“He made mistakes,” Randolph said. “Big ones. I wouldn’t call him a fool.”
“Good. Because if you had…I would have chewed off your legs so you could not run and then eaten you over the course of twelve years.”
This was no threat, but a simple statement of fact.
“How would you handle the Skinners?” Borrek asked.
“I used to hunt them. Now I watch to see what they might do. They consider the leeches and wretches enemies as well. One of them has the potential to kill Esteban himself. Some are much more likely to bring the Dryad out of hiding than any of our kind.”
“I have matters to discuss with the Dryad witches,” Borrek growled.
“Gorren was known to be fond of them,” Randolph said.
“Yes. Very fond of them…until the day when they betrayed him on a whim.”
“I don’t know that story.”
“It is not one that was allowed outside of Gorren’s bloodline. But perhaps I could entrust it to you if it is proven you are worthy of such a thing. Can you tell me where to find one of the Dryad?”
“They used to build their temples in plain sight where the humans could visit and worship them,” Randolph told him. “Long buildings with pointed roofs painted the shade of a whore’s mouth. Their language could even be seen along the stonework and etched into the walls.”
“Always so brazen. Where can I find one of these temples?”
“The ones I have seen are in the New World. In America, there is little need for them to hide. At least, that’s how it used to be. Many such temples still stand.”
“Perhaps it is time for me to stretch my legs after all,” Borrek said.
“And what about the rest of what we discussed?”
“After I find one of these temples, I will then find you.” The gray one’s muscles shifted to give him more bulk where they would be needed for a prolonged run. “If you have lied to me to gain favor…I will find you even sooner.”
When Borrek bounded away, Randolph knew better than to follow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Missouri
Five years ago, Rico would have rather tried walking across a state or two before sucking it up and driving in a little teal hatchback with rainbow stickers on the bumper. Times being what they were, he hung his elbow out the window of Haley’s Hyundai Excel and thanked whatever shreds of luck he had left that the car got good gas mileage and could go above seventy for extended amounts of time. There were even CDs to listen to, which put him in an even better mood.
“What’s this shit?” he grunted while tapping the button to skip to the next song.
“It’s not shit,” Haley said from the passenger seat. “It’s Pink.”
“Pink shit? Got any Pink Floyd?”
“Who’s that?”
“Aw, fer Christ’s sake,” Rico groaned.
“If you don’t like it so much, then take it out. I’ve got more stuff to listen to.”
“Nah, she’s got attitude. Reminds me of someone I used to know.”
Haley shifted so her back was against her door and one knee was pulled up against her chest. “Really? A girl?”
“Yeah.”
“Like…a girlfriend?”
“A real good friend.” Shooting her a sideways glance, he added, “Not that kind of friend. She would’a liked you, though.”
“Oh,” Haley said as she lifted her chin proudly. “You have some real good friends.”
“Had.”
Her expression darkened, and her bottom lip stuck out just enough to form a pout that was genuinely sad. “Sorry. Is that why you’ve been so grumpy?”
Rico let out a haggard sigh, looked over to her, looked at the road and then back to her again. “If we’re gonna ride together, you seriously need to knock off the cute talk. Your boyfriend may have thought it was adorable, but I don’t.”
“Real sensitive, you dick.”
“That’s better.”
“When are we going to stop again?”
They’d been driving west all day long on I-64 ever since leaving St. Albans and had only stopped a few times to scrounge up supplies and gas. There were enough places along the side of the road still open for business that they’d gotten what they’d needed fairly quickly. Those times were about to change real soon, however.
“Actually, we’re down to about a quarter tank,” Rico said. “I’d like to top off before we hit Saint Louis.”
“Why? Last sign I saw said it was only about thirty miles until St. Louis. We can make it that far, and there’s got to be lots of places to stop once we get there.”
“I don’t wanna stop there.”
She set her chin upon her knee and studied him carefully. “That’s why you’re so pissy? You don’t like Saint Louis?”
“Something like that.”
“Well the place is probably just as trashed as everything else,” she said. “That should make you feel better.”
“It ain’t that. There’s just…memories there.”
“Bad memories?”
“Not really,” Rico said grimly.
Haley nodded and turned her head to look out the windshield. The interstate was a mess of scratched concrete littered with the occasional car wreck or pile of bloody bones on the side of the road. The packs hadn’t been much of a problem since there were enough cities and towns in this part of the country to keep them occupied and well fed. Staring out at the Midwestern landscape with her music playing had allowed her to slip into a mostly quiet, neutral mode that hadn’t abated until the last hour or two. “I know how that goes,” she said in a tired monotone. “Sometimes the good memories sting a lot worse than the bad ones. I bet we can stop a few times and pick up enough supplies and gas to make it all the way to…where are you going again?”
“Colorado.”
“That’s right.” Tapping her finger against her window, she added, “Looks like there’s some people over in that truck stop. How about stopping there?”
Rico looked over to the side of the road past a sign that used to display the names of sponsored gas stations. Now, the only thing it displayed was several rows of bullet holes put there by the same kind of assholes who saw any sort of crisis as a great time to score themselves a free TV. About half a mile away from the interstate was a gas station surrounded by a tall fence. A few people wandered outside the little building, and some smoke rose from what was either a bar-b-q pit or a generator. Considering all the stale, pre-packaged junk food he’d been eating, Rico hoped for the former.
“Looks good,” he said. “I’ll do the talking.”
“Just like the other times. I know.”
He pulled off the interstate, swerved around a jackknifed semi with its front end plowed into a ditch, and then drew the Sig Sauer from his shoulder holster to place it upon his knee. Already, some of the people at the gas station were approaching the fence. They held shotguns in a way that made the weapons easy to see without pointing them directly at the Hyundai.
A large gate on the road leading to the truck stop had been pieced together from scrap chunks of lumber and what was most likely the remains of the burned-out McDonald’s across the street. Rico pulled to a stop in front of it, holding the Sig in his left hand so it could be mostly hidden as he let it dangle inside the car.
The gate was opened just enough to let one guy step through. He was a skinny dude with a dirty face and bloodshot eyes. The smile he wore as he approached the Hyundai seemed genuine enough as he asked, “You need gas, food or a place to stay?”
“The first two,” Rico said.
Haley leaned forward to add, “And a bathroom.”
The skinny dude hunched down to get a better look at her, making no effort to hide his attempt to stare down the front of her shirt. “What’ve you got to trade?”
“We can spare some ammo,” Rico said. “A few pistol rounds.”
“Pistol rounds?” the guy said as if the words were a waste of his breath. “We got enou
gh pistol rounds to last us a while.”
“I’m talkin’ about the good stuff. Snapper rounds.”
Rico had been working on the Snapper rounds back when he, Paige and Cole were kicking around Saint Louis. They were basically hollow points with an embedded tension pin that kept the bullets from flattening until a fraction of a second after impact. Between that and a Teflon coating, Snapper rounds could penetrate most body armor before expanding to rip up whatever lay beneath. Although most Half Breeds could be taken down by a few shotgun blasts or a long burst of automatic fire, one shot from a Snapper could penetrate its hide and do enough damage to either kill it or bring it down. Rico’s market for the specialized ammunition used to be him, a few other Skinners and then the IRD. Once the rounds started leaking out to the general public, they became some of the highest currency available in an economy that valued concrete trades over money that wasn’t good for much other than kindling.
“You got Snappers?” the skinny dude asked. “How many?”
“Haven’t counted them up yet,” Rico told him. “Let us in, and I’ll see what I got.” As he spoke, Rico scratched his chin in a way that made his scarred palm visible to the guy with the shotgun. Now that Skinners weren’t in hiding anymore, a gesture like that was similar to flashing a badge to get out of a traffic ticket.
Seeing the scars made the promise of Snapper rounds much easier to swallow. The skinny dude stepped away from the car and waved at the others manning the gate. “Let ‘em through!”
As he drove down the short access road leading through the gate, Rico thought about what the place must have looked like before so much had changed. Instead of a fenced compound, it would have been just another truck stop filled with salty snacks, strong coffee and a Subway counter. The attendants wouldn’t have been armed, and the other buildings in sight wouldn’t have been broken shells filled with bloody remains and broken glass.
Well, Rico thought after a bit of consideration, the attendants may have still been armed.
It was easy enough to tell which pumps still had some gas in them. They were the ones being guarded by no fewer than three burly men and two almost equally burly women. All of them wore a mish mosh of clothing that had obviously been pulled from the truck stop’s store or looted from some of the people who hadn’t made it out of the place after a Half Breed attack. Every shirt or pair of shorts was either poorly fitting or had the logo of a local team on it. Their caps were covered with dopey sayings that had been meant to catch the eye of impulse buyers at the cash register.
After pulling to a stop beside the guarded pump, Rico killed the engine, discreetly holstered the Sig Sauer and opened his door. Before his second boot hit the cracked pavement, Haley had bolted outside. She was in such a hurry to get to the building that she barely even seemed to notice how nervous she was making the armed attendants.
“Bathroom,” she said. “Do I need a key or anything? Where’s it at?”
The largest woman sympathized with her and tossed a key attached to a lug wrench. “Go inside and head straight on back,” she said.
“Thanks!”
“So…” the skinny guy who’d greeted Rico said. “You’re one of them?”
“Yeah,” Rico said as he stretched his back. “I am.”
“Then you might be able to help out with a problem we got.”
Using both hands to scratch his head and a few other places, Rico said, “Look, we got places to be. This spot looks pretty well fortified, so you should do fine. If you’re after anything I got as far as unconventional weapons, you’ll have a hell of a time gettin’ ‘em away from me.”
Once the existence of Skinners had become widely known, some of the more aggressive survivalists had taken it upon themselves to try and steal Skinner weapons so they could get a leg up on the packs in the shortest amount of time possible. Once aggressive survivalists started disappearing, the rest took a sneakier approach and offered big rewards for any Skinner weaponry brought to them by anyone lucky or tough enough to get their hands on it.
“No, we already got unconventional weapons,” the skinny dude said. “A few sticks of dynamite and a grenade in the back. There’s a few things we need more than just weapons and we’re willing to go a long ways to get it. Know what I’m saying?”
Rico just now noticed a filthy tag stitched onto the dude’s shirt. “Look here…Glen. You’d better not have your eye on that girl who ran off to use the facilities.”
The guy shook his head and stammered a few times as though the gears in his head had ground to a stop. He then looked down at the front of his shirt and grinned. “Naw, this ain’t my name. I got this shirt off’a some mechanic from Columbia. My name’s Gary.”
“Whatever. Leave that girl alone, or I’ll chuck you over that fence to whatever’s out there that’s hungry. Got me?”
“I get it, but I wasn’t trying to threaten nobody. It’s just that we been having trouble with a few packs over the last few weeks. They’re ripping at our fence and taking off before we can fire more than one or two shots at them.”
“Try setting traps. You said you’ve got explosives.”
“We did that. They found those traps, defused the explosives and carried them away.”
Rico leaned against the car and crossed his arms. From where he was, he could see through the front window of the truck stop and hadn’t noticed anything to raise any red flags yet. “Did you say a pack defused your trap?”
“Yeah.”
“A pack of werewolves.”
Nodding, Gary said, “Some of them crazy ones with the pointed snouts and no tails.”
“So let me get this straight,” Rico said. “A pack of werewolves ran up and defused a bomb?”
“Yessir.”
“You sure one of them wasn’t a big fucker walking on two legs?”
Gary thought that over and nodded. “Yes, I’m sure.”
“You talkin’ about those dogs that ran off with our bomb?” one of the women asked. She was the same one who’d tossed the bathroom key to Haley and outweighed Gary by at least sixty pounds of pure muscle.
“That’s right!” Gary replied.
She came walking over with a stride that made her look like a bow-legged cowboy straight from a Bonanza rerun and was one of the few in sight who wasn’t carrying a shotgun. She held an AK-47 patched together by electrical tape. Shaking her head as she stepped up to Rico, she said, “Every time he tells that story to someone, it gets weirder.”
“So let’s hear the watered down version,” Rico said.
“We set up a bomb because those packs were hitting one spot at the fence every damn night,” she told him. “They chipped away at it until it started to give, so we placed the charge there and sat back to watch the fireworks. When the pack came again, they backed off right away. One of those big dog things came up, sniffed out the bomb and carried it away from the fence. Real careful like. We tried detonating the thing, but it wouldn’t blow until it was too late to do any good. Damn things probably chewed through the wires we rigged. Actually, those wires probably weren’t rigged too well in the first place.”
When the door to the truck stop’s largest building swung open, Rico turned to see Haley walking briskly outside. Judging by the spring in her step, she’d found what she was after. Since she wasn’t hurt and nobody was coming after her, he shifted his attention back to the two in front of him. “Did any of them shift?” he asked. Seeing the confusion on both of their faces, Rico added, “Change. Did any of those wolves change into anything else?”
Gary was quick to shake his head, and the big woman next to him was almost as quick to swat him on the shoulder. “You were too distracted by the explosion,” she said. “That and you’re halfway to being blind without your glasses.”
“That thing did blow up pretty good, now that I think about it,” Gary said. “One of those wolves carried the bomb away from the rest of the pack and exploded like a sack of meat….and explosives.”
Tu
rning so Gary was taking up less of his field of vision, Rico concentrated on the woman and said, “I’m Rico. Who are you?”
“Linda.”
“Nice to meet you, Linda. How about I talk to you for a while?”
“Smart man.”
“So did one of those things change or not?” Rico asked.
She nodded uncomfortably. “It was one of the dogs that hung back farther than the rest. It squirmed around so much I thought it got tangled up in one of the barbed wire snares we set up in the fields outside the fence. Wailed and clawed at the ground like it was in pain. When it was through, it looked more like a man but…not.”
“What do you mean?”
Although the word “squeamish” couldn’t really apply to a woman who looked like she could punch through a refrigerator door, Linda obviously didn’t like the image that had drifted into her mind. “That whole pack…they looked like all the others that’ve been coming around.”
“Screwed up,” Gary said. “That’s what they look like.”
Both Rico and Linda acted as though the skinny guy hadn’t even said anything, so Gary just walked away to join some of the others near the fence.
“What’s screwed up?” Haley asked as she walked over to her car.
“That was quick,” Rico said. “Everything ok?”
“Yeah. Here’s the key back.”
Linda took the key / wrench combo with an upward nod as a quick acknowledgment and stuffed it into one of the leg pockets of her cargo pants. “So we first thought that pack was like the rest,” she continued. “I didn’t really notice a difference until about the third or fourth time they came sniffing around to dig at the fence. The leader was a little smaller than the others. Its legs were longer and thicker. Its head was rounder. Somehow the thing just looked less like a dog than the rest of them.”
“Did it have long claws and flaps on the side of its neck?” Rico asked.
“Nope.”
“What about a real long tail and softer fur? Maybe something else that made it look more like a cat?”
Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series Page 27