End of the World, Start of My Empire novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Tax
The Tax strips Nolan of his haul and beats him; a pod in a culvert seals a blue cuff on his arm, and he frees three caged women from the Tax truck.
The Tax took my water first, then my boots, then the bag I had spent six days filling.
I was on my knees in a dry canal outside Barstow with a rifle butt against my ribs.
Fourteen months after the Fall, that was what a good scavenging week looked like.
"Half of everything," said the man with the red armband.
I only ever called him the captain, because he had a captain's smile and a captain's boots.
"I gave you half at the gate," I said.
"You gave me half of what you showed me."
He dumped my bag in the dirt and kicked through it with his toe.
Four cans of peaches, a coil of copper wire, two bottles of antibiotics from a pharmacy that had been dead for a year.
The antibiotics were for my mother.
She worked the laundry inside the Yard, and she had been coughing since spring.
"Not those," I said.
The captain held a bottle up to the sun.
"Haskell's ledger says Nolan Greer owes three buckets from last month."
"I paid three buckets."
"Then the ledger's wrong, and the ledger doesn't get to be wrong."
He tucked the bottles into his vest.
I lunged at him.
I got one hand on his collar before the rifle butt caught me across the nose.
It cracked.
Then the other two Tax riders were on me, and the boots came in, and the canal went white and loud.
"Leave him for the dogs," the captain said from far away. "Nobody walks out of the Yard owing."
Engines started.
The sound faded east along the canal bed, and I lay with my cheek in the dust and tasted blood.
I could have stayed there.
Plenty of people did, in those months.
But the bottles had my mother's name on them, in a way, and I was not done.
I got my elbows under me.
The canal ran into a concrete culvert under the old highway.
I crawled toward it because it was the only shade there was.
The culvert had cracked in the war.
A slab of road had come down and split the floor, and under it was a hole I had walked past a hundred times.
Today the hole was glowing.
It was a pale blue light, steady.
I crawled to the edge and looked down.
A pod the size of a coffin lay on its side in the dirt, grey metal, split open along one seam.
Inside was a single band of the same metal, thin as a bracelet, lit from within.
I should have left it alone.
Every scrap of sense I had left said so.
But I was bleeding in a hole in the earth, and the thing hummed.
I reached in and touched it.
It leapt onto my left forearm and closed around the bone with a click.
Heat ran up my arm to the shoulder, then through my chest.
My ribs stopped hurting.
I felt the bones in my nose slide back into place, and I screamed, and the culvert rang with it.
When I could see again, the blue light ran under my skin in lines.
I could feel engines.
That was the only way I could say it.
Far to the east, a diesel truck was grinding along the old highway.
I could feel its pistons.
I climbed out of the culvert on my own legs.
The Tax truck was a mile ahead, and I ran after it before I had decided anything.
I came over a rise and saw it stopped at a washout, the captain and two riders standing around a cage in the truck bed.
I had not noticed the cage when they took my bag.
Three women were in it, wrists zip-tied to the bars, with canvas sacks pulled half off their heads.
"Pretty haul," one rider said. "The boss pays double for the medic."
The tallest woman spat at his boots.
I stood on the rise with my arm hanging at my side, and I wanted the truck to stop.
The engine died.
It did not sputter or cough.
It simply stopped.
The captain spun around, and his smile went flat.
"That's him," he said. "Get the rifles."
I walked down the slope with blue light crawling up my sleeve.
I raised my hand, and the rifles flew out of their hands and slammed into the side of the truck.
The captain ran.
I put up a hard invisible wall that I felt more than saw.
It shoved him flat on his face in the dust.
The other two riders did not run.
They stared at my arm, and one of them whispered a word I had never heard anyone say in earnest.
"Alien."
I broke the zip ties on the cage with a thought, and the door swung open.
The small redhead stepped out first, one hand pressed hard against her ribs.
She was grinning anyway.
"Who the hell are you?" she asked.
Before I could answer, the dead radio in the truck cab crackled to life.
Bram Haskell's calm voice came out of it.
"All units," he said. "Find the man with the blue light on his arm. Bring him to me with the arm still on."
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