Hero: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 7)

by Tom Abrahams

  “You’ll make it,” said Warner.

  “But what if we can’t?”

  “You don’t want that to happen,” said Warner. “So let’s just put that out of our minds.”

  The woman folded her arms across her chest, tucking her hands underneath her armpits. Lowering her head, she stared blankly at the ground in front of her.

  “Any other questions?” asked Warner. “If not, we’d best get a move on. We got to get the rations, the canteens; then we can hit the road.”

  Blessing stepped toward the women, pulling the length of rope from his shoulder and unwinding it. With one end in his hand, he dragged the rest of it in the dirt toward the woman at the left end of the line at the building’s facade. He crouched down and pulled the rope through a link in the chain between the first woman’s legs. Then he drew it through the chain between her child’s legs.

  Andrea raised her hand and didn’t wait for permission to ask her question, stepping forward from the building, commanding Warner’s full attention. “Where are you taking us?”

  Blessing kept working, pulling the rope through Javier’s chain.

  Warner smiled. “Well now,” he said, tipping his cap toward Andrea, “if I told you that, it would spoil the surprise.”

  CHAPTER 5

  APRIL 17, 2054, 10:45 AM

  SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7 MONTHS

  CHATHAM, VIRGINIA

  “Where did you get all of these weapons?” asked Dallas. He stood opposite Marcus at the kitchen counter. His palms were flat on the engineered stone. When he lifted them, the moisture from his hands left an afterimage before evaporating.

  “This isn’t that many weapons,” said Marcus. “It’s not like I used to have. It’ll have to do.”

  Laid out on the counter between them were a half dozen handguns, three rifles, and the short-barreled shotgun with which Dallas was already well acquainted. Dallas’s weapon, which Marcus had returned minutes earlier, was safely in his holster.

  Next to the weapons were a pair of black backpacks. Both of them were worn, strained at the seams, and the synthetic fabric was faded to a color that more closely resembled gray with hints of red than black. There were a couple of jars of honey similar to the one on the kitchen table. A stack of waxy blocks was next to the jars.

  Dallas wagged his fingers at the blocks and jars. “What’s this about?”

  Marcus checked a nine-millimeter magazine and slapped it into a Glock. “It’s from my livestock.”

  “Livestock? You got cattle?”

  Marcus picked up a jar and tested the seal on its top, twisting it clockwise as far as it would go. He repeated the process with the second jar. “No. Cows don’t make honey. At least no cow I’ve ever seen.”

  “Then what?” asked Dallas. “Goats?”

  Marcus laughed. It was a belly laugh, as if Dallas had been the first person in the history of the world to find Marcus’s sense of humor.

  When he’d stopped laughing, Marcus motioned toward the back door. After he’d taken a couple of steps and Dallas hadn’t moved, he stopped and bent at his waist. With his hands he guided his guest to the exit. “Come with me.”

  The screen door creaked on its hinges, mirroring its twin on the front of the house, and slapped shut behind the men while they walked across the dirt of the backyard. Dirt kicked up from Marcus’s boots, swirling around him like a dervish, like the dry earth was forming him into a man at that moment.

  The men stopped when they’d reached a collection of pine boxes. A dull hum vibrated in the air around them.

  “Bees?”

  Marcus nodded. A lone explorer hovered in front of him. He didn’t swat it away or move furiously to avoid it.

  “Why?”

  “Why not?” Marcus said. “They’re incredible. Do you know how many different uses there are for honey? The list is endless. I wish I’d thought more about them back in the day.”

  A rogue sputtered toward Dallas and he ducked. “How’d you get into it?”

  “A trade,” said Marcus. “I had some venison when you could still find whitetail without too much of a problem. A woman a few miles from here knew about it. She was an apiarist. Had more than she needed. We swapped. She taught me the basics. It’s made a huge difference.”

  “Huge difference?”

  Marcus stuffed his hands into his pockets. He looked past the pine boxes toward the clusters of dead pines that stood sentry across his backyard. “Not just the food,” he said, “the soap, the medicinal aspects of it. It’s the keeping busy that I liked. I used to talk to my dead wife. I named my guns.”

  “I know,” said Dallas. “Lou told me about it.”

  Marcus shifted his weight and attention toward Dallas and looked at the ground between their feet. A bee landed on his head. He didn’t react to it. He exhaled loudly. “I’m sure she did. It wasn’t healthy, you know? Watching movies all the time, naming guns after the characters, having full-on, deep-as-the-ocean conversations with my wife was a bad thing.”

  Dallas mimicked Marcus and buried his hands in his pockets.

  “It kept me sane,” Marcus said. “If I was sane, that is. But this, these guys…” Marcus turned toward the hives. The bee on his head zigged into the air and joined a half dozen others that zagged above one of the pine boxes. “They’re living, breathing things. I can talk to them and listen to the collective buzz. It’s like they’re listening. Like they’re talking back. Like that buzz has the answers buried in the transmission.”

  “You chose to be alone,” said Dallas.

  Marcus took his hands from his pockets and pulled back his shoulders. He folded his arms across his chest and lifted his chin. “I didn’t choose it. Being alone chose me, Dallas. You seriously wanna go there? I don’t think you wanna go there.”

  Dallas looked past Marcus toward the hives on the other side of him. He motioned with his chin. “You gonna open ’em up and let me see?”

  Marcus stood there. He was stone.

  Dallas tried again, breaking the uneasy, hum-filled silence. “I’d like to see.”

  “Nah,” said Marcus. “The smoker’s in the barn. So’s my suit. We’d best get going, anyhow.”

  Marcus started back to the house, his boots scraping across the dirt and crunching the fine layer of packed earth. His shoulder bumped Dallas as he passed him. Marcus didn’t apologize.

  “What are you going to do with the bees when we leave?” Dallas called after him. “Won’t they die?”

  Without turning around or stopping, Marcus answered, “Maybe. They’ve managed to beat the odds so far.”

  Marcus wore a pack on his shoulders and held a rifle in each hand by the time Dallas shut the rear door behind him. The blocks of wax and the jars of honey were gone from the counter and from the kitchen table.

  Dallas moved to the kitchen counter and rested his palms on its edge. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “Nope,” said Marcus. “You shouldn’t have. I’ve seen a lot of dead horses since the Scourge. I never saw fit to beat one of them.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Marcus slung one of the rifles and shrugged the pack higher on his back. With his free hand he tightened the strap that ran across his chest. Then he handed the other rifle to Dallas. “You’re forgiven. Let’s get going.”

  Within minutes they were on Business 29, the highway that ran north and south through what was once the town of Chatham. Now it was little more than a testament to abandonment, to the Scourge, the drought, and everything that had conspired to drive people away from it.

  They walked south.

  “It took me a half day to walk here from the train station,” said Dallas. “It’s a good twenty miles.”

  Marcus walked ahead of Dallas, not worrying about whether the man kept pace. He unshouldered the rifle and carried it in both hands. Marcus was wearing a cowboy hat now. It was black, a relic of the Cartel he’d kept as a souvenir.

  “I don’t have any money left for the train,” s
aid Dallas. “I used all of it to get here. Well, most of it. The rest got stolen.”

  “Stolen?”

  “Bandits,” said Dallas. “On the train.”

  A blackbird circled overhead, and Marcus craned his neck to watch it drift on the current. Its broad wings didn’t flap; they hung extended, the feathers at their tips fluttering.

  There weren’t other birds in the sky. No murder of circling crow signaled decay. This was a solitary raven finding its way, searching for purchase somewhere.

  He lowered the hat on his eyes and scratched the healthy scruff he’d allowed to grow on his face and neck. Most of it was gray. He didn’t like that. It was a reminder of how old he’d gotten. But he liked shaving less, and he knew that getting old was better than the alternative.

  “Tell me about this place we’re headed,” said Marcus.

  “Baird?” said Dallas. “Same as it was. We’re living in a different—”

  Marcus frowned. “Not Baird. Valhalla. The magical fairy land where all good parents live happily ever after. Oz. Whatever it is.”

  “Norma knows about it,” said Dallas.

  “The place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How’s that?”

  “She worked with them,” Dallas said.

  “Who?”

  “There’s an underground railroad,” said Dallas. “Not a real train. But—”

  “I know what an underground railroad is,” said Marcus. “They used it in the Civil War times to free slaves. They used it during World War II to smuggle Jews out of wherever the Nazis were. The Ukrainians even had one during the war with Russia in the 2020s.”

  “If we can get to Atlanta, they can get us to the Harbor.”

  Marcus stopped in the middle of the road and waited for Dallas to pull alongside him. “That what it’s called?” he asked. “The Harbor?”

  “I don’t know if that’s the official name,” said Dallas. “But it’s what I’ve heard it called. It’s what Norma called it. She helped smuggle out a bunch of women a couple of years ago.”

  Marcus tipped his hat back on his head and thumped Dallas on the arm with the back of his hand. “Then why am I doing this? If Norma can handle everything, you don’t need me.”

  Dallas shook his head. “Norma can’t handle it. The Pop Guard cut off the railroad south of the wall a year ago, south of Atlanta, really. We have to get to Atlanta.”

  “And from there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dallas. “I know we have to get to Atlanta. And given that Texas is still…Texas, there’s no way we could do it alone.”

  “So we need to take a train, full of bandits, south to the wall,” said Marcus. “Then we have to cross the wall and find our way through tribal territories back to Baird. Once we’re in Baird, we head back north through said territories and cross the wall again. This time though, we’ve got a pregnant woman or a woman with two kids. Once we’re north of the wall, we somehow avoid roaming Pop Guards, coyotes, and other ne’er-do-wells to Atlanta. And in Atlanta we meet up with an underground railroad the Pop Guard knows exists, and ride it, so to speak, to an undisclosed location called the Harbor.”

  Dallas scratched his head with his free hand and shrugged his pack higher onto his shoulders. The look on his face said he was running through the gauntlet Marcus verbalized a moment earlier. He nodded. “That about sums it up.”

  “Okay then,” said Marcus. “I get why you need my help.”

  The men exchanged smiles and walked another few minutes without saying anything to each other. The clop of their boots and the shuffle of their packs filled the space between them.

  “We can’t walk all the way to Texas,” said Dallas. “Well, we could, but it’s not safe.”

  “We’re not walking all the way to Texas. We’ll catch the train in Danville and take it as far south as we can.”

  “They’ve got stops now through Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans,” said Dallas. “But it’s not cheap. Plus, there are bandits.”

  “You said something about that. Even north of the wall?” asked Marcus. “I thought the government took care of that.”

  Dallas shook his head. “Nah. They look the other way. It’s too much to police, I guess. As long as the trains run, it’s like they don’t care if the passengers get robbed. Part of me thinks the government is part of it.”

  “People just let it happen?”

  Dallas shrugged. “What are they gonna do? Money’s not worth what it was. Might as well let ’em take it.”

  “Money’s still money.” Marcus sighed. “Any other options?”

  Dallas shook his head. “Not really. It’ll take too long to get to the wall otherwise.”

  “We’ll take it as far as we can. But I’m not giving anything to bandits.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Marcus started walking again. “It means we’ll kill whoever we have to kill to make sure we get to where we need to go without giving up anything. We’re gonna need money south of the wall, and the bottom line is we gotta get to Lou. Whatever it takes. Right?”

  Marcus could tell Dallas had a question hanging on his lips, but he dared not ask it. He also could tell Dallas didn’t know whether he was being serious or not.

  Truth was, Marcus didn’t know either.

  CHAPTER 6

  APRIL 17, 2054, 11:15 AM

  SCOURGE +21 YEARS, 7 MONTHS

  BAIRD, TEXAS

  Sweat bloomed on Lou’s forehead and around her eyes. She swiped at it and took another look through the binoculars Rudy had handed her moments earlier.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” she said. “This is bad. Very bad.”

  Rudy nodded his agreement. “It’s not good. I haven’t seen them this far south in three or four months.”

  “You think someone tipped them off?”

  “No telling.”

  Lou touched her belly. “I’ve been so careful. I don’t think anybody knows.”

  “Maybe not.”

  Rudy took the binoculars and looked again, adjusting the focus. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes deepened. His mouth drew up into the tight smile of someone squinting.

  Lou looked in the same direction toward the hazy distance. A bead of sweat dripped into one eye, and she blinked away the sting. On the horizon, marching toward them on horseback, was a squad of nine Pop Guard soldiers. They were armed with automatic rifles and rode with purpose.

  Without the binoculars they were warbling specks, indistinguishable as men on horseback. The sun was behind Lou, near its apogee in the cloudless sky. The heat of the day was building, the air still. As she watched the men approaching, it was stifling.

  “They’re coming this way,” said Rudy.

  “No doubt,” said Lou. “And we don’t have much time.”

  There’s not enough time.

  Rudy lowered the binoculars and sighed. They were sitting in a deer stand left over from the days before the drought. The stand wasn’t for deer. It was a perch from which to see oncoming threats.

  Their property was on the eastern edge of TP Lake, which sat south of Interstate 20. Highway 283 was to the west and ran north and south. The Pop Guard hadn’t crossed the highway, as far as they could tell. They were on what used to be Bowen Road near the old FedEx Freight facility.

  “Surprised they aren’t in trucks,” said Lou. “Don’t they usually ride in trucks?”

  Rudy shuffled toward the opening on the side of the stand. The aluminum snap-together frame was still solid, but the steel brackets that held it together were rusting. There were ladders on either side that also served as an A-frame support. His feet hit the rungs and he turned around to face Lou. “I heard they’ve been using horses lately. Element of surprise.”

  “Makes sense,” said Lou. “Except you have to feed and water horses. There isn’t a lot of either.”

  “We manage,” said Rudy.

  “Touché.”

  Lou slid on her bottom to the ladder on the
opposite side. She didn’t roll onto her stomach as had Rudy; she descended the ladder one foot, one rung at a time. With each step lower, she rested her back against the higher rung until her feet hit the dry earth. Her dress stuck to the small of her back. She hated dresses, but her jeans didn’t fit.

  It’s too hot for April. Is it April?

  Rudy was there to offer a hand. She took it and he pulled her from a lean to an upright position. She cradled her belly in both hands and exhaled.

  “You gonna be able to stick to the plan?” he asked.

  Lou smirked. “Asked the old man with the bad hips?”

  “Touché again,” said Rudy. “Norma’s already moved David.”

  Lou nodded and started walking back toward the main cluster of buildings, farther away from the edge of the lake, or where the lake used to be. There was still water there, enough to call it a pond at least, and while it was too deep to cross on foot or horseback, it wasn’t deep enough to keep the algae and murk at bay. Lou glanced across the lake and west.

  Nine of them. All armed. All with horses.

  Anybody approaching from the west had only one easy path to the heart of the property and the cluster of buildings. A road, as much dirt as chipped asphalt, cut around the southern edge of the lake, tracing its straight banks and the lone finger that jutted south. There were railroad tracks that ran north of the lake, but men on horseback wouldn’t take that route. They wouldn’t risk injuring their animals on the large track ballast that formed the bed between sleepers.

  Had the men been smart or done any reconnaissance, they’d have split into two groups. One would have come west; the other would have ridden south from Interstate 20 on County Road 494 east of the property. The county road stopped north of the buildings, but provided a straight shot to the back side.

  Lou hurried, waddling more than running, toward the largest of the four buildings on the property. It was what they called the main house and was where Rudy and Norma lived. It was a typical farmhouse, two stories with a wraparound porch and a crawlspace underneath a pier and beam foundation.

  The three other buildings, which sat east of the main house and were positioned one north of the other, were Lou’s house, a dry storage building where they kept their provisions, and an antenna-equipped barn that doubled as an emergency hideout. There were two horses of their own in that barn.