“Talon!” Slayer cries, as the worms burrow into her leader’s back.
As Marrow does her best to lay down cover fire to protect her leader, Talon swipes at the worms. She gets some of them off, but most of them make it into her skin. Then a deer plows into her, knocking her off her feet, throwing her axes from her hands, and tossing her up into the air. When Marrow sees Talon hit the ground, she abandons her fallen leader and crosses the camp, joining Slayer’s group.
Talon gets up. There is a fire in her eyes that Hyena has never seen before. Her dog snout snarls fiercely. Like a fully transformed werewolf, she charges at the deer that had knocked her down, running on all fours after the animal. Fully embracing her predatory instincts, Talon leaps up on top of the deer and sinks her claws into its flesh. Then she rips its throat out with her teeth as it carries her off into the forest. It doesn’t fall down even with its neck torn open, continuing to flee away from the camp into the darkness. Talon hangs on, feasting on the animal as it runs, worms biting her in the chest, squirming down her throat.
With Talon infected, Hyena realizes that it’s up to Slayer now. She’ll have to lead them through this battle. But just one look at the young black wolf and Hyena can tell that she’s not troubled by this turn of events.
“Get to the vehicles,” Slayer tells the women.
They follow her lead, leaping over dead animals and collapsed tents. Hyena helps the wounded girls to safety, careful not to get too close to their parasite-ridden flesh. Once at the vehicles, they find Apple and Nova inside one of the cars, shooting at deer through the windows.
“Turn this car around,” Slayer yells at Apple. “We need a barricade.”
Then she orders another wolf girl, Baretta, to get into the other vehicle and pull it in. As soon as the vehicles are in position, the wolf women come to a turning point in the battle. The eight women left standing fire at the crazed animals from above, behind, and within the vehicles, taking down deer after deer.
“Aim for the legs,” Slayer yells.
The deer attempt to leap over the vehicles to get at them, but with machine guns spraying across their ankles they collapse before they get off the ground. After a dozen of them go down, the animals become timid and fall back. Even in their rabid state, they recognize their efforts are hopeless.
But one animal doesn’t stand down. An eighteen-hundred-pound moose barrels toward them. Hyena knows that an animal that size could hit their vehicle barrier so hard that it would crush all of them against the car behind them. When she looks at Slayer, she can tell the black wolf is worried about the same thing.
High in the trees, Vermin blows a dart into the moose. It doesn’t slow down. She blows another one. The animal’s massive weight is just too much for the poison to have any effect. When Slayer realizes Vermin’s darts aren’t going to save them, she steps up.
“Cover me,” Slayer says to Hyena, handing off her machine gun.
“What are you going to do?” Hyena asks.
Slayer licks her tongue at the beta wolf and puts the blade of a hunting knife between her teeth. Without saying a word, she hops over the hood of the car and races cheetah-like toward the infected moose. Racing on her front and back paws, grinding her teeth on the blade in her mouth, she leaps through the fire like a demon bat. And a second before the beast and the beast woman collide, Slayer grabs the knife out of her mouth, rolls out of the way, and plunges the blade into the moose’s foot.
The blade goes deep enough into the ground that it nails the hoof to the spot, but the beast is moving with too much force to stop. As Slayer holds the knife down with all of her wolf-strength, the moose’s leg rips from its body when its massive weight plows forward. Once it hits the ground, Slayer pulls the knife out, grabs the animal by one of its giant antlers, and stabs it in the head until it stops moving. Then she backs away before any of the parasites get to her.
Bear Slayer was Slayer’s original tribe name. They gave it to her because she killed a large bear when she was only a child, with nothing but a sharpened stick. Hyena always thought those were just rumors. She figured it had to have been an exaggeration or just an all out lie. But after witnessing Slayer take down the rabid moose with a hunting knife, she begins to wonder if those rumors weren’t actually completely true.
Hyena and a few of the wolf women come out of hiding to kill the other wounded deer in the camp, and Vermin slides out of the tree to finish off the animals she paralyzed with her darts.
The wolf girls stand in the middle of the destruction, looking around as if amazed any of them made it through alive at all. Before any of them get a chance to speak, Talon comes staggering out of the woods into the camp with deer blood leaking from her mouth down her chest. She goes for her misplaced axes and gives Slayer a nod of approval as she straps them to her back. Then she collapses onto the dead moose’s back like she mistook it for a big comfortable bed.
After assessing the situation, Hyena returns to Slayer who is still leaning over Talon’s unconscious body.
“Dice, Arsenic, and Spink are dead,” Hyena tells her. “Kimmy, Hunter, Likki, and Celia are infected.” Then she looks down at their leader below. “In addition to Talon.”
Slayer nods.
“Are our infected sisters going to end up like these animals?” Slayer asks. “Will they attack us?”
“Yes,” Hyena says. “Once the parasites take over their minds.”
Slayer nods.
“Then we should kill them before that happens.” Slayer’s words are cold and detached. “Take care of it.”
When she turns to walk away, Hyena stops her.
“Wait,” Hyena says. “There’s a way we can save them.
Slayer looks back.
“Bunny was infected before and we saved her,” Hyena says. “We just have to kill the creature that controls the parasites.”
“How do we find it?”
“It lives in the ocean. We’ll probably be able to find it if we follow the coast.”
“I don’t want to give our sisters false hope,” Slayer says.
“We have to try,” Hyena says.
Slayer thinks about it for a quick moment.
“Do we still have any Meat cages?” Slayer asks.
“Yeah,” Hyena says.
“Lock them up for now,” Slayer says. “We’re pulling out of here within the hour.”
Then Slayer walks away. As she strides through camp with the confidence of a young Talon, Hyena realizes she was wrong about the young girl. Slayer does have what it takes to be a leader. A great one. And she’s more than ready, no matter her age.
Hyena, on the other hand, still isn’t sure if she’s the right person to be Slayer’s second in command.
When Talon is conscious, metal worms crawling through her face, she asks to see Slayer, Hyena, and Bunny.
Bunny is the last to arrive, licking her wounds, walking with a slight limp. She was unconscious for half the battle and didn’t even know what had happened to Talon until a minute beforehand. She had always thought the hard dog-faced bitch was indestructible. She had to see it to believe it.
“I want you to assemble your team of knights, find the sea beast, and kill it no matter the cost,” Talon tells Slayer. “I don’t care about my life, but our sisters must be cured.”
She doesn’t have to tell this to the three warriors. Even if she would have persuaded them not to go, they would still go.
“There should be eight knights just as there have always been,” Talon tells Slayer. “Choose five more from whoever is left. Leave the others to guard the infected. Tell them to keep us locked in this cage no matter what happens.”
Slayer nods. “We won’t fail.”
Hyena doesn’t approve of Slayer’s overconfidence.
“It’s going to be more difficult than you think,” Hyena tells her. “We were lucky to have defeated the ocean creature the last time.”
“But you will be eight,” Talon says. “We beat the creature and
we were only three.”
“But you were one of the three,” Hyena says to Talon. “One of you is worth a hundred knights.”
Talon snorts a worm up her black nostril like snot. “Don’t underestimate yourselves. If you all fight together you will figure out a way to beat it.”
“The tough part will be finding the creature,” Slayer says.
Bunny steps in. “No, that should be the easy part. Any of the infected animals could lead us to the monster. All we have to do is find them and follow them, and with the number of infected animals in this area we shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
Slayer nods. “We can do this.”
Talon smiles at the serious look on Slayer’s face. She can tell the little wild girl has really grown up.
“I know you can,” Talon says.
“Who do we have left to choose from?” Slayer asks Hyena and Bunny, as they discuss who Slayer should choose to join the knights.
“There’s only eight left to choose from,” Hyena says.
“Which eight?”
Hyena lists them off, “Marrow, Baretta, Zizzy, Vyra, Apple, Toy, Nova, and Vermin.
“We take five and leave three?” Slayer asks.
Then she ponders it over in her head. A few seconds later, she’s already made a firm decision.
“Let’s take Baretta, Zizzy, Vyra, Toy and Vermin. Let’s leave Nova, Apple, and Marrow.”
“What?” both Bunny and Hyena say at the same time.
“Apple should go with us,” Hyena says. “She’s fought these creatures before.”
As she says this, Apple walks by chomping on an apple. “Huh?”
“She did hold up pretty good two years ago,” Bunny says. “And that was before she actually knew how to fight.”
“Wait a minute…” Apple interjects. “Don’t sign me up for this thing. I barely survived last time.”
“I don’t want Apple,” Slayer says.
“Yeah, she doesn’t want me,” Apple says.
Nobody is acknowledging her even though the conversation is about her.
“She’s not a warrior,” Slayer says. “She’s just a driver.”
“I’m just a driver,” Apple says.
“But she’s older and more experienced than the other girls,” Hyena says.
Slayer shakes her head. “She’d be useless.”
“Yeah, I’d be useless,” Apple says.
Hyena says, “She’s not my first choice either, but she’s in the top five. Trust me, let’s take her.”
“No, don’t trust her,” Apple says, chewing a bite of apple. “Leave me.”
“I think her experience with these parasites would be more useful here,” Slayer says, “keeping an eye on Talon. She stays behind. That’s final.”
“Yay!” Apple says, lifting her arms victoriously into the air and walking away from them. They still don’t acknowledge her.
“I think you should leave Toy, Zizzy, and Vermin,” Hyena says.
“I need Toy and Vermin,” Slayer says.
“Have you ever seen Toy in a fight?” Hyena says. “She’s a mechanic. She’s not knight material.”
“But we could use a mechanic.”
“Forget about Toy,” Bunny says. “She’s injured. We should leave her.”
Slayer looks over at the wolf girl mechanic by the vehicles and sees her bandaged leg. Then she nods at Hyena in agreement.
Hyena continues her thought, “And Vermin might be useful when sneaking around in the shadows, but how is she on a bike? Has she even ridden a bike before?”
“I could always use someone like Vermin,” Slayer says. “She’s one of my top choices.”
“But you cut my two top choices,” Hyena says. “Marrow and Nova.”
“I can’t use Marrow and Nova.”
“Marrow is the strongest of the bunch and Nova killed the Hamburglar.”
“Are you serious?” Bunny says. “She actually killed the Hamburglar?”
“In single combat,” Hyena says.
“I only thought Talon could defeat someone like that,” Bunny says.
“She’s knight material more than any of them.”
“But Nova and Marrow are both suffering from personal issues,” Slayer says. “Their heads just aren’t in the game. Marrow hasn’t even begun to recover from her sisters dying in the war. Talon is infected right now because of her. She’s not thinking clearly.”
“But they are the only two I would have definitely chosen of the eight,” Hyena says. “You’re choosing all the kids. Vyra, Zizzy, Vermin, Baretta? They have no idea what to do in a battle.”
“That’s what everyone told Pippi and I when we were their age. Then Talon gave us a chance. We quickly proved ourselves despite what everyone said about us.”
“If you take Nova and Marrow, I don’t care who you pick for the other three.”
Slayer thinks about it for a minute.
“I’ll take Nova if you can convince her to come with us,” Slayer says. “But I don’t think she’ll go. I don’t want her unless she’s feeling up to it.”
“I’ll convince her,” Hyena says. “But you should leave Zizzy and take Marrow. She’s a solid fighter.”
“I don’t want to separate Zizzy, Baretta, and Vyra. They make a great team.”
“I’m sorry,” Hyena says. “But I won’t be your beta wolf if you don’t trust me on this. Marrow should go. Zizzy should stay.”
“I want Zizzy.”
“If Marrow isn’t going then that’s it, I’m out.”
Slayer thinks for a minute. Her deep eyes staring off into the night sky.
“Fine,” Slayer says. “For you, I’ll compromise. We can take Nova and Marrow, but we don’t leave Zizzy. We’ll leave Baretta.”
Bunny says, “Of those three girls, Baretta’s the best shot. Why leave her?”
“She might be the better shot at target practice,” Slayer says, “but she’s the most nervous of the three during battle. The only way I’d feel confident in her is if she had her two friends backing her up, giving her support.”
She points at the three girls sitting by the fire. Teenagers with bright, excited looks in their faces. She focuses on Zizzy, the scrawny albino girl with cold white eyes and long white hair that flows past her waist.
“Zizzy is the bravest of the three,” Slayer says. “I’d rather have her than any of them.”
“Then leave Vyra,” Hyena says about the tall girl with the overly tan skin. “You can have the best shot and the bravest. Leave the mediocre soldier.”
Slayer doesn’t like that idea.
“I agree,” Bunny says. “It’s a good compromise.”
“It’s not the team I want,” Slayer says. “Our chances of success will be much lower.”
“You’ll still get Zizzy and Vermin,” Hyena says.
“I really wish we could just leave Marrow . . .” Slayer says.
“Marrow isn’t debatable,” Hyena says. “We take Marrow, Nova, Baretta, Vermin, and Zizzy. We leave Vyra, Apple, and Toy. Sound good?”
Slayer doesn’t respond for a moment. Then she shakes her head. “I’ll think about it. The final decision is up to me.”
“It’s the best decision,” Hyena says. “Unless you want to leave Vermin and Zizzy in exchange for Apple and Vyra.”
Slayer doesn’t like Hyena’s tone. “I’ll think about it.”
Then she walks off, toward the mechanic.
Bunny smiles at Hyena. “I’ve never seen you get so worked up over something.”
“I really hate Talon for putting me in this position.”
“As Slayer’s second in command?” Bunny asks.
Hyena sighs loudly, ignoring the rabbit girl next to her.
“If she doesn’t agree to the compromise, I’m breaking Zizzy’s legs so that she doesn’t have a choice.”
Bunny snickers under her breath and steps away.
“How many bikes are ready to go?” Hyena asks the mechanic, Toy.
Toy rubs grease onto her red fur. In the back of her truck, there are multiple motorcycle parts. It’s her job to keep all of the vehicles running, especially the motorcycles for the knights of their gang. As an apprentice of the engineer, Kockwick, she is talented at reconstructing new vehicles out of old junk.
“Four,” Toy says. “But I can get you a fifth if you wait until midday tomorrow.”
“We want to get out of here as soon as possible,” Hyena says. “Four will be fine. We’ll just double-up.”
“Is Slayer going to ride with you?” Toy asks. “The way Talon rode with her second in command, Mars?”
“Slayer is going to ride Talon’s bike,” Hyena says. “It’s got the most muscle. And I’m riding my own bike.”
“Are you sure?” Toy asks. “You should stick by her side, especially on her first time leading the knights.”
“I don’t ride anything but my own bike.”
Marrow comes up to Toy’s truck and picks out the bike she wants.
“That one,” Marrow says, pointing at Slayer’s old bike. She knows Slayer will be riding Talon’s bike, so she wants the next best available.
Marrow has already assumed she would be riding with the knights, knowing that she’s the toughest warrior of the eight candidates. She would have been shocked to learn how much Hyena had to fight Slayer to get her on the team.
“When do we pull out?” Marrow asks Hyena.
Hyena says, “Twenty minutes.”
By the campfire, Slayer is telling the younger girls which ones are coming. Although none of them had ever been taken seriously by many of the warriors due to their age and lack of fighting experience, they knew at least one of them had to be able to join the knights due to lack of candidates.
Based on Baretta’s animated reaction and the disappointed look on Vyra’s face, it seems as if Slayer did decide to take Hyena’s advice. Baretta, Zizzy, and Vermin will be joining the knights. Vyra stays. The spiky black-haired wolf girl is so devastated by the news she looks like she could rip somebody’s face off.
“You know, I never really cared to join the knights before,” Marrow says to Hyena, leaning on the side of the pickup truck with her round hip thrust to one side. “I always could have, you know. I’ve always been really good at riding and shooting. But I’m more of a leader than a follower, and you know how Talon is. She’s the alpha wolf. She hates riding with really strong warriors like me who’d be too much competition.”
Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands Page 14
