Captives (42 page)

Yet Mia wasn't sure how many people in Raina's position would take the choice that offered them no chance of survival. Anson wouldn't, she knew that much; he probably couldn't conceive how the People of the Stars could continue to exist without him. Thus any choice that guaranteed his death also guaranteed the death of his people. Mauser wouldn't, either. Too solipsistic. Walt? Too much ego. Raymond would have, so long as Mia had been one of the people he was sacrificing himself to save. But that didn't really count. Lots of people did crazy things for love.

She wasn't sure why she was still here. She should have died years ago in the bombing. Or after, lying broken in the street. Why persist when her last hope of finding Raymond alive had been crushed like a beetle on a sidewalk? When she seemed to take no pleasure in anything besides hurting her enemies? If not for her miserable survival instinct—that sniveling, selfish bitch—her consciousness would have opted to put an end to itself as soon as she'd found the picture of the pier in the wallet of his jeans.

At last, though, she had a reason besides Raymond. Besides her mindless self-preservation.

"I can get her back," she said. Mauser was turned away, thinking out loud at the others, polling them for the likeliest route the Stars would take on their way home. Mia strode in front of him. "Hey! Jabbering fuckface! Do you want me to go get her back or not?"

Mauser snapped his mouth shut mid-sentence. "Get her back? How do you intend to do that?"

"Find me a bike. With fourteen of us searching, it'll only take a few minutes. I'll shadow them. If I don't see an opportunity to snag her during the ride, I'll talk my way back inside the Heart."

"That," he said, "is not the worst idea I've ever heard floated. I have but one revision: we'll need
two
bikes."

"You can't go. If I can't pull this off, they're going to need you in San Pedro. After what she did, Raina would never let you endanger yourself chasing after her."

"Unfortunately, Raina has seen fit to remove herself from the chain of command. This has resulted in the mantle of leadership being placed on the shoulders of a bozo who is presently incapable of doing the smart thing." He glanced throughout the others. "Two bikes. Chop chop!"

The others scattered across the park. Mia ran north toward the houses across the street. The main problem with hunting for bikes was that most of them had already been snagged as soon as the survivors began to realize there was no new gasoline in the pipeline and that the old stuff went bad within a matter of months. On top of that, this hadn't exactly been a bicycle town to begin with. She ran from garage to garage, but the open ones were open because they'd been looted. Many had side doors, but this was Inglewood, and any glass in the doors was protected by iron bars.

Just as she was beginning to fear her plan was stillborn, a whistle split the morning. She ran back to the park. There, Mauser straddled a bike. A second stood beside it, riderless. Mia mounted up and flipped up the kickstand.

Mauser turned to Jensen. "Take the others and hole up a quarter mile east of here. If I need you to bring up the troops, the signal will be two shots, a pause, and two more shots."

The middle-aged man folded his arms. "Like pow, pow… pow, pow?"

"P-pow, pause, p-pow. Got it?"

"Gotten."

"If you haven't heard from us by nightfall, head back to the Place. Inform Jeanne she's in charge and that she should begin fortifications immediately." Mauser took a last look at the others. "I suppose that's it. Shouldn't you be wishing us godspeed?"

In unison, the warriors uttered a gruff battle cry. Mauser pedaled across the grass to a path leading to the corner of the park. Mia fell in behind him, her bow slipping down her shoulder. She shrugged it back into place, resolving that once this was over, she'd do some research on how the Mongols had managed.

"Right," Mauser said. "Still no real plan, then?"

"Take what they offer. First things first, we'd better catch up."

He nodded and surged forward, knees pumping. He swerved around a disembodied bumper, then a rain-cemented pile of what might once have been a cardboard box. Mia matched pace.

Mauser was uncharacteristically silent. Mia kept her ears pricked while doing some mental math. During her long hunt for Walt, she'd owned a horse on two occasions. The first had come in Tennessee; it had been standing in a field watching her, chewing grass. She had no intention of doing anything more than appreciating its animal bigness until the chorus of the Johnny Cash song had started up in her head. On what could only be called a whim, she'd then walked up to the horse, expecting it to bolt, but it seemed to have been waiting for a new master. It had been a good one.

The second horse she'd picked up in Mexico after her bike chain broke and she couldn't rig a replacement. She wasn't sure how the animal had survived alone in the desert, but without it, she might not have made it.

Both times, she'd given up on her mount after a few weeks, sending them back into the wilds. In the right circumstances, the animals beat walking, but they had to be fed and watered and cared for. They got tired. Worst of all, they made a shitload of noise, particularly in cities when you most needed stealth. For her money, a good bike beat them in every situation except the most rugged terrain.

Over the course of her ownership, she'd learned a horse couldn't sustain a full-speed gallop for all that long. Neither of hers had been able to do more than a mile before needing to slow down. It was at least ten miles from Inglewood to the Stars' home base in the hills. If they slowed to a trot, they could cover that in one go, but if they were pushing themselves hard to open space between themselves and Raina's people, they'd need to stop and rest along the way.

Either way, she and Mauser could catch them before they were back behind their walls.

They left Inglewood behind and rode up a series of hills. Ahead, the skyscrapers rose from the plain. To their left, the hills of La Cienega were brown and vacant of everything but shrubs and the motionless, hammer-like oil wells. As they pedaled down the north face of the hills, she began to think about angling that way—the region's idiotic lack of long-term planning and coordination meant it lacked any kind of proper grid, and La Cienega was one of the few contiguous north-south thoroughfares that ran all the way to the hills quarantining L.A. from the Valley. As she was about to suggest this course change to Mauser, she heard the sound they'd been hunting for: hooves. Multiple sets proceeding at no more than a trot. Oddly, they emanated from the northeast—a detour from the more or less straight northbound course between Inglewood and the Heart.

She and Mauser exchanged a look and angled toward the noise. Her legs were already getting gassed, but even at a slower speed, they gained on the clatter. Over the course of the next couple miles, the chase turned due east, running along the freeway toward downtown.

"I was under the impression they kept themselves in rich man's territory," Mauser said, gesturing toward Beverly Hills, now thoroughly to their left and falling behind them by the moment.

"I don't get it, either." She reached for her water bottle, keeping one hand on the handlebars. "Could be they're detouring to throw off pursuit. If we had a car—"

"Which we don't."

"Do they know that?"

"Given the way most outsiders talk about us, I wouldn't be surprised if the People of the Stars believed we'd be chasing after them on flying broomsticks. So yes, it's possible they'd think we have vehicles."

The towers loomed higher and higher. Ahead, several square blocks had burned to the ground. Over the years, shrubs and palms had grown from the ashes, but they'd been unable to find root on the exposed foundations, leading to open lines of sight through what had once been a dense city center. Through one such gap, she glimpsed the riders. They were moving down the street in loose columns, dispersing and reforming as they passed through the gridlock of dead cars. Ahead, simple bridges spanned a wide culvert.

"They're going to the river," she said. "Probably to water the horses."

"That pathetic excuse for a river isn't exactly the only source of water in the region." His train of thought was interrupted by the need to jink around the corroded remnants of an SUV splashed across three lanes. "They've grabbed Raina. Decapitated us. But that leaves a big ugly body angry about the loss of its head. I think they're on their way to poison us before we can strike back."

"If you're right, they might split up. That could be our best chance to retake her."

"Two against… something more than two," Mauser said. "Hope they've said their prayers."

At the culvert, the horde drew to a halt. Mauser and Mia stopped a few blocks short to watch through binoculars, ensconcing themselves in an impressive tangle of red-flowered bougainvillea. Members of the Sworn dismounted, flapping their white capes to air out their sweaty bodies while others led horses down the concrete embankment to the river. Mia spotted her, breath catching. Raina was seated on one of the horses. Her hands appeared to be tied behind her back.

Two mounted figures detached from the troop and trotted back the way they'd come in. Mauser reached for his rifle, threading it through the thorny branches. The two riders—scouts, from the way they were glancing around—drew nearer, but kept their rifles in their laps. Their hooves racketed down the street. As they passed, Mia recognized Fred's eager face.

Something moved in her stomach. "Got an idea."

"One you don't sound thrilled to entertain."

"It's a good idea. But I'm not sure I like the kind of person who'd do it."

"The plague turned right and wrong on its ear," Mauser said. "Our brains, meanwhile, continue to insist we're the same people who grew up forming orderly lines at grocery stores and writing thank you letters to our grandparents for the five dollar bill they sent us for Christmas." He pointed toward the men at the river. "What part of that strikes you as 'good'?"

The noise of the riders receded. Mia wheeled her bike from behind the bougainvillea and moved after them, careful to keep a screen of stalled cars between herself and those seeing to their horses at the river. Mauser trailed behind her. The scouts didn't push their mounts and it was simple to keep up. After traveling a quarter mile west, the two men stopped in the shadow of a glass office tower.

Mia swung around a corner and hopped off her bike. The two men dismounted to confer. She set down her bow and stripped off her shirt. Mauser watched in pure perplexion as she unwound the bindings around her chest.

"Holy shit, you're a
chick
?" Mauser hissed. "What manner of sorcery is this? And what are—?"

"Cover me." She pulled her shirt back on. "But don't shoot unless you have to."

She mussed her hair to get it to stand up, then picked up her bow and jogged into the open, employing a slight limp. In front of the office, the two men spun to face her, going for their guns.

"Fred?" she called.

"Mia?" He grinned in disbelief. "I heard you'd vanished into thin air!"

"You wouldn't believe it if I told you," she laughed, continuing to jog toward them. "Is everything okay? I swear I just heard an army go through here."

Fred's partner smirked. Mia whipped out an arrow and fired it through his throat.

"What are you
doing
?" Fred screamed.

Her second shot was already on its way. It hit him in the upper chest. He staggered against the building, blood leaking from the wound.

"I'm sorry," she said, and then she shot him in the head.

She turned and waved to Mauser. As he ran toward her, she knelt beside Fred's partner, buried her knife in his heart, and began to strip the cloak from his body. Blood stained the white fabric. The man was Hispanic, a good match, but his features were obviously heavier than Mia's. She dabbed her fingers in the blood pouring slackly from his throat and, with the help of her hand mirror, smeared it over her face, particularly her nose and jaw.

"I'm starting to get the picture." Mauser dropped beside Fred and went for his cloak.

"Wrong," Mia said. "His cloak stays on. If you want to help, get him back in the saddle."

"Giving him a traditional Western funeral?"

"Making use of my props." She stripped a pistol and holster from the partner and belted it on, then donned the thick gold chain the man been wearing.

By the time she was finished turning herself into him, Mauser had only managed to sit Fred upright in the street. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she pulled the arrow from his skull, shrugged off her white cloak to prevent it from getting too bloody, and helped boost the body into the saddle.

"I'm going to take him back to the Stars," she wheezed. "Tell them there's been an attack. It's your job to fire off enough rounds to convince them they'll need to send in the cavalry."

"You're thinking you can split them up? What then?"

"We take whatever they give us."

"Sounds like a recipe for chaos casserole."

She glared at him. "Do you have a better idea?"

"No ma'am." He set his hands on his hips, facing east toward the river. "If we get separated, which we will, and if we make it out, which I doubt, meet up at the Galleria. Torrance, not Glendale."

"That's in Redondo. And it's a bit of a hike."

"These assholes are galloping around on horseback. I'd order you to meet me in Timbuktu if I knew where it was." He checked the bolt of his rifle. "Your name isn't really Thom, is it?"

"Mia."

"Good to meet you, Mia. Next time you're going to strip, give me some warning."

"Didn't take you for the bashful type."

"So I can find a camera."

They'd been blabbering long enough. She approached the dead man's horse. It shuffled away from her, shoes clicking. She murmured to it. It stopped and she touched its neck and swung into the saddle. It smelled like the half-ton slab of perspiring muscle that it was. She took up the reins, nudging the horse forward, then taking it through a figure eight. She walked it over to the other horse; it continued to uneasily bear Fred's body. She took the reins and led it beside her.