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

  Marcus gritted his teeth and balled his fists. He squeezed his hands as tight as he could and then kicked the dead man’s side hard enough a rib snapped. He cursed loudly then looked over at the girl. “Sorry.”

  “I’ve heard worse,” she said. “I’ve seen worse.”

  Marcus fished through the man’s pockets, but they were empty. He crossed the road to the other man, the one who’d hidden behind the tree.

  That man was a heap, his body awkwardly leaning against the trunk. His eyes were open, as was the hole between them that leaked a crooked creek of blood down his nose and around his open mouth. His tongue hung at the side, protruding between two rows of canary yellow teeth that looked like pieces of candy.

  One hand was twisted behind his back, the other palm down on the ground. It too had the dollar-sign ink. Marcus cursed again.

  “What is it?” asked the girl.

  “I should have left one of them alive,” said Marcus. “They know somebody I’m looking for.”

  “Who’s that?”

  He knelt down and picked the man’s empty pockets, trying to breathe through his mouth. The man reeked of cheap moonshine but had nothing else to offer other than the AR-15 lying in the dirt.

  Marcus picked up the Colt-made rifle and checked its magazine. It was empty. He pulled it tight against his shoulder, aimed it toward the open field beyond the cattle fence, and pulled the trigger. The weapon kicked and blasted the last round from the barrel.

  He walked over to the girl. “Here, you can have this one.”

  The girl narrowed her eyes with suspicion but took the gift and held it in her hands. She put one hand around the pistol grip and, with the other, wrapped her fingers around the vented handguard. She aimed it at the ground in front of Marcus’s feet.

  “I’m guessing it’s empty,” she said, one eyebrow arched higher than the other.

  “Yep.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “I can’t carry three rifles,” said Marcus, “and I’m not letting you have a loaded one. At least you look dangerous.”

  The girl rolled her eyes. “Great. What now?”

  “We ride the horse to our camping spot.”

  Marcus undid the clove hitch on the rope tying the horse to the dead mesquite, helped the girl struggle into the saddle, and climbed on behind her.

  “Hold on to the saddle horn,” he said, kicking the horse forward with his heels.

  The Appaloosa snorted and moved onto the highway heading due north, its shoes clacking on the asphalt in a four-beat gait. Marcus let the mare go at her pace, not pushing her to go faster than she intended. He held the reins on either side of the girl.

  “Who is it you’re trying to find?” she asked again.

  The horse walked north, fighting against a wind that blew from the west. A thin layer of clouds drifted across the sun, casting a mosaic of shadows across the road ahead.

  Marcus took a deep breath and exhaled. “Somebody who needs killing.”

  CHAPTER 5

  OCTOBER 21, 2042, 8:53 PM

  SCOURGE +10 YEARS

  SOUTH OF BAIRD LAKE, TEXAS

  The fire crackled and popped, embers dancing through the smoke and climbing into the night toward the black sky. The clouds had long since moved on, leaving the stars to shine and strobe as they always had above West Texas. Marcus loved the stars. He often considered the light from those stars as a window to the past, a time before the Scourge. When the light from those ancient stars millions of light years away had begun traveling through space, Earth was a much different place.

  As it traveled through space on its way toward his evolving planet, dinosaurs ruled on the ground and in the sky. Then man came and he ruled, an unstoppable force, until a viral pneumonia killed two-thirds of the population.

  At some point on the light’s journey, Marcus was born and fell in love. He married and fought in war. He came home and became a father. He worked to protect his family and lost everything.

  Marcus settled against his pack, which he’d leaned against a watermelon-sized rock, and folded his arms against his chest. The heat from the fire lapped at his face in waves, providing intermittent breaks from the night chill.

  The girl sat across from him on the opposite side of the flames. She was tearing off pieces of lettuce and shoving them into her mouth. She chewed with her mouth wide open, chomping on the earthy greens. Her face glowed orange from the fire, but her eyes were still so black they killed the light that hit them. Marcus was convinced she hid evil in those eyes—either hers or someone else’s.

  “What’s your name?” Marcus asked over the crackling flames.

  “What’s yours?” the girl countered, a piece of lettuce flying from her mouth.

  “Marcus Battle.”

  “Battle?” asked the girl. “Like war?”

  “Yeah.”

  The girl swallowed another mouthful of lettuce. “That’s a stupid name. It’s like a comic book character or from one of those lame stories my dad used to read on his iPad.”

  Marcus ignored the insult. “You know what an iPad was? And comic books?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Marcus said. “You’re just young, that’s all. What are you? Fifteen?”

  The girl ripped another strip of lettuce and stuffed it in her mouth. “Seventeen. I was in first grade.”

  “When the Scourge happened?”

  “Yep.”

  Marcus reached for the canteen hooked to the side of his pack. “So what’s your name?”

  “Lou.”

  “Lou?”

  “Lou.”

  “That’s a boy’s name.”

  “It’s short for Louise,” she said. “I don’t like Louise.”

  Marcus took a swig of water and wiped his face with the back of his hand. He capped the jug and leaned forward, reaching out and around the flames. She took the offering and guzzled the water. Her gulps sounded like a toddler downing a sippy cup of apple juice.

  “Lou it is, then,” he said. “You can call me Marcus.”

  Lou came up for air, breathing heavily. “I’m sure as heck not calling you Battle.”

  “Was Lou your dad’s name too?”

  The girl’s hardened features softened. Her shoulders slumped and she wiped her nose with the collar of her T-shirt.

  “I called him Dad.”

  A breeze filtered through their campsite, blowing the smoke and embers toward Marcus. He squeezed his eyes against the acrid burn and coughed. The breeze shifted and cleared the air. He knuckled the corners of his eyes. “Can I ask what happened to him?”

  Lou stiffened. “You can ask.”

  Marcus smirked and stood from his seat. “I need to get water. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “I’m good,” said Lou.

  “I’m not asking.” Marcus motioned toward the lake with his head, pulled a plastic bottle from his bag, and Lou grumbled her way from the ground to his side.

  They were camped on the eastern edge of an oval dirt road that looped along the southwestern side of Baird Lake. In the middle of the oval was a grassy field littered with abandoned mobile homes and trailers. There were eight of them. There were also two empty single-story houses. Marcus had checked them when they’d arrived.

  Extending from the eastern edge of the dirt road to the lake was a trio of worn, weedy paths that had likely served as boat ramps at one time. Marcus and Lou walked toward the water. The only light was the waxing quarter moon and its reflection on the water. It was enough, though, to guide them to the lake’s edge.

  Marcus dipped the bottle into the water and felt it glug until it was full. He handed it to Lou and told her to carry it back to the camp. She begrudgingly agreed and they moved back along the path to the fire.

  The lake had, at one time, been surrounded by oil fields and later towering wind turbines that harnessed the raw power of the Texas winds. Now the place was a virtually deserted d
ust bowl where those same winds carried the soil aloft and coated the lake with its minerals. The lake was fed by a natural spring, Baird Springs, which, at the time Scourge began was the only remaining active springs in Callahan County. Marcus made a mental note to someday locate the springs just to see if it was still flowing. That is, if he survived what lay ahead in his quest to find the tattooed men who killed his family and left him to die.

  Returning to the campfire, Lou held up the bottle against the flames and turned it in her hand. “This is gross,” she said of the opaque brownish liquid filling the plastic container. “I can’t drink this.”

  “Hold your horses,” said Marcus. “It’ll be fine.”

  He reached into his pack and pulled out a second large plastic bottle. He set it next to the pack and then removed his first aid kit, the automotive tool kit, and a couple of paper towels. From the first aid kit, he took a straight needle. From the tool kit, he grabbed a pair of pliers.

  He grasped the needle with the pliers and held it at the base of the fire, rolling it over as it heated up; then he used the hot needle to poke several holes in the bottom of the empty plastic bottle.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lou.

  “You’ll see,” said Marcus. He eased back next to his pack and pulled out a baggie filled with activated carbon. Carefully, he poured a quarter of the contents into the bottle.

  “What’s that stuff?”

  “Activated carbon.”

  “Activated carbon?” asked Lou. “Something everyone just has lying around ten years after a plague.”

  “I used to hunt with my kid,” said Marcus. “I had stashes of this stuff for this very reason. You never know when you’re going to need clean water.”

  Marcus took a paper towel and rolled it into a tight cone, folding over the end of the paper towel to close the hole and stuffing it into the dry, carbon-filled bottle. He unhooked the canteen from the side of his pack, withdrew a folded camping pot, and then moved around the fire to sit next to Lou. He placed the pot on the ground in front of her and set the carbon bottle in the middle of it.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Pour the water into the bottle.”

  Lou eyed him for a moment but followed instructions. Slowly, she emptied the dirty lake water into the bottle, clean water draining through the holes in the bottom of the bottle and into the pot. Once the long process was finished, Marcus drained the pot into the canteen. Then he set the closed canteen at the edge of the fire.

  “Got to let it boil a bit,” he said. “Then it’s good to go.”

  “We can drink it?”

  “Yep.”

  Lou was staring blankly into the fire. “Huh.” She blinked and looked over at Marcus. “My dad used to say there are two types of people. Those who are smart and those who think they are.”

  Marcus moved to his bag and repacked his belongings. The two sat quietly for a few minutes, staring at the flames lapping at the embers, as if trying to catch them before they floated skyward.

  Finally, Marcus cleared his throat. “I’ll bite. Which am I?”

  Lou took her hat off, set it on the ground beside her, and scratched her head with both hands. “You’re either one or the other.”

  Marcus zipped the pack closed and chuckled. “And you?”

  “I’m both.”

  “Of course you are,” Marcus said, standing. He tugged at the collar of his shirt and scratched at the healing wound in the area between his neck and shoulder.

  “What happened there?” asked Lola.

  Marcus touched the tender skin with his fingers. “I got shot.”

  “And you didn’t die?”

  “I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question given that I’m alive and we’re having a conversation.”

  Lou pursed her lips.

  “No.” He sighed. “I didn’t die. The bullet went straight through. There was a lot of blood though. Kinda thought I’d been hit in the chest. So did the men who did it.”

  Lou’s eyes widened with an epiphany. “And that’s who we’re—”

  “Both of us need to get some sleep,” Marcus cut in. “We’re heading out early. We’ve got a marathon tomorrow. The horse will help, but I want to make Abilene long before sundown.”

  He picked up the camping pot and scraped it along the ground, shoveling loose dirt and shallow weeds into it. Then he dumped it onto the fire, weakening the flames. Another two pot loads had it out within minutes.

  Marcus checked to make sure he had the two rifles, the Glock, and the knives secured beneath the pack and then laid his head on the bag. He looked up at the stars and listened to the wind whip around the camp. He raised the collar on his denim jacket and folded his arms across his chest to tuck his hands under his pits. It was getting colder without the fire’s ambient heat.

  “My dad told me the story about Marathon,” Lou said softly. “It was a battle between the Greeks and the Persians.”

  Marcus closed his eyes and listened. He inhaled the fading scent of burning wood and smoke.

  “Philippides, a messenger, was sent to Sparta to ask for help when the Persians landed in Marathon,” Lou continued. “When the Greeks won, he ran from the battlefield in Marathon to Athens to deliver the news. He ran so far and so hard that right after he told everybody about the victory, he died.”

  “It’s a fable, you know,” said Marcus.

  “The run or the death?”

  “Both.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “What?”

  “That it’s not real?” she asked, a snip in her tone. “It’s a good story. It’s about a man who gave his life for something bigger. That’s a good story.”

  “Maybe,” Marcus conceded.

  Lou was quiet for a moment; then she chuckled. “I’ve decided.”

  Marcus sighed. “What?”

  “You’re the kind who thinks he’s smart.”

  CHAPTER 6

  OCTOBER 22, 2042, 2:53 PM

  SCOURGE +10 YEARS

  ABILENE, TEXAS

  Abilene wasn’t Abilene anymore. At least it wasn’t the post-Scourge Cartel-run city Marcus remembered the last time he’d moseyed through its wide streets and fire-bombed Bible Hardware. But it wasn’t the city in which he’d spent so much time in the years before the end of the world as he knew it.

  The drought had painted the city in dust and grime. The constant wind whipped it into Marcus’s eyes and into his nose. He reached for the half-empty canteen. He’d given most of the water to Lou and the Appaloosa, figuring they needed it more than him. Now his cracked lips burned and a headache was knocking at the back of his head.

  He uncapped the canteen and took a long pull from it. He let the warm water sit in his mouth, soaking into his dry tongue, relishing it washing down his throat.

  They clopped along east Highway 80, which forked westward as Interstate 20 raced north around the city. The distantly familiar orange and white striped A-frame roof of a Whataburger reminded Marcus they were only a couple of blocks from the center of town.

  Unlike the smaller enclaves through which he’d traveled, Abilene still resembled civilization, as rough as it might be. There were people nervously milling about at the edges of the wide streets. Men and women hurried about, hand in hand, their heads down. Although there was a palpable anxiety that hung low over the streets, there were signs of life. Marcus slowed the horse to a stop and hopped to the street, offering up a hand to help Lou down.

  He looked up to the sky, past the increasingly dense rows of buildings on either side of the wide street. A pair of blackbirds circled high above, gliding on the chilly breeze that whistled through what might have passed as the town’s commercial center.

  Marcus tied the horse to an old newspaper vending machine bolted to the sidewalk above the high concrete curb that ran the length of the boulevard. The coin-operated box was a dusty brown and the blue star in the Reporter-News masthead logo was faded. The racks in the machine itself were empty.

 
Up ahead to the right was the charred exterior of the former home of Bible Hardware. Marcus had shopped at the family-run business for years before the Scourge. He’d also blown it up five years earlier when it served as a local headquarters for the Cartel, a network of criminals who’d put most of Texas under their bloodstained thumb.

  Marcus withdrew the Remington from the scabbard, patted the horse, and walked to the middle of the street and westward a few steps to get a better look at the black streaks that fanned outward from the shattered glass entrance. He held the rifle, balancing its weight in his open right hand as he stared at the building.

  Lou joined Marcus at the road’s center. “Somebody must have been angry to set fire to a place like that,” she said. “It looks like it got bombed.”

  “It did,” Marcus said. “Actually it was grenades.”

  Lou moved around to face Marcus with a furrowed brow. “How do you know?”

  “Because I did it.”

  A smile spread across her face. “I’m impressed. I’ve been past that place I don’t know how many times and I always wondered what happened.”

  Marcus started moving again. “C’mon, I need your help.”

  “Why?” Lou asked. “With what?”

  “You said you’d been here,” said Marcus. “You said there were bad people here. I need you to show me where they hang out, where they live.”

  Marcus wiped his sweating forehead with the back of his left hand and pulled the rifle up to cradle it diagonally across his chest. Lou kept pace, her footsteps dragging along the asphalt twice as fast as Marcus’s longer, slower stride.

  “I’ll need my knives,” she said. “I’m not kidding.”