let those assholes get the better of me. I’m going to Base One whether you like it or not.”
I zipped up the tactical jacket, swung the rifle over my shoulder, and headed in the same direction as Kalupa’s footprints.
“Is that what you think of me?” my father called. “That I don’t care about anyone but myself? That I’m still holding on to the fear that your mother’s death instilled in me? Camp Haven is gone, George. Gone! And I feel the loss of every single one of those people as if they were my own family. I can’t lose you too.”
I paused and turned around. “What do you know about Camp Haven?”
“What do you mean?”
I marched across the snow toward him. “I mean that I’ve been looking for you for months. No one at Camp Haven knows who you are. No one knows you even exist. I thought you were dead or, at best, long gone from the Rockies, so what the hell do you know about Camp Haven?”
“George,” he said softly. “I built Camp Haven.”
“What?”
He sighed and gestured for me to follow him. I trailed after him out of sheer curiosity. We could always come back to the bodies and Kalupa’s trail to Base One later.
“Did they ever tell you the story of how Camp Haven came to be?” Dad asked, clearing aside dead branches as the trees gathered closer together.
“Yeah, they fed me some bullshit about a guy named Sylvester,” I said. “According to Ludo—he’s dead too by the way—Sylvester got caught in a snowstorm and almost died. Then a woman, an angel or whatever, came to him in his dreams and led him to our cabin. He built Camp Haven from there.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Well, I called that from the start.”
The ground sloped upward, and my father easily lifted himself onto a rock ledge carved into the side of the mountain. He grabbed my hand and hauled me up after him. Then we continued on our way. Where we were going, other than up, I had no idea.
“Here’s the truth,” he said, his breath puffing out in clouds of condensation. “After you left, I was crushed. Don’t give me that face. I understand why you did it. Back then, I tried to convince myself that you had gotten lost in the woods. I spent weeks combing the mountains for you, ignoring the signs that you’d gone to the city. I thought about going after you. I even got halfway to Denver a few times before turning back. Every time I got close enough to see the lights in the city, anxiety took over me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t go back there, not after what happened to your mother in that terrible place.”
“Dad—”
“No, let me finish.” He climbed on, never looking back to check if I was following. “I hated myself for never going to rescue you, but after a few years, I had to accept that you had either made it to the city safely or you had died trying. Either way, it was enough of an excuse for me to stop looking. I continued living at the cabin alone.”
Snowflakes began to drift down from above. I pulled the thief’s balaclava up over my mouth and nose to warm my breathing air. The higher we climbed, the colder it got.
“One day, in the wintertime, I was out looking for whatever game might have braved the weather,” my father continued. “I heard something rustling in a snowbank. Thought I’d gotten lucky and stumbled across a rabbit. I almost shot at it. Good thing I didn’t. It turned out to be a kid.”
My boot slipped over a tree root hidden beneath the snow. “What?”
“It was a kid,” he repeated, finally looking behind him to check on me. I got to my feet by myself. “He was about eight or nine years old, covered head to toe in snow and completely blue in the face. I thought I was too late. He was practically dead of hypothermia, but I pulled him out of the snowbank and rushed him back to the cabin. A few days later, he was back to normal and chatting my ear off.”
“Denver,” my father answered matter-of-factly. “He had run away from home. He was a foster kid. Both of his parents died when he was young, and his foster parents abused him. He told me that he couldn’t go back, so he ran into the mountains, hoping for something better. I told myself that after he recovered, I would take him back to the city, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. He had bruises all over. Old ones, new ones. Scrapes and scars. I didn’t have the heart to send him back to that.”
“So you kept him,” I guessed.
“I did,” he confirmed. “He reminded me of you at that age. Sharp, witty, resourceful. And he had a mouth like a sailor on him. I taught him everything that I taught you. After a while, Sylvester and I were the best kind of team.”
I froze in my tracks, taking hold of a sturdy branch to steady myself on the slippery rocks of the mountain face. “What did you say his name was?”
“Sylvester.”
“Sylvester,” I said. “As in the director of Camp Haven?”
My father unfurled my fingers from the branch, clapped his arm around my shoulders, and led me up the rocks. “Sylvester was never the director of Camp Haven, George. I was. Up you get.”
He gave me a leg up over another steep rock face. As I cleared the ledge, I let out a small gasp. The land flattened out in a small clearing, the far side of which looked out over the side of the mountain. A small house, erected from stone and wood, occupied the far corner of the clearing. Wisps of smoke spiraled up from the chimney, leftover from a hastily extinguished fire. I got to my feet, dusted snow from my knees, and approached the far edge. The ruins of Camp Haven were visible below. It was all ash and debris now, flattened by Base One’s ruthless attack.
“You’ve been up here all this time,” I said. “You’ve been watching the camp, haven’t you?”
“The rest of the story that Ludo told you is somewhat true,” Dad said as he joined me on the ridge. “I figured there were more people like Sylvester out there, people who wanted something different than what Denver and the rest of the world had to offer them. So I started to build Camp Haven, but when the first campers arrived, I couldn’t face them. My fear of others held me back. I left Sylvester to judge the best of them—unbeknownst to them, of course—and I appointed leaders as he saw fit. Unintentionally, I made him the mysterious figurehead of the camp. He split his time between here and the cabin at Camp Haven, relaying news and messages to me from the residents.”