Junkyard War by Faith Hunter

Author:Faith Hunter [Hunter, Faith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lore Seekers Press
Published: 2023-06-19T18:30:00+00:00

Slowly, drawing their attention to every movement I made, I stood and walked to the huge window looking over the hills behind the armored house. “Now this.”

The men gathered in front of me, elbowing me to the side. Which was fine with me, because I got to watch their faces when Mateo drove the Simba down the hills and toward the back entrance, narrowly missing crushing Marconi’s bikes. With the camo feature turned off, it was like watching an entire city block crush across the landscape on tank tracks. Then it stopped. The Simba sat there, in all its mid-war glory, clearly not a piece of scrap, but a war machine with functional weapons.

Mateo didn’t have to get out, so the fact that the driver was a warbot was still a secret. A partial secret. Maybe.

In the poker room, no one moved until Bengal swiveled on his feet and demanded, “What the fuck else you got hid?”

“Not much as you hope. Maybe more than I’ve said.”

The Booze and the Sabbath glared at each other, looked back out the window, and both shrugged. “I’m in,” they both said.

The Simba’s chameleon skin wavered, and it disappeared, visible only by the movement of crushed trees as it crawled up the far hill on its massive tracks.

“And you want nothing out of this bunker except a prisoner, right?” McQuestion asked.

“Like I said. You let me rescue her as part of this Op, you help me kill Warhammer, and you can have all the goodies.”

All in all, the leaders reached a consensus much faster than I had expected. I had come prepared for us to stay overnight if necessary, but after seeing the Simba—and the execution of McQuestion’s wife—the club leaders were all in. Part of their easy acquiescence might have been the grief, poorly hidden in McQuestion’s eyes. Part of it was the rats. Part was seeing how many of their own people had been infected. And part was all the wartime weapons, armaments, supplies, and goodies in the bunker. But the biggest part was the men’s abilities to see a problem and decide when to be practical and pragmatic and work together for a common goal.

Plus, they knew they could kill each other afterward if needed.

* * *

It was dead-dark-thirty when the biker leaders finally hammered out the specifics of their agreement to work together, without honoring their individual supposedly-ultra-secret contracts with the military. The clubs’ parley ended with the agreement to keep their infected members in the prison—which Marconi informed us he had discovered in the basement of his fortress—until they could be transitioned back with my med-bay and my “medication protocol.” They still needed to choose a commander to run the attack—which I figured they’d fight over, then end up choosing Jagger. Sure enough, the conversation got heated, so I left them to check on the med-bay occupants, my cats, and the prisoners. While I was occupied, they also picked a time and a location to meet—about two klicks south of the bunker in a time schedule I could meet if I hustled.

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