The Day After Never - Retribution (Post-Apocalyptic Dystopian Thriller - Book 4) (13 page)

Michael snapped his fingers. “What about using the river water to drive a turbine? Wouldn’t that work?”

Craig shook his head. “The problem is you need a lot of pressure to turn one of any size – assuming you could build one designed for that. A river won’t do it. You’d need a reservoir, and then the pressure of the water backed up, released through a narrow gap, would drive it. The river’s current alone won’t do it. Sorry.”

“Windmills?” Michael tried again.

“Sure. In theory. But where are we going to get a bunch of wind turbines to generate power? Not to mention the storage problem. See, with geothermal, you have power twenty-four seven because you always have steam. With wind? You need a really windy area, and it isn’t that windy here.”

“Worst case, couldn’t we use wood to heat water, and the steam could drive the turbine?”

Craig opened a door and removed a mop. “Great solution. But the problem isn’t that we don’t have a limitless supply of hot water, Michael. So that would be perfect for a different issue.”

Elliot touched Michael’s arm, reacting to the annoyance that was creeping into Craig’s voice. “Come on. Let’s leave Craig to his work.” Elliot nodded to the engineer. “Radio me if you need anything. We’re going over to the hospital.”

“Will do.”

Chapter 19

Lucas led the group along a trail that paralleled the highway to Tulsa, periodically sweeping the landscape with his binoculars. He hadn’t seen any riders or travelers on the road, which struck him as ominous this close to a sizeable metro area – generally, if people avoided travel near a hub, it was because safety was an issue. In the post-apocalyptic world, many were nomadic by necessity, either fleeing danger or pursuing opportunity, and Tulsa was large enough that he would have expected at least a little traffic.

“Why didn’t the Crew take over Tulsa, too?” he asked Sierra in a low voice. “It’s not that far from Oklahoma City, and then they’d have almost the whole state.”

“I’ve never been to either place, but when I was in Dallas, I heard that there wasn’t anything worth taking over. They don’t devote men to an area if there’s nothing to steal. Sort of like Pecos – not worth their time.”

“Makes sense.”

“They don’t do anything that isn’t about power or profit.”

Arnold grunted from behind them. “Kind of like the last government.”

Lucas chuckled humorlessly. Even though he’d worked for the Texas Rangers, he hadn’t been blind to the inequity of the society he’d sworn to protect, where oil billionaires drove past tent cities of the homeless, insulated from unpleasantness by bulletproof glass and run-flat tires. There had been a long-running joke among his peers that if your skin was brown and you robbed a bank, you went to prison; whereas if you were white, you likely owned a bank that robbed everyone around it, and they made you the governor.

Of course that was a wild exaggeration, but it had been difficult not to see the results of a criminal justice system that was operated for profit, where the prison population was used as effective slave labor, and the vast majority of those incarcerated were minorities. Not much had changed from the days when Jim Crow laws targeted minority populations, only victimless crimes like drug possession replaced racism as the pretense for locking a large percentage of the targeted demographic behind bars.

In the old days, lawmen like his father had reacted to crimes that had victims – violence or property crime. Somewhere along the line that had shifted to where most of the arrests were for violations of laws where there was no victim, only a perp. It had skewed the role of the police to where they no longer protected and served, but rather arrested to improve their career record, and often the easiest targets were those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale – which usually meant people of color. He’d encountered it every day on the job, and it was one of the aspects of law enforcement that he had been glad to put behind him. Now everyone was the same, discrimination a luxury few could afford in a survival-mode world where starvation and disease were greater concerns than the color of someone’s skin.

Tulsa’s skyline came into view as they neared, but there were still no people in evidence. The usual carcasses of rusting vehicles abandoned on the roads were everywhere, as were the ruins of homes looted in the early days before everything had run dry, but no signs of life.

“You’d think there would be farms or something, huh?” Colt said.

Lucas didn’t respond. The whole area was sending a shiver of anxiety up his spine, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. He was no stranger to devastation or danger – so why was the alarm going off?

Arnold pointed ahead at several columns of smoke rising from within the city limits. “At least we know somebody’s home.”

They fell quiet as they neared a suburb that had been flattened – by a tornado, Lucas guessed, based on the destruction: only slabs remained on many of the lots, the houses blown to the four corners.

Once they had run the gauntlet of wreckage, they arrived at the edge of the city, where three men with filthy hair and grimy skin, dressed in clothes little more than rags and holding weapons as dirty as their shirts, manned a sandbagged guard outpost on the western side of the Arkansas River.

“Whoa, there, cowboy. Hold up,” one of them called. The others raised their weapons, and even at a distance Lucas could make out that their arms were so thin they were nearly skeletal. “Where you think you’re going?”

“We’re looking for a trading post. Something with a radio,” Lucas said.

“Yeah? Where you coming from?”

“Texas.”

“Why you coming this direction? Nothing here but misery, and I hear tell it gets worse the further east you go.”

“Maybe so,” Lucas said agreeably. “But it can’t be any worse than Texas these days.”

The men took in Sierra with hungry looks, and then the lead sentry’s eyes narrowed. “You gang affiliated?”

“No. Just looking for a trading post.”

“What you got to trade?”

“That’s between me and the trader, isn’t it?”

“Don’t get all uppity. Just curious,” the man snapped.

“Weapons and ammo. The usual.”

The man’s stare roamed over Tango and settled on Lucas’s M4. “Nice gun you got there.”

“Thanks.”

“Horse looks like a winner, too. You gonna trade either of them?”

Lucas shook his head. “Not likely.”

“Keep your eyes on him. Way things are these days, lot of folks would eat him just as soon as ride him.”

“I intend to.”

Lucas waited for the guard to decide whether to let them pass, having exhausted his questions and having no interest in discussing the weather. The man coughed a phlegmy hack and stepped back. “Well, come on in, then. It’s your funeral.”

“Anything we should know? Any rules?”

The sentries exchanged a glance and then laughed, treating Lucas to a view of rotting teeth and blackened gums. “Not really. You kill anyone, better have a good reason or enough to buy your way out of it. Other than that, you’re on your own.”

“Where’s the nearest trading post?” Arnold asked, his voice flat.

“Over by the university. Can’t miss it.”

“Does it have a radio?”

“Did last time I was up that way.”

“How do we get there?” Lucas asked.

“Cross the bridge, and then head east on Eleventh Street. It’ll be on your left a ways up.”

“How do we know when we’re at Eleventh Street?” Sierra asked.

“It’s the street right before that hospital tower,” he said, pointing to a gleaming building in the near distance. “Still got street signs. But you might want to put on a jacket or something. We don’t get a lot of young women as good-lookin’ as you these days.” The man offered an oily grin. “Wouldn’t want to see you come to a bad end.”

Lucas led them across the long span over a rushing brown and frothy river, and they found themselves on a broad freeway clogged with junked cars. The horses picked their way between the vehicles until they reached an off-ramp near the base of the hospital, which they veered down before finding Eleventh Street.

They rode past a pair of men with long, matted hair and faces spectral from malnutrition, who were shambling down the cracked sidewalk, pushing a rusting shopping cart filled with detritus. They looked up at the riders with the uncurious eyes of those close to death, their skin yellow and hanging loose from their skulls, and then resumed their task.

Sierra sidled closer to Lucas and whispered over the clomp of the horses’ hooves, “Tell me that isn’t creepy.”

“This whole place is.”

They passed several more pedestrians, all obviously without anything to their names, and reached an intersection where a man with a long black coat and a shabby top hat was reciting biblical verse in a loud voice to a crowd of none. When he spotted them approaching, he brightened and held up a soiled piece of paper. “Woe be to those who fail to recognize the sign! The Savior has been sent, but we have rejected our salvation, for which we are now paying! We brought this upon ourselves!” he announced, waving the paper like a talisman.

Lucas ignored the man and continued past. On the next corner, another preacher was offering his spin on the end-times to a small gathering of women and children. Sierra leaned toward Lucas. “Awful religious, aren’t they?”

“Maybe this is the district or something.”

“Neither Dallas or Lubbock were like this.”

“These people look like they’re starving. How was it in Texas?” Colt asked from behind her.

“It was bad, but nothing like this.”

“Maybe that’s your answer,” Arnold said. “When you’re out of hope and you have nothing to eat, suddenly even the worst sinner becomes a believer.”

Lucas nodded. “Could be.”

A child, no more than six or seven, spotted them and ran toward Lucas with a pamphlet. The boy looked feverish, his face a patchwork of scabbed sores, and Lucas recoiled when the child tried to thrust the paper into his hand. Seeing that Lucas wasn’t going to take it, he held it to Sierra, who waved him away unsuccessfully. When he didn’t give up, she reluctantly took it from him and he scurried back to the preacher, who looked like a mad hermit with his gray beard and dreadlocked hair, now gesticulating feverishly at the sky.

Lucas shook his head and sighed at the spectacle of so much misery. Sierra interrupted his introspection, her voice alarmed.

“Lucas!” she hissed from beside him.

“What?” he demanded, reaching for his pistol.

“Look at this.”

He relaxed. “Look at what?”

“The paper that kid gave me.”

“I’m a little busy right now, trying to keep an eye out so we don’t get killed. Why don’t you read it to me?” he said.

“You need to see it.”

“Not now, Sierra. What is it?”

“It’s…it’s a picture of Eve. From Lubbock.”

“We know they were searching for you. That’s no surprise.”

“No. But it’s not that.”

“Then what is it?”

“It says she’s the…that Eve’s the second coming.”

Chapter 20

New Orleans, Louisiana

It was the dead of night when the destroyer idled to a stop in Lake Borgne several hundred yards from the distressed brick ruins of Beauregard’s Castle, near the mouth of the channel that led to Shell Beach and its private marina, now a black hole in the shoreline. Lightning flashed within a phalanx of plum-colored clouds over the Gulf of Mexico. The air was heavy with the smell of ozone, the wetlands beyond the cut redolent of brine and decaying vegetation as the big ship drifted, its huge engines nearly silent against a background of distant thunder.

Snake watched while four tenders dropped to the water. The crew had foregone the electric winches and was lowering them manually to cut down on noise. When the boats were floating by the ship’s hull, another group lowered the gangplank, at the end of which was a platform large enough for one of the tenders to tie off while loading.

“That’s it. Move,” he said, and the first of his fighters tromped down the ramp, bristling with weapons, their faces blacked out.

Snake had done his homework on New Orleans’ defenses and learned that nobody watched any of the seaward approaches; if his force could land without attracting attention, they could be in the city center before anyone knew they were there. The warlord who ran the area was holed up in the Garden District with a retinue of twenty guards and had easily five hundred men in his fighting group, which made him a formidable threat. But Snake’s best estimate had been that most of those fighters would be loyal to the Crew when pressed, especially if Snake could achieve the coup he’d planned before the sun rose.

If all went well, the New Orleans contingent would awaken to their leader deposed and Snake directing affairs until he could appoint a replacement. His hope was to avoid a frontal confrontation and present the New Orleans faction with a fait accompli – a lesson that the all-seeing eye of Providence wasn’t simply a metaphor.

If successful, it would chill any further ideas of rebellion in the ranks and seal his place at the top of the pyramid.

Zach had been key in developing the plan and the ship critical to avoiding telegraphing their moves, which would have translated into a long and bloody campaign with Snake’s men at a disadvantage, paying a heavy toll in blood for every yard. It was the Illuminati fixer who’d come up with the idea of transporting several hundred of Snake’s gunmen via ship with no advance notice and no warning of where they were going.

Approaching by sea had bypassed the checkpoints along the roads connecting Houston with New Orleans, so there would be no radio alert to the warlord from a patrol.

The only negative was that they would have to travel the twelve miles from the shore to the city on foot, but compared to the value of surprise, that was a trivial concern. They’d calculated that most of his men would survive a skirmish at the warlord’s mansion, thus leaving a formidable presence to halt any revolt against his authority by the local Crew.

The first tender filled and putted toward the inlet while the second lashed itself to the platform and the loading continued. By the time the last boat had left, the first one had returned for a second load, and soon the men were assembled near the remains of the marina, night vision goggles in place as the inky sky flashed with celestial pyrotechnics that announced the approaching squall.