American Apocalypse Wastelands by Nova

up when I needed to take a piss and to decorate my pants with ticks and burrs.
    Ninja carried the same knife he had worn for the last year. He was really proud of it when he bought it at the market. It wasn’t just a knife. It was the Dragon Knife. Made in China, of course. Stainless steel, with a handle shaped like a dragon’s head.
    He thought it was awesome. I thought it was ridiculous when he first showed it to me.
    â€œNinj, what the hell is that?”
    â€œIt’s my Dragon Knife!”
    I shook my head and handed it back to him. “It’s stainless steel. You need carbon steel.”
    â€œNo, I don’t.”
    I rolled my eyes. “It’s a fantasy knife, Ninj.”
    He pointed at the medieval dagger I was wearing back then. “What do you call that?”
    He had a point. I held up my hands. “Fine. It’s yours.”
    After he had walked away, unhappily, I thought to myself, Wow, nice job, asshole. He’s a freaking kid. I made a point of looking him up later, reexamining the knife, and grudgingly praising it.
    When I told Night about it later, she laughed and told me, “He wanted to buy a Ninja sword, but no one had any for sale.”
    The sun was beating down on us. Max had told us we were not going to push it past early afternoon for the first week. He also told us that after we stopped for the day and settled in, he wanted to look at everyone’s feet. I had a feeling that it would probably turn into a teaching
moment, which was fine. Max didn’t beat his points into the ground.
    Out of the corner of my eye I caught the occasional bird. I saw a red-tailed hawk soaring above us one day. That was pretty cool. On the trail I saw a lot of Virginia butterflies, also known as gypsy moths.
    Maybe that was why they almost always caught me by surprise. Well, not surprise, but off-balance for a second. Probably because it was so unexpected.
    I berated myself later. There was no excuse for it. Nowadays, a second meant everything.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    I was walking point and had come to a bend in the trail. I could not see around it because of the plants and a fallen tree. I should have held up my fist in the FREEZE sign and gone on by myself first. I didn’t. Yet another mistake. Instead, lulled by the sun and walking on autopilot, I just kept going.
    What awaited us was a little different from what we usually dealt with when we walked our beat back in Fairfax. Yet in many ways it was the same. It was always the same type of people up to the same kind of shit that they always get up to when no one is around to kick their asses.
    The first thing I noticed was a fat, jiggly, very white ass pumping up and down, with a big boil or zit on it. I normally would have shot the guy just for violating the gross and ugly law, but he wasn’t alone. They never are.
    Also standing with his back to me was a skinny white man with a bunnytail ass and his pants around his ankles. He had long, scraggly gray-and-white hair, and even from this distance it was easy to tell that he needed a wash.
Not just his hair, either. He had a fair amount of blood on him. On the ground off to his right lay a bloody machete. He was watching Fatboy and jerking off.
    About four feet away, two more white guys watched the show. One had shaggy blond hair and wore a Polo shirt and khaki pants. He held a hunting bow. My guess was that he was the leader. He was smoking and pointing at Fat Boy pumping away.
    He said something to his sidekick, a middle-aged white guy who looked like every high school gym teacher I had ever seen. In his hand he should have had the AR-15 that was at his feet. Instead he had a bottle. They both began laughing.
    It was easy to see what must have happened. The guy in the tie-dyed shirt had come around the bend. I’m sure he had seen the downed tree out of the corner of his eye. So when he saw the pine limb across the path it did not set off any alarms, especially since the trail