As everyone else in the room, men normally accustomed to violence from other men, stood and gaped, she grabbed the knife from Porter’s belt with her one still bound hand and ran the edge along the inside of his thigh. The blade was very sharp and it bit deep. Blood spewed from the inner arteries of his leg and Porter screamed, and went down.
Hands dropped to gun belts as she leapt from the floor onto Shell’s desk into a coiled crouch, and Shell vaguely noted that neither of her hands were now tied. She cocked back the arm holding the huge knife, and Shell realized she was about to throw it right between his eyes from a distance of a few feet.
“Wait!” he screamed as the shining flash of steel spun towards him. “No!”
The wind next to his ear as he involuntarily jerked his head away gave him the realization she hadn’t thrown her knife at him. She sent it spinning into the floor-to-ceiling plate glass window he’d spent so many hours looking out of. The glass exploded out over the street and dead cars below.
Shell turned back to his desk to see the woman launch herself at him, much like a mountain lion would. Her strong hands grabbed his collar and a half second later her feet jammed into his stomach. He tried to keep his balance, but the momentum carried them both backwards. His arms windmilling, he heard a shot ring out and something hot burned the side of his neck.
“Shit! Don’t shoot! You’ll hit the boss!” Axyl’s voice rang out.
“Help!” Shell screamed as he fell back, trying to keep his feet under him.
And then he realized he was walking on nothing.
****
Ghost Wind knew that the chance of dying in this stunt was quite good.
As she drove Shell through the broken window, trying to put his body between her and any broken glass, she knew the landing was not going to be fun. She shifted her weight when she started to roll forward so that her adversary’s body once again rotated under her. The fall seemed to take forever, with the terrible anticipation of its ending looming in her mind. Shell’s horror-filled face looked up at her, whites of his eyes showing all the way around and he screamed, realizing his predicament.
“Damn you, you fucking b—”
The impact was harsh to say the least, as both of them landed on a 2027 Toyota Seeker, smashing in the roof. Ghost Wind’s powerful legs drove down into Shell and she catapulted out into the dusty street into a shoulder roll, trying to absorb some of the force in counter momentum. She came up hard against a derelict van and saw stars as well as feeling a shooting pain in one wrist, the one she had purposely dislocated earlier.
“Oh. Great Spirit!” She gasped. “That was…” She stood, swaying for a moment. There was no time to be lost. Feeling a shooting pain in one ankle, she staggered over to Shell. Ghost Wind grabbed one of the sleeves of his wool coat and began shaking him out of it.
“Augh!” His pained scream told her he had regained consciousness. “Stop! Please! My back, I think it might be broken!”
“How awful for you,” she replied, pulling him out of the first sleeve and flipping him face down onto the hood of the car. “That must be really painful!”
“NGHH!” Shell sobbed. “You bitch, my legs just went numb! I can’t feel my legs now!”
“Karma’s a bitch, and now, so am I.” She knew she had to work fast. She pulled the coat the rest of the way off, stripped the man’s sneakers off his feet, grabbed her pistol and knife and did what the Scouts of the Clan of the Hawk did best.
She disappeared into the twilight.
****
They all stood frozen for a moment as the woman and their leader backed out into thin air through the broken window. They all heard the impressive crash sound seconds later. Axyl, usually pretty fast to adapt to new situations, took several moments before he recovered enough to run to the now open-air window to look down at the carnage below.
Shell lay face down on a derelict car. Axe could see the dent in the roof where he had obviously impacted and he heard the man groan in pain. He saw no sign of Ghost Wind but he knew she was out there, waiting to cut his throat.
“Listen up!” he shouted, “The boss is in a bad way. I want two of you to get Doc Mullins and a stretcher and get him back indoors where he can be tended to. I want everyone else to get out there and find that bitch from hell, and I want her SHOT ON SIGHT! Is everyone clear on that? Kill her if you have any opportunity. If she’s alive I… we all… are in danger. She’s sneaky as hell, and can cut your throat before you know you’re dead. Understand me. Kill her on sight!”
They all stood dazed, no one moving except Porter whimpering as his blood ran out.
“Move! NOW, damn you!” They broke for the door like a wave. Cord was the only one who didn’t hurry.
“Cord! You get a tourniquet on Porter’s leg. Let’s see if we can keep him alive.”
“What about Grogan?” Cord gestured towards the smelly Road Shark now up and leaning heavily on Shell’s desk.
“Let me take care of our Mr. Grogan, Mr. Couldn’t Keep from Fucking Up.” Axyl walked up behind Grogan, reaching between his legs from behind, grabbing him by the crotch in his right and the man’s neck in his left. Grogan screamed that pig scream again as Axyl calmly walked him to the edge of the broken window and kept walking him through it.
Axyl had made sure to hang onto the man’s crotch a half second longer than his neck to ensure Grogan went head first and was not disappointed. He calmly watched as his former comrade went sailing down, screaming all the way and winced slightly at the sound of a muffled impact.
“Oh dear,” he said, looking back at Cord who was affixing his belt to Porter’s upper thigh.
“What?”
“I think we’re going to have to change poor Grogan’s name!”
Cord had no love for the smelly biker, and a good idea where this was going, “Oh?” he asked.
“Yep. Let’s remember him by his new name…”
“Which is?” Cord waited, eyebrow raised.
“Lawn Dart!” Axyl began to go into uncontrolled fits of laughter.
Hysterical laughter,
Cord thought to himself.
Eli was being excruciatingly careful. Riding past the old city was always tricky and he had no intention of giving himself away. Passing the belly of the beast the Road Sharks had made of this area, with all its traps and ambush points, made him not want to make any stupid mistakes. Eli had seen what happened to people when they let the Sharks get the upper hand.
It was close to dark. He was on a backstreet, as far out from the city center as possible and pushing the Terror on foot. Fusion cycles were very quiet in comparison to their combustion engine predecessors but they still made noise, a droning sound that, if listened for, could give a biker away. The enemy had many years to lay traps and ambushes and Eli had run afoul of a few. One or two had been near misses, and his nerves were keyed up.
When the ragged silhouetted figure stepped out of the brush in front of him, he braced his motorcycle and pulled his handgun in less time than it took to blink. It was only the need for silence which prevented him from pulling the trigger but when the person stepped out of the dark shadows, he was very glad he hadn’t.
“Hello, Eli.” Ghost Wind said. He noticed she was limping, and seemed none too steady on her feet. As she came close he saw her face was bruised and scratched and she looked like she had a shiner on her left eye, just above her old scar. She’d obviously been through the wringer.
And she still took his breath away.
“Ghost Wind! Good God! What happened? Are you all right?”
“I am now. Get me the hell out of this place! These bastards are all insane.”
He noted the heavy wool military coat, with her revolver sticking out of one large pocket, and her heavy knife in one hand. What surprised him most though was that she was wearing what appeared to be a pair of Beforetime tennis shoes, the kind that had been nicknamed “Chucks,” on her feet. Her legs were bare.
“We’re almost through the Shark’s home turf. If we can get a little further south, I can fire up the Terror and we can make some time. I can’t risk starting it up now.” He told her, “You get on and steer, while I push and you’re going to have to be the alert one so I don’t run us into one of their ambushes or traps.”
“They’re searching for me, the ones who haven’t gone up to New Hope.”
That brought him up short. “New Hope? What’s going on there?”
“The people they have guarding the slave pens are not exactly the sharpest tools in the shed. They tended to drop bits and pieces of information. They’re planning on some sort of attack of the compound tomorrow night.”
“I was on my way down to the meeting they’re calling at the old High Desert Museum. I would bet the meeting has something to do with this attack they’re planning. New Hope is not an easy target.”
She was silent a moment.
“Eli? I think I am well enough to ride, if you will take me with you. If I can get off my feet for a little bit, I might even be useful.”
“I should just find a good place to hide you until I get back, this is going to be a little iffy, danger-wise and I don’t really want to risk you getting captured or killed. Don’t think I don’t have a lot of respect for you and your skills, but I’m not sure I could stand it if I got you killed.”
“When is the meeting?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s later tonight, so I need to get my ass a movin’ and I can’t look after you at the same time.” He expected an argument, hopefully a quiet one, but her next suggestion mangled his own argument with a totally unfair dose of common sense.
“I can warn New Hope and possibly tell Yama No Matsu what is going on while you’re down there. I just need your help.”
“My help? Ghost Wind, how the hell are you going to get back there in time?”
“You are going to help me steal a fusion cycle.”
****
“Nuthin’ like a warm fire on a cold night,” Olaf said to himself.
Olaf was not exactly the prime example of a Road Shark. Oh, he enjoyed the privileges of being one of the gang, but in another far off age, he would have been considered ‘shy.’ Not the shy that has trouble speaking to strangers, but more along the lines of a complete lack of desire to do anything dangerous. He took a lot of shit for that, but as he often told himself, many of the ones who had called him chicken hadn’t survived long, and he was still kicking.
Not wanting to rely too heavily on his fighting spirit, his leaders had given him a lot of duties that bored the hell out of most of their men. Olaf was fine with them.
He didn’t mind sitting for mind numbing hours at a roadside checkpoint-ambush, he didn’t mind guarding the bikes, he didn’t mind walking half the length of town to scrounge something the boss wanted. What he minded, was being shot at or having to fight people who had a vested interest in spilling his blood. Didn’t want that, didn’t want to have to try to chase people down, when he could just pick ‘em off from the brush and he didn’t want to ever have to face that Eli bastard again. He’d wound up with a dislocated shoulder at New Hope, and even though Doc Mullins had put it back in place, it still ached. He hadn’t even seen that son of a bitch coming before he was down in the dirt screaming.
At least he was better off than Pid and Stanley.
No one was likely to be coming down the road in the dark, and he probably should have gone back to the ‘barn’ to see if they wanted him to do some other bullshit job, but he had built a small fire to keep warm, and was in no hurry.
“Nice night,” a voice said.
Olaf looked up, and the devil stepped out of the darkness in front of him. Olaf froze, not even thinking about reaching for the deer rifle next to him and trying very hard not to pee himself.
“Olaf, isn’t it?” Eli said. “We’ve crossed paths a couple of times now, as I recall. Um…. did you want to try for your rifle there?”
“Oh shit, no!” The reluctant Road Shark kicked the rifle hard enough to send it into the brush. “Please don’t kill me, Eli!”
“Wellll, I dunno. I mean you are a Road Shark and all, and I DID let you off pretty easy a day or so ago. A smart man might have taken the hint and cleared out, but here you are, goin’ about the Shark business of setting ambushes. I will admit, your heart obviously isn’t in it. Kinda hard to ambush someone when you’re staring into a warm fire.”
“I just been doin’ what they tell me, man! I don’t want trouble, but y’know when you’re in the Sharks, you do what Shell tells you. Or… at least we did.”
“Make yourself valuable, Olaf. What’s the situation there? And if I find out you’ve lied to me…”
“Shell ain’t in charge no more! Axe Man is. Shell’s bombed out of his mind on meds since some hardass chick kicked him out a third story window and broke his back.”
“Hmmm. Interesting.” Eli smiled widely at Olaf, knowing who the hardass chick had to have been, “Say, Oley, I hear there’s a meeting down at the old Museum tonight. Brief me.”
“Uh, Axe is goin’ down there to recruit all the indie bikers in the areas to the south and east….”
“Recruit them for what?”
“Um,” Olaf knew he’s said too much now and was trying to figure out something to tell this demon from hell. Unfortunately, he did not have the best poker face.
One moment, Eli was on the other side of the fire, the next he was standing next to Olaf and had his right hand in a vice-like grip. He slowly bent Olaf’s middle finger until the tip was pressing against his palm, and then pushed down on the joint next to the knuckle. Pain exploded throughout Olaf’s world and he went up high on his toes.
“Okay! Okay! Okay! Stop! Please, Eli!” he said, panting for air. “I’ll tell you! I’ll tell you everything!”
“Good fellow. Now what is the plan?”
Olaf had no idea what, if anything Eli knew, but he wasn’t going to take a chance and tell him a lie. The Road Shark’s plans were not worth his own ass.
“Shell has been tricklin’ guys up into the New Hope area for the last day or so. Tomorrow night, after almost all the troops are up there, hidin’ in the trees, they’s gonna blow a section of their wall with C4 they got from this “empire” to the east. Then they’re gonna rush in while everyone’s still stunned and take the place and make the farmers into their own personal food workers.” Olaf was spilling his guts so fast, he had to pause a moment to catch his breath. “Then the Road Sharks will control the farm food supply for the this whole region, enough so that we won’t have short rations in the winter and the Sharks’ll have more clout to take over the whole region.”