For the most part I am left alone for the past several days, I leave my radios off: the two-way, the shortwave, the VHF— all of them. I just hang out with Heath and we do our best to pretend everything is okay, we're just a normal family and it's just another day.

I think we both know it's complete bullshit.

Either Heath is humouring me, or he wants to live in this little fantasy with me just a little longer. But I think we both know that sooner or later— likely sooner— we're going to have to face the music and move on. Yet we continue to ignore the outside world; the cold stark realities beyond the walls of the house, the devastating truth that exists just outside the confines of the backyard garden.

We are farmers now. Dirty hands, strong backs, up before the Sun and working until the last light of day. Evenings of sipping tea and reading together by candle light. Our daily ritual has resulted in a magnificent bounty of vegetation born of sweat and toil, calloused hands and tanned skin. We live in a pastoral utopia-- as long as we don't turn on the radios --as long as we cling to our willful ignorance and pretend the world is only us.

It can't last. Every day I expect it will come to and end, so when I hear the knock at the door I know it is over.

The look on Hartt's face when I open the door tells me he desperately doesn't want to be the guy delivering the message, but I also know it's his sense of duty that brought him here.

"Hi Trevor," I say. "Don't worry, I've been expecting you. Or at least, one of you."

"I'm sorry Connor," he says. "Frost has sent someone here everyday to talk to you, we keep turning them away at the gate," he continues, referring to the makeshift checkpoint we now have at the entrance to the neighbourhood. "He's desperate enough to have relayed the message to me through Sabine, it sounds pretty urgent. He is requesting a meeting immediately."

"It's always urgent when they want something from us."

"I think it really is this time."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because he wants me to bring you in the TAPV, he wants you to come armed, and he offered to fill the TAPV with diesel for our trouble if I get you there right now."

I'm not sure which part I find more incredulous, that Frost wants me to show up locked and loaded, or that he's willing to give away his precious diesel fuel.

"Does he know the TAPV is running on fumes? That's a shit ton of diesel."

"Frankly, I don't think he cares about that."

"He might change his mind after 250 litres of fuel disappears."

"I don't mean to be pushy, but this is time sensitive and a full tank is a pretty big bonus for a brief chat."

"Okay, okay," I say reluctantly. "Give me a couple minutes to get ready and I gotta do something with Heath."

"Danny has volunteered to watch him, if you don't mind. Freya and Raven are out scavenging-- everyone is kind of busy. Up to you."

"That's fine," I agree, despite my ongoing trust issues with Danny, Heath seems to really enjoy his company and although I am loath to admit it, the interaction seems good for Danny as well.

I change my soiled work clothes, strap the .45 to my leg and head out the door, passing Danny on his way up the drive.

"I'll take good care of him, sir," Danny says. "Don't worry about a thing. Is it okay to give Heath some Skittles?"

"Yeah, sure Danny, you can give him Skittles," I reply dismissively. Danny always has Skittles, he seems to have a bag in every pocket. The kid is practically made of Skittles at this point.

"Do you need me to feed the chickens or anything?"

"You can ask Heath, he knows what needs to be done."

"Okay, thank-you sir. Good luck!" Danny adds, somewhat over enthusiastically. I get the feeling he's already had way too many Skittles. Then again, compared to the crap he used to put in his body, a bunch of sugar is no big deal.

The Limo belches out a great cloud of black soot as Hart turns the engine over, the wheels are barely turning when I find myself yearning for the simplicity of weeding the garden. It feels like the longest eight minute drive of my life.

------------

As promised, we are directed straight to the fuel storage area at the Pelex facility upon arrival. My acceptance to the meeting being declared over the airwaves by way of the radios I've come to despise. Mr. Beck is there to greet us, his enigmatic smile would give Mona Lisa a run for her money. I don't get the usual pat down, in fact, Billy doesn't even acknowledge the firearm I openly carry and instead he just gives me a nod.

"Right this way Mr. Killoren," he says with a sweeping gesture of his oversized hand.

He leads me through a labyrinth of passageways and halls and I eventually get a sense that beneath his usual demeanor there is an intensity I hadn't noticed before. While not openly carrying like myself, his concealed sidearm is printing through his sport coat which I make note of. I also soon notice the way he moves through the hallways, his near imperceptible extra vigilance especially at junctions and corners begins to unnerve me.

"Everything okay?" I ask.

"Everything is fine," he replies checking another corner.

We pass a maintenance crew working on a wiring box of some sort, their conversation ceases as we approach. Mr. Beck creates a little extra space as we merge in the hallway, they don't notice, but I do. Mr. Beck keeps his head up and eyes forward, the two workers watch us, one of them glances at my sidearm, I make note of the tattoo on his forearm. We disappear around a corner and the muscles in Mr. Beck's neck relax ever so slightly.

"Everything is definitely not okay," I say.

"Keep walking," he replies coolly.

We descend some stairs and proceed down a dimly lit corridor, I get the feeling we are in the bowels of the Pelex main building.

"We are going to see Denton, right?" I ask, only partially joking.

"Yes."

"Does he want to show me his Bat Cave?"

This remark garners no response.

We come to an unmarked closed door that Mr. Beck gestures to.

"This better not be a pit full of alligators," I say. To which Mr. Beck doesn't respond, he just glares at me expectantly.

I open the door to what is obviously some kind of small maintenance room in which I find Denton Frost sitting on a dilapidated plastic chair.

"Thank-you Mr. Beck," he says before turning his attention to me. "Please close the door will you Connor."

I give the gray painted metal door a light kick with my boot and it swings effortlessly on well-oiled hinges closing with a thunk.

"Thank-you fo--"

"What do you want Denton?" I cut him off.

"Have a seat, please Connor," he asks in a tone I'm not used to hearing from him. He sounds almost contrite. I take a seat in an equally crappy chair, the plastic legs, brittle with age, threaten to snap from the added weight.

"You let me in here with a gun. Hell, I'm not even supposed to be inside the city limits last time I checked. What the fuck is going on? Why is Mr. Beck wound up so goddamn tight?"

"It's complicated," Denton says.

"Yeah... complicated. Why do I get the feeling complicated just means bad for me and my people?"

"If you are willing to listen, I can explain."

The light in the room is poor, the overhead fluorescent lighting is off or not working, instead an incandescent worklight dangles from a hook casting harsh shadows. Even still, I can see Denton well enough to notice he's tired.

"You don't look so good man, you getting enough sleep?"

"You won't be sleeping much either after I am done here."

That gets my attention, not the words, but the sincerity. I lean forward and something inside tells me to leave, leave now, run from this place and don't ever come back. Instead, I look Denton straight in the eyes and say, "tell me everything."

-----------

"Well?" Hartt says, refilling my glass with the very last of the fine American bourbon we have on hand.

"He told me everything," I reply. "I should have left."

We're all collected in Ari's backyard, seated around Ari's generously proportioned table, I have a full audience. Ari has, as always, provided a spread of finger foods, albeit possibly not quite the usual fare given our circumstances. It is, however, appreciated by all in attendance and I snatch a piece of cheese and a strawberry and take a sip of my whisky.

"...and?" Raven prompts.

"And, we're fucked," I answer bluntly. "Remember that plane at night? Well, turns out lots of people saw it, or heard it and on a bunch of different nights. Was a bit of a mystery, but Denton's people quickly figured it out. It's been spraying herbicide on the crops, it's a fucking midnight crop duster. Frost says they've lost at least a thousand acres, likely a lot more than that."

"Where is it from?" Heather asks. She's seated away from the group, a safe distance from the cigar smoke, one hand resting on her belly in a sub-conscious maternal gesture of protectiveness. Jake hands her a juice box.

"My bet is G.F.A, almost certainly, but insofar as concrete evidence goes, they have no idea. Denton says he is working on it, whatever that means. Of course, that's not everything, Denton was acting weird, hell, Billy was acting weird, the whole experience was weird."

"Define weird, for those of use who weren't there," Jake says.

"The whole meeting took place in a fucking maintenance closet, for starters. Denton looked like shit, and Beck was so wound up I thought his head was going to explode. Something is up at Pelex. They let me waltz through the place with a pistol strapped to my leg and I swear Beck was visibly relieved when he saw I was armed."

"There is power struggle," Ari chimes in. "There is, how you say, another player?"

"Is this good for us or bad for us?" Sung Mi asks.

"I don't think it is ever good for us," Raven replies.

"I feel the same way, Raven," I add. "I can't believe I'm going to defend Denton, but at least there was some stability and some hope with him there. If there is another faction vying for power, not only does that risk destabilizing things for everyone in Grey Harbour, but it's now another piece on the board for us to deal with."

"Hope it's not a Queen," Raven says.

"No shit," I reply. "You know, we were walking through this hallway in the Pelex sub-level and we passed these guys, Beck tensed up, those dudes gave us the stink eye the whole time and one of them had that tattoo on his arm."

"What tattoo?" Freya asks.

"I know the one," Jake says, nodding. "The fucking cross-hole right?"

"Cross-hole? You just make that up?" I reply.

"Yep, just popped in my head."

"Well, unfortunately you're dead on."

"You think it's those guys causing trouble for Frost? Brothers of the Sacred turd or something."

"Don't under estimate," Ari says, and I know he's right. They are easy to dismiss as religious freaks, but at least from what I could tell the last time I was in town, they don't lack for followers.

"Considering that even Beck is on edge, the threat seems real enough to them. At least Frost was a known quantity, last thing we need is another player, especially since I very much doubt the new guys align very well with what we're doing."

"What's the game plan then?" Hartt asks.

"We have a sort of unofficial truce in effect with the Pelex folks at this point, but Beck and Frost want us to maintain our distance. For all intents and purposes it's business as usual; take care of our little community down here and avoid them as much as possible. We're going to use Danny and more importantly, his well-connected brother Dennis, to sniff out what exactly is going on with the power and politics in Grey Harbour."

"It's those fanatic nutbags," Jake says. "You know it is."

"I agree with Jake," Freya adds. "Those sick fucks are like a plague, and it's spreading. Seems to be more people falling into that insanity all the time. They're everywhere now."

"Frost feels the same way, they've definitely infiltrated Pelex security and pretty much every other aspect of Pelex. They could destabilize everything."

"What's he want us to do?" Raven asks.

"About the burgeoning insurgency? Nothing, and I didn't offer to do anything about it. We need to concentrate on making this little outpost as self-sufficient as possible. Finish the perimeter defenses, scavenge for supplies to get us through the winter and protect our food-- and it's that last bit that I volunteered to help with, all it would take is one midnight visit from that fucking plane and we'd lose ninety percent of our crop."

"Volunteered?" Jake says. "For what exactly."

"To accompany Frost on a little hunting trip," I reply. "Ari, I'll need you to get in touch with Fish, I have a proposal for him. Hartt, I'm gonna need to borrow the C6."

"What is the plan exactly?" Hartt asks.

"In a nutshell, insert Fish behind enemy lines to find where that plane is coming from and report back when it takes off. Frost and I will intercept and with any luck take care of the issue."

"How will you and Frost intercept again?" Hartt presses.

"Oh, did I forget to mention-- Frost can fly a plane (because of course he can). So he flies, I shoot. That's the plan."

"Doesn't seem particularly well thought out."

"Yeah, you're probably right, but unless Ari has been hiding a surface-to-air missile system in his shed, we don't have many other options and even less time to concoct any sort of better plan. A couple more nights of that plane spraying poison and there's going to be a lot of starving people this winter. If you think things are bad now, just wait until people start going hungry."

"Why you?" Jake says. "No offence, but either Hartt or myself would be a better choice on the C6."

"I can't argue that with you Jake, but part of the deal with Frost is that it is me up there. It's a guarantee of sorts."

"Mutual annihilation," he replies.

"Something like that."

"Ever fired a machine gun from the door of a moving vehicle before?" Hartt asks, putting a fine point on the ridiculous nature of the task at hand.

After giving Hartt the appropriate sideways glance, I reply, "I think we all know the limit of my experience in doing anything from the door of a vehicle is largely limited to accepting coffees at the drive-thru. Unless you want to count that time when I was a teenager and we took a bat to some mailboxes out on the back roads."

"Ah, so you do have some experience," Jake replies and then turns to Hartt and asks, "do we have any seven-six-two to spare? I have an idea."

"I think we can spare a belt," Hartt replies.

"Why do I get the feeling I'm not going to like this?"

"When's the last time you liked anything?" Jake fires back.

My mind flashes back to a hot summer night, but I reply, "fair enough".

----------

It takes roughly thirty-six hours for my dreaded clairvoyance to prove correct, I don't like what I'm doing. Then again, I don't like what I'm going to be doing that has me doing this in the first place either. Fuck my life.

Ari had no problem getting in touch with Fish and Fish was happy to accept the challenge making a pretty sweet deal with Pelex in the process, all the while using us as a proxy as to maintain his very disciplined operational security. We also obtain a dedicated secure frequency and a handful of better radios for the mission.

As for me-- Jake has me trussed up with all sorts of rigging, webbing, cordage and cables in the back of his truck which he is recklessly piloting over uneven ground at ridiculous speeds back and forth past a 55-gallon metal drum painted International Orange. The paint is even more ridiculous because it's the middle of the night, overcast and dark as hell. We're in a gravel pit away from prying eyes and ears. Jake has decided to slap his fancy helmet on my head onto which he has slapped his even fancier and ostensibly insanely expensive night vision goggles, something he keeps calling "nods".

"Thermal sight would be nice," Hartt says as Jake adjusts my rigging. I'm somewhat suspended from a hastily prepared welded cage to simulate the open door of a small aircraft. As maneuvering the aircraft would place me at the mercy of several of Newton's laws, I'll need to be harnessed in some fashion lest I bounce around the cabin or be wholly departed from the aircraft.

Similarly, the gun itself is suspended and tied off, there would be no way for me to shoulder-fire the C6 in-flight. Jake and Hartt have done their best to provide a steady gun platform that still allows me to traverse the weapon to track a target. It's far from perfect, but it's the best we can do.

Next I'm just practicing tracking and leading the target all the while getting used to the weird sensation of wearing NODs and the decrease in depth perception. I will mostly have to rely on using the tracer rounds to provide any sense of where my shots are going.

Jake and Hartt spent an hour or more with me earlier drilling me on the manual-of-arms for the C6: firing procedures, clearing malfunctions and the dreaded blind-folded reload. I don't feel that I came away from the lesson a proficient operator, but I think I can fumble my way through the basics.

"Next we do reloads on the move," Jake yells from the cab of the truck. He guns the engine and we're off to the races. The only thing keeping me from being ejected from the truck bed is Jake's rigging, the C6 has come alive and is doing its level best to break free from my grasp, I struggle against the weight of the gun and the g-forces on my body as the rigging strains to keep me in place. I pull back the charging handle, get the cover open and slap a fresh belt in place, then for a moment I am flying, or floating suspended mid-air by the rigging, but my feet are no longer in contact with the truck bed, we are truly airborne.

Something smashes hard into my face, like a prize fighter's punch, next thing I know, I'm on the ground, in the dirt and gravel in the bowels of an old quarry. Hartt is holding a wad of gauze to my face, looking down at me, the harsh glare of Jake's many truck lights illuminating the scene.

"Wha... what the fuck was that?" I ask, the coppery taste of blood in my mouth.

"Turbulence," Jake says. "The good news is you didn't break any teeth."

"And the bad news?"

"The NODs are fucked."

Hartt, dejected, turns to Jake, "we should just get him home, he's had enough for tonight."

"Yeah," Jake agrees, regretfully. "We're done here."

"Sorry Connor," Hartt says helping me up. "The gun broke free and whacked you, the helmet and NODs took the brunt of the impact, but still rung your bell pretty good."

"I didn't get to shoot," I say.

"Yeah, I know, maybe we try again tomorrow. When you're feeling better."

Tomorrow had other plans.