Deadman

The next day, after a pot of coffee and a breakfast of dried meat and biscuits, I made my way to Jasper to check in with Murphy and see if he’d found anything from my list. I didn’t have any scrap for him, but between whatever credit I may have and the mountain of Patriot Points I was sitting on after my last investigation and all my recent combats, I was sure I could afford whatever I needed. I left my bike behind since Jasper wasn’t too far and I didn’t see a good reason to waste the fuel.

After I was about halfway there, I started to hear gunshots. I slowed my approach and took a deep breath. I caught a hint of gunpowder and blood in the air. I quickened my pace to a jog, and drew my rifle. The sounds and smells became clearer until Jasper came into view. There was a trail of destruction straight through the center of the settlement, as if something had rammed through buildings and people on the way through town. I could see the men in the towers firing down into the center of the settlement, but couldn’t make out what they’d been firing on. I could just barely make out the shapes of people, many of them running back and forth between buildings.

I holstered my rifle, and drew my sword and shotgun. I’d need to get in close to avoid hitting bystanders. Though I could hear gunfire and yelling that indicated that the people of Jasper themselves were fighting back in pockets across the settlement. I ran the rest of the way into the town, getting a nod of acknowledgement from one of the tower guards as I passed. I moved toward the center of town, where the fighting was at its thickest.

There were three raiders posted behind a small food stand, with one of them loading up a bag while the other two fired on anything they saw. I used my knowledge of Jasper’s backstreets, which I’d gained from avoiding people on the main ones, to sneak around to the side of the cart. The first shell from my shotgun killed the closest of the raiders and maimed the one behind them, and the second shell killed the last two.

That drew the attention of another raider who charged me with a spear. I batted the point of it away with the barrel of my gun and slashed the haft of the weapon in two with my sword. The woman surprised me by not hesitating to swing with the broken part of the spear, hitting the inside of my wrist as I attempted to dodge away.

Before she could follow up again, I kicked her in the chest with the full strength I could muster. I heard bones crack and she flew backward into a scrap metal shack that dented as she struck it. She coughed up blood and her eyes clouded over.

I moved back into the back alleys and started making my way further into the center, following my nose and ears to where more of the raiders might be. I wound up near the market in the center of town, right next to Murphy’s. There were already two dead raiders outside his place, and two more looking in the doorway and taking potshots.

I didn’t want to risk firing on them from behind and hitting whoever was inside on accident, so I holstered my shotgun. I waited for them to start taking more shots into the doorway, then made my move. I cut the one to the left of the doorway across the middle, bisecting her, and when the other one moved to react her head exploded into mist, her body crumpling.

I raised a hand and looked into the doorway to see Bill, a desert eagle in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. The lenses of his glasses were flipped up. “Donovan.” He said, as calmly as if I’d walked into his store on any average day.

“Bill.”

He shook his head. “It’s Murphy. Signs on ain’t it?”

I took a step out and looked over at the ‘Murphy’s’ sign, it was riddled with bullets and no longer lit. “Fraid not.”

“Oh. Guess Bill’s fine then. You looking to see if I found anything else on your list?”

“Yeah, but that’ll have to wait.”

He looked at the corpses in his doorway. “Oh. Right. Well, check in when you’re done with this. I think I found a few things on it. Gotta dig them up though.”

I nodded. “Thanks, Bill.” Sure that there were no more raiders near his shop I moved even closer to where the raiders were concentrated. I saw one woman holding a case of ammo running back toward cover. I raised my shotgun, but before I could fire, a gunshot came from behind me and dropped her. The tower guards were still the crack shots I remembered.

A little further in I saw the source of the destruction, and the raiders. It was a bus, plated in scrap metal with dozens of slots from which to fire. The raiders were loading guns, ammo, food, and whatever other loot they could retrieve into it as quickly as possible. I could see a number of Jasper’s residents, starting to rally and shoot their own weapons at them, but it would still be some time before they were able to drive them off completely.

I closed in on the bus, and, unfortunately, it was at that time that the rear door of it swung open, revealing a mounted machine gun. It opened fire, but luckily didn’t seem to be aiming at me in particular, and instead fired in an arc from right to left in order to keep the growing resistance down. I dove, expecting to take at least a glancing hit, but was surprised when instead several bullets simply stopped before they could hit me, seemingly in midair. I looked down at the crushed shells and as I did I noticed that the armband I’d been wearing had been turned on at some point during the assault on Jasper.

Another hail of bullets shot out and I raised my arm in front of my body and the bullets within roughly a four foot square simply stopped and fell before they could hit me. The bars on the wristband’s screen seemed to trickle down relative to how many bullets were deflected, and I was already down to about half power. I decided to use it. I started running, with all the speed I could, directly for the back of the bus. The machine gun turned to focus its fire on me, but by then I was already halfway there. I used my new shield to block its fire as I ran and was less than ten feet away by the time the shield failed. I dove the rest of the way rolling and coming up just under the gun. I reached for the floor of the bus to pull myself up, and that’s when it started moving.

I tightened my grip as I started being dragged forward. Luckily, the bus was moving slowly at first so I managed to sheathe my sword in order to use my other hand. I attempted to run with it as it built up speed, but soon found my legs dragging behind me instead.

The woman who’d been manning the gun appeared above where I was standing. She went to kick one of my hands off, but I removed it and grabbed her leg, pulling her down. I used the extra leverage to pull myself the rest of the way up, throwing her down behind the bus as I did.

I looked up to see more than a dozen women with guns leveled at me and a busload of loot.

“Shit.” I managed, moving to leap out of the back as they opened fire. I felt several rounds hit me in the back before I found myself rolling on the hard ground behind the bus, everything becoming a haze until I came to a stop, and for a few minutes after that.

I was, unfortunately, completely conscious. I could feel my body knitting itself back together. Bullets pushing out of my skin, cuts mending, and after about a half hour I was able to stand, though I was ravenously hungry. I looked at the device on my wrist. If it had just had a bit more juice, I may have been able to get through that encounter unscathed, and killed the raiders as well. Still, it would be incredibly helpful in the future. Even as I stood looking at it, a single bar was restored on the device’s small screen.

I moved back to where I’d thrown the woman from the back of the bus, heading back toward Jasper. The woman was dead. Her neck snapped. I checked her wrists, following an inkling I had when I’d noticed that the raiders were all women. Sitting on the center of her wrist was a black widow tattoo.