Quake (6 page)

The entire usable collection was made up of
Star Wars
, a murky-looking
Titanic
, the second half of
Ferris Bueller's Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles
(recently added to the dead pile), and
The Shining
.

The Shining
had cult status among the group.

“You just have to lean into it,” Hawk said. He'd become weirdly obsessed with
The Shining
. “Like Dylan said, Stanley Kubrick was probably a pre-Intel or whatever. He was something else.”

“Like Hotspur Chance?” Faith asked, perking up a little. Hotspur was their mortal enemy, and as far as they knew, he was plotting to destroy the States and usher in some kind of new world order. Intel had been hard to come by in the intervening days, which was driving Faith crazy.

The screen on the old TV was filled with Jack Nicholson's maniacally grinning face as he peered through a door. Faith had seen only snippets of the movie, because they were always stopping it to debate the meaning of things like the twins, the colors, the numbers, the handholding, and the endless loop the boy rode on his Big Wheel.

“Doesn't this movie bother you?” Faith asked Jade. Faith had been playing big sister since they'd arrived, a decision that sometimes worked and other times didn't. Jade was unpredictable, so when she turned those stunning green eyes toward the couch, Faith wasn't sure what to expect.

“They're almost to the hedge maze,” Jade said. “Scariest part.”

Jade got up off the floor and sat next to Faith. That left Hawk alone on the throw rug with the remote. He eyed the couch, calculating whether he could fit in the space that remained.

“Don't even try it,” Dylan said. “This sucker is maxed out.”

Hawk went back to watching the movie and Faith pulled Jade in close.

“I've seen it like a hundred times,” Jade whispered over the screams, leaning harder into Faith. “But it always scares me just the same.”

Faith couldn't help but think about how this innocent girl had never been off the mountain and had no idea how scary life could really get.

“Stop it there,” Dylan said.

Hawk fumbled with the controller and had to rewind a little bit. He was nervous around Jade. The scene had shifted to a snowy night outside and a little boy was hiding behind a snowplow.

“It's the dead of winter,” Dylan said, “but you can't see his breath. Do you think that's on purpose or a mistake?”

“I think I'm going back to bed,” Faith said.

She kissed Dylan and wandered out of the room with her baseball bat, wondering how it was that she could be so tuned out to something everyone else seemed so tuned
in
to.
It's them, right?
she kept telling herself.
Or possibly it's me
. Either way, she couldn't watch parts of that movie without imagining a nightmare in the making.

The lodge was an abandoned outpost, full of old snowboards, guest rooms, and long hallways. Almost all the rooms were empty, but it didn't make the lodge feel haunted or lonely. Faith liked it up here, away from the world and all its problems. She liked to think she preferred the thrill of being in the fight, but Faith was starting to feel something new on top of this mountain: she had found a place she could imagine calling home.

She walked down the long hallway lined with old pictures of people skiing. The images looked as if they were from a million years ago, everyone laughing and posing in their powder pants and goofy goggles. She wondered if such emotions existed inside the States, because carefree was the last thing Faith could imagine ever feeling again. Too much had happened. Too many people had been taken from her. Her world had moved irreversibly beyond lighthearted. She could never get that back, not that she could recall ever feeling that way to begin with.

Faith heard a sound behind her, a faint creak on floorboards marred with age-old ski-boot scratches. She turned, instinctively wielding the bat.

“I've seen that movie more than twelve times.”

It was Jade, whose forehead didn't even reach Faith's shoulders. Jade tiptoed a few steps closer, rubbing her hands together nervously.

Faith played along. “How many times have you seen it?”

Jade shrugged. “I've been up here my whole life with no Tablet and eight movies on those old tapes. How many times do you think I've seen it?”

“Too many?”

Jade shrugged and looked at the floor again, a habit that made her appear younger than she was, a vestige of childhood she didn't know how to throw off. “Hawk likes it.”

Faith smiled and moved a step closer. “And you like Hawk?”

Jade laughed nervously, quietly. She glanced back toward the door to the TV room as if her biggest secret had just been revealed and someone might hear. She turned back to Faith with a knowing look and shrugged once more.

Faith lifted her shoulders, too, raising an eyebrow.

“Your secret's safe with me,” Faith said, although she knew it was obvious to everyone that Jade and Hawk were circling each other.

“Can you tell me something about him? Something that might, you know, help me?”

Faith knew that Jade was desperate for help navigating her first crush. And so, while she knew it would hurt, Faith let her memory drift back to the Dr. Seuss book she had torn to shreds, and further still to Liz and Hawk on a night alone in a hidden library full of books. The memories bloomed inside her like poison flowers, fast and all-consuming, drawing her down into darkness. Faith pushed the memories down, deeper than they were before, and told herself not to go searching for them ever again.

“There are a lot of old books here, the kind that are printed,” Faith said. “Give him one of those, and make it one that will tell him something about you.”

“But that's so boring,” Jade said. “He's been out there doing all this amazing stuff. He's seen
everything
. Why would he want some old book from a place the world has forgotten about?”

It was a hard thing to explain and Faith was desperate to move her mind away from where this conversation had taken her. “Trust me on this one. Hawk has a thing for real books. You'll thank me later . . .”

Jade eyed Faith suspiciously and began backpedaling as the sound of
The Shining
poured out into the hallway. A moment later she was gone and Faith continued alone, trying not to think about the things she'd dredged up, things that scared her a lot more than a movie about a madman loose in a ski lodge.

Faith turned a corner and walked right into the barrel chest of a giant moving quickly down the hall. She jumped back and swung the bat, but Clooger was fast. He caught the end in his hand.

“You need to mellow out,” Clooger said. “Look first,
then
swing.”

“Sorry, I—”

“Don't worry about it. I'm glad you're awake,” Clooger said. “Get Hawk and Dylan and meet me at the fire.”

Clooger let go of the bat and started to leave.

“What is it? What's going on?” Faith asked.

She didn't think Clooger was going to answer as he ran his hand over the growing stubble on his head, but then he did.

“It's time to finish what we started.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

In the largest room of the lodge a gathering of leather couches encircled a raging fire where six people sat together. This was all that remained of a frayed resistance in a world on the brink of catastrophe.

Faith scanned the faces and landed on Clooger's brother. She wondered how much Carl knew, how committed he was, what his role would be. Dylan and Hawk and Clooger had proven themselves, but Carl was a wild card with a child, and Faith thought being a parent might complicate things. Would he grab Jade and run the second that trouble showed up? As for Jade, she was naïve and caught in the snare of first love. The biggest risk she represented was distracting Hawk at a time when they needed him most.

There was something else unusual about Carl: he made Clooger look like an out-of-shape middle-aged couch potato. They stood facing each other from opposite sides of the small gathering. Both had the same frame to work with, but what was built on those bones was astonishingly different. Clooger was huge and strong as an ox, but he was soft around the edges. If Carl weren't standing beside him, it would be easy to say Clooger was the biggest, strongest person Faith had ever seen. But Carl
was
standing next to Clooger as the fire crackled behind them in the dim light, and that made all the difference.

Carl's neck was as wide as his oversized head, a head that was covered in long waves of raven-black hair. His back and chest were broad and solid like a refrigerator, but it was his bare arms that demanded attention. If biceps were guns, these things were rocket launchers: bigger around than most people's thighs and endlessly ripped with muscle.

Carl lifted weights relentlessly in the lodge gymnasium and read old gun magazines as if they were the Holy Bible. He was armed to the teeth with weaponry—Lugers and knives holstered in six different places up and down his body armor. There was a rumor going around that he had a stash of munitions fit for an army, but Faith had seen only what Carl wore around the lodge all day and night.

“Okay, listen up, everyone,” Clooger began. He had abandoned his beloved trench coat in favor of a blue and gray flannel shirt and jeans, but he still had the sawed-off shotgun strapped to his left leg.

“We've finally gotten some serious intel from one of the sleeper cells in the Western State. Hawk, maps.”

“Roger that.”

Clooger's military background had rubbed off on Hawk, and they sometimes spoke in what Dylan and Faith called “command and answer.”

“What sleeper cells?” Dylan asked. “I thought we were it, the whole resistance.”

Clooger looked at his brother, nodded once, and Carl spoke.

“It appears Meredith had a small group on the inside—how high up we don't know. Hell, we don't even know who they are or if the intel is accurate. But it's something, a thread.”

“It's accurate,” Clooger said.

Carl looked at his brother, flexed his guns. “Says you.”

The two of them were friendly rivals, Carl younger by a couple of years. There was no way Cloog was backing down. A staring contest ensued until Jade intervened.

“Mellow out, you two. We're on the same side, remember?”

Clooger got right up in Carl's grill.

“I'll mellow out if he does,” Clooger said.

Faith knew it was all about the facts with Clooger, so she zeroed in on what they knew. “How about you tell us what you heard and how the information got here. We can all decide if the intel is solid or not.”

Both men seemed to view this as a practical way to save face. They both faked a punch at each other and neither flinched. Clooger faced the group.

“A contact sequence for this outpost was established twelve years ago when Carl and Jade moved up here. The lodge was a last resort, a final out if we had no place else to go. I thought only Meredith and I knew the sequence, but she must have told at least one other person.”

“She was always like that,” Dylan said, a slight edge to his voice. “The center of a wheel, connected to spokes that didn't know anything about one another. I have to hand it to her; she knew how to keep secrets better than all of us put together.”

Carl picked up the thread.

“When we established this station we went all retro, totally untraceable. We're talking FM radio wired up to an ultra-high-frequency carrier wave. The only way to even get on that wave is to have the right equipment. We're talking massively specific, ancient technology.”

“So you're saying it works like radio used to work, but it's on a frequency almost no one knows about?” Hawk asked.

“Bingo,” Carl said, pointing his massively muscle-bound arm at Hawk. Faith was starting to get that Carl was an off-the-grid geek-junkie extraordinaire. If it was hacked or stolen, do-it-yourself or cobbled together from random parts, or shot with your own gun and cooked over a fire on wood from a tree you cut down, or, better yet, blew out of the ground with a homemade explosive, Carl loved it.

“I built only three systems,” Carl went on. “Mine, Cloog's, Meredith's. So how is there a sleeper cell out there contacting us with intel?”

Faith jumped in before another argument could break out between the two biggest guys in the room.

“Okay, so someone else knows how to get on the frequency and has the right equipment to do it,” Faith said. She looked at Clooger. “How's that possible? And either way, what are the odds this communication system has fallen into the wrong hands?”

She and everyone else watched as Hawk projected a three-dimensional holographic map of the United States into the air in the middle of the room.