Chapter 3 Cora #2
"Not Vampyren. Bandit signal. The chatter is human, the radio set is California military surplus. Year-one cohort, the cheap kind. They will not be heavily armed."
"They will be armed enough."
"Yes."
I looked at Drew. Drew was already reading the side mirror.
"They want the third truck," Drew said. "Sylvia's truck. The medical pack registers as high-value. They want the pack."
"How."
"They can see it on the rack from a mile out. The frame Brecca built is metal-rimmed and it catches the sun. They've been watching the convoy since Vegas. The cohort that hit Barstow has been pushing east for two months. We are exactly the convoy they have been hoping for."
I keyed the radio.
"Renn. Sylvia. Front-loading. Drop back to my eight-o'clock. Cruz, you take the diamond apex on my four. Sylvia, you tuck in between us. If we have to lose a truck we lose the second one. The med pack stays."
"Copy." Renn.
"Copy." Cruz.
"Copy." Sylvia, calm, the way Brecca had trained her to be calm.
The trucks shifted.
Drew was watching the mirror.
"Cora."
"Yeah."
"I'm getting out at the bottom of the next descent. You see that wash on the right, mile and a half ahead. I'm going to be on foot in that wash before they close. I will engage them as they pass and you keep moving."
"Drew."
"You said two-on-one with Renn for Hess. This is three-on-one with me. Cruz will cover from the convoy if it gets out of hand. It will not get out of hand. Bandits on motorcycles in broken terrain are not the same fight as Vampyren patrols."
"Three-on-one. Drew, nine. It's nine."
"Three cycles. Nine men. Six are gunners. Three are drivers. The drivers are the easy ones. The gunners I take from cover. I will be on foot in the wash with a rifle and a blade. They are on motorcycles in the open at forty miles an hour."
"You'll die."
"I won't."
"Drew."
He looked at me. The half-clinical sweep was gone. The look was steady.
"Cora. I have been waiting nine months to do exactly this for someone in this camp. You wrote my name on the paper. You signed me on the team. You did it because of the math, and the math says I cover the rear. Let me cover the rear."
"If you die out there I have to."
"You have to drive. That's the whole job. The convoy gets to Albuquerque tonight or we lose the cache window. Drive."
I drove.
The wash was at mile-marker one-thirty-one.
The descent was steep and broken. I had to slow to thirty just to keep the lead truck on the asphalt.
Drew opened the door at twenty-five. He did not wait for me to come to a full stop.
He stepped down and rolled, the half-Vampyren way, faster than human, less graceful than full Vampyren, and was in the wash in under two seconds.
The rifle was on his back. The blade was at his hip. The carving was on my dashboard.
He did not look up.
I drove.
The motorcycles came over the ridge two minutes later.
I saw them in the mirror. Three of them, in a stagger formation, the lead bike going low on the descent the way bandit cohorts ran when they were trying to close a gap on a heavier convoy.
The gunners on the rear bikes had short-barreled rifles.
The lead bike was a scout. The other two were the hammer.
The lead bike hit the wash and the rider's head came off in a clean line.
He did not see Drew. Nobody on the cycles saw Drew.
Drew was in the wash on the south side of the road, ten feet down from the asphalt, in cover that the cycles' angle of approach did not allow them to see.
He fired once and the lead rider's head separated and the bike fishtailed across the asphalt and went into the north drainage ditch.
The second bike braked. Hard. The rear gunner on that bike turned to find the shooter.
He was looking in the wrong direction, north, where the lead bike had gone, when Drew shot him in the temple.
The bike's driver tried to gun it out of the kill zone.
Drew shot him too. He went off the bike at maybe twenty miles per hour and the bike kept going and slid into the drainage ditch alongside the lead one.
The third bike was the one with three men on it. The gunners had spotted the wash by then. They opened up.
I saw the muzzle flashes in the mirror. Drew did not return fire immediately. He had ducked under the wash lip. The bandits put three or four bursts into the wash trying to suppress the position. Then the lead gunner stood up on the back of the bike to get a better firing angle.
Drew came up out of the wash with the rifle and put one round through the gunner's chest, swung the rifle, put one round through the second gunner's neck, and the driver, last man, tried to swerve into the wash to ram.
The bike caught the rim of the wash at speed.
It cartwheeled. The driver went one way, the bike went another, and Drew was already moving down the wash with the blade out.
I did not see the rest. I had the convoy at fifty by then. I was nine seconds away from the next bend in the road. The mirror tilted up as the suspension hit a rut and I lost the angle.
The radio crackled.
"Cora." Drew. Steady. A little out of breath.
"Drew."
"Clear."
"You good."
"Wrist. Glancing. I'll wrap it."
"Get back to the convoy."
"Two miles up. I'm running. The bikes. One's still operational. I'm bringing it."
"Drew, we don't need a."
"It's three weeks' worth of fuel. I'm bringing it."
I looked at Renn in the mirror. Renn was on the radio with me, listening. Renn keyed in.
"Bring the bike, Drew. We can use the cycle for advance scouting on the Arizona stretches. Cora, throttle back. He'll catch us in fifteen."
I throttled back.
Drew caught us at the next overlook, on the bike, his wrist wrapped in something he had cut from the dead driver's jacket. He pulled the bike up alongside the lead truck and Sylvia came up on the radio.
"Drew. Stop. Stop, I need to see the wrist."
"It's fine. Glancing. Through the soft tissue. No tendon."
"You said no tendon. I am the medic. I get to say no tendon. Stop the bike."
He stopped the bike.
Sylvia came down off the third truck with the field kit.
She took his wrist. She unwrapped it. She made a sound, small, professional, not happy, and unrolled gauze and antiseptic and a packet of the topical clotter Brecca had developed last year for fast-bleed lacerations.
Drew watched her work. His face did nothing.
"Tendon's intact," Sylvia said. "Through the meat. Five stitches. Five. Hold still."
"Sylvia. We don't have time."
"Drew." Sylvia's voice cut. The medic voice, the one Brecca had drilled into her.
"You can either let me put five stitches in your wrist while we're stopped on this overlook for the four minutes the convoy can afford, or I can put five stitches in your wrist while you bleed into the cab of the lead truck for the next sixty miles. Pick."
Drew held the wrist out. Sylvia stitched.
Five stitches. Fast. The needle moved like she had been waiting for this exact wound her whole life. Drew watched it the way he watched everything: registering, not reacting.
I watched him watch it. He did not pull. He did not breathe in. His face did nothing. But the small tendon at the side of his neck shifted when the third stitch went in, which was the tendon Brecca had once told me was the half-Vampyren equivalent of a flinch. It moved.
Sylvia finished. She put the kit away.
"You took those well."
"You're good."
"I'm trained." She did not look up from her bag. "By Brecca. Who is good. I am her redundancy. I am also her redundancy because she trained me as if my life depended on it, which it does. Do not let me down."
Drew did not respond.
She got back in the third truck.
Drew got on the bike. He brought the bike up to the lead truck's window. He looked at me.
"Two trucks plus a bike," he said. "We're three weeks longer-range than we were ten minutes ago."
"You knew that before you got out."
"Yes."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"I am authorizing you to stay in the cab from now on unless I personally tell you to get out. The next bandit cohort, the next anti-Council scout, the next anything: you stay in the cab unless I authorize a step-out. Understood?"
"Understood."
"Now get in the cab."
He parked the bike, climbed in, fastened the strap on the bike to the truck's running board so it would tow on the next leg, and got back in the passenger seat.
He did not pick up the carving from the dashboard. He looked at it. He looked at me.
"It moved," he said.
"What."
"The carving. When the suspension hit the rut. It moved an inch. I didn't move it back."
"Why are you telling me."
"Because you said the carving was for luck and the carving moved. I wanted you to know it moved."
I looked at the carving. It had moved. About an inch east. Tess had not specified east. Tess had not specified anything except dashboard and for luck.
"It can move," I said. "Tess didn't say it couldn't move."
"Okay."
"Drew."
"Yes."
"Thank you."
He looked at the wrist. He looked at the road.
He nodded once.
I drove.
* * *
We hit Albuquerque at sunset.