Complex Three (The Savage Horde Series Book 3) Read online

  Complex Three

  CHRIS BOSTIC

  First printing, February 2017

  Copyright © 2017, Chris Bostic

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 1542910188

  ISBN-13: 978-1542910187

  Cover Design by Chris Bostic

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  DEDICATION

  For devotees of dystopian and post-apocalyptic

  fiction, especially my Facebook friends from the group

  Band of Dystopian Authors and Fans

  CHAPTER 1

  “Dang, we haven’t heard that in far too long,” Joe said. He squeezed Leisa’s hand.

  She looked at him curiously. “Seagulls?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure beats chickens.” Remembering how she had raised poultry on her farm back home, he quickly added, “No offense.”

  “I’ll never look at them the same way.” She squinted into the fading sunlight as they sat in the eastern foothills of the mountains surrounding the prison camp not-so-affectionately named Old Stony Lonesome. It had been a couple long days of frantic hiking, putting them clear on the other side of the mountain range. A good twenty-five miles that still didn’t seem far enough from the scene of devastation and unbridled brutality.

  “Flying rats,” muttered their grizzly sergeant, Constantine “Connie” Braddock as he watched the seagulls soar. “Not much better than pigeons…and we’ll see a bunch of those if we ever make it to the city.”

  “Ah, good ole Pasun. A hellhole like no other.” Joe reflexively gripped his coilgun tightly, and tried to blink away a building frown.

  “What are you guys talking about?” Jade chirped. “I thought the capitol was a place of unmatched beauty. All the ancient architecture. The seat of power for the Republic.”

  “Didn’t get out of your big house much, did ya?” Connie asked her.

  “Not really,” she said softly. “But I know all about Pasun.”

  “No doubt there’s a roadmap in that pretty little head of yours,” Connie said with a smile. “I really hope that’ll come in handy, but I have a feeling it doesn’t quite look the way you’re expecting. There hasn’t been a beautiful thing there since you left.”

  Joe groaned at his sergeant’s unabashed flirting. The guy hadn’t stopped flattering her, much less kept his hands to himself the entire afternoon.

  “Technically I didn’t live in the city,” Jade said. “My creator’s house is outside city limits, about three miles southwest on the-”

  “I know,” Connie interrupted, having figured out what Joe had learned days before. The only way to keep Jade from rambling on was to cut her off mid-sentence. “I was just paying you a compliment.”

  “That’s all he’s done,” Leisa whispered to Joe. “I almost miss the old Connie.”

  He laughed at the age reference seeing how Connie wasn’t even ten years older than the teens. “Yeah, the cranky old man who acts three times his age and doesn’t try to impress anyone.”

  “Especially a girl,” Leisa added.

  Joe nodded. “And a girl robot at that.”

  Jade’s head swiveled toward him with eyes narrowed.

  “Kidding,” he whispered, knowing that was all it took for her superhuman ears to pick up his voice.

  She nodded, and went back to trying to speak to Connie.

  He wasn’t having any of it, and shushed her so he could draw a map in the dirt. With a wave of his hand, he said, “Gather ‘round.”

  Joe quit watching the seagulls soar over a broad plateau like miniature eagles diving and circling on thermals, and slunk over with Leisa.

  “You guys have been doing alright, I guess, so we’re here…probably less than ten miles from the sea judging from all the birds. So maybe not too far from Pasun,” Connie explained, pointing beside a stone he’d deposited in the middle of the map. “We need to get across the open area after sundown, and see about continuing to work our way east.”

  “To my house,” Jade said. “You really are going to take me home. I can’t believe-”

  “Of course,” he interrupted, but looked to Leisa. “Sorry, kid. It’s gonna be a little while longer. Jade’s house is closest.”

  “And that makes me last,” Joe reasoned, seeing how his village was the farthest away at about forty miles east of Pasun.

  “It’s fine,” Leisa said, answering Connie.

  Joe wasn’t so sure that was the case, particularly seeing how the two girls hadn’t exactly gotten along splendidly upon first meeting in the prison camp. However, Leisa had been very understanding, and hadn’t seemed to harbor much anger or bitterness with Joe over the way he had bonded with Jade from the next cell over.

  He assumed Leisa had understood they’d had to work together to make it out of the prison alive. If there was any tension left between the girls, it was more the idea that having to go south to keep away from the savage onslaught at the camp had put them no closer to Leisa’s family on the outside of Pasun. Her brother was hopefully still running the farm up on the northern outskirts. They could only hope the oncoming savages weren’t closing on the city from the north as well.

  “We’ll get there as soon as we can,” Connie was saying as Joe tuned back in. “I promise. It’s just-”

  “I know.” She sighed, but met his expression with a firm look. “We’re obviously closest to Jade’s place, even if it looks like the stick is only a couple inches from the stone.”

  “Impressive. You never were good with a map,” Connie quipped.

  She stuck her tongue out at him. “Rocks make more sense than squiggles and dots.”

  Joe echoed the sentiment. Seeing how Pasun was the center of his pitiful universe and it was hard as a rock to crack, Connie’s imagery seemed extra fitting.

  “That settles it,” Connie said. “We roll out at nightfall, assuming…” He turned to Jade. “Any sounds we should be concerned about?”

  “Nothing, Sarge. I haven’t heard any shooting all day. No clucking either.”

  “Good.”

  The lack of shooting didn’t surprise Joe. He knew the savages rarely attacked in daylight. The bulbous-headed creatures were as bizarre looking as they acted, which did nothing to calm the constant buzzing of his nerves.

  While he’d outrun the savages several times, they kept coming. There seemed to be no way the Republic’s soldiers, the Regulators, could ever stop their advance. Though countless savages had watered the countryside with their blood, it seemed as if there were no end. Perhaps there wasn’t, like they were being cloned around the clock in a factory.

  “Sure wish we had some food,” Joe said as he watched the shadows of the mountains grow long over the endless plateau.

  “Nothing like escaping without any supplies,” Leisa added. “We’re in trouble.”

  “That’s true. Water’s getting to be an absolute necessity.” Connie looked to Jade. “How are you holding up, darling? Do you need anything?”

  “Not right away, Sarge. I can synthesize water from the humidity in the air, but it is awfully dry out here. It helps if I can find a clean source.”

  Joe had wished they could’ve bottled up the stream they’d crossed during their mountain trek away from the prison. But they carried nothing to store the crystal clear goodness for later. A short-lived slice of paradise, it had been the first time Joe had appreciated finding a mountain stream since the time he’d been trapped behind enemy lines.

  Having drunk their fill, there had been no time to relax. It had been far more important to put distance between themselve
s and the smoldering prison camp. So they’d soldiered on until they made it to the edge of the plateau by midafternoon. With nothing but a vacant expanse awaiting them, Connie had decided that it was time to finally rest. There was no point getting caught out in the open with nowhere to run.

  “Get a little sleep,” Connie said, stifling a yawn. He turned to Jade. “You can shut yourself down, or whatever it is you need to do.”

  “I don’t really need to sleep,” she replied. “I’ll stand guard.”

  Joe looked at her curiously.

  “I don’t have a power source that needs to be recharged,” she said. His eyes strayed to the sun, and she followed his gaze with a nod. “There’s a solar component, but that’s mostly a back-up system. I can pull energy from the world around me, not just the sun.”

  “You’re a heck of a woman,” Connie told her.

  Joe looked away to find Leisa pretending to gag herself.

  “It’s gonna be a long trip with those two,” she whispered.

  “It’s at least another eighteen miles to my house,” Jade interjected. “At our current rate of travel, we can be there…”

  Joe didn’t want to know. He scooted over next to a boulder, and leaned back underneath a bristly shrub. The dull gray-green matched his prison uniform well.

  Patting the ground for Leisa to join him, he said, “It’s nice and quiet back here.”

  She crawled over to him. “We’re not gonna have any privacy with little Miss Bionic Hearing around,” she whispered so softly that Joe could barely make out the words. It didn’t help that his ears were still ringing from the explosions and gunshots from a day-and-a-half earlier.

  “True story. Guess we’ll have to communicate another way.” He stirred a finger in the sandy soil and drew the shape of a heart.

  Leisa fought off a giggle. “Okay, Connie. What’s with you guys being all flirty?”

  “We’ve been locked up in prison.”

  “Yeah, next to Jade. Like that was torture to your eyes.”

  “Ears, maybe.”

  That elicited a quick chuckle. She drew another heart linking with his, and flashed a suggestive smile and a wink. “That was awful sweet. I figured you had other, uhm, things in mind, you know, by sneaking off over here to communicate.”

  “Do I ever, but I’m too dang tired to do more than fall over.”

  “I know. Me, too.” She leaned back against him, and they slid to the ground.

  Joe wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her close to him. In a matter of seconds, he slipped off to sleep.

  * * *

  “Wake up,” Connie grumbled.

  Joe rubbed at his crusty eyes, and found the shadow of the shrub had amplified to almost total darkness. “Whoa.”

  “Yeah, I let you two lovebirds sleep in longer than I should’ve. We need to get going.”

  “Yes, sir,” Joe said, shaking Leisa to rouse her.

  She joined the living a moment later, and together they stumbled back to the edge of the plateau.

  The moon was no more than a sliver in the cloudless night. A multitude of stars would have to provide enough illumination to lead them across the vast expanse, which glowed like a quiet lake in the starlight.

  “I don’t like this,” Joe whispered to Leisa as they took off after Connie and Jade.

  “No need to whisper. Besides, your girlfriend can hear them coming from miles away.” She squeezed his hand. “We’ll be fine.” Somehow the way Leisa said that seemed more tentative than confident, and Joe swallowed exaggeratedly.

  “I’ll never get used to the dark again,” he replied. “There’s nothing but bad memories.”

  “Yeah, more like nightmares,” Leisa volunteered. “I get them too.”

  Jade spun around. “I’ve always wondered what dreams are like,” she interjected. “It would be so cool to be able to actually imagine something purely fictional, like a make-believe world. Everything I get in my head is strictly the facts, or predictions. But it’s always something rational.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s a bad thing,” Joe said. “In an irrational world, I think it might be nice to see nothing but the truth.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” Connie replied. “The truth is a pretty ugly thing nowadays. It’ll have you feeling lower than whale crap on the bottom of the ocean. I’d much rather be lost in a fantasy world for a while.”

  “Seems strange coming from you,” Leisa said.

  “I’ve grown some.” He dropped Jade’s hand long enough to rub his belly. “And lost some too. That prison diet was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “And the labor…I mean workouts,” Joe added.

  “Oh, yeah. Nothing like digging, uhm…” He turned to Jade. “How many miles of trench, kid?”

  “Five miles-”

  “In three days. And you guys thought I was a drill sergeant.” Connie threw his head back and roared, “Now that’s how you toughen up your recruits!”

  “That’s not even funny,” Leisa said.

  Jade frowned. “I don’t see how electrocuting prisoners and working others until they pass out is-”

  “C’mon, I’m joking. When are you guys ever gonna figure that out?”

  Joe had struggled with that. Since he’d met his sergeant a couple months earlier, he’d assumed Connie was a cruel, bitter man. But the time when he had offered up his life so they could escape from the savages up in the northern hills had changed Joe’s perspective. A prison cell across the aisle from the big man had further served to build the profile of someone not as gruff as he liked to sound. But Joe still didn’t know much else about the man, at least not on a personal level.

  “So we’re going to Jade’s first, then Leisa’s,” Joe said. “How about you, Sarge?”

  “I’m just along for the ride.” He patted Jade on the butt, eliciting a giggle from her, though she probably didn’t pick up on the hidden sexual undercurrent in just about everything Connie said.

  “Be serious,” Joe chided. “We all get to find our families. What about you?”

  “Yeah, Sarge.” Jade fluttered her strikingly blue eyes. “I think we all want to know.”

  “Family is overrated.” The big man caught a reproachful look from Jade and softened his tone. “Well, it’s true. Who needs ‘em?”

  Leisa huffed and squeezed Joe’s hand so tightly his knuckles rubbed together uncomfortably. “Thanks for belittling my whole purpose in life,” she muttered.

  “Seriously, people. I’m joking. I just said that.”

  “Sorry if it takes me a while to figure that out,” Leisa snapped. “It’s not like you were ever some kind of comedian.”

  Joe nodded in agreement. If anyone in their old crew had been the comic relief, it had to have been his buddy Pete. Unfortunately, his body had been left behind on the side of a mountain that hadn’t been worth the price it had taken to capture it.

  “I just mean that I really don’t have anywhere to go,” Connie said softly. “I don’t have a family.”

  “I knew it,” Leisa whispered to Joe.

  He nodded in reply. They’d both wondered if Connie had any family, or a spouse. Maybe even kids. He was a closed book, though Jade was somehow finding a way to crack him open ever so slightly.

  Joe thought back to an old conversation with Leisa about how their sergeant was possibly raising a whole squad of sexist, racist, xenophobic little kids. “So there’s not a dozen little baby Connie’s running around?”

  “Could be. I didn’t say that,” he replied with a grin.

  “Sarge,” Leisa said, taken aback.

  “I’m joking…sorta. I don’t have any kids, at least as far as I know.”

  “Something doesn’t compute,” Jade said. “How would you not know if you had children?”

  Connie quickly changed the subject. “Darling, I’m starving. Thirsty too. Do you have any supplies at your house…you know, for people?”

  “We have water. My creator’s the only human
who lives there, but he should have food for us.” She grinned, and sing-songed, “I can’t wait to see my siblings.”

  Joe noticed Leisa scowl. He squeezed her hand and pulled her alongside him. He bumped her with his shoulder, causing the frown to erase.

  “We’ll find your brother soon. I know we will.”

  “Thanks for trying to cheer me up.”

  Joe and Leisa quieted, matching footsteps with Jade and Connie. Ever the insensitive one, Connie had to keep talking about family. He told Jade, “I’m curious to meet your, uhm, siblings.”

  Joe was admittedly curious himself, but also couldn’t help but wonder if Connie was only interested in checking them out too. He certainly showed no qualms about trying to be romantically involved with an android. If they were half as attractive as Jade, Joe knew his sergeant wouldn’t mind having five other clones around either.

  With three sets of shuffling feet to go along with Jade’s smooth gait, they trundled off across the plateau. The mountains faded behind them.

  Sorely needing water, Joe struggled to swallow the ball of dust and stress building in the back of his throat. He coughed repeatedly before finally spitting on the arid ground.

  “Keep it down back there,” Connie said, but Joe didn’t need to be told that. He knew the risks associated with being so exposed, even with Jade’s exceptional hearing. But that wasn’t her only early warning system.

  Seconds later, Jade’s exceptional sight helped her spot a dust cloud rising in the distance. Footsteps followed.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Something’s moving,” Jade said. “A big group. Lots of feet pounding the ground.”

  “Just like the savages.” Joe’s heart rate lurched into overdrive. “You could always hear ‘em coming from miles away.”

  “Get down.” Connie pulled Jade to her knees. The others followed suit. He frowned as he looked around. “Not that there’s anywhere to hide.”

  Joe sat side by side with Leisa. He gripped his coilgun with both hands, and tilted it to the side to check the battery. A green light showed a full charge, though ammunition was the bigger problem.