Chapter Text
In red:
Pray for us.
Under it, spray painted by a different hand in black:
Lookin 4 GOD? Good luck - like Elvis, he has left the building!
Graffiti on an old billboard, south of Sarnia, in the fallout zone from Detroit. All of the bridges that once crossed between Canada and the States were blown or guarded by Green's men, absent Buffalo, which was still under gang or militia control depending on the day of the week. Getting into the States across the St. Clair River specifically meant using an old flat-platform ferry and negotiating with the poor boatman bastard who could operate it for passage, radioing ahead of time so he could leave his house in the clean area to get there.
Charon, across the Styx. But the trip was never cheap.
Sarnia's bridge was long gone, and no one wanted to get too close to Detroit thanks to it still being a hot zone. Even Green's troops avoided the area, since they had the Mackinac Bridge under control. There had been points when the area was guarded on the US side of the border, times when the Fourth World soldiers and the Canadians exchanged fire. These days, it was only guarded on the side with a still-functional nation.
The wandering ShadowKnights were safe enough on the Canadian side; all three of them had proper ID, and if they wanted to go into the wasted and bitter landscape across the border to salvage -- or steal, but no one admitted to that -- then that was their business. Coming back was harder, of course. As it should be. Luckily, the border guards were aware they were on a humanitarian mission, and unless one of them scanned hot or their truck did, they didn't have to go through decon. Nance had some kind of arrangement going on, though according to her, it was tenuous and depended on people who might not be there forever
The first time Arnie had been past that bit of graffiti, he had been a little disturbed by the bleakness of it. Now, he viewed it like an old friend, a milepost on a very long road. The part of him that had gotten good at photography while he was freelancing for the New Salem News wanted to capture it on film, but film didn't tend to handle radioactivity all that well and shouldn't be wasted on an artistic whim. Still, it stuck with him. The gallows humor.
The former United States was a hodgepodge of dystopian themes; around the former northeast corridor, it had been deserted. Arnie had walked a fair distance before he had encountered his first fellow human (and that encounter involved him being shot at), after he left the truck stop he'd been dropped at. Just going by eastern Pennsylvania, it would be easy to assume that the entire country was reduced to long stretches of emptiness with the occasional small group sloughing it out to survive.
That wasn't the case. Sadly, things might have actually been better if it was.
He hadn't been given anything like a briefing to get the lay of the land here when he'd been dropped outside the Promised Land. Just told that he should go to Toronto. He rather wished he'd been told ahead of time that he was going to be dropped into a post-nuclear post-almost-apocalypse, but you couldn't expect too many straight answers when you were dealing with celestials.
Had he known a lot of the things he figured out later, he probably would have brought more with him, or at least come into it with a different mindset than he had. Maybe he would have thought things out more carefully. Prepared better. Or, maybe he would have then chickened out and stayed in Westchester, a grief-stricken ghost to haunt an empty house until he could figure out what the hell to do with himself.
Maybe-- maybe a lot of things. Usually when his mind tried to tug him down that road, he found a way to distract himself, but not always.
He was still awake and trying not to think too much when they rolled into Tawas City, Michigan, and he smothered the urge to groan when the pickup bounced over a rough, broken driveway up to their safehouse. It was already dark, had been for an hour and a half, but the feeling of the garage closing around them felt more like claustrophobia than safety.
Something flappy and papery landed on his chest, then Tom said, "Wake up, sleepy-head."
Arnie scowled, even if it was too dark for the expression to have the right effect, picking up the notepad where they kept track of the radiation levels every hour and levering himself up to sit with a few little winces. "Piss off, Tom, I wasn't sleeping."
"Coulda fooled me, quiet as you were."
"You weren't exactly orating like a statesman in the front seat yourself."
There was a long pause, then Tom asked, "Rev, did he just accuse me of doin' somethin' indecent with you up here?"
Arnie slapped his palm to his own brow and was about to launch into a vitriolic explanation, perhaps with a few choice insults about Tom's parentage, when the Reverend cracked up and Tom started snickering and he realized he'd been had. Seeing no legitimate way to save face -- and really, trying not to give in and laugh, because that was pretty good -- he just threw the notepad back, hitting Tom in the head with it in a satisfying manner, and scooted across the seat to open the door and try to unfold himself.
Wasn't much space between the truck and the wall, but he stretched his arms over his head and felt his back pop in more places than he felt like counting.
A string of Christmas lights turned on, finally giving the place enough illumination that it seemed a little less tomb-like; through the rickety door to from the house, a short woman with brown skin and black-and-silver shot hair poked her head out. "Come on, I’ve got a kettle on and the shower's free."
The other two clambered out; Tom nearly ran over Arnie to head around the front of the truck, scraping past its nose and shouldering past the woman. "I call it!"
Arnie rolled his eyes, then bothered to grab both his and Tom's packs out of the back of the truck. "I suppose I'll just leave this outside the bathroom door and hope to avoid the show, then."
The Reverend was more sedate about going in, at least, taking the time to grab his own gear and balance a box on the other arm. "Thanks, Adala. We brought some supplies for you."
Adala ooh'd and leaned over, looking into the box. "Did Nance manage some maple syrup?"
"Small bottle, but yes." The Rev transferred the box over to her and waved to Arnie. "C'mon, Ghost."
"Weren't you in Ohio last fall?" Arnie asked, as he managed to get around the truck with both packs, giving Adala what he hoped was a joking look of suspicion. There wasn't a lot of major migration west of the Indiana-Ohio border and south of there, because most cities, towns and settlements left were either under Green's control, or very suspicious of anyone showing up. Still, he was glad to see her again; he had yet to be to the same place twice, and she was the first rebel he'd met twice below the border.
She wasn't a ShadowKnight, but she was a reliable contact in a very unreliable world.
"Getting too hot," she said, ruefully; she wasn't talking about radiation, clearly. She turned and set the box inside, then held out a hand, taking Tom's pack when he passed it over. "Come on, I'll make you a mug of mint tea. Even throw some honey in for you."
"Where did you get honey?" He followed her in, closing the door behind him.
"Brought it from Ohio, of course. It doesn't go off." Adala led him into the kitchen, where the Reverend was already pouring himself a cup. "Well, make yourself at home, why don't you?" she teased the man, shaking her head and pulling a mug down, then taking the kettle, the smell of mint crisp in the air.
Arnie hadn't had a cup of black tea since he'd managed to salvage some exceptionally stale Lipton in Pennsylvania four years back. He'd nursed that box of twenty-five tea bags for the better part of a year, too. But even homemade herbal tea was better than no tea, and honey was a rare treat. He listened with half an ear to the Rev and Adala bantering -- they apparently knew each other far better, and it involved at least one bible verse -- and started flipping through the mission details that had been left on the table for him. He'd already done his studying of all of Nance's satellite pictures of the base at the former Iosco County airport, but the actual set-up had been Adala's cell's job. There was only so much planning you could do from a distance.
Tawas was closer to the base than he liked, but Adala had apparently accounted for that; a couple of her boys were going to take him for a trunk ride while out deer hunting and deposit him in the trees north of the base. From there, he had about eight miles overland, and with any luck, he'd be there just after nightfall so he could get a feel for the patrol pattern.
One thing that was to his advantage: Philip Green was a nasty piece of work. Incredibly nasty. A bullet would have been too good for the man.
Hell, dipping him into a pool of piranha after smearing him with fish paste would have been too good for Colonel Green. Arnie was long past any interest in military history as something to admire, but if he hadn't been, Green would have done that in quite handily.
Still, the reason that was to his advantage was that Green's forces were chronically spread thin. Green was always pushing his strongest troops -- his First Armored, his non-addicted infantry, plus companies more of addicts -- to take new territory. He spread like a virus, but even he didn't have infinite manpower, even with his idea of a 'recruitment' plan.
It looked like, from Adala's notes, that most of the people manning this base were the coulamine-addicted conscripts with only a handful of officers overseeing. It wasn’t a big base. More of a way-station and supply depot to help hold onto Michigan and give them an airport to fly in and out of.
“Don’t let this go cold, BBC,” Adala said, setting the mug next to his hand. “Any questions?”
“BBC? The Beeb has been off the air for--” Actually, Arnie had no idea when that had happened; it had predated his time in this timeline. He tried to cover with a shake of his head. “I could do the standard American midwestern accent, if you want,” he added, in that exact accent, smirking up at her and wrapping his hand around the mug. “Or southern, if that makes y’all more comfortable,” he finished, in a drawl that came from somewhere in between Virginia and North Carolina.
Adala actually shuddered. “Don’t do that, that’s creepy.”
Well. That got him blinking. “How is that creepy?” he asked, incredulous, back to his own Ionian accent.
“You’re way too good at it, but you look way too British to pull it off.”
“She’s right. You practically scream tea and scones,” The Reverend added, sitting across the table.
“And button-down shirts with skinny ties,” Adala said. “Maybe suspenders, too.”
They had him there, he had to admit. Even if he hadn’t worn a skinny tie in-- three universes? And that was on his damned Space Corps uniform. He did wear braces over button-downs when he was working in New York, though.
Arnie just shook his head and took a sip of tea, then let it go. “Good to know, I suppose. Anyway, thank you for the tea, and I don’t have any questions yet; I’ll let you know if I do.”
As 'foraging' missions went, the plan for it was delightfully straight-forward. Get close to the base, observe the patrol, observe the assets, choose one of the trucks constantly moving in and out for winter stockpiling that had food in it and not drugs, go Grand Theft Auto on it and get out of there. Then, meet at the rendezvous so they could strip the cargo and reload it into the pickup and the trailer that Adala had set up for them, and beat it back to Canada with considerably more haste and risk than they had left it.
They were always careful to hit bases in no discernible pattern. It was very likely Green suspected the attacks were from the Canadians, but he kept his focus on the States right now, moving and subjugating every remaining settlement of humanity, only saber-rattling at Alberta and Saskatchewan to remind them that he was coming for them next. His main base of operations was in Montana. Arnie had been that far west only once; the situation out there was so desperately grim that it had actually shaken him up some.
According to the rebel cells there -- few and scattered -- Green's army rolled into towns, then offered terms of surrender. Typically, it was a case of Green ordering the dismemberment of one of the leadership's family members unless they gave in instantly. Then, he would come out with the beleaguered leadership and announce that the town was under the 'protection' of the Fourth World. His officers would pick out conscripts to serve; they would then be herded off. People with any notable mutations would be sent to ‘medical camps’ in Iowa, but they usually didn’t get far before they were shot and dumped into a mass grave.
Purification, it was called.
The conscripts were shot full of cooked-up coulamine; after that, nothing mattered to them except their next hit of the stuff. Even the strongest willed would break from the horror of withdrawal. What could have been a revolutionary drug in a civilized world had been created by Crossman Pharmaceuticals to force a nigh-on unbreakable cycle of addiction.
What population was left after conscription and murder was usually pressed into service in other ways. Rape was common. Forced support for the military in the form of labor. Weapons and food raided and taken. A few ranking overseers and soldiers were left alongside a demoralized, heartbroken populace. The only rebels who managed to survive this constant onslaught were the ones very good at hiding and guerilla warfare.
Arnie admired the insurgency over there; they were bitter and gritty and mean as snakes out west, but they were survivors. The rest of it, though--
He was good at keeping a pretty high level of detachment from the suffering of others. He was aware of it, of course, but investing himself too much emotionally into their plights was courting disaster. In a way, he was glad that Nance was physically confined to a box; he had a feeling that if she wasn't, she would be on the front lines trying to save people, individually or by town, and would get herself killed or captured in the process. If it was hard for him to witness this, it would have been beyond hell for her. He knew she was aware of it, but the physical separation from the very visceral horror probably helped.
Though, she had her own hell to navigate. He’d heard tell of her desperate efforts during the nuclear exchange. Rebels told stories. Even the ones down here knew of it, though they thought she was a human hacker.
His own ShadowKnights would have never been able to handle this world. It would have devastated the other three; they would have tried their hearts out to fix it and would have broken themselves on the rocky shores of it. Even with a good, thick wall of detachment, Arnie sometimes wondered how he was able to deal with it all himself. He wasn't nightmare prone in the least, and yet he still had them sometimes about the situation out there.
Well, some of coping with it was down to action. Not all of his volunteering for the tough missions was a desire to keep too busy to think. Every single time he and whichever team he was assigned to pulled off the impossible, he was doing something to help people. Buying them more time. Most of the rations they stole from the States were distributed to the marginalized in Canada; given the rations were highly nutrient and calorie dense, compressed into bricks and usually used to feed Green's army, one crate could keep a family of four going through the winter, albeit not particularly happily. Given the number they had stolen, they had kept a lot of people alive.
If Canada fell, then the people down here had no one who could offer refuge in those rare times they escaped over the border. No one to help the insurgents down here. ShadowKnight had to keep the home front alive because, without it, Green would roll over the entire continent.
What wasn't distributed in Canada was given to the rebel cells down here below the border to keep them going, and as part of a bargaining chip; the box Adala had now had some maple syrup, but most of it was antibiotics and other medications it was hard to get anywhere, even in Canada, though thanks to Forrester they were able to. If not always reliably. Keeping the insurgency alive in the States was critical to all of their survival, just the same. They were a mobius strip of dependency on each other.
A lot of this, Arnie had to put together from observation and the occasional overheard conversation. He wasn't part of Nance's war room council; right now, he was just a highly useful grunt. While he had a hell of a time remembering that he was supposedly only thirty-four and shouldn't even remember the BBC, he was decent at collecting and collating information about operations.
"Get methodical," Logan had told him, an entire lifetime ago. "If ya got time, use it. Observe, assess, then act. Don't go off half-cocked." Funny enough, Enrico had the same philosophy when it came to survival training.
Since Arnie was quite good at being methodical -- to the point of neurotic if left unchecked -- it was natural to continue to be.
The nuclear war had wiped out a vast swatch of ShadowKnight -- here, abroad, everywhere -- and left Nance with a couple dozen field-capable ops. Many of those that she had when the bombs fell had been out in the field, and only a few had managed to make it back to Toronto. Even now, years later, they were an endangered species; only eight of them were still young enough to climb fences and steal trucks reliably with the least risk, including him. The rest were support and transport specialists. He knew she had more in training -- though he doubted any of them would come close to the skill he'd gotten thanks to time and practice -- but even getting to replacement level was daunting.
(He didn't think about the fact that someone was going to notice in the next six or so years that he didn't get any older; he'd worry about that later.)
All of those thoughts marched through his head as he finished the cup of tea and memorizing the mission specs, and then went and got cleaned up (the shower was lukewarm, which almost qualified as another treat) and dropped on one of the beds so he could get up the next day and go try to save the world one truck full of food at a time.
At least this time, he could confidently and with experience say he slept like the dead.