Aurora(33)
He’d be at Sanctuary in eleven hours.
Battle Mountain, Nevada, was just off the I-80, more or less midway between Silicon Valley and Thom’s silo complex in Utah. The unincorporated town was, at its roaring peak, home to about three thousand citizens, most of them spread out on the flat, arid badlands surrounding it. Its high-desert location meant hot days, cold nights, and a scarcity of population that suited some people well. There were three reasons to settle in or around Battle Mountain: you were born there, you planned to die there, or you couldn’t stand the sight of people but still liked the idea of running water.
The old Arco station two miles outside of town had once done a decent business, until the local highway, 51, was killed off by the construction of the interstate and the slow death of the area’s mining facilities. With no more copper or ore to mine and truck away, there was little demand for gas this far off the beaten path. When Thom was looking for a wholly-owned refueling station, the Arco’s location, rock-bottom land value, and pristine underground tanks made it a perfect choice.
The late-afternoon light was fading into a cold blue as Brady pulled the BMW to a stop, got out, and stretched his back. He’d made the drive out of San Francisco easily enough, after steering his way through surface streets to escape the clutch of refugees on the 580. He’d gone due north from Mill Valley instead of east, getting on and off the 37 as traffic dictated, then north on the 29 and east on the 12, until finally hooking up with the I-80 at Cordelia. It was refreshing to be forced to use his memory to find the route instead of his phone; it had been years since those old synapses had been asked to connect, and to him they felt grateful for the use. It was like putting his fingers on a manual typewriter again, after all these years—you forgot how physically satisfying the act of typing used to be and how pleasantly drained you could be afterwards.
He’d stopped to pee only once, so now he hurried across the gravel parking area to get inside the old Arco building, noting with some satisfaction that his breath was curling up in little clouds in front of him. He’d always loved getting out of the city and didn’t understand why he didn’t do so more often, especially when there was so much natural beauty within a short drive of San Francisco. It was funny, he thought, turning the key in the lock of the old service station’s front door, how it always seemed to take a crisis to remind a person of the extremely simple things that were important to them. It was then, mid-thought, that he first noticed the shadow moving on the tile floor in front of him, growing bigger at his feet, and right around the moment that he realized the shadow was not his, the crowbar whooshed through the air beside him, coming down toward the crown of his head.
The last few microseconds were the ones that saved Brady’s skull and life. The red alerts in his brain went off, all at once, silenced his pointless reverie about getting out into nature more often, and reminded him that he had just committed the cardinal sin of walking into a darkened room without so much as pausing in the entrance to make sure it was safe.
His police training kicked in, angry at his neglect, and he managed to twitch his torso just a few degrees clockwise, tilting his head and rotating his upper body away from the blow. The crowbar came down not on his skull or clavicle but on the thick, ropy muscles of his rotator cuff. The impact was still enough to make his vision flash hot white, and he collapsed in pain and surprise, his knees hitting the hard floor first. He managed to put out a hand to stop himself from going all the way down, and the shock of pain now spread into his wrist as well. Two seconds into the assault and he’d suffered injuries in four critical areas: shoulder, both kneecaps, and left wrist.
But none was debilitating. He turned his head sharply and saw a pair of decrepit black high-tops, a pair that might have been top-of-the-line once but were now ratty and torn, victims of years of abuse and stink, only the rotted traces of laces left in them, and the bare, dirty skin of filthy shins peeking over their tops.
Brady rolled once, to his left this time, and the crowbar came down in the middle of the tile floor, sending chips of white ceramic flying. Ordinarily his right hand would have ducked into the shoulder holster he wore around his left side, just inside his canvas jacket, but he didn’t bother this time, because he knew there was nothing in it. Still only a few seconds into the attack, he decided to give himself a break and leave aside the utter idiocy he had shown by strolling, unarmed, into an unguarded, abandoned fuel station during a worldwide emergency without carrying a weapon or even pausing for so much as a “Hello, anybody home?” first. He was due for a fearless and searching self-evaluation, once he got out of this predicament, should he be lucky enough to do so.
Brady knew that taking a look back at his attacker was likely to prove fatal—he’d be low, looking up, in a helpless posture, as the crowbar came down for a third time—so he scrabbled across the hard tile floor without so much as a glance, scuttling like a crab toward the still-open front door. He passed over the threshold on throbbing wrist and aching knees, dragged himself up onto his feet, and ran to the car, fleeing like a seventeen-year-old camper in a horror movie.
He got to the car, yanked open the driver’s door, and didn’t dare to look back at his pursuer until he had both hands on the armrest, squeezing the outer ledge of the plastic lid and simultaneously tugging upward on the front lip. The compartment clicked open and Brady’s right hand dove inside, closing around the cold, pebbled handle of the M&P Scandium, the one with the hammer.