Chapter 4
“Rush, no.” Star lunged at Carroll before the grieving daughter knew how to react, but as soon as her arms curled up under Carroll’s, the girl snapped into a fit.
“I knew it. Dixon. Do something. Murderer!”
Avery slid in between Rush and Carroll. “He had no choice. Star was a hostage. He did what he could. The whole town could have been buried, but he risked his life and we’re all alive today because of him.”
“Oh I doubt that. He was probably too drunk to do that job right just like he couldn’t do his job as a father right and keep his own son safe.”
A fever of wrath shot under Rush’s skin. He wanted to pinch her cheeks together and dare her to say that again. Avery stepped between them and pushed her back. Rush growled and turned away.
“I know you’ve gone through a terrible experience,” Avery told her. “But Rush is an invaluable member of our team going forward. We’ve all made mistakes—”
“He—”
“I know what he did. I’m not sure I could have done any better given the circumstance and knowing what I’d do to save my own wife if she were here, I can relate.”
Carroll made fists as she stomped toward the stern.
“I’ll talk to her.” Dixon handed the rifle to Avery and went after his wife.
Star walked to Rush. “I’m not happy either, but just let it drift off.”
“I know.” Rush tucked her in his good arm and watched their sarfer head toward a valley between two dunes. Light glinted off two small circles near the top of the western peak. A shadow moved within its space, like two bodies perched along the side, heads near the reflective eyes. “Av. Two shooters!”
Avery chambered a round in the rifle as he swung around to aim. Blood popped in his shoulder from a force that tossed him off his feet. Another burst splintered the mast, spraying them with bits of wood. Blood spray stained Rush’s cast as he reached out to stop Avery’s fall. The rifle skittered as it rolled over on the deck. Blood pooled under Avery’s arm and darkened a circle around the new hole in his suit. Shadow spilled over the deck. Concurrent cracks echoed down the hill and into the plains. The main sail crumpled into the jib. Wind ruffled through the cloth and spit out at the ends.
Avery cursed.
Rush yanked Star to the deck.
Dixon crawled to Avery’s side. He checked his back. “It went through.”
Avery looked up at the sail. “Radio.”
Their ship slowed. The multi-hulled sarfer behind them cut right and lifted its starboard hull off the sand. Leaning on its port side, the underside of the starboard hull swung over Rush’s head. The passing ship leaned and caught in the wind, but righted its path and sank back onto two hulls.
Rush caught the eye of the woman sailing it as she looked back at how close she’d been. Viky owned a small mechanic shop in Shantytown. Her presence in the group eased his mind in case an engine broke down.
He pointed to the shooters up on the hill. “Do they have any guns?”
“No.” Avery cursed again.
Dixon held him down. “I need to keep pressure on this.”
Rush crawled to the dash and the radio hanging on a hook, his bad hand holding up the heavy blanket of sail. “We need them to fan out.”
“It’s on the group channel,” Avery pointed Dixon to the side of the boat. “Cut some rope from there and tie it around.”
Rush took the radio off the hook and keyed the mic. “Cut west and spread out. Two shooters on the northeast ridge of the western dune.”
“Rush.” Avery tossed him his blue-tipped staff.
Rush caught it and turned the staff over. Above the knob was a slider switch.
“Push that over to enact the power surge. The button lengthens the staff for long-distance accuracy.” Avery helped Dixon get the rope under his arm and up top for him to tie it down. “When it turns green, press the space opened by the slider to fire.”
Rush thumbed the switch over.
Two more concurrent cracks thundered across the valley. The fallen sail prevented Rush from seeing who was shot.
Yellow light grew from the left edge of a thumbprint-sized, flush button. Rush pressed in the knob and the staff expanded to forearm length. The main sail clouded around him. Star helped hold it out of his face. He pressed the knob again and it grew to a bow-sized staff.
“Hurry, Rush.” Avery waved Dixon off. “It’s good, thank you.”
Frantic cries escaped the speaker near the mic. “Bruss is dead,” a female voice shouted. It sounded like Viky. “They got our sail, too!”
Avery crawled to the bow and typed on the dash panel while Rush readied his staff’s end to poke up through the piled jib. The flush button rimmed in green.
“Short bursts now,” Avery told him.
Star helped hold the sail over Rush’s head as he peeked back into daylight. Their ships had sailed west around Avery’s, but the one with the female driver had its mast shot and had been stalled as well. Two people cried over a still body draped against the side. Two ships sailed ahead, many of their passengers looking back at Rush, hoping for a savior. They’re just civilians.
Rush aimed for the upper shadow on the western dune and fired. Hot blue and white light jerked the staff up as its surge kicked across the plain.
“I said short!”
Sand three meters wide and seven high of his target shaded the dune in solid gray and dark brown. The top shadow moved. Light glinted off the scope of the lower shadow. Rush swung his aim back to the right. The bolt of blue lanced into open air and lost its source. The tail disappeared beyond the dune, into the evening sky. Rush tried the flush button again, but it lost its glow. The whole staff lost its color.
“Av?”
“Crap. Already? Hold on.” Avery pushed a button below the dash and a low rumbling engine came to life, muffled by the belly of the hull. “Here. It should have more juice than that.”
Rush handed it over. Avery smacked it back into pocket size and stored it in a compartment in the dash just the right size. Metal prongs tucked it in on both sides like it was a battery.
Avery took the mic. “Viky, get your people out and behind the cover of the ship. We’ll come back for you as soon as we take care of these shooters. Sit tight.”
A small hole of wood burst from the deck ten yards behind Rush. Light rays opened up through a new tear in the sail, their origin near where his head had been.
Engines revved under Avery’s pressure on the throttle. He turned the wheel sharp left. The sky cracked from the delayed sound of the gunshot. “Rush, could you help hold up the sail for me?”
Dixon inched up to Avery’s right and poked his rifle up under the sail. Their hull broke through a wave and bounced everyone for a half second of air time. Dixon dropped his aim and reached a hand behind him to keep from falling. “I need a steady ride to get a shot, D.M.”
“I know.” Avery held his arms straight into the wheel as they hit another wave and went flying. “Okay. Quick.”
Dixon pulled back the sail and stuck the rifle into free space, tucked its back into his shoulder, inhaled, aimed and fired. The blast rang in Rush’s ears. Dixon kept his eye on the iron sights. “Agh.” Inhale. Fire. They waited. “Yes. Down. The other is still behind the dune.”
Avery threw the sail off the dash and looked over his port side shoulder. Rush followed. Two multi-hulled sarfers veered out around their path. Avery spun the wheel, taking the boat into a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn and back toward Viky’s ship. “Dixon, keep an eye on that second shooter.” He keyed the mic. “Everyone stay spread out. No straight lines. Head for the next dune to the west and if you get there before us dock under cover.”
That dune had a half valley seventy meters up that gave view to the dark stone mountain along the western horizon and cloud-whisked, sand-swept sky. Their back way.
Two of the sarfers almost hit each other in a drunken-looking attempt to zigzag. “How much sailing have the
se people done?” Rush asked Avery.
He just shook his head. “I barely had enough of them who’d ridden in a sarfer to get at least one per boat. Most are sissyfoots or wall crew. Spent as much time as I could training them at the cost of looking longer for guns.”
Dixon held the northern dune in his sights, having set up behind Star on the port side. Sitting next to him, Carroll bent her knees up and sobbed with her head down. As angry as she’d been at him, Rush still held a place in his heart for her, near the memory of when she’d sit and share his canteen in the shade as he managed Dixon’s laps. Her dad had made it to the sandscrapers through inventing an improved air ventilation system. Her mom had modified the shoveling system that kept the wells pumped fast enough for the sissyfoots to get more water on each pail-full. Their loss were only two of many lives snuffed out by Rush’s inability to stop Warren.
Was there anything else Rush could have done?
He didn’t know, but the question would haunt him for the rest of his life.
Avery coasted their ship to forty meters from Viky’s ship. Rush set his hand on Star’s arm, smiled, and crawl-walked over to Carroll’s right side. “Hey.”
“You’re the last person I want to hear breathing right now.”
“Request received.”
She shifted and looked over the opposite shoulder.
“Your burden is immense. I’ve known something like it. My parents also died.”
“Did you ever have to sit this close to their killer?”
He let her have that one. “My point is, and as you know, I didn’t handle it well.”
“I’d say. Anything else I don’t already know?”
“That’s...Okay. That may be related. If I hadn’t tried to drown my sorrows in alcohol, I might not have been there for Warren to blackmail.”
She faced him, reached under her goggles and wiped a tear from each side, then dried her finger on her red silk shirt. The glisten smeared and faded some of her paling cream to reveal her true tan. She was just a girl from the scrapers, angry at the broken promises her livelihood had pretended to ensure. “How does that work, exactly?”
“What, the blackmail?”
“Yeah, what’d he say? Where did he tell you he had your wife?”
Rush didn't know Warren had his wife until after he'd taken the job. But this would open up other questions he didn’t want to answer. He simplified things for her. “In the Honey Hole. Came over to my table, showed me a guy he’d killed where he sat without anyone knowing, and said he’d kill me and my wife if I didn’t go with him.”
“So then you left and didn’t try to tell anyone to leave town?”
Rush had come back. Hadn’t told anyone. Almost enjoyed a prostitute while harboring the knowledge of the death to come. It made him sick to his stomach. “Who would have listened to me, even if I could have gotten away from him long enough to do so?”
“Did you even try?”
“Carroll,” Dixon interrupted. “Nothing he says can bring your parents back. Please. Try to remember the times you enjoyed with them. It’s what they’d want.”
Avery glanced back at Dixon as they neared Viky’s broken sarfer. “I’m going to dock in front. Shooter may be waiting for a still target, so be ready. Rush, man the wheel so me and my two hands can get them and their stuff on the boat.”
“You sure you should be lifting anything with that?” Rush said, indicating his shoulder.
“I can use that arm to climb. I’ll be fine with a few stitches. Just a graze.”
Rush paused with his gaze on Carroll, her reflective goggles preventing him from reading her soul. He tried anyway. “I really am sorry about your parents.”
“Oh, pack it.”
“Carroll...Having known them, shared a meal with you and them, I know they’d want me to help you. I believe they live on, and to them I promise to watch after their daughter. Regardless of how she feels about me.”
Avery eased on the throttle and turned down the dive generator to slow the ship as it neared the front of Viky’s. Rush took up his spot at the wheel. The setup and principles of the throttle and generator radius were similar to mono-hull ships he and Avery had piloted before, but the dash controls were unfamiliar. Almost all digital, as though delivered from centuries past. He’d have to ask Avery about the hauls he’d scavenged in the past two years since Rush stopped going out with him.
“I’m going!” A teenage boy shouted down as he climbed up the ladder to Rush’s right. He was a skinny kid with wiry muscles, a sissyfoot Rush had seen before but didn’t know his name. A shorter boy climbed up behind him, three or so years younger and with similar length in nose and cheekbones, but blond instead of black hair. They carried backpacks stuffed to the seam. The older boy gave Rush a shy glance and checked out the rest of the ship. “We all supposed to fit on this?”
“I’m not sitting close enough to touch Jeff.” The blond one looked down the ladder, then stepped off and gave his brother distance. He checked out Rush as well, but looked away instantly.
“You’ll be thankful they came back for us, now sit where you’re told,” a mother figure said as she climbed the ladder. She was skinnier than her oldest, and four inches shorter, but she smiled when she saw Rush. All three wore Shantytown brown rags for clothes.
“Thank you for coming back.” The woman said this not knowing what he’d done a few hours ago. Was one of her loved ones dead because of the bombs he carried?
Rush nodded and scanned the breeze of sand lifting the upper layer off the plain and taking it west like the millions of other particles in the air. Star helped them set up near the stern. More voices invaded his space. More lives affected by his decisions. Fish wanted him to embrace living, but he’d done enough for one day. At the moment, he just wanted a cold beer, silence, and to get out of the sun. His cheeks between his goggles and ker already had the itch of sunburn.
Sunburn? You’re one pathetic sand diver.
And his cast wasn’t helping matters.
Something beeped three quick chimes inside a narrow panel on the left-hand side of the dash.
Rush pushed on the panel. The upper portion gave and folded out to reveal a thin, black object with a lit white screen. The chime went off again. In grabbing the device with his far hand, Rush’s thumb accidentally slid across the screen. Black glass turned to a picture of a young man in an Old World suit sitting in a black chair. Behind him, clouds floated in the distance beyond the windows. The sky was so blue...Where is he?
The man squinted. “Who are you?” Pinpoints of bright blue lights flickered around his pupils.
Rush dropped the device. What the hell was that?
Not only did the picture move, but his eyes...What kind of radio is that?
The picture was black, replaced by the time. Except. Was it six o’clock already?
Viky appeared next atop the ladder, her sleeveless, tan arms flexing corded muscle as she pulled herself onto the deck. She watched Rush with interest, scratched the top of her buzz cut scalp. “I thought that was you.” She looked down the ladder. “You drag Rushing out of the Honey Hole ‘fore it collapsed?”
“Nope, he…”
Rush grabbed the device off the sandy deck, pushed it inside the panel, and closed the lid.
Viky caught his awkward movement, tilted an eyebrow at his attempted secrecy. A grin formed on one side of her thin lips that promised a question when they were alone.
She wasn’t the kind to tell anyone what she’d seen—being known as a gossip was a quick trip out of the business of fixing sarfers. But she wouldn’t let him get away without telling her the truth, and at that point, he wasn’t sure what he thought of the truth.
Where did Avery get all this technology?
The man in the fancy microphone had a suit like in the tan papers, as new looking as if he had lived before the sands.
What building was he in? That was too high to be Low Pub. It could have been in the mountains, but the sky was
too clear. He’d never seen that color blue in nature. And his eyes...
Rush had just seen another world.
And its alien had called for his friend.
SCAVENGER: Blue Dawn
Chapter 5
Avery hurried up the ladder and onto the deck. He looked at Rush like he’d caught him with his hand in his pants. “You okay?” He walked closer. “You didn’t break anything did you?”
“No. No. Sorry.” Rush backed off and studied the floor. Stuck-on sand added a rough texture to a rich brown polish unlike wood he’d seen. Superman had also come from another planet and kept his secret from his friends.
Could Avery have found a ship off their world and come back to save him?
Ridiculous. And yet, what other explanation was there? He’d always wondered if the Old World had found a way into the stars, and if they’d come back to rescue him or if they would just stay and enjoy their new lives on a planet with an abundance of water.
What if the man in the blue sky gave Avery this technology?
“You all right, honey?” Star turned him from the wind and lifted his goggles off.
He tried to play his confusion into the effects of their afternoon. “Yeah, there’s just,” he lowered his voice, “the people...what I did.” Avery joined their little circle. “I need to get off this ship. And I could really use a beer.”
Avery patted him on the back. “Sure. I understand. Just have a seat. I don’t think I’ll need anything from you for a bit. Just take it easy.”
Avery returned to the wheel, increased the dive generator range, and drove the throttle forward. Sand sloshed against the hull as the ship rose and then dipped down. The generator hummed as they began their carve west with the wind and distant bombs at their backs.
Dixon moved over to the starboard side, knelt beside the edge, and returned the rifle to his armpit.
“Where’d you get that?” the blond boy asked.
Dixon nodded over at Rush. “Divemaster Stenson. One of two divemasters on this boat and my teacher.”
“Hello.” Rush shielded a hand between the wind and his face.
Scavenger: Evolution: (Sand Divers, Book One) Page 6