The Travels of Scout Shannon Books 1-3

Chapter 4

4

The town of Flat Valley was much farther north than Scout had ever been. As the rover rolled on, the hills around her grew ever taller. She could even see the dark smudge of mountains on the horizon. The rover crested the top of a sprawling ridge that extended out from the hills to the east, slowly fading down to the level of the prairie to the west. Far to the north was another similar ridge, the two like the arms of a prostrate worshiper spread as far as they could reach into the prairie, fingers splayed wide into its red-gold grasses. Between the arms was bare mud and rock dotted with sparse scrub, the typical ground covering in the hill country. She could almost smell it, the sharp sage-like aroma the scrub gave off when stepped on.

And in the center of that scrubby plain was the town, even smaller than Prairie Springs. It had no metal wall, nothing to catch and reflect back the sunlight. From this distance it looked like nothing more than a strange rock formation standing far apart from the rest of the hills. But the rover map was labeling it Flat Valley.

Once the rover was down the ridge and back on level ground, Scout got up to stretch her back and then went down the steps to check on the dogs.

Shadow raised his head from where he had curled up at the bottom of the stairs, tail wagging somewhat uncertainly. Scout bent to give him a pat on the head and a little scratch behind the ears.

Gert was sprawled across the center of the floor and stirred not at all.

Scout’s eyes fell on the pistol lying on the table in the dining nook. Her stomach clenched, and she felt like she had eaten mud and it was hardening in her belly.

She had threatened a bunch of kids. She had never intended to shoot them, but then she hadn’t intended to draw the weapon either. Who was she now that she had so little control over her impulses?

She was prepared to live with the nightmares from what happened those four days underground, for the rest of her life if she had to, but she vowed she wasn’t going to let that fear change her.

Neither was she going to become like those assassin girls who had killed most of the others during those long four days. Once they had been the same as her, perhaps, but then they had changed. They had gone to living beyond fear, beyond any feeling, willing to do anything at all. That couldn’t be her either.

She remembered Gertrude: always calm, always in charge. She had to find a way to become like that. Even when she was afraid for her life.

Scout left the pistol on the table and went back into the rover’s cockpit, all too aware of the different weight to the belt now that the holster at the small of her back was empty.

She could see the town more clearly now. Unlike other towns, the buildings here had never been parts of containers dropped from space. They were made from blocks of stone stacked into walls that were a bit on the short side. Slabs of plastic molded to look like wood were stacked to form the roofs of the buildings. Scout had seen plastic like that used for tabletops. It was pretty durable for that use. Never having seen actual wood, she had no idea how convincing the illusion was, but such tables were common in the cities.

But she had never seen those tabletops used for roofing. It might keep out the glare of the daylight sun or the occasional sprinkling of rain, but it had to be useless against an ejection storm. What did these people do when the alarms went off?

Scout’s hand on the seat back trembled as a horrible image floated up in her mind. The whole town dead, nothing in those buildings but radiation-burned bodies huddled together.

But that wasn’t possible. Someone had answered Ruby’s call. They had seen the man she was looking for. They must have a safe place to wait out the storms.

The rover rolled to a halt a respectable distance away from the buildings and Scout dropped back down to the rover’s main floor. The dogs both looked up at her this time.

“Come on, dogs,” she said as she pushed the button to open the door. Even that little gesture made her breath hitch with sudden pain. “We’re sticking together this time.”

There couldn’t be more than twenty or so inhabitants here, not enough of a population to support any street kids, but Scout wasn’t taking any chances. Shadow jumped up and down, ecstatic to be going out with her. Gert yawned sleepily but her tail was wagging too.

The dogs ran off into the scrub the minute they were outside. Scout stayed by the rover, waiting for the door to seal shut again before stepping away.

The dogs came running back to her when she whistled with tails wagging, bodies crouching and bouncing, trying to entice her to join them in the scrubby grass to hunt for smells or the occasional small animal. But when she turned to walk into town, they quickly fell into step beside her.

The town consisted of four smaller buildings skirting a larger central one. That had to be the public house. She could see no signs of people anywhere, but the doors to the four smaller structures, also of plastic molded to look like wood, were all shut. The public house had larger double doors, the plastic slabs flat against the sides of the stone walls like shutters thrown wide open to let in the wind and the sun.

Scout stopped in the doorway to let her eyes adjust to the light inside. The roof was even less adequate as shelter than she had supposed, little shards of sunlight penetrating between slabs in scores of places, covering the dirt floor with golden circles like coins of light. The floor was otherwise bare, but tables and chairs were stacked on the wall to Scout’s left as if someone was planning to host a dance.

“Stranger,” a woman’s voice said out of the darkness in the far end of the room. It was easily the oddest greeting Scout had ever heard.

“Yes,” Scout admitted. “I’ve come from Prairie Valley. I’m looking for someone.”

“Ruby sent you,” the voice said.

“She did,” Scout said. She took another step inside the building but still couldn’t spot the speaker.

“Your dogs are welcome here,” the woman said.

Scout looked back at Shadow and Gert. They were both standing at the threshold as if waiting for permission to enter. That was somewhat odd from Shadow, who occasionally waited for guidance from Scout but rarely obeyed others. It was very odd from Gert.

“Come, dogs,” Scout said, and the two charged past her. Gert immediately disappeared in the gloom on the far side of the room, but Shadow’s white coat glowed all ghostly. He jumped up, putting his paws on something.

Scout squinted until at last her eyes could pick out the form of an older woman, stooped with sparse wisps of white hair floating around her sun-darkened scalp. Scout stepped closer. The woman looked anything but frail; the hands offering some sort of treat to each dog may have been gnarled with age but the arms were still all hard muscle.

“I was looking for someone,” Scout said.

“I’ve seen him,” the woman said. “Not lately, not with the storm. He didn’t shelter with us, but then he generally keeps to himself.”

“Where do you shelter?” Scout asked.

“You’re standing on it,” she said. Scout looked down to see a hatch under her feet. More molded plastic, already half-covered with dirt from the floor, although the townspeople would have just come up out of there this morning.

“This plastic is enough protection?” Scout asked.

“That’s just the drop down to the cave mouth,” the woman said. Gert was pawing her, and she bent down to give the dog another treat and rub around her ears. She spoke to the dog in a singsong: “We go ever so much deeper than that, don’t we, darling? To a cavern so large it has its own lake. A whole other world just a kilometer under your four paws. I bet you’d like it down there, wouldn’t you, darling? Play fetch in the lake, chase cave rodents. Wouldn’t you?”

Scout looked down but of course saw nothing but the toes of her own dusty boots. A natural cavern with an underground lake? That she would love to see. A shame she was on a job. And after that she would be leaving this world forever.

“Do you know where I can find him? Or start looking for him, anyway?” Scout asked.

The hard edge returned to the woman’s tone now that she was talking to Scout and not the dogs. “If you step outside and look to the east, you’ll see a hill that’s lighter in color than the others. Head that way. That’s where he walks in from.”

“So he could be anywhere in that direction?” Scout asked. She tried to keep the whiny undertone out of her voice—she hated herself whenever she heard it—but there was no hiding that she was disappointed. This was going to be much harder than she thought. And she only had three days.

“If there’s one thing we like less than strangers in these parts it’s strangers snooping into other people’s business,” the woman said sharply. “I’m telling you this much because Ruby tells me it’s important.”

“It is,” Scout said. “Thank you.”

She started to turn to the door but then turned back as a dark thought stabbed into her brain.

“He’s not from here,” she said. “Like really not from here.”

“Not my business,” the woman said. Her voice was still unfriendly but she smiled down at the dogs. Scout was glad she had brought them with. She hadn’t wanted to leave them alone, but now they were clearly also helping her keep this woman talking when otherwise she likely would have stalked away minutes ago.

“Has he been here long enough to know to take shelter from a coronal mass ejection?” Scout asked.

“If he has any sense he knows that,” the woman snapped. “I don’t go mothering others for free.”

Scout nodded and said no more. She wondered what the odds were that her mission was going to end with her standing over a radiation-burned body after all. “Thanks for the help,” she said, then whistled for the dogs. She was half afraid they would ignore her, preferring the company of the treat-dispensing woman, but they both ran to join her as she stepped back out into the stiflingly hot day.

She had to drive the rover manually now, having no destination to program into the navigation system. But she could lock down the steering and speed controls long enough to stand up and get a brief look around now and again.

The rover’s narrow window defined the horizon, framing the hills before her in a panorama. She half expected to see one hill shining brighter than the others based on that woman’s description. At first glance they all looked alike, blending into each other in the glare from the afternoon sun.

Then, as the rover continued rolling across the flat plain, she began to see differences. The farthest hills were bare rock with a blasted and twisted look, as if they had once been mountains before becoming victims of some indescribable violence. The middle-range hills were more of what she was used to: red clay with sparse grasses and shrubs of sage green.

But one hill closer to her than all the others was gray. It seemed a featureless gray at first, as if by some optical illusion it appeared closer than it really was, smudged by the distance like the mountains to the north. After nearly an hour of rolling over the sunbaked earth of the plain she started to see a bit of texture. Another hour and she was certain that this hill, unlike all the others, was covered in gravel. Or was entirely made of gravel. An enormous mound of gravel left out here in the middle of nowhere. But who would do such a thing, and why?

The baked earth here was as smooth as the streets in the domed cities. It was almost as if they were gliding in a hover car. But she knew the rover treads were not as silent as a hover car. She had to find this man’s hideout, to have eyes on it before they drew near to it. Otherwise when he heard them coming he could flee and she’d never know what direction he had fled to.

At last she saw something: a low hut built entirely from slabs of the plastic molded to look like wood. Where had all the plastic slabs in this region come from? This hut was even smaller than the stone structures in Flat Valley. It was more the size of a child’s fort. If a man lived in there, he never got off his knees unless he went outside.

There was no sign of motion. The ridges were taller and closer together here, the sound of the rover’s motor echoing back and forth between the two rock faces.

Either she had missed seeing him flee, or he hadn’t been here in the first place.

Or he was still inside.

Scout parked the rover outside the hut, then clambered down the stairs.

She looked again at the pistol on the table. She felt like it was looking back at her, judging her, taunting her. In the end, she snatched it up. Too many people had told her to be careful. Leaving it behind when she might need it would be very foolish, perhaps fatally so.

Reaching behind her to slip it back in its holster sent another stab of pain through her chest. She was unlikely to forget the events of that morning, even if she found herself in danger again, not with that pain always ready to remind her.

Scout hopped outside and the dogs jumped down after her. She expected them to run off into the sparse grass again, but they stayed close at her sides. Shadow was sniffing the air, the hair on his back bristling tensely, and Gert kept swinging her head from side to side as if searching for something.

Scout stepped up to the hut’s open doorway. It faced the sunset, and she stood just to one side to let the sun light the interior. She squinted as details became apparent to her eyes. The floor of the hut was a meter down from the doorway, dug down into the packed earth with no steps to reach it. She could only make out the bare ground just below the doorway. Scout squatted, still keeping to one side of the door so as not to block the sun, and pushed her hat off her head to lean around the doorframe and peer inside.

She jumped at the sight of a man inside, staring back up at her as he lay sprawled across the floor.

“Damn,” Scout said. “Too late.” For he was quite dead.

The dogs sniffed at the doorway but had no interest in going inside. They went around to the back of the hut, snuffling at the ground and occasionally catching each other’s attention so they could both sniff at the same fascinating scent.

Scout jumped down to the floor of the hut, never taking her eyes off the man. He remained motionless, definitely dead, but not from the storm. In fact, she would guess he had died after the storm, the blood around the bullet wound in his chest just starting to dry and turn brown at the edges.

Someone had beaten her to her prey. But who? He was a stranger on this world, and while she had no doubt he had many enemies all across the galaxy, none of them knew he was here. So who had shot him, and why?

“Did you know him?”

Scout spun at the words—from a boy speaking in a conversational tone—and realized belatedly that once more the pistol had found its way into her hand.