by Chris Lowry
Add to that her weak muscles, and shortness of breath and she was quite glad when he called a halt near a concrete bridge spanning a shallow creek.
He led her under the arches into the cool shadows and she let out a sigh of relief.
"Yeah," he agreed, and dropped to his armored knees next to the water.
He dropped a bladder pouch under the surface and listened to the gurgle of bubbles as he filled it.
"Bacteria," she warned him.
He screwed the lid on and showed her the tip of the straw hose.
"Filter," he held it out to her. "Now I know this ain't got that piss flavor you're used to."
She took the tip in her mouth and bit down as she sucked moisture between her teeth and moaned.
He grunted approval and let her almost empty the bladder before he refilled it.
Annie sat on a large rock and crossed her legs at the ankle.
It was tough to find a comfortable position, but being here, under the bridge and back on earth made it all worthwhile.
"Damn," she sighed.
Lt reseated the bladder in a pouch on his Suit and turned to face her.
He held a finger up to his nose to quiet her and lowered the faceplate as his hands lifted the blaster from the strap.
"I wasn't being that loud," she said in a low voice.
Lt spun around and pointed into the trees. Annie rolled off the rock and hid behind it.
A girl squirmed out from between two oaks, hands raised in the air.
"Whoa," she said. "Whoa, I surrender."
Lt motioned her to one side with the barrel of the blaster and turned it back toward the trees.
"The rest of you, come on out."
Two more teenagers stepped out of the woods and lifted their hands.
"Is it safe?" Annie lifted her head.
"Define safe," said Lt.
The teens approached in a wary straight line, which made him think either they were tactically dumb or innocent.
He opted for the dumb scenario.
"Stay," he commanded and they stopped.
He scanned the woods around them through his faceplate, but it registered nothing, showed nothing.
"You alone?" he asked.
The first girl, all knees, elbows and a wiry mop of tousled hair piled on top of her too skinny head, nodded.
The other two, another girl and boy trying harder to look dirtier than the first, followed her lead.
Lt watched their heads bob like oversized balls on narrow springs.
They looked harmless enough, but it depended on what they were trying to do.
Follow him was one thing, but if they were acting as a distraction.
"Warbucks, check our six," he said, eyes locked on the trio in front of him.
"I don't have a timepiece," she told him.
"Six o'clock," Lt sighed. "Check behind us."
"It's called astern," she informed him.
"I don't give a shit what you call it. Check it and tell me if we're clear."
Annie tilted her head to spy on the other end of the bridge.
"Nope," she answered.
"Not clear?"
"Not even close," she said.
He glanced over his shoulder to see her standing up, hands lifted over her head in the universal sign of surrender.
"Licks?" called to her.
"We're human," a man's voice answered. "Take your gun off the kids."
"I'm going to turn around," said Lt. "Hold your fire."
"Hold," the man answered, but Lt didn't listen.
He wasn't too concerned about it, to be truthful.
If anyone decided to take shots at him, the armor would keep him safe.
Annie was beside a big rock, and if the shooting started, he hoped she could duck down fast enough to avoid getting hit.
Lt wanted to see what he was up against.
He kept the blaster aimed at the three teens and turned to see two men standing at the far end of the bridge, a distance of four meters between them, both holding ancient lever action rifles.
One was aimed at Lt, the other at Annie.
He lowered his blaster.
The odds were low of her being caught in a ricochet, but under direct fire?
He didn't think she was fast enough to duck out of the path of a bullet.
"Careful friend," Lt advised.
"I'm not your friend," the man on the left said.
He kept his gun trained on Lt.
"You kids get out of the way. Go home."
He had hard eyes the color of flint, worry lines etched in deep creases on his forehead and a permanent frown carved on his lips, bracketed by wrinkles that ran down from his nose to his chin in almost a straight line.
He looked like a man who had not known laughter in his lifetime.
The finger on the trigger was steady, Lt noted and the gun barrel didn't waver.
"You probably want to be my friend," Lt said. "It'd turn out better for you that way."
The man nodded his head like a chunk of granite sliding off the rockface of a mountain.
Chin down to his chest and up again, as he considered the statement.
His partner sent a pink tongue out across his chapped lips, made the circle before darting back in, and out again.
"Maybe," the flint eyed man answered. "But you look like a hell of a lot of trouble."
"Brother, you have no idea," Lt said.
The man studied him more, not that there was much to see other than the armor, which he took a keen interest in.
The eyes drank in the Suit, the blaster, then danced over to Annie in her jumpsuit.
"Guess it's safe to say, you're not from around here."
Lt shrugged, but it was lost on the man, hidden inside the armor.
"Depends on where here is."
"We don't have names on the map anymore," the man answered. "The Licks took care of all the named places."
"And a few more besides," said Lt. "I'm in the business of paying them back for that."
"How's that working out?"
"Business is good," Lt grinned, still lost on the man but it must have shown in his voice.
"We had a couple of young men who thought they might enjoy alien hunting," said the man. "A little payback. They're dead now."
Lt nodded.
"It happens. I've lost good men myself."
"They were good men," the rifle didn't waver, but the finger came off the trigger and rested on the metal guard next to it.
"I haven't seen one of those Suits since before the invasion. I thought they were lost."
Lt glanced down at his armor.
"We found 'em."
"And is that a flight suit?"
"From the Bezos," Annie pointed up.
His hard eyes followed the direction of her finger as he glanced up into the blue sky.
"All that was lost," he informed her.
She opened her mouth to answer, but he beat her too it.
"Guess you found it too."
"He did."
The eyes moved back and landed on Lt.
"That what you're good at? Finding things that have been lost?"
"Nope," said Lt. "I'm good at killing fucking Licks. I just got lucky finding better ways to do it."
The man slid his eyes across both of them again, up and down her, then down and up Lt.
When he was done, he lowered his gun, though kept it ready, and his partner followed his lead, as if some private communication passed between them.
"Name's Ramirez," the man with flint colored eyes said. "Do you think you can help us find something?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Eli Ramirez was a pragmatic man.
He walked six steps behind Annie on a narrow trail that he instructed Lt to follow.
It was a useless instruction because the wiry haired girl had stayed behind when told to go home, hiding behind the trees just off the trail.
When she saw the direction they were going, she took off.<
br />
Lt just followed her.
Eli held his rifle against his hip as he walked, prepared to blow a hole in the back of the woman's head if Lt did something he didn't like, and had shared the plan with both of them.
"Don't do anything, okay?" Annie said in a tight grin.
But her eyes were serious. Lt knew why.
He's seen the glint in Eli's eyes, and the man looked like he meant what he said. Which Lt could appreciate.
"Abe," he called back over his shoulder. "You taking us back to that Church?"
Eli stutter stepped and recovered quick enough.
"Name's Eli," he answered. "And how did you know about our camp?"
"Passed it by," said Lt. "Left you good folks alone, and now you're out here at gunpoint dragging us back to it."
"Why did he call me Abe?" Eli asked Annie.
"It's his thing," she said. "He calls me Warbucks from Little Orphan Annie."
"Does he know your real name?"
"I don’t know," she shrugged and Eli could see her do it. "Hey Lt, do you know my real name?"
"Warbucks are you kidding me? After all we've been through together? I've had women try to break my heart and break my nuts but none of them cared enough to crash me into the ground in a space ship. You never forget a woman's name after that."
She shook her head.
"See?" she said to Eli, as if that explained it.
"You crashed?"
"Yeah, Abe, we crashed hard. She plowed us into the ground like she was mad at it."
"We were being shot at," she defended herself.
"Don't let her fool you Abe, there was shooting. But you know, before the aliens took all the cars away, people would say things about woman drivers. Bad things. I can't say she wasn't trying to do her make up in the monitor as a mirror, cause I had my eyes shut tight. Crashing and all."
Eli stared at the back of the helmeted head as they walked down the path.
"I wasn't putting on make up," she said. "We were coming in hot, under fire."
"You don't have to make excuses for it Warbucks. I was there. We know what happened."
"Why Abe?" Eli called out.
"Cause you seem like an honest man," Lt said without turning.
Eli nodded, and if Lt had turned, he might have seen the man stand up a little straighter, shoulders thrown back, spine erect.
The Lt's assessment and subsequent dubbing of the nickname touched on a feeling Eli liked about himself. He liked to think he was honest.
Honest in a world gone mad.
"Don't let it bother you," said Annie.
It didn't, but Eli didn't share that with her.
They reached the edge of the trees and Lt stopped to wait for the wiry haired girl to make the metal building before he stepped into the sunlight.
The people, men, women and children gathered on a call he didn't hear, the girl yelling perhaps, and lined up to watch their approach as Eli directed them around the crops and into the blacktop asphalt parking lot.
Lt remembered something from his youth, a trip to a Church with his grandparents. The man on the pulpit gesticulating as he read from the Bible about Thou Shalt Not Judge.
Cause he felt like the group watching them sure as hell was.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ping. Ping. Plunk. They were shooting him again.
Not with bullets.
They tried that the first night and only the first time.
It cost them one life of some guy standing in the path of the ricochet, and Babe was glad they couldn't see him smirk behind the faceplate of his helmet.
They graduated to throwing things. Then a slingshot.
Ping. Ping. Plunk. Ping. Ping. Plunk.
He wasn't sure what they used for ammo. Tiny pieces of metal. Chunks of rock.
The bandits took turn sending shots into him.
He was tied to a tree. More accurate, he was chained to a tree, arms stretched behind him around a massive trunk of an ancient oak.
Chief held a blaster to his head while they did it.
Babe could see him standing on the edge of the room, lost half in the shadows as a fire burned in a trench pit in the floor.
The room was like a log cabin built against the trees, with the giant oak in the rear of the room.
It would have been a super cool place to hang, he thought. If he wasn't tied up.
And the company was better.
The leader was a small man with a small face that narrowed to a point that ended at the tip of his nose.
Babe bet Lt would have called him Hatchet, although that sounded too tough for the weasel looking man. It would have been more creative than Rat or Ferret, but he couldn't think of it at the moment.
His wrists hurt. His shoulders hurt.
He was starving and the nano inside him were dying.
Babe licked his chapped lips and tried to remember the last time he ate.
Days. Stringy squirrel meat boiled in a week stew with dandelion stems. Salted. Peppered. The only flavors he could remember.
Hatchet face sat eating bacon.
At least it looked like bacon. Babe couldn't smell it through the helmet, but there were wild boar in the woods.
He supposed it could be a crispy slice of warm dripping heaven.
Saliva gushed inside his cheeks and he almost choked.
They were deciding what to do with him. It wasn't like they could send him back, but Babe knew the debate was ongoing.
Should they team with Russel? Should they combine forces with the man, and split the spoils?
It lasted for hours, with each man in the room given a chance to talk.
Democracy in action, Babe thought. Though they did not ask him his opinion.
CHAPTER NINE
"Brother James," Eli introduced him to the man standing at the bottom of the double steps up to the brick church doors.
Brother James beamed at Lt and Annie, his rugged face offset with a boyish enthusiasm, long fingers grasped together in front of his waist.
He wore a denim jacket and denim jeans, scuffed boots with traces of mud in the creases.
"I would say welcome," he said in a melodious voice that sounded custom crafted for a pulpit or politician's stage. "But since Eli has brought you to us at the point of the gun, I may hold my well wishes until I learn more."
Smart, thought Lt. Charming as hell.
"We ain't got no problem with that, Reverend Jim. No problems with you, either, I'm gonna point out. We were just passing through, when Honest Abe there decided we needed to pay you a visit?"
The smile on his face faltered as he tried to process what Lt said.
"Who is Abe?"
"It's something he does," Eli explained.
"You call people by something other than their name?"
"He calls me Warbucks, if it helps," offered Annie.
Brother James took a step toward them.
"And what is your name?"
"Annie," she said.
James nodded.
"Annie Warbucks," James nodded, the smile popping back on like a flash bulb. "Little Orphan Annie. Very clever. But Abe?"
"He thinks I'm honest," said Eli.
"Astute," said James.
"I've been called a lot of things in my day, Reverend Jim, but astute ain't one of 'em. Hell, I don't even know what a stoot is."
Brother James offered a slight chuckle.
"I prefer James," he said. "And what should we call you?"
"Lieutenant William H. Bonney," said Lt. "You can call me Lt or Lt Bonney. Just don't call me-,"
"Billy the Kid," James said.
