The Day After Never - Blood Honor (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller) (5 page)

“Shame. I liked him. How?”

“Snake bite.” Duke shook his head. “Kid wasn’t the brightest.”

Doug returned with a work lamp on a stand and a large magnifying glass attached to an olive green hinged arm. Duke took the glass from him and clamped it to the table, and then pointed at an extension cord in the corner. Doug plugged in the lamp, and the dining room flooded with cold white light.

Lucas blinked. “Batteries still holding a charge, I see.”

“During the day we run these outlets directly from the panels. Consumes almost nothing.”

“Smart. Mine are doing okay.”

“Should be able to eke another couple or three years out of the batteries, I’d expect,” Duke offered. “By then the grid will be back up.”

Both men chuckled at the notion.

“Been hearing about that for the last, what, five years?” Lucas said.

“Never been closer. I hear the feds have got D.C. online. Or maybe part of it.”

Lucas’s eyebrows rose. “Verified?”

“A little bird told another little bird, who whispered something to a guy I know, who told me.”

One of the common themes of survivor hopes was that someone was going to impose order, that the government would get the country operating again. Which ignored that the government had been composed of people, not superheroes, most of whom didn’t do the actual work – and that the worker bees who knew how to keep power plants operating, how to repair turbines, how to keep thieves from stealing the copper out of power lines, who could be convinced to drive trucks or trains laden with necessities in spite of a contagious killer flu and civil unrest that made war zones look inviting, had shown their unwillingness to show up and work for free instead of staying home and protecting their families.

As with most black swan events, so named because they were unpredictable singularities, the combination of the super flu – regardless of whether brought to the U.S. by refugees, illegal immigrants, or returning servicemen – and an economic meltdown had never been envisioned. There were simply no scenarios for it, and when it happened, civilization had unraveled far faster than anyone would have believed.

Yet not a week went by that someone didn’t hear that some area had been brought back to life and that the men in black suits were working furiously to restore the nation’s systems.

Lucas had long ago recognized the futility of hoping that anything would ever normalize again, at least during his lifetime. Self-sufficiency was the new normal. Radio reports from around the world had shown that no country had remained unscathed – Europe was in ruins, Russia was a graveyard, Asia and the Middle East disaster zones. China had made a fumbled attempt to invade Japan in the early days of the collapse, but had been repulsed by the U.S. threat of nukes. Within weeks it hadn’t mattered – everyone was either dying or too sick to work. Famine had raged across India and Pakistan, China’s mortality rate rose to nearly sixty percent due to lack of adequate medical facilities, and soon it was impossible for anyone to keep up with disposing of all the bodies, much less maintaining infrastructure and order.

So the notion that the wonks in Washington had somehow gotten their act together and been able to organize was a pipe dream, and Lucas just rolled his eyes when he heard the speculations. Those beholden to the idea that the same bureaucrats who’d been unable to see this disastrous confluence of events coming had somehow managed to demonstrate anything but incompetence once all the support systems had given way were not long for this world.

Better to suck it up and do what had to be done to stay alive than to believe fairy tales. If anything, the collapse had shown just how unprepared the vast majority were to deal with harsh reality, and how dependent what passed for civilization was on the nanny state coming to the rescue.

When it failed to do so, as it had for many weeks during prior regional natural disasters – like the hurricane that had wiped out New Orleans – the only surprise to Lucas had been the number of people caught completely off guard.

Duke adjusted the lamp to shine on the woman and turned his attention to the wound. He studied the bandage and then called out to Aaron. “Bring the surgery kit. Alcohol. Gauze. Soldering iron.”

“Be right back,” Aaron said, and went into one of the back rooms.

“What’s her story?” Duke asked as they waited.

Lucas shrugged. “Beats me. I found her in the desert, along with some dead friends.”

“Kind of a looker, ain’t she?”

Lucas grunted noncommittally. “Business been good?”

“Can’t complain.”

Duke had set up the trading post once the worst of the chaos had subsided, and it had thrived ever since. Duke’s terms were simple: he was relatively honest, and he didn’t ask or tell where items came from. His discretion was prized, although he reserved the right to refuse anything he didn’t want.

A shortwave radio crackled softly in a corner and went silent. Lucas tilted his head toward it. “Anything new going on in the world?”

Duke laughed, the sound a harsh bark. “Black helos. The Russians are coming. The grid will be back online any day. A nuke plant in California melted down and we’re all doomed. Take your pick.”

“So same old.”

“Yep.” Duke collected gossip like a fishwife and spent his off hours monitoring the airwaves, exchanging rumors with other survivors around the country. It was because of his hobby, in fact, that he’d been one of the first to recognize the true danger as the collapse had unfolded. The media had lied early and often, the Internet had been increasingly censored in the interests of national security, and straight answers had been few and far between. But Duke had collected reports from all over the nation from other like-minded, self-sufficient folks who’d seen disaster coming years in advance and taken appropriate steps to defend themselves.

When the first casualties of the new super flu had begun appearing in Asia and the Middle East, he’d heard accounts from returning servicemen who were in his network, and the stories differed materially from those online or in the news. Unlike prior flu pandemics, this one had a longer infectious cycle with extremely mild, almost undetectable symptoms, enabling the virus to spread like wildfire before anyone realized the extent. By the time the domestic media and the CDC had been willing to admit that the case-fatality ratio of the airborne, highly infectious bug was approaching forty percent, the damage had been done: sixty percent of those infected ultimately survived, but even the survivors were bedridden for ten days to two weeks in the second stage of the disease, and transmission levels were near ninety-six percent, with only a fraction escaping unscathed due to natural immunity.

Speculation had been rampant in the early days that the flu was a conspiracy, lab-generated, an attack on the U.S., part of a larger depopulation scheme, a takeover of the world by some shadowy group, while cooler heads had pointed out that every hundred years or so a bug came along and wiped out a significant portion of the population. The prior lethal pandemic had been the Spanish flu, which had effectively ended World War One, both sides being too sick to fight, and which, in a time before plane travel, had decimated the population with an estimated ten to twenty percent mortality rate.

But as bad as the super flu had been, it was the collapse of the financial system and the breakdown of law all over the world that had tipped the scales. Unlike in 1918, the globe’s financial system was deeply intertwined due to the unregulated derivatives market, with mega-banks in the U.S. holding tens of trillions of paper from European and Asian banks, and vice versa – meaning that if one in the queue collapsed, it would take the rest with it. With the major industrialized nations incapacitated from the flu, derivative instruments in the hundreds of trillions of dollars had come due, and in a daisy chain, every economy and bank on the planet froze up as they were exposed as being insolvent. Once confidence was shaken, the next pedestal of modern finance to collapse was sovereign debt, and the American T-bill became unsellable overnight. The central banks tried turning on the money presses to counter the effect, but that had only resulted in a loss of faith in paper currency, and hyper-inflation that had made Zimbabwe look like a poster child for fiscal conservancy.

When the banks didn’t open, credit cards stopped working, and nobody wanted to accept the government’s paper currency, then nothing could function, not even the military – nobody would work for worthless paper IOUs backed by the nonexistent faith and credit of a bankrupt regime. When a gallon of gas went from $3 a gallon to $30 to $300 in only two weeks, faith in fiat currency and the government’s continued ability to operate in perpetual debt collapsed – and faith was all the system had been running on for generations.

Americans had quickly discovered that their prosperity was a fragile construct that could collapse in a matter of days, and watched in horror as their wealth was revealed to be a mirage, as was every other economy in the world where the same cartel of interdependent, privately owned banks had convinced the population that paper IOUs were a good exchange for their labor and land. When riots swept the cities, starting on the west and east coasts and working inland, the authorities had been unable to cope, and what had previously only been seen in brief flare-ups in Baltimore, Los Angeles, and New Orleans quickly went nationwide as the desperate turned on each other with the realization that survival was now a zero-sum game.

Lucas was jarred from his reverie by Aaron’s arrival with the surgery kit.

“Here you go, boss man,” Aaron said with a smile, and set the kit down beside Duke.

Duke opened the oversized plastic tackle box and extracted a bottle of white lightning and a dizzying array of gleaming surgical instruments. He placed a tray near the woman’s head and filled it halfway with alcohol, and after a long look at the bottle, chugged two swallows and burped.

Lucas regarded him with a neutral expression. “Sure you’re okay?”

“We’ll soon find out.” Duke’s expression darkened. “Aaron, I need more gauze than this. And the soldering iron.”

Aaron nodded. “Be right back.”

Duke busied himself placing scalpels, forceps, clamps, spanners, and a variety of other instruments in the alcohol, and then turned to Lucas. “Let’s go wash our hands. Can you assist?”

“Tell me what to do and I’ll try,” Lucas said.

“First, let’s wash all the grime off. Then, go put on a clean shirt. Don’t need her getting infected from road dust.”

“I don’t have an extra handy.”

“Don’t worry; I do. I’ll put it on your tab.” Duke gave him a hard stare. “Hope you’ve got some real goods to trade, or you’ll be delivering white lightning for free for the duration.”

“I’ve got a half dozen ack-ack guns. Maybe a thousand rounds. Some handguns. Don’t sweat it.”

“What kind of rifles?”

“AR-15s and AKs.”

“Shape?”

“Better than your liver.”

Duke’s face cracked in a pained smile. “Man after my own heart, Lucas.”

Lucas matched his expression. “No accounting for taste.”

Chapter 5

An hour and a half later, Duke set down the soldering iron and wiped sweat from his brow. After inspecting his work, he turned to Doug.

“Open some windows. Smells like a Texas barbecue in here.”

The pungent odor of burnt flesh had filled the room as he’d cauterized the wounds, the round finally removed in three fragments. He’d injected the woman with another shot of morphine before operating and had used local anesthetic in the tissue around the chest wound as an additional measure.

Duke and Lucas walked together to the door and stepped out into the morning sunshine.

“What do you think?” Lucas asked.

Duke inspected his nails and then met Lucas’s gaze. “Fifty-fifty. She’s lost a ton of blood. Next thing, we need to do a transfusion.”

“How do you know what blood type she is?”

“Doesn’t matter. Aaron’s O negative. Universal donor.”

Lucas nodded. “That’s a lucky break. How much?”

“Probably a pint or two. I’ll get a line going to start a bag in a second.”

“No, I mean how much for him to do it?”

Duke named a price in ammo, and Lucas whistled. “There goes my retirement.”

“Unless you’ve got gold or silver. In that case, quarter ounce of gold should do the trick. Silver, fifty ounces.”

“You still collecting, huh?”

“Damn right I am.” Duke had once explained to Lucas that the reason he was stockpiling precious metals was because whenever trade with other nations was reestablished, the likelihood of trading partners accepting anything but gold was zero after the fiat currency nightmare. Even now, with the continent a wasteland, gold and silver were prized for the same reason – they had been money for thousands of years and would likely continue to be in demand as such for the foreseeable future. Lucas had twenty gold coins he’d ferreted away for emergencies that he’d carried with him since the collapse, but he’d part with just about anything else before resorting to using any of it.

“Between the operation and the blood, you’ve pretty much wiped out half my stash of guns and ammo.”

“Best things in life may be free, but here, no tickee, no laundry.”

Lucas shrugged. “It is what it is.”

“I’ll have Doug check out the weapons and ammo while I’m draining Aaron dry.”

“Send him out. I want to check on Tango.”

Duke studied Lucas’s face. “You look like you’ve been rode hard and put away wet, partner. Maybe take a nap.”

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

“That’s the spirit. If you change your mind, there’s a hammock over there in the shade. No charge.” Duke hesitated. “How much do you know about her?”

“She never said a word.”

Duke nodded. “You notice the tattoo on her upper arm?”

“What, the Egyptian-looking eye? What about it?”

Duke eyed a droplet of dried blood on his boot and scowled. “Probably nothing.”

“Spit it out, Duke.”

“Let’s see if she makes it.”

“You have something to say, best to say it,” Lucas said.