Wall: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (The Traveler Book 3) (23 page)

She had no doubt the gunshots and the siren’s wail from a baby would draw more attention. She kicked her heels into the horse and urged it into a trot. With the reins in one hand and the gun in the other, she couldn’t reload. With the baby on her chest, the rifle wasn’t an option. She had two shots left in the six-shooter. Ana coaxed the horse to speed up. She wanted out of Dallas. Nothing good would come of staying there. The wall was within reach.

She leaned forward and sang a lullaby to her inconsolable daughter. Ana felt tears forming in her eyes. Her voice warbled and cracked as she crooned.

As she found her way onto the interstate and the horse moved quickly north, she wondered if there were any good people left on either side of the wall.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

OCTOBER 26, 2037, 5:40 AM

SCOURGE +5 YEARS

PALO DURO CANYON, TEXAS

Juliana Paagal turned off the satellite phone and set it next to the map atop the wooden desk inside her tent. She pumped her fist. “Yes,” she said. “Everything is as planned.”

She looked across the table at Baadal. His eyes were wide and his skin was kissed red from the tent as if he’d spent a week in the sun.

“So what does that mean?” he asked. “Are we winning?”

Paagal walked around the table, dragging her fingertips along the wood. She put her hands on his shoulders, squeezing gently, and pressed her lips to his. She lingered, inhaling his piquant scent of sweat and natural musk.

“Yes,” she whispered and kissed him again. Baadal moved to put his hands on her hips, but she blocked his wrists with hers and stepped back. She moved away, walking back to her spot on the opposite side of the table.

“Dallas is in flames,” she said gleefully. “Houston, as far as I know, is already under our control. San Antonio is turning. Austin is the only holdout.”

She traced her finger along the map, drawing a circle around the former Texas capital. “The slogan there, you know, was ‘Keep Austin Weird’,” she said. “It still fits.”

Baadal looked at the map. “So the cells did their jobs in every city?”

“It looks like it. Total surprise in every case. The posse bosses, captains, even the two generals never saw it coming.”

“A lot of death.”

“Collateral damage,” Paagal reasoned. “Serious change cannot happen otherwise. There are always sacrifices made by the few that benefit the whole.”

“I suppose.”

Paagal ran her finger toward the lower right of the map and tapped it. “Houston has me a bit concerned, I’ll admit,” she said. “I haven’t heard any updates since we took care of Harvey Logan. The team there assured me they were gaining control, but…”

Baadal’s eyes danced around the room. “What about Lubbock?”

Paagal cocked her head like a bird, her eyes narrowed. “What about Lubbock?”

“That’s their distribution hub, right?” he asked rhetorically. “Isn’t that a critical part of the insurgency?”

“Not yet,” Paagal said. “We need to contain as many cities as possible, draw the support of the oppressed, and then send large, well-equipped groups heading this way.”

Paagal planted her hands on the large map atop the desk and leaned on them. The long muscles in her triceps flexed against the weight. “We’ll have the retreating Cartel troops trapped. They’ll have nowhere to go. They’ll surrender or die.”

“Then we shut down their distribution,” said Baadal. “We choke off their illicit trade with those outside the territory.”

Paagal threw her head back and cackled. “Shut it down?” Her eyes returned to Baadal’s, flashing a hint of insanity. “We’re not shutting it down, darling,” she said. “We’re taking it over.”

Baadal’s brow curled. “Wait. What?”

“Equi donati dentes non inspiciuntur.”

Baadal folded his arms across his chest and pressed his lips together.

Paagal rolled her eyes. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” she said. “Why would we eliminate such easy income?”

“Because it’s a violent, unethical trade,” he said. “You’re talking about selling and moving all kinds of drugs, providing an expensive black market for water and gasoline and food.”

“And?”

Baadal stepped to the table. “And that’s part of what kept us under the Cartel’s thumb for so long,” he argued. “We need a fair and open market like they have north of the wall. Otherwise we’re no better than the Cartel. Maybe we’re worse.”

Paagal stepped back from the table. “Huh,” she said, “I thought you were with me.”

“I am,” said Baadal. “I mean—”

“First,” she said, “fear is what kept the Cartel in power, not a lucrative black market. Second, there’s no fair and open market north of the wall. If there were, why would there be such demand for what the Cartel’s been providing? Third, I’ll take any characterization of our movement you offer as long as ours is the movement in power.”

Baadal stood silently at the table. His eyes drifted downward, avoiding contact with the woman who, minutes earlier, he was anxious to bed.

Paagal took a deep breath and exhaled. “You seem…” She searched for the right word.

Baadal kept his unfocused gaze aimed at the table between them. “Disillusioned,” he said.

She laughed. “Disillusioned,” she said. “Isn’t that the word that describes everyone and everything since the Scourge?”

He looked up at her and shook his head. “Your point?”

“Nothing is black and white,” she said. “Nobody is all good or all evil. No group or movement or insurgency is entirely benevolent or exclusively malicious. I explained this to Marcus Battle. We live in a world where we must do what we must do to survive.”

Baadal’s gaze softened. He licked his lips and let his teeth drag across them.

“Some random virus mutated and killed two-thirds of the world’s population,” she said. “The only ones who lived have some genetic immunity to it. Good people died. Bad people lived. For the last five years, our world has been a confluence of chance and will. Those who take chances and have the will to survive flourish. Those who don’t…” She shrugged.

“That sounds like you’re trying to convince yourself,” Baadal said, “like some moral rationalization.”

“Hardly,” Paagal scoffed. “You really are naïve, aren’t you?”

“I—”

“That wasn’t really a question,” she said. “This is a harsh world, Baadal. It is Darwinian. Adapt or die. I’m adapting our cause, our movement, our insurgency, to the call of the times. We cannot be weak or wholly good. To serve the good, to make lives better for those who’ve suffered under the Cartel, we must harvest from the same soiled ideology they employed. We pick from it. We take the seeds that will nourish us. We ignore the rest.”

“I’m not naïve,” he said. “I’ve told you I’m not a good person. I know you’re not either at your core. It’s not about shades of morality. It’s about becoming what we’ve sought to overthrow.”

“You say potatoes,” she said, elongating the “ayyy” sound. “I say po-tah-toes.” Paagal ran her hands through her hair and sighed. “Either you’ll stand here at my side or you won’t. I don’t have time for any more therapy session, Felipe. We have a war to win.”

Felipe Baadal nodded. His eyes moved up and down her body as he assessed her soul. He spun without saying a word, grabbed his rifle, and pushed his way out into the morning. The sun would be up in less than two and a half hours. His men needed him on the rim.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

OCTOBER 26, 2037, 6:20 AM

SCOURGE +5 YEARS

PALO DURO CANYON, TEXAS

General Roof fired the first shots. His SCAR 17 delivered as it was designed to and sprayed the Dwellers guarding the southeastern rim of the canyon with rimless, bottlenecked .308s, the same ammunition he’d used to hunt game before the Scourge. The Dwellers were smoking cigarettes. The orange glow at the end of the burning white column of paper was enough of a target.

One after another the deadly projectiles twisted toward their targets. Three of the Dwellers were dead before the fight began.

Roof advanced without fear. His long strides and deliberate steps toward the enemy had the look of a man who thought himself invincible.

By the time he was within thirty yards of the surviving Dwellers, his riding companions had dismounted and were targeting a secondary group approaching from the east. Roof directed half of them to stop the advancing Dwellers while he, Grat Dalton, and three other grunts took on the squad directly in front of them.

Roof looked east at the team he’d sent to protect their right flank. In the distance, where the canyon met the horizon, the sky was growing purple. Sunup was less than ninety minutes away. With the storm having passed, the moon overhead was enough to provide the vague image of movement in the dark. It didn’t fully illuminate anything.

“Got one,” Grat Dalton said from his position behind some low-profile mesquite. The tangled branches gave him enough cover in the dark. “Roof, I got one!”

Roof took a position behind a rotting stump. He lay prone on the ground and rested his elbows on the soft, crumbling wood. A thick root pushed against his ribs and made the position uncomfortable. He scanned the darkness for muzzle flashes. It had proven the best way to take down the enemy.

His finger rested on the trigger as he searched for a target. Grat cheered another hit, and Roof considered turning his aim to the overzealous grunt.

To his right, the sound of gunfire amplified. From the corner of his eye he could see the evolving firefight. He refocused at the edge of the rim and spotted the outline of a Dweller. He lost the slack and pulled the trigger. The outline jerked and disappeared.

Roof knew large platoons of Cartel grunts and their leaders would attack from the west within minutes, if they hadn’t already begun their assault. If everything was as it should be, there would be simultaneous waves hitting the other parts of the rim within the hour. By sunrise, the entirety of the canyon’s circumference would be under siege. He and his men would make their way down the lone, narrow entrance to the canyon floor. The end of the Dwellers was beginning.

A bullet skimmed the jagged decay on the surface of the trunk before zipping past Roof’s head. A shower of splinters hit the side of his face, and his cheek stung as if peppered with needles. Roof winced but kept his eye on the remaining Dwellers ahead. He caught a shift of what he’d thought was a small boulder. He pivoted and leveled the rifle’s barrel at the dark mass and pulled the trigger twice. The mass flattened with the first connection and shuddered with the second.

There was no more movement along the rim directly in front of Roof. He looked over his shoulder to his left. A pair of grunts were on one knee, out in the open, firing relentlessly into the dark.

Roof would have laughed had the reality of their ineptitude not been so remarkably sad. He thought back to a series of movies he’d watched in Syria during an R&R night in camp. The film’s storyline had taken place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.

The bad guys had been these ridiculous white-armored clones called stormtroopers. They couldn’t have hit the broadside of a barn with their laser rifles if they’d been leaning against it.

So many of the grunts who’d signed up to join the Cartel were like those stormtroopers. They’d apparently liked the idea of serving the evil empire. They just weren’t that good at protecting it.

Roof’s recollection vaporized as one of the grunts took a shot to the head. His neck snapped backward and he fell awkwardly into the grunt next to him. That grunt struggled to free himself from the weight of his dead comrade as incoming fire callously stopped his effort. He cried out in pain until another shot silenced him.

Roof tried to project the angle of the shots that had killed the grunts. There were too many muzzle flashes to count. Farther to his right, Grat Dalton was taking aim directly east. Beyond Dalton, grunts were retreating. One at a time, they’d fire off a shot or two and then run west.

Dalton rolled from his position at the mesquite and hurried to Roof. “There’s too many of them over there,” he said breathlessly. “Our guys are getting slaughtered. They’re coming back this way.”

No sooner had Roof pushed himself from the stump than the thunder of rifle and shotgun fire exploded in front of him. It was coming from the west.

He saw what looked like an endless stream of grunts marching his way. Armed with shotguns, some of them were wasting their ammunition, taking aim from well outside the weapon’s limited range. The percussion of it was like the intimidation of a loudly beating drum. Some of the men were still perched on their horses as they rode toward the plucky Dwellers.

Roof grabbed Dalton by the scruff of his shirt and pulled him flat to the ground. They were caught in the crossfire when the two armies converged. Cries of pain and screams for help quickly joined the chorus of gunfire.

Roof elbowed Dalton and directed him to take aim on the horde of Dwellers pushing their way closer. A grunt stumbled past them and then arched his back wildly when he was shot. He fell face forward, landing next to Roof.

Roof looked at the man’s eyes. They were full of the same icy fear he’d seen as he choked the life from Cyrus Skinner. Roof eyed the iron sights atop his rifle, found a target, and pulled the trigger. He exhaled through his nose and found another Dweller in his sights. Another pull. Another kill.

Dalton wasn’t as confident as he’d been minutes earlier. There were no hoots or hollers with successful hits. Instead, he was emptying his weapon into the men and women trying to kill him.

Roof kept firing, one target at a time, as the reinforcements drew even with him and Grat. They set a line parallel to Roof, and he rose to his feet. He marched backward among the din of gunfire to find a hat-wearing boss.

He located one atop a palomino behind the front line of grunts. “You in charge?” he yelled up at the boss.

The boss wrapped the reins tighter around his right fist. “Yeah,” he said. “What of it?”

“I’m General Roof.”

The boss snickered and tipped back his hat, leaning over toward Roof. “Is that so?”