“Yeah, they were being a grade-A pain in our asses.”
“As I recall, I had you seduce one of the females up there and you managed to get close enough to their leader to get the deed done and eliminate her.”
“Boss,” Axyl said shakily, pointing at the drawing, “this is the one. This is the one I tricked. She’s the one I seduced,and now she’s down here!”
“Hmmm. Interesting.”
“Interesting? Boss, she’s can only be down this way for one reason. She wants to find me!”
“The ladies just can’t get enough, can they, Axyl?” Shell smirked.
“Okay, you’re not gettin’ me here, so let me spell it out,” Axyl said, his voice tight. “If she’s down here lookin’ for me, it’s so she can come up on me in the dark some night and cut my throat before I even know she’s there. She’s good, boss. During our little love meetings, I usually never knew when she showed up until she stepped out of the bushes, or dropped out of a tree. Her type start their training as little kids, and by the time they get to be her age, they’re damn dangerous!”
“You seriously think one girl can cause us trouble? You think she can challenge the Road Sharks? Come on…”
“Look, man, our troops here ain’t exactly elite forces. These scouts of the Clan of the Hawk…”
“Clan of the Hawk? How melodramatic.”
“These scouts of the Clan of the Hawk can move as silent as them ninjas in the old vids. I’m gonna have to sleep with one eye open while she’s anywhere in the vicinity.”
Shell leafed through the stack to the last drawing in the pile. “Oh, this is interesting.”
Axyl moved to look at the drawing in Shell’s hands. It showed the same woman again, but this time she stood facing and apparently arguing with a tall dark skinned man wearing a long duster.
“Eli,” Axyl said. “She’s knows Eli.”
Shell looked at his subordinate. “That might mean she knows where that son of a bitch lives.”
The ride up into the mountains was cold. The late February day was sunny, but the farther into the Cascades they went, the more snow was along the single rutted path that ran before them.
Though it followed a Beforetime road, the path through the snow had obviously been worn by passing vehicles, not plowed. It was bumpy and rutted and a few times Ghost Wind’s heart went to her throat each time Eli slewed the bike around in a particularly slushy part.
Even though he had reduced speed, the cold on her cheeks was brisk, but Ghost Wind wasn’t afraid of cold. She spent most
of the ride looking at this new country of pines and sagebrush. Most homes along the highway, showed signs of being broken into along with years of neglect. The houses had been beautiful and had probably cost much of the “God of the Beforetime,” but now, nature was slowly starting its reclamation.
Eli slowed the Terror to a stop, and to Ghost Wind’s surprise, began to let it slowly roll backwards. She looked behind them and saw that he was unerringly keeping the bike in the track they had just ridden up.
“Hold still, please,” he said, “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”
She held her head and body still, amazed when they kept rolling downhill. What she had assumed would be only a hundred feet turned into a quarter of a mile before he applied the brakes and shut off the engine.
“Okay,” he said, “this is where it always gets a little tricky, but it’s a good workout. You’ve shown you’re quite good at obscuring tracks, so if you’d help me out with that, I’d appreciate it.”
“Aren’t you going to need for me to help you push, like earlier on the way up?” Following Eli’s gaze, she saw the barest trace of a trail off the side of the road.
“Not this time.” He gave her his toothy grin reached under the frame near the front and the back. With a grunt, he lifted the fusion cycle into the air and began to shuffle down the faint path with it.
Ghost Wind began to think there would be no end of amazing things she would witness. She had helped push the Terror through a snowdrift on the way up, and was surprised at how heavy it had been. She was strong, but the motorcycle weighed at least six hundred pounds. If Eli hadn’t been pushing also, she probably wouldn’t have succeeded in moving it by herself.
Now, he was carrying an object that she was sure three men couldn’t easily get off the ground, and though he was straining, he seemed nowhere near the limit of his endurance. She stared at his back for a moment, then began to attend to her job of obliterating the trail into the forest. After a short distance the main road disappeared behind the trees and she turned to find Eli covering the Terror with his homemade camouflage tarp. He had carefully positioned the bike in a brush patch, and even with the leaves gone, the tarp made it almost invisible.
“How can you possibly carry that much weight?” she asked, taking her bedroll and haversack from him. “You’re barely breathing hard! You hardly broke a sweat but you didn’t even unload our gear from the bike.”
“I gots me some secrets, girl.” Eli shouldered his own pack. “Stick around, and maybe I’ll share a few with you. For now, though, we walk.”
Shortly after they left the fusion cycle, Ghost Wind realized they were walking down an old road, the entrance now hidden from the highway. In places they waded through knee-deep snow, in others, they walked on cracked pavement, heated by the sun. Her gear was light for the most part, but it was unwieldy when the snow was deep.
She had repaired and greased her moccasins, but she began to wish that she had been able to make a pair of winter mukluks. After a mile, even with the bare stretches, the wet from the snow began to soak through her leather shoes and felted socks. At the two mile mark she felt the warmth draining from her feet.
“We’re gettin’ close, Ghost Wind,” Eli said. “See that bridge up there? That’s the old hatchery and it’s where the road to the village starts.”
“How much farther?” she asked.
“Getting tired?” he said, looking at her with concern.
“No. Not tired, but my feet are soaked and they’re getting cold.”
“Damn,” he said, looking at her soaked moccasins. “I should have noted that. I’m sorry. I could have gone on and retrieved some decent winter footwear from the village. I wasn’t being mindful.”
“I am… was… a scout of the Clan of the Hawk. I am not a wilting flower who cannot deal with the cold. I have stood in the Icicle River in January, up to my neck and controlled my body temperature while doing so…”
“Okay, okay. No knock on your skills or toughness was intended. But cold wet feet just plain suck. We keep a guard house at the old hatchery, and I’m sure Kenji will have his little hibachi set up to stay warm. You can dry your feet there while I go on to the village and retrieve a pair of boots for you. It’ll give me a chance to tell everyone we have company.”
****
Kenji was probably around sixteen years old and male enough to try not to be caught staring at the new female in town. He wasn’t entirely successful. As Ghost Wind hung her socks over a small dowel by the hibachi, she set her moccasins a little farther back and pointed the bottoms of her feet at the tiny stove. The heat was wonderful!
“So, do you always run this lookout, Kenji?”
He blushed. “Um… I’m, like… here on Mondays and Thursdays. Old Mr. Palmer is here on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Gramma Jones is here on Wednesdays. On the weekends, others rotate in.” He shyly looked back towards the coals.
“Ah. Well, your people have done a good job of hiding the road in here. Unless one has a Beforetime map it’d be unlikely someone would wander in here.”
“Yeah, but Kita says we have to be ‘always vigilant’ or slavers might raid us and take us away again.” Kenji’s face grew dark.
“You say that like slavers took you away before.”
He hesitated for a while, and Ghost Wind waited.
“I was a little kid. Back then, my name was Jimmie Franks. My mom and me had gone to try and find my dad, ‘cause he’d like… disappeared. We was just a day or two away from home when them bastards caught us. Chained us like animals and started marching us north. Eli rescued us and even gave us a ride on the Terror back to our farm, but someone had emptied it out. There was nothing for us to live on. Turned out our neighbor down the road had told the slavers where we were so he could pick our place clean.” Ghost Wind saw hate flare up on Kenji’s young face.
“What did Eli do?”
“Nuthin’. The guy had five kids, an’ all the food we stored was eaten. We were lucky to get some of our stuff and our two horses back alive. Eli talked Mom into comin’ up here with him, and we joined the village.” He looked up at her, his eyes warm again. “It’s good here, we ain’t gone hungry. Are you gonna join too?”
His hopeful expression put her at a momentary loss for words. “I… I don’t know. We’ll have to see how things go.”
“Just so you know, I don’t got a girlfriend. Just… just sayin’ y’know.” His face turned bright red and he looked back at the hibachi.
Well! You silver-tongued devil
, she thought.
“Good to know,” she said, “Didn’t you say your name was Jimmie though? Why are you now Kenji?”
“Oh! I changed it in honor of Sensei Kita! She’s been teachin’ me naginata-do and Iaido. Several of her students have changed to Japanese names.”
“That’s very interesting. She seems to command a great deal of respect.”
“Eli may be the rescuer, but it’s Mamma Kita who holds us all together and makes thing work at home.” He lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Eli is a great dude, but he gets the urge to roam a lot. I think he wants to bring law and order to this area, but that’s a pretty big order, what with the Road Sharks and the Red Slavers owning so much o’ the area.”
“So he’s not at home much?”
“Oh! I don’t wanna make it sound like he’s gone all the time, he ain’t! But most of us like to stay hidden here in the mountains and only go down the hill when we need to scrounge something, or trade with New Hope. Eli though, he likes to get on the Terror and ride.”
“Hey, Kenji,” a voice called from the door. “You’re not supposed to tell her all my secrets!” Eli entered the guardhouse through the narrow door.
“I have a feeling Kenji here barely scratched the surface,” Ghost Wind said. She noticed the bundle he was carrying. “For me?”
He unloaded the package to show her a pair of Beforetime boots, with an inner felt liner and a pair of homemade wool socks.
“Got a little somethin’-somethin’ here,” he said, smiling. “Try ‘em on!”
“These socks are SO soft!” she said, pulling them on.
“We got alpacas!” Kenji exclaimed, “Most of the ladies are pretty good on the looms, and some of us men, too!”
“Nothing like wool, and this is some fine wool.”
Eli watched her enjoyment as she put on the socks. There was a sensuous smile on her face as she put them on. He found his heart beating a bit faster.
“Do you ever use your wool for trade?” she asked him.
“We trade some loomed wool to the folks down in New Hope, but there aren’t that many communities out this way to do business with, and we’re sure not going to try and trade with the Road Sharks. Maybe someday the area will be less like a war zone and we can actually start an economy.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Is that why you’re trying to bring law and order to the ‘badlands,’ Sheriff Eli?”
“Part of it,” he smiled wryly, “and also I just hate vermin that prey on their fellow human beings. I’ve seen enough of it that I want to put as much of an end to it as I can.”
“I’ve heard worse goals, Eli.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get me on my soapbox. If you’ll put these boots on, we’ll go meet Kita.”
“Do you think I’ll make a good impression?”
“Lady,” he grimaced, “nobody makes a good first impression on Kita.”
“Well, this is home,” Eli said. “What do you think?”
The village of Yama No Matsu was bigger than Ghost Wind had thought. Almost fifty small homes, made from a combination of stone, raw lumber and scrounged materials from Beforetime structures, dotted the landscape with muddy paths joining them all.
Though the construction of each was pretty eclectic, she was impressed by the sturdy-looking buildings and the elaborate metal and stone chimneys that extended from sheet metal roofs. Though the village was warmed in winter by wood, the chimneys were designed to stunt the raw smoke going into the air, and she hadn’t smelled them ’til she was almost to the township itself. She also thought she saw a few solar panels at various points.
“I… I haven’t lived with this many people for over a decade, but it’s very impressive. You’ve gone to a lot of effort to make this place hard to find”
“Considering the state of things in the world, I doubt anyone could blame us for that.”
“I wasn’t complaining.”
Eli stopped at a snug little cabin. “This is it, my little corner of the world.”
It was very well built, with a small porch with three old wooden chairs sitting on it. It looked like a nice spot to sit and listen to rain ping off the slightly rusty sheet metal roof.
“I like it; it looks warm in the winter,” she said.
“Would you like to take a look inside? You can leave your gear here while we go do the meet and greet with Kita.”
****
Kita lived in a nicely appointed cabin almost at the end of the village. It was small but sturdy, with a trickle of smoke coming from the stove pipe sticking out of the green and rust colored metal roof.
“Where did your people get all the building materials, Eli?”
“Well,” he looked back at her as he stepped on to the porch, “if one were to
take a survey of the Beforetime homes in this area, one would find a lot of empty foundations lying about. Our villagers make a pretty good reclamation team and if you look carefully, you can see most of the cabins have solar panels nearby. We keep looking for a fusion charger, but so far, we’ve only found a small one, fit only for motorcycles and carts, but we’re doing pretty good up here.”