by James Axler
He held up a small, flat leather packet. Random moonlight glittered on little splints of metal.
“Just as soon as I open her up with my handy hidey lockpick kit.”
* * *
RYAN STOLE down the jailhouse hallway. Aside from the dim waver of orange from a lantern in the room at the end, it was as dark as a swampie’s heart. He carried a knife with a short, wide, single-edged blade. It was one he’d held out from the inefficient frisking by their captors.
He’d left J.B. and Doc to keep the others quiet and from wandering. Croom was still in a walking trance. Cable, though aware enough to snarl at Ryan, couldn’t yet reliably stand unaided. As for Dan and the rest of the men crammed together in the second cell, Ryan had left them locked up for the moment, which was the best way he knew to keep them out from underfoot while he did what needed doing. If Croom’s authority couldn’t keep them from yapping about how bad they wanted let out right now, he reckoned his two companions could.
The ceiling was low, wood with heavy rafters that were basically just logs of similar size cleaned of bark and branch stubs. He had to keep his back rounded and his head hunched forward to keep from banging his forehead. He was glad the floor outside the cells was the same hard-trodden earth as inside. That way he didn’t have to worry about a warped plank groaning underfoot.
As he reached the corridor’s end, where it widened out of sight to the right, he heard soft, regular breathing. Not snoring, but what sounded like a man asleep. He heard no other breathing and no conversation.
That didn’t mean there weren’t half a dozen wide-awake but not talkative sec men sitting in the room. Only one way to find out. Ryan paused just at the corner, held his breath, listened. Then he stuck his head out for a three-second look.
At first he saw no one. He had to crane his head hard right to see the sec man: sitting in a wooden chair with his back against the raw adobe wall and his chin sunk to his clavicle. He had a Winchester-type lever action longblaster across his lap. The lantern burned on a low table on his side away from the door.
Ryan pulled back. Easy, he thought, which naturally raised a question. Too easy?
He ducked, stuck his head out again at about hip height for another look. No one waited in the shadows to pounce. Aside from another, larger table by the side wall and a couple of empty chairs, there wasn’t even any more furniture in the little room.
Ryan slid the knife into his belt, then leaned out. Moving purposefully but without haste he grabbed the barrel of the longblaster, yanking the weapon out of the sleeping man’s slack grip.
“Huh?” The sec man raised his head and turned blinking eyes to the hallway.
Ryan rammed the steel-shod butt of the carbine back into the man’s forehead. He fell over sideways and didn’t move or moan. The chair stayed upright.
The one-eyed man stepped quickly around, leveling the blaster at the fallen man. If he wasn’t unconscious or chilled, he was a rad-blasted fine actor.
The door in the far wall opened. Ryan snapped his head and the longblaster around and found himself staring into the wide, dark eyes of Katherine Raker.
Chapter Eighteen
“What do you bitches want?”
Mildred had to fight to choke back the reflexive snarl that rose in her throat in response to the casually callous insult by the sec man outside the warehouse room. She was powerless in this situation and knew it.
So did the man outside the heavy, locked door. That was why he talked that way to the captives he was keeping watch over.
“We got a plaguer in here,” she called back, trying to turn the strain she felt into fear and anxiety rather than fury, which wasn’t hard. She was afraid. She was anxious. She was just pissed off hotter than nuke red at the whole situation.
I still can’t believe we fell for that glib bastard’s bullshit, she thought.
“Bullshit,” the sec man called.
Mildred heard a moan from behind her and glanced briefly around. The eleven people—four drivers, three sec women, Dan’s lieutenant wrench Randi, and Bass Croom’s main aide, Sandra Watson—were sitting on the concrete floor of the storeroom between the empty shelves, or slouching on or against a stout empty table by the back wall.
Then she looked at Krysty, who was lying on the floor with just a single coat below her to cushion her from the cold concrete, and another covering her from shins to jaw for a modicum of warmth. She turned her head from side to side, moaning feverishly. Her hair, sopping wet as if from sweat, covered her beautiful pale face like lank red water weeds.
“Look through the window if you doubt me,” she said through the wrought-iron grillwork. It made sense that this currently disused room of a warehouse next to the wag park should be pressed into service to hold the female captives of Bry Raker’s treachery. It was clearly meant to stash valuable goods, and some of them, at least, would fetch high prices from slavers.
“All right,” the unseen sec man called. “Which one of you bitches is sick?”
Mildred ground her jaw. “The redhead,” she said.
“Nuking hell!” the man yelped. Krysty was clearly the pick of the lot.
“But if you want her chilled,” Mildred said, striking the iron while it was good and hot, “and maybe the rest of us shitting our guts out on the floor before sunup, feel free to just stand out there and listen.”
“Stand back! I’m coming in.”
She heard scratching at the door as the guard fumbled his key at the lock.
“Gladly,” she said. “Stepping back now.” She retreated to take up position by the stricken woman’s booted feet.
The door opened. The sec man was a burly guy with a shaved head, like a smaller edition of his sec boss, Butler. He was smart enough not to enter a roomful of captives with a blaster in his hand. Or his scary boss had frightened religion into him. His snub-nosed Chief’s Special .38 stayed in its holster at his narrow waist. He did carry a hardwood truncheon in one meaty fist.
He looked around. The only light was what came in from outside, which wasn’t much to see by.
“Here you go,” Mildred called. She gestured at the prostrate woman. Krysty uttered a small whimper.
“Fuck,” the sec man said under his breath. He dithered a moment, afraid to approach someone so obviously ill—and seriously so—close up. But fear of his bosses, Butler and Raker, quickly won out.
He walked to Krysty and bent over. “Wrong with you, Fire Hair?” he asked.
The hair trailing limp across the strained and sculpted features stirred as if coming to life. The sec man’s big head recoiled on its thick neck. “What the nuke?”
Krysty’s right hand shot up from the floor like a piston and hammered him full-force under his chin.
Mildred heard his teeth shatter under the force of the blow. Unless she summoned her Gaia power, which would leave her drained and as weak as a newborn kitten and thus unable to flee or fight further, Krysty had only the strength of a human woman. But she was a very strong human woman who knew a thing or two about close-in fighting.
The crack of his lantern jaw breaking overrode the noise of his teeth giving way. His eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed across Krysty.
Mildred heard the redhead mutter something uncharacteristic beneath her breath. Then with a heave of strong arms and some help from her legs, Krysty flopped the dazed sec man off to her right.
Randi, Dan Hogue’s big blonde Valkyrie assistant, was on him like a diving eagle. She seized the club from his unresisting fist and proceeded to hammer him about the temples with it. A powerfully built and handsome woman, who looked after her gentle boss with the same ferocious competence she brought to her trade, she also had a notably short fuse.
Apparently Mildred wasn’t the only one to take the sec man’s sexist slurs personally. As strong as t
he big mechanic was, and as vigorously as she was pounding him, the question of whether Krysty’s shot had given him a concussion would become academic once his skull gave way.
Mildred was interested in getting at the bastard’s blaster. Unfortunately it had somehow worked itself around so it was now buried beneath his broad white butt, and somewhere in the course of his ongoing harsh treatment his bowels had let go. Had Mildred been squeamish she never would’ve survived her residency to get her M.D. Still, she needed to get that stupid snubby if they were to have even a faint prayer of getting away that was the best they could hope for.
“All right, ladies, let’s move with a purpose,” she heard Sandra Watson say. Croom’s aide was a slight middle-aged woman who wore reading glasses and her graying blonde hair in a plain bob. She was normally quiet but had somewhere picked up the trick of making her voice crack with command at need. “We have to get moving now.”
As Mildred continued to tug at the now disgustingly moist and squishy holster, and Randi continued methodically to beat the man’s head in, she heard the shuffling of bodies getting into motion.
From right beside her she heard Sandi say, “Neat strike, that. Never thought an open hand shot could be so powerful.”
“My mother taught it to me,” said Krysty, who was sitting up now. She looked remarkably restored, glimpsed from the corner of Mildred’s preoccupied eye. Not surprising since her sickness had been a sham. “Hitting bone with a closed hand is a good way to break fingers.”
Krysty started to get up. Mildred managed to get a grip on the slimy wood grips of the Colt and found it still held tight by the strap.
She heard someone scream.
Her head snapped up and around just in time to see a second sec man come in the door behind a leveled scattergun whose muzzles seemed to gape like twin tunnel entrances.
* * *
“GO AHEAD AND CHILL ME if you want,” Katherine said. Something in her voice and manner actually stopped Ryan from carrying through with his intent to leap, grab her and take her hostage with the Winchester muzzle against her head.
“I came here to help you,” the woman declared in a voice that was at once quiet and edged with jagged glass. “I don’t care if you believe me, any more than if I live or die.”
Ryan straightened, keeping the blaster pointed at her. “Talk fast,” he said. “I’ll listen.”
“I hate him,” she said simply, stepping inside and closing the door. “Bry Raker.”
She stopped to spit on the pinewood floor. As she did her heavy coat fell open. Ryan couldn’t help noticing that beneath it she wore a filmy negligée and thick boots. The underthing had to be predark, and scavvy in that condition had to have set Raker back a fortune.
For all that jack and barter, he thought, it didn’t hide much. Katherine’s breasts were clearly visible. Ryan loved Krysty but was still human....
From the flicker in her dark eyes the woman seemed to notice how his attention had strayed before snapping back to her face. But she was on a mission, and not to be deflected.
“He kidnapped me,” she said, as J.B. and Bass stepped up to either side of Ryan. “I was fourteen years old. His coldhearts butchered my family. He took me across his saddlebow like some kind of barbarian chief from predark books. Took me back to his camp and used me.”
“I thought you were his wife,” Bass said. He was sounding steadier. Ryan reckoned the fact that they could do something had a tonic effect on him. Even if realistically what they could expect to do was to die on their feet sometime in the next handful of minutes.
The woman spit again. A lock of her raven-wing hair escaped the tight bun she’d tied it into at her nape and fell in her strained and beautiful face.
“He forced me to go through a ceremony he called marriage, yes,” she said. “It was a fraud. He still uses me as he will. And he is still a rapist!”
“Bullshit,” Cable said. He was sounding stronger, too, though a fast side glance told Ryan he was leaning on his boss’s burly arm yet for support. “She’s lying!”
“Why did she come here at all then?” J.B. asked. “What’s she got to gain, coming out like this? Poor girl’s like to catch her death of cold, even in that coat.”
“She’s just hot for the one-eyed glory boy, here,” Cable said, sneering.
“Back up off the trigger of the blaster, my friend,” Bass said, turning to grip Cable’s forearm briefly. “We’re on all the same side here.”
Katherine tossed back her vagrant lock of hair. “I desire him, yes,” she said. “What woman wouldn’t? But it doesn’t matter.”
“Why are you doing this, then?” Ryan asked.
“I will have an end,” she said simply, squaring her shoulders and elevating her chin.
“I will end it tonight. Raker has gone too far. He and that beast Butler cooked up their treachery on the spur of the moment. He will ruin this rest stop, his inheritance, despite the fact it’s built on the best water well for fifty miles. He’s doomed himself. But I am the one who will bring him down!”
“I believe her,” Bass said.
Ryan nodded. “Yeah. So what now?”
“I can lead you to your gear. And your arms. None of the plunder’s been sorted yet. That waits for morning. After you were taken Raker got drunk and—used me. He now lies passed out snoring like the pig he is. So does Butler. I will see you armed.
“Then getting free is your own problem. I can do no more for you.”
“And that’s plenty,” J.B. said, tipping his fedora.
“What about the women?” Bass asked a beat before Ryan could.
“They’re locked in a backroom in a warehouse by the vehicle park, just like your blasters,” Katherine said. “Now let loose the other men, and fast. There’s little time until you are discovered. Not all the sec men are drunk or sleeping, and many others in the compound will fight you for the shares of the slaver payments Raker has promised them!”
* * *
RYAN SLIPPED OUT the front door of the jail. J.B. stood in the doorway, blocking the exit of the rest until Ryan gave the all-clear. Despite Croom’s leadership some of his men were stone spooked, not too surprisingly. If allowed the chance, they might just bolt and give the whole show away, which would get everybody chilled sooner rather than later.
They were on a dirt side street, narrow, with more makeshift buildings hunched to either side. A block down he could see the wag park, the vehicles gleaming dully in the light of a waning but still-swollen moon.
He saw a shadow flit from shanty to shanty down the block. Waving a quick gesture to J.B. to hold and get ready, he raised the Winchester he’d taken from the guard to his shoulder.
A shadow detached itself from the swaybacked porch of a shack. It resolved itself into a tall figure—an obviously female one.
“You sure that’s what you want to point at me, lover?” a contralto voice asked.
“Krysty?”
The moonlight hit the figure and turned shadow into the most beautiful woman Ryan had ever seen. Still and always.
“We were coming to rescue you,” he said.
She gestured behind her. “Us, too.”
He saw her frown briefly, then her emerald eyes go wide. He turned to see a very determined-looking Katherine Raker push her way out into the street. She had to be determined to get past J.B.
“My, Ryan,” Krysty murmured, “you are a fast worker, aren’t you?”
“Good,” said the black-haired woman, striding up beside Ryan. He noticed she still hadn’t bothered buttoning her coat. “This will save time. Now move!”
* * *
“GOT IT,” J.B. said, straightening and slipping his pick from the padlock on the door into the warehouse Kit had led them to. He let his satisfaction show in his voice. He always enjoyed a job wel
l done, even a small one.
The Armorer pulled the lock open and dropped it by the door. No point in trying to pretend it hadn’t been cracked. One way or another that wasn’t going to matter past the next five minutes.
“So then little Dezzy turned into a wildcat,” Krysty was saying. She was hunched behind Ryan reporting the details of the women’s escape from captivity. They were guarding the Armorer’s back while he performed his break-in. The others held back crowded in a narrow alley between buildings nearby, waiting the signal.
“Dezzy?” Ryan asked. J.B. ducked inside the building. He had his hideout knife in hand.
“Little black-haired sec woman Ricky is sweet on.”
“He is?”
“Men. Anyway, she jumped the sec man from the side, grabbed his blaster, shoved the muzzle toward the ceiling hard enough it broke his trigger finger without him shooting. Then Mildred kicked him in the crotch and we swarmed him.”
“Ace,” Ryan said.
J.B. popped out. “Clear,” he said. “No one inside.”
As he vanished back inside the darkened warehouse, Ryan turned and signaled. Krysty went on in as the others came forward, herded by Doc, Sandra and Randi. Bass was in the lead, walking confidently. Cable followed, still obviously a little dazed. Even though Mildred said he probably didn’t have a concussion, he was obviously not near fit to fight yet. But like the rest, he was going to have to. And soon.
“Should we get people into the wags?” Bass said as he came up. At least Cable wasn’t going to be puffing his chest and woofing and trying to pick a dominance fight this time.
“No,” Ryan said. “They’ll have sentries. We don’t have time to take them down by stealth. So we need to get armed-up to fight.”
As the freed captives moved inside, restrained from all rushing in at once by Dan, the gentle but well-respected boss wrench, Bass put his big bearded lips near Ryan’s ear.
“We got a chance?”
“We’re breathing,” Ryan said. “That means we’ve always got a chance. Good one? No.”
