Some of Elizabeth’s guilt seemed to ease and she gave a reluctant nod. Lack of certainty bothered her. Always had.

  Jefferson City might be crawling with militia types, or Apex, or just a bunch of desperate people willing to do anything to try and survive. If they crossed the river, they could easily end up surrounded. If they stuck to this side, they could drive into more fires, or run out of supplies before they made it through the area.

  He motioned to a building not fully destroyed by fire. “Park behind here. Lana and I can scout ahead.” He smiled at his wife. “Give you and Derek a chance to rest.”

  Derek began to argue, but Lana chimed in. “Your wound needs to heal. Don’t push it.”

  He fell back against the seat, irritated, but not at her. Caleb kept a smile to himself. They were a good pair, even if he hated to admit it.

  After gearing up, they picked their way along the street, dipping into a neighborhood of blackened houses backed by a field of bare, burned trees, and what must have been a school. Caleb had never been to the capitol of Missouri, but he knew it was very green on the outskirts—or had been, before the fire came through. There were trees everywhere in the suburban area, giving the fire plenty of fuel.

  A half hour trek towards the city center and they’d only seen one or two buildings that had been miraculously spared. Both had been picked clean, probably well before the fire approached.

  But there were some signs that the city hadn’t emptied out after the fall. Like most big targets, there were a few meteor impacts evident, but nothing particularly large seemed to have come down here. Even burned out like they were, some of the houses still showed windows that had been boarded up, and garages now exposed that had clearly been full of supplies. Little had survived, but this was a place where people had hunkered down for a while, at least.

  Here and there, husks of vehicles still had gas tanks open where someone searched for fuel. Whether they’d managed to recover any infrastructure was impossible to say. What was clear from the things left behind, though, was that people had vacated quickly once the fire turned their direction.

  Lana spoke up as if reading his mind. “When there’s no good way forward, what do you do?”

  It was nice to be asked for advice. Was she trying to figure out ways to be more thoughtful and less impulsive? He hoped so. “Like most things, you assess, and then pick the option with the lowest risk or the highest reward.”

  She mulled his answer for a moment. “So, for us, sticking to this side of the river is the option with the least risk—no people, only mother nature to deal with. But crossing is the highest reward because we’re more likely to find supplies.”

  “The range of choices usually isn’t so black and white, but in this case, that’s about the size of it.”

  “What about when it’s more complicated?”

  Caleb frowned slightly, memories drifting up to the surface of his mind as he considered the best way to answer. A breeze brought them a cloud of smoke swept between two charred houses, and for a moment neither of them spoke as they drew their jackets up to cover their mouths and noses until it passed.

  “Sometimes, your best choice is the one that means the fewest number of people are at risk. But even when you can’t avoid the risks—when every option in front of you means someone might get hurt—you weigh which risks come with the best reward and figure out how to minimize the risks the best you can. A lot of the time, if you take the time to plan it out, there’s a way.”

  “And sometimes there’s not?”

  He sighed. “Sometimes there’s not.”

  “What do you do when that happens?”

  Caleb stopped walking and turned to face her. His daughter’s expression was pained, and a deeper meaning to the conversation hit him. “You know, I’m not going anywhere.”

  Her lips thinned, and she looked away from him and down the ruined street for a moment. “I know you aren’t. Or... I know you’re going to do your best not to. But you can’t promise that. And I know Derek probably knows this stuff, too, but I don’t want to have to rely on him. I’m sorry I drove through the fire without stopping first. I thought I was making the right decision.”

  “You did. It was the right call, Lana. Really. If we’d taken the time to talk it through, we probably would have agreed.” Caleb reached out and touched her shoulder. “Remember that tree? The one that nearly fell on us?”

  She nodded.

  “If we’d waited, that tree would have already fallen by the time we got there. We’d have had to back track, or figure out a way to move it, or... Well, my point is, sometimes you can minimize your losses and make the best plan possible with what you’ve got, but about half of any successful strategy is just blind luck. Everyone in the right place at the right time, with the right set of circumstances to make it all work out. There’s no amount of planning that can account for that. At the end of the day, the best plan can sink or swim based on things you can’t possibly control.”

  Lana was quiet a moment, then moved toward him quickly and put her arms around him. He smiled, folded her in his arms, and held her for a moment, keeping one eye on the street. He kissed the top of her head where she pressed her cheek to his chest.

  He couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt, even for a moment, like his little girl again. But there was a fierce kind of attachment in the hug, maybe even desperation. Like she was worried it would be the last time.

  As much as he wanted to know she could make it on her own—though he hoped she’d never have to before all of this was over—it felt good to think that maybe she still needed him as much as she had when she was little.

  The moment passed, though, as Lana withdrew and cleared her throat. “We’re losing daylight.” She waved her rifle toward the far end of the street and the city center. “We should get moving.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Lana snorted quietly, shook her head, and headed off at a trot just a little faster than Caleb could easily keep up with, slowing only when there was some distance between them. Maybe she needed a bit of space to think about whatever was going on in her head.

  He couldn’t help but think that part of it was preparing herself for the day when he was no longer with her.

  “No activity that we could find,” Lana reported when they returned to the car. “We scouted in pretty far. I think anyone left here ditched the place when the fire came. We checked a few places, found no running water—probably they realized they couldn’t fight the fire.”

  “The whole city?” Derek wondered. “I mean, that’s good for us, but...”

  “But an empty small town makes easy sense,” Caleb agreed, filling in what was written on Derek’s face. “A place this size, it seems a little strange, right?”

  Derek shrugged. “Jefferson City wasn’t that big to begin with, but yeah. It’s a little strange.”

  “St. Louis isn’t that far,” Lana pointed out, tracing a line on the map from where they were to the larger city. “Could be most of them took off that direction at the start of things? And then the rest left when the fire came?”

  “Could be,” Caleb agreed. “Either way, it’s better for us if there’s no one here. Getting across the bridge should be easy enough, assuming it didn’t get hit in the first showers. So, we cross here?”

  He looked at his wife, who still wore a look of reservation. Elizabeth stared at the map as though it would answer some question she had. At length, though, she sighed. “I have a bad feeling. But maybe I’m just nervous about the city. If you two didn’t see anyone, I guess there’s nothing organized to worry about. Still... I can’t shake it.”

  At this point, after striking out twice and seeing Greensboro devolve into chaos, cities made Caleb nervous as well. But in this case, at least, he was pretty sure that was all it was. “Most of the roads around the city center are clear. If we get part of the way in and things look dicey, we can always turn back and stick to this side. I’ll let Lana drive, and if we have to bolt, I’m pretty sure no one would catch up with us.”

  Lana rolled her eyes but smiled all the same.

  Elizabeth sighed in resignation and seemed to shake off her nerves. “I’m sure you’re right.” She glanced up at the sky. “It’ll be dark soon. If we’re going, we should go.”

  Caleb agreed, so the four of them piled in with him at the wheel. He’d been joking about letting Lana drive. She’d made an impressive show of getting through the border of the wildfire, but in the event they were suddenly under fire, he preferred to be the one to get them out of it or at least to get them into cover.

  The chances seemed slim, but then so did a US General trying to conquer the southeast United States and a bloodthirsty compound of end-times fanatics, until they’d come across them. At this point, Caleb had begun to expect the crazy and unlikely. It seemed safer that way.

  The drive in was easy enough; easier than the hike had been, certainly, and not the least because they didn’t have as much smoke to contend with in the confines of the SUV. They took the path that Caleb and Lana had taken in, sticking to streets and roads they already knew were clear of debris and obstacles.

  By the time they’d made their way carefully into the main city, it looked as though they were in the clear. No sign of people at all, if there were any still there, and nothing so disastrous that they had to find a way around. It began to seem like their initial worries had been for nothing.

  Until they reached the bridge.

  The bridge itself was part of the highway, and to get onto it they took the ramp from Main Street. At first, it looked promising. No cars clogged the entrance, and from their vantage point, it appeared intact across the river. Caleb drove onto it with the lights off in case someone had set up camp amid all the steel and concrete to avoid the fire. They made it about a quarter of the way across without trouble.

  “Stop,” Elizabeth said. Quietly at first, and then more urgently as she reached for Caleb’s arm. “Caleb, stop—look.”

  He hit the brakes as he squinted into the darkness for some sign of what she was seeing. “Liz, I don’t see... oh.”

  Caleb had been looking for people, or a trap, or lights. It took a second to see what had gotten Elizabeth’s attention. It was a toppled line of barriers, one of which was angled so that they could see the text printed on the side.

  Apex Security Forces Checkpoint.

  He muttered out a curse and twisted around to look out the back window as he put the SUV into reverse. “They must have withdrawn from this side when the fire came through. They could be on the other end. It’s fine; they can’t have seen us; we’ll just go back the way we came. There’s another bridge to the north, we can take that and—”

  Before he could finish, or even get the SUV as far back as the end of the bridge, lights cut across the dark. Not car lights, but just as bad. Worse, even. Swaying quickly in the darkness, the ends of flashlights bobbed along the walkway that bordered their side of the bridge, unmistakably attached to the ends of rifles.

  One at a time, they pointed in their direction. A second later, a woman’s voice came over a megaphone. “This is Field Marshall Victoria Steen with Apex Security. Please exit your vehicle peacefully. You are surrounded.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  LANA

  Jefferson City, MO

  Thursday, July 19th, 7:11 pm CST

  “There are a lot of them, Dad.” Her father stiffened in the front seat as he put the SUV in reverse. Lana chewed on her lip. “Are you sure we can back out?”

  The talk he’d given her about how to assess risk, how to determine whether it was worth it or not, seemed relevant just then. Maybe they could make it back down the highway in reverse, and possibly speed away before they had to risk some confrontation, but the old SUV wasn’t bullet proof.

  Even if a bullet didn’t hit one of them, it could easily wreck the engine, or blow a tire. And if that happened and they were pinned down, there was no telling what the reaction would be. Was Apex in the business of executing people over non-compliance? Were they guarding a border here of some kind?

  “Caleb,” Elizabeth murmured, reaching over to touch his arm, “we have to be careful.”

  He bowed his head and shook it slowly. “We should have checked out the bridge, gotten a close-up look. Damn it.”

  They had gotten a good look at it, just before dark. There hadn’t been any signs of Apex in the area, though they’d seen evidence that at some point the bridge had been closed. Then again, it had been strange to find no one in the city.

  Maybe this was why. Apex had been here, rounded people up, moved them somewhere else. The fact was, other than knowing Apex was registering people and establishing ‘hubs’—whatever those were—they knew very little about them or what they were doing. Not in specifics, anyway.

  Lana leaned forward between the two front seats, her voice low. “This might not be so bad. If they’re like that other group, just trying to get people registered and sending them to nearby hubs, this could be a chance to ask some questions and find out more. We can play it nice, tell them we’ve been looking for safety. It’s the lowest risk option with the highest reward.”

  He glanced at her, and some of the irritation melted from his expression. “So, you do listen, huh?”

  She shrugged a shoulder and forced an unconcerned grin, even if she wasn’t feeling it. “When you’ve got something good to say, old man.”

  “What’s the order, sir?” Derek asked.

  Caleb sighed, glanced around them at the approaching flashlights, and then slowly took his hands from the wheel and turned off the ignition. He looked at Lana in the rear-view mirror. “Play it like Lana said. We’re looking for safety. Derek and I are already registered. We found the two of you, you were visiting family out west when the fall happened. We came out this way looking for you. If they’ve got notes that Derek and I were alone, that’ll help explain the discrepancy. Everything else—just tell them the truth. There are too many details we might get wrong.”

  “And if it sounds like a good deal?” Elizabeth wondered.

  Lana frowned at her. “What, going to their Apex hub or town or... corporate slave camp or something?”

  Her mother’s jaw tightened briefly. “If we find out it’s not a slave camp,” she qualified. “If it sounds like it could be safe, though? If we could finally get off the road and settle back down and try to get back to normal? What then?”

  Lana started to tell her the many reasons that wouldn’t happen, but Caleb spoke before she could. “Then we’ll all discuss it. They’re getting close. We’ll figure it out after, okay? Everyone just be as easy as possible. We don’t want to find out what happens if we get in trouble with these people.”

  They all climbed out of the SUV slowly and left their weapons inside. Hands up, they waited outside their closed doors as some of the Apex people peeled away from one group and approached them. The woman that spoke up was the same one who’d been on the speaker. “Any of you have DIDs on you?”

  Caleb responded for them. “DID? Is that the Apex ID? Dimension?”

  “It is.” The woman eased closer as she surveyed them all. Her eyes lingered on Lana for several seconds before returning to Caleb. “Have you been registered? You’re currently in Apex managed territory, on a restricted access road.”

  Managed. What exactly did that mean? The woman was clad in a full tactical outfit, black from collar to boots except for the blue and white Apex logo visible on the upper arms of her jacket. A rifle slung across her chest, the same model as the men from the chicken farm. Some kind of automatic sub-machine gun, maybe? It looked high-tech.

  So did everything about her, from the earpiece she wore, to the sleek tactical helmet with a thin covering over her eyes that had a slight glow to it. Maybe a heads-up display? If Lana had been right about Apex being an Alan Trusk operation, it looked as though he’d outfitted his people with the most advanced tech at his disposal.

  Which, in some distant part of her mind, made her wonder if he’d always had his fingers in military tech development. Or if he’d just always been on the verge of outfitting a small army with proprietary equipment he didn’t even share with the military. None of those questions seemed like they were about to be answered, though.

  Her father spoke up, his hands still raised. “I don’t have my ID, but I’ve been registered. So has he.” He gestured at the other side of the SUV toward Derek. “But my wife and daughter haven’t been. We just reunited recently.”

  The woman looked them over again. Her eyes were slightly obscured by the visor on her helmet, and it made it difficult for Lana to see what her expression really said. She felt examined, though. Assessed, or evaluated for something unspoken.

  After a moment, the field marshal’s shoulders seemed to relax marginally—just a hair, but she had clearly been expecting resistance. “You’re lucky, then,” she told Caleb. “I’m Victoria Steen, a field marshal for Apex Security. What are your names? And you two,” she leaned and waved Elizabeth and Derek over, “come around here.”

  As each of them introduced themselves, Victoria’s eyes flicked around behind her visor. After, she gave a nod. “Caleb Machert,” she said, as if reading. “You were registered south of here. How did you make it north? The fire’s spread pretty far, you’d have had to drive through it to get here. Why didn’t you head to Lebanon as instructed?”

  Lana’s father hesitated in answering, and her pulse quickened. Before he could manage to come up with an explanation, she answered for him. “Me and my mom were in Freeburg.” She grabbed the first town name she could remember from road signs on their way north. “When the first showers happened, I mean. Visiting some cousins. We figured if we stayed put, Dad would come and find us. And he did.”

  Again, the field marshal’s eyes flicked across her visor. It was definitely a screen. What was she reading, though? “Freeburg was designated a class B disaster,” she remarked. “Very lucky the two of you made it. It seems all of you have been remarkably fortunate. Mind if we have a look inside your vehicle?”