Nightwalker 3

by Frank Roderus

  Nightwalker 3

  A Post-Apocalyptic Western Adventure

  Frank Roderus

  Craig Martelle

  This book is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Nightwalker (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are Copyright (c) 2015 by Frank Roderus (as revised)

  Cover by Ryan Schwarz - thecoverdesigner.com

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  Nightwalker is published by LMBPN Publishing

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of LMBPN Publishing. Published under license from the Roderus Estate.

  First US edition, May 2019

  ISBN: 978-1-64202-212-4

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  About the Author

  Notes - Craig Martelle

  Books by Frank Roderus

  Books by Craig Martelle

  Other books from LMBPN Publishing

  Chapter One

  The bad news was that he was an outlaw, wanted now by the Federal Command throughout the clear areas of what remained of the United States. The good news was that he was free—so far. Jim Wolfe walked cross-country through the rocks and canyons of the increasingly dry land along the border between Wyoming and Utah.

  As far as he could determine, he had left the Wyoming clear area behind and was now in one of the red zones, where radiation contamination was too dangerous for human habitation. In truth, Wolfe would gladly have stayed in the safer clear area behind him, if it were not for the knowledge that he was, or very soon would be, declared an outlaw by the Federal Command.

  After the exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the coalition of China, India, and North Korea, Wolfe hid for a couple years inside an abandoned mine tunnel. He stayed there until he ran out of the food that had been in the cargo he’d been carrying as a long-haul trucker. That, and the water that seeped like a mountain spring from the tunnel walls, sustained him.

  When Wolfe finally emerged, both he and the world around him were drastically changed. He himself was unusually strong—perhaps due to radiation causing changes in the water, or possibly as the result of some chemical action—and his eyes no longer dilated normally. He could see perfectly well at night now, but during the day, was blinded by sunlight unless he wore the welding goggles that he’d found at an old service station. And, perhaps understandably, his hair had turned completely white.

  Much more than the changes he found in himself, though, were the changes that had taken place in the country. State and local government had been abandoned in the declared clear areas. Governments fell to the hands of a single, Federal Command structure. While the military continued to fight a distant war, and America’s enemies no longer had the means to deliver nuclear weapons to the North American continent, the Federal Command, commonly known as FEDCOM, granted citizens livelihood at little more than a subsistence level. Commodities were strictly rationed. Gasoline for private transportation was virtually nonexistent now, and luxury items like cigarettes and alcoholic beverages had disappeared from American life. Those contraband items could still be found, however, in the abandoned stores and warehouses inside the prescribed red zones, and a brisk trade had developed in them.

  Scavengers who lived in the clear areas crossed into the red zones to find valuables and smuggle them past FEDCOM guards at the borders. It had been Jim Wolfe’s bad luck to run afoul of a family of highly successful but vicious scavengers.

  In the course of rescuing a friend of his from slavery at the hands of the Alston brothers, two of the Alstons had died. The surviving brothers, Ralph and Ed, undertook to pursue Wolfe. Their intent: to kill him to avenge the deaths they considered to have been murder. More recently, the Alstons themselves murdered several FEDCOM border guards and an elderly woman in the Wyoming clear area. They successfully blamed those murders on Wolfe, and now he was a fugitive from the FEDCOM inside the clear areas, and had a price on his head imposed by the Alstons in the red zones. That was the bad news.

  The good, however, was that so far, he had eluded them. And, every day that passed, every foot of ground he covered, brought him that much closer to his home. Or, to where his home used to be.

  With no long-distance communication, and virtually nothing in the way of news travelling from one clear area to another, he had no way to learn if Bradenton, Florida, still stood. After all, the little Gulf Coast town lay immediately south of Tampa Bay, where MacDill Air Force Base contained the military’s Central Command. He had to assume that MacDill would have been targeted in the sequence of sneak attacks that destroyed so much of the country. MacDill was probably gone. But Wolfe continued to hold out hope that somehow, his wife, Lurleen, and their toddler son, Jojo, had survived.

  Without them to go back to, he had little reason to go on, and he would not, he could not, rest until he got home and knew once and for all.

  Trapped on the road in Idaho when the first bombs fell, Wolfe had a very long way to travel. Being an outlaw would not make that any easier for him, but then, neither that, nor anything else short of death, would stop him from getting back to Florida.

  Wolfe opened a can of corned beef, gave half to the big German Shepherd mix dog that had become his traveling companion, and used a pair of twigs like chopsticks to eat his portion. It would soon be dark and he would be able to travel comfortably then.

  “Maybe we’ve put our troubles behind us, boy. What do you think?” He scratched the dog behind its ears. Wolfe’s hope that trouble was over and done with was only human—it was also very wrong.

  Chapter Two

  Wolfe disliked walking inside the canyon. He felt cramped in there, restricted by the sandstone walls and the fact that he could not see far. His enemies could be close without him being aware of them, and that made him nervous. On the other hand, he had little real choice in the matter. He knew he could get along without food for weeks at a time if need be, but a human being absolutely must have water in order to sustain life. He could find water down in the bottoms, the low-lying areas even if he had to dig for it.

  He stayed close to the canyon wall and paid attention to the dog as he walked. The dog was his early warning system. At least, he hoped it would warn him of danger. Of course, i
t was more apt to show him the presence of others by wagging its tail than by growling. The one time it had shown any aggression was back in Wyoming when it had attacked and badly slashed the face of Ed Alston. Wolfe figured that barely counted, since the dog was once owned by the Alstons and had been mistreated by them.

  “What do you think, boy? It’s getting close to daybreak. Should we start looking for a place to hole up now?” Since resuming his journey, Wolfe’s habit was to march during the night when he could see perfectly well and when he had less to fear from dehydration or heat, and hole up during the daylight hours. He also had decided to avoid the highways and paved roads now. There was no private vehicular traffic on them these days; the only motorized vehicles Wolfe had seen since he emerged from his refuge in the mine tunnel were a few—very few—FEDCOM trucks. Even so, he did not want to be out in the open along the highways. The easily-walked routes attracted scavengers, and as well were likely to be used by the wilders—the lawless few who seemed to enjoy the brutal anarchy that existed in the red zones—and by drifters who simply wanted to live free of the restrictions imposed by the government.

  The problem with encountering strangers was that you never knew which sort of red zone dweller you had. Wolfe had run across some fine folks in the red zone up in Idaho. He’d also found himself involved with some of the other sort as well, and he did not want to take any chances—especially now that a price had been put on his head.

  As the first pale hints of daylight began to lighten the upper rim of the canyon he’d been following, Wolfe looked for a side canyon or some niche where he could get out of the open. Nothing that he could see looked particularly inviting, and there seemed to be no water close, either. Still, the thought of travelling in this barren country during broad daylight was not at all appealing. He settled for making a nest of sorts behind a slab of rock that had fallen from the rim above, and pouring a scant cup full of water from one of the two canteens he carried. Little as it was, he shared it with the dog. Then, he pulled his dark goggles in place and laid down on top of the blankets that served him for a bed, his good sleeping bag and other possessions having been stolen by the Alston brothers a week or so back.

  “Keep an eye on things while I’m sleeping, boy. Wake me if somebody comes,” he said aloud, although, not with any expectation at all that the big dog would really do it.

  Chapter Three

  It was just as well that Wolfe placed no great confidence in the dog. When he stirred and finally opened his eyes, he found himself looking at two young men, one of whom was petting the dog and grinning.

  “Not much of a watch dog, is he?” that one asked.

  The two were in their late teens or early twenties, Wolfe thought. Both wore grey sweatshirts, jeans, and sneakers. Both wore their hair in short buzz cuts and were clean shaven—a great rarity after the war when production of razor blades stopped and household electricity disappeared.

  Wolfe sat up and stifled a yawn. “Who are you?”

  The one by the dog said, “I’m Jason. My friend here is Leon.” He stopped messing with the dog and asked, “And what is your business here?”

  The question was ordinary enough, but Wolfe thought he could hear a slight edge in Jason’s voice when he asked it. Wolfe introduced himself and then said, “I’m not here on any particular business. Just passing through on my way home.”

  “That would be…where?”

  Wolfe told him.

  “And you just happened to come this way?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Even though it would be shorter to cut east through the clear area over there?”

  Wolfe shrugged.

  “You really should answer the questions,” Leon said.

  Wolfe looked at him for a moment without saying anything. He snapped his fingers and the dog left Jason and came to Wolfe’s side. Wolfe scratched the animal behind the ears.

  “What’s his name?” Jason asked.

  “I haven’t gotten around to giving him one. He travels with me. I feed him. I haven’t thought of him as being my dog or anything.”

  “He looks like a wolf. Call him Lobo.”

  “Too obvious,” Wolfe said. “Besides, then people would think I was talking about myself or something.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll think of a good name for him,” Jason said.

  “It’s a shame I won’t be around to find out what it is. The dog and I will be moving along now.”

  “Not just yet,” Leon said.

  Wolfe hadn’t been paying any particular attention until now, but it belatedly occurred to him that the rifle he’d placed beside his bedroll when he’d laid down to sleep was gone from that spot.

  Jason and Leon were both armed, not that there was anything unusual about that here in the red zone, where virtually everyone went armed for sheer survival, but not with M16s like the FEDCOM troopers and Wolfe carried.

  “Where’s my rifle?”

  “We didn’t want you to misunderstand when you woke up. We’re keeping it safe for you,” Leon said.

  “Fine. I’m awake now, and there’s no misunderstanding. I’ll have the rifle back now, if you please.”

  “Later.”

  “Now,” Wolfe said calmly. If these youngsters thought they were going to intimidate him, they had a long way to go. Of course, because of the snow-white hair, they probably thought he was an old man. It was a common enough mistake. And they could have no way to know how quick and powerful he was. If he chose to hurt them, he could break both their necks before they had a chance to bring their lever-action rifles into play.

  “Now,” he said again.

  Jason looked at his companion and nodded. “Give Mr. Wolfe back his gun, Leon.”

  “But--”

  “Now,” Jason said crisply.

  Leon rather reluctantly reached behind him and produced the rifle, which he handed to Wolfe.

  “Thank you.”

  “What we would like,” Jason said, “is for you to come with us and meet our leader.”

  “Leader? Of what?”

  Jason smiled. “Nothing sinister, I assure you, Mr. Wolfe. It’s just—you could call it a protective society. Don’t worry. He’ll explain everything when we get there.” Jason stood and Leon quickly followed suit. “Can we help you get your gear together? Then we’ll show you where we live. You’ll like it. You might even want to join us.”

  Wolfe said nothing, but he knew better than that. Whatever this society of theirs was, and wherever they lived, they could not compare with his own family waiting for him several thousand miles away on the Gulf Coast of Florida. It took him only a few moments to roll his things together and stuff everything into the rucksack. “All right,” he said when he was ready. Then he grinned and added, “Take me to your leader.”

  Neither of the young men so much as cracked a smile, although Wolfe had thought it a pretty good line. The two set off at a swift walk with Wolfe and the dog trailing behind.

  Chapter Four

  Two sharp turns and about three miles down the floor of the canyon Wolfe had been following, they came to a footpath leading up to a bridge that spanned the width of the canyon. At the top of the bridge lay a small town, unlike any town Wolfe had seen since he emerged from hiding after the nuclear war. This one was still functioning.

  There were no trucks or automobiles in evidence. He was used to not seeing any vehicles in motion, but here, he did not even see any abandoned along the streets. What he did see were horses. Mostly, they were hitched to low-riding, sturdy wagons, but a few saddle horses were tied to rails in front of the buildings, just like something out of an old western movie.

  “Oh, we cleared all that away,” Jason told him when Wolfe asked about the missing vehicles. “They just got in the way. We pulled them over to that end of town and stuck them in a vacant lot there. You never know what pieces you might want off of ‘em. The older ones, the ones with frames instead of unibody construction, were mostly converted into those w
agons you see there.”

  “Clever,” Wolfe said, and he meant it.

  “Our leader is very clever. You see all the windmills?”

  “It would have been difficult to miss them.” Most buildings in the town had what looked like the windmills used to pump water in isolated pastures and the more empty stretches in the west. Except instead of standing on towers, perched over wells, these were, for the most part, mounted on roofs.

  “That was our leader’s idea, too,” Jason said. “While we still had gasoline available, we gathered those in from ranches for a hundred miles around. We took them apart and brought them here. Now they’re turning generators that we removed from those cars and trucks I mentioned before. The generators feed banks of batteries in each house or store, and we converted our power to twelve volt, so now we have electric lights and workable small appliances, even a little refrigeration.”

  “Air conditioning?” Wolfe asked, rather hopefully. It was late afternoon and the heat was stifling.

  Jason laughed. “We don’t have that much power available, but we do have electric fans. They help a lot.”