Chapter 7

Leaving Ft. Salina late that afternoon, at first Jodie and I kept up a rather restrained pace, uncertain if our posse, the pack horses and Ruth's mare Sunflower could all keep up the pace, but they showed that they could. Gypsum was only about ten miles southeast of Ft. Salina, but with a big troop of youngsters I didn't want to ride off there fast and hard. Ruth also obviously hadn't spent the hours in the saddle that Jodie had, nor was I yet much of an expert myself, but with a light mental tie to Black, we were quickly becoming a team that worked fairly seamlessly together. Jodie was slightly less fond of her own horse, a gelding named Brownie, a rather less than assertive horse for a mounted warrioress who frankly would much have rather stayed behind this fine evening, still back in the stable. At the time when she rode off from Kansas City to track me down, it was more or less the best 'available' horse in the stable at the time. Anything else decent had been claimed. She was looking to upgrade, preferably yesterday, but nothing significantly better in Ft. Salina's horse market matched the limited coins in her purse. With any luck, some poor unfortunate cannibal riding a fine horse was going to get shot (or gutted with her knives) for the creature.

Over a final early dinner right before we left town the three of us had briefly discussed money, and we pretty much concluded that none of us had much left. Ruth had some minor pocket silver, and Jodie really didn't have very much more. For a real emergency, she had a letter of credit from the witchfinder base in Kansas City that ought to be good at most major banks or moneychangers, but nothing yet so far really fit that sort of major emergency. For now, my remaining good antique silver coins and emergency gold would see us through. Besides, we weren't going to visit the horde for a shopping trip. Anything they had that we wanted we could just take over their cooling dead bodies.

Naturally, none of our fine young would-be cavalry lads had much more than two worn coppers to rub together, but if the lucky buggers lived they'd likely find more than enough ale money to drink up a good chunk of the booze in Ft. Salina's ale-houses. And if I lived, or could keep even half of the kids alive, I'd even buy the first round!

For starters, Jodie and I divided up our patrol into two squads of riders and we tried to do a little OJT, or rather, in-the-saddle training. It was little surprise that our lads couldn't ride particularly well, nor could they hit the broad side of a barn (literally) firing in turn our pair of Marlin .22 rifles from the saddle in a gallop. On foot they managed a bit better, with only two lads striking a bull's-eye on our ad hoc targets. For their sins, we promoted the pair of them to be corporals and assistant squad-leaders to our two sergeants, whose own marksmanship wasn't particularly impressive either.

At dusk we pitched a camp less than an hour away from Ft. Salina with a small campfire and set up a rotating schedule of guards. The ladies and I almost made it through the night without an interruption to our sleep. Jodie was more than willing to 'put on a show' for our lads, but Ruth, the sensible one, convinced her that it would be more than bit cruel, as they likely weren't getting laid much themselves. Instead we behaved ourselves, mostly, except for when Jodie and Ruth quietly gave me a blowjob under the privacy of our blankets.

Actually, the early wake-up call just before dawn was a good thing. Our early morning pair of camp guards was pretty sure they had spotted someone off in the brush about a quarter mile away up on a small nearby hill watching us. As witchfinders, both Jodie and I had exceptional night vision, and with little trouble we soon casually picked out where our hidden spies were lurking, and my excitable little blond was all for paying them a secretive private visit rather than having the lads just starting shooting wildly.

It was quite possible that this was just a small batch of refugees and not outriders from the horde, so it seemed reasonable to me that a talk first, shoot later approach might be reasonable. So I told Jodie that she could sidle over in the dark and take a look and with a giggle she was done in a flash.

My night vision was indeed pretty good, but I had to admit that the moment Jodie snuck out of our camp off into the waist height rye-grass intermixed with small bushes and the occasional small tree, I lost track of her nearly at once. Even her careful passage didn't seem to break the smoothness of the dark grain. Our watchers apparently saw even less. About ten minutes later they just suddenly disappeared and a moment later Jodi's shadowy form could be seen beckoning to us from on top of the hill. The watchers had indeed been hostile outriders from the horde and never even sensed the quiet arrival of our petite and deadly little assassin.

They didn't have much for weapons and their supplies were dubious – we all knew what sort of dried meat the horde preferred, and their coins were few. I announced to our troop that any copper or silver that we 'recovered' would be split evenly by shares and this more than suitably improved their morale. Everyone hates their boss, and Jodie and I weren't exactly easy people to get along with, but if we were fair to our men and decently liberal about bonuses, we hoped that most of them would at least try and learn what they needed to help stay alive. If they listened to us and even respected us, hopefully they'd learn even faster ... or at least obey our orders in an emergency when everyone's lives might later depend upon it!

For target practice that early dawn, using the staked out bodies of our two knife gutted enemy spies, our lads were slightly more enthusiastic and productive. We let everyone fire off ten .22 rounds each from the training rifles and a few good hits were noted. Upon mounting we then conducted a mock cavalry charge at the stiffs using their sabers, with each squad riding past and chopping at a more realistic target than a dead tree or the occasional black mast cactus. To my approval, most of the lads did hit their target as they rode by. Enough meat remained upright to try the exercise again, and the lads did a bit better this time ... and even managed to cleanly break off and turn around right after the attack toward us, and theoretical safety. Even with a week's worth of hard practice, our lads would never be ready yet for a cut and stay sort of fight, but maybe we could manage some peripheral attacks, like slicing away at the edge of a greater force, like peeling away the husk of a dew-melon.

Old Grampy used to joke about things being 'peeled away like an orange', but I'd never seen a real one, just pictures in an old pre-disaster book. Still, I supposed that the idea was the same – cut away the outer edges until we could find something soft to strike! That was a concept that Jodie and I thought our willing but green lads could handle. Let some other poor cannibal bastard die for his crazy and insane gods, and not us! Strike fast and hard ... and preferably staying out of range of anything bigger or nastier than we could handle in the process.

Riding slowly with constant stops and meandering for training, we made it about half of the way there, five miles or less from Gypsum, by midday. We'd gallop the patrol east and then back west, and sometimes even back north, only gradually moving closer to our real destination. Jodie and I could probably sense trouble before we could see it, but with a baker's dozen of ill-trained troopers I was pretty sure that we weren't particular stealthy. The irregular spring rains had started recently a few weeks ago so we weren't leaving much of a dusty trail, but the horses were beating a path through the growing wild rye-grass that not even a blind man put on a hill or tree a few miles away could miss. Every hour we'd stop and find something for our lads to practice upon, and about noontime some more than suitable practice material sort of found us, or putting it generously, we all pretty much discovered each other at the same time ... and at a rather closer range than I would have preferred!

I've mentioned that since I'd become intimate with Jodi, I had somewhat absorbed her own mental ability to sense danger up ahead and even (at extremely close range) been able to read strong surface thoughts. I'd used these talents fairly capably during my previous scouting mission but now I was starting to notice that the strength of my 'borrowed' powers was very range specific. In fact, since I now hadn't had sex with Jodie in about two days now, I was starting to notice that if I was much beyond shouting distance from her, that my mental sensing 'range' was significantly diminishing. Perhaps in another day without intimate contact, my range for sensing danger would be nearly insignificant. Now that I thought about it, I realized that this sort of power weakening must have occurred during my previous scouting trip, when I had first tried to shield myself from enemy view ... undoubtedly using talents 'borrowed' from Jodie with which I had almost no experience.

I was just thinking about asking both Jodie and Ruth about this oddity when my senses did snap to the nearby danger of a approaching group of horde scouts. At the moment we were taking a rather long and narrow ravine that ran around the base around a rather large hill we'd decided to bypass. I was pretty sure someone was nearby watching from on top of it as it gave a commanding view over the terrain around us for at least a mile or two, except for this wood and brush covered gulley. Riding out of it now to the northwestern side wasn't really an option right here as the rocky and brush covered bank to our right was nearly as high as the steep hillside to our left. Black might be able to climb or jump out of it, but he was rather exceptional. The other horses probably couldn't.

The ravine had interested me as it seemed the obvious way to bypass around the hill and a close observation revealed that there seemed to be a regularly traveled trail here. Some older hoof-prints were noted, and quite a few of them, but none recent since the last rain. This made me suspect that maybe a weekly cavalry patrol of the horde used this ravine for their scouting, maybe once a week or at least several times a month. This made me all the more curious to discover where they had come from ... especially now that we'd been unlucky enough to try and pass through this narrow ravine at the same time as the approaching horde horsemen, with virtually no room for maneuvering at all!

With little time for warning, and next to no visibility ahead of us, I shouted out the order for A-Squad behind me at the front of our column to dismount, get into cover and get ready to shoot, and for B-Squad at the rear to stand back at the ready, pistols and swords at the ready to charge or pursue survivors. Jodie was happy for a chance to apply some bare steel and was taking charge of the mounted 'B' members just as my 'A' group was still getting dismounted. They had been too bunched up to rapidly dismount together en-masse, and by the time the enemy scouting group broke out of the bush cover in front of us, everything was in a awful state of disorder with men and horses of each force crying out in confusion and alarm and hastily shouted orders that largely no one heard over the ragged volleys of wild and mostly inaccurate gunfire from both parties.

Tactically, our patrol should have been at an extreme disadvantage. The raw inexperienced lads were outnumbered about three to one and if the horde cavalry had caught us out in the open our odds wouldn't have been particularly good. Sure Jodie and I could have burned our way out with witch-fire, but the odds of many of our boys making it out safely with us were fairly small. This full troop of horde scouts had veteran soldiers that seemed to know what they were doing, but their problem was that here in this confined ravine constrained by space to ranks of two in a long column, they couldn't all quite get to us to start doing it. It took them a minute to figure out the situation and get out the order to charge us all of the way down their line. Fortunately for us with the narrow width of the ravine at most only two horses could transverse at a time and when their columns ran smack into ours, no one could move either forward or backward.

This was definitely a problem when their front ranks of troopers were now getting shot at by my dismounted soldiers first, only to advance and find the ravine blocked by our other squad still mounted and blocking the way entirely. My 'A' group had been shuffled earlier to include the better marksmen, but none of them was particular particularly competent yet, let alone a deadly rifleman. The horde soldiers were much more accurate, but only a few at a time had clear shots in the confusion of the brush covered and narrow terrain. The air between the two groups was starting to fill with lead and most of it was wildly inaccurate. Still, in such confined quarters, even random un-aimed shots could still find a target. Quickly, the close-quarters firefight was becoming a wild unmanageable bloodbath that no one seemed safe from.

I just hoped that Ruth was safely at the rear with the pack horses. Jodie could handle herself and already I could hear her loud voice and the blasts of her beloved sawed-off shotgun as the lead element of the enemy squadron had ridden their way to a dead halt in front of her mounted squad. As the entire fight collapsed into close-range and even hand-to-hand combat, the middle squads of the enemy force found themselves stopped and unable to maneuver in any direction. Here our dismounted squad had much the better of it, as long as they could avoid the enemy's swords and sabers.

Up at the sharp edge, nearly surrounded by the middle squads of the enemy riders who could neither press forward nor retreat backwards, I had little trouble blasting the first six enemy soldiers facing me out of their saddles with my beloved Harry Blackhawk Special, and the powerful .44 slugs (normal ones) ensured that each of the horde troopers was dead even before they fell from their saddles onto the already over-crowded ground. Swords and revolvers flashed in my direction but my shields held nicely. Frankly, the more of the enemy that fired at me, instead of my green lads, the happier we'd all be!

Still I didn't dare take the time to reload. Even the moment I'd spend glancing down to retrieve fresh ammo from my belt pouch would take too long and be more of a distraction than I could safely spare. Jodi, with her twin .45's could safely plunk about two dozen foes from their saddles before she'd need to reload, the advantage of a semi-automatic with a large magazine ... but still I loved my big revolver. Now that it was empty, I'd need to do something else rather quickly. My Marlin Lincoln was up on Black, still in the saddle holster, but I could reach my Ithaca fast, in my holster on my back. It only held two rounds, both 00-buck, but these would be enough to disable the next pair of riders now pressing towards me, trying to push through the mass of riderless horses around me, mostly unsuccessfully. I'm afraid the wide spreading pellets from both shells struck the horses quite as much as their riders, but both did fall from their saddles, wounded rather than killed, but more or less quite of out the fight for now.

With two gulps of gunpowder filled air that smelled sweeter than any flowers I could remember, I now had the moments I needed to quickly reload my .44. Behind me, my dismounted squad was dealing with the last of the front squads of soldiers that had ridden past me, and now I could hear the rapid-fire of Jodie delivering twin .45 justice to the remainder of the advance enemy troopers. Now I only had to deal with the rear trooper up ahead of me. They were still trying to press forward, but really had nowhere to go. Still they had their rifles at the ready and were more than happy to plunk at my shields as I advanced upon them, but after the next six cannibals dropped I decided that perhaps a bit of flame might help finish up the rout. This was going to cost us a few captured horses probably, but a direct application of magical malevolence hastily performed seemed a better option to me at that moment rather than trying to gather up some of my own men to make a more honest and even fight out of it.

Cannibal hordes are many things, but an honorable foe isn't one of them. They just deserved death ... and a horrible burning one would do just fine. The front half of the remaining patrol obliged me nicely, and unfortunately with about half of their mounts lost to the flames as well. The rearmost squad got the idea quickly that I wasn't going to fight fair and they very practically decided en-masse to get the hell out of there! While I was still fighting my way past angry and burned horses, most of them succeeded and escaped.

With the sounds of gunfire almost entirely gone now, I shouted at Jodie to get her mounted squad up here pronto in pursuit, but they didn't have any more of a prayer of forcing their way through the herd of riderless mounts than the enemy had. Yep, it works both ways sometimes. Getting the now captured herd organized and taken by twos back out of the ravine to our rear, exhausted most of the next hour. Tending to our own butcher's bill took even longer, but fortunately we were not interrupted.

Taken as a percentage, our little skirmish was decidedly a total victory for the forces of goodness and the continued rule of law in central Kansas. We'd estimated that our troop of thirteen faced and defeated a much superior group of about thirty-six, with perhaps ten of the enemy successfully escaping. This cost us two dead and three severely wounded enough that any further immediate combat would likely be fatal for them.

I begrudged the time, but we stopped to dig a good grave for our two dead soldiers. As for the more than two dozen dead horde-soldiers, well they could rot.

There was nothing for it. We retreated back out of the ravine to the northeast for a mile or two and then swung around east a bit behind a few hills and tried to maximize our passage over sections of bare lava-rock. Not terribly effectively, I had to admit.

"We've got to stop now, or even sooner, if we're going to save the wounded." Jodie quietly stated while I was appraising a small horseshoe shaped hillock for its defensive characteristics.

"Yep," I agreed. Almost as a whisper back and straight to the point. "How does this hill look like as a place for a valiant last stand? There's a quite a bit of a hollow up at the top, enough to make all of the horses lay down under the crest of the ridgeline and more of less out of harm's way. On three sides it's clear shooting and not much ground cover for at least a quarter-mile. The rifles can do some serious hurt here, especially if they get stupid and just charge us. As for the fourth side, that's facing about due north, and probably the least likely way they'd arrive from. There's a lot more cover there, but I can cover that approach with my sniper rifle and maybe convince their officers that this route is too costly."

"I think you're right. Besides, it's the only good hill in sight. We can see them coming and if we're amazingly lucky they could miss us entirely, or at least long enough for us to camp out the night and find a better camp. If I don't have to burn up a company or two with witch-flame, I might have enough healing power to stabilize the three worst and patch up the walking wounded half-way decently. Besides, until you came along I wasn't much good with flame anyway and my power is best used for healing our wounded right now."

"Sounds like a plan to me! I don't think the worst wounded would survive a fast, hard six mile gallop back to Ft. Salina, so here we heal and rest ... and kill any of the bastards that want to debate the issue otherwise!" Ruth added. Already none of us, including the troopers, ever had any inclination to argue with her. If common sense was a witch-power, then she was a mighty sorceress of it already!

Our little hilltop camp we called Ft. Necessity actually wasn't too bad. The bowl at the top of the ridge was indeed deep enough to shelter the twenty-odd horses we'd captured, along with ours and with everyone under cover we had some hope of being unspotted by searching enemy scouts. We'd also scrounged up all of the useable enemy weapons and their ammo, and except for a skeleton guard, I put the remaining eight unwounded lads to hard work cleaning weapons and preparing good shooting positions for a defensive fight.

"Dig hard now and maybe we can all rest safely later this evening!" I told the lads and they didn't need any further encouragement.

I let Jodie do most of the heavy healing for the three seriously wounded and by the time she was a near exhausted wreck they were all now in significantly better shape and promoted into the ranks of the walking wounded, capable of light duty ... such as lying prone at the ridgeline and aiming a rifle with hopefully deadly effect. As for the three minor wounded, I was able to practice my own minimal healing skills, which I assumed (like my danger sense) were abilities borrowed from Jodie. She joked that she'd now acquired my 'deadly' aim as well, of one shot causing a certain kill, right where we wished the bullet to go!

After a bit more very private discussion, we agreed our 'borrowed' talents were now fading more rapidly and that perhaps our lack of recent physical intimacy was the root cause ... and we winked that tonight, enemy attack or not, we were going to find a place and time for a quick 'refresher' to rekindle our senses. This lead to the equally interesting question of whether Ruth was going to eventually acquire some shadow of our witch-abilities as well, as the bond between her and us, especially me, grew. A weighty question for another day.

Like good little insane cannibals, their revenge force took its time gathering itself and/or following us and didn't start to pollute our air until nearly dusk. However, they'd assembled a rather nice little raiding/strike force. We guessed that this was about a company or squadron sized unit of cavalry, all mounted, and about half with long rifles. This was inconvenient, but not entirely unexpected.

Our lads, now blooded veterans, had at least 90% secure cover now behind the ridge in the bowl of the hilltop and could hopefully take a heavy toll of them! For the moment, I'd given instructions for everyone to keep their head down and not to fire under any provocation. Luck wasn't running heavily with us today, but I still hoped they'd somehow miss our trail and safely bypass us. They didn't – that was too much of a miracle to hope for, but they weren't quite sure yet exactly where we were, let alone how many of us there were. We'd left tracks with about thirty-something horses, but the fleeing scouts that had gotten away earlier hadn't seen many of us, mostly just a crazy witchhunter burning down their ranks in a nearly insane fury. If they were really smart, they'd have brought along a green priest or three just to deal with me, and they did.

Lying flat on my stomach behind a nice bit of weed cover protecting my little sniper's nest on top of our horseshoe ridge, I looked through my sniper scope and counted four green priests that seemed to be the leaders of this cavalry squadron, or at least they were giving the orders right now. They were splitting up into four equal cavalry troops of about 50-60 each so that one troop was covering each side of the hill. Finding the better cover on the northern side, as I'd anticipated, the four priests thought they were nicely out of our range, being about 500 yards away or more away from us. For most rifles, including our relatively weak M-1's and Winchesters, that was a fairly safe calculation. Wildly fired, a bullet might make it that distance, but certainly not an 'aimed' bullet that had any hope of hitting anything.

My M25 military grade sniper rifle was an entirely different matter. My silver-coated .308's could make that shot ... and then some. Joe had told me that he'd given these silver-coated lead rounds a few extra grains of powder, giving the round a slightly longer and flatter trajectory than the 'normal' ones, and I trusted crazy paranoid Joe to measure his powder grains to the exact measure. Holding a few of the silver rounds one at a time in my right hand, sensing them ... feeling them out, I thought I could guess pretty accurately how to compensate the range and windage for these priest-killing bullets, and with a smile I chambered and locked in my first round. Using just my gut 'magical instinct' guide me as I adjusted the range in my scope, I tweaked the knobs until they felt just right and the crosshairs were fixed dead center into the chest of the woman that I believed to be the most senior priest present. It certainly seemed to me that the younger three, two women and a man not much older than my young cavalry lads, were doing an awful lot of groveling and bowing towards her. I almost laughed as I gently squeezed off my first round and my right hand was reaching to load the next bullet, even before the first had stuck its target ... right dead center into the senior priestesses heart. She was absolutely dead even before her body hit the ground.

At first, the younger priests weren't sure what had happened. My shot was from quite a long distance away and it had been muffled quite a bit by the rather sharp rim of the hilltop and my distant range. At first they weren't sure what was wrong and they bent down to help their stricken mistress, until my second round blew right through the center of the young male priest's ribcage, then passing through his heart on the way out the ribs on the other side. Now the two remaining young priestesses were sure that something was wrong, and they obviously powered up their defensive shields and turned to face us, looking frantically to find and punish their unseen and mysterious foe. I laughed softly, and definitively demonstrated to my, and their, satisfaction that yes, silver-coated bullets have no trouble at all piercing magical shielding ... and a good bit of flesh and bone behind them!

And then there was only one! This last priestess was a pretty clever bitch and she dived for cover behind a small tree and ordered her troop of the northern flank of cavalry to mount up and charge us, and they did this pretty neatly and sharply. I made a note to myself to have our lads work on this drill until they could manage it about half as efficiently and smartly as these cocksuckers had performed it.

They were soon charging our hill fast, and once their lead riders had reached the base of our hill I gave the general order to open fire. I only had six of my lads here on this side, leaving the other five to cover the other three flanks for the moment, but to stay in reserve with their revolvers if, and only if, the enemy managed to crest the ridge. None did. The rather puny .30 carbine round of the M-1's may not be the best man-killer sort of ammo, but the metal sights on the carbines was dead accurate and with slow methodical shooting my riflemen proved that they were hitting their targets and at least often disabling, if not dismounting the wounded attackers. About three-quarters of the way up the hill, the riders began to slow their charge, as the wounded and slain men and horses in front of them obstructed their path, and then as they surveyed the carnage I could see the fear in the two dozen or so survivor's eyes. They wanted to retreat, to turn their mounts around and ride back down that hill of certain death, and any sane soldier probably would have done so. But not these men.

These cavalrymen were cannibal raiders, and probably of a fairly elite sort of unit. They had training and experience; each of them was probably a picked or selected man, and more importantly they were far more afraid of their priests and other leaders than they were of us, or even certain death. Onward they came, firing their pistols at us almost wildly as they charged, but to a man they all fell before they reached the crest. For a few moments I was almost even sorry for them. Hordesmen or not, they had charged us bravely and died rather than retreated. I just hoped that my own lads could learn something from this brave example.

Dead or wounded to a man, the northern attack had been stopped, and far more importantly to me, not one of my troopers had even been scratched. This flank was now secure, and I quietly sent the riflemen off to equally cover the other three hillsides, leaving me alone again with my sniper rifle to deal with the last priestess. I had a long wait, but I really wasn't in any hurry.

Taking advantage of the growing darkness of eveing, the sly evil cunt thought she could creep slowly away under the cover of the dark brush and trees. Most snipers probably would have missed her, and while I could see her under most of the cover, I didn't feel right yet about taking a shot at her until she risked a fast passage into a relatively open but dark area. I had no trouble at all then seeing her well enough to put a single round right into her left eye as she turned to look towards the hill as she scampered, and the shower of the right side of her skull and her brains actually glistened with a slight reflective glow upon the nearby bush behind her body.