by James Axler
Ricky looked up into the eyes of Solo, his sec man partner on the chuck wag. The young man’s eyes were wide and staring—down at the bloody spear head sticking eight inches out of the middle of his chest.
A giant biker grinned at Ricky from over Solo’s shoulder. “You’re next!” he called, though with all the shooting and screaming and commotion—or maybe just the thunder of his own pulse drowning his ear—he could only make out the words by reading the man’s lips.
Solo raised his head. His eyes met Ricky’s, and he lifted his right hand, as if to shoot Ricky at contact range with the Model 1911 semi-auto handblaster still gripped in it. He’d used it to blast the woman about to take Ricky’s life, at the cost of his own.
Time seemed to slow to a tortured and torturing crawl. Solo gave the blaster a funny little shake that incongruously reminded Ricky of trying to wag his penis dry after taking a piss. Then Solo’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, and his chin slumped down to the notch of his collarbone.
Ricky understood his final message an instant before it was too late.
As the Stone Nation biker yanked his spear out of his victim’s back, Ricky let the DeLisle drop. Its sling yanked his shoulder, but he ignored the impact. He grabbed the .45 from his comrade’s hand. Fumbling with fingers that still held the empty Webley, he turned the big angular blaster in his grip.
The enormous biker cocked the spear back by his waist to stab Ricky across Solo’s fallen body. Ricky thrust the sec man’s blaster to the full length of his arm and pulled the trigger.
The big blaster roared and did its best to buck free of his hand. It had double the recoil of his wheelgun, caused by the big mass of machined metal, the slide, that slammed back and forth after each shot to eject the empty casing and drive home a fresh cartridge from the magazine in the well.
His first shot went wide. The big Stone biker’s eyes grew large in surprise. The second shot hit him right under the right nipple. The blaster was rising inexorably in response to its powerful blasts.
On Ricky’s third shot the slide locked back. Empty.
But the nomad head was rocked back. Ricky got a glimpse of his mad dark eyes seeming to cross as they tried to look up at the fat blue hole that had just appeared in the middle of his forehead above them, then he toppled like a felled tree off the rear of the chuck wag.
Ricky turned. As he did, he cracked open the Webley’s top-break action and fumbled in a pouch at his waist for a fresh full-moon clip of .45 ACP rounds. Though the Stones attacking J.B. hid the Armorer from his sight as well as whatever was happening to Ryan at the tanker’s front end, the very fact the nomads were still there confirmed that the little man in the battered hat and glasses was somehow holding his own.
Ricky slammed the reloaded cylinder shut. His jaw jutted with determination. I’ll save you, J.B.! he thought.
Sensing a rush of motion behind him, Ricky wheeled back to blast a lunging biker in the body at face-spitting range.
He saw others clambering up, with that same crazy courage they’d showed all along. Ricky would have to save himself first, and that was going to be a full-time job for a spell.
The rest of his life, maybe.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Ryan wheeled right, bringing up his Scout as he did so. Not to shoot—its chamber was empty, and he’d had no chance to throw the bolt, especially not with his big panga gripped in his left hand.
An impact caught the weapon as it crossed in front on his face. The pressure ran up Ryan’s arm and drove him back a step. He recovered, then gazed past the curved blade buried in the Steyr into Speaker’s face. Though his jaw was thrust out with determination, something like delight glinted in the chieftan’s black eyes.
“Just you and me, One-Eye,” the Stone Nation boss said. “Just like it was fated to be.”
Ryan yanked downward with the longblaster as he got his hips behind a whistling panga cut at the oddly calm face.
The heavy but razor-honed blade of the panga clipped a lock of black hair from Speaker’s head as the Stone Nation warrior turned his body right, away from the blow. He kicked the Steyr’s receiver, barely missing smashing Ryan’s finger on the trigger guard. He used the impact both to wrench free his weapon and dance back a step.
Ryan let the Scout fall to hang on its sling.
“So what’s it to be, then?” Speaker said. He was actually grinning now. “Will you whip out your SIG and blast me? Or will you face me blade to blade like a man?”
I’d shoot you on the spot like a man who intends to go on breathing, Ryan thought. If I didn’t know triple well you’d cut me down with that fancy-ass pig-sticker while I was trying to draw.
He tugged at the Scout’s sling with his thumb so that the longblaster rode muzzle-down along his back. That way it wouldn’t foul his fighting form. Then he lunged forward. The panga whistled overhand toward the apex of Speaker’s hair pyramid. Ryan was done with words. Now he’d let steel do his talking.
He saw Speaker’s thin lips twist in a smile of contempt for the sheer blunt obviousness of Ryan’s attack. His own weapon swept up. It was actually a full-on saber, the old cavalry type, with a steel basket hilt guarding his hand and everything. A sword—the kind of weapon that’d been obsolete for like a century before the Big Nuke. It was still serious steel, with a lethal edge, and Speaker knew how to use it.
He’d already made a mistake, though. Ryan tucked his own blade in as he let his body drop. He put the knuckles of his knife hand on the flat ribbed-steel catwalk and let that take his weight as he scythed his right leg around in a sweep at Speaker’s legs. The Stone Nation chieftain went down sideways.
The man didn’t lose his bearing or his balance and fall off the fat steel tank, as Ryan hoped. He landed hard on his side and without a beat rolled toward Ryan, launching a wicked saber cut at him overhand.
Ryan already had his boots beneath him to get up, and simply jumped back out of the way, out of his sandbag nest.
The saber split the sandbag nearest the front. Speaker recovered instantly to a guard position as it began to bleed yellow sand.
“You’re good, One-Eye,” he said. “But good enough?”
Good enough not to underestimate you again, Ryan thought. He’d had a pretty high assessment out the gate of the combat skills of a man who could be acknowledged boss of the vast, contentious Stone Nation. Now he had to lever it up a few notches.
He still didn’t aim to lose.
With the empty sandbag nest between them, his backpack lying inside, he risked a quick glance over his shoulder to see how his friend was making out. He was in time to see the Armorer’s body snap forward, catapulting a woman with blue-dyed braids into the bearded face of a Stone Nation warrior wielding a ball bat with nails sticking out of it. Both fell howling off the tanker.
J.B. held his own. For now, at least. The little man was easy to underestimate, too. Especially the wiry strength wound up in that compact body of his.
Ryan turned to meet a furious leaping attack by Speaker. He stepped back as the chieftan landed on the rear sandbag. His panga easily parried the cavalry sword.
Shorter than Ryan’s blade, it wasn’t that much lighter than the saber. Nor did Speaker have the strength simply to power Ryan—a bigger man—down.
Still, he had plenty of strength. Ryan felt it, right enough.
Blades rang like wicked bells as they traded fast and violent strokes. Speaker did love flair—he had a flashy style that wasted energy and time, two vital commodities in a fight, as that jumping attack over the sandbags showed. But triple fast, enough so that his flamboyance didn’t give Ryan any obvious openings for counterattacks.
After what felt like an hour to Ryan, it was clear that straight-up, blade-to-blade fighting wasn’t giving a clear edge to either, which meant his opponent likely noticed it, t
oo.
Instinct guided him. He sprang back a step as Speaker unleashed a horizontal slash forehand at his blind eye, and then used his momentum to whirl into a spinning back kick.
It was the sort of move that almost always ended in getting the man who made it chilled. Though sometimes crippled up first, if the intended recipient grabbed the overexposed leg and threw his opponent down. Or simply dislocated the hip. Ryan had done all those things to foes.
It was a stupid move to throw at a fighter with the skill and rattlesnake speed of Ryan Cawdor, if you didn’t have the skill and puma speed of Speaker.
The sheer unexpectedness of the kick, which while relatively slow to develop was as powerful a strike as a human body could deliver, would have nailed Ryan in the chest with rib-crushing force, but Ryan’s instincts, and likely his ability to read the shifts of his opponent’s balance, had saved him and won him the chance to slash at the back of Speaker’s lower leg.
Speaker’s boot and his own quick reflexes saved him. He rechambered the kick immediately, then put his foot down and went back into a sensible fighting stance.
He showed Ryan a big grin, the one-eyed man had felt his blade bite flesh, even if not deeply. He saw red gleam on the wide blade as he held it up in front of his face.
“You don’t trick easy, do you, One-Eye?” Speaker asked.
Ryan said nothing. He was judging the other’s injury by his weight. It wasn’t serious. He knew that from the fact the Stone Nation chief was able to put weight on his injured limb.
The difference between a sword fight, which this functionally was, and a fight with smaller knives was that a single cut or thrust could kill a combatant and frequently did. It was a rare battle that could be stopped by a single knife wound, cut or thrust. Whereas a blade as big and beefy as the panga’s—or the saber—could split a skull or even lop off a limb. Just like that.
In a knife fight, the most common outcome was for both combatants to get cut, and for the one who bled less to win as his opponent weakened and allowed him the fatal upper hand.
That dynamic could play in a full-on sword fight just as easily. First blood had gone to Ryan. Now, given their close match in fighting ability, all he had to do was to hang and bang until Speaker weakened. The problem was that was still a minor cut. A man like Speaker could lose a deal of blood and still function at peak, especially with adrenaline supercharging his system like an overdose of jolt.
The worst problem was that Speaker knew it, so he’d be looking to change the odds back in his favor, any way he could.
The conventional move was for Ryan to press him hard and let him bleed. At the moment Ryan had no better tactic than to do that. He came on hard, driving the smaller man back with a flurry of blows that took advantage of his edge in height and strength.
Just when he let himself hope he could get Speaker to stub a boot heel against the fighting nest and fall over backward, Speaker threw himself right at him. He parried high, letting the panga blade slide down his upthrust saber, then clacked Ryan’s teeth together and rocked his head back with a savage left uppercut.
Red exploded behind Ryan’s eyes. His body reacted on its own, yanking his left knee up almost to his chest, then pistoning his boot forward with his hips behind a massive thrust kick.
Speaker hadn’t been expecting that any more than Ryan had anticipated that punch. The two fighters flew away from each other.
Still fuzzed by the blow to his jaw Ryan lost his balance and had to turn clear around. As he caught himself with his left hand on the catwalk he saw a Stone Nation woman, her back to him, raising her spear for an overhand stab at J.B., whom her body hid from Ryan’s view.
The Deathlands warrior knew that Speaker had recovered his balance and poise fast and was undoubtedly springing to attack his opponent’s back. So he did something the nomad boss wouldn’t expect. He sprinted fifteen feet toward the rear of the tanker and slashed the spear woman across the back with his panga.
She shrieked and arched her back like a cat hit by a speeding wag. The spear flew away from upflung hands, and then a savage sideways stroke of the M-4000’s butt smashed the side of her face and toppled her off the truck.
J.B. stood there, his hat and glasses still in place. He held his scattergun in both hands like a riot baton. The pair of foes left to him were keeping a respectful distance behind.
“I had it,” the Armorer said mildly. “Mind your own knitting, Ryan.”
Ryan saw a figure suddenly loom behind J.B., a figure not that much taller than the armorer, though significantly broader. Its head, which seemed to flow up out of the huge sloped shoulders without much intervention by a neck, was shaved to a short scalp lock, dyed a brighter red than the droplets of blood drying on the grinning face.
Speaker’s lieutenant Pit Bull had joined the fight.
J.B. was already turning to face his earlier foes as well as the new arrival.
Ryan wheeled and slashed. J.B. could take care of himself, as his mild reproach—the equivalent of another man cussing Ryan up one side and down the other for his damn foolishness—had indicated.
And he needed to, because the timer in Ryan’s mind had reckoned a man like Speaker would’ve just had time to reassess the situation and charge to take advantage of his foe’s turned back. As usual it was right.
Ryan’s backhand panga swing deflected a whistling cut from the saber, but it was a glancing contact.
With a wrist undoubtedly strengthened by hours working a wrench, Speaker was able to twirl his long blade around like a willow wand. As Ryan’s knife hand rolled over for a swing the other way, the long curved sword gashed his arm, just over the ulna and about three inches above the wrist.
Driving with all the power in his long, strong legs, Ryan threw himself forward. His dropped shoulder smashed into Speaker’s chest.
Once more Speaker’s cat reflexes saved him. Instead of letting the bigger man power him down, he sprang back. He almost overbalanced and went over the side for the long fall to the road streaming by a dozen or so feet beneath.
But he didn’t. He caught himself and backed away, waving his saber in the air between his face and Ryan’s with deceptive gentleness.
“Like your friend said,” the Stone Nation boss called. “Keep your mind on your own troubles. I told you—this is between just you and me.”
He wasn’t even breathing hard. Then again, neither was Ryan.
But Ryan had troubles now.
Speaker’s white teeth flashed. “So we each have scored a hit,” the nomad said. “Let’s see whose hurts worse, first.”
Ryan felt his lips skin back from his teeth in a grimace. Having either a leg fold up or having your weapon-arm drop could get a person chilled pretty fast in a fight like this; kind of a toss-up which was worse, really. But while Ryan’s wound was superficial—he could feel by the fact his grip stayed strong that it hadn’t cut muscle or tendon, but mostly skin and maybe veins—he suspected it was bleeding harder than the nick he’d inflicted on Speaker’s hind leg. An arm would weaken faster than a leg, being smaller.
So now Speaker pressed his advantage hard. The saber turned into a steel whirlwind with Ryan at the center of its concentrated fury.
The one-eyed man felt his arm begin to weaken. The blood was flying freely from his cut. He had to keep ducking his head to keep a drop from flying in his eye and blinding him for the split second that would be all it would take for him to wind up with that eye staring up at the sky from the ditch by the road.
He was still able to match Speaker’s speed, but his strength was draining like gas from a bullet-holed tank.
Just when he was thinking about trying to use his superior weight to try to regain the advantage, Speaker lunged for him.
They caught each other’s weapon wrist. Grinning like a fiend, supercharged by the advantage he
knew he held, Speaker forced the long blade of his sword toward the taller man’s face.
Sunlight glinted off the wickedly honed edge of the saber inching toward Ryan’s eye. Sweat streamed down his face and the muscles of his shoulders and back screamed from exertion, as the blade kept getting closer and closer.
Ryan’s right arm buckled.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ryan went with it.
Speaker was trying to push his body against Ryan’s with all his strength. Instead of fighting that any more, the one-eyed man lunged. He pushed up hard with his left hand, using the sudden shift of position to stop opposing the power of Speaker’s sword arm with his own, moving hand and weapon skyward. His forehead snapped forward and down, right onto Speaker’s right collarbone.
The bone snapped with a sound like a glass rod breaking.
Speaker howled and sprang back. He let go of Ryan’s failing panga arm and used his body’s momentum to rip his other wrist free of Ryan’s grip. He landed lightly clean on the front side of Ryan’s sandbag emplacement, but his sword arm dropped as if it had turned to a used gaudy bar rag. The saber dropped from his fingers and slid, clattering, over the swell of the fuel tank’s side and away out of sight.
Speaker stared down at his limply dangling arm, which no matter the strength of his muscles, he couldn’t force to rise. That was what a broken clavicle did to a person.
The leader of the Stone Nation raised a look of sheer horror to Ryan’s face.
“You bastard,” he said.
“And then some,” Ryan agreed, then flew right up and over the sandbags in a flying sidekick, because Ryan Cawdor had some flash of his own.
It should have been easy for Speaker to deflect the kick and send the man hurtling onward to his doom with a faceful of cracked asphalt.
But Speaker’s reflex was to use his right arm, which didn’t work.
