The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) (22 page)

Lucas tied Gunner off beside eight other horses and nodded to an old man sitting on a milk carton in the shadows, pistol in hand. “Watch my ride?”

“On the house, Señor,” he said. “Although tips appreciated.”

“What do you drink?”

The old Mexican gave him a toothless grin. “Anything.”

Inside, the scene was as dangerous as any he’d ventured into since the collapse: a smattering of marauders, traders, and murderous-looking locals – but to Lucas’s surprise, no obvious cartel members. He approached the bar and nodded to a rail-thin bald man who was staring at him like he planned to rob the place.

“What are you serving?” Lucas asked.

“Moonshine, tequila, home-brew beer.”

“How cold’s the beer?”

“Room temperature.” The man named a price: three bottles for one round of ammo.

Lucas tossed one of the 9mm rounds he’d brought for barter on the bar. “Perfect.”

He spent the next half hour nursing a beer that tasted like sweat socks, commiserating with a trader from San Antonio way who’d gotten a lousy deal on a pair of horses from a cartel buyer, milking him for information on the group’s habits.

“They stick to their joint at the courthouse. Locos only. Keeps the murder rate down to something tolerable, according to the locals.”

“Yeah? What do most of the locals do for a living?”

“Whatever the cartel tells them to.”

“What about the people who don’t go along?”

“They’re all dead. Cartel made a point of exterminating them, going block by block. Of course, weren’t many left after the bug got done with ’em. Hit hard here. But nothing like as bad as in the bigger towns.”

“Yeah?” Lucas said, pretending interest.

“El Paso, Austin, San Antonio…you wouldn’t recognize ’em. Tell you what, buddy, you ain’t a believer in God, you’ll believe in hell once you seen what I have.”

“That bad, huh? I was in El Paso for a couple weeks after the flu hit. Got out when the power died.”

“Just in time. Turned into a free-for-all. No border patrol to stop the beaners from crossing and killing anything that moved. Local gangs going nuts. No law, no army, nothing. A friend said that for a solid month, all you heard from sundown to sunup was shooting. Looters picked the place clean, raped anyone with a pulse, you name it. Once the food ran out, they turned on each other. Good riddance.”

“What’s it like now?”

“Divided between two Mexican cartels. Gun battles every day. Meth labs all over town. Still a trade for that. Some things never change.”

“No sign of the government getting its act together?”

The trader’s laugh was a dry hack. “What government? Ain’t none. Although I heard rumors about D.C. having power. Probably, knowing how things work. They probably got champagne and hookers and AC while the country’s starving. Ain’t that how it always is?”

“Anywhere else?”

“Parts of Houston and Dallas, but only gang areas.”

“You’d think people would have organized and taken their cities back by now.”

The trader checked furtively around and lowered his voice. “That’s dangerous talk there. The gangs are organized. They kill if you look at ’em wrong. Try to set up resistance, your kids get burned alive in front of you, and then your wife gets gang-raped, and then they skin you alive and drag you down the street until you’re hamburger.” The trader shook his head. “One thing to talk about standing up, another to do it. See that a few times, trust me, bruthah, you’re not steppin’ outta line.”

“Just hard to believe.”

The man smiled sadly. “
And it was granted to the one who sat on it to take peace from the earth, and that people should kill one another
.” He took a sip from a shot glass half full of tequila. “That’s the Good Book. Revelation 6:3-4. Tells it all right there in black and white. This here’s the end times. Just got to keep our heads down and wait for it all to play out.”

The trader didn’t know where the cartel kept its prisoners, and as he grew drunker and more morose, he gradually lost interest in any further discussion. Lucas detached and, sickened by the aroma of unwashed bodies and rancid sweat in the bar, carried his remaining two beers out to the old man and handed them to him.

“Where would be a good place to camp in town?” Lucas asked.

The old man studied him and shook his head. “I wouldn’t.”

“Anyplace safe to leave my horse?”

“All dangerous.” The man looked to his left. “There’s a lot down by the courthouse, maybe two blocks away, has some grass growing. Horse might like it. But I’d sleep with your eyes open.”

Lucas nodded and, after checking his saddlebags to verify nothing had been filched, led Gunner toward the courthouse, a plan taking shape with every heavy step.

Chapter 30

After tying Gunner to a tree in the vacant lot, Lucas filled every available compartment of his plate holder with magazines and made for the cartel’s clubhouse. He darted from building to building toward the rear of the courthouse, having verified that the disinterested sentries were only guarding the front on his ride by. He paused on the corner and noted through his binoculars that they were bored, playing cards and not paying attention to their surroundings, secure in the knowledge that they owned the town and that nobody posed any danger to them.

He hoped to leverage that complacency and make it work against them. His only advantage was surprise, and once he lost it, he would be a dead man unless he could force the cartel to play the game he had in mind. His chances weren’t stellar, but he didn’t care – he wanted blood for blood, and by his reckoning, a hundred of the cartel needed killing if it was to be an even score. Although preferably he could exterminate them all.

The only way he could see of inflicting maximum casualties was to blow up the building, but that wouldn’t be easy. He had no explosives, there was no gas to ignite, and it was just him and a few guns.

But he would find a way.

He edged along an abandoned hulk on the final block, and when he was across the street from his target, he stood motionless in the shadows and studied the building through the NV monocle. Nothing moved, and from what he could tell, there was nobody minding the back side.

Lucas glanced at his watch. Closing in on midnight, and no lights were on in the building except in the front area. The music from the festivities carried, reverberating off the brick buildings that surrounded him, which would further mask the sound of his entry – at least, that was his hope.

He lowered the NV scope, darted across the street, and moments later was at one of the ground-floor windows. Most had been broken out and were now boarded up, but several still held their glass, and it was one of these that he selected for his entry. He tried the frame, but it was locked. After scanning the area a final time, he withdrew his hunting knife from its sheath and slammed the metal handle base against the glass.

The pane shattered and collapsed into the building, and Lucas cringed at the sound. Not waiting to see whether he had attracted unwanted attention, he knocked out the fragments along the bottom that thrust upward like broken teeth and pulled himself through.

His boots crunched the glass on the floor as he made for the door. The room he found himself in was an administrative office that had obviously been sacked. At the door, he listened with his ear against the wood panel – hearing nothing, he pulled it open.

The hall was pitch black, and Lucas took cautious steps toward the stairs that led to the second floor, using the monocle to guide him. At the stairway, he paused at a noise from the far end of the corridor and ducked into the stairwell at the sound of a door opening. Pounding music from the foyer momentarily flooded the hall, accompanied by men’s raucous laughter and yells, and then faded as the door closed.

A flashlight beam played along the floor and footsteps approached. Lucas gripped his knife and set the NV monocle on a step behind him as he waited for whoever was nearing to reach him. The hallway brightened as the flashlight drew even with the stairwell, and a wiry man with tattoos ringing his neck stepped into view, a pistol in hand, unaware of Lucas only a few feet away.

Lucas kicked the man’s pistol hand hard enough to send the weapon clattering down the hall, and then clocked him in the temple with the heavy knife handle. The flashlight tumbled from the man’s hand as his eyes rolled into his head, and Lucas dropped him with a left hook that nearly broke his jaw.

The gunman slumped to the floor, stunned, and Lucas sheathed the knife and scooped up the flashlight and pistol. He turned to where the thug lay on the floor and trained the man’s Glock on his head.

“Get up. Nice and slow. Now,” Lucas said menacingly.

The man struggled to rise, and Lucas motioned to the stairwell.

“Up the stairs. Come on,” Lucas instructed.

The thug looked confused, but not alarmed, and Lucas wanted to keep him off balance until he could have a discussion in a more private area. He shined the light into the man’s eyes, causing him to wince and twist away.

“Start walking or I pop a cap in your skull,” Lucas warned.

“You a dead man,” the man managed.

“We all go sometime,” Lucas agreed. “Move.”

The thug staggered up the steps, and Lucas snagged the monocle on the way up with his flashlight hand, his right steady as a rock holding the pistol. At the second floor, Lucas glanced down the hall and directed the man to one of the doors. “Inside,” he said.

The man twisted the handle and sneered at Lucas. “Locked, homeboy.”

“Try the next one.”

He did, and the door opened. Lucas motioned with the flashlight. “Inside.”

The man stepped into the dark room, and Lucas followed six feet behind him. As the man was turning around, Lucas clobbered him again, this time with the base of the aluminum flashlight, and then closed the door behind him.

Four minutes later Lucas exited the room. The man had told him what he needed to know before Lucas dispatched him, the sharp crack of the Walther PPK muffled by a seat cushion. Lucas made his way down the hall to the last door, which he kicked open.

Inside he used the monocle, the flashlight now a liability, and surveyed the room’s contents. After a scan of the items on the floor he moved to a crate of grenades and inspected one, and then slipped three into an empty pocket of his plate carrier. Smiling, he opened a green ammo box of 7.62mm M13 link belt rounds, and then reclosed and latched it. He shouldered an FN Mag M240B medium machine gun before hefting the ammo box, the glow from the bonfires providing just enough light through the window for him to make his way back to the stairwell.

Lucas felt his way down the steps and retraced his route along the hall to the back room through which he’d entered. Once inside, he moved to the window, set down the ammunition case, and freed the NV monocle to survey the street. Satisfied it was empty, he slipped the monocle back into his plate carrier and lowered the machine gun to the ground outside, leaning its barrel against the brick exterior. He set the ammo box on the windowsill for easy recovery and then dropped from the window, landing in a crouch.

He was back across the street in moments, with the gun shouldered and the ammunition case in his left hand, and he inched along the street until he was near the jail across the plaza from the courthouse. The building was scorched from where the cartel had torched the building; the windows were missing and the interior black as death. Lucas made his way to the rear of the jail on the side hidden from the guards and entered through the back exit, whose heavy steel door stood ajar.

A maintenance ladder led to the roof, and five minutes later he’d prepared his spot: the M240B waited on its bipod, barrel angled toward the stars, and the belt of ammunition was locked and loaded into place. He checked the time and returned to the ladder, his pulse pounding in his ears, and descended to the ground floor.

If he was successful, they’d never know what hit them. After some persuasion, the thug had told him that at least half the cartel’s foot soldiers were partying in the courthouse, enjoying the free alcohol and drugs that were their reward for their raid on the town. The celebrants numbered over a hundred, and Lucas’s mouth twisted into an ugly grin. He would bring the hurt to them in a way they’d never imagined, and would either succeed or die trying.

And he didn’t plan on dying tonight.

Not when there was work to do.

Chapter 31

Eddie, one of the pair of guards chartered with staying sober and keeping the fiesta at the courthouse safe – from what, he didn’t know, since nobody in their right mind would have tried anything in the heart of the cartel’s stronghold – looked up from his cards as a tall figure in a cowboy hat materialized out of the darkness to his right.

He dropped the straight he was trying for and reached for his AK. “What the hell you think you–”

Lucas’s Kimber roared. The first hollow point caught Eddie in the base of the throat, expanded as it passed through his body, and took his life with it when it exited the back of his neck, leaving a wound the size of an orange. His partner was raising his gun when Lucas’s second round punched through his nose and blew the rear of his skull across the pavement.

Lucas accelerated to a flat-out run and covered the twenty yards to the front entrance of the courthouse in Olympic speed. His bet that with the music blaring, the cartel vermin wouldn’t hear his shots paid off, and he pulled one of the tall wooden front doors open and tossed in two of the grenades, one after the other. He didn’t pause to view the reaction of the drunken crowd, instead pouring on the steam and making for the jail as the cartel members registered the armed grenades and fought to make it through the exit before they blew.

He was rounding the front of the jail when the grenades detonated, and picked up his pace. In twenty more seconds Lucas was on the roof, and at the M240B moments later, sighting down at the courthouse as the surviving cartel killers stumbled from the building, some with weapons in hand sweeping the plaza for a target, others wounded and streaming blood, several missing limbs.