Tribal Ways by Alex Archer

to ensure they could only come at her one at a time she could retreat fully back into the stall and accept the restrictions on her own scope of movement.
    And if at any time the opportunity presented itself, she’d bolt out the door and be gone with the ice-nasty Plains wind that beat and boomed outside.
    “You shouldn’t think so much,” the man on her left said. “You should just leave.”
    “Indian people don’t want you here,” the other said.
    She frowned. Tom Ten Bears spoke with a blend of rolling Okie drawl and Indian staccato. Strange as that sounded when she tried to describe it to herself, in his actual speech it came out perfectly naturally. These men were both speaking deep in their throats in an exaggerated stereotype of a Native American accent.
    “You should turn aroun’, drive back to Albuquerque,” the first man said. “Get on a plane and fly away home. You don’t belong here, stickin’ your long nose in where it don’t belong.”
    The bad grammar sounded as forced as their accents. By their builds and the general shapes of their faces, which was all she could make out for the paint and the not-very-good illumination, she figured they really were Indians, probably Comanche. But they seemed to be playing a role, and rather too hard at that.
    “Thanks for the advice,” she said. “I’ll give it the consideration it deserves. Now, if you’ll excuse me—” She started to walk between them.
    The man on the left said, “Not so fast,” and grabbed her upper arm.
    She spun smartly into him. Her left arm came up and struck his forearm on the underside, knocking his grip loose before he’d had a chance to clamp it down. The palm-heel strike she followed up with flattened his nose with a satisfying crunch of cartilage breaking.
    He emitted a squeal and dropped to his knees, clutching his face, which was pouring blood. Having your nose broken for the first time tended to affect you that way, Annja had observed.
    His partner had already started grabbing for her right shoulder; if the object lesson provided by his buddy made an impression it came too late for him. She wheeled back into him. Her right forearm struck his left, again breaking his hold on her. She let her hand flop onto his arm. Then, putting her hips into it, she snapped right, yanking his trapped arm straight, back into the open stall, and locking out the elbow. She put her upraised left forearm against the locked-out joint and drove with her hips.
    Annja knew very well how much pressure it took to break an elbow, and exactly how it felt to apply it.
    The Dog Soldier did not choose to find out for himself what it took to give his elbow a whole new dimension of play. He had no choice but to allow himself to be swung face-first into the stout floor-to-ceiling upright that anchored the stall’s front.
    His face cracked against metal. He groaned and slumped. Annja gave him a Phoenix-eye fist, first knuckle extended, in the right kidney, just to get his mind right. He dropped with a painful thunk to his knees.
    The other guy was game. On his knees, still trying futilely to staunch the blood from his broken nose with one hand, he groped for Annja with the other hand as she turned to go. She gave him a side kick that drove his other hand into his broken nose and snapped his head back against the other metal upright. He collapsed like an empty grain sack.
    “Good evening, gentlemen,” she said. “No need to get up. The pleasure was all mine.”

9
    “Mind if I sit down?”
    Annja Creed’s blood froze. It was a warm, charismatic baritone voice, absolutely dripping testosterone-fueled charisma.
    It also belong to Johnny Ten Bears, chieftain of the outlaw Iron Horse People Motorcycle Club.
    Chiding herself for being unobservant she looked up. He loomed above her, smiling in a nonthreatening way all over his darkly handsome face, with his black hair hanging again unbound over his colors.
    She kept herself from flicking her eyes left and