by T. K. Malone
“Sure would,” said Ned. “He sure would.”
Trip could barely stand when they made to move on, but wouldn’t hear of one of them going ahead to retrieve a truck, so they labored on through the wood. When they finally made it, he collapsed against the fallen trunk.
“Don’t suppose you could fish out a smoke. Plenty in the back of my truck,” he said.
Teah walked around the trunk, pulling the camouflage away. Both trucks were still there, for which she was thankful. Just as they’d got a camp together, some semblance of a base, it had all been ripped away from them. Ned held out his hand, and she gave him Trip’s key. He pulled the truck out and went back for Morrow’s.
“Yep,” he shouted, “got a radio.”
“Pull her out, then.”
Teah sat by Trip after she’d dressed his wound with bandages, and Ned fiddled with the radio. It was déjà vu in some ways, Teah mused; the same scene only recently interrupted by drones, explosions and bullets. The drone and helicopter attack had clearly forced their hand. Trip now needed medical attention, for out here his leg would either go septic or he’d bleed to death. It was also clear the army was cleaning shop, making sure there was nothing left to worry about out here. She guessed she’d been right in her appraisal of them—there was army, and there was not—a distinct line between the two, no blurred edges.
“Gonna have to get you into that compound,” Teah said to Trip.
“Or?”
“Or…”
“Or I’m going to die. There’s always an ‘or’. You should say it, not be scared of it. I know, bandaging ain’t bad, wound might even stop bleeding, but a corruption will come, sure as eggs are eggs.”
“Sure as eggs are eggs,” Teah affirmed.
“We’ll get moving in ten,” Ned shouted from the truck. “That helo pilot might be fooled into thinking we’re dead, but it’ll all be on tape. When they review it, they’re gonna know the bullets didn’t go anywhere near me and Trip. Nope, we’ve gotta put some miles between us and here. Only thing in our favor is they don’t know we’ve got wheels.”
“You think he’ll come back?” Trip asked.
“Him? Nope, but I think one of his buddies will already be on the way. Reckon we’ve got about forty minutes to get far enough away. Just lucky both of these trucks started. What one d’ya want, Teah? Trip can lay in the back of his—no room in the jeep.”
“No odds to me.”
“Take Trip’s, then. I can mess around with the radio. We’ll go a couple of miles up, then hide out and wait for the helo.”
“You sure it’ll come?”
“Sure as eggs are eggs.”
Trip took a toke on his smoke. “Sure appreciate you not leaving me back there.”
“We ain’t the leaving kind,” said Teah, and grabbed his shoulder, giving it a squeeze. He looked around at her and smiled. In some ways he was still a child, and in many he was a man. The mountain life must do that to you, Teah thought, must make you grow like a tree, capable of bending whichever way the wind blows. He could squash a man’s head without looking at it, skin a rabbit without blinking, run with a bullet hole in his leg without complaining, and just be thankful he hadn’t been left behind. She grinned back at him, a moment shared.
Behind them, Ned whistled. “You weren’t far wrong when you said he had a small armory back here. Heck, there’s even a couple of grenades tucked away. What kinda trouble were they expecting?” Teah heard him cocking the guns, then emptying their chambers.
“Maybe they’re gearing up for war? Who knows? Either way, they’re ours now.”
“Ours to give back to Briscoe in trade for our guts remaining where they should be.”
“But ours for now,” Teah maintained.
“True, ‘sides, how do you prepare for a war you don’t know’s coming?”
Teah sat and thought. It was something Jake had said to her. Something that hadn’t rung true but had niggled her, prodding away in the background. What had it been? That was it: “Lester always said you’d be his greatest challenge”. The thrust behind those words suggested Lester knew she was going to come, that he’d been waiting for her, but how could that have been so? Unless she’d got the meaning muddled, but then, it wasn’t the first time she’d gotten the feeling that everything, to some degree or other, had been preordained. Jake had referred to it as a game. Charm had referred to her as his queen. Could it be just that? Could she be blundering around fulfilling someone else’s whims with just a push of their finger, a nudge here, another there? A burst of cold shivered through her at the thought, a thought immediately discounted as being hardly a sane explanation.
To have planned all this would have meant the apocalypse had itself been preplanned, and no human being could possibly be that irresponsible.
“Tell me about Briscoe,” she muttered, reached for a smoke, and pulled down the cattleman.
“Briscoe?” said Ned, lumping down next to her. “’Bout my age—early forties, tallish but no giant, stocky but not muscle-bound. No, he ain’t nothing fantastic, but he has something about him, something which makes you…comply.”
“Like what?”
Ned picked up a stone and tossed it toward a sequoia trunk a dozen or so yards away. “I dunno, probably just mythical shit, you know?”
“Mythical shit?”
“If you believe a man’s an idiot, chances are he’ll act like one—I suppose you only think him dim because you have good reason, so the chances are he’s dim and that’s why he acts that way.” Ned scratched his head. “Not making myself clear, am I?”
Teah said nothing; sometimes thoughts just had to be thought through.
“No, probably not,” he continued. “It’s like legend. One way or the other, the man who is the legend, earned the legend. The only thing you could dispute is whether that legend was just the blabber of fools. If it was, then the legend engineered that, so he deserves his memory. Briscoe is a living legend.”
“How so?”
“Bit the head off a rattler, I heard,” Trip butted in. “Bigun’, too; size of a tree trunk.”
“A tree trunk?” Teah questioned.
“Yeah,” said Trip.
“And there’s more,” Ned assured her. “He’s shot a man at over three miles, wrestled a bear, fought a crowd of drunks singlehanded, and bedded every woman in the valley.” He raised an eyebrow at Teah. Though she’d never met the man, she blushed and looked away, then laughed and looked back. Ned went on, “Briscoe built up the compound from a ragtag bunch of cowboy farmers into an army of survivalists. He designed the buildings, laid the bricks, dug the sewers, fathered the children, counseled the suicidal, and calmed the enraged. You getting the picture?”
“Beginning to, but it doesn’t answer my question: what’s he like?”
Ned let out a breath. “Well, he’s got swagger.”
“Swagger?”
“Some folks are natural-born leaders, and Briscoe’s one of them. Thing about Spike is: he’s earned his legend. If there’s a ditch to be dug, he’ll be in there digging, but if there’s a man needing shooting, he’ll be holding the gun. The man’s got vision, and he’s bent on making it happen.”
“So, we’ve just got to be useful, to show we can help him.”
“Ah, well, there’s the problem. Briscoe is fiercely protective of his folk, and we’re kind of in a jam, what with Morrow and Grizzly. My bet is he won’t wait for excuses, just enhance that killing reputation he’s got.”
“Killing reputation?”
“Briscoe don’t like strangers.” Ned stood and jumped into Morrow’s jeep. “You’ve never been up there, have you?”
“Nope.”
“Road up: it’s littered with burned out trucks and bones. Just so as you know,” and he pulled the jeep away.
4
Teah’s Story
Strike time: plus 4 days
Location: Upper Morton Valley
This high up the valley, the trail ran close
to the river, two sloping flanks of vast trees to either side which reached for the grey ridges, which in turn seemed to touched the sky itself. The blue sky, Teah noted as she drove along, and as she wondered about Trip’s forecast of rain. They’d hidden out a little lower down the valley and watched the helicopter come and go. It had crisscrossed the valley for a while before giving up. It appeared Ned had called that one completely correctly, and that worried Teah more than it would have if he’d gotten it wrong. It all again came back to what Jake had said: “A general and a foot soldier”. That was it, and in no way could the groaning form of Trip be regarded as a general.
So, the question that remained and tumbled around her head as the wind whistled past was a singular one, which in itself surprised her, given their destination. Was Ned an army man? More pertinently, had Jake got it wrong? Could he be working with the army for some ulterior motive? Given what little she knew was merely a muddle of facts and rumor, strewn around like the dead leaves of a forest floor, it was entirely possible anything could go, and as such anything could be rightly considered.
She tried assuming Ned was an army man, or at the very least she attempted playing advocate for that presumption. What would the army gain? If he was indeed army, then he could have influenced their move to the lake and in doing so allowed the army to destroy Aldertown, thus narrowing their options. He could have called in the drone strike, for hadn’t that happened just a few moments after he’d declared the radio didn’t work—and with unerring accuracy? Trip’s injury—deliberate or fortunate?
Still pondering, she followed Ned up the winding trail and wondered how on earth there could be fields this far up the mountains. The valley they were in was narrowing, not getting larger. Surely fields and grazing wouldn’t be plentiful farther up. The river itself kept changing from a wide and relatively shallow flow to a narrow and white, even angry, spurt. But that land soon started to have a familiar feel, as though she had lived here, not just passed through, and she realized they were nearing Lester’s mine.
Weather-beaten rock faces, scree-covered escarpments, boulders littering scrawny grass, and skeletal trees clinging to those craggy faces typified the narrow throat of the valley which Lester had called his own. Looking over at the yellow-stained cliff under which his mine had been burrowed, memories tumbled back into her mind. Those of hard and testing times, but of fair times, all endured beneath the judgment of that sentinel rock. Much to her surprise, Ned veered off that way. He pulled the jeep up near the mine and jumped out. Teah drew up alongside.
“Stopping here?” she asked.
“Good a place as any. Lester’s old place—you should know the hunting, the lay of the land. Any cover around here?”
“Why don’t we just drive on to the compound?”
“Don’t want to be getting there too close to dark. Heard they get rattier near dusk—trigger happy; heard that a few times.”
“There ain’t that much cover around here,” she told him, distrust of him now firmly set in her mind.
“Strikes me the mine will do. I know it done Jenny and Lester in, but there’s no need to stray too far inside. Keep to the mouth and we should be good. Wide enough to take the trucks—I can see that from here.”
Teah thought on this; Jake’s proclamation that the mines were safe was fresh in her mind. She scoffed inwardly. Seemed a lot of things Jake had said were fresh in her mind. She couldn’t stop looking at Ned as he walked to the mineshaft. He had balance, poise, and a way about him which was fluid. She pondered on him. Training, there was definitely something in his manner which gave away some form of training. Then it dawned on her: if he was in cahoots with, or even part of, the army, then his sole purpose must have been to drive her up here.
To the mine or to the compound, though? she wondered. If the compound, then surely it was as a spy; could that be it? Had Jake warned her but used smoke and mirrors to manipulate her, as well?
“Yup, it’s big enough,” Ned shouted back, and he began to walk toward the jeep. It was a strange, surreal moment, one where she heard the wind blowing down the valley, as clear as though she could hear it billow over every rock, skitter across the river’s surface, and get torn apart by the trees. Each vibrant color vied for her attention; the emerald of the trees, the gold of the sun-drenched rock which towered above them, the silver-blue of the water as it nattered and chattered past. It was as though her every sense was alive and receptive, in a way they’d never been before. As she continued to watch Ned walk back, she smelled the scent of lavender on the air, then saw Ned’s forehead explode in a burst of crimson.
He didn’t stagger, nor did he get thrown back, arms flailing. Ned just fell, as if he’d had his strings cut. Teah stared fixedly at his still body. Trip briefly sprang upright in the back of his truck, then clearly thought better of it and hunkered down just as quickly.
In her shock, Teah just stood and waited for her own bullet, yet it didn’t come, and nor did any thoughts. Only that smell of lavender changed, growing thicker in her nostrils. She realized she was shaking, paralyzed by fear, knowing full well that whoever had shot Ned had their sights firmly trained on her. Slowly, painfully slowly, she raised her hands above the cattleman and sank to her knees.
Ten minutes, maybe more, passed. Her knees began to scream out against the sharp rock she knelt on, but she didn’t move, not a tremor, not a hint, all the while the smell growing thicker. Just when it had become almost overpowering, she felt a gun barrel press against the back of her head.
“Now,” a crisp, masculine voice said, “you can start your tale by telling me how your friend happens to be driving my friend’s jeep, then we’ll take it from there. Do you understand?” She heard the gun cock. “First, let me make myself clear. I’m not in the habit of killing injured men, so while you tell me your story, my men will drive this here truck away and tend for him. It’s my experience an injured animal becomes very loyal when it’s nursed back to health. Very loyal indeed.”
Teah let those words sink in. The man—she assumed it was Briscoe—sounded calm, very calm, as though taking Ned’s life had meant nothing to him, and therefore, by default, nor would taking hers. Yet she knew begging wouldn’t help, wouldn’t gain her any respect.
“All the smokes are in that truck,” she muttered.
“Smokes? Did you just say what I think you said?”
“I was just saying: the smokes are all in that truck. If you’re after one, it’d be foolish to let ‘em just drive on out of here.”
“And do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you want a smoke?”
“Pretty much doesn’t matter what I want, you’re the one with the gun. ‘Sides, I’ve got my hands in the air; hard to smoke like this.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw two men approach Trip’s truck. They both looked weathered, assured, and moved with a purpose reserved for those who knew their orders and were hell bent on carrying them out.
“Saggers’ smokes?” the voice asked.
“Yep.”
“Say, Marshall, toss us some smokes from in that truck.”
“Drawstring bag, passenger side,” said Teah. “There’s a boatload in the back, though.”
“You heard her, Marshall.”
“You got it, Spike,” and he reached into the truck, retrieved the sack and tossed it at Teah. She didn’t move a muscle, just let the sack fall at her knees. Marshall and his companion got in Trip’s truck and drove off.
“Just you and me, then,” Spike said. “Name’s Spike, as you’ve no doubt surmised, though some just call me Briscoe.”
“Teah.”
“Oh,” he laughed, “I know who you are. I know very well who you are. You’re the one, for instance, who torched old Lester’s hut. You’re the one with the kid, the one most folk in Aldertown hated. I know a bit about you.”
“Hated?”
“Hated,”
“Harsh.”
“Folk dislike what they
don’t understand. A woman with no husband, a kid in tow, who wants no help, doesn’t encourage love; now, did she?”
“’Spose not. Can I put my hands down any time soon?”
“Only if your very first action is to take that heavy old coat off.”
“Deal,” said Teah, and she slowly lowered one arm, shrugging the sleeve off before raising it again. After she’d done the same with the other, she waited. “You’re going to have to put the gun down to pat me down.”
“You reckon? I could just get you to carry on until you ain’t got anywhere to hide anything.”
“That you could.”
“So, have you?”
“Knife on my belt—you can see that. One tucked in my boot. No handgun—not worth it when you’ve got a rifle in the foot well, till the foot well drives away, of course. Oh, and I had a sword in the back, but I ain’t learned to use that yet.”
“A sword? What kind of ninja assassin you aspiring to be?” and Spike’s voice sounded exaggeratedly incredulous.
“Why’d you kill Ned?”
“Thought I told you that.”
“No; just because he was driving, that’s not enough.”
“That a man was driving my second-in-command’s jeep right toward my compound, armed to the teeth with my own weapons—that wasn’t enough? That he’d more than likely killed him and The Grizzly—that wasn’t enough? Or the fact I just don’t like strangers—that enough? Pick one, the bullet was cheap, and I’m not going to lose any sleep over it.”
“You want my knives?”
“One by one. Toss ‘em away.”
Teah did as she was told, then raised her hands back up. “Thing is: I was told one of my companions was on side with you already. I was kinda trying to find out which one. You’ve sort of ruined my plan.”
“Plan? Your plan was to drive up here and see who wouldn’t get shot?”
Teah shrugged, “Didn’t say it was a good plan. Say, my arms are getting tired, the smokes aren’t getting smoked and my plan’s in tatters, any chance we could at least sit and chew the fat on this?”