by Chogan Swan
“Say, thank you, Nepenthe,” Amber said, pushing Ayleana towards the man.
“Thank you, sir. You are a life saver.” Ayleana handed Kest her bullpup and put her arms around the man then kissed him on the lips. His eyes went wide.
“Here is a place you can lie down for a moment so I can do the transfusion,” Amber said, opening the hatch of the abandoned Subaru wagon next to her. “Nepenthe, help him lie down.”
Ayleana picked the man up, since he was collapsing anyway, and carried him to the rear of the Subaru, sliding him in and leaning over to take the vein in his arm between her lips. The blood was rich, full of cholesterol and iron. After she took it—fighting with herself to stop after a half liter—she returned a compound, one that Tiana had taught her, to balance his cholesterol levels. Then, she healed the bite. As she left him, he was snoring quietly. With her elbow, she broke one of the back windows to make sure the car was well-ventilated so he wouldn’t overheat before he woke. On her way back to where Kest and Amber were rummaging through the luggage, she slid her tail from the slit in her harem pants, and made a vow to herself to hide it as little as possible from the world. It was time Earth learned humans weren’t the only players on the stage.
Amber handed Ayleana her bullpup. Ayleana noted that Amber had removed her sidearm holster and left it with Kest’s bike. Ayleana handed Amber’s bullpup to Kest; she wouldn’t need the redundancy.
Amber had already unpacked a drone from a Faraday bag. Now, she picked up the controls and sent the drone soaring into the sky. “If those bastards pick now to send another pulse, I am going to be pissed,” she said between her teeth.
Ayleana and Kest watched over her shoulders as the drone soared over the trees that blocked the view around the bend in the road.
Soon the view of the ambush site became clear.
“Oh, God,” Kest said in a strangled voice.
The screen showed sixteen men grouped around two more who were raping one of the captives, a young woman tied to the hood of a car like a trophy kill.
“Aylie, I spot sentries to the rear at twelve and seven. You see any others?” said Amber.
“No that’s both of them, unless one is really deep in a blind below the IR spectrum.”
Amber pursed her lips. “Kest, I’m going to take your sidearm strapped behind me and have mine hidden in my waistband. You sit behind me on my bike, and I’ll slow down to drop you at the green Tahoe here. Then, I’ll continue to here where I’ll stop and drop the bike, acting as if I’ve just spotted the trap. I’ll roll to cover and engage. You two come running to support me when you hear the shots.”
Amber turned to Ayleana. “How long will it take you to take out the sentries?”
“It’s two klicks of running. Then, I’ll need to be quiet coming up on them. If you two leave here in seven minutes, I’ll have time to get in place.”
Amber looked at her watch. “I’ll give you an extra two minutes for a margin.”
“Good, that will give me time for a snack,” Ayleana said, glaring at what was happening on the display screen.
Amber turned her watch to where Ayleana could see the face. “I plan to start shooting when my watch says 7:01 am. Got it?”
Ayleana nodded her head. “Kest, you should stop watching that. It will make you stupid in the fight.”
Kest tore his eyes away from the screen.
“Try to leave some alive,” said Ayleana.
Kest, smelling of rage from what was on the screen, looked at her in confusion.
Ayleana could tell he wanted them all dead. Then he understood her and his eyes narrowed.
He nodded. “Got it.”
Ayleana pulled the strap of her bullpup tighter and launched from the top of the guardrail, landing at the bottom of the road grade. At top speed, she ran across the field toward the wooded terrain that surrounded the ambush site. It was a good plan, but she had her own timetable, and it didn’t involve her family walking into an ambush as bait.
Chapter 39 — War
As she ran, Ayleana prepared herself for war. The pint from the man who’d warned them had taken the jagged edge off her hunger and given her fuel for the threshold change. Her body was blossoming into something new, and the sensations and emotions that produced were like sailing through a storm on the seas of Omhault 3’s southern hemisphere.
Riniana Tiana’s threshold had been tame... insipid... compared to this. Ayleana wondered if that were because Riniana Tiana’s support group was a combination of calm stoic Dymba and her family’s friends.
Maybe it has more to do with my body.
HumanaH had never talked to her much at all until their last meeting when Ayleana introduced her to Kest. And, none of that had been about what HumanaH might have done to produce the genetic code she’d given to her newest branch sister. Perhaps it was simply because Ayleana’s transition was occurring during war, strife and battle instead of with the support of everyone around her. Not that Kest, Amber—and even Drew and the stranger who’d warned them—hadn’t been supportive. It seemed more about the struggle she was facing that was pushing her body’s development in new directions.
Trees flew past her in a blur as she narrowed the gap to her targets. Ayleana had the scent of the two sentries now, and she pulled the half-meter blowgun tube from its slot in her pack and yanked three darts from the pocket beneath her vest. When she was twelve meters from her first target, she leapt to a tree branch four meters above the ground. The first target was a heavyset man in a dirty white t-shirt and blue jeans riding low on his buttocks. A clear shot presented, and she took it. The needle hit the sentry in his right ass cheek, and he pivoted his head to stare at it for a second before dropping.
Ayleana dropped quietly to the ground, stalked to where he lay and plucked the needle out. Licking the smear of blood from the shaft and renewing the coat of the sleep toxin. She slid it into the blowgun again, listening and sniffing. The noise from the gang rape urged her to hurry, but she controlled the instinct and drifted through the woods to her next target.
Most of the trees were small here and the next sentry had stationed himself at the top of a rise by a large oak for a good field of fire and something to hide behind. He’d put some thought into it, but he hadn’t considered that the sentry to the side of him might have failed.
Ayleana moved behind him, stalking low to the ground on all fours toward his blind. Thick undergrowth concealed him from all sides, making the darts useless. She pulled the stabbing needle with its wooden spiral handle from her pack strap, licked it and let her tail entwine in its grip. A slow stalk was the only way, so she crept to his position, keeping the tree between them for cover.
From behind the trunk, she clapped her hand over his mouth and cracked his head against the tree, stabbing him with the needle as he slumped to the ground.
Footsteps were approaching from the ambush site, someone walking carelessly—but with purpose—towards the sentry post. The breeze brought the scent of the new target to her. A man who’d just finished participating in rape.
“Hey, Jimmy, I had mine, buddy. You can go take a turn. I got your— “
Ayleana’s fingers clasped his throat and lifted him in the air. She looked him in the eyes and bared her teeth, ignoring his weak kicks as she pulled his throat to her mouth. With her teeth, she sliced open the main vein and applied suction, taking blood until he passed out. Then, she healed the gash with a quick patch and dropped his body, stabbing him with her envenomed tail spike to be certain he stayed down. she
Close to the rape scene now, Ayleana could see a few of the onlookers from where she stood. She slipped behind the last bush between her and the crowd of enemies . All were gathered in the parking lot of a run-down convenience store, out of sight of the main road where they’d positioned vehicles to get their victims to thread through obstacles that squeezed them into a point of no-return.
The other victims had all been stripped to their underwear or further, gagged, zip-ti
ed to each other and positioned so they had a good view of what was happening to the woman tied to the roof of the silver BMW.
Ayleana slid from the cover of the bush to the shelter of a pickup truck. Evidently, it was one of the prizes they’d captured. The cover was perfect, so she pulled more darts from the pouch and leaned out to hit the closest. In rapid succession, she worked her way from one to the next then to the one currently committing the violation. Right up until Ayleana’s needle sunk three inches into his ass, he, no doubt, thought he was the object of everyone’s attention.
For her purposes, it had been close enough to the truth.
Ayleana checked the countdown to Amber’s arrival as she sorted through the smells to see how many of the gang remained. Amber’s motorcycle started up in the distance. The drone had shown eighteeen, and she’d put down thriteen so far. Ayleana counted the prisoners; nine plus the woman tied to the BMW, all of them covered with the smell of fear and shock.
Then, she counted the rest of the body scents—Six!— and tried to locate them. One of them was in the store.
What?!
Without locking that one down, she couldn’t leave to help Amber.
A quick look in the open door showed nothing. Ayleana picked up a rock from the dirty landscaping by the doorway and tossed it into the back of the store. She listened, sorting through sounds, desperate for a clue and heard... crying... someone in the back right corner of the store—without a gag.
A rapid peek around the empty shelves showed a young man, twenty-something, curled on the floor. Ayleana put a dart in him then sprinted for the ambush site.
She came around the corner of a blue van, chambering the bullpup’s first round and took out the four wanna-be-the-next-rapists in her field of view with headshots just as Amber’s tires skidded on the pavement. Ayleana glanced around the corner to see an urban cowboy type wheeling round to see why shots were firing behind him.
Amber, now flat on her back, pulled the Glock concealed by her jacket from her waistband and shot for his gun hand as it crossed his body on the way to pointing his Colt 45 revolver at Ayleana. He’d spun with a motion that revealed time spent in cowboy-quickdraw competitions. A scream of pain and the sound of lead colliding with bone and metal announced the end of his career in that sport.
Ayleana stuck her head out again. “Nice shot,” she said then stalked up to the whimpering cowboy and stabbed him with the tail spike. “It’s just my nature,” she said to him as he collapsed.
“Thanks,” Amber said. “You started early didn’t you.”
“Yeah, but I saved that one for you.”
“All clear, Kest,” Amber yelled as Kest’s footsteps came pounding up from behind her.
Kest growled as he came around the corner. “You left me further away than you needed to on purpose then went so fast you didn’t have backup. What kind of teamwork is that?”
“I know, fucked up, right?” Amber said with a glare at Ayleana. “Except I was pretty damned sure I had backup here already and I was right. Besides, I made a keep-you-alive promise.”
Amber climbed to her feet and slipped her gun back into her belt. “Aylie, you and Kest go pick up the two sentries and bring them here.”
“First, I have to help that woman,” Ayleana said.
“Right,” Amber turned to Kest. “I need to talk to the prisoners. Can you help me get the gags off them?”
Kest nodded and went to the line of captives, flipping open his knife. They all reacted, shying back in fear.
“Relax palefaces, no scalping today,” he muttered and started cutting the bailing twine that kept the rags in their mouths.
Ayleana went to the woman on the car and gave her a dose of sedative and the compound that would make her forget the past hours then untied her and took her into the store.
This was going to take some work.
Chapter 40 — Shooting Lesson
Amber looked over the little crowd on the ground. “Ok, people, I know you’ve all been through a lot, and in a minute I will untie you and send you on your way. But now, I need your complete attention. We are in a hurry and I don’t want to put your gags back in for interrupting me. Are you with me on that?”
When she had nods from all of them, she helped Kest take their gags off. Then, finished with the gags, she spotted bottles of ginger ale on a bench and put a bottle next to each of them as she cut their hands free.
“Now we—who just saved your lives, at no small risk to our own—have a pressing need for cold storage. Whole blood from these criminals will save the lives of people dear to us. Their donations are required, so I need them alive for a bit. Do any of you have chemical cold packs in your first aid kits? The need is not trivial, I assure you.”
Two people nodded.
“Please tell the nice young man where to find those.”
Kest had just finished cutting the gag from a young man, Amber had pegged as a yuppie. His hair was now matted with sweaty hair gel dripping onto his torn dress shirt. The gang had rolled up his silk tie and put in his mouth. As soon as the gag was out, he shouted, “Where did she take my wife?” His voice was hoarse and rasping.
Amber turned to look at him. “The woman they were gang raping was your wife?”
“Yes! What is that..., that tailed freak doing to her?”
Amber glared at him. “Do you have something against all people with tails or just the ones who save your life and rescue your wife from a gang bang? You know, I felt sorry for your wife when I saw what was happening to her. “My friend in there told me we had to rescue you people. But now I know she’s married to you and I feel terrible for her.”
Amber turned to Kest. “Put it back in.”
Kest jammed the tie back in, tied it in place and turned back to the older couple who had been trying to tell him where to find the cold packs. He cut them loose and helped them to their feet.
“Thank you, young man,” said the woman. “You know, I thought it a very nice tail, quite fetching. Like a kinkajou’s but prettier and obviously so useful. When she stuck the needle in that dreadful man’s keester.... Oh, yes, he had that coming. Didn’t he Bernard?”
“He did, my dear,” said Bernard. “You know, son,” he leaned closer and whispered, “You need to kill those men. No good will come of them living.”
“We’ll take care of that later, sir,” said Kest.
“I’m afraid I’ll need to stick around to see that done.”
“I completely understand.”
Amber turned back to the captives. “People, I expect you want these bandits put down, but I want you to give me your word again before we untie your feet that you will wait. We are from a community in desperate need of blood donations. These criminals will give their blood as the only thing of worth they have to offer the world they will soon be leaving. That’s why we need the cold packs.”
The older woman came back from her car with two cold packs and handed them to Amber. “Thank you so much, dear,” she said. “Maybe they have more in the store. You were very brave to ride in here like that. My name is Bernice, Bernice Handy, and that’s Bernard. I call Bernard my Handy man. You just tell us if there’s anything else you need. If we have it, it’s yours.” She leaned close to Amber. “Please don’t neglect to kill those men, dear,” she whispered. “You can’t let them run loose with no fear of the law to keep them in check. Oh! Dear me! I need to sit down.”
Amber grabbed her arm and kept her from collapsing until Bernard limped over to help her to the shaded bench under the store’s overhang.
“Kest, would you check the store for cold packs and something for these folks to drink? I’ll finish with the zip ties,” Amber called.
Kest ducked into the store and came out with two eight-packs of bottled water a moment later. He put a bottle next to each of the prisoners, starting at the Handys and stopping at the man he’d re-gagged. “Are you going to be polite now?” he said.
The man nodded, reluctantly.
&nb
sp; Kest took his knife and held it front of the man’s face while looking into his eyes with a calm stare. He made a quick slice across the twine on top of the silk tie, pulled the tie out. “Stay on good behavior, and I’ll cut your zip ties too. Those damn things hurt like hell, I know, but—to be honest—I don’t trust you. Your wife’s need for medical attention trumps your comfort, and I will not let you interfere. Drink,” he said and held the bottle for him.
“People,” Amber called. “Please bring me your water bottles when you are finished with them,” Some of them stared at her with blank faces. A teen-age girl—naked as the day she was born—finished her bottle and gathered the rest of the empties from the people still too stunned to move. She carried the bottles to Amber, hugging them to her chest. “Would you take me with you?” she said. “I was next in line for that show. If her husband hadn’t pissed them off, I would have been the one on that car.”
“I can’t bring you with us,” Amber said, “but we can organize the ones who want to get there and tell you how to find it. There is a .45 caliber revolver over there that might still be working. You may have to duct tape the grip. If you get it and bring it to me with the gun belt, I’ll show you how to use it. You’re never naked if you’re carrying a gun.”
The girl nodded and hurried around the corner to where Tiana had left the cowboy. When she came back a few minutes later, she wore the cowboy's fancy western shirt that fit her like a dress. She had the gun belted over the shirt, and her head was now shaded by an expensive ten-gallon hat padded out by a bandana and her thick red hair tied up in a ponytail with a red bandana. “Am I going to need a permit for this or something?” she said. Then she flushed red-faced. “Damn, that was a stupid question.”
“It takes time to adjust to a new paradigm,” Amber said, as she dragged another of the unconscious gang members to the pickup truck. “Did you check his pockets for more cartridges?”
“This was all he had.”
“After I show you how to shoot, you might want to go through all their stuff and see what you can find.” Amber held out her hand and took the gun when the girl handed it to her. “What’s your name?” Amber said, checking to see if the gun was loaded... It was.