Hyena knows Marrow has always been one of the better warriors, but she never knew Marrow thought of herself as good enough to be competition for Talon. None of the warriors but the old leader, Grandma, were in Talon’s league.
“I probably should be leading the knights now,” Marrow says. “But, you know, Slayer was always Talon’s favorite. Everyone likes her. It’s all just a popularity contest and has nothing to do with who is the best suited for the job. I’m suited for the job, of course, but I’m not the type who wins popularity contests. I don’t care for that kind of bullshit.”
Hyena wonders why Marrow is talking to her like this. Everyone knows she hates casual conversation. She wonders if people are going to always talk to her like this now that she’s Slayer’s right arm. Or maybe it’s because there are just not many people in their tribe left to talk to.
“I notice you ride with a spear,” Marrow says. “I’m a shotgun bitch, myself. I don’t do melee weapons. They break too easy in a fight. There ain’t no melee weapon that can outlast my shotgun.”
As Marrow continues talking about her prowess with a shotgun, Toy rolls out Hyena’s bike and gives her an it’s ready nod.
“All gassed up?” Hyena asks, cutting Marrow off to speak to Toy.
“Yeah,” Toy says. “Plus extra in the canisters.”
“Thanks.” Hyena heads off with the bike toward her camp to pack, leaving Marrow in mid-conversation.
Although Marrow’s a competent fighter, Hyena is not going to enjoy riding with her if she’s always going to be talking about herself like that. There’s nothing Hyena hates more than a woman with an over-inflated ego.
The eight warrior knights ride out of the moonlit camp, two per bike. Apple, Vyra, and Toy wave goodbye, wishing them all luck and trying not to show any sign of doubt. Three of the infected wolf women have already gone rabid, thrashing at the bars of their cage as the motorcycles drive by. Talon looks like she’s just barely hanging in there, trying with all her might to keep control of her senses as the metal worms crawl in and out of her snout.
Hyena ended up with Vermin riding on the back of her bike. She is not in a very good mood as she rides with the rat girl’s body pressed against her naked back, drenching her fur and bike seat with vinegary oils. At least, while they’re moving, the wind will blow her stink back away from Hyena’s nose. But Vermin couldn’t be happier to be riding with Hyena, her mouth permanently stuck in a wide open smile with her wolf tongue dangling out in the wind.
Slayer leads the pack with Zizzy holding tightly to her waist, followed by Hyena and Vermin, then Bunny and Baretta—who rides in a sidecar that Toy attached to Bunny’s motorcycle, rather than on the back of her bike, since Bunny is still a carrier of the parasites and could easily infect anyone who gets too close to her.
Far behind the pack, Marrow and Nova ride, but Marrow has a difficult time keeping control of her bike as they get onto the cracked ancient highway.
When Slayer notices this, she falls back to check on the two stragglers.
“Any problems with the bike?” Slayer yells over their motors.
Even though Slayer is genuinely trying to find and solve a problem if one exists, Marrow only hears her leader’s tone of voice as a condemning one and reacts defensively.
“It’s because she’s on my back,” Marrow yells, pointing at Nova. “I’m used to riding solo and she moves around too much.”
Slayer eyes the older warrior woman for a few yards.
“You can go back to camp and switch places with Vyra if you like,” Slayer tells her. “She wouldn’t have any problems riding with anyone on her back. Tomorrow afternoon Toy will have a fifth bike ready and you’ll be able to catch up to us, riding solo.”
Marrow takes it as a threat, but Slayer is actually serious. It is the best solution for Marrow’s problem. That is, unless Marrow is just making up excuses for her poor riding skills.
“I’ll be fine,” Marrow says. She turns to Nova. “Just quit moving around so much, you wiggly bitch.”
Then Marrow speeds up, to prove she knows what she’s doing and nearly knocks Nova off when she hits a pothole. Nova wiggles twice as much after that.
Back at camp, when Hyena and Slayer asked Nova to join the knights, they found her masturbating out in the woods again. Hyena came up behind her, and even though they smelled each other, Nova wouldn’t stop. She was naked, her spiked armor piled near the tree behind her.
By the look on her face, Nova was taking no pleasure from the act. It was almost as if the act of masturbating was frustrating and tedious to her. She just wanted to have an orgasm so she could take another step closer to becoming a full werewolf.
As she finished, Hyena asked her, “We want you to ride with us.”
Nova leaned back against a tree trunk with her thin coffee-colored legs spread, her muscles tensed, convulsing slightly as her body transformed. She couldn’t say anything for several minutes, but she seemed like she could listen.
“You’re a good fighter,” Hyena said. “You killed the Hamburglar in the war, escaped from the Outlander prison camp, and I even saw you take on Casper and her crew single-handedly. You were made to be a knight.”
They waited until Nova could speak again.
“I don’t even know how to ride a motorcycle,” Nova said with the long bangs of her short black hair covering her eyes.
“You don’t have to ride,” Hyena said. “We don’t have enough bikes for everyone yet anyway.”
Nova took deep breaths, casually fidgeting with her pubic hair. “I’m done with fighting. You should count on somebody else. I’m not going to be around much longer.”
Hyena growled with frustration.
Slayer put her hand on Hyena’s shoulder to calm her down. “Let her stay. She’s got a lot of masturbating to do.”
As they turned to walk away, Slayer spoke to Hyena loud enough so that Nova could hear. “She’s only had two or three orgasms in her entire life. She’s practically still human. It’s going to take her weeks, maybe months to fully turn, even if she masturbates nonstop.”
Slayer looked back and squinted her eyes at the dark-skinned girl. “It’s too bad. We could have really used her. Talon could have really used her. And if I were her, I would be begging to ride into battle. Nothing takes my mind off of my problems like riding into battle.”
Then they returned to camp.
Hyena was surprised when Nova entered the camp five minutes later. She didn’t say anything, nor did Slayer say anything to her. The depressed wolf girl just got ready to go, calmly packing up her things without even making eye contact with any of her fellow sisters.
The wolf girls follow the highway south, the morning sun rising in the eastern sky.
On the way, they come across a row of infected turtles walking along the side of the road, verifying that they are headed in the right direction. Up ahead, they come across an infected warthog. Then some infected raccoons. All of them headed in the same direction.
“They’re headed for the Forbidden Zone,” Bunny says to the group, yelling over their engines as they ride. “There’s a southern coast down there. I’m sure a sea beast lives in that ocean just as there was a sea beast in the western ocean.”
“Why’s it called the Forbidden Zone?” Vermin asks, looking back at Bunny from Hyena’s bike.
“I don’t know,” Bunny says. “It used to be called Texas in the old world. There’s a community of people who live down there. The Meat who imprisoned me called them Zoners.”
“Are they dangerous?”
“I have no idea,” Bunny says. “The Meat knew practically nothing about them.”
The wolf women stop every two hours for a ten minute rest. Every third stop they rest for an hour, where they eat and try to get some sleep, just enough to trick their bodies into believing that they’ve rested.
They are on their second hour-long rest stop now, hiding out in a long-abandoned train car that is warped and rusted into the track.
As long as they stay out of sight, the infected animals traveling along the highway won’t attack.
Hyena stares at a map of the old world in an ancient book, the last remaining copy in the Warriors’ possession.
She says, “I don’t know if we’re going to have enough gas to get there, let alone get back.”
“Where is it?” Slayer asks, trying to understand the map.
With her long black index claw, Hyena points at the highway they’re on and where she believes they are at the moment. Then she shows Slayer where she thinks they need to go, down to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
“We’re going to have a long walk if we don’t get any gas by the time we reach the Forbidden Zone,” Hyena says. “And there’s nobody out here to raid.”
“I’ll figure something out,” Slayer says.
“We should have stopped at the Outpost when we came to it,” Hyena says. “There surely would have been plenty of gas. We could have gotten all we needed there.”
“It was too much of a risk,” Slayer says. “I can’t afford to lose anyone on the way to the Forbidden Zone. It’s going to be hard enough with just the eight of us.”
“We can still go back,” Hyena says. “I’m sure the infected Meat have already cleared out and started heading south with the animals.”
Slayer shakes her head. “We keep moving forward.”
“Yeah, we keep moving forward,” say the three teenagers in unison, hovering behind Hyena’s back.
The girls giggle.
When Hyena puts the atlas down and steps away, the three teenagers leap for the book. They gather around and flip through the pages, covering all the maps with muddy fingerprints. Hyena doesn’t go back to stop them, but growls with annoyance. The girls don’t even know how to read.
All three of the teenagers on the mission (as well as Vyra back at camp) were born in the wasteland. They were all conceived in the same way: between the joining of a werewolf mother and a male captive. They all had different mothers, each one eventually killed off in one battle or another. They never knew who their fathers were.
Wolf women born in the wasteland don’t even understand the concept of what a father is. They understand that women mate with men to become pregnant, but other than that they see no significance to the men. The men are slaves, no more than cattle to the women.
Like cattle, their mothers most likely ate their fathers eventually. For all these girls know, they might have shared in eating their fathers as well. The wolf women often share their meals with the rest of the tribe. And all teenage girls in the wasteland grow up on the flesh of men. They do not see it as cannibalism. They are taught that men are not of the same species as wolf women.
Hyena has eaten quite a few men herself since she’s joined the Warriors, yet she still thinks of it as unusual and barbaric. She finds it difficult to understand how easy young wolf women take to eating members of the opposite sex.
Most women who refuse to eat the flesh of men are usually ostracized in the tribe. So Hyena, who found the idea of being ostracized incredibly appealing, decided she wouldn’t eat men for a while. But then something happened. The first time a man was slaughtered for a feast, the blood in the air made Hyena ferocious with hunger. The wolf in her craved to eat the meat of men, needed to. It was as if her brain had been rewired to think of human males as her primary food source. The more attractive a male was to her, the more delicious his meat would be. It was as if hunger and sexual desire had somehow gotten mixed up in her head and she couldn’t tell them apart anymore, nor did she want to.
But deep down, she still knew how wrong it was. It still felt like cannibalism to her. It still confounded her how normal it was to the younger women, especially the pre-pubescent virgins who were still completely human. It disturbed her how much she actually enjoyed it. Still, she did it anyway. And the more of a wolf she became, the harder it was to resist.
Thirty hours of following ancient highways on the map. The further south they travel, the more infected animals they cross on the highway. It sometimes becomes difficult to get through them. Only once do the animals try to attack them on their bikes, but the women move too quickly for them.
It is also increasingly becoming hotter for the women the further south they go. The bright sun beats down on them as they travel across the desert wasteland, causing them to sweat profusely through their fur, especially those who have not shed their winter coats yet. The less furry girls, like Nova, Zizzy, and Baretta, are doing okay, but the hairier women are really suffering in the heat. Vermin is collapsed against Hyena’s back, panting loudly in her ear. Marrow looks like she’s ready to fall off her bike. And Bunny has stripped down naked with her sweat-drenched underclothes wrapped around her head like a wet towel.
Slayer seems to be toughing it out, even though she has to be suffering worse than anyone. She has more hair on her body than any of them and her hair is black, which attracts the sun’s light. She is also covered from head to toe in black leather, with only her face uncovered.
When they come to their next ten minute rest stop, Slayer unzips her leather jacket and a pool of sweat splashes onto the asphalt. She stands with her jacket open, facing the wind. A wide satisfied smile stretches across her black dog lips.
“I’m ready to shave all of this shit off,” Marrow says, as she pulls globs of wet fur off of her body and slaps it to the ground. “I can’t fucking stand the heat.”
The knights begin to get low on fuel. Even their reserves are almost dry. At first, Hyena thought Slayer was just ignoring their fuel situation and hoped to make it to the Forbidden Zone on what they had. But Slayer has a plan.
“How much further do we have?” she asks Hyena.
“At least fifty miles to the border of the Zone,” she says. “And there’s still a long way to go before we reach the coast.”
Slayer nods and turns to the rest of the group.
“We’re going to separate,” Slayer says. “Bunny, Marrow, I want you to empty your fuel tanks and put it in the other two bikes. We’re leaving you here. Hyena and I will take Zizzy and Vermin up ahead. We’ll get enough gas for our mission and bring it back to you.”
“That’s assuming you’ll find gas there,” Marrow says. By her tone, Hyena can tell she really doesn’t like being among the women to be left behind.
“There’s gas there alright,” Bunny says. “All of our gas comes from the Forbidden Zone. The question is, will you be able to get some in time?”
“We’ll get it,” Slayer says. “While you wait, I want you four to hunt for food. There’s got to be uninfected animals out here somewhere that we can eat. Get some food in your stomachs and dry the leftovers for the rest of the trip.”
Bunny and Nova nod in agreement, but Marrow kicks an empty gas canister across the road.
“Is there a problem?” Slayer asks Marrow.
Marrow opens her mouth to complain, but holds her tongue. Something in Slayer’s eyes causes her to stand down. Hyena is surprised to see the young leader already using her alpha wolf muscles, especially on a warrior twice her size.
No signs of life as they cross the border into what should be a part of the Forbidden Zone. The landscape remains the same. It is just as desolate and dead as anywhere else. They pull over into a parking lot of a collapsed mini-mall in the middle of the desert, which now looks more like a giant mound of soggy newspaper.
“We aren’t going to last much longer,” Hyena says.
Slayer responds, “We have to look for signs of life.”
“Maybe you should take our gas and go on alone,” Hyena says.
Slayer shakes her head. “Not yet. If we have to take the gas by force I need all four of us.”
Hyena pointed at a nearby mountain. “I could climb up there and get a good look of the area. If there’s any civilization within a twenty mile radius I’ll be able to see it.”
Slayer stares off at the mountain for a few moments.
“I’ll go,” she says.
She drops off Zizzy and heads for the mountain slope. Hyena doesn’t enjoy being left alone with the two youngsters. Neither of them speak to her, but they do stare up at her as if expecting her to give them some kind of words of wisdom, which is almost just as bad.
When Slayer gets back twenty minutes later, she says, “Come with me. There’s something on the other side.”
Around the side of the mountain is a vast open desert filled with oil pumps that stretch as far as the eyes can see. They ride out and investigate, but none of the pumps are working. There are no people around.
“Are these from the old world?” Zizzy asks over Slayer’s shoulder, as they pull up to one of the pumps.
Hyena gets off of her bike and goes to it.
“Some of them are,” Hyena says. “But this one’s more recent. Only three or four decades old.”
“Can we get oil from them?” Slayer asks.
Hyena looks across the desert.
“No,” Hyena says. “The wells are long dry. Even if they weren’t it wouldn’t be much use to us. We couldn’t actually refine it into gasoline ourselves.”
Slayer nods. “Let’s keep following the pumps south. There’s bound to be one still pumping out there somewhere. And once we find it, we’ll also find a person responsible for it. And that person will surely have gasoline or know how to get some.”
They follow the pumps for miles, but the pumps are all dead. Hundreds of them line the landscape, like a vast mechanical cemetery.
“It looks like they’ve pumped every drop of oil out of this land,” Slayer says.
Hyena nods. “They’ve been pumping it for a hundred years. It had to run out eventually.”
Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands Page 15
