But there was no time for further contemplation as George led her out onto the walkway and the door closed behind her. The click seemed unnaturally loud to Lora’s ears as she followed her father to Corridor 4, where they took a left. From that point, everything went just as he said it would. He opened the door marked “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY” and led her across a long catwalk. Greenish water swirled below as huge blades kept it moving, just part of the complicated machinery that made the habitat possible.
Having reached the central platform, they boarded a service elevator, which carried them up to the very top of the structure, where a uniformed protector was waiting for them—one of the same men Lora had spoken with the night before! Except now he was armed with an assault rifle and a pistol. Lora’s heart nearly stopped, and some of her fear must have been visible on her face, because the protector smiled. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m on your side.”
George chuckled. “He sure is. Officer Fry has been extremely helpful. In fact, it’s safe to say we wouldn’t be able to carry out our mission without him.”
Another lift arrived and five people got off. Lora recognized three of them as friends of her father’s, meaning individuals who came to visit once in a while. It wasn’t long before even more leavers arrived—sixteen in all, counting the Larsys. That was when Lora realized something important, to her at least, and that was the fact that there weren’t any other teenagers in the group. She was all alone. That shouldn’t bother you, she told herself, because you were alone at school too. But somehow it did.
There was a lot of excited chatter, which stopped when George spoke. “Keep it down, everybody—we’ll have plenty of time to talk later on. Larry? Lead the way.”
Officer Fry opened a door, and one of the leavers held it as the rest of them trooped through and stepped onto a circular road. After following it past a number of alcoves and bays, the group arrived at the point where the path passed between opposing sets of doors.
The one on the left was labeled “HATCH 5,” and a sign on the one directly across from it said “VEHICLE STORAGE.” Fry slipped a key card into a slot next to the vehicle storage bay. Two vehicles were revealed as a corrugated door rumbled up and out of sight They were orange, boxy, and equipped with four sets of tracks each—two in front and two in back. “They’re Sno-Cats,” George explained. “The keepers haven’t allowed anyone to do anything more than maintain them for the past twenty-five years. Our gear is aboard and they’re ready to go.”
It soon became apparent that two of the leavers knew how to drive the machines, because they were quick to open doors, climb aboard, and start the engines. They pulled out onto the circular road, where they paused to let the rest of the group board. Suddenly, a phalanx of protectors surged into sight with weapons at the ready. One of them shouted, “Stop!” and fired a warning shot. There was a clang as the bullet hit metal and ricocheted away.
And there, at the very front of the group, was council member Hal Mackey, Matt’s father. That was when Lora knew the horrible truth. The entire group had been betrayed. And it was her fault.
Chapter Two
Except for the yellow bruise off to the west, the rest of the sky was gray. And according to the tiny gauge clipped to his ragged parka, the temperature was thirty-eight degrees, a warm spring day.
Tre was lying on his stomach under an old tarp. It was a standard part of his kit and could be used as a shelter or, in this case, a hide. And hiding was an important skill in a world ruled by predators. Tre had spent the last day and a half watching the town of Jackson, Wyoming, through a pair of highly prized Nikon binoculars. They were small and light and had been found lying next to a skeleton. Two skeletons, actually, an adult and a child, spooned together in the stained remains of a cheap sleeping bag. Had they been sick? Or died of starvation? Either was possible in post apocalyptic America.
Tre pushed the memory aside in order to scan the town below. He had a good vantage point about halfway up Snow King Mountain, just off what had been the path of a chair lift. Some of the cables were down now, as was one of the towers, and trees were repopulating the former ski runs.
The downtown area was laid out in a grid pattern that made it easy to draw on the notebook near his right hand. Because while Tre had a much-creased map of Wyoming, he didn’t have a map of Jackson.
It looked as though half the town had been ravaged by fire at some point, and it was safe to assume that it had been looted as well, but there were very few tracks in the snow-covered streets. Tre figured that three, maybe four people lived in Jackson now, each of whom was probably aware of the others. Did they get along? Or were they trying to kill one another? There was no way to tell. But Tre hadn’t seen any signs that gangs roamed the ruins below, and that was important, because while he could handle one or two assailants if necessary, a group could take him down. That’s why more than a day had been spent watching the town from afar.
Satisfied that he knew as much about Jackson as he was likely to learn from the mountainside, Tre put the binoculars away and began to make the necessary preparations. The plan was to go down, find a hidey-hole, and fort up. Then he’d get up early and go looking for tech, books, and food, in that order—not because he didn’t need food but because he was very unlikely to find any in a town that had been picked over by thousands of people for a period of fifty years.
But tech? Lots of people lacked the knowledge required to use or repair it. And books, well, that was where Tre’s knowledge of technology had been acquired.
So Tre folded the tarp into thirds and rolled it into a tight tube, which he attached to the bottom of his aluminum pack frame just above the precious mummy bag. The Whittaker Marmot sack was filthy, and home to a rank smell, but it could keep Tre warm down to forty below, a very important asset found in a compartment under the floor of a wrecked van. It was why Tre always looked inside vehicles—even if there was every reason to believe that countless other people had already done so. All it took was one Marmot bag to make hundreds of such investigations worthwhile.
Tre strapped the aluminum snowshoes onto his boots, struggled to stand, and bent to retrieve his pack. It felt lighter than it had when he set out from home. But if luck was with him, it would soon be heavy again.
The last step was to open his Savage model 311-A double-barreled shotgun and check to make sure that it was loaded. The weapon was, like everything else, a compromise. Being a .410, it didn’t pack the punch that a twelve-gauge would. On the other hand, the ammo was lighter, and Tre could fire the sawed off weapon one-handed and was likely to hit something if he did. Then he could fire again or run, the second option being the one he favored most.
There was a comforting click as he closed the gun and returned it to the holster strapped to his right thigh. That left Tre’s hands free to use the hand-carved trekker poles. They helped Tre maintain his footing as he made his way down through a scattering of evergreens toward the flatland below. The widely spaced trees weren’t much; however, some cover was better than none.
There were tracks, but not many, since it was hard for animals to find enough food. Tre saw some elk scat, what might have been raccoon prints, and the kind of scratch marks that birds make, but nothing human. And that was the main concern as Tre arrived at the tree line, where he paused to look around. There were no pillars of smoke to be seen, which was a good thing. It was important to cross the open area as quickly as possible.