“That’s good. It means they’re way behind us.”
“Will we get to sleep soon?”
Ruby and Sierra exchanged a glance. “I hope so. But we still have a ways to go. You look tired,” Ruby said.
“I am.” Her forehead creased. “Is Lucas going to be able to find us?”
“That’s the plan.”
“When he does, he’ll know what to do,” Sierra said, her tone confident.
Eve nodded solemnly. “My bottom hurts.”
“It’s a lot of riding,” Ruby agreed. “Mine does too.” She paused. “Sierra, have you told us everything you know about Shangri-La?”
Sierra seemed taken aback. “Of course. I mean, it’s pretty easy, since I don’t know much in the first place. It’s supposed to be safe and have power and is run the way things used to be. Civilized, in other words.”
“And you believe that?”
“A lot of people risked their lives so Eve could make it there. They obviously thought it was important. So I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt.” Sierra sighed. “We’ll see when we get there, won’t we? If it isn’t all that, what have we really lost?”
“Assuming Lucas finds the vest.”
The younger woman nodded, her face unreadable in the darkness.
Nugget’s front hoof slipped off a treacherous submerged stone, and Eve’s eyes widened as she pitched sideways. Sierra struggled to control the mare with the reins, and then the little girl’s balance passed the tipping point and she fell off the horse, hitting the water with a loud splash. Eve cried out in alarm as Sierra fought with Nugget, the horse now panicked as the bottom dropped away unexpectedly and she suddenly found herself in chest-deep water.
“Eve!” Sierra cried.
The child’s head disappeared from view; the current was not as gentle as they’d guessed in this stretch.
Ruby brought Jax up short and leapt from his back, flailing with her arms, trying to locate Eve. Jax stopped in his tracks, unwilling to go on, and she splashed toward Nugget, her footing unsure as the water pulled at her legs with considerable force.
“Do something!” Sierra screamed. “She can’t swim!”
Ruby continued toward the horse, forcing herself to move faster. Eve’s head popped from the surface ten yards downstream and she coughed water before going under again. Ruby gritted her teeth and abandoned trying to walk, instead diving forward as the river deepened and swimming with unsteady strokes.
“Eve!” Ruby managed as the little girl’s face rose out of the river five feet from her, and she groped for her as Eve sputtered, gasping for breath. Ruby’s fingers latched onto the child’s shirt, and she pulled her nearer as she felt for footing. The bottom was suddenly shallower, explaining the rush of current as the river narrowed, creating a funnel effect.
Eve coughed water and Ruby clutched her to her chest, keeping her head above the surface as she struggled toward the bank. And then, just as quickly as things had come unwound, they were both in knee-deep water, Eve clearing her lungs and struggling for air.
Sierra dropped from Nugget and moved toward them, taking ginger steps as Ruby supported Eve. The little girl’s hands were on her knees, her head bowed, hair hanging as she coughed.
“Are you all right?” Sierra asked as she neared.
Eve didn’t say anything. Ruby nodded. “She’ll be okay.”
“I…I don’t know how to swim myself, or I would have gone in after her.”
“Don’t sweat it. I got to her in time.” Ruby eyed her. “Besides, probably not a great idea with your chest wound. It’s healing nicely, but you want to avoid anything that could increase the chances of infection, and a dunking in this river probably isn’t the best idea.”
Eve gasped again and Ruby thumped her on her back. “Does it feel like you have water in your chest?”
Another hacking cough, more frothing spray, and then she took a big gulp of air and shook her head. “Don’t think so.”
“Let me listen,” Sierra said, and leaned over to place her ear against Eve’s back. After a few deep breaths, Sierra straightened. “Doesn’t sound bad.”
Ruby guided Eve to the bank, where she lay shaking, Sierra beside her. The older woman went after their mounts and led Jax and Nugget to them. Eve looked up at her apologetically. “I’m…sorry,” she said.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“You got all wet.”
Ruby shrugged. “Nature’s way of telling me I needed a bath. No harm done.” Ruby brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “You think you can ride now?”
Eve nodded.
“Okay, then. I’ll help you back up once your aunt’s in the saddle.”
Sierra hoisted herself onto Nugget and used her good arm to take Eve from Ruby’s arms. When Eve was seated, Ruby gave Jax a pat, and he flicked his tail. “All right, big boy, maybe we’ll stick to dry land for a while. That work for you?” The mule greeted her question with stoic indifference, and she remounted the mule and directed him up the bank.
Ruby didn’t complain, but her leg was throbbing from where she’d struck a stone during the rescue, and her back burned in protest from the unexpected exertion. She was reminded again that she wasn’t a young woman any longer, but forced herself to shrug off the pain – she’d been through worse and was still standing, and if a few bruises and bumps were thrown her way, she’d take them in stride. After all, she had to be alive to feel pain, and most she knew no longer were. In that light, anything but death’s hand on her shoulder was reason for optimism, she reasoned, and goaded Jax to greater speed. She was anxious to get away from the spot, unwilling to assume that their pursuers hadn’t heard Sierra’s yells.
The older woman was again struck by how composed Eve was. Even after her dunking, she hadn’t cried and had recovered quickly without any drama.
“Thanks, Ruby. You saved her life,” Sierra said quietly.
“Over and done with,” Ruby said in a whisper. “Let’s keep it down while we ride, okay? Don’t want to attract any more attention than we already have.”
“Of course. Sorry,” Sierra said, and fell silent.
Ruby didn’t respond, preferring to keep her own counsel rather than continue to engage. There was no point reprimanding Sierra for her cries and not much to be done about it other than to continue making their trail as difficult and convoluted to follow as possible, and pray that circumstances worked in their favor.
Ruby rocked side to side with the mule’s stride, lost in thought as Nugget’s hooves on the gentle slope of the gravel bank accompanied Jax’s faster gait, the mule’s short legs working like small pistons as they pressed into the desert night.
Chapter 16
Lucas paused on the trail that led toward the root cellar and tilted his head as he listened. An otherworldly baying drifted to him on the light breeze, and Tango stamped a restless hoof. Lucas’s eyes narrowed at the sound and he dismounted. Another howl confirmed the need for caution, and he led the big horse to a grove of saplings and tied him to one. After giving Tango some water, Lucas set off at a jog, night vision scope activated on his M4, the rifle held at present arms.
When he arrived at the tree line, he stopped and surveyed the area by the root cellar through his NV scope. The horses and riders were easy to spot, as were the dogs – the source of the howls. He cursed under his breath as he watched, and slowly backed away when he was sure that the group hadn’t taken the women captive; the obvious hunt for their trail confirmed that they’d somehow escaped.
He debated attacking the gunmen; the element of surprise was on his side and the newly acquired grenade launcher made a great leveler, but he discarded the option. It would be stupid given that he didn’t know how large the total force was, and if he wasn’t successful, it would leave the women at the mercy of the cartel without him to defend them.
The other possibility was to shoot the dogs, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Besides, it was easier said than done, with a force o
f several dozen men firing at him and giving chase.
No, his best option – which he didn’t kid himself was a great one – was to ride to the rendezvous.
Which meant that he was now in a race to reach them before the gunmen did. The only bright spot in the scenario was that he knew where the women had gone – a considerable advantage that meant he could easily beat their pursuers to the punch. It would mean more night riding, but given that he knew where most of the bad guys in the area now were, the risk seemed slight.
He made his way back to Tango and saddled up, and then guided the horse south, skirting the property and giving the search party a wide berth. Once out of earshot, he debated whether to take the most direct way to Blue Springs or a more circuitous route; he opted for the latter in case there were multiple teams of trackers working. He had no idea when the women had left, nor when the miscreants had shown up, and it was more than possible that this wasn’t the first group to have worked the site.
Lucas recalled Sierra’s warning that the Crew would never give up looking for them, and had to give her credit for calling that one correctly. He wouldn’t have believed that their Loco cartel minions would have expended the effort to not only return to the bunker, where so many of them had met their end, but to locate and enlist tracking dogs – it wasn’t as though you could shake a stick and find those.
He glanced at his watch. If he was careful, he could reach Blue Springs by sunup or shortly thereafter. He just hoped that Ruby had the presence of mind to wait for him and hadn’t gotten spooked by the reappearance of the bad guys on her property. He didn’t think so, but people did strange things under pressure.
There was only one way to find out.
“All right, buddy. Sorry to put you through this, but we’re going to have to keep going,” Lucas murmured to Tango. The horse had been on the trail all day and had to be nearing the end of his endurance. If Lucas didn’t want to find himself walking, he’d have to give the stallion ample chances to rest on the route west – there were practical limits of what the animal could physically do, and Lucas was sensitive to the fact that he’d already put in a herculean effort.
Lucas allowed Tango to meander in the general direction of Blue Springs as he thought through their next step. They would need to find a safe place to go to ground – the springs would be a temporary solution, but they needed to put some serious distance between themselves and Pecos, and staying in the area of Loving was obviously a bad bet. But given the topography, there were few viable alternatives. West led into the mountains, which might be good for disappearing, but would be lousy for survival, especially when one of the region’s storms hit. East was effectively desert for over a hundred miles, with unknown dangers and, worse, was headed back toward the Crew’s territory. South lay the Locos and Raiders.
Which left north. The problem being that he didn’t know much past Loving, having had no reason to explore and potentially expose himself to danger. He knew that further along the highway lay Carlsbad, which was another armed encampment like Loving had been, and then Artesia, and past it, the larger city of Roswell, but if the cartel had put out the word about Sierra and Eve, which Lucas figured they had, any of those places could result in them being betrayed in exchange for a reward.
That one would be offered was a given. It was what Lucas would have done under the circumstances, and with the stakes as high as they were, it was bound to be a big one.
Maybe they would do best to split up?
Certainly, that would be the smartest for Lucas’s and Ruby’s survival – they weren’t the direct object of the manhunt. But Sierra and Eve would be dead meat. Just a matter of time.
No, he’d have to come up with a plan that would enable them to go to ground in a safe place and try to figure out what the note said. But no matter what, they couldn’t stay in one place very long. Remaining stationary for even a short period was inviting detection.
The thought didn’t bother Lucas much. He had nothing to go back to at the ranch, and Ruby had lost everything, so life on the road was no worse than waiting to fall prey to scavengers or the other marauders that roamed the badlands.
Lucas glanced up at the stars, and the sight of the heavens stretching to infinity calmed his racing thoughts. He’d figure something out. He always did. And now that Sierra and Eve were depending on him, he had no choice but to perform.
The white scar of a dirt road through the brush appeared on his right, and Lucas directed Tango along its shoulder for an hour before again opting for a game trail that led off into nothingness. The night air was still as the moon rose higher, and he found himself checking the luminous dial of his watch more than normal, keenly aware that he hadn’t slept much and wasn’t as sharp as he’d have liked. Once off the road, their progress slowed to a crawl, and when they reached the Black River, he took a breather and let the horse drink its fill and munch on the grass that carpeted the tree line.
A fox darted down the bank to Lucas’s right, and he had to fight to get his heart rate back down. That was no good – he was getting spooked by stimuli that he’d have normally taken in stride. Deciding to occupy his time productively, he cleaned the Remington by the water’s edge while Tango went about his business. His stomach rumbled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten dinner, and he removed the container of jerky from his saddlebag and chewed six ounces of it, remembering how his grandfather had taken such pride in the brick oven he’d constructed with ample space on either side for smoking.
Hal had prized skills like canning, gardening, and smoking food, as well as the ability to repair most mechanical items with whatever was at hand – a characteristic he had laughingly referred to as Mexican engineering – never intending it in a disparaging way, but rather admiring the ingenuity the neighbors to the south regularly employed to keep things operating even in the face of poverty and adversity it would have been impossible for most Americans to imagine, at least, before the collapse.
Now, with the population reduced to primitive conditions, pre-collapse Mexico would have seemed like a wonderland of riches, Lucas knew from his trips across the border. It was ironic to him that the rural peasants there had probably suffered less of a culture shock than his kind had. Hal had pointed out repeatedly that the world’s poor made do with almost nothing, so the lack of running water or electricity or any but naturally grown medicine had changed little in their day-to-day lives. The man who had spent his entire life walking six miles to a river every morning since he’d been a boy to catch fish so the family could eat probably did the same thing now, the idea of a car or television or the Internet as alien to him as the notion of space travel. That man likely hadn’t seen his existence impacted much from the collapse of modern society, whereas more developed nations had been devastated, and the ensuing chaos had opened the door for a descent into de facto civil war between competing factions of predators.
“They first raise up those the Gods would destroy,” Lucas whispered to himself. There was some truth to that. The mighty had farther to fall, and America’s almost total dependence on its government to provide everything the population needed had proved to be its Achilles’ heel. Knowledge of the features of the latest iPhone or winning hacks to the newest video games had proved poor substitutes for rudimentary survival skills, and most had quickly perished, having evolved in just a few generations from a species that lived off the land to one of privileged consumption, many unable to do the simplest things for themselves.
And how they’d turned on one another when desperate! The most striking thing to Lucas in the weeks following the collapse had been how lacking most had been in a sense of community – an essential element of civilization that might have saved many turned out to be entirely lacking in the engineered isolation of modern life. Because most didn’t know their neighbors and were unaccustomed to helping those in need, when things had broken down they’d had nothing to fall back on and had gone at each other like dogs. In the end, the every-man-for-himself ethos
proved a deadly one for the majority.
Only those who had lived in small, isolated communities had developed the sense of kinship that all settlements on the fringes of civilization tended to have, which enabled them to pull together for protection and to create workable solutions to food, water, and basic care problems. Loving had been a good example, but one that had ultimately misjudged the ferocity that its enemies would bring to bear on destroying what had taken years to build.
The melancholy thought saddened him, and he finished with his rifle and reassembled it before clicking at Tango to signal it was time to ride. Dwelling on the unpleasant would accomplish nothing; what was done, was done. Now his future lay in finding a hidden sanctuary with an absurd moniker against odds so tall he didn’t want to think about them.
“Nobody’s holding a gun to your head,” he muttered, and swung onto Tango in a single practiced move, sliding the M4 sling from his shoulder as he took the reins for more hours of travel, his only consolation that he’d long since stopped hearing the baying of the hounds.
Chapter 17
Blue Springs was little more than a hundred-yard-long by thirty-yard-wide lagoon fed by an underground spring in the foothills east of Carlsbad Caverns National Park. It met the Black River in a small white water rapids that Ruby could hear well before they arrived at the oasis. The pool was surrounded by oak trees, she knew, which meant the temperature would be cooler and humid.
The spot was a popular one with the local wildlife, and the women followed a clear game trail the final distance. Both Jax and Nugget seemed as relieved as their riders to reach the destination as a faint glow brightened the eastern sky.
Ruby located the footbridge over the rapids that marked the area where they’d agreed to rendezvous with Lucas, and they made camp on the sloping bank. Beige cliffs jutted from the water around them. Jax and Nugget strolled off to forage what they could, and Ruby spread her bedroll on the gentle incline as the sun rose over the crest.
The Day After Never Bundle (First 4 novels) Page 31