Blood Rules (5 page)

Human.

Again, the reliance on her needled.

A cure. Would it get rid of this ailment for him?

It was enough to make him say something he probably shouldn't have.

“Tomorrow night would be a better time for us to leave instead of now, when we've already burned part of the darkness,” he said.

They all gaped at him. Mariah especially.

Then Chaplin yipped, a little cheer.

Meanwhile, Gabriel kept hearing his words over and over again. . . .
for
us
to leave . . .

But he'd said it, and he couldn't take it back. He wasn't even sure he wanted to, because he could feel Mariah's pulse hopping in him, animating him beyond anything he'd experienced when he was away from her.

Relief. Happiness. Gratefulness. He fed off it all, and he saw it for what it was—another addiction, stronger than what he'd experienced with the alcohol he'd soothed himself with after his family's deaths.

Stronger than the fear he'd heard in Abby and Mariah, qualities that had attracted him to them in the first place.

As the Badlanders started firing questions at him, Gabriel left the room before anyone could figure out that he needed help just as much as Mariah did.

“
D
id you ever hear about the boy who cried wolf?” asked Goodie Jern from her side of the shack.

Johnson Stamp backed against a scuffed wall, knowing he was in for a talking-to from the other ex-Shredder. All the chairs except for hers seemed to be broken here in this watering hole on the outskirts of the Bloodlands, where he'd tracked her down.

Like every Shredder who'd been indoctrinated young so that they could learn and absorb the passé ways of preters, the woman spoke Old American. Stamp would've even said that the years since retirement had been rough on Goodie Jern—she was in her early thirties and still had a sense of slim femininity, but otherwise looked as used-up as a shriveled whale-skin jug.

But Stamp had post-service issues, too, even though he was about a decade younger than she was.

He adjusted his slight weight, favoring the reconstructed leg he'd crushed during the showdown with the vampire Gabriel and his were-creature friends. Although it'd been repaired, phantom pain had a habit of singing to him every so often. It was more a reminder than a physical sensation, though, and he took a swig of turtlegrape alcohol to chase away the bitter taste in his mouth.

Then he said, “Refresh my memory. They didn't exactly tell me bedtime stories in the orphan camp after my parents exploded.”

Goodie Jern, candlelight making the stubble on her head shine, said, “None of us grew up with the sweetheart version of fairy tales, did we?”

“Not unless you count the ones I saw in my nightmares.” The monster sympathizers, human bombs in a marketplace, murdering Stamp's mom and dad while he watched from a near distance. He'd been trying to catch up to them while they played tag among the crowd. Through his six-year-old eyes, he could still see them there and then gone in a blast of blood and ripped flesh.

The only other person in the room, Goodie Jern's teenaged, prairie-braided female companion, lit up a smoke from her place behind the bar. She wasn't much younger than Stamp.

“Just make your point,” he said to Goodie Jern.

She considered him with a piercing set of dark eyes, much like his, then decided to grant Stamp this boon.

“I think ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf' goes something like this: There was once a kid who went to the nowheres, trying to make a better life for himself than he had in the hubs. But he came back, wounded very badly. After he healed somewhat through reconstruction, he told a few well-selected friends that, out in the nowheres, he'd seen a wolf . . . or a few monsters. Somehow, he rounded up a few of these friends to go back out there with him, weapons in hand, ready to spray some Shredder bullets around. They didn't find anything except a deserted compound that held no evidence of were-creatures, and when his friends went back to society, the boy cried about how monsters were really out there and he just needed a little extra help—”

Stamp didn't have the patience for this. “When the boy went out there to put the final whomp on those wolves and other were-creatures, they had obviously cleaned up after themselves, Goodie. They're smart, these monsters. They know how to hide, and I guarantee they're somewhere else by now.”

Goodie Jern chuckled, showing silver where regular teeth should've been.

She hadn't gotten all of the thinly veiled story correct; it'd been his right-hand woman, Montemagni, who'd gathered some of his old Shredder friends while Stamp had quickly healed with the help of laser medicals from the minor chest wound Gabriel had inflicted, as well as the leg he'd crushed when he'd fallen down a mine shaft during the showdown escape. He'd recovered in enough time for them all to go out to the Bloodlands again, and even though they hadn't found the monster community that time, Stamp knew it was still out there.

It'd taken a couple days to track down Goodie Jern for his next hopeful trip. “You'll see I'm right if you just come with me.”

“Why should I listen to you when the other ex-Shredders won't listen anymore? Water robbers were wiped out a few years ago, babycakes. That's what the government told us when they cut us loose.”

“And you believe them?”

Goodie Jern's flask had been halfway to her chapped lips, and she stopped there, glaring at him. No one questioned the government—especially the ex-Shredders who'd received a tidy sum to shut up about preters and live the rest of their lives quietly. None of them even complained when they heard rumors about how they'd been replaced by newer models—ones that were said to be faster, stronger, more efficient.

She went ahead and took her next drink, and Stamp waited, hearing her companion playing a lone game at the bar, lazily stabbing at the wood with a knife.

Stamp almost smiled at the attempt to intimidate him. He didn't know if Braids was anxious about Goodie liking Stamp more than her, or if the teen just plain didn't want Stamp and his preter stories in here. Either way, she was amateur hour.

When Goodie Jern had finished with her flask, she said, “If there
were
anything out there, the old bosses would know it. Since the government's got new investors and they pulled out of that economic sanction trouble with India, they'll have enough funds to be doing new surveillance sweeps, if they haven't already started.”

“The preters would know how to shield from surveillance with camouflage. We discovered steel plating at their homestead, and that might block government eyes.”

“So you want to do your civic duty by wiping out the last of the monsters, is that it?”

“I want . . .”

His conviction trailed off. At first, he'd gone out to the New Badlands—or the Bloodlands as he called it now—because he'd truly wanted a new start in life. He'd wanted neighbors who didn't know he'd been raised to kill, and he wanted to help the bunch of former criminals he'd hired as employees to farm water and carve out peaceful existences.

Then his men had started dying, one by one, just because they were a little curious about the neighboring community over the hills. Turned out that community was a bunch of were-creatures who'd adopted a vampire, and Stamp had declared war, because monsters were built to kill, and you had to get them first.

Yes, he knew what he wanted.

Payback.

Stamp pushed away from the wall, putting his weight on his leg and hearing a few gears ease into place. He still wasn't used to the sound of the robotic parts the doctors had used, and he hoped that Goodie Jern hadn't heard them.

Then he made his way to the bar for more turtlegrape. Goodie Jern's companion looked at him with blank eyes and silently gave him what he wanted while her knife rested on the blade-scarred bar just within reach.

Meanwhile, Stamp kept talking. “You won't come with me, then?”

“Not unless you're offering a lifetime of riches.”

Her voice held a hint of pity, and it rankled him. Obviously word had gotten around that he'd lost his severance money because he'd invested everything when he'd moved out to the Bloodlands. His one remaining employee, Mags, had filched enough water-currency to pay for his healing, as well as salaries for that first batch of ex-Shredders who'd gone to clean out the scrub compound. All he had left now was the hope that other Shredders would feel the same fire in their bellies to hunt down any and all preters before it was too late for humanity.

But Stamp was finding that the fires had been put out with his old friends. They kept telling him the preters were done for, the government had even said so, and the busted adventure he'd taken his comrades on to the Bloodlands only proved it.

They thought he was loco, and sometimes Stamp even wondered. If it hadn't been for Mags and how she'd gone through the same trials with the monsters, he might've found his own shithole outpost bar like Goodie Jern and stayed there for the rest of his damned life.

“You were good at what you did,” Goodie Jern finally said. “That's a fact. One of the youngest Shredders ever, with quite a few kills to his name. But it's time to let it go, babycakes. If the government still deems monsters a hazard, they'll take care of it themselves.”

He turned toward her, ready to argue that.

Goodie Jern leaned forward, serious now. “You were lucky to find any ex-Shredders who went with you the first time, do you know that?”

In back of him, he heard the companion stabbing her knife into the bar again. This time, it didn't sound like jealousy.

The rough woman in front of him shook her head. “Shredders stopped being Shredders the moment we accepted our severance. The government has ways of containing everything, even those who think they're looking out for the greater good.”

“Are you saying they became cautious of us, like they did with Intel Dogs and local government councils who actually had the balls to think? That's why they disbanded us?”

The stabbing paused, as if the companion had the knife in midair.

“I'm saying,” Goodie Jern answered, “that when our time of greatest contribution is up, it's up.”

Stamp stared at her. Goodie Jern had boasted a few government connections back in the day, and that made sense for a Shredder of her standing. She'd racked up more kills than most and had been given special assignments that were said to be stored in the black-files.

Maybe he shouldn't have come here.

Or maybe he should just listen to her now.

Yet common sense didn't stop his blood from boiling whenever he tried to move his bum leg, whenever he thought about the vampire and the weres that'd gotten away from him and no doubt lived scot-free in the Bloodlands.

“Word to the wise,” Goodie Jern said. “You stop now or you expect some higher authority to interfere. Understand my meaning?”

Stamp didn't understand at all, but he nodded, knowing when to argue and when not to. Then he glanced back at her companion, who was watching him, her dirty hand gripping the knife handle as she held it in front of her.

Without another word, Stamp left the shack and stepped out into the tepid night. Ten yards away, Mags waited in an archaic blue van that'd been painted on the outside with big-breasted women in bikinis. Quaint, in these times of carnerotica.

They'd salvaged the vehicle from a garage back when they'd fled the Bloodlands after his showdown with the preters. The weapons they'd been carrying on them—a chest puncher, a corner shotgun, a deathlock gun, a few knives—were stored in the cab next to his Shredder uniform and heat suits.

He limped to the van, where Mags already had the door open on the passenger side. She'd known he was coming because she'd been listening in on the comm connected to his personal computer, which had been activated the entire time.

Slipping into the front, he closed the door.

The throttled moonlight shone over Mags's dark skin and battered shirt, pants, and boots. She wore a yellow bandanna that held back her curly black hair, and it gave her bladed cheekbones and slanted brown eyes that much more prominence. There had to be Korean blood in her, along with some Afro-American roots.

“No go?” she asked him in her husky voice.

“Drive,” he said.

And she did, over the uneven ground, sending the van to bumping. They passed a mob of loto cactus, with their swirled, needled shapes; passed stranded old cars from humans who'd tried to live outside the hubs with no luck. Most who'd come out here had been soft and ill-educated in even the most basic survival methods, such as how to derive fuel from the tymol roots discovered under the desert ground after the world had changed.

Most humans had ultimately stayed in the hubs, locked inside their own homes, strangers to even their neighbors. Too much terrorism, too many bad guys outside the door.

That was survival enough.

Before Stamp and Mags had gone even a few miles, she slowed the van, bringing it to a grumbling idle.

“Might want to check your computer,” she said.

“Why?”

She lifted an eyebrow and smiled a little.

He rolled up his shirtsleeve and pulled down the glove that covered him up to the inner forearm, where his personal computer screen was embedded, hooked up to his chip implant. When he accessed his new data, a message from Mags popped up.

It featured grainy satellite images taken from a long, skyhigh distance, then focused to a closer view: blips of light blobs against dark. He made out what looked to be hills. Sand. Trees.