The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) (25 page)

Garret pointed to the gap in the barrier wall. “There’s your escape route.”

“Right. Lead the way.”

The riders filed through the opening, Garret at the head of the line, and picked their way down the slope toward the railway. Once on the tracks, he and Luis stopped again to confer. Garret motioned to his left. “We’ll do this the same way. Split up, you go east. Holler if you find anything. They have to have left a trail of some kind.”

Luis nodded. “Keep your radio on. They can’t have gotten far.”

Half an hour later, Luis received a hail on his two-way. Garret’s rasp emanated from the speaker.

“We found fresh tracks.”

“How big a party?”

When Garret spoke after a long pause, his voice was soft. “Looks like one horse.”

“One! The rest must still be back in town. I’ll warn the others. This may not be over.”

“Maybe. But time’s running out.”

“We’re already riding toward you. Keep your eyes peeled.”

Chapter 35

Gunner rested, grazing in the moonlight, as Sierra sat on a nearby rock with Lucas’s first aid kit, eyeing her handiwork. He flexed his arm to test the wrap around his bicep and nodded. Sierra had cleaned the wound with alcohol before applying a bandage and swathing the dressing with gauze. The white lightning had hurt like an unanesthetized root canal, but Lucas had suffered in silence, and the pain was already fading.

He’d been keenly aware of Sierra’s proximity as she’d worked on him, and had done his best to mask his interest, but a part of him had to admit that it had been a long time since he’d felt the touch of a woman. Too long, he thought, and then banished the errant idea – this was neither the time nor the place.

They’d both heard the exchange on the radio, and Lucas’s face was drawn in the gloom. He stood and eyed Gunner. “No way can this horse outrun the cartel’s fresh ones after an all-day ride. He’s beat.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Lucas looked off into the darkness and then indicated the ruins of a roadside café in the near distance. “You hide out in there, and I’ll continue northwest until I get to some terrain where they won’t be able to follow the trail. Then I’ll circle back to the south. They’ll waste hours trying to pick up my tracks, by which time we’ll have enough of a lead so they’ll never find us.”

“What makes you think they won’t find your tracks sooner?”

“They know we’re headed north, so they won’t be looking south. Plus, it’s dark out, so they’ll be hard-pressed to find anything.”

“You think that will work?” she asked skeptically.

“Got any better ideas?”

“We could send Gunner on his way, park in the building, and gun them down as they ride by.”

“Right. Except we don’t know whether they’ve got night vision gear. If they do, that could be our death sentence.” Lucas paused. “Rule number one of successful engagement: always avoid a fair fight.”

She nodded slowly. “How long will you be gone?”

He looked off at the night sky. “Long as it takes.”

Sierra frowned. “I can’t shoot them as they pass by? Not even a little?”

Lucas studied her and turned without comment. She followed him to Gunner and repacked the kit in his saddlebag.

“Don’t make a sound,” Lucas warned. “Or all of this will have been for nothing.”

“What if something happens to you, and you don’t come back?”

“I’ll come back.”

“But what if you don’t?” she pressed.

“Start walking at sunup.”

Sierra looked like she was going to argue, but instead nodded wordlessly. Lucas climbed into the saddle and watched her with more concern than he showed as she limped to the building. The riders were an hour behind them, but would be closing fast, and he couldn’t waste any more time holding her hand. He gathered the reins and directed Gunner west in the hopes that the terrain turned rockier as he neared the foothills.

The young horse had performed admirably, but he was losing steam, and Lucas felt sorry for him having to haul two riders, even at a slow walk. Still, Lucas was keenly aware of the search party on his tail, and so drove the beast to a trot, hating that he had to do so.

Twenty minutes later the texture underfoot transitioned from the alluvial soil created by runoff from the foothills to hard-packed dirt. Another quarter mile and it changed again, from dirt to gravel and then to rock. He craned around to study his tracks and saw that they ended ten yards behind him, and he nodded to himself as he continued due west for another five minutes before slowing Gunner and whispering to him.

“Good boy, partner. Now I just need you to turn in one more burst, and we’re home free.”

The horse plodded south with the monotonous resignation of a prisoner to the gallows, and when Lucas judged that they’d traveled far enough that the tracking party wouldn’t be able to easily pick up the trail, he circled back toward the east and coaxed the horse to greater speed. By his reckoning he was on a bearing that would take him across the path of his pursuers a good mile behind them, assuming they were moving at a fair clip.

He stopped to listen every few minutes, but heard nothing. Eventually, he crossed his own tracks headed north, and noted with satisfaction that they were obscured by multiple hoofprints.

When he arrived at the ruins, Sierra gimped from the interior of the building, gun in hand, and gazed up at him. “It worked,” she said simply.

“So far. Come on. Let’s walk Gunner some, and I’ll use a branch to erase his hoofprints. We only have to do it for a few hundred yards.”

“I didn’t shoot them,” she said with a small smile.

“Good work.”

~ ~ ~

Garret’s hopes evaporated as the hunt for the rider’s tracks entered its third hour. They’d lost sight of the trail earlier, and Garret had directed the men to scour the northern edge of the rocky area. After two sweeps, Luis had complained that there was nothing to find, and warned that they needed to wait until daylight to have a better chance – the night vision goggles were only so good, and they couldn’t display the sort of nuance that a trained eye in sunlight would detect.

Garret had refused, and the search had shifted to the west. He had no idea why the rider had tacked in that direction, but he suspected a rendezvous of some sort – perhaps to pick up a security detail or meet with the other members of the party that had attacked the courthouse and the hospital? Whatever it was, he couldn’t give up until he’d exhausted all other options.

Another hour passed, and when they hadn’t met with any success to the west, where the soil transitioned to hard rock as the hills rose from the plain, he’d ordered the men to stand down. They would wait until morning, which would be there soon enough.

Luis busied himself with the two-way radio as casualty reports continued to come in from Pecos, and by the time the first faint tendrils of dawn were glowing in the east, it had become obvious that the Locos’ strength had been reduced by three quarters, if not more. When an anxious broadcast informed Luis that Paco had been found murdered, Luis looked like he’d been gut shot. He seemed numb from shock and sleep deprivation when he broke the news to Garret, who pretended surprise.

“Beaten to death? Then the attack must have been a rival gang, don’t you think?” Garret asked.

“We don’t have any enemies. We cooperate with El Paso, and we do deals with everyone else.”

Garret resisted the urge to smile. “Well, you apparently have some now. Good thing we did a deal before this happened, or Magnus might not have been interested. He only approached you because of the size of your force.” He paused. “Guess that makes you the new head honcho, right?”

Luis grunted. “Yeah. I expect it does.”

“Well, don’t worry. A deal’s a deal. We’ll honor it. You just need to do whatever it takes to get the woman back – and find the girl.”

Luis nodded mutely, digesting the news that he’d just been catapulted to the head of the cartel – and that he was fronting a group that might not be able to defend itself any longer, whose ranks were in disarray and its power center eroded to a sliver of what it had been just yesterday.

Garret watched him walk away and then leaned back against his saddlebags and closed his eyes. It would be daybreak soon, and he’d need his energy.

The woman was out there somewhere. He could feel it.

And she wouldn’t escape him again.

Chapter 36

Gunner was on his last legs as the trading post came into view, the afternoon sun baking the fields of tall grass surrounding it. Lucas had chosen a trail well to the east of the ones he would normally have used, figuring that on the offhand chance the cartel got lucky, they’d never be able to track him through scrub and grass – or if they did, it would take days to ferret out the evidence of his passing. It wasn’t like he was leaking yellow paint for them to follow, and he doubted that anyone in the criminal gang possessed the outdoor skills necessary to run them to ground.

Earlier, he’d probed Sierra for more detail on her story, but sensed that she was holding out on him by the time she was through.

“Tell me again how you wound up in the gulch, and who the men were, Sierra,” he’d asked.

“I told you. We were headed away from Dallas. They helped me escape.”

“Right, I remember. But why? Out of the goodness of their hearts?”

“Of course not. They were friends with one of the guys who took pity on me. On us.”

Lucas had shaken his head. “What’s the story on Eve, Sierra? Seems like some pretty dangerous people are pulling out all the stops to find you two.”

“They can’t allow anyone to rebel or escape. It’s a challenge to their dominance. They have a zero tolerance policy. You try to break away, you’re dead. Simple.”

“I hear you, but the lengths they’re going to don’t make sense.”

“None of this does. Look around you. We’re living in a waking nightmare.”

“Back to your escorts. They looked like they were paramilitary. Militia.”

“They sort of were.”

“Sort of?”

“Look, Lucas, I don’t know everything about them. An opportunity to get away from miserable conditions presented itself. We had almost no notice, and on the spur of the moment, we took it. We almost got away with it, and then we got blindsided by – what was it you called them? Raiders? We got hit by killers out in the middle of nowhere, after surviving all the way across the state. What makes sense about that? That we would get taken down by pure chance, with the Crew on our tail?” She’d laughed bitterly. “Don’t tell me about things not making sense. Nothing has for five years.”

Lucas had shifted gears. “How old are you, Sierra?”

“Twenty-two. Almost twenty-three.”

“It can’t have been easy. I can understand why you’d risk everything to get away.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“So what’s your theory as to why the Locos are after you?”

“Houston probably put them up to it. That’s my guess. Birds of a feather, isn’t that right?”

“Maybe. I’m just surprised they didn’t kill you.” He’d told her about the town and his grandfather, and she’d gone quiet. The miles had dragged by, but she hadn’t volunteered anything more, and as they neared Duke’s, Lucas knew about as much as he had when he’d started the discussion.

Sierra’s long sigh of relief at the sight of the outpost pulled him back to the present. “Is that it?”

“It is. But don’t get too comfortable. We’re just going to switch horses. I want to get back to Ruby’s by tonight.”

She groaned. “The idea of rest sounded too good to be true.”

“At least you’ll have your own horse. You can sleep in the saddle.”

“My luck, I’ll fall off and break my neck.”

Lucas smiled at that. “Tell me more about this Magnus who runs the operation in Houston.”

Her face clouded. “He’s the devil.”

“Pretty crowded field these days.”

“No, I mean it. He’s a monster. You name a depravity, he’s behind it. Bestiality, pedophilia, gang rape, torture, slavery, satanic rituals. And he delights in killing. He’s probably responsible for at least half the surviving populations of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and Lubbock dying. Makes Hitler seem like Mother Teresa.”

“Where did he come from?”

“Out of nowhere. He just…appeared, and suddenly his men were everywhere. The guy who helped us escape said Magnus had been on death row. I don’t know if that’s true, but he should have been. The world would be a better place with him six feet under.”

“This place you broke out of in Dallas. What was it?”

“One of their facilities. They have a bunch.”

“What do they do there?”

“You don’t want to know.”

He bit back his impatience at her deflections. “Try me.”

“Use your imagination.”

Lucas twisted to look at her. “You’re not telling me anything, Sierra. You’re saying words, but there’s no information.”

“Maybe that’s because I don’t know much. Or I’m just stupid. Or I’m injured, I’ve been up for days, and I’m barely breathing. You think that could have something to do with me not being chatty?”

He resisted the urge to apologize. He knew BS when he heard it, and for whatever reason, she was playing him for a fool.

But he’d get to the bottom of it. In the meantime, he needed to do a trade with Duke for a fresh horse for her, a shower, and a couple of meals. The white lightning would cover that tab, along with some of the ammo he’d conserved. Not that he could ever adequately repay Duke for his generosity – the night vision monocle and Gunner had saved their bacon.

Fatigued as Lucas was, the feel of Sierra’s arms around his waist was distracting him in a pleasant way. He had mixed emotions about their ride together as the trading post swam into view. He knew nothing about this woman; he simultaneously distrusted her and was drawn to her, and wondered that two conflicting emotions could occupy so much of his rusty emotional bandwidth, especially with so much else going on.

Aaron was on guard duty again and waved as they drew near. Lucas tipped his hat in return, and the gate opened.

“Any more trouble?” Lucas asked as he rode through.