CONTENTS
Copyright page
Chapter One - Followed
Chapter Two - The Rock Pile
Chapter Three - Ah for the Old Days
Chapter Four - The Rock Pile
Chapter Five - A Bunch of Screw Ups
Chapter Six - The Bridge
Chapter Seven - Hanging in the Wind
Chapter Eight - Try Again
Chapter Nine - Nurse Ghost Wind
Chapter Ten - Decision
Chapter Eleven - The Old Farm
Chapter Twelve - The Offer
Chapter Thirteen - Riding the Terror
Chapter Fourteen - Seeking New Hope
Chapter Fifteen - Horace
Chapter Sixteen - Road Sharks
Chapter Seventeen - Local Hospitality
Chapter Eighteen - Drawing Away
Chapter Nineteen - The Mountain Folk
Chapter Twenty - Kita
Chapter Twenty-One - Going Downhill
Chapter Twenty-Two - The Plan
Chapter Twenty-Three - A Bad Day for All
Chapter Twenty-Four - Welcome to the Jungle
Chapter Twenty-Five - What Just Happened?
Chapter Twenty-Six - Little help here?
Chapter Twenty-Seven - You're Not the Boss of Me
Chapter Twenty-Eight - You've Got to Believe
Chapter Twenty-Nine - Don't Want to Believe
Chapter Thirty - New Hope Redux
Chapter Thirty-One - Hammer Time
Chapter Thirty-Two - Honey, I'm Home
Chapter Thirty-Three - You're Kidding, Right?
Chapter Thirty-Four - Let's Grind 'em
Chapter Thirty-Five - Pushing It
Chapter Thirty-Six - Learn to Shut Up
Chapter Thirty-Seven - Atonement
Chapter Thirty-Eight - Pay the Piper
Chapter Thirty-Nine - Guard This
Chapter Forty - H'ast la Vista
Chapter Forty-One - Justice?
Chapter Forty-Two - Going Home
Acknowledgements
Also by Clint Hollingsworth
Author Bio
Copyright © 2015 by Clint Hollingsworth
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including printing, photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the website address below.
www.clinthollingsworth.com
Printed in the United States of America
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9909952-5-8
CHAPTER ONE
Followed
Yep. I’m being hunted.
She had been training in awareness since she was eight years old, ten years now, and there was no mistaking the feeling on the back of her neck. Someone… something was following her with intent.
One of my former friends, fellow scouts of the Clan of the Hawk looking for revenge? If so, they certainly took their time. It’s been six months. That didn’t seem likely.
One of the Yakama Nation?
Less likely. The Yakamas were friendly people, both natives and their adoptees. A Yakama medicine woman had nursed her back to health.
She gazed over the sagebrush landscape, letting her eyes wander the dust covered interstate highway to her east around to the slope of the Cascade Mountains to the west.
Nothing showed itself. She didn’t believe it would until it needed to.
Maybe not hunted. Maybe haunted.
CHAPTER TWO
The Rock Pile
****
Damn it, my face aches!
She touched the livid scar that ran from the side of her nose to the outer edge of her once flawless left cheekbone. The cold wind, blowing though the miles of sagebrush made the half-healed white scar throb. There was precious little area to block the weather until she hit the trees again.
I should have listened to Lila Whitefeather. It’s too early in the spring to have started my…journey.
She laughed inwardly. Journey. Why not call it what it was? Banishment. Why not call her what she was? Ghost Wind, the exiled scout.
Should have listened to Sifu.
She looked longingly at the old, broken and unused road. The rocks of the open sagebrush country were not kind to her feet, softened by a four-month convalescence, and the moccasins she wore needed the soles replaced fifty miles ago. She would have liked to have walked down the relatively flat middle of the crumbling former highway, but it was not the way of the scout to follow roads.
I’m not a scout of the Clan of the Hawk anymore, so what does it matter if I take the easy way?
She knew better.
The Way of the Scout was the only thing that would keep her alive in the deserts, mountains, dead cities and in the unclaimed lands. Twenty seven years after The Great Die-off, twenty seven years appropriately named “The Crazy Years”, it was hard enough to survive as a group.
She was a lone-wolf, and lone wolves rarely survived long.
Skills and knowledge were the only thing between herself and an early grave. That and the few items she had accepted from Lila for survival.
Maybe it was best to just lie down here, out in the sagebrush where no one but the coyotes would find her. Maybe it would be good to just lie down and let the cold claim her. The clan always preached fairness and justice for all, about not making the mistakes of the Beforetimers, but they’d dumped her out to die, wounded and sick without even giving her a chance to defend against what they charged her with.
Some family.
No. She would not let being depressed lead into being dead. She wasn’t going to give them that satisfaction. A lot of them obviously wanted her dead, and they’d almost gotten their wish. She felt the old burning anger start in her chest again, like embers coming to life.
Screw them.
Out of the haze of falling snow and wind, she saw something looming. As she approached, she saw it was a semi-tractor trailer, a good fifty feet off the road. Looked like it had been there a long time, the trailer canted at a forty-five degree angle. She could still see the ancient ruts of its path off the main highway.
She crawled up against one of the huge wheels, screened from the wind and sat down to rest. The dancing snow wafted in, touched her face but she barely felt it. She had trained long and hard to stay in the present moment but since the banishment, her rebel mind seemed to take off on its own like a bee-stung horse.
They should have given me a chance to at least defend myself, laying on the ground, tied and bleeding. Where was their much spoken of justice then?
By chance, she looked up at the faded lettering on the side of the old semi, and she laughed a short sharp laugh. It was a Mav-Tech transport.
At least there’s someone more hated than me, at least I didn’t unleash a plague on the world, wipe out eighty percent of humanity and plunge civilization into barbarism!
Small consolation, but you took what you could get these days.
CHAPTER THREE
Ah for the Old Days
****
Darwin Shell looked over what had been a beautiful riverwalk in the Beforetime. The memories of how nice things had been back then, over twenty years ago, always made him a bit melancholy. Bend had been a beautiful city. Sitting in his office in the old municipal building, he sighed. Now the city was a slowly crumbling ruin, trying its level best to return to nature.
The riverwalk was choked with willows, the coffee stands sitting there
with small trees growing out of them. It seemed all great civilizations eventually fell to their own apathy and stupidity. Having it too good for too long dulled people’s wits, made them sit back and assume someone else would take care of everything.
“Well, someone sure as hell took care of us, that’s for damn sure,” he growled more to himself than to the younger man sitting in an old leather easy chair.
“Thinkin’ ‘bout the old days again, boss?” Axyl, his second-in-command asked.
“Now why would you ask that, Axe?”
“Whenever you start sighing or growling like that, you’re most likely dippin’ into your nostalgia fund.”
Shell let a slight smile curve his bearded lips. “You’ll never understand, young man. You were born into this miserable existence, but I was raised in something far better, far more refined.”
“I’ve lived a lot rougher than this, boss. We’ve actually got a pretty sweet setup. You get all the best pickin’s here and are generous enough to share with me, thank you very much.” Axyl grinned. “Seems pretty cushy to me.”
“Axyl, I lived in a time when you could fly to any place in the entire world. Now, I haven’t even left this area in over a decade. I lived in a time when if you needed to know something, you just typed it in to a search engine and you could find an exhaustive amount of information on your subject. Now, I have to rely on our less-than-reliable scouts to bring me knowledge that is at best, four or five days old.” Shell sighed again. “Back then, we had dentists.” Shell looked into the mirror, noting the black holes where some of his teeth had been lost.
“I’ll take your word for it, boss. But answer me this, didn’t you used to have a shitload of rules back then? And a lot of people who made sure you followed their rules or they’d kill you, or chain you in a deep dark building someplace for most of your life?”
“Yes. Yes we did.”
“They’d have probably not approved of your having that skinny girl chained up there in your bedroom, just waiting for you to show her who’s boss. They’d most likely a’been pissed about all the people we been yankin’ off their farms and shipping to those clients of ours back east.”
“Actually, you’d be surprised what you could get away with back then, if you had money and power, but I take your point. It’s good to be the one making the rules. It’s good to ‘be da king’ out here.”
Shell turned back towards the window, thinking about the girl and smirking slightly. She’d been brought in with the last batch of round-ups, and he had taken to her instantly. He pondered taking off early so he could… No. The anticipation was part of the fun and he and Axyl had plans to make.
“Enough chit-chat, Axyl. It’s time to decide what to do about New Hope.” He spread an old, dogeared map of the area on the table. “That much fresh food would be an asset in the short term, but we really need to control its production. One of our biggest problems, as our Road Shark group grows, is feeding the troops.”
“I’m tellin’ you,” Axyl said, looking down at the map, “if we keep sending all our slaves back east to the Empire, we’re not going to be able to get our own food supplies tended to. We need to hold some of them back. The Beforetime supplies that they send us are okay, but fresh food is much better than those old military meals.”
“I’m starting to come around to your way of thinking,” the older man replied, “so my idea is to make New Hope a designated compound.”
“Meaning?”
“Instead of sending its inhabitants back east, we keep them as farmworkers. Once we take the village, we use their children as a lever to keep them in order and productive. We can even let them return to their families in the evenings, reminding them what’s at stake.”
“Well, that’s pretty damn generous, considering all the families we’ve sent to our ‘clients’ in old Montana.”
Shell looked up from the map to stare at the younger man. “Axe Man, here is a lesson you need to put in your little notebook. If you take everything from a man, then that man has nothing to lose. If our new slaves-to-be perceive they can lose even more than their freedom, as in their loved ones, then they are less likely to get ideas of rebelling or escaping. The cost is simply too high.”
“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.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Rock Pile
****
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 sc
out 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.
The Road Sharks Page 1