by neetha Napew
He recognized Kyle Lynch's Mannlicher Model V rifle, one of the .357 rounds finding its target.
"Keep me covered, I'm coming in!" Desperately he plowed on, stumbling and falling, catching his knee an agonizing crack on a jagged rock half-hidden in the dirt.
Jim glanced once behind him, seeing that several of the hydroponic units were already being burned or smashed or both. The light of the fires showed a number of armed men darting from building to building, smoky blue flames blossoming where they stopped.
There was the constant crackle of small arms, larded with the occasional deeper, heavier explosions of grenades or incoming mortar shells.
Carrie appeared out of the blackness, holding her little .22. She grabbed him by the sleeve and pulled him roughly to his feet.
"You hit?"
"No. Banged my knee. The others?"
"By the trucks. Come on, Captain. Time to haul ass out of here."
It was the best advice he'd heard in a while.
Even if they'd rallied around Diego and the others, their own weapons were totally outclassed by the overwhelming firepower of the Hunters of the Sun.
It would have simply been a maimed and futile sacrifice on their part.
"The big hut's blazing!" Kyle was standing by the two trucks, the hunting rifle carried at the high port. His eyes were white in the darkness, and he was panting as though he'd completed the Boston Marathon.
Jim looked back once more.
The dormitory building was well on fire. As he watched, the door was kicked open and a slender figure appeared. At that distance it wasn't possible to be sure, but it seemed as if it was holding a scattergun. Before the man, who might have been Diego Chimayo, could shoot, he was hit by a burst of automatic fire that almost ripped him in half and sent him tottering down the steps, the gun falling from the bloodied, limp fingers.
"Gimme the rifle," said Jim.
"Why?"
"Just fucking do it, Kyle. Then go start them up. Heather and Sly safe?"
Carrie answered. "Both in your four-by, Jim."
"Fine. Go start it. Kyle, wait for me a couple of minutes. Carrie, take the four-by and head off up the back-trail. Fast as you can. And safe as you can. No lights."
She disappeared, and the slender black man handed Jim the rifle. "Seven left, including one under the hammer. Got a spare mag in any pocket if—"
"No. Want to slow them up. Discourage them, Kyle. Get the engine going."
Suddenly Jim Hilton was alone.
Frozen in a vacuum. Behind him he heard the two engines coughing into life, and he thought he caught Heather's voice raised in protest. Ahead, the experimental plant unit was being destroyed in front of his eyes. A second spotlight was working, focusing on the tumbling remains of the hut that had been home for the group of young idealists. A tall figure appeared, silhouetted against the flames, and threw something inside that erupted into dazzling, oily fire.
"Napalm," breathed Jim. "Bastard." He focused the sniper scope on the soldier, centered on his chest. Finger gently on the trigger, he squeezed. But seeing the killer go down and lie still wasn't satisfaction enough in light of their murderous deeds.
Before he turned and ran to join Kyle in the second of the four-bys, Jim emptied the magazine of the Mannlicher into the group of men by the armored personnel carrier. He didn't wait to see how successful he'd been.
It didn't even up the score, but it stopped the murderous sons of bitches exulting in a bloody victory.
And that was something.
Chapter Seven
Fifteen miles out of Fort Bragg, Jim Hilton found that the old Highway 1 was blocked again. A bridge had fallen, probably as a result of more earthquake action, making further progress north toward Eureka impossible along the coast.
The map showed a back road that cut east toward Laytonville on 101, through a village called Branscomb. It was partly unpaved and went across the south fork of the Eel River.
"Could be tough going," said Carrie as they all peered at the Rand McNally.
It was midafternoon on December 16, two days shy of their projected meet at Eureka, which was still at least one hundred and twenty miles farther north.
"Do we have a choice?" Heather asked, looking around them. The weather had turned cold again and they'd been running through groves of timber, mostly stiff and dead. But some of the bigger redwoods had shown encouraging signs of having survived the Earthblood virus and were green and healthy.
"What's blue?" asked Sly, pointing at the map with an eager, stubby finger.
"The sea," replied the girl. "Pacific Ocean. Guess that would be another choice, wouldn't it, Dad? If we could get hold of a boat somewhere."
"Possibly. Rather keep our feet dry for as long as we can, though."
"Blue sea, knew me, true buzzy bee with new knee and poo pee poo pee pee and poo."
"Yeah, that's enough, Sly," said Kyle, patting the laughing teenager on the back, though he was unable to restrain his own broad grin.
Carrie took the wheel of the first truck, Heather at her side. Jim was taking a rest in the second four-by-four, allowing Kyle to drive, with Sly sitting between them, counting the houses they passed.
He wasn't too confident going much above five, but that didn't matter, since the stretch of dirt road was deserted, with only an occasional homestead.
The only sign of life, apart from a circling flock of gulls, was a small pack of wild dogs that came running from a thicket, barking wildly, snapping at the wheels, jumping up and snarling at the open windows.
Carrie put her foot down, and they soon outdistanced the malevolent animals.
About three miles farther along they reached a hamlet so tiny, or recent, that it didn't even merit a black dot on the road atlas.
A tilted sign proclaimed that it was called North Banell and its population was nineteen.
It didn't even have anything that could properly be called a main street. Two frame houses and a ransacked general store. It only took about thirty seconds to drive from one end of North Banell to the other, where there was a white sign with an arrow pointing off to the right:
Cameras… Trade Buy And Sell… Vids Movies And Stills… Film For All.
Carrie heard a hooting from behind her and slowed right down when she saw in the mirror that Kyle was flashing his lights at her. She stopped and leaned out of the window into the cold drizzle that had been falling steadily most of the day.
"What is it?"
"Cameras," he shouted. "Been wanting to try and get one for a couple of weeks. This could be my chance." He paused to say something to Jim in the cab with him. "Captain here says it's all right, Second Navigator Princip."
She laughed at his mock formality. "Can't disobey both my superiors, Navigator Lynch," she yelled back, revving the engine and turning off up a driveway in the direction of the arrow.
Kyle kicked up gravel as he accelerated after her up the hill toward a distant single-story building with a flat, dark green roof.
When they got there, they got out of the vehicles.
"What a bastard mess." Kyle stood with hands on hips, staring at what once proclaimed itself to have been the Best Camera Emporium In Northern California.
Most of the windows were broken, and the door was missing. Heather had accompanied her father on a cursory recon, while the others waited by the vehicles. She had come scampering back to report that the kitchen had been burned out and it looked as if everything inside had been smashed.
"Everything?" Kyle asked, unable to conceal his disappointment and seething anger.
"Broke the cameras and vids, Kyle."
"But they wouldn't have been much use. Not once society had broken down. Where's Jim gone?"
"Having a look around the back. There's loads of outbuildings and barns. Saw a dead horse."
"Me see horse." Sly started eagerly forward, but the girl grabbed his hand to stop him.
"No. Not very nice. All maggots and stinky. Stay here with me. Come
under the porch to get out of the rain, Sly."
Carrie and Kyle watched as they walked together and stood on the front veranda. The young woman shuddered and hunched her shoulders.
"What is it? Cold and wet?"
Carrie sniffed and sighed. "Old one about someone walking over my grave. Just find this sort of thing real sad. I understand looting for food. Not mindless damage by a bunch of shit-for-brains. Don't get that."
Jim reappeared around the corner of the camera store, holstering his Ruger. "I heard that, Carrie. Probably starving and terrified young shit-for-brains. Didn't find anything to keep their bellies from rubbing on their backbones. So they took it out on everything else they found."
"Anything interesting around?" asked Kyle.
"Guess it was a farm ten or twenty years ago."
"No food?"
Jim shook his head. "No, Kyle. But I saw foot tracks in the mud, and there's some stinking bedding in one of the small barns. Some bones there."
"Animal or human?" Carrie asked, prepared for anything.
"Oh, animal. Birds, I think, mostly. Reckon some scavenger was living here."
"Think it was him did the damage?" asked Kyle.
"Or her," said Carrie.
With evening closing in and the weather getting worse, they agreed that they might as well hole up there for the night. Sly had been enchanted by a flurry of snow just as the light was finally fading away and had run clumsily around the backyard trying to catch the tumbling flakes in his cupped hands.
Jim had found two oil lamps in the largest barn, both nearly filled with kerosene, and they put one in the living room behind the shop. There was a sofa there and one unbroken armchair, enough for them to sit down in reasonable comfort. Carrie hunted around and found a pile of charred wood, already hewn into neat logs. She brought some in and piled them in the hearth where she soon had a fine blaze going.
Kyle took the second brass lamp, lit it and walked slowly around the devastated store, boots crunching through glass and plastic.
It broke his heart to see what had been done.
The first impression was that the place could easily have lived up to its proud boast. The shop was L-shaped, with a door around the corner that opened at the side of the nearest barn. Kyle guessed that the overall size of the store was somewhere about fifteen hundred square feet.
In places the debris was thigh deep, with empty and full boxes piled haphazardly. There had been an attempt to fire some of it, but it looked as if it hadn't caught with some inflammable packing material.
There were sophisticated camcorders and all sizes of ordinary cameras. Mainly 35 mm models, with some 25 mm models, compacts and triple-reflex jobs. The owner had installed a small hi-fi section with some tiny SHD cassette players, as well as the CD vid hardware.
Hardly anything was unbroken.
Kyle stooped and picked up a magnificent Hayakawa 3-D instant camera, but someone had put his heel through the delicate lens, smashing the crystal glass.
"Some coffee, Kyle?" called Carrie from the other room, where the fire crackled merrily.
"Coffee?"
She laughed. "It's wet and very hot and kind of a brown color, Kyle."
"Sure. Be right in."
He dropped the Hayakawa amidst the rest of the rubbish. His eye was caught by a tripod at the far end of the store, farthest away from the side door. When he picked it up, he found there was a camera still attached to it.
Kyle whistled. It was a reflex Ryuichi instant, one of the best on offer, that presented a totally developed print without more than a second's delay.
He set it up, pointing down the length of the shop, making sure it was level. There was a timer that Kyle set for five seconds, then positioned himself in front of it and waited.
A tiny red eye blinked, and then there was the dazzling flash that made him blink.
"What's that?" shouted Sly. "You want help, Kyle?"
"No, thanks. After I've had a drink I'll take some pix of us all with this."
The print hung from the front like the extruded tongue of some techno-beast. It was perfectly sharp and detailed.
"Christ! I look about a hundred years old," Kyle said. "Every day in every way I'm getting more and more like my father. Real scary."
"Show us," called Jim.
"In a minute. One more."
There was a faint sound from behind him. Kyle turned around, but there was nothing to see in the deep shadows. He reset the camera and posed in front of it, hand on chest, teeth bared in a cheesy grin.
There was the same bright starburst flash that seemed to scorch the retina, followed by the tiny whir of the motor, propelling the print out of the camera.
Kyle took a half-dozen careful steps toward it and stooped to try to make out his image by the flickering golden light of the oil lamp.
There he was, teeth white, head slightly on one side as the timer sprang the shutter release, his bushy hair spreading around his face like a halo. Kyle hadn't realized quite how long it had grown in the past few weeks and made the decision to ask Carrie to cut it for him before they moved on in the morning.
He was beginning to grin at himself when he noticed something else in the photograph.
Behind him, in the darkness toward the hidden door, around the corner. Something that didn't…
Kyle leaned closer, squinting and turning the picture to catch the light so that he could see…
See the old man coming toward him in the photo, holding up a short-hafted chopping ax, its honed blade catching the silvery gleam of the camera flash and making it look like the sword of an avenging angel.
Kyle Lynch opened his mouth to scream as he started to turn around to confront his doom, hand reaching for his Mondadori .32, the developed print fluttering to the floor at his feet.
The ax crashed into the center of his face, pulping his nose, cutting a path into his forehead, between the staring eyes, slicing his lips apart and smashing teeth.
Kyle's last sentient thought as he slipped from life was the taste of splinters of charred wood on his tongue.
Chapter Eight
The voice was thin and querulous. "Fucking stealing nigger!"
Jim Hilton, .44 in his hand, was first through the door into the shop, where the flickering light of the oil lamp revealed a horrific scene.
Kyle Lynch was sitting down with his back against the remains of one of the camera store's counters, his legs splayed in front of him, a dark, wet patch staining the crotch of his jeans. His eyes were staring blindly in front of him, hands lying in his lap, the fingers knotted together in a rigid grip. There was a massive gash running vertically down the middle of his face, dividing his forehead, crushing his nose, smashing both upper and lower jaws. Blood was flooding from the wound, though across the forehead Jim could also see the stark ivory gleam of bone.
Standing in front of him, gripping a short-handled wood-splitting ax, was a small, elderly white man, bewhiskered and filthy.
Carrie was at Jim's heels, Heather right behind her, both gasping with horror and shock. In the room at their backs, Jim could also hear Sly lumbering to his feet, asking plaintively what was wrong.
"Nigger wrecked my store and was stealing pictures off of me, but I done for him."
The ratlike face turned toward the group in the doorway, alight with a malign cunning. Threads of yellowish drool dangled from his parted lips into the stained beard.
"No!" began Jim Hilton, part of his mind struggling to reject the unbelievable image of his good friend sprawled on the floor.
"I done for the thieving nigger bastard. Give him forty whacks when I seen what he done."
"Oh," said Sly Romero in a tiny voice, peering over the shoulders of Heather and Carrie.
"Now I'll give him forty-one." He lifted the ax again above his scrawny shoulder.
Jim's finger tightened on the trigger of the Ruger Blackhawk Hunter, but the explosion that filled the devastated store wasn't the powerful boom of his revolver.
It was the waspish crack of the Smith & Wesson 2050, Carrie Princip's 6-shot revolver.
The .22-caliber bullet hit the old man through the side of the chest, on the right side, making him stagger backward and drop the ax.
"Bitch," he growled, stopping and fumbling for his blood-slick weapon.
Carrie shot him twice more, once through the ragged shirt that flapped over his belly and once through the throat. The first bullet made him grab at the gut wound and gasp in pain. The second put him on his back amidst a scattered pile of old rental vids, his blood spouting all over them.
"That does it," said Jim quietly. "Don't waste another one on him."
The old man struggled to sit up, gargling in his own blood as he fought to speak again. But the bullet had nicked his spine, and all the lines were down. He flopped back again and choked to death, breath rattling noisily in his throat, crimson froth mottling his beard.
Jim had moved quickly to kneel by Kyle Lynch, putting an arm around the slender shoulders.
"Christ, man, he's done me," whispered Kyle, eyes still gazing blankly out at some limitless vision of eternity.
"Guess he has," agreed Jim. He wiped some of the blood off with his sleeve. Kyle was dying in front of them, and there wasn't the smallest hope of doing a thing for him.
"Want me to pass on any word to your girl, Leanne, if I ever meet her?"
"No." He managed a slow shake of the head. His hands were becoming still. "Rosa. It was Rosa I loved. If… tell her…"
Jim felt a slight shift in the body he held, and realized that Kyle was gone
.
AS THEY WERE getting ready to bury Kyle the next morning, Jim went out into the store, where the old man's corpse had already stiffened. One of the vids that lay beslobbered under the body was Sunstrokers, the biggest hit that his own dead wife, Lori, had starred in. He picked it up and stared at the familiar face, speckled with brown stains. Her hair was tied in a garish bandanna, and she wore a tiny maroon leather skirt and matching bra top, and thigh-length boots. Lori had been so proud of herself in the part, though his own, private feelings were that it wasn't likely to do all that much to advance her acting ambitions. As it turned out, he'd been right.