The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) (20 page)

She moved surprisingly fast. Lucas remained behind, watching the building in case anyone appeared. When he couldn’t see Ruby any longer, he snicked out of the corner of his mouth twice and waited.

Nothing.

“Come on, Tango. Listen up,” he muttered, and then snicked again.

When Tango didn’t show himself, Lucas abandoned hope that the horse would hear him and dragged his saddle through the tall grass, carrying the saddlebags over one shoulder while carrying the M4 in his free hand. He stopped to snick again every twenty yards, and as he was nearing a clump of tall bushes, a huge dark shape materialized out of the night and neared him with a whinny. Lucas’s smile came unbidden to his lips, and he whispered Tango’s name as the stallion drew abreast of him.

Lucas had Tango’s saddle pad and bridle out of the bags in moments and strapped the gear onto the horse while watching the area by the bunker, his Remington in the scabbard hanging from the horn. After a quick inspection of his work, he took the reins and walked Tango to where Ruby and Eve were crouched in the field.

“You found him!” Eve said.

“He found me. Ruby, where to from here?”

“I’ve got a storm cellar about a mile from the main building. I use it to store bottling equipment for my herbs and a few odds and ends. It’s not much, but it’ll do in a fix for up to a week. Two rooms, no frills. But it’s invisible unless you know where to look.”

“That sounds awfully good right now.”

“We keep our heads down, we should be fine.”

“You still have that damn bracelet?” Lucas asked.

“In my pocket.”

“Are you a hundred percent sure it can’t give us away?”

“Absolutely. It’s harmless as long as it’s in the case. Probably even out of it now that the cable’s been cut.”

Lucas nodded. “Hope you know what you’re doing.”

Ruby managed a smile. “Even a broken clock…”

They walked through the darkness, Tango by Lucas’s side with Eve in the saddle, and made it to the storm cellar in under an hour. The night was quiet around them as Lucas helped Ruby unlock the cellar door, her energy having faded somewhere back in the field. As promised, the interior of the cellar was stark, and they did a quick inspection to ensure there were no unwanted reptilian visitors with Ruby’s flashlight, the bright beam dampened through a sheer cloth once the outer door was closed.

A detonation vibrated the ground, and then two more in rapid succession, and they rushed to the doorway and Lucas eased it open. There was nothing to see, no fireball, but the corners of Ruby’s mouth pulled downward.

She looked to Lucas. “Well, that’s that. Surprised they got in, but that’s why you always have a backup.”

“Any chance of survivors?”

“I doubt it.”

“What did you rig it with?”

“I had eight portable propane tanks – the five footers. I kept each ten percent full, just in case.”

“Nice. And to detonate them?”

“Blasting cap and enough TNT from a miner friend to vaporize the whole shebang. Electronic trigger. A baby could have wired it up.”

His eyebrows rose. “Must have been quite a blast.”

“In an enclosed space like that, nobody’s walking away from it.”

Lucas regarded her with newfound respect. “Hope you’re right.”

Her profile looked sharp in the moonlight, her features hard planes, and he had a sudden flash of Ruby as a younger woman, fiercely smart and independent.

She exhaled audibly and stared into the field.

“I am.”

Chapter 27

Paco Espinoza Rivera, also known as Loco, forked more scrambled eggs into his mouth as a tall man with elaborate facial tattoos and a puckered scar running from above his milky left eye to his upper lip approached the circular wooden table at which the cartel kingpin was sitting and pulled up a chair. Loco, who had created the eponymous cartel as a teenager, was thirty-six years old, a sociopath who had killed more men by the time he was seventeen as a gang hit man than he had fingers.

He’d spent time in Chula Vista and East San Diego, building support for his group with the gangs there and, with his contacts on the other side of the border, had established an informal collection of vicious lowlifes who’d claimed El Paso as their turf. He’d been arrested countless times, but no charges had ever stuck, what with witnesses disappearing or refusing to testify.

After the collapse, when El Paso had erupted in an all-out turf war between more powerful interests, he and a group of enterprising gang members had moved east and settled in Pecos, which was small enough to control and defend but large enough to support his aspirations. Over time he’d taken over the town, the population a fragment of its earlier size after the flu and starvation had worked their magic, and Pecos was now owned and operated by his group, which numbered several hundred strong – or had, until they’d lost a quarter of their membership in the last two days from disastrous operations to the north.

The tall man was Garret, a representative of the Crew, who’d arrived with a small group of men at the start of the week to work a cooperation deal with the Locos – they would provide the muscle in recovering the woman and girl, and in return would keep the spoils of their raids. They wanted trade assistance from Houston as well as protection from the Crew cartel while retaining their autonomy.

Loco had jumped at the deal, but was now having second thoughts. Some of his best fighters had died taking the town, and he’d gotten word only minutes ago that the entire war party that had gone after the child when Garret’s tracking device had pinpointed her location had been vaporized in a powerful explosion.

The report had come in via two-way radio from the site to a waiting messenger with another two-way to the transmitter that the Locos controlled in their headquarters at the Pecos courthouse. The operator had demanded details twice, unable to believe that all but one lookout who’d been posted above ground had been killed.

“Garret, want some huevos?” Loco offered. “Coffee? Freeze-dried instant, but it’s not terrible. Never goes bad.”

“Don’t mind if I do.”

Loco snapped his fingers, and a short woman with the face of a prizefighter ducked into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for the newcomer. Garret watched the cartel boss munch his eggs like a farmhand, his smacking as loud as a pig chowing slop, one arm on the table to protect his food – the unconscious posture a giveaway of his time behind bars, where everyone ate that way to avoid another prisoner making a grab for it.

The woman brought a steaming cup of coffee and a plate piled high with scrambled eggs, and Garret picked at them as he waited to hear why the gang leader had summoned him.

“We heard back on your girl,” Loco said, as though discussing the weather.

“And?” Garret asked.

“Didn’t go so good, man.”

Garret stopped eating. “How exactly didn’t it go so good?”

“Complications.”

“Like what?”

“We lost everyone. Place blew up.” Loco dropped his fork onto his plate and clapped his hands together with a manic expression, his eyes huge. “Boom! Like that.” Loco laughed.

“And the girl?”

Loco shrugged. “
No sabe, kemosabe
. My boy thinks it was a booby trap, and if he’s right, she’ll turn up alive sooner or later, right? You got that scanner. We just got to wait.”

Garret fought to maintain his composure. “I told you that she was to be taken alive.”

Loco sat back, a dangerous expression replacing his grin. “You
asked
she be taken alive, homey. Not dissing you, but nobody tells Loco nothin’. Not on my turf. Don’t step to me like that or there gonna be problems, you understand what I’m saying?”

“She’s very important to my boss. He would be…disappointed…if she got hurt, or died, while in your territory.”

“Yeah, well, I can’t do nothin’ about all that until we know more. But what I do know is we need to talk about things. I lost fifty men on this goose chase. Didn’t sign up for that.”

No, Loco had signed up for a walk in the park, Garret thought. It was inconceivable that fifty fighters were dead; but then again, nobody had factored in the mystery man the woman had told them about. He was an unknown variable, but things had gone south since he’d gotten involved, and Garret was unsure how to best proceed. What he did know was that he didn’t want to have to report to Magnus that they’d lost the girl again, much less that she’d died. If he did, he might as well slash his own wrists while he made the call, because he’d be a dead man walking.

“I hear you made quite a score on weapons and ammo in Loving. Got yourself a bunch of fine horses, too. Seems to me you’ve done pretty well,” Garret observed, returning to his meal.

Loco’s stare was gangsta hard. “We coulda done that anytime. Way I see it, they was just holding all that for us. I was fine with it like that.”

Garret resisted the urge to mad dog Loco. The little puke had no idea who he was dealing with. But Garret had other fish to fry, so he held back, absently tracing the scar on his face, a souvenir from an attempted shanking by a rival. The man had blinded him and stabbed him six times, but that hadn’t stopped Garret from beating him to death, using his head as a hammer against a cell-block wall. If Garret had been so disposed, he could have reached across the table and offed the punk with no more effort than snapping a chicken’s neck, but he wasn’t there to stir up trouble.

He needed the girl.

“Sounds like you have some ideas about how to even things out, huh?” Garret said, choosing diplomacy over brute force.

“That’s right. What can you do for me, man?”

Garret made an offer: homemade methamphetamines Magnus cooked up to keep his troops alert. More advanced weaponry. Training in explosives for ten men Loco could hand select and send to Houston.

They eventually arrived at a deal. Garret’s relief was hollow, though, and the eggs tasted like cardboard in his mouth as he finished his food. A straightforward exercise had turned into a major problem for him, and if he didn’t stop the bleeding soon, Magnus would express his displeasure in an unmistakable way – and then Garret would be replaced by one of the warlord’s other lieutenants.

Garret couldn’t let that happen.

He would return to interrogating the woman to see what else she knew. He believed she’d told him the truth, but with women you could never be sure. He didn’t trust the female of the species, likely a byproduct of his mother abandoning him when he was three, and he’d had considerable difficulty controlling the black cloud of rage that had threatened to overcome him as he was questioning her. He’d wanted to hurt her in ways she couldn’t even imagine when she eyed him with her superior glare, but that wasn’t his mission.

At least, not yet.

Magnus might decide to reward him when he was successful.

Garret knew exactly what he would ask for.

Chapter 28

Ruby hummed as she brewed herbal tea over a butane stove while Lucas and Eve slumbered. She’d awakened with first light and hadn’t been able to get back to sleep. The prior day’s events had so disturbed her psyche that her rest had been filled with horrifying nightmares, each more awful than the last, and she wondered if that was how she’d spend the remainder of her sleeping hours on earth. So many innocents, many of them her friends…

She was as realistic as anyone, but she’d been sure that this many years after the worst of it, things were improving. She had to believe that, or what was the point of going on? If humanity was nothing more than evil running roughshod over good, what hope did anyone have? But the town’s sacking had been worse than anything she could have imagined, and when she closed her eyes, her thoughts were filled with the screams of children, the dying moans of the old, the desperate entreaties of the panicked.

No stranger to history, she knew that what had happened barely registered on the human scale of suffering. The same had happened to the Native Americans, with villages eradicated right down to the chickens. And the Mexicans had done that much, and worse, to the white settlers in Texas, who’d returned the favor by embarking on campaigns on the other side of the Rio Grande and slaughtering anything that moved. Misery was the fuel that powered the engine of humanity, and she couldn’t think of a time when one group wasn’t butchering another over political or nationalistic differences, religious disagreements, or when all else failed, the color of their skin. No, this was nothing new; but knowledge wasn’t the same as experience, and after seeing her fellow travelers claw their way back from the abyss and build a tiny slice of civilization from the ashes, she’d had hope. Foolishly, she now knew.

Lucas stirred and groaned in his sleep, and Ruby shook her head. That poor man had lost everything. As had she, but he was haunted by ghosts she couldn’t fathom, whereas she was already thinking about how to start over – and where. Her optimism was completely unwarranted, but her faith in God and in her own abilities was strong, and even if she didn’t understand everything about what transpired on this earth, she was confident she would persevere.

She looked over at the girl, and her heart melted. So young, so pure, Eve radiated goodness and possibility and hope. If there was evil so dark it blotted out the sun, then it was surely countered by good so obvious and promising.

But Lucas? He was an enigma. The one thing she was certain of was that he wanted revenge – thirsted for it – and would exact it in a terrible manner. He was only one man, but he had an energy, an inner fire that burned white hot, and she didn’t envy those who’d incurred his wrath.

He shifted on the old horse blanket he was using as a mattress as she poured her first cup of tea of the morning, and then sat up as she stirred the mixture.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Morning.” He checked his watch and yawned. “I needed that.”

“I figured you did.”

He stood and stretched his arms over his head. “Any sign of the bad guys?”

“Fortunately not.”

Lucas regarded Eve’s sleeping form. “I’m thinking I’ll head out this morning. Can I ask you to watch her while I’m gone?”