by Ric Beard
That sentimental son of a bitch.
The thought was barely out of Moss’s head when Brady’s head exploded.
Chapter Thirty-Three
I'll See Him Bleed
The badlander on the ridge was sending bullets into anyone he could sight, new shots sounding as the echo from the previous trailed off through the valley. Children screamed, and his men yelled reports, while the women remained eerily silent.
Moss raised his head above the edge of the porch where several corpses lay, their blood pooling and draining into the cracks between the planks of wood. A muzzle flashed 150 yards up the hill, and the report arrived at the same time a girl’s shoulder exploded into a hail of bone, tissue and blood that splattered Moss’s face. A piece of root beer candy flew out of her mouth. Moss cringed, his leg muscles tensing up to take action, but her screams lasted only a few seconds before the sniper silenced her permanently. Moss ground his teeth.
Son of a bitch! He’s gonna kill all of them, and I can’t get up there to do anything.
Moss peeked over the edge again and saw the two surviving women hunched in the corner of the porch against the house, avoiding the sniper fire. A dirty-faced blonde girl hid in the corner next to them. The dark-haired woman’s eyes locked onto Moss’s for a moment, and then she pushed herself up with her back to the wall. Her hands also bore the plastic ties Moss’s team had wrapped there. How he wished they hadn’t bound them. She looked down at him again, and he saw her legs tense as she crouched.
“No!” Moss yelled. His head jerked left and right, trying to deter her. But he was too late. The woman launched herself out of cover, took two giant strides, and leaped over Moss’s head as a shot rang out and porch wood splintered an inch from her foot. Her feet hit the ground and she rolled beside him. Moss looked down at her like she was crazy. Tangled black and bloodstained hair matted on her head. He turned his eyes back to the porch just as the other woman started her launch. A shot rang out, her throat opened up and a chunk of flesh the shape of a rubber drain plug fell to the wood below.
He lowered his face to wipe the blood from his eyes onto his sleeve. The woman next to him struggled to a sitting position, blood draining from a gash over her left eye.
“Give me a gun.”
“Fuck that, stay down. I’ve killed enough of you for one day.”
Moss lowered his head and looked around. The woman sat with her back to the porch, her bound hands resting over her bent knees. Her eyes were boring into his.
“That’s my daughter in the corner up there.” Another bullet ripped across the back of the house. She looked up to the sky and yelled, “Stay there, Lucy! You’re safe there!”
Moss reached into his belt, pulled out his knife, and sliced her bindings. Fifty feet beyond her, Sanchez was pinned behind the trunk of a wide tree. Moss tapped his throat.
“Sanchez, we’ve still got a couple alive, and I’d like to get out of this with all my skin intact. Report!”
“Right.” Sanchez stood, gluing his back to the tree. He flinched as a bullet sent bark flying next to his shoulder. “God dammit. I got no report from here, boss. What’s the plan?” Sanchez panted.
The lady poked her head over the porch. She dropped back down and yelled across to Sanchez, “Give me that rifle on your back. I was Triangle Expeditionary Forces.”
Moss, hesitating at first, nodded to Sanchez, who pivoted and tossed her the JenCorp pulse rifle.
She checked the gun. “So, we gonna take this fucker out?”
“Can you shoot that thing straight?”
“Nipple off a C-cup at half a click out, sir.” She gave a half-hearted, two finger salute. “I might be a little rusty.”
Moss nodded at her.
“Sanchez. The lady and I will lay down cover fire. Go wide.”
“Roger, boss.”
“Chapman. You alive?”
“And kicking, boss. Say when.”
“Darren? Hudson? Team! Report!”
Chapman replied, his tone low. “Me, you, and Sanchez now.”
Moss growled, “Son of a whore!” He sighed and looked down, picturing the faces of his dead men in his mind. Then he raised his head. “I’m gonna draw his fire low. When the shit goes down, roll out.”
“Roger.”
“Roger.”
“I’ll see him bleed for this,” Moss muttered. He looked over his cover. “Zoom twelve times.” He looked through the scope and spied a fallen tree atop the ridge. He leveled his weapon on it and waited. “Long range, lethal charge.” The rifle gave off a mechanical whine as it charged for the next shot. The sniper’s head popped up as he readied his weapon. Moss fired. A bright white flash splintered wood on the log to the left of the sniper’s position, but Moss kept firing at two-second intervals to keep him down. Sanchez left the tree cover, and Moss fired again. The sniper’s head popped up on the opposite end of the log, and he readied and fired his weapon at Moss, who felt splintering wood pierce the skin on his forehead.
That was close.
He got the attention of the woman. “Cover fire around that corner.” He pointed. “Don’t even stick your face out.”
Moss elbowed out a section of board composed of rotted wood and rolled underneath the porch, where he crawled on his belly to the opposite side, closing the distance between himself and the sniper by a few feet. Using the butt of his weapon, he beat one end of a plank and then rolled to the other end and did the same. A shot rang out and splintered the end of the board where he’d just been lying. The high board popped out and he lay beneath so the sniper’s only option was to fire blindly and hope to hit him, which would waste his time and attention. Popping his head up, Moss fired one shot onto the ridge and shuffled backward. Then he reversed his crawl so he could return to his previous position, on the opposite end of the porch. A shot fired through the opening he created to his right. Then another.
The sniper was taking the bait.
Moss registered a distant pulse weapon’s report. When he’d reached his original position, he raised his head for a moment.
“Target neutralized,” Sanchez’s voice reported in Moss’s ear-piece.
“Any other targets?”
“Looks clear.”
Moss stood and gave the clear signal to the woman, forgetting she might know different signals. But she nodded, took one look around the corner, and stepped out. She hopped onto the porch and swept the toddler in the corner up and into her arms.
“Good job, Sanchez. Good work.”
“Roger, boss. Want me to drag his ass to you or vice versa?”
“He’s alive?”
“Pulse stunned him.”
“We’ll come to you.”
Moss stepped onto the porch and walked over to the woman who had the child’s face pressed into her shoulder. To his surprise, the child wasn’t making a noise. Moss circled them, checking them for injuries.
“You good?” He asked.
The woman didn’t look at him.
“We’re uninjured.” She looked around the porch, taking in the carnage. “And I guess we should consider that lucky.”
“I’m sorry. I made a mistake…”
The woman turned and met Moss’s gaze. Then, to his utter bafflement, she set the child down for a moment, jumped forward and swung her arms around him, squeezing hard around his neck. Her voice quivered almost undetectably.
“I can’t believe I’m going to get out of here.” She released him and scooped up her girl. “My daughter has never even seen the outside of this block.” She looked around, fear filling her eyes suddenly, as if a scary thought occurred to her. “We have to double-time it the hell out of here before the scouting party comes back. Now.”
“That’s something I can make happen,” Moss replied. “Sanchez, we’re inbound.” He turned to Chapman. “Escort them up the hill.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Red Carpet All the Way
Moss found Darren with two holes in his back; beneath him
was a small girl with a hole where her eye should have been. Hudson was lying in some bushes with a large chunk of his thigh missing and a hole where his ribs had exploded. It looked like he had bled out in seconds. Moss had never even heard him scream. He turned and looked at Brady’s half headless corpse and wiped a tear away.
Under his breath, he grunted, “Tighten up, soldier.” But no matter what he said, Moss knew that he’d just lost three of his squad and four civilians including children to his own carelessness. People like them were the reasons he was here. He looked all around him as a thought occurred.
Where are the boys?
Moss gathered extra gear and ID patches from his fallen soldiers’ uniforms and trudged up the hill to join Sanchez, Chapman, the woman, and her child. As he approached, they were standing in a semicircle facing the other side of the log. Chapman was working his jaw as he looked down. Sanchez had his rifle resting on his shoulder, muzzle pointed toward the sky, as he scanned the neighborhood below and the hillside where they stood.
Moss looked at the woman and then down at the sniper. The bandit was wearing a leather vest, his leather pants covered in mud. He had a nose ring and a homemade tattoo of a crow on his neck.
“Who is this fuck?” Moss asked, noting the oversized night vision scope on the rifle laying on the ground.
“That’s Reggie,” the woman replied. “Sickly type. Probably left patrol to come back to the neighborhood.”
“Tell me about this patrol.”
“Ten guys go out on foot each week. They look for supplies, make sure the surrounding area is clear, and check for members of the other factions.”
“Factions?”
“Yeah.” She was still looking down at Reggie, her expression cold. Moss saw no anger in those eyes. It was easy to imagine how the woman would be numb by now if she had really been the prisoner of the badlanders longer than the child had been alive. The toddler was three years old, at most.
“Around here it’s mostly these guys, but sometimes they’ll bump into Yorkies from up north and, rarely, the crazies from the west.”
“The Horde,” Chapman grunted.
“These guys are Chain?” Moss asked.
“These guys are out for themselves. They call themselves Chain when they’re around Chain.” She pointed at the tattoo. “But they think of themselves as ‘The Crows.’ They trade with The Chain and grow food on a farm west of here.” She pointed. “You can see the fields from the top of that ridge.”
“These guys are farmers?”
“Yeah. Corn and soybeans. They’ve got several farms, starting just over that ridge.”
The men all knew The Chain was a group that considered everything south and east of here its territory. Moss glanced at the pulse rifle she was holding and considered how far west of Triangle City he was standing.
“How are The Crows getting these weapons?”
“They trade with Horace’s force.”
“Who is Horace?”
“He calls himself General Horace. He leads The Chain’s military, if you can call that roughshod group of Neanderthals a military.”
“The crows trade him food for his troops and get these weapons? For corn and soybeans?”
“Shit, no. Well, I mean, yeah. But not for weapons this good. They traded two boys for these.”
“They traded children for weapons? You kiddin’ me?”
She shook her head and said, “They’re shit, these ones.” She nodded toward the bottom of the hill.
“And, you are?”
The woman looked up and met his eyes. Through his night vision goggles, he could see her own eyes were like walnuts with large irises.
“I’m Reagan. This is Lucy.”
Lucy was staring at Moss, but when he turned his eyes on her, she buried her face in her mother’s shoulder.
Moss gestured. “That’s Chapman. That’s Sanchez. I’m Moss.”
She glanced at each of them in turn and then back at Moss.
“What are we doing with Reggie?”
“Tell me we’re going to make him dead, boss,” Chapman said.
“Yeah, boss, no way this guy walks away,” Sanchez agreed.
“Don’t worry. He ain’t limping away either. But I want information first.” Moss didn’t like killing unnecessarily. It went against a code built by a long line of ancestry, but this wasn’t their time and it wasn’t their place. His code had no place among these men.
“Good luck getting him to talk without shooting his leg off.”
“Then we’ll shoot his leg off,” Chapman said. “He hasn’t earned any mercy.”
“Let’s try to keep some sense of what makes us different from these assholes,” Moss said. “Let’s get it over with.”
Reagan held Lucy out, and to Moss’s surprise, Sanchez took her. The girl looked up at the big man, tentative. Then Sanchez touched her gently on the nose, and the child smiled. He nodded at Moss and carried the child toward a patch of trees, bouncing her up and down in his arms.
“I’ll keep watch.”
Reagan stepped forward. “Let me do the honors.” She kicked Reggie in the ribs, and he grunted. She kicked him again. A hard third kick brought him around.
“Aw, what the fuck!” he yelled as he surfaced from oblivion. Then he looked up and saw the people standing around him and scurried up to set his back against the log. “Aw, fuck. Awwwww, fuck!”
“You awake, sweetie?” She kicked Reggie in the face. Blood shot out one side of his nose as it cracked and started flowing from both nostrils.
Reggie screamed and slapped his hand to his face as if to stop the bleeding, as he looked up at them.
“The fuck do you want?” Reggie gurgled as the blood flowed between his fingers and down his throat.
“We want to know where the patrol is.”
“South of here.” Reggie’s answer came with no hesitation.
“He’s lying,” Reagan said. “He knows we’ll be going that way, so he’s trying to slow us down, make us cautious. Then he’ll send them up behind us when they get back.”
Chapman unsheathed his knife, the silvery edge reflecting the first hints of sunrise in the east.
“Okay! Okay!” Reggie held his hands out in front of him. “They’re to the east, scouting out a township.”
“That sounds more like it.” Reagan ran fingers through her short, knife-cut hair. Blood from sources lying dead on the patio down the hill created creases that didn’t move. She crouched down and twisted the shaft of the gun into his cheek. “Lucky for you, you only raped me a few times yourself,” she sneered into his ear. “If you were Wolfe, I’d burn you.”
“Sorry, man. Sorry!” He squirmed.
Moss shot an evil look down at the man, then looked at Chapman and mouthed “Rape?” Chapman gave a singular nod and scowled down at Reggie.
“Oh!” Reagan said. “You’re sorry? Well, shit, we’re good then, big man! If you’d have said that to start with…”
Moss felt heat rising in his face. He looked down at Reggie and back at Reagan.
“Do what you want with him. We have what we need, but like you said, let’s not be here when they get back.”
“How about we ambush them?” Chapman asked. “End every last one of the sadistic son-of-a-bitches?”
“I have better plans for this group,” Moss said. “I’m bringing in the third to level this fucking place.” The third was a demolition tank crew out of Little Rock. “Then they’ll take their farms. Sanchez, go cut the throats of those three bastards we left down there. I think Reagan is all the intel we need.” Killing unnecessarily might be against his code, but they’d lost family today and rape? Well, you might as well just kill someone as rape them. To rape them over and over again? They deserved no mercy. He nodded at her.
Reagan nodded in reply and turned her attention back to Reggie. She kept a neutral face as she raised the weapon, pointed between Reggie’s outstretched hands, and pulled the trigger. Reggie slumped to the ground.
She tilted her head, as if to admire her handy work. She let one hand drop, raised her eyes to look at Moss, and pulled the trigger twice more as if it was an afterthought.
“Thanks.”
“No problem, ma’am. So, I guess you’re coming south with us?”
“If you have room.”
“Lady, it doesn’t matter who you fought with, you’re a P.O.W. You’re a god-damned hero in our book. You’re going red carpet all the way to the interstate.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
You and Me Both
Day 6
Sunday, Mar 24, 2137
The Badlands
The scent of ozone filled the air as a spectacle of lightning forks crawled across black clouds in the southern sky. Lucy slept within the makeshift wrap Moss had fashioned, so Reagan could steer Darren’s hover bike with both hands as the wind caused the crafts to jerk suddenly. Armed with the information that The Crows were east of their path, Moss led the group south so they could merge with the interstate and follow the highway east to Jenna’s crew, whose position his handheld couldn’t isolate due to the storm ahead. He queued a message for Jenna so that it would auto-send if the clouds ever broke up. Storms were all-too-common in this region and Moss was used to being wet and miserable. But the clouds to the south looked ominous and, considering the scent in the air, dangerous.
I hope Ray and Scruff get her into a cube if that storm rolls over them. He smiled to himself. Who am I kidding, she’ll be the one ordering them into their cubes.
“That storm looks unfriendly,” Moss yelled over the wind as they cruised. “We’re going to be pinned between it and the scouting party if we wait for it to pass. Let’s head slightly southwest and hope to wrap around behind it.”