He'd found this spot on their second day. It was on a bend in the little river beneath the trees and utterly peaceful. The water itself was brown, but he'd seen plenty of signs of life—coots and ducks on the surface and the occasional splash of fish he couldn't pretend to identify. Rodents scurried along the waterline and he thought he once saw a snake swimming across the surface, but it had been getting toward dusk and he might have been imagining things.
"Jessie says she wants to see you," Margie said, finally breaking his train of thought.
"Why didn't you tell me before now?" he asked, putting down his now-empty cup of noodles.
She smiled. "She also said you had to eat. And I knew you would just go to her when I told you."
"You're smarter than …"
"I look? Yeah, I look dumb, but I ain't."
He got up and then offer her a hand. "You sure aren't, Margie. You sure aren't."
"Dev," she said, turning to him as he walked into the kitchenette. "You took your time."
"I had to eat my noodles. What's up? Jay doing alright?"
She handed him a coffee and led him over to the pair of couches that doubled up as a bed for the two of them. They sat down, and Devon decided to lance the boil. "He hasn't fought off the infection, has he?"
"Not completely," she said. "It's not just that, though. It's the pain. It was good of you to share your medication with him, but it's not enough."
"I can manage without, I think." He glanced away and felt his stomach tighten as he said it. The morphine tablets had been a safety blanket for those days when the pain of his scars became hard to bear. The skin on the back of his neck and his right leg had stiffened and not even Jessie's regular application of baby oil—which was not without its pleasure—could loosen it enough to stop it tearing. It was the physical appearance of his scars that upset him the most, however, especially the one that ran down his cheek as if he was chewing a dog's rope toy. The livid red had given way to a gentler pale pink, but that made it all the more obvious against his dark skin.
He could feel Jessie's eyes on him. He hated her pity because it unmanned him, and he loved it because it spoke of her true feelings. "I'm sorry, Dev, but we need more. I hate to ask, but I know you won't let me go without you."
"You're not going at all," he said. "And neither is Sam."
She flushed and the dreaded finger came out. "Now don't you go all Neanderthal on me, Devon Myers. I can handle myself."
"But it's not just you we're talking about, is it? Do I have to remind you you're pregnant?"
"You do not! I've barely kept my breakfast down these past few days, but I can manage."
He shook his head. "Call me a caveman all you like: this isn't about being a sexist pig."
"And you won't let Sam go either?"
"Jessie, we've traveled clear across the country to fetch her. I'm not about to risk taking her into a ruined city. If I don't come back within a day, you're to get into the other Land Rover and head for Hope. I'll siphon off most of the fuel in the gas tank."
She sighed and lifted the coffee cup to her lips. "You'll take Amanda with you." Before he could say a word, she added, "She once worked as a nurse. She'll be useful."
It had been an expert pincer movement. She'd known all along that he wouldn't let her or Sam go, and so she trapped him between doing what he wanted—which was to go alone—and admitting to being a misogynist. "Right," he said.
"He's in a bad way, Devon." Amanda sat in the back seat of the Land Rover, a blanket pulled half over her. If they were spotted by a patrol, she would lie down and cover herself. It was a pathetic plan, but it was slightly better than nothing.
Devon nodded. He'd been up to see Jay before they left. The boy was now conscious, but he was burning up and Devon could see the fear written on Sam's face as she nursed him. Devon was no expert on toe amputation, but he suspected there was a good way and a bad way to do it. The good way would have been to cut the toes without slicing through the major arteries of the foot. The bad way was simply to swing the ax and hope. He feared the young man might never walk again. And if they didn't get a fresh supply of antibiotics, he wouldn't be doing anything again.
"I know. And I don't rate our chances of finding a pharmacy that hasn't been burned down or cleaned out since …"
"Where are you headed?"
He glanced back at her. "There's bound to be a hospital somewhere. Probably in the city center. I'll start there."
"I don't think that's a good idea. Dollar to a dime it's burned down, and if it hasn't, it'll be guarded. I think we'd be better off looking for a little pharmacy on the outskirts. Even the smallest one will have what we're looking for."
Devon grunted and pulled the black mask down over his face. She was right, and since the only plan they had was to pretend to be one of the brotherhood—or whatever their collective noun was—they'd stand a much better chance in some out-of-the-way pharmacy than Devon trying to charm his way into a hospital, even if they could find one that wasn't a charred wreck.
They were driving through a pleasant, flat land of fields and trees. A railway track ran along one side of the two-lane highway, and the grass grew high in the vast fields to their right. Devon found himself wondering how long it would take for the landscape to revert to its natural state. Judging by how much it had changed already, not long.
He was so caught up with the view to the right that they were almost upon the train wreck before he saw it. His eye was caught by a group of cars, all blackened and twisted, rusting steel. They were blocking most of the road so that the few vehicles that had driven along here since the firestorm had made a rutted, muddy arc in the grass on the other side. Beyond the cars lay the wreckage of a cargo train, most of the railcars on their side where they'd come off the track.
Devon maneuvered the Land Rover around the cars blocking the highway.
"Should we take a look?" Amanda asked from the back.
"It'll have been stripped clean," Devon responded as he caught sight of the locomotive which lay on its side a full twenty yards from the track, with the railcars behind it still attached like discarded Christmas decorations. It was nothing more than a frame of tortured metal with traces of color visible among the grays, blacks and rust-reds of the dead thing.
"Oh my God," Amanda said, pointing along the track.
Devon looked up to see what looked like a concrete tower, but it wasn't this that Amanda was gesturing at. Barely a half-mile along the track from the crash they'd just seen was a graveyard of trains and trailers. He could only imagine the inferno this must have become on the night of the firestorm as half a dozen rail tracks all converged on this terminus. Mercifully, they were all carrying goods and materials rather than people, but there must have been a hundred of them lying, piled three high in places, across the tracks in front of the concrete building. "It's some sort of silo," he said. "Agricultural, maybe, or a food processing plant. The trains brought materials into here."
"I wonder if the silos still have anything in them?"
A good point. There could be tons of grain—or whatever tanks like that contained—sitting there unnoticed. But they drove on. Right now, their priority was to ensure that Jay survived the next days. The medium term would have to take care of itself.
Devon picked his way past the back end of a tanker that lay on its side, green paint peeling away to reveal rust beneath. “Savage” was scrawled in black above a row of indecipherable graffiti than ran along the lower edge. The remnants of what had probably once been a white powdery substance formed a crust on the grass that separated the highway from the rail tracks. It was a pitiful sight, a true reminder of how civilization, with all its interconnected parts, can come crashing down in mere minutes.
A few minutes later, they took a left toward the city and were able to look down over the terminus from a bridge over the railway. It was even worse from up here. It looked like a massed beaching of porpoises, or the aftermath of a domino run. As they left the b
ridge, they passed distribution centers with the remains of trucks outside. One had been emerging from its loading bay when the firestorm had hit. Devon caught a flicker of fire from somewhere within; the first positive sign of any living person since they'd arrived in the outbuilding by the river.
Salina was a flat city in a flat landscape. The destroyed distribution centers gave way to office space and light industry and then, finally, to suburbia. They passed remains of an Orscheln Farm & Home store, still proudly offering 25% off denims, and a U-Haul that looked like a truck graveyard. Now, on either side, burned-out ranch houses and the remains of a community church.
Every now and again, they'd spot a building that had survived, and there was something simultaneously heartening and pathetic about the clotheslines strung from one side of the building to the other, betraying the crowded conditions within. At least it suggested that the people here felt safe enough to advertise their presence. It felt as though the first green shoots of recovery were emerging from the scorched earth.
And then he saw why. Along an avenue of burned-out ranch houses, he could see an old Land Rover parked outside a surviving house. As they passed the end of the road, a figure in a black mask walked from the car, weapon raised.
So, they'd gotten this far. "Did you see him?"
"Yeah."
"Stay hidden."
In the end, they stumbled across the pharmacy. They'd turned off the main road to avoid a surviving gas station and its complement of black-masked soldiers and there it was.
"My goodness, it's intact!" Amanda said, peering through the back window. "It's a B&K. They'll have what we need. Or, at least, they would have had it."
Devon felt hope rise and fall again. She was right. The place had survived, which meant it had probably been stripped of anything of value. Either that, or the Sons had taken it over. Then he saw the guard.
It was too late to change direction. The man in the black hood had seen the car approach and was gesturing them into the parking lot.
Devon glanced over his shoulder to see Amanda pulling the edges of the blanket over her and then piling a thick coat on top. When he'd stopped the car, he got out, trying to remember his training. He'd done this sort of thing before, but infiltration usually took months.
"Howdy. Novo mundo," the guard said as he approached. He looked pretty relaxed and Devon suspected this area had been under their control for some time. Perhaps even from the day itself. There was no time to puzzle over how many similar cells had lain dormant until the firestorm, and then sprung out of hiding to take over the gas stations, food warehouses and medical centers.
"Novo mundo," he responded. It sounded like Latin.
"No, you ain't got it right. I say novo mundo, you say novum populum. Sounds a bit …" He looked nervously at Devon as if trying to penetrate his mask; perhaps wondering if he'd said the wrong thing. "Don't your squad leader make you practice?"
Devon smiled. "Sure. Sorry."
"Don't worry 'bout it. Just don't let none of the Sons hear ya."
Interesting. So, these guards weren't Sons themselves. There was obviously more to the organization than he'd imagined.
"So, how can I help y'all?"
"I'm looking for some morphine. I got burned and I've run out."
The guard tilted his head to the side and Devon glimpsed blue eyes wide with sympathy. "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. I heard there've been some uprisings. You'd have thought folks would have gotten the picture by now. The old way is dead. Novo mundo, novum populum. See, I been practicing. But, anyways. I ain't no doctor and there's no one else here right now."
"It's okay, I know what I'm looking for."
Devon could see doubt in the guard's posture. "I'm not sure I can do that, buddy. I got strict orders not to let no one inside without a permit. And I ain't even seen your ID yet."
He held out his hand as Devon's insides turned to ice. He'd somehow managed to bluff his way past the guards at the gas stations, but this time his luck had run out. He had an ID card, of course, but no amount of scarring would explain the fact that the photo on his card showed a young white man.
Devon reached into his pocket and felt the knife there. It was a desperate move, likely to bring a dozen black guards down on them, but he had no choice.
"Hey, who's that in the back?"
Devon swung around to see Amanda's face, but she was looking past him to the guard.
"Help! Please help me!"
The guard ran to the door and pulled it open. "Well, what've we got here?"
Amanda looked up at him with pleading eyes. "He took me to … use … kept me drugged … morphine, I think …"
The guard turned around to look at Devon, crooked teeth exposed in a wide grin. "Now I see why you want to get some drugs. You like your meat nice 'n mature, do ya? Well, I can't say I blame you. Me, I like it tender, and boy have I had some fine dining to—"
He fell in a heap without making a sound.
"Beast," Amanda said, climbing out behind him. She took a cable tie from her jacket pocket, pulled his arms around and yanked the tie closed.
Devon watched, openmouthed, as she pulled his hood off, wound it into a makeshift gag and tied it behind the man's head. Good grief, he was young. Maybe twenty. Maybe less. Thick black hair and a pathetic excuse for a beard, but otherwise a boy you wouldn't look twice at.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Amanda said as she tied the boy's legs together and rolled him under the car. "Didn't think I had it in me? You'd be surprised."
"I am," he said, helping her to her feet before stooping down and fishing in the man's pockets. "Here, we'll need these." He handed her the keys.
"After you."
Chapter 18: Rusty
Persuading Mayor Hawkins to part with some of her medical supplies had been the easy bit. Her daughter had pitched in on Hick's side, pointing out that Hope had used much of its own stock on treating the Ezrans it had taken in. Mayor Hawkins, it seemed, was a cautious sort who worried about what would happen when their limited cache of medicines ran out, but she also recognized that Hick had come out the worse from their deal. She was a fair woman and Hick made a mental note to find a way to exploit that someday.
The complication was that Jenson Bowie was in the hospital, recovering from a gunshot wound that had almost killed him. Hick swore under his breath when he found out. That kid must've been a cat in a former existence, and he was runnin' out of lives. Hick's plan had been to make a show of trying to track Rusty down by questioning the people who'd been at the battle before feigning to conclude that there was nothing he could do and hightailing it back to Hope with the welcome medical supplies. But he had no choice now; he had to see Jenson and he knew he wouldn't be able to do it alone.
"Hey, kid," he said. In truth, he'd have been glad enough to see the boy alive if it hadn't wrecked his plan. The bed Jenson was occupying had been squeezed with half a dozen others into a room intended for a mother to give birth. Mayor Hawkins had explained that everyone in this room had been injured in the battle at the hospital or, in Jenson's case, afterward.
Jenson pulled himself up in bed, eyes wide. "Mr. Hickman! What're you doin' here? Did you come all this way to see me?"
"I didn't know you were here until I arrived," he said, moving closer to the bed while aware of Libby Hawkins hovering behind him. They weren't going to get any privacy, that was for sure. "So, you wanna start from the beginning?"
Jenson's hand shot out, grabbing for Hickman's arm. "The sheriff's alive, Mr. Hickman! They got him at their camp. I tried to break him out, but …" He held up an arm wrapped in bandages.
Damn it, thought Paul Hickman. If he could have returned to Hope with supplies and Jenson Bowie, that ought to have been enough to get his family on his side. Now he knew Rusty was alive, however, he couldn't go back without trying to rescue him.
"He nearly bled out." A tall woman in a white coat had slipped into the room and taken her place beside the bed. "He was lucky he
stumbled onto some farmland and got picked up and brought here. I thought we were going to lose him, but he survived. Single gunshot wound ruptured the brachial artery. I managed to repair it, but it'll be a while before he's back on his feet. He lost a lot of blood, and had a minor case of septicemia."
"Tell me about the folks holding the sheriff," Hickman said to Jenson.
"They're in some old mine workings. I followed their tire tracks until they disappeared among the rocks, then one of their patrols almost had me. They've repaired some of the buildings and they're livin' out there. I watched them from a rise for a few hours and then I got lucky. I saw the sheriff sittin' around a fire with some others. He looked bad beaten up, so I watched him till he was taken inside at nightfall. Near froze to death waiting, then I snuck down at midnight. But I stumbled climbing down the slope and they raised the alarm. They was just shootin' blind, but they winged me. I been beggin' the mayor to go rescue the sheriff, but she says she can't risk the manpower. But you'll go, won't you, Mr. Hickman? You won't leave the sheriff?"
Hick glanced at Libby Hawkins and sighed. "I'll do my best, son. I'll do my best."
They abandoned the car about a mile from the mine workings and approached the camp cautiously, scrambling through the rocky landscape expecting at any moment for the cry to go up. Mayor Hawkins couldn't—or wouldn't—spare anyone to help, though she'd let him pick some weapons from the armory on condition that he returned them. If he came back.
Hick had been surprised that Libby Hawkins had offered to go with him, but her mother had put her foot down at that and so he had only one companion. It had been Brain who'd given away the fact that the sheriff might still be alive and so it had seemed just punishment that he accompany Hick on this fool's errand. Besides, Brain was just about the only person in Hope he could trust completely. Which was pretty sad when he came to think about it.
Paul Hickman loved two things: his daughter and having control. Right now, he had neither. Sam was missing in action. He'd had no word from Devon and Jessie since those kids had arrived from Wendover. How long ago had that been? He considered this for a moment. Time seemed to have developed a mind of its own since that first night, though the world had kept on turning and spring was in the air. Four weeks. Yeah, that would be about it. So that made it over five since the firestorm. Good grief, it felt like six months.
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