Confederation -- 21

Chapter 21

We were awakened by the sound of a shuttle passing overhead. Hattie jumped up, startled. Our shuttles were the only air traffic, and people had become unused to seeing vehicles in the sky. The only things that flew today were birds or perhaps a kite or two.

I doubted that there were many kites. Life was too hard to waste time on frivolous recreation.

We crawled out of the hole and drank at the pool in the gully. My stomach was growling, causing Hattie to say, "You're going to have to wait for breakfast. Maybe we'll see a rabbit or two later."

My head still ached with a fierce, throbbing drumbeat, and my stomach was definitely empty. It wasn't nice of me, but I took that as an excuse to snap at her, "I hope the little fur-balls show up soon and you don't miss with that little pea-shooter!"

She gave back as good as she got, "Well, maybe I shouldn't have cut you loose, after all. You weren't doing too well back there on your own."

I looked around. The sun was shining, and a light breeze was stirring the weeds along the side of the gully. The scene was calming. I took a deep breath, rotated my shoulders to loosen them, and said, "Okay. I'm sorry. My head is pounding. Let's start again, shall we?"

Her smile was like another sunrise. Under all of the dirt and matted hair, I hadn't recognized how pretty a girl she was. And, as I looked closer, how young she was. She couldn't have been more than fifteen or sixteen.

I smiled back, "That's better. I'm sorry I'm grumpy. Something to eat will probably help my head, so we'd better get going. No rabbits in sight here."

"When you're as old as you are, it's okay to be grumpy in the morning," she said earnestly.

I didn't know quite how to answer that. I guess someone in their thirties does look old to a teenager, especially someone who'd been more or less concussed, tied up, urinated on, and generally mistreated after their shuttle crashed. After a minute, I decided to let it go. She was already heading towards the road we'd been following last night, so I followed along quietly because talking made my temples and the back of my head throb.

We reached the fence and then climbed up onto the asphalt. It was a poor excuse for a road. The lack of maintenance showed in the deep cracks and weeds growing up through the surface in random shoots and clumps. The good thing about the road's condition was that there were patches of dust in places where the wind had deposited them in the lee of weed clumps. These were softer, and any incautious travelers would leave their imprint there. There were numerous bird tracks, small and large. Some might have been grouse, maybe. There were also small mammal tracks left by rabbits, pack rats, coyotes, or maybe feral dogs, and once we saw the prints of a bobcat.

I noticed that Hattie kept well clear of the dust, and I mentally gave her a high mark for that. She was cautious about leaving a trail. That was something that was now natural for me. A few years ago, I was mostly an urban dweller, at least when I wasn't being a soldier. In the years since our technology died, I'd become a pretty fair mountain man, and being aware of my tracks was second nature. I feared, though, that it would also be second nature for any of the Motherland Army men.

We didn't see any sign that another human had traveled on the road until the sun was well up. We came up a hill, and at the crest, Hattie dove off into the ditch. I was a little behind her and cautiously stepped forward until I could just see over the top into the next valley.

There were the remains of a fire on a flat place in the middle of the road at the lowest part between our hill and the next. There was no smoke, and there hadn't been any odor, but the wind was quartering across and probably wouldn't have carried any scent to us.

I inspected the area carefully. It seemed safe. We had to keep going, so I decided to chance it. I murmured to Hattie out of the side of my mouth as I walked by her position, "Stay here and keep an eye out. I'm going down."

She hissed in response and slowly parted the weeds so that she could see better.

I walked slowly down the road, trying to use my mental senses to determine if there was an ambush after all. It was no use. I couldn't sense anything, but my head was still pounding, and that made it extremely difficult to slip into the relaxed mode that my mental sensing required.

When I reached the site of the fire, I stopped and looked around. The wind blew through the long grass of the hillside, creating surprisingly regular waves. A bird was calling from a small bush. It seemed cheerful and not at all alarmed. I kicked the ashes, and they were cold. Then I looked around again. Nothing.

There were a few bones near the side of the road. I squatted by them and picked up one. It was a goat, and it had obviously been cooked. It had been some time ago. There was no meat left on the bone. The small animals, mice, birds, and rats had cleaned off every scrap of flesh.

Standing, I waved for Hattie, and she stood up in the ditch, looking around. Then she ambled down to where I waited.

"Somebody was here, huh?" she asked.

"Yeah, maybe a week ago or so. The fire is cold, and the bones there have been picked by the mice," I replied.

She snorted and walked past, saying, "Well, standing around isn't going to get us to the mountains. Let's get going."

She wasn't making this easy on me. I followed along, hoping for something to eat and daydreaming about finding Whistle. Then it hit me. I must have a concussion. My mind just wasn't as fast as it usually was. I should have been trying to contact him mentally!

Hattie was a little ahead of me as we moved westward. I tried my best to ignore the pounding in my head, softening my steps to minimize the pain, which seemed to beat in time with my strides. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and let my hands hang limply as I walked, trying to slide into a state where I could push my psychic senses out far enough to sense Whistle or Frazzle or Liz! I was really foggy! I'd forgotten about her. She was far more sensitive than either of the two Sunnys.

I gradually drifted into a deep state of meditation as I walked. It's necessary for me to alter my brain frequency, slowing it down to a theta level, about four cycles per second. Human brains usually slow to that point just before drifting off to sleep. It's when we usually have a series of dream-like thoughts that gradually fade out as we doze off. Things were progressing well. I seemed to be able to continue walking as I meditated. My eyes were still open, but I was focused on other-where.

...Snap...

I jerked awake at the sound, and my eyes popped open fully. I'd dropped back and was about fifty yards behind Hattie. She was standing on the edge of the road, holding her little pistol. There was a small trickle of smoke exiting the barrel. She lowered the weapon and tucked it into its holster as I watched.

She turned to me and called in a low voice, "Hurry up. I got us a rabbit!"

That got my attention. She jumped the ditch and fence, and by the time I got up to her position, she was probing in some grass and weeds. Rising, she turned to me with a grin, holding a nice, fat, and thoroughly dead rabbit by the hind leg.

A few yards beyond her location was a small clump of woody brush. We gathered dead sticks and built a small fire in a barren area well away from the dry grass. It was the work of a moment to pull the skin off the bunny and gut it. Then, we cooked strips of the lean meat on sticks held over the almost smokeless fire.

The meat tasted amazing. I'd forgotten what food was like, or so it seemed. By the time the fire died out, we'd cooked and eaten the entire rabbit. It hadn't been as big as it first looked, but I felt comfortably full, and my head was better. As I ate, the headache started to fade, and now, although I still had to move carefully, I almost felt human again.

"Hattie, I need to take a few minutes to try and contact my friends," I started.

"How? You don't have a radio, and I don't see any telephones around here either." She wasn't being sarcastic. She was just impatient and wanted to get moving again.

"It's a long story, but to make it short, I'm able sometimes to use my mind to contact people over long distances," I said, hoping that she'd take that as a complete explanation.

"Oh, you mean like telepathy?" she asked.

I kept underestimating her. She was filthy and her hair matted, but underneath was a beautiful and intelligent young girl.

"Yes. That's exactly what I mean. If you'll give me some quiet time, I'll see if I can reach them," I said.

"Okay," she replied.

I was surprised. No arguments; she just sat there with her mouth shut, watching me expectantly. I briefly wondered if she thought I'd go into some kind of fit or something. Her intense staring didn't help. I tried to drop into the meditative state, but her constant gaze made me self-conscious.

"Look, I can't get into the right state with you staring at me. It's embarrassing or something like that. Just keep watch and make sure we are secure or whatever," I pleaded.

She huffed a bit but then moved over to a small hillock that afforded a slightly better view of the surrounding terrain. I sat there by the remains of the fire, sensing the breeze as it gusted fitfully around me. The noon sun shone down brightly, and there were some bird calls in the distance. The grass waved and …

I was drifting down into that twilight area that I wanted. My mind separated from my body and slid out to a great distance or an infinitely tiny distance, and there was no meaning to normal spatial measurements. I became aware of – Liz!

"Dec! Dec! Where are you? What happened? I've been so worried! Where are you? I love you." Her mental stream almost overflowed my mind.

"Calm down. I'm Okay. I love you, too. I'm walking back towards Denver, and I'm maybe twenty miles west of

where our shuttle went down. What happened to the shuttle anyway? It wasn't there when I got back," I sent.

She sent back, "Whistle got it rebooted, but you'd been captured. He slid into the pond and watched from out in the water. He said someone hit you on the head, and you went down. He didn't know if you were alright. They dragged you off, and he was afraid to follow, so he went to the shuttle, got it going, and came back for help. They went out to try and find you early this morning."

That was the shuttle that had woken us! They were probably poking around off to the east, trying to find me there.

"Are they still looking?" I mentally asked.

The response was clear, "Yes, they're still out there. Rudy and Joe and some of the Marines. Whistle is piloting."

"Can you radio them to follow the road that is about a half-mile south of the crash site? I estimate we've come about twenty miles," I sent.

"What do you mean, 'we'?" she asked.

"The Motherland guys grabbed me, but a girl rescued me," I sent back. "Her family seems to be gone, and she's a refugee. I'm going to bring her back. She's got a lot going for her, and she needs to be somewhere safe."

"Is she pretty?" Liz asked.

My wife! "She's so dirty that you can't really tell, but I think so. She's also pretty smart. I think that she's had an awful time." I sent.

"Dec! You make sure that girl gets back here safely! Frazzle has the shuttle on the radio. Get somewhere they can see you. They should be there in a few minutes."

She betrayed her worry by scolding. I hadn't realized that she could add a scolding overtone to her mental sending, but she had.

We hiked back to the road, climbed to the top of one of its low hills, and stood there waiting. I was looking to the east for the shuttle. I had just seen a distant flash as the sun glinted off of the craft's hull when Hattie grabbed my arm.

"Look!" she pointed westward along the road. There was a group of men coming. They were about half a mile away and had just come over a hillock into sight. We could faintly hear them shout as they sighted us.

They left no question about their identity and intentions. A rifle bullet struck the asphalt off to our left and whined away as it ricocheted off the hard surface.

We dashed eastward over the top of the hill. When we could just barely see them over the rise, I unslung my rifle and fired several high shots in their direction. The weapon was poorly sighted, and I wasn't sure where it was hitting, so I was surprised when one of them went down. They scattered, diving into the roadside ditches and leaving the fallen man to wriggle his way over to the edge of the road. It must have been too much for him since he stopped trying as soon as he got to the edge of the asphalt and lay still.

They kept shooting at us, but the bullets mostly bounced off the asphalt and flew overhead, whirring as they tumbled through the air. Hattie was crouched low, her eyes wide.

She looked at me and asked, "How do we get out of this?"

She wasn't panicked. She was obviously trying to figure out how to deal with a novel situation. I realized that she had never been in an actual firefight, despite the cold-blooded way she'd taken down the drunken soldiers.

I started to speak, but there was a loud whining noise, and the shuttle came to a hovering stop about a hundred yards over our heads. I mentally tuned in to the crew and contacted Rudy.

Our mental communication was sketchy. He could use his mind to send, but he was nowhere near as facile as Liz.

"Stay down, Dec. We're going to use the plasma weapon on those guys, and then we'll drop down and pick you up." His communication came through in bits and pieces, but that was its intent.

There was a flurry of rifle shots that either missed or bounced bullets off of the tough shuttle armor, followed by a screeching crack as the plasma cannon fired. There was a sense of quickly passing heat even one hundred yards below as the weapon discharged.

The surviving men in the ditches jumped up and took off running as if the devil himself were on their heels. The bolt had struck a little short of their position and started all of the grass and weeds on fire on one side of the road. I figured the men on the other side of the road knew they were the next targets because they all ran away in a tight group. That was a big mistake.

There was another crack, and this time the bolt struck right in the middle of the running group. It exploded with a flash, leaving no one standing.

Now, it may seem cruel to shoot retreating targets, but Rudy was nothing if not expedient. He had always gone for the throat in battle, and this was no exception. As he'd told me once, "The only good enemy is a dead one."

The craft settled with its characteristic jet-turbine whine and landed on the hilltop directly in front of us.