Freedom

Chapter 19

Distant stalkers were chattering on the open channel, but I wasn't listening. Our party of four was up to six, and we were on our way to add even more to the group. Sure, the girls were baggage, but there is undeniable strength in numbers. Just having them with us increased our ability to deter attack by quite a bit. Sagaris had them both carrying the pump shotguns taken from the bandits, though he'd emptied them. We didn't want these girls accidentally blowing one of us away – but if someone was looking, they'd see two more guns to deal with if they wanted a piece of us.

Ahead, the cliffs loomed. We were south of where the Americans and I had been ambushed, but I was on my guard anyway. Since neither Velvet nor the Biker could be bothered to fill me in on the details, I had only a vague idea of our destination and objectives. I couldn't complain. We had a nice, big group. It was cold, but not too cold. We weren't getting rained on. Nobody had shot at me yet today. Sagaris walked at my side, discreetly watching the girls, who were just ahead of us. The voluminous bandit coats didn't give us much to look at.

"What do you think about this?" I asked quietly.

"I think it's been a long time since I've gotten laid," Sagaris replied without hesitation. Don't ask me why, but with his Russian accent and tired expression, that struck me as enormously funny. I hid my smile. "What do you think?"

"The same thing," I admitted. "But we're supposed to be gentlemen."

"I am a gentleman," Sagaris sniffed.

I had to fight another laugh, not because I doubted him, but because the oddest things sound funny with a Russian accent. You had to be there. He just looked so serious. Anyway.

"I think this is dangerous for all parties."

"No choice, though."

"No," Sagaris agreed. "No choice."

I switched off my earpiece and looked up, then back. I didn't see any crows; that was a relief. "Did you catch their names?"

"No."

"They have no idea where we're going, what we're doing. They're totally lost. Their lives are in the hands of people they've only known for a couple hours. They must be pretty tough."

Velvet was suddenly beside us. "I get the impression they've had a rough couple of weeks."

"If they're scared enough to try to hide in the Zone, somebody has to be trying to kill them. I believe it."

"They aren't the targets, their parents are. They just wanted them out of the way so they couldn't become leverage."

No matter how you looked at it, it was a grim picture. I didn't even want to know the details.

We reached the cliffs in the early afternoon. Down this far, they were much less friendly than they were farther west. It was more or less a sheer face, dotted with highly-anomalous looking vegetation.

"How's the radiation?" Velvet asked, gazing up.

"Not bad," the Biker reported, putting away his counter.

She turned to us, looking thoughtful. Her eyes settled on me. "Mist, you get the honor – no, the privilege – of doing the climb."

"Me?" I pointed at myself.

"You've got a light build, you're dressed for it. You're the obvious choice." Velvet motioned to the Biker, who handed me a coil of climbing rope. "Get up there and tie the line, then keep watch while the rest of us come up."

"Oh, hell." I took the rope, grimacing. I'm actually a capable climber; the problem was that this wasn't a rock wall in a gym, it was the real thing. There was no harness, and there was some really suspect-looking plant life growing on the rock, and who knew what else. I handed my pack to Sagaris, slung the rope over my shoulder, checked my carbine's harness, and wondered what it felt like to fall to your death.

It was about a seventy-foot climb, made longer by some irregularities in the rock. On the bright side, there would never be any shortage of hand or foot holds, but that was small comfort. I could see black openings, and I couldn't help but wonder what was in them. I checked my Glock and my knife, and realized I was stalling. I caught Sagaris' eye.

"You are the ninja," he said, shrugging. I rolled my eyes and started to climb. It was easy at first, mostly because there's no feeling of peril when you're only ten feet up. Past that it started getting harder. While there were plenty of things to grab onto, quite of a few of them were not strong enough to support me, and crumbled when I put my weight on them. That made for a couple of heart-racing moments.

I was also careful to give a wide berth to both openings in the rock and any plant life, neither of which I was keen to get familiar with. I was about halfway up before I started to get tired. My muscles burned and ached. I was in good shape – great shape, really – but you don't get this kind of workout in a gym or in day to day life. On the bright side, if I hadn't been in as good of shape as I was, I probably wouldn't have been able to make it to the top at all.

At one point my Geiger counter started going crazy, and I had to sort of shuffle over horizontally. There was something intensely radioactive, maybe buried in the rock face, but I had no way of finding out what it was. I kept climbing.

The others were silent below. Calling to me wouldn't have done any good; I didn't need encouragement, and I definitely didn't need a reason to look down.

I reached the top and started to clamber up, but froze. Not even five meters away sat a stalker. He was big and burly, but tattered. His armor had to have come from Duty, but there were several bullet holes in it, and it didn't quite fit him. Scavenged or stolen. All identifying marks had been removed or covered. His back was to me; he didn't seem to know I was there. I hadn't been taking any particular pains to climb quietly, but I'd been moving slowly enough that a great deal of noise hadn't been needed.

The stalker sat on a low rock. I searched for any possible companions, but found none. My gaze fell on a bundle of weapons lying on the ground. Rifles without magazines were tied together with straps so that they could be easily carried. There were probably a dozen in total. A lot to carry.

The strain on my muscles was painful. Too painful. I couldn't just hang there. I hauled myself up. The stalker heard me and turned, but I got my Glock out of its holster and pointed at him, though I was still on my hands and knees. "Easy," I gasped, and he halted, expression serious. He didn't have a weapon in his hands. A bullpup I didn't recognize lay close at hand.

I got shakily to my feet. "I don't want trouble," I said, for lack of anything better. I wasn't up to fighting, and he could see it. There was a predatory light in his eyes. There was no evidence to support it, but I suddenly knew with certainty how he'd come by those rifles. "Just stay there," I said. "We'll be on our way."

He didn't. He took a step toward me, his eyes sliding over my gear. He liked what he saw, and just as my instincts told me what he was, his senses as a predator told him I was weak from my climb. I took a step back, knocking a few pebbles from the edge. I realized the danger and took a step forward, putting both hands on the gun and getting ready to shoot – but he wasn't going to let this go on. He lunged.

It wasn't a bad idea on his part, especially not against someone as exhausted as I was. How could he know, aside from my vaguely ninja-like appearance, that I was an accomplished martial artist? He was too close to shoot, and there wasn't much I could do with the situation – fortunately, the well-known Judo sacrifice throw exists almost explicitly for times like these.

I grabbed him and dropped to my back, planting my boot on his chest and sending him on his way almost entirely by his own momentum. It would have been all well and good if it had ended there, but the sacrifice throw also leaves the thrower with a fair amount of backward inertia, exacerbated by the aggression of the attacker. As the bandit sailed over the edge of the cliff, I rolled right off after him.