“Sorry,” she said. “I’m Monica. I guess we work for you now.”
“We?”
“My sister Tracie and I. And Ellen.”
“You work for us?”
She nodded. “Talk to Duke.”
Luis scowled. “I will.”
He led his stallion to the area they’d designated as a stable and eyed six new horses milling around inside the paddock fence. After removing the saddle and bags, he penned his horse and set his gear in the shed beside the rest and then walked to the main building with his dinner bag.
Another woman was sweeping the area – Tracie, he guessed from the resemblance to the one at the gate. He ignored her and made for the offices, where Duke as talking to yet another woman in a low voice. Duke looked up when Luis darkened the doorway, and grinned.
“Luis! You made it! This is Ellen. Ellen, Luis, my partner in crime.”
Luis nodded to her and stared at Duke. “Can I talk to you?”
“Sure. Ellen? Maybe you can help Tracie.”
“Of course, Duke,” she said, and brushed by Luis, whose eyes followed her down the hall before returning to Duke.
“Of course, Duke,” Luis mimicked. Duke indicated one of the chairs in front of the desk.
“Take a load off. What you got there?”
“Rabbit.”
“Enough for six?”
“Want to tell me what’s going on here?”
Duke gave him an abridged rundown of the day’s events. When he finished, Luis just stared at him. “You can’t be serious.”
“I already hired them. Let’s see how they work out.”
“Three women at a trading post? Tell me how that won’t be a magnet for trouble, Duke.”
“You’re looking at this the wrong way. They’re attractive. We’ll probably get more business once word spreads.”
“Or we’ll be fighting off every miscreant in the region who wants to burn the place to the ground and take them.”
“We need help, Luis. Three extra pairs of hands will go a long way.”
Luis’s eyes narrowed. “The brunette. The one that was just here. You like her, don’t you?”
“They aren’t hard to look at. Tell me you don’t think so too.”
“Is this all about you trying to get lucky?”
Duke exhaled and sat forward. “Luis, if you have a problem with this, I’ll cover them out of my cut.”
“It’s not a few bullets. It’s…it changes everything. You’ll see.” He paused. “Have you told them what we’re really doing here?”
Duke looked over Luis’s shoulder to ensure the hall was empty. “Of course not. As far as they’re concerned, we’re a trading post. That’s it.”
“And you don’t think they’ll start asking questions when one of us disappears for days at a time with full saddlebags and returns loaded down with different stuff?”
“It’ll be a while before we have to make a run.”
“What about the transmitter? How do you explain that?”
“We have a radio. Which we charge people to use. Big deal. I’m a hobbyist. Crazy about it. Use your head, Luis. This isn’t a problem. If it becomes one, we’ll tell them to leave.”
“All I know is that you get some good-looking women involved with a bunch of men, it leads nowhere good.”
“They’re not involved. They’ll stand guard with us, clean the place up with us, help us get up and running. That’s it.”
Luis pushed back his chair and stood. “I’m going to dress these so we can eat. Rabbit stew. You have any other surprises for me?”
“There’s nothing to be pissed off about, Luis.”
“You did this without asking me, Duke. And now it’s a done deal. How’s that a partnership?”
Duke didn’t respond, and Luis stormed out of the office, angrier than he’d been for a long time. He asked himself why he was so upset, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. He just knew from the look in Duke’s eyes and his defense of his decision that something important had changed between them, and that Duke’s interest in the women’s welfare wasn’t entirely altruistic. Not that he entirely blamed him; the brunette was definitely a looker, especially after months without any female company.
Which was a big part of the problem. Their focus wouldn’t be on survival and business any longer – they’d be sneaking looks at the women or making decisions designed to protect them.
Which meant decisions that could hurt everyone if Duke wasn’t thinking clearly. And right now Luis had a good idea of what was on his mind, because in spite of his best instincts, it was on his as well.
And that could go nowhere good.
Chapter 10
A group of thirty squatters from the Astoria tent city trudged north along the coast road, carting all their worldly possessions with them. They were one of several groups who’d been offered a choice of joining the fighting force that had helped tackle the Chinese or fending for themselves. This group had chosen the latter, most of them uninterested in doing anything but surviving another year.
With the river seeping poison, they couldn’t stay where they were, so they’d crossed the bridge and headed toward Canada, where they’d heard things were better than in the northwest. Nobody could put their finger on who had started the rumor of civilization flourishing north of the border, but it was a seductive idea that had taken root and had guided their actions. Now, as they came to the end of another long day with blistered feet and little in the way of provisions, the decision to take off on their own seemed far more imprudent than it had before daybreak the prior day when they’d packed up and headed north.
“This looks as good as any,” Martin, one of the alpha males in the group, said at a bend in the road. “We can camp here tonight and start again tomorrow.”
“How far do you figure we’ve come?” one of the squatters asked.
“From Astoria? Maybe forty-five miles.”
“And how far to the border?”
“Reckon it’s another seventy-five, at least. Like we talked about, it should take a week or so, maybe a little more. But we’ll make it.”
Greg, one of the other men in the group, stepped forward. “I say we keep going until it’s too dark to see.”
“What’s the point?” Martin asked. “It’s not like we’ll be late for dinner or anything.”
“There’s a town farther up the road. We can make it if we’ve come as far as you figure.”
“A town? I don’t know this area as well as you do.”
“Yeah. South Bend. It’s on a river. I heard it’s abandoned. We could catch fish for breakfast tomorrow and stretch what we got.” He sniffed the air. “Shouldn’t be too much farther.”
So they continued their trek, and the sun had sunk into the west when they stopped again.
“This wind’s freezing. Great idea to keep going, Greg,” Martin complained.
“We got tents. And there’s nothing here. We can make some fires.”
“Not sure that’s a great idea. They’ll draw attention.”
“From who? We’re the only ones stupid enough to be out here.”
“I say no.”
Greg shook his head and motioned to his companions. “You’re not the boss, Martin. We do what we want.”
Martin bristled. “Not if you put us all at risk.”
“Fine. We’ll keep going. Have a nice life, asswipe.”
“Suit yourself.”
Greg and six of his friends continued up the road for another hour, until they arrived at a reasonably sheltered stretch. They pitched their tents and ate what dried food they had, and two foraged for firewood while the others made a fire pit. Some grumbled about their predicament and questioned whether they would have been better off staying with the others, but eventually the discontent faded along with the energy to complain.
The night sky was a tapestry of stars by the time the fire was blazing, and they sat around it and warmed themselves against the chill off the nearby o
cean until it had burned down to embers. They tucked in to sleep while one of them stood guard, the only sounds the soft moan of the wind through the trees and the rustle of night creatures in the surrounding woods.
The moon was high overhead when the guard heard something from the road. He leaned forward from the tree he was using for a backrest and squinted to see what had made the sound, but saw nothing. After several minutes of tense silence, he relaxed, the desolate coastline devoid of any obvious threat. He was settling back against the tree when a trio of figures stepped from the shadows with their weapons pointed at his head.
“What the–”
A blow from a rifle butt silenced him. One of the men took his gun, and then five more materialized out of the darkness and headed toward the tents.
Greg poked his head from his tent and found himself staring into the barrel of an assault rifle. He looked up from the muzzle at a stern face with a Chinese army hat pulled low across the brow, and swallowed hard just before a boot knocked him senseless and the starlight faded to black.
Chapter 11
Laredo, Texas
The silhouette of the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge that spanned the Rio Grande river was faint against the partially cloudy night sky. Clogged with the rusting hulks of long-abandoned vehicles trying to get to or from Mexico, the bridge’s eight lanes were impassable and served as a natural barrier between the two countries – not that there was any recognized border anymore, nor any border patrol to police it. The Crew acted as the law in Laredo, and its grip on the town was like its other holdings: absolute and brutal.
The Crew used the old immigration checkpoint building on the Texas side of the bridge as its base in the southern end of town, with its headquarters at the airport to the north. Since the collapse, the population had thinned to a little over four thousand souls, ruled over by a tenth as many gang members who took what they wanted from the locals and taxed them ninety percent of everything they were able to produce – which wasn’t much in the harsh climate. Many eked out a subsistence living trading with their counterparts in Nuevo Laredo, but the commerce was paltry, with the Mexicans even poorer than the Americans, most living hardscrabble and cannibalizing anything they could find to exchange for food or ammo.
Music from a cantina drifted across the river from the Mexican side, and the Crew members on night duty listened with frowns. Most of their group were elsewhere in town, drinking and whoring their week’s rations away, and the chore of manning the outpost was one of the least popular assignments, especially on payday.
Outside, beneath an overhang near the bridge, Kerry, a tall man with tobacco-colored skin and the arms of a boxer, cocked his head at a card table, where he was in the process of taking the other poker players for everything they had. “You hear that?”
The other players shook their heads, and one of them glanced over at the camp lantern that was providing light for their game. “Just that caterwauling from across the river.”
“I thought I heard something from the bridge.”
“Probably a dog. Nobody there’s stupid enough to try to sneak into town after dark. They all know the rules.”
The Crew’s approach to border control was draconian: anyone from Mexico caught on the Texas side after dark was dragged to the river and shot. The gang had forced any Hispanics in Laredo to get the Crew’s symbol tattooed on their forearm, branding them as Crew-owned, so it was easy to tell the locals from their Mexican counterparts. Once word had spread south of the border, there hadn’t been any problems with looting from Nuevo Laredo – the Crew didn’t take kindly to its property being stolen, and everything and everyone in Laredo was its property.
“Have someone check,” Kerry ordered. He was the equivalent of a master sergeant in the gang’s hierarchy, and the customs station was Kerry’s for the night and the dozen gunmen there his to command.
One of the players, a barrel-chested thug with the face of a bulldog, pushed back from the table with his cards. “Not gonna leave ’em here for you thieves,” he said, and made a show of counting the bullets in the pile before him.
“Hurry up, Otter. That hand’s not gonna heat up by stalling,” Kerry said, and the other players laughed.
Otter trudged from the card table to where the rest of the men were gathered, most swinging in hammocks strung from the steel girders that held a sweeping overhang in place. He approached five men sitting by a small fire and motioned with his cards.
“Bert, Jaime, boss says he heard something from the bridge.”
“And?” Jaime asked.
“Wants us to check to make sure we don’t have a runner.”
Unlike the pre-collapse, where desperate Mexicans had braved the river and the border patrol in the hopes of finding opportunity north of the border, now most of what the Crew was on the watch for were Laredo residents trying to escape the hell on earth the gang had created on the U.S. side. Bad as it was in Mexico, with its own warlords and cartels running the country, the Crew’s territory was worse, and Laredo had steadily lost laborers until the gang had blocked all the exit routes and issued a death penalty for anyone attempting escape.
The men tossed their cards into the pot and ambled toward the bridge with their rifles, grumbling at being asked to interrupt their much-needed downtime from long hours of rape, extortion, and mayhem.
“If it’s a runner, I call dibs on popping ’em,” Bert muttered.
Jaime made a face. “After what you drank, you couldn’t hit the side of a bus with a shotgun.”
They chuckled and reached the first of the clogged vehicles. All they heard was the wail of a horn and the thrumming of a tuba from Mexico. “Sounds like they’re having a better time than we are. Don’t see how, though, without two nickels to rub together.”
Then the clink of metal on metal reached them from the bridge, and both stiffened. “I definitely heard that,” Bert said.
They edged past a tall truck, its tires degraded to black dust, and made their way forward in the darkness, leading with their guns. Fifteen yards from the bank they stopped again to listen, but the only thing they heard besides the cantina band was the rush of the river beneath them. Bert was turning to speak to his companion when an axe blade swung from the open window of the car beside him and sliced through his sternum. Jaime raised his rifle just as a crossbow shaft sprouted from between his shoulder blades, and he coughed a stream of blood down his chin and dropped his rifle.
The axe wielder jerked the axe free as Bert struggled to swing his gun around, but the blow had sapped his strength, and he was too slow. The second blow took half his skull off in a spray of blood and brains, and he collapsed in a heap beside Jaime, who was kneeling and struggling for breath, his hands on the shaft protruding from his chest and his mouth working like a beached fish. The man with the axe leveled a blow at his shoulder and bisected him from clavicle to midchest, and then stepped back to avoid the worst of the blood that geysered from the wound.
“Grab their guns,” a voice called in Spanish from behind him. Two men pushed past him and relieved the gangsters of their weapons and ammunition, working with practiced efficiency as the man with the axe wiped his blade clean on Jaime’s pant leg.
When they were done, a long column of armed cartel fighters snaked its way across the bridge, taking care to move silently so as not to draw any more investigation. The gunmen stayed low, using the cars and trucks for cover, and remained in the gloom until they were near enough to the Crew outpost to hear the card players bickering.
The captain of the Laredo cartel signaled to his men, and ten broke off to the right while another dozen ran in a crouch to the left. The rest waited, motionless, weapons in hand. The lead fighters were armed with hunting crossbows in addition to sound-suppressed rifles and were under instruction not to make a sound when overrunning the outpost.
The plan was a good one, but had failed to account for Kerry and his three card sharks, who came around the corner shooting when they heard the
strangled cries of their men. Otter’s shotgun boomed over and over as Kerry’s Kalashnikov stuttered death at the attackers, who opened up with their rifles once the shooting began. Otter took four rounds to the torso, and Kerry ducked back around the corner as a burst of slugs pocked the building behind him, his boots slamming against the cement as he made for the radio he’d left on the table. He reached it and sprinted away from the gunfight, pressing the transmit button as he ran.
“We’re under attack at the bridge. Mexicans. Ton of them. I’m the only one left.”
“How many?”
Kerry was cut off by an AK on full auto from behind. The rounds tore through him and knocked him off his feet. His finger squeezed the trigger of his rifle as he fell, but his bullets whizzed harmlessly into the night.
A Mexican with facial tattoos like those favored by the Crew stepped from the darkness for Kerry’s rifle, his expression impassive; Kerry was just the first of many he would execute before the night was over. He shouldered the weapon and removed three spare magazines from the dead man’s vest, and then returned to where the others were mopping up the last of the Crew, aware they were at a disadvantage now that their shots had telegraphed their presence.
The cartel ran into a wall halfway to the airport headquarters, where over a hundred Crew were waiting with grenades in addition to their assault rifles. The Mexicans fought ferociously but were outgunned, and after sustaining heavy losses, they retreated across the bridge, their effort to take over Laredo foiled.
Snake received word of the attack an hour after it finished, and his mood was vile after being woken in the dead of night. That the cartel had dared to make a play for Laredo was ominous – they’d have never tried such a thing under Magnus’s rule, and the attempt was further confirmation that the Crew under Snake was vulnerable.
The Day After Never (Book 7): Havoc Page 6