Assault on Cheyenne Mountain (Denver Burning Book 4) Page 6

  “Fine with me,” Khalil said, looking to Carson. “I stay with my whirlybird, no matter what.”

  “All right, we swear,” Carson said, bemused at the older man’s antics. “Take us to your ‘lair’.” Dana gave him a sidelong glance. She didn’t trust the man. Carson had little reason to either, besides the gratitude he felt for the rescue. But his instincts were telling him to go with it. Taking the chopper and leaving on their own wouldn’t put them much farther along anyway, and would burn a bridge with this group of scrappy fighters that he sensed might be important later.

  “We ought to take a long, roundabout route so Tamare can’t lock on to the helicopter again,” the man told them, eyes still lingering on the Pave Hawk.

  Carson laughed. “I do believe you just want to have a longer ride in it, sir.”

  The man grinned again, as did some of his followers. “This is the most exciting day we’ve had in a long time, I will admit,” he said. “We came close to getting Tamare, we got a helicopter, and if my intuition is correct we’ve found us some new lifelong friends.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Dana was sullen.

  “You’re kind of cute when you’re upset, Miss,” the bearded man said. “I’m Mason, by the way, Mason Walsh. So pleased to meet you.”

  “Whatever.” Dana stormed off to board the chopper.

  Chapter 8: Allies

  Mason’s “lair” was an old high school in Boulder, several miles to the south. They left most of the fighters behind to clean up at the battle site, and took Mason and four of his closest colleagues in the chopper. They arrived after swinging wide to the northwest over the mountains, and set down in an enclosed courtyard where students had congregated in happier times. The chopper was hidden from all view except directly overhead.

  The school’s interior was dim and smelled of mildewed carpet and dust, but it was also spacious and quiet, which felt good after the noisy, cramped ride. Carson felt weary in his bones; too many days and nights of stress took a greater toll than mere physical exhaustion. He was also feeling the weight of leadership. They’d never actually talked it out, but in subtle ways Brunson, Khalil, and Dana all seemed to look to him for decisions not just regarding their objectives, but in the small things too. He almost resented the pressure of command; he had turned away from that path long before while still a Marine.

  But then he mocked himself for thinking he was a commander. It wasn’t like the others would fall apart without him. They were all strong, independent people facing desperate times. But somehow, he felt responsible for them anyway. And it was a heavy weight.

  More of Mason’s people were at the school, a small commune of displaced fighters working against the army that was moving into the Platte River valley. They had something cooking in the cafeteria kitchen, and seemed to have converted most of the classrooms into living quarters or storage for various stockpiles of contraband and weaponry. Carson saw pieces of a small airplane in one classroom as they walked down the hall.

  They entered the old teachers’ lounge and the men that had come back with Mason joined others that were glad to see them, women and men and even a few children. They relaxed, laughing, taking off their packs and setting down weapons, elated at the bloodless victory over Tamare. Mason himself sat down on an old couch with a sigh. He gestured to some classroom chairs, and the others took a seat. A gray-haired woman brought some bottled water from a battered cooler, and they gratefully quenched their thirst.

  “Okay, kids. Time to tell Uncle Mason all about yourselves.” Mason had unhooked one of his overall clasps and took off his shoes. Dana turned her head away at the sight of his holey socks and rolled her eyes at Carson.

  Carson smiled and began talking, keeping his story as streamlined and detail-free as possible. He just wanted to give Mason a basic idea of who they were and how they’d gotten to Longmont in a stolen military chopper. He recounted their escape from the prison camp near Colorado Springs and their journey north through Denver, omitting only what they’d found in Longmont.

  When he was done, Mason nodded. “Sounds legit. But you’re going to have to expand a little, you know? Like, what were you incarcerated for down south? And what were you doing in that building where we found you? I mean, come on. Give me a little more, here.”

  Carson smiled. “I dish, you dish. Give us a few of your own dirty little secrets, and I’ll let go of a few more of mine.” It was sheer bravado. Carson knew he didn’t have much to bargain with, but Mason laughed.

  “Okay, sure. I dish. What do you want to know?”

  Once Mason started talking, he didn’t stop for a while. He explained that his group of fighters had grown rapidly in the past few months as the troops coming from the east alienated citizens and displaced people from their homes, often confiscating what little they had left after the winter without power.

  His people were a cross-section of pre-meltdown middle America. Men and women, older and younger, blue and white collar. Some ex-military, some rancher types. Lots of ex-cops; it appeared that Mason had particularly recruited these, and they had come eagerly since they were unwelcome almost everywhere else.

  Those with families kept them safe in the surrounding rural communities, which were strongly protected now that they had formed a loose coalition against the common enemy. The ones actually living in the high school were those that had bounties on their heads.

  Carson got the sense that Mason, along with several others, had been ahead of the curve when things went dark. They weren’t exactly preppers, per se, but they had reacted to the catastrophe with speed and good sense. They had quickly organized their rural communities and had thus been spared the looting and depredations other communities, including Denver, had suffered. The initial waves of refugees from Denver had overwhelmed some areas, but the rumors of the reactor meltdown by Longmont had channeled many of them away.

  Then, a few months into the disaster, while Carson had been cooling his heels in lockup, rumors had begun to surface. Refugees, captured looters, other human detritus began to speak of a movement coming out of the Midwest. It was big, it was organized, and it was gaining momentum. The general idea, gleaned from conversations with several different sources, was a concerted effort to restore law and order nationwide. But it was a gloves-off thing, with no tolerance for dissent of any kind, and the rumors mentioned, among other things, executions. Lots of executions.

  Peace through force was the mantra, and a good share of the momentum enjoyed by this fully militarized push was the near universal hatred and mistrust of the old government shared by practically everyone, especially from the conservative heartland. The rumors could not verify if there was one leader or several, but the thing had a name.

  The called themselves the Correctionists.

  “What does that even mean?” Khalil asked. “Correct what?”

  Mason shrugged. “Everything. They’re here to correct a nation gone astray, according to their pamphlets. They want to re-form the whole fabric of society to be stronger and more orderly. Now that the fabric of society is non-existent, that’s a viable proposition for many people. But not for us.”

  Carson said nothing, feeling a pang of disillusionment as strongly as when he’d been betrayed by his director and imprisoned without cause. He understood the need for law and order, and he agreed with the Correctionist agenda that far. He even understood the necessity of harsh measures in order to achieve such order. Sometimes you had to clamp down, enforce unpopular laws. But executions? Was there no other way?

  Not according to the Correctionists, as Mason explained. They spread fear among every new population they encountered, telling everyone that unless they wanted to starve and die in a holocaust of violence now, and fall before foreign invasions later, it was their way or the firing squad.

  But Mason continued, describing how his allied communities had developed a mobile militia loosely linked with other similar forces to the south and east, capable of engaging any exterior threat sho
rt of a foreign army with a fully operational air force. He believed firmly that if they could purge the inside threat from the heartland, they would find the strength to fend off any opportunistic invasions on the coasts. It wouldn’t be easy or quick, but they were talking about defense of their homeland. He and his men would die before they caved to any oppressive regime.

  “You haven’t been cooperating with a militia in Colorado Springs headed by a man named Masters, have you?” Carson asked. “That’s one you don’t want to work with.”

  “Not him,” Mason said. “But my brother leads one even farther south, in Pueblo, and they’ve had some success. At least, last I heard… I haven’t gotten news from down that way in four months.”

  Mason’s people had been in contact with the National Guard early on, but the complete lack of information from higher channels had so demoralized and polarized the Guard that within weeks Mason’s people had been a more effective field force in the rural areas north of Denver, lacking only the heavy guns of the Guard. They did, however, have an assortment of working vehicles, and his mechanics were repairing more each week by using old models fitted with newly modified parts that got around the fried circuitry. It didn’t work for 99% of the vehicles cluttering the nation’s roadways, but now and then they brought in a new one to work on.

  With the new rumors, the militia groups had taken to scouting further and further afield, always looking for more information. There was a fledging ham radio network throughout western Colorado now, and data was coming in piecemeal from farther out. The picture taking shape, however, was equal parts encouraging and frightening.

  Denver was a mess of squabbling factions that no one expected to clean up in the foreseeable future. But Mason had learned of General Tamare early on, and had been keeping an eye on him.

  “At first, we thought, good for him, you know? He kept Colorado Springs viable. Things weren’t too bad down there. But you know, it just felt weird. The last thing we wanted was a military dictatorship, a local general taking charge ‘for the duration of the emergency’.”

  At first, the tension between the newly-appointed Commissioner Masters and General Tamare had been kept at a low simmer due to an almost equal power balance. Tamare had trained troops and guns, but the commissioner had control over all the people living in the city, due to his early efforts to impose order after the grid went down. But then something had changed.

  “We don’t know how, but Tamare got in contact with the Correctionists. First time we know of that anybody was able to communicate farther out than Nebraska. They started talking regularly, making plans. Tamare was feeding them everything he knew about regional conditions. And all the time, the Correctionists are getting bigger and bigger out east. We’re talking Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, part of Iowa, the Dakotas, part of Arkansas. Oklahoma was absorbed. Texans are still putting up a fight, so they say. And the South is a permanent quagmire. We assume the whole East Coast, including the northeast, is Correctionist territory, if it’s populated at all anymore.”

  Carson hadn’t told anyone about the flash drive he’d delivered to Tamare for Scala. He didn’t think it would help the situation to confess now, so he merely took another sip from his water bottle. “Wow. Did any corner of the country weather it all?”

  “Who knows?” Mason said. “We only hear what people bring us from different regions. And it’s hard to confirm anything. They say Montana is chugging along pretty much as it always did. Hard winters so nobody wanted to move that direction with the snows coming on, and just enough beef cattle to feed themselves. But California’s a wasteland, of course.

  “They say that the Correctionists have a lot of soldiers spread out over all the territory they’ve grabbed. Not real military, most of them, but there’s lots of them and they have weapons. A ton of hungry, desperate people in the cities back east, willing to join up and leave whatever they had behind.”

  “What’s Tamare going to do now?” Khalil asked. “What’s his end goal?”

  Mason sighed. “Ever since contacting the Correctionists, Tamare has been leaving the base regularly, leading a campaign of patrols. At first he kept close to Colorado Springs. ‘Extended perimeter security,’ his men called it. But his loops got wider and wider. And then he started killing people. He called it ‘pacification.’

  “That’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s lots of looters and predators out there, and we’ve had to kill some ourselves. With law and order, the crazies stay down, mostly, but it’s open season for rapists, serial killers, and the like. We found a guy with six bodies in his garage last month, eating on them one by one. You come across something like that in your back yard, and you have to put down the mad dog.

  “Anyway, Tamare was targeting only the larger problem areas. He would intentionally ignore some areas if they weren’t worth his time. At first we thought he was just conserving his manpower and ammunition, only tackling the worst places that smaller groups like ours couldn’t keep civil. I almost liked him for that. But then we noticed a pattern.”

  Mason pointed to a battered old map on the wall, with pins stuck all over it.

  “Tamare started at Colorado Springs, then he moved north to Interstate 70. He went for all the towns along I-70 as far east as Burlington. Totally cleared them of looters. Trouble was, he cleared them of pretty much everything else, too. We talked to some survivors. If you had certain skills, or were the right age and sex, they left you alone. Others had their homes burned or bull-dozed, were run off at gunpoint.

  “It took them a month. Then they drove north again, to Interstate 76, and followed it east to where it merges with I-80. They kept heading east along I-80, as far as Julesburg. Cleared every town, hamlet, and city along the route. Drove people out en masse, said nobody could stay because there was too much disease or some excuse like that. Many that refused to comply, they gunned down.

  “That’s where our people had first contact with Tamare, in some of those isolated towns. He didn’t spare the ammunition, and our people, the few we had that far east, were almost wiped out. It’s tough to fight armored Hummers with deer rifles, you know? So we looked real hard at what he was doing. And we saw it. You see it?”

  Carson looked over the map at the places Mason had mentioned, and nodded. He could see from Brunson’s face that he’d figured it out, too.

  “They’re prepping the routes,” Carson said.

  “Give the man a cookie,” Mason said. “They pacified those highways completely. As the Correctionists come barreling down both routes, they don’t face any resistance now. The only people left are the ones Tamare and his overlords want there. It’s a two-pronged push west to Denver. They even pushed the abandoned vehicles off to the sides, so that the Correctionists can use every square inch of the road.”

  “What’s after Denver?” Dana asked quietly.

  “Utah, Idaho, the West Coast, presumably. And then they’ll control the entire nation.”

  Chapter 9: Return to Longmont

  There was a long silence in the stuffy teachers’ lounge. Most of Mason’s other people had moved off to the cafeteria.

  Finally Carson spoke. “What a brave new world these Correctionists are making.”

  “Yeah. And now it’s your turn again,” said Mason. “I’ve been pretty forthcoming. Let’s hear what you found important enough to travel to Longmont for.”

  Carson knew now that he’d found a trustworthy man and a valuable ally. It was time to lay his cards on the table and see if he could gather the support necessary to strike decisively at the Correctionists. That was something he couldn’t do alone.

  “The facility you found us in is an information repository, a black site that houses a sort of fail-safe memory dump. We weren’t able to get much out of it, but if my assumptions are right, it contains data that will tell us who’s responsible for this whole thing. Who started the fire, in other words.”

  “Are you serious?” Mason was incredulous. “Are you telling me the most
important secret in the world has been lying at my fingertips, right there in Longmont?”

  “Hard to believe? Let me walk you through the scenario as I understand it.” Carson sipped his water. “Let’s say the government knew, years ago, that it was only a matter of time before the U.S. was hit with a massive, widespread cyber-attack. On the level of Pearl Harbor, or 9/11, but worse. And let’s say they decided that if countermeasures failed, and the attack was successful, then the next most important thing after preventing such an attack would be finding out how and why, and most important, who. Makes sense so far, right?

  “And if the attack was successful enough to take down the power grid, satellites, and data processing, then our very means of finding out who was responsible would be negated. We can’t hunt for answers in a jungle that doesn’t exist anymore. So, thinking ahead for once, they set up the system so that every day, or every hour, or every ten minutes for all I know, trillions of bits of data from all over the world are routed to this facility and saved in a hardened, secure stash where it will be available no matter what.”

  Mason squinted and waved for Carson to continue.

  “So the idea is that somebody like me comes along afterward, retrieves the data, and delivers it to whoever’s left to trace what happened just prior to the attack. That was my mission, although things didn’t go quite as planned.”

  Mason studied Carson carefully. “What are you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “What are you? Some kind of government spook? Spec-ops?” Carson noticed that Mason’s hand had dropped casually to his holstered sidearm, a fat revolver in a worn leather holster.

  “Relax. I’m with… I was with Homeland Security.”

  “Okay. Homeland Security. And you’re a spy, or a computer guy, or what?”

  “A clandestine operative, yes. My program was tasked with securing local assets in order to restore law and order as soon as possible.”