“IT’S KING SOLOMON’S damned mine,” Jesse whispered.
“What?” Eve asked. “Who’s that?” She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “How? Where did this all come from?”
Jesse had no idea how, or why, or who could have done this. It was worth…well, everything. He was almost afraid to blink, not wanting the magnificence to fade away as if it were some magician’s illusion. When he finally did blink, it was all still there after his eyes opened again, all gleaming and shining, and nearly impossible.
“Thanks,” he said, looking skyward.
Inside the compartment, under the bench, seemingly sealed away for years, yet still in perfect condition, were guns. Lots of guns. Long guns. Hand guns. Shot guns. Boxes of shells. Canvas bags bulging with lumpy ammunition.
He dug his fingers into a bag of shiny brass bullets and let them sieve through his fingers.
Then he saw something else.
“Alcohol?” Eve asked, incredulous.
Jesse nodded at that. Bottles of the stuff. Whiskey, Tequila, Vodka, Rum. All of it top shelf quality, the kind of brands he could never afford to buy before the raptors. And to find them now?
It was a goddamned miracle.
He lifted one of the rifles from the compartment with reverence. It was a Model 70 Winchester with a fat Leica scope mounted on top, the metal still possessing a dull sheen. He checked the action. Smooth. The gun had a deeply colored walnut stock, hand rubbed with oil to perfection. It had a rubber butt piece for shock and recoil reduction. The whole thing was a beautiful, pre-raptor testament to American craftsmanship and ingenuity. He spotted a couple of AR-15s in there too. They weren’t nearly as nice. There were also Colts, Smith and Wessons, Glocks, Sigs.
“Careful,” Eve said, backing away.
He wondered for a moment if she had seen something he’d missed. He ran his eyes over the hidden compartment again, but could not see anything leading him to believe it might have been booby-trapped. This stash had to have been made before the raptors. Perhaps the storeowner knew what was coming and had created it and never returned for it. People had been in and out of this room, some even living in it with such a great treasure buried so closely.
“Ha,” Jesse said, marking his good fortune.
“What are we going to do with all this stuff?” she asked, echoing what he was now asking himself.
Did he even have to say it? Was her knowing worth the tiny amount of breath he might need to inform her of the obvious?
Hell no.
“How much do you think all this is worth?” she asked when he didn’t respond.
“Everything,” he mumbled, fitting the rifle to his shoulder and looking through the scope.
Plans began to form and rattle around inside his head. What he had here could be traded anywhere he went for a fortune. He could live like a king in what little of the world remained with just a fraction of all this.
If he could keep it from being stolen, he reminded himself.
His mind churned through different scenarios. From the how, to the why, to what he was going to do about it. He could hoard them. Hide them. He could just disappear now. Take the guns, load the Humvee, grab Kate and go. Leave everyone else behind. It would be so easy to do.
Screw the bunker. Screw Cory. Screw Eve.
He became so engrossed in his thoughts that he lost track of time, and of Eve. She was no longer in the room with him.
“Shit,” he said, rising.
He took the rifle and set it back inside the compartment. Resealed it with the lid, grabbed his two-by-four club, and headed after her. He couldn’t let her tell them about this. Not until he’d had time to think through what he was going to do about it. This was all his. He had found it, fair and square.
He spotted her outside, walking back toward the motel, briskly. He stepped faster, breaking into a jog to catch up with her. When he came alongside, he grabbed her by the arm and brought her to a stop. She spun, and he held onto her arm, squeezing.
“Not a word,” he said, staring into her eyes.
She swallowed hard and tried to glance away. “What?”
“I don’t want them to know what I found just yet.”
“Why not?”
“Just because. Okay?”
She stared at him, puzzled. It wasn’t as if he didn’t want them to know about the stash. No. He just didn’t want her to be the one who told them about it. He needed to control how much they knew until he could figure out what he was going to do about it. He still didn’t trust Andrea yet, so he couldn’t judge how she would react. And Cory might not see the sudden windfall the right way if Eve were the one to tell him. The stuff was just too valuable, and Cory might end up getting the wrong idea, or he might get greedy.
No, this needed to be handled delicately.
She nodded her agreement, and they both continued back to the motel.
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” she said, keeping her eyes forward.
“What?”
“About the guns.”
“Huh?”
“Figure it out for yourself, genius. You can’t get greedy about it.”
He missed a step and stopped. He let her walk away then sped up to catch her.
“Oh, so now you are curious?”
He grunted.
“Well, maybe I’ll tell you. Maybe not. I know you, Jesse. You are not going to leave us behind no matter what you think you are planning to do. No matter how you treat me or the others. You are just not that kind of guy.”
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
“I saw the way you handled those guns. You were thinking of leaving us, weren’t you? But, I think I now understand you well enough to know you would never leave us behind. Not even me. You just can’t.”
He shook his head. Of course he could, of course he could leave them all behind. It would be easy.
When they got closer to the motel room, he spied Cory standing outside alone, leaning against a support pillar for the second floor. He’d defied Andrea’s direction again, which was completely understandable. Maybe he was doing better, maybe not.
Cory was smoking.
“Great,” Jesse whispered as he approached.
“You wouldn’t believe what we found,” Eve said when she got within earshot of Cory.
Jesse grabbed her arm. “What did I just say?”
She replied loudly, “We found some weapons that got left behind.”
Jesse squeezed her arm harder and pulled her backward. Then he looked at Cory and stopped. He let go, nearly knocking her to the ground.
Cory didn’t say anything. He dropped his cigarette and crushed it with the toe of his shoe.
“You should see it all,” Eve said, stepping away from Jesse. “There’s guns and alcohol.”
Cory nodded. Andrea exited the motel room and strode past Cory, limping her way along. She’d evidently been observing the entire conversation because she was eyeing Jesse warily. She held her side where she had been shot and cocked her head sideways.
“You found guns?” she asked.
“Some,” he said.
“Alcohol?”
“Yup.”
She remained silent for a few seconds. She adjusted her glasses.
“What?” Jesse asked.
“You okay?” she asked in return. “Not tired or anything?”
“Fine. Never better. Why?”
She only nodded.
Of course he was okay. What the hell kind of question was that?
A cold breeze flapped his shirttails. He shivered once and wiped the corners of his eyes with his thumb then tugged at his beard.
Andrea beckoned. “Eve, dear. Come help me for a moment, please.”
“Good,” Jesse replied, knowing that Eve was now otherwise occupied. “I’ve got a hell of a lot that needs to get done.”
-14-
TRAINING TIME
JESSE RAISED THE Winchester rifle to his shoulder and stared down the scope, sc
anning the perimeter. He had moved everyone up to the motel’s roof, figuring it would prove safer than remaining locked in one of the rooms, or crammed together inside the gun store, or trying to seek safety in one of the other buildings. It had taken some effort to get Cory and Andrea to the rooftop, but Cory now sat against a ventilation pipe, and Andrea sat near him, both propped up by thin mattresses and covered with blankets.
It was going to be a long cold night.
The sun had already set, leaving the sky with faint wisps of orange and purple. So far, through the scope, Jesse had not seen any raptors or signs of them, but he knew they would be arriving soon, even if they had to come from miles away.
They always came.
“Doc,” he said, lifting his eye away from the scope. “Got a question for you.” He’d been talking on and off with her about the raptors and how much she knew about them.
She had her back to a boxy air conditioning unit jutting up through the rooftop and was half dozing. Kate sat next to her cleaning her fingernails with a wicked-looking knife Jesse had found in the stash of weapons. Somehow, the gift seemed appropriate given that the last knife he’d given her weeks ago had been taken away. Plus it seemed to bother Eve.
“What?” Andrea asked.
“Why only at night? The raptors, I mean. I’ve always wondered that.”
She straightened herself against the A/C unit and didn’t speak for nearly a minute. Jesse had already started looking through the rifle’s scope again when she spoke.
“You ever heard of Xeroderma Pigmentosum?”
“Zero, what?”
“Xeroderma, with an X. Or XP. It’s a rare skin disorder. In the most extreme cases, it causes all sorts of nasty lesions and scarring.”
Jesse set his rifle down and sat next to it.
Andrea continued, “We gave it to them. The raptors. Or, I guess I should call them XC-1142, because that was the name given to the final strain. They were one of the last batches we created before… Before all this.” She waved her hands, palms up. “XP was supposed to be a safety mechanism.”
“Safety mechanism?” he repeated. “Nah, you’ve got to be shitting me.”
“I’m not. They were all engineered to have it.”
He nodded. “Okay, then, why?”
“Think of it this way. These things were originally supposed to replace chickens. They were meant to grow faster, bigger. Most could go from an egg to an egg layer in as little as thirty days, which is much faster than chickens. They were also tweaked to grow at an accelerated rate and become quite large, far outstripping anything else out there.”
“So they were supposed to be food?” he asked. “This was all planned? I always thought it was some government, made-up lie. I’d always figured the Feds were behind this.”
“You’re from Texas, right?” she asked rhetorically. “You of all people should know the government is not that smart,” she said. “No, these were supposed to be the new standard so we could replace chickens, but things got out of control.” She hung her head, looked up. “As for your question, we gave them XP as a way to keep them contained. Most chickens spend their entire lives indoors. It was supposed to be the same with raptors. They were never supposed to get out. And, since they could never get out, we gave them XP as a way to discourage competitors from stealing them away, or creating any that could live outside specially controlled environments. We were all wrongheaded, and stupid. I was—”
“The hell…” he said. “Damn it. Goddamn it. You really are serious, aren’t you? It just doesn’t seem right.”
“No, it doesn’t,” she added. “It was a mistake. One, world-ending, huge goddamned mistake.”
“Damn,” he breathed. “So a mistake really did start all this?”
“No, I didn’t say that. Creating XC-1142 was not the mistake. It was…”
“Was what?”
She whispered something.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“It was my mistake,” she whispered, louder. “So much of this is my fault. I think God is keeping me alive just to witness what I’ve done.”
He pressed his lips together and turned away. He picked up the rifle and stared through the scope again, making a scan of the area. He didn’t quite know how to process this. Here was a woman, probably the one responsible for the end of mankind. Here was a sword-wielding guy in a ridiculous leather jacket, acting like he was some superhero bent on ending the raptors once and for all with some mystery virus. And here he was, A.J. Prieo, widower turned cold-blooded killer, trying to hold it all together.
While letting things settle, he went back to scanning the area around them with the scope of the rifle. The large optics helped gather enough light to let him see better than he could unaided.
But things wouldn’t settle.
He set the rifle down and went to place three empty bottles on the edge of the rooftop opposite him.
“It’s going to get a little loud,” he warned. “Kate, come here. Closer.”
“You sure that is such a smart idea?” Andrea asked. “The noise. Won’t it attract raptors?”
“Doesn’t matter much,” Jesse said. “They’re already here. Just wait until it gets dark.”
Andrea grunted and reseated herself.
Jesse handed Kate an unloaded Glock 17, which he knew would fit her best. It was finally time for her to learn how to shoot a gun properly. Her last shot, the one that had killed Rose, he was sure had been luck.
“Let’s get this right,” he said as he stepped behind her. “Straighten your shoulders, relax your elbows. Good. Now, the way my dad taught me was a little different. He didn’t go for spending a lot of time thinking about what he shot. He always said, ‘you’ll know it when you feel it.’ And he was right there. It is not much different from using your finger to point at something. Don’t think too much about it, just do it.”
Kate nodded.
“Now, lower the gun. Don’t think about it. Just think about pointing your finger at those bottles.”
Eve joined them. She’d been skulking on the opposite side of the roof, staying out of his way. “You sure you should be teaching her that?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Jesse said. “Better now than never.”
“There’s only so many guns left, and ammunition,” she said.
“She still needs to learn how to shoot.”
“What about me?” Eve asked.
Jesse ignored her. He readjusted Kate, making her widen her stance just a fraction and tweak her angle to the target. So much was coming back to him. He remembered learning the same way from his father, which brought his father’s loss back into focus. While his dad would have hated to have seen all the self-pity bullshit he had gone through in the city, just the fact that he’d survived should have impressed him. But as he thought about it, he wasn’t so sure.
Kate hefted the Glock and shut one eye, holding it out as if she knew what she was doing.
“Good,” he said. “Now turn to the side and look away.” She did. “Okay, now go!”
She spun and whipped the pistol onto target and pulled the trigger. He checked and guessed she had lined up the shot correctly.
Eve bumped him with her hip. “Really, I don’t think she should be doing this,” she said.
He shook her off and indicated for her to back away.
“Screw you,” she said and walked away.
Shaking his head in dismay, Jesse removed the clip for the Glock from his pocket and gently slid it into the gun in Kate’s hand. “Okay, now try it again, but keep your finger straight and don’t pull the trigger. The weight will be all different, but the actions you take will be all the same. Just point your finger and think of squeezing the trigger. But don’t.”
She did as he said. And he made her do it again, and again before he was finally satisfied.
It was time for her to do it for real. He knew she could do it if she focused on what he’d told her to do. One shot at a time, build her up
. While she’d taken out Rose with a single shot, that had to have been a fluke. She was lucky. Damn lucky.
“Okay, this time it counts. There are five rounds loaded. Do all the same motions I just showed you. There will be a kick now also that you’ll have to control. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad. Just squeeze the trigger and wait for the gun to come back on target before squeezing again. Ready?”
She nodded.
Three. Two. One. “Go,” he said.
Kate immediately snapped the Glock on target. The gun went off, shattering the first empty bottle. While the report echoed, Jesse opened his mouth to praise her. Before he could, Kate fired again, and again. The two empty bottles next to the one she had already hit shattered in a spray of twinkling glass.
Kate lowered her arm.
How? How the hell had she done that? He sucked in a breath, blew it out slowly.
“Not bad,” Cory said from behind. “Quick study.”
Jesse turned back to Kate. She did learn quickly. Or, maybe there were still things he had to learn about her. He could never have made those same shots at her age. He remembered his father’s frustrations when he couldn’t even hit a can of Coke from a yard away. He had only been hoping that she could get a shot going in the general direction of the target, much less actually hit the damn thing.
Kate said nothing as she clicked the release and ejected the magazine. She checked it and reinserted the magazine back into the gun without looking at it.
“Guess there is not much left to show you,” he said, holding his hand out to take the gun.
Eve returned. “Kate, where did you learn to shoot like that?”
Kate shrugged and handed the gun to Jesse.
Jesse grinned. “Want to go again?” he asked.
She shrugged again.
Jesse returned the Glock and nodded. Looking past her, he spotted movement. He hurried to pick up the rifle and raised it and scanned the area to the south through the scope. Everything was painted in various shades of gray.
And some of that gray was moving.
-15-
TURKEY SHOOT
JESSE COUNTED TO ten and got to work. The Model 70 in his hands felt familiar to him, like a long-lost friendship reunited.
Righteous Apostate: Raptor Apocalypse Book 3 Page 11