“Anything,” Victor answered.
She nodded. “Then we could use your help. We need to deliver a message to this Baron, make sure he understands his people are breaking the rules of the truce and there will be consequences.”
“I think you might be past the point of sending warnings.”
“Well, that’s our call to make. Far as we can tell, the horsemen always come from the east.”
“Right,” Victor answered. “They’re coming from Rayburn.”
She pursed her lips. “It’s not as simple as you might think. The city is not a single unit the way it used to be. Since the food riots, it has fractured into several competing factions. We assume the horsemen belong to one of these factions, but we can’t be sure which one.”
Victor frowned. “Wait a minute. You made a deal - a truce - with these people without even knowing who they are? What, did they just show up and claim to represent some bigger group, and you went along with it?”
Blackburn tensed, but Cora cut him off. “They were…convincing,” she said, and Victor could see from the set of her jaw that she didn’t wish to tell the story. “They came with guns, with manpower, and they surprised us. They could have wiped us out—maybe not the whole Federation, but this community at least. But instead of killing us and taking what we had, they offered a deal.”
“And you signed the dotted line,” Victor said, shaking his head.
“What would you have done?” Blackburn said sharply. “We had no choice.”
“There’s always a choice. You just preferred the consequences of getting in bed with kidnappers and murderers.”
Cora raised her voice to interrupt the argument. “Regardless of our reasoning, we did make a deal with them. But that deal did not involve surrendering our children. That’s why, like I said, we need to send a message.”
“So send an army,” Victor said. “Go in force. Show them they have more reason to cooperate than to fight.”
Blackburn said, “You really think these are the kind of people who like to cooperate?”
“You’re the ones who made a pact with them in the first place,” Victor said.
“We can’t do that,” Cora said. “We don’t have the manpower, and besides, we can’t risk antagonizing them. A few people navigating the countryside on their own would stand a better chance of reaching the city and coming to terms with them.”
“A few people,” Victor repeated. “I’m guessing I’m one of those few.”
Cora nodded. “We’ll give you plenty of food, water, and any other provisions you might need. We’ll share the latest information on the conditions of the roads and any roving groups you might run into.”
“And if I refuse, I suppose I go back to that interrogation room?”
She smiled a little. “That’s about the sum of it.”
Victor sighed. “I guess I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”
Chapter 19: Game Changer
Fresh vegetables, clean water, and even bottles of vitamins went into Victor’s backpack as they prepared to leave. A doctor had cleaned the cuts on Jenny’s face and exchanged the bandage for a pair of sunglasses she chose by touch. She would have a few scars to commemorate the loss of her sight, especially the jagged line slanting across her forehead, but there were no signs of infection.
“The headaches will probably continue for a little while,” the doctor said. “She really should stay here.”
Victor had considered this idea and pulled Jenny aside. “Are you sure you want to come?” he asked. “They could take care of you.”
“You trust them?” she replied in that quiet way of hers. She seemed to have aged a decade since the accident that took her eyesight. She spoke now with the maturity of an adult, and Victor no longer felt the need to make an effort to speak on her level.
He sighed. “I won’t lie to you. The jury’s still out on that decision. But as far as whether it’s safer to go or to stay, I’d pick staying by a mile. We’re not just risking trouble by going out there. We’re looking for it.”
She considered this, turning her sightless eyes on the early sun. Victor wondered how well she could still sense the light. “I don’t know these people, Vic.” It was the first time she had used the shortened form of his name. It reminded him of Dante.
“Do you really know me?”
“Enough to know you won’t leave me a second time.”
Victor winced. He would have liked to ask her to stay, as much for her safety as for his own convenience, but it would feel too much like trying to get rid of her. He would help her find somewhere to start over, and if she did not think she could make such a life here, they would keep looking.
As they left the town of Pierce, walking on foot, Victor recalled what Cora had told him about the horsemen. The more he considered Dante’s kidnapping, the more certain he became that Dante had been targeted. But why Dante? According to everything he had learned so far, the horsemen had begun kidnapping children, not adults. Why had they made an exception for Dante? What was it about Dante that gave them a use for him?
Victor wracked his brain to think of anything from Dante’s past that might have contributed to his kidnapping. Was there some old enemy Victor did not know about? That seemed unlikely. Dante wasn’t really the kind of person who made enemies. It was just as far-fetched, however, to think this might be a prank played by some old friends.
Did Dante possess some kind of valuable knowledge? Did he have some skill Victor did not know about? The questions swam through Victor’s mind, but he seemed no closer to solving them than he had been on the morning Dante was taken.
_____
They had lost the trail of the horsemen after their encounter with Blackburn’s crew, so the only way to find them now was to head for the city of Rayburn and hope their paths crossed. As much as Victor would have liked to ask if anyone had seen the horsemen come through, he chose to give a wide berth to any groups of survivors they encountered. He had learned his lesson from the Federation towns. Though he and Jenny had been allowed to go free, he knew that next time they might not be so fortunate. His circle of trust included two people, a blind girl and a brother who had been kidnapped by strangers. It was a strange world.
It was early afternoon when they caught their first break: a horse track on the side of the road, clearly printed in the mud. After finding the first one, the others were easier. The tracks, along with a few educated guesses, led them to a large colonial house separated from the road by a stone wall.
“Are you sure it’s them?” Jenny asked after Victor had described the sight to her. She had good reason to doubt their success, especially now that they knew Blackburn and his men rode horses, but Victor thought they were on the right trail. Call it good old-fashioned intuition.
“The only way of knowing,” he said, “is to go in there and see what we find.”
Jenny did not like the idea of waiting by herself in the bushes while Victor looked for trouble, but she understood why he did not want to take her with him. “Please hurry,” she said. Then, thinking better of it, she added, “But be careful.”
Milkweed seeds caught in his hair as he approached the house, landing as softly as flakes of snow. Victor thought of the year drawing to a close. He thought of winter’s icy grip, of the difficulty of finding food. He thought of Dante alone, afraid, caught in a group of strangers.
A beaten patch of weeds showed where the horses had been tied. Unwilling to assume the house was empty, Victor drew his Colt and approached the front door. It was unlocked. The hall inside was muddy enough to put a fraternity dorm to shame.
“Hello?” he called in a soft voice, not really sure why. No one answered. The wind continued to roll by outside, stirring the weeds like a turbulent sea, another reminder that cold weather was coming.
Victor’s heart clenched at the sight of blood dotting the carpet. With the Colt in hand, he advanced deeper into the house. A loose window frame rattled somewhere upstairs. The front
door creaked behind him as the wind pressed against it.
The blood on the carpet became obscured by the stampede of muddy tracks. Most of the curtains in the house were drawn across the windows, except for the dining room’s bay window. It was the kind of window where a child would sit and read a book on a rainy summer day, dreaming of tomorrow’s adventures, still convinced of the immortality of the season.
The drops of blood led from the carpeted hall to the tiled bathroom. The door stood ajar, open just enough to show the bloody print of a hand on the eggshell wall.
Victor stopped at the door, listening. Hearing…something, something soft as the wind in the trees, subtle as the odor of sweat that drifted through the open door, an animal smell of fear and hostility.
“What’s your name?” Victor said.
The room was silent for a long moment. Then: “Sean.”
“How bad is it, Sean?”
“It hurts like hell,” Sean whispered.
Victor recalled the shootout at Fairfield and how he’d hit one of the horsemen. This must have been as far as they were willing to take him. Last stop to drop off your wounded.
“And they just left you here,” Victor said in a Oh, what a pity kind of tone. “You took one for the team, and they left you behind.”
Sean did not answer.
“Are you still with me?” Victor said, staring at the handprint on the wall. He heard Sean shift, changing the play of light against the wall. The window must have been behind him.
“God, it hurts like hell!”
“I’m looking for someone, Sean. If you help me, I’ll help you. Do you know who I’m looking for?”
“The Spaniard,” Sean answered. “That’s what they call him.”
“He’s still alive?” Victor’s heartbeat had become an audible sound.
“I don’t know, man. He was alive when they left me.”
“Alright,” Victor said, thinking quickly. “I’m going to get you out of here, okay? Sean?”
“They wanted me to eat a bullet,” Sean said.
Victor saw the shadow shift. He took a step back from the door. “I thought your friends preferred swords.”
“That’s just for show. There are still some bullets left. I think this one has my name on it. I just don’t know if I can do it.”
“You don’t have to do it, Sean.”
Sean gave a humorless laugh. “You think they can’t find me?”
“Tell me about the Spaniard, Sean. Why did you grab him? Where are your friends taking him?”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Sean whimpered. “I never should have gone. Why didn’t I just stay? Why the hell did I have to go?” He choked on the last words.
“It’s alright, Sean,” Victor said. “I’m coming in, okay?”
He nudged the door open with his foot, raising the Colt as his eyes took in the rest of the bathroom: the sink with the chrome faucets, the wastebasket with the shopping bag, the young man curled in the corner of the tub beneath the shower head. Sean was holding a 9mm in both hands, the barrel pointed at Victor.
Victor fired twice in rapid succession. The first hit Sean’s left shoulder, pulling the 9mm left and up as it spat a bullet into the plaster above Victor’s head. The second passed cleanly through his throat and cracked into the wall behind him, scattering bits of tile like shattered glass.
Victor lowered the Colt.
Sean was dressed in a sweat-stained hoodie, a black beanie, and a pair of jeans torn at the knees. The blood was still pulsing from his throat like a cheap fountain pump, drenching his clothes and settling at the bottom of the tub.
Victor pried the gun from the dead kid’s fingers. As he did so, he noticed a mark on the back of Sean’s right wrist. It was a tattoo of a bird, its wings raised in a V shape, its talons out, its beak open and hungry. At first Victor took it for an eagle, but then he realized the beak was wrong. No, this was a different kind of bird of prey.
A vulture. Victor didn’t think he could have conceived a more fitting symbol for the horsemen if he’d tried.
_____
Victor felt a thrill course through his body as he retraced his steps to the front of the house. His mind replayed the image of Sean slumping back in the tub, limp, his life draining away.
One down, Victor thought, and he paused before returning to the front door. He paused because he was not sure if Jenny would sense the change that had overcome him. He paused because he could not remember how long it had been since he killed someone. This had been easy. He’d grown desensitized to violence long ago, which was the very thing that troubled him. He’d almost left the house without giving it a second thought.
He was not, and never would be, a pacifist. But he had seen good men with good intentions cross the line, and he did not care to be one of them. There was a reason some believed soldiers often fired over the heads of their enemies in battle. Killing could do as much harm to the killer as to the victim.
“Get a hold of yourself,” he whispered, leaning against the frame of the door. Tears were brimming in his eyes—not tears of fear or of regret, but tears of release, like those of a parent who is reunited with a missing child. It was as if some piece of Victor had been fit back into place again and, if only for these few moments, it gave him clarity to remember who he was.
You were right, Dante, he thought. They should not have stayed so long at the cabin, isolated from the rest of the world. They should have branched out and looked for other survivors. If there was no civilization to be found, they should have started it over by themselves instead of hiding in the forest, waiting for someone else to address the problem. Victor had let fear dictate his actions—fear of who he might become, fear that Dante would see him for what he really was. But the world needed people like Victor, people who could do what had to be done.
Until this moment, Victor had been obsessed with learning why the horsemen had taken Dante. It had been like a complicated riddle or an itch he could not scratch. Now, however, everything looked different. It did not matter who they were or why they had taken Dante. No matter where they went or what explanation they gave when Victor found them, it would not change what he was going to do.
He was going to put each and every one of them into the ground.
Chapter 20: The Reapers
“What happened?” Jenny asked as she emerged from the bushes and moved toward the sound of Victor’s voice. “I heard gunshots.”
“They left one to ambush us,” Victor answered.
“Is he…?” She didn’t finish the sentence.
“No,” he said, trying to soften his voice. “We exchanged a few shots, then he ran out the back. I don’t think we have to worry about him. We’re on the right track, though. They were definitely here.”
He studied her face. She was getting better at hiding her emotions, especially when her eyes were hidden by the sunglasses. He suspected she did not believe his story—not that it mattered a great deal. Regardless of what she thought had happened, Sean would not be bothering them again.
“We should get moving,” he said. “There’s no telling who might have heard that gunfire.”
She nodded and they returned to the road. Now that they had regained the trail, they found signs of their quarry almost every mile: cigarette butts smoked all the way down to the filters, candy wrappers, chewing gum. These small signs fortified Victor’s resolve, but also frustrated him. They were close, surely no farther than a day behind, and yet they could not hope to make up the difference except by some miracle. And the closer they came to the riders’ destination, he feared, the more difficult it would become to free Dante.
Jenny talked occasionally to break the silence. She spoke of Allen and the simple life they’d enjoyed at Fairfield, but never of her true parents. Those people, Victor sensed, were no more than buried fossils to her, even if she had forgiven them.
Victor enjoyed listening to Jenny. If nothing else, it gave his mind something to do while his feet counted the long mil
es. The words seemed to bubble up from inside her, stubbornly refusing to let her wallow in grief. Perhaps she was too dazed to feel her grief fully. Perhaps that would come later.
“I think I would have liked Allen,” Victor said during one of these conversations, a few days after the incident with Sean.
She smiled at him, but it was a pained smile. “I think you would, too,” she answered. “Maybe if you and your brother had found us earlier, things could have been different.”
Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1) Page 14
