Angels of Vengeance

side of the tracks. Fire, she had learned, was as arbitrary as a tornado, sometimes wiping out one half of a street while leaving the other half untouched. Having survived the dog pack, she did not care to spend a second longer than was necessary contemplating the ruins of Temple. She moved off, uncomfortable and a little disgusted in her blood- and piss-stained clothes.

The market had been built right up to the edge of the road surface and a large tarmac remained largely free of vegetation. A few hardy weeds poked through cracks in the concrete here and there, but unlike in so much of this ghost town, she did not have to wade through waist-high grass in which any number of dangers might lay.

The doors of the market were jammed open. They had attempted to close on a trolley on the morning of the Disappearance. No moonlight penetrated the interior. Sofia pushed the trolley out of the way, forcing it over the pile of clothes lying on the floor just behind it. After holstering her Magnum and flicking on a small flashlight, she could see the remains of the Disappeared everywhere. The authorities had not been through here to clean them up, and nor had there been any attempt at salvage. That made sense. Unlike her, the federales could rely on being properly fed and watered, and by now, Sofia knew, most of the contents of this store would be unusable. The fresh food had all rotted away or been eaten by vermin years ago, so too with most of the packaged food. But her needs were simple.

Crossing herself and murmuring a prayer for the dead, she stepped deeper into the gloom. Her senses were still amplified after the fight for her life. She could hear rats scurrying deep inside the market building, but nothing larger than that.

The first of her provisions she found in the third aisle. Five-gallon plastic bottles of water. The contents would taste foul after all this time, but water did not go off as long as the seal on the bottles remained unbroken. With no running water in the motel she’d chosen to lay up in tonight, she had no choice but to seek out potable supplies. Food was more of a challenge. On the journey to KC, they had hunted and trapped wherever possible, but occasionally they came across stores of food preserved well enough to use. Sofia knew what to look for, thanks to Trudi Jessup, who had schooled all of them in the shelf life of canned and dried groceries.

Into her backpack went half-a-dozen cans of corn, a tin of peaches, two packets of vacuum-sealed lentils and - the Lord Jesus be praised - one large canned Christmas cake. A real score. She checked the tins for dents and swelling and the packets of dried food for any sign of insect infestation. She would do a more thorough check once back in her room, but as an experienced scavenger, she was confident she’d just secured enough food and water for three days.

Once upon a time she would’ve thought nothing of walking the ten or twelve blocks back to her new hideout. A trip of maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. But returning from the market this night, she was heavily weighed down as she negotiated a treacherous passage through more streets overgrown with vegetation and blocked by wreckage and fallen trees. Advancing in short bursts of movement. Scurrying from cover to cover. Always watching and listening to avoid being discovered, Sofia took over two hours to return to the Economy Inn, a two-storey motel of brown bricks and weather-faded trim on the southern edge of Temple’s town centre. It was close enough for her to feel as though she was in some sort of contact with the federales, but far enough removed from their comings and goings that she didn’t have to remain in hiding every hour of the day.

Despite the chill of the night, she was sweating by the time she got home.

Home.

How sad that she should think of the Economy Inn as her home.

Although a young teen in years, Sofia Pieraro was experienced in the dictates of survival. She did not hurry into the motel; she remained in cover where she could observe from a safe distance. Having killed bandits who returned to their own camp sites without taking the precaution of checking for ambushes laid in their absence, she knew to wait and watch for at least an hour. Even though, in this instance, she was certain long before then that it was safe to enter, Sofia cleaved to the lessons of the past. Only when a full hour had passed with no sign of anybody lying in wait for her did she complete the last, short leg of her return trip.

Even then she was not done with caution. Leaving her supplies at the front desk, she retrieved the AK-47 from where she had stashed it, behind a fire hose in a closet on the ground floor. Without night-vision equipment, she had to fix the little flashlight to the barrel with a couple of thick rubber bands she carried for that purpose. Safety off, finger on the trigger, selector to full auto, she performed the last rite of her careful passage back into hiding: effecting an entry into her motel room, as though she knew it to be occupied by an intruder.

It wasn’t, and after a quick sweep of the few places where somebody could be hiding, she collected her food and water and shut herself in.

First priority was to clean herself up and dispose of her soiled clothing. She wouldn’t waste water on laundry, not when clothes could be scavenged so easily from right here in the motel. She stripped off, washed herself down with a cup of water and a hand towel and soap from the bathroom. Changed into a clean pair of jeans and a dark blue flannel shirt. Bundled up her dirty clothing and tossed it into the room next door. Working by moonlight, she fed herself from the dwindling supplies she had brought with her, leaving it until morning to properly examine the cans and packages she’d taken from the market. Dinner consisted of two muesli bars, a sachet of protein gel, and two cups of water.

She was exhausted but wired, still coming down from the shock of fighting off the pack of wild dogs. Part of her, the weak, unworthy part, longed to crawl into bed and dream of happier days. But there could be no happiness for her, not while there was breath in the body of the man she blamed for the death of her family, perhaps even for her father. The tyrant Blackstone might not have driven the car that ran him down, but he had certainly driven Miguel Pieraro to Kansas City, where he had perished.

Wrapping herself around the small, dark furnace of her loathing for Jackson Blackstone, Sofia crawled into bed with the transistor radio, now tuned to one of the two talk stations broadcasting from Killeen. Other local stations played music, and she might well have been able to calm down and sleep while listening to one of them. But she found the talk stations an excellent way of learning about Fort Hood and Killeen. Not so much about the Hood’s interminable feuds with Seattle or its worries about Roberto Morales, Caribbean pirates, migrants and West Coast liberals, all of which seemed to exercise the imaginations of the people phoning in. Rather, she was interested in the calls that gave her an insight into how things actually worked over here.

She knew, for instance, that all the rumours back in KC about only white people being able to walk the streets were wrong. There were many African-American families, Asians and even some Latinos living in Blackstone’s capital. But they were all military people who had joined the Texas Defense Force. Of the settler families who had come here, fewer hailed from all over the world compared with Kansas City. There were no Indians and Pakistanis working on the railways in Killeen. No Arab doctors in the hospitals. No Mexican farmers tending to their own associates, but there were hundreds of them working on government farms that sounded similar, in some ways, to those her family had worked on as refugees in Australia. But very, very different in other ways. On the government farm outside Sydney, they had been free to come and go when not working, whereas here, workers seemed to move only between the fields and the barracks that housed them. Sofia knew this because of callers like ‘Estelle’, who was right then complaining to the host of the midnight shift about the number of ‘beaners’ she had seen walking around, as free as birds, when she’d done her shopping that morning.

‘What I want to know is where were their bosses and foremen, Ray? Where were they? I didn’t see ‘em. I didn’t see ‘em anywhere. Do we let these people run around like this nowadays? Is that how things are now? Just like Seattle, where anything goes? Because you can see what happens when anything goes, Ray. It goes to hell in a handbasket.’

Sofia had heard this complaint a few times in the last day. The good people of Killeen and Fort Hood seemed most put out that they should be inconvenienced by frequent traffic stops and checkpoints, while ‘beaners’ and ‘servants’ seemed to have the run of the town.

Ray assured Estelle that he was certain Governor Blackstone would not condone a situation where anything goes. Governor Blackstone would make sure that Estelle had nothing to worry about. Ray, Sofia had learned, spent a good deal of his time on air assuring Estelle and her ilk of Governor Blackstone’s best intentions.

Estelle seemed unconvinced, but Sofia was satisfied. This was the fourth caller she had heard complaining about unescorted ‘servants’ being allowed to wander around the town unsupervised. That was interesting, thought Sofia. She added it to a growing list of interesting facts she had learned from the radio or gleaned from her conversations with Dave Bowman.

Most interesting of all was the fact that Blackstone lived ‘among his people’. In a simple house on the base.