Bell, exhausted, rolled off and watched Patty drag the body up and put the man’s face into the piss-filled toilet bowl, holding it under water with her knee. She walked her knees up on the man’s neck, holding him down until she realized he was dead. She watched the last few bubbles of air from the dead man’s lungs came up out of the piss water. Bell could see the white of Patty’s naked thighs, her pants still around her ankles, as she knelt on the man’s submerged head, toilet water leaking onto the floor.
“Dead,” Bell whispered.
She finally climbed off the man’s back and away from the body. She bent down and pulled up her wet pants. Bell put his index finger up to his lips in a signal for quiet. He picked up the pistol from the wet floor, sure one of the guards would come in after hearing the shots.
Patty finished buckling her belt. It was quiet, with only the sound of the water leaking from the toilet. Bell walked out to the room, planning to step outside and shoot it out with the guard.
Patty came to his side and grabbed his shoulder, stopping him. “No. Wait.”
“We can’t wait,” Bell said. “We’ve got to get out of here. Someone must have heard those shots.”
“Let me go first. They’ve seen me. They won’t react to me, maybe.”
Bell looked at her. “Okay,” he said.
“I’ll walk out. If more than one is out there, I’ll tell them they’d better come and check on their friend.”
They heard howling outside the hotel, coming from the pool area. Bell walked to the window overlooking the pool and saw several Howlers standing around the verge of the pool. Their ugly faces were lit by the pool’s underwater light.
The group was cut down in a hail of automatic-weapons fire. The guards in the hall had left to deal with the Howler attack, he realized.
“I have to find Ryder,” Bell said. “We need to find out where that helicopter is.”
“What about the girl—Rebecca?” Patty said.
“Okay,” Bell said. “We find her first.”
“She’s just down the hall,” Patty said. “We were kept together.” Bell nodded.
Patty walked out of the room. She ducked back inside almost immediately and motioned for him to follow her. The hallway was empty, but he felt sure they wouldn’t make it more than a few yards before being cut down.
Patty stopped in front of a room several doors down. She tried to open the door, but it was locked. She knocked softly but got no answer. She turned to look at Bell. He leaned against the wall, motioning her aside, and kicked the door in.
* * *
Senator Prince looked up from an Apple tablet computer where he was poring over military grade maps of the Sierra Nevada, using Google’s special top-secret web site reserved for Government contractors and NSA. Two of his guards escorted the blond girl he’d asked for, in just her underwear, into his tidy hotel suite. The senator dropped an electronic pin, with gusto, into the spot where Chuck Phelps’s cabin had been finally located.
The NSA had been especially interested in the place because it was considered one of the best doomsday forts in the Sierra. It had been the NSA’s idea to fund a “Doomsday Prepper” series on Cable TV as a way to get more data from unwitting would-be preppers who deluged the show’s web site with comments, photos, and requests to be on TV, all without raising suspicion. The government had about ninety percent of all the Level One strong houses in the country located, photographed, and monitored continuously by high altitude drones. Level One structures—many with bunker-type constructions below ground, like the Phelps Cabin, were at the top of the government’s list.
The doomsday preppers, as a class, had been put on a master list in order of importance. A sophisticated algorithm regularly updated the list of Level One sites, the ones Homeland Security thought worth taking over in the event of any insurrection. NSA scanned the Internet for any mention of key phrases or credit-card transactions. Anyone buying, say, an electric generator and freeze dried food, or ammunition, during the same credit-card billing cycle would be added to a list of possible doomsday preppers. Homeland Security would search the target’s email correspondence going back five years, while the NSA program compiled property records, credit card purchase records, photo records, voice and messaging records. A Homeland Security drone would fly over any sites, once identified to take photos, sometimes during construction. Rural properties, especially those built expressly as “forts”, and with adjoining farms, were ranked Level One.
NSA had shared its information with important government contractors, asking them to build a database of all the important doomsday prepper sites in the country. A private intelligence organization reported 10,000 of them, and had built the database. Google had worked closely with Stratford and NSA; the special Google/NSA map of the Sierras was marked with several electronic red pins, all Level One forts. A click on Google Earth revealed photographic details under each pin.
An NSA employee had deleted the Phelps site’s coordinates from the agency’s computer records, along with hundreds of other doomsday forts in California. The records had been part of an extensive database that listed all the Level One doomsday-preppers’ sites in the country, including Hawaii. But the talked-about Phelps strong house had been relocated and added back to the list.
Prince had decided to use the Phelps site as his headquarters during the campaign to clear the Sierra Nevada of Howlers. The provisional government being formed in Washington thought he would be safe there. The region’s other doomsday sites would serve as forts in the new government’s war against the Howlers.
Senator Prince had two satellite radios on the table. CNN was playing behind him on one of the room’s flat-screen televisions. CNN was broadcasting live feed from the destruction of Washington, DC by huge mobs of Howlers. Prince, however, knew something the reporters didn’t: the DC Howlers were fakes, a false flag using the Western states’ outbreak as the opportunity for a coup.
A helicopter pilot was providing dramatic voiceover. The news ticker at the bottom of the screen said that the White House had been abandoned, and that the President and his family had been airlifted safely to Camp David. Due to the extraordinary emergency, the anchorperson said, the President had declared martial law “until further notice.” The military would be providing “continuity of government,” according to the President, who’d spoken to the country via a radio hook up early that morning. There was no further message at this time, nor any kind of explanation of what had happened in several major American cities on the West Coast.
The military had ordered all radio and television networks to stop broadcasting and to carry only approved news. CNN had been designated the official voice of the “provisional government.” Newscasters were using this term to suggest that the U.S. constitution had been abrogated, but no one at CNN questioned any of the military’s press releases.
With the help of government contractors, Senator Prince was cobbling together something called the “New Freedom Army.” Forces within the government had been waiting for any kind of social disorder to allow them to spring into action with a secret plan to “save the republic.” The emergency was the excuse needed to take over the U.S. government and run America with the super-rich at the wheel. The Howler emergency had been just the kind of national emergency they’d been waiting for—in fact, hoping for.
The senator was in close communication with other important members of the secret government. The Provisional Government’s first priority was the formation of something called the “Steel Ring,” which would both protect them from any counter-coup and insure their personal safety from the Howlers—which were real, and a threat.