by James Axler
“It’s supposed to be a triple-fancy titanium firing pin for the Oerlikon 20 mm autocannon you just bought,” J.B. said.
Trader nodded. “What about it?”
J.B. turned it. “It’s not titanium. It’s cheap electroplated junk.”
Trader frowned as he saw the long scratch down the side where the shiny metal had been scratched to reveal duller gray beneath.
He turned back. “What’s this, Vespa?” he asked the Science Sister.
“That’s bullshit!” squealed the shorter of her male companions. “What does this fucking kid know?”
The Science Brothers were a group of about a hundred members who operated out of a hidden HQ somewhere in the Midwest. They liked people to think it was some kind of lost predark research facility, but nobody knew. Outsiders never got in to see. What they were was an open question. Some said they were no better than a coldheart gang with fancy trappings—certainly, their reputation for arrogance and truculence did little to dispel that, though J.B. wasn’t sure if that might just be because they defended themselves when people messed with them.
That happened frequently. In a time when scientists, or as they were usually called, whitecoats, were nearly as universally distrusted and despised as muties, the Science Brothers openly professed not just an open admiration for science, but attempted to practice the ways of twentieth-century science—the thing that had caused, or at least enabled, the destruction of the world.
How successful they were was another open question. Marsh Folsom, who knew things—book things—called them a “cargo cult,” claiming that they mostly acted as if they’d gain the secrets of the near-mystical powers of science if they could just imitate the old-days whitecoats closely enough.
Seeing them here and now, at this remote site where they’d insisted on meeting with Trader and a small party in the middle of the damn night, J.B. was ready to believe they were coldhearts, right enough. After getting a close look at them he thought he might sign off on the “cult” thing, too.
“I’ll show you,” he said to the man who had challenged his knowledge. He picked another pin out of the tray set out among other displays of parts and components, mostly pretty high-tech, that they were trying to sell Trader. He examined it by the light, hefted it. Then he held it up.
“Looks like titanium, too,” he said. “But check this out.”
He flicked open his knife and carefully scratched down the side of the pin.
“Hey!” the Science Brother, who had by now moved obnoxiously close, shouted. “That’s valuable merchandise you’re damaging!”
He tried to snatch the pin. J.B. pivoted neatly away and never stopped working.
He was able after a moment’s effort to dislodge a thin shard of what appeared to be titanium plating.
“See?” he said, holding his prize out so both Trader and the Science Brother could see it. “It’s just a thin coating of titanium with monkey metal inside.”
He tossed it back in the bin. “These parts’ll last just long enough for us to be a hundred miles away from these bastard scammers before they bust. Probably in the middle of a firefight.”
He looked at Trader, who did not look pleased. “I’m no big judge of the electronics. But I bet the same applies to everything they’re trying to peddle.”
The Science Brother turned to Trader. “Are you going let this little sawed-off shit queer the deal? He’s trying to pretend he knows stuff to make himself look like a big man.”
J.B. sucker-punched the back of the guy’s bald head, hard enough to make the knuckles of his right hand sting. The man lurched forward.
J.B. jumped on his back, pummeling him.
“Take them out!” he heard the woman named Vespa scream.
Suddenly the scene flooded with dazzling white light.
And Trader said, softly, “Oh, shit.”
* * *
“NOT MUCH OF a tourist attraction,” Mildred remarked.
She was not in the best of moods. Worry for J.B. ate at her guts like an ulcer. But she doubted it was just her disposition souring her view of their destination.
Tavern Bay lay where a gorge through hilly, heavily forested highlands suddenly opened into a wide valley that gave onto the sea. The cliffs wrapped around to the north and south to form headlands that protected the anchorage, which was a wide, placid extent of water that looked gray-green. A pair of dumpy fishing trawlers headed back toward the ville, drawing narrow V-shaped wakes behind them. A triangular white sail stuck up from the water like a shark’s fin, way out where the haze ate the horizon. The sun was already threatening to fall out of sight beyond the heights behind them.
From the landward side the ville was surrounded by a broad, flat expanse of salt marsh. Big straw-colored patches of various aquatic reeds and weeds—Mildred wasn’t a botanist—were interspersed with swatches of murky-looking water. She could smell the brackishness from where she stood, along with a glum, stomach-dragging hint of decaying sea life.
The ville looked like a collection of wooden structures, some just shacks and shanties, toward the outskirts, others bigger if not always less dilapidated. Toward the center of the ville, down toward the waterfront, the buildings turned more to brick, bluish-gray or a kind of grime-encrusted red, and grimy gray granite. Most of the buildings were two or three stories tall and narrow to the point of attenuation. The streets had to have been narrow, too, Mildred reckoned; that would account for the cramped, crabbed look to the place.
Though the afternoon was starting to turn ashy-yellow and dark, no lights showed from the ville.
“Does anybody even live here?” Mildred demanded.
“It’s the most populous ville in this area,” Alysa said. “It didn’t suffer much damage from the war. The population came back fairly quickly after skydark. But it seemed to peak and began to dwindle perhaps fifty years ago, or so we’re told. It still holds perhaps a few hundred souls.”
Once more, Mildred wondered at the girl’s odd turns of speech, many of which would have been archaic in Mildred’s own time, over a century ago, before the Big Nuke. Then again, the phrase it takes all kinds was even more applicable to the world today than before she had gone into cryosleep—and with a fraction of the population to make up all those kinds.
She shrugged. Compared to the people where we picked up the new kid, she reminded herself, Alysa’s mundane to the point of boring.
The human denizens of Monster Island lived in perfect amity alongside all manner of muties, including stickies, notorious for their vicious sadism and homicidal proclivities.
“We’re not here to sightsee,” Ryan said. “Let’s get a move on.”
“The road we’re on,” Alysa said, referring to the pair of parallel ruts through sandy soil clumped with sparse, knee-high yellow grass on which they had halted their horses, “meets up with the causeway into Tavern Bay.”
“I don’t like this,” Mildred said.
“Not like, either,” Jak said from the back of his penny-colored mare.
Krysty had ridden up alongside Ryan. They had used some of the jack they had taken off the slavers they ambushed, who had no further need of it, to buy her a new ride from a logging camp about ten miles from the Bear-clan cabin. This was a gray mare, a bit undersize to carry a woman of Krysty’s size, and undernourished and depressive to start with. Or so Mildred judged, though she wasn’t a vet, either.
The beast had both filled out and brightened up in the day and a half since they got it. Krysty just naturally got on with animals. As of course she would; she had the sort of nature that was strong enough to be kind in a blighted world like this one.
She laughed. “Would you rather spend the night out here?”
The breeze off the sea was warm. Ish. The day was cold, but by comparison to the brutal bitterness of the week and change since they’d jumped into the former Maine—Mildred still wasn’t sure why anybody would stick a secret facility way up here in frozen-ass Stephen King country—almos
t comfortable. But the failing light was dialing down the celestial thermometer, turning down the heat as it went. And the wind was rising.
For answer, Ryan nudged the flanks of his notch-eared, black-and-white-splotched beast to get it walking down the track. He did it firmly, and without unnecessary force, Mildred couldn’t help noticing. She couldn’t call their one-eyed leader kind, really. She’d seen him do some harsh things, even by the tough standards of the here and now. But never any more forceful, or any crueler, than he deemed necessary to survive.
And it’s kept us alive, she thought. So far.
And she clamped down hard on the cold, dark place where she kept fear for her own love.
Mildred hauled her mule’s big, ugly head up from where it had its snout buried in a clump of grass.
“It’s not just a life, it’s an adventure,” she muttered, and fell into line behind the shiny black rump of Doc’s gelding.
Chapter Twenty
J.B. froze in the act of pummeling the bald-headed Science Brother, and his adversary froze. As if their heads were fixed to the same transfer rod, they swiveled to look toward the source of the brilliant light.
The meeting place of Trader’s group and the Science Brothers was a scrap of grassy shelf between a steep raw-dirt bluff and a wide valley belonging to a tributary of the upper Wabash River. A new sun had appeared at the bluff’s top. It was a compound sun, made of a pair of square bluish headlights and multiple spots.
It was War Wag One, rolling into place just behind the line of sight. At some signal from Trader—even J.B. didn’t know what it was—it had rolled forward to the edge of the bluff and hit all the lights at once.
Even as reflex cranked his neck that way, J.B. knew what he’d see. He’d been in on that much of the plan, anyway. Trader had not got where he was, or even stayed on his pins, by being overly trusting. And a powerful, arrogant bunch like the Science Brothers he didn’t trust at all.
At least he had sense to wind his eyelids down to slits to save some of his night vision.
J.B. didn’t need night vision, truth to tell, when he looked back down the shallow slope to see what had disturbed Trader.
It turned out Trader’s mistrust of the Science Brothers was justified. In spades. The valley below swarmed with wags and bikes and dudes on foot, all bristling with weapons.
An evil grin winching across his face, the Science Brother whose back J.B. straddled turned his face back toward him. J.B. met him with a right-hand punch to the jaw. This time he remembered to clench his hand tight and land with the last three knuckles of his fist lined up with the bones of his arm for maximum structural strength—and damage, the way he’d been taught by Abe, who knew old-days boxing.
As intended, the properly delivered punch didn’t much hurt his hand. It also had the intended effect. The Brother’s visible eye rolled up in its socket and his knees buckled.
The other Science Brother had launched himself at Trader, who lunged at him in turn, catching him by surprise and shattering his nose with a brutal head-butt.
As J.B. dismounted his own collapsing opponent, giving him a brisk knee to the side of his head as he sagged downward from his knees, Trader caught that Brother with a shin-kick to the balls. As that man folded, Trader put right palm on left fist and pile-drove his elbow into the back of his victim’s unprotected neck.
A shockingly loud noise hit J.B.’s ear from the right, followed quickly by two more. Marsh Folsom was standing behind the table with his hideout .38 snubby blaster held in both hands in an isosceles stance. And Vespa was wheeling to the ground with some kind of semiauto blaster dropping from her hand.
Then dirt began to kick up all around them as the Science Brothers waiting in ambush below opened fire.
J.B. dived for the cover afforded by the fact that the coldhearts were shooting upward past a shelf. As he did, he snagged the SKS he’d left propped by a rock.
Trader and Marsh both hit the dirt. An M-4 carbine came cartwheeling over the table of dreck wares to be snagged by a now-prone Trader with one hand. Marsh had scooped it up and tossed it to his partner.
Somewhere below a machine gun began to rip. It sounded like a 5.56 mm, probably an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon. J.B. fast-crawled on his elbows forward to where he could return fire with some cover by the edge. Since it was mostly sod, basically, it wouldn’t afford that much cover. But he knew shooting at an upward angle gave the blaster a disadvantage, and he was never one to hang back from a fight.
Especially one, he realized with a rush of adreneline to his heart, that he had started himself.
Crackling thunder came from above. Ace was cutting loose with the new 20 mm blaster in its armored mount atop the front section of War Wag One. From the green tracer lines streaking overhead, he was shooting at the M-249.
The first thing J.B. saw when he hit the edge of the cliff made his nutsack try to crawl up into his skinny belly and hide. It was the firefly flicker of a couple of dozen muzzle-flashes flaming his way. It was the giant yellow-white fire-blossom from below and left, and the blue spark streaking upward from it, that scared him to his core.
J.B. was never much for reading. Not for its own sake, though he knew how to do it. But one thing he did read was books about weapons—especially predark tech manuals.
He had never seen one before, but he knew instantly with no possible leeway for doubt that he’d just witnessed the launch of a BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile that would burn through even War Wag One’s stout front armor and blow the command section apart like a firecracker in an apple.
TOW stood for Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-command guided missile. The big tank-killer needed an operator to guide it to its target.
All that flashed through J.B.’s mind as fast as a high-speed rifle round. He knew there was just one chance to save War Wag One.
He snugged the SKS butt to his shoulder and started squeezing off rounds at the spot where he’d seen the first flash of launching. He wasn’t much of a longblaster man, not with his vision. Nor was the SKS especially accurate. But the missileer was about 150 yards away, and J.B. was ice-cold now, not even tempted to crank shots off wildly.
He fired until a flash lit the sky from above and behind.
He looked back to see brilliant sparks and smoke explode away from War Wag One’s cab.
But not the compartment. Rather the missile had deflected upward—slightly. It had hit the front glacis of the 20 mm blaster’s improvised-armor shield.
From way off to the right, well past the now-silent SAW, more bluish glare flooded a narrower valley running down to join the one where the Science Brothers had laid in wait.
War Wag Two had joined the fray, swinging down around the right flank of Trader’s people, emplaced on the bluff, to take the Science Brothers on the left.
Or even more likely, J.B. realized, to do just what it had just done: provide a nasty surprise to a troop of Science Brothers blaster wags and bikes, clearly driving up the tributary valley to try to outflank the convoy on that side.
He tried not to think about the fate of the 20 mm blaster, and Ace and his crew, and the rest of the butcher’s bill he’d run up by losing his self-control, and began picking out muzzle-flashes to shoot at. Because right now, he had a job to do, and that was always the best refuge.
* * *
“I HOPE THEY can give us information here that will allow us to recover the baron’s daughter quickly,” Alysa Korn said as the seven of them walked through the slanting yellow light that couldn’t quite bring color to the gray and washed-out streets of Tavern Bay. “It is so urgent to bring her back home safely.”
“Yeah,” said Mildred, walking a few steps behind the sec woman. “The sooner we give Frost back his daughter, the sooner I get J.B. back.”
If he’s even still alive. Krysty didn’t need to be telepathic to know that her friend was thinking that. The sturdy woman with the beaded plaits might as well have shouted it.
Alysa’s shoulders hu
nched briefly beneath her bulky coat. Mildred blew out an exasperated breath.
“Sorry, kid,” she said. “I didn’t mean that as harsh as it sounded. We all want to get your girl back safe. Even Ryan, no matter how much he likes to play the hard-ass.”
Swinging along at Krysty’s side, Ryan scowled briefly. She suppressed a giggle.
The pair brought up the rear. Jak, restless at having been encumbered—as he thought of it—by a horse, was walking point with his pal Ricky, who clutched his blaster with both hands, trying to look alert as well as important.
Horses were not permitted in Tavern Bay, the middle-aged man and teenage boy who guarded the bridge that seemed to provide the only land route into the ville had told them. For an extortionate amount of jack they had stabled their mounts in a ramshackle structure on the ville-ward side. It was no more than a mile to the ville’s center, anyway. They had been instructed to seek out the ville mayor. There had been an ominous tone in the older gatekeeper’s voice when he’d said that, suggesting dire penalties if they disobeyed.
But lacking any better plan once they got to the ville, Ryan had decided the mayor was just the man they needed to see anyway.
“Where is everybody?” Ricky asked. “This is spooky. It’s supposed to be a well-off ville.”
Up close the place had a decaying look. Many roofs showed great gaping patches open to the long lead-and-rose clouds streaked across the near-sunset sky. Windows and doors gaped like the eyes and mouths of skulls. Even many of the buildings that showed signs of recent use and occupancy looked as if they were just waiting for the next strong wind as an excuse to lie down and give up.
“Plus I guess you’re pretty broken up about what happened to Milya’s maid,” Mildred said. “Uh, Darya. So she was a pretty good friend of yours?”
To Krysty’s surprise Alysa shook her head, making her pale yellow hair fly across the shoulders of her greatcoat.
“I barely knew her. She was a sweet girl. As Milya is, down inside her show of rebellion. I’m not close to the baron’s family, really. Only the baron.”
