The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2)

by Cassandra Duffy

  “Not that you’ll hear me complaining, but you’re quite the little heat reactor,” Liam said loud enough to be heard above the rain.

  Claudia didn’t know how he knew she was awake or if he was just talking to talk. “Someone told me it was an Irradiate trait to exude heat, although I think I was always somewhat hot blooded.”

  “If that’s true, you’ll be popular in the winter,” Liam said.

  “Who is to say I’m not already popular?”

  “Touché, lieutenant.”

  Silence hung between them for awhile. Liam’s shivering stopped, which Claudia had barely noticed until after it was gone. His breathing was evening out and she suspected he was going to fall back to sleep soon. There were questions she wanted to ask him in the darkness, questions she might not be as interested in asking tomorrow. “What brought you to San Francisco before the war?”

  “I was supposed to play professional football…er…soccer for the L.A. Galaxy team, but I never saw the field. A month after landing in Los Angeles, it was overrun with those giant metal machines of death. Bad luck or good, I’m still not sure which, and a few different evacuations landed me in San Francisco right before it fell,” Liam said. “Do you mind answering the same question?”

  “Maybe later,” Claudia replied.

  “I don’t mind a little mystery, but my natural curiosity and active listening skills will win out eventually,” Liam said.

  “I’ll watch for that.”

  They fell asleep again, this time to a more restful slumber. When Claudia came to the next morning, the fog had abated, but the sky was still overcast and the smoke of war and wildfires still hung low in places. Her beret was a little off kilter and when she looked up to Liam, she figured out why. At some point in the night, he’d rolled his head almost entirely to one side to sleep with the top pressed against the ground. In turning into the position that looked remarkably like something only a housecat would find comfortable, the auburn stubble on his solid chin had caught on the felt of her hat. She nudged him in the stomach with her thumb and he came to the world with fluttering eyes and a little yawn, calm as if he’d awoken in his own bed.

  “Mind putting the kettle on while I get the paper?” Liam said with a little grin.

  “Sleeping cold, wet, and on the dirty ground, yet he wakes up with a joke,” Claudia murmured. She extricated herself from his embrace and the nearly toppled shelter roof to stretch beside the stream. She spun off the cap of her canteen and took a drink of the hastily purified water. It had the unpleasant chemical taste of iodine, but it was refreshing in her dried mouth. Liam would need water soon. If she’d realized that earlier, she might have rigged up something to catch rain water when the deluge started the night before.

  Liam slipped from the shelter as well, dug around in the roof a bit, and pulled out his half-full canteen from the branches. He took a sip and winked to her. “My mom used to say, ‘if you can’t wake with a song in your heart, what’s the point of waking at all?’” Liam rustled his hand through his messy hair to dislodged the bits of dried mud collected from sleeping on the ground. “Of course, she was a proper bipolar nutter who spent quite a bit of time not getting out of bed because of her depression.”

  Claudia smiled and shook her head. It’d been a long while since she’d had company out in the wild, and even longer since she’d had company she actually enjoyed on her scouting missions. “We should get moving,” Claudia said.

  “Right you are, lieutenant.” Liam removed a wide brimmed British Special Forces hat from his jacket pocket and settled it over his head. When Claudia gave the hat a weird look, he shrugged. “I’m Scottish,” he said with a laugh. “I’ll burn to a crisp when the sun comes out, even in the fall.”

  “Where did you get the hat?”

  “Raided a military surplus store at one point or other. Why? Where did you get yours?”

  Claudia straightened her beret. The insignia patch on the front identified her as a Canadian Special Operations Commando. Technically, it was her father’s hat that he’d given to her before she left on her choir trip to America, back when there was an America and a CSO. Strangely, Liam was the first person to actually ask her about it although others had made vague comments about it through the years. She still wasn’t ready to tell him who her father was, or give him a hint that would help him figure it out. She liked how casual he was around her; she liked his jokes and easy manner. If he knew she was the great commander’s daughter, he might back away to a formal distance the way Olivia did.

  “I won it in an arm wrestling competition,” Claudia replied.

  The answer seemed to please Liam as he smiled and nodded with an appreciative grin on his face. “I’ll consider myself warned not to bet anything I’m not willing to lose in an arm wrestling contest against you,” he said.

  Chapter 21:

  Options Being What They Are…

  It didn’t take long to figure out the mountain wasn’t going to be passable with the limited supplies of a couple rifles, knives, a grenade or two, and the clothes on their backs. The hill wasn’t a hill, but probably a mountain that was part of a range, and may have even had a name before the Slark came along and destroyed California, irradiated the soil, and planted horrible lasher trees everywhere. They’d had to see the now nameless mountain first hand as he was Scottish and she was Canadian, and neither of them knew California as it once was. They turned back, and while the failure hit Claudia in her already morose-leaning core, it did little to diminish Liam’s good mood.

  “I mean to say, four hands and they can’t be bothered to hold something in any of them,” Liam continued his diatribe about how ridiculous the Slark were in how they held their weapons. “What did Slark criminals do back on their home world if the Slark police caught them? ‘Twiddle your weapon thumbs idly while we gather enough handcuffs to fit all your gangly arms.’” He’d already pointed out that their weapon triggers were actually rings on the ends of wires attached to what he believed was the thumb on their three fingered hands. Claudia was glad to find someone else thought it was equally preposterous that their weapons were wrist mounted, although she hadn’t put nearly the consideration into it that Liam clearly had. Still, something he’d said resonated with her.

  “What do you think their home world is like?” Claudia asked. They’d been heading back in the general direction they’d come. Early in the day, the sounds of war echoed in the north, but as noon came and went, the sounds faded beyond hearing, indicating to Claudia the battle was heading toward the wall.

  “A dead, useless rock by now, I would imagine,” Liam replied. “I read a book once, I can’t remember who it was by, that spoke about an alien race whose planet was all used up and they started killing each other off until a race of pink jellyfish people came and saved them in space ships.”

  “That was from a video game,” Claudia said with a smirk.

  Liam winced and shook his head. “I knew I gave too much detail. You bloody well caught me; I’m not much of a reader, but I used to enjoy a good video game.”

  “I’ll forgive it for the moment, but only because I need you to consider an unappealing proposal,” Claudia said. They stopped for a minute for her to point out what she’d been pondering since they were forced to turn back from the mountain. “We’re stuck between a hostile army on the north, a forest of certain death on the south, and a mountain on the east, which means we have to keep heading west in a no-other-options sort of way. You’re going to run out of water if it doesn’t rain again soon and we’re going to need food. While I can eat the game around here…” Claudia shuddered inwardly and wondered exactly what it would take to convince herself to eat one of the abomination deer if they couldn’t find something less mutated. Liam looked to her as though he’d nearly worked out where she was going with the seemingly unsolvable problem. “…there’s only one source of meat around here that isn’t irradiated,” she said softly.

  “You can’t mean…”

&n
bsp; “I heard the feudal lord of Tombstone ate Slark all the time and he seemed healthier than anyone.”

  “Then why are you talking about him in the past tense?”

  “We sent him packing into the desert where I would imagine he ate several more Slark before dying of thirst.” Veronica hadn’t thought he’d really died and neither had Fiona, but that was all semantics as far as Claudia was concerned—she’d watched Zeke walk out into the desert as good as dead.

  “I’ll try to muster up the courage by the time we get back to the bodies we shot yesterday,” Liam said.

  “If it helps your resolve, the other option is to die,” Claudia said.

  “And don’t think I won’t be considering it seriously,” Liam said, trying his best to keep a straight face, although a flicker of a smile worked its way in.

  They walked on, finding the bodies of the Slark they’d shot the day before by mid afternoon. The sun had burned through the fog and cloud cover at some point in the late morning, and the Slark bodies were bloated and already beset by flies, several of which looked mutated. Claudia was starving, and she’d already seen a few rabbits on their trek that didn’t look too deformed, but she didn’t want to eat while Liam went hungry. For a brief, impetuous moment she even thought she might try eating Slark meat with him so he’d feel better about the whole thing. She’d only known him for a day and she was already concerned with his happiness and comfort—she cringed inwardly at what that could mean.

  They soon came across where the wildfire started on its westward tear through the rolling grasslands. A few spires of weak smoke said the fire had mostly burned itself out, leaving the overwhelming scent of burned grass in the air. Trudging through the tall grass to that point was tiresome, but walking over the charcoal remains of the increasingly alien landscape was downright unpleasant, although the scorched, ashen remains of the field were far easier to walk over. They’d encountered very few lasher trees to that point, and judging from the blackened field stretching out as far as the eye could see Claudia suspected they weren’t going to see anymore anytime soon.

  “I don’t mean to point out your future misery here, but this will about eliminate wild game from your diet,” Liam said, kicking up a bit of ash.

  “I guess we both get to find out what Slark tastes like.” Claudia couldn’t decide what was more repellant to her: eating the green Slark meat or eating one of the five legged deer with the Picasso heads.

  “Is there a reason you’re acting as though we might be out here awhile?” Liam asked.

  “You can never tell with these things,” Claudia said, although she could tell. The more she saw of the communications beams above her head, the more she doubted there would be a gap for them to slip through anytime soon. She’d counted two dozen the first night, and though they weren’t as easy to see during the day, she suspected that number had doubled. The western flank was lighter when it came to the beams, likely because of the fire that swept through, but this seemed to be only a momentary setback as new beams were cropping up in front of them every few hours.

  “Then we best get to work shooting some fresh Slark,” Liam said, “because I’m hungry and only planning on getting hungrier.”

  “Speaking of which…” Claudia whispered under her breath. She pointed, although she knew it wouldn’t do Liam any good. “There’s a beam coming online right over there.” The beams always started by flickering in intervals with a light pink color and then turned to solid blue streaks when they were in use and likely hardened against interference. The beam in question was just over the next rise and it was still in the flickering pink state.

  She grasped Liam by the arm and pulled him back from hiking up the hill right away. “We’ll stick out, you especially, in this landscape,” Claudia said. Most of her clothing was black or gray, and her hair was black, meaning she’d only need to conceal her face to cover her appearance in the burned up landscape, but Liam didn’t have a scrap of black on him aside from the soot clinging to his boots. “Start rolling around on the ground.”

  Liam reluctantly did as he was told, humming a tune to himself as he did, only singing softly the chorus which mentioned something about a roll in the hay with a sweet maid. Claudia tried not to laugh out loud for fear of alerting the Slark to their position. She scooped up a handful of the ash from the ground and poured water from her canteen over it. The ash turned into black slurry in her palm and she quickly coated her face in the mixture. When Liam’s clothes were dusted by the soot on the ground, he rolled onto his back and looked up at the sky.

  “That was easily as weird as I suspected it would be,” Liam said.

  “It’s about to get weirder.” Claudia knelt beside him and began painting his face with the black mixture. He made a few faces of discomfort at the cold, scratchy stuff being rubbed across his skin, but didn’t move away. His face and clothes were reasonably camouflaged and for the part of the plan he was playing, he simply needed to be slightly less easy to see while she was the one who truly needed to hide. She helped him to his feet and handed him his rifle that he’d set aside to start his rolling.

  “If we are where I think we are, my tractor should be just around the base of this rise,” Claudia said. “If you circle around to the south, you can use it as cover to draw their attention away from the beam.” She plucked the two pineapple grenades from her belt and handed them to him. “Use these only if there’s more than ten. Less than that, we can take out with gunfire without alerting too much support. We’re far enough behind the main line that they likely don’t have much security for this location.”

  “Where will you be?” Liam asked, clipping the grenades to his belt.

  “I’ll go right over the top of the rise, find a comfy place to lie down, and flank their position when they turn back toward you,” Claudia said, pointing to the hill above them.

  “How lucky am I that the officer who found me knows more than a few things about waging war in the wilds,” Liam said with an appreciative nod. “Luckier still that she’s a looker even covered in black smudges.”

  Claudia was glad the charcoal mixture on her face covered the blushing she was likely doing. “Focus,” she snapped, trying to banish the warming effects of the flattery, especially since she’d just told him she planned on using him as bait, which he hadn’t mentioned. “You don’t need to kill them, so don’t take any risks with your cover. Just draw their attention and their fire.”

  “I will endeavor to be enticing and unattainable at the same time,” Liam said, adding a sloppy salute.

  The impetuous, romantic side of Claudia snuck up on her, and flirty words exited her mouth before she could wrangle them, “reserve the unattainable part only for the Slark.” Before he could reply, she pushed him toward the south. “Now go.”

  He jogged off with a spring in his step, although she attributed it to his natural affability and not necessarily that she’d said something mildly suggestive to him. She started her slow, deliberate walk up the hill, dropping to crawl on her stomach as she neared the top of the ridge. She moved leisurely, adding more and more soot to her own cover as she went. The top of the hill had a few natural undulations which she settled among. Below her, possibly four hundred yards away, she spotted the Slark position.

  Half-a-dozen of the aliens were collected around a tripod device that stood three times as tall as on of them with a spike on the top, fitted with a strange, green lens that was the source of the flickering beam heading south. Claudia waited as long as she could before pulling her rifle up to use the scope. Any glinting of light off the metal weapon with the glass lens scope might give away her position prematurely. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Liam skulking up low and fast in a crouched stance. He was to the burned out remains of Tractor 23, across an impressive expanse of open terrain without being seen. For such a tall man, he was remarkably stealthy.

  Claudia flipped open the cap on her scope and settled in to observe her enemy. The Slark were clearly a communi
cations team as only two of the six were actively armed and none were paying much attention to their surroundings. This was true of most Slark she’d fought—adept at their tasks, but with poor discipline. Until the Gator, she’d actually started to think the Slark didn’t even have soldiers and only succeeded in the earliest stages of the war because of their ridiculous technological advantage. Without the command structure of military minds, the Slark seemed no better than humans at keeping their soldiers in line, especially conscripts. She suspected she was likely looking at the Slark equivalent of six cell phone salesmen instructed to set up and guard a communications relay in a support position.

  Liam seemed to be taking a long while lining up his first shot. Claudia began to wonder if he was waiting for a signal from her when he finally fired. She heard the shot and saw the round hit home. He was maybe a hundred and fifty yards from the targets, yet he made a solid first shot with an open-sight rifle. The Slark he’d hit in center mass, dropped onto its strange backward knees, and then pitched over sideways, obviously dead. The analogous organ to a heart on the Slark was actually lower and set slightly to the right—Liam’s shot, intentionally aimed or not, had hit it dead on.

  Claudia zeroed in on the remaining armed Slark, found its head as soon as its attention went from its fallen compatriot to search for the source of the rifle fire. He glanced up almost directly at her position before she put a round through his head. She looked for another target, but found the Slark dropping like flies. Liam had switched the setting on his rifle and was putting a spray of bullets onto their clustered position that was tearing through the unsuspecting Slark. One managed to take refuge behind the support leg of the mobile relay tower, and this one Claudia shot down, landing her bullet high on his chest. The entire conflict was over and done with in a matter of twenty seconds or so. The tower continued flickering with its pink, broken light.