by James Axler
He gave them a smile that looked more like a hideous leer. Both Mildred and Krysty felt that the alliance was something to which Ryan had given tacit agreement by not opening fire when he and Jak had the chance. Some chance of getting out was better than none. But all the same, there was something about this tribe that stank to high heavens, more than a three-day-chill stickie laid out in the sun.
Krysty looked across at Jak. The albino was unreadable. There was no way that any of them could ever tell what was going on in his head. He gave her some indication by a very slight, almost imperceptible shrug. And he was right—what could they do? At least they were still alive. It was a question of playing percentages, something that Ryan would always do if he had the option. The one-eyed man may be laid out at the moment, unaware of what was going on around him, but his style of leadership had impressed itself enough for the others to follow what would have been his lead.
The party of inbreds, with the companions uneasy among them, reached the outer sec doors and one of their number punched in the sec code. The door opened to reveal that it was now dusk outside.
“Hey, looks like it’s nearly night,” the fat man enthused. “Mebbe we’ll find us some critters come out in the dark that we can chill on the way home. Mebbe give us the chance to get some fresh meat in the pot.” He cackled, and some of the others joined in with him. It made the companions wonder what the hell they would get to eat when they arrived wherever the hell it was they were headed.
Because right now, it looked like another march lay ahead of them. They’d had no indication of a ville on their previous journey through the territory surrounding the redoubt and nothing to show that there were any wags hidden away on their way back.
Then again, there had been no signs of any tracks to alert them as they approached. Maybe these people weren’t quite as stupe and mad as they feared.
“How far have we got to go—What do I call you?” Mildred asked, adding, “I don’t know how much more Doc can take. Ryan should be okay, but Doc’s lost a lot of blood.”
The fat man sniffed as he led them out of the shallow valley and around to the rear of the redoubt entrance. The soil had been scoured so thin by the elements that the concrete lining the redoubt tunnel was visible, like bone, through parts of the incline.
“You can call me Boss…Boss Buckley. The Buckleys been the mainstay of Nagasaki since before the nukecaust. We’s the ones kept the whole fucker going, in more ways than one. Yes, indeed.” He started to laugh, petering out to a cough that presaged another glob of phlegm that spattered on the soil, staining it.
Krysty frowned, looked across at Mildred. The name was familiar to her: Nagasaki was something she had heard of back in Harmony. Something to do with the times before the nukecaust and when the nukes first began. It had some kind of symbolic meaning that she couldn’t recall right now. But how did it get to be the name of some pesthole ville full of inbreds?
Mildred returned the glance with a shrug. She remembered only too well the dark shadow of nuclear warfare under which her generation had been raised and which they had helped reach fruition. The pictures and old news footage she had seen back before she was frozen flickered through her memory. It was a dark heritage, but how did it lend its name to where these people came from?
Both women were lost in their thoughts and didn’t notice that Buckley had stopped by a small gathering of scrub. Jak, however, had seen why. He marveled at the ingenuity of the camouflage, even though the logic to it was a little askew.
Under Buckley’s direction, some of the inbreds moved the scrub. It formed a screen over a pit about four feet in depth, some twenty feet in length, and about twelve feet in breadth. Within this were two wags, each hitched to two sickly and weak-looking mules. Two of the inbreds coaxed the mules up out of the pit with whispered words and clicking tongues.
“We’ll never all fit into that!” Mildred exclaimed.
“Don’t have to,” Buckley grunted. “Always hide our mules and wags like this, so’s any passing convoy don’t get wind of the special place. Couldn’t dig that deep and wide without it looking strange. Not that much scrub around here. But we take it in turns—some walk, others ride, then we change around. Ain’t perfect, but what is now? Least ways all of us get to rest up some on the way back.”
With the mules and wags now on the flat, Doc and Ryan were loaded on one, with Mildred, Krysty and Jak on the other. They were given first chance to rest, while some of the inbreds mounted around them. The others walked by the side of the wags.
They headed to the south. Mildred and Krysty found themselves falling into intermittent sleep, disturbed only by the occasional blastershot as someone took a potshot at a passing small mammal or lizard. Only Jak remained alert, not trusting to fall asleep while the others also dozed.
The journey took all night. The sun was rising and the companions were now walking beside the wags, when Buckley hailed them and pointed ahead.
“Nagasaki,” he said simply.
Mildred looked ahead at the low gathering of ramshackle huts and ruined buildings that constituted the ville and she despaired of being able to tend to Ryan and Doc in such circumstances. Even from this distance, it seemed to be a pesthole and as the wags trundled nearer, her worst impressions were confirmed.
Most of the population of Nagasaki seemed to have followed Buckley on the trip to the redoubt, for there were only a few older people coming from the dirty collapsing buildings to greet them. Mildred guessed, from the condition of most of the war party and from a look at their ville, that old age wasn’t a viable option in Nagasaki and most of the people would buy the farm relatively young, either from injuries incurred in battle or simply because their inbred state would pass on illnesses and weaknesses that would pick them off when still young.
There were a few animals—a couple of pigs, some chickens and something that may have been a goat of some kind—wandering through the dust and mud that constituted the streets of the ville. In truth, ville was too grand a description for this collection of ruins. It was more like a series of huts that had been built around a couple of old predark ranch houses. Mildred guessed that before the nuclear winter, it had probably been a viable ranch and farm.
The straggling dwellers came out to the war party and the companions could see that they were as badly deformed as the others, merely younger or older. Even the animals with them looked inbred.
The wags pulled up in the middle of the cluster of dwellings. To the rear of the main ranch house, Mildred could see that an old barn had been rebuilt. More, in fact: it looked as though the old structure, which stood apart from the rest of the dwellings, had been reinforced and made secure. She wasn’t sure—it was too far and too obscured by the other dwellings to tell—but it looked as though a dry moat had been dug around it, with a footbridge connecting the barn to the rest of the surrounding ville.
She looked across at Krysty and then at Jak. Both had also seen the barn and although Krysty looked concerned, Jak gave a small shake of his head. The time to worry about it would be later. It gave the place a sinister air, but there were more pressing concerns.
Such as attending to Ryan and Doc.
Buckley hopped down from one of the wags and gestured to some of his people, barking guttural, almost unintelligible commands at them. They lifted the prone figures of Doc and Ryan off the wags. Doc had briefly recovered consciousness, but was now out once more; Ryan was conscious but weak.
Buckley turned to the others. He seemed to be making an attempt to regulate his speech, realizing that they were still having trouble understanding him. “I’m giving you the best that we got, so’s you can get your two men up and running again. You’re coming in with me—I gets to live in the best ’cause I’s the leader and that’s the way it’s always been. So you follow me, and we’ll all meet up later and talk about what we do, yeah?”
With a curt nod and not waiting for a reply, he turned and limped away into the old ranch house, followed by t
he men and women who carried Doc and Ryan. The remaining three companions followed, using the few seconds in the open to try to get a better look at Nagasaki.
Mud, dirt and slack jaws: that seemed to sum up the ville. The huts and the two ranch houses were covered in filth and looked as though they hadn’t been cleaned for several generations. The streets were caked with filth, sewage seeming to flow into the mud and dirt at random. It was amazing that the dwellers hadn’t perished from disease—although it did occur to Mildred that their inbred and possibly mutated genetics, over a period of generations, may have built in an immunity to the crap around them. The dwellers who watched them go into the ranch house could all be divided into the tall and thin, and the short and fat, obviously the two dominant families in the original settlement. The two things both groups shared were a vacant stare and a slack, openmouthed look of confusion; their brains scrambled by the small genetic pool. But the companions had fought against them and wouldn’t take that as a reason to underestimate their capacity for savagery.
Inside the ranch house, the furnishings were all from the predark era and were battered and filthy. Tables that had chunks splintered from them, sofas and chairs that were almost bereft of stuffing, their linen and leather covers in rags and strips. There were still some paintings on the walls, but time and the environment around had eroded them so that whatever they may have once portrayed was lost forever. The carpets underfoot were nothing more than loose colorless fibers that flapped over stone flags that were grimy with neglect.
“You get settled in here, sort out your wounded, and we’ll meet later,” Buckley said, directing them into a room that was shuttered from the ville outside. It was as filthy as the other rooms, but had three beds that were at least covered with rags that had once been blankets and mattresses that may, at one time, have been stuffed. It could have been worse, but not by much.
“Jesus, what a dump,” Mildred muttered as the door closed on them. “How the hell can I treat Ryan and Doc in conditions like this?”
Jak checked the shuttered windows and the door before indicating that it was all right to talk. There were no spies.
“What the hell have we gotten into?” Krysty questioned. “These people are really fucked. One thing’s for sure, Buckley’s got nothing good in store for us.”
“Second that,” Jak agreed. “But now we need get Doc, Ryan, up, fighting. May need every hand.”
“Yeah, but I wish I just had better conditions to work in. It’s not exactly sanitary in here,” Mildred muttered.
Ryan had been listening, drifting in and out of sleep. He felt as helpless and weak as a child. He told Mildred as much when she tended to his wound, wincing as she stripped the material from the congealed blood around the arm wound and cleaned it with old antiseptic that she took from the supplies she kept in her med bag. Fortunately, it was only a flesh wound and the bullet had passed directly through. She applied a dressing.
“I wish we’d had time to see if there were any medical supplies left in the redoubt or we’d found a ville with decent facilities. Dammit, there’s not even anything here we could use for a dressing, let alone…” she tailed off, then took a deep breath before continuing. “You’ve lost a lot of blood because we couldn’t staunch the flow early. There’s no major damage, but you’re not going to be back to full strength for a couple of days.”
Ryan cursed. “Whatever this Buckley’s got in mind for us and whatever we’re going to have to do, that’s the last thing I wanted to hear.”
“Could be worse, could be Doc,” Jak said quietly.
“Yeah, what about Doc?” Ryan queried.
“He’s in a mess,” Krysty replied. While Mildred had been attending to Ryan, the red-haired woman had been making a start on preparing Doc for treatment. She had stripped him of his coat and cut away the arm of his shirt, peeling back the matted and congealed cloth to reveal the wound in his shoulder.
The SMG shell had ripped through the flesh just above the bone, exposing the whiteness but, fortunately, not splintering it. It was a deep gouge, and would have been enough to have knocked him off his feet in ordinary circumstances. The adrenaline rush of combat had kept him upright, but the wound had been deep and long enough to cause a vast amount of bleeding. As well, despite his toughness and willpower, Doc wasn’t as strong as the others. It meant that he was now weakened considerably. He would have benefited from blood or plasma, had any been available.
Mildred cursed repeatedly to herself as she painstakingly cleaned the wound and tried to dress it, aided by Krysty. Doc was beginning to regain consciousness, flinching and moaning as the wound was cleaned.
Mildred dressed the wound as best she could, but Doc was a real cause for concern. He would be unable to defend himself adequately for some time and his shoulder may never quite be the same again. She couldn’t be sure with these facilities, but some of the tendon and muscle around the shoulder joint might have been damaged. The size of the wound also meant that, despite her attempts to clean it as best as possible, Doc was open to infection.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she cursed as she finished dressing the wound. “I just hope the awkward old buzzard can get through this.”
Doc opened one eye and said weakly, “My dear doctor, I am alive. This, at least, puts me ahead of the game, I would say.”
After attending to the minor abrasions and cuts on herself and the others and cursing the aches and pains from muscle pulls and grazes that nothing could be done to alleviate, Mildred sat back. She could do no more.
Now they had to wait until Buckley came back for them, and they found out just what exactly the ville chief had in store for them.
“You think we’ll get some food, even some water?” Krysty asked with a cynical edge to her tone.
“Looks to me like they have enough trouble even feeding themselves. Did you see any farming or livestock?” Mildred wondered.
“Only those weird, mutie-looking creatures—I’d have to be triple starving to go near them,” Krysty replied.
“Then how do they eat?” Jak queried. It wasn’t something they cared to think about too closely right now and the conversation petered out.
In the semidarkness of the shuttered room, time passed slowly. They tried to rest, but some noise filtered in from outside. Arguments and fights among the dwellers and the sounds of mundane tasks being carried out, the yelping of small animals and the cries and imprecations of workers.
Just another day. Except that it wasn’t for the five who sat or lay in the darkened room, waiting for their fate.
Eventually, Buckley came to them. The room was now almost dark, the light seeping through the shutters down to nothing as night began to fall. Jak sat up as he heard footsteps approach: three people, two of whom were lame.
“Buckley,” he whispered to the others.
As the chief of the small pesthole ville threw back the door, the companions might have seemed at first glance to be relaxed, but all were poised. The fact that Buckley hadn’t stripped them of their weapons suggested that he meant no harm—but a person could never be certain, particularly in this inbred settlement where insanity might be second nature.
“Hey, how you all feeling now?” he asked cheerily as the door banged against the wall. “You’re feeling better? ’Cause we’s gonna eat and talk about getting some convoy stuff. See, I figure you’re gonna be a lot of help.”
“Even with two of us operating injured?” Ryan asked, heaving himself off the bed with some effort. Doc was sitting up, but anything other than gradual movement was still difficult, even though the rest had allowed him to regain some strength.
“Hell, yeah. Don’t you worry ’bout that.” Buckley grinned—not a pleasant sight—before adding, “But first we got introduce you properly to everyone. See, we don’t have many strangers and it helps to let everyone know who you are and what you’re doing here.”
To each and every one of the companions, this stank of bullshit. But they had no option but to go
along with it and see what the ville chief had in store for them.
They followed Buckley and his two guards along the corridor into the main room of the ranch house. There was food on the table—a stewpot covered in the crusted remains of previous meals, filled with something indistinguishable—and pitchers of water that looked less than clean. It was waiting for them, but despite their hunger and thirst there was no great enthusiasm stirring among them.
Before they reached the entrance, Ryan asked, “The others have told me that this is called Nagasaki. It’s a strange and unusual name for a ville around here.” Unconscious on the approach to the settlement, Ryan had been told by Mildred and Krysty, who had also relayed to him what they knew of the original, predark Nagasaki. Ryan had seen something in old vids and books, and he, too, was curious.
Buckley looked at Ryan suspiciously. “Didn’t know you knew ’bout ’round here, but you’re right—is an unusual name. Given to us by those who came before. They knew, see.”
“Knew what?” Ryan prodded.
“’Bout what was going down,” Buckley replied obscurely. “Look, see if this don’t tell you.” Beckoning them, he changed direction and led them back into the ranch house. They followed him down a side passage until they reached a closed and locked door. He took a key from a leather pouch around his neck.
“This is real important,” he breathed, with an air of awe in his voice. “I get to keep the key ’cause I’m the leader and it’s handed down. See, the ones who came before started this place ’cause they knew what was coming. Not many get to see in here very often and it’s a real treat, I tell you.”
This much was obvious to the companions, as the two men with Buckley were breathing heavily, drooling with excitement. One of them was making small yelping noises in the back of his throat, as though he had to choke down his excitement.
What the hell could be behind the door?
With great reverence, Buckley unlocked and opened the door. Inside the room, which smelled musty and close, as though all the doors and windows were always shut, there was an oil lamp that he lit, the growing light throwing shadows across the room and revealing the secrets that were held within.
