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 h
e 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.
Sierra helped Eve prepare her roll and then sat down heavily on her blanket. Ruby pushed some rocks together, gathered kindling, and started a fire using her lighter. When it was crackling, she removed a dented pot with a thick wire handle from her bag, filled it with river water, and then placed it into the fire using a branch. She watched the mesmerizing flames with Sierra and Eve, waiting while the water heated.
“You hungry?” Ruby asked.
“Yes,” Eve said, nodding.
“Bet there are some fish in this river.”
Sierra yawned and then managed a smile. “I take it you know how to fish.”
“Not hard,” Ruby said, going to her saddlebags and retrieving a length of monofilament neatly wound on a plastic spool, with a small spinning lure on one end. “All you have to do is be smarter than the fish. And more patient.” She pointed to where a plant hung over the water. “I’d expect that would be a good spot. Bugs will drop off the leaves into the water, and the current will be mild from where the rocks above it are breaking the flow. If I was a fish, that’s where I’d be.”
Eve eyed the older woman. “Really?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Half an hour later, they had two reasonably sized bass cleaned and broiling over the fire. When the fish were cooked through, the three ate greedily using their fingers and washed the meal down with some of Ruby’s tea. Stomachs full, Sierra moved to her bedroll, accompanied by Eve, who looked ready to drop.
“Think it’s safe to catch some sleep?” Sierra asked.
“I’m sure it is. They’re miles away. With all the river crossings, I can’t imagine them making it here anytime soon…if at all.”
“How do you want to do this?”
“One of us needs to keep watch,” Ruby said, patting her shotgun.
“You’ve had a rough night. I can take first shift.”
“Are you sure?”
“Get a few hours of rest, and I’ll wake you when I can’t keep my eyes open any longer. Deal?”
Ruby felt the weight of every one of her years as she battled the fatigue that had been wearing at her since the adrenaline rush of the river rescue had burned from her system. She could barely think, she was so tired, which made her decision easier – the younger woman was more resilient.
“Deal. But wake me if you have even the slightest suspicion anyone’s coming.”
“I will.”
Ruby took another look at Eve, who was already asleep, her face shaded by the trees, and smiled. Youth was wasted on the young. What she wouldn’t have done for some of the little girl’s calm assurance that everything would be fine, much less her stamina.
She lay down and closed her eyes to the rush of the frothing white rapids down the bank. Her back ached and her legs felt like she’d been beaten with a lead pipe. As she drifted off to sleep, her last thought was that they were really in deep weeds if Lucas hadn’t been able to find the note or, worse, never showed up at the rendezvous point.
It seemed only moments later that Sierra was shaking her shoulder. Ruby jolted awake and found herself staring into the younger woman’s frightened eyes.
“What is it?” Ruby asked.
“Someone’s coming.”
“Dogs?”
“No.”
“How far?”
“I…not very.”
Ruby leapt to her feet, shotgun in hand, just as four armed men with scraggly long hair and wild beards crossed the bridge, their weapons pointed straight at her. Eve rolled over, awakened by Sierra’s warning, and sat up with a shocked expression at the sight of the gunmen. The one in the lead stopped twenty yards away.
“Drop your guns,” he ordered.
Sierra looked to Ruby for guidance. The older woman shook her head. If they tried to shoot it out at that range, they stood no chance – and Eve would likely be killed in the fray.
“Who are you?” Ruby demanded, stalling for time to think.
“Drop ’em, or I shoot.”
Ruby slowly lowered her shotgun and placed it on the ground. Sierra hesitated, but faced with certain death, tossed the AR-15 on the bank in front of her and raised her hands. The man stepped forward. “Keep ’em high. Skeet, search ’em.”
A short man beside the leader moved forward and handed over his rifle, and then continued to the women and did a thorough frisk. He held Sierra’s 1911 pistol up, examined it, and then slipped it into his waistband. When he was done with the younger woman, he approached Ruby and did the same. Ruby suffered the indignity in frowning silence, not wanting to provoke anything worse than they were already facing.
Skeet moved to Eve and repeated the procedure. Once finished, he stepped back and regarded them. “That’s everything,” he said.
“What’re you delicate blooms doin’ out here in God’s country?” the leader asked.
“Point A to point B,” Ruby said. “What’s it to you?”
The man ignored her and spoke to the gunman on his left, his attention still fixed on the women.
“All right. Lenny, throw Skeet some rope. Tie the two young ones up, and Rick, you get the horses.”
“You can’t!” Sierra protested.
“Who’s gonna stop me?” The man spit. “Should be glad that’s all I’m gonna do. Least for now.”
“You have no right.”
“Got more guns. That’s all the right I need.”
Ruby frowned. “What are you going to do with me?”
“Everyone’s got a best-if-used-by date, lady. You’re way past yours.”
“Who are you?” she countered.
The man offered an evil grin. “Think of us as gypsies. We trade anything we come across. Sometimes stuff, sometimes animals, sometimes people.” The man paused and looked her up and down. “Nobody’s gonna give us anything for you. Not even Skeet there.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that. I’m an expert with herbs and medicine. Teeth. Horses. Anything that needs attention. That’s more valuable than you may think.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah? Prove it.”
“In my saddlebags. You’ll find a ton of herbs. You know many people that carry around large quantities of herbs who don’t know how to use them?”
“Billy?” Skeet asked the leader.
“Go take a look,” Billy snapped, his gun unwavering.
Skeet returned a minute later with Jax. “She ain’t lyin’.”
“So you’re going to kidnap us?” Sierra demanded.
“Way you should think about i
t is more like I’m not gonna kill you,” Billy corrected. He looked her up and down. “Come to think about it, you match someone the boys in Pecos put the word out about. Bet they’d pay through the nose to get you back.”
“You bastards…”
Billy laughed. “Got some spirit. I like that. Make the trip go by faster.” His tone grew serious. “Skeet’s gonna tie you and the brat up nice and gentle, less’n you give him lip, in which case it’ll go hard on you.”
“You don’t have to tie us up.”
“Don’t have to do anything. But I’ll feel better once you’re hobbled some.” He looked around. “Just you three, huh? Damn fools.”
“We haven’t done anything to you,” Ruby tried.
“World’s done plenty. Just the way it is. Eat or be eaten. Today you’re the food.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way.”
“Lady, you’re starting to get on my nerves, and I only been talkin’ to you for two minutes. Maybe you should shut your trap before I think twice about takin’ you on a ride with us.”
“Where are we going?” Sierra asked.
“I’m thinkin’ Pecos might be a good start.”
“Please. Don’t do this. They’ll kill us,” Sierra pleaded. “She’s just a little girl.”
“Lot of misery in this here world, candy pants. ’Sides, way you look, they won’t kill you. Might wish you were dead by the end of it, but nobody’s gonna let a fine piece like you go to waste.”
Sierra looked away. “You’re animals.”
“Don’t hate the playah, sweet thing. Hate the game. Ain’t that the expression?”
Skeet and Billy laughed together at his mangling of the old maxim. “Now hold still, or you’re gonna get hurt,” Skeet said, uncoiling the rope. “Be a shame to have to hurt you – bring a lower price with a broken nose.”
When they were bound, Billy whistled, and another four men appeared from the trail, all of them filthy and feral looking. They approached Sierra and admired her with Billy, who was obviously the chief of the little band, and let their horses drink while Skeet and Lenny helped Sierra and Eve onto Nugget. Ruby got no assistance, but once she was on Jax, Skeet approached and tied her wrists. “Just in case, grandma,” he sneered as he cinched the knot tight.
The Day After Never (Book 2): Purgatory Road Page 9