Desert Blade (3 page)

He raised the revolver and shot, taking down the first man to tumble into the hospital parking lot, the bottle of Molotov cocktail in the rioter’s hand rolling to the pavement, unlit, unbroken, unlike the one that had destroyed his home. His Hester. He lifted his good arm and fired again.

* * *

The riot had been ugly, but though it broke her heart to see the death, Lidia knew it was best that the rioters didn’t break into the hospital. The supplies here would be ruined. Supplies that were desperately needed.

During it all, Derek had helped defend the hospital until he nearly collapsed in exhaustion when the rioters had finally dispersed. She’d loaded him with precious anti-inflammatories and pain killers.

The next few days passed much the same. Dr. Kelso stayed in his makeshift room, only emerging to check Derek’s prosthetic. Lidia monitored Derek’s recovery. They talked. She laughed at his roughness and he smiled at her, finally laughing at himself.

Dawn broke on the day she’d leave Chicago, never to return. She slung a pack over her shoulder and stared out the ER doors with Dr. Kelso pacing behind her. All her possessions fit in one crate already aboard a large army truck.

“Stay back. We’ll load the trucks, then escort you out.” A sergeant oversaw the loading of the crates as he watched the streets, looking for trouble.

“Why Leavenworth?” Derek stood beside her and a small crazy voice in her head insisted that was where he belonged. In a short week, he’d grown on her. In a big way.

He was in a clean Guardsman uniform. Tall. Wide shoulders. Black hair falling into his hazel eyes. She kept her hand gripped on to her pack’s strap. He didn’t need her help to brush the thick strands from his forehead.

The sergeant gave a deep bark of tinged laughter. “Hell if I know. I guess there’s a general there who’s managed to keep a lid on the riots. The fort is safe. Unlike this hellhole.”

Time to go. It hit her right in the stomach.

She wanted time to stop. Though only weeks ago she’d wanted out of Chicago before it went up in flames, somehow she wasn’t ready to leave.

“Make sure you follow my instructions to the letter.” Dr. Kelso nodded to Derek and took off running to the truck in front of the small caravan of trucks with the very few remaining hospital staff and some people she didn’t recognize—probably a Guardsman’s family.

“I will,” Derek replied after Kelso was well out of earshot. Then he used his warm hand to guide her by the elbow to another waiting truck. His touch allowed her legs to work, her heart to calm, and her nerves to settle.

He grunted when he sat beside her and adjusted his sling.

Below the scent of bandages and the ever-present smoke, his clean male presence calmed her. She’d grown used to it.

“You’ll come to Leavenworth?” The worry she’d bottled up sprang free.

He squeezed her hand, winding his fingers into hers. Her world narrowed to that point.

“If there’s a way, I’ll be there.”

The truck bumped along the road, speeding as fast as possible through the deserted early morning streets. They’d planned the route around the destruction that grew every day. They finally slowed as they pulled into the train yard, rolling between barriers that kept out a throng of people.

She wanted to take them all. Get them all out of here. Feed them. Get them the rations on the train. She wanted to treat the open wounds visible amid the tattered clothing. She wanted to turn back time and make it all happen differently. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This was Chicago. A bustling, lively city.

These people would die.

She squeezed Derek’s hand and faced reality. She couldn’t save them all. Her throat closed but she forced out the words. “Take care of that arm. Don’t overdo it. You have Dr. Kelso’s instructions. Follow them to the letter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t mock me.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

“Sure you would.”

He helped her from the truck. The ground thudded with the start of the engine of an eight-car train. It seemed to be a signal. The crowd at the temporary fencing sent up calls and curses, the noise deafening.

The cries swept over her. The chants resolved in her ears to recriminations: “You failed. Do something. Save us. You failed.”

Movement flickered around her. Shouts and commands. The constant pressure of Derek’s hand kept her from flying apart.

A crash and a swoosh sounded to her left. Smoke clogged her nose. Derek hissed. “Fucking Molotov.”

It happened too fast.

Everyone else from the trucks was ahead, scrambling from the platform through the train doors. Derek broke into a run, pulling her faster than she’d ever run, and shoved her toward the steps of the train. His hold never left, but yanked her around. He loomed over her, his eyes glittering. Red streaked across his cheeks; his chest heaved. Angling to bring her up against his uninjured side, he cupped the back of her neck and tilted her face up to his. His breath fanned across her, and her legs went weak, sending her falling against his side.

“You are no longer my doctor, Lidia.”

“No,” she breathed.

His mouth covered hers in a sweet caress. For seconds, they suspended there, the point of contact aching with need. Then his lips parted and his tongue pushed the seam of hers. Her chest warmed and she let him inside. The kiss turned hot, desperate and consuming. A shudder shook beneath her feet, and Derek broke away.

Her vision hadn’t cleared before his heat left, his solid body gone. She opened her eyes to the horror around her. He stood, blocking the entrance to the train, facing a surging crowd that had knocked down the fence.

One hand brought up his revolver and shot in the air. It didn’t stop the men and women converging on the train. The train rocked, moving forward, slowly. Panic wanted to take over, but she reached into herself and found that ER doctor who’d face anything and everything. Calm took her mind, her body, even as her heart pounded so hard she could hear it above the screaming.

“Get on the train, Derek.”

He turned, winked and shoved the sling aside, extending the sword. Fanning out, sending the rioters back on their heels, he kept her safe though the movement must have been excruciatingly painful. The entrance to the train car would’ve been overtaken, but he fended them off, the revolver spitting, the sword gleaming. The train gained speed. It was leaving. It was leaving Derek at the mercy of that mob.

She was leaving—without him.

“Get on the train!” she screamed, but she couldn’t see him anymore. He wouldn’t make it away from this station, not with the sea of people converging on the last train out of Chicago. He wouldn’t bury his mother.

She ran through the train aisles, slamming past Guardsmen, past huddled families hand-picked for whatever reasons, past Dr. Kelso who raised a brow at her and turned away.

Banging a knee, she almost fell, but she hobbled to the back of the train. Smudged and dirty, the rear window still gave her a view of the left-behind fencing, the barbed wire, the angry rioters, and the deserted buildings passing to the right and left.

Derek was gone.

She sank down on the floor, gripped the strap holding down a crate next to her and whispered, “Survive, Derek. Survive.”

Ten years later

Lidia yanked on the wheel. The land yacht banked hard. The wheels skidded across the desert floor until the sail went slack and the craft rolled to a stop. The wind ceased and her skin immediately misted from the heat of the sun bearing down.

She loved the new smaller vehicle, which greatly resembled an old go-cart with a fifteen-foot single sail instead of an engine. The wheels were small and, if a good wind caught, could take her to speeds that left her white-knuckled on the directional. It was an improvement over the sail wagon she used for work, which was large enough to transport patients if needed.

It was quiet out beyond the windbreaks. And tough. A woman didn’t greet a stranger out in the middle of New Kansas with no one at her back, but she wasn’t far out.

She adjusted the sail to head toward the corral area. The sturdy wheels of the yacht bumped over the sand, the pitiless dunes that shifted, each day erasing more of what was. The dustbowl had finished killing off most of what the Tasho fungus hadn’t. Ahead, through the weave of the windbreaks, the green of the few trees remaining along the Missouri River hung tough, held on for all they were worth through drought, tornados and dust storms. Just like the people had.

She parked the yacht and tied it down to the post of one of large windbreak panels made of downed trees, found scaffolding, anything at least forty feet tall. Each panel consisted of two poles with a large sheet between them. Today, they’d replaced one of the panels with something new, a woven mat from recycled corn husks, a crop they’d been proud to coax from the land in the past few growing seasons.

She shrugged out of her hoodie and ran a hand over her two long braids. Dust flew everywhere.

“Doc!” General Toole stepped next to her. “How do you like your new ride?”

“I love it. So maneuverable.” She grinned at the man who commanded the survivors here and upheld the old government with a gruff compassion. Everyone accepted and appreciated what he’d done to keep them alive and build a thriving community.

“Good. Have a boy in the clinic needs your attention. Mind if we take your new wheels and attend to him?” He’d asked as a question, but it was really an order. In this case, she didn’t mind. Though she hadn’t quite forgiven him for their last disagreement, when he’d ordered her to try saving the womb of a woman they’d rescued from the drifters. Heartbreaking as it was, she had to remove it, to save the eighteen-year-old a lifetime of pain, a constant reminder of the brutality she’d suffered in the hands of a gang of scum. The world might need more babies, but the teen would have died otherwise.

With a salute to his men, General Toole sat in the second seat of her new vehicle, which had a shiny metal frame not much larger than the two adults sitting in it.

Gliding beneath the windbreaks, she eased the yacht through the protected lines of tended trees, a long patch of berry plants, and rows upon rows of bee hives. She kept constant vigil for nasty surprises hidden in the sand. Destroyed buildings stuck out here and there, still clinging to the old life despite the rapid erosion of tornados and brutal wind storms.

They cruised into the outskirts of what remained of the city of Leavenworth. Houses dotted the landscape outside the still-standing buildings along the riverfront. She rolled into her spot at the clinic and furled the sail.

The clinic was her territory. She treated people from the outlying town as well as from the barracks. In return, they brought her food, fixed up her place, did her chores, made her meals—the last was pretty important since she wasn’t too handy with cooking over fire. The electricity they coaxed from the old Lawrence Dam was used for essentials, her cottage not being one.

She found her new patient, white-faced but brave, lying on a bed with bloody bandages covering his right arm.

“Hey, soldier. Rough day?”

He grinned weakly and sat up with a grunt. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“What’s your name?”

“Private Neil Wilson, sir.”

Lidia blinked. Neil. She hadn’t heard that name in a dozen years. Not since her ex had finally put the brakes on their dying relationship. For the thousandth time, she said a silent “thank you” that she’d listened to Neil and not had children. At first because they’d married so young, then because he didn’t think they’d be good parents. The hurt when he’d left after two years of marriage and immediately moved in with his pregnant girlfriend had been a bitter pill to swallow. Now, she’d forgiven him. Might as well have, since he and his family were long dead.

She prepped a strip of sterile cloth. “Drop the ‘sir,’ Neil, and we’ll get along fine. I’m Doc.”

He remained jaw-clenched silent as she unwrapped and cleaned his wound.

“This is unusual. Almost as clean a cut as a scalpel.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sweating, he muttered through his grinding teeth. She could give him pain relief, but she reserved it for can’t-do-without-it emergencies. She had to keep a careful ration over all the supplies they had.

“Would you like one of my pain-relieving teas?” she asked him as she prepared all she needed for stitches.

“The general doesn’t like it.” He swallowed hard. “I mean…”

General Toole snorted behind her. They had a tentative friendship when they discussed sailing, but in this, they argued. Toole had been a medic and was always opinionated, including about what she did in her clinic. She ignored him.

“I know. He doesn’t like me to use herbal medicines on his troops. Thinks my training myself in natural remedies isn’t safe. Let me assure you, it’s safe.”

“I better not.”

“Suit yourself.”

She did her best to be gentle and fast, but the young man still passed out as she closed the elbow-to-shoulder gash in his arm. Luckily, it wasn’t deep. Though she was good with needle and thread, using small stitches, he’d scar.

“He’ll be good as new.” General Toole was gruff, but he studied the young man with a frown. She never questioned his concern for those in his charge.

“I tried to keep the scarring to a minimum.”

“Shows he’s a man. He’ll be proud of it.” Boots scuffing the floor, the general spread his legs as if for battle. Clean but faded, his fatigues were adorned with well-earned medals. “I have someone else I need you to see.”

“Really? Don’t usually have more than one patient a day. This reminds me of the old days.”

“This isn’t like the old days. Need you to check a possible concussion. The dirtbag who injured that soldier there. He’s in the prison.”

Lidia shrugged away the tension in her shoulders and motioned the general out.

They left the clinic and walked the streets the residents maintained together, filling potholes, sweeping sand and keeping it as level as possible for walking. The old Leavenworth prison still gave her chills when she had to enter. The cloud of atrocity seeped into her skin. When the food shortages reached critical levels, they’d stopped feeding the prisoners first.

The cleanup effort afterward still gave her nightmares.

“Still won’t forgive me?” General Toole said grimly. They’d skirted the issue the few times she’d come to the prison, but there was no doubt what she thought.

She lifted her chin and stared ahead. “Those men could’ve helped us rebuild. They didn’t have to die that way.”

The hallways groaned, though they were kept clean, open and well lit. With only around a dozen people kept here since it’d reopened, staff was sparse. The upper-level cells had been converted to store anything of value they’d scavenged and might prove useful one day. A careful record of everything up there was kept by a librarian who worked whenever she could. They passed her empty office, stacked with books and odd pieces of furniture.

At the cell block, two guards saluted and opened the doors. Leaving their posts, they followed behind with a signal from Toole.

“There aren’t any ghosts, Doc.”

“Sure,” she muttered, but he didn’t like it any more than she did. None of the people who’d lived in the area during that time liked to come in here. The screams and pleas had carried on the wind for miles, days on end. The silence had been worse.

In the cell a man lay on a cot, facing away, a blanket thrown over him.

But she knew who he was, even though he now sported a shaved head instead of the thick dark mass she’d fingered while he slept.

She knew. Immediately. Her heart thumped against her chest.

His left arm lay outside the covers, identifying him, an arm that was branded indelibly in her memory.

Her knees buckled. General Toole caught her and led her to the metal chair bolted to the floor. “Sit here, Doc.”

The man on the cot shifted.

“Stay right there, boy.” The general’s threat echoed through the empty cells.

In a blur of motion, the blanket sailed through the air, blinding her. A swish and clank resounded through the building. Wind brushed cold over her before the blanket fell to the floor.

Features harsh and rigid, an angry giant of a man held General Toole at knife point.