by Bobby Adair
“Nothing is ever a coincidence,” rasped Dalhover.
“I’ll tell them to prepare,” said Grace.
“Get people in the towers with binoculars,” instructed Dalhover. “Watch the sky.” Turning to me, he said, “Let’s catch these bastards.”
10
We took the first exit off the highway, racing north past a field of a hundred matching mounds of winter road sand, heaped in tidy rows at the junction of FM 2903 and I-10. The years had slowly eroded the mounds, and desert flora had long since grown them over. From my position, standing through the roof hatch, ready to light up any threat with the .50, I watched for movement among the piles. In the flat desert, any terrain feature big enough to hide a person was worth keeping an eye on.
In the front passenger seat again, Murphy had the map out, checking for known obstacles and road hazards. “We’re clear for another two miles.” One good thing about our scouts and map tenders, they were meticulous about keeping info on nearby roads up to date. It was part of our home field advantage when threats arose.
Dalhover pushed our speed up past fifty. Wind noise drowned most of the conversation coming up from below.
I turned my attention back to the sky, alternatively scanning the airspace with naked eyes and binoculars, searching for any moving speck. I paid particular attention to the direction in which Murphy’d last glimpsed the drone. The pilot had to be over there somewhere.
“You think they have more than one drone?” called Murphy from below.
“Yeah.” It was one of the things that bothered me when I’d started on the logic of the situation. We were living in a post-apocalyptic world where everything I’d taken for granted as a kid had turned into a luxury. So the idea of someone having a functioning drone was unexpected and exciting, almost tech-miraculous. At the same time, if someone had happened upon a functioning drone, still in a package in a store or warehouse somewhere, what was to say they hadn’t discovered a hundred of them, stacked and dusty, just waiting for a scavenger to come by and recognize them for their value?
In the fourteen years since the collapse, it had never occurred to me to scavenge for a drone. Now I wanted to kick myself for not having thought of it. How handy would one have been in all manner of everything from scouting to hunting to keeping watch? But it wasn’t just me who’d missed that particular opportunity. The thought had never occurred to any of us in Balmorhea—I idly wondered what else we’d missed.
Mulling it over as we drove on, I decided our blindspot for drones made sense. Drone tech had still been new when the world collapsed. Most people were aware of it back in the day, but very few had any first-hand experience. After the collapse, people who were too dependent on their electronic toys tended to perish. Drones, being in that category, were therefore easily forgotten. Hell, most of our immigrants hadn’t seen electricity in years. As for the recent ones, they hadn’t had electricity in more than a decade.
“Hey Zane,” called Dalhover, “you didn’t fall asleep up there, did you?”
Of course I hadn’t, but Dalhover’s griping spurred a new thought into my mind. “You remember that old concrete factory up on 3334?”
“What about it?” snapped Dalhover.
“If I was flying a drone several miles out of my sight,” I told him, “I think I’d climb up there so the drone wouldn’t lose the signal from my controller.”
“Makes sense.” Murphy started scoping out the path on the map.
“What about those RVs?” Dalhover was asking about a caravan of a dozen RVs that had gotten ambushed way back before we’d even arrived in Balmorhea. Their deteriorating hulks were spread over a half-mile of an otherwise clear piece of 2903 like an ancient wagon train massacre. After some trouble in the early years, our patrols tended to avoid that section of road, unless we were on a mission specifically to clear them of transient bandits.
“There’s a cutoff,” Murphy told us. “A dirt road just north of the first RV that’ll take us diagonally over to 3334.”
“Keep that .50 trained on those RVs when we pass,” Dalhover ordered me. “You see anything move, you shred it. You hear me? I’m not slowing down.”
Thumbs on the big machine gun’s trigger, I pointed it at the scatter of RV bones up the highway ahead. Some still held their rough cubicle shapes. Others had burned down to their stout metal frames. Many lay sideways, blown over by the windstorms that plagued the region. Most had drifts of sand and tumbleweeds mounded around them.
True to his word, Dalhover didn’t slow as we approached the first of them. He steered the Humvee onto the shoulder to give the RV a wide berth. Bouncing through the rough dirt, it was only our proximity to the RV that made it possible to keep my machine gun pointed at it. To guard against a flanking ambush, Murphy laid his map down and pointed his M4 at the saltbushes in the desert outside the passenger window.
“I don’t see the turn,” growled Dalhover.
“It’s a dirt road,” Murphy told him. “About a hundred yards past the RV. You’ll have to slow down.”
I swung the .50 around to keep it trained on the next hulk up the road.
With a big bump, Dalhover pulled back onto the pavement.
“Right there!” hollered Murphy. “Just past that sign.”
“What sign?”
“That post,” Murphy corrected. All that was left of the sign was a single post.
Dalhover wheeled the Humvee into a fast right turn onto an angled dirt road. The centrifugal force pulled me hard to the left. When Dalhover tore through an eroded ditch he nearly bounced me out.
Murphy shouted, “Goddamn, Evel Knievel!”
Dalhover spurred our armored beast up the rutted dirt road.
11
After so many years of tactical experience together, we didn’t need a plan. Nothing beyond a few words, anyway. We knew our roles. We knew how to react, and each of us knew how the others would react. It wasn’t that way with just we three, but with most of us on the scout crews. We trained together. We learned from our mistakes and our successes together. We scouted and scavenged in teams. We were what passed for the professional military core of Balmorhea’s militia on those occasions when organized violence was the best response to a problem.
With the concrete factory looming in front of us, Dalhover cut the Humvee into a left turn onto the property. Rusting machines and vehicles dotted the site, leaving way too many places for bandits to conceal themselves. Murphy and I searched for targets among the silos, corroding conveyors, and the mounds of gravel. Dalhover helped us out with that by driving the perimeter of the gravelly yard in a wide arc. Unless snipers were hiding out in the desert scrub, we only had one flank to worry about.
Murphy hollered, “I don’t see nothin’, Top.”
We’d just raced around the rear side of the factory and Dalhover had us headed back toward the road. Unfortunately, he had to drive between the factory and a complex of long-dilapidated pole barns where a feedlot used to fatten up cattle before sending them to market. Always jumpy with danger in the air, I couldn’t help but glance over my shoulder several times in search of ambushers.
We reached the road again without incident. Dalhover pulled onto the pavement, rolling slowly west. “Where to next?”
Putting his typical positive spin on what now seemed like a waste of time, Murphy called up to me, “It seemed like a good guess.”
I wasn’t through with guesses. I dropped down into the Humvee. “Dalhover, take us over to the silos. I’m going to hop out and climb the ladder to the top.”
“Not by yourself, you’re not,” Murphy told me.
“Why?” asked Dalhover.
“From up there,” I answered, “I’ll be able to see everything for miles around.”
No more discussion needed. Dalhover revved the engine and steered toward the tall silos. “You both go. Jump out fast. I’ll head back out to the road after I drop you.”
Minutes later, panting from my climb, I stood atop of one of th
e concrete factory’s aggregate silos, scanning the desert with a pair of binoculars.
Murphy waved to Dalhover to let him know we’d made it to the top without incident.
I pointed. “There.”
Murphy hurried over to my side of the platform. “Where?”
“See those three ag circles?” After so many years going fallow, they were barely discernible from the surrounding plain. “That road running north of them. I see a dust plume.”
I heard a smile in Murphy’s voice when he said, “We got the motherfuckers now.” He ran to the other side of the platform to wave Dalhover to come back. Then he looked at me. “Why are you still standing there? Let’s get down so we can go.”
By my estimate, the drone pilots were already three or four miles away. And picking up speed. Turning onto a paved road, their driver left the telltale dust plume behind. “They’ll be ten miles from here by the time we’re rolling again.”
“Who cares?” argued Murphy. “It’s not like there’s anywhere to hide.”
“All they need is distance. I can barely see them now.”
“They have telescopes in the tower.” Murphy was talking about the observation tower back in Balmorhea that we’d constructed out of recycled high-tension power line tower parts. Up there, they had binoculars and they did indeed have a few powerful telescopes. Unfortunately, as we’d learned through the years since we’d built the tower, being able to see something the size of a car far out on the horizon depended not just on weather and wind, but on having the telescope pointed in exactly the right direction at exactly the right angle. Rotating one of those telescopes one degree left or right could move the focal point a quarter mile left or right. It had seemed like a good idea at the time—we still used it for visual observation.
“By the time we get down to the radio in the Humvee, they’ll be fifteen miles from Balmorhea.” The drone spies were going to get away. That realization angered me. Worse, I hated the feeling that we were being outsmarted and outmaneuvered. “The way they’re hauling ass up that road, they had to have known we were coming.”
“We know which road they’re on. We can still catch ‘em.”
“I think they had another drone up there we never saw.”
“You mean you never saw.” Murphy headed for the ladder. “You were up top.”
“We were lucky we saw the first one,” I told him. “Just luck. It was only because of the way the light was hitting it, making it glow against the dark sky. Under normal conditions, those little hobby drones more than three or four hundred feet up are near impossible to see.”
“You’re saying they saw us coming, so that’s why they bugged out. You’re saying by the time we start chasing, they could be set up somewhere else, watching us from above and we wouldn’t know it.”
“Yeah.”
“And once we start heading their way, they’ll bug out again.”
“Exactly.”
Murphy cursed, because he saw the implications piling up, just like I did.
“If they wanted to be friends with us,” I deduced, “they wouldn’t be trying so hard to get away from us.”
Murphy nodded.
I chased my caution to the next logical step. “We need to know who they are, and we need to know why they spied on us.”
“I got a guess.”
I didn’t like my guess, but I said, “I think we’re probably thinking the same thing.”
“That the drone belongs to those assholes who shot at us back in Carlsbad? And the reason we slipped out of town so easy is because they let us.”
I felt like a stooge, but the obvious had to be said. “They used their drones to follow us all the way down here.”
“We need to get back to Bal.”
12
The largest enclosed space in Balmorhea was the high school basketball gym. We used it for basketball games—no surprise—well, maybe so. We were more than a decade past the collapse of civilization. I didn’t know much about the world beyond our surrounding desert, but I imagined we had things pretty good in our little town. Elsewhere, anyone still alive probably spent too much time running from the infected or scrounging for food to have time for rubber-ball hoop games. In our gym, we held community movie nights, Saturday night dances, indoor swap meets, and any other activity that required an enclosed space, including hastily-called town council meetings.
The one inside had been humming along for three hours when I snuck out with Murphy close behind. Dalhover, being a council member, had to stay, and would answer the follow-up questions that were likely to arise when Mayor Ortega finally forced the discussion back to the urgent question of the drones and the Carlsbad skirmish. As things stood, two or three dozen spectating citizens were spewing this year’s incarnation of the rumor that a horde of mechanized Whites was terrorizing East Texas. And of course, they were spreading west, and they were the ones we ran into in Carlsbad. Conflating the Carlsbad belligerents with the East Texas imagined horde didn’t make any sense, but that didn’t stop anyone from pushing the lie—again.
Heading toward a pair of picnic tables in the sparse shade of a winter-bare tree, Murphy yawned. “Man, if Steph were still mayor we wouldn’t be—”
I stopped him there. “She ran Bal for seven years. You know she was tired of it.”
“I get that, man, but you know.” Murphy had expounded his opinion on the matter about a hundred times, which wasn’t going to stop him from telling me again, whether I wanted to hear it or not. We were like an old married couple that way. “Ortega does a good job, but she’s all rose-colored glasses and unicorn poop.”
“People respond to hope.”
“People who never go outside far enough to lose sight of the walls. Things around here are chill most of the time. It’s not like what we see out by El Paso, or even in Fort Stockton. Most of these people wouldn’t last five minutes in Fort Stockton. That place is turning into a zoo.”
“Most of them lasted for years before they found us.”
“You mean before we found them.” Murphy was right about that. At the same time, he wasn’t. We took in immigrants of both kinds—those who found us, and those we found. Nobody had actually run a survey to find out which we had more of.
I told him, “Ortega did put Bal on alert.”
“Because Dalhover’s on the town council. I’ll bet you a wet booger he pushed her into it.”
“Why would I want a wet booger?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I don’t think I do.” I stretched and yawned. Fatigue from the Carlsbad escapade was catching up with me. “Ortega is good at what she does. She’s a nit-pickety busybody. It’s baked into her nature. That’s why she likes running Bal and putting up with the endless mothering.” That brought to the surface memories of Steph’s ongoing frustrations with the job. “You’d think after everything everyone here has been through, convincing them not to quibble over trivial crap would be easy.”
“Managing the equitable allocation of goat cheese is one thing but—”
I laughed. “Did you just use the phrase, ‘equitable allocation’?”
“Like you own all the big words.” Murphy punched me in the arm, nearly knocking me over. “What I’m sayin’ is, Ortega is the kind of lady you want running the DMV or organizing the annual cookie sale for the Girl Scout troop. What happens the next time we got a horde of Whites climbing the wall? I don’t know, man.”
“You think she’ll panic?”
Murphy shuffled around, not sure what to say—unusual for him. “She feels like the same kind of politician we used to get stuck with back before the collapse.”
“Media whore?”
Murphy found that particularly funny. “I guess what I’m saying is, she’s good at making people like her.”
“Not making them,” I argued, “She’s a natural. It just happens.”
“Yeah, whatever. Point is, she’s no George Washington.”
I sauntered over and sat do
wn at an old picnic table and started to pick at the flaking paint. “Maybe we don’t need a George Washington anymore. Maybe we need a likeable bureaucrat.”
“Coming out here to Balmorhea, a million miles from everything, was a genius idea.” Murphy stopped himself and studied me for a moment. “Don’t let that go to your head, it being your idea to come out here and all. I’m just sayin’, being out here in the desert insulated us from a lot of what’s gone on in the world since the collapse.”
Letting one of my lingering worries out into the world, I asked, “You think we’re complacent?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe we are. I think Ortega is maybe proof that we turned complacent in exactly the wrong ways, and with what happened in Carlsbad, with that drone snooping over our shoulders…” Murphy shook his head and stared at the perimeter wall, visible just down the street. “What happens when it’s not just hordes of stupid Whites? What happens when a mob of Smart Ones comes at us? What if the shit we saw in Carlsbad is a preview of our future?”
“Look dude, I’m just as concerned about Carlsbad as you are. But you know, I can understand why a horde of Whites might attack us—it makes sense. For whatever dumbass reason it happens, a bunch of them get it in their heads to leave wherever they’ve been all this time, and they set out across the desert. They get hungry. They get thirsty. Because it’s the desert. The ones that make it this far and see Bal on the horizon must think it’s some kind of oasis. So, of course, they come at us. What other choice do they have?”
Murphy feigned awe. “Gosh, if I only I were as smart as you. Maybe just half, even. Because then—”
I heaved a sigh to shut him up. “What I’m getting around to saying is, why would anybody who’s gone to the trouble to scavenge together a mechanized military force care about coming all the way out here to Bal? There’s got to be a hundred thousand square miles of oil fields from here all the way up to Oklahoma, and we’re just barely on the edge. So, oil? Off the table. What about water? Farmland? Free for the taking all over the country. Anything anybody might need must be more easily had anywhere else.”