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

  He exhaled again and spun back around toward the 7-Eleven, settling his eye close to the scope. He repositioned the weapon to his previous spot at the left corner of the building and aimed downward at the ground to spot the shoe. It was gone.

  Marcus lifted his head from the rifle and scanned the building, cursing under his breath, and returned to the scope. The threat had moved.

  He had two choices. He could stay in position and lay in wait for the threat to reemerge, or he could load up and keep moving. Neither option was appealing. He cursed himself again.

  Before he could flip a coin in his mind and choose the lesser of two evils, he heard the unmistakable whine of scraping metal straight ahead. He snapped the rifle to his right and zeroed in on the store. He couldn’t see anything behind the racks or moving amongst the debris, but he knew the threat was there.

  Marcus exhaled and leaned up from the scope. “Hey!” he called. “I don’t want to kill you, but I’ve got you in my sights. My finger is on the trigger.”

  His voice echoed in the cool morning air, reverberating off the valley of abandoned stores and houses. Marcus listened to the echoing of his own voice, anticipating a response from the threat.

  “You’ll have to come out eventually,” Marcus said when there was no reply. “Might as well save us both some time and do it now.”

  He lowered his eye to the scope and scanned fluidly from right to left. He was ready to move back to the right when a young girl no older than fifteen peeked out from behind a rack. She was wearing a worn Houston Astros baseball cap sideways. Her long black hair was frayed at the ends and covered her shoulders like wiry tentacles. Her bright eyes were narrowed in defiance as she raised her hands above her head.

  Marcus lifted his head, looking for others. “Who’s with you?”

  The girl stepped forward, awkwardly maneuvering around the debris in the store. With her hands above her head, she moved from the store to the parking lot, her brown canvas shoes crunching on broken glass.

  Marcus tapped the trigger guard with his fingertip. The rifle rested on the pack, its business end aimed at the girl, training on her as she walked closer to Marcus. Her dark eyes were focused on the weapon, her face expressionless.

  “Are you alone?” Marcus asked.

  The girl lowered her hands, her arms loose at her sides. She wiggled her fingers as if playing a concerto on an invisible piano. She tilted her head from one side to the other, cracking her neck, without taking her nasty glare off Marcus.

  If she hadn’t seemed dangerous, Marcus might have laughed at the absurdity of the teenage pugilist ready for a fight. She was gangly, her body not having quite grown into her spindly legs and boat-sized feet. Her long fingers were agile as she fluttered them musically. Her thumbs curved outward, giving them an almost clawlike appearance. Marcus marveled at how the girl’s tiny, dark features were impish, but her dead eyes gave away that she’d led anything but a carefree childhood.

  He sighed, growing tired of the pubescent grandstanding. “You need to—”

  Without warning, and with incredible quickness, the girl drew a knife from behind her back and flung it at Marcus’s head. The sunlight glinted off the blade as it hurled toward him, but he didn’t have time to react. It whipped past his head and nailed a wooden utility pole right behind him.

  As he jerked his head away from the knife’s path, he instinctively slid his finger to the trigger, ready to fire. But he didn’t. He didn’t want to kill the child. “Hey,” he said sternly, as would a father scolding his disobedient child, “put your hands up now. Both of them over your head. Or I pull this trigger.”

  The girl pouted and raised her hands. She rested them on her ball cap and laced her fingers.

  “Stay put,” he ordered. “One stupid move and you’re toast. Do you understand?”

  The girl didn’t acknowledge Marcus as he pushed himself to his feet and approached her with the rifle aimed at her chest. He was close enough to see the patch of faint acne populating her chin.

  “Do you understand English?” he asked. “¿Habla Español?”

  The girl shrugged.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” said Marcus. “Do you understand me? Can you understand what I’m saying?”

  The girl inhaled and let out a sigh.

  Marcus adjusted the rifle, tightening the stock’s position against his shoulder. His gut told him to leave the feral child by herself and move on. He had places to be and people to kill. Still, there was something about her that had him transfixed. Maybe it was her guile, her aggression, her obvious will to survive.

  He motioned to the right. “Turn around.”

  The girl hesitated.

  Marcus jabbed the barrel toward her. “Now.”

  She turned around, her back to Marcus. Her shirt was torn across the top, as if she’d snagged it on something sharp. Protruding from her cinched waistband was the matte black steel handle of a throwing knife.

  “I’m taking the knife,” Marcus said. He held the rifle with his right hand and reached for the knife with his left. When his hand touched the handle, the girl quickly spun, grabbed his wrist, and twisted it.

  Acting without thinking, Marcus backed up and pulled hard, yanking the girl off balance enough that he regained control of the knife and wrestled it free from her as she struggled to stay on her feet. He moved quickly away from her, the knife in one hand and the rifle in the other.

  He checked over one shoulder and the other, keeping the girl in his line of sight. She was alone. If she hadn’t been, companions would have shown themselves. Marcus tucked the knife into his waistband.

  “You’ve got fight,” he said. “That’s good. It’ll keep you alive.”

  The girl wiped her face with the back of her hand. Her chin was tilted toward her chest and she looked up at Marcus with demon eyes that glowed from behind the dark curtain of hair that hung in front of her face. She was breathing through her mouth, her jaw slack. Her chest heaved and her tattered shirt hung from her body. Her fingers were curled into fists. Marcus sighed and limped backward toward his pack. He kept the girl in front of him as he retreated in a defensive but ready posture. He’d wasted enough time here. She clearly didn’t want his help and saw him as a threat. Without her knives, she was relatively harmless.

  Still facing her, he crouched down, wincing at the pressure on his leg, and grabbed his pack. He slung it over one shoulder, not willing to risk putting down his rifle to put on the pack properly, and backed onto the road. He stopped at the utility pole and levered the knife free of the wood.

  “You dropped your hat,” he called, and turned to resume his march toward Abilene. He’d gone a half-dozen steps when she spoke.

  “You can’t take my knives,” she called out to him. “I need them.”

  Marcus looked over his shoulder at the girl. The hat was in her hand and she ran her fingers across its curved brim. Suddenly the feral demon looked every bit the frightened child. Marcus adjusted the pack on his shoulder and waited for her to speak again.

  “Can I please have my knives?”

  “Why?” he asked. “I give you the knives and you’ll kill with them.”

  Her features softened. “I promise I won’t,” she said. “I ain’t got nobody, just me and my knives.”

  Marcus looked west, in the direction he was going, and then back east from where he’d come. The sun cast a hazy glow in what was now a pale blue sky. A bird flapped overhead and then glided toward a cluster of scrub oaks on the northern side of the highway. He clenched his jaw.

  “We're in a no-win situation,” he said to the girl. “I give you the knives, you wing one at me and stick me in the back as I walk away. I take the knives and you probably don’t last a week out here.”

  The girl lifted the hat and set it on her head, spinning the brim to the side. She fingered her hair from her eyes, pulling it back across her shoulders, and shrugged.

  “How long you been out here alone?” Marcus asked.


  She eyed the ground in front of her feet and her lips moved as if she were trying to count the days. “A year or two,” she said. “Could be longer. I stopped counting.”

  “What’s your suggestion?” asked Marcus. “You’re smart. What would you do if you were me?”

  A smirk dimpled one of the girl’s cheeks and she took a step closer to Marcus. “How about you leave the knives in the pole there. Jab ’em real good. I stay where I am, and when you’re far enough away, I get my knives. You go your way and I go mine.”

  Marcus glanced at the utility pole and then back at the girl. “That doesn’t help me out. You tried to kill me.”

  The girl’s smirk evaporated. Her expression flattened and her eyes went cold. “There are bad people out there who need killing. Hard to tell them from the others sometimes.”

  Marcus worked to suppress a grin. She was years younger than him but maybe just as wise. After all, they’d both lived post-Scourge for the same amount of time and, as a percentage of her life, she’d lived it longer. He ran his fingers along the twin knife handles tucked at his waist.

  “You’re right about that,” he said. “We don’t know enough about each other to know whether either or both of us need killing, right?”

  The girl cocked her head to one side like a confused puppy. Her brow furrowed.

  “Let’s figure it out,” he said. “I can’t leave you here to die if you’re the kind that needs to live, but I can’t give you your knives if I’m the kind that needs to live. So how about I keep the knives for now, you tag along with me, and I keep you fed? We get to know each other, and at some point we’ll figure each other out.”

  The girl wiggled her fingers at her side. “And then I get my knives back?”

  “Depends on what kind of person you are.”

  She huffed. “Or what kind you are.”

  “Exactly. I’m heading west to Abilene.”

  The girl adjusted the cap on her head, her eyes widening with uncertainty. “There are bad people in Abilene.”

  “There are bad people everywhere,” said Marcus. Marcus shrugged the pack higher on his back and started walking away from the girl. His leg ached, but it wasn’t unbearable. The stiffness from the morning chill was nearly gone. He’d walked a couple of dozen steps when he heard quick footsteps pattering against the asphalt.

  The girl sidled up to Marcus and slowed her pace. “You said something about food,” she said. “And water?”

  Marcus unhooked the canteen from the side of his pack and handed it to the girl. She uncapped it and gulped, streams of water trickling down her cheeks.

  “Not too fast,” Marcus said. “You’ll get sick.”

  The girl took another large gulp, storing it in her cheeks, and handed back the canteen. What was left of the water sloshed around the inside. Marcus drew it to his mouth and slugged a mouthful. He swished it around in his mouth and curled his cracked lips around his teeth, moistening them.

  “We’re gonna head north in a bit,” he said. “We’ll camp for the night. There’s a lake south of I-20. We’ll hit it by nightfall.”

  The girl bobbed her head and fingered her hair behind her ear, tucking it away from her face. Marcus slid the knives along his waistband to his right, away from the girl.

  CHAPTER 4

  OCTOBER 21, 2042, 12:53 PM

  SCOURGE +10 YEARS

  SOUTH OF BELLE PLAIN, TEXAS

  Marcus heard the crack of a rifle and crouched. He unslung the Springfield from his shoulder, gripped it with both hands, and waved the girl behind him as he moved to the north side of Highway 36. At the edge of the road was a drainage ditch that separated the disintegrating asphalt shoulder from a high-tensile cattle fence.

  Another crack thundered through the air and pushed Marcus to his chest in the dirt and dying weeds. The girl was at his left hip, mimicking his prone position.

  “I can’t see where it’s coming from,” he said. He lowered his eye to the scope and scanned the horizon, breathing in and out slowly, trying to regulate his thumping, rapid pulse.

  The girl inched forward, pulling herself along the ditch on her elbows. She was three body lengths ahead of Marcus when she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “It’s near the intersection up there,” she said. “There are two people. They’ve both got guns, it looks like.”

  Marcus narrowed his eyes and checked the scope again. He zeroed in on the intersection with US 283, which was three or four hundred yards ahead. Tucked behind a pair of graying scrub oaks was a man with a rifle. He couldn’t see the other person and lifted his eye from the scope. The girl had turned around and was inching her way back toward him.

  “I only see one,” he said. “How do you see two?”

  “I’m not old like you,” she said. “There’s the one with the gun at the tree, and on the opposite corner, there’s one hiding behind some bushes. They’ve got a horse too.”

  Marcus looked again through the scope. He panned to the right, adjusting his elbow, and picked out the second person at a cluster of dense yaupon. There was a horse there too. He’d missed it the first time.

  A third crack rolled through the air and a round zipped past Marcus close enough for him to hear it. A fourth followed quickly and splintered a fence post a couple of feet from Marcus’s head.

  “Give me the knives,” the girl said flatly.

  Marcus shook his head. “Not gonna happen. I’ll take them out.”

  “You fire once and the one you don’t hit will know exactly where you are,” she said. “He’ll see the muzzle flash and you’ll be dead. And that’s assuming you hit the target with the first round. That rifle looks older than you.”

  Marcus checked the scope and then looked at the girl again. He could feel the knives pressed flat against his hip. “What are you going to do?”

  “You take the one with the horse,” she said. “I’ll roll under the fence and surprise the other one. As soon as you fire, I’ll throw. Or I could take your pistol.”

  Marcus smirked. “That’s not happening.”

  The girl leaned forward on her elbows and shrugged. “Suit yourself. I’ll just wait until you’re dead and take my knives.”

  Marcus smiled and lowered his eye to the scope. He exhaled and focused on the man at the yaupon. “Sounds like a plan. Now get behind me.”

  While the girl moved, muttering under her breath, Marcus slid his finger along the trigger guard. He leveled the crosshair at the man’s head, adjusted the scope for the four-hundred yard distance, and then swung quickly to the right to find the other shooter. He practiced the move twice as another shot buzzed above them.

  He made sure the safety was off and the magazine cutoff was flipped to the on position. Marcus focused the center of the target on the man’s chest and slid his finger to the Springfield’s trigger. He exhaled, steadied his aim, and fired.

  The rifle kicked into his shoulder and the blast echoed loudly through the air. Without waiting to see if the bullet hit the target, he quickly swung to the right, cycling the rifle’s bolt. The round chambered automatically from the internal magazine and he set the crosshair on the second target’s chest. The man was taking aim himself.

  Marcus pulled the trigger at the moment the target’s weapon flashed. The twin rifle shots cracked like simultaneous bolts of thunder and a round slugged the edge of the trench next to Marcus’s left arm when the target spun and dropped his weapon, falling into the trunk as he collapsed.

  Marcus swung his rifle back to the left and, through the scope, saw the man tangled at the edge of the yaupon, the thin branches suspending his limp body. His rifle was on the ground.

  “You were saying?” Marcus said to the girl.

  “That you’re old. And you should have let me taken care of one of them.”

  “Did you not just see—”

  “My dad used to say even a stopped clock is right twice a day,” she said, pushing herself to her feet. “You got lucky, especially with that…what’s the word? Musket
.”

  Marcus rolled his eyes, set the safety, and using the rifle as a cane, eased himself from the ground. He adjusted the heavy pack against his back and cinched its waist strap. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, checked at his hips for his Glock and the girl’s knives, and stepped up onto the asphalt. The edge of the shoulder crumbled under the weight of his boot.

  He motioned toward the intersection. “Let’s go see about these two, but don’t go near the weapons. If you do, we’ve got a problem.”

  The girl huffed. “Fine.”

  Marcus limped purposefully toward the man at the yaupon. As he got closer, he could see the grisly wound on the man's chest. On the ground not far from the man’s dangling fingertips was his weapon, a Remington 700. Marcus recognized the popular bolt-action rifle’s stainless-steel bar barrel and its walnut stock with the distinctive black fore-end cap. It was a beautiful weapon.

  He bent over and picked up the rifle, feeling its heft in his left hand. He rounded the corner, turning south onto 283 behind the yaupon, and approached the horse. It was a deep brown with white splotches across its hind end. Marcus moved slowly to the animal at its side. He slid the rifle into a saddle scabbard and ran his hand along its smooth coat. He checked a saddlebag and found a half-empty box of Remington .30-06 ammunition. He smiled at the good fortune and latched the bag closed.

  “It’s a bay blanket,” said the girl. She was standing in the middle of the road, a good twenty feet from Marcus.

  “What is?”

  “The pattern on the horse,” she said. “My dad used to have one. He had a bay blanket Appaloosa and a Grulla blanket. It was silvery and white.”

  Marcus patted the horse gently, admiring the loud-colored mare. “Good to know.” He left the horse tied to the brittle, jagged stump of a dead mesquite and moved back to the dead man.

  He was wearing dirt-stained cargo pants and a sweatshirt that rode up his hairy back, revealing his gray skin beneath the dark tendrils. Marcus grabbed the man’s ankles and yanked him free of the yaupon tangle. He laid the man flat on the dirt at the shoulder of the highway, leaving a dark red streak on the ground where the dead man’s head bopped along the gravelly earth. His sweatshirt rode up his back and caught at his pits. The wide swirls of dark hair painted the man’s back like paisleys. Marcus dropped the feet when he noticed the backs of the man’s hands. Barely visible beneath the hair on each hand was a black tattooed dollar sign. They were the same tattoos as the ones on the hands of the red-bearded man named Barbas.