Hernan had been a laborer in one of these towns. Wanting a better life, he’d slipped a broker all the money he’d saved in six months for a spot on the roof of a freight car that launched from a station near Arriaga in the Mexican State of Chiapas. The train headed due north past the colorless sage and over rail lines that uncoiled like a snake, eventually leading to the industrial outskirts of Mexico City and then on to Texas, Arizona, and beyond.
Along the way he’d been forced off with the others at gunpoint and conscripted by a “Citizen’s Militia” that was fighting a drug cartel called the Knights Templar. He’d never tell his children about the shameful things he was forced to do, the ones that taught him all he knew about survival. After many months he escaped the militia and hopped aboard another train that was worse than the first.
The savagery on the new train coldcocked him. He’d witnessed rape, wholesale theft and depravity, and the murder or disfigurement of those who refused to pay the tolls demanded by the machete-wielding gangs and wannabe Coyotes that roamed the tracks.
Along the way, he’d shared space with easy women, hardened preachers, end-times orators, and various strongmen backed by armed followers who tried to tell anyone who’d listen that their way was the only way. After a few weeks in his camp, Hernan recognized that Longman was no different from those men. He was, what his father used to call, a prince of smoke.
Hernan and Emil crept silently forward with Longman’s army. Hernan spotted the trackers on point, moving through the eight-foot tall alligator grass, surveying the contours of the land that unfurled before them. He spied a faint outline at first, a mirage of buildings, a crude settlement out on the horizon.
The procession stopped and collectively took cover in a patchwork of trees and bracken. Hernan and Emil were sent out to recon the settlement. They angled forward, Hernan making sure they put some distance between themselves and the other fighters. They soon found themselves alone on the right flank of the procession.
“What do you think, Emi?” Hernan said to his son.
Emil looked out at the settlement.
“There are bad people out there for sure, mala gente,” Emil whispered, his hands trembling. “Bad people deserve whatever they get.”
“And if they aren’t bad?” said Hernan.
“You heard what Longman said,” Emil replied.
“He’s said a lot of things.”
“He’s protected us.”
“Then why aren’t we allowed to leave?” asked Hernan, reaching over, clutching Emil’s hands. “Porque?”
Emil didn’t have an answer for that. Hernan summoned a smile and placed a hand on Emil’s shoulder.
“Have I ever lied to you?”
“No, Papa.”
“Do you remember that time we were confronted by those men in Emporia?
“The ones in Kansas that asked us to give them Mama and Marisol?”
Hernan nodded. “We spared them after the fight. We could’ve easily done dirt to them, but we didn’t. Do you remember why?”
Emil’s brow furrowed and then he nodded. “Because you said we wouldn’t give up our humanity. That’s what you said.”
Hernan smiled warmly and kissed the top of Emil’s head. “We are not like that man back there, Emi. We might be marching in his shadow, but we are not like Longman. Never forget that.”
Emil nodded.
Father and son struck out, moving as one beyond the line of sight of the others and stopped behind the belly of a fallen tree. They could see that the settlement was actually just a potluck of tents and hastily built lean-tos arranged around domes of concrete and what appeared to be great metal doors that led into the earth. Hernan spotted official-looking insignias on the doors and reckoned that the place had likely been important in the years before.
He surmised from one of the markings, an image of wings over a star, that it was likely the site of an air force base. Hernan wondered whether the domes had been where they kept the most dangerous weapons of all. The ones that could truly end everything with just the push of a button.
Closer now, Hernan and Emil and a few others continued to slink through the dusky twilight. They saw people in the village. Regular-looking people. Not cannibals or madmen with saliva dripping from their mouths. Men and women and children. Planting vegetables, stacking wood, drawing up pails of water, laughing, loving, living.
“I will not do this,” Hernan said to himself and Emil, emboldened, wringing his hands. “I want no part of this.”
Hernan grabbed Emil’s wrist and the two surreptitiously broke from the pack and took shelter in a windfall of trees and scrub.
One of Longman’s Lieutenants spotted them and wagged a pistol in their direction.
“Get back with the others,” the man said.
“We cannot do it,” Hernan said. “Those are families out there.”
“Families my ass. Them are fucking cannibals,” Longman’s man replied.
“You heard my father,” Emil said.
“Indeed, I did,” said Longman’s man, pulling the slide back on his pistol.
The man gestured to a comrade who bounded over and the two set to work on Hernan and Emil. They grabbed their weapons and tossed them away and then bound their hands behind their backs with lengths of wire.
“If you ain’t gonna take part in the killing,” Longman’s man said gleefully, “then we’re gonna make you watch.”
A whistle made of bone split the air.
Hernan and Emil looked up as more whistles were blown and then a flare was fired into the air, followed by the group’s only rocket-propelled grenade that curled up into the sky and air-burst smack dab in the middle of the village.
Before the grenade’s shockwave had even subsided, Longman’s troops rose up from their hiding spots and opened fire.
Hernan closed his eyes and his scalp tightened with fear. Emil wept openly, watching as Longman’s men waded through the encampment, shooting down or slicing anything that moved. They watched Longman in the middle of it like some modern day Colonel Chivington, a butcher, exhorting his soldiers to violence.
Hernan saw Longman shoot dead an elderly couple and skewer a young, preteen girl through the back with a saber when she tried to flee into the woods. More than three dozen men, women, and children died there as Longman’s army mutilated the corpses and gathered up limbs and body parts that they displayed at the end of their weapons or on shafts of cedar and poplar that they cut from the woodline. Hernan laid his head next to Emil’s and said a prayer that the killing might stop.
Longman, still holding his saber, pushed on past the dead and dying, noting that a few of the mutilated corpses were still garbed in moldering military uniforms, the remnants of the base that had once stood here. He knew what the place was, he’d come here by design. Followed by his most loyal men, he moved through the interior of the base, past an alphabet soup of government and military signage, until he found a plaque for the 321st Strategic Missile Wing which had been moved to this location during a period of base realignments a decade before the world ended. Longman had heard of the unit, one of perhaps six such Wings scattered across the Great Plains.
He moved into a bunkhouse and toward an open stairwell that led 60 feet down into the ground. At the bottom of the well was a landing that curled through a survival chamber, two rooms surrounded by four feet of reinforced concrete that had been designed to house enough food and fuel to last for nine weeks. At the far end of the chamber was a 13-ton blast door that had been pried open to reveal an inner control console, a tight space filled with red chairs facing a bank of dormant computers studded with buttons that would enable those in the chairs to incinerate the world.
Standing watch in the middle of the space was a man holding a pistol and clad in the mildewed uniform of an Air Force officer.
Longman smiled, thinking the man must have been a launch officer back in the days before.
Behind the officer another intact door with a biometric scann
er could be seen. A generator echoed somewhere off in the distance and a red light glowed on the screen of the scanner.
Judging by the officer's expression, he wasn't impressed by Longman or the men who trickled out behind and around him.
“I ask that you let us pass, friend,” said Longman.
“Wouldn’t do you any good if I did, friend,” the officer replied, sneering as he mouthed the word ‘friend.’
Longman smiled at this.
“It’s your prints, isn’t it?” Longman asked. “Without you, there’s no getting at the goodies kept within that vault.”
The officer thumbed the hammer back on his pistol. Longman looked at his men and held up his hands as if to urge them to lower their weapons.
Two things happened almost at once: the other man fired his pistol and Longman flung his saber. The bullet from the gun kissed Longman’s ear and the saber found the man’s chest, sticking it in up to the hilt. Those surrounding Longman were awestruck, amazed that the shot had missed him.
Longman moved forward and removed the saber from the dying man. He peered down at the man who was sputtering, drowning in his own crimson fluid. He paused, considering what would make a person like this officer choose to stand his ground in the face of such overwhelming odds? Stubbornness? A sense of duty? It had been so long since Longman had felt fealty to anyone other than himself that he had a hard time processing the very notion of duty. Then he hacked off the man’s hands at the wrists and gathered them up and stood before the last door.
Longman stared down at the thin trail of blood leaking from the officer’s severed hands. Then he held them up to the biometric scanner. The right hand initiated a red light to flash green, the internal mechanisms engaged and the door slowly eased open.
Longman looked in to see an inner keep filled with lockers and a metal table. On the table was a computer device, a tablet. And beside the tablet was a small nuclear warhead in a long metal case that looked as clean and as functional as the day it was created. Scanning the warhead he recognized that it was from an earlier era, older technology, and for that he was initially crestfallen. But then he convinced himself that it would do. He would find a way to make it work.
He had his soldiers lift the two-hundred pound warhead up and place it inside a heavy wooden box into which were inserted thick poles of oak. The warhead was then lifted up and carried aloft like the Ark of the Covenant and all of those who witnessed it stopped the mutilation and killings and doffed their caps or bowed their heads. But not Hernan or Emil.
Hernan and Emil were herded with a few others who’d refused to murder, then taken before Longman who eased their fear with pleasantries. He told them he understood their positions and that he, above all others, tolerated dissent and differences of opinion.
Still, Hernan and Emil were not loosed from their bindings, but were instead marched through the woods to a rise that looked down over a depression in the ground, a pit.
The pit was filled with hundreds, maybe thousands of bodies. Many were the recent dead, some bodies were blue and black-bloated, baking in what little sun there was, feasted upon by all kinds of large-winged birds and lesser creatures that nibbled at flesh and slurped at blood and bodily fluids.
Some of the prisoners wept and gnashed their teeth at the sight of the dead. A few called out for mercy, but Hernan and Emil knew that none would be given. One of Longman’s men approached. He placed a pistol to Hernan’s ear. “Offer up your son as a sacrifice to Longman and we’ll let you live.”
Hernan cursed the man in Spanish and spit in his face. The man punched Hernan to the ground and then hands grabbed him and Emil and positioned them so that they were facing the pit.
Father and son could hear the boots on Longman’s men as they roamed the ridgeline behind them. Hernan heard the cylinders on their guns spin, listened to the click of hammers and firing pins being gently eased into place.
Hernan shared a last look with his son and smiled. If this was it, if this was their time to cross over, then at least they’d be together. He thought of his wife and little girl and said a dozen quick prayers that both would be safe and somehow cared for.
“I love you more than life,” were Hernan’s final words to Emil.
When another man tried to pry the metal from Hernan’s wrist, the loop that his daughter had given him, Hernan lashed out and bit the man in the hand, tearing a chunk of flesh from his palm before the man pistol-whipped him onto his backside. Hernan rose, barking out in anger, but the words collapsed in his mouth as a bullet passed through his skull and he felt a final wave of darkness and dissonance wash over him.
Father and son were shot multiple times. Their bodies fell, curling and then sliding straight down into the pit, slipping quietly into the next life together.
Back out near the timberline, Longman and his troops marched toward their encampment as flumes of lightning crisscrossed the sky. They were careful to ditch their trophies of war. No need to startle those waiting for them, the women, children, the old and infirm. They would have to come up with a good reason why so many weren’t making it back, but Longman wasn’t concerned with this. He was used to spurring his tongue and covering his tracks, and this time would be no different, except for one thing. He had what he needed now, a weapon to end all weapons, although it was presently dormant. The means to march into what was once downtown Chicago and make it his own.
79
The truck drifted like a sloop over the grasslands, Elias clutching a metal side-bar, marveling at the machine as it seemed to hover, suspended in mid-air. He looked over at Marisol and something, a flicker of energy passed between them. He held out a hand that she took gently in hers, and for a second it felt as if she had squeezed it.
The truck hitched through the gloom, coasting until it stopped on a bald jetty of rock that dangled over a jagged pocket of trees and underbrush. Banners of light from New Chicago were barely visible in the distance as everyone dropped to the ground.
Most of the men stopped to relieve themselves, but not Jessup. He nosed through a twisted hollow between the saplings until he had a good look at the wall and all that lay before it. He slapped his palms together and looked back at the others who were slowly approaching.
“Longman, or whatever that bastard’s name is, he’ll be knocking on the other side of a coffin when I get done with him,” Jessup growled while gesturing in the general vicinity of the wall. “He has fucked with the wrong man.”
Elias, Marisol and the others followed Jessup back to the truck which everyone quickly helped him unload. They carried all the weapons and other gear lifted from the vault, Elias’s legs burning under the weight of a cluster of rifles and ammo crates that he humped like a coolie.
The weapons were lined up on the termite-ridden corpse of a fallen tree. Elias watched Jessup wipe his brow and flare a nub of cigarette as Jon took a swig from a small flask. Terry showed his firearms precocity by field-stripping a few of the rifles, a penlight dangling from his mouth. Jessup ashed his smoke, then grabbed the clanker box and set it down on the ground, as he looked around at everyone.
“Makes me sick just thinking about it, but how do we make a deal with the devil inside the wall?” Jessup asked.
“No fool ever made a deal with the devil, J.,” Terry answered. “I’m paraphrasing Joseph Conrad here, but the fool’s either too much of a fool or the devil’s too much of a devil.”
“I’m neither, but thanks for the input,” Jessup said.
Jon gestured at the clanker box with his flask, “One of us needs to let them know that we’ve got that thing, that’s for starters,” he said.
“And a bunch of us need to stay hidden and do overwatch,” Terry replied.
“They’ve got traps out there,” Elias offered.
Moses nodded. “The kid’s right. They got ‘em camouflaged and whatnot. Explosives. Sharp stakes. Bad stuff attached to razor wire. Longman got himself a bomb-maker named Archer Blood if that ain’t the most approp
riate name of all time. Heard he ran some industrial feedlot out past Baxter, Kansas in the days before. He’s well-versed in trapping and the building of things that can slice and dice and go boom. He planted it all out there. You don’t know the way in and out, sure as sugar gonna get messy.”
“So what are you saying?” Jon whispered.
“So I’m sayin’ only three of us, give or take, have come from that wall and lived to tell about it,” Moses responded, his eyes hopping to Elias and Marisol.
“I’m not sending them,” Jessup said.
“I’ll go with them long as the rest of you give us some cover. The man inside the wall ain’t gonna touch us once he sees what we got,” Moses said, pointing at the clanker box. “He’ll recognize us, that’ll surprise him, and that’ll give us a chance to make a trade.”
Jessup’s gaze slipped toward Elias. He was shaken by the discussion, as he had no desire to go back anywhere near the wall.
“What do you think, kid? I’m not exactly fond of the idea of sending sheep in to help hunt a wolf and I won’t make you go. I’m leaving it up to the both of you. Your call.”
Elias peered at Marisol whose eyes shone as bright as a cat’s under the moonlight. He considered the idea for a moment, his stomach heaving at the very thought of it. They’d risked so much getting out of New Chicago. Why would they ever want to go back?
“I … can’t … won’t,” he said, without fully considering it. “I mean, I appreciate all that you’ve done for us, but I won’t go back there.”
Jessup peered at Marisol whose eyes pinched to focus in the darkness. She held his gaze and then looked at her feet.
“Whatever he’s doing, I’m doing.”
“So I’ll go then,” Moses said as he strode forward. “I’ll take the box to the wall and make the trade. I’m not afraid of him. Hell, after all I been through, I’m not afraid of anything anymore.”
Blood Runners: Box Set Page 34
