“How long do we wait?” Jaxon whined.

  “Jamal said three days,” Cass answered.

  “I know what Jamal said, but nobody is coming. Those damn drol’ka got all the main roads blocked off. You’re the one with the eagle eyes. What do you see?”

  Cass and Jaxon were concealed at the top of the glass factory’s ingredient silo. Cass was on her belly, hiding behind a metal sign that warned not to lean on the guardrail wrapped around the structure. She peered through the gap between the bottom of the sign and the rounded dome beneath it.

  “Nothing.” She turned back toward the access hatch where Jaxon’s head was protruding.

  “No, you don’t see nothing. Or did all those bastards pack up and head out of town?”

  “There still there, but I don’t see anybody, besides them.”

  “I don’t like this. We need to get out of here. We damn sure don’t need to be up here. What if we’re spotted? What then. How many would you guess are out there? Forty? Fifty? They have six roadblocks, at least. We only made it here because we cut through the back roads and came out right down the road. What’s our escape plan?”

  “We wait the three days. That was my order.” Cass had no intentions of deviating from the instructions Jamal gave.

  “Well, I don’t take orders from Jamal or you.” Jaxon reminded her.

  “Whatever your problem is, shelf it. You would be dead or in the back of a trailer if not for me, and none of us would be here if it weren’t for Jamal.”

  “I understand how orders work, but we were trained with different priorities. I wasn’t a soldier. I was an asset. I was more valuable alive than dead. My orders never superseded my life. I’m leaving when it gets dark.”

  “You can’t leave. We are safer if we stay together!”

  “‘We’? There is no ‘we’. There is me, and there is nobody else.”

  Cass looked into Jaxon’s eyes and knew he meant it.

  “Why don’t you care about anybody else. Do their lives have no value to you?”

  “You need to understand something. I don’t care about you or anybody else. The only value a person has is the value on their head. I’m figure I better off on my own than trying to sneak away with your little group of dead weight.” Jaxon told her.

  “I need your help, Jaxon. We could pay you, but we both know money is worthless. How about we barter?”

  Jaxon didn’t respond right away. Cass figured that was a good sign.

  “What could you have that I need?”

  “Everything. Food, water, shelter, weapons, ammo. What would it take? If you stay long enough to get us to the mountains, what would you want?”

  “I don’t need any of those things. You don’t understand the work I did. On any given day, this world of ours was teetering on the brink of catastrophe. Dictators, terrorists, narcissists with too much money and delusions of grandeur. I was sent in to quietly maintain the status quo. I was one of thousands. I knew too much not to prepare for the day one of those others missed their shot. I have supply caches all over the place. I’ll be fine.”

  Cass crawled backward, toward the hatch. She spun a half circle so she could face Jaxon.

  “I know it eats you up that Barry got augmentations, and you didn’t. I get it. You are a trained killer. Calm under fire. a flesh-and-blood killing machine. He’s an overweight nobody. You think it makes more sense to enhance your body instead of his. But, here’s the thing you don’t understand. Barry can be trusted. You can’t. You are cold and heartless. Your interests are self-serving. Barry would step in front of a bullet for you, while you will always do the thing that improves your position.”

  “I can’t help anybody if I’m dead.” Jaxon reasoned.

  “You can’t help anybody if you don’t want to. You lack compassion and humanity. The Hol’den exist only to protect others.”

  “I have no desire to be a Hol’den!” Jaxon replied.

  “A human cannot be augmented with being a Hol’den. One can’t exist without the other..”

  “What is your point?”

  “I can get you augments, but you must prove you are willing to take on the role of a Hol’den. Help us get to the mountains, and the Kai’den will make you one of us.” She assured him.

  “I will never be a Hol’den. I do not care about other people. I have never felt the connection that others have. You are all just obstacles that I must navigate around.”

  “Hol’den is not a religion or a philosophy. It is a job. The Kai’den do not care why you do the job. They only care that it gets done. The better you do the job, the more they reward you. Get us to the Kiamichi Mountains, and you will get your first reward. Like Barry, you will have your physiological limiters removed. The more valuable you make yourself, the more augmentations you get.”

  “And what happens if they make me like Barry and I disappear?”

  “Like I said, you can’t be augmented without being a Hol’den. The Kai’den that gives you the augmentations will track you down and strip them from you.”

  “If they can find me. You don’t underst—”

  “You don’t understand! The Kai’den will not harm another living creature. I wish they would. There are only seven Kai’den. Seven! They are unwilling to take direct action. I wish they would. It would only take one Kai’den to forego their passivity, and they would wipe the Drol’ka’Choth’Den from this planet. Do not, for a single second, let your ego trick you into thinking you could hide from a Kai’den. If you think it's amazing what they can do to augment our bodies. Imagine the inverse. Imagine having all your connective tissues liquified. Imagine the pain of having every nerve in your body telling your brain they are burning. What would you do if your stomach and intestines spontaneously leaked their contents into your body? How horrible would your death be if a Kai’den caused skin to grow over your anus. Do you understand what happens if you can no longer take a shit?”

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “I get it. I should be scared of the Kai’den.” Jaxon mocked.

  “No, dammit. You shouldn’t be. That’s the point. They won’t harm you. They won’t harm anything, and that is why the Hol'den exist. We are their goddam loophole. We exist to do the things they can’t. We are the necessary evil that keeps the drol’ka from rampaging over mankind. You and I are the same. You would be doing the same job, but instead of a fat paycheck, you’re getting something that money could never buy.”

  “I don’t know. I will think about it.”

  —----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  Joel scribbled on the notepad and handed it to Barry. Barry read the question and slowly answered so Joel could clearly read his lips.

  “It’s called cullet. This factory makes float glass. One end mixes the silica and other ingredients and then gets heated in a giant oven. Once it gets hot enough, it starts to melt. It floats on top of molten metal. I think it is tin or something. Anyway, it slowly floats across the molten metal and reaches the other end of the bath, where a conveyor lifts it out. It travels very slowly, and as it cools, it makes a continuous sheet of glass. At some point, the sheet is cut to whatever sizes the order needs. At the end of the line, people take the panes off and stack them on racks to be shipped. Any defective pieces get tossed into the cullet tunnels. It is crushed up to be recycled. They take all the crushed glass and pile it up out here. Eventually, it will get mixed with the other ingredients and turned back into new glass.”

  Joel nodded before scribbling another question.

  “Because I worked here the summer after I graduated high school,” Barry answered. “It takes a long time to heat those ovens to temperature. Once they start making glass, they run twenty-four hours a day for years.”

  Joel had another question waiting for Barry.

  “We will head out tomorrow after dark. I don’t know what the plan is to get to the mountain. I have a feeling we will be making it up as we go. There are all kinds of towns between here and there. I doubt Durant is the only town crawling with drol’ka.”

  Joel dropped his head and pretended to be interested in a piece of gravel near his foot. Barry reached over and tapped his arm. Joel looked up and saw Barry smiling.

  “Don’t be scared until it’s time to be scared. For all we know, we might be able to drive straight through without stopping. The way Cass has been talking, the drol’ka don’t have the numbers to be like this everywhere.”

  Barry heard the metal exit door clank as Doyle came outside.

  “What’cha got there?” Barry asked.

  “I raided the cafeteria. They got fridges in there. I think somebody sold homemade tamales. The two coolers are full of them.” Doyle explained as he pulled a few out and handed them to Barry.

  “Never ate a cold tamale before,” Barry complained. “Surely, they have a microwave in there.”

  “Of course they do, but do you know what else is in there?”

  “What?” Barry asked.

  “About two hundred bloated corpses. The ovens are still rolling, and it’s gotta be a hundred and forty degrees in there. Look at me, man. I’m soaked in sweat and it smells like the devils asshole in there. You’re welcome to go warm these up for us.”

  “Um, yeah, cold tamales are just fine.” Barry decided.

  “Man, it’s so surreal. Everybody died, and the factory just kept cranking out the glass. The conveyors are still going. There’s no more glass coming down them, but you see dead bodies at the end of the lines. There are giant piles of broken glass where it just kept coming and dumped right onto the ground. You know, there is some kind of control room in there. It has all these gauges and blinking lights. Alarms were going off, and there were temperature gauges that were bouncing in the red danger zones. It got me to thinking about something. Are there any nuclear power plants around here?”

  Barry thought for a moment before responding.

  “I’m pretty sure there aren’t any in Oklahoma, but there is one about sixty miles southwest of Dallas. Why? You wondering what happens when there is nobody alive to man it?”

  “Hell yeah, aren’t you?”

  “We’re fine. It's got to be a hundred fifty miles from here and almost two hundred from the Kiamichi Wilderness. But…I bet we would still know if it blows. From up in the mountains, we would probably see the mushroom cloud in the distance. If it was nighttime, we might even see the flash.” Barry extrapolated.

  “So, you don’t think we need to worry about it?”

  “I really don’t.”

  Joel reached around and grabbed a few tamales and walked over to the vehicles that were hidden behind the enormous cullet piles.

  “How’s the kid doing?” Doyle asked.

  “I don’t know, man. He mostly asks questions about mundane things. I think it's his way of coping, like he is trying to ignore it all.”

  “What if his dad’s alive?”

  “I hope he is, for Joel’s sake.” Barry replied.

  “Yeah, but if he is…we’re taking his son seventy miles up into the mountains. He would have no clue. How would they ever find each other?”

  “Shit, Doyle. I never thought about that. That’s a shitty thing to think about, but I’m sure his dad would rather him be safe. I mean, his safety is all I can worry about. The whole world gone to shit. What can we do about it?”

  “Bear, you hear that?”

  Barry listened for what Doyle was hearing. It was gravel crunching. Then, they noticed the sound of an engine approaching.

  “Quick, come on!” Barry ordered as he hurried to the trucks. Barry gestured for Joel to get down and stay quiet. Barry peeked around the side of the army truck and saw a silver Honda Civic flying toward them.

  “What do we do?” Doyle whispered.

  “Quick, grab our guns. Let it get a little closer, and we gotta step out and make them stop. Cass has to have spotted it. I’m sure she’s on her way down, already.” Barry answered.

  “Already here.”

  They both turned around and saw Cass and Jaxon approaching.

  “Get ready. You two step out when I say. Jaxon and I will stay concealed. We need them to stop and identify themselves. They could be survivors.”

  “What if they have guns and start shooting at us?” Doyle worried.

  “He’s got a point, Cass.” Barry agreed.

  “Okay, Step out. Wave them down and make sure they see the rifles, then step back around and post up on the edge of the truck. Make sure they see the guns are aimed at them.” Cass instructed.

  “Go, do it, now!”

  Barry and Doyle stepped out, and the car immediately began to slow. They took cover and kept their rifle drawn on the approaching vehicle. It stopped a couple hundred feet away. The driver angled the car with the passenger side facing them. The driver’s door opened, and a man popped out and drew his own rifle over the roof.

  “WHERE IS SHE?” the man yelled.

  “WHERE IS WHO?” Barry yelled back.

  “WHERE THE DAMN SQUAW THAT OWNS THAT BRONCO?” .

  “HOW DO YOU KNOW WHO OWNS THAT BRON—” Barry felt a hand on his shoulder. He turned his head to see Cass walking around him.

  “YOU DAMN HILLBILLY. HOW MANY TIMES DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU CAN’T CALL ME A SQUAW? IT’S OFFENSIVE!”