The Saffron Malformation (23 page)

             
“Where’s Dusty?”

             
“He’s out front.  He’s got a gun,” she added, her eyes shimmering.  “I didn’t even know he had one,” she added hollowly.

             
“That doesn’t matter now, because it’s a good thing he does.  You listen-”

             
“Are they savages?” she asked.

             
Quey pondered, looking up at the cliffs, listening to the rumbling engines and exchange of gunfire.  It was likely the law had rallied in an attempt to fend them off, whoever they were.

             
“Don’t know,” Quey replied, “But I don’t think so,” he added.  “Once Men are scavengers mostly, comin across what’s smaller and weaker.”

             
Tears dripped down Rachel’s cheeks and she gasped, breathing frantically.

             
“Hey, it’s going to be fine,” Quey told her.  “You just stick with Dusty, he and I been through stickies greater by far than this, right?”

             
She nodded, though she didn’t believe him.

             
“You stick to him and-”

             
The screen cut out.

             
The word ‘Searching’ appeared on his device but Quey knew it was hopeless.  Raiders liked to jam up the networks to keep people from calling for help.

Quey exited the call and opened the map.  He zoomed in on Fen Quada and began looking at the roads.  One major road leading into town and another heading out was what there was and that was bad news for them.  He scanned the map more thoroughly and found a number of side roads that led to smaller settlements outside of Fen Quada, but if they went that way they were stuck on those roads for a while.  None of the outlying areas had direct access to the major highways.

              Quey looked back at Rusty Nails and Fluffy Tails and tried to imagine holding up inside but couldn’t.  It was open and welcoming with too many windows.  They’d need and army to cover all the points of entry and then a team of carpenters to build cover for them.

             
“Fuck,” Quey grumbled and turned back to his truck.  It was risky, depending on the sort of raiders that were pillaging overhead.  Gathering up his folk and jumping into his truck might get them out or it might get them chased.

             
Motorcycles growled up and down the street and peppered through the sound of the engines was the cracking pops of gunfire.  They weren’t shooting at anything particular, just trying to scare folks so they’d scamper like spooked livestock and put up less of a fight.  It worked.  Residents of Fen Quada ran this way and that, hiding when they could, making their way toward whatever or whoever they deemed precious enough to risk a bullet over.

A ways behind them were more vehicles, cars and trucks, maybe even a rig or two, rolling in slowly with bad intentions.  When Reggie first heard the engines and spotted the raiders he searched for a spot to nestle down and found it in a side street between two buildings.  There was a crook in the wall and he pressed into it knowing they wouldn’t pay notice unless he moved.  As the bikes roared past he leaned over and took a peak at the situation on the main road.  Motorbikes were crisscrossing through the streets, scouting the grid of upper Fen Quada.  Residents scurried here and there, most just trying to vacate the streets.  A woman ran, a man on a bike spotted her and opened fire.  Her chest heaved and a faint mist of red exploded from it as she tumbled to the ground.

              Reggie ducked back a bit when another bike came around the corner up the block and started toward him.  He kept his eyes on the bandit, seeking his markings, hoping to make out what gang affiliation they showed.  It wasn’t until the bike passed and he could see the patch on the back of the biker’s jacket that he knew who they were.  An angel screaming with its hands to the sky while its flesh rotted off its body and blood soaked into its robes.  Its wings were tattered and bat like, its halo shattered and insects crawled across its face and hands.  They were Angels of the Brood, probably one of two gangs that could pull off a raid of this size.  Fen Quada had sheriffs aplenty for its own needs but no official Blue Moon Security and nothing that could handle something like this.  They were used to tourists getting a bit too much drink in them and stumbling down the street with a bit too little clothes on, not a full on gang raid.

             
Gunshots boomed with greater frequency and he could hear return fire attached to them.  Another explosion sent a tremor through the ground.  Someone was putting up a fight, and Reggie feared that someone wasn’t going to last long.  A car screeched to a stop just up the block and the doors opened.  Five men climbed from inside, each carrying a rifle, and started down the street.  They were sloppy, just walking, no organization or formation and no one watching the rear.  The barrels of their guns pointed everywhere but in front of them.

             
Reggie crouched in the alley.  They weren’t covering themselves, they didn’t check the shops as they passed or the spaces between.  The large dark man smiled as they strolled past as carefree as teenagers heading to the theater, happy just to see people running away from them.  When the last one passed Reggie hurried, moving surprisingly fast and silent for a man of his size, and seized the one in back.  One arm wrapped around his neck, choking him, while the other tore his gun from his hand and then he tossed the man to the pavement.   Oblivious even as one of them fell, the others continued forward until Reggie opened fire.

             
There was a switch in Reggie’s mind that he allowed to flip and the soldier took over.  He fired four quick shots that tore through the bandits and sent them to the ground.  Two were dead for sure, he assessed as he lowered the barrel to the head of the one he’d grabbed.  The guy, probably no older than twenty-two began to plead. “Plea-“

             
But Reggie fired and his head burst like a water balloon across the pavement.  As he went around, collecting the raiders’ ammo he popped rounds into the two that were wheezing and struggling to move.  No reason to leave a man suffering and choking on his own blood.

Two minutes after he
had dashed from his nook between the buildings, Reggie was back in place and taking stock of his inventory.  He’d collected a fully loaded assault rifle and four spare clips from the dead men in the road.  There had been more but he only needed to get back to his place, that’s where the real artillery was. 

Watching up and down the street, Reggie took off his shirt and tied the clips inside.  He would have rather had them on his belt or in his pockets but the shorts he was wearing wouldn’t accommodate that.

              Another car rolled down the street and stopped not far from the first.  He could hear men yelling from inside, they’d spotted the bodies in the road and they were deciding what to do next.  Kneeling, Reggie brought his gun up, keeping as much of himself behind the corner of the building as possible, and fired into the car.  The first three shots punched tight, clean holes through the windshield and left a web of cracked glass around them.  The rear doors flew open and the three men in the back seat clamored out of the vehicle.  Reggie pumped a set of rounds into the one who’d made the mistake of getting out on the side he was shooting from.  The other two fired wildly from across the car, aiming their barrels up and at nothing.  Reggie waited and when the first one shot up from behind cover, like a whack-a-mole, Reggie gently squeezed the trigger.  The man’s head jerked back as a bullet shattered his skull and showed his brains the light of day.

             
The last of them stayed low and hurried back up the road.  Once or twice Reggie thought he might have a shot but nothing was clean and he didn’t feel like wasting bullets just yet.  In his mind his mission wasn’t to kill these assholes but to get back to lower Fen Quada.  Get to his guns and get to Quey and Rail and even that little guy Arnie, that’s what was important.  Anything else was gravy.

             
After a brief pause, when he was sure the street was clear, he snuck away from the main road, gun in one hand and ammo wrapped in a shirt in the other, and started down the side road that would take him back to the cliffs.

             
There was a time when Dusty would have run the two kilometers or so from his house to the Nails and Tails without feeling the effort, but that was long ago.  Now he had to pace himself, and that coupled with needing to keep track of Rachel made the trip a slow go.  He stuck to the side roads, passing through the main streets only to cross them and duck into other alleys.  He could hear the motorcycles screeching down Costal Cliff road, a three kilometer stretch that took its time winding down the cliff.  From where he was, lightly jogging through an alley between a set of bungalows, he could see Fen Quada above and could hear the gunshots faintly cracking in the wind.

             
An engine revved and he stopped, reaching out to Rachel and taking her hand, pulling her close to him.  They were at the main street, Coast View, and the Nails and Tails was still a few hundred meters away.  People, some on their own—most in small groups of a handful—hurried this way and that, fear and panic mixed with uncertainty and drenched their eyes in a certain primal look.  Dusty had seen this look before and knew it’d lead them to do things they never thought themselves capable.  In this state, ordinary people were made into dangerous animals.

             
Dusty knelt low and peeked out from the alley, glancing briefly up the wide main street lined with shops on either side.  There was a man on a bike sitting in the middle of the next intersection up the road.  He was waving in more members of the raiding party.  Angels of the Brood.  Dusty recognized the patchwork from an encounter he and Quey had with them in the way back when.

             
“What is it?” Rachel asked between hard breaths.

             
“Slow and deep,” Dusty told her and she looked at him strangely.  “Breathe slow and deep, you recover better.”

             
Rachel took in a set of long breaths and then asked again, “What is it?”

             
Dusty looked up at her
  
there was something hard in his eyes—and ignored her question for the moment.  He looked out again and saw two more bikes had joined the first, and they were discussing something among themselves.  The guy on the first bike had a shaggy face and long straggly hair.  His clothes were tattered and patched in places and he was pointing up and down the streets.  The other two nodded and revved their engines.

             
“We have about ten minutes,” Dusty said, feeling his heart racing in his chest, knowing most of its speed hadn’t come from the jog.

             
“Then what?”

             
He’d almost forgotten Rachel was there and didn’t know he’d spoken loud enough for her to hear.  He looked up at her and watched her large brown eyes shimmering with the same look the scampering citizens of Fen Quada had.  Wind whipped strands of her golden brown hair across her face and she didn’t seem to notice, she was waiting for him to tell her what would happen next and he did.  “Then the raiders get here.”

             
“The raiders… but… Who are they?” she asked, indicating the men on bikes with a tremble in her voice.  She started to look out onto the street.

             
Dusty grabbed her arm and pulled her back and down beside him.  “They’re scouts.  They’re here to test the town, see what kind of resistance there might be.”

             
Rachel watched him with a collage of emotion.  Part of it was fear of the raiders, the engines rumbling through the streets and the gunshots erupting now only a block away, and the screams that followed.  Another part was awe.  When she looked at Dusty she didn’t see the same fear in his eyes that she felt in her own.  She knew about his past, the years he’d spent with Quey on the road as a petty thief and the time after, when they’d met Cal, she knew he’d seen this type of stuff before and that he could stay focused was no surprise.  What was a surprise was what she saw and felt under the surface.  It was exhilaration.  There was a part of him that was enjoying this, a part that reveled in the action.

             
She’d been close to terrible things once, a small part of a movement that led to guns and violence and fighting but she hated it and abandoned the cause and the people that took her there.  She’d never seen it close up, even then, but now that she had she couldn’t imagine ever liking it.

             
“Come on,” he said, looking up the street at a bandit firing an assault rifle into the face of a storefront.  He took Rachel’s hand and she allowed him to lead her across Costal View and in between a set of eateries, one was a delicatessen and the other served mostly tacos, burritos, and the like.

             
“Wait,” Dusty told her and stooped to one knee five feet back from the narrow entrance.  “Duck down and cover your head with your arms,” he told her.  Out in the street the motorbike revved and then roared closer.  The rider screamed but his words were lost in the chaos.