Wasteland Marshals Read online

  2

  The next three weeks found a quiet rhythm. Despite Lucas’s protests, Preston insisted that he stay and recover fully, saying that he would not clear a farm hand to go back to work from such an injury any sooner. Lucas grudgingly gave in, but he insisted on helping with light chores around the house and doctor’s office to keep from going stir crazy. Shane tended their horses and helped in the barn, lending a hand for any farm work.

  At night, he and Lucas played poker or one of the well-worn fantasy card games Shane kept in his duffle. It was another pastime carried over from long, boring weeks babysitting Mob witnesses in the old days, one that transitioned well now that power for electronics was hard to come by. Shane missed binge-watching horror movies and the all-night online gaming that used to fill empty evenings, but cards were a sociable substitute. Preston joined them now and again when his duties permitted.

  “There you are,” Preston said when Shane came back inside after an early morning in the barn. “Thought you’d want to know, Lucas is cleared to go. I know he’s been champing at the bit for a while, but I wanted to make sure he healed up clean and solid before you two headed out. The road’s no place to open up stitches or deal with an infection.”

  Shane wholeheartedly agreed, although he and Lucas had managed through some bad injuries plenty of times since the world fell apart. “I’m amazed he didn’t meet me at the door with our bags packed,” he replied with a chuckle.

  “I haven’t told him yet.” Preston hesitated. “I know you have important work to do out there, but I’ll be sorry to see you go,” he admitted. “The stable hands will miss you, too. They say you’ve more than done your share.”

  Shane shrugged. “I like to keep busy. And helping on some of the carpentry was a nice change. My dad was in construction. Maybe it’s in my blood a little.”

  He didn’t mention that his parents and two brothers had died in the Events. Preston didn’t ask. He didn’t have to.

  “If you ever decide to quit being Marshals, I’ll put in a good word for you here,” Preston joked.

  “Stranger things have happened.” Personally, Shane figured that he and Lucas would die with their boots on.

  “Well, the offer stands,” Preston replied, clapping him on the shoulder. “Go talk to Lucas and let me know what kind of provisions you’ll need and when you want to get back on the road. We’ll make sure you have what you need.”

  Shane thanked him and headed toward Lucas’s room. He paused when he reached the door to the bedroom and ran a hand over his face. It had been too damn close. Shane still had nightmares about the attack. No one really knew what prowled in the night nowadays. Regular travelers wouldn’t have had a chance. They’d only survived because they were ex-military, US Marshals, with all the training that entailed. And still, it had been a near thing.

  He burst in without knocking and caught Lucas trying to pull his pants on. At the unexpected intrusion, Lucas wobbled and nearly toppled over with one leg stuck in his trousers.

  “What the…fudge?” Lucas said, catching himself at the last minute and censoring his language out of respect for their host. “You ever hear of knocking?”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Shane replied, grinning. “If you’re well enough to walk, you’re well enough for me to go back to irritating the crap out of you.”

  “Joy,” Lucas replied in a droll tone. He regained his balance and pulled his pants up, giving a huff at the indignity. “A little privacy here? I’m trying to get dressed.”

  “Seriously?” Shane questioned, leaning against the wall. “They sent us into the bathroom together in elementary school since the time we were in third grade. Military barracks. Crappy hotels. And, we’ve been on the road for three years now. I’m long past needing to sneak up on you if I wanted to get an eyeful. You flatter yourself.”

  Lucas managed a smile that was almost like normal. “Yeah, yeah.”

  Shane closed the door and walked farther into the room, to sit on a wooden chair near the bed. Lucas picked up the pitcher next to the basin on a washstand and sluiced water over his face. In the two weeks they’d been here, stubble had become a full, dark beard, and his hair, which he also usually kept close-cut, had also grown longer.

  “Guess I’m getting a head start on my winter beard.” He sighed, looking in the mirror. Shane could see the toll the injury had taken on Lucas. He’d lost weight, and despite the enforced inactivity of recovery, he had dark circles under his eyes.

  Shane and Lucas had been a team since they’d been picked for partners in third-grade dodgeball, and even the end of the world hadn’t changed that. Shane was blond, with the kind of trustworthy good looks that made it far too easy for him to get what he wanted with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. Lucas had olive skin and black hair, and his moody vibe had been intimidating, even back in school, growing more so after a couple of tours of duty together and then joining the Marshals.

  “Where’ve you been?” Lucas asked.

  “Playing farmhand. Not sure I could ever get used to the suspenders and hats for myself, but Green Farm is a nice place.”

  “Your folks always did have a backyard garden,” Lucas said, sitting down to pull on his boots. “And my dad went deer hunting. That’s about as country as we ever got.”

  “Back when there were cities.”

  “Yeah.” Lucas’s parents, sister, and brother hadn’t survived the Events.

  “I let you sleep and went and sat on the porch. Thank God the Amish believe in coffee,” Shane replied. “Talked to the doc. He thinks you’re ready to go back on the road.”

  Lucas seemed to take stock of himself in the mirror, sighed in frustration, and headed back toward the bed. “I’m ready to be gone,” he said, pulling his shirt over the newly healed scars on his chest and shoulder.

  “Kinda nice to be somewhere for a while where nothing’s trying to kill us,” Shane replied.

  Lucas snorted. “If we stick around long enough, you’ll manage to annoy the fu…dge out of them. They’ll probably chase us off with axes and scythes.”

  “I’m the people person, remember?” It was an old sparring match, almost as old as the debate over which of them was taller. Shane stood half an inch taller than Lucas, a point his friend would never concede.

  “Says you,” Lucas retorted. He stretched, then grimaced as the newly healed skin protested. “Ouch. I remember when we just transported WITSEC informants, chased down some fugitives, and only had to worry about the Mob,” Lucas said wistfully. “Good times.”

  When the cities went dark, and the relentless bustle of cars, trains, and planes came to an abrupt halt, creatures that had awaited their turn to take back the night slunk from their hiding places to remind humankind that they were no longer the apex predators.

  “But still, it feels wrong not to keep moving,” Lucas went on. “Places to go, people to see, things to kill.” Shane knew that Lucas had never been able to sit still.

  “Messes to clean up,” Shane added.

  Back in school, they’d called Lucas’s jitters ADHD and given him pills. The Army liked the hyper-vigilant focus the pills gave Lucas, a good thing for a sniper. But since the Events, the pills, like much of the Army, were long gone. Shane was resigned to Lucas just being twitchy as fuck. It suited Lucas as if he’d reverted to his natural state, like most everything else had.

  A knock at the door startled them, although Shane knew they were safe here.

  “See? Someone knows how to knock,” Lucas muttered. “Come in!” he said in a louder voice.

  Doc Preston walked in and cast an assessing gaze over Lucas. “You’re up. I told Shane you’re healed enough to go back on the road. I’d be most displeased if all my handiwork on those stitches was for naught.” One hundred careful stitches, which would leave a scar. Shane had already taken to calling Lucas “quilt boy” when he was out of arm’s reach.

  “Have your folks heard anything about what’s going on out there?” Shane asked.
r />   “Look at it this way—we’ve already had the apocalypse, so nothing else is too bad by comparison, right?” Preston replied. “Heard there’ve been floods to the northeast, and wildfires in the west. The usual.”

  The end of the world, when it came, wasn’t due to just one thing—it was a cascade of one calamity after another. Some people referred to the year-long shit storm that had torn apart modern civilization as “The Cataclysm,” but most people just called it “The Events.”

  “Good to know,” Lucas said. “Not that it changes the circuit we ride. When we can, we try to pitch in and lend a hand when that shi—stuff happens.”

  “I imagine there’s too much territory, and not enough of you Marshals to go around,” Preston replied. He didn’t know the half of it, Shane thought. And that lets him sleep at night, so we’re not going to tell him.

  The aftermath of the Events had badly strained the military and law enforcement, and without modern communication and transportation, they were stretched even thinner. Shane and Lucas were the only Marshals in their area, which covered parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. Too much space, too many problems, for just two men, but they did the best they could.

  Shane and Lucas made the rounds, thanking the many people who had brought food, tended their horses, or stopped by with well-wishes. And of course, there was Preston, who had taken them into his home and saved Lucas’s life.

  “Come back, when the circuit brings you this way,” Preston said, walking with them and their horses to the front gate of the enclave. “Bring us news. But try to come back in one piece.”

  They shook his hand. “Deal,” Lucas said, an empty promise but a pleasant thought. They swung up into the saddles and rode out, and Shane had to admit that he was happy to be back on the road.

  “I think the horses figured they had a vacation,” Shane said, riding next to Lucas. Route 19 was the most direct way south other than the interstate, but they didn’t expect to see a lot of fellow travelers.

  Once in a while, peddlers or a trader caravan wended their way across the broken landscape, but that was more likely in summer, not now, when fall storms were in the offing. Most folks stayed close to home unless a disaster forced them to relocate. Shane thought it was as if Fate picked up the snow globe of the world and shook it, just for the hell of it, to see where the pieces would land.

  The land on either side of them had been farmland or pastures for horses and cows. A few small hamlets at the crossroads had offered gas, convenience stores, and beer. Most of that was gone now. Violent storms had chased off some residents, while the collapse of big parts of the power grid had shuttered most businesses. The ones who remained survived by banding together into communities every bit as tightly knit as the Amish and toughing it out, helping each other through fire, flood, and famine. Unlike the Amish, some of those enclaves were decidedly unfriendly to outsiders, even Marshals.

  Just north of I-80, Shane saw two travelers coming toward them. Their clothing made identification easy and immediate.

  “Looks like a couple of the IT Priests are heading our way,” he said to Lucas.

  The two riders were dressed in black academic robes. Each wore several strands of Mardi Gras beads, from which hung a fandom pendant. In this case, the dark-haired young man on the left had a Transformer medallion, while his companion, a fine-featured blond whose gender Shane couldn’t guess, wore a Decepticon amulet.

  “Greetings, Marshals!” the dark-haired man said, noting the badges Shane and Lucas wore, prominently displayed. “I’m Brother Jon, and this is Devon.”

  “Hello, monks. What brings you this way?” Lucas asked.

  “Heading to the Thiel campus,” the blond replied. “We’ve just made a circuit of the towers and nodes. We’ll rest a bit and get new orders, then head out again.”

  When the Events destroyed cities, unleashed outbreaks, and sent the survivors fleeing, many college students realized they couldn’t go home. The universities realized that with their own power plants and extensive facilities, they could function as independent villages. Sporting fields were plowed and planted for food, flax, and cotton, and escaped livestock from abandoned farms got corralled and brought within the palisade fencing that sprang up to protect the inhabitants.

  Townsfolks who didn’t flee either moved on campus or took shelter there during the new, unpredictable storms. Students suddenly found their majors had become their professions and pitched in. ROTC and sporting teams were deputized to campus security and local law enforcement or helped with the farming. But the engineering and computer science majors and their professors found a whole new calling.

  The whole “priesthood” thing had started as a joke, gallows humor after the Events, a self-deprecating nod to the stereotype that programmers didn’t have a social life and didn’t get laid, and that college students with loans might as well have taken a vow of poverty. But when universities realized that they and the few remaining scattered government facilities were the last guardians of what remained of the internet, the task of keeping the backbone of the system functioning became an urgent way to save knowledge and preserve a key communications tool.

  And so engineers and programmers teamed up to ride circuits between campuses, doing their best to keep what remained of the system and its servers functioning. No one knew who came up with the idea of the robes, beads, and geek symbols, but it immediately identified the wearers to all who saw them and afforded some protection from brigands.

  “Any news from the road?” Shane asked. “We were sidelined for a bit from an injury.”

  “We came across I-80,” Devon said. “Didn’t have any trouble, but we’ve heard there have been some incidents on the side roads.”

  “Incidents?” Lucas asked, immediately going into what Shane thought of as “cop mode.”

  Jon nodded. “Brigands, robbing peddlers and stealing horses.”

  “Where?” Lucas pressed.

  “Around the state game lands, just south of here,” Devon replied. “That’s all we know.”

  Shane and Lucas exchanged a glance. “All right. We’ll look into it,” Shane assured the monks.

  “We have a message for you,” Jon said. “Professor Gibbons at Slippery Rock has us all looking for you two.”

  “What’s going on?” Lucas asked.

  “We’re losing contact with IOT.”

  “Eye-aught?” Shane echoed, confused.

  “I-O-T. Internet of Things,” Devon replied. “You probably never noticed, before everything went to hell in a handbasket, that all the equipment and appliances around you were networked to the internet. So your coffee maker and your refrigerator and your smart TV could all report back to their manufacturers for software updates—and data mining.”

  “I think everyone’s warranty is fucked, at this point,” Lucas pointed out.

  “Not the point,” Jon said. “We were able to hack into the IOT early on, and we used the reports to get data. Anything on batteries or with a generator—or in the places where the grid isn’t down, still has power—became our eyes and ears. That’s what helped us feed you the intel you needed to know the safe routes out of the D.C. suburbs and helped the responders on the coast get around where the bridges were out and the roads were flooded.”

  “So Big Brother actually served a purpose,” Lucas snarked. “And now you’re losing contact? Why? Grid going dark? Batteries running low?”

  “That’s some of it, but I’m afraid there’s more,” Devon said. “We think something is actively trying to block the signal in places.”

  “You’re sure it’s not just a glitch?” Shane asked, frowning.

  Jon shook his head. “No. Something’s cut off the signal in certain areas. We haven’t figured out a pattern, but the signal isn’t failing—it’s being blocked. We don’t know what that means, or what could do that—or why anyone would want to.”

  “Could it be something natural?” Lucas wondered aloud. “Weird, but natural? We’ve had
more than our share of that kind of thing, lately.”

  “Maybe,” Devon allowed. “We’re looking into it, and we’ve got queries out to the other priests, but no one’s given us anything usable yet.”

  “All right,” Shane replied. “Keep us posted. What else?”

  “We’ve completely lost touch with the enclave at Site R,” Jon said gravely. “We’ve accepted the probability that they’ve been wiped out.”

  3

  “What the fuck is Site R?” Lucas asked. “And why should I care? Boston and Philadelphia are gone, too. We deal with it.”

  Jon gave him a long-suffering look. “Neither Boston nor Philadelphia were secure location bunkers for top government officials. Site R—Raven Rock—was. Very hush-hush. That location was built to withstand everything up to and including a nuclear bomb to the East Coast.”

  “So if it’s gone dark…” Shane said.

  Devon nodded. “Yeah. Gettysburg University alerted us a week ago. They’ve been trying to reach Site R and lost contact. So they put out a call for anyone who heard from the Marshals to send you their way and see what’s going wrong. You’ll probably want to swing through and talk to the Gettysburg folks, then head south from there.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “We’ll head that way.”

  “Travel safely,” Devon said. “May the Force be with you, and all that jazz.”

  “And also with you,” Lucas added with a smirk, riffing on his Catholic upbringing.

  “May the odds be ever in your favor,” Shane returned. Lucas knew that since the Events, both he and Shane had lost faith in a god that seemed to have left without a forwarding address. That left them to find comfort in other things, like the books and movies that they didn’t want to forget.

  Lucas and Shane said nothing until after Jon and Devon had ridden off. Finally, Lucas turned to his partner. “So…Site R?”