“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” Talon says to Hyena. “It’s about Slayer.”
Hyena looks over at her while chewing a barbequed squirrel thigh.
Talon says, “With Slayer now leading the knights, she’s going to need help. She won’t be able to do it on her own, just as I wasn’t able to do it when I first led the knights. I’m relying on you to guide her and help her become a strong leader. I want you to be her right hand.”
Hyena shakes her head immediately.
“You should ask somebody else,” Hyena says, choking down squirrel foot.
“There isn’t anyone else,” Talon says.
Hyena doesn’t like the serious look in Talon’s eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Hyena says. “I’ll fight beside her, but I won’t be her babysitter. I won’t be her right hand. I’m no beta wolf.”
“Why not?”
“How long have you known me? I hate being responsible for other people. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for her.”
Talon can see there’s something else. “You don’t think I chose the right leader for the knights, do you?”
After a moment of silence, Hyena shakes her head. She decides to be honest.
“She has potential,” Hyena says. “But I don’t think she’s ready to be a leader. She’s young. She’s going to make mistakes, even get people killed.”
“But out of everyone who’s left, she’s the right person for the job. I know she is.”
“Even so, I’m not the right person to guide her. She should be getting that from you. You’re the one with the experience. You’re the one with the advice she needs.”
“But I’m not always going to be around when she needs help,” Talon says. “You will.”
“I prefer to stay in the background,” Hyena says. “I keep quiet and follow orders. That’s who I am.”
“You’re afraid of responsibility.”
Hyena coughs on her meat.
Talon says, “Pippi left us. The other knights are dead. Aside from Slayer, you’re the only one left. I’m sure I can convince Bunny to rejoin the knights, but she can’t be Slayer’s right hand. It’s got to be you.”
Hyena looks away and focuses on her food. “I’ll think about it.”
Talon stands up. “Another thing, I want you to move your tent closer into camp before it gets dark.”
“Why?”
“Remember two years ago, when some of our big sisters were infected with those metal parasites?”
Hyena nods.
“Well, they’re back. Bunny said the Outpost where she was imprisoned for the past week was overrun by the parasites. Hundreds of men were infected. She barely made it out of there alive.”
Hyena looks at her food, searching for parasites in the meat.
“She said this whole region is likely crawling with the infected,” Talon says. “We need to keep a strong guard overnight.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Hyena says. She has no intention of moving her tent into camp, no matter the danger.
“I hope so,” Talon says.
The middle of the night. Hyena wakes to strange sounds coming from the woods, rubbing grit from the fur on her eyelids. They are moaning, bellowing sounds, like some kind of animal is dying out in the woods. She grabs her spear and machine gun, and creeps into camp.
When she arrives, she finds Talon and Slayer at the edge of the camp, staring off into the darkness beyond the trees. The other wolf girls are poking their heads out of their tents or sitting around the fire with weapons in their laps.
As she arrives, Slayer asks, “What is it?”
The young wolf woman’s fur is so thick and black that Hyena can’t make out any detail of her face in the dim firelight. Just a black fuzzy ball with two yellow glowing eyes.
Talon hushes her and listens more carefully. Then she says, “Some kind of animal.”
“Only one?”
“It sounds that way.”
There is the sound of branches breaking in the distance as the beast staggers through the brush.
“I want you to check it out,” Talon says to Slayer. “Take Hyena and one other warrior with you. If you get into trouble call out and I’ll come running. If you find anything that’s got metal worms crawling on its flesh, you get the hell out of there.”
Slayer nods and grabs her gun. Then she calls out to a small wolf girl sitting by the fire. “Vermin, you’re with us.”
Hyena is surprised by Slayer’s choice in warrior to accompany them. Vermin is a small, scraggly girl who isn’t much in a fight. An omega wolf.
Hyena has to ask. “Why Vermin?”
Slayer’s fur puffs out at the question.
Hyena says, “Hunter, Marrow and Arsenic are the obvious choices. Or Bunny. They are the strongest warriors after Talon.”
Slayer shakes her head. “They’re too big and loud. I’m not looking for strong. I want stealthy.”
Then she tosses Vermin a machete. The grungy wolf girl sheaths it through a muddy rotten leather belt around her waist. She has a big smile on her face, grit between her thin pointy teeth, as the three of them enter the woods. She’s excited to finally be able to do something. Most of the time, she’s ordered to stay back at camp and stay out of trouble.
Hyena doesn’t like Vermin very much. The girl always has a skunky, vinegary smell to her. Her thick dark fur is always knotted and matted, with leaves and weeds tangled within. Sometimes she can be found cutting dried shit out of the fur on her ass. She’s like the dirty stray dog that nobody ever wants to pet.
When Hyena first joined the Warriors, she ran into the same problem that she had in McDonaldland: people paid too much attention to her. After a few months alone in the wild, Hyena ran across the wolf women and decided to join them. She enjoyed her time alone, but knew her chances of survival were greater joining a pack. During her time alone, Hyena had dropped a hundred pounds without losing any of her curves, so when the other wolf women met her they all fell in love with her beauty. They all wanted to be her friend.
And just like in McDonaldland, Hyena tried to get everyone to hate her, so she came up with the idea of modifying her appearance. She turned herself into a Hyena, so that she wouldn’t fit in. But many wolf girls, like Bunny and Skunky, only cheered her new look. They started copying her idea and modified their looks as well. She was cursed with being the trend-starting type. Eventually, she had to start treating the other wolf women like shit. It was the only way to give them the message that she preferred to be left alone.
Hyena met Vermin years later. The scraggly girl had been a part of the tribe since she was a little kid, long before Hyena joined, but Hyena had never noticed her before.
As Hyena looks like a Hyena, Vermin looks like a rat. At first, Hyena thought Vermin was just another trend-follower who modified her wolf features to look like another animal. She hated when new wolf women followed her trend. But then Hyena learned that Vermin did not modify herself to look rat-like. She wasn’t modified at all. It’s just a mere coincidence that her natural wolf features make her look exactly like a rat.
As they go deep into the woods, Slayer and Vermin become nearly invisible in the dark, disappearing into the shadows. Their steps are quiet, practically inaudible. If it wasn’t for their smells, Hyena wouldn’t be able to keep track of them. And they haven’t even gone into stealth mode yet.
Slayer uses her long black fingers to give the women commands, ordering Vermin to flank left and Hyena to flank right. Her two subordinates go directly into action, sneaking through the brush toward the moaning animal cries.
Hyena knows Talon sent the three of them out there together on purpose. She’s testing Slayer and Hyena both. She wants to see how quickly the young wolf woman takes to command, who she chooses to keep in her company, and she wants to see how Hyena takes to being Slayer’s beta wolf. Hyena loves and admires Talon, but the dog-faced bitch really knows how to piss her off.
Alone an
d creeping through the brush along the right side of the animal, Hyena gets a better smell of what they are dealing with. She smells deer fur, open wounds, blood in the air. The aroma causes her to instinctually growl from the shadows, her muscles flexing, ready to pounce.
When she sees the deer, it is crawling through the trees, its stomach ripped open, its insides leaking out through the forest. As it struggles, Hyena can tell that it’s stuck. Some of its intestines are tangled around a fallen tree branch, pinning it to the spot.
The breeze changes direction and Hyena can smell other animals in the forest coming closer. Their odor is very similar to that of her big sisters, but their movements aren’t loud enough to be.
Her eyes widen when they come out of the trees and approach the wounded animal. They are wolves. Real wolves. Hyena had thought real wolves had gone extinct ages ago. She had only seen them previously as illustrations in books.
The wolves creep slowly to the animal, growls under their breath, then they attack. They go for the neck, finishing the animal off, then devour its meat with snarling ferocity. It’s a beautiful sight. Real wolves on a real hunt, enjoying their bounty.
Hyena continues flanking the beasts until she runs into Vermin’s vinegary stink. It takes her a while to figure out where the grimy woman is hiding, even when she knows she’s only few feet away from her. Vermin gives her position away when she smiles widely at Hyena, her teeth reflecting the moonlight. The rat girl seems even more excited to see real wolves than she is.
A crashing noise in the woods startles the wolves. They stop eating and look into the dark, all in the same direction. Something else is coming toward them. As it speeds through the trees, the wolf pack disperses, fleeing in the other direction.
One of the smaller wolves isn’t fast enough and the unseen predator takes it down, bites into it, holds it down by the scruff of its neck. The first thing Hyena notices are metal worms whipping out of its face and down its spine. An infected gray wolf.
As the crazed beast releases its parasites into the smaller wolf, Vermin slowly pulls two small cylinders out of her belt strap. She screws them together and forms a blowgun, her weapon of choice. Hyena grabs her arm and shakes her head at the wolf girl. Talon told them to get the hell out of there if they came in contact with anything infected. But as soon as Hyena releases her hand and wipes away the girl’s foul-smelling grease and dander covering her palm, Vermin just loads up the blowgun and returns to her original goal.
Vermin blows a poison dart into the infected wolf. The creature barks and snarls at the pricking sensation, then turns to the two wolf women. It moves two feet in their direction and then collapses to the ground, paralyzed. Vermin whips out her machete, leaps like a jumping spider out of the bushes, and chops the creature’s head off in one swing. Then she decapitates the other wolf, to put it out of its misery.
“Don’t get any of those worms on you,” Hyena yells, moving toward her.
But Vermin is already stepping away from it, shaking the blood and parasite larvae off the blade.
Slayer steps out of the woods and meets them. The way she looks at her, Hyena can tell she’s proud of her decision to bring Vermin along with them. She doesn’t say a word about it; no congratulating Vermin on killing the infected wolf single-handedly, no rubbing Hyena’s nose in the fact that she was right about stealth over strength. She just stands there calmly, like a statuesque warrior, and nods her head at her two subordinates. The kid’s confidence really pisses Hyena off.
“Let’s get back to camp and tell the others,” Slayer says. “There’s bound to be more infected animals nearby.”
But the second she finishes saying that, they hear screaming back at camp. Then gunfire. The wolf women are under attack.
The three wolf women race toward camp. As they run, they hear the chaos of combat; bullets ripping through the trees, growls and snarls of heated warriors, the cries of their sisters as they fall in battle.
A young wolf girl dashes through the woods toward them. A horrified look splayed across her face as she flees for her life, as if something monstrous is pursuing her.
“Run!” the girl yells as she charges, ready to plow through them if they don’t get out of her way. “We have to get out of here!”
Then her body explodes into a rainbow of blood as an enormous beast barrels into her. Not from behind, but from her right side, coming out of nowhere. An infected moose. Its antlers tear her in half on impact, then it tramples her corpse, crushing her skull into the earth, as it continues running through the trees.
Hyena looks down at the girl’s pulverized body. She no longer has a face and most of her guts are now spread across the ground, like a bloody trail left behind by the infected animal. She was new to the tribe, having joined only a few days ago, after being rescued from the Outlander facility prison with Talon and Nova. After enduring rape and torture at the hands of the Outlanders, escaping the fate of being turned into a food animal for the people of McDonaldland, and surviving the great war that took the lives of over ninety percent of the wolf women tribe, she ended up dying here, pathetically, like human roadkill.
As the moose circles back and heads in their direction, Slayer snaps Hyena out of it.
“Come on!” she says.
Hyena raises her rifle and they head into camp, losing the moose in a thicket of trees.
When the camp comes into view, the place is a war zone. Dozens of infected forest creatures are raging through the trees at their sisters, attacking wildly. They are mostly large animals—elk, deer, moose, and even a couple of wild bulls. At least one of their sisters is already dead, others are wounded. One wolf woman is on the ground screaming, wriggling as an elk chews open her stomach and pukes metal worms into her belly. Bunny is riding her metal sentinel, spider-walking through the camp, blasting at the rabid deer with Gatling guns. Talon hacks at the animals with her dual axes as they stampede at her subordinates.
The three wolf women open fire as they enter camp, painting the oncoming beasts with bullet holes. But the animals keep coming. Slayer is taken aback.
“The worms keep them moving,” Hyena tells her. “You have to sever the spine or damage the brain to stop them.”
Slayer nods in agreement, then formulates a strategy.
“Get up a tree,” Slayer tells Vermin. “Get as many as you can with your darts. They’ll be more effective than bullets.”
Vermin nods her head and goes for the nearest tree, climbing up like a raggedy spider monkey.
Slayer turns to Hyena. “Watch my back.”
A deer crosses their path, dragging a screaming wolf girl. It’s got her by the ankle, biting down on it as if it were a wolf-like predator carrying away its prey. Blood and meat dribble from its teeth. The woman screeches wildly, worms entering the holes in her ankle, sheets of skin peeling off as her face is dragged across the dirt. Slayer fires at the deer. She shoots off its lower jaw and the wolf girl is let free. Slayer steps forward and fires three more bullets into its face as the wounded girl runs for cover. The deer escapes before Slayer can take it down.
They reach the main group of wolf women, standing back-to-back in the center of camp. Inside their circle, there are two wounded girls, quivering and curled into balls as metal worms crawl under their skin. Slayer immediately takes command of the five women still standing.
“Aim for the legs or faces,” Slayer tells them, as the thrashing animals circle them like sharks.
With Slayer’s guidance, the women take out three deer, all of them focusing on one at a time. From up above, Vermin’s darts hit seven of the animals, stopping them in their tracks. Hyena begins to feel as if the worst is over.
But then something happens. The animals get smarter. Instead of attacking chaotically through the camp, they team up and combine forces. Two elk and a moose go for Bunny in the sentinel. All at the same time, they slam their weight into one of the machine’s legs, bending it in half. The sentinel falls, crashing into one of the warrior v
ehicles, pinning Bunny down.
The deer gang up on Vermin, slamming their antlers into the tree trunk, trying to shake her off. Vermin holds onto the trunk tightly like a tick in a wolf’s armpit. The creatures aren’t able to knock her off, but with all the shaking she is no longer able to aim her blowgun at them, not even for a split second.
Four of the elk try to split up the crowd in the center of camp, they charge right through them until a few women splinter off in different directions. Then the deer choose one of them, Arsenic, the largest warrior of the group. They crowd around her, keeping her from getting back to the others. She lowers her axe into an elk’s forehead. The axe becomes lodged in the animal’s skull, but it doesn’t go down. The animal stands up on its hind legs and kicks Arsenic in the face with such force that the top half of her head pops off in a gob of messy pulp.
Slayer regroups the women and orders them not to separate again. There are only two women left standing in the camp outside of their group. One is Talon, standing back to back with a warrior named Marrow. Talon hacks through antlers and elk flesh as the animals come near her. Marrow blasts them with her shotgun. But the unified elk quickly separate the two women and go after Marrow. They circle her, squeeze her into an awkward fighting stance.
Marrow aims her shotgun at the ground and blows out the knees of two of the elk, then blows off the face of another. Hyena thinks she might have a chance. The woman has always been a solid fighter. She takes out all four of the elk, blowing out their knees first, then targeting their faces with a close-range shotgun blast.
But Marrow isn’t paying close enough attention to what’s around her. Three more elk come in and knock her off her feet. As she lays on the ground, she blows one of their heads off in a shower of brain and gore. When she crawls away from the animals and goes back to Talon, she realizes the mistake she’s made. Marrow’s gunshot blast had coated Talon’s back with the animal’s insides, covering her with blood and dozens of tiny metal parasites.
Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands Page 13
