Sins of Honor

by James Axler

  “It’s not my old bag,” he said with a grin, “but better than nothing!”

  Just then Jak looked up from the ground, beaming a wide grin. “Horses!” he said, jerking a thumb.

  Armed and ready for anything, the rest of the companions formed a wedge behind the young man as Jak followed a nearly invisible trail away from the blast zone. Reentering the forest, Jak smiled at the sight of a large copse of intact pine, the open spaces between the trees blocked with pieces of thorn bushes tied in place with hemp rope.

  Forcing their way through the makeshift corral, the companions found the majority of the animals dead on the ground, riddled with shrapnel from the blast. But there were ten horses in the far corner, relatively undamaged aside from some small cuts.

  Constantly snorting the smoke out of their black noses, the animals kept rolling their big eyes, clearly still terrified by the unfathomable detonation and the bloody chaos that swiftly followed.

  Standing still, Ryan made gentle chucking sounds and held out an open hand. He wasn’t overly surprised when all of the horses shuffled forward, obviously grateful for the presence of any human protector.

  “We’ll take seven and let the rest go free,” Krysty said, stroking the neck of a roan gelding to try to calm the animal. The mare nickered at the gentle ministrations as if it has never gotten any before, then it bumped her with its great head in a friendly manner.

  “Saddles!” Mildred announced, walking toward a small lean-to made from overlapping branches and a ratty bearskin.

  Inside the ramshackle structure were piles of horse blankets, saddles, reins, canvas sacks of feed and dozens of worn leather saddlebags, most of them full of the previous owner’s possessions.

  “Dark night, there’s too many supplies,” J.B. growled, looking over the array of powderhorns, flintlocks and crossbows. “If this black powder had been stored any closer to the camp...” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  “Then we’d have lost all of the horses,” Ricky stated, lifting a saddle almost twice his size. Then his face darkened. “Damn, you mean this many supplies says the sec men are close to their home ville, only been out hunting a few days.”

  “We can expect others to come check on that blast triple-fast,” Ryan declared, hauling a saddle and blanket out to the horses. “Haul ass, people! We better be long gone before the rescue party arrives.”

  “Don’t take too much,” J.B. suggested, sliding a couple of pipe bombs into his new munitions bag. “We’ll travel faster with light packs.”

  “As long as there’s some food,” Doc muttered, his stomach rumbling as he slung a blanket and saddle across a shoulder.

  Walking out of the lean-to with both arms full, Jak snorted. “Plenty of that,” he said, indicating the dozens of dead horses strewed on the ground.

  Pursing his lips, Doc was clearly displeased by the suggestion, then shrugged in acceptance.

  “Life is for the living, eh?” Mildred said, throwing a blanket across the back of an Appaloosa mare.

  “Too true, madam. Audaces fortuna iuvat!”

  “Fortune favors the brave?” Mildred smiled. “Not always, but near enough.”

  Softly whistling, Ryan waited as a big chestnut stallion shuffled forward at the call. Stroking the neck of the animal, he waited impatiently until the horse relaxed then laid the blanket across its back and swung up the saddle.

  In short order, all of the companions had saddled a mount, and started ferrying bags of supplies out of the lean-to.

  “No brass, but we do have blasters,” Krysty said, hefting a massive .66 flintlock handblaster. The weapon was easily four times the size of her deadly S&W revolver, and much heavier.

  “If nothing else, these bastards knew how to maintain their weapons,” J.B. agreed, sliding a flintlock longblaster into the gunboot alongside his saddle.

  The yard-long weapon was homemade, probably copied from a museum display, or a picture in a book that had survived the rioting that happened after skydark. He had encountered many similar weapons in his days traveling with the Trader. The springs seemed to have come from a screen door, the trigger was carved bone, and the stock was obviously made from a table leg. But the firing mechanism engaged smoothly, and the blaster was scrupulously clean.

  “Good for us, bad for them,” Ryan replied, easing a fistful of paper bullets into a shirt pocket.

  Perfect for use in a muzzle-loading weapon, the homemade cartridges were a clever combination of a precise measure of black powder and miniball sealed inside a paper tube. The paper was used as the wadding to hold everything in place.

  “Doc, did you say these things were invented back in your time?” Krysty asked, checking the action on the horse pistol.

  “Indeed, I did!” Doc replied with a toothy grin. “One of the few good things to ever come out of the War Between the States.”

  “You mean the Civil War,” Mildred corrected, lashing down the flap on a saddlebag.

  “Nothing civil about damn war,” Jak said loquaciously.

  “Too true, my young friend.” Doc laughed, kneeing his gelding in the side before tightening the belly strap. “How often in the past I would have been delighted to receive such a cornucopia of black powder for my old LeMat.”

  “I’m surprised you kept it as long as you did,” Ryan said, pulling the panga.

  “It came from my era,” Doc said simply. “It was a tangible piece of my home...my true home. A reminder of better days in these savage lands, and the promise of someday returning to my beloved Emily.”

  “But you can’t go back anymore?” Ricky asked, carefully wiggling a worn leather bit into the mouth of his chestnut stallion.

  Giving a wan smile, Doc said nothing in reply and continued packing away the assorted supplies.

  Going to the dead animals, Ryan looked them over for any signs of mutations, then started swiftly butchering some steaks from the flanks.

  Abruptly, Doc stopped loading ammunition into a saddlebag to stare in horror at a pile of paper cartridges. “Am...am I hallucinating, or do these have printing on them?”

  “Looks like,” J.B. said, adjusting his glasses. “Something about the best of times, worst of times...is it code?”

  “My lord, these are made from books!” Doc gasped. “This used to be a Dickens novel, The Tale of Two Cities. The foul Visigoths!”

  Folding pieces of the raw horsehide over a pile of steaks, Ryan handed J.B. one of the bundles and put the other into his own saddlebag.

  “Eat good tonight!” Jak chuckled, ruffling the mane of his horse.

  Just then, a soft hoot sounded on the breeze. It was almost like a lonely barn owl calling for its mate. But the noise made all of the companions jerk out weapons and cast glances around the corral.

  “Not here yet,” Ricky said, licking dry lips.

  “But they soon will be,” Ryan countered, working the bolt on the Steyr Scout to chamber one of his few remaining live bullets. “Okay, on the hump, people!”

  Leading the others to the gate, Doc stayed in the saddle and used his sword to slash the ropes holding the thorny bushes in place. As they fell away, the companions walked their horses out of the corral, mounted, then broke into a full gallop.

  “Follow me!” Jak announced, chucking the reins.

  Going to the right, he led the others around the copse of trees twice in an effort to muddle their tracks, then he angled away sharply to head for the northern foothills. Long minutes passed while the companions did nothing but ride hard, trying to put as much distance between them and the Granite campsite as possible.

  As they crested a snowy knoll, Ryan paused to look back and saw several inhuman shapes shambling around the decimated campsite. Faint hoots could be heard on the wind as the stickies eagerly dived upon the horsemeat and the scattered pieces of the dead se
c men.

  Using the suckers on their boneless arms, the stickies ripped out chunks of the raw flesh, then waved the grisly morsels around in triumph. As they feasted, the hoots got even louder.

  “And there, but for the grace of God, go us,” Mildred said softly, making the ancient sign of the Christian cross.

  “Better the dead than us,” Ryan countered grimly, kicking his horse in the rump with his boot heels. “Let’s roll! It’s a couple hundred miles to the next known redoubt.”

  “Why go there?” Doc asked. “There’s a redoubt just a hundred miles to the northwest of here hidden in a graveyard. I was taken prisoner there once by...” His voice faded away in lost memory.

  “That graveyard got a name?” Ryan asked, riding closer.

  “Hmm?” Doc asked in confusion. “What graveyard is that, my friend?”

  “The one you were just...” Ryan saw the blank look on the face of the time traveler and knew the conversation was over far too early. “Never mind.”

  Riding along, Doc replied with a gentle smile.

  “One hundred is better than two or more,” Krysty stated, wrapping the reins around a fist for better control. “And how hard can it be to find a predark graveyard?”

  “Trust Doc,” Jak said simply. “Not wrong yet.”

  “Northwest it is,” Ryan decided, kicking his mount to a full gallop. “Let’s ride through the night if we can and find the place by dawn!”

  “With a quick stop for dinner,” J.B. added eagerly, patting the bulging saddlebag.

  Ryan grinned. “You can load that in a blaster!”

  As the companions galloped away toward the inland foothills, back at the campsite one of the stickies paused in its monstrous feeding to stare at the distant figures. Still holding a human head, the mutie slowly started to shuffle forward in that direction.

  Chapter Four

  As dawn began cresting over Cobalt Mountain, a pair of armed guards walked patrol along the top of the tall limestone wall surrounding the ville of Near-Miss.

  The only opening was a single huge gate made of sheet steel and railroad ties, multiple patches with lesser materials overlapping each other as repairs had been made over the long decades. The gate was so heavy it required a dozen hinges salvaged from predark garages, and still needed a double row of car tires at the far end to keep it from sagging.

  Inside the wall, the neat rows of homes were the usual mixture of canvas tents, log cabins and predark brick structures. Almost all of the glass windows were gone, replaced with thick pine shutters more than capable of keeping out screamwings and skeeters, as well as the bitter evening chill.

  Rows of buildings followed the ancient street patterns, even though the asphalt and sidewalks had long ago been harvested to help build the original defensive wall around the settlement. Over time, the bare ground had been tromped flat, and gravel added to give strength against the spring rains, but mud holes were prevalent, some of them deep enough to use as an impromptu washbasin.

  Set on a mound that rose higher than the roof of any other building in the ville was a massive cinder-block structure surrounded by a wide moat, pungi sticks and endless coils of greasy barbed wire.

  The morning breeze carried the fresh smell of green bamboo and lava down from the rumbling Cobalt Mountain in the west. The pungent highland smells mixed with the more homey aromas rising from the sprawling village of Near-Miss: fresh horse dung, baking bread, boiling soap, and the sharp tang of fermenting mash issuing from a heavily fortified concrete blockhouse.

  Safely ensconced behind the high limestone walls, the people of Near-Miss began to shuffle from their homes. The adults yawned and scratched, while the children hauled buckets of nightsoil off to the sluice gate near the appropriately named Drek Creek.

  On the second floor of a gaudy house, a woman in a worn corset threw open the night curtains. Stretching her arms wide, she luxuriated in the warm morning sunlight, showing ample cleavage to the passersby.

  Below the balcony, an old man darted out of an alley, the nylon bag at his side stuffed full of wiggling rats, a nylon fishing net in his other hand. Her muscled torso shiny with sweat, a female blacksmith paused to light a corncob pipe. A chained gang of slaves began chopping wood under the watchful eye of a burly overseer, a knotted bullwhip expertly coiled in his callused fist.

  Standing on top of the village wall, the pair of guards ignored the usual morning goings on, their full attention on the open expanse of bare ground extending from the ville to the distant fields of waving wheat to the north, and the vast carpet of blue-green soybean fields to the far south.

  “The crops look good this year,” the sec woman said, scratching her neck. “Who knew that boiled nightsoil would help make plants grow?”

  “Yeah, the queen is a real whitecoat, that’s for triple damn sure,” the sec man agreed, yawning, opening the front of his pants to piss off the top of the ville wall.

  “Blind Norad, do you have to do that here?” the sec woman asked. Scowling, she angled away her Browning longblaster to avoid the spray of her partner. “There are perfectly good crappers all over the ville! Some of them even without splinters in the seat.”

  “But I likes the feel of the breeze!” The sec man laughed, closing his pants again. “Come on, give it a try!”

  “In public? Not even if Baron Linderholm himself was standing directly under me,” the woman replied with a haughty sniff, resting the longblaster on a shoulder.

  The weapon was old, patched a hundred times since the world ended, but the metal gleamed with fresh oil, and a bandolier of live brass lay across her snakeskin shirt like a necklace of golden death.

  “Now that would really be something, eh, wife?” He laughed again, shifting his own longblaster to a more comfortable position.

  Tucking a loose curl of hair behind an ear, she nodded in agreement. “Yes, that would be better than cold steel. However, I’m famished, so let’s go get—” The sec woman stopped talking. She slid the heavy longblaster off her shoulder and swiftly worked the arming bolt.

  To the east of the ville stood a fallow field, waiting to be planted the following year. Mostly it was barren, but there were a few scattered rosebushes amid the misty acres of turned earth.

  “See something?” the sec man demanded, leveling his Browning.

  “Mebbe...” she whispered, clicking off the safety.

  Softly, the distant Cobalt Mountain rumbled, a flashing discharge of lightning highlighting the perpetual radioactive clouds hovering above the colossal volcano. There hadn’t been an eruption in living memory, but the locals were very aware of the mountain’s moods, and stayed constantly alert for the deep underground growl that legend said was the warning of a coming eruption.

  Just then, a rosebush located in the field trembled slightly even though there was no breeze at the moment. The sec team aimed and fired their weapons. With an inhuman scream, an insect-like mutie stumbled out of the bushes to fall shuddering on the dirt, pale blood gushing from a pair of wounds in the throat.

  Not buying that nonsense for an instant, both weapons fired again, and the mutie convulsed violently as the bullets tore away most of its main face. The skull cracked exposing the mass of wiggling pink tendrils that served the horrid thing for a brain. The sec team fired once more, ending the inhuman life as the tendrils were scattered across the bare earth for yards.

  “Nuking hellfire, the damn tinglers get bolder every year,” the sec man muttered, the heavy Browning cradled in both hands.

  “But we keep getting better shots,” his wife replied, working the bolt action of the longblaster.

  “And I’m thankful for that! Now, what were you saying before you were so rudely interrupted?”

  “Breakfast!” The sec woman laughed, slapping her younger husband on the shoulder. “Then back home for a fa
st wash and a good long fuck.”

  “Now, I’d prefer that in reverse order, Mrs. Jones,” he said with a grin, rubbing a callused hand lewdly between his legs.

  She bumped him with a hip. “Too bad, Mr. Jones. Because the blaster tells the brass, not the other way around. Savvy?”

  “Fair enough!” Jones started down the wooden stairs leading to the ground.

  A dull clanging began to sound from the direction of the front gate. Both of them paused for only a moment in surprise before spinning with their weapons at the ready.

  On the far other side of the ville, a fat sec man positioned above the ville gate was using a baseball bat to wildly beat a circle of steel suspended inside a bamboo frame.

  “Incoming!” Jones bellowed over the noise. “Red alert! We have incoming!”

  All across the ville, shutters slammed shut and frantic civilians grabbed children to bodily haul them inside the nearest house. Meanwhile, a hundred sec men boiled out of the brick barracks, only a few of them fully dressed, some wearing only their skivvies, and one fellow was stark naked, but everybody was carrying iron.

  “What is it, a tingler or a howler?” Jones demanded, squinting to try to see past a guard tower.

  “Much worse, lover,” his wife replied, lowering her longblaster. “It’s Goldberg and some of his boys riding like skydark itself is chasing their asses.”

  “They being chased by coldhearts, cannies mebbe?”

  “Nobody and nothing else in sight, but them.”

  “Strange.” Easing his stance, Jones frowned. “Don’t like this. The major and his crew only left last month to recce those old ruins on the coast. Do you think—”

  With a throaty sputter, a small engine roared into operation near the front gate. Sluggishly, an electric generator revved to full power, then locking bars were hastily removed and the ville gate began to ponderously cycle open.