Table of Contents
Chapter 16
Borne, Planet Castin
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
The backway to town, through the northernmost side of the neighboring Kinlo property, added about twenty minutes each way. Truth be told, Jack was happy to waste the time. He had his handgun with him, but if he ran into the Bilge’s on his own he was almost certainly going to be killed. Not only that, the extra time gave him a few peaceful moments to think, away from the sounds of torture that were taking place back in their homeship.
Jack felt blank. A week ago everything had been fine. As fine as it could be, anyway. The same as it had always been. And that was how he wanted it. He wanted that back. But that wasn’t going to happen.
Often, Jack’s thoughts would drift to Anna when she was young. Before the lung problem. She would ride around with him on the buggy, keeping an eye on the mining drones as they did their work. She had been about four, and had loved it. But slowly the desert cough started to creep in. At first it wasn’t much more than the occasional cough. But over time it grew into a hack. And then into asthma attacks. Now she was a young woman that lived on a desert planet that was killing her. Her lungs were so damaged, their only real option was a transplant, according to her doctor. And with no lung growth labs in the Cygi belt, she’s have to go closer to The Core to get a new set. Transport alone was expensive. And they’d need two tickets, it was too dangerous for her to travel alone. Not to mention the cost of the lungs and procedure, which was easily several dozen times more expensive than the transport. They never were going to have enough money. It was never even an option. But then he had discovered that glowing vein in the mountains.
It was getting on toward afternoon now. The sun was high, and it was hot. Jack wore a hat to cover his bronzed face from the sun. He wound through a desolate region that was mostly home to the equivalent of cacti and desert weeds, kicking up dust as he went. He weaved in and out down the path that he himself had worn into their property.
They had asked him about it once. Why he was driving through the land that they owned? He hadn’t had a good explanation. He said he just liked to take the long way sometimes. They hadn’t cared, so he had never stopped.
Jack pulled into town from the backside of Lavernus’ store. He pulled up, parked his solar buggy, and tried to walk in through the back door. It moved, but then didn’t. It wouldn’t budge. He pushed harder. Something was on the other side of the door. He groaned as he pushed against it. Whatever was there, it had a little bit of give. It seemed like the door was opening a quarter of an inch farther each time that he pushed.
He decided to walk around. As he did, he looked across the dusty road and at his surroundings to make sure that he wasn’t being watched. When he didn’t see anything, he quickly popped through the front door.
“Lavernus,” Jack called out when he didn’t see him at the front. No reply. Suddenly, Jack could feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He made his way around the back of the store, near the pistons and primers and went behind the front counter. Lavernus was always here. And he would never leave the door unlocked if he wasn’t. It wasn’t that kind of place. He crept along, near the front, until he reached the back hallway that led to the back entrance of Lavernus shop.
There, sticking out just beyond the door, were a pair of black dress shoes, far too clean for where they were. Jack froze in place.
He floated around the edge to find Lavernus laying there, his arm strangely bent behind his stomach, his face on the concrete floor, and a large red hole in the back of his head. The walls surrounding him were splattered with blood. Jack felt his stomach lurch up into his throat. His eyes welled with tears as he knelt down to inspect the body. He looked pale. Jack touched an exposed bit of arm — he was cold. Lavernus was dead.
***
Jack had balled his eyes out the entire way home on the buggy. Lavernus has been a nice man. He had gone far out of his way to make sure that their family had been taken care of when they needed it most. He had often, over years, extended them credit for mining drone parts and other necessary supplies.
He had, of course, been an absolute ace in the hole throughout this feud with the Bilge’s. He had always been so appreciative of Lavernus — a man who hadn’t needed to stay here and run a small supply store on a backwater planet that had never reached its potential, but he had. Jack had never known why, and had never bothered to fully ask. There were a lot of questions that had internally wondered about Lavernus’ life. He would never get to ask those questions now.
He arrived home about thirty minutes later, his face streaked red, despite how hard he had tried to clean up before walking inside.
“What now?” Val asked as he ran into him outside of the front of their homeship.
“They killed Lavernus.”
“They…What?! Why would they do that!?”
“I don’t know. They probably found out that he was helping us. Shot him through the back of his head in the back hallway of the shop.”
Val hung his head into his hands. He had always liked Lavernus too.
“What a waste,” Val said.
Chapter 17
Calin Homeship, Castin Planet
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
Val had taken the news hard. Anna had cried, again, but her slobbery crying fit eventually turned into a coughing fit, and Jack had been forced to usher her back to her room, give her a steroid shot, and turn on the humidifier to help ease the pain of feeling like she was breathing through a straw. Eventually she had calmed down and whimpered herself to bed.
Jar had just been angry. He hadn’t said a word, but his reddened face said enough. He’d sat in the kitchen for several hours, casually sipping away at the corn vodka he had been saving, and occasionally beating his fist against the table.
The feeling of hopelessness came over Jack as he laid in his bed. He wouldn’t sleep a wink that night. He just couldn’t get the image of Lavernus laying there with a gaping hole in the back of his head. Or the image of his grandfather cut in half in the living room.
He couldn’t shake just how unfair it all seemed. His family had been here for two-and, with some luck, a-quarter generations. Grandpa had been one of the first people to homestead in the Borne area. He had been a community figure.
That’s how Jack knew that news of the feud had already made its way around Borne. Otherwise there would have been a never ending parade of fake sympathies and frozen casseroles that they probably would never eat. Of course, they couldn’t tell anyone that he was dead until this was resolved.
The thought of it made his chest fill with rage. Jack wasn’t normally the type to get so angry. But this, this was a different thing altogether.
They had been robbed. Not just of some vein, but of the family’s future. A future that belonged to them. Then, when they had tried to stand up for themselves — it had gotten Grandpa and Lavernus killed. Had it been Val, Jar, or even Jack himself, he could live with it. But not those two. They didn’t deserve this.
What killed Jack was that his grandfather’s final memory was watching everything he had hoped for be ripped from his hands. If they had managed to find that lerasum vein first, he would have seen his biggest dream come true. Years late, but true nonetheless. He could have died of natural causes with a peaceful mind, knowing that generations of his family would be cared for based on the decisions that he made.
Instead, he died figuring himself for a failure. And he didn’t deserve it. It wasn’t true. Not at a.
They couldn’t let that pass. They were in too deep now. Jack would almost rather the rest of them, save for Anna, die trying to get the lerasum back then to let the Bilge’s leave and live happily ever after. That wasn’t going to do.
Then, as if God himself had been listening to Jack’s mind — his coms terminal chimed. He picked it up from his bedside table and looked at the screen.
NEW NOTIFICATION FROM DRONE5 — MOVEMENT DETECTED
He opened the notification. It was from a drone that was monitoring the land just south of the Bilge property. It had trained in on a piece of land. There, in the sand, the Earth itself looked as if it slid. The drone zeroed in on a rock face that appeared to move several feet. As it slid, a dark hole opened in the ground and side of the rock face. Jack couldn’t see anything in the hole, but it continued to expand until it was perhaps fifteen feet across.
Then, a light switched on in the hole, illuminating what appeared to be a corridor under the ground. A figure climbed out, emerging into view outside of the opening in the rock face.
Then the red lights on the coms terminal started blinking. The drone zoomed out to reveal a large long hauler truck coming screaming across the desert, dust clouds left in its wake. It sped as fast as it could, straight to the new opening, and pulled around it, before pulling in front and backing its way down the ramp.
Jack could feel his heart racing. This was it. The Bilge’s had hidden the lerasum in an underground facility and they were going to load it into that truck and take it to wherever they were heading with it. And they were doing it tonight. Now.
A bang so loud that Jack immediately knew it was a gunshot rang from the back of the homeship. He stuffed his coms terminal into his pocket, and sprinted out of his bedroom and toward the back of the hallway, where Gar was being kept.
He walked into the room to see Gar in the center, still tied to the bed. In front of him was Jar, holding his revolver to his side. Gar had a giant hole in his chest, and scarlett blood poured out of the hole and out of his mouth, spilling onto his chest.
“What the fuck,” Val said as he came flying in behind them, using Jack to slow his speed, as Gar choked on his own blood, sputtering down onto his beard and neck.
“That’s for the Old Man,” Jar said through gritted teeth, as he watched Gar take his last breaths. “And Lavernus.”
Gar’s body fell silent. The violent heave and hoe of his chest died. He lay still and they all sat in shock for a moment.
“I know where the lerasum is,” Jack said.
Chapter 18
Calin Homeship, Castin Planet
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
“Well I’ll be damned,” Val said as they watched the video in the kitchen. They hadn’t even bothered to clean up Gar’s body. It still sat strapped to the chair in the bedroom, his head angled back awkwardly. “They’re moving it.”
“They’re moving it tonight,” Jack corrected. “No way would they make that move, knowing we could be watching, and not transport it quickly.”
Val nodded. “How long though? How quickly can they move it?”
“Shit, that much lerasum, based on how big I think that vein was…with the drones loading it for them…still at least a few hours,” Jar said, calmed by the revelation. “We hit them tonight.”
That seemed a little rushed to Jack, but then again, he didn’t see how they had an option. If they drove away with that lerasum they were never getting it back.
“Yeah, but how?” Val asked. “We just wait until they drive out and start firing at them?”
“Yep,” Jar said, having put absolutely no thought into whether or not that was the right idea.
“Well…hang on. Do you think shots can even stop that truck? You saw that thing. Rifles aren’t stopping that,” Jack said, rolling back the tape to show the meaty transport truck. “We are going to need something…stronger.”
“Like what?”
“The mining C4. We got enough of it to stop that thing dead in its tracks,” Jack said.
Val’s eyes lit up and he snapped his fingers. “Yes. So we fly them outside of that big garage exit and wait for them to come out.”
“Exactly.”
“And we’re waiting out there with rifles to clean anything else up.”
“Yep!” Val said, raising his eyebrows. “That’s…actually a great idea. If they are well placed…well, shit, that should put it out. Not guaranteeing that it will kill everyone. But then we have a couple still flying for the cleanup and secondary vehicles.
Jack nodded his head in silence for a moment. “I like it. It makes sense. I think I can rig up the drones to be ordered in quick succession to drop on their heads. No guarantees, though. But if we are going to do this, we gotta do it right. Do it all the way. There is one thing we have to make sure of.”
“What’s that?” Jar asked.
“Every one of them has to die. Not one Bilge can survive and get away. Because if they do, this isn’t over. They will keep coming back until either they get the lerasum, or all of them are dead. And we have to watch our backs for the rest of our lives,” Jack said.
Chapter 19
Bilge Homestead, Castin Planet
Velorum System, Cygni Branch
Turning the drones into remote-controlled kamikaze bombers had actually been a relatively simple task. Jack had strapped the smart C4 case to the drone, wired them together, and updated the system with coded instructions for the C4 to detonate on the drone’s impact.
Of course, Jack couldn’t test and debug the issue without wasting one of their drones or C4 cases, so he ran some simulations and was content with just hoping that it would work the way that it was supposed to. He had confidence in his logic.
All together, they have five drone bombs that they could drop on their heads. Definitely enough to immobilize their transport truck. Hopefully enough to kill them all. If not, they all had gauss rifles that they could use to clean things up.
Jack could feel himself being dragged deeper into not giving a fuck. Killing — that wasn’t him. Or at least it hadn’t been him, before all this started. But you kill Grandpa and you kill Lavernus for no reason at all, the paradigm had changed. The Bilge’s were not just trying to steal away the bloodline’s future, they were killing everything he loved in the process.
Normally Jack would be inclined to try to talk things out. Maybe they take half of the lerasum, and leave half behind. Everyone goes home rich. No one dies. They probably wouldn’t have accepted it, Jack knew that. The Bilge’s just weren’t the types to split a fortune like that in half. They’d sooner steal it, obviously.
When they had thrown those explosives into the homeship, they hadn’t taken a look to see who would be hit. Anna could have been there. At any other time of the day, there was a good chance that she would have been in there, crouched behind a table to avoid the gunfire. And she would have died. Horrifically. So fuck them.
Doubts flew threw his head. What if the bombs didn’t go off? What if the vehicle wasn’t disabled and it just kept on driving? All the scenarios. There was a lot riding on this.
But Jack kept telling himself that their current plan was the best option. Dropping explosives in their head was perhaps the most humane and conflict-free way to end this. No pain. Just boom, then bits of them strewn all over the desert floor. It was as good as it was going to get.
Then there was the question of what to do with Anna. None of them were comfortable leaving her at the homeship while this thing went down. There was always the chance that the Bilge’s would be on to them and they might come back here to look for Gar. Once they realized that poor old Gar had a fucking hole through his chest — well, they didn’t want Anna here for them to exact their revenge on.
After much back and forth, they decided that they would have Anna watch from the hills some ways away. If things went south, she’d have a buggy to escape on. She could head for their cousins in Caleo, about 400 kilometers south.
Still — taking her out in the desert was a bad idea. Her lungs could seize up at any moment, particularly if they were kicking up a bunch of dust with literal bombs. Saving all of the lerasum in the universe wouldn’t be worth it if she died right there in front of them.
They went back and forth on what to do with her for a full ten minutes before they decided that they would bring her, but keep her away from the action. There was a ridge about five-hundred meters from the opening in the rock face. She would stay there, with her injection ready to go if her lungs started to freeze.
If things went south and she wasn’t sure if they were going to win, they told her to run toward town. By now, someone else surely would have discovered Lavernus’ body. There was sure to be authorities poking around in town. In fact, if they had given them enough time to dig, there is a good chance that the authorities would have shown up knocking on their homeship sometime soon. Everyone gets questioned when someone comes up dead.
While Anna was on her stomach on top of the ridge watching the action unfold, Jack, Jar, and Val would be positioned in a triangle in front of the opening with gauss rifles. If anyone came running out, they’d shower them in bullets and hope they went down.
***
When the time came, they loaded the solar vehicles and headed in the opposite direction of the Bilge Compound, in case they had eyes on them. If they did, with some luck, they might think that they were hightailing it out of there. Either way, they were going to have to take the long way around and approach the compound from the back.
The drive took several hours since they had to go all the way around the Bilge homestead to approach from the back, and Jack’s stomach was in knots the entire way. He ran over the plan again and again in his mind.
It was simple. But the simplicity made Jack worry about whether or not they were taking too basic of an approach. Would they expect it? Their entire family could die today if they made the wrong choice.
They approached the compound from the backside slowly, so as not to kick up too much dust on the horizon. They found a small hill about two miles away, the perfect place for Annie to watch from and more discreet than the hill a few hundred meters away.
Her part in this thing was simple. She was to watch through her binoculars. If we won, she could stay. If things went badly, she was to jump on the nearest solar buggy and head for town. If authorities were there, she would ask them for help. If not, she’d continue on toward the cousins and refuse to stop for any reason until she got there.
Jack had messaged ahead to let them know that she might be stopping by, but didn’t offer any details about why, just that she might be in the area. He’d let Anna decide how much their cousins needed to know if things went that direction.
They dropped Anna off and parked the vehicles on the backside of the hilline. There was always a chance that they had a drone or some type of surveillance watching the compound, but Jack was hoping that they wouldn’t be keeping an eye on all of the surrounding desert.
They crept forward in their hands and knees until they reached the small hill a few hundred meters from the opening and laid on the backside of it.
There, they piled their guns and supplies on the ground. It wasn’t much. A couple of shotguns. Some rifles. A handgun for each of them. And Jack’s drone controller.
He looked up in the sky, but couldn’t catch a glimpse of them. That made him feel better, because he was going to have to call them down soon. According to the manual, each drone could probably hold upwards of fifty pounds before it would have trouble flying. And if that is what the manual said, he was going to bet that each could realistically carry double that weight. So they were going to have no problem flying around with a brick or two of C4 strapped to them.
The three drones hovered in a triangle formation above the exit in the rock face. The other drone, with double C4 bricks strapped to it, was playing river to get a view of the whole property.
Jack was counting on that double C4 drone to finish them off
Jack, Val, and Jar crept to the edge of the embankment and surveyed the area around the underground opening. If they hadn’t have known where it was they would’ve never seen it. Val looked at it through the night vision binoculars.
Jack took a quick look, then passed them back to Jar. He’d get a good look from the drone cameras. The doors were uncovered. That had changed. Everytime they had closed them previously, they were covered with a sand-colored tarp that made the opening difficult to spot, even from drones.
“Remember the plan. Triangle up, cross fire their locations so they get pinned down. Drop a bomb on the truck’s engine to disable it. When they ball up around the truck, you bring the bombs down on them,” Val said, extending his fist for a bump.
“That’s the plan,” Jack said and fist-bumped him back. They both looked to Jar who nodded, “Let’s kill these filthy Bilge’s.”
The three of them crept up. Jack didn’t have far to travel. He was shooting from the eastern side of the doorway about a hundred meters in front of the hill they were on now. Val would be in the middle, to Jack’s right, and directly in front of the rock face exit. Jar on the backside.
They gathered their weapons. “Go,” Jar whispered as loudly as he could.
Jack crawled along the ground, worming up dust as he ran. He was moving toward a few large rocks that were about fifty meters from the subterranean door.
Jar ducked and ran, his feet pattering against the cold desert sand, but stayed low to the ground before setting up on the backside of a small hill across from Jack. Val moved to his spot.
The desert nights were quiet as could be, and was working its way toward freezing as the sun had now been down for nearly an hour and a half. They weren’t sure when they would try to leave, just that they would do it under the cover of darkness. Jack could feel the knot in his stomach cinching down as they waited five minutes. Then ten. Then twenty. Then an hour. Jack felt himself start to lose awareness but forced himself to focus with a long, hard sniff of some smelling salts that Jar had passed to him early.
After an hour and twenty minutes, they heard the familiar creek of old metal scraping across itself.
“Go time,” Val said over the coms.
Then, the old doors split in the middle, kicking up a plume of dust. Things sat silent for a moment and then Jack saw two strong beams of light come shooting out the upward sloping ramp and out into the sky.
Jack rose just as the nose of a large truck began to peak out of the opening. It rolled out and leveled itself on the sand. One man who Jack thought he recognized as the middle Bilge brother was hanging onto the outside of the passenger side door.
Val wasted no time, letting off rounds as soon as they were out. Within seconds, he had plugged the man on the door right in the chest and he had fallen to the ground screaming and coughing up blood. Val had always been a good shot.
Jack ducked down and pulled out the controk and screen for the drones. Each was now hovering about 300 meters in the air, lights off to be safe.
He selected the first drones with one brick of C4 explosive material strapped to it, then selected the camera view. Jar lit the truck up with a hail of bullets. The drones interface showed the land below where could clearly see the front end of the truck.
He waited a moment. Not knowing where people were, he wanted to see if he could find a way to inflict some damage outside of just the truck itself.
A man hopped out from the large back bed of the truck at the backside and started unloading at Jar, who returned fire back. Jack waited a moment, waiting to see where the next man would appear. No one did, but the man that Jack now recognized as the eldest Bilge son, was in the perfect location to try to disable the left driver side wheel of the large truck and hit him at the same time.
He selected a spot just a few feet to the side of the man, hugging close to the vehicle. He gave the order to dive bomb. The gap closed almost instantly on the video. The drones were terrifyingly fast when they wanted to be. It impacted and the explosion rocked the vehicle. The eldest brother was vaporized almost immediately, a red splash across the desert sand.
The truck rocked back and forth for several seconds before settling. When the dust disappeared, Jack could see that the left front wheel and axle had been severely damaged. It looked like the axle was busted in half. The truck wasn’t going anywhere.
The gunfire returned and Jack could hear several people yelling. Multiple shooters were still inside the covered garage area and unfortunately the truck had been disabled in a spot that gave them really solid cover. A hand stuck out from behind the truck and fired wild and blind from a pistol.
Two men hopped out of the other side of the truck, facing Jack, throwing a rain of bullets toward him as he ducked behind the rock, listening to them ricochet off into the sand and dry air around him. Jack snuck a quick look and realized it was the younger Bilge brother and his father.
Val laid down some cover fire. Another man that Jack did not recognize pulled another gun from his belt line and walked fearlessly out from behind the truck toward Val, dumping bullets as he went.
“What the fuck are you doing Jack! Bring the boom down on them!” Jar yelled into the channel.
Shit. The gunfire had made him slow on the uptake. He lined up the next drone kamikaze shot, but the man had ventured too far away from the vehicle and the rest of the team. He couldn’t kill them both. Without a second thought he prioritized the vehicle and lined up the second drone to come down on top of the eldest brother’s head. And it did.
This impact sent the truck bouncing, now unable to move. The unidentified man kept dumping bullets in Val’s direction, and one connected with his shoulder, shooting a mist of red into the air. Val let out a scream and ducked behind the rock he had been using for refuge.
Jar left his own spot of refuge and sprinted toward Val, kicking up dust as he ran. “NO!” Johns screamed. The remaining Bilge’s retreated back I side the underground entrance, and two men poked their heads out and fired at Jar as he streaked quickly across the desert.
Without hesitation this time, Jack queued the third and final C4-strapped drone, and within milliseconds it had bombed through the doors and landed somewhere inside. The explosion blew outward, sending the heavy metal doors flying into the air and creating a fireball twenty feet into the sky. The big truck lurched forward and the tarps covering the load were ripped off, exposing the green-glowing lerasum in the back of the truck. “It’s here!” Johns yelled into the channel.
Jack saw a blackened hand reach out of the entrance and pull himself into the desert sand. It was the youngest brother. He coughed up a pile of blood into the sand in front of him then lay still.
Meanwhile, the unknown man had been trading shots with Jar while working his way toward Val. Val popped up from behind the rock and popped a shot into the man’s shoulder. He groaned, but ran quickly around the nearer rock and let bullets fly. Jack could hear Val screaming, then silence.
“No!” Jar screamed as he reached the rock, unloading a full clip of bullets into the man’s chest. He ran to be beside Val, lifted his head into his arms, and sobbed.
Jack knew Val was dead. He didn’t have to look. It was going to kill him. But he couldn’t worry about that now.
He counted up the bodies in his head. The first blast had killed one. The second two. The third two. Plus the unknown man. Gar was already gone. One left. Old Man Bilge.
Jack pulled the shotgun he had strapped around his right shoulder and hoisted it. “Jar, let’s go. The old man is still alive.”
“Ok,” Jar said through the tears. He drew his weapon and ran to meet Jar at the enterence. They peeked in. The two poor bastards that had been hit with the third C4 drone weren’t much more than a red smudge across the ramp leading out of what appeared to be an underground garage. Johns hoped he’d see the old man laying there too, but he didn’t.
The metal ramp had eaten the blast surprisingly well. Jack wondered how long this underground enclosure had been here. Had it always been here? Had they built it just for this? Jack was sure that he would have noticed if it had always been here. It’s hard to miss anything that happens one homestead over when there’s nothing else to pay attention to.
They walked past the truck filled with lerasum, illuminating the entrance with a splash of green, down the incline, boots thudding against the metal. Jack held his shotgun square against his shoulder, scanning as he walked.
They were walking into a long metallic hallway. At the back end, where he assumed the tunnel ran under the Bilge house, were machines and workbenches that Jack assumed had been used to store and load the lerasum.
They crept slowly, not wanting to let him get the jump on either of them. As they approached the back area with the scattered machinery, Jack realized that there were many places for him to hide.
“You here old man?” Jar yelled, realizing the same thing.
“I am,” the raspy voice called back. Jack wasn’t sure where it had come from, there were so many echoes in the metallic tunnel.
“Come on out and let’s get on with it then,” Jar said playfully.
“…Alright,” Old Man said before popping out from behind a broken down mining bit, firing, and sinking a bullet into Jar’s lower right side neck area. He stood in shock for a moment, coughed, and fell to the ground. He touched the wound with the tip of his finger as blood poured down and over his hand. He looked wide eyed at Jack, who bent down and helped Jar press his hand against the wound to slow the blood. Jar didn’t say anything, having the awareness to know that the Old Man was out there. Jack held up one finger and nodded to Jar to let him know that he was coming back.
Jack popped his head up. The good news was that Old Man Bilge seemed to only be armed with a pistol. If he could close the gap his shotgun would win the fight. But he couldn’t see him. It was too dark, the only lights from the workbenches against the far back wall and the faint green glow of the lerasum in the back of the truck. He was sure the old man had moved.
“ Are we the last ones?” Old Man’s voice echoed.
“Jar’s alive. But yes, we’re the last.”
“…You killed my family, boy. Ended my bloodline.”
“And if I don’t kill you, you’ll do the same to mine.”
“Is the girl dead too?”
“No, she isn’t here.”
“Smart,” Old Man Bilge said. “I’ll make sure to track her down after all this.”
Jack snarled and launched two rounds of buckshot into a table he thought Old Man might be behind based on the sound of his voice.
“Nope,” the old man taunted.
Jack inched his way forward, slicing the barrel of his gun behind objects and toward corners as he moved.
“What would you even do with the lerasum if you got your hands on it, boy? You destroyed the truck. How are you going to transport it? Then you need to get it on a ship. Do you have a ship?”
“I’ll take my chances and worry about that after I kill you.”
Old Man laughed. “Do you have any idea how much that shit is worth? That much of it?”
“Enough to live wealthy a thousand times.”
“Or more. Who are you going to sell it to boy? You’re going to get robbed. Probably end up dead.”
“And you had a plan, I assume?”
“Of course I did. Started putting it together as soon as we found the vein. We have the ship. We have the buyer. Price is locked in. I’m not moving this much lerasum around with a half-cocked plan.”
“Oh yeah? And what will you even do with all that money? You’re on your way out old man, and you have no heirs.”
He was quiet for a moment. “There’s enough money there to buy an heir. Get him young, raise him up right. Give him an empire.”
“You think you have time for that?”
“We’ll see.”
Old Man jumped out from behind a concrete beam, and let one off wildly. The bullet ricocheted off of the floors and up into Jack’s shin. He yelled and took cover behind some nearby machinery.
“Come and get it!” Old Man bellowed.
Jack scuttled along the outside of the underground enclosure, moving from pile of junk to piece of machinery. He could see the old man, about thirty feet away, looking around in the dark, waving his pistol.
Once he had rotated nearly 180 degrees around the man, he took cover behind a workbench. Old Man Bilge fired off another blast randomly in Jacks vicinity. “Come on out, boy!” He fired again and the blasts echo was deafening off the cold metal walls.
Now. His hands drenched in sweat, Jack took off toward the old man. He was on top of him before his old frail body could swivel around. He raised his shotgun to Old Man’s face, and squeezed the trigger. His head evaporated into a sheet of pink mist, spraying all surfaces directly behind him. His body seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then slumped to the ground with a thud.
Jack slowly lowered the gun to his side, and let himself slide to the ground. Tears welled up in his eyes. It was done. He allowed himself just a short time to let his emotions out, then he gathered his gun and made his way back to Jar, who laid lifeless, staring blankly up at the ceiling above him. Jack bent down and felt for a pulse. He was gone.
Jack made his way out through the devastation at the front entrance and then walked out to see Anna. She was hiding behind the solar buggy, with a grip of death on the back bar, her knuckles purple.
“Are they?” She asked, poking her head out from around the back of the vehicle.
Jack nodded. Anna burst into tears and ran toward Jack, embracing him. He cried. They wept, together.
He turned around, staring at the large truck and the green glow coming out of its bed. “It’s just us now,” Jack said. He had some things to figure out. How he was going to move the lerasum. Who he was going to sell it to. How he would keep the authorities off their back. They’d come knocking eventually. But none of it mattered now. He’d figure it out.
“You’re going to get some new lungs, Anna,” Jack said with a broad smile.
