The shot echoes out across the hills along the river… and strikes just under the salve tin again, flipping it into the air only to land off somewhere out of sight.
Walker lowers the coat. He knows one thing now.
Whoever is up there doesn’t want to shoot him.
~~~
Last Night.
Whoever it is down there, Shooter thought, down past the bridge and off behind the low dirt rise, he’s a sharp one.
But what’s he doing there?
A lone sniper just out to kill? Nah. No sir. Not a scout for some PMP gang either. He was too patient. He’d been down there too long. No one scouted for this long, all alone, vulnerable, unless their issue was personal.
Shooter had watched the sniper slow crawl to the river for water. Had watched him through the night vision ‘nocs and knew this cat was well trained.
He’s not down there to pick off farmers for giggles. This person is after someone else.
We’re like the bait.
This was what Shooter was thinking as he worked the night vision ‘nocs over the area again.
He tested me too, Shooter thought. Dang sure tested me to see if I meant him any harm. That’s strange.
Maybe I should test him?
Without thinking about it quite as long as he should have, Shooter reached down and grabbed a length of rope. There was always rope in the pillbox, and he didn’t have any trouble finding a section about five feet long.
He should have thought about it longer, but he didn’t. It seemed like a good test, so he just did it. He ignored Ellis saying, “some mistakes you only get to make once.”
He wrapped one end of the rope around a rock on the floor, off to his right. He stretched the rope tight and then wrapped it around a nail protruding from the horizontal telephone pole that supported the roofline of the pillbox.
Then he pulled out his Zippo and set the rope ablaze. The fire licked roofward and, too late, Shooter realized the flames were sufficient to light up everything else in the pillbox. Including himself.
He froze. Some mistakes you only get to make once.
The words, “Oh crap!” that left his mouth were not sufficient to describe his panic. In an attempt to give the other sniper something to shoot at in the darkness, he’d lit up the whole pillbox like a city on a hill. Like a big, stinkin’ target.
And now he felt himself moving too slowly. Fear squeezed his heart and he felt that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Like that moment when you’re falling and you know it, but it’s too late to unmake the mistake you’ve made.
That’s when he heard the shot. Not so much the gun firing, but the air splitting and the viperous hiss as the bullet split the flaming rope and thumped into the heavy clay dirt at the back of the pillbox.
The bottom piece of the rope dropped to the ground and the upper piece swung for a second before the flame severed it and the glowing remnants too plummeted to the dirt.
It was all over in half a minute, but to Shooter the entire event seemed frozen in time.
Test completed.
He doesn’t want me dead either.
Some mistakes should kill you, but they don’t.
Chapter 24
At a crossroads out in the middle of nowhere, east of a land once called Texas, west of paradise lost on that last apocalypse day, when yet one more battle would end everything all over again, someone turned on The Doors.
Live album. A recording.
Break on through to the other side.
Reyes Badfinger’s war song.
Murder and death and mayhem were comin’ someone’s way… and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
No, not at all.
The dead man had been right. There was a high valley up there and someone with some stuff. Stuff that needed to be redistributed. Taken. Taken from…
Reyes Badfinger pulled the last of the tequila from the bottle with a wet suck and then held the bottle high in the morning sun. Held it in front of the burning disc. Watched it distort light and flame. Watched the world through a bottle of poison.
Then he saw, once again, the tiny Black Hand tattooed between his thumb and forefinger. Saw it and knew, knew what he was, what he’d been made to be. Knew he was just a pawn with an appetite for destruction. Knew that when he smashed the empty tequila bottle down onto the old rent and tired pavement at the crossroads in the middle of nowhere that he and his soldiers would assault the bridge, take the valley, rape the women and carry away all the stuff they could.
Knew it.
Had known it.
Ever since the old gangbanger had given him the tattoo…
…everything was just a prelude to the horror of now. He’d been made for this moment. This dark now. Time in a bottle.
~~~
It started with tagging.
Digiberto Reyes Navarro was eight. He lived with his family in the barrios of LA and Orange County. Already the schools were little more than warehouses where Reyes and the rest would learn that California had been stolen. That all this, all the suburban wasteland was actually stolen from them. Stolen by the white people. Taken from the brown people.
Tagging was the first step in taking it back. Making it theirs. Making it Mexico again.
Even though Reyes’ father had moved from gardener up to accountant at the small construction and landscaping company he worked for, promising Reyes he’d have everything if “Digiberto” studied hard and did well, none of that ever happened because of the heart attack.
It was at the funeral when Reyes, his two little brothers, and his three sisters watched the relatives come and lament and weep into their mother’s shirt that all of this was unfair, unjust and somehow wrong. That was when the boy’d walked to the front of the little Ranchero house his father had proudly purchased, and that was when he found his cholo uncles drinking beer and pouring one out into the grass for his father.
The white socks. The long shorts. The white t-shirts. Tattooed tear drops falling from an eye.
They called him “little man”.
They told him he’d been robbed.
They told him they would never desert him. They would take care of him. He was one of them now.
A week later, he tagged a fire extinguisher in an apartment complex. Then a fast food joint bathroom. That one felt “big time”. A Gangbanger. But he wasn’t, not yet.
He never got caught for the tagging.
It was the rock that he’d get caught for.
The Rosecrans Crew, named after the street that crossed over the 710 freeway. The initiation was a rock. Thrown. Thrown at the passing cars. A passing car. You had to break a windshield. Causing an accident was bonus.
That day, Reyes, whose real given first name was actually Digiberto, crossed onto the bridge all alone. Southern California fall. Hot and windy. Other boys, tall dark-eyed, fat, shaved heads, watched him from the far end of the overpass.
Everyone knew the sound a breaking windshield made.
Today was the day.
He crossed alone, walking up the concrete rise, feeling his heart thunder with the excitement of impending wrong being done. Knowing that when he saw his uncles, both of whom were doing a stretch in Corcoran, they’d be so proud of him.
One of us, they’d tell him. One of us, “little man”.
He saw the lady he’d kill from far down the freeway. Saw the silver Mustang she was riding in as a passenger. Saw it all as a target moving toward him in very slow motion. As destiny approaching. Like Alexander must have seen Bucephalus. The car was in the fast lane but it might as well have been moving slow. In one motion he turned, raising the rock high over the back of his head. Like an “Elle Lay Dodger, Homes”. He saw the driver, a man, eyes wide, knowing they were the target of this becoming boy, speeding at Digiberto Reyes Navarro—who’d one day be Reyes Badfinger; a One Percenter; a gangland biker and emissary of the Black Hand. The man saw the kid and knew there was murder in those deep brown eyes, even if the kid didn’
t know it yet.
Reyes threw with all his might.
Not because white people had taken California from him—or so he’d been taught by his uncles, La Raza, the schools, his people. No, not at all. Not because his father had died of a heart attack on the way to work stuck in traffic, trying to make a better life than the one he knew all too well in Mexico. The one Reyes’ Uncles talked so fondly of. Even romanticized.
No, not at all.
He threw the rock as though it were a plea. A work to be judged and valued. An offering to something unknown.
Value this, he told the world and hurled it almost straight down into the speeding car. The windshield. The lady.
Later, the arresting officers told him she’d died at the scene. But that was days later. Days after the horrible-beautiful sonic “SMACK” the rock had made when it smashed into the windshield of the speeding car. Days after Digiberto, now Reyes, had fled across the bridge to his waiting “homies”, all of them running in the fall heat and laughing as they did so. Days later as the police searched for him in the neighborhoods and later at the school, rumors abounded that Reyes had even killed a baby in the car. Or that he’d smashed the lady’s skull in. Or that the car had flipped end over end and killed several people including a movie star. Tales and non-truths abounded and made legend.
Days later, as Reyes was led out from the school by two uniformed cops, one of them told him what had really happened. The rock had smashed through the windshield and killed the woman. The driver, her husband, had pulled over, and by the time he’d gotten off the freeway, his wife was dead.
Later than night, in juvenile holding, booked for murder, Reyes sat in his cell, still awake, long after lights out. He stared at the floor and the bars, thinking that he’d be welcomed in the big prison up north with his uncles, the one called Corcoran. He would be a hero. He would get his teardrops. One for every three years.
Something to look forward to.
Something hoped for.
The old janitor with the gangbanger tats mopping back and forth down the hall stopped with his bucket in front of the cell. Kneeling down in front of the bars he whispered to Reyes, in Spanish, to hold out his hand. For a long moment Reyes did not.
“You want in?” said the Viejo. The old man. The old gangbanger.
Reyes nodded, his dark eyes like two frozen pools of oil.
“Then hold out your hand, mijo.”
Reyes did and watched with amazement as he trembled.
This was real. As real as it gets in this life.
Working fast with a needle gun and getting the ink cartridge inserted, the old man, kneeling before the bars, anointed Reyes Badfinger. Thirty minutes later the tiny Black Hand was finished. Forever.
“Now you are one of the Black Hand and you serve the eighty-eight and their queen, mijo.”
Without another word the Viejo stood and continued mopping his way down the wide hall between the cells in juvenile holding.
Five years later, the boy who’d been Digiberto, “my strong Digiberto” to his father, was all gone. Reyes Badfinger walked away from juvenile holding thanks to the efforts of a non-profit legal aid clinic who felt that youthful offenders deserved better than life in prison. Even if they’d killed someone’s wife. Someone’s daughter. Someone’s hopes and dreams.
Six months later he did two more years in county for assault. A year after that, another six months for car theft. He stabbed six people in prison and never got caught. When the world ended he was doing eight years federal for rape and second degree murder. When the world ended he was in a transport van in the middle of nowhere Texas.
The world ending was the best thing that ever happened to Reyes Badfinger. The best thing. Within an hour he’d murdered both guards, stolen a Hog and headed out with three guns. Five years later he led the One Percenters and raped, murdered and tortured whomever he pleased.
Redistribution in action.
Five years later, now, he held the tequila bottle up to the rising sun, his mouth full and hot and hungry, and then he smashed it down onto the old road.
Within seconds Hogs were firing up, kicked to angry life in roars and blue smoke.
The plan was simple, race for the bridge, hit them hard and take their stuff.
Reyes wanted a new groupie. That was for sure. A young one. Maybe they would have really young ones.
The Man in Black, the Stranger in Black, he’d said the ancient word that was a sign. And when the word was said, given to a member of the Black Hand, then the Black Hand obeyed.
“Destroy them, Reyes Badfinger, destroy them all,” the lunatic Man in Black murmured over and over as they’d finished the homebrew tequila. “Destroy them, mijo.”
And…
“They are survivors… and all survivors must die.”
Reyes drove the hog hard and Jim Morrison was still in his ear and the wind was in his hair and yes, this was indeed the day one could “Break on through to the other side”.
The bridge rose up across the dusty flats and beyond was the river and the rise into the high valley.
Isn’t it funny that this all started on a bridge?
Reyes was too far gone, too manic, to see the circle completing. He just thought, another bridge to be crossed in life. I just need to break on through…
“…to the other side.”
Reyes screamed at the world and wrenched the throttle wide open.
“We chased our pleasures here…”
A racing biker fell off to his side. Reyes heard the gunshot above his engine’s roar and rumble. Another shot and another One Percenter was down.
Reyes screamed again, readying himself for a fight.
“We chased our pleasure there…”
~~~
Walker heard them from a long way off. Heard them coming. Heard them racing forward and knew, knew for certain they were coming for the valley. And knew they were the same ones that had destroyed his convoy and killed his friends.
The sniper on the hill began to fire but the crazy bikers, determined, sped on toward the undefended bridge. In a moment Walker was up and racing into their throng, his 9mm blazing. The revenge had taken hold of him and he didn’t care what came next.
Dead bikers were down everywhere. Dust roostertailed into sudden fronts as the remaining reprobates circled. The sniper on the hill was still taking shots at targets of opportunity, occasionally dropping one as blooms of dirt and dust rose in swirls and clouds.
The slide on the nine locked back and Walker knew the gun was done forever and that he was probably next. A Mexican biker came in at him swinging a chain. Walker took a blow to the face and the biker slithered away, leaning way out from his bike. As the rider turned, Walker scrambled off into the dust.
He found a fallen machete and hacked at another biker who came out of the dirt cloud and tried to run him down. Stepping away and striking downward, Walker buried the machete in the man’s skull. The motorcycle dragged both men away and Walker finally let go of the handle and rolled in the dust.
He was unsure of where he was. Where the river was and where, more importantly, his rifle was. All was chaos. Bikers were still appearing and disappearing in the dust like sudden phantoms, their mustaches and leathers covered in white-yellow chalk. They screamed and laughed even though their dead numbered as many as the living.
Reyes Badfinger dropped his bike and watched it slide out and onto the bridge. The front tire had shredded from a bullet or some unseen trap. Now incoming fire was coming from more than one direction. Reyes dropped and crawled like a frantic gecko for the cover of the dust cloud. One of his own bikers ran over his leg and then took a bullet in the chest, toppling from the now riderless Hog. A moment later, Reyes was inside the cloud.
Badfinger placed two fingers in his rotten mouth and whistled. It was the signal to dismount. He needed to organize. Count the living and the dead. Attack again.
He would kill these people, he promised himself.
That’s
when he saw the gringo. Saw the man who was not one of his brothers moving through the swirling dust ahead like an angel of vengeance. Saw the man turn and not see him. Reyes drew his knife and charged.
He was two steps away from Walker when the back of his skull erupted and a bullet came out between his eyes, spraying the gringo’s long leather coat with blood and brain matter.
Reyes had always wondered what came “after,” and in the eyes of all the dead, he’d decided long ago the answer was “nothing”. But now he knew, as consciousness of this broken world faded and was replaced by something infinitely more horrible. His sightless eyes stared finally at nothing but the swirling and settling dust, seeing something unconsidered and truly terrible. He knew he’d been wrong. So foolishly wrong.
Chapter 25
Down in the tunnel, the clock is ticking.
That’s what they say, Delores thought as she and Chuck stopped at the pile of munitions. The clock is ticking. As if there is ever a time when the clock is not ticking.
“We’re running out of time,” she grunted to Chuck through clenched teeth. “The clock is ticking.”
Chuck pulled on a headlamp, adjusted it quickly, flicked on the light, then started handing her things from the pile. “If he’s locked in some kind of steel grate, we have to blow him out,” he said. “We don’t have time to pick a lock.”
“Will it kill him?”
“Not if he dives down and we’re really careful.”
Chuck grabbed a roll of det cord, a small box of trigger devices, a roll of duct tape, and a “clicker” that would provide the electrical spark to set off the explosive.
“Does that take batteries?” Delores asked.
“Not this one,” Chuck said as he finished his task and then rushed toward the ladder. He answered over his shoulder, pulling Delores along behind him. “This one has a small crank. It builds up a charge and then you flip the switch. Ellis let us practice with some small explosions just last week. Tiny ones. This one will be bigger.”
Digger 1.0 Page 14
