by Alex Archer
It flashed through Annja’s mind that he probably had a point.
But she wasn’t just any crazy white-eyes chick. She was Annja Creed. She reached up, grabbed his right ankle and yanked.
With a screech he flew off the tank and over her head. He struck the road sideways and rolled.
The Horses broke to either side of him to prevent being knocked over. Though he’d lost his rifle he was actually hard core enough to get right back up again with his back to the tanker.
And Snake, who’d fallen behind after being forced off the dirt road and was pushing hard to catch up, yanked the short front fork of her sled up into a wheelie. Spinning fast the front tire promptly came down again, catching the dismounted Dog Soldier full in the face like a combination of a tomahawk and a circular saw.
Annja looked away. And realized she was dangling one-handed from the back of a speeding hijacked tanker loaded with gasoline.
“Focus,” she said aloud. She got both hands and feet on the cold steel rungs. Then she peered over the upper rim.
Two Dog Soldiers crouched on the roof, one shooting left, one shooting right. Ducking down and taking another quick look around Annja realized that the Dog Solder bikers were pressing the Iron Horse People hard. The most her friends could do to help her with the tanker guards was keep scattering the occasional shot their way.
Fear for Johnny jabbed her hard. Annja felt a fondness for all the Iron Horses, even the intractable Snake, and a desperate desire they should all pull through unscathed. That was already impossible, she knew. Jake was certainly dead. She had exchanged perhaps a dozen words with him; she recalled he had a five-year-old daughter.
And Johnny—he was definitely not unscathed. Annja could only hope against hope that neither the hatchet blow—which had been hastily delivered, after all—nor the ensuing fall from his bike had done him irreparable damage.
But she couldn’t worry about that now, any more than she could ponder just why she felt such concern for Johnny Ten Bears. Instead, she flung herself up and over.
Suppressing the memory that she was on the back of a gasoline tank jouncing down a dirt road, Annja bull-rushed the nearer gunman. Focused on his weapon and his targets he didn’t even notice her in his peripheral vision until she was almost on him. Then it was too late.
He swung the long barrel of his rifle toward her. She put her shoulder down and slammed into him, hoping her unexpected momentum would knock him off balance and allow her to pitch him overboard.
But the Dog Soldier was a powerful man, built low to the ground—or in this case, the steel runway along the tanker’s spine. He held his ground. He might have quickly overpowered Annja, but she grabbed the ribbed plastic forearm of his M-16 and wrenched it. He refused to let go.
Instead, he started swinging his upper body from side to side, hoping to fling Annja away from him and off the truck. As he did she saw the other gunman, at the front of the tank, do a double take as he noticed their dance of death. Then he swung his rifle toward them.
The man grappling with Annja spun her counterclockwise. She quit resisting. That caught him by surprise. He swung her clear around, legs swinging dizzily over empty space, so that when her feet came down her back was toward the other rifleman.
Catching the M-16 with both hands, she used it like a trapeze and swung herself between the Dog’s wide-braced legs. As she did, his partner’s rifle opened up with a shattering noise. Her opponent grunted as the needlelike .22-caliber bullets lanced into his unprotected flesh.
Annja popped up on the far side of the Dog Soldier. Spinning, she caught him as his considerable weight slumped toward the runway. Leaning her shoulder into his bare back, which despite the chill was slick with sweat, and grabbing the waistband of his buckskin pants, she ran him toward his companion. Perhaps trying to keep himself from falling over the side, the wounded man stumbled through several paces. Screaming, his buddy pumped burst after three-round burst into his chest and belly.
Annja felt the man slump. Screeching her own hawk challenge back at the other man she charged him.
The Dog Soldier jumped back. His flinch yanked his rifle barrel up and off-line. Risking all, Annja vaulted the bullet-riddled man as he dropped onto his face on the ribbed steel of the runway.
The sword came into her hand.
The other man’s eyes went huge in his black-painted face as he saw the three-foot blade materialize in her hand out of thin air. Shock-slowed, he threw up the rifle before his face to protect himself. She started swinging the sword before her feet touched steel.
Shock ran from Annja’s hand up her sword arm. Annja swung the blade again. She struck him in the forehead.
He stared at her for a disbelieving moment. Then he slumped onto his face.
Annja let go of the sword, allowing it to vanish back into the otherwhere, rather than risk being dragged off the tanker with him as his body rolled down the gleaming steel flank and fell from view. She crouched, securing her balance as the immensely heavy tank-trailer jumped into the air over a particularly bad rut. Then she dashed forward the final few steps to leap over the gap between the gasoline tank’s front and the green roof of the tractor’s little overcab apartment.
All this time the rig had been driving arrow straight, north on the dirt road. Suddenly it swerved beneath Annja. The violent surprise direction change threw her off balance. She tumbled off the cab to her left.
Recalling the sword she reversed grip and plunged the blade down through the thin-gauge metal roof of the cab. Her legs swung wildly over space. Metal tore with a scream.
Tires grinding the packed and rutted dirt of the road, the tractor veered left. Annja was snapped onto her back on the overcab apartment. Momentum slid her across it on her rump until her heels thumped on the roof of the cab itself, in front of the raised apartment. She barely kept her grip on her sword’s hilt.
If she let go it would vanish again. It was the only thing keeping her from being thrown to the road in the tanker’s path.
The cab roof shuddered beneath Annja’s feet. Silver holes appeared in the green-painted metal, punching upward. The passenger was shooting blindly, hoping to hit her.
Frantically she yanked her feet back up onto the apartment roof. The driver cranked it right again. This time she felt the rig’s wheels rise all along the left side. The coupling between tractor and tank squealed in protest.
Annja’s breath caught in her throat. He’s willing to risk losing control to shake me off, she thought. Again the tractor swung left.
She released the sword and flung herself forward. As she did she recalled the mystic weapon yet again. She plunged its tip downward through the left side of the roof.
She heard a scream as it transfixed the driver from above.
Bullets stitched through the roof right beside her rib cage. Then the shooting stopped. The truck headed off the road to the left.
Abruptly it cranked right again. Held on the cab by her death grip on the sword’s hilt Annja realized the man riding shotgun had grabbed the wheel from the out-of-action driver and was hauling back clockwise to avert disaster. Except he was seriously overcorrecting.
She looked down. The road wasn’t moving all that fast below her. But she knew the burly tractor, and its massive load of liquid fire, had momentum.
Once more she released the sword. Then she jumped for the ditch.
Even as she flew through the chill morning air she heard a tremendous ripping noise behind her as the big rig jackknifed. The mass of the tanker and its thousands of gallons of gasoline was driving the tractor down the road sideways, stripping tires from rims.
Annja hit. Feeling flash gratitude for gymnastics training as well as some instruction in parachuting technique—specifically landing—she let her legs flex and went into a roll.
Her vectors were a little more complex than what she compensated for. What was intended as a forward roll turned into a weird sort of corkscrew, flopping her over and over across prickly bunchgrass
and the hard earth beneath it. After what seemed a really long time Annja came to rest facedown in the dirt.
Annja raised her head to look toward the eighteen-wheeler in time to see it crash into the right-hand ditch. She saw the tanker split open like a sausage flexed violently in giant hands. Then a white spark.
She buried her face in her arms. With a colossal hollow whoomp! the load of gasoline ignited. A shock-wave rolled over her, stinging her bare wrists and the back of her neck like dragon’s breath.
But the laws of physics were on her side. She risked a glance over her arm. Its fine pale hairs were kinked by heat. The truck was crumpling, screaming, glittering steel and a vast yellow fireball that tumbled away from her across the prairie. With a sigh she collapsed back onto the ground, luxuriating in its cool embrace.
She was completely spent.
For a time she just lay there. She relished the sense of numbness that enveloped her. Too soon, she knew, it would give way to something a whole lot more like a full-body bruise. She’d been here before.
She heard a snarling of multiple motorcycle engines, forced herself to roll over and sit up, reaching for the Glock. It was still in her small-of-the-back holster, she knew. Its imprint, and that of its holster, had been embossed deeply into her flesh by her madcap roll across the landscape. That was the risk of wearing a holster there, although she was smart enough to wear it to the right of her spine to avoid serious damage.
To Annja’s surprise and double relief she saw Johnny Ten Bears. Beside him rode Billy White Bird; between them they steered an untenanted Iron Horse bike with one hand each on the handlebars. They came to a stop near her.
“Johnny!” she exclaimed. Despite the throbbing agony now starting to seep through her body she leaped up and ran to embrace him. He put his cheek to hers and hugged her.
“Not too tight,” he said. “I don’t reckon we’re either of us in shape to stand up to much punishment right now.”
She pushed him away to arm’s length—still being cautious to keep her finger off the Glock’s trigger, and not cover either man with the muzzle. “It’s so great to see you! You look awful!”
And he did. His handsome face was brutally bruised, one eye almost swollen shut. His jeans were torn, and the leather jacket he’d worn against the cold had little tufts of grass sticking out at random angles, as if indifferently sodded. His hair had escaped the ponytail; its left side had been turned into a lank, faintly rust-hued mat by the blood that had soaked it and begun to dry. A pressure bandage had been hastily taped to his head.
“I may not be much of a gentleman,” he said, laughing, “but my sense of self-preservation’s strong enough to keep me from commenting on your appearance.”
He pointed at his head. “That fat bastard Abell’s so hung up on his fantasy reenactor thing he tried to scalp me. Almost brought it off, too. Too bad for him he forgot to kill me first.”
He shook his head in annoyance. “Damn! Son of a bitch got the better of me again.”
“Not a bad bit of work there, Ms. Creed,” Billy said, holding the extra bike balanced. He nodded his chin toward the furious red blaze of the big rig and the thick column of black smoke that rose out of sight through the cloud cover. “Looked like you were swinging a pretty big blade up there up top that truck, the few times I had a chance to look over.”
“A machete,” she said with practiced ease. She hated to lie to a friend, especially one who was now a comrade in arms. But she had no choice. “Took it off the one dude before his buddy shot him.”
Billy’s cheeks rode up to turn his eyes into little narrow fingernail slices of skepticism. “That was one mighty big machete.”
“Isn’t that kind of a personal remark, Billy?” she asked sweetly. She laughed as his dark complexion flushed deep red.
She turned to Johnny. “I take it we won?”
His smile vanished. “We accomplished the mission,” he said in a flat tone. “By definition, that’s victory.”
“Once the truck blew, the rest of the Dogs ran off tail-high,” Billy said.
Annja frowned in sympathy—and her own pang of loss. “Did we lose many?”
“Coulda been worse,” Billy said, “but any’s plenty bad.”
“None of us is expendable,” Johnny said, and his voice was broken now. “No one.”
Annja shook her head. “I’m sorry. We—we did something big here. Saved a lot of people. That has to count for something.”
Slowly Johnny nodded.
“Weren’t any draftees out here today, son,” Billy said. “Leastwise, not on our side.”
The noise of the flames was like the wavering, shifting boom of the wind intensified a hundredfold. A shift in the actual wind brought the stink of burning gasoline to wrinkle Annja’s nose.
“It’s Jake’s bike,” Johnny said, indicating the spare bike. “He’s wasted. We got a couple trucks following behind. They’ll pick up him and the…others.”
“Then can we go home now?” Annja asked.
He looked at her a moment, as if having trouble processing her words. Then a slow half smile winched up one side of his mouth.
“Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go home. The good guys won. This time.”
22
The good guys won.
The surviving Iron Horse People celebrated at the Bad Medicine that night.
“Listen up, everybody!” Johnny Ten Bears shouted. “Let me salute the real heroine of the hour. Without her, the world would be a darker place for everybody, and especially us. So let’s give it up for Annja Creed!”
The Iron Horse People cheered and clustered around her. They were all smiles, hugging her, shaking her hand, thanking her. Even Snake caught her eye and gave her a nod.
And if I ever have to earn an acknowledgment bigger than that, Annja thought, I probably won’t survive.
When the crowd broke into smaller groups, Annja found herself sitting with Billy and Johnny.
“I want to give you my own thanks, Annja,” Johnny said, leaning his head in close. “You saved my bacon, in particular.”
She nodded, then smiled, a little sadly.
“I’m glad I could help,” she said. “You were innocent. And we stopped the guilty.”
Billy bellowed a laugh and slapped the table. “We did more than stop them,” he said. “We kicked their asses, we took their names, and the brothers and sisters are drinking their beer!”
Suddenly people were shushing one another and bidding Ed, the bartender, who was actually cracking a smile, to crank up the volume on the TV set over the bar.
Annja looked up at the screen and laughed out loud. “That’s the last person I’d expect the Iron Horse People to turn up the volume for,” she said. “Special Agent in Charge Young!”
“You’re saying, Special Agent Young,” the reporter stated, “that in effect George Abell of the Comanche Nation’s special investigative unit, and the secret organization he apparently heads, this so-called Dog Society, have swapped places on the Most Wanted list, and as a designated terrorist organization with John Jacob Ten Bears and the Iron Horse Motorcycle Club?”
“In the wake of today’s events,” Young said, pudding bland as always in face and voice, “we can confirm that the Dog Society is the object of the recent months-long investigation by a multiagency task force, and that they were responsible for the recent wave of killings and disappearances.”
“What the hell?” someone shouted. “The Dogs were part of the multidisciplinary task force!”
“And they were also behind the attempt to run a hijacked gasoline tanker into the front of the Comanche Star Casino during the opening ceremonies?” the reporter asked.
“Precisely. As you know, through testimony by surviving terrorists, as well as physical evidence collected this afternoon and evening, we can definitively pin responsibility on these extremely troubled and violent individuals.”
Information had come out by dribs and drabs in the media and on the Internet tha
t afternoon. Though badly burned and battered the man riding shotgun in the tractor of the hijacked tanker had survived. And he’d been spilling his guts. The Dog Society’s intention was to spark a race war—“first, Indians against white-eyes, then all oppressed minorities against the whites.” They planned to make their opening statement by plowing the stolen gas tanker through the crowds attending the Comanche Star Casino opening and ramming the entrance.
In his most sensational revelation, the survivor had named the Dog Society’s chief as none other than George Abell—head of their new special investigative unit. Apparently a bunch of George’s well-connected buddies had been working days in SIU and playing Dog Soldier by night.
The media theorized that a last-minute falling out among the actual terrorist strike team had resulted in the spectacular flaming crash of the hijacked truck, as well as strewing the countryside outside Lawton with Dog Soldier bodies.
“You see, Jerry,” Young was saying to the white-haired reporter, “sometimes misdirection is required to smoke out particularly diabolical terrorist conspiracies. Hence, the recent public characterization of the Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club.”
“So John Ten Bears is no longer a person of interest to the Bureau?”
Young looked directly into the camera. “John Ten Bears has never been a person of interest to the Bureau,” he said.
“You lying sack of shit!” somebody shouted.
“Standard Bureau word mincing,” Angel said. She stood by the bar with Ricky’s arm around her. “If you’re Most Wanted, that’s not a ‘person of interest.’ Different categories. So as far as he and the Bureau are concerned he’s telling the truth.”
The TV coverage had switched to a press conference held earlier that evening by a spokesperson for the Oklahoma State Attorney General’s office, thanking the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and complimenting the Department of Public Safety, the Comanche County Sheriff’s Department, the Lawton police and, improbably, the law-enforcement division of the Comanche Nation for their work in bringing an end to the most serious terrorist threat to the state and people of Oklahoma since the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Center.
