First Night

Journal of Rowana, daughter of Rowetha

01 / 02 / 2120 of the Fourth Age, cont'd

"Azzie, no!" I cried.

The three-season tent didn't take more than a few minutes to set up. Just long enough for me to take my eyes off the big-breasted orc woman. When I had it set up, I turned back to see Azzie squatting beside the corpse. She'd rolled back his sleeve and was about to chomp down on his arm. At my outcry, she paused.

"We don't eat people," Rowana said. "Here. If you're hungry, I've got food in the ATV."

Reluctantly, Azzie dropped the dead man's arm. Rowana dug into the back and came up with a handful of MREs.

"Okay, we've got lembas bread...soylent curry...and Dwarven stew."

The dark eyes went wide. A long tongue ran over those plush lips.

So we had a feast. Pellenor pale ale and meals ready to eat. I was wiping the last of the curry up with the lembas bread as she licked the stew pouch clean, but my eyes kept going back to the dead man. A corpse was a complication I hadn't counted on.

Burial? I didn't want a barrow-wight anywhere near my property. I didn't worry about law, this far out on the edges of things, but he couldn't have been out here on foot. There must be a vehicle, big enough for him and Azzie. If he was a smuggler, it probably wouldn't have a transponder, but...

"Morgoth's balls," I swore as I stood back up and went digging in the back of the Pathfinder.

The Shrike was a decommissioned quad-copter drone. I'd flown plenty of the military models over in Harad. While it didn't have any armaments—no handy little grenades to drop—it did still have the nightvision cameras. Azzie watched me as I unpacked it from its crate, snapped the batteries in place, and then took out the control module.

Her dark eyes were fixed on me as I popped the dust cover from the neural jack at the back of my skull and guided the optic lead to it. Not much different from a civilian model, but ruggedized. The lead locked into place, and my vision winked out.

The Shrike rose, and new vision filtered in. Green-tinted, the burning of the fire, the Orc woman's dark eyes followed it as it rose into the air. Standard search pattern would be a spiral away from the campsite. Except I already knew which direction both Azzie and the dead man had come from. Out into the dark night, almost nothing moved...and then she saw it. Two klicks to west. A dirt track. An unmarked black van. I hovered low, circled once—and saw the other body.

Dropped down, hovered. Big man, a bruiser, wide shoulders, long hair. Chest a mass of blood. A shotgun at close range would do that.

I sighed, brought the Shrike up, circled around. Nothing moved below except a few hares. I brought it back to camp. When it set down and powered off, I reached up and unplugged. My vision came back to me.

"You get some sleep," I said, and pointed to the tent. "I've got a little business to take care of."

Was I fool for letting an orc woman I'd just met alone with all my worldly possessions as I hauled a mostly-headless corpse fireman-style out into the wilderness at night? Maybe. I still had no idea what lived out on these plains and haunted these hills. Wargs, maybe. Never seen a warg, but I'd heard after the Last War a lot of them had escaped, gone feral. Snakes, scorpions, giant spiders...

I tried to keep my orientation as I carried my load. I didn't really care if some of his brains dripped out along the way. Critters would handle that. She was more concerned with two-legged vermin. The kind that might come after a vatgrown Uruk-Hai that hadn't been delivered to her customer because halfway there the two assholes smuggling her had decided to squabble over the money or something.

The van was about where I remembered it, and the other corpse. I dropped off my load atop him and checked out the van.

Gondorian plates. No registration, but there was a basic autodrive system and a dwarf-made lighter in the glovebox. No sign of a transponder. I felt like doing checkpoints back in Harad. There was a wall built between the front seats and the back of the van, which was odd.

The back of the van was empty. Only one set of restraints. They'd been chewed through. Vans were like any other cars these days, they couldn't be locked to keep an occupant inside. Maybe that was what caused them to stop. An argument, weapons drawn—

I didn't care. I'm not a detective.

So, dead bodies in the front seats; and I thanked the Valar they hadn't gotten stiff yet. Siphon a bit of petrol out of the tank to splash over them. Engine on, window down, and yes, they had a destination plugged into the autodrive. I pressed the dead man's finger in, and the van started to roll.

I jogged along for a few feet. Tossed in the lighter. Petrol went up and flame and smoke carried out of the window as the vehicle moved on under its own power. The autodrive would keep going until they ran out of gas or the fire consumed it.

Either way, not my problem.

There was time to think on the way back. What to do about Azzie. I didn't know a thing about her, where she came from, what she wanted. Maybe she didn't have any interest in pipe-weed farming with a broken soldier. She'd already seen me kill one Man tonight. Here I was, tired and maybe going to share a tent with her? Maybe it was best to drive her back down to Barbur's Rest, try and call somebody...or at least sleep in the Pathfinder. Give her some privacy.

I took a minute to wash the blood and petrol off in the creek. The cold water sobered me up a little, and I was shivering by the time I got back to the camp. It was after midnight, and Azzie had let the fire die down to coals. I paused before the tent, not sure what to do.

The zipper came up. A bare green leg slid out. Yellow-green fingers held the edge of the zipper, to keep it from falling open. One dark eye peeked out of the flap—but what stopped me in my tracks was the bulge of her breasts against the tent flap. My throat went dry. It had been a long time for me...and maybe it wasn't right, to just...

The tent flap fell. A small green hand shot out and grabbed my belt. With surprising strength I was pulled forward, off my feet, ducked to not hit my head on the tent, and into naked green arms and my face pressed between a pair of warm green pillows like absolutely nothing I'd ever experienced in twenty years in the rangers. It brought me back to my days on the farm, rubbing bag balm into the cow's udders.

Azzie closed the tent flap. She laid me down onto the open sleeping bag, and it was so dark I couldn't see her smile.

Or her hand, as the optic lead plugged into the neural jack at the base of my skull.