Radio Hope (Toxic World Book 1) (12 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Annette struggled. The tweaker was on top of her, his blackened nails reaching for her face. She batted his hands away but he kept coming, babbling and drooling, reaching out with those filthy hands. In the distance she could hear the screams of her family and friends as they were slaughtered. The tweaker’s hands tore at her face, ripped her clothing. . .

She bolted awake, her hand already gripping her shotgun. For a moment she was disoriented, looking around an unfamiliar room from where she sat in her bedroll on the floor.

“You’re safe,” a voice said nearby.

She looked over. Jackson stood watch next to the window. She sighed.

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “It’s not your turn for watch for another hour.”

She didn’t reply. Her heart was racing and she struggled to control her breath. Mitch and Ha-Ram slept peacefully nearby. She envied them.

“I hate those dreams,” Jackson said.

“Shut up,” Annette replied, “You don’t know shit about me or my dreams.”

Nobody did. She got them at least once a week. Sometimes she woke up screaming, and had to tuck Pablo bac
k into bed with the explanation that she saw a spider. Pablo was convinced his mother had a phobia about spiders. She’d let a thousand spiders crawl over her if she could just stop having the dreams.

Annette rubbed her eyes. It was the damn twe
aker that had triggered it. The memory of when the bandits came.

They’d come on a d
ark, cloudy night like this one. They slit the throats of the sentries and were upon them before the rest of the adults had a chance to wake up and defend themselves. Annette had run, and because she was so young they hadn’t tried too hard to catch her. She hid in the bushes and watched as they slaughtered her father and big brother and all the rest of the men, and did something else to her mother and the other women. She was only nine and didn’t know what those naked bodies were doing, but the screams and struggles had stayed in her memory. The sight of the bandits killing all the women once they were done with them stayed with her too.

She swore to herself as she trembled and cried in the bushes that she’d survive, that she’d never get hurt like her
mother and the other women had been.

And she never was. She learned to kill to protect her body, learned how to hide so she wouldn’t have to kill. For a few years she was practically feral,
a half-starved beast in rags wandering the wildlands, but a deep loneliness twisted her insides and after a time she found another group to join, another band of scavengers trying to live off of the wreckage of the Old Times. They were wiped out one harsh winter when they got caught in a mountain pass. She survived by wrapping all of their clothing around her and making a shelter of the frozen corpses.

There followed
another couple years of loneliness. By then she’d grown into a young woman and came upon a lone scavenger just a little older than her. They became lovers and wandered the wildlands together until he opened up the wrong barrel and took a breath of something lethal. Later she found another group and met her second love, the man who would become Pablo’s father. He died of cancer the year after their son was born.

One autumn the
group heard of a city over the mountains, not a destroyed city, not burnt-out ruins inhabited by nothing but tweakers and memories, but a real city, with streets and lights and laws. They arrived during the harvest market to trade what they had scavenged. Annette took one look around and decided this was the place to raise Pablo.

Roy
took her in. At first she was wary of him. Too many men had offered to help her and then wanted something in return. But Roy wasn’t like that. The only woman he cared about had died years before. Annette washed dishes and served tables at his business until one night a drunk scavenger couldn’t take a hint. He grabbed a handful of ass and got a bottle in the face in return. Roy fell off his chair laughing and made her the bouncer.

“You OK?” Jackson asked.

Annette looked back at him again. When she didn’t reply Jackson went on.

“I get bad dreams sometimes too. About the city, mostly, and what I’ve seen there.”

“Shut up,” Annette said. She lay back down and turned her back on him. She forced herself to relax and tried to sleep.

The next morning after eating a cold breakfast of crackers and dried meat, Jackson suggested they cut across the wildlands.

“The two roads we need to follow make right angles to each other, so if we cut diagonally across them we’ll save several miles,” he explained.

Ha-Ram nodded. “
Good idea. Being on the road makes me feel like a target.”

“But if we go off the road we won’t spot the Righteous Horde if they come this way,” Annette said.

“The reports say it’s a pretty big group. If we miss them we’re sure to see signs of where they passed by,” Jackson said. “If there are enough of them they might even kick up a dust cloud.”

“And who wants to bump into them anyway?” Ha-Ram said.

Annette studied him. “I thought one of the reasons we’re out here is to find them.”

Ha-Ram looked at his feet. Before she could press the issue Mitch cut her off.

“I vote we do it Jackson’s way. Save time.”

Annette looked between Ha-Ram and Mitch. Something was up with those two. She shrugged. They’d outvoted her, and it was unlikely the horde was this close in any case.

Jackson studied the map and then led them off the road through low hills and fields on which grew grass and half-withered shrubs. The few trees grew stunted and sickly, and there were patches of soil where nothing grew at all.

“Looks like we’re not away from Toxic Bay quite yet,” she commented.

“We’re only a few linear miles from the industrial park,” Jackson said.

“It’s amazing you can translate all those squiggly lines into a landscape in your head,” Annette said. “I’d love to be able to do that.”

Jackson snorted. “Yeah, I bet you would.”

They ascended a low rise and a sharp tang prickled their nostrils.

“Shit, toxins!” Ha-Ram said.

They looked out over a narrow valley between bare hills. Almost nothing grew in it. Mitch pulled out a compact pair of binoculars and scanned the valley floor.
Annette blinked when she saw them.

Would have been nice to mention you had those
,
she thought.

“There, look,” he pointed to a spot near the middle of the valley and handed the binoculars to Annette.

She looked where Mitch had indicated and saw several corroded metal cylinders stuck into the ground.

“Are those artillery shells?” she asked.

“Yup, chemical rounds,” Mitch said.

Jackson and Ha-Ram took turns looking through the binoculars. Jackson then knelt down, opened up his map, and took a red gre
ase pen out of his pocket. Comparing the landscape and the map for a moment, he put a red mark on the map. Annette noticed other marks on the map’s lamination. Some were green, others were blue, but most were red.

He stood up, stowed the map, and led them on a different route.

By late afternoon they were skirting the east-west road that led to the mountain pass. They had seen no one, which was just fine by Annette. The few houses they came across were ruins, picked clean of anything even remotely valuable. This was dead territory for everyone—farmers, scavengers, even the tweakers would head to the city where they could find a more ready supply of chemicals.

The mountains loomed up ahead of them, their summits reddened by the setting sun. The pass was clearly visible in front of them and through Mitch’s binoculars they could make out the narrow ribbon of road snaking up and into it.

“I haven’t seen any standing buildings for a while,” Jackson said, “I guess we’ll have to camp in the open tonight. I’d rather not risk trying to find a house on the road this close to the pass.”

Annette looked around. They were in a narrow swale with hills all around.

“This is as good a place as any,” she said. “It will be hard to spot us.”

Everyone took
off their packs. As Annette laid out her bedroll she saw Ha-Ram give Mitch a look and incline his head to the side. Mitch looked up at the hill in that direction, which was the highest one around them, and nodded.

“We’ll be back in a minute,” Mitch said.

“Where are you going?” Annette asked.

“Just got to check something,” Mitch said over his shoulder as he and Ha-Ram walked
toward the hill. “Stay here, we’ll be back in a minute.”

Annette and Jackson looked at each other.

“Fuck that,” Jackson said.

Annette nodded.
“Ditto.”

They got up and followed Mitch and Ha-Ram, bringing their packs with them. Both had enough experience in the wildlands never to leave anything behind
. You could never know when some hidden scavenger was watching. When Mitch saw them following he gave them a glare but didn’t object. Annette smiled. The guy may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but he knew better than to try to stop them.

They came
to the top of the hill and got a clear view of the darkening landscape all around. The sun had just set, turning the distant water into a crimson line on the horizon. Sunlight still shone on the mountaintops but the rest of the plains and hills were blanketed in deep blue.

Automatically Annette
scanned the area for campfires but saw none. Mitch pulled out his binoculars and looked around as well.

Ha-Ram opened his pack and pulled out something wrapped in cloth. Unwinding the cloth he revealed a long
metal rod with a series of crossbars. On one end was a black box with electronic dials and switches and a compass set into one face. The crossbars were wider on the end near the box and tapered off gradually toward the other end of the main rod.

“What’s that?” Annette asked.

Ha-Ram flipped a switch and a LED readout flicked on. He tuned a dial until the numbers read “1010”. Then he started turning slowly to the left. As he did, the needle on a meter fell down a numbered scale. He stopped and started turning to the right. A needle began to climb the scale and then started dipping down again. Ha-Ram began to turn back to the left and made little adjustments with his body back and forth until the needle held at its highest level. He now faced almost directly at the pass, with the rod of his instrument pointing a little to the left of it.

Ha-Ram carefully set the device down on the ground and pulled out a paper and pencil. On it was written “107º ESE”. Below it he added “89º ENE”.

“What is that?” Annette repeated.

“Where we’re going,” Ha-Ram said.

“Those are compass coordinates,” Jackson said.

Suddenly it mad
e sense. She’d seen compasses before but had never seen coordinates written down. During her time in the wildlands, she and all the other scavengers she knew had gotten around by the stars and the knowledge of the land.

“But why two directions?” Annette asked. Automatically she looked to Jackson for the answer, knowing tha
t she wouldn’t get one from Ha-Ram or Mitch.

Jackson’s brow furrowed for a second, then his face lit up.

“Triangulation! You’re pinpointing something.”

Mitch looked angry. Ha-Ram shrugged and told him, “They would have found out sooner or later.”

Mitch didn’t reply to the technician, instead he asked to see Jackson’s topo map.

Annette saw Jackson struggle between wariness and curiosity. Curiosity won. He pulled out the map and laid it out on the ground.

“Here,” Ha-Ram said, pulling out a notebook. “Use this as a straightedge. You can read this topo way better than I can so how about you draw in the lines?”

Jackson looked at him. “The first comes from New City, I suppose?”

Ha-Ram nodded. Jackson pulled out a black grease pencil and a field compass. Annette’s eyebrows shot up. Jackson had a compass as well as a topo? And Mitch had a pair of binoculars he hadn’t told anyone about before they set out. And Ha-Ram had this weird device. Just how much stuff was everyone hiding?

Jackson fiddled with the compass and the notebook for a minute, and then drew a line across the plas
tic coating of the map. He studied the landscape, put his finger one a set of irregular concentric circles that Annette now recognized as marking a hill, apparently the very hill on which they stood. Consulting the compass he then drew another line. The two intersected at a point in a maze of lines not far to the east.

Annette studied the map. If these lines denoted changes in elevation, then this point they were looking at was just north of the pass and right in the middle of the mountain range.

She didn’t get to deduce any more. Jackson folded up the map and put it away.

Yeah, hide that map, Blamer. It’s not too hard to figure out given a bit of time.

“So what’s there?” Jackson asked.