Tribal Ways

Annja made for the pay phone only to see that the bearlike guy had stopped playing pool and had slipped into the booth. She realized with a start that he didn’t have a shirt on beneath his own denim vest, and that his considerable paunch was covered in an intricate blue tattoo.

He showed her a happy grin. “Sorry,” he said with patent insincerity, trapping the handset between his shoulder and his ear. “I got to call my broker to see how much money I lost on stocks today. I’m still waitin’ on my personal bailout.”

He punched a number and pretended to listen. All the while he smiled beatifically at Annja out of his wide, round face.

She found it much scarier than the snake woman.

“You should probably go,” he said, as if as an afterthought.

After a moment Annja said, “You’re right.” She turned and started to walk out.

Discretion, in this case, was the better part of staying alive. Anyway I can hike to the highway much better if both my legs aren’t broken, she told herself.

A young biker emerged from a dark oblong opening in the back wall next to the phone booth. He was tall and straight, long-legged and narrow-waisted in his blue jeans, broad-shouldered in his colors. Unlike almost everybody else in the bar, men or women, he wore his long black hair unbound in a straight gleaming fall down his back. He was, undeniably, gorgeous.

From his carriage, from the way the feeling in the room suddenly shifted, he was clearly the boss. His dark-chocolate eyes locked on Annja’s. “Who the hell are you?” he asked.

She made a beeline for the door. Away from him.

She felt a strong hand clamp on her right biceps.

“Not so fast,” the biker chieftain said, spinning her around. “I got a few questions for—”

Annja used the momentum imparted by his yanking her around to jam her left knee into his groin really hard.

Okay, this is probably not the brightest thing you’ve ever done in your life, she thought even as she brought her knee up to its inevitable rendezvous with the juncture of those long, lean legs. It didn’t diminish in the slightest the sheer fierce satisfaction she felt. He had laid hands on her. Even in the lion’s den boundaries must be drawn, and rigorously enforced. Perhaps even more so. And Annja had not had a good day.

Clearly her victim didn’t remotely expect any such response to trying to turn the interloper around. The breath burst out of him and he doubled over, then collapsed to the floor.

Despite herself, Annja was impressed by her results.

Unfortunately the entire bar full of rough Indian outlaw bikers were too. And after a beat or two of goggling at their pack leader lying there helpless on the sawdust-covered planks—was that even in code?—they got pissed.

“She dropped Johnny!” a voice cried. “Get her!”

A heavy weight landed on Annja’s shoulders, staggering her. She reached back to grab a handful of coarse hair, then jackknifed forward, pulling hard. A figure flew over her back to slam on the planks in a cloud of sawdust. Annja saw it was a woman.

Hands clutched at Annja from several directions. A hand grabbed her jacket. Somebody yanked her hair. She slapped the hands away, lashing out with quick jabs and backfists. All the time she waded through the crowd toward the door.

As if materializing from the gloom itself the snake woman blocked Annja’s path. She grabbed a handful of Annja’s blouse through her open jacket and cocked her left fist back for a punch.

As she did she rocked her weight back. Annja grabbed the woman’s left wrist and stepped quickly forward with her right foot, stepping out so that her hip brushed the woman’s right hip. Her left hand shot up and around to grab the denim vest up near the slim neck. At the same time Annja pressed her elbow into her opponent’s upper arm, effectively fouling the blow.

Annja twisted hard counterclockwise, putting her hips and all the strength of her own long legs into it. The other woman was wiry-strong, but Annja was strong, too; and she’d been practicing her grappling techniques. With her own weight already going backward the taller woman was easily toppled over Annja’s outthrust hip and slammed flat on her back onto the pool table. Her head hit with a crack and the air rushed out of her.

For a moment the way cleared. Annja started to move for the door but the short, wide guy who’d occupied the phone booth now stood in her way.

A flash decision faced Annja. She had an ace in her sleeve, but it wasn’t one she cared to turn up in public. And also there were all those guns. If this confrontation turned lethal she’d be able to hope for nothing better than an honor guard to take into the afterlife with her.

Besides, even though these people were attacking her, Annja knew she was the intruder. And they hadn’t used weapons yet. Should the need arise, she knew she could summon her sword from the otherwhere. But she did not want to have to explain the sudden appearance of the weapon to a bar full of people.

But she was going to have to even the odds somehow. And that entailed a certain risk.

She grabbed a discarded pool cue that lay on the pool table near the moaning, disoriented snake woman and snapped it right over the wide guy’s cannonball head. He thumped to his knees, grabbed his head with both hands and howled.

She raced past him. Holding two feet of cue in a wide grip she used it as a riot baton or a pitchfork, prodding and levering bodies out of her path.

“Stop her!” Annja heard the leader call out. To her satisfaction she noticed his voice was still pretty choked.

But she was fast and very determined. She sent tables and chairs spinning to the sawdust in her wake, with a clatter of heavy glass and yeasty slog of beer arcing through the thick air. In a few steps she reached the door.

Tossing the broken cue aside she yanked the door open. She stepped into the teeth of a now-icy wind, hauling the door closed behind her.

If the pursuit didn’t develop too quickly she’d try to start the balky car and get as far as she could. If that didn’t pan out she’d run off into the hills. Outlaw bikers weren’t famous for their cross-country running abilities. And their motorcycles, heavy and low-slung as a lot of them were themselves, were optimized for high-speed cruising on paved road. The opposite of dirt bikes, they’d quickly bog down in the rolling landscape.

Annja liked her chances of evading the Iron Horse People in the dark. Whatever they might like to pretend, they weren’t their ancestors, wild children of the wind, grass, sun and moon. They were products of the same modern cell-phone and flat-screen culture as she was.

She neared her car. And suddenly men stood from behind it. The bar sign’s jittery pink glow glistened on faces painted black.

And on the knives and hatchets in their hands.

From the footsteps and angry shouts she understood a bunch more bad guys had crowded in between the vehicles behind her. She’d fled just in time.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw a brighter light stretched across the gravel from the direction of the bar’s sagging facade. The front door was opening.

A male voice bellowed, “Dog Soldiers!” Then a lot of shouting erupted inside the bar in a guttural language she didn’t understand.

That was the most fortuitous diversion she could ever have hoped for. She had a flare of hope that the sudden discovery of the Dog Soldiers, whoever they were, and the consternation that caused among the Iron Horse People, would cleanly cover her getaway.

She heard handgun shots popping from the parking lot. The deep hard-edged boom of a shotgun answered from inside the bar.

Annja never broke stride. She had her plan and she followed through. She ran straight to the back of the bar, cut around behind it and then, when she was sure she was out of everybody’s sight, beelined right up a low ridge nearby and was gone with the wind.

5

Even though Annja’s GPS built into her phone stayed AWOL, she was not lost.

She could see the bright yellow glow of Lawton to the east. The clouds actually made that a better beacon by providing a handy surface for the lights to reflect off. As long as Annja kept that glow, the largest in the vicinity in any direction, on her right, she knew she was heading north toward the graded-earth country road and eventually the highway.

She wondered whether the two groups of crazy outlaws back at the bar might sort things out enough to give chase to her. It was so frigid in the wind and rain that it felt as if her bones would break. She knew the bikers might be the least of her problems.

Every time the chill grew intolerable she picked up the pace a notch.

Even though she reckoned later she hadn’t been hiking even twenty minutes—after what seemed an eternity—she reached the county road. She walked on, hoping to eventually get a signal on her cell phone.

Approaching from the right, a quarter mile off, she spotted a pair of headlights.

Coming out of the east made it unlikely the car was chasing her from the bar. There was always the frightening possibility that it might contain reinforcements for either set of her enemies.