Trail of Tears (13 page)

She could see the logic, but it wasn’t logic
that drove her right now. It was fear for her son and what the
bastards would do to him. And it was a burning hatred for the
vampires and thralls. They had raped her and then ripped a child
from her womb for their insatiable appetites and left her for dead.
She would see them all burn for that. There was no room for
anything else. Except guilt, of course. Not even the joy of having
Jillian in her arms was enough and, at some level, she knew that
Jillian was aware of this. Her daughter might not understand the
emotions but she did know that her mother wasn’t there for her as
she should be. And so the guilt fuelled the hatred and left her
bitter and ashamed.

She felt the rumble of the heavy trucks
through the ground and frowned. The patrol was taking longer than
usual to reach them. They must be travelling at a much slower
speed. That didn’t make a lot of sense, surely if they were worried
about an attack they would travel faster?

The main camp where the humans were kept in
the pens was in the middle of what had been an inner city area, so
food could not be grown and livestock had nowhere to graze. Because
of this, the food was produced outside the city and had to be
driven into the main camp twice a week. This was their third attack
since their escape and, already, the number of guards had trebled.
The deep rumble of heavy diesel engines reached her and she risked
a quick glance and watched as the vehicles began to emerge from the
dust. Her heart thumped in her chest as she saw the lead vehicle.
No wonder the patrol was travelling so slowly.

She hissed towards Josh to get his
attention. “Tank.”

Josh nodded as if she had merely stated that
the sun was shining.
How in hell were they supposed to take on a
tank?
There were twenty of them in this guerrilla force with a
further hundred people in the mountains, deep in a shelter under
the rocks. It wasn’t quite a government shelter but seemed to be
where one might have been planned before the economy had crashed.
The groundwork had been completed, the rock removed and smoothed
out but no living quarters had been built. It was enough for now
though; it was deep enough so that fires could be lit in safety
with a number of tunnels cut into the rock to ensure the smoke
dissipated before rising. They had raided the city where they could
and had brought back enough bedding and supplies to see out the
winter.

She hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the
briefing, preferring to sulk while the others made plans that would
not only feed their small band of survivors but also make possible
the rescue of her son. She suddenly realised that her petulance
might have put them all in danger. She didn’t know what she was
supposed to do. Had Josh anticipated a tank? How could they hope to
penetrate the armour? Her thoughts were interrupted as the rumble
of the tank became deafening and drew level with her position. The
ground shook violently and she felt terror rise within her. Surely
they weren’t going to att…

The explosion was so loud that she dropped
her weapon. The ground heaved and the rock she hid behind vibrated
as it was struck repeatedly with large objects. Her hearing was
gone. She looked over to where Josh had been, but there was no sign
of him. Her ears were filled with a ringing. And something else.
There was another sound, a chattering in the distance but she
couldn’t hear it very well.

Gunfire
! She suddenly realised. She
scrambled to retrieve her weapon, almost dropping it in hands made
damp with sweat. She popped her head out from around the rock and
it took her a few moments to make out what she was seeing. The tank
was stationary with thick black smoke billowing from its turret.
Dust still hung over the scene making it difficult to make out
details but she could see a number of bodies strewn around and
other figures darting through the smoke and dusk firing, rolling,
running and dying.

She was frozen for a moment longer as her
brain tried to catch up. Her friends were risking their lives right
in front of her and she wasn’t helping. She felt a burning shame
scald her cheeks and she ran into the fray. For the moment her mind
was finally free of its nagging worry for her son.

* * *

Tanya rocked in the back of the truck as
they left the scene of the attack. Thick black smoke still climbed
steadily into a sky already darkened with clouds pregnant with
snow. Her hands shook from the cold and the aftermath of the
adrenaline rush. It appeared that Josh had anticipated the tank
after all. She had totally missed that part of the plan that had
Gerard Tolliver dig a hollow in the middle of the road and cover it
with a sand glazed metal plate where he had hid until the tank
rolled over him.

Still, they had lost two men. Men that she
suddenly realised she did not even know their names. She looked
over at Josh and was about to speak when he moved over to her. She
expected another pep talk but his face was surprisingly hard.

“Tanya,” he began with a sigh, “this has to
stop.” She felt a sudden flaring of anger and took a breath to
respond when he cut her off.

“No, this time you’re going to listen to me.
You were no use to anyone today; in fact you were a danger to us
all. The others don’t trust you and I can’t blame them. Most of
them are doing this for you and you don’t even acknowledge them.
There are easier ways to steal food than taking on fucking tanks
you know.”

She felt her cheeks grow warm and her anger
rise.

“Go on, tell me the name of at least one of
the men who died today and I’ll stop.”

She closed her mouth in shock.

“And what about Jillian? Jesus, it’s not her
fault Mark is still a prisoner. I promised you we would get him out
and we will, but it would be suicide right now. We have to do this
first. We have to pull them away from the camp or all of this is a
waste. It’s working. If you took the time to look you’d see that
the convoys are growing in desperation. The thralls are starving.
It’s working. And now we need you to play your part. Next time you
will do as you are told or you will stay back in camp where you
will remain until you have regained our trust. ”

Tears began to well in her eyes and drip
down her cheeks. She wanted to lash out at him, to attack him with
cutting words but she couldn’t find the words. Suddenly Josh’s face
softened and he pulled her to him. She fought him off, pushed
against him but he forced her to him in a strong embrace. She
thumped his back but he held her tightly. She screamed into his
shoulder and then the sobs came, racking her body as the emotions
she had suppressed for so long finally gushed to the surface. Her
screams turned to sobs. Her hands stopped hitting and gripped Josh
tightly, desperately. And all the time his voice spoke quietly,
soothing her pain. Despite the cold, despite her anger and her
shame, the rocking of the truck and her exhaustion soon overcame
her and she fell into a deep sleep. For once the dreams didn’t come
and she slept until the truck rolled into the cave.

Chandler Flynn listened to the reports with
growing impatience. His entire existence had become a litany of
reports. Reports of food stocks, reports on the number of humans
who had died during the day—either from natural causes or from too
heavy a hand by their guards— reports of what that fucker Warrick
was doing in the south, more reports of what Von Kruger was up to.
How many times had he flown over his borders now? He had lost
count. Reports of the weather and which way the wind blew to
determine if the nuclear cloud was a threat to his food supply. The
thrall’s voice droned on and Flynn looked irritably at the
remaining sheets of paper in the thrall’s hands.

Jesus! He was sick of reports. Was this what
being a vampire was all about? Was this what he had clawed his way
through carnage to emerge as the undisputed master of his territory
for? His mind wandered to the time when the vampires had come.

He had been wasting his life, drifting from
job to job. Two tours in Afghanistan had left a naïve, small town
boy a highly trained killer but bugger all use for anything else,
especially with a dishonourable discharge. He had been the ‘go to’
guy in the army. If you wanted anything in Afghanistan it was Flynn
that the soldiers went to. He had a knack for sourcing anything.
When the newbies arrived with their brand new uniforms and kit it
wasn’t long before they came to him for the kit they would actually
need to survive. Everyone came to him eventually to increase their
chances of surviving by supplementing the kit that a bankrupt
country couldn’t afford to issue to its own soldiers. Flak jackets
had a tendency to be issued with only one plate of Kevlar in the
front—leaving soldiers vulnerable to a bullet in the back, weapons
quickly became clogged with desert sand without the correct
sheaths, not the shite they were issued with. The list went on and
on.

Flynn hadn’t started out to make money; it
had just happened. Of course, making money over there tended to
attract attention. He had been shocked to find that his superiors
took a dim view of him siphoning from what they considered their
retirement funds. It appeared that those who issued the kit were
not always as innocent as they professed. Perfectly good kit came
in but was adapted or replaced with sub-standard kit and issued to
the unsuspecting newbies forcing the soldiers to look to the Black
Market to complete their kit. The Black Market in this case being
his immediate superior. Flynn hadn’t been as greedy as the official
Black Market so he had quickly become the main route to augment the
platoon’s requirements.

It hadn’t taken his superior long to pin a
trumped up charge against him, and he had been quietly removed from
active duty and discharged. The army had flown him home and left
him at the airport to pick up his life. Luckily Flynn had been too
quick for his superior and had managed to send his money back to
the states before he had been arrested. He had enough money to live
quietly for a few years, but he had come home with a bitterness
that began to eat away at him. He hadn’t noticed at first. Yes, he
was quicker to anger and tended not to stay anywhere too long, but
he put that down to being lost. He would find himself again.

Only he didn’t. An argument in a small town
bar led to one of his attackers ending up dead. Four men had
attacked him and his training had taken over. He knew no one would
listen to his side of the story so he had run. A dishonourable
discharge and a murder rap were hard to run from. It became more
expensive to remain free and his money quickly ran out. By the time
the vampires came, the bitterness had taken over. None of it had
been his fault. He had been the butt of other people’s greed but he
was the one living rough and running. He had joined the army
because he had believed in his country. He had been happy to serve
and had been proud of his unit. The previous two years had
shattered his life, his beliefs, and tempered his bitterness and
hatred to a point where he was unrecognisable from the boy who had
proudly joined the army. When the vampires offered him a way out,
he accepted immediately. His life had changed again from that
moment.

The vampires had been totally disorganised.
They had never had to manage so many of their kind over such large
areas before so they had no systems, no processes, and no control.
They had sheer power but power was easily deflected if it was not
grounded. Flynn became that grounding. He used his skills to
provide a secure base for the vampires’ operations. He quickly
became central to organising the thralls, the food supply, and the
logistics of getting the vampires’ forces to the places where they
were most needed. In this role Flynn worked closely with the
thralls and it was to him that they owed their first loyalty. The
other vampires dismissed the thralls as muscle and half breeds.
Even the modern vampires, those who had become vampires recently,
were too caught up in their new positions to even consider the
thralls as anything more than a necessary nuisance.

It had been easy during the chaos of the
last days, before the serum had taken the fight from the humans, to
ensure his position as second in command to Goitlip. Goitlip had
been an ancient vampire from Germany who’d been amazingly
proficient in tactics and unbeatable in hand-to-hand fighting. He
was a titan, so filled with natural charisma that others accepted
his lead without question. Of course, his skills had not helped him
when he had been helpless in his coffin and the thrall Flynn had
bribed had removed his head. During the same night three other
vampires had been slain in their sleep and Flynn had emerged as the
undisputed heir.

The fact that the vampires who had been
killed had been those who posed the most threat to his ascension
had been noted by those who had survived. Flynn had, of course,
slaughtered the thralls responsible, in a suitably violent fit of
outrage over their heinous crime. Of course, the fact that their
death also assured their silence was noted by those who survived.
The vampires learned a lesson that had stayed with them from that
moment. Whoever controlled the thralls controlled the fate of
vampire and human alike. Flynn emerged victorious to enjoy the
spoils. In this case the spoils of war appeared to be reports. Lots
of reports.

His Kingdom was mostly in good shape. There
were a few areas which concerned him though. The thralls had
reported quite a lot of deaths of their human charges over the last
month. Each morning more and more bodies were being discovered.
None of them had any obvious signs for their demise. There had
always been deaths of course. Sometimes the thralls were too rough,
a vampire might occasionally bypass the controlled bleeding and
take a human the old fashioned way, but these occurrences were
rare. Sometimes a human just gave up, but the number of deaths
recently was greater than anything he had seen. Two hundred bodies
in the last week and a half.