“So you’re not going to tell me,” she said.
“I already told you, but you don’t believe me. I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“Your real name, for starters.”
He sighed. “You shouldn’t ask questions if you have no interest in accepting the answer.”
“Fine, then.”
There wasn’t very much around them but flat land and more outcrops. The ground had gotten harder under his boots, with fewer stalks of grass and even fewer goldenrods anywhere to be seen. The emptiness might have convinced him he’d inadvertently gone backwards into Arizona or New Mexico if not for the constant chill in the air.
Mary’s question wasn’t anything he hadn’t had to answer before.
“So you’re just gonna walk around?” Gary, the old man who had taken Donna—Margo, now—in, had said to him when he informed the man of his intentions.
“Pretty much,” Smith had said.
“Like that guy from that TV show,” the old woman Gary was shacking up with, Natalie, had said.
The truth was, they hadn’t been that old—the woman was in her fifties and the man was just creeping up on his sixties—but they were the oldest people he’d encountered since he ditched his uniform and started walking. They certainly weren’t old enough that he felt Margo was in danger of being left alone too soon.
There was no guilt about leaving the kid with them, either. The way Smith saw it, he was giving both sides something they wanted: The couple would get a kid to take care of, and Margo would, essentially, have parents again. He hadn’t come to the decision easily, either. Smith and Margo had spent three days with Gary and Natalie before Smith made up his mind. If he’d detected even the slightest bit of crazy or danger from them, he wouldn’t have made the choice. But they were good people, and he liked to think he was an excellent judge of character.
“What guy?” he had said to Natalie.
“You know, from China?” she had said.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“It’s an old TV show,” Gary had chimed it. “Was on for a few seasons then they canceled it. But I think they did a remake or some such later on.”
“I don’t watch a lot of TV.”
“His name was Kwai Chang Caine, and he went around the Old West fighting bad guys and righting wrongs.”
“Righting wrongs? What does that even mean?”
“You know, a crusader for justice?”
“Like Batman?”
“I guess. But he didn’t wear a mask or anything. He just had kung fu.”
Smith had shaken his head. “Sorry, but that really doesn’t clear any of it up.”
“Well, it was an old TV show, lost in the past with everything else, now,” Natalie had said, with that thoughtful and nostalgic shake of her head so common with older survivors.
So Smith had left Margo (he guessed she would probably call it “abandoned her,” if he ever headed back that way and they crossed paths again) and never looked back. He didn’t know where he was going, just that he couldn’t stay.
Or want to.
They had been walking for almost the whole morning before Mary asked if they could take a break. Afternoon was peaking over some hills in the distance when they settled down on another outcrop of rocks. The trio of assholes had plenty of food in their packs, and Mary had wisely kept almost all of them while throwing away a lot of other things they didn’t need, including, according to her, bottles of booze.
Sometime between when they woke up and started their morning walk, Mary had also thrown away one of the packs, but not before transferring all the valuables—food, water, and whatever else she kept in there and didn’t show him—onto the one remaining bag. Aaron still carried—or dragged, really—his half-full pack behind him, but not because he was tired and more because, well, he was bored out of his mind. Despite everything he’d been through, he looked surprisingly well-adjusted. Or maybe it was all an act, but Smith didn’t think so.
Smith had plenty of food in his own pack, so he didn’t need to dip into mother and son’s. He took out the bag of deer jerky, a good-bye present from Gary, and chewed on it while Aaron ate some SPAM from a can and shared it with his mom. Mary didn’t look like she enjoyed the taste, but Aaron couldn’t get enough of the stuff.
“Are we in Nebraska?” Mary asked after a while.
“I don’t know,” Smith said. “Maybe.”
“You’re not sure?”
“No.”
“Did you see any signs?”
“I try not to.”
“I don’t understand.”
He shrugged. How did you explain to someone that you didn’t care where you went just as long as you “went?” Most people couldn’t grasp the simple concept. Even Gary and Natalie had looked at him strangely when he told them.
“You ever saw a TV show about a kung-fu guy in the Old West?” Smith asked Mary. “I think he was from China or something.”
Mary shook her head. “No.”
“What about you?” Smith asked the boy.
Aaron glanced up at him just long enough to blink once or twice, before going back to eating his food.
“He can’t talk,” Mary said.
“What?” Smith said.
“Aaron. He can’t talk. He’s never been able to talk.”
Smith stared at her for a moment, trying to remember if he’d heard the boy talk since they came into his company. Except she was right; Aaron had never said a word. Smith had heard him grunting once or twice, but those weren’t words.
Wow. How did I miss that?
“Oh,” Smith said.
“You didn’t notice before?” Mary asked. She was staring at him, maybe trying to decide if he was messing with her.
Smith shook his head. “I didn’t notice, no.”
If the boy heard their conversation, or understood it, he didn’t look up to let Smith know. Then again, he was too busy attacking the can of SPAM. If he wasn’t careful, he might gobble up the whole thing and leave nothing for his mom.
“We don’t know why,” Mary said. “Tom and I—” She stopped suddenly, before continuing a few seconds later. “Tom is my husband. Was my husband.” She pursed a smile and looked away.
Smith didn’t have to ask her what had happened to Tom. Probably the same thing that had happened to all the other members of their caravan when they ran into Peoples, the Accountant, and Tall and Lanky.
He said instead, “But he’s your son.”
Mary looked back at him. “Yes. Why?”
“No reason.”
“Why would I say he’s my son if he wasn’t?”
“It’s not like it hasn’t happened before. Plenty of people call kids theirs when they aren’t. Not by blood, anyway. Was Tom really your husband?”
“Yes. Why would I lie about that, too?”
“Is there a piece of paper that makes it official? Did you guys get married in a church?”
Mary opened her mouth to answer, but she stopped herself short and seemed to actually think about it for a moment.
“I guess not,” she finally said. “I mean, there’s nothing official or anything.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Smith said. “Just like with the boy. If you say he’s yours, then he’s yours. I was just curious.”
Mary nodded and looked away again.
Smith continued eating his jerky.
“So that’s what you’re doing out here? Just…walking around like this Chinese guy?” she asked after a while.
“Pretty much.”
“Was he a good guy? The kung-fu guy?”
“Apparently.”
“I mean, he has to be, right?”
Smith shrugged. “I guess.”
“Like you.”
“Like me?”
“Like you. You’re a hero, too.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You saved us.”
“They tried to kill me. I was mad.”
“That’s all?”
He shrugged again. “That’s all it was to me.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you—” Smith stopped short and lifted his head.
“What is it?” Mary asked.
Smith didn’t answer. He stood up and hurried to the edge of the outcrop and looked out and down the direction they’d come from.
Men on horses, flying across the terrain.
Now what?
The riders were half a kilometer away, but closing in fast. If they didn’t already know where he, Mary, and Aaron were, then they did now, because Smith was pretty sure they could see him despite the distance. He had just stood up and revealed himself without realizing it. And out here, with nothing but open land and jutting gray boulders, he might as well put up a sign pointing straight down on his head.
Smith also spotted something he hadn’t seen before, but now that he was standing on a slightly elevated plane, couldn’t miss. It was a long and very obvious jagged trail cutting across the landscape, and right to their current position.
He glanced over at Aaron’s pack, covered in dust and dirt.
Dammit. How’d I miss that before?
The boy probably didn’t know he was doing it, anyway. He was just a kid, after all. Even if the riders hadn’t seen Smith—and he was pretty sure they already had—then they could have just followed Aaron’s very generous track all the way to them. Which was likely exactly what they were doing before now.
The question was, where did they come from, and what did they want? And were they tracking Smith, or the woman and her child? Or all three of them?
Mary had stood up and walked over, and saw what he did. “Who are they?”
“I don’t know,” Smith said, and walked back to pick up his AR-10. He fine-tuned the scope on top of the rifle as he returned. “Are you armed?”
“Yes,” Mary said. She hurried over to her pack and opened it. She took out a Glock handgun—it looked like the one Peoples had been wielding last night—and rushed back. “I should have brought the rifle, too, but it was so heavy.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Smith said, though what he really wanted to say was, If I can’t shoot us out of here, one more rifle isn’t going to make a whole lot of difference.
The AR-10 was a sniper rifle, with a powerful optic designed specifically for long-distance shooting. It was the only reason Smith still carried it around. Everything else on him was for close-quarter combat.
Not that Smith was going to kill anyone this afternoon, if he could help it.
He held up the rifle and peered through the scope.
There were at least half a dozen men, and they were wearing boots, chaps, and dusters, and for all intents and purposes looked like cowboys. A few of them even wore Stetsons, though a couple had on ball caps. The only other thing that set them apart from the cowboys Smith had seen in Westerns were their rifles. They were the automatic variety.
He watched them for ten long seconds, more than enough time to know they were headed right for him and Mary. If he had any doubts about that—or wondered if they’d already spotted him previously—that vanished when one of them pointed right back at him.
He lowered the rifle. “They’re headed for us.”
“Are you sure?” Mary asked.
“They’ve been following our trail. Probably all the way from the camp last night.”
“Who are they?”
“Maybe you can tell me.” Smith walked back to his pack and brought out a pair of binoculars and handed it to her. “See if you recognize any of them.”
She looked through the field glasses for a few seconds, before lowering them. Given how quickly she’d done it, Smith already had his answer.
Mary confirmed it: “I’ve never seen them before.”
The riders were getting closer, their mounts sending thicker puffs of dust and dirt from the flat, hard earth into the air behind them. It looked like a giant sandstorm was headed right at Smith.
And maybe, he thought, that wasn’t too far from the truth.
“What are we going to do?” Mary asked.
Smith sighed, and thought, “We?” Since when did this become a “we” thing?
Six
“Should we run?” Mary asked.
“I don’t see what good that would do,” Smith said. “They’ve already seen us. And last time I checked, it’s nigh impossible to outrun a horse unless you’re an Olympic sprinter. And even then, you’d have to be Usain Bolt.”
“So what do we do? Do we just stand here and wait for them to reach us?”
“No. We’ll finish our breakfast first.”
“And then?’
“We’ll play it by ear.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it.”
“I feel like we should be doing more.”
“Why? They’ll get here when they get here. Nothing’s going to change that. We’ll deal with them then. Besides, I’m still hungry. Aren’t you?”
“A little bit,” Mary said, if a bit reluctantly.
Smith walked back to where he’d left his deer jerky and finished his breakfast. Mary rejoined her son, but she sat down tentatively. If the boy had even noticed what was going on around him he hadn’t looked up from his food; the kid was too busy rooting around the aluminum can for more chunks of meat. Or whatever it was that they made SPAM out of. Smith had never been entirely sure.
Mary spent the next few minutes looking at Smith across the small space of their camp—she’d willingly gotten much closer since last night—and over in the direction of the approaching posse, because that was what it looked like to Smith. A posse, like something out of a Western. Even if Mary didn’t know where the group of riders were coming from, all she’d have to do was look for the cloud of dust. And then there was the low rumbling noise of their horse hooves pounding away against the flat land.
“You don’t think we should be doing something?” Mary finally asked.
“Like what?” Smith said as he took a sip from his canteen.
Water was hard to find out here—especially the drinkable variety—so he only drank what he needed to stay hydrated. Even when you could find them, water was also heavy as hell to carry around. He had two canteens in his pack and was glad he didn’t have to share with Mary and her son. They had their own supply courtesy of Peoples’s gang.
“I don’t know, but something,” Mary said.
“They’ll be here when they get here. When that happens, we’ll find out what they want.”
“They have guns.”
“So do we.”
That was technically true, not that Smith was really counting on Mary to have his back if something were to happen with the posse. (Never mind the kid.) She wasn’t exactly a stranger around weapons, something she’d proven last night when she obliterated Peoples’s face with his own AR. But shooting someone when they were down and had no way to fight back wasn’t the same as being reliable in a gunfight.
Besides, one of Smith’s rules was not to depend on other people to watch his back. It was a steadfast rule, one that had been developed—and proven correct—over the course of many disappointments. If you don’t depend on others, then they can’t disappoint you.
“Let me see the gun,” Smith said.
Mary took the Glock out of her pack and handed it to him. A Glock 17. It was a nice weapon, with a 17-round magazine capacity. The weapon was in reasonably good shape, so Peoples had taken care of it. Not that it had done him any good last night, but oh well, that wasn’t Smith’s problem.
He handed the gun back to her. “You know how to use that? I mean, really know how to use that? Anyone can pull a trigger.”
“Yes,” Mary said, taking the pistol back. “Tom made sure I knew how to shoot guns. But I can’t do it the way you do it.”
“The way I do it?”
“You didn’t even aim when you fired yours last night.”
“Why do you say that? You
think I got lucky?”
“No, but, I didn’t see you aim.”
“There’s a lot of ways to aim a gun. You don’t always have to straighten your arm and peek down the sights.”
“Tom never taught me any other way but that.”
Smith shrugged. “It’s a skill not many people have.”
“Can you teach me?”
“Why?”
“Why?”
“Why would you want to learn? It’s not something you can show off at parties. It’s a skill that’s meant for only one purpose: to put an end to someone’s life. I don’t draw my gun unless that’s exactly what I’m going to do. If you learn anything from me, it should be that. Don’t show your gun unless you’re going to kill someone.”
Mary nodded and looked down at the weapon in her hands. Smith wasn’t sure if she really understood what he’d said. Most people didn’t, so why would she be an exception?
He glanced over as the sounds of horse hooves increased noticeably. The posse was getting closer, and Smith could see the clouds they were generating getting bigger as they rose higher in the air.
“They’re almost here,” he said.
Mary looked over. “So we just see what they want?”
“Yes,” Smith said, even though he had a feeling he already knew.
Mary had put the Glock into her jacket pocket and kept it there, along with her right hand. Smith almost smiled. He hadn’t told her to do that, but he was going to suggest it.
I guess she’s learning, he thought as he zipped up his bag of deer jerky—he still had a few pieces left and didn’t want to waste them—and put it back into the pack, before standing up and brushing his hands against his pants legs.
“Stay to my right, and don’t do anything until I do,” Smith said.
Mary nodded and stood up. She put a hand over Aaron’s head, and the boy glanced up. “Stay here, okay? Don’t go anywhere. Mr. Smith and I are going to go talk to some people.”
Aaron nodded, not that Smith really thought he understood anything. As far as Smith knew, the kid still hadn’t noticed the approaching riders. Aaron all but confirmed that when he went back to digging for more SPAM with his all-purpose eating utensil.
After The Purge, AKA John Smith (Book 2): Run or Fight Page 4
