“Gawd’amighty woman! You about made me jump out of my skin!”
Laughter poured over the rampart.
“This the gal you said was waitin’ for ya, Eli?” Horace cackled. “Appears she grow’d tired of it!”
Eli lowered his voice so that the spectators couldn’t hear. “Ghost Wind, don’t ever sneak up on me like that! I could’ve overreacted and hurt you, which is about the last thing I want to do!”
“You tricked me,” she replied, equally quiet. “Somehow you think I can let that stand? You want me to trust you, but I was ready to take off cross-country and you could’ve kissed my fading footprints!”
“Heweee!” Horace called down, “A couple starts talkin’ all quiet like that, you know there’s a storm on the horizon.”
“We’re not a couple!” Ghost Wind and Eli replied simultaneously.
“I’m dang glad to hear it, seein’ as how our little community is three quarters men and one quarter women. Anyone who can look that good and can sneak up on Mr. Sharp Ears there, would be mighty welcome here!”
“Do you want these weapons, or not?” Eli yelled up.
“I think you two best come in for a little stew and tea, and we’ll discuss it!”
“I don’t think—” Eli began.
“Accepted!” Ghost Wind cut him off. “Thank you for the hospitality!”
Horace laughed, and the metal gate began to move.
“Porter,” Axyl said. “Please tell me Eli didn’t do this.”
Um…” From the hangdog look on the man’s face and the lack of the rest of the battered-looking crew’s ability to raise their gaze from the ground, Axyl knew that was exactly what had happened. Again.
“Fuck, man, how the hell am I supposed to keep Darwin from just shooting you, Port? This is twice you’ve screwed up a simple recon!” Axyl looked at Porter, shaking his head.
“Dammit, Axe. You keep sending me out with the stupidest guys in the gang, and they are just not good at being slick or quiet.” The other men looked at Porter with hard stares. “Sure as shit, them farmers heard some of these yahoos talkin’ in the brush, and the next think I know, firefight.”
“You’d better not have lost Durpee,” he said. “Or I swear to God, I’m gonna beat the boss to the draw in blowing your brains all over this nice wallpaper.”
“No! No, Axe, Durpee was hid when the shooting started, I had to go back an’ get him! He ain’t got a scratch, man! Wish I could say the same for the rest of us.”
“Where’s Stanley?”
“Ol’ Eli dislocated his jaw so bad, I don’t think even the doc could’a helped him. He was hurtin’ something’ terrible, boss, so… I popped him when he weren’t lookin’. It was a mercy, honest!”
“All right, Porter,” Axle cut in, sighing. “Just tell me what you learned about New Hope so I can have an idea what went down before we tell Darwin.”
The meeting upstairs with Shell went just about as Axyl expected, badly.
****
“Honest to fuck, boss, it wasn’t our fault!” Porter Dell had a note of hysteria in his voice.
“You come back here,” Shell started quietly, volume increasing with each word, “beat to hell, missing men and not bringing me the information I needed! Tell me, Porter, you’re supposed to be one of my lieutenants, but what the HELL good are you?”
Porter flinched and subconsciously tried to protect the shoulder that Doc Mullins had just put back in the socket. Shell was tempted to punch the man in that shoulder, but knew that getting information from people while they were sobbing was tedious at best.
“Tell me,” he said, “what exactly happened, Porter.”
“Boss,” Porter looked at him with a pitiable expression, “It was that goddamned Eli again! He snuck up and jacked us from behind!”
Shell closed his eyes and massaged the bridge of his nose. When he opened them again, Axyl was leaning over Porter shaking his head. “Porter,” Shell said, “you were supposed to just recon the compound, why in the hell were you exchanging valuable bullets with a bunch of farm boys for no damn reason?”
“Uh, well, sir, you know Pid?”
“Pid. He’s the guy that always has that vague smell of urine about him, right?”
“Yep. That’s Pid. Well, he.. um.. kinda let himself be seen.”
“Exactly what we told you not to do.”
“Yeah, well, ol’ Pid wasn’t really too bright and he couldn’t seem to shut up. Anyway, the farmers started shooting at us, then we had to shoot back and—”
Shell interrupted in a fury. “The one thing we wanted you to do, to bring back information on their set up, you didn’t manage to accomplish, but you did manage to do the one thing we least wanted, which was to get them more alert to possible attack. Does that about sum it up, Porter? Do I have the lay of the land correct here?”
Axyl watched his employer start to reach for the gun in his shoulder holster and calmly stepped between Porter and Shell.
“Whoa, boss,” he said, looking Shell directly in the eye, “you’re trying to build an army here, let’s not be offing the troops less’n we have to. Ol’ Port here is one of our smarter guys, let’s not waste him.”
“God help us if he’s one of the smarter ones.” Shell dropped his hand, then his expression became perplexed. “Porter, you say it was Eli who nailed you? And he just beat the crap out of you?”
Porter nodded miserably.
“Did he kill any of you, this time?”
Porter shook his head.
“Then how, if you don’t mind my polite inquiry, did you lose two of my men?”
Porter looked down at the carpeting.
“Porter,” Axyl said, a warning in his voice, “you’d best answer the man.”
“Well, y’see… like I tol’ ya, Pid let ‘em know we was there, and on the way back to the bikes we was all in some pain. Pid kept moanin’ and all he had was a few bruises, far as I could see.” Porter hesitated for a moment. “Well, I was already purty damn pissed at him anyway, and finally all that moanin’… well… I just hauled off and shot him in the head. Stanley, on the other hand, wasn’t even gonna make it back on his own, and I kilt him as a mercy.”
Now it was Axyl’s turn to massage the bridge of his nose in exasperation.
“Get him out of my sight, Axyl, before I shoot the stupid ass.”
“C’mon, Port. You and me are gonna step outside and see if we can figure out how to make this right.”
****
“Oh, damn, Axe,” Porter turned to him, a relieved grin on his face, “I got to thank you for…”
The Axe Man’s right hand struck as quick as a rattlesnake, grabbing Porter’s crotch, getting his subordinate’s testicles in a death grip.
“Porter?” he said softly, “do I have your complete fucking attention?”
“Yeeeggg!”
“Good. Now, as you and I know, you are an incredibly useless piece of shit, and it was just luck and me that have kept you alive to this point. Is that a fair assessment?”
“Y-Yeeeesss?”
“All right then, you had better not EVER fuck up this badly again, or you are going in the ground. Am I clear?”
“Y-y-yyeesss.” Axyl let go and Porter collapsed to his knees.
“Porter, when you can walk again,” Axyl’s voice had turned conversationally friendly, “go get Durpee and bring him up here to me. I want him to show the boss something. Don’t take too long, okay?”
“Okayaaayyyy.”
The stew must have been very tasty to one who had been living on dried meat and foraged plants for the previous several weeks. Eli was amazed and impressed to watch Ghost Wind pack it away. She ate with a gusto that he found refreshing.
The women of New Hope tended to flock around Eli when he came to visit, and knowing their matrimonial structure he was always a little careful to be circumspect in his flirting. Alice Ann was squirming her way onto his lap and Horace had to shoo her off so they could conduct their business.
“I’ll gladly trade you a full bin of apples for them rifles, Eli, though how you’re gonna get ‘em up to Yama no Matsu is beyond me. Certainly ya cain’t carry that many up there on the Terror, even if ya was to leave this lovely young eatin’ machine here with us.” Horace looked over at Ghost Wind fondly.
“You’re not going to believe this, Horace, but Tengu found a matched pair of draft horses, I think actual Clydesdales. He has a wagon now that we can bring down here and do some proper trading, not just these pieces and bits we’re always exchanging back and forth.”
“Where is the hell didja find draft horses, much less a wagon to hitch ‘em too? Such things weren’t that common in the Beforetime.”
Eli’s face darkened, “We found them on a patrol. The original owners had run afoul of the Road Sharks.”
“Surprised they left the horses alive.”
“The horses were smarter than the owners.”
Looking up, Ghost Wind wiped her mouth and said, “Who are these Road Sharks? Are there really so many that everyone is afraid? Can you not drive them out of the area?”
“That’s a lot easier said than done, Miss Ghost Wind,” Horace said. “You only rarely catch ‘em in small bunches like today. Usually it’s twenty or thirty at a time, and I got ta tell ya, they are a mean bunch. Most folks don’t want to attract their attention, ‘cept maybe Eli here.”
“We can’t seem to coordinate a big enough group effort to drive off or exterminate the vermin,” Eli said, looking pointedly at Horace.
“Now don’t start. Dammit, Eli, me and my people ain’t fighters. We just stick to what we know, farmin’ and defending these walls. Anything else would most likely be the end of this place.”
“And so, they just get a little stronger every year.”
Both men were silent for a moment. Horace looked at Eli, “That’s why I wished you’da just taken them boys outside the wall outta the picture. The less men ol’ Shell has, the less power he has.”
A sharp reply came to Eli’s tongue, but he swallowed it.
“Horace, there’s some days when killing others, even when they deserve it, just sits poorly on a man’s mind.”
“Well, hope that high-minded liberal idealism don’t come back to bite ya in the ass, Eli.”
“Yep.”
“Oh dearie me,” Horace said, and Eli looked where the big man’s gaze fell, “It appears to me your Miss Ghost Wind is talkin’ to Marilee. Kinda wish that could’a waited…”
Eli stifled a laugh, watching Ghost Wind’s eyes suddenly go as big as saucers. “Well, let’s be honest, Horace. There’s no one here who will talk as frankly about your mating setup than Marilee.”
“Yeah,” Horace sighed sadly, “I know.”
****
“You have more than one husband!? Two men?” Ghost Wind said, her provincial morals deeply stung.
Marilee looked at her with mild amusement. “I would never be so thoughtless, girl! The ratio of strapping men to women here is almost three to one. I would never be so rude as to only love two men.”
It took Ghost Wind a moment to absorb the implications of this, but when she did, her eyes, already quite opened, grew even wider. From the age of eight, she had been trained by the tracker scouts of the Clan of the Hawk and she had not had a lot of romantic interaction other than occasional flirting and kissing with the male apprentices.
Then Axyl had come along and besotted her with “romance.” He had been her first and only lover, and his betrayal left her not even wanting to think of the sexual interactions between men and women. But now her curiosity wouldn’t let her drop the subject.
Marilee could see the young woman calculating in her head, and waited for the inevitable questions.
“But,” Ghost Wind started, the hesitated a moment, “does that mean you sleep with all the men here?”
“Not all at once!” Marilee laughed. “No, silly girl! Of course not, Shorty and Lem are my first cousins, that’s a no-no.”
“But the rest?”
“I’ve had four children since I’ve been here, and have one on the way,” Marilee told her. “Eventually, we’ll have to find more young women, but for now, everyone understands the needs of our community. And though the men are the muscle here, I want you to know the women run this show.”
Marilee looked at Ghost Wind pointedly. “And for harmony’s sake, we don’t let any of our men go too long without sex.”
Which,
Ghost Wind thought,
is another way of saying “yes, many husbands”.
“Which brings us to you…”
“Me!?” Ghost Wind’s eyes again grew huge.
“Young, strong obviously, and very feminine build. Be a great plus for us, and if you understand your genetics, a very good decision, biological diversity-wise. The more women who join us, the sooner we can all take a break. I don’t know who you’re with now, but we can offer a lot. No shortage of food, good people and a target that’s hard to take for any raider group.”
But still an obvious target.
Ghost Wind thought.
“And I would have to…?”
“Oh, not at first, sweetie. We’re not barbarians!”
“But later…?”
“Well, the needs of the many must be met.” Marilee looked to her left, and a slight smirk came to her face. Ghost Wind followed her gaze and saw three bearded men watching her. They quickly smiled, in an attempt to be disarming, but she knew desire when she saw it and was sure they were all hoping she would join their “service agreement.”
“I… um… need to talk to Eli for a moment,” she told her hostess.
“Oh, certainly, sweetie, see if you can get that handsome rogue to join as well.” Marilee looked toward the vigilante. “We could definitely use some of those genes in the mix!”
“Ahhh… yeah,” Ghost Wind said, moving away.
As she approached Eli and Horace, she noted they were drinking out of a quart jar and both were laughing and acting a bit less formal. Ghost Wind took Eli’s jar from his hand and sniffed. The burn in her nose told her all she needed to know and she handed it back to him.
“I am going back to where we left my gear. If you want to meet me there, I will see you then. If not, then good fortune to you and perhaps I will see you at a later time,” She said, picking up her rifle.
“Ghost Wind, wait!” Eli stood a little unsteadily. “Horace and I have just about finished with our haggling. Give me a few minutes and I’ll come with you.”