"Hey!" A voice from the other side of the ruined courtyard. "Look out!" I was in midair, I was scrambling onto the big guy's back, I was reaching for his chin- but he had turned at the warning, and had gotten an arm between us. I wasn't clinging to his back; I was closer to his shoulder. This might not have been my first rodeo, but it wasn't his, either. Howling with rage, the angry raider seized me by the front of my shirt and charged, pushing me ahead of him like a bull. I was so surprised that it took me a precious second to figure out what he was trying to do. By the time I realized it and tried to escape, it was too late. He pile-drove me into a still-standing wall back first, and I blacked out for a moment.
I opened my eyes and found myself sailing through the air. I had just enough time to realize I had been thrown before I hit the cracked pavement and bounced, leaving some of the skin on my arms and legs behind as I skidded to a painful halt. Oh, this was bad. This was very bad. "Hey!" It was the voice that had warned the big guy, the voice of the one I hadn't seen. "Hey! We got the little bitch! Guys, come on over if you want a piece of this! I got dibs on first run!"
I tried to get to my feet, but a big, broad leathery hand slammed down over my throat like a vice, then closed down hard. I struggled as I was lifted into the air, trying to gasp but unable to breathe past the iron grip suspending me aloft. “Not so fast Burke,” the big man said, tightening his grip on my throat more and more by the second. “This little bitch killed Carter, Kenny, and Rawhide. I’ll be damned, but she was about to stick me, too. I’m going to soften her up first.”
Burke made a noncommittal sound and then sighed. "Go ahead, but remember, Alpha Dog, I don't like my apples bruised."
Alpha Dog’s only response to this was a snicker. “You pussy.” It was unclear if it had been a friendly comment for Burke or a challenge. I was pretty sure I didn’t care either way. What I did care about was the red haze closing in, and the blackness following close on its heels. I couldn't blackout. If I did, I would never wake up- or worse, I would, and death would be a long, agonizing way off. I didn't know firsthand what Burke and those like him meant when they called "Dibs" on me, but I had a pretty good guess. I was young, not stupid.
Without warning, the pressure around my throat released, and I dropped from Alpha Dog’s meaty fist, collapsing to the cracked pavement and gasping for air. I winced, bracing myself for the boot that I knew would be coming- but it didn’t come. Against my better judgment, I looked up.
Alpha Dog was just standing there, his eyes glassy, his mouth slack, and a little dark dribble starting from the corner of his mouth. He stayed there for a moment, making odd, chirping sounds, and then fell forward onto his face. That’s when I noticed the crude pipe-and-scrap tomahawk sticking out of the back of his head. A scrawny, pale man with too-wide eyes growled through a mouth of rotten teeth, “Now who’s the pussy, you fat fuck?” So that was Burke.
Boots crunched on gravel, and I looked over to see two more bandits approaching, both of them bearing makeshift weapons in a casual manner, not seeming bothered in the slightest by the murder that had just happened right in front of them. I guessed that the old Alpha Dog had not been well-liked. One of the men, smoking something greasy between filthy cracked lips, spit a gob of something disgusting and brown. “Hail to the Chief,” he drawled.
“Fuckin’ a,” commented the other in an amused tone, apparently by way of agreement.
It was right then that I remembered that I was in danger. I was the tigress, not a little girl, and I had been snared by the poachers. I had to get out of this… and I thought I saw a way. I lunged forward, snatching the tomahawk out of the back of Alpha Dog's skull, and before the new chief could do anything to stop me, I swung it as hard as I could in a diagonal slash aimed for his skinny little neck. He put up a hand to stop me, and lost three fingers for his trouble. The tomahawk was deflected slightly, and it didn't open the side of his neck. Instead, I tore open the side of his face in gout of blood and pulverized teeth.
Chief Burke screamed and reeled, but none of the others moved to assist him. They just watched, still standing casually, still looking just as amused as before. I snapped my gaze back towards the man I had just maimed, in time to see his undamaged hand come screaming in like a major league fastball for the side of my head. I ducked, and the wind of that blow's passing lifted some of my wild black hair up off of my head in its wake. I didn't wait for another invitation. I dropped my weight and charged forward in a shoulder block, imitating the big athletes I used to watch… before. Burke, already off balance because of his clumsy roundhouse, flipped over my back as I plowed right through him and crashed down hard to the ground.
I spared a glance for my audience, but the two bandits hadn’t moved. One of them lifted a hand and drew a slow circle in a clear “go on…” gesture. I focused on the prone Burke, just now trying to get to his feet. If I had been a hero, like in the movies, I would have thrown that tomahawk right into the back of his head. It would have been poetic, badass, impressive. Instead, I closed with the wounded man, careful not to show any hesitation. I didn’t say a clever one-liner. I didn’t say anything. I just hit him with the tomahawk in the back of his neck until he collapsed and didn’t move again.
For a short while, there was silence, and I just stared down at what I had done. I spit on the bloody wreckage of the brief reign of Chief Burke. Then slow, steady clapping broke the stillness. I looked up. The two bandits were standing a little closer, their weapons down by their sides, deliberately non-threatening.
One of them, a tall, athletic, well-tanned man with a leather patch over one eye said, in exactly the same tone as he had before, “Hail to the Chief.” He gave me a little bow, surprisingly absent of mockery. He seemed genuinely impressed.
The other man, who looked like the lovechild of a bull steer and a dump truck, spat a stream of brown juice from his lower lip’s payload of tobacco and said, “Fuckin’ a,” by way of agreement.
“Okay, cool,” I said, and immediately began scrounging around for that damn pair of boots.
Chapter Forty-Three
Feral girl-child
Seeking Divinity
I ran with those guys for about a year. They called me Chief and brought me food and water when I asked, but pretty much just led themselves. We left my stomping grounds in the ruins, and roamed south, past the rad zones of the dead city and out onto the old highway. My "subjects," as they called themselves (really just Pat and Boone), seemed pretty happy to have me around as a sort of a cross between a protégé and a mascot. They were a lot older than me, but that didn't matter. Later I realized that I reminded each of them of a kid sister or a niece- someone turned to ash in the war. Sometimes I would catch one or the other of them just staring at me, but nothing came of it. It didn't really matter. We were a little pack.
A tigress didn't run with a pack, but whatever, maybe I was a she-wolf. We robbed the folks we thought we could sneak up on, and we set traps out on the road to lure in the unwary. Usually, I was bait. Nobody was afraid of a twelve-year-old girl. But I wasn't a girl. I was a she-wolf. We stole, we cursed, we killed, and a few times, finding ourselves caught in a fight with better bandits, we ran. At the time, I thought it was the best time I would ever have. It wasn't right. It wasn't wrong. It just was. It was life after the end of the world, and it seemed like things were as alright as they could be, at least for a little she-wolf and her two-man pack. Until Pim.
Chapter Forty-Four
Feral girl-child
Seeking Divinity
We started just as we had many times before. I was bait. Just a hurt little girl, smeared with rabbit blood and leaning up against a burned out car, crying and apparently alone. The travelers we had been stalking were not far down the road, and before long, they appeared out of the heat haze, walking steadily down the road bearing packs loaded with who-knew-what. It looked like they were a small family. Hah. Easy pickings. Couples always fell for the “lost little lamb” act. The only rubes who co
uld give them a run for their money were “lone-wolf” guys- especially since I was thirteen, and I was starting to look less like a little girl every day. I snickered to myself, then quickly suppressed it and let out another loud, melodramatic sob. Somewhere off nearby, I could practically hear Boone rolling his single eye at my theatrics, but I ignored him. It really was funny, that “lone-wolf” thing. A lone-wolf wasn’t badass. A lone-wolf was a shitty wolf. A wolf without a pack was a dead wolf. Fuckin’ morons.
The travelers drew closer, and I saw that I was right. Two men, probably brothers, one woman, a kid in the middle, maybe my age. Everyone looked related, with the same tawny skin and mouse-brown hair. The kid hadn’t gotten his size yet, and he still looked a little like a puppy with his oversized feet and hands and his scrawny frame. But his eyes were something else. They were beautiful, colored a blue so pale that they seemed almost white when the light hit them. They seemed fairly well-fed and fairly sure of themselves, and every one of them was armed with higher-end hardware, all except the boy. Not the best sign, but we could take them. All I had to do was sell the part.
I shook with feeble sobs as they approached, clutching at my belly, where I had stained my ragged shirt with most of the rabbit's blood. I reached out a trembling, bloody hand and cried, managing somehow to squeeze the word "help" out between my wracking sobs. The two men in the lead immediately took an interest, and they raised their guns reflexively, but immediately lowered them when they saw me. Excellent. They were gonna be easy marks. I wondered how they had gotten so well armed and supplied if they were so damn gullible. Most people at least hesitated to approach, but one of the guys was already walking towards me, fishing what looked like bandages out of a pocket. I opened my mouth to give the signal- the three words that would end these four lives. It wasn’t really their fault, but they were deer, and Boone, Pat and I? We were wolves.
"Help me, please," I said- or at least I tried to say that. Instead, my words died on my lips as the boy looked right at me with those bright, piercing eyes, and said, almost conversationally, "Trap." And everything fell apart.
Pat and Boone attacked, bursting out of their hiding places in the grass by the sides of the road. We had had some luck, and we had guns of our own- though they weren't nearly as nice as the traveler's armaments. Gunfire erupted in all directions. Boone and Pat had the advantage of the flank, and relative surprise, but these men- these men were playing in a different league than my "subjects." We were wolves. But they weren't deer. They were moose.
The fight was brief and intense. Everyone but the boy and I got shot, but the adult travelers didn’t die when they were hit. They fell, they bled, but they seemed more pained and angry than they were mortally wounded. The boy had prudently dropped flat to the pavement, and now he was climbing to his feet, slowly, grinning a little. Of course he was pleased with himself, the little shithead. He had just saved the day by giving his people an extra second to react. The woman was smiling, and she nodded over at the kid. “Good eye, Pim. You just saved all our lives.”
There was no more gunfire, and I knew what that meant for Pat and Boone. But this pack wasn’t done. Oh, I was hurt, I was mad- but I wasn’t a lone-wolf. Oh no. These smug people were tough, and they had stopped the ambush, surviving the bullets that should have put them down because the armor I now saw peeking out from beneath the collars of their shirts. But they had made the same mistake that those raiders had made so long ago, and the same one that every mark before this had made in the last year. They thought I was a little, lost girl. They thought I was just the bait, just some little lost lamb being used by the wolves. They probably thought I was confused. They had taken the bait, even if everything else had gone so horribly wrong. But I wasn’t a lost lamb. Oh no. I was a tigress.
I couldn’t hear a thing. Just ringing. Just that damned dial tone. I drew it out from beneath the car and sighted, just as Boone had shown me. The adults hadn’t been paying attention to me, distracted by checking their wounds. They had only just started to get to their feet. It was in my hands. Comfortable. Familiar. My fellow wolves had always saved the best stuff for me, even this beautiful gauss. Breathe out. Squeeze. Crack. A splash of red. Again. Crack. Again. Crack. And then it was just me, staring across corpses at those wide, pale, terrified eyes.
We just sat there on the road for a while, just staring at each other. I cleared my throat awkwardly in the silence. “Pim, is it?”
The boy’s mouth was hanging open, his eyes just as wide. It didn’t look like he was breathing. “You…” he croaked hoarsely. “You killed them. You killed them!” His voice broke and spiraled up into a brief falsetto; taking the intensity out of the accusation and making me chuckle, despite myself. It wasn’t funny. Nothing was funny. My friends were dead. The marks were dead. It was just me and this kid on a road streaked in blood and smelling of fresh death. The flies had already started to gather.
Pim regained control of his voice. “You’re a fucking monster.” I could not have told you what name he actually said. But I knew that it was my old name. That long-lost name, gone to oblivion, pushed down into the scar tissue of trauma along with that face- the one that had belonged to that wise, leathery-faced old man. But the boy wasn’t done. His eyes shone with a vicious light, a hard, ice-crystal hate freezing over those eyes as he spat the words that he knew would cut me the deepest. “Do you think your daddy is proud of his little fucking monster?”
I reeled back as if he had just punched me in the face. I didn’t know how he had done all of that, how he had known where the cracks in my wall had been, but the strike had been surgical in its precision. I don’t remember raising the gun. I don’t remember pulling the trigger. I dropped the gun and lay down on the bloody concrete, staring up at the shattered sky. “Do you think your daddy is proud of his little fucking monster?” I could no longer see that face in my mind, the leathery-faced, wise, smiling face of a man long gone. He had left me. I disgusted him. I was a monster. I closed my eyes and waited to die. It would happen eventually.
Chapter Forty-Five
Feral girl-child
Seeking Divinity
They found me near the remains of Los Angeles. The world wasn't dead. There was a presidente, a warrior with an army of men sweeping across the broken fragments of that grand old U.S. of A., and he was going to put the world back together. He was hope and salvation and life, and everyone loved him. Everyone except me. I didn't feel anything, not at first. They didn't know what had happened to me, they just found me lying nearly starved and heat-stroked in a tangle of bodies and just assumed I was the only survivor of a highway ambush gone wrong. Once again, people thought I was the little lost lamb.
They put me in a sort of orphanage and cleaned me up, and fed and clothed me. They gave me a name, picked "Joanna" out of a hat, and appended "Angeles" to it, for the place they had found me. I was one of many, but the caretakers were dedicated. Counselors spoke to us all, gently, carefully, trying to help all of the kids in their little flock of sheep live with whatever unspeakable traumas lived behind the scar tissue in their brains. All the while, they never suspected I was a tigress, they thought I was another cute, fluffy sheep. They didn't push me, and I didn't tell them anything. Eventually, they left the broken little "sheep" alone and moved on to the next kid.
Eventually, I started to believe the stories that they told me. I was just another victim found half-dead out on the highway, another casualty of the horrible aftermath of the war. We had gotten lucky, they said, lucky that the Savior had turned almost two-thirds of the nukes into useless duds in the air. I didn't know what that meant, but everything else, I ate right up. I became Joanna Angeles: quiet, meek, pretty little Joanna. I studied in school; I ate my vegetables, I smiled when they took my picture. I loved the presidente. I looked up to the soldadesca. And when they asked for volunteers for the Former program, to "secure the future of the human race," I volunteered with a wide, genuine, empty smile.
The whole time, I didn
’t think once about Boone, or Pat, or the hundreds of bloody faces that should have been etched into the back of my eyelids when I tried to sleep. Most of the time, I slept just fine. I was just a little lost lamb, found and returned to the fold. But sometimes, every so often, the mask would slip, and I would dream of wide, pale accusing eyes, and hear words that seethed and burned inside me. And I would know that I was a monster.
Chapter Forty-Six
Joanna
Seeking Divinity
I woke up screaming on the ice, panting, breathing hard, pale-blue eyes in memory burning holes in my soul. What little of it remains. This time, the voice from the monolith was my own, speaking in a mocking, almost singsong tone. Sweet little Joanna, poor little Joanna. Why is the universe so cruel to you? Tears streamed down my face and froze halfway down my cheeks, but I didn’t feel them at all. Did you ever wonder why Barbas chose to greet you with that gun? He had to placate the tigress, you poison, you cancer of person. You can hide in your little wool mask, but you can't hide from me.
“Stop it!” I screamed, clawing at my head. “Get out! That’s not my voice! That’s not how it happened!”
Volistad: Paranormal Sci-Fi Alien Romance (Alien Mates Book 3) Page 24
