Wolf Tracker (6 page)

“That’s stupid.” Tami paused to cough faintly. “Once I’m dead, there’s no reason for him to let you live. Your friends died quick. He can take his time with you once I’m dead. Ow! Come on! You’re breaking my ribs!”

There was a blur of heat near her temple and a strange
thunking
noise, and then she and her captor both hit the ground in a flurry of legs. His arm fell away from her as he writhed around in the dead grass, clawing at the arrow in his throat. Tami tried to scramble away from him, but it felt like moving through Jell-O. It took so much effort to crawl she didn’t get far before she saw a pair of moccasins step past her. She turned her head and saw Blondie go to one knee by her captor and the flash of a knife in the sun. The arrow in her captor’s neck might not have killed him, but the slit throat would do the trick. Tami swallowed desperately to contain her nausea. How could she be nauseous? She had nothing in her stomach. In the movies, slit throats didn’t smell. In the movies, blood didn’t steam when it hit frozen ground. She retched drily.

Blondie cleaned his blade with a few deft swipes on the dead man’s pants. He turned his head to look at her. Tami tried to ignore the fact that weakness had planted her butt on the ground in an awkward sprawl. She held his eyes, fiercely determined to maintain as much dignity as she could. She would not faint, scream, or beg for mercy. She would
not
cry. Blondie was staring at her out of a narrow, impassive face that looked like it smiled once a decade. There was a scab at the hairline over his left eyebrow. At least she hadn’t killed him. He turned his attention back to the dead man and pulled his arrow out of the cut he’d made in the dead man’s throat. Tami watched in numb horror as he retrieved each arrow and cleaned the heads of blood and gore. She barely reacted when he approached her with the brown leather jacket he’d roughly stripped from a dead man.

“You’re cold,” he said, when she didn’t take the jacket. “Put it on.”

It was still warm from the dead man’s body heat. Tami felt the warmth sink into her when she slid her arms into the sleeves and buttoned it up. It was a heavy comfort hugging her. There was blood on the fleece collar. She didn’t care. When she looked up, Blondie had gone off to catch Freedom. She could grab one of the dead men’s horses and make a break for it. She sat unmoving in the dried, blood-spattered grass. Where had her strength gone? When she tried to stand she found herself wilting back to the ground like a fainting heroine in a Victorian romance novel. Crawling took longer and wasn’t dignified, but it worked to get her to a fallen pistol.

Blondie was leading Freedom back to her but he paused when he saw the pistol she had propped on her bent knee aimed at him. Freedom snorted tiredly beside him. “You gonna use that?” he asked mildly.

“Are you going to try to force me to go back?”

Couldn’t he show a little emotion? But his face, too narrow and hard to be handsome, showed nothing. “Did Leach hurt you?”

Memories shook the gun on her knee. She hoped her face was as impassive as his when she said, “Yes.”

His mouth tightened the tiniest bit. “Then I won’t take you back.” He led Freedom past her and began gathering the other horses together.

The gun slid down her leg to the ground. “What are you going to do?” she demanded of his back.

“Get us a ways off from this place, first off. Feed you and get you warmed up. Then we can talk.”

She watched him move around the bodies to collect the dead men’s horses. He flipped through the saddle bags with impersonal deftness and found a rope, then used it to link Freedom and three of the horses together. The fourth horse, a fine bay gelding, he led over to her.

“Can you mount?”

Tami was almost positive she couldn’t even stand, but she grimly crawled to her feet. She couldn’t hold the pistol at the same time and mount, so she let it lay on the grass and used the last bit of her strength to get on the horse. It wasn’t elegant, and it took two tries, but she made it into the saddle. The stirrups were just the right length for a long-legged woman, and she thanked God for it, because it helped her stay on the horse. She gathered the reins up, and put her hands on the saddle horn to steady herself. Blondie watched coolly without offering to help, and stepped away once she was up. He scooped up the pistol and tucked it into the waist of his breechcloth. He gave a faint whistle, and an ugly dun horse, even uglier than Freedom, trotted out from behind a jumble of rocks. Blondie mounted with a lithe grace that made Tami feel like a sack of potatoes. A tired, sagging sack of potatoes. With her frantic desperate escape attempt foiled, all her energy had drained away. He had the four horses on the lead in his left hand and nodded to her to follow.

Tami glanced at the blood glistening on the grass by the bodies. “What about them? Are you going to just leave them?”

Blondie glanced indifferently at the bodies behind him. “Was there somewheres you wanted to take ’em?”

Tami swallowed. “No.” She nudged a heel into her horse and followed the braids.

Chapter Seven

Tami followed Blondie in a numb daze. She had done everything she could to escape him, but she’d failed. She wondered if she should be terrified. He had trailed her for days, and when he finally found her, she’d attacked him. And then, when he caught up with her again, he killed four men. She
should
be terrified, but she was just too tired. This must be what shock felt like. The sun should be warming her by now, but she felt cold all the way through in spite of the fleece-lined coat. She found herself staring so blindly at her horse’s ears, she was surprised when the horse stopped suddenly. She blinked at Blondie, who was dismounting with silent grace.

“We’re stopping?” she croaked.

He glanced at her briefly. “We’ll make camp here for a day or two.”

It looked like a good place. There was a tumble of tall rocks jumbled at the base of a slope to break the wind. Knowing she couldn’t match Blondie’s grace, Tami dismounted carefully. The impact of her boots on the ground jolted her so badly she tumbled to her hands and knees. She was still cocooned in numbness, but Blondie’s sudden appearance leaning over her cut through it like a light saber. She jerked back from him so sharply she fell backward and the horse shied. Blondie backed up, hands held out to show her they were empty. His face was still expressionless when he said, “I’ll take care of the horses. You go on and sit.”

Tami wasn’t stupid enough to argue with him, even though she wanted to care for her horse herself. She knew she was too weak. Strangely weak, as if all her strength had drained away like water in a bathtub when the plug was pulled. Yes, she was in shock. She got to her feet by bracing her hands on her thighs and staggered over to one of the smaller rocks to collapse on it. She hadn’t been really afraid of Blondie until just now, when she saw his hands reaching for her. She had been careful to force back the memories of those men and what they had done to her. While running, she hadn’t had time to give in to horror and rage. But now she was done running, and she realized she and Blondie were alone. He could do whatever he wanted to her, just like those men she had escaped from. Why had she let Blondie take the gun?

Tami cut off that thought. It threatened hysteria and she was too tired for hysteria. She had survived rape before; she would survive it again if she had to.

Sometime during her inner musings Blondie had come back and begun building a fire. She watched, wondering dully where he had gotten the wood. But it didn't matter. What mattered was the magic way the tiny tongue of flame grew to be a warm dance of many tiny tongues and the way they ate the chill from the air. Tears stung her eyes at the feel of the heat. She had been cold for so long she had forgotten what heat felt like. She forced herself to stay on her rock and give him room to work instead of throwing herself down beside the flames.

Had she fallen asleep? She flinched slightly from Blondie when she saw him standing in front of her. He stood very still until she got herself back under control, then held a steaming cup out to her.

“Coffee,” he said in that quiet smooth voice she remembered from last night. “Not the best kind, but it’s hot. I’ve fixed you a seat close by the fire.”

Heaven. The cup was so hot she almost burned her hand before she hooked her fingers into the handle. The aroma of the coffee was the best thing she’d ever smelled. She stood up carefully and shuffled to the rock he’d covered with a folded blanket. The coffee was black and bitter, and tasted like it had been cut with something else. Maybe chicory? It probably had grounds at the bottom of the cup. Cowboy campfire coffee, strong enough to float an egg, just the way she liked it. Froufrou designer coffees had been Brad’s thing, not hers. Half way through the cup she felt awake and alive and began taking an interest in what Blondie was doing.

He had a small pot hanging over the edge of the fire, shaving thin slices of dried meat into it. It smelled like beef soup. A few small bundles wrapped up in waxed paper were on the ground next to the fire ring. She could see all six of the horses hobbled several yards away, and just outside the immediate camp were saddles laid on their sides, and saddlebags lined up alongside them. Rolls of blankets were on the far side of the fire. He knew how to set up a tidy camp. Everything was laid out neatly so it could be easily packed. It didn’t surprise her. From his skill in tracking she could have guessed he’d set up a good camp.

She watched him open the waxed paper and add small onions to the pot now, and then some dried herbs. Tami was salivating. When Blondie seemed to be satisfied with what he’d done, he folded his legs and sat on the ground and looked at her with his face showing no expression.

“Ma’am, I reckon now’s as good a time as any for us to do a little talking.” He paused, a faint line showing between his pale brows. “Best start right from the beginning. Were you riding inside of that airplane that fell out of the sky?”

Her heart jerked. He knew about that? “Yes! Did you see it? Have you seen others from the plane? Are they okay?”

“I’ve met three women who were inside the airplane. They’re all well. Will you tell me what happened to you?”

Tami took a deep breath, trying to order her thoughts. “After the plane crashed and no emergency personnel came, six of us who were not hurt walked to find help. Me and Jessi went north. We were found and captured by some men. They took us to Greasy Butte and sold us. Five men bought Jessi, four men bought me. They said we were their wives.” Tami drank the last of her coffee to give herself a minute to control herself. “The men who bought me tried to be nice. I think. At first, at least. Jessi’s guys… Well, she hung herself the third day.”

“More coffee?” he asked in a quiet, even voice.

Tami held the cup out to him. When he handed it back the sunlight gleamed in his eyes, turning them to vivid sapphires. He was a lean man, hard-muscled and hard-faced, but his eyes belied that with their girlishly long lashes. It made him look almost human. “After that, I was tied up most of the time.”

After she’d been quiet for a couple minutes Blondie said, “You said Tom Leach hurt you. If I’m gonna break my word and not take you back, I need to know why. Don’t need details, just a general idea.”

She didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to talk about it. But she had to convince him to not take her back, so she got through it as quickly as she could. “The first few days, those guys tried to get me to have sex with them. I wouldn’t. They said I was their wife, like I was married to all of them. I told them to leave me alone, but they wouldn’t. I guess they got tired of waiting for me to say yes. Tom Leach raped me first. It was…” Tami tasted blood on her lip. Had she bitten it? She wiped impatiently at it. “I decided fighting only hurt more. So after that first time, I acted like I gave in. Steve came to me the next night, and I let him do what he wanted, then the next night it was Dwight’s turn. On the fourth night it was Tim’s turn. He didn’t rape me. Tim.” She cleared her throat to force back exhausted tears. “He just laid on the bed and put his arms around me. He said he thought it should be one man for one woman. In the morning when he took me to the outhouse, he showed me which horse was his. It was saddled and there was a roll of blankets and a saddlebag. Then he left me alone to take a nap.”

Blondie leaned over to stir the pot. “This Tim feller helped you escape.”

It wasn’t a question, but Tami answered as if it had been. “Yeah, I think so. And you know what’s happened since then.”

He grunted and began scooping soup into a bowl. “Eat up, Mrs. Leach.”

Tami shuddered. “Don’t call me that. My name is Tami Casper; you can call me Tami. What’s your name?”

“Folks mostly call me Tracker.”

He passed her a handful of dried apple slices and some hard flat bread in a square of waxed paper, then got himself some food. The soup was more like warm water with bits of dried meat floating in it along with some chunks of onion. It was as good as the coffee. Tami refrained from gulping it down. She’d had so little food for the last week she knew she would make herself sick if she didn’t take small sips and chew each small piece of meat thoroughly. He didn’t seem to be watching her, his attention on his soup.

Tami steeled herself. “So? Are you going to take me back?”

Blondie—Tracker—used his chin to point at her neck. “Who did that to your neck?”

Her spoon clattered against the side of the tin bowl, propelled by her shaking fingers. “That was Steve.” The memory of his hands around her neck while he pounded inside her made her almost wish she hadn’t eaten. Shock was threatening again, so she said quickly, “Are you taking me back?”

He set his bowl aside and looked her in the eye. “No, ma’am, I am not. Where was you headed when you run off?”

“Home. My ranch in Colorado.” But it probably wasn’t even there anymore. The handle of the coffee cup cut into her finger. “Can you tell me what year it is?”

“2064. Whereabouts is your ranch?”

The date wasn’t a surprise. She shouldn’t feel that cold shock settle in her stomach. “Don’t you mean
when
?” The bitterness overflowed. “In 2014 it was outside Ft. Irwin, about twenty-five miles north and west of Denver. Is it true there was a World War III? And the Ten Plagues came again?”