Black Harvest

by James Axler

  By the time Ryan was taking aim at the third sec man, the fourth had turned around and seen them.

  There was an expression of confusion about his fate for a split second, and then his face was gone as a round from Krysty’s Smith & Wesson wiped it away in a wash of red.

  “J.B., Krysty and Johnson, keep them busy for a minute!” Ryan ordered. “Doc, dust off your blaster. I’ve got a job for it.”

  Without a word of response, J.B., Krysty and Johnson began firing back at the sec men across the street, having no better luck at eliminating them than the sec men Ryan had just chilled.

  The one-eyed man pointed to a billboard that was bolted to the building on the northeast corner of the intersection. “See that sign hanging across the street?”

  “The one that says, ‘There’s a whole new world coming’?”

  Ryan nodded. “Yeah. Take it down with the LeMat.”

  Doc rested the barrel of the giant blaster on a pre-Dark newspaper box that was chained to the corner lamppost and took aim at the sign.

  “Be ready to cross the street on my order,” Ryan warned.

  Doc continued to adjust the blaster.

  “Any time you’re ready, Doc.”

  “Patience, my dear Ryan. The LeMat is not a Czech-built target pistol, it needs to be aimed thoughtfully and with, I must admit, a bit of imagination in terms of wind and climate and so forth. If I were to miss, or otherwise not achieve the desired results, your plan will have been foiled and we will be forced to come up with another… And, considering this is your first plan, I don’t hold out great confidence for the successful outcome of the ones that will follow it.”

  “He always like this?” Johnson asked.

  “Just fire the damn blaster, Doc!”

  “As you wish.”

  Doc pulled the trigger and the Civil War blaster’s .63-caliber scattergun boomed.

  An instant later the sign across the street twisted savagely as if it had been struck by hurricane-force winds, and then it came apart from the wall it was secured to, tearing several bricks out of the wall along with it.

  The sign fluttered down on the sec men. It had looked small hanging over the street and secured to the wall, but by the time it was on street level, it had covered three of the sec men, while the fourth had his head sheared off by one of the twisted, jagged edges created by the force of Doc’s round.

  There were screams and shouts coming from the other side of the street.

  “That’s it, let’s move!” Ryan said, his SIG-Sauer covering the rest of the friends as they scrambled across the intersection and down the street.

  In moments the firefight was behind them, and judging by the sounds of things, it was over as well.

  “That was quite the plan,” Johnson said, obviously impressed. “No wonder Spearpoint was toast after you were through with it.”

  Ryan wasn’t interested.

  “Is that the tower?”

  Johnson turned around and like the others, saw the bell tower, still pretty much intact, rising up in the center of a large open square.

  “That’s it, all right.”

  “Where’s the stuff buried?”

  “Underneath it, but you have to access the vault through the building over there, or a stairway at the edge of the square.”

  “Take us to the stairway.”

  Johnson shook his head. “I don’t have a key for that door.” Then he looked at Doc’s smoking blaster. “But then again, mebbe we won’t be needing a key.”

  JAK’S SCREAM was painful for Mildred to listen to.

  The albino teen had been brought into a sort of large shower room that Bennett Johnson and his family used not only to keep themselves clean, but as an infirmary as well.

  There were a few rudimentary medical tools on shelves on the walls and a few basic supplies stored in jars, but the best aspect of the room was the homemade wooden table in the center of it. The table was basically a workbench that had been converted into a sort of bed. It was covered with a rag-filled mattress, and a series of leather belts was positioned periodically at its edges starting at the head, and going down the body. Obviously Johnson’s family had had to deal with dangerous patients before, maybe even on a regular basis.

  Mildred had done her best to make Jak comfortable, keeping him hydrated as she toweled the sweat from his body. She also used damp towels to keep his body temperature down to acceptable levels.

  A few of the Johnson family members had offered her some rudimentary sedatives that were something like pre-Dark Valium, but Mildred was hesitant to give Jak anything she really didn’t have to, since she didn’t know when the others would be returning and couldn’t be sure how whatever she gave him to rest would react with the antibodies they would be bringing her later on.

  Jak let out another bone-jarring, blood-curdling scream.

  But while Mildred was affected by her friend’s pain, the rest of the Johnson family seemed unbothered by the sound of the albino teen’s suffering.

  “We’ve heard much worse,” one of the older children said. Mildred remembered his name being Lars. “When my brother came back from the ville, he’d been on bang for three months. He screamed for seven days before he was finally off the drug. For him—” he gestured to Jak “—it hasn’t even been seven hours.”

  Mildred wondered how long it had been and glanced at her wrist chron.

  Not even two hours since the friends had left.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Sec chief Viviani was the first to crawl out from under the sign.

  “Are you all right?” he asked, looking left and right. “Is everyone all—” He stopped in midsentence when he saw the head of one of his sec men several yards away from the man’s body.

  “I’m all right,” one of the other sec men said.

  “Cut my arm, but I’ll live.”

  Viviani looked away from the dead man.

  “How is he?” another sec man asked.

  “Dead.”

  A moment of silence.

  “Where did they go?” the sec chief asked.

  “Who?”

  “Robards’s sec men.”

  “Gone.”

  “Mebbe they’re trying to get around us and knocked down the sign as a distraction.”

  A sliver of fear crept up Viviani’s spine. Mebbe taking control of the ville wasn’t going to be as easy as Baron Schini thought. “Back to the baron’s residence. We’ll set up a position there. If we can’t take over the rest of the ville, at least we’ll control the main gate and the ville’s control center.”

  “IT’S DOWN THERE,” Johnson said.

  There were the remains of a pre-Dark fence on the edge of the square, and the entrance to the cairn itself was a three-sided rectangular box that had one end open to a stairway that led down into the ground.

  “There’s a door at the bottom of the stairs that leads under the bell tower. It was a room they kept electronic and public-address equipment in for the square—you know, so they could make announcements at special events and such.”

  “Why store medicine there?”

  “Why not?” Johnson answered. “Few people know where it leads, the room is dry and cool in both winter and summer, and it’s easy to get to…if you have a key.”

  Johnson led them to the stairs.

  When they stopped there, they all looked at Johnson, whose own eyes were wide in surprise.

  The door at the bottom of the stairs was unlocked, and open.

  THE MUTIES had stormed through the main gate, stoning the sec men there, then taking their weapons before charging into the heart of the ville.

  They were tempted to head for the baron’s residence first, but it was the most heavily defended part of the ville and attacking it now was akin to suicide. They were better off taking over the back alleys and side streets, and rolling the dealers for both their drugs and their jack. Some of them even carried blasters, which would give their inevitable assault on the baron’s residen
ce an even better chance at success.

  The muties stayed close to the shadows, although their rambling gait betrayed their presence, as looping hands and feet often strayed into the light as they walked.

  But they made no sound.

  The leader, an older man with a body covered in open sores, led them to a part of the ville known for its gaudy houses and jolt dealers—Jarvis Street.

  As they neared the street, it seemed as if no one in the neighborhood was aware that the ville was under siege. The lights were on in each of the gaudy houses, and there were jolt dealers on every street corner.

  But once they reached Jarvis Street itself, it was obvious that the gaudy houses had been affected by the change in power and were busy doing business with the new sec force. And while the dealers out on the street were still there, now they had a sec man watching over them, ready to take the baron’s cut of the dealer’s gross…or what the new baron would take as a cut once she figured out the intricacies of the ville’s finances.

  They took out the first sec man with a handblaster to the head at short range. That convinced the dealer to give up his money, jolt and bang, as well as his blaster, a single-shot homemade weapon strapped to his right wrist.

  When a sec man came out of the gaudy house to see what was going on, the muties chilled him with a blaster round to the back of the head.

  And then they took his blaster.

  When another sec man came out to see what had happened to the first, they used the first sec man’s blaster to chill him as well. And then they took his weapon.

  Eventually, sec men stopped coming out into the street.

  That’s when the muties moved on to the next gaudy house, dividing the appropriated jolt and bang between themselves. As a result, they were an army that was becoming increasingly well armed by the hour.

  And thanks to the jolt and bang, they were also becoming more fearless, not to mention reckless, the deeper they moved into the ville.

  “WHAT’S PAST the door?” Ryan asked Johnson, the friends’ guide through the ville.

  “There’s a short hallway just inside and then another door, without a lock on it, that leads into the storage room.”

  “How big’s the storage room?”

  “Ten by twenty feet.”

  “If we go in blasting, will we damage the antibodies?”

  “Hard to say. If they’re still in storage, no. But, if there’s someone in there and they’ve got the antibodies in their hands or in a pocket…” His voice trailed off.

  “We’ll take our chances. Me and J.B. will lead.”

  And then without another word, Ryan slipped down the stairs, followed by J.B. Krysty, Doc and Johnson stayed above ground, making sure the others would have an escape route and wouldn’t get holed up in the stairway.

  At the bottom of the stairs, Ryan pushed the door fully open with the point of his index finger. It swung open silently at first, but then creaked on its hinges. Ryan couldn’t stop the door from moving and hoped that whoever was inside would think it was just the wind.

  Ryan and J.B. remained alert, their blasters pointed through the doorway and ready to fill the darkness with lead the moment someone appeared.

  No one did.

  They pressed on, through the door and into the darkness. Surely, whoever was inside had a light with them, an open flame or lantern. Then, as they got closer to the second doorway, a sliver of light materialized on the floor beneath the bottom of the door.

  They watched the light for several moments.

  Ryan turned to J.B. and first put up an index finger, then added his middle finger, asking the Armorer if he thought there were one or two people inside.

  J.B. held up a single finger.

  Ryan nodded, then glanced to J.B. to see if he was ready.

  J.B. nodded.

  Ryan moved his SIG-Sauer in a side-to-side motion, suggesting that J.B. spray the room with fire from his Uzi.

  The Armorer nodded.

  Ryan moved closer to the door. It was a steel door and would probably stop their 9 mm fire from causing any damage inside the room. They needed an unobstructed line of fire and they would have it in seconds.

  J.B. took a position about a yard from the door, planted his feet, then raised his Uzi to waist height.

  Ryan reached for the doorknob and put his hand on it. He took a breath, then turned the knob and pulled the door open in a single swift motion.

  J.B. opened fire, the Uzi spraying lead into the room at a rate of six hundred rounds per minute.

  The light that had been filling the room went out and in the flash of the Uzi’s muzzle, they could see a single figure in the room, caught in a hail of blasterfire and being thrown back against the wall opposite the doorway.

  After less than two seconds of explosive blaster chatter, followed by a single short scream, everything went eerily silent.

  “Let them know we’re all right,” Ryan said. “And call Johnson down here so we know what we’re looking for.”

  J.B. went back to the bottom of the stairs.

  Ryan moved forward into the room. There was a small amount of light from above streaming down the stairs, but he would need a smaller, more intense light to find what they needed.

  Ryan found the body in the middle of the room and stood next to it so the others wouldn’t stumble over it.

  In moments, Johnson was with them.

  “You have a match, lighter?”

  A tiny flame suddenly erupted in Johnson’s hand. He handed the lighter to Ryan.

  “Is it here?” Ryan asked. The room was filled with a couple of banks of pre-Dark electronic equipment, and other parts of the room had been used for storage of all sorts of things, from ropes and chains to shovels and swords. There were plenty of boxes, too, but they didn’t have time to go through them to discover their contents.

  Johnson went to one corner of the room where a heavy steel cabinet was already open. “It’s usually in here,” he said. “Whoever that is, they were probably after the same thing. I imagine the antibodies will be pretty valuable now that the flow of drugs might be disrupted for a while.”

  At Johnson’s mention of the body, Ryan brought the lighter to its face to see if they recognized who it was.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan said.

  “What is it?” J.B. asked.

  “Take a look.”

  J.B. knelt to take a look and his face was masked in surprise. “Dark night.”

  “What’s wrong?” Johnson asked, scooping up the antibodies from inside the cabinet.

  It was the woman Doc had fallen for, Eleander.

  “What’s she doing in here? If she knew about the antibodies, why didn’t she come with us?”

  Ryan brought the flame down closer to the woman’s face.

  And then her eyes gently fluttered open. She looked over at Ryan. “I know you,” she whispered.

  Ryan said nothing, but his face had to have relayed the question that was on his mind.

  “Didn’t want to leave,” she managed to say. “Like drugs…”

  Ryan reached down to hold her hand.

  “But when Doc left…” She coughed up some blood, and it trickled out of the corner of her mouth. “Thought about it…wanted to change…my life—”

  Her body was racked by another cough. She took a breath, but was choked off by blood inside her lungs.

  Eleander was still.

  Johnson stood over them. “Someone you knew?” Ryan looked at J.B. The Armorer’s lips pressed together in a thin line and he adjusted his fedora.

  “No,” Ryan said.

  Johnson nodded. “Right, then. All done here.”

  They left the room and headed for the stairs.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  There were more and more people gathering in front of the baron’s residence, but only a fraction of them could be seen.

  Most of the people were members of Baron Schini’s sec force, standing guard over the building and waiting for daylight s
o they could move through the ville and get rid of what was left of the previous baron’s sec force.

  There were muties moving into the area as well. They had had their fill of bang and were far less tenacious than they’d been no more than an hour before, but they were still interested in taking whatever they could get, control of the ville if possible, or if not that, then jack and as much drugs as they could carry.

  A few people hidden in the shadows were former sec men of Baron DeMann, who had served under Sec chief Robards. The sec men had split into two groups, the ones who had hated Robards’s guts and would have run him through with a steak knife if they thought they could get away with it, and the ones who liked Robards enough to wonder where he’d gone and what he might be planning to take back the ville.

  And finally, there were citizens, many of whom had helped put out the fire in front of the baron’s residence earlier in the evening and were now hanging around to see who was in charge of the ville, and to see if they should bother showing up for work in the morning.

  Viviani arrived in front of the baron’s residence, out of breath after a firefight with the former baron’s sec force a few blocks away.

  “Where’s Baron Schini?” he asked.

  “She hasn’t come down yet.”

  “Why didn’t you go up and get her?”

  The sec man looked at the chief. “Sorry, sir, but I’d rather not be the one to wake up that woman.”

  The sec chief nodded, understanding. He was about to enter the building to wake her up and bring her down when blasterfire erupted on the other side of the street.

  Instead of waking up the baron, Sec chief Viviani dived for cover.

  “HAVE YOU GOT the medicine for Jak?” Doc asked.

  Johnson smiled. “Got it right here.”

  “Excellent!”

  “Trouble down there?” Krysty asked.

  “Lone person,” Ryan said. “Looking to loot the place.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” J.B. added.

  For a moment the two men looked at each other, then Ryan turned away. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Then to Johnson he said, “Think we can go the same way we came?”