The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) (17 page)

That stopped him. How had they known he’d been the one to bring her to Loving?

“Clem,” Lucas muttered. Of course. They’d tortured him not because they’d wanted to know about Duke’s defenses – because they’d wanted to know where he was going.

And when they’d learned that the woman wasn’t at Duke’s, they’d figured out that he’d taken her to the town the courier had been heading for, in search of the medicine she needed. The smaller search party had returned to Pecos for reinforcements – enough to raze the town and kill everyone in it.

Lucas’s despair deepened. The odds that Duke had been attacked again, this time successfully, were high. Unless… There was a chance that they’d taken a stealth approach, having tried a frontal assault before and failed, and instead sent a confederate into the outpost to trade. A seemingly innocent question or two would have quickly confirmed that the woman wasn’t there, and the cartel would still have their outlet for weapon and supply trading.

That was how Lucas would have done it.

He nodded, his face impassive. It made sense.

Lucas looked over at the shortwave radio transmitter in the corner and shook his head – like the doc’s, smashed. Ruined rather than taken, even though it was worth its weight in gold.

A sound deep in the house froze him in his tracks.

A red streak led to his bedroom, and he swallowed the bile that threatened to flood his mouth. Lucas walked slowly toward the room, and when he heard the sound again, a spike of anguish shot straight through his heart.

Bear lay bleeding at the foot of his bed where he’d dragged himself, shot three times in his massive chest but too stubborn to die. He looked up at Lucas with chocolate eyes filled with pain, as though apologizing for failing to protect the ranch, for not doing better, for failing Lucas, and tried to lift his head.

Lucas’s eyes brimmed and he collapsed beside Bear with a strangled cry.

Ruby stood with Eve by the front gate, the little girl taking in the destruction, neither of them speaking. Ruby spotted the corpse of one of the attackers and turned Eve away, but she shrugged loose and continued staring at the house.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her voice small. “I’ve seen worse.”

A shot rang out from within the house, and Ruby gripped her shotgun tight to her chest. She was preparing to order Eve back to Jax when Lucas appeared at the front door, carrying Hal.

They moved slowly toward Lucas as he walked down the steps and made for the vegetable garden beside the well. When he reached it, he set his grandfather down and turned to Ruby.

“Got a shovel in my kit. I’ll bury him and Bear, here, on the land they loved, and then go into Loving and deal with the townsfolk.”

“I’ll help,” Ruby said quietly.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do.” She hesitated and then put her hand on Lucas’s shoulder. “I’m so sorry, Lucas.”

He nodded curtly. “There’s work to be done.”

She watched as he marched to where Tango was drinking from the water trough and retrieved his camp shovel from his saddlebags, his expression hard, steel gray eyes unreadable. When he returned, he removed his plate carrier, strapped his M4 across his back, and began digging in the red dirt. Nothing could be heard other than the abrasive sound of the steel slicing into the earth.

“See if there’s any white lightning over in the root cellar,” he said. “Should be. Be obliged if you’d put as much as you can carry in your mule’s bags and top mine up. We’re going to need it.”

“Okay, Lucas.” She hesitated. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.”

He scooped out another shovelful of dirt and tossed it aside. “There’s a gun safe in the house. See if there’s anything useable left.”

She nodded. “I know where it is.”

“Could use as much .45 and 5.56mm as you can find.”

“Will do.”

“I can help,” Eve said.

Ruby patted her head. “Good. I could use some.”

Lucas watched them go, wondering at the little girl’s poise in the presence of so much death.

An hour later, Hal and Bear were buried. Lucas had wrestled a heavy stone to mark Hal’s grave, and they’d said a funeral prayer, commending his grandfather’s soul to God’s safekeeping. The cartel had raided the gun safe, and there was nothing to be scrounged, but they’d missed the door to the root cellar, where two dozen jars were filled with Hal’s potion, stored in the cool soil. Lucas went to his bedroom and packed what clothes he could fit in his saddlebags. Once Jax was loaded to the brim, they took a long final look at the ranch, and then Lucas sat Eve in front of him on Tango and they made their way back to town.

The afternoon was fading by the time he and Ruby had dragged all the corpses into the wood-frame town hall, where they’d hauled as much lumber and cloth as they could find. The cartel had apparently been uninterested in taking the time to destroy the empty building, preferring to concentrate on murder and desecrating the homes of the innocent, but Lucas intended to put the building to fitting use. Both Lucas and Ruby had done their grim work with bandannas over their noses and mouths. After grouping the dead as best they could, they emptied the contents of Hal’s jars on the wood they’d collected, also soaking as many of the bodies as possible.

Lucas stood with head bowed and said words while Ruby and Eve looked on, and then he lit a rag he’d stuffed into the top of one of the remaining jars, tossed the flaming container through the door, and turned to face the setting sun as flame licked from the building before consuming it.

Ruby took Lucas’s hand as they walked back to where they’d left the animals by the gate, and gave it a concerned squeeze. “You look like you could use some rest, Lucas.”

“Don’t think I’ll be able to sleep ever again, Ruby.”

“Come back to my place. It’s safe, and we can figure out what to do next.”

“I know what I plan to do.”

“Your horse is beat. So are you. And Eve here needs a bath and some food and drink.” Ruby studied Lucas’s profile. “When was the last time you ate?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“That’s what I thought. Come on, Lucas. You’ve got no place else to go. Do it as a favor to me. To Hal, God rest his soul.”

Lucas sighed and nodded agreement. “Always a bad idea to ride at night,” he conceded.

“I’ve got plenty of hay and apples for your horse. He looks like he’s had a rough go of it, too.” Ruby looked down at Eve. “You like apples?”

Eve looked confused. “I…I don’t know.”

Ruby smiled and patted her head. “Only one way to find out.”

Chapter 24

Houston, Texas

Orange flames shot into the air from bonfires around what had once been Lakewood Church, a mammoth auditorium that could seat almost seventeen thousand of the faithful in the days before the collapse. Now it served as the headquarters for the Crew, which had commandeered the facility several months after the city’s infrastructure had failed, with more than ninety-five percent of the population dead from disease and unrest. The Crew leader, Magnus, had been one of the hardest cases serving life in Beaumont, a United States penitentiary, when the grid had failed. Three days after the prison had been deserted by the staff, his gang had broken it open, just as they had prisons all over the state, and embarked on a terror spree that had become the stuff of whispered infamy.

By the time the dust had settled, Magnus had effective control over much of Texas, including Houston and the seaport, as well as Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Arkansas; his men’s rapacious violence and cold-blooded willingness to kill had overcome all resistance. When the state apparatus had crumbled as the monetary system failed, Magnus had seized the opportunity to become a regional warlord and ruled with impunity, there being no organization capable of opposing him. He’d earned the instant loyalty of the state’s surviving prison population when his gang had freed them, and with the help of this swarm of miscreants, his group’s influence had spread like wildfire.

As his crowning achievement in his old hometown, he’d taken over Ellington Field, the military base in Houston, and with the cache of weapons retrieved there, had systematically butchered anyone who might have posed a challenge to his reign – not that there were many after the flu had ravaged the nation and the government imploded. With no police or military to stop the spread of his gang, he’d offered the surviving residents a choice: obey him, or die.

Most chose life, and with the cooperation of the remnants of the urban drug gangs, as well as the Mexican cartels which had crossed the unguarded border in search of easy prey, he’d built a criminal network that reveled in atrocity, no act too disgraceful or foul, no deed too despicable to celebrate.

Tonight, Magnus was overseeing a regular feature of his reign – a public execution of rivals, rule-breakers, resisters, and critics. Early into the collapse he’d discovered the old ways were best, and that it was prudent to demonstrate an absolute willingness to punish in the harshest possible manner even the smallest of violations. Beheadings, drawing and quartering, burning alive, hanging, bayonetting – all were favorites and ensured that the surviving population understood well the penalty for resistance.

Around him at an oversized conference table sat his advisors, a rogue’s gallery of felons and quislings, who despite their predilections for chaos and abomination had achieved some remarkable innovations. One man, Sax Whitely, had been an engineer before being convicted of the double murder of his ex-wife and her new husband, and he’d single-handedly brought limited power back to Dallas using a steam turbine he’d built, as well as to parts of Houston, using geothermal technology and equipment looted from throughout the state.

Whitely was the head of Magnus’s research group, which the warlord hoped he could parlay into greater influence when civilization inevitably reestablished itself. His current efforts included attempting to get one of the big Houston refineries operating again, but so far he hadn’t been able to, there being insufficient skilled labor, replacement parts, or power to drive it. Whitely was also searching for a way to revive the rail system using an ancient coal-burning locomotive in Dallas, in the hopes of spreading the Crew’s power even further.

Magnus held his empty cup aloft. “More rum!” he called, and one of his minions ran to fetch a bottle.

Magnus had taken his moniker while serving multiple life sentences in supermax prison for homicide and torture connected with his drug-trafficking, extortion, and racketeering ventures. While incarcerated he’d studied the history of the world’s great fortunes and had concluded that in times of extremes, wealth was more easily created. From the European banking dynasties, which had funded both sides of every armed conflict for at least two centuries, to American icons like the Rockefellers, whose riches were created in the opium trade before diversifying into oil and banking, to the Kennedy clan, whose patriarch had parlayed stock manipulations and bootlegging operations into the equivalent of an American royal family, cunning, treachery, amorality, and utter ruthlessness had played a large role in their fortunes. Magnus saw himself as a kindred spirit who simply hadn’t had the right opportunity. Until now.

When the power had gone out all over the country, and it had become obvious that society was in flux, he’d acted decisively when most others were either cowering in fear or bickering over peanuts. He was utterly fearless and was possessed of a powerful prison-yard physique from countless hours of weightlifting, which along with his above-average intelligence had made him a natural leader in a time of upheaval. Modeling his approach after his idol Genghis Khan, he’d struck hard, eliminated threats to his power, absorbed possible allies and rewarded them for their allegiance, and consolidated territory under his flag.

The servant returned with a fresh bottle of the añejo rum Magnus reserved for his own consumption and poured several inches into his goblet before slinking away to await his master’s next order. Magnus took a long, appreciative sip and smacked his lips.

Magnus had chosen the Eye of Providence for his signature, largely due to its occult legacy and its symbolic importance to the Illuminati, which he’d studied with fascination while behind bars, and which he was convinced was the shadow organization that ran the world, pulling the strings of puppet governments and front groups while always remaining in the background. Magnus had grown obsessed with them, convinced that the trick to claiming a seat at the table of power once a national government was formed was to prove his worth and loyalty to the group, whom he believed responsible for the super flu and resultant economic Armageddon. He had secured forbidden tomes that purported to explain the true significance of the Georgia Guide Stones, the Jesuit “black pope” and the Vatican, Satanic secret societies that operated in plain sight, modern neo-Nazism and global fascist totalitarianism, and a plethora of other arcane and occult interests he believed influenced all events of note.

His men were swigging moonshine and rum, finishing up their daily status reports, anticipating the executions and the debauchery that would follow with the female slaves, many of them barely teenagers, hand-selected for defilement. The current topic was the Lubbock laboratory – one of Whitely’s projects that had gone unexpectedly bad, setting him on edge for two weeks as his future with Magnus, and his life, hung in the balance.

“Security should have been tighter,” spat Lorne, one of Whitely’s rivals. “If I’d been running things there, this would never have happened.”

“If you’d been running things there, you’d still have been trying to figure out how to boil water,” Whitely countered.

The gathering laughed at the barbs being exchanged, in much the same way Romans might have chuckled as gladiators battled to the death in the coliseum. Magnus took a deep draught of his rum and touched the tattooed eye in the center of his forehead, the pyramid below it extending to his jawline on either side of his face. “I’m tiring of excuses,” he said in a low rumble, and the men nodded as though he’d dispensed profound wisdom.