The Salazars had no long-term plan, but as the number of their followers grew, they began formulating a scheme to spread east and claim nearby Louisiana – it wasn’t as though the Crew membership that operated in that area was particularly loyal to Snake, and if the cousins offered them a better deal, it was likely they would jump at it. They’d sent a few riders to feel out the New Orleans leadership and were waiting to hear back. A positive response would spread through the Crew ranks like wildfire, further weakening Snake’s support in Houston and swelling the cousins’ gang with disgruntled fighters. Their hope was that at some point they would become too big to challenge and could work out a cooperative deal where they existed autonomously from the Crew, operating as an ally.
But for now they were Snake’s enemy, on alert against an attack that grew less likely with each day. Their spies had told them morale was at an all-time low as Snake settled old scores with enemies and bolstered his power through cunning and treachery.
The Salazar cousins’ faction now boasted over seven hundred gunmen, a powerful force growing stronger with each hour. The fighters had set up a tent city in the center of the massive refinery, whose main buildings housed the cousins and their lieutenants. A quarter of the force was on guard at any given time, armed and ready for whatever Snake ultimately managed to throw at them – assuming the weasel didn’t leave the Baytown area to them.
Night had fallen three hours earlier, and the evening shift was halfway through its watch. The warm air was sticky with humidity, and bright trees of lightning over the Gulf pulsed in a cloudbank on the horizon. The sentries manning the guard posts were equipped with handheld radios, and roving patrols along the perimeter checked in with clocklike regularity. One of the details near the southern approach had failed to call in five minutes earlier, and the boredom of long hours of monotonous inactivity was replaced by anxiety as the shift leader attempted to raise them.
“Repeat. Scorpion, this is Ruger. Do you read? Over.”
Ruger, a seasoned killer with a face hardened from a lifetime spent behind bars, listened intently to the soft hiss of static from his handheld, his eyes darting along the area outside the wall. After ten more seconds of silence, he shook his head at his subordinate.
“Could be their battery’s dead,” he said. Two days ago the same thing had happened – one of the patrols had gone dark, sending a chill through the guard detail until the patrol appeared out of the gloom ten minutes later, unharmed, their radio out of juice. “Damned things are getting worse every week.”
“Could be,” his lieutenant agreed, his voice doubtful.
“They still have fifteen minutes before they’re due back, so let’s not freak out until they don’t show.”
The subordinate nodded, and then his head jerked back like he’d been swatted by an invisible hand, and the back of his skull erupted in blood. Ruger gasped at the sight, and then another muffled pop sounded from beyond the range of the spotlight, and the guard to Ruger’s right grunted, the thwack of a high-velocity round through the base of his throat barely louder than a slap. Ruger fumbled with his radio and ducked down. He was almost below the wall when a slug sheared the top of his head off, sending him tumbling backward, the radio and his Kalashnikov assault rifle clattering beside him.
The fourth guard raised his weapon, searching for a target. He saw nothing, but when he squinted into the shadows to better make out any movement, his left eye was replaced by a neat hole, and he slumped to the side, dead before he hit the ground.
The suppressed sniper rifles had been nearly silent, and when six gunmen appeared from the perimeter, walking unhurriedly, they were indistinguishable from a genuine patrol. They made their way to the access gate, and one of the snipers drew a bead on the nearest spotlight and fired.
The light exploded in a shower of glass and blinked out, triggering a rush of men who swarmed toward the gate from across the field. The intruders moved in silence, the night quiet other than the dull pounding of their footsteps on the grass. When the first reached the opening, he led the rest through, signaling to his companions with curt gestures. Within a minute several hundred men had breached the refinery’s defenses and were spreading out, gliding like wraiths in the gloom as more gunmen crossed the field and entered behind them.
Shots rang out from north of their entry point, where another mass of gunmen had used the same ruse to breach the refinery, and then the staccato chatter of assault rifles filled the air as the defenders engaged the attacking force. A tall Crew gunman motioned to his fellows and pointed to the occupants’ tent city off in the distance, and the men advanced at a trot toward the heart of the compound.
They’d made it no more than two hundred yards when a grenade detonated in their midst, followed instantly by a hail of bullets as a half dozen defenders fired at them from atop one of the storage tanks. The attackers took what cover they could as they returned fire. One of the attack force shouldered an RPG and launched it at the top of the tank, where it exploded near the rim, sending a shower of metal and flesh skyward in a shower of destruction. What oil remained in the tank ignited and added to the clouds of toxicity as the gunmen pushed forward, the defenders above no longer raining death down upon them.
The intensity of the shooting increased as they neared the cousins’ headquarters, and the attack force suffered heavy casualties as it fought for every inch against a determined group of cornered rats who could expect no mercy if captured. Both sides lost hundreds of men as they brought their heavy machine guns to bear, the .50-caliber rounds shredding through everything in their path.
Eventually the attack force overwhelmed the defenders, and the headquarters exploded in a fiery blaze. Anyone trying to escape the inferno was gunned down, and a half hour after the assault began, the last shots died away, leaving only the moans of the wounded and a cloud of black smoke from the blaze.
Snake’s radio operator turned from the shortwave console, removed his headset, and fiddled with it nervously.
“Well?” Snake barked from the corner of the room.
“It’s over. We won.”
A harsh smile creased Snake’s hatchet face, twisting the tattoos that covered it so they resembled squirming insects. He nodded in satisfaction and rubbed a hand over his shaved head.
“Of course we did. Any survivors?”
The operator shook his head. “No. As you ordered, everyone we found was executed.”
“How bad are our casualties?”
“They’re still searching, but it looks like almost two hundred.”
Snake’s smirk transformed into a frown. “Christ.”
The operator had nothing to add. Snake spun toward the door and dismissed the man with a wave of his hand. “I’ll be upstairs if anything else comes in.”
“Yes, sir.”
Snake pushed the metal door open and appraised the six fighters waiting for him outside – his security detail of the bodyguards he trusted with his life. He’d known each man for years, and they’d proved their loyalty – a commodity he’d learned to prize since taking over Magnus’s throne, when he had become a target for every malcontent in the Crew.
He’d been insulated from resentment-driven reprisals when Magnus had been alive, his rivals’ enmity blunted by their leader’s ferocity. But Magnus was dead, and when Snake had assumed permanent command, many had refused to play along, culminating in the Baytown refinery faction presenting him with an open challenge that couldn’t go unanswered.
Victory there had been essential to maintaining control, but he knew his problems were far from over. The Crew had far too much influence and wealth for his underlings to give up on their schemes. Snake had known when he announced Magnus’s death that he would face numerous obstacles, but he was ready for them. Inside of a week he’d managed to eliminate the immediate threats, starting with his murder of his rivals among Magnus’s inner circle. The Salazars had been a surprise he hadn’t foreseen, but his swift and absolute elimination of them would se
nd a clear message to anyone else thinking of challenging him.
Framed by his guards, Snake mounted the steps from the basement, lost in thought. He leaned toward his security chief and spoke in a low voice.
“I want my guard detail tripled. Can you find enough loyal men?”
“Of course.”
“I’ll hold you responsible if any prove…unreliable.”
“I understand.”
Snake bypassed the ground level and proceeded to his quarters – a lavish suite of rooms cooled by air conditioning on the upper level of the cavernous hall. His men could hold off a battalion from that vantage point, but he still had difficulty sleeping for more than a few hours at a time, his mind revving into the redline even in slumber. Part of the problem was the meth he consumed in prodigious amounts, but the constant stress of being in the crosshairs wasn’t helping, and he’d taken to softening the buzz with downers, which only partially worked.
The guards took up their station outside his main chamber door and he triple-locked it behind him. The idea of taking over the Crew had seemed like genius, but now, barely a week in, the pressure was wearing at him. The tic in his left eye had started three days ago, and the surge of blinding rage that threatened to drown him when he received bad news had become the norm rather than an occasional aberration. He shook his head as he removed the Desert Eagle he wore at his hip, set it beside the bed, and then lowered himself onto the mattress, fully clothed. His breathing was ragged; he hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, his time consumed with planning the elimination of the Baytown threat, and now even the meth wasn’t keeping him alert enough to function.
Snake’s eyes drifted to the bag of white crystals on a round table by a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, and he forced himself up, the lure of the drug stronger than his body’s demand for rest. A little hit would enable him to keep functioning for a few more hours as reports from the refinery came in. He would sleep after the situation was completely resolved, not before.
That was how Magnus would have handled it.
The snap of the lighter and the crackle of the meth as he sucked in as much of the pungent vapor as he could manage were replaced by the thud of his pulse in his temples, and then he was soaring, his heartbeat spiking, stamina flooding his system as he closed his eyes, the rush almost impossibly euphoric.
Snake coughed twice and sat motionless for a long, silent beat before leaping to his feet. A manic smile revealed yellowed teeth, and he paced the room with jerky movements, muttering to himself, scratching his bare arms, glaring at the furnishings as though they’d insulted him. After several minutes he froze in the center of the room, eyes closed, and then exploded into motion and retraced his steps to the entry door.
When it swung open, his guards maintained neutral expressions at the sight of their leader obviously amped, the corners of his mouth spasming in an unconscious grimace.
“Bring me a girl. Now,” he ordered.
The chief of the guards nodded. “Anything special?”
“Young. I want her young. And scared. A new one.”
The chief took in Snake’s leer and smirked.
“I’ll be back shortly.”
Chapter 2
“They should have called in by now. Something’s wrong.”
Elliot Barnes was standing with his hands on his hips, transfixed by the radio. The riders he’d sent north from Shangri-La to Colorado to scout the most promising location for a new settlement had been gone for five days. The prospective site, Pagosa Springs, was a little over a hundred miles from their valley, in the mountains and sufficiently remote to avoid attention, with water and power from an experimental geothermal plant – assuming that hadn’t fallen into complete disrepair or been destroyed by looters.
The only negative to the location was the harsh Colorado winter, which Elliot was confident they could withstand as well as they had the snow and freezing conditions in their former mountaintop sanctuary. But they had little time to prepare the new location, assuming it was livable – which brought him back to waiting for a report from the scouting party, which had failed to check in.
He’d last heard from them three days earlier, and they hadn’t responded to any of the transmissions Elliot had broadcast over the last twenty-four hours. The coil of anxiety in his gut blossomed as the time had raced by, and he’d spent most of the day in the radio room, fidgeting as the operator sat nearby.
Michael frowned in his seat near the window. “They might have gotten delayed.”
“Or hit a snag. Lame horse. Bridge collapsed. Robbers. We don’t really have any idea what it’s like up there these days,” Arnold said from the corner of the room where he sat with his arms crossed, his face drawn after the hardest week of his life.
After taking stock of the survivors, it had been immediately apparent that the group’s most capable fighters had fallen, leaving women, children, and about sixty able-bodied males – a far cry from the nearly two hundred and fifty militiamen they’d had before the confrontation with the Crew. Many wounded during the battle had succumbed to their injuries over the last six days, and there were now fewer than twenty still hanging on, tended to by Sarah, the sanctuary’s physician, using what slim supplies had survived the shelling.
“What do we do if we don’t hear from them by tomorrow?” Elliot asked, his voice soft. “We have to get moving. One way or another, we need to put some distance between us and this valley – the surviving Crew members may have reached their headquarters by now, and an army could be rolling our way.”
Arnold scowled. They didn’t have the resources to hold off another attack and couldn’t spare anyone to mount guerilla forays against an approaching force, so they were sitting ducks should the Crew decide to finish them – which was highly likely in everyone’s opinion, even with Magnus dead.
And then there was the matter of Santa Fe, with plenty of opportunistic miscreants who would be more than willing to complete the Crew’s job if they thought they could get their hands on Shangri-La’s wealth of antibiotics, gold, and arms. It wasn’t whether anyone would make a play, it was when, and the clock was working against them with each passing hour.
“I still think we should have gone after the survivors,” Arnold griped. “If nobody had gotten away, there would be nobody to report back on what happened, and we’d have bought ourselves more time.”
Michael shook his head. “It would have been impossible to catch everyone. They had too much of a head start. For all we know, they could have radioed from the river, and there’s already a column rolling toward us from Houston or Dallas or Lubbock.”
“Probably not. There’s little chance their mobile transmitters would have reached Houston,” Arnold countered.
“They might not have had to. They could have left some men in Albuquerque to relay messages,” Elliot said. “We’ve gone over this a dozen times. Let’s not bicker over what’s done. We need to focus on the challenges ahead.”
Michael nodded agreement. “Like how we’re going to transport the wounded and all our supplies – not to mention the lab gear.”
Elliot sighed. “I can’t see any way for the equipment other than by horseback over the dam trail. We’d never be able to get it down the canyon with all the rockslides, not to mention the mines.”
“Lucas suggested using the Crew’s vehicles for as long as they last. I think it’s a good idea,” Arnold said. “Even after being shot up, some of them are serviceable – the horse transports and a few of the buses. And a couple of the Humvees.”
“A fine idea, but impractical until we have a destination,” said Michael.
Arnold shifted from foot to foot. “We can’t just sit here forever, hoping to hear from the scouts. We all agreed we had to move within a week. Tomorrow will be the seventh day.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Michael grumbled. “We can all read a calendar.”
“My point is that we’re jeopardizing our survival if we stay any longer. My vote was to leave earli
er, if you remember.”
Elliot interrupted the exchange. “We’ll leave tomorrow. One way or another.”
“But go where, if we don’t hear back?”
“There were some other locations we considered. Pagosa Springs was only one.”
“It was the most promising, as I recall,” Michael countered.
“No argument. Worst case, we can discuss it on the road. But I agree we can’t stay.” Elliot paused. “Arnold, how’s the inventory going?”
Arnold ran down a list of their weapons and ammunition, as well as their portable food stocks, medical stores, and necessary equipment – lathes and tools from the machine shop, the lab essentials, hospital gear. The report was disheartening. Much of their equipment had been damaged by the bombardment in spite of its underground location, the incessant vibration from the shelling having caused some minor cave-ins. When Arnold finished, he glanced out the window at the lunar landscape surrounding the few buildings still standing. The trees that had shaded the river were now bare, their branches transformed into skeletal fingers clawing at the sky.
“Well, that’s more than we had when we started Shangri-La,” Elliot said. “We should consider ourselves lucky. That we survived a full-scale attack by the most powerful group in the region is a testament to the bravery of our people and the preparation that went into creating our defenses.” He hesitated. “I’m sure that wherever we land, we can apply that same determination and make ourselves a home worth taking pride in.”
“The hurdle being the wherever part,” Arnold said.
“We have enough problems without all the negativity,” Michael snapped.
“I’m not being negative. I’m being realistic,” Arnold said coldly. “Without a destination in mind, it’s just a matter of time before we’re picked off on the road. We need to choose somewhere and make tracks, not pat ourselves on the back for surviving.” He frowned slightly at Michael and then looked away. “We have a lot of logistical issues no matter where we go, and they aren’t being solved by standing around and waiting for a call that may never come.”
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