by James Axler
It wasn’t well lit. That suited Jak fine. He wasn’t eager to be seen, which was why he picked the darkest, most obscure corner he could find. While he wasn’t completely hidden here, he could see pretty much the entire barroom. The shadows and his own lack of size, plus his ability to be quiet in more ways than not talking, helped him avoid drawing attention to himself. As fond as he was of stealth, being able to see was even more important than not being seen.
While he gathered Santee’s so-called marshals weren’t exactly welcome in Esperance, and especially not in the Last Resort, he reckoned he was cutting it close enough, appearing in public right up the road from the place that’d tried to hang him so recently.
It was a decent crowd, perhaps half the chairs were taken. It was loud but calm. Such outbursts as he’d seen appeared to be caused mostly by outlanders, starting beefs with each other or the locals. Being on a well-used road, as Esperance was, that was a normal state of affairs. If they weren’t coldhearts themselves—or even if they were—the men and women who traveled the Deathlands roads certainly had to deal with coldhearts on a regular basis. They tended to have a greater need to blow off steam than locals did, at least in a relatively well-off ville like this one.
He savored the taste of the beer. In part because it tasted of defiance. He’d once had a little trouble handling his liquor. Since then his companions—former companions—had been on him all the time to not drink too much, if at all. Krysty had been worst of all, mebbe because of her mother-hen instincts—and mebbe because Jak couldn’t say no to her; few men could.
Meg had been fairly jazzed to pocket the .22 rounds he’d bartered with. They were originals, not reloads. But at the prices Meg charged he’d eat up his ammo credit double quick. That didn’t concern him much. He could get by. For one thing, Meg was always looking for fresh meat and other victuals for her head cook, Cho, to fix in her kitchen. The gaudy served a lot of meals, and they weren’t any worse than the alcohol, maybe better. He knew if you approached the pronghorns the right way—from downwind, to start—they’d actually stand there and let you walk right up to them. He could sell meat here, enough to pay his bar tabs.
And if not, he reckoned he didn’t have to drink. Though he had to admit, he did enjoy the way the warmth flowed through him, even after just a little beer. That showed how little head for alcohol he had.
He felt comfortable here.
Jak frowned and shoved that feeling ungently down. These were manmade surroundings; he could never feel at ease here. Another night, maybe two, with gaudy rent-room walls around him to decrease the risk, let him rest and build up, then he’d be gone. Like the wind, blowing away across the wide, free lands, leaving humanity’s works, the ugly little joke they called “civilization” and, most of all, his past behind him.
He was thinking about ordering a plate of beans and bacon when a disturbance drew his eye to another, even more obscure corner of the gaudy—well away from the bar and out of its direct line of sight, though not double far from the kitchen door.
It was the kitchen girl. She’d caught his eye a couple of times, though she was quiet and seemed to try as much as possible not to be seen herself. But since she was always scuttling in and out of the kitchen, cleaning tables, carrying spent bottles and mugs and crockery, and, with her water-pail, coal scoop and sawdust bucket, cleaning up the messes not massive enough to require Bo’s intervention.
Also, she interested Jak because she was as black as he was white—a midnight, almost blue-black color that he’d frankly never seen before. Her hair was straight and cut relatively short above a high, gleaming forehead. Her eyes were bright, alert and aware. She was pretty in an unconventional way, tiny, and looked to be no older than fourteen, too young even for him.
But she hadn’t been quick or furtive enough to escape the attention of a couple drunken louts. One was tall and burly, with a curly brown neck beard. The other was shorter and leaner, with straight hair and slightly bugged eyes. By their dress and their smell, which he could pick out from all the other smells crowded into the gaudy even at this range, they were drivers and handlers for a horse-drawn wag. Or maybe a local stable, though something about their manner suggested they were the passing-through types.
“What we got here?” asked the taller man, leaning over the much smaller girl, bracing his left arm on the wall over her head and crowding her with his gut in its stained linen shirt. “You sure are shiny. You sure you ain’t a mutie?”
“Nobody’s that dark and shiny,” his partner said, “’less they got the taint. You must be a mutie, girl.” He stood to the taller man’s left, helping back the kitchen helper in a sort of nook in the irregularly shaped barroom.
She shook her head resolutely. “I’m not a mutie,” she said. “My parents were just like me.”
The two bullies traded a look and a booze-heavy laugh.
“Then yer folks must’ve been muties, too,” the big man said.
Though Jak’s face was turned to the gaudy’s center, and carefully kept as blank as the sheet of paper its color suggested to so many, his eyes were fixed narrowly on the pair hemming in the diminutive girl. They had his interest now.
Skin color wasn’t much of an issue in the Deathlands. He only knew that it had been at one time because Mildred talked about how different things were back in her day, like, all the time. Unfortunately, what did make a difference was the prevailing fear and hatred of mutation, and anything that smacked of it.
That was a prejudice Jak shared, though one of his closest friends for years had been Krysty Wroth, a mutie herself. Because of her, largely, he had at least learned to keep a leash on it. But it was hard, specifically because the most dreaded and dangerous accusation that could be leveled in the Deathlands—that of bearing the mutie taint—was often thrown at him.
Stay out, he told himself sternly. Not business. Can’t draw attention.
“Lookit the little mutie,” said the taller goon. “Pretending to be a real live norm and all.”
He grabbed the girl’s pretty face and squeezed so hard the obsidian skin of her cheeks turned gray.
“Got a purty little mouth for a inhuman monster.”
She tried to bat his hand away. “Let me go!” She didn’t say it loud. Out of the whole gaudy, only Jak heard.
“Ooh.” Her two tormentors exchanged looks.
“The mutie done attacked you, Ferd,” the shorter man said.
“That she did, Jeff.”
“I was only defending myself,” the girl said, her voice still venomously low. “Now let me go and nobody gets hurt.”
“Mutie scum ain’t got no rights, like natural people have,” Jeff said. “So you got to pay for your crimes. How we gonna make her do that, Ferd?”
Jak found himself on his feet and sauntering casually toward them. Fixated solely on their victim with a predator’s typical tunnel vision, they had no clue he was approaching. Of course, he was careful to walk up slowly, from behind as well as from the side.
His mind spun furious schemes. Bare-handed brawling could end in disaster. Attacking the two with weapons would be starting trouble, in a way he knew Meg would crush rapidly and with extreme prejudice—and, likely, with no questions asked up front.
And say he successfully bled out both of these bastards—what then? His travels with the companions had taught him about the ways of ville life and justice. Or rather, its injustice, of which his narrow brush with death in Second Chance had been only a relatively minor example, major though its consequences had almost been—and he stepped hard on the lump rising into his throat at the thought of what his companions had done to free his neck from the chafing of the noose.
Even if Meg backed him for helping out one of her people, as for a fact she seemed the sort to do, the local authorities would automatically tend to assume he was wrong and guilty. Especially since
they’d no doubt take him for a mutie, too.
But Jak hadn’t earned the dreaded name of White Wolf as a mere child by taking on bigger, badder enemies directly. He smiled and made his moves.
Like all the best plans Jak’s was simple. Coming in on the men’s blind side, he steeled himself, rolled the fingers of his left hand into a stiffened spear and, coming closer than he liked to a man who smelled like that, reached around to poke Jeff in the right buttock. The inside—as if it came from his left.
He turned his head to his pal.
“What’d you wanna go and do that for, you asshole?” Jeff demanded.
“Do what, now?” Ferd sounded totally perplexed.
“You goosed me, you freak. Don’t try to pretend you didn’t!”
“I dunno what you’re talking about, you feeb. Here now, see? You distract me, you’re gonna let this little bitch get away afore we can break her in right and proper as a gaudy slut—hey!”
The last came out explosively as Jak glided past behind the drunken pair, boots noiseless on the sawdust-muffled floorboards, and delivered the same stroke right-handed to the inner part of the cheek of Ferd’s ass.
For men like this—whether drunk or not—there was usually only one way to settle a dispute. Barely remembering to push off from the wall slightly so he didn’t collapse against it face first, Ferd balled his left hand and delivered a surprisingly credible hook right to the bridge of Jeff’s nose, which broke with a loud snap.
Jeff didn’t go down. He took a step away from Ferd, his eyes glaring bloodshot outrage. He reached up to his lip, then looked down at a hand dripping with the blood fountaining from his violated nose.
“You nuke shit no-account Hoosier cocksucker!” he yelled. He launched himself at his larger partner with a fury that sent them both reeling toward the kitchen door.
And the fight was on, rolling, kicking and eye-gouging in beer-fueled rage and general stupidity. Until hands the size and general color of smoked hams grabbed both men by the backs of their jackets, hauled them bodily upright and slammed their heads together. Both immediately went limp.
By this time, Jak had slipped into a chair at the vacant little table closest to the kitchen door and sat watching with the sort of mild amusement that might be expected if he’d just been sitting there all along, a totally innocent bystander.
The girl had slipped away the instant Ferd’s attention was diverted. She crouched with her back against the wall next to the recess, panting like a dog on a hot summer day.
A dazed Ferd gurgled and then puked. Most of it went down the front of his shirt. Most of the rest wound up spattering his moaning, head-rolling partner. None at all got on the enormous bouncer, who, well seasoned at his trade, had correctly read the warning signs and shoved them both out to the length of his bare, impressively brawny arms.
A cupful or so slopped onto the floor.
“You nuke-withered assholes!” the girl hissed. “I have to clean that up.”
“Fit, little girl?” Jak asked as the unspeaking Bo dragged the combatants to the door by their collars. Jak was reminded why gaudies traditionally had swinging doors when Bo was able to blast them wide open with Jeff’s and Ferd’s faces without needing to free up his hands to work a knob or anything.
The girl frowned furiously at him a moment. Then her brow smoothed in comprehension. If not much less irritation.
“Yes, I’m okay, thank you. And I’m not a little girl. I’m nineteen years old.”
“Huh,” was the only thing he could think of to say. It was more than he usually would have, but these were special circumstances.
The fact that she wasn’t the child he’d taken her for was making his cheeks unaccountably warm.
“And I’ll have you know I could’ve taken care of them myself!” she snapped. “I was just about to, before you—horned in.”
He had to laugh at that. A low laugh, a wolf’s laugh that reminded him of Ryan Cawdor.
Even as he felt his brow furrowing at the thought, she met his eyes. Hers were the same gleaming black as her skin.
After a couple heartbeats she giggled. “Though I got to admit, those were some pretty slick moves. Long as you wash your hands up double careful!”
“Chally!” Jak glanced reflexively over his shoulder at Meg’s disinterested but bull-voiced shout. “Clean up, girl.”
When he glanced back, the girl was gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Ryan came instantly awake. He sat bolt upright in the bedroom with his 9 mm blaster in his hand, blinking his eye at a blackness just slightly diluted with gray before he knew what had wakened him.
Bootsteps were flying across the clearing toward the half-collapsed house. Somebody was coming fast, and making no effort not to be heard by those inside.
He heard a whistle from the living room. That was J.B., letting Ryan and Krysty know he was alert.
Ryan was at the door in a single step. It was already open. He had his jeans on—he’d slept in them after doing his turn on sentry duty some time before.
Ricky was on watch now. The teen yanked open the front door and nearly stumbled inside, clutching his DeLisle carbine by one hand. His cheeks were flushed, his dark eyes wild.
“They’re coming!” he said.
Ryan nodded satisfaction that the kid still had the presence of mind enough to say it quietly.
“Who?” Mildred asked muzzily. She was still sitting on the makeshift pallet of clothes she’d shared with the Armorer, who was on his feet, fully dressed, boots all laced up and everything, with his glasses in front of his eyes and his fedora on. He held his Uzi in both hands and looked speculatively out into the darkness past the front window.
Ricky stared at her as if she’d just landed in a flying saucer. “Marshals.”
* * *
“HOW MANY IN the house?” Cutter Dan asked. He ran a thumb down the new scar that marked his face from brow to jaw. It seemed to be healing nicely, but the itching drove him crazy.
Payback’s coming soon, One Eye, he thought. Hope you like reaping what you sow.
He and his United States Marshal posse were hunkered down in a more-or-less clear patch of thicket. Around them the vines stirred with unsanctified life, and things that weren’t crickets and things that might once, generations ago, have been birds chirped and croaked to greet the coming dawn.
“All of ’em,” answered Mort, the younger tracker. He had on a battered black hat with an eagle feather stuck in the band, though in this light, or absence of it, the main reason Cutter Dan knew that was memory. The Choctaw knelt on the springy turf with the butt of his Winchester .30-30 grounded beside him.
“How many is all of them?” Cutter Dan asked, reminding himself to stay patient and keep his tone civil. Indians could be mighty touchy cusses. And Second Chance was nowhere near powerful enough to go pissing off their head man. Especially not since they were currently all buddied up to the Osage Nation, the most powerful of regional tribes.
“Six,” Old Pete said. Cutter Dan knew he had a face made up mostly of deep seams and deeper ones beneath his turban, the same way he knew Mort had a dark face or that the oldie wore a Navy Colt replica stuck into the front of his belt. He preferred to use the one-piece drop-forged scavvy steel hatchet in its beadwork holster by his hip, though.
“They all inside?”
“No,” Old Pete said. “One’s out walkin’ around. The Mex kid with the funny-lookin’ longblaster.”
“C.D., it’s darker out than twelve feet up a coal miner’s small intestine,” said tall, gawky Edwards. “How can he see a thing like that?”
“I trust the wrinklie old bastard,” Cutter Dan replied. “The kid, now, he’s gotta prove himself. But Old Pete, he knows and I know that Chief Billy Feather of the Choctaw doesn’t want to piss off J
udge Santee, any more than we want to run afoul of him. Right?”
Old Pete grunted. If Mort objected to the Chief Marshal’s statement about him, he gave no sign.
“I was hoping the mutie woulda met up with them again by now,” Scovul said. “So we could scoop ’em all up at once like mouse turds in a dustpan.”
“Life’s a bitch, sometimes,” Cutter Dan pointed out.
“He did join up,” Old Pete reminded him. “Night after they broke him loose from your four-holer hanging tree. But he turned and walked right out of their camp. That’s all the trace we seen of him.”
He shook his head. “Can’t hardly track that one. He’s like a ghost.”
“So we get what we got,” Cutter Dan said. “We’re gonna surround the house first at a distance, then move in, catch ’em in a nice neat bundle. If they got any sense, they’ll surrender and save us all the trouble.”
“I hope they don’t surrender,” Edwards said. He was clearly feeling his oats.
“Ace in the line,” Cutter Dan told him affably. “I hope you enjoy explaining to Judge Santee subsequently how fired up with happiness you are that we were unable to comply with his clear directive we bring them all in more or less intact.”
Edwards swallowed audibly and took a step back. Scovul caught his boss’s eye, not an easy trick in this gloom. He nodded at their not-really-willing guide, the woodcutter, who stood nearby twisting his wool cap in his hands and tried not to quiver too visibly in his boots. Scovul’s eyebrow crooked a question.
“We may still need him,” Cutter Dan said. “In case some bastards get away. Gag him, tie him, leave him.”
“In the Wild? You can’t do that!” Torrance told him, his spoiled-egg green eyes practically popping out of his face. “The muties’d get me. Or a catamount. Guess it don’t rightly make me no nevermind which of ’em eats me.”
Cutter Dan gave him a brief, unpleasant smile. “Then you better hope we wrap this up quick, huh? All right, everybody, let’s get split up in our parties and move like we got a purpose! We pull this off, we can be back in time to enjoy a well-deserved tall, cool one with our lunch.”
