The Road Sharks (2 page)

“I guess that’s all well an’ good, but first we gotta take the compound, and you hav’ta admit, it’s pretty damn well fortified.”

“With enough manpower and a little C-4 supplied by our friends, it can be done. I sent our scouts up to take a look and they should be back any time.”

Ghost Wind squinted in the fading light and lessening snow. It was there, thank the Maker, the three-sheep rock. A large trio of boulders brought there by a mega-flood so long ago that humans probably didn’t exist on the continent when it happened.
 

She was still in Yakama Nation territory, and she was sure they wouldn’t bother her. If they did, dropping Lila’s name would get her out of trouble, at least until she crossed the Columbia into Oregon.

As she expected, the small cave the slanting rocks made was unoccupied. She had a place to camp.

Hopefully her ghosts would leave her alone tonight.

****

C’mon baby! Light!

The wooden stick twirled in her hand. In warmer weather, she could perform the hand drill fire making method and have a flame in less than a minute. The cold had robbed her hands of their dexterity and now this simple thing was seeming beyond her. She thought longingly of flint, steel and char cloth. If only.

She stopped for a moment to rest, and placed her hands under her armpits to warm them. She could hear the wind whistling around the rocks and thanked the spirits of this place for the windbreak they provided.
 
She checked her tinder bundle, painstakingly scraped from the bark of the surrounding sagebrush, putting it lightly against her upper lip. It was dry.

I should be able to do this in my sleep!

She performed the calmness mantra in her mind.
 

I am the scout.

I am quiet within and without.

I am made of the stars.

My skills are impeccable.

My mind is clear.

My mind is here.

I will prevail.

The breath. It was the breath she needed to watch, not the fear. It was the now she needed to be in, not the then. Slowly, briefly, temporarily, all her difficulties faded and there was only the spinning hand drill. She repeated the mantra in her mind.

The smoke appeared in the baseboard, and in a few moments, she had the ember she needed. Carefully transferring it from the bark it formed on, she gently placed the smoldering dust in the bird nest of dried grass, shaved bark and wood fluff she had created. It began to smoke and as she gently blew on it, she saw flame glowing in the tinder bundle’s heart. She quickly placed it with its mate in the small pyramid of sticks that would be the start of her fire and watched the ember grow to a small blaze.

Oh great Creator of all things, thank
 
you
 
for this warmth!

As her shelter began to warm, she reached into the leather shoulder bag she carried and pulled out the blackened Beforetime coffee can she used for a cooking pot along with two battered stainless steel water bottles. She then began making a dinner of parched corn powder and jerky.

As the meal cooked, she untied the leather cords on her most precious possession, a heavy wool blanket Lila had gifted to her. She pulled it out of the elderly USGI Beforetime poncho she used to keep the elements off of the blanket and laid the poncho on the earth with the blanket on top of it.
 

I should have wrapped up in the blanket while out there in that frigid cold, but if anything happens to it, I’ll be up the brown creek, paddle-less.

A small stuffed bear rolled out of the blanket.

“Hello there, Go-Go. Hope the journey wasn’t too bumpy for you,” she said. “If you’ll remember, Lila told me that you volunteered for this mission.” She smiled grimly.
 

The warrior scout Ghost Wind, relying on and talking to a plush toy for company. It didn’t seem quite as insane as it did when Lila first forced Go-Go bear on her. Now it just seemed mildly insane.

The hot meal and the blanket allowed her to finally relax for the first time in the day. “It’s unlikely the glow from the fire will be seen from the road, Go-Go. Scouts of the Clan of the Hawk choose their hideaways carefully. And we... they’ve… been using this one for years.” Even though she was deep in Yakama Nation territory, she knew her former fellow scouts used this spot whenever going farther south to scout the “Indie” territories.

That gave her an idea. She pulled out one of the odds and ends she carried out of her bag, a greasy chalk pastel stick. Ghost Wind looked at the rock wall ahead of her.
 

No, this is foolish. Don’t be stupid. Don’t leave a trace.

She reached out with the chalk and extending it to the rock face she wrote: GHOST WIND in large off-white letters. She knew it was unwise, but the scouts were the only ones of her people who would ever come here, and she needed to say… something… to them. She continued, I WAS DUPED, I LOVED MY SIFU.

And yet, she was at the very least, a large part of the reason Jannelle Longwalker was dead.

She reached out again, trying to write with vision clouded by unwanted tears. I AM SO SORRY.

But I’m not the one who should be most sorry. The lying bastard murderer who fooled me, who betrayed me and murdered her should be sorry.

She wrote one last line: I WILL FIND THE AXEMAN. I WILL MAKE HIM PAY! I SO SWEAR! Wise or not, she found the writing gave her comfort.
 

It also gave her a purpose.

****

The scout warrior woke in the dead of night, the small stuffed bear clutched tightly in her arms under the blanket. Even after her convalescence, her senses still were sharp and they were telling her she was not alone. She glanced at the embers of her fire, and threw a little more sagebrush on to warm the shelter but it didn’t seem to help. It was cold! Looking at the far wall of the rock pile she slept in, Ghost Wind saw why.

Her earlier graffiti was barely visible through her guest. Jannelle had come to visit, perhaps, to torment.

“Hello, Sifu.” Ghost Wind sighed. “You are one persistent hallucination. Always showing up when I’m half awake. Probably not a coincidence.”

The visitor said nothing, but simply looked at her with sad eyes.
She held up the toy. “I travel with a new class of friend now, Sifu, much harder to get him killed. Also he’s much less inclined to make a snap judgment about who is guilty and who is not.”

The visitor seemed to have a slight smile. She seemed to be saying something, but Ghost Wind couldn’t hear her.

“Oh, Sifu, I know I say it every time you show up, but I didn’t know… I thought he loved me. I couldn’t know… but you told me didn’t you? Clan scouts don’t get involved with strangers, especially handsome ones who tell you everything you want to hear.” Ghost Wind’s heart started to burn with her anger. “Especially lying dogs who want to remove a thorn in the side of all the bandits and slavers in the area, who wanted to remove you.”
 

She looked down at the fire “As he did remove you.”

The apparition seemed to look at her sympathetically, as Ghost Wind’s eyes came back up, blazing with anger.
 

“I swear to you Jannelle Longwalker, I will find Axyl, and I will kill him. You will be avenged!”

The spirit suddenly looked even sadder. Its lips moved but Ghost Wind, trained from a young age to read lips, still could not make out the words as her visitor faded from sight.

“Oh, Go-Go,” she said, “Even if my life is as short as I expect it to be, I still hope I won’t have to go through that many more times. It tears my heart out.”
 

The warrior woman gazed out over the snow covered sagebrush, “And worse, I don’t know if I’m really seeing her, or if I’m just going crazy.”

She crawled back into her blanket and did her best to fall asleep once more.
 
She thought that would be pretty much impossible, but her exhausted body said otherwise. She was asleep in minutes.

“This plan is coming together well, Axyl! In a few days, we’ll have the information we need from the scouts I sent out to…” Shell began.

Axyl looked at Shell, nonplussed.

“What? Why are you giving me that look, Axyl?”

“I guess no one told you Porter and his guys got back about two hours ago.”

Shell was silent for a moment, then said oh-so-calmly, “They are supposed to be my scouts. If I may be so bold as to ask, why the FUCK haven’t they reported in!?” His voice rose, and his second-in-command prepared himself to withstand a hurricane level rant.

“I’m guessing, they’re afraid to talk to you, boss.”

“And I’m guessing that means there’s a snag.” Shell’s voice was that of a man trying to master his temper,” Axyl, my dear fellow, would you be so kind as to invite these gentlemen to make an appearance? Before I have them strung up by their balls?”

“I’m on it.”

“Oh, thank you so much.”

****

“Boss, we was just getting there, on the road, ready to set up at New Hope when around the bend comes you know who! He jacked Smitty, cut off his freakin’ head with some kinda stick sword. Smitty’s head just went bouncin’ down the road and the rest of us hauled ass outta there!”

“Porter,” Darwin Shell said, looking at him with a frosty stare, “You are supposed to be one of my smarter lieutenants, but Axyl tells me this happened on the main highway!”

Porter looked down, afraid to admit his screw up.

“On a mission of this nature, a so-called smart man might think it would be best to stick to the back roads and dirt tracks of the area. I take it you didn’t think that was a good idea?”

“Boss,” Porter whined, “a lotta them old back roads is gettin’ so overgrown in the last ten years, you wind up havin’ to chop your way through half of ‘em!”

Shell’s voice grew soft. “For your plea to move me, sir, I would have to give a shit whether you had to work a little harder or not. Let me assure you, I do not give the prerequisite shit. Now, man up and do your job!”

Axyl had to work to keep himself from smiling. “So boss, I’m guessing…”

“Yes, goddamn it,” Shell said, “send them right back.”

Once outside Shell’s office, Porter asked “Axe, what we gonna do about that damn Eli? He’s messing us up at every turn, man.”

“Don’t worry about that, Porter. I got a couple boys, indies, that I’m usin’ as bait. Gonna give ol’ Eli a bit of a surprise. And that ol’ boy ain’t gonna like this surprise.”

The bridges were the worst.
 

Ghost Wind’s foot went out on the old girder laden bridge, and she could feel the wind making the once solid structure sway and vibrate slightly.

This bridge was huge and looked like it had been built well before the last millennium. The sixty or seventy intervening years, particularly the last twenty or so, without any maintenance, had not been kind. She bet the Yakamas would never take one of their “wobbly” tanks across it. They’d probably think twice about driving a truck across.
 

There were two cars on the bridge. One, formerly a small fusion-powered sedan, leaned precariously over the Columbia River. Even from a distance, she could see the energy generator had been scavenged. The other, an old-school gas pickup held a skeleton sitting semi-upright behind the drivers wheel of his dust rusty tomb, as if he had just pulled over and parked there, forever.

I can certainly think of better places to leave my mortal remains.

None of these things were the cause of her nervousness however. Not the height of the road over the huge river below, or the slight swaying caused by the constant bitter wind blowing down the river. And it certainly wasn’t the mortal remains of the people who had been sitting here dead for over two decades. Ghost Wind had seen plenty of decades-old corpses, and not once had one ever threatened her.

The nerve-wracking thing about bridges was the choke point.

There’s no way to get across this river unless I use the bridge.
She sure couldn’t swim a half-mile of icy river in February.
If I was going to set up an ambush, I’d stage it at a bridge like this one. With a decent rifle, you could pick off just about anyone who wasn’t wearing some sort of battle armor.

This was the reason she hated the idea of crossing it. Someone could snipe her just as easily. She might have to wait ’til darkness fell to make the attempt to cross.

She moved down the bank of the river to get a look at the bottom of the bridge. Leaving her gear in a clump of bitterbrush, she carefully followed a deer trail. She moved into the shadow of one of the toppled giant wind-harvest power generators, lying there like some sort of huge alien machine.
 

Once out of the scant sunlight, the wind chill seemed to drop another ten degrees. As she moved below the bottom of the bridge, she saw a rusty catwalk extending beneath it.

That looks promising! There are a few sections that look questionable, but I can get to the other side of the Columbia without exposing myself to being ambushed. I think…

From the sash she wore around her ratty gray wool and deer skin coat, Ghost Wind pulled a carefully padded small package and unwrapped the contents. The monocular she kept hidden fogged slightly as she put it up to the warmth of her skin. Looking at the catwalk, she could now see some of the sections were very rusty and a few looked as if they had separated from the bridge during one of the heavy winds in the canyon.

Maybe a little less promising than I thought.
She stood a moment, considering.
Guess I need to flip a coin as to which is the more dangerous way to go.
 

To go over the bridge invited, if not instant death, certainly the possibility of being discovered. From what she had heard, that was a very undesirable outcome.