Absolution: A Near Future Thriller (Forsaken Mercenary Book 2) Page 6

  “Thanks, I’m good,” I lied.

  I knew X was probably right, but right now, I had one thing on my mind and that was finding Sam in the Badlands. Finding her led to even more answers and answers were the only thing I had on my mind at the moment.

  “You know of a town in the Badlands called Cecile?” I leaned forward and shouted at the back of Lori’s seat.

  Lori didn’t turn around and look at me, but Riner sure did. His eyes were huge. He looked at me like I had just grown a second head or confessed that I was actually a Cyber Hunter.

  “Why do you want to go to Cecile?” Lori asked. The normal joyful almost playful kick in the woman’s voice was gone. In its place was something like cautious dread.

  “It’s where I’m going to find the answers I need,” I responded, just as guarded. “Why? What’s in Cecile?”

  Both Lori and Riner sat quiet. Neither of them made a sound for a long minute.

  “We can drop him off without having to land,” Riner said to Lori. “That was the plan anyway. He can chute in.”

  Lori remained quiet.

  I wished I could have seen the expression on her face, try to read her somehow to get a gauge on what was going on here. Whatever the case, these two were not hot on the idea of heading to the city in the Badlands.

  “If you want to go in, Immortal Man,” Lori started, “we’ll do a flyover under the cover of night and you can chute in. When we pick you up, you have to be out of sight of the city and under the cover of night. That’s the deal.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said, swallowing a mouthful of water from the canteen under my seat. “But I need to know what’s wrong with the city.”

  “Not what, who,” Lori said. “Riner, take the wheel. I’m going to inform our friend here the hell he’s about to drop into.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lori handed the controls over to Riner. She unstrapped herself from her seatbelt, motioning me to do the same, and follow her.

  I kept the can of cheese spray with me as we headed into the rear of the dropship that contained the four rows of seats. The two middle rows of seats were back to back facing the other two rows, which were pressed against the sides of the dropship.

  Lori fell into one of the seats at random. She studied me with her hard blue eyes. It was the same look I used to give people back on the moon when I was a gladiator. I’d eye them, weighing their intention to see if I’d have to step in sooner or later to keep them in line.

  “You know rumors have been going through the Vault about you like wildfire on a piece of land that hasn’t seen moisture in a decade,” Lori said, chewing her bottom lip. “They’re calling you the Immortal Man. I mean, those Phoenix soldiers who saw the fight when you first arrived at the Vault are, at least.”

  “I’m not immortal.” I thought back to the way Echo killed Amber. “I bleed and I can die like anyone else. Well, not exactly the same as anyone else. I can heal quick, that’s all there is to it. Mystery solved. Tell me what’s the issue with the Badlands and the city of Cecile?”

  “Well, the Badlands themselves aren’t that difficult to understand.” Lori shrugged. “It’s just the lands to the north. Roving tribes and gangs fight for dominance in what’s left of the Earth. Not any real news, same as it is all over this godforsaken rock. The issue is the city of Cecile.”

  When Lori said the name, a visible shudder came over her. Lori wasn’t the kind of woman to fear a whole heck of a lot. I got that from her just in the time I had known her. I took another mouthful of the cheese spray then pushed the line of questioning.

  “What happened to this city?” I asked gently, trying to coax the words out of her. “What’s the issue there?”

  Lori took a deep breath. Her eyes moved from me to the wall of the dropship as if she had a view into the past.

  “Had to be about four years, maybe five years ago now,” Lori said as if she were relating to me actual events she could see in her mind. “I was stationed at the Vault when we got the call. See, back then, we actually tried to stop some of the worst chaos out here. Back then, we thought we could police some of these gangs. Phoenix stands for order. We’re the good guys. We thought we could help where the GG couldn’t or wouldn’t. We were wrong.”

  Lori quieted again. Her eyes glossed over. She took a deep breath and pressed on.

  “We got a call about the city of Cecile. There was a report another dropship brought back that it was on fire. At least some of it was. Something big was going down. The city was home to a hard gang called the Skull Bearers. You’d think with a name like that, they’d be able to take care of themselves.” Lori whistled low and shook her head. “Not so much.”

  “What did you see?” I asked, putting the puzzle pieces together in my own mind. “You were the dropship that went out to see what was going on?”

  “Oh, we saw it all right,” Lori said with a sigh. “The Skull Bearers weren’t exactly our allies or nothing, but we were making inroads in speaking with some of the gangs out here. It was Commander Shaw’s idea to try and open lines of communication with them. When we touched down in Cecile, you’d think we were their best friends. They came running to us for help, begging us to take them with us. They said the devil came to Cecile in the form of a red-haired woman.”

  That was enough for me to put down the bottle of cheese spray. I didn’t believe in random chance. No way Sam said she was going to Earth then this red-haired woman just shows up. It had to be her and the timing seemed right as well. Five years ago would have put her in the same time frame as Amber’s death.

  “Grown men, and not just grown men—I’m talking about seasoned warriors here. Individuals no stranger to violence were begging us to help them,” Lori said with another shake of her head. Her eyes still weren’t on me. She was completely lost to the events of the past now. “Half the city was on fire. When we touched down, I was ordered to keep the ship running ready for takeoff, but even from my seat in the captain’s chair, I could see the dead bodies. Blood covered the streets. I heard the commanding Phoenix officer of the mission speaking with the Skull Bearers on the ground as they begged for a ride out of the city.”

  Lori took a deep breath, finally snapping out of her trance-like state.

  “That’s it. We couldn’t help them, we were ordered back to the Vault, and I never wanted to step foot in that city again,” Lori said, clearing her throat. “Since then, we’ve pretty much steered clear of it. The random pieces of news drift in now and then. Seems the city was taken over by that woman. She doesn’t bother us and we don’t bother her.”

  The conversation died between us, Lori thinking of the events of the past while I thought about what happened to Sam. In Echo’s memory, I wasn’t sure if she was a good woman. Still, going to a city and slaughtering half the inhabitants didn’t seem like the woman I saw in his memory at all. Could the same Sam that refused to kill Amber have taken out her rage on the city of Cecile?

  “No more smoke on the horizon either,” Lori said, rising from her seat with a grunt. “It seems whatever devil woman took over Cecile, her rise to power was violent but short. Probably a new warlord flexing her power. Anyway, we should get you set to chute in. We’re a few hours away. It’ll be dark when you make your drop.”

  “Chute in, huh?” I asked uncertainly. I knew I didn’t have any love for flying. I wasn’t too hot on the idea of jumping out of a dropship at night either. “I’ll probably need a refresher.”

  “You’ve never made a drop?” Lori looked at me sideways. “I guess I just expected someone like you would be used to the idea.”

  “Well, to be honest with you, I don’t really know. I guess we’ll find out together,” I said with a shrug. “Odds are you’re right and it’ll come back to me.”

  “You’re a strange cookie, Immortal Man,” Lori said with a grin. “But I feel okay about you. Not everyone takes a liking to that rat spray in your hand and you gobbled it up as well as I do.”

  “Say what,
now?” I asked, looking down at the bottle of cheese spray in my palm. The metal cylinder didn’t say anything about rats on it. It had an orange image of cheese on it with a paragraph of ingredients I couldn’t spell.

  “Oh, just a term I use for it.” Lori laughed out loud. “It’s so old, no one else will touch it, but it tastes fine to me. Something left over from the old world. Other pilots took to calling it rat spray because they hated the taste, but I like it just fine. Never saw an expiration date on the can.”

  “Riiiiiiight,” I said, the word dragging out as I put the container of cheese on one of the seats next to me.

  “Anyway, like I said, we have a few hours until we reach the city, but I’ll go over your chute and the drop now,” Lori said, making her way past the seating area in the dropship to the cargo hold that ended in the closed rear doors of the craft. She lifted what looked like a black backpack off the wall. “We’ll fly in low. You get this strapped to your back, and as soon as you jump, you count to five and pull this orange cord here.”

  Lori pointed to a cord on the right side of the chute.

  Easy enough, I told myself in my head. Jump, count to five, pull. What could go wrong?

  “We’ll give you coordinates for a pick-up location two nights from now,” Lori said. “You can get us on our channel if you need us sooner. You going to need a radio?”

  “No, I’ve got mine,” I said, referring to X.

  “Pretty rude to call me a radio, Daniel,” X said in my head.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “What’s that?” Lori looked at me sideways again.

  “Nothing, I’m good to go,” I answered.

  “All right,” Lori said, heading back to the pilot’s seat. “You make yourself at home. I’ll tell you when we’re fifteen minutes out so you can get that chute on.”

  “Thank you,” I said as Lori retreated back the way we came. She picked up the can of rat spray and took another gulp as she went.

  “So what are you going to do once you find her?” X asked out loud. “I mean Sam. I’m assuming that’s short for Samantha.”

  “Haven’t thought that far ahead,” I said honestly. “Talk to her, I guess. Get more answers about who I am. What Amber was trying to do talking with the Order. Then I’m going to help Monica get her father back.”

  “What then?” X pushed. “Daniel, going after Immortal Corp isn’t going to end well. The power they have, the resources and money. You’re a one-man army, but they’re an organization that’s been around for thousands of years.”

  “They made me and threw me to the side,” I said. “Actually, I don’t even know that. I know how and why Amber died now, but what happened to me after? Why, how did I wake up on the moon with no memory?”

  “If I had to guess, someone wiped your memory so you wouldn’t try and do exactly what you’re doing now,” X said. “Maybe someone was trying to protect you from yourself? Maybe you have a few friends out there after all.”

  “Maybe, or maybe I got into a fight,” I said, thinking about the theory I had decided on over the last five years. “Maybe I was knocked unconscious and the damage erased my memories.”

  “Either way, whatever happened to you, you need to talk about it,” X pushed. “It’s not healthy to keep it all inside.”

  “I’m just going to bury my emotions and let them out when it’s time,” I said, going back to the seating area. Like Lori, I found a random seat to sit in and closed my eyes. “I’m fine, X. Thanks for caring, but I’ll be fine.”

  “You didn’t seem fine when we were in Echo’s memory,” X insisted. “You just saw the woman you loved murdered and you’re fine?”

  “What do you want me to say?” I said as my anger flared. “I’m frustrated. I wasn’t there for her. I wish I could change the past. I wish I could go to Mars right now and find her body in that river. Yeah, I want all of that, but I can’t change the past. The only thing I can do now is move forward.”

  “There you go,” X said in a soft voice. “See, talking about it’s not so hard.”

  I took a deep breath as my anger subsided. I wasn’t going to tell X, but our brief conversation did help a little to clear my thoughts. Maybe she was onto something with this talking thing.

  I closed my eyes, settling into sleep, hoping against hope there would be no nightmares or memories of the past in store for me. I was wrong.

  Chapter Ten

  “You are such a loser.”

  I looked up and around this time, not seeing myself like I had in my last dream of the past when I was with Preacher or when I was viewing Echo’s memory but through my own eyes.

  I was in an alley. Three larger boys looked down at me. I call them boys, but they had to be in their late teens, maybe early twenties. I wanted to jump up and rip them apart, but like many dreams and memories of the past, I was destined to live this one out the way it happened before.

  I knew I was seeing an event that had transpired before. In my mind, I wanted to be the man I was today to resolve it. This version of myself was weak, sickly even.

  “Don’t you ever get tired of being so pathetic?” One of the boys, a meaty kid with freckles across his face went over to a trash can. He picked it up then proceeded to empty its contents on me as I sat against the stone wall of the building behind me.

  Garbage fell across my face and shirt, one of the two shirts I had. I don’t know why that fact stuck out to me in that moment, but I knew it was true. The rank smell of molding food and refuse assailed my nostrils, making me gag.

  I tried to get to my feet. I received a brutal kick to the stomach from one of the three boys as the other shoved me down so hard, my head bashed against the stone building behind me.

  The kid emptying trash on me laughed then slammed the steel garbage container into my face, opening a cut above my eye.

  I felt helpless—angry at them, sure—but angrier at myself for not being able to stop any of it from happening.

  “There you go,” one of the other boys said with a smirk. He was tall for his age, skinny with dark brown eyes. “Right where you belong, Daniel, with the rest of the trash.”

  “Orphan, poor, no friends, depressed, and what was the last one?” the third and largest boy asked his compatriots with a sneer. “Oh, yeah, you suffer from anxiety?”

  All three boys had a good laugh at that one. The third boy leafed through a journal he had taken from me. He read a passage out loud. “Sometimes I think it would be better if it was all over. What am I doing here anyway?”

  “I don’t know. What are you doing here?” the kid with the freckled face asked me. “Maybe it would be better if you just killed yourself. I mean, what kind of life is this anyway? You work at the orphanage you should have already aged out of. You should really get a life now.”

  Get up, what are you doing? I asked myself or the version of myself in the memory. It was a strange feeling to know I was seeing myself and not able to do anything. All that could happen was what had actually happened in the past. Do something!

  “What are you? Like a janitor or something for the orphanage now?” The kid with the deep brown eyes took the journal from his friend and started to rip it up in front of me. “Here, here’s some more trash for you.”

  “No!” I leapt to my feet, trying to grab the journal out of the kid’s hands before he ripped it apart.

  Finally, some kind of reaction, the current version of myself thought.

  I was much too slow to grab the journal. I received jeers and a beatdown from the other two while the third kid went to town on my journal, turning it into nothing more than a handful of confetti.

  “Hey, you kids. I think he’s had enough.” A familiar voice reached my ears from the end of the filthy alley.

  The sun was just fading past the domes of whatever city we were in on the moon. Past the pain and blood in my eyes, I could see the figure of a man. He wore a coat. That was all I could tell at the moment.

  “He’s had enough when we say
he has.” The largest boy threw what was left of my journal to the ground. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a switchblade. “Or do you got something to say about that, old man?”

  The man didn’t seem fazed in the least. He walked into my view. The version of me in the memory had no idea who he was. I knew I was looking at Wesley Cage.

  A half-smoked cigar hung from the corner of his mouth. He puffed a heavy cloud of smoke before taking it out of his mouth with his right hand.

  “You got a mouth on you,” Wesley Cage said, looking at the largest boy, who advanced on him with the knife. “No, I don’t think I will give you the opportunity to leave. Not before you’re taught a lesson.”

  “This guy is nuts, Freddy,” the tall skinny one said to his friend. “Let’s cut him. Show him what happens when he comes to our city and—”

  Wesley Cage moved so quickly, he was more of a blur than a man making any actual clear movement. He stepped in close, jamming his lit cigar into the thug who was talking. Next he pivoted to Freddy, who held his knife up, ready to stab Wesley in a straight jab as if he were stoking a fire.

  Wesley avoided Freddy’s lunge, kicking his legs out from under him and slamming his fist into the back of Freddy’s head so hard, it shoved him down even faster as the front of his face collided with the ground in front of him.

  Freddy didn’t get up.

  The tall kid screamed, clawing at his smoking eye where the cigar had been a second ago. The freckled kid took a step backward with an expression of horror on his face. Not horror—sheer terror. He took another step back. One of his friends was writhing on the ground, the other unconscious in a pool of his own blood. I couldn’t imagine what was going through his mind.

  “No, no, please,” the kid begged, putting his hands up palms outward in sign of surrender. “Whatever you want, whatever you want me to do. I’ll do it.”