by James Axler
Naturally they hadn’t intended to give over all the best grens they found to the baron, presuming he kept his deal, but of course he hadn’t. There were a few in the trove they had discovered that held little market value.
But that didn’t mean they weren’t valuable.
Ryan nodded. Grinning still wider, Jak yanked the pin from the cylindrical gren and lobbed the bomb underhanded into the middle of the concrete floor. It bounced off a table stacked with piles of cloth and garments, some scavvy, some recently put together.
The shoppers had begun to pick themselves off the floor where they dropped when the shooting started. Now those near the gren began to yelp in shrill terror.
But Ryan wasn’t going to blow up random customers of the Doylesville trade center not without a good purpose, at least. And anyway the blast radius of a gren was too limited, and the confines of the center way too big, for a frag to take down more than a single sec man. They were too spread out even to hope to bring down two. And even that wouldn’t trim the odds against the group surviving enough to count.
But instead of exploding, the gren suddenly erupted in a giant cloud of dense white smoke.
Cries of “Gas!” pealed out even as the smoke spread across the floor, hiding most of the shoppers from Ryan’s sight. It may have been that some of the first voices to yell the word belonged to his own friends, namely J.B. and Mildred.
Of course it wasn’t. It was just a smoke gren, doing what a smoke gren was meant to do—foul the bad guys’ line of sight, allowing the good guys to shift elsewhere in a hurry with a much reduced chance of stopping any stray large metal particulates moving at high speed.
The last sec man in view at least knew that was no toxic-gas bomb. He swung his pump-action shotgun toward Ryan, who already had his P-226 leveled and ready.
He gave the sec man a double tap, aimed at his chest. Ryan shot left-handed freehand almost as well as he shot with his right hand properly braced in shooting stance. The sec man fell. His shotgun blasted its loads toward the steel rafters. Ryan heard the zing of a couple of buckshot pellets ricocheting.
“Out the back!” he shouted.
He and his friends ran for the baron’s personal entrance in the rear. They raced right past the man, who hadn’t managed to bleed out yet, which was good. As long as he was still hollering, his bodyguards would be reluctant to start blazing away at random through the smoke screen that was slowly filling the entire hall.
As Ryan drew alongside Doyle, the baron’s head jerked sideways. His eyes bulged unnaturally far from their sockets. Blood shot out one temple.
Doyle’s screams cut off. Ryan knew at once—by a .45-caliber bullet, not moving fast enough to exit Murv Doyle’s skull on the far side—the sniper was a well-aimed by an equally well-meaning Ricky Morales.
“Fireblast!” Ryan cursed. But there was no helping it now.
Somebody had the door open. He was the last man through, coming right behind Krysty.
He couldn’t help noticing that the rear door of the trade center opened into a small but luxuriously appointed office, with a potbellied stove merrily giving out the heat from one corner that the baron cunningly denied his customers out in the center itself. He even had scavvied oak veneer paneling the walls around his big desk, which was piled high with papers and ledgers.
There would be excellent plunder here, Ryan knew, but without another thought he followed his friends without slowing around the desk and out the open back door into the frigid embrace of a Zark spring morning.
* * *
WITHOUT A RUSTLE of branches Jak Lauren stepped into the small clearing.
“No follow,” he said in his abbreviated speech.
“Well,” J.B. said, tipping his hat back up on his forehead and gazing down the narrow forested valley they had just climbed. “That went well.”
Mildred scowled at him. J.B. was capable of dry and cutting wit, but the man sounded as if he meant it.
“Are you a few rounds short of a full mag, John?” she demanded. “That went just about as far sideways as a deal could possibly go!”
“We’re alive, Millie,” J.B. said mildly—and unrepentantly. He gave her a placid smile and slapped the heavy steel box he held beneath one arm. “Plus we still got these prime grens.”
“Indeed,” Doc said.
His blue eyes were still shining brightly from his wrinkled face. Sometimes after the heat of battle wore off he lapsed into the vagueness that often beset him, deeper and longer than his usual bouts. But now he still seemed hyped-up. Maybe the several hours they’d spent fleeing at a brisk pace from the scene of their latest adventure still had him worked up enough to stay focused in the here and now, and not wander off along the mists of time that always swirled in his mind.
And never had the trite phrase “mists of time” been so literal. While Mildred had slept the years from her own time away as a frozen near-corpse, Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been snatched from his happy home and trolled away through time by the whitecoats who ran Operation Chronos, the same ultrasecret late-twentieth Century project that created the mat-trans gateway network that enabled the companions to travel instantaneously among redoubts scattered all across North America and indeed the globe.
Doc’s time had been the mid-1890s. After using and abusing him as a test subject, the whitecoats had dumped him in the hopeless future of Deathlands.
“Still, we managed to come away intact only through our quick wits and skills,” Doc went on, “and the fact that our esteemed leader possesses what my contemporaries would have called the Devil’s own luck. Mostly the latter, I fear.”
“Any fuck up we can walk away from,” Ryan said, still frowning back the way they had come, “is, well, we walked away.”
“With all our parts,” J.B. added.
Once they got into the woods on the slopes close to the trade center, they had slowed, seeing no sign of pursuit. Clearly the loud and sudden fall of Baron Doyle and his sec chief had caused disorder in the ville.
“Why aren’t they chasing us?” Mildred demanded.
“We don’t know that they aren’t,” J.B. said. “They’re just not close, is what Jak’s saying.”
“I don’t know what other kind of powerful types were in the ville,” Ryan said thoughtfully. He had been born and raised a baron’s son—before a brother’s treachery robbed him of his family, his inheritance and his left eye.
“I don’t reckon Doyle would’ve allowed too many to get big enough to threaten him,” Ryan said. “But he may have had family. One way or another, there’ll be a struggle for power. He’s got too sweet a deal, the way he’s got that ville beat down. Someone’ll step in and take control.”
“Power vacuum, you mean,” Mildred said.
Ryan shrugged. “Not sure there’s really such a thing. But here—I guess. Might as well call it that as any other thing.”
“What you’re saying, lover,” Krysty said, “is that whoever does succeed Doyle may not be all that eager to hunt down the people who gave him that power. Or her.”
“We have learned how far we can rely on the gratitude of barons,” Doc said.
“We can’t know,” Ryan said. “There are plenty of reasons whoever takes charge might decide to run us down hard and fast.”
“So what do we do?” Mildred asked. “Sadly there’s no handy-dandy gateway anywhere within a fifty-mile radius.”
“I would suggest we relocate as expeditiously as might be,” Doc suggested, “both from the immediate environs and from the Ozark region as a whole.”
“For once I agree with you,” Mildred said. “We ought to get out of here.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
Right about then Mildred realized how little her aching buttocks and trembling legs cared for that notion. You had to go and open your big mouth,
she reproached herself. Then she realized there would be plenty of time to rest her tired walking muscles. Once she was dead.
“Where there’s a will...” she murmured.
“What’s that, Millie?”
“Never mind, J.B.”
“One thing before we go,” J.B. said, turning to the group in general. “Ricky, that was a pretty sweet shot you put through the baron’s head back there.”
Ricky had been sitting on the winter-brittle humus floor of the clearing. He had been worn down by the exertion of the rapid, mostly upward hike, under the weight of his blasters and his still mostly full pack of spare 10-round ammo mags. He wasn’t yet as trail-toughened as his companions.
But now he jumped to his feet. His olive cheeks flushed pink. Mildred saw him visibly inflate with pride at his mentor’s praise.
Too bad he doesn’t see the needle coming as clearly as I do, she thought.
She even knew what it would be, little as she cared for it.
“Thing is,” J.B. went on, as gentle as ever, “when you got an enemy squalling and carrying-on like, you don’t want to chill him, as a general rule. He tends to distract the other side. Demoralize them, remind them the kind of hurt we can lay on them.
“And you don’t want to chill an injured, screaming man when he’s important. Not to mention when the very fact he’s still alive and hollering is mebbe all that’s keeping a dozen sec men from cutting loose through that little smoke screen we laid down and cutting us all to pieces. Got that?”
Ricky’s utter deflation would’ve been comical if it wasn’t so heartbreaking. And for the fact that for a moment Mildred thought his own tired legs would give out on him completely and she’d have to catch him to keep him from going down and maybe cracking his head on a hidden rock. He sort of fell in on himself, and his black bangs fell to hide his downturned face, which Mildred suspected as beginning to leak water from around the eyes.
Doc stepped up and laid a reassuring hand on Ricky’s slumped shoulder.
“Take heart, lad,” he said. “You did most noble work on our behalf, prior to that little faux pas. Even the fact you inadvertently wound up drawing the attention of our foes to yourself by firing your revolver helped save our bacon.
“And remember—no one is born knowing all these things. Not even our esteemed leader.”
“Yeah,” Ryan grunted. “So now you know.”
His lone eye blazed like a blue searchlight sweeping over the others. “And now we move.”
“Which way, kemo sabe?” Mildred asked.
“South,” Ryan said without hesitation.
“Why south, lover?” Krysty asked with a smile.
“Packs are cached that way.”
“And one way seems as good as the next,” Doc said. “As long as it be away from Doylesville.”
“I hear ya,” J.B. said.
“Enough jawing,” Ryan rasped. “Get walking!”
Chapter Four
“So I hear tell you’re fixing to leave fair Menaville.”
From the neatly raked gravel-covered walkway, Bastion “Bass” Croom looked up at the dried, spare figure rocking on a chair on the porch of the two-story frame house with the steep slate roof. It wasn’t much to look at. Neither was the wrinklie wrapped with a horse blanket over his legs. But he was the most powerful man in this part of the Ouachita Range, here south of the Zarks, and absolute baron of Menaville.
Bass nodded judiciously. “You hear correctly, Baron Billy.”
His breath came in puffs. Though spring was clearly on the way, it was still a chilly morning in the wooded Ouachita hills among which Menaville nestled.
Baron Billy Howe looked stern. He was well equipped to do that. He had never been a soft man, nor a very handsome one. But the way age had shrunk his pale, leathery hide made his square chin jut and turned his cheekbones into big high flanges, gave an added authority to the hot blue glare of his eyes.
“And how in the name of glowing night shit is Menaville supposed to get by without the commerce your emporium and trade caravans bring us if you up and leave, Bass?”
Bass smiled through his beard. He was no longer the slim youth he had been years before, age having had the exact opposite effect on him as on the baron. It had left him with a big heavy face and a substantial gut beneath his long black coat. But he was fast enough with his fists or his ParaOrdnance .45 handblaster at need, powerful with the one and lethal-accurate with the other.
He preferred not to use either. He preferred plain talk and fair dealing. Standing by those preferences had made him a very rich man.
They hadn’t sufficed to allow him to sleep each night untroubled by bad dreams, though. And now, as he approached the culmination of his own long cherished dream, the nightmares were growing worse.
It was the burden he bore for a sin he could never wash away.
“Just as Menaville and her people have prospered for years under the wise and enlightened rule of their baron,” he said, “they will find a way to do so without me.”
Baron Billy uttered a dry caw of laughter.
“Horseshit, Bass,” he said. “I never liked you worth a pinch of dried owl shit. Nor you me. But I always thought we respected each other. Enough so you wouldn’t try to go and soft-soap an old man like that.”
Bass laughed. “Habit,” he said. “My momma raised me to be polite.”
“Mine didn’t,” the baron said. “She raised me to be a real coldhearted ring-tailed squealer of a son of a bitch. Served me well when I had to scratch and claw my way to the top of the heap in this here ville!”
He scowled ferociously at Bass, with his bushy white brows crunched way down over eyes as bright and merciless as a mountain sky in a bleak winter. Many strong men withered under that baronial glare. Bass didn’t.
He’d had worse from the crusty old bastard.
“Well,” Baron Billy said, “I reckon neither one of us did too bad for hisself, walking different ways as we have our whole cussed lives.”
“No,” Bass said, “we haven’t. And I meant what I said before, our differences notwithstanding.”
And he had. He couldn’t altogether approve of Billy Howe, or any baron, likely. But he knew from bitter experience what a bad baron was like.
Howe wasn’t bad. For his breed. He was harsh but never cruel. He could be arbitrary but seldom deliberately unfair. He brooked no opposition, and had been known to crush men on suspicion; but he had also suppressed the coldheart gangs that preyed on the trade caravans and the outlying homesteads. He had stolen little enough and allowed his subjects enough latitude that they had done well, overall.
He even held to a rough code of honor beyond plain self-interest, unlike most barons of Croom’s experience, and at least made an effort to keep his word, which being said, Bass reckoned he’d be a triple fool to stake his life on either.
Clutching the arms of his rocker with bare old knobby hands blue-white in the morning cold, the baron leaned forward with a predator’s smile.
“And what do you want from me, Big Fish?” he asked. “I know you wouldn’t wander into my sight otherwise, unless I ordered you here.”
Bass’s jaw set briefly, a tic he hoped his beard hid. He hated that nickname, and the one sure way to get a good feel for the temper he usually held in check with an iron hand was to use it in his hearing. Baron Billy wasn’t above showing that he held the whip hand.
“As you know well, Baron,” Bass said, “these stickie attacks have only gotten worse the past several seasons, in spite of all efforts to stop them.”
The baron’s already taut face clenched like a fist at that comment. The “all efforts” to deal with the colony of stickies were those of the Menaville sec boss, Morson, and his men. Baron Billy hated to fail, and hated being reminded of it.
Croom wasn’t a spiteful man by nature, but neither was he anybody’s damn doormat.
The baron’s glare didn’t transmute to angry words. He was a man capable of seeing the truth when it was plain as a blaster in the face. More, he was that rarity, a man capable of accepting that truth no matter how little he liked the look of it. It made him unusually capable and also dangerous. But seldom, Bass knew, to the person with balls to tell him that truth.
“My own losses of goods, wags and men to the muties have gone up steadily, despite my own ever-increasing security.” Having made his point, Bass felt no hesitation admitting his own failure. He made it a practice to take truth when he found it, too. “I’m tired of absorbing those losses, losing good people, as well as throwing good jack after bad trying to hold them down.”
“Nonetheless, I’ll say it again—you’re no poor man, Bass Croom.”
“I’m not. I’m also not as young as I used to be. I’m getting tired of waging that particular losing battle, Baron. I mean to retire.”
Baron Billy’s eyes narrowed to slits that blazed like furnace vents. “And how do you mean to spend that retirement?” he asked.
While there had never been any question who held the ultimate power in Menaville since Billy Howe came into possession of it, there was also no doubt who held the second most power. Bass Croom’s honesty, integrity and calm strength of character made him by far the most influential man in the ville, surrounding settlements and homesteads after the baron, long before Bass became the wealthiest man in the Ouachitas. Indeed it was those traits and the consequent influence that made it possible for him to become so rich.
And for all their mutual respect, Bass and Billy had butted heads more often than not over the years. It was no exaggeration to say that Bass was the ville’s foremost check on Billy’s harshness—and incipient paranoia. As strong as he was, the baron had never had enough power to crush the merchant. And he was wise enough to know not to try.
Also too smart. Aside from the risk, small but unacceptable, that he’d lose such a showdown, the baron saw clearly what a hit Menaville’s prosperity—hence his own—would take if Bass Croom was successfully removed from the scene.
