by Nick Cole
But that rider had been different than the ones of the first wave. A white guy. Typical Hell’s Angel, hell bent for leather type from back in the day before the blindness struck, heralding the end of everything.
Odd, thought Walker. Road gangs didn’t usually work together. They were too tribal. Too likely to start fightin’ with each other when the pickings got slim or even when there was something good to fight over.
Other bikers from the second wave were dropping their fat tired hogs in the sand, unlimbering heavy hunting rifles and beginning to draw down on the bus.
A loud Daaaang sounded off the clap-trap armor of the observation deck and Walker dropped down into the bus. Bullets were beginning to careen off the thick armor they’d pieced together and welded to the sides of the bus along their travels. A cobbled together and reinforced heavy-duty suspension allowed the bus to carry the added weight. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.
Now Walker’s shooters would take their time and find their targets, or so he hoped. It was just a matter of time before the armored convoy wore out their attackers and then, hopefully, Mason would come in at the bikers from behind.
“Judy’s hit!” someone screamed. Walker threaded the shooting nests and found Judy. Her teeth were gritted as she tried to tie off a bandage with one hand.
“Forget about me, Walker!” she grunted. “Just got grazed by a stray.”
Walker checked her. She was right. A war wound to brag about later, maybe on a gulf coast beach somewhere. Maybe if they lived past today.
He walked along the aisle, trying to see out of the slats, trying to see the third wave.
Where had they gone, He wondered.
***
An hour later, they were still pinned down and there was no sign of Mason. Walker chanced a bold look from the deck of the observation tower and saw no sign of the quick reaction force anywhere. Bikers were merely taking unmolested pot shots at the small mobile fort. But Walker knew he had ammo to spare and food and water and shelter. They could wait out their attackers for weeks out here along the highway and the scrub. They’d done it before. They could do it again if they had to.
But something’s wrong this time, he thought as he searched for the missing Mason. He knew it in his heart.
***
Toward sunset, they saw black smoke rising from the small hill where Mason had led the reaction force. There was nothing good about those twisting black smoky twirls and when Walker put the ‘nocs on the hill he saw heat waves shimmering up from ominous flames, growing around a silently shrieking woman he knew as Cat from Colorado. One of Mason’s shooters. Another wooden pillar was pushed upward and he saw a bloodied Mason strapped and bound to it. He saw heat waves and flames and then he lowered the busted ‘nocs and Walker knew they were in trouble this time.
The sun was bloody in the west. The night sky above wide and streaked in black and blue. Minutes later, as all the vehicle commanders, the surviving vehicle commanders, rallied in the center of the mobile fort, Walker told them it was time to mount up and push on under cover of night.
Flee, was what he thought. Remembering how he’d fled for days on end after the Fall of Taos. He’d flee again.
As Walker told them what to do and where to go if they got separated, Rufus the bus driver began to lean on the ancient Bluebird school bus horn. A loud blaring bleat. Walker ran to the door of the bus and up the steps. Rufus, rangy scraggly-chinned Rufus, pointed through the armored slats of the front windshield and out toward the road beyond. The road that led into the east, through a place called the Basin. The road south of Hagersville.
Something was out there on the road.
One ancient massive headlight bore down on them, racing toward the openings in the slats. Even in the moment that Walker watched it, tried to understand it, tried to make yet another plan to deal with yet another disaster, it moved from far to near with startling speed.
He had only one thought in that final moment before impact. He yelled, “Run!”
But he couldn’t be sure if he’d actually yelled.
A moment later, an old priority mail delivery truck packed with a mixture of fertilizer and other chemicals that go boom slammed head-on into the bus. In the moment just before that, Rufus saw the wide-eyed terror of the suicide driver as he raced at them. A biker with hate and anger and fear and even something else in his eyes.
Belief maybe.
Something.
Then, Boom.
***
The moon was high that night. It was midnight maybe, when the last of the shooters pinned down in the shattered vehicles ran out of ammo close to hand.
A bleeding and badly burned Walker, lying stunned and immobile beneath one of the semis, watched as the bikers, all different types, multiple gangs even, he guessed, came in to finish off what remained of the survivors. Those who’d lived past the initial explosion and sniper fire.
One of the Mexican bikers came in through the ragged, blown open gap in their mobile fort. He was short and built like a bull. Pancho Villa mustache. Machete. Stereotype. Walker could see the 1 Percenter patch and the El Diablo drawn in ghostly white paint across the back of the dusty black leather jacket when the biker turned away from him, bending down to hack one of the other wounded survivors to death.
And there was something else. A large white splash of paint under the El Diablo, and imprinted on the white splash was a black hand.
No more bullets.
Knife work now.
When the man’s back was turned, Walker pulled a body—the body that used to house one of his few true friends—over him and he laid very still, forcing himself to take in air slowly, with almost imperceptible breaths, knowing the ruse probably wouldn’t work. But it was all he had left after everything ended, again.
He’d been right, he thought, right about better times. Right about not believing even himself regarding them.
Chapter 3
Ellis Kint rolled out of his pallet at his normal time and his head drooped to his chest as he stretched his calves and clinched and released them in the darkness. Systems check. His ability to survive was directly related to his ability to work, so he’d become increasingly attuned to the condition of his body, testing it from the moment he rolled out of the rack. The slight twinge of his calf muscles wanting to cramp told him that he was low on potassium. He’d need to add some dark, leafy greens to his diet today. That is if the goats hadn’t gotten into the garden again. Yesterday the kale and collards were standing good and tall. Hopefully, the goats hadn’t destroyed anything overnight.
“Goats,” he sighed in the darkness. “Who needs ‘em?”
We do, he answered himself.
He straightened his pallet and pushed it up against the wall. That’s what he called it. His pallet. Beds were for the time before the Beginning, before the blindness. This was a new world, and he’d determined that beds were for people without cares and fears and threats and woes. Everything had changed since the Beginning. Pallet-time, that’s what he said when it was time to turn in at night. A man sleeping on a pallet has his woes and doesn’t underestimate them.
Ellis had plenty of woes. Of that he was most certain. Just yesterday the goats had gotten into his seedlings again, and another week’s worth of work had been ruined in just a few minutes. Now everyone was looking to him for answers. The old saying was mostly true. If a fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold a goat. Something had to be done, but Ellis was out of ideas, at least for the moment. One solution—a bad one—always popped into his mind first. They could kill and eat the four Alpine goats (two milking nannies, a female kid, and one billy,) but then there wouldn’t be any milk for the family.
Not an option worth considering.
Milk was often the main thing that would keep them alive when the other food ran low. Feeding the family was a constant concern. A daily one. What
bigger care is there than the survival of the family?
And while you are worrying about milk and goats and feeding the family, somewhere out there a horde might be moving your way.
He called them his family, this pack of young pirates and beggars that had adopted him as their surrogate dad. They weren’t kin to him, though. At twenty-two years old he was too young to have kids as old as this bunch. They counted on him for answers, though—the ten of them did—and now they wanted answers about the goat dilemma.
That would have to be put off for a bit. There were more urgent concerns. Like the water problem. A world grown used to water delivered just-in-time through pipes and pushed by electric pumps didn’t understand the miracle and constant necessity of water. Not enough water, you die. Too much water, you die. In a world without water coming through pipes, everything revolved around having access to ample supplies of it. Just like with animals in the Serengeti, water was the first and last arbiter of life. Government services and grid utilities all disappeared right at the very Beginning. Water had reasserted itself in the world after the Beginning.
In the five years since he’d been on the farm, they’d never caught enough water to have any extra. There’d always been just enough. Now, with their expansion necessary, they were trying to water the gardens and the animals and provide enough for themselves with the same amount of liquid life that they’d survived on back when they were just eating canned goods, rice, and wild game. Rain wasn’t as regular and steady as it had been before the Beginning… since that day when the world went blind for twenty-four hours and the newer, darker world started. Now, the stretches of dry and drought sometimes dragged on interminably, and when it did rain, the word deluge wasn’t good enough to describe how much water descended from the heavens. Too much or not enough. For weeks on end there’d be nothing, then the skies would open up and they’d all nearly be carried away in sudden flash floods. In the wet times, they couldn’t hold all the rain that came. The weather was like that now, ever since someone—or something—broke the world.
The family needed to quadruple their water catchment, at a minimum, if they were going to keep surviving in this place. And that was just it. This was the end of the road for all of them. They were done running and hiding. If the rumors could be believed, there was nowhere else to go now. They’d have to make it here, or it was over. For all of them.
***
Ellis was the first to find the place they all just called “The Farm.” He’d wandered since the day of blindness. Barely surviving. Avoiding people. Trying to get by in the shadows. Funny that. When his sight came back, it became too dangerous to live in the light. Somehow the darkness had stayed, even when the blindness went away. He’d been at the farm a few weeks when the rest of the family found him. A gaggle of misfits who’d also come from hiding in the shadows. The relationship was tense at first, but neither Ellis nor the rest of the group had any intention of leaving the valley. They’d have to fight one another for the farm, or work together to make a life there. The outside had become too hostile, too dangerous for any of them, so together they’d put down stakes and gambled everything in their pockets and packs to make it work. Ellis let them stay, and in return—in gratitude—the misfits made him their leader. It was a good fit in many ways, and with more hands for working, the load became lighter. Now there were friends with which to go out hunting wild game, or to gather edibles in the woods, to work the gardens, and to share in all of the other endless chores. Strangers became friends. Friends became family.
Wild Game.
There was another woe Ellis could add to his list. The scarcity of wild game in the valley was notable, even though things were beginning to improve. The deer and turkey were only now starting a resurgence after being decimated in the years after the collapse. The first year after the blindness was a slaughter. For man and beast. Over-hunting, disease, and predation by feral dogs had very nearly wiped out the wild game populations for good. Ellis hated to think that some elements of the Beginning might have been a good thing, but he couldn’t help thinking it. He shivered when he considered what might have happened to the animal population if sixty percent of the human race hadn’t been culled by the devastating Auto Immune Influenza (HI8) that kicked off just as the world began to go south. That the flu had devastated the world was rumor. That it had ravaged Texas was fact. Hunger, disease, and violence had claimed another sixty percent of the survivors who hadn’t been felled by the flu. Blow after blow after blow. With over eighty percent of the world’s population gone (so they said) the animals had only just begun to reappear, but not fast enough to provide regular meat for the family.
And the homesteaders couldn’t travel too far outside of the homestead and its surrounding valley into the rest of the Basin without running into the gangs who controlled the highways, or worse… the hordes. Feral packs of humans, sometimes in numbers running into the thousands. Tens of thousands. Maybe more. Leaderless, soulless, and mostly mindless now, the hordes crisscrossed the badlands like locusts, sometimes even penetrating into the mostly desert Basin in their search for food. If you happened to be out salvaging, you could hear them long before the clouds of dust on the horizon announced their presence. How’d the hordes come to be? Well, that was a topic of gossip and rumor, but there were theories. Plenty of theories.
The small towns that remained were all barricaded and defended by nervous and paranoid townspeople with guns, and who could blame them for being nervous and paranoid? This was the time of the gun.
The only urban area that wasn’t barricaded and defended was Central City, the largest metropolis in the Basin. It was once a growing and thriving University town, but now it had its own horrors. If you could even get there.
Before the Beginning, Central City was a moderately sized urban zone, formerly home to half a million residents. After the blindness and then the devastation and depopulation, it had proven to be too large for anyone to control.
At least, up until now.
Now it was a relic of the time before the Beginning. A monument, they say. A wrecked and rubble-strewn memoir of a bygone era known for over-consumption, obscene wealth, and codified corruption. Only the smartest, most efficient, and best organized salvage teams ventured into Central City. Everyone else avoided it like the plague.
Ellis reached into his pocket and took out a charcoal from the flat, metal cigar tin he used for small tools and necessities. He put another mark on the wall above his pallet. Another day in the valley. Spring was moving on, and the family needed to beef up the gardens before the heat of the summer made starting plants more difficult. So many things to do. They needed more raised beds because intensive gardening provided more food per square foot than traditional row planting, and minimized the need for large-scale irrigation or equipment. Salvaged industrial goods made things easier, but even easier was never easy. The family needed plastic, glass, windows, roofing panels, anything at all that could be used to build more greenhouses so they could grow food year ‘round. The list was endless. Sheets of tin or steel so they could build more rooflines and catch more water; not to mention gutters, PVC piping, catchment barrels or bags of cement for cisterns. They needed to expand and develop, and they needed to be doing it today. After five years, survival was still about today. Getting through it and trying to improve the situation, because tomorrow could always be worse, and it usually was.
***
Amy was up and cooking breakfast. She was a girl but everyone except for Ellis called her Rooster because of the way she would crow whenever she won any competition, and how she would get her hackles up when someone tried to treat her like a girl. She loved to fight. She was twelve and she did most of the cooking, not because she was female, but because the other children were horrible at it. Rooster believed the old adage that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. Her real name was Amy Armbruster, but Ellis was the only one who ever called her Amy. To
everyone else she was just Rooster, and she was fine with that. For now.
The collapse had marked them all in so many ways. Because she was small, strong, and fast, Amy had successfully escaped the predatory clutches of a gang of precious metal pirates. PMPs. Like the unscrupulous buffalo hunters who in the 1800s would kill a buffalo for its skin and leave the carcass to rot in the sun, most of the PMPs lived by pillage, cared not for anything but what they could steal, and preyed upon the weak. Small communities of survivors, bands of salvagers, or any groups that were smaller or less prepared than the PMPs could expect to be attacked if they were found wandering the Basin. The PMPs would descend like birds of prey, wantonly killing, then stealing any precious metals, stones, or booty of transportable value. Killing a man for the gold or metal in his teeth was common with the PMPs. The pirates were known to shadow the hordes like jackals or dingoes and pick off the slow and those who, through protein deprivation, had grown too weak to continue.
Amy had escaped just such a PMP crew. They’d tracked her for days, but she’d turned out to be too fast. Too wily. And after a few days hiding in the Scraps, she’d teamed up with the rest of the youth in the family for protection and survival. She’d proven to be intelligent, aggressive, and really good at salvage, so the other youth had welcomed her into their crew. That was before they’d all finally stumbled upon the strange, raised valley, hidden in the top of a mesa. As with most of the youth on the Farm, the external scars were fading, but sometimes the internal ones never do.
***
As usual, the milking crew of Karl, Renny, and Marlon weren’t at breakfast when Ellis got to the kitchen. Those three were a constant team, working together because of their proximity in ages (ten, twelve, and thirteen respectively.) They’d already eaten breakfast and gone off to do their chores. Delores was there in the kitchen, and so was Harvick (a young man everyone called ‘Shooter’), and so was Caroline (known as ‘Kay’). These three were eating breakfast in the kitchen when Ellis walked in, stretching and yawning.