Wrong Side of the Coffin: A WIPpersnappers Anthology

White Nose, Orange Skies (Part 1/3)

White Nose, Orange Skies

by Victor Serrano

The rattle of automatic fire echoed behind us, cutting through the woods framed by the orange skies above, as the last of my rear guard stumbled along. I braced my revolver against a pine tree and squinted into the distance. I doubted my last four bullets would do much good if the Riders pressed us.

"Is that everybody?"

"No losses," Frank huffed as he paused to sit against a boulder. "Despite all the shooting." He reached in his jacket and put an old-fashioned vape to his lips, his arm trembling slightly. I knew it wasn't due to nerves but to the high levels of radiation he'd been exposed to. How he'd even made it out of Denver after the nukes was beyond me.

"Let's keep it that way," I snapped, snatching his vape away and hauling him up. "To the ridgeline. Don't stop for anything."

Behind us came the growing, communal shouting they called the Rebel Yell, echoing through the mountains. Branches snapped as a few wild shots cut through the forest. But they didn't pursue us any further.

Frank and I reached a few other stragglers on the way to the ridgeline, who scrambled faster as I barked at them, even as my burning lungs protested the altitude. The raging wildfires hadn't given us much choice but to seek high ground. Problem was, we weren't the only ones trying to scratch out a living in these parts.

"Chief!"

I slowed at the top of the ridgeline, where our only machine gun was stationed beside a couple belts of ammunition taken from an armory and carefully husbanded over the past couple years of hell. But it wasn't the gunner calling me. Instead it was Lisa Sanchez, lean and muscular though she must be pushing fifty, and voted Vice Chief of our ragged band of survivors.

"We found two travellers in the woods," she said, gesturing back. "Thought you'd want to have a chat."

A nervous-looking Latina with a teal hoodie and overloaded backpack stood beside one of my sentries, but my attention was fixed on the pale man behind her. He wore pitch black clothing, framed against the orange sky behind him. Behind a cloth face mask I could make out blotchy white markings that disfigured half his face. I wondered if he kept the mask on just for that purpose. Clean air was most of a continent away, past the irradiated nuclear wastelands and spreading wildfires, far into the interior of Canada and Mexico.

But what really stood out to me about this man was his eyes. They peered at me over the blue mask with a special kind of loathing; almost as if I'd personally offended the man. Yet that same mixture of hatred and contempt stayed on his expression even as he surveyed the others around me.

"What brings you here?" Lisa prompted, breaking my attention.

"I was out scavenging," the woman said, shifting in place. "I heard the gunfire and thought I'd take a look. Are those raiders?"

"Worse. Forrest's Riders. One of the white supremacist bands that formed after the nukes fell. We're just a group of survivors looking to outrun the wildfires," I said, waving a hand back at the wall of orange haze in the distance. "Thought we'd winter up here."

The woman frowned. "There's not much food in these mountains. I'm with another group on the other side of the mountains. I was scavenging the cabins on this slope along with a few others."

"Like your friend here?" I asked, gesturing over to the splotchy-faced man. Then I blinked.

He was gone.

"Where the hell..." Lisa trailed off, glancing left and right. There was no motion in the trees nearby. Nothing except a black bird, or maybe a bat, flying off into the distance.