A light flashed behind Dakota’s eyes. “That’s what Uncle Roger always hoped for. He had a room at the back of his house and sometimes I’d hear him in there talking. He had one of those old-school radio thingies. You know, the ones with the wires and the mic.”
“A shortwave?” Nate asked, turning in the saddle, his eyes intense and staring right at her.
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
“What was his call sign?”
“Call sign?”
“His nickname over the radio. His moniker.”
“Oh, I thought it was Ranger, but I was wrong. He called himself Renegade.”
Nate snorted with a burst of laughter.
“Why are you laughing? I’m telling the truth,” Dakota said, sounding defensive.
“I know you are. I spoke to your uncle the day after the lights went out. He left me with the impression that he was very knowledgeable.”
“He is. You know, he wasn’t a mean drunk at all. I guess the booze meant he wasn’t very…” She looked up, scanning for the right word.
“Resilient?” Nate inquired.
“No, dependable. I was sent to foster homes not long after. Try being bounced between every small town in a fifty-mile radius. Landed in one house where the husband liked to let his hands wander, if you know what I mean. Tried to put his thumb in my mouth and I bit down hard enough to hear the bone crunch. Another family would send me around to babysit and steal the money I earned. And if I tried to fight back, they’d keep me locked in my room without food or water for hours. The last family I was with, they weren’t cruel, not in the same way. All they wanted was the government check. And when the lights went out, they skipped out faster than green grass through a goose.”
Nate’s eyes widened. “They left you behind?”
Dakota nodded, the corner of her mouth turned down in an ‘are you really all that surprised?’ kinda look. “I woke up to find myself alone. On the kitchen counter was a note telling me to get myself to Rockford.”
“Wow, that’s cold.”
“If the government was done paying, they were done caring, I suppose. They had a crap car for winter. I’d hear the man—Greg was his name—complaining about not having enough to buy a new one. A Nissan hatchback or maybe it was a Honda.” She pointed at a passing snow mound. “Anyway. Wouldn’t surprise me if it was them under one of these frozen heaps.”
An image of the dead boy sticking out of the snow drift flashed before Nate’s eyes. In normal times, the melting snows in springtime might only reveal a mountain of dog turds. But he had a sinking feeling the next spring something far more ghastly than turds would litter the streets and sidewalks.
“I had been up for a grand total of three minutes,” Dakota went on, using her hand to block a sudden gust of cold wind, “still trying to figure out whether or not I was being pranked, when I heard the door open. Only it wasn’t my foster parents come back to get me. It was my foster mother’s lowlife brother, Marvin.”
“Marvin,” Nate repeated, his expression a mask of distaste.
“Came in with three of his lowlife friends and grabbed me along with a few of my things and threw me in a cage. Then you showed up and put two in his chest.”
Sudden understanding flashed on Nate’s face. Marvin was the guy he had nicknamed Ugly. “Did you ever find out what they’d intended to do with you?” he asked, not entirely sure he wanted to hear the answer.
Mercifully, Dakota shook her head. “I heard them talking about a guy they worked for. Someone named Jakes. Left me with the distinct impression they were going to try to sell me.”
“That won’t happen,” Nate assured her. “Not as long as I’m around.” He would have liked to have said she believed him. But he also understood getting bounced around from one foster home to another had a habit of eroding a person’s faith in their fellow man much the way water could eat into a cliffside. Once gone, it was darn well impossible to get it back.
“I hope we never need to test that promise,” she said, thoughtfully.
“It took guts to come clean,” Nate told her. “That’s quite a life you’ve had. I don’t blame you for not wanting to share the full truth.” He tried to grin, but his frozen lips refused to budge. “Looking down the barrel at my fortieth, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’ve done a few things I’m not terribly proud of. Most of it’s just stuff a person has to deal and get on with. That’s life, right? But there’s one that I can’t shake. Something big I can’t help feeling responsible for.”
“Please tell me you didn’t pull the wrong switch and shut the power off by mistake.” She looked annoyed and that made Nate laugh.
“No, hackers did that. No doubt very skillful ones too. What I’m getting at is that I feel responsible for the meltdown.”
“Responsible how? Do you work there?”
“I did for a number of years. I was in charge of cyber-security. It was my job to spot potential vulnerabilities and plug those holes before the bad guys could exploit them. When I discovered that the Byron plant’s anti-hacking protocols were lacking, I tried to address it, but the company wouldn’t let me.”
“How on earth is that your fault?”
“The weight might not rest entirely on my shoulders, but I can feel it pressing down nonetheless. It happens whenever I see a dead body. It happened at the farmhouse too when Harold started coughing up blood. I could have done more. Gone to the local news station maybe. I don’t know. Somehow, I should have forced the company’s hand, even if doing so would have meant getting sued into oblivion.”
“You’re talking about a suicide mission,” Dakota said, compassion filling her young face. “Guys like that can sue you for everything you’re worth. Leave you and your family penniless. If your only choice is a kamikaze mission, that’s not really a choice. You see what I mean? All of that blood is on the hands of the people who refused to listen. I say that as I sit here on Sundae’s hard, incredibly uncomfortable saddle, freezing my butt off. You did everything any reasonable person could be expected to do. You’re not the bad guy in all this. The jerks who hacked in and shut everything down, they’re the ones who will need to answer for what they’ve done.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he told her, feeling a little more convinced. “It’s our job to survive long enough to rebuild what we once knew.”
Dakota held the pommel with both hands and straightened her back. “Or maybe something better.”
Chapter 30
They were a little better than halfway to Rockford when the light began to fade.
“We’ll need to stay out overnight,” Nate told her. “Give the horses a chance to recover and hopefully catch some shut-eye ourselves.”
Dakota scanned their surroundings. “You have something in mind?”
“Well, I figured we could dig out one of these cars and use them as shelter. Assuming, of course, it’s empty.” His comment had a gallows quality he hadn’t intended.
“What about Sundae and Wayne? We can’t just leave them on the road.”
Nate pointed to the deep snow. “They won’t get hit by a car, if that’s what you’re worried about. Nothing short of a main battle tank could make it through a dumping this heavy.”
“I think I have a better idea,” she said, her gaze wandering to the forest that stretched along this part of the highway.
After considering it for a moment, he quickly concluded that if her idea proved to be a waste of time, they could always come back and camp out in one of the abandoned vehicles.
They veered off the path, leading the horses up a small incline and into a cluster of trees. The snow here was untouched and much deeper. The horses grunted as they struggled to place one hoof in front of the other. Fifteen yards in, they reached a small clearing. Dakota pulled Sundae to a stop. “This is where we’ll build it,” she said enigmatically.