Dahlia fought for more than her life. More even than Neeko. She fought for the whole Pack. She fought with anger and heartbreak and passion.
She fought with coldness, too. And that was strange for her. Even as she moved she was aware that the heat of rage was not there, or . . . not real, at least. Instead the furnace of her heart seemed to be stoked with shovelfuls of ice. When she attacked, it was no blind rush, but instead an attack designed to disrupt the group of Rovers and sow the seeds of confusion. It was strategic rather than impassioned.
It was how Mr. Church had trained her.
The Rovers were positioned in two knots: three in front, and two behind. She went straight at the knot of three and as they shifted to meet her charge, she suddenly jagged right and struck the Rover at the edge of that group. Not with the knife, but with her hand, parrying his reach with her forearm and then bouncing off of that impact and using the resulting force to power a blow with the open Y of her hand formed by thumb and index finger, so that the big knuckle of the index finger struck the man’s Adam’s apple. He gagged and sagged back.
Most people are right-handed, Church had said, and most right-handed fighters are awkward when fighting a left-hander. Although Dahlia was right-handed she had been relentlessly trained to fight ambidextrously. Church had insisted on it. He’d been inflexible, almost cruel about it. As the Rover canted backward and crashed into the smaller of the two women, Dahlia understood why.
Don’t stand and admire your work. When you create an advantage, press it.
She followed the Rover’s fall, reaching now with the heavy kukri knife and striking with a loose, deft flick of her wrist. The blade caught the dreadlocked man across the bridge of the nose. He screamed and reeled back so sharply, grabbing at his face, that his elbow struck a tree trunk. He screamed and fell, landing on top of the man she’d hit in the throat.
When in a pincer attack, don’t turn to see what danger is behind you. Keep moving and turning. If you’re in the center, then you are trapped.
Dahlia jumped sideways, turning in midair and slashing with the kukri as she did so. The blade encountered a stab from the leader of the gang. The muscular woman had a military bayonet and had lunged forward with a powerful blow that was intended to end the fight there and then. The blades rang off one another, striking sparks but drawing no blood. The fifth Rover grabbed Neeko and wrapped a tattooed arm around the little scout’s throat.
“I’ll fucking kill him,” roared the Rover, but then he grunted in pain and surprise as Neeko struck backward to hit the man in the crotch with the side of his fist. Immediately the scout turned inside the choke, pushing his chin into the crook of the arm to create a narrow margin for breath, and twisted his whole body toward the muscular arm. A turn-away would have tightened the choke, but turning toward the shoulder of the choking arm created exactly the opposite effect. For a split second the arm was a cage and inside that cage was Neeko and everything on the Rover’s body he wanted to hit.
When you create an opportunity for counter-attack you must waste no time and show no mercy. Overwhelm the attacker with as many strikes, kicks, head-butts and bites as you can manage. Do not let up because if you give him even a moment to catch his breath he will come back harder. Take that option away completely.
Neeko did exactly that. In the space of a single fractured moment he head-butted the Rover in the nose, kneed him in the crotch, stamped on his instep and ground the man’s foot-bones, bit the side of his neck, boxed his ears and punched him in the throat. All of the blows were sloppy with fear, and no single strike was crippling, but the cumulative effect was akin to being dropped into a threshing machine. The man staggered and Neeko pivoted to kick him on the kneecap with a flat-footed attack that filled the air with a huge dry-stick crack.
Dahlia saw all of this out of the corner of her eye, but all of her other awareness was drawn to the leader of the Rovers, who drove at her with a furious attack. The bayonet slashed and chopped and stabbed. The woman was shorter but very solid, with ropey muscles and catlike speed. Her attacks drove Dahlia back step by step.
Never allow the enemy to fight his fight. The rules are yours to change.
Dahlia suddenly threw herself sideways into a tight shoulder roll and came up with a handful of dirt and small stones. She rose and hurled them at the woman, forcing her to shield her eyes and turn away. The woman tripped over a root and fell heavily, losing her knife.
That’s when Dahlia made her first mistake.
Mr. Church taught her to press an advantage, to never leave an enemy able to regroup. One part of her knew that and understood the logic of it, but another part—an older, less confident and perhaps more moral part—shouted that to press the advantage meant killing these people. All of them. She was not sure she could commit five murders. Not in cold or hot blood. Killing the living dead was one thing; this was something entirely different.
And so she ran to Neeko, grabbed him by the shoulder and propelled him into the woods with all of her strength.
“Run!” she yelled.
He gaped at her and looked past Dahlia to where the Rovers were all climbing back to their feet. Then he gave a small cry and vanished into the woods. Dahlia knew that in a flat race no one was going to catch the little scout. He was as fast as a weasel and slippery as an eel, and terror put wings on his feet.
Dahlia tried to run, too, but she was neither as fast nor as nimble. She tore into the woods, but with howls of fury the Rovers gave chase. The air was abruptly split by the sound of whistles—like the gym teacher in high school used—and after a moment there were answering whistles from deeper in the woods.
That’s when Dahlia realized the full scope of her mistake. If she’d done as she was taught, then maybe there would have been a way out. Now she was caught in a trap with who knew how many of the killers.
She ran.
Other bits of Old Man Church’s training came to her, guiding her. She cut left and right, avoided collision with bushes whose branches might be damaged by her passing and thereby be proof of her direction. She stepped on flat rocks and leaped over obstacles, then changed direction two or three times after landing. She cut back across her own trail to confuse pursuit. All the time the whistles screeched, signaling one to the other as the Rovers tried to catch her. Some blasts were long and steady; others short and staccato. There was some kind of pattern to it, but there was no time to suss out what it was. The Rovers were likely using the whistles to talk to each other.
She heard one whistle directly ahead and dropped low, becoming absolutely still as a Rover broke from the woods, a hunting hatchet in his hand. He looked left and right but did not see her, and then ran to follow the call of another shrill whistle blast. As soon as he was gone, Dahlia rose and moved into a dense stand of pine trees.
And there was a Rover directly in front of her. Tall. Powerful.
Familiar.
She jerked to a stop and stared with horrified eyes.
“Trash . . . ?” she whispered.
Time seemed to freeze into a bitter nothing as they stood there, six feet apart. He was dressed in leather now. Like them. She looked for a necklace of grim trophies, but he wore none. Dahlia wasn’t sure if that was a relief. Maybe it only meant he needed to start his collection. Which part of her would he cut off to buy his way into their trust?
Whistles in various patterns cut the air. Trash lifted his head to listen, then his eyes dropped back to meet hers.
“Dahlia,” he said.
“Please,” she begged.
He raised his whistle and put it between his lips. Those lips. The ones she had kissed too many times. The lips that had whispered such sweet things to her in the nights. The lips that had kissed her when she woke from nightmares.
“Please . . . ” she whispered and raised her knife.
He blew his whistle. Three short blasts.
“Go,” he said fiercely. “Go south. Now!”
She lingered a moment longer, see
ing the terrible pain in his eyes. Then he gave a single small, sad smile.
She bolted and ran, heading into the woods, angling south. Behind her she heard voices. The muscular woman and Trash.
“You saw her?” demanded the woman.
“Yeah,” said Trash. “Caught just a glimpse of her going north, maybe northeast. C’mon, I’ll show you. She can’t be too far ahead.”
There were more whistles and the sounds of shouting.
Going northeast.
Going away.
Tears fell down her cheeks.
“Trash . . . ” she said so softly that it was little more than a breath. She turned.
And Mr. Church was there. Right there. Four feet behind her. She hadn’t heard him at all. He had a pistol in his hands, the barrel pointing where Trash had stood. His eyes searched hers. She nodded, and after a moment he responded in kind. He lowered his weapon very slowly.
Then, without a word, he holstered the weapon, turned and led the way through the woods to where Neeko and the rest of the Pack waited.
After a long, long time, Dahlia ran to catch up to Old Man Church.
— 30 —
THE WARRIOR WOMAN
Rachael fought.
But there was one of her and six of them. Kyle, the one she’d kicked, joined the others, his face bloated and flushed, naked hatred in his eyes. He muscled his way between the others and punched Rachael in the stomach. It was an ugly, brutal blow that drove the air from her lungs and would have dropped her to the ground had the ropes not already been wound around her waist. She screamed and then gagged, trying to suck in air, but there didn’t seem to be any left in the whole world.
Kyle grabbed her face, pinching her chin between his thumb and fingers and leaned close to spit in her face. Then he gave her a grin that was beyond malicious, crossing over into true malevolence.
“I hope the walkers don’t find you for weeks, you little whore,” he said. “I hope you starve out here.”
Her legs were bound, as was her right arm; Rachael tried to tear her left free so she could stick a thumb in his eye or punch him in the throat, but the others held her.
“That’s enough,” growled the man with the cigarette. “She’s done. Let it go.”
“She’s done when I say she’s done,” growled Kyle. He reached for the frayed collar of her Batgirl T-shirt, clearly intending to rip it open. But then the moment, the day, and maybe the world changed as a voice spoke from the shadows of the woods.
“Now ain’t this interesting as all shit?”
They all whipped their heads around as a woman stepped from between two big pines. She was muscular, with a sharply-etched face and a necklace of human ears.
“Who the hell are you?” asked Kyle. He shook Rachael by his handhold on her blouse, tearing the collar. “More of your pussy friends?”
“Well,” said the woman, “I don’t know this little cutie but I’d like to. Mind if we join the party?”
Before Kyle could ask what she meant by “we,” he found out as three other strangers came out of the woods. They were all dressed in leather; they all had grisly necklaces. They all had knives or axes or hatchets in their hands.
Rachael stared at them and felt her heart sink. For one tiny second she thought that the universe was going to cut her a sliver of luck. That hope faded as she looked into the faces of the newcomers. They were hard, brutal, amused. The townsfolk spread out, drawing their own weapons. Only one of them had a gun, but it was a shotgun and not even a pump-action. The strangers were spread far apart and none of them looked particularly frightened of the weapon.
The woman took a couple of steps into the clearing. “Which one of you pencil dicks is running this cluster-fuck?”
“I am,” said the cigarette guy, who tossed the smoldering butt away. “Who the hell are you?”
“Me?” said the woman, contriving to look surprised at the question. Then an oily smile broke on her thin-lipped mouth. “My name’s Glory and I’m the goddamn angel of death.”
The man with the shotgun tucked it into his shoulder and pointed the barrel at her.
“Yeah? Well I’ve got a load of buck shot that says you ain’t shit.”
Glory turned to him—not her whole body, just an insectoid pivot of her head. She raised her hand, kissed her fingers and blew him a kiss. “Buh-bye,” she said sweetly.
Rachael saw a fragment of the forest shadows shift and break off and she began to cry out in warning, but the sound caught in her throat. Who would she warn? And why? She had no friends at all in this place, of that she was absolutely certain.
The shadow moved with blinding speed and suddenly the man with the shotgun grunted, stiffened, seemed to rise to his toes. His eyes bugged wide and his mouth opened to let loose a scream, but all that came from his throat was about a pint of dark red blood. Then the shadow rose up behind him and became something else. A man. Young and tall, with a handsome face twisted into a brutal mask. The shotgun sagged down and with a spasmodic jerk of dying fingers blasted the buckshot impotently into the dirt. The dying man fell to his knees and then the killer braced a knee against his back and tugged, jerking free a thick-bladed butcher knife. The shotgun man fell limply onto his face, twitched twice, and then lay still.
The townsfolk all cried out in shock and then flinched backward as a fifth leather-clad stranger stepped out of the woods, a big nickel-plated revolver in his massive fist.
“Jesus Christ,” gasped Kyle.
The cry woke Jason, who opened his eyes and looked around in sudden panic. He was bound, bloody, bruised, and tied to a cross in a grove filled with dead people and armed killers. Claudia still hung limp. Maybe dead.
“Ra—Rachael . . . ?” he murmured weakly.
Glory was still smiling at the townies. “You assholes are all from Happy Valley, aren’t you? Yeah, no need to answer. You’re the elitist jerkoffs hiding behind the wall thinking you’re better than everyone. Thinking that you have it all solved, that you own this fucking world. That your shit don’t stink. Well, newsflash, kids . . . as wake up calls go, this one’s going to be a real bitch. Trust me.”
— 31 —
THE SOLDIER AND THE DOG
In the morning I patrolled the perimeter of the town again and found two more sets of Rover scouts in concealed observation posts. Three Rovers in each. Baskerville wanted to start the day with some red fun, but I told him no. I was still in the intelligence-gathering mode. I had a pretty good read on what the Mad Max crowd had in mind, but I thought it might be useful to verify what Loki and Diver had told me about the residents of Happy Valley.
If the people inside the walls were forcing travelers into slave labor, then I wanted to do something about it. Only problem was that the Rovers I’d interrogated didn’t know if there were any forced workers still inside. Their man, Buckeye, hadn’t filed his last report. If there were no slaves in there, then fuck it. I’d let the Rovers and the elitist pricks inside kill each other and write the whole place off my list.
If.
But I had to find out, and I didn’t want to risk alerting their wall sentries if taking out the Rover teams got loud. Instead, I circled the town until I found a place where I could scale the wall with little or no chance of being seen by Rovers or sentries. I took the grappling hook I’d made from the bike frame, gave Baskerville some commands to stay free and alert and not engage unless attacked. Dogs are smart and if you train them they can understand complex orders. Ask sheep farmers and the show-dog crowd. Ask soldiers and K9 cops. I mean . . . you could have asked them if they were still alive.
Fuck. Sigh. The world really blows.
Point is . . . my dog would be safe. He couldn’t climb the walls anyway.
My line of approach was by crawling through a drainage ditch that took rain runoff to a creek. The thin weeds were tall and blew constantly in any breeze. When it came to security, the residents of this town had their collective heads way up their own asses.
I ma
de it to a pair of crooked slash pines and was up into the branches before you could say kiss my hairy white butt. I crouched among the bristles, dislodging and annoying a squirrel who fled to a higher branch and threw pieces of pine cone at me. Little asshole.
The wall was ten feet away and there were metal struts standing upright every six yards to anchor the razor wire. I was just starting to wind up to throw the grappling hook when I saw movement down on the ground, forty yards from me. There was a small side gate in the wall and a group of people stepped out into the morning sunlight. Six of them. Five men, one woman. Each pair of them was carrying a third person, so there were nine in all. The three being carried—well, dragged, really—looked to be either dead or unconscious. A tall guy, a waifish girl, and a very solid-looking woman.
I used my binoculars but could only see the strong-looking woman from my angle. She wore dark wash jeans, a faded grey T-shirt with batgirl logo in yellow, dirty knee-high black combat boots, leather bracers on her forearms and an old-fashioned pauldron on one shoulder. The armor pieces were probably looted from a museum or handmade by someone who spent a lot of time in Renaissance fairs before the dead rose.
Two men carried her along so that the toes of her boots dragged through the grass. I couldn’t see her face very well because her forehead and cheeks were covered in blood, and more of it matted thickly in her long dark hair.
They lugged her across the apron of open ground and vanished into the woods. The other pairs likewise hauled their burdens, moving quickly and cursing frequently. From the direction they took I had a good guess where they were going.
The clearing.
“Son of a bitch,” I said under my breath.
Three minutes later I was back in the ditch, worming my way back to the woods. Baskerville either saw me or smelled me, because he was waiting inside the forest shadows, looking like he wanted very much to bite something.
“Let’s go hunting,” I said.
— 32 —
DAHLIA AND THE PACK
Still of Night Page 25