Lone Gunfighter of the Wastelands

by Rachel Aukes

  “Why would I—?”

  Rex cut him off with a sharp wave of his hand. “You hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Cutter doors closing.” Rex jumped to his feet and peeked out the front window. He snapped around. “We’re about to have company. At least one hunter and four murcs.”

  Reuben’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I don’t understand. How’d they find us here? There’s no paperwork. I’ve never told anyone about this place.”

  Rex paused. “Wait. How’d you come about this place?”

  He shrugged. “It was my mom’s hideout.”

  Rex scowled, then pulled on his helmet. “Cat knows all of your mom’s hideouts, you idjit.”

  “Why would she know?” Reuben asked, but Rex ignored him.

  The hunter grabbed the bottle of whiskey and began pouring it on the floor and walls. When he’d finished the bottle, he grabbed another and threw it against the door.

  “What a waste of alcohol,” Rex muttered as he motioned for Reuben to follow. Rex had his blaster out and led the way through the back entrance. Once outside, Reuben saw their attackers stalking toward the small domed house.

  Rex pointed up.

  Reuben frowned, confused. What? he mouthed.

  Rex holstered his blaster, then bent and interlocked his fingers.

  Oh. Reuben stepped onto Rex’s cupped hands, and Rex flung him upward. Reuben caught himself before sliding off the roof, and dragged himself up. He reached out to Rex, but instead watched as Rex backed away and then sprinted at the wall. Reuben had no idea how he managed it, but Rex ran up the wall and onto the roof. Rex walked to a vent and pulled it out of its brackets. He then peered down and watched while Reuben crouched and spied on the murcs preparing to break down the door. The hunter stood behind them, his blaster raised.

  There came the sound of the door crashing, and blaster fire filled the interior. Rex began firing down into the fray. After a couple of seconds, Reuben heard the whooshing sound of a fire coming alive. His eyes went wide when he heard the screams.

  Rex leaned back. “Best bit of wisdom my old man gave me. He always said, ‘Give a man a match, and he’ll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.’”

  Reuben stared in shock. Rex clapped him on the back. “All right. Now, we go to my hiding place.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The garbage bales stacked in the car gave the air a heavy, cloying odor that made it impossible to get a decent breath. Worse, the garbage was compacted, which meant that anything that could’ve been of value, like a partial bottle of water or a half-eaten protein bar, would’ve been crushed beyond use.

  Sloan had taken his armlet along with his exoshield, so he had no way to pull up a map of Shiprock and the train routes. He also had no idea of time, not that knowing the time would do him any good until he learned where and when the next stop would be. If he was a gambler, he’d sit this game out, but he wasn’t, and he had to get back to Cavil to find Nick and Romy, and to rescue Sara.

  Joe watched Terry’s depressed expression as the prisoner stared at the floor of the dimly lit cargo car. Joe knew that were two types of people: those who gave orders and those who took orders. It was pretty obvious which type Terry was.

  “Don’t worry about the murcs. We’ll be long gone before we get to the next stop,” Joe said.

  Terry’s features brightened. “Really?”

  Joe held up a hand. “It’s not as easy as it sounds. First, we need to figure out when and where the next stop is. And, we need to figure out if there’re any towns between here and there because we won’t last long out there without water. With my injuries, I can’t do the legwork that’s needed; I’m going to need your help.”

  Terry nodded. “What do I need to do?”

  Joe pushed to his feet and winced. The painkiller was wearing off, and his wounds would soon be hurting worse than before. He leaned against the wall, eyed the door for a moment, then looked up. “Cargo cars are designed to open from the top for loading. These side doors are only used when people have to unload cargo manually. There has to be a way to open the roof from inside.”

  “Okay,” Terry said, and he practically jumped into action. As he moved garbage bales, he said, “You know, Joe. I’ve never met anyone like you before.”

  Joe paused while he searched a wall. “A bounty hunter?”

  Terry shook his head. “No. A bona fide hero. I’ve heard about them, but I’ve never met someone who put others’ needs before their own. You saved my life, Joe.”

  Joe chortled. “I needed a crutch. You were the easiest sucker to convince.”

  Terry eyed Joe with a straight face. “I’m serious. You’re a hero.”

  Joe frowned. “Trust me. You don’t know the stuff I’ve done in my life. I’m no hero, and calling me one is akin to calling a beggar a banker.”

  If Terry’s enthusiasm was injured by this remark, he didn’t show it. No longer focused on Joe, he’d climbed up a stack of bales. “Hey, I found it!”

  A second later, the entire roof of the cargo car retracted. A fresh, albeit hot, wind hit Joe’s face, and he sucked in a deep breath. “Good work, kid.”

  Terry sat on top of the garbage bales for several moments, his face in the wind. When he came back down, he had a smile on his face. “What do you want me to do now?”

  “This next bit will be tricky,” Joe said. “I need you to climb up on top of the train cars and walk all the way to the engine, which is at the very front of the train. You’d better be careful because this train is traveling at well over two hundred miles per hour.”

  Terry’s eyes grew wider and wider. “You want me to walk across the top of a train going two hundred miles per hour?”

  “Crawling may be easier, but we don’t have time to waste. When you get to the engine, its roof may or may not open, but I know it’ll have a side door. There’ll be a panel in there with all the details on the train, its schedule, everything. There has to be one in case the automated systems fail, and an engineer has to enter the engine to work on it. I need you to get inside, find out how much time we have before the next stop, and the two towns between us and that stop.”

  Terry’s jaw hung open. “And you think I can work a computer?”

  “There should be nothing to work. The informational stats should be viewable by anyone. It’s only the engineering stuff that you wouldn’t have access to, and we don’t need that.”

  Terry slumped. “I don’t know if I can do this.”

  “Sure you can. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that there’s no place around the fire for a quitter’s blanket?”

  Terry’s brow furrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Joe sighed. “It means that we’re going to get out of this, but I need you committed to make it happen.”

  “I can try,” Terry said with a hint of exasperation in his voice.

  “No. You’ll do it. Trust me, this isn’t rocket science. As long as you’re careful getting to the engine and back, I’ll get you out of here safely. Now, listen, because this is important: The reason I want you to pick any two towns that are midway before the next stop is because we don’t have a clock back here to gauge when we have to get off this train, so we have to work from a little guesswork and visual cues. When you find two towns midway on this route, when we pass by the first, I need to know how much time we have left before we reach the second, which will be our stop. And, I want to know how much time we have after we jump the train before the train arrives at its stop because it’ll be not long after that the murcs will see that someone hitched a ride on the train, and they’ll launch a hunt. Does this make sense?”

  Terry nodded, slowly at first, then with more confidence. “Yeah. I think so.”

  Joe reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “You’ve got this. The two of us together busted out of the Devil’s Playground, and you didn’t freeze up on me once. I know you have what it takes to
do this.” He reached out. “Give me your blaster. You won’t need it.”

  Terry did.

  Joe continued. “When you have what we need, meet me back at the last car.”

  Terry frowned. “Not this one?”

  Joe shook his head. “If we tried to jump off a train at this speed, we’d be killed. I’m going to disconnect the last car, and we’ll ride that until it slows enough for us to jump.”

  “But you’re not going to disconnect the car until I’m back there, right?”

  Joe smirked. “I’m not going to disconnect the car until you’re back there. But that doesn’t mean you can slack off. Now you need to get a move on. We’ve got a train to ditch.”

  Terry took off, pausing at the top of the garbage bales to look down at Joe.

  “You’ve got this,” Joe said.

  Terry seemed to gird himself, then moved out of Joe’s line of sight. Joe slung the second rifle over his shoulder and climbed the garbage bales. He struggled through the pain, and it took him three times as long as it had the wiry kid. When he reached the roofline, he sat to catch his breath. The oven-like wind tried to press him back, but he leaned into it. He rummaged through his pocket, gripped a second painkiller, and popped the pill in his mouth. That left a single pill, which he hoped would get him by until he found safe transport back to Cavil.

  He wondered where Nick and Romy were, if they were still in the nook in the underground hallway, hiding from Sloan’s goons, or if they’d ventured out. Worse, had the murcs found them and made them Sloan’s prisoners, like Sara? Just the thought of Sloan made Joe furious. He looked forward to killing that man.

  As the painkiller kicked in, he slid from the edge of the garbage car to the next car back. The gap between the cars was less than two feet, thanks to their oval shapes, and Joe was able to move from one car to the next without jumping. With the wind at his back, which helped, he slid across the roofs to rest his leg. He turned back every few seconds to check on Terry. The wind burned his eyes and made them water, but he could make out the young man making headway toward the front of the train.

  Joe didn’t know how Terry, a slip of a human being, was managing against the wind, but he was, and Joe was relieved for that. There was no way Joe would’ve made it to the front in his current condition. He could feel the wind sucking the moisture out of his body even now. His throat was parched, but he assumed that the entire train had been unloaded at the Playground and was being returned with garbage, which would be burned to provide power to the train lines.

  When Joe reached the last car, he slipped down between the two cars. There was little room to work. He bent down and searched for an emergency disconnector, but found none. He grimaced. This was going to have to be done the hard way. He unslung the rifle and, holding onto the rail with his left hand, fired a shot at the metal connectors. The blast didn’t even chip at the thick metal.

  He fired a succession of shots, melting away the smallest fraction of metal. Scowling, he fired nonstop for the next few minutes. The wind cleared the smoke as he fired, but the blaster grew hot in his hand, and he was forced to set it aside to cool. Heat radiated from the connectors, giving the air a wavelike illusion. When he saw how little progress he’d made, he scowled.

  “Hey.”

  Joe swung up the blaster to see Terry’s wind-blown face and red eyes.

  “Whoa!” Terry said. “It’s just me. What are you doing there?”

  “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m trying to cut through the connectors,” Joe said, then added, “You got here a lot faster than I expected.”

  Terry’s nervous tic returned. “You weren’t thinking about leaving without me, were you?”

  Joe frowned. “What? No. I was trying to get the connector cut down enough so we can detach at the right time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you get what we need?”

  “Yeah. The next stop is in forty minutes. I picked Sandville and Templeton because they’re midway. We’re coming up on Sandville in ten minutes, and Templeton in fifteen minutes.”

  “That’s sooner than I expected. My guess is that we’ll need to detach at Sandville to slow down enough to jump off at Templeton.” He handed the second rifle to Terry. “Start shooting.”

  After five minutes, both men were forced to let the blasters cool. Joe checked the power setting on his rifle. “I’m down to ten percent. Where’s yours?”

  Terry searched for a moment before finding the data screen. “Forty-five.”

  Joe eyed the connector. It was only a quarter melted through, nowhere near enough to detach the car. He didn’t say anything. As soon as the blaster was cool enough to touch, he began shooting again. When his rifle died, he scrutinized the connector.

  Terry stopped shooting and whipped around. “We’re passing through Sandville.”

  Joe muttered a curse, then narrowed his gaze on the connector. “Hold up. I have an idea.”

  He opened the battery compartment on his blaster to expose the battery, knelt, and placed his dead blaster over the connector, using the rifle’s strap to secure it in place. He stood. “All right. Get to the roof.”

  Terry shimmied up the side. Joe struggled up, and Terry helped him the last couple of feet. Joe reached out for Terry’s blaster. He had to shout to be heard over the wind noise. “Give it to me.”

  Terry handed him the weapon. “What are you going to do?”

  Joe rolled onto his stomach. “An old trick I learned during the Revolution. Blaster batteries are explosive. They make one hell of a boom if you fire a direct shot to the battery.” He nodded. “Hold on and cover your face.”

  Joe aimed the blaster at the compartment. The motion over the tracks required Joe to take an extra second than normal to aim. He fired.

  The explosion knocked Joe back, and he went sliding across the car. He dropped the rifle to grab at the smooth roof, but slid over the edge of the car. He grabbed the railing as he went over, and his shoulder screamed at the sudden jolt. He held on, but felt the speed of the car already decreasing.

  Terry’s head popped over the side, looking down at him. “Oh, thank God you’re okay. I thought you were a goner there for a moment. Your idea worked! We’re detached from the rest of the train.”

  Joe nodded. Indeed, the rocks and cacti weren’t zooming past as quickly as they’d been a minute ago.

  But the car was slowing a lot quicker than Joe had intended. Already, he could make out every individual rock and even count the needles on a cactus as they came to a full stop. He couldn’t even make out the outline of Templeton in the distance. He looked behind them and could barely make out Sandville.

  Sandville it was.

  Chapter Forty

  Val scanned the moonlit landscape before entering the cove that hid the silo. She parked and turned to the six people crammed into her cutter. They were thin and had no possessions except for the worn-out clothes they wore.

  “We’re here,” she announced.

  None spoke—they were still too afraid. She led them to the door and pressed her hand over a panel. The door opened to reveal an elevator. She still held the keycard. It was the only way to fully lockdown the silo should the need ever arise—though she prayed she’d never need it again.

  She stepped onto the lift first, to show that it was safe, and then the group joined her. She pressed a button, and the elevator carried them down so far that her ears popped. When it stopped, a woman stood outside, holding a blaster.

  “We have new people joining us,” Val said.

  The woman with the blaster smiled and then tapped another button. Within seconds, a man arrived. He was still too skinny, but Val was glad to see he’d put some weight on since she’d last seen him.

  “Welcome,” he said. “If you come with me, I’ll get you processed, and your credentials into the system. You’ll have your own cabins within the hour.”

  One of the women who’d come with Val grabbed her hands. “Thank you, sheriff. You’ve
saved our lives.”

  Val gave her a warm smile. “I do what I can.”

  With that, Val left the latest group of refugees in the silo and returned to the surface. Her smile fell into a frown as she left the silo behind. She’d continue to bring refugees—people who’d escaped from Roderick’s farm—to the silo, but until the Sloan brothers were killed, there’d always be more slaves she couldn’t save.

  Havoc had told her he’d return to help her take down Roderick once and for all. He’d told her he was a man of his word. But he hadn’t returned, and she knew that if he was coming back, he would’ve been there by now.

  It didn’t matter. She should’ve known better than to trust a hunter…a Raven. Ravens had killed the rest of her squad during the Revolution, which meant that it was likely that Havoc had had a hand in the death of the soldiers under her command. She tried to never think of the past, but it had a way of creeping back up on her. Like how she’d thought she was finally free from Zenith’s control, then realized they’d never stopped watching her.

  She climbed into her cutter and pulled away. She’d found a home for the refugees, a place where they’d be safe from the Sloans. Now, it was time she prepared to go after the brothers on her own.

  Chapter Forty-One

  It was hotter than hell in the Shiprock desert, but Joe’s leg was even hotter. His wounds were infected and only going to get worse until he found medicine. He’d taken his last painkiller an hour earlier, and could already feel the effects wearing off. Terry helped him walk—Joe could scarcely put weight on his left leg now—and the pair were soaked in sweat.

  They’d reached Sandville, but Joe was already wondering if they shouldn’t have gone toward Templeton instead. The murc posse would know by now that fugitives had been on the train, and would be scouring every town along the tracks until they tracked them down. Sandville was an eight-building town. It would take all of ten minutes for a posse to find Joe and Terry there.