Winter's Edge: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (Outzone Drifter Series Book 1) Read online

  “The smaller houses come and go,” Cole warned Brogan. “Stick to the bigger ones like Zhiglov’s, or risk holding some fancy toilet paper in your wallet.”

  All cooking, lighting, and transport used portable fuels: bottled natural gas, diesel, and kerosene. In the cities, generators powered the larger establishments at night while the smaller ones used simple kerosene lanterns.

  Now that the Outzone’s border with New Haven State was closed, most of the fuel other than locally produced bio-diesel was hauled in from Canada at the tiny two-mile stretch of border the negotiators of the Outzone Territory Act had been shrewd enough to bargain for.

  The fuel, along with other essentials such as coffee and tobacco, were exchanged for a variety of commodities like gold, silver, and precious stones that artesian miners pan-handled, blasted, or chiseled out of the rocks and rivers. Furs too were traded, and trapping was popular in the Outzone.

  Shortwave radio was the main form of communication throughout the Outzone, though some cities had set up simple GPRS systems, the parts scavenged from beyond the REZ—the Radioactive Exclusion Zone—a vast area delineated by the US military that marked the western boundary of the Outzone, stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

  In Winter’s Edge, there were two competing GPRS operators, each with their own masts that gave coverage across the entire city. Pre-war Nokias, reliable with long-lasting batteries, were popular handsets, and minutos or load, depending on the operator, could be bought at any corner stall. There were also several radio stations in the city, even a couple of free-to-air TV channels that broadcast old TV shows and movies between local advertisements.

  Agent Cole had come to the last slide. He closed the slideshow app and shut down his laptop.

  “Okay Frank. We’ve one more thing to get through,” he said, looking across at Brogan carefully. “I’ve got a few more photos to show you, of some people I think you’ll be interested in.”

  The muscles in Brogan’s stomach tensed. They had come to the part of the discussion he had been the most anxious to hear. The part he couldn’t talk to Henderson about. He tried not to show any emotion on his face.

  “Show me.”

  Cole reached down and unzipped the side pocket of his laptop case. He pulled out a small stack of photographs and handed them to him. Brogan thumbed through them, one by one.

  The photographs were of three men. Some showed the three together, others were close-ups of each individual. Looking at each one carefully, the knot in Brogan’s stomach tightened even more.

  The first photograph showed a scrawny-looking individual in his mid-thirties who sat on a large dirt-track motorbike. Behind him, the road stretched back for miles along a flat plain, and away in the distance, the dark jagged edges of a mountain range could be seen. The man looked unkempt. He had straggly brown hair and was wearing a tan jacket made from some type of animal hide, a pair of dusty black pants, and mud-caked boots.

  Brogan turned to the next photograph. It was of the same man, closer up this time. In this picture, he was smiling, or perhaps leering might have been a better description. His eyes were an intense blue, and his right upper lip was twisted up into an ugly smile, as if he was reacting to some joke or comment.

  “Charming sonofabitch, isn’t he?” Cole said quietly. “Believe it or not, he’s the brains of the outfit. The other two are his muscle.”

  The next photograph, judging by the motorbike he stood next to, was of an extremely large man, at least six foot five. Powerfully built with huge square shoulders, he had short, dark, curly hair, a broad unshaven face, and a protruding brow. What Brogan noticed most, though, were the cold, hard eyes that stared toward the camera. They appeared devoid of any emotion, like those of a predatory animal.

  “I think, this one’s got a link all the way back to the last ice age,” Cole said, trying to lighten up the somber mood that had fallen over the room. “I bet you could keep spare change on that forehead.”

  Brogan stared down at the photograph. His head was starting to pound. “Are these the men that…that….”

  “Yes, Frank,” Cole said gently. “These are the perps. No doubt about it.”

  The pressure inside Brogan’s head became almost unbearable. For a moment he could do or say nothing. Finally he flicked over to the next photograph.

  It showed another large man in his early thirties. He had a similar build to the one in the previous photo, though a little smaller, a little younger. Brogan noted both men had distinct dimples on their chins.

  “These two…they brothers?” he asked hoarsely. His throat had gone completely dry.

  “Biometric analysis suggests it’s likely. But remember, we got zip coming up for them on the system. No names, nothing. Just an eye-in-the-sky that picked them up from their biosigs. If you like, I’ll see if I can dig up any pre-war intel on them, send an IPR down to Colorado.”

  With so many data centers, mirror sites and colocation centers destroyed during the Great Global War, much of both intelligence and civilian pre-war data had been lost or “disconnected”. Other than for known criminals or POI’s, persons of interest, NIA didn’t keep many records on Outzoners, especially on those who had simply walked across the border in the era before the Exclusion Wall had been built. To run an Intelligence Provenance Request on the men, Cole would have to submit the photographs to NIAWC, NIA’s Watch Center in Colorado, and see if anything came up on any of the historic off-line systems.

  Brogan shook his head. “It’s alright, John. So long as I can find them. That’s all that matters.”

  “Don’t worry,” the agent said confidently. “Now we got them tagged, we’re not going to lose track of these bastards, especially not the two Neanderthal brothers.”

  Brogan wondered how Cole was so sure these were the men he was looking for. In the photographs he’d seen taken by the roving Triton drone flying at fifty thousand feet on the day of the crime, all three had been wearing masks. It had been cloudy too, and the quality of the photos had been poor.

  “How did you get these?” he asked, tapping the photographs with his finger. “They’re not from the crime scene, I know that.”

  “We built a composite biosig from the photos of the three men that day,” Cole explained. “When I received a possible match alert from the Triton, I sent a Shadow across to get a closer look. That’s where the photos you’re looking at come from. The fact the three travel together made it easy for us, even though they wore masks.”

  The Shadow 800 series were small low-flying drones the military operated for deep reconnaissance sorties, better at taking detailed photographs than the high-altitude UAVs such as the Triton. Though it had taken a little time, Cole’s senior position at New Haven’s NIA station had allowed him to put in a surveillance request for the three men. The timing of the results couldn’t have been better.

  A thin smile formed on the agent’s lips. “We’re not supposed to fly over the Outzone below fifty thousand feet, but every now and then one of our low flyers goes adrift. I don’t know…somebody punches in the wrong mission co-ords or something. So long as it doesn’t happen too often, those pain-in-the-neck UN observers that stay glued to our tails don’t get too ticked off about it.”

  As part of the terms of the Outzone Territory Act, UNOZOM, a small but permanent UN mission, had been setup to make sure that the terms of the treaty were properly upheld. It had been humiliating for the US to have to agree to such a thing, and had shown exactly how desperate the United States military had been to break up the secessionist alliance at the time.

  Brogan gave Cole a vague nod of his head. He was still thinking about something else.

  “John, what was the match score?” he asked after a couple of moments. He needed to know how definitively the biometric recognition system rated the chance these were the three men who had murdered his wife and daughter.

  “It’s a one-hundred percenter.”

  Cole’s quietly spoken words pierced deep into B
rogan’s head. His friend had tracked down the killers of his family. The Strata State might not be in a position to hunt them down and bring them to justice, but Brogan certainly was.

  “So where are they now?” he said in a strained monotone. The muscles in his jaw had clenched so tight it had become painful.

  “They were last sighted in a town a few hundred miles south of Winter’s Edge, a place called Solomon’s Point.”

  “That’s where I’ll be heading to then.”

  Cole looked at him, a frown on his face. “Steady on, Frank. These guys move around a lot. You’re still a few days away from leaving here. Who knows where they’ll be then?”

  “I’ll wait to get a last minute update from you before I go across. You can keep track of them until then, right?”

  Cole took out a small notebook and wrote something down on it. He tore out the page and handed to Brogan. “I can do a lot better than that.”

  Brogan looked down at the piece of paper in his hand. “Whose number is this?”

  “Mine. When you get to Winter’s Edge, this is the number you contact me on.”

  Brogan raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You can make calls from the Outzone to Metro?”

  “That’s right, buddy. Keep that on the QT. State secret,” Cole said with a smile. “Now that we’ve got the perps’ bio-sigs tagged, we can track them real easy. As soon as you’re ready over there, you contact me. I’ll lead you right to them.”

  The agent went on to explain to Brogan that the NIA station had a GPRS signal repeater positioned near the border. Cole used it to communicate with his agents and to monitor certain Outzoners.

  “Remember, sending messages from the Outzone is dangerous work. The towers use unencrypted data transmissions and there’s people over there real good at triangulating positions. Some folks think the Outzone is total stone age. Not true. They got hackers there that’d put most NH/IT graduates to shame. We got to manually encrypt our messages, same way the city gangs do it so we don’t stand out, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “And this is how we do it.” Cole reached into his laptop case again. He pulled out a paperback book with a black front cover on it and placed it on the desk. Brogan stared at it curiously. Its title was Dark Star.

  “Reading is a popular pastime in the Outzone, by the way, so you won’t stick out. And the way you beat technology, sometimes, is by being real old-fashioned.” The agent took out a folded sheet of paper from inside the book. “When I leave here, you need to read this.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever read a printed book before,” Brogan said, staring down at it.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not the book you have to study, just our transmission protocol. Though the book’s worth a read too. I think you’d enjoy it.”

  He picked up the sheet of paper and waved it at Brogan.

  “The book you take with you. This protocol stays here, on this side of the border. Memorize it carefully before you leave. Whatever you do, you do not take it with you. Remember what I said about the rat cage? This’ll get them chewing on your balls if someone finds this on you, got it?”

  Brogan nodded. “Got it.”

  Cole checked his watch. “Damn it, I’ve got to run. Got a meeting in thirty minutes I can’t put off.” He put the laptop back in its case.

  “I know how that goes,” Brogan said.”Anyway, I think I got it all now.”

  “Last thing,” Cole said, standing up. “Ditch the cop persona. They’ll clock it a mile away.”

  “Yeah, I think I’m picking up on that.”

  Cole slipped his jacket from off the back of his chair and put it on, then walked over to the door with Brogan following.

  “I’ll be waiting for your message, buddy,” Cole said gruffly, sticking out his hand.

  Brogan clasped the hand firmly. Putting his other arm around Cole’s shoulder, he pulled his friend in close to him. “John, I won’t forget this.”

  “Shit, Frank. Nothing you wouldn’t do for me in a heartbeat.” Though his friend wasn’t one who liked to display his emotions, Brogan could hear the strain in Cole’s voice. “When this is over, we’ll figure out a way to get you back.”

  Before he could reply, Cole opened the door and walked out of the room. Brogan stared after him as the agent made his way down the hall, turned the corner, and disappeared from sight.

  He closed the door. Another good man he would never see again.

  Three Days Later

  Chapter 7

  Sanctuary Drive, Strata-1, Metro New Haven

  On a cold and blustery September morning, Brogan stared out through a rain-speckled bus window as it made its way along Sanctuary Drive. Above him, dark gray clouds hung low over the city, and to either side of the street the branches of the sycamores shook forlornly in the wind.

  He sat alone, wearing a black cold weather tactical jacket, jeans, and work boots. Even though it was only a short distance from the motel to the Scangate terminal, he was glad he had decided not to walk it, instead picking up a passing shuttle bus taking Strata-Oners to work in the nearby industrial zones.

  “Next stop, Eastwood Avenue. All passengers for Eastwood Avenue, please alight here,” a pleasant matronly voice informed people over the speaker system.

  Moments later, the bus pulled up by a shelter at the side of the road and came to a stop. There was a slight hiss when the door to the driverless vehicle opened, and a man stepped on-board, flashed his card at the reader, and made his way inside.

  Peering out the window, Brogan saw the turn for the Scangate terminal ahead. He turned to the man sitting behind him. “Say, friend, does this bus make a turn here for the Scangate?”

  The man shook his head. “No, bud, you need to get off here.”

  Brogan thanked him, collected his backpack from the luggage rack, and hurried to the side doors before they closed. He stepped off the bus.

  The bus took off and he hauled his pack up onto his shoulders and started walking. Ahead of him, to either side of the Scangate terminal, the Exclusion Wall stretched out as far as the eye could see, the thirty-foot high gray cement structure blending perfectly into the gloomy skies above.

  Drawing closer, Brogan spotted a sentinel-bot crawling along the top of the wall. High above, just below the cloud line, a hoverdrone flew east in a straight line over the border on its pre-programmed flight path. With their advanced human-detection technologies, a variety of different types of sentinels and drones prevented most unlawful entries into New Haven State, though not all. Something Brogan knew only too well.

  It was eight-thirty a.m. when he walked into the terminal building, entering through a set of tinted nanoplex doors that swished open for him. They took him into the main waiting area, a large bleak hall with a suite of recently installed Inland Border Patrol offices built along one side of the room. Since the closing of the Outzone border, the Scangate terminal’s main use now was as an IBP administration center. Looking around him, Brogan saw there were more guards inside than civilians.

  He walked to the far end of the hall, where he joined a straggled line of about thirty people that had already formed in front of the Scangate security clearance system, and dropped his pack to the floor.

  Staring at the people in the line, he saw many of the men wore clothes similar to his own. Others wore Arctic or hunting jackets, and combat fatigues instead of jeans. The women were practically dressed too. He spotted one wearing a dark-olive hoodie windbreaker, another in a camo hunting parka.

  Nowadays, the Scangate served only as the release point for departees into the Outzone. In the past, its primary function had been to process the hordes of Outzone day laborers who had flocked into Metro New Haven each morning during the city’s massive post-war development project. That era had finally come to an end six months ago when Governor Janet Haskins, popularly known as “Iron Jane” for her tough no-nonsense style of governing, had closed the border. Enough robots had been built by then to operate the plants and fact
ories of its industrial zones, and only the State’s own Strata-Oners were required for the new construction projects.

  The bots worked more cheaply and efficiently than any Outzoner ever could. They were machines that never stopped to complain their work was too tedious or too dangerous, nor were tempted to sneak out some valuable electronic part stuffed inside their work pants or some part of their anatomy.

  The closing of the border had been one of the governor’s most satisfying achievements. Several years ago, Haskins’ daughter had been taken hostage in Winter’s Edge. In her own inimitable way, the governor had sent in a CyCOM special ops team to get her back. While she insisted it was nothing personal, people on both sides referred to the closing of the border as “Iron Jane’s Revenge.”

  At nine a.m. a loud bleep sounded at the top of the line and a green light flashed above on the wall. A stern-looking female IBP guard ushered the first departee forward after the thick steel door to the Scangate chamber slid open.

  At the head of the line, a tall man turned to two women who looked to be his wife and daughter. Both were attractive, with similar sandy blonde hair. The man said something briefly in the older woman’s ear, then picked up his luggage and strode confidently across to the chamber. When he stepped inside, the gate slid closed behind him and the light above turned from green to red. A minute later, the light turned green again, the gate opened once more, and the younger of the two women stepped forward.

  Brogan moved up the line, using his foot to slide his backpack ahead of him along the floor. He felt a light tap on his shoulder, and turned around to see a thickset man in his early forties staring fixedly at him.

  The man had dark-brown hair, a two-day stubble on his face, and a misshapen nose twisted to one side that Brogan guessed hadn’t seen at least one punch coming. Though quite a few inches shorter than Brogan’s six foot three, he was muscular and tough-looking, with broad shoulders and a thick, powerful neck.