Friday Snippets: Once Upon a Trip to Mexico

Here's the Friday Snippet. So sorry, most humble apologies and all that jazz about it being late. Leave you link! I'll come and see you!

Copyrighted, do not reproduce, material liable to change. Etc.

Under the cover of dark, Dell rode for almost four hours. The fires from the inner city threw her shadow out long on the pavement and to the east and west the sky burned like burnished copper with the the death of St. Louis and Kansas city. She'd slipped past the barricades at midnight, killing the engine and walking the bike, her shotgun within easy reach.

Now, she laid low off the interstate far north of ground zero. As she approached a lower overpass, she slid the bike down into the ditch and flattened herself against the sloping hill near the exit ramp. Two tanks hunched on either side of the bridge like hulking monsters and Dell could hear the low rumble of engines and generators. It was difficult to see through the tinted lenses of the gas mask, but she snaked her way up the incline until she lay within an a few yards of the tank treads. She strained her ears to listen.

"With the power grid down from here to Detroit, they're right to move us south. No lights, no heat - and the radiation's gonna fall out soon. We can't stay here. Jones said he already heard radio chatter. The Guard's tellin' most people to stay put - but the smart ones, they'll come south ahead of the cold."

"The Guard's tellin' most people to stay put - but the smart ones, they'll come south ahead of the cold."

At that moment, Dell heard the wail of high speed aircraft overhead and saw the black silhouette of slender stealth bombers eating the stars as they raged against the sky. Sonic booms bludgeoned the air just a few seconds later and crushed her beneath the roar of sound. When her ears stopped ringing, she lifted her face from the grass and heard the men above her cheering raggedly. They fired their mortars and their guns into the night sky.

Dell slid back down the hill under the flickering barrage and cranked the bike. Keeping the lights dark, she hunkered over the handlebars, rumbling under the deepest shadows of the bridge. She was completely hidden in the open beneath the light and the thunder as the soldiers on the bridge cheered on the Stealths and the bombs sleeping deadly quiet in their metal bellies.

Dell turned off on the side roads, following her memory of the terrain. She would go north, to the little town of Mexico and she would find someone who could tell her what had happened, someone without tanks that crouched on bridges or bombers who brought death on the wind. She never saw the thick rope slung across the road.

It caught her in the chest, bruising her sternum and blasting the air from her lungs. Her grip on the handlebars went nerveless and the bike careened onto its side, screaming in the gravel as it sputtered to a halt. Dell saw sky and earth and sky again and slammed onto her back in the dust. Everything hurt at once and she thought maybe she was dying. Then she felt her fingers twitch and the cold length of Math's shot gun barrel under her left leg. She thumbed back the hammer, when a shadow leaned over her, blotting out the moon.

So say we all.
Bri