Digger 1.0 (2 page)

Let’s stay well clear of Hagersville
,
Walker told himself again. They had no intel on it. Which, in and
of itself, was cause for suspicion.

Why was there no intel? If a city was dead,
people salvaged there. If the burg was still operating as a town,
people did trade there. Instead, there’d been a conspicuous absence
of palaver regarding Hagersville. And as they’d drawn closer, when
they would have expected to hear chatter and rumors, there was not
a word from—or about—the city.

Steer clear
.

Walker peered out through the armored slats
at the back of the bus. Twenty-three vehicles stretched out behind
him: three buses, two semis, and an assortment of dune buggies. All
of them kept barely running on a homebrew fuel that was only just
reliable.

An offhand glance to the north, looking for
Hagersville, expecting nothing, and he saw them.

Bikers coming on through the low scrub and
thick sand, creating dust clouds in the morning breeze.

He ran back to the ladder that led up to the
observation platform, tapping the shooters on the head. They knew
the drill.

Action.

Stations.

He climbed the ladder and raised his busted
‘nocs to his eyes.

A lot of ‘em, he thought as he saw the dust
trails blooming in the sand and scrub.

But they’d fought biker gangs before and
won.

They’d fight them again today.

They’d win today.

Because they had to.

Ever since the Dark Day, every single day
was a day you had to win.

And biker gangs move faster than hordes. You
can’t outrun them. You have to fight them, and you have to win.

Unconsciously he circled his upraised arm
and stomped his foot on the old galvanized steel of the roof of the
bus. Rufus the driver knew what to do as he pulled the ancient
Bluebird school bus off to the right hand side of the road. The
other buses came alongside as did the two massive trucks, forming a
small box fort. The dune buggies and assorted other cars were now
under the command of Mason. Moments later, Mason in the lead buggy,
pulled up alongside the bus.

“Circle off to the south and try to get up
on that low hill!” shouted Walker, pointing off toward the hill in
the distance. Mason knew what to do after that. They’d wait until
the bikers attacked the mobile fort, then they’d come in like a
quick reaction force and try to chew them up from behind. Or lay
low out in the brush and provide sniper cover. Either way they had
options.

In seconds, Mason and the rest of his force
were off in great clouds of dust, disappearing into the scrub like
wary coyotes.

Walker let his ‘nocs go and shouldered his
hunting rifle. He scoped the bikers, looking for an obvious leader.
Nothing. They were the usual assortment of road trash, probably
held together by a violent psychopath. Probably looking for easy
prey. Probably used to it in all the years since the day the
blindness hit, when absolute darkness like a palpable and
impenetrable spirit came down and all of humanity went blind. When
the sun went dark and all the stars refused to shine. He hated to
stereotype, but since the Beginning, he’d learned that survival
favored those who embraced unpleasant realities. Before the
collapse, there were good bikers and bad bikers just like there’d
been good accountants and bad accountants. But in this new world it
paid to assume the worst, and despite his pre-collapse
proclivities, he’d learned that stereotyping was often a valid
survival technique. Perhaps these bikers would ride on by, but he
doubted it. Probably they were on the hunt.

Stray families caught broken down along the
highway.

Lone preppers with a single AR-15 who
thought being off the beaten track was enough to avoid trouble.

Basically, the outnumbered weak.

Still
, there were a lot of ‘em, thought Walker as he
watched the bikers come on in three distinct, though ragged waves.
They weren’t riding on by. This was an attack formation.

The sudden loud reports of rifles began to
erupt from within the bus and already the first wave of bikers were
falling. Walker scoped a downed rider who dropped his bike after
being hit. He was small, bow-legged and brown. He had a large
Pancho Villa mustache and bad tattoos. Talk about stereotypes. This
guy was a cartoon. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket with some
kind of specific white paint design across the back. A devil,
maybe.

Affiliated
, thought Walker. A
“
one percenter
”.

Another bullet from one of the shooters on
the bus tore the downed biker’s head off an instant later.

Probably not used to a fight, thought
Walker. Been too easy for far too long.

For a moment he thinks they might do
something here in the Badlands, Walker and his plucky band of
survivors, even if that something is just to survive one more
day.

The second wave of bikers weaved through the
sagebrush and sand and passed the downed Mexican bikers without a
look or thought.
These are different. The first ones were meat,
meant to draw fire.
Walker tracked one, thought about squeezing
off a shot on the guy, and passed when the rider suddenly dropped
down out of sight into a gully.

But that rider had been different than the
ones of the first wave. A white guy. Typical Hell’s Angel, hell
bent for leather type from back in the day before the blindness
struck, heralding the end of everything.

Odd, thought Walker. Road gangs didn’t
usually work together. They were too tribal. Too likely to start
fightin’ with each other when the pickings got slim or even when
there was something good to fight over.

Other bikers from the second wave were
dropping their fat tired hogs in the sand, unlimbering heavy
hunting rifles and beginning to draw down on the bus.

A loud
Daaaang
sounded off the clap-trap armor of
the observation deck and Walker dropped down into the bus. Bullets
were beginning to careen off the thick armor they’d pieced together
and welded to the sides of the bus along their travels. A cobbled
together and reinforced heavy-duty suspension allowed the bus to
carry the added weight. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked.

Now Walker’s shooters would take their time
and find their targets, or so he hoped. It was just a matter of
time before the armored convoy wore out their attackers and then,
hopefully, Mason would come in at the bikers from behind.

“Judy’s hit!” someone screamed. Walker
threaded the shooting nests and found Judy. Her teeth were gritted
as she tried to tie off a bandage with one hand.

“Forget about me, Walker!” she grunted.
“Just got grazed by a stray.”

Walker checked her. She was right. A war
wound to brag about later, maybe on a gulf coast beach somewhere.
Maybe if they lived past today.

He walked along the aisle, trying to see out
of the slats, trying to see the third wave.

Where had they gone, He wondered.

~~~

An hour later, they were still pinned down
and there was no sign of Mason. Walker chanced a bold look from the
deck of the observation tower and saw no sign of the quick reaction
force anywhere. Bikers were merely taking unmolested pot shots at
the small mobile fort. But Walker knew he had ammo to spare and
food and water and shelter. They could wait out their attackers for
weeks out here along the highway and the scrub. They’d done it
before. They could do it again if they had to.

But something’s wrong this time, he thought
as he searched for the missing Mason. He knew it in his heart.

~~~

Toward sunset, they saw black smoke rising
from the small hill where Mason had led the reaction force. There
was nothing good about those twisting black smoky twirls and when
Walker put the ‘nocs on the hill he saw heat waves shimmering up
from ominous flames, growing around a silently shrieking woman he
knew as Cat from Colorado. One of Mason’s shooters. Another wooden
pillar was pushed upward and he saw a bloodied Mason strapped and
bound to it. He saw heat waves and flames and then he lowered the
busted ‘nocs and Walker knew they were in trouble this time.

The sun was bloody in the west. The night
sky above wide and streaked in black and blue. Minutes later, as
all the vehicle commanders, the
surviving
vehicle
commanders, rallied in the center of the mobile fort, Walker told
them it was time to mount up and push on under cover of night.

Flee, was what he thought. Remembering how
he’d fled for days on end after the Fall of Taos. He’d flee
again.

As Walker told them what to do and where to
go if they got separated, Rufus the bus driver began to lean on the
ancient Bluebird school bus horn. A loud blaring bleat. Walker ran
to the door of the bus and up the steps. Rufus, rangy
scraggly-chinned Rufus, pointed through the armored slats of the
front windshield and out toward the road beyond. The road that led
into the east, through a place called the Basin. The road south of
Hagersville.

Something was out there on the road.

One ancient massive headlight bore down on
them, racing toward the openings in the slats. Even in the moment
that Walker watched it, tried to understand it, tried to make yet
another plan to deal with yet another disaster, it moved from far
to near with startling speed.

He had only one thought in that final moment
before impact. He yelled, “Run!”

But he couldn’t be sure if he’d actually
yelled.

A moment later, an old priority mail
delivery truck packed with a mixture of fertilizer and other
chemicals that go
boom
slammed head-on into the bus. In the moment
just before that, Rufus saw the wide-eyed terror of the suicide
driver as he raced at them. A biker with hate and anger and fear
and even something else in his eyes.

Belief maybe.

Something.

Then,
Boom
.

~~~

The moon was high that night. It was
midnight maybe, when the last of the shooters pinned down in the
shattered vehicles ran out of ammo close to hand.

A bleeding and badly burned Walker, lying
stunned and immobile beneath one of the semis, watched as the
bikers, all different types, multiple gangs even, he guessed, came
in to finish off what remained of the survivors. Those who’d lived
past the initial explosion and sniper fire.

One of the Mexican bikers came in through
the ragged, blown open gap in their mobile fort. He was short and
built like a bull. Pancho Villa mustache. Machete. Stereotype.
Walker could see the 1 Percenter patch and the
El Diablo
drawn in ghostly
white paint across the back of the dusty black leather jacket when
the biker turned away from him, bending down to hack one of the
other wounded survivors to death.

And there was something else. A large white
splash of paint under the
El Diablo
, and imprinted on the white splash was a
black hand.

No more bullets.

Knife work now.

When the man’s back was turned, Walker
pulled a body—the body that used to house one of his few true
friends—over him and he laid very still, forcing himself to take in
air slowly, with almost imperceptible breaths, knowing the ruse
probably wouldn’t work. But it was all he had left after everything
ended, again.

He’d been right, he thought, right about
better times. Right about not believing even himself regarding
them.

Ellis Kint rolled out of his pallet at his
normal time and his head drooped to his chest as he stretched his
calves and clinched and released them in the darkness. Systems
check. His ability to survive was directly related to his ability
to work, so he’d become increasingly attuned to the condition of
his body, testing it from the moment he rolled out of the rack. The
slight twinge of his calf muscles wanting to cramp told him that he
was low on potassium. He’d need to add some dark, leafy greens to
his diet today. That is
if
the goats hadn’t gotten into the
garden again. Yesterday the kale and collards were standing good
and tall. Hopefully, the goats hadn’t destroyed anything
overnight.

“Goats,” he sighed in the darkness. “Who
needs ‘em?”

We do
, he answered himself.

He straightened his pallet and pushed it up
against the wall. That’s what he called it. His
pallet
. Beds
were for the time before
the Beginning
, before the
blindness. This was a new world, and he’d determined that beds were
for people without cares and fears and threats and woes. Everything
had changed since the Beginning.
Pallet-time
, that’s what he
said when it was time to turn in at night. A man sleeping on a
pallet has his woes and doesn’t underestimate them.

Ellis had plenty of woes. Of that he was
most certain. Just yesterday the goats had gotten into his
seedlings again, and another week’s worth of work had been ruined
in just a few minutes. Now everyone was looking to him for answers.
The old saying was mostly true. If a fence won’t hold water, it
won’t hold a goat. Something had to be done, but Ellis was out of
ideas, at least for the moment. One solution
—
a bad one—always popped into his mind first. They
could kill and eat the four Alpine goats (two milking nannies, a
female kid, and one billy,) but then there wouldn’t be any milk for
the family.

Not an option worth considering
.

Milk was often the main thing that would
keep them alive when the other food ran low. Feeding the family was
a constant concern. A daily one. What bigger care is there than the
survival of the family?

And while you are worrying about milk and
goats and feeding the family, somewhere out there a horde might be
moving your way.