Killer of Enemies Read online

  Dad was like that about most important things. Joking and serious at the same time.

  But he was not joking when he gave me the name of our old time relative Lozen.

  It’s a name to live up to. It inspires me and reminds me of all our ancestors. I try to hunt in their old way. First, I always show respect to the enemy. Not hate, not anger. Respect. Secondly, when I have made a kill, I speak to that creature’s spirit. I ask forgiveness for taking its life.

  Thinking of two things, I have not yet mentioned Numero Dos of my reasons for butchering every beast I kill. It, too, comes from the old traditions of my people and not the new, self-centered masters I must continue to serve if I wish to keep my mother and my Victor and Ana alive. It is a tradition to take into my own being some of a dead monster’s power.

  I cut out its heart. I hold it up and say a few old Chiricahua words. Then I eat it. Raw.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Little Food

  I am two-thirds of the way back to Haven when I hear it. Or feel it.

  Hello, Little Food.

  Not again. I freeze at those breathless words that came right after the stabbing pain in the middle of my forehead, pain that is getting too familiar. It always happens when I am alone.

  Hello, Little Food.

  Those three words were not spoken out loud. Not carried on sound waves, but “heard” somehow, somewhere in whatever part of the brain can be touched mind to mind. I feel the hair standing up on the back of my neck.

  My body is telling me to run. But I was trained too well to do that. My training started as soon as I could walk. Not just by my dad, but also by Uncle Chatto. Chatto, my Little Father, my mother’s brother.

  “Prey animals,” Uncle Chatto said, “the hunted ones, are fooled by their fear. The mountain lion roars and the rabbit runs right into the paws of the one lying in wait for it.”

  And though I was only four years old when he said that to me, I nodded and understood.

  So I do not run. Instead, I drop down to one knee. I slip the pack from my shoulder, heavy with all those pounds of meat I cut from the porcupine cat. Prime cuts to be eaten or salted and dried for later. My load weighs more than most men could easily carry. I’m deceptively thin, but few ordinary men are as strong as I am.

  But this is not the time for strength. Getting low is the best tactic to employ right now. I’m out in the open, exposed. I’ve only crossed halfway across a wide field. It once was part of some giant automated agri-biz operation. No crops are planted here anymore. The soil is starved of the mix of chemicals that sustained its fertility, parched without the water drawn from deep wells that moistened it. It’s now drier and more lifeless then the desert it was before it was artificially fed and irrigated. No rock or tree here to put my back against. Damn!

  I’m just as exposed as I was the first time that self-amused voice spoke to me. The nearest shelter, a four-story-tall derelict robo-tractor, is hundreds of yards away, parked next to the burnt-out hangar that once housed it.

  I do just as I did a month ago when I first heard that breathless voice. I sweep my gaze slowly in a circle, heavy gun in one hand, heavier knife in the other. Nada. Nothing moving. No shape resolving itself into an enemy.

  I don’t know how near this someone else—or something else—needs to be for its telepathy to work. Feet? Yards? Miles? Does it have to see me? I am fairly certain, though I can’t say why, that it does see me. I am even more certain that its addressing me as “Little Food” is not a positive sign for my continued health, even though the deep voice echoing through my brain has what I can only describe as a mellow, friendly tone.

  I wait. That’s all I can do. Breathe in and out. Count. One and one pony. Two and one pony.

  I get up to sixty before the voice touches me again. It’s fainter. Whatever is communicating is moving away.

  Not yet, it says. Not yet.

  Then it’s gone.

  Somehow, again I’m not sure why, I believe that voice to be telling the truth. Not yet. Still, I wait long enough to be fairly certain that an attack really is not coming. Then I shrug the pack back up onto my back. I trudge across the sere plain where little winds spin dust devils in front of me. Half a league, half a league, half a league onward. I climb up the small familiar hill where pines are reclaiming a once bare ridge top. Not as good a view of Haven from up here as on the peak four miles back where I encountered the porci-cat, but high enough to take it all in. I sit and watch the swirling patterns of smoke in the sky above Haven, smoke rising from the fires kept burning for protection atop the walls.

  One more mile to go. Part of me can’t wait to get there. That’s the part that is worried about my mom and Ana and Victor. They’re the reason I have to survive. My worries about them make me have nightmares about dying almost every night. What bothers me about those dreams is not my own dying, but that my getting killed will leave them with no one to watch over them. I have to protect them and keep trying to work out some way to get them out of there. So far all I have are vague ideas, plans thwarted by the security of Haven. I’ve already figured out one escape route that I could take at night and get away for sure. My scouting trips have always served a double purpose. Numero Uno for the Ones: Kill their enemies.

  Numero Dos for me: Plan our escape. Each time I’ve gone out I’ve taken note of safe sheltering places and have stored piles of firewood there. I’ve stashed dried food—and a few other things—in various places along potential getaway routes. I’ve located sources of the precious water so vital for survival. Here in the southwest your body loses a pound of it every day through sweating alone. Our ancestors managed to survive for so long with thousands of white and black soldiers pursuing them because they knew all the springs and seeps. My namesake, Lozen, was a water finder, a gift as important as being able to locate the direction of her enemies before they could reach her.

  Enemies. That’s another obstacle at least as big as Haven’s walls.

  After getting over the wall, any nighttime getaway would only be relatively easy if I was alone, not with three other people. Things wait outside Haven at night. Every night. Welcoming, but not in any way that would be easy for us to survive. By myself I could elude, outrun, or outfight them. But my family couldn’t do that. Without access to the armory, we wouldn’t have the weaponry needed to protect ourselves at night. While I am pretty sure Guy—who runs the armory—is my ally, that’s one problem I haven’t quite solved.

  Not that I would actually be able to get my family to that escape route yet. It’s no accident that every time I’m sent out on a mission the Ones make sure that my family is tightly secured somewhere. We’re allowed to get together only for brief visits. Since being brought to Haven we’ve never been able to spend even a single night together. But I’m not going to give up until I find a way. No prison is escape-proof. There must be a way. There has to be.

  Just thinking of them makes it seem for a moment as if they’re here with me. I can smell the comforting odor of the herbal soap that Mom makes coming from her hair. I can feel Ana’s soft palm on my arm as she looks up at me with her beautiful eyes. Too beautiful. It worries me about the way some of the worst men here have started to notice her. “Lozen,” she’ll say as she always does, “I’m so glad you’re back.” And I can see tough little Victor pretending he’s not all that excited to see me, but making sure that he sits down close enough to lean his back against me. He wishes he were old enough to be trained to do the kind of work I do. I thank all the saints in heaven that he is not. I already have enough to worry about.

  I'm glad he’s only eight. If he was older, he’d be forced to use his hunting skills in service to the Ones, not our people.

  If it weren’t for my family, I would turn around and start running, not stopping till I’d put at least fifty miles between me and this place. Eager as I am to see them, to make sure they’re all right, I need to prolong my return to Haven’s tight security and tighter bonds just a little bit longer. Br
eathe the air of something that is almost freedom for just a little bit longer.

  In a funny way, I am glad I heard that voice again, even if whatever communicated seems to view me as a midnight snack. It means I am not imagining my new ability.

  That ability: reading other people’s minds. Not exactly like in some old sci-fi story. I just hear bits of speech, sometimes not even words but just scenes from the brains of people around me. And usually I have to really focus to do it, though sometimes it just pops up on me. And when I do, I feel as if there is a needle, getting hotter and hotter, right in the middle of my forehead.

  There have been rumors about other people being able to do it. Just rumors. And I’ve told no one about my own experience. It started not too long after the cloud settled in. Which makes me speculate about a few possibilities. One is that telepathy, speaking mind to mind, may be something latent in all human beings. Maybe it is something genetic—better developed, more common—in certain people, certain families. My nineteenth-century namesake, the first Lozen, was able to do things others could not. She could perceive danger coming from farther away than eyes could see. When she spoke with the spirits, they told her about things that had not yet happened. Maybe mind-reading was one of her skills.

  A second speculation is about why I was never able to experience this before. My theory is that all the now-vanished modern communication activities in the world—telephones, short-wave, video and audio broadcasts, computers, the Internet—acted as a damper on paranormal abilities. Then the Cloud overthrew humanity’s fragile electronic empire. It also released a whole passel of craziness from the minds of the human survivors. Cults and their accompanying armies sprang up overnight—like the Know Nots who rose after New America fell. They believed that knowledge was the cause of humanity’s downfall and went around burning libraries and every form of printed matter they could find.

  I can’t stay here long. I sigh, stand up, start walking again. Down one hill, up another, and so on until I am only one ridge away from Haven. One ridge away from its walls that surround you like a giant’s fist, holding you so tight that you have to struggle to breathe. But those I love are there, too. I have no choice but to return.

  However, I don’t have to hurry. I sit down again, this time next to a stone with petroglyphs on it that look like bird-winged beings. I raise my gaze to watch a golden eagle circling overhead through the shimmering air. I wish I could join it. That big bird is free. Its power was undiminished by that subtle effulgence that has silvered Earth’s sky since it all ended.

  It happened so fast. I am sure some people thought it was a dream, even though we all watched the start of it on handhelds and implants and city center com-screens. A shimmering silver cloud far out in interplanetary space. First spotted by one of New America’s dozen Mars satellites. Heading toward Earth from beyond Jupiter, first concealed by that giant planet’s mass until it was well past it. Moving at a speed just slow enough for images of it to continue to be flashed for a full day on all the public personal viewers, such as those imprinted inside the eyelids of the Ones and the cheaper mass-produced temp-screens leased to the ordinaries at reasonable rates. One very full day. Time enough for it to be seen and discussed all over our planet before it reached us. A magnetic phenomenon? A sentient entity?

  At the speed it was approaching, over a hundred thousand miles per hour, there was not much time for anything much to be done to prepare for it. Not that anything much would have worked. The fifty or so thermonuclear asteroid buster warheads deployed against it did not explode. They might have disintegrated any oncoming space rock into dust, but not this threat. No big atomic explosions. Just a cessation of transmission as that cloud, now estimated to be twice the size of Earth’s moon, kept coming. It quietly settled into the atmosphere, adding a gentle glaze to the sky through which the sunlight streamed and the night stars remained visible. More visible than before when all the lights of the cities went out.

  And countless billions of screens went blank forever.

  The results of the permanent silencing of every bit of electronic technology from Marconi on were notably noisy in many instances, such as in the rapid unpowered return of all aircrafts to the unforgiving surfaces of our planet’s lands and waters. Or the screaming of ordinaries trapped a thousand miles from the nearest station inside subterranean trains that stopped speeding through the tunnels bored deep in the earth to link the continents.

  Countless scenarios of disaster played out during that time, among them those hooked up to life-saving machines now permanently obsolete. Or—alas for nearly all of the elite—the disastrous consequences visited upon those now more than half-machine themselves because of their numerous transplants, upgrades, and enhancements. The most important men and women who chaired the three great corporate nation-states of New America, Euro-Russia, and Afro-Asia all perished painfully, quickly, and dramatically.

  Luckily for my family, we were what was once called lower class. We had nothing attached to us other than by external mag strips.

  It was lucky for me in particular that my youthful skills included such (pre-cloud) anachronistically useless pursuits as hand-to-hand combat, marksmanship, tracking, and wilderness survival at a time when the wilderness itself was barely surviving. Those esoteric and (pre-C) outdated interests can be blamed on or credited to my family, especially my uncle and my dad—stubborn descendants of a nation that had been targeted for destruction in more than one century yet still survived.

  Not all of the Ones, our planetary elite, perished with the coming of the Cloud. Those with plenty of lust for power but not enough status for full modification—they survived. And the more basic weapons held by what was left of their armies still worked. That was when they began to bring “order” out of the ensuing chaos. Order meaning the establishment of little dictatorships like the one we have at Haven.

  That struggle for order is still underway around this continent and in what’s left of the other great corporate states as well. But the reestablishment of anything resembling nations has been held back by a bunch of things. Limited communication, for example—aside from runners and carrier birds. No means of rapid transportation with the demise of internal combustion engines.

  That didn’t stop people way back in the day, but then there are the gemods and the various other non-human or semihuman monsters that were released from their electrified cells, cages, and other enclosures. The presence of those beings quickly made the cities death traps. Predators know that the best places to hunt are the water holes. For water holes, substitute supply marts where cred machines no longer worked and windows and autolock doors have been broken or pried open by looters looking for packaged food and drink. And now imagine various critters of different shapes and sizes with interesting combinations of fangs and claws leaping out from the concealment of counters or dropping from the ceilings.

  The cities were not places to survive. Nor was life under the rule of petty warlords that much better. That’s why some of us—like my family—retreated from the craziness. Rather than fighting with each other, we tried to cooperate. We created a little tribal community where our knowledge of the land and old ways of sustaining ourselves could be put to good use. We had two dozen peaceful people living together in our valley before the scouts from Haven found us. Only four of us are still alive.

  I shade my eyes with one hand and squint down at Haven. While I’ve been sitting here musing about a vanished past that is not coming back, the sun has moved across the sky. It’s shining so brightly that my eyes have started watering. I wipe the corner of them with one knuckle. I look up at the sky. No sign of the eagle anymore. It’s flown as far out of sight as any futile dreams of freedom.

  I stand up and brush the sand off my knees. I sling my bag over my shoulder. Time to return to my home sweet prison.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Password

  I am welcomed by adoring crowds strewing my path with blossoms as they chant my name.


  Lo siento, senorita. That would make life a lot nicer, wouldn’t it?

  Instead, after I have pounded on the small metal door in the middle of the big metal door that is the main entrance to Haven, I stand out in the hot sun mentally counting to myself.

  One and one pony. Two and one pony.

  At one hundred and one pony I bang again. The prescribed six times that comprise today’s password. Or pass-pound, I suppose.

  Nothing. They could put a bench out here for scouts and couriers to sit on while they wait. But, no. That would be too easy.

  I sigh and start counting again.

  I get up to five hundred before anyone answers.

  “Friend or foe,” a high, hostile voice calls down from the gun tower above the gate.

  I look up, showing my face to the person who just spoke and remains hidden, aside from the metal eyes of his doublebarrel protruding from the gun slot. He knows who I am. Probably recognized me when I was still half a mile away, crossing the wide expanse around Haven that is kept free of anything other than gravel.

  “It’s me, Edwin,” I reply, trying not to sound exasperated. Which I am, as well as tired and feeling an ache in my back.

  “Friend or foe?”

  Edwin, who believes he is at least the second toughest guy in Haven, saw far too many war movies in his pre-C life.

  “How about neither?” I reply, thinking, do your damn job and unlock the frigging door!

  A bee-sting sized pain stabs the middle of my forehead. And I hear Edwin’s thought in my mind.

  How about waiting, bitch?

  Those words in his head are mixed with a very unpleasant image that features me in a most uncomfortable position while Edwin—twice as muscular as in real life—stands over me. The creep tried hitting on me half a dozen times before I finally snapped and swept his feet out from under him as he accidentally (for the fourth time) groped me in the mess hall. Of course he hopped right up again, red-faced. Made it look like he slipped on something. I didn’t argue with him then, nor do I now.