Survivor (Rewinder Series Book 3)

by Brett Battles

  __________

  WITH THE PILOT’S assistance, Jovan takes us into the air again. He keeps our altitude low so that we blend in with the treetops as we travel up the slope.

  I watch out the window for any pinpricks of light or signs indicating someone is coming our way, but the night remains dark and still.

  It takes only five minutes to reach the summit of the nearest mountain pass. The view from the top is awe inspiring. The lights of Saint Jakup stretch much farther south than I assumed, the city’s vastness reminding me more of Los Angeles than San Diego. Saint Jakup might be even larger than L.A. Contrasting this is the total darkness to the north and east. It makes me wonder how much of this world has been turned uninhabitable.

  If Lidia’s goal was to create a living hell, she might have succeeded.

  The pilot says something to Jovan as we start down the other side, and out of the corner of my eye I see my friend touch the control surface again. I’m so transfixed by the panorama out my window that I barely register either occurrence.

  But there’s no missing when the engine stops and we start to drop.

  Jovan slaps at the control panel but it’s gone completely dark, and within seconds we hit the ground.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I’M LYING ON my back, dirt below me. The sky is blue, the day is warm, and the roar of the crash still echoes in my head. When I try to move, intense spikes of pain shoot through my body in waves that are so crippling, I pass out again.

  The sky. Black now. But there’s light nearby, flickering off a boulder that seems to have magically appeared beside me.

  As I turn my head to search for the source, the pain returns like a sword being shoved up my spine. I close my eyes and grit my way through it. It’s excruciating but not quite as bad as before, and this time I don’t lose consciousness.

  When I part my eyelids again, I see the flames of a small fire dancing several feet away. Someone is sitting on the other side of it. I blink several times to clear my vision but still can’t see who it is.

  The small amount of energy I’ve spent exhausts me, and it’s only moments before I fall back asleep.

  It’s still dark when I wake for a third time. Or maybe it’s dark again.

  No fire now, though. And, because I’m able to look around without immediately passing out, I see there’s no one nearby, either.

  The boulder beside me has several companions that arc around what is apparently our campsite. I say our because someone must have brought me here, but I don’t know who.

  Pain again. A throbbing ache.

  I’m now alert enough to sense it’s coming from my right leg. More specifically, my right thigh. I take a deep breath and push myself up on my hands. This increases the pain, but not enough to send me crashing back to the ground.

  Someone has placed a tarp over me to keep me warm. I fold it back so I can see my leg. My pant leg has been cut away, and a cloth wrapped around my thigh as a bandage. It’s not soaked in blood but it is spotted with it.

  Something must have cut me in the crash. A deep cut, too, because it wouldn’t be this painful otherwise.

  I try to sit all the way up to touch my leg, but this pulls on the muscles in my thigh and causes the pain to return. I lie back down again. I can try again later.

  I just need a little more rest.

  A little more…

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  I WARM MY hands over the campfire as the day dawns.

  The pain in my broken leg kept me awake most of the night. I could have taken one of the pills from the rotor’s first-aid kit to dull the throbbing, but we have so few left. Best to keep them for when I really need them.

  It’s been over a month and a half since the crash.

  What I’ve been told is this:

  The instruction the pilot gave Jovan killed the aircraft’s engine and controls. When the rotor hit the ground, it somersaulted down the mountain nearly a quarter mile before it tumbled into a narrow ravine that ripped it open and stopped its momentum.

  I came out the most damaged, if you don’t count the pilot. I’m not sure what exactly happened to him but he’s dead. Me, I had a concussion and a compound fracture of my right thigh.

  Jovan was cut and bruised but otherwise intact. Of course, he already had a sprained ankle before we took off. Clora sustained a dislocated shoulder that she put back in place herself. But her injury meant that Jovan, damaged ankle or not, had to carry me off the mountain by himself, after they had reset my leg as best they could. Clora told me it took two days to reach the bottom, and an additional five to locate a campsite far enough from the location of the crash to satisfy Jovan.

  I can hear Clora snoring lightly from the other side of the fire where she and Jovan usually sleep. They have grown close since the crash. I wouldn’t call it love, more companionship in the shared experience. A way, I guess, for each of them not to go crazy.

  Jovan’s not with her tonight, though. He left two days ago on a scavenger run across the mountains and should be back in another day or so. It’s not the first time he’s had to do this, and each time he goes, I can’t help but fear he won’t return. I know Clora worries, too. I often catch her standing on the rocks surrounding our camp, looking toward the west.

  At least none of the bounty hunters have found us. The last rotor we saw was three weeks ago and it was way off to the north, along the mountains. Jovan said they were probably checking the crash site again. He told me in the first week someone always seemed to be there. But none have ventured as far east as we have, into the no-man zone between the habitable and the not.

  I try to avoid thinking too much about Dumont and my chaser. It’s not that I want to forget them, but for now I can do nothing to find them, and fixating on them will only frustrate me more.

  What I can’t stop thinking about, though, is how far I am from Ellie and Iffy. Even after I get the chaser back, there will still be much for me to do before my sister and the woman I love exist again. And if I fail to correct just one change Lidia made, who knows what I’ll find when I return to the present.

  I sometimes find myself thinking I’m never going to succeed. That I should give up now and accept this world as my final destination. I’m usually able to fight off these depressive tangents, but it’s becoming harder to do and that’s when I worry most I’ll give in.

  It’s better to focus on the here and now.

  Survive. That’s what I need to concentrate on.

  The future can wait.

  I stoke the flames and put the pot containing what’s left of the coffee from the night before on a flat stone next to the fire. In a while, I’ll heat up our remaining piece of meat and fry up the last of the rice.

  Survive. That’s all I can do.

  For now.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “IT LOOKS ABANDONED,” Clora says as she hands Jovan the binoculars.

  He takes a look before passing the glasses to me.

  The object of interest is a brick building, with roof and windows that look intact.

  It’s half a mile away at the edge of what was a small town before the war. There are more buildings beyond it, and they, too, look undamaged. The fighting apparently never made it to this point.

  Though the sun is barely above the horizon, it’s already hot. It’s been hot for months now, which is one of the reasons we travel at night.

  We’ve been heading south since early May. It’s now nearly the end of August, but the distance we’ve traveled is not nearly as far as you would expect. The problem is my leg. While the bone has knitted back together, it hasn’t done so perfectly, and I now have a hitch in my step that slows me down considerably. In addition to continued leg pain, the aches in other places not used to my new gait force us to stop for extended periods every few days.

  Even then, we have moved considerably southeast of Saint Jakup and are now in the northern half of the Baja—or I guess I should say Shandong—peninsula, the same peninsula on which t
he Trinity research station is located. How much farther we have to go, I don’t know. Weeks, if my leg doesn’t act up too much. Otherwise maybe months.

  For our own safety, we’ve stuck to the forbidden zone that curls around Saint Jakup. I’d begun to wonder if it encompassed the whole interior of the continent, but when I asked Jovan, he said it only extends to the mountains I’m guessing are the Rockies. So not the whole continent, just a big chunk.

  We have come across other old towns, most damaged by warfare, but a few are similar to the one in front of us. Some of them turned out to be still inhabited. Not by many people, thirty or forty at the most. A few are lawbreakers who escaped rather than be caught, but most are individuals who couldn’t take living within the repressive civilization they were born into.

  Most of these communities are happy enough for us to stay the night and to share their food. In exchange, Jovan and Clora tell them news from Saint Jakup they might have missed. A few communities, though, have signs posted a few miles away making it clear outsiders are not welcome. We always cut a wide path around those towns.

  In truth, as much as I like the meals we sometimes receive, I prefer the villages that are deserted. The fewer new people I meet, the better. I already have ties now to Jovan and Clora that will make eliminating this world painful enough.

  Since we’ve been walking all night, we would usually make camp right about now, but with shelter so close, we continue hiking to the building.

  The structure turns out to have been some kind of mechanic’s shop. There are battered workbenches and dilapidated machines and rusted tools scattered around. From the buildup of sand around the structure, I figure no one has been here for a long time.

  After we set up our beds in a second-floor office, Clora and I get to work building a campfire outside the main entrance, while Jovan scavenges the nearby buildings for anything we could use—food, weapons, tools.

  When the fire takes hold, I prep a pot of rice while Clora cuts a few thin strips of meat we’ll warm right before we eat. I’m getting ready to pour water into the coffee pot when I hear footsteps running in our direction.

  Clora is closest to the rifle, so she grabs it and tosses it to me. I use the stock to push myself to my feet and then I limp over to the corner of the building and peek around it.

  Jovan is sprinting toward us. When he sees me, he signals for me to put out the fire.

  I repeat the message to Clora and she starts kicking dirt into the flames. It’s almost out by the time I reach her and join in.

  Jovan races around the corner. “Cover it all up.”

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  But he’s already disappeared into the building.

  As Clora and I finish filling in the pit and covering the stones surrounding it, he comes running back out, holding several pieces of corroded metal shelving that were lying on the workshop floor. He arranges them over the fire pit and kicks some dirt on them, making them look like they’ve been there for a while.

  “We have to hide,” he says, grabbing the rice pot.

  I snatch up the coffee pot while Clora collects the other items we’ve been using to make our meal. “From who?” I ask.

  “Soldiers. They’re in the middle of the village, heading this way.”

  “Give me the rice,” I say. “Go grab our stuff. Clora and I will head back the way we came.”

  Jovan hands the rice pot to me and rushes into the building.

  “Footprints,” Clora says, looking at the ground around us.

  The sandy area around the campfire is covered by evidence of our presence.

  “Take these,” I say, handing her the pots. “Stay on the road until you find someplace we can hide. We’ll be right behind you.”

  After months together, we’ve come to trust each other, so with a nod she’s off and running down the cracked pavement road.

  Jovan exits the building as I finish up brushing away our prints with a dead bush. I then sweep the ground behind us as we cross the short distance to the cracked pavement. There, I toss the bush to the side where it won’t be noticed, and we take off after Clora.

  We hide in a dry gully about a quarter mile away, and use the binoculars to see what’s going on back in town. Jovan was right about the soldiers. Less than ten minutes after we abandoned our campsite, three of them approach the machine shop. They walk right by the pile of discarded metal that covers our fire pit and enter the building.

  Every moment they remain inside, I grow more certain they’ve discovered something we left behind, but when they finally emerge, there’s no indication that happened. I hand the binoculars to Jovan.

  “Dark green uniforms,” I say. “Doesn’t that mean they’re Dux Shim’s troops?”

  Jovan looks for a moment before he says, “Their insignia patch is in the right place, but I can’t make out the details. I think you’re right, though.”

  The soldiers search around the outside of the machine shop for a few more minutes before heading back to the more distant buildings where other soldiers are moving around.

  “Why would Shim’s soldiers be out here? We’re not anywhere near her district.”

  “True, but we could be near one she controls.”

  Over the months of hiking and sitting around campfires, I received an unofficial education in this world from the stories Jovan and Clora told. I know now all the different groups of soldiers I saw in Saint Jakup were once part of the same army. At the end of the great war, each division was given a specific area to oversee. A temporary measure, meant to last during the rebuilding only, but the process dragged on longer than it should have, and the militarized zones became entrenched and institutionalized. Rivalries between them were inevitable, resulting in areas overseen by weaker groups being absorbed by stronger ones. From what I understand, this almost city-state-like condition is not limited to Saint Jakup and can be found in many places around the world, especially those near former combat areas.

  The army Shim controls was assigned the western part of central Saint Jakup, which includes the spit of land I know as Coronado Island. In the decades since the war ended, her predecessors have absorbed many other areas, making them one of the main power factions in the protectorate.

  “Are they here looking for us?” I ask.

  “It’s possible, but after all this time, I doubt it. It’s probably just a squatter sweep.”

  After a while, the soldiers disappear from the village and a large rotor rises into the sky, heading west.

  Though Jovan is likely right about the sweep, we can’t ignore the possibility we were the reason the soldiers came, so going back to the village is out of the question. We make camp under a shallow overhang in the gully that should—for a good part of the day, anyway—shield us from the sun.

  __________

  “THE RESEARCH STATION should be right about here,” Clora says, pointing at the map Jovan found the other day.

  It’s been over a week since our near encounter with Shim’s soldiers. We’ve continued to make our way steadily south, with even more caution than usual.

  The map is a godsend. It’s an old thing, brittle from years in the desert heat and must be handled with care, but it has shown us where we are and, if Clora’s guess is right, where we want to be.

  The spot she’s pointing at is about thirty miles away. At my pace, it’ll take us four nights and part of a fifth to get there, and that’s if I don’t need a day to rest.

  “The border should be right about here,” Jovan says, drawing an imaginary line on the map. “Won’t reach it tonight, but we should get close.”

  We have no idea what the border will be. Another fence? A wall? A minefield? The only thing we do know is it stands between us and our destination.

  Jovan carefully packs the map away and we continue hiking, not stopping again until we see the first signs of the coming day. There are only about two miles between us and whatever divides the habitable from the forbidden. Though we’re not cl
ose enough to see it, we don’t risk making a fire.

  I don’t know about the others, but I suspect they’re having as hard a time sleeping as I do. When I finally go under, I dream of the crash, something I haven’t done in months. The tumbling and the terror make for restless slumber, and I wake more tired than I was when I lay down.

  After a quick meal of cold rabbit meat as the sun sets, we are once more on our way.

  The ache in my leg is worse than usual, but I ignore it and press on. On a different night, the others might notice my difficulties, but I’m sure the only thing they can think about now is the border. That’s true for me.

  We are maybe a mile away when we see it. Like points on a graph, a line of lights dot the desert in front of us, running off to the left and right as far as we can see.

  We slow and keep as low as possible in case lookouts are watching for movement. As the distance decreases, we see the lights aren’t sitting on the ground but mounted on top of a solid wall at least twenty feet high.

  “How are we going to get over that?” Clora whispers.

  Neither Jovan nor I reply.

  We stop about two hundred yards from the wall, just outside the halo of lights. I can see no doors, no windows, no openings of any kind on the structure.

  I scan the top for signs of guards. The lights make it difficult, but there doesn’t appear to be anyone looking over the top, nor do I spot anything that might be a guard hut.

  It makes sense. The likelihood of people approaching through the desert is extremely low. There’s no need to waste the manpower. The fence’s main purpose is probably to remind those on the other side where they shouldn’t go. In fact, I’d be willing to bet the lights are meant only to scare off wild animals.

  Now that I look down the line, I see a handful of dark spots where lamps are not on. If it were only one or two, I’d assume the bulbs are replaced as soon as they die out, but there are more than a dozen dark ones, which probably means repairs are made on a set schedule and some lights could be off for days, maybe even weeks.