Canyon: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 2) (13 page)

Lola was a survivor too. Unlike Pico, who reacted out of fear, she was all emotion and grit.

Battle didn’t blame her. Her kid was missing and in the hands of people who’d made her life a living hell. She had every right to pout or question or demand action. Battle was almost, though not quite, at the point where he appreciated her devil’s advocacy and her sharp, unwavering focus when it came to finding Sawyer.

He braced himself as the Humvee swung to the left and accelerated along the feeder road before merging onto the interstate. The wind whipped past either side of the cab, chilling the air.

Battle reached for a worn olive-colored fleece hoodie from the floor of the bed and slid his arms into the sleeves. He hadn’t noticed it before, and it was a little snug, but he was glad to have it. His muscles were already tight, his lungs angry at the cold air. A little warmth was welcome.

He pulled the hood over his head, stretching it atop the Stetson as best he could, and watched the infinite trail of the highway behind the Humvee. The occasional oak or desert willow dotted the flat brown landscape on either side of the wide asphalt strip. A clump of
Vitex
caught Battle’s attention. He recognized them despite the lack of distinctive purple flowers. His wife, Sylvia, had loved
Vitex
. They were drought tolerant and offered the same beauty, she’d told him, as a Crepe Myrtle, though they grew faster and appeared less ornamental to Sylvia.

Battle shook free of the daydream, reminding himself of the need to be vigilant. They could run into trouble at any moment. Still, his attention drifted.

The interstate was lined with billboards. Most of them were tattered, the product or place they advertised barely decipherable. Battle found himself trying to piece together the gist of each placard as they zoomed by. The ones he could see best were on the opposite side of the interstate, facing the eastbound traffic.

He smiled at a black and yellow billboard featuring half the face of a cartoon beaver. The board promised clean bathrooms only two hundred and eighteen miles away in Terrell, Texas. That was the closest Buc-ee’s.

Buc-ee’s was a Texas landmark. Part truck stop, part cafe, part gift store, Buc-ee’s made road trips fun. Sylvia had always insisted on stopping at one whenever they passed a location. She’d refused to use the restroom anywhere else. She also loved their fudge and their famous Beaver Nuggets, which their son, Wesson, insisted tasted exactly like Corn Pops cereal.

Battle hadn’t thought about Buc-ee’s in a long time. There were so many things from the pre-Scourge world he’d forgotten. Then he’d remember them and wish he hadn’t.

The smile slid from his face and he tugged the hoodie over his ears. He picked up his rifle and released its magazine. He needed to fill it. Something told him they wouldn’t make it to Lubbock without using it.

CHAPTER 18

OCTOBER 15, 2037, 11:30 AM

SCOURGE + 5 YEARS

I-20 BETWEEN DERMOTT AND JUSTICEBURG, TEXAS

Grat Dalton was saddle sore. He hadn’t ridden a long distance in weeks. His thighs were chafing. His tailbone felt bruised. They’d been running the horses at a two-beat trot, moving along at about ten miles per hour. Grat didn’t think he could handle a gallop.

Emmett Dalton pulled his horse alongside Grat’s. “You okay?” he asked above the clop of the metal shoes on the asphalt. “You got a sour look on your face.”

“Just sore.”

“We’re making good time, I reckon,” Emmett said. “We hit Dermott a lot earlier than I figured we would. Justiceburg is the next town up ahead.”

Grat yanked on the rope that connected him to the boy. “Keep your eyes open,” he spat.

Sawyer opened his eyes and looked over at Grat. Grat saw a look on the boy’s face he didn’t like. He was like a chained dog straining at his collar, ready to pounce if he had the chance.

“How old you say you are?” Grat asked the boy.

Sawyer’s body was bouncing along with his horse’s gait. His bleeding wrists were cuffed together; his hands gripped the saddle horn. “Thirteen.”

“You look older,” Emmett said. “He looks older, right, Grat?”

“He does.”

Emmett laughed. “He don’t look happy neither.”

“No. He don’t.”

“He ain’t gonna be feeling any better when we hit Lubbock,” Emmett said. “That’s for sure.”

Grat chuckled an acknowledgement and shifted his weight in his saddle. He grimaced and shifted again.

“You wanna take a break?” asked Emmett. “We could take a few. Stop on the side of the road. Stretch out.”

“We did that in Dermott,” he said. “The fellas there told us we had a long ride ahead. They said they made the trip plenty. Told us we’d need to keep good time. Weren’t you listening?”

Emmett scowled. “I was listening. I heard them boys. They was grunts like you and me. I don’t need to take ideas from other grunts. That’s not the natural order of things.”

“No,” Grat said. “But our orders ain’t from them grunts in Dermott. They come from the top. You know that.”

“Captain Skinner told us the generals was gonna be there in Lubbock. At least one of them. Maybe more.”

Grat arched his back and adjusted his feet in the stirrup irons. “He said Roof was gonna be there. He wanted to see the boy. This come from him.”

“So?”

“So that means we don’t take another break,” said Grat. “We do our jobs and get the kid to Lubbock. Then we find ourselves a couple women, some pills, a cheap place to sleep. It’s all good then.”

A toothy grin spread across Emmett’s face. “At least a couple women.” He laughed, fidgeting with anticipation in his saddle. “At least a couple.”

“And the pills,” said Grat. “They got good ones in Lubbock. Lots to choose from.”

“Lots of women to choose from,” said Emmett. He licked his upper lip and then flicked his tongue like a lizard. “Ooh wee.”

Grat felt a tug on the rope and he looked over at Sawyer.

The boy’s eyebrows were knitted, his mouth turned down. He suddenly looked his age. “Who’s General Roof?”

Emmett cackled. “Boy wants to know who Roof is.”

“He’s one of the generals,” offered Grat. “One of the men who helped put the Cartel together. He’s a legend.”

Emmett nodded. “A legend.”

“What do the generals do?” asked Sawyer. “I know you grunts do all of the hard work, and the posse bosses are in charge of you. And I know there are captains, right?”

Grat turned away from the boy. He was riding between Sawyer and his brother. Emmett shrugged, apparently unsure of how Grat should answer the question. He drew a full canteen of water from his saddlebag and took a sip of the cool liquid. Cold water was a luxury he didn’t often enjoy. He took a longer swig and sucked it between the gaps in his rotting teeth, swirling it around in his mouth with his tongue.

Sawyer tugged on the rope again. “What do they do?”

Grat tugged back on the rope, almost jerking Sawyer from the saddle as they trotted north. The boy regained his balance and set his feet back into the stirrup irons.

“They run things,” said Grat. “Everything the Cartel does. All over the territory. They’re at the top of the pyramid. That’s all you need to know.”

“Who are they?” Sawyer asked. “How’d they get to the top of the pyramid?”

“First off,” said Grat. “They built the pyramid. Second off, they’re the generals. That’s who they are.”

The kid was persistent. “I mean who
were
they? You know, before the Scourge.”

Grat laughed from his belly. “Who knows, boy?” he said. “Ain’t none of us what we was
before
the Scourge.”

“Yeah,” echoed Emmett. “That’s a stupid question. None of us is who we was.”

They rode for another few minutes in silence, accompanied by the quick tap of the horses’ shoes as they pushed forward. Grat watched Sawyer as they rode. He was intrigued with the kid.

Despite his untenable situation—handcuffed, strapped to a horse, on his way to certain death—he was inquisitive. He was defiant. He was tough. An occasional wind swirled past them, ruffling the collars of the brothers’ matching fourth-hand barn jackets. The elbows and cuffs were threadbare.

They were far warmer than Sawyer, whose teeth chattered reflexively with each northerly gust. The wind, when it picked up, came straight at them, dropping the ambient temperature a good twenty degrees. It was cold enough without that wind. The sun was almost straight overhead on what had become a clear day. The sky was ice blue.

Grat noticed the boy shivering. “You cold?”

Sawyer flexed against the metal cuffs on his wrists. He hunched his shoulders forward and drew his arms close to his side. His chin was tucked to his chest. He glanced over at Grat but didn’t reply.

Grat forgot about his discomfort in the saddle. He didn’t like kids. He never had, even when he was one. They’d picked on him and made him feel small. “Grat the Gnat” they’d called him. He was tall and skinny with narrow shoulders and a bird chest like the boy riding alongside him.

His brother had tried, with a shocking level of futility, to help him when he could. Emmett was small and a half-wit. He wasn’t much help with defending Grat physically or verbally. Sometimes he’d made things worse.

Eventually, as they got older and Grat got stronger, the teasing stopped. Grat turned the tables and became the aggressor. His brother tagged along. When Grat hooked up with a biker gang in Montgomery County, Texas, a year before the Scourge, Emmett was allowed to join too.

They fit in. They had friends. They were respected, for the most part, for their proclivities and their willingness to do whatever needed to be done.

“You remind me of me,” said Grat. “You’re a tough young’un. I respect that. Don’t mean I like you. Means I see where you’re coming from.”

Emmett cackled. “You serious, Grat? You’re joking, right? That’s a joke.”

Grat watched the boy’s non-reaction to his admission. Sawyer didn’t blink. He turned away and buried his head, trying to avoid the buffeting wind as much as he could.

“I ain’t jokin’,” Grat said, his eyes still on the boy. Then he turned to Emmett. “What he’s probably been through, what he’s gonna have to go through at the Jones? I’d be pissin’ in my drawers if I was him.”

Emmett’s face curled into a pout. “That’s a joke. Kid’s a kid. His momma’s dead. He’s gonna be dead. Here you are with your pleasantries and whatnot. I don’t get you sometimes, Grat.”

Grat turned to look at his brother. He sniffed the cold snot dripping at the end of his long, thin nose and then spat a thick wad of it onto the road. “I don’t care what you get, Emmett.”

CHAPTER 19

OCTOBER 15, 2037, 12:02 PM

SCOURGE +5 YEARS

ABILENE, TEXAS

Cyrus Skinner licked the blood from the tip of his middle finger. He’d sliced it on a shard of wood as he picked his way back through the HQ and into his office.

He checked it for a splinter, spreading open the paper-thin gash until another bloom of blood filled the space. Finding none, he sucked it clean again and found his way to the corner of the unrecognizable room.

He took off his white hat and set it carefully on the floor next to him and lowered himself to his knees. He ran his hands along the wood planks on the floor, occasionally tapping on them with his knuckles. He worked one board and then the next, brushing away debris and dust, until a tap produced a hollow sound.

Skinner looked over his shoulder, assuring none of the hundred men gathering outside the HQ on Walnut Street had slipped inside. Confident nobody was in the room with him, he fished a pocketknife from his pants and slid the two-inch blade into the joint between a pair of hollow planks. He leveraged the blade until one of the planks popped up and he could fit his fingers underneath the gap.

Skinner pulled on the board until the three-foot length of it broke free, cracking into two pieces. He folded the knife, returned it to his pants, and used both hands to free the adjacent boards.

He tossed the boards aside, sucked the sting from his finger, and leaned over to peer into the subfloor compartment. The light filtering in through the window was enough for him to see the treasure buried there.

Skinner reached into the hole and pressed his hand flat against an electronic panel. Nothing happened. He tried again. Nothing. Either the blood on his finger or a dead internal battery rendered the fingerprint recognition useless.

Skinner cursed under his breath and searched his memory.

“Yes,” he hissed when the numbers raced back to his consciousness. He grasped the cylinder, spun it to the left three times, and found the right number. He spun it to the right and again to the left then cranked an adjacent lever to open the Cartel’s emergency safe.

Skinner pulled on the heavy iron door and it opened outward. The safe was sitting on its back, its contents placed there neatly. Skinner pulled them out one by one and set them next to his hat.

He looked toward the window and smiled at the dusty sunlight beaming through. Skinner needed sunlight today. He reached one more time into the safe and removed a small black bag. He opened the bag and filled it with the treasure, slung it over his shoulder, and trudged across the debris back to Walnut Street.

A cacophony of gritty, drawling voices met him as he stepped from the wide sidewalk onto the street. He drew his lower lip up toward his nose and nodded. Skinner figured there had to be as many as a hundred fifty, maybe two hundred men crowding the street. Some of them were gathered around a box truck. Others were checking the oil on a rusting black SUV. There was a landscaping trailer draped with a large blue tarp attached to the back of the SUV.

There were countless horses and a couple of motorcycles. Men not preoccupied with prepping their transportation were talking, smoking, checking their weapons. None of them paid Skinner any mind. The grunts and bosses were focused.

This was good. No more child’s play. No more special forces scout teams. They needed overkill to handle Mad Max. Skinner tried to remind himself he knew the infidel’s real name now. It was Battle.
Battle.
He whispered the name to himself again and again as he walked south on Walnut, away from his army.
Battle.
He cursed the name. He cursed the man. He cursed his predicament.