Dark Angel After the Dark

Chapter One A COLD DAY IN HELL MEANDER RIVER, ALBERTA DECEMBER 18, 2021 Six months on the run. Six months in small towns, big cities, motels, hotels, campsites, public parks, cohabiting with the riffraff, even the homeless, scrounging, surviving . . . What a humiliating tenure this had been, in the post-Pulse ruins that was America, for a man of Ames White's abilities and sensibilities. But White was, if nothing else, a man able to endure difficulties, to overcome hardships, to shrug off adversities that would defeat even above-average specimens of mere humanity. True, he was not particularly blessed with patience--that attribute had always eluded him. Nor was grace in the face of frustration his long suit; forbearance in the presence of mediocrity--not his forte. Nor was compassion a trait he considered worth cultivating. So in his lack of "sensitivity," he seemed--to the second- and third-rate minds he so often encountered--cruel, even cold. But such (wrongly) perceived cruelty and coldness only bespoke a superiority of mind and spirit, the end result of thousands of years of selective breeding; and, as such, were part and parcel of his ability to prevail. Anyway, Ames White was free of most of these primitive "human" emotions, though admittedly vestiges remained. He had loved a woman, once; and he loved his son. But that was family. Breeding. That was allowed, even encouraged. And Ames White was possessed with a dark, wicked streak of humor. He could well appreciate the irony of a "cold" character like himself finding refuge in the bitterly frigid Dene Tha town of Meander River, Alberta, Canada. Its population no larger than the Sunday crowd in a Seattle marketplace, Meander River had taken him about as far north as he could manage, short of renting a dogsled. The people who lived here were so removed from civilization that White wondered if these subhumans had even heard about the Pulse, let alone felt its repercussions. The Meander River economy was based on barter, and the citizens had very little use for computers, which meant scant had changed here, after what had been a cataclysm to the nearby United States. When terrorists set off an electromagnetic pulse over the East Coast back in 2009, the USA had lost everything, a superpower instantly reduced to the status of Third World nation. To Meander River, the event was as trivial as an electrical outage in a thunderstorm. Buried under a mound of snow measured in feet, not inches, Meander River was the perfect vacation getaway for the person who didn't want to be found by persnickety types . . . NSA federal bosses, say, who might be annoyed that a certain agent had gone rogue; or the Familiars, White's breeding cult family, who might be ticked that one of their own had failed in every one of his mission objectives, and could merit a reprimand . . . the fatal kind. If those were the kinds of people you needed a vacation from, then Meander River had much to offer. Not only was there the biting cold and daunting snow, Meander River was also over three hours from the nearest pre-Pulse landing strip, and a good twelve hours from Edmonton and a real airport. Those conditions did not make travel to this fugitive's frozen paradise a simple proposition, particularly only a week before Christmas when the average high for the day was still well below zero. Meander River was also located in the middle of the Dene Tha Native Reserve. Back in the United States, such locales were called Indian Reservations, with the generally abominable conditions to be expected as the end result of a several-centuries-long government-sponsored genocidal undertaking. Up here, conditions were at least slightly better, with a school, a firehouse, a general store, and maybe a hundred clapboard houses, all in decent enough shape. The area was neatly maintained, withouCollins, Max Allan is the author of 'Dark Angel After the Dark' with ISBN 9780345451842 and ISBN 0345451848.