Fireside (16 page)

Aeric passed the rifle over to the Shooter and walked him in on the high-rises. “See those there? I bet there are a few of them left that have line of site to the old Texas State Capitol where the Vultures used to have their headquarters. I’d be willing to bet that they still occupy the place; there’s no reason to have moved.”

“The Vultures’ headquarters is that pink building?” Joseph asked.

He smirked; the granite
did
look pink in the morning light. “It’s the type of rock that they used for construction. It’s more brown than pink.”

“Eh, I don’t think so, looks pink.”

“I want to get up in the top of one of those buildings and see if we can take out Kendrick. End this thing before it even starts.”

Joe pulled the binoculars away from his eyes and squinted at him. “I knew it. Are you sure you can do that, Traxx? I mean, Kendrick is your kid.”

Aeric dropped his eyes and then looked away, back towards the city. “I used to think that, once. Not anymore. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it since that crazy old man told us that he was the leader of the Vultures. I think Veronica and I made a huge mistake by telling him the truth about his father. We should have never let him know that he wasn’t my child and the differences in appearance could have been explained away that he took after his mother, who died in childbirth. When he learned the truth about his heritage, he made himself an outsider.

“I loved that boy like my own and didn’t treat him any different than my other children. I guess it wasn’t enough for him. ”He took a ragged breath, surprised that he felt so emotional about this, he was usually fairly stoic. “I have to kill him, Joe. If I can kill him before they attack, maybe they’ll start fighting among themselves again and leave us alone. I can’t let my feelings for him cloud my judgement about what’s best for more than five thousand people.”

Joseph seemed to consider his words for a moment and then stated, “When the time comes, I’ll take the shot.”

Traxx smiled, “Nah, Joe. I appreciate it, but I’ve got to do it.”

“I’m a much better shot than you. I’ve trained extensively with that rifle.”

Aeric patted the 30.06 that Joseph had leaned against the side of an old air conditioning unit when they began talking. “I don’t know…you’ve never seen me shoot. Besides, you wouldn’t know who Kendrick is—hell, it’s been fifteen years,
I
might have a hard time figuring it out.”

“Then point him out to me.”

“See, here’s the part where we start talking about a plan. I don’t intend for this to be a suicide mission. If we both went to one spot and fired, they’d probably home in on us pretty quickly. If both of us are shooting—and moving—from different locations, then they won’t be able to mass on us, we’ll keep ‘em guessing where the shots are coming from.”

Joseph nodded slowly in understanding. “So we’re splitting up, in a hostile city? Wasn’t the whole point of me coming with you to watch your back?”

“It was. This strategy gives us a greater chance of survivability, though. We’ll disguise ourselves to infiltrate the city and get a feel for the place, then split up to go to our shooting positions. In two days, we’ll meet back here.”

“Two days from now or two days after we spilt up?”

“Good point,” Aeric acknowledged. “Two days after we split up. That’ll give us probably one day of shooting and one day of evading.”

“What if we don’t see any targets? Do we still come back here?”

“This would have been so much easier with a radio,” the older man muttered as he rubbed the scars across the bridge of his nose. “Okay, we’ll meet here in the evening of the second day after one of us shoots our weapon. It could be a week before we see anyone, though.”

“Got it. That makes more sense.”

They spent the remainder of the day hiding their bikes in the skeletal forest surrounding the campus and finding a defensible place to sleep. They settled on an outbuilding near the back side of the school grounds, which would allow them an easier escape than the roof of the high school if it came to that. Aeric took first watch while Joseph slept. He figured that he had a lot of thinking to do before he could go to sleep anyways.

After all, he’d signed up to murder his son.

*****

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t see you,” Aeric protested as the guard turned menacingly to see who’d bumped into him.

“Do you know who I am?” the man, dressed in army-style camouflage pants and a grimy t-shirt with a green square sewn on the left side, asked.

“Yes, sir. You’re one of them Vultures.”

“What the hell happened to you?” The gang member pointed at Aeric’s face, “Looks like you got caught making love to a stove!” He laughed while his buddies congratulated him on what they thought was a witty comment.

All of them wore the green square of cloth and it reminded Aeric of something that he’d seen before, but couldn’t quite remember where. As his mind clutched at the significance of the fabric, he had to abandon that line of thought and deal with the immediate situation in front of him. There’d be time to ponder the Vulture’s fashion choice later. “I was on the outskirts of San Antonio when it got bombed. Got trapped in a burning apartment,” he lied. “That’s why I can’t see so well, sir.”

“Well get the fuck out of here, old man. I don’t have any food to give you.” He raised both his hands and “shooed” Traxx away like he was trying to scare away birds from a table. “Go on, before I change my mind.”

Aeric dragged his leg behind him like he’d been doing for the last two blocks as he hurried away along the palace’s fence line. His hip hurt like hell from limping as a part of his disguise, but it was necessary. He’d been able to verify that the old state capitol was still the Vulture’s headquarters and now he had a place to focus his attention. Now all he needed to do was to link back up with Joseph and find a building that would allow him to fire down into the palace grounds when he saw Kendrick.

He turned down a street that he remembered from his college days. Back then, it had been named San Jacinto Street or Boulevard, he couldn’t quite recall. Now, a sign hung from an old lamp post that said it was Murder Lane. “Cute,” he muttered, dragging his leg until a building blocked the palace guards from view. Then he walked normally back towards where he’d left Joseph in an alley with most of their weapons.

Since coming into the city, he’d been surprised at how clean everything seemed to be compared to San Angelo. If he pretended that the war hadn’t happened, he could almost think that it was the Austin of old. There weren’t the large piles of trash that had littered the city the last time he was here and, thankfully, the bodies had been hauled away as well. He wondered if they’d gone through their own round of illnesses, like had happened at San Angelo, that forced them to change their ways.

They’d taken the cleanliness to the extreme, which was a strange combination when you mixed it with the totalitarian rule of the Vultures. From the renamed streets to the furtive glances of residents as they passed by, it was clear that the people were repressed by the gang.

The Vulture’s oppressive rule worked in Aeric and Joseph’s favor. Even though they were easily recognized as outsiders and carried their weapons openly, no alarms had been raised against them. If anything, the people seemed surprised by the two men, traveling through the city, not marked as Vultures, without a cart or wheelbarrow of some kind. The residents were curious about the two of them, but they continued their work and didn’t ask any questions of them.

The children seemed to be the exception. Here, like in San Angelo, if a child was too young to work, they had the run of the streets. There were three of them in the alley with Joseph when Aeric returned.

“Okay, you guys need to get out of here,” Joseph told the kids.

“You gon’ try to steal our food?” one of them asked.

The first child was quickly followed up by another, “You get caught stealin’ an they chop off you hands. Both of ‘em.”

“Yeah, den dey beat ya to deaf for not workin’ on ya farm.”

“We’re not going to steal anything,” Aeric muttered. “We got tired of living alone in the wasteland so we’re moving into the city.”

“Sho, sho. How you get over da fence if you wasn’t sneakin’?”

Aeric grinned, hoping that his disfigurement didn’t scare the children. “We want to set up our own place, without the Vulture’s help, so we climbed over.”

The third child finally spoke, “You just don’t wanna get called up for the army. You must be a wimp if you don’t wanna fight.”

He kept the grin plastered across his face as he said, “We’ve been fighting in the wasteland our whole lives. Maybe we
will
join the army. What are they putting an army together for?”

“The boss man, he says it’s time to pay back for all the seeds and animals,” the third boy continued. “There’s some bad guys outside that want to come take our crops and murder everyone, so we gonna go stop them.”

Aeric nodded his head solemnly, “Yeah, there are lots of bad guys outside the walls. When is the army going to go get those dirty murderers?”

The boy shrugged, “Don’t know. My dad and both brothers are going to keep me and momma safe. I’d go if they let me.”

“Believe me, kid, you’ll end up seeing war sooner than you expect. You shouldn’t wish for those sorts of things. Hey, do you guys know of an empty house where we could stay?”

“What ‘bout one of dem on five-one ess tee? They’s a buncha empty ones over there.”

“Five-one ess tee? Oh, do you mean Fifty-First Street?” Aeric asked.

“Sure, whatever. You can stay there.”

“We’ll go see about it then.” Aeric pretended to have a thought pop into his head, “Oh, hey! What about one of these big tall buildings? Are there any rooms in there where we could stay?”

The talkative boy of the bunch shook his head emphatically. “The boss man don’t let
nobody
live in those no more. Didn’t like people not havin’ a farm. Now they’re empty. Don’t try to live there, you’ll get arrested—or worse.”

The grin reappeared on Aeric’s scarred face; that was exactly what he wanted to hear. “Thank you for the advice. I guess we’ll be going up to Fifty-First Street to see what’s available up there.”

He motioned for Joseph to follow him as he turned towards the north and headed in the general direction that they’d been told housing was available. They continued their ruse for three blocks, making a few turns here and there to ensure that they weren’t being followed, before ducking down an alley and jogging back towards the shadows near one of the high-rises that overlooked the grounds of the Vultures’ headquarters.

They hid until nightfall and then split up to go into the separate buildings like they’d planned when they were at the high school. Aeric watched Joseph walk casually into the night and then he used the wall to push himself up.

“Ugh,” he grunted. “Geez, I’m getting too old to do this.”

He thought about running towards the boarded-up entryway that they’d passed on the way into the alley and decided against it. It would be better to find the emergency exit door to see if he could get in that way. It was a long shot that he’d find an open way into the building except through the front.

His hands trailed across the dry, dust-covered brick as he groped blindly for the opening. The few remaining high-rise buildings conspired to block out the moonlight from above, casting the entire alley into a deep, black shadow. He could barely see anything in the closeness of the alley.

His fingers finally ran into a set of hinges. Aeric turned and faced the door so he could keep one hand on the hinge and search for the handle with the other. He cursed as his fingers rubbed against a jagged piece of metal sticking out where the handle should have been. He felt blood dripping from the ends of his fingers, but it was too dark to see how badly he’d been cut.

More cautiously this time, he probed the area where the handle should have been. He felt the circular opening where the knob had been knocked off at some point in the past. The shard of metal that had stabbed him protruded from the door along the lower side of the opening, probably where the knob had ripped it away as it fell.

Aeric slid his fingers into the top of the hole and tugged gently on the door. It didn’t budge. He cursed silently once more; there was no getting into the building from the alley. They’d purposefully made it so someone couldn’t sneak in that way. While he hadn’t expected it to be so easy, he’d allowed himself to become hopeful.
Gotta stop doing that
, he told himself. There was no reason to be hopeful about anything in Austin; he was probably going to die there.

He crept down the alley, still trailing his hand along the wall, more to keep in contact with it and go in one direction than in hopes of finding another door. Ahead, the gray of the sidewalk pavement nearly glowed in the dark compared to the alleyway.

When he neared the opening back to the main streets, he paused to listen. Nothing seemed out of place, so he peered cautiously around the corner of the building, first one way and then the other. Nothing moved along “Murder Lane” so he walked around the corner as casually as he could manage. There was no sense in drawing suspicion to himself by acting like he was trying to hide his movements.