“Lovely speech,” Esme said, resting her forehead on her knees as she folded over herself. “I’d ask what your grandmother might have thought, but you’ve made it clear to me we are not truly together, so I don’t know why you’re asking me what I think.”
Claudia pulled her hair back into a ponytail and tied it off. She didn’t have anything else to do to get ready to leave, but wasn’t ready to leave the conversation just yet. For a moment, a brief, angry moment, she considered telling Esme about the warrior women who captured her heart or made her hot, wet, and wanting. Whenever she’d tried to talk about Fiona or Veronica in the past, Esme always stopped her with the trite saying, “less history—more mystery.” By the third time, when Claudia simply wanted to tell Esme about the kindness Veronica had shown her in letting her leave, and how she suspected it was likely the last time she would ever see the remarkable woman, Esme had repeated the mantra, and Claudia wanted to slap her for the disrespect.
Claudia rushed to the edge of the bed and grabbed Esme by the shoulders, pulling her face from her knees until they were looking each other square in the eyes. “What do you see when you look upon me?” Claudia demanded. “What am I if not this?”
“You are…sweet, with music in you,” Esme replied.
Claudia shook her head and let Esme go. It was a simplistic and easy answer—neither description particularly true anymore. She couldn’t sing anymore, not since the radiation damage to her throat and lungs, not that she felt like it anyway. Nor did she feel all that sweet. In truth, she felt like killing something, many things, starting with Inspector Cavanaugh and then any Slark or mutant stupid enough to cross her path. For a brief, angry instant, she flashed upon the moment in the old casino in Carson City when the men meant to assist her had tried to kill her. The satisfaction of seeing them dangling at the ends of ropes followed. No, she was definitely not sweet.
“All this time I thought I was the one with the messed up eyes,” Claudia replied as she made for the door.
“What do you see when you look at me?” Esme asked before Claudia could leave.
Claudia stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She wanted to close the literal door, but not the figurative one, not yet anyway, although she couldn’t understand why just yet, and so she didn’t say the first thing that came to her mind, the thought about Esme being anyone or everyone who never wanted to face down a conflict.
“A clever woman who can make a good cruller,” Claudia replied.
Chapter 19:
Beyond the Wall in Good Company.
Claudia waited in the gray, pre-dawn hours amid what looked like a combination of an army and a tree trimming crew. A chilly fog hung over the day, dampening the mood of the men when combined with the early hour.
Her father specifically hadn’t come down to see her off. His presence, as he’d explained, would undermine her authority if she was perceived as a child being dropped off for her first day of school by her father. He was the commander of all military forces now, and she was at the bottom of the officer hierarchy—the appearance of nepotism needed to be avoided at all costs. Still, as Claudia looked around to the gathered families and friends seeing off the men of the torch brigade she wished someone had come to see her off. It had been so long since she had anyone staying behind to wish her luck as most of her lovers to that point went off to war with her. Now she had a father and two pseudo-girlfriends to wish her well, and none of them were there.
“You must be the Marceau girl,” a gravely man’s voice snapped her attention away from the several dozen touching scenes around her.
Claudia looked ahead to address the person speaking to her. She found a gray uniform with three bars up and three bars down—a master sergeant to be addressed with respect but not a salute as she was technically commissioned as a second lieutenant.
“Yes, master sergeant,” Claudia replied, “ready to receive my posting.”
“Walk with me, lieutenant,” the master sergeant replied.
They set off at a slow walk as the sergeant had a pronounced limp in his left leg. Claudia glanced down to find he had one of Dr. Gatling’s mechanical legs in place of his right limb below the knee. This brought Claudia’s attention to the rest of the support staff fueling up the scissor lift vehicles, arming the burners, and issuing duty commands—all of them were missing one or more limbs to have them replaced with the bronze mechanical arms and legs designed by Dr. Gatling.
“Normally, I would have questioned putting a woman on a shooting tower, but after seeing you on the range, I think this posting may be a bit beneath your abilities,” the master sergeant said. “Here’s your detail, Tractor 23.” The sergeant checked a few pages down on his clipboard. “You’ll be clearing grid delta-niner. Don’t worry, Alfie here knows right where that is. Good luck out there, Marceau.” The sergeant limped away, leaving Claudia in the company of her new men.
Claudia’s men snapped to attention upon her arrival, offering her a sloppy set of salutes to which she responded with one of her own. The driver that the sergeant had referred to as Alfie was a gangly young man, no more than sixteen or seventeen, with a shock of dirty blond hair and a missing front tooth. The burners consisted of two burly men in their thirties, brothers or cousins by the similarity of their jagged facial features and curly black hair, and a stocky bulldog of a man with an ornate handlebar moustache.
“I am Lieutenant Marceau,” Claudia said to her men. “My history is with scout sniper units so my military decorum is a bit lacking. Can we dispense with all the saluting from here on out?”
“That’s dandy-candy with us, LT,” Alfie said. “We’re an informal lot down here in the pits. As the sarge said, I’m Alfie, the two towers at the front of our rig are the Hungarian brothers—they’ve got names none of us can pronounce, so we just call them Ben and Jerry.” The two brothers nodded to Claudia before returning to their chores of helping one another into their leather protective gear. “The man with the mighty moustache goes by the Greek.”
“We lose angry, drunk Russian and get tiny woman with face so pretty it remind the Greek of his own daughters,” the moustache man said in a thick Mediterranean accent. “I like this plan. I like this rumor I hear that small woman shoot dots off dice to win bet.”
“Is that true, LT?” Alfie asked. “We heard you shot a set of dice off a target at three hundred yards.”
“It was four hundred,” Claudia corrected him. “I’m guessing you’re the man that hands out the names, Alfie.”
“Sure-sure, if you don’t like LT, I can conjure up a new one, but it’s best not to change them up too much as the Greek gets confused easily since his English isn’t so good, and the Hungarians don’t speak much English at all.” Alfie hopped off the edge of the tractor tracks he was lounging on and took a step closer to Claudia to whisper as not to be overheard easily by the other three. “I’m the only one what knows you’re the commander’s daughter. I’ll keep it under my hat if you like or tell them if you like that better.”
“LT is fine and I’d prefer if you kept that bit of information to yourself,” Claudia said.
“As the officer bids, so do we go,” Alfie said with a grin, showing off the gap left by his missing incisor. “Grab your seat, LT, and we’ll be underway in a jiffy.”
Claudia climbed up the ladder at the back of the strange vehicle until she stood in the armored basket atop the scissor lift. The two Hungarian brothers took their positions along running boards with handles to hold onto on the sides of the vehicle while the Greek secured himself to the front, slightly off to one side, so Alfie could still see where he was driving from the sunken cockpit between the two tractor tracks.
The massive wall, towering in front of them, taller than any free-standing wall Claudia had ever seen, stretched off in both directions beyond sight. Up close, Claudia marveled at the wall’s construction, looking as though the city itself had somehow influenced the flavor of the patchwork structure in remarkably aesthetic ways. The wa
ll began to open at the base as a section lifted much like a hundred yard wide garage door.
The sixty or so similar tractors around them started up, sending blue puffs of diesel smoke into the air as the squads made ready to depart. With a few lurches, they were off, heading out under the direction of the lead tractor a few ranks ahead of them. Alfie pulled on a leather helmet reminiscent of a World War I pilot’s, pulled goggles over his eyes, and spoke loudly into a metal cone in front of him to check in as ready. The whole column of gangly vehicles departed at a turtle’s crawl. The metal and stone wall of remarkable sturdiness and architectural beauty loomed large above them as they dipped into a trough beneath. The sound of so many engines in such an enclosed space was deafening, the smell of the exhaust choking to the eyes and throat, and entirely dark for the fifty or so feet they were under the wall. They popped up into the remains of a true war zone that Claudia expected of San Francisco.
The rolling hills and valleys of what used to be the suburban sprawl of South San Francisco was rubble on par with the bombed out husks from old war movies. The column of tractors broke up into the ruins, visible at a distance only by the spires of their blue exhaust smoke rising into the fog and overcast sky. Claudia kept her eyes scanning back and forth as they made their clanking way through the debris of shattered city streets and fallen buildings. As they got farther and farther away from the wall, the column spread so thin she couldn’t even see any of the other tractors around them. She suspected mutants to leap from the ruins at any minute to set upon them, but she was alone in this as the three burners looked almost bored in their perches on the edges of the tractor. The posting was said to be routine. They needed to keep the lasher trees from getting close enough to the city so they couldn’t spread their spores on the populated side of the wall. With how often the torch brigade burned out the no-man’s land, the Slark and mutants seemed to get the message about staying out of the way.
At a top speed of about seven or eight miles an hour, it was almost noon before they broke free of the war torn no-man’s land of South San Francisco. Trappings of true wilderness began to pop up around them, but it seemed to have an alien tint to it. Grasses and shrubs looked normal for coastal California, but among them were peculiar looking flora as well. Occasionally a grayish trunk, almost razor straight with a tiny taper at the top, jutted from the landscape.
“What are those?” Claudia shouted to be heard above the clanking of the tracks.
“Lasher trees, LT,” Alfie shouted up to her. “Those are just saplings though, and not in our grid. The squads behind us will take care of them.”
Claudia spotted movement off to the right, far enough away to be indiscernible with the naked eye. She lifted her rifle to her shoulder and sighted through the scope to see what it was. A few mutated deer were moving through the grass near one of the lasher saplings. Most of the deer lacked full coats of fur, most had odd numbers of limbs, either five or three, and none of them had a regular head shape. Claudia cringed at the sight of them, but watched on with the same morbid curiosity attributed to watching a car wreck. One of the deer came close to the lasher tree, not close enough by Claudia’s or the deer’s estimation to be in range, but sure enough, the gray spire snapped open from a seam on the side, and a thin, pink, ropey tentacle shot out, snatching the deer from the ground. The entire gray spire bent under the weight, trembling as the deer tried to escape. Two more tentacles, blue and smaller than the first, followed the pink one, and sliced off the deer’s hind legs with the surgical precision of a laser.
Claudia tore her vision away from the rifle’s scope, not wanting to see any more. Olivia mentioned losing her leg to a lasher tree, but Claudia didn’t know what that truly entailed and Olivia hadn’t wanted to go into detail. Seeing how lasher trees actually removed limbs, Claudia could understand why. The shocking number of amputees in the support staff for the torch brigade suddenly made a lot more sense.
“The trees don’t attack the Slark?” Claudia asked.
“They don’t seem to,” Alfie shouted back. “They don’t smell like prey or something. Dr. Gatling said lashers are a lot more like our jelly fish than our trees, but I think they’ve got to have some shark in there too since they can smell prey a mile away.”
“What about mutants? Do they eat mutants?” Claudia asked.
“It would solve problems if they could,” the Greek bellowed, “but mutants have learned the trees and do not get eaten so much now. Trees eat up all dumb, slow mutants. Leave only smart, fast ones.”
“It’s a proper messed up Wild Kingdom episode out here,” Alfie added. “The mutants learned to come after us when we’re burning the trees down. Those mutants may look all messed up and wrong, but they’re still as smart as most people.”
“There are million, maybe two of the millions,” the Greek rumbled, “we in torch brigade kill hundred or so two time a month. It only take thousand years to get rid of them all.”
“With LT on our tractor, you can cut that time in half,” Alfie replied.
They rode on for an hour more in conversational silence, although the tractor itself made every manner of noise as the bio-diesel engine rumbled, the tracks squeaked and squealed, and the metal pieces rattled against one another. The forest, a true forest of redwoods, firs, and pines loomed ahead and Claudia found she was a little excited to return to the wilderness. They stopped short of the actual tree line by almost a quarter mile. Alfie stopped the tractor and shut down the engine. The remarkable silence that followed was nearly deafening until the sound of wind across the open grass and down out of the hills filled the void left by the tractor’s racket.
“Are we in Half Moon Bay?” Claudia asked.
“We passed to the east of those ruins awhile back,” Alfie said. “We went right down the middle here toward the lowest grid. The old freeway through San Mateo is to our left, the ocean is to our right, and our task is directly ahead.”
The two Hungarians and the Greek hopped off their perches on the tractor. They assembled in something of a ring, facing each other’s backs, and did the final preparations on the tanks strapped to the next man in line’s back. They pulled on their huge, bronze helmets that looked like older diver equipment but with welder shield slots along the front. Alfie made a few strange bip and boop noises into the cone on the tractor and all three held up their thumbs.
“About to send you skyward, LT,” Alfie said. He threw a lever forward and the scissor lift extended, hoisting Claudia and her little armored platform up into the air thirty feet or so. “They’ll work left to right across the grid,” Alfie explained. “The mutants will come up behind them if they’re going to come at all, usually popping right out of the ground. The real fight out here for you is going to be boredom.”
“Boredom I can handle,” Claudia muttered.
She watched the three men in heavy leather drapings with their brass flamethrowers and divers helmets first with her naked eye, and then the scope of her rifle when they were a hundred yards out or so. They triangulated one of the pointed gray spires of a lasher tree, keeping a good distance from it always. The Greek crept up closer and sent a couple sprays of fire, stepping several paces back when the seam along the side opened. The tentacles lashed out, although not nearly far enough to grab the stocky little burner, and the Hungarians pounced, at least as much of a pounce as massively encumbered men could make, spraying at the opening along the side with jets of strange, blue fire. The entire process was kind of remarkable. The lasher tree didn’t burn like a plant, which was what Claudia expected, rather it exploded like a water balloon sending semi-clear liquid spraying in all directions.
“That’s weird,” she said. “It popped.”
“Like I was saying—they’re basically jelly fish,” Alfie said, never looking up from the torn remnants of the paperback he was reading. “The water boils in them, expands until their skin can’t take it, and then sploosh! They’re gone.”
“Why did the Slark plant them?” Cl
audia asked.
“No earthy clue, LT,” Alfie replied. “We made sense of the fish they brought right quick, but these things…who the hell knows? They started planting them before the cataclysm, says Professor Kingston anyway, so it can’t be to keep us in line since they had their crawlers doing that just fine. Got any theories?”
“A food source is all I can think of,” Claudia replied.
“I like that,” Alfie said, “simple, easy to remember, and makes us seem like proper ruffians running around burning the other bloke’s crops and all.”
Claudia returned her full attention to her vigil over the three burners. They were making good time sweeping the sapling lasher trees away, still staying well away from the actual tree line of more traditional trees and shrubbery. The grasslands that looked to have grown to about knee high on the Hungarians and mid thigh on the Greek were clear of any mutant attackers. Boredom indeed, Claudia thought.
“Are we going into the actual forest?” Claudia asked although she knew the answer. Using flamethrowers, even carefully, would start a forest fire, which she knew California was already prone to.
“Nope,” Alfie replied. “The lashers in there have grown tall, strong, and hide well among the real trees. In there is a proper killing zone.”
“Hang on, I think we have our first customer,” Claudia said, catching a flicker of movement near the edge of the forest out in front of where the three burners were making their sweep. She zeroed in on the shape, expecting one of the lumpy, amorphous humanoid mutants she’d seen in Yuba City. What she actually saw made her blood run cold. It was gray, scaly, and definitely not alone. “Slark!” she shouted.
Alfie snapped to attention and shouted into the cone, “skate, skate, skate!”
Claudia didn’t know what the warning meant initially, but apparently the burners knew as they dropped their work of triangulating one of the lashers and began trundling back toward the tractor. They swung wide through the area they’d cleared rather than try to dodge the line of lashers between them and the tractor that they hadn’t cleared yet. Claudia thought they were moving painfully slowly, although she didn’t know how fast she could run through tall grass with limited visibility and all that gear on.
The Steam-Powered Sniper in the City of Broken Bridges (The Raven Ladies Book 2) Page 17
