Digger 1.0 (18 page)

~~~

Delores stepped off the rebar ladder into
the horizontal tunnel that led toward the barn. She’d decided her
best chance of getting help for Ellis before it was too late would
be to get Chuck. Chuck was the strongest young man in the family,
and he was handy too. He’d know what to do.

She sprinted, trying her best to keep the
back of one hand on the tunnel wall to her right. She’d know she
was getting close to the upward climb to the barn when the left
wall disappeared. Twenty yards from the barn climb, another tunnel
broke off southwestward down toward the pillbox and surfaced in the
woods not far behind Shooter’s nest.

When she felt the right wall disappear, she
slowed her pace. She needed to be careful now. Her light
illuminated the cases of explosives and other materials that had
been stacked beneath the barn. She scurried past and climbed the
wooden ladder that led upward into the barn floor.

Up and out of the trap door, and she
remembered to very quickly kick some hay over the entranceway.
Ellis had drilled it into them since the tunnels had first been
discovered that obscuring the entrances could be a matter of life
or death. She didn’t tarry, though. Once she’d scattered enough
straw, she sprinted toward the door of the barn, and almost ran
headlong into Chuck, Marlon, and Patrick who were scrambling into
the barn in a near panic.

“Where have you been?” Marlon yelled. “Where
have you been? Where is Ellis?”

“I—”

“Where is Ellis?” Patrick shouted.

“We’
re
under attack, Delores,
” Chuck said. He wasn’t calm, but he
was a little more composed. “Looks like a gang of some sort. Not
too big, but well-armed. Trying to make it to the bridge.”

“The bridge?” Delores said. Her mind was
spinning. She needed to get help for Ellis, but now, what? Was it
all ending? Could this be it?

“Shooter, Rooster, and Neil have them all
slowed up a bit down the rise,” Chuck said. “
Shooter
’s in the pillbox. Neil and Rooster
are up in Utah, firing and moving, and we’re about to get some
triangulation opened up on them from the hay loft. Renny, Kay, and
Karl are digging in up by the house in case they break
through.”

Delores brought her hands to her face, and
began to feel unsteady, and Chuck grabbed her to keep her from
toppling over.

“What is it?” he said.

“It’s… It’s Ellis. He’
s in trouble! Big trouble. And he
’s going
to die if we don’t get to him right now!”

“Trouble?” Chuck repeated. “What is it? Did
he fall or something? Is he hurt?”

“Was there a collapse?” Patrick asked.

“No. I’ll have to show you, but
he’
s trapped,
” she said,
grabbing Chuck’s arms for support. “Like an animal. He’s in a pool
of water, and he’s trapped by a metal grate.”

Chuck turned to the other boys. “Get up to
the loft and make sure to keep your heads down,” he said. “Watch
your fire. You know what to do. And make sure you keep an eye on
your ammo. If they make it over the bridge, get everyone down into
the tunnel and make plans to hold them off from there. Just like we
planned to, okay?”

The two boys nodded and ran toward the
ladder that led up to the loft.

“Over the bridge?” Delores shrieked, her
face not masking her incredulity. “You haven’t blown the
bridge?”

“Shooter will make that decision,” Chuck
said. “We need to go!”

“We should just blow the bridge!” Delores
said almost hysterically, pulling away from Chuck’s grip.

“We can blow it from the pillbox, or up in
Utah, Delores,” Chuck said. “Either place. Any time. So let the
rest of the family do their jobs, and let’s go get Ellis.”

~~~

Yesterday. Up Top. Early Morning
Darkness.

The stars turn and whirl overhead and Walker
watches them dance. It’s easier than the revenge he’s consumed
with. The constant revenge. And then he moves slowly, cautiously,
back to the scope and watches the bridge, the hill, and the hidden
valley.

“What time is it?”

All that is gone forever seems swallowed up
by the question. A million times asked in a world now broken and
gone. Shouted from stages by switched-on rappers ginning up
commerce by whipping up hate. A voice in your mind, reminding you
that now is not forever.

What time is it?

Walker leaves the scope and crawls forward,
one limb at a time, toward the burbling water below the bridge.
This is how it’s done. Right arm forward. Stop. Wait. Left leg
rising then pushing slowly forward. Stop. Wait. Other arm. Stop.
Wait. Other leg. Stop. Wait. Repeat and repeat and repeat until you
reach the water murmuring across flat river stones. It takes a good
hour to get down to the water and an hour to get back to his
position.

If there is a sentry out there, waiting in
the dark, it’s well past midnight on a moonless night, and they’re
probably asleep.

The river water is cold and clear by Texas
starlight.

We could have stayed here, thinks Walker as
the leader of a convoy that is no more.

And the revenge is back.

He returns, crawling slowly, across the tall
grass along the riverbank. He crawls back to the scope and watches
the hidden valley rising above him in the dark. In time he takes
out the medicinal salve, what little is left, and applies it to the
worst of the burns.

And the stars wheel and dance on toward
dawn.

And Walker sleeps and dreams of revenge.

~~~

Yesterday.

Morning light strikes Walker like a hammer
being driven into the side of a dead man’s skull. He opens his eyes
and knows by the light that the morning sun is close to its zenith.
The air is unusually clear and warm.

A last day kinda day, he thinks and
remembers thinking it many times before. Remembers thinking it
while hidden under bodies, hiding from the stinkin’ bikers who’d
laid waste his convoy. Lying on his back, he looks up and sees he’s
left the tin of salve at the top of the dirt rise he’s been
sleeping behind. A tactical mistake made late in the night. He
didn’t often make mistakes, and he always assumes that any mistake
will be his last.

After the end of the world, mistakes are
fatal.

And just as he reaches up to take the tin
and place it back inside his old trench coat… he hears the distant
rifle shot and knows a bullet is racing from far to very near. The
tin flies up, tumbling end over end, and lands on
Walker’
s chest.

Whoever took the shot didn’t mean to
actually hit the tin. They’d just knocked it away by aiming for the
dirt beneath. Expert level shooting. Walker tries to recall the
specifics of the shot. Its sound. The space between gunshot and the
tin flying end over end above him. All the facts converge on him
almost unconsciously.

Slowly Walker turns his head to the left and
raises one eyepiece of his busted ‘nocs’. He has a pretty good idea
where the pillbox is now thanks to the shot.

Then he sees it.

It is well-hidden, but it is there. Right
angles and man-made lines showing up if you know just where to
look. He’d been right all along.

Walker slithers out of his duster and shoves
a short stick up into the collar. Then he places the salve tin
along the edge of the dirt berm, again.

He watches it for a long second, seconds,
waiting to see if the sniper will fire. Then he takes the stick,
places it on his chest and begins to raise the old leather trench
coat up like some Halloween ghost.

The shot echoes out across the hills along
the river… and strikes just under the salve tin again, flipping it
into the air only to land off somewhere out of sight.

Walker lowers the coat. He knows one thing
now.

Whoever is up there doesn’t want to shoot
him.

~~~

Last Night.

Whoever it is down there, Shooter thought,
down past the bridge and off behind the low dirt rise, he’s a sharp
one.

But what’s he doing there?

A lone sniper just out to kill? Nah. No sir.
Not a scout for some PMP gang either. He was too patient. He’d been
down there too long. No one scouted for this long, all alone,
vulnerable, unless their issue was personal.

Shooter had watched the sniper slow crawl to
the river for water. Had watched him through the night vision ‘nocs
and knew this cat was well trained.

He’s not down there to pick off farmers for
giggles. This person is after someone else.

We’re like the bait.

This was what Shooter was thinking as he
worked the night vision ‘nocs over the area again.

He tested me too, Shooter thought. Dang sure
tested me to see if I meant him any harm. That’s strange.

Maybe I should test him?

Without thinking about it quite as long as
he should have, Shooter reached down and grabbed a length of rope.
There was always rope in the pillbox, and he didn’t have any
trouble finding a section about five feet long.

He should have thought about it longer, but
he didn’t. It seemed like a good test, so he just did it. He
ignored Ellis saying, “some mistakes you only get to make
once.”

He wrapped one end of the rope around a rock
on the floor, off to his right. He stretched the rope tight and
then wrapped it around a nail protruding from the horizontal
telephone pole that supported the roofline of the pillbox.

Then he pulled out his Zippo and set the
rope ablaze. The fire licked roofward and, too late, Shooter
realized the flames were sufficient to light up everything else in
the pillbox. Including himself.

He froze. Some mistakes you only get to make
once.

The words, “Oh crap!” that left his mouth
were not sufficient to describe his panic. In an attempt to give
the other sniper something to shoot at in the darkness, he’d lit up
the whole pillbox like a city on a hill. Like a big, stinkin’
target.

And now he felt himself moving too slowly.
Fear squeezed his heart and he felt that sinking feeling in the pit
of his stomach. Like that moment when you’re falling and you know
it, but it’s too late to unmake the mistake you’ve made.

That’s when he heard the shot. Not so much
the gun firing, but the air splitting and the viperous hiss as the
bullet split the flaming rope and thumped into the heavy clay dirt
at the back of the pillbox.

The bottom piece of the rope dropped to the
ground and the upper piece swung for a second before the flame
severed it and the glowing remnants too plummeted to the dirt.

It was all over in half a minute, but to
Shooter the entire event seemed frozen in time.

Test completed.

He doesn’t want me dead either
.

Some mistakes should kill you, but they
don’t.

At a crossroads out in the middle of
nowhere, east of a land once called Texas, west of paradise lost on
that last apocalypse day, when yet one more battle would end
everything all over again, someone turned on The Doors.

Live album. A recording.

Break on through to the other
side
.

Reyes
Badfinger
’s war song.

Murder and death and mayhem were comin’
someone’s way… and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

No, not at all.

The dead man had been right. There was a
high valley up there and someone with some stuff. Stuff that needed
to be redistributed. Taken. Taken from…

Reyes Badfinger pulled the last of the
tequila from the bottle with a wet suck and then held the bottle
high in the morning sun. Held it in front of the burning disc.
Watched it distort light and flame. Watched the world through a
bottle of poison.

Then he saw, once again, the tiny Black Hand
tattooed between his thumb and forefinger. Saw it and knew, knew
what he was, what he’d been made to be. Knew he was just a pawn
with an appetite for destruction. Knew that when he smashed the
empty tequila bottle down onto the old rent and tired pavement at
the crossroads in the middle of nowhere that he and his soldiers
would assault the bridge, take the valley, rape the women and carry
away all the stuff they could.

Knew it.

Had known it.

Ever since the old gangbanger had given him
the tattoo…

…everything was just a prelude to the horror
of now. He’d been made for this moment. This dark now. Time in a
bottle.

~~~

It started with tagging.

Digiberto Reyes Navarro was eight. He lived
with his family in the barrios of LA and Orange County. Already the
schools were little more than warehouses where Reyes and the rest
would learn that California had been stolen. That all this, all the
suburban wasteland was actually stolen from them. Stolen by the
white people. Taken from the brown people.

Tagging was the first step in taking it
back. Making it theirs. Making it Mexico again.

Even though Reyes’ father had moved from
gardener up to accountant at the small construction and landscaping
company he worked for, promising Reyes he’d have everything if
“Digiberto” studied hard and did well, none of that ever happened
because of the heart attack.

It was at the funeral when Reyes, his two
little brothers, and his three sisters watched the relatives come
and lament and weep into their mother’s shirt that all of this was
unfair, unjust and somehow wrong. That was when the boy’d walked to
the front of the little Ranchero house his father had proudly
purchased, and that was when he found his
cholo
uncles
drinking beer and pouring one out into the grass for his
father.