Claudia gave him a false smile and thanked him. The tall, slender, doctor, well past his prime with a lot of miles on bald tires, looked like a bedraggled Irish Setter gone completely white. He took no notice of the thanks. He beleaguered the moment before reluctantly turning to other duties in the chaotic room of patients. Claudia wondered how she’d slept through the chaos as she was normally such a shallow sleeper.
Bancroft helped Claudia from the bed and pointed her to under the bed to find the gear she wasn’t already wearing. Claudia was interested in a hot meal, some sort of bath, and maybe another nap, but Bancroft had other ideas. She waited only as long as it took Claudia to collect her things and lace up her combat boots before ushering her quickly out of the main infirmary.
“Are all the medical staff so attentive?” Claudia asked as they wound their way deeper into the hospital. The more of the building Claudia saw, the more she suspected it was actually a school converted to a hospital at some point. This wasn’t surprising as the Slark targeted hospitals first as standard operating procedure.
“You met the one and only doctor we have,” Bancroft said. “The medics and nurses we can still scrounge are burned out on the worthless side and I had thought Dr. Granger was too until you came in.” Bancroft moved Claudia with gentle nudges on her shoulder in the direction she wanted her to turn, ushering her away from the loudest parts of the converted hospital to more genteel settings. “You were a special success for the good doctor. You came to his care in rough shape and are leaving in pristine condition. That doesn’t happen around here.”
Every glance into the various rooms they passed confirmed this statement. Claudia spotted at least a few makeshift morgues and every wounded soldier she saw appeared to be maimed for life by their injuries. As if to embody the point, the final room Bancroft ushered her into contained one man, burned horrendously yet on the mend. Half his face, scalp, indeed, the entire right half of his body appeared to have suffered severe burns giving him the look of being half-comprised of thoroughly chewed gum. Through the extent of the burns, it was difficult to tell how old the man was. In the lone remaining brown eye, Claudia caught a sense of something wily.
“Meet, the Owl, Corporal Marceau,” Bancroft said, “the last survivor of our scout sniper corps and my husband.”
It was clear that the Owl would never again practice the art of the distant strike. His right hand, and likely his trigger hand, was burned into a useless stump, fingers either fused or missing, and without a second eye for depth perception and range finding, he likely wouldn’t be able to determine shots with any reliability or speed. Bancroft ushered Claudia to a wooden chair next to the hospital bed the Owl occupied, placing her on the left side, and not coincidentally the good side while Bancroft sat on the burned side of her husband.
“A pleasure to meet you,” the Owl said, struggling to form the words with only half a functional mouth. “Don’t mind my face. If it hurts you to look at, imagine how much it must hurt me to have it.”
Claudia smiled and looked brazenly at the wounded part of his face. “It does not bother me in the slightest,” she said, meaning every word of it.
“The scaly fucks have been breaking open the unusable cluster bombs they used to drop from their giant walkers and are hurling the bomblings like grenades,” Bancroft explained. “The Owl was trying to kill the Gator when his sniper nest got hit by a salvo of the things.”
“I fired one too many times,” the Owl said, “and didn’t hit anything of value.”
“The Gator?” Claudia asked.
“The Slark commander on the other side. He came in from who-the-hell-knows-where about six months ago and has pushed our line back from Lake Tahoe to the western edge of Carson City and now he’s threatening even that,” Bancroft said. “If you kill him before you leave, you’ll be doing us a world of good.”
“Leave us to talk, my dear,” the Owl said to his wife. “I’ll make sure she learns from my mistakes.”
Bancroft stood reluctantly, placed a sweet kiss on the burned side of the Owl’s face, and took her leave. The Owl waited a good while, more than long enough for his wife to be well away before returning his attention to Claudia. A few birds, actual song birds, chirped in the trees outside the window of what Claudia guessed used to be an office of some kind. It was a strange turn of events to hear them in such a mournful place.
“Everything I have of value came from before the war,” the Owl explained. “My wife, my name, my skill with a gun…it’s all from before. I was a vermin hunter in a trailer park outside Vegas before the war; my wife was a pit boss at a fading casino in the old dregs of Las Vegas. It was a lean, but good life. In case you’re wondering, that’s where I got the name: the Owl, by killing rats, opossums, and raccoons at night to keep the trailer park clean. Tell me, Corporal, what were you before the war?”
It was taboo to even speak about the before times within the Ravens. What you were, what you did in life before you became a Raven was irrelevant—the society that had made people what they were had been burned out, replaced by what the Ravens built. The skills acquired afterward or use made of any skills carried over determined worth; the hierarchy created by a worthless, opulent society mattered not at all in a world with no need of accountants, lawyers, CEOs, or politicians. As much as Claudia appreciated the new world order, she didn’t see any harm in talking of the past.
“I was a high school freshman,” she said. “I sang in the school choir and was on the gymnastics team.”
The Owl actually laughed at this. “That’d be the truth of it,” he said. “Neither of us could return to what we were before even if the world went back to the way it was.”
Claudia realized too late why the Ravens demanded a purging of one’s past life. The Owl looked at her differently knowing she was an innocent when the invasion began regardless of what she’d become after. There was no such thing as an innocent anymore, but she could see in his remaining eye that he didn’t see her as a viable option to kill the target he’d failed in assassinating. With his livelihood stolen from him, he could only see himself as a defunct exterminator and he could only see her as a choir girl.
“I have seventy-nine confirmed Slark kills, and forty-three confirmed human kills,” Claudia said. “Have no faith in what I was—have faith in the numbers I claim. I swear, I will kill your Gator.”
“Good enough for me,” the Owl said. “Listen and learn from my mistakes…” He rested his head back on the pillow as though he were unloading a great weight, closed his remaining good eye, and began retelling the story of how he’d failed in killing the crafty old lizard.
Chapter 5:
Slaying the Gator.
Claudia checked and rechecked the plan. She scouted the nest and the kill zone on her own and then with her team of three others—coincidentally the three men who had found her near her bike. She didn’t actually remember them, although she was assured they were the same three, not that she cared. Their task was simply to ensure her safety to and from the sniper’s nest, although Claudia suspected the from part wouldn’t be as important as the to part.
Bancroft’s scouts mapped several kill zones along a proscribed path for the plan of luring the Gator into sniper fire when the Owl was to be the assassin. The one Claudia chose of the remaining three had a shot already known to be around 400 meters from fifty or so feet of elevation. She would take the shot from the fourth floor of what appeared to be a shelled out hotel. Of the remaining three firing positions, it was the last before the Slark fully pushed their way into Carson City. Fire pots were set along the route for light, the sniper’s nest was prepped with metal plates along the front of the building to prevent return fire should the Slark spot her before or after her shot, and three escape avenues were mapped; Claudia spotted a fourth route for escape, a long, winding path through the ruins of the western suburbs, but she didn’t mention it during the pre-battle briefing. Claudia and her team bunkered down in the fourth floor of the Ormsby H
ouse Casino in the early afternoon, and waited.
The three men kept their own company, silently playing cards well away from the windows on the attack side of the floor. The carpet was already stripped and the interior walls knocked down, leaving only a cement tomb broken up by an occasional pillar or pile of useless rubble. Claudia made a show of dozing against the wall even though she was too excited to actually sleep. She got the usual butterflies of performance, the same ones she’d always gotten before a choir concert or a gymnastics competition, but in more recent years before battles in which she was to take a vital shot. The last time she’d gotten the butterflies was south of Tombstone when she’d made good on her promise to Fiona by killing Yahweh Hawkins with a beautiful headshot at 350 meters. The shot to come that night was farther out and the target bigger, still the butterflies were the same.
Time to close her eyes and reflect turned into questioning her own sanity. The man at the rest area, if there had even been a man, said he recognized her accent from a man in San Francisco. This was, quite frankly, the flimsiest evidence for anything…possibly ever. Maybe she’d imagined the man. Maybe in her delirious state of dehydration, exhaustion, and fear, she’d imagined a shadowy figure. Tracking her bike at night during a torrential rainstorm seemed nearly impossible. To add to this, her accent was thin and vaguely French sounding—most Americans couldn’t even place the origin language causing it let alone know it was that of a Quebecois and not European French. Even further doubt crept into her when she thought of exactly how deranged and delusional most desert folk became, especially marauders, after long stretches alone without prey. The man might have been crazy, so crazy as to never have been to San Francisco save in his own diseased mind and even if he had, he might not be able to split the differences between her accent and that of Wayne Gretzky, if the man even existed. She was such an idiot sometimes.
Claudia bonked her head back against the cement wall.
Veronica would cover for her. She could stay in Carson City, or go back to Tombstone, or Vegas, or…returning to the machine was not an option. Nor was heading blindly north any sort of plan now that she stopped to think about it. Autumn and winter would be upon her soon and Canada, especially the open lands of Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario, could be unforgiving and brutal as early as October.
Something else strange occurred to her. If her father did live, the last place he would have known to search for her was San Francisco. Her itinerary was a tour, on a bus, that had started from San Francisco, traveled east to Sacramento, down to Las Vegas, with the final stop being Los Angeles, a stop that never came as the Slark invaded less than twelve hours before they were supposed to leave. Her father knew the general idea of the trip, but in her misguided teenage independence, she hadn’t remotely kept him in the loop of where she actually was on any given day. If he was to search for her, San Francisco was likely to be where he would start.
The joy of her concocted thin hope faded when she mused about what might remain of San Francisco. She didn’t know what became of Los Angeles, but none of the stories carried by refugees were good. California certainly seemed to belong to the lizards. She shook this off; whatever was there, she would see it, and then decide what could be done about it all. She was uniquely qualified to survive for quite awhile without society should the need arise to eventually make her way north.
A gentle hand on her shoulder tore her from her musings. The sun was fading in the west, and one of the soldiers with the strange metal breastplates was holding up a hand-cranked radio with the incoming signal light flashing. They weren’t to receive or send any actual radio transmission as some soldiers speculated the Slark were tracking patrols by radio signal. This sounded out of character for the Slark, but so too did a leader of the skill and organization the Gator supposedly possessed. No sooner had she seen the flashing signal light on the drab green handheld than she heard the sounds of battle echoing through what remained of the southwest commercial district.
She slipped into position, settling her rifle amidst some plastic sheeting and rags she’d draped around the window and several other windows throughout the building. She could hear the fighters luring the Slark, their automatic weapons clattering as they retreated in an orderly fashion, drawing the body of the Slark column into new territory. As the battle neared, she could hear the diesel engine of the Slark crawlers giving chase as the mechanical centipede-like walkers clanked along the rubble strewn roads. Through the scope and the haze of the early evening, she could follow the fires lit by the soldiers as they baited the Slark toward the trap. The ground was too open for a traditional ambush in numbers and the Gator’s support force was well known to be larger than anything the humans could muster on short notice. Bancroft’s plan counted on the Gator having the military knowledge to understand his advantage, using his confidence to lure him into a lone sniper. The fires served three purposes in keeping the Slark to a specific line, throwing off their normally acute night vision for anything outside the realm of the fire pots, and showing Claudia the exact path they were taking.
This was the point of exaltation the Owl had warned about. He’d fallen prey to it, thinking everything going to plan meant everything was going well. Just because they were following the path, just because the Slark made a show of letting themselves be lured, didn’t mean anything else would work or that they would be helpless when they arrived. They’d easily sniffed out his sniper’s nest and assaulted it expertly. Claudia took a deep breath, calming herself for the coming onslaught, steeling herself for a difficult shot as she’d made up her mind she would only be taking one.
The fighting men of the Ravens came into sight first. They were indeed working well together in luring the Slark, keeping their distance but never too far, and always pressing an attack should the Slark appear to waiver in their resolve. The ebb and flow of battle was nothing new to Claudia. She’d been in more than a few and always felt the flow as if standing in a storm with shifting winds. This one was a flood gate though, waiting to burst through, and it finally did shy of her position. The Slark made a terrible charge, frustrated by their numerical advantage being stymied again and again by the fleeing Raven soldiers. The rush didn’t entirely catch the Raven men off guard, although enough damage was done to put a hopping step in the three men of her escort. She held out her hand to them, palm down, and gestured for them to hang back. They were acting, as she’d instructed, as decoys at other windows, and now she was regretting the instruction. If she’d held them back near the stairs, they wouldn’t have been able to see the battle turning against the men below and they wouldn’t be antsy to flee or join the fight. It was too late now to remedy that mistake in judgment.
The Slark crawlers pushed into view finally, three in all. The laboring engines running on barely processed diesel fuel struggled to move the heavy machinery at much more than a crawl, forcing most of the Slark soldiers to walk alongside, reserving the fortified positions on the crawlers for the most important of the lizard army. For what it was worth, and Claudia didn’t think it was worth all that much, the Slark soldiers appeared to have suffered some pretty extreme maiming of their own in the standoff. Many were scarred or missing limbs as well although the aliens had more limbs to lose before becoming useless in combat. There was speculation among the Raven scientists charged with learning and understanding the Slark that they behaved much like earth lizards in being able to regenerate even severe body damage when they shed their skin. From the look of the Slark army, soldiers couldn’t be spared to allow this level of healing without depleting the force needed to keep pressure on the Carson City humans.
Claudia scanned the first crawler and the escorts on foot around it. The Owl said he’d fixated on the first one when he’d made his attempt, and he believed this might have led to his missing the Gator. She searched again and again, checking and re-checking the lizard men, finally concluding, the Gator was not among them. The three men, her escorts started to move toward her, she could feel th
eir eyes on her, but she held out her hand again and for the moment they returned to their positions. They were eager, unused to the patience required of the scout sniper, and she was now regretting their very existence in the building; Bancroft’s reasoning behind the escort was sound as the Owl might not have suffered such grievous injuries had someone been there to put out the fires on him. Still, Claudia wasn’t planning on getting set on fire, so they were more of an irritation for her than a source of security.
The second crawler through was the one she believed the Gator would be on, in the middle of the formation, able to rely on defense from the first and third in case of an ambush. She didn’t like the third for it, didn’t believe the Gator would lead from the rear, although she tried her best not to fixate as the Owl had. On the second crawler there were two possible targets, one on the crawler and one walking beside it. She moved on from these two, noting their positions, but not taking her initial impression as solid—this too was a mistake the Owl had made. He’d stuck the Gator label to a target too easily and only learned after that the one he’d killed was a decoy. By the time he learned this lesson, his advantage was gone and he had to scramble to find a specific target within a kicked hornet’s nest. Surprise was an advantage Claudia had no intention of relinquishing.
The third crawler, which the Owl said he hadn’t even really known was coming, didn’t appear to be anything but support crew working to rearm the first two crawlers and their fire teams. Claudia inspected it in disbelief, not that she thought the Gator would be on it, but simply out of shock at the organization level the Slark were showing. They’d lost their command structure—they weren’t supposed to know how to organize military raids anymore than human farmers, mechanics, and fishermen were. There was something indeed special about this Gator. He was either a soldier who had survived the cataclysm or he was smart enough to learn how to become a soldier under pressure. The Slark on the re-supply crawler were all too small to be the Gator. They were what the Ravens referred to as whelps—smaller Slark trusted only with menial tasks and cowardly in the extreme typically. Claudia was a little surprised they would be trusted anywhere near combat.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 4