Battle

by Tom Abrahams

  “They got law there?”

  Marcus eyed the gun in Whisper’s hand, whose finger was rubbing the outside of the trigger guard.

  “Yeah,” said Marcus. “As much as anybody’s got law. There’s a man named Battle. He takes your guns when you get there. That’s why I was offering to help out. If you wanted to keep your guns, I could—”

  “You could what?” squeaked Grissom. “I don’t like you, Rufus. I don’t know you. I don’t believe you.”

  Whisper backed away from Marcus. He raised a finger, asking him to wait, and he approached Grissom’s horse. While Grissom kept his angry gaze aimed at Marcus, Whisper spoke softly to him. Occasionally he’d point at Marcus or glance at him momentarily as he made his case, whatever it was.

  Grissom spoke under his breath, but his tense shoulders and wrinkled brow told Marcus he didn’t like what Whisper had to say. Marcus rolled his neck from side to side. He flexed his fingers in and out. His triceps and biceps were thick with exhaustion, but he kept them as high as he could.

  Finally, Whisper walked toward Marcus. “Look, Rufus,” he said, “we can take you as far as Baird and you can show us what—”

  Whisper stopped talking and moving. His eyes shifted beyond Marcus, over his shoulder. Marcus followed his gaze and glanced behind him.

  His horse was there, chewing grass and standing in the middle of the road. Marcus cursed himself and the horse and turned back to Whisper.

  “What is that, Rufus?” asked Whisper.

  “I told you,” said Grissom. “I knew—”

  Without thinking about the impossibility of it, Marcus acted. In a series of quick, seamless movements, he lowered his arms, drew his Glock, zipped two shots at Whisper, dropped to one knee, and rolled into the grass.

  Whisper dropped where he stood, collapsing to his knees and falling forward. His face smacked the pavement and his handgun rattled harmlessly from his hand, skittering across the road into the grass. He never managed a shot.

  The shots startled all three horses. Marcus’s backed away and trotted back into the grass. Whisper’s snorted and galloped north. Grissom’s horse reared with fright, throwing the unsuspecting rider from the saddle. He hit the ground awkwardly on his shoulder and lost his handgun.

  He was groaning and writhing in pain on the cool pavement, crying out about the pain in his shoulder and the lack of feeling in his arm as Marcus approached. He stepped around the blood that spilled from Whisper’s cracked nose and the wounds to his chest. Marcus noticed the slight reflection of the moon in the pooling black sheen that leeched across the fading lane marker.

  He adjusted his grip on the Glock and marched to Grissom’s side. He stood dispassionately over the sniveling man begging for his life as he held his disjointed shoulder at its socket. He raised the weapon and aimed it at Grissom’s head.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Stop crying.”

  “Don’t,” said Grissom. “Don’t kill me. Please.”

  Marcus held a finger to his lips. “Shhhh.”

  Grissom whimpered but stopped talking. Sweat bloomed in thick beads on his forehead and his upper lip. He was pale with shock. His pupils soaked in the moonlight and his body shuddered.

  “How many men are you taking to Baird?”

  Grissom’s face twisted with confusion, as if he didn’t understand the question. “What?”

  “How. Many. Men?”

  “I don’t—”

  Marcus tightened his hold on the Glock and squatted. He pressed the business end of the pistol to Grissom’s drenched forehead. “I know you’re headed to Baird to kill Marcus Battle. How many men are you bringing with you?”

  Grissom swallowed hard. “T-t-twenty,” he stuttered. “I mean nineteen. Is Whisper dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Who is Junior?”

  Again, Grissom’s wide-eyed response smacked of a man who couldn’t comprehend what was being asked of him. The surprise gave way to recognition and his chest heaved. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it again, then announced the obvious. “You’re Marcus Battle,” he said. “Oh God. You’re him.”

  Marcus tapped the barrel on Grissom’s forehead and pressed it inward, applying pressure. “Who is Junior? Why does he want me dead?”

  “Y-y-you killed his father.”

  “Who?”

  “Hank Barbas.”

  Marcus withdrew the Glock and stood. He backed away a step from the groveling casualty on the road.

  Hank Barbas? The red-bearded devil? The man who helped kill his family? That Hank Barbas?

  Of all the men he’d offed, all the sons, husbands, and fathers whose lives he’d cut short with a bullet or bomb, it was Hank Barbas’s son who’d mounted a coordinated attack against him?

  “I didn’t kill Hank Barbas,” he muttered absently. “A dog killed him.” Marcus squatted again and looked Grissom in the eyes. “Open your eyes and look at me.”

  Grissom, whose eyes were flooded with tears and sweat, nodded and visibly worked to keep his eyes open.

  Marcus enunciated each word for crystal clarity. He wanted the injured man to understand every word through the fog of his pain.

  “You go back to wherever you came from,” he instructed. “You tell Junior that it doesn’t matter whether he has nineteen men or nineteen hundred. If he comes to Baird, it’s where he dies. It’s where I let the same dog that killed his father chew on his carcass until all I have left to bury are the bones that dog doesn’t want.”

  Grissom, still holding his shoulder in place, nodded his understanding.

  Marcus stood and walked away. He whistled to his horse and the animal trotted to his side. He climbed aboard and walked to Grissom’s side. From high in his saddle, Marcus looked down. “Best get going,” he said, “before I change my mind and deliver the message myself.”

  Grissom struggled to his feet, his arm hanging limply at his side. Marcus drove his heels into the horse’s sides and she moved toward Baird. The wind had switched direction and was coming from the north now. It was cold, but Marcus couldn’t feel it. He didn’t feel anything.

  CHAPTER 14

  FEBRUARY 9, 2044, 5:02 AM

  SCOURGE + 11 YEARS, 4 MONTHS

  EAST OF RANGER, TEXAS

  Taskar glanced in the rearview mirror. The man lying in the back amongst the quintet of large CDC-provisioned gasoline cans was coughing more vigorously than he had in hours. It was a wet, rattling cough that hurt Taskar’s ears, even through the filter of industrial plastic.

  He could almost see the deadly microbes and the spray of mucus exploding from the man’s lungs and through his open mouth. He imagined the particulate dancing through the air like invisible pieces of a blown dandelion, floating with purpose in a widening arc to the front seat, where it curled around his head and neck, seeking out the current of air that would suck it into his nostrils and deep within his own lungs, where it could take hold. The virus would attach itself and start overtaking his cells one by one. They would mutate and expand and sicken him. Then he’d be coughing and wheezing, his own breath pricked with the crackle of infection.

  It didn’t matter that they’d outfitted him with his own hazmat suit or that he was breathing a self-contained supply of clean air. Somehow, he figured the YPH5N1, a lethal combination of the Scourge and the swine flu, would kill him.

  He shifted his shoulders toward the hazmat-suited twin sitting next to him. Blankenship hadn’t slept a wink since they’d left Atlanta the previous night. He’d sat stoically, his large eyes focused on the road straight ahead like a robot on pause awaiting further instructions. He hadn’t spoken, hummed, or even moved his hands from the rifle he held at his lap atop the seatbelt pulled high across his hips.

  The man in the back hadn’t played the statue game. He’d been talkative, in fact. He’d told them his name was Lomas and that he’d volunteered for the program to give his children a better life than the one he could offer. He’d told them he regrette
d his decision. He’d made a bad choice.

  The only time he wasn’t talking was when he was groaning in pain or coughing up the thick, virulent fluid that pooled in his lungs like the backwash in the bottom of a first grader’s carton of milk.

  Blankenship had asked him to be quiet. He ordered it. He’d threatened it.

  Taskar reminded him there wasn’t much anyone could do to frighten a man who was already inoperably sick. Blankenship had disagreed. He’d seen plenty of things that could frighten anyone, even a man who could feel death’s grip. He done some of those things, he assured Taskar. But he didn’t follow through. He sat facing forward, watching the world whoosh past them as they moved closer to the proposed ground zero.

  Taskar adjusted the rearview mirror with his gloved hand. There was something foreign about his own car without the tactile sensation of touching the familiar molded plastic of that mirror or the worn leather of the wheel. Even the seat grooves molded to his body and shape weren’t quite right. He sucked in a deep breath of the artificial air, inhaling the new-rubber scent of the hazmat suit. There was the faint odor of gasoline that he could taste in the back of his throat.

  “I don’t know how you got me through the wall,” said Lomas, his voice carrying through the cabin. It was muffled but audible. “I can’t believe them folks let you bring me south.”

  “He doesn’t understand how it works,” said Blankenship. His voice was without emotion.

  Is he a robot?

  “What do you mean?” asked Taskar. “How what works?”

  The soldier peered at Taskar through the clear encased visor of his helmet. “The wall,” he said. “How the wall works.”

  “You mean the guards are on the northern side?” he asked. “That since the Dwellers took over, nobody cares if you move south?”

  Blankenship twisted forward, his suit crinkling. “Yes, that’s correct.”

  Taskar looked at Lomas through the mirror. The man was strapped to a gurney, his head toward the back of the hearse, his eyes facing forward. He was confined at his wrists and ankles. There was also a wide restraint that ran across his chest. Taskar thought that particularly cruel given the heaving cough that strained the leather strap every time Lomas expelled the fluid from his irritated lungs.

  “You hear what I’m saying?” he wheezed, his chin pulled to his chest so he could look at Taskar in the mirror. “Nobody’s going to be safe. Not when the others follow us here. Everybody’s going to get sick. Everybody is going to die. It’s the Scourge all over again.”

  Taskar let those words play in his head. He listened to the hum and warble of the tires on the highway and the thump of his pulse in his head. He tried to focus on the road ahead. He pretended he was a robot and sat as still as he could as he steered the hearse west.

  But the mirror kept pulling his attention toward the back of the hearse and Lomas’s sermon. He was telling of things that had happened and warning of the things that would come. The sick man’s voice rose and fell like a preacher full of spirit. Each word powered the next.

  “It’ll be like the locusts,” he prophesied between worsening, barking coughs. “Sick people will descend carrying this incurable disease. It’ll come in waves. That’s what they said. One wave and then another. A tsunami of death. That’s what they want. And I know why they want it.”

  “What is he talking about?” asked Taskar.

  “He’s babbling,” said Blankenship. “He’s delirious.”

  “They don’t think I know,” said Lomas. “They don’t think anyone knows. But I heard them. I know. I knnnoowwww.”

  Lomas coughed. A short hack followed by a quick succession of staccato barks. Then he gasped for air, struggling as if surfacing from too long underwater. He arched his back and shook his head wildly. His eyes squeezed shut and tears streaked from their corners. One cough begat another and another. Now they were jagged, angry hawks audibly tearing at Lomas’s chest and throat.

  He was no longer mumbling non sequiturs or knowledge of secret conspiracies. He was fully engulfed in the throes of his rapidly progressing genetically modified disease.

  Taskar gripped the wheel and shifted his upper body toward Blankenship. “Should we stop? Should we help him?”

  “And do what?”

  “I don’t know. Loosen the binds. Pound on his back. Let him raise his hands above his head?”

  “That’s not happening.”

  The cough morphed into something less human. It was part growl, part moan, part retch. Taskar heard the rattle of the gurney’s thin metal frame against the side of the hearse’s interior. It was as though the wheeled bed was coming apart. The whole of the vehicle began to shimmy with Lomas’s violent spasms.

  Taskar tried to think of things worse than the sounds filling his car. Nails on a chalkboard? A drill grinding into a tooth? A metal blade scraping against glass? None of them made Timothy Taskar want to scream like Lomas’s agonizing fight against the infection devouring his body.

  Against his better judgment, he sheepishly checked the rearview through squinted eyes. His mouth gaped open, his body shuddering inside his protective suit.

  The image reflected in the rectangular mirror was a study in blood. Lomas was covered in it. His face, his chest. The roof lining dripped. Taskar slammed on the brakes. The seatbelt snapped tight against his chest. In the passenger seat, Blankenship slid forward and braced himself against the dash with an extended arm. He faced Taskar with his upper body.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “Nobody told you to stop.”

  Taskar glanced one more time in the mirror; then he eyed Blankenship and his rifle. He knew instantly what to do. He flipped the hearse into park in the middle of what used to be called I-20, and unbuckled his constrictive seatbelt.

  “He’s dying,” said Taskar. “We can’t let him die, can we?”

  Blankenship awkwardly moved himself such that he could see the rear of the hearse. His eyes expanded, scanning the blood-soaked tableau, and his mouth pursed with disgust. He met Taskar around the back of the vehicle.

  Taskar fumbled with the handle through his trembling gloves, but he managed to swing open the tailgate, illuminating the vehicle in a bath of pale yellow light from the overhead bulbs. Lomas arched his back and neck, looking out toward the suited men. He coughed and choked on the bloody sputum. A fountain of it sprayed upward and outward, much of it landing back on Lomas, the rest of it sprinkling Taskar’s suit and visor. The dying man was gargling, his hands flexing and contracting at his sides. His toes arched as if they were cramped into painful knots.

  Blankenship stepped back. He cursed repeatedly, uttering words Taskar hadn’t heard in years. He didn’t even know the meaning of some of them. Apparently, the soldier wasn’t a robot.

  “Holy mother—” his final volley was muted by another cacophony of pain. “How much blood can he have left?”

  Taskar swallowed against the dry lump in his throat. Sweat dripped into one eye and he tried blinking back the salty sting of it. He was breathing heavily and puffs of hot condensation clouded his visor. His legs, stiff from the drive, were weak. His knees shook and his ankles struggled to hold his weight as he slid into the hearse to work on releasing the hooks that held the gurney in place.

  Even through the filter of his suit, the muffled groaning and bubbly cough spewing from Lomas was distracting. Taskar tried manipulating the hooks by touch.

  Blankenship stood over Taskar’s shoulder, one hand on his rifle’s grip and the other on the underside of its barrel. “What are we doing?” he asked. “What’s the goal here?”

  Taskar didn’t have an answer. The humidity in his helmet was thick and hot. The suit suddenly felt as if it were shrinking around him, like somebody had attached it to a vacuum hose and was sucking out the air. His pulse thumped against his chest, at his neck, and in his ears. He considered taking off the gloves, but thought better of it and managed to free the first two hooks. The other two were too far to reach. He stretched
as far as he could, but his arms weren’t close to long enough. He pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees and measured Blankenship with his eyes. The soldier was broad and muscular, but no taller. He wouldn’t do.

  Taskar’s breath fogged his visor in the predawn. He planted his palms flat on the carpeted floor of the hearse. There was enough room to squeeze his suited body between the wheeled legs of the shaking gurney and the five gas cans pushed against the interior wall.

  Blankenship’s stance stiffened. He pulled back his shoulders and spread his stance. “Wait, what are you doing? You haven’t answered my question.”

  Taskar blinked against another tendril of sweat and blew it from the corner of his twisted mouth. He pressed his gloved palms into the carpet and heaved himself headfirst into the vehicle. The oxygenator on the front of his suit pressed inward, pushing against his ribs, so he adjusted his body and angled himself at forty-five degrees. He slid forward and rolled his shoulder out from underneath his body, freeing it enough to reach the farther of the two hooks. He labored at it, his eyes wandering from the task to the trail of blood leaching along the gurney’s upper rail. It traveled the length of the metal rail, twisting and throbbing like rain falling on a windshield, until it reached a bend in the frame and dripped to the floor in what Taskar imagined was a rhythmic beat.

  He closed his eyes, the sting of sweat forcing them back open. He stretched them wide, pulling his skin taut against his cheeks, and took another shallow breath. The hook unlatched and he shortened his reach to the one inches from his face. He made quicker work of the connection than he had the other three and quickly slid himself from the cabin.

  He pushed himself to his feet and shifted his weight to find the soldier. Blankenship was at the back corner of the hearse, his eyes planted firmly on Taskar’s chest. Taskar followed the gaze and looked down at himself.

  His chest was smeared with streaks of dark blood. He looked at his gloved hands. The palms were decorated with the same gruesome paint. He wiped them on his sides. It didn’t matter.