Black Harvest

by James Axler

  “Best to head east, then.”

  “Yeah, that was my thought, too. East or south.”

  “Head east for a while,” Ryan said. “At least until we reach that river we found the two women swimming in.”

  J.B. nodded. “How’s Jak?”

  “Pretty bad. Mildred’s not sure what’s wrong. Seems worse than just a simple withdrawal from drugs.”

  “Bastards!” J.B. spit. “Wouldn’t mind going back there and blowing up the whole ville.”

  “The thought crossed my mind,” Ryan replied. “But we don’t have any grens to do it with, we’re also way low on ammo, and… First thing we’ve got to do is take care of Jak, and he’ll need plenty of water, some food, too.”

  J.B. put the wag in gear and pointed it east.

  Ryan climbed up into the steel box to check on Jak. “Any change?”

  “No,” Mildred answered. “And he’s becoming catatonic.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Well, he goes through alternating periods of muscular rigidity and mental stupor, and great excitement and confusion.”

  “So he could go wild again at any moment.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Tie his hands and feet together,” Ryan ordered. Doc, Krysty and Mildred set to work lashing Jak’s hands together behind his back, and his feet together at the ankles.

  “His mouth, too,” Ryan said. “But just a gag this time, in case he wants to bite somebody.”

  Doc took a long strip of clean cloth and pulled it tight against Jak’s lips and tied it securely behind his head so he couldn’t bite anybody in one of his wilder moments.

  Ryan sat down with his back against the left side of the box. “Isn’t there anything else you can do for him?”

  Mildred shrugged and shook her head at the same time. “If I knew exactly what they put into his system I might be able to give him something to counter it, but I don’t know what they used, so there isn’t a whole lot I can do. I can’t even give him something to keep him calm because whatever I give him might interact with the drugs that are already in his system.”

  Ryan nodded, understanding.

  “We’re heading for the river.”

  “Hopefully the water will be good enough to drink.”

  “Should be, especially since we’ll be upriver from the ville.”

  “Good, if nothing else, Jak needs to be drinking a lot of water so he can flush out his system.”

  Just then the wag hit a bump in the road and Jak opened his eyes.

  “Hi, Jak,” Krysty greeted.

  Jak suddenly began twisting furiously against the bindings around his hands and feet. He screamed, too, but his cries were muffled by the gag.

  Ryan jumped on top of Jak and did his best to hold him down so he wouldn’t hurt himself against the sides of the steel box. But Ryan’s weight alone wasn’t enough to keep Jak still, and moments later, Doc and Krysty were also holding down the surprisingly strong albino teen.

  Mildred heard his muffled cries for help, then looked into Jak’s burning red eyes and saw that he was in great pain, agony. She could only hope that somehow she could provide him with some relief.

  And soon.

  THE FIRE on the street in front of the baron’s residence had finally been put out. The street was black and charred, and the pre-Dark asphalt had buckled under the heat of the fire. The sides of the baron’s mansion were also scarred by the flames, with windows on the first three floors melted from the heat.

  But while the street fire was out, the wag-pool barn was still blazing fiercely. A great pall of smoke hung over the entire ville, making it look as if the place had just been through a war.

  Baron Schini stood in the middle of the street in front of the baron’s mansion with fisted hands resting on her hips. There was a cheroot jammed into the corner of her mouth, and a tight smile holding it in place.

  It had all been so easy.

  She had expected a firefight for the place with dozens of dead and twice as many injured. But the outlanders had taken care of most of the opposition just escaping from the ville. The ville’s sec force had been cut by half, and the half that remained were exhausted from fighting the fires.

  On the other hand her sec force hadn’t fired a single round and were able to just ride into the ville in their wags and take over control. There were still a few sec men about and a few of them would undoubtedly remain loyal to Robards, or even to DeMann, and there might even be a movement afoot to get rid of her from within. But all of that would be addressed in the next few days.

  For now, she was the only baron in the ville, and in fact, she was now baron of two villes, and she had never had a sweeter moment of triumph in her life.

  Just then, the first of her sec men were approaching in their wags. The first two wags drove right by her, setting a perimeter around the baron’s residence building, which would do very well as her command center.

  The third wag came to a halt just in front of her. When the smoke cleared she saw that Robards was sitting in the passenger seat with the blasters of the two sec men behind him pushing hard against his skull.

  “Ah, Sec chief Robards…or should I say, Sec man Robards.” She gave him a little smile. “How did you enjoy being baron?”

  Robards didn’t answer.

  “I bet you savored every one of those twenty minutes.” She plucked the cheroot from the corner of her mouth and laughed.

  “Tell these men to pull back their blasters, or I swear I’ll—”

  “You’ll do sweet fuck-all, asshole.” Baron Schini spit the words in a show of contempt. “You’re nothing in this ville now. Especially since it was you who chilled Baron DeMann in cold blood.”

  A crowd of ville residents began to gather around them.

  “I did not,” Robards said. “It was you, you were the one who shot him in cold blood.”

  “So you’re a liar, too, I see.”

  “No, you chilled him.” Robards began moving his head in all directions as if he were talking to everyone at once. “Check the round, it’s from a snub-nosed .38. I use 9 mm ammo. Check it and you’ll see, it’s a perfect match to her blaster.”

  “Thought of everything I see,” the baron said. “You used my blaster, or one just like it in an attempt to frame me.” She shook her head. “You’re more despicable than I thought.”

  The crowd of people looked at Robards with disgust.

  “Take him into the basement and hold him there until I decide on a suitable punishment for him.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the sec men said.

  They restarted the wag and drove Robards away.

  “Now, let’s get that front gate blocked off,” the baron ordered. “Last thing we need is muties wandering around while we’re trying to get this ville back on its feet.”

  At that moment a man stepped out of the crowd. “Who decided that you’d be the new baron?” the man asked.

  Baron Schini didn’t answer. Instead, the sec man on her right raised his blaster and fired off a single round that punched a hole through the man’s neck and spattered blood on all of the citizens standing behind him.

  “Any other questions?” the baron asked.

  The crowd was silent.

  The baron smiled. “Good, then let’s get to work.”

  THEY REACHED a quiet bend in the river just as the sun was beginning to fall out of the western sky, tinting the clouds strange hues of orange, red and yellow.

  If the friends hadn’t been so tired and hungry, and if Jak hadn’t been fighting for his life, it could have been a very pleasant evening for them. But the moment J.B. brought the wag to a halt and cut the engine, Ryan was on his feet and barking orders.

  “Doc, you and Krysty find out if there are any fish in the river worth eating.”

  “As you wish,” Doc said with forced humor. “I shall fish.”

  “Mildred, you and I’ll get Jak onto the ground. This box gives good protection, but the steel will get
awfully cold at night.”

  “How are we going to get Jak out of here?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t think he’s going to be helping us any.”

  “We’ll see if this box can tilt. If it does, the job’s easy, and if it doesn’t, we’ll try to make Jak as comfortable as we can inside the box.”

  Ryan peeked over the top of the box. “You think this box still goes up and down?”

  “Don’t know,” J.B. replied. “There’s a control here that reads Up and Down. I suppose that one’s worth a try.

  “Give me a minute,” Ryan said, as he climbed down from the box. He got Mildred to pass him the last can of fuel, and anything else that needed to be removed from the box before it was raised.

  When Ryan was done, J.B. started up the wag.

  Ryan positioned himself behind and to the side of the wag and gave J.B. the signal to raise the box.

  J.B. revved the wag’s engine and after a few moments, he flipped the control in the cab to the Up position.

  The wag’s engine started to falter, but continued to run roughly as the steel box slowly began to rise.

  Ryan moved directly behind the steel box and watched as the large rectangular door lifted up off its restraints and began to hang freely open.

  “Far enough!” Ryan shouted.

  Even though raising the box farther would make the opening wider, Ryan didn’t want Jak and Mildred to come sliding out of the box since the rocky ground near the river’s edge would make for a hard landing.

  J.B. moved the control to the middle position, causing the box to stop rising and the engine to run much smoother.

  Ryan grabbed a few nearby tree branches to prop the door open and then reached inside the box for Jak.

  He was in a dormant stage, and Ryan easily picked him up and carried him around to the side of the wag. Then he put him onto the ground as quickly as he could, not wanting to be holding the teen if and when he suddenly turned wild on him.

  With Jak on the ground and Mildred attending to him, Ryan removed the branches holding the box open and told J.B. to lower it.

  A few moments later the box was down and the wag’s engine was once again shut down.

  “I’ll get some water for Jak,” Ryan said. Then he turned to face J.B. “You see if you can use the wag to set up some sort of shelter for us.”

  J.B. nodded silently and went off searching for materials to make a shelter for the friends.

  Night was coming.

  And judging by the condition Jak was in, it was going to be a long, hard one.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Shortly after dark, Baron Schini’s sec force had closed off the main gate and were working toward controlling the key functions of the ville.

  Her men had taken over the armory, which was full of remades and ammo, even a few pre-Dark grens, and they’d set up guards around the smoldering ruins of the wag pool. They had cut off the supply of fresh water from the ville’s main well and diverted the flow to just a single pump so they could control the consumption of water. Whoever recognized her as the new baron of the ville got as much water as they needed.

  Those who opposed her would die of thirst.

  Any sec men who openly defied her were either shot or imprisoned. And if they refused to give themselves up, then their entire families were wiped out.

  A funeral pyre of bodies burned in the open roadway between the baron’s mansion and the front gate.

  A small triage area was set up next to the fire, where pancreases, livers and other chemical-producing and -storing organs could be harvested before the bodies were placed on the fire.

  The smell of burning flesh was putrid and traveled throughout the ville, reminding those who chose to hide that no one and no place was safe for those who opposed the new baron.

  But once you got past the sec men and the ville leaders, and stepped down a few rungs on the social ladder, few citizens really cared who ran the ville. In the gaudy houses and taverns, there was no change in the supply of drugs and people continued to use dreem and jolt to escape their reality. For them, a new baron meant that one form of tyranny had been exchanged for another, and they were still stuck inside the ville’s walls. When morning came they would still be making bang and smash for easterners whose lives were just as hopeless as their own.

  For people on the ville’s bottom rung it was a case of the old saying that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same. However, even though things had changed, few thought that the changes would be permanent.

  “Raise a glass to the new baron,” one of Baron Schini’s sec men said, trying to rally support for the ville’s new leader.

  About half the customers lifted their mugs in reply.

  “What’s the matter, ain’t you going to toast the bitch in charge?” a gaudy-house slut said to one of the old-timers playing blackjack in the corner.

  The old-timer lifted his mug quickly, then set it down again. “I’ll toast the new baron when there is a new baron. The battle’s over for today, but I got a feelin’ the war ain’t over yet.”

  “What do you mean? The new baron’s got a sec force of over thirty men.”

  “And DeMann had a force of over forty that was pretty much wiped out by a handful of outlanders.”

  “So who’s going to be the new baron when all this is over with?”

  “Don’t know that. But I do know it won’t be Schini…”

  “How do you know?”

  The old-timer shrugged. “Just do.”

  The dealer dealt another card to the old-timer, who turned his cards over showing a total of twenty-one.

  BY THE TIME darkness fell on their camp, J.B. had constructed a lean-to against the side of the wag that provided Jak a modest amount of protection from the elements. Ryan had given up his coat and the other friends had done the same, hoping to keep Jak warm through the night.

  Doc had managed to net a few catfish from the river and along with the few dried provisions they could muster, the evening meal provided an acceptable amount of nourishment, if not flavor. The fresh water and a few bites of food had seemed to help Jak, stretching out the time he was dormant so that his wild outbursts came roughly every hour. However, his fever was still running dangerously high, and his wild times were becoming increasingly more savage. During the last one he had bitten cleanly through his gag and let out a loud blood-curdling cry that had surely been heard for miles around.

  And so, expecting company, Ryan and J.B. took the first watch, but Krysty and Doc didn’t feel much like sleeping so the four of them kept an eye, and ear, on the darkness while Mildred tended to Jak.

  Using the wag as a home base, Ryan scouted a perimeter of fifty yards starting from the river’s edge and making a broad circle around the wag, crossing with J.B. roughly in the middle, before continuing on until he hit the river’s edge once more.

  Ryan and J.B. were about to cross paths for the sixth time when they stopped for a few minutes to talk.

  “Think Jak will pull through?” J.B. asked.

  Ryan shook his head. “If Mildred doesn’t know, how should I? I do know that if anyone can make it through this, Jak’s a good bet to be the one.”

  “Can’t argue with—”

  J.B. stopped in midsentence to listen to the dark, dark night.

  “I heard it, too,” Ryan whispered.

  The two men dropped to a crouch.

  “Direction?”

  “I make it to the left, ten o’clock.”

  “Yeah, that’s sounds about right.”

  Ryan looked behind him and saw that Krysty and Doc were aware of the danger and had also taken up defensive positions.

  “You circle right,” Ryan said, “I’ll circle left. Let’s see if we can get behind them.”

  J.B. and Ryan started to move when a voice boomed out of the darkness.

  “Hold it right there, One-eye!”

  Ryan froze.

  J.B. kept moving.

  “You, too, thin man.”
<
br />   J.B. reluctantly stopped in his tracks.

  “We don’t want any more trouble from you, Baron,” Ryan said, trying to find someone in the darkness, but without any luck. “You let us go now, and we’ll cause you no more trouble. But if you want more of a fight, we’ll only chill more of your sec force and bust up your ville.”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” the voice in the darkness said.

  Ryan didn’t recognize the voice. It didn’t sound like either of the barons he’d heard speak in the ville. This one sounded, well…earthier, maybe even older. It was the voice of someone who lived off the land, and had done so for a very long time.

  “But before you decide on fighting us, let me warn you that there are fifteen members of my family surrounding your little encampment. We’ve got automatic weapons with plenty of ammo, so it won’t bother us in the least firing a dozen rounds into the darkness for just a single hit.

  “And before you consider sneaking down to the river and away in the current, I should tell you that I’ve got two of my sons on the other side of the river waiting for you, just in case.”

  This was no baron, Ryan was sure of it.

  But if not a baron, then who?

  “My name is Ryan… Ryan Cawdor, and not One-eye. Who are you?”

  The voice, somewhat softer this time, said, “A friend.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  As darkness fell over the ville, Baron Schini’s sec men cleared the muties from the entrance to the ville and began working on rebuilding the gate, using their wags to push and drag derelict vehicles from different parts of the wall to plug up the gaping hole that had replaced the large wooden gate. The makeshift patch would do for this night, as long as there were guards posted, but in the morning they would need to repair or rebuild the wooden gate and rerun it on its hinges.

  Meanwhile, the baron had ordered Robards chained inside the steel box with the doors left open so that the rest of the citizens of the ville could see what had happened to their former sec chief…and baron.

  The prisoner who had been hanging from the walls of the box, a former sec man named Desmond, was let down and set free. When first told of his good luck, Des had a hard time believing it.