The Long Fall of Night: The Long Fall of Night Book 1 (11 page)

The sooner we go, the better. Fewer people aware of the danger.

If he hadn’t suffered another retch at that moment, he’d have shrugged off the hand that landed between his shoulder blades and rubbed, but once the touch registered, it felt good, soothing. Ash hunched over until his stomach was completely empty. Despite years of being selective of those he trusted, he found himself thankful for the comfort Elliot offered. The guy was just as fucked up scared as he was, and yet, he wasn’t thinking of himself.

Ash straightened and looked Elliot in the eye, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Elliot’s hand stayed on his arm, his haunted eyes searching Ash’s face. To his surprise, Elliot slid his arms around Ash’s shoulders and hugged him, holding on tight. For someone so lanky, he was remarkably strong, and Ash held on, clenching his t-shirt in fists to stop his hands shaking. Elliot turned his face into Ash’s neck and the stubble of his chin scratched when he spoke.

“Are we gonna be okay?” he asked, sounding like a little kid who’d just learned sometimes monsters were real.

“I don’t know,” Ash answered truthfully, voice muffled in the cotton of Elliot’s shoulder as he searched their surroundings. For what, he wasn’t sure. Answers he knew neither of them had? Reassurance? Hope? All of the above, most likely. He didn’t know what to say, so he closed his eyes and squeezed. “We’ll try to be. What else can we do?”

Elliot let go and backed up, his gaze landing in the middle distance of the field. “My dad said his VP of security would be coming for me. That he’d have a satellite phone. I don’t know when he’ll get here, but he won’t waste time once my dad tells him where to go. My guess is he’ll arrive by tonight. Can we at least wait for him? Maybe he’ll have an idea.”

Ash shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know that we’ll be ready to leave that soon anyway. I want to get more supplies, and I have to wait for dark to do it. So yeah, we can wait for your dad’s man.”

Elliot nodded and shoved his hands in his pockets, looking so lost, Ash felt the visceral need to hold him again, comfort him. He squashed the urge. Getting sappy was
not
going to keep them alive. Still, Elliot’s presence helped, and Ash wasn’t sure what that meant, but he had more than enough on his mind without worrying about that, too.

“Come on, let’s go talk to my sister. We can’t let Riley know what’s going on, or he’ll freak out.” Ash walked to the car, and when Elliot shut the passenger door, he drove the remaining two blocks to her house.

Elliot laid a hand on his forearm before he could turn the car into the driveway. “I’ll keep Riley busy while you talk to Charlotte and Russ. Maybe we can discuss a plan tonight, when Riley is asleep.”

If we can think of one,
Ash thought miserably. “That’d be great. Riley likes you.”

Elliot chuckled. “Glad someone does.” It wasn’t said bitterly or with any resentment, but the words still made Ash’s sensitive stomach drop again.

“I like you, too. I’m just, you know, not great with the making friends thing, remember?”

Elliot smiled. How he could smile with what they’d learned blew Ash away, but he found himself smiling back almost involuntarily.

Riley bounded out of the house and knocked on Elliot’s window, breaking the spell between them. “What’d you get?” His high-pitched voice was muffled through the glass.

Ash popped the trunk and got out. “Nothing fun, kiddo. Help us carry it in, though?”

“Whoa!” Riley exclaimed when he saw all the beef jerky. “Can I have some now? Mom never lets me have this. Too expensive.”

“Yeah, we’ll bust out some jerky and see what we can scrounge up for dinner, okay runt?” Ash said, handing him two of the lighter bags. “Your mom still around?”

“Yeah. Russ is fixing the van again, and she’s dragging out the camping gear to see what we can use. The house smells like mosquito candles.”

Ash made a face. He hated citronella, but at least they wouldn’t be bungling around in the dark. Carrying in the bags of food, Ash hollered for Charlotte.

“I’m right here,” she groused, coming up from the basement with a duffel bag trailing cobwebs and a box in her arms, which he took from her and set on the floor next to the counter-top.

“Listen, Char. Plans have changed.”

“Hey, Riley.” Elliot turned to the boy. “Let’s go build a Lego city and then stomp on it like Godzilla.”

“Have you ever stepped on a Lego, Elliot?” Riley asked, all skepticism. “It kinda hurts.”

“Then we’ll build a spaceship, too, and have aliens invade the city and wreak havoc. I’m in the mood to build something. You can do the demolition.”

Riley beamed and scampered to his room, Elliot on his heels, while Charlotte gazed after them fondly. Elliot stopped at the entrance to the hall and looked over his shoulder, raising an eyebrow as if to ask if they’d be okay without him. Ash nodded and mouthed a thank you, then turned to Charlotte.

“You might want to go get Russ for this.”

Charlotte gave him an odd look but didn’t ask questions, moving to the screen door to the carport to holler for Russ.

All in all, they took it as well as Ash expected. Russ blustered some before calming down to listen, once Charlotte pointed out Ash had absolutely no reason to lie or embellish.

“So I plan to go down to the mall again after dark and load up at the Bass Pro Shop,” he finished. “Then we can pack up the van and get the hell out of here first thing tomorrow. Russ, how long do you think it’ll take you to fix that sensor?” If he had a choice, he’d ditch Russ, but disliking someone wasn’t enough cause to leave them to fend for themselves when the world went to shit.

“Couple more hours. I have to get it done before we lose daylight. It’s pretty easy, since I brought my tools from home.”

Ash checked his watch. Sunset was at least three hours away. “Good, so we’ll have time to load up while we wait for Elliot’s dad’s friend to get here and—”

“Who says we’re going anywhere, Ash?” Charlotte demanded, holding up a hand to stop him. “If Elliot’s dad, this bigwig billionaire, trusts the military with his son, why shouldn’t we listen and do what the man says? I mean, wouldn’t Uncle Marvin tell us that, too? Trust the troops?”

Ash scoffed at her derisively. “Guess you haven’t been listening the last few years since Marvin has been saying trust no one but family. We’re going to him, Charlotte. It’s dangerous for a few days, but once we get there, we’ll be far safer than anywhere we could be on this side of the Rockies.”

“It’s the getting there that worries me, Asher,” she pointed out fiercely, keeping her volume low with a wary glance toward the hall. “If people are going to go as crazy as you say, then traveling would be the stupidest thing we can do. I personally would want a few soldiers standing between us and any sort of rioting hordes.”

Ash put his head on the table, so much frustration in his chest, he had to breathe through it. When he looked up, he put on his best pleading face. “Charlotte, our parents taught us both to survive nearly anything, did they not? Mom with cooking and how to look after our checkbooks, and Dad with a gun and fishing line and bow and arrow. We
know
how to do this, and frankly, this is everything Dad trained us for.”

“No,” she argued, glancing at Russ for backup. He stared between them, listening to both sides. “This is way more than Dad ever said he was doing. He showed us a few things about hunting and self-protection. That wasn’t
training,
and if you think you’re as good as the marines or whoever is going to be moving in to stop all this supposed chaos you’re predicting, you’re deluded. I’m
not
dragging my
ten-year-old
out in some sort of wilderness apocalypse wet dream you and Marvin have convinced yourselves will happen here!”

“Charlotte—”

“No. This is stupid, and you’re not a little boy playing soldier anymore. I will not risk my son’s life on some grand adventure because you want to follow in Dad’s footsteps, complete with early death.” She scuffed her chair back and stalked from the kitchen, slamming her bedroom door a few seconds later.

“Give her a day or two,” Russ said, trying to be helpful. “She may be stubborn as hell, but she’ll come around if things start to get bad around here.”

Ash eyed the man. “It’ll be too late by then. Just please get the van fixed as quick as you can?” He pushed up from the table, shoulders hunched as he wandered off to join Elliot and Riley. Maybe he’d come up with a better way to convince her. Maybe when Elliot’s friend got here, they could make some calls, and she could hear firsthand how bad it was going to get. It wasn’t an easy situation to comprehend, because it was just so
unheard
of, and maybe her assurance they were safe where they were wouldn’t need to be challenged so much as upstaged by the idea that going would be safer.

Right. If Elliot’s dad wants his son to stay put, he’s not going to convince Charlotte to go with me. Why would he?

“Got room for one more?” he asked, crouching on the floor in Riley’s room over the land of skyscrapers Riley was building.

Elliot looked up from his spacecraft construction, sympathetic the moment he saw Ash’s expression. Again he asked with a raised brow how Ash was, but Ash could only give a negligible shake of his head. The best he could do was lose himself in a few hours of play-time and hope some development would help him change Charlotte’s mind.

“
W
hat are you doing
?” Elliot asked, coming into the kitchen and pulling out a chair. Ash sat by the light of a battery-operated camping lantern, hunched over his cellphone with a felt tip pen and little pad of paper, a cookie tin full of electronics beside him. He didn’t look up.

“Nothing,” he muttered, scribbling a series of numbers in a specific order from what looked like a notes app in his phone.

Elliot watched for a moment, not knowing how to get Ash to open up to him. He’d thought they might have been getting somewhere, with the increase in physical touches between them and Ash’s admission in the car that afternoon about liking him, but he should have guessed seeing Ash lose his lunch and showing he was human would bring the asshole armor swinging back with a vengeance at some point. He tried another tack.

“Riley’s asleep. He kept asking me if we were going to have more mini hot dogs tomorrow. I guess he liked the Vienna sausages.” Frankly, Elliot was surprised the kid had crashed so early, but he supposed all their morning running around could have tired the boy out. It was only 8:30 p.m., an hour or so past sunset.

Ash grunted, capped the pen with the lid between his teeth, then pulled the cookie tin closer. Elliot craned his neck to look.

“Is that a Faraday cage?” he asked, leaning forward on his elbows. The tin was lined completely with cardboard, the telltale aluminum tape sticking out like a tongue from where Ash pulled it away to pry off the lid. The electronics it carried had been covered in several layers of foil and placed in individual plastic baggies. The phone, and what looked like a handheld GPS unit, had been unwrapped. The rest looked like a bunch of toaster pastries in size and shape. There was also a roll of cash, and a picture of a man kissing the cheek of a blushing girl of about nine while a little boy with blond hair and a huge smile clung monkey-like to his back. There was no mistaking Charlotte’s freckled nose, though the joyous face of the boy who could only be Ash was foreign.

“Yeah,” Ash confirmed. Faraday cages were designed to keep electronics safe in the event of a power surge of some kind, usually lightning striking a car, whose roll cage acted as a conductor to keep the electrical current from breaching the interior. It channeled the electricity around the outside skin of the cage, thus keeping the contents within—electronics and people alike—safe. This was usually why cars struck by lightning weren’t totally destroyed, not rubber tires, as most people thought.

Elliot knew it’d be pushing it to go pawing through the box to see what sorts of electronics Ash had saved, but judging by the shape of some of the items with stubby protuberances, he guessed there were hand-held two-way radios with short, fat antennas. The cookie tin wasn’t enormous, but it was a good twelve by twelve. Elliot frowned. GPS, radios, Ash’s phone….

“Wait a second.” His eyes went wide, and he sat back, stunned. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you? More than just your Uncle Marvin warning you ‘something’ could happen.” He made air quotes as he said it. “You knew what kind of something to watch for, didn’t you?”

Ash met his gaze, his blue eyes haunted. “I knew a little over twelve hours in advance. I got an encrypted email from my uncle that he’d seen some chatter on the deep web about the possibility of some kind of cyber attack on our infrastructure using EMP technology. He had no proof, but he told me specific devices to save, gave me this list of coordinates.” Ash held up the small notepad. “All I know is this is the path he wants us to take to get to him. I didn’t have a lot of time to ask questions.”

“Deep web?”

Ash sat back and crossed his arms. “The Internet as we know it is not the entire Internet. I don’t know much, but the deep web includes sites not indexed by search engines. Think of it like Google being an ocean-going fishing trawler dragging a net in its wake. That net may seem huge, but it only goes down several hundred feet. It’ll catch some fish, maybe a lot of fish. Enough that the fishermen are satisfied with the haul and don’t need to go any deeper. But there’s more ocean, far more, that the Google net can’t reach. What’s excluded from a search engine’s index is considered the deep web. Some of it is normal stuff, like office intranets, and some of it’s not. Some of it is peer-to-peer sharing, networking that can’t be traced by IP address, or whatever. I don’t know the technical way it works. It’s sort of a back-alley electronic world. Not everyone who uses it is a shady character, but there are plenty of places to hide for those who are. Uncle Marvin knows better than I do. He’s got some conspiracy friends he keeps in touch with, I guess. He honestly doesn’t really talk a lot about where his information comes from. I just know he’s been right often enough, when he tells me to watch out for something, I do what he says.”