Most of this was beyond Alec’s understanding, and he felt stupid for not following. “The Overseers came from another world, taking a long time. Now we’re building a device that they can walk through to get to Earth? Does that mean they have a gate on their planet?”
“Tom said you were bright,” she said with a smile. “If this is what we think it is, then yes, they have the other side waiting to be activated on their home world.” Monet finished her food off, and Alec glanced at the last few bites in his bowl. This was all too much to handle. His life had been flipped upside down. He’d never considered where they were from for more than a fleeting moment years ago, and now he was learning this wasn’t even as bad as it was going to get.
“They’re just using us,” he said.
She nodded.
“Do you think they’ll keep us around after the others arrive?”
“I believe they’re growing used to us being there. Why dispose of an animal that does your chores for you?” she asked, giving Alec a lot to think about.
“Where’s Tom. Is he alive?” Alec asked.
She smiled again. “Very much so. He’s at our base. We had him sent to Detroit years ago on an intel mission. When he got all he could, he was pulled out. He felt so terrible about not being able to bring you with him.”
Relief flooded Alec. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that,” he said. The food, the news of his friend being alive, wasn’t enough to counter the despair he’d felt from Beth’s death, but he had a focus now.
“I want to join the Reclaimers.” Alec let his spoon fall to clang inside the bowl.
She took the gun from her pocket, set it on the table, and slid it toward him. “I think you already have.”
Chapter 16
Lina
It took Lina all of that afternoon to start talking to herself. The cumulative effects of the stress, the loss and fear, the dehydration and hunger had left their mark, but in the end, it was the utterly overwhelming sensation of pure isolation that stopped her.
She sat hard against a rock at the river she followed as it wound its way north, leaning her head back to drink the clear water from the bottle she’d been using, and couldn’t hold it together long enough to get the water to her lips. She broke, her mouth issuing a sob sounding so unlike her that she thought for a fleeting second that someone else was there.
She collapsed onto the dirt beside the river, tucking her knees up to her chest like a child and crying so hard that she lost all track of time.
When the tears subsided, when the effort of her breakdown had forced her into a short and uncomfortable period of unconsciousness so far removed from being asleep that she actually woke more exhausted than when she started, she seemed… better.
The upset was gone. The fear was still there, but it was no longer the fear of being alone; instead, it was the genuine and very real fear of being caught. Whatever part of her needed other people, reassurance, and companionship, that part seemed to have been driven away by her tears, frightened off with no real way of knowing if it would ever return.
Standing up and brushing off the dirt and leaves from her clothes, Lina drank her fill from the river and topped off both the bottle she carried and the cooking pot she had adopted as one of her most prized possessions.
As the sun began to rise, she ate her fill, dreading the consequences of yet another belly full of fresh fruit. Movement out of the corner of her eye made her spin towards the water, fearful at first but relaxing when she realized what it had been. When it dawned on her fully that she was looking at a fish that was more than sufficient enough to sustain her, she tried to rack her brain for a way to get the fat fish out of the cool water and onto dry land where she could eat it.
Cutting away at the younger trees she fashioned herself a mostly straight pole and used her knife to sharpen the end into a point and a rock to hit the top of the blade and cut that point into four and wedge a small rock into the end to splay out the four sharp points. She’d seen the people who fished their huge lake back home do this; standing like a statue in the shallows for hours to spear the precious protein.
Lina hadn’t done it herself, not even as a child when they were taught to do bits of everything, but she didn’t think to admit to herself that she couldn’t do something. She knew the theory, part of it at least, and the rest she would figure out.
An hour she spent there, missing with her first three attempts when the fish swam close enough for her to strike.
In the end, she was forced to remove her new pants and stand in the water, which came to just above her knees, and wade carefully upstream over the smooth, slick rocks beneath her bare feet.
Her first attempt while in her prey’s natural environment was a failure, as she realized too late that the fish wasn’t where she thought it would be because of the way the water bent the light. When she had figured out that important fact, her next strike speared the fish with two of the sharp points for it to thrash against her makeshift tool with more power than she thought possible.
Then the thrashing stopped, and when the silt and mud stirred up from the disturbed stream bed cleared, she found a small chunk of flesh stuck between the spikes but no fish.
Exasperated, she threw the spear into the water, losing the vital mouthful of food she needed, and climbed out to pace up and down on the bank as she muttered angrily to herself. No sign of any of the other fish could be seen, so she put her pants and boots on and stomped on throughout the gathering heat of the morning until she had drunk all of her water. She knelt to the river, swollen now with bubbling froth lingering where the watercourse ran across larger boulders, and filled her bottle to take another drink.
It tasted… wrong, somehow. She couldn’t say why or how, but the tepid water she had finished tasted better than the fresher, cooler liquid she had taken. She decided that after wasting an hour and all of the energy expended on the fish who easily avoided her, she wasn’t going to waste any more time trying to figure this out and drank it before walking onwards.
A whining, buzzing noise sounded from up ahead of her where a tree had fallen in the water, and she couldn’t help but lean over to look.
She wished she hadn’t.
The buzzing noise was caused by the flies. They teemed above the thing caught against the trapped tree trunk, and in response to her presence, a huge swathe of the parasites flew away to expose a mess of rotting meat and bone under a sagging, soaked hide. Maggots and a thin stream of dark gore flowed out of the dead animal, no longer recognizable as belonging to any specific species, and as her eyes followed the gore downstream, they rested on the water bottle in her hand.
With feverish hands, she unscrewed the cap of the bottle and poured and shook it until every drop of the contaminated liquid was gone. She staggered to her feet and ran away from the rotting carcass, hoping to leave behind the knowledge of what she had ingested.
Unless something major had changed in the world, the sun still rose in the east. As she was heading north, and the sun had not long risen, it should be on her right side. But it was behind her, which, even to Lina in the state she was in, meant that she was heading west.
“They said we have to go north,” she told herself, muttering as though she argued with someone in public and didn’t want the world to hear their problems. “It was the last thing they said before…” She paced and banged the heels of both hands into her temples. “We have to go north!”
Logically, after she had calmed a little more, she knew that leaving the river was a survival choice, as it meant leaving a guaranteed source of fresh water, despite the recent events she tried not to think of, and also food if she could master fishing and live off the foraged berries. Without a map, without a guide, she had no way of knowing if that river swung back to the north after a long, sweeping bend west or if it carried on out that way to another mountain range that wasn’t the one she needed to find.
Forcing herself to wash out and refill her two bottles, she t
urned her back to the river, and feeling the overwhelming urge to find somewhere to sleep, Lina tightened the straps of her pack and picked up the heavy shotgun as she set off into the sunlight to find a safe place to rest.
Chapter 17
Cole
Cole spent a whole afternoon chopping up dried wood, which he guessed had been part of some old fence, using it to keep the small fire going to dry the strips of meat from the second turkey he’d caught. His trap hadn’t sprung, which he thought was strange, but the big birds obviously weren’t the smartest of things or had missed what he had done to their buddy the day before, because another one wandered foolishly close enough for him to grab.
He carried it up the hill to his little slice of home – not that home was something he had ever really known – and had almost discarded the head until he remembered his tenant.
Cole tossed the coyote the turkey head and kept moving, the sound of crunching bones following after him. As he wasn’t in need of a meal, and because he knew how quickly meat went bad in the dry heat, he used his knife to open up the skin of the bird and slice away long strips of meat from the breasts, which he laid across his metal mesh tray to dry them out over the fire he revived.
Leaving a lot of meat on the carcass, which possessed all of its guts, he carried it carefully outside and decided to leave it in the open doorway to test the injured animal. If it couldn’t walk the short distance to fetch the food, then he knew what would have to be done to it, but as he wasn’t a healer and the thing was likely to try and rip his throat out if he tried to help, he didn’t think there was much more he could do for it but put it out of its misery quickly.
“Tomorrow,” he told himself. “We’ll see how you are tomorrow.”
Glancing up at the skies, he saw a large patch of grey heading his way from the south, and knew he would either get wet or be forced under cover. A snarl from the doorway reminded him that he was being watched.
“Rain coming,” he told the animal, “which is good, because any Tracker on my scent would probably lose it after a good rain. Lucky for once, huh?” As though to underline the coyote’s point, thunder began to roll through the distant landscape.
SW-18 stopped and turned its head up to the skies. The head, or at least the articulating part of the chassis that mimicked a head, bobbed to collect the scent from the air and assess it.
Any person watching it would say it was sniffing, that it was smelling the air, but it wasn’t. It was drawing in samples of the local atmosphere and assessing it through an olfactory sensor array. It was following a program, not an instinct.
The assessment told SW-18 that rain was imminent, given that an 86.97 percent chance of precipitation was interpreted as imminent. That changed the search parameters greatly, as it had followed a circuitous track in and out of a meandering watercourse for two days and nights, stopping only to power down to recharge for the minimum time calculated through the fold-out solar panel array built into the upper back of the chassis.
The power banks, which made up the majority of the weight it locomoted, was essentially a multi-cell battery core that diminished in small sections, which were then sealed off until the recharging cycle reactivated them. SW-18 only recharged for as long as it had to in order to not lose the long lead its quarry had stretched out ahead of its pursuit. Maintaining an operating power supply of around thirty percent meant that an extended period working through the rain would mean an enforced shutdown ahead of the preferred time period.
IF SW-18 could talk, it would have sighed and mumbled something like “so be it” to itself before trudging onwards until it could go no further.
Splashing in and out of the river to cast for the traces of scent on either bank made the progress in distance very slow, but each time it found the scent by doing what the programming titled as “casting,” whereby it went upriver a way and scanned for the scent on both sides of the bank, it had learned enough about its prey to come close to appreciating a challenge.
Conscious of the impending downpour as thunder pealed in the distance to serve as a reminder, SW-18 took a calculated gamble and stretched far ahead in a straight line at a running speed not optimal to maintaining battery life.
It was, not that SW-18 would call it this, a gamble.
But it was a wager that paid off, because three miles further ahead, the fresher scent of Vermin lit up SW-18’s sensor array like an explosion. Only it was different. Instead of the wet smell of the young male, it detected the trail of a female instead. SW-18 turned in the direction that the new track faced and ran some quick calculations.
Probability of locating original track and hunting down the first Vermin, factoring in the imminent rainfall, was a little over seventeen percent.
Probability of tracking the fresher scent, even factoring in the rain; sixty-six-point four percent. Unable to ignore the math, SW-18 set off at a more sedate pace in an attempt to make ground with optimum efficiency, but the storm clouds caught up with it and the power reserves finally ran into the red and slowed the legs of the chassis until SW-18 was forced to contract in on itself and wait for sunlight.
Chapter 18
Dex
A knock at his door woke him, and he glanced at the window, where the shades were pulled low. Judging by the light creeping inside the room, it was well into the afternoon.
“Who is it?” he asked, crossing the area to pick up his Glock. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, but his jeans were still on, as well as his boots. He never knew when he’d need a quick escape.
“Kate. Come on, let me in,” she said.
He unlatched the sliding chain and tugged the door open. The redheaded firecracker of a Hunter stood there grinning at him like a cat about to pounce on a canary. Her eyes looked him up and down, stopping briefly at this torso. Deep white scars ran lengthwise over his chest, and he turned, grabbing a white t-shirt.
“Hello, Kate. What’s the word?” he asked, trying to keep it casual. Kate and he had a history, and he wasn’t sure which woman was showing up at his door today.
“That’s all you have for me?” she asked, her voice holding a hint of a purr to it.
“What more do you want?”
She walked in, pressing her hand on his stomach. “I can think of a few things,” she said softly.
Dex wasn’t in the mood for Kate today. The business with the Trackers, then the Overseers’ vessel had set his nerves on edge.
“Stop. Not today,” he said more forcefully than he’d intended.
She took the hint and walked to the windows, opening the blinds. “I heard about your job. What the hell happened?”
Dex grabbed a bottle of whiskey, and her eyes widened at the sight. “Now that’s a sight for sore eyes,” she said, sitting down at the tiny round table. He didn’t bother with glasses. He just twisted the top off and passed the bottle to her. He hadn’t had so much as a sip of the case from Creston yet.
She took a swig, and water welled inside her clear eyes. “Haven’t had the good stuff in a long time. Where’d you find it?”
He told her about his trip to Creston and chasing down the accountant. She grimaced as he painted the picture of James’ hand lying beside the skate sharpener. When he got to the part with the Trackers, she tensed, taking another pull from the whiskey bottle.
“You have to be shitting me,” she said. If there was one thing he could expect from Kate, she spoke her mind.
“Not at all. Killed him outright,” Dex said.
“What kind of stuff was he into? Was he one of the terrorists?” Kate almost spat as she said the word.
Dex shook his head. “Don’t think so.” There was no way he was telling another soul about his conversation with Trent James, especially not a Hunter, and doubly so Kate. She was a fanatic. She loved being a Hunter. Dex knew she relished the fact that the Overseers had come. He hadn’t pieced much of her past out of her, but she was at least a couple years his junior. How she became so jaded at such a young age before the inc
ursion was beyond him.
“Dex,” she placed her hand on his, and he felt the roughness to them as she rubbed the back of his hand, “promise me something.”
“What?” Dex asked, taking a shot from the bottle. It burned a little going down. He put the whiskey on the table, finding he didn’t have the stomach or head for it anymore. He thought about tossing the case away along with the old cigarettes, but he knew he wouldn’t.
“We have to stick together. If something is coming down the pipeline that’s going to mess with the Hunters, we have to work as a team. You, me…”
“The others?” he asked, implying the other Hunters.
She didn’t answer, and he knew what she was suggesting. It wasn’t the first time she had brought up the idea of the two of them hunting as a team. It was done by a few couples out there, but even though he’d given in to her blatant advances on a few occasions, for him, it was nothing more than blowing off steam.
He decided not to rock the boat. “Of course. I promise,” he lied.
This seemed to calm her, and they stayed there, talking about her latest hunt, which it turned out was for a teenage girl escaping one of the facilities. Dex cringed and didn’t ask if she went back alive or dead. He didn’t want to know.
“Did you hear something” Kate asked, her gaze flicking to the door.
“Dex! Kate!” Cleveland’s voice boomed from outside the door before he banged on it.
Dex hopped up and opened it. “Big job came in. They want everyone in the quadrant anyway,” Cleveland said.
This surprised Dex. He’d heard of some larger Hunts, but everyone sitting idle would be at least eight Hunters. “What the hell has them so riled up?” Dex asked.
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