by James Axler
His two trackers were half Choctaw and Wild raised. They had confirmed that the scumbags who rescued the white-skinned mutie from Judge Santee’s justice had headed west initially. But they hadn’t made it away with enough horses to carry all of them; Mort and Old Pete had found several of the animals grazing near an old burned-out farmhouse that the thicket hadn’t reclaimed yet. The wag was abandoned there, too. They might’ve piled the extra perps into it, but would never have been able to outpace the swift mounted pursuit they surely knew would follow.
He turned back to the miserable cluster of people standing in the rain by their horse-drawn covered wag with their hands up.
“Can we go now, Marshal?” the older man asked. “Whoever you’re looking for, you gotta know by now we had nothin’ to do with ’em.”
In a way it was a relief they had headed off into the Wild. Had they had enough horses and just kept riding west down the road, they’d’ve cleared the mutie thicket in a day or two. Then the odds of Cutter Dan and his sec men ever catching up with them would have become small, indeed. Bashing through the thorn vines would take them days.
It was a pain in the ass following them, of course. Old Pete and Mort would pick up their trail eventually. But Cutter Dan’s posse couldn’t move much quicker than they could. If they could even go as quick.
“Marshal,” the bearded wagoneer said. “Can we please be on our way? Or at least let us put our hands down. My arms are getting tired. And the womenfolk are bound to catch their death, standing out here in the drizzle like this—”
Without even a glance his way, Cutter Dan drew his huge Bowie knife, flipped it into the air, caught it by its tip and threw it. Hard.
He heard a thunk. The wag dude’s words trailed off.
Cutter Dan looked at him then and nodded. The fat blade had caught the bearded man right in the chest, with enough velocity to punch through his sternum and cut his heart in two. The trader coughed once and collapsed like an empty sack.
The women screamed. The younger man yelled, “Pa!”
He jumped to cradle the older man’s head in his lap, plopping his skinny rear right down in the road mud. The older man’s eyes were rolled up in his head. Instant chill.
“You still got the touch, C.D.,” his deputy drawled.
The women clung to each other and screamed. The younger trader raised a reddened face running with tears. His mousey hair was plastered to his head. His features were all knotted up like a gaudy-man’s bar-rags.
“You bastard!” he shrieked at Cutter Dan. “You murdered my pa in cold blood!”
In a wave of reddish spray he hurled himself off the roadway at the sec boss, his fingers clawed. Cutter Dan met him with a hard boot heel to the chest. The younger man flew backward, landing in an even bigger splash within a foot of where he’d started out.
“Assaulting an officer of the peace,” Cutter Dan said, shaking his head. “That’s a capital offense, you taint.”
“We take him back for the Judge to string up, Dan?” Hammer asked.
“Not this trip. We travel light. We gotta catch these coldheart pricks.”
A gunshot cracked. The kid’s head jerked to the side as a dark spray gushed out the temple. He fell across his father’s cooling corpse.
“Why’d you go and waste a good round on the taint, Yonas?” Cutter Dan asked the marshal with the eye patch, and a smoking Ruger Old Army .44 in his hand.
“It’s just black powder, C.D.,” Yonas said, gesturing with the handblaster.
“Bullets cost jack,” Cutter Dan said. “So do caps and even the powder. Oh, well, smokeless or smoke-pole, can’t ever get the bullet back in the blaster.”
Like their now-deceased menfolk, the two female captives showed an age split that hinted strongly they were mother and daughter. Oddly enough, the mother was the better-looking of the two, with dirtwater blond hair streaming like waterweeds down her back and big jugs in her homespun dress. She was sturdy in the hips but not any kind of sow. The daughter had a crossed eye and a hint of black mustache, though otherwise she was put together pretty decent. She was slim built but clearly hadn’t missed many more meals than her mother. Apparently being traders had worked out well for them.
Until today, anyway.
The mother had been hanging on to her daughter as if holding her up out of the mud, while they both carried on. Now with her left arm still circling her daughter’s sob-convulsed shoulders, her right hand dived inside her voluminous skirts.
It came up with a dingy-looking Davis .380 hidie handblaster, which rose to aim square at Cutter Dan’s broad chest.
But the first motion had triggered the sec boss’s bowstring-taut danger sense. Before her little pistol came to bear his Smith & Wesson 627 slid out of its holster and spoke first.
She reeled back as the .357 Magnum jacketed hollowpoint slug took her in the chest. Because she didn’t go down or drop the piece right away, he shot her twice more. Her knees finally gave way.
Shaven-headed Belusky stepped up behind the girl and caught her in a bear-hug from behind before she could collapse all over her chilled mom.
“Who’s wastin’ good ammo on road trash now, Cutter Dan?” he asked, grinning beneath his blond mustache. “And modern smokeless cartridge, too.”
“Shut your pie hole, Belusky. I already used my knife. As you would’ve noticed if all the blood hadn’t run to your two-inch hard-on.”
The sec man’s grin never flickered. “Might not be long, Danny boy,” he said. “But wide? Lord, is it wide!”
“You call yourselves lawmen!” the daughter screamed from his unfriendly embrace. “But you’re nothing but a bunch of murdering coldhearts!”
“Yeah, well,” Cutter Dan said, emptying the cylinder, with its three spent casings and three live rounds, into a palm. “We are the law hereabouts, see? So the law’s what we say it is.”
“Us and Judge Santee,” Scovul called from the back of his horse, which was so used to blasterfire it hadn’t even reacted to the shots, loud as they were. The two plugs hitched to the wag were sure tossing their heads and rolling their eyes, though. But with the handbrake set, they weren’t going anywhere. “And since he ain’t here—”
“See, the boys’n’me have suffered an emotional blow, recently,” Cutter Dan told the distraught girl. “And we’re naturally frustrated because the criminals who wronged us have so far managed to elude justice. So it’s just natural we need to let off a little steam.”
“And you had to go and chill the better-looking snatch, C.D.,” Hammer said. “Even if she was an oldie.”
Dan laughed. “Not like the bitch left me much choice there, did she? But I tell you what. Just for that you can take your place last in line.”
“But why are you doing this?” the cross-eyed girl shrieked.
“Some folks’re resisting the rightful restoration of law and order under us and Judge Santee,” Dan said, stuffing both the loose cartridges and empties in a pocket and reloading his handblaster from a speedloader. “So we gotta provide ’em object lessons in the terrors of living under all this anarchy.”
He snapped shut the cylinder of his beefy stainless-steel blaster. Then he smiled at the girl.
“Just think of it as doing your patriotic duty. Everybody’s gotta make sacrifices.”
Holstering his blaster he began unbuttoning the fly of his jeans.
“Today is yours. Get her stripped and bent over the wag box, boys. Time to dispense some justice, American style!”
* * *
“FIREBLAST,” RYAN SAID.
The giant hog glared blood and death at him and gouged deep grooves in the red dirt of the stream-bank with a sharp black hoof. It stood a good four feet high at the peak of its back, which was topped with bristles like ten-penny nails. Its body had to be as long as Ryan was tall
or longer. Its jowly head was the size of a beer keg, and it brought back memories of the horrible hogs they had faced a while back in Canada.
All of the companions had blasters, but Ryan’s Steyr Scout was the only one in the bunch with a lost child’s chance in a scalie nest of dropping the monster in a single shot. It was slung across his shoulder, and he knew that those huge feral porkers could move like a high-power bullet when they dug in and launched themselves.
As one this old and bad and mean surely would, the instant its little bloodshot eyes saw any of them make a move.
Ryan had just resolved to draw his SIG Sauer P-226 and try for the hog’s beady eyes anyway when he saw a stirring in the leaves of the vines near the immense creature.
A living wave of scuttling shapes boiled from the vines at the top of the cut. They closed on the hog from both sides. The centipedes climbed up one another’s segmented bodies, forming a sort of living pyramid.
Too late, the hog realized the danger. It began grunting furiously. It shook its massive head and stamped with its hooves. Its jaws and tusks shredded the many-legged creatures and sent parts and yellow ichor spraying in all directions.
“Well, now, that’s a mite unusual,” J.B. observed mildly.
The hog began to squeal like a steam-train whistle as the monster arthropods’ mandibles began to find ways through its dense fur to rip into its hide.
Ricky raised the fat barrel of his longblaster to aim at the beast, now all but completely invisible beneath the surging brown bodies. Ryan promptly grabbed it and twisted it skyward.
“But I was going to put it out of its misery!” the youth protested.
“Not this time, son,” J.B. said. “The fact it’s fighting back is mostly what’s putting those little monsters out of ours.”
For a moment the Ricky’s dark eyes blazed rebelliously, then he swallowed and nodded.
“Right,” he said hoarsely.
Ryan let go of the blaster. Ricky obediently turned it to the side, making sure the muzzle never covered his friends on the way.
“Compassion always loses to survival,” Mildred said. “Welcome to the Deathlands, kid.”
“Time to haul ass downstream,” Ryan told them. “Those bastards aren’t our only problem.”
Ricky yelped shrilly. Ryan turned to see a giant centipede that had apparently decided it was too late for the raw-pork feast and jumped down from the vines on the bank above, clutching Ricky’s right arm with its hundred talons. It sank its huge hooked jaws into the exposed skin of his forearm.
“Oh, my God!” Mildred yelled.
Ricky whipped his arm to the side. The centipede flew away, to hit the bare clay slope on its back. As it slid down, J.B. destroyed its head with a blast of buckshot from his M-4000.
Ryan didn’t say a word to his friend about the ammo expenditure. J.B. was the Armorer. He was more sensitive about all things blaster than even Ryan was. If he thought this merited a shell, it did.
Mildred sprang for the stricken youth.
“Hold still,” she said, her voice surprisingly calm despite her burst of frantic activity. “Hold your arm down by your side.”
Numbly Ricky obeyed. He continued clutching the DeLisle’s foregrip with his left hand. His olive face had already gone an unhealthy ashy-yellow.
“Going down,” he said.
His eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed into Mildred’s arms.
Chapter Seven
Jak ran with the pronghorn, filled with exhilaration.
After several moments the yellow, antelope-like creatures left him quickly behind, bounding across the flat Deathlands plain with graceful bounds.
He slowed to a stop, laughing, as he bent, panting, with his hands on his thighs. He watched the pronghorn bounce up and down as they dwindled across the vast flat. The red soil had begun to dry and fracture in the sun after just a couple of days without rain. Tufts of green grass sprouted from the fissure lines, as did a few white-and-yellow Deathlands daisies.
He might not be able to keep up with the beasts, but it felt good to run. And run free.
He was a child of the Louisiana bayous. He had grown up wild and hard, a feared and successful freedom fighter—or terrorist, depending on which side you viewed it from—from childhood on. And this flat, arid land was no more similar to the environment he’d grown up in than the rubble-choked streets of some urban nukescape.
But he felt at home here. Or almost, anyway. He felt alive when he was on the loose in nature. He often felt confined in villes.
Being able to run and be free of responsibilities and rules lifted a tremendous weight from his shoulders. It made him feel as if he could breathe again, for the first time in a long while.
He felt a twinge, somewhere inside him. He decided he was just hungry.
Jak’s T-shirt was soaked through. He stripped it off, then laid it across his white shoulders to keep them from burning. The pronghorns’ butts disappeared into the heat haze on the far western horizon.
He glanced up into a surprisingly cloudless sky whose blue was without pity, though not as threatening as the orange and yellow clouds that usually took it over. The sun was past zenith but still plenty high. He had lots of time to hunt or gather food before dark.
Even if this wasn’t his sort of country, Jak just seemed to have a knack for living off it.
Laughing softly, he turned and began walking back to where he’d cached his jacket and pack.
Life was good.
* * *
“OUR LIFE SUCKS,” Mildred said.
Even though Ryan, Krysty, J.B. and Doc were bearing the brunt of Ricky’s deadweight as they carried him, his blasters and backpack down the cut, the physician’s short legs made it hard to keep up with her friends. She was busy holding up Ricky’s arm to examine it, without raising it as high as his heart, to try to keep the mutie centipede’s venom as localized as possible. But she still had to examine the wound, because in a case like this seconds could count.
If it wasn’t too late already. She felt her face flush and the sweat roll down her back—not just from all the frenzied exertion in a humidity-drenched atmosphere that was starting to heat up despite the clouds and rain, but at the prospect of losing another member of her small and tight-knit family.
From behind came sounds too terrible to describe as the huge black jaws of the swarming centipedes devoured the hapless monster hog.
“Is the lad still alive?” Doc asked anxiously.
“So far,” Mildred answered. “Still breathing, still got a pulse. Both pretty strong.”
Ricky’s arm was completely relaxed in her grasp. The other hung loosely, hand dragging in the tiny stream underfoot as they splashed downhill.
“He just seems to be unconscious,” she stated.
“All right,” Ryan said. “I think we can stop here.”
The other companions did so with minimal awkwardness. Mildred glanced up to find herself and her friends at the bottom of a ravine. The walls were maybe fifty or sixty feet high and steep red clay. They were crowned with the dense tangles of the Wild.
The bottom, though, widened considerably from what they’d first come down. They had reached a small canyon, of sorts. There was enough room to get out of the stream, which had widened and deepened considerably from other gullies feeding into it, as the runlet they had followed did.
Gratefully, Ryan and the others set Ricky on a relatively flat, grassy bank. The rain had stopped completely, though the sky was still the color of bullets overhead. Mildred relinquished her grasp on the poisoned boy’s arm long enough for the others to extricate him from his backpack and slung rifle. Then they rolled him onto his back, and she knelt at once beside him.
Ryan came and hunkered across him from Mildred. “What have we got?” he as
ked.
She thumbed open the half-closed lids of Ricky’s brown eyes. “No dilation of the pupils. Strong, steady respiration, same as before. Pulse still strong. Temperature seems normal.”
She took her fingers from his neck and stretched his wounded arm out from his side. Then, bending close, she examined the bite.
“Huh,” she said. “No signs of inflammation except a little bit around the actual puncture wounds. No discoloration.”
She looked up at Ryan. The others had gathered around, as well, in a circle of concern.
Except the Armorer. She frowned in sudden irritation with the man. The kid was his apprentice, so to speak, and he couldn’t even be bothered—
Then she caught him in the corner of her eye. He was standing to the side, his Smith & Wesson shotgun in his hands, keeping a lookout while the others focused on their injured friend. It wasn’t lack of concern for Ricky that kept him apart. It was concern for his companions.
“Mildred, what is it?” Krysty asked in alarm. “Is he—”
She shook her head. “I think he’s fine,” she said. “Like I say, he just seems to be out cold.”
“What about the venom?” Ryan asked.
“Beats me,” she said. “I gotta warn you, I’m not a toxicologist. But there are certainly none of the gross signs of hemolytic toxin present. Nor of neurotoxins, though I’m on way shakier ground here. At least, not the sorts that cause death or serious nerve damage.”
“His eyelids are fluttering,” Doc said, bending over with his hands on his skinny thighs.
“Does that mean he just fainted?” Ryan asked.
“Don’t be too hard on him, Ryan,” Krysty said, laying a hand on his shoulder. “I’d be triple upset if one those things bit me.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that,” Mildred said. The supine boy was beginning to stir. He moved his head slightly. “He didn’t seem freaked out or anything. Not enough that he was going to faint from fear. He seemed mostly taken by surprise and then—boom. Out like a light.”
Ricky’s lips moved. No sound came out. His jaw worked.
