Battle Read online

  The information was displayed on her tablet as a spreadsheet. The tracking implant identification numbers correlated with their subjects. There was latitudinal and longitudinal information as well as length of service and basic biometric intelligence for each of the associated subjects.

  Sharp twisted the chair, the pale blue glow of the screen holding her attention. “Thank you,” she said.

  The tablet’s display refreshed with the latest information and the AI narrated the new data. “I’ve located the following tracking implants and their locations,” it said. “All are north of the series of coordinates identified as ‘the wall.’ There is one exception, however.”

  The screen changed again, revealing a single set of data for a tracking implant associated with subject CV-01. Sharp stopped twisting and focused on the numbers displayed on the screen. They didn’t make sense. The biometric data was offline and the location for the tracking implant was inconclusive in real time.

  “Have we lost the tracking data for CV-01?” asked Sharp. “I don’t understand what I’m seeing. Is CV-01 deceased?”

  “I’m running another diagnostic, Dr. Sharp,” said the AI. “I should have that information in a moment.”

  The display dissolved into another screen with another set of numbers. They also didn’t compute. They showed the tracking implant at her current location.

  “I’m running a time lapse from the moment of injection through the point at which the data transmission was halted,” said the AI. “Please stand by, Dr. Sharp.”

  The numbers fluctuated, the geolocator’s coordinates shifted, and the biometric data reflected Lomas’s body temperature and heart rate. After several hours, his temperature spiked, his biometrics collapsed to zero, and then his body temperature spiked again in the seconds before the tracking implant ceased transmitting data.

  “Is that an external spike in temperature?” she asked the computer.

  “Yes,” said the AI. “The measurement is nine hundred degrees Fahrenheit, which is consistent with a fire.”

  “What is the location?”

  “The last transmission location was 32.476171 degrees north, 98.594055 degrees west.”

  “Which is where exactly? Is that Abilene?”

  “No, Dr. Sharp,” said the AI. “The location is east of Ranger, Texas, on Interstate 20.”

  Sharp’s muscles tensed. She flexed her fingers and balled them into fists, planted her feet flat on the floor, and slid to the edge of her chair. She stared at the numbers on the screen. Her first test subject had not made it to his location. For some reason, the courier hadn’t delivered and Blankenship hadn’t done as he was assigned.

  She lay back in her chair, releasing the tension and relaxing her posture. This was a setback. She knew this wouldn’t be easy. Nothing worth having ever was.

  She told herself this was only one subject, only one of many. It was minor. Inconsequential. If she repeated it enough, she hoped she’d believe it. However, something deep within her, something that clawed at the back of her mind, told her this was much more than a simple failure. It wasn’t an anomaly. An overwhelming feeling of dread suggested this was, in some way, catastrophic to all they had planned.

  CHAPTER 16

  FEBRUARY 9, 2044, 9:12 AM

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  COLEMAN, TEXAS

  Grissom slid uncomfortably from his horse. He held his shoulder and stumbled toward the center of the camp where the other men were loading up. They were ready to go. Nobody paid attention to him until Bumppo stopped him short of reaching Junior.

  His face etched deep with concern, Bumppo grabbed Grissom’s collar and tightened his fist around the sweat-stained cotton. “Where’s Whisper?”

  Grissom shook his head. “He’s dead. Battle got ’im.”

  The lines in Bumppo’s forehead shifted from anger to worry. He loosened his hold on the shirt. “What do you mean? How? Where?”

  “I dunno,” said Grissom. “It was dark. He was waiting for us. He had to be waiting for us.”

  “Why didn’t he kill both of you?”

  Grissom swallowed hard. He couldn’t look Bumppo in the face. “He wanted me to warn you.”

  Junior marched toward them from his horse, rubbing his hands on his shirt. With his chin up, he called to both, “Warn who?”

  “Whisper’s dead,” Bumppo told him. “Battle killed him.”

  Junior motioned with his chin toward Grissom. “He’s dead and you’re here?”

  Grissom’s dead arm hung limply from his dislocated shoulder. His face was stretched with the thumping pain that radiated from the misaligned joint. He nodded.

  Junior shook his head. “Ain’t that something,” he said, unfazed by the revelation. “Go ahead and learn us about what happened.”

  “He came from nowhere,” Grissom said with a shaky voice after taking a deep breath. “Just popped up on the road. Cut us off.”

  “He killed Bumppo’s best man?”

  “Something like that,” said Grissom. “He claimed he was lost, needed help. Said he’d been wandering. We didn’t know who he was. Then his horse shows up.”

  “Shows up?” asked Junior, his voice sharp with incredulity.

  “I don’t know where it was,” said Grissom. “Maybe he’d tied it somewhere, I don’t know. But it shows up and that’s when we know he’s lying. Like a flash he draws and fires, shoots Whisper dead. My horse spooked and threw me off.”

  “Why didn’t he kill you?” interjected Bumppo.

  “He told me to deliver a message.”

  Bumppo and Junior exchanged glances. Junior stepped closer to Grissom and lowered his voice. “What message?”

  Grissom’s mouth opened and closed again with the hesitation of a messenger who knew better than to deliver. He closed his eyes. “Battle said it doesn’t matter whether you got nineteen men or nineteen hundred. He said if you come to Baird, it’s where you’ll die.”

  Junior gently put a hand on Grissom’s good shoulder. “Anything else?”

  Grissom swallowed hard. “He also said…”

  “What?” Junior prompted.

  Grissom’s eyes fluttered and he looked at his feet. “He also said he’s going to let the same dog that killed your dad chew on your carcass until all he has to bury are the bones the dog doesn’t want.”

  Junior’s hand gripped Grissom’s shoulder, his nails digging through the thin fabric of the shirt. His eyes narrowed and twitched. He stuck out his tongue and licked the corner of his mouth.

  Grissom flinched like a dog expecting a backhand to the head. But Junior released his hold and backed away. He wasn’t looking at Grissom anymore, he was looking through him. His hand slid to his holster at his hip and he took another half-dozen steps backward until he stopped. He stood there for more than a minute. He didn’t speak. He didn’t move.

  Grissom held his breath. Bolts of pain pulsed from his shoulder, drawing an ache in his neck, but he too was cemented in place. He swallowed hard. His throat was dry. So dry. His tongue was thick in his mouth. He tried to avoid making eye contact with his boss. He knew he shouldn’t.

  Bumppo cupped his hands over his mouth and dragged his fingers downward, as if wiping away the tension. He started to speak, but he was interrupted by the loud crack of gunfire.

  Without saying anything, let alone changing his expression, Junior drew his weapon from his holster, pulled back the hammer, leveled it, and pulled the trigger. With smoke trailing from the end of the barrel, he mindlessly spun the weapon forward and backward on his finger and slid it back into his holster.

  Startled, Grissom jumped at the blast. It didn’t register at first that Junior had fired at him. Then he felt the heat at his gut and looked down at himself.

  There was a small hole torn near his navel. A spot of blood bloomed into something larger, something monstrous, and Grissom knew what had happened.

  He clutched the wound with his good hand and lurched forward. His eyes drifted lazily
from the deathblow to the man who dealt it. Tears welled in his eyes and then drifted down his cheeks. The heat became cold, a cold that spread like frost from his core to the rest of his body, and his legs weakened.

  “W-w-why?” he stuttered.

  Bumppo moved to Grissom’s side and helped lower him to his knees. He cried out, “What are you doing?”

  Grissom’s vision blurred, the edges darkening. The pain was gone. His pulse slowed. The conversation between the man holding him and the one standing over him was mumbled gibberish. He tilted back his head and through the haze saw the watercolor shape of a large black bird circling overhead. Its wings were extended, slicing through the air, buoyed by the breeze. He accepted his fate. The man whom he’d served faithfully for much of his adult life, the only one in the post-Scourge world he considered family, had done him a favor.

  * * *

  Junior watched Grissom take his last breath. It was a rattle, a ragged breath that struggled to leave his lungs. The color changed in his friend’s face, the tension floated from his body. He ran his tongue across his teeth and turned his attention to the sallow-faced Bumppo, who was sitting on the ground with Grissom’s head in his lap. He shrugged.

  “He delivered the message,” said Junior.

  “And you shot the messenger,” said Bumppo. “You literally killed the messenger. I’ve never—”

  Junior crouched down, balancing his weight on the balls of his heels. He pointed at Bumppo’s face and sneered. “You’ve never had a man tell you that the dog who ripped apart your father is coming for you? Is that what you were about to say?”

  Bumppo shook his head. “We need every man we got. We’re down two now and you killed one of ’em. You killed your own man.”

  Junior circled his finger, referencing the men now surrounding them, obviously curious as to what had just transpired. His focus, however, was squarely on Bumppo. “That should be a warning to you and yours, then, shouldn’t it?” he asked rhetorically. “If I’m gonna kill the man I trusted most, what am I gonna do to those I paid as hired guns? You best not run. You best not flake. You best not give me no bad news. You understand me?”

  Junior slid his hand to his holster until Bumppo nodded silently. He took a final look at Grissom’s body, spun on his boot heel, and marched, arms swinging, toward the water. He reached the edge, ignoring the crescendo of murmuring behind him, and dipped his hands into the pond. He cupped them together and drew enough of the cool water to splash it onto his face. He watched the concentric ripples dissipate until his reflection reappeared.

  Junior didn’t recognize the eyes staring back at him. They were feral, searching for prey. He understood the task ahead, what he’d sacrificed to satisfy the consuming rotgut called revenge. As he stared, searching for familiarity in his face, the image morphed into something softer. It was Grissom’s face.

  Grissom, the willing manservant who’d done whatever Junior had asked of him. He’d cooked, cleaned, bartered, hauled, listened, and advised. He’d lost his father too. An orphan of the Scourge, he’d found shelter with Junior’s family by accident. Two years younger than Junior, he’d always looked up to him. He’d followed his every move, mimicked him, worked hard to please him. Junior knew these things about Grissom. He knew that the boy who’d come to them—seeking moldy bread, fetid water, and a manure-soiled mattress in a barn—had given so much more than he’d taken. Grissom wasn’t like anyone else he’d known. In Junior’s world, men were raiders and conquerors. They ruled with fear and lived to satisfy their most basic instincts: power, money, and sex.

  Grissom lived to help. He lived for others. He sought only companionship and acceptance. Junior admired him for it. He also hated him for it. Grissom had served, unwittingly, as Junior’s conscience, a balance to the scale. He was innately good and ran afoul only in an effort to please his one friend.

  Regret swelled in Junior’s chest. His chin quivered. As quickly as he let his humanity return, he quashed it by punching the water with his fists. He waited for the wash to clear, the ripples to settle, and his reflection to reappear. It was his face again, his lupine features staring back at him with eyes that were at once dead and wild with the anticipation of coming violence. Grissom got what was coming. He never should have let Battle get the best of him. He shouldn’t have let him escape. He’d failed. He’d gotten another man killed and returned without the intelligence they’d sought. A bullet was the best thing for him, no doubt.

  “I don’t need your judgment,” he quavered. He blinked back tears and bit down hard on the inside of his cheek. Warm, metallic-tasting blood filled his mouth, flooding the spaces around his tongue. He slid his tongue to the rough wound in his cheek and sucked his cheeks inward. He took a deep breath through his nose and exhaled. He swallowed a mouthful of blood and balled his hands into fists.

  Junior stood. He wiped his face with the back of his hand and drew snot into his mouth with a loud snort. He spat the gritty, bloody wad into the water and his boots crunched their way back to the waiting posse. His red, swollen eyes floated across the men mounted on their horses. He waved dismissively at them.

  “What are you waiting on?” he asked. “We got a town to kill.”

  In a single, smooth motion, he swung himself into his saddle and looped a hand into the reins. He adjusted his boots into the iron stirrups he’d stolen weeks earlier and kicked his heels into his ride. The horse responded with a grunt and picked up its hooves, moving back to the highway and leading the cadre of mercenaries toward Baird, toward Junior’s destiny.

  CHAPTER 17

  FEBRUARY 9, 2044, HIGH NOON

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  BAIRD, TEXAS

  “It’s noon,” said Lou. “They gotta be coming soon. Everyone who’s anyone knows the bad guy rides into town at noon.”

  Dallas shook his head. “I ain’t never heard that.”

  “Guess that means you ain’t anyone, then?” Lou snipped.

  She was perched atop a flat-roofed building in the middle of town between Fourth and Fifth Streets, which ran through the center of Baird. Fourth Street doubled as Interstate 20 Business, running parallel just south of the highway. The former government building itself was two stories plus a basement, and at one time was the county courthouse. It equipped him with the best crow’s nest view of the town.

  Lou was absently twirling her knives in her hands. She was slightly less disappointed about her assigned position than she was about having to share it with Dallas.

  “Why noon?” he asked. He was armed with a rifle and was braced against the two-foot brick lip that ran around the top of the two-story structure as a decorative ledge. “Why not before sunup when everybody’s sleeping?”

  Lou rolled her eyes, which otherwise were pinned to the eastern horizon, looking for advancing enemies. She adjusted her cap on her head, straightening the tattered bill. She thumbed a worn spot on the front and rubbed the stitched H emblazoned to represent the Houston Astros.

  “It’s a myth, you know,” she said.

  “What?”

  “The Old West duels that we have now never happened a hundred fifty, two hundred years ago. What’s going on now is an apocalyptic approximation.”

  Dallas looked at her like a confused dog, as if the context made no sense to him. He rubbed the sweat from under his eyes with his knuckles.

  “This world we live in south of the wall is like a parallel universe or something,” Lou said. “Everyone likes the pretense that this is 1870s Deadwood, and we’re all gamblers, gold-seekers, whores, and heathens. But what we’re living is like some twisted version of that.”

  “How do you know that?” asked Dallas. “Everything I heard is that the Scourge sent us back to the Old West. That aside from the occasional lightbulb, automatic weapons, and some working cars, we’re pretty much living in the Old West.”

  “Duels didn’t happen except by drunk men fighting over money or women,” she said. “I mean there was Wild Bill Hickok. He
shot and killed Davis Tutt in a duel, but Hickok got tried for murder.”

  “What about the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral?”

  “That wasn’t a duel,” she said condescendingly.

  Dallas shook his head. “No,” he said, “but neither is what’s about to happen here.”

  “Fair enough,” Lou conceded.

  “You’re smart, huh?” asked Dallas. “I mean, you like to act smart at least.”

  Lou bit her lip, considering how to respond. It was a backhanded compliment. But it was a compliment, so she wasn’t quick to snap at him. Nobody had ever called her smart. Her father had called her inquisitive and a book-sponge, he’d never called her smart. Neither had Marcus. He called her deadly and sarcastic. He called her deadly sarcastic too, but never smart.

  Even Rudy and Norma, who’d been generous and kind with their home and their love, hadn’t expressed their views of her obvious intelligence. She was sweet, she was funny, she had a good wit, she was generous, she was good with Fifty. But never smart.

  She smiled demurely, her eyes locking with his. She’d never noticed how blue they were, like icy pools of glacier water. Blue like the sky on the morning after a bad storm when the clouds cleared out.

  “I just read a lot,” she said. “Well, I used to. When I was with my dad, we’d both read a lot. I guess you learn stuff when you read.”

  “Your dad die in the Scourge?”

  She looked away from him, back to the east. “No.”

  “Oh,” said Dallas. “Sorry.”

  The hazy, warbling horizon dissolved in front of her and Lou pictured her dad sitting at a long study table in the library, his legs crossed at the ankles and resting on the pressed wood tabletop. He’d have a stack of three or four books next to his feet, another in his lap, and one in his hands. He’d occasionally chuckle or sigh or curse. Sometimes he’d call out to Lou, his voice reaching her in some far-flung aisle of children’s fiction or biographies. She’d snap shut her book, her thumb holding her place, and bounce along the well-trod paths in the industrial Berber carpet and sidle up next to him so he could read aloud a particularly interesting paragraph, page, or chapter.