Junkyard Riders #13
Bengal was bloody petrifying on a good day. Right now, his face was a thundercloud of fury. If I hadn’t known he wasn’t angry at me, I’d have quaked. But Bengal owed me. Even better, he liked me.
“Girl,” Bengal said to me, his voice a low growl, full of threat. “You talk too much. You know what happens to women who talk too much.”
The butt-slapper grabbed Cupcake’s elbow and swung her behind him.
Cupcake tripped him and spun, using the slapper’s own momentum and torque against him.
He hadn’t expected her to know any moves.
Amos’ fist punched the slapper’s gut as he was going down, a low blow, landing way below the belt.
The man made a strange sound, part-oof, part-squeal as he curled over and bounced.
Another man dove at me.
I was faster than human. I stepped aside.
My guy skidded into the kitchen and slammed into the grill. Caught himself with a hand on the hot surface and screeched. Two, moderately disabled. That left ten. Good odds, for a bar fight.
Especially since the Dark Riders were mostly still sitting, trapped, two or three in each booth seat.
To my side, Bengal waded in, his bot-arm taking down two men in a single punch.
Amos face-punched another. Nanobot fast. Guy never saw it coming.
I swung the fry pan.
My swing connected. I took out a guy with a blow to the back of his head. It made a ringing thump. Skidding across a table on my butt, I took another out with the backhand swing.
Bloody damn, this feels good.
By the time I landed on the floor, the remaining riders had gotten themselves up and pulled weapons, which changed everything.
Until the cats attacked. Flying fur, yowls, howls, whistling, and hissing, louder than incoming rockets. Faster than normal cats. They were everywhere.
Dark Riders tumbled. Raged. Struck out. I blocked two punches and throat punched one of the hitters. I tripped one guy and shoved him back into two more. One guy fired a weapon that took out a ceiling fixture. A cat landed on his face.
Amos took two steps and bowled over two men. It had to feel like being hit by a flying refrigerator.
Bengal knocked out a guy’s teeth. Kicked another in the balls. Both men went down. All that wartime augmentation. And his bot arm.
The fight was going well, when the laxatives took effect.
Explosively. One after another, the men doubled over.
Several men shat their britches where they stood and lay.
The conscious ones shuffled-ran toward the back.
And the only bathroom. The smell was . .
. I couldn’t describe how bad it was. Open sewer bad.
I didn’t want to take the breath to laugh, and held it in, snorts escaping through my nose.
One guy tried to aim my way with a blaster. I kicked it out of his hand. He groaned and gripped his belly. Dropped trou and did a number on the floor.
“Holy crap,” I said, chortling, backing away.
A little blood, a few teeth on the floor, a few broken bones was one thing. Explosive diarrhea was another.
The cats sprang away, the stink so strong even they were disgusted.
Cupcake wiped sweat and someone else’s blood from her face. She took her pink lipstick from her pocket and scrawled across the diner’s bar top, “Shitheads. Taken down by two women.”
I snorted again, the stench up my nose with the breath. Even without the guys’ backup and fists, the riders, and their britches, would have been down anyway, and not in the way they had been planning. So yeah. Two women.
Cupcake left through the front door with Bengal. The cats followed, one, again, carrying a huge rat.
Out front, Amos sliced the tires on the DR bikes, confiscated their weapons and anything else that looked interesting, including their comms gear so they couldn’t call for help once they managed to get their bowels empty.
Amos found several stashes of money, which he waved to me before he pocketed it.
Satisfied that my people had gotten away, I jumped through the order window to circumvent the pooping crowd in the hall, avoided the man pooing on the kitchen floor, holding his burned palm in the air.
I walked out the back like a biker chick after a good fight.
Keyed on my screamer bike. Four cats dove into the panniers.
One had a rat, but I wasn’t about to fuss.
Cupcake hopped on behind her man and waved at me.
My tires shot rocks as I whipped around the building and took point, leaving my team to eat my dust. The only really good thing about a crotch-rocket was speed.
We got out of Dodge.
As I drove, Mateo said into comms, “You want to explain the comment about an alien ship buried at Brushy Fork Coal impoundment pond? Because to my knowledge, there is no such thing.”
“Sure,” I said into my mic, checking to see that the two bikes were still near me.
“If the weather holds, we should have a couple of days to set up a nice trap, far away from our territory, on the other side of the mountain from Four County Mine and our allies, and hell and gone from the junkyard. All we need is a little help from Devil Anse in Logan, West Virginia, a working backhoe, and a transport truck. I have the equipment. Anse has our bait.”
“And what’s your bait?” Jolene demanded.
Trusting in Jolene’s link, I said, “The rotation rings from the downed alien Bug ship in Anse’s possession.” He also had the other dead alien carapace. Like dead-dead, not in multilarval stage kind of death. I wasn’t going to ask for the body, however.
“You can tell your fiancé that I won’t let the bad guys get the rings.
” I whipped the bike around again and practically flew back past the diner to the boulder-sized not-slag.
I stopped and walked up close. With the edge of a blade, I carved off three slivers of the metal, surprised that steel would cut into it. “Hey, Jolene,” I said. “You copy?”
There was no reply, just the odd staticky absence of EntNu comms.
I began to drive, and every few seconds I tried to contact Jolene. It never worked, until I pulled over and placed the shards of not-slag into the small metal tin where the amaranth seeds were. When I spoke again, Jolene answered instantly.
“Copy, Sugah. Where the heck fire are you, girl?”
“Just about caught up to the others.” Which told her nothing, and more importantly told CAIT nothing. But it told me everything.
When I reached the others, I keyed off the bike, set the Jiffy, and dismounted.
Cupcake ran up to me squealing, and threw her arms around me.
I went stiff for all of ten seconds, but Cupcake had decided in the last few weeks that she was a hugger and I figured she wasn’t letting me go until I hugged her back.
I reached around her and patted her back.
“That’s pitiful,” she said to me, laughing softly. “But I guess it’s better than it used to be.”
I grunted and stepped away.
Mateo had arrived in his ATV Quadro and the gear had been partially unpacked. The crew was celebrating, big grins and cold beers all around. The cats were feeding from three foil packets of something that smelled like spoiled fish, but was marginally better than the shit stink at the diner.
I took a beer. It was some local IPA stuff, too hoppy for my taste buds, but it was wet. That was what mattered. And it was celebratory. No one celebrated like a bike club. I sat flat on the ground and drank. Thinking. Swiping through maps on my autonomous morphon.
When the stinky fish was gone and the last of the beers had been drained, Mateo said, in a bad, vaguely French-Spanish accent, “What’s the plan, mon presidente?”
“All I got is the bare bones,” I said, still concentrating on the morphon and tapping out calculations. “but it starts with Brushy Fork Coal Mine, just north of Four County Mine, in Boone County.”
“You said something about an impoundment dam,” Jolene said. “I believe it was the Brushy Fork Coal impoundment?”
“That’s the one,” I said. “Twilight MTR Surface Mine, near Twilight, West Virginia created the Brushy Fork impoundment ‘pond.’ It’s really the biggest earthen dam in the western hemisphere.
It’s two hundred, forty-seven meters high, as close as I can calculate it.
The old records list it at eight hundred, ten feet high, so, more or less.
It holds back 7.8 billion gallons—which is just north of 29 billion liters—of toxic coal ash sludge,” I said, converting units from pre-war to current, and reading at the same time.
“We have a scary assortment of chemicals stored there, starting with manganese, cadmium, lead, and mercury.
“Near it is a smaller, newer, impoundment pond in a deep depression in the mine. I’m proposing that we borrow the burned alien ship rings and scrap, and place the pieces in the smaller pond, just under the surface.
And just wait for the Dark Riders. As soon as they stop shitting their pants and find a way to contact their bosses, I’m betting they’ll reconnoiter the place and spot the rings.
Then they’ll come. All of them. Even the brass.
Especially the brass. Because they’ll assume this is a big discovery, one for the history books, and they have egos bigger than the moon.
And we take them all out at one time, for good. ”
Mateo’s metallic voice nearly spat, “Ambush. Assassination.”
I looked up and scowled at him through the warbot face shield. I didn’t like the sound of those words. Worse, I didn’t like what I had said, what I had meant. I didn’t like what those words meant about me and who I was.