The next two kills were much harder to find. She widened her search outward from the vehicles until she came across an unburned body in the ditch on the north side of the roadway, well behind the vehicles. Apparently, this one had been on the highway outside of the radius of the fireball. Maybe he had even had time to dive for cover, but he had been unsuccessful in that effort. A jagged piece of shrapnel protruded from his neck and the dirt was sticky and wet beneath his head, his blue eyes staring up vacantly into the sky. This was the one that had always carried the heavy pack, though she could see no sign of it now. She knew that it marked him as a high priest of their godforsaken technology and, therefore, made him more dangerous than the sadists and hunters and torturers and murderers that accompanied him. This one endangered the soul.
The bastard had almost gotten away. It was proof of the divine that a single hunk of metal had taken him out so thoroughly. She was glad he was dead and prayed that his satanic equipment was one of the heaps of molten slag that littered the scene. She hoped even more fervently that his two missing companions were also among the heaps of molten slag.
When she found no more corpses at the outer limit of the blast radius, she was forced to work her way back in, more slowly, more methodically, to see if she had missed anything. The arsenal in the back of the rear truck had done a lot of damage; it could be that there was not much left to find. She resigned herself that she might be looking for nothing more than body parts, then trying to figure how many different bodies they came from.
Finally, late in the afternoon, she found the evidence she had sought so ardently. It wasn’t much—a blood soaked spot, remnants of a bloody ConFoe jacket, a bit of hair, and some small bone fragments in the scorched crater beneath the back of the second transport. A small man had apparently sought refuge underneath the chassis when the lead truck had exploded. Even with the high clearance of the ConFoe Hummers, he would have to have been wiry and nimble to have taken cover so quickly.
Trapped by the flaming fuel and plastic that surrounded him and set the second truck ablaze, he had, she mused, probably pulled his jacket over his head in a desperate and futile attempt to escape the heat and smoke. Odds are he was already dead from the fire or smoke inhalation when the arsenal above him had gone off and his inert body had been pummeled repeatedly into the asphalt by a crate of bullets and a collection of satchel charges. Finally, she guessed, the grisly remains had been incinerated by the burning fuel and then pulverized or dispersed when the rack of armor-piercing mortars blew, leaving nothing but a greasy red smear and a tuft of hair mixed with gray matter on the cratered pavement beneath the rear axle.
Bad choice, small guy.
That made six.
Joshua had said there were seven in the patrol. She thought that she had confirmed Joshua’s count when she had sighted the fragments of the squad as she moved past her foe from a distance, though it was difficult to tell for sure through the dappled light and intervening branches of the pine forest.
Six.
She took a break, then gathered up a few salvageable MREs and ate one of the bland, unrecognizable entrees as she thought.
Maybe her count was wrong. Maybe Joshua had killed one of the ConFoes before he had died. She had to know. She could not return to Sanctuary not knowing.
The sun was already heading for the peaks in the west. Damn! Why had she slept away so much of the day? The coming darkness was no friend to any of the possibilities that faced her.
Finally she strode rapidly to the outer perimeter of the area she had searched. She wasn’t the best tracker in Sanctuary, but she was probably good enough to tell if anyone had left this place. If not, she could always attempt to track back along the more trampled route from where the ConFoes had hiked and see if she could find a body—a ConFoe body lying somewhere next to Joshua.
* * * * *
Tracking, tracking was the key to gaining the information needed. And tracking was tough, tedious work, even under the best of circumstances. It hadn’t been the best of circumstances for a long, long time and things didn’t seem to be getting any better.
Chapter 6
Derek’s speed increased somewhat once he found a gravel roadway. True, he had shied away from the highway as too visible, too dangerous. But trudging his bruised and battered body cross-country with a hundred pounds of cumbersome equipment was no way to make progress toward anything but an eventual heart attack. It was tricky and dangerous in the dark; in the light, it was hot and agonizingly slow.
At midmorning he rested in the shade alongside a rivulet of clear, cold water that meandered through an idyllic meadow in a flat vale. He took a swig of water and examined his map fragment. After some effort, he knew where he was. The problem was, Derek had no real idea where he should go.
The com unit contained in the scanning equipment was short-range only; the long-range laser hook-up was with A. K. in the truck and had been completely fried. Without decent communications gear, he only really had two choices, neither of them good.
The first alternative was to locate a useable vehicle and return to the ConFoe’s southwestern base in Arizona—hundreds of miles away. Maybe he would get lucky and meet up with a ConFoe patrol on the way. Then again, in an unauthorized vehicle with no identifying beacon, he might get unlucky and be targeted at range by A. K.’s cousins in arms.
Second, he could find an open spot, set up camp, and start a campfire, then wait to be spotted by the ConFoe satellites. Of course, that could take some time, given the spreading wildfire that his very team had ignited to the southwest. It would also make him quite visible to the mals, if any were about. And, again, even if the ConFoes spotted him first and sent a team, they would likely take him for a mal or a deserter and shoot first and ask questions later . . . over his dead body.
Transportation was his best bet in a rigged game. Cars meant roads, so he calculated a vector to the nearest backwoods road and hefted back on the pack and took to his task.
Duty is most easily accomplished when you are too tired to think.
As he mindlessly put one foot in front of the other, Derek’s mind wandered back to the recruiting vid years before.
“One family, one volunteer. The Conversion Forces need you to make sure your family is safe for their conversion and beyond. Don’t let the rabble-rousers, the cultists, the gangs, and the lunatics take eternity away from your loved ones or from you. Help yourself and your family while helping both mankind and the few remaining and misguided malcontents by enforcing the next, mandatory phase of man’s evolution. We are looking for enthusiastic outdoor types as well as technically proficient altruists, so don’t worry. We have a spot for you in this world and the next. Transferable conversion preferences and credits awarded based on qualifications and length of service guaranty. One family, one volunteer, one tour. An infinite future for you and yours.”
The insipid jingle and patriotic music still resonated in his head now four, no five, years later. He hated the music, hated the jingle, hated the Conversion Forces. The only redeeming thing about the whole debacle was that they had been true to their word about the credits. As soon as he had completed boot camp, they had issued the credits based on his training scores and his overly enthusiastic six-year commitment. He had immediately transferred them to his mom for Katy, so her conversion would be appropriately modified.
Just a bit longer and he would see her on Alpha Two, smiling and running up to greet him. Just another year.
For now, though, it was another step. And another, and another, and another into his infinite future.
That’s when he saw the cabin.
* * * * *
Maria did not sleep well.
Her mind returned again and again to the tracks she had found as twilight fell—tracks leading away from her faux triumph over the ConFoes.
She saw the maniacal ConFoe butcher heading to a high spot, calling in to his evil brethren, and leading a force of man-apes, swarming over the crags and charcoal dea
dfalls of her once peaceful, living vale into the halls of Sanctuary itself. The hideous primates chittered and screamed in ghoulish delight as they ran down the men and women of her home and ate the babies. The man-apes jumped up and down on the chests of the defeated and pulled off their arms until the Believers begged for conversion.
Then, pale goblinesque creatures in white coats strapped down the tortured souls and attached sensors and electrodes to them and turned on their hideous computers and equipment. The Believers screamed in terror and pain and shame as their immortal souls were sucked out of their bodies and placed into small, but secure, stainless steel canisters.
The goblins gave the man-apes the soul-filled canisters and the beasts shook them violently and placed them in a pit of charcoal and napalm. They lit the petroleum jelly and danced and howled as the flames licked greedily at the sides of the canisters, searing them with white-hot intensity forever.
And between the howls of the man-apes and the queer whizzing of the goblins’ soul-sucking machines, she could hear the cries of anguish of the Believers, deep inside the sterile, stainless steel hell they had chosen in their weakness. Some cried her name, accusing her. “Maria, she’s the one,” they’d say, “Sanctuary fell because of her.”
Above all else, though, she heard the cries of the children. They would not be ignored. They would not be silenced. “Mommy, Mommy,” cried one tiny, terrified voice, “why did she lead them here? Why did she let them get away? Why do I burn and burn and burn?”
The dreams echoed in Maria’s mind as she awoke. The cries of the Believers stayed with her as she returned to the trail she had found and started on her way. With no one to assist her, no one to give orders to or take orders from, no one to talk with her, she knew the voices would not fade until she banished them by action or by death.
She was no expert, but it seemed that her quarry was heavily laden and moving slowly. Although she probably moved not much faster, given the need to track, his pace was the only thing that gave her hope.
It gave her hope, but it didn’t banish the screams.
* * * * *
Derek hadn’t expected to see any structures at all along this weed-infested stretch of gravel roadway. The single, unimproved lane had meandered higher and higher toward a saddle-pass between two towering snow-capped peaks. The saddle itself was just above the tree line, probably something just short of 11,000 feet at this latitude. The cabin was several hundred feet below the top edge of the trees. The slope fell off sharply, leaving the cabin’s front clearly visible from the south despite the somewhat stunted piney growth on all sides. It had to be situated well over 10,000 feet above sea level.
Great view, but a hell of an inconvenient place to live. Socked in by snow a good bit of the year, subject to sudden fierce storms even in the good season, and damn scarce of oxygen. Of course, those same things would also mean that no one would bother you much way up here. Hell, even the ConFoe satellites didn’t regularly search for infrared sources at this altitude.
But there it was, a picturesque little cabin perched most of the way up a mountain. Oh, it wasn’t pretty like those log cabin kit places that the contractors hereabouts used to push to the summer tourists, but it was square and true, with a genuine birch rocker on the porch, and a real glass window on the south side. Derek hadn’t seen a non-military building with unbroken ground-level windows for years. A path wound around the cabin from the east side of the porch to a small lake in a well-rounded depression on a brief plateau to that side.
The apparent good repair of the cabin and the fact that the path to the lake was visible from a distance surprised Derek and put him on guard. Someone had taken care of this place; someone had been here on a regular basis and not that long ago. He looked closer, inspecting every detail, then cursed himself for his oblivious stupidity when he noticed it. A faint wisp of smoke was rising from the natural stone chimney.
Danger, perhaps, but also an opportunity to get what he needed. He slipped off to the side of the poor excuse for a road where he could sit and think, but still keep an eye on the place. It was still a bit of a hike to the cabin, all uphill and much of it exposed to that big picture window view.
Just because he was tired and hungry and longed for shelter, a hot meal, and a speedy ride out of the wilderness was no reason to go off half-cocked. Survival and duty were the only things left to him now.
* * * * *
Despite her merely serviceable tracking ability, Maria had only two really major delays in her belated following of the seventh ConFoe. The first came when the fellow had suddenly and inexplicably changed directions three-quarters of the way across an alpine valley.
She was surprised and dismayed when she suddenly realized there were no more tracks in the direction she and supposedly her foe had been heading. She lost time while she backtracked to find out when the guy had changed course, searching slowly to either side of his earlier vector looking for the minute signs of human passage through the wilderness. She lost even more time as she pondered the course change.
Had he received some communication? Had he seen something? Did he know he was being pursued?
He didn’t appear to be hunting for game or hiding. The tracks along the new vector showed no more signs of stealth or attempts to take cover than had those she had followed earlier. It was like the fellow had one of those GPS navigational systems they used to put in personal cars and that annoyed everyone by mouthing off, “Turn left in seventy-five meters, turn left in fifty meters, turn now, continue for four point three kilometers,” until their owners turned them off or replaced them with a screen that gave constant stock market updates as they drove along.
The second major delay was when she tracked her quarry onto one of those scenic roads that traversed the back passes and wandered aimlessly, though spectacularly, through the old national forests. It was not that the gravel route provided no way for her to continue to track the ConFoe scum. The occasional scuff in the gravel or trampled weed continued to provide solid, if infrequent, confirmation that she was still on target. In places, there was even enough dusting from the yellow pollen of the Ponderosa pines to make out a boot-print. But even the meager width of the roadway made it difficult to easily scan to either side to determine if number seven had gotten new traffic instructions and careened off unexpectedly somewhere on a new tangent. For a while, her pace slowed considerably as she veered from one side of the right-of-way to the other, searching the shoulders for signs of passage into the trees beyond.
Finally, she decided to stop trying and rely on the fact that the guy had decided to follow this overgrown and underused four-wheel drive roadway. If she didn’t see any confirming telltales of his passage for a mile or so, she could always come back and look more carefully.
Number seven wasn’t Superman. As long as she made reasonably good time and put in what she imagined was a longer day than he, she would catch up to him. Tomorrow or the day after, at worst. Then, then he would face her and die.
Chapter 7
Derek sucked unenthusiastically on the packaging from his last MRE. It was best to build up his energy for whatever lay ahead. By morning he would either have new stores of food from the cabin or he would be dead and in the process of being turned into beef-jerky by some crazed lunatic that had taken refuge up here during the riots and gang wars that had plagued the cities after mandatory conversion had taken effect. Either way, MREs were not in his immediate future and he was grateful for that at least.
He tossed the foil container casually aside with no more respect for nature than A. K. habitually had shown.
He would wait for nightfall, then move up the road, past the winding and overgrown driveway that once serviced the cabin. Once well beyond and up-slope of the cabin, he would stash his non-combat supplies and come back down-slope upon the cabin from the rear. A quick reconnoiter and he would slip in and surprise the sleeping occupant. He hoped whatever deranged coot lived here was not quite so crazy that he set a ni
ghtly spring-gun trap on the doorway. There was no way to tell and it would considerably mess up his plan, not to mention his filthy uniform, if the discharge from a sawed-off shotgun mangled his face and chest into steak tartare.
Best to keep low as he went in the door, just in case.
He napped fitfully ‘til midnight, thankfully without dreaming, then set about his plan in the pale moonlight. The trek up-slope took longer than he anticipated; distances can be deceiving in the mountains. He took special care as he passed the long driveway that curved up toward the cabin, but he sensed nothing but the squeak and sway of a faded sign hung on a wooden post at the end of the drive. For Sale. Coldwell Banker. Agent Ken Ritchart.
That had to be pretty old. Who would pay good money for something as completely useless as land?
He refocused his efforts and moved on up the road a quarter mile toward the pass, dropped off his heavy pack of scanning equipment, then turned right into the brush and doubled back toward his target. The sparse and scraggly trees above the cabin provided little effective cover as he made his way back down, attempting to be stealthy as he gingerly picked his way down the steep, rocky slope. Fortunately, the cabin had no windows on the north side—sensible from an architectural standpoint given the shade and the pressure from uphill snowpack during the winter—so he felt relatively safe in his approach.
He reached the rear wall of the cabin and carefully pressed against it, straining to discern any sound through the minute chinks that might exist in the filler between the thick, sturdy wood, but there was none. It could be a sign that all was still and quiet within or merely a sign of competent construction and good maintenance—there was no telling which.
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