by James Axler
“Let’s get him some water,” Mildred said, reaching for a canteen.
“Are you sure that is wise, in his state?” Doc asked.
“No,” she replied, unscrewing the lid. “Like I said, I’m not a poison specialist. And neither are you, you old coot. I don’t see any reason to let him get dehydrated, here. Help me hold his head up so we don’t choke him, Krysty.”
With the redhead’s help Mildred trickled a few drops of water into Ricky’s barely open lips. He coughed, spit, shook his head vigorously. His eyes shot open.
“What?” he demanded. He looked wildly up at the others. “What are you all staring at?”
“Seems like it’d be pretty obvious,” J.B. said from the side.
“What? Oh. Sorry.” Ricky sat suddenly upright. “Nuestra Señora, that thing bit me!”
“Yes, it did,” Ryan said. “And you keeled right over like you’d been shot.”
“I—I did? Wait—where are we, anyway? What happened?”
“Someplace safe,” Krysty told him.
“Safe enough,” Ryan said. “For the moment.”
“What did you feel?” Mildred asked.
Ricky asked for more water. Mildred held the canteen up to his lips for a swallow, then let him take hold of it and drink some more.
“Well, it stung like a bast—like fire,” he said when he’d drained half the container. “It kind of gave me a jolt. And I felt like there was something else, like an edge to it, almost. Like when you get stung by an ant, you can tell you’ve been poisoned, if only a little, you know?”
“Yeah,” Mildred said. “Go on.”
“Well, my arm started to go numb. And I started feeling really cold. My stomach got woozy, my head started to spin, my vision seemed to get dark around the edges. Then, well, next thing I remember was waking up here on the grass.”
Ryan stood up. “Reckon he’s gonna live?” he asked Mildred.
“Afraid so,” she said.
“The centipede’s venom must produce some kind of soporific effect,” Doc said.
“Like some sort of knockout dose,” Ryan suggested.
“Seems so,” Mildred said. “Pretty fast acting, though.”
“Muties,” Krysty stated simply.
“I guess.”
“How do you feel, kid?” Ryan asked. “You fit to fight?”
“Don’t really know,” Ricky said thoughtfully. Then he grinned at Ryan. “But I bet I can walk and carry my pack. That’s what you’re really asking, isn’t it, Ryan?”
Ryan grinned. “Reckon so.”
He leaned down and, gripping Ricky forearm to forearm, pulled him to his feet.
“And that’s what we need to do,” he said. “Move. For one thing, there’s no way of knowing whether some of those bastard centipedes might’ve missed out on the pork banquet and decided to come looking for us. Plus, while this gives us a nice handy route to try to get clear of this damn mutant thorn tangle, it’s also a natural highway for everything else big and bad.”
“Including our friends from the ville,” J.B. said.
Mildred and Krysty helped Ricky get his pack up and onto his back.
“Speaking of that unfortunate swine,” Doc said, looking speculatively back up the way they’d come, “I cannot help wondering...if the outsized centipedes’ bite produces instant unconsciousness, why did the hog continue to struggle and squeal for so long?”
“Don’t ask me,” Mildred said. “I’m barely a people doctor, in the way I so often need to be. I’m certainly not a bug doctor.”
“Dear lady, while those creatures are unquestionably arthropods, they are, equally unquestionably, not of the class of Arthropoda that constitutes the insects.”
She fixed him with a furious glare. “They have nasty, segmented chitinous bodies, too many legs and they bite,” she said. “They’re bugs.”
“Less talking,” Ryan admonished sternly. “More walking.”
“Yes, sir,” Mildred said.
* * *
“HOW FAR DOES this thing go on, anyway?”
At the question, Krysty glanced back over her shoulder at Ricky, who bringing up the rear. He was staring up at the heights above the tangle of miniature canyons by which they made their way through the Wild.
“How would I know?” Ryan said from the lead. “Not like we got any reliable maps of this country.”
“Rumor in the last ville we stopped at before Jak’s adventure says the thicket’s expanding,” Krysty said. “Or trying to. The cook I talked to at the eatery said it keeps running up against the drought and acid-rain-prone belts of the Deathlands. So far, they’re winning. But it’s double big.”
“If we could take the roads we could be clear in a day,” Mildred grumbled. “Two, max.”
“We’d be hanging by the necks in front of Judge Santee’s courthouse before sunset the first day,” J.B. said.
“Aside from that.”
She glanced up again. The thorn vines showed no signs of thinning, either up the walls of the ravine or ahead, as far as the eye could see.
The route they were taking was fast only in comparison to creeping along snaky game trails through the Wild or trying to hack their way through by main force. It wasn’t a practical thing to do for very long, in any event. The ground underfoot was muddy and mucky, and it clutched at Mildred’s boots despite the grass roots holding it more or less together.
“Shit,” she murmured, mostly to herself.
“I know,” Krysty agreed sympathetically.
“I know it’s stupid,” Mildred said, still keeping her voice way down, “but still I can’t help wondering if we’d be having quite this much trouble if, well, you know....”
“How can you say that?” Krysty asked. “You know Ryan does all he can—all anyone can, and then some—to keep us alive!”
“Yeah, I know, Krysty. Sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
But I do, she thought, more miserable even than before. I was looking for someone or something to blame for us being in shit this deep. But it’s nobody’s fault. Except the asshole politicians and whitecoats who blew up the world and made this mess.
She heard Krysty sigh gustily.
“I’m sorry, Mildred. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off like that. The fact is, deep down—I wonder too, sometimes. And that’s why I reacted the way I did. Overreacted.”
“We all have our skills, but Ryan can do anything,” Mildred said. “At least, it feels like he can. Anything we’ve ever needed him to do to pull us through, he’s done.”
She shook her head, setting her beaded plaits to swinging.
“But, well—”
“He can’t do everything at once,” Krysty admitted. “And even he’d admit, Jak’s a better scout than he is. Just as J.B.’s handier with blaster-smithing. Though I wouldn’t try to pin down Ryan on the whole Jak thing just this particular instant—”
“Look out!” Ricky screeched from the rear of the procession. Belatedly he added the useful part. “Ryan, down!”
Chapter Eight
“And the only possible sentence is death!” Marley Toogood finished, making his voice ring.
Though the day was dreary, with more low, gray clouds spewing a miserable drizzle, his heart soared. Something about being able to proclaim those words, loud and proud, to the assembled citizens of Second Chance and Judge Santee’s nascent empire, and hear the moans of despair and the increasingly desperate pleas for mercy from the four condemned men and women standing with nooses around their necks, just made a man’s heart naturally soar.
He heard the creak and grind as the hangman threw the lever. Four traps snapped open under four sets of feet.
“Oh, please, no, not my baby, too—”
The sound of necks snapping was like the ripple of blasterfire from a firing squad, which was also a satisfactory way to send off evildoers, Toogood thought. But it cost more money, even for black-powder blasters. And also the Judge was a traditional sort of man, with a strong fondness for the gallows as a symbolic statement of community principles.
And, of course, a way of making sure that anybody who disagreed with him too strongly on pretty much any subject at all sooner or later found himself swinging from one.
The crowd issued a joint sigh of sorts. Toogood looked around sharply. The sec men on duty monitoring the area didn’t seem to notice any particular offenders.
The louts get slack when Cutter Dan is out of the ville, he thought. Ah, well. We can hardly recruit men of higher caliber to do what is, after all, a menial chore.
Santee pushed himself out of his chair, stood to his full skeletal height and shambled inside. He moved with a purpose. Knowing a little about the state of his internal affairs from the Judge’s house servants, whom Toogood was careful to bribe just the right amount, the mayor suspected Santee’s bowels had been struck with the sudden urge to make one of their infrequent and irregular movements. It wouldn’t do for a man of Santee’s dignity to soil his trousers in front of the whole ville, after all.
“So, how long will it be before the chief marshal catches those coldheart scumbags and gets back to his real job, Marley?” asked one of his fellow town fathers. They had risen from their seats on the dais and stood beneath umbrellas.
“You’re asking the wrong man, Gein,” he said. He pulled out his handkerchief to wipe sweat and rain from his broad expanse of forehead—broad, signifying a powerful, thinking brain behind it, of course.
“You know everything that goes on in the courthouse,” the fussy and diminutive man said.
Toogood laughed. “You give me far too much credit, my friend.”
“I’m worried,” said the sturdy Myers, frowning beneath bushy red eyebrows at the crowd, sullen as the ville folk ambled away to get back to their daily duties under the watchful eyes of a dozen sec men. “We’re spread too thin. If only we had let the coldhearts and the filthy mutie they stole from justice get away scot free, instead of weakening our sec force! Just look at these shiftless scoundrels. They’re just waiting for the opportunity to pull us down like wolves and tear us apart.”
“Why else do you think I just sent off a foursome at once, gentlemen?” cawed a familiar voice from behind them.
They snapped their heads around to see Judge Santee sheltering inside the open door of the courthouse and silently laughing at them.
“What better way to remind them who’s in charge, eh?” the Judge said. “Make an impression! Justice is not to be denied!”
He smiled unpleasantly. It occurred to Toogood to wonder if he’d ever seen the man smile any other way.
“Perhaps you gentlemen would be wise to take such lessons to heart, before you walk quite so perilously close to sedition. Wouldn’t you agree?”
And cackling openly he turned and vanished into the darks depths of his lair.
Myers’s bearded jowls shook as he vented a shuddering breath. “Brrr. The man’s unnerving sometimes.”
“We, of course, appreciate fully how fortunate we are to find ourselves in Judge Santee’s strong and capable hands,” Toogood said loudly. “Of course, none of us harbor any thoughts but those of complete loyalty to our Judge and his vision!”
He winked one eye furiously at his fellow grandees.
“Of course!” Gein piped up. He nudged Myers in the well-padded ribs with his elbow.
“Oh, very well,” the stockier man said. Then more loudly, he added, “Of course I know that the Judge’s decisions are wise!”
“Better, gentlemen,” Toogood said, nodding and beaming vigorously.
“The real shame is that this snipe hunt is slowing up our schedule for restoring the rule of law to nearby villes,” Gein said, in far more subdued tones. “Once we start consolidating our grip—that is, consolidating the rule of law and of the United States—we’ll have no trouble bringing in enough recruits to keep the rabble in their proper places.”
“For now, we must agree to disagree, Donnell,” Myers said.
He turned to Toogood. “What’s the next ville due for reintegration into our United States, Marley?”
Toogood frowned as he thought about the question. “I’m not privy to strategy,” he said, and officially that was true. “That’s for the Judge and Cutter Dan to decide. But I believe it’s the ville of Esperance, to the southwest.”
“Ugh,” Myers said. “A real nest of vipers and freethinkers. I know we rely on trade with them. All the more reason to bring them to heel. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to be able to free my employees from their pernicious influence and example.”
“See, Munktun?” Gein proclaimed. “We’ll make a believer of you yet!”
“Perish the thought,” Myers said.
* * *
THE FACT THAT Ryan only had one eye severely restricted his peripheral vision. But, as he marched in the lead of his companions, he kept his head constantly turning, like a one-eyed tomcat in a ville back alley. Even before Ricky shouted his warning, he’d spotted the missile arcing toward him from the dense mutie growth atop the high wall to the left.
His mind registered that it was a spear. Then it passed through the place where he would have been walking and embedded itself in the red clay bank to his right.
He threw himself forward into the stream. He had been carrying his Scout longblaster. Now he held it up as he belly flopped clear to the bottom of the shallow running water. Then, rolling rapidly to his right, he brought the weapon to his shoulder and pointed toward where the spear had come from.
He saw a creature gazing back down at him from the edge of the braid of thick, spiky vines. At first he thought it was another mutie animal, an outsized lizard of some sort, or mebbe a bird. It was about four feet tall, with a black-banded gray face and an off-white, streaked belly. It had a crest of turquoise feathers. He couldn’t see more of it for the growth.
Then he noticed the thing had something like a bandolier slung across its chest. It looked as if it had bags and pouches attached to it, and a knife in a beaded sheath.
A second one appeared, with an arm cocked back to throw another spear.
By this point Ryan had his longblaster pointed in the right direction. He caught a flash picture through the ghost-ring iron sights mounted beneath the scope and gave the trigger a compressed speed break. The lightweight rifle bellowed and bucked. When Ryan pulled it back online, both inhuman faces were gone.
“They’re on both sides!” Ricky shouted. “What are those things?”
“Trouble,” Ryan yelled, rolling on his back in the stream and jackknifing to stand back up by the sheer power of his gut muscles. “They’re not just animals! They got hands and weapons.”
Muzzle blasts buffeted Ryan’s ears as his friends opened up. He hoped they were picking their targets. They couldn’t afford to just bust caps, lost in the Wild like this.
He got his boots beneath him and, first things first, quickly sidestepped. It got him out of the stream, onto soft and slightly slippery, but still more reliable footing, and also shifted him out of the target zone for any other arm-launched missiles that might heading his way.
The vines atop both walls rustled with a seethe of drab-colored bodies, as the lizard muties appeared to throw stuff and duck back out of sight. After the first one missed Ryan, few spears seemed to be coming their way. The muties seemed not to want to waste their prime weapons. Mostly what came raining down on Ryan and his companions was hefty chunks of vine, many with long thorns still attached, tumbling end over end.
He slung his Scout and drew his handblaster. Now that the enemy knew he and the others could hit back he wa
sn’t going to get many good shots. If he was going to waste ammo he preferred to burn the lighter, easier-to-come by 9 mm than the 7.62 mm his Scout used.
To his relief the others had stopped their brief flurry of fire as they realized they were just busting caps. Now they were concentrating on spotting objects thrown their way, ducking and dodging, or batting them aside.
Ryan looked quickly around. When in an ambush, he remembered, Trader always advised the best thing to do was assault right into it.
The problem with that was, the most obvious way to do it in this case was to charge straight up one of the steep and wet-slick clay walls of the little canyon, which would almost certainly turn into a particularly grubby and arduous type of suicide. Likewise, charging straight ahead the way they’d been heading might send them straight into the heart of the nest. Or whatever the lizards lived in.
“Back the way we came,” he yelled. “Triple fast! J.B., take the lead. I got the rear.”
With his short, bandy legs, the Armorer was unlikely to set a pace that any of them couldn’t keep, and risk falling behind—fatally. Even Mildred could keep up with him.
“What about the centipedes?” Mildred demanded.
“Let’s all try to stay alive long enough to get back to them,” Ryan called back. “We can sort that out then.”
For the first few moments, as Ryan trotted along the stream bank, he thought their attackers would be content to let them just back out of their domain. The hail of vine chunks tapered off rapidly.
Then he had to yell a warning as another spear came zipping down from the right bank.
Chapter Nine
“Why would we help you?” one woodcutter demanded.
Cutter Dan stood facing the two men, rubbing the side of his face. Then he snatched his hand away. The cut the coldheart bastard had given him had far from truly healed, and it itched like blazing blue death.
“Fair question,” he said.
He turned slightly, drew his big handblaster, and shot the man’s partner through the belly. He fell, clutching his ruptured guts, screaming and kicking at the bare red dirt yard of the ramshackle shack.
