Men of Truth (The Wasteland Soldier #4)

Stone asked her what had happened, and where she’d come from, but the girl had no voice.

Her lips parted, breath escaped, but there were no words. The pickup rattled along the highway and Stone drove in the ruts made by the Triple Death convoy. He was thinking Yuan had covered a hell of a distance. He glanced at her. She was staring through the windshield, still holding onto his coat, and he saw pain in her dark young eyes. He was patient enough to wait. He thought of hot food and hot coffee. He was always hungry after a killing. And filled with other desires, too, but it had been a long time since any of those had been satisfied and there was no one here he wanted to be close to.

There were only enemies and victims in Kiven.

He wondered where that left Cali. She was hardly a victim but he couldn’t quite stack her up as an enemy. She was untrustworthy and he was pissed at cleaning up her mess. He couldn’t read her very well, either, and wondered if that frustrated him more. She was leaning against the truck door, arms folded, sullen looking. Her head dipped forward at short intervals as she half-dozed. The pickup bounced over a pothole and she jolted sharply in her seat, drooping eyelids snapping open. She matched his gaze with a hateful look. His words had hit harder than any slap.

She hadn’t danced since she’d met him and she hadn’t really smiled much and he hadn’t heard her laugh. She hadn’t painted her cheeks or her lips or her eyes and he tried not to reflect on those things but there was little else to do as the snow-covered asphalt stretched into the distance.

Faint light creased the horizon and the land gaped as the truck motored across a bridge, its metal crash barriers rusted but intact.

He looked at Yuan, wondering if she was ever going to talk, and looked at Cali, realising he’d made it so she never would.

He let out a deep sigh.

“Cali.”

“What?”

“You alright?”

“Like you care, cocksucker.”

“I didn’t mean what I said back there.”

“Ah, you meant it, man. I saw it in those dead eyes of yours. I know you wish I was lying on the floor of that refuge, my guts ripped open, all those beaky-faced women gloating that I got what was coming me. Ain’t that right? You’re no different to them. You think life is shit, life is hard. Fuck, no. Life’s what you make it, man. You feel me? Life’s whatever the fuck you make it.”

Cali saw Yuan nodding and turned on her. “What the fuck do you know about anything?”

Her fist punched the door. Yuan shrank closer to Stone.

“You don’t know how to talk to people,” she continued. “Especially me. That’s your problem, Stone.”

He said, “I wish I could’ve saved Jeremiah. Is that enough talk for you?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. But you still wish I was dead, ain’t that the damn truth?”

“I’m glad I saved one of you.”

“Sure.”

“Not that you needed saving.”

She paused. “Got that right.”

“I’ll still help you get to Silver Road.”

“Sure.”

“Not that you need an escort.”

She paused, again. “I don’t, but you can tag along.”

“That’s settled then.”

Her lips found a grudging smile.

“Ain’t no thing, old man. I know you were just being hot-headed. Maybe you know how to talk after all.”

Stone nodded. “Sure.”

Yuan looked at him. “What’s Silver Road?”

He was relieved to hear her voice. He’d seen violence turn victims mute. Before he could ask her anything, Cali began to talk. She spoke with enthusiasm. It was a place of hope and new beginnings. The words didn’t belong to her. She hadn’t been there. Stone drew parallels. In the summer, he’d urged Nuria and the Map Maker across the Metal Sea to find the promised land of Ennpithia. Only now his companions were scattered, possibly forever. Silver Road was reminiscent of the dream he’d been sold. But where the Ennpithians were dogged by endless laws only one law existed in the second-world town.

“You take nothing from your neighbour,” said Cali.

Yuan nodded.

“Nothing.”

Stone remembered his father saying the same thing when he was four or five years old.

A lifetime ago.

“You never take anything from your neighbour.”

He couldn’t remember his father’s face or touch; only those words, and a blurred image of a hacked body.

“Not money,” Cali was saying. “Not sex, not possessions, not even life; you take nothing. That’s the only law down in Silver Road. One law. That’s why the place rocks, you know?”

The story might have belonged to Jeremiah or someone Jeremiah had met but the ownership was unimportant. Yuan was attentive like a younger sibling, glassy-eyed and dazzled, despite being several years older. The faraway place formed and it was a picture of beauty, freedom.

“How far to your people, Yuan?” he asked.

“We’re close. A few more miles. We need to come off the highway.”

“You rode a long way.”

She half-smiled. Cali had smoothed out the wrinkles. Now the girl was talkative.

“I cycled for hours. My legs are still aching. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“How many people are there?”

“Between two and three hundred. I’m not sure exactly.”

“Do you have lookouts?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“Booby traps? Explosives?”

“What?”

“Guns? Do you have any guns? Or long ranged weapons?”

The girl didn’t answer.

Stone spotted an exit ahead. There was a rusted metal sign: EXT 246. He stopped the pickup.

“The tracks go off here,” he said. “What defences does your community have?”

“Why are you asking all these questions?”

Cali groaned. “’Cause we’re driving the truck that was chasing you down. Some fool might be hiding behind a tree ready to open up on us.”

Dawn light unpicked the gloom. Stone killed the engine and turned in his seat, the worn vinyl creaking. “Tell us exactly what happened last night. We need to know everything before we turn off.”

Yuan rubbed her hands against her thighs.

“Deshi put me on a bicycle and told me to get away. I lost my cousin, Suyin, five months ago. She disappeared into the city. He thought it might happen to me. People vanish from time to time and they never come back. Deshi didn’t want to lose me. We’re only a small community. We really can’t protect ourselves. There are other communities scattered through the city but we never really have anything to do with them. Our people have been here for generations. We build on what we have. Things have been peaceful for a long time. But it’s changing. We can see it. The older ones refuse to. Deshi is different. He’s older but he knows things are becoming dangerous.”

She chewed her lip.

“He was supposed to be working late in his trailer but I was with him. The vehicles came off the highway like an angry storm. All noise and smell. It was terrible. Deshi’s trailer is on the far side of the compound. Everyone was outside … including his wife. She was holding their little girl. He wouldn’t let me leave through the front because his wife would’ve seen me. I told him I would hide but he was scared what might happen if the marauders searched the compound.”

She laughed.

“He was more afraid of his wife than the marauders. He smuggled me out the back window to where the bicycles are stored. We have fences but there are gaps here and there. He told me to cycle a few miles down the road and stay hidden. But I was in a terrible state. I was crying and I was cold and I kept pedalling. I don’t know what the men wanted with us. We don’t have much of anything.”

Cali glanced out the window.

“Just before I rode away I heard my father urging our people not to fight. He is an important man in our community. People listen to him. Maybe we listen to him too much. I know I do. He is a peaceful man. He refuses to fight. He always thinks things are going to be OK. When Suyin disappeared he argued that she’d run away and we shouldn’t go looking for her. Travis and a group of men had volunteered to do so. But my father stopped them from leaving. He said Suyin would come back. But she hasn’t and sometimes I watch him staring off into space, on the verge of tears. He knows he is wrong but he is too stubborn to admit it. My cousin didn’t run away. No one runs away. Why would they? There is nowhere to run to. There is our compound and the city and that is it. But that’s my father. He won’t believe bad things happen so no one searched for Suyin. He hides from it. He’s afraid … like I am … like we all are … because we’re not strong enough.”

“You killed a man,” said Stone. “You’re strong enough.”

“How does that make me strong?” She stared at her hands. “I was running away. I was so tired when they caught up with me. I kept thinking this is my punishment for sleeping with another woman’s man. That isn’t being strong.”

She studied his face; the long scar, the leathery skin, the haunted eyes.

“You’re strong.”

“I never had a choice.”

She let go of his coat for the first time and ran her fingers through her hair.

“There are no lookouts. Some of the men have weapons, a couple of handguns and Dennis has a bow for hunting wild animals. Travis has a rifle. He is a good shot. He practises with it all the time. He has been trying to organise a fighting group, a militia that can protect the compound. But my father keeps it from happening.”

“Have you ever seen these men kill anyone?”

She seemed shocked by the question. “No.”

Then these are the worse kind, thought Stone, men with weapons who would be nervous and unpredictable.

“Deshi said he would come looking for me.”

“That dude went back to his wife’s honey pot,” said Cali. “Forget about him, girl.”

Stone reached for the ignition but the engine didn’t fire. He tried it again, and again, and nothing.

“We walk,” he said. He headed for the rear of the truck. “Grab a weapon.”

He pulled on his pack and ammunition bag and picked up a submachine gun one of the Triple Death marauders had carried but never fired. It was lightweight and small in his large hands. Its black steel barrel was perforated, the wooden stock scratched and worn. There was a curved stick magazine that was fully loaded. He flicked off the safety and switched the weapon from full-auto to semi-auto.

He spat a few bullets at a line of trees, spraying bark. It was punchy and he nodded, impressed.

Cali helped herself to a slingshot carbine. She was a Kiven girl and it was a weapon she’d been around all her life. She discarded the first one, noting the sling was frayed and near to breaking, and the barrel looked gummed, and the trigger was loose and unresponsive. The second one she picked up was spotlessly clean and she realised it was probably the one Stone had been carrying. It didn’t matter. She filled her pockets with steel ball ammunition. Stone picked up a handgun, checked the magazine and passed it to her.

Yuan looked on wide-eyed in the keening wind as they distributed weapons and ammunition in such a matter-of-fact way. The tools they held would spill blood and take lives in the blink of an eye. Her father’s voice was in her head. She let out a deep sigh. Thin rays of sunlight touched her clean olive skin. She thought once more of the men who’d invaded her community and chased her along the highway and it angered her that no one, especially Deshi or her father, had protected her. Her father’s words had not saved her on the highway last night but Stone’s weapons had.

She reached onto the flatbed and took one of the triple-bladed knives. She hung it from her belt.

“What about the rest of it?” asked Cali.

“Leave it for now. We need to keep mobile.”

He glanced ruefully at the weapons and supplies being left behind but he had no plans to drag the sled into the city. Seconds wasted in ditching it to lift his gun might cost him his life.

He raised his scarf around his face and trudged ahead, one hand on the submachine gun hanging from his shoulder, eyes shifting left and right.

Wind drove against the three of them. A weak sun pushed through frayed looking clouds. Stone could hear the light jangle of steel balls in Cali’s pockets. The single lane road slanted from the highway and angled toward a crossroads. The left hand turn led to a tunnel beneath the highway but the supports for the bridge above had spider-webbed and the four-lane highway had imploded. A shower of asphalt, metal and concrete had speared the road below.

Yuan pointed at a rusted sign: BATESVILLE.

“It’s not far,” she said.

Stone read the name and took out his telescope. The landscape was wide open and cratered. Patches of brown showed where the snow was beginning to thaw. He saw ruined filling stations and truck stops with windows blasted out and signage curled and bubbled. He saw a rusted tanker on its side, the rig half-buried and frozen in the soil. He saw giant billboards corroded with the passage of time, discoloured imagery reflecting nothing in his existence. He saw flattened industrial estates with buckled chain-link fences and rusted cars melted into the asphalt of parking lots. He saw tarred poles and metal pylons collapsed or leaning at peculiar angles, cables swaying. He saw mangled satellite dishes atop scattered rooftops and a mass of buildings that bled into the horizon. There was a sapping emptiness to the city, a preserved stillness as if the thousands who had died centuries ago had passed only a few days earlier.

“There,” said Yuan.

But Stone already had his telescope trained on it. There were low brick buildings with reinforced doors and hangers with large metal shutters. There were trailers with curtained windows, panel trucks utilised as storehouses, sheds stacked with materials and long greenhouses dripping with condensation. There was even a freshly swept, oblong-shaped court with basketball hoops.

The compound lingered on the outskirts of the city. Hundreds of years ago it had converted from a multi-national business hub into a survivor’s community. The forefathers had owned houses and taken fishing trips and drank beer and shopped at the mall. They had been responsible for millions of parcels distributed through the air and across the sea. It was impossible to imagine how or why. Few here had ranged beyond the city limits and no one had seen anything in the sky except the clouds. In the age of the second-world the concept was laughable.

A black man was pushing a barrow of soil-smeared vegetables. A short-haired man in a cap was at the top of a ladder, unclogging guttering. A grey haired man with olive skin was leaning on a cane and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, sharing conversation with another man of a similar age. There was a burst of laughter from a hanger and a small group of grubby-faced women emerged, overalls and boots and tools. Two men with rifles looked across at them. One of them nudged the other.

Stone watched life unfold and painted Nuria across it, his thoughts momentarily clouded.

Get a grip, he told himself.

He passed the telescope to Yuan.

“Is that your people?”

She scoped the compound. The corners of her mouth curved upward.

“I can see my father, Shen.”

She beamed.

“He’s OK. Thank goodness he’s OK.”

“Who are the two idiots with rifles?”

She didn’t answer at once. “That’s Henry and Trevor. They’re good boys.”

He took the telescope from her. “They’re patrolling inside the compound. Not the gate or the fence. They’re idiots.”

The fence ringed the compound and was unguarded. They had used wooden poles, plastic pallets, metal spikes, crates, tyres, barrels and corrugated iron - anything that could be lashed together with rope and wire. Stone couldn’t see where Triple Death had breeched it. But if Shen was as weak as Yuan had described then perhaps he’d invited them in through the front gate.

He spotted a firebombed buggy, further down the road. It bore the markings of the drug gang.

He frowned. “Maybe your people know how to fight after all.”

“Not idiots then?”

“We’ll see.”

He swept the city of Batesville. It was wide open, deserted. He saw no movement anywhere.

“I cannot believe my people fought back,” said Yuan.

Stone glanced at her.

“Let’s get you home,” he said.