Suddenly Mac stood up his face red and angry. “Not right? Not right!” he yelled. “What do you know about not right, Boy?” Jolo holstered the Colt and stepped back. “Not right I got stranded here with 287 souls on board. Not right we lost eight boats and one of them was the biggest thing in the core at that time. Not right I had to watch them all die. They all died.”
Jolo felt ashamed for pulling out the gun. He sat down again and the old man sat down, too. “Tell me your story old man. I got no right to judge. But how ‘bout the truth this time.”
“I came on the Arcadia many years before in search of the Exeter. I wasn’t the cook.”
“Officer? Were you on the bridge of that big boat?”
“Doesn’t matter. We went in after our scout boats never returned. It was stupid to go in and Trant should have known to stay away. But the fool went in. He was a little too cocky.”
“What happened to Trant? I know his grandson.”
The old man looked up at Jolo with big eyes.
“You know Marin? He was a good boy.”
“Ain’t no boy. And he’s in jail for killing Silas Filcher.”
“Must’ve been a good reason. The Trant men have always been honorable.”
Jolo clinched his teeth when he thought about Marin Trant running away in his gunboat when the Persephony was under attack. But he held his tongue. “Did you know Evinrude Trant, the captain of the Arcadia? What became of him?”
“He died like the rest of them. We lost a quarter of the crew to a hard crash landing that tore the big boat in two. Then we lost more when the big Cruisers came. Most were hauled off and sent to work camps. I don’t think they were quite ready for such a big group of ships to come. But even so, they got things under control pretty quick.
Me and a small group made it to Macon. That was before the BG blew up the bridges, before the walkers patrolled in such great numbers. All the other ships suffered the same fate. That bastard Hazuki and his ground force, plus the Cruisers, gave us little chance.”
“I thought the boats didn’t work.”
“They launched after ours went down. Nothing flies when the Queen flips the switch.”
“Where’s the power coming from?”
“I searched for it, thinking if I could destroy it I could get a boat off this rock. But it just isn’t here.”
“What happened to the people you escaped with?”
“We found shelter not too far from here underground. Nothing remains up top, but a few bits of the world that was here before remained.” Here Mac stopped, fumbled with the piece of jerky in his hands, then put it in his pocket.
“We were happy to be alive at first. Full of fire and hope. Like you. There was a supply ship that went down on our side of the ravine that the BG hadn’t taken yet, so we horded all we could. And we lasted for almost two years. During that time we’d send out little recon missions to find the power source, to find another food source, or more human survivors.” Mac stopped again, took a deep breath. “We stopped that after awhile because we found nothing. And we kept losing good people. We found a few weapons, but finding ammunition was another story. We wondered if the BG knew we were there. I think they did. But they didn’t care. It’s as if they were just keeping us. When the food ran out people started eating the black.
It was okay for awhile even though it tasted like shite, but after a few months they started to change. First they’d forget things, then they’d lose their speech, their mouths and tongue all black. In the end they’d just wander off into the dust. There were only about eight of us left when we encountered the first group of walkers. One of our women, Macy, ran up to greet them. We were overjoyed to see other humans.
She ran right up to them and they tore her apart and ate her. She deserved better. A Federation officer. We had no weapons so we ran home and cried.
So we knew the black stuff was poison but there was nothing left to eat. We all got skinny and hungry and desperate. I had gotten close to a woman, Morgana. She’d been a server in the officers mess on the Arcadia. Her first trip on a Fed boat.” Mac shook his head slowly. “She started eating the black again and I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want to watch her go the way the others went.
So one night I slipped out with a short-handled axe and went hunting. They weren’t hard to find. The difficult part was taking one down without alerting the others. Some of them were old meat. They didn’t bleed. But there were some more fresh. The ones that bled proper. I got to where I could tell which was which. The first time I cried when I did it, and I cried when I cooked it up over one of them dang burners. But I ate it. And I didn’t feel that bad because I’d seen what those things were capable of.
A few days later I told the group. I begged Morgana to eat it, but she refused. None of them could do it. They were weak. All the strong ones who might have followed me had died on our ignorant recon missions in search of a power source that didn’t exist. After that the group looked at me like I was an animal. No one would talk to me, not even Morgana. That’s when I went out to the road and found shelter in the old ship.”
They slept in the vault that night. Jolo brushed the wood splinters off to the side and laid down in the back. Mac stayed up near the door. It was mostly quiet except for the occasional moan or a bump from the walkers outside the door.
……
Jolo dreamed of Katy that night. He wanted to be with her. But in the dream they were on the Argossy and he’d get close to her and she’d just vanish. He woke up with his stomach grumbling, and his mouth dry. Hope had faded, replaced with an urge to beat the shite out of everything in the vault with the sledge. They could hear the walkers still milling about outside so Jolo didn’t care about making noise.
“We ain’t getting out of here you keep banging away like that,” said Mac.
“We’ll be dead of starvation soon enough.”
“Yeah, but if there’s a high concentration of walkers in one area the patrols will come and check it out. We need to get out of here and lay low.”
“Patrols?”
“Resupply every few weeks. Where do you think the food for the women they keep in the breeding program comes from.”
“I’ve never seen a patrol.”
“You haven’t been here long enough. Every two weeks.”
“But they’ll leave the women, right?”
“They’ve got cities all over the planet. They move people all the time. You been making trouble so I imagine they’ll send a few mechs to clean up.”
Jolo sat down and tried to count the days he’d been there. When the Queen nearly got him and Greeley they were maybe three days in, but how many days were they with Riley and the wild boys? And then the underground parking lot, then the trip out here.
“I been here ten days,” said Jolo.
“By my count the resupply will be here in three days. I think the Arcadia was doomed because we crashed down on a resupply day and there were Cruisers and mechs already on the ground waiting. If we’d have landed a day later we might have survived.”
“I gotta go. Now,” said Jolo. He pulled out the Colt and grabbed the sledge with his left hand.
“They’ll kill you before you get to the hoverbike, Jolo.” Mac stood between Jolo and the door. “Let’s come up with a plan.”
Everything was falling apart. Jolo threw the sledge across the room as hard as he could and it put a big dent in one of the oil barrels.
“Great, just go ahead and throw a tantrum. That’ll help!” said Mac.
“My people are out there and need me and I’m stuck here with some old fart in a worthless vault and can’t get out because 300 of the Fed’s finest want to eat me. Oh, and I’m hungry. Really hungry. And being hungry makes me cranky!”
Mac looked Jolo dead in the eye and said coldly, “You have options.”
The vault went quiet as Jolo pondered the unthinkable. He could hear them brushing up against the door, whispering odd human sounds that didn’t equal words.
>
“I can’t.”
“You just can’t make the tough decisions. One day it’ll come down to living or dying and you’ll have to make a sacrifice. How far are you willing to go?”
“I don’t eat people.”
“You’ll do worse before it’s over! You just haven’t been properly tested yet. You don’t know what it’s like to lose good people!”
“Yes I do! I’ve lost people before and I remember all of them.”
“I’ve lost so many I’ve forgotten their names.”
“You’re just a friggin’ cook, right?”
“I am Evinrude Trant, captain of the Arcadia of the Federation.”
Jolo dropped the sledge on the floor. Silence again.
“The Trant’s were always good at lookin’ after themselves.”
The old man pushed Jolo back into the barrels angrily but Jolo didn’t fight back.
He picked up the sledge and hit the barrel again. The noise echoed off the walls of the vault and the murmurs and noises outside turned into wails and crazed screams. Again and again Jolo beat the oil barrel until the round top came off. “If we’re gonna die here then let’s go out in style. Make some noise, get a big crowd of walkers outside, then wait for a BG Cruiser to come.” Jolo grabbed the top of the barrel and tipped it over. Black oil spilled all over the floor and Mac jumped out of the way, but Jolo just stood there and watched the floor turn black in the dim light of the stupid little Federation burners that Mac used to cook humans.
Jolo closed his eyes and stood there taking deep breaths. He was Jolo Vargas. How could it have come to this?
He opened his eyes and Mac was pointing to the barrel with big eyes. “Jolo, look!”
Something hard was sticking out of the barrel. Jolo reached down and pulled out a big gun. It had a magazine to hold bullets. He held it up and ran a check against all the guns in his internal computer database. United States Marine M-16. There were eight machine guns in the barrel.
“Why didn’t I think of it?” said Mac. “They call that pickling. An old weapon like that will last forever in oil.”
“I’m gonna get the rest of the guns. You figure a way out of here.” So Jolo proceeded to pop the tops off the rest of the barrels. An hour later they were ankle deep in old thirty-weight motor oil but Jolo had found 74 M-16 machine guns and 6 grenade launchers. “That’s what I’m talkin’ ‘bout!” yelled Jolo. He smiled for the first time in days. He picked up two of the machine guns, one for each hand. “Let’s go.”
“Not like that.”
“I’m leaving. I got people in town that need these guns. I gotta get there before the BG come and take my people.”
“You can’t just stroll out there and load the guns with the walkers waiting for you. But I think I can clear a path for you if you trust me.”
Goodbye, Macon
The old man stood at the door taking deep breaths like he was about to run a race with an M-16 in either hand and one strapped to his back.
“This ain’t gonna work,” said Jolo. “You said yourself you can’t outrun them. They’ll cut you off where ever you go.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yeah,” said Jolo, but he secretly worried Trant would jump on the hoverbike and be gone. “Maybe I should go and you get the bike?”
“I know these creatures. Been hunting them for quite a while now. Are you ready?”
Jolo pulled the door open and there were fifty or so walkers milling about. Jolo and Mac had been quiet for an hour waiting for them to ease away from the door a bit, every moment Jolo imagining the big black ships coming down to take Katy and the rest away to God knows where.
Mac opened fire with both guns and mowed down a path right to the street. He didn’t start yelling until he’d blown a hole through the horde and was standing fifty meters from the entrance to the admin building. There were several hundred all along the main street, on side streets, caught up in buildings, bumping into old cars. But they all turned when Mac started yelling and firing the guns.
Jolo closed the door to the vault and started his internal clock. Mac said it’d take fifteen minutes to clear them out.
It seemed like days. He thought about just running for it, but he needed a clear path to the hoverbike, then time to load. Mac said don’t use the gun except as a last resort because it will draw them in.
Right at fifteen minutes Jolo eased the door to the vault open: one ten meters off, one at the entrance and one near the bike. Jolo grabbed the sledge and stepped into the orange light of day. Before his time in the vault he’d hated the dingy brown days of Earth, but now he breathed in the air and was happy to be outside again. The first walker didn’t see it coming. Jolo put a dent in a large man’s head and he fell to the ground. The next two came to him and a few moments later he was alone on the street. He ran to the hover bike which had been pushed back down the street aways by the walkers but otherwise in perfect condition. He did not engage the main engine, just pushed it along in hover mode back to the edge of the stairs on the first floor.
He figured he could get thirty or so guns into the cart, guessing the weight was roughly equal to the jet. There were tie downs and a cover so hopefully they would make it over the ravines. He left the jet and Koba’s rig behind. He put one of the M-16s on his back, engaged the hoverbike’s engines and headed to the rendezvous point. Trant had drawn a map in the dirt on the floor of the vault. He would lead them away, then double back to that point. Jolo wondered how the old man thought he could pull that off when even he wasn’t able to do it.
Jolo made it to the pickup spot but Trant wasn’t there. He could see the road to the north and thought about taking off, but couldn’t leave him. He circled back and pretty soon heard an M-16. He followed the sound to a tight group of buildings surrounded by walkers.
He found Evinrude Trant sitting on a first floor girder beam of a small building. The upper floors had rotted away and the weight of the horde pushing against the vertical beams made the whole thing sway. Rust and dirt fell from the old structure right on Trant but he didn’t move. His legs dangled down just out of reach of the walkers but soon the building would come down and he’d be dead. They were thirty deep all around him.
He sang to them. “I knew a girl from Altor 5!” he yelled. “She was ugly but so am I! I asked her momma, for her hand! She said Hell No you gunboat man!” He slapped their hands with the but of the M-16. He was out of ammo.
The crowd below screamed and wailed and clawed over each other, drawn in by his taunts and the sound of his voice.
“No!” yelled Jolo from the hoverbike. “It doesn’t have to be this way. Come with me.”
Trant stood up and waved. “Yes, it does,” he hollered back. “I need to do one good thing before I die. Go now and save your people and do not become me. I cannot come with you.”
“I could lead them away…” said Jolo.
“Go. You fool!”
Jolo turned to go and Mac called out again. “Under my rack, take my tags, my journal and my blaster and give them to Marin. Tell him I’m proud of him.”
“He reminds me of you. Stubborn and strong!” Jolo shot two walkers that got close but he still couldn’t leave.
Trant laughed, his arms spread out, palms up. “You still don’t know what this place is, do you?”
“Hell!”
“Wrong, captain. This is a worm world. It always has been. For all we know the Queen may have been born here.”
“No!” said Jolo.
“What do you think they’re doing in the other cities? The Queen’s progeny tended to by black-mouthed Federation fools! You stand on the doorstep of a much larger enterprise than you could imagine.”
Another walker got close and Jolo shot it.
“Go now, you fool!” Trant yelled. “And when the time comes, do what you must to save your people. Do what I couldn’t do.” Jolo still didn’t move.
The old man shook his head at Jolo. Then he threw the M-16 down into the ma
ss of people. He took off his shirt and threw that down, too, and they tore at it and screamed. He took off each boot and threw that at them. Then he just stood there drawing the walkers in with his old man’s wrinkled flesh. He waved at Jolo and smiled. It was goodbye.
“NO!” yelled Jolo.
But Trant jumped down into the mass of walkers like he was jumping off a pier into a lake. Jolo saw a flash of his white hair and then nothing. He couldn’t watch and he couldn’t save him.
Jolo hit the throttle on the hover bike and did not look back. He heard screaming, but didn’t know if it was Trant or not. Soon the voice trailed off, replaced by the wind and the dust, and the deep, animal urge to return to the ice with thirty-five machine guns and blood on his mind.
The Captain Returns
Ten kilometers out Jolo started checking the hoverbike’s scanner, but there were no boats in the vicinity. He wondered if that was good news. Or had the black boats already come and gone? The dim light of day was just starting to fade when the ice under the bike got thick and gray and the nav on the hoverbike read under a kilometer to destination.
At 758 meters to go two red dots popped up on the bike’s scanner. Jolo looked up and two shiny, black Cruisers were right over the hotel. How did they get down so fast? They had to have gone through the atmosphere, then the slow drop down to the ground. He should have seen them long before they got to the ground so fast.
Jolo pointed the bike straight at the closest one and it turned, surely locking in to the hoverbike’s engines. Jolo put the bike on autopilot, jumped into the carryall, then pulled the manual release. The bike shot ahead straight at the black boat. The big Cruiser got into position, locked on to the bike and fired two quick ion cannon blasts. There was nothing left but melted ice and tiny bits of metal and plasticyte floating down onto the hard pack. The Cruiser then moved forward towards Jolo and the guns. He grabbed an M-16 and a grenade launcher and started running away from the carryall. He couldn’t let the Cruiser destroy the guns.
The Cold Dead Earth (The Jolo Vargas Space Opera Series Book 3) Page 17