by SD Tanner
***
Pax watched as eight shooters snuck out of the office next to the warehouse and towards the trucks. He could have fired on them, but they’d agreed they didn’t have any use for the Major’s men and anyone who was willing to leave peacefully, would be allowed to. As the truck pulled away to go out the main gate, he caught a glimpse of blonde hair in the passenger side window.
It was BD and he immediately radioed the driver of his Stryker, ‘Move! I need ya to follow a truck! Pick me up on the way out.’
Sprinting to meet the Stryker, he radioed Gears, ‘Gotta go. Major’s got BD.’
Radioing Hatch, he said, ‘Hatch follow the Stryker leavin’ the base. We gotta stop the truck we’re followin’.’
Hatch replied, ‘Roger that, Pax.’
He heard Pop speak from his observation site, ‘I see ya, Pax. I’m gonna head down to ya with the truck.’
He replied, ‘Thanks, Pop.’
The Strykers top speed was only 60 miles per hour and the Major was in a truck that would no doubt go 100 miles per hour, plus the Major had a short lead on them. He needed to convince the Major to stop, otherwise they’d never catch up to the truck and the truck was already pulling away. He wasn’t interested in the Major. He only wanted BD back safe with him and he said to the Stryker gunner, ‘Fire on ‘em, but fire short and in sharp bursts. Only warn ‘em.’
The gunner did as ordered. Through the viewing screens in the Stryker, Pax saw the truck was accelerating further ahead of them. Pax said to the gunner, ‘Do it again, but fire to the left of the driver so he knows we’re deliberately missin’ ‘em.’
The gunner again did as ordered. The truck swerved slightly and braked lightly, but didn’t stop. The truck was now nearing a corner and it braked to take the corner. It took the Stryker less than a minute to take the same corner. The road opened up as a straight stretch of road and the Major’s truck accelerated away again. He could hear the bird near them, and knowing they’d be able to track the truck, he didn’t want to shoot directly into it while BD was inside. Pop was on his way in his own truck and, as long as the bird kept eyes on the Major’s truck, he figured they could continue the pursuit in Pop’s truck.
He was about to tell Hatch to keep eyes on the Majors truck and check how close Pop was, when he saw the Major’s truck brake. The Stryker started to gain ground on the truck and Hatch was hovering overhead. The Major’s truck suddenly accelerated away. Initially he was confused, but the gunner said, ‘They threw a body out.’
Feeling his stomach contract, he asked, ‘What’s it look like?’
The gunner replied, ‘A woman.’
He knew, but he tried to ignore what he knew and said, ‘Pull over next to that body.’
The Major had thrown BD out of the truck to stop their pursuit, and he could only hope that she was still alive. The Major’s truck accelerated away and the Stryker pulled up next to the body lying on the road.
Clambering from the Stryker, he shouted, ‘Hatch! Get yer gunners to take that fuckin’ truck out.’
Hatch replied, ‘Roger that.’
Clutching a medical kit, he jogged to where the body lay crumpled. It was BD and she wasn’t moving. Dropping to one knee, he felt for a pulse and found one, but it was faint and slow. Leaning close to her face, he asked, ‘BD. Can ya hear me?’
BD said faintly, ‘Oh it’s you. You came for me. I knew you would.’
There didn’t seem to be any blood and he couldn’t see how she was injured. Gently rolling her over, he saw a round spreading circle of blood across the middle of her spine. The Major hadn’t just thrown her from the truck, he’d shot her in the back first. Obviously he’d hoped the Stryker would stop for BD and it had, but he could hear the gunners firing in the distance and he thought the Major killed BD for nothing. Sacrificing her wouldn’t save him from the fury of his gunners, but right now his only worry was BD. He opened the medical pack and starting digging for morphine and packing for the wound.
Scrabbling through his pack, he said, ‘It’s gonna be okay, baby. We’ll get ya back to the ship. Lydia can patch ya up.’
He knew he was lying. A bullet at close range through the back might have been a survivable wound in modern combat, but it wasn’t survivable in the post-apocalyptic world they now lived in.
Sounding tired, BD said, ‘Frank told the Major about me, but I didn’t think you’d come so quick.’
He wasn’t a medic and he was fumbling with the packaging on the shot of morphine. Usually calm in a crisis, he couldn’t seem to stop his hands from shaking and it was if his body had stopped listening to him.
Looking at her tenderly, he said softly, ‘I promised ya, baby. I told ya, I’d come getcha.’
Smiling faintly, BD said, ‘Thank you.’ Then her body went limp, and he knew she was gone.
Having shot the Major’s truck to a stop less than half a mile from them, Hatch landed the bird in a nearby clearing. Looking up, he saw Pop’s truck pulling in next to the Stryker. He was still holding the pack of half-opened morphine and he realized he was in shock. It all happened so suddenly. One moment BD was there, and then she was just gone. Death’s a merciless bitch, he thought angrily. There was no going back. There was nothing that would change his growing sense of loss. This hurts, he thought. He’d seen a lot of death in his time, but this was the first time it hurt in a way he knew would be hard to ignore.
He felt Pop bend down next to him and put his hand on his shoulder and ask, ‘Who was she to ya, son?’
He didn’t know how to answer that. To him, BD was a woman he’d shared time with, but she’d also been one of their own. She was a woman who protected their base with her life, but he thought none of those things described what she’d meant to him.
Standing up and facing his father, with his face blank and his voice flat, he said, ‘She was the woman I loved.’
Patting his shoulder, Pop said, ‘Then let’s take her home, son.’
Picking up her body, he and Pop took her back to the truck and returned to the Major’s base with Hatch and the Stryker following them. It looked like a heavily armed funeral procession. He didn’t understand why, but he held BD’s hand all the way back to the base and it struck him as a bit crazy. She couldn’t know he was there, but just holding her cooling hand made him feel slightly saner.
Pulling up in Pop’s truck, he saw about a dozen men in zip cuffs, a bunch of civilians standing about and his own guys guarding the prisoners. Spotting Frank lurking with the civilians, he climbed out of the truck and stormed over.
‘Ya fuckin’ sonofabitch!’ He roared as he lunged for Frank. Gears grabbed him by his vest and yanked him back.
***
‘What the hell are ya doin’,’ he shouted at Pax.
‘He told Major major asshole who BD was,’ Pax shouted. ‘Sonofabitch got her killed. I’m gonna gut the prick.’
‘Th…that’s murder’ Frank whined. ‘You can’t kill me in cold blood. I did nothing wrong. You only have the Major’s word and everyone knows he was a bastard. You aren’t judge, jury and executioner. If you kill me, then you guys are just as bad as the Major.’
Quietly speaking in his ear, TL said, ‘He’s right, Gears. If we kill him like this then the people here will believe we’re no better than the Major.’
Pax obviously heard what TL said to him and, whirling on TL with his face twisted in grief, he snarled, ‘Shaddup TL! This is not a fuckin’ election and we are not fuckin’ politicians!’
Fearing Pax would lose his rag and make good on his threat to gut Frank, he pulled him away and said steadily, ‘Ya can’t kill him this way, Pax. Whether ya like it not, we’re leaders now. We kill him and we become dictators, or worse still, we tell everyone anarchy is okay. Either way, it’s no good.’
Looking at him in complete disgust, Pax said angrily, ‘Explain this to me, Gears. This asshole gets one of us killed and we jus’ walk away?’
He didn’t like it either, but he knew their army wa
s only a large group of heavily armed civilians who were trained to kill. As civilians, they had no shared code of conduct, no rules and no laws they had to follow. If he, Pax and TL started shooting people they didn’t like, then so would everyone else. They could only set the codes of conduct if they followed them themselves. He didn’t like it, but it was the role they’d put themselves in and he wasn’t sure he had much choice. He was about to tell Pax they would take Frank back to the Base and sort it out, when a shot rang out and Frank crumpled to the ground dead. Letting go of Pax in shock, he spun around to see who’d shot Frank.
Pop was lowering his M24 sniper rifle and he said in a loud voice so everyone could hear, ‘I got over 35 kiddies on that ship and that asshole was willin’ to kill ‘em. I won’t let that kinda vermin put our little ones at risk, and I don’t care if I’m a murderer. If that’s what it takes to protect ‘em, then I’ll sort it out with my maker when my time comes.’
As if the incident had never happened, everyone continued doing what they needed to do. Walking over to his father, he said, ‘Thanks, Pop.’
Pop nodded at him and said, ‘Ya boys are in a difficult position now. Ya got enough structure to have some sort of chance at startin’ to fight the hunters, but not enough to have the law to manage your people. You’re gonna have to put some kinda legal system in eventually, but for now it’s gonna get messy some days.’
Shrugging at his father, he said, ‘Problem’s solved for today, and that’s good enough for now.’
Walking over to Pax, Pop put his hand on his shoulder and said sincerely, ‘All ya can do for her now is bury her well, son.’ Looking grim, Pax nodded.
Pax wrapped BD’s body in a clean white sheet he’d found in the Major’s living quarters, but a little blood had soaked through the white sheet giving no doubt about what lay within it. Hatch took them back to the Base where they grabbed a couple of shovels and a truck. Ip had also been at the Base helping Fagan and the scavengers with their runs for the day, and he brought her with them. A funeral was a family event, and after such a bad day, he felt they needed to be together. He, Pax, TL and Ip had driven to a house he didn’t know was there. Pax insisted BD was buried at that particular house. They gently laid her body down on one of the La-Z-Boys under a large pecan tree. He, TL and Pax shared the work to dig her grave under the tree and next to the stream, while Ip sat nearby, idly running her hands in the water.
Pax surprised him today. In all the years he’d known Pax, he’d never seen him let any woman worry him much for long. He’d no idea Pax felt this way about BD, and he didn’t understand why Pax let her go to the Major’s base, but he knew these were not questions for today. He figured BD must have been someone special and he wished he’d known her. As it was, he didn’t remember seeing her at the Base and Pax didn’t know her real name. He would have to ask Kat when they got back to the Base.
Silently they took her wrapped body and placed it carefully in the grave. Pax took a handful of dirt and threw it onto the white sheet and said grimly, ‘I dunno how ya did it, baby, but ya really got to me.’
With that one comment, Pax grabbed the shovel and started hurling dirt into the grave. He and TL looked at one another and shrugging, he grabbed the other shovel and helped Pax fill the grave until there was no dirt left. When they were done, Pax went down on one knee at the foot of her grave and bent his head.
Ip thinks: The noisy one his heart is dark. I can feel he has lost his spark. He mourns the loss of the body here. I do not understand for she is near. She stands beside his bent head. I can see her heart to him was wed. He need not mourn for her life is not lost. She will continue. On that he can trust. If their souls be wedded strong they will join again for they belong. And our lives are so very long. She kissed his mouth and then she left. He should not feel so bereft. She loved him well. She loves him still. Perhaps these two have not yet had their fill. These humans are so very blind. They see so little of life that is so kind. It must be lonely not to know that there is so much more in life’s endless flow.
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR: Battle rattle (Gears)
Pax was lying on the bathroom floor attached to his bedroom groaning. Ip was sitting beside him batting at his head with a wet cloth.
‘That’s not helpin’, sweetheart,’ he told her gently.
Tossing the cloth on the floor, she got up and sat on the counter next to the sink.
The intern who’d just injected Pax in the ass, turned to them and said, ‘The meds should kick in fairly quickly.’
Barely suppressing his smile, he said as seriously as he was able, ‘Thank you.’
From his prone position on the floor, Pax grumbled, ‘It’s not funny, ya asshole.’
Chuckling, TL said, ‘It’s kinda funny, Pax.’
It’d been four weeks since the attack on the Major’s base and the navy ships engineers from Izzie’s group arrived around that time and finally got the boat moving a few days ago. It was a good day for everyone except Pax. As it turned out, Pax got seasick and he hadn’t stopped throwing up ever since the ship started moving.
‘It might ease up enough to be manageable with a lower dose of medication,’ the intern said sympathetically.
By way of response, Pax pulled himself onto the rim of the toilet and threw up into the bowl. Looking slightly put out, the young intern said, ‘Keep me posted.’
Still trying to look appropriately concerned, he said, ‘Of course.’
While Pax refused to leave the bathroom, they went back into his room. Sitting down in the armchair next to Pax’s bed, Ip bounced off the bathroom counter and sat in his lap. Without Isaac, he couldn’t communicate with her directly, but on a few occasions he’d gotten Isaac on the radio he could still talk to her. Their relationship was as it always had been, only now he knew a lot more about the world she lived in. Although Isaac was staying with Nelson, he figured in Ip’s world, Isaac was no further away in her mind than if he was here.
They hadn’t closed down the Base as planned. It turned out there were over 200 civilians living near the Major’s base and they’d relied on the Major for supplies and to keep the hunter population at bay. According to them, it had come at an increasingly high price and the Major and his men were becoming progressively more abusive. They also learned the Major was never in the army, but he’d been a Major in the prison service. Some of the civilians from the Major’s area asked if they could take over the Base and they left them with weapons and supplies. Some of the civilians had chosen to stay with their homes and about eighty joined the ship and brought much needed skills to their growing team.
The ship now had over 450 people. It was nowhere near its capacity, but it was already a lot of mouths to feed. He wanted to establish a safe island as soon as they could find one. As usual, he wasn’t thinking about the problems of today, and was already trying to work out what they needed to do now to be ready for the problems of tomorrow. With that in mind, he asked Hatch to train more co-pilots. Nelson didn’t have a pilot yet, but he was sure he’d find one eventually and they’d given Nelson one of the birds from the Major’s base. Keeping the winged Black Hawk on the ship, they hid the other bird on a naval base in Gulfport. They were so reliant on the bird to get to land for supplies now they were at sea, he wanted a backup bird and pilots. He figured if Nelson hadn’t found a pilot by the time Hatch had the two co-pilots trained, one of them could relocate to Nelsons base for a while and help him out. In the meantime, he couldn’t spare Hatch even for a day or two.
The medication must have kicked in and Pax staggered out of the bathroom and collapsed on his bed. TL handed him a bottle of water and Pax sipped it gingerly.
Lying down on the bed, Pax asked, ‘Whatdaya think the super hunters are? Demon? Or dead?’
Yawning, TL replied, ‘Why can’t they be both?’
Sitting up again, Pax asked, ‘If they’re demons, then don’t that mean there’s a Devil?’
Since BD died, Pax had been quieter and a little introspect
ive, but it wasn’t like him to think too deeply about anything and he asked, ‘Why do ya care?’
Sniffing, Pax said, ‘I doan care. It’s just if there’s demons, then there’s a Devil, right? And if there’s a Devil, then there’s gotta be a God, otherwise who keeps the Devil in check?’
He’d never heard Pax mention God or the Devil before unless he was cursing. God wasn’t something he thought about much. As far as he was concerned, life was WYSIWYG, “What You See Is What You Get”. God and the Devil were not something he could see, and he didn’t think either had anything to do with him.
Looking at Pax, TL asked amiably, ‘You having an existential moment, Pax?’
Screwing up his face, Pax said, ‘I dunno what that is. I’m just sayin’, if the super hunters are demons, then we dunno what’s goin’ on.’
Chuckling, TL asked, ‘Do we ever?’
‘Yeah we do, TL,’ he replied. ‘Right now we got too many enemies. Hunters, super hunters and dumbass humans who wanna behave like assholes. What I know, is that if we don’t stop fightin’ one another, we ain’t gonna win against the hunters or super hunters, no matter what they are.’
Looking at him, TL said pragmatically, ‘We’re working on the counter virus to deal with the hunters, and Ip can find the super hunters and we can kill them.’
Snorting in disgust, Pax exclaimed, ‘The counter virus was a bust! Damn water pistols didn’t do nothin’ useful, jus’ got ‘em wet.’
Shaking his head, he said, ‘It has some effect, Pax. Lydia tested the one we brought back from the Walmart. The counter virus destroyed more of the hunters’ brain, and they’re still workin’ on the counter virus, so the next generation of the counter virus could do more damage to the hunters.’
‘That’s true,’ TL agreed. ‘We just gotta keep working on it.’
Shrugging, Pax said, ‘Yeah, well, I’m glad we didn’t rely on it at the Walmart. We’d be dead.’
