Trin

Chapter 2

Trin

By J.M. Snyder

The run-gunners roll into the outposts like the very devlars themselves. Wild men, guns blazing in the setting sun, raising a crowd of cheering spectators in the dust that trails them from the wasteland. Trin is in the garage, resting on a stack of balding tires and fanning himself with an oily rag, when the earth rumbles beneath his feet from the growl of their engines. As he stands, his stomach clenches like a fist. Behind him a door opens and slaps shut, a languid sound in the heat of the evening.

“Gunners,” Aissa says, coming up beside him.

“I know.” Trin doesn’t want to think about the men—he’s hot enough already. Running a hand through his sweaty hair to push it from his face, he watches Aissa cross to the open bay doors. When she leans out of the shadows to peer down the road, the last rays of sunlight set her long red curls aflame. Trin wants to call to her, tell her to come back, but what’s the use?

Whether or not they see her, the gunners are headed this way. They’ll dump their trucks at the garage before they head for Blain’s waystation in search of a hot meal, a cold drink, and a soft pallet to bed down in for the night. Blain is Trin’s brother, older by twenty odd years. He was a gunner, too, until devlars got their parents on a run between outposts. Trin was eight at the time and doesn’t remember his mother. In his memories, his father and Blain are the same man. Blain gave up the life and settled down in Arens with the waystation, garage, and a little brother his only inheritance.

Aissa tucks a strand of hair behind her ear and laughs. “Gerrick’s with them,” she tells Trin. Turning, she gives him a wink and suggests, “Maybe finally—”

Trin’s face heats up at her tone. “Stop it,” he mutters. He has a thing for the gunners—strong, brave men who tear through the wasteland, defending the runs against the creatures out there, preybirds and devlars. Gunners travel in packs, like wolves, two or three run-gun trucks barreling down the empty stretches of land that link the outposts together, kicking up hot, blasted sand in their wake.

A couple times a month they come through Arens. Trin’s only seen Gerrick once before but he’s heard the talk and he’s in love with the man. He asks every gunner about him—Blain’s grown tired of his questions and doesn’t even answer anymore. “I’ve told you already,” he’ll say, mulling over the accounts. He isn’t a businessman and it takes him most of the month to keep the books balanced. “I haven’t seen him in years, Trin. I rode with him once to Oriel, once, and that was it.”

“But he likes boys,” Trin will prompt. That excites him, the thought that he might catch Gerrick’s eye if the gunner ever does chance through Arens. “You said…”

Blain will nod, weary. “He likes them, yes. Now get. You see I’m busy here.”

And now here he comes. Trin smoothes back his hair again and feels the grease in it. Maybe Aissa is wrong. Maybe Gerrick isn’t with the gunners. Can he clean up before they get here? All this time talking him up, he thinks. He hates the smirk on Aissa’s face. Let him keep going, please. Let him just pass right by. Here’s his chance and suddenly he doesn’t want it.

What if Gerrick doesn’t notice him?

What if he doesn’t care?

Down the street, engines roar like caged beasts. Aissa shoves her hands deep into the pockets of her overalls and rocks back on her heels. “The trump owner told you he was headed this way.”

“Yeah,” Trin concedes, “but I didn’t think he was serious.” The old man runs a store at the palisade selling face powders and dehydrated food. What the hell’s he know about the gunners? He was just talking s**t to get Trin worked up. “Aissa, are you sure it’s him?”

“It’s his mark,” she says. She has to shout over the sounds now, engines growling, cheers from the crowd, gunfire like caps popping in the heat. “On the side of the truck, Trin. I’d know it anywhere, you talk about it often enough.”

Gerrick then. Here. Here.

* * * *

Aissa is two years younger than Trin and sweet Jesus, twice as mean. She told him once that’s all she has: her hair, her t**s, and her attitude, but in this world, that’s a lot. She’s not pretty and she knows it, which is one thing he likes about her—there’s a strawberry-colored birthmark blotched across her forehead that darkens in the sun, and she has a scar above her lip that she claims is from fending off a devlar attack.

Trin knows better. He’s known her since she was six years old—they met right after his parents died. He was sitting on a hitching post outside the waystation, waiting for Blain to arrive, not really feeling much of anything as he watched a scrappy slip of a girl across the street kicking stones. Every now and then he’d turn and stare down the dusty road, but his brother wasn’t in sight. Each time he looked back, the girl was closer, and she had a catty way of looking at him from the corner of her eye that unnerved him.

The next time he glanced down the road, she ran over to the hitching post and pushed him, both hands flat against the small of his back, right the hell off. No reason. Scuffed his knees and hands in the stones she’d been kicking. She got the scar when he pegged a rock at her and it split her lip. He’d never seen so much blood in his life. “It’s alright,” he told her, trying to dab at the cut with the hem of his shirt. The fabric was dusty from where he landed in the dirt, and every time he tried to touch her, she wailed. Her jagged crying was like a saw cutting through his thoughts. “Shh,” he said. The corner of his shirt found her face and she screamed in pain. “Shh, girl. Stop crying, will you? Just stop bleeding already.”

She punched him hard in the nuts and he yanked her hair, and they probably would’ve kept it up if Blain hadn’t stepped in at that moment. Trin hadn’t even heard him ride up. “She started it,” he muttered.

“She’s a girl,” Blain explained. He had a deep voice that scared Trin and hands that seemed too big to be real. When he knelt down beside Aissa, it seemed to take years for his knees to touch the ground. With large, saucer-like eyes Aissa watched those hands. Once or twice she hitched her breath but the tears were gone, the cries, the screams. Trin thought maybe even the cut stopped bleeding once Blain arrived.

Ten years later, she had that same wide-eyed look when Trin ran into her in the hall above the waystation common room. It was late and she should’ve been asleep, they both should’ve, but a gunner had promised to tell Trin about Gerrick’s latest exploit if he’d touch the man and Trin was already half hard with anticipation when he bumped into Aissa. She wore a thin robe and nothing else—Trin could see the dark silhouette of her curves through the material. “Where…”

She pulled the robe closed at her throat and threw her hair back, defiant. The birthmark on her forehead looked like a burn against her pale skin. “Blain,” she said simply. “If he’ll have me. Good night.”

With that, she brushed past him. Always getting what she wants, that’s another thing Trin likes about her. She simply told his brother look, this is the way it is, and in the face of that, what could Blain do?

“You should give it a go, Trini,” she’s said. “You think Gerrick doesn’t knows you like him? The others have to talk about it. Be like, ‘there’s this kid in Arens who’s all about you, don’t you know?’ Mention your name and he’ll follow you around like a lost pup. When he comes through here—and he will, I know it—when he does, just tell him hey. It doesn’t even have to be love, you know? Wake up beside me in the morning, think about me on the run, come back here when you can. What more could you possibly hope to want?”

* * * *

The run-gun trucks tear through the open bays and crouch in the middle of the garage, idling. There are two vehicles, five men between them. Devlar hides are strung across the grilles, the beasts’ wings hang like prizes from the antennas, and caked mud eats into the rust and paint, but Trin can see Gerrick’s mark well enough. Aissa’s right, he’s finally here.

When the men file out of the trucks, Trin sees him immediately. There’s more grey in the blond hair and deeper lines around the grey-green eyes, but it’s him, it’s Gerrick, Trin would know him anywhere.

Once, years ago, Blain took Trin out to Konstas with him to trade for parts and on the run home, their engine died. Sort of ironic, Trin thought at the time, lying on the hood of Blain’s old jalopy and staring up into the nuclear sky while his brother swore at the truck. A bed full of burned out motors and none of them worked. If it weren’t for the heat baking his skin and the dust clogging his nose, he might have even laughed.

In the drowsy sun, Trin didn’t hear the devlars until they were swarming over the back of the truck. “Trin!” Blain cried. His brother gave him a shove that sent him sliding off the hood and into the dust, and before he could stand Blain grabbed the back of his shirt and hauled him to his feet.

Dark shadows flittered over the ground from preybirds circling above, sensing a kill. He got one good look at the devlars—claws and teeth and hateful eyes like drops of black blood—and then his brother foisted him into the cab of the truck, slammed the door shut behind him. Inside the heat was stifling, and Trin could hear the insidious sound of dry wings rubbing together, teeth squealing off metal, his brother’s gun firing laborious rounds into the horde.

What about when the pillshot ran out? What about when they overtook Blain and Trin was trapped inside?

He tried to peer through the windows but they were thick with dust. His heart hammered in his chest—three seconds ago, he was almost asleep. He couldn’t seem to comprehend that this wasn’t part of a sun-induced dream.

The ground rumbled like thunder and Trin wiped at the windshield, desperate to see. From out of the swirling sand rode two large run-gun trucks, one gunner on each roof, another leaning out the passenger side windows, flames licking from their guns. The driver of the closest truck held it on the run with one hand and aimed into the devlars with the gun in his other. Trin saw the driver’s hand steady on the steering wheel, felt the pellets from his gun strike the truck, each shot carefully aimed.

Later, after the devlars were dead and the men gone as quickly as they had appeared, he asked Blain who they were. “Gunners,” his brother replied. The look he gave Trin suggested that he thought the sun had melted part of his brother’s brain.

“I know that,” Trin said. He remembered the driver’s smoky eyes, the blonde mustache above lips pulled back in a grimace, each shot fired true. Not one astray, not one. “But who are they?” he persisted. “Did you know them when you gunned?”

At Blain’s nod, Trin wanted to know, “The tall one, the driver? Who’s he?”

Blain laughed. “How do you know he’s tall? He stayed in the cab.”

It was no matter to Trin, tall or not. He had to know. Those hands, those eyes. “Who is he?”

“Gerrick,” Blain told him.

Gerrick.

* * * *

The evening sun slants into the garage, casting the chrome and steel in a golden glow. As Gerrick hefts a travel pack from the bed of his truck, he laughs at something one of the other gunners says. The crowd that followed the men through the outposts now jostles around the bay doors but Aissa won’t let them into the garage. They stand at the shadow’s edge and call out to the gunners, laugh, shriek, cry, anything to get the men’s attentions.

Each time someone shouts Gerrick’s name, Trin feels a tiny jolt in his chest that sends his blood racing. He wants to be lost in the people, obscured by anonymity, free to scream out for the gunner, too. Aissa’s voice rings through his mind, Don’t you think he knows? Trin doesn’t dare dwell on that.