“Should be there by now,” he mumbled in a less than confident tone, wondering if his sudden need to reassure himself was an attempt to provide optimism for his impending arrival. Or perhaps it was a warning to his suspicious self.
Either way, one thing was clear. He was late for this meeting. A meeting with someone important. Someone he trusted. Someone who needed both his guidance and his protection.
He pushed his legs to the top of the next rise, bringing a new scene to his eyes—a snow-covered depression the size of a football field, with a half-buried school bus smack in the middle of the lowest point. It sat at a steep angle, the hood at least ten feet higher than the rear axle.
Snow drifts had buried the back half of the bus, much like he remembered when he chose this location as the rendezvous point. The front of the bus was less encumbered, with its twin doors near the front hanging open on the side, flapping in the wind on their battered hinges.
He closed the distance in a short minute, expecting to see the face of his waiting friend. Unfortunately, the bus appeared to be abandoned, much like he felt after his disfigurement ten years earlier.
All it took back then was a single run-in with an angry volcano to change his life in an instant.
The Nomad didn’t understand any of it when it happened, not just with the accident, but with the people around him. Everyone he knew seemed to withdraw from his life, as if the generals in Washington had ordered their collective retreat.
He was still the same man, other than what he saw in the mirror each night when he removed his mask. Duty had taken its toll, leaving him less than his former self, not just on the surface, but deep inside, too.
Thirty-three steps later, Nomad’s assessment changed when he came across a myriad of tracks in the snow—barefoot tracks, thousands of them, heading in every direction at once.
The Scabs had been here. An entire herd. All of them drooling in search of their next meal. If they’d been successful, he’d most certainly find blood belonging to his friend. Or possibly nothing at all.
The Nomad pulled his twin swords and brought them up in a striking position as he bent down on one knee to scan the area with a keen eye.
It’s always wise to minimize your profile when you walk into an uncontrolled sector. Not so much to reduce your scent from the creatures with a taste for flesh, but rather to give the men with high-powered rifles less to shoot at, assuming they were nearby.
History had taught him that the Scabs were often hunted by the men with the chain tattoos. Men who ran with the soulless leader known as Simon Frost. A man the Nomad despised like most others who were still alive in this hellhole, but a man everyone came to tolerate, for no other reason than to make it through to one more sunrise.
The rules of survival had elevated Simon Frost to the rank of bearable, if that was even the correct term. Of course, for that to happen, one had to choose to abandon every moral, every ethic, and every decency that made them who they were.
He’d learned firsthand that it doesn’t take long for your moral compass to change direction when death is on the hunt for you every minute of every day.
More recently, though, the roles between Frost’s crew and the Scabs had reversed, with the hunters now the hunted, despite their superior intellect and firepower.
He’d seen the change in tactics live, when he held back and witnessed the cannibals overrun the Trading Post, tearing through those who opposed their advance. It was an unbalanced war to be sure, but a conflict with clear skirmish lines and differing rules of engagement.
The Nomad knew the Scabs had been growing in numbers, but he had no idea how effective a mass attack would be when it was unleashed with precision.
The tactics employed meant one of two things. Either their collective intelligence was growing or someone with superior skills was coordinating, acting as puppeteer for the damned.
The Nomad took a quick measurement of the track next to his boot. Size eleven was his guess, roughly an inch smaller than his. He ran a visual check of the other footprints nearby. None of them were noticeably smaller, though one set seemed deeper and flatter than all of the others, without much in the way of toe prints, except one—an odd-shaped big toe on the right foot. It was overly large, as if it had swelled to double its normal size.
His eyes came up as he studied the area from left to right, looking for signs of a threat along the ridgeline that surrounded him. There was no movement among the shadows. No unexpected blurs. No random grunts. No prolonged growls. No clatter of boots or gear, or the determined breaths of men with a live target in their sights.
It was time to move ahead.
He rose from his knee, but remained in a crouched position as he swung around to the left, deciding to work the perimeter in a clockwise direction. Not because it was the proper tactical choice, but rather because he’d chosen counterclockwise the last three times he performed this maneuver.
“Got to mix it up,” he mumbled in a tone barely above a whisper, his eyes tracking the horizon beyond the bus. If there was an ambush waiting, it would come from the rise at his ten o’clock, matching the path of the sun. He figured somewhere beyond it was a throng of meat-eaters, or a patrol of men with M-Spec rifles.
He advanced another thirty yards left and swung around, putting the bus at his five o’clock position. Still nothing. No blood. No signs of a struggle, either, just the sea of footprints etched in the snow, including the deeper set with the mutant big toe.
Someone else might have wondered if the footprints had been staged as part of some kind of ruse. Yet he knew better, having seen this same mass set of tracks before, minus the big-toe print. The Scabs had worked the area like a squadron of ants, carpet bombing the expanse in their quest for food.
Just then, he heard a rattling thud behind him, followed by a series of grunts. He spun with his curved weapons leading the way, their razor-sharp blades in a forward position.
When his eyes tracked the sound, he spotted someone inside the bus. A girl. Young and blonde. Hair like a rat’s nest. Her hands were pressed up against the window on either side of her nose-less face. An instant later, her grunts resumed, as did her pounding on the glass, making an awful racket.
He held out his hands with the blades aimed at the ground. “Shhhhh!’
She stopped the racket, bobbing up and down on her legs, looking as though she were about to open her very first present on Christmas morning.
The Nomad held up a hand, releasing two fingers from his grip on one of the blades, then pushed his palm down a few inches in a repetitive manner to send her a command.
She ducked down to a point where he could only see her eyes, plus the crown of her frizzy mop, her hands no longer in view.
He gave her another hand signal, telling her to hold position while he worked his way around the bus to check the area.
She rose in the window and bounced up and down again, this time waving at him to come closer.
He ignored her request, working the area with his swords at the ready.
First, he made his way to the top of the ridge ahead, then leaned up and peered beyond. There were scores of tracks leading away, heading toward a pile of rubble in the distance.
As before, they were all barefoot tracks, size eleven or so. No small prints or any signs of men in boots. The odd thing was, the deeper set of tracks with the big toe had disappeared.
The Nomad worked his way to the right, repeating the same scan multiple times until he confirmed there were no threats. He returned to the bus, this time approaching the doors hanging open along the side.
He climbed the steps and went inside, where he was greeted with a flying leap from the blonde girl. She wrapped her scrawny arms around his neck, with her equally thin legs latching onto his waist.