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  Ruben’s eyes closed as his head dropped back on his shoulders. “Fuck me,” he groaned. “He kept us sitting here until you could get into position.”

  “But why?” Carly was practically sputtering. “Colonel, what possible reason could you have for doing this? And where did these men get their uniforms?”

  “Use your head, Carly,” said Roth. “This is Colorado Springs. There are at least a dozen military supply stores that were just lying there, waiting to be pillaged.”

  “That doesn’t explain what’s going on! Where did you disappear to? They think you deserted!”

  Roth stared at her as if she was speaking a foreign language.

  “Of course I deserted,” he said finally. “There was no place for me in the new command structure.”

  Jax scowled, finally lowering his hands. “How did you know? You took off before anyone had a chance to talk to you.”

  “It’s the army or nothing, Captain,” said Roth. “We both know that. Look at Major Price: senior ranking marine in the state and he’s working some shit detail under you.”

  “What we do is important!” Jax protested.

  “Is that right? Like helping ‘Joe’ here deal with his night terrors?”

  Carly’s eyes blazed. “Very funny, Nick. We’re also recruiting civilians to help dig the mass graves we need to bury the hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in and around this city. What have you been doing besides getting this band of brothers together?”

  “Enough,” Jax said. “I don’t give a shit if you’re working on a revival of The Wizard of Oz. I’m giving you one last chance to get the hell out of here and take your clown crew with you. Archer is in command under the president now, and a guy named Smith has his old job. Believe me, you don’t want that bastard to catch up with you anywhere.”

  Roth surprised Jax by smiling. “I know, I heard about the incident in Atlanta. Tell me, Captain, doesn’t it seem just the slightest bit odd to you that he ended up where he is?”

  It had, but Jax didn’t want to give Roth any more fodder.

  “Smith is willing to do what has to be done,” he said instead. “This is a new reality, Roth. A new republic. And if we don’t maintain some semblance of order here in Colorado Springs, then there’s no hope for the rest of America.”

  “Says the man who ordered the death of a dozen men at William J. Palmer High School,” Roth said. “I’d say Smith has himself a protégé.”

  Jax felt his face flush with blood. Roth’s men had remained silent up to that point, but a few were now shaking their heads.

  “You think there’s an America left to save?” asked a guy who Jax recognized from one of the recruitment rallies. “This shit happened everywhere in the fucking world, you said so yourself. There’s no America anymore. There’s no anything anymore!”

  Ruben’s clear baritone rang out in the tent. “America isn’t a place, you idiot!” he yelled. “It’s a concept! And If we don’t keep it alive, we’re all well and truly fucked!”

  Jax thought he’d never agreed with his friend more in his life than he did right at that moment.

  “Well, then,” said Roth, crossing his arms over his chest. “We’re all fucked, Lieutenant, because America is over. It died last week, and the world died with it. All that’s left is us.”

  Carly shook her head. “This isn’t the Nick Roth I knew,” she said. “You didn’t join the air force and work your way up to command because you didn’t believe in America.”

  “Enough!” Jax barked. “Either shoot now or tell us what this is about. If you don’t, I’m walking out of here, and I’ll kill anyone who gets in my way. Is that clear?”

  “That sound like the American thing to say, Lieutenant?” Roth said to Ruben. The smugness in his expression made Jax want to knock his teeth down his throat.

  “All right, all right,” Roth said, raising his hands in a gesture of mock surrender. “You win. Obviously there’s a reason for this. We need you to drive us to Schriever.”

  Jax stared at him, angry and dumbfounded. This was all about hitching a ride to a fucking air force base?

  “It’s a thirty-minute trip and all you’ll find at the end is thousands of bodies,” he said. “Why the hell would you want to go there? And why do you need us to drive you?”

  Roth grinned. “There’s a bit more there than just bodies, and technically, I only need you to drive me. These two are extraneous.”

  Carly’s face flushed as the realization of what he’d said set in. Ruben scowled beside her and squared himself into a ready position. Nothing was happening to her while he was around.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Roth said when he saw their reactions. “I just meant that you’re the only one who’s indispensable on this mission, Captain.”

  “Why? None of you can drive a personnel truck?”

  Roth chuckled. “I like your style, Captain. I think under different circumstances, we could have been friends.”

  “You think wrong.”

  He shrugged. “C’est la vie. Anyway, I need you to get us into a specific place at Schriever. Once that happens, you three can go do whatever you want for the rest of your lives and I won’t give a single shit.”

  “What specific place?”

  Roth perked up. “I’m glad you asked. It’s actually a storage facility near the east end of the parking lot.”

  Jax blinked. “What?”

  “That’s it. Get us past the guard detail there and you’re home free.”

  “Why is there a guard detail? There’s nothing worth stealing at Schriever! You say America is over? Well, I say the air force is over, for the time being, at least.”

  “I know that,” Roth said drily. “There’s no aircraft in the building. It’s something much more useful.”

  Jax sighed. “Get to the point.”

  “It’s a cache of weapons that Archer had moved there before Echo Company and the rest arrived at Cheyenne.”

  “Bullshit.” Jax frowned. “You’re out of your mind. There’s nothing at Schriever besides aircraft you can’t fly and thousands of Eko victims. Everything else has been scavenged for use at Cheyenne Mountain or here in the city.”

  Roth shrugged. “Then I guess none of this matters. You take us there, we find an empty storage facility and the joke’s on us. Then if you follow your current standard operating procedure, you kill all of us and go back home for supper.”

  “You fucking—”

  “Easy, Captain. The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we can all get on with our lives.”

  Jax shook his head, grinning. “See, that’s where you’re wrong. You think we’re going to go along with this. What are you going to do if we don’t? Kill us? You do and Echo Company will be on you like a pack of wolves on a nest of mice. You wouldn’t last a day.”

  He watched as Roth’s expression changed. The man took a deep breath, let it out. Where before he’d been almost joking around, now he looked deadly serious.

  “All right, Captain,” he sighed. “I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but you’ve forced my hand.”

  Jax scoffed. “Is that right? You’ve got some leverage on us, do you?”

  Roth reached down to his belt, removed a walkie-talkie and turned the dial to activate it. The hiss of static filled the tent until he pressed down on the button on the side.

  “Liberty Two, this is Liberty One, over.”

  Liberty, Jax thought. Give me a fucking break.

  “Go for Liberty Two, over,” said a voice on the other end. Jax felt a flutter in his solar plexus as he recognized it: the kid with the jerry can.

  “Do you have the package, over?”

  “Affirmative, over.”

  Roth looked Jax in the eye. “Remember, Captain, this is on you.” He handed the radio to him.

  “This is Captain Jackson Booth,” he barked into the mouthpiece. “And I am seriously pissed off right now. I suggest you do not fuck with me. What’s going on?”

&nbs
p; The line hissed static for several long moments until a small voice came across the speaker, quiet as a whisper but powerful enough to freeze his guts solid.

  “Jax?” Hayley sobbed. “Are you there? He says he’s going to hurt me.”

  And suddenly all his rage drained out of him, replaced by cold terror.

  Chapter 24

  The van had been easy enough to find. It was a twelve-seater Foton, black, sitting on the lot of a dealership near Palmer Park. One of Roth’s goons had shot out the glass of the front door and gone through the fobs until he found all the ones with the Mercedes logo, then activated them all until they found the one to the van.

  In the rearview camera, Jax saw an SUV appropriated in the same way from the same lot. A pair of armed goons rode in its backseat behind Ruben and Carly as they followed them along Highway 94 east towards Schriever AFB and whatever awaited them there.

  It was hardly a scenic drive; the mountains and the lowering sun were behind them in the west. All that broke up the endless sea of dun and green along the road was the occasional herd of cattle wandering along the barbed wire fences that lined the highway.

  “Somebody needs to get out here and start taking care of the cattle,” Roth said from the passenger seat next to Jax. If not for the SIG Sauer leveled at his ribs, the man could have been just a hitchhiker who was chatting to pass the time on a particularly boring trip.

  “What do you know about it?” Jax muttered.

  “Just that it would be stupid not to take advantage of such an easy food supply. If you don’t, Colorado is going to have a mighty obese wolf and coyote population.”

  Jax shook his head. “Disease will kill a lot more of them than predators.”

  “You sound like you know what you’re talking about.”

  “I grew up on a ranch. East Texas.”

  Roth grinned. “Who better to take over the operation, then? The Chico Basin Ranch south of Schriever has thousands of head of cattle. Horses, too. They all need looking after. Seems to me your talents are being wasted, Captain.”

  “My talent is killing terrorists.”

  “Is that how you see me?”

  Jax snarled. “You’re holding an innocent little girl hostage so that I’ll help you get your hands on heavy duty military weapons. What do you call yourself, a philanthropist?”

  The miles ticked by as Highway 94 unfolded in front of them. Soon they would turn south on Enoch Road, which would take them the last handful of miles to the base.

  “You’re not seeing the big picture,” said Roth. “You’re either ignoring it or you’re blind, but either way, the result is the same.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “The government is going to pretend that it can still control things. The only way it can do that is to maintain order. The only way to do that is by enforcing rules.”

  “How is that a bad thing?”

  Roth shook his head. “Did you not see President Fletcher’s final message?”

  Jax frowned as he remembered using Fletcher’s own words only days ago to justify his own actions. But Roth’s ideas were skewed—they did need to maintain order. Without it, America would simply revert back to the Wild West, where whoever had the most guns made the rules. They couldn’t allow that to happen.

  “It’s a different reality now,” he said. “Fletcher didn’t know the extent of the virus—”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” said Roth. “America’s intelligence community saw Eko coming, believe me. How do you think they managed to get a vaccine?”

  “Yeah, way too late for it to stop the end of the world.”

  “Ah, but they managed to get it to the military people first, didn’t they?”

  Jax glared at him. “Who else would you give it to? They needed soldiers to maintain order after the collapse. It’s the only possible hope for survival.”

  “Whose survival?” Roth shrugged. “Civilians? There’s more than enough preserved food and bottled water sitting around for the survivors of Eko. There are, what, 15,000 people left in Colorado Springs? There was enough food in the city to feed 800,000 before the collapse. Simple math says they’ll survive. Sure, it won’t be the most luxurious life, but they’ll have food, shelter, all the basics they need.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “I’m wondering how that situation is going to be made better by having a government and an army in place.”

  “Says the man who’s about to steal a cache of weapons from that military. How do they fit into this new return to the natural state?”

  “Good point,” said Roth. “Cicero probably wouldn’t have approved. But Cicero lived in ancient Rome, not post-collapse America. If we’re going to go our own way, we need to be able to keep the Archers and Smiths at bay. We’d have to be idiots not to do this.”

  Jax slowed the van as he saw the sign for Enoch Road. He hit his right turn signal before he even realized what he was doing.

  “Had to let Carly and Lt. Lambert know we were turning?” Roth taunted.

  Jax ignored it. “If we’re going to have any hope of rebuilding the republic, we need structure in place, not anarchy.”

  “Says who? How do you know that America wouldn’t be better off as a series of independent states all across this great land, from sea to shining sea? People returning to their roots, leaving technology and government behind and just living simply in peace?”

  “We had that for thousands of years,” said Jax. “Ever read a history book? There’s a war on pretty much every page.”

  Roth raised a pointed finger like a professor who’s just been challenged by a student. “Yes, indeed! But those were in places where there were a whole lot of people crammed into a small space. America has nothing but space now, and no shortage of resources. When everyone has enough, there’s no reason for them to fight.”

  “The Communists in the Soviet Union preached about everyone having enough. That was cold comfort to the millions of people Stalin killed.”

  “That’s a completely different situation,” Roth said, then sighed. “Okay, Captain, I get it. We’re not on the same page. We’ll agree to disagree.”

  Jax grinned. “No, I’ll agree to put a bullet in your head the second I get the chance, Roth. You can agree to whatever the hell you want.”

  Sunset was just beginning as the first view of Schriever appeared on the horizon. Jax checked his rear camera to make sure Ruben and Carly were keeping up. Behind him in the van, the ten members of Roth’s ad hoc militia stared out the windows; some fidgeted with their rifles, a few rocked back and forth in their seats. One dug a finger into his left nostril almost to the second knuckle.

  As they passed the visitor’s center and followed Falcon Parkway towards the main base, Roth leaned closer to Jax.

  “You can see the building as soon as we enter the parking lot,” he said. “There will be two guards, both with AR-15s.”

  “And then what? You kill them? But you’re not terrorists—you said so yourself.”

  “Who said anything about killing them? That’s why we needed you for this—to convince them to open it up.”

  “Why do you need to do that?”

  “Because the building is locked tight, and just in case anyone gets past the guards, there’s a failsafe explosive charge set up around the perimeter of the building.”

  Jax chewed on that. Why was there a weapons cache in the first place? And in the aftermath of the collapse, why was there so much effort to keep it away from people?

  Roth smiled. “I can see the wheels moving behind your eyes, Captain. Good. But for now, we need to focus on the task at hand.”

  “What makes you think they’ll do anything for me?” asked Jax.

  “Don’t be so modest. You’re the man who killed the mole who shot down Air Force One and assassinated Marcus Chase. You’re a hero, Captain.” He paused before adding, “That’s the official story, at least.”

  A jolt of unease ran through Jax’s belly and
he wondered if there was any way Roth could possibly know the truth. Before he could give it any more thought, they entered the parking lot. In the distance, he saw what Roth had been talking about: a metal shoebox, maybe 20,000 square feet. A pair of ten-foot hangar doors covered a good chunk of the front of the building.

  Sure enough, two armed men in fatigues stood guard next to a fleet of trucks parked nearby. The yellow eagles on their shoulders identified them as privates. As the van approached, the men moved forward and raised their hands for him to stop. He checked behind him: as per the plan, Ruben and Carly had stayed back at the entrance to the parking lot.

  The guard closest to the driver’s side approached him slowly, almost as if he were bored by the duty. Jax rolled down his window and flashed what he hoped was a winning smile.

  “Evening, Private,” he said. “How’d you snag this primo detail?”

  “Identify please, sir.”

  “Capt. Jackson Booth, here on orders from Col. Smith. We need to get inside.”

  The guard, a swarthy fellow who appeared to be in his late twenties, looked like he’d just been slapped.

  “The Capt.Booth?” he asked, eyes wide. “The guy who killed the mole in Cheyenne Mountain?”

  Jax smiled but it felt more like a grimace. “The same.”

  The private turned to his colleague, who was standing on the passenger side of the van. “Hey, man!” he called. “This is Capt. Booth, man!”

  Now it was the other guy’s turn to let his eyes pop out.

  “No shit!” he said, then cleared his throat and saluted. “Jeremiah Perry, sir. It’s an honor.”

  The other seemed to shake himself out of a daze and followed suit. “Begging your pardon, sir. Joe Stratch. I’m very glad to meet you, sir.”

  “Privates.” Jax nodded and returned their salutes. “I’ve heard nothing but good things about you two.”

  The men glanced at each other and visibly swelled with pride.

  “What can we do for you, sir?” asked Perry.

  “We’re here to do an emergency inventory. Just need to get in. There’s sixteen of us, so shouldn’t take more than an hour. When do you men get relieved?”