by James Axler
The pack on her back was surprisingly small. She was clearly accustomed to packing light. Although there was nothing light about the black single-action revolver in a well-weathered cross-draw holster in front of her left hip.
“Are you Mr. Croom?” she asked, meeting the merchant right beside the tanker. She stuck out a gloved hand. “My name is Olympia. I want to buy passage with your convoy.”
Bass enfolded her hand in both his own, which were made even larger by his gloves. Her hand seemed slight in comparison to the merchant’s huge paws. Yet the woman herself seemed not at all overmatched by either the merchant’s bulk or presence. For one thing, she stood almost as tall as he did.
“Please to meet you, Miss Olympia,” he said. “And I’m afraid that’s not going to work out. This isn’t really a passenger run.”
“I can pay.”
“You look like you can handle yourself,” Bass said. “But this isn’t going to be a solo trip through the mountains, risky as that is for a person such as yourself. We’ll be crossing the whole of the deepest, most dangerous Deathlands. And a convoy like this is going to attract trouble like a jam sandwich attracts flies.”
“I’m traveling to the Pacific Northwest,” she said, using the less common ancient term for the great Western ocean. “I understand what you say, Mr. Croom, but risks aside, I’d rather ride than walk.”
From where he sat on the top of the tanker, Ryan saw that quite a crowd was beginning to gather. Cable had joined his boss. Morty had turned up, too, openly ogling the woman in the uniformlike clothes. Ricky and Jak and materialized, as well.
Bass shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss. It would be irresponsible to subject a passenger to the sort of perils we’re certain to encounter. Anyway, we’re not exactly set up to accommodate the needs of a person such as yourself.”
She smiled. From the earlier set of her olive face, just a few shades lighter than Ricky’s, Ryan wasn’t sure that she could. At least without breaking something.
“By the looks of it, your rolling accommodations will be substantially more comfortable than what I’m accustomed to, Mr. Croom.”
She held out a gloved hand and deposited a doeskin bag in the reflexively upturned palm of Bass’s hand. By the heft, Ryan gathered it had to be filled with metal coins or chunks of gold.
Bass could no more refrain from tugging open the rawhide thong that sealed the top and peering inside than Ryan could have held back from dodging or blocking a chair thrown at his face. He was just wired that way. And while his heavy bearded face was downturned so Ryan couldn’t see the look on it from up there, the way his head suddenly pulled away from the bag, and the sudden hunch of his big shoulders, told Ryan that whatever he saw in the bag impressed him powerfully.
“I can carry my weight,” she said. “I can do camp chores, some wrench work. And I can fight. You’re going to need that. I knew before you told me.”
“Well...” Bass said.
Hefting the bag on his palm, he looked around. “Dace?”
The sec boss shrugged. “If she can handle herself and that big blaster of hers, we can use her. Although a single-action wheelgun’s a pretty odd choice for a seasoned shooter.”
“I’m comfortable with it,” Olympia said. “I don’t usually need to shoot many rounds.”
“You will this time out.”
“I’ll manage.”
Cable turned back to his boss. “I don’t think she’s gonna get in the way. She looks functional enough. I say let her come.”
“Bass,” Morty whined. That was his usual mode, Ryan had noticed; but the word had had that extra nasal edge to it that meant he was actually bitching. “Do you really have to take in every stray that wanders in out of the wasteland?”
“That’s enough, Morty.”
Bass turned to Ryan. “Mr. Cawdor?”
Ryan didn’t miss the way Cable’s brow tightened at his boss consulting the outlander. Gonna have to set things straight with that boy, soon or late, he told himself. Just hope his ego problems don’t get us chilled.
“You’re our cross-country sec expert. What do you think about taking on a passenger so late in the game?”
“As long as you think you can feed another mouth—and as long as the woman really understands what she’s getting into—then I’m with your sec boss.”
“We can’t have too many blasters.” It was J.B., ambling over from the M-2 wag to see what was happening. “Or backs bending to help heave a stuck wag out of a ditch or a mudhole.”
Olympia nodded to the little Armorer. “I’ve done that,” she said.
J.B. looked up at Ryan and nodded. Whether Croom was surprised at Ryan consulting his companion or not Ryan neither knew nor cared.
He’d made up his mind anyway on his own. But had J.B. registered a serious objection, he’d have thought it through again double-quick, and then made up his own mind again.
“I say yes,” Ryan told the trader.
Bass shrugged, then his beard split in a wide smile.
“Welcome aboard, Miss Olympia,” he said, shaking her hand again, to her apparent but quiet amusement. “Where would you care to ride among our princely conveyances?”
He turned to indicate the whole convoy with a grand sweep of his arm: the blaster wags, the half dozen cargo wags, including the supply truck; the cook-wag minivan; Bass’s lightly armored SUV and the schoolbus where most of the off-duty crew would ride and try to catch some shut-eye.
Olympia turned and without hesitation began to climb the tanker’s front rungs.
“That’s not going to be a very comfortable perch, Miss,” Bass called.
Olympia reached the top and stood to face Ryan, who looked from her to Krysty. The redhead had also moved up to hear the exchange with the newcomer, standing right behind Jak and Ricky, in case their young-man hormones got the better of them, most likely. She had given him a quick nod and a smile.
She knew she was his mate, and he hers, and was no less secure than Ryan himself.
Despite the fact that the newcomer was closely sizing Ryan up with eyes that, though darkish blue with a bit of green, like jade, had marked epicanthic folds. But Ryan sensed no sexual interest in that scrutiny, a thing he had more than a bit of experience at seeing. Instead it was the same kind of examination he was giving her, the kind that two obvious coldhearts made on first encountering each other.
“Liable to get more than uncomfortable up here,” he said. “I’m Ryan Cawdor.”
“Mr. Cawdor,” she said with a crisp nod. “I realize that. I did just walk into Menaville by myself, you know.”
Ryan grunted. He felt stupid. Of course she did.
“Your funeral,” he said, turning back to his sandbag post.
Somebody had thoughtfully added a blanket or two to the midst of it, both to cushion the occupant’s butt against the cold, hard steel and to provide added warmth against the wind of passage. Well, that was an advantage of riding with somebody as smart and seasoned as Bass Croom clearly was. He understood, bottom line, that a cold and miserable lookout and guard wasn’t looking out or guarding at peak efficiency.
“That’s what I intend to avoid, Mr. Cawdor,” Olympia called to his back. “When there’s danger, I feel much more confident facing it myself than leaving it in the hands of others.”
Had he been Dace Cable—obviously smart enough, and highly competent, but also less than fully secure—he might have bristled at the suggestion that the sec crew couldn’t protect a paying passenger.
But he wasn’t. So he simply nodded without looking back and started to get settled in.
There were a few more hang-ups. Dan Hogue and his two assistants, one male, one female, had to open the engine compartment of the so-called chuck wag to check something before clearing it to roll. But in surprisingly short order Bass Croom po
sed dramatically in the open driver’s door of his black command wag.
“Gentlemen,” he cried. “Ladies. We roll!”
Chapter Nine
The compound gates were thrown open. The lead blaster wag mounting the M-249, and manned by Cable and a female member of his sec crew, rolled out onto the streets of Menaville for the very last time.
Only half an hour late, Ryan thought, sitting in his sandbag nest with his Scout rifle cradled in his arms and his coat collar pulled up against a chill early breeze. Not bad.
The streets were lined with gawking ville folk. They burst into cheers when they saw Bass standing upright atop his slow-rolling command wag to wave goodbye with both hands.
The man knows how to make an exit, and that’s a fact, Ryan thought, craning his head out sideways so he could catch a glimpse of his boss past the battered powder-blue school bus.
He tried to ignore the fact it was Krysty riding up there, and with only Ricky with her. Ryan noticed that the youth had his own longblaster sling cinched up on his left forearm, ready to snap into firing position and take a shot. That reassured Ryan. After all, Krysty was there to provide backup to the kid with the long weapon, rather than vice versa, the way the slender, quiet woman with the long black braid was for Ryan on the tanker. A longblaster shooter could do his on her long-range work best when somebody else had his on his back. Ryan trusted seasoned veteran Krysty to handle that task. For both of them.
As for the woman called Olympia, well, Ryan would just see. What little he gathered of her, mostly watching the way she moved—and the way she scanned the crowd now, brows furrowed and eyes keen—encouraged him that if the stickies hit them, none of them would be ripping the skin off the back of Ryan’s neck with their suckered fingers while he was lost in the glass of his shooting scope.
He went back to eyeing the streets, as well. He knew that Cable and his crew were all wired-up before the convoy started to roll. Anybody would have to be stupe to the point of insane to hit such a well-armed assemblage even with the full sec force of a ville this size. For one thing, J.B., playing Tail-End Charlie in the burly Toyota wag with the M-2 mounted in the bed, could shoot through any building in Menaville, even the brick ones, and in most directions the thumb-size bullets could go through all the structures in the way and keep heading for the treeline with enough speed to spoil someone’s whole day.
Ryan didn’t know Baron Billy Howe. Croom obviously respected him more than liked him, and didn’t entirely trust him not to go jolt-walker crazy at the last moment. Ryan was leery of casino and gaudy-owner Boss Morgan. He might resent the pain of getting his nose broken and then rubbed in the dirt more than he feared the memory of how those things had happened to him.
Ryan reckoned the man was yellow deep down, a bully, nasty when he held the whip hand, and turning into runny shit when his back felt the lash. Ryan wasn’t being paid to take the safety of the convoy for granted, nor did he ever take his own, and that of his friends, either.
They made it past the outskirts of the ville without incident. If the baron came out to watch them go, Ryan didn’t notice.
The road west from Menaville, to the ruins of the old postdark Fort McIlvaine twenty miles away, wound between fairly mild hills. Actually, neither the Zarks nor the Ouachitas struck any of the group as being mountains. They had seen mountains. Even Ricky had grown up traveling through higher, steeper ones with his father on their annual donkey-train trade trips into the Monster Island interior.
The problem was that it led through fairly serious stands of timber: big hardwoods, oak mostly, with big, strong branches reaching right out over the right-of-way.
As soon as they got beneath some, Ryan started watching above to the exclusion of anywhere else. There were plenty eyes looking around at ground level. What almost everybody did always was forget to look up, which included Ryan and his friends on their trip into town.
“Good you’re watching trees.”
They were the first words Olympia had spoken to him since a brief greeting on her climb to the top of the fuel tank. He had acknowledged her with a grunt then. Now he didn’t even glance at her. He knew she was sitting alert in her own sandbag “hardpoint.”
“Stickies around the ville climb trees,” she went on.
“I know,” he said. “We met up with some on the walk in.”
“Cable didn’t believe you when you tried to tell him about that, did he?” the woman said.
“Nope.”
A high-pitched snarl of blaster fire ripped the morning air, sharp and loud above the grumble of wag engines.
“Showtime,” Olympia said, mostly to herself. When Ryan glanced briefly at her she had her funny cowboy handblaster out and ready.
It was a Ruger Blackhawk .357 Magnum. It was like Jak’s Colt Python, but unlike his, a single action, and empties could only be ejected and the cylinder reloaded a chamber at a time. It wouldn’t have been Ryan’s first choice for a blaster, nor second or tenth, no matter how much J.B. raved and Ricky nodded about what a fine and classic blaster it was. But while the blaster was slow to reload, it spoke with way more authority than that snubby Krysty carried, and held six rounds to her Smith’s five.
The Squad Automatic Weapon on the lead wag snarled again. Ryan heard other blasters thudding out single shots. All came from up ahead. Apparently J.B., who had Jak watching his back, didn’t yet see anything worth burning up his own thunder-booming cartridges on.
He didn’t hear Krysty’s distinctive .38 Special snubby yet. He heard what he reckoned for Doc’s LeMat. The older man and Mildred rode on top of cargo wags in similar sandbag nests, paired with members of Cable’s sec crew. Ryan couldn’t see them over the top of the bus.
Then the one-eyed man spotted motion—a big tree branch bobbing up and down right as the school bus was starting to roll under it. He caught the motion far enough in advance to actually bring the low-power Leupold scope to his eye rather than use the iron battle sights mounted below it.
It actually took a moment before his vision separated the branch from the being that crept along it. Its slimy hide, mottled brown and gray, was streaked by leaf mold and dirt and bird shit.
Who knew the little fuckers could learn to hide that well? he thought. Not to mention adapt.
Ryan had already let out half a quickly sucked-down breath, let more out, then held it. His gloved finger slowly squeezed the trigger. Well-made and better-tuned by the Armorer, the trigger broke crisply and cleanly. The longblaster roared and kicked Ryan in the shoulder, the barrel riding up in recoil.
A fresh round was chambered by the time the weapon came back online. He didn’t see the creeping stickie anymore, but the branch it was perched on was bouncing vigorously up and down as if recovering from just having shed a substantial weight.
Seeing no other targets when he shifted the restricted vision field of the scope he pulled his eye away from the long-relief eyepiece to take a quick look around and grab some situational awareness. Just in time to see a stickie drop down right behind Olympia.
He didn’t dare shoot. Aside from the risk that the wag might lurch in the uneven road and send a shot astray, there was the fact that at a range of not much more than twenty feet, a dead-center hit on the stickie might blow right and through and chill his companion. So he shouted a warning instead.
Most of the guards and the companions had equipped themselves with melee weapons, specifically ones that could keep a little distance between a stickie and the user’s body. Even Jak had augmented his collection of knives with a hickory ax-handle. Olympia didn’t seem to have one, despite the fact she, too, knew the stickies were there and likely to ambush them.
Apparently she had that covered after all. Without looking first, she spun. As she did, something shiny expanded in her hand into a four-foot-long steel rod that smashed the stickie right across i
ts gaping mouth. Ryan could tell its mouth was open because Olympia’s savage stroke snapped the mutie’s head around so that its huge eyes made contact with Ryan’s eye in the instant before it toppled off the catwalk to the roadside ditch.
Olympia snapped off a shot, thumbing back the hammer and firing so fast only a seasoned shooter like Ryan could even tell she’d fully extended her arm and probably caught a flash sight picture. A shit-streaked body fell writhing in front of the tanker’s tractor. The tank itself bumped ever so slightly as it ran over the stickie.
As Ryan felt it, he saw Olympia give him a quick thumbs-up from the hand that clutched the expandable steel staff she’d been carrying in a holder on her web belt. Then she turned forward and blasted again with her Blackhawk.
Ryan was already searching for more targets. As he looked right, he saw tree branches thrash along that side of the roadway. An earth-shattering roar hit his ears from the rear of the convoy as dead leaves, twigs and flailing stickies fell from the trees.
And stickie parts, along with something like black rain.
Evidently J.B. had got his driver to pull into the right-hand ditch, allowing him to cut loose alongside the convoy with the .50-caliber blaster. Since the road curved to the left ahead he had a clear line of fire. He was savaging the stickies attacking from the trees on that side.
The convoy kept rolling. Looking back Ryan saw the trail wag—J.B.’s—follow, canted to the right half in the ditch. Ryan could feel the buffeting overpressure of the Browning’s colossal muzzle-blast.
He turned his attention to the left. From the way the brush on that side was dancing, and more stickies were falling from the trees, Ryan guessed the rest of the wag’s blasters had concentrated their fire on the other side of the convoy from the .50, which was smart.
He didn’t get another target as the convoy rolled through a wider valley where the trees fell away and the dense undergrowth turned to dry grass and scattered bushes, with hills humping up to either side.
No more targets. Dropping the 10-round box magazine out of the well of his own longblaster, Ryan winced when he thought about the ammo they’d burned up in that little encounter, especially the rare ammo for the Browning .50-caliber blaster.
