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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

13. Candace

She added to her virtual resume the little-known skill pretending to enjoy your own imprisonment. Her list of skills was getting pretty long and esoteric. She wasn’t sure what kind of job they would help her get assuming she wasn’t executed in the next eight and a half hours.

None of the soldiers seemed to be paying any particular attention to them, but they were careful anyway, keeping up a stream of chatter and basically pretending to get drunk. It made sense, she thought; they’d tried a few gambits and seen one of their own killed and the other two threatened. It made sense that they would simply drown their sorrows. It served two purposes: It made everyone think they’d given up, and it gave them a reason to hang around the bar area and shift position a lot.

Mike made his way around the bar in stages, always engaged in conversation.

That was the hardest part, she thought. The chatter. Behaving like you were talking to people and hanging out was exhausting when it was all for show, when all you wanted to do was watch the guards and scream out of frustration and fear.

Mike just dropped behind the bar. One moment he was there, the next he was on the floor and hidden from the rest of the room. None of them reacted in any way. None of the soldiers took any notice. And she kept pretending to have a conversation with Jack and Glen, or she was having a conversation but it made no sense, it was just the three of them saying things to each other and nodding. She couldn’t pull her thoughts into line long enough to make any sense as Mike crawled to the trap, pulled it up, and slipped down, pulling the trap shut behind him.

They’d allowed about three minutes for Mike to make his way to the other trap in the back room, based on the darkness, the difficulty of moving in such a confined space, and an effort to not make any unnecessary noise. Longer, if he got turned around. But from what she’d seen of him, she doubted that was likely. After that, she had no idea what would happen.

“Excuse me?”

Candace felt herself tighten up, her throat closing up as a surge of panic went through her.

“Young lady?”

You’ll be okay. She could picture her father nodding encouragingly, telling her to make it work, she was smart, like her mother. She forced herself to turn. Dr. Raslowski scowled at her from his table, his glasses turned into opaque discs of white light by the collection of monitors facing him. He waved impatiently.

“Yes you, dear God save me from the hicks of the world. Come here.”

Her mind raced. Up to this point, Raslowski had acted as if the entire population of the bar didn’t exist, and she realized she preferred to be a figment of someone’s imagination. That terrible eyeless face pointed in her direction was much, much worse. She kept hearing him spit doesn’t matter after Simms had been shot.

Doesn’t matter.

She tried to mirror his scowl and did the only thing she could think to try: She stalled. “What do you want?”

He cocked his head as if examining an interesting-looking bug. “I want you to come here.”

She looked at Eastman and McCoy, but they both had no suggestions for her. So she took a deep breath and turned and walked over to where the Physicist sat, staring at her. As she approached he leaned back and crossed his arms.

“Please do take your time. As you might imagine we came here and are holding you all under guard for no reason of any importance whatsoever, so there is no urgency to any of this.”

She stopped a few inches away from him. His eyes roamed over her and she felt the familiar, creepy vibe of a man studying her body and making a record of it for later use. “What?”

She was conscious of Mike, worming his way under the bar, in the dark, about to creep up from below and try to take out an armed guard, free Jim Haggen, and deliver weapons to Jack McCoy.

“Sit down,” Raslowski said, turning and placing a small metal box on the table. “I’m going to need some blood.”

“What?”

Raslowski sighed as he pulled a pair of plastic gloves from the box and began tugging them on. “Solely to check identities. Jesus, you people,” he muttered. “King!”

King stepped out of a knot of four soldiers who’d congregated around the front door. “Sir?”

Candace eyed her. She was cute, sort of, short with dark, curly hair. She moved with a fighter’s posture, Candace thought, shoulders out and head lowered, like she was always prepared to scrap. Her face was round and blandly pretty, set in a mask of near-total disinterest.

“Round them up,” Raslowski said. “I need to take some blood samples.”

Candace stood frozen, mind racing. Mike! He was under the floorboards, or in the back about to jump Warner. If they discovered him missing, it would go badly for all of them.

King snapped off a salute, then hesitated, a scowl flashing across her face. She doesn’t like him, or taking orders from him, Candace thought. He wasn’t military. He was a scientist, and they’d probably been ordered to take his commands. But how long does that discipline last? Candace ran her eyes over King and noted the black armbands they all wore. If they were right and something bad had happened and might happen again, and these soldiers were assigned to guard them—

Candace gasped a little as it hit her. The black armbands—these soldiers had been chosen, or volunteered, to die. Or at least to take that risk—this was a suicide mission, in some sense. They were dead anyway.

King’s face smoothed out and she snapped off another impressive salute. “Sir!” Raslowski didn’t even notice; he was busy pulling syringes and tubing from the box, along with a small beige device that had a tiny screen on one end. It looked like an advanced pencil sharpener.

Candace thought furiously, holding herself still. If she tried to signal Jack and Glen, she might be observed, it might give everything away. If she did nothing, in a few moments they were going to discover something was up.

I could cause a disruption—I could jump King and knock her down, start a fight, she thought.

She saw Mr. Simms in her mind, dead, staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. That seemed like a dangerous choice, to say the least.

I could try to signal Mike. Make a noise.

But I don’t know what would make it through the floorboards, and I don’t know what would make sense to him but wouldn’t give everything away.

King had turned away. Candace knew she had a second to make a decision, to do something, anything.

She thought,

Jesus Christ, just do it!

She closed her eyes and let herself drop to the floor.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

12. Mike

McCoy laughed. “Are you fucking kidding?”

Mike shook his head. The whiskey had been a mistake; he’d been shaky and at first the alcohol had felt good, calming him down. But now he felt fuzzy, and he wanted to be sharp. “We don’t have a choice. Listen—it’s not certain, but there is a chance that this ends with executions, right? No matter how remote, if there’s a chance of that, we have to defend ourselves. Even if it’s just 1%.”

McCoy leaned back, taking another hit from the bottle. Mike wanted to say something, to suggest he stay sober, but hesitated: He didn’t know these people. “Maybe,” McCoy said. “You got a point.”

“Damn right he has a point,” Eastman said fiercely, surprising Mike. He’d taken Eastman to be an academic, a milquetoast. He didn’t expect him to see reality so quickly, or be so supportive. It remained to be seen if the retired teacher was going to be able to back it up with action, but Mike was encouraged. He had a feeling he was going to need everyone at their best.

He took a deep breath, because that led him to his next thought. He looked from McCoy to Eastman to Candace. “We need to get Haggen out of the back.”

“What?” McCoy said, grinning. “You think that won’t be noticed?”

“Ah, let him stew back there,” Eastman said. “Jimmy Haggen’s all right, but he’s a troublemaker. Always complaining, always telling us how we’re supposed to be living. But he just wants to hide in the woods, to be left alone. Believe me, I tried to organize him a bunch of times. He’s no goddamn use to anyone.”

Mike shook his head. He was impressed with Haggen. The man was a little crazy, but he’d fought well, and he’d taken cues and picked up on things quickly. Mike had his doubts about McCoy and Eastman, but he thought he could rely on Candace—and Haggen, so he wanted him. “Haggen’s reliable. I think maybe he just hasn’t had the chance to show you what he’s got yet. Let’s think about how we could break him out without setting off any alarms.”

McCoy made a face. Eastman rolled his eyes.

Candace looked right at him. “They’ve got him in the back? With the kegs?”

Mike nodded. He fought off a smile; he liked this woman. She was smart, she was up for anything, and she was capable. He was impressed with how she’d handled herself getting online—there’d been no hesitation when he and Haggen had set to it. She hadn’t been shocked or tentative, she’d gone to work.

“We can get back there through the crawlspace. There’s a trap door behind the bar.”

“Dumb idea,” McCoy said. “They got Jim under guard, right?”

Mike thought back. Then he leaned up out of his seat and looked around, checking all the soldiers. “Yeah. One of the soldiers—Warner. Dark skin, bad attitude. He’s not here, so I think he’s still guarding Haggen.”

McCoy shrugged. “There you go. Fucking suicide to even try.”

Mike nodded. This was confirming what he thought: Haggen was reliable. McCoy and Eastman weren’t. That made it even more vital to get Haggen loose.

“Even if you got him free,” Eastman said, “it would just cause trouble. There’d be a reaction.”

“Not if we leave Warner back there,” Candace said. “Tied up, gagged. They’ll assume he’s still guarding Jimmy.”

Mike shook his head. “No, this is a military unit. There will be scheduled check-ins, relief.”

Candace shrugged. “We’d have a window, then. We’d have some time. First we need to know the schedule, right? They have to walk right past us here to get back there. We watch, we make a note. We know how long we’d have. Then we time it: We bring him out, we know exactly how long we have until he’s noticed.”

“And do what?” Eastman asked. “He’s not Superman, guys. Okay, Mr. Malloy says Jimmy’s useful, reliable, whatever. And okay—we have a deficit in terms of manpower, we could use a warm body. But say we have an hour—say we could get Jim loose and we’d have an hour until they noticed? We need to have a plan in place before we spring him. We need to know exactly what we plan to do, or it won’t mean anything.”

Mike nodded. “You’re right.”

“So let’s make a plan,” Candace said. She looked at Mike. “You said take control—how do we do that?”

Mike looked at her, then at McCoy, Eastman, and back to her. “We take the guns.”

McCoy laughed out loud. When he spoke his words had the slightest slur to them. “Sure! Of course, it’s easy. First we cut Jimmy loose but make sure they don’t notice, because having Jimmy Haggen on our side makes all the damn difference. Then the five of us take on, what, a dozen armed, trained soldiers with no weapons?”

Mike shook his head, feeling his heart rate climbing. He knew this was reluctance dressed up as objection—McCoy just wanted to get drunk and hope for the best, and any suggestion that they take action, take risks he was going to meet with all the reasons it was a bad idea. And the worst of it was, Mike knew it was a bad idea, for exactly the reasons McCoy had just outlined. But he couldn’t do nothing. He’d spent too much of his life doing nothing, and now he’d spent a year or more doing nothing in a different way, doing nothing by trying to do everything all at once. “Don’t play that—”

Candace interrupted. “We have weapons,” she said.

They all turned to look at her. She blushed, and Mike thought it made her look lovely.

“Jack, your hunting gear is in the back, too,” she said, looking from face to face.

McCoy frowned. “It’s a crossbow, kid.”

She nodded. “And a survival knife,” she said. “And the bow’s an auto-cocker, and you’ve taken down some huge Moose with that thing.”

“All right,” McCoy said looking around to make sure none of the soldiers were close enough to hear them. “But it’s still just one weapon.”

Mike was thinking quickly. “An auto cocker means you can reload in what, a few seconds? Without having to plant the thing for the pull. If we can get you into the right position, you could do some real damage.”

McCoy stared at him. “Some damage? You’re talking about killing people.”

Mike shook his head. “You know how to shoot. You can go for injury instead of killshots.”

“And when they start returning fire? When Hammond gives the order to just kill us all? Burn the place down?”

“And what, you want to just sit here and hope for the best?” Mike demanded, feeling his pulse pound. “Look, we have the element of surprise. I go down the trap, get the drop on the guard back there, and if nothing else we suddenly have an advantage they’re unaware of. It’s better than sitting here drinking liquor and waiting for someone else to decide if I’m going to live or die.”

Eastman was looking down at his hands. “I tend to agree, Jack.”

“Me too,” Candace said. “Better to do something than nothing.”

McCoy took another slug from the bottle, eyes on the soldiers around them. “All right. Why you?”

Mike shrugged. “It’s my idea, first of all. Wouldn’t be right to make someone else take the risk. And I know how to fight. No offense, but you and Mr. Eastman here are a little older and out of shape.”

Glen smiled. “And that’s being kind,” he said.

“I don’t suppose once I’m in the crawlspace there’s a way outside?”

Candace shook her head. “It’s literally a crawlspace, maybe three feet high. Its dirty and filled with spiderwebs and pipes and electrical. It’s dark—but it’s a clean shot straight back to the other trap, which will bring you up behind the freezer in the back. Between that and the shelves and kegs you have a good chance of getting up and out without being seen by the guard.”

Mike nodded. “All right. Jack, you stay behind the bar. Stop drinking. We need you as sober as possible. I’ll make my way back there and take care of Jimmy, and take the guard’s sidearm. Then I’ll head back, and switch places with you—you head back there through the crawlspace. The hallway entrance is your best position—no one behind you except Hammond, you’ll have visual command of the whole bar. Glen, Candace, when Jack heads back you get behind the bar—casual, move slowly, like you’re making yourselves a drink—so you’ll have cover.”

“What if Hammond comes at me?”

“Jimmy will have your back,” Mike said. “And I’ll be up here with the sidearm. They look like Beretta M9A3s, which means a minimum ten-round magazine, but maybe fifteen rounds. Either way I’m familiar with the basic M9 design and I think I can be pretty accurate with it.”

Candace smiled slightly. “Let me guess: You spent a few months paying someone to teach you about guns.”

Mike nodded, returning her ghostly smile. “I’m no expert, but I’m an okay shot.”

She looked around. “Okay. Me and Glen will be on distraction duty. Anyone looks like they plan on heading back there, we’ll do our best to stop them. We ready?”

They all looked at each other. McCoy picked up the cap of his bottle and deliberately screwed it back into place. “Okay,” he said. “Ready.”

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

10. Mike

He had to admit he hadn’t expected much from Haggen, and it just went to show that no matter how much you saw or how many people you paid to hang out with you and show you how they lived, you could still be surprised.

He’d been restrained along with Haggen, plastic zip ties binding their wrists behind their backs, marched into the office, and shoved around pretty roughly—but not, he reflected, shot. This was either a renewed imposition of discipline from the colonel, or a new policy concerning the hostages. His face burned with swollen pain, one eye was closing, and when he breathed he felt the ragged tug of what he suspected was a bruised or maybe broken rib. He didn’t mind. He’d given just as good, and he’d been relieved that Haggen at least knew the one golden rule of staging a fight: You can’t stage a fight. You just had a real fight for staged reasons.

As soldiers marched them down the hall, he’d wondered again why the two of them were still alive. All Simms had done was try to leave.

Colonel Hammond leaned back in Jack’s chair and studied them. She was a woman that people would call handsome, he thought. The sort of tall, gawky woman who wasn’t unattractive, really, but who didn’t fall into any of the boxes you normally put a woman into. She wasn’t pretty, she wasn’t ugly. She had neither grace nor clumsiness. She was tall, but slight, had bright, clear eyes—and a presence. She was the sort of person you were instantly intimidated by, but who you couldn’t easily describe—at least not physically.

“This bullshit,” she said suddenly, spitting out the words as if with great self-control. “Stops now. Are we clear on that? Whatever bad blood exists between you two, it stops right now. There will be no second reprieve, yes?”

She was looking at him. Mike made a mental note, adding to the short list of information he’d managed to accrue over the last two hours: She didn’t know much about them. She’d demonstrated they knew all their names, and basic background, but her knowledge wasn’t deep. Or she hadn’t had time to read it all. She thought his fight with Haggen was not only legitimate, but based on an existing grudge.

“Or we get shot,” Haggen said, spitting a wad of blood onto the floor. “We get it, Kommisar.”

Her eyes shifted to Haggen, and Mike glanced at the computer. Candace had left it on. To his horror, the screen showed a photo of Raslowski. All the colonel would have to do was glance at it, and she would instantly know they’d been snooping. He wasn’t sure how she would react, and he didn’t want to find out. The phrase no second reprieve rang in his head.

His eyes scanned the room, landing on the thick black power cord that snaked from the back of the monitor to the power strip on the floor. The strip had a red switch on one end that would kill the power in an instant.

Mike marked the switch’s location and looked back at the Colonel. He could turn it off just by taking one step forward. He wasn’t worried about getting a beating, or getting into some other trouble. He knew if he did it while Hammond was sitting at the desk, she would notice the screen going off. She wasn’t an idiot. She would know something was up.

Hammond sighed and leaned back in the chair. She looked from Haggen to Mike and back again. For a moment he thought she looked absolutely exhausted, her face hollowed out, her eyes dull and blank. He thought, irrationally, that he was about to die: She would just decide not to worry about it, to kill them both to be safe.

“King, what’s the count?”

The soldier with the curly hair straightened up just slightly more. “The Doc counted off nine hours last,” she said.

Mike made a mental note: One more piece of data—nine hours, whatever that means.

Hammond nodded, then looked back at me and Haggen. “You gonna be a pain in my ass or can we consider this shit settled? In case you hadn’t noticed, my people are a little itchy. I’m sorry about your friend—I truly am—but if you cause one more lick of trouble for me, I’m going to hogtie you and dump you in the back with the beer kegs for the duration of this duty, are we clear on that?” She shook her head. “And that will be more for your own safety than anything else.”

Haggen nodded cheerfully. “You can put me in the back with the kegs any time, Colonel.”

Mike hesitated, then shook his head. “Everything you’re doing here is illegal. You’ve detained us illegally, you’ve killed an American citizen without cause, you’ve restrained me and … ” he hesitated, then on impulse decided to keep up the pretense that he was intimately involved, a local or at least familiar with everything and everyone. “… Jimmy, you’re trespassing—the list goes on.” He looked her right in the eye. “After killing one of us, how am I expected to believe you won’t just kill us all when you’re done here with whatever this is?”

Hammond leaned back in the seat and regarded him. Mike thought she was evaluating him, considering him, and it made him nervous.

“Mr. Malloy,” she said, her voice icy cold. “That is a possibility, unfortunately.”

Mike’s heart skipped a beat. Had she actually just admitted she might murder them all?

She leaned forward, planting her elbows on the desk. “I am hoping to avoid that eventuality, though. I am hoping to resolve this without any further bloodshed. Part of that is up to you—if you have influence over your people, use it to calm them down. Use it to keep everyone under control. Do that, and there’s a much better chance of avoiding any further problems. Because if crowd control becomes an issue here, we will fall back on alternative methods, without hesitation, understood?”

Mike was stunned, but managed to nod back. He started to agree, but remembered the computer screen. He need to play for time. He had the feeling that another outburst, another round with Haggen would just get them hogtied—or worse—but he didn’t know how else he was going to distract her.

Suddenly, Haggen leaned forward. “Well, Colonel, let me speak for all of us when I say you’re a right fucking cunt, and you all can go fuck yourselves.”

Mike stared. Was he crazy? He was going to get himself killed. He was going to get them both killed, right here, in this office.

The colonel had gone completely still. She stared at Haggen with a similarly disbelieving expression. The whole room seemed to have frozen.

Haggen nodded. “You got this bullshit command because none of the men would take it, right? You been cooling your heels in what—the commissary? The secretary pool, taking dictation?”

“Warner,” Hammond said in a tight voice. “Shut this piece of shit up.”

The other guard, a tall, lanky man with tree-like arms, nodded, but Haggen just smiled more broadly. “Sure, get the men to do your ass-kicking, too. Stupid fascist bitch. Been wanting to boss some men around, found a career path that let you do it. Bet every man in this unit wants to slap your bitch face but can’t risk their career. I bet—”

Warner stepped between Haggen and the desk and expertly socked him in the belly with one powerful punch. Haggen bent over, instantly reduced to a silent, red-face wheeze.

Hammond stood up. Mike didn’t hesitate; Haggen must have seen exactly what he did, and he’d distracted the colonel the only way he could think of. Mike stepped forward, bringing his foot down on the power strip. He heard the old computer suddenly go quiet, but no one else noticed. Hammond was still stepping around the desk, where she leaned down and took Haggen by the hair, forcing him to look up at her.

“Take this piece of shit and hogtie him in the back,” she said quietly. She straightened up and glanced at Mike, then wordlessly turned away. “Turn Malloy loose.”

King snapped out a small knife and stepped behind him as Haggen was literally dragged away, limp as a ragdoll and still struggling to breathe. “You people need to step back,” the soldier whispered as she sliced his ziptie free. “This goes hard or it goes easy, your choice. Spread that word.”

Mike nodded, numb. For a moment he couldn’t move; frustration seized him. They had little bits of information, but no answers, and they were no closer to getting out of this alive than before.

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I’ll be posting one chapter of my novel Detained every week throughout 2021. Download links below!

9. Candace

For a moment, she thought it had all gone to hell. Jimmy followed up his sucker punch with a rebel yell and leaped down onto Mike, fists swinging, and the rest of the place devolved into chaos. The soldiers surged forward, but before they could get to the pair, Mike somehow scissored his legs, gained some leverage, and flipped Jimmy over onto his back. Jimmy then rolled away as Mike pounced, sprang to his feet, and crashed into Jimmy, knocking over tables.

She’d seen Jimmy Haggen get into fights before—plenty of times. He didn’t have any particular training or style; he was a scrapper. He had a lean, natural athleticism that made him a dangerous opponent, but he relied entirely on his reflexes and speed—and an ability to take a punch.

Mike, though, looked like he’d trained somewhere. He wasn’t boxing, his whole center of gravity had shifted. He kept shifting away from Jimmy, then leaning in with lightning speed and landing a blow before dancing back again. Dancing, she thought. It was exactly like he was dancing with Jimmy.

Jimmy was getting the worst of it, though; Mike touched him regularly and he seemed unable to get past Mike’s defenses. Haggen didn’t seem to mind; his smile was constant. She realized they were putting on a performance, because whenever one of the soldiers made a move as if to break them up, they suddenly locked into each other and crashed into another part of the bar, where they resumed their odd dance.

When Hammond stormed from behind past her, she was startled out of her trance. The colonel, tall and cool and more or less the definition of unamused, walked about three steps past her and stood for a moment with her arms akimbo, her back ramrod straight.

Going over the list of things to look up that she and Mike had quickly compiled, she took a step backwards, eyes locked on Hammond, then spun and moved as swiftly and silently as she could down the hall. She’d taken this route a million times, during endless boring nights when literally no one had come into the place before ten at night, but it suddenly seemed sinister and foreign, as if Hammond and her people had taken it from them after their invasion.

She ducked into the office, forcing herself to not look back. She could hear the fight, and she hadn’t yet heard Hammond give any order to shut it down. She told herself that as long as Jimmy and Mike kept it up, she had time.

She slid into the chair and turned on the old monitor; the plastic casing had once been beige but had soured into something yellower over the years. It hummed and took a while to warm up, but the moment the screen slowly began to fade into being she was moving the mouse, clicking on the dial-up icon.

When she’d first started working at Jack’s, she’d been stunned to discover that there was no high-speed Internet, no satellite television, and only this wheezing old relic of a computer. The jukebox hadn’t been serviced or updated in years, and the furniture and decorations were exactly what Jack had inherited from old Catfish Lowell, which Lowell himself had inherited decades earlier. She knew she had never been the hippest or coolest girl in the world (and knew that even the coolest girl in this tiny town wouldn’t even make the list in a big city), but even so the complete disinterest Jack McCoy had in modernizing the place was disturbing.

And the most disturbing aspect by far was the dialup. Before working at the bar, Candace had retained vague, watery memories of dialup Internet, and those memories were unhappy ones. When Jack had painstakingly walked her through the process, she’d been amazed that this was how people had once gotten on the Internet. How she herself had once done it, though she didn’t think she’d had to wait through the screeching modem noises since High School, at the latest. She was doubly amazed that it was still possible, but Jack assured her millions of people still used dialup Internet. She was then not amazed, but rather horrified, at the speed dialup offered. It was like reading a book with someone feeding you one letter at a time from a very great distance.

The login box appeared, with Jack’s user name and the starred-out password already filled in. The modem roared into tinny life with the now-familiar burps and screeches of data over a phone line, and her heart leaped: It seemed incredibly loud in Jack’s tiny, overstuffed office. Her heart racing, she danced in the chair as the handshake completed and the computer announced she was connected.

She clicked on the text-only browser she’d installed a few years back. It ignored all graphics and other elements and rendered every page solely as text. She’d installed it out of desperation after the old computer kept freezing every time she tried to load any web page that had been created within the last five years—the text-only browser meant she wasn’t getting the most fun aspects of the Internet, but at least she was able to read the news and gossip without growing old in the process.

The browser window appeared, no-frills, just a white box with an input line. The fight continued to rage outside. She typed a news site she liked to visit into the box and hit the enter key. She’d discussed it with Mike, and they’d agreed if something worldwide or even nationwide was happening, it made sense to start with that. She held her breath as the modem crunched bits and the browser waited. Then the page started trickling in, one line of text at a time. There was nothing. A football player had been in a car crash and fled the scene. Someone in Atlanta had called in a bomb threat to a church. Russia had sent troops into the Arctic again, but nothing about it seemed urgent.

Not a general event, she thought. Unless they’re suppressing it. She felt foolish for thinking such a paranoid thought, then regrouped. Jesus, we’re being detained mysteriously by troops, she thought. If there was ever a time to be paranoid, this is it.

She pulled up a search engine and typed RASLOWSKI DOCTOR Ph.D. M.D. into the search box. Mike thought that since he was the only non-military person in the group, there might be more on him out there.

She heard Hammond shouting, and nearly jumped out of the seat. The text came scrolling onto the screen; the first few hits were generic ones for doctor-related websites, then an encyclopedia entry. The next few seemed innocuous: Local doctor offices in far-away places, or ratings websites giving reviews for local doctors.

The eighth hit caught her eye; it was a news item, titled PHYSICIST LEAVES UNDER CLOUD. The brief snippet beneath the headline began “Dr. Emory Raslowski resigned his position as senior scientist at.”

She clicked on the link just as Hammond shouted again.

“King and Williams! Stop holding your junk and separate these men!”

The screen filled with minimally-formatted text: Dr. Emory Raslowski resigned his position as senior scientist at the Holzman Institute Monday. Dr. Raslowski, regarded as one of the leading theoretical physicists in the world, has been under investigation by the compliance committee for alleged ethics violations in research programs under his direct supervision. Dr. Raslowski has so far offered no comment on the accusations, and today announced via memorandum that he would be vacating his position. He would not specify what, if any, new position he had accepted, responding to queries only with an emailed “No comment.”

The noise in the next room became suddenly louder, and Candace imagined soldiers getting involved, which meant that Mike and Jimmy were now actively risking their lives. She opened the regular browser and counted the four heartbeats it took to grind through its boot process on the ancient computer, then typed the same search in. She clicked the link and waited another agonizing few seconds while the old browser sorted itself out, the web page appearing in jerky increments as the lights on the old modem danced.

Suddenly, the chaos outside stopped. She could hear Hammond speaking in much more controlled voice. Her heart was pounding. There wasn’t much time.

There was a photo, halfway down the screen. It appeared one scanned line at a time, and she leaned forward, willing it to resolve into something she could comprehend. Line by line, the photo grew like it was being hand-stippled on the screen by unseen hands. When it was halfway finished she knew it was Raslowski, but despite the ominous silence outside and her shaking hands, she forced herself to wait a few seconds more, and then a few seconds more, until it was absolutely him, the same mild-looking man in the same dark plastic glasses, scowling at her from the screen.

“King, if these men so much as make a noise, gag them and handcuff them to the bar,” Hammond bellowed.

Oh, fuck, Candace thought.

Frantically, she leaped up. Without thinking, she dashed forward and slid behind the open door, hiding in the darkness between it and the wall. A second later, Hammond stepped into the office.

Candace closed her eyes. How long could she stand there, how long could she stay silent? What if the colonel wanted some privacy and closed the door? She ran through possible scenarios, reactions. What would be her excuse? Why was she in the office? What justification could she offer?

Suddenly there was another commotion outside, with raised voices that quickly swelled in volume. She heard the colonel hiss a curse under her breath, and then heard her storm out of the office again.

Immediately, she stepped back out from behind the door and with a deep breath she walked out into the hallway. She felt hidden for a moment in the relative gloom of the hallway, but as she approached the bar area again she felt increasingly exposed. Everyone was paying attention to Jimmy, who was being restrained by two soldiers, thrashing about and shouting.

“Fuck you!” he shouted. “This is the United States of America and I demand to be allowed to make a god-damn phone call!”

She held her breath as she approached the line that divided the well-lit bar from the dark hallway. She realized that Jimmy was staring at her as she crept forward.

“You can’t do this! I’m going to fucking own you when I get my lawyer on the line!”

She slipped into the light and leaned back against the wall. A moment later their eyes locked, and he winked at he, then slumped, breathing hard.

“All right,” he said. “I’m done.”

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8. Mike

Haggen was their best chance. The moment she suggested it, Mike knew Candace was right. The shifty-looking ex-boyfriend was half in the bag and seemed kind of erratic, but they didn’t have any other choice. The retired teacher, Eastman, didn’t look like he had the balls to act as a distraction. Jack McCoy, the bar’s owner, Candace didn’t seem to think he had the brains, and Mike was inclined to agree after the man took his suggestion to go make sandwiches to heart like it was the most important mission ever handed down in a crisis.

Mike would have done it himself; the role of distraction was dangerous. They’d just seen someone shot to death because he caused trouble, spoke up, refused to follow orders. Making some noise and drawing all those twitchy trigger fingers to you wasn’t going to end well, and if someone was going to be put in danger, Mike thought it might be best if it was him. Not because he was a hero, but because he was alone: No one knew where he was. He had no ties to his family, no friends left. He’d been drifting for so long he’d come unmoored from everything except his bank accounts. If someone was going to die, why not the guy who had nothing but money?

But Candace said that Haggen was the ideal disruptor. He’d been one his whole life, first as the kid who drove all the teachers crazy, then as the employee who expertly toed the line between being difficult to his bosses and getting fired, and finally as a libertarian-type who lived in the woods and hunted for his food, who had the sort of natural ability with a computer and electrical wiring to achieve a more or less off-the-grid life because he didn’t want to pay taxes and have his life documented. She said he’d spent his whole life causing trouble, and Mike took one look at him and believed her. And if he really did know how to code and wire things up he was smarter than he’d been pretending to be, and Mike kind of liked anyone who feigned stupidity for a tactical advantage.

Mike steeled himself. He could sense that Haggen didn’t like him very much. And he already had an instinctive sense that Haggen was the sort who enjoyed being difficult, just to throw his weight around.

He settled himself against the bar at the far end, where Haggen had returned, sitting slumped over, one hand on a bottle of Jim Beam.

“Shit,” Haggen said immediately without moving or looking at him. “I thought I was ready for this, you know?”

Mike was nonplussed. He’d anticipated a difficult time getting the man to talk to him. “For what?”

Haggen glanced at him. There was, Mike thought, a surprising spark in his eyes, a glimmer of intelligence he’d missed before. “This. This—the end. Government crackdown. Martial law. Economic collapse, chaos.” He shook his head. “If I was in my house, I’d be fine. I’m prepared. In my house. But I had the bad luck to be here getting shitfaced when it came down.”

“Martial law?”

Haggen snorted. “What else do you call being imprisoned in Jack McCoy’s shithole bar with soldiers shooting people who try to leave?”

Mike leaned in. “We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t have any information. As far as we know, this might be the only place in the world this is happening.”

Haggen picked up the bottle and poured whiskey into his glass. He proffered the bottle. “Drink?”

Mike shook his head. “We need information, Mr. Haggen—”

“Jim.” He set the bottle down. “We’re all gonna die in this shithole, I’m not going sober, and I’m not being called Mr. Haggen like I’m some fucking lawyer.” He picked up the glass and held it between them. “I have water. Solar. Food. A propane generator and two hundred-pound tanks. Gasoline. Guns. Books. I could have lived out there for years while all this played out.” He toasted Mike. “Best laid plans and all that.”

Mike reached out and put his hand on Haggen’s arm as he raised the glass. “We need your help, Jim.”

Haggen smiled. “We? Man, you got here like two hours ago.”

“And if I’d kept driving I might not know anything about this. I might be in a hotel room right now, ordering room service. Or sleeping in my car on the side of the road. Or maybe arrested somewhere else, detained somewhere else—I don’t know. That’s the point, Jim. We don’t know. We need your help to get some information.”

Haggen oriented on him, and Mike had the sense he was listening to him for the first time that evening. “Information?” he said, frowning. “About these guys? How?”

Not as drunk as he seemed, Mike thought, noting how he seemed suddenly sharper, less blurry. Either a man who held his liquor well, or an old con artist who knew appearing drunk gave him an advantage.

“The old computer in the office. Candace thinks the hardline the old modem uses might have been overlooked.”

Haggen’s focus shifted slightly away from Mike, as if thinking, then he snapped back, leaning forward.

“Holy shit,” he hissed. “That crappy old box with the 56k dialup. Yes—listen, man, a year, two ago Jack had a flood in here, had an electrician in. They found this one line they couldn’t shut off. The main was tripped, everything disconnected, this one outlet in that office was hot. Finally discovered the previous owner—named Catfish Lowell, and if you want a fucking story, ask about him—had done a lot of work around this place himself, ignoring code, permit requirements, and property laws. He’d run power and phone lines out to the road, if you can fucking believe it, stealing service.” He nodded. “I will bet you these assholes missed a phone line. I would bet.”

Mike glanced around. Candace had Eastman and McCoy at the middle of the bar, occupied. The soldiers stood around the perimeter, Raslowski sat at his computers. Did the soldiers all look tense? Worried? Were they sweating? It was hard to tell, but in a flash Mike had a sense that maybe they had less time than he thought, because the body language in the place seemed to imply a looming, invisible deadline.

“We need a distraction. Candace will go in—she knows the system and won’t waste time figuring it all out. You up for getting Hammond out of that office and keeping her out of there for as long as possible?”

Haggen stared at him. Mike prepared himself for an insult, for pushback.

“I can do that,” Haggen said. “How long you need?”

Mike blinked. He recovered himself and said “It’s dangerous, Jim. You saw what happened to Simms.”

Haggen shrugged. “Man, I got little doubt we’ll all be dead in this goddamn bar soon enough.” He sighed, glancing over Mike’s shoulder for a moment. “She’s a gem, man. A fucking gem. I screwed that up. A long time ago—this isn’t a confession of a torch or anything. There ain’t no romance there, anymore. But you know, sometimes you look at someone from your past and it just reminds you of everything you’ve ever done wrong, and you realize it was most of it.” He looked back at Mike. “You understand?”

Mike saw her again, stretched out on the floor in her underwear, purple bruises on her legs. “Yes,” he said. “I get that.”

Haggen shrugged. “I like my life. I like myself. Maybe always a little too much. I know a lot of people thought it was silly, me worrying about the government coming in and taking what was mine. Not so silly now, I guess. I worked hard my whole life to get out from under, and here I am being crushed again. Screw that.” He smiled. “Get our girl in position and let’s make some noise.”

Mike studied him, then nodded. “Good. Thank you. Anything you need?”

Haggen smiled. “I’ve been fucking with authority figures my whole life,” he said. “I got this.”

“He’s in.”

Candace looked up at him and seemed to freeze, then her eyes leaped over his shoulder. Mike was surprised at his reaction: He didn’t like it. At all.

“Oh, Jim,” she said softly. “You have always been an idiot.”

The place was quiet, and they were all murmuring softly but it seemed like everyone ought to be able to hear every single word they said. He gestured at the hallway that led to the office. “Let’s go; he’s waiting for you to be in position.”

“Mr. Malloy,” Glen Eastman said, adjusting his glasses with one finger. Mike glanced at the old man: Standard issue retiree, he thought. Paunchy, no fashion sense, whitening hair and thickening glasses, dressed like it was Halloween and his costume was Fisherman. “I know you saw no need to consult me—or Jack, here—but I want my objection noted. This is a dangerous plan. Actually, plan is a grandiose word for what this is.”

He talked like a schoolteacher too, Mike thought. He knew the type, from his own school days, and from some of his travels. He’d spent some time volunteering at high schools for a while, trying it on for size. A way to spend his time and money. An experience to have—it all sounded so ridiculous in his head now. A better way to put it, he thought, was that he’d spent all this time wandering the world so he didn’t have to think about what he’d done, or not done.

“Mr. Eastman, where do you imagine your objection could possibly be noted?” he asked, irritated.

“Mr. Eastman,” Candace said, touching his arm. “I appreciate your concern. But we need to do this.” She looked at Mike and nodded.

He walked with her towards the hallway. Two soldiers were posted on either side; they would escort people to the restroom as per Hammond’s orders. They watched as they drew close, but didn’t react, and when they stopped just beyond the hallway their eyes went elsewhere.

She turned to look at him. “Listen,” he said.

“Mike!”

A hand on his shoulder, and he was being spun around forcefully. Jim Haggen grinned at him.

“I’m causin’ a disturbance!” he said conversationally, and hit Mike hard in the face.

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7. Candace

For a moment, she stared down at the first aid kit and heard Mike a few moments ago, screaming for it while Mr. Simms bled out. She looked up at Mike, but he was just sitting on the floor of the bathroom, staring at the wall. His hands were covered in congealing blood, his knees were stained with it. At some point he’d pushed a hand through his hair and touched his face, leaving behind gore.

She heard him screaming for a First Aid kit, and saw herself standing there, frozen.

She opened the kit and scrounged for some cotton balls. “I’m sorry you had to go through that,” she said. “We should—I should have helped you.”

He blinked and looked at her, for a moment seeming far away. Then he shook his head, looking down at his hands. “There wasn’t anything you could do. There wasn’t anything I could do.” He snorted. “I’ve been traveling around, apprenticing. I thought I was … I don’t know, it seems stupid now. I thought I was learning a little bit about everything. Spend a few months fighting wildfires, a few weeks working in a car repair shop. People are always happy to bend the rules and let you just hang around, doing free labor, especially if you offer them a lot of money.” He closed his eyes. “I should have done something better with that money. Donated it. Started a charity, a foundation.”

She closed the first aid kit and put it aside and grabbed a handful of paper towels instead. She dampened them and began cleaning his face. He opened his eyes and watched her, calm, unashamed. His eyes were brown and she liked them, the steady way they regarded her. “I don’t know,” she said. “Traveling around learning—it sounds nice. A good way to spend your life.”

“It’s selfish. It’s arrogant. It presumes me knowing things is somehow important to the universe.” He swallowed. “I … never wanted to feel helpless again. I lost someone, and I realized I had no idea what to do. I woke up and she was gone and I’d spent a decade doing nothing, being nothing. I guess I wanted to make up for that lost time and be everything, all at once.” He sighed. “It didn’t help Kevin Simms.”

“They didn’t let you help him,” she said, surprised at the bite of anger in her own voice. “They shot that poor man and then just stood there and let him bleed.” She paused and looked directly at him. “We have to do something. We have to get out of here.”

He nodded. “We don’t even know what’s going on. I wish you knew something about that facility down the road. Was lit up bright as Christmas when I drove by it, and I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that’s where our new friends came from.”

She tossed the towels into the garbage and grabbed another handful. She knew she wasn’t really doing anything—he wasn’t hurt and could clean himself up—but she’d felt a need to do something for him, to connect with him somehow. “I don’t know anything. Maybe Jack does, he’s—” She hesitated to say older than me for some reason. “It’s been closed for years, even before I was born, I think. Padlock on the gates and everything. I don’t actually know who owns it.”

He shook his head. “When I drove past it just before I got here, it was definitely not empty. It was alive, and populated. Whatever was going on there is a big secret, and that makes me nervous.” He accepted damp towels from her and scrubbed at his face. “What I wouldn’t give for a working cell phone signal right now. I’m betting a lot of this stuff is classified, but we have a few names, a location—we might find out something that would help.”

She nodded, something nagging at her thoughts. “Or we might find out it’s happening everywhere, all over the place,” she said. “Martial law or something.”

He stared at her. “I hadn’t though of that,” he said.

“You know what’s strange to me,” she said, leaning against the wall. “They don’t have any walkie-talkies, radios, nothing. They have no way of communicating with the outside world.”

“They’ve got Raslowski’s laptops,” Mike said, turning to the sink and running the water. “He seems to be connected to something.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But he’s not talking to anyone else is he? He’s not passing information that we can see. And what’s his deal, anyway? He’s not a soldier, but they obey his orders, and—” She froze. “Wait!”

He turned to her, still crouched over the sink, his face dripping. “What is it?”

“The office computer!” She looked at him, eyes burning. “It’s ancient.”

He frowned. “Okay.”

“Like, seriously ancient,” she said. “It’s got an old dial-up modem in there. It’s the only Internet connection he’s ever had. Landline. Hardline.”

She thought of all the boring nights without customers, surfing the web in there and hating every moment. She turned off images in the browser and everything else, and eventually even downloaded a text-only browser, which at least allowed her to read the news at a decent clip. Jack McCoy was probably the only person in a hundred miles who hadn’t gotten a satellite dish.

Once again, Jimmy Haggen figured into it; he was like a form of mold that had gotten into every single nook and cranny of her life, taking root in microscopic ways. He was the one who, one night when Jack had gone on a run for lemons—the Great Lemon Emergency—had taken her in to Jack’s office and showed her the old box. It’s a fucking first-gen Pentium! he’d cawed. It’s fucking amazing it does anything!

And Jimmy had shown her how to make it go online, and made all sorts of tweaks trying to get it to run a little faster. He was the one who’d suggested she use the text browser, making inscrutable jokes about the Dark Web and onions. She wondered if there were any stories in her life that didn’t somehow involve James Haggen, and decided to table the thought for later contemplation when she wasn’t being held prisoner.

Mike’s smile came slowly, and then he nodded. “So not blocked by whatever’s killing our phones,” he said. “And maybe they overlooked it. We can call out.”

“And look everything up online,” she said breathlessly. “It’s slow as heck, but it works.”

“If they didn’t notice it.”

She nodded. “If they didn’t notice it. But I’ll bet they didn’t. Who would think of a landline these days? Or a dial-up modem?”

“There’s one problem: Hammond has set up in the office.”

She deflated, kicking herself. Of course, she knew that. The Colonel had been sitting in Jack’s office since she’d arrived, and called people in when she needed them.

He grabbed more towels and dried himself off. “That means we need to distract her, get her out of there for a few minutes. Then someone goes in and connects, does some searching. Or calls the police.”

She shook her head. “No way, Mike. Seriously—Mr. Simms is dead. Anyone playing around at distracting Hammond or sneaking into that office could get shot. Plus,” she continued, cutting off his response, “plus, the police around here is one guy named Werner who hasn’t so much as pulled his sidearm from the holster in fifteen years.”

Mike smiled. “My kind of cop.”

“It’s not worth it. There are too many moving parts.”

He shook his head. “We have to, Candace,” he said, his face intent. She liked the fact that he had not yet once called her Candy, which was usually irresistible to men of all ages and social standings. “We don’t know what’s going on, which means this could be a lot bigger than just us. It might involve who knows how many people—or the whole country, or the whole world.” He nodded. “We have to try this.”

“And what if it’s everybody? What if it’s everywhere?”

He nodded. “In that case, it doesn’t matter, does it? If it’s something like that, we’re totally screwed. There would be no place to go anyway, no other authority to appeal to.”

She had the sense that he was right, but she didn’t want him to be. She wanted there to be someplace to go, some authority to appeal to. She wanted to get to tomorrow, when she could quit her job and pack a bag and leave town like she should have last year, or the year before. She knew she might never be an artist, or be rich, but she would at least be somewhere other than this bar every single night.

It wasn’t fair. She’d seen a man die, and suddenly the possibility not just of her own death, but her own death in this goddamn bar was all too real. She wasn’t the morbid type: She didn’t spend a lot of time contemplating her own mortality. But now that she could see her mortality in a very real way, she felt a near-panic to break out. Dying in the woods twenty feet outside One-Eyed Jack’s would be better than dying inside it.

“All right,” she said. “How would we do it?”

Mike looked off to the side, thinking. She liked his profile. “You’ve signed on. How long does it take, usually?”

She thought, imagining the hated little box on screen, the odd electronic noises. “A minute, probably.”

He nodded. “Okay. We need to have a set of searches ready, mapped out. From most important to least.” He started to pace, taking two steps in one direction and two in the opposite. “Even if we manage to get Hammond out of the office, we’ll need to get you into the office. And even then we can’t be certain how much time you’ll have, so we have to have everything set from least to most important. And—”

“Wait—me?”

He stopped pacing and turned, taking her by the shoulders. “You know the system. The log on, everything. We can’t risk wasted seconds. It has to be you.”

She stared, fear dripping into her. She saw Simms lying on the floor, bleeding, the confused, terrified expression on his face. Her heart started to pound. She wasn’t built for this. She was just a waitress, a girl past thirty who’d stayed in her hometown because her father got sick and deferred any sort of dreams she might have had for herself. She had a high school diploma and a decent music collection and, everyone had always assured her, a good head on her shoulders. She wasn’t a spy. She wasn’t built to risk her life. She would crack, she would slip up, ruin everything, and get killed.

You’ll figure it out, she heard her Dad say in his growly voice that strangers always thought sounded angry. You’ll be okay.

She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for just one moment. What was the alternative? If she didn’t do it, they would be right back where they began, sitting around waiting for whatever these people decided to do to them. And she doubted it ended with Hammond apologizing and ordering her people to leave without incident. And then she saw herself kneeling, hands tied behind her back, with a gun pointed at her head.

She opened her eyes. Mike was studying her, but with distance, holding back, giving her room.

“Okay,” she said. “How do you get me in there?”

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