by Jim Heskett
The scavenger pushed Hector away and dropped his gun on the floor, then he raised his shaking hands toward the ceiling.
Alma shot the kidnapper in the stomach, then she rushed across the room. He was still standing, hands over the hole in his stomach. She stomped her boot on his shin, which sent him to his knees. Gasping for air, eyes wide as his hands became coated with his blood.
She leaned down, her face tense. “My name is Alma Castillo, you piece of shit. When you see the devil, make sure you tell him who sent you there.”
And then, she shot the man in the head, spreading chunks of flesh in all directions. Blood spattered her face, neck, jacket, pants.
She swiveled around to find George removing the bag over Hector’s head. Her father gulped a huge breath, his eyes wide and harried.
“Are you hurt?” she said.
He shook his head.
“I’ve got this,” George said, and he guided Hector out of the house. As the rest of her guards filtered out, Jarvis stood there, panting, giving her evil eyes.
Alma wiped the scavenger’s blood from her face as she squared up against him. “What?”
“Never disrespect me in front of the men.”
Alma holstered her pistol and took a breath to calm herself. The adrenaline of the incident was making her lightheaded. “You pointed a gun at my father. You’re lucky I’m not going to have you torn to pieces by feral dogs.”
“Lucky?” he said, sneering. He pointed at the front door. “Most of those men out there answer to me. You think you could walk out there and tell them to hurt me and they would actually do it? You’re crazy. This is my army.”
“Maybe so,” she said, “but this is my country. Don’t ever forget that.”
Jarvis smirked, and his expression stirred something deep inside Alma. How many days had she tolerated his insolence, his arrogance, his total lack of maturity?
No longer. Jarvis was a pest, and she knew what to do with pests. Not one day longer would she humor him.
Then, he rolled his eyes at her, and she couldn’t take it. She’d had enough.
Alma raised her pistol, pointed it at his ear, and squeezed the trigger. Jarvis’ head made a popping sound as the bullet entered his skull.
He crumpled to his knees, smoke pouring out of the hole. He opened his mouth, maybe to speak, but it didn’t matter. The life had already vanished from his body. His eyes went blank, and he slumped to the hardwood floor of this suburban house.
The door behind her swung open, and George rushed in. “Christ, what happened? Did you shoot him?”
“We don’t need him.”
“The hell we don’t. What in God’s name were you thinking?”
She shrugged. “It will be okay.”
“I don’t know how you can think that. These troops don’t know us. The ones we’re going to meet in Denver don’t know us.”
“Do not worry about the men,” Alma said as she holstered her pistol. “This is my army now.”
Chapter 23
Kellen - Lebanon
The man with the blazing red hair leveled his assault rifle as he rushed across the space between the convenience store and the building next to it. Kellen couldn’t help but notice how the green of the man’s eyes made his red hair seem almost orange. Pale skin highlighted cheeks rosy from the cold night air. If this assailant had been five years old, he would have been cute with freckles like specks of dirt lining the bridge of his nose.
But he wasn’t cute. He was sprinting, holding an assault rifle, and squealing like a madman.
Isabelle, a knife slash across her cheek, pinwheeled and stumbled back as blood squirted from her face. White and Dave were both spinning, trying to find the source of the blade. In the dark, Kellen could only see flashes of motion around him, and so much was happening, he had trouble tracking it all.
But Kellen was looking dead on at the young man rushing straight toward him. The man met his eyes and locked on.
“Hey Kellen!” the man shouted, glee on his face. “I’m Lincoln. George Grant says hello!”
He squeezed the trigger just as Kellen let his knees bend and his body drag itself to the ground. The spurt of bullets raced over his head, missing his scalp by mere inches.
White leaped into action, racing toward the attacker. When the man saw the big bald-headed brute coming, he changed course, now rushing at Dave.
Why not shoot him? He was holding an assault rifle. Unless killing them all wasn’t his goal. He probably intended to take Dave hostage, but to what end?
By this point, Isabelle had recovered, and she snatched the gun from her belt. She fired a shot, which missed the rushing attacker, but the proximity altered his path, tangled his feet, and he tumbled to the ground. He rolled over the rifle, grunting as he halted his skid.
Kellen and the man made eye contact again, both of them prone. The man grinned. He’d mentioned George. Not only was George Grant not dead, but he knew Kellen was alive and had sent this man to kill him.
Had George seen him back at the rest stop? Was there any other explanation?
None of that mattered right now. The attacker sprung to his feet as White was closing in on him. White raised his arms wide, attempting to grapple with the man.
The attacker kicked White in the chest, knocking him back a step. Seeing White topple like that made Kellen’s heart race. The big brute White was more solid than a brick tower. How could this scrawny kid catch him off guard like that?
Isabelle fired again, and the blast hit the man, but it only grazed his shoulder. The fabric of his jacket frayed, and the young man grimaced but it did not stop him. With a grunt, he ducked right, toward the edge of a building. He dashed around it and disappeared from sight.
“What the hell?” White said, panting. For a second, the world was quiet, only the faraway sounds of Rappaport’s troops doing night drills cut through the silence.
Then, the redheaded man appeared around the other side of the building. He squeezed the trigger as he ran, sending a stream of bullets into the air, nowhere near them. This kid was a terrible shot. Or, he wasn’t trying to hit them.
From behind, Kellen heard the rustle of boots on the ground and attachments on belts clattering. Ten seconds after the attack had begun, Rappaport’s soldiers were inbound to check out the source of the gunfire.
White, Kellen, and Isabelle all pointed weapons as the attacker spun, eyes darting at all the fresh faces joining them. A single gun blast echoed across the open space, and the attacker dropped the assault rifle. The shot had blown the tip of his left index finger clean off, but he hadn’t seemed to have registered the pain.
“On your knees!” shouted a soldier. “Hands on your head.”
The attacker, maintaining eye contact with Kellen, slowly raised his hands, but he didn’t make any effort to drop to his knees. Blood trickled down his wrist, and the moonlight made it look as black as molasses.
Then, he flicked something attached to his belt. Kellen heard a sound like a lighter catching, and then a small object whooshed through the air.
A blinding white light filled his vision, along with a violent pop like an airplane taking off, all in the space of a half-second. Kellen felt himself moving backward as if pushed, his hands instinctively rushing to cover his face. The light burned in his eyes. Heat, force, pressure, driving him to the ground. Like he was being squeezed from both inside and out.
Five seconds later, his vision returned, at first in the hazy lines of vague shapes, and then he could see people. The soldiers and others were all on the ground, each of them shaking their heads and rubbing their eyes. Like they’d all been smacked down by some invisible force from above. Kellen’s ears rang, his eyes fluttered as he tried to blink the sting away.
Flashbang grenade.
The attacker who’d known Kellen’s name was gone, and in his place was a collection of a half-dozen teeth, like diamonds on the ground.
Chapter 24
Kellen - Kansas City
<
br /> Dave and Isabelle turned out to be good traveling partners. Unlike most people, they didn’t bother Kellen with questions about his past life as the Soothsayer; whether he knew Edward LaVey and Beth Fortner, these mythical creatures of American history; if he had actually written the blog post that outed them to the general public.
In turn, he didn’t ask them about the Air Force Academy bombing or how they had come to be generals in Helen Rappaport’s army. They were roughly his same age, no kids, and had plenty of experience in this new world. Dave, a former truck driver, had even run gasoline for Chicago Boss Chalmers for a few years, not long after she had assumed power. They talked little about those experiences other than to state that they had happened.
They didn’t need to talk about it because if you were still alive, you’d done things you weren’t proud of. Anyone who had insisted on drawing those uncrossable lines in the moral sand had been eliminated by natural selection years ago.
At the Missouri/Kansas border, they stopped to rest for a day at the Oak Tree Inn, which straddled the state line. Kellen felt guilty for resting since there was no way to know if the people in Nederland were urgently in need of help. Or, if they were even still alive. But the arduous road had made them all so weary, they’d had no choice but to pause to regain their strength. They would be back in Colorado in a day or two, at most.
Kellen and his crew hadn’t come across any more city or state border crossings. If it was Rappaport’s army influencing that, or Alma Castillo’s Eighteener army, Kellen didn’t know. Either way, the recent power squabbles brought one nice side effect: consolidation of terror.
They had no trouble entering the Inn and found no one squatting in any of the first floor rooms. As they settled into the restaurant attached to the Inn, Isabelle kept her rifle pointed at the door that led back into the main building. Better safe than ambushed.
At the bar, as Dave rooted through some boxes to scavenge food, the rest sat at a table and rested. Kellen pondered terror consolidation as his traveling companions stared at the wood grain of the table. Heads were heavy. No one seemed to be interested in chatting.
“Would you rather fight a single dragon,” Kellen said, “or a dozen bears?”
White gave him a quizzical look, but Isabelle grinned. “You noticed the lack of border crossings and roadblocks too, huh?”
Kellen nodded, impressed she’d followed his metaphor. “It’s not as if they can cure looting and pillaging and eradicate the smaller gangs in one fell swoop. But, people do like to join things. A bigger target is easier to hit.”
Dave joined them, plopping down two perfectly fine bottles of cheap whiskey. Kellen couldn’t even read the frayed label on the bottle, but he didn’t care. After the last few days, he’d drink anything.
He uncapped one and took a swig. “But, say we do find out that Hector Castillo and George Grant are still alive, and they’re leading this army of former gang bangers. Let me play devil’s advocate here: What does killing them actually accomplish? What’s the endgame?”
Dave passed the bottle to White, who glugged some, then made an awful face as he breathed out. “It creates chaos. Decentralizes them.”
“How is decentralizing an army better than fighting a hundred individual gangs?” Dave said.
White shrugged. “I can’t say that it is better.”
“I know how it’s better,” Kellen said as he took the bottle from White’s hands. “If I walk into a market anywhere in this country with Hector Castillo or George Grant’s head on a spike, I can trade it for enough food to keep us all fed for six months. Whatever it does to this overall movement, killing the leader has tangible benefits.”
He sipped as Isabelle sighed.
“You’re being quiet,” Kellen said.
“Dave and I have been fighting the Infinity for years out east. What those sickos have done to this country… I don’t know if we can ever recover from it. I can’t see how it matters what happens with this current struggle for power. If we beat them back, someone else will come along eventually and rise up to snatch control. There will be some other dragon to slay in a year or two. What’s that saying about nature and a vacuum?”
Kellen pointed toward the front of the hotel. “A few days ago, in this very town, White and I killed some people to steal their car. We did it because they were going to kill us, but we also did it because we needed the car more than they did. Ten years ago, I would have been decimated from the guilt of taking someone else’s life. But now, I didn’t even think about it after I woke up the next morning.”
“What’s your point?” Isabelle said.
Kellen shrugged. “Maybe it’s not about who’s in charge. It’s about how we get by, regardless of the big picture.”
The bottle made its way back around to Dave, and he sipped at it. “So that’s how it is? A battle of who wants things the most, and who can have the cleanest conscience about it? There’s nothing else to life than that?”
Kellen opened his mouth to reply but stopped himself. He realized he had nothing to say. And no one else did, either.
Chapter 25
Alma - Denver
As her army marched into Denver over I-25, Alma felt the eyes upon her from the windows of nearby buildings. She marveled at the heads poking above the stands at the football stadium next to the highway. She remembered professional sports teams, back when those things were so important. And she resented not having a team to call her own since her father relocated her so often. Funny what trivial things seem critical when you’re young.
Once they were in town, they could find no wide open spaces to set up camp, so they stretched out among the streets from the area south of some large opera house, along the streets of downtown, using the tall buildings as cover.
This town was quieter than she had expected. Hardly any pockets of Red Streets to be found anywhere. Everywhere they went, they met local Eighteeners, although some were standoffish, and some were rude. Few individuals could be persuaded into joining their cause.
It had become her tradition in the evenings to sweep through the camp, with Hector on one side and George on the other. But, until two days ago, she had trailed behind Jarvis, with him acting as the ambassador. The men had saluted him, some with smiles and some with a mix of fear and respect on their faces. The plan had been to use him as a tool to insert herself into their collective consciousness until they would view her as an equal to Jarvis.
There were still some of the troops who didn’t even know who she was.
And as Alma and George walked along the downtown Denver street against the setting sun, feeling the eyes upon her, being in their company did not set her at ease. Many of her own troops did not trust her. Why should they? Killing Jarvis in Colorado Springs had done little to earn their trust.
It didn’t matter. She couldn’t undo her action, so she had to proceed as best she could.
“What’s the plan here?” George said.
For a moment, she ignored his question. Obviously, George wanted to proceed straight to the airport to recover the black box, and they would, but not yet.
“We will let them come to us,” she said. “These locals must have a leader, and we will convince him to join us. Explain to him how one army is better than two.”
George scowled but didn’t vocalize his dissent. That was fine. He could make unpleasant faces all he wanted, as long as he did what he was told.
She paused at the open doorway of a building that could have at one time been a dress shop or shoe shop, based on the elevated displays in front of the windows. Didn’t matter now what it had been, though. Its current purpose was a shop for making bullets, at least it had been since she had ordered some skilled craftsmen to take up residence here yesterday morning. Inside, several of the Eighteeners had set up workbenches, collecting boxes of spent casings, cleaning the primer out and readying them to once again become tools of war.
As she and George hovered in the doorway, none of the workers insi
de lifted an eye to acknowledge her. There were no salutes, no one standing at attention. At the workbenches, there were only laborers going about their business, and she was no more important to them than their coworkers.
She didn’t want to clear her throat to get their attention. After waiting a full sixty seconds for anyone to even notice her, she quietly withdrew from the doorway and returned to the street.
George opened his mouth to say something, but she held up a hand to silence him. Didn’t want to hear it. If he would remind her yet again how removing Jarvis from the command team had been a mistake, she didn’t need to repeat that old song again.
At the next intersection, Alma turned and came upon a brick street, some kind of outdoor walking mall. Many of the troops had set up camp here. And in the middle of a ring of tents, two men were squared off, fighting. Even in this blustery cold, they were shirtless, fists raised like boxers, knees bent.
Alma watched for a moment, debating if she should say anything. A crowd was gathering around, forming a circle to keep the men inside. They weren’t yet throwing punches, but they were roving, eyes on each other, their breaths like steam in the cold evening air.
Maybe they had a legitimate reason to argue. A fight to settle a debt, perhaps. Would interfering lessen their respect for her, or gain it? Hector was back at the command tent, resting, and she struggled to think what he would do in this situation.
Then one of them pulled a knife from his back pocket, and Alma’s senses went on high alert. She rushed across the brick street to the edge of the circle.
“Stop!”
The men halted, briefly, and then returned to what they were doing. The crowd paid her almost no mind. Some of them cringed, some called for them to stop dancing around each other and to get down to business. They relished the possibility of bloodsport.