It took until near sunset before all the infected were sequestered. By then, Razor was in our personal med-bay. Spy was hissing mad, but fine. Maul might limp with pain until he could get back into the vet-bay for a second go-round, but his ribs were stitching together and his broken legs were mending. He could get around. His cracked skull was a different matter, making him dizzy, and that would take several stints in the vet-bay. I would treat him again when Razor was done.
When the last thrall was isolated, one of the noninfected came forward about her man, who was zip-tied and secured to a tree. She told me all about how they had met this woman. Warhammer’s image was on his Morphon. The Old Lady hadn’t told her prez because her man told her not to and backed it up with a fist to her jaw. When I heard that, I walked to her Old Man, adjusted my gloves so the pointed steel knuckle rivets were in the right places, made a good fist, and punched him directly in his mouth. He was laughing as my fist came at him because I was a little girl in name as well as in reality. But I was stronger than human.
Only as my fist impacted his jaw did I realize I had just usurped the power and job of an enforcer. I busted out his front teeth, tore his lips, and gave him a serious case of whiplash.
Behind him, I spotted a woman slinking from tree to tree. Down the road. Getting away.Bloody damn. It was McQuestion’s Old Lady. Six-Gun Annie Gamble. This would get ugly.
I walked over to Jagger. Hiding my gesture, I pointed. “McQuestion’s Old Lady hasn’t been tested. She’s trying to escape.”
Jagger cursed.
“I’m going after her. You deal with your boss.” I raised my voice, shouting as I tore down the drive, “Cupcake! To me!”
She was instantly at my left side, keeping pace. My nanobots reached out to her, connecting. I felt her armor harden, her attention shift for an instant. I saw what she saw.
Knowing what she planned, I held out my hand for the weapon she placed into it. Synchronicity at its finest. I slowed.
Cupcake passed me. Using her armor’s reverse recoil feature, she leaped two meters up.
I fired at a man partially hidden behind a nearby tree in the same moment that Cupcake grabbed a tree limb overhead. Swung forward and landed on Annie’s back. They rammed into a pile of dry dead limbs. Cupcake flipped the woman over and slapped her once. Into unconsciousness.
When my target went down, I walked over, kicked away his sniper’s rifle, and shot him again, outer left arm, the round tearing into his delt. I toed him over and saw where my first shot had taken him through the right shoulder. Blood spurted. My round had hit him low enough to have nicked his lung and the big artery that fed his arm. He’d bleed out in two minutes. I tried to decide if I cared. He stank of Warhammer. I was pretty sure he wasn’t alone. I decided I had other priorities.
He whimpered, gasped, and died.
I walked over and stared down at Annie, who had just complicated my life. She was coming around faster than she would have, had she been a normal human.
Jagger was coming up behind me. He wasn’t alone. I set my expression into battlefield neutral and met McQuestion’s eyes. At his side was his daughter. Tears were running down her face.
“She isn’t dead, Camilla,” I said, my tone neutral. “Just knocked silly.”Concussion, possible brain damage, and a traitor to you and your dad and your club, I thought. Annie shook her head, trying to wake up.
“Roy, you wanted to know how Warhammer found out about today?” I said. “Here’s your answer.”
Camilla stepped into her father’s arms, still sobbing. “Please, Daddy. Please,” she whispered.
Grief etched Roy’s face as he cradled his daughter’s head against his kutte. I didn’t understand. Then he pulled a weapon. “I said if anyone ran, they’d be shot,” he said. “You ran.”
“Roy, no!” Annie said, struggling to form the words. “I can explain—”
He fired. Three shots. Into his wife’s chest. Her breath exhaled. She lay still.
Roy walked away, pulling his daughter as if in a dance step. He shot the sniper as they walked past, though the man was already dead. He holstered his weapon, back straight, his body taut.
I stood there, lips parted, breathing too fast, trying to reason out what had just happened.
“He didn’t know his Old Lady had been infected when he said he’d shoot anyone who ran,” Cupcake said as she lifted Annie in her arms, carrying her like a baby. “And when she ran, he didn’t have a choice.”
“Everyone has a choice,” I said as we walked toward the rig.
I knew one thing. I was firmly back in the biker world. And no matter how this ended up, people were going to die. And I was screwed.
* * *
Locking the cats out of the back of the cab, I cleaned up in the truck, trying to wand off the stink of skewed honor, misplaced promises, and the blood and stench of Warhammer’s thralls. I used some of our precious water to wash off any of her nanobots that might have been lurking on Annie’s skin.
I had killed the sniper in cold blood, and I wasn’t upset by that in the least. But Six-Gun Annie’s death and Camilla’s tears, and even the memory of the brown-eyed woman I had killed at the beginning of all this, had unleashed something in me. Something bitter and miserable. It had been compounded by the bleak purpose in Roy’s eyes as he carried out his promise.
I pulled on clean underwear, but had no clean jeans, no clean shirt. I tried the wand on the cloth, but all it did was turn the blood black. When I was decent, I opened the tiny door to see Spy sitting like some Egyptian goddess on the back of the passenger seat, her odd eyes—one bright green, the other bright blue—on mine. I figured she wanted to chat, and though I didn’t want anyone’s mind in mine, I plopped down in the narrow space between the seats and stared at her.
