A New Day in America (24 page)

Nos had picked one of many overseas stories that might sound like plausible reasons to quit the military. None of it is true.

Steve nods and turns to the orange firelight. Both have lived the decades-long nightmare of men in turbans, robes, and body armor with automatics and RPGs and no fear of death bent on their lives—then to come home to the barren nightmare of the Black Sun. First Fallujah and then Brooklyn.

“There were three Arab kids once,” Steve began. “All three had pistols. They giggled and pointed them at each other’s heads. It was me and another Ranger. Craig Evans was his name. He gunned down one of the kids with five shots. The kids dropped and ran. Guns weren’t even loaded.”

Clair comes over to Steve and holds his hand.

“Then I lost this,” Steve says and rolls up his pant-leg and reveals a metal exoskeleton wearing a sock and shoved into his sneaker. “Twenty some-odd tours in major conflict areas. Last tour did me in.”

Clair puts an old-fashioned mercury thermometer under Naomi’s tongue, wiping her forehead as she sweats. She takes it out and reads.

“
Christ
,” she says. “A hundred and three.”

***

They offer Nos a night in the spare bed. He opts to sleep on the floor. Clair takes Naomi to their bedroom and Steve follows, only to hop back out one-legged in sweats and a tank top with a pillow under his arm.

He lays on the couch above Nos. He has a Rangers tattoo on his forearm.

“The girls kicked me out,” he tells Nos. “Children make Clair very emotional, bless her. Had a miscarriage about five years ago. Another three years ago. Another two. Doctors don’t know why. Then the disease…”

Nos thinks of Yvette’s bad dreams. He thinks of Leila and wishes he could protect her now. He thinks of Lawlor and the shrapnel in the vial of Naomi’s necklace.
His
necklace.

As far as New York and the Army were concerned, Nos had died in those Afghan mountains.
A month with no word. A month I was in those hills, lost in that opium dream. Sometimes it felt like a week. Sometimes a year
.

Maybe it felt like a year to Yvette, too. It had been a good year that their marriage felt like anything but. She might have been done with him long before she’d even thought that he’d died.
She must have thought I was dead
. Even if the Navy brass had told her to hold out hope, that they hadn’t found a body, she wouldn’t have believed them. She said she didn’t. If he’d been taken hostage, the U.S. would’ve known. No one truly believed that anyone but a goat-herder could survive those mountains.
Men who looked and acted like me came through her doors every day. Maybe she didn’t think I was dead. Maybe she knew I chose the End of the World over her. I’d given up, so she gave up
.

Once Nos did get home, it was a shock. Then it was sweet. They made passionate love that first week, like when they’d first met. That made him regret staying away so long.
That was what she’d been waiting for. That was home
.

The fire dims to a bed of ashen coal as Steve drifts off. Nos lays awake watching the ceiling fan hum around and around like chopper blades in slow motion. He doesn’t want to fall asleep. If he sleeps he will dream.

When the footsteps come from outside they are only a whisper. Nos is watching the window by the shore when he sees shadows within the shadows.

A team of four or six. Nos wonders if Lawlor is with them.
It’d be tough to take him out like this, having to protect three civilians. Still, better to get him over with
.

Nos isn’t sure how the guard found him. Lawlor must have linked back up with his command somewhere, turned right around and launched another mission.
I wonder what’s my tier? My target name?

Nos considers how he’d take the house. Suppressed sidearms and night vision goggles. Thermal scopes on suppressed snipers for the boys outside. They would be able to see Nos in a white silhouette if he so much as passed by a window.

Nos crouches with his back to the wall along the door. He hears the soldiers of the Revelation Guard shuffle to the entrance. He has been on the other side of this routine so many times, he knows exactly where the guards are stacked up without having to see. Nos waits with his knife in his hand and his Sig holstered.
Would rather shoot them now
. But Nos only hears two.
Better do them stealthy. Don’t let the others hear
.

A hiss of aerosol seeps into the series of locks, and one by one the bolts are frozen through and broken cleanly apart. The door eases open. As they step inside, Nos springs and backhands his knife into the neck on his right and flies at an angle to his partner. A rifle point swings after him, but Nos gets just behind it and clamps on the guard’s back. One arm cranks under his throat as his other hand forces the guard’s helmet toward his chest. Nos hooks his legs inside, buckling him to the floor. Nos rolls to his back. The guard is tough, but Nos has it cinched.
Matter of time
.

The guard goes limp as a doll. Nos plunges his knife above the man’s ribcage at an angle to his heart. Nos takes his vest, his night vision goggles, and his suppressed firearms—an M4 assault rifle with a thermal scope and a silenced Glock 19.
Crazy high tech. Expensive
.

He finds a small explosive doughnut charge in the Omnicorp interceptor vest, paired with a remote trigger. Likely they would have hooked the explosive to the door if the molecular freeze didn’t work. Nos covers his eyes in the night vision goggles and the room goes pale and burns with electric green silhouettes.

Steve sleeps soundly on the couch. No sound or movement yet from upstairs. Clair and Naomi are out cold in the bedroom.

Nos sees Steve’s leg by the bed and picks it up. He examines it—a steel exoskeleton mimicking the structure and musculature of a human leg.

He brings the artificial leg out to Steve along with his rifle and wakes him.

“We’re under attack,” he says and Steve’s groggy eyes pop awake.

The Ranger snaps his leg into place and takes his rifle in ready fire position.

“Probably two on the second floor. Cover the stairs,” says Nos.

“
The fuck is this about?”
he hisses.

“Right now, it’s about the two upstairs.”

Steve angrily nods.

He goes to the front door and drags one of the bodies toward the south lakeside window and props the corpse to a crouch, staying out of sight. Cupping the back of the neck, he holds the head out into the open window. Sniper fire punches through the man’s forehead and out the back, just missing Nos’ fingers. He sees the hole in the back wall and judges the sniper is firing from twelve-thirty. He pulls the man at a duck below the sill and removes the night vision goggles, readying the thermal scope of the M4. He raises the punctured head once more and bullets blow through in perfect repetition of the previous shots. Nos presses the chin against the sill and aims the thermal scope past the lifeless shoulder. He finds the white silhouette of his target and fires. The action is so smooth there is no kickback. Bullets drive through the sniper’s crouched body.

Steve’s gun erupts in thunderous blasts at the second floor. Nos takes a flash bang from the interceptor vest as bullets crack past Steve and rip through the downstairs wall. They lock eyes. Steve nods. Nos hurls the flash bang up the stairs and it pops with a deafening ring. Nos and Steve rush the stairs to the explosion of pure white and open fire on the blinded and staggering soldiers. They crank out bullets until the men are twitching bodies on the floor.

Nos examines each one. Body armor, advanced gear. No flaming chalice. He pulls their helmets off.
Not Lawlor
.

Steve is dumbstruck.

“What happened?”

Nos runs to the north window and aims the thermal scope down the road and past the trees. Nothing. The streets are desolate and quiet. Except for the angry crickets.

Clair roars in the room.

“What is going on?”

“Just who the hell are you?” follows Steve.

Clair holds Naomi in her arms, in a cold sweat. She is the calmest of the three.

“We—I’ve put you at risk.”

“Us at risk?” Clair yells, tears streaming. “And her? Your girl? Look at what you’ve already done to her!”

Steve puts his arm around Clair to calm her.

“I’ve got blood on my hands—I’ve killed for you! Now who the fuck are you?” he demands.

“Nostradamus Greene. Former Delta Force. They tried to take my daughter for her rash. I fought back. We’ve been on the run ever since. Believe me that I am sorry, and I thank you deeply for your help. We have to
go
, now.”

“We? You’re taking her into this? They’re hunting
you
,” says Clair, clutching Naomi to her chest. “You drag your little girl with you? You’ll be killed! She’ll be killed!”

“I have no choice,” says Nos.

“But you do,” says Clair, with a wistful smile. “I can take care of her.”

She makes sense. The Revelation is
hunting
him at this point. He has killed too many of them.
Lawlor won’t let go either. They won’t ever stop
.

“She would be safest here,” says Clair, quiet now. “We could give her a real home.”

A place to die. And strangers to die with
.

Steve places a reassuring hand on Nos’ shoulder. “Really, think about it, bud. Though there isn’t much time.”

The couple stands in earnest. Their nest is so empty that even with dead soldiers on their floor, they look to fill it.
These are good people
. Clair would make a lovely mother. Her protectiveness begins to remind Nos of Yvette, her anger an expression of Yvette’s old passions. Nos lives by the gun. He will die by the gun.
Why should Naomi suffer the same?

“It’s been so hard, we’ve tried for so long,” says Clair.

Nos nods. Clair carries Naomi inside the bedroom and comes back out with a handful of photos.

“Our first try was a girl,” she says. “She was stillborn.” She glances at her pictures, then looks away and hands them to Nos.

They are of a dead baby girl dressed in the outfits they had picked out for her when they had believed they were bringing new life into the world.
Now the End of the World. What else could they want?

“Please,” says Clair. “She’s too precious. Don’t take her, please. She’s too precious. You’ll kill her.”

Nos breathes in deep and his pulse rate skyrockets. He closes his eyes but still sees the vision of the dead baby girl.

“There is no question in my mind that you would make a great mother, Clair,” says Nos.

She sniffs in her tears.

“But Naomi and I are two halves of a whole. I hope you can understand.” Nos unloads a stack of bills on their table. “I know this is only a gesture, but I hope it helps.” He reaches his arm to his daughter. “Come, Nay, we must go now.”

Something bangs against his head. He hears a
pop
. A flash of white and then total black. Nos falls to the ground.

Steve
.

Steve cocks his gun. Nos’ head throbs from where Steve pistol-whipped him. Nos looks up from the floor and sees the barrel pointed down at him.

“I can’t let you go,” he says, his voice different: cold, commanding.

Clair backs away with Naomi. Nos closes his eyes.
Trust no one
. Yvette was saying it all along.
Trust no one
. Abe made him sloppy.

Nos presses the trigger of the small remote device in the palm of his hand. An explosion in Steve’s artificial leg blows him off his feet. The room rings. Steve and his bloody stump slam against the wall and drop.

Nos had clipped the doughnut charge to Steve’s artificial leg before he’d handed it off. The explosive was meant for the door, but it blew Steve in half just as well.

Their team had mobilized too quick for Lawlor to report in and make another move. Lawlor wasn’t among the dead.
Yeah, Clair had me going for a moment. Bought in. But not sold
.

Nos quickly draws and fires twice into Steve’s heart.

“N-no—no no no,” Clair repeats in hysteria. “No no no!”

Blood pools on the hardwood. Nos walks beside Steve and kicks his rifle away from him. A soft groan escapes his dying lips.

“I meant everything I said,” he struggles to speak through the agony of the oncoming. “I betrayed you, yes—but my condition was that the girl stay here with us and they leave my wife be. You must believe me. Don’t let my wife suffer alone. I beg you. Leave the girl…”

“They never would have let you keep her,” says Nos. He shoots Steve one last time through his forehead.

Clair runs with Naomi into the bedroom. Nos follows.

“Stay back! Stay away! Animal! Leave now! Leave her here, you fucking monster!”

Nos stands in the doorway. “Put her down, Clair. Please. Put her down now.”

“Never, you savage! She can’t go with you. She has to stay here with me. She wants to.”

“Just put her down. We have to go now.”

Clair looks into Naomi’s wide-eyed sickly face and kisses her forehead. “You want to stay with me, sweetheart?”

Naomi’s eyes soften, and her chin touches her chest. She turns to Nos.

“Pa,” she says and begins to cry.

“Yes, Nay we have to go.”

Clair reluctantly lowers the girl, clutching onto her. As soon as Naomi’s feet hit the floor, they scurry to her father’s arms. They hold each other tight. He carries her through the kitchen, and she looks back over Nos’ shoulder as Clair follows in tears. She is unable to look at her husband, only at the little girl’s blackberry eyes hovering over her father’s shoulder.

Nos hoofs it down to the river as Clair watches them outlined by the kitchen light in the doorway. Naomi keeps looking back as though she can still feel her motherly touch.

Nos boards an abandoned Revelation boat, starts the motor, and steers out into the lake. One last gunshot bangs a thunderclap into the night.

The ravaged home is but a dot of light and chimney smoke on the hill behind. Nos drives on to the narrow, dark rapids ahead. Naomi stands starboard side with her hands on the hull of the boat, gazing back at Clair’s invisible ghost.