by E. R. Torre
Afterwards, she paused and waited. There was no return fire. The sniper managed only that one last shot.
Nox laid the handgun down. It took a great deal of effort for her to turn and look at Ellis.
Nox knew what she’d see.
The elderly man lay on the ground next to the boulder. Blood flowed freely from a stomach wound.
Nox rose to her feet and fully exposed herself. There was no more point in hiding. Either she eliminated the sniper or not. If she didn’t, there was no use in delaying her fate. The sun beat down on Nox and a second, then two, passed. No more shots were fired her way.
Nox peered at the mesa.
Got you, you son of a bitch.
The Mechanic climbed out of the ditch and ran to Ellis’ side. The older man was still alive, though his eyes were sunken in their sockets and his breath was shallow. Nox cradled her old friend.
“You dumb bastard.”
“D-did you get him?” Ellis muttered.
“Yeah.”
The windshield of the Octi Corp. van parked on the top of the mesa was shattered to pieces. Lying in front of it and still cradling a sniper’s rifle was a man in his late twenties. His shoulder and forehead were colored a bright red. His left eye was shot out. The kill shot.
Beside him lay his spotter. The man looked away from the horror that lay there, but his breathing remained heavy and he couldn’t stop shaking. It took several tense minutes for him to crawl away from his original spot and get behind the van. Once there, he opened the vehicle’s back door and entered.
Within the van was a small bathroom. The spotter hurried inside and stared at his reflection in the mirror. His partner’s blood was splattered on his face and hands.
“Fuck me,” he mumbled.
The sniper’s spotter cleaned the mess and exited the bathroom. He then cautiously walked to the front of the van and, while keeping all body parts away from the shattered window, reached for the radio receiver.
“This is Octi 45,” he said into the microphone. “I have a man down.”
There was a pause followed by a burst of static.
“Acknowledged, Octi 45,” came his response. “What about your target?”
The spotter leaned forward enough to see past the remains of the windshield. His partner remained in place and somewhere far below was his killer. The spotter’s jaw tightened. He again moved away from the window.
“John took one of them out before the other took him out.”
“Are all targets down?”
The spotter suppressed a shiver.
“Yes,” he lied. “They’re all dead.”
“Backup is on its way. Eta—”
“It won’t be necessary.”
There was a pause.
“Please confirm, Octi 45. You no longer require backup?”
The suppressed shiver burst through and passed the spotter’s body. He felt like he was going to faint. My partner’s dead and I’ve really stuck my foot in it now.
“No. I don’t need any backup.”
Our targets have no means of transportation and no water, the spotter thought. They might not be dead –yet– but they were as good as dead. Let the sands take care of whoever’s left alive. For now.
“I repeat, I don’t need backup. I'm coming in.”
“Hide the bodies,” the voice on the radio said. “That includes your partner’s. None of this happened. Understood?”
Only too well.
“Yes sir. Over and out.”
The spotter shut off the radio. He shook his head and slid into the driver’s seat. The buzzards can take care of all the bodies. No way in hell he’d stick around.
No way in hell.
On the road below, Nox and Ellis heard the distant sound of the Octi van starting up.
“They're leaving?” Ellis asked.
“Guess so.”
“Fucking cowards. We gave them more of a fight than they were willing to take.”
Ellis let out a bloody cough.
“What kind of men sends kids into a war?” he muttered.
Nox held Ellis close. Ellis’ words were slurred and increasingly confused.
“Follow them. Get them...”
“I can't leave you here,” Nox said.
“It’s your only chance.”
Nox lowered her head.
Despite his weakened state, Ellis was right. Nox had to follow the Octi van. It would head to a nearby base or, if Nox was lucky, it might even be on its way to wherever Robert Octi Jr. was going.
But to leave now meant…
“You'll die.”
Ellis stared at Nox. His eyes were distant, unfocused.
“Forget…forget about me.”
The old man’s final breath drifted out of his mouth and dissipated into the desert air. The tension in his face was gone. His lips curled into something resembling a smile.
Nox gently propped the body against the rock that shielded Ellis only moments before. In the distance, she saw the faint trace of dust kicked up by the Octi Corp. van on the mesa. They were moving away.
Nox walked to her chopper. She hoped the damage she saw on her vehicle from a distance wasn’t quite that bad.
It was.
The chopper’s handlebars and frame were badly warped. The gas tank was pierced and all the fuel had drained into the sand.
Nox reached for the pouch hanging at the chopper’s side. She removed the shovel she had previously used to uncover the Octi Corp. survey van. She then walked back to Ellis’ side.
Nox stared at the freshly dug grave. It was the best the Mechanic could do for her old friend. When this affair was done, Nox swore, she would return and give Ellis a proper burial. One befitting a veteran.
“There are few words I can offer,” Nox said. She slung the backpack over her shoulder. “You lived your life the way you wanted to. What else is there to say?”
Nox smiled at that thought.
“Everyone should be that lucky.”
Nox then walked down the road. When she was far past the sniper’s mesa, she spotted the Octi Corp. van’s tracks. Nox leaned down and memorized the tread. She then stood and stared through her binoculars and into the distance.
She spotted a tiny puff of dust far off to the east. Nox replaced the binoculars in her backpack and continued her long walk.
It would be tough, but not impossible, to follow the sniper’s van.
It took only a few more minutes before she could no longer see any sign of the van through her binoculars. But by then, Nox knew the van was moving off the main dirt road and maintaining an easterly course. The tracks proved easier to follow at that point, though she feared the evening winds might obliterate their path.
Nox moved on, a solitary black figure almost invisible against the stark rusty red sands.
Her movements slowed with the passage of time and as the sun and the oppressive heat inevitably sapped her of strength.
Much later, the sky grew dark. Nox had long since lost track of the time and didn’t bother to look at her wrist watch.
She kept her head low and steadily moved on.
The arrival of night brought the first of the cool winds.
Nox sat on a stone overlooking a flat plain. She removed her boots and flexed her aching toes before laying her heavy backpack on the ground.
The Mechanic relished the change in temperature. She turned her chapped and blistered face into the wind and soaked up the cool air.
Though she desperately wanted to continue following the van’s tracks, she had to stop for the night. There simply wasn’t enough light left to see anything in the red sands.
As the hours passed and the evening winds rose, Nox grew more and more worried about the tracks she was following. If the wind grew too strong, there was the very real possibility that all the van’s tracks would be gone by first light.
And even if the wind maintained its current strength, the tracks would be very faded by morning and all that much harder
to follow.
Nox wondered how far she had come but worried even more about how much farther she still had to go.
Her life depended on it.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
In the morning Nox awoke thirsty and feverish. She slipped her boots back on and got to her feet but her legs felt wobbly and her body screamed for her to stay down. To do so, Nox knew, meant she would never move again.
The desert sands had done plenty of damage to the Octi Corp van’s tracks, but there remained enough of them here and there for Nox to follow. She did so robotically, passing one grueling mile after another. The vista around her was unchanged. There were no mesas, there were no hills, and there were no valleys.
Only the monotonously smooth sandy plain.
Nox kept her eyes from the blazing sun. There was still a very long way to go.
The hours passed…
Once in a while Nox tracked the sun’s position by her shadow. It moved across the sands like a primitive hourglass. Nox’s gaze inevitably shifted away from the shadow and to the sands themselves. The tracks of the van were at times very faint. For a while she lost them but kept moving forward anyway. Luckily for her, the van’s path remained monotonously straight. She eventually found the lost tracks again, sometimes as far as a mile or two away.
As she followed the increasingly faded tracks, a nagging worry gripped the Mechanic. If she didn’t find the van’s destination by this very nightfall, by morning what was left of the tracks would most certainly be gone, and with them any hope of survival.
…the hours passed.
The first winds of late afternoon came as a surprise to the Mechanic. Nox looked up and was shocked to see the sun setting far off to the west. The sky was a bloody red rose and wisps of sand danced before it.
The terrain had changed. She was now in a section of the desert populated with smooth hills. Much farther in the distance were several mesas. When Nox squinted, she could just see the outlines of mountains still further off. She wondered if they were real or a hallucination.
Nox’s breathing was labored, and the skin on her face peeled and blistered. She shuffled as she walked, and found it almost impossible to swallow. Her hands felt so heavy and she had so little energy left.
Nox stopped and cocked her head to the side.
“What?” she mumbled. Her voice sounded like a leaking tire. She looked back from where she came and listened hard. Had she heard something?
After a few seconds, Nox shook her head.
Hallucinations.
She continued forward. But after only a few steps, she once again stopped.
No. Not a hallucination.
Nox listened for several long seconds until she was sure. There was a rumbling coming from somewhere behind her. It was the sound of a mechanized caravan. Nox stared into the distance and kept perfectly still. After a while, she spotted a dust cloud.
Though it pained her burned lips, the Mechanic cracked a smile.
Nox hurried forward and climbed a small hill. She pulled her binoculars from her backpack and stared into the distance. There were five trucks moving in her general direction. A marking on the front of the lead truck identified it as belonging to Octi Corp.
The smile on Nox’s face widened.
She hurried down the hill and found a place to hide between two mounds. She had a plan. The timing would be tight, but if she was quick and had just enough strength left, she could jump the last of the vans and stow herself away within.
The trucks closed in on her position as the last of the sun’s rays winked out. The trucks’ front lights came on all at once as their massive engines roared ever closer.
Nox shook her head. They were moving fast. Too fast. She hoped they would slow down as they entered the hills but, if anything, they seemed to speed up. Nox had no hope, in her weakened state, of jumping them. Her only alternative was to force them to slow down.
Nox removed her assembled handgun from the backpack and aimed it at the second vehicle’s rear tires. Her hands shook with the weight of something she held without any problem innumerable times before.
Can you make the shot?
Nox took a deep breath of the rapidly cooling air. She had only one chance to pull this off and, despite the loud noises coming from the trucks’ engines, there was no guarantee the occupants of the vehicles wouldn’t hear the gun shot. If they did, Nox was done.
Let the engine noises be loud enough, Nox hoped.
The Mechanic exhaled and stared through the gun’s sight. The image within shook. Nox clamped down and held the weapon as steady as she could. She aimed carefully and, when she felt comfortable enough, Nox squeezed the trigger.
To Nox, the single shot exploded with the sound of an atomic bomb. The Mechanic leaned down and away. She quickly stored the gun into the backpack and dare not look up.
They heard it, she thought. You screwed it up. There’s no way they didn’t hear that sound.
Nox was certain despair had pushed her into making a fatal mistake. The drivers would arm themselves. They would come for her. They would…
The trucks’ forward movement slowed. Nox took a chance and peeked over the mound she was hiding behind. The caravan was still quite far away, but they were indeed slowing.
Please let them think it’s a flat tire. A flat tire and nothing more.
The caravan came to a stop and the crews dismounted. They walked around the stricken vehicle and the driver of that truck kicked his useless tire.
Nox tried hard to contain herself. The drivers moved around casually, joking and pointing to the flat, as if they suffered only a temporary misfortune. They didn’t hide behind the van’s metal body, they didn’t arm themselves…
They didn’t hear the shot!
Nox closed her eyes and forced herself to relax. This was only the first part. She still had a way to go.
Off in the distance, the driver of the disabled van shook his head and scratched the back of his neck. He waved to several of the other drivers. Two of the younger members of the team headed to one of the lead trucks. When they returned, one of them rolled a spare tire while the other carried a heavy jack. The man with the spare tire let it drop on the sand and helped his partner set up the jack.
The others walked around, smoked, and stretched. A couple drank from a canteen mounted on the second to the last truck’s side.
In the growing darkness, Nox silently worked her way around the vans until she was behind the last of them. She crawled under this truck and forward, until she was directly below the vehicle’s engine. The effort left her winded and seeing stars. Nox feared she might pass out.
If she did, and they drove off…
Nox closed her eyes and rested for a few seconds.
The break proved beneficial. The caravan’s occupants had their fill of the canteen water and left it beside the rear truck and only a couple of feet away from Nox’s position. While the members of the crew leisurely roamed elsewhere, Nox crawled out and grabbed the canteen. She took a long, deep swig of the warm water and almost choked. Despite this, the water felt like the essence of life poured back into a cadaver. Nox took another long pull before spilling water over her face and upper body. She soaked her shirt and brushed away the damned sand. She felt like laughing out loud but forced herself to keep her mouth shut.
She was in heaven.
Though still quite weak, Nox felt strength return to her body. She took one last long sip of the warm liquid before putting it back in its place. The spare tire was almost mounted and Nox had little time. She crawled back and out from under the truck. She inspected the vehicle’s cargo bay and found within it several large boxes of rations. Nox opened one of the containers and removed a couple of individual packets. Nox then took one last look at the caravan’s occupants. The spare tire was mounted and the crew joked at the wasted time and inconvenience. All members headed to their respective vehicles.
Nox climbed the back of the truck and lay down on the roof of its carg
o bay. She opened one of the stolen ration packs and was halfway done eating it by the time the trucks started moving.
A little later she was fast asleep.
The burning sunlight woke her.
Nox covered her eyes and noted the position of the sun. Morning was almost gone. To her surprise, she had slept some fifteen or more hours. Nox turned on her stomach and peered ahead.
The caravan proceeded east. It moved through and around a series of low lying hills. The terrain forced the drivers to cut their speed and move carefully. Nox involuntarily shook. It was sheer dumb luck she came across this caravan. Considering the distance they had traveled since she hitched this ride, it was also clear she would never have caught up with the sniper’s van.
She was lucky to still be alive.
The vans continued their trek. The terrain smoothed out but Nox spotted deep valleys to the north. Eventually, the vans turned off into one of those valleys. Off in the distance Nox spotted a metallic reflection. She pulled her binoculars out and studied what lay ahead.
She saw a sand colored canvas port shielding a pair of Octi Corp. trucks. The entire contraption was set up next to a rocky hill. From the air, no one would see the parked vehicles and the port was large enough to fit the entire caravan.
Nox examined the two vehicles already parked under that canvas port. The front windshield of the first van was shattered by three bullet holes. Nox’s jaw tightened. She caught up to the vehicle she was following.
The caravan slowed as they approached the rocky hill.
Nox didn’t wait for them to park. She lowered herself off the top of her truck and jumped to the sandy ground. She hit it hard and rolled off to the side. Once hidden behind a couple of boulders, Nox watched the caravan enter the canvas port and park. The occupants of the caravan disembarked and, for the next few hours, unloaded their supplies.
The crew used hand trucks to move their cargo to its destination, somewhere hidden behind the rocky hill. When all the boxes and containers were unloaded, the drivers and crew returned to their vehicles, started them up, and drove off the way they came. The entire caravan passed within a few feet of Nox’s hideout.
