“I may do just that,” Bancroft said. “Can you imagine him becoming a proper teacher after starting out a vermin…?”
“In the world of the Raven, he is what he is, not what he was,” Claudia said quickly to cut off the drunken confession Bancroft was about to make. The words the Owl imparted taught her both intended and unintended lessons. As much as Claudia wished to be free of the Ravens, she knew the construction of society it was based upon was precisely what humanity needed in the world thrown down into chaos. In breaking those rules, the Owl showed her how valuable they were.
“As it should be,” Bancroft said, steel returning to her spine.
The Red Rook’s wallowing, albeit brief, gave Claudia hope for herself and Bancroft. Melancholy was understandable, eradicating it impossible, but with practice it might become fleeting. Claudia lifted her glass, clinked it to Bancroft’s and they both drank.
“Should I ever love in the way you love the Owl, I am certain it will be my death,” Claudia said, unsure of where the leak of honesty came from.
Bancroft shook her head, this time violent enough to let there be no doubt it was in rejection of the statement. “No, no, a good love, a solid love grants life. We’re both still here because the other needs us to be. Find that, and love will keep you from death.”
Maybe she was drunk. Maybe she was pining for Fiona and Veronica and even a little for Danny. Maybe she simply wanted to believe Bancroft. Regardless of the reason, Claudia thought it was the most brilliant thing she’d ever heard and willed herself to remember it regardless of the inebriated state she found herself in.
†
The following morning, with her motorcycle repaired, refueled, and refilled with water, Claudia believed her mount better prepared for the journey than her. She had a hangover of biblical proportions that refused to abate even after she delayed her departure for more sleep. Staying another day to recover could too easily turn into another day and another and so on until she found more than enough reasons to abandon her search permanently; she couldn’t let her hangover be a snowball to start an avalanche no matter how hard Bancroft tried to encourage it. Bancroft and the Owl came out to see her off. She was loaded down with more than enough supplies to make it to San Francisco and back again should she feel the need.
They stood by, awkward in the farewell, as though they were reluctant parents seeing their only daughter off to college. Claudia liked the comparison. It felt normal. It was also something she didn’t get to experience and she doubted Bancroft and the Owl had either.
“If the White Rook built this monstrosity, I’m glad she’s on our side,” Bancroft said, making idle conversation about the most prominent thing in the area.
“You should see the flying machines she built,” Claudia said with a little wink that left ample room to wonder if she was joking.
“One more gift before you go,” the Owl said.
“I am sure I have no more room,” Claudia replied, making a bit of a show of searching the laden bike for further space.
“It’s not so big a gift as that.” The Owl produced a metal rod from his jacket pocket, holding it out in his burned hand by a curved ball handle.
Claudia immediately recognized the bolt action from her rifle. She took it with reverent fingers, confident it would take days to locate, days she didn’t have to find it among the rubble after she got a daylight look at the floor it fell to. She slipped the rifle from the holster along the side of the bike and slid the bolt back into place.
“How did you find it?” Claudia asked.
The Owl pointed to his remaining good eye with the burned stump of his right hand. “This one still works,” he said with a single-sided grin.
“Thank you,” Claudia said, “truly, thank you.”
She left them with those words hanging in the air. It was a goodbye, of sorts, and one of the most honest she’d ever managed. The way she’d left things with Veronica churned in her. She didn’t know how she was meant to say goodbye to the White Queen, but she knew how she’d done it wasn’t going to offer closure of any kind for either of them. She couldn’t even consider how useless and futile her goodbye with Fiona had been, if it could even be called that. Thank you, truly, thank you, felt like a worthy way of leaving things with people who helped her more than she helped them.
The bike wound its way through the remains of Carson City heading northwest to find the highway. She spotted the gallows and the fat, black crows atop it. She wondered after the birds eating Slark carrion. She knew they would if they were hungry enough, but she couldn’t imagine that would be a problem in Carson. As she neared the plank, she saw they had indeed passed on the Gator’s battered body. Three humans, the three men who were to be her protection, were strung up beside the Gator. The metal bands wrapped around them at mid-arm/chest level, wrist/hip, and knees told of the pain they’d suffered before being hanged. The metal bands, like rungs around a wooden barrel, were tightened until they constricted breathing, broke bones, and contorted joints. This was ended by the slow strangulation of hanging as Raven gallows held no trap doors to break necks. Criminals convicted of capital offenses were lifted off the ground by the ropes and left to dangle. Death sentences were rare as the crimes to earn them were few and the belief in the code was nearly absolute. It had been years since Claudia last saw an ironclad hanging.
She stopped in front of the gallows a moment to watch the bodies gently swaying as the crows picked at them. The daughter her father knew would be horrified. The woman she’d become saw only justice of a valiant system. Her aching left eye acted as a reminder, not of what was done to her, but what the laws really represented. If their word was held as truth, all four of them would have died in the building even after the Gator was long dead. In the Ravens, her word was law, not theirs. If they’d listened to her, they would have lived.
“Fools,” Claudia muttered under her breath as she roared away from the macabre scene.
The Ravens were already pushing out the Slark, widening their holdings to the original battle lines. Claudia wouldn’t have to swing nearly as wide to the north to find the end of the Slark line. Maybe, if she wasn’t fast enough, she might even get swept up in the fleeing Slark if Bancroft decided to keep pushing them west. It was a silly thought. Even still, it brought a smile to Claudia’s face.
Chapter 7:
Mutants of a Forgotten City.
Shooting the gap was what Claudia considered it. She skirted the southern edge of Reno, as far from the heart of the city that would contain another Raven outpost that might draw her in with more work and might not be nearly as willing to let her leave as Bancroft. Still, she needed to make the crossing far enough north to avoid the end of the Slark line. With a map and a compass in her possession, this gap shooting took place easily, keeping to unused roads that weren’t nearly as choked with derelict cars as the major freeways of California still were. She broke west onto a two lane road named after a real person. The tall trees and sylvan wilderness shielded her, reminded her of Canada, and sent her morale soaring. Roaring down the open road, through a true forest, toward a possible reuniting with her father, felt right for the first time since she’d parted company with Veronica.
She marveled at the beauty of northern California as she passed through forests, around mountain lakes, passing through the most beautiful parts of the Sierras at one of the best times to do so. As the Tahoe National Forest finally broke around her, she followed Marysville Road down toward Yuba City. Here her swift progress hit its first snag of the day, coming late in the afternoon. Claudia stopped the bike well away from the edge of where Marysville Road emptied into Highway 20. She lowered the pod legs, slipped from the saddle to stretch her back and legs, and took a brief walk to look down into the lowlands below and the devastation they’d suffered. She slipped her map from the pocket of her jacket and re-checked her route. Directly south of her was supposed to be Beale Air Force Base—in its place was an entirely devastated wasteland. To the sout
hwest, Yuba City didn’t look to be much better. Her hunch, not really needing to take a closer look, was that she would lose the road entirely if she tried to pass through the field of utter destruction. Curving south to cut around would require her to rejoin Interstate 80 at some point and would take her directly into what she believed would be Slark occupied territory. To head north around would add hours to her drive and would make no promise of things getting any better. She would begin losing the light in another two hours and would have to make her attempt soon if she was to make it at all.
Claudia returned to the bike, retracted the pod, and gunned the engine down toward the ruins of Yuba City.
She didn’t know what Yuba City was supposed to look like, but she didn’t think it was supposed to be the strangely dusty and dry wasteland it had become. Almost immediately, passing through the shattered city, her sixth sense screamed to her that something was very wrong. She’d passed through several abandoned towns to that point without ever getting such an unwelcome sense. Her rational mind wanted to explain the ominous feeling away as a product of the level of destruction Yuba City had suffered, but Claudia knew better than to listen to her rational mind over her danger-sensing gut.
On the map, highway 20 cut a straight line exactly west through Yuba City before resuming its meandering into the coastal mountain range. If she kept this exact heading, even if she lost the road, she would end up more or less where she should. She’d attached the little ball compass the Owl had given her to the center of the handlebars on her motorcycle. Normally Gieo seemed so detail oriented and fond of multi-functional gadgets that Claudia wondered why the pilot hadn’t done this when she was building the bike. Perhaps the pilot planned on celestial navigation night and day, perhaps she had a better innate sense of direction, or perhaps, and this was what Claudia thought most likely, the pilot simply wasn’t done fine tuning the bike when it was stolen. Regardless of why a compass hadn’t been included in the vehicle’s standard package, Claudia quickly became grateful she’d added the aftermarket feature when the road fell away entirely into a post-apocalyptic wasteland of war-torn rubble.
She veered as best she could among the largest chunks of upended asphalt. The bike rattled beneath her all the same, crunching through a layer of debris and rocks of almost unperceivable thickness. With how focused she was on trying to traverse the shattered ground directly before her, she couldn’t even scan the area for a better option to try to make her way toward. The vibrations even rattled the compass so severely she couldn’t accurately read it to know whether or not she was still heading west. With frustration mounting, her speed plummeting, and no way of knowing if she was even still going in the right direction, Claudia finally slowed to a stop, praying she would be able to get the motorcycle moving again.
She lowered the bracing pod, which struggled to find purchase among the rocks. When it clearly wasn’t going to help hold the bike stable, Claudia retracted it and tried her best to balance the bike between her legs with aid from the internal gyroscopes that held the bike upright during riding. From the look of destruction of Yuba City, the war had taken place a hundred years ago or more. What remained might interest an archaeologist but wouldn’t even be given a second glance by most scavengers. A few trappings of what society once existed still remained among the destruction and dirt that had blown in from somewhere. She could see what she guessed was a McDonald’s sign listing heavily to one side a few hundred meters to the south. The posts for a gas station alcove or some other lofted structure were still standing a little ahead. The top of a bus, or part of the top anyway, poked out a dingy yellow between two huge mounds of gravel to the north. She checked the compass again; she was already quite a few degrees off course, heading in a slightly southern direction now. She slid her rifle from its holster along the side of the bike and scanned the horizon with the scope to see if any roads survived.
Her sixth sense of something being off went into full blown paranoia when she spotted a dusty figure shuffling between the jagged rocks and ruins of old cement buildings. The sun was at her face now, heading quick to the southwest and an eventual setting. Getting a clear picture of what was ahead would be difficult only to get even more difficult. She tore her gaze from the scope to briefly scan ahead. She still couldn’t spot anything approaching a road, though she could see other dusty figures moving among the ruins, no doubt brought to attention by the roar of her bike engine and its colossal tires crushing rocks as it roared into the devastated town.
She focused on one of the figures ahead of her, angling as best she could until the sun’s glare wasn’t obscuring her scope too severely. There was something very wrong with the figure. It was humanoid, yet didn’t move quite right to be a person. She lowered the rifle and glanced around again for a closer target to get a better look at the strange figures wandering around her at an extreme range. She knew two things for certain: they weren’t Ravens and they weren’t Slark. Beyond that she had no way of knowing if they were dangerous or how dangerous. To the north, near a flat area that could possibly be an intact road, she spotted one of the hunched figures.
She lifted her rifle and inspected the figure closely. It was most likely male from the heavy set to its shoulders. It seemed to be short an arm. She turned the aperture on her scope a click to increase the magnification. Entirely swaddled in rags, the man was indeed missing his right arm, but also his left leg below the knee. He was scrambling among the rocks and rubble in a strange crawl using his left arm and right leg as his primary limbs. His head was entirely stripped of hair and his face looked as though it was melted over in plastic; not the familiar chewed up look of burn scars, but literally melted like dripping candle wax.
Claudia didn’t need to see any more—she needed to get the fuck out of there. She strapped the rifle back into its case on the side of her bike. The first rock thrown at her landed woefully short, clattering among the other stones of similar size. The second rock hit close enough to send a spray of shards into her hair. She cranked the engine up and gunned it. The bike wallowed in the loose gravel. She cranked one gear higher and gave the throttle a slow squeeze, repeating a mantra of ‘do not panic—if you panic you are dead’ to herself as she walked herself through the steps of extracting the motorcycle from the mire she’d just put it in by cranking the engine too hard. More rocks and other items began raining down on her, a few even clinking off the bike’s flanks. She finally broke free of the debris, but try as she might, she couldn’t gain any true sense of control over the motorcycle’s path. It bounded and leapt beneath her like a raging bull, bouncing off whatever came into its path, and all she could do was hold on and hope it remained upright.
The dust she’d kicked up seemed to serve a dual purpose. She could no longer see anything through the haze, and she had to squint to see anything at all as she’d only been using sunglasses to that point to protect her eyes and those were immediately flung from her head by a violent jolt during her bull ride. Additionally, the mutants didn’t seem to be able to see her anymore either as their hurled projectiles became increasingly inaccurate into the ballooning bank of dust.
Flat ground and a light breeze at her back righted her path. The needle on the compass, nearly obscured by the dust on the plastic cover, snapped to the north and Claudia knew her course albeit in the wrong direction. She didn’t dare gun the engine again, for fear the obscured road and dust stinging her eyes would suddenly end in a pit, a wall, or some other catastrophe before she could react. As the dust began to clear, slowly expanding her field of vision, she pressed harder on the engine, picking up speed, although she didn’t know how much as all the gauges were covered over in a thin layer of dust. Her exhilaration of possible escape came to a crashing halt when humanoid figures began shooting past her on the road. In the dust cloud, which was clearly following her, it took her a moment to realize they weren’t whizzing past her, she was driving past stationary figures going far faster than she could tell without a real reference point.
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The reaction to this realization came a second too late as she crashed through a group of the mutants at a speed she could only guess at. For this moment alone, she was glad to be partially blinded by the dust in her eyes as the carnage was undeniable. Something hard knocked her right hand from the handlebar in a painful jolt. Something bigger and wrapped in rags made full impact on the front of the bike, shattering the headlamp and knocking the compass off with such force that Claudia had to duck to avoid being smacked in the face by the plastic ball. Falling back on the only information she had regarding road kill, something her father once said to her when they’d nearly hit a deer in the wilds of Manitoba: “If you are about to hit a deer, and you cannot swerve to avoid it, it is better to speed up—make the animal go high over the top.” Of course, he’d swerved to miss the deer. It was just on the edge of what he and their old Toyota Land Cruiser could handle to stay on the road. The near roll over at highway speeds had rattled them both, but not so much that he couldn’t impart the advice and she couldn’t take it to heart. She cranked the engine, prayed to whoever was listening, and roared farther into the collection of mutants. The bike didn’t catapult the mutants over the top, as her father said would happen with a deer, but began rolling over them like some demonic steed on a grisly rampage. They howled inhuman shrieks of pain and curses at her. They ricocheted off the motorcycle when they weren’t sucked under. And the smell, the horrible scent of rotting flesh still clinging to bone, fetid breath, body odor, stale urine saturated cloth, and the putrescence of spilled bowel all combined into a horrific bouquet that threatened to knock Claudia from the bike.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 6