Clarissa scooped Amber out of her captor’s hands and into her shoulder, scowling as she tried to quiet her child.
Relief gave way to anger as Craig drew up the kidnapper by his lapel. He shoved his pistol against Hector’s head and hotly demanded to know, “Where are Leticia and Belinda?”
Hector frowned and shook his head. Craig repeated in Spanish but got the same results.
Clarissa aimed at Hector’s eye while Amber cried in her ear. “Where are they, you bastard?”
“I no take,” he insisted as he started to weep. “I yust miss my childrayn.” He continued lamenting in Spanish, crying harder with every sentence that followed. From what Craig could understand, the poor man had illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexican border with his wife and four children with the help of a paid coyote, who assured them they would be taken somewhere no one would find them. He since took work in some rich guy’s yard in a town called Lakewood until he had lost his children to the plague. His wife had abandoned him before he was taken by the Denver warlords as slave labor—then as the personal pet of a man named Mercer. Once he finished his story, he collapsed into a fetal ball on the ground and lay there a bawling mess.
Craig didn’t know what to do with the man but pity him. “He didn’t—”
“I heard,” Clarissa said softly, her eyes glistening as she cradled her baby closer to her, “but if he didn’t take them, who did?”
He didn’t dare utter his only idea. He just had to accept this small victory. “Let’s get back.”
“What about him?” she asked with her pistol at the ready.
Craig watched Hector weep in his little ball for a long moment, then hoisted the poor man onto his shoulders, figuring, “Better to have him where we can see him until Didi can make that call.”
“If she comes back.”
He didn’t want to think that way, but he couldn’t stop worrying about it the whole way back to the bus.
*****
Didi raced through the slush at full speed, which caused her to trip several times. All she could do was get back up and keep moving. She couldn’t wait for Isaac to grab all the truck parts, load the pickup he told her about, and drive her back to the Ford; no, she begged Lavon to direct her back so she could make sure she didn’t screw up. Even hearing she had no blood on her face didn’t convince her. She needed to know, and she prayed hard.
When she reached the truck, she saw nothing moving. No signs of a struggle, no blood, no broken windows …
Please, God … “Cody?” she called out. Please!
“Didi?” came from the truck, and relief dulled the agony in her brain.
She rushed for the truck and yanked the back door open to find the prone Cody and Gilda smiling up at her from the seat and floor, respectively. She reached in and hugged Cody, which made him grunt in the usual way when she overdid her embrace. She released him. “I was worried I ate you.”
“I thought you would … after you broke that door down,” he said with a winded chuckle. “All I could do was … play ostrich.”
“Now can we get out of here?” Gilda asked as she slid past Didi and stretched her limbs. “I’m freezing my tuchus off, here.”
“We’ll get back as soon as—”
The grinding hum of a truck engine finished her statement for her, and prompted Gilda to rush back into the Ford.
Didi drew two of her pistols and stood before the truck like a shield, just in case.
Weak headlights appeared in the white blur and slowly grew in her presence before halting, then the engine cut off. Its doors opened.
“It’s just us,” Rachelle assured her.
Didi smiled and holstered her guns.
“Bitch, I thought you was gonna shoot us,” Isaac said.
“Call me bitch again and I might,” she half-jested. “You got everything?”
“We’ll find out in a minute. Pop the hood,” he said louder, which she assumed was for the occupants of the Ford.
Metal clunked, then Isaac opened the hood.
He took off her backpack and pulled some things out. “I’m-a replace the fuses and see if that works. The battery should be fine, but, if it ain’t, I’ll rig up another one.”
“Then what?” Lavon asked.
“Then we get back to the bus and get the hell out of here,” Didi said.
“Hey, are we gonna isolate her?” Isaac asked.
“Isolate?” Lavon parroted nervously. “What does that mean?”
The big man stopped working and faced her. “We got a three-day isolation period to make sure you’re safe and all.”
“We used to lock people up in a theater,” Rachelle elaborated, “but we don’t have—”
Lavon backed away, wide-eyed in panic. “Uh-uh. No way I’m getting locked up. Not ever!”
“Whoa, baby,” Isaac said with a smile. “We ain’t got a way to lock—”
“Don’t call me baby,” she ordered as she drew a pistol and aimed it at each of them in turn.
He raised his hands and backed away. “A’ight! Chill!”
“Relax, Lavon,” Didi said. “We won’t hurt you if you don’t hurt us.”
Lavon aimed at Didi’s head. “Don’t think I won’t put you down.”
Didi stopped but remained calm. “We isolate all new people for three days to make sure they’re not nuts or infected.”
“You’re infected,” Lavon snapped, briefly jerking her pistol. “Doesn’t that make you a hypocrite?”
“Whatever else I am, I defend my camp. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“I don’t care what you are,” she screamed, her gun jerking. “You’re not locking me up again.”
“Corporal—”
“Again?” Isaac uttered, which drew Lavon’s aim back to him. He threw his hands up higher.
“Stay back,” she shouted, her pistol quivering as much as her lip.
“No one’s here to judge you or take you in,” Didi said, which garnered the fretful Marine’s aim again. “There’s no one to take you to, anyway. We’re all in the same boat, here.”
“You don’t know anything about me,” Lavon snapped.
“I know you’re a troop who takes her duty seriously.” Didi nodded back toward the truck. “I got one just like that. You just want to do the right thing.”
“What’s right anymore?” Lavon cried, her lower lip quivering over her gun. “I did what I was told. I followed my orders. I obeyed the law. It didn’t matter. They still took her from me.”
“Her?” Rachelle muttered.
Tears fell from the Marine’s eyes. “My unit couldn’t do a damn thing. The law let him take her.” She sniffled, then cried out, “You call that right?”
No one responded or moved. The others just looked piteously on the Marine, who held her head and sobbed, her pistol clasped in her adjoined hands lamely.
“What happened?” Didi softly asked.
Lavon wiped away her tears and sniffled. “My ex-boyfriend Ralph was the city comptroller. I really liked him … until I learned he had been gambling with municipal funds, taking bribes from drug dealers. I tried to turn him in, but my testimony wasn’t enough. Then he found out I was pregnant,” she said as a fresh tear scarred her cheek. “I tried to keep it from him and raise her myself, but he found out and sued me for full custody. JAG couldn’t stop or prosecute him. Civilian authorities couldn’t do anything without proof. I was out of options.”
“So you took her,” Rachelle said.
Lavon nodded sadly. “What else was I supposed to do? Let that corrupt bastard raise her?”
Rachelle regarded her sadly. So did Didi.
The Marine sniffled again. “I don’t even know if she survived the plague. I was being shipped to Miramar when they closed the post. The M.P.s reassigned us to different guard duties.”
“By Captain Washington?” Cody asked from the truck.
Lavon nodded to him and wiped away more tears.
Didi slowly approached her, sof
tly asking, “What was her name?”
Lavon sniffled. “Ayla. She’ll be five in a week. I stood my post all this time in the hopes that one day I would—”
Gunfire sparked all around the asphalt and forced everyone to scramble for their cover. Lavon shot back in odd directions while running into the building.
Didi joined Rachelle behind one of the many rectangular cargo containers, looking frantically over her friend with no concern to whether or not any damage had been done to her own body.
“Where’s it comin’ from?” Isaac shouted from behind a car.
The shooting stopped and a voice with a thick British accent echoed, “Don’t move, don’t shoot, and you don’t die. All we want is the Death Doll.”
Rachelle locked eyes with Didi, who now had a decision to make.
*****
“We got her back, but we can’t just leave him or let him take another kid. He needs help,” Mister Flannel told the group huddled outside between the bus and the tanker while the baker taped the head case from Denver to the seat behind the priss. The lamebrain hadn’t stopped muttering in Spanish the whole time.
Cynthia would’ve rolled her eyes at Craig’s mercy if she dared to draw any attention to herself. With two kids still missing, the peons looked like they wanted blood, and she feared that hers would do out of sheer convenience.
“What if he’s faking it?” the luchador shouted.
Mister Flannel threw his hand at the doorway. “Didn’t you see him? He’s a wreck.”
“He’s still dangerous,” Chuck snapped, “and obviously no good to us. I say we—”
“We what? Kill him? We don’t do that.”
“Why not?” the oaf they called Ron shouted. “No one else out here seems to care.”
“We’re not them,” the baker chimed in. “If we start, we won’t stop, and we’ve got a long and dangerous trip ahead of us as it is without making—”
“Which’ll go nowhere if we don’t find our missing kids,” Miss America yelled, which got loud backing by the others. “For all we know, any one of these newbies is responsible.”
“Whoa, wait a minute,” the skinny twin bellowed. “We didn’t do anything.”
“Except annoy us with your bickering, and your brother hasn’t stopped trying to hook up since he got here. Maybe he’s—”
Alan got in Clarissa’s face. “Hey, my brother may be a pervert, but he’s no pedophile.”
“I’m not taking any chances with my baby; not with any of these kids.”
“Except that little bitch!” Chucky-boy again pointed out Cynthia, whose fingers twitched with an intense desire to rip out his eyes. “She doesn’t belong with us.”
The rest of the peons loudly agreed, leaving Cynthia both pissed and scared.
“Didi and Cody say she stays,” Chief Catatonia insisted, “so she stays.”
The wrestler got in Bob’s face, which would’ve been funny if they weren’t arguing Cynthia’s fate. “Well, they’re not here now, and we don’t need them to tell us who’s a threat.”
Hashim squeezed in between the two. “Take it easy, Chuck. Don’t forget who saved you.”
“Hey, I’ll give Didi her props for what she’s done for us, but we don’t need her to make this call. We need to get rid of the newbies, and I don’t care how we do it.”
The others agreed with the luchador, some with fists in the air like they were about to riot. Cynthia flushed with fear, especially when Ron pantomimed shooting her with his hand. The twins looked scared. The Pakistani technophile kept typing like none of this applied to him.
“Come on, people,” Craig shouted over the uproar. “Didi and Cody make these calls for a reason. We need to wait for—”
“We haven’t heard from them in hours,” Chuck yelled. “We don’t know if they’re still alive.”
“It’s not their fault they were near an E.M.P.,” Hashim scolded them, his face wrinkled with more betrayal than age. “For all we know, they could be on their way back.”
“Unless these Mountain Men got them,” Miss America countered.
“Who?” Chuck asked while the idiots on the Panel anxiously glanced at each other.
“Something they heard about in Denver. They’ve been whispering about it this whole time; people who steal children.”
“We have no proof it’s true,” Bob said.
“When were you going to tell the rest of us about this?” Alan shouted.
“You shut the hell up,” Chuck roared as the others erupted into a shouting fit at its elders.
The soccer mom tried to argue with the angry mob, but that dickhead Ron threatened her triplets. She backed down without another word.
Hashim and Bob tried to settle them all down, but no one listened. The so-called Panel looked like they might be in the same boat as Cynthia.
A sudden gun blast halted the tantrum, and all eyes fell to the back of the bus.
Jerri walked off the bus and faced the entire crowd with two sawed-off shotguns aimed right at each of Ron’s useless heads. “If you ever threaten my kids again, I will neuter you. Capíche?”
The stocky asshole recoiled, his jaw hanging open.
“The Panel has heard your arguments,” Jerri said loudly for the crowd without looking away from Ron. “Now, we vote. Yay to leave them, neigh to—”
The crowd shouted a big yay before she could finish talking.
She regarded each of those assholes in turn, her hard green eyes morose, disappointed, and resolute all at once.
A chill ran down Cynthia’s spine worse than the cold blowing in from the doorway.
Jerri nodded sadly and lowered her guns. “Motion passed. Cynthia, Hector, Aaron, Alan, Nick … for the good of the community, you are all banished.”
The camp erupted in cheers while the Panel traded hesitant looks. Cynthia’s back and forehead suddenly poured sweat.
“I wish you luck wherever you go,” Jerri continued when the whooping died down enough, “but it won’t be with us or with any of our provisions. If we see you, we will assume you’re hostile and defend ourselves any way we have to.”
After a long, tense silence, Hashim boarded the bus. He placed his pistol barrel against Cynthia’s head and cut her bonds with a blade in his other hand. “Off,” he ordered.
She glared up at him as she rubbed her wrists, but he wasn’t who she was really mad at. Jumping him for his gun would only get her killed. With no play, she stepped off the bus.
The head case soon followed, not even looking like he understood what just happened.
The Asshole Twins begged to stay, but the mob shoved them away amid all the jeering.
The Arab whined about getting the rest of his stuff back while packing his laptop into his black backpack, his entitled demands falling on deaf ears.
Cynthia headed for the highway, finally free of the bitchy weaklings yet feeling no safer in this strange region. Now what?
CHAPTER 18
THE MOUNTAIN MEN
Whoever was out there was smart enough to save ammo, but no other tells gave Didi any idea of the numbers she faced. She couldn’t see far enough to distinguish anything in the snowy blur, but she had another set of eyes. “Do you see anything?” she whispered.
Rachelle briefly peeked around the containers. “Nothing. How many you think they have?”
Didi shrugged. “If we’re surrounded, we’d have seen them by now.”
Rachelle looked in other directions.
“No?” the British stranger yelled from well beyond the container. “Fine.”
The gunfire resumed, each shot off the container echoing loudly in Didi’s ears.
Rachelle aimed out and popped off a random shot.
Didi pulled her pupil back just before the container lit up where the girl’s head was. “Wait until you can see something.”
“Wait?” Rachelle hissed. “We can’t just sit here and wait. We’ve got to do something.”
Didi saw only one thing she could
do, and she really hated the idea. “Alright, stop,” she shouted, drawing a bewildered look from her pupil. “I’m coming out.”
“No,” Rachelle said.
Didi patted her friend’s shoulder and slowly rounded the corner with her hands up. “I’m here.”
“Just keep walkin’, love,” the mystery man said.
So she did, keeping her pace slow to give herself a chance to spot the slightest hint of movement. Alas, nothing. Figuring out what they wanted wasn’t too hard, seeing as how only the Gamesman would know her by her current moniker in this area. The question was whether this agent’s orders were vengeance or acquisition. Her still being able to walk told her the latter.
She passed a space between a shack and a long building when she heard, “Turn left.” As soon as she complied, seven dark blobs rushed at her, slowly taking the form of jexes as they closed in with their guns in her face.
“Are you here to kill me?” she asked as two jexes disarmed her.
One of the others stepped up to her with the kind of grin that expected a blowjob, looking her up and down before touching her mouth. The urge to bite him shot straight through her, which took all of her discipline not to obey. “Not as long as no one shoots at us,” the dark Brit said with a macho grin, “though I kinda wish you’d resist a li’l, Baby Dahl.”
The mention of her stage name both reviled her and gave her hope. She had to milk it. “I seem to have quite a fan base in this area. What’s your name?”
“I’m Joe Gallahue,” he said with a gravelly voice, “and I’m takin’ you back to the Gamesman … as soon as I feel ready to leave. Anythin’ else you’d like to know?”
“What might delay our departure?” she asked with a flirty tone, hoping if nothing else to buy her friends some time to get the drop on these horny boys.
Joe looked her up and down again with a growing smile, but he paused at her chest. “You must have those wrapped down tight,” he said while the barrel of his gun lingered on her chest. “That help you in a fight?”
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