Hereafter

by C. K. Crigger

  Lily hooked a stray lock of brown hair behind her ear. “I never heard him called Screenmaster in those days. I guess it might figure, though. He’s got a revolting past. When details of his crimes came out, he became known as the Blue Prairie Pig Farmer.”

  “Pig farmer?” He started to laugh, then stopped at the look on her face. “How so?” he urged when she fell silent.

  Lily’s hazel eyes met his. Her upper lip curled in disgust. “He killed women. Lots of women. Little girls, young mothers, a seventy-year-old grandma. Didn’t matter to him as long as they were female. He met most of them online, enticed them into meeting him, and if they passed his criteria, he had sex before he murdered them.” She paused. “And after he murdered them, too. He tortured them first, and when he was done with their bodies, fed the good parts to his hogs. Which he then sold to the local butcher shop. He spread what was left on his pasture for fertilizer.”

  Nate’s gaze darted to where the little man was now standing on the driving seat, pumping his fist in the air and shouting what sounded like exhortations to the Techs. He couldn’t hear what Screenmaster was saying, but judging by Lily’s expression, she had a good idea.

  “What’s he yammering about?”

  “Blood.” Her head cocked to the side. “O’Quinn blood. He says kill the men, keep the women for later. And…”

  “And?”

  He waited.

  Finally she muttered, “He says save the Cross-up woman for him.”

  “I think we’d better tell Bannion this story.” He got ready to move. “Might make some difference in how he negotiates with these people.” As an afterthought he added, “And in how we fight.”

  “I remember hearing he, Barnes, was very strong,” Lily said. “Don’t let his size and shape fool you.”

  “Yeah.” Nate shoved a rolling bit of rubble aside with his foot. “I’ve heard something about that. He’s a regular little Superman. Wait here, Lily.” Flat on his belly, he crawled from the rubble and wormed a way beyond the concealed entrance. “Keep your head down,” a whisper wafted back.

  With a little slick maneuvering, Nate remained out of sight from anyone watching the road, and ghosted over to where Bannion, Rongo, and a few others were working with all due speed.

  “We need a little palaver,” he said.

  “Kind of busy here, Nate.” Bannion laid hold of a log, helping a couple boys heave it into place. “Doubt if that little bastard is going to wait for us to get all snugged in tight and cozy. I hear he isn’t too patient.”

  Nate ignored this as drivel. “This can’t wait, Sheriff.” Deliberately, he used Bannion’s most formal title. It earned him a sharp glance and drew his cousin over to meet him out of the patroller’s hearing.

  “What’s up, Nate? More bad news? Did something happen to Dak and the scouts?” Worry etched new lines in Bannion’s face. He glanced over his shoulder as if hoping to see his scouts. “They should’ve been here.”

  “Far as I know they’re okay, but you’re right. I expected them to check in before now. Their absence isn’t our only worry.” Talking fast, but keeping his voice low, he outlined what Lily had told him about the man they knew as Screenmaster.

  Bannion listened in silence, the muscles in his jaw working, his eyes snapping fire.

  Nate finished talking and watched his cousin.

  “She sure about this?” Bannion asked a few heartbeats later.

  “Seemed so. Looks like this character scares her pretty bad. She tried to hide it, but I could tell seeing him shook her up.”

  “Ain’t this just ducky,” Bannion said. A second later he called over to Rongo, telling him to get that last log in place and have the fighters hunker down behind it. “I’d as soon have something stout between us and him. I don’t know how much actual power he has, but I don’t want him practicing on us. And if what Lily says is true, he has to be kept from the women at all costs.”

  “You ain’t just awhistlin’ Dixie,” Nate agreed soberly, drawing a hard stare from the sheriff. “This is apt to be worse than just scaring off a few Techs.”

  “Get back in position.” Bannion’s jaw tightened. “Hold your archers until we can get the enemy between us. Take out the dwarf if you can. Tell your fighters he’s first meat.”

  Nate nodded.

  “It’s the best we can do.” Bannion strode off, summoning Sergeant Rongo Zelnor to him with a gesture.

  “I’m thinking the boss might’ve bit off more than he can chew with this outfit,” Nate said when he slipped in beside Lily again, so quiet he made her jump at the sound of his voice. “We could use more fighters. I’ll be glad when our scouts get back. Be good to know if the Techs have a company waiting on the sidelines.” He didn’t let on he was wondering now if Dak, and House and the girl were even alive.

  “Might they?” she asked. She studied the terrain, a curious, if convoluted mix of newer trees interspersed with burnt stumps. “Yes. A flanking movement,” she decided, and pointed. “From over there,” her thin finger moved, “and there.”

  “They’ve been known to use that tactic.” Nate rested his elbows on a flat piece of concrete and held a small pair of antique binoculars to his eyes.

  Lily raised her brows, which made him grin despite his worry. “Jacob brought them up to me,” he said. “He thought they might come in handy. That boy’s got good warrior instincts.”

  “Hmm,” Lily agreed. “It’s nice to know something from the old time still works.”

  Nate, although he heard her, didn’t answer. Taking the binoculars from his eyes, he cocked his head. “Well, you had’em pegged. The Tech’s have got a few men working up from the main body on either side. Not many, and they’re on foot. Guess I’ll wander over and see if I can shut some of those boys down. Stay here. Don’t come out unless Bannion or Rongo calls for you.” He frowned. “You got that?”

  Her mouth pursed. “I hear you.”

  It wasn’t exact agreement, a point he didn’t miss. Lifting his hat from his head, he handed it to Lily. “Keep this for me until I get back. Make sure you don’t lose it.”

  Automatically, she grabbed the hat’s floppy brim and set it on her own head where it sank around her ears. “Sure.” Her lips twitched. “I don’t suppose you’d like to explain?”

  “Hard to sneak through the underbrush wearin’ a hat, especially when the wind comes up.”

  “The wind isn’t blowing.”

  “It will be. And snow soon after.”

  ***

  Everything but the job he assigned himself dropped from Nate’s consciousness as he drifted into the woods. There wasn’t time to fill Bannion in on his plan. Using his normal caution, he’d have the Tech scouts nullified before the skirmish began, preventing them from flanking the O’Quinns. If he didn’t succeed with that, he could still raise some kind of commotion. Give the clan folk warning, so they wouldn’t be taken by surprise. Anyway, Bannion would be watching the birds. He always did, and they seldom failed to alert him to any strangeness in their domain.

  A rabbit raced hell-bent in front of him, almost under his feet. Nate froze. Whatever had startled the animal, its fear of Nate was less than for what it fled. Nate heard something, too. A nearby bush rattled, a downed log thumped hollowly, a branch cracked as it broke. He glanced upward. Yes. Birds were avoiding this region of the sky.

  Nate drew his long fighting knife, holding it unsheathed in one hand. Dropping to his knees, he parted the branches of a low bush in front of him with one cautious finger and peered through the opening.

  A sudden breeze stirred the pine needles above his head, and whispered in the dry leaves clinging to the snowberry bushes. Cold air blew under his coat collar, down his neck, and through his uncovered hair.

  He sniffed the air. An odor foreign to the forest mixed with the natural earthiness. The fetid stench of man. Or more specifically, the smell of a man—or men—who’d been sweating heavily, dried, then sweat and dried in a cycle several times over. Saiclers
or saiclists or whatever the hell they called themselves, worked hard, pumping their wheels up the hills, even though they coasted on the way down. His nostrils flared, taking in the scent. This particular man had been eating onions.

  The odor led Nate straight to the nearest Tech scout, a term that almost caused Nate to snort out loud. A rail thin man, dark rings showing under the arms of a close-fitting shirt, was blundering through the underbrush, walking bent over like he thought it made him invisible. Twenty yards beyond him was another man, and then, at a further twenty yards, another.

  Nate smiled in satisfaction. City boys, all of them, a long way from being woodsmen. If they only knew, they’d have been better off staying together. As it was, he could take them out one at a time, all without the others knowing until it became their turn. They wallowed through the woods oblivious to their surroundings. In a way, he felt almost sorry for them. But not quite.

  For Nate, it was a simple matter of dropping to his belly and wriggling forward beneath the lowest branches of bushes and trees. The soft rustle of his clothing dragging against the dirt was hidden by the breeze through the pine tree’s branches. He came up behind the first man who died unsuspecting, as though the hold that snapped his neck came out of the blue. Nate shuddered in sympathy.

  The second man died harder. At the last moment, he sensed Nate behind him and turned around, his mouth open to shout a warning. It was the breath he took first that spelled failure. Nate’s sharply honed knife dug into his throat and ripped to the side before any sound escaped, the resultant spurt of blood drenching them both.

  It was all so easy Nate got careless in the last encounter. It might’ve been the crackle of a leaves under his moccasins, or even the smell of blood clinging to him, but the man—a kid, really—spotted him before he was set. Fortunately for Nate, the kid, instead of immediately sounding the alarm, sprang at him, the hum of his whirling spiked ball and chain loud as it passed over Nate’s head a fraction of a second after he ducked.

  But he had gone against these weapons before. Ugly damn things that did a lot of messy damage if they connected. They were designed to keep an opponent at a distance, a strategy he had no patience with. Instead of ducking a second time, he dove beneath the chain at the kid’s legs, bringing the youth down and knocking the wind out of him. After that it was simple, if it’s ever a simple thing to watch the light fade from a man’s eyes.

  In the end, he wasn’t even breathing hard.

  After that, he made haste to cross the road at the bend just beyond the hill’s crest. The first two flankers on this side had even less chance against him than the others, him with the blood lust boiling in his veins already. But then he discovered the last of them was a woman, which made Nate almost hesitate an instant too long.

  She came at him teeth bared, her eyes ferocious, as wild as any animal in the woods. A big woman and tall, she outweighed him by a good twenty pounds. She had him down and was within an inch of breaking his neck when he, flailing his legs with all he had in him, got his foot hooked under one of her knees and pulled her loose enough to stick his knife blade into a kidney.

  “Dammit,” he whispered when she finally stopped moving and he got his breath back. Rolling her flaccid bulk to one side, he rose to his knees, placing his forefinger on the carotid under her ear. Nothing. Her blood soaked his britches, sticky and bright. Not a good color for camouflage.

  He hated killing females, even, although the failing was something he never admitted to his cousin Bannion, a Mag female. Women, and their ability to bear children, carried responsibility for the species. Someday, he felt certain, all people would be joined under a banner of humanity, as they had been in the olden days.More or less. But that was a hope for another day, not this one.

  After this maudlin thought, what his eyes had focused on struck home. The woman’s clothing was as bloodstained as his own, although her shirt had dried enough to stiffen. And that meant the blood didn’t belong to her—or to him, for that matter. So whose blood was it?

  Nate’s head jerked up, a sudden frisson sending a warning through him. How had these flankers, clumsy town dwellers at that, managed to get this close to the O’Quinn’s without being stopped? How had they gotten past Dak and Bannion’s other two patrollers, each fairly experienced in scout work?Where the hell were those scouts now?

  From the direction of the Wolf Point Crossing roadblock, he heard voices calling back and forth. Bannion, for one, he thought, and at least two others. Techs, or the Screenmaster. Both, maybe. That was good. Keep’em jabbering. No need to rush this thing. He needed time to catch his breath and think what his next move should be.

  Anxiety over Lily Turnbow churned in his gut. He shouldn’t have left her alone this long. Bannion would have his head if she pulled any kind of unpredictable stunt. And although he was intrigued by her wicked sense of humor and felt an unaccustomed pull of attraction, he didn’t trust her. Couldn’t trust her.

  Whose side would she come down on? This coming battle depended on that. Now more than ever. If she…

  The spreading puddle of the Tech woman’s blood at his feet decided him. Nate wiped his knife, jamming it into the sheath on his belt. Studying the ground as he moved, he took off at a trot, following the signs the Techs had left as they threshed a trail through the woods wide enough for a two-year-old to follow. He found where one had taken a leak, where another had loosed an arrow and brought down a squirrel, then left it to rot.

  It didn’t take long for him to pass beyond the last saicler straggler. The woods quiet around him, he broke into a run, his moccasins silent on the forest floor. At the foot of the long hill leading to the crossroad, he started hearing a sound that raised the hair on the back of his neck. An up and down wail he wasn’t certain was human. Then he found a small mess where someone had vomited, and thirty yards away, another.

  The keening grew in his ears until it about broke his skull. And his heart.

  He found House first, the young patroller’s flesh slashed to ribbons with enough blood drenching the soil a man would think a horse had died there. The wounds in his hands and across his face told he’d put up a terrific fight. They’d cut out his eyes. And cut off his testicles.

  Nate swallowed on his own bile, anger burning through him hot enough to start a fire. Sonsabitchin’ savages! As bad as the Mags even if they weren’t technically cannibals. What need of this?

  A repeat of the agonized wail that had drawn him here carried over the wind and through the trees, closer now. Soft-footed, Nate followed the sound. It led him to a clearing where a big old cottonwood tree stood in what had once been a stump rancher’s dooryard.

  Kira Shandy hung suspended from one of the branches. Her body spun in slow circles as the rope looped beneath her arms and around her chest twisted with the convulsions racking her.

  “Christ!” Hyper-alert senses assured Nate no one had been left to watch the girl die. Knife out, he approached the tree and the girl’s broken body . “Kira. Kira Shandy. Can you hear me?”

  Another unintelligible cry. Her lips were mashed and swollen, bitten through by broken teeth. Her eyes were open, aware and watching him. Blood had flowed copiously from a ragged cut in her scalp, flooding her face and down her shoulders. Bone showed through a gap where her hair had been torn from the roots. Her hands, below the tightly bound ropes, were purple, swollen blobs. Both legs, he noted, had been beaten and broken in numerous places, as though they’d strung her into the tree, then used her as a living piñata.

  “Christ,” he said again. “Hold on, Kira. I’ll cut you down.”

  “D…d…d…” she breathed, the rope spinning with another spasm.

  Nate took a few deep breaths, forcing his racing heart to slow while he figured out how to lower her without doing more harm. His only choice seemed to be to climb the tree, which he did. The limb, when he crawled out on it to cut the rope, creaked dangerously under his and Kira’s combined weight. He dropped the girl as gently as possible to the g
round, the slack in the rope sliding through his hands, raising blisters.

  Her wail became a scream, then shut off.

  Nate jumped down beside her. Her eyes had closed now, and he could hear the labored sound of her breathing, fighting the rope’s constriction of her lungs. Within moments, he sliced through the hemp, freeing her.

  “D…Dak?” she whispered.

  She didn’t ask about House. Knew what had befallen him, probably. Couldn’t help it, if her eyes were open. Nate had seen the boy’s body from the branch where she hung, the details all too clear.

  “Haven’t seen Dak,” Nate told her. For one of the few times in his life he felt helpless. They needed a whole healer team for Kira, right now, and there was none to be had. Hell, he didn’t even have any water with him to ease her throat.

  “Dak.” Kira forced words past her broken teeth. “Rocks.”

  Nate glanced around. The rocks she must be referring to were stones gathered onsite and used, way back when, to make the foundation of a barn. Long since destroyed by weather or fire, the mortar holding them together had moldered. Fallen rocks now formed a two-foot tall mound.

  “I’ll look,” he told Kira, wondering how she remained conscious, and wishing, for her sake, she’s wouldn’t.

  A body lay a couple dozen yards beyond the rock. It wasn’t Dak. Rolling the man over, Nate saw another saicler, this one with his guts spilling onto the dirt beneath him. Studying the splatter of blood, disturbed soil, broken sticks and whatnot, he narrowed his eyes and followed the pointers until thick underbrush stopped him. Shrugging, he returned to the rocks and stared down at them. “Dak,” he said. “You here?”

  Silence. Cold wind blew down his neck, making Nate shiver, then a pile of dry, fallen leaves rustled and a hand poked through.

  Chapter 19

  Every minute Nate was gone seemed to last forever, or so Lily thought as forced herself to sit without fidgeting. His absence grew to a half-hour, then forty-five minutes. More than enough time for him to have completed a scout. The sheriff and the leader of the saiclers were bound to cease their dickering—or bickering—soon and get down to the business of war. Judging by the increasing noise of the saiclers, they were all rested up and ready to fight. And when that happened, Bannion was going to wonder want his cousin on the firing line.