Men of Truth (The Wasteland Soldier #4)

A few lonely stars sparkled in the rain-drenched night sky.

Stone led them across fields no longer marked by fences. There were broken down buildings that had once shaped a farm and half-buried ancient machinery. The ground was sodden and there was the smell of sewage in the air. They made camp inside a silo, its curved metal sides patched with rust. It was cold and damp and the floor was bare. Spindly vegetation had crawled inside to escape the winter months and curled around joists and rafters.

Stone went back into the rain to hunt for something to burn. He returned shortly and built a meagre fire. Yuan opened her pack and portioned out the rations she had taken from home; hard biscuit and dried out vegetables that could be eaten raw. They had a spiky kick to them and tasted better than they looked. Huddled beside the fire, they ate without conversation, the silence fuelled by what had not been said, rather than by what had.

Once the meal had finished, Stone began to strip and clean his weapons. Yuan bunched herself against the wall of the silo. Her mud-spattered legs peeked from beneath her long dress. She watched Stone through the flickering flames, wanting to sit with him, but her limbs were thick with tiredness and she could not move. She glanced at Weaver and found him staring at her legs. She tugged at the hem of her dress, pulled her coat around her and shifted herself out of his line of sight.

The rain plopped against the metal panels of the silo and the hollow rhythm sent her to sleep.

Weaver moved away from the fire, stretched his legs and stood at the door. It was black outside.

“You go your own way in the morning,” said Stone, not lifting his head.

Cali looked at him, then at Weaver. The automobile dealer nodded, hands in his pockets.

“I was thinking of doing that anyway.”

He suddenly spun round, anger in his face.

“Thanks for ruining my life, Stone. There’s no safe route back to Batesville from here. I can’t travel that highway.”

“Yeah,” said Cali. “The Uppers will get you, man.”

“Shut up, girl. No one is talking to you.”

Stone got to his feet.

“Leave it, man, it’s all good. This asshole has been nothing but bad luck for us. Why don’t you leave now, Weaver?”

Weaver glanced over his shoulder.

“I don’t think …”

Stone hit him with his open palm, square in the chest. Weaver reeled, arms flailing, and stumbled through the silo door, landing in the wet soil. Yuan woke, startled by the commotion.

Gasping, Weaver scrambled to his feet. Stone stepped into the pouring rain and grabbed hold of him.

“You shouldn’t have recognised me.”

“I wouldn’t have done anything about it.”

“You would’ve sold that bit of information. I could’ve dropped you in Batesville but I spared you, Weaver. Don’t make me regret that.”

“What gives you the right over life and death?”

Stone shoved him away.

“Get the fuck out of here.”

“You think you’re this self-appointed judge of the wasteland,” shouted Weaver. “But you’re not. There’s nothing good about you, Stone, you’re trash. You would have killed those people back there just so you can get to where you’re going.”

Yuan and Cali looked on, silent.

“You’re right,” said Stone. “But I didn’t have to.”

“Only because you didn’t have any bullets.” Weaver was drenched. “That’s the only reason you spared them.”

“We’ll never know.”

“I know. I saw it in your eyes. I saw that look.”

“You shouldn’t have messed with the gauge.”

Weaver widened his arms, bowed.

“Goodbye, Mr Cartwright.”

He trudged away.

“You can’t let him leave,” said Yuan. “Stone, make him come back.”

“Forget about him,” said Cali. “Asshole brought it on himself.”

“No,” said Yuan, and stamped into the rain-soaked field. “You didn’t abandon me. We can’t abandon him.”

She began to run after him.

“Last bottle,” said Cali.

He was still at the door of the silo. Weaver hadn’t gone far. He’d found a dry spot in one of the leaking barns and Yuan had followed him inside.

“Do you think I should go after them?”

“No,” said Cali.

Stone wandered back to the fire.

“Are you thinking about what Weaver said?”

The fire crackled.

“Guy’s an asshole with a big fucking ego that could do with getting stamped on. They’re all like him, you know.”

“Who?” asked Stone.

“Society of Souls. Always gotta see shit from another point of view. Sometimes things are just the way they are but those Society folk always gotta analyse and make life more complicated. That’s one fucked up faction, man.”

Stone gave her a wry smile.

“I wasn’t thinking about Weaver. I was thinking about Jeremiah.”

“He would’ve been impressed with how you handled it back there. You gave those people a chance.”

Stone said nothing.

“Don’t be coy, man. Uppers.” She snorted. “Anyone from up top, right? You know you could’ve turned it into a bloodbath but you showed compassion. That was cool.”

Stone waited for her to finish.

“Yeah, that’s it.” She washed her hands together. “All done with the praise.”

“How are your hands?”

The bottle hesitated at her swollen lips. “Painful. But thanks for asking.”

“You said Jeremiah was a major in the URA,” said Stone. “And that someone in New Washington betrayed him, right?”

“Yeah, they gave Pavla and Timo a list of the rangers he picked for this mission.”

“So what happens when we find this weapon? We have to think carefully about who we hand it over to.”

He locked eyes with her.

“If we hand it over.”

“But they need it. He told me the townships are pulling in different directions. This weapon will help unite them.”

She handed him the bottle.

“Did he tell you anything about the threat to New Washington?”

“No.”

“That troubles me.”

“Why?”

“What if there is no threat? What if this is all a play to obtain weapons from the past?”

“Hmm.”

“This is what I stopped, Cali. The League of Restoration armed with weapons of the Ancients. This is why they wanted me dead. I saw a missile in the sky, watched it shoot into Ennpithia. It was terrifying.”

“This ain’t the same, Stone. Jeremiah never had that vibe about him. He was, like, passionate, man, about saving lives.”

“OK,” said Stone, holding up his hand. “Let’s peg him as a man of truth. We still don’t know who we can trust in New Washington. We don’t know if we can trust any of them.”

“I thought you were going to help me steal it?”

“I am.”

“So what are you talking about?” She twisted her mouth. “Are you going to destroy it?”

“Is arming a township we know nothing about with a weapon we know nothing about a good idea?”

She chewed over his words. “A lot of soldiers are dead, Stone. They were fighting for something, like you do.”

“What do you think the weapon is?”

“What the fuck do I know about weapons of the Ancients? I’m a Kiven girl, man, blades and slingshots.”

“You know drawings.” He showed her the piece of paper of the night sky. “What do you make of it?”

Cali was silent for a moment.

“It resembles the sky, all the streaks and the stars, but that doesn’t make any sense. The night sky ain’t a weapon. So I reckon it’s a code, a code for something else.”

Stone nodded.

“Did Jeremiah talk much about New Washington?”

“A bit. It doesn’t sound that different to what we got here. Only …”

“Only what?”

“I guess it did sound better. More kinda organised. He said something once. What was it? Yeah, New Washington is … all about rebuilding our nation from the ground up.”

“Our nation?”

“Yeah, that’s what he called it.”

Stone took out the map.

“You said to me I was looking in the wrong place on this and I think you’re right.”

She shuffled around the fire, beside him.

“I think the Map Maker was wrong.”

“The Map Maker? That dude you ripped off?”

“Yeah, that dude I ripped off. But he put us here, on this land mass. In a land called Spain. He believed Spain was the Ancients word for Gallen.”

“Do you miss him?”

“No.”

“I think you do.”

Stone said nothing more and continued to examine the old map in the flickering flames.

“All the learning gets unlearnt. Jeremiah told me that. People forget and sometimes they want to forget, because the stuff is bad, it needs forgetting. That’s how he put it, anyway. He was cool for an old dude.”

She looked at him.

“A bit like you.”

“Old?”

She elbowed him, let out a stuttering laugh.

“This was how it all looked.” She stopped, awed by her own words, allowing the gravity of them to settle. “But I told him there ain’t any Kiven on there and he told me Kiven is a second-world name. That the first-world name for Kiven is Kansas. So I ain’t no Kiven girl, Stone, I’m a Kansas bitch.” She laughed. “Who the fuck cares?”

Stone pointed at the map.

“He might be right because Kansas is on here, and the fifty-five, and the city of Batesville. It’s all here.”

She leaned against him, tired, wanting only to listen.

“Kansas City,” he said. “Which puts the Place of Bridges roughly here, along this strip, I reckon. Touron, Ennpithia’s capital, would be about … here, Dallas. But then Ennpithia reformed and Touron is built on grass.”

“No more Dallas?”

“No more Dallas,” he said.

“Good, I like the name Touron better,” she muttered, yawning.

He guessed at more names, picking first-world cities and pairing them with second-world equivalents, ticking off Brix and Mosscar, Winshead and Great Onglee.

“But if this map is right,” he said. “Then we’re a long way from New Washington.”

Cali heard the glumness in his voice. She sat up, rubbed her eyes and looked at the map.

“Oh, fuck,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“That’s a long way to travel.”

“And Washington, or New Washington, takes me even further from Nuria.”

He folded the map.

“But what part of this is Gallen? There’s land where I know there’s sea because I crossed the damn thing.”

“Maybe the land fell away like on the West Coast?”

Stone pinched the bridge of his nose.

“My father told me our tribe travelled for years before settling in the deserts of Gallen.”

“Jeremiah was a bit obsessed with that map. Don’t go the same way. Does it really matter what places are called?”

“No, but we can’t get anywhere unless we know exactly where we are.”

Cali dismissed the comment.

“Talk to me about Nuria. Not maps.”

Stone said nothing.

“You ain’t dodging me.”

He picked up the whiskey bottle, sloshed around the last of the copper-coloured drink.

“C’mon, man, what’s she like?”

He drank, wiped his mouth.

“She makes everything mean something. That’s what she’s like.”

“Yeah, I get that.”

“Get some sleep. You’ve had a rough day.”

“Ain’t nothing truer than that.”

He waited for her to settle but she didn’t budge. She stared at the adhesive covering his head wound, the scar down his face.

“Why’d you do what you do? Most dudes work, get drunk, whore around. Why’d you risk everything?”

“Why’d you draw?”

“I couldn’t imagine not doing it. That bastard almost fucked up my hands but it ain’t gonna stop me.” She sighed. “My biggest fear is running out of stuff to draw with or finding stuff to draw on.”

“There’s your answer.”

“That ain’t the same thing and you know it. When I draw I’m creating something. You’re taking lives and shit.”

“That’s the best answer I have.”

“You mean the only one you’re gonna give, right?

He half-smiled

“You know, I was raised by my Grandma,” said Cali. “Did I tell you? I never knew my old man. My mum is just a hazy memory. My Grandma told me that California was sunny all the time. I doubt it. Probably just a big shit heap like Kiven, or Kansas, or whatever the fuck it’s called. World got to falling away. They had to come east. They all did. Grandma used to say she could close her eyes and hear the sea. She was a star. I still think of her. Always in our kitchen, poky slum kitchen. I’d come home when shit had gone wrong, bitchin’ about this and that, and she’d put me on a stool with a pot of vegetables and told me to get to it. That was her answer to everything. Peeling and chopping.”

Her eyes were glazed, tiredness or memories, or both.

“I wish I’d known my folks.”

She reached into her coat, tugged out a knitted doll.

“Where’d you get that?”

“I lifted it from Weaver’s place. Once a thief, right? It was with the tin. I wonder who Pavla killed for it.”

Stone watched her closely. He could see the hurt in her eyes.

“My sister had one of those,” he said. “Or something similar.”

“She dead a long time?”

He poked at the fire. “I was eight when she was killed. She was a year younger. I trick myself into thinking I can remember her face … but that’s all it is … a trick.”

Cali patted his arm, clutched the doll, and drifted asleep.