by James Axler
“I don’t rightly see how we’re gonna get them all that way, period,” Ryan admitted. “But I take your point.”
He was starting to wonder himself how he’d get this whole traveling circus across the continent. There were going to be a dozen wags in the convoy, minimum. That meant drivers as well as sec men and the wrenches Dan talked about bringing along. Just keeping them from wandering off to pee at night and getting eaten by muties was going to be a handful. To say nothing of keeping them all safe in the face of what were certain to be concerted efforts to wipe them out by wild animals, coldhearts, and the furies of Nature. And the problem of feeding them all....
“Sure glad logistics aren’t our problem, huh?” said J.B.
Ryan grunted. “When rations start to run low, it’s gonna become our problem in a nuke of a hurry.”
J.B. shrugged, then tensed like a hunting dog spotting a pheasant.
“What’re those wags there?” he asked Dan, peering the tail end of the well-used bus.
“Under the tarps? Well, yeah, I reckon you gents would be interested in those. Ladies, too, mebbe. We moved ’em out here this morning so’s to have more room to work on the cargo trucks.”
“What are they?” Ricky asked.
“Come look.”
Dan rolled on to the second of the trucks parked nose-to-tail and started yanking at the tarps.
J.B. looked at Ryan and nodded. “That an M-249?” Ryan asked.
“Guess so.”
“You guess so?” Ricky yelped.
Dan shrugged. “Well, you know. It’s a blaster. They told me to mount it good and solid, so we did. Got a pillar bolted to the bed. Got it fixed to the pillar with a pintle setup. Should be able to shoot all around.”
“You’ll want to mount some kind of stop up front, if you haven’t already,” J.B. said. Like the mechanic, he was ignoring Ricky’s look of openmouthed outrage at Dan’s characterization of the 5.56 mm machine gun as “blaster.” Especially since Ricky was probably familiar with the piece only through illustrations in old books or brittle magazines. “Stop your gunners from blasting your own cab by accident when things get interesting.”
Dan’s eyebrows crawled up toward the center part of his long brown hair. “You’re right, man. Never thought of that.”
“You do what you do. You know wags better than blasters, right? That’s your job.”
J.B. meant that at sincere praise, Ryan knew, and Dan took it as such. Ryan reckoned those two were going to get on ace in the line.
Himself and Cable, he wasn’t so sure about.
“Thanks,” Dan said with a big smile. “And since you seem to appreciate blasters as well as wags, you’re really gonna love this other little gem. It impresses even me.”
With a certain dramatic flair he whipped the tarps away from the lead wag.
“Whoa,” Ricky breathed.
“I see what you mean,” Ryan said.
“Ma Deuce,” J.B. said with something akin to reverent joy. “Ryan, I’m starting to think we just might be able to pull this off after all.”
“Gives us a leg up,” Ryan admitted. “This boss of yours seems to have put a lot in building up for this little trip to the coast.”
“Oh, yeah.” Dan clambered over the side of the pickup bed to wipe some condensation from the boxy receiver of the heavy machine gun. “Worked for it for twenty years, I hear. Course, I ain’t been with him half that long. But I seen it, too. Put everything he could squirrel away toward building up for the big day. And now I reckon it’s about to come.”
J.B. climbed in after him to examine the blaster. Given the joyful look on the Armorer’s face, Ryan reckoned the piece met his approval, from a mechanical and weapon smithing point of view. While he knew a thing or two about blasters himself, Ryan was more than content to trust his friend’s assessment. So he didn’t climb up in the truck bed himself.
“What happening?” Jak asked.
Ryan turned to see the albino youth frowning toward the door that opened directly from the rear of Croom’s store to the yard. A short-haired woman in an apron had come out and was talking to a couple of workers. By the way she waved her hands she was agitated.
“Trouble,” Krysty said.
J.B. straightened from bending over the .50’s receiver and turned, frowning.
At the same time Ryan felt a tingle creeping down his spine. Jak had a keen nose for danger.
“Gather up, people,” Ryan rasped. “I think we’re about to start earning our keep.”
* * *
KRYSTY SENSED the tension as soon as they entered the shop from the storeroom.
She sized up the tableau they found in a glance. Bass stood behind the counter with Cable by his side, both tense and frowning. Confronting them across the glass-fronted case stood a man almost as tall as the merchant, and much rounder—seriously fat, not merely lugging a middle-aged paunch. He was dressed in fancy scavenged clothes, with a white shirt and a string tie and a little black hat. Two obvious sec men stood flanking him.
Monty Croom, slouched in front of the fat man in the dapper duds looking like nothing so much as a dog caught pooping on a rug.
“Kid works fast,” she heard J.B. mutter behind her. “We met him here less than an hour ago, and now he’s gone somewhere else and got his ass caught in a crack.”
The four sec men gave hard eyes to the newcomers. The men were extra large, with necks wider than their mostly shaved heads. Krysty was glad neither Croom nor Cable’s taste ran along those lines for their sec crew: they were well-muscled bullies, who’d eat like boar hogs and whose guts would turn to water when real, live stickies started dropping on them from the trees.
Their obese boss’s little glittery dark eyes never flickered from Bass’s face. Clearly he paid his bullies to deal with riffraff like Ryan Cawdor and his friends.
That thought put her at serious risk of laughing out loud.
“All right, Morgan,” Bass said steadily. “I paid up the debts Morty ran up on your tables. That means we’re square.”
Morgan smiled beneath an oily-looking mustache. He looked at Krysty as if he had made careful study of villains in popular predark entertainment. Then went all out to emulate them.
“That’s not the way I see it,” he said. “I think you need to fork over a lot more.”
“And how do you reckon that?”
“Easy, boss.” That was Cable. “Morgan’s got a big crew backing him, too. With us already lame ducks in Menaville, could be the balance of Baron Billy’s favor has shifted.”
Krysty felt surprise. That was a shrewder assessment of the situation than she’d expected from the goateed sec boss. Also, since he seemed to have a bit of insecure swagger about him, she hadn’t expected him to advise caution. He apparently took his job seriously, meaning that he owed what he saw as the hard truth to his employer, no matter the cost to his pride.
“You got it, Earring Boy,” Morgan said.
He turned to Croom. “You ain’t the Big Fish in Menaville no more. You paid Baron Billy for his permission to leave. Now you’re gonna pay me. Plenty.”
“I don’t think so.”
That was Ryan, stepping forward around the counter.
“Who asked you, scumbag?” asked the goon to Morgan’s right. He was dark, with a mustache even grander than his boss’s, and more black stubble on his heavy cheeks than on his head.
Ryan ignored him. Planting himself firmly in front of the gambling-house owner, he said, “Mr. Croom paid you what you’re owed. Leave, now.”
That was Krysty’s cue. She stepped up, grabbed Morty by the collar and yanked him bodily away from his captors. She passed the kid back to Mildred, who towed him behind the counter. It wasn’t so much a matter of keeping him safe. It was about keeping him out of the way.<
br />
The richly dressed fat man had definitely noticed Ryan now. Fixing him with a red-eyed glare, he said, “Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to, you scabby-assed, one-eyed cocksu—”
Ryan shot a straight right fist into the middle of the man’s fat face.
Chapter Eight
Morgan’s nose squashed like a boot-stomped tomato. It felt good beneath Ryan’s fist. So did the hot blood squirting over it.
Plenty happened at once.
The Mex-looking coldheart turned, cocking a fist to blast Ryan, who was waiting for just that—he seemed the most self-aware of the quartet. He gave the man a swift shin in the crotch. The mustached and stubbled man bent over clutching himself and groaning.
The big lighter-skinned guy on Morgan’s other side, who had tribal tattoos all swirled up the sides of his own shaved dome, closed quickly on Ryan from the right.
As the one-eyed man tried to turn in time to counter his charge, something zipped over his shoulder and hit Tattoo Head in the mouth. Something crunched, and the sec man sat as emphatically as his boss had.
Ryan stepped back, looking for other threats, and found Morgan’s other two goons standing stock-still. One had the tip of Jak’s big bowie-bladed fighting knife pressed hard into the crotch of his jeans, and Jak giving him a big, evil grin from the region of his breastbone.
The other was staring cross-eyed at Doc’s LeMat handblaster, less than a foot from his much broken nose.
“You have a choice to make, my lad,” Doc said. “Do you prefer a third eye? The top barrel will provide that. The lower one will perform a clean amputation of your entire head at this range. I am willing to accommodate you in either way.”
The sec man held up his hands. Ryan saw the crotch of his jeans suddenly darken as his bladder let go in sheer panic.
The man who’d been punched by Ryan was outraged. “Bastard kid took my teeth!” he roared. He seemed to be foaming at the mouth, with weird pink froth covering his beard and dripping down the front of his black T-shirt.
Mildred hurried past Ryan and swung the steel-shod toe of her right combat boot into the rising sec man’s already injured mouth. He fell, stunned, onto the floorboards.
“Looks like you lost more teeth there, bozo,” she said, standing over his supine form. “If you want, I can borrow some pliers from the grease monkeys and extract the rest of them for you.”
“I didn’t know you were a dentist as well as a healer, my dear Mildred,” Doc said.
She crossed her arms and leaned against his side, being careful not to disturb his outsize revolver’s aim at the bridge of the sec man’s nose.
“It’s more like a hobby with me, Doc,” she said.
Krysty had stepped up to stand to Ryan’s right. The dark-skinned dude whose balls he’d kicked in suddenly started to straighten. His right arm came up, too—with a handblaster clutched in his fist.
As the blaster rose toward Ryan, Krysty moved like lightning. Her red hair contracting to a cap around her skull, she sidestepped left, reaching across her body to seize the man’s gun wrist with her right hand. Pushing the muzzle toward the general store’s ceiling, she twisted her hips clockwise. Her hand yanked the sec man’s arm, locking the elbow, which she continued her powerful hip turn to break with a savage left forearm bar. The blaster bounced off the floor. The man joined it at once, crumpled and gobbling like a turkey in pain.
That was everybody. Mildred had drawn her Czech handblaster. J.B. had stepped up alongside Krysty with his scattergun leveled.
Ryan turned back toward Bass Croom. Cable stood protectively in front of him.
“Wanted to see what you people could do,” the sec chief said with a taut grin. “Looks as if you know what you’re doing.”
Ryan frowned, but he couldn’t call the man out over that. His job was to protect his boss at all costs; he’d done that by putting his body between the trader and harm. And he didn’t owe Ryan and his bunch jackshit, as yet.
None of which meant it tasted good on Ryan’s tongue. But there was no point in pissing and moaning about it, either. Things would shake into smooth working order between them and Cable’s bunch. Or they wouldn’t. Dealing with either eventuality was the job they’d signed on for.
He noticed that a heavy square glass jar lay on the floor near the man with the smashed-out teeth. Its lid had come off and it had spilled white powder onto the planks.
“Who threw that, anyway?” Ryan said. “That was pretty good work. Also, good aim.”
Bass Croom had recovered his good nature. He hadn’t made a move during the brief scuffle, either. Then again that wasn’t his job. Ryan still didn’t much doubt the big merchant could handle himself in a scrape if he had to.
He showed Ryan a big white-toothed grin and clapped Ricky Morales on the shoulder. “Your boy here did that. I thought he was just a tag-along, but he showed me he pulls his weight.”
Bass nodded. “I think you’ll do. Dace?”
Cable nodded, but his eyes were hard on Ryan’s face.
Morgan sat on his broad butt staring in sheer terror at the carnage around him.
“Listen up and listen close,” Ryan told him. “Gather up your friends and leave. Now. Be glad you and they can.
“And if you think to round up more of your gaudy bouncers and try your luck again, we’ll just chill them all, shoot you in the belly, set fire to your gaudy house and toss your carcass inside. This will happen. So if you want more, you’d best just step up now and face me man to man. Dying’ll hurt less that way, and waste less of our time.”
“I—”
Bass stepped past Ryan to extend a hand to his fallen rival. Morgan glared at it a furious heartbeat, then he wised up and took it.
The merchant hauled his bulk back upright with barely a huff of effort.
“You should hear the man, Morgan,” he said. “He means it. And I think you know he and his crew can back it up. And my bunch will help.
“You got the money Morty owed you. And we’ll be gone from here tomorrow morning. So you’ll pretty much have the ville to yourself. You and Baron Billy, that is. So do us all a favor and head on back to the Busted Flush, now.”
Morgan did that. His two injured goons supported each other. The ones who had given up without needing have anything broken took up position on either side of their master, tight jawed and narrow-eyed. They group marched right out the door into the afternoon light. Or stumbled, as the case may be.
“What is that stuff in that jar, anyway?” J.B. asked, lowering his shotgun as the door closed behind the busted-up sec men.
“Baking powder,” Bass said.
Most of the companions laughed at that, but Ryan looked their new employer square in the eye.
“We roll tomorrow morning?” he asked. “That’s your plan.”
Bass smiled. “It is now.”
* * *
“SO WHO’D BE stupid enough to ride on top of a big old rolling firebomb?” Mildred asked.
Ryan glanced at her. She stood in the yard beside the fuel tanker, squinting up through bright morning sunlight at the sandbag nests atop it without evident favor.
The one-eyed man stepped up beside her. “That would be me,” he said, deadpan.
She turned him a look of wide-eyed amazement. “You’ve got to be joking!”
“How often does Ryan kid about that kind of thing, Mildred?” J.B. asked. “Besides, the ‘bomb’ part is the least of his worries. If anybody cares to take us on, one of their first objectives is gonna be the gas that puppy’s carrying.”
“If the stickies pull their drop-down-from-the-branches stunt on the convoy,” Ryan said, “I want to be one of the first to welcome the bastards.”
“You’re still spouting that tree-climbing stickie crap?” Cable whinnied a la
ugh through his thin nose. Ryan reflected that it had apparently never been broken.
Yet.
“Listen, man,” the sec boss said, swaggering close. “You got the job. You don’t have to go on with all the Deathlands tall tales. Stickies in trees? Wearing camou, were they?”
Ryan said nothing. He only turned and climbed up the steel handholds to the top of the tanker. He carried a light detachable bag on his back with extra ammo magazines for his weapons, and several full canteens.
Along the top of the tank ran a flat walkway. The sandbagged “hardpoints” were near the front and rear. They didn’t look any harder up here than they sounded on the ground.
Ryan went to the rear nest and deposited his bag. Then, unslinging his Steyr Scout longblaster, he stood. He wasn’t concerned. As J.B. had pointed out, nobody was likely to shoot at the major prize of the whole rad-blasted convoy.
And the first enemy they were liable to face didn’t use blasters.
He grinned into the early morning breeze that blew unimpeded across the top of the fence. Stickies don’t have blasters yet, he told himself. They didn’t used to climb trees or camouflage themselves, either.
“Hello!” he heard a voice call.
Despite the grumble of engines as the last of the cargo wags pulled into the open yard, the call was audible. It came in a female voice, high but not shrill, as crisp as a bell ringing.
He looked toward the rear of the shop. A figure had stepped out the door that led directly to the yard. It was tall and slim. The brown jacket, trousers and boots did nothing to conceal that it was feminine, albeit on the slim side.
“What can we do for you, Miss?” Bass asked, striding across the lot toward her. He wore his usual wolfskin coat and dark brown hat. It seemed that even though he was just about to relinquish his role as general-store owner for Menaville forever, he found it hard to break the habits involved.
The newcomer came to meet him halfway. She moved with brisk, long-legged strides, and a grace that made Ryan’s eyebrows raise. She carried herself like a trained fighter.
