The Road Sharks (8 page)

“Okay,” she said. “From this point it gets a little tricky. If you will move off the side of the road between those two large bushes, I’m going to practice a little scout magic.”

“I can’t wait to see this!” he muttered, stepping to the side of the road.
 

Ghost Wind moved forward fifteen feet and very lightly began to run her brush-broom over the end of the remaining track. As she progressed back towards the end, she increased the pressure, making sure to erase her own tracks as she went. When she reached the end, she moved off the road, continuing to obscure her own trail.

“What do you think?” she asked, as they surveyed her handiwork.

“You’ve made it look like our track just fades away. But where is the ‘magic’?”

“The magic is making someone see something, and getting them to believe what you want them to believe. The scouts of the Clan of the Hawk are well trained in psychological warfare. We’re the DDT.”

“You’re what?” he said, “Scouts are the clan’s pesticide?”

She had no idea what he meant, “DDT, The Department of Dirty Tricks. We bring terror and confusion to the minds of the enemy. What did you mean?”

He sighed. “Never mind. Information no longer relevant. So what is the purpose of fading the track like that?”

“The enemy follows the track, but it just fades away and vanishes. Did the wind blow it away? Did the riders just vanish? Did angels come and take them away? This far from settlements, the imagination can have quite an effect and ghosts can seem quite real.” She paused for a moment, a frown coming momentarily to her face. “Er… anyway, perhaps it will be distracting enough, they won’t think to go back to that overgrown little side road and find our real trail.”

Eli nodded. “I’ve done a little DDT work myself,” he said, “Someday we can swap secrets.”

“Perhaps. It looks like a rain squall is coming. That should make our counter tracking look perfectly normal.”

Eli turned and headed into the sagebrush and junipers. “Let’s get back to the Terror.”
 

“All right Durpee, you and I been all around the compound now. Izzat enough for you to do your drawin’ thing?” Porter asked.

“Yeah, Port! I seen it all, an’ I can draw it when we get home!” The boy seemed excited just to be someplace new.

“Good, then. I need for you to sit tight in this little spot back here in the trees. I gotta go take one more circle of this place and look for weak spots. Then I’ll go get the others and we’ll get on home. All right?”

“Sure! I’ll stay hid back here and maybe I can take a little nap. I had ta get up pretty early this morning.” The boy yawned as he said it. “Hey Porter?”

“Yeah, Durp?”

“How come we hadda bring Pid and all them other guys? They don’t seem to do much except sit and play cards.”

“Yeah. I got a lot to say on that, but we don’t have time. You just stay here ’til I come get ya, ‘kay?”

“Okay.”

Porter carefully made another circuit of the farm complex, doing his best to stay out of sight of the guards on the wall. Those guards weren’t really looking too alert, and one guy seemed to be nodding off at the south quadrant, but Porter did not want to be seen. It wasn’t just to avoid trouble here, but mostly to avoid trouble back at HQ with Shell and Axyl.

He noted a spot near the southeast section that didn’t quite look as sturdy as the rest of the sheet metal walls. Not that it probably mattered with as much C4 as they had, but you never knew. There was no success like excess.

“Just let this go smoothly…”

Shots began cracking out in the morning air. Coming from the area of the front gate.

He really should have known better.

The backroads went on forever.

The Terror, which had seemed to be going faster than the speed of sound when they started, was actually going down the dusty tracks at 35-45 miles per hour, and the journey was long and bumpy. One moment they would be cruising through miles of pine and juniper, the next through long forgotten and overgrown backstreets of the many small deserted towns along the way.

Ghost Wind’s early gut clenching fear had gone from fear to exhilaration to familiarity to boredom. When Eli finally pulled over her stiffening body was glad for the break.

“Not that I’m complaining, but why are we stopping? I thought your enclave was up in the mountains somewhere.”

“We’ll meet up with Highway 126 later on, but right now, I’d like to take a detour to New Hope. It’s a small community of farmers, our closest real neighbors and Kita asked me to see if they had any apples left to trade.”

“I thought you had to be south of Bend by February 27
th
, Eli.”

He looked at her. “It’s only the 25
th
. Unless a huge snow storm moves into the area, I have plenty of time to get there and cause mayhem. Right now, I’m going to have a snack.”

She sat beside him on a bed of juniper needles. There was snow packed lightly in the shady spots in the mini forest they were in, but they had chosen a spot where the sun warmed the ground. She noted that even when they just sat, the silences were comfortable. That was rare in non-scouts. Most of the outsiders she had met in her travels tended to want to fill the air with small talk.

Don’t get too comfortable. You don’t really know this man, and the Scout Way says to keep your guard up.

The truth was though, even after her experiences with Axyl, she still felt instinctively that Eli was a much better man. Maybe that would be her undoing. Just thinking about it made her head hurt. But Axyl wouldn’t have been able to let the silence lie, he would have had to fill it.

They were sitting on a high spot in relatively flat country and the view was superb. The low-lands, filled with a flowing forest of smaller high-desert junipers and sagebrush gave way to pines and firs as the Cascade Mountains climbed to the west. Clouds sat, sluggishly approaching from the way they had come.

Eli looked up from his canteen, “Did you hear that?” he asked her.

“I don’t think I heard…” Ghost Wind listened for a moment, then cupped her hand behind her ear. “I might have heard gunfire, but a long, long ways off. Someone in a running gun fight?”

“Doesn’t sound like the dustup’s moving. It’s coming from the direction of New Hope.” He looked at her. “I think you’d best wait here a while. I’m going to see what’s going on.”

“I’m going.”

“There’s no need for you to get involved in this,” he said, “You have no stake in this, and you don’t know these people.”

“I saved your life. I helped you regain your health, which, by the way, I am not convinced that you HAVE regained fully.” She looked at him with raised chin. “I have a stake in your continued living.”

She expected an argument, but Eli looked toward where the sounds had come from. “Pull your gear off the back, hide it in the brush, and get your firearms out to take with us.”

“Why pull my things off?”

“Because,” he turned back to her, “there are no guarantees. This could go bad, but if you can get out in the bush, I’m confident you could get away if things go to shit. If you can get away you can eventually find your way back here, and have your gear intact.”

She nodded and pulled her bag and bedroll from the Terror, and placed it thirty feet from the road. She had just pulled her rifle out when she heard the motorcycle engine, quiet as it was, start up. She ran back to the road only to see Eli driving off down the road in a plume of dust.

“I’ll be back! Wait for me!” he yelled back over his shoulder.

The people of the Clan of the Hawk believe habits influence life, and they didn’t tend to swear often because of that belief. Ghost Wind, never one to enjoy being tricked, almost turned the air blue with the rapid fire comments about Eli’s parentage, personal sexual inclination towards farm animals, and general habit of having a cranium filled with excrement. She did NOT like being lied to.

“I will be damned if I’m going to be here when he gets back!” she said, after realizing she had started to repeat herself. Grabbing her things, she started to move cross-country, then pulled up short. This hadn’t helped increase her trust in Eli, but the thought of having a people, a home again grabbed her around the jagged edges of her broken heart.

“If I go, there a chance I will always be an outcast.” The lure of having a tribe to live with swayed her decision. She thought again how lonely she had been since leaving Lila’s place.

Dammit. I want to know if I could fit in with…

The gunshots couldn’t be more than a few miles away…

“Damn you, Eli!”

****

She was sweaty when she arrived, but not tired. Ghost Wind was used to covering vast distances on foot, often trotting and she would have felt right at home with the trail runners of the Beforetime. She realized she was not quite fully recovered from her convalescence though, when her breath was shorter than it had been for many years.

The gunshots had died down, but she wasn’t going to be less cautious because of that. She hadn’t wanted to use the road, but the last few miles, she had realized that she needed to follow Eli’s tracks if she was going to catch up with him.
 
Ghost Wind hoped she wasn’t too late to help.

She was sure she was getting close and as she moved along the edges, the wind shifted to blow into her face.
 

Oh Great Spirit! What stinks?

As the wind shifted, she realized it was the scent of unwashed men blowing down the road and moved off into the thick junipers, readying her engraved rifle. The six-gun at her thigh was an afterthought, needed only as a backup, but she was glad to have it with her.
 

She had barely settled in when a troop of eight men began filing past. They were unkempt and from the look and smell, filthy. They wore dirty jean vests, though some were obviously jackets that had been cut off at the arms and each vest bore a hand-painted picture of some sort of cartoon shark. She was sighting on the third man in line when she realized that none of them seemed to be armed. She was almost thirty feet away, but she clearly saw empty holsters and knife sheaths and none of the group was carrying a rifle.
 

They’re all injured! All unarmed.

Each man that passed was limping, holding an arm or ribs and all seemed to have been battered around their faces. One man was softly sobbing and holding his jaw, which seemed either broken or dislocated and another was patting his shoulder, trying to help. They all occasionally looked behind them, either in fear or hatred but none of them seemed willing to return to whoever had done this to them.

After she was sure they had all moved on, Ghost Wind moved from her hiding place and paralleled the road for another two hundred yards. Trying to remain alert with all her senses, she eventually heard raised voices ahead and gripped her Henry rifle tighter. Moving with the stealth of a wolf, she came to a point with line of sight to the argument. In front of a large wall, made mostly of concrete, rusty sheet metal and various kinds of barbed wire, Eli stood yelling up to a big hairy man with an old M-24 army rifle who stood on some kind of rampart behind the wall.

“Damn it, Horace! I’ve been working with and trading with you folks for the last four years! Why in the hell would you stop trusting me now!”
 

The big man spit off to Eli’s left. “A’cause you didn’t kill them bastards when you had the chance, Eli. Ever’ one o’ them Road Sharks that bites the dust is a little more peace o’ mind for decent people. The fact that they’re still breathin’ makes me wonder if you don’t have some sort o’ deal with ‘em.”

“You saw me come up behind ‘em and kick the shit out of them, isn’t that enough? I have their weapons, and a couple of those men have injuries that’ll take a lot of time to heal, if they ever do,” Eli shouted. “I think that’s enough to send them back to their HQ and report this is a place best left alone.”

“The less of them around, the less brave they are.”

“We could sit here and argue all day. Bottom line is, I didn’t feel like killing anyone today that I didn’t have to.” Eli, obviously quite angry, began to pick up weapons from around the area. “I’ll just take these with me, if you’re not interested, or if you really think I’d have a deal with those pukes, go ahead and shoot me in the back.”

Even from her hiding spot, Ghost Wind could see Horace hesitate.

“Now wait a second there, son. I mighta been just a little hasty, about that deal remark. I know you ain’t with that bunch. Let me see them guns and such, and let’s see if we can come to some sort o’ agreement.”

“Okay, but I gotta hurry, Horace,” Eli said, his voice slightly cold. “I’m keeping a lady waiting, standing here jawing with you.”

Ghost Wind’s eyes narrowed.

Ah, yes. Thanks for reminding me that I am really irritated with you, trickster. The little woman has decided not to stay hidden in the brush!

Eli began holding up rifles for Horace to see, and as they started to haggle, more heads popped up from behind the rampart.
 

Ghost Wind calmly and methodically set down her rifle and pistol and moved forward. She kept to cover as she had been taught, emerging into sight fifteen feet behind Eli. She knew the people on the rampart could see her and she carefully raised her hands to show she was unarmed, and put a finger to her lips to signal silence. Eyebrows raised, but the farmers decided to play along and watch to see what would happen. There wasn’t that much to do in these parts, so any entertainment was appreciated.

She thought about slapping him on the back of the head like a misbehaving apprentice, but decided on something a little less violent. As Eli vocalized the benefits of one of the salvaged rifles, Ghost Wind leaned close and blew on the back of his left ear. What happened next astonished her. One second he was right in front of her facing away, the next he was six feet away, looking towards her, hands in a combat position. She had barely seen him move.