Winter's Edge: A Post Apocalyptic/Dystopian Adventure (Outzone Drifter Series Book 1) (4 page)

The sound of the engine got louder. Moments later, Ritter caught sight of movement close to the point where they had left the footpath. Through the trees, he could make out the blurry figure of a man riding past them.

“Shit,” Nooge whispered. “What the fuck do we do now? The rest will be here any minute.”

Their decision was made for them when Ritter heard a gasp of pain, and a moment later the girl let out an earsplitting scream.

He turned to see Nooge struggling with her. When she screamed again, Nooge punched her hard, catching her above the right eye. The girl’s eyes fluttered and she began to slide off the seat. Nooge moved quickly, deftly catching her around the waist before she fell from the machine.

He looked over at Ritter and scowled. “Bitch bit my hand,” he said, pulling her back up onto the seat.

Ahead, the motorbike revved its engine. The three heard it approaching once more, this time from the other direction.

Moments later it stopped, its engine puttering noisily. Ritter could see the rider looking down at the path and knew he was inspecting the track marks. He drew his Walther P99 from out of his holster. Beside him, with one arm wound around the girl who was starting to come around again, Nooge did likewise with his Sig.

The rider pulled off the path and wove his way through the trees across the forest floor. A few seconds later, he reached the edge of the clearing and came skidding to a halt not more than twenty feet away.

Ritter was surprised to see he was only a boy, not much more than eighteen years old.

He wore no helmet, had cropped blond hair, and was wearing a black leather jacket over a pair of blue dungarees and work boots. Resting on top of the throttle in the grip of his right hand was an old service revolver. It looked at least thirty years old.

Ritter raised a hand indicating that nobody fire their weapons.

The young man looked first at Ritter, his P99 pointing straight at him, then across at Nooge, one hand over the mouth of the girl, the other with his pistol in it, wrapped tightly around her waist. Away in the distance, Ritter could just make out the sound of the other motorbikes, a low, constant hum. They must have lost their trail in the forest, he guessed, or they would have been here by now.

“Hey!” the boy yelled at Nooge. “Let her go!”

“Hey you,” Nooge growled back.

“Put her down and go,” the boy said nervously, realizing the vulnerability of his position. He waved his pistol. “I shoot this and the rest will be here in a minute. Just let her go and leave.”

“Easy kid, relax,” Ritter said. “Nobody needs to get hurt here.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Brick moving noiselessly around the back of the trees, heading to where the boy sat on his motorbike, its motor idling loudly in neutral. It never ceased to amaze Ritter how stealthily the big man could move.

The girl saw him too, and struggled wildly, her eyes bulging as Nooge kept a firm grip over her mouth.

“I said let go of her,” the boy said. He aimed the revolver at Nooge’s forehead, squinting one eye as he lined up his shot. “I’m not kidding. I know how to shoot.”

Behind him, Brick had emerged from out of the trees and into the clearing. In his left hand was his Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol, in his right a short black baton he’d taken off the chain of his belt.

The girl’s eyes looked like they were about to pop out of their sockets.

“Okay, Nooge,” Ritter said quietly. “Let her go.”

“Sure.” Nooge released his grip on the girl. He pushed her hard in the back and she slid off the bike, staggering forward.

“Behind you, Jimmy!” she screamed.

The boy started to turn, but it was too late. Brick was only a couple of feet from him, moving fast with the baton raised high. He smashed it across the side of the boy’s head, making a loud thud when it connected with his skull.

Without uttering a sound, the boy toppled over the side of his motorbike and crashed to the ground, his machine falling over and landing across the back of his legs.

Jimmy!” the girl gasped. She ran forward and crouched next to him. With her hands tied behind her back, there was nothing she could do for him. She knelt beside him, moaning helplessly.

The sounds of the motorbikes were closer now. They had picked up the trail again. Perhaps they had heard the girl scream.

“Come on,” Ritter said. “We need to get out of here.”

Nooge glanced down at the girl. “Haiden, she’s not going to cooperate. She can’t ride with you alone.”

What Nooge said was true. The girl was willful. At every opportunity, she had done her best to hamper their efforts.

“Hide your bike behind those bushes over there,” Ritter said, pointing to a cluster of thick bushes ten yards away. The group of pursuers had only seen two motorbikes, they wouldn’t find Nooge’s so long as it was well-hidden.”We’ll pick it up tonight. Hurry now.”

Nooge ran over to his Kawasaki. Grabbing the handlebars, he pushed it, and running alongside, took it around to the back of the bushes and disappeared from sight. Moments later he emerged again, walking backward, running his boot across the ground in front of him to remove any traces of the tire marks.

The boy was beginning to stir, and the girl squatted next to him, whispering in his ear.

“What about the kid?” Brick asked. “He’s seen everything.”

Ritter looked over at Nooge, then nodded toward the girl. The younger of the Gresham brothers moved swiftly across to her. Leaning over, he clamped his hand over her mouth again and pulled her to her feet.

As he dragged her away, Brick strode over to the boy, baton in hand. Crouching over him, his huge frame obscuring the view from where Ritter and the other two stood, he raised it in the air and brought it down fast with a sharp crack. He raised it again and swung it hard one more time.

Beside Ritter, though her mouth was covered, the girl whimpered uncontrollably, her eyes welling up with tears.

“That’s what you get for causing trouble, lady,” he snarled. “Your boyfriend’s dead, and it’s all on you.”

Brick came strolling back, wiping off the club with a bunch of leaves he’d picked up from the forest floor.

“Careful with our prize,” Ritter said to him as Nooge roughly turned the sobbing girl around.

Once more, Brick raised his club. Measuring the distance to her head, he clipped her hard across the temple and the girl slumped into his brother’s arms.

“Let’s get out of here,” the big man said, casually clipping the baton back onto his belt.

He jumped on his motorbike and started the engine. Looking over at Ritter, his brow furrowed and a questioning look came over his face.

“Um, Haiden…which way?”

Sanctuary Suites, Strata-1, Metro New Haven

One week after his procedure, Brogan received his
Citizenship Rescindment Order,
the official term the State called his expatriation request to the Outzone. By then, he had already moved out of the apartment and into an S-1 motel off Sanctuary Drive, close to the Scangate terminal. There had been no choice, since the CRO identity card he had been issued only allowed access within the Strata-1 zone.

Brogan was an oddity. The system didn’t make allowances for higher strata citizens like him. But by that time, he had been happy to leave. The house held nothing but painful memories for him.

“These will be useful, John. Can I keep them?”

Brogan turned to the man sitting next to him at the desk of his tiny motel room. The two carefully studied a series of high-quality aerial reconnaissance photographs of the Outzone’s
de facto
capital, Winter’s Edge. Taken recently by a military surveillance drone, some were of the city itself, others of its outlying areas—particularly around the border with Metro New Haven—including one of the Scangate terminal, which had a route mapped out in red marker all the way to the city’s southern gates.

“Of course. Just don’t bring them with you. You get taken for an agent, start counting down the last hours of your life. Long, brutal hours you’ll beg to be over.”

The photographs, along with an assortment of videos and slides, had been brought over to the motel by NIA Special Agent John Cole. A taciturn, slightly-built man in his mid-forties, the agent had short black hair just starting to recede at the sides. Under his shirt, Brogan made out the beginnings of a paunch, something he hadn’t noticed before. It appeared the desk job was finally catching up with his friend.

The two men had served together during the Great Global War, and had remained close friends ever since. While neither of them would consider themselves religious, both shared a belief that there was such a thing as good and evil in the world, albeit with a lot of gray in between. They had seen too much to think any different.

For years Cole had worked as a deep cover agent in Winter’s Edge. After serving a long and dangerous stint there, he had been brought back to the New Haven NIA station, promoted, and given his own team to run. Brogan was in the process of receiving a shortened version of the induction course Cole gave his agents before sending them into the field.

The National Intelligence Agency operated directly under H-SEC which, along with H-DEF, was one of two super agencies legislated into being in 2040 during a radical shakeup of the government’s military and intelligence services at the onset of the Secessionist Wars. While H-DEF was tasked with defending the nation’s coastline, air space, and borders, H-SEC’s mandate was “to protect American citizens from subversion, lawlessness and domestic insurgency” under the new constitution’s Civic Internal Defense program. NIA was its eyes and ears.

The Strata State needed to protect itself from all emerging security risks. Although unconstitutional, it was an open secret that there were NIA operatives in the Outzone. As well as agents, they also kept several safe houses where they stored money and arms caches ready for any eventuality.

Their work had already proven useful. A few years ago, an extremist group, The Third Homeland, had risen to prominence and its leader, known as The Reverent
,
had fomented rebellion among the lower stratas as he agitated for an independent religious homeland. Operating from within the Outzone, he had caused considerable unrest before finally being tracked down and eliminated.

Unfortunately, NIA’s covert activities also had unintended consequences. Sniffing out their safe houses became a profitable business for the Outzone’s many gangs, and any agent captured faced torture to reveal their locations.

“They shove your head in a wooden cage and throw rats in it,” Cole explained, staring at Brogan with expressionless olive-green eyes that constantly dissected every facial twitch, every comment made by those around him. “If that don’t make you talk, they move the cage down to your waist and let the rats chew on your balls.”

Brogan grimaced. “Nice.”

Cole shrugged. “People learned some twisted shit during the war.”

“Well, we both know the war was a gift for the twisted to shine. So what’s next?”

The special agent spent the next thirty minutes detailing how things worked on a day to day basis inside Winter’s Edge, clicking through a series of slides on his laptop.

Brogan learned quite a bit.

If you didn’t stay alive, nothing else was going to matter, and keeping a low-key profile on arrival was paramount to survival, blending into the city as quickly as possible. The district at the center, the Barrio de Los Triguenos, a mainly Latino neighborhood commonly known as the Barrio T, was the safest starting point for most expatriates, though if threatened in any way, rule number one of the old wild west came into force:
shoot first, and ask questions later.

Cole warned Brogan that if he ran into trouble, he wouldn’t be able to help. The job of his agents was already dangerous enough as it was.

“But now the turf wars are over, life’s not as bad as people make out,” he told him. “There’s good people there too. Never forget that. Stay low, bro, as we say, until people get to know your face. That should get you through the first week, anyway.”

Outside of the cities, gold and silver, and B&B (bullets and barter), worked best when buying stuff. Inside Winter’s Edge you could trade these things, plus anything else deemed of value at one of the many “asset houses”, as they were known, where they could be exchanged for a house’s issued currency. The larger houses charged a higher premium, that extra premium giving you the comfort of knowing your notes would still be worth something the next day.

“The smaller houses come and go,” Cole warned Brogan. “Stick to the bigger ones like Zhiglov’s, or risk holding some fancy toilet paper in your wallet.”

All cooking, lighting, and transport used portable fuels: bottled natural gas, diesel, and kerosene. In the cities, generators powered the larger establishments at night while the smaller ones used simple kerosene lanterns.

Now that the Outzone’s border with New Haven State was closed, most of the fuel other than locally produced bio-diesel was hauled in from Canada at the tiny two-mile stretch of border the negotiators of the Outzone Territory Act had been shrewd enough to bargain for.

The fuel, along with other essentials such as coffee and tobacco, were exchanged for a variety of commodities like gold, silver, and precious stones that artesian miners pan-handled, blasted, or chiseled out of the rocks and rivers. Furs too were traded, and trapping was popular in the Outzone.

Shortwave radio was the main form of communication throughout the Outzone, though some cities had set up simple GPRS systems, the parts scavenged from beyond the REZ—the Radioactive Exclusion Zone—a vast area delineated by the US military that marked the western boundary of the Outzone, stretching all the way to the Pacific Ocean.

In Winter’s Edge, there were two competing GPRS operators, each with their own masts that gave coverage across the entire city. Pre-war Nokias, reliable with long-lasting batteries, were popular handsets, and
minutos
or
load
, depending on the operator, could be bought at any corner stall. There were also several radio stations in the city, even a couple of free-to-air TV channels that broadcast old TV shows and movies between local advertisements.