by Ric Beard
Jimmy stepped forward. “A pleasure.”
“Hey, your brother might have been dead before we got there!” Sean said.
“Might not have,” Jimmy replied. Unsheathing a blade, he held it up so Sean could see. “Either way, you killed our friends, mister.”
Jimmy stepped onto the platform atop which the pole was stationed and raised the knife. He jammed his off hand into Sean’s neck and Sean gagged, but he clenched his molars together and pushed hard breaths through his nostrils so warm breath created steam against the cold air, resembling a dragon.
I’ll be damned if it’s going to be easy for you.
The unmistakable crackle of nearby gunfire filled the night air, and all heads jerked around as the man atop the roof paced to the corner closest to Sean and Lexi.
“What’s that? You two go check it out.”
Jimmy squinted one eye at Sean and sheathed the knife. “We’ll just finish this up later.” Then he sucker-punched Sean in the gut.
The two men yanked the rifles off their shoulders and disappeared down the street as Sean heaved, unable to double over and relax the assaulted muscles in his abdomen.
“Just breathe,” Lexi said. “Push the pain away with your mind and—”
“What is this, a meditation session?” Sean choked.
“You two think you could wrap it up?”
A low, throaty voice came out of the darkness from somewhere over Sean’s shoulder.
Sean’s head swiveled to the left, finding only a row of rusted metal barrels and the scaffold raised for a good old fashioned hanging. With the storm pushing dark cloud cover above and the shadows cast by the barrels, the darkness in that direction was inky, but less dark than his prospects of living past tonight. A squint and the stilling of his eyes finally revealed a gloved hand protruding from behind the right side of the barrels. Sean’s eyes ticked to the man sauntering to one side of the roof, then back.
Something curved stuck up from the top of the barrels, followed by another gloved hand in a fist, pulling on a rope—no…
A bowstring.
Sean whipped his head in the direction of the guard on the roof, standing at the opposite end of the long building, a good ninety feet away.
No way a bow takes him from there. There’s no way.
After a short pop and the almost imperceptible whisper of the arrow cutting air, he was proven wrong. The man on top of the roof slapped at his neck and turned, so Sean saw him from the side. The glow of spotlights below the guard illuminated the gleaming black fletching of an arrow. The lawkeeper tugged at the shaft as if he could pull the projectile through. Sean imagined a drop of thick blood dangling from the arrow’s slim tip, though there was no way to see, even with the spotlights at ground level.
Turning his head toward Lexi and Sean and raising his arms as if to complain, the lawkeeper lumbered across the roof in their direction. Swinging the rifle up in an effort to bring it to bear on them, he fumbled the weapon. Nearly tripping as he bent over to grab it, he slapped at his sidearm When he reached the edge of the roof directly across from Sean, he uttered a sickening bubbling sound. Blood splurged from his mouth, black against the projection of the spotlight mounted on a tripod below. The cap worn loosely back off his forehead slid off as he tumbled from the side of the building, flipped once, and slammed into the dirt road beneath. A plume of dust puffed into the air upon impact.
Sean winced at the thud and peered across the three alleys on the other side of the street, one at a time, then faced west, his sore abs forgotten.
A man wearing a black, wide-brimmed hat low on his forehead stood in the darkness near the barrels. Flashes of lighting popped like breaking lightbulbs through clouds in the distance behind the figure. The tails of his black trench coat flapped under a new, westerly breeze. The bow’s string crossed his chest.
Over the man’s shoulder, Sean spied one of the restored radio towers that littered the region, standing in the distance near the northern edge of the storm system.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Sean said. “I mean, this day just keeps getting better and better.”
“Nice shot,” Lexi said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” the throaty voice said.
The man closed the distance and raised his chin, revealing tawny eyes beneath the shadow of his hat. A gloved hand yanked away from his hip holding a long knife with what looked like metal shark’s teeth set into the back of the blade. He nodded at Sean.
“If I cut you loose, you gotta promise not to charge me.”
Lexi laughed.
Sean tilted his head back and feigned laughter. “Oh, you’re hilarious.” He threw a nervous glance down the alleys, again.
He’d last set eyes on this man during what Lexi described as the worst snow storm Triangle City had seen in years. Along a back street near what the city labeled the Technology District, Sean had tried to attack the man in black because he’d thrown him in a box out on Old I-40 days before. He’d easily evaded Sean, disarmed Lexi—which was no easy feat—and saved them from a man who’d held a fusion pistol on them.
Maybe I should’ve been grateful for that last part.
But Sean remembered the inciting feeling in his gut like it was yesterday. His aggression had been unthinking, born of claustrophobia he’d never managed to conquer, until recently.
After saving their asses, Moss had vanished at the other end of the alley. Sean and Lexi hadn’t heard a word from him since.
“We got a deal?”
“You sure know how and when to make an appearance, dude.” Sean jerked his head toward the scaffold. “We have a deal, Moss.”
Chapter Three
YOU'RE LATE
3
Last time Lexi Shaw set eyes upon him, Moss had been awash in black, dancing evasively on a snowy street with the effortless grace of a jujitsu master. The tails of his long trench coat had masked the movements of his body beneath, shrouding his form from his attacker’s view while whipping up cold white powder all around him. The shadow cast by the same hat he wore now had given the impression there was no man beneath all those black garments as he’d glided toward the man holding Lexi, Sean, and a soldier named Reagan at gunpoint.
They stopped next to the corpse and Moss flipped the lawman evenly onto his side. A dull sucking sound , followed by a pop, emanated from the split throat as the arrow was extracted from his neck. A tiny wisp of steam rose from the tip of the arrow.
Sean gagged. Lexi chuckled.
“Is this wise?” Sean asked. “Standing in this spotlight so you can retrieve your arrow?”
A thick drop of blood rolled slowly down the shaft as Moss held it vertically.
“This arrow is aluminum. I don’t have a way to manufacture more of them.”
Lexi sensed no irritation in the husky voice emanating from the shadowy void beneath his hat, but wondered why. If she thought Sean was a pain in the ass, what must this man think?
Sean gave a single nod. “Oh. That makes sense.”
Moss cocked his head to the north and started walking. They fell in.
Jenna’s descriptions of the tactician clad in soldiering gear in the badlands contrasted Lexi’s vision of the man in black so completely that there was no reconciling the two. If the soldier version of Moss had been a cover persona, who was he in reality? Who did he work for? Now, it seemed she was finally going to have an answer to the question to which everyone wanted an answer.
“Who the hell are you?” Lexi asked.
The shine of Moss’s teeth penetrated the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat.
“That’s a fine way to ask a question,” Moss said. “You don’t waste any time.”
“Trust me, I’ve waited long enough. It’s not like we ever went for coffee.”
They turned into an alley between two of the one-story shacks that pervaded the town and Lexi noted how she and Moss both moved in the shadows next to the wall while a quick look over her shoulder verified Sean had made no such move. She shook
her head in derision.
Moss flicked his eyes around as he spoke, constantly surveying the area.
“I don’t know how people drink that sludge. Especially with what it costs.”
Lexi gave a weak smile in response as she recalled Jenna’s words about Moss’s tactical abilities. She reached into her mind for a quote from The Art of War.
‘Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.’
The way Jenna told it, Moss had been a revered soldier in the OK City special forces, serving in a unit called the Viper Wipers, but it had been just a mask he’d worn, another cloak with a purpose her Foundation didn’t yet understand.
He swapped one shroud for another. I wonder how many personas he has. He’s like a man after my own heart.
“Where are we going?” Sean drifted along behind them, rocks crunching beneath his footfalls on the dusty road.
Lexi glanced back at her brother. Dark eyes shifted in paranoid glances to either side of the road. Glossy hair, shining like it belonged on a cat, was tied in a short ponytail behind his head. It reminded Lexi of the Japanese warriors depicted on the painted scrolls in her foster father’s doh jahng—the practice space at the house in Maryland where she’d lived in the wake of her parents’ deaths, so long ago.
“We have to pick somebody up,” Moss answered.
“And keep your voice down,” Lexi whispered harshly at her brother. “Bad enough you walk like a golem and drag your feet like it’s a pastime, but you still can’t speak in a whisper?”
“Why would I need to, with a couple of ninjas like you walking in front of me?”
Ninjas. Funny, but also somewhat true.
The Foundation had taken a wait-and-see approach, expecting that these characters in Black would resurface at some point. Three interventions on Foundation members’ behalves was indication enough that Lexi’s people and Moss’s shared interests, and the speculation as to what those interests were, was endless. Now that Moss had intervened a fourth time, after two years of radio silence, Lexi was ready to find out.
“Speaking of rocks,” Sean said in a barely audible whisper, “you seem to have one up your ass lately.”
Having Sean back after 110 years or so was more than any reasonable person should’ve asked of the universe, but the ways in which he refused to absorb her training—like how to walk quietly— irked her senseless. She reminded herself to show some gratitude.
Lexi flashed a smile over her shoulder at her brother. “I told you we should have killed him.”
Sean returned a sideways, humorless smile and threw in a middle finger for effect. “Fuck you, sis.”
Lexi’s grin grew wider. Moss chuckled, though he kept his face forward. “So, tell me something, Moss—hey, what’s your real name?”
“Moss is my real name. My given name is Porter.”
“Porter Moss,” Sean said, as if testing it on his lips. “That’s a pretty cool name.”
“Thanks. I didn’t have much to do with it. I’m named for an ancestor.”
Ancestor? Lexi thought. Who talks like that?
Moss jerked his chin up. Even with the moon in front of him, his face was shaded by the brim on his hat. Only because she moved right beside him could she see the whites of his eyes. Lexi was mystified by how practiced his every motion seemed to be, even something as simple as the way he moved his head. It was like he’d practiced The Silence himself.
“It’s up here on the right. Lock and load.”
Flipping one tail of his trench coat to the side, Moss revealed a pulse pistol and held it out to Lexi. From the opposite side, he drew out a JenCorp 8000 series pulse rifle, checked the charge levels, pumped the handle beneath the stock twice, racked it back into place, and tossed it at Sean’s chest. “Seems more your style. It’s noisy.”
Sean didn’t smile this time. “Funny. You found my gun. Thanks.”
The man in black reached into his trench and withdrew two pairs of glasses, offering them, in turn.
“Just so you know, I’ve regretted the rifle butt on the interstate the day we met. It was wrong.”
“Then why did you do it?”
Though Sean hadn’t been back for long, Lexi knew his tone indicated a chilly disposition over the events on Old I-40. The claustrophobia, born when a crooked judge sent her brother to prison in his late teens to profit from a state prison-turned-private, had already spawned a violent action from Sean when setting eyes upon Moss in Triangle City. His response had been guttural, automatic, and without consideration of the potential consequences.
As Sean told it, he’d arrived in time to aid Jenna and Moss against a badlander attack. Moss rewarded him with a gun butt to the face and a night in one of the small cubes used as sleeping quarters by Jenna’s interstate clearing crew. The stint inside the cube had been why Sean had charged Moss in the snowy back alley in Triangle City, even after Moss had saved them from a pistol wielding asshole.
To hear her brother describe his ailment, she’d have thought he was describing a trip to a sadistic dentist.
“The truck,” Moss said.
“The truck? What about the truck?”
Lexi sighed and looked up and down the dirt street. “Is this really the time for this?”
To her chagrin, Moss ignored her. “It was one of ours.”
“One of whose?” Sean asked. “I mean, you aren’t Oklahoma City, right? That was a ruse?”
“Not entirely. That’s a longer story and I’ll be glad to tell it later, but suffice it to say, the technology wasn’t created by anyone in OK City. It was designed by my people.”
Sean threw up his free hand. “Then why didn’t you ask your people before you hit me with your rifle?”
Moss smiled but only with his lips. “Because I wasn’t in touch with my people.”
“You planned on sending me back to OK City so they could look into me. You said so.”
“I had a man in OK City. I was going to have him question you about how you came to possess the truck. I never reported you to the authorities and we wouldn’t have turned you over to anyone in the city, but I admit it’s a good thing you escaped because I didn’t know when I hit you that you were Lexi’s brother and a wanted criminal.”
“Is this friend an operative?” He made quotes with curled fingers.
“He’s still one of my operatives. Yes.”
“And what if he didn’t like my answers?”
“Don’t worry. We don’t kill people without good reason.” Moss pulled the slide on his weapon and peered at it. “The place I’m from designs those vehicles, and I’ve since learned that my former leader, the one who excommunicated me from my home, sent it to OK City to hedge his bets against a deal he made with The Horde.” He held up a hand. “Which is a story for later, considering where we are.”
Sean didn’t respond, but Lexi saw the pinkish color in his face receding.
“We good here?” Lexi asked.
Moss stuck his hand out again. Sean grasped it and nodded.
“You saved our asses tonight. I figure that clears your record.”
“Thanks.”
Lexi gazed up and down the street and dropped her shoulders as she became bored with the banter.
Signaling direction by flipping a few fingers toward himself, Moss turned up a side street and stopped near a wide door, setting his back against the stucco wall of a small windowless building. Lexi leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the heavy wooden door. She smelled paint and stepped away to check her clothes. None rubbed off. Besides looking like a skunk with a white stripe running up her back, the paint would make her visible to pursuers.
“Why’d you wear the combat suit if you were trying to be incognito?” Moss whispered.
“We’d been asking around about lawkeepers and left town when we saw one of Sampson’s trucks filled with enforcers roll in. I changed clothes and we snuck back in to do something on the down low. We didn’t realize
a guy we’d encountered before, during the battle outside Triangle City, had recognized us. Mister crunchy feet over there made too much noise and the posse he’d sent out looking for us showed up.”
“So, it was my fault,” Sean said. It didn’t sound like a question.
Lexi shot him her best not right now glare. “Save it.”
She finished checking her suit for paint and turned her eyes to find Moss holding up a single finger. Then he made a fist.
He’d been counting down. Moss turned the knob, kicked the door, and sailed inside like a crow, his coat tails flying high next to him as he spun to the inside corner. Lexi spun on her heels, swept across the threshold, and stopped, filling the space on the other side of the door, weapon at the ready.
Tilting her head to one side, Lexi spied the two men sprawled on the floor. A third leaned with his back against the bars and his chin dipped to his chest. She could see a shining bald spot drawing a perfect circle in the center of his head.
Inside the cell, a short woman with powerful legs buttoned a black shirt, covering considerable cleavage.
How the hell did she do all this from in there?
Lexi’s eyes ticked to each of the three men sprawling on the floor, then back to the unarmed woman standing inside the cell.
Impressive.
The place reminded Lexi of the jailhouses seen in western movies she’d watched with her father, back when she was too young to understand that they sucked. A small, beaten desk sat on the right. Bars separated the rectangular cell from the rest of the room. All the space needed was a cot and the picture would’ve been complete.
As Sean crossed the threshold and stepped into the building wielding his rifle, Lexi lowered her weapon.
“Holy hell,” Sean said, eyeing the scene.
The woman spoke without looking up from her shirt buttons. “You’re late.”
Moss chuckled. “Funny. Are any of these guys dead?”
She brushed her shirt with the back of her hand. “No. That would’ve just pissed you off. They’re breathing. I can’t speak to how they’ll feel when they wake up.”
Lexi squinted an eye at the woman inside the cell. “You were the distraction that pulled our guards away.”
