“What?” she said, wide eyed and taking a step back, “You don’t seriously think I’m going to ride on that thing with you?”
“Um, yeah. What did you think I meant?” She took another step back, and with one eyebrow raised, he asked, “Oh, mighty scout, are you afraid?”
Her chin went up, and her back became ramrod straight. “Just because I am not suicidal, does NOT mean I am afraid!”
He looked skeptical. “Prove it.”
“I… do NOT have to prove anything to you!” she sputtered. “I have never ridden on one of these monstrosities, and I most likely never will!”
“Never say never,” he said, grinning evilly.
****
In the end, an old song her mother used to sing to her about ‘Rock and Roll Dreams,’ coming to her out of the blue, convinced her to get on the bike. She couldn’t run away forever, but she could regret her decision the minute they rolled out on the main highway.
“Too fast!” she yelled over the light whine of the fusion engine. “Slow down!”
“What? We’re barely doing twenty-five, woman!” he yelled back, “I haven’t even gotten near cruising speed!”
“It’s s-so fast!”
He twisted and looked back at her and saw her eyes were wide with fear she would never admit.
“You’ve never ridden on a motorcycle, have you?”
“I’ve only ridden in a horse-drawn wagon, and it didn’t go even close to this fast!”
“Well, we’re going to be going a lot faster in a sec, so put your head against my back and close your eyes.”
Ghost Wind, normally not one to submit to being ordered around, meekly complied as she felt their speed increase. Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her thoughts went back to what one of the senior scouts, Black Dog had said whenever they dared to complain about comfort in their training exercises: You can get used to anything if you give it enough time.
“This is cowardice. This is not how I live.” Ghost Wind muttered quietly into Eli’s jacket.
Open your eyes. Jannelle’s voice spoke in her head.
The thought made her tremble, but Ghost Wind forced her eyes open and saw the sagebrush rushing by. She almost closed them immediately, but she forced herself to see her surroundings.
No scout goes about with their eyes closed. Now raise your head up like a warrior.
With all the grit she could manage, she slowly eased up from Eli’s back and, heart hammering, forced herself to see the road and the landscape going by at an amazing speed (for one who had never ridden any kind of motor vehicle before).
And she did get used to it.
The first ten miles were nerve-wracking. By the time they had ridden twenty-five miles, Ghost Wind was leaning into the turns with Eli, complimenting his driving rather than fighting it.
“Hey! Not too shabby, noobie! You’re riding like a pro!” he said over his shoulder. “We’re gonna have to find you your own bike!”
“Don’t get crazy!” she shouted over the road whine. “I may never do this again!”
“Bull,” he shouted back twisting around to look at her. “I can see in your eyes that you like it. Bet you never got to try anything like this, livin’ with the Clan of the Hawk! We’ll be turning off the main highway just ahead, so be ready when we slow down.”
“Why are we turning?”
“We’re coming into Road Shark territory, if we stay on SR97, chances of being ambushed go up to about 99 percent!”
In the terrifying thrill of riding behind Eli, she had forgotten the world she lived in now. Glancing behind them, she saw the Terror’s trail in the dust of the road, standing out like the clouds on a clear day. She had hoped no one would follow them, but those tire tracks would be impossible to miss.
As they started to make the turn, she tapped Eli on the shoulder. “Wait! Drive down the main road for another 100 yards, then circle back.”
“What? Why?”
“Try to trust ME just this once, if you will.”
He nodded and did as she asked, going past then coming back to their turn-off on the other side of the highway, then cutting across their trail onto the side road.
“Pull off here, in this brushy area,” she said. As they came to a stop, she swung down from her seat and realized her legs had gotten a little stiff from sitting. She stretched for a moment, then, pulling out her small hammer/hatchet, she chopped off two large sagebrush fronds.
Moving to the rear of the bike, she began a rhythmic erasing of the tracks they left on the side road. Two swipes side to side, then two fast vertical swats, and as Eli watched, he saw she was making a half-way decent imitation of the rain pocks from the earlier downpours. He began to follow.
“Eli,” Ghost Wind brought him out of his reverie, “If you are going to come with me to do this, then please get behind me, so I can erase all our tracks at once.”
She watched as he looked behind him. The tracks he was leaving were almost imperceptible compared to what the heavy bike and its passengers had been leaving, but they stood out like a Beforetime neon sign to her. He stepped off the road and went to a thick stalked sagebrush. Grabbing a limb almost an inch in diameter in one hand, he wrenched it loose with a loud snap. She looked at him, astonished.
“I’m… ah… feeling better.”
Ghost Wind was strong, but she had to hack at a similar sized limb with her hatchet to get it loose. Many of her male fellow scouts with the Clan had been bigger and stronger looking than Eli, but she was quite sure none of them would have been able to break off that branch with one hand. Certainly not without a lot of wrenching back and forth.
Eli walked alongside her and began helping her erase the trail. It was all Ghost Wind could do to let the incident go without comment.
It took them almost a half an hour to reach the spot where they had turned the Terror around on the main road and come back to the smaller road. They erased the return trail, leaving their first line of travel untouched until only the original track on the main highway, before they had looped back, remained. Eli hadn’t argued with her method, he seemed to be watching what she did carefully and trying to emulate it. It now looked like no one had ever turned off on the side road.
“Okay,” she said. “From this point it gets a little tricky. If you will move off the side of the road between those two large bushes, I’m going to practice a little scout magic.”
“I can’t wait to see this!” he muttered, stepping to the side of the road.
Ghost Wind moved forward fifteen feet and very lightly began to run her brush-broom over the end of the remaining track. As she progressed back towards the end, she increased the pressure, making sure to erase her own tracks as she went. When she reached the end, she moved off the road, continuing to obscure her own trail.
“What do you think?” she asked, as they surveyed her handiwork.
“You’ve made it look like our track just fades away. But where is the ‘magic’?”
“The magic is making someone see something, and getting them to believe what you want them to believe. The scouts of the Clan of the Hawk are well trained in psychological warfare. We’re the DDT.”
“You’re what?” he said, “Scouts are the clan’s pesticide?”
She had no idea what he meant, “DDT, The Department of Dirty Tricks. We bring terror and confusion to the minds of the enemy. What did you mean?”
He sighed. “Never mind. Information no longer relevant. So what is the purpose of fading the track like that?”
“The enemy follows the track, but it just fades away and vanishes. Did the wind blow it away? Did the riders just vanish? Did angels come and take them away? This far from settlements, the imagination can have quite an effect and ghosts can seem quite real.” She paused for a moment, a frown coming momentarily to her face. “Er… anyway, perhaps it will be distracting enough, they won’t think to go back to that overgrown little side road and find our real trail.”
Eli nodded. “I’ve don
e a little DDT work myself,” he said, “Someday we can swap secrets.”
“Perhaps. It looks like a rain squall is coming. That should make our counter tracking look perfectly normal.”
Eli turned and headed into the sagebrush and junipers. “Let’s get back to the Terror.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Seeking New Hope
****
“All right Durpee, you and I been all around the compound now. Izzat enough for you to do your drawin’ thing?” Porter asked.
“Yeah, Port! I seen it all, an’ I can draw it when we get home!” The boy seemed excited just to be someplace new.
“Good, then. I need for you to sit tight in this little spot back here in the trees. I gotta go take one more circle of this place and look for weak spots. Then I’ll go get the others and we’ll get on home. All right?”
“Sure! I’ll stay hid back here and maybe I can take a little nap. I had ta get up pretty early this morning.” The boy yawned as he said it. “Hey Porter?”
“Yeah, Durp?”
“How come we hadda bring Pid and all them other guys? They don’t seem to do much except sit and play cards.”
“Yeah. I got a lot to say on that, but we don’t have time. You just stay here ’til I come get ya, ‘kay?”
“Okay.”
Porter carefully made another circuit of the farm complex, doing his best to stay out of sight of the guards on the wall. Those guards weren’t really looking too alert, and one guy seemed to be nodding off at the south quadrant, but Porter did not want to be seen. It wasn’t just to avoid trouble here, but mostly to avoid trouble back at HQ with Shell and Axyl.
He noted a spot near the southeast section that didn’t quite look as sturdy as the rest of the sheet metal walls. Not that it probably mattered with as much C4 as they had, but you never knew. There was no success like excess.
“Just let this go smoothly…”
Shots began cracking out in the morning air. Coming from the area of the front gate.
He really should have known better.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Horace
****
The backroads went on forever.
The Terror, which had seemed to be going faster than the speed of sound when they started, was actually going down the dusty tracks at 35-45 miles per hour, and the journey was long and bumpy. One moment they would be cruising through miles of pine and juniper, the next through long forgotten and overgrown backstreets of the many small deserted towns along the way.
Ghost Wind’s early gut clenching fear had gone from fear to exhilaration to familiarity to boredom. When Eli finally pulled over her stiffening body was glad for the break.
“Not that I’m complaining, but why are we stopping? I thought your enclave was up in the mountains somewhere.”
“We’ll meet up with Highway 126 later on, but right now, I’d like to take a detour to New Hope. It’s a small community of farmers, our closest real neighbors and Kita asked me to see if they had any apples left to trade.”
“I thought you had to be south of Bend by February 27th, Eli.”
He looked at her. “It’s only the 25th. Unless a huge snow storm moves into the area, I have plenty of time to get there and cause mayhem. Right now, I’m going to have a snack.”
She sat beside him on a bed of juniper needles. There was snow packed lightly in the shady spots in the mini forest they were in, but they had chosen a spot where the sun warmed the ground. She noted that even when they just sat, the silences were comfortable. That was rare in non-scouts. Most of the outsiders she had met in her travels tended to want to fill the air with small talk.
Don’t get too comfortable. You don’t really know this man, and the Scout Way says to keep your guard up.
The truth was though, even after her experiences with Axyl, she still felt instinctively that Eli was a much better man. Maybe that would be her undoing. Just thinking about it made her head hurt. But Axyl wouldn’t have been able to let the silence lie, he would have had to fill it.
They were sitting on a high spot in relatively flat country and the view was superb. The low-lands, filled with a flowing forest of smaller high-desert junipers and sagebrush gave way to pines and firs as the Cascade Mountains climbed to the west. Clouds sat, sluggishly approaching from the way they had come.
Eli looked up from his canteen, “Did you hear that?” he asked her.
“I don’t think I heard…” Ghost Wind listened for a moment, then cupped her hand behind her ear. “I might have heard gunfire, but a long, long ways off. Someone in a running gun fight?”
“Doesn’t sound like the dustup’s moving. It’s coming from the direction of New Hope.” He looked at her. “I think you’d best wait here a while. I’m going to see what’s going on.”
“I’m going.”
“There’s no need for you to get involved in this,” he said, “You have no stake in this, and you don’t know these people.”
“I saved your life. I helped you regain your health, which, by the way, I am not convinced that you HAVE regained fully.” She looked at him with raised chin. “I have a stake in your continued living.”
She expected an argument, but Eli looked toward where the sounds had come from. “Pull your gear off the back, hide it in the brush, and get your firearms out to take with us.”
“Why pull my things off?”
“Because,” he turned back to her, “there are no guarantees. This could go bad, but if you can get out in the bush, I’m confident you could get away if things go to shit. If you can get away you can eventually find your way back here, and have your gear intact.”
She nodded and pulled her bag and bedroll from the Terror, and placed it thirty feet from the road. She had just pulled her rifle out when she heard the motorcycle engine, quiet as it was, start up. She ran back to the road only to see Eli driving off down the road in a plume of dust.
“I’ll be back! Wait for me!” he yelled back over his shoulder.
The people of the Clan of the Hawk believe habits influence life, and they didn’t tend to swear often because of that belief. Ghost Wind, never one to enjoy being tricked, almost turned the air blue with the rapid fire comments about Eli’s parentage, personal sexual inclination towards farm animals, and general habit of having a cranium filled with excrement. She did NOT like being lied to.
“I will be damned if I’m going to be here when he gets back!” she said, after realizing she had started to repeat herself. Grabbing her things, she started to move cross-country, then pulled up short. This hadn’t helped increase her trust in Eli, but the thought of having a people, a home again grabbed her around the jagged edges of her broken heart.
“If I go, there a chance I will always be an outcast.” The lure of having a tribe to live with swayed her decision. She thought again how lonely she had been since leaving Lila’s place.
Dammit. I want to know if I could fit in with…
The gunshots couldn’t be more than a few miles away…
“Damn you, Eli!”
****
She was sweaty when she arrived, but not tired. Ghost Wind was used to covering vast distances on foot, often trotting and she would have felt right at home with the trail runners of the Beforetime. She realized she was not quite fully recovered from her convalescence though, when her breath was shorter than it had been for many years.
The gunshots had died down, but she wasn’t going to be less cautious because of that. She hadn’t wanted to use the road, but the last few miles, she had realized that she needed to follow Eli’s tracks if she was going to catch up with him. Ghost Wind hoped she wasn’t too late to help.
She was sure she was getting close and as she moved along the edges, the wind shifted to blow into her face.
Oh Great Spirit! What stinks?
As the wind shifted, she realized it was the scent of unwashed men blowing down the road and moved off into the thick junipers, readying her engraved rifle. The six
-gun at her thigh was an afterthought, needed only as a backup, but she was glad to have it with her.
She had barely settled in when a troop of eight men began filing past. They were unkempt and from the look and smell, filthy. They wore dirty jean vests, though some were obviously jackets that had been cut off at the arms and each vest bore a hand-painted picture of some sort of cartoon shark. She was sighting on the third man in line when she realized that none of them seemed to be armed. She was almost thirty feet away, but she clearly saw empty holsters and knife sheaths and none of the group was carrying a rifle.
They’re all injured! All unarmed.
Each man that passed was limping, holding an arm or ribs and all seemed to have been battered around their faces. One man was softly sobbing and holding his jaw, which seemed either broken or dislocated and another was patting his shoulder, trying to help. They all occasionally looked behind them, either in fear or hatred but none of them seemed willing to return to whoever had done this to them.
After she was sure they had all moved on, Ghost Wind moved from her hiding place and paralleled the road for another two hundred yards. Trying to remain alert with all her senses, she eventually heard raised voices ahead and gripped her Henry rifle tighter. Moving with the stealth of a wolf, she came to a point with line of sight to the argument. In front of a large wall, made mostly of concrete, rusty sheet metal and various kinds of barbed wire, Eli stood yelling up to a big hairy man with an old M-24 army rifle who stood on some kind of rampart behind the wall.
“Damn it, Horace! I’ve been working with and trading with you folks for the last four years! Why in the hell would you stop trusting me now!”
The big man spit off to Eli’s left. “A’cause you didn’t kill them bastards when you had the chance, Eli. Ever’ one o’ them Road Sharks that bites the dust is a little more peace o’ mind for decent people. The fact that they’re still breathin’ makes me wonder if you don’t have some sort o’ deal with ‘em.”
“You saw me come up behind ‘em and kick the shit out of them, isn’t that enough? I have their weapons, and a couple of those men have injuries that’ll take a lot of time to heal, if they ever do,” Eli shouted. “I think that’s enough to send them back to their HQ and report this is a place best left alone.”
The Road Sharks Page 6
