Rising: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 4) Page 7

He laid his head back against the concrete floor. Clamping his jaw tightly, he puffed his cheeks while breathing slowly in and out through his nose in expectation of the greater pain to come. As the rush of the gunfight dissipated, the fire at the wound intensified.

  “Okay,” Lou said. “Here goes.”

  Marcus held his breath and felt his flesh tear; a searing rush of punishment exploded and then subsided. There was pressure at the wound, the sound of plastic tearing, and then Lou’s mumble as she affixed a bandage to his side. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he licked beads of it from the scruff above his upper lip.

  “That’s all I can do for now,” said Lou. “I don’t have time for stitches.”

  Marcus slid onto his elbows. There was a wide flesh-colored patch beneath his ribs and to the left of his navel. Lou was stuffing the first aid kit back into the pack at his feet. She plucked the canteen from its side, uncapped it, and handed it to Marcus, along with two packages of ibuprofen.

  “Drink up,” she said. “I think there’s a couple more headed this way. You’ve got to get up and act like a man.”

  Marcus gulped a swallow of the warm water. “How wide is it?” he asked and took another healthy swig, tasting the sweetness of the minerals.

  Lou held up her fingers, indicating the size of the wound. “It’s not wide, but it’s two inches long. You’re gonna need to stitch it later. You know, once we kill Rasgado.”

  Lou adjusted the Astros ball cap on her head, swinging the brim around to the back. She wiped her hair from her face with both hands, tucking the long strands behind her ears. Her dark eyes almost glowed against the dark color of her skin.

  Marcus took another drink and recapped the canteen. Lou grabbed the Remington, stood, and slipped the barrel through the wall between two jagged edges of a ripped joint.

  She leaned forward at her waist, her shoulders out in front of her feet, and looked into the scope. She moved her shoulders as if tracking her target, and then the weapon kicked with a bang into her shoulder. Although it knocked her back an inch, she held the weapon level. She hurriedly worked the bolt and leaned in again. Another shot blasted. Then another.

  Lou stepped back, pulling the barrel back through the opening. “Three bullets that time. Two men down. I think we need to get to that main house pretty quick though. Rasgado’s not coming out, I wouldn’t think. From my experience, the bad men always hide. They let the grunts do their dirty work.”

  Marcus was on his feet. He was light-headed, but the sweat was drying on his neck and back. “Seventeen?” he asked. He pulled on his pack and leaned on the Springfield.

  Lou was reloading the Remington. “Seventeen what?”

  “Years old,” said Marcus. “You’re only seventeen. You don’t act that young.”

  “My dad used to say everybody ages in dog years nowadays,” she said. “By that count I’d be one hundred and nineteen years old. You’d be…Methuselah.”

  Marcus chuckled and moved slowly toward an opening in the side of the building. He was building up his momentum, each step a little easier than the one before it.

  “You know about Methuselah?” he asked.

  “My dad used to tell me stories at night.”

  Lou beat him to the opening and stepped out into the grass. She slung the Remington across her back, its strap running diagonally from one shoulder to the opposite hip, and withdrew her knives, holding both of them in her left hand.

  It was virtually dark now. Only a purple and orange halo glowed against the horizon to their right.

  Crouched low, the two of them crossed the parking lot, hugging its edges. There were bloodied bodies and weapons scattered on the asphalt. The wide lot narrowed to a driveway that squeezed between a building to their right and a pair of swimming pools to their left. One was circular, the other was rectangular, and both were empty.

  The building on the right looked like it had once been the clubhouse and was now maybe a guardhouse or storage room. Three of the guards were dead on the ground in front of it.

  Marcus and Lou worked their way past the driveway to a second wider parking lot. At the back of that lot was the compound where Marcus believed they’d find Emilio Rasgado.

  As they drew closer, what they’d thought was a complex of buildings appeared to be one large structure. It was mostly clay red brick with a healthy band of Texas limestone wrapping its base from one end to the other. At the center of the large building were two rows of rectangular brick columns that led to the main entrance.

  To its left was a curved wall with three large six-panel glass windows. Unlike most of the buildings Marcus had seen over the past decade, all of the windows were intact. Dim light flickered from the inside. There was movement that intermittently obscured the glow.

  Marcus and Lou stayed low, hiding themselves behind the thick trunk of a dead ornamental tree on an island in the center of the parking lot. Marcus drew the Glock from its holster and checked the magazine before palming it back into the grip.

  Lou pointed at the building with her knives. “You know this is stupid, right?” she said. “Busting in there without knowing what we’ll find.”

  Marcus pulled back the Glock's slide to confirm there was a round in the chamber. “You don’t have to go.”

  Lou sighed. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You have a death wish.”

  Marcus tightened his grip on the Glock and adjusted the Springfield’s strap across his chest. Sweat bloomed on his brow and he clenched his jaw. He glanced at the bay window and back at Lou. She was probably right. He didn’t have much of a plan other than employing violent abandon. He wasn’t being tactical or using what he’d learned in the military.

  He wasn’t being stupid though. He wasn’t even being careless. Marcus knew, as he hid with a teenaged smart-ass behind a decaying tree in the parking lot of a defunct, overgrown golf course, his sole purpose was to exact revenge on those who’d wronged him. If it meant he died in trying to dole out his punishment, so be it.

  It was skewed logic, but Marcus was skewed. His warped sense of reality had long strayed from anything the pre-Scourge Marcus recognized, let alone justified.

  He was a shell of his former self. He’d twice lost his family. He’d helped kill Rufus Buck, the man whose life he’d risked his own to save so many years before. He’d spent half of the last decade alone and wandering the dark corners of his own mind. He’d named his weapons and had talked to ghosts. He was borderline psychotic and a young girl was calling him out.

  Marcus stood and leaned against the tree, hitching from the instant throb that webbed from his newest injury. He blew out a heavy breath that carried with it the stress of the moment and he smiled at Lou.

  “What would your dad say about me having nothing to lose, running in there with my guns blazing? What would he say about me killing a man who took my wife and children?”

  Lou crept around the side of the tree, using the trunk to stand up. She nodded. “He’d say, ‘What are you waiting for?’”

  Marcus winked at Lou and marched with purpose toward the bay window to the right of the main entrance. Lou was a step behind and to his right.

  “Your left!” Lou shouted.

  Marcus whipped around in time to see two men emerging from between the columns. They were no more than twenty feet from him, but before they could take aim with their cumbersome rifles, Marcus had powered multiple shots into both of them. He stopped in front of the bay windows and looked to his right.

  “Watch it,” he said to Lou and leveled the Glock at the glass. Two more shots and the window exploded.

  Marcus put his hand on Lou’s back and urged her ahead of him at the open windows, keeping his eyes on the interior, searching for threats. Together they avoided the remnant shards of glass and climbed into the building. The odor hit them immediately.

  Lou wrinkled her nose. “What is that?” she whispered.

  “Weed.”

&nb
sp; “Weeds?”

  “No,” said Marcus. “Pot. Marijuana.”

  The flickering candlelight wasn’t coming from the large dining room they’d just entered. It was from a hallway to their left and reflected in a large mirror behind a bar. The shelves on either side of the mirror were empty. The few tables left in the room were working stations for a drug operation.

  Despite the drought and apparent lack of widespread power, Rasgado appeared to be managing a healthy marijuana business. There were scales on one table, mounds of dried cannabis leaves on another, and mortars and pestles on a third. The work was clearly unfinished. He and Lou must have interrupted the men.

  Marcus passed the tables and spun left, both of his hands on the Glock’s grip as he turned toward the wide hallway that led from the dining room/drug den to the main lobby. Facing the entrance and against the wall was a long, narrow table that held a collection of candles.

  “Which way are we going?” asked Lou, carrying one knife in each hand.

  Marcus motioned toward the candlelight and moved cautiously toward the lobby. Once there, he could see the main entry doors were open. A body lay on the ground not far from the building. Moving through the lobby, he felt the warmth of the candles on his right side. Past the flickering light, there was another large room and a hallway leading to the right. The room appeared empty.

  Marcus turned into the hallway, leaving the flickering light behind him and moving deeper into the darkness. He slowed his pace, inching forward while his eyes adjusted to the dimness of the room.

  Lou was behind him and to his right. She was breathing heavily through her mouth and kept bumping into his pack. They were on carpet. Other than Lou’s respiration, the pair moved in muted silence.

  Once his eyes adapted to the lack of light, the gray outline of closed doors on either side of the hallway materialized. He kept his focus on the gap between the bottoms of the doors and the carpet. There was nothing of interest until they reached a T-intersection with a hallway that ran parallel to the front lobby, stretching from one end of the building to the other.

  Marcus looked to his left. Darkness. He looked to the right and saw something. About twenty feet ahead, on the right side of the hallway, there was a dim yellow glow coming from beneath a closed door. He held a finger up to his lips then pointed at the light. Lou nodded. Ignoring the aching throb in his leg and the jabbing burn at his ribs, Marcus adjusted his grip on the Glock and slowly crept toward the narrow, horizontal beam of light.

  He stepped past the door and pressed himself against the wall as much as he could with a pack and rifle on his back. He put the Glock in his left hand and extended his right toward the handle on the opposite side of the door. Lou stood directly in front of the door, knives at the ready.

  When Marcus was about to turn the handle, the percussive crash of another door flying from its hinges came from behind Lou, throwing her body forward and slamming her awkwardly into Marcus’s arm. Before he could process what had happened, a figure emerged from the opening across from him. In the dark, Marcus couldn’t make out who the man was, but he was tall and he was armed.

  Lou moaned softly on the ground. The man across the hall roared with anger and fired a shot point-blank at Marcus, trimming his ear and drilling a hole into the drywall next to his head. A second shot grazed his neck.

  Marcus instinctively slid to one side, flinching from the shot, and returned fire with the Glock. The deafening blast of semiautomatic gunfire rang in his ears as he pulled the trigger again and again.

  The dark figure jerked and convulsed against the repeated hits. He dropped his weapon and it rebounded at Marcus’s feet. The combatant sank to his knees, sliding back against the open doorjamb. He was wheezing, his breaths shallow and full of blood. Marcus had heard the sound before. The man would be dead within a minute.

  Ignoring the dying man, Marcus reached over for Lou. She shrugged him off, insisting she was fine. She picked up her knives and used the wall to balance herself as she stood. Marcus then opened the door next to him. Candlelight flooded the section of hallway where they stood.

  The man across from them was already gray. Blood leaked from his mouth and ears. His torso was riddled and soaked. His gloved hands were limp at his sides, his long, angular face decorated with a long scar.

  Marcus took a big step across the hall and squatted in front of Emilio Rasgado so the man could see him. He grabbed Rasgado’s jaw and pulled the dying man’s eyes to his.

  “I’m Marcus Battle,” he said. “You killed my family east of Rising Star. You thought I was dying and you said I wouldn’t even make it to lunch.”

  Rasgado’s eyes fluttered and Marcus slapped him across the face. He reached around the man’s neck and gripped it, pulling Rasgado’s face closer to his, and hissed, “I made it.”

  Rasgado coughed, splattering blood across Battle’s face. The dying man smiled. “Your woman,” he gurgled. “I remember. She was…she was…” His muscles tensed; then his body went limp. His head fell to one side, resting on Marcus’s forearm.

  Marcus let go of Rasgado’s neck and shoved the dead man to one side. He took a deep breath and stood, his injured leg screaming with pain.

  “You’re bleeding again,” Lou said. She was standing against the wall.

  Marcus reached for his ribs.

  “Not there,” she said. “Your neck and the side of your head.”

  Marcus touched his ear. His fingers came away bloodied. He wiped it on his shirt and touched the wound on his neck. It was superficial.

  “I’m fine,” he said. “Flesh wounds.”

  “You’re not fine.”

  Marcus stuffed the Glock into his holster. “Let’s go. We need to find a place to crash before we head south to San Angelo.”

  CHAPTER 8

  OCTOBER 23, 2042, 7:31 AM

  SCOURGE +10 YEARS

  SOUTH ABILENE, TEXAS

  A bird chirping woke Marcus from his restless night’s sleep. He was flat on his back in a bunker at the southeastern edge of the Abilene Country Club, and when he tried to sit up, his inability to do it reminded him of the fresh sutures at his ribs.

  He’d done them himself before passing out from exhaustion. Lou was still asleep, her jaw slack as she breathed in and out through her mouth, using the pack as a pillow.

  The horses had been tied to a light pole at the tennis courts nearby the night before. Marcus rolled onto his side. They were still there, both grazing on the brittle grass and weeds that surrounded them.

  Marcus slowly raised himself onto one knee and then to his feet. He puffed his chest to arch his back and work the stiffness from it. There wasn’t a part of his body that didn’t hurt. He rubbed his shoulders where the pack wore on them, touched his neck and the bandage he’d slapped on it.

  He took a couple of steps up the slope of the bunker and onto the dewy grass that crept along the dirt in search of sunlight and water. He found the water twenty yards south, a small pond that miraculously wasn’t dry. Marcus fetched the filtering bottles and headed toward the pond’s edge. His healing leg was disagreeable in the morning chill, but he forced it along to the water and back.

  By the time he’d filtered a canteen full, Lou was awake. After adjusting her clothes and retying her shoes, she opened up the pack and pulled out a couple of bags of potato chips. She tossed one at Marcus and pulled open one for herself.

  “Where’d you get these?” he asked.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Thank you.”

  She popped a chip in her mouth and crunched on it. “I got a bunch of stuff,” she said. “After you fell asleep, I snuck back into the building. They had boxes of old snack foods and cereals. I took some pot too. You never know when we could trade it.”

  Marcus ripped open the bag and sniffed the contents. It smelled like vinegar-flavored potato chips. He plucked one from the bag and placed it on his tongue, working it between his teeth and chewing it.

  “Not the best,” she
said. “But potato chips don’t go bad. Neither does dry cereal if it’s sealed. It just gets really stale.”

  Marcus pulled a couple more salty chips from the bag. “I thought this stuff could only last a few months,” he said. “Maybe the vinegar helped preserve them.”

  Lou shrugged. “Or all of the chemicals they put in them. Could be either. Or both.”

  Marcus looked at the bag. “The expiration date was January 2034. We’re going to get sick.”

  “If we survived the Scourge, potato chips aren’t going to kill us.”

  Marcus chuckled. “We need to hit the road.”

  The two of them finished the chips, packed up the horses, and headed south. Hanging from the side of the paint was a short rope looped through a pair of AR-15s. Marcus had added a half-dozen loaded magazines to his pack, which was now almost too heavy to carry. But leaving all of the weapons and extra ammunition would have been a fool’s move.

  The sunrise was partially obscured by a thin haze of clouds that tracked slowly across the sky. Lou kept her paint even with Marcus’s Appaloosa. They rode south on 277 for nearly an hour and barely spoke. It was getting colder. Marcus pulled his denim collar up around his neck, being careful not to rub it against his newest wound. The clouds were thickening.

  “So we were talking about the Scourge,” said Lou.

  Marcus unhooked the canteen and handed it over to her. “Were we?”

  Lou rode easy in the saddle, her body loose and swaying with the movement of the animal. She looped the reins around the saddle horn while she uncapped the container and took a drink. She screwed it closed and handed it back to Marcus.

  “What happened to you?” she asked.

  “When?”

  “After the Scourge. You’re on this mission or whatever it is, like you lost your family yesterday. So I’m guessing everybody survived the pneumonia?”

  Marcus ran his thumbs along the reins. He sucked in a deep breath to give him more time to think about how to answer her. There was no easy explanation, no one sentence that could ward off the barrage of questions that were sure to come. He held his breath for an extra beat and then let it out.