Jason Frost - Warlord 04 - Prisonland (2 page)

Eric sucked in a deep breath. The sudden rush of cold air stabbed into the raw cavity in his tooth like a ten-inch hypodermic needle. He muffled a groan of pain. It had been hurting on and off for five days so far, ever since chipping the filling on a shard of bone in his squirrel stew. Now it hurt every time he saw a squirrel.

He’d ignored the pain, concentrating instead on following Dodd. Now he had him. But there was nothing he could do. There were six of them down there, all armed. Two had revolvers, one a shotgun, two carried fiberglass bows. The sixth, Dodd, packed a fancy Heckler & Koch VP70M automatic pistol. It was self-loading and double-action, with a high cyclic rate of fire that generated a lot of internal force. That’s why it had only four moving parts. But even without the gun, Dodd was still the most dangerous man down there. Like Eric, he’d been trained by Dirk Fallows.

Eric waited, fighting the fatigue tugging at his tired body. He could sit or stand for hours without moving, flexing each muscle internally to keep from cramping. Something else Big Bill Tenderwolf had taught him on Eric’s many visits to the Hopi reservation when he was a teenager. Once Big Bill took young Eric out to the desert in the middle of a hot June day. He made Eric squat in the bright sun while he sat in the shade of a rock drinking a six-pack of cold Budweiser, gulping handfuls of Planters roasted peanuts. After finishing the first beer, Big Bill crushed the can and tossed it toward Eric. It landed less than a foot away. “Here’s the deal, Eric. I get to stay right here and you get to stay right there. Only you can’t move.”

Eric knew better than to ask why, so he asked, “How long?”

“Until that beer can crawls right up and kisses your big toe.”

“Come on, Bill,” Eric had protested, his legs already starting to ache, “Get serious.”

“I assure you, Eric, I’m quite serious. Either it scoots up and smooches your size elevens, or I drive off and let you walk home.”

Despite Big Bill’s smile, Eric knew he meant it. “It can’t move, damn it!”

“Sure it can, boy. Hopi magic. Stronger than Tinker Bell.” Then Big Bill laughed, belched, and started in on the next can of beer, all the time staring at Eric. “And don’t let me see you move. Just the can.”

Eric had not moved, squatting in the blazing sun, the moisture sucked from his body until even his eyelids scraped roughly against the eyes when he blinked. He imagined his skin peeling from his forehead, dry flakes like old paint curling on a weatherworn porch. His muscles had gone beyond pain into a realm of agony that was so constant it was almost comfortable. Without moving his head, he could see Big Bill Tenderwolf sipping beer in the shade, staring sleepily at him, silently daring him to quit. But Eric would not. He fixed his eyes on the squashed beer can in front of him, glaring in the bright desert sun like an aluminum pancake. Still, it didn’t move.

After a couple hours under the barbed sun, Eric thought maybe it was moving. It seemed closer, just a little. Perhaps there was some Hopi magic after all. But then he took a deep breath and realized it hadn’t really moved, it had just been his own sweaty delirium. Eric’s body felt small and heavy, as if the air were suddenly a great weight crushing down on him. He wasn’t sure he could stand up even if he wanted to. He would probably just topple over into the dirt. But what else could he do? The damn can wasn’t going to walk over to him. Whatever lesson Big Bill was trying to teach was escaping him. That was humiliating.

Of course
! Eric thought suddenly.

The beer can couldn’t move toward him, but he could move toward the beer can. Big Bill hadn’t said not to move, just not to let him
see
any movement.

Realization was one thing, moving feet another. How could he move his cramped body ten inches? Eric concentrated, imagining each clenched muscle in his legs and feet, evoking a mental image of them being stretched and soaked in warm water. He pictured the individual muscle fibers relaxing, each molecule floating free. And soon the pain was gone. Now his legs were like mechanical devices. He willed movement and they responded like machines. He calibrated the tiniest, most imperceptible motion, something short of a shuffle, and the left foot slid forward a sixteenth of an inch. Wait. Then the right foot. Wait. Move. And so forth until two hours later the crushed beer can touched the toes of his dusty Keds.

Then Big Bill Tenderwolf had stood, stretching his massive body and yawning as he lifted Eric to his wobbly feet. “You had me worried there for a while, buddy,” he’d grinned, slapping Eric on the back. “I was down to my last beer.”

And so Eric stood now, balanced precariously high in the pine tree somewhere outside of what once was San Jose, waiting for his chance at Dodd. Using a combination of what Big Bill Tenderwolf had taught him with what he’d learned in the Night Shift section of Special Forces, Eric had crept through the underbrush for three hours, in that time covering only a hundred yards and climbing this tree.

He’d been chasing Dodd for a week now, through the burnt-out cities and rubble-strewn towns of what was left of the island of California.

Two days ago he’d lost the trail, finally catching up with Dodd at a camp in the woods just as he was executing the last member of a family: mother, father, two teenage sons. The males wore the traditional skullcaps of devout Jews. They’d been eating lunch, passing around a battered box of Trix cereal and washing it down with a few sips of water. Eric watched as Dodd, having slaughtered the father last, wolfed down a handful of cereal and said, “Silly rabbi, Trix are for kids.” And he’d laughed so hard he spit out the mouthful of cereal over the bodies. Eric had watched without emotion as Dodd stripped the bodies, lingering over the dead mother’s nude corpse. Eric did not judge anymore. He had seen too much of the horror, glimpsed the blackness of man’s soul lurking beneath the human skin. Now he measured right and wrong only in terms of how it might help him get his son back. The rest didn’t matter.

Dodd was just a means, a lead to find Tim. Dodd had been trained by Dirk Fallows in Vietnam, had been with Fallows when he’d raided University Camp and butchered Eric’s daughter, had been with him later in Savvytown when Fallows had ordered Annie, Eric’s wife, killed. And had been with Fallows when he’d kidnapped Eric’s son, Tim.

Now for some reason, Dodd had left Fallows. The reason didn’t matter to Eric, only the possibility that Dodd might know where Fallows and his gang of cutthroat mercenaries had gone. And where they had taken Tim.

For that, Eric needed Dodd alive.

So he waited. Waited for the poker game to break up or the men to go to sleep or Dodd to move on. These men weren’t Dodd’s friends. They’d only just met a few hours ago. Eric had watched Dodd sneak up on the five men as they played cards, moving with slightly less skill than Eric. Then, with his 9mm H&K VP70M pistol drawn, he’d walked into camp with a loud, “Got room for another player, friends?”

The five men were a burly gruff bunch, mangy looking and rough acting. It was common now for men to travel in small packs of five or six, like wild dogs, moving quickly, scavenging what they could from less ruthless people who still had some vague notion of civilization and justice. Perfect victims for men like these. A hundred years ago they’d have been hanged as cattle rustlers, two hundred years ago as slave traders. But today, there was no one around to do the hanging.

Eric pressed a spot at the hinge of his jaw. That re lieved some of the pain of his toothache as he watched Dodd deal a hand of five card draw. As expected, Dodd was cheating, dealing seconds and crudely marking corners. The others didn’t seem to notice. Eric thought it an amusing irony that since the earthquakes that had ripped California from the continent and sent it adrift from the rest of the world, many of those who remained, struggling to survive, adopted an obsession with gambling. Cards, dice, backgammon, just about anything was bet on, and bet on heavily. There were no friendly bets. People bet until it hurt. It was as if they were daring Fate to take what little they had left, thumbing their noses like some modern day Jobs. Though they didn’t realize it, they were acting very much like the Indians of the early West, who gambled constantly, wagering everything they had, including knife, horse, and wife on whether or not a tossed crow’s claw would come up on the painted side.

At least that’s the way Eric had described it in his classroom lectures. Back when the world was sane and he was a simple college history professor. When he had a wife, a son, a daughter. A home. Before he began carrying a gun and crossbow and chasing after his kidnapped son.

Long ago, Eric sighed. Sometimes it seemed almost a full evolutionary cycle ago. When humans walked upright in the sun, not crouched at night in trees and bushes.

“Make your fucking bet, Dodd,” Krimm growled.

Dodd reached into his backpack and pulled out half a jar of Smuckers strawberry preserves. “This is preserves, guys, not jam. Real goddamn strawberries in here.”

“How do we know it’s still good.”

“Easy.” Dodd unscrewed the lid, dipped his finger into the jar, scooping up a glob of preserves. He stuck his finger into his mouth and licked it clean. “Yummy, yummy.”

The men stared, hungrily licking their lips.

“I’ll see the bet,” another gambler said immediately, tossing three shotgun shells into the center of the blanket. Everyone else folded.

Dodd shook his head. “Take five shells at least to match this.”

“That’s only half a jar,” the man protested, pulling his yellow Caterpillar cap lower on his broad forehead.

“Maybe,” Dodd nodded. “Only next time you get to wanting something sweet, try sucking that popgun.”

The man with the yellow cap tossed in two more shells.

“How many cards?” Dodd asked.

Yellow Cap threw one card down. Dodd dealt him one.

“Hmmm,” Dodd said, pinching his cards into a fan. “Only took one, huh? Guess I’ll have to rethink this.” He threw three cards into the pile and dealt himself three new cards. He shuffled them into his hand without looking.

“You opened,” Yellow Cap said.

“Check blind,” Dodd said.

Yellow Cap rooted through the pile of winnings in front of him, tossing in a pair of wool socks and a compass ripped from some car dashboard. He hesitated, staring intently into Dodd’s face. Huge beads of sweat across his forehead reflected the flickering firelight. “Ah hell,” he said, “Let’s do this up right.” He pushed in half his pile of winnings: cartridges, a pocket knife, a pack of Certs, half a pack of Salem cigarettes, two cans of RC Cola.

“Jesus,” Dodd whistled. “Must be a helluva hand you’re sitting on. I better take a look-see here.” He fanned the cards close to his face, shrugged. “Like you said, what the hell.” He dug into his backpack, pulled out an unopened bottle of Courvoissier VSOP brandy. There was an audible murmur of approval at the sight of the bottle. Eric had seen countless homemade stills since the quakes. Booze was big business, traded for food, clothing, even people. But real brandy was a rarity, as valuable as a carton of cartridges. It would figure that Dodd would have a bottle. As a henchman of Fallows, he would have only the best. That was the trademark of Fallows’s gang. Take the best for themselves, leave the scraps for anyone else.

“Been saving this baby,” Dodd said, “but I can’t remember what for. So I’ll just call you, pal. Whataya got?”

Yellow Cap laid his cards face up on the blanket and smiled. “Two pair. Kings and fours.”

Dodd stared. Shook his head. Looked at his cards. Scratched at his beard. Then he laid his cards down face up. “Straight through to the jack.” He chuckled, raking the pot toward him.

“Straight!” Yellow Cap hollered. “You drew
three
fucking cards!”

“Yup,” Dodd said. “Thing is, I was going for a flush.” He cackled now, stuffing the goodies into his backpack beside him.

“Cheater!” Yellow Cap said, lifting his shotgun from his lap, thumbing the hammer back as he swung it toward Dodd.

It all happened so fast, Eric was almost caught off-guard. He quickly shouldered his crossbow and aimed it at Yellow Cap. He couldn’t let anything happen to Dodd, not until he’d questioned him about the whereabouts of Fallows and Tim.

But no need to worry. Dodd reacted with whiplike reflexes, drawing the heavy hunting knife from the sheath strapped to his thigh, and knocking away the shotgun barrel as he lunged toward Yellow Cap, driving the fat blade between meaty ribs, twisting the handle as if coring a stubborn apple.

Yellow Cap’s death reflex jerked the trigger of the shotgun. It exploded, blowing a hole through the chest of one of the gamblers who’d been innocently sitting next to Dodd. Hunks of his moist flesh flew into the fire and sizzled. The dead man tumbled backward into a sloppy somersault, his legs flopping over his head into the fire. The other men sat immobile, watching.

Dodd yanked his long knife out of Yellow Cap’s chest and let the big man’s dead body sag to the ground. He used his foot to nudge him off the blanket as if he were a rolling log. Then he walked over to the fire, hauled the shotgunned body of the other man out of the flames, stomped the fiery pants into smoke, and sat back down at the edge of the blanket. “Now,” he said, picking up the deck. “Whose deal?”

There was a moment’s silence while the other three men gripped their weapons and stared at Dodd, deciding. The stench of burnt flesh and fresh blood hung in the humid summer air.

Eric aimed his crossbow, waiting for someone to move.

Then Krimm reached over Yellow Cap’s dead body, took the man’s shotgun for his own, and said, “My deal, I think.”

Eric relaxed, puffing out a deep breath, lowering his crossbow. Close. If he’d have had to involve himself in Dodd’s fight, they would have known where he was and they would have all turned on him. Now he could again wait, silent and patient.

He leaned against the rough bark and watched the poker game proceed. His bad tooth was aching again, as if someone were jabbing a jagged piece of glass into his gums. He pressed at the jaw again to relieve the pressure—

Then suddenly everything was moving. The branch Eric was balanced on abruptly dipped. He reached for another branch to catch himself, but the dip became a snap and the branch fell away from under him. He clutched the crossbow in his right hand and grabbed out at something to hold onto as he fell. But the tree was deceptive. What looked like thick branches were only long twigs, ruffled with thick pine needles. Eric felt his knee smash against a branch, his face scrape against bark, his hand stabbed by a sharp twig. All the time falling helplessly toward the ground.