It took a few days for Valentina to fully regain her strength. Her relapse hit her harder than even she expected. The headaches were kept down with pills, and she didn’t show any signs of further hallucinations. Evidently, Eric had taken the time to explain the technical details of the whole affair to this General Knox. Her pack would come around her bed and let her know what each was being asked, from Sabina recounting Marcus and his manic episodes to Jovian’s narrow escape from recruitment and the changes made to his body. The only wolf who didn’t speak of things was Brennus. His only concern was seeing Val through her recovery.
In due time, Knox joined the bedside communing.
“When you’re well enough,” he began in that rather charming rasp of his. “I want to confer with you and just you. Evidently, you’ve struck a chord in this plight and I have some questions about that.”
Val nodded and smiled. “Sure thing. I guess when your goons tell me I’m set.”
As soon as the words spilled out, the white wolf snapped her hands over her muzzle in embarrassment. Knox chuckled.
“No I get it,” he grinned. “Big ol’ army might magically have something up their sleeves. You’ve a right to skepticism. As do I.”
He left her with those words and kept his distance for the remainder of her recovery. By the fourth day, she was finally set and ready to go. She’d been allowed some activity, but she took advantage of the adjacent gym so she could regain a little more of her physical strength. She hadn’t seen all these ellipticals and treadmill contraptions before, but she got the hang of them soon enough. After a proper shower and lunch, she was ready to have her meeting with Knox.
She was helped through the long winding corridors by two of his security team. She was whisked past the hounds in leather jackets and cowboy boots, all packing heat on their hips and shades on their snouts, before at last reaching the “principal’s office” as it was still called. After these doors came the final threshold; the General’s board room.
A wood-lined room, beaming with warmth through the gloss and the walls of Old World texts lining each side. Coffee sat ready, dead center in the middle of a long wooden table. And instead of sitting at the table’s head and leaving Val’s back to the main office, Knox sat in his plain white T-shirt and stone-washed denim with his back to the wall of atlases. He waved his mechanical silver hand over and pointed to the seat opposite him.
“That way none of us feel like we’re gonna be made men by the end of this.” the dark gray wolf chuckled.
“I know you’ve probably gotten quite the picture of me,” Valentina smiled sheepishly, taking her seat.
Knox nodded, pouring her cup for her. “Determination. Tenacity. Pig-headness which I’m a big fan of myself. Your stories–all ya’s–is probably the most fucked thing that digital bitch has cooked up of all our gripes, and trust me, we’ve got plenty of our own.”
Val took a sip and perked up. “Oh thank God y’all know how to brew it up here.”
“Trust me, if this Force didn’t have good coffee, you could kiss the whole fucking thing goodbye. One of the few things I took with me when I left Haven P.D.”
The white wolf stopped mid-sip and glowered.
“Don’t worry now,” Knox replied. “This silver hand’s the reason I turned coat on them. I ain’t the call coming from inside the house.”
“How’d you lose it?” Val asked cautiously.
“Got the real one cut off during a protest. Fella seized up on me when he grabbed my hand. ‘Magically,’ the gate at the capital building came whizzing down and cut it right off. How I got there was learning what happened to my old partner. Why I left was what she did to try and make me stay.”
Valentina cocked her head.
“Have you ever had all the news media, all the police, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men array a conspiracy to placate your own suspicions? Ever had a cop-killer materialize from thin air to keep you from thinking your own wolves are getting it in the neck for having a thought or two that fall astray of a meticulously curated status quo. Ever been told by the bitch who built it all that she did it for your own good?”
The white wolf sunk back into her seat. Not from her past fear of offense, but from sheer shock.
“And you believe me don’t you?” Knox grinned. “Cause I bet you if you told anyone exactly all of what you pieced together, they’d call you crazier than a coke bag.”
Val gave her solemn nod. “I guess it’s just forgetting the scope of it all.”
“We all got problems, Miss,” the gray wolf replied. “You and I just got one common denominator, the worst thing to happen on God’s good gray earth since they dropped half-a-planet’s worth of nuclear lead some two-hundred-plus years ago. My only question is: what was the plan?”
Again, Val stopped mid-sip. “Which plan?”
“What you’d do when you got there. The Point A to B shit ain’t my concern. We can help out as best we can with our intel networks and associates in finding this Colosseum. What I’m curious about is what you’d do to it. And why do it? Why go through all this hell, all this shit when we’re planning to tear through that city the second we got an in. She’s dying after all, and I got the data to prove it. Little fluctuations in the Tower Network shield, failure of services, a report from the 2450s about a goddamned military manufacturing base that is being–as I can only suspect–built in CYBERSPACE and printed in real facilities.”
“The hell you saying?” Val glowered.
“I’m saying the Second Plane doesn’t exist. Not tangibly. I’m saying we’re dealing with what could be the merging of cyberspace and the tangible world. Not out here of course. But within Haven. No one understands it, I’m not even sure the hypothesis is on lock, but your story might be the key in understanding what we’re up against. We need more intel, we need more time. And I don’t want to send civilians to go gallivanting around looking for shit to wreck that might not be there.”
“The fuck you mean then!?” the white wolf snapped. “You hold us hostage, you gonna lock us up and keep us from getting there and stopping–”
“Stopping what?”
Knox’s voice never rose above casual conversation. And in that calm intonation, Val felt the bubble of her world pop in on a single instant. She didn’t even know why the words stung until Knox clarified.
“Your experience with these Gladi-Models proves one simple fact: the games are over. The super-soldier program is over. They aren’t coming for anyone anymore. At least not for conversion. We’ve sent a team to dynamite Níyol. Even got every Injun tribe’s blessing. There’ll be no more conversions. We’re also going to take the tech there and retro-fit it for analysis. We might be able to comb the whole desert to find any remaining facilities via reverse signal tracking. Plus, we’ve snagged some of those sleeper agent bodies from your posse’s latest row and are working on finding common code signifiers to classify Gladis as enemy targets.”
Val slouched back down in the chair. “But you’re ruining–”
“Ruining what?”
Knox’s brow furrowed.
“Revenge, is it? You want to piss five lives down the drain because yours got fucked? Sister, if that’s all it took, I woulda sent all sum-ten-thousand of those boys and girls in denim and leather to their deaths right now. I woulda put my head to a U1’s 40-foot barrel and told ‘em to blow me away when my wife gave her life fighting for the land we just won back at the godforsaken border. The Ivory Coast is ours now and a foothold we got on the goddamn doorstep of the A.C.E.S. I know the pain. Not your exact pain but THE pain. Cherish that man of yours, ‘cuz you never know which day’ll be the last. I shoulda prepared for that and I didn’t. I spent one miserable night paying for it. What I’m saying is you can see to the Colosseum’s destruction, but it’s gotta be planned, it’s gotta be precise, and it’s gotta be with real muscle. You guys are tough, you’re competent. But you can’t do it alone. If we can find this place, and if we want it good and dead, we can’t just go sending in folks without some real backup.”
Valentina’s hands trembled with fury, but then with one quick shutting of her eyes, and a long, slow deep breath, the tremors ceased. Those jade eyes stared straight down Knox’s soul as she gave her reply.
“Guess it’s probation for both of us. You prove to me you got the muscle, we prove to you we got the skills.”
Knox took another sip of his brew before standing up.
“Interesting perspective shift there.” he remarked before extending his right hand. “But I get it. You and your team have full access to the gym any time. Check with Captain Westley about access to the gun range and test track. You can use them, but you’ll have to work around the scheduled drills.”
She left it hanging in the air for a moment before shaking on it. “Thanks. I’ll start with getting back in shape.”
For a while, no one saw Valentina beyond glances down corridors. Marcus and Sabina would see her dart from her new quarters straight to the gym. Brennus would only see her after the day’s work for dinner, but their nights together were frigid and silent. Jovian found himself being analyzed by some technicians from the Chief Engineer’s office, curious about how the augmentations impacted performance and how he evaded a complete surrender to the other Gladis’ base programming. Eric stayed on base with him to make sure no harm came to him in the process, and always laid eyes on Val as he saw her walk through the halls.
“Is everything alright?” Jovian asked innocently as he sat up from the observation table.
Eric nodded and patted the young hound’s knee. “I don’t think she’s had to reckon with just how big this all is. Tunnel vision does that.”
When their days weren’t spent working out or under the microscope, Knox organized observation periods to better illustrate his point and to clue the rest of the Pack in on how the Force operated. At first the driving range wasn’t that impressive. A nicely realized course with obstacles festooned throughout, and bleachers left over from the days when the Force’s HQ was a one-story school.
The cars were another story, at least for Marcus.
“I didn’t know they kept ol’ Hornets in that good a nick,” the red warrior beamed. “Got you a Hornet, a Charger, and even a putterin’ lil’ Baja Bug all in one running.”
“You don’t get on this team without having a love of these ol’ iron beauties.” General Knox smiled. “I imagine that’s why you two wound up with a happy ol’ DeSoto. When Angel showed me a picture from an ol’ catalogue, I about doubled-over and died laughing at how cute the thing was.”
“It’s like waking up to a second sun,” Sabina nodded, cozying up to her lover.
Even for all her frustration, Val found it encouraging to see Knox taking a shine to Marcus and Sabina. It was hard not to love those two, so he at least had a heart somewhere in there. Though she remained largely unimpressed until she saw the invention of the cargun on display.
Two Gatling-style barrels that swing out from the chassis of a ride that can rattle off laser-fire faster than most machine guns.
“It’s operated via a trigger beneath the throttle.” Knox explained to the group. “Angel figured that if you’re in battle with one of these beasts, you’d want to not let up one inch in the assault. Just attack-attack-attack. If you’re making evasive maneuvers, you’re already kicking the brakes left and right so love tappin’ the gas won’t yield contact that often.”
The guns also had a way of shredding through every obstacle put before them. Some of that childlike wonder came back to Marcus’s eye as he saw the display. Everyone from Brennus to Jovian leaned forward in amazement at the invention. While Valentina held back, she did so out of quiet admiration.
The gun range wasn’t anything earth-shattering on the face of it–all the R&D having clearly gone into making every hot rod and rust-bucket a mobile minigun–but it was the sight of 20 hounds, clad in denim and leather, all firing rifles in perfect unison that started to gnaw at Valentina. Full row upon full row, firing in lockstep and near perfect aim. 20 after 20 after 20.
He really did have the hounds for the job. He had the wolves, the rides, the weapons, and the structure needed to make. And over the course of several evenings with him, he revealed even more about his concerns with “Your Mission” as he put it when it came to intel.
“We’ve never had anyone who had a predicament like yours intersect with the larger problem.” he spoke one night. “That you folks were part of potentially one facility that used the industrialized cyberspace we’ve been trying to nail down as a certainty. Because the end result means one of two things: either large chunks of the city are projections, holographic in nature. Or on the flip-side, there are layers of perception at play. Citizens who are chipped see things different from how unchipped hounds see it. You’re being presented a reality to work you to the psychological bones while those in the stands see little more than care-free entertainment.”
It was as hard to wrap around as it was the horror of their time in the Colosseum’s light, but it was a conversation made of equal parts compassion and composure. Even as the thought of her glorious discovery and cathartic destruction ate her up from inside, Valentina’s frustrations were only agitated by that unbearable truth: he cared. Behind all the military structures and his former allegiances, he cared. She saw it on his face as he passed even the lowest rank in the hall, when congratulating each instructor on fine work. He could be a goddamn president if he put his mind to it.
One of these dinners cemented this fact. On this particular evening, Jovian got to talking about missing home and his folks. About the joys of being in the ring, of his friends in the street who would hoverboard with him and hijack him and his now “famous” Lincoln to go for skitches. “I used to arrest fellas like you.” Knox quipped, which got Jovian laughing and kept him from getting really weepy. All the same, when the General saw the melancholy coming on, he rested his metal hand on the young gray’s.
“Not a day goes by that I don’t think of my Mom and Dad,” he nodded solemnly. “Nice days out in the park, sun shining all golden. Back when she was nicer, even the little scent notes Ace would pop into the air made the day better, even a bad one. Shit, you were probably just a pup when it happened, but you remember that one day half the city went from smelling like a breath mint to like an ashtray and it kept going back and forth every hour–”
“No shit, I do!” Jovian gasped. “I dunno if you left by then, but when I was skitching with some of my buddies, something like it happened where one block smelled like a big bunch of flowers, then the next like melting plastic. It was only for part of the day, but God we all wanted to ralph out the window, but couldn’t cuz then we’d drench poor Billy rocking his hoverboard behind my Lincoln! Shit, I think Duane actually got him one time–”
Jovian couldn’t even finish the thought as the mental image hit him like a comedy bomb. The young wolf let out a sweet, snickering laugh that had the whole table in stitches. A fella that tall and that muscular having something this side of a child’s giggle got everyone by surprise. Even Val let out a brief smirk
Again, she couldn’t write him off as some overzealous police captain or City Hall dumping pounds of bureaucratic paperwork in her way. He had the numbers, the resources, and time and time again reassured the quintet that they shared a goal with him. He was a perfect ally. And that drove Valentina madder and madder.
Over the week’s course, the rest of the pack continued their chummy streak with Knox. Each night over a fine cooked meal, the city boy’s peculiar rustic twang spun many tales of grand strategy, of ol’ General Godred’s days in battle, and of the advancements made in the fight and the ground gained. All the while sat in the background of the nights of wining and dining was a near-catatonic Valentina, slipping further and further away from her team, her dream, the whole damn thing.
“I figure I’d pull a trick outta ol’ man Leo’s hat and christen y’all ‘the Cazadores,’” Knox said on Friday night. “You’ve been on a hunt so long as a team, I can see you’d work well as a unit within us. Desert recon and intel for now, then when it’s time to clear through Haven, you hit the Colosseum once we got a lock on it, then help open the border for the rest of us. Eric’s vouched for ya pulling together when times get tough. You won’t be able to pull the Latin radio codes though, at least in communications with HQ. Having codes on a unit basis though will help with stealth.”
While everyone at the table liked the idea, they all looked back to Valentina, waiting for her reply. She looked from her plate to see all those soft, earnest faces before turning her attention to Knox. Her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t make a scene. She jabbed her fork into a nice cut of stake and said with a careless sigh, “I guess it could work.”
The dark gray General gave a gentle nod before continuing. “I’ll be using that to address you all from here on out when convening these get-togethers. I’ll also give everyone a chance to sleep on it. You’re still coming at this from a civilian angle and that means we got some training in store for you if y’all are on board.”
Again, to the rest of the Pack, it didn’t seem unreasonable.
Though Val didn’t let it show, she was just slipping further and further away from it all, wishing she could go back into that catatonic stupor where everything was numb and all she could do was lift her head up, take her pills and what little food she could, and pass back out.
That night, nearly two weeks into their stay, Brennus walked into their quarters to find Val undressed in bed, and looking at him with eyes he hadn’t seen in ages. Hungry, playful eyes. She finally wanted him, and it wasn’t long before she got him. Gone was the frigid air about her, and just this once, she could feel something again. That gorgeous passion she knew from days long ago when Brennus was little more than a mystery in a shack sat high upon red sands.
The gray-furred martial artist pulled the white wolf close to his chest in the afterglow of it all. He worked her with a few tender kisses before broaching the subject foremost on his mind.
“You’re scaring ‘em.” he said softly. “You’re scaring me. You gotta tell me what’s going on.”
At first, the thought Val wanted to wrench herself from Brennus, but the hound put his strength to good use when he spun her back around beneath the covers. He made sure she was looking straight at him.
“You’re gonna have to tell us at some point.” he spoke in as placid a voice as he could.
For the first time in a while, hate filled those jade eyes of hers, but Brennus didn’t loosen his grip.
“I need to know if we can help. Are you relapsing, has a new change occurred, have–”
“I’m done.”
Two words was all it took for Brennus to drop his hands from her shoulders. Instead of leaping out of bed the way she wanted to, the white wolf collapsed onto her lover’s chest.
“I can’t do it.” she began to weep. “I can’t I can’t I can’t–”
“Do what?” Brennus pressed, running his gentle hand along her arm.
“All of this.” she blubbered. “The whole fucking thing is busted to hell. I thought we could do it on our own, I thought we could take the whole thing down ourselves, but we can’t. When I talked with that General I wanted to rip his fucking throat out because he was telling me something I didn’t even think about in all the madness. He told me the goddamn truth. He told me all the fucking logistics in the world about how crazy this whole thing is. And y’know what? He’s right. The way I was going about it, I coulda led y’all like lambs to a fucking slaughterhouse. Look at what he’s got! He’s got everything right where he fucking needs it, the only thing stopping him is the only thing in the goddamn world. That miserable fucking bitch out west.”
The gray wolf pulled his woman close, soothing her as best he could.
“I think you’re looking at it the wrong way.” he began.
“Like hell, I–”
She felt the pinch of his hand on her snout as he snapped her eyes towards his.
“Let me finish.” he said calmly before shifting his hand to her cheek. “I think you are. You’re tough, we’re tough. We know we got a righteous cause we’re fighting one no one else even thought of. Either no one else lived it, or you had me and Marcus. Just spending our lives pretending it hadn’t happened. It took you making a ruckus to move needles on anything. It took you getting us together to help settle a few scores along the way. Save some lives even if they didn’t mean shit to our cause. Even if we called it here, we’d been doing good.”
Her sobs subsided to sniffles as he thumbed the tears away.
“You ain’t military, beautiful, but you’re as tough as they come. Just cause the battlefield’s changing doesn’t mean it ain’t worth staying on and fighting it to the end. All we gotta do is wait. Ain’t no one gettin’ hurt while we wait. If anything, that Knox fella might be as good a window into this as we have. He was a cop there, he had to work with the state. In his own small way, he had to work with the A.C.E.S.”
“That’s what gets me, though.” she cut in. “Like I knew all these little things, but I just forgot there was a war on. Like all it was was just some kids playing toy soldiers in the desert with big ol’ tanks. I thought I could just bulldoze right in there once I knew the coordinates and take the fucker down brick by brick. I didn’t even stop to think about what cutting in on the whole thing would even do. Buncha crazy-ass commandos from the desert come racing in trying to fuck up some random hunka city, the fuck we’d even do when we get there?”
Brennus held her close and let her get the rest of it out of her system before continuing.
“With backing like what we got now,” he smiled. “We’ll make sure the job’s done. Well-done like that steak you’ve been having.” That got a chuckle from her, one he savored with another kiss. “When they come storming through with the city in their pocket, they’ll make sure nothing like it happens to no one again. That’s all you wanted outta this right? That’s all you ever wanted was to keep folks from getting hurt?”
She nodded gently.
“That’s what we’re here to do and that’s what we’re gonna keep doing. That’s how we’re gonna keep rolling until we find that deviled place and raze it to the ground.”
Val kissed him the second those words slipped from his muzzle, the thought sending shivers rolling down her bare back as she kept kissing him all over.
“Now that’s more like it,” he grinned, caressing her as the two savored every kiss and caress and thrust. In what felt like a near week of powerlessness, even with her growing strength and healing, Val finally felt something close to the power she felt in the weeks and months prior. All in the arms of a hound who believed in her.
It was just seconds after Round 2 that a blood-curdling sound raced through the halls: a screaming fire alarm followed by an announcement on the PA system.
“RAID ON TALBOT SETTLEMENT. REPEAT. RAID ON TALBOT SETTLEMENT. DEPLOYMENTS STARTING IN GARAGE 3. IF YOU’RE PARKED IN QUARTER A, YOU ARE BEING DEPLOYED. CHECK FOR FULLY CHARGED LASER-CARTRIDGES, REPORT TO YOUR SUPERIORS.”
Valentina jolted up from the bed and leapt towards the night stand. She rummaged furiously through the papers to find the filings on where her Humvee was parked.
“I’m in Spot 33. And you all parked alongside, right?”
Brennus could see where this was going.
“Honey, are you sure you’re ready?”
At first she just kept gathering her clothes before she felt those mighty gray hands snap to her shoulders and spin her on a dime. She looked up to see the worried face of her lover.
“I need to know. Are you ready?”
She composed herself and stilled her chattering breath long enough to make her case, gently stroking that soft gray face of his.
“If we’re part of a bigger team now, then we oughta be team players.” the white wolf said. “Right now it ain’t about me. Too much of it’s been about me. Even if it didn’t seem like it, something in me was doing it all for myself. I could’ve worked harder to overcome it the way you did. I could’ve let myself get swallowed by it the way poor Marcus did. But instead I let it eat me up and make me some kinda Patton when all I was was a little girl scared shitless. Let me be a woman and do my part instead of making y’all run ‘round the desert ‘cuz I kept feeling sorry for myself and wanted to take it out on the thing I hated most. I know I’m better than that now, we all are. I want to prove it.”
Brennus pulled her close one last time before looking down and flashing a confident grin.
“Get dressed. I’ll get the others up.”
The two got straight to it, throwing on their shirts, jeans and sandals, Brennus knocking on the two doors besides the lovers’ quarters. To his surprise, Marcus and Sabina were already up and dressed, walking out the second he knocked. When he went to Jovian’s room, there the young gray gladiator was, standing tall with his keys in hand.
Together, the five hounds booked it to join the exodus of hot rods and motorcycles. When they reached the garage, they flashed their keys and the attendant waved them through. They made it past him, but one of the commanding officers was completely baffled by their appearance.
“When the hell’d we order Italian?”
The gray Commander Martin Archer Douglas was not particularly impressed by the sandal-pawed quintet and their rag-tag garb.
“Our staging of Julius Caesar ain’t for another millennium, now get back to bed.”
“We’re in the quarter and we’re here to fight.” Val shot back. “I don’t want to make a meal of this, so just let us pitch in.”
“LET ‘EM ROLL, MAD DOG. WE NEED ALL HANDS ON DECK.”
General Adam Knox’s voice echoed down the garage and was met with a reluctant salute and a quick cock of his head. The General raced down past them in his Hemi Cuda, and for the briefest moment, him and Val locked eyes. It wasn’t a cold glower of “watch yourself,” but the earnest plea of “prove my faith right.”
Everyone got to their cars and fired their engines up. Val’s sandy Humvee went first, followed by Brennus’ black Mustang, the smiling DeSoto of Marcus and Sabina, and lastly the screaming steel boat of a car that was Jovian’s Lincoln.
What surprised all five was the first thing that came over their radios.
“This is General Knox to Team Code: Cazadores. That’s all five of you. We haven’t yet gotten a chance to go through all the pencil-pushing and formal tests, but you’ve been through enough hell to know how to fight. I won’t upset your command structure, but I will give you the quick rules of engagement. Remember to flow with the traffic on our side, never against. Advance, advance, advance. We move as a wall against these bastards. Friendly fire gets you shot on site. Understood?”
The five answers of “Roger” that came over the radio inspired confidence in the General.
“Other than that,” he continued. “Give ‘em hell. Fuck ‘em till they bleed. We don’t stand for raider scum when we got so many other fish to fry. Godspeed.”
With that, it was all about seeing what the town was like and who they’d be fighting against. The village of Talbot came into view in short order, your standard revived Western ghost town, now being attacked by raiders with their usual disregard for the sanctity of life and liberty.
Stunning the quintet of warriors was the Technicolor hailstorm ringing out beside them. Dozens of cars and bikes lobbing streaks of electric lead of all colors into the rickety rat rods and hair-brained chop jobs attacking the wolves of Talbot. They’d never truly seen the miracle of the cargun in action until this night and the results were instant. The raiders were being struck down with incredible ease.
But what the Force was all focusing on wasn’t the end of it.
“Team Leader Cazadores to Knox.” Val barked on the radio. “We got more coming in at 2 O’Clock, back-side of town.”
“Think you can take ‘em?”
“Bet on it.” she replied, slamming her paw down on the throttle.
The Humvee tore away from the main formation, her team following suit.
Everyone checked to make sure their guns were loaded before engaging the raiders’ backup. Valentina went first in a way only her Humvee could; plowing right through the weakest rust buckets, crushing car and head alike as she split one of the others open.
Brennus joined in the fire fight alongside Sabina with her cherished sawed-off shotgun. The gray and red wolves, while unable to match the volume of Force’s display, landed shot after shot, dead in the head of each driver coming their way. Those that weren’t crushed by Val’s Humvee were spun like tops between Marcus and Jovian’s driving. The young gray gladiator in particular was taking the kamikaze route like Valentina, but instead of going over the tops of the low-riders, he started pinning rides against the nearest rock face.
The first car, a low-riding hot rod, got caught on a rock en route, spinning cab-over-wheels and crushing the raider instantly. Jovian’s second kill came with a more robust sedan getting slammed against the target. The second the driver came at him with a pistol, Jovian swung his rifle out the window and blew the bastard’s head away.
The backup became paste-like smears of red on the desert sand as a pileup began to take care of the rest. Those who tried to avoid their comrades’ fate were met with the same for monstrous cars assaulting them on all fronts. Those that weren’t crushed were shot, those that weren’t shot were flipped.
When Valentina saw the rest retreating, she got back on the radio. “Team Leader Cazadores to Knox. Backup’s retreating. What’s left of it. What’s the safest way to return to the formation?”
“Stand guard. Will give you the go ahead when the town is cleared. When you come back, high-beams and hazards on.”
The adrenaline kept the Pack alert and jittering with tension, but they wouldn’t have to wait long.
“This is T. Jeff to all rides, T. Jeff to all rides. Returning from southeast of the battlefield are a beige Humvee, a black Mustang, a cream DeSoto, and a white Lincoln. These are not enemies, these are our guys. Besides, they took better care of their rides than these fuckers, so you’ll know ‘em when you see ‘em.”
That was the quintet’s cue to make their descent from the road down to the rest of the Force’s troops. When they arrived there, they weren’t held as heroes, nor was there any heckling. In a strangely simple way, they were nothing more than five rides in a sea of nearly a hundred. All the same, the one hound who counted found them before they left the settlement.
General Knox pulled up to the warriors as they all stood next to their rides. The lovers were in each others’ arms, and Jovian stood by Val and Brennus, the white wolf quick to bring him in for an embrace.
The tall dark gray wolf surveyed the group with a drill sergeant’s eye, always observant and piercing. He made his way to Valentina and looked down at her.
“Good start.” he said, extending his organic hand. “I won’t call it probation. Let’s say a trial run. One you just passed.”
Valentina shook on it. Instead of aggression or insecurity, the white wolf met the General with a knowing look.
“I get it now.” she said. “It really is bigger than I ever thought.”
“But yours is an important piece of the puzzle. Now we gotta find out just how big of a piece it is?”
It was a question Valentina wanted the answer to as well. And in due time, she’d get it. She’d get all she’d ever wanted to know about Haven and more...
My gut tells me things are beginning to heat up in the fight against A.C.E.S.