Page 50 of Bram

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

We sat there, two generations of the same bad idea, bleeding together into the new day. Then the shit started again.

Drop Miller bought it crossing the hardpan, right between the main building and the garage. He’d just checked his mag and was jogging to reinforce the east wall when a Scorpion who’d been playing possum snapped a shotgun up from the dust and fired from less than ten feet away. The blast caught Miller square in the chest. There was a sound like wet canvas tearing, and he hit the ground so hard it left a crater in the dirt. His helmet cracked in two at the brow, the visor spinning off into the darkness.

Trace dropped the shooter before the man could pump another round, but Miller was already flat on his back, both boots pointed straight up, gloved hand still gripping his rifle. I sprinted to him, more out of reflex than hope, and slid in low. The blast had cored him out—nothing left but muscle memory and a dark stain spreading wide as a horse blanket.

I crouched over Miller for exactly three seconds, saw the Kingman patch still bright on his cut, the eyes glassy but not quite empty. The man had ridden through the night to die here, and that was all there was to say about it.

“Rest,” I muttered. Not a prayer. Just the instruction.

I closed his eyes and stood up.

Rusty limped over to me, his arm packed with a ragged strip of shirt, the flesh beneath already swelling ugly and purple.

He spat, the blood dark in the dust. “You want me to say something?”

I looked at the line of dead, then at the living, then at the desert.

“No,” I said.

Rusty shrugged. “Guess that’s fair.”

Kodiak stood a few feet off, cradling his broken hand to his ribs, face turned to the dawn.

He said, “Scorpions are done.”

I didn’t answer right away. I watched the sunrise burn away the last of the night, then scanned the compound, the horizon, the tangle of wire and broken concrete.

“Not all of them,” I said.

No one had to ask what I meant.

The men set to work stripping the weapons, patching up the wounded, and searching the compound for anything that looked like leverage. I left them to it. There would be another fight. There was always another fight. The Colonel was still out there—somewhere just past the edge of this broken place, watching, counting our losses, waiting to finish the job.

My shirt was soaked through on the left side, the blood running off my fingers and onto the ground. I pressed the wound, let the pain keep me anchored.

Trace walked over, face set and raw.

“What now?”

“We clean up,” I said.

I walked the yard, checked every door, every body, every corner where someone could hide.

By the time the sun was up, we had the bodies buried in a shallow trench, the flag snapping overhead, and the blood washed from the stoop. The Kingman and Santa Fe crews sat around the firepit, heads down, faces cut and swollen, but alive.

I stood at the gate, the pain in my ribs a bright, white line, and watched the highway shimmer in the rising heat.

This was our ground now.

But the job wasn’t done.

Not until I had the Colonel’s head in my hands.

I turned to Rusty. “Let’s get ready,” I said. “We’ve got one more to go.”

He grinned, then coughed.