Forty Nine

Once out of sight of the G village, Bird decided that the mountain path that led there wasn’t the best route to take. Instead, she headed directly north into heavily forested territory. She looked to be following her gut on this adventure, and maybe a hunch or two, but she seemed to be concentrating and leaving Fyndraxis out of her internal conversation.
Every couple of hundred yards she would stop for a minute and place her hand against a tree and close her eyes. When she did this, she got a very sour look on her face, like she was tasting something awful. She would eventually shake that off and move on. Eventually, she sat down and removed her boots, deciding to continue on barefoot.
“What are you doing?” Fyndraxis eventually asked her.
“Trying to figure out where Lange is,” she answered distractedly.
“How?” he asked, puzzled.
“I’m a pretty good tracker. I have spent all of my life in these woods and there are ways to tell what’s going on,” she offered in explanation.
“By touching trees?” He asked, doubting the veracity of her technique.
“Trees know a lot. Hey, I don’t ask you how you do all of your magic shit. Maybe I have some magic shit of my own,” she answered while she made her way to another tree to gather some news.
“I’m not doing magic,” Fyndraxis stated.
“Could’a fooled me,” away from the village, she had slipped back into her native accent.
“I’m not really doing magic though,’ Fyndraxis explained, “I just happen to have a technological advantage.”
“My mother had this kinda sense,” she began, “she always seemed to know where to go and what to do. Now that I’m grown, I have a little better idea of what she was doin’, but she had a real knack for it. She had confidence in what she was doin’ and knew when to trust her gut. She took clues from the forest around her and was able to read it like a book. I mean, it eventually got her and my dad killed, but it worked out for a while.”
“I think that’s just experience,” Fyndraxis countered.
“Well, you can’t argue with results,” Bird observed.
“What if humans did have magic though?” Fyndraxis mused, “Back before everything collapsed, people had these things called telephones. They ended up being able to do a lot of things, but their original purpose was communication. Everybody had one, so if you were worried about where somebody was, you could just give them a call.”
“That’d be pretty handy right about now,” she said, “we’d just get in touch with Lange and he’d say that he got a new idea about a ski and forgot to come home or somethin’ like that. And I wouldn’t have to march all over hell’s half acre lookin’ for him”
“Exactly,” the Daemon Blade agreed.
“Could anybody get in touch with you on one of these things?” She asked, taking her time to select another tree.
“Yeah, it ended up being a real problem,” he said, winding up for one of his usual technological diatribes.
“I could imagine it ruining a lot of peace and quiet,” she deduced correctly, “got ‘em.”
She had cut Fyndraxis off and taken off at a dead sprint to the northeast. Bird was an athlete. She had to be. The post collapse world made sure of that. To be merely average in the current state of things meant that you had to be exceptional. The bar had been raised for humanity as a whole, and anyone that couldn’t live up to the current standards of survival, simply died as a result.
If you had asthma, you were dead. Allergic to fish? Dead. Diabetic? Enjoy the sweet release of death. Prone to chest colds? You wouldn’t make it through infancy. Bird had been forged in this harsh world, and she was a finely tuned product of that environment.
She absolutely flew through the forest on silent feet. She tore down hills, and vaulted over creeks. She moved like a sparrow through the trees. Fyndraxis had known that she was physically impressive, but hadn’t really known to what extent. Given this example, he was astounded. She was a post-apocalyte in the prime of her life, and she was on a mission.
She kept up this pace until they started to lose light. They had run out of forest and continued into the plains that dominated the valley floor. She no longer had to bob and weave through maples and birches, so she could really focus on covering some ground. When she finally started to slow down, they could see an encampment in the distance.
This encampment seemed to be sort of a defensive position. It had been built into a lone stand of pines that had decided to grow next to the river that ran north through the valley. The trunks of these pines had been a pretty decent start of a defensive wall, and had been added to and reinforced by scavenged lumber and various detritus.
Evening had brought darkness to the valley, and Bird took advantage of this fact to sneak within spitting distance of the wall to gather some intelligence and probably throw together some sort of plan.
“I probably don’t have to tell you this,” Bird whispered to Fyndraxis, “But, from here on out I’m goin’ to need you to be quiet.”
Fyndraxis said nothing, but couldn’t help but have a bit of Deja Vu regarding his time with Hunner. Bird sat there and listened for a couple of minutes, trying to get an idea of what was going on within the walls. Once satisfied, she took a couple deep breaths and seemed to be psyching herself up for something.
Her back had been to the wall throughout all of this, and she was in a bit of a crouch. Bird had rather pale skin and black hair, which gave her kind of a black and white aesthetic, on top of that she chose to go about all dressed in black. She usually looked distinctly like she was on her way to a medieval record store to dig for rare Depeche Mode singles.
Her skin wasn’t pale exactly, she had managed to get some sun over the course of the spring, but she could have been considered quite fair. This fair lightly tanned skin started to get lighter in shade, changing to a bone white. The capillaries on her face, normally an almost invisible light pink, suddenly darkened to charcoal black, and she looked as if she had been drawn upon with India ink and an extremely fine quill. She regarded Fyndraxis with eyes the color of obsidian. If Fyndraxis had been able to return that look, it would have been with eyes narrowed in suspicion. Something was stupendously amiss.
She vaulted the wall in a single leap. While it wasn’t an impressively high wall, it was still an olympic quality maneuver. With her back to the wall she had been facing away from the encampment, this would not be an ideal attitude in which to land, so she threw a twist into the mix. This made sure that when she landed, she would be facing whatever action was going on inside. She also used the angular momentum of this twist as an opportunity to easily draw the Daemon Sword.
The blade crackled loudly and shone sky blue into the night. Anyone witnessing this would no doubt have had a blinding blue afterimage burned into their retinas. Bird seemed to know and understand this, and quickly took advantage of the element of surprise and the cannibals’ stunned vision.
She had the drop on these guys completely, and their reaction was that of pure suprise. The cannibals had just been there preparing dinner and gossiping, when a vision of death wreathed in blue light had come sailing into their calm little party. Bird moved like a wraith into the crowd gathered around the central fire of the encampment.
There was an interesting moment where Fyndraxis was able to observe an entire crowd of people making a fight or flight calculation en masse. Roughly one third of them had chosen to fight, which under normal circumstances would be a pretty good bet. These circumstances, being quite abnormal, were a different case entirely.
Bird was set upon by perhaps ten men who had not only chosen to fight, but managed in a couple of seconds to arm themselves with whatever they had handy. This marked them out as warriors and seasoned killers of men.
The first of these warriors to encounter Bird was brandishing a length of pipe about a meter in length. He had looked at the size of Bird and made a rough estimate of her weight. They were of similar size, but being a man, he figured that he had her out classed in upper body strength. There are a couple of ways to win a fight, you can overpower somebody, or you can try to trick them into doing something stupid. After they are tricked, you can go ahead and beat them senseless or whatever.
This guy had chosen to be sneaky. He presented his head briefly as a target and then when the inevitable strike came to meet him he would beat the blade away with a brutal uppercut from the pipe that he wielded. That kind of went to plan up until the point that the pipe became an important part of the tactic. The Daemon Blade, its edge being honed to a single neutron, had no intention of cooperating with this gambit, and passed through the pipe leaving only a brief flash of Cherenkov radiation as evidence of their interaction.
Fyndraxis got a firsthand look at this warrior’s anatomy. From the tender flesh of the neck, he journeyed through a few vertebrae, from there it was a quick jaunt through the collarbone and into the viscera. After chicaning through some ribs and important organs, he had a brief moment of respite before he had the distinct displeasure of lopping off a hand.
This demonstration of brutality had given the other nine men something to think about. They had about half a second to rethink the situation from a tactical standpoint. Physics, had some thoughts as well. These men had been charging into the fray, ready to do battle and they were carrying a decent amount of momentum. This sudden change of heart had affected them in various ways.
A couple of them lost their footing. Some managed to get their momentum under control, and one singular cannibal managed to skewer Bird right through the chest with something that resembled a pike.
Fighting ten men takes a lot of concentration. In this situation there are twenty arms and legs to keep track of, all of which are trying to kill you. From a statistical standpoint, having just a single blow fall on you would be pretty good. From a practical standpoint it seemed to be very bad news. The cannibals took this opportunity to fall upon her with the weapons that they wielded.
These were mostly blunt instruments made of wood. The sound of a body, especially the skull, receiving his sort of blunt force trauma, was sickening. Dull meaty thuds, the occasional crack of a bat sending one over the fence, the surprisingly explosive report of a femur breaking, it was all nauseating.
Fyndraxis was sure that Bird was dead. She showed all the typical signs. Lack of movement, lifeless eyes, absent breath, an abundance of blood of unknown origin, all the signs were there. The cannibals also realized this and took a second to admire their handiwork. The pike wielder even began to untie the cord that held his pants together in a move that Fyndraxis found substantially uncouth. In this melee, they had taken one casualty, that wasn’t all that bad considering the brutal ambush that they had undergone.
Everyone seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, even Bird. This gave the Cannibals pause. Although the human body does do some unpredictable things after giving up the ghost, it isn’t typically known to blink and get its breathing under control. It also isn’t known to mend broken bones and cure itself of multiple subdural hematomas, but that’s what she did.
In the growing list of strange things that Bird was doing, she opted to do something even stranger after she had stood up and regained her footing. She luminesced a familiar pale green into the night and gave out a feral, inhuman scream.
From where she stood, a circle of death began to grow. Everything this circle touched turned to dust. The nine men that had just shown her the business end of their instruments of death became ash that floated on the breeze. Anything metal that they possessed, simply fell out of thin air and tinkled musically to the ground.
After this brief circle of death had been drawn, she moved on to a different strategy. She began chasing down individual cannibals in a gruesome game of tag and turning them to dust one by one. Partway into this game, the weather turned and it had begun to rain. Because of this rain, instead of turning to dust, the cannibals became a sort of corpse paint that splattered to the earth. Bird spent a couple of minutes doing a macabre Bob Ross impression, and then the only person left was Lange. Luckily he was hog tied and blindfolded.
Fyndraxis was livid. There was some confusion for sure, but the overarching emotion was rage. He retreated to his inner world for a little while to cool his jets and think about how he was going to approach this situation.
He wanted to talk about how betrayed he felt. He would need to have some words about things like trust and the bargain they had made at the quarry. A they would need to chit chat about the long term effects of gamma radiation. The more he thought about it though, the more this rage gave way to genuine curiosity. Just what the fuck had just happened?
“What the fuck was that?” Fyndraxis whispered to her after he joined her back in her world.
“Yeah, we should talk. Not now though, I’d rather Lange didn’t overhear,” she answered almost silently.
The pike was still sticking out of her chest and she took a second to break it off and push it the rest of the way through her body. She bore this pain well, but it was obviously excruciating.