After America ww-2

by John Birmingham

  Sofia confirmed her father's suspicions that the two teenagers had been discussing this issue by quickly following up on Adam's suggestion.

  "That's right," she said as they reached the tree line at the edge of the clearing. The going became much tougher there. They did not have the night vision goggles, and the two men had agreed it would be reckless to use a torch that might be spotted many miles away. As long as the moon was out, they had just enough light to pick their way through the undergrowth, but whenever it disappeared behind a drift of cloud, they were forced to proceed much more carefully and slowly. The dogs, in contrast, bounded ahead, crashing through the long grass and occasionally tripping on a tree root without a care.

  "It's worth considering," Randall said. "We probably should send riders ahead just to be sure."

  "And who would these riders be?" Miguel wondered aloud.

  "I'll go," said Adam.

  "Me, too," Sofia added quickly.

  The night brightened just perceptibly as a meteor streaked overhead. Miguel resisted the urge to stare at it, not wanting to ruin his night vision.

  "I do not think so, Princesa," he said. "But you, Adam, you could ride with me if Cooper Aronson allowed it."

  He braced himself for his daughter's protest, and it was not long in coming.

  "That's not fair," she said just a little too loudly before continuing in a stage whisper. "I can ride and shoot as well as Adam, probably better. No, much better. Sorry, Adam, but it's true."

  It was true, Miguel thought. Her performance in Crockett had confirmed that. With her hunting experience, she had all the natural makings of a scout. He often found her looking at the next horizon with binoculars or her Remington in hand. The trail boss in him saw the merit of her argument.

  But there was no way he was going to have his only surviving daughter tracking the sorts of monsters responsible for the atrocity in Palestine. Adam was skilled enough to do that sort of work, and after the gunfight in Crockett, Miguel trusted him to keep his head.

  The lad seemed most put out to have had his manly virtues dismissed by Sofia. Miguel could tell, even in the dark, that Adam was considering a wounded protest.

  The cowboy smiled to himself.

  Miss Sally would look all the more attractive to the Mormon boy now. Cooper Aronson sipped at the steaming mug of coffee. In the soft, guttering candlelight he looked as though he'd aged ten years in the short time Miguel had known him. His eyes stared out from sunken pits, and the cowboy could swear that deep lines and new crevasses scored his face. The Mormon leader stood at a cork-covered island bench with his hands wrapped around the chipped enamel coffee mug as though he were hugging it for comfort as much as for warmth. Only three candles burned in the kitchen, where Miguel, Ben Randall, Willem D'Age, and Aronson had gathered after a modest evening meal of salt pork and beans. All the rest had bunked down in their sleeping bags throughout the farmhouse after the Mormons had tended to the remains of one of the former residents.

  "It seems a reasonable idea," Aronson said. "But are you sure that Adam is the one to take with you?"

  "He is a good boy," Miguel said. "Brave and reliable. And he will be under my supervision, of course. I will ensure he does not run off the trail and do something stupid."

  Ben Randall topped off his mug from the coffeepot standing on the bench in front of them. Maive Aronson had made up the brew after discovering a stash of vacuum-sealed beans in the larder. They were not exactly fresh, but it was still something of a luxury to have them.

  "I'm happy to go with Miguel," Randall offered, but the vaquero could tell from the way the lines in Aronson's face grew even longer and deeper that he did not relish the idea of losing a man who had proved himself so capable in the brutal hand-to-hand fight back at Crockett.

  "No, I think we will go with Miguel's idea," Aronson said. "If he's the one out scouting for these characters, I think we should leave it to him who he chooses to ride with."

  The engineer shrugged off what could have been taken as a slight, but Miguel felt he needed to explain himself anyway.

  "My daughter will be here when I ride away," he said. "I would be happier, much happier, knowing you were here to guard her. I saw you beating down those road agents in Crockett, Randall. Sofia will be safe with you."

  Randall tipped his coffee mug slightly toward Miguel. "And you can rest assured no harm will come to her while there is breath in my body, Miguel," he said.

  "Then we shall head out before first light," said the cowboy. "Adam is already sleeping. He has packed himself a bedroll and supplies for a five-day ride. I shall do the same. But first we should agree on a route, yes?"

  He reached along the bench for one of the battered Rand McNally road maps they were using to navigate through Texas. The thick, laminated foldout map was covered in squiggles and notes. It was fraying at the edges and along the creases where it had been folded and unfolded countless times. Miguel made a mental note to pick up a new one when the opportunity arose. They cleared a space between the candles and refolded the document to center it on their current location.

  Miguel placed his finger on their location and traced a rough waving line to the north. "We shall follow this path," he said. "Switching and doubling back as we go, clearing a trail, shall we say twenty miles wide, looking for any sign of the agents."

  "And if you do find them?" Aronson said.

  "Then we shall make sure they do not find us."

  42

  Texas Administrative Division The dogs began growling long before Miguel and Adam approached the ridgeline. The vaquero called them back with a nightingale whistle, as they had been taught, and tossed each a piece of beef jerky as a reward.

  "Stay. Be quiet," he ordered them before motioning to the boy to dismount and secure his horse. Adam did as he was told, not saying a word, leading his mare to a cedar tree, where he tied her to a low branch before unslinging an M4 carbine fitted with a heavy-looking silencer. Life on the range was pressing all the youth out of him, leaving just the hardy stripling of a young man behind. He was learning quickly.

  Miguel took a moment to look behind him, checking all the possible places where Sofia might lurk. After Crockett he was especially sharp to the notion that she might repeat her performance.

  Once satisfied that his daughter had stayed behind, Miguel took his Winchester from the scabbard. They advanced cautiously to the crest through a light forest of fir trees, mountain juniper, and a few scattered conifers and Dutch elms. The forest floor was soft with pine needles, deadening the sound of their approach. Miguel could smell wood smoke and roasting pig meat, and his mouth watered involuntarily. A few feet from the top, they both crouched down and snaked forward the rest of the way on their bellies. Miguel gave Adam a brief nod. The boy was doing fine and seemed unaffected by the anxiety that had nearly unmanned him before the rescue at Crockett.

  The voices reached them as they warily raised themselves up on their elbows and peered over the ridgeline. The hillside fell away a good three hundred yards down to a plateau that had been cleared of trees a long time in the past. A hunting lodge, most likely constructed from the felled pines and firs, stood facing the west, bathed in the warm light of the late-afternoon sun. A band of men, over twenty of them, lolled about on the soft grass in front of the lodge and on couches and Adirondack chairs sheltered under a generous front porch. A spitted hog fizzed and crackled over a bed of coals, causing Miguel to wonder at its origin. Pigs were one of the animals that had vanished or been killed in great numbers by the Wave. Was this a feral leftover or perhaps a trophy taken from some poor settler family, perhaps even those poor folk they had found back in Palestine?

  "Agents?" his companion asked in a low voice.

  Miguel nodded. The men were well armed with military weapons, and their camp looked as though it had been professionally supplied. They were dressed in the same ragtag fashion as the agents back in Crockett, sporting outlandish costumes obviously chosen more for effect than for
practicality. As he drew a pair of binoculars to study the camp in closer detail, two women emerged from the hut, both attired in the same slutty fashion as the camp whores they had liberated: miniskirts, boots, low-cut T-shirts. None of it was sensible in cold spring weather, but he had to admit they were outfits well chosen to please the men they were with. Miguel studied the camp for five minutes, searching for evidence of any captives, but there were none. Perhaps this band of outlaws preferred to move more freely than would be possible with reluctant prisoners in tow. Perhaps that was why the women in Palestine had not survived their encounter, if these were the men responsible.

  Miguel grunted in frustration.

  "Anything seem strange to you, Miguel?" Adam asked, keeping his eye to the scope of his weapon.

  "What am I looking for?"

  "A lot of them are clean-shaven, lean and trim," Adam said. "Not like the other agents."

  "I see," Miguel said. "Blackstone's soldiers, perhaps?"

  Adam shrugged. "Suspect so."

  It was all idle and pointless speculation. They could not know the minds of the men down in that glade, and short of stealing into the camp to snatch a prisoner for interrogation, they never would. And again, what would be the point? They had been lucky in Crockett. The agents there had been sloppy and ill disciplined. There was nothing about this gang that made him think they would be as fortunate a second time around. The camp was well laid out, with garbage and sewage pits dug well away from the lodge and the little spring that presumably provided their water. If they were soldiers, there would be fighting positions, traps, and perhaps even land mines hidden around the exterior of the camp. A line of clothes hung drying in the weak sunlight, attended by the whores who had just emerged from the lodge, and there was even a small vegetable patch situated to catch the northern sun.

  No. These men knew what they were doing, which meant they would have patrols out in the woods.

  He had seen enough.

  "Let's go," he mouthed to Adam. "We must divert farther to the northeast," Miguel insisted.

  He warmed his hands over a potbellied stove in a holiday house overlooking Pineywoods Lake, a good twenty miles to the west of the road agent's camp. Most of the Mormon party was there save for Benjamin and Maive, who were out riding patrol. The ranch-style home, all timber and stone, had expansive views over the water, which rippled in the glow of a crescent moon. He was able to see out through the picture windows because a few candles and the glowing coals of the stove provided the only illumination, creating just the ghost reflection of the small group of travelers in the glass. Still rugged up against the cold, routinely armed, thin and tired, they presented an almost medieval image when viewed against the background of the moon-dappled lake.

  "Are you sure about this, Miguel?" Cooper Aronson asked. "It could add weeks to our traveling time, and I don't need to tell you that every day we're out in the wilderness is another we're at risk."

  "I saw them, too, brother," Adam said, speaking with quiet confidence. "They were road agents for a certainty. And a meaner crew than we saw in Crockett. They looked… I don't know… professional."

  "He is right," Miguel said. "They were agents, and I suspect they may have been the ones responsible for Palestine. They were close enough for it to fall within their territory if it is true that Crockett was the northern extent of the other gang's turf."

  He cast an inquiring eye over at the camp whore called Marsha. Of the women they had taken in after Crockett, she had adapted best to her new role with the Mormons. That did not make her particularly reliable or pleasant company, but she was better than her two sullen friends who sat apart smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and furtively drinking from a hip flask they passed between each other. The Saints did not prevent their drinking-that would have been unfair given that they raised no objection to Miguel taking a sip at the end of the day-but they did not encourage the women to feel comfortable doing so in their presence. Marsha sat well away from the two women but still maintained her distance from everyone else except Miss Jessup, who formed a bridge of sorts between the two groups of women.

  "Well, Marsha, do you think it's true?" Trudi asked, in a gentle voice. "From what you knew. Are the men Miguel and Adam saw today likely to be agents claiming the country north of Crockett?"

  Marsha glared momentarily at Miguel, who had, after all, blown the head off her man, but she softened under a supportive shoulder pat from Miss Jessup. Sofia rolled her eyes at her father, but he motioned her to be still. There was no sense holding a grudge against this woman for the company she had kept, not when she might be of some use to them.

  "Could be," Marsha offered. "The boys didn't like to talk much about that sorta thing. They'd brag all day on a shootin' or some pillage. But old Tom, he cracked down pretty hard on discussin' things like that. You know, turf and politics."

  Miguel nodded. "Old Tom was the last man we hanged, yes?"

  Marsha glared at him. "He was. And he was a good guy, too!"

  Sofia snorted. "He was a murderer and a rapist who got what he deserved."

  "I am sure he has gone to his reward," the vaquero intoned in a flat voice before addressing Aronson again. "You know my feelings about the agents. They are Fort Hood men. Perhaps not the lesser rank of them. They would just be thugs for hire, expendable. But the leaders of these gangs, they must answer to Blackstone, and to run their gangs as effectively as they do, they must have some training. The camp today, it was like the army with its discipline. I believe had we delayed long on that ridge, we would have been caught by them. They are not amateurs, and we will have a hard time staying away from them if we pursue our original route. This is why we must divert to the northeast. We cannot go west and into the lands directly controlled by Fort Hood. To them you are federales. Seattle's people. You will not find an easy passage there."

  Willem D'Age leaned forward from his perch next to his fiancee Jenny, on the end of an expensive-looking leather couch. He used a small log to open the grille of the wood stove. Tossing in more fuel, he took up the case with Aronson.

  "Miguel might be right. We did have trouble with those Texas customs and excise people a few days after we left Corpus Christi. You said at the time it was almost like they were waiting for us. And to tithe us as they did, I still do not believe that to be legal or just."

  Miguel folded his arms and nodded. "It is as I said. Out here justice is a bullet. These customs men, they pretended to tax you?"

  Aronson snorted.

  "No pretending about it, my friend. They took ten percent of our herd and supplies. Said it was a border fee or some such thing. They had papers and issued us with a receipt. It was all very official. Right down to the platoon of Texas Defense Force soldiers standing watch over the transaction. But they also said we would need to pay more tolls if we used the state roads to offset the cost of our protection. That's how we came to ride through the agents' territory. It seemed to us we would have nothing left if we tarried long in Blackstone country."

  Miguel stroked the rough beard on his chin and grunted.

  "I have heard similar tales of federal ranches similarly taxed despite the exemption from Seattle, although it did not happen to me. Why take something piece by piece when you can have it in one bite, I suppose."

  "So do we do as Miguel suggests and ride around these men?" Adam asked, surprising the cowboy and causing Aronson to raise his eyebrows, too. The lad had developed a very mature sort of confidence. Miguel suppressed a smile as he saw young Sally Gray glancing approvingly at the boy, an interlude that his daughter very studiously chose to ignore. She would just have to accept the situation, he thought. The two Mormon youngsters had been spending a great deal of time together when the boy's duties allowed, and although Miguel could see that Adam was drawn to the exotic in Sofia, there was no doubting the attraction of one's own kind in the end.

  He did not imagine they would be zipping their sleeping bags together, however. The Mormons maintained a strict proprie
ty regarding such things. Even D'Age and his fiancee still slept apart. For Miguel, who felt Mariela's absence like a suppurating wound, it was an impressive display of abstinence. What he would not give just to lie down with his wife one last time. Just to tell her of the things there had never been time to discuss in the rush of the everyday.

  He rubbed at his eyes as they blurred and watered. Nobody noticed the weakness.

  "I do not suppose we can hope to stand down this gang if we encounter them," Aronson mused.

  Again, before Miguel could answer, Adam spoke up.

  "Not a chance," he insisted. "They looked sharp and mean. The best we can hope for is to never see them again. I suggest we move before first light. They will have outriders, and the cattle do raise a dust cloud."

  Sally Gray, sitting next to Jenny, nodded vigorously but remained quiet.

  "What say you, Willem?" Aronson asked.

  "I'm with Brother Adam and Miguel, Cooper. I fear these men might be the perpetrators of that mass murder. And if they are, we will get no quarter from them. Not out here. I think it best if we take ourselves as far away as we can, as fast as possible."

  Aronson sat quietly, weighing his responsibilities as their leader. Miguel could see Adam's impatience in every line of the youth's rigid stance. He had placed himself over near the main entry to the large, open lounge area, and unlike the others he was still cradling his carbine as though ready to use it at a moment's notice. Silence fell save for the crackling of the fire and the tinkling of cutlery on plates and bowls as a few of them finished their evening meals-beans and beef stew. Miguel gave Adam a look as if to say calm down, and the boy did visibly relax somewhat. Sofia meanwhile was as quiet and watchful as a cat.

  "All right," the Mormon leader said, at last. "I have to agree. We have not the numbers or, frankly, the ability to tangle with men like this and survive the encounter. I suggest that we bed down early tonight and make a start before sunup in the morning. I'll tell Ben and Maive when they return from their patrol."