The Road Sharks (7 page)

She didn’t look up, but nodded.

“Here, I found this in the man’s den,” Eli said. “Maybe you won’t have to keep sharpening that monster blade of yours.” He handed her a fine stag-handled hunting knife in a leather sheath. “It was in a display case, out of the sheath, so there’s not much corrosion.”

“Hmmm.” She took it, looked at it and smiled. “It will make a good hunting knife, but the blade I am working on is a war-blade. It is intended to be used in self-defense. But thank you, I’ll take this with me.”

“I made quite a find. Found a Saudi-Syria War era sleep set, sleeping bag and waterproof bivy. I’ll stuff that in my pack, strap it all onto the Terror and I’m set.”

“The Terror?”

“I’ll introduce you later. I’m going to rest a bit, then I think I’ll saunter on over to Lester and Benny’s camp to see what I can find. Will you think about what I said? You don’t have to make a decision right now. I understand you don’t know me well, but I hope you can eventually learn to trust me.”

She nodded again and said, “I’m going for a walk. I need to think.”

“okay then,” he wrapped up in his new sleeping bag, and put a fatuous look on his face, “But come back soon, ‘cause I’ma gonna be hongry.”

He saw that ghost of a smile, then it was gone. She rose and moved through the doorway.

I hope you won’t get in the way of your own best interests, lady.

****

The rain had stopped and the freshness of the air and the smell of wet sagebrush pulled a deep breath from Ghost Wind.
 
Her heart pounding, she took another. She had no idea how to deal with what had just happened, she was confused by…

Confused by kindness.
 

She had reached the point where she was ready to accept the notion that kindness, friendship, and all the other good things in life were of the past. She had accepted from the point she left Lila’s home that her life would be one of simple survival, day to day. This acceptance allowed her to maintain a strong attitude, to not show weakness, to not BE weak and remain strong in the face of her trials.

It seemed that strength was rather fragile in the face of simple human kindness.

I need to be doing something.

She began walking towards the makeshift cross she had found Eli on. If he wanted to see if his two captors had known anything useful, perhaps she could find something he could study while he convalesced. The half-mile walk helped her regain equilibrium.

She came to the point where she had left Benny. The strong single-knuckle reverse punch she’d sent to the base of his skull had severed his spine, killing him instantly. Her active life outdoors had made her strong, and the Kung Fu training she possessed had made her deadly in a crunch.

Benny lay face down, head turned to one side, and as she walked up two turkey vultures flapped off into the distance to avoid her. The man’s stupid gap-toothed face hadn’t been much to look at while he was alive, but now, with help from the vultures, it was truly hideous. The scout woman had seen enough death in her life that she was unmoved by the sight, but the smell was another matter.

“I thought he smelled bad when he was alive…” she said, trying not to breathe through her nose. She took out the pair of leather gloves she carried, slipped them on and began to search the corpse. She found a small poorly maintained (dull) one-hand opening pocket knife, a well-used snot rag, an old style lighter with a faded picture of a naked woman on it and a few .357 cartridges. Nothing was of particular interest, and she had no desire to carry around the personal effects of someone devoted to evil.
 

Dark energies clung to such items.

She left his things piled on the small of his back, taking only the four cartridges. Moving out of the sagebrush, she walked over to Lester, who also was no prize to look at. His face was at least turned downward into the dust.

“Well, Lester, do you have something to share with us?” For some reason, the dead man decided not to answer her. Ghost Wind searched him. Lester’s ratty pants had no useable pockets but he wore a grimy old vest that was covered with them. The scout simply lifted him at the collar of the vest, shook the body until the kilabyker’s arms slipped through and his corpse fell facedown into the dust.

“Now, what do you have for us, dead man?” She rummaged through the pockets, finding odds and ends, but nothing of use. “Ah ha! What is this? Holding out on me are you, moldy?”

The exterior pockets had given her nothing useable, but an interior chest pocket yielded a folded piece of ragged paper. She looked at it carefully.
 

“This may be what Eli’s looking for.” The folded note stated briefly: MEETING AT THE OLD MUSEUM, SOUTH OF BEND, TUES. FEB 27. WAIT. Cryptic, but maybe all her wounded charge needed.

“Great Spirit’s eye, I have no idea what day it is.” She had lost count. “February twenty-seventh could be today, yesterday or five days from now!”

A quick search of Lester and Benny’s camp found little that she hadn’t seen in her previous foray to retrieve Eli’s supplies, but it reinforced her disgust with their habits and embracing of filth. She could only imagine what their minds would be like. She shuddered.

She left at a trot, before she became somehow contaminated. She was almost back to camp, when the old feeling came to her once more. The feeling of being watched, hunted. She scanned the horizon but saw nothing. Nature gave away no clues, and she wondered if it was the spirit world watching, maybe Jannelle, maybe the owners of the farm, maybe Lester and Benny.

Or maybe none of those. Jannelle had taught her when one tracked an animal, for a time, your spirit and that of what you tracked were linked. Maybe she was being tracked by the living, tracked by someone very good.
 

Either way, she didn’t want to stay here much longer.

Eli hadn’t lied to her. There was a Terror, though she was none too glad to make its acquaintance.

They had packed up at first light under a drizzly gray sky. Ghost Wind was still amazed that Eli could even move, much less walk five miles. He limped a bit and had to lean on his walking stick the whole way but eventually they came to a small grove of juniper trees. She saw something in the shadows, but couldn’t make it out ’til she realized it was an object covered with a hand-painted camouflage tarp. Being something of an aficionado of camo patterns, she was impressed.

“Here’s my faithful steed,” Eli said, breathing a bit heavily from the walk.
 

“It’s an impressive paint job,” she said. “Hopefully what it conceals is impressive too.”

Pulling off the tarp, he grinned at her, “If you think the tarp has an impressive paint job, get a load of my baby!”
 

Underneath was a very disreputable looking motorcycle.

“That,” she asked, “is the Terror? Do you mean terror from riding it?”

“This,” he replied flatly, “is one of the finest cold fusion battery motorcycles to come off the Mav-Tech showrooms in the year 2031. She’ll still do a good eighty miles per hour on a straightaway, assuming you can still find a road that you’d care to trust that much. We have a fusion charger back home that will give my baby over 2,000 miles of running distance.”

It was a truly amazing amalgamation of parts. The front wheel faring was painted with a garish bright red and white shark smile, with a pair of fierce-looking eyes glaring straight ahead. The wheels didn’t match, and some sort of strange carrying rack had been welded on the back, making the cycle a good foot and a half longer. A sawed off shotgun scabbard had been added to the left side, and Eli shoved the newly shortened Remington into it.

“Okay, GW, hand me your gear, and I’ll lash it on.”
 

“What?” she said, wide eyed and taking a step back, “You don’t seriously think I’m going to ride on that thing with you?”

“Um, yeah. What did you think I meant?” She took another step back, and with one eyebrow raised, he asked, “Oh, mighty scout, are you afraid?”

Her chin went up, and her back became ramrod straight. “Just because I am not suicidal, does NOT mean I am afraid!”
 

He looked skeptical. “Prove it.”

“I… do NOT have to prove anything to you!” she sputtered. “I have never ridden on one of these monstrosities, and I most likely never will!”

“Never say never,” he said, grinning evilly.

****

In the end, an old song her mother used to sing to her about ‘Rock and Roll Dreams,’ coming to her out of the blue, convinced her to get on the bike.
 
She couldn’t run away forever, but she could regret her decision the minute they rolled out on the main highway.

“Too fast!” she yelled over the light whine of the fusion engine. “Slow down!”

“What? We’re barely doing twenty-five, woman!” he yelled back, “I haven’t even gotten near cruising speed!”

“It’s s-so fast!”

He twisted and looked back at her and saw her eyes were wide with fear she would never admit.
 

“You’ve never ridden on a motorcycle, have you?”

“I’ve only ridden in a horse-drawn wagon, and it didn’t go even close to this fast!”

“Well, we’re going to be going a lot faster in a sec, so put your head against my back and close your eyes.”

Ghost Wind, normally not one to submit to being ordered around, meekly complied as she felt their speed increase. Her eyes squeezed tightly shut, her thoughts went back to what one of the senior scouts, Black Dog had said whenever they dared to complain about comfort in their training exercises:
You can get used to anything if you give it enough time
.

“This is cowardice. This is not how I live.” Ghost Wind muttered quietly into Eli’s jacket.
 

Open your eyes.
Jannelle’s voice spoke in her head.

The thought made her tremble, but Ghost Wind forced her eyes open and saw the sagebrush rushing by. She almost closed them immediately, but she forced herself to see her surroundings.

No scout goes about with their eyes closed. Now raise your head up like a warrior.

With all the grit she could manage, she slowly eased up from Eli’s back and, heart hammering, forced herself to see the road and the landscape going by at an amazing speed (for one who had never ridden any kind of motor vehicle before).

And she did get used to it.
 

The first ten miles were nerve-wracking. By the time they had ridden twenty-five miles, Ghost Wind was leaning into the turns with Eli, complimenting his driving rather than fighting it.
 

“Hey! Not too shabby, noobie! You’re riding like a pro!” he said over his shoulder. “We’re gonna have to find you your own bike!”

“Don’t get crazy!” she shouted over the road whine. “I may never do this again!”

“Bull,” he shouted back twisting around to look at her. “I can see in your eyes that you like it. Bet you never got to try anything like this, livin’ with the Clan of the Hawk! We’ll be turning off the main highway just ahead, so be ready when we slow down.”

“Why are we turning?”

“We’re coming into Road Shark territory, if we stay on SR97, chances of being ambushed go up to about 99 percent!”

In the terrifying thrill of riding behind Eli, she had forgotten the world she lived in now. Glancing behind them, she saw the Terror’s trail in the dust of the road, standing out like the clouds on a clear day. She had hoped no one would follow them, but those tire tracks would be impossible to miss.

As they started to make the turn, she tapped Eli on the shoulder. “Wait! Drive down the main road for another 100 yards, then circle back.”

“What? Why?”

“Try to trust ME just this once, if you will.”

He nodded and did as she asked, going past then coming back to their turn-off on the other side of the highway, then cutting across their trail onto the side road.

“Pull off here, in this brushy area,” she said. As they came to a stop, she swung down from her seat and realized her legs had gotten a little stiff from sitting. She stretched for a moment, then, pulling out her small hammer/hatchet, she chopped off two large sagebrush fronds.
 

Moving to the rear of the bike, she began a rhythmic erasing of the tracks they left on the side road. Two swipes side to side, then two fast vertical swats, and as Eli watched, he saw she was making a half-way decent imitation of the rain pocks from the earlier downpours. He began to follow.

“Eli,” Ghost Wind brought him out of his reverie, “If you are going to come with me to do this, then please get behind me, so I can erase all our tracks at once.”

She watched as he looked behind him. The tracks he was leaving were almost imperceptible compared to what the heavy bike and its passengers had been leaving, but they stood out like a Beforetime neon sign to her. He stepped off the road and went to a thick stalked sagebrush. Grabbing a limb almost an inch in diameter in one hand, he wrenched it loose with a loud snap. She looked at him, astonished.

“I’m… ah… feeling better.”

Ghost Wind was strong, but she had to hack at a similar sized limb with her hatchet to get it loose. Many of her male fellow scouts with the Clan had been bigger and stronger looking than Eli, but she was quite sure none of them would have been able to break off that branch with one hand. Certainly not without a lot of wrenching back and forth.

Eli walked alongside her and began helping her erase the trail. It was all Ghost Wind could do to let the incident go without comment.

It took them almost a half an hour to reach the spot where they had turned the Terror around on the main road and come back to the smaller road. They erased the return trail, leaving their first line of travel untouched until only the original track on the main highway, before they had looped back, remained. Eli hadn’t argued with her method, he seemed to be watching what she did carefully and trying to emulate it. It now looked like no one had ever turned off on the side road.