by Jim Rudnick
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As the truck made its way along the regional roads, Wayne was still bitching from the crew cab area.
“If the dam bombs had fallen just a couple of miles to either side, she’d still be up and we’d be safer—hey, what the hell is that?” he suddenly added to his rambling complaint as he pointed off to one side of the road.
After leaving Adair and getting back up on the interstate, they’d not gone more than ten miles when they saw that the interstate roadway had fallen.
“That was probably due to the large town below,” Sue said. “Used to be a bedroom community for Lindos, “which is like only about forty more miles away. Trains, as I remember, were big here—commuters would go in and out daily. But the Boathi took care of that, and the interstate was a bystander that got caught in the bombing. Most likely, ‘cause the railway yards here were so big …” She pointed to the massive craters and twisted rails ahead.
They had left the interstate by doubling back about three miles to an on-ramp, and taking it down, Javor had turned the truck around and headed back east. This regional road, a four-lane road, had few cars or vehicle pileups, and they made good time until they found their way ahead blocked.
The interstate itself had fallen down ahead, and its six lanes of concrete, re-bar, and twisted beams lay ahead and completely blocked the road itself. A large crater on the right of the roadside stretched outward to the right, and there was no way to guide the truck that way.
Sue pointed to the left and said, “Try the left—slow though, I’d think.”
Javor had the same opinion and nodded. He backed the truck up a few yards, spun the wheel to the left, mounted the curb, and went over onto the overgrown weeds and pockets of trash and debris from the interstate. Twice, they all had to get out and manhandle something out of the way. The biggest thing they moved was a beam. They hooked the beam up to the back of the truck using a chain they found in the truck and yanked the beam just a few feet to the right. As they slowly made progress, Sue spoke up finally.
“We need to camp out somewhere, so let’s look for that spot first and worry about getting by all of this tomorrow, shall we?” and that got nods from them all.
Javor slowly took the truck to the left as far as he could, right up beside a small slope. The banks of the slope climbed up the side of one of the interstate support pillars and slowly went ahead. From what he could see, the slope went well past the pillar itself, and that might give them some cover on one side of the truck.
He slowed and looked at Sue.
“With the slope, we’re covered on that side. All we need do is to have our eyes on the other sides and we’d be fine, I’d think.”
Sue held up a finger and got out of the truck. The rest of them followed her.
Javor watched Bixby carefully. Bixby loped along ahead a bit, then climbed the slope to dig for a moment, and then came back to the group who were peering around the parked truck.
Slope on the left side. Ahead, overgrowth and what looked like a small dip down a culvert of some kind. To the right was the pile of interstate rubble that ran on for hundreds of yards. Huge beams now showing the oxides of rust and twisted sections of concrete and re-bar lay like broken crackers in a box. From where they were now, they couldn’t see where the interstate was back up and they’d be able to use it again. Right now, they were stuck on the grade-level regional roads, which as they’d heard from the Regime could be a problem.
They all looked at each other and then shrugged en masse.
“Not a problem, I think.” Sue smiled.
“Bruce, your turn for first sentry duty ‘til say midnight—Wayne ‘til four and then wake me up. We’ve got some food in hand as well as boxes of whatever kind of food stuff Nutty was carrying to Walkerville. Let’s all try to find a spot to sleep—dibs on the front seat of the truck. Back though would be great too, I’m thinking.” She went back to the truck as did Javor, and he turned Nutty off and then grabbed his pack from the rear of the truck.
With one of the guys taking the crew cab seat, he decided to sleep on the top of the truck, rather than in the back. Don’t have claustrophobia, but being out in the open is always better. Might be a bit safer too. Course, how the hell do I get Bixby—wait, he thought.
He went to the back end of the truck and slowly climbed the slope, finding handholds with the weeds and enough space to force a foot up and up again. As he got to about the height of the truck, he stopped and looked back—and the top of the truck was only five feet away. He grinned as Bixby stopped whining, scrambled up beside him, leapt over that gap, and strutted around on top of the truck.
Not a problem, Javor thought as he went back down and got his shotgun and backpack too. Removing two MREs that he’d stocked from the Drake, he also got a fresh supply of jerky bars and tucked them into his armor vest pocket too.
Back down on the ground, Sue and the others were sitting on debris from the interstate. The twisted concrete that Bruce was on looked almost like a love seat, and he stretched out his legs and sighed.
“Wish we could have a fire—but yeah, I know, not safe. Wish we all had some beers and music too—if I gotta be in the woods, I’d like more to do,” he said wistfully.
Wayne nodded. “How unlike you, Bruce, to want what we can’t have. Just don’t get too comfy on that loveseat you’re on—sentry duty means staying awake, eh?” he said, and while he meant to josh with Bruce, one could tell he meant it.
Sue looked up from the packages of the Nutty Spread that she was carefully layering on top of some kind of cheese. She waited until she’d gobbled down a big piece before she spoke.
“Sentry duty Bruce is good at—hate to think you’d get by him. But yeah, we are in some kind of zone that the Regime said we shouldn’t be … so let’s all pay close attention to anything that seems like it could be trouble.
From above them on top of the truck still, Bixby suddenly barked and wheeled around. They could hear him scrambling down the slope of the embankment, and it sounded like an avalanche as he was in a hurry, and Javor picked up his shotgun just in case.
The dog went right by them and off into the debris field from the fallen interstate, and they could hear him barking. Sue motioned for them all to spread out as they turned to face outward.
Bixby stopped his barking and growled now instead. Something else growled back, and Javor was off at a run.
He moved over some of the piles of concrete and when he reached a small cleared spot, he stopped cold.
Bixby was backed against a tall pile of rubble, but what faced him was a creature Javor had never seen before. More than five feet tall at the top of its head, it was, or should have been, pure white fur—but the animal was so dirty that the word white would never be used to describe it’s color. Big head, fangs that were bared, and it looked like a cross between a cat and something else. Claws flexed out of the muddy fur around the feline’s feet, and the tail was held back but flicking from side to side—a hunting gesture he knew from other cats.
Javor had no idea what the other animal was, but as he aimed his gun, Bruce beside him said, “No let me—clean kill shot is easier with a rifle” as he pointed his rifle at the predator.
Bixby barked and barked, and then the sound of the rifle rang out.
The cat-like animal fell in a heap, twitching for a moment and then lying still.
Bixby went right up to it, ignoring Javor’s commands to stay back and wait, and he sniffed the animal.
“Zoos here those years ago freed all their animals—including, I’d guess, this one, called a Kellas—dunno why though. Bigger than I remember from trips to the Arlington Zoo thirty years ago and more. Still, would have loved to have eaten Bixby or us! Good shooting, Bruce,” Sue said as she turned to walk back to the truck and their meal.
Javor nodded. A Kellas, she’d called it. Big enough—almost twice the size of Bixby—to have eaten us all.
Calling Bixby did no good, and he had to grab the dog by the scr
uff of his neck to drag him back to their truck. He praised the dog though, reminding himself that if the Kellas had had more time, it might have not ended up so good for Bixby and them.
As they retraced their steps away from the cat, Javor looked up. It was growing darker as dusk was just about over, and a few stars could be seen in the eastern sky to their right. The shadows had deepened and the faint glow off the top of the slope behind them and to the west was almost gone.
Sitting once again on the same log, he had a couple of mouthfuls of his MRE—Beef Sloppy Joes the label read—and he noted that Bixby now had eyes for only him and the food.
He grinned at his dog and then pulled the rip tab on the second MRE. Putting it down, he opened it with his knife, and Bixby stared at him. Well trained, he thought, as he nodded toward the food and said, “Okay, boy, chow down, lad,” and the dog wolfed down the whole MRE in a few seconds flat, chomping his lips together afterward to gather any of the gravy or drippings that were on his muzzle.
Wayne had watched the whole thing, and as he ate his dinner, he spoke up.
“A Kellas that attacks not at a good time for same—just dusk now—instead of in the middle of the night when hunting for a cat is always better might mean something, eh?”
Sue looked at him as she wiped off some of the Nutty Spread off her lips.
“Meaning?” she said.
“Well, predators—especially I’d think this Kellas—would know that their success rate goes way up when it’s dark. So something made her approach us in the daytime. She didn’t even know that Bixby was here—he was up on top of the truck. So something else is making her pick a bad time—she was after us—right?”
Javor thought this made sense and as nicely as he could, he said, “Wonder what might prompt that kind of a change in behavior?”
“No idea,” Sue said, “but dusk it is, and I’m bedding down. Bruce, you’re up ‘til midnight … night, all,” she said, and taking her things, she went back to the front seat of the truck.
Wayne went too and Javor hustled Bixby along with him, said “Night,” and left Bruce alone in his love seat.
Up the slope was a bit easier this second time, and when he turned to jump across the gap, Bixby was already there, lying beside his backpack.
Getting comfortable was a problem as no truck roof was made to be comfy on, but his roll-out pad helped a bit. The foil blanket would keep him warm as it insulated him from the cooler night airs, and Bixby lay just an arm’s length away on one side. He took off his armor vest and rolled it up around the Colt to use as his pillow. Only his shotgun was closer. The moons above were gently golden tonight as the last parts of their crescents were just slivers.
As he drifted off, Javor flexed his knee a few times. The alien tissue had surely done its job earlier in the day. But those kinds of demands on it usually meant that he limped for a few days. He just hoped that the few days were all it was going to cost him.
He smiled at no one and thought of home, his brother whom he hadn’t seen now in almost a dozen years, of another dog he’d had when he was a youngster named Skippy, and how much fun it had been to be a kid.
He slept.
Dreamless sleep at first, and then the twenty years of decathlon training and what that had cost him in relationships and body parts came too, but tonight not so much. In his dream, he was training for the discus throw and the circles were so hard to grasp at first. It had taken him almost five full years to learn the proper spin technique.
How hard it had been to learn that the one-and-one-half spins were all to be phased in in sections.
His coach yelled at him time and time again that if he were just to focus on rhythm, it would bring about the consistency to get in the right positions that many throwers lacked.
“Executing a sound discus throw with solid technique required perfect balance,” Coach yelled at him.
This was due to the throw being a linear movement combined with a one and a half rotation and an implement at the end of one arm, his coach drilled into him time and time again, and tonight’s dream was no different.
As he squatted once again at the back of the circle, ready to spin counter-clockwise, he was pulled from his dream.
Something was wrong.
He felt that more than anything, as one hand crept out of the foil blanket and found the shotgun, and then he heard Bixby’s low growl. Trying to get the dog to quiet was not possible, and Bixby jumped off the truck top back to the slope. Javor heard Bixby barking like mad as the dog crashed down the slope.
Something was going on, and he quickly got up on his knees as quietly as he could to peer around in the nighttime blackness as Bixby’s frantic barking continued.
Big sounds like footsteps came from below in front of the truck, so he went back on his belly to crawl right up to the front edge of the roof above the cab below.
Something was moving toward the truck, and yet he couldn’t see squat.
“No way around this,” he said to himself, as he banged the butt of the shotgun down and slammed it into the metal roof of the cab.
“Sue—turn on the truck’s lights,” he barked out. As he brought the shotgun up to cover the front area, his eyes widened.
From behind him, a club cracked into his skull, and he lost consciousness in a sea of blackness and dog barks.
CHAPTER EIGHT
As the fog cleared when Javor slowly came to, he realized someone had gone through his clothing and his backpack. The first thing he saw was everything from his backpack in a jumbled mess across the top of the truck.
He shook his head and a foot nudged him. A huge club swung from the belt of the figure standing above him.
That foot was attached to a big solid man about thirty years old. He held a bow with the arrow nocked but just pointing at him, and he gestured with his head for Javor to get off the top and down the slope to join the others.
Javor did, but he did so slowly as his head was splitting. As he looked around the truck top, he couldn’t see his shotgun. That was a problem, but he slowly made his way to the edge of the truck and leapt across the few feet to the slope. Too groggy to stand, he used his rear end to slowly slide down the dirt slope, and when he reached grade level, he tried to stand.
He hoped he’d never have to do again. Both temples began to pulse and a sharp pain shot down the back of his head too. That guy wields a pretty good club. He gritted his teeth as he made his way around the truck and over to the group.
Sue was nursing a hit that would blacken her left eye—if not the whole left side of her face.
Bruce, who’d been on guard duty, had taken an arrow to his shoulder. He pressed a rag into the spot all around the protruding arrow and grimaced.
Wayne lay still unconscious in a heap. Javor went over to him to straighten up his legs and saw no wounds. Club maybe, he thought.
And Bixby. Bixby sat quietly, beside another robed person who appeared to be the head of the attackers, and his tongue hung out as he breathed heavily.
“I am Disciple Anqas—I lead this team of raiders from the Forest Empire. You have a tablet. A tablet of ours—that you found when you found Khuno,” he said as he pointed down at Bixby. “His master would have had it with him in his bag. You have it now. We want it now—and you can all live. Who speaks for you?” he finished as he looked at Javor and Bruce.
“I do,” said Sue, “and what would make you think that we have any kind of tablet? Let alone one from Bixby’s owner?”
The fact that a woman was in charge appeared to make the robed leader step back and think for a second.
“A woman leads … that is so very different. But we have seen many things in the past hundreds of miles that have surprised us greatly. So, leader—do you have a name?” the man asked.
Javor thought he detected a bit of civility in the man. Of course, being held by six other robed men, all with arrows nocked and pointed directly at his group might have made him think that, he guessed.
“My name is Sue—Sue of the Regime—I run this cadre for them. Who are you and this Forest Empire?” she said as she stalled for time.
Javor carefully leaned forward over Wayne and patted him on the face gently. No response yet, but the robed men allowed him to find a canteen and wet the unconscious man’s lips.
“We are the nation that is in power in the north—well north of this area. We know that the God who came and made all the changes to Ceti4 did so to rid the lands of non-believers. We await their return as our saviors and know that in the meantime we need to be as pure as we can. Of course, as you can see,” he said as he pointed at Wayne and Bruce, “when people resist, they will need to learn that the Empire is the rightful new nation on Ceti4. The tablet is …” he said.
Back on point, and he wondered what Sue would do, but she just nodded and then asked if they’d let her go into her backpack in the front seat of the car, to which he replied, “No.”
Disciple Anqas nodded to one of the others to go, and in a moment, he was back with the backpack. After rifling through it, he nodded as he pulled out that tablet and handed it to Anqas.
He took the tablet, turned it on, and then scratched his head.
“Disciple Kaspi’s PIN is his birthday too?”
The large robed man who stood over Javor nodded as he said “ten, twenty, seventy-two.”
After Disciple Anqas keyed that PIN in, the tablet appeared to light up, and he was in. Nodding, he turned it off and then looked back at Sue.
“Just how far have you come for that thing? And boy, you guys must be fast,” she said.
That got a nod from one of the bow holders who said, “More than five hundred miles in less than ten days …”
Anqas frowned and waved his hand to quiet the others. He stood there and stared at the cadre.
A woman with a face that was bruising down the whole left-hand side, a man with an arrow still in his shoulder, another with what could only be a screaming headache, and one that was still unconscious—hardly a group to worry about.