keyed the talk switch on his walkie-talkie. “All right, people. Get ready to blow them to hell if they make any funky moves toward Jane. One mistake on our part means Jane gets shot up. Let’s don’t let that happen.”
Jane took her position on the shoulder of the interstate.
Tony’s lead vehicle rounded the curve in the interstate. “Goddamn, Pete,” the driver said. “Look at that cunt up there.”
“Yeah, I see her. Looks pretty good from here.”
“Pretty good? Man, you need glasses. That’s prime gash.”
The man on the passenger side radioed Tony, who was in the center of the column.
“Stop here,” Tony ordered his driver. “It could be a trap.” He radioed to the lead cars. “Rest of you guys go on up there and check it out.”
A half dozen cars approached the lone woman standing by the side of the interstate. The lead car stopped, the others grinding to a halt behind him. The driver rolled down the window and stuck his head out. “Hello, sweet thing. You waitin’ for a bus, maybe?”
“Could be,” Jane replied. She smiled. The windbreaker was draped over her right hand and forearm, hiding the cocked .45 semi-automatic pistol in her hand. Her finger was on the trigger.
“Well, now, ain’t you the lucky one, though. No point in you standin’ out there, baby. Why don’t you just hop your pretty ass in here with us. We’ll take you to the nearest bus station. We might decide to have some fun along the way.”
“I think I’ll just wait for the Trailways, if you don’t mind,” Jane told him. “One should be along any time.”
“Honey, there ain’t been no buses on this road for a long time. Now get your ass in here like I tol’ you.”
Jane offered no reply. She stood alone on the windswept shoulder of the road, matching the man look I for look.
The driver’s features hardened. “I said, baby, get your ass in here and get ready for a good fuckin’. I’m gettin’ a bone just lookin’ at you.”
“And if I don’t?” Jane asked. Her smile had turned grim. Before joining Raines’ Rebels, Jane had been taken captive by a group of men and sexually abused. She had been left for dead by the side of the road. She had no patience or mercy for rapists.
The driver could not know it, but he was gazing into the pretty face of death.
The driver laughed and got out of the car. He unzipped his pants and pulled out his thickening penis. “Don’t that look good to you, baby? Now why don’t you just come to Daddy and grab hold my tool? You can skin it back and get it up real hard for the both of us.”
“No thanks,” Jane said. “Fucking animals has never been my thing. And you look like a cross between an ape and a pig.”
The men still in the cars laughed at that.
The man with his cock hanging out of his jeans flushed with anger. “You gonna know some pain for that smart-mouth crack, girlie.” He stepped toward her.
Jane slid back her windbreaker and shot the man in the groin. The heavy .45-caliber slug, from a very close range, separated penis from man. The slug tore through the man’s lower belly, slamming him to the ground. Jane lifted the .45 and emptied it into the car, the booming of the pistol not masking the man with the missing pecker’s howling as he rolled and began the dying process on the shoulder of the interstate.
Jane leaped for the ditch just as automatic weapons fire cracked and roared and lanced death from both sides of the interstate. The slugs turned the lead vehicles into death traps. Glass splintered and metal
howled as slugs whined and sparked and tore through flesh and bone.
A quarter of a mile back, Tony Silver yelled his commands. “Get outta here! It’s a fuckin’ ambush.”
Tony’s boast that he’d show his men how to kick the ass off Ben Raines blew into the air like the thin emptiness it was as the cars squalled around and retreated down the interstate. Two miles down the road, they were forced to run the gauntlet of Susie and the other Scouts as they pot-shot from the brush along the roadway. “Jesus fucking Christ!” Tony yelled. He was crouched on the floorboards, trembling in fear and rage-the rage directed at himself for showing his fear in front of his men. But he did not need to worry about that; his men were more frightened than him. One had shit his pants and one had pissed his pants. Glass showered Tony as slugs slammed the car. Blood splattered him as one of his men took a round through the head and fell forward, his blood and brains and fluid leaking onto the front seat and dripping onto Tony in a red river.
“Floorboard this mother!” Tony squalled. “Get me the hell outta here!”
“Finish it,” Ben told his people. “Take a few of the men alive for questioning-if you can find any alive. Get as much information from them as possible then shoot them.”
“My pleasure,” Jane said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“I sure would like to find some wheels,” Ike said. “I have never been a fan of hikin’. Swimmin’, yeah-walkin’, no, thank you, ma’am.”
“You said you were a Shark?”
Ike laughed. “No, Nina! Not a shark, a SEAL. Navy. Means sea, air and land. Back in my day we were the bad boys of the Navy-so called, that is.”
“How come, Ike?”
“Oh,” he replied with typical modesty. “I guess “cause our tra*” was so rough and the dirty jobs that was always handed to us.”
“You mean you guys wouldn’t run from anything?”
Ike again laughed. “Only a fool won’t haul his ass out of some situations, little one. Hell, yes, I ran at times. Run like a thief in the night.”
“But I bet you won medals for being brave,” she said.
“I won a few. Some I guess maybe I deserved, others I didn’t. Ever’body that sees combat oughta win medals.” Ike stepped on a rock in the old road. “Ouch! Shit! Goddamn walkin’!”
Nina laughed at him. “Getting old, Ike?”
Ike’s grin was rueful as it transformed his face, the
years fading away with the smile. “You bet, I am, Nina. I’m pushin’ hard at the half century mark.”
“No! I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true, kid.” Except for the gray in his close-cropped hair, Ike looked about thirty-five. “I don’t feel it, but it’s true.”
They walked down the center of the highway.
“You got any kids, Ike?”
Ike was flung back in time. Back to the original Tri-States, and to Megan, his first wife. “Yeah, but I lost “em in the battle for Tri-States. Me and Sally adopted a whole brood later on.”
“You and Sally been married long?”
“Not long. I lost my first wife, Megan, in the big battle for Tri-States. Me and Sally got hooked up a couple years ago.”
“You love her, Ike?”
“I like her,” he replied, and Nina knew the subject was closed.
“Was you and General Raines in the SEAL’S together?”
“No, Ben was a Hell Hound.” He saw the confused look on her face. “The Hell Hounds was the closest thing the U.s. ever had to a full-fledged mercenary unit. Mean bunch of cutthroats. I did a year with ‘em, but that was long after Ben was wounded and got out. He was probably over in Africa at that time, fightin” with the five or six Commandoes. I don’t know. We don’t talk much about those days anymore. Brings back too many bad memories; too many good men died over there, Nina. The war got all turned around in the minds of people back home. Hell with it.”
And the subject was closed.
The faint sounds of engines reached them. Ike grabbed Nina’s arm and jerked her off the road. They climbed up the embankment and hid in the thick timber and brush. The engine noise grew louder.
The first truck came into view. “It’s them!” Nina hissed. “The Ninth Order. That’s the bunch that’s been
