Donovan O'Niel's Arc

Chapter 8 of 11

At first light they rolled out in the patrol truck. Donovan had the trader's map open on his knee, the tower's route inked clear. Kira drove. Logan rode shotgun, watching the open ground with a salvager's eye. The relay still ran on its fixed schedule. Donovan meant to reach its source and turn a two-hundred-year-old tower into the backbone of his network. They never made the tower. Static broke over the dash radio, then a voice. A trader, shaking, reading off a battered emergency set. Raiders had hit a caravan bound for Ranger Camp. Wounded down. He called out the attack site in short, panic-cut words. Kira didn't ask. She wrenched the wheel toward the coordinates. "Look," she said, flat. "The tower's stood two centuries. It holds one more hour. Those traders don't." Donovan folded the map into his case and brought his rifle up. Mary Long braced in the back seat, her medical folder clamped to her chest. She was the field hospital's head nurse, riding along to study the tower route for future supply runs. Now she checked her bag by feel, counting stimpaks without looking. "Tell me how many down the second we're close," she said. No fear in it. Just the next task. The truck crested a rise. Below, three overturned carts smoked. Ghouls moved among them, not wild, not scattered. They worked in a line, cutting off the survivors who crouched behind a wheel. Military fatigues hung off their gray hides. These ghouls kept formation. "Same kind that hit my supply road," Kira said, braking hard. "They don't break. You have to put them down." Donovan fired from the truck bed. One ghoul dropped. The others turned as a unit and charged. Logan took the left flank, calm, spacing his shots. "Three left," he called. "They flank when you reload. So don't." Donovan didn't. He kept the trigger steady and dropped a second. Kira's pistol cracked twice beside him. The last ghoul reached the carts before Logan's shot folded it. Then quiet, but for the fire and a trader's groan. Mary was already out and moving. She knelt by the worst-hurt man, pressed a stimpak to his thigh, and worked without pause. Two more she stabilized in minutes. The survivors watched her like she'd dropped from the sky. While she worked, the lead trader talked. He'd run the roads near the tower for years. He drew Donovan a sketch in the dirt: tower used to on a major but after years of changing hands The Atomic Cats Traders have for 20 years or so, owned and control the tower and defended by putting a Atomic Cats base around it. Reaching it had just become possible because Ruby and Marcus the leaders of the Atomic are on very good terms with the Rangers. Team makes camp ready to move the Tower in the morning.