The Lawgivers: Gabriel Read online

  Or maybe it was the confidence in his voice when he’d told them the penalty was death?

  Lexa shook her thoughts as she heard the bellows of the gang members, sporadic gunfire, and the strange, high pitched whine of that weapon the angel wore on his wrist.

  Angel of death, she thought as she reached the counter and looked around for the proprietor. She discovered he was crouched behind the counter. “I need to trade for food and water,” she said in a rush.

  “I ain’t comin’ out till it’s over,” the proprietor snapped at her.

  “Well I can’t wait!” Lexa growled angrily, slapping her bag down on the counter and then jerking it up again to empty the contents on the counter. “Most of it’s broke now. I used it to beat that bastard off of me, but this thing was workin’ before. Makes numbers on this little window here. Uses sunlight.”

  Interest sparkled in the proprietor’s eyes despite his fear. “A cac-lator?” He lifted up enough to spot it and snatched it off the counter.

  “Yeah. How much?”

  The proprietor was frowning as he played with the buttons.

  The sounds in the street were escalating and Lexa very much feared the angel was going to make good on his word.

  Well, she didn’t want to hang around to see if he lost either. It wouldn’t be a good thing for her either way.

  “Two bottles of water. A can of meat.”

  Lexa was tempted to just take what was offered without haggling, but two bottles probably wouldn’t get her to the next watering hole or the next town and the canned meat was rarely edible anymore. “Four bottles, directions to the next watering hole, two cans of meat and a can of fruit.”

  “Ain’t got no fruit.”

  Disappointment filled her but she didn’t have time to look around to see if the man was lying. “Ok. Four bottles of water, directions, and two cans of meat.”

  “Done!”

  Annoyance flickered through Lexa. She could probably have done a lot better, damn it! There wasn’t time to weep over it, though. She watched anxiously as the proprietor crawled along behind the counter and collected her trade goods, pitching them toward her instead of putting them on the counter. She missed most of the stuff he threw at her and had to scramble around the floor for the bottles and cans. “You broke one of the bottles, you stupid motherfucker! Give me another one.”

  “No guarantees!” the bastard threw back at her. “You shoulda caught them.”

  Lexa ground her teeth, struggling with the desire to beat the bastard’s head in—which she knew she probably couldn’t manage anyway. “Directions?”

  “Head due west. The first one is poison. There’s a little spring in the side of the hill a bit further, though, and that water’s good.”

  “Thanks! Back way out?”

  The proprietor gestured. Lexa hesitated, but she didn’t want the udai on her heels. She needed to see what was happening to judge the lead time she had. Rushing to the front, she peered outside to see how the battle was going.

  Four more of the gang members were lying in the street, two of them missing about half of their heads. Lexa’s stomach lurched, but she focused on spotting the udai.

  It wasn’t hard to spot him. He was walking right down the middle of the street as bold as brass, no doubt searching for the other gang members—who’d vanished and either fled or simply ducked for cover.

  By her calculations he was half done. That should give her a good start.

  Abandoning the door, Lexa ran through the mercantile to the rear. There wasn’t a door in the back, but there was a window. It was a struggle to open the board shutter covering the opening, but she managed after a few moments and tumbled out of it into the alley. Getting to her feet, she checked her water bottles. Fortunately, they were made of the stuff called plasty and hadn’t broken as the first had. If she was careful, it should be enough to get her to the next watering hole and the plasty was almost as valuable as the water it held. She’d have something to carry more water with her.

  It took her a few moments to get her bearings since she’d gone out the back and dusk was falling fast. There was no longer a sun to use to get her direction. Mentally, she traced her path into the mercantile and mapped a return, though.

  She’d planned to use the nearest escape route out of town even if she didn’t have to run, but she needed to return to her point of entry to figure out due west since the sun was gone. She was breathless and tired by the time she reached that point. She wanted to rest. A mixture of fear and resentment filled her when she thought about what the udai had said, however.

  She had no idea why he’d fixated on her or what he had in mind for her, but she wasn’t about to hang around and find out!

  She hadn’t done anything!

  And now she didn’t dare return to the spot where she’d hidden her other supplies, but the little she’d left wasn’t worth the risk of running into the udai. With any luck, she could collect it when it was safer.

  Shaking the thoughts off, she opened one of her bottles and took a few sips and then carefully put the lid on again and pushed the bottle back into her bag. The proprietor of the mercantile had said the closest waterhole was due west and something about a hill.

  It was a shame the spring wasn’t in the only hill around! The town was surrounded on three sides by hills, though.

  Well, she told herself as she started out, if there was water there’d be plants growing around it and if there were plants there was food. She could hang on to the canned food until she really, really needed it. And if the waterhole was far enough for her to feel safe from the udai, she might just camp there a spell so that she didn’t have to worry about water for a while.

  For the first time in a very long time, she thought about what it would be like to stay in one place and get comfortable—at least as comfortable as she could manage.

  She discovered she couldn’t actually picture it in her mind. It almost seemed like she’d spent her entire life running, but that was far from the actuality. She’d grown up on a farm, or what passed for farms since the day. Her mother hadn’t remembered anything about ‘before’ or at least hadn’t talked about it that Lexa could recall if she did—not really surprising when she could barely remember her mother at all. But Sir, the man who’d taken her and her mother in and had fathered her younger siblings, had been an older. He’d talked about it all the time—before whatever had happened. He’d said ‘they’ must have dropped bombs because it had almost seemed as if the whole world was on fire. He didn’t know who ‘they’ were or even, for certain, if they had dropped bombs, but his parents had seemed to think that was what had happened and he was convinced they’d known.

  He’d grown up on a farm his parents had owned, but he couldn’t grow things like his parents had and he was certain it was because of the bomb or bombs. Nothing grew like it had before although it was better than the ‘after’—the time directly after—far better. The sky had been so filled with clouds then that it had almost seemed like perpetual night. So little light shone through that even the weeds, which never needed much encouragement to grow, had begun to whither by the time the clouds had begun to clear enough for sunlight to hit the ground, but even then everything was stunted.

  There was food in cans and bags and plasty containers, though, a lot of it, and not a lot of people to fight for it because so many had been caught in the open ‘the day’. So they’d hunted food buried in the rubble of what were called houses and stores and warehouses, and sometimes just buried in the ground when they couldn’t find other food to eat—when even such things as rats and edible grasses had become scarce.

  After his parents had died, when he’d stumbled upon a cache of seed, he’d decided to find a place and start a farm like the one he remembered from his childhood. It wasn’t much of a farm, but it fed him and when he’d caught her mother, it fed her and the brats, too.

  She hadn’t actually known what he meant about catching her mother until the day the raiders ha
d come.

  One day had seemed much like the next until that day, each day filled with the toils of trying to grow enough, or find enough, to feed themselves—and tending the little ones, which had become her job when her mother died birthing the little sister that they ended up burying with her.

  Then the raiders had descended upon them, screaming like demons, so terrifying her that she’d been frozen with it, unable to think. Finally, the frightened cries of the little ones had penetrated her stupor enough to trigger the thought of running and hiding but by then it was too late.

  It had probably been too late from the moment the raiders had burst upon them, but she’d spent many sleepless nights replaying it in her mind and trying to think if there was something she could’ve done to save herself and the little ones. She’d tortured herself with what ifs until she was half crazy before she’d finally, resolutely, pushed all of it from her mind the best she could. What she might have done didn’t matter. She’d been too scared to try until it was too late.

  She resolved never to let her fear prevent her from trying again. In trying, she might still have failed, but not to try was certain failure. She’d been a coward and, because of that, her life became a living nightmare. Because of her failure to act, the lives of the little ones had become a nightmare—if they lived at all—and she didn’t know if they’d even survived the raid. She knew Sir hadn’t. She’d seen the raider king cut him down.

  She’d cried most of that first day because she was afraid for herself and she was afraid for the little ones. She’d had only a dim idea of what the raiders wanted her for but that was enough to terrify her. She just hadn’t known what it was that Sir and her mother had done that made babies—exactly.

  Once she discovered that she wondered why it was that her mother didn’t scream when her father did that to her—because she had, and she’d fought him, and it hadn’t made any difference at all. Except that he’d slapped her hard enough to make her ears ring and told her to shut up before he knocked her teeth down her throat.

  After a while, it didn’t hurt, but she still hated it and lived in dread of the next time. He stank and his breath stank worse and she felt nasty when he finished and rolled off of her. All she could think was how badly she wanted to wash his smell and that slimy, disgusting stuff off, but there was no water for that. There was barely enough for drinking.

  Eventually, they’d arrived at the village the raider king called his own. Eventually, she’d grown accustomed—as used to it as she could—and ceased to be afraid all of the time. She hadn’t seen any of the little ones, but then King Ralph kept her locked in one little room for a very long time and even after he’d decided she was too afraid to run away, he never let her go far. So she comforted herself with the thought that the little ones were there, too, somewhere. Their lives might be as hellish as hers was, but at least they weren’t dead, and they hadn’t been abandoned to starve.

  She’d lived in that village as the king’s woman for several years. In that time, she’d had three miscarriages but no living babies. She’d always believed it was because Ralph had the habit of knocking her around any time he was in a foul mood—which he was fairly often—but he didn’t seem to think so. He said there was something wrong with her female parts and she wasn’t a fit breeder and he was going to trade her off as soon as he found a replacement that appealed to him.

  Or maybe just pass her to his first officer.

  Who was worse than Ralph.

  One day, when he was feeling particularly nasty, he’d told her he was sorry he hadn’t kept her little sister instead of trading her off. She’d been too young to breed, though, and of course the boys were useless. She supposed he thought that would worry her more, the fact that he’d begun to think of her as useless, but it had freed her. Right up until then, she hadn’t considered escaping him because she’d convinced herself that the little ones were in the village, as well, and she couldn’t consider leaving them. She knew what he meant by useless, though. Useless was dead. The little brothers were dead and the little sister was gone, traded off so long ago that she had no hope of finding her again. So she’d waited until the opportunity arose, when Ralph took his men off on a raid on another village, and she’d sneaked off and she’d been running ever since.

  Her first impulse had been to head for home. She’d been in sight of the farm she’d grown up on when it dawned on her that there was nothing there for her anymore. Sir was gone and everyone in the world that mattered to her—the little ones—were gone, too. Worse, her memories of them weren’t. They were tied to the farm. She realized then that she couldn’t bear to stay there even a moment.

  That had been … years ago. She knew a number of years had passed since that time because every season had its own brand of misery and many, many seasons had passed. She just wasn’t sure how many—enough to soothe the pain to a dull ache and no more.

  She thought that it had taken her nearly a year to get to the point where she was managing to take care of herself fairly well. She’d thought, at first, that she was going to die. For a while, she almost hoped for it because she was so tired of being hungry and thirsty all the time, so tired of just being exhausted, and dirty, and cold or so hot she felt like she would pass out.

  She was so tired of torturing herself with the memories of her failure to protect the little ones when that was her job ….

  There were a few times when she’d considered just sitting down and waiting to die.

  There’d even been times when she’d considered going back. As hellish as life had been with Ralph at least she hadn’t been hungry … much, or thirsty. She’d had fire and covers to help keep her warm when it was cold. She hadn’t had to trudge through snow or walk through a burning desert wasteland in the heat.

  But then she remembered what it had been like sharing a bed with Ralph and she thought she could endure just about anything but that.

  Death would be preferable to living with a man like him.

  Struggling to throw off the painful memories, Lexa stopped, trying to get her bearings. It took an effort to shake the ghosts from her mind enough to focus on her present circumstances. It wasn’t often, anymore, that she allowed the past to get a grip on her, but being tired always made her more vulnerable to the memories and she was so tired she was staggering. Huffing for breath, she took out a bottle, got another drink of water, and stood staring at the night sky trying to decide whether she was still heading the right way or not and if she’d put enough distance between herself and that demon from hell.

  She couldn’t decide whether she had or not, but she finally decided that she was too tired to care at the moment. She would just rest for a little bit and then she’d get up and keep moving until she’d put that threat behind her as she’d put Ralph behind her.

  She was tempted to simply drop where she stood, but she needed shelter of some kind. After surveying her surroundings she finally spied a shadowy lump she thought was a scraggly bush of some kind and trudged toward it. When she neared it, she squinted her eyes and stared at it hard, trying to decide if anything else had decided to take shelter beneath it and finally looked around for a few rocks—just in case.

  Nothing fled when she threw the rocks so she dropped to her knees and crawled under it. There was a light dusting of decaying leaves beneath it from seasons past, so she scooped them up into a tight pile, to help insulate her from the cold ground, took the ragged blanket she carried in her pack out and covered herself the best she could. It was thin and far too short, but when she’d curled into a tight ball, it mostly covered her from her shoulders to her feet and she began to feel a little warmer as she dropped to sleep like a rock.

  Troublesome images flickered through her mind, fragments of nightmarish dreams and memories. Her mind kept switching back and forth from the raid of her childhood to the battle in the streets of the village until the two became hopelessly entangled and it was the dark angel who called himself Gabriel who fought the raiders instead o
f Sir—Gabriel who carried her away and Ralph who died because half of his head had been blasted away.

  Something nudged her, bringing her so rapidly from a deep sleep that her eyeballs burned when her eyelids flew open. Her eyes filled with tears, making it even harder to bring whatever it was into focus.

  “Get up.”

  Lexa sat up with a jolt, realizing abruptly that it was the udai. He was standing over her, blocking the weak light from the rising moon.

  Slamming her fist down on the toe of the boot he’d nudged her with hard enough to make her hand go numb, she scrambled away from him and got to her feet. Any hope that she’d incapacitated him, at all, was almost immediately dashed. An arm came around her waist that felt like an iron band and knocked the wind from her.

  Struggling to catch her breath, unable to choose a target, she began flailing her arms in every direction and, when he jerked her off her feet, her legs. She managed to connect with his body several times. She knew it by the pain that shot through her hands and shins and feet.