The Day After Never (Book 1): Blood Honor Page 9

  Occasional stories of California had chilled him from groups migrating east. Los Angeles, with its population density and lack of resources, had quickly turned into a war zone, with the population caught in the crossfire as warring factions battled it out, killing anything in their path. San Francisco had fared little better, the story the same in every instance: the lion’s share of the population had believed that their government would protect them. The discovery of their error had proved terminal.

  He tried not to think of a little girl lost in the wilds, strange night sounds all around as her water ran dry, her stomach growling from hunger, every moment possibly her last – tried but failed, as the image insisted on dominating his thoughts.

  Why was he fixating on this? It was unlike him. He evaluated situations, made a determination based on all criteria, and then took action and moved on. Second-guessing and mulling over doubts was a sure recipe for failure, he knew from harsh experience, so why was he doing it now?

  “You okay?” Hal asked from the doorway.

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look like somebody pissed in your Wheaties.”

  “No such thing anymore.”

  Hal shrugged. “Hope you’ve got an appetite, or that freeloader will get it all,” he said, glancing at Bear lounging on the floor, drooling in anticipation of the meal to come. Hal closed the front door and bolted it, and then moved to a bank of blinking controls and checked them. They had prepared for a night attack by booby-trapping the grounds immediately outside of the perimeter, between the main wall trench and a shallower one fifteen feet beyond it to keep animals from wandering into one of the traps or the trip wires. Lucas had improved on the system over the years, trading moonshine for the motion detectors and wire that used little power and added an additional sense of security to a perilous situation. Trip alarms in the house provided just one more safeguard. In spite of all the precautions, he and Hal kept shifts at night, five hours apiece, and took a few hours during the heat of the day for naps. They’d grown conditioned to the routine and neither questioned it, although Lucas secretly wondered how much longer Hal would remain active enough to pull the long hours. He required less sleep than Lucas, but the years couldn’t be denied, and Lucas knew better than to expect him to be a fully functional partner indefinitely.

  “Bear deserves anything he can get,” Lucas chided. The dog spent nights outdoors, another early warning system should anyone be foolhardy enough to want to take on the ranch.

  “He eats more than both of us combined.”

  “He’s a growing boy.”

  Lucas had adopted the dog as a puppy on one of his trips to Loving four years earlier and had never regretted it. Like Tango, the dog had provided company and silent, nonjudgmental understanding as he’d grieved for his wife. Though the pain had softened over the years, it was still with him and likely always would be. He’d come to accept that and didn’t fight it. The truth was that in the darkest hours of night, he missed her, for all his tough exterior and seeming coldheartedness.

  “You sort your situation out?” Hal asked as he sat at the dining table.

  Lucas set a steaming plate in front of him before serving himself. “You want some water?” he asked, sidestepping the question.

  “Sticking to lightning. But only one tonight. I’ll leave you to sleep. I got plenty of rest the last couple days without you around to keep me up.”

  “Suit yourself,” Lucas said, carrying over a heaping plate and sitting down opposite Hal. They bowed their heads as Hal said grace and then dug in, the only sound their chomping and the clinking of spoons against plates.

  “I’m thinking ’bout heading into town day after tomorrow for the market,” Hal said. “Could use some of Miss Pam’s fresh bread and corn tortillas.”

  “They are good,” Lucas agreed between mouthfuls.

  “When you heading back into the hills for the horses?”

  “Probably tomorrow.”

  “No rush,” Hal agreed. “How is it out there?”

  “Never changes. My ears are still ringing from the shootout at Duke’s, though.”

  “That’ll stay with you a day or three.”

  “Yup.”

  They continued eating, and as Lucas scooped up the last of his portion, he sat back abruptly and dropped the spoon with a clatter. “Crap.”

  Hal didn’t comment, just looked up, his expression wooden. “Be careful.”

  Lucas pushed back from the table, slopped more stew onto his plate, and set it on the floor for Bear. He moved to Hal’s shortwave radio and powered it up, and then transmitted a call for the doctor on the channel the radio operators in town monitored. A moment later the doctor’s voice answered after a burst of static. Lucas asked about Carl.

  “He and Alan rode out about twenty minutes ago,” the doctor said.

  “Which way?”

  “Staying off the highway. Keeping to the road to the east.”

  “Thanks, Doc. How’s she doing?”

  “She’s sleeping. Not out of the woods yet, but she’s scrappy. You saw for yourself.”

  Hal watched Lucas and, when he switched the radio off, rose and moved to the pantry, where they kept their food in resealable containers. The refrigerator was a high-efficiency model that consumed almost no power, but they didn’t keep much in the way of perishables, preferring to hunt every two or three days and store what they dressed for immediate consumption.

  “You’re going to want more jerky. Some of these rolls should be okay for another day,” Hal said.

  “I’ll get my guns and body armor.”

  Hal nodded. “I’d pack for a couple of days. You’ll want a lot of water. She’ll be dehydrated.”

  Lucas eyed him. “You okay with this?”

  Hal shrugged. “Not my call.”

  Lucas went to prepare his kit. Much as he wanted to ignore the little girl’s plight, leaving it to the do-gooders who would probably get themselves killed bumbling around in the desert, he just couldn’t. Maybe it was his experience losing his wife, or just the way he’d been raised, but he ultimately had no more choice in the matter than a compass had to point due north.

  Carl’s and Alan’s horses tromped along the shoulder of the secondary road at a moderate pace, the route south clearly visible in the moonlight. Both wore plate carriers stuffed with extra magazines and clutched AR-15s. The lawmen also sported 9mm Berettas in hip holsters and toted twelve-gauge shotguns in their saddle scabbards.

  Carl slowed as they rounded a gentle bend and cocked his head, his Stetson perched at an angle. After several seconds, he leaned toward the younger deputy and whispered, “You hear that?”

  Alan shook his head.

  “My ears are probably playing tricks on me,” Carl said in hushed tones, eyes roving over the brush.

  “Maybe not,” Alan said a moment later, and pointed ahead, where a rider waited motionless in the center of the road, astride an impressively large stallion.

  Carl spurred his horse forward until he drew even with Lucas. The sheriff looked him up and down, and then cleared his throat and tried not to grin. “Lovely night for a ride.”

  Lucas spun Tango around wordlessly and let Carl and Alan take the lead, already nodding off in the saddle as the three of them headed south.

  Chapter 14

  Dawn was still several hours away when they turned off the secondary road and cut toward the foothills where Lucas had rescued the woman. Duke’s trading post lay six miles due south, but by riding in a more westerly direction, they could bypass his place and cut three hours off their trip. They were taking it easy on their horses, stopping regularly to rest and water them, and hadn’t seen anything but coyotes and the occasional night bird.

  A ranch house stood to their right. Its roof had burned away, leaving only the cinder-block walls. Lucas sniffed the air before turning to Carl, his tone grim. “The other day there were people settled there. I gave them a wide berth, but saw a couple and their kid through my glass
es. Had a roof then, too.”

  Carl nodded. “They never learn. Probably the cartel out of Pecos got them.”

  “God rest their souls,” Alan said, and all three men nodded.

  Travelers would spy a promising dwelling lying vacant and take it over in the hopes of finding peace, only to be butchered by one of the armed criminal groups that viewed the area from the river south of Loving as their hunting ground. The group in Pecos, the nearest large town, was a Hispanic gang that called itself the Loco Cartel, especially savage in its raids. It left Duke alone, since his outpost served as a useful venue where its minions could trade their ill-gotten wares, but anyone else was fair game, and it demanded stiff tithes for protection, mainly from itself.

  Lucas didn’t know anything about the settlers, but suspected they’d either bypassed Pecos and were unaware of the danger they faced from the cartel or were simply out of energy and had decided to take their chances squatting for a while before moving on. Either way, they’d learned firsthand that there was no place too remote for the cartel to extort, and if they hadn’t had anything to pay, the males had probably been killed and the woman enslaved and carted away – assuming they’d taken her alive. They probably had, as live females held barter value in the criminal underworld of the cities, whereas corpses were worthless.

  The men skirted the ruined home, and the horses whinnied softly as they passed, as though sensing the death in the atmosphere. Nobody spoke; the scene was unremarkable, just as similar scenes played out on a daily basis in battlegrounds all over the world, whether in the Middle East or Ukraine or Africa, the end result always more crops for the grim reaper’s scythe.

  Lucas had snatched some sleep in hour-long increments as the horses plodded along, and was more rested than he had a right to be by the time veins of crimson marbled the eastern sky. He stopped to check his compass and, after taking his bearings, pointed at the hills.

  “Maybe five more hours’ ride,” he said, scanning the surroundings, and then raised his binoculars to his eyes and did a slow inspection of the horizon.

  “See anything?” Alan asked.

  “Nothing to see.”

  “That’s good, right?” Alan persisted.

  “Every day you draw breath is,” Lucas answered, and dropped the spyglasses back against his chest. He dismounted, removed the night vision scope from his M4, and packed it into its hard case before dropping it into one of the saddlebags, and then removed one of the five-gallon water jugs and set about watering Tango. The other men did the same and after twenty minutes were back in the saddle, pressing forward to where, hopefully, the little girl was still alive.

  “People are fools trying to settle out here alone,” Carl said, obviously still thinking about the destroyed ranch house. “You’d think they’d have learned by now.”

  “Everyone hopes that it’s getting better,” Lucas said with a shrug. “Price to find out you’re wrong is pretty steep.”

  “So you don’t think it will ever improve?” Alan asked. “It has to. It can’t just stay…like this.”

  “Oh, eventually it might. But if you know your history, the world’s always been a dangerous place. People forgot that, but it’s true. One of my ancestors died at the Alamo, fighting Mexicans. More Americans died in the Civil War than in any other. The U.S. has been at constant war in one place or another since WWII, but because none of them were fought on our soil, they were out of sight and mind. But if you lived in one of those countries, it was like this all the time, for the most part, I’d imagine. Warring groups taking what they wanted, killing indiscriminately, battling for turf, destroying rather than building. Some areas stayed like that for decades, even with no killer flu or global collapse. So do I think it will improve? Sure. Eventually. But eventually can be a long, long time, and my bet is that we won’t have learned anything when it does.”

  “What do you mean?” Alan asked.

  “We’re a selfish, brutal, venal species. Whenever there’s a disaster, we see that time and time again. Nothing’s changed. We’re still made of the same stuff we were when the Mongols were sweeping across Asia, or the barbarians were ravaging Europe, or our ancestors were slaughtering the Indians, or we were bombing Vietnam and its neighbors into the Stone Age.” Lucas spat to the side. “Think about what happened here. The power went off and a lot of us got sick and died. That’s it. But what really happened was that the darkness that’s always lurking just out of sight spotted weakness, and darkness always looks for any way to defeat light. Been that way since original sin.”

  “Pretty pessimistic philosophy,” Carl observed.

  “You seen anything to convince you I got it wrong?” Lucas asked.

  “We aren’t that way in Loving. You and your grandpa aren’t. There’s plenty of good in the world. Not everyone’s bad.”

  “Not saying everyone’s bad. I’m saying we’re damaged goods, and any day we can show our mean side. Only way to keep it in check is to acknowledge it’s true and be on the lookout for it in ourselves.”

  “The ones that burned that house down or attacked the woman are scum, Lucas. We both know that. Don’t lump everyone in with them. You do yourself a disservice.”

  “They’re flesh and blood, too. Sure, they’re evil, but that same evil’s in all of us. You see that working in law enforcement.” Lucas didn’t say real law enforcement; he didn’t have to. “You arrest a teenage girl with a face like a saint for cooking her baby in the oven because she couldn’t handle it crying, you’ll see what I mean. You interrogate a young man who killed his parents for a lousy ten grand life insurance policy, you see how petty evil can be, how it looks pretty much like you or me. Clean up after a mass shooting, where a guy who was polite and went to church on Sundays decides to wipe the earth of a dozen of his fellows, and tell me about how good we are at heart.” Lucas paused. “We’re seeing how we truly are with this collapse. That’s all. The bad are winning. Darkness is winning. That’s what this is, nothing less. We built an artificial reality where everything seemed safe, but it was a lie. World’s never been safe, and it never will be. Just bad guys trying to dominate good ones. Old as the devil.”

  Alan and Carl exchanged a look. “That was an inspiring sermon,” Carl said.

  Lucas squinted at the rising sun. “He asked.”

  “Yet you’re helping us. We’re all risking our lives to find a child,” Alan said.

  “That’s the light, Deputy. That’s our hope for a better tomorrow. Like I said, we’re capable of extraordinary goodness. No question.”

  “Then things could get better.”

  “Oh, I expect, assuming the reactors don’t melt down. Anything’s possible. But if you think a bunch of faceless cheats in Washington are going to wave a magic wand, you’re nuts. They’re probably all dead. And if they aren’t, they’ve got to convince people like you and me to do the work, because they’ll never get their hands dirty. No, they’ll set up their admiralty courts and pass laws and rules the rest of us have to follow, and find ways to screw us out of the fruits of our labor, but they won’t risk their own skins. That’s not how it works. Not how it’s ever worked.” Lucas spat again.

  Carl looked at Lucas for a long time. “Hard to believe you were ever a Ranger.”

  Lucas pulled his reins tight and Tango stopped. Lucas stared daggers through Carl, and when he spoke, his tone could have cut glass. “Carl, you’re a decent enough sort, but you ever say anything like that again, you’ll be eating through a straw the rest of your life.”

  Carl didn’t speak. Lucas snicked out of the corner of his mouth and Tango started walking again.

  When Carl looked over at Alan, the younger man averted his eyes and busied himself with inspecting the blisters forming on his hands from the reins.

  Chapter 15

  The temperature rose as the morning sun ascended, and by the time the procession was near the gulch where Lucas had rescued the woman, all three men were sweating. Alan fiddled with his plate carrier, tryin
g to adjust it so it was more comfortable.

  “I hate this thing. It’s heavy and bulky,” he complained.

  “It’s like a seatbelt. You’re happy for it when you need it,” Carl said, and looked to Lucas. “Yours looks more comfortable.”

  “None of them are, but this one’s better than most. Each plate’s seven and a half pounds. The level IV composite plates will stop an armor-piercing round.”

  “Ever have to test that theory?”

  “Whole point’s avoiding that.”

  Lucas held a finger to his lips and stopped, and Carl and Alan followed his lead, quizzical expressions on their faces. Lucas peered through his binoculars and then leaned toward them.

  “Someone’s there. I see smoke.”

  “That’s not good,” Alan said.

  Lucas didn’t bother responding, preferring to dismount and walk Tango forward. Carl did the same, Alan bringing up the rear, and they made their way on foot, leading the horses until Lucas pointed to a shady spot beneath the spread of a tree. Lucas tied Tango’s reins to a branch and whispered to the others.

  “Let’s see what we got down there. Keep out of sight, and watch for sentries.”

  They set off toward the ridge that overlooked the gully, and ten minutes later were looking down at the site of the battle. Skeletons picked clean by buzzards and insects were stacked in a pile near the boulders where Lucas had rescued Sierra, and more than a dozen Raiders, their Mohawks as distinctive as war paint even at a distance, were sorting through the dead men’s belongings near a cooking fire – the source of the smoke Lucas had spotted from afar.

  Lucas studied the Raiders for a moment and then shifted his focus to the caves that peppered the sides of the canyon. Carl and Alan waited patiently until he pulled himself back from the crest and turned to them.