Hunting Upstream

This story immediately follows Lockets Full of Instructions.

Robin keeps fiddling with that heart shaped locket that Doc gave her. She hasn't said much since we left town. I'm never gonna get used to calling it that. Towns seem like such a foreign concept now. I remember towns, and what's left out there ain't them. But we have one. Doc made that place a home, and we made it a town, and now we have to go to war for it. This better be the shortest war in the history of the God damn planet. I'm sick of this Mad Max bullshit.

San Antonio was still kind of nice when I got the Hell out of there. Parts of it were, at least. They weren't safe, but they looked nice. People tried to keep their little communities tidy, organized. I don't know it they did. Mine started to fill up with good ol' boys and yahoos, so I packed up the rest of my guns and got out. None of 'em bothered trying to stop me, probably cause I looked like them. Maybe because they saw me packing the same heat as them and carrying it correctly. There's no way half of 'em ever saw combat, but they loved pretending they were ready for it. I wasn't gonna stick around to see how that went.

Still saw plenty of it on the road. Try as I might, the highways have to go through somewhere, and a lot of what used to be little towns turned into settlements for dumb fuck neo nazis who wanted to have someone else's cake and eat it too. I don't know how many of 'em I killed. I don't know how many people I killed were them. I know how many rounds I fired, though. Gotta keep track of your resources extra judiciously like that now.

The trek upstream is only going to take us half a day before it's time to break up. I wish one of the girls was staying with me. I get it, though. We all have a job to do, and the way this plan breaks down none of us get to do them together. It's all the same job in the end. Save the town by killing the bad guys. I know D.G. doesn't want to think about it, and that Robin and Summer think maybe we can do this another way. Auburn gets it, though. I get it, too. We're going to kill those sons of bitches, and there ain't no two ways about it.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's one of those gangs of dumb fucks that thinks the real dumb thing they did was real clever. I'll hand it to 'em, they got us pretty good with poisoning the river. There's no way they did that without keeping an eye on us for a while now, though, and that means they've been watching us work. Watching us live. They haven't seen us fight yet. We don't fight in our town.

D.G. figured out pretty quick that they only way they could be hitting us this bad without their own pipeline was from one of the old treatment plants just off the river, so they aren't far from there. Summer had asked if they could have built a pipeline like we built what little infrastructure our town has. These dumb fucks ain't that smart. I'd say they thought this would kill us off before we figured out what was happening, or make us weak enough to come in and clean house without a fight. Dumb fucks. All of 'em. Now they've just got us hunting upstream. I hope they're not young.

"Break up point is pretty close. Y'all wanna get anything out before then?" Auburn's voice is firm, but unsteady. She ain't ready. She'll do the job anyways, though.

"Gear already got double checked. You both know the way. We can shoot the shit when it's done." My voice isn't steady, either. I'm ready, though.

"Robin? You need to say something, hun?" Auburn asks. Her voice is less firm this time.

"Nah. No," Robin barely croaks out. She just needs a second to breath and clear her throat.

"Robin?" Auburn asks again. She's worried now.

"No," Robin replies. There it is. There's the hunter.

"Now," I say, "We split up now."

"You sure?" Auburn asks me. Her voice is firm again.

"Yeah," I tell her, looking towards Robin. "We split up now."

She's still fiddling with that locket. I hope she thinks it means something more than what it is. They all need something to believe in beyond the town. I don't know who all has a god they still pray to, but I know Robin ain't one of 'em. She looks me in the eye. We all look each other in the eye before we part ways. None of us are ready. Not really.

A few hours after splitting off I've made my spot. The lights from the treatment plant are almost all on, and I can see 'em clear as day from a half mile out. Assuming nobody changed the settings before they got the power back up and running, those lights are gonna go back off just after dawn, and dawn is real dark this time of year. Dumb fucks. All of 'em.

This series is continued in Summer on the Horizon.

Thanks for checking out this story, and if you haven't already, the first part of this series entitled 'Lockets Full of Instructions' is also available right here on Vocal. Hit the heart button at the bottom of this article to let me know you liked it, or the one next to it to buy me a coffee. You can even click both of them. No one will stop you! You can also find me writing about comic books on CBR.com, as well as posting infrequently to never on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.