Trail of Tears (33 page)

“The next person who moves will join the
wounded here,” he tried his best to sound tough but his head was
swimming from rising too quickly. He held the weapon steady though
and that spoke volumes.

“Emma, Amanda,” he called with only a slight
tremor in his voice. “Are you alright?”

“Here,” he heard Emma call as she pulled
herself to her feet, wrenching her hand away from someone who
reached out for her. He saw a flurry of movement to his right and
someone lifted a limp body and began to approach him. He could see
a splash of blood on Amanda’s head as she was carried by a man he
didn’t know. Screams persisted behind them and the train’s motion
meant that people were jostled repeatedly, but Conor planted his
feet far apart and remained steady.

“Fools,” he spat at the crowd. “She’s the
only one who can help the wounded. If we lose her we’re finished.”
He looked out over the frightened faces as Emma came up beside him
and eased the XM8 from his hands. Things had calmed enough for one
of the nurses to take Amanda and lay her on the floor to examine
her.

And then bullets tore through the walls and
everyone screamed again and surged forward. Conor threw himself at
Emma and they both rolled to the ground as the crowd’s feet
trampled them. He shielded Emma with his body as the bullets tore
through flesh and wood with equal distain. The noise was unbearable
and the pain surged though his body each time he was struck by a
booted foot. Then one struck his head and all went black.

* * *

Philip Warkowski grunted as a bullet struck
him. The heavy .50 calibre slipped from his hands and he dropped to
the bed of the jeep. He didn’t feel any pain at first but strength
evaporated from his legs. He tried to rise and then a wave of pain
rushed over him making him stumble back down. The jeep swerved and
he was sent crashing into the side painfully where he struck his
head.

He saw McAteer look back towards him and
shout something but he couldn’t understand the words. There were
only the two of them left in the jeep after the others had followed
Harris so there was no one else to take the .50 calibre. He
struggled to rise again but something was keeping him down. He
looked for the wound but his heavy weather gear was too bulky to
see anything. He could see a dark stain spreading across the fabric
low on the left side though but how fast he was bleeding he didn’t
know.

He struggled to rise again, using the mount
for the machine gun to support his weight. He could still move his
right leg and used it to anchor himself. He dragged his left leg
across the bed of the jeep. Every movement was agony but the thrall
jeep was tearing the crap out of their jeep now with a hail of
bullets. McAteer was screaming at him to shoot back and trying to
avoid the stream of bullets tearing through the air towards them.
His hands were slick with blood and it made gripping the cold metal
difficult. He tried to wipe his hands on his jacket but the jeep
was swerving too much to allow him to remove his hands.

Suddenly he heard McAteer cry out and the
jeep veered violently to the left. He held on for as long as he
could but the vehicle hit something and began to roll. He was
thrown into the air as the jeep continued to tumble beneath him,
pieces flying everywhere. The last thing he saw was the thrall in
the jeep ahead. He watched it swing the .50 calibre back towards
the train and the chatter began again. Then he hit something hard
and everything went dark.

Tanya Syn sat once more in the pens and
looked out. She had been caught last evening as she wandered near
but not too close to the pens. She hadn’t wanted to appear eager to
be caught and skirted the camp, trying to steal food from the
thralls. It would have been very easy to steal the food; the
thralls were lax in their patrols. It had been necessary to make
enough noise for them to notice her.

She’d been roughed up a bit by the thralls
but no one thought to inform their superiors that she’d been
caught. In fairness, who would want to be put back into the pens
after they’d escaped? They suspected nothing. They had found her
knife but not the razor blade she had hidden in her bra. It
wouldn’t help her escape but it felt good to have something she
could use as a weapon.

She spent the first few hours searching
every inch of the pen and finally came to terms with the fact that
Mark wasn’t here. It was cruel luck indeed that kept them still
separated. She had spent the last two hours keeping a close watch
on the pen on the opposite side of the square for any sign of her
son. So far she hadn’t seen him but the pens were huge so that was
not so surprising—heart breaking, sure, but not surprising.

Tanya noticed that the pens were very
different from before. For one thing everyone was off the serum and
it created a different dynamic. People were restless, angry, bored
and it made for an excitable atmosphere. Fights broke out
frequently, people stole food and blankets from others, and pockets
of people formed around the pen where different groups huddled
together for warmth and protection. Mini fiefdoms sprang up with
people buying their inclusion into these protected groups with food
or sex. It appeared that humans could not help dominating each
other, even in their most desperate hour of need.

Her thoughts kept straying to Mark. How was
he coping? What had he been forced to do to survive? She felt so
helpless here. She wondered for the hundredth time if she would
have been better off back with Josh and the others. She was
surprised to learn that she missed Josh more than she had expected.
At first he had been a means to an end. A well-intentioned means,
yes, but nothing more. Her thoughts had been for her son
exclusively. If this man wanted to help then that was fine, but
that was as far as it went.

She had never experienced much kindness from
others in her life, and certainly not unless they benefited. Josh
was different. He had not asked for anything from her. From the
beginning he had helped because he could, and she had treated him
badly from the start. She realised, now that she had time to think,
that she had been hoping to force Josh’s hand into rescuing Mark
and herself. And all she managed to do was get locked up in the
wrong damn pen, cut off from the only person who bothered to help.
And she had left her daughter alone with him. Was she mad?

Surprisingly, she wasn’t as worried about
Jillian as she thought she would be. She had no doubt that Josh
would look after her. She had always been able to read people. It
hadn’t made a lot of difference when she picked her partners
though. For that she had no excuse. She was a sucker for the bad
boy. So she was never surprised when things went bad.

But Josh was different. She recalled how he
treated her between missions back at the cave. The easy way he
talked to her and not at her. Most surprisingly was the way Jillian
had taken to him. She never liked any of the men Tanya had taken
home before the fall. But she had taken to Josh almost immediately.
She’d even taken his side in a few arguments against her mother.
She knew that he would die before he let anything bad happen to
Jillian. She was using him, she knew. Using him to save her other
child.

But would Josh come for her? Could he? As
she sat and watched the camp, she could see that there were an
awful lot of thrall guards, much more than she realised. They
patrolled far out of sight in all directions and patrols were
coming in all the time from their sweeps. She couldn’t figure out
how Josh and the others
could
rescue them, even if they
would follow him on such a mad mission. She felt a single tear well
up in her eye and it dripped onto her cheek. She remembered the
last time she had cried and how Josh had pulled her into his arms.
The cold wind cut through the thin blanket she had and she shivered
as she thought again about how warm Josh’s arms had been. She
longed to feel them around her once more as she watched the barren
horizon.

* * *

Josh was frustrated. No one was prepared to
leave the cave. They had so much food stock piled that his
arguments fell on deaf ears. Most of the people here did not care
about the others in the pens. What was the point in risking their
lives? Taking on a camp full of thralls and vampires was a sure way
to commit suicide. And to what end? To swell their numbers even
further and put even more strain on their resources. And what would
the vampires do if their entire food supply disappeared? Did he
really think they would leave them alone? They were better off
hiding here until they had to scavenge for food again.

What was worse was that, strategically, they
were right. If they pissed Von Richelieu off enough then he would
scour the area until he found them. For now they were a mere
annoyance. Not really worth the effort of a sustained search. The
food convoys were bad enough, but now that they had killed a
vampire they risked their full fury. Already he had seen more
patrols. If the vampires came out in force to search for them he
wasn’t sure that the rock above would hide them from their
senses.

But what was he to do about Tanya? The mad
cow had walked straight into the enemy camp and got locked up again
in an effort to force his hand. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what she
was doing, but he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He had spent
yesterday scouting the thrall camp but he had not been able to get
anywhere near them. Patrols were far more numerous than before and
each thrall looked alert.

He sighed as he scanned the distant horizon.
A cold wind brought small flakes of snow that drifted lazily in
front of him before falling to earth where the disappeared. The
snow wasn’t sticking up here on the rocks but the grass below was
covered in a fine blanket of white. He looked up at the slate grey
sky and wondered if they would get another storm. If they did he
might be able to sneak into the camp and…

No
.

He couldn’t put one person ahead of so many.
For better or worse the people looked to him for guidance. However,
it wasn’t as if they obeyed him either. They liked to get his
opinion but there were so many factions within their small group
now and everything was debated to death. The final decision was
often procrastinated so many times that people ended up forgetting
what they had been debating about.

It had been different when Hammond stood
with him. The man had exuded confidence and his easy smile often
brought people around quicker than a well-crafted argument. His
death had left him alone against the rest of the community.
Everyone missed Hammond and some even blamed Josh for his death.
The dynamic within the group had changed. He heard a scraping
behind him and turned to see Jillian walking towards him. She sat
beside him with a sigh.

“Hey, Red,” he smiled as the girl laid her
head on his shoulder.

“Do you think she found Mark?” she asked
quietly, as if her voice would be heard.

“I think your mother is capable of doing
anything she sets her mind to,” he laughed.

“She’s not that tough, you know. She only
appears that way ‘cause she has to.” There was an easy silence
between them. Jillian was an easy kid to like but she didn’t give
her trust easily—like her mother. “She likes you.”

Josh snorted, surprised by her statement. He
looked down at her and she met his gaze.

“She has a funny way of showing it.”

“She left me with you didn’t she?”

He put his arm around her, shielding her
form the cold.

“That she did,” he agreed. “She must really
hate me.” Jillian slapped him in the chest playfully and cuddled
deeper into his warmth. They remained like that for some time.
Eventually she looked up again.

“You will get her back, won’t you?”

Her voice cracked with the emotion and his
heart went out to her.

“Yes,” he said simply. He sat there for some
time wracking his brains for some solution but came up empty. He
looked down at Jillian’s face. She had fallen asleep. He picked her
up and carried her into the cave.

* * *

Von Richelieu considered the report he had
just heard. Kavanagh was planning an attack. He had worked that out
without the need for spies. What was interesting though was the
fact that the humans might also be attacking. Now that
was
unexpected. Had the serum damaged their brains? Humans attacking a
camp filled with thralls and vampires. Madness! His spy must have
gotten it wrong. Either that or Kavanagh was more intelligent that
he thought and was feeding him false information. But that would
mean identifying both his sources and that was unlikely.

What happened to respect he wondered. He
came from a time where the elder vampires were venerated. These new
breeds of vampire were mongrels. They were incapable of loyalty. He
stood abruptly and paced his room. He had never paced before. He
had always found comfort in considering his options while
mediating, but he could no longer do that. He felt restless all the
time now. He longed to do something, to put some plan into motion.
Any plan. But he knew that would be wrong. Doing anything was
always worse than doing nothing in his experience. He had increased
the patrols and was confident that no one could attack without
sufficient warning. But, with inclement weather and such a large
area to cover it was frustrating to do nothing.

His ranks had stabilised recently with the
number of deserters reduced to a trickle now. He estimated that
Kavanagh had thirty five vampires to his two hundred. He also had
over a hundred and fifty thralls, some of whom he could turn fully
to vampires if required. On paper it was madness to even consider
that there might be an issue at all. But if Kavanagh caused enough
of a problem and the humans somehow managed to free the other
humans his food supply would be gone. If that happened having more
mouths to feed would not be an advantage.