The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) (2 page)

Lucas’s attention fixed on a distant spire of brown dust. He lowered the spyglasses and glanced at the heavens. It would be dark in a few more hours. He eyed the old mechanical pilot’s watch on his wrist, not because he had much use for time anymore, but to help with reckoning. The dust was maybe five miles off, and he didn’t want to blow out his horse on the trek – Lucas would need the animal’s speed to lasso his targets, and that was the priority.

He nodded to himself. At a moderate pace, he could make it to the dust by twilight.

Lucas adjusted the M4A1 assault rifle strapped across his back and felt automatically for the stock of his Remington 700 Police DM .308-caliber rifle in its scabbard by his right knee.

Not that he would need them.

Assuming the dust was the herd.

There wasn’t much to forage in the arid gulches, all the homes having long ago been abandoned and stripped of anything of value, but that didn’t stop looting parties from Mexico from making their way north. The situation south of what had once been the border was as bad or worse than it was here, and based on what he’d seen firsthand, life was cheap to the border scavengers. They lived hardscrabble from anything they could steal, and would kill a man just as soon as look at him – gringo or Mexican, didn’t much matter.

That was one of the reasons Lucas avoided the deserted highways that spanned the area. Other than the pavement being hard on Tango’s hooves, there were the depressing hulks of rusting vehicles dotting the road, left where they’d run dry. Even now, five years after the day everyone had said would never come, the highway was a threat, and there were still scum who lay in wait to ambush travelers – often desperate families trundling carts loaded with their possessions, heading toward somewhere they’d heard might hold better prospects for a life. Fuel had long ago degraded and was unusable, even diesel, leaving survivors to cobble together whatever they could for transportation – bicycles, animals, it didn’t matter as long as it enabled them to keep moving.

“Fool’s errand,” he spat, and stopped at the dry sound of his voice. Talking to his horse was one thing; holding conversations with himself was a warning sign – one of many he was alert to. The fear that he might be cracking up was constant since things had come unraveled.

Lucas made a clicking sound from the corner of his mouth and Tango plodded onward, the horse’s footing unsure on the loose shale. The soft sough of the wind was the only sound besides Tango’s clomping and an occasional snort. Lucas’s senses told him he was alone, but he remained alert. His clothes blended with the backdrop, and he hoped his worn jeans, tan shirt, and plate carrier in desert camouflage made him a difficult target. Unlike in the movies, it was harder than hell to tag a moving figure from any distance, especially with a brisk wind.

He grunted as they moved over a particularly difficult section, and he urged Tango forward, Lucas’s lower back protesting the jolting ride. What he wouldn’t have given for an ATV, or even a dirt bike, much less a four-wheel drive vehicle like his old truck. He’d loved that big Chevy; the truck, like his M4, had been a perk of his service as one of the youngest Texas Rangers in the history of the force, operating with the E Division out of El Paso. But the vehicle, like the organization, hadn’t lasted, and it had been a sad day when he’d left it for dead in the high desert.

The sun was a red ember sinking into the line of clouds when the reports of rifles reached him from the distance. The distinctive chatter of automatic weapons rattled in bursts across the landscape, barely louder than muffled firecrackers, but unmistakable. Tango drew up short, and Lucas’s eyes narrowed as he soothed the horse.

“Looks like the dust wasn’t the herd,” he whispered.

The shooting stopped after several minutes. He guessed that he was still at least a mile away. Lucas scanned the horizon again with the binoculars but saw nothing. Whatever had occurred had taken place out of sight, over a far crest.

His instinct was to investigate – if there was a band of gunmen in the area, he needed to know sooner than later and would cut short his search for wild horses until they cleared out. He intended to use the animals for barter – the ranch was running low on stock items he could trade at a nearby outpost – but he had to be alive to do so, and he wouldn’t be able to cover his tracks adequately while droving unruly mustangs.

“Come on, Tango. Time to earn your feedbag.” Lucas guided the horse to his left, opting for a circuitous path to avoid detection.

Purple and salmon streaked the sky as he dismounted near the crest and tied Tango to a scraggly mesquite tree. He withdrew the Remington 700 rifle and patted the four spare thirty-round magazines of 5.56mm full-metal-jacketed rounds for the M4 in his ATS Aegis V2 plate carrier vest, reassured by the weight of his pride and joy, a Kimber 1911 Tactical Custom II .45 semiautomatic pistol on his hip. Lucas checked the safety and the flash suppressor on the M4, and then his gaze rose to the ebony forms of buzzards wheeling overhead.

Lucas removed his hat as he crept toward the rise and froze behind a cover of dense brush. Bodies lay strewn around the base of a dry gulch. Lucas could tell at a glance that the group near the center had been ambushed from above – it was obvious from their position that the defenders had died staving off the attack.

He regarded the area through his binoculars for several minutes, taking his time to study the bodies: four men wearing army-surplus camouflage shirts and pants, two with plate carriers over their shirts, clutching the distinctive shapes of their AR-15s or M16s. Two of their horses had been gunned down and were already bloating nearby, with a crude travois fashioned from a pair of crossed poles collapsed behind one of them. Nearby, thick crimson globules trailed up the arroyo, probably from horses that had been wounded, but not so badly they couldn’t put distance between themselves and the battleground.

Five assailants ringed the area, their blood streaked against the hard rocks where they’d fallen as they’d closed in. In his mind’s eye Lucas could visualize the battle, which he knew from the shooting had been short and fierce. Judging by the tracks, the smaller group had been traveling northwest along the gulch toward a small lake, where they’d probably planned to spend the night. The attackers had chosen an advantageous spot and, with the sun to their backs, opened fire. But they’d been overconfident and moved in too quickly, suffering heavy casualties in their haste.

Lucas squinted at the steep rock face of the opposite wall of the ravine, dotted with cave openings, wary of any possibility of ambush. Movement from near one of the fallen men in camo drew his attention, and he watched as a vulture withdrew its bloody beak from where it had been feasting. The big bird cocked its head in his direction and sized him up, and then flapped its ebony wings and returned to its meal, having decided Lucas posed no immediate threat from the crest.

It was unlikely that any of the attackers remained, or the buzzards would have been more cautious. Besides, there was no reason for anyone to stick around – assuming there had been any survivors. He didn’t see any horses, so theirs had likely run off as well. More for Lucas to capture, he reasoned pragmatically. Better domesticated animals than wild ones. Easier to sell.

Lucas had seen plenty of death since the collapse. Unmoved, he returned to Tango and remounted. The days of reckoning, of law and order, of consequences, were over, leaving in their wake a brutal alternative of predator and prey. When he’d been a Ranger, he would have made it his life’s mission to hunt down any surviving attackers and drag them to justice, but now no such concept existed, other than that issuing from the barrel of a gun.

He slid his boots into the stirrups, gave Tango a soft slap against his neck with the reins, the M4 clutched in his right hand, and the horse began making his way down the slope toward the grisly scene. Lucas continued to survey the surroundings, sweeping the scene with his rifle barrel.

The vulture hopped away and lifted into the air to join its companions in their overhead vigil as Lucas approached. Satisfied he was unobserved, he dismounted and whispered in Tango’s ear. “Stay.”

Tango blinked at him with mahogany eyes and stood, waiting.

Lucas took in the scene, sickened by the senseless loss of life, and moved to the first of the defenders’ corpses and rolled it over. Three wounds stitched across the man’s chest, the final one having torn away half his shoulder. His sightless eyes stared into eternity with a look of surprise that Lucas knew well, and he laid the man back down and moved to the next, repeating the process of verifying they were dead. It didn’t take long, the pools of blood beneath them all the evidence he needed. All had the rawboned look of men whose diets had dramatically changed when society ended, their consumption of processed crap replaced by whatever they could hunt or grow. He noted that they had reasonably cropped hair and decent gear, which he gathered quickly and placed in a pile, concentrating on the weapons and ammunition, finding little else of barter value he could easily ride with.

Next he moved to the dead horses and checked their saddlebags, which held plastic containers of rice, pots, more ammunition, compasses, dried venison and other durable food, and the usual assortment of paltry belongings that counted for treasures nowadays. He emptied the bags and did a quick inventory, and then replaced the items he couldn’t carry – space and weight would be at a premium, and the value of a good buck knife or an AR-15 and several hundred rounds of 5.56mm were far higher than anything else he’d found.

When he reached the first of the dead attackers, his nose wrinkled in distaste. The man’s head was grimy and buzzing with flies; the front of his skull had been vaporized by a round, leaving only his black, oily hair trimmed into a Mohawk on top and a filthy, unkempt beard below.

“Raider,” Lucas muttered. The Mohawk was the calling card of one of the gangs that roamed the region, terrorizing anyone they came across. They were undisciplined amateurs, but still as dangerous as scorpions and utterly ruthless. Most were career criminals who had taken to the road when the grid had shut down, creating a tribe of cutthroats who lived by robbery and murder rather than the sweat of their brow. The collapse had brought out both the best and the worst in humanity; unfortunately, the worst had largely prevailed, their willingness to employ savagery against the meek giving them the edge.

Lucas had seen the Raiders’ handiwork more than a few times in the undefended homes that had once populated the region. Like a plague of locusts, they destroyed everything they came across, killing all but the young females, whom they pressed into slavery – a fate worse than death, he understood from the rumors. He gave them a wide berth, and they left the town he lived near alone, preferring easier pickings than its heavily armed residents. Like the Raiders, Lucas had a reputation that preceded him, and they avoided the ranch where he lived with his grandfather just as he shunned their stronghold at all costs.

Three of the other dead were also Raiders, one indicator being their weapon of choice, the Kalashnikov AK-47s, whose 7.62mm ammunition was easily obtained from trading with bandits from Mexico, which had been flooded with the guns during the war on drugs. Called the
Cuerno de Chivo
in Spanish – the goat’s horn, so monikered after their distinctively curved thirty-round magazines – most were fully automatic and, while not as accurate as Lucas’s M4, possessed of prodigious punch at ranges up to three hundred yards. Lucas gathered the assault rifles, two of which were the AKM variant with folding wire stocks, and tossed them near the rest of the weapons.

A gurgle from a figure he’d yet to search stopped him in his tracks, and he swung around in a crouch, M4 at the ready. The man, his Mohawk bleached canary yellow, was dressed identically to the other Raiders in filthy black jeans and a sweat-stained shirt. Lucas jogged toward him, ready to open fire, but the man seemed oblivious. Blood from a head wound was crusted across his forehead and eyelids. Lucas relieved him of the Glock in his waistband and toed the AK away, and then knelt beside him cautiously.

The man’s eyes fluttered open and he stared vacantly at Lucas. He tried to speak, but all that emanated from his mouth was a gush of blood; and then his head rolled to the side and he moaned, the death rattle drawn out for a good five seconds.

Lucas went through his things and removed a folding buck knife from the man’s back pocket. It was of high quality and would command a reasonable trade. The Glock and the two spare magazines would also be prized for barter, he knew, although he personally had little use for a 9mm weapon. Lucas’s philosophy had always been that the trade-off of temporary deafness that accompanied firing his Kimber was more than compensated for by its raw stopping power.

Once all the weapons were accounted for, he did a quick inventory and then carried the ones with the highest trade value over to Tango. Lucas loaded his saddlebags to the bursting point with guns and ammunition, disappointed but unsurprised that he had to leave two of the AK-47s and several pounds of ammo behind.

The boom of distant thunder echoed off the gulch walls, and Lucas turned in the direction of the approaching storm – and froze when he spied another figure near a boulder outcropping, chest heaving and obviously alive. He hadn’t spotted the figure earlier, so whoever it was had been well concealed. He sprang into motion, sprinting in a zigzag toward the downed shooter, M4 trained on the figure as he ran.

When he reached the outcropping, he stopped short, mouth open in disbelief.

It was a woman.

Unconscious and gasping, an AR-15 dropped nearby.

But alive, her chest laboring with each ragged breath, her shirt and pants stained dark with blood.

Chapter 2

Lucas slowly lowered his weapon as he neared the woman and took in her condition. She’d been hit in the thigh and the upper chest, her cheap body armor affording inadequate protection against rifle rounds. He crouched by her side and eyed her pale face: her features twisted with agony even in unconsciousness.