The Lucky Ones (Evergreen Book 3)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “You know how we deal with criminality here, miss?” asked Lieutenant Boyd. “Are you completely sure these are the men who—”

  The guy with the broken wrist made a grab for the rifle of a soldier next to him. Both men holding his arms wrestled with him, trying to peel him away.

  Amid that distraction, the pudgy guy screamed, “Get off me” and twisted his big body hard enough to hurl one of the men holding him to the ground. He started to run, but the other soldier still had a grip on his left elbow, and flung him to the ground, flat on his stomach. The big guy started to struggle, unable to get up with his hands tied behind him—but several of the soldiers near him riddled him with bullets.

  Shaggy, his face pale as death, stared down. He appeared to expect death, but lacked the energy to put up a last stand—or care.

  The soldier holding the contested M4 wrenched it away from broken wrist guy, then walloped him in the face with the stock, knocking him to the dirt, his jaw smashed.

  Lieutenant Boyd drew a 9mm Beretta from his hip, aimed, and put one bullet into the forehead of the man she’d stabbed, then shot the last man while he lay dazed.

  Harper didn’t make an obvious show of cringing from the spectacle of death, but she kept her gaze off to the side, not looking at any of them. Someday, we might have to do this in Evergreen. Taking the life of someone trying to kill her in the heat of the moment while defending herself had become a necessary evil she could cope with. Executions, however, she couldn’t handle. She hoped she would never change so much that she could bring herself to shoot a defenseless person, no matter what they’d done—except for a few atrocities that might break down the last barrier of her humanity.

  She really didn’t want to think about those crimes, as they involved Madison, Lorelei, and Jonathan—or any of the kids. Thinking of the man who shot Logan made her bite her lip. Technically, shooting an unconscious man had been an execution. But, she rationalized it as having happened within seconds of the attack. Not the same as staring into the eyes of a condemned person and pulling the trigger.

  “Well.” Lieutenant Boyd holstered his Beretta, emitted a pained sigh, then put back on his ‘military face.’ “I’m sorry that had to happen. This isn’t exactly an ideal situation for anyone concerned, but given the state of things, we lack the resources for incarceration.”

  “I understand.” Harper swallowed saliva. “Those three would’ve been a threat to other women.”

  Annapurna, Deacon, and Rafael took a few minutes to comfort her while the soldiers gathered up the dead and dragged them away. Lieutenant Boyd apologized to Deacon for the attack on one of his people, assuming him the ‘person in charge’ of the Evergreen crew. They shook hands, and the lieutenant walked off toward the big Quonset hut, hands clasped behind his back.

  He hates having to do that, too. I hope karma is real. Whoever pushed that button deserves worse than death.

  “Ready to get going?” asked Rafael.

  “Sounds good to me.” Annapurna pulled Harper back to the van, ushering her inside in to sit on the floor.

  Mrs. Parsons looked up, her knowing stare tinged with jealousy—but not too much. More a ‘good for you’ sort of feeling than resentment at Harper for getting away. Eva, evidently oblivious to what just happened a few meters away, began peppering her with questions about Madison. To keep her distracted, Harper told her about Evergreen, that Becca had turned up as well, and both of them did fine.

  Deacon climbed into the passenger seat.

  “Hey, big dude,” said Darci. “Shouldn’t Harper sit there? She literally has shotgun.”

  Harper groaned. The men laughed.

  Annapurna glanced around at everyone, confused. “What does that have to do with sitting up front?”

  “It’s just like something people say when they wanna sit in the passenger seat.” Darci shrugged.

  Cliff would know why they call that ‘shotgun.’

  Rafael grasped the key. “If anyone here has gods, might wanna ask them for a hand.”

  Everyone—even Eva—held their breath.

  He turned the key. The starter emitted a labored whirr-whirr-whirr.

  A desperate scream built up inside Harper’s lungs, but before she could shout at the van to start, it did just that.

  Whew.

  25

  Revenge in Small Doses

  Annapurna stretched tall to peer out the window as the van exited the camp gate.

  “What?” Harper clutched the Mossberg tighter. “You look like you’re expecting a problem.”

  “Hoping not, but… I am somewhat surprised they aren’t giving us trouble for taking your friends out.”

  “It’s a survivor camp, not a prison,” said Mrs. Parsons. “We can leave if we want, but there’s nowhere to go. Sometimes, I think we would’ve been safer out there on our own.”

  “Trust me, not really.” Harper shivered. “Especially around Lakewood. A gang’s taken over that whole area. They’re the ones who killed my parents. Cliff thinks they started off as a band of former convicts. Right after the war, we hid out in our basement. Dad didn’t want to go outside yet because he worried about fallout. I think his plan was to give it six months if we could find enough canned food, but the gang attacked us after only two. If you see anyone wearing a scrap of blue cloth like a necklace, run the other way.”

  Darci nodded. “Oh, yeah. I saw some of those dudes before the Army found me. They kicked in doors across the street. Remember the ‘secret base’?”

  “Wow… I haven’t thought about that in years.” Harper pictured Darci’s basement bedroom, specifically, the unfinished part in the back containing the hot water heater and furnace. A small hole in the brick wall led to a dirt-floored crawlspace they used to play in years ago.

  “I hid in there while they raided my house. They took everything from the kitchen, even the ramen. Got a real bad feeling from them, so I stayed hidden and got the hell out of there once they left.” Darci rubbed at a small cut on the side of her foot. “Is it weird that I don’t really miss being home? Like, I’m more upset that someone stole my damned shoes than I had to leave my house. Like who does that? Takes someone’s shoes.”

  Eva wiggled her toes. “Someone stole mine, too.”

  “What?” Harper gawked. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.” Eva frowned.

  “Maybe someone else with a child who didn’t have shoes. Guess they saw her and decided their kid deserved them more. Some people.” Harper sighed.

  “It didn’t happen at the camp.” Eva shook her head. “Someone tried ta pull me off the Army truck by the legs.”

  Mrs. Parsons squeezed her daughter in a hug. “Our truck had so many people in it. Piled on top of each other, hanging on the sides. They kept trying to climb on, throw people off to make room. Didn’t care if they tossed a little girl or an old person to the street to make way, just blind panic.”

  “Like rats trying not to drown,” muttered Darci.

  “The Army man hit the guy who grabbed me in the face with his gun, but he took my shoes when he fell.” Eva frowned, picking at the tattered white fabric around her ankles. “My leggings wore out. I gotta shower with Mom now ’cause there’s not enough water. They don’t let us wash clothes either.”

  Heartsick, Harper stared at the rail thin phantom who somewhat resembled Madison’s friend. She’d have felt happier about bringing the girl to Evergreen if not for the dozens of children left behind at the Army camp. She couldn’t take them away from their families, and she couldn’t bring that many people back with her. Both because the van didn’t have enough room and the town’s food supply might not be able to tolerate such an increase in population. Next year perhaps if the greenhouses worked.

  To distract herself from her inability to help everyone, she started talking about Evergreen, trying to cheer the Parsons and Darci up a bit. Though, her friend didn’t act too much different from how she remembered. The girl had always been overly mellow. Christina once
joked that her reaction to the end of the world would be ‘wow, that sucked.’ From the look of it, she’d been right.

  Of course, Darci dealt with the death of her mother eight years ago to cancer. Even then, she hadn’t been overly emotional, though her interest in the goth thing intensified after that. Harper figured her frequent use of weed, ecstasy, and whatever other ‘light drugs’ she could get her hands on had something to do with losing her mother so young. Darci’s father had been awesome, so no one could blame ‘daddy issues.’ In fact, Harper credited him with her friend only wanting to get high on softer drugs as an escape rather than obliterate herself with stuff like heroin or meth. The man didn’t deserve to be crushed in his sleep by flying concrete.

  The more Harper spoke of Evergreen, the more Eva seemed to crawl out of the mental cocoon she’d been hiding in. It seemed as though she’d started off in black-and-white, gradually shifting to full color. A hint of happiness in her eyes made her gaunt appearance even more alarming, but offered hope she hadn’t suffered too much mental damage.

  Kids are resilient, said Tegan in her mind.

  “Shit!” screamed Rafael.

  Before Harper could look up, the van swerved hard to the left. A couple of gunshots went off outside, but nothing hit the van. Eva screamed and went rolling into the passenger side wall. Harper fell over onto her back, feet in the air. Darci slid into the rear doors while Mrs. Parsons crashed over onto Harper, squishing her.

  Oof. Ouch.

  Deacon fired out the passenger side window, empty shell casings jumping over the seat. Harper raised her arms to shield her face from the flying hot brass. The van straightened out with enough of a rebound swerve to fling Mrs. Parsons away and propel Harper into an upright sitting position. Eva tumbled into the middle of the cargo area, flat on her back. Deacon pivoted to his right as the van accelerated, snapping off a few more shots at their attackers.

  The engine struggled to respond to Rafael stomping on the pedal. When it started to chug toward an imminent stall, he eased back and erupted with Spanish cursing.

  “What’s going on?” shouted Harper.

  “Lawless.” Deacon fired one more shot. “Bunch of them jumped out on the road in front of us.”

  Harper moved up to one knee so she could see out the windshield.

  They rumbled down a four-lane street, two in either direction separated by a narrow concrete island. A Diamond Shamrock station went by on the left before they crossed a bridge with metal arches on either side. The street past the bridge went downhill at a relatively steep angle, offering a panoramic view of a small town that had been smashed by a nearby nuclear blast. Traffic lights up ahead draped down on their poles like candles left too near an oven.

  “Where the heck are we?” She whistled. “This place doesn’t even look worth scavenging from.”

  A liquor store went by on the left, all its windows missing. Cars in the lot had been reduced to bare frames sitting in puddles of once-molten plastic and rubber. Trees, street signs, lamp posts, and telephone poles all canted to the right, toward the West, away from the source of the blast.

  “Golden,” said Rafael. “Washington Road. Gonna try to loop back to 93 on the other side of town.”

  As soon as he said it, she spotted a small “Welcome to Golden” sign coming up on the island in the middle of the road. She held onto the passenger seat for stability as the van slalomed abandoned cars as well as a corpse or three. Buildings on both sides had suffered significant damage from heat, their surfaces charred or melted, large swaths having burned to the ground.

  “Stay down.” Harper balanced on her left knee, right leg stretched out for stability, and aimed the Mossberg at the window. They couldn’t open more than tilting out an inch or so, but if she had to, she’d blow out the glass to keep everyone safe.

  Darci draped herself over Eva, holding the girl down. Mrs. Parsons did her best to lie flat. Annapurna covered the driver’s side, rifle poised. Harper focused on the dark spots between and inside the blasted buildings going by. She eyed a building with a sign that read ‘Mountain Toad bar.’ She kept aiming around at openings, alleys, broken fences, and debris hurled from across town like she played Call of Duty, expecting Lawless to ambush them at any second. Some of the concrete chunks looked bigger than refrigerators, embedded in the craters they made when they came down.

  Most of the smaller trees here had vanished, incinerated in place or knocked flat and burned to ash. A few thicker ones still stood like charred matchsticks in a field to the left. A statue in the middle of the road depicted a cowboy with a little girl sitting on his shoulders. Rafael drove onto another bridge with four metal framework towers, one at each corner, supporting cables—half of which had snapped—connected to brick columns along the sides of the roadway.

  Harper’s stomach twisted over in worry, dreading the bridge would collapse out from under them… but it didn’t. The next intersection offered a view of a big mesa to the left, beyond a parking garage. Up ahead, a brown arch spanned the road with a larger ‘Welcome to Golden’ on it in yellow letters. Rafael drove under it, accelerating along the relatively open street in the downtown section.

  The scenery reminded Harper of World War II movies showing bombarded Europe. Many of the close-packed buildings had disintegrated to shells of crumbling concrete. A large brownish building on the right still had a ‘Vital Outdoors’ sign near the peak of its roof, but the stores themselves looked as if a tornado had blown through already. Whether looters or nuclear wind did it, she couldn’t tell.

  Sudden gunfire came from up ahead. Harper shrieked and ducked as the windshield exploded inward, a burst of glimmering snowy fragments dusting over everyone. Several clanks hit the frame and a loud boom accompanied the vehicle lurching left and down.

  “Mierda!” shouted Rafael, stomping on the brakes.

  Harper rocked forward. Tires screeched. The Darci-Eva bundle slid into her from behind, knocking her over on her back. Mrs. Parsons steamrolled Annapurna into the driver’s seat.

  Wham!

  The van slammed into something hard, coming to a full stop. The hit flung Harper into the passenger seat, squishing Darci and Eva. Fortunately, Rafael had slowed enough that the crash didn’t hurt too much. She scrambled upright, instinctively pointing her shotgun at the side windows and scanning for danger.

  They’d hit a parked sedan on the left side of the road in front of a place marked ‘Woody’s Wood-Fired Pizza.’

  Rafael grabbed the AR from its sling and fired out the broken windshield, shell casings landing almost perfectly in the center console’s cup holders. Deacon jumped out the passenger door and charged forward to take cover behind a half-melted pickup truck sideways across the road. Several Lawless returned fire from positions behind cars a little more than a block away.

  Annapurna aimed between the two front seats, shooting at the thugs.

  Eva screamed, “Behind us!”

  “That’s not good,” deadpanned Darci.

  The back doors swung open.

  Harper swiveled to her right. Two men wearing blue sashes started climbing into the van; the near one pushing the doors wider, the guy right behind him raising a handgun. As reflexively as tagging flying plates on the range, she shot the gunman first and the lead man second in the span of not quite two full seconds.

  Seven.

  They fell to the road, revealing three more Lawless about thirty yards away coming up behind the van, all with guns drawn. Without even thinking, Harper screamed a war cry, leapt to her feet, and charged out the back. She fired at the closest man despite the range, mostly to call attention to herself and draw incoming fire away from a pregnant woman, a child, and her friend sitting in a metal box with nowhere to go.

  He howled in pain but didn’t go down. Harper sprinted as hard as she could run, bullets whistling by and clicking off the road behind her. She veered left and leapt behind a burned out SUV in the middle of the road, hunkering down as incoming shots clinked and pinged
off the wreck.

  Six.

  Rapid fire came from her right side. A man somewhere to her left and in front let out an oof.

  Footsteps scuffed closer. Harper swiveled left, raising the Mossberg barely a second before a big man in a motorcycle helmet and Kevlar rounded into view past the end of the SUV, a large hatchet in each hand. She shifted her aim down to avoid an ineffective strike on armor, blasting him in the groin from four feet away.

  Five.

  The man emitted an awful howl and doubled over forward, dropping his axes and grabbing the bloody ruin between his legs. Harper pumped two blasts into the helmet point-blank, shattering it apart into a spray of bloody foam chunks and plastic shrapnel.

  Three.

  The man stopped screaming.

  “You’re clear,” shouted Annapurna.

  Harper glanced to her right. Both Annapurna and Rafael aimed out the back of the van, the likely source of the barrage seconds earlier.

  “Clear on this side,” yelled Deacon.

  “Anyone hit?” called Rafael.

  “I’m good,” said Annapurna.

  “Estoy bien,” said Rafael.

  “I’m okay.” Harper didn’t like how much her voice quivered, but she didn’t feel scared… merely shook from adrenaline. She stared down at her hands, then at the van twenty or so feet away across completely open road dotted with white marks where bullets had chipped it. Oh, damn. What the hell did I do?

  Three rounds left. She flipped the Mossberg over and fed it six shells from her hip bag, then crept back to the van, her hands still trembling.

  “You okay?” asked Annapurna.

  “No, not really. Having a ‘holy shit I can’t believe I did that’ moment.”

  “Damn girl.” Deacon trotted over. “Why the hell did you run like that?”

  Harper glanced at Eva clinging to her mother, Darci staring at her in total disbelief. “I didn’t want those f—those… bastards shooting into the van. Bullets would go right through it and hit them.” She couldn’t help but laugh. “I just killed three Lawless and I can’t make myself drop an F-bomb. How messed up is that?”