by Noah Mann
“Give it up!” I commanded the unseen man.
His answer was a wild, unsighted burst of fire from his rifle held above the smoldering cycles.
Convincing him was now out of the question. Elimination was the only option I had left. I drew myself higher on the rise and sighted carefully, drilling a dozen rounds through the bikes at where the man had to be. I waited, listened, expecting more return fire, but none came.
“He’s down!”
The report came from the captive, his vantage point giving him a clear view behind the now disabled motorcycles. I slipped back into my pack and changed magazines, wanting a full thirty rounds for my approach. Moving a few yards to the right, I ran over the top of the rise and sidestepped toward the captive, keeping my AR trained on the area of the smoking cycles. As I drew near to the bound man, I saw the second man, sprawled backward on the ground behind the cover he’d chosen, a bloom of blood staining the earth behind him.
“Thank God,” the man said.
I took my knife and cut him free. He reached out and grabbed my shoulder for support.
“And thank you,” he added.
“Have you seen a man and a woman?” I asked him. “They were taken just a while ago.”
The man shook his head, his gaze seeming to swim for a moment as he tried to focus.
“I haven’t seen anybody out here,” he told me. “But these guys have friends. They can’t be far off.”
I brought one of his arms up and around my neck, taking some of his weight as I thought. We were in the wide open. If he was right and there were more of this type of thug out here, a near certainty knowing what had happened to Neil and Elaine, then we first had to get to cover. Someplace to think. To question him. To begin to understand what had happened.
“Let’s move,” I said.
“Where are we going?”
“South,” I told him. “Keep quiet and help me get you out of here.”
He did this that, and a half an hour later I had him at the greenhouse complex where everything had first gone to hell.
Twenty Seven
The man’s left leg collapsed fully beneath him as I led him into the outer room of the greenhouse.
“You all right?”
He nodded and took my hand for support, rising from the floor near where the tomato plant had withered in its puddled soil.
“Just a little dizzy,” he said. “That thump on the head they gave me.”
Any other time I might have taken a moment to check the man over. But this wasn’t any other time.
“I’m Ben,” the man said, introducing himself matter-of-factly. “Thanks for—”
“Ben, listen, I don’t have time for pleasantries or chit chat. I have to find my friends. Someone took them.”
Ben shook his left leg, as if trying to wake a limb that had been slept on awkwardly. He limped past the dead tomato plant and paused where shadow filled the space beyond, peering into the darkness.
“There’s a door,” he said.
I dropped my pack and slid against the wall until I was sitting on the floor.
“I have to find them,” I said, mostly to myself. “I have to find her.”
Elaine...
“They’re in Cheyenne,” Ben said, almost absently, then looked back to me. “There’s a door over here.”
“Were you there?”
“They’re where I was,” he told me, puzzling not at what I was sharing, but at the once vibrant tomato plant. “This didn’t die with everything else.”
“How do you know they’re in Cheyenne?”
“Look, this is a plant,” he said. “It had to have been alive less than a month ago by the looks of it.”
I shot up from the floor and grabbed the man by his collar, shoving him against the wall where the failed pump was bolted.
“There’s a whole room of plants past that door!” I screamed at him from mere inches away, dialing my adrenalin down after a few breaths. “A damn supermarket of fruits and vegetables. Okay? You can have it all. But what I need from you is to know who took my friends and why.”
Ben looked away from me, to the door barely visible through the din. I bunched his collar tighter in my fists, making him look at me again.
“Who has them?”
His gaze turned grim.
“You can’t help them,” he said. “If they were grabbed out here, they’re as good as gone.”
I let him go.
“So were you,” I reminded him.
He looked around. To the door we’d come in. And the one I’d pointed to.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
I rubbed at my forehead, trying to think.
“We came looking for what’s in there,” I told him. “A lot of people are going to die if we can’t replicate what’s on the other side of that door.”
“Who sent you?” he asked.
“Jesus, would you just let me—”
Motorcycles. That sound stopped my frustrated plea. More than one. Whining in the distance.
Like the one I’d heard when we’d first approached the outskirts of Cheyenne. Like the ones I’d seen where I’d saved Ben. Like at least one of them, I reminded myself, the other some awkward, cobbled together monstrosity of machinery.
“Stay here,” I said.
“They’re coming,” Ben said, the statement delivered not with fear, but as a simple statement of fact.
I moved to the exit door and opened it slightly, my AR ready. Beyond the low, dune-like hills a half mile to the south there were multiple riders. Four or five, it now seemed, speeding from west to east, a rooster tail of dust billowing skyward in the distance. They weren’t slowing, and, more importantly, it appeared they weren’t drawing closer.
“Ben,” I said, looking back to tell him. “They—”
But he was gone. Through the shadows at the far end of the room I could see the inner door to the greenhouse, open now, light from the bright space slanting through.
“Drop it.”
The order came from outside. Close outside. It was accompanied by movement, to both the left and right of the door.
“Drop it now or we drop you.”
We...
More than one, as I’d thought. But how many more. Two? Five? Ten?
Beyond the hills the motorcycles revved, changing direction, heading west now, from the direction they’d come.
“I don’t think he believes us,” another man said.
BANG!
A single shot slammed into the dirt walkway just beyond the door, a mere foot from me. Bits of rock and dry earth erupted, a piece of stone striking my cheek, stinging, a warm and wet trickle tracing down my face from the point of impact. I was bleeding.
I suspected I would bleed much more if I didn’t comply. And that would end any chance of finding Elaine and Neil.
“Okay,” I said.
“Weapon down,” the first man said.
I took my AR by the suppressed barrel and set it down just outside, butt first, letting it tip and fall into the dirt.
“Now you.”
I stepped fully from the doorway.
“Eyes forward and take three steps.”
I did as instructed. As my foot touched the ground on that third step a rifle butt struck me mid-back, sending me to the ground, face first, in pain.
“Stay down!”
A knee planted itself between my shoulder blades.
“Check inside,” the man atop me instructed his partner.
“Got it,” the other man said.
I heard a door kicked open behind, then more within the structure, glass breaking, items toppling. The man atop me reached to my hip and took the Springfield from its holster.
“You won’t be needing this, either,” he said.
“Son of a...”
The truncated exclamation came from within. A moment later rushed bootsteps brought the second man out again, something in hand. I angled my face to get a look and was rewarded with
a smack from my own pistol across the cheek. A second later my backpack thudded to the ground inches from my face.
My backpack...
Inside were things immeasurably valuable. Seeds. The notebook from the professor’s underground lab. Lists of food caches that might still exist.
“You want to know what I found?” the second man asked the first, a small chuckle slipping out before he continued. “That backpack, a dead guy in a rocking chair, and plants.”
“What?”
The surprise was audible from the man atop me.
“Plants,” the second man said. “Fruit trees, vegetables. Real live plants.”
A silence between the men hung in the air for a moment, then I felt the first man reach for something. Seconds later, static hissed over a radio as it was turned on.
“We got one,” he said. “At the professor’s place. You guys can go hunting.”
“Righteous!” the reply came back over the radio.
In the distance the motorcycles’ whine shrieked, the vehicles speeding off to the east. They’d been nothing but decoys designed to focus my attention so I wouldn’t notice the approach of the men who’d taken me. And it had worked.
Handcuffs clamped fast around my wrists and the man atop me shifted his weight off, then flipped me over so that I was staring up at a chiseled face, black patch over one eye, tall, smiling man above him.
“We’d given up on this place,” Eyepatch said.
“Crazy guy would shoot at anything he saw,” the other man said, laughing giddily. “But not anymore.”
Chuckles swung a fist at the air above, joyous, taking satisfaction in the demise of the nearly mummified man. He’d come out with a description of what was within. And my pack.
But not Ben.
“Watch him,” Eyepatch said, rising off of me.
“Gladly,” Chuckles told him, taking a position over me, aiming his AK right at my face and glancing to his comrade. “What are you going to do?”
Eyepatch shoved my Springfield into my pack and did a cursory inspection, finding nothing that interested him.
“No food.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Chuckles asked. “Look inside.”
Eyepatch closed my pack and looked to the open door.
“You think I’m bullshitting?” Chuckles challenged.
It seemed to me that Eyepatch held some sort of authority over his partner. But he wasn’t in charge. I could sense that about him. He had the air of a foreman on a jobsite. A middle manager. But a somewhat timid one. Afraid to take too many risks. To make mistakes. To incur the wrath of the one at the top.
“Where are my friends?” I asked past a swelling lip.
“Shut up,” Eyepatch said, then disappeared into the greenhouse structure.
“You have them, don’t you?”
Chuckles lowered the muzzle of his AK until it touched the tip of my nose.
“He said shut up. Or should I shut you up by knocking your teeth in?”
I didn’t push it anymore. I laid there, on my back, the grinning, armed thug standing over me, sounds of opening and closing doors beyond within the structure. A few minutes later Eyepatch emerged. He stood, perplexed, one-eyed gaze darting about the parched fields, some thought weighing on him. Some decision.
Finally he looked to Chuckles.
“Go fill your bag with a bunch of what’s in there,” Eyepatch directed. “Apples and...everything. We’ll take it back to him and see what he says.”
Him...
I was right. Eyepatch reported to another. A situation similar to major Layton, I imagined. Some dictatorial type lording over the willing, and the unwilling.
Chuckles returned to the interior, leaving Eyepatch alone with me.
“Did you kill Brick and Eddie?”
His question would have made no sense to anyone. Anyone but me. I hadn’t known the names of the two men I’d shot, but they were certainly dead by my hand.
“You did,” Eyepatch said, accusing and convicting me in the same breath.
“And my friends,” I said. “Did you kill them?”
Eyepatch looked to me, confusion in his one eye.
“That would be a damn waste now, wouldn’t it?”
His denial both puzzled and worried me. Death was an end. What might come before held possibilities of horror I didn’t want to imagine.
Chuckles returned, his bag bulging.
“Let’s move,” Eyepatch instructed.
He took hold of one leg, Chuckles the other, my gear and weapons split between them as they dragged me to the far side of the greenhouse, to where a pair of odd motorcycles sat, gear sled tied to the end of one, similar to what I’d seen a mile and a half to the north. Each were squat and wide, crudely modified guts shoved into conventional frames. They laid me down on the sled and lashed me to it, shoving my pack into a space just above my head.
“Stay behind,” Eyepatch instructed Chuckles. “If he tries to get off, shoot him.”
“With pleasure,” Chuckles said, winking and smiling at me.
The thugs mounted their bikes and we began to move. But there was no churning growl of the motorcycle engines I’d known. There was just a rising whine, electric motors spinning.
“Enjoy the ride,” Eyepatch said, glancing back to me as he sped up.
The sled bounced and slid, over rocks and across gullies, as my captors raced across the fallow landscape toward Cheyenne.
Twenty Eight
I’d smelled death before. This was worse.
“Move!”
Eyepatch shoved me through the door his partner had unlocked, sending my body slamming into an unnaturally sturdy wall. A steel wall. I shook off the impact and eyed the slab of metal I’d impacted. It was covered with rough welds, lines of the once molten steel crisscrossing it like old, dull scars. Dozens of individual pieces of scrap had been welded together inside an old auto repair shop to form what I’d been thrown against. But what was it?
“Move, I said!” Eyepatch repeated, grabbing my cuffed hands and levering them upward, forcing my head down as he ‘steered’ me along the metal wall. “Fun times ahead for you.”
Behind, his partner, snickered.
“You think he’s figured it out yet?” Chuckles asked.
“He looks like a bright guy,” Eyepatch said.
I was steered around a corner, more metal wall here to my right, huge bolts driven through this section, some color streaked upon the mismatched surface. A dark and crusty hue.
Dried blood.
We turned still another corner, steel still to my right, and the smell, the stench, overpowering now. It was the scent not of ones who’d already passed, but of some horror before. Of life barely that.
A final corner brought me face to face with just what that was.
Cages filled the space before me. In what had been a row of repair bays, chain link holding pens had been built, their back walls the steel I had seen from the opposite side. In each were one or two or three people.
People...
Yes, they were still that. Human beings. But they had begun to transition from that state, it seemed. All were naked. And all, in one way or another, had been mutilated. A woman was missing a leg, the limb gone from the hip down. A man was missing a leg and an arm. Another both legs and one arm, his pitiful form alone in a cage, huddled in the back against the steel wall, skin darkened with grimy sweat. That was what I saw in front of me.
When Eyepatch whipped me around I saw my friends.
“Elaine...”
She sat on a bench at the back of a different sort of cell, Neil next to her, their hands cuffed to a bar that ran along the front edge of the long seat. Where the other cages were dank with filth, this one, by comparison, was pristine. A light shone above it. The floor looked to have been recently mopped and the back wall was painted a clean and clinical green.
“Eric...”
Chuckles opened a padlock that secured a chain link gate and swung it ou
tward. Eyepatch pushed me through, hard enough that I stumbled, falling to my knees, my head landing on Neil’s lap.
“Look who dropped in for a visit,” Eyepatch joked, and Chuckles laughed, closing and locking the gate before both of them left the hideous holding area.
“Are you all right?” Neil asked.
I shifted my position and managed to stand.
“Relatively,” I said. “Eyepatch and Chuckles could have done worse.”
“What should we call the ones who grabbed us?” Neil asked Elaine.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t say a thing. All she did was look at me. Thankful and worried all at once.
“I think Gruff and Headcase are fitting nicks for them,” Neil said. “Trust me, you’ll have no problem picking which one is Headcase if he drops by.”
“Are you okay?” I asked Elaine, crouching in front of her.
She nodded, the assurance tepid at best.
“Up,” a voice said.
I looked to see Eyepatch standing outside the cell again.
“Back up to the door,” he instructed me.
I stood and did as he’d said. When I was close to the chain link barrier he reached through a small reinforced rectangular opening in the laced steel and grabbed my cuffed hands, pulling them roughly through and unlocking them. A second later the cuffs were off. I pulled my hands back through the opening and turned to face Eyepatch. He held the key in one hand and slipped the cuffs over his belt, letting that hand, empty now, come to rest atop a pistol on his hip.
“Unlock them,” he said, holding the key up to the chain link.
I hesitated, expecting some sort of trick.
“Take it,” he repeated, smiling darkly. “We don’t want no bruised flesh.”
Past him a dozen or so specimens of savaged humanity lay in pens like stunned cattle. His words, and what I was seeing, and smelling, gave me a full understanding of what awaited us. Of what fate lay ahead.
Unless we could find a way out.
“Fine,” I said, taking the key.
I went to my friends and removed the cuffs that bound them to the bench.
“Pass ‘em through,” Eyepatch said. “And the key.”