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Dahlia liked to be able to move like a ninja. It was much better than the way she used to move, which was more like a sick bear or a beached whale. A little unfair, she knew, but self-loathing was a hard habit to shake.
Nowadays, with all the practice of surviving out here, with actual things that want to kill you, every day was like a video game. Or VR. Or something. Seeing firsthand what happened to people who couldn’t move quietly was a pretty good incentive program. She’d seen cops and soldiers get eaten because they made too much noise and drew too much attention.
So, for her it was ninja style.
She practiced it a lot with Trash and some of the other fighters, and also with Neeko and the scouts. It was kind of scary and kind of fun, and she could feel how it increased her confidence while also giving her some muscle tone. And if she thought about being a badass ninja while she ran those drills, well . . . no one else had to know.
Now it was critical for her to be truly as silent as one of those shadow warriors. Her gear was padded so nothing clanked or creaked. She and Trash took time moving through the forest, making sure not to step on twigs, watching for trip wires and booby traps as they got closer to where Neeko said the old fart was camped.
The forest was oddly lovely today. Sunlight slanted down through the treetops and painted big swaths of foliage with gold. There were all kinds of birds out here, and their combined songs filled the air with the kind of beauty that survivors often forgot about, or ignored. Dahlia did not ignore it. Without beauty, what was survival even worth?
Trash moved past her, angling down a slope toward the creek where Neeko got beaten up. For all his faults—and there were a lot of them—Trash knew how to move. His body was lean and muscular, and she loved to see him in action, even if it was just walking across a room. He looked pretty damn good naked, too, and that thought always gave her a flush. Trash was the first boy she’d ever slept with. She was moderately sure he didn’t know she was a virgin that first time, but he was as gentle in the sack as he was brutal in a fight. And on missions like this one, he always reminded her of a panther or tiger. There was a phrase she read once in a novel: “moving with oiled grace.” That was him. It was the kind of movement she aspired to, and seeing him glide past her and down the slope made her want him. Tonight was going to be one of the intense sessions, of that she had no doubt. He might have that oiled grace, but she had the stamina to wear him out.
The others, Nathan, Jumper, Serena, and Slow Dog, were spread out in a line a hundred yards wide. All four of them were tough, but each in different ways. Nathan was a bull in both looks and mentality; he was strong enough to smash through just about anything and liked to try. Jumper was all about Parkour and free-running. He was nimble, fast, and weird; and he did not relate to other people very well, so Dahlia figured he was some kind of sociopath. Serena thought she was Lara Croft, and had the body for it, but her mind was more like a snake—cold and ruthless. Slow Dog was probably the sanest of the Pack’s fighters, but that was a pretty low bar. He was loyal to a fault and would do very bad things to anyone who messed with the Pack. He was a nice guy around camp but sometimes he totally lost it in a fight, going way over the top with the amount of damage he needed to inflict in order to win.
Right now, though, Dahlia felt comforted to have all of them at her back. And Trash. Psycho or not, he was an incredible fighter. The old bastard was never going to know what hit him.
Not that she wanted to hurt the guy necessarily, but she did want to take all of his stuff, and maybe let Trash give him a few dents because of what the man had done to the scouts.
That was the thought going through Dahlia’s mind when every single thing went wrong.
She was looking for trip wires and saw one. She was even smiling as she lifted her foot and stepped over it. Dahlia had no idea what a pressure-sensitive field trap was until she heard the faint click. Then the tough, flexible pine bough that had been curved back, taught as a longbow, was released by the ground trigger hidden under dry leaves. The bough caught her in the stomach and folded her in half, lifting her completely off the ground, and swatting her backward into a tangle of berry bushes. The air was smashed from her lungs, but she managed a high, shrill, single-note wail of shock and pain. When she crashed down in the shrubs, Dahlia felt like she had been shot. She briefly thought that’s what had happened.
She lay there, punched deep into the shrubs, splayed like a starfish, gasping for air that seemed to have been sucked out of the whole world.
Nathan rushed over, pulling a heavy-bladed meat cleaver from a leather belt pouch, crying a warning to the others. Dahlia stared, confused, as the forest itself seemed to come alive and consume him. She saw leaves and branches move and fold around him, but there were sounds like knuckles on flesh, and then Nathan was falling, his eyes going high and white, his knees buckling, the cleaver gone from his big fist.
“There!” cried Jumper. “He’s right there.”
Dahlia forced her head to turn a half inch—an effort that seemed impossibly difficult—and saw Jumper leap toward a tree, step off the side of it, pivot in mid-air and drill a devasting punch toward a shadowy figure who moved away from Nathan. Dahlia knew what Jumper’s leaping punches could do. They were bone breakers, neck-sprainers, teeth snappers. Except they needed to land in order to do damage. The figure—and she realized now it was someone wearing forest camo and foliage as a disguise—shifted away from the punch, allowing it to miss by an inch. Then a stiff forearm chopped laterally across Jumper’s upper chest. The impact turned the arm into an axle and Jumper’s body into the wheel; he rotated in midair and then fell hard on his face. The figure squatted and drove a two-knuckled punch into the base of Jumper’s skull and the free-runner flattened out and did not move again.
Then Trash, Serena, and Slow Dog were there, crashing through the brush, each of them swinging weapons.
The moment seemed to slow down, almost to freeze, as Dahlia got a clear look at the face of the man in the camo. He was tall and blocky, with big shoulders and a barrel chest. He wore one of those full ski-masks on his head—a balaclava, Dahlia thought it was called—but she could see his eyes. They were dark and surrounded by crow’s feet. For one fragment of a moment those eyes looked into hers and she couldn’t read the emotions that should have been there. No anger, no fear, no hatred. Instead she saw disappointment and annoyance. As if her whole strike team was nothing more than an inconvenience.
Time speeded up all at once. The figure—the old man, she was sure of it—suddenly seemed to lose substance, to blur as he moved. Or maybe it was simply that he was so fast that she could not track him.
Serena tried to stab him and he punched her forearm, her bicep, her deltoid and the side of her jaw. Bam, bam, bam, bam. The knife fell; the arm itself seemed to die and flop down, and then the lights in Serena’s eyes flickered and went out. She dropped in place.
Slow Dog wore brass knuckles on both of his huge fists and he swung a one-two combination that was as fast as it was brutal. The old man did not evade but instead stepped into the swings so that Slow Dog’s huge arms wrapped around him and rebounded. Dahlia did not see what the old man actually did, but Slow Dog shrieked and staggered backward, blood spurting
from his nose and mouth. He dropped to his knees and then fell over sideways.
Then Trash, faster than the others, grabbed the old man by the shoulder, spun him and drove a knife into his guts.
Except that’s not what happened.
The knife was suddenly gone from Trash’s hand and it struck the tree and buried itself in the bark, quivering with the impact. Trash himself seemed to leap into the air, twisting and turning. He hit the tree just inches below the knife, slamming shoulders and the back of his head into it.
The old man stepped back and let him fall.
Dahlia managed to pull her pistol out, even as her oxygen starved lungs clawed in a single breath. She raised the pistol and pointed it at him.
The man stopped. He looked at the gun. Then he reached up and removed his balaclava, revealing a weathered face and graying hair. His eyes were calm, without trace of fear or surprise. He did not look at the gun. Instead he looked directly into Dahlia’s eyes.
“The day is going badly for you, little sister,” he said. “You are not as good at this as you think. I’m going to give you a chance.”
The gun trembled in Dahlia’s hand.
