James Axler – Bitter Fruit

J.B. had kept a close watch over their backtrail. There’d been no lights, no signs of pursuit.

The land remained broken and uneven, the terrain almost impassable. Bringing the wag out of the complex, even with its four-wheel-drive capability, would have been impossible, at least if they wanted to remain inconspicuous. The forest surrounding them was dense, almost virgin, and the wildlife had been plentiful.

Ryan crouched beside a boulder after checking his blasters and making sure they hadn’t fouled, then opened a self-heat that contained rice and some kind of meat he wasn’t sure he wanted to identify. He ate it anyway. His body would take care of turning it into fuel no matter what it was. When he finished, he took a trenching tool from his pack and dug a hole in the rocky soil, carefully cutting away the topsoil so it hung together like a plug. He dropped the empty self-heat inside.

“You finish with those things,” he said, “drop ’em in. If the frost melts off with the morning, there won’t be any tracks for Burroughs to follow. No sense in making another trail. Last one finishes kicks the dirt over the mess and covers it with the sod.”

“You feel it, lover?” Krysty asked as she approached him.

“What?”

The woman shook her head, but her hair stayed coiled into her scalp. “I don’t know. Wrongness, mebbe. Feels like the forest is alive around us, like it’s watching.”

“You figure somebody’s spying on us?”

“No.” A hesitant smile flitted across the woman’s mouth. “Can’t explain it, lover. Just don’t get the feeling we’re welcome here.”

“We get plenty of that most places we go,” Ryan said. “I’d be worried if you got the feeling someone was going to roll out the red carpet hearing we come to town.” Still, he used his peripheral vision to scan the closest brush. The shadows, though leaned out and stretched thin by the moon and the added illumination from the reflection off the frost, still had plenty of places to hide ambushers.

“How far have we come in two hours?”

“Mebbe five, six miles. Been hard getting that distance under these conditions.” Ryan had kept them heading west. Not because it seemed like the direction to go, but subconsciously they all knew it was a step in the right direction.

“And in that time we haven’t seen sign of a trail or civilization, past or present. How likely does it seem to you that Walker and his unknown allies would put in a hidden retreat so far from anywhere? Especially if they were doing computer theft or fraud?”

The thought had been bothering Ryan, too, but he had no answers. “Got no choice,” he said quietly. “We’re in it now. We’ll have to see it through to the end.” He gave her a brief hug, letting her feel the love that he held for her.

They went back to the others and got the hike under way again. Twenty minutes later they found the dead men.

Chapter Ten

There were three of them, all dead for days and showing the beak marks where the birds had been at them. The carrion eaters hadn’t been limited to the winged variety.

The youngest man looked to have been in his teens, and the oldest perhaps forty. They were dressed in a combination of homespun clothes and manufactured coats and vests that had obviously been handed down a long time. Gray duct tape, repeatedly applied, covered both elbows of the youngest man’s jacket.

“Dark night,” J.B. breathed.

Ryan waved them into defensive positions, settling in behind a tall oak tree himself.

They were quiet then, waiting to see if it was a trap they’d stepped into. The back of Ryan’s neck prickled tight as he searched the darkness clinging to the forest. Nothing moved.

“Cover me,” he said.

The three men hung from the trees in a clearing that looked to have been used as a campsite. Upon closer inspection the oldest and youngest resembled each other enough to have been related. Ryan felt they were possibly a father and son, or brothers. The third man was black, but his right cheek was puckered and pink from an old burn scar, possibly caused by acid.