Lucas had seen plenty of death since the collapse. Unmoved, he returned to Tango and remounted. The days of reckoning, of law and order, of consequences, were over, leaving in their wake a brutal alternative of predator and prey. When he’d been a Ranger, he would have made it his life’s mission to hunt down any surviving attackers and drag them to justice, but now no such concept existed, other than that issuing from the barrel of a gun.
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 a 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.
Chapter 2
Lucas slowly lowered his weapon as he neared the woman and took in her condition. She’d been hit in the thigh and the upper chest, her cheap body armor affording inadequate protection against rifle rounds. He crouched by her side and eyed her pale face: her features twisted with agony even in unconsciousness.
He frisked her and found a snub-nose .38 revolver at the small of her back. He tossed the gun aside and glanced up at the sky, concerned that he was losing the light, and then returned his attention to the woman and eased her out of the vest. His fingers came away slick with blood, and he quickly ferreted in his flak vest for a small LED flashlight that used rechargeable batteries.
Lucas twisted the penlight on and trained the beam on the woman’s wounds. The leg didn’t look too bad, but the upper chest wound did – judging by her pallor, she’d lost considerable blood and was in danger of going into shock, assuming she wasn’t already there. More blood oozed from the entry wound, and Lucas made a quick decision. He would have to risk the flashlight drawing any bad guys lingering in the area, or the woman would die.
He retraced his steps to Tango and retrieved his first aid kit from a pouch dangling from his saddle. The horse seemed to intuit his agitation and whinnied softly.
“Don’t worry, big guy. We’ll be out of here soon enough,” Lucas murmured, and made his way back to the woman.
After flicking on the flashlight again, he extracted a plastic bottle and unscrewed the top. The heady aroma of high-octane alcohol caused his nostrils to flare. Triple-distilled by his grandfather from corn he grew on his ranch, the white lightning in the bottle came
in at 160 proof. Besides being a hotly sought-after barter item, it made an ideal disinfectant, although his grandpa frowned at the idea, mocking it as a waste of good liquor.
Lucas lifted a plastic sheet from inside the case and laid out the kit. After inspecting the chest wound again, he sterilized a pair of long-handled forceps. When he was satisfied he wouldn’t cause any infection from the instrument, he first examined the thigh wound, noting that the entry and exit were clean. She’d been lucky on that one, but not so on the chest. The round had missed her lung, but there was no exit, and he was hardly prepared to perform surgery by flashlight in the great wide open.
He probed the entry, trying to see if he could feel the slug, but after several minutes of fruitless effort, gave up. The best he would be able to do was sterilize the wound with the alcohol and rig a pressure bandage. If she survived the night, he’d try for the nearest trading post, where someone more qualified could help. Lucas was no stranger to blood and had tended to a few wounds since the collapse, but nothing this severe, and even though he’d read an army manual on emergency first aid, he was out of his depth.
The blood loss was probably more dangerous than the chances of the bullet moving and causing any further damage. Judging by the flow, it hadn’t hit any major arteries, but he couldn’t be sure. He watched for any telltale arterial spurting and, when he only saw a faint pulse of red, reached into the kit for the syringe of morphine that he’d liberated from a medical clinic after the collapse. He’d never had to use the drug before and hoped for the woman’s sake that even though it was well past the expiration date, the caramel liquid would still pack a wallop.
Lucas poured some more alcohol on her arm and emptied three-quarters of the syringe into her, and then immersed the needle in the alcohol, using the bottle top as a receptacle. After thirty seconds of disinfection, he capped the syringe and replaced it in the kit.
The woman’s breathing eased and became more regular. Lucas removed his hat and held his ear to her chest in an effort to determine whether her lungs were congested, but couldn’t make out much. Her chest sounded clear, but he was winging it at this point – if she were drowning in her own blood, there was nothing he could do for her but offer a prayer and the rest of the morphine.
Lucas sat back and reached for the alcohol, resisting the urge to take a swig to steady his hand. He splashed some on the leg wound, rinsing the drying blood away, and she barely stirred. Before attending to her chest, he opened up one of the sealed packages of bandages and affixed two to her thigh, wrapping them with gauze to hold them in place after generously dabbing them with expired antibacterial ointment.
Better than nothing, he reasoned and then moved to her traumatized chest. This time the alcohol produced a pained moan and a squirm, but the woman didn’t open her eyes. He slathered the wound with ointment, leaving some of the alcohol in the cavity for good measure, and then improvised a pressure bandage to quell the bleeding.
Five minutes later he was repacking the kit, enshrouded in darkness and anxious to extinguish the bright beam of the flashlight before it drew any danger. He strode back to Tango and replaced the kit in the pouch, and then switched off the flashlight and slid it back into his pocket.
Lucas stood by his steed as his eyes adjusted. Over the far hills flashes of lightning forked from the thunderheads, followed by the occasional shuddering boom. He counted between the next large flash and the arriving explosion, and figured the storm was still at least fifteen miles away, maybe more.
Guilt ate at him as he looked around in the darkness at the dead. If he’d had more time and there had been no wounded woman, he would have covered the corpses with rocks or excavated shallow graves with his collapsible camp shovel. But with the storm on its way and the woman in dire straits, the best he could manage was a few words of prayer while standing over each body.
“May God have mercy on your souls,” he finished, wondering at the fickleness of the universe that these men, Raiders and travelers alike, had been spared death through the greatest catastrophe to have befallen mankind since biblical times only to die in a rutted gulley with no name. He supposed that it had ever been so, but at times like these his faith was tested by the seeming randomness of it all.
The wind moaned like an old woman, jarring him from the moment, and he led Tango to where the woman rested in narcotic slumber. He debated giving her some canteen water, but decided against it, not knowing whether it would hasten any congestion or, worse, choke her. Instead, he found the dead horse with the travois and detached the pair of long poles from its back, relieved that neither had broken when the poor beast had dropped. The crude sled, a sling suspended between two poles used by Native Americans, had been adopted by enterprising survivors who traveled by horse, mule, or cow, which enabled them to carry far more than they could on their animal’s back, even across rough terrain that would have proved impossible for a cart.
Lucas lashed the contrivance in front of the saddle horn, and the crossed poles spread wide behind Tango. He hadn’t thought to check the sling on his first pass, but was gratified to find plastic jugs of water and several baskets of half-rotten apples and oranges. He debated how much of the cargo to haul and settled for two jugs of water, one basket of fruit, and the remainder of the weapons he couldn’t fit in his bags, reasoning that if he had to ask Tango to haul the woman’s weight, a few more pounds of hardware wouldn’t hurt.
When he was done, he inspected his work. It would easily support the woman, and if he took it slow, wouldn’t pose too much of a challenge for the big stallion. He scooped her up, surprised by how light she was. It had been so long since he’d had a woman in his arms, he’d almost forgotten…
He shook off the thought and placed her in the cradle, securing her with a length of rope so she wouldn’t fall out. He didn’t plan to go far at night – traveling after dark was asking to be ambushed, and he typically avoided it.
Lucas swung up into the saddle in a fluid motion and snicked at Tango. The stallion pulled forward, and Lucas was relieved to see that the horse wasn’t visibly straining at the extra load.
They followed the ravine until a dip in the terrain enabled Lucas to guide Tango back onto the ridge. He took a break at the top and swept the horizon with his binoculars. Other than the line of roiling clouds to the west, there was nothing to see. He reckoned by the sound of the thunder that the storm was hovering over the mountains, where it would hopefully stay, blowing itself out and sparing him a muddy slog the next morning.
After another stretch he found a spot where he’d made camp before, with good lines of fire and only two ways into the clearing at the base of a jutting rock outcropping. He unharnessed Tango and removed the saddle, taking care to pat the horse appreciatively before setting him loose to graze. Four and a half years old, Tango had been raised by Lucas, and the horse was as attached to him as it was possible for an animal to be. Lucas had no fear that Tango would wander far, preferring to stay close in the clearing, where there was plentiful grass this time of year.
Lucas checked on the woman and then set out his trip lines fifty yards from his position. He painstakingly strung plastic-coated wire eighteen inches off the ground between two trees that framed the main approach any intruder would likely take, and then repeated the process on the rear passage between two boulders, tying the wire to a pair of stout saplings to produce the same result.
He padded back to where the woman lay on the sling, opened one of the water containers, and after sniffing it, held it up to Tango, who was contentedly munching at the long grass a few yards away.
“Want some water, buddy?” he whispered, and Tango moved toward him as though understanding. The horse drank the entire thing, and Lucas reminded himself that Tango needed at least ten gallons a day, preferably more when he was exerting himself.
Lucas unfurled his bedroll, draped it over the woman, and sat beside her. He listened to her breathing, interrupted only by the occasional hoot from an owl and the rumble of th
under. Lucas brushed a lock of light brown hair off her forehead and studied her face in the faint moonlight streaming through scattered clouds.
“What are you doing out here, huh?” he muttered, the question more to himself than anything. “Good way to get yourself killed.”
He decided to risk a small fire – given the clearing’s isolation and placement within a rocky area, it should be safe, and he’d done so before when he’d camped there in the past; in fact, his old fire pit was only footsteps away. After gathering some dried kindling and moving the small rocks of the fire pit closer, he doused the wood with his grandfather’s secret recipe and lit it with a disposable butane lighter – one of three he owned, and a highly prized trading item.
The fire blazed to life, and he watched the flames dance as the wood crackled. He chewed slowly on some of the jerky he and his grandfather made at the ranch, lost in thought, mesmerized by the orange tongues licking at the night air.
Lucas blinked away his fatigue and glanced over at Tango, who had returned to his grazing, unconcerned by his master’s one-sided discussion. Lucas shrugged in silent apology and sat back against the hard rock, his M4A1 in his lap with its Exelis NE-PVS-14 night vision scope in place and Kimber holstered at his hip, his lids heavy after the adrenaline from the day had burned off. He allowed himself the small luxury of a few seconds of shut-eye, just to relieve the burning itch. A vision of his late wife, Kerry, drifted into his mind, and he gave a sigh of quiet misery. Lucas held the image of her face as long as he could, and then it evaporated, fading like morning mist, her smiling eyes the last to go.
Was that why he was taking the risk of trying to rescue the woman? Guilt over having failed to save his wife, the love of his life? At having chosen his job over her?
“That’s not true,” he whispered, but the words sounded hollow.
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