Nick had been feeling around with his hand in the soft dirt of the fresh grave. Now he stopped, and his expression was unreadable.
"Jack," he said. "There's another body under here."
Their mouths tight with the thought of what they might find, the two men heaved the wrapped body aside and dug with redoubled effort to uncover the second corpse,buried beneath the shrouded body of the shaven-headed raider. But it wasn't Lily who lay there; it was Garrick. His wrists and ankles had been bound tightly with wire. In his struggles, it had cut deeply into his skin, and his face and body showed signs of a savage beating. His eyes were wide with terror and his open mouth was filled with the dirt he'd breathed in as it was shovelled in on top of him.
"Jesus," Nick said. "I guess we know the kind of people we're dealing with."
"I guess we do." Jack's mouth was dry, and a cold fear gripped him. He looked at Nick and saw his own horror mirrored in the other man's face. "How long?" he finally said.
Nick rolled Garrick over to get a better look. "A day," he said, "maybe a day and a half. We're catching up."
"Good," Jack said. But he turned away and his eyes were dark with worry.
Nick quartered the area, looking for clues. The raiders had built a small fire in the clearing and there were marks of four bedrolls close by. Two more had been spread at the very edge of the clearing and next to them he spied a tuft of blue thread snagged on the bark at the base of a tree.
"Look at this," he called to Jack, pointing. "And see here?" A chunk of broken concrete poked out of the ground on the other side of the tree. A thin edge of rebar jutted out from it and the otherwise-rusted metal was polished smooth near the end, as if from rubbing. There were strands of rope fibre caught in the concrete and more of the blue woollen thread.
"She was here," Jack breathed, touching the bark of the tree. "She was alive."
"And trying to free herself."
"That's my girl." But he didn't smile. "Now let's go get her."
-OOO-
The trail continued nearly straight west. Near the remains of a collapsed church, the trail was joined by another set of tracks: a group of six more riders, coming up from the south. The group picked up speed now, moving more confidently and the two hunters also pushed hard, stopping only when it was too dark to see. They were getting closer. But Jack was worried.
"Day after tomorrow if the weather holds," he guessed, turning an eye skyward. They were sheltering in a tumble-down service station back among the trees just off the highway. The sky was clear and the night had turned cold, so they had risked a small fire. There had been no rain for several days and the dry wood burned clean and smokelessly. But there were clouds on the horizon. "We could get snow out of this," he said. "That might not be so bad. Rain would be a problem. If you're right about them, they'll turn north sooner or later. If we miss where they turn off, we could lose them entirely."
"We'll find them," Nick said, reassuringly. But the thought of Lily spending another night in the hands of the raiders filled him with dread.
"And when what? What's your plan for when we meet them?"
"We'll have to think about that," Nick said. "Ten of them and two of us – I don't much like the odds."
"They're over-confident," Jack said. "At first they were at least trying to cover their trail. Now look at them – riding along like they own the place. No fear. I think they're used to being the big dogs on the block. People like that make mistakes."
"We're not covering our trail either."
"Yeah, but no one's following us."
"We hope. But I wish we had a troop of Minutemen behind us."
The ex-Gunner snorted contemptuously. "For what? So they could march in and get my daughter killed? Sorry, Nick," he added, "I know the General is a friend of yours. And they've come a long way since the mob that attacked us at Quincy. But they're still just a bunch of farmers with hunting rifles. Anyone with a halfway decent military will eat them for dinner."
"Really?" Nick said with a touch of sarcasm. "As I recall, those 'farmers with hunting rifles' beat your Gunners pretty handily at Quincy."
Jack laughed. "We were in more danger running the training course in basic. All we had to do was give you Quincy and retreat back into the swamps. Once you followed us in we'd have taken you apart."
"Then why didn't you?"
Jack stared into the fire without answering. Finally he said, "Quincy was our home. We took a vote on it. And the vote was that we were done hiding in swamps." He sighed. "Stupid, really. The place was a nightmare to defend. I guess we all knew how it was going to end."
"Then why didn't you just surrender? Negotiate peace? Mercenaries of all people should be smart enough to recognize what side of the bread has the butter on it." Nick felt himself getting angry. "Might have saved us all some grief."
"And if we had, then what? Be the military arm of the Commonwealth? Paid soldiers marching at the command of our masters in DC and Goodneighbour? We were done with that, too."
There was silence. Nick poked at the fire, watching it flare up in sparks. "Well, I'm sorry," he said at last. "Sorry it worked out that way. For all of us. The way things are looking, we could use a few more like you right now."
"Not all of us tattooed our blood types on our foreheads. There's lots got away in the confusion. Lots still left, too, even after 20 years. They're like me. They've got families, lives, places to call home. We're Commonwealth now. But if those bent-cross friends of yours come knocking, they'll find out we're Gunners, too." He stood up, reaching for his rifle. "I'll take first watch."
From far away he heard the sound of wolves howling, and he wondered what game they hunted.
-OOO-
There was a road, narrow and slick with rain, the asphalt gleaming in the light of the motorcycle's single headlight. Nick hunkered down low over the gas tank, trying to find shelter behind the tiny windscreen from the rain that pelted down. His fingers were numb with cold despite the heavy gauntlets he wore and the rain had soaked through his leather jacket to the skin beneath.
A flash of lightning lit up the countryside, so close he could hear the thunder even over the rush of air in his ears and the howl of the engine. In the light he saw a car pulled over onto the narrow shoulder and sticking partway out into the road. Its hood was raised and a man stood beside it waving frantically. Faces were pressed against the glass: a woman and children, he thought, their features blurred into pale ovals by the rain. He leaned away, swerving to avoid them as he raced past. Urgency ripped at him.
The road was rising steeply, cutting back and forth in a series of steep switchbacks as it left the valley floor below. There'd been an accident here: a vehicle on its roof, its wheels still spinning, another one on its side, and skid marks leading to a smashed guardrail with tire tracks vanishing into the darkness beyond. Headlights splashed at crazy angles through the downpour and across the bodies lying in careless heaps on the pavement, leaking bloody rivers in the rain. He slowed to thread his way through the mess and felt hands reaching for him. A face loomed, mangled and torn, a shard of glass driven deep into one eye, the mouth working in voiceless agony. But there was nothing he could do and he kicked out and saw then man stagger backwards and fall. Then he was past. He wrenched at the throttle and tore away.
He was going too fast, far too fast: for the weather, for the night, for this narrow, back country road twisting through the high hills. But there was no other way. The main highway was full, jammed with people fleeing the cities, and there was no time. He touched his breast where her letter lay folded in its envelope in an inside pocket:
"It's crazy here. Everyone's leaving, trying to find somewhere safe. Is there such a place? Do you remember your friend's cabin where we stayed that time? It was so beautiful there, just you and me. If the world's going to end, that's where I'd like to be."
He gripped the throttle and the night raced away on either side.
-OOO-
Nick's eyes flew open and he stared wildly around, trying to remember where he was. The fire was burned to ashes. A cold, grey, light filtered in through the broken roof of the ruined service station. Memory came back to him as the dream slipped away and he sat up stiffly, his joints creaking audibly in the damp morning chill.
Jack lay rolled up in his blanket across from him, fast asleep. He opened his eyes as Nick stirred.
"You didn't wake me up," Nick said.
"You seemed pretty done in," Jack answered, rolling out of his bedroll and rubbing his eyes. "I figured you needed the break."
"What about you?"
"I've marched longer on less." He began stowing his blanket.
Clouds had moved in overnight and the day was cold under a heavy overcast. In the west, dark streaks of rain waved like ragged curtains along the horizon. But for now, the rain stayed away and Jack picked up the riders' trail easily. They ate breakfast as they walked, threading their way through the trees and gaining steadily.
"Nick?" Jack said. It was mid-morning. They were wading across a shallow brook at the edge of a meadow. Trees hung over the bank on its far side, roots exposed where the stream had undercut them. A tumbled-down shack of fairly recent vintage suggested that people had lived there recently, but there was nothing inside it except a few sticks of broken furniture and the litter of a dozen seasons, and no clue as to who lived there or what had become of them.
The riders' trail showed clearly where they'd crossed, standing their horses in the stream to drink before scrambling up the bank on the far side then up the steep valley wall to the crest above.
"What?"
"When you shut down at night, are you sleeping? The way people sleep?"
Nick clambered up the bank, using a tree branch to steady himself then reached back to help Jack up.
"Hard to say," he answered. "I go into a low power mode that gives my systems a chance to recharge, do a little maintenance, that sort of thing." He thought about it. "I suppose it's something like sleep. Why?"
"Because you were muttering away last night. I don't know what about; I couldn't make it out."
"Huh." Nick started up the hillside to the top of the valley. The morning's dream came back to him: the motorcycle careering through the rainswept darkness, the mangled corpses littering the accident scene at the cliff-edge and the rain puddling the blood on the pavement and taking it away in rivers around his wheels.
"I've been dreaming," he finally said. "Visions. Or maybe memories. I'm not sure which."
"What do you mean?"
Nick shook his head. "I don't really understand it myself. My memories end on the day the Institute recorded Nick Valentine's personality onto their machines. They don't start up again until the day I woke up in this body. But lately I've been remembering…things."
"What kind of things?"
"Well that's the funny part. I think they're Nick Valentine's memories. I think he was here. I don't mean before the War. Those things I'd remember. We came up here lots of times in the old days. Good skiing in the winter, hiking trails, that kind of thing. I mean after the bombs fell."
"So?"
"So there's no way I should be able to remember any of that that. Those things happened after my memories were recorded. They didn't happen to me."
-OOO-
About midday the road turned northwest. The trees were starting to thin out here, and in the distance, the Green Mountains spread across the horizon. The riders' trail was pointed directly toward them.
"Not a bad place to hide out," Nick, said, indicating the spot on his map. The two had stopped to catch their breath and their bearings. "It's pretty rugged up there, lots of little valleys to camp out in, plenty of forage for the horse and lots of water. Plus you could see anybody coming for miles. If I were planning an invasion, that's where I'd start out from."
"So what are you thinking?"
Nick pointed to the map. "It depends which way they go. If they stick to the main road they'll eventually hit the Connecticut River, here. That means they'll turn north, follow the valley. It's wide and flat, open country. Good place for men on horseback. Once they get across the river they can make a beeline for the mountains."
Jack traced the route with his finger He was shaking his head. "Nick, I don't think we can catch them. Not with the country opening up here, and not this close to those hills. If you're right and that's where they're headed, we only have a day, maybe less, before they close the door on us."
"I know. So instead we're gonna cut the angle, head 'em off at the pass. Here."
He pointed to a high valley running north from the highway. A thin, grey line showed where a narrow road wound through it before turning sharply to climb up to a notch in the hills and drop down into the river valley on the other side. "They stay on the highway, they have to loop a long ways around to the south before hitting the river. We go this way, we should be able to come out ahead of them."
"But what if we're wrong? Jack said worriedly. "We're taking a real chance here. What if they turn off? Or just keep going?" He pointed to where the line of the highway crossed the river. "They do that, they could be halfway to California before we catch up to them."
Nick shook his head. "It's a chance, I know. But what else do we have? We don't have to worry about them crossing there, anyway. The bridge has been down for years. It's a day's ride north to the nearest ford."
"What if they brought boats?"
"Then I guess we're going to California.
-OOO-
"There they are."
Nick handed the binoculars to Jack. It had been a hellish trek up the remains of the old highway that wound through the narrow, steep-sided valley, stopping to sleep for only a couple hours under an outcropping of rock before pushing on. But the gamble had paid off, for now they were ahead, and for the first time they could see their quarry. The riders were still a half mile away, approaching along the highway that followed the edge of the wide, flat valley below the hilltop where the hunters lay concealed in a clump of bushes. In the distance, the water of the Connecticut River sparkled in the late afternoon sunlight, and snow glistened among the trees in the deep folds of the hills opposite.
Jack put the glasses to his eyes and stared through them. They were in loose formation: two ragged clumps, one trailing the other. They were bareheaded and bare-armed, some of them shirtless in the sunshine, with their weapons slung over their shoulders or hanging from their saddles. He could see their faces clearly through the glasses. They were big men, some bearded and shaven-headed, heavily tattooed, some with the swastika symbol carved into their foreheads. One of them threw something at another, who threw it back. The sound of laughter drifted faintly up to them.
He handed the glasses back. "Nine of them now," he said. "And three empty saddles. They look pretty relaxed for scouts in enemy territory. I guess they figure they're home free."
"Or it's a set up."
"That, too."
Nick scanned the valley up and down and twisted around to look behind him. Except for a hawk riding a thermal high above them, nothing moved. Just below them the little forest road curved around the shoulder of the hill before diving down a narrow coulee toward the main road, some 300 yards below.
Jack eased his sniper rifle off his shoulder. He'd wound a strip of burlap around the barrel to keep it from glinting in the sunlight and now he slid it forward, squirming around to get into firing position. He laid a pair of spare magazines out next to him.
"Here's the plan," he said in a low voice. "You get down there and wait for my signal. Stay hidden. I'll aim for the rearmost rider. They'll be surprised, but that won't last long. If they've got any brains, they'll figure out where I am pretty quick and charge straight up the hill. Wait until they turn then take them from the flank."
"Okay." Nick took another look through the binoculars. "Jack," he said, "I don't see Lily."
"I know."
"We need one of them alive."
"I know."
-OOO-
7