4 – Scavs
Ward arched an eyebrow at Grace’s sudden outburst. “Huh?”
“Go! East! Keep moving. Come on, run!” She started ahead of him, and Ward, straining to hear what had bothered her, started jogging. He felt surprisingly good, much better than he had the last time he’d exercised. His ankles and knees were pain-free. His lower back didn’t protest. And, despite them having been hiking for quite a few minutes in the steady light of twin suns, he didn’t feel overly taxed.
“I feel pretty good.”
“I know you do! I healed all your old injuries. Come on, Ward! We don’t want those scavs to catch us. Even on Cinder, they probably have some mana control.”
“Scavs?”
“Scavengers! Come on, sharpen up, old man!” She leaped over a fallen trunk four feet high. Ward didn’t think he could clear it, so he slowed and used a hand to vault it.
“What the hell are they scavenging out here?” He gestured to the expanse of ashes and burned trees.
“There were cities and towns out here that got burned when the fire passed. They’ll dig for the basements and cellars, looking for old treasures.”
“Don’t the people who fled the flames come back?”
“Some, but let's be real, they’d have to circle the globe. Most just move ahead of the flames enough to live in peace for a few decades.” She slowed down, sighed heavily, and shrugged her shoulders, turning to look at him with a funny expression. She wore half a smile, and yet her eyes looked at him with sympathy. “Oh damn, I’m sorry, Ward.”
“What?”
“Well, I’d hoped I’d have some time to introduce you to Cinder a little slower and maybe let you meet some friendly folk. Looks like it’s out of the frying pan and into the fire for you. Those scavs are running this way, and they’re moving a lot faster than you can. Maybe they won’t kill you. Maybe they’ll just rob you—”
“Nah, hell with that,” Ward growled, yanking his .357 out of his holster. “How many?”
“Three, but Ward . . .”
She trailed off as, hooting and yowling, sounding much like a pack of wild dogs, three tall, loping figures crested the top of the slope where Ward and Grace had been chatting. They were each well over six feet tall with long, wiry limbs jutting out of weird apparel that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Star Wars set. At this distance, Ward couldn’t make them out clearly, but he thought it looked like they had animal snouts and high, pointed ears; they almost looked half dog and half person. They caught sight of him and howled with greater fervor and began loping down the slope, rapidly approaching.
Ward barked his old go-to phrase, lifting his gun. “Get on the ground!”
The scavs carried packs on their backs, satchels over their shoulders, belts, and bandoliers laden with knives and, if he weren’t mistaken, pistols. When he hollered for them to get on the ground, he saw them grab hold of those knives and guns, and Ward didn’t hesitate; he squeezed the trigger.
Back in Afghanistan, some of Ward’s buddies in the Marines accused him of having ice in his veins. He never got rattled during an engagement. No, Ward saved that for later. When he’d gotten home from his deployment, he’d spent many nights waking up in cold sweats, images from the war fresh in his mind. Once he’d been hired onto the force, the department had probably shelled out double his salary to the various shrinks that had served his unit over the years. He went in voluntarily and also on the captain’s orders after his many violent encounters with felons.
All that said, when his first shot dropped the scav in the lead, sending him careening head over heels through the ash and tumbling down the hill, he didn’t flinch when the others returned fire. Their guns barked loudly, sending clouds of black smoke into the air with each shot, and Ward heard their bullets snap through the air nearby, kicking up clouds of ash and dirt and splintering into a burned-out tree he stood beside. Nonetheless, he held steady. He took aim, and he blasted. The S&W barked in his hand, and the scav on the left, now only fifteen yards away, cried out and grabbed at its throat, dropping its pistol.
Ward couldn’t help thinking of the scav as “it.” They looked like bipedal dogs wearing clothes, and he couldn’t tell if they were males or females or something else altogether. As the scav tried in vain to hold the blood inside its body, it fell to its rump with a sad, almost pathetic whimper. The other scav, the last one, dropped its gun and stooped low, looking up at Ward in much the way a dog might if you caught it pissing on the rug, a look of guilt and surrender in its eyes. “Please,” it begged in a surprisingly feminine, human-like voice. Before Ward could come to grips with that, it struck him that it spoke English.
“Get on the ground,” he growled, defaulting to old habits again as his mind whirled. To his delight, the scav complied, laying on her chest, snout to the side, hands spread. Ward checked the other two and saw the one he’d first shot was lying in a heap, unmoving against a burned tree. The other, the one he’d shot through the neck, was lying on its side, panting in short quick breaths. Ward had a feeling he or she wasn’t long for this world.
“Well! That went better than I thought! I knew I liked how you handled those cultists.” Grace stepped out from behind a nearby tree and approached him. “You should just shoot this other one. You don’t want her to find you in the night and slit your throat.”
“Why the hell can I understand her?”
“Huh?” the scav asked. She was squeezing her eyes shut, but she peeled one open, a big, honey-colored orb wet with moisture, and rolled it in the socket to better look at Ward. “Did you ask me something?”
“She can understand you because you’re speaking her language. Well, I’m doing it for you. I told you I would help you, didn’t I?”
“You’re what?” Ward was very damn sure he was speaking English. He could feel his mouth moving and hear the words in his ears.
“Ward, you gotta get with it—”
“Sir, my brother, he’s dying!” The scav sounded desperate, and Ward had to take a beat to realize what an asshole he was being. The guy might look like he was part dog, and he might have been trying to kill him, but a man shouldn’t be so callous while another person was bleeding out in front of him.
“Can you help him?” he asked his prisoner.
“Yes!”
“Do it. Don’t try anything funny, or I’ll have to start shooting.”
“Oh, brother! What’s going on here, Ward?” Grace took two quick steps toward him, reached up, and flicked one of her pointy red nails against his earlobe. It felt like a wasp stung him.
“Ouch!” He slapped a hand to his ear and scowled at her. “What the hell?” The female scav who’d scurried over to kneel over her gasping, bleeding brother jerked her head up and narrowed her strange lupine eyes at him.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Ward! What are you going to do with these scavs? Suppose she saves the hurt one? Now you’ve got two people with vendettas against you loose in the world. Just finish them off!”
Ward whirled on Grace and growled, “I don’t do that kind of shit!”
“What? Come on, Ward! I saw you basically assassinate Lafferty and his crew—”
“That’s different. There were dead bodies around; they had you tied up in a circle—”
“Not me—”
“And they came at me with knives!” Ward waved off Grace’s objection, and in the process, he let his gaze fall on the scav and saw she was staring at him with wide yellow-brown eyes and an open mouth from which hung a pink tongue.
She ran that long tongue over her snout and sniffed. “Are you okay? You’re not talking to me, are you?”
“Now you’ve done it,” Grace sighed. “Pretty soon, everyone on Cinder’s gonna be talking about the raving lunatic in the burn belt.”
“Can it, Grace.” Ward sighed and shook his head, then walked over to the scav. “He gonna make it?”
“No.” She made a faint whimpering sound, and Ward almost reached down to stroke her furry head between the ears. He stepped back, though, reminding himself that this was a person and she’d just been set on killing him.
“Look, I’m sorry about your loss, but you folks were aiming to kill me, right?”
“I suppose.” She sniffed and rubbed a hairy arm over her moist, black nostrils.
“Well, I’m gonna take one of your packs and all the guns, and then we’re going to walk in opposite directions. Understand?” He’d folded his arms over his chest, but he still held the .357, and he tapped it against his elbow, letting the metal clink as a reminder that he was in charge.
“The first reasonable thing you’ve said.” Grace walked around in a slow circle behind the scavenger, scrutinizing her. “Don’t forget about the knife on her belt.”
“You can keep your knife, but keep your hands away from it until we’re gone.”
“We?” The scavenger looked left and right, then scrutinized Ward, and, despite her canine appearance, he could read what she was thinking—he was nuts.
“Yeah,” he covered, “you and me. You can play with your knife all you want when we're both gone from here.” He looked past her to the crumpled corpse of the first scav he’d shot. “I’ll get his pack, but you need to come with me. I’m not going to turn my back on you. Got it?”
The scav whimpered as she stood up from her brother’s body, but she complied, and soon, maybe ten minutes later, Ward had a big backpack filled with random odds and ends, three big-barreled, breech-loading pistols, and a cloth sack full of brass cartridges. The bullets were long and wide, almost the size of a 410-shotgun shell, but unlike any caliber Ward was familiar with. Grace paced and muttered the whole time he’d been going through the scavs’ packs and weapons, clearly irritated with him and the mercy he’d shown.
When Ward shouldered the heavy canvas pack, he looked to the surviving scavenger and watched as she carried a stone over and set it beside her brother’s furry leg. “You’re gonna build a cairn over him?”
“Yes. I promise I won’t follow you after I finish.”
“Oh, come on, Ward!” Grace called from further down the slope.
“Right. Well, good luck.” Ward thought about it for a minute, and then he reached into the sack where he’d stuffed the pistols, took one out, and set it on a nearby stone. “I’ll leave a couple of bullets a bit further down.”
“Thank you, stranger. I’m Lizzy.”
“Ward.” He nodded to her, then turned and, after taking ten or fifteen steps, put two big brass bullets on a rock. He glanced back to see Lizzy watching him, and then he continued marching toward Grace’s distant, slender, black-clothed form. When he caught up to her, she was sitting on a flat stone beside which a tall, green sapling grew. It had tiny branches, and from them sprouted thousands of little V-shaped leaves.
“Take a seat.” She pointed to a stone next to her.
“We’re not going further?”
“Sure, we are, but not yet. We’ll wait for your girlfriend to leave, and then we’ll see if you can sense or, if luck is with us, even see mana.”
“What’s it got to do with her?”
Grace shifted, folding her legs under her, and then met Ward’s eyes with hers. She stared at him for a long moment. “When someone dies, their anima breaks up and drifts out of their bodies as mana. If you leave a body alone long enough, the mana will disburse into the universe, but there’s a little time when the mana lingers, and that’s when people with the right talent can see it. Some lucky ones can even gather it up into themselves. We’ll see if you’re one of those people.”
“You think I am?”
“I have a sneaking suspicion, but I’ve been wrong before.”
Ward grunted and sat down on the rock she’d pointed to. “What if Lizzy takes it?”
“The mana? No chance. There wasn’t a trace of talent in those three, which was damn lucky, by the way, Ward. You could have run into far worse!” She yawned and stretched her legs, laying back with her fingers entwined behind her head, supporting it. “Now, just relax a while and wait for that little scav to wander off, and we’ll see what’s what.”
Ward grunted, only partially listening to her. He’d shifted the pack around in front of him and was digging out a strange item he’d seen. When he found it, he held it up—a plate of copper-colored metal about the size of a tablet. In fact, it was the reason he’d grabbed it and stuffed it into the pack; it had reminded him of his iPad. The metallic backing was tarnished with green and blue, but the front was glass, and he thought he could see a sheen of iridescent liquid behind it. “The hell is this thing?”
“What?” Grace opened her eyes and peered over at him. “Oh, probably junk. I’d toss it.”
Ward ignored her and continued to study the thing. On the front, in the lower left corner, a slight depression in the metal casing caught his eye. Tiny flecks of rust or something like it stained the metal there. Ward flaked the stuff away with his thumbnail, and when he held his nail up to the light, he knew exactly what it was. “Blood,” he grunted.
“Seriously, Ward, quit wasting your time. Scavs don’t generally carry good equipment.”
Again, Ward ignored her, but not so much that he didn’t realize she didn’t want him looking at the object in his hands. He pressed his thumb into the indentation—nothing happened. He could hear Grace shifting, moving off the stone, and stepping quietly toward him. His mind fixated on the blood, and, feeling rushed, he picked up one of the knives he’d taken from the scavs, carefully notching a tiny cut into the side of his pinky.
Suddenly, Grace was beside him, hissing into his ear, “What are you doing, Ward? Quit wasting time. Are you trying to get infected?”
“Relax,” Ward grunted, then he touched the droplet of blood on his pinky into the little depression on the tablet. Grace hissed, and he could hear the frustration in her tone, but she stomped away just as the weird liquid behind the glass started to shift and form strange patterns. Ward stared, fascinated, as the undeniable lines of letters and numerals began to form, solidifying into a little table:
Bloodline: Basic Human (h) Accumulated Mana: 2 Mana Sensitivity: Bronze Mana Pathways: Tin Vessel Capacity: Tin Vessel Durability: h + 0 Vessel Strength: h + 0 Vessel Speed: h + 0 Longevity Remaining: ~40% Anima: NIL
“Um, Grace? What the hell is all this?”