Outside the Wire Read online

From his vantage atop the broken overpass, Cadmus scanned the dead horizon.

  He shifted his grip on the rifle and said, “Wolves.”

  The two young caravan guards strained their eyes in the direction the huge man indicated.

  Eyes darting back and forth over the sunburned scrub and Domino said, “Are you sure? All’s I see are heat shimmers.” Sweat ran pale rivulets through the boy's dust-covered face. This guard was the taller of the two dark-haired brothers, not bent with a twisted spine like the other.

  Cadmus nodded. “Three or four.” He squinted his already hooded dark eyes and then inhaled deeply of the slight breeze. “Males. Probably a raiding party for the pack that ranges south bank Platte. Could be rogues, but I doubt it, being on the edge of claimed lands.”

  “They going to attack, maybe?” Checker asked. He was the smaller brother, bent and twisty-backed like so many of the normals born after the world began to die. The young man, boy not more than fourteen really, continued to shift his grip on the old single-barrel shotgun he held by his side.

  Cadmus turned his massive head to the boy and laid an eye on him. “If I weren’t here, they’d have tried you last night.”

  The two young guards exchanged a look as if contemplating an exclamation of youthful bravado. Cadmus knew it would sound impotent, with real monsters so close and them standing less than two-thirds his height.

  He raised his pristine bolt-action rifle and sighted east through the scope for a better look. “Not just my scent boys, I’m sure they smell the silver in my gun.”

  “What should we do?” Domino asked. This boy’s shotgun had two barrels, an old over-and-under, but Cadmus knew that neither of the brothers had silver on them.

  “Long as they stay wolf and keep low in the swales I can’t get a shot. So, press on toward Sanctum is all we can do. Hope it’s just them and they don’t bring more.”

  Cadmus lowered the long rifle and held it in the crook of his arm while he slipped covers back over the scope lenses to protect them from the dust and grit. Then he took a long drink from the water skin Checkers offered him.

  “See anything?” the old voice called up from the cracked asphalt below the overpass.

  Domino started to call back and Cadmus silenced him with a look. “No need to scream the bad news down and spook the pilgrims, we’ll tell your father up close.”

  Cadmus leaned over and rumbled down at the old man at the head of the little caravan in his deep bass voice, “Clear for miles, but no time to lolly and gag!”

  Before they started back down, Cadmus stopped the two boys. He pushed aside dead brush with the barrel of his rifle. Empty sockets stared up from a little pyramid of bleached human skulls that reeked of stale urine.

  "What is it?" Domino asked.

  "Totem. Marks the edge of the pack's lands we're skirting," Cadmus said.

  "I'd have never seen if you didn't point it out." Checkers said.

  "Wasn't there for you to see. Keeps other wolves out."

  As they slid down the side of the embankment, their footfalls made small avalanches of scree and broken concrete, throwing up little clouds of dust. As he half-walked, half-slid down the dry slope to the cracked old highway, Cadmus caught the gaze of the old man and gave a come-here jerk with his chin.

  The old man left his wagon and limped over. The vehicle had been an old flatbed Toyota pickup of indeterminate color with road-smoothed rubber tires, now pulled by two skinny oxen. The stained green canvas pulled up over bent aluminum stays hid the old man's mercantile and the special package he transported.

  Cadmus could tell the oxen weren't really needed as the engine smelled like it had worked sometime in the last few months.

  Joseph was probably middle-aged when the old world died, now he looked ancient. Funny a man that old with two young sons. He had organized this caravan and hired Cadmus to provide added security for the one hundred and something miles from Trade City to within sight of Sanctum. Just to within sight, as Cadmus wouldn¹t be welcomed in with the normals.

  Behind the mercantile wagon, three other carts rested in the shade of the broken overpass. Two had been the chassis of cars at one time, now with sun-bleached timbers across the steel frames, piled with junk and pulled by sickly cattle. Five wasted men between them. The last was a light thing; tarp-covered, new-made cart of wood, rubber-less bicycle tires for wheels, being pushed and pulled by a band of five new-religioners. The two old men and three old women, with their shabby cloaks and helix pendants, were pilgrims going to Sanctum.

  Cadmus hadn’t seen the girl hidden inside, just her eyes in the shadow of the parted tarp. Her eyes and her promising smell. They thought he didn’t know about her, but he did, and she was called Harmony.

  Joseph came up close to Cadmus and his own two boys and quietly asked, “What’d you see? Is it shamblers?”

  Cadmus smiled broadly and waved to the raggedly dressed bobble-heads watching from the shade. Most wore the pockmark-scars of Tyson's syndrome. One held a crossbow, one a makeshift spear. A scruffy goat, leashed to a wagon, bleated questioningly as if for the whole crowd. Quietly to Joseph, he said, “Raiding party of wolves. Maybe two miles up ahead.”

  Joseph sucked air through his remaining teeth and smacked his straw hat back on his head. Sweat beads, a deep red crease on his forehead and a look of real pain came up as the color rose in his cheeks.

  “Easy, old-timer. Don¹t need a panic here.”

  Joseph started to exclaim loudly, then his head swiveled around on its ropey old neck and he looked behind at the crowd. He turned back and fixed Cadmus with his watery, old-man eyes. “You mean real ones?”

  “When you ever hear of real wolves this far out on the plain?” Cadmus patted the old man’s bony shoulder with a huge hand and turned him back toward his wagon.

  “There’s nothing to be done but keep going.”

  As they walked Cadmus said quietly, “Break out your silver-loads for the boy’s scatter-guns, quiet like, and we’ll keep it going. I’ll walk on the top of the berm till the land flattens back down level with the road.”

  The highway had been cut flat, while the hill rose a good ten feet above. It was a prime location for a bushwhack and that's why Cadmus had chosen the overpass as a lookout.

  "You busting out on us?" Joseph asked.

  "Gave my word on the deal, old man. Security for you and deliver the new-religioner's package and that girl to Sanctum's my end and that I'll do."

  The old man picked his way through the cracked asphalt, glancing up at Cadmus, but not meeting his eyes. "I just figure the deal was on the old highway. I understand if you might want to change your end, diverting south cause of the time-storm like we did."

  When the old-worlders tried to kill the world, seams that held space and time had pulled hard and sometimes little cracks formed. They called the cracks time-storms. Soundless, black tornados, sometimes yards and sometimes miles high, and it was best to stay clear. That brought them a day's pull south to the old Interstate, to the edge of a wolf pack's territory. Cadmus had warned Joseph, but thought they just might make it through. This late in the summer though, dry as it was, raiding parties ranged far.

  “We could turn back, and see if the way’s clear?” Joseph offered.

  “They have your scent now. They’ll follow whichever way you go.”

  Joseph made an indecisive old man sound.

  "I’m sticking. I made a point to point bargain, not a route deal.” Cadmus gave him a smile he thought reassuring and added, “Perhaps next time I should include a clause."

  Cadmus followed the old man into the overpass shade, out of the merciless sun, to the side of the old truck.

  "A clause. Sound like a lawyerey-man," Joseph scoffed. He pulled and the passenger door groaned open.

  "That's what my father did before the world died." Before the bomb shelter made for the wrong cataclysm, and the darkness and the chaos.

  "Hmmm. I did the same then as now. Mercantile. I used
to own a slew of stores, called seven-elevens. Remember those?" Joseph reached into the cab and pulled out a small cloth bundle.

  Cadmus closed his eyes a second and thought back to a happier time. The scene accompanied by the sound of his father¹s harmonica. A skinned knee after a T-ball game, his father's big hand on his shoulder, a bell jingling as a glass door pushed open.

  "Slurpees?"

  Joseph's seamed old face cracked a little more as he smiled. He pulled a small handful of shotgun cartridges from the cloth and handed a few to each of his boys. They broke the guns open at the stocks and replaced lead loads with silver ones.

  Cadmus had almost laughed when he met this troop on the road, and was challenged by these two with three rounds between them. Security indeed.

  He gave them nods now, told one to go up front and one behind and then he headed back up the lip of the desiccated embankment himself, where he could see for miles. And be seen.