“So move your people to Vegas,” said Angie. “Get ’em to safety. That’s your better bet.”
“I hear Vegas is under attack too.” Kate raised her chin. “These things have to be stopped at the source, and you’ll all have a much better chance of stopping them if I’m there helping you keep your blood on the inside where it belongs.”
Vargas glanced around at the rest of us, looking for support.
I just shrugged. It made sense to me to bring her. We could definitely use a medic, but thinking back to how casually I’d put Athalia at risk the night before, I wasn’t sure I could trust my judgment anymore.
“Sorry,” said Ace. “You ain’t seen enough of life yet. You need to live a little before you die. Go on home and find somebody to dance and kiss and climb trees with. Death’ll still be waitin’ after you’ve had your fun.”
Athalia nodded in agreement. “We might need you, but you shouldn’t—”
“You all don’t seem to understand,” said Kate. “I’m not asking your permission. I’m coming no matter what you say.”
We all looked at each other. Finally Angie turned away from the girl. “Well, since it seems like the only way to stop her would be to kneecap her, I guess she’s coming.”
“Fine,” said Vargas. “But she gets the next piece of body armor we find.”
“Agreed,” said everybody in unison, and then we started south again with Kate panting after us, that huge pack on her back looking like it was going to topple her over and squash her like a bug.
After a while Vargas looked back at her, then grinned at Angie. “Reminds me of that little gal who showed up at Ranger Center ‘bout a year back, all full of piss and vinegar. Didn’t let nobody tell her she couldn’t be a ranger. What was her name? Gave herself a real mean one, something to scare raiders with — Angel something.”
“Fuck you, Vargas,” said Angie. “Least I didn’t go calling myself Snake.”
“Hey, I didn’t pick that name. Folks started callin’ me that after I got bit that third time.”
Athalia blinked. “You’ve been bit by snakes three times?”
Vargas looked embarrassed. “Uh, five now, counting the time just now that got me caught by those raiders back there.”
“Five?” I stared. “How the hell does that happen?”
Vargas shrugged. “Snakes just like me, I guess. I don’t know.”
“Well I guess we do need a medic after all,” I said. “Just to take care of you.”
Everybody laughed, even Ace, even though it wasn’t that funny. I think we were all just trying to forget that letting that little girl come with us was pretty much signing her death warrant. I mean, we were signing our own too, but walking into the grinder was our job. We were resigned to it. Letting civilians die was precisely what a ranger wasn’t supposed to do.
We headed south through the mountains, moving higher in altitude. That cooled things off a bit, brought a little green to the red and rust of the wastes. It should have been comforting, but it just meant that the things that wanted to kill us had better hiding places.
It took us a day and a half to get to the pass that opened on the valley that the map I’d found in my old self’s pocket said should contain Darwin Village. It was a strange trip, at least for me. Each new turn in the trail brought back a vivid but useless flash of déjà–vu. I’d definitely been this way before, at least my former self — sorry, one of my former selves — had been, and maybe more than once. Some of the flashes were calm, just walking along, looking at the scenery. Some were nightmarish and filled with pain, like I had been running from something on a broken leg. I did my best to keep these flashes at bay and concentrate on finding any sign of where my predecessor had been attacked. Either I missed them, they weren’t there, or someone had done a hell of a job covering them up.
Another day on and we found Darwin. It wasn’t quite what we’d expected.
Based on the note about the missing sec pass, I’d thought Project Darwin was going to be another military facility, but what we found was a village. I also confirmed that I’d been there before, or at least an earlier me had. The déjà–vu that had been jerking my head around the whole long march continued as we wandered through the outskirts toward the town center. Again, it was like I was seeing the place through two dreams, one calm and bright — a daydream — the other dark and terrifying — a nightmare.
The daydream was just a repetition of what I was seeing now, a sense of having passed this shack before, of having seen that dog in that yard before. The nightmare was the same scenes against a red sky, with the dog barking and people slamming the door of the shack as I stumbled by, bleeding and broken. Were both visions true? Only one? Which one?
There was also the sensation of walking backwards through time as we got closer to the center of the village. At the edges the scene was typical wasteland — ramshackle farms with fields of stunted crops and cattle, cobbled–together shacks made of bits of old billboards, tin sheeting, car parts and tarps, but as we moved on, the buildings started to get older, but at the same time better–constructed and better–maintained, until finally we found ourselves in an area where all the houses were set on a grid of paved streets with trim lawns and white picket fences.
It creeped me out.
These weren’t the first buildings I’d seen that had been built before the bombs flew. Ranger Center had once been a prison complex which the first rangers had put to a new purpose. But even Ranger Center showed wear and tear. Sharp edges had weathered, paint peeled, the odd discolored shingle hinted at repairs. Here there was none of that. Everything looked as clean and new as the day it had been built. It seemed as if time and the nuclear holocaust hadn’t touched the town of Darwin.
But something had. We could tell that right away.
I’d have put the population of the town at around three hundred, which was enough to support a bar, a cat house, a clinic, a general store, and a building that advertised itself as the Darwin Village Free Library, but a good percentage of that population seemed to be sick. We could hear moans and retching from some of the houses, and saw other people stumbling around the streets like zombies, shivering and red–eyed.
The library and the general store were deserted when we poked our heads in, so we headed for the bar, which went by the name of the Black Gila.
The sounds of fighting coming from the place could be heard from a block away — a symphony of shattering glassware, splintering furniture, and the roaring of angry voices.
“Come on, you tongue–tied dummy! Do that again! I dare you!”
Angie raised her head. “That’s Hell Razor’s voice!”
An inarticulate bellow nearly drowned her out.
“And that’s Thrasher,” said Vargas. “I’d recognize that howl anywhere. Come on!”
We ran for the swinging doors, Vargas limping, Kate supporting him, and pushed through into a rustic–looking saloon with weary men and women slumped at trestle tables and the bar, all staring dully at two khaki–clad hellions who were rolling on the floor next to the pool table and beating the living shit out of each other.
“Razor!” shouted Angie.
“Thrasher!” barked Vargas.
The two men halted their combat and looked up. Both were sporting black eyes and bloody lips and noses. One was lean and wiry, with limp black hair and a face like the joker in a pack of cards. He had a buck knife the size of a machete strapped to his leg and a pistol holstered under his arm. The other was enormous — tall, wide and padded out like a sofa with too much stuffing — with a stubbly shaved head and an utterly blank expression on his broad brown face.