Consciousness didn’t slowly come back, everything flicked on like a light. From my many years of experience as an infantryman I knew without opening my eyes that I was in a position I’d been in countless times before: face down in the grass. The first thing that registered was the lack of road noise. You could hear interstates for miles, so not hearing any of that was concerning. What’s more, I didn’t hurt any more than I did when we crossed out of Illinois. If I’d just survived an accident, I should be able to hear the traffic and I most definitely should hurt like hell based off what little I remembered before it all went black. The only thing that made sense was it sounded like I was in the woods. That’s basically most of everything between Kentucky and my destination.

  While my conscious mind laid there completely vapor locked, countless hours of training took over. Rub toes against the inside of my boots to check feeling and function. Same for fingers. Slight movement of arms and legs to check for joint damage. Slow transition to pushup position and then scan for immediate threats while to coming to a kneeling position, like an inverse mountain climber.

  Forest ahead of me, not terribly dense, but thick enough to provide ample cover for an ambush and make the armor boys look for another way through. Shadows seldom lie, the sun was to my right. It felt like early morning, so I had to be facing north. Eastward, the forest thickened dramatically to the point the thought occurred to me I’d stumbled across a land nav nightmare the folks back at RASP would gleefully cackle over. Between underbrush, fallen trunks, and scattered limbs, there would be no quick passage in that direction. Mass movement as a coherent unit would be even slower, and if you were making a business call you’d be moving at a snails pace to avoid making noise.

  I pivoted on my heel and froze. Terrain-wise, the woods to my south was no different than the north, but that wasn’t what caught my breath in my throat. No, that was everything we’d been hauling scattered in a blast pattern toward me and the string of stumps that looked like someone had sheered them off with a plasma torch at ankle level between me and the start of the debris field.

  No doubt, any observer would have seen little reaction on my part from the discovery beyond a slow blink before I turned my head to my right, toward the west. That would be the aforementioned training doing the driving, not me. Westward, the trees thinned abruptly. Not far beyond the edge, the ground sloped upward. Maybe a hundred feet past the last tree the grass thinned into some sort of rock I’d never seen before, a mottled mishmash of light and darker stone. I couldn’t make out much more due to distance and trees.

  In the face of no obvious threats and only the sound of natural woodland life, my automatic response focused in on something I’d seen in the debris field, not far from me. The gift from my parents had stood out because of the bright red logo across the top, and after moving low and quick over to it, I found myself frowning.

  The logo, a bright red arrowhead with inset black Fairburn Sykes knife, was untouched. The same couldn't be said for the rest of the pelican case. A crack ran across one edge of the lid and the opposite side looked like someone had taken an acetylene torch to it.

  Naturally, training didn’t care about any of that, but I reluctantly added the tabled topic to the growing list of things that I’d probably lose my shit over once I was safe. Speaking of safe, the moment I popped the latches and reached into the foam lined case, I took the very first, most important step toward being safe: be armed.

  For the first time since I woke, my ears filled with reassuring sound: a slide riding home on a full magazine. One of my instructors had been fond of telling us that the real weapon is the man, not the implement, but always pointed out that having a weapon in-hand was always preferable to the alternative when shit went pear shaped. In the brief moment my training’s grip loosened enough for me to contemplate that lesson, the only thing that went through my mind was the surety that shit had long since passed the shape of any fruit known to man.

  I breathed in slowly, deeply, while surveying the debris once more. Ignoring the tabled topic of what happened to the truck and trailer, the debris pattern suggested my sister should be here with me, but I saw nothing, heard nothing to suggest that was true. My head turned toward the west. There’s almost no way to get the truck in here with all the trees, and the few ways in would leave a lot of fucked up grass. No tracks, no truck. Find the truck, find Genevieve. Still, I need to find out where I am in general.

  “Up. Recon’s always more effective from an elevated position,” I murmured to myself and stood. I made it precisely two steps before it occurred to me that I might want a holster. Another step later, a mental image popped into my head, one of highway patrol pulling up on an accident with the passenger wandering around with a pistol in his hand. “Yeah, no, I can do without that.”

  Thankfully, I had a fairly good map in my head as to what was packed where before it got strewn across the forest floor, so it only took me a few moments to find the bag and liberate my holster. On a lark, I snagged my Kevlar shooting gloves and the tomahawk I’d packed in next to the holster. Checking my phone produced the expected result: no signal.

  Clearing the edge of the forest, the part of me that was deeply wishing everything was still normal and I’d just missed something clenched its teeth and went to sit in the back of my head next to the tabled topics. The hillside beyond was not the raised revetment of a roadway that part of me had hoped it would be. Not at all. If it were made of dirt, I might’ve said it was a super-sized version of one of the Cahokia mounds, but this was easily three or four times the height and at least as many times as wide. Moreover, the dirt stopped maybe a quarter of the way up, giving way to the weirdly mottled stone I’d seen earlier, but the absolute cherry on top, the feature that laid the coup de grace on my want for normalcy was the stone edifice atop it all. There was what appeared to be a weathered medieval keep of some sort atop this crag.

  I stumbled to a halt and pursed my lips while my subconscious chewed on what lay before me. Unamused but undeterred, I turned about on my heel after a few moments and spent a short while searching for either my binoculars or my long-range shooting scope. In the end, I found the binoculars first and then looked for the lightweight backpack I’d packed as a go-to-hell bag specifically for this trip. I returned to the bottom of the slope to stare once more, this time with basic first aid, a canteen of water, food, a poncho liner, some rope, and a few other basic necessities on hand.

  “Fuck it, why not?” I asked the empty air and started up.

  I won’t lie and say I made it to the top a few minutes later, all chipper and super happy about life. No, it took me the better part of an hour and I felt like the hillside took one look at the Army’s mountain training regimen, patted me on the head, and walked off laughing. The bottom quarter was largely easy by Army standards, the next quarter by Ranger standards, and the rest was simply a motherfucker for the best of all bad reasons: I didn’t have the gear. A proper climbing setup and the ability to hammer in anchors would’ve tamed it, but I was left to test every potential foot and handhold and inch ever upward every time what traversable path I’d found ended.

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  To be completely honest, I realized how stupid I was being somewhere a bit over halfway up the top half. That’s why, when I finally pulled my sweaty ass over the edge at the top, the first thing I did once I’d rested is to look down to try to see if I’d missed easier paths. I knew if I hadn’t, I’d screwed myself. Guess what? I screwed myself.

  “Shit always looks easier than it is from the bottom,” I muttered to myself as I stood and fluffed my shirt to cool off. With a grunt, I turned to look at the wall behind me. Unlike the rock face below, which looked like someone had cemented light and dark stone of various colors together haphazardly, this stone was a single, homogeneous color and one I recognized: granite.

  As my eyes wandered up the fa?ade, I noted the fit between the stones was unreasonably tight, to the point I saw no mortar, but each stone looked like it belonged atop each other. Every stone had been mated to the one above and below it. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew if I dug out a sheet of paper, it wouldn’t fit between the stones.

  Chewing on my lip as I eyed what looked like thirty feet of solid stone, I remembered I’d heard about stone constructions in South America, from the Incans probably, that seemed unreasonably well constructed for their tech level. I handed that factoid off to the part of me sitting next to the tabled topics and started following the narrow path between the cliff face and the wall. Had to be an entrance around here somewhere. Maybe there was an easier way up, just not from this direction.

  To be fair, I probably should have broken the binoculars at that point, but part of me wanted to see if I could get atop the walls before doing so. That, and the part concerned about survival had determined this place might make a decent base of operations, provided it was uninhabited and there was an easier path up, depending on how easy. Feudal lords built castles and keeps for a reason: they’re defensible.

  I fought back a smile when I came around the northern corner. A low, crenelated wall ran along the edge of the cliff face. Leaning into the nearest gap, I saw there was, in fact, an easier path up, but there was a caveat. The terraced path up the northern slope reminded me of some of the hairpin mountainside highways I’d seen in Italy, but someone had excavated a deep ditch between the top of the path and this level. Twenty feet of empty air separated the two.

  I pushed away from the wall and noted no structure where I expected one to be, just what appeared to be overgrown rubble. Frustrated, I walked the rest of the way down to where there should’ve been a gatehouse. Based on the rubble above and the stone littering the gap below, there had been a gatehouse at one point, but the front facia and a good chunk of the structure proper had collapsed into the gap. I had a hard time seeing something as apparently well-engineered as the stonework here doing that on its own accord so I filed that away with a frown.

  “Well, I have a way down at least,” I muttered to myself and turned toward the keep proper and the pile of rusting metal where the wall’s primary gate and portcullis would have been. Beyond the gap, the keep stood silently, a stone stairway running up and around the corner to my right. By the lack of welcome party and the utter silence from within, I was satisfied the place was likely uninhabited by two-legged threats, but I still couldn’t rule out anything else.

  The short climb over and around the metal remnants gave me plenty of time to think about what their presence meant. They weren’t marred, at least in the sense of obvious impact points, and glancing at where the machinery should have been only showed me open sky.

  Once inside, I glanced around the inner yard for a few minutes trying to sort everything out. Everything that survived whatever happened here was either stone or metal. Aside from the gravel filling the yard, every surface appeared clean, no cracks, gouges, or broken edges. Moreover, there were no plants to be seen. In a few places I could see from the gate, the dusty gravel along the wall was a fair bit darker. Aside from the discoloration, the gravel was largely uniform with no obvious tracks or footprints disturbing the surface.

  Hand on pistol, I walked the yard and eventually wandered up the stone stairs to peek inside the keep proper. No surprise awaited me inside, as I expected the open space inside the roofless walls and the central pit with a small lake at the bottom.

  By that point, my sense of disbelief had basically been waterboarded by reality enough so far that I wasn’t surprised the near noonday sun revealed a small pipe at the surface of the water, probably a relief for what should have been a sealed basement cistern.

  “The fuck happened here?” I asked myself as I picked up a fist-sized rock and tossed it in only for it to vanish from sight altogether. Satisfied the water was deep, I returned to the courtyard next to the gate where a series of stones protruded from the inner wall, likely originally used as a base for a wooden staircase.

  Climbing up as best I could, I thought about my options. This was clearly a defensible position, but it had its own complications. If that water wasn’t drinkable, I’d have to find another source. Considering the pool was clearly stagnant, that was a bad bet. Using the chlorine tablets in my emergency kit to purify it would only last so long, so I’d still need another source. That would also mean procuring the means to carry water up here without spilling it. I had some buckets in the trailer, but I had no idea if they were intact, and even if they were, I wasn’t entirely sure what I’d do when they eventually broke.

  Beyond that, the question of food was an open one. Sure, I had a few boxes of MREs and dehydrated food I was bringing to my buddy’s place, but those would only last so long, too. Similarly, my tent would work for now, but it wasn’t going to be a long-term solution either.

  I was suddenly very happy I’d prepped to help Rob clear the land with the understanding we’d be camping out most of the time on undeveloped property like lumberjack hobos. If I hadn’t already been planning on living outdoors for most of a month, I’d be completely hosed instead of only just mostly.

  I breathed in the fresh air when I hit the top, looked out from the wall, and whistled. “Thank God for small favors, this hot dick in the ass has a great view.”

  I scanned the horizon as best I could in every direction as I popped the retaining tab on my binocular case. Corner by corner, I took in the surrounding countryside in all directions.

  “So, it could be worse,” I told myself. I was on narrow crag of stone, probably five hundred feet tall by itself, surrounded on all sides by dense forest, mostly deciduous types like oak, hickory, and maple. Farther out, the trees appeared surprisingly large, similar to redwoods. Some pine lined the edge of the forest on the north end and had started creeping up the hill in one spot. Speaking of the northern slope, the forest there was set back a fair bit farther than the other directions and one area opposite the pine encroachment was spaced at almost conspicuously even intervals.

  Farther out, it was an unbroken sea of green until the horizon, though the way the treetops rolled, I suspected the ground rose almost precipitously out there. Still, thanks to the distance, shimmer in the air, and tree cover, I couldn’t be sure what I was seeing. The first thing that came to mind was that I was in the middle of some god-awfully huge crater.

  By that point, I’d decided on a plan of action. I was going to move everything that survived up here. That’d certainly take more than the rest of the day to do, so I’d have to prioritize things animals might get into first and tarp the rest in the hope it wouldn’t rain before I found a better way to take care of them. Besides which, all of Genevieve’s books were down there, and she’d shit kittens if I let the weather get to them.

  I stopped before departing and threw my need for normalcy one last lifeline by taking out my phone. No signal. I sighed, turned it off to save battery, and looked back toward the keep.

  “I dub thee Fort Kickass.”