The Lawgivers: Gabriel (5 page)

Lexa shook her thoughts as she heard
the bellows of the gang members, sporadic gunfire, and the strange,
high pitched whine of that weapon the angel wore on his
wrist.

Angel of death, she thought as she
reached the counter and looked around for the proprietor. She
discovered he was crouched behind the counter. “I need to trade for
food and water,” she said in a rush.

“I ain’t comin’ out till it’s over,”
the proprietor snapped at her.

“Well I can’t wait!” Lexa growled
angrily, slapping her bag down on the counter and then jerking it
up again to empty the contents on the counter. “Most of it’s broke
now. I used it to beat that bastard off of me, but this thing was
workin’ before. Makes numbers on this little window here. Uses
sunlight.”

Interest sparkled in the proprietor’s
eyes despite his fear. “A cac-lator?” He lifted up enough to spot
it and snatched it off the counter.

“Yeah. How much?”

The proprietor was frowning as he
played with the buttons.

The sounds in the street were
escalating and Lexa very much feared the angel was going to make
good on his word.

Well, she didn’t want to hang around to
see if he lost either. It wouldn’t be a good thing for her either
way.

“Two bottles of water. A can of
meat.”

Lexa was tempted to just take what was
offered without haggling, but two bottles probably wouldn’t get her
to the next watering hole or the next town and the canned meat was
rarely edible anymore. “Four bottles, directions to the next
watering hole, two cans of meat and a can of fruit.”

“Ain’t got no fruit.”

Disappointment filled her but she
didn’t have time to look around to see if the man was lying. “Ok.
Four bottles of water, directions, and two cans of
meat.”

“Done!”

Annoyance flickered through Lexa. She
could probably have done a lot better, damn it! There wasn’t time
to weep over it, though. She watched anxiously as the proprietor
crawled along behind the counter and collected her trade goods,
pitching them toward her instead of putting them on the counter.
She missed most of the stuff he threw at her and had to scramble
around the floor for the bottles and cans. “You broke one of the
bottles, you stupid motherfucker! Give me another one.”

“No guarantees!” the bastard threw back
at her. “You shoulda caught them.”

Lexa ground her teeth, struggling with
the desire to beat the bastard’s head in—which she knew she
probably couldn’t manage anyway. “Directions?”

“Head due west. The first one is
poison. There’s a little spring in the side of the hill a bit
further, though, and that water’s good.”

“Thanks! Back way out?”

The proprietor gestured. Lexa
hesitated, but she didn’t want the udai on her heels. She needed to
see what was happening to judge the lead time she had. Rushing to
the front, she peered outside to see how the battle was
going.

Four more of the gang members were
lying in the street, two of them missing about half of their heads.
Lexa’s stomach lurched, but she focused on spotting the
udai.

It wasn’t hard to spot him. He was
walking right down the middle of the street as bold as brass, no
doubt searching for the other gang members—who’d vanished and
either fled or simply ducked for cover.

By her calculations he was half done.
That should give her a good start.

Abandoning the door, Lexa ran through
the mercantile to the rear. There wasn’t a door in the back, but
there was a window. It was a struggle to open the board shutter
covering the opening, but she managed after a few moments and
tumbled out of it into the alley. Getting to her feet, she checked
her water bottles. Fortunately, they were made of the stuff called
plasty and hadn’t broken as the first had. If she was careful, it
should be enough to get her to the next watering hole and the
plasty was almost as valuable as the water it held. She’d have
something to carry more water with her.

It took her a few moments to get her
bearings since she’d gone out the back and dusk was falling fast.
There was no longer a sun to use to get her direction. Mentally,
she traced her path into the mercantile and mapped a return,
though.

She’d planned to use the nearest escape
route out of town even if she didn’t have to run, but she needed to
return to her point of entry to figure out due west since the sun
was gone. She was breathless and tired by the time she reached that
point. She wanted to rest. A mixture of fear and resentment filled
her when she thought about what the udai had said,
however.

She had no idea why he’d fixated on her
or what he had in mind for her, but she wasn’t about to hang around
and find out!

She hadn’t done anything!

And now she didn’t dare return to the
spot where she’d hidden her other supplies, but the little she’d
left wasn’t worth the risk of running into the udai. With any luck,
she could collect it when it was safer.

Shaking the thoughts off, she opened
one of her bottles and took a few sips and then carefully put the
lid on again and pushed the bottle back into her bag. The
proprietor of the mercantile had said the closest waterhole was due
west and something about a hill.

It was a shame the spring wasn’t in the
only hill around! The town was surrounded on three sides by hills,
though.

Well, she told herself as she started
out, if there was water there’d be plants growing around it and if
there were plants there was food. She could hang on to the canned
food until she really, really needed it. And if the waterhole was
far enough for her to feel safe from the udai, she might just camp
there a spell so that she didn’t have to worry about water for a
while.

For the first time in a very long time,
she thought about what it would be like to stay in one place and
get comfortable—at least as comfortable as she could
manage.

She discovered she couldn’t actually
picture it in her mind. It almost seemed like she’d spent her
entire life running, but that was far from the actuality. She’d
grown up on a farm, or what passed for farms since the day. Her
mother hadn’t remembered anything about ‘before’ or at least hadn’t
talked about it that Lexa could recall if she did—not really
surprising when she could barely remember her mother at all. But
Sir, the man who’d taken her and her mother in and had fathered her
younger siblings, had been an older. He’d talked about it all the
time—before whatever had happened. He’d said ‘they’ must have
dropped bombs because it had almost seemed as if the whole world
was on fire. He didn’t know who ‘they’ were or even, for certain,
if they had dropped bombs, but his parents had seemed to think that
was what had happened and he was convinced they’d known.

He’d grown up on a farm his parents had
owned, but he couldn’t grow things like his parents had and he was
certain it was because of the bomb or bombs. Nothing grew like it
had before although it was better than the ‘after’—the time
directly after—far better. The sky had been so filled with clouds
then that it had almost seemed like perpetual night. So little
light shone through that even the weeds, which never needed much
encouragement to grow, had begun to whither by the time the clouds
had begun to clear enough for sunlight to hit the ground, but even
then everything was stunted.

There was food in cans and bags and
plasty containers, though, a lot of it, and not a lot of people to
fight for it because so many had been caught in the open ‘the day’.
So they’d hunted food buried in the rubble of what were called
houses and stores and warehouses, and sometimes just buried in the
ground when they couldn’t find other food to eat—when even such
things as rats and edible grasses had become scarce.

After his parents had died, when he’d
stumbled upon a cache of seed, he’d decided to find a place and
start a farm like the one he remembered from his childhood. It
wasn’t much of a farm, but it fed him and when he’d caught her
mother, it fed her and the brats, too.

She hadn’t actually known what he meant
about catching her mother until the day the raiders had
come.

One day had seemed much like the next
until that day, each day filled with the toils of trying to grow
enough, or find enough, to feed themselves—and tending the little
ones, which had become her job when her mother died birthing the
little sister that they ended up burying with her.

Then the raiders had descended upon
them, screaming like demons, so terrifying her that she’d been
frozen with it, unable to think. Finally, the frightened cries of
the little ones had penetrated her stupor enough to trigger the
thought of running and hiding but by then it was too
late.

It had probably been too late from the
moment the raiders had burst upon them, but she’d spent many
sleepless nights replaying it in her mind and trying to think if
there was something she could’ve done to save herself and the
little ones. She’d tortured herself with what ifs until she was
half crazy before she’d finally, resolutely, pushed all of it from
her mind the best she could. What she might have done didn’t
matter. She’d been too scared to try until it was too
late.

She resolved never to let her fear
prevent her from trying again. In trying, she might still have
failed, but not to try was certain failure. She’d been a coward
and, because of that, her life became a living nightmare. Because
of her failure to act, the lives of the little ones had become a
nightmare—if they lived at all—and she didn’t know if they’d even
survived the raid. She knew Sir hadn’t. She’d seen the raider king
cut him down.

She’d cried most of that first day
because she was afraid for herself and she was afraid for the
little ones. She’d had only a dim idea of what the raiders wanted
her for but that was enough to terrify her. She just hadn’t known
what it was that Sir and her mother had done that made
babies—exactly.

Once she discovered that she wondered
why it was that her mother didn’t scream when her father did that
to her—because she had, and she’d fought him, and it hadn’t made
any difference at all. Except that he’d slapped her hard enough to
make her ears ring and told her to shut up before he knocked her
teeth down her throat.

After a while, it didn’t hurt, but she
still hated it and lived in dread of the next time. He stank and
his breath stank worse and she felt nasty when he finished and
rolled off of her. All she could think was how badly she wanted to
wash his smell and that slimy, disgusting stuff off, but there was
no water for that. There was barely enough for drinking.

Eventually, they’d arrived at the
village the raider king called his own. Eventually, she’d grown
accustomed—as used to it as she could—and ceased to be afraid all
of the time. She hadn’t seen any of the little ones, but then King
Ralph kept her locked in one little room for a very long time and
even after he’d decided she was too afraid to run away, he never
let her go far. So she comforted herself with the thought that the
little ones were there, too, somewhere. Their lives might be as
hellish as hers was, but at least they weren’t dead, and they
hadn’t been abandoned to starve.

She’d lived in that village as the
king’s woman for several years. In that time, she’d had three
miscarriages but no living babies. She’d always believed it was
because Ralph had the habit of knocking her around any time he was
in a foul mood—which he was fairly often—but he didn’t seem to
think so. He said there was something wrong with her female parts
and she wasn’t a fit breeder and he was going to trade her off as
soon as he found a replacement that appealed to him.

Or maybe just pass her to his first
officer.

Who was worse than Ralph.

One day, when he was feeling
particularly nasty, he’d told her he was sorry he hadn’t kept her
little sister instead of trading her off. She’d been too young to
breed, though, and of course the boys were useless. She supposed he
thought that would worry her more, the fact that he’d begun to
think of her as useless, but it had freed her. Right up until then,
she hadn’t considered escaping him because she’d convinced herself
that the little ones were in the village, as well, and she couldn’t
consider leaving them. She knew what he meant by useless, though.
Useless was dead. The little brothers were dead and the little
sister was gone, traded off so long ago that she had no hope of
finding her again. So she’d waited until the opportunity arose,
when Ralph took his men off on a raid on another village, and she’d
sneaked off and she’d been running ever since.

Her first impulse had been to head for
home. She’d been in sight of the farm she’d grown up on when it
dawned on her that there was nothing there for her anymore. Sir was
gone and everyone in the world that mattered to her—the little
ones—were gone, too. Worse, her memories of them weren’t. They were
tied to the farm. She realized then that she couldn’t bear to stay
there even a moment.

That had been … years ago. She knew a
number of years had passed since that time because every season had
its own brand of misery and many, many seasons had passed. She just
wasn’t sure how many—enough to soothe the pain to a dull ache and
no more.