The Day After Never (Book 1): Blood Honor Read online

But she’d paid the price.

  His mind wandered, replaying in agonizing slow motion the inexorable grind into chaos as civilization had broken down. The population had been woefully unprepared for the reality of a food chain with only three days of supply, dependent as they were on the state for protection, for gas, for clean water, and electricity. Their faith proved misplaced as the bodies piled up and food riots swept the nation, followed by total anarchy. He still remembered that last time he’d seen a television program – an anxious newscaster, beads of sweat on his face, assured viewers that all would be well and urged them not to panic, to remain inside as martial law was imposed, his promise that it would never come to the apocalyptic scenario spreading via social media a transparent lie.

  The word never was burned into Lucas’s mind, its certitude so false, so patently wrong.

  That had been only hours before the Web had shut down; whether by the government or vandals, it made no difference. He woke the following day to his empty home, his wife dead less than a week, the television dark, the power gone, gunfire reverberating in the near distance, his comfortable routine of job and mission and duty forever over now that the day after never had arrived.

  Lucas sighed again, wondering why he was torturing himself with toxic memories. It had been an eternity since those days. Now he was just another survivor trying to make the best of a living hell. How or why it had unfolded was ultimately unimportant. That it had was all that mattered.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the glow from the tangerine moon on the tall grass and then back at the fire, which had diminished by half. His eyes drifted back to the woman, his mind racing, wondering what her story was, where she had come from, where she was going, and why she had been in the middle of nowhere with four heavily armed militiamen, traversing a region well known to be as dangerous as a striped snake in even the best of circumstances.

  Chapter 3

  Lucas started awake with a whispered curse. He swept the area and his eyes settled on the nearby ring of stones – the fire was nothing but smoldering remnants, the fuel exhausted, coils of smoke twisting from the charred ash all that remained of the blaze.

  He’d drifted off, tormented by his past, but something had broken through the haze of sleep. Tango snorted again from nearby, as clear a warning as Lucas needed, and he was already forcing himself to his feet when he heard an oath and the twang of the trip line he’d strung across the main approach.

  He didn’t wait to see who the speaker was. Operating on automatic pilot, he moved quickly but quietly through the gap at the rear of the clearing, avoiding the trip wire there, and made his way toward the rock outcropping, where he’d have a decent view of the area from the cover of the stones.

  Moments later he was at the top, staring down at three figures creeping through the grass toward Tango. The woman lay comatose on the sling blanket a few yards from the horse. Lucas considered his options – he could probably take all three, but if he missed one, they’d be firing toward Tango and the woman, and there was no way of guaranteeing kill shots in the gloom.

  No, he’d have to try to circle around and flank them while they were making for the outcropping. He watched their movements for several seconds; they were goons, he concluded, no training to their approach, just slow steps into what could have been a trap.

  That made them idiots.

  No less dangerous, but a potential advantage for him.

  He edged away from the gap and retraced his steps down the outcropping, and then hurried around the periphery of the boulders that encircled the clearing. He saw the silhouettes of three horses near a grove of trees a hundred yards downhill and reassessed his earlier impression – the bandits couldn’t have been that dumb if they’d spotted his camp and taken the precaution of leaving their mounts behind.

  Lucas arrived at the trip wire and stepped over it. The men were thirty yards in front of him, motioning at each other with hand signals, unaware of his presence behind them. He knelt down and steadied the M4 against a tree trunk and felt for the fire selector switch to confirm that it was in three-round burst mode.

  The breeze shifted, denting the tops of the tall grass near him and carrying the stench of sour perspiration and decay from the gunmen in front of him. Typical for the scavengers who roamed the badlands, whose interest in bathing and personal hygiene was minimal. Lucas grimaced at the odor and sighted on the first figure through the night vision scope, the greenish image bright as day thanks to its rechargeable CR123A battery. The gunman was carrying what looked like a double-barreled shotgun, confirming Lucas’s impression that these were border rats who’d probably seen his fire and been drawn by the glowing invitation – opportunists looking for an easy takedown.

  Which, if he had anything to say about it, would be the last mistake they’d ever make.

  His finger tightened on the trigger and the rifle barked a three-round burst that slammed into the shotgun-carrying man, spinning him around before he dropped into the grass.

  Lucas was already sighting on the second man, who twisted and fired in his direction, missing by a wide margin. Lucas cut him down with another well-directed burst, and the man’s weapon flew from his grip as he tumbled forward.

  Lucas peered through the scope, searching for the third man, and swore to himself.

  Nothing.

  He’d disappeared into the grass and was apparently savvy enough not to fire blindly.

  Which left Lucas with a difficult choice: wait for the man to show himself and hope that he was faster, or take evasive action and move to higher ground, where because of the perspective from above, the grass would provide less shelter for the gunman.

  It didn’t take him long to decide. Lucas backed away from the tree and crept into the shadows, retracing his steps to the rear of the clearing and the jutting outcropping of rocks.

  When he arrived, a part of him hoped that the scavenger had cut and run after seeing that his companions were finished. The man couldn’t have any idea how many were defending the camp, and now alone, with the element of surprise gone, he had no advantage.

  Lucas removed his hat and set it beside him, and then peeked over the rocks, through the gap. As he’d expected, the grass offered no cover from above, and he could clearly make out the dead assailants.

  But not the third man.

  A whinny from down the hill confirmed Lucas’s suspicion. The third man had retreated, unsure of where the shooting had come from, and had made for the horses.

  Lucas waited for several minutes and, when he saw no further movement, jogged in a low crouch down the trail to the trees.

  The horses were gone.

  He nodded to himself. Dead men wouldn’t need rides, and everything they owned was probably in their saddlebags, so the third man had just gotten significantly more prosperous by virtue of his companions’ possessions and the trade value of the horses.

  Lucas made for Tango, still on alert. He paused at each of the corpses, holding his breath, and shook his head at the poor condition of their weapons and the filthy rags they wore. That humanity had been reduced to this level saddened him, but he didn’t feel any remorse. It was a kill-or-be-killed situation, as were most these days, and he couldn’t afford to hesitate or second-guess himself. The ugly new world had little use for mercy, and a part of him wondered whether he’d made the wrong decision in allowing the scavenger to escape.

  Tango was waiting for Lucas, visibly shaken by the gunfire but standing his ground. The woman was still unconscious, oblivious to the drama playing out around her. Lucas wasted no time in retrieving his precious trip wires, refastening the travois, and saddling Tango, and in minutes was riding away from the clearing, the surrounding hills luminescent in the starlight.

  The last of the storm, its forward motion and energy exhausted by the terrain, flashed trees of lightning over the mountains. Lucas truly hated traveling at night, but didn’t want to chance the scavenger returning with friends. The campsite was blown, useless now for
his purposes, and from this point on he’d skirt it whenever he was down this way. The buzzards would take care of the downed men, and within a day at most nothing would remain but bones picked clean by scavengers – coyotes, vultures, and finally, insects. Nothing went to waste in this no-man’s land, even human excrement like those who hunted other men rather than putting in an honest day’s work.

  “Got a long way to go,” Lucas whispered to Tango, patting his neck, his fatigue banished by the effort to stay alive.

  Chapter 4

  Lucas sighted the trading post as dawn broke. The compound wasn’t much to look at: two buildings and a covered outdoor area built on a rise near the Texas-New Mexico border. Its proximity to the Red Bluff Reservoir and the Pecos River made it an ideal location for trade, with Carlsbad and Loving to the north in New Mexico, and Pecos, Texas, to the south.

  Lucas lived on a ranch that occupied fifty acres near Loving, having abandoned his home in El Paso after his wife’s death. The ranch was a hard day’s ride from the outpost under the best of conditions. But his grandfather’s white lightning, as well as the occasional wild horses Lucas captured, required an outlet, and the trading post was the last vestige of civilization until Pecos, which had degraded into a prison-gang stronghold where depravity was the order of the day.

  Lucas twisted to look at the woman. Her face was blanched with pallor from shock, a stark contrast to the tanned skin on her forearms. That she’d made it this far was a minor miracle, but one that was out of his hands, his bag of tricks now empty. His hope was that Duke, the scoundrel who operated the trading post, would be able to attend to her chest. He had the reputation as a jack-of-all-trades and had been in the service before setting up shop, so might have more experience with bullet wounds than Lucas.

  It took another hour to make it to the trading post, and as he neared, Lucas noted with approval the occasional rocks on either side painted red, yellow, and finally, white. They had been placed at hundred-yard intervals to make establishing range easier if the trading post was attacked. It had been several times in the past, by roving gangs who’d mistaken it for easy pickings, unaware that Duke’s retinue of helpers were also all ex-military, battle-hardened and ruthless as scorpions. Lately, however, it had enjoyed relative peace, its reputation as a place not to be trifled with firmly established, as were the stories of its wealth of forbidden items that could be had at the right price.

  Ever since the collapse, barter was the way goods were exchanged. Duke took five to ten percent of the value for facilitating a trade between two parties in a safe location; he was also the buyer of last resort if there were no takers for a traveler’s offering, and would exchange either goods or gold and silver for the wares. He kept an inventory of weapons that would have made a Marine battalion envious, tanks of purified water, food brought by locals from their gardens…in short, anything of value that was in demand.

  Which, of course, made him a target. Lucas smiled to himself as he neared the compound’s iron gates, steel plates welded into place to prevent anyone shooting through them, and gave a wave to the man lounging in the shade behind some sandbags: Clem, one of Duke’s men, who was on guard duty.

  “How’s it going?” Lucas called out.

  “Pretty good, Lucas,” Clem replied, returning the wave.

  “Thanks for not shooting me to pieces.”

  “No problem. Had you on the scope from a half mile away,” Clem said, tapping an old telescope mounted on a tripod.

  Lucas noted the distinctive muzzle of a Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle poking from the bags and had no doubt that if Clem had sensed any danger, Lucas could have been dropped from that distance, easily – the idea being to take out any threat before it got into range. There were too many armories that had been looted, and National Guard weapons that had been abandoned and scavenged, floating around, to allow anyone unidentified to get too close. Add into the mix that RPGs and grenades purchased from Mexican cartels were not unknown, nor were automatic weapons of every variety, so it was prudent to err on the side of caution.

  Clem motioned at the travois. “What you got there?”

  “Woman. Hurt. Duke around?” Lucas asked.

  “Of course. Probably grumpy as hell, though. Up late last night.”

  Duke enjoyed a drink now and again. More like again and again, Lucas knew, based on the trader’s bottomless appetite for Lucas’s grandfather’s elixir. “She needs help.”

  “How bad’s she hurt?” Clem asked.

  “Bad enough.”

  The right gate slid open, and Clem nodded at Lucas as he rode in. “Go ahead and tie your horse over by the water trough,” he said.

  “I’ll need some feed, too,” Lucas replied.

  “Everything’s for sale.”

  “That’s what I figured.” He paused, drawing Tango up short. “Could use a hand getting her into the main building.”

  “The boys are inside. They’ll help. I’ve got to stay on duty. Rules is rules.”

  Lucas tied Tango to a post and the horse drank greedily from the water as Lucas took the stairs to the cinder-block building and knocked on the steel door, noting a gleaming bank of solar panels to his left, arranged behind a short protective wall in the courtyard to benefit from the sun’s arc.

  The door swung wide and one of Duke’s men looked him up and down. “Yeah?”

  “Duke awake?”

  “Might be. Who’s asking?”

  Lucas’s eyes narrowed and he held the man’s stare. “You’re new, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right. So?”

  “Tell him Lucas is here. Got a wounded woman needs some help.”

  The door slammed behind the man, and two minutes later Duke appeared, his eyes bleary and red, underlined by puffy bags. His haystack hair and florid complexion told the story of his life at a glance.

  One corner of Lucas’s mouth pulled upward at the sight. “Got hit by the lightning stick, did we?” Lucas asked.

  “Nonsense. I was just meditating,” Duke said, his sandpaper voice gruff. “What’s up? Doug here says you have a damsel in distress?”

  Lucas eyed him skeptically. “You up to it?”

  “Ever ready. That’s my middle name.” Duke looked past Lucas at the travois and then turned his head and yelled into the interior of the building, “Doug! Aaron! Help get this woman into the dining room. Come on. Double time!”

  The man who’d answered the door and a short black man shaped like a fireplug, whom Lucas recognized as Aaron, shouldered past them to where the woman lay. “Careful, gents,” Lucas warned, and watched with Duke as they carried her into the building.

  Duke shrugged to Lucas. “Might as well come in. I expect you’ve got some booty to trade for this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then mi casa, and all that crap.”

  Lucas followed Duke to the dining room, where Aaron and Doug had placed the woman on the massive rectangular wooden table. Duke snapped his fingers at Doug. “Get me my magnifying glass and one of the portable LED lamps,” he ordered.

  Doug, his arms emblazoned with tribal and military tattoos, nodded and hurried away without a word.

  Lucas cleared his throat. “New boy?”

  Duke nodded, never taking his eyes off the woman. “Solomon got himself killed.”

  “Shame. I liked him. How?”

  “Snake bite.” Duke shook his head. “Kid wasn’t the brightest.”

  Doug returned with a work lamp on a stand and a large magnifying glass attached to an olive green hinged arm. Duke took the glass from him and clamped it to the table, and then pointed at an extension cord in the corner. Doug plugged in the lamp, and the dining room flooded with cold white light.

  Lucas blinked. “Batteries still holding a charge, I see.”

  “During the day we run these outlets directly from the panels. Consumes almost nothing.”

  “Smart. Mine are doing okay.”

  “Should be able to eke another couple or three y
ears out of the batteries, I’d expect,” Duke offered. “By then the grid will be back up.”

  Both men chuckled at the notion.

  “Been hearing about that for the last, what, five years?” Lucas said.

  “Never been closer. I hear the feds have got D.C. online. Or maybe part of it.”

  Lucas’s eyebrows rose. “Verified?”

  “A little bird told another little bird, who whispered something to a guy I know, who told me.”

  One of the common themes of survivor hopes was that someone was going to impose order, that the government would get the country operating again. Which ignored that the government had been composed of people, not superheroes, most of whom didn’t do the actual work – and that the worker bees who knew how to keep power plants operating, how to repair turbines, how to keep thieves from stealing the copper out of power lines, who could be convinced to drive trucks or trains laden with necessities in spite of a contagious killer flu and civil unrest that made war zones look inviting, had shown their unwillingness to show up and work for free instead of staying home and protecting their families.

  As with most black swan events, so named because they were unpredictable singularities, the combination of the super flu – regardless of whether brought to the U.S. by refugees, illegal immigrants, or returning servicemen – and an economic meltdown had never been envisioned. There were simply no scenarios for it, and when it happened, civilization had unraveled far faster than anyone would have believed.

  Yet not a week went by that someone didn’t hear that some area had been brought back to life and that the men in black suits were working furiously to restore the nation’s systems.

  Lucas had long ago recognized the futility of hoping that anything would ever normalize again, at least during his lifetime. Self-sufficiency was the new normal. Radio reports from around the world had shown that no country had remained unscathed – Europe was in ruins, Russia was a graveyard, Asia and the Middle East disaster zones. China had made a fumbled attempt to invade Japan in the early days of the collapse, but had been repulsed by the U.S. threat of nukes. Within weeks it hadn’t mattered – everyone was either dying or too sick to work. Famine had raged across India and Pakistan, China’s mortality rate rose to nearly sixty percent due to lack of adequate medical facilities, and soon it was impossible for anyone to keep up with disposing of all the bodies, much less maintaining infrastructure and order.