by James Axler
Then the albino teen sniffed and said, “Oh.”
The brush stirred across the little clearing. Jak straightened. Instead of aiming his Colt Python, he pointed its vented barrel at the ground. Ryan frowned. This wasn’t Jak’s usual behavior.
A figure stepped from the brush. Ryan had an instant impression of ivory skin, contrasting with scarlet hair that stirred though there was no breath of breeze in the clearing. A very familiar voice was cursing a backpack for hanging up on the brush.
It wasn’t possible.
“Krysty?” he said tentatively, as if afraid she was an illusion that would vanish into air.
She looked at him with hot green eyes. “Ryan,” she said, “where the hell have you been?”
Then they were in each other’s arms, their mouths joining in a long and searching kiss.
They didn’t break free until the others joined them. “Sorry to intrude on you young lovers,” Mildred said, “but we’ve got a situation here.”
“A spontaneous remission, by the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed. “So our journey into swampie land and the sacrifices our companions made were in vain.”
“What’s he talking about, lover?” Krysty asked.
“You got bitten by a snake. You went into a coma. We had to go stop a war with some swampies to bring you out of it. Or so we were told.”
He looked at the others. “Not so sure it wasn’t necessary. Maman Fucton told me my just being there might provide kind of a lifeline to bring Krysty back. Thought it was just a metaphor at the time.”
He teetered on the brink of saying why she said she told him that, then he didn’t. There were some things a man just didn’t have to talk about. Also the thought of talking about how Maman Fucton said his love and devotion were the key to Krysty’s pulling out of her deathlike trance put a knot in his tongue.
“What about that herbal packet Maman—that is, the swampie shamaness gave you to heal Krysty, Ryan?”
Ryan frowned a moment, then laughed. “Reckon she gave it to me so I’d feel I got something for my pains. Something happened there, and I believe it helped Krysty pull out. As to what, I’ll never know. And I’m fine with that.”
“And what will you do with the packet now?” Mildred said.
He shrugged. “Hang on to it, I guess. Who knows what it might come in handy for.”
“So where to now, Ryan?” J.B. asked. He nodded toward the sounds of shots. “That isn’t our battle now. Especially given what we know.”
“I don’t know as it isn’t our battle,” Ryan said. “These people did right by us. Mostly. Anyway, I made my deal with Papa Dough. I aim to carry it through, Black Gang or no Black Gang.”
“That’s fair,” J.B. acknowledged.
“Ryan, the most amazing thing happened to me,” Krysty said.
“Not now, Krys—”
“Mother Gaia wakened me just as I was attacked by some sort of horrible creature. I knocked it out and it turned into a young woman with long black hair!”
Ryan pursed his cheeks and let a lot of air slide out his mouth. “We got a lot to fill each other in on. But we also better get a move on, if we want there to be anybody left to help against the pirates.”
“You can go ahead and start,” she said, laying her pack down in the grass and opening it up. “I’m going to get out of this nightgown and put some clothes on as we talk.”
“IS IT A GOOD SIGN or a bad sign when the shooting and shouting starts to die down like this?” Mildred asked.
“Depends on who it means won, Mildred,” J.B. said.
Giving wide berth to the burning house, which they feared would prove a beacon for trouble, they had worked their way close to the main square. Now they crouched in an alley that ran between structures of brick and planks from the local mill. An empty wagon and some crazily stacked crates and barrels offered concealment from casual observation.
Mildred’s heart hammered in her chest. She was acutely aware that even now they might be surrounded by blood-thirsty enemies. So what else was new? she asked herself, trying to drain the tension.
It didn’t work.
“That fearful cannon has remained silent for some minutes,” Doc said.
“Recoilless blaster takes a spell to reload,” J.B. said.
At a sign from Ryan, Jak prowled ahead. A handful of moments later he was back, looking agitated.
“Square full pirates,” he reported.
“Very well,” Doc said. “The cessation of combat appears to be a bad thing, then.”
“Still our fight, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“Still our fight.” Mildred knew the Armorer wasn’t being timid. Only practical.
“What’s our move?”
“Let’s get a better look at the situation,” Ryan said.
Jak led them into a side yard. There was a chicken coop but no chickens, and a little garden, a couple of chairs on a swaybacked porch. Mildred could detect no signs of life anywhere in the building or immediate environs. Any occupants had either fled the fighting or joined it.
They crouched by a fence that allowed them to look through knotholes at the plaza, still a block or two away.
Before she should squelch it a groan escaped Mildred. “They’ve got Tobias.”
EVEN KNOWING what he did, it angered Ryan to see the baron in such a state. Naked from the waist up, he staggered under the weight of a huge timber beam, which had been tied across his broad shoulders with thick ropes and his arms lashed to it. He looked badly beaten. His long white hair hung lank in a face that was a mask of bruise and blood. Blood streaked his body. Laughing pirates prodded him along with the muzzles of longblasters.
“This isn’t good,” he said. “Mebbe he didn’t play entirely straight with us about his sister, but he doesn’t deserve this. We’ve got to try to do something. Doc, you pair with Jak. Mildred and J.B., you’re the other team. Krysty, you’re with me.”
“Always, lover.”
“We’re north of the square. J.B., Mildred, try finding a position on the west side near this end. Doc and Jak, you take up position on the north side.”
“If we sneak around to east and south,” J.B. said, “we’d be firing them up from the rear, sitting clean astride their route of retreat. That throws a good scare into folks. Does a lot to even out triple-bad odds.”
But Ryan shook his head. “Two reasons. First, it’d take too bastard long. Second, when those coldhearts break and run, do you want to be sitting right smack between them and their ride out of town?”
J.B. chuckled. “Right, Ryan. I hear you.”
“Infiltrate as far forward as you safely can, find some good firing positions. Teammates watch each other’s backs. Standard stuff. Wait for me to shoot my longblaster.”
“What about you and Krysty?” J.B. asked.
Ryan showed his teeth in a grin. “I been lugging this fancy sniper rifle all over the Deathlands. Time to do me some sniping.”
“WE’RE NOT seriously thinking of taking on this pirate horde all by ourselves, are we?” Mildred asked as she and J.B. slipped through a deserted hardware store.
“We’ll see.”
“It’s nuts! There’s a hundred of them out there.” She gestured through a front window. “They’ll roll right over us!”
“They’re pirates, Millie. Not looking to get shot. They’re out for loot and a good old time. Hit them hard and right, they’ll just scatter.”
“What if they don’t? Besides, even if Ryan needs to pay off the debt to the swampies, can’t we just wait until the pirates pull out and talk to whoever’s left in charge of the ville then?”
“Might not be so eager to listen to us if we didn’t help when the chips were down. Anyway, I’m so sure this fight’s done. These Haven folks are tough. I think they may muster a counterattack here before long.”
“Aren’t we staking our lives on a lot of ifs?”
J.B. gave her a quick tight smile. “Haven’t we always?”
JAK HUNKE
RED DOWN next to a wag piled high with cargo covered in waxed canvas. It was one of a line of similarly laden wags parked with tongues down along the west side of the square. That was one of the things about the ville: people could leave their goods out like that and not have to worry about them getting stolen. The kids he’d run with since coming here all took that sort of thing for granted, which struck him as being strange.
Well, they left their stuff out safely until now.
He glanced over at Doc, crouched behind the next wag in line with his big handblaster in hand. Jak felt a slight resentment being saddled with Doc, but he had to admit the old man handled himself pretty well in a fight. He didn’t make too much noise creepy-crawling, either—by the standards of people who weren’t Jak Lauren.
He’d learned to make allowances.
They had a narrow path between buildings handy, so they could pull back if they needed to run. That was always important to Jak—knowing you had a way out.
With a hunter’s patience he settled down to watch events over his front sight, and wait for Ryan’s shot to start the party.
MOST OF HAVEN’S buildings stood a single story high. For some reason several of the rare two-story structures clustered just half a block back from the square’s northwest corner, around one that actually sprouted a third story. It was barely more than a little square room with a roof and big windows looking all four directions. Ryan reckoned it was likely a watch tower.
It was an ideal spot for a sniper. So Ryan moved on. He picked a second-story roof one building west of the three-story tower. Once he opened up, any pirates better off than double stupe and blind in both eyes would just naturally reckon he was shooting from the highest point around, and open up on the little blocky watchtower with everything they had. There was even an off chance there’d be line-of-sight between the structure and the Black Joke’s bow-mounted recoilless blaster. Ryan wanted no part of that.
As he wriggled forward on belly and elbows across the rooftop, Krysty said from behind him, “Lover?”
“Yeah?” He glanced back. He wasn’t any more worried than she clearly was about pirates overhearing. The coldhearts were raising a powerful hullabaloo out there, laughing, shouting, jeering at their prize captive. Ryan suspected casks of imported rum had been discovered and used to fuel the general good feelings among the marauders.
Krysty was dressed in a gray checked man’s shirt and jeans, and she carried her little Smith & Wesson 640 snubby in her hand. Even former Olympic shooter Mildred, a wizard with a handblaster, would have had her work cut out for her hitting anything she aimed at with that piece at this range. But Krysty wasn’t there to shoot at pirates down in the square. She was there to shoot pirates trying to climb on the roof and blast Ryan in the back while his eye was glued to his scope.
“Would you really have screwed that swampie magic woman to save me?”
Ryan’s stomach did a slow roll, and not just because of the unwelcome visual image her words brought to mind. This was one of those questions any man feared from his partner.
As he usually did where Krysty was concerned, when in doubt he fell back on honesty. “Yeah. Made up my mind I was going to get you back whatever it took.”
She smiled like the sun breaking free of the clouds that had stolen in from the sea to cover the ville.
She caressed his calf and briefly laid her cheek against it. “I’m a lucky woman. I love you, Ryan.”
“Um. Love you, too.”
She pulled away and was all business again. She had his back, and no coldheart was getting past her. Well shy of the lip of the roof, Ryan reared up to peer down at the square.
“Fireblast!” he said. He sat up and got his legs around in front of him so he could bring up the rifle and prop his elbows inside his thighs. The rifle thus steadied, he peered through the scope to confirm his startling initial impression.
“It’s Black Mask himself down there!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Ryan clicked off the longblaster’s safety, sucked in a breath and started to let it go as he sighted in on the black-cowled head of the surprisingly slight figure in its black frock coat and pants. Then, “Damn,” he said.
A body blurred by being off the focal point obstructed his vision. He looked up over the top of the scope. A phalanx of six burly black-clad pirates, with black shades and black bandannas tied around shaved heads, had taken up position in a semicircle behind the pirate chieftain.
“Sec goons in my line of fire.”
“Should we move?”
He gave his head a quick shake. “No time. Now, shush. I need to hear what I can.”
MILDRED COULD HEAR quite well. She and J.B. were crouched, barely breathing, a yard behind open windows in the storefront, behind and to Black Mask’s left. They didn’t have a shot at him, either, thanks to his bulky bodyguard.
“So Baron Blackwood,” the pirate boss said. They could tell he was speaking because of the way his hood slightly muffled his words. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this moment.”
Blackwood had been bashed by rifle butts to his knees on the trampled grass of the north end of the square. His head hung so that his hair hid his face. The light rain had resumed. The drops made tiny explosions on the beam across his back.
“But then, you’ve no idea who I really am.” Black Mask’s voice sounded more cultured than Mildred expected. It was dry and rasping, and cut like a thin whip.
Blackwood’s head jerked up. He showed a look of puzzlement mixed with disbelief. Unless that’s my imagination, Mildred told herself. Not easy to see his expression beneath all that blood and bruising.
“Yes,” Black Mask said. “I believe a light is beginning to dawn.”
Deliberately he reached up, unfastened his hood and pulled it off.
SIXTY YARDS from where J.B. and Mildred were concealed, Jak could see the face revealed when the mask came off. “Triple ugly,” he muttered softly.
It was a normal enough middle-aged dude face, triangular, fairly thin. But something had clawed the right side of it all to shit. Then it had gotten bastard infected. That whole side was furrows of scar tissue like a plowed field.
ALL MILDRED COULD SEE was the back of Black Mask’s head. His hair was dark, curly, cropped short. It seemed to be dusted with gray.
But Blackwood reacted as if he’d been shot. “Dupree!” he exclaimed.
“Dupree,” she repeated softly. “That’s—”
“Baron Dornan’s old sec boss,” J.B. finished softly.
“But I thought he was—”
“Chilled? Blackwood thought so, too.” J.B. held a finger over his lips and turned his attention forward again.
The pirate mob cheered and jeered. The diminutive Dupree stood with hands on hips, soaking in the moment.
“You thought I died, didn’t you, you treacherous whelp? The one decent thing I ever did in a long and nasty life was to help Dornan try to kill that bitch-pup sister of yours. Too bad his reward for a good deed was you chilling him with his own sword. And that sister of yours ripped my face open and left me looking like this! The Beast of Blackwood left me looking like this!”
He raised his head and turned it this way and that. “Are you getting an earful, you Havenite pieces of shit?” he shouted. “I know you’re out there, cowering in your holes like mice. Yes. It’s the truth. The mass of fucking scars on the front of my head bears witness. Elizabeth Blackwood is the Beast! And her brother’s been covering for her all along!”
Blackwood was sitting bolt upright despite the weight of the beam on his back. His expression was like a thousand miles of badlands. Rain ran down his face like long pent-up tears.
“They used you. The Blackwoods used you. For sport. Like cattle!”
“That’s not true!” Blackwood shouted. “Elizabeth has no control over her sickness. We tried our best to stop it. Tried to…at least to keep the damage down.”
“I bet that makes a huge difference to the families of th
ose your sister ripped limb from limb. ‘Oh, I feel so much better about the Beast eating my baby girl Michelle’s guts like a string of sausage, now that I know it’s really that lovely Elizabeth Blackwood.’”
“So now you pose as liberator of Haven?” Blackwood challenged.
“Oh, no! What do I care for the people of Haven? You, and Elizabeth the Beast had that right. They are cattle. They were never fit to lick dog shit off Baron Dornan’s boots. They let this happen to me. How they must’ve celebrated, thinking that bastard Dupree had finally been chilled!”
He laughed. “Well, you all fucked up. Dupree didn’t die. Dupree didn’t forget, either. No, Tobias, you hypocritical bleached turd, I’m going to loot this town of every scrap, every scavvied thing that might possibly be of value. Then I’m going to burn it down. To the nuke-dusted ground! All your precious people will be sold into slavery, and the weak ones chilled. After my boys have had a chance to play with all the prettier women.”
The pirates shook grubby fists in the air and roared approval. That they understood. Dupree turned left and right, making rising motions with his turned-up hands to encourage them.
“I’m going to tear down everything you tried to build here, Tobias, you ungrateful prick. Before you die, in long and excruciating agony, you will know the supreme taste of ultimate failure. And, oh— What have we here?”
He turned. A party of men appeared from Mildred and J.B.’s right carrying a limp female figure dressed in a sodden white silk gown. She appeared to be unconscious. Raven’s-wing hair trailed on the dirt of the street beneath her.
“Elizabeth?” Mildred said. “Oh, shit.”
She looked back in time to see, clearly, Blackwood mouthing the word “Elizabeth.”
So she was the Beast, Mildred thought. Maybe she deserved to die. She didn’t deserve what these monsters would do.
