“Alrighty then.” Koda starts cautiously down the stairs, eyes open and alert. She reaches the third step from the bottom when her brother’s voice sounds over her shoulder.
“Hold up a second.”
Koda freezes where she is. “Something?”
“A twinge in my gut. Something’s not right. Here, let me through.”
“Um, I hate to break it to you, big brother, but there’s barely room for me on this step. And you’re blocking me from behind. Do you propose levitation or should I just try my invisibility trick?”
“Very funny. Here, let me try—this.” Grunting, he puts his hand carefully in front of her face, feeling blindly for what he senses is there. “Just…a little…furth—.”
The sound of a gun going off is deafening in the small confines of the stairwell.
The men above hear it easily and, as one, race for the door to the cellar. Poteet reaches it first. “Doc! Cap! Are you guys alright?”
Dakota’s voice drifts up from the darkness below. “Just fine.” She stares at the charred, ragged hole in her brother’s shirt cuff. “Nice reflexes there, Tex.”
“Jesus. That was almost your head, chunkshi !”
“But it wasn’t, thanks to you.” She peers down the rest of the stairs. “How’s the gut now?”
“As soon as it stops digesting my heart, I’ll let you know.”
Reaching up, she gives his large, warm hand a squeeze. “Thanks, thiblo . I owe you one.”
“Nah,” he shrugs, trying to sound offhand and not exactly succeeding, “that’s what big brothers are for, right?”
“Riiight,” she drawls before beginning her descent once again. She reaches the floor when her brother’s voice halts her steps. “Another twinge?”
“Just making sure,” as he steps off the last stair and moves around her, his light sweeping in arcs across the floor and reflecting off of the dozens of wooden packing crates stacked along the length and breadth of the mid-sized cellar. He whistles soft and low. “How in the hell did he get a hold of all this?”
“Probably the same way he was able to openly sell illegal weapons in his storefront,” Koda replies, looking past the muscled bulk of her brother’s body. Spotting something out of the corner of her eye, she freezes. “Tacoma, shine your like back this way.”
“What way?”
“Toward that packing crate with the crowbar on it. Yeah that one.” Her eyes narrow, trying to recapture what she’s sure she’s seen. “Anything look fishy to you?”
“I’m not the one with the eagle eyes here, sis.” Still, he does his best. “No, don’t see anything but a few dust motes. What do you see?”
“Not sure. Move the light to your right, slowly. There. What does that look like to you?”
Concentrating on holding the light steady, he squints and spies a thin, translucent thread from the crowbar’s forked end to the ceiling rafter above it. “Well, it’s either a tripwire, or a cobweb. It’s sagging in the middle, so I’d go for old cobweb, but I wouldn’t bet your life on it, chunkshi .”
Taking the flashlight from his hands, she shines it along the walls and ceiling, eyes straining for any glimpse of weaponry or other lethal surprises. There is nothing that she can see, but her instincts, once alerted, refuse to be quieted.
“Squat down.” As her brother follows her instructions, Dakota hands him back the flashlight, digs into the pocket of her jeans and pulls out the keys to the APC. “Get ready to duck….”
“Dakota—.”
With an easy underhand motion, she tosses the keys so that they break through the thin thread above the crowbar. In the same motion, the covers her brother’s body with her own, pushing him to the floor. A split second later, four miniature crossbows let loose their bolts, one from each side of the room, all set to intersect through the plane of space that anyone who had hefted the crowbar would be occupying—a space that is, thankfully, empty.
“Can you let me up now, Koda?” Tacoma’s muffled voice filters up from beneath her. “This moldy cement is giving me hives.”
Carefully, Dakota leans back, eyes alert for any further danger. Thankfully, all remains quiet, and she helps her brother sit up.
Tacoma looks over his shoulder at the crossbow bolt driven halfway through the cheap plywood wall at the level of where his head would have been had his sister not pushed him down. He lets out a slow breath, then gifts Koda with a small grin. “Guess we’re even now, huh?”
Laughing, she slaps his meaty shoulder. “You are such a goober.”
“Yeah, yeah, you say that now .” Rising easily to his feet, he reaches down a hand and helps her up. “Shall we see what Santa Skin-Head left us for Christmas?”
*
Koda eases Redtail One out of the small shopping center’s parking lot, followed by the other trucks in the convoy. The back wheels answer sluggishly to the steering wheel; the lead vehicle, like the others, is packed from bed to canopy with crates of small arms and the ammunition to go with them. Old Boney had been a desultory desultory sort of right-winger, not much into doctrinaire survivalism himself but willing to capitalize on the kind of paranoia that drove self-styled “militiamen” to indulge in black helicopter fantasies and stock up on illegal weapons, all against the day that the commies came swarming over the Pole. Or the federal government, whichever arrived first.
Terrence, on the other hand, had been a nutjob’s nutjob. When Sister Rosalie had assigned a book report on a “classic” in seventh grade— and by “classic” she had meant something like David Copperfield or The Last of the Mohicans —Terrence had turned in a glowing review of The Turner Diaries . Some of the literature they had found along with the guns had been considerably more radical. If Terrence had lived through the uprising, she had no doubt he would be yelling “I told you so!” to anyone who would listen.
But Terrence had been into droids, especially the military models. He’d even bought a surplus metalhead or two and had been trying to modify them for what he’d termed “commando operations.”
Live by the droid, die by the droid.
Beside her, Poteet turns his handsome new Bowie knife over in his hands. Once they had cracked the store, they had had to empty it down to the slingshots and Swiss Army can openers or risk the weapons’ getting loose in the population. Which would not have been a problem in nine cases out of ten. But the variety and extent of Terrence’s stock indicated a considerable customer base. And there was bound to be more than one surviving wingnut out there, more than one surviving Dietrich. Not the kind of folk one would want to trust with mortars and grenades and LAAW rockets.
“Eyes on the street, Joe,” she says quietly. “There’s more weapons like these out there, and not all are upstanding citizens like us.”
“Ma’am,” he says with a guilty glance up at her. Then he sets his prize aside and takes up his M-16 again, laying it lightly across his knees.
Koda flashes him a smile to let him know he’s not in trouble and glances into the rearview mirror. The other three trucks follow closely behind, all of them as heavily laden as Redtail One. Casually Dakota waves at the line of kids and teenagers standing across the street, watching as she and her party relieve Boney’s establishment of his inventory. She says, “They’re gonna be real disappointed we didn’t leave them anything.”
“Looks like folks have liberated just about everything that’s not nailed down.”
“And a few things that were.” Navigating around the hulks of cars left standing in the street, Koda gestures toward and abandoned house. The windows gape black, the glass lifted out, not broken; the wall studs stand bare like ribs where clapboard siding has been pried away, possibly for building, more likely for fuel. A couple blocks down, a six-foot-high plank fence with an iron gate surrounds another house.