Panting, dizzy with blood loss, she peered around the wreckage.
“No,” it came out a breathy moan. “Oh, no.”
They’d won. The dragon was, indeed, dead. Its smoking hulk lying on the ground outside the bunker blocked out most of the skyline, but it was missing one critical body part: its head. Not even those creatures could come back from that. But at what cost?
Audrey blinked. The room was getting darker. Breath wheezed through her lungs, each inhalation becoming more labored. Her eyes latched on to the unmoving form of Lieutenant Micah Caine lying in the shadow of the dead beast.
The monster was dead, but so was the lieutenant. So were they all. She didn’t have enough strength left to cry.
The last thing Audrey Harrison ever saw was the beautiful face of the man she had secretly loved, his blue eyes staring blindly at a sky just beginning to light with dawn.
“THIS IS IT.” RAIN MAURI squatted at the top of the escarpment, faded map held in front of her. The pastel colors denoting long-vanished borders meant nothing to her, but there were other landmarks to follow. Most of them handwritten decades after the map had left the printer.
Sutter scanned the valley below. “Ain’t nothing much here but dust.”
Rain stood, letting her eyes, hidden behind a beat-up pair of dark glasses, roam over the barren landscape. He was right. The entire valley was one big dust bowl. Not a tree in sight, not even a bush. “There.” She pointed to a heap of gray stones in the distance. “That’s it.”
“Still don’t see it.” Sutter lifted his grimy baseball cap and scratched his scalp. He’d shaved his head before they left the compound and it was starting to grow back, a black shadow against coffee skin.
“Seriously? You don’t see that giant pile of rocks?”
He rolled his eyes. “Of course, I see the giant pile of rocks, Rain. Just don’t see what’s so special about that particular pile of rocks. Lots of rock piles closer to Sanctuary if you’re desperate for rocks.”
Rain shrugged and started down the hillside. The path was treacherous with loose stones and crumbling earth and her boots were just this side of worn out, but she didn’t hesitate. Sutter sighed and followed.
When they reached the bottom, Rain realized the valley wasn’t quite as barren as it looked from above. Here and there fragile shoots of grass bravely raised their heads above the ravaged soil. Nature was making a comeback. Or at least trying.
She headed toward the rock pile which began to look less like rocks and more like rubble the closer they got.
“That’s a concrete building.” Sutter’s voice held a hint of surprise. “Or what’s left of it anyway.”
Rain nodded and hitched her rifle a little higher over her shoulder. They were safe enough during daytime, but it never hurt to be prepared. “Old U.S. Army bunker. It was abandoned before the War.”
He shot her a look. “There are scorch marks on some of that rubble. Those beasts don’t attack abandoned buildings.”
Rain smiled. “Ever heard of Caine’s Last Stand?”
“No way! This is it?”
“Yep. This is it.” Her smile widened, flashing dimples.
Caine’s Last Stand was legendary. A tale told around countless campfires, whispered on dark nights. It had grown and changed until it resembled a tale from one of those ancient comic books Sutter thought no one knew about. Most people thought it was just a story made up by the Army during the War to keep up the spirits of the soldiers fighting a losing battle.
Rain knew different. Maybe the details had changed over time, but the story was real. Lieutenant Micah Caine had been real. And so had his sacrifice. She’d discovered the files that proved it and now she’d finally found the place where it had happened.
“Come on.” She led the way across the scattered rubble to what remained of a set of concrete stairs, worn and broken by time and battle. Sutter followed her down into the ruined military bunker.
“Wow, that’s a hell of a gun.” Sutter’s eyes grew wide at the sight of the enormous rail gun, barrel pointed skyward. After decades of exposure to the elements it was impressive, but useless. Not to mention the thing wouldn’t work without electricity. Rain was far more interested in the remains huddled at the foot of the giant gun.
Time and vermin had scattered the bones and rotted the clothing, but she knew who it was. “Audrey Harrison. She was a librarian before the war. By all accounts a pacifist.” Rain had done her homework. Caine’s Last Stand had been an obsession since childhood.
Sutter’s brown eyes widened as he scratched at the three-day growth of beard on his chin. No time to shave and no safe place to do it out here. “What the hell was a pacifist doing handling a weapon like this?”
“It was war, Sutter. They were fighting dragons. If you were human, you fought. Or you died. Just like now.”
Nothing much had changed since then, in Rain’s opinion. Except that the humans had gone underground and kept to the daylight while the monsters had multiplied despite their best efforts. Pacifism was no longer an option.
Fury rode her as she stared down at Audrey Harrison’s remains. Even in this shelled-out ruin of a world, the dead were respected. Yet these dead, these heroes, had been left to rot. The excuse, of course, had been that it was wartime. Typical bureaucratic nonsense, as Padre Pedro would say.
She stepped to what had once been a window but was now a gaping hole along one side of the bunker. Her boots left deep impressions in decades of dust and grime. Crumbled pieces of concrete and stone rattled underfoot, but her attention was on the view outside.
The pile of bones hadn’t been scattered, but loomed against the sky, bleached
