by James Axler
“Bastard,” he hissed, slamming the body’s head back down. “More trouble than you’re worth. Let’s see what Xander has to say ’bout you.”
He poked his head over the lip of the well, staring down at the point of light below. “How you doing?” he yelled down.
“Nearly finished. Where’s that fucking rope?” Hafler shouted in reply.
Sim let an evil grin cross his face. “Can’t get that fucking knot you tied around that other bastard out,” he yelled. “Can’t get the rope down—you’ll have to climb up without it.” He chuckled as he listened to the stream of abuse that came up from the bottom of the well.
“That’ll teach you,” he said to himself before tossing the end of the rope down the well.
When Hafler had pulled himself up, they stood over the body looking down on it.
“Reckon we should just chill the fucker now?” Hafler asked. “It’d save us a lot of trouble.”
Sim hoicked up and spit on the Armorer. “Nah. Let’s see if he comes around first. Take him back and see what Xander says. I reckon he’ll be interested to know just how this fucker ended up down there.”
“Shit,” Hafler cursed, kicking J.B. again. “I know you’re right, but that means we’ve got to carry this son of a bitch back to the ville.”
Between them, the two men picked up the Armorer’s body and began the long haul back to the ville. The sun was still high, although beginning the long journey into night and the heat beat down on them. J.B. was out cold, a motionless deadweight. Hafler had hold of his legs while Sim had hold of his shoulders. The thin, rat-faced man cursed without pause, railing at the fate that had led him to be assigned to Sim, to have to cover someone else’s ass on the south sector, to find this motherfucker stupe at the bottom of a well and for him to actually have the audacity to be alive.
“That’s it, that’s enough,” Sim said, unceremoniously dropping the body onto the dirt and turning to face his companion. “I’ve had enough of you moaning all the fucking time, boy. You want this guy chilled, so we don’t have to drag him back? Okay, you chill him.” The big man took an old Colt .44 six-shot blaster from the back of his waistband. The blaster was vintage, but highly polished and well maintained. It was obviously more than just a weapon to Sim, it was an object of some pride. This was clear from the way he checked that it was fully loaded and handed it carefully to Hafler.
Hafler had his own blaster, but he knew what this piece of hardware meant to his companion and he took it almost nervously, a slight tremor in his hand.
“Don’t do that, boy, it might go off in the wrong direction,” Sim murmured in a calm voice.
“Nah…nah, I’m not using this,” Hafler said, shaking his head violently and handing back the blaster with something that approached urgency.
Sim took it, shrugged and pointed the barrel at the Armorer’s skull. “Whatever you say, boy. But you moan anymore and I’ll take him out right now. And you’ll have to explain to Xander why we didn’t bring him back for interrogation if he ever gets to find out.”
Hafler sucked in his breath. “Don’t be stupe. You know I wouldn’t want that…Okay, okay, I’ll keep it shut, right?” He managed a pathetic attempt at a smile.
Sim’s own grimace of a smile was broader: round one to him. “Good. Then just pick the fucker up and let’s get rolling.”
The two men picked up the Armorer as before and resumed their trek. Hafler couldn’t stop the muttering under his breath that came as second nature, but made sure it was low enough not to annoy Sim.
Gradually, the landscape changed a little. The scrub became a little denser as they hit the remains of an old, predark woodland. A few hardy specimens had survived and they provided what little cover there was for the small, reinforced sec post, dug down into a trench and reinforced to two feet above ground level.
“Hey, what you two assholes got there?” yelled the sec man in the trench, his head alone visible above the reinforcements.
“They got something?” a second voice queried, his head also appearing above the reinforcement. Whereas the first sec man had a lean face framed by long, greasy black hair, the second had a bullet head on which the hair was savagely cropped. He also had what looked like a cigar clamped in his jaws, billowing a foul smoke.
“How d’you know it was us, Deke?” Hafler whined.
“The man Upton here says assholes, can only mean you two,” Deke replied with a beatific grin.
“Fuck you,” Hafler grumbled, which only made Deke laugh harder.
Upton, who was as tall and rangy as the shape of his face suggested, scrambled out of the sec dugout to examine what the two men were carrying. He prodded the Armorer’s inert body with the end of the remade Sharps rifle he was carrying. “So where you find this one?” he asked mildly.
“Weirdest thing. We covered this well in south—”
“Silborg and Denning—lazy fucks,” Upton interjected, nodding wisely.
“Exactly,” Sim continued. “One of the wells was blocked and when we looked down it, what did we find but laughing boy, here. Fuck knows how he got there, but there he was, blocking the water flow.”
“Never seen him before and he don’t look like one of the scum,” Upton mused. “So not a mutie and not on convoy. A real little mystery.”
“Only until the bastard wakes up. Xander’ll get it out of him.”
“Yeah, but we’ll probably never get to know,” murmured Deke, who had clambered out of the dugout to join them and had his Lee-Enfield .303 slung casually over his shoulder. Out on this post, the men eschewed SMGs in favor of rifles with which they could pick off any threat at distance.
Sim shrugged. “Xander’s baron. Guess it’s his right to know and his right to tell us or not.”
“Mebbe…but I’m curious.”
“Curious chilled the cougar,” Hafler said solemnly. They all looked at him. “Something my mama used to say,” he added weakly.
“Really?” Deke asked innocently. “All she used to say to me was ‘more, more…harder, harder.’”
Three of the four men laughed hard. Hafler managed a weak smile. Because, unlike Upton and Sim, he knew that Deke was only being truthful.
“Fuck it, can’t stand around here all day. We’ve got meat to deliver before it goes off,” Sim said, gesturing to Hafler to pick up the Armorer’s feet. Bidding their farewells, they left the two sec men to return to their post in the dugout and carried on toward their ville.
Another half mile brought them to the outer defenses of the ville. Their path across the scrub crossed a couple of dirt tracks and then finally met up with an old two-lane blacktop that was scarred, pitted and twisted by the quakes and ravages of the nuclear winter, but was still basically traversable. It was used regularly by the convoys of traders that came in and out of their ville, both as a stop-off to rest awhile and as a trading post. When they came to the blacktop, they turned right and headed toward the ville, clearly visible now.
It was a squat ville, with buildings no bigger than two stories high, all either the remnants of the predark suburban development or constructions that had been erected around the existing buildings, cobbled together from whatever materials could be found or traded. It gave the ville a lopsided, nightmarish look. A settlement filled with strange angles, abutments were used to shore up buildings that otherwise may have collapsed. Everything was either brown or gray. Color faded quickly in the heat and dust, and even black soon washed out. A pall of smoke hung over the whole area, coming up from the businesses and homes beneath. Even this far out, a buzz of noise could be heard. It was never quiet.
Encircling the ville, broken only on the blacktop by two heavily reinforced steel and concrete bunker houses that acted as sec posts, was a barrier of old barbed wire. Sharp fragments of steel and metal glittered here and there up to a height of eight feet. It had taken a long time to erect the fence. Sim still shivered at the memories of being on the construction crews. Some of the men had fallen onto the wire
while putting it together, and were either sliced to ribbons by the metal and glass and bought the farm through blood loss, or died slowly and painfully from the poisons carried on the old barbed wire.
They approached the sec posts, grim and forbidding. You couldn’t see if they were occupied or by how many men, but anyone inside could see you coming from a distance of several miles.
Sim and Hafler were only about a half mile away and they were known to the sec crews. So, as with the earlier sec post, they were greeted by sec men who came out to meet them. All three sec men were dressed in dusty combat fatigues, carrying AK-47s. All walked in the same way, as though they were still wary, even though they knew the approaching duo. The only differences were their heights and builds.
“Who’s that?” asked one of them, shorter and rounder than the others. “I don’t recognize him.”
“You wouldn’t,” Sim began, the weariness evident in his voice as he told the story once again. They were waved through the sec post and they gratefully entered the boundaries of the ville, marked by a banner that hung limp in the still air, strung between the two sec posts. Its lettering was faded against the bleached-out cloth, but still readable.
Duma.
Sim and Hafler had seen it so many times they didn’t even acknowledge it as they passed under, continuing their trudge toward the heart of the ville.
The noise grew from a buzz to a clamor as they entered the area of population. The ville was built around a system of tracks and roads hacked into the dust bowl, radiating either side of the blacktop, which cut through the ville. From one end of Duma you could see clearly the sec posts guarding the road leading out on the other end. Dwellings and businesses were one and the same, with everyone trying to hustle something from where they lived and slept. Most had signs outside selling goods and commodities of all kinds, some were bars and some were gaudy houses. There was no division between the trade area and the living area, and children ran wild among the streets, trying to steal trinkets and dried fruits and meats from their displays. Adults chased them and beat them if they caught them.
Only two areas differed from the rest of the ville. A cleared space on either side of the blacktop, fenced in and guarded, offered parking for the wags of the trading convoys. The ville’s baron figured that the convoys would spend more jack in the ville if they could leave their wags protected by his force—for a small consideration, of course.
The other area lay to the right of the blacktop from the direction they had entered. The fenced-off area, with three old buildings inside, represented the baron’s personal dwelling and trading space. It was the only place where people weren’t allowed to walk freely. A trickle came in and out to conduct business of one kind or another, but they were regulated by the two sec men who stood, in dusty fatigues, at the only gate in the fence.
This was where Sim and Hafler headed, carrying their prize. J.B. was still unconscious, had remained so throughout the journey. Somewhere deep in his subconscious he knew that he was on the move, but his pain and injuries were so great that his body had shut down to recover from the trauma.
Sim and Hafler wondered if the bastard had chilled on them before they had a chance to get him back to the baron.
“What the fuck is that?” one of the sec men on the gate asked as they came into view, gesturing at J.B. with his AK-47.
Sim sighed and went through the story one more time, adding that they had brought the man to the baron as soon as possible.
The sec man scratched his head. “Shit, that’s a weird one. Guess the baron’ll reward you for this,” he added, waving them through.
Not to incur his wrath for bringing their find back chilled would suit them. Both fervently hoped that their charge was still breathing, as they hadn’t checked for some time.
The compound in which Xander, baron of Duma, lived was heavily guarded. Sec men walked around inside and outside the buildings, dissuading any of the ville dwellers from stealing and pilfering while they were inside the compound fence. The buildings that housed his home and headquarters were three old predark houses, all of them redecorated on the inside. Walls had been ripped out to form long halls and rich hangings and ornaments traded with the convoys adorned them. Heavy furniture reflected the dark tastes of the man who ran Duma, and also of his father, who had founded the ville.
Sim knew that at this time of the day Xander would be in the building he reserved both for meeting the incoming traders and for dealing with any complaints or requests from the residents. Xander had a reputation among traders of driving hard but fair deals, which was how he had built up the ville founded by his father. But once the convoy left the compound, they would trade with the rest of the ville’s residents.
The two workmen carried the Armorer through the entrance to the building, where the sec man on door duty just gave them a puzzled glance. Sim struck out at a marching pace toward the dais where Xander was seated on a heavy wooden throne, listening to a linen dealer from Duma outline a way of extracting more material for less jack from the convoys. It was the sixteenth request in a row for permission to rob slyly and he no longer wanted to hear details—he just granted his permission to get the boring little man out of sight.
Two workmen carrying a filthy and unconscious body piqued his interest. “Well, well, what have you got for me here?” he asked, dismissing the linen dealer with a wave of the hand.
Sim and Hafler unceremoniously dumped J.B.’s body in front of the baron and Sim unreeled his story once more, this time, making sure he didn’t sound so bored in the telling, in case the baron detected this and think it a slight against him. When he had finished, Xander sat back and steepled his fingers, suppressing a smile.
“Now that is something to make life a little more interesting. Take him to the security block and get a healer to have a look at him. I want him to live, so I can find out what the fuck brought him here. You did well, boys, and I won’t forget it.”
He dismissed them with another gesture, and they picked up the Armorer’s inert form, carrying him off. Hafler was pissed off, having expected some kind of reward, but Sim was just glad to be getting out in one piece. Xander had an unpredictable temper and you never quite knew when you were doing the right thing for him.
Now escorted by a couple of sec men the baron ordered to accompany them, Sim and Hafler carried J.B. out of the building and back into the throng beyond the gate. With the sec men clearing a way through those who were either curious enough to try to get a look, or those who were just in the way because they were conducting business and couldn’t be bothered with a sick man, Sim and Hafler made quick time to the secure block. This was a heavily guarded building with barred windows, built to house jolt-or brew-crazed convoy crew who ran amok while spending—or being fleeced of—their jack.
The rooms of the building were windowless barren cells containing plain plank beds and sputtering overhead lights that were fed by a generator on the outside of the building. The two workmen placed J.B. on a plank bed and waited awkwardly while one of the sec men went to fetch a healer.
“You need us here?” Sim asked finally, noticing how Hafler was shuffling from foot to foot. The sec man shrugged, but said nothing. So they waited.
Eventually, the second sec man returned with a healer. Grant was a man in his fifties with a shock of white hair and a limp acquired in a fight thirty years before. He had been a sec man then, and had trained as a healer rather than be put onto menial tasks such as sewage clearance, his limp making him unfit for sec or work-party duty. Despite the passing years, he still had the mien of a sec man and struck fear in both Sim and Hafler. He knew both men: work duty was hard and every worker had passed through his hands at some point.
“Boys,” he said, indicating J.B., “tell me where and when.”
Sim told his story over once more, stopping to clarify when Grant questioned him on certain points about where J.B. had been in the well and what it had looked like around him. Sim had to get Hafler to answer
these questions, and the younger man was visibly rattled talking to the grim-faced healer. Finally, Grant was satisfied.
“Okay, you boys can go…for now,” he added. They were only too pleased to hurry out, leaving the healer and the sec men alone with the outlander.
Grant examined the Armorer. To his surprise, there were no broken bones, although the man had several contusions and swelling around the back of his skull, down to the base, which suggested he had been hit several times. There were some animal bites, multiple bruises and contusions around the body, but nothing major that he could see. There were no swellings or lumps to suggest internal hemorrhaging.
Grant rose to his feet. “We’ll just have to wait for him to come around, see what he says. The man’s dehydrated, so we’ll need water nearby and someone to try to wet him from time to time. I’ll send a servant. What really interests me,” Grant continued, reaching down and flicking through the canvas bags that were still attached to J.B.’s body, “is where he got all these blasters and grens. Funny things to be carrying around for no reason in the middle of a quake. Tell you boys what. He’s going to have a hell of a headache when he wakes up and an even bigger one when he has to answer all the questions Xander’ll put to him….”
Chapter Five
“Dark night, where the fuck…” J.B. opened swollen eyelids. The overhead light pinpricked through the skin in red dots and he caught the glare full in pupils that had been accustomed only to darkness for the past few days. The sudden flare of light made his head spin and he closed his eyes again.
He could vaguely recall the last time he had been awake and how much he had been hurting. He could still feel aches and pains all over, but now it was nowhere near so intense. It was, at least, bearable.
