“I see. And two?”
“Two: What would be the more desirable outcome for Shell? To gain the location and inside info on this village, which does not in anyway impact his day-to-day, but instead is just on his wish list…”
“I sense an ‘or’ coming.”
“Or… to eliminate the biggest thorn in the side of the Road Sharks by killing me, the one who is constantly thwarting him, releasing slaves, attacking thugs, tearing at his infrastructure. Which do you think would be higher on his to-do list? I’m thinking my death would be on top. He’d want, and pardon my hubris, to take the king off the chessboard. But look, here I am. Because of her. Please, explain how that makes ANY sense in the context of your paranoid theory.”
Kita looked away over the valleys and mountains.
“All right, I might be willing to give her a chance, under close scrutiny.”
“Did you hear that…?” Eli looked back over his shoulder, Ghost Wind was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Going Downhill
****
“I should have known,” Ghost Wind muttered under her breath. “How stupid was I to think the Creator Spirit would let me off the hook for what I’ve done. Until I atone by taking Axyl’s goddamned head, I will always be alone!”
She had retrieved her gear from Eli’s cabin, and was almost back to Kenji’s lookout. She opened the door, bringing in a small amount of crumbly snow and surprised the boy, who had been lightly dozing.
“Miss Ghost Wind!” he said, jerking awake, “I wasn’t sleeping!”
“Yes,” she said dryly, “so I see.” Ghost Wind kicked off the borrowed boots and checked her moccasins which were almost dry. She hesitated a moment, but regretfully slid the alpaca wool socks off and put her own damp ones back on. They were clammy, but at least they had dried some.
“Um,” Kenji said, “how did it go with Kita?”
“Not well.” She pulled on her moccasins and stood, shouldering her bedroll pack. “Not well at all. It was nice to have met you, Kenji. I must be going.”
“But… I don’t understand! Why didn’t Kita…”
“You can ask her, Kenji, but when you see Eli, thank him for trying, will you?” With that, she stepped out of the door and started back toward the main road. As she moved from a dry piece of pavement to snow patch and back, she looked over her shoulder. Kenji was watching her from the doorway. His expression was confused and sad.
Well, at least one person is unhappy I’m leaving. Guess I should be thankful for that.
As she walked, Ghost Wind noted that even up here, where the snow still reigned, the areas under many of the pines had melted, and if they were close together, the bare patches almost formed a highway through the wilderness. There was a lot less brush in this area than on her home range and the going would be easier, even having to cross the large snowy areas still remaining.
Time to go back to the Scout Way.
****
Eli was fuming. “You couldn’t have said anything, when you saw her walking off? You should have said something!”
Kita shrugged. “I wasn’t going to let her stay. Her walking away was just fine with me, but I knew you’d try to stop her.”
Eli glared at her, and started down the street. “Was she heading towards my place?”
“Yes,” Kita yelled after him, “So, I wonder, Eli, is your interest in this young woman more than just for a new member of the village?”
“Phht.” Eli looked over his shoulder, “No! Nothing like that…”
A slow smile began on Kita’s face as the big man stalked off.
Eli walked the length of the makeshift ‘street,’ watching for the tracks the boots he had loaned Ghost Wind would make.
“I’ve really got to do a refresher on my tracking,” he said to himself. People out and about watched their champion curiously as he went muttering down the street, gesticulating with his arms at no one visible.
When he arrived at his cabin, Ghost Wind was nowhere to be found and all her gear was gone. She hadn’t waited.
“C’mon, girl, give us half a chance here. We can make this work!” He cringed when he thought of Kita’s words to the proud young scout. It was really no wonder she had been gone when he turned around. He should have expected it and headed her off. When you put one overly proud, stick-up-the-ass woman against another, disaster of one sort or another was usually the eventual result.
He turned down the path towards the lookout point and finally found her tracks, recognizing the slightly overlarge bootprints in the snow. Ten minutes later, he stuck his head in the door and barked at Kenji, “Where is she?”
The boy, not used to this tone from the normally kind and charismatic man he idolized, pointed at the footwear on the floor.
“Is it true? Did she have a fight with Kita?”
“Yes.” Eli saw that Ghost Wind had left the boots and the alpaca wool socks, and switched into her probably still wet moccasins and ratty socks. “And obviously, she’s not going to take anything from us that might be helpful to her.”
“Ghost Wind seemed pretty mad, but kinda sad too.”
“Aw… SHIT.” Eli looked at the boy. “I’ll see if I can find her, and maybe we can get this sorted out. I think Kita might give a little, if I can just find Ghost Wind and keep her from hitting the road prematurely. Later, Kenji.”
Eli started out at a brisk pace, assuming Ghost Wind would aim for the road. As he moved over the snow covered areas he thought he occasionally saw her footprints, but they were very faint, much more faint that he would have expected from such a solidly built, muscular girl. As he neared the Terror, he wasn’t seeing any trace of her at all. He uncovered and picked up the bike and moved around the tree it had been under, trying to stay off the snow as much as possible. He didn’t want to take the time to brush out his tracks, but his conscience wouldn’t let him just leave them there.
He assumed that Ghost Wind had started walking down the same road they had come in on, and that on the bike he’d be able to catch up with her in short order. After ten miles and no sign of her, he realized he’d badly underestimated her. She’d gone overland.
He felt a strong loss, the kind he hadn’t felt since Jean-Anne had died in the plague.
Weird. I barely know this girl.
He turned the fusion cycle around and drove back up the hill, looking for any sign of Ghost Wind he could find.
****
“This might do, for a while,” she said as she came to a small plateau, thick with pines on one side.
Ghost Wind finally found a place to rest. She had moved down the mountainside for most of the remaining day, and eventually, the snow had given way to dirt and the earliest signs of spring. Grass was starting, buds were forming and there were even some patches of ground that she could consider reasonably dry.
Maybe it’s time to take a break and just live for a while. I’ve traveled far enough to be out of the Clan of the Hawk’s reach.
It was a pretty place. She could see far out over the lowlands, to where the pine forests thinned out to sagebrush and juniper to the east, and to the north she could see a high mountain, once a volcano. She was unsure if it was Mount Hood, or one of the other old volcanoes in this chain of mountains.
“I wish I’d have been able to take one of the old maps from the clan’s libraries with me,” she said to herself, setting her bedroll on a layer of pine needles. “I didn’t know much about this area before I came here, and I still don’t.” It was, of course, an absurd thought. The Clan scouts hadn’t let her take anything but the clothes on her back.
It was late afternoon, and the sun had already set in the lowlands. She began making a triangular frame of sticks and limbs, then stuffed as many of the sun-warmed pine needles and big-leaf maple leaves from the previous year into the frame as she could make fit. After mashing them down a bit, she made a mirror of the frame on the other side of ridgepole and began to weave smaller limbs into it. Using the old
poncho, she poured more leaves and pine needles on top of the shelter until they were almost a foot and a half deep.
Once her shelter was built, she unrolled her blanket, and pushed all her possessions inside, with the tiny stuffed bear being last, sitting and looking out of the shelter at her.
“Well, Go-Go,” she said to her verbally challenged friend, “it appears, as I feared, I am not wanted anywhere. That’s all right. I can be perfectly content out here away from everyone and living off the land. That’s what scouts do, and I am just FINE with that.” As she dug a foot deep pit to build her Dakota-style fire, the ache in her heart said otherwise.
Twilight was falling as she dragged a fourth load of firewood to her camp. She had gone a ways afield to find a dead maple, as the pine tended to be quite smoky, something a lone woman wanted to avoid in her fires. The world was vastly depopulated from what it had been in the Beforetime, but it seemed that an inordinate number of assholes had survived.
No sense in taking chances.
She took a thick sapling, and cut it into sections with her big knife, using the two narrowest sections to drive into the ground next to each other at an angle. She then hacked the rest of the stave into shorter sections, and stacked those on each other, tying them together with handmade twine. The end result was a backrest that she could lean against as she sat and watched her steel canteen cup boil jerky and nettle stew.
“As quick camps go, this is pretty comfy, Go-Go,” she opined to the bear, “And it’d be pretty damn hard to find. I can hear water down the hill somewhere, and in the morning I can go down and fill my water bottles.” She looked across the meadow with new growth coming up everywhere.
Maybe we’ll stay here for a while. I can make a bow, and maybe hunt and dry more jerky.
Unfortunately, as she sat in the darkening evening, the quiet also gave her time to think about the day and what had happened. She had probably, once again been her own worst enemy, though Kita was certainly trying hard for the position.
Her face turned red with shame. She had stormed off too soon, Eli had been advocating for her, but Kita’s words cut straight to her fears. She had walked off, not in pride, but in fear. Fear of being rejected once again.
“Oh bear,” she sighed, “at least I don’t have to worry about being a total screw-up around you. Lila was wise to at least help me have one friend in the world.”
“Sorry, Go-Go.” She looked down at the small stuffed toy, with its scuffed plastic eyes seeming to watch her. “That sounded a lot like feeling sorry for myself, didn’t it? I apologize. That’s not the way of the scout warrior, I assure you. I hope you’ll overlook it.”
She looked out at the wide open sky, curving off into seeming infinity over the lowlands. She could see Orion starting to appear to the southeast, and the Dipper was starting to show in the north.
“That’s what I need to remember.” Her voice was soft in the chilly evening breeze. “Banished from the Clan of the Hawk or not, I have the training of the Scout, I AM a scout warrior and if nothing else, I can devote myself to improving my skills. Maybe someday there will be someone worth using them for again.”
The bear, never a great conversationalist, didn’t reply.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The Plan
****
Late that night, many miles away, Axyl was rallying the troops. He took a deep breath before he began. It was always a test of patience trying to get complex ideas across to the Road Sharks and the plan he had made with Shell was about the most complex plan they’d ever been exposed to.
“Everyone drink up! We’ve got some good home brew here, and I don’t want anyone to not get their fair share!” Several of the men gave loud hoops and cheers. Enough home brew always made them more receptive.
Sitting in the back of the room with his five cronies was Cord. The tall man, with his coal black hair, watched the rest of the Sharks with disdain as they swilled the half cured beer, laughed at jokes a toddler could see coming and occasionally made vomit-induced rushes for the door. The smell of the place testified to the inability of many of the gang to navigate that short distance in time.
Cord and his boys didn’t want to be here, but riding north they’d found themselves in Shark territory and before they could make an exit, they’d been given an offer they couldn’t refuse, join or die. They didn’t participate in most of the excesses that the rest of the bikers did, but they did what they were told.
Axyl nodded at Cord, and the other man gave him the slightest acknowledgment in return.
“All right, listen up you buncha coyotes! This comes from Shell, so, boring as it may seem, you best open your ears.” Axyl knew Shell delegated these meetings to him because Axyl had something the older man lacked, charisma. Shell was the brains, Axyl was the voice.
For now.
“We’ve got something comin’ up. Something BIG. Shell says it’s time we started to consolidate our holdings.”
“Con.. what?” Chimed in a thick browed thug named Grogan, sitting in the front.
“Sorry boys, I shouldn’t of used the old man’s fancy words. What I meant to say, is that it’s time we, the Road Sharks, controlled all the settlements in our area, starting with New Hope.”
“How we gonna do that, Axe?” Grogan interrupted.
“I’m gettin’ to that, Grogan,” Axyl said, starting to feel just a bit irritated. “We are going to trickle in by twos and threes to the area around their compound over the next day or so, keepin’ out of sight, and then blow one of their walls away with some C-4. Our friends to the east have gifted us a generous amount and we can…”
“Oh man!” Grogan exclaimed. “I LOVE blowin’ stuff up! I wanna be the one to give them farmers the blow job!” The more stupid members of the crew thought that was the height of humor and guffawed loudly.
“I thought they was supposed to give us one,” another idiot chimed in. “I’d sure like to have…” The second man stopped, being aware enough to read the look on Axyl’s face.
“Grogan?” Axyl said softly, taking a half step forward.
“Uh, yeah, Axe?” the biker said, trying to hear him.
“Grogan,” Axyl said even more softly.
“Yeah, Axe, what is it?” The man leaned forward slightly but several of the more observant Road Sharks had started to put a little distance between themselves and their more mentally challenged comrade. They noted the momentary look on their leader’s face before it had become a neutral mask.
“Oh, Grogan,” Axyl said, even more quietly.
“Axe, I can’t hardly hear ya,” Grogan complained, leaning farther forward.
The boot heel that slammed into the spot just above Grogan’s nose came as quick as a rattlesnake’s strike. Axyl had purposely kicked the man in the head, reasoning that an impact to his brain was the place least likely to cause noticeable damage.
Grogan went over backwards and the people around him did their best to avoid being in the path of his impressive trajectory, but no one moved to help him as he lay there groaning.
“Do I have everyone’s attention?” Axyl asked, almost pleasantly. Heads nodded around the room. “Good.”
Grogan, however was starting to get to his feet, groaning and it was obvious he was going to protest his treatment until Cord yanked him from the ground in an impressive display of strength. He grabbed the back of Grogan’s neck, slammed him into his now righted chair, slapped the back of his head and growled “Shut up. Listen.”
Grogan could understand short simple instructions and he shut up. Cord gestured to Axyl.
“Thank you.” The Axe Man continued. “As I was saying, we’ll blow a hole in New Hope’s compound wall, and then flood in and capture the farmers with superior numbers. HOWEVER, listen to this part CAREFULLY. We want to kill as few of them as possible!”
The disappointed looks in the room were many and varied.
“But..” one man started. Axyl silenced him with a look.
“I know
everyone here,” he looked at Cord, “well, most of us anyway, like to be there at the moment of the kill, but this is different. We need to look long-term. The farmers are a resource, one we don’t want to waste. If we get them under our thumb, we won’t have these lean fucking winters like we do every year. We’ll make them slaves, but we’ll treat them better than we do these poor sods we’ve been sending east to be the Empire’s slaves.”
“Why for, Axe?” Porter asked from the back of the room.
“Think about it. These people produce something we need, food that we eat. You don’t destroy the beehive to get the honey, you just make the bees work for you.” Axyl could see, by the perplexed look on many in the crowd, that he was getting on shaky ground with his metaphor and decided to be more literal, “We’re gonna make the farmers work for us, but we can’t be too hard on ‘em or they won’t make the food grow. Or some smart ass will put something in our food. We’re gonna let them go on pretty much as they have before, only we’ll be in charge.”
“So…” MacCombie said hesitantly, “what about their women and kids?”
“In this venture, it is HANDS OFF the women and kids. They’re our insurance that the menfolk will do as they’re told. We only harm them if some farm boy decides he’s not gonna cooperate; if so, his loved ones suffer in his place. It keeps ‘em from getting creative.”
The looks of disappointment from a majority of the crowd didn’t surprise Axyl in the least.
“Look, guys. We are building our own empire here. That means we can’t just rely on soldiers. We need farmers and we’re gonna need hunters, at least better hunters than we have now. Eventually, after we own New Hope, we’ll find all the little communities around here and ALL the resources will be ours. Then we can move outward, with more men and take over. Then you’ll be able to kill and rape as much as you like while we expand.”
The Road Sharks Page 10
