Her words settled a heaviness on my shoulders and a sickness in my gut.
Jodi and our reconnaissance team had been cut off by the distant troubles in the northern district. Now, Ava was on the streets, and Ava never went out. Jodi handled that side of things.
Jodi was tough as fucking nails so Ava didn’t need to be.
The history between those two had happened after the collapse, but I still didn’t know much about it. There was speculation—there was always speculation within a community, but especially one with only thirty people. Jodi had decked a newly arrived soldier when he’d tried it on with Ava. It was fair to say she was protective. Heck, they slept in the same bed. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that they were together in a way that went beyond friends.
We all had a history. Things we recalled fondly and things we’d like to forget.
It was clear the two women came from different sides of the track prior to the collapse. Afterward, new lines had formed, and it was survival of the fittest. The rest of us were just hanging on for as long as we could. My mind stretched into wondering what we would do if the team never returned.
Mary leaned across and patted my hand, her gnarly knuckles scraped tight against skin made fragile with age. “She’ll be fine. Nine out of ten times, they never see a soul during an op.”
“It’s the one in ten that worries me,” I said. As I locked gazes with Mary, I noticed the tightness in her face. “If someone gets hold of her—”
“They won’t,” Mary pushed back firmly.
The urge to cry rose. Adam slept on, oblivious to the turmoil his small presence wrecked upon our tiny part of the world.
Like a creeping tide, fear could never be banished completely in the post-apocalyptic world.
I knew if anyone should catch Ava, I would never see my friend again.
CHAPTER TWO
Ava
THREE DAYS HAD passed since I’d left Sanctuary, during which the conflict in the northern district had both escalated and expanded.
Rain pelted the rooftop where I had hunkered down to hide. It was midday, and grey clouds rolled relentlessly overhead. The distant roar of combat, the put-put of weapons firing and the occasional boom of a louder discharge, blended into the hopeless cacophony of war.
It had been years since I’d been outside. Jodi had been with me last time, a comforting and protective presence that had made it tolerable.
I should have been back by now, but the largest battle I’d seen in a decade had thwarted those plans. I wondered if Jodi and the team were trapped outside, their fate as precarious as mine. Should any of us be captured, Sanctuary would be compromised, and that meant the lives of everyone inside. The former data center-turned-home was right in the middle of these two warring factions. The conflict had ignored it so far. We’d seen such troubles before. They had always passed us by, but something about this time roused a sense of inevitability.
Given the scale of activity and my questionable skills, I couldn’t see myself avoiding detection much longer. Yesterday, I’d attempted to return, but the streets had been crawling with soldiers brandishing enough firepower to render my temperamental Colt useless. The endless scenarios of being discovered haunted me. In most of them, my assailant had laughed when the stupid gun had jammed.
I thought I ought to feel more rage, but three days without food had taken its toll, and all my emotions remained muted. Finding water had been easy enough given the weather. My immune system had been genetically modified long before the collapse and handled the dirty source. The lack of food had bothered me at first. Now I was living on stress.
My eyes drifted shut, and I blinked to try and rouse myself. Rest was a luxury and a risk, and the lack of it was having predictable repercussions. I couldn’t afford to let my guard down, even here on the top of this abandoned warehouse that looked like it hadn’t seen human footsteps since the infamous war.
A flashback of the supplier going up in flames brought a familiar surge of hopelessness.
Gone.
No meds for Adam, even assuming I could’ve gotten them to him.
I had no idea what to do or where to go for more.
I was exhausted with the war and the consequence of humanity’s greatest folly. The pendulum was always swinging on progress and regression. Back and forth, back and forth from the day we started to grunt as we scratched pictures into the dirt. You cannot stop the wheels of progress. I’d read that in a history book while ensconced within my uncles community and still had time and facility to waste on such pursuits. I couldn’t recall the title now, but it covered a thousand years of history through what was called the Dark Ages.
I thought we had set ourselves back a thousand years, maybe more.
Compassion and fundamental human rights were gone, and now every day was colored by survival.
If progress had happened since the collapse, I was too close to the action to see.
And if I didn’t get some rest, I was going to make a mistake.
Blaine
“Have we lost many?” Taylor asked, sharp eyes surveying the scene of his making.
“Yeah, some,” I replied. “More than I wanted, but you don’t assimilate a city without some fallout.”
We stood on the rooftop of a recently acquired building, twenty stories of semi-derelict gangland heaven that gave a good vantage of the city. To our north, fires burned uncontrolled, and the light rain offered nothing useful for the cause.
Taylor nodded. The man had not risen to be the leader of two, soon to be three, cities and a dozen towns without an impressive grasp of strategy, and a gut instinct second to none where trouble was concerned.
On the far side of the roof bracing the exit door, two members of his personal security team stood waiting. I was trusted; they were more interested in a potential threat from below.
“You look like shit,” Taylor said, side-eyeing me with a grin that was sharp and white against his dark skin. “What’s the point in all those enhancements if you still look like shit?”
I shrugged. If I thought about it, I could probably identify the individual layers of bruising that came from the seven days of intense fighting. Things had gotten messy during the operation at a couple of points.
The previous owner of this district wasn’t relinquishing possession without a fight.
And a fight was what we’d got.
“Enhancements just mean I can take a lot more shit. Hence I look like, well, whatever.” Taylor’s comment wasn’t one that required a serious response, and to be fair, I was too tired to care.
“We’re going to need to take Sanctuary,” he said, distracting me from the battered state of my body. The self-proclaimed King’s attention had turned south to where the small fortified community stood.
“I figured as much,” I replied. Taking a peaceful enclave never sat well. If they wanted to be left alone, it was fine by me. Unfortunately for Sanctuary, they were right in the middle of a pocket of fierce resistance. Peace would be slow to arrive after such a brutal change of ruler. As was inevitable, those previously wielding power here would be kicking up trouble as they sought to wrest control back.
Perhaps Sanctuary had enough supplies to weather out the surrounding storm. Given its defensible structure, there was also a chance that those trouble makers would turn their attention to it as a base. Sanctuary’s defense was basic at present, but its layout and composition meant it could be ramped up with relative ease by a motivated party. We didn’t need a rebel force holed up in the middle of the city. Better if Sanctuary was in our hands.