He slid his boots into the stirrups, gave Tango a soft slap against his neck with the reins, the M4 clutched in his right hand, and the horse began making his way down the slope toward the grisly scene. Lucas continued to survey the surroundings, sweeping the scene with his rifle barrel.
The vulture hopped away and lifted into the air to join its companions in their overhead vigil as Lucas approached. Satisfied he was unobserved, he dismounted and whispered in Tango’s ear. “Stay.”
Tango blinked at him with mahogany eyes and stood, waiting.
Lucas took in the scene, sickened by the senseless loss of life, and moved to the first of the defenders’ corpses and rolled it over. Three wounds stitched across the man’s chest, the final one having torn away half his shoulder. His sightless eyes stared into eternity with a look of surprise that Lucas knew well, and he laid the man back down and moved to the next, repeating the process of verifying they were dead. It didn’t take long, the pools of blood beneath them all the evidence he needed. All had the rawboned look of men whose diets had dramatically changed when society ended, their consumption of processed crap replaced by whatever they could hunt or grow. He noted that they had reasonably cropped hair and decent gear, which he gathered quickly and placed in a pile, concentrating on the weapons and ammunition, finding little else of barter value he could easily ride with.
Next he moved to the dead horses and checked their saddlebags, which held plastic containers of rice, pots, more ammunition, compasses, dried venison and other durable food, and the usual assortment of paltry belongings that counted for treasures nowadays. He emptied the bags and did a quick inventory, and then replaced the items he couldn’t carry – space and weight would be at a premium, and the value of a good buck knife or an AR-15 and several hundred rounds of 5.56mm were far higher than anything else he’d found.
When he reached the first of the dead attackers, his nose wrinkled in distaste. The man’s head was grimy and buzzing with flies; the front of his skull had been vaporized by a round, leaving only his black, oily hair trimmed into a Mohawk on top and a filthy, unkempt beard below.
“Raider,” Lucas muttered. The Mohawk was the calling card of one of the gangs that roamed the region, terrorizing anyone they came across. They were undisciplined amateurs, but still as dangerous as scorpions and utterly ruthless. Most were career criminals who had taken to the road when the grid had shut down, creating a tribe of cutthroats who lived by robbery and murder rather than the sweat of their brow. The collapse had brought out both the best and the worst in humanity; unfortunately, the worst had largely prevailed, their willingness to employ savagery against the meek giving them the edge.
Lucas had seen the Raiders’ handiwork more than a few times in the undefended homes that had once populated the region. Like a plague of locusts, they destroyed everything they came across, killing all but the young females, whom they pressed into slavery – a fate worse than death, he understood from the rumors. He gave them a wide berth, and they left the town he lived near alone, preferring easier pickings than its heavily armed residents. Like the Raiders, Lucas had a reputation that preceded him, and they avoided the ranch where he lived with his grandfather just as he shunned their stronghold at all costs.
Three of the other dead were also Raiders, one indicator being their weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov AK-47s, whose 7.62mm ammunition was easily obtained from trading with bandits from Mexico, which had been flooded with the guns during the war on drugs. Called the Cuerno de Chivo in Spanish – the goat’s horn, so monikered after their distinctively curved thirty-round magazines – most were fully automatic and, while not as accurate as Lucas’s M4, possessed of prodigious punch at ranges up to three hundred yards. Lucas gathered the assault rifles, two of which were the AKM variant with folding wire stocks, and tossed them near the rest of the weapons.
A gurgle from a figure he’d yet to search stopped him in his tracks, and he swung around in a crouch, M4 at the ready. The man, his Mohawk bleached canary yellow, was dressed identically to the other Raiders in filthy black jeans and a sweat-stained shirt. Lucas jogged toward him, ready to open fire, but the man seemed oblivious. Blood from a head wound was crusted across his forehead and eyelids. Lucas relieved him of the Glock in his waistband and toed the AK away, and then knelt beside him cautiously.
The man’s eyes fluttered open and he stared vacantly at Lucas. He tried to speak, but all that emanated from his mouth was a gush of blood; and then his head rolled to the side and he moaned, the death rattle drawn out for a good five seconds.
Lucas went through his things and removed a folding buck knife from the man’s back pocket. It was of high quality and would command a reasonable trade. The Glock and the two spare magazines would also be prized for barter, he knew, although he personally had little use for a 9mm weapon. Lucas’s philosophy had always been that the trade-off of temporary deafness that accompanied firing his Kimber was more than compensated for by its raw stopping power.
Once all the weapons were accounted for, he did a quick inventory and then carried the ones with the highest trade value over to Tango. Lucas loaded his saddlebags to the bursting point with guns and ammunition, disappointed but unsurprised that he had to leave two of the AK-47s and several pounds of ammo behind.
The boom of distant thunder echoed off the gulch walls, and Lucas turned in the direction of the approaching storm – and froze when he spied another figure near a boulder outcropping, chest heaving and obviously alive. He hadn’t spotted the figure earlier, so whoever it was had been well concealed. He sprang into motion, sprinting in a zigzag toward the downed shooter, M4 trained on the figure as he ran.
When he reached the outcropping, he stopped short, mouth open in disbelief.
It was a woman.
Unconscious and gasping, an AR-15 dropped nearby.
But alive, her chest laboring with each ragged breath, her shirt and pants stained dark with blood.
The Goddess Legacy Page 30