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

  “Now?” asked Lou.

  “Wait a second,” said Marcus. “When one of them starts plugging in the cables, shoot the lookout. I’ll get the other one.”

  No sooner Marcus had finished his instructions than the first of the two men turned his back to them and pointed at the disconnected cables on the ground. The second one raised his weapon, scanning his surroundings in a wide arc. When the first one turned his back to the riverbank, Lou took her shot.

  She fired at the instant lightning flashed. The round hit the man in his back, right between his shoulder blades, and he fell forward onto one of the generators. When the second man moved toward his fallen comrade, Marcus plugged him with a pair of shots to his chest. He dropped his weapon, clutching at the wounds as he stumbled sideways. He fell onto the ground, hitting his head on the large wheel of the generator close to him.

  “How long do we wait for another team to show up?” asked Rudy. He pointed to the northern sky as lightning flickered. The accompanying thunder was louder than before. “I don’t think we have a lot of time before the storm hits.”

  Marcus wiped his runny nose with the back of his hand. It was cold, a storm was coming, they’d lost the element of surprise, and his brilliant generator move had only netted them two more kills. There was no telling, really, how much of a threat remained inside. It could be a half-dozen men, or it could be three or four times that number.

  He cursed himself for not being the soldier he’d once been. Major Marcus Battle never would have gotten his team to this point without three or four viable endgames. Then again, he never would have lost his home and his family twice. He never would have been weak enough to fall prey to the seductive darkness of revenge. Marcus bit the inside of his cheek and clenched his jaw. He had to remind himself he wasn’t Major Marcus Battle anymore. He hadn’t been for a long time. He was a fractured, Frankenstein’s monster, a Mr. Hyde version of Marcus Battle.

  His gut told him to storm the place, as he had the golf club in Abilene. But with Lou, Rudy, and Fifty at his side, he couldn’t risk their lives for the satisfaction of some Rambo-esque attack that left everyone dead.

  Thunder boomed closer after a prolonged strobe of lightning and Marcus didn’t have to consider options anymore. There was only one, and it was leaving en masse from the rear of the hotel building.

  A half dozen or more men were marching across the back parking lot toward a three-level concrete parking garage. He couldn’t be sure, but Marcus thought Barbas was among them.

  They were maybe two hundred yards away and well within the rifle’s range. Marcus had three shots left in the Springfield. He worked the bolt and lowered his eye to the scope.

  “You see that?” he asked Lou.

  “Already on it,” she said. “Ready when you are.”

  “If they start running, we do too,” Marcus said.

  “Got it,” said Lou. “Say the word.”

  “Ready,” said Rudy.

  “In three,” Marcus said, setting his aim on his target. “I’ve got the man in front.”

  “I’ve got the back,” said Lou.

  “Three.” Marcus drew his finger to the trigger and exhaled. “Two.” He relaxed and focused on the target. “One.”

  Marcus pulled his trigger and the rifle kicked back into his shoulder. A moment later the man in the front of the group went limp and dropped. Marcus cranked the bolt and aimed at the man right behind the first target. He exhaled and fired. The second man spun around and stumbled backward but didn’t fall. Marcus emptied his rifle with the third shot, finishing off the injured man.

  With his scope, he could see Lou had dropped two other men. There were three still standing. But they weren’t running. They’d turned and were moving toward them.

  Marcus pulled another five rounds from his pocket and quickly loaded them into the rifle. A gust of wind carried with it a fine mist. Lightning flickered overhead and thunder cracked almost immediately. Another five men emerged from the rear of the building and joined the three who’d survived the initial volley. They were returning fire now, the muzzle flashes from their weapons strobing. Bullets were zipping past their heads where they ducked, pinging the ground in front of them and to the sides. Rudy ordered Fifty to the bottom of the ravine. The dog obeyed reluctantly and descended the embankment to the trickle of water at the bottom.

  Another gust of cold wind and crack of thunder brought with them thick drops of rain, which hit the dry ground like tiny bombs, kicking up the dust into a low haze that looked like dirty fog. Marcus took aim at one of the approaching men and hit him in the leg. The man grabbed at the wound and Marcus drilled him with a second shot. Beside him, he could hear the crack of Lou’s rifle. The sounds of gunfire mixed with the increasingly frequent cracks of thunder overhead. A sheet of rain swept across them right to left, engulfing the fight in a downpour.

  In the dark, through the shower and dust, Marcus had trouble with the scope, so he abandoned it and lifted his head. He cranked the bolt and unleashed another shot, and another.

  “I’m out!” Lou cried over the cacophony of the storm.

  Marcus took aim and fired his last round, missing the gangster he intended to kill. He reached into his pocket and grabbed a handful of rounds, quickly reloaded, and handed Lou the rest. The approaching gang was less than a hundred yards away.

  Lou wiped the rain from her face and spun her hat so it protected her eyes, sinking her elbows back into what was now a thin layer of mud. She fired a quick couple of rounds, stopping one advancing threat before Rudy called out a warning.

  He was pointing toward the river beneath them. “We’ve got a problem,” he said. “The ground can’t hold the water.”

  The land was so dry it wasn’t absorbing the torrential downpour quickly enough. It was running off the dirt and down the embankment into the riverbed. What had been a trickle a few minutes earlier was visibly deeper with an aggressive current. Fifty had moved from the bottom of the ravine to halfway up. His ears were back as he carefully watched the water rise.

  Marcus looked over his shoulder at the rising river, cursed aloud, and then turned back to face the oncoming attack. A bullet whizzed by him, clipping his jacket on the right shoulder.

  Because of the rain, it was hard to focus on the shadows and figures moving toward them at odd angles. He paid attention to muzzle flashes and aimed his fire at them. Twice he stopped the man behind the weapon. Still more men came. It was as if they were descending on them from the clouds.

  Lou throttled another attacker with a true shot. “How many are there?” she asked above the din. “This isn’t good.”

  Another shot grazed Marcus’s hand and ricocheted off the rifle. He grunted in pain and dropped the weapon into the mud.

  Lou looked at him with wide eyes. Lightning flashed, revealing her furrowed brow and downward-curled mouth. “You okay?”

  “I’m good,” he said. “Just got dinged.”

  She nodded and went back to business.

  Marcus drew his Glock. Some of the men were close enough now it made sense. He pushed himself from the momentary safety of the ravine and rolled through the mud until he could right himself. From one knee he raised the handgun, depressing the trigger safety as he applied pressure. Within seconds he’d unloaded the magazine and taken down four more men. Lightning and thunder cracked and crashed simultaneously, sending a violent shudder through the length of his body.

  He reached into his pocket, thinking he’d added an extra loaded magazine there. He hadn’t. All he found were the remaining few rounds for the Springfield. His pack was with the horses. This wasn’t conduct becoming Major Marcus Battle.

  Another flare of lightning lit up Marcus’s surroundings. There were at least three men marching in his direction. How they hadn’t hit him yet was remarkable. Or divine intervention, or perhaps dumb luck. To his left was the outstretched arm of a dead man, his AK-47 still in his hand.

  Marcus rolled to his right and grabbed the weapon, dr
agging it through the thin slop until he had it in his hands. He was on his back, positioned as if he were halfway through a sit-up. There was no way to get the proper leverage, but he held the rifle tight against his shoulder and sprayed his surroundings, tapping the trigger repeatedly and mowing down the trio closest to him.

  Heavy, cold pellets of rain slapped against his face. His clothes were soaked and stuck to his body. His ears were ringing with a high-pitched tone. His mind flashed for a split second to his time in Syria and the close-quarters combat he’d frequently endured.

  Marcus rolled over onto his stomach and sank his elbows into the ground. The sounds of gunfire rattled and cracked alongside the thunder that pealed from above, crashing and reverberating around him. The wind blew the rain and the muck onto his cheeks and into his eyes. He settled himself, the rifle positioned in his hands and against his body, and pulled the trigger again, aiming for a bright muzzle flash at his ten o’clock. He fired again at a man running straight at him. The man must not have seen him, though, as he was firing well over Marcus’s head. Marcus hit the man twice before he stumbled forward and landed on top of Marcus, sliding into him and knocking the rifle from his hands.

  The man, bleeding and grunting, struggled with Marcus and then used his weight to pin him to the ground. He was a large man and easily outweighed Marcus by thirty or forty pounds.

  He cursed with a hoarse, scratchy voice and clawed, his thickly calloused hands finding their way to Marcus’s face, pressing his face into the muck.

  Marcus sucked in a mouthful of glop and tried coughing it out but couldn’t. Facedown in the mud, he could feel the man leaning on him, holding him down. Marcus flailed, kicked his feet, and grasped with his hands at nothing. He couldn’t breathe. His chest started to burn and his head buzzed. He was losing consciousness.

  The man started laughing. Above the noise of the wind, rain, and fighting, Marcus felt the vibration of the man’s laughter against his body. Then Marcus heard a loud, trilling whistle and the laughter stopped, the pressure on his back and head instantly gone.

  Marcus instantly raised his head and took a ragged, desperate breath. Coughing up the filth in his mouth, he fell onto his side and felt a struggle at his back. His ears were ringing, his vision blurry. The gunfire had ended, but in the distance he could hear screaming and a gnarling growl. Marcus struggled onto his knees and felt something warm and wet slap against the side of his face. He touched the spot and looked at his bloodied hand.

  Slowly, as he focused, he understood what had happened. The man’s body was on the ground, twitching, his face unrecognizable as human. There were pieces of it strewn about. It was his nose that had hit Marcus on the cheek.

  The sting of bile traveled up his throat and Marcus retched. It was as nauseating as anything he’d ever seen, and the architect of it was a four-legged mutt.

  Fifty was still tearing at the man’s neck when Rudy called him off. The dog looked up at his owner. He wagged his tail and smacked his mouth as if he’d eaten a spoonful of peanut butter.

  Lou appeared from the darkness, muddied and drenched, cradling the Remington across her chest. The Astros cap was askew atop her head and her hair hung over her eyes.

  Rudy reached out and offered Marcus his hand. Marcus took it and pulled himself to his feet. A prolonged strobe of lightning illuminated the battlefield, revealing the breadth of the massacre.

  Somehow Marcus, Rudy, Lou, and Fifty had slain at least twenty men. Their bodies stretched the distance from their position to the rear of the hotel.

  “I whistled,” said Rudy. “That’s the signal for Fifty to attack. I don’t tell him who to jump. He knows. He knew to help you, Marcus.”

  Marcus patted Rudy on the back and thanked him. “Let’s regroup and go find Barbas,” said Marcus. “We need to get him and rescue Norma and Trina.”

  “I think we found him,” said Lou, her breath visible in the cold.

  The rain was letting up. Lightning flickered, but the thunder was distant. The wind was weaker, but the air was much colder. The storm was moving south.

  “Where?” asked Marcus.

  Lou reached down and picked up what looked like a small pelt. She tossed it at Marcus, who caught it against his chest and raised it up to look at it.

  It was a scrap of skin coated with a thick, wiry clump of red hair. Marcus tossed it to the side and knelt down over the man’s body. He leaned into the man’s bloodied, mangled face and closed his eyes. There was a gurgle, the slightest rattle. Barbas was still alive.

  Marcus pushed his hands in the mud next to him and whispered in what was left of Barbas’s ear, “I don’t know if you can hear me or not, but I still got life left in me.”

  He looked up at Rudy and Lou. “Let’s find the women.”

  ***

  The inside of the hotel was unusual. In its center, beyond the glass-panel doors of the lobby, was a large entertainment area with a pool, a putting green, and a dining area. All of it was in disrepair and the pool was empty. But there were empty bottles of liquor and trash strewn about that indicated the space was well used.

  Surrounding the entertainment area on all sides were two floors of hotel rooms. The second story was accessible by staircases at each of the four corners of the space. All of the rooms had covered windows and sidelights that prevented anyone on the outside from seeing what might be happening on the inside.

  Marcus stood dripping at the glass doors with Rudy to one side and Lou the other. All of them had cleaned the mud off of their weapons and reloaded after Marcus had retrieved his pack. Fifty stood in front of them, his ears pricking. He took a few steps into what amounted to an enclosed concrete courtyard and shook the water from his coat.

  “Let’s go room by room,” Marcus suggested. “I’ll take the first floor, and you two take the second.”

  Lou went to the staircase on the right and Rudy to the left. Marcus scanned the open area and moved to the left. The doors to the rooms that lined the space in a U shape were recessed under the balcony that provided access to upper floors. Marcus shrugged his pack up on his shoulders and adjusted the chest strap. His rifle was slung diagonally across his back. He had the Glock in his right hand. He tried the first door. It was unlocked.

  He turned the handle and slowly shouldered open the door past the jamb before slamming it open and moving himself to the side while leveling the Glock at the opening. The room was dark and silent.

  He moved to the next two doors, repeating the process. Both were empty.

  The fourth room, however, was different. It too was unlocked, but when Marcus slammed open the door, he heard a woman’s muted groan. There was dim light in the room from a low-burning candle on a dresser that ran the length of one wall. He could see it from the edge of the door where he stood. He peeked around the corner and called out to the person inside, “Are you okay?”

  No response.

  “I’m coming in,” he said. “I’m armed. I’m not a threat. I want to help.”

  Marcus stepped into the room. He aimed his weapon at where he imagined the bed would be, his eyes quickly adjusting to the light in the room.

  The bed was there. So was a woman. She was bound and gagged.

  He moved to the side of the bed, sliding his Glock into the holster so he could pull the thin, crumpled sheet over her body and immediately begin working on the binds at the woman’s wrists. Even in the dim light, the bruising on her face was evident. Her eyelids appeared heavy. The woman couldn’t keep them open, but tears leaked from the sides while Marcus undid the knot that kept her hands bound together.

  The woman flinched and recoiled when he touched her shoulder, trying to move her so he could remove the gag. Her body trembled.

  He put his hand on her bare shoulder and said softly, “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help you.”

  He loosened the rag that cut across her mouth and cheeks and pulled it free. The woman gagged and coughed.

  “Who are you?” she rasped.<
br />
  Marcus helped the woman sit up, insuring the sheet covered her. He sat on the edge of the uncovered mattress and leaned over to untie the woman’s legs one at a time.

  “I’m Marcus,” he said. “My friends and I are looking for two women the Llano River Clan brought here within the last couple of days.”

  He finished with the first leg and moved to the other. The woman’s skin was cold and there was a healthy growth of fine hair along her shins and ankles. Her toenails were long and jagged.

  The woman coughed again and sighed, her words carrying with them a vibrato. “There are others here,” she whimpered. “I don’t know how many. They come and go. I could hear them sometimes.”

  Marcus loosened the knot on her second leg and removed the rope. He tossed it to the floor and then looked at the woman. “Where do they take the new ones?”

  The woman pulled the sheet up to her chin, her bloodied wrists swollen and bruised. She shook her head, her chin trembling. “I don’t know. I never saw them. Sometimes I could hear them. I could hear the men talk about them.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Michelle.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Weeks. Maybe a few months?”

  “Where are you from, Michelle?”

  “Odessa.”

  Marcus stood from the bed. “Can you walk?”

  Michelle shook her head. “Not far.”

  “All right,” Marcus said. “Let’s get you up. I’ll tighten that sheet around you and we’ll get you out into the courtyard area. Okay?”

  Michelle blinked her wide, frightened eyes and nodded. She took Marcus’s hand and stood as he wrapped the large sheet around her frail, emaciated frame. She draped her arm across his shoulder and he put his hand around her waist, helping her from the room one cautious step at a time. Marcus felt the entirety of her ninety pounds relying on his strength as they found their way to a table and chairs not far from her door.

  “I’m going to leave you here,” Marcus said. “I need to look for others.”