“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.