by M C Rooney
The daughter of the man with the bow ran to her cousin and helped her to gingerly dismount from Renee’s horse.
“We are sorry,” Locke said to the man. “We arrived too late to stop them from killing her father and hurting your niece.”
“Bandits!” he said in disbelief; they normally just wanted your food. He looked at his niece and noticed her torn clothes and the way she walked. Oh no, please no, he thought as the grief swelled in his heart.
“Not bandits,” replied Locke quietly. “It was people from the west.”
“Who?” the man replied, devastated.
“I think we need to talk,” Locke said, eyeing him steadily.
The man looked at Locke for a long moment and then turned to his neighbours in the distance and waved them away.
The house of Greg Hurst may have dated back over a hundred years and was made of something called ‘brick veneer’, or so he thought. It was slowly falling apart, but it still provided needed shelter for him and his daughter. Tom, Renee, and Locke sat at a table with their weapons and hats removed as Greg offered them glasses of water.
Locke tried to explain what had happened.
“So, do you want the long story or the short story?” Locke asked his host.
“Short,” replied Greg.
“There is a tower in the Midlands that may produce electricity. We are headed there to check it out, even though some tribe from the west surrounds it.”
“Um, perhaps the long story will be better,” replied Greg in complete confusion.
“You know there is an epidemic in Hobart?” said Locke.
“I have heard rumours,” replied Greg.
“There is also a hospital in the city with outdated medicine that we cannot use,” said Locke, “but hospital equipment that just may help.”
“But you don’t know that,” Greg replied. “My wife and her sister, Marissa’s mother, were taken from us by a disease not long ago. It killed about twenty percent of our population.”
“How did you survive?” asked Renee.
“We gathered our food and stayed inside,” he replied. “This reduced contact as much as possible between our families, and eventually, the disease went away.”
“Is the mayor doing this, Breaker?” asked Tom.
“Yes, exactly that,” replied Locke.
Tom nodded. He knew his aunt would be providing the best precautions for their people.
“So perhaps there is hope,” said Renee with a hint of a relieved smile.
“Maybe, but finding a new, or should I say, old energy source is a priority of ours,” said Locke, as serious as ever.
“Otherwise, we are susceptible to any future disease,” Tom added.
“And we will never rise to the heights of the civilization before the Collapse,” said Greg in understanding. “We will always be barely surviving, rather than thriving.”
“Exactly,” said Locke.
“So these men from the west, if they have this electricity tower,” Greg said in growing concern and anger, “why did they come south like that?”
“I’m not sure,” Locke replied with a deep sigh.
“They came a long way,” Renee said. “Almost one hundred twenty kilometres, by our reckoning.”
“Perhaps they don’t know how to maintain it,” said Tom. “The people who built it may have passed on by now.”
“But again, why come south?” asked Greg.
“There are very few houses in the Midlands; maybe they did come all this way for the knowledge in computers,” Renee answered. “If they have electricity, perhaps they may be able to work.”
Locke looked at the youngsters. They could be on to something. On the other hand, they may have come south just to rape and pillage, he thought with worry.
“I’m sorry, Greg, but did your niece give any indication as to what they were looking for?” said Locke.
“No, she just said they ransacked the house,” he replied with gritted teeth. “Anyway, I know what they were looking for.”
Greg looked at his visitors. They all seemed trained in the arts of war. The boy looked like he could break rocks with his bare hands, and the older man had a calmness to him that inspired confidence, like he had seen danger many times before and had grown accustomed to it. Even the girl looked like someone you need to take care not to offend. He had to ask, and he tried to ask calmly, but …
“I want them to pay for what they did!” Greg almost shouted as his hand clenched as if to thump the table.
His niece was now being cared for by his daughter in the other room, but he could hear the tears from where they sat. Whether they were from his daughter or his niece he couldn’t say. But the tears broke his heart.
“They did,” replied Locke in a calm tone.
Greg was about to ask them to hunt the men down, but now he paused. “What do you mean?”
“We killed eleven of them; only one escaped,” Tom informed him. “The one who hurt your niece paid the full price.”
Renee looked ashamed now that she had missed killing the one who ran away. It wasn’t her fault, but after what they had done to their host’s niece, who was to say they had not done this before.
“Eleven!” Greg said in shock. “How could the three of you kill so many without taking as much as a wound?”
“They had no horses,” said Renee.
“Or bows; otherwise, we would have never gotten close enough to fight them,” said Tom.
“We were lucky,” Locke added. “We caught them by complete surprise.”
“But these two, with no offence meant,” Greg looked from Locke to Tom and Renee and back, “these two don’t seem to have seen that many winters.”
“We trained them for three years,” replied Locke.
“We swore an oath,” said Renee with a determined look. “I’m not going to stand by while these animals commit such atrocities.”
“To protect our people,” continued Tom, “is my job, and whether you realise it or not, you and your community are our people, Mr Hurst.”
“The old days of power and resource wars are long gone now that money doesn’t exist,” Locke said. “We only mean to look after our own, and we would like that to include your community.”
Tom looked at Locke. Their first priority was to find out as much as they could about the tower. But now it seemed that protecting this community was to be included in their mission as well. He wondered what his aunt would think of this. Would she be pleased? Or had the disease in Hobart spread and killed more people? Tom wasn’t even sure if their mission would be of any help at all. They still didn’t know how to use all of the equipment. He had the feeling learning the old technology would take years and would involve many hits and misses. He had looked at the lightbulb he kept in his saddlebag many times on the journey, and still, there was no sign of light.
Greg Hurst looked at the youngsters and the seasoned campaigner in pure astonishment. He saw a ray of hope for his small community. In one of the darkest periods for humanity, in a time of dog eat dog, here were three people who actually seemed to care about their fellow human beings. This was not just caring about your family or friends; these people cared about complete strangers. They didn’t have to stop when they saw his family in trouble. They could have kept on riding. But instead, they took a stand and risked their own lives in service to others. And just three of them had managed to take down twelve!
“I need to call a town meeting and discuss with the other families about the Westerners and how we need to protect ourselves.” he said. The bandits just wanted food, which was bad enough, but these new people from the west were something else entirely. “I want to inform them of what we need to do with our own youngsters,” he continued.
“I’m sorry,” replied Locke. “I’m not sure what you mean?”
“I want some of our youth trained,” he replied. “I want them to become rangers, like you.”
“Where is he?” Sam growled as he and his nineteen cho
sen ran southwards over a wide expanse of farmlands in groups of five. It was originally twenty, but a member of their group by the name of Bill had just fallen down a sinkhole and broken his neck.
It was getting late; they had been running for about eight hours now, and it was starting to get cold. But wearing next to nothing was a display of how tough you were in the culture of Hockey’s tribe. The women, on the other hand, wore fur clothing when it was cold. They were weak, thought Sam, but the fact that they never seemed to die from the cold never entered his proud male brain.
“He only had a two-hour head start, at the most,” said his brother, Alex. “The plains are so flat for miles and miles, surely we should have seen him by now. Especially in that shiny suit, and how slow he normally moves.” Whilst Sam had a Mohawk, his brother had short hair with a massive beard that nearly went to his stomach.
“Are you sure he was heading south?” said their companion Ian, who was a friend but not very bright.
“I saw him head south myself,” Sam said with a sharp look. Why did I invite him along? Oh, yes, I didn’t; he just tags along, as he always does.
“And how are we to kill him?” said another man called Jeremiah, whom, if you called him a bullfrog after some ancient song his grandparents sang to him, would laugh and then try to punch you in the face.
“Well, there are twenty of us; maybe Sam wants us all to jump on him,” said Wayne, who was the fifth main member of this group, and the most violent. Sam wondered whether Wayne wanted the suit for himself. He definitely asked a lot of questions about it.
“Shut up, and stop asking questions,” said Sam, ignoring both the fact that he didn’t know how he was going to catch Rodent and Wayne’s nasty scowl, which reminded him of Frank or Fred Carter.
“These questions need answering, though,” said Ian.
Everybody ignored him.
“Rodent is so unfit,” said Jeremiah. “Surely we should have caught him by now.”
“Look, we tracked him for most of the way,” growled Sam. The silver suit left burn marks if you looked hard enough.
“Yes, but the tracks kept disappearing,” said Ian.
Everybody ignored him.
“And what about those massive sinkholes?” said Alex.
Sam thought about this. Those holes were so dangerous, as Bill would testify, if he was still alive to talk, of course. The plains were covered in high native grasses, which used to be grazing fodder for the farmers’ sheep and cows before they were herded up by surviving humans or eaten by the zombies who were attracted to their smell as much as they were to the human smell.
“Oh, fuck!” Sam stopped and shouted at the top of his lungs.
Alex stepped back a little as he looked at Sam’s face; he knew when to keep a distance from his brother. His temper could be fearsome, as everybody now knew. How he had stood up to Hockey was a testament to his bad temper.
“What?” said Wayne, looking around for what was bothering their leader and taking out some very sharp knives he used for killing animals and humans. Mostly humans, though.
“The sinkholes we saw,” Sam said. “They were so smooth.”
“Um, yes, they were,” Ian said with another dumb look as he scratched his short blond hair
“Were they similar to the one Lord Feral made?” enquired Wayne keenly, with an almost feverish look to his eyes.
Yes. He definitely wants the suit, thought Sam, and his knives are still unsheathed. When will he try to kill me, though?
“Exactly, with the same unnatural smoothness,” replied Sam, “except hers was a trench, not a deep hole.”
“And Rodent has the same type of suit,” said Jeremiah.
“Yep,” said Sam.
“So that means Rodent made a sinkhole when he saw us coming,” said Alex.
“Most likely,” Sam answered in a tight voice. “Or he knew that someone would be following, so he prepared a trap.”
“That sounds too intelligent for Rodent,” said Alex.
“Yes, it does,” Sam said with a confused look. “He must have seen us. He can’t have outrun us.”
“How many sinkholes have we passed?” asked Jeremiah.
“Maybe twenty,” said Wayne, toying with his knives and looking at Sam.
“They were a fair size too,” Sam said. “Maybe two metres diameter and one to five metres in depth, plenty of spaces to hide if you tried.”
“Why did he make so many?” asked Ian.
Sam looked at Ian with forced patience. “So we would fall down them and break our necks just like Bill did. Remember him? The guy who died ten minutes ago?”
“To hide from us as well,” Alex said more kindly to Ian, “or to slow us down, and maybe he was practicing a newly found technology of the suit; he definitely didn’t know how to do that before,” he finished with a smile. Alex was always too nice to people by Sam’s reckoning.
“Is that enough reasons for you, Ian?” said Sam.
“Yeah, I guess so,” replied Ian, once more scratching his head.
“That’s good,” replied Sam with a false smile.
“And when was the last time we saw one?” said Ian, who had now moved on to picking his nose.
“About ten minutes ago,” replied Sam. “You remember Bill, who died ten minutes ago? The guy whose name I just mentioned about ten seconds ago?”
Someone please give me strength with this idiot, Sam thought in exasperation, but he still noticed that Wayne had his knives pointed in his direction.
“They were all within a small area as well,” said Wayne. “I think he may have been testing it, like Alex said.” He finished with a smile at Alex.
Don’t suck up to my brother, Sam thought; he is loyal to me. He glanced at his brother, who gave him a knowing look back. So it isn’t just my paranoia, Alex had noticed as well.
They all knew too well that Wayne had ambitions in the tribe. Sure, he was Sam’s friend, but everybody knew Hockey was getting old now, and maybe with the suit, he could challenge Buzz. Sam would not challenge Buzz, though. He had meant it when he swore fealty to him.
Ian was about to turn around when Sam reached out and grabbed his shoulder.
“Ian,” said Sam with a forced smile, trying to be as kind as his brother and failing. “As we couldn’t catch up to that slow bastard, it is possible he is behind us right now. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” replied Ian, “that’s why I was turning back to look for him.” He had finally decided to give his nose a rest, apparently.
Sam took a deep breath. “But if he knows—Alex!” he said and walked off to take a deep breath before he punched Ian.
“If we turn to look back,” Alex said to Ian patiently, “then that means that Rodent, who may be looking at us right this very minute, will know that we know that he is behind us.”
“What?” Ian replied.
Alex took a deep, patient breath.
“The sinkholes are behind us, right, Ian?” said Alex.
“Yes,” said Ian.
“And Rodent could be in one of them right at this minute.”
“Yes,” replied Ian.
“And he has the lightning suit, which could kill us all,” Alex continued.
“Yes,” said Ian again.
“So we need to set a trap for him ourselves,” said Alex.
“Yes.”
“Where would the best place be to set a trap?”
Ian thought for a moment. This went on for about a minute as he dug deep into his thoughts as well as his nose again.
Jeremiah looked at Ian and pointed south and even whispered the direction.
“South?” said Ian.
“Well done,” said Alex as if talking to his favourite animal.
Sam soon rounded up his nineteen men into a tight circle as they gathered to listen to his instructions. Wayne moved alongside of Sam. He’s not brazen enough to try it here, is he? Sam wondered.
But if he killed Sam and then Alex, he would take over easily,
as he was no doubt the best and nastiest fighter among the group. Alex moved into position.
“All right,” he said. “We have very good reasons to believe Rodent is behind us right now.” Nobody looked behind them, not even Ian. “So we are going to lead him into a trap…” Wayne then made a sudden and, in hindsight, stupid move to kill Sam, but Alex had positioned himself behind him and immediately stabbed Wayne in the back. Sam then casually brought out his knife and cut Wayne’s throat. Sam continued talking as Wayne fell and lay at their feet, choking to death on his own blood. “But first, we must all realise that Rodent’s suit is mine. Hockey gave that suit to me. Do you all understand?” he finished mildly.
Everybody nodded their agreement, and after Sam had finished giving them their instructions, they ran southwards, leaving the dead body of their friend Wayne Jackman behind. Once past the nearest tree line, two groups of four, including Alex, veered off to the west and east to wait and see if Rodent was behind them, and eleven, which included Sam, continued south to see if, by some miracle, he was ahead of them.
So it looked like Sam, for the first time in three years, would be preparing a trap for a Lightning Lord himself, except this lord was the idiot Rodent. It shouldn’t be too hard.
Rodent tried to climb out of the hole he had created but couldn’t. What a shock it had been for him when, after getting bored on his walk south, he decided to play with a few of the numerous buttons on his suit sleeve and the ground beneath him had given way with a small sound of vibration. He immediately stopped pushing the buttons on the first hole he made when it got to about his chest height. Then he spent the next ten minutes trying to remember the sequence in which he pushed the buttons, and when successful, made another sinkhole that was about his height in depth. He struggled for another ten minutes to get out of that sinkhole, then decided to try to make another one, but this time, he pointed his arm away from his feet in the hope that he could make a sinkhole away from his body. It didn’t work. The sinkhole was connected to his feet somehow, or only worked in a vertical position. But this didn’t stop Rodent from making more sinkholes, but ones of the depth of which he could easily get out of. During this experiment, he learnt that if you pushed the existing buttons with a third button next to it, the sinkhole would expand in diameter, but this would reduce the time it took to make the hole deeper. Then he decided to make a sinkhole whilst walking, and he found that if he skimmed back and forth along the grass, he could make a long trench, like that bitch Lord Feral had done.