Redoubt
I walked out of the truck-stop diner toward my rig, but the news wouldn't leave me alone. It kept looping through my head.
Road Warriors. Gangs. Raiders.
The country they were hitting was the same stretch of road Dave and the others were on right now. I wanted to call them that instant and warn them, but beyond a vague be careful, I had nothing to give them. I didn't have the intel.
I climbed into the driver's seat and picked up the CB mic.
For a while it was just the usual chatter.
"Westbound 84, ice is bad around Wind River Canyon. Everybody knock it down."
Then the voice I'd been waiting for came through.
I keyed the mic.
I marked everything I'd heard onto the map with care. Their strike points. The likely escape route. Then I ran the situation in my head, fast.
I knew how raiders operated. After a score that big, they went to ground for a while. It was the same in the Sahel, the same in Afghanistan — every conflict zone I'd ever seen. But I didn't think they'd stay down long. They'd be thinking about the Great Winter too, and that meant they'd be heading south.
This is the window.
The best play was for Dave and the others to use that downtime, push hard, and link up with me here as fast as they could.
I picked up the phone and called Dave, willing the signal to go through.
Luck was with me. It barely rang before he picked up.
"Chan, what's going on?"
"You good to talk? You driving?"
"Yeah, it's fine. We haven't rolled out yet. You're on speaker."
"Listen close. There's a raider outfit called the Road Warriors working the roads you're on right now. It's worse than what they showed on the news."
I passed him everything I'd gotten off the CB, clean and tight.
"They hit the rest stop after Shelby, and it looks like they've gone to ground in a mountain valley off Montana Highway 2. No telling when they'll pop back up."
"…"
"The way I see it, even if you have to push it, you need to get through that stretch as fast as you can. Don't stop. You hear me?"
Dave's voice came back calm and even.
"Got it. We saw the same news in Shelby. We're thinking the same thing. We're going to run through the night — no stops. I want to be past Great Falls at a minimum."
That, finally, let me breathe. Dave and the others weren't green refugees anymore.
"Good. That's the right call. Be careful."
"You too. Stay lucky, friend."
I hung up and set the phone down. All I could do now, once again, was wait.
But this time was different. Instead of that shapeless dread, a hard conviction had settled in my chest: they were going to make it.
The dread was gone. In its place, a cleaner, sharper sense of crisis wrapped itself around me.
The Road Warriors showing up wasn't just a raider problem. It was proof that America's social machinery was already tearing itself apart from the inside — and the Great Winter, the real catastrophe, hadn't even fully arrived yet.
There would be a second Road Warriors. A third. They'd spring up like weeds. And every last one of them would run south, trying to outrun this vicious winter.
But I couldn't move. I had to wait for Dave and the others.
Until they got here, I needed to finish every last preparation. No gaps. No excuses.
I picked up the toolbox and stepped back out into the cold. It was time to install the last of the defensive systems I'd been putting off.
While I crawled under the truck and went up and down the ladder, Wolf sat a little ways off, perfectly still, watching every move I made. Head cocked, as if he were trying to figure out what the hell I was doing.
For a long stretch I was under the bumper, grunting and wrestling with the work. When I finally crawled out, I found myself looking straight into Wolf's eyes. I wiped the sweat off my face and huffed a laugh.
"Want a snack?"
His ears snapped up. A high whimper broke into an eager awoo!, and his tail started beating the air.
"Alright. Let's take a break."
I crossed over to the trailer, pulled a strip of jerky, and tossed it to him. He snatched it out of the air like a pro. I gave his head a rub, then went straight back to work.
The trickiest job was the rear of the trailer. Because of the way the truck and trailer articulated, running the trailer's tripwires from the cab was asking for a misfire. I couldn't just leave it, though.
I ran the worst-case in my head. What if I ended up trapped inside the trailer? What if the truck was immobilized and we were surrounded? Then the trailer itself was the last fallback.
After thinking it through, I rigged tripwires around the trailer, each one loaded with buckshot. I sleeved the wires — three triggers on some, five on others — in tubing and ran them inside, right next to the CCTV monitor.
They were manual, single-shot. But now I could sit inside the trailer, watch the cameras, and erase anything that came too close to my fortress. I'd given myself a Claymore.
An RC transmitter or an electric blasting cap would've made this a lot easier.
I knew the trick — drill into the side of a shotgun shell's powder chamber, feed in a wire, jury-rig an electric detonator.
I should grab some RC toys when I get the chance.
Wait. Mount a shell in a steel pipe and I could build a shotgun drone.
The ideas kept branching even as I finished the work, sweating through it to the end.
And somewhere in there, the sun went down.
The sky wasn't the orange dusk I used to know. Beneath a sheet of ashen cloud, a dark crimson sunset lay low along the horizon, like blood seeping through a bandage.
It was beautiful. It was also a sick, dying sky. Looking at that wrong, ruined light, I felt it again — the world I'd lived in was actually over.
I closed out the long day by filling Wolf's bowl first. Then I headed for the truck-stop diner.
Through the whole late dinner, my eyes never left the phone sitting on the table.
I was nearly finished eating when the call I'd been waiting for finally came.
"Dave!"
Familiar voices tumbled through the speaker all at once.
"Chan, it's us! We're all here!"
"How you been, Chan?"
Frank and Mike came through the speakerphone in a noisy overlap, talking over each other.
"You all made it. Where are you?"
"About two hundred and eighty miles south of Shelby. Huge truck stop just past Great Falls. We're going to rest here a bit, then push on."
"Yeah, I know the place. They've got security on site, and it's big enough. You should be safe there."
Dave started groaning like a dying man.
"Don't even get me started. Hauling that caravan, I thought I was gonna die."
"Why? Something happen?"
"No, nothing like that. We just couldn't make any speed with the caravan on, so we ran it straight through from Shelby without a single stop. I thought my ass was gonna fuse to the seat."
Mike's big, rolling laugh came through the speaker.
"Hell, I even had to piss in a bottle while I was driving. Haha."
"Still no signal on the road, then?"
"We tried a few times. On the interstate the phones barely work at all. Even when you get a connection, it drops right away. Luckily Mike packed a bunch of handhelds, so we were able to talk to each other on those the whole way down."
Dave sounded genuinely impressed.
"Chan, Mike here's as much of a squirrel as you are. There isn't a thing he doesn't have."
Mike answered, mild and unhurried.
"Anyone who's done a hitch and seen a war zone knows this much is just common sense. Being prepared never hurt anybody."
Dave jumped back in.
"Come on. In the middle of all this, you're driving around with a welder in the van? That's insane!"
Mike laughed that deep, easy laugh of his.
"When you don't need it, it's just dead weight and a pain in the neck. But the day you do need it, it'll do a hell of a job."
Listening to them, I felt a solid, unexpected smile pull at my mouth. Mike wasn't just along for the ride. He was going to matter.
"Alright, all of you. You'll be in Boise tomorrow, then. Come in careful."
"Will do. See you tomorrow."
We left it there, hanging up on the promise of tomorrow, and I sat with a full, satisfied feeling in my chest. I wasn't alone anymore. We had people now. People I could count on.
The call with Dave was like a stove in the middle of a cold room. I walked back to my fortress in a lifted mood, Wolf at my side.
Same as always, I pulled a cold beer from the fridge. Wolf was staring a hole through me, so I tossed him a big chew.
The can cracked open with a hiss, and I let myself sink into the couch. I turned on the TV. The world on the screen was still a different kind of hell from the one I was living in.
Dave didn't leave it too late.
A few more days of delay and they might have been the ones in that firefight. Fatigue was pulling at me. I reached for the remote, ready to kill the TV — and that was the moment the screen blew over red.
I nearly dropped the beer in my hand. On the screen, a satellite feed showed a dark crimson mushroom cloud.
It was a different kind of disaster — not the wind of despair blowing in from the east, but a new catastrophe rolling in from the west.
Alaska, bolted onto the edge of the North American continent, had just blown. The nightmare scenario the experts had been warning about was no longer a warning.
It was happening.