Ain't Talkin'

Somewhere west of the Sierra’s, Roche caught the first whiff of the trail. It wasn’t much, but there it was.

In a hollow between two hills was a campsite. An old tire had been used to contain the meager camp fire that the Corporation soldiers had built for the night. There were tread tracks, two in a line and three small tracks off to one side. There were two bikes, then, not just one. Roche had been under the assumption, he wasn’t sure why, that there had only been two soldiers, but a pair of motorbikes meant that there were at least three in addition to Alex Markus.

They had the poor guy bound, from the look of the leftover marks in the sand. Scuffs and shoulder prints meant that they kept his feet and hands tied tight at night while they slept, lest he try to get away. During they day they might take turns with him on the back of one of the bikes, slouched across it on his belly or riding sidesaddle Roche couldn’t be sure.

He’d left Lucky at the edge of the campsite when he came upon it and the horse whinnied behind him. Roche followed the horses eyes. She’d seen something.

Over the next rise of the hills was a trio of circling bald birds, riding thermals with wings spread wide.

“Good girl.” Roche said to the horse and walked toward where the vultures circled, Lucky followed several paces behind.

Beneath the vultures was a dead highwayman. He was dressed all in faded blacks and a long jacket. His hood had been cowled over his head and he wore a pair of old night goggles that probably barely worked well enough to see your hand in front of your face.

The highwayman must have tried to sneak up on the trio of soldiers in the night, hoping for an easy kill, maybe a meal, but you couldn’t tell if a dead man had the shakes.

His neck had been blown through with something high-powered, and there was a second hole in his gut from something of a smaller caliber. Either the soldiers heard him coming or they were still vigilant enough to be posting one man on watch while the other two slept, it was hard to tell from the tracks.

Winking up through his shades at the noon sun Roche tried to guess at how long the highwayman had been dead.

There was a good deal of sand in his wounds, but the breezes and winds in the Mojave for the last day or so had been strangely light, apart from the dust storm that Lucky and he had outrun the day before. That storm had not touched this far west. The highwayman had been dead a day, two at the most, and Roche knew that he was gaining on them.

They had motorbikes, sure, but even if they kept to the roads, which they hadn’t been, it seemed, the going would be slow with two men to a bike, and he had to bet they were hauling their own gasoline as well.

Another day at a good clip and he might be hot enough on their trail to catch them during the night.

Roche gripped the pommel and rear of Lucky’s saddle and swung a leg over the mare. He put his heels into her sides just hard enough to get his point across and off they went towards the ache of the Sierra’s against the horizon.