Armageddon's Children (13 page)

“Shame on you,” he said quietly. He yanked the leader into a sitting position and squatted before him. “Where is this slave camp?”

The man stared at him with a stunned expression, then shook his head. “Don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. You probably helped those that were hunting them.” He tightened his hand about the other’s throat and squeezed. “Tell me where it is.”

The man gasped frantically, fighting for breath. “West…somewhere. Never…been…there!”

Logan nodded in response. “You should go sometime. It would do you a world of good.” He flung the man down so hard that his head slammed against the hard earth. “If you’re lying, I’ll be back to show you the error of your ways. Do you understand me?”

The man nodded, eyes wide, swallowing hard. “I can’t make my arms move. What did you do to me?”

Logan straightened. “I let you live. That’s more than you deserve. If I were you, I’d find a way to make the best of my good fortune, you and these other animals.” He stood up, looking down at the man. “If I ever come across you again, I’ll not be so generous.”

For just a moment, he considered the possibility of not being so generous right then and there. These men were the worst of their kind, the dregs of the humanity that the once-men preyed upon. They were little better than the once-men themselves, lacking only organization and a little deeper madness to qualify. That was what the world had come to, what civilization in its terrible collapse had birthed.

The man must have seen something of what he was thinking in his eyes. “Don’t hurt me,” he said. “I’m just trying to stay alive like everyone else.”

Logan stared down at him. Trying to stay alive for what? But it didn’t bear thinking on. He turned away, climbed back in the AV, and started up the engine. With a final glance at the men on the ground, he drove from the park back onto the roadway and then west toward the midland flats.

L
ATE THAT AFTERNOON
, with the other Ghosts safely returned to their underground home, Hawk departed for his meeting with Tessa. He told Owl to feed the others, and that he would eat when he returned. She gave him the look she always gave him when he was going out so close to nightfall, the one that both despaired of his insistence on tempting fate and warned him to be careful. She did not try to dissuade him; she never did. Even at only twenty-three, she understood his needs better than he did, and she knew that telling him not to go would make no difference. Not in this case. Not with Tessa.

The gray mistiness of earlier had darkened further with the night’s approach, and the ruins of the city were layered thick with shadows as Hawk emerged from the underground with one of the solar-charged prods in hand and Cheney in tow. He always took Cheney on these visits, not so reckless as to go alone. It was dangerous for anyone to be out after dark, although he was better equipped than most to take the risk. Blessed with night vision that enabled him to see as clearly in the dark as in the light, he was also possessed of unusually acute hearing. But the darkness could be treacherous, and there were things hiding in it that could see and hear much better than he could. The Ghosts were forbidden to go out at night for that very reason, even in groups. Hawk went because it was the only time Tessa could risk meeting him.

But he was especially mindful tonight of whatever it was that had killed those Croaks down by the waterfront and the Lizard at midtown. Something big and dangerous was loose in the city, and it was hunting. If it could kill a full-grown Lizard and a pack of Croaks, it probably could dispatch a street kid without much trouble. Even a street kid with a dog like Cheney.

The light was failing, but it was not yet so dark that Hawk couldn’t see down First Avenue through the jumble of abandoned cars and collapsed buildings. He made his way quickly through the debris, keeping to the center of the roadway, letting Cheney take the lead and set the pace. The city was silent and empty feeling, but he knew there were things living in it everywhere. Some he had encountered, like the community of Spiders living in the warehouse complex that sat just above the compound and the small family of Lizards that occupied what had once been a residential apartment building. There were Croaks down this way, too, but not many because of the compound. The Croaks were bold, but they were wary of open places. Croaks preferred the darker, more isolated locations for their hunting. Even in packs, they avoided the compounds.

But Hawk was alone and outside, so he knew he was fair game. The Croaks would be watching.

His lean, ragged shadow lengthened as he walked and the air grew cooler. It was midyear sometime, though he didn’t know exactly when. Owl might, but she made little mention of it because it didn’t matter. Clocks and calendars were for those who lived in the compounds and wanted to maintain some sense of a past they refused to recognize as dead and gone. Those living on the streets, like the Ghosts, found comfort only in the moment, not in memories. Most of them didn’t even talk about their parents anymore, those who could remember their parents at all. Their old families were like stories once told and then mostly forgotten. Their old families were no longer real.

Some of them could still recall a little of their past lives. Hawk wasn’t one of them. He remembered almost nothing, and what he did recall was so fragmented and disconnected from his current reality that he could not give a context to it. His father was a faceless shadow, but every now and then he could catch glimpses of his mother—an image of her face on a smudged wall, a beckoning of her hand in the movement of shadows, her laugh in the cry of a gull. He could never put the pieces together, though; could never make her whole. Even the particulars of his past life were vague. He remembered swimming on the Oregon coast. He remembered the beach. Not much else. It was almost as if he had not had a life until he came to this city.

He gave a mental shrug. Life before coming here didn’t matter anyway. The Ghosts had reinvented their lives in more ways than not. Customs and rituals were all new. Owl set the rules for eating, sleeping, and bathing. Hawk assigned chores. Routine kept them focused on staying alive. They did not celebrate holidays. No one except for Owl could even name more than one or two. They celebrated them in the compounds, he knew. Sometimes Tessa talked glowingly of those celebrations, but to him they sounded perfunctory and forced. There even seemed to be disagreement on the kinds of holidays worth remembering. It was just more clinging to the past. The Ghosts did celebrate birthdays, even though most of them no longer knew when their birthdays actually were. Owl had assigned birthdays to those who had forgotten them, and she marked them off on a makeshift calendar she had drawn on the wall. She didn’t know what day it was or even what year. She just made it up, and it became a game they could all play.

Off to one side, deep in the shadows of a mostly whole building, something moved. Cheney went into a crouch, faced the black opening of the doorway, and growled softly. Hawk stopped where he was, holding the prod ready. After a few tense moments, Cheney turned away and started off again. Hawk swung in behind him, and they continued on.

Sometimes he thought that it would all be so much simpler if they lived in the compound with Tessa and the others. Not that it would ever be allowed after they had lived on the streets for so long, but just for the sake of argument. There was safety in numbers. There was less to be responsible for and less to worry about on a daily basis. Food and shelter and medical supplies were easier to come by. Some of the people in the compounds still had special skills that street kids would never have. But there was something so abhorrent about compound life that it overshadowed everything that made it appear desirable. Too many restrictions and rules. Too little freedom. Too much conformity of the few for the benefit of the many. Too much fear of everything outside the walls. It was the old world in miniature, and if Hawk was certain of one thing in this life it was that the old world was dead and gone and should remain that way. Eventually, a new world would be born from the ashes of the old, and living in a walled fortress was not the way to make that happen.

Darkness was almost complete when he emerged from the ash-and soot-blackened ruins of the city’s south end and could see clearly the dark bulk of the compound outlined against the gray skyline. Walls several stories high surrounded what had once been an arena and playing field, stretching away on four sides to occupy several city blocks. A raised metal roof rested atop a network of steel girders and wheels that had once allowed it to move back and forth on a track to open the playing field to the sky, but now was rusted permanently open. Barbed wire rimmed the tops of the walls and the perimeter of the compound in thick rolls. Watchtowers dotted the corners and heavy barricades blocked those entrances that hadn’t been sealed completely. A wide swath of open space separated the compound from the rest of the city; everything close had been torn down to prevent enemies from approaching without being seen.

A sign with bits and pieces of its letters broken off and its smooth surface blackened and scarred proclaimed that this was
SAFECO FIELD
.

Rumor had it that there had once been an adjacent arena that occupied the open space between the city and the compound. But terrorists had bombed it when it was one of the last active playing fields in the country and still fighting to maintain its traditions. More than two thousand had died in the attack, and much of the building had collapsed. Shortly after, the first of the plagues struck, wiping out fifty thousand in less than a week, and that was pretty much the beginning of the end of the old ways.

Hawk made a circuitous approach to the compound, keeping to the concealment of the rubble and shadows. His destination was some hundred yards east of where he worked his way forward in a crouch, Cheney close beside him. Nothing lived in this part of the city because the men on the walls kept watch day and night; if anything was seen, they were quick to send out a sanitation squad to destroy it. Twilight was the hardest time for the watchers to spot movement in the debris, even on the more open ground, which was the main reason Hawk had chosen this time of day for his meetings with Tessa. He met with her on the same day each week with no deviation. If either failed to show, the meeting was automatically rescheduled for the following night. The time and place were always the same—nightfall in the ruins of an old shelter that had once connected to an underground light rail system.

Hawk scanned his surroundings as he proceeded, searching through a mix of old bones, desiccated animals, and the occasional human corpse. He didn’t look closely at any of it; there wasn’t any reason to. Dead things were everywhere, and there wasn’t anything anyone could do about them. He found the remains of street children almost every week, loners or outcasts or just plain unfortunates who had fallen victim to the things that hunted them. He no longer found the remains of adults; except for the Weatherman, those few still living outside the compounds had long since fled into the countryside, where your chances were marginally better if you possessed a few survival skills.

Hawk had lost two of his own family in the five years he had been living in the underground. The Croaks had gotten one, a little girl he’d named Mouse. The older boy, Heron, had died in a fall. He could still see their faces, hear their voices, and remember what they had been like. He could still feel the heat of his rage at having failed them.

It took him a long time to reach the outbuilding, working his way slowly and carefully through the ruins to keep out of sight of the compound guards, which sometimes required that he change directions away from the place he was trying to reach. Cheney stayed close to him, aware of his caution. But Cheney knew enough about staying alive to avoid being seen in any case. Hawk was always amazed at how anything so big could move so quietly and invisibly. When Cheney didn’t want to be seen or heard, you didn’t see or hear him. Even now, he would come up on Hawk unexpectedly, appearing from the shadows as if born of mist and darkness. If the boy hadn’t been so used to it, he would have jumped out of his skin.

When he reached the shelter leading to the rail system, he slipped down the darkened stairwell to the underground door and rapped three times, twice hard and once soft, then stepped back and waited. Almost immediately the locking device on the other side of the door released, the door opened, and Tessa burst through.

“Hawk!” She breathed his name like a prayer answered and threw her arms around him. “I almost gave up! Where were you?” She began kissing him on his face and mouth. “I was so sure that this time you weren’t coming!”

She was always like this, desperate to be with him, convinced he wouldn’t appear. She loved him so much that it frightened him, yet it made him feel empowered, too. She gave him a different kind of strength with her love, a strength born of knowing that you could change another person’s life just by being who you were. That he felt the same about her reinforced his certainty that by being together anything was possible. He had known it almost from the moment he had first seen her. He had felt it deep inside in a way he had never felt anything else.