End of the World, Start of My Empire novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Five Riders

Nolan wrecks a patrol with the cuff and Tova leads the fight; a captive says Haskell is holding his mother in the laundry.

The drone dropped out of the sky and hit the roof.

I had stretched out my hand from the top of the ladder, and the blue light had reached up and switched it off.

Bria caught it before it rolled off the edge.

She flipped it over, thumbed open a panel, and pulled out a small black card.

"They watch through this," she said. "Haskell's people know exactly where we are, and they've known for an hour."

"How long until they get here?"

She looked at the sun.

"Dusk, if they're careful. Sooner, if they're stupid."

"Haskell isn't stupid," Tova said from the bottom of the ladder.

"Then dusk."

We had about three hours, and Tova used every minute of them.

She walked the fence line with a rifle on her shoulder, and she pointed at things.

"One road in. One bridge. Kill the road and they walk."

"I can do that," I said.

"I know you can. Do it when I tell you, not before."

She looked at me for a moment longer than she needed to.

"What?" I asked.

"Nothing. You just look different standing next to a gun."

Hallie spread a blanket on the concrete floor and made me sit.

She pressed two fingers under my jaw, then ran them down my ribs.

"I felt these crack this morning," she said.

"You didn't. You weren't there."

"I felt them on the way in the truck, in the way you were breathing." She pressed harder. "They're closed. A rib takes six weeks."

"It's been six hours."

"I know," she said quietly. "I'd like it written down that I know."

Bria had already dragged the Tax truck's battery into the station and was wiring something to the fence with copper from my bag.

She moved fast, hands black to the wrist, humming through her teeth.

She was pale, though, and every time she bent over she pressed her side again.

"Bria," Hallie said. "Come here."

"I'm busy."

"You're busy being pale."

"I'm busy being brilliant."

She waved a pair of pliers over her shoulder and kept working.

The riders came at dusk, five of them in a single line, headlights swinging over the dunes.

I stood in the doorway with my arm at my side.

Tova lay on the roof with the rifle.

Hallie was behind the pump housing with a pistol.

The lead rider stopped at the bridge and raised a bullhorn.

"Greer," he called. "Bring us the arm and the women, and Haskell will forgive your debt."

"What debt?" I called back.

"Three buckets of water."

"I paid that."

"Haskell's ledger says you didn't."

I almost laughed.

"Tell him the ledger's wrong," I said.

Then I closed my hand.

The bridge went out from under them.

I did not touch it.

I felt the old concrete deck and the rebar inside it.

The blue light went through me and into the span, and the whole thing dropped into the riverbed in one long scream of stone.

The lead rider's bike went over the edge.

The others hit their brakes.

"Now," Tova said from the roof.

Her rifle cracked once.

The second bike's front tire burst and the rider flew over the bars.

I reached again.

Engines died in the dark, one after another.

A rider ran at the door with a knife.

I put up the wall and he bounced off it, and Hallie shot him in the shoulder before he hit the ground.

"He's alive," she said calmly. "Don't kill him. I want to talk to him."

The last two riders threw down their rifles and put their hands in the air.

It had taken less than three minutes.

I stood in the dust with blue light crawling up my neck, breathing hard.

I turned and saw the three of them in the glare of the dead headlights.

Tova had come down off the roof.

Hallie's hand was on her pistol.

Bria was sitting on the ground with her back against the fence, one hand on her ribs.

The other was wiping her nose.

"It's nothing," she said, when she saw me looking. "Dust."

I let it go.

I shouldn't have, but the man Hallie had shot was talking.

He sat against a bumper with a hand pressed to his shoulder, grinning at me through the pain.

"You think you won," he said. "You think a blue arm gets you a valley."

"I think it got me five bikes."

"He's been waiting for you for a year."

"For me?"

"For somebody. Anybody with a blue light on his arm." He spat blood.

"You know why he takes half of everything the scavengers bring in? He's been looking for the thing in the culvert."

"Everyone else looked and found nothing. You walked in and it put itself on you."

"Who told him about it?"

"He took a map off a dead surveyor in the first week of the Fall."

He looked at the three women standing around me.

"He'll want it. And he's got leverage on you."

"I don't have anyone."

"Your mother," the rider said, and smiled wider, "works his laundry. He'll trade her for the arm."

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