Axyl glanced over at Big Mo, riding just behind him on the right as the man grabbed his leg and lost control of his ride. Axyl was horrified to see an arrow sticking out of the man’s thigh.
Fucking Ghost Wind! It’s gotta be!
Riding past an old service station, Axyl felt a bullet ping off the front of his bike, just below the windscreen and tried to will the elderly cycle to faster speeds. He heard more gunshots over the wind and whine of the fusion-bike and heard a crash behind him but didn’t look back. It was every man for himself at this point, and any of his people who hadn’t figured out the situation by this point were too stupid to live anyway.
The shooting had just died down when he noticed something smoking on a tree and recognized an elderly Claymore mine fizzing and sparking.
“Go! Go! Go! Booby trap!” he screamed and anyone who wasn’t at full throttle definitely moved there.
They were well down the road when the explosion came, missing everyone. Axyl looked back and a quick headcount told him he had lost six.
“Someone’s gonna pay for this someday, but for now let’s get the fuck outta here!”
None of his motley crew objected.
****
The strategy had not really survived contact with the enemy.
Ghost Wind, shooting arrows as fast as she could pull them from the ground they were stuck in, hit three of the kilabykers as they zoomed through, and someone had hit a fourth before their enemies had figured out their danger. But most of her archers had missed. Flat out missed.
Two of her targets had been dead before their bikes had went down and the third was leaving this world quickly. The fourth died in hail of arrows, Kita’s students actually being able to hit a target if it wasn’t moving.
She turned towards where Axyl and the rest of his men were tearing up the road, dropped her bow and grabbed the elderly AR rifle at her side. She began firing as fast as she could and thought she had hit another man though he didn’t crash his bike. For a moment, the crowd of bikes shifted and she had a clear shot at the back of the Axe Man’s head only to hear a disconcerting click when she pulled the trigger of the elderly rifle.
“Shit!” she screamed, trying to clear the jam. “Damn you, Axyl!” Looking up, she saw that the enemy had put the pedal to the metal and were rapidly moving out of range. It was a forlorn hope that she would get a shot at him now, but she started limping up the road while trying to get the jammed cartridge to eject out of the chamber.
“C’mon, Kita! Fire that Claymore!” she growled, only to see the enemy bikers blow through the booby trap with no casualties. “Oh for the love! You people have brought new meaning to the word FUBAR!”
Two more bikers were down in the road ahead, and one of them had propped himself behind his machine and was exchanging shots with Roger and Mort, evidently hoping for a chance to make a break for it. The other was a huge man and the arrow in his thigh hardly seemed to bother him. He had seen Kita emerge from the building she had used and was advancing on her with a sawed off shotgun in one hand and a spiked baseball bat in the other. He’d started to raise the gun towards Kita, when the older woman shot him in the stomach. He doubled over for a moment, and dropped the shotgun, putting his hand over the wound. Ghost Wind could hear the click of an empty magazine as Kita tried to shoot him again and was stunned when the kilabyker raised his head and charged the older woman.
“Kita!” she screamed, trying to break into a painful trot. “Run!”
Kita however, watching as the man picked up speed and raised his horrific club, simply waited for him with a disdainful expression on her face. As the huge man reached her he screamed and swung his awful weapon at the diminutive teacher but his club met only empty air. Kita took what looked like a tiny step to the man’s left, pulled the sword she wore from its wooden scabbard and cut, seemingly with her entire body.
The result was instantaneous. Her opponent went down without any other conscious movement, his head flopping loosely. Half a second later, a jet of blood erupted from his half severed neck and Kita stepped back to avoid the spray. She then pulled a piece of paper from her pocket and folding the paper to each side of the blade cleaned it in one sliding movement. She released the bloody paper to flutter down on her dead enemy like a falling cherry blossom.
A few more shots rang out and the remaining biker went down under the bullets of Roger and Mort. As Kita looked down at the man she had killed, the mine she had planted finally blew, showering steel shards all over the empty road. Axyl and most of his men disappeared over a rise in the road, too far to reach.
They had failed.
The bodies had been dragged from the road and their fusion cycles and been hidden inside the old recharging station. Ghost Wind had resolutely kept her mouth shut, though she had wanted to yell at Kita for not training her warriors to shoot better in respect to moving targets. There was no need of course, the lack in their education was readily apparent, and Kita and all her students were well aware of their shortcomings.
“We’d better get after them.” Kita said, “Maybe we can thin them down a little if we can catch them. I don’t relish the idea of pursuing men who live on their motorcycles with people who only ride occasionally, but we need to do something.”
“No,” Ghost Wind replied, “That would be a huge mistake, and probably cost many, if not all of your people here.”
“Explain yourself,” Kita said harshly, stung by the bluntness of the words.
“Axyl’s group just blew through our ambush with minimal losses. He knows someone is trying to take them down and that someone failed. The same someone is now behind him, and if they are determined, what is the first thing his ambushers are likely to do?”
The older woman thought for a moment. “Either give up, or more likely, to pursue the kilabykers and try to do a more thorough job the second time around.”
“And we’re just about to do the latter. Axyl may not be the sharpest tool in the shed, but he’s got a lot of time ’til the attack tonight, so I’d guess he’s going to pull over a little way up the road and see if he can turn the tables on us. My guess is that within the next five to ten miles you’d run into a firestorm from both sides of the road and it would look like Custer’s last stand.”
The whole group looked at her, horrified at the thought.
“What do you suggest?”
“I was a scout of the Clan of the Hawk. The way of the scout is to always do the unexpected. Always. I suggest we take one of these back roads that lead to New Hope, and make contact with Eli. If we can find the explosive they’re going to use to blow the wall of the compound, we’ll know where most of them are going to attack and can concentrate defense in that area.”
“How will we be able to reach Eli, if he’s in the compound, much less move about the outside of the wall looking for explosives?”
“That,” Ghost Wind said, looking over the broken grassy concrete, “is my personal specialty.”
****
“Maybe we could have done more,” Roger, one of Kita’s more experienced students said.
They had parked almost five miles from the compound, not wanting to have any unexpected encounters with the Sharks. Ghost Wind looked over the small crew of would-be warriors and realized there was little that they could do until they had more information.
The group stashed their cycles and gear in the low-lying juniper forest and came together to discuss what they were going to do.
“Maybe we should have tried to get ahead of the Axe Man and set up another ambush just before they reached the compound,” Roger said, his long brown beard drooping in the chill of the February day. “Maybe we could have got another shot at those turds and done some real damage this time.”
“We would have been too close to the Road Sharks that are here already,” Kita told him, “We were outnumbered in the original ambush, and if we were caught between the two groups, it’s unlikely we’d last long.”
“So what do we do? Just go home?” The question was asked by Tara, a short muscular girl with flawless skin the color of onyx. “I want to do something to help the people of New Hope! I know people there! I have friends there!”
“You will have your chance,” Ghost Wind said, looking into the faces of the entire group, one by one, “but for now, I have to go alone to warn Eli about our earlier failure and to see if I can find where they’ve got the explosives planted.”
“How in the name of God do you plan to get to Eli, if he’s in that compound and get past all the Road Sharks that must be around the place?”
“When I was there, I noticed small gaps in a few places in the metal wall they’ve put up, gaps at the base where gullies were. They’ve tried to fill them in, but I could see it was mostly loose dirt and rock in a few of them.” She touched the big rough knife at her belt. “With a little digging, I think I can wiggle through. The people of New Hope have also not been as diligent as they should be about keeping the weeds and brush trimmed at the base of their walls. It gives me a little cover to work, and a little cover is all a warrior scout needs.”
She moved toward a small spring, the reason she had signaled them to stop and park their motorcycles. Ghost Wind sat on her knees Japanese style, and started digging up grayish mud and algae from the water. She applied the gooey mess to her face, making a base layer of grays and greens, then took a piece of campfire charcoal she had retrieved on the way and began to work shadows and highlights into the mix.
“You gals always gotta get made up ‘fore you go out on a date, don’t cha?” Mort chuckled. Ghost Wind’s face at this point would have made any Beforetime special forces operative proud.
“We always like to look our best for the men-folk. Besides, I’d like to cover up this black eye anyway.” Ghost Wind said, smiling white teeth standing out in the stone-mud texture of her face. Her face obscured, she started to work on the wool coat when she noticed Roger’s old gray-tone camouflage military jacket. “Roger, will you switch coats with me? I’ll be getting yours a bit dirty…”
“Hell yeah!” Roger exclaimed as he took the field jacket off. “Not a problem.”
As Ghost Wind pulled off Shell’s overlarge wool coat, the group went silent. It was not the sight of a half-naked muscular woman that shocked them; it was the battered condition of her body. The scout’s skin was covered in purple bruises, scrapes, and scratches. The women’s faces were stony, and the men’s faces showed straight up outrage.
“Damn, girl, what did they do to you?” Tara asked. “What did those bastards do?”
“Not as much as they had planned or threatened,” Ghost Wind growled, feeling her own blush under the mud. “And they paid for what they did do with their leader’s spine. Kita? Can you wrap my ankle? It’s been giving me trouble all day.”
“Er… um…” Roger reached into his pack and pulled out a pair of baggy old jeans. He blushed as he said, “It might be easier for you if you wore these too. The brush here is notoriously stickery.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that. Can you hand me my haversack, Mort?”
“Sure, here you go. I sure would like to give those fucks some payback. Harm our friends, get treated like the rats you are,” Mort said, voice thick with emotion. “Whatever happens here, I’m glad and proud of anything we can do to monkey wrench these… these…”
“Yes,” Kita said quietly as she tightly wrapped Ghost Wind’s ankle. ‘We all feel this, Mort. They have hurt one of our own.” She looked up into Ghost Wind’s eyes.
Ghost Wind stared at the older woman, confused. “Wha.. what?”
“You heard me, young lady. And I mean it. So try not to get killed so that perhaps I can…” she sighed as she said it, “..make amends.”
The group wasn’t quite certain what had just happened, but they saw the young scout doing her best to not let her tears show.
“Here now, honey,” Mort said quietly, “you’re gonna make your makeup run.”
The white smile on the muddy face flashed for a second again. Then Ghost Wind went to work on her clothes.
****
As she ghosted between the junipers, Ghost Wind chuckled to herself at the amazement of the group when she had finished her camouflage. She had moved into cover as she left, and she could tell they lost sight of her quickly.
She had covered two miles before signs of her enemies began to show. The Road Sharks had people all around near New Hope to keep an eye on their objective, but the majority of their troops were farther back, to avoid any of the stupider members of the gang letting themselves be seen. As she moved forwards, it wasn’t that hard to detect them before she ever saw them. Aside from the stink, most of the more idiotic members couldn’t seem to realize talking to each other wasn’t the best way to remain hidden. Whoever had moved these boneheads to the rear had known what they were doing.
“Gaw’damn I am tired o’ sittin’ on my ass out here in the dust, George.” A particularly piquant gentleman opined. “Not sure that fuckin’ Axe Man knows what the hell he’s doin’.”
“Well Norv, he’s over there in the vicinity of the front gate with all them Indies he brung. Whyn’t ya just go on over an’ ask ‘im?”
Another voice interrupted, “I heard someone tried to jack Axyl and his bunch on the way up here. I wonder if them sodbusters know we’re plannin’ somethin’?”
“Not unless they’s somehow resurrected the cell phones them Beforetimers used to use. Someone might know, but I don’t see how they could tell the folks inside. We got the area sealed up tight. A lizard couldn’t get through if we didn’t want it to.”
Ghost Wind smiled wryly as she crawled past their position.
A hundred yards farther, she started encountering the more alert members of the gang and started moving lower to the ground. There were points where she had to move forward by doing a push-up and rocking forward, careful to lower herself back to the ground noiselessly. To try and crawl in spots like this would have made too much noise in the dry juniper needles and dried grass. Mud and dirt stuck to her clothing, but Scouts felt safest when they were covered in muck.