American Apocalypse Wastelands (4 page)

I just stared at him. I wasn't contemplating whether or not to go against the timer, I was deciding whether or not to kill him right now.

Ninja got excited and started chanting, “Do it, Gardener! Do it!”

Ignoring Ninja, I grinned at Jake. “Sure, why not?” Ninja cheered. I looked around. Max's face was impassive. Night was smiling.

Jake explained how it worked. We would each stand facing a timer set for two seconds, a light would flash, and we'd draw. Our times would be displayed on a digital readout. He asked, “You want to warm up?”

“No, I'm good.”

“Not good enough.” Then the asshole laughed. I didn't. I had a special surprise planned for him.

We went three times. He beat me by .02 seconds the first time; the second time, by .04 seconds. The third time I beat him by .01.

He loved it. He told me, “You're pretty good, Gardener. If you practiced, you could improve.” I think he thought he was being gracious.

Everyone looked stunned, everyone except Max. His face hadn't changed, but when my eyes slid across his, he winked. If you didn't know him as well as I did, you would have missed it or thought it was a twitch. I knew better. Max didn't twitch.

I watched as Jake looked at Max. Waiting for the recognition, the approval. Max's face didn't register a change. He looked at him, nodded, said “Nice,” and walked away.

I laughed, slapped him on the shoulder, and said, “I think we found our gunslinger.”

Ninja looked stunned and then shrugged. I limped down the hall into the bedroom we were now using. Night followed me. Behind me I heard Ninja ask Jake, “Want to play
Halo
?”

 

We were lying in bed a couple days later. Since I was able to handle the stairs, Night and I had moved into one of Jake's spare bedrooms. He wasn't thrilled about it but it was obvious to everyone that we needed some privacy, especially since Night was also healing up rather nicely.

She was resting her head on my chest. She had cut her hair very short, using a pair of scissors and the bathroom mirror, and had begun wearing a bandanna to cover the back while it grew in. At first I was startled by the new look, but I was adjusting all right.

 

As her fingertip idly traced patterns only she could see on my chest and across my abs, she whispered, “Jake made a pass at me this morning.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me more.”

She sighed. “I was in the kitchen washing dishes”—she paused and poked me in the ribs with a finger—“your dishes as a matter of fact.”

“Ouch!”

“Anyway, he came in and started talking to me. I didn't think anything of it. Then he walked up next to me. I thought he needed a glass or was going to offer to help.”

She sighed at the absurdity of what she had just said. I might be a little slack on doing the dishes but I still did chores. Jake didn't do shit. His attitude was,
It's my place, my food. You do the grunt work
.

“So I'm standing there and all of a sudden he has a handful of my ass and is squeezing it.” She stopped.

I gave her about a minute. Damn, I hated having to drag stuff out of people. “Then what?”

“I slapped him and told him, ‘Touch me again and I will kill you.' He just laughed. Then he drew on me. I told him, ‘You think you're good. Wait until I tell Gardener.'”

I interrupted her, “Let me guess. He probably said something like ‘Go ahead, baby, but I'm faster.'”

She pulled her head back enough so she could see my face. “That was pretty much it.”

I laughed. “Did he do his Hollywood spin when he holstered them?”

“Yes.” I could tell by her expression and the flatness in her reply that she wasn't getting the reaction she expected.

“Don't worry about it. I'll take care of it.”

She gave me a hug. I thought that was it. In fact, I was drifting off to sleep when she said, “Gardener?”

“Hmm?”

“Can you take him?”

“I already have. He just doesn't know it yet.”

CHAPTER FOUR

I let a couple of days go by. When we crossed paths, I acted as if nothing had happened. Now I knew why Jake had seemed a little tense around me for the past few days.

On the third day we were sitting around the table talking about Max's plan to head for the farm. Max asked Jake if he wanted to go with him early the next morning and recon the route he had chosen. Jake agreed, of course. I knew he resented the fact that Max never asked him along when he went out. I thought it was sort of funny actually.

The next morning I was sitting at the kitchen table with Max, drinking coffee, when Jake came out of his bedroom.

“Hello, sleepyhead,” I said.

He shot me the evil eye and pointedly looked at the clock to let me know he was on time. I grinned at him. He didn't bother to address me. Instead he asked Max, “He's going?” Meaning me, of course.

“Yep. We might as well practice how we are going to move cross-country.”

Jake liked that. I knew about jock sniffers. That there were camo crotch sniffers was a revelation to me. Jake, I thought, definitely fell in that category.

“Great idea. I can walk point.”

“Yeah. We'll all be doing some of that.” Max said.

We headed south down the path behind the house. It was already warm for so early in the morning. It was going to be another hot, muggy summer. Max had a shotgun and his .45 while Jake and I just wore our gun belts. I was wearing a daypack with our lunches, a medic kit, and water inside.

We went down the path, single file, not talking. Max went through a couple of hand signs that we would use. They were basic stuff like STOP! and DOWN! and I SEE THE ENEMY! Jake loved it.

It was closing on midday when I took point from Jake. I kept us going for about twenty minutes, and then I flashed STOP! and went forward about fifteen feet. Here I shrugged off my daypack and tossed it underhand into a bush about five feet from me.

I stood there for a few beats and enjoyed having the weight gone. I wiggled my shoulders to loosen them up and stared at Jake, who was behind me. I started walking toward him. As I did, Max quietly slid to the side and off the trail.

“What's up, Gardener?”

I told him, “It's time for you to go.”

He laughed. “Me? Why?”

“You think I was going to let you live after you touched Night?”

He started laughing. “Shit, Gardener, she ain't nothing. She's just a throwaway piece of Asian ass. We're better than—”

I drew. He drew.

My first round hit him in the chest and staggered him. He looked stunned, probably because he hadn't even cleared his holster.
Time this, prick
, I thought, and shot him again.

He went down to his knees. Then he went face-first into the hard-packed clay of the trail. I walked over to him. He was going, if not gone.

 

Max joined me, looked down at Jake, shook his head, and asked, “You hungry?”

“Yeah. Let's eat.”

We found a downed tree off the trail to sit on after I retrieved my pack. Jake's body was cooling where he had fallen.

Max indicated the body. “We're going to have to do something about that.”

“Yeah, I know, Max.” I was looking inside the pack. I was hungry and curious what Night had packed us for lunch. “Alright!”

Max looked at me curiously.

“She packed the last of the Twinkies!”

“That's love, Gardener. I would have eaten them and left you with something healthy like a can of tuna fish instead.”

I tossed him one. “She packed enough for two.”

“Nice. Very nice.”

We also had Tupperware containers with rice and beans, plus an apple for each of us.

“Hey, Max. Did you know what was going to happen here with me and the asshole?”

“No. I knew something wasn't right. Hell, I probably would have ended up getting around to it myself eventually.”

“Hmm … you say anything to Night before we left?”

“Why do you ask?”

“She only packed two lunches.”

He laughed and laughed. Max wasn't the kind of guy who spent a lot of time laughing. He was still chuckling as we stood over the body. We always looted our kills. It kept our cash flow positive a lot of the time.

I found a set of keys and held them up to look closer at them. Puzzled, I said, “He brought his car keys?”

“Habit. A lot of people are still running on old habits. That's what keeps getting them killed.”

That made sense to me. I dug Jake's wallet out and did a quick check for cash. He had $549 in new dollars. Handy for the few places left that took it. Cash was on its way out. The new national ID was going to be upgraded to a debit card, and eventually it would tie into all your accounts. Max had pointed out the obvious to me: “Real-time spending data is also real-time GPS until they figure out how to tag all of us.”

“You want his weapon, Max?”

“You don't want it?” Weapons and anything else always went to the winner of the encounter.

“No. Let someone else get lucky.”

I grabbed his arms and Max took his feet. On a count of three, we tossed him into the bushes and vines that lined the trail.

“Damn, Max. There's a lot of poison ivy in there. Not going to be much fun for whoever decides he's worth pulling out.”

“Yeah. We'll be gone by then.”

We made sure we left nothing behind. I reloaded and pocketed the brass. A pocketful of spent brass was like having a pocketful of quarters now. Some places, you could spend them like change, too.

CHAPTER FIVE

We pushed on after eating. Despite the interruption, we were actually out here to plan our exit strategy. We needed to move but the big question was how to do it. By road, bicycle, or foot?

It was starting to look as though our move would be on foot. The government had really clamped down hard around D.C. Iceland was reporting that government influence was waning in certain states. The federal government was, if you believed the Icelandic News, starting to have a serious problem projecting authority and collecting revenue.

The Icelanders aired an interesting program on it. It wasn't that our federal government was hated, although that sentiment was certainly rising. People still saw themselves as Americans and flew the flag. The abstract idea of America was still valid, but the reality wasn't.

The change was gradual at first and then picked up speed. But there wasn't a single tipping point. It depended on the state, where in that state you lived, and,
often, how well established the area was. Religion played an important part, too. Utah was well on its way to becoming an autonomous province: the Quebec of America.

The breakdown started with the states. They couldn't afford to provide basic services anywhere near what people needed. The counties tried to pick up the slack by not forwarding their revenue to the state. In some cases they managed to provide some of service, but over time their own falling revenues ate away at that.

In theory the Feds should have stepped in but there was no money to do so. The previous administration followed a policy of “Hope for the best. Ignore the West.”

That policy failed. Badly. Ignoring California meant abandoning a state whose GDP would have put it in the world's top ten if it were a country. The Pacific Northwest was ignored because its residents had turned out in huge numbers against the previous administration.

So what we had at this point were states with partially functioning services in some areas, partially functioning towns and counties, and no-go zones–—areas that were run by gangs or religious or political nut jobs, or were just in free fall. The Burners ran huge parts of California, Oregon, and Washington State. Mexican gangs controlled southern Arizona, except for pockets of Maricopa County.

The Apache and some of the other tribes were also making their moves. The casino years had given them the money to make hardware purchases. The Sioux were bringing back the buffalo and beginning to burn out the AgriCorp holdings if they got in the way.

Halfway through the program, Max had turned to me and said, “Damn, we brought the 'Stan home with us.” There wasn't much I could do in reply other than shrug.
Max would walk or bicycle for miles when he wasn't walking with me. Sometimes he left again after dinner. He was out talking to people. Watching the roads. Making phone calls with disposable phones.

The roads were no longer safe for us. The new administration was determined to hold and pacify the area surrounding Washington, D.C. In phone calls to old friends still on active duty Max learned more from what was not said than from what was. Often he would meet them at Top's house in the suburbs. Top was retired but he knew a lot of people from all the years he had spent on active duty.

From them, he found out that the Feds had canceled a decision to send a team to hunt us down. As long as we kept a low profile and didn't get stopped by anyone other than a sheriff or local law enforcement outside the Zone, we would be okay.

If a federal or army patrol stopped us, however, we would be screwed. The Feds no longer trusted local law enforcement with access to their databases. If the locals were good and had proved their loyalty, they were allowed access to a sanitized version. We were marked as “Hold and Notify” in the Fed version.

We planned to head south to the farm where I had recovered from my first bad wound. We were going to walk out of the Zone to a prearranged pickup point. From there we would ride the remaining distance.