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Boyd Baker grits his teeth against the nausea sloshing around in his stomach. He refuses to let his men know how sick and fearful he is of riding in this death machine. He had waved Marco into the driver’s seat once they were ready to go because he didn’t have the first idea of how to work the vehicle and he didn’t want the two men laughing at him. It was clear from the start that Marco was just as clueless causing the machine to lurch ahead and slam to a stop. Once he got the hang of it though, they had picked up speed and the motion was causing Boyd to feel sick and scared. He had never ridden in anything that moved before and even the twenty-five miles an hour speed was terrifying to him.
Marco swerved sharply to avoid a clump of sage brush, sending Boyd flying hard into the passenger door and the contents of his stomach into his throat. They were driving beside the old railroad tracks on the hard-packed sands that the oversized tires handled well. The hot sun was high in the sky so Boyd assumed it was around noon. They had started hitting houses first thing in the morning and had cleaned out quite a few when one of his men remembered that Silvia was a friend to Claudia’s family. The information he had gotten out of her was going to change his life. The way he figured it, the girl had only one reason to head east deeper into the desert and that was to get the gold her grandfather had mined. It was the only thing that would give her and her sister a shot at a new life somewhere else. There was nowhere else to the east for her to go. All the major cities were death traps filled with gangs and bandits that had crossed over from Mexico when the government had abandoned the lower states. She wouldn’t risk taking a small child into any of them so it had to be the gold she was after.
As the hot sun burned down on him, he dreamed about what it would be like to have enough gold for passage over the wall. He had heard whispers and soft-spoken rumors of cool weather and endless lakes of water. Not one day of his life had he felt anything but hot, sticky, and sweaty. He planned to change all that. He deserved more than this dry, dusty heat-scape and he was going to get it no matter who stood in his way.
He figured the girl and his coward of a brother had an eighteen-hour lead on him but they would only be traveling at half the speed of the dune buggy so they should catch up to them in under a day. Just then, the wheels on his side hit a half-buried rock sending him flying into the air only to slam his head against the roll bar. He dropped back down half into his seat and then forward causing his arm and face to slam into the hard-plastic dash when Marco slammed on the brakes. The wounds on his arm and face screamed out in pain from the contact making him let out a roar of rage. He was ready to call this journey a wash and return to town when the burning fire of vengeance reared its ugly head, reminding him of how he was wounded in the first place.
He sat fuming while Pete reached around him from the back seat and pulled a belt across his lap and buckled him in. He would find them and when he did he would make them pay, in so many ways!