“Do you think they’ll suspect?”
She shrugged. “Why would they? As far as they know it was just you, me and Sutter in the compound. And Sutter’s dead.” Her voice choked on the last bit. She cleared her throat. “There was enough in there to throw them off the scent. For now.”
Hopefully Smith and his Marines would never guess that the two barrels of watered-down home brew and the cases of canned food mostly gone off were nothing more than a smokescreen. Their true winter stores were far below ground, as were their true numbers. Elan hadn’t been about to let the Marines decimate their compound like they had so many others.
“Elan, about Sutter ...”
He shook his head. “I don’t wish to talk about it. He’s dead. That’s that. We’ll hold vigil for him tonight and then we move on.” He turned and walked back into the compound. Probably to drink himself into a stupor.
But Rain wasn’t satisfied. Sutter had been her partner, her friend, the closest thing she had to a brother. She wasn’t about to let him go out that way. She’d made him a promise and she was going to keep it.
Her eyes narrowed as she stared in the direction the Humvees had disappeared. What did the Marines want with Sutter’s body, anyway?
Five
THE RUSTED SIGN SWUNG gently in the breeze, each twist making a slight squeaking sound. The letters were nearly gone, worn away by wind and rain, but she could still make out the town name: Fossil.
Rain frowned. Odd name for a town.
She hitched her pack up a little higher. At first glance the town looked deserted. The windows of the shops on Main Street were coated in grime. One of the old telephone poles had toppled over and lay across the road, the attached streetlight broken to pieces. Weeds and saplings grew through cracks in the pavement. It looked like no one had come this way in a very long time.
Rain knew better than to judge things by the way they looked. After all, it had been her idea to have a separate storage area with a bunch of crap food for when the Marines came calling.
She turned off Main Street, keeping to the shadows, her footsteps soft. No sense advertising her presence. She didn’t have Sutter to watch her back anymore. She pushed that thought out of her mind.
“You lost?”
Rain whirled around. “Jesus, you scared me.”
“Ain’t Jesus. ‘Least not last time I checked anyhow.” The woman was bent nearly double, her face lined with age. To Rain she looked about a hundred. Her gnarled hands gripped the handle of a small battered suitcase, the sides decorated with giant orange flowers. “Well, don’t just stand there gawping, missy. Help an old lady out.”
Still baffled at having been taken by surprise, Rain let herself be pressed into service. The suitcase was surprisingly heavy. “You need a cart or something.”
“Oh, pish. Why do I need one of those things when I’ve got a perfectly good suitcase? Waste not, want not, I always say. I’m Albie, by the way. Alberta Buck, it is, but everyone calls me Albie.”
“Rain Mauri. Nice to meet you.”
“Rain, huh? That’s an unusual name. Were your parents hippies?”
Rain frowned. She had no idea what a “hippie” was. In fact, she had no idea who or what her parents had been. “No. I don’t think so.”
Albie hobbled down the walk, Rain trailing behind her. “How old are you then?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Hmm. You remember the Before?”
That was what some people called the time before the Dragon Wars: The Before. “No, not really.” Rain remembered some things. She remembered riding in a car. She remembered a big yellow bird on TV. She remembered sticking her head in the freezer in a grocery store. The cold air made her skin tingle. But her memories of the Before were just little snap shots, more like dreams than anything.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Albie said with a slight nod of her head. “I remember. I remember clear as day. Sometimes I wished I could forget. Horrible things, I seen. Horrible. Here we are.”
They stopped in front of what looked like an old corner store. Paint was peeling from the cement walls and the cracked windows had been boarded up. It sure didn’t look like anyone was home.
Albie gave a sharp rap on the door. After a moment Rain heard a slight shuffling sound inside then someone called out. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Hank. Brought us a visitor.”
There were some more shuffling noises, a slight thunk, and then the door swung open. Inside it was dark and Rain’s eyes were used to the bright sunlight. She hesitated. She hadn’t survived this long by being stupid. No matter how nice Albie seemed, it could be a trap.
Rain hefted the suitcase with her left hand. Nice and heavy. Good weapon if it came down to it. Just in case, she slid her handgun out from where it nestled at the base of her spine. It was a small gun, but deadly. At least for humans.
“You first,” she told Albie.
The old woman gave her a smile as if she knew exactly what Rain was thinking, then stepped through the doorway with Rain hot on her heels. The door slammed shut behind them.
“Hank, put that damn thing down before you shoot yourself in the foot,” Albie snapped.
The man called Hank looked just about as old as Albie. Rain doubted he could even pull the trigger on the rusted-out shotgun in his hands. And if he did, he’d probably blow himself up.
He slowly lowered the weapon and Rain breathed a sigh of relief. She’d have hated to shoot the old man.
“Rain, honey, I’d like you to meet my fool nephew Hank. Hank, this here’s Rain Mauri. She’s new in town. Be nice.”
“Nephew?”
“My brother, Hank’s daddy, was a good twenty years older than me. Here, you
