V Plague (Book 16): Brimstone

by Dirk Patton

  “Out.”

  He looked at me for a long moment before gingerly easing an injured leg out of the vehicle and standing. The passenger door opened and Mavis hurried around the hood to stand close to me.

  “What are you doing?” she asked, but I ignored her.

  “So, you’re just a good guy looking out for the girl. That right?”

  He stared back at me and I was surprised to not see what I’d expected to see in his eyes. When he looked at her, I could see genuine concern.

  “White man never looks out for one of us,” he said. “Have to take care of our own, mate.”

  I stood in the rain, watching him, then something struck me. Frowning, I motioned to Mavis and we stepped a few yards away.

  “Remember when you met me?” I asked in a low voice. “You could see something. Afraid I was going to take you away.”

  “Still see it,” she said, giving me a funny look. “Why?”

  “He’s not freaking out. That’s why,” I said.

  She looked over her shoulder at the man for a moment before turning back and shrugging. I watched him, thinking about what to do.

  “He offered to take me home,” Mavis suddenly said, surprising me.

  “Home? When he was speaking that… language? What does that mean?”

  “Yes. It just means where our people live away from the city.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “Told him I was good where I am.”

  I was quiet for a minute, thinking about that. Thinking about Mavis having turned down an opportunity to be safe, living with people like her. With a start, I realized how glad I was she wanted to stay.

  “Me, too,” I said, rewarded with a broad smile.

  The snarl of motorcycle exhaust sounded and I turned to see the other two bikers pull out of a side road and come to a stop. Quickly, I ushered Mavis to the far side of the car where I could keep an eye on our passenger and them as well. Both men sat in the rain, engines burbling as they watched us. I kept the rifle in plain view, just not aimed at either of them.

  “Looks like your ride’s here,” I called to the man we’d saved.

  He looked at me, then glanced at Mavis and rattled off something in Aborigine again. She answered immediately, shaking her head emphatically as she spoke. He watched her closely, then stepped away from the car and looked at me.

  “I see you,” he said after a long pause. “I see your soul.”

  I was taken aback. Not at what he said, but the fact that he wasn’t scared of me.

  “Why aren’t you afraid?” I called.

  “I see much more. My father and grandfather were garratji, as am I. What the white man calls a medicine man. You cannot harm me.”

  “What do you see?” I asked quietly as I moved closer and lowered my weapon.

  He squinted against the driving rain that had soaked all of us to the skin, looking me up and down.

  “Darkness,” he said. “Death rides on your shoulders. And pain. Lots of pain. But there is also a light. It is hidden behind the darkness, but shines through when you look at her.”

  He tilted his head at Mavis who seemed supremely pleased by his words. I wasn’t sure how to respond, so I settled for nodding my head and gesturing at the pair of idling motorcycles. He held my eyes for a moment then turned and limped toward them. I watched him for a few steps, then turned to put Mavis in the car so we could get the rest of the way out of the city.

  “John!”

  I whirled when he called my name. He had stopped halfway to the waiting bikes and was looking at me.

  “I didn’t tell you my name,” I shouted, gooseflesh prickling along my back.

  “Thank you for saving me,” he said before turning away.

  41

  We’d been driving for a couple of hours and were finally well clear of Sydney and its suburbs. Even better, the storm didn’t seem to extend this far inland. Not that it wasn’t windy with an electrically charged feel to the air, but at least the pounding rain had been left behind.

  The road had climbed into the mountains as we continued west and the sun was going down, dipping beneath the layer of clouds and shining directly into my eye. Without sunglasses and the visor useless, I’d had to reduce speed so I didn’t drive us into a ravine. Fortunately, there wasn’t any other traffic, only the frequently abandoned car.

  I slowed to a crawl each time we passed a vehicle, just to give it a good look. The sedan we were in had taken a beating when I’d used it as a battering ram to rescue the biker. Rattles from the back end were steadily growing louder and I kept waiting to hear the metallic clang of something falling off. But that wasn’t my chief concern.

  There was also a low whine that had started up from somewhere in the drivetrain. I didn’t think it had anything to do with the damage to the sheet metal, rather suspected it was just the age of the vehicle and a lack of maintenance. More pressing was the need for fuel. And since I wasn’t seeing any sign of civilization, I was growing more concerned by the mile.

  The first half dozen or so abandoned vehicles we’d encountered, I’d stopped to check their tanks. It hadn’t taken long to realize that the reason they’d been left sitting in the middle of the road is they’d run out of gas. Not really surprising when I considered that people had fled the city in a panic. They either didn’t stop to fill up, or that wasn’t an option so they’d decided being away from the epicenter of the nerve gas release was more important than how far they would get.

  But where had they all gone? They had to have been on foot, unless someone else picked them up. That was possible, but for the number of cars we’d encountered, there would have to have been a concerted effort by a lot of people with large vehicles to scoop up this many stranded refugees. The government? Perhaps. Actually, that’s all that made sense.

  The road bent to the north and I breathed a sigh of relief when I wasn’t having to stare directly into the setting sun. Ahead, it turned back to the west and I grumbled to myself, staying quiet to not wake Mavis. She’d fallen asleep soon after we left the last neighborhood behind and I figured she needed some rest after the day we’d had.

  A Toyota SUV appeared as I steered into the curve and I lifted my foot off the accelerator. Crashed into the guardrail that protected from a several hundred-foot-deep canyon, this wasn’t an abandoned vehicle. Two tires on the passenger side were flat and most of the glass had been blown out. Bullet holes riddled the body on the same side as the pair of flats. This had been an ambush.

  I brought the sedan to a stop with a faint squeal of brakes, sitting there looking at the SUV and not liking any of the thoughts I was having. Bandits in the area. And they’d sprung up very quickly. If I hadn’t lived through the past year, I’m not sure I would have believed society could disintegrate this quickly, but I’d seen it myself. The apocalypse brought out the best in good people and the worst in bad.

  “What are we doing?” Mavis mumbled, her voice thick with sleep.

  “Got a wrecked car ahead. Looks like it was shot up.”

  “Shot? You mean with guns?” Mavis sat up straight, suddenly wide awake.

  “Yep,” I said. “Just like that. Means there’s probably some bad guys ahead.”

  Glancing at the sun, which had turned the western sky several fantastical shades of pink and orange as it brushed the horizon, I looked back at the Toyota then Mavis. After a moment’s hesitation, I shifted into reverse and slowly turned us around.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Going to put a few miles between us and the wreck. It’s about to get dark. We’re low on gas and there’re bad guys in the area. I’d rather find a place to spend the night that we can defend, if we have to, then we’ll worry about how to keep moving in the morning.”

  Mavis pulled her legs beneath her, sitting up on her knees for a better view as I accelerated away from the ambush site. It was growing dark quickly as the sun sank behind the mountain peaks. Rather than turn on headlights, I put the Russian
made night vision goggles on my head and activated them.

  It was completely dark when I stopped, ten kilometers later. The NVGs were doing their job though and I could clearly see the terrain around us. We were on a relatively level stretch of road, a forested slope running up and away to the right. About five hundred feet above the pavement was a large rock outcropping amidst the trees, a nearly sheer face backing it. High ground and protected from the rear made it a good place to set up camp for the night.

  “We’re here,” I said, shutting off the engine and opening my door.

  “What’s here?” Mavis asked, following me out to stand by a low guard rail.

  I removed the NVGs and carefully put them on her head.

  “WOW!” she said, turning a circle and trying to look at everything at once.

  “Up there.” I pointed. “See the rocks? That’s where we’re spending the night.”

  She stared up the slope, slowly raising the goggles clear of her eyes for a moment before putting them back in place. She repeated this several times until, with a smile, I took them away from her.

  “Need to save the batteries,” I explained, hanging them from my vest.

  I stepped over the rail, turning back and lifting her over, wincing silently in the darkness. My arm had been steadily growing more painful and I’d been experiencing hot flashes as we’d driven. Now it was so bad I nearly dropped her.

  “Heavier than you look,” I said to cover my weakness.

  She didn’t seem to have noticed and didn’t respond to my comment. Leading the way with the rifle in my hands, I began climbing the slope. Night had settled in and a variety of nocturnal animals were awake and looking for breakfast. I could hear their calls and the occasional rustle in the underbrush, but nothing seemed large enough to present us with a problem.

  We hadn’t gone far when I had to stop to catch my breath, which was odd as I knew we weren’t that far above sea level. The evening, mountain air was cool, but sweat was running into my eyes and soaking through my clothes. It must have been more humid than I realized. Taking several deep breaths, I resumed the climb, failing to notice that Mavis was no more stressed than if she’d been strolling through a park.

  After two more stops, we reached the rocks. Gratefully, I stepped onto the mostly level shelf and turned to look at the road below. A wave of dizziness passed over me and I began to shuffle sideways as my equilibrium failed. With a cry, Mavis grabbed my arm and pulled hard an instant before I would have stepped off the edge. Not releasing me, she tugged and I staggered with her, dropping to my knees near the vertical face at the back of the shelf.

  Panting and head swimming, I knelt there until the worst of the vertigo passed. When it did, I tried to raise my head, but that sent the world twirling again. Another flash of heat washed across my face and with a grunt, I rolled off my knees onto my ass and put my back against the rock.

  I could hear Mavis calling my name, but it sounded like she was at the bottom of a well. Her frightened face swam in and out of my vision a couple of times, then I felt myself start to slide to the side and descend into a dark tunnel.

  42

  The Black Hawk helicopter pounded through the cold air in southern Utah, Martinez at the controls. Beside her, Titus still had a ‘kid in the candy store’ expression on his face as he watched the ground slip by beneath them. She couldn’t help but smile at the cranky old man’s enthusiasm over his first ride in a helo.

  She’d counted herself very lucky to have found a Black Hawk with external fuel tanks already mounted. This gave them more than enough range to travel from Mountain Home Air Force Base to the location of the radio signal. And if they didn’t spend a lot of time in the air once they reached their destination, they’d be able to return to Idaho if they wanted.

  “Hear anything?” Martinez shouted.

  The helo didn’t have a built-in, civilian band AM radio, so they’d taken a portable unit from the BX. It was Titus’s job to monitor the frequency as she navigated to the coordinates the system in his bunker had identified as the source of the signal. This required he keep one ear of the headset he was wearing pushed clear so he could hear the tinny speaker. But he was too enthralled with the view from eight thousand feet and wasn’t paying attention to the radio, or her.

  “Hey!” she shouted, slapping the side of his arm with the back of her hand.

  “What?” he shouted back, tearing his eyes off the view through the windscreen.

  Martinez pointed at the small radio he was gripping tightly in his hand.

  “You’re not doing your job!”

  Titus looked at the radio then shot her a glance.

  “Don’t go gettin’ pushy,” he grumbled, holding it up to his uncovered ear.

  He kept it in place, staring outside the helo. Despite his cantankerous personality, Martinez had quickly grown attached. Probably because his attitude reminded her of her father and grandfather, she mused as her eyes scanned across the aircraft’s instruments.

  “Nothin’,” he said after nearly ten minutes. “How close you reckon we is?”

  “Twenty miles,” she said after checking a navigation display.

  Titus grunted and she thought he’d gone back to playing tourist until he spoke again.

  “Maybe not such a good idea to just drop in on folks in a whirlybird.”

  “Was thinking the same thing,” she said, nodding. “Feel like taking a walk?”

  “What’cha got in mind, missy?”

  “Thinking we land about five miles short of the target. That’s far enough that they won’t hear us. We walk in and see what’s what. Could be Russians, but I don’t think so. In case it is, though, if we just popped up over the horizon, we could have some big problems.”

  “What kinda problems?” he asked, looking at her intently.

  “The kind that go BOOM. Anti-air defenses. Or they could put up a couple of helos and run us to ground.”

  “Ya think?” he asked, eyes growing wide.

  “No, I don’t think so. But better safe than sorry. We get in trouble, there’s no one to come bail our asses out.”

  Titus watched her for a moment as if trying to judge whether she was messing with him. When she didn’t smile to indicate it was a joke, he nodded in agreement.

  Martinez brought them down slowly as they continued to approach the coordinates. When they were at the five-mile mark, she transitioned to a slow orbit, looking for a suitable landing spot. The terrain was rugged, alternating between jagged rocks and stunted trees. It had snowed recently, blanketing the ground in a layer of white. She was glad to see that everything was pristine with no sign of tracks of any kind marring the surface.

  Finding a large enough area that was wide open, she brought the heavy helicopter down. The big rotor kicked up a maelstrom of snow that completely obscured the view through the windscreen. For a moment, it was like they were floating inside a snow globe, then there was a hard thump as the landing gear met the frozen ground.

  She shut the Black Hawk down, the air clearing quickly as the rotor slowed. But it never came to a complete stop, continuing to spin slowly despite the engines being switched off.

  “Gotta secure the blades,” Martinez said, popping the door and climbing out.

  Titus hesitated a beat, then followed, standing in the snow and looking around at the desolate countryside. While he kept watch, she attached two lines to anchor points near the belly of the aircraft. Scrambling up the exterior of the helo, she made the other ends fast to the still turning rotor.

  Back on the ground, she pulled both taught, stopping the blade’s movement. No sooner had she finished than a powerful gust of frigid wind lashed them. The two lines emitted a twanging sound from the stress, but held tight.

  Gathering her weapons, Martinez spent a moment adjusting the knives she carried. They were brand new, fresh from the BX, and all were stiff in their sheaths. Digging through her pack, she found a small bottle of oil she’d brought specifically for this p
urpose. Working quickly, she lubricated the steel blades with a thin layer and tried them again. This time, each one slid free with hardly a whisper.

  Meeting Titus’s eyes, she pointed a direction and he nodded, falling in step with her. Heading southeast, she started at a fast pace that quickly slowed as her injured leg began complaining. Occasionally she referenced a small, handheld compass to make sure they hadn’t strayed off course.

  After nearly an hour of moving across the rugged terrain, she called a halt and eased to a seat on a large rock. Titus gratefully joined her, taking a long drink from a canteen.

  “How far ya reckon we come?”

  Martinez thought as she sipped slowly from her canteen.

  “Maybe two miles. I’m moving slow and the terrain is a bitch. Worse than it looked from the air.”

  “Maybe should turn ‘round an’ git back to that whirlybird. Goin’ too damn slow an it’s gonna be dark soon. Fore we’s can git there an’ back. Feel more snow comin’. Don’t wanna be caught out in that.”

  Martinez considered his suggestion, grudgingly acknowledging that he had a very good point. Especially with the wind, it was already cold as hell. And it would only get worse once the sun set. How the hell did people like the Major do it? Spend the whole time on the ground like this, with no protection from the elements.

  “I think you’re right,” she said, unhappy at the turn of events. “We’ll spend the night in the helo and see what the morning brings.”

  She tucked the canteen away and started to stand. Titus’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist before she could move.

  “Gots company out there in them rocks,” he whispered.

  “Infected?” Martinez asked, moving a hand to grip the hilt of one of her knives.

  “Nope. Being real sneaky pete.”

  “How many?” she asked, avoiding looking and giving away that she knew they were being watched.

  “Only seen the one, but that don’t mean nothin’. Could be more. What’cha wanna do, missy? We fightin’?”

  “That wouldn’t be a good idea,” a voice said a few yards behind them.