They left him without acknowledgement. None was needed. Only action. Trusk eased into his chair and steepled his fingers, pressing them to his lips as he began to run through the plans again mentally, looking for potential problems that TARA might have missed. That was half the secret to his success in life—looking for problems and either fixing or exploiting them. That was what made him a great man.

  What would make him a great steward for this broken world. And soon enough, no one would have much of a choice but to see it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CALEB

  Springfield, CO

  Monday July 30th, 9:00 am MST

  Caleb stood on the front porch, staring out across the road. Behind him, the small house teemed with people. Springfield—the leadership, the residents, everyone, really—welcomed them immediately. Providing a place to sleep, food to eat, and in the future, jobs. But the house was packed.

  Four families, one in each bedroom.

  At first, he’d bristled. So many strangers a thin wall away from his family. After General Thomas and Calvary… It was difficult to say the least. But after a few days, the low-grade anxiety waned about the living arrangements, at least.

  They’d made it. Springfield was all around them. It wasn’t everything he expected, but it was also plenty of things he hadn’t considered. A mixed bag, in the end, but one that meant some degree of safety for his family. Or that’s what he kept reminding himself.

  A brief wave of dizziness washed through him. It didn’t last, not like it had the first day he’d been up and trying to move around. He tentatively brushed the puckered stitches across his temple. As he let his hand drop, the screen door creaked behind him and Lana butted her way through the door, a basket of laundry balanced on her hip.

  She spotted him two steps across the porch, headed to the laundry facility near the center of town. “There you are. Mom’s looking for you. She thinks you’re out walking the perimeter again.”

  Caleb grimaced slightly. Elizabeth had been attached to his hip since they returned. It was nice in its way, and he appreciated the concern. The concussion had been serious, still was, and it worried her. But he wasn’t an invalid.

  Walking helped his hip, and he wasn’t stumbling around anymore. She wasn’t wrong, though. “I got back about ten minutes ago,” he admitted. “I’ll go find her. Where’s Derek? I thought you two were sharing laundry duty.”

  Lana rolled her eyes before propping the basket on the porch rail. “Derek’s got a meeting with what’s-his-name… Samuels? The guy that runs security. With the mustache.”

  For a moment, the man’s name escaped Caleb as well. They’d only met briefly when they first arrived, and Caleb lacked his full faculties, then. “You worried about him?”

  Caleb’s daughter snorted. “No. I’m not worried. I wanted to go with him, but apparently there are no women on security detail. Samuels, or whatever his name is, is some retired law-enforcement jerk who thinks they need to keep all the women protected. You know, for making babies.”

  He didn’t think that was precisely the case, but from the way Lana’s bitterness showed, he didn’t press. The argument wasn’t worth it. And truth was, he didn’t want Lana on security, anyway. She was a good shot, a good soldier, and smart even if a little rash on occasion.

  But they were in Springfield, now. It wasn’t all over, there were going to be other challenges. Especially with Apex out there spreading like a cancer. There were other people here who could be responsible for concerns like security, though. It didn’t have to be Lana.

  She could stop fighting and go back to being… Well, he wasn’t sure. Who she was before she was forced to change? His little girl? Something that didn’t put her in mortal danger 24-7, at least.

  All the same, she was upset, and upset Lana tended to be a thorn. “I’ll have a talk with him,” Caleb offered. “See if I can work him around.”

  “Maybe he’ll actually listen to you.” Lana hefted the basket to her hip with a drawn-out sigh. “I already pled my case. He wouldn’t even let me show him what I can do. I bet I’m a better shot than half his people. Or more.”

  “Probably,” Caleb agreed. “Try not to get too upset. We’ll sort it all out. We’re new here. We’ve got some adjusting to do, okay?”

  She gave him a reluctant nod before stepping off the porch. A few paces away, she turned to walk backward. “Derek’s got a lead on a tech guy who might be able to help with the Apex laptop.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He’s wiring something for the power plant until the afternoon, but we’re going to meet up with him after that and see what he can make of it. You should join us. Whatever’s on there, you can probably make more sense of it than we can.”

  Good news. And a nice stroke of luck after everything they’d been through. “I will,” He watched her stride away, full of confidence and youthful energy. Anxiety threatened to return, but he shoved it down.

  They were in Springfield. Maybe it wasn’t a fortress, but he didn’t have to worry about Lana on her way to the laundry. At least not now.

  He found Elizabeth in the kitchen, midway through a conversation with one of their housemates, Mateo. He was a slender guy, his face gaunt. He and his brother had been on their own for a long time before stumbling across Springfield by accident, according to Vince.

  They hadn’t been as fortunate as Caleb’s family, and barely been able to find a scrap of food. It showed on them still, though they’d been in Springfield for almost three weeks now.

  “…so then,” Mateo was saying, his fingers on some corn husks, “you take all the ground up vegetables and the chorizo and you layer them in the corn husks like that, see? And fold them over, and you can grill them, or bake them, even steam them. My Abuela would just toss them on the wood fire in the yard, on a grate. The outside will char, but the inside will be—ah, hola, hermano.” Mateo waved at him, and then nudged Elizabeth with his elbow. “Your man is back.”

  Elizabeth turned and her lips twisted into an irritated frown of disapproval. “Where did you go?” she demanded. “You didn’t leave a note or tell anyone anything. Were you walking the perimeter again? Caleb, baby, you’re hurt and you can’t—”

  Caleb smiled as he closed the distance between them, lips pressing softly against hers to silence the complaint. He cupped her cheeks with his hands as he pulled away. “I’m okay.”

  Mateo turned back to his work, humming as he wrapped corn husks around a fantastic smelling filling. But Elizabeth wasn’t swayed. She thumped Caleb gently on the chest with the back of her knuckles. “You can’t do that, Caleb. How’s your head? Any headaches? I can go to the hospital and ask for more pain meds. Are your stitches still fine? You have to keep them clean or you’re going to get an infection.”

  Behind her, Mateo gave a quiet chuckle.

  Caleb reached up and gently pried her hands away from the injury. “It’s fine, baby. We’re okay. I’m okay.”

  The few days they’d been in Springfield had certainly been better than any others since the impact, but tension still clung to all of them. Derek barely slept and spent most nights sitting up on watch. Lana cleaned her rifle four times since they’d arrived.

  Caleb himself was constantly hyper-vigilant. Each morning since they’d arrived, he’d walked the perimeter of the main settlement, looking for signs of forced entry or potential openings in the fences and walls that had been hastily erected around the place.

  That’s what the security corps was for, of course, and he’d seen them doing the job as well. But other than a few that looked like old pros, maybe retired cops, or military, most of the security patrol were in their twenties, maybe even younger in some cases. It’s what Springfield had to work with, but it didn’t inspire as much confidence as he liked.

  Elizabeth would settle in. It would just take some time. She rested a hand on his chest and stared into his eyes a moment before changing the subject. “Mateo says you’re planning to talk to Thurmond about the cell tower?”

  Happy for the change of subject, Caleb nodded. “We might be able to modify it for range. And Derek apparently found some tech guy who might be able to help with the laptop. We might have a lot more information, soon.”

  Elizabeth’s face fell slightly, but she covered with a quick nod and a forced smile. “Good. Everything we can learn is a positive.” She glanced at their housemate. “Thanks to Mateo, we’re making some makeshift tamales for lunch. A real, home-cooked meal for once. Make sure you’re back here by then. You need to eat.”

  Caleb caught Mateo smiling and rolled his eyes. “I’ll be here for lunch,” he promised. He kissed Elizabeth on the forehead. It would be naive to say that it felt safe here, but… it was a taste of normal, at least. A hint at their old life before the impact, and a quiet promise that it could go back to that or something like it one day. “I love you. Gotta get going.”

  She smiled up at him, and slipped her arms around his neck, pulling him down into a proper kiss as Mateo politely looked away. Before she let him go, she hugged him close and whispered in his ear, “Mateo and Vince are going to be gone tonight. Lana and Derek are planning to go read to the kids. We’ll have the place to ourselves for a bit. Just so you know…”

  Concussion or no, Caleb’s body ached for his wife just then. He licked his lips, the corner of his mouth twisting to a half grin. “I’ll be sure and get a shower,” he murmured. He kissed her again, a final time before she let him go and he took a step back. “Looking forward to those tamales, Mateo.”

  “We will make extra, hermano. Be safe out there. If you see Vince, tell him lunch is at one, too.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  The wry smile on Elizabeth’s face stayed with him as he left the house. Not normal, yet. But so much promise.

  Roger Thurmond hid what little hair sprouted from the top of his head with an ancient Yankee’s ball cap. Squat and a little hunched, Caleb had been surprised to hear he was Springfield’s communications guy. He looked like he’d been retired for a decade, at the very least, and not current on the latest technology. He was sharp, though, and proved it right away when Caleb first spoke with him about the nearby cell tower.

  “It was fitted with all the new 5G masts just about a month before the impact.” He pointed up at the patched, blocky equipment. “Course, it’s useless at this point, but the problem is, we don’t have the equipment to adapt it to long-range radio. 5G range is too short, so even if the install could be modified, we wouldn’t have the range we need.

  “Nearest real radio tower’s about ten miles away, northwest, and was picked clean early on. Now, Springfield’s not that big, but with no cell service, no Internet, no nothing, we’re limited to two-way radios. Worked fine at first, but now things are built up a little, there are blind spots. Places you can’t radio from.”

  Caleb nodded. While technically a radio tower, cell towers didn’t come set up to relay radio communications. It wasn’t an easy thing to change, especially if the tech wasn’t familiar with cell technology.

  “So you want the tower to link up all the radios in town.” Caleb made a mental list of what he could see from this distance. “Get rid of any blind spots. Of course, that makes the tower a point of vulnerability. Anyone takes it out, comms go down.”

  Thurmond shrugged, raising his hands helplessly. “Cap’n Sam can put a detail on it. But the alternative is putting more people at more checkpoints in town, and relaying messages. That, or build a new tower from scratch inside the walls. There’s a plan to expand out here, once we got the materials to get the wall out this far. Course, can’t do much about a military assault…”

  No, but then, Springfield wasn’t exactly up to the task of repelling a full-scale attack. Not from the US government, which it sounded like was a possibility—an alarming one that Caleb hadn’t believed was possible—or perhaps even from Apex. It wouldn’t take much to knock the tower out, whether it was inside the walls or not.

  Still, he saw Thurmond’s point. With a working tower picking up and relaying the radio signals from all around Springfield, the whole place would be more secure, even if that just meant being able to alert everyone to a breach or attack, or even something more mundane like a fire.

  And even if the tower was taken out, the sudden lack of communication would be an alert that reached everyone on a radio right away. Some protocol needed to be in place for that, he decided. That meant finding or building new radios as a backup system. And with very little materials for it.

  It was no small task. But… It was doable. More than that, it gave Caleb a sense that he could be useful in some immediate way. “I think we can get it working. I’ve done some mods like this before, but usually the other direction. Converting old radio towers into cell towers.”

  He thought it over. “Might need a supply trip to scrape up what we need, but most of it is more common than you’d think. Strip a couple of houses for wire… re-purpose the right camping gear for antennae, even, if we can find it. Copper pipe isn't ideal for an array, but if there’s enough of it and it’s the right gauge, it’ll do as well. Should be able to find some of that if there’s any structure nearby.”

  Thurmond took his hat off and scratched the top of his mostly bald head with the bill before tugging it back down. “That’d be helpful. Glad to have you here. I got a list of materials we’d need already, but… well, my knees make it rough to go out and scavenge like that. Good to have someone younger around I can trust to get the right stuff. So… you and the family settling in alright?”

  Caleb smiled as Thurmond started back to the car. He followed the old man. “Hard to say if we can feel ‘settled’ so quickly,” he admitted. “After all the time we spent on the road, dealing with one thing after another. But… more peaceful, at least, for the moment?”

  Thurmond grunted in understanding as he pulled the door to the beat-up old Volvo open. Most of the paint had been scraped off and it was missing both mirrors, as well.

  “It was like that for me at first, too.” The older man eased himself inside. “This feeling sticks with you. That it’s… not real. Or that it’ll only be real for a little while before something comes along and messes it all up. I still feel it, to be honest, and I was with Cap’n Sam and the Chief when they first locked the place down and got everyone working together. I don’t know that it goes away after something like this.”

  “You may be right.” Caleb fell into the passenger seat. He didn’t like to think of it, but even all these years later, some of his time in the Corps stuck with him. It was more distant now, easier to manage. He didn’t wake up from nightmares and hadn’t in a long while. But it was always there, like a ghost just behind his shoulder, or something moving in the corner of his eye.

  He eyed the gray sky through the windshield. Hard to say if it looked like rain. It always did, these days. This region had at least been spared the scouring acid rain that fell out east and in other places. Some trick of the geography, maybe. The mountains, he supposed.

  “I can’t shake the feeling there’s something already happening,” he said when Thurmond started the car and pulled away down the narrow dirt road that led back to Springfield. “Like it’s up there in the clouds, boiling away, just waiting to rain down on us and wash everything out.”

  Thurmond shot him a sad look. “Wish I could say that was just paranoia. But… truth is, that’s probably the reality. Best we can do is just get ready for it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  ELIZABETH

  Springfield, CO

  Monday July 30th, 10:00 am MST

  “Knock knock!”

  Elizabeth looked up from the tray of uncooked tamales, then glanced at Mateo, brow knit at the voice coming from the front of the house. It’s just a visitor, Elizabeth. Get a grip. Ever since the meteor impact, she’d been ping-ponging back and forth in an emotional rollercoaster of fear and grief and anger. She’d watched her daughter turn into a soldier overnight, murdered a man to protect her, and almost lost her husband. Now she was, what? Supposed to be a well-adjusted wife and mother again?

  At least she was trying. She ignored the knot of anxiety twisting in her stomach. “Are you expecting company?”

  Mateo shook his head, smiling for a moment before he seemed to really study her. “People just like to check in here.” His voice was reassuring. “It’s probably just someone from city hall coming to see if you’re comfortable. Here, I’ll take these. Unless you want me to see who it is?”

  When he reached for the tray, she handed it to him, suddenly embarrassed for tensing up at all. Anyone who might be a danger wouldn’t announce themselves. They’d just barge in with weapons drawn, or worse.

  She smoothed the makeshift apron she’d worn to keep her new-old clothes from getting stained with the chorizo they’d been handling all morning. A gift from Mateo. “No, no.” She exhaled the breath she’d started to hold. “I’ve got it. Just… jumping at shadows, is all.”

  He watched her go, and she felt it. It was kind—Mateo and Vince had both been entirely too patient and welcoming, to the point she was almost embarrassed about it—but it made her feel fragile for him to worry about her so much when they barely knew one another.

  Untying the apron out of habit at the possibility of company, she folded it around the stains on the front and draped it over the back of the old, torn-up sofa in the house’s common room on her way to the door.

  When she pulled the door open, all she could do for several seconds was stare.

  “Hello.” President Thomas Daniels smiled serenely as Elizabeth’s jaw fell open. “You must be Elizabeth? Or, is it Liz?”

  She closed her mouth, suddenly compelled to look over the man’s shoulder—the President’s shoulder—like this might be a mistake or a prank. “Either… is fine,” she offered, mystified. She’d seen him when they first arrived, of course. She knew he was here, in town, instead of… running the country. But to be face to face with him felt surreal. Wrong, even. “My friends… My friends call me Liz.”