From the Ashes
Page 16
The council was looking at Lucia. They did it sometimes, waiting for her approval. Quietly. It drove her nuts, but she adjusted.
She smiled at Lieutenant Griswold—this smile was mostly gratitude.
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I believe that concludes today’s new business. If there’s nothing further, we all have jobs to do.”
The militia lieutenant nodded once in response, the closest to a smile Lucia would ever receive from the soldier.
As the various functionaries and council members got out of their seats, the door burst open. A young militia woman stumbled in. She was slick with sweat, and her eyes were wild with panic.
“Mayor Frausto! Raiders! We’ve sighted raiders!”
Frausto looked at Griswold, who looked equal parts angry and embarrassed.
“How far out?”
“They’re at the gates, ma’am, and they’re calling for you.”
* * *
Lucia strode out to the palisade wall. She made sure to smile at everyone she passed, waving hello to those she knew. Civilians hustled inside, and members of the militia trooped down the streets, sergeants barking orders. Closer to the palisade, the militia was setting up a mortar system. Lucia smiled at the mortar team leader as she walked past, heading toward the nearest ladder to the top. She could hear the raiders’ rumbling engines well before she climbed the wall. They sounded heavier than the average post-Fall ethanol engines. The uneven palisade was lined with militia soldiers leveling weapons at the raiders, waiting for direction. A few looked up at her. She smiled at each one. Lucia motioned for one to step aside, and he did. She smiled as she thanked him, taking time to grab an offered set of binoculars from Lieutenant Griswold. As she looked over the gates at the assembled raiders, she quickly analyzed the situation.
The force of raiders outside the wall wasn’t the largest she’d ever seen, but this long after the Fall, in this desolate part of what used to be North America, it was a veritable horde.
Seventeen vehicles, each armed with a different crew-served weapon, circled and revved their engines in a show of force. Lucia counted at least one Teledyne Mk. III railgun—if they had ammunition for it, the town’s wooden palisade wouldn’t stand a chance. A few machine guns, an autocannon or two, and a multiple launch rocket system rounded out the formation. The vehicles ranged from rovers made months before the Fall to throwbacks from the mid-20th century, re-tooled and jury-rigged by resourceful scavengers. They belched angry clouds of diesel smoke.
Raiders with engineering skills, thought Lucia. There’s a nightmare.
Each of the vehicles had a flowing red banner attached to its antenna or pasted over the hood. A white flame was emblazoned on the banners, the sigil of some warlord, no doubt. The marauders looked hungry for blood. Raiders hung off the sides of the vehicles or sat in the backs. They looked well-fed and well-equipped. They were wearing a lot of leather armor, and many had body armor, whether cobbled together or ripped from a Corporate armory. None of them appeared to be anything other than mundane humans, but Lucia knew that appearances could be deceptive. As Lucia appeared, they hooted and hollered, jeering at her in English…and in Spanish. They called her name, not only her real name, but the name she thought she’d buried in the rubble.
* * *
A lone man strode forward from the front vehicle. Lucia thought he looked vaguely familiar. As he walked, the raider vehicles, one by one, cut their engines, still training their heavy weapons on the wall. Several of them dismounted and took a knee, genuflecting to the man. As the man approached the gates, silence gripped the air, punctuated only by the wind.
“Lucia Frausto!” the man shouted. “I see you, and I challenge you, you coward. Come out and deal with me, one on one!”
Lucia grimaced. She didn’t like the idea of a raider who knew her, but this challenge didn’t scare her. The man carried himself like he might be an operative or a Specialist. So had many that she’d cut down, including the warlord who’d claimed Mankato after the bombs fell.
“Lieutenant Griswold,” Lucia said. “Keep me covered. If anything funny happens, open fire.”
The lieutenant acknowledged as Lucia climbed down and motioned for some men to open the gates. Two militia members started the pulley system, and the heavy wooden gates parted. As they did, Lucia keyed her holo-belt and changed the image to the clothes she was best known for—a blue China poblana dress, accessorized with blue and white ribbons. The ribbons appeared to flow through her hair, a clever visual subroutine she’d coded herself, all those years ago. She strode forward, her hologram raising her arms while she raised her modified Serbu Super-Shorty shotgun under the cover of the hologram, pointing it at the man. The venerable weapon was downright primitive compared to some, but she preferred it for a couple of reasons—the FRAG rounds packed plenty of punch and the weapon’s compact size made it easy to conceal behind her hologram.
The hologram smiled, but Lucia did not.
“Welcome. Bienvenidos,” she said.
The man said nothing, merely puffing on his cigarette. As Lucia got closer, she got a better look at him. His head was shaved, and scars crisscrossed his face. He had an automatic weapon slung on his back and a machete at his hip. Decked out in raider faux-punk chic, he was no different from any other leatherhead. Lucia had put down countless numbers of his ilk.
“You called for me,” she continued. “So, I’m here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Guess you are.”
Silence descended. Lucia gripped her shotgun tighter, waiting for the man to draw one of his weapons, but instead, he stood there. His breathing seemed erratic, and he radiated anger, but he made no move.
“Ok,” she said. “I’m gonna help you out a bit. You demanded I come face you. I’m here. So, the way I see it, you’ve got two options. You can draw, and die like a man, or I can put you down in cold blood.”
“Cold blood would seem more appropriate,” he said, locking eyes with Lucia. “That’s how you put down my wife and daughter.”
Lucia blinked, slowly, behind her hologram, which maintained a perfect poker face, though she had the smile fade to a grimace, and the ribbons stop flowing, as if the wind had just been turned off.
“You’ve got me confused with someone else,” Lucia told the raider.
“Nah, I really don’t. You’re Lucia Victoria Frausto y Ortega. You’ve got all those idiots behind that wall fooled, but I know who you really were. You killed my family because Teledyne Internal Affairs told you to.”
Lucia’s voice caught in her throat. Her eyes widened. She dissolved the hologram and faced him. Now he could see that she had her shotgun leveled at him, and her bodysuit was still clearly labelled with Teledyne markings.
“Who the hell are you?”
The raider smiled, his teeth yellowed and broken. “My callsign was Napalm.”
The memories of her sins hit her like a freight train. She remembered a rainy night, many, many years ago, when she made a trip as the Frost Dancer. She remembered the cries of Napalm’s wife as Lucia stabbed her to death. The daughter didn’t resist—would’ve been hard for an eight-year-old to do so. A single shell of buckshot was enough to finish off the child. The message was clear—don’t desert Teledyne. Lucia had executed hundreds of missions, mostly the same, preying on wives and husbands, sons and daughters. It was a job, one that filled Lucia with shame, one that she turned and ran from, just before the old world ended in a thunderclap of nuclear oblivion.
“I was a different person,” Lucia said, haltingly, her voice betraying her insecurity. “I’m sorry for what I did, but—“
“You were just following orders?” Napalm cut her off, pausing briefly to sneer. “I don’t give a fuck. You took everything from me. You took my family and my future, so what? So Teledyne could snag a few more bucks by edging Obsidian out of some worthless fuckin’ mountain range?!”
He spit and motioned toward the palisade.
“Was it worth it? All the money they paid
you?” he asked. Lucia said nothing. The big raider continued ranting.
“These fuckin’ hicks have no idea who you really are. There’s no way they do, or you’d be ruling through fear.”
Lucia thought of all the people waiting behind the palisades. Of the council, of Alan, of so many she’d helped in the past years.
“It’s a new world, Napalm. Since the bombs fell, who I used to be is irrelevant.”
He shook his head. “Not to me, and not to my boys. Hell, I’d say being able to square up with you is about the only thing that’s kept me going. I’ve been looking for you for so long, and to find you, here, so close to where you murdered Diana and Rosie, it’s… it’s insulting.”
Lucia paused for a second, considering her words.
“Napalm,” she said. “There’s no more Teledyne. You’re carrying the corpse of a grudge from a long dead world. There’s no need for this. You’ve got a horde, and you’ve got some engineers. You could live in prosperity. Let the past die and ride away, and we’ll put this behind us.”
“I don’t give a fuck about prosperity, and I don’t give a fuck about Teledyne!” Napalm shouted. “Teledyne may have given the order, but we both know you were the one who pulled the trigger. I can never leave that behind. We’re gonna square up, and you’re gonna get what I owe you.”
“So, I get no credit for redemption?” Lucia asked, anger rising in her voice. “I’ve led this city for nearly a decade. I’ve saved refugees and fed the hungry. I cannot be redeemed?”
He shook his head again. “Nope. I’m going to kill you. Not sure if that’ll be just, but it’ll make me feel better. In a world where so many people have no family and no future, feeling good is about all we’ve got left. I was wondering what kind of woman you’d become, so I’ll give you a simple choice—come out here tomorrow, at dawn, and fight me and my boys. You do so, we’ll spare your town. You hide behind those gates, we’ll hit you with everything we’ve got, and we won’t stop until Mankato’s another faded memory, like Boston, or New Orleans, or whatever shithole you crawled out of in Mexico.”
Lucia kept her expression calm, determined not to show Napalm any of her simmering anger.
“I’m already here,” Lucia said. “You don’t want to dance? Save ourselves this ridiculous ‘High Noon’ nonsense?”
“No, Frost Dancer, I don’t,” he said, his eyes darting toward her shotgun. “Because I’m a man of honor, a man of my word. I had to deliver my ultimatum, to see if you’d grown a conscience in the last few years.”
Lucia stared him down, looking at the hatred burning in his eyes. He was twitching—probably going through withdrawals from some drug Teledyne had hooked him on years ago, maybe one made by Lucia’s old associates. She glanced at his genuflecting soldiers, at the silent war machines and their crews. She wondered how many of them even remembered the world before the fall.
She thought about her people, safe behind the walls. Years ago, she would’ve thought of them as a useful barrier between her and the guns and knives of these raiders.
The funny thing about redemption, though, is sometimes it sticks. Napalm might have some sense of honor, but the looks in the eyes of so many of his raiders, as well as the skulls and bones decorating their vehicles, suggested they had a much more primitive view of what the strong get to do to the weak. Lucia was intimately familiar with that view.
“I accept your offer,” she said. “I’ll meet you at dawn, just me. You and your men think you can take me down…We’ll see.”
Napalm’s eyes glowed. “Be there, Frost Dancer, and we’ll spare your town. If you’re even a second late, well…my boys aren’t as patient as I am.”
Napalm flicked his cigarette to the ground and walked off. As he did, his raiders rapidly stood and climbed into their vehicles. Engines started up one after the other. Within a minute, the horde had departed, leaving Mankato behind.
* * *
“What are you going to do?” asked Alan. His salt-and-pepper hair was shaggy, groomed as well as it could be in a town that didn’t always have power. His ice blue eyes betrayed what Lucia had learned to read as concern. The two were seated across from each other at the kitchen table in the mayor’s house, uneaten protein paste between them.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m at a loss, Alan.”
“Why?” asked Alan. “They’re raiders, no different from the ones you defeated, here, years ago. Get out there, do your thing, use all that expensive Corporate training.”
“They’re different,” Lucia said.
“Different how?”
Lucia shook her head. “It would hurt too much to explain it to you. I need to talk to a priest.”
“It won’t hurt me,” Alan said. “I have an idea of what you did, what you used to do, about your time as a Specialist.”
“You don’t,” Lucia said, a tear streaking down her face. “You have no idea, Alan.”
“Tell me.”
“I can’t.” Lucia wiped the tear away. “I would lose you if I told you.”
“Nothing you say will make me leave,” Alan said. “I’m here for you.”
Lucia thought. She wanted to tell him everything—but she couldn’t. She knew he meant well. She knew he wanted to help, but kind, gentle-hearted Alan could not withstand hearing about all the vile deeds she had done. He wasn’t capable of understanding the number of innocents dead at her hand. Because, even in the post-Armageddon scarcity of this fallen world, Alan would choose love and peace. He would not choose survival. It made him incompatible with who Lucia felt she really was.
So, she fled.
She got up, and as Alan protested, she walked out, stopping only to pick up her shotguns.
* * *
Lucia walked around town, smiling at everyone she met, searching for someone to confide in. She didn’t want to tell Alan her secrets, out of fear of losing him. She didn’t want to tell Lieutenant Griswold or Doctor Olmstead or Greg Stein. They all looked up to her, and she doubted she’d keep her leadership position if she revealed her true nature. As she watched, she thought back to her youth in Mexico. There weren’t many people she could trust in the early days, and the older she got, the more guilt she suppressed. She hoped, for her sake and the sake of the town, Father McClaren would honor the confidentiality of confession the way priests were supposed to.
The Church of the Holy Rosary was filled to capacity with survivors and refugees. As Lucia gently opened the heavy door, the soft sounds of a hymn played on an organ, with lyrics half-sung by people who didn’t know the words, greeted her. She walked inside and saw the packed congregation—the pews had mostly been removed, but that hadn’t stopped Father McClaren. Lucia smiled at a few of her citizens who thanked her for some minor task she’d accomplished. She hid what she felt, kept up the façade, and made small talk with her people as she looked for the priest.
Father Henry McClaren was ministering to an elderly woman as Lucia approached. The priest was an old man—in his early 70s, though still hale and hearty, with an infectious energy. His wispy white hair and kind green eyes made him seem instantly trustworthy.
“Father,” she said.
“Mayor Frausto,” he replied. “I’m surprised to see you here. You don’t strike me as the church-going type.”
I was, once, thought Lucia.
“Are you here about my absence from the meeting?” asked the priest. “I’ve been quite b—“
“I need someone to talk to,” said Lucia, interrupting him. “Do you have a moment?”
The priest’s expression briefly flashed to confusion, but quickly turned to compassion.
“Of course,” Father McClaren nodded. “We can speak in the basement. I have a quiet room down there.”
She followed the priest downstairs, making sure she smiled at the parishioners and refugees as she passed them, offering a few words of encouragement where she could.
In the basement, the priest led her over to a converted storage closet.
“It’s been too long, and I’ve forgotten the ritual,” Lucia said. “I need to unburden my soul. I’m sorry that sounds so dramatic, but I’m carrying a weight, Father, and I have to tell someone.”
The priest took a seat, and motioned for Lucia to do the same.
“Before I tell you,” she said. “Please, no ‘my child’ or anything like that. I only want to talk.”
“Of course,” McClaren acknowledged. “Where do you want to start?”
“Los Caballeros Templarios,” Lucia blurted, the words leaping out of her mouth before she finished thinking them.
“The knightly order?”
She shook her head. “The cartel. The one that died in the 2010s, then was resurrected in the 2050s. They recruited me. I killed for them.”
“I see,” McClaren said, his eyes holding no judgment. “And you harbor guilt from that time?”
“No, well, yes, I mean…” Lucia stammered.
Silence hung in the air for a second. Lucia wasn’t sure what else she wanted to tell him. She tried to organize her thoughts, but failed. So, she poured it all out. She told him about how her time in the Templars was quick, brutal, and violent, but it was home for an orphan who never knew a family. She told him about drug-running, drive-by shootings, standing watch at brothels and drug dens and gambling parlors, and hurting elderly folks to force them to pay protection. The priest listened, taking it all in.
“The worst of it, though,” she said, “is that I committed these sins for money. I’ve forgiven myself for my time as a Templar. I was young and desperate, and maybe that’s no excuse, but I was still learning right and wrong. It’s what happened afterward that burdens me. I’m ashamed to my very core about what I did for Teledyne.”
“What do you mean?” asked McClaren.
“Teledyne bought out the Templars,” she said. “Most of the existing leadership was purged. Those of us in the top ranks of the sicarios were given a choice—become Specialists or hit the road and return to the barrios we scrabbled to escape. It was a simple choice, and faced with the idea of poverty, I couldn’t go back, not once I’d tasted the good life.”