“I mean it this time!”
“You meant it last time!”
I laughed and turned Dagger to watch as the wagons began to roll in closer to the scraper, and Farmers began to unload crates of MREs. I kept a wary eye out for anything that looked out of place, but Faulkner’s zone was exactly what the man had claimed.
Faulkner seemed to be an honest man, a rare thing in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 8
Lassiter’s zone was just ahead, or whatever the new guy called it. I turned back toward the wagons.
“Be ready,” I said to Kalet, who rode the lead horse. “Probably have to shoot some people here.”
He swung his rifle from his back to hold it across his chest. “We’ll be ready.”
I rode forward toward the scraper. A group of armed men numbering close to twenty exited the building, and I saw several places where the glass had been removed on the scraper itself. Figured there would be guys up in those rooms.
I stopped Dagger at the foot of the steps and waited for the leader to approach.
He was looking past me at the wagons.
“You’re still thinking about it, aren’t you?” I asked. “Wouldn’t suggest it.”
The guy was big and reminded me of an old movie Jimmy had made me watch about a superhero that was a Norse god.
“You don’t think we could take your wagons?”
“I don’t,” I answered. “You might get some of my guys, but every person in this zone would die because of a terminal case of stupid.”
“You think pretty highly of yourself. You think you could kill everyone in the zone?”
“I did it with just three of us,” I said. “What do you think I’ll do with a hundred and fifty?”
“You’re that guy?”
I smiled.
He raised a closed fist. “What exactly do you want?”
I dismounted, and I felt a bullet whip past my head. My pistol was already in my hand by the time I heard the shot from the opening in the scraper. I returned fire into the man I could see in the shadows. Three shots before close to seventy-five rifles fired. And the fifty opened up on the spot where the shot had come from.
As the whole corner of the scraper exploded in debris, my pistol dropped to point directly between the big blonde guy’s eyes.
His hand stopped halfway to the gun at his hip.
“Give me a reason to keep shootin’,” I said.
His hand went back up, as did the men around him. There were another seventy-five guns pointed at them.
“That wasn’t planned,” he said and glanced toward the gaping hole in his scraper. “Fadder was a dumbass.”
“Yes, he was,” I said. “I’m tempted to just ride on through and leave you to your own devices, but Pop says I have to give you folks a chance too. So here’s the deal. I want to see every single person in the zone. We’ll provide food for each person, enough to have at least one meal per day for thirty days.”
“You’re giving it away?” He looked confused. “Are you an idiot?”
“Question is, are you?”
His eyes narrowed, but he turned to the guys behind him. “Get everyone out here.”
“Several simple rules to the process,” I said. “I give each person thirty of these.” I held up the plastic chip. “Each person exchanges one chip for an MRE. You come to me with more than thirty, I’ll assume you took them from someone else, and I’ll shoot you.
“Everyone follows the rules, and everyone eats,” I continued.
I pulled chips from the sack and counted out thirty of them. I held them out to the warlord. “Your chips.”
He waited for a few seconds but decided to go ahead and take them.
“The MREs will be distributed at that wagon,” I said and pointed to the second wagon in the train. “Allen!”
“Sir!” Allen Garvis answered from his place in the train.
“Come distribute the chips.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I’ll be at that wagon,” I said to the warlord. “Remember the rules. Thirty chips, no more.”
The warlord walked beside me toward the wagon as I led Dagger. He kept looking over at me.
“What?”
“Trying to figure out what’s in this for you. I saw what you guys left here; you’re not the bleeding hearts you’re acting like.”
“Thing is,” I said, “I’d have just burned this place to the ground, but Pop has a plan. He wants to save as many as we can before this city destroys all the humanity in the people living here. It’s already done so with too many.”
“Humanity? Humans have always been savages. We just hid it under a veneer of civility. You know what I’m talking about. Like I said, I saw what you left here.”
“That veneer is what he is looking for,” I said. “I know what I am. What we left here was a warning.”
“What I don’t understand is how they let you just walk in here with two people and do all that.”
“They didn’t let us do anything,” I said. “They tried their level best not to let us do what we did. But we did it anyway, and that’s part of the warning.”
He looked down the line of wagons at all the automatic weapons and shook his head. I glanced toward the scraper as a line of people exited the front door. This was part of what I’d been waiting for. They lined up after the warlord’s goons. I saw a short confrontation where one of the women from the last group handed her chips to the goon who confronted her. She moved off to the side with tears in her eyes.
As the guy approached, I looked at the warlord, who’d seen what happened. He was ignoring it.
The guy handed Harry Feder, who was distributing MREs, sixty chips.
“You took those?” I asked.
“What’s it to ya?”
I stepped two steps to my right so there was no one in the line of fire and palmed my .45. He still had a look of complete surprise on his face as the bullet entered his forehead. Blood and brain matter exploded from the back of his head, and he seemed to topple in slow motion. Actually, everything seemed to be moving in slow motion.
Then everything was back to its normal pace. That was new.
I turned to the warlord, who shrugged.
“Told the dumbass to wait till she got her MREs.”
I pointed at the woman, who jerked. I crooked my finger for her to come forward.
“Y-yes?” She was hardly old enough to be called a woman. It looked like she was about sixteen.
“You can take your thirty MREs,” I said, “or you can come with us. We need workers on the Farms. Here you might get to eat one of these before they take the others. There, you’ll get three meals a day and…”
“I’ll go.”
“Just wait a damn minute!”
I looked at the warlord. “This is one of those times you get to choose between the path to civility and the path to barbarism. Choose wisely.”
“These are our sla—”
“Slaves?” I interrupted. “Slavery ended in this country centuries ago. Prisoners? What crime did they commit?”
He scowled.
“Let me make your choice easier.” I handed him the thirty chips that had been the girl’s allotment. “One time only offer. Any of these… prisoners who come with us won’t be needing their allotment of chips. They’ll go to you as the warlord of this zone. But listen close. If you want business with us in the future, remember what I said. Slavery ended in this country centuries ago.”
He stopped his complaining as he looked into the wagon packed with MREs. He was still scowling, but he nodded. There were fifty-two slaves, and they all chose to go with us. Many of his men were unhappy with the deal, but I didn’t have to shoot anyone else. I was a little disappointed.
Pop rode up beside me and pointed to one of the former slaves.
“You bought them?” Pop asked.
“I didn’t want to have a gunfight with them in the middle.” I shrugged.
&n
bsp; “Thought you wanted to burn it down.”
“Still thinkin’ about it,” I said.
“Gotta try to avoid fights now with a bunch of innocents in the caravan with us,” he said.
“I know. I just couldn’t leave them under those bastards. It hurt my heart to give them any rations at all.”
“We have to give them a chance, son. They need a chance to do the right thing.”
“They’ve had their chance, Pop. They enslaved those people. Raped the women, maybe even the men. How much of a chance do they warrant?”
“Only the one,” he said. “We come back next time to the same shit, and we’ll leave them hanging from the lampposts.”
“That’s where they need to be.”
“We’ll see.” He turned in his saddle toward me. “I noticed a little something back there. You’ve always been quick with that pistol, boy, but that was on a different level. I could barely follow the movement as you drew it. You’re faster than you were. I mean, Jimmy fast.”
“I know, Pop,” I said. “The nanites that came with his blood are doing something to me. I think they’re turning me into something like him.”
“That’s what I’m thinkin’,” he said. “When we get back, I want you to work with Jimmy and see what the nanites have done to you. If you’re going to get that strength and speed, you’ll need to work with it so you don’t hurt someone.”
“You mean so I don’t hurt Allie.”
“Maybe.”
“I get you, Pop. I wouldn’t hurt that little girl for the world.”
“Not on purpose, you wouldn’t. Jimmy’s strength and speed came with all the training. You’re going to have to do it the old-fashioned way.”
I nodded. “We’ll start as soon as we get back home. For the moment, I better get back up there and introduce myself to the next of these warlords.”
He could hear the distaste in my voice.
“I don’t like the term any more than you do, but it’s the one we’re left with. Go see if we need to shoot this bunch or not.”
“One can hope.”
“Hopefully we won’t need to,” Pop said. “But you can’t always get what you want in this Fallen World.”
* * * * *
Chapter 9
Surprisingly, we didn’t have to shoot anyone in the next zone, or the eight zones that followed. It began to get easier as we moved along, because word seemed to spread long before we got there.
“Kalet, got enough left to do one more?” I asked.
“One good-sized one, or maybe two small zones.”
“Alright, let’s keep going then.” I still wasn’t sure it was all worth it. We’d been through twelve zones, and six of them had been run by people I’d rather have shot.
We’d grown our caravan to double its original size with volunteers to go back to the Farms. The last two unsavory zones didn’t have any slaves. I almost searched their zones to see if they were telling me the truth, but Pop had nixed that. I wasn’t happy about it, but he was right. We had a couple hundred innocents in our caravan and didn’t need to put them at risk.
I would remember the zones, though. Something could be done at a later date. Pop had proven the viability of his plan with the other six zones.
Three men in red stepped into the center of the street. All three were carrying automatic weapons. The police riot gear they wore was painted red with a large ‘W’ on the chest.
I stopped Dagger in front of the men.
“My name is Zebediah Pratt, and we would like to speak with your warlord. We have provisions for the people of your zone.”
“We’ve heard the rumors. Our boss sent us to meet you and examine your caravan before we let you enter.”
I grinned as I picked out the snipers on the buildings to each side of the street. There was a wall in the process of being built across the street behind the men.
“You can examine what we have to offer,” I said. “One of you can come with me, and we’ll walk the caravan. The others will stay where they are.”
I dismounted and handed the reins to Kalet. “If your guys in those buildings get too antsy, Grady will probably get upset.”
I pointed to the wagon with the fifty.
“The last thing we want to do is upset the guy with a fifty cal,” he said with a grin. “If we go with one half of the rumors, you folks are a godsend. If the other half is right, you’ll not enter here, now or ever.”
“I’d guess the second half are saying we took a bunch of their people?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Figured,” I said. “One of the things I’ll show you are the people we took. Each and every one of them chose to go with us rather than be held as slaves by the warlords.”
He grimaced. “I hate that word.”
“I do, too,” I said, “but it’s the title that was chosen by most of them.”
“Alright,” he said. “Let’s take a look.”
He walked toward me and slung his gun onto his back. I nodded and slipped the strap of my rifle over the saddle horn. The guy was tall, but not overly big, with black hair that he kept cut short. Something nagged at me. I felt I should recognize the guy. Nothing was coming to me, so I shrugged and walked down the side of the caravan. The first wagon was empty.
He nodded and we moved to the second. I opened it, and he jerked as he saw three men raise rifles. The whole back of the wagon was stacked with ammo for the fifty.
“Down boys,” I said.
Gary looked up into the cupola. “Could have warned us, asshole.”
Gary and his cohorts lowered the weapons.
I looked toward the guy I was escorting. “That’s for transparency. We have a lot of guns and a lot of people trained to use them. I understand your boss’s hesitancy. But we’re prepared to defend ourselves if the need arises.”
He nodded. I still couldn’t stop the niggling feeling that I recognized the man. “Next wagon has some of the people we took. You’ll probably want to talk to them.”
“I do.”
I opened the door, and several women looked up from where they sat in the wagon. He cocked his head to the side as he looked into the wagon. That was when it dawned on me who the guy was. I’d seen that same look from him on the vids.
“I’ll step back, Mister Wilderman, and let you ask your questions. Somehow, I think your boss is a lot closer than anyone has let on.”
I stepped away and heard him ask several of the women about their stories. I was near the front of the wagon, but I could hear them as if they were right beside me. More of the changes from the nanites. My stomach rumbled, and I reached into a pocket to pull out one of the dried bars from the MREs and chewed on a piece. They weren’t the best, but I had to eat on a regular basis until the nanites were finished with me.
“You could have loaded the front wagons with what you thought I’d want to see, but I think you can skip down to the supply wagons. What do you have to offer, and what is it going to cost?”
“The last two wagons have what remains of our supplies,” I said.
“And the cost?”
“There is no cost. Pop has a plan. He wants to help save what’s left of this city. We have food, and it’s growing scarce in the city. Whether we make this a normal thing will depend on what we see when we go into your zone. There have been several I won’t be working with if we find the same thing we found on the way through. I have a real problem with slavery. This city took the woman I cared about more than any other person in this world, but I’ll try to do what she would have wanted of me. I remember you from before, and I surely hope you’re the man you used to be, because right now it’s fifty-fifty whether I wash my hands of it.”
Thomas Wilderman, former chief of police of the Philadelphia Province, nodded to me. “I think you’ll be satisfied that we’re some of the good guys.”
I opened the last wagon to show him the packed interior.
“Like I said, could be a godsend,” he said. “Welco
me to Wilderman’s.”
I followed the man back up the line of wagons and into a little slice of the past. Amidst the hell this city had become, there was a small oasis of normalcy in this Fallen World.
* * * * *
Chapter 10
“Let me approach these guys first,” Wilderman said. “They’re a group of Obsidian guys. We try to keep peace by mutual ambivalence. We don’t mess with them, and they don’t mess with us.”
We stood in the street looking at a nondescript building. It was five stories tall with white-coated cinder blocks. At least that was what it was designed to look like. I could see the details in the wall much better than I’d been able to before the nanites.
The pattern wasn’t real cinder blocks. It was the design of cinder blocks stamped into a solid concrete wall.
“Obsidian is usually a little more on the fancy side,” Pop said as we watched Wilderman approach the entrance.
“This is something different,” I said. “That’s solid concrete with the pattern of cinder block stamped onto it.”
“Who stamps a plain pattern like that into concrete?” He looked puzzled. “And how can you tell from here?”
“I see a little better than before, Pop.”
“You really have to spend some time with Jimmy when we get back home.”
“I know.”
Wilderman walked back out to us. “I know you have a hard rule on each person claiming their own packages, but they have a problem with it. All my dealings have been through an envoy, and they don’t want to change that.”
I looked at the building with the guards on the door. Pop started to answer, but I placed my hand on his shoulder. He looked over at me and, after a moment, he nodded to me.
“It’s a hard rule for a reason,” I said. “The Obsidian Corporation is gone. All we have left are just survivors. If they send me an envoy, they’ll get enough food for one man to have one meal per day for thirty days, just like any other person in this zone or any other. That’s the way it is. I won’t show any favor for them that I wouldn’t show to any other in this screwed up city. I’ll set up a wagon right here for three hours. It’s their choice.”
Farmer's Creed Page 4
