Quake (13 page)

“GPS says it's the Burnside Bridge,” Faith said, touching the screen to move the map from side to side. She pointed to a pinkish-colored building directly across the river. “That's the Koin Building.”

“Still no sign of Jade?” Dylan asked as he knelt down and tied his boot.

“I'm a little surprised,” Faith said, shaking her head. “I really thought they'd be here.”

Portland was more than five miles across, but not by much. Either Hotspur Chance had decided the city was too risky and moved somewhere else, or he'd never been here to begin with. Either way it was probably some very bad news.

“Let's get to the Koin Building and see if Hawk can help,” Dylan said. “We could fly over, swim, or take the bridge. What's your poison?”

Faith smiled because she knew they couldn't fly over the river without the risk of being detected, and swimming just seemed like a lot of work that would leave them cold and wet.

“Bridge,” they both said at once.

Dylan put an arm around Faith. “Great minds think alike.”

They reached the span twenty minutes later and found a slew of abandoned cars and buildings. Faith hated zeroed cities. They always seemed like zombie towns, at once sad and scary as hell. The bridge angled up gradually, cracked and strewn with old bicycles and pickup trucks and taxi cabs.

“It's as if this stuff was put here on purpose,” Dylan said, noticing that some of the vehicles were turned up on their sides, creating a pathway of rubble they needed to crisscross through in order to pass. “Something doesn't feel right.”

Faith felt the same way as they continued on, finding more and more cars with blown-out windows filling the bridge. The pathway through narrowed even more until they reached the midpoint of the bridge and an opening appeared, encircled by abandoned cars.

“This is getting weird,” Faith said.

Steel beams rose into the sky overhead, where a makeshift fort had been built out of plywood and random junk. A bullhorn sounded from somewhere inside the structure.

“How about you two hold up right there so I can get a good look at you.”

The voice had a cowboy drawl to it, as if whoever was up there staring down at them was fresh off the rodeo circuit.

“We're not looking for trouble,” Dylan said, putting his hands out to his sides to show that he was not carrying anything. “We're unarmed, just passing through.”

There was no reply, but all the windows in the cars that circled Faith and Dylan unexpectedly filled with shotgun barrels.

“It's like the O.K. Corral,” Faith said, drawing on some long-ago history lecture she'd sat through when she was ten or eleven. “They've even got cowboy hats.”

“What's the O.K. Corral?” Dylan asked curiously.

“Didn't you
ever
study?”

“Of course I did. I know a lot of stuff. But I read a lot of comic books in history class.” Dylan shrugged.

Faith thought of how easy it had become to rely on the fact that the guns trained on them would have no effect, even if they all fired at once and every single one of them hit its target. “Hang on now,” the voice overhead said into the bullhorn. “I'm comin' down to check this out.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Should we just leave? Let them shoot?”

Faith thought that was a terrible idea and shook her head.
Chill. Let's let this play out.

Faith glanced around the circle and saw that every head in every window was covered with a cowboy hat. They were some sort of urban gang of gun-loving wackos who'd never gone into the States and chosen instead to take over what was left of Portland as an outpost. Faith and Dylan had tried to cross a checkpoint of some kind.

“This just gets weirder,” Dylan said as he looked up into the beams of steel. The whole fort was moving down on cables like an outdoor junk elevator. It stopped on the pavement of the bridge and a metal door swung open.

A bearded man with a plaid shirt, cowboy boots, and a ten-gallon hat walked out onto the bridge. When he entered the circle of cars Dylan and Faith stood inside of, he motioned for everyone to settle down.

“Let's have a look at what we got here,” the man said warily. He was packing a pistol in a holster and holding an assault weapon that looked as if it could fire a thousand rounds a minute.

“Like I said,” Dylan offered, hands out at his sides, “we're not looking for trouble. We just want to pass through.”

The man's eyes narrowed and he stepped closer to Dylan. He ran his free hand over a gray mustache that looked as if it hadn't been trimmed for about a decade.

“Name's Clay, how about you two?” the man said. He appeared to be chewing on a small bit of gum or his lip or something left over from breakfast, it was hard to say which.

“We'd rather not say,” Dylan answered, taking a step toward Clay and flexing his arms. Dylan could be an imposing figure. Cool confidence oozed off him in situations like this, which had a certain power of its own. It was a power Clay didn't seem to take much notice of.

“I generally prefer it when I know names before I start shooting, but it's your funeral either way.”

Clay raised the assault rifle so it pointed at Dylan and laid his finger on the trigger.

“Go ahead,” Dylan goaded, stepping into the barrel of the gun until it touched his chest. “See what happens.”

“Okay, you two,” Faith said. “Enough testosterone already. I'm Faith, this is Dylan, and we're passing through. Is there some sort of toll or something? Because if there is you can check our packs. We're dead broke.”

Clay didn't take his eyes off Dylan the entire time Faith spoke. He took a deep breath, and then he fired about twenty rounds into Dylan's chest, knocking Dylan onto the ground with the force of the bullets. The man turned the gun on Faith and fired a similar number of rounds, but Faith saw them coming and braced herself enough to stay standing when the bullets stopped flying.

Clay held his gun out to the side and someone exited a creaky car door, ran over and took the gun, and returned to where he'd come. Dylan didn't seem to know what to do, so he stayed on the ground and looked at Faith.
Now what?

Clay surprised everyone and reached a hand down toward Dylan.

“You're as tough as your mom said you would be. And headstrong, just like her.”

“Wait,” Faith said as Dylan took Clay's hand and Clay pulled him up onto his feet. “You knew
Meredith
?”

“Knew?” Clay's attention turned dramatically toward Faith and no one else. “Whatcha mean,
knew
?”

Faith looked around and saw how out in the open they were, how exposed and dramatic it all must have looked, especially with the gunfire.

“You seem to know a lot more about us than we know about you,” she said. “But I can promise you this: Portland might be your home, but it also feels like the most dangerous place on earth. Can we disband this little show and sit down somewhere less conspicuous?”

Clay looked around at the ridiculous spectacle he'd created and seemed to agree. He nodded to a woman in a wide-brimmed Stetson who sat in a late-model solar car that was pockmarked with bullet holes and dents.

“Saddle up!” the woman yelled, and all the cars moved in a line around the sides of the fort that had been lowered onto the bridge. They moved in silence, each of them running on some combination of solar and electrical power.

A few minutes later all three were in the fort, which had been lifted into the air above the bridge. Light streamed in through cracks in the corrugated-metal walls as Clay offered them each a chair at a table in the center of the room.

“Is she gone?” Clay asked solemnly. “Just tell me that much and we can start exchanging information freely.”

“Yeah,” Dylan said. “She's gone. A few weeks ago.”

“I figured as much,” Clay said, shaking his head. “We got some intel on the crazy stuff going down in the Western State, but it was spotty. Figured she was involved in whatever the dustup was.”

“It was a little more than a dustup,” Dylan said.

He nodded, looked hard at Faith, then Dylan. “You do know you're public enemy number four and five, right?”

There was an ancient Tablet on the table, at least twenty years old, and Clay tapped the screen alive. A few more taps and there was a page with five faces on it.

“Whole world is looking for you. Also Clara and Wade Quinn.”

“And Hotspur Chance,” Faith said, finishing the picture.

“Prisoner One,” Clay mused, barely above a whisper. “How the hell he ever got out I can't imagine. After everything Mallory told me about how they were holding him, it doesn't seem possible.”

“How much
do
you know?” Faith asked, astonished at how in the loop Clay seemed to be.

Clay took off his hat and rubbed his matted gray hair with a dirty finger.

“We're what you might call the third-string benchwarmers. Not a pulse in the bunch, but we're on your side. Small group of twenty, sworn to help if help ever came calling. You know about Carl? We've been sending provisions up there for years.”

Dylan looked at Faith:
I'll take this one
.

“Listen, Clay. Carl's dead. Clooger's dead, too, if you know who that is. The entire single-pulse army Meredith trained up—they're all gone. You're looking at the sum total of the revolution front line. We're all that's left.”

Clay sighed and put an elbow on the table. His forehead fell into his open palm.

“I figured it was bad. Not this bad.”

Faith explained everything about Jade and Hawk and Hotspur and the Quinns, the whole ball of wax, and then she asked Clay a question.

“Are you still with us?”

Clay didn't hesitate to reply.

“Absolutely, a hundred percent. Also, I'm sorry for shooting you both. But I knew it wasn't going to kill you. I was pretty sure, anyway.”

Dylan and Faith both smirked and looked at each other. They'd just signed on with a guy who had a very itchy trigger finger. It wouldn't take much for Clay to start shooting if things went off the rails, not that it would do any good in a confrontation with the Quinns.

“I have something I need you to do for me,” Faith said, sensing how long Clay and his team of urban cowboys had waited to actually be of some use. “You and your team.”

Clay smiled under that fabulously wild mustache and his thick eyebrows rose in anticipation.

“Fire when ready.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

They spent the next hour with Clay in the makeshift fort, sharing what they knew about past events. Too many of the stories ended with a dead person on their team and after a while they gave up trying to find a silver lining in the journey they'd each taken. They ate together, reviewed some of Clay's old maps, and all too soon began feeling restless.

“There's something I need you to do for us,” Faith said as they stepped out of the fort. “It might really help us.”

“That's what my team is here for, last resort,” Clay said. “As long as it don't involve running away, we're ready. We're
always
ready.”

Faith appreciated the resolve and the patience of a man who could spend years waiting in obscurity, only to be called up at the deadliest moment under the worst of circumstances.

“There's not much left of us, but what we've got is solid gold,” Faith said, looking first at Dylan and then at Clay. Her meaning was clear:
We're enough to get this done.

Once Faith had told Clay what she needed and they'd talked a little more, she and Dylan were on their way through the urban slums of Portland. They took no one else with them and asked Clay to steer clear.

“If we encounter the Quinns it might turn into all-out war faster than you or your team can scatter. Not worth the risk.”

Faith had given Clay an important but ultimately very boring task. The good news was that it was something Clay and the rest of them could actually do, it would keep them occupied and out of harm's way for a couple of days, and in the end it might prove very helpful.

“The two-way is cool,” Dylan said, thinking about the seventy-year-old communication gadget Clay had given them. It was tucked away in Dylan's pack, another in a long string of pre-Tablet wireless devices used by millions of people before the States were developed. This one was connected directly to a similar palm-sized device Clay kept strapped to his hip next to a revolver. As long as they stayed within twenty miles or so of each other, they could use the two-way to communicate.

“Keep it in your pocket in case I need to contact you,” Clay said. “I'll nudge you first, make sure you're not in mixed company.”

“Nudge?” Dylan had asked, playing with the dial and the buttons of the two-way as Clay pointed at a small button on the top of Dylan's two-way.