“Oh my,” Horace said, grinning. “Guess they won’t be comin’ in through the wall after all.”
“Actually, Horace, if my plan works, they will be. It’s just that they won’t be expecting what’s on the other side.”
“Hunh?”
“I want another look at these building materials of yours,” she said, limping towards the sheds. “We need to make sure that as few Road Sharks get out of this as we can. Attrition will make them weak.”
Eli and Horace looked at each other, then at the woman walking off.
“Damn,” Horace whispered, “force o’ nature, that one.”
“Amen, brother.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Let's Grind 'em
****
Axyl was tired. Tired of waiting to put the plan in place, tired of sitting out here in the pines and tired of smelly assholes questioning every other damn command he gave.
“I’m tellin’ ya, Axe,” Sky Rider said, looking toward the metal walls of New Hope, “if we just went at two a.m. instead of midnight, they’d all be asleep for sure, probably even whatever sentries they might have posted. Midnight, they might just be windin’ down. Two a.m. and they’ll be deep asleep.”
“Goddamn it, Rider! The problem with your idea is that these goons we’re assaulting the place with are never awake at two a.m. and even now, are probably sneaking drags from whatever bottles of hootch they smuggled with them when we rode up here. At midnight we might be able to hit the walls with most of our force still ready to rumble, but by two a.m. I can tell you, half of them will be worthless.”
“Heh. Most of them are worthless, sober or smashed, Axe.”
“Yeah. But hear me, Rider. Neither you nor I are great strategists here. Darwin Shell was… er.. is! This is his plan, and we’re gonna follow it, if we want any fuckin’ chance of pulling this off. Sabé?”
“Yeah, yeah I gotcha.”
“You’re sure no one has been through here, today? I don’t want these farm boys to know what we’re planning ahead of time. Surprise will make this a whole hell’uva lot easier.”
“I had Earl and ol’ Ballsy stationed not fifty yards from the main gate…”
“Oh! Ballsy! There’s a paragon of alertness,” Axyl growled.
“Well, maybe he ain’t the best of our people, but there’s no damn way they could’ve missed anyone. If anyone had gone through there, we’d know and they’d probably have never made it to within sight of the gate, Axe.”
“You better hope so, man. If not, this night is gonna be a lot hairier that we expect it to be.”
****
It was almost half past eleven p.m. and the troops were getting restless. Axyl, Shadow Rider, and a few of the more intelligent Sharks had been carefully trying to get the remainder into a semblance of a strike force and it was proving to be a bit more difficult than planned.
Shell, before his accident, was fond of quoting a Beforetime comedy guy who said, “You can’t fix stupid” and Axyl was inclined to agree. The hardest thing was to get some of the more dense members of the group to simply shut their mouths. Many had nothing resembling impulse control, and only learned to rein in their useless comments when they were given enough pain to let the lesson sink in.
“Fuck it, Axe,” Rider said. “This is the first time we’ve really tried a strategy different than ‘ride in and do mayhem’ and honestly, I’m not sure half these shit-for-brains are gonna be equal to the task!”
“With these farmers, you can be sure some of them will be ready to shoot when we come through, which means we’re probably going to lose some men. I think we should choose pretty carefully who goes in first, once the wall is blown. You know who the assholes are in the Indies, and we both know the Road Sharks that tend to lower the IQ curve.”
“Yeah. What’re ya thinkin’?”
“Let’s stack the strike force so the people we like least are in the front of the pack when we go through. If the whole thing don’t work like Shell thought, at least we’ll have cleaned up the gang’s gene pool a little.” Axyl looked at the Rider, to make sure there were no objections. He needn’t have worried.
“Oh hell, yeah.” The old man grinned, “Some o’ these uppity assholes been making life unpleasant for everyone and not respectin’ their elders. I’ll be happy to herd ‘em to the place in line they’ll be most likely to catch a bullet!”
“Good. And Rider? As the two smartest men out here, I think you and I should come in last, so we can see and discourage any excesses we see. Shell wants these farmers, if not happy, at least not fuming for revenge, so we need to come down hard on any unneeded brutality or rapes. Come down HARD.”
“I ain’t gonna argue about goin’ in last. Less chance of takin’ a bullet. That’s what our cannon fodder is for.”
Axyl smiled his white shiny smile. “I’m so glad we had this talk.”
****
The explosion at midnight was not as big as Axyl had expected. There was the flash and the bang, but he suspected the elderly explosives had lost some of their oomph in the decades passing. Nonetheless, the effect was as desired. The big sheet metal wall, instead of flying into the air in a million pieces simply teetered and fell inward in a cloud of smoke.
“Now! Charge!” Axyl screamed, and the ragged column of men began to move forward into the smoke. He hoped that a few of the defenders that were awake had been on that section of wall, but that was probably wishful thinking.
“We got ‘em moving, Rider, let’s keep ‘em moving!”
The attackers picked up speed, and began pouring through the breach and Axyl knew he couldn’t wait too long to stick his head in. He was at the rear, but his own adrenaline was so jacked up that if someone ran up to him to tell him something right now, he’d probably shoot them.
He would have to do some serious crowd control on his own men, or they’d have an empty compound filled with dead farmers. He was still behind the last of his crew to enter, only so many could go through at once and had just stopped for a moment to listen to what was going on in the smoke, when a horrendous tightly-coordinated series of shots rang out. Screams followed immediately.
“Shit! Rider, we gotta get in there! They’re slaughtering the farmers!” Axyl looked for the older man, and was surprised to see him standing ten paces to his rear. There was something about the biker’s expression that didn’t seem right.
“Axe, I don’t think that shooting was us!” Shadow Rider yelled to him, “Those shots were too controlled to be our guys! I got a bad feeling—”
The Rider never finished the sentence. Another volley of shots rang out and in that instant Axyl recognized some of the screams as coming from men he knew. A road flare went flying into his group from inside the compound and Axyl saw that large numbers of his forces were lying on the ground in front of a second wall.
A huge body knocked him aside, and to his horror, he realized his troops were in full retreat. He tried to stumble to his feet when another volley went off, and he felt an impact graze the outside of his left shoulder that could have only been a bullet. Fearless Leader Axyl was immediately replaced by Save Yer Ass Axyl and as he glanced toward the compound, he saw the inner wall was actually three walls built like a cattle pen to hold his men. There were a lot of bodies lying in the kill zone.
“Get to the bikes! Back to the base! Every fucker for himself!” Axyl screamed. And the pro-tem leader of the Road Sharks took to his heels.
****
Ghost Wind slipped over the wall after the first set of shots rang out. She hoped Kita’s people had stayed hidden and were ready to pick off stragglers as they went by. There could be no mercy allowed. If they wanted to have a Road Shark free future, they needed to teach these vermin a lesson that any survivors would NEVER forget.
She hugged the wall, mindful that the people of New Hope were still at the trap point, shooting anything still moving. She slipped into the darkness carefully, not wanting any of the sentries to shoot her, think
ing she was a kilabyker in the dark.
Ghost Wind went hunting.
Once out in the junipers and pines, she could see shapes moving in various stages of panic, and she silently cursed herself for not having Kita’s fighters working on destroying the Road Shark bikes. It was too late to worry about it, now.
“Shit!” She went down. Ghost Wind was not accustomed to tripping over things and reached out, to feel a body under her hand. A quick investigation found an arrow in his back and she was reminded, that in the dark, she could catch an arrow also. She resolved to move more carefully.
She trotted, keeping low and staying silent, and had no trouble finding the main body of Sharks stumbling and yelling to each other. They were totally disorganized, a perfect setup for a wolves-on-deer attack scenario. Ghost Wind had only killed one man in the time before she was banished, a brutal mountain man that had gone cannibal back in Clan of the Hawk territory. She had done what she had to, but it had left its mark on her soul.
But now, somehow, she didn’t feel all that guilty about what she was about to do. Maybe it was the threats, beatings, and humiliation she had endured at their hands. She loosened her big Khukri from its makeshift sheath and pulled it out.
“Where are the fucking bikes?” a voice screeched out of the darkness and a man trotted towards her. A flare went off, coming from New Hope and she saw a big man with an even bigger beard coming her way. “George! Is that you? Where the hell are the goddamn bikes, man?”
“Norv!” a voice yelled to the left, “over this way!”
The big man started, looked to his left and looked back at her. Realizing that he was coming up on the wrong person, he tried to see which fellow Road Shark was in front of him when Ghost Wind swung the big knife in a glittering arc at him. The lower half of Norv’s beard fell away and he grabbed at his throat. He went to his knees, blood flowing between his fingers.
Ghost Wind whirled away from the dying man, hearing footsteps coming up behind her and saw a lean skinny kilabyker aiming his rifle at her. There was no way she could cover the distance in time or get her pistol out and she readied herself for the bullet’s impact. Just as the man’s finger tightened on the trigger, another shape appeared behind him and knocked the rifle aside and the shot went wild. A punch too fast to see hit the man and he doubled over, another blow loudly broke his neck.
“Lovely night for an ambush, wouldn’t you say, dear?” Eli whispered.
“That was close, thank you.”
A noise behind her caused her to whirl, but it was only Norv, finishing up dying and falling on his face. The majority of the Road Sharks were still ahead of them and Eli pointed where they had gone.
“I’m not a man who likes slaughter, but we’d better take as many of these idiots out as we can while we have the chance. I want them dead or terrified.”
Ghost Wind felt no pity for the Road Sharks, remembering their plans for her when they had her helpless and in their power.
“I’d prefer the former,” she said.
****
We’re so screwed.
Axyl’s self-preservation instincts and youthful muscularity had put him at the front of the retreat towards the bikes, and he sought to outdo himself for speed as he ran. Shadow Rider had fallen far back after a brief run, the old man not able to keep up with the younger Axyl, or in fact even most of his fellow Sharks.
“Good luck, Rider, wherever the hell you are,” Axyl breathed. To say this night had not gone according to plan, would have been the understatement of the Aftertime, and he had little idea what they’d do after this. The understanding hit him that he needed to keep as much of his army alive as he could, and he started to slow, to rally the troops when a young thickly mustached Shark a few feet from him stiffened and fell to the ground. Looking at the body, he saw an arrow sticking out of the man’s back.
Ghost Wind! She’s out there! I’m out here! With her!
He looked wildly around, and realized most of his men had passed him, and were starting to mount their motorcycles. He was near the end of the pack.
“Screw this! If they ain’t made it to the bikes by now, they’re on their own!” he said, once more breaking into a sprint. He had made it another thirty feet when something flashed by him right in front of his nose. He heard a hefty ‘thunk’ as bark exploded from the tree just to his right. He looked and saw a huge curved knife stuck in the wood, a knife he recognized. He turned and looked where the blade had come from, and she was there.
“Axyyyyl!” her scream of rage and hate sounded like a hawk on the attack. The Axe Man, in a panic, fumbled for the old .45 automatic pistol he had taken to wearing and finally got it loose from its holster. As he looked up again, she was gone.
“Fuck!” he screamed, firing several times at the area where she had been. Axyl turned and sprinted again, beating any speed records he’s previously held by a wide margin. He was jumping on his bike when the first pistol shot rang out to his left, shattering his windscreen. He always insisted that his bike be given the best maintenance, and old Willard, understanding where the power in the Sharks lay, made sure it ran like a dream.
The fusion engine fired first try and the bike leapt ahead, just as another shot tore the seat just behind him. He looked back and saw her in the fading light of the flare taking aim with her pistol again and he began to ride a serpentine path. He heard two more shots, and felt a burn along his right side.
He hit a turn in the road, faster than he should have and the bike slewed for a moment but he quickly regained control. Axyl had been riding the metal beasts since he was fourteen years old and Shell had taken him in, and it was his learned instincts that made him lay the bike over on its side in a slide as something went flying over him.
He used the motorcycle’s momentum to throw it upright again, and looked at what had just missed him. It was the dark outline of a man rolling to his feet.
Eli! Shit!
Adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream and Axyl gunned the throttle, throwing dust behind him. The bike surged forward but as he looked back he saw the big man run out of the dust, chasing him faster than any human had a right to move. He turned the throttle to full, knowing there was no way Eli could catch him now. He looked back.
The bastard’s still coming!
His long duster drifting to the ground behind him, Eli was sprinting full out, and he was gaining on the fusion cycle!
Impossible!
Eli was getting close when Axyl remembered his side arm, drew it and began wildly shooting behind him. His pursuer turned, ducked and ran off the road into the junipers and Axyl tore off hell-bent for leather down the road.
The Axe Man kept looking over his shoulder all the way back to Bend.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Pushing It
****
“We can’t stop now.”
Ghost Wind turned from Kita to Eli in the fading gloom of the pre-sunrise morning. “Eli, surely you see we need to put the pressure on them now, while they’re reeling. This is scout psychology beginner stuff. Don’t let your enemy regroup or dig in.”
“We’ve cut their number in half,” Kita broke in, “but it hasn’t been without cost. Horace has lost three people, and we lost…” She had to stop for a moment. “We lost Mort.”
The pang of grief that Ghost Wind felt at that news surprised her. She had known the older man less than a day, but he had been kind, and he had been a brave fighter.
“Well, I don’t want to seem callous, and I liked ol’ Mort too, but I think we need to look at the bigger picture,” Horace said. “I think the wolf-girl here is right. We need to press ‘em, to make them even sorrier they ever got into the bein’ an asshole business.”
“I’d like nothing better than to be done with all this too,” Eli said, looking at Kita, “But Axyl got away with at least thirty men and bikes. That’s still a sizeable enough force to be a thorn in everyone else’s side, not only that, but he’ll probably, if left alone, decide he wa
nts revenge. At that point, they’ll be actively hunting anyone they can catch and probably making raids based purely on malice.”
“That’s nothing new,” Kita replied.
“Actually, it is,” Eli said, looking at the row of captured fusion cycles. “Before, as much as those sadists might like to hurt people they catch alone and unprotected, their coordinated efforts always revolved around profit in one form or another. Now, they’ll be coordinating on just giving everyone they think wronged them a very bad day. These jack holes need to be given the gift of fear.”
“I agree,” Horace said.
“I don’t want to lose any more of my people,” Kita told him. “We have so few as it is.”
“Same with New Hope, Kita. And you may think they’ll only come after us, but eventually, somebody in that bunch will find a way to Yama No Matsu, and you’ll be wishin’ that we’d dealt them boys a death blow when it happens.”
Reluctantly, Kita nodded. “Let me get my people, and we’ll form a plan.”
****
Axyl arrived back in the big municipal garage fifteen minutes after sunrise, and he was in no mood to take anything off anybody.
“Boss! What we gonna do? Half our guys didn’t come back.”
“Back off.” He told a grimy biker who had a splatter of blood on his face. “You want to make yourself useful? You want to know what to do? Go tell Cook we all need food and drink and to get her ass on it. Then go find me Cord and anyone else that stayed behind and tell them I want them guarding our perimeter.”
The shell-shocked biker looked at him for a moment too long and Axyl grabbed him by the collar, pulling him close. “Why the fuck are you still standing there? Didn’t I just give you a fucking order?” Released, the man turned and ran to do Axyl’s bidding. Axyl watched him go, a sneer on his handsome face.
“Shadow Rider! Where’s Rider? He and I need to strategize!” Axyl yelled.
“I.. ain’t sure he made it, Axe.” One of the burlier Sharks carefully walked up to him. “Last time I seen him, he was on all fours wheezin’ and coughing. He was a pretty old dude, and I don’t think he could run far. I’d guess he’s probably worm food by now.”
The Road Sharks Page 17
