by James Axler
In their ignorance, they still had hope.
“What do the pilgrims do to strangers?” he said, his voice no longer soothing. “We need to be ready, understand? For better or worse, you’re in this with us. If we go down, you go down.”
She had no answers for Ryan. Already staring at her feet, Jubilee turned her head away.
He caught her by the chin and made her face him.
For a second she looked helplessly into that sky-blue eye of his. It seemed to probe her very soul. Unable to break free, she clamped her eyes shut, hoping he hadn’t seen the truth.
Chapter Eleven
Three hours after the moon had set, Ryan walked over to the straw mattress where Jubilee lay. It was dark in the room and he couldn’t tell if she was asleep or not. When he touched her shoulder, she stiffened, but she didn’t jerk away, so he guessed she had to have been awake.
If the girl was afraid her new husband wanted to exercise his marital rights, she had nothing to worry about.
“Get up,” Ryan said softly, but firmly. “We’re going for a walk and you’re coming with us.”
When she sat up, he said, “If you make any noise, or try to warn the pilgrims, we will tie you up and gag you, and drag you along. Do you understand?”
If she nodded, he couldn’t see it in the dark.
“Say yes, or we’ll tie you up right now,” he said.
In a voice barely above a whisper she said, “Yes.”
Behind him the door opened a crack and a shaft of light from the hall cut through the gloom. From the looks of her face, she’d been curled up on the straw pallet, crying.
Ryan took her by the arm and led her to the door, where the companions waited. With their packs strapped on and rattle-proofed, they were ready to put Little Pueblo behind them, forever. The light in the hall came from torches burning in makeshift stanchions. Except for the hissing of the flames there was no sound. And there was no one on guard in the corridor. They moved single file out the door and along the hall to the staircase. Jubilee was sandwiched in the middle of the line, between Mildred and Krysty.
The stairs creaked and quivered as they descended. Jak and Ryan took the lead and J.B. brought up the rear. They only had a short way to go, just one floor to pass before they reached the foyer and the city hall entrance. The rickety staircase was a necessary evil. If it hadn’t been for the pregnant girl, they would have used a rope from one of their packs to rappel out the window and onto the street.
Jak and Ryan paused on the first-floor landing, listening hard. Again, they heard no sounds except for the sizzling of the torches. There was no way to know whether the pilgrims had put guards on them or not. Or how close the guards would be stationed. To be safe, the companions had to assume that they were under some kind of surveillance. It made the early morning recce more challenging. Their plan was to break into the redoubt, and if possible jump out of the gateway mat-trans. If that wasn’t possible, to return to city hall unseen and before they were missed.
Ryan had no illusions about what would happen to them if they were caught in the act of breaking into Minotaur. The ville folk weren’t going to take kindly to the desecration of Bob and Enid’s “tomb.” But staying in Little Pueblo wasn’t an option. Compared to what surrounded it, the place was paradise, all right, but it was also a prison for people who valued their freedom. The companions weren’t field hands, and had no aspirations to becoming same. On principle, they refused to live off the forced labor of others. And none of them was willing to go along with the Darwin-harem thing.
When they reached the foyer, they found the long corridor lit by torches at either end. They had to pass by four doorways, including the elevator, which Ryan discounted because it had been nailed shut. No light leaked out from under the other doors. Before they began to advance, Ryan made sure Jak was aware of the potential threat.
As they proceeded, he and the albino started opening the doors and clearing each of the rooms. The idea was to get out of the building without alerting anyone. Poking their heads and weapons in the rooms increased the chances of a firefight, and discovery, but it was the only way to prevent the worst case scenario—a crossfire ambush in the corridor.
When Ryan and Jak approached the third and last door, everything went to hell. Three men burst out of the doorway carrying cut-down, predark pump shotguns on shoulder slings, hip-braced to fire. They weren’t pilgrims. They were field slaves with blasters.
One half of the companions’ plan was down the crapper. There would be no sneaking back to the second floor.
The man standing in front of Ryan swung the muzzle of his 12-gauge back and forth at waist height. “Don’t move,” he warned.
As he spoke, something whooshed. With a thunk, a shiny steel blade slammed into his right eye socket. The man’s head snapped back, and his knees buckled. The knife point had driven through the thin bone behind the eye and deep into his brain.
As he fell, dead on his feet, the other two guards looked on in astonishment. The lapse of attention lasted less than a second, just long enough. Ryan pivoted from his hips, bringing the butt of the Steyr around in a tight, precise arc. It was sacrilege to use a finely tuned sniper rifle as a bludgeon, but under the circumstances there was no alternative. The steel-shod butt crunched into the nearer man’s temple, poleaxing him. The tremendous force of the blow sent him sprawling into the guard beside him.
Before that man could recover his balance and fire, a leaf-bladed knife pinned his beard to the front of his throat, burrowing deep, its point cutting his windpipe and his carotid artery. He let the shotgun fall on its sling and clutched at his neck with both hands. As blood sheeted down the front of his robe, his mouth opened and closed, like fish out of water.
Jak ripped the blaster away from him, and Ryan shoved him against the wall. Goggle-eyed, his mouth still moving, he slid to the floor. It took him about a minute to bleed out. The homespun robe soaked up the gore like a sponge.
“This one’s dead, too,” Mildred said, leaning over the guy who’d taken the blow to the temple. “You caved in his head.”
Krysty had her left hand clamped on Jubilee’s shoulder. In her right hand she held her Smith & Wesson Model 640. The girl was trembling, her face blanched by shock.
Ryan surveyed the mess they’d made. Even if they could find a place to hide the bodies, there were puddles of blood all over the floor. Way too much to clean up.
“I think we just wore out our welcome,” J.B. observed.
“Permanently, I fear,” Doc said
“Do you think there’ll be more waiting for us outside?” Mildred queried.
“If the pilgrims posted three guards in here,” Ryan said, “it means they don’t trust us. And if they don’t trust us, you can bet there’re more.”
“They could be set up to defend Minotaur,” Krysty said. “They could have an ambush set up in the park, figuring we’d try to loot it.”
“They could be anywhere,” Mildred said.
“Word isn’t out, yet,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to break into Minotaur before they realize we’re on the move.”
“And if the mat-trans unit doesn’t work when we get there?” Krysty said.
The companions all looked at Ryan.
“Let’s hope there’s a ton of ammo inside,” he said, “because we’re going to need it.”
Outside the city hall’s front doors, the only light on the street was from the blanket of stars. The town square was bathed in deep shadow, its bordering row of trees cast wide pools of impenetrable darkness, their trunks and branches obscured the view of the redoubt. The companions filed down the steps, keeping low and moving at a trot.
The street to the corner was deserted.
No sentries in sight.
With J.B. and Ryan covering the rear, backstepping with weapons up, they crossed over to the park. Jak and Doc led them to the cover of the nearest trees, which were fifty feet from the corner of the square. They took up kneeling positions around t
he trunks, covering all directions.
Up and down the line of trees nothing moved. Not a twig. Not a leaf. Between them and the low, concrete oblong of the redoubt was seventy-five yards of tightly cropped grass. Ninety yards of open space to cross in the scorching, breathless night.
“If we have to retreat, we’re going to need covering fire,” Ryan said. “Doc, you stay here and watch our backs. Jak, cross over to the trees on the other side, and do the same from there. Keep an eye on the redoubt’s entrance, too. We’ll signal when we’ve got the door open. And when we do, you come running.”
“Be assured that we will do just that, my dear Ryan,” Doc said.
The albino slipped into the shadows of the line of trees, and promptly vanished. After a minute or two, starlight reflected off something white near the base of a tree trunk directly across the sward. Jak was in position.
Before they set off, Ryan leaned close to Krysty and whispered in her ear, “Watch the girl close. When she realizes what we’re up to, she may make a fuss. Can’t have that.”
Krysty nodded.
With Ryan in the lead, J.B., Krysty, Jubilee and Mildred ran for the redoubt. If anybody was watching them from the trees, they kept quiet and out of sight. When Ryan reached the front wall, he hurried along it to the steps leading down to the entrance.
Jubilee stopped short when he waved the others down the steps ahead of him. Her eyes grew wide, and with a whimper she broke free. She got three steps before Krysty caught her by the back of her robe and jerked her back, hard.
“No!” the girl gasped. “You can’t! You must not!”
Krysty clamped a hand over her mouth and held her still. “Stop it,” she said into the girl’s ear. “I don’t want to hurt you. Don’t make me hurt you.”
Jubilee stopped struggling at once. She looked at Ryan with pleading eyes.
In vain as far as he was concerned.
The child knew nothing about the inner workings of redoubts and the network of mat-trans units that connected them. She knew only superstition and myth.
Bob and Enid.
He helped Krysty pull Jubilee to the bottom of the stairs, where they forced her to sit. The concrete pad was stacked with smooth boulders, a steeply angled slope that leaned against, and blocked the vanadium door, top to bottom. The entrance’s keypad lock was just visible on the outside edge of the pile, on the right. Unlocking the door was pointless at this stage; with all the rocks in the way it wouldn’t open.
Mildred took a look-out post near the top of the steps while J.B. and Ryan ditched their packs, then started moving the stones to clear the way. The rocks were so heavy they could only manage to carry one at a time. They staggered up the steps with their burdens, and when they got to the top, they rolled the stones out onto the neatly trimmed grass.
AS JAK WATCHED his friends disappear down the stairwell, his heart did a little flip in his chest. He’d had the same bad feeling many times before. The sense that everything was on the verge of falling apart. In a way, and on a scale that would boggle his radblasted, mutie mind.
This wasn’t the doomie sight.
Jak couldn’t read the future like the pages of a book already written. His unease came as his brain digested the facts of the present. They’d gotten themselves into a box for real, this time. There was only one possible safe way out, and there was a good chance that was a dead end.
Mildred would have said he was calculating probabilities. Whatever it was, Jak just did it, like breathing in and out.
And while he did it, bad feeling and all, a smile played across his mouth. Every nerve in his body was on triple alert. In Deathlands, where most people got from here to there on foot, or on the back of some dumb animal, this was the fast lane.
When a stick softly cracked to his right, at the corner of the park, some fifty feet away, he didn’t jump in surprise because he was expecting it. Bracing against the tree trunk he brought the sights of his Colt Python to bear.
His mouth tightened.
Ville folk poured through the gap in the trees. Not just on Jak’s side, but on Doc’s as well. Dozens of them, armed with blasters, moving quickly and with precision toward the redoubt.
Ryan Cawdor, Deathlands’ warrior of warriors, had taught him that in every game, every battle, there was one move that couldn’t be countered.
Checkmate.
Killshot.
That’s what this was.
He squeezed the Python’s combat trigger and it barked and bucked in his fist. Downrange, one of the running figures crumpled. As the man fell, he tripped up two others following closely behind. Across the park, Doc’s .44 boomed. Jak caught the flare of three-foot-long muzzle-flash out of the corner of his eye.
As he lined up his sights and brought up the trigger’s slack, the ville folk returned fire in a big way. Muzzles flashed at him from the grass and from the shadows below the trees. Semi- and full-auto centerfire weapons clattered and black-powder blasters unleashed thundering booms. Bullets whined past his head and thunked into the tree trunk, spraying him with bits of bark.
Jak had to throw himself belly down to avoid being torn apart.
Twisting around the base of the tree, he saw three attackers, running full tilt right at him, shoulder to shoulder.
Jak fired double action, four times, as fast as he could pull the trigger.
A pair of Magnum slugs bored through the middle man, hitting him high in the chest, sending him crashing first to his knees, then his face. The guy on the right jerked sideways as a bullet slammed his shoulder. Screaming and clutching his dead arm, he dropped his weapon and dived for the cover of the trees. The man on the left took a .357 bullet square through the bridge of his nose, and the back of his head exploded in a plume of blood mist, brains and bone that pelted the grass behind him. Rag-doll limp, he, too, went from knees to face.
His four quick shots gave the other ville folk something to aim at. From three sides they poured a fusillade of fire at his muzzle-flashes. And the air was full of screaming slugs and pistol balls. Under the onslaught, the tree before him started to shake and fall apart. Leaves, limbs, hunks of bark rained on him. Dirt and grass from the low shots kicked up in his face.
To stand and fight was to die.
And for nothing.
He couldn’t protect the companions from this position, and he couldn’t chill enough of the enemy to improve their odds.
Jak scrambled to his feet and bolted around the tree trunk, heading for the sidewalk. As he did so, he practically collided with an oncoming robed figure. The AK-74 the person carried registered in his mind a split second before he fired from the hip. One shot straight into the gut. The Python roared and the figure was blown backward; the assault rifle went flying. Dashing on Jak saw there was no chin beard. It was a one of the pilgrims’ wives, rolling on her back in the grass, clutching her stomach.
As he ran past her, he pulled a gren from his pocket and primed it. He paused to lob it over the tops of the trees, toward the massed fire. He didn’t stick around for the bang. He just threw it and sprinted for the sidewalk. Blasterfire raged behind him, but not at him. It sounded like J.B. and Ryan were firing from the redoubt entrance.
Then came the rocking explosion, followed by screams.
Then more explosions, more screams. Somebody else was chucking grens, too.
The problem was, what would have worked in the confines of the theater wasn’t going to work in the open square. There was too much room for the ville folk to maneuver and evade. And way too many of them.
In long strides Jak crossed the street and ducked into the front of a one-story building. It was dark inside, and no one was home. He dumped the Colt’s spent casings on the floor and used a speedloader to refill the cylinder with jacketed .357 mag rounds.
Ready to resume the fight, he found the back door and a narrow alley that ran behind the row of buildings. As he stepped out, more explosions interrupted the steady crackle of blasterfire. He had to get behind the
enemy, and quick. That meant coming up on the redoubt from the rear. He turned right and started to run. The alley opened onto one of the streets that ringed the square. Jak came around the edge of the last building low and fast, dashing up the sidewalk for the corner.
From that vantage point, he could see the back side of the park. And he could see folks in robes standing in front of the trees.
Then the roar of gunfire suddenly faltered, and stopped.
If Ryan and the others weren’t already dead, they were about to be.
As he raised the Python, his targets moved through the trees and out of sight into the square.
Jak cursed, then darted across the street to the tree line. Peering around a trunk he could see the ville folk sprinting for the rear wall of the redoubt. He had the bastards, now. Bracing his blaster hand against the tree, he took aim and tightened down on the trigger.
“No, my dear boy,” Doc said softly beside him. “It is far too late for that.”
Chapter Twelve
Lathered with sweat, his legs and back aching, Ryan lurched up the steps with yet another 120-pound boulder. He and J.B. were pushing as hard as they could, working without pause, fighting through the pain. At least they wouldn’t have to replace all the rocks to cover their tracks. They wouldn’t be returning to city hall, under any conditions. Not with the three corpses they’d left behind. For the companions it had come down to either the redoubt and the mat-trans unit, or risking the desert on foot.
As Ryan dumped the stone onto the grass, two blaster shots shattered the early morning stillness. The tree lines on either side of the park lit up for an instant from the muzzle-flashes, then went dark. He knew the sound of Jak’s and Doc’s weapons.
They weren’t shooting jackrabbits.
Before he could turn, the ville folk answered fire, raining bullets down on the redoubt’s entrance. Slugs sparked off the boulders scattered on the grass and slammed into the concrete wall, showering the entrance stairwell with sharp fragments.
