He spotted one rider off to the north as they cut in closer to the city. Moe thought about calling them back, but his radio chirped twice before the deputy’s voice came through the line. “Moe. This is Whalen. We’re over here to the south. We found something you might want to look at.”
He detected a down tick of dread in the man’s voice. Deputy Whalen had been a simple rancher two weeks ago until Sheriff Ahiga had given him a badge with an oath to protect the Chinle citizens.
He guided Copper to the left, waving at Waki to grab her attention. Her head raised as she spotted his change of direction. The woman nodded sharply, angling her horse to follow.
Moe rode for nearly a quarter mile before he saw Whalen and the other scout standing by a low brush with their horses lingering nearby.
As they trotted up, Moe noted the men stood slightly turned away from a cluster of knee-high shrubs. The deputy wore a pinched expression as he looked to the sky, as if trying to ignore something in the dirt behind him.
Moe gave Copper a “whoa!” and threw his leg over the saddle to dismount. “What’s going on?” Moe stepped around the man, eyes searching the ground. “You said there was something I...” His words dropped like a rock.
He stared down at a woman lying in the brush. No, she wasn’t lying, but positioned. Placed. Presented like a morbid sacrifice to an evil god.
While the heat had bloated her limbs, Moe recognized her. She was the one they’d taken off Carver’s bus when the cult had first entered town. She was the one snake bitten and saved by the camp doctors.
Waki dismounted and rushed to see what was happening, but Moe blocked her way. She gave him a firm punch in his side and pushed by. It wasn’t a hard blow, but a move she might have made as a kid when they wrestled or goofed around. And when she put her bony knuckles into it, she meant business.
Moe grunted and stepped aside, hands raised to let her pass.
Waki stared down at the corpse. Her face shifted through shades of emotion as the travesty set in. “Are those snake bites all over her?”
“They call themselves the Light and Venom Commune,” Moe explained. “Hence the bites. This is the woman they’d brought in with them. She had snake bites already. The camp doctors saved her, but I guess that didn’t sit well with Carver.”
Waki shook her head, setting free a tear to streak down her cheek. “Why would they do something like this?”
While on the road as a truck driver, Moe had spent a lot of time in his sleeper cab. It had become a ritual to cook a microwave dinner and kick back on his bed, watching his nineteen-inch television. He enjoyed catching a movie, though his favorite shows were the unsolved mysteries and killer shows.
Sometimes he came across a cult documentary. He’d sit there in awe with a wide-eyed expression as he marveled at how a single man and his followers could draw in weak-minded individuals, convincing them to do horrible things. He often fell asleep watching the shows, leaving him with terrible nightmares.
He recalled his first meeting with the cult, the woman’s snake-bit arm, and Carver’s blasé concern about it. The bite wasn’t an accident, and neither were the ritualistic burnings and killings around camp. They were planned, part of some larger concept of control Moe couldn’t possibly understand.
“They must perform ugly rituals to keep their followers scared and in line,” he said.
“But why dump a body out here? Why not display it in their camp?”
“To warn us.” Moe bent down, studying the corpse. “Or send us a message. Look.” He snagged a piece of paper from the woman’s hand. He opened it up and held it out. “Still awaiting your formal response.”
He refolded the note with a shake of his head and stuck it in his pocket. “This is who we’re dealing with. Do you still want to attack them outright?”
Waki’s eyes remained wide, her face tortured. “More than ever. I want to root them out and defang them.”
“That’s what I figured. I do, too. But we must play our hand carefully. We have to understand that we’re not dealing with a regular person. This isn’t a gang member or common criminal. Carver is more than that.”
Waki nodded absently. Then she wiped the tear off her cheek and turned to him with the midday sun reflecting off her pain-filled eyes. She started to speak when a single rifle crack jerked their attention to the north.
Whalen and the other man from camp leapt onto their horses with Moe and Waki quickly following. They sat atop the beasts, cantering side-to-side, turning, searching the horizon for the lone member of their scouting team who’d gone that way.
When they couldn’t find him, Moe snatched his radio from where it was clipped to his shirt. “Moe to Quicktail, do you read me?” Moe had just met the former rancher four hours ago. He was quiet and likeable. An excellent rider, too.
Another shot fired off, jerking Moe into a slouched position.
Whalen stiffened in his saddle, pointing off to the north. “I see him. There he is.”
They kicked their horses to a stirring of dust, racing across the brush-covered dirt, weaving between scrubs and scraggly olive trees. Moe was relieved to see Quicktail fly over a hilly knob and plunge down the other side.
As they drew closer, he saw the man riding low against his horse’s neck, left hand thrown to his right shoulder. They converged and trotted southeast toward the canyon.
“What happened?” Moe shouted across to him.
“They ran a Jeep in behind me and forced me into a sniper nest,” Quicktail replied, his long ponytail bouncing against his back. “Bastard almost hit me.”
“Is it bad?”
The man lifted his hand from the wound to reveal a blood-soaked shirt, yet he still controlled his horse’s reins with ease. “Just a scratch.”
Moe grimaced. “Go back to camp and see Sage right away.”
Quicktail nodded and urged his horse forward. As the scout rode ahead, Moe slowed Copper and peeled him off in a wide arc with the others following in tight formation behind him. He still held his radio in his left hand, and he raised it to his lips, pressing the talk button. “Aponi, this is Moe. Requesting backup near the South Rim, south of the Tsegi Overlook. Over.”
The reply from the radio speaker was overloaded with engine noise, though Aponi shouted above it loud and clear. “We’re incoming!” The warrior woman was John Wolf’s daughter-in-law and had accompanied them to scout Window Rock a few days prior. She was a fast, reliable quad rider who had a grudge to bear after losing her husband and father-in-law there.
They drew up to the hill Quicktail had appeared from and dismounted. Moe dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the top of the rise beneath a prickly scrub bush.
He raised his binoculars to his eyes and looked through the magnified lenses. It was easy to spot the long trail of dust rising from a pair of vehicles as they tore along the desert in their direction.
“What do you see?” Whalen asked as he crouched behind him.
“Two of Carver’s Jeeps approaching fast,” Moe’s breath was rushed. “I count ten people with rifles.”
“Can we outrun them?”
“No, but we can lose them in the gullies to the south.”
“Do we want to lose them?”
Moe rolled to his left and stared up at Waki where she stood with her rifle in her hands. She wore a fierce expression, but something about her seemed uncertain. She’d never been in a firefight before. Could he risk his sister’s life?
“We’re just a scouting unit,” he said, eyes shifting to Whalen. “We’re not to engage so far out.”
The deputy nodded as the sound of ATV’s approached from the distance. It was Aponi and the rest of her team along with all their firepower.
“Two Jeeps and ten people?” Waki protested. “Surely, we can beat them.”
She was right. Together, they had enough force and mobility to engage Carver’s people and probably win. But it wasn’t what they’d agreed to do with the elders and Sheriff Ahiga.
Moe shook his head, scooted down the rise, and got to his feet. “No, we retreat. Let’s get out of here. Now.”
He pushed past his gape-jawed sister and mounted Copper. Whalen and the other scout member were right behind him. Waki waited a moment longer, staring up at her brother with disbelief.
He returned her hard look with a challenge of his own. “Come, Waki. Mount up. Let’s go!”
She shook her head but shouldered her rifle and climbed upon her chestnut mare. Moe turned Copper around and guided him down to the desert floor. Then he gave him a hard kick to send him flying southeast.
He spotted Aponi and her six ATVs speeding toward them and waved to get her attention. She drew her vehicle to a halt and raised in her seat. Moe held his finger in the air and made a circling motion before gesturing back the way they’d come.
Aponi nodded and reached for her radio, shouting orders to her team on their channel. The vehicles waited for the horses to ride by, then they turned in a measured retreat, leaving dust patterns drifting upward as they sped away.
Chapter 10
Bishop, Salina, Kansas
“Those storm clouds are wicked,” Trevor whispered in awe.
Bishop looked up from where he was tightening a tire lug nut and gazed eastward where a wall of ominous black-gray clouds pressed toward them. He focused his attention back to the tire, making the last couple turns before standing up and nodding.
“That should do it,” he said. He glanced at the clouds again, noting their fast approach. “We better get a move on if we’re going to beat the storm.”
“Do you think you’ll have time?” That was Kim speaking from her lab. She had access to the camera monitors from her desk and could track the bad weather herself.
“We can do a quick search of Salina and be back within a couple of hours. I think we can beat the storm if we leave now.” He frowned. “But it’s not like we have a weatherperson to give us any predictions on when it’ll hit.”
“I never thought I’d say this,” Kim pined, “but I really miss the weather people.”
“You used to complain about them being wrong all the time,” Trevor reminded them with a scoff. “Once, I remember you asking how they could even have a job.”
“Well, I was wrong,” Kim said, pointedly. “I didn’t realize what I had at the time, and I’d give anything for a simple Doppler Five Radar Report right about now.”
Bishop chuckled darkly. “You and me both. I’d watch the news all day if we still had it. Anyway, let’s get going.”
He put the tire iron and the rest of the tools away in the bus’s storage compartment and checked on Trevor. The boy had dressed in jeans and a long-sleeve shirt with his mask positioned firmly on his face.
“I’m with you, Dad.”
They moved off to the Stryker, lowered the back door, and climbed aboard. Taking up their usual spots in the driver and camera seats, Bishop cycled through the startup sequence, and the armored vehicle rumbled to life. He turned it down the exit ramp and then south toward Salina.
He held them at a steady thirty-five miles per hour, giving Trevor time to have a look around with his cameras. “Let me know if you see something, and we’ll stop and investigate.”
“Okay.”
From his reduced viewpoint, Bishop saw the road stretching out ahead of them covered with strips of gray fungus. They passed the truck stop on their left and kept going. Through the tiny glass rectangle, he spotted a beat-up sign for an old trailer park and the dilapidated mobile homes behind it. The landscape was covered with gray, tree limbs weighted down with the fungus.
“Are you there, honey? Kim?”
There was a moment’s pause before her voice piped through the line. “I’m here, babe. What’s up?”
“I’m looking around at all the fungus. This stuff is really dying. Did AMI give you any external readings for the spore count out here?”
“I haven’t checked them recently.” Kim paused. “Well, this is something, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“This is actually incredible.”
“What’s incredible?”
“I’ve had AMI tracking the outside spore counts since yesterday evening. One reading every ten minutes. I set it up and then forgot about it.” Kim paused again and clicked her tongue. “The average reading is five hundred fifty-three spores per cubic meter. That’s less than what was in the bus back in Yellow Springs.”
“Could it be the drier air out here?”
“It’s possible,” Kim said. “Or it’s a significant reduction in fungal strength. It reinforces what Thomas and I hypothesized back in Washington. It gives us even more of a chance to beat Asphyxia.”
“That’s great news.” Bishop kept his eyes on the road. “We need to hold on and wait this thing out.”
He shook his head, recalling how lethal the spores were back in Ft. Collins. How such a monstrous force of nature had cut down millions of people like Death’s scythe through a field of wheat. It was a miracle they’d survived.
“Thanks. We’ll keep looking for the kid.”
He increased their speed to forty-five miles per hour, weaving between stalled cars and accidents. Lumps of what had once been people lay sprawled in the road. The closer they came to town, the thicker the congestion.
The Stryker thrummed as loud as a big rig. Mechanisms whined and squeaked when he turned the slightest bit. As they devoured pavement, the journey began to feel surreal. They were strangers on another planet, or in some episode of the Twilight Zone.
A mile and a half later, fast-food restaurants sprouted up on both sides, dead places with dead people inside.
“See anything, son?”
“There’s nothing moving out there at all.”
Bishop nodded as they passed through an intersection and crossed a set of railroad tracks. He caught sight of something off to the right and jerked his wheel hard in that direction. The Stryker banked hard, and if he hadn’t been strapped in, he would have rolled out of the seat.
He eased his foot onto the brake and brought them to a halt. In an open lot, near a single tall oak, burned a heap of wood. Crates and skids and chairs lay charred or half-scorched. The fire still smoldered but without much smoke.
There were other things in the pile, too. Forms and figures that looked like mannequins on their backs with arms stretched out. Some sat slumped over, all blackened from the intense flames, outer layers peeled back to reveal the pinkness beneath.
They weren’t mannequins at all.
“Are those what I think they are?” Trevor asked in a soft tone.
Bishop gulped. “Yes.”
“What is it, guys?” Kim asked from the bus.
“It looks like someone made a bonfire several days ago. I see a lot of scrap wood thrown on top--”
“And bodies,” Trevor added. “Maybe two dozen of them. They tried to burn them but didn’t do a very good job.”
The way the boy said it with such cold efficiency sent a shudder up Bishop’s spine. The kids were used to seeing death. They’d become immune to it. In a way, that was a good thing. It made them tougher in the harsh new world, but it assaulted their last shred of innocence, too. Bishop wondered how long it would take to permanently jade them.
“Oh, that’s terrible,” Kim replied. “I’m sorry you guys have to see that.”
“Someone was stacking corpses to kill off the spores,” he said. “Or maybe it’s a big funeral pyre. I don’t sense it was malicious.”
“Does it look dangerous? Should you come back?”
“There’s no one around.” Bishop squinted through the window and nodded with determination. “We promised to look for the kid, so we’ll stick it out a little longer.”
His eyes lingered on the smoldering pile before he turned the wheel and hit the gas. The Stryker lurched rolled forward, its thick tires crunching over the gravel and wood.
He drove them slowly through a warehouse district, creeping al
ong until they reached a barrier of cars lined up across the road. The vehicles stretched between an air conditioning business and an ancient car repair shop with paint-fleck brick walls. A minivan, two pickup trucks, and four sedans formed the steel line.
Bishop sat back. “Well, it looks like someone doesn’t want us going any farther. They’ve positioned cars across the road. None of them are wrecks. They weren’t towed or pushed into place.”
“Can you get around them?”
He looked to the sides but couldn’t see far. “What do you think, Trevor?”
“There’s room on the right, around that old repair shop. We’d have to go through a field, but...” The boy paused, staring hard at one screen.
“What is it, son?” Bishop leaned back in his seat.
“I found that kid’s bike.” He shook his head and glanced at his father.
“His bike? You mean, the kid that got away from me yesterday?”
“Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. Black with yellow trim, right?”
“Sounds like it.” Bishop unbuckled his seat belt and stood.
Stooping, he edged through the cabin until he hovered behind the boy, peering down over his shoulder at the screen. The camera view focused on the dilapidated auto repair shop. The front had a single garage door, an entrance, and two windows. Another door and window sat tucked around the side. Old boards covered the openings, except for the side door which hung wide. The bike with black and yellow trim lay ten yards away.
“This place looks like something out of the early nineteen hundreds,” Bishop murmured. He could imagine two old fellows sitting on a bench in front, reading newspapers while a mechanic worked on a Model T Ford inside. “The town was probably going to tear it down before the spores hit.”
Trevor blinked at the screen, his mind assembling possibilities. “You think the kid is in there?”
“No clue,” he replied. “But that’s definitely his bike.”
“What if he’s inside there, hurt?” The boy’s eyes widened. “What if he lives in there?”
Spore Series | Book 4 | Exist Page 10
