Sampson's Legacy: The Post-Apocalyptic Sequel To Legacy Of Ashes (Earth's Ashes Book 2)

by Ric Beard

  “How’s that work?”

  The nerve endings in my arm send electrical signals from the radial and ulnar nerves through receptors in the cup of the prosthetic and along biosynthetic fibers to the tips of the fingers.

  “Something tells me you wouldn’t understand.”

  A muscle under his eye twitched.

  Her captor twisted his neck at the harsh sound of a door slamming in another room. Nina followed his gaze.

  “Janie, you don’t want to come in here.” His eyes danced around the room and then down at the knife he wielded. His arm jerked toward the counter and it clattered across the dingy surface.

  Yeah, that’ll hide it, dummy.

  Janie stepped across the threshold through the wide opening into the kitchen. She towered over the farmer.

  Big girl. She might be taller than Lexi.

  Cold gray eyes met with Nina’s and widened. Her disheveled hair was black with thick streaks of gray that contrasted her smooth, unwrinkled skin. Her mouth dropped open as if she’d speak, but then she pressed her lips tightly.

  “Have you finally just lost your mind in total?” She thrust a finger in Nina’s direction. “What in the hell are you doing with this woman?”

  “You caught us,” Nina said. “We’re having an affair.” She lowered her chin toward the ropes. “I like it kinky.”

  “Shut up!” he barked at Nina. Then he turned toward Janie. “I’m saving our lives! When they come back, we can give her over. Look at her!” He pointed at Nina. “She’s real pretty, right? They might even give us food for her instead of taking ours!”

  “Where the hell did she come from?”

  The gray eyes darted between Nina and her partner repeatedly.

  “She was sleeping on a hill in the MidEast.”

  “I passed out, you liar!” Nina looked at Janie. “I have a condition.”

  The woman sighed and turned toward Nina. “Where’d you come from, missy? Tell me true.”

  Nina’s mind raced as she racked her brain for the best answer. Nothing came, so she squinted in what she hoped was an intimidating way until she could clear the fog.

  “Sampson.”

  “Sampson?” Janie’s mouth dropped. Nina could see her glottis hanging down in the back of her throat. “She’s Sampson’s?” She smacked his shoulder over and over, “—trade one of Sampson’s people to…Sampson’s people?”

  Arms outstretched in an effort to fend off her attacks, the man stepped backward until his spine touched the counter.

  “If she’s Sampson’s, what’s with the fancy glasses?”

  The woman stepped closer. “She could’ve got those from anywhere. So, what! She got some nice sunglasses!”

  “Twyla is going to hear you, honey!”

  Their bodies froze as they looked back in the direction from which Janie had come. Nina noticed their breaths catching as the woman held a hand to her chest and pushed a long lock of hair behind her ear as she leaned her head slightly, as if listening for something. A sigh hissed through her nose as she turned her ire back on Charlie.

  Janie throated a harsh whisper. “You know they’ll kill us, right? Twyla, too.”

  Charlie thrust an accusing finger. “She don’t talk like MidEast! You ever heard someone Down East talk like that?”

  Janie looked Nina up and down before pushing the same errant lock of hair behind her ear and focusing her bright eyes on Nina’s.

  “You from OK City? You come out here with Sampson?”

  The interrogation rooms drew themselves in her head again.

  Silence is a strong tactic, too. Don’t cooperate. Let their imaginations draw the worst scenario…

  Nina kept her eyes trained on the cool gray ones standing over her.

  Charlie whispered, “If she’s got people, they might come looking for her.”

  “Maybe you should’ve thought of that before you let your crazy out! Like what you done with Twyla wasn’t bad enough!” Janie thrusted a finger at the door. “Outside! Out the back, so she won’t hear us.”

  Sparing a short glance at Nina, Charlie lowered his head slightly, gripped and turned the doorknob, and stepped through the door. Janie followed him onto the porch shaded from the morning sun and pulled the back door closed with a gentle click.

  My pulse rifle is leaning against the wall out there. I hope it doesn’t give Janie any ideas.

  Nina looked down at her prosthetic. It was wedged into the rope pretty good, but if she could just get it turned so she could grasp the rope…

  The woman was hissing now and Nina looked up to see a crack she hadn’t noticed in one of the four panes of glass built into the back door. She strained to hear, but they were too quiet. Judging from Janie’s violent finger jerks, the woman was good and worked up with no sign of calming any time soon.

  No, good ol’ Charlie is going to be hearing about this one for a long time. If you don’t get the hell out of this, they’re going to bury you in their fields before they let Sampson find out they took one of his people. Of all the stupid cover stories…

  All Nina wanted in the world was to get out of that chair. She couldn’t force the twine too much, or she might end up disengaging the prosthetic and having it slip off her stump, rendering it useless. Straining the nerve endings on her stump, she got the thumb pulled back enough to force it between two strands of rope and began to pull.

  Thanks to Lucian’s modifications, the prosthetic’s grip was rated at 500 pounds, more than three times that of a strong man’s. The rope began to creak as the thumb forced it toward the fingers before she heard the metallic swivel of the door knob and looked up, trying to relax her posture without moving her prosthetic.

  If they see that arm, they’ll pop the straps off, and you’ll be finished. Even an idiot could figure out the design.

  Through the window, she saw Janie slap Charlie’s hand away and the door knob swiveled back into the closed position.

  She isn’t done yelling at you, Charlie.

  Sweat trickled down Nina’s forehead and across her glasses as the thumb slowly pulled two more strands. The rope creaked as she continued to tug, stealing glances through the panes at the couple fighting outside. Her head jerked back down as the rope snapped. Another glance at the door revealed that they were still talking, but didn’t seem nearly as heated. Janie’s hands were set on her hips as she nodded almost imperceptibly. They were face-to-face, maybe two feet apart.

  They’re back to intimate distance. Go!

  Nina shook the arm back and forth, creating more play in the rope. The swivel of the door knob sounded again, but it was too late to worry with them now. Getting out of that chair would be life or death at this point, when stupid Charlie realized the rope was too loose and spied the knife on that counter. Nina grunted and tugged hard, feeding loose rope right to left until her prosthetic yanked upward.

  Her head jerked up. The couple was standing in the doorway, their mouths hinged open.

  “She’s getting out!” Janie yelled.

  “The hell she is!” As she’d predicted, Charlie grabbed the knife off the counter, raised it over his head, and lunged toward Nina.

  Chapter Thirty

  HANDS OFF ME, SWINE

  30

  The scene through the porthole was flabbergasting. The same woman Ruby had seen dragged out of the medical tent in Ripley, now floated atop seven feet of water, her hands stroking in even motions along her side, from hip to head as her feet kicked gently beneath the surface. Her form moved in such a strangely adept way it seemed as if she were born in liquid and had returned to the place of her origins.

  She can swim.

  “You have lost your stupid mind,” Ruby muttered. “How long has she been in there like that?” She turned her gaze on Augustus, her lips pressed tightly together.

  “About three hours. I have to say, I’m impressed with this one. Had her down for a long count earlier. She takes long breaths, sucked the air out of the tank in mere minutes, feeding
that machine.”

  “Machine?”

  “Her body. I mean look at her. She’s ripped.”

  “I’ve never wanted to punch someone in the face so badly in all my days, Augustus.” Ruby felt the blood rising to her face as she turned to face him with her body as well as her eyes. “Do you know what Sampson would do to you if you killed her?”

  Augustus didn’t answer; his eyes were still racked with the image of the blonde with the big tits in the tank. Ruby saw the distant gaze for what it was. There was no mistaking his eyes as they hungered for the woman inside. It wasn’t sexual, though, not for Augustus. She’d never heard word of him having a woman, or a man, for that matter. He likely solved his sexual challenges one-handed. It wasn’t that he was impressed with her tits at all, it was that his inner psycho had been touched somehow. He wanted to keep her. This just wouldn’t do.

  “Answer me.”

  Ruby wasn’t sure if the movement of his chest was indicative of a quiet sigh or if he was just putting his words together in his head before he spoke them out loud, but either scenario woe her patience at its end. If he didn’t open his mouth and start—

  “I imagine Sampson would get pretty pissed off if I killed her,” Augustus said.

  His movement was too fast for her to react as he swiveled, swept his arms into the air and pinned her to the wall with one forearm across her chest, the other beneath her chin. The force bore the back of her head into the wall.

  “But let’s get one thing straight, Miss Ruby. You’re in my place, now. This is what I do.” His chin was inches from her now, his breath warm and rotten on her skin. “You run around your region trying to prove yourself to the big bad men who’re never gonna trust you. Like you’re the same as them. Little-miss-ex-hooker with a chip on her shoulder, riding around, filling out her reports, planning infrastructure, and setting her men on their routines, you don’t impress me. Save your orders for those who’ll listen.”

  “Take your hands off of me, swine,” Ruby said. She pressed the tip of her knife against his belly, but Augustus didn’t move. Instead, his sneer morphed into a smile, and he peered down at her chest, then back up at her face. “I will carve you like the pig you are, mother fucker.” She pressed the tip forward slightly.

  The tension on her body released so quickly she almost fell forward. Instead, she pulled her jacket taut with one hand and pushed the knife back into its sheath.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said. “The hooker grew herself some claws.” He formed claws with his hands and scratched the air.

  “Drain the tank, asshole. I want to talk to her.”

  Augustus’s smile faded. “No one talks to my prisoners, except me.”

  “Evidently your old friendship with the boss is fading, Augustus. Maybe he hasn’t kept you in the loop?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  Ruby stepped forward and shoved a finger against his chest, running it lingeringly down to his naval.

  “I’m Sampson’s Justice in the North now, Augustus. When I run around my region doing all the things you just described, including giving orders” she shoved her finger into his naval and twisted, “they command you.”

  Augustus lifted up his shirt. Blood trickled from his naval, and Ruby held up her finger, a long nail rising from the tip.

  “My orders will be obeyed.”

  Wearing a mask of disbelief, Augustus straightened his back. “I fall under Bradshaw.”

  “No, asshole, you used to fall under Bradshaw. Now, you fall under me. You’re in the Northern Territory.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Then pick up the radio and call Sampson, Augustus. We can talk to him about your recent insubordination, while we’re at it.”

  Augustus looked around, as if others filled the room, but they were the only two there. His expression slackened.

  “Open the god damned door, I would like to talk to our prisoner. Push me further and she’ll be my prisoner.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  LEXI SHAW, FOR THE WIN

  31

  The metal-on-metal screech of the wheel on the watertight door was a distant distraction from which Jenna instantly recovered as she pushed back down, into the shroud she’d painted over her mind. The water tracing the edges of her body was a soup of rippling calm against her skin as she floated on the surface, weaving her arms smoothly from above her head, underneath the liquid, and down to her thighs. Motion was automation, a separate function from the void of her mind.

  Someone spoke, but the sound was a vague utterance, muffled by her self-imposed trance and the water filling her ears. Words came again. She wasn’t sure if the man was repeating himself or if he’d said something new, but the words seemed to have come with the same inflection and lasted for about the same duration as the previous. Cold penetrated her calm universe as she allowed her mind to climb from the shallow depth of her subconscious, reaching out slowly to the world to grasp and pull it back into her life.

  Her motions remained fluid as she blinked open her eyes, bringing the labor of her muscles back to her conscious control. Soreness rose into her awareness with the resulting irritation of a child wakened from a deep sleep. Her head pivoted as if on a creaking hinge requiring oil as she peered over at the pair standing outside the tank. Though the thin white tank she wore as an undershirt was soaked through and left her mostly nude to the four eyes tracing her form, Jenna was immune to their lack of consideration.

  Gone was the hunger from her captor’s eyes. Instead they threw daggers at the tall, walnut-haired woman standing in front of him as she surveyed Jenna from top to bottom, which was left to right.

  Jenna spit a full mouth of cold water at the cage wall, turned her head to face the ceiling again, and continued to casually float. Her eyes slowly drifted closed.

  Lexi Shaw, for the win.

  They’d sat at the edge of the compound, overlooking the long drop, down the rock face of the mountain to the outcroppings and then to the rocky bottom a thousand feet below. It’d taken Lexi years to get Jenna to quiet her busy brain long enough to reach into any sort of meditative trance.

  Again and again, Jenna’d argued that she wasn’t adaptive. A racing mind was a healthy mind, a planning mind, an executing mind. It’d been that way for eighty years and Lexi Shaw was never going to change it.

  “Wear someone else down with your chanting,” Jenna had said. “You can’t hypnotize me.”

  To which Lexi had only smiled and said, “You forget, I don’t give up so easily.”

  “She says after eighty years.” Jenna had snorted.

  On that day, however, Jenna couldn’t hear the working children with their fathers in the gardens 100 feet away. The work on the wind turbines had been auditorily invisible. Lexi Shaw hadn’t given up, and to Jenna’s dismay, had proven her wrong once again.

  A span of six years had passed where Jenna Clark and Lexi Shaw had not seen hide nor hair of each other. Six years when the blonde woman led an OK City Special Forces Team, and subsequently, a road-clearing crew, under the worst conditions she could’ve imagined—and she could’ve imagined a lot. Her sanity had held only due to her will and Lexi Shaw’s training. Whether on a truck bed, the hood of a rusted-out car, a random rock out on Interstate 40, or inside her cube when the work day was done, she’d made it a point to meditate and seek out the place of warm darkness Lexi’d been preaching for decades.

  But her consciousness had never quite taken a back seat, and Jenna had all but accepted that her brain was not the kind that could enter into a state of self-hypnosis because it was, by her accounting, noisy. Halfway would just have to do, and halfway had served her well enough for all those years away from the people she loved—her post-apocalypse family.

  Lexi’s patience was anything but legendary. Ever since they’d entered the MidEast, she’d sent messages to Jenna from down south, asking if Jenna was ready to ‘cut the head off the snake, already. In the field, she was trite at
times and snippy—hell, downright ornery—but those she trained were given the time they needed to come to master their skills. Be it combat training, rock climbing lessons, medical triage, or meditation, Lexi’s students were always treated with poise and restraint, like a switch was flipped.

  But her treatment of Jenna when they were home was even softer. Spend a hundred or so years with someone, and you’re either going to kill them or love them, and as much as Jenna and Lexi had tried each other’s patience—even to the point of blows, in the old days—the love was ever-present and deep.

  When Lexi’d invited Jenna for meditation on the edge of the mountain compound the day after they’d reunited, Jenna’d explained her predicament.

  “I’m going to guide you. Don’t accept that halfway shit, or that’s all your body is going to give you. It’s a question of mastery. Mind over matter.”

  Then her sensei had rubbed her shoulders as Jenna sat cross-legged at the edge of the rock until she felt like she might fall asleep. A soothing monotone chanting of instructions had then breezed through Lexi’s lips as she guided Jenna into the place she sought.

  Lexi had pushed her hand gently into Jenna’s lower back as she spoke. “Keep your back straight and count as you breathe slowly in through your nose, for ten seconds. Good. Count backwards as you exhale for ten seconds slowly through your mouth. Good. Keep a nice even pace. Accept the blackness, and let nothing else fill your mind. Don’t use your eyes to see, use the inside of your eyelids like soft blankets. Then just tune out. Let the sounds float away on the breeze.”

  Jenna had jerked, opened her eyes wide and stared at Lexi.

  “See?” Jenna had said. “That’s what happens. I go too deep and my body jerks. I can’t do it for more than a few seconds.”

  “What do you mean?” Lexi had asked, placing her hands on Jenna’s shoulders as she sat behind her.

  “It’s just frustrating. I’ve seen you sit here for an hour without moving, back in the day. I try to do that, and my legs jump. My shoulders jerk.”

  Lexi’s voice had still been calm, soothing as she replied.