He climbed aboard the machine and brought it to life.
“I’ll be back, you bastards.”
Chapter 40
Dave already knew that a Polaris, creeping along at its own pace with no foot on the accelerator, made virtually no sound at all.
Other than the sound the pavement made as the balloon tires rolled over it.
The pouring rain deadened even that sound, and the machine moved as quietly as a whisper.
Still, just to be safe, he stayed off the streets and took the same route he’d come in on, through the alleys.
One thing he didn’t know was whether the Dalton gang had working radios. The fact that they had a working generator and working lights certainly made that possible. If they either had a prepper in their employ or had robbed one of his goodies, they might well have a base station as well as handhelds.
If they had such gear, and if they’d heard him start the Polaris and drive off on it, there was a good chance the sentries at the highway on-ramp were already watching for him.
He fully expected to have to abandon the ATV when he got to the service road and hoof it from car to car, the same way he’d gotten in.
But then again, maybe not.
The storm was getting heavier, the visibility getting worse.
Dark rain clouds covered the partial moon and stars. It was damn near pitch black.
That was the good news.
The bad news was, between the heavy rain and the darkness it was getting harder and harder to see what was in front of him.
As he left the house headed back to the highway he weighed his options. There were three. First, he could play it safe and ditch the Polaris, go out the way he came in, and avoid the sentries and their checkpoint altogether.
Or he could try to creep silently past them, assuming they’d take refuge in the Lincoln Town Car. He was pretty sure he could get by them, waiting until he got to the highway to pick up his speed.
The third and last option was merely to gun and run, trying to speed his way past the checkpoint. Catch them with their pants down, so to speak, and try to get past them before they recovered enough to shoot at him. And knowing they’d have little chance of hitting him, firing blindly into the dark night and a driving rain.
The third option was out now. He couldn’t speed anywhere. There were cars all over the place he could no longer see.
Not until he crashed into them, anyway. And crashing the Polaris anywhere near the sentries wouldn’t play well for him.
That left two choices. And he didn’t want to abandon the Polaris, simply because he didn’t want to have to walk the twelve miles back to his weapons. That was an all day hike even in dry weather. If the storms continued it would stretch into two full days.
No. He had to drive the Polaris out of the camp. He’d need it.
He drove as quickly as he dared toward the checkpoint, and parked the ATV fifty yards away. He left it there and moved carefully from one shadowy silhouette of a vehicle to the next, until he was mere yards from the Town Car.
The sentries were inside, the windows all fogged up from their body heat.
Under other circumstances Dave would have surely smiled. He might have even laughed out loud. The so-called sentries, the ones Dalton counted on to provide security and prevent hostile enemies from entering their compound, chose comfort over doing their jobs.
They couldn’t have seen a semi drive by with its headlights on high beams.
Yes, under other circumstances Dave might have laughed.
But tonight he just didn’t feel like it.
He jogged back to the Polaris and fumbled around in the dark trying to find the ignition.
A lightning bolt directly overhead took mercy on him and gave him enough light to see the keyhole. The same bolt flashed long enough to give him an idea what lay ahead of him for the next hundred yards or so.
He committed it to memory while he waited for the lightning blindness to go away, then crept forward.
A few minutes later he was back on the highway in search of somewhere to spend the night.
Dave was just as prone as other men to let his emotions get away from him. Especially when he just suffered a traumatic loss.
But Dave wasn’t that way when it came to combat. It didn’t matter whether he was wearing the desert camouflage of the United States Marine Corps, or fighting his own personal war against the bad men of the world.
When he went to war, he put his game face on and his best foot forward. He carefully thought out every situation and planned accordingly.
Tonight he’d entered warrior mode. He’d declared war on Dalton’s Raiders, despite Tony’s admonition not to.
He couldn’t help that part, anyway. His reasoning was simple. Killing one of his friends was almost as bad as killing one of his family.
Some things just could not go unpunished.
Tony had given his life to obtain news about the people who’d kidnapped Beth.
Dave was convinced his friend kept himself alive long enough to pass the information on to him.
He reasoned that since Beth was not in the hell hole which was Albuquerque, she was no longer in immediate danger.
And he could take care of business here before setting out after her again.
He also knew that night traveling without goggles, in a driving rainstorm, on a pitch black night, would be a fool’s game. He’d move little more than walking pace. And after a long night on the road he’d be exhausted. And only halfway to his weapons.
No, it made much more sense to try to get some sleep. Difficult considering his present state of mind, sure. But if he could do it he’d have a much clearer head when the sun came up.
And he’d be a lot less likely to do something stupid.
Chapter 41
Dave did manage to get five hours of very fitful sleep. It wasn’t enough, but it was better than nothing.
When he awoke in the sleeper cab of the big orange Roadway tractor it took him a moment to regain his bearings. His mind was in a haze, from all the turmoil he’d suffered the night before, the trying to sleep in soggy clothing, the dehydration he felt from not having taken in liquids in twelve plus hours.
For several moments he wasn’t even sure what he’d dreamed and what was real.
He saw the key to the Polaris on the tiny drop-down bedside table and he realized it was all real. Every bit of it, good and bad.
“I’m sorry, Tony. I let you down. I should have been there sooner.”
In time, after he had a chance to think things over, Dave would realize he’d followed their plan to the letter. Tony had been on the street for at least three hours, slowly dying. They couldn’t have burned him once the rain had started. And the rain started before Tony was overdue.
Dave didn’t screw up. What happened to Tony was unfortunate. And preventable in several ways.
But Dave couldn’t have followed their plan and prevented it.
For now, though, his blind rage wasn’t letting him think things through. In his mind he caused Tony’s death. Tony wasn’t perfect by any means. But they were partners. Tony had stuck his neck out on Dave’s behalf. And Dave had let him die.
He owed Tony.
And there was only one way he could pay him back.
By chopping off the head of the snake that bit him.
He stepped down from the tractor and looked at his watch. It had stopped during the night, but he didn’t think it was from water damage.
From the angle of the sun he estimated it to be about oh eight hundred hours. He set his watch and wound it, happy to see the second hand start moving.
He looked around and saw no other souls in sight.
That was good. Whether any highway travelers might be friendly or not was not particularly relevant. He didn’t much feel like dealing with them either way.
He picked up the backpack he’d retrieved from the highway after he left the Dalton compound the night before and peered inside.
&n
bsp; The pack was soaked through and through, of course. But the soup and jerky he had left was okay.
Okay in that it had been protected from water damage and was still edible.
He just didn’t have enough.
He removed a bottle of water and guzzled it on the spot.
That left two bottles.
He’d need more.
Dave’s plan was to go off-road.
It was the only safe way to move by day on an all-terrain vehicle. If he drove along the highway he’d be visible for a mile or more. Anyone with a rifle could pick him off from a distance and merely walk to the crashed vehicle to retrieve it.
In all likelihood Dave would never even see the shooter before he died.
Night travel wasn’t much better.
On an overcast night he’d have to move at a very low speed since he had no goggles. Otherwise he’d risk crashing into obstacles he wouldn’t see until the very last second.
And at that speed, if he passed someone along the highway and didn’t see them in the inky darkness, they could run up behind him and unload a full magazine before he even realized he’d been spotted.
No. He’d thought it through and decided the only safe way to move was well off the highway, keeping the highway in sight so he didn’t get lost, but staying far enough away to be more or less safe.
He defined far enough as a thousand meters or so.
At that range only a man with a sniper rifle could pick him off, and he’d need a very steady hand and a great grasp of shooting fundamentals.
He walked off the highway and into the brush of a rest area park. The Polaris was still there, as he hoped it would be. He still had the key in his pocket. So he wasn’t worried about anyone starting it and driving away.
But he’d had no tools when he parked it in the heavy rain. No way to remove the battery cable.
If someone with a little bit of no-how had stumbled across it, they might have been able to hotwire it.
Of course, they’d have no way of knowing it wasn’t fried by the EMPs like the hundreds of other vehicles within a mile in either direction of it.
The vehicle had a small cargo bed, with a spare tire mounted behind the driver’s seat with a bungee cord.
A second cord held two very important items tightly against the tire: a lug wrench and a pair of eighteen inch bolt cutters.
No jack was needed. The Polaris was light enough when empty to allow a grown man to lift any of the four corners and place it atop a block. As long as he had a spare, a lug wrench and something to shove under it, no jack was needed.
The bolt cutters weren’t standard equipment for such a vehicle. They were added by Tony after the blackout, presumably to cut the metal tag seals and padlocks from trailers on the highway.
Dave had his own pair in the Explorer which was almost identical.
They weren’t made for cutting barbed wire, necessarily.
But they’d do the trick quite nicely.
He returned to the highway and set out toward a long white trailer perhaps half a mile away. It said “Kroger’s Grocers” on the side, although from that distance Dave couldn’t make out the words. He recognized the color scheme, though. Dark green tractor, white trailer, orange wind deflector. He’d passed enough of the trucks during his travels to know what was in them.
He crossed his fingers and hoped the trailer would add some food and water to his supplies.
Chapter 42
By the time Dave filled his backpack with food and bottled water, then made his way back to the Polaris, it was almost noon.
But he still had at least seven hours of daylight left.
And he could cover a hell of a lot of ground on a Polaris in seven hours, even going overland over muddy ground.
The Polaris was one of the best ATVs on the market. They were almost impossible to get stuck, almost never broke down and had enough power to climb up steep embankments.
Dave wasn’t sure whether Tony had his choice of vehicles when he procured this thing from his prepper friend. But if he did, he made a wise choice indeed.
Before he left he topped off the tank, using a five gallon jerry can he took from a jeep on his way back from the Kroger’s truck. The can was still half full, and he put it in the cargo bay of the ATV. Then he stepped aboard, fired it up, and drove due south until he was half a mile from the highway.
The barbed wire fences slowed him down. There were far more of them than he ever expected.
Dave had been born and raised in Texas. Driving up and down highways and county roads in Texas, one sees a lot of barbed wire fences. It’s impossible to drive more than a mile without passing one. And they line most of the county and state highways.
He’d always assumed that was because Texas had so many cattle, which needed to be kept off the roads so they didn’t become big four legged collision hazards.
And that much was true. But Dave was wrong in assuming the fencing was predominant only in cattle country.
New Mexico had just as much barbed wire as Texas. But far fewer cattle.
Actually, that wasn’t quite true. Much of the fencing in New Mexico looked like barbed wire. But since there were few cattle on the huge tracts of scrub brush and desert in the Land of Enchantment, much of it was just wire.
No barbs. Just wire.
From a distance it looked just like barbed wire, but it didn’t have the sharp points on it which cows hated brushing up against. And which encouraged them not to push against the wire and break it.
From Dave’s perspective, the fact it had no barbs was irrelevant. It was still a pain in the ass.
He still had to get off his vehicle every few hundred yards to cut three strands of the stuff with his bolt cutters so he could proceed.
It slowed him down. But it was still the safest way to travel. And even though the ground he was traversing over was soft and muddy from the storm the night before, it was no match for the soft knobby tires of the Polaris.
Cutting the wires was a pain in the ass, but in the grand scheme of things it wasn’t that big a deal.
What was a big deal was something Dave discovered after he’d cut some fencing and was climbing back onto the ATV.
Something caught his eye.
Something which caused him to fall to his knees on the muddy ground and wail like a banshee.
Something that would cause him distress and reawaken the rage he’d felt the evening before.
A large fly, one his grandpa would have called a horse fly, buzzed around Dave’s head as he cut the three strands of wire and let them fall to the ground. He swatted at it with his free hand and missed it, but it flew away and left him alone.
And that was good enough for him.
As he climbed back onto the vehicle, though, he saw the fly again.
This time it flew into the passenger side cup holder, which Dave honestly hadn’t paid much attention to at that point.
Perhaps if one of the Starbuck’s had been open for business and he’d pulled up to the drive-through for a grande latte, he would have.
But those days were gone forever.
The fly flew into the cup holder and never came out, which piqued Dave’s curiosity.
So he peered into it to see what the fly was doing.
He was immediately sickened, almost to the point of throwing up.
It was a human finger.
Chapter 43
Dave removed it with two of his own fingers and held it at arm’s length while he examined it.
It hadn’t been torn off. It was severed with something tough enough to cut through the bone, almost down to the knuckle of the poor soul it once belonged to.
It appeared to be a man’s finger, from the way it was calloused and rough. The nail wasn’t manicured, and there was a considerable amount of dirt beneath the nail.
Certainly not uncommon in the post-apocalyptic world, where many people lived like animals.
He hoped it wasn’t Tony’s. And he’d probably never kn
ow. The night before, he’d focused on Tony’s face as he lay dying with his head in Dave’s lap, and on trying to hear Tony’s last words.
It certainly never occurred to Dave to inspect his friend’s hands and count his fingers.
The finger was fresh. It had turned gray, but was still pliable and hadn’t yet started to decompose.
He hoped it wasn’t Tony’s, for that would mean they tortured him before they set him on fire. As though the burning itself didn’t give them enough sadistic pleasure, they had to make him suffer first.
But then again, if it wasn’t Tony’s finger, then whose could it possibly be?
Were those madmen in the habit of brutally murdering more than one person in the same day?
Whoever’s appendage it was, circumstances were vastly different now than they were the night before. Dave was no longer in enemy territory, running the risk of being discovered and shot at any moment.
It wasn’t raining torrentially.
He didn’t have a full body to bury, and no shovel to bury it with.
This time he could do better than just leave a body under a tree and ask God to watch over it for him.
Dave had always hated the term “remains.”
In Iraq, a couple of his friends were blown to bits by improvised explosive devices. So much so that the pieces had to be meticulously collected.
He caught a peek at the manifest on the day an Air Force C-17 cargo plane came to pick up the flag-draped coffin of one of those buddies.
The manifest listed his friend as:
Remains, human, Corp Robert L. Taylor, USMC
Dave had been overcome with grief that day, and yelled at the plane’s loadmaster, an Air Force Technical Sergeant.
“He’s not remains, damn you! He’s a man. A good man. He left behind a wife and three children. He’s a United States Marine. He’s not remains.”
He was overcome with grief and behaved badly. To pacify him, the loadmaster scratched out the word “remains” on the manifest and replaced it with “damn fine Marine.”
Dave looked for the man again every time a C-17 touched down but never saw him again. He wanted to apologize. He wanted to explain he knew it wasn’t the loadmaster’s fault. That it was just the military’s way of dealing with things.
On Desert Sands: Alone: Book 6 Page 12