Nemesis

by James Axler

Snow fell in tiny, dry white grains on his right hand, which was the one he first saw. He felt each speck sting like a biting insect.

  Sensory-impression scraps jumbled into his mind: pain. Fear. A dimly lit room with stone walls almost as cold as the hearts of the burly men surrounding him. The smell of spilled booze and puke.

  So they didn’t dump me down the shaft in the back room, he thought. And no longer doubted its reality. Just dumped my sorry busted ass on the rubble pile outside their door.

  I suppose I should be fucking grateful.

  But he didn’t feel grateful. He felt hot past nuke red. He had been abused by every single person he’d come across that day. His dreams had been stolen, his labor and risk of years pissed on. Then he’d been beaten up and tossed out like a whore’s used moontime rag.

  He heard a sound.

  Somebody was singing, slurring, stumbling over the words “Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my...darling Clem-en-tine....”

  He raised his head farther. His neck bones creaked like rusty gears loaded with grit. His eyes, unable to focus right and further blurred by the little dry snow turds clinging to the lashes, saw a figure stumbling into the shadows between shacks off to his left. It was the Asian guy who’d been talking his ear off all evening about his pocketful of jack and dreams of a Promised Land.

  He dared to boast about that shit to a man who had none of those things.

  Some unknown time before Bass’s vision had been blacked out by a bat to the back of the head. Now his vision was covered in red.

  Numb now to everything but utter rage, Bass rose. He felt the hardness of the chunk of rock clutched in his right hand.

  Never after would he remember seeing anything but a sort of glowing red curtain. But he could never forget the feel of repeated impacts, grunts of effort—his—of pain—somebody else’s, the repeated impacts that dug hard points of icy busted stone into his palm and sent shocks shivering up his arm, the hot wet that splashed his face and stubble of beard.

  Then he was on all fours, swaybacked and panting like a horse run to the point of dropping dead from exhaustion, his tongue hanging out as he tried to fill his burning lungs with air that cut like blades. Right in front of him a human figure lay sprawled on its back with arms outflung.

  From the fleece-lined collar of the heavy jacket up there was nothing even vaguely reminiscent of a man, except for a few odd wet prominences that shone shocking red in the light of the wind-whipped torches outside the gaudy door.

  Terror too stark for words flooded Bass, as did remorse.

  But spilled blood didn’t go back in the body, his old granny who’d raised him always said. Stern old bitch she was, too.

  And as usual, Gran had been right.

  Without forming conscious intent Bass found his hands, the fingers like frozen sausages, fumbling open the thick woolen jacket. They delved into the pockets of shirt and pants beneath, coming out with a wad of jack and then a fistful of dully gleaming gold and silver coins that was everything the man had boasted about.

  Seized by a wild impulse as inexplicable as his early onset of rage, Bass tore open the shirt. There was a packet of some kind of skin or leather, shiny with oil, hung by a rawhide thong around the chill’s neck. It resisted his attempts to break it; he had to haul it upward and then out, dripping with clotted red and black gunk, to free it.

  The prize. The way to the Promised Land, to which the man had dedicated his whole life.

  For which he’d lost it.

  Bass felt eyes upon him.

  They’d always told him, the old coldheart-fighting hands and convoy scouts, that a man properly in tune with his senses could feel another person looking at him. He had always doubted that.

  Now he knew with sudden fear he’d been wrong about that, too.

  He looked up. Despite the pain it sent surging through his skull and crackling down his neck to radiate throughout his rib cage, Bass turned his head frantically this way and that. If somebody’s come out of the gaudy... Well, he doubted that swag-bellied old bastard Dug gave two smears of stickie shit for what happened to the stranger. But murdering a recent patron right outside the Mine Shaft door could be bad for business.

  Boss didn’t doubt that if he got caught, he’d shortly find himself introduced to the fabled back room and the forever fall into blackness that promised.

  But the door was resolutely shut against the sounds of bad music, allowing only murmurs to escape.

  He looked around again. Between a couple of storage sheds he made a darker shadow in shadow. He had the impression of a bulky jacket, slim legs and eyes: dark, wide, feminine.

  He jumped up and ran. He didn’t know where. Just away into the darkness, which he knew already he’d never truly escape.

  Part I:

  The Ville

  Chapter One

  “You like this?” Krysty Wroth asked. She held a strand of brightly colored clay beads to her throat.

  Mildred Wyeth eyed the tall, statuesque redhead critically. “Gilding the lily, Krysty,” she said. “How do these look on me?”

  The twentieth-century freezie physician was a head shorter than her friend, dark-skinned and full-figured, with her hair done in plaited beads, and light brown eyes. She dangled a bright green polished-malachite earring by her right lobe.

  “They suit your coloring,” Krysty said. Her emerald-green eyes danced, and both women tittered like little girls.

  Ryan Cawdor turned away. The women’s byplay, with the old vendor in her many layers of woolen shawls, was half for show. But, he sensed, perhaps no more than half.

  Oh, well. Both women stood steady as stone when the bullets started flying, especially Krysty. There was no one other than his best friend, J. B. Dix, who stood by his elbow gazing blandly through his wire-rimmed specs at the crowd inside the Doylesville trade center, Ryan would rather have at his back than his life mate.

  He switched his attention to scoping the center in general. Its cavernous interior was already packed with buyers and sellers from all over the southern Zarks.

  Doylesville had prospered under the decades of enlightened rule by Baron Murv Doyle. While the ville had expanded steadily over the years, so Ryan heard tell, every expansion was marked by a corresponding expansion of the razor-tape tangle perimeter that sealed it off from the rest of the world. The trade center still lay more than a hundred yards outside the recently advanced gates.

  “Used to call this place Choad,” J.B. said, taking off his glasses and polishing them with a handkerchief. “We came by here once, when I rolled with Trader. Back before your time.”

  “They’ve gone up-market between then and now,” Ryan said.

  “Baron’s a cocky son of a bitch,” J.B. said, putting the glasses back on his nose. He was a runt of a man, utterly nondescript from his battered fedora, past his scuffed brown leather jacket, to the even more thoroughly scuffed toes of his work boots. He said little and what he said was always to the point.

  He looked completely harmless and liked it that way. So did Ryan. It made enemies underestimate him.

  “Lets people in here without even disarming them,” J.B. said. He wore his full pack with his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and his Uzi strapped openly to the outside. Ryan himself carried his Steyr Scout longblaster slung over his shoulder next to his backpack.

  “Indeed,” said Dr. Theophilus Tanner. A tall man in a long black Victorian frock coat, with long silver white hair and pale blue eyes, he looked seventy, and those hard years. In fact he was in his late thirties, in terms of years actually lived through. “Especially inasmuch as they say subjects inside the wire are allowed to possess no arms more threatening than a cleaver or butcher knife in home or shop, nor carry any but a pocketknife.”

  “Now that actually suits you,” Ryan heard Mildred say. He glan
ced over to see Krysty holding a choker of bright yellow metal disks against her ivory throat.

  “I make my pieces myself,” the proprietor said with pride in her cracked voice. “Make ’em out of found scraps—old wire, buttons, busted machine parts. That choker I made from clapped-out cartridge cases I beat into disks.”

  “And are you paid directly for the sale of your wares, my good woman?” Doc asked. Ryan acknowledged that the man had a strange way of talking, but not for a man who was born a century and a half before World War III blew up the planet in 2001, or so Ryan gathered. He had a courtly way about him, though, that women in particular responded to. So they tended to overlook his peculiarities of speech.

  His words, though, clearly made the old vendor uncomfortable. She looked around surreptitiously, then, with a meaningful nod at a sec man who stood a dozen feet away holding a pump-action riot gun by a pistol, she said, “The baron takes care of all us vendors.”

  “Indeed,” Doc said.

  “Triple-good care,” J.B. said even more softly than usual. “Must have a dozen sec men posted around the place, all armed for a fight.”

  “That’s why he doesn’t sweat letting us customers and traders carry our weapons,” Ryan said. “It’d cut into his trade, and from what I hear he reckons if he has to make an example out of somebody every so often, then he does.”

  “The baron enjoys a less than savory reputation,” Doc murmured. “I do not relish doing business with him.”

  “We brought him what he agreed to pay a pretty price for,” J.B. said.

  “So much the more reason for my discomfort.”

  “Can hurry up?” a voice asked from behind. “Heavy.”

  It was the last member of the companions’ trade delegation: a young man with dead-white skin and hair and shocking blood-colored eyes, whose slight frame was bent under the weight of a hard-used green metal ammo box.

  That had been Krysty’s idea, to make him carry the wares. Jak Lauren was loyal to a fault to his comrades, especially their tall, one-eyed leader. But inside he was still the wild youth who’d grown up waging guerrilla warfare against invaders in his home Gulf Coast swamps. What Mildred referred to as his impulse control was still not everything it could be. Krysty had calculated toting the massive box would tend to keep him out of trouble.

  “And speaking of the devil,” Doc said, nodding toward the end of the center farthest from the entrance, “here we behold Baron Doyle himself, emerging at his leisure from his annex to tend to serious business.”

  He looked at Ryan. “Are you sure this is wise?”

  “No,” Ryan said. “That’s why we’ve got insurance.”

  * * *

  IT STILL SURPRISED Ricky Morales that the wooden stair around the corner of the big trade center was left unguarded, but Jak had spent a whole day watching the place from the surrounding hills and confirmed it was true.

  When they had first met, the young albino had treated Ricky—only a handful of years younger at sixteen—as a rival and unwelcome. But then Ricky had demonstrated his worth, saving the lives of his companions—and Jak himself—during the course of guiding the party around the mountains of his home island of Puerto Rico. By the time it came to jump out of the place outlanders called Monster Island, by means of the magical secret mat-trans network by which Ryan and his friends traveled the Deathlands, they had accepted the boy as one of them.

  Jak and he were fast friends now. It was inevitable, he supposed. They were by far the closest together in age. Everyone else in the group seemed old to him, although none had lost much vigor. Not even Doc, who looked to be a hundred to Ricky’s young eyes.

  A pair of guards stood at the main entrance to the center, sure enough, giving the hard eye to the crowd queued outside hugging themselves and stamping their feet against what seemed to Ricky to be unendurable cold. One of them had a Mini-14 longblaster, the other a remade machine pistol, all right angles and perforated barrel with a folding metal stock, that Ricky recognized as a 9 mm Karl Gustav M/45.

  Ricky knew a lot about weapons. To the despair of his pacifistic and respectable parents, he had always been far more at home in his uncle’s metal shop than helping them and his adored older sister, Yami, stocking shelves and sweeping floors in the shop they ran in his home ville of Nuestra Señora. Eventually José and María Elena Morales had given in to the inevitable and acquiesced to his becoming apprentice to his Uncle Benito, the town mechanic—and weaponsmith.

  In the end, when El Guapo’s coldheart army came to punish Nuestra Señora for refusing to submit to the rule of its self-proclaimed general, neither passivity nor spirited resistance had sufficed to save either Ricky’s parents or his uncle. He felt again the agony of seeing his parents brutally murdered by El Guapo’s shark-toothed sec boss Tiburón, and his beautiful sister kidnapped.

  He had seen both evil ones paid back with interest, but he hadn’t been able to rescue his sister, whom he’d learned had been sold into slavery. He had been unable to trace her further; but the desire to one day find her trail, find her and liberate her was never far from his conscious mind.

  With a well-rehearsed effort of will he pushed those memories back into his subconscious. He had a task to perform. His new friends—his new family—relied upon him.

  With a last quick look around—trying not to look as suspicious as humanly possible—Ricky moved up the rickety wood steps as fast he could. They creaked alarmingly, but since well-armed sec men tramped up and down them many times a day, he doubted his own lesser weight would challenge their load-bearing capabilities. Not even with the burden strapped to his back.

  As for the noises, the cold, impatient mob awaiting entry to the trade center was more than enough to cover those. Still, each little wood squeal was like a fear-dagger to his heart.

  The door, as Jak reported, was locked with a dead bolt. Among the many marvelous arts his new mentor, J. B. Dix, was teaching him was the skill of picking locks. The Armorer disdained the use of lockpick guns as for those who needed to substitute predark tech for skill. Regardless of which, he’d provided one to Ricky, with training and assurance it would serve to get him in. Ricky had talent, as he did for anything to do with machines, but his skill wasn’t yet great. And J.B. was no man to let scruples get in the way of survival.

  Ricky was especially fearful of being spotted breaking into the second-story door. He somehow managed not to hunch over the lock like a total burglar on the little wood platform at the top of the stairs.

  Nor did it turn out he needed to. It took a quick poke of the predark gun and the lock clunked open. He could hardly have gotten in more quickly and slickly had he had the key.

  Inside was empty. There was usually a sec man watching the floor from the little wood booth built out over the concrete floor of the converted industrial building. But he usually got there a bit late, apparently confident the baron, who entered always from the building’s other end, wouldn’t find out.

  Fortunately the door locked on the inside with a twist-knob, not a key. Ricky locked it behind him. He hoped the guard took his time.

  Unslinging his precious burden—the legacy of his beloved uncle, who had made it with his own capable hands, and Ricky’s less capable but avid help—Ricky moved to the chair waiting below the window looking out over the center’s interior.

  * * *

  “SO, GENTLEMEN,” the man said, smiling through a gray-dusted ginger beard, “ladies. What treasures did you bring me today?”

  “Same as we agreed on, Baron,” Ryan said in a level voice.

  Baron Murv Doyle of Doylesville was a big man, made bulkier by the wolfskin coat he wore with the silver and black fur on the outside. Rumor had it he added to his natural mass, abundant in fat and muscle both, with a Kevlar bullet-resistant vest worn under his shirt. Ryan was inclined to believe it simply because of his willing
ness to expose his person in spite of his doubtful reputation. A tall black Astrakhan hat added half a foot to an already impressive six-four or -five frame.

  Ryan guessed the outfit was calculated as much for psychological effect as it was for warmth. As, for that matter, was the chill inside the trade center. And the massive presence of sec men with blasters in hand. Everything was designed to keep those who had come to do business with the baron and his minions as uncomfortable and off balance as possible.

  That didn’t work as far as Ryan was concerned, or, so he reckoned, his companions. They’d been cold before, and they’d faced bigger, more threatening presences than Murv Doyle without letting themselves get intimidated.

  Ryan nodded over his shoulder. With a relieved grunt Jak placed his burden on the heavy hardwood table in front of Doyle. The grim-looking sec men flanking the baron started forward, then relaxed. Their boss, Tug, who stood right behind the baron’s left shoulder, remained still, his grin fixed through his own ash-blond beard, his gray shark eyes glittering like the ball bearings they resembled. The sec chief looked to be about the same height as his boss, if you subtracted the tall woolly hat. His own hair was close-cropped and retreating back onto a narrow skull. The ring in his left earlobe glinted like steel as if to add to his impression of having iron in more than just his blood.

  “Here,” Ryan said. “We promised to trade twenty prime grens. Ten frag, five concussion and five tear gas.”

  “Where’d you get them?” Tug asked.

  J.B. produced a brief chuckle. “Somewhere you wouldn’t want to go,” he said.

  Tug glared at the Armorer, who failed to quail. The little, unassuming man in the battered fedora, scuffed leather jacket and wire-rimmed specs didn’t look at all intimidating. He didn’t try to. He was also as tough a customer as Ryan had ever encountered in his years spent knocking around the Deathlands.

  Instead, J.B. took a dried apple from his jacket pocket. He examined it without favor and bit into it.

  Ignoring the byplay, the baron opened the box and reached inside. Black-gloved fingers picked up first a spherical frag, then a cylindrical concussion gren. He held the latter up to examine it in the morning light drifting through the wire mesh over the windows.