by Ric Beard
She fired.
Through her scope, she saw the badlander's chest explode and a torrent of red liquid and leather exit his back. His undeterred compatriots plowed on with little more than random head jerks. A barrage of gunfire opened on both sides as Jenna’s crew unleashed theirs into the rainy day.
“Crow?” Scruff asked as he wrung the water out of his long beard. He had his foot on the chest of a man he’d killed during the barrage. The dead wore brown and black patchwork leather jackets and pants. Four of them had chest wounds. The rest were headshot. Each had a tattoo of a black bird on their necks.
“That’s what they look like,” Jenna said.
“Fuckin’ badlanders.” Tyler kicked one of the corpses. Jenna thought he looked like a chicken, standing there trying to pose with one hand on his hip while holding his carbine over his shoulder.
“Agreed.” She looked to the sky and off to the west. The rain was coming on again. “Doesn’t look like the shit’s gonna let up any time soon. Can’t get a call off. We can either pull back and wait for the rain to let up, so I can get a word in with Little Rock, or…”
Ray took the queue.
“Fuck that. Better to use the storm for cover while we can.”
“Got that right,” Tyler agreed.
Scruff grunted the affirmative.
“All right. Scouting party, then. Lock it down. Then we head out.”
Chapter Nineteen
A Towering Steeple
Over the uninspired protests of the crew, Scruff led them away from the muddy motorcycle tracks on the asphalt and into the wet, grassy fields to the north. Jenna defined Scruff’s tracking instincts as a superpower. She didn’t know how he could lead them to the point of origin of a bunch of motorcycles by leaving the trail, but she knew better than to doubt him. They tracked for much longer than they’d expected—about three hours. Then, after barely managing to keep from sliding on their asses down a soaked, grassy hillside, Scruff led them into a line of trees and they emerged on the other side five minutes later. Another steep slope flowed down to the backs of houses arranged around a cul-de-sac in an ancient, time-tattered subdivision.
Jenna crouched at the edge of the trees and pointed at a flickering light in one of the second-story windows, then at another in a different house. Scruff crouched next to her and nodded. The rain was picking up again, and rivers ran through the low-hanging knot in his beard.
“We wrap around to survey the cul-de-sac, mark the location for the wipers, and we’re out,” Jenna said.
“Not what I’d call a win.”
Of course, Tyler, who wanted to engage at every opportunity, didn’t agree. But that wasn’t her problem as long as he followed orders.
“You pout like a dog,” Jenna said. “If you’re done whimpering…” She stuck her tongue out at him.
She pointed at Tyler and Ray, chopping her hand toward the house on the right. After she watched them go, she looked up at Scruff and rolled her eyes. Scruff shrugged in return. She jerked her head in the opposite direction, and Scruff fell in next to her. They bent at the waist and gently took the muddy slope toward the side of a house on the opposite side.
Scouting the origin of their attackers was only allowed by OK City Command because of the reputation Jenna’s crew maintained. Anyone else would sit out on the interstate and let the wiper crew take care of this. But even if faith in her crew gave her some latitude, Jenna had rules about getting her guys dead. They were here serving OK City and the proposed Union itself. Not just OK City Command. They weren’t a military unit and it was her duty to get her guys home breathing, but she also didn’t like the idea of Lieutenant Moss’s wipers having to take on all the danger without a scouting report, regardless of their training.
Moss’s guys were military, their leader somewhat legendary on the battlefield, though he’d only served for a few years. A Special Forces unit, their unofficial designation was the Viper Wipers because they moved into an area, silently struck at the enemy, and slithered away without anyone having known who’d left the trail of bodies.
Jenna and Scruff edged up to the back of the two-story structure farthest south. Considering the extent of its wood rot, Jenna didn’t know how the structure continued to stand. There were all kinds of trash and debris in the yard. The screened porch on the back had already given up and mostly returned to a stack of individual, rotted beams.
As Jenna led Scruff along the side of the house, she stopped and held up a fist. Scruff ran into her, but he reached out to steady her.
“Watch where you’re going, Chewbacca,” she whispered over her shoulder.
Scruff raised a curious eyebrow.
Easy on the twentieth century references, genius.
“Forget it.”
The rain picked up as Jenna peeked around the front corner of the house, pulling her cap down over her eyes. The fronts of the houses lined the street from the cul-de-sac on the south end to where a roundabout emptied into it on the north. In the center of the roundabout was a fresher-looking gazebo that seemed out of place among the weather-beaten houses.
The first thing to catch Jenna’s attention was a crew of badlanders sitting under the shelter of the gazebo laughing and carrying on. She yanked the goggles from her pouch and held them over her eyes. Once they adjusted for the lighting at dusk, she held the manual button causing them to magnify more precisely than clicking the knob. The badlanders were all men. Scruffy. Dirty. Typical. But—
What in the hell…
“Check out those weapons.” She offered her goggles, but Scruff raised up his own.
“Hm. Those don’t shoot bullets.”
“No, sir. I mean, shit. Look at the charging chambers under the barrels of the three on the right.” She pointed. “Obviously pulse weapons, but the scopes are tiny. That one over on the left? That looks like a shotgun, but that barrel isn’t metal and it’s got a pump-action charge lever on it. Can you imagine the hole that would make? Shit.” She kept looking around, then gave a curt nod. “Roving guy, ten o’clock. Hefty fuck. See him?”
“Yup.”
“What the hell is that thing slung over his shoulder?”
“No clue,” Scruff grunted. “Find out?”
Jenna considered it for a moment.
“No. We’ll stick to the plan.”
That weapon couldn’t have come from OK City.
A thought poked at her. These could have been the spoils of a raid on the Triangle City military, but they patrolled a long way from here, on the other side of the Appalachians.
Jenna reached into her pack and pulled out a small, round composite beacon. She pushed a button on it and slapped it on the side of the house. Its composite material flickered before transitioning to match the siding’s color. Then she turned her attention back to the gazebo, pushed a button on her goggles, and waited as it zoomed tighter on the rifles and snapped a few pictures.
“Good?” Scruff grunted.
“Yeah. Fall back.”
The two slipped back around the house and hunkered down. Jenna took out her handheld and brought up an icon with Ray’s face. After sending him a signal, she started up the hill ahead of Scruff. One foot slipped in the mud and she felt her feet coming out from under her, her mind ever-so-briefly imagining a slide downhill in the grass and mud and a trek back with soaked, freezing boobs. But Scruff grabbed her waist and steadied her. She threw him a thankful smile. When they reached the edge of the tree line at the top of the hill, they turned and looked back as she took a relieved breath.
A thought tickled her brain and she turned her eyes on the giant.
“Okay, so there’s no way that the badlanders we took out drove those bikes up this hill and through this thicket.” Jenna pointed around to the west. “The streets must’ve been cleared that way.”
Scruff grunted and gave an accentuating nod.
“But you led us away from that road, across the puddle-soaked grass, and up to these trees, bringing us up behind the n
eighborhood.”
Scruff nodded.
“So, how did you know?”
He gently grabbed the brim of her hat and turned it, aimed it. Jenna squinted confusion at first, but then she raised her goggles for the night vision. On the opposite side of the neighborhood, a tall, black steeple towered above a cleared concrete slab with what looked like burned planks sitting in the grass off to one side. Jenna looked back to the area south from which they had come and traced the straighter line along the road, to the church.
“How did you see that in this shit?” She raised a palm up to the rain.
“Just seen it,” he mumbled with a shrug.
Jenna eyed Scruff’s towering form as he watched for the return of their compatriots.
Scruff was born in the badlands. At around seventeen, he was found by OK City Defense Forces when they were clearing territory won from The Horde hundreds of miles northwest of Oklahoma City. Jenna heard the story of his discovery from one of the soldiers on patrol that day. Scruff had been brooding on the front porch of an old house that looked like one side was about to cave in and he’d sat so still as the unit walked by that they’d almost missed him, in spite of his size. When they called to him upon approach, Scruff just sat and glared at them.
Jenna smiled, thinking about how Scruff’s gaze could burn through someone, especially when coupled with his sheer mass.
After a few minutes at the end of the sidewalk, their lieutenant ordered two men forward, suggesting the hulk sitting on the rickety steps didn’t understand them. By the time the men’s boots clicked onto the second step, Scruff was on his feet. Grabbing each man with one hand, he had raised them into the air and threw them like rucksacks off the porch. They never touched the stairs on the way down.
It took two fully-charged stunner blasts to bring him down. Jenna bet that gave the team the chills, considering a single stunner jolt could bring down a bear. The team searched the house and found three sets of skeletal remains: a female adult, a female child, and a young adult male, all gathered together in the same room. Scruff later explained to Jenna that they were his mother, sister and brother. He’d been guarding their bones because he’d seen The Horde use bones in interesting ways to intimidate people. Jenna didn’t ask why he didn’t just bury them because she understood—he probably hadn’t been ready to let go.
They confined Scruff to a cell in the indoctrination facility for people who chose violence over integration. It wasn’t that he was acting out violently; it was that he didn’t talk, he’d already manhandled two soldiers, and his size intimidated people. Even though he proved willing to work with the integrators, he was almost always silent. This left the city government unsure what to make of him—even less, what to do with him.
Jenna was volunteering with an orphan girl brought in from the wilds the day Scruff stepped in to save an integrator when a new inductee tried to take a knife to him. Scruff had clocked the ruffian on the back of his head with his palm, rendering the smaller man unconscious. Everyone in the large hall took tentative steps backward after seeing the display, the natural response of people accustomed to being surrounded by people with penchants for violence. But Jenna, who had just entered the room in time to see the display of force, the relief on the face of the man who’d just been saved, and the knife as it rattled to the floor, walked over to the giant man and extended her hand, introducing herself.
Another smile warmed her face in spite of the rain as Jenna remembered Scruff standing there, looking down at her hand, having no idea what to do with it. But when Jenna turned and admonished the crowd for being such cowards in light of how the man had just saved someone from a stab wound, people started coming forward. Attitudes toward Scruff changed almost instantly, opening the door for Jenna to work with him over the next few months with the full support of the staff.
When Scruff started talking to her in short bursts of words a few weeks later, she realized he was smart as a whip. He didn’t like to talk because people had a hard time understanding him. But Jenna picked up his inflections and began to understand him perfectly. To this day, he said little unless it was just the two of them, but Jenna had caught him several times, working on the language programs on his handheld in his cube.
When Jenna was finally offered the opportunity to connect two cities—the very opportunity she’d been waiting for—she hated the idea of leaving Scruff. She practiced carefully how she would break the news.
But Scruff wasn’t having any of it. He told Jenna he either went with her, or he went back home.
So, she went to her commander, told him that Scruff would be an asset in the field, and took responsibility for training him herself. Knowing her chin was set on the matter and that her doctoring skills were needed on the interstate, Commander Gilson capitulated and even extended her start date two weeks so she could train Scruff on weapons and basic rules of engagement—of which there were few. After all, they weren’t military, they were a road clearing crew. Plus, badlanders didn’t have rules, why should the clearing crews?
Jenna looked back up at Scruff. He was squinting, his eyes on the steeple, a slight frown on his lips.
“What’s the deal?” she asked. Scruff shrugged. “You see something?” Scruff shook his head, wet blond hair slinging droplets of water. “Tell me.”
“The Black.” He pointed at the tower.
“Yeah, it’s weird. A church steeple painted black.”
Scruff shook his head. “Never mind.”
Strange. Jenna remembered the Chewbacca reference and how she’d dismissed it.
“What?”
Scruff grunted and shrugged.
Jenna leaned up and kissed his cheek.
The corners of Scruff’s mouth twitched and rose slightly before he forced them back into place.
Jenna smiled up at him, but he intentionally diverted his gaze, as if to prevent a smile of his own.
Tyler and Ray rounded the corner of the house at the bottom of the hill. The two hurried up the incline in spite of the slippery earth beneath their feet.
“Can we pop them?” Tyler asked. He sounded like a kid asking for an early birthday present.
“Are you crazy?” Jenna asked. “We have no idea how many are in the houses, dude.”
“We can take ‘em,” Tyler said. “Or at least sabotage the joint.”
Ray nodded agreement.
Jenna jerked a thumb. “We fall back and call in support. Move your asses.”
They were silent as they skulked into the trees. Then Tyler shot a grin at Scruff. “Did the boss kiss you again, man?”
Jenna looked at Scruff, then at Tyler.
“How can you tell?” She asked.
There was the pop of a wet branch behind them.
Scruff turned, leveling his sidearm over Jenna’s shoulder as he stepped around to her side.
The other two turned as well to see a young girl, twelve at most, holding a big gunmetal gray hand cannon.
Jenna pointed her gun up in the air. Tyler and Ray followed suit, but Scruff directed his at the girl, clicking the silencer lever on his pistol as if to display he meant business. Jenna held out an empty palm to signal she meant no harm. Instead of lowering the weapon, the girl straightened her arm, extended the barrel outward, and aimed it right at the center of Jenna’s face.
Scruff fired.
Book Two
Part Five
The East
Chapter Twenty
I Always Come Prepared
Day 3
Thursday, Mar 21, 2137
Triangle City
Mikael Jensen gazed at the pigeons mulling around his ankles in search of treats. He cogitated on the threads of commonality between the people of this city and the stupid animals bobbing greedily around his feet. The people were a lot like the little beasts. If Mayor Vaughn chose to enable the stupid with a pinch of satisfaction, they would come bobbing back for another dose of his leavings every time. Vaughn was a politician who knew the people we
re like sheep, even if he did have an I.Q. around room temperature. If not for his right-hand man, that Morgan bastard, Vaughn would’ve been a private citizen instead of the most powerful man in the city. As it stood, the mayor had the people right where he wanted them, locked into complacency and fueled by distraction.
Mikael sneered at the metaphors stuttering around at his feet.
Go find your own fucking nut.
Each generation seemed more soft-headed than the last, shitting repeatedly upon the groundwork laid by the founders and not having the sense to know it. Jim ‘by-god’ Johnson would roll over in his little pine box if he could see these cowering twits so readily bending to Vaughn's will. For decades, he’d held out hope that this new iteration of humanity might flourish through understanding, but he should have known better.
I’m going to change this city.
Mikael removed his fedora and set it on the park bench next to him, revealing his mostly bald head to the sun above as he took a moment to enjoy it beating down on his face.
The deck was stacked in the favor of the corrupt. Technology was the tit upon which the feeble suckled while ignoring the puddle of shit in their diaper. Everyone wore their SmartGlasses and carried their Tabs so they could see at night and not have to remember directions, respectively. They planned on their calendars and tapped out messages to each other over the UltraMesh. They never had to so much as flip a light switch or use a key to unlock a door. Vehicles floated above the ground with some kind of hybrid anti-magnetic-and-fan technology he’d never been made to understand, and Mikael saw it as a metaphor for the spoiled citizenry.
Too precious to touch the ground.
The race hadn’t evolved with the technology; it’d been replaced by it.
Some days he was surprised language had survived.
