Jason Frost - The Warlord

Tag shook his head. "Tracy? You're nuts. She hasn't said a thing, done anything to suggest what you're implying."

"Trust me, Tag," she said, patting his arm. "A woman can tell. Not that she'd do anything about it; she's got too much class for that. She's-"

Tag held up his hand for silence. "Hear that?"

Season tightened the grip on her bow, her fingers tugging slightly on the string. She hunched forward, swiveling her head to listen. Tag saw the intensity on her face, was reminded of African tribeswomen smeared with stripes of colored mud as they hunted, spear in hand. He felt a rush of desire flame down his chest, stomach, flickering through his groin.

They stood without moving or breathing for a full minute, eyes darting through the desert brush, noses unconsciously sniffing for the smell of men. Finally, they looked at each other, shrugged, relaxed a hit.

Tag pointed down at Eric and the others filling their canteens. "Looks like they were successful. That's the first oasis I've ever seen outside a movie. Somehow it doesn't look as real as in the movies."

"It's got water. That's real enough."

"I guess it's a good thing we've been traveling mostly at night. Rydell told me that we each need a gallon of water a day to survive in the desert, but that at night we can cover twice as much mileage on that gallon as during the day. Twenty miles as opposed to ten."

"Yeah, I saw Beau Geste too. Only trouble is, so did Fallows, and he's been covering the same ground. More, because his men are in better shape."

Tag nodded, fell silent. He tried to catch a glimpse of Season out of the corner of his eye, see if she was still looking at him. He'd never had much trouble finding girls, but this one overwhelmed him. All the qualities he had to push himself to have-courage, humor, forth-rightness-she displayed easily. "You know, Season, uh, about what you said before-"

"You understand the Dewey Decimal System?"

"Huh?"

"All those ridiculous numbers. You understand them?"

"Yeah. It's based on a classification formulated by W.T. Harris for the St. Louis Public Library. Melvil Dewey devised it in 1873 for the Amherst College Library. In it, all knowledge is divided into ten groups, with each group assigned a hundred numbers. Then-"

"Okay, okay. I didn't understand it before and you're not making it any easier. I just figure we should get to know each other a bit better since we're kind of like the last two people at a singles bar. Eventually we're going to go home together, so we might as well enjoy each other's company. Make sense?"

He nodded. "Sure, I guess."

"Great!" she smiled and pecked him on the cheek. "At least now it's out in the open. We don't have to kid each other."

Tag turned to say something to her, he wasn't sure what exactly, just something nice. He hoped the words would, for once, spring naturally and unarmored from his mouth. "I-"

He heard a funny sound. A zipper closing too fast. Where had he heard that sound before? There was a nudge at his chest, the distant sound of screaming. Season's.

"Jesus God, no!"

Lazily he followed her eyes to his chest, saw the green stick of wood, the yellow feathers bunched like a bouquet at one end. The shaft was wedged into his chest. How'd that get there? he wondered, started to reach for it to pluck it out. But his arms wouldn't move. His hand uncurled from the bow, it dropped on his foot. He didn't feel it. Slowly, so slowly, he felt his legs melting under him.

Like a vivid dream, it all seemed to take hours to Tag. But for Season, from the time she saw him hit to the time he dropped to the ground was a matter of a second or two.

She'd screamed from shock, but had recovered quickly, dropping to one knee and firing off an arrow in the direction the crossbow bolt had come from. The arrow rustled through the brush, but didn't hit anything solid. She flipped another arrow from quiver to bow and drew. The bow's system of pulleys allowed her to keep it drawn without arm fatigue as she swept it in a fanning motion from brush to brush.

Zzziipp.

Another bolt sizzled by her, embedded itself in Tag's exposed back. She pivoted in the direction it had come from, fired her arrow. It too was swallowed by the brush. She reached for another arrow.

Zzziipp.

The bolt's razor-edged tip punctured her right forearm, slicing through flesh and muscle like a ship's prow through water. Instantly it poked through the back of her forearm dripping blood onto her fine wheat-colored hairs.

Zzziipp.

Zzziipp.

Two more bolts flashed toward her, one whooshing over her right shoulder, the other chipping a splinter from her bow before being deflected to the ground.

Unable to either see the enemy or fire her bow with her injured arm, Season dropped the bow and did what her body was trained to do best. She ran.

Eric gave the cap of the canteen an extra twist. "That about does it. Again, thanks for the help."

Joseph Baldwin smiled, shook Eric's hand. "No problem. It's the least I could do after bending all your ears so much. Hope you find whoever you're tracking."

Eric's face hardened.

"No, don't worry, none of you let anything slip. You forget, I was a lawyer. Had a stint as a public defender for a couple years. I know the look." He gave them a grim smile. "But from judging the kind of people you seem to be, I'd say whoever it is has it coming."

'Thanks for the water," Eric said again, nodding to the others to move out,

"Jesus God, no!" Season's scream cracked the air like a gunshot.

Eric led them as they scrambled up the sandy incline. They ran clumsily through the shifting sand, their feet slogging as if buried in mud. Only Eric seemed to move easily, his feet slapping ahead of the others as if he were on pavement. His crossbow was cocked, the bolt snug against the string, waiting for that 150 pounds of tension to snap it through the air.

Season was running toward him now, her legs and arms pumping, fighting the sand's pull as it sucked at her feet. The bloody arrow through her forearm looked like some child's prank, a toy bought at a cheap magic shop to scare her parents. Once it banged against her thigh as she ran. Her howl of pain was sudden, reflexive. Then she gulped it back and ran even harder.

"Drop to the ground!" Eric yelled. "Drop!"

She shook her head as she ran toward him. Another bolt flew out from the clump of brush behind her, whizzed within a few inches of her back before shooting past her.

Eric flopped to his stomach, lifted the crossbow to his shoulder, and calculated the backward trajectory of the bolt that had just missed Season. It was like playing the film of the arrow's flight in reverse. Then he freeze-framed the film on the exact spot where the bolt had emerged from the brush, aimed the crossbow, and squeezed the trigger.

The short arrow spat from the bow like an angry torpedo headed for an enemy U-boat.

A surprised grunt of sudden unendurable agony burst from the brush, followed by a body in combat fatigues pitching forward, grasping madly at the bolt blooming like a deadly flower from his stomach. But the shaft was too slippery with blood for him to get a firm grasp. His fingers slid helplessly off the arrow. Then he died.

Twelve yards to the left, young Foxworth swallowed a bubble of panic as he watched Toomey's eyes stare unblinking into the orange sky. Tiny grains of sand coated Toomey's bloody fingers like breading and Foxworth suddenly thought of Kentucky Fried Chicken, the one thing he missed most since the quakes. He wanted to laugh, to cry, to vomit, to piss his pants. All at once.

Through the crisp skeletal twigs of the brush, he could see Ravensmith and the others crawling cautiously toward him. He calculated his chances of running away.

Slim to none. Ravensmith would put an arrow in his back before he got ten yards away. He squirmed, wringing his sweaty hands around the crossbow. Damn thing. Why hadn't Colonel Fallows given them guns. Then he remembered the feeling he'd got when he'd fired into that guy's body. Sure, Toomey had already brought him down, but Foxworth had put another arrow into him anyway. To see how it felt. It felt good. The way the body twitched and jerked as the bolt thumped into it. It was, well, satisfying. Almost as good as fucking those twins and their mother, though he was the last in line and by then they'd all been so abused they were hardly conscious enough to notice him doing anything. He did it anyway.