by Ric Beard
Shaw fired into the herd, shrieks of rage bellowing from her depths as she unloaded a barrage of death’s light into the night.
Jacob shook his head.
I swear, in the name of the universe, women are the craziest—
Chapter Seventy-Five
GET IN THE DAMN TRUCK
75
“You have to run!” Sasha slapped Lexi hard, clutching at the neckline of her suit to hold herself up.
The galloping bore down on them.
A new, rapid, repeating sound flooded her left ear as glowing tracers filled the night sky just a couple feet overhead, washing Sasha in a flashing glow.
Ret ret ret ret ret ret ret ret…
Lexi jerked her head to the left and her sightline was flooded by an amazing cluster of blue and white light illuminating the air around her, glowing pulses flowing over them and down the hill. Suddenly, Sasha and Jacob launched themselves at her and shoved her to the ground.
Then the engine was next to them.
“You people want to get in the damn truck?”
Lexi looked up and found Lucian leaning outside the passenger window of a big green truck like many she’d seen before. Huge boots impacted the ground next to her and she found herself rising up off the ground and being dumped into the back of the truck.
Scruff banged the top of the cab as the Gatling stopped firing, and smoke poured out of its barrels along with blue plasma running down its shaft.
“Vent’s jammed! It’s dead!”
Lexi lay on cold steel and looked up to see Cage straighten to full height. In one hand, he held a huge bullet-firing pistol that would probably tear her shoulder off. In the opposite hand, he wielded a shotgun with four barrels, stacked two by two.
Realizing Lucinda Proctor was still down in the valley, Lexi cringed at the site of the close-ranged weapons in the giant’s hands and his rifle laying on the bed of the truck.
Uh-oh
Moss sat next to Sasha, huffing in the back corner of the bed, his eyes locked on the back of Jenna’s head in the driver’s seat. Nina sat opposite, tapping random spots on her weapon and muttering something under her breath. Then she ejected the charge handle and pumped a few times, before slapping it back into the casing and tapping again.
Lexi followed Nina’s fingers as she tapped out the same sequence again.
Energy level.
Vent.
Safety.
Power setting.
That’s not good.
Lexi allowed a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding to flow between her lips and into the night air.
“We’re not done yet!” Scruff yelled.
Chapter Seventy-Six
YO!
76
Cage sneered down at the pack of dogs surrounding the truck, unloading shot from the weapon in one hand and rounds from the other. The truck might be big, but it would get jammed up if it tried to roll over all these animals. Mama was going to change the world, or she was gonna die trying and he’d be damned if it was going the be the latter.
If she was already dead, De Le Court would pay slowly. If she was alive, Cage would use the shotgun instead.
He heard his mama’s voice in his ear, the way she said the name he hated so.
Earnest.
He hated his name. Sounded more like it belonged on the little hippie with the smooth skin sitting in the cab of the truck, fiddling with one of his gadgets. He liked Cage.
But he loved mama, and Ella would never forgive him if he didn’t get her back.
But like mama always said, you can’t change the world by yourself. His eyes flicked up to the other big guy, pumping up a rifle at the back of the cab and firing into the assaulting animals below as they tried to jump into the bed.
“Yo!” Cage bellowed, hoisting his shotgun.
Chapter Seventy-Seven
DOERS
77
Something told Scruff this big fella wasn’t much for talking—kind of like him. Maybe it was the weapons in each hand and the white line for lips. Maybe it had been the way he’d called him with the single syllable. Either way, standing there, he looked more like a doer than a talker.
Doers worked.
Doers got shit done.
Scruff had a blaster of a headache, and he was ready to Get. Shit. Done.
Scruff reached for the fusion rifle on his back, then the axe clipped to the rifle mount beneath the window on the back of the truck, just to be sure.
“You ready to make trouble or what?” The man yelled over the roaring engine as Jenna revved it, evidently trying to decide which direction to go.
Scruff smiled and grunted, though he knew no one could hear it. A single nod turned the big guy’s sneer into a shallow smile on one side of his face. Then they jumped over the side of the truck.
Bellows through her window brought Jenna’s head out of the cab, where she dodged a jumping dog and leaned out again. “What the hell are you psychos doing?”
Scruff swung the axe as a dog lunged into the air toward him. “Clearing a path!”
“Are you fucking crazy? Get back in the god damned—”
But then the two men started slamming into the dogs, sending them squealing over the edge and into the chasm below.
Chapter Seventy-Eight
ALL TWERKED OUT
78
“They’re out of there god-forsaken minds,” he muttered.
The sea of dogs advancing on the two giants made Lucian’s heart thump as a hollow formed there. He glanced down the mountain and thermal imaging revealed hundreds of these things, demon dogs, flowing into the hills all around the valley below. But then he noticed in front of the truck, dogs had begun to turn on each other. Blood flew everywhere as animals attacked animals, and the two men plowed wildly through them in front of the truck.
Pack doesn’t turn on pack. What the hell?
Then it hit him.
Unholy shit balls, they’re all twerked out. Meth!
His eyes shot to the back of Scruff’s flowing, dirty-blonde hair and thick shoulders as the giant man slung his rifle away and ripped his axe off his back. Slinging the weapon in wide arcs, Scruff pushed forward, slamming into the animals, his axe spewing crimson far and wide. Explosive rounds bellowed out of Cage’s shotgun in heavy pops above the noisy truck’s engine. Beyond the looming figures, white bodies exploded into bloody corpses and tripped up the flooding meth dogs behind. Lucian grabbed his rifle and forced himself up, onto the frame of the door where his window had been.
“Aim for their heads!” Nina shouted from the back of the truck. “Too many to waste two shots!”
Lucian was thrilled to see she’d come out of the daze, where she’d tapped her rifle like some kind of sick kid in an old-world psych ward, and was ready to engage.
“Easy for you to say, queen marksman!”
“Oh, screw this!” Nina yelled.
A few breaths later, the red glare of plasma blobs erupted down the hill and whole segments of white masses became hollow voids as Nina unleashed her fury from the grenade launcher beneath her gun. There couldn’t be much plasma left in that thing, but every shot counted. A few dogs filtered through, and as one launched at Cage, Scruff planted an axe into its back as Cage slammed it with the stock of his shotgun.
Then gunfire erupted from the back of the truck, and the black and white dogs who’d made it past their falling comrades and into the beams of headlights began to collapse. Lucian looked over his shoulder to find Lexi Shaw and two figures in black firing wildly into the night.
His face stretched into a smile.
Chapter Seventy-Nine
HEDGING YOUR BETS?
79
The distant rattle of gunfire and explosions halted with an echo, and Ruby knew her fate was near, but she’d be damned if she was going out without living up to the title bestowed upon her by the governor.
Justice. What irony…
The mine doors gaped wide, the sea of dogs having passed up the access road
and into the hills in every direction. The meth-induced army of beasts was free from their cages to wreak havoc, thanks to Sampson. It seemed his strong sense of self-preservation, the one that helped him survive the streets of OK City after his parents died violently, the one that helped him build a small army and force his brand of law and order over thousands of people in the MidEast, had manifested itself with brutal finality, sending General Horace’s mongrel brainchildren flooding the night.
Stepping on the wrist of one of the corpses, Ruby yanked a rifle from his dead, clutching hand, as she eyed the mine doors. Crossing the threshold into the dim space, she spied the row of lights hanging loosely in a chain from the ceiling, crawling like a centipede, down into the depths of the place where the dogs had been housed, the place where criminals who didn’t play the games by Sampson’s rules labored a mile down.
Around the first bend, she found Sampson standing over Lucinda Proctor, the pulse weapon he’d displayed aimed at her face. Empty waist-high cages lined the rocky walls on either side, their doors hanging open.
“… your doing,” Sampson said. “If you’d just gone with the flow, you could’ve kept your place in Blacksburg, sold your guns, and lived in peace.”
“And what?” Proctor said, her accent thick. “Y’all would’ve just let us be, huh? What would you have taken for taxes from us? I’ll be damned if I worked my whole life, opening trade routes with OK City and all these townships just to give what we worked for to the likes of you, Sampson De Le Court. I know your kind, I’ve seen ‘em for years. The only reason conscription ended was because you saw a new potential for the boys, like the ones that bastard Horace used to steal from their families, as your labor force.”
“Why shouldn’t a man be able to work to better his station?” Sampson growled. “Why don’t you people get the simplest of concepts? I was saving you!”
“They were little more than slaves, addicted to your junk.”
Ruby raised the rifle. “Drop the pistol, Sampson.”
Sampson’s head twisted toward her and his mouth dropped open. “Ruby? You’re alive?” A smile crossed his face, but it deteriorated as her words seemed to register and his eyes trailed down her form to the weapon she held on him.
“I won’t be for long. They killed your fucking dogs, now they’re going to be coming for Proctor. I aim to see she’s breathing when they come for her.”
“Hedging your bets?” Proctor asked. “I don’t think Cage is going to care, to be honest, honey. You picked the wrong side.”
Ruby jutted her chin toward the governor. “Why don’t you ask him why I picked his side?”
Proctor looked up at Sampson and shrugged. “Why is that, Sampson?”
But Ruby had no intention of letting him answer. “Because he lied the whole way, let me believe he cared about people, that he’d do right by ‘em.”
“Of course, I care!” Sampson yelled. “Why else would I do this?”
“Because you’re a power-hungry asshole. Drop the fucking pistol, or I’ll kill you where you stand.”
A flood of footsteps filled the mine from around the bend behind her. Ruby shuffled forward, closing the distance to Sampson, jerking her rifle at him.
“Drop it!”
Sampson let the pistol dangle from his trigger finger before dropping it to the ground.
“You ungrateful little—”
A woman’s voice echoed through the tunnel. “Drop it, Ruby!”
Ruby pivoted slowly to the side and raised the gun higher, leveling it at Sampson’s head. Her eyes flicked to the right for a split second to see the crowd standing there: four figures in black, a woman with a white arm, a long haired, soft-looking type, with the blonde she’d spoken to at Augustus’s, standing in front, holding one of those black, fancy rifles.
“Sorry, Jenna,” Ruby said. “But I have a little unfinished business here.”
“I’m not kidding, Ruby! Drop it.”
“She’s pointing it at Sampson,” the tall redhead said.
“A ruse,” the blonde replied.
Ruby guffawed. “Okay, honey. Hear me out for two minutes, and then you can do what you like. Promise me that and I’ll put the gun down. You just point yours at him. Deal?”
The blonde looked at Ruby, then at Sampson, then at Proctor. “Deal. Put the gun down, and you’ve got a deal.”
Ruby lowered the weapon and set it on the ground, inches from the toes of her boots. The big, bald guy in the back stepped forward and stopped next to Jenna. Ruby eyed him, the way he looked at the woman on the floor, and nodded.
“Miss Proctor, I think you can go.”
Lucinda stood. She eyed Sampson for a long moment. Then she drew back a balled-up fist and punched him. Sampson faltered backward, but kept his feet. Blood flowed from one nostril. The scowl on his face was visual poetry, to Ruby, but he didn’t so much as raise his hand to the wound.
“You really pulled the wool over my eyes, Sampson. You lied to me that whole time.”
“I never—”
“Shut up! I’m talking now!”
Sampson’s eyes widened; he crinkled his nose as if to sneer again, but cringed instead, finally lifting his hand to his nose.
“You killed your own man after Churchill.”
“He broke the law. He murdered people.”
“Who ordered him to do that, Sampson?”
“I didn’t give any such order.”
“I don’t believe you. You decided that, if those people had the nerve to deny your authority a second time, you would make an example. Then you killed a man who was just following your orders, so you could show that you would impose the law on your own. So duplicitous. So conniving. I can’t believe I didn’t see through it sooner. Tell me something else.” She fanned her fingers out and gestured at the crowd standing to her right. “These Black Ghosts, the ones who took up at the Ellison farm. Did they really steal that farm?”
“It’s one of the richest farms in the territory!” Sampson yelled, sending blood spitting into the air.
“I put men there to protect it,” the taller man in black said. Ruby flashed a look at his dark figure, child by the way she couldn’t see any of his skin in his perfect shroud. “Its proximity to Churchill led us to follow Sampson’s men inside. We were patrolling the area in case his enforcers returned. The Ellisons are friends, now.”
“I find that believable,” Ruby said. “But Sampson sent two trucks back anyway, didn’t he? You let the first set of men go without a single death, and Sampson sent two trucks back.”
“Yes.”
“How many of them did they kill?” Ruby asked, turning toward Sampson. “How many of our men did these evil Black Ghosts murder for your insolence, governor?” She made an ‘O’ with her fingers and thumb. “Don’t much sound like the sadistic killers you’ve had artists rendering onto wanted posters all over the Mideast, to me.”
“This is my place!” Sampson said. “My home!”
“No, it’s my home! You lived most of your life in the city. I should’ve seen it the first time you rode in on the back of that damn truck.”
“We have so much now! I’ve built lumber mills! I’ve—”
“You’ve built nothing. The men and women of the region built them, and you repaid them by getting them addicted to your drugs. Then this woman,” Ruby gestured at Jenna, “came to help them.”
“She’s just trying to turn them against me!”
“And why shouldn’t she? If you’d get them addicted so they could work longer, what else might you do?”
“Traitor!” Sampson stepped forward.
Jenna raised her rifle in response. “Hey!” She lowered her tone to a growl. “You might want to gain your senses because I spent the last two days in an aquarium with your sadistic pawn, and I’m not in a good mood.”
Sampson blinked and took a step backward, his eyes still glaring at Ruby.
“Answer the question, De Le Court,” Ruby said. “Tell these people what e
lse you might do.”
Sampson sneered, this time holding the expression regardless of any pain.
Ruby turned toward Moss. “Tell me something, mystery man.” Since she couldn’t see his expression, and the man didn’t move, Ruby continued. “Did you kill one of my lawkeepers with an arrow?”
The man’s hat dipped so Ruby saw its top. “Yes ma’am. He’d planned on hanging my friends, and I’ve been here long enough to know the good from the bad. He wasn’t one of the good if he’d hang people who hadn’t committed any crime. I never take killing lightly.”
“If you did, I imagine we’d have had more than just a blown-up truck at the Ellison farm,” Ruby said. “But when you killed him, you played right into Sampson’s hand. See, we lost a man, Lawkeeper Simms, a short while back. Seems he was killed with another fancy weapon from the city. When you killed the second lawkeeper, you all but told the MidEast you were guilty of both killings. But you weren’t, were you?”
“We were not.”
“That’s right, because Sampson killed Lawkeeper Simms.”
“You lying bitch!”
Ruby tilted her head to one side. “Am I lying, Sampson?” Holding up both hands with their fingers splayed out and holding Jenna’s gaze, Ruby reached behind her back and raised her shirt. When she brought the hand around, it gripped a black pistol. “That was the last piece of the puzzle for me. You’ve blamed everyone else, sold it all along as if these people did the deed.”
“Why would I kill Simms?”
“Because he was wildly popular with his people? Because he didn’t push your drugs so they’d work longer hours? Simms didn’t play along, did he? He didn’t have vision, did he, Sampson?”
Ruby drew a breath.
“You know, when I was at your new place in The North, watching you tinker around on your precious bookshelf, I noticed you fingering a particular spine. I remember thinking about how you told me knowing your enemy was the key to winning the war. It wasn’t until I was on the back of the truck riding here, when I found this pistol and the black outfit in your storage box that I put it together. Ninjutsu: The Dark Art, I believe the book was called. I scanned the pages later and saw how it described these people in black, how they moved around in the dark, mostly unseen.