Chapter 3 Cora
The LA outskirts at noon looked like a city that had been embarrassed into pretending it was not still on fire.
I drove the lead truck through the surface streets east of what had been Pasadena.
Cruz had the second truck on my four-o'clock, Sylvia the third on his four-o'clock — a loose diamond, narrow enough to keep the convoy visible to each driver, wide enough that a single shoulder-launched something would not take all three at once.
Renn was in the cab with Cruz. Drew was beside me.
Ninety minutes. He had not spoken in ninety minutes.
The freeway underpasses were where the bodies stopped being buried.
I had not been east of the Mojave foothills in fourteen months.
The last time I had come through here, on a supply run to the Pasadena salvage corridor, the underpasses had been clean.
Today they were not clean. The bandit cohort that had taken Barstow in March had pushed west and the push had left things in the underpasses that I did not slow down to look at.
Drew looked.
He looked the way Drew looked. Not the half-clinical sweep, the other one, the way he looked when he was registering something he was not going to talk about. He did not turn his head. His eyes did the work.
"How many in the southern underpass."
"Eleven." He said it without pausing. "Two months. Maybe less. Two children."
"You can tell that from here."
"Yes."
I did not ask how. I did not have to. Drew's scent acuity at distance was real.
He had told me once, in a moment I did not remember consenting to receiving the information, that two months was a number he could date by the breakdown rate of fabric.
Children had less fabric than adults. The count of fabric remnants and the count of bodies did not match in a way that revealed the count of children.
I drove faster through the underpass.
* * *
Vegas was two hundred and seventy miles. We hit it at midnight.
Renn had the radio. He had been on it for the last fifty miles, pinging the Vegas resistance enclave at the frequency he had carried out of Caesars in year three and never given up.
The enclave was no longer at Caesars; Caesars had been abandoned eighteen months ago when the elevator shafts had collapsed for reasons nobody had ever audited.
But the surviving Vegas Vampyren had moved their network to a strip-mall complex three blocks off the south end of the Strip, and the strip-mall complex had a working barter market and a working medical and a small standing force of Vampyren under a local lead Renn had served with in his unit-cohort.
The local lead was named Yev. Renn was the one who said it; I had not heard the name before. I gave the radio one of those neutral yes, fine responses and let Renn handle the diplomatic side.
Yev met us at the south checkpoint. He was about seven-three, blue-black hair in a half-braid, a Vampyren who did not bother with the small talk humans had taught the Council Vampyren to do. He looked at Renn. He looked at me. He looked at Cruz and Sylvia, briefly. He looked at Drew.
His head moved. Not quite a nod. The kind of motion Vampyren made when they were registering a foreign trace and trying to figure out whether to read it as a threat or a curiosity.
"Half-Vampyren."
"Yes." Drew, even.
"I have not seen one of you walking outside a camp in eleven years."
"I have not been outside a camp in eleven years."
Yev looked at me. Then back at Drew. His face did the Vampyren face-thing where a small line shifted at the corner of his mouth and might have been amusement and might have been something else.
"Cora King." Renn's voice from beside me. "Mojave mission lead. Authorized by Loren. We need fuel, water, fresh tires for the third truck, two hours of rack space for the team, and we leave at dawn."
"You bring word from Loren."
"He is alive. He is exhausted. He sends his regards."
Yev did not respond to the regards. He turned. Walked. Renn followed. I followed. The team came behind.
The strip-mall complex was a former T-Mobile, a former Subway, a former pet store, and three former retail spaces nobody had bothered to identify on the surviving signage.
The Vampyren had not bothered to restore the signs.
The complex was eight tents inside the structures, a perimeter of welded steel plate, a generator running on something that smelled like aviation fuel, and a small barter market that was open at midnight because Vegas had not adjusted to the post-invasion sleep rhythm and was running its commerce on the schedule that had always worked for it.
We got the fuel. We got the water. We got the tires. We got the rack space: eight cots in a former phone store, blankets, no questions about who slept where.
I assigned watches.
"Drew. Solo, midnight to five."
He nodded.
"Renn, Cruz, Sylvia, sleep. Two hours, then I'll take the perimeter rotation with the Vegas crew. We move at oh-six."
Renn paused. Looked at me. The Vampyren-formal nod again, the one he had given Drew at the strip. Then he went to a cot.
Cruz went to a cot.
Sylvia went to a cot.
Drew went to the doorway.
I went outside with him.
The Vegas night was warm. The neon was on, partially.
Three blocks of Strip lighting that the Vampyren had restored last year and which the enclave kept lit because the neon was a beacon any human convoy from the south could spot at twenty miles.
The light was pink and gold and broken. It did not reach the strip-mall directly.
Drew stood at the southwest corner of the perimeter, where the welded plate dropped off into the dirt lot that backed onto an old self-storage facility.
He had the blade at his hip and the carving in his pocket. He was looking at the lot.
"You should sleep," he said.
"I will, in two hours."
"You should sleep now."
"You wouldn't."
"I am not the one driving the lead truck in the morning."
"Drew."
He looked at me. The half-clinical sweep dropped. He looked at me the way he had at the supply tent yesterday, the way he had looked at me when he had held the rebar out and said yours.
"I am not going to argue with you, Cora. I am asking. Sleep two hours. I will not move from this corner. If anything comes across that lot I will see it before it sees me. I will wake you if it is something."
"Will you wake me even if it is nothing."
His face did the not-saying.
"Drew."
"I will wake you for the move at oh-six. I will not wake you for nothing. The whole point of the solo watch is that you don't get woken for nothing."
I went to a cot.
I did not sleep for forty minutes. I lay on the cot and listened to Vegas.
I listened to the generator. I listened to the small sounds the Vampyren-enclave made at night, different from the Mojave camp, faster, fewer human voices, the way a Vampyren cohort moved at night when it was not regressed.
Yev's people were moving. Their cohort was eleven, Renn had said.
Eleven warriors and a small support group of humans who lived among them by choice.
Vegas was the strangest Vampyren outpost on the continent in that way; the humans had not been rescued from anywhere, they had stayed.
The neon blinked through the partially-lit storefront.
I thought about the count.
Two hundred and fourteen humans. Eleven Vampyren. One half-Vampyren adult. Six Lucian who'd stuck. One baby. Six in Urbana, waiting.
I thought about Drew at the corner. I thought about the way he had said I will not move from this corner. I thought about the carving in his pocket. I thought about Tess on the kitchen tent with Auriel on her hip.
I slept.
* * *
Drew woke me at oh-five-fifty-eight.
He was crouched next to my cot. He did not touch me. He spoke. Just my name. Once.
"Cora."
I was up. The cot creaked. The blade was in my hand before I was upright; Brecca had drilled that into me three years ago. Drew did not flinch.
"Convoy?"
"Move at oh-six. I let you have the two extra minutes."
"What did I miss."
"Nothing."
"Drew."
"Two dogs across the dirt lot at oh-three. One bandit scout at oh-four, on foot, north end of the storage facility, did not come within fifty yards of the corner. Yev's eastern patrol passed at oh-five. Nothing close enough to worry. You needed the sleep. You got two more minutes."
"You stayed at the corner."
"Yes."
"The whole time."
"Yes."
"You did not eat."
"No."
"You did not drink."
"No."
"Drew."
"Cora. I am about to spend nine days in a truck cab next to you and I will need food and water at the rate the team takes food and water and not before. I am not going to argue with you about the corner. The corner was mine. The convoy is yours. Move."
I got up.
The rest of the team was already at the trucks.
Renn had the second truck running. Cruz had the third running.
Sylvia had the medical pack strapped. Yev was at the south checkpoint with two of his cohort, watching us go without quite watching, which was a Vampyren-courtesy for I have noticed you are leaving and I am not making it a thing. I climbed into the lead truck.
Drew climbed in beside me. He had the carving on the dashboard already, where he had put it the morning before. He had put it back at some point during the watch. I did not ask when.
"Go," he said.
I drove.
* * *
The Mojave-to-Vegas leg had been the easy one. The Vegas-to-Albuquerque leg was the one Renn had been preparing for.
We hit the anti-Council pursuit five hours east of Vegas, on a stretch of I-40 that had been re-paved by some surviving Caltrans crew in year two and then never maintained, and which now had the broken asphalt that ate suspension.
I had been driving at forty-five. Renn was on the radio in the second truck and his voice came through with the calm Vampyren-warrior pitch that meant do not panic but increase the relevant numbers.
"Cora. Three motorcycles on the rear-quarter. Two-mile gap. Closing at maybe sixty."
"How many on the cycles."
"Three each. Nine total."
"Anti-Council?"