Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall (21 page)

He had separated them from the rest of the camp and the startled remarks of "Holy shit, Diego's a
girl!"
had finally died out and the boys were showing a considerable amount of interest in Bottom's jackrabbit stew. The clamor had grown quieter the moment the girl had been identified as Alma. Muffled remarks drifting across the way now reached him as, "
Shit,
I knew it was Alma all the time."

Drakkar lay on the far side of the campfire, long legs stretched out in front of him, indolently crossed at the ankle, his arms folded across his chest, back propped against his saddle and gear. Thomas couldn't read his eyes. All he was being given was a well-chiseled profile.

Stefan hunkered down, setting off more sparks than the old dried logs and chips the fire used for fuel. His white-blond hair had spiked up when he'd run his hand through it in exasperation and the sweat had dried it that way. Thomas stifled a sigh. What he wanted here was a happy ending and it was patently obvious he wasn't going to get it.

Alma had been talking through muffled sobs. Her voice trailed off into silence. No one said anything for a few moments. Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but Stefan cut him off.

"I don't appreciate the interference," he said, looking at Blade. "You encouraged her to come even after we talked and I made it clear what I wanted to do."

"I had nothing to do with it. She just told you that only Lady knew she was leaving the Warden compound."

"Lady, you, you're both the same."

Thomas started to argue that vehemently and stopped. Instead, he said mildly, "If I had been planning to send you home to your wife, would I have groomed you for survey leader?''

Stefan's lip curled slightly as he answered, "You don't intend to let any of us go. We should have known that. Our blood is too valuable to the counties. You were going to let us go as far as the Vaults, tease us with stories of unexplored land, then rope us together and haul us back home."

Blade figured to hell with it. "I won't deny your value to the counties. Our population has never been high enough to lose good men. But this expedition was agreed upon, and you're going as far as you have the skill to get. Of course, it's going to be a little difficult riding with your head up your ass, but you might find a way."

Drakkar snickered.

Alma said, "Stefan,
please.
Nobody sent me. Nobody knew about me. I came because I—I couldn't see any other way to get you to come home." In spite of her speaking out, she cringed when Stefan glared her way.

"Get this straight.
We
don't have a home to go back to. We're not the perfect genetic pair anymore and I don't have to return to you. I'm sterile, Alma, and that gives me back my life."

Her mouth opened in a sad "o." Her eyes brimmed with another tear fall.

"We don't know that," Thomas said.

"I know it. I've been her husband for two years. Does she look pregnant to you? Look," and he surged to his feet. "Do what you want to with her. Just make sure birdman here keeps his hands off her.''

Drakkar turned about slowly to face him. He smiled. "You can't have it both ways, whitey."

Stefan's fists balled and then unclenched. He strode away from the fire and disappeared in the darkness fringing the encampment.

Alma buried her face in her hands. Thomas reached over. "He's hotheaded, always has been. He'll cool down. Let him think about it."

She looked up. She might have been all right, but Drakkar said, "How could you let him walk all over you like that?"

"Keep out of this," Blade snapped.

Drakkar got to his feet. He took his gloves off and slapped them against his thigh. "You should not," he said to Alma, "let others do your fighting for you." He looked at Blade. "I've got the horses to finish watering." He sauntered off without a backward look.

Alma dabbed at her eyes with the cuff of her shirt. She met Thomas' look. "He's right," she said. "First I went to Lady, then she went to you."

"It wasn't your fault. Stefan's been treated like a bull in a breeding pen. Neither of you needs that kind of pressure." Thomas stirred up the fire. "I'd like to leave you riding with Drakkar, if that's all right. He's the best man in a fight around here, outside of myself."

A sniffle. "All right. You're not sending me back?"

"You know I can't spare the manpower. You'll go back with me from the Vaults." Thomas stood. "I've ridden with Lady, so I'm not the kind to expect you wouldn't pull your own weight. Stay out of Stefan's way and let his temper run its course. He may change his mind after we've been through the Vaults."

Alma said nothing in reply. She sat, folded over as though she had received a mortal blow to the vitals. As Thomas strode away, he reflected that perhaps she had.

Thomas reined in. Harley came to a halt and snorted, blowing snot and foam through the air. The gelding showed his teeth at Stefan's mount as the young man answered Blade's signal to come forward and join him. The two horses leaned on one another and Stefan's mount threatened to cow-kick Harley until Stefan reined him away. It was definitely fall. The cool tinge of the late afternoon air made even these trail-weary horses dance about a bit.

Thomas looked across the Claremont-Montclair strip. They had just crossed the broad expanse of what had once been a major highway, an artery of the L. A. basin. It was more a hazard than a thoroughfare now. Huge gaps that could snap an unwary leg yawned in the road. Thomas breathed a sigh that he'd gotten the party across safely. Now he frowned at what worried him.

' 'What is it?'' Stefan asked. His tone was strictly business.

Blade indicated the broken cityscape, foothills rising behind it. "Because of the reservoir back in the hills, this is prime nester territory. Remember? We should be running into totems soon. Fetishes, at the least."

Stefan took off his hat, mopped his forehead with the back of his hand. "I didn't recognize the lay of the land," he said shortly.

Thomas hadn't expected him to. He'd been two years younger, greener, and in the company of a guard from the Vaults. "You wouldn't. We're coming at it from a different approach. But these streets are still territory, for all that." Blade sighed. "I don't like it."

"Where could they have gone?"

"Back into the Angeles Crest, maybe. More water back in there, after a long dry summer. Or. ..." He let his thoughts trail off. Would a nester nation still have clans marking individual territories? What was he facing in these foothills, answering the challenge the dean had sent him? "We may not see anything, but they know we're here." He eyed the sky overhead. Sparrows darted aimlessly over the cityscape. He watched a lone crow make its way north. "Stefan, I'm going to put you mostly in charge.".

"Where are you going?" The towhead's attention snapped toward him.

"Right here. But I'll be using some Talent and I'll need the backup to catch details I might be a little slow on."

Stefan nodded.

Thomas continued, "Tell Bottom to take your trail buddy, you're switching with him."

"All right."

He twisted in his saddle, looking toward the rear where Drakkar and Alma rode an informal drag. "And tell those two to keep up and stay alert."

His lips tightened, but Stefan nodded again, pivoted his horse and rode back.

Blade returned to surveying the cityscape and the foothills. Unless the nesters had one hell of a shaman, he thought, they would no longer be seeing what they thought they were seeing. Painstakingly he began to gather the elements of the illusion he wanted to project. He could not keep it up for more than the length of the ride, but that was all the time he needed. By nightfall, they'd be camping at the ruins of the College Vault.

The dean cupped his field glasses to his eyes. He blinked, vision doubling, his eyes watering. He adjusted the glasses with a muffled curse, knowing the signs of age and hating them. He scanned the city lines below.

He picked up Blade downslope, only Blade, in spite of nester intelligence that he'd come with a full party, and the dean didn't like that. If they'd split up, where were the rest of the riders? He had plans for all of them.

He shifted on the ground. Rocks and pebbles dug into his lean flanks. He enjoyed the sensation. It reminded him of his rejuvenation into vitality. Propped on his elbows, he eyed the sky instead, thinking of Ketchum and his tracker instinct.

Behind Blade for a block, maybe further, birds continued to be startled into the air.

With a dry laugh, the dean lowered his binoculars. How the mutant screened off his party, he couldn't begin to guess, but they were there, invisible, trailing behind him. He almost wished that, in the past when he'd had Blade in his labs, he'd done a little more thorough experimentation. He'd like to know how the trick was accomplished.

"I've got you," he said softly. He began to laugh again. He dug in for a long night.

Thomas reached out and touched the fetish hanging from a tortured branch of the live oak. Summer-dried leaves cupped and shivered in the evening breeze. The fetish was old, faded, as dried as the oak leaves beginning to drift groundward. No nester would leave a fetish as old as this hanging. A weak fetish meant a weak chieftain. Old and shriveled meant the power was gone as well.

The encampment was deserted, nothing to mark that a nester had ever claimed this reservoir basin except the bare spots where the shacks and tepees had rested. The basin had been abandoned a year, maybe two years ago. Who could be strong enough to drive or order nesters away from a water resource this constant and this pure?

Stefan shifted in his saddle. "The boys are hoping to go swimming if there's enough light and before it gets any colder," he said. "They're getting kind of rank."

Blade could use a bath as well. The reservoir was low, way down its banks and lapping onto a shore, but there was plenty of water for bathing and swimming. The mappers were tired and giddy—theyd come this far, to the first of their goals, and they could use a little celebration.

He turned on a boot heel. He felt as if he was being watched. Had been watched all day.
Are you out there?

He got no answer. He rubbed the back of his neck. His Intuition was gone, having fled in fatigue, and there was nothing he could do but take precautions. He'd gotten them this far. He looked at the broken crown of what had once been a proud mountain. It would take the morning light to dig out an entrance. "All right," he said to Stefan. "But I want a double guard posted tonight. They're expecting us. Sooner or later, there's going to be trouble."

There was a whoop from many mouths at his reply. Thomas found himself blinking in a cloud of dust as riders thundered past him, to draw to a halt and leap headfirst from their saddles into the reservoir. Dinner would be late tonight.

Alma was sleeping when Thomas found her. He touched her shoulder gently. "The boys are all out. There's good light yet and the water is fairly warm. Stefan's set up a guard so you can bathe."

She set her mouth, then asked, "You put him there?"

"No, he volunteered. Come on ... do you want a bath or not?"

She suddenly wanted a bath so badly she could taste it. She grabbed up her pack with an extra set of clothes and sprinted down the rocky pathway toward the basin where the boys had made so much noise.

She sat down on the slope, after kicking pebbles out of the way, and shed clothes and boots so quickly they went flying. There was a bag of scented soft sand and she dug it out of the bottom of her pack, hoping it would help scrub her stained skin clean. Cautiously, because the slope was very rocky, she made her way to the water's edge.

She put a toe in. It was cool and she shivered as a sudden feeling hit her, an evil oiliness washed over her. Alma stopped and looked about. There was no one to be seen. Stefan was doing his guard duty discreetly. Shaking, she pushed herself into the water and began to scrub as soon as she could crouch down and douse herself. She was afraid and could see nothing to be afraid of.

The dean lowered his glasses. Branches and grasses bent underneath him now since he had changed his vantage point. His hands trembled as he placed the binoculars on the bower in front of him.

Blade had brought a woman with him. Not just any woman, but a young woman, firm and slender, without blemish.
Without mutation,
as near as he could see. He had seen nothing like her since the demise of his people in the Vaults. Flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood—not imaginable among these freaks—he shook with emotion as his mind ran through the possibilities.

He snatched up the glasses quickly. He would have to separate the woman from the others and he knew just how he would do it. He gathered himself and leapt down from his bower. By night he moved yet again and found a new place to lie in wait.

Watty took the telescope Thomas had left with him and opened it up. The instrument sparkled in the morning sun and its brass casings smelled of oil. He eyed the exploring party as they picked their way around the base of the mountain and along a dry creek bed. Disappointment still ached keenly through him—he'd not made the cut to be with Blade and the others going in. He wished now he had not found the trail leading around the mountain's crumpled remains and downhill to what appeared to be an escape tunnel. But Blade had been most pleased with his discovery.