Flash Fiction Interlude: Sense of Direction

AUTHOR'S NOTE: This story was written for Thursday Tales and will be cross-posted later this week at Weekend Writer's Retreat.. It's also part of the Will and Diana series, which you can find out more about in the sidebar or by following the tags.
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“This isn’t it.” Will reined in and the two young men behind him did the same.

The lead rider, Aguilero, sneezed and huddled deeper in his jacket.

Boeing glared. “You’ve gotten us lost." He turned to Will. “I told you we shouldn’t leave the tracking to a guy who’s sick.” He waved his arm in a gesture that took in the darkening landscape and the distant hulk of an abandoned barn. “No way will we make it back to camp tonight. We don’t even know where we are.”

Coyote tightened the reins and tried to calm his fidgety horse. “I know where we are.”

“Shut up, weirdo.”

Will shook his head. “No, you shut up, Boeing. This isn’t getting us anywhere.” He moved his horse a little closer to Aguilero’s. “What do you think?”

Aguilero sniffled and shrugged. “I think I’ve got a fever.”

“Isn’t that just fucking great,” Boeing muttered.

Will turned on him. “He’s our best tracker. It’s not his fault he’s sick.” He looked at Aguilero and in a softer voice added, “I wish you’d told us it was this bad.” He pondered the darkening landscape. “We’ll camp in that barn, if it’s stable enough.”

As they walked their horses toward the barn, Will fell in beside Coyote, who was looking around with his usual air of casual curiosity. “I'd hoped we would make it back tonight.”

Coyote nodded in understanding. “Our girls can handle it.”

“Handle what?” Will’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“Not sure, but don’t worry. It’s fine, and we’re not far from base. We’ll be there tomorrow.”

“Can we get there tonight?” Will looked ready to ride off in whatever direction Coyote might suggest.

A few paces behind, Boeing had been listening. “Don’t tell me you believe everything Psychic Wonderboy says.”

Coyote flashed him a look. “How often have I been wrong?”

“The problem isn’t that you’re wrong,” Boeing admitted. “It’s that you’re vague, and those voices in your head tend to leave out critical information.”

With a twitch of his shoulders, Coyote acknowledged Boeing’s point. “We can’t get back tonight, anyway.” He glanced at the old barn with a devilish glint in his eye. “This will be fun.”

“Glad it’s all a game to you,” Boeing said, and went to lead his horse inside.

Will stopped and glanced at Coyote. “You’re sure we can’t make it back tonight, and that our girls are safe?”

“Safe? No. But like I said, they can handle it.” He clapped Will on the shoulder. “You worry too much.”

Will watched him go inside, then cast his eyes toward the evening sky once again. His gaze settled on the old weather vane, creaking in the wind. Useless thing. It could tell which way the wind blew, but not which direction one should go. But what could he do? Coyote was right. Their girlfriends were skilled and savvy fighters, just like they were. They could manage any problems that came up. And in the morning, Aguilero would lead them out of this place.

He would have to.














Photo by Leolajax

The Sniper (a "Will and Diana" Adventure)

It started with a ping off the dutch oven. A musical note, it startled Cascabel as she was about to crack an egg. A few feet away, Macy looked up from the coffee grinder with a frown.

The second bullet zipped past Cascabel's arm like a bee. She dropped the egg and clutched her shoulder.

“Get down!” Paloma shoved Cascabel to the ground while Macy shrieked and scurried behind a donkey cart.

There was a rustle in the nearest tent and Ikea poked her head out the flap. A bullet punctured the canvas inches from her face. With a gasp she ducked back inside, but her action had given Paloma and Cascabel enough time to hurry to the shelter of Macy’s cart. Ikea fired some warning shots, sounding the alarm.

In a tent at the edge of camp, Will sat up with a start. He grabbed the rifle he kept by his side and scrambled to his feet, stepping into his moccasins as he ran outside. Diana tried to follow, but Amalia grabbed her arm and jerked her back.

Will heard them arguing as he zig-zagged toward the shelter of a crumbling wall. He hoped Amalia would keep Diana away. Although he trusted his adoptive sister’s aim, it made him crazy when someone took shots at her, and bringing down a sniper would require he keep his cool.

He stopped to collect his thoughts as bullets chipped harmlessly at the other side of the wall. How the hell had someone gotten close enough to fire on their camp? And was it a loner, or part of an advance group for an enemy unit?

A few feet away, Sachi waved to him from behind the shelter of a metal drum. She made hand signals that Will thought he understood, then fired in the direction the shots seemed to be coming from. Her distraction drew the sniper’s fire and Will made a run for it.

It took only a few minutes of ducking and dodging to get out of the line of fire, but it felt like hours before he was safely scrambling up the hillside behind the cover of some creosote and mesquite. Although he couldn’t make out the marksman’s exact position, he suspected he was hiding somewhere along the ridge of flattened space where a road used to wind through these sand hills.

He was almost over the spot when he came upon Boeing taking temporary shelter behind a rock. “What the hell’s going on?” Will asked.

“Seems to be just one. Got past the Javelina somehow.”

“He better have shot him,” Will muttered. “’Cause if any of our people get killed, I’ll slit Javelina’s fucking throat.”

The two young men advanced slowly, sometimes crouching, sometimes dragging themselves through the brush on their bellies, until they finally made out their target—a dark-hatted figure in bandoliers taking aim at the camp from behind a rusted pickup truck.

Just as Will and Boeing raised their guns to their shoulders, a shadow rustled the nearby scrub. They cursed and were about to fire when they realized it was only Javier. “We were hoping you were dead,” Will said. With a snort of disgust, he turned back to the sniper

It was never clear whether it was his shot or Boeing’s that laid the sniper flat against the rusting metal, but what neither of them doubted was that Javier’s shot was an afterthought, punctuating the body with a superfluous hole after the real work had been done.

It was Javier who was first down the trail to the sniper’s perch, where he shot the marksman a few extra times with his pistol.

“Quit wasting ammo,” Boeing said.

“If you’d done your job and kept proper watch—”

“Me? He came up on your side, asshole!”

While they shouted at each other, Will turned the body over. “Shit. He’s just a kid.” He started checking the boy’s gear and clothing for signs of group affiliation.

“What’s he got?” Javier forced his way forward and shoved his hand in one of the boy’s pockets. With a pleased smile he withdrew a few silver coins.

“That belongs to the group,” Will said.

“No, it belongs to me. For the trouble I had to go to to kill the little bastard.”

Boeing lunged toward him. “You didn’t do jack, Javelina—”

Before he could say any more, Will’s fist connected with Javier’s gut, knocking the wind out of him with a gasp. “You’re such an asshole.” He picked up the coins where they had spilled on the ground, then returned to the matter at hand. “I don’t see any evidence the kid had affiliation,” he told Boeing as Javier lay wheezing at his feet.

“Probably a lone troublemaker.”

Will examined the sniper’s face, the blunted boyish features innocent in repose. “We’ll take him down to camp and make sure he gets a decent burial.”

From where he was still trying to catch his breath, Javier gasped, “Let the fucker rot. He wanted to kill us.”

Boeing kicked Javier in the ribs, then helped Will pick up the body. “This kid wasn’t a half bad shot,” he said as they stumbled down the trail. "I wonder why he did it.”

“No telling.”

“Maybe he had something to prove.”

Will adjusted his footing in a patch of loose gravel. He thought of Macy and Cascabel and wondered if there would still be coffee and eggs. “He only proved he could shoot at women making breakfast. That’s nothing special.”

“And it's a dumb way to die,” Boeing added.

Character Study: Will Channing

With a nod to Susan Helene Gottfried and her West of Mars blog, I’ve decided to post occasional character studies, drawn from my writings.

I’m starting with loyal but stubborn Will Channing, from my dystopian novels. He is a peripheral character in Tin Soldier, a main character in Bella Diana, and gets a few mentions in the first diary of Diana's Diary. He also features prominently in the planned final book, Water Bearer.

1. Will isn’t technically an orphan. He has no reason to think his parents are dead. He just hates them.
   
2. When he was seven his parents hired him out him to a rancher who was a known child molester. He figured if he did a good job, he would be left alone. This worked at first, until it quit working.
   
3. Will ran away and spent the next few years traveling and getting by as best he could.
   
4. He coped with his memories of molestation by protecting the girls he met on the streets. This made him feel strong and in control of his own destiny.
   
5. At the time Donovan Sloan caught him picking pockets in the town of Macrina, Will was caring for a young orphan named Tasha. He referred to her as his sister, even though she wasn’t.
   
6. Donovan took Will and Tasha to live with Amalia and her sister Carina in Valle Redondo. After nearly four years on the streets, Will didn’t adapt very well to having rules and lessons.
   
7. Everything changed when Will met the neighbor girl, Diana. They were close in age and shared the same interests, but she was smarter and didn’t need Will’s protection. He found this so surprising that he was smitten, although he was too young to realize it.
   
8. Will learned how to read only because Diana liked to send him notes and he wanted to know what they said.
   
9. When the government mercenaries came to Valle Redondo, Will saved Diana’s life but couldn’t save her family.
   
10. Will started calling Amalia “Mother,” as a gesture of respect.
    
11. He took Amalia’s last name as his own, even though she never adopted him in any legal fashion because the secession and civil war made it too confusing to figure out which “government” was the “real” one.
    
12. Because Diana was so traumatized at the loss of her mother and grandparents, Will allowed her to call him “brother,” or “shilah” in the language of the small Apache tribe they sheltered with after they left the valley. He thought she’d get better faster if she felt like she still had family.
    
13. By the time Will was old enough to realize that he was in love with her, Diana had been calling him “brother” for so long she could think of him in no other way. But he won't accept that.
    
14. Will isn’t introspective, and he isn’t a man of ideas. But he can recognize these traits in others and he respects them.
    
15. Will is loyal and reliable, almost to a fault. These traits inspire confidence when he is in a leadership role.
    
16. These same qualities turn to stubborn blindness in his dealings with Diana, who won’t follow his lead in the one thing that really matters to him—building a future together as husband and wife.