Jessie stood there, watching the two of them and wanted to slap herself on her back. It was the best performance she had ever given! Especially with her clothes on. She knew where the words came from, and as much as she wanted to spit at the thought of him, she almost wondered if maybe he had something. Maybe she was right – and maybe he had been right too.
“Sis?” Dusty asked.
“All right,” she said. As Dustin continued to stare at her she rolled her eyes and said, “Fine! I’m in, okay? I just don’t trust her. What makes her different from the guys that took her car? We don’t know shit about her!”
Dusty opened his mouth to respond, but glanced at Jessie briefly before doing so. Jessie beat him to the punch.
“What do you want to know about me?” she asked. “We don’t have to be friends. I don’t expect an invitation to Christmas dinner. But I’m all you’ve got.”
“And that way you get a nice happy reward,” Tanya said, pointing out what seemed obvious to her.
“Fine!” Jessie snapped, rubbing the back of her neck in irritation. “Maybe that’s it! Maybe you’re just a fucking paycheck. At least that means I need to get you back safe and sound, don’t it? Either way, trust me or not, you get back okay and you never have to be bothered by me again.”
The moment of silence stretched out, tense and awkward. Jessie stared at Tanya, then occasionally glanced over at Dustin. He would look away quickly though, embarrassed by the argument. Finally the former gymnast relented, either seeing Jessie’s point or giving in to her brother’s obvious, if unspoken, request.
“So where are we going? We can’t walk without food or water for that long.”
“I know a guy, we can be there before the day is over,” Jessie said, hating her only option but knowing she had to take it.
“Thought you said everybody wants something,” Tanya pointed out. “What’s he going to want?”
“He’ll probably want to shoot me,” she admitted. “But he’ll help. He helped me before and got nothing for it.”
“Why not head to Vegas? That’s closer – or even Lake Havasu?” Dustin asked, thinking hard about geography and momentarily distracting himself from his pain.
“Vegas was a shit-hole full of people aching to bleed you dry before. Imagine what it’s like now,” Jessie said. “Besides, I heard they had one of the first and biggest dirty bombs.”
“What about Lake Havasu?” Tanya asked, remembering seeing it from the window of the airplane as the flew overhead. “That place used to be nice, didn’t it?”
Jessie thought it over and shrugged. She had partied there a few times before the bombs, it was a great place. “Okay, maybe. This guy I know, he’s closer though. If he won’t help us we can head there.”
“Okay, you got us,” Tanya told her. “Lead the way.”
Jessie smiled, then pointed to the North and East. “Let’s go, we’ll have to help Dusty up like before.”
She made her way to a niche in the wall of the wash and climbed up. She sat down on the edge and waited for Dustin to get in place. He worked his way up, grunting along the way, and grabbed onto Jessie’s hands while Tanya pushed from behind. He made it up, coming into close contact with Jessie again and enjoying it in spite of the pain he felt. Jessie just smiled encouragingly at him and made sure he was all right before offering Tanya her hand. Tanya ignored it, easily climbing up the wall on her own with muscles that were trained to bounce and jump.
They set out, Jessie leading with her gun then slipping it back into her pants so that she could help Dustin. He moved a little quicker that way, and clearly enjoyed the close contact with the starlet pretending to be a courier.
“How…did…you….get hurt?” he asked between steps that made him wince and drove the breath from him.
Tanya walked beside them, watching carefully and listening intently. Jessie knew what she was doing and found it annoying and touching, how she was so worried about her brother.
“It was… a long time ago,” Jessie said. “I was in the Army, back when the world just started turning to shit. I was in Iran in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“What happened?” Tanya asked, sparing Dustin the breath and effort.
Jessie almost shrugged, but didn’t want to hurt the kid clinging to her. “Wrong place; wrong time. I got hurt. Got me fixed up, sent home, and out of the Army. End of story.”
There was a lot more to it, but Jessie didn’t like thinking about it, let alone talking about it. It was bad enough she lived through it night after night in her dreams.
“That what happened to your hand?” Tanya asked.
Jessie clenched the three fingers on her right hand into a fist subconsciously. Fortunately for Dustin, he was on her left side. “Yes,” she admitted.
“Oh, I’m, um, sorry,” Tanya said.
“I knew it,” Dusty whispered, so quiet that only Jessie could hear him. He turned to glance at her, his eyes wide and a smile on his lips.
Suddenly nervous, Jessie glanced around and then looked to Tanya. “Tanya, help your brother, I need to scout ahead a little.”
Seeing the suspicion in the gymnast’s eyes, Jessie sighed. “You’ll be able to see me the entire time, just be ready to get down or move faster to me if I motion for it, okay?”
Tanya nodded and made her way over to help Dustin. Jessie handed him off then moved ahead, pulling out her pistol again and making sure that they did not catch up to her. She looked around as she walked, but found herself paying attention to nothing. Her words kept going over and over in her mind, reminding her of what had happened. She shook her head a few times, but found she could not focus.
Nauseas again, she found herself bending over a dusty rock and dry heaving little more than phlegm and bile onto the hard backed ground. She was glad to see she had digested her breakfast, at least.
On her way back to her feet Tanya and Dustin were suddenly at her side. “Are you okay?” one or the other asked. Or perhaps both did, she was not sure.
She nodded. “Ate something bad,” she lied. “Coming back to haunt me.”
“You’re soaked,” Tanya said, seeing the sweat that had drenched Jessie’s top and was running down her body.
“Fuck!” Jessie spat out, tasting her vomit and wishing she had a beer to drink. “Come on, we’re fucked if we’re stuck out here at night.”
“Why?” Tanya asked her as she started to walk away.
“Cold,” Jessie said. She grimaced as a pain shot through her stomach, either from the contortions caused by vomiting or something else she could not be sure. “We’ll freeze to death.”
“It doesn’t get that cold,” she protested.
“Dry, high 30’s or low 40’s, without clothing it gets cold.”
“We’re not naked,” Tanya protested.
Jessie looked down at herself and did a double take. She really was drenched with sweat. Cold because of it too, even though it had to be near ten or eleven in the morning and it should be getting uncomfortably warm out. She was glad her top was dark blue instead of white, but even still her nipples were making obvious dents in the wet fabric. “You want to loan me a jacket then?” she asked.
“Oh, good point,” Tanya said.
“So let’s go,” Jessie said gruffly, and started out again.
Tanya and Dustin looked to one another, both thinking many thoughts but neither willing to voice them. After a brief moment, he nodded towards his sister. With a nervous smile, Tanya nodded back and they started after their erstwhile rescuer. Dustin was almost certain he knew who she was, but her acting was just good enough to leave him unconvinced. Besides, she looked a mess. Beautiful, sure; but a sweaty and dirty mess. All the movies he’d seen starring Jizzy Banks she was wearing makeup, had her hair styled, and was drop dead gorgeous. Jessie looked a lot like her, but she acted different. She talked a lot, unlike the one he’d seen in the movies. He’d heard a rumor that she’d lost a finger in an accident, but he had never once seen one of her
movies that showed it.
Still, that shadow of doubt kept his lips sealed. That, and he figured the longer he kept silent, the better his chances of seeing more of her and being closer to her.
With the sun rising through the red haze overhead, they trudged onward through what had once been the California desert.
Chapter 4
A chirp woke Carl up from the light doze he had finally settled into after his walk back. He looked over, instantly focusing on what he knew the problem to be. One of the three windows on his monitor displaying live video feeds showed movement. He rose up from his chair and looked closer at it, focusing on the small figures. Three bodies, he counted, at least two of them wounded.
The dust in the air and on his lens made identification impossible. He made a note to clean his lens again, he had to do it at least once a week. That could wait. First he had to deal with the trespassers. They were a lot closer to his hideout than he was comfortable with. He stared a moment longer, gathering what intel he could, then shrugged at the tiny figures he was about to kill. More scavengers better off dead anyhow, he figured.
Carl grabbed his jacket and slipped it over his worn army combat uniform. He opened a cabinet and looked at the different weapons contained within. He glanced at the monitor, the screen facing away from him, and decided to go with his M24. He loaded it full of five .300 Winchester rounds and was already thinking of where he was going to set up his sniper stand to intercept them. They were moving slow so he had time.
On his way out he slung his handy M4 over his shoulder, just in case. He took a different path than the roundabout circuit he had led the drugged out whore through earlier. He had led her all over the place to be sure she’d never find her way back. Truth was he’d parked her car to the east of his hideout a few hundred yards then driven her further east and south before heading back west when she flipped out on him. He sighed at how far people had fallen. Then again, this is what they deserved for decades of thinking only of themselves.
He chuckled bitterly while he walked. He was no different from anybody else and he knew it. If he really wanted to make a difference, he wouldn’t be out here living the life of a hermit. He climbed up a small ridge and found a niche in the shadow of a boulder. Before laying in it he made sure there were no surprises waiting for him in the shadows of the rocks or under the loose pieces of shale. Last thing he needed would be to lay down on a scorpion, spider, or a rattlesnake.
Set up finally, Carl pulled out his ranging scope and took a few measurements. Firing the .300 Winchester round he had a maximum range of around 1300 yards, about three quarters of a mile. They’d never even hear the shots by the time they were bleeding out onto the ground. He saw them in the distance of his scope, blurry through the haze of dust and dirt that kept being kicked up by the dry weather and hot winds. At the rate they were moving he figured he had a good fifteen minutes or more before they’d be in range.
* * * *
Jessie was stumbling frequently. She tried for a while to fake it, pretending to be tripping over loose rocks and pushing herself off of rocks and bushes. It was not long before her legs and abdomen were scratched by the thorny bushes and it was everything she could do to stay on her feet and moving. The rescued siblings watched her with growing concern, wondering what was wrong. Tanya had whispered a few times her concern about Jessie having the fever. Dusty nodded, agreeing with her and even more concerned. Jessie might not have been much, but she was all they had.
Besides, if she was who he thought she was, it would be a terrible loss if she died. As it was, he was seeing that she was human and not the unstoppably sexy movie star he had known her to be. Not to mention uninhibited! He fondly remembered some of her more raunchy scenes and blushed as he found his gaze drawn to her stumbling figure. At least she took his mind off his aching side.
Jessie paused ahead of them, her hands resting against a struggling Joshua tree that had managed to live through the upwind fallout from when LA had been nuked. Her head hung low and she was breathing ragged, but then she seemed to collect herself and, without a glance back at them, she started forward again. Something pinged off a rock in front of her, but she took another step before the strange sound registered. Thunder rolled across in front of them, announcing the shot that had chipped the rock near Jessie.
Jessie’s head popped up. She looked around stupidly, trying to make sense of what she knew was happening. Tanya and Dusty ducked down, moving over to the tree and using it as cover. No more shots came immediately, but Jessie stood there staring around. She slowly raised her hands up in the air, then turned around slowly. Tanya and Dustin saw her face and saw the streaks of dirt on it from sweat and, from all appearances, tears. She looked calm at the moment, though circles under her bloodshot eyes gave evidence to exhaustion and misery. Her hands quivered in mid-air from where she held them as well.
With no more shots coming at them, Jessie finished her circle and then started forward again. The single report from the bolt action sniper rifle prevented them from identifying where it had come from, though they knew it was somewhere ahead of them. Arms still up, she stumbled a few times over the uneven ground. Once she even fell, skinning her knee and palms when she hit the rocky ground. Gasping for breath, she picked herself up and kept going. Behind her, a nervous brother and sister followed cautiously.
It took them forever to cross the ground, afraid at any minute the breath they took might be their last. Finally they were drawn into a small ditch, limiting their ability to easily go anywhere but forward or backwards. Jessie looked about nervously as soon as she realized it, then felt her heart hammering in her chest faster than ever. Her breath came in short gasps and she had to reach up to wipe some sweat from her brow. What she could not figure out was why she was sweating; she was freezing cold! Even without the near constant winds that kicked up the dirt these days, the spring sun should have made her feel like she was being baked alive.
Her next step was on some loose rocks. Her traction slipped and her knees failed to react in time. Jessie felt herself falling as though from a distance, like it was happening to somebody else. She grunted as she hit the ground, rolling slowly and wondering if she’d been shot. She’d never been shot before, perhaps that was what it felt like? Her head was pounding and her heart felt like it was going to burst in her chest. Her ankle and knee hurt, and so did her shoulder. Still, it was a lot better than being caught up in an explosion.
She heard people calling her name. She wondered what they wanted. The ground was comfortable even if there was a couple of rocks poking her in the back. She could handle that. At least she was lying down. Her head rolled to the side, letting her see up the side of the small ravine they were in. She saw the lip of it, where the sky rose above the ground, and she wondered if she crawled up to it and crossed over if she’d fall off.
“The world’s round,” she muttered, realizing how stupid that idea was. She passed out then, giving in to her exhaustion and confusion.
Tanya pulled Dustin forward, forgetting the earlier shot that had been taken at them. Grimacing and gasping in pain, he knelt down next to Jessie while Tanya tried to gently shake her to wake her up.
A shadow fell over them, making Dustin gasp, and then wheeze in a strangled cry of pain. Tanya turned at the noise and saw the soldier staring down at them from the lip of the ravine, rifle trained on them. She stood up slowly, her hands rising. “Please,” she said, feeling her own heart hammering in her chest. “Please help.”
He walked down the incline, a boonie hat shielding his face from any glare from the sun. A long barreled rifle hung across his back on a strap and a shorter more traditional looking rifle was held in his hands, pointing at them. He said nothing, but came to a stop towering over them as they knelt next to the down actress cum courier. His face was expressionless as he stared down at them.
“She dead?” he asked, breaking the silence. His tone showed he didn’t care one way or the other what the answer was.
> “No,” Tanya said quickly. “She was helping us – taking us back to Mexicali,” she added quickly.
“Some help,” he observed. “Who’re you?”
“I’m…” she started, but was interrupted by her brother.
“We were in a plane that crashed. Nobody else survived. She pulled us out of the wreckage and saved us from some scavengers.”
“She did, did she?” He asked absent-mindedly while staring at her. Carl twisted his neck, muffled popping noises showing the success of his maneuver.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked, turning to look at Dustin.
“Chest hurts,” he said, his hand going gently to cradle his ribs.
Carl nodded. He knelt down and took the pistol out of Jessie’s pants, slipping it into a pocket on his coat, then picked her up none-too-gently and tossed her over a shoulder. “Keep up,” he grunted to the others, then started off heading across the ground at a pace that was rough for the teens to follow, especially Dustin.
The walk only lasted for half an hour. Carl had enough of a lead on them that it took Tanya and Dustin a few minutes to see where he had gone. They figured it out a minute later when they looked down a narrow path between some rocks over a ridge. It was a small trail along another dry gully. Crossing it they came to some steps hewn out of the dirt and rock, occasionally shored up with a timber. They led to a small plateau that was blessed with some almost healthy vegetation. Passing through it quickly, for fear they might never find Carl, they stopped short and stared in surprise. A small clearing sloped upwards away from them gradually, but was riddled with a barbed wire fence that was the sort used to keep cattle in, save that it was at least five feet high. A break in it served as a door, and as a choke point. Carl, holding the semi-conscious Jessie, stood and waited for them.
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