Jack Archer (Book 3): Year Zero Read online

  She sighed, dropping the phone to the table. “Stupid piece of crap. Jack must be out of range.”

  “That must be it.” Ramos gave her a sympathetic smile. “Or maybe his battery ran out.”

  Karen shot him a sidelong glance, and under her steely gaze Ramos grabbed the spoon and poked at the ice cream. He didn’t want to look her in the eye, and it wasn’t hard to see why. She knew what he was thinking.

  If he’s even still alive.

  “Just say it, Doc.”

  Ramos scooped a spoonful and let it fall back into the tub. “Say what?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Karen snapped, snatching the spoon from his hand. “If you think he’s dead, just say it.”

  “Dead?” Ramos sighed, and before he answered he took a moment to compose his thoughts. Finally he laid his hand on her shoulder and looked her straight in the eye. “Karen,” he said, “I’ve known Jack since he was a first year resident, and hand to God I’ve never met a more stubborn, tenacious, bloody minded pain in the ass in all my years in medicine. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s hell out there, and he has a lot of miles to cover if he’s going to make it back to us, but I know this for sure. If there’s one guy who could make it halfway across the country while nukes are blowing up around him it’s Jack Archer. He cares too much to even think about giving up. That man would walk through fire if Emily was on the other side.”

  Karen felt tears prick at her eyes, and when Ramos spoke again she struggled to hold them back.

  “He’d walk through fire for you, too.” Ramos began to blush. It was clear he was out of his comfort zone, but he forced himself to go on. He could see that she needed to hear this. “He never stopped loving you, Karen. Not for a minute. Not even when things got really bad. When I spoke to him yesterday I could hear the love in his voice. I didn't have to ask him to come home.”

  Karen clutched the phone tighter, fighting to keep her lip from wobbling. She knew she’d burst into tears if she let her guard down.

  “So no, I don’t think he’s dead,” Ramos continued. “I think he’s running just as fast as he can to get back to the two of you, and when he hears from you it’ll only make him run harder. Send him a message. If he still has his phone he’ll find a way to read it.”

  “What should I say?” Karen asked, her voice trembling as she fought to hold back her emotions.

  “Tell him…” Ramos scratched at the thick gray stubble sprouting on his cheeks. “Tell him we’ll meet him at the safe zone. Send him to Truckee. Tell him his girls are waiting for him there.” He squeezed her shoulder and gave her a reassuring smile. “Tell him you love him.”

  Karen nodded, wiping a tear from her cheek as she looked down at the phone, and with a shuddering breath she began to type.

  ΅

  CHAPTER FOUR

  48 MILES TO TRUCKEE

  THE MILES SEEMED to pass beneath the wheels in a blur.

  For the past hour Jack had been fighting to keep his attention fixed on the road ahead. He struggled to keep his eyes from wandering back to the cell phone resting on the dash, but each time the winding ribbon of asphalt straightened out before him he succumbed to the temptation. He just couldn’t help but steal another glance at the words that had sent his heart thumping a samba rhythm the moment he’d seen them.

  On any other day he’d drive at a cautious crawl on a treacherous road like this, a series of tight switchbacks high in the Sierra Nevadas. He’d usually drive with one foot hovering over the brake, muttering under his breath at suicidal drivers as they roared by on blind hairpin bends. A whispered prayer would never be far from his lips as he hugged the shoulder, keeping as far as possible from the dizzying drop on the far side of the road.

  But not today. Today he urged the stolen police cruiser onward ever faster, his foot glued to the gas pedal. Even when he reached the tight hairpin turns he kept going at breakneck speed, touching the brake only as an occasional afterthought, veering out so close to the steel barrier that he could reach out and touch it. Still he wanted to go faster, and the throaty V8 growled its eager encouragement.

  A brief straight appeared at the end of a broad, sweeping curve, and without a second thought Jack grabbed his phone from the dash and tapped back to the message, staring at the screen as if he still didn’t quite believe it was real.

  Me+Em+Doc heading to safe zone in Truckee. We’re safe. Can you meet us there? Please tell us where you are.

  We both love you so, so much xxx

  Please come home to us.

  K

  As soon as he’d seen the message on the way out of Plumas Creek he’d felt every last muscle in his body relax. He hadn’t realized just how tightly wound the fear had left him, how on edge he’d been, not knowing whether Karen and Emily were alive or dead. When he saw those words he’d felt a wave of excitement rush through his body, and without thinking he’d stepped on the gas and sent the cruiser surging forward.

  And then something else had happened, something he’d never expected at his age. As he played the words over in his head he discovered that in the blink of an eye he regressed to the state of an anxious lovestruck teen. He’d pulled the cruiser to the side of the road, clicked away and opened the first message Karen had sent, comparing the two with forensic obsession while Cathy protested from the back seat.

  Love you

  We both love you so, so much xxx

  He’d pored over that first message a thousand times over the last twenty four hours, wondering if Karen had written those words with genuine love or just out of habit, a muscle memory hangover after years of marriage. For hours he’d tortured himself with the possibilities of those words, poking at them like a tongue against a loose tooth.

  And now it looked as if he finally had an answer. The second message seemed unambiguous. Karen hadn’t typed those words absently. They weren’t just a meaningless pleasantry.

  She still loves you.

  The thought of it had plastered a delirious grin on his face. It had been more than a year since the night he’d packed his bags and left the family home. A year since that last argument, the straw that broke the camel’s back, when Karen brought Emily home from school and found Jack slumped on the sofa in the basement, an empty bottle of scotch and loose Percocet scattered across the floor beside him. He’d only been half conscious as she yelled at him, staring at her through glazed eyes, but he’d sobered up when he saw the look on her face. When he saw her flip that mental switch as she made the decision that ended their marriage.

  I can’t afford to love you any more. It’s killing me.

  Every moment since then he’d felt as if there were a wall standing between him and his family, ten feet thick and a hundred tall, impossible to breach. He thought he was cursed to spend the rest of his life standing out in the cold while his little girl was raised in the warm glow of her mother’s love, a love he’d so selfishly rejected as he indulged himself in pity and drank to silence the guilt and shame.

  But now… now for the first time he thought he could see a chink of light break through that wall.

  He’d feverishly tapped out a response, pouring out his heart in a few dozen characters. He’d barely been able to control his excitement, ignoring Cathy as she yelled at him to get moving, but when he hit send it had only taken a few seconds for the message to bounce back.

  Delivery failed.

  He’d tried again and again, first tapping the screen and then angrily stabbing at it, but each time the phone kicked back the same maddening error message as the signal indicator wavered between a single bar and zero. Even when he wheeled the cruiser around and drove back to the exact spot the message had come through the phone refused to cooperate. It was as if they’d passed through a magical sweet spot, a shifting square inch of air where the signal was just strong enough to carry a message, but when Jack tried to find it again it eluded him, like an itch that came from deep beneath the skin where searching fingernails couldn’t reach it.
/>   An hour had passed since then, and Jack still couldn’t help but stare at the screen every couple of minutes, praying for a signal to appear.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  The question hung in the air for a long moment before Jack realized it had been directed at him.

  “Huh? Sorry, what was that?” He grabbed hold of the rear view mirror and angled it towards the back seat. Cathy lay curled up with Boomer against the door, grabbing some much needed sleep after her night outdoors. Beside her Garside leaned forward between the front seats, gazing out the windshield at the pine forest that whipped by on either side of the road.

  “I said it’s quite beautiful, isn’t it? The view, I mean.”

  He took a deep breath and let out a long, peaceful sigh, and Jack flinched away from the smell of whiskey on his breath. Cathy had added a more than generous splash to the cup of gas station coffee they’d poured down his throat back when they’d stopped back in Greenville, and it seemed to have done the trick. Gone was the shocked, trembling shell of a man who replayed over and over the moment he'd killed the sheriff. Now Garside seemed like a new man, serene and at peace, and since he’d grabbed the bottle and continued to drink in the car he’d become ever more at peace as the journey continued. Perhaps a little too much.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s pretty damned beautiful,” Jack agreed, though he’d barely noticed the scenery as he split his attention between the phone and the road.

  “You know, I had no idea your country could look so bloody spectacular,” Garside smiled, shaking his head in wonder at the endless pine forest that climbed from the shadows of the deep gorges to the peaks that towered above them. “Back home… back home we think we know America. Most of us only know about it through movies and TV shows, and I think a lot of us come away with the impression that your entire country is… I don’t know, just a bunch of scary rednecks in small towns and sarcastic liberals in the cities. Fast food and fat people as far as the eye can see. I know that’s what I thought before I came here.”

  “Well thanks, Doug,” Jack grimaced, shying away from the pungent odor of whiskey. “You really know how to flatter a patriot.”

  “No, no, that’s not what I mean,” Garside slurred. “I mean we just get a strange, skewed snapshot of your country that doesn’t look anything like reality. We get our heads filled with that nonsense and we think it’s real.”

  He sighed again, resting his chin on the head rest in front of him, a peaceful, slightly soused smile plastered across his face. “But then we see a place like this. These mountains. That sky. Good Lord, I see a view like this and suddenly I understand why you people wave your flags so much. Did you ever see anything quite so beautiful?”

  Jack looked out on the scenery, really seeing it for the first time. The bright sunlight shining from a crisp, clear blue sky gave the sprawling pine forest a rich emerald sheen. As the road curved around a rocky outcrop a swift, narrow river came into view far below, white water churning at the foot of a gorge, working its way between immovable boulders as it searched for lower ground. Far above their heads a brace of eagles swooped around each other in slow, stately arcs, searching for prey in the forest clearings below. It looked like the kind of place where taking a single deep breath of the crisp, clean air would cure any illness. It really was picture postcard beautiful.

  “Twice,” he muttered, looking back on a distant memory. “I’ve only seen beauty like this twice before.”

  Jack glanced in the rear view, and he smiled at Garside’s questioning expression.

  “My kids,” he explained. “The day they were born. Nothing compares to the first time you see them. It’s just… I can’t describe the feeling. Looking down at this perfect little thing and thinking Jesus… I made this. Takes your breath away, and you don’t ever really get it back.”

  “Ah, yes,” smiled Garside, “I know that feeling well.” He tipped the whiskey back, wincing as it burned his throat. “Until that moment comes you can’t really understand what your heart is for.”

  Jack was surprised. “You have kids?” For some reason he hadn’t imagined Doug as a parent. Hadn’t even considered the possibility that there might be a whole family of Garsides back home.

  “Oh, I’ll say. We have three, two girls and a boy. Well, I suppose I should say two women and a man now. Our youngest flew the coop last year, down to London to either follow her dreams or work at Pret a Manger, whichever takes the least effort.”

  He paused for a moment, gazing at the whiskey with a sigh before he continued, his tone suddenly maudlin. “To be honest I think Brenda and I have been at something of a loose end since they left. It’s hard to adjust to an empty nest after so many years, you know? Hard to walk through the house and find it silent after a couple of decades of laughter and tears. I suppose that’s why we made this trip, now I think about it. Just… just trying to fill the time.” He moved to take another swig from the bottle, and suddenly froze. “Good Lord, where are my manners?” He thrust the open bottle over the seat, tapping it against Jack’s shoulder. “Care for a nip?”

  “I’m good, thanks,” Jack replied, turning his head and holding his breath to avoid the smell. “Not while I’m driving. I want to keep a clear head.”

  He’d just blurted out the first refusal that came to mind, but as soon as he spoke the words he realized they were true. He was good. In fact, he was better than he’d been in as long as he could remember. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d turned down a drink.

  He didn’t want to kid himself. Sure, he’d love nothing more than to pull over and drain the bottle, to escape into that wonderful and terrible oblivion for a few hours. He knew there wasn’t a simple switch he could flip to turn off the cravings. He knew he’d have a lifetime of temptation ahead of him, and he had no idea if he’d always be able to find the strength to resist, but right now he felt a pull in the other direction, and it was a thousand times stronger than the pull of the bottle.

  It was coming from his phone. He reached out and tapped it, awaking the screen to flash its message of hope. The tether pulling him back to his past, and towards one possible future.

  We both love you so, so much xxx

  “What about you?”

  “Hmmm?” Jack half turned to Garside, still resting his chin on the passenger seat.

  “Your kids. I’m guessing you’re not old enough to have turfed them out of the house yet?”

  “Oh. No, they’re still little. Emily’s seven. Well, she’d want me to tell you she’s seven and three quarters.” He grinned. “Her mom started teaching her fractions a little while ago, and now she insists. Robbie…” He paused for a moment. He didn’t want to have this conversation again. “Robbie’s six. The most beautiful little angel you could ever imagine. Always smiling.”

  “And you and their mother, you’re not… you’re not together?” Garside screwed the cap back on the bottle and slipped it into the pocket in the back of the driver’s seat. “Sorry, I don’t mean to pry. I just got the impression that maybe you were…”

  “Yeah, we’re divorced. Long story. I wasn’t the greatest husband those last couple of years. Wasn’t a very good father, either. I took a few wrong turns, and then a few more, and before I knew it… well, I guess I found myself somewhere I didn’t want to be.”

  Garside patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry to hear that, Jack.”

  “Thanks, Doug.” Jack squinted out at the road. Up ahead was a junction, and as they drew closer he saw two signposts: Marysville 60 miles to the right, Truckee 48 to the left. He swung the wheel and sent the cruiser left.

  “I don’t want to jinx it,” he said, pressing his foot hard on the gas, “but after all this time I think I’ve finally remembered the way home.”

  Forty eight miles to Karen and Emily. With a full tank of gas and a following wind, even on these slow, winding roads they were no more than an hour from the safe zone. An hour from wrapping his arms around his little girl and neve
r letting go. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself, but maybe an hour away from a future he thought was gone forever. Tonight he wouldn’t be sleeping alone in a hotel room far from home. He wouldn’t wake up hungover with the other half of the bed ice cold. He’d be with his family for the first time in… God, more than a year? The longing felt like a fist squeezing his heart.

  For the first time in a long time Jack felt something he thought had abandoned him long ago. Hope. In the middle of all this horror, in amongst all the death and destruction, he felt like a bright beacon of optimism. Even now he could see the future roll out ahead of him. When they reached the safe zone Garside could contact the zones east of Los Angeles and track down his wife. Maybe – God willing she survived the attack – they could arrange for her to be sent further inland. Maybe they could all travel east together, back to a part of the country where life was still going on. Where they could find shelter and start to rebuild. Maybe they could—

  “Jack, do you hear that?”

  “Huh?” Garside’s voice pulled Jack from his reverie. “What did you say?”

  “Listen.” Doug held up a hand. “Is it just me, or do you hear a horn?”

  Jack tilted his head. For a moment he could only hear the shrill whistle of wind through the narrowly opened window beside him, but then he caught it at the very edge of his hearing. A long, insistent honk sounded in the distance, and it only grew louder as he rolled the window fully down.

  “Is that ahead of us or behind?” he asked, shifting the rear view to get a better angle out the back window. “Do you see anything?”

  “No, I…” Garside twisted in his seat, peering out the rear windshield as the cruiser turned around a switchback. “Wait! Yes, I caught a glimpse of something behind us just before we went round that bend. A pickup truck or a van, I think. Something big, anyway. Looked like it was taking up half the road.”