by Kris Holt
The second of the brothers was slumped on the floor by the shattered side window. A large section of the floor behind him was painted red. No-one alive can be still like he was still, so I mentally scratched another one off the list. Two down, two to go. The other side of the room led to a dark corridor that went off toward the back room I'd come past. The first guy I'd seen had to be in there, but he might come out again at any moment.
There was the slightest of movements from past the doorway to my left and I rocked back on my heels, taser up.
'Phoenix,' Gregory said, offering me a raised palm. His other hand was dragging a dead weight behind him by the collar. 'Caught him trying to go out a back window. Don't think he even saw me.'
Three down. 'If you went round that way, that would explain why Jayci's stopped firing. She wouldn't have wanted to risk hitting you.'
Gregor shook his head and let his captive slump face first onto the wooden floor. 'She'd already stopped firing by then.'
I stared past him, into the empty space where the dirty light just made the blackness beyond even emptier and more tempting. 'Okay. Keep watch here and back the way you came. There's one more, but he might have gone and run for it.'
I tiptoed over towards the hallway, trying to ignore the general devastation around me. This room was a living room with a sofa and a radio in the corner. The dial on the box was shattered and the back hissed. Damn shame, I thought. We could have taken that back to Gregor's.
There was a bang at the end of the corridor and I ducked back, but it was followed by a creak, and I could see the screen door I'd approached earlier, albeit from the other side, slamming to and fro on its hinges. I stepped forward, cobra-quick and quiet as a mouse, expecting to see the final brother either hiding in the blind corner on the other side or fleeing into the darkness past the outhouse. Too late I saw him in the bedroom opposite, seated against the wall, eyes staring, gun resting in his lap.
I rolled and flicked the taser up in one movement, hitting him, but he made no reaction and I figured the charge must have burned itself out. I clambered gracelessly behind the bed, had my mom's gun out and pointed before I realised that he hadn't moved. Still training the gun on him carefully, I got close enough in the darkness to see the tiny red hole in the centre of his forehead. Suddenly weary, I reached down and closed his eyes for the last time. Jayci was a good shot.
Gregor called from the front. 'Did you get him?'
'We got two alive out here, and two dead in there. Four down. That's the lot.'
I was all ready to follow him out when I glanced at the end of the corridor. Right there, where I hadn't been looking, was another doorway. The door itself was missing, but the curtain across the space was dark blue, the colour of night.
For just a moment, I was seeing myself through Piano Man's eyes. He'd done a better job of counting numbers than the rest of us.
Them Southern boys are oh-so-dim...
Chapter 16 – Hesitation Lives
Hesitation is a live one. No cautious man ever fell from the sky, or rushed into fire in a damn fool mission to save a loved one. Hesitation waits, hesitation thinks, hesitation plans. Hesitation lives.
Course, you'd best believe that I took out my mom's laser and I shredded that curtain and everything behind it before any of those thoughts grew wings.
Gregor came sprinting round the corner and ran chest-first into my outstretched arm.
'Back,' I commanded. 'Whatever happens, don't come round here. If you hear any more gunfire, you run. You run quick, and you run far. Pick up Jayci, physically if you have to. Ignore anything she says. Take her with you and keep going south until morning.' I felt him melt away.
It wasn't ten yards but that corridor was the longest one I've ever taken. I wanted reassurance, wanted to wait, but maybe I'd already waited too long. If I stayed there 'til Jayci arrived, I could be condemning us all to death. I strained my ears for noises, for piano music in the distance. There was nothing at all to guide me. I was totally alone.
Is this what happened to her, to my mom? Did she die sitting still, crouched like a prey animal? Was she straining her ears for sounds when the moment came? Was her skin prickling like mine in the darkness, like she could feel the bad, like she could taste it? Would her way be my way, the words of a spirit enough to send her to her death?
The sound of another set of footsteps began behind me. Bird-light but with the purpose of a man twice her size, Jayci rounded the corner. There was no way I was letting her put herself in danger.
'Back,' I snarled, before she could even open her mouth. Her eyes widened as she subsided. That might be the only time ever that that girl listened to something I said.
The failing light meant that I had to get right on up in the cubbyhole before I could see what was there. It might have been storage once, a cupboard or an airing space or who knows what. What was sure was that it was filled now with the corpse of a man, an unseen brother or friend of a brother who was sitting jammed in the hole with a shotgun resting on his knees.
I stood there for a few seconds more, taking in the silence, revelling in the absolute stillness in the whole scene. It wasn't that one man's life had ended, but that for the three of us there, ours could begin again.
'Is it done?' Gregor called.
'Yes,' I said quietly, my mind filled with distant flames. 'It's done.'
* * *
'So the question you're asking,' Jayci said slowly, 'is what makes a bunch of low-life no-goods fresh from the Pen into hardened criminals.'
'I said, what makes a bunch of guys with a petty history suddenly decide to go all scorched earth on us,' I replied.
'Desperate men,' Jayci said with a shrug. She was chewing on a toothpick and as she was thinking, she was moving it from side to side in her mouth. 'I got more important things on my mind. Like, if these guys took all of Carter's weapons, where did they stash them?'
'Why don't we ask one of these guys when they wake up?' Gregor said. He gestured at the surviving brothers, who we'd cuffed unconscious to a radiator and stacked up against the wall.
'Could be hours before they wake up. I'm not keen on spending the night out in the Sands. Reckon we'll just load 'em up and deliver them to Carter.' I nudged one of the unconscious men with the toe of my boot. 'She'll be all keen to speak to them.'
'And then they go back to the Pen?'
'Not these guys,' I said, shaking my head. 'These guys are looking at a long uncomfortable talk followed by a short-and-even-less-comfortable rope.'
'And you guys are looking at enough cash to cover the bills for a few more weeks,' Gregor said.
'Hey, one of those live ones is yours,' I replied. 'Turns out you're a handyman in more ways than one.'
Gregor looked pained. 'We've got far more important things to worry about than money.'
I waited, fully expecting Jayci to jump on that and berate our resident engineer for his prioritsation skills, but the girl had crept out of the room. Curious, we followed her trail outside, where she was a hard shadow kneeling in the dust underneath the spotlight in the yard.
'Jayci? Is everything okay?' Gregor asked.
'Everything's fine,' she said. It was hard to see in the light, but the girl seemed to be shifting the sand with her hands, like a child in a playpit.
'You sure?'
'Fine and dandy. You can come over here, join in if you want. And best believe that you're gonna want.'
'The quicker we do this, the quicker we get out of here.' Gregor scampered past me. I was all ready to walk down with him until another detail caught my eye. In addition to the shadow Jayci was casting from the spotlight on the farmhouse, another weaker shadow was cutting across the first. I looked up past her, where the horizon was glowing yellow. At the same time, I became aware of a humming on the edge of my hearing, distant, but growing louder.
Gregor knelt down next to Jayci, shared a few words that I didn't hear and scuffed up the sand next to her.
'Gregor,' I sa
id, looking back out to the horizon, 'what in hell is causing that light?'
'Forget about the light,' Jayci ordered. 'Get your ass down here and help us search.'
'What are you even looking for?'
Jayci gestured with the toothpick to a space back below the porch, where a chain was hanging from the timbers. Heavy links snaked down from the rotting timbers and disappeared beneath the surface. 'I think this might be our lead. But first, we gotta dig that fucker out.'
I went down on my knees with the the pair of them, tracing the path of the chain in the sand. It went deeper as it went out, meaning we had to dig more the longer we stayed with it. As we did, the light got brighter and the hum got louder. I kept looking up, hoping I might see something, but there was nothing beyond the light itself.
'Is that not bothering you?' I asked. 'Whatever that is?'
Jayci wiped her forehead and squinted into the distance. Gregor glanced only at her. 'Keep working,' she said.
Finally, Gregor let out a little shriek and his hands scrubbed sand off the lid of a buried metal crate. With another few minutes of work, we shook the top of the crate completely free of sand. The crate was fifteen feet long and twice as wide. Deepness, I could only guess at. It was Jayci, grinning eerily in the chequered light, who took it upon herself to pop the lid.
Inside, there was an immense host of weaponry, the likes of which I'd never even seen. There were handguns, automatic rifles, military shotguns, grenades. Some things I didn't even recognise. No-one outside of the military could ever have afforded this amount of armaments. It was an arsenal that could take a city. Hell, maybe even a country.
Jayci swept her braids behind her and leered at me. 'I told you, didn't I? I told you! The fucking motherlode.'
'There's more here than Carter's guns. They must have been raiding, stockpiling for...ages.' I couldn't even guess how long it had taken to build up this stash.
'The fucking motherlode,' Jayci repeated.
'This has to go back to Carter. All of it.'
'We could do that,' Jayci said.
I stared at her. 'What are you thinking?'
'Well, we could give most of it back, sure. But there's enough here that they won't notice a few items, carefully hidden away...and then we'd be better armed than any goddamn bad we ever ran into again. You and me, Phoe-Phoe. Think about it. We could be the baddest hunters in the whole of Hole Town history.'
'Guys,' Gregor said.
I looked up. The light was now as bright as day, the hum a roar, and I'd been staring into the crate, distracted and not looking at what was coming. The three of us got to our feet in time to see an armada of vehicles, trucks, motorbikes and jeeps approaching. Their headlights crested the horizon, their engines roared, and they bathed us in light. The other vehicles were flanking a giant armoured monster truck that was surely the single biggest vehicle in Christendom. You could have stood me on Gregor's shoulders and Jayci on mine, and I'm not sure we could have climbed one of the wheels.
Jayci's mouth opened so wide that she dropped the toothpick. It dropped to the sand, where it was swept away by a breeze on the grainy surface. 'The fucking motherlode,' she said again.
Chapter 17 – The Good, the Bad and the oh-so Ugly
The three of us stood there like we were dumb while a whole battalion of men in black leather lifted visors and stepped off of motorbikes or leaned out of trucks and pointed weapons at us. The whole scene was silhouetted against the backdrop of a light bright enough to blind a man, brighter even than the sun.
Slowly, the three of us raised our hands. Jayci was close enough to me that when she whispered in my ear, her breath tickled. 'If you had any plans saved up for what to do if an army invaded the desert, now would be a good time to share them.'
'Me?' I said. 'I thought you were the one with ideas of global domination.'
'Gregor? You got anything?'
'My usual forte is running, and I don't think that's going to work here.'
So, we still had a ways to go before we were big league, but then it's not every day that an army strolls over the horizon and faces you down. What would you do?
I stepped forward and called out, 'What do you want?'
'You to shut up.' The man who responded walked towards us awkwardly, as though his clothes were maybe a size too small for him, but the rifle he was carrying was as tall as he himself, and he wasn't a short man. He waved an arm and with a distant slam, the light level dropped considerably. Now I could pick out faces in the gloom, and none of them were friendly.
The man who'd approached us had a jaw so square it might have been panel beat. His hair was grey and the rest of his face was scarred, like he'd been chewed up and spat out by something. If I'd seen this guy's face on a wanted poster, I'd have been tempted to look around for something a bit easier to deal with. For his part, he looked about as impressed with us as I was by him. He stood the rifle upright in one hand, pulled out a pistol with the other and pointed it at my head.
'You ain't Bennett Brown,' he said.
'Bennett's back inside,' I said. Hey, he might have been chained to a radiator, but it wasn't a lie.
The man walked around me at a safe distance, careful to have one eye spare for Jayci and Gregor. It was clear he wasn't taking us lightly.
'You in charge here?' he said.
'Girl here is the smart one and Fat Boy back there does the navigating,' I said. If I could get him to focus on me, that might leave a window for one of the others to do...something. 'I'm the one with the gun.'
He tipped his head to look at the laser and whistled through his teeth.
'Very nice gun that is too. A classic model. They hand-built all of them lasers, none of this production line shit. I'm talking real craftsmanship. You just don't get stuff like that any more. Take Betsy, here.' He tipped the rifle towards me. 'I built her myself after I dropped out of the military. You know, they spend all their time, chasing round the desert in sandy environments that fuck up their weapons in hours. Hey, it don't matter none. It's all about the bombs these days. 'Course, every one they drop breeds a hundred more men that stand and fight...but then, no-one getting rich from war is interested in war coming to an end, are they?'
Jayci was leaning into me and I could feel her body stiffening. I could tell she was thinking the same as me - this guy knew too much. He wasn't going to be someone you could fool with a cheap trick.
Grey Hair pointed his rifle at the horizon across from us and sighted her. 'Betsy and me, we've killed fifty men. And of course, there was more before I made her, but I didn't ever keep a count of those. You probably killed a few yourself...' and here, he allowed the sentence to dangle like a baited hook. When I didn't reply, he shrugged. 'Or maybe in your line of work, you prefer to take 'em alive.'
He saw me sideglance at Jayci. 'Your guild badge is a dead giveaway, son. Now, for a moment, I was thinking you were just some mud-dweller...but that laser is something serious. You're way too young to have been around when they were made, so I'm guessing you either looted that or you inherited it. If it's the latter, my commiserations. If it's the former, I suggest you don't try to fire it.' He even knew about the laser.
A different, younger voice drifted down from on high. 'Captain Jensen, how long is this going to take?'
We looked upwards, to where a younger man was sitting on an improvised throne atop the Monster Truck that had been leading the fleet. He was wearing strange, light clothes under a leather cloak the same colour as the tight copper curls on his head. As we watched, his legs swung out and rested on the dashboard. The boots he was wearing stopped at the ankle, and looked like they were made out of some futuristic material, the like of which I'd never seen before.
The man we now knew to be Captain Jensen said, 'Sir, I'm just doing a little recon work right here, find out what we're dealing with. See, I was expecting to meet with one man, and I get a little itchy when another man shows up instead.'
Before anyone else could reply, Gregor li
fted his telescope to his eye and looked upwards. He adjusted the lens while I watched, and then he let it hang loose in his hands, a troubled look on his face. 'It's Nate Di Vio.'
'Who the hell is Nate Di Vio?' I asked.
'He's the man who owns the Silver Sea,' Gregor said. 'It's the solar farm where the panels cover the entire county. It's the reason why the union hasn't collapsed completely. It powers everything from the far side of the Sands to the northern point of the continent.'
'Oh,' I said.
'He's rich beyond our imagination,' Gregor replied. 'And he's a genius.'
Jensen looked at Gregor for a moment with the sour expression of the long-serving and underappreciated underling who hears someone else praising his boss. Then he called up again, 'See, I'm just a little bit unsure about handing over a large sum of money to these guys when I don't even know who they are.'