by Drew Avera
“Could be fun,” Catalina mused.
“Just let me do the talking,” Nate told them.
The ATV pulled up beside the locomotive, the engine dying with a final, sputtering cough. The rider was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt beneath a military-style tactical vest, with a compact handgun holstered on the left side of the vest. A nylon sheath in woodland camo was fastened to the side of the ATV, the wooden stock of a shotgun protruding from the end of it. The rider pulled off the visored helmet and long, brown hair spilled out in a wild tangle.
She was not unattractive, Nate admitted, in a rough, road-worn sort of way. She looked thirty-something but was probably in her twenties, though the missing teeth when she smiled aged her even more than the lines beside her eyes and mouth.
“Y’all wanna pass by here,” she said, her Kentucky accent strong, “there’s goin’ to be a toll.”
“And who are you people?” Nate asked her. “You represent one of the local towns?”
“We represent the holler,” she told him with a cackle. “It’s over yonder,” she added, jerking a thumb over her shoulder.
“And what’s the holler’s cut today, miss?”
“Whatever you’re carrying,” she told him, “we’ll take half of it.”
Nate barked a laugh.
“That’s pretty ballsy of you. What if we haul you off that toy and put a gun to your head to get through instead?”
“I ain’t that important, mister,” she assured him, waving the idea off with a chuckle. “You kill me, all it’ll do is make the boys mad.”
“We’re not giving you half of our load,” Nate told her. Not least because all we’re carrying is mechs and ammo. “We have a case of T-rations, never opened. You can have ‘em if you let us through.” He shrugged. “And some pot. There was ten kilos of it, but I think our guys might have smoked some. You’re welcome to the rest of it. That’s the best we can do.”
“We ain’t throwin’ a fucking cocktail party, mister,” she protested. “Shit. I’ll go tell the boys and see what they say, though. Y’all wait right here.”
The woman slipped her helmet back on and started the ATV, which took five attempts before the engine turned over. She turned it back toward the intersection and goosed the throttle, the old rattletrap screaming in protest at the effort.
“She’s full of shit,” Catalina opined. “She ain’t expendable. I think she’s in charge.”
“Maybe,” Barron allowed, “but if that’s so, why did she bother to say she’d go run the offer by her people?”
“She took off so we wouldn’t put a gun to her head,” Nate said, “which is maybe what I should have done, but…” He turned over his shoulder and shot a look at Bill. “How big is your video library for that projection system?”
“Why?” the man snapped. “You wanna open up a Goddamned drive-in movie?”
Nate rolled his eyes.
“You were projecting a pair of Tagans when James and Ramirez came to see you. They told me all about it. Do you have anything else? Any other weapons systems?”
Bill shrugged, obviously confused.
“I bought a whole set of three-dimensional clip art with the projectors, but most of them’s Russian shit. I can’t even remember what all’s in there.”
“Then go fucking look,” Nate said, trying not to grind his teeth. “And find me a damned ZU-23!”
“A which?” Bill squinted at him.
“ZU-23. Just look.”
“And hurry, whatever you’re going to do,” Catalina added, nodding back down the tracks.
One of the technicals was moving, easing onto the strip of grass between the old fence and the tracks, slowly heading their way.
“Whaddya want me to do with this Shilka thing once I find it?” Bill asked from inside the locomotive, his voice muffled as it trickled out the door.
“Raise the projection screens above our car,” Nate told him, beginning to climb back up the ladder to the top of the next car. “We’ll take it from there.”
Elizabeth Jean Crowder, better known to her family and childhood friends as Betty-Jean, and lately just called “Ma” by the only people who mattered, watched the train carefully through her stolen binoculars.
“Think they knew who you was, Ma?” Marcus asked her, punctuating the question with a stream of tobacco juice spat carelessly on the broken pavement of the old road.
Marcus wasn’t much, she knew. He wasn’t smart, nor overly handsome, and he had even fewer teeth than she did thanks to the chaw, but he had balls and was a fair shot, and he cared about her. He’d walked around the flatbed to meet her when she drove the ATV back from the train, risking going into the open, armored with nothing but his old denim vest.
“If they did,” she said, scratching at something around her hairline and hoping she didn’t have lice again, “they didn’t let on, and they didn’t do nothing about it. They made us an offer of a case of military sealed rations and most of a key of grass.”
“Well, the grass sounds like a nice change,” he allowed, “but that seems awful spare for a toll.”
“I didn’t say I was gonna take the offer.” She scowled at him. “Tell Bobby to take one of the gun trucks up there and light up their locomotive a little, let them know we ain’t fucking around.”
“We shoot it up too much,” Marcus warned, “it won’t move, and then we gotta use the tractor to clear the tracks again, and that takes forever.”
“Well, tell the stupid motherfucker not to shoot it up too much then!” she snapped. “Draw him a fucking picture if you have to! Kill one or two of them military-looking assholes but don’t break nothing important!”
“Yes, Ma,” he said, nodding obediently and running off to the closest of the technicals, a lifted Ford pickup.
Bobby Wayne was driving the truck, and if Marcus wasn’t much, Bobby was even less. He was better looking by the virtue of being ten years younger, but was also, regrettably, ten years dumber. But hey, he had a pickup and he could drive like a bat out of hell. And he was enthusiastic about it. She could hear his ululating yell from fifty yards away as he gunned his engine and spun his oversized tires on the gravel of the old road, then headed off into the grass.
His brother, Dewey, was hanging onto the old fifty-cal they’d liberated from a train heading the other way, carrying truck engines to sell in the markets of the old cities. The truck engines had fetched a good price, too. They’d let the entrepreneurs keep half of them, of course. Wouldn’t want people to stop coming through here, altogether, or their main source of income would dry up.
Just like these yahoos, even though they were trying to get by without paying their fair share. She’d show them the error of their ways, take half of what they had in those cars, whatever it was, then let them take their train and go, because what use did she have for a train? It was just something other people could rob.
“Hey, all y’all!” she yelled, waving a hand over her head to get the attention of the others.
There were two other gun trucks, a Toyota and another Ford, with Sandi and Dwayne behind the wheel. They were good, dependable folks from out near Louisville, refugees when she’d found them. Besides the crews in the trucks, there was Tommy Lee who’d driven the semi, and his wife and brother who’d come with him in the cab and were up on top of the load of timber with old AK-47s, covering the others.
All of their heads turned her way. She’d always been good at making her voice carry.
“Keep your eyes open,” she warned them. “Once Bobby and Dewey fire them fuckers up, they might get it in their heads to try to ram the barricade. They do that, all y’all open fire at the locomotive and try to disable it.” She rolled her eyes when she saw the incomprehension on Tommy’s face. “That means try to break shit so it don’t work,” she clarified. “Everybody got that?”
Nods all around.
“And be careful, they got a rifle with them.”
Not that one rifle was going to make that much diffe
rence, but all it took was one lucky shot and she’d be down a man or woman. At least they didn’t have to worry about more than a couple machine guns at the most. Anyone who could afford heavy weapons wouldn’t be bothering to push a beat-up, pre-war civilian train over the old passenger rail lines through this part of Kentucky. Hell, anyone with the money just paid to have their freight sent on the military trains up north. People who came through here were riding the ragged edge.
Course, so are we.
Bobby was about two or three hundred meters from the locomotive when she noticed something rising out of one of the freight cars not too far back from the engine. The car had an open top, and the way the black, angular thing emerged with an irregular, jerky motion, it had to be on some sort of platform being cranked up, maybe by hand. She couldn’t make out what it was, though, and she raised her binoculars to her face, trying to focus on the car.
The thing was long, nearly as long as the car, with some sort of big drum at one end and a seat with a man in it, wearing some kind of green peacoat and a helmet and the whole thing seemed to be swinging around perpendicular to the car like a…
It was a gun.
“Bobby!” she yelled, knowing he couldn’t hear her, knowing even if he could, he couldn’t possibly stop in time.
She’d let the binoculars fall away from her eyes, but she didn’t need them to see when the gun fired. There was a flash and a puff of smoke, but she didn’t hear the report from the weapon until she saw the front of Bobby Wayne’s truck disintegrate in a ball of fire. The old Ford rolled forward under its momentum, slowly coasting to a stop, black smoke pouring off the wreckage of the engine.
“Oh, sweet Jesus!” someone was moaning. She thought it might be Marcus. “They’re dead!”
But they weren’t. She could already see Dewey hopping off the back of the truck, abandoning his machine gun to the raging fire and, as she watched, the driver’s side door swung open and Bobby stumbled out, limping away from the truck. The two brothers ran back toward them at the crossing, the panic and desperation on their faces visible even from a couple hundred meters away.
The train was moving again, slowly at first but definitely coming their way, and the barrel of that big-assed gun was swinging towards them, toward the lumber truck.
“Everybody scatter!” she bellowed, waving her arms demonstratively. “Tommy Lee! Get your asses off that truck!”
Damn it, this was all going to shit and people were going to die…
But the gun didn’t fire. Tommy Lee and his family clambered down off the flatbed and the other two pickups drove away from the semi and, hopefully, out of range, and the gun didn’t fire.
“Hey lady!” The voice was amplified by some kind of speaker system on the outside of the locomotive, but she recognized it as the clean-cut, mildly-handsome fella who’d talked to her earlier. “If you move the truck off the tracks, you can still have the box of T-rations.” A pause. “But I think we’re keeping the grass.”
Ma hissed out a sigh and kicked an ancient aluminum soda can across the ground.
“Shit.”
“Okay, bring it down, Roach,” Nate said into the radio handset. “We’re far enough away.”
The Hellfire crouched back down into the interior of the freight car, locking into place and then powering down with a hum of servomotors. Behind the mech, Hector Ramirez and James Fuller were hand-cranking the plastic sheeting back down into the car, the wind starting to billow against the sheets like the sails of a schooner. The projection had done its job, disguising the Hellfire as an old Russian anti-aircraft cannon.
“Anyone who was paying attention,” Jenny remarked, leaning back against the side of the freight car, “and knew anything about Russian equipment would have noticed the difference between a ZU-23 anti-aircraft gun and the sound and effects of a 20mm Vulcan cannon.”
“You think those Kentucky hillbillies know anything about Russian military weapons?” Svetlana asked her, laughing sharply in derision.
“Hey boss,” Ramirez said, a curious tone to his voice. “We had them dead to rights. Why didn’t you just have Roach blow the shit out of them?”
“Because we didn’t need to, Hector,” Nate said, shaking his head. “We kill enough people in this business when we don’t have any other choice.” His voice was bleak. “I have enough dead men and women on my conscience. And I expect I’ll have more before this is all over. When we can get away without killing anyone, I call it a win.”
Chapter Eighteen
Anton Varlamov didn’t know whether it was the lack of sleep, or the days spent in the cockpit, or perhaps the elevation making him feel light-headed. Or perhaps it was the spectacular view.
Pikes Peak was over four thousand meters high and the battalion of Tagans was summitting the mountain on the old road, staying off the main arteries and away from any potential military checkpoints and far from the areas where surveillance drones would be patrolling. The road was a ribbon above the clouds, the landscape beneath so far below them it might as well have been on another planet. It was late evening and yet still light up here, light enough he didn’t feel the panic of disconnection from the earth below he might have in the dark. The elevation was enough to make him acrophobic, though he wasn’t prone to it.
It made no sense from any logical point of view. He was in a vehicle with flight capability, and any fall, any slip off the edge would be a minor inconvenience, more of an embarrassment than a danger. Yet some things didn’t work by logic and he was grateful for the dregs of the sun and the illusion of stability it gave him. He wouldn’t have it much longer. The sun would be down in minutes.
But it’s all downhill from here.
No more flying now, anyway, except for the theoretical fall off the cliff, and Sverdlov would probably rather he let himself die in the tumble than give their position away. The thermal signature would stand out too bright on the mountainside, or so they’d been told, so it was one foot in front of the other for kilometer after kilometer. Anton began to lose track of time and distance, unwilling to take his eyes off the road, off the mechs in front of him, unwilling to even glance sideways at the wreath of stars rising over the Rockies.
He had, he knew, what long-haul truckers in the United States used to call white-line fever, a sort of self-hypnosis brought on from staring at the endless strip of road while driving at night. He’d read about it in a book of historical fiction when he’d been an enlisted man, many years ago, but knowing the term and the condition didn’t break the spell. A misstep did that, when the fugue made him sloppy and the bottom of one of his Tagan’s footpads scraped against the pavement with a painful, ear-splitting squeal.
Anton winced, and not just from the irritating sound.
“Get your shit together, Varlamov,” Sverdlov snapped. “We’re too close to start fucking up now.”
“Roger that, Colonel,” he acknowledged, abashed. “Sorry.”
“You aren’t the only one dragging, Anton. Everyone, time for a security halt.”
Anton sighed relief, careful to mute the mic. They hadn’t stopped moving for hours, and his legs and back were like one giant muscle spasm.
“Anton, bring your mech next to mine.”
The command wasn’t a surprise. Sverdlov had made a habit of stopping next to Anton’s machine and cracking the canopy to discuss the trip, their personal lives, their military careers, their opinions of the situation in North America, their respective opinions of the Russian government and military brass and their taste in women. Sverdlov preferred busty redheads, but would take a blond in a pinch. Anton thought the man simply didn’t have many opportunities to shoot the shit with an officer near his own rank who wasn’t in his chain of command.
And I know the feeling.
The line of mechs in the formation ahead had stepped off to the side of the road against the mountainside, in the old emergency lane, which was so overgrown with vegetation and covered in dirt, he almost couldn’t tell it had ever been
paved. He found Sverdlov’s machine on the IFF display and stepped past four other Tagans, waving to the pilots as they stretched and yawned inside their cockpits. He’d met them all by now, though he couldn’t have remembered their names with a gun to his head.
Sverdlov already had his canopy open and was dangling his legs out of it, the firefly glow of a cigarette tracing the movement of his right hand up and down as he blew out a cloud of pale smoke. Anton locked his Tagan into place and powered down the controls, yanking the lever to raise his canopy. His legs screamed in agony when he put weight on them, slowly and carefully climbing out of his seat and bracing his feet on platforms to either side of it, leaning out into the night air.
It was cold out here. Not objectively. It was probably still close to thirteen or fourteen degrees Celsius—what the Americans still insisted on calling fifty-five or sixty Fahrenheit—but compared to the steaming swamps of the east coast, it nearly made him shiver.
“What’s up, sir?” he asked.
Sverdlov was staring at the distant stars, still smoking his cigarette.
“Just call me Piotr except when we’re on the radio,” the man told him.
Anton blew a sigh very quietly out of his nose, keeping it as silent and undetectable as possible.
“Okay, Piotr,” he assented. “What’s going on?”
“I love the Rockies, Anton. They remind me of the Urals.” He glanced aside at Anton. “Have you ever spent any time in the Urals?”
“I have. My unit did cold weather training there once. It’s very beautiful.” He hesitated but continued. “If I am being honest, though, the Rockies have a different character to my eyes than the Urals. The Urals feel like old mountains to me, less craggy than these. The Rockies feel as young as the United States.”
“The Rockies will last longer,” Sverdlov commented dryly. “The United States as a cohesive political entity will be dead in days.” He shrugged. “If one could not honestly say it died years ago. Perhaps we are merely putting it out of its misery.” He gestured toward Anton with his cigarette. “Russia, though, we are different. The United States could die because it is a political entity. Russia will live forever because we are a people.”