Fireside (19 page)

“What was that thing? I couldn’t see clearly after the flash from your rifle.”

“Either a demonbroc or a dog,” Joseph replied calmly. He looked around at the boat and asked, “How do we make this thing go?”

“I uh…” Aeric trailed off. There weren’t any oars and even if there were a motor, it probably would have been useless along with every other mechanical engine that used spark plugs for ignition. They could use long poles to push themselves off for a few feet, but wouldn’t be able to touch as they got farther out into the lake. They’d be sitting ducks for the Vultures to pick off.

“The rifles! We can use the stocks on the rifles as paddles,” Aeric whispered excitedly.

Joseph had never been in a boat before and Aeric hadn’t been in one since he was a teenager, so it took a few tries, wasting time that they didn’t have, to make their longer, full-stocked sniper rifles work as paddles. The M-4s had a narrow stock without the larger surface area the two rifles had and were useless for the task.

They’d gone a couple hundred feet when the water around them began to plink. The Vultures had found where they went into the lake. They both paddled for everything they were worth, learning quickly to work in unison instead of fighting against each other. The boat slid across the surface of the water and the shore disappeared into the darkness behind them.

*****

“What do you mean they got away?” Kendrick hissed into the Humvee’s radio.

“
I mean, they got away and we can’t find them, sir
,” the imbecile on the other radio answered. “
We tracked them all the way to a giant lake and they got away in a boat. We shot one of them before they got in the boat, though. There was a lot of blood on the ground.
”

Kendrick wanted to throw the handset into the wastes. Doing so would be pointless, though. The damn thing was connected by a cord running from the receiver to the radio. He wondered for the hundredth time who’d taken a shot at him. It
had
to be the San Angelians. First they showed up in Eden after a decade of abandonment and then, just days later, the old man stopped answering the radio.

Of course, that could have been because the battery died, he reminded himself. His father had seized a large stockpile of them from Camp Mabry, the old National Guard base in Austin. The batteries weren’t designed to hold their charge for years, so the Vulture engineers had jury-rigged a solar panel to act as a power supply for the battery charging case that had kept their military radios working, even if it was basically on life support. The battery that he’d given the watcher had been new in the factory packaging, so it probably hadn’t held much juice.

The most damning evidence that it was the San Angelians, in Kendrick’s mind, was that the assassins fled towards the northwest. They’d made a beeline towards the setting sun until they were forced to go north to avoid a small force that he’d sent on horseback to sweep around in front of them. Somehow Aeric and his idealistic rejects had gotten word that he was coming to destroy their city and they’d attempted a preemptive strike.

While he hated the man for what he’d done to Justin Rustwood, Kendrick had to respect Aeric’s move. Traxx didn’t know about the explosives that he’d set in the walls or about his surprise in the sewers, but he knew that Kendrick would eventually be able to find a way in, so he tried to end it before it began. Aeric probably thought that if he assassinated the Vulture’s leader, they’d once again fall into the power struggle that had decimated the Vultures during the twenty years that Greg Sanders had been in control.

He pulled the receiver back towards his face and pressed the button on the side. “Okay, if you can’t swim or take a boat across, go to the far side. The dogs will pick up their scent.”

“
Yes, sir
.”

Kendrick thought about it for a moment and continued, “I want them caught before they get back to San Angelo. If they escape, I will give you to Starr.”

“
We’ll get them, sir. They lost their bicycles and at least one of them has a bullet hole or two in—
”

Kendrick didn’t bother to listen to the rest of his lackey’s excuse. He dropped the receiver into the front seat of the Humvee and walked over to the large tent that made up his command post. He admired his Vultures’ quick work; the tent had been a pile of fabric when he started the radio conversation with Hobbes, now it was already up and they were carrying bedding inside.

He smiled at Starr as she came skipping through the camp towards him. Three men dragged a screaming captive several yards behind her. “Hiya, Kendrick!” she gushed as she kissed him quickly on the cheek. “It’s been two days. You said on the second night that I’d get to have one.”

“You’re right. I was on the radio with Hobbes, is the cage set up yet?”

“Almost, or at least it will be by the time we get over there,” she replied. Starr rubbed at the bandage on her hand where she’d cut herself jumping from the horse. “Did they kill them yet?”

“No, the idiots let them escape across a lake…in a boat. How the hell did they find a boat that wasn’t rotted through or in someone’s possession?”

She stared blankly at him and he said, “It means a boat that nobody owned.”

“Oh, maybe that’s how they got there in the first place and were running to where they’d left the boat.”

Kendrick hadn’t thought of that possibility. If that were true, then maybe the shooters hadn’t been from San Angelo. If they came by boat, they could have been from anywhere on the Colorado River that wasn’t cut off by a dam. “Hmm… Maybe.”

He decided to change the subject and asked, “What are you planning for tonight’s entertainment?”

She grinned mischievously at him. “I want to cut off his eyelids so he suffers the entire dusty trip. And I’ll pull out his fingernails slowly with some needle-nosed pliers. You know the men enjoy getting an entire, intact nail as a reward. I’ve even heard that they trade them as currency!”

Kendrick nodded his head, he’d heard that too. “Seems a little mild for you, my dear.”

“I want him to last,” she deadpanned. “Maybe I’ll take a few other body parts that will hurt like hell, but won’t kill him.”

Kendrick thought for a moment before answering, “Nipples?”

“Sure.”

“Ears?”

“Maybe one.”

“Testicles?”

“Dammit, Kendrick! I didn’t want to ruin the surprise, but you’re too good,” she answered, practically bouncing in anticipation. “I’m gonna nail his nut sack to a piece of long wood that’ll rest across his thighs. I glued sandpaper to the back side, so as he walks the wood will pull against his balls while it rubs away the skin on his legs. Everything will be made even worse by the dust and salt in his sweat. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

He pulled his enthusiastic little torturer into an embrace. “Yes, sweetie. The men will love it.”

“Oh, maybe I’ll put a hot poker up his ass too. That’s always a crowd pleaser.”

*****

The boat finally ran aground on the far shore of the lake and the men stepped wearily from it as the sun peeked over the eastern horizon. Aeric’s arms, back and shoulders ached from the effort of rowing the boat across the lake using only the stocks on their rifles as oars and his hand throbbed uncontrollably where the thorn was still embedded.

He was better off than Joseph, though. The Shooter was leaking blood from his thigh and every time he’d shifted on the fishing boat’s seat, it tore away any scab that had tried to form. It was still dark out and difficult to see, but the man looked much paler in the moonlight than he had before they bedded down for the evening at the dam.

“How you holding up, buddy?” he asked in concern.

“We need some time to get a good pressure bandage applied to both the entry and exit wound,” he muttered. “And I need food. So hungry.”

They’d cut miles and miles of shoreline off of their route by rowing straight across the lake. He wanted to take advantage of their lead and couldn’t. There was simply no way that Joseph would be able to make a run for it with his leg bleeding the way it was. Aeric glanced around the area where they’d landed. It looked like as good a place as any to try and make camp. There was a small square shape not too far inland that looked like it might have been a house of some kind.

“Alright, let’s see about that house over there. Maybe we’ll get lucky and nobody will be living there.”

He helped Joseph hobble along, which was harder than he thought it would be with both of them wearing backpacks and carrying two rifles. They’d walked fifty feet before he spoke again, “I changed my mind. Maybe we’ll get lucky and somebody
will
be living there. We need supplies that we don’t have.”

As they neared the squat, one story building, he realized that it had been a store of some kind. Fifties-style gas pumps, considered old before the end of the world, rusted in the parking lot along with various pieces of trash and abandoned material. Everything seemed intact except for the front door, which had a large hole bashed through the glass.

“Wait here and cover me,” Aeric ordered as he shifted Joseph’s weight off of his shoulders and leaned him up against the gas pumps.

He slid the carbine off his shoulder and pressed the stock deep into his shoulder with the barrel pointing slightly down in front of him like the Shooters had taught him. They called it the low-ready position. He could easily lift the barrel up and fire an aimed shot, which was much more sensible in a potential encounter than carrying the rifle at his side or on his shoulder. The damned spike in his hand felt odd against the pistol grip. He couldn’t risk removing it until he had a place to perform the minor surgery that it would require. They
needed
that gas station.

Aeric stepped forward cautiously towards the gas station. The hole in the glass meant that the store had been raided at some point. He had no way of knowing if that was last week or if it had happened twenty years ago. The morning had lightened up enough that he could make out vague, indistinct shapes behind the grime-encrusted windows and he didn’t see any movement.

He picked out his path among the refuse in the parking lot and stared hard at the space in front of him, watching for tripwires or any type of movement. He didn’t want to set off some paramilitary nut-job’s grenade booby-trap and end up maimed—or worse. As he walked, his mind drifted to the possibilities of how someone could have set up a trap, to defend themselves or to catch something for food. Lord knows they’d heard plenty of stories about cannibals in the wastes as the resources dwindled during those lean years where virtually nothing would grow.

If he’d been setting the trap, he would have rigged it to blow the gasoline pumps as well. That way, he’d have been guaranteed to get most of the raiding party in the explosion. The rain of body parts wouldn’t have been a pretty sight. It was every man for himself first, then family and friends. Nobody else mattered.

Glass crunched under his boot, shattering the early morning stillness. Aeric paused and waited for some type of reaction from inside the gas station. He waited for several seconds before finally continuing on. It was nerve-wracking to be outside the walls of San Angelo again. He’d done it often enough on the Gathering Squad as a young man, but hadn’t been on any type of clearing operation since Veronica’s father died and he became the mayor in his place. And he’d never cleared anyplace by himself before. Even immediately after the war, he always had Tyler right by his side or providing backup from a few feet away.

His mind wandered again to his earlier thought that nobody else mattered. He still remembered those innocent days of his youth when he thought that human beings cared for each other. He’d even engaged in a debate that freshman semester at UT that mankind ultimately wanted the get along and become a community. One of his arguments had been that if mankind was so evil, as they were portrayed in movies and literature, then the first societies would have never been formed. He used to think that mankind ultimately was good and wanted to be together in some type of society.

He still felt that way, to an extent, but he’d been wrong in his argument about the good intentions of humanity. People wanted to be together when there was enough food to go around. When there wasn’t, they were violent, petty and mean. The ancients knew how to farm, how to hunt and how to preserve food from going bad, the people that survived here in Texas did not know how to do any of that at first—and people died by the thousands.

Aeric reached the door without incident. There hadn’t been any traps in the parking lot; now he had to contend with the door itself. An easy trick would have been to tie fishing line to the door handle and the other end to a grenade pin, then when he pulled the door open, the pin would come out, the spoon would fly and
boom
, no more Aeric Traxx.

Then the logical part of his mind took over. The average American, even the average Texan, didn’t have grenades lying around. It was unlikely that they had anything like that. They could have set up some type of ram to come down from the ceiling into the doorway like in that movie with the alien headhunter in South America.

Something like that would be fairly easy to set up and far more likely to happen than a grenade. Even so, he pulled gently on the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. He pulled hard on the door and swung down to the side, crouching beside the brick exterior. If there was some kind of booby-trap the brick should keep him safe, he reasoned.