by Sam Sisavath
“True,” she said.
“That’s how I likes ’em. The other bird?”
“Flew the coop,” Nate said.
“Well, that’s disappointing. I guess it’s true what they say: You want someone dead, you gotta shoot them yourself.”
“What do we do with him?” Gaby asked.
“Good question,” Mason said.
“Shut up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Blue truck’s still good,” Danny said. “We’ll grab Doogie Howser, M.D. here and boogie before more of his friends show up. Nate, salvage what you can.”
Gaby hadn’t looked away from Mason. A part of her thought he might vanish if she turned away for even a second. He had struggled to sit up and was still clutching his leg.
“Why?” Gaby asked.
“Why what?” Mason said.
“I wasn’t talking to you.” She looked back at Danny. “Why are we wasting our time dragging this piece of trash along with us?”
“Hey, come on now, no need for that kind of language,” Mason said.
“Shut the hell up,” she said, and pointed her rifle at him.
He stared defiantly back at her. She could almost believe he wasn’t frightened, but she knew better. He was putting on a good front, but men like Mason didn’t want to die.
“Because he’s still got friends out there,” Danny said. “What are the chances we’re going to get around all of them? Unlikely, and you know how optimistic I can be. But I bet our new friend here’s willing to point out all the ambush spots so we can go around them.”
“And why would I do that?” Mason asked.
“Because if we get caught, you’re going to be the first to go. And I ain’t talkin’ about the bathroom, short stuff. You comprehende my bad Spanishe?”
Mason grinned widely. “Well, you do make a persuasive argument.”
“See? We’re practically BFFs. That’s how I am. I live and let live. There’s even a word for that.”
“Magnanimous?” Mason said.
“No thanks, I just ate.”
Gaby sighed. She didn’t like it. The thought of having to spend another minute around Mason made her queasy, but Danny was right. They needed to get home, which meant making their way back to Port Arthur. There was a lot of highway between them, and with Mercer out there, more dangerous than when they had first traveled the same miles.
Her eyes drifted to the road around them, at the white pieces of paper strewn about, as if someone had dumped their office trash out of a second-floor window. “Danny. The plane. They were dropping paper.”
Danny snatched one up. “You guys littering now?” he asked Mason.
“Not us,” Mason said.
There were large, blocky capital letters on the paper in Danny’s hand, but she couldn’t make out the words over his shoulder.
“What’s it say?” she asked.
He skimmed it, then handed it to her. It looked like some kind of advertising flyer, about half the size of the paper she was used to back in school. The letters were clearly generated by a printer, and they read:
JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS
WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
She returned her gaze to Mason, still sitting on the pavement, either too hurt to try to get up or too afraid of being shot.
“Mercer,” she said.
“Would be my guess,” the man nodded.
“Looks like we got ourselves a regular Hatfields and McCoys situation,” Danny said. “Hide the relatives and pass the ammo. Me personally, I like to stay out of other people’s civil wars.” He looked back at Mason. “So the question of the moment is, how many more of your pals are out there beyond the town limits?”
“This is it,” Mason said.
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you want.” He nodded at the flyer in Gaby’s hand. “We got bigger problems right now. They sent us back here just to see what happened to their friends.”
“Sent you?” Gaby said. “You used to be in charge of a whole town.”
Mason sighed almost wistfully. “Things change, blondie. We’re not in Louisiana anymore. New job, new position. That whole Song Island fiasco messed up my cred with the bosses. I guess you could say I’m back in the mail room.”
“So we won’t run into more of you out there?” Danny asked.
“I didn’t say that. The towns may be on lockdown, but the guys in charge aren’t just going to sit back and wait. It’s the Wild West out there—multiple kill teams running around shooting each other. Theirs and ours. Lucky for you, I know where our guys will be. I know their movements.”
“And Mercer’s peeps?”
Mason shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Danny,” Gaby said. “He’s too dangerous. We can’t trust him.”
“We have to,” Danny said. “He gives us a better chance of getting home.” Danny tapped his Sig Sauer for effect when he added, “Of course, for someone with a ten-year-old girl’s body, he’s got a nice big juicy head. I bet I could plug that thing from fifty yards using this here handgun, easy.”
Mason swallowed, but smartly didn’t say anything.
Danny looked over at her. “Let’s go home, kid.”
“What if he’s lying, and he leads us right into a trap?” she asked.
“Then we’ll kill them, along with anyone else who gets in our way,” Danny said, and turned to go.
CHAPTER 29
KEO
THEY HAD BEEN walking north for the last hour, keeping parallel to the highway about fifty yards to their right while staying out of the open. Unfortunately, that meant traveling across fields of farmland and grass that at times went all the way up to their knees. Fortunately, the land wasn’t fenced off, which saved them the trouble of having to go around each individual property. The extra precaution didn’t make them completely hidden from the road, but it was better than just walking around out there exposed, the way they had done in the truck yesterday. They’d eaten a rocket for that little bout of stupidity.
“Remember what that guy said about Angleton?” Keo said.
“Something about it being dead,” Jordan said. “For a year now. Why?”
“Might be worth looking for supplies there.”
“You really think they’ll be something useful after all this time?”
“Won’t know until we look.”
“But wouldn’t your friend Marcy and her pals have already raided it by now? I got the sense they were based around here.”
“My ‘friend’ Marcy?”
“She did give you back the spork.”
“She gave us back the spork. And as I recall, she threw it into the cage.”
“Probably her idea of foreplay.”
Keo glanced over, not sure if all of this was her way of teasing him or—
She was grinning.
Right. Teasing. Walked right into that one, didn’tcha?
“I’m just messing with you, Keo,” she said. “Have to keep myself entertained somehow.”
“Good to know.”
She shooed away a bug that had launched from one of the sunburnt blades of grass around them and landed on her forehead. “How long have we been walking, anyway?”
“An hour.”
“You sure? It feels like more. By the way, I’m hungry.”
“Too bad, because there’s nothing to eat.”
“Can’t you go, I don’t know, make a trap out of some twigs and catch us a rabbit or something?”
He wished there were something in the endless acres of untended farmland spread out to the left, right, forward, and back of them. He would have settled for a fruit or two. Jordan wasn’t the only one starving this morning.
“What am I, your servant?” he said instead.
“Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“Well that’s disappointing. What kind of relationship can we possibly have if you
won’t even go out there and hunt down food for me?”
He chuckled and whirled the tire iron in the air, listening to the whoosh-whoosh it made, the only sound other than their tired footsteps for miles around. The lack of anything made him wonder who the farmhouse they had escaped from belonged to, and why the people had come all the way out here, so far from another living human being.
“Jesus, where is everyone?” Jordan said after a while.
“We’re in the boondocks.”
“This isn’t the boondocks, Keo. This is Mars. Only drier.”
He looked toward the highway. It was flat and empty and cut across the fields, the only stubborn hint of civilization having even reached this far out into the countryside. Like Jordan, he wondered where Marcy and her collaborators had gone to. Was there a city nearby that he didn’t know about or hadn’t seen on the map when they still had one? It would make sense, assuming the machine gunner wasn’t lying when he told Keo Angleton was “dead.”
“I’m hungry,” Jordan said next to him.
“You already said that.”
“I’m starving.”
“I got the gist when you said you were hungry.”
She sighed. “Do something, Keo. Go find a cow and beat it over the head with that tire iron and cook me something to eat.”
He smiled. He would, if he could, but there was nothing around them but unfettered tall grass swaying in the morning breeze. What were the chances there was an animal or two hiding among them? Towns like T18 had their share, but they were far from T18 at the moment.
“Car!” Jordan half-shouted and half-whispered.
He went into a crouch even before Jordan had finished saying the word. She did the same next to him, clutching the machete, the dull brown-colored blade so rusted over he was afraid it might fall apart if she moved it too fast. He changed up his grip on the tire iron, but like the last hour, still found it incredibly lacking.
What’s that old saying? “Don’t bring a tire iron to a gunfight.”
Or something like that.
It was a white Ford truck, overturned in the ditch on the other side of the road, about forty meters in front of them. Its wheels were sticking out just above the grass line, sunlight glinting off their rims. He scanned the empty acres around them but came up as empty now as the last dozen or so times he’d searched for clues of humanity.
He glanced at Jordan. “I’ll go first. Don’t move until you see me reach the other side.”
He expected an argument, a variation of “If you can do it, I can too” girl power nonsense, but Jordan just nodded back.
He must have looked surprised, because she said, “What?”
“Keep an eye out around us, just in case,” he said, then got up and jogged forward, angling right as he went.
He bent over at the waist to lessen his profile as much as possible, but he knew it wouldn’t be nearly enough if someone was out there watching him. The fact that he was wearing dark clothes and moving through a mostly tan/brown sun-scorched field likely didn’t help. He stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb.
Keo breathed easier (though not by much) when he finally reached the ditch on their side. He snapped a glance up, then down the road, saw pieces of glass, metal, and aluminum spread across the pavement, and burnt tire tracks. Sections of the truck had broken loose as the vehicle skidded off the road before finally landing on its roof on the other side. He sniffed freshly spilled gasoline and leaked motor oil, so whatever had happened hadn’t been all that long ago. Maybe even this morning.
He took a breath, then climbed out of the ditch and darted across the road, still keeping himself as low as possible. He waited for gunshots, but they never came. He finally reached the other side and hopped down, breathing with relief when he flattened his back against the cold dirt wall, because no one had fired a shot yet.
He started up the ditch, crunching glass hidden among the thick weeds. There were still no signs of people or blood in the ditch or on the road to his left, and he wasn’t entirely sure if that was a good or bad sign. Cars didn’t drive themselves, and they certainly didn’t lose control and overturn without a reason.
Keo stopped for a moment and peeked over the top of the ditch to see Jordan moving steadily from the fields and toward the other side. She finally got there and hopped into the ditch, then peered up and across at him. They exchanged a brief nod.
He continued toward the truck, trying to see as much of the vehicle as possible, but the angle was all wrong and he ended up staring at the bent back bumper and a Texas license plate hanging on by just one remaining screw. He was fully prepared to break someone’s head open with the tire iron should they lunge out at him from the wreckage, but he didn’t have to, no matter how much noise he was making with all the crunching glass under his boots.
When he finally reached the damaged vehicle, Keo sneaked a quick look into the shattered back passenger window by exposing his head for a brief half second before pulling it back and waited for the gunshots that never came.
Breathing easier now, he crouched and took a longer look this time. There was no one inside the back or the front seats. Shredded upholstery, more broken glass, and splashes of blood covered the driver’s seat and front passenger’s. He figured out where most of that blood came from when he spotted the two spiderwebbed bullet holes in the front windshield. There was plenty of evidence that whoever was in the vehicle when it ran off course hadn’t left unscathed, but there were no signs of the people themselves.
Keo stood up and looked around him again. This was the first time he had gotten a good view at the open land on this side of the highway, not that there was much of a difference; it looked just as brown and sun-bleached on this side as it had on the other.
He swept the immediate area around the truck, trying to find traces of where the driver and passenger had gone. There was a lot of blood in the grass around him, but no clear indications the men (or women) had been pulled out and then dragged away.
So where the hell were the bodies?
He turned back to the highway. “Clear,” he said, just loud enough for Jordan to hear.
She climbed out of the ditch. “Bodies?”
“They must have either been thrown clear or taken.”
“Who would take them?”
“I don’t know. But they bled all over the place.”
“I’ll see if they’re back there,” she said. “They might have things we can use, like real weapons.”
“Good luck.”
Keo watched her walking down the highway for a moment before crouching again and pulling open the back driver-side door and crawling inside. He had to pick his way through two dozen or so stray cartridges scattered along the ceiling just to find a couple of empty MRE bags. He could still smell their contents—lasagna in one, mashed potatoes and turkey in the other. His stomach growled at the aroma. Close, but no cigar.
There wasn’t much in the front except some empty water bottles and candy bar wrappers. He spotted more abandoned 5.56 rounds, but no hints of the weapons they were meant to load. The fact that he couldn’t find a single spent shell casing told him the truck’s owners hadn’t fired back when they were ambushed.
And this was definitely an ambush. The only thing that didn’t make any sense was the bodies. Where the hell were the bodies?
“There’s nothing back there,” Jordan said when he crawled back outside the vehicle. She was perched on the highway behind him. “Anything useful?”
“Not a thing.”
“Food?”
“See first answer.”
“Bummer.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I didn’t completely come back empty-handed,” she said, holding out a familiar piece of white paper—more of the flyers they had found back at the farmhouse, except this one had fresh tire tracks over it. “They’re going to get such a stern talking to when Texas finds out they’re littering out here.”
The white sheet had the same blo
cky capital letters as the others, and read:
JOIN THE FIGHT TO TAKE BACK TEXAS
WAR IS HERE PICK A SIDE
THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING
Keo climbed up from the ditch and stood on the highway. Jordan stretched next to him, then folded the piece of paper and slipped it into her back pocket.
“Are you collecting them now?” he asked.
“I’m going to take a look at them again later.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “There might be a secret code or something we’re just not seeing.”
“Seriously?”
She smiled. “It’ll give me something to do. Better than staring at your ugly face all the time.”
“Damn,” he said.
“Just kidding. Your face is beautiful. Even with all those unsightly things on it.”
She flicked some dirt off his forehead and leaned in and kissed him. She tasted of sun and day-old tuna, but that didn’t stop him from kissing her back. She rubbed her hands playfully against his butt, and he might have thrown her to the highway and had his way with her right then and there if she didn’t pull away, laughing as she did so.
“Let’s make a promise,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“Next time, it has to be on a bed.”
“Not a lot of beds around here, Jordan…”
“So when we finally find one, it’ll be even more spectacular.”
“‘Spectacular’?” he smiled. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“I never do,” she said, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips before looking back down at the truck in the ditch. “So what happened to it?”
He smiled, amused she could switch topics so easily when they were just making out like teenagers a moment ago.
“Bullet holes in the front windshield took out the driver and his passenger,” he said. “Or maybe just the driver, who lost control of the car and ended up there. Same difference.”
“So where are the bodies?”
“That’s a good question.”
“Maybe the animals took them?”
“That’s assuming there are still wild animals out here.”
“There has to be, right? There was that dog back at the beach outside of Sunport. Anyway, who do you think they were?”