CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Twelve hours earlier in front of the cave, Ric reached out to grab Jeanell, but she vanished in Brad’s grip, black holed to New York City. Ric’s impulse was to grab their retrieved smartphone and follow, but he knew he couldn’t go straight into the chancellor’s tower without a secret code, and now his plan to invade the tower for a rescue mission was on his shoulders alone. And for one person, it would be impossible.
“What’s going on out here?” Ric spun to see Reeves and Brooke step out from deep within the cave, Reeves holding their only automatic rifle. “Where is everybody?”
“Holed out, I think,” Ric said, “Jeanell too, I’m sure of that. Brad grabbed her and holed back to New York, I suspect. Why weren’t you on guard?”
Brooke said, “Nobody knew we were here, we can’t be on guard forever.”
Ric looked at her, and then at Reeves, new information settling into his brain. “So you two were in one of those rear chambers… fucking?”
“You did it,” Brooke said. “You and that girl.”
“We weren’t on guard duty at the time!”
Reeves stepped toward Ric, his voice low and cold. “Brooke’s right; there wasn’t any reason to think we’d be set upon here. They must have just come and gone.”
“Happens in a flash, you should know that by now.” Ric paced around the cave entrance.
Brooke called out, “Truly? Honestly!”
“They’re gone, Brooke,” Ric spat out. “Prisoners of the chancellor!”
Reeves said, “All right then, what’s done is done.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Ric said. “But I suppose that’s right, we can’t undo it now. Funny, if we could go back in time… anyway, we must mount the rescue. There’s a bag of suits over there; find one that fits and put it on. He hole it in an hour.”
But Reeves said simply, “No.”
Ric stopped and turned. “What’s that?”
Reeves stood his ground, automatic rifle in his hands. “I said no.”
“Okay, sooner then.”
“No,” Reeves said, “we’re not going at all.”
“Reeves, it’s your fault this happened!”
“If we’d been out here,” Reeves shrugged, “they’d have holed us too. Wouldn’t have made any difference.”
“You could have shot Jeanell’s friend Brad before he made off with her.”
Brooke said, “Not much of a friend.”
“And you, Brooke, you left the kids alone!”
“I didn’t know anything would happen.”
“Now you do, and what’s happening is that we’re holing to New York, breaking into that tower, and—”
Reeves barked, “No!”
“Why?”
“It’s a suicide mission, I told you that from the beginning.”
“So what? What do any of us have to live for?” But Reeves and Brooke exchanged a warm smile, Ric rolling his eyes. “This is no time for that, you too!”
Brooke snapped, “Hypocrite! You want us to sacrifice our love just to try to save yours!”
“What about the kids,” Ric asked, “and the others?”
“That’s the way things are now,” Reeves said, hand craning around the gun. “Acceptable losses. But Brooke and I can repopulate—”
“Reeves,” Ric said, but had time to say nothing more.
“We’ll be safe here, we’ll have each other.”
Ric shook his head in disbelief. “How safe were the others?”
Brooke said, “If that Brad stayed to hole your girlfriend, then they don’t have any reason to think we’re still here or they’d have come into the cave to get us.”
Reeves glanced at his new lady love, impressed, turning back to Ric to say, “Affirmative.”
Ric said, “Brad and I saw each other, so they’ll know I’m here.”
Reeves shrugged. “Why should that be of any concern to us?”
“What about the twins, or the others who were here? You don’t think any of them will tell the chancellor’s men that you were left behind?”
Reeves and Brooke glanced at each other, worry in their eyes. Reeves thought aloud, “We’ll move on, deeper into the Rockies. They’ll search for a while, then give up. I was never the one they wanted, and Brooke sure isn’t. In fact, I think they got who they wanted.” Reeves looked Ric over. “Though you might still be a prized target.”
“If I am or not,” Ric said, “doesn’t matter. Because I am going to New York, and I am getting Jeanell out of there, and as many of the others as I can.”
Reeves barely twitched. “Or die trying.”
“Happily.”
Brooke said, “Does she mean that much to you? Do you love her so much?”
“Yes, I do,” Ric said without a second thought. “It makes me sick to think of what they’re going to do to her in that tower. She’ll never walk out on her own power, and if she dies there, I… I really don’t feel like I’d deserve to live. I certainly wouldn’t want to. But it’s not just about me. This is our only chance to stop the chancellor, to end this national nightmare once and for all. Jeanell is more than a victim here, she’s our secret weapon!”
Reeves huffed, shaking his head. “Your secret weapon—not mine, not ours.” Ric sneered, waiting for an explanation. And Reeves was happy to deliver. “You white people, it’s your society, always has been. For someone like me—”
Ric asked, “What are you talking about? You were a corporal in the U.S. Army, an engineer, and you were handpicked for a job you had back in your time. That’s not exactly three-fifths of a person, Reeves.”
“Things hardly changed. Cops shooting us on the street, jobs impossible to get, can’t vote because most of the population were felons. And why were they felons? Drug crimes, drugs you white people created and distributed on our streets, through our own brothers and sisters.”
“I didn’t do any of that!”
Reeves huffed. “Things are worse now! I have been to town, I know what’s going on; not a single black person, hardly anyone else of any color at all. Damn near went snow-blind. And you want us to give our lives for that? You have got to be kidding.”
Ric sighed, pacing around. Reeves and Brooke looked at him impassively, Brooke clinging to her new man’s beefy arm.
“What kind of life is this,” Ric asked, looking around. “Living in the wild, foraging for food?”
“Isn’t that how you were living when we arrived?”
“We had a home, such as it was, a community.”
“And we’ll have those same things,” Reeves said.
Ric looked at Brooke, her eyes big and sad but resolved as she snuggled against Reeves’ strong arm. Reeves was stoic with an unmoving grimace. Ric knew then that he’d be facing the chancellor alone.
“All right then,” Ric said. “I’ve done my best to convince you, but if you’re set on this course, I can’t do anything about it. I wish you luck, I guess. And it’s not that I’m not happy for you both. I mean, love is a rare enough thing under the best circumstances, so… congratulations, right?”
Ric turned to Brooke with a warm smile. “Brooke, I… I know things didn’t work out between us the way you always hoped they would. I never meant to hurt you, I hope you know that. It’s just with Colleen dying and everything, I… I always thought of you as a friend, a sister. I guess I needed that.”
Brooke couldn’t prevent a tear from pushing out of her eye and crawling down her pale cheek. “I understand,” she said.
“And these things,” Ric went on, “they happen for a reason. Now that you and Reeves here have found each other, well, maybe that’s the reason.”
More tears trailed Brooke’s face as she gasped. “You could stay here with us!”
“We’re movin’ on,” Reeves said coldly.
“Okay then,” Brooke said, to Ric as much as to Reeves, “we’ll travel together. There’s safety in numbers, that’s obvious. And Ric, back in the collider, you were our leader!”
“I’m in charge now,” Reeves said, a silent tension lingering in his wake.
Brooke looked nervously from one man to another. “Okay, that doesn’t really matter. We’ll all be working together for our mutual benefit. We’ll need as many able bodies as we can gather if we’re going to survive out in the Rockies.”
“There’ll be others,” Reeves said, “straggling around out there. We’ll consolidate.”
Ric said, “You mean you’ll overwhelm them, take over, take charge like you did here, lay down your own personal marshal law.”
“Drastic times,” Reeves said, fingers craning around the rifle. “Survival of the fittest. You gotta fall into line,” he glanced at Brooke before adding, “for our mutual benefit.”
Brooke said to Reeves, “But… we’re not gonna hurt anyone?”
“Hurt? No.” The silence which followed that statement was deadly.
Ric said to Brooke, “Are you sure you wanna go with him? You can still come with me if you like.”
“No.” Reeves said, “she’s mine now!”
“No,” Ric snapped back, chest thrust forward, “she’s her own person, always has been. We didn’t sacrifice that freedom to the chancellor and we’re not about to sacrifice it to you!”
“It’s okay, Ric,” Brooke said quickly, “I want to stay, I want to be with him.”
The two men stared each other down, teeth gritted, wills pushed to the limit.
Ric said, “All right, Brooke, if that’s what you want.”
Brooke pulled Ric away from Reeves, the two men locked on each other. Brooke knew then that the two men couldn’t cohabitate or work together, and she also knew that where Ric was going, there was no coming back.
Brooke said to Ric, “You go clean up, Ric, change, get ready for your hole to New York. I’m sure that… well, if anybody can do it, you can.”
Ric looked down at Brooke, a little tear creeping down her cheek to know that the old friends were seeing each other for the very last time. Sniffling through her tears, she asked, “Are you sure?”
Ric offered a soft smile and a gentle nod. “Are you?” Brooke glanced at Reeves, then back at Ric and returned his nod with one of her own. Ric said, “Okay then, lemme get cleaned up. You two should probably get going if you’re going to put some distance between you and the chancellor’s goons.”
But Reeves said, “No.”
Ric paused, confused. “I’m sorry?”
“I said no.”
“Right, so, stick around, I don’t give a damn. I got things to do.”
“No,” Reeves said.
“Excuse me?”
Reeves said, “No, you don’t.”
Brooke asked him, “What’s wrong, honey?”
“He’s a security breach. He goes down there, gets caught, he’ll tell them we’re out here and they’ll come after us.”
Brooke shook her head, eyes going wide. “No, he won’t. He was the strongest of all of us, he’d never crack like that!”
“He ran out on his own,” Reeves said. “You call that strength? You call that courage?”
“He had to,” Brooke said. “That woman you brought here is a danger to all of us, to the whole history of humanity!”
After a deadly pause, Reeves pointed the automatic rifle at Ric. “Off point.”
Brooke said, “No, you can’t!”
“He’s as good as dead anyway, storming that tower alone. And he’ll probably get the twins killed, and the rest. It’s for their benefit as much as ours. The man must die.”
Ric looked around, knowing he couldn’t get into the smartphone in his pocket fast enough to hole out of there. Reeves had him dead to rights.
Dead.
Brooke screamed out Ric’s name and threw herself in front of him just before two quick bursts of the machine gun sent a tyrant flycatcher scattering out of the yellow birch branches. Ric was shocked still by the split-second burst of violence, and before he or Reeves realized, Brooke lay dead on the forest floor between them.
They both looked at her in stunned silence, a blood-chilling moment of guilt, horror, and then anger.
Reeves screamed and pulled the trigger on Ric, but the gun clicked dry. The two men faced each other off, teeth gritted, eyes burning. Ric charged and Reeves was ready to receive him. Reeves swung the butt end of the rifle at Ric, hoping to knock him back with a sharp blow to the face.
But Ric ducked it and threw several quick punches into Reeves’ gut. Unfazed, the bigger man raised the rifle and swung that deadly butt down toward the back of Ric’s head. One blow would end it and him.
But Ric was lightning quick and dodged the blow again, trained by a lifetime of survival tactics and self-training. Ric pulled back then threw a sidekick at his adversary, easily blocked by the automatic weapon, empty but still a deadly club.
Reeves had military training on his side, not to mention deadly revenge for the loss of his new love and the guilt he felt for creating that loss with his own hand.
Ric grabbed the rifle again with both hands and leaned back, each man struggling to pull it from the other’s grip. Ric hissed, “You killed one of my best friends! You see where your leadership takes us?”
“Yeah… to your grave!”
Reeves twisted the rifle and spun around. In an instant, Ric stood with his back to Reeves, still clutching the rifle. Reeves wrenched forward and flipped Ric over his back and to a position in front of him, hopefully on the ground.
But Ric landed on his feet and was quick to retaliate. He head-butted Reeves with a hard crack, the big man wavering. A hard kick to the crotch sent him craning forward with an oof! Ric could finally pull the machine gun out of Reeves’ hands. The image of himself crushing Reeves’ skull with one swift motion filled Ric’s mind, and his arms were ready to respond.
But his instincts thought the better of it, and Ric stepped back to deliver a sound front kick into Reeves’ face. It would put him on the ground, unarmed, without killing him.
Ric stood over him, Reeves on his back on the ground. Ric said, “Stay down, pal.” Reeves grimaced from the forest floor as Ric went on, “Okay, we’ve both lost now, and that was your fault, Reeves, yours! But I’m ready to forgive you. And you’ll do the same, though I’ve done nothing to be forgiven for. Then we get on with the business at hand and get to New York.”
Reeves coughed, straining to breathe. “I’ll kill you the first chance I get.”
“I’ll make you a deal, pal; we get Jeanell out of that tower, you and I will have our day. But until then, we work together.”
“Why should I?”
“There are still the kids to save, and the others. And what reason do you have to stay out here now?” They glanced at Brooke’s dead body, slumped nearby. Reeves’ hardened face went soft, guilt overtaking his anger, then hopelessness, then realization, then resolve.
He looked up at Ric and nodded. Ric extended his hand to help the big man up, and the two of them staggered toward the stream to clean up and get ready. Reeves said, “You got decent moves, boy.”
Ric offered up a chuckled huff. “Don’t call me boy.”