“Fuck you, Lester,” Eli rasped out.
“That’s whatcha get when ya try to be Mister Boy Scout. Bye, Eli!” Lester smiled an awful smile. “Give ‘im yer best shot, Ben!”
Eli looked from Lester back to Benny.
Benny was gone.
The spear he had been about to throw lay in the dust, and its owner was nowhere to be seen. Lester’s mouth dropped open, and he moved toward the last known location of his friend.
He wasn’t watching his captive and Eli wasn’t one to let an opportunity pass. Pain bursting through his hands and feet, he braced himself, reached up with his free hand and pulled. The spike holding his remaining hand came loose with a loud shriek and Eli fell from his perch to the dusty ground.
“What the fuckin’ hell?” Lester snarled turning back to his now free captive. “I dunno what you did to Ben, but youse gonna get a spear up yer ass for yer trouble!”
Eli had just reached his feet, when a wave of dizziness took him. For all his advanced abilities, he barely avoided being skewered, grabbing the spear as his attacker missed. Normally he would have turned Lester into goulash by now, but he had used the last of his strength pulling out the spike. The spear was ripped out of Eli’s hand and he stumbled. His enemy raised the crude weapon to finish the kill.
Then Lester’s eyes grew very wide. He stood a moment, looking vaguely confused and then fell face first into the dust. His body lay twitching, and Eli saw a very large, very crude-looking knife sticking out of one of his assailant’s kidneys. He pulled it out of the still shuddering soon-to-be corpse, and noticed it seemed to be a crude version of a design he had seen before. It looked like it had been hand hammered on a forge, and sharpened with files and stones.
“That is mine.” He looked up. The wolf woman was standing a mere three feet from him.
“How in the hell do you do that?” he asked, the faintness of his own voice surprising him. “Here, you might want to wipe the blood off on ol’ Lester’s shirt there…”
“I have already soiled a good blade with his blood. I have no interest in touching him further.” She walked over and began cleaning the blade with dry grass.
Eli watched her for a moment. She moved with the fluid grace of an athlete but she was standing oddly, at a forty-five degree angle.
No… wait… I’m standing at a forty-five degree…
The dusty ground came up and slapped him in the face.
“All right, Porter,” Axyl had said, “I think the problem was that you didn’t have enough backup last time. I’m sending seven more guys with you this time.”
Porter snorted, looking back at the “soldiers” Axe Man had provided. This bunch wasn’t any of the smarter guys in the Road Sharks. It was just some of the more stupid (and expendable) dumb asses, just like before, only more of ‘em. At least Axyl personally made it clear to them they had to keep quiet and out of sight of the farm compound. The problem was that called for stealth, and stealth called for subtlety. Most of this bunch was about as subtle as a thumb in the eye.
“Oh, one more thing, Port,” Axyl told him, a big shit-eating grin on his face, “we need to have a map and some drawings made.”
Porter’s belly clenched. He knew where Axyl was going with it before he saw the kid coming, pushing papers and half worn pencils into a shoulder bag.
“Oh hell no, Axe,” he’d protested. “You cannot be serious! You want me to take Durpee with us? Why don’t you just shoot me now?”
“okay, Port. If that’s what you want.” Axyl reached for the back of his belt where he kept his old model 1911.
“Wait, goddamn it!” Porter raised his hands, “Axe, you’re sending me out there, with the dregs, and now I’ve got to babysit the idiot too? That’s crazy!”
“Durp can draw anything he sees Porter, whether right there, or three days later and he draws it real good. Shell’s a little less than inclined to think you guys will do a good job of recon, so it’s my idea to send Durpee along as kind of a human camera. And like all cameras, you got to take care of it. So, you’ll take good care of Durp, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not shitting, Port. I want him back here unharmed. You lose the others, I don’t care so much, as long as you bring back the kid so he can draw us some pics. Clear?”
“Crystal.”
And that had been that. As they drove out of the garage, Porter glanced over his shoulder, and could see the kid huddled up against him, arms wrapped tightly around him. Dupree had his eyes closed and his legs had the fusion cycle in a death grip.
Porter sighed, and drove up the highway.
Ghost Wind had just decided she had her hand-made khukri knife clean enough when she heard a
plumpf
behind her. Turning, she saw the man she had helped land face-down, limp on the ground. She face-palmed herself.
“Just wonderful,” she snarled. “If I leave him here, he’ll likely die.” She had put all that effort into getting him off the cross, and leaving him to expire on the ground went against everything she believed in.
She looked to the east. She could just make out a streak of green, far back from the road. Water was rare in sagebrush country, and the green, probably spruces she guessed, said there was enough water to support them, a rarity in this place. She carefully moved in that direction, hoping she would find something that might help the wounds of the fool lying in the dust.
There were spruces all right and out from them, a number of desert junipers. A farmhouse sat well-hidden among them.
The farm itself was looking none too great, having been left to itself for the last twenty-something years. There were no signs that anyone had been there for a very long time. Weeds grew through the porch, dead Arbor Vitae surrounded the lawn but in one corner of the yard several birches were still flourishing.
By all rights, these trees should have died long ago, and the fact they had not confirmed her earlier assessment. Water.
She moved past the remains of a rusty e-car and saw what she was looking for. Her quick search showed an old hand pump, and bubbling out of its base was a small but steady stream of water. She assumed it was a natural spring, the pump left there for the former owner’s convenience.
Near the pump, she found Yarrow and Broadleaf Plantain.
“Ah. Just what I needed. At least now, I have something to put on his wounds.”
****
Eli awoke to the sound of water dribbling in the distance. Holding his hand up, he saw the wounds in his brown skin had almost closed, but they were covered with some kind of greenish goo. To his left, he saw his own pack and realized he was lying on his sleeping bag. Above this was a latticework of limbs and sagebrush forming an igloo shape and juniper boughs covered the floor.
To his right, the wolf woman sat, tending a tiny fire in a place scraped down to the dirt. She was cooking something in what looked like a blackened and battered coffee can with a wire handle.
“How did you figure out which gear was mine?” he asked, his voice a barely audible croak. “Benny and Lester must’ve been ransacking my pack for whatever they wanted to take.”
She looked coldly at him for a moment, as if trying to decide if she really wanted to engage in conversation with him or just maintain a stony silence. Finally, she spoke, “Your equipment was only dusty. Everything they owned was filthy, and it stunk of them.” She went back to tending what she was cooking.
Ah. Woman of few words.
“I want to thank you for… rescuing me. I was pretty sure I was done for.”
She nodded slightly, never taking her eyes from the fire. Her dark hair was arranged under a head band, and the forwards sections on the outside of the band formed wings that partially hid her face.
“You’re a long way from nowhere, you from up north?”
“We are not discussing me.” She looked up. “Instead, let’s hear how you managed to wind up on that big cross out there. And I’d like to know how those horrific wounds healed over so fast.”
Careful, Eli, this one doesn’t miss much.
“Well, it’s a little embarrassing,” he said, looking down. “I’ve been hunting those two for about a month, now. I work as sort of an independent… lawman, trying to bring some civilized behavior back to this area.”
“A vigilante.”
“If you want to say it like that. Right now, several small settlements are being attacked by slavers. People are kidnapped and taken way off to the northeast to some outfit called Farnham’s Empire. Don’t know much about them, but they sound like nothing but trouble.”
She looked up again at his mention of the Empire and her hair fell away to reveal the terrible scar on the left side of her face.
Shit Eli, don’t stare at her scar! Were you raised by badgers?
Too late. She had seen him looking. She looked down again and moved her hair back over that side of her face.
“Ahhh so, anyway, I have been tracking down those two in hopes that I might not only take them out of circulation permanently, but also learn something about where these goddamned slavers are. Slavers been workin’ with the Road Sharks and that’s trouble for everyone.”
She looked at him and the message was clear.
Tell me more.
He sighed, “Unfortunately, when I found Benny and Lester, I thought to sneak up on them in the dark. They were a little smarter than I gave them credit for, and they had trapped the area around their camp. I found their one and only bear trap, the hard way.”
She looked at the medium brown skin of his leg. “Yet, that leg doesn’t seem to be broken, and the wounds I saw on it yesterday are much less prominent, only one day later.”
“Yeeaah… funny story there, but enough about me. What brings a lovely young woman such as yourself out here to what has become a deserted wasteland.” He smiled winningly as he said it, which only seemed to make her expression more stony.
“I don’t know you, so don’t presume to ask me personal questions. It was a hard decision to help you in the first place, and now I’m stuck here trying to make sure you don’t die.” The haughtiness in her voice reminded Eli of certain scientists and administrators he had known decades before. She didn’t look like the administrator of much, but she had the proud voice.
But something in her manner said that pride had been damaged lately.
“Okay, but I’ve always felt that information exchange should be
quid pro quo
, y’know? You give a little, I give a little,” he replied, eyebrow raised, “I’m not asking for your life story, but this is hard country, few travel alone yet here you are. And I’ve never seen anyone as good at staying hidden or disappearing as you are.”
“I understand Latin, you needn’t explain it to me.” She sighed. “You also travel alone.”
“It’s not by choice young lady, I…”
“And why do you keep calling me young? You can’t be more than a few years older than I am.”
“Sorry. As to why I travel alone, I’m trying to help people out here, and that is a very foreign concept in this area.” He smiled slightly. “Everyone here is just scrambling to get by and helping others is not something most would go out of their way to do. They sure as hell have no interest in joining me to hunt down dangerous men and women. So, I’m on my own with my Quixotic quest.”
She looked at him.
“Sooo, your story is….?” he said, eyebrows raised in question.
She looked at the sagebrush bough wall for a moment, considering. Then she climbed out of the small door of the shelter and walked off into the night.
Okay, then. We’ll just have to take that a little slower,
he thought.
****
Ghost Wind stepped out and walked away from the wigwam she had constructed over her strange guest. His questions had made her want to escape the narrow space for a time, and the night sky was clear, unlike her thoughts.
In the Beforetime, there would have been lights everywhere, or so she had been told, even many in a remote area like this. They would have made it difficult to even see the stars, but now artificial light out here was non-existent. As her eyes adjusted, her heart filled with a brief joy looking up at the Milky Way, Orion and the wanderer’s friend— Polaris, the North Star.
“Hello old stars. Thank you for coming with me. At least you are familiar, like family, in this place so far from home.” She felt tears rise.
She didn’t need to meditate to know what was wrong. She was afraid. The warrior Ghost Wind had rarely been afraid, but now, it seemed she was always living in fear. Not necessarily fear of death, but fear of the future, fear of loneliness and fear of trusting anyone ever again.
Ghost Wind sat and watched him as he slept.
Her own mind was a roiling cauldron of turmoil and part of her thoughts screamed that she should quietly pack her things and leave. Trusting this man could be a huge mistake, just like her trust in Axyl was.
The other part of her was so lonely that she could barely stand it.
The scouts were trained to be alone at a young age, and Ghost Wind had spent weeks, even a month completely by herself and had never had a problem with it. It was different now. Then, she had people to return to, a home, such as it was, and a purpose that helped make the long hours on scout easier, much easier, to bear.
Now, she was truly alone, no one cared about her survival, how she felt, what she was doing. She was in effect, a non-entity. That seemed it would be the course of the rest of her life.
But what if he’s just like Axyl?
What if he isn’t and I throw away my only ally down here.
Creator Spirit, please help me.
****
Eli woke around four a.m. This was pretty common for him, usually he didn’t need much sleep, but his aches and pains made him want to turn over and go right back to dreamland.