***

The tank’s tracks ground up whatever dirt or debris they rolled over on its detoured journey north. Commander Luis Claire let the wind whip the dirt and grease smudged on his face as he rode atop the tank’s open hatch, his broad shoulders almost too big for the entrance. The tank had the capacity to travel at speeds of up to forty-five miles per hour, so the wind cutting across him was quite harsh, but he didn’t mind. If he closed his eyes and just felt the wind against his cheeks, it was almost like being back on one of his ships. A tank was a poor substitute for a destroyer, but being in the Navy for the past fifteen years had made him biased. Seawater coursed through his veins, and the further inland he traveled, the drier he became. But his current objective overrode his thirst for the ocean.

Luis had received orders to continue his campaign into Oklahoma, then Kansas, but he first needed to find two men stuck somewhere in the untamed land of north Wyoming. These men knew who betrayed his sister, putting her in Gordon Reath’s twisted hands.

Ben, the old man who guided Luis to the hidden lab where Emma and Todd had completed their work, did the best he could in giving a description of Alex but had no exact location of where he was.

The Coalition wasn’t known for pardoning its community members or granting any sense of mercy. Reath ruled his subordinates with a spiked, poison-tipped iron fist. He didn’t just hurt people—he mutilated them. The farm camps were built on a foundation of corpses. Each day they added to it, raising their factories of death higher.

“There,” Ben said, shouting from inside the tank. “Just to the east.”

A significant piece of earth had been dislodged and exposed an opening, which revealed a staircase. The tank came to a stop, and Luis jumped to the ground in one swift, powerful motion. When he landed, the large piece of metal that was used to conceal Todd’s lab rattled. They were the only people around for miles, but Luis drew his sidearm out of habit and descended into the dark cavern below.

“Who’s there?” a voice called.

“Commander Luis Claire, United States Navy.”

“Christ, Luis! It’s Ray!”

Luis hurried down the steps and found the generator. He cranked it to life, turning on the lights that revealed both Ray and Nelson, bound together at the end of the lab. Luis holstered his pistol and pulled out his knife to cut the men free. “You two all right?”

The blade sliced through the rope used to subdue the two of them, and they both rubbed their wrists. “Yeah,” Ray said. “We’re okay.”

“Ray, I don’t have a lot of time. I need you to tell me everything you know about the man who was here. The hunter.”

“Fucking two-faced traitor is what he is,” Ray answered, sulking around the lab’s main table, still rubbing the tender flesh under his wrists and working out the stiffness in his legs from being bound up for almost an entire day. “He was from some community in Kansas, at least that’s what he told us. I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

“I need to find him, Ray. And I need to find him quickly.”

“I could probably hack into the database and see where they’re keeping them,” Nelson said.

“You can do that?” Luis asked.

Nelson wiggled his way around Ray and took a seat in front of his computer. A few quick keystrokes and hundreds of lines of code and pieces of data flew across the screen. “It shouldn’t be too difficult.” Nelson’s fingers turned into blurs over the keyboard. “There, it looks like Alex was taken back to his community in west Kansas.”

“What about Emma and Todd?” Luis asked. “Can you find them?”

Another few quick strokes, and a massive error message filled the screen. Nelson quickly backtracked and tried another way in but was met with the same result. “They’re not coming up.”

Luis gripped the table next to him for support, hoping the other two men didn’t notice. The same sturdy legs that had weathered countless storms on the unforgiving ocean waves could barely keep him upright on level ground. If they weren’t in Gordon’s databases, then he wasn’t sure what Gordon was doing to them. They were most likely in Topeka, which was the heart of the Coalition’s infrastructure. It was surrounded by farm camps and communities armed with tens of thousands of sentries.

Invading Topeka was the endgame for the military’s push against the Coalition, but it would be some time before they could take the Coalition’s capital. And Luis wasn’t even sure if Emma and Todd would be alive by then.