Rising: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 4) Read online

  Marcus let go of his reins and put both hands on the Glock’s grip. He raised the weapon and leveled it at the building. The wind whistled through the streets, tumbling a large piece of crumpled cardboard from one side of Main to the other.

  “Hey!” called a faint voice from inside the first building. “Don’t shoot!”

  “And don’t sic that dog on us neither,” said a stronger, deeper voice. “We ain’t done nothin’. Ain’t gonna do nothin’.”

  “The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” Marcus said.

  Bouncing the knife up and down in her hand, Lou said, “Hamlet, act 3, scene 2.”

  Marcus smiled.

  A pair of hands appeared from an open wood casement window. They were thin with long fingers, waving wildly. “See?” said the deeper voice. “Nothin’.”

  “What do you think?” asked Lou. “Good people or bad people?”

  “You know what I think,” said Marcus. It was odd. This was an empty town, barely even a waypoint between Abilene and San Angelo. Most people would be on their toes and defensive. If threatened, they’d pull a gun first and not claim to be unarmed. Especially if they had no way of knowing someone already had the drop on them.

  With his hand still on the mutt, Rudy motioned toward the building with his head. “I think they’re okay. I don’t see any weapons.”

  “I told ya,” said the softer voice. “We’re clean as a whistle.”

  “Let me see the backs of your hands!” Marcus called out. “Flip your hands around.”

  The hands disappeared into the building. “What?” called the deeper voice. “Why?”

  “Let me see the backs of your hands,” Marcus repeated.

  Rudy pulled his hand from the dog and cupped it under the fore-end of his shotgun. He pulled the butt to his shoulder and thumbed off the safety behind the trigger. He was well within the fifty-yard range of his weapon.

  Fifty edged forward on his haunches. His jaw squared and the hair on his back, which had relaxed, straightened again. The dog was alternately panting and offering a low growl.

  “Okay then,” said the deeper voice. The fingers of one hand appeared from the casement window, the dirt black fingernails, the rough knuckles, and then the dollar-sign tattoos. The man held them there for a moment, wiggling his fingers. “This good eno—”

  The man disappeared from the window and wailed like a banshee. “My hand!”

  Blood streamed from the center of the tattoo around the edges of a blade. His hand was stuck flat against the wooden casement, pinned there by Lou’s knife. The man struggled vainly to withdraw the knife from his hand and the wood. He twisted his body awkwardly and a second man’s torso emerged through the open window. He grabbed at the knife, trying to help his comrade, when a second blade silently spun through the air and speared the side of his neck. He convulsed and dropped over the window ledge, his body draped there while his nervous system twitched until he died.

  Fifty sprang forward and raced to the wounded, crying man. He stopped at the window, bared his teeth, and snarled. The man raised his free hand above his head.

  Marcus jumped from his horse and, with Lou and Rudy at his side, approached the wailing man. He looked young. His frightened eyes lacked the dull resignation of older, wiser men. His teeth were sparse, though, and drool leaked from his thin, cracked lips. He was pale and beads of sweat coated his bald head.

  “Take it out!” he cried. “Take it out!”

  Marcus shoved the dead man’s body aside and climbed through the window. He slid his Glock into his holster, pulled a handgun from the man’s waistband at the small of his back, and then slammed him against the wall inside the window. The man cried out, tears streaming down his face. His chest heaving, he breathed heavily between sobs.

  Lou yanked one knife from the dead man’s neck, wiped both sides of the blade on his pants, and climbed onto the wide sill. “Can I?” she asked, looking at Marcus.

  Marcus nodded. His fingers were wrapped around the man’s neck as he held him against the wall. The man’s eyes were squeezed shut. He bit his lower lip with the three remaining top teeth at the front of his mouth.

  Lou reached up and pulled at the knife. “Ooh,” she purred. “That’s in there good.” She wiggled the hilt, forcing the man to cry out, then yanked the blade free.

  The man pulled his lame hand to his body and his muscles relaxed. He sighed loudly and whimpered.

  “Tell me about Barbas,” Marcus said.

  The man shook his head, sweat flying from his head. “Uh-uh. He’ll kill me.”

  Marcus loosened his hold on the man’s neck and brought the handgun to the soft spot beneath his chin, pushing it upward. “Like I won’t?”

  “I-I-I don’t know anything.”

  Marcus’s nasty smile flattened. He grabbed the man’s injured hand and pressed his thumbnail into the open, bleeding wound. “Tell. Me. About. Barbas.”

  The man winced and suppressed a scream with a prolonged grunt. His eyes were clamped shut and his tears mixed with the profuse sweat streaming from his head, his breathing shallow and quick.

  “Okay!” he gasped. “He’s in San Angelo.”

  Marcus raised his eyebrows, asking for more.

  “He’s at Pearl on the Concho,” said the man through ragged breaths. “The old hotel.”

  “How many men?”

  “I don’t—”

  Marcus dug his thumb into the rip running through the man’s palm. He yelped.

  Outside the window, Fifty whimpered and licked his chops but sat patiently at Rudy’s feet. Rudy frowned disapprovingly at Marcus. Lou was carving something into the windowsill with her knife.

  The man puffed his cheeks and exhaled. “Okay. Maybe ten. At least ten. But that doesn’t count the coyotes.”

  Lou stopped playing with her knife. “Coyotes?”

  “Smugglers,” said the man through his clenched jaw. “Smugglers pick up the women. They take them places.”

  Rudy’s obvious disapproval of Marcus’s tactics morphed into sudden interest. He stepped forward, his body tense. “What places?”

  Still puffing his cheeks in and out, the man blinked sweat from his eyes and sniffed it into his nose. “I don’t know. Places.”

  Rudy aimed his shotgun at the man’s face and clicked off the safety. “What places?”

  The man was trembling. His knees weakened and Marcus held him up against the wall. “I don’t know,” he said. “I ain’t never been to none. Honest.”

  Rudy tilted his head toward the sightless barrel. He closed one eye and steadied his aim.

  The man swallowed hard. “Del Rio,” he said. “Dallas. Houston. Wichita Falls.”

  Rudy raised his head and opened his eye. “That it?”

  “Some go north of the wall, some go south into Mexico, some go to the big cities,” said the man. “Please let me go. Don’t kill me.”

  Marcus released his hold on the man and lowered the weapon from his chin. He took two steps back. He glanced at Rudy and Lou before settling his gaze back on the wounded man.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Vic.”

  Marcus patted the man on the chest. “Vic, the good news is I’m not going to kill you.”

  Vic sighed, his face curling into an ugly cry. His shoulders shuddered and he sank to the floor, his back flat against the wall next to the sill. His eyes avoided looking at his dead compadre’s body.

  “The bad news is I’m not letting you go,” said Marcus.

  “What?” asked Lou and Rudy in unison, their faces mirror images of one another.

  Marcus nodded at the sniveling Vic. “We’re taking him with us. He knows where to go.”

  “We can’t trust him,” said Rudy. “Are you kidding, Marcus?”

  “If he leads us astray, he’ll die right along with us,” Marcus replied. “I think he’s proven how badly he wants to live. Isn’t that right, Vic?”

  Vic, holding his wounded hand in the other, nod
ded.

  “We only have three horses,” said Lou. “What about that?”

  “He’s not riding on a horse,” said Marcus. “He’s walking.”

  “That’ll slow us down,” said Rudy. “We need to get to San Angelo. We need to get my wife and cousin’s wife back.”

  “Better we’re slow and smart than fast and stupid,” said Marcus. “There’s a hardware store a block back. I bet we find rope or a chain or something that’ll keep him tied to my horse. You keep an eye on him. I’ll go take a look.”

  Without waiting for their protests, Marcus climbed through the window and around the dead man’s body. “You mind your manners now, Vic,” he said as he handed the handgun to Lou and retraced his steps toward the hardware store.

  Marcus wiped his hands on his denim jacket and tugged on the bottom of it to pull it straight. The thing might as well have been a wearable dishrag it had so many stains on it: sweat, dirt, grease, blood.

  He and Lola’s son, Sawyer, had found it during one of their hunting trips a couple of years earlier. They’d been tracking a herd of whitetail deer from one virtually dry watering hole to another. They’d lost track of it a couple of times, when Sawyer heard the doe bleating.

  “I’ve got an eye on one of them,” the boy had said. “It’s a buck. It’s horning on the lick of that mesquite over there. The doe can’t be far from him.”

  Marcus had looked through the scope of his rifle and had seen the large male deer scraping its antler on a low branch of the tree.

  “Before you take the shot,” said Marcus, “you gotta answer the trivia.”

  “Again?” Sawyer had whined.

  “You’ve gotta respect what it is you’re about to kill.”

  Sawyer had smirked. “You respect every person you kill?”

  “I respect that they’ll kill me first if they get the chance. So tell me, what is the fourth chamber of the whitetail’s stomach?”

  “Please,” Sawyer had said, “challenge me. Abomasum.”

  “Fire away.”

  Sawyer had taken a single shot, frightening the birds into flight from their perches high in the dying trees. He hit the deer perfectly, in a line drawn directly up from the back of the front leg, between one-third and one-half of the way up the body. The buck instantly bawled, sounding like a shrieking human, and lurched forward, toppling to the ground.

  Sawyer had looked back at Marcus with wide-eyed delight. Marcus slapped the boy on his back, rubbing his hair on his head.

  “Great shot. That’ll feed us for a while. Let’s go get him.”

  That was when they’d come across a pair of ratty suitcases abandoned in the middle of the field along an overgrown dirt road. One had been larger than the other, but both were zipped shut and secured with small padlocks.

  “Should we open them?” Sawyer had asked.

  Marcus had grabbed the larger one by the handle and tested its weight. “It’s heavy. It’s got wheels. So does the smaller one. We’ll roll them back and open them at home.”

  “What about the kill?”

  “We’ll carry it liked we planned. I’ll backpack it. It’s not that big a buck. One hundred fifty pounds probably.”

  After Marcus had beheaded and gutted the buck, he’d used a knife to cut the sinew behind the bone in the backs of the animal’s legs. On the front legs, he’d cut at the joints and cracked the bone, cutting between the sinew and the bone. This had left the lower part of the deer’s front legs dangling and attached to the upper part only by shreds of skin.

  He’d then taken the front hooves and ran them from the inside out through the sliced sinew in the holes in the back legs and drew the broken bones past the holes to create a makeshift peg button, held up the carcass to drain the remaining blood, and he was finished. With the legs of the animal forming the straps, he’d shouldered the buck on his back. Swatting flies away, he’d moved quickly back to the suitcases and the two of them had marched back to their home, conquering heroes.

  Lola had been as excited about the suitcases as she’d been about the deer. She’d grown tired of venison and its gamey flavor. Aside from fish, it was about all they could regularly count on for fresh protein.

  Javelinas had been nearly extinct in their part of the world and blackbirds didn’t taste good. The occasional rattlesnake had provided a nice chicken substitute, but removing the buckshot was a tedious annoyance.

  Like Christmas, the family had gathered around the almost ceremonial opening of the cases, and there’d been something for everyone inside, as if a post-apocalyptic nymph had left the luggage in the field just for them.

  The smaller of the two bags contained flowery sundresses and loose-fitting tank tops that couldn’t have fit Lola better had she picked them from a boutique herself. There was also a pair of black leather boots a size too big. She managed to make them fit with some work.

  The smaller bag had also held children’s clothes. There were tiny, elastic-waisted jeans and color-coordinated outfits in a rainbow of colors. They were boy’s clothes and a little large for Penny, but she could wear them. They provided some semblance of a wardrobe, as she’d all but outgrown hers.

  The larger bag had been a bonanza for Sawyer. There were shorts, pants, and shirts that fit him. There was even an unopened six-pack of white athletic socks.

  “Somebody kept a fresh pack of socks for eight years?” Sawyer had asked, clutching the package to his chest. “This is like finding gold.”

  The only thing in the larger case that fit Marcus was the denim jacket. It hung on Sawyer and dwarfed his thin frame. On Marcus, though, it was comfortable. The inside was thinly lined for added warmth. There were pockets at its sides, a hefty collar, and sturdy hammered metal buttons that ran up the front.

  Marcus loved the jacket and had worn it almost every day. Lola had washed it once or twice, but he liked the stains and smears.

  “They tell a story like a scar,” he told her.

  As he walked to the hardware store in Bronte, Texas, there were more stories than he cared to remember splashed onto that jacket. He folded the collar down at his neck, his finger grazing across the bandage there, and stepped to the store’s entrance.

  The facade was painted blood red. A flat awning hung over the wide concrete sidewalk with cased neon lettering that should have spelled “Hardware”. Instead, it read “H dwa”.

  There was a rectangular hole between twin six-pane floor-to-ceiling windows where an air-conditioning unit had once been, remnant strips of insulation hanging from the opening. The windows were open too. The glass that had likely once provided a nice preview of the goods inside was mostly gone. Jagged shards hugged the edges like manmade stalactites and stalagmites.

  As with most buildings these days, Marcus couldn’t see much inside from the street. The sunlight only traveled so far into the space. The awning only made the lighting worse.

  He stood on the sidewalk, listening for any movement inside the store. The faint odor of ammonia wafted from inside, but there was no sound, so he walked past the windows and in through the doorless opening at the center of the building. The strength of the ammonia hit him instantly and he covered his nose and mouth with the crook of his arm. He stepped over debris and glass crunched underfoot as he searched for anything resembling a rope or chain.

  Ten years post-Scourge, where every supply was life-or-death, he didn’t expect to find exactly what he’d need. He was prepared to improvise. He walked past an aisle marked “Tools”. It was empty, as was one designated for nuts, bolts, and screws.

  There were animal droppings everywhere, and what little gray light existed within the store revealed one dried splash of urine after another. There were shreds of clothes mixed with leaves and pine needles on one shelf. Some cracked eggshells lay next to them.

  Marcus was nearing the back of the store when he noticed an aisle labeled “Yard Supplies”. There were no rakes or shovels. Even the spot for trowels was empty. But on the floor, under the endcap, almost hidd
en by the lowest shelf, there were two small spools of neon orange nylon trimmer line.

  “That might work,” Marcus mumbled. He pulled the first spool, rolling it into his hand. The second was harder to reach, so he got down onto his knees, his lower back and leg protesting, and reached under the dark shelving unit to pull the spool free and pick it up.

  As his fingers gripped the spool, he heard a cry and a hiss from under the shelves. He shuddered, startled by the noise. Before he could move, whatever it was hissed again and Marcus felt a sharp pain on his knuckles. He snatched his hand back, bringing the spool with him. Something launched at his head from the darkness. He covered his face and felt the animal scratch at the back of his head and shoulder before scurrying off.

  Marcus turned in the direction of the animal to see a feral cat climb onto a neighboring unit. It arched its back and bared its tiny razor teeth, its eyes glowing as it warned Marcus to steer clear of its territory.

  He cursed at the animal and struggled to his feet, then touched the back of his head. It was wet, but there wasn’t any blood. The cat relaxed and licked its paw, then rubbed the back of its ear. Marcus stuffed the line into his pockets and made a wide, careful berth around the grumpy cat. His eyes were watering from the ammonia stench by the time he made it to the street. He sucked in a deep breath of dusty, cold air, and coughed it out.

  “You okay?” Rudy was standing in the middle of the street in front of the red brick hardware store. “I heard you squeal like a little girl, so I thought—”

  “I didn’t squeal like a girl.”

  “Sounded like it.”

  “It was a cat.”

  “I heard the cat,” Rudy smirked. “It didn’t sound like a little girl.”

  Marcus walked past Rudy and toward the building from where they’d come. “That’s sexist, Rudy,” he said. “I bet Lou wouldn’t appreciate your likening my genuine fear-laced reaction with a little girl.”

  Rudy followed Marcus along the street. “I doubt Lou would squeal like a little girl.”

  Marcus glared at Rudy for a moment before smiling widely. He laughed. Rudy laughed too. They were still chuckling when they reached Lou, Fifty, and Vic.