Fireside (11 page)

SEVEN

Captain Griffith looked up to see Shooter Joseph come through the door to her office. She cinched the strap on her bag down tight and then used the side of her desk to surreptitiously help herself up. Her features remained controlled and blank while she looked at the newcomer. There was no way that she’d let one of the young guys see that her old body was stiff just from packing her backpack with supplies.

She laughed to herself. Before the collapse of the old world, she wouldn’t have batted an eye at facing life at fifty. Now, with a serious lack of diversity in their diets and all the multivitamins long gone, her body felt like she’d been beaten repeatedly. Standing for too long hurt her, then again, too much sitting was painful as well.

Thirty-five years ago, she was a young, married lieutenant in the US Army, intent on getting out as soon as her five year commitment was up. Then the Vultures initiated World War Three and destroyed the future of mankind. Her husband was killed, along with everyone else she knew, when Fort Hood was obliterated by a small-yield nuke.

She made her way to San Angelo with her platoon and joined up with the Air Force commander at Goodfellow Air Force Base. Her team made do for a little while under the Air Force as guards on the gates, then eventually separated to form the nucleus of the Shooters, an organization that worked directly for the city’s mayor. The Shooters were a hybrid of police SWAT and an army infantry platoon, tasked with keeping the wastelands surrounding San Angelo safe. Over time, the commander of the base died and the military base was annexed into San Angelo. The Shooters took over one of the buildings near the walls that cut off the runway and expanded operations to be in charge of both the ground defense area and manning the gates.

Lorelei Griffith promoted herself from lieutenant to captain as the commander of the Shooters and established several platoons with lieutenants in charge of each. She’d become more of an administrator than an operator after that, only going out on operations sparingly. She was in the final preparation stage of an operation now.

Aeric stopped by in the morning to discuss operations beyond the San Angelo defense area and to borrow a Shooter to escort him into the Barrio. She’d been as surprised as he’d been when they started looking through the patrol reports. While it hadn’t been five years like he thought, it
had
been more than two years since they’d conducted a patrol outside of the immediate area around the city.
That was way too long
, she told herself.

Events outside the walls had settled drastically over the years and she’d allowed the Shooters to get lazy. It was inexcusable and Lorelei promised Aeric that she would personally lead a patrol before the end of the day. The group was ready to go, the only thing that she’d been waiting on was Joseph’s return from the Barrio.

“How’d it go? Did you find the girl that Traxx was looking for?” she asked the young Shooter standing a respectful four feet from her desk.

“Yes, ma’am. We found Maria and brought her out of the Barrio to Traxx’s house.” His eyes darted towards the ground, indicating to Lorelei that he wanted to say more.

“What is it, Joe?”

“Well, it’s just… The girl is strange.” He took a moment to organize his thoughts. The captain had known Joseph a long time, from when he was a little gang banger in the Barrio, through the Shooter selection and training. Then he’d spent two years at the garrison up in Tennyson where they’d set up a secure location to retreat to in the event that San Angelo ever became compromised and, more recently, another year with him in the city. He’d grown exponentially over the years, but his formative youth in the slums without a proper attempt at education sometimes held him back from speaking fluidly without pausing to ensure the old accent didn’t emerge and to put things in the correct order in his mind. She could be patient.

“Maria has what they call the Gift.”

“The Gift? You mean the children who supposedly can predict the future?”

“Yeah. Ma’am, I know it seems like a bunch of lies,” Joseph stated. “I’ve seen some of the things that she’s said come true. I don’t know about the other people who say that their kid has it. They could be lying. Maria is different.”

“Okay, so convince me. What have you seen?”

He thought for a moment before answering. “The crop boost last fall. She said something about there would be so much food that we wouldn’t know what to do with it. That came true.”

“There was a lot of clean rain last spring and even in the summer we got some,” Lorelei countered. “Even a little girl could have seen that coming.”

“She also said that it would be a mild winter. We only had a few deaths last winter because of the cold.”

“So the ‘Gift’ is good for predicting the weather?”

“No, ma’am… Um, well, I guess so. She predicted that attacks by the bandits and mutants from the wastes would stop. We haven’t had a raid attempt in more than a year.”

“When did she
predict
that?” she asked with mild interest.

“A few days after she arrived here. We took her in and there were only a few more attacks on the perimeter before they stopped.”

“Interesting. So, what is she saying now that’s caused Traxx to want to seek her out?”

“She said that San Angelo is going to burn. That the birds were coming to destroy the city.”

That caught her attention. “What else did she say about the birds?”

He thought for a moment, “That they’d eat us and use our skin for clothing. She also said that the walls would fall.”

“How old is this girl?” Lorelei asked in alarm.

“Ten or eleven.”

That’s some gruesome shit for such a young person to be going around telling people
, Lorelei thought. She wondered if it was better to remove her from the public eye before she caused a panic in the population. She’d have to ask Traxx if they should segregate her somehow.

Joseph chilled her blood when he continued, “She also said everything that will happen to San Angelo is Traxx’s fault. That he brought the curse on us.”

“The Vultures,” she muttered. She knew without a doubt what Maria had seen. It made her upcoming patrol all the more important. How could she have been so stupid and lackadaisical in the performance of her duties? “The girl is talking about the Vultures.”

“The Vultures, ma’am?”

She glanced up at the young man. He’d been a part of the Shooters for several years now, but was still too young to know anything about the early days of the city after the war. “Have you ever wondered about the scars that cover Traxx’s face and arms?”

He shrugged, “No, ma’am. They’re burn marks, that’s plain to see. I figured that it was some kind of fire or maybe an injury from the war.”

“The Vultures are a real gang—not like those kids in the Barrio pretending to be meaner and bigger than they are. They started out as computer hackers.” She stopped. She’d lost him. “A computer is a machine from the old world. They helped to control our daily lives and a hacker was a person who would invade someone else’s computer from far away and take it over, then cause the computer to do whatever they told it to do. The hackers took over a computer that started the war and destroyed everything.”

“If it was so easy to take over the computer, why would people in the old world have the…” He searched for the word before remembering it, “Why were the
bombs
controlled by the computer? Why didn’t they carry them around with them or keep them locked up? Why did they have bombs that could destroy the world?”

“Good questions,” she conceded. “They made the more powerful bombs to keep up with our enemies, each of them making bigger and stronger bombs to intimidate the other. As to why were they controlled by a computer? That’s just how it was. Everything was run by computers. People even had a tiny personal computer in their pocket for communication called a cell phone. Hell, computers were everywhere, now the ones that you still see are ancient pieces of junk.

“Anyways, the Vultures started the war and made sure that Austin, the city where they lived, wasn’t destroyed. They were led by a crazy man named Justin who took over the city during the war. They tortured people, murdered, destroyed and stole everything in the surrounding area. Aeric Traxx and Tyler—the commander of the Gathering Squad—were taken prisoner by the Vultures and tortured. They’re the ones who burned him and put out Tyler’s eye. They escaped and killed Justin, then came here. The last we heard, the Vultures had crumbled from the inside as they fought amongst themselves to see who would be the new leader after Justin’s death.”

She took a deep breath. It had been years since she related the story to anyone and it took more of a mental toll on her than she thought it would. “The Shooters were established specifically to fight the Vultures if they came here. Of course, we had thirty or forty thousand residents back then and made a much more lucrative target. We’ve fought raiders and mutants, and turned back people seeking shelter, but we never ended up going head-to-head with the Vultures. If what that little girl is saying is true, then we’re in trouble.”

“We’re ready to fight, ma’am. I remember how bad it was as a child without much food. We have a stable way of life now. We’ll defend our home if it comes to that.”

“I know we will.” She smirked and said something that she’d been taught as a brand new officer in school, “The best defense is a good offense. We have a patrol that’s going outside of the ground defense area. We’re leaving in a few minutes if you want to go.”

This time, the Shooter didn’t deliberate or take time to arrange his thoughts before answering. “Absolutely, ma’am. Let’s go see what’s out there.”

*****

The heavy trucks chugged along at eleven miles per hour, belching smoke and steam into the early afternoon. The engineer, Ted Winston, had long ago converted several of the old gasoline-powered trucks into massive steam engines because he foresaw that the quality of fossil fuels would degrade over time and be unusable to power the vehicles. He was right, of course.

It had been more than thirty-five years since the last tanker of fuel left a refinery along the gulf coast. Gasoline that remained unused was now worthless for transportation and barely even able to be used to start fires. The first thing that Ted converted was the earth-moving equipment—bulldozers and backhoes, primarily—to keep the ever-changing walls repaired. Next were a few flatbed trucks that the Gathering Squad could use to continue their operations as they had to range farther and farther during the lean years of acid rain, and finally, he retrofitted three of the big military transport trucks for the Shooters.

Lorelei hated riding in the damn things, though. The trucks reminded her too much of what they’d lost over the years. The city was riddled with remnants of the old world, from defunct street lamps to the old basketball arena. Everywhere you looked, one could see what had been lost when the Vultures started the war.

The rough coughing of men and women from the cargo area made her turn and peer through the missing window into the back. Ten of her Shooters sat along a row of benches in the middle of her truck, facing out. Their mixture of old Air Force uniforms pilfered from the base stores, combined with bandanas and ragged strips of cloth covering their faces to keep the smoke and grit from the engines and the surrounding wastes out of their mouths. Everyone also wore goggles of some type, most were the military-issued ones, but a few of her men had old swimmer’s goggles and one even had a full gas mask, anything they could use to keep the debris from their eyes.

Nearer to the cab, two men steadily fed a mixture of coal and other flammable material into a chute that led to a fire bin underneath the boiler that Ted had designed for the overly-simplified steam engine. Water in the boiler was converted to steam, which then forced a piston to move through a cylinder, allowing for vehicle movement. The excess steam was then trapped and piped back into the boiler as it cooled. The whole design was much less complicated—and more efficient—than the old locomotive engines that used to run all over the country.

“You doing okay back there?” she shouted over the roar of the engine. Several of the Shooters gave her a thumbs up without answering verbally, so she turned back around and stared out of the windshield, which was spider-webbed on her side from a long-forgotten battle with marauders.

The desolate landscape stretched on for miles in all directions. She’d sent two trucks out the Northern Gate, one going north and the other going west to see what was beyond their normal patrol routes. She’d purposefully chosen to take her truck out of the Eastern Gate. Back when they used to get in fights with scavengers and bands of raiders out in the wastes, it was almost always on the eastern side of the city where people had fled from the larger cities of Austin and possibly San Antonio. Even though she knew that they were all dead and gone, she still contributed all of the fights on the east to the Vultures.

They passed by the remnants of Wall, a small town that the Gathering Squad had dismantled, taking everything usable into San Angelo. The old concrete foundations of the buildings were as far as anyone from the city had been in several years. She remembered the weeks upon weeks of boring protection duty as her Shooters guarded the Gatherers when they tore apart houses and the few businesses. Those times were interspersed with several firefights; she lost two Shooters on the mission. Of course, there were always more volunteers willing to become a Shooter in exchange for steady meals back in those days so it hadn’t been an issue.