Relapse (Breakers Book 7) Page 6

"That sounds more like the way to be dethroned."

  By the end of the week, Tina came to her with a list of names assigned to the planting of farms, the repairing of boats, and so on. There had been some grumbling, but according to her, most people understood what was needed of them and were happy to be put to use.

  This was all well and good. As for Raina, she wanted nothing but to return to the field and slash at whatever extremities Anson's soldiers left exposed.

  Two days later, she got her chance. The scouts reported that a small contingent of the People of the Stars' soldiers had ridden south. Where they were headed was unknown, but they appeared to be equipped for a trip of perhaps a week. They had taken the coastal highway in broad daylight, proudly. Henna believed they would return along the same route.

  Raina intended to ambush them miles south of Long Beach where the noise of combat would not be a factor. To that end, she stocked her team with those best versed in guns, especially long rifles. They would sail to Huntington Beach and head south on foot while the sloop attempted to track Anson's warriors along the coast.

  They had everything in place by late afternoon. To kill time before the crossing that night, Raina retired to her chambers for a nap. She was just drifting off when an insistent knock jolted her awake.

  The man at the door was Wilson Gates. He was stocky and he shaved his head to the scalp. The quantity of dark hair on his arms balanced this. He was a forceful man, and though he used some of his strong shoulders to bear his large ego, he carried an even larger thirst for the truth. This was why Raina had appointed him sheriff of Catalina.

  "Is it true?" he said.

  "That you are in the habit of asking me questions I can't possibly answer?"

  "Word on the street is you and your merry band are heading back to the city to take another whack at Anson's people."

  "He's our enemy," she said. "He has earned what will befall him."

  "I'd love to walk out of this room and find his head on a pike," Wilson said. "But you're not after him, are you? Just his grunts."

  "This is how we will get to him. We cut him until he is too weak to fight back."

  "Oh, I get the idea. And it's wonderful—but you're not going on the mission. Or any others."

  5

  "Straight through the heart. Hell of a shot." Lowell braced his knee and rose from the body with the arrow sprouting from its chest. He met eyes with the trooper, whose white cape was dirt-streaked and leaf-studded. "You lost them?"

  The man pursed his lips. "We're still searching. We think they crossed the road, then doubled back to the coast to wherever they left their boat."

  "Calm down. I'm not about to put one in the back of your head. What I'm asking is if you know where they went."

  "Not at the moment. But like I said—"

  Lowell turned from him and crunched through the gravel of the shoulder to the road. He crossed to the woods where the riders had supposedly cornered the primitives. In their search for the escaped enemy, the whitecoats had torn up the ground pretty bad, but a shot that precise had to have been close range. He gazed across the pines and magnolias, stopping when he spotted the snarl of red-flowered bougainvillea.

  Several of its thorns were snapped. He touched them at the break. Still wet. Footprints in the dirt—shallow, but visible. He poked around a minute longer. Finding nothing, he moved back across the road and walked a wide semi-circle around the body.

  Uphill, angry voices argued back and forth. Lowell shut them out of his mind, sweeping in wider and wider arcs. Thirty feet uphill from the body, he found half a shoe print in the damp earth. The toe wasn't pointed south or east, toward the coast, but west-northwest. Deeper into the hills.

  Hurried though they must have been, they'd done a good job hiding their trail. Following them was slow work. He had to backtrack more than once. They had stuck to the woods, though, and he was able to trace their path for hundreds of yards.

  The tracks led to a road winding through a quiet, desolate neighborhood. The asphalt was dirty and leaf-strewn but not enough to show him a new trail. While watching the whole scene, he shifted his gaze from window to window, hoping that, if they'd holed up here, one would be dumb enough to spook if he appeared to look right at them.

  He had no such luck. He knew better than to think they'd stopped here, anyway. When you slipped through the barricade, you didn't stop at the next gas station for a snack.

  Because he was already there, he walked a circuit around the neighborhood, eyes sharp for tracks, blood, discarded gear, fresh damage to fences. He didn't see any of that. But as he moved past a Victorian with a collapsed roof, he saw something else: an eight-foot diameter concrete tube half sunk into the earth and running up to the wooded hills.

  * * *

  "Let me guess," Anson said. "She slipped away. Again."

  "We need dogs," Lowell said. He was on the stage Anson's double had been parading around on during the opening ceremonies. Most of the merchants and citizens had scattered during the gunplay, but a few were down in the street and he didn't like how the stage presented him to them.

  "Dogs?"

  "For tracking. Like Abyss uses."

  The blond man furrowed his brow, giving it two seconds of thought. "No. Can't do it. Terrible PR."

  "Who gives a shit about PR? This is warfare."

  "PR is warfare. I'm talking about men with rifles and sunglasses leading a pack of baying beagles. Do you know what that evokes? American slavery. Escaped convicts. Using animals to chase people down makes you look like a monster."

  "So you say they're rescue dogs. Dress them in bandanas." Lowell scowled. "Why am I coming up with this shit? Maintaining your status as Golden Boy is your job."

  Anson narrowed his eyes. "Forget image a moment. Think logistics. How would we find and train the dogs?"

  "Get Burleigh to do it. She and her husband are crazy about dogs. Or save yourself some time and hire someone away from Abyss."

  The big man laughed. "We won't be trying that. When our arrangement with Liss lapsed, the entire relationship fell apart. Last time I sent someone up there, they sent his head back in a basket."

  "A basket?"

  "I know, right? It's like somebody made too many trips to Medieval Times. Listen, what is all this dog talk? Why dogs? What's the core problem that requires dogs to solve?"

  "The core problem," Lowell said, "is they know this land better than we do."

  "Is that all? That problem solves itself. The longer we stay here, the better we come to understand it."

  "I don't think you need me to spell this out for you. The further you expand your borders, Mr. Caesar, the more frontier you have to protect. Suckering the girl here and offering her your stunt double was a nice trick. But it didn't work."

  Anson swore and gazed up at the brown ridges surrounding the market. "Do we know what happened with that yet?"

  Lowell got out his hanky and dabbed sweat from his temples and neck. "By all accounts, they had more than enough time to take a shot. That they didn't? Well, to me, that says they'd figured it wasn't really you on that stage."

  "Now how did they figure that out? Leon's built just like me. He spent all week practicing and all morning in makeup. Do they have spies here?"

  "I'll look into it. Maybe it's like they say—the girl's got magical ESP powers."

  "Don't even start with that." From the base of the stage, someone called Anson's name. He glanced their way and held up one finger. "Let's get back on track. What do you see coming next?"

  "Could be she's gearing up for a rematch. That, I'm not worried about. If her army marches on San Pedro, we pull out, regroup in the city or at the Heart, and then it's a numbers game. Which we'll win. It would make her look like the aggressor, too. She'll erode her support and strengthen ours." Lowell glanced down at the market. Whitecoats had moved in to secure the area and people were trickling back in. "But if I were her, if I'm safe on that island and I know this land better than my enemy, I get asymm
etrical. You've cleared out the gangs, your rivals. You own everything between Malibu and Long Beach. And there's your weakness: you can't possibly protect all that territory from a mobile, knowledgeable enemy who doesn't have to worry about protecting any resources of their own."

  "So how do we stop them?"

  "Emperors have grappled with this for five thousand years. They've only come up with two lasting solutions to occupied populations: eliminate or assimilate."

  "Neither of which will work. That bitch will never knuckle under. And if we were in position to eliminate them, we wouldn't be having this chat. What else is there?"

  "I have a radical suggestion," Lowell said. "Leave her alone."

  "Can't do that."

  "Can't? Or won't?"

  Anson sputtered with laughter. "These people worship the moon. Raina, she makes decisions by consulting the bones of the enemies she's slain. And she's bent on vengeance. Do you think it's a good idea to leave someone like that free to attack our people whenever she pleases?"

  Lowell folded his arms. "So you can't trust her because you've hurt her too bad for her to forgive you."

  The blond man's laughter died in his throat. Cheeks reddening, he leaned close. "I had no choice. If I hadn't done what the aliens wanted, they would have come for us instead. I'm not Attila the Hun. I'm not shedding blood because I like to see it flow. Every life, it weighs on me. Some mornings, it's all I can do to stand up. I lie there and I think, 'If this is all that's left, maybe it's not worth it.'"

  The man at the base of the stage called Anson's name again. He leaned back, blinking. "Be right there, Gene!" He smiled at the other man, then swung to face Lowell. "Questioning things that can't be undone isn't helping anyone. You want to save lives, figure out what to do about the guerrillas. Okay?"

  Anson smacked him on the shoulder, bobbed his head, and jogged off to meet Gene.

  Lowell got out a stick of gum. He scraped away the pieces of wrapper that stuck to it and considered the brown ridges of the market below. People laughed and chatted. A few gossiped about the morning's attack, but for the most part, you could pretend nothing had happened at all.

  In his experience, most people preferred it that way.

  * * *

  Over the next ten days, he established a rapid response system. It was crude, but these days, what wasn't? He distributed squads of the Sworn across the city and equipped them with trumpets and flares. There weren't enough horses to go around, so they stole a page from the barbarians and kitted the rest with bicycles. In event of intrusion, the team that spotted it would either send out a rider for reinforcements, or signal with the horns and/or flares. The interceptors would then shadow the islanders until enough troops arrived to effectively engage.

  The main problem was the coastline. There was about forty miles of it between Malibu and Long Beach. You could watch it during the day, but after sundown, it became as permeable as a cotton shirt. Additionally, there was nothing to stop the enemy from making landfall beyond the People of the Stars' territory and penetrating inland. You'd have to be delusional to think you could keep them out.

  Lowell wasn't too worried about that. He didn't stress as much to Anson, but his strategy wasn't about stopping the enemy from doing any damage. Oh, he'd minimize it best he could. But minimizing damage would never put a stop to it.

  That would have to be accomplished through other means.

  "Quietly, we've offered peace," he told his squad leaders. "They don't want anything to do with it. Do you understand what that means?"

  "They're coming for us?" Edgar said.

  "It means they've been given the chance to end this. But they would rather come for your lives. For the lives of the people you're sworn to protect. Do you know what that means?"

  "That we have to stop them?"

  "That there's no room for mercy. If you want to save the lives of your friends and people, we have to hurt the Lunatics so bad that they can't stand to come back."

  With a hunch that the barbarians would focus most of their attention on their former home, Lowell stuck around the southlands, moving from patrol to patrol. There was no sign of further intrusion. He knew it wouldn't last: after the failed assassination, the enemy would be revising their strategy, putting things in motion for a longer campaign. A mood of light tension hung in the air. As the season deepened, the days stayed warm, but the nights got colder. Each morning, thick, seaborne dew gleamed from the filthy cars and the carpets of ice plant that had taken over the dead lawns.

  Two weeks out from the shootings at the Dunemarket, and eleven days after the first patrols had begun their rounds, Edgar told him there'd been reports of strangers roaming the coast south of Huntington. Lowell gave him the okay to take four men and check it out.

  Three days later, they hadn't come back. Lowell geared up and rode east. Along the Long Beach docks, masts thrust from the water like pine snags. The salt flats at the inlet in Seal Beach marked the official border of their territory. Trotting down PCH, the blue body of Catalina was visible wherever he had sight of the ocean.

  By noon, as he walked his horse along the straight, miles-long beach at Huntington, he spotted something white on the sea far to the south. Through his binoculars, it appeared to be a sail. He spurred his horse into a ground-eating trot.

  Green hills marched down to meet the coast. Waves swirled and foamed around craggy black rocks jutting from the water hundreds of feet from the sands. Near the southern tip of Laguna Beach, the highway spanned a lively creek. He stopped to water his horse and stretch his legs.

  Smelling the brackish waters of the creek's mouth, he led the horse along the shrub-choked banks. Palms flapped on both sides of the waterway. After a few hundred feet, he found a break in the shrubs and brought his horse to the water. The creek was forty feet wide and no more than four or five at its deepest. Lowell stripped off his shirt and washed up.

  Finished, he leaned back. The wind was cold on his damp skin but the sun was high and warm. Upstream, something white billowed in the shallows. Cloth of some kind. Not only was it white, it was bright white. Clean.

  He stood and got his rifle from the saddle. He scanned both banks, then moved upstream to where the white cloth flapped in the water, snagged on a thorn. It was the size of a blanket and thick enough to keep you warm.

  Rifle in hand, he continued up the banks. Water sluiced over rocks. Palm fronds ruffled. Bugs whirred. Around the next bend, four bodies sprawled in the grass, white capes stained by blood.

  One of the Sworn—Michael, his name had been—was lying on his back with his right arm stuck up, hand bent at his wrist. Lowell got his gloves from his back pocket. When he gave the arm a nudge, the whole body rocked. Stiff as pinewood. They'd been dead at least four, six hours, but less than a day.

  The wounds were bullet holes. Blankets and pans and packs lay on the ground. The men were all wearing boots. No campfire—they'd been too smart for that, at least—but they'd been attacked after breakfast, before they'd had the chance to pack up and roll out.

  Horseshoes had left clear gouges up the slope. These followed the creek to the highway and disappeared. He went back to the camp site to check the bodies for anything valuable, or meaningful to their families. Near the waterline, there was a gap in the weeds. Many of the plants had sprung back, but others were flattened. He wasn't sure how he'd missed it the first time, but that was how it worked: you got so busy taking in the big picture you missed the brush strokes in the margins.

  The trail through the grass was about a foot and a half wide. Dark, dried fluid blotted the soil. The path of broken weeds followed the angled bank to where the ground flattened out, shaded by a grove of knotty-barked trees with orange flowers shaped like anemones.

  The body was curled over the roots of the nearest tree. Edgar. He had been shot once in the ribs and once in the gut. The blood around his ribs was streaked pink. The blood from his gut was much richer, chocolatey. The air smelled like copper and fresh decay. Lowell
sniffed, then stepped back and spat.

  Edgar groaned and turned on his back, eyes fluttering. Lowell's blood went electric. The young man's eyes flared wide, rolling like a horse's.

  His jaw dropped. "Lowell."

  "Jesus, I thought you were dead." Lowell dropped his rifle and his pack and got out his first aid bundle. "What happened?"

  "Help me. Lowell, I'm dying, you have to help me."

  "You're going to be just fine. Okay?"

  "They shot me, Lowell. They shot everyone."

  "You're fine, do you understand?" He got out his scissors and kneeled beside Edgar and began to cut his shirt away. "Don't look at this. Tell me what happened."

  Edgar grasped at his shirt. "The others. Are any of them alive?"

  "You don't need to worry about them."

  "They're dead, aren't they? I pretended to be dead, too. Even after they shot me the second time."

  Lowell pulled Edgar's shirt back. The wounds looked about like he'd expected them to. "They're dead. You're not. If you want to get out of this, tell me everything that happened."

  "What will that change?"

  He slopped alcohol onto a wad of cotton. "It'll take your mind off this."

  He swabbed the wound on Edgar's ribs. Edgar's whole body went taut, cords standing out on his neck. "Oh God!"

  "What happened to you, Edgar?"

  "It was dawn. We'd been bitching about cold food, arguing about a fire. They were waiting on us, out in the darkness. Without a word, they started shooting. Jarrod was dead like that."

  "Who was it? The Lunatics?"

  Edgar nodded, then squeezed his eyes shut. "I recognized one of them from the battle. The big one. She had the sides of her head shaved like a woman from a video game. Can't have been twenty. She put an arrow in Josh's eye like he was a diseased dog."

  "And then what?"

  "And then nothing. Everyone was dead. They knew we were here, Lowell. How?"

  "That's what I'm here to figure out." He finished cleaning the first wound and speared an arm under Edgar's back, leveraging him up while he wrapped a bandage around his chest. "You were out here for three days. Why so long? Where were you before today?"