Though Douglass hadn’t been able to talk directly to the girl for fear of the armed gorilla in the seat beside him, it had quickly become clear what the problem was. The guy was definitely off his meds.
Thankfully, Douglass had quite a few sedative samples in his bag that he could use to chill the guy out, just as soon as he could convince the brute to take them. Poor guy. Probably a military vet suffering PTSD, maybe even an escapee from Providence, though how he’d gotten hold of an arsenal while on the lam was beyond him. He looked pretty healthy for a schizophrenic—usually they were stick-thin and had brown rings around their eyes—but some of the things that had come out of the guy’s mouth were definitely from Loopy Town. Douglass felt himself feeling sorry for the dude. He had probably just gotten triggered by the power outage and was teetering in a confused reality, sure it was aliens.
“It’s aliens,” the gun-toting man said, right on cue. He was squinting at the sky, where moments before, a purple strobe light had lit up the overcast cloud layer above them.
Poor dude. Douglass had known a kid in High School who’d similarly lost it after military service, convinced the world was run by aliens. He ending up offing himself in his bathroom a few years later, careful to sit down on towels beforehand to make cleanup easy for whoever found him.
Douglass glanced again at the nervous-looking girl behind the steering wheel. She obviously thought the guy was off his rocker, but she was also quite visibly terrified to say anything about it. And who wouldn’t be? The guy had enough guns on his person to take on the National Guard.
Thank God for mediclorians…
“So…” Douglass offered as the woman stopped the truck at the main traffic light in Palmer, which, like everything else about the town, looked completely dead aside from the odd wandering car, “What’s waiting for us up in Hatcher’s Pass?” It was tempting to try and dodge out of the truck as she waited for an old lady in a Honda across the intersection to go, but, after getting a very graphic view of gunshot wounds and their ramifications for the last seven years, he really didn’t want to get shot. Besides, it looked like she could use the help.
“Safety,” the man said matter-of-factly. “The aliens are gonna take out Anchorage. Maybe Eagle River, too. Gotta get to high ground.”
Yep, definitely a schizo. Douglass began categorizing the sedatives, opioids, and antipsychotics he’d brought with him from Chicago in the bottom of his bag. Technically, he was pretty sure that tricking a deranged lunatic into believing he was taking something that would give him Jedi powers was a breach of the Hippocratic Oath, but he didn’t think the police would ask too many questions if a schizophrenic with a gun collapsed after kidnapping him and a pretty girl.
And she really was pretty. Like the kind of pretty he might ask out on a date, if it weren’t for Rambo, here. He wondered what her profession was. She dressed like she’d been raised in Alaska, but her posture and elocution betrayed that she probably came from money.
“High ground, eh?” Douglass squinted up at the mountains in front of them. “Pretty sure that road doesn’t go all the way through the pass in the winter.”
“It goes high enough,” the schizo said. “About a quarter mile off the highway, I staked out a good place to hunker down and make camp. Gives us a good view of anyone coming up the pass.”
“He’s not wearing snowboots, Rusty,” the woman said with an exasperation that suggested she somehow knew him beyond the crazy-doomsday-nutjob scenario. “How’s he gonna walk in the mountains like that?”
“I have poor circulation,” Douglass added.
“Don’t care. He walks.”
So spaketh the man with the gun. Douglass glanced over the backrest at the duffel of weapons in the back seat. He could make it two men with guns…
“Don’t even try it, snowflake,” the only man with the gun said. Then he gave a really big smile that was scary as shit.
“Sure,” Douglass said, quickly finding something else to look at. As they turned off the Glenn Highway and sped up the road that supposedly went to Hatcher’s Pass, he cleared his throat. He’d only been in Alaska five days now, but this was definitely not what he was expecting when he signed up for the Doctors Without Borders commission, thinking he could get some fresh air and a change of pace from the busy city life of Chicago.
He twiddled his thumbs as the tension in the truck continued to rise. The woman’s knuckles were white knobs of bone on the steering wheel. The gorilla was the only one in the vehicle who appeared totally calm.
Gotta be those steely nerves of true psychosis, Douglass thought. He really wished he’d had a chance to call his sister in Wasilla before getting kidnapped by the alien prepper. He’d never seen such a huge power-outage. Every building along the highway—government or otherwise—was cold and dark. People were wandering in their driveways, shaking their cell phones, looking up at the pretty lights in the sky.
A strong aurora, obviously. Back when he’d been thinking of moving to Canada, he’d read that in 1989, the entire electrical power grid of Quebec had been shut down in less than two minutes by a powerful solar storm. And, as everyone knew, solar storms caused vibrant auroras. Sure, purple was a weird color, but it all depended on what ions of what atmospheric elements got excited by which surges of the sun’s energy, and how strong those surges were. He was sure purple was possible—people had seen red before in the now-infamous ‘blood auroras’.
“So what’s the plan?” Douglass asked. “I mean, if it is aliens.” His eyes slid nervously back to Rusty. “You gonna take ‘em all on yourself?”
“I got grenades and white phosphorus,” Rusty said.
Great.
Douglass turned to look at Envy for confirmation, but she didn’t deny it.
Wonderful. A schizoid with grenades. Halleluiah. He was beginning to think he’d need to dose the guy’s mediclorians sooner rather than later.
“White phosphorus…” Douglass offered. “Isn’t that hard to come by?” He’d heard of it in small amounts on the heads of matches, but otherwise the US government had made it nigh impossible for the Average Joe to get ahold of it.
“He’s that guy who raided Elmendorf a few years back,” Envy said.
At first, he thought he’d misheard. Then, when her face remained tense and focused and he realized he hadn’t, Douglass’s mouth fell open, then he found his side starting to itch where the gun was pointed at it, the ante effectively upped by a few million percent. “Seriously?” He was having trouble hearing over the sound of his own heartbeat. “I thought they caught those guys. Some eastern European terrorists or something.”
“Nope. Just me.” The big, goofy grin on Rusty’s face was enough to tell him that, at the very least, Rusty believed he had been the one to break into the government site and steal the six tons of military-grade weapons.
Douglass swallowed hard. By Envy’s reaction, the revelation didn’t surprise her. No wonder she was so pale.
“Well,” Douglass said, as the road ahead of them began to get windy as they hit the first real incline leading up into the mountains, “that’s not good.”
“No, that’s very good,” Rusty insisted. “This way, when those alien bastards come storming our bunker, we’ll have the firepower to defend what’s ours.”
“So…” Douglass began, “you plan to give me a gun?”
“Later,” Rusty said. “Once everyone is dead.”
Houston, that didn’t sound good. “Uh…huh.” Douglass was beginning to re-think his cooperation here. He pulled out his phone again, determined that it was still dead, then frantically started trying to come up with contingencies in his mind that would mitigate the gun-toting gorilla long enough for him and the pretty girl to escape.
“He doesn’t plan to kill anyone,” Envy said, glaring past him at the Southern oaf. “Just aliens. Right, Rusty?”
“You got it, Miss Travis.”
Envy focused her attention back on Douglass. “Just aliens. Not people.”
“Unless they try to stop me or take our gear,” Rusty amended. Then he cocked his head with a little frown. “Or they’re lawyers.”
“For the love of Christ, Rusty, stop being a knuckle-dragging asshole for two minutes—you are not shooting lawyers just because they’re lawyers!”
The big man actually looked rebuked. “But—”
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“No buts!”
“Thomas Jefferson was a lawyer,” Douglass added, banking on the fact he guessed from the collection of guns, southern twang, and general education level that he was dealing with a dyed-and-true Republican Good Ol’ Boy. “So was Hamilton and Adams.” He cocked his head, thinking. “And James Madison and Patrick Henry.”
The brute seemed a bit stunned by that. “What about Washington and Edison?”
Douglass opened his mouth to tell him that Washington was just a rich boy and Edison was the wrong century, but a quick head-shake from Envy out of the corner of his eye made him catch himself. “Uh, yeah, pretty sure they were, too.”
“They were,” Envy insisted. “All the founding fathers were. Stop trying to find reasons to go on a lawyer killing spree, okay?” It was pretty clear she thought the guy was capable of such.
Seemingly mollified, the big man turned to watch the truck climb up the mountain, lost in thought.
“So,” Douglass said awkwardly to the driver, “I take it he’s got a thing against lawyers?”
She just shook her head frustratedly, disgust radiating from her.
Douglass turned to Rusty. “What you got against lawyers?”
“Lots of them are lizards,” Rusty replied.
Douglass blinked. “Ah.” Then, when Rusty offered nothing else, he said, “I take it you mean that literally, not figuratively?”
Rusty frowned. “No, I mean actually lizards. Dad saw them a lot before he left.”
Douglass looked the big man over, judging just how much he could ask him without getting shot. “What about you? You ever see any lizards?”
“Nah,” Rusty said, with obvious wistfulness. “Never had my dad’s gift for it.”
So maybe there was hope after all. He glanced at Envy out of the corner of his eye, but she was concentrating on the road. He cleared his throat. “So you hate lawyers because you think they’re all aliens?”
“Well, that and because they kept trying to have me committed.”
“No shit.” No sooner had he said it than Douglass realized he’d gotten his inflection wrong. He coughed. “No shit? How so?” In the driver’s seat, Envy bit back a snort.
But Rusty was now glaring at him. “You think I’m stupid, don’t you?”
Weeeeeeelllllll, when you say it that way…
Rusty just scoffed and shook his big, buzz-cut head. “You just wait ‘til we get out of these clouds, city-boy. You’ll be wishin’ you’d had a dad who saw aliens.”
There wasn’t much that could be said to that, so Douglass just nodded. The rest of the trip into the Pass went on in silence, though the big Southern boy didn’t move the gun pointed at Rusty’s guts.
“You know, Rusty,” Douglass said conversationally, “bullets tend to pass through the soft tissues and out the other side.” He gestured at the girl, whom he had more or less determined the brute had some sort of crush on.
Rusty glanced at the angle of the gun, saw that Envy was, indeed, directly on the other side, and casually brought his arm up over the back of the seat and aimed it at the back of Douglass’s cerebellum. “Better?”
Douglass, knowing he had a better chance of surviving with a gut shot than a direct hit to the brainstem, gave a weak grin. “Yep.”
Rusty grunted. Then, to Envy, he said, “Just another mile up here on the left. Gonna stop at a chained-off drive and start walking.”
Didn’t that sound like fun. Douglass glanced down at his expensive loafers and tried to imagine how badly they would be waterstained by the time the schitzo marched them out to whatever hidey-hole he had crafted out of rocks and tree branches.
Damn, he missed Chicago.
“Okay, turn here,” Rusty said. “Pull off here. Time to walk.”
“Joy,” Douglass muttered. He wondered why this part hadn’t been in the Welcome To Alaska part of the Doctors Without Borders brochure.
Envy pulled the truck in at the chained-off driveway Rusty indicated, plowing through almost a foot of snow to reach the gate. As soon as she took the truck out of gear, Rusty reached over and yanked the key from the ignition. “Okay,” the big guy said, “time to get up to the lookout. Envy, you’ve got winter boots—you should go first. Then the doc. I’ll take up the rear.”
Muttering about polished suede, Douglass climbed out after the girl. Then the two of them stood there and watched, a little dumbfounded, as the beefy redneck threw every bag from the truck over his shoulders like some sort of unholy cross between Hulk and a packmule.
Unfortunately, his ability to pack on the equipment had only given him access to more guns. Now he held an automatic rifle on his cerebellum instead of a nine-millimeter. “Okay, go,” the brute said, gesturing with the assault weapon.
“How far?” Envy said, dubiously glancing up the long, inclined driveway that disappeared into heavy brush.
“Not far,” the big man said. “Couple miles.”
The woman’s face went slack. “You’ve got to be joking.”
The man gave her a pointed look. “You still having that bad feeling about Eagle River?”
Envy glanced uncertainly over her shoulder at the valley that was mostly hidden by cloud cover. “I guess…”
“Then we walk.” He jabbed Douglass in the back with a rifle muzzle to punctuate.
The girl looked like she wanted to argue, then her face twisted suddenly. “You’re right.” She glanced over her shoulder, giving the mountain a confused look. “It’s safer up there.”
“Told you. Go on, before the doc gets cold feet.” He grinned at Douglass behind his ridiculously huge gun. “Get it? Cold feet?”
“Har,” Douglass muttered. He took one last, reluctant look at his bag—which was now draped over Rusty’s shoulder in a place-of-honor—and started walking after Envy, who was even then trudging a path through the snow up the mountain.
He’s gonna kill us up here, he thought, noticing the way the driveway hadn’t been used all winter. He’s gonna kill us and we won’t be found until spring.
Sure, in mid-March, spring wasn’t too far away, but the timing didn’t really seem that important, in the grand scheme of things.
“What bad feeling?” Douglass asked as he tried to think about how much it was going to cost to replace his shoes in order to keep from thinking about how he was trudging through a foot of snow with a psychiatric escapee carrying an AK-47 riding up his ass.
“It’s nothing,” Envy muttered, at the same time Rusty said, “She feels the future coming.”
Douglass raised his brow, wondering if the woman’s ‘feeling’ might be something like his mediclorians—a way to control the lawyer-bashing brute with the arsenal.
But Rusty didn’t stop there. “She saved me from a plane crash once. Was headed to Fairbanks and she stopped me and told me I’d die if I got on the plane.”
“Did you?” Douglass asked.
“Nope,” Rusty said, beaming as if he weren’t carrying three hundred pounds of gear. “I decided to hold off, and that plane crashed on the way. Killed every damn soul aboard except for me.”
Douglass glanced ahead of him at Envy. “That true?”
She shrugged. “I get it wrong sometimes.”
“And then there was this other time she warned me about some bad ammo that was gonna take off my hand. Threw it away and I’ve still got the hand.” He held up the appendage in question and wiggled its massive digits.
“It’s a miracle,” Douglass said. Then he cocked his head, maliciousness from being forced to death-march across a mountainside seeping into his general good nature. “But…” He paused as if thinking. “If you threw the ammo away, how do you know it would’ve exploded your hand?”
“Took off some other guy’s hand,” Rusty said, shrugging. “Some dude found my rounds in the trash down at the range and he started using them and blew his hand off.”
Oh.
Douglass squinted back at Rusty, then turned back to Envy. “Is he serious?”
Envy was tense, and for a good minute, it didn’t look like she would answer. “I get nudges sometimes,” she finally admitted on a huge release of breath. “They’re generally pretty accurate, gives me warnings about what’s to come. Nothing major.”
“Saving him from a plane crash is pretty major.”
“Yeah, well.” She shrugged. “I got a bad feeling this morning, and guess what?” She glared over her shoulder at Rusty. “I’m death-marching across a mountain in Hatchers pass, kidnapped by a gorilla with an AK-47.”
Right there, Douglass decided he liked her.
“It’s an AR-15,” was Rusty’s immediate response. “And it’s just a precaution. Once you see what’s going on, I’ll let you both go.”
Envy shook her head and went back to breaking the trail for them. At least Douglass didn’t have to do that. As it was, his loafers were already full of snow and his feet were aching. Definitely not what he was expecting when he read through the brochure.
After what seemed like a century of cold, pointless trudging through what was left of the winter’s snowload, Rusty called a halt and went over to tug on a snowy tree branch. Sure enough, when it sprang up, it bore a little R carved into the bark. “Here’s where we leave the trail,” he said, gesturing. “Up there.”
Douglass glanced at the thick, snow-laden brush and almost threw a tantrum right there on the ground. He managed to hold it in, however, because Envy threw one first. “Rusty, you dipshit, there’s no way we can get our cold, tired asses up there. Your goddamn doctor’s gonna lose his feet, you inbred hillbilly dumbass, and I’m about to the point of marching over there and shoving that fucking AK-47 up your ass.”
“It’s an AR—” Rusty began, but stopped at the sudden scowl he got from Envy. He swallowed. “Uh, the brush only lasts a few feet, then it opens up to a meadow.”
“I don’t want a fucking meadow, I want to go home.”
“Feel it out,” Rusty offered. “What’s the future feel like if we go back to the truck?”
Her face scrunched like she tasted something foul.
“Now how about if we go up yonder to my cache?”
For the longest time, Envy stood there glaring at the gun-toting gorilla, then she reluctantly glanced at the brush. She made a face again, but without another word, left the long, winding dirt road and walked into the heavy treeline where Rusty had indicated.
“Wait, you’re going up there?!” Douglass cried.
“It’s safer up here,” came her reply from within the stand of willows.
Incredulous that she’d given in, Douglass just stood in the path, dumbfounded.
“Better hurry up, city boy,” Rusty said, poking him in the spine again with the AR-15. “Looks like we don’t got much time.”
Douglass took another moment to process the fact that Envy had willingly left the path to go boonie-busting in deep snow and heavy brush, then decided she must have a plan to ambush the Yeti when he was floundering in the same. A bit mollified, he followed her up the mountain.
It wasn’t to be. She led them out onto an open hillock where a lone stand of willows stood exposed against the elements and Rusty pushed past them to start digging at the snow inside the willow grove. “There we go,” he said, kicking snow from a locked metal trunk about the size of a coffin. “Got supplies in here. Tent, sleeping bag, lanterns, meals, matches…”
Douglass didn’t like the way the big man had said sleeping bag. “Wait. Just one sleeping bag?”
“Just one tent, too,” he said. “Helps conserve body heat.”
Douglass slowly turned to give Envy the Can You Believe This Shit look, which she did not return. She was too busy frowning at the hillside below them. Out in the valley, the sky was clearing, and they could see Palmer from their vantage point. Beyond that, the massive mountains along the Knik River.
Hovering over the flatlands below was a crescent-shaped black craft that was too big to be anything that could have come from Earth. Even then, the same neon-purple glow from the sky before was now spotlighting the ground beneath it as it slowly floated across the Palmer valley, melting the snow in a massive swath beneath it.
“Holy shit,” Douglass whispered, his cold feet forgotten. He stood and numbly stumbled over to stand beside Envy.
“Don’t you two try to run off, now,” Rusty warned as he dug through the metal chest and pulled out a camo tent. “My gun’s faster than you.”
Technically bullets were faster than them, but Douglass kept his smartass comment reined in, mainly because was too busy staring at the massive black spaceship sliding eerily over the terrain, spotlighting it in eye-searing purple that was charring the ground underneath it in football-field swaths. “Is that what I think it is?” he whispered.
Envy looked sick. “Pretty sure.”
So much for getting to the hospital before he got fired. “That's not good,” Douglass whispered.
Her only response was a wide-eyed shake of her head.