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

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

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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6. Mike

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He was moving before he realized it, diving forward at a run and throwing himself down next to Simms, his knees soaking in the man’s warm blood. He could see Simms’ eye moving behind his thick glasses, looking around, wide and amazed. His lips, pale and wet, were moving as if he was asking a question.

Mike remembered a summer spent riding along with a volunteer ambulance corp in Ohio; it was amazing what a generous donation could do. No one had any objections as long as he agreed to stay out of the way, and during the down time he got an education in emergency first aid. He learned about the Golden Hour when it came to gunshot wounds: People who made it to emergency medical services within an hour of being shot had a much better chance of survival.

He looked up. The soldier at the door was still holding the gun in his hand. He looked at the man with the glasses. His face was cold and almost sneering.

“A doctor! A medic!” Mike shouted. “You must have one in your unit!”

No one moved. Behind him, he heard the other civilians yelling, but the soldiers and the cold, still man sitting at the table just stared at him.

“A first aid kit!” he shouted desperately, heart pounding. “Anything! Please!”

The man with the glasses turned back to his screens. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Anger flooded into him. These bastards could have shoved Simms, pushed him around, even hit him, and he would have been cowed. Shooting him had been savage, unnecessary—cruel.

He tore off his jacket and then the flannel shirt he was wearing, fingers numb and clumsy, buttons popping off. He leaned over Simms; blood had welled up and stained his shirt just above his waist, and continued to pulse onto the floor with every heartbeat. Mike balled up the shirt and pushed it down onto the wound, applying pressure. Simms gasped and his whole body jerked, but Mike could recall his lessons from the EMTs: Direct pressure, slow down the bleeding. It was literally the only thing he could do without any sort of supplies—or a doctor.

“Come on Kevin,” he said, looking into Simms’ eyes. “We’re gonna help you. Just hang on, okay?”

Simms’ eyes were locked on his, watery and terrified. His lips kept moving, but Mike couldn’t hear what they said.

He remembered the only time he’d seen someone die while shadowing the EMTs. A heart attack. They’d wheeled him into the ambulance, and he’d been alive, and conscious, red-faced and weak, but there. And then he’d flatlined, his eyes rolling up, and they’d worked on him the whole drive to the hospital. And Mike had felt so useless, so stupid, just sitting there. And he’d thought that if he could just do something, anything, it would be better. Nothing, he’d thought, could be worse than sitting by idly and helpless while another human being died. It was even somehow worse than waking up and finding Julia dead, on her belly in her panties, her beautiful hair stringy and dirty, her skin marked by purple bruises, junkie marks.

Now he felt Simms’ life leaking away literally under his hands and he knew better. This was worse. An hour ago he didn’t know Kevin Simms existed. Now the man was dying right in front of him.

He tore his gaze from Simms’ glassy stare and looked around. “Jesus fucking Christ a man is dying! A man is fucking dying here!”

The man in the black-framed glasses didn’t look up from his keyboards, but he sighed in what Mike thought was irritation. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “He’s not in my calculations.”

Mike looked back at Simms, whose face had gone slack, his eyes staring fixedly up at the ceiling. His calculations? Something about the word drilled down into him, and molten rage boiled up. Without thinking Mike turned and launched himself, bloody hands and all, at the little man.

“Doesn’t—”

Someone punched him in the stomach as his legs were swept out from under him. He landed on his back, hard, head bouncing on the floor, and there was a gun in his face, the barrel an inch away. He froze and closed his eyes, waiting for the shot.

“Soldier, step back!”

The whole place went still. Mike opened his eyes and for a moment his field of vision was the gun barrel, nothing else, just the perfect symmetry of the weapon.

“That was a command, son.”

The gun disappeared, and the soldier—the same one who had shot Simms, he saw, a tall, lanky man with a crooked nose and a monobrow that made him seem perpetually angry—stepped smartly back, holding the gun by his thigh.

Mike twisted himself up on one elbow, his abdomen still aching from the punch. Colonel Hammond stood in the doorway that led to the office and bathrooms. She looked angry. Mike revised, his brain jerking and kicking back into motion. She looked apoplectic. Her face had flushed, and she stood ramrod straight, her body almost vibrating with tension and anger.

“Holster that weapon, Musgraves,” she snapped. “Then remove your holster and hand it to King. Don’t speak a fucking word, soldier, or you will regret it. King, you are detailed with Musgraves’ weapon. Do not let it out of your sight.”

Mike watched the monobrowed soldier wordlessly holster the gun, then unsnap the holster and hand it to the other soldier who’d been guarding the front door, a woman with densely curly black hair. She took it wordlessly, not looking at him, and buckled it over her own.

Hammond remained where she was, looking over the whole place, nostrils flaring. Mike thought the only sound in the place was the Colonel’s breath whistling in her nose. His own heart was beating wildly, all over the place, without rhythm. Sweat had soaked through his shirt, and his pants and arms were covered in Simms’ blood.

“Next member of this unit who discharges their weapon,” Hammond said in a steady, acidic tone of voice, “without my direct order will also regret that decision.”

She let that hang in the air.

“King: Detail someone to deal with the body. Show some respect.”

Mike blinked and turned his head. Simms stared blankly at the ceiling. He was dead.

Then she looked at the skinny little man in the glasses, who’d continued to work at his keyboards as if nothing had happened.

“Dr. Raslowski,” she snapped. “My office.”

She turned and walked back down the hall. Raslowski kept tapping at his keyboards for a moment, as if he hadn’t heard or didn’t intend to obey. Then he suddenly shoved the table violently, making all his equipment jump, and leaped up, striding quickly through the room. Mike thought he looked like a little boy who’d been reprimanded in school.

He stared around. The soldiers had their eyes on distant points, their faces expressionless. The bar patrons and employees were pale and shaken, staring back at him. He closed his eyes and thought, Raslowski. Hammond. King. Musgraves. Four names was a paltry list of new data for Simms to have died for, but he was determined to make it count.

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5. Candace

He came to save her from the Most Boring Mole Ever and she was eternally grateful. The guy—Andy, if that was his real name—seemed nice enough, although his eyes went and lingered places on her anatomy she didn’t appreciate. She had a sense that he was the sort of young kid who got a little drunk and made passes at waitresses like her, then grinned and was sorry-not-sorry when he got called out on his shit. He was also, she thought, the sort of guy who thought he was a lot more charming than he really was, as he seemed instantly convinced she was really into him.

She kept a smile on her face. She’d been through this a million times: Tourist hunters in town for a night or three, mistaking her professional politeness for attraction. She had a collection of matchbooks, business cards, napkins, and other trash with phone numbers. She didn’t know why she kept them.

“Jack says there’ll be sandwiches,” Mike said, suddenly appearing next to her. “Couple of minutes.”

“Thank god,” Andy said, smiling. “And beer, I hope.”

She thought his smile was good, but calculated. She was trying to watch him like a disinterested observer. To judge his performance, and she thought it was good—if she’d hadn’t remembered checking the bathroom earlier in the evening, if the place hadn’t been so empty, making it easy for her to note the sudden appearance of an unfamiliar face—she might have been fooled. Mad One Jack’s never got crowded in the way she saw bars on TV get crowded, but there were a few nights every week when there were a couple dozen folks moving through the place, mostly travelers stopping off for a beer and a bite. The town was ten miles east and population less than a hundred, so off-season the bar was usually pretty dead.

Did Hammond decide on the mole strategy without knowing the situation? If she’d known how empty the bar was, she would never have imagined the ploy would work. She thought that indicated the Colonel and her crew, whatever they were, had put this operation together quickly.

“Do me a favor,” Mike said to Andy. “Check on Jack in the kitchen, see if he needs any help?”

She admired the dim smile Mike put on his face, looking for all the world like an idiot. Andy nodded.

“Sure,” he said, and walked off.

She watched that dumb smile fade. “Who are you?” she asked, and was immediately embarrassed.

He smiled. “Thanks for the distraction. I know it was kind of a shitty, sexist thing for me to say, but I honestly didn’t have a better idea.”

She shrugged. “I’ll take it as a compliment. I always used to tell my Dad my job was hot waitress.” She bit off the second part of that sentence: Wishing he was still around for her to gloat about being right.

He smiled, then leaned in and filled her in on the plan, such as it was. She liked the way he smelled. He wasn’t wearing any sort of cologne, it was just him: Sweat and something else, something sexy and interesting.

“The best thing to do with a spy,” he said in a low, intimate voice, “isn’t to stonewall. Spies get suspicious when they’re not hearing anything. The best thing to do is to feed them something totally useless, but busy.”

She nodded. “Sandwiches.”

He grinned. “Yup, we all just had a big, serious discussion about sandwiches.”

“That was smart. Where’d you learn to think like that?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been … I guess the best word is studying. I’ve been taking classes with people. Experts. Anyone with a skill or a point of view. I travel to them, spend some time with them, try to learn something new. Sometimes it’s a waste of time. Sometimes it’s just fun. Sometimes I learn something really amazing.”

She raised an eyebrow, thinking this was the weirdest thing she’d ever heard … but kind of cool, too. “So you’re just traveling around with your black no-limit credit card, studying the world.”

He laughed, face reddening, and she liked that he was awkward about it. “I, er, came into some money. All right: A lot of money. I was really young and my parents were both dead.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, worried that she’d put her foot in it.

He waved her off. “It was a long time ago—now. Back then, I was sixteen when Mom passed and it was ugly. Anyway, my grandfather on Mom’s side was rich, like, epically rich, and he’d always intended to leave everything to me because he hated my father. So when he passed away, I inherited … well, a lot of money and I was twenty years old.”

“Jesus.” She tried to imagine herself suddenly wealthy at twenty. What would she have done? Given Dad the retirement he deserved, certainly. Would she have gone to school, become an artist? She thought so, but twenty seemed so long ago, like a different country.

He was looking around, watching. She was amazed at how easily he’d taken charge, someone none of them had met before, someone none of them knew. She trusted him, though. Something about him seemed reliable, real. Like he was a what-you-see-is-what-you-get sort of guy.

“Anyway, I wasn’t ready for it. I spent ten years partying. Like, seriously partying. Heavy stuff. I should have died a bunch of times. I built up this group of … well, I called them friends but they were just leeches and enablers, really. Had a ball, for a while. Met a … ” he hesitated, looking down at his shoes for just a moment, but she thought it looked incredibly sad. “Met a girl,” he finished quietly. “She was messed up, like me, but we loved each other.” He suddenly looked up at her, directly into her eyes. “She died. And it was my fault. I mean, I didn’t kill her or anything, but it was the way we lived, the way I lived. I loved her, but I loved the party more, and so she died.”

Without realizing it, she’d reached out and put her hand on his arm. The pain in his face was real.

“Anyway,” he said, clearing his throat and smiling. “I sobered up after that. Checked in with my finance guy, and was surprised to learn I was still pretty rich, though I’d blown a huge amount of it. I was thirty-something and I’d spent most of my youth in a haze, and I realized somehow I’d felt sorry for myself because my parents had been taken from me. I felt like an idiot, suddenly, and so I decided I needed to clear my head. I needed to grieve for Julia, I needed to do something, learn something, broaden my horizons. So that’s what I’ve been doing for a year and a half now.” He looked around again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to just dump all that. It just came out. What about you? What’s your story?”

She tried to put an expression of self-mockery on her face. “Oh, you know: Just a small town girl, living in a lonely—actually, you can’t even call this a small town, we’re like fifty people living in the woods with a road and a post office—”

“Yeah, I passed through town—what is it, population seventy, there’s a feed store and a diner.”

She nodded. “Yup. So, micro-town girl thinks she’s going to be an artist. Wins an award in junior year of high school, but forgets that her graduating class is twenty kids, so the competition ain’t so hot. She figures she’ll take a job waitressing at Mad One’s because that’s what her mama did and that’s just what girls do around here, but she’ll do it for one year and save up and head out for New York City to attend art school.”

He smiled. “So far so good. What happened?”

She smiled back. “You mean, why is that girl still waitressing here instead of opening a gallery show in SoHo or at least married to some rich tourist who came through laying all the local waitresses?”

His smile kinked up. “Aside from the fact that I’d never use a word like laying, yeah, pretty much.”

She shrugged. “Well, Dad got sick. I stuck around to take care of him. His retirement dried up, and I started working extra shifts to pay bills, and when he died there was debt. Just nothing but debt. And I’ve just about cleaned it up, and was making plans to finally do something, take off, when this happens.”

“About to make a break for it, literally soldiers show up to stop you,” he said, sounding amused.

“Yes! Exactly! Not to sound all self-important, but it’s like the universe doesn’t want me to leave.”

“Maybe so you could meet me.”

She could tell, the moment he said it he wished he hadn’t, and an awkward moment welled up between them. She’d never felt this comfortable with someone this quickly, and he wasn’t even trying. She’d seen guys try. She’d seen them try so damn hard, and this was the opposite.

Suddenly there was a commotion, and they both spun to see the tourist, Simms, standing near the front door, looking agitated.

“You can’t just hold us here without some sort of authority!” he was saying, sounding more exasperated than afraid. Two soldiers stood in front of him, impassive. Nearby, the nerdy-looking man with the glasses took no notice, working on his laptops. “Jesus, we’re American citizens and this is native soil. You haven’t shown us any sort of authorization. I think you’re just trying to intimidate us.”

Glen Eastman started towards him. “Mr. Simms,” he said in the sonorous voice Candace remembered so well from her school days, being ordered to do laps, “step back here and let’s talk about this.”

“Dude,” Jimmy Haggen said drunkenly from behind the bar, where he’d set himself up as the unofficial bartender. “Let the tourist go if he wants to go!”

Simms waved a hand impatiently behind him. “I’m walking out this door. Anyone puts a hand on me, they’re going to be hearing from my lawyer.”

“Right on!” Haggen cheered, enjoying himself. Candace felt a wave of revulsion. It had been nearly two decades, but she still couldn’t believe she’d dated him.

Suddenly, the man in the glasses spoke. His voice was high-pitched and breathy. “Mr. Simms, no one will lay a hand on you.” He turned around in his seat and stared at the balding man with a blank, flat expression. “We will shoot you if you try to walk out that door. Do you understand?”

Simms turned and looked back at the other detainees for a moment, his expression uncertain. Then he set his mouth firmly and turned back. “I’m going out that door, and you have no right to stop me, mister.”

The man in the glasses nodded. He gestured, and one of the two soldiers unsnapped his holster and drew his weapon, a black automatic pistol. He held it down by his thigh, his finger along the side instead of on the trigger, but Candace still jumped at the sight of it, adrenaline dumping into her veins. She was used to guns; she’d grown up with them and had been on more hunting trips than she could remember, but there was something about a handgun that was somehow more threatening than a hunting rifle.

“Kevin,” Mike said. “Come on, buddy, they’re serious. Step back and let Mr. Haggen pour you a drink.”

“Fuck that!” Jimmy shouted. “Stand up, Kev! Show ?em who’s boss!”

“Jimmy, shut up!” Candace hissed.

Simms hesitated, and half turned back, shaking his head. Candace felt herself relax. Then, suddenly, he pushed aside one soldier and made a run for the door.

Everything happened in a blur. She saw Mike take a step forward instinctively. She heard Glen shout something. Her whole body tensed up, and she watched the second soldier raise his sidearm just as Simms pushed past him. She heard the shot, louder than she would have thought possible in the stillness of the bar. She saw Simms flail backwards as if he’d been shoved by some invisible giant.

Someone was screaming. It took a moment to realize it was her.

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