The Day After Never (Book 1): Blood Honor

by Russell Blake

  “Too many to take on.”

  “We have the element of surprise. We could ambush them and neutralize them all before they knew what hit them,” Carl said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. All you need are a few to escape the first salvo and take cover behind those rocks, and then we’re at a stalemate – they could hold out for hours, and the numbers aren’t in our favor. Especially if there are more out there.”

  Alan shook his head. “If we each take four or five, we could do it.”

  Lucas regarded the younger man. “You been in many firefights?”

  A flush of color rose in Alan’s cheeks. “I’m just saying we could take them.”

  “It’s rarely like what you think,” Lucas advised. “A smart man avoids confrontation, doesn’t look for it. Besides, the more shooting, the more likely we draw other unfriendlies. I’d rather not chance it.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” Carl asked.

  “We need a diversion.”

  “With no shooting? How do you see that working?”

  Lucas thought for a moment. “You ever fired a crossbow?”

  Carl nodded. “Sure. For hunting. Half the town uses the same three bows.”

  “If we could get right on top of them, we could hit one with a bolt, and that would draw the rest of them after us.”

  Carl nodded slowly. “And then what?”

  “We lead them on a chase, get them out of the area. Look for, and hopefully find, the girl – and then rendezvous at a prearranged point later.”

  “I take it you’ve got a crossbow?”

  “In my saddlebag. I use it in the field for game.”

  “Alan and I will lead them away. You hunt for the girl,” Carl said.

  “We need more of a plan than that,” Lucas said.

  Carl studied Lucas’s face. “How well you know this area?”

  “Well enough.”

  “Where would you lead them to lose them?”

  “There’s a bunch of ravines a mile or so north. What I’d do is have Alan wait there for you to lead them to him, and then pick them off as they ride by. They won’t be able to take cover easily on horseback. Your rifles auto or single-shot?”

  “Auto,” Alan said.

  “Got plenty of ammo?”

  “Enough.”

  “They’ll have a hell of a time finding their way back up out of the gulch there, so you’ll have a good head start on them. Make sure you go slow enough so you don’t lose them,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t want to get back shot.”

  Lucas nodded. “Let’s go pick a spot.”

  An hour later they were back at the trees, talking in low tones. Alan shook hands with Lucas and Carl, and rode off. Carl accompanied Lucas to the rise, and then Lucas continued along the crest, out of sight of the party below. Carl would shoot one or two of the Raiders with the crossbow and then leave a dust trail for them to chase. Hopefully, seeing their companions fall, they would all take off after him, leaving the gully for Lucas to search.

  It was far from a perfect plan, but few ever were. Both Carl and Alan knew that they had the more dangerous part of the job, but neither complained, preferring to focus on their mission. Lucas had warned them that when it all happened, it would go faster than they expected, so to be prepared and calm. Now it was out of his hands.

  He peeked over the crest and eyed the Raiders. They were loud and boisterous, untroubled by their surroundings, at the top of the food chain out here in their element. Nobody would be stupid enough to attack an armed party of their ilk, so they had no reason to fear a threat.

  That was about to change.

  Chapter 16

  The Raiders were chortling as they amused themselves playing soccer with one of the corpses’ skulls. The men were disappointed that most of the weapons were gone, but there was sufficient booty to keep them happy, and after packing up later they would go in search of greener pastures. After the attack, a surviving member of the original ambush party had ridden back to their stronghold and reported back on the carnage, and led them to the site the prior day so they could collect what they could before the scene was picked completely clean by opportunists.

  “Goooooooalllll!!!” one of the Raiders screamed in triumph as the skull skittered between his adversary’s legs, and then let out a whoop, arms extended overhead in victory. The exclamation was cut off when the feathered shaft of a quarrel materialized in the center of the Raider’s chest. He sputtered and grabbed the shaft before slowly sinking to his knees, a trickle of blood drooling from the corner of his mouth.

  The other Raiders stood transfixed, failing to process the unexpected assault for several critical seconds. By the time they sprang into action, another had dropped, a bolt sticking from between his shoulder blades. The Raider leader howled in outrage and pointed at the top of the ridge, where a cloud of dust hung in the air like a taunt.

  “Mount up!” he yelled, and the men rushed to their horses, unprepared for the sudden requirement that they give chase. None of the horses were saddled, and by the time they were galloping off toward the narrow trail that led up the side of the ravine two hundred yards away, precious minutes had slipped away.

  Carl drove his horse hard, aware that the greater his lead, the likelier he would be to escape with his life. After further discussion, he and Lucas had agreed that if he could lead them far enough away from the gulch, he might not have to resort to a gun battle, and if they continued to hunt for him long enough, Lucas would have a decent shot at finding the girl.

  Carl’s horse was fatigued after the long night’s forced march, but strained gamely as he urged it to greater speed. The desert soil was perfect for leaving a dust trail for the Raiders to follow, but he wanted to stay out of range – not that it was likely they’d be able to hit him on horseback, firing from the saddle. Even with automatic weapons that would be nearly impossible, but nevertheless he rode as fast as his horse would gallop, leaning forward like a jockey to increase his speed.

  The Raiders’ only advantage would be that their horses were fresh, but that lead would diminish as they tired from clambering up the steep gully and giving hard chase. After five minutes he dared a look behind him and saw that his pursuers were just now on the flat, easily a half mile behind him.

  He hoped that would be a sufficient head start. Lucas had advised him that it was a fifty-fifty proposition that they would eventually tire of the hunt and slow as their horses faltered. Carl’s goal was to lead them higher, into the mountains, where he could lose them among the twisting tributary ravines that fed the dry main washes. He’d leave clear tracks for them until he was on the rocky gravel further up the grade, where his hoofprints would vanish.

  For now, he just needed to buy Lucas an hour. If he couldn’t locate the girl and get clear within that timeframe, she wasn’t destined to be found, and their adventure would have been for nothing. Which meant his horse only had to be able to extend the burst of effort for another twenty minutes, tops, and then he could slow and be more selective about his route.

  Carl’s jaw clenched in determination as he bounced with each stride, and he avoided the temptation to veer into the brush, where he could lose his pursuers with relative ease. As the elevation increased, so too did the surrounding vegetation, but he followed the trail that led to the canyon where Alan was waiting with a pile of full magazines, weapon at the ready.

  Another glance over his shoulder and he eased up on his steed. The Raiders weren’t gaining on him, so he still had a five-minute lead. That translated into a margin of safety he was comfortable with, and there was no point in killing his horse to gain a few more yards. Now it would be an endurance match, and his ace in the hole was that his mount was in better physical condition than those of the Raiders, who tended to be as slovenly and uncaring tending to their animals as they were with themselves.

  Minutes ticked by and he checked behind him periodically, happy that the plan was working. He had no way of knowing whether all the men
had scrambled when he’d attacked, but that was Lucas’s problem, and Carl couldn’t affect that part of the operation no matter what he did.

  The surrounding hills rose around him as he entered the area they’d chosen for the ambush. To his right, up two hundred yards, Alan was positioned behind a boulder outcropping well above the gully. Straight ahead was the continuation of a larger canyon that led higher into the Guadalupe Mountains, carved by millennia of flash floods from rain runoff. Now it was a question of how lucky he felt, and how many of the Raiders would choose the wider canyon rather than the smaller branch.

  He was leaning toward continuing up the canyon when his horse misstepped on the difficult terrain and tumbled forward. Carl barely had time to register what had happened, and then he was falling, the ground rushing up at him before he could react.

  Behind Carl, the Raider leader was riding hard, yelling furiously for his men to speed up. A Kalashnikov AK-47 was clutched in his right hand and the reins in the other while his brain worked furiously to try to figure out who would dare to attack his men. Not the Pecos cartel – the Raiders and the cartel cooperated with each other: the cartel stuck to the roads and left the barren wastes to his group.

  Could this be the beginning of an encroachment? A change in the cartel’s strategy? Were they finally out of options in Pecos and the roads that led from north to south, which they controlled completely, and whose travelers they routinely plundered?

  That made no sense. The cartel members were city thugs. While they did own horses, they’d only bothered learning to ride when their fuel supply had run out after a year and a half. The Locos were definitely hard, but they weren’t Raiders, who had early grasped the inevitable dearth of fuel and built their model on silent mobility over rough terrain. Most of them had been more than familiar with horses from their lives before the collapse, so it had been natural for them to form allegiances with like-minded criminals and pool their resources, creating a rural outpost where they numbered over eighty strong – a respectable force in an area nobody valued, but one that saw sufficient travelers desperate to escape the constant violence in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez to sustain them.

  The pounding of hooves all around him and an occasional shout of encouragement or rage spurred him on, and he grinned when he saw that they were gaining on the rider. They would skin him alive and drag him behind their horses all the way back to the camp. Nobody attacked the Raiders and lived.

  When the rider’s horse buckled and went down, the leader screamed in triumph, and his men joined in with a ragged ululating that echoed up the canyon.

  “He’s down! Come on, boys! Playtime! Try not to kill him – I’ve got plans for our new friend!” the leader yelled, and fingered his rifle’s trigger guard in anticipation.

  The man would die a thousand deaths before they finally sent him to hell.

  He would see to that.

  Chapter 17

  Dust drifted from the base of the gulch, past where Lucas hid behind a strip of juniper bushes wavering in the light wind. When the sound of hoofbeats had diminished to a faint pounding in the distance, he poked his head over the rise and took in the empty wash.

  Descending into the gully was easier on foot than on his prior attempt on horseback, and he hurriedly navigated the steep bank to the gravel below. Above him on the opposite side were the caves, and after another glance down the ravine, he ascended until he was near the closest opening. He listened, his head cocked. Hearing nothing, he moved to the entrance, cupped his hands around his mouth, and called into it.

  “Eve? Are you in here? Your aunt Sierra sent me.”

  Lucas’s ears strained for any hint of movement inside, and after a long pause, he called out again. “Eve. Eve. It’s safe. If you’re in here, yell. The bad men are gone.”

  He waited.

  Nothing.

  Painfully aware of the clock ticking, he scrambled to the next aperture and repeated his overture.

  “Eve. If you’re here, call out. Aunt Sierra sent me.”

  He heard something – a faint movement in the inky interior.

  “Eve? Is that you?”

  Lucas froze at the sight of a pair of orbs weaving side to side three feet from his face. A rattle sounded, signaling the snake was preparing to strike, and Lucas slowly backed away, hopeful that the rattler would slither off rather than going on the offensive.

  If Eve had been in that cave, she was beyond Lucas’s ability to help now.

  Lucas edged to another opening and called for her, only to be met by the same stony silence. He checked his watch: seven minutes had gone by.

  He tried again and was struck by the futility of his task. If she had been in one of the caves, after three days there was no guarantee she was still there. It had been a fool’s errand, as he’d feared. The girl was five. She’d probably hidden for a couple of hours and then gone in search of her aunt, scared to be alone. Which meant she could be anywhere, including dead from exposure or snake bite or dehydration, or any of a hundred other causes, none of them pretty. What had he been thinking, getting his hopes up? He knew better.

  Still, he was there, so he yelled for her again, his voice echoing off the cave walls. It sounded like this opening led into a larger space, judging by the reverberation. He slipped his flashlight from the plate holder pocket and switched it on. The beam shone into the depths of the passage and stopped at a bend in the entry. Roots hung down from the ceiling of hard-packed dirt still a million years from its transformation into stone.

  He thought about Sierra’s description of the cave where she’d hidden Eve. She’d said it had been above the rock outcropping where he’d found her.

  Lucas cast his eyes over the area again, trying to remember which outcropping that had been, and realized that he’d been facing west, not east, when he’d spotted Sierra. Which meant that he was on the wrong side of the gulch.

  He cursed under his breath and dropped back to the wash bed, verifying that the jumble of stones he was looking at were the correct ones. The problem was that there were a number of rock formations, none particularly memorable, on both sides of the gulch, where over the years the softer earth around them had been eroded by periodic flash floods.

  Lucas scrutinized the bank and saw a small gap in the cut. He forced himself up until he was even with the hole and called into it. “Eve? Your aunt sent me. Eve, if you’re in here, say something.”

  He listened and thought he heard something deep in the earth, but he wasn’t sure. It could have been the wind – and the fact that his ears were still ringing slightly from gunfire-induced tinnitus didn’t help.

  “Eve? Eve!”

  He turned his head and heard the sound again. It wasn’t his imagination.

  “Eve!”

  This time, he was rewarded with a tortured sob of terror from the farthest reaches of the passage. He directed his penlight into the chamber and saw nothing but more dirt. But he knew what he’d heard. “Eve, it’s okay. The bad men are gone. Your aunt Sierra is very worried about you. Are you hurt?”

  A flood of crying answered his query from what sounded like a larger cavern beyond the turn in the entry passage, judging by the echo. “Say something, Eve. I’ve got water. Food. A horse. I’m here to take you to Aunt Sierra.”

  More crying, and then the sound of a pair of horses approaching from the east drifted down the gully. Lucas swore and dragged himself into the opening, flashlight between his teeth, but it was too narrow for him to negotiate. His plate holder and M4 scraped and stopped him from getting any farther in, and the hoofbeats grew louder. Lucas’s arms strained and his boots fought for purchase, but it was no good.

  He shrugged out of the gap and made for a larger opening ten yards to his right. He dragged himself into the opening just as the riders arrived below, and he hurriedly pulled his legs all the way in, praying that he’d been fast enough that the Raiders hadn’t seen him.

  Lucas inclined his head and forced himself to quiet his breathing. He w
aited a few moments and then dog-crawled further into the earth, wincing as his rifle barrel scraped against the low ceiling. The sound was amplified by his surroundings, and he hoped that it was an auditory illusion. But even if they didn’t hear him, he understood that he was now in a worst-case position: trapped, with the Raiders outside, and no way to escape.

  Chapter 18

  Carl landed hard, having barely gotten clear of the stirrups in time to avoid shattering his leg as the horse went down. He hit the chunky shale and his left arm went instantly numb. Several ribs snapped from the impact, broken by his elbow in spite of the plate holder, and they sent a white-hot lance of pain through his body. He struggled for breath as he lay staring at the sky, and then rolled with a groan toward the horse, which was fighting to its feet, stunned but uninjured. The mare then bolted up the canyon, leaving Carl to his fate with the Raiders bearing down on him.

  The sheriff forced himself to his feet and grimaced as he blinked away blood from a gash in his forehead where a shard of rock had slashed him. He tried to wipe it away with his left arm, but the appendage wouldn’t obey. Possibly broken or nerve damaged, he thought as he tested his weight. His ankle and knee throbbed, and when he looked down, his pants were torn and his shin was puckered and white from where multiple rocks had punctured it. He watched as blood welled from the lacerations as if in slow motion, and then the pounding of the approaching Raiders drew his attention.

  He eyed the ravine where Alan was waiting and did a quick estimation of how long it would take him to hobble to relative safety. The riders were nearing fast, but if he was lucky, he’d be able to make it to cover. Carl retrieved his AR-15, his left arm hanging uselessly at his side, and concentrated on managing the uneven terrain, ignoring the shrieks of pain from his leg with every unsteady step.

  He was nearly at the bend when he chanced a glance behind him. The Raiders were a vision from a medieval past, their faces distorted with bloodlust as they steered their horses into the canyon mouth. Carl knew that his survival was now measured in minutes as the dust cloud approached, and drove himself faster, blood streaming freely from his mangled leg, his boot wet from it pooling in the sole.