Shadows (6 page)

The problem was he needed the other settlements’ cooperation. Never mind Rule. If he couldn’t dole out supplies to those outliers, groups that were too small to be true villages but still large enough to be useful, they wouldn’t keep up their end of the bargain. If that happened? Bad news for everybody.

“I guess.” Tyler hesitated, then said, “I keep seeing that old lady, you know? Like, I dream about the fire and the animals, how they screamed and then she . . . when she took her gun and—”

“No one told her to eat that bullet.”

“But we killed her husband.”

“Hey.” Indignant, Peter took up his reins a little too fast.

Surprised, Fable snorted then slithered, her hooves clattering on ice. Dead Man’s Alley was steep as a ski jump but a straight, fast, twenty-mile shot all the way back to Rule. Given his druthers, he wouldn’t be here, for all kinds of reasons. Still, he was reasonably sure the Changed were bedded down for the day by now, and he just didn’t like the looks of that pewter sky, or the smell of blued steel. The storm that had been brewing and dogging them ever since Wisconsin was coming for sure. “That old guy shot first, and then we had no choice. It’s not rocket science.”

“But we were taking just about everything they had,” Tyler said.

“Who said life is fair?” Peter said. The butt of a Desert Eagle fisted into the small of his back. He’d pried the weapon from some guy they’d found slumped on the steps of a Winnebago. At least, Peter thought the body was a he
.
No head, minus a foot and the left hand, just some leathery tendons and skin hanging off long bones like bark curls from birch. But the weapon was sweet, a real bone-breaker, judging from the exit craters blown out of two kids sprawled nearby. The kids were popsicles; scavengers didn’t touch the Changed. Anyway, he took the Eagle and a couple bricks of ammo he found stashed in the trailer. “It’s us or them, me or you. Now, I’m sorry about that old lady and everyone else I’ve had to shoot, but I got a responsibility. What I take from others, I put into your mouth.”

Which wasn’t strictly true. Not everything they salvaged ended up in Rule, but only Peter knew the reasons why. The equation was deceptively simple: supplies equaled cooperation. Yet it was a complex and delicate calculus that governed their survival. He didn’t care how the outlying groups north and west of Rule decided whose time was up; that was their business. Hold a lottery, do eeny-meeny-miney-mo, whatever. Just so long as
someone
drew that short straw and got booted out to face . . . well, the same thing that preyed on anyone Rule Banned and sent into the Zone. Everyone knew the Changed were out there, of course. Most just didn’t understand why they stayed.

To his mind, what he’d negotiated with the outliers was a one-hand-washes-the-other kind of thing. Peter wasn’t a bad guy, but a bargain was a bargain and you couldn’t make exceptions. Open the door just a little bit, let someone bend the rules, and the other groups got wind? Bring down the whole system, and then Rule was dead.

“I know it’s harsh,” he said to Tyler. “But no one said the end of the world would be easy. There’s nobody going to save us but us.”

“I guess.” Tyler was quiet a moment, then changed the subject. “Do you believe the stories? About the military getting bounty hunters to round up Spared?”

“I don’t know what to believe,” he said, but that was a lie, too. Crack a rumor and often as not there was a pearl of truth. That the military had a starring role wasn’t much of a surprise either. If only a third of the rumors were true, Rule was especially vulnerable. With sixty some odd kids, there just were too many Spared concentrated in too small an area. They had the Zone, but if the military really
was
involved, they had hardware that could reduce Rule to rubble. Might be time to break up the settlement, figure out safe havens where they could hide the younger kids if—

Beneath him, he felt Fable lurch in a quick, clattering stutter step. At the same moment, Tyler yelped and pitched forward, one foot still hooked in a stirrup, as his horse crashed to the ice. Lunging, Peter tried a grab, but then Fable’s legs gave, cut out from under. The mare came down very hard and with so much force that Peter heard the
crack
, a sound like a tree limb snapped over one knee.

Fable let go of a high, bawling scream.

A split second later, Peter was airborne.

Peter had no time to think, much less react. White rushed for his face, and then he smacked hard against the ice, his vision cutting out for a split second like a dropped call from a cell. There was a gap, like a sudden gasp in time, before he faded back, the feeling in his arms and legs coming in shocks and jabs, as if something with spikes and claws was scrambling over his skin. Someone was screaming his name, but he couldn’t answer. Every breath was a struggle. His own horse was still shrieking, and oh God, the
noise
coming out of Fable’s mouth hurt like nails hammered into his skull.

“Fable,” he croaked, the mare’s name riding on nothing more than a wheeze. Where was she? Rolling onto his left arm, he craned to look back up the hill, and that was when his heart turned over in his chest.

Bleating with terror and pain, Fable sprawled, thrashing, three good hooves pedaling air. But her right foreleg . . .
Oh girl.
A surge of pity and grief flooded into Peter’s chest. What he saw was a ruin: just a shattered stalk of bloody bone. Blood jetted from the severed artery to the ice, where it seeped in thick rivulets, flowing into ruts and dyeing the road a bright ruby-red. Fable was already dead. The poor thing just didn’t know it ye—

To his left, a tiny white geyser spurted from the snow at the very periphery of his vision. Confused, he had just enough time to think:
Animal?
A split second later, he caught a singular, distinctive
snap
followed by a whooshing
HAAAAHHH.

And then Peter knew exactly what was going on, because sound is slow compared to a high-velocity bullet.

“Peter!” It was Weller, somewhere behind and up the hill. “Shooters! Move,
move!
”

Rolling, his body still screaming, Peter planted his hands and feet.
Tyler—Tyler was thrown; so where is the kid, where is he?
Peter threw a wild look over his left shoulder and spotted the boy’s horse perhaps twenty yards further on. A single glance was enough. The animal was still and very dead, its neck twisted so far around that the horse’s bulging eyes stared up the hill and right into his. Tyler was nowhere in sight.

Snow exploded to his right. Ice spray, sharp as broken glass, nipped his cheeks. More
kerrr-SNAP
s now and then yawning sighs as bullets streaked past. Another jump of snow and then a
snap
followed by a
HAAAAHHH
. He eyed the angle where bullet met snow and then knew where the shooters were.

On my left, up high, shooting down. But why am I not dead? I should be.

“Peter!” Weller, again, alongside the third wagon and still, somehow, astride his dancing roan. Men spilled from their horses amidst a confused gabble of barking dogs and the staccato stamp of horse hooves. “Peter, I’m coming for—”

“No, stay where you are!” Peter gestured in a frantic semaphore. “They’re on the left, up the hill! Get everyone behind the wagons!”

Snap
—and then a nearly instantaneous, almost womanly shriek from a horse pulling the first, and closest, wagon. A fraction of a second later, the animal dropped, dead in its traces before it hit the ice. The animal’s weight dragged on the far horse, which stumbled as the driver tried, frantically, to adjust.

That was when Peter saw the barbed wire, stretched across the road at precisely the right height.

Ambush. But how did they know? I didn’t decide to come this way until five hours ago, when I sent the runner, Lang, ahead.

Braying, the horse tried backing away even as the wire tore its flesh. Another
snap.
The driver flung out his arms in a cartoonish gesture of surprise and crumpled as the horse finally panicked and reared, coming down with a clash of hooves that burst the driver’s skull like a cantaloupe. There was a series of loud cracks, like brittle bones, as the horse shafts disintegrated. And then the wagon was thundering over the ice in a shower of sparks: a thousand pounds of squalling metal and rumbling wood coming right at him.

Peter sprang left. He felt the tug and suck of air at his neck as the wagon screamed by. Thudding to the road, he swarmed over the rutted ice.
Have to move, have to move, have to move, move,
move
!
He scuttled up Dead Man’s Alley on hands and knees, his boots slip-sliding on ice and horse blood.

Fable was still alive, but her legs had ceased their frantic run on air. Her one visible eye rolled, trying to keep him in sight. This close, he smelled her rank sweat and the aluminum tang of her blood. Her leg was shredded, the skin hanging in bloody ribbons where the bone had ripped through. As he dropped into the sheltering hollow along her belly, his horse moaned and tried to roll to her feet.

“Easy.” Pulling the Eagle free, he put the muzzle to the horse’s ear. “I’m sorry, girl,” he said, and took up the slack on the trigger.

“Peter?”

“I’m all right!” Blinking against tears and the fine misty blowback of Fable’s blood, Peter looked back toward his men. The remaining wagons were gathered in a rough stagger, and his people were shielded for the moment. Peter counted five more horses down and at least as many men. There was a throaty growl of weapons fire as his men fought back, but Peter knew they were outmatched and outgunned. As if to underscore the point, he saw the head of a faun-colored mutt, which had been cowering beneath a wagon, suddenly explode. What was left keeled over, legs jittering, blood spurting in thick ropes from the raw stump of its neck.

Rage grabbed Peter’s gut. Targeting men, even horses, was one thing, but killing that poor dog was a taunt. Like flipping the bird. Same as that crazy lady torching her barn and—

Wait a minute.
His thoughts coalesced to an icy clarity.
She soaked the hay with—

“M-Mom?” A voice, frightened and too young:
“Daaad?”

Oh shit.
“Tyler?” He didn’t dare raise his head. “Tyler, stay there! Stay—”

“Mom
.
” Tyler’s voice was watery and weak. “Mom
.
”

Peter shut his eyes, just for a second, and thought about it. The smart play was to leave the boy. From the sound of his voice, Tyler was hurt pretty bad and probably beyond any real help. So, go to Tyler and he’d accomplish nothing. Get himself pinned down and maybe even killed. Besides, captains lost men all the time. Shit happened.

The thing was—no one had ever accused him of being too smart.

Peter took off from a low crouch, darting down the hill as fast as he could. Didn’t bother weaving. The road was too rotten and treacherous with Fable’s blood. He was just as likely to break his neck as take a bullet. Over the thunder of his heart, he heard his men screaming as bullets buzzed around like angry hornets. Something plucked at his back, but then he was coming up on Tyler’s horse—fifteen yards, ten, five . . .

The horse’s hindquarters gave a sudden, spastic jolt. For a split second, he thought the horse was still alive, then realized the shooters were leading, anticipating his next move.
Have to jump for it.
Ten feet away, he dug in with his left boot, pivoted, swerved right—and then felt something smack into his left side, really hard, like this one cow, a nasty milker he’d never learned to avoid as a kid. Stumbling, he launched himself in a flat, ungainly dive. His head and chest cleared the horse, but then he ran out of air and came down half in and half out of a hollow formed by the horse’s belly.

And found Tyler.

Or, rather, what was left.

Tyler’s horse had fallen at an awkward angle. Judging from the blood splashed over the animal’s poll, it had driven into the ice headfirst and broken its neck. Unfortunately, Tyler’s foot never had come free of that stirrup. So when the horse collapsed, the boy’s body had gotten pinned from the waist down beneath a thousand pounds of dead meat.

Oh my . . .
Peter’s stunned gaze tracked from the shelf of the boy’s ribs to the sharp drop-off where Tyler’s pelvis thinned to the thickness of a piece of construction paper before disappearing in a very wide, very red pool. A gory, steaming spool of intestines and blood-smeared fat spilled through a rip in the boy’s belly. The horse’s weight had been so great and the bag of the boy’s body so fragile that whatever hadn’t flattened had simply burst.

Peter’s blood turned to slush. Tyler’s steaming guts slowly undulated and bunched like thick, moist worms because the connections weren’t quite severed, the body not yet ready to give up. Like the jittering legs of the headless dog. Like Fable’s doomed run. Tyler’s insides smelled, too, rank and feral as a gutted deer.

“D-Daaaad?” Fresh blood, red as lava, bubbled over Tyler’s lips. There was something wrong with his eyes, too. The left fixed on Peter, but the right roved off-center, searching for a target it would never find.

“I’m h-here,” Peter said, and then realized that his teeth were chattering. He was, suddenly, very cold. His right leg moved, but there was something wrong with his left. It wouldn’t budge, like it no longer belonged, and he was still draped over the horse’s body, not completely under cover. Latching onto the withers, he pulled. Pain clutched his left side. When he moved, something squelched. His parka was soaked. He put a numb hand to his side. Liquid nudged his palm in a rhythmic surge like water from a bubbler, and his hand came back glistening.

I’m shot.
Another twist of pain now, worse than before.
Artery . . . bleeding out—

The air came alive with those hornets again and then someone tumbled over Tyler’s horse, dropping in a heap alongside. “Peter?” someone said, and then Peter felt hands grab his shoulders and pull. The pain was unbearable, and Peter screamed.