by James Axler
But when, he wondered, would the idiot war party make an appearance?
THE COMPANIONS WAITED until it was dark. No one came for them. Outside they could hear the wag being prepared and Buckley ordering his minions about their duties. Ryan hoped that with the amount of work that was being expended on the preparation for the raid, no one would want to go to the barn and the surviving captive would be ignored.
It seemed that luck would hold. By late afternoon, there had been no enraged Buckley, no furor surrounding a sudden discovery. The companions prepared by cleaning their blasters and checking their diminishing stocks of ammo. Without J.B., supplies were quickly running low.
At least, Ryan, Jak and Mildred prepared themselves. For Doc and Krysty there was only the knowledge that they would have to stay behind, the unspoken hostages to the success of the mission. And beyond that? Only time would tell.
Hours dragged until at last Buckley and his two-man guard came to fetch them. He threw the door open as usual, slamming it into the wall.
“Hey, hey, hey—y’all ready to get rolling?”
It was a rhetorical question and they followed him out into the center of Nagasaki. The wag was waiting, with a crew of five standing by. Two of them were recognizable as the woman Mags and the man she had fought a few nights before. The other three were indeterminate: one of the thin men, a fat man and a fat woman. They could have been any of the ville dwellers.
“Are you coming with us?” Ryan asked Buckley.
“Hell, yeah,” the chief cackled. “Me and the boys wouldn’t miss this one for anything—right, boys?” The two permanent guards to Buckley nodded eagerly.
At a gesture from Buckley, three ville dwellers moved forward and came between the companions, separating Doc and Krysty from the others.
“Subtle. Oh, but so very subtle,” Doc murmured, keeping his sarcasm as low as he could manage.
“Now then, I’s a thinking that y’all could make yourselves useful around here while we’s gone. Make way for all the good things we’s be bringing back for y’all.”
“In other words, you wish us to mop out storehouses and clean ordure from the surrounding area. To be skivvies to your glorious society,” Doc intoned, sure that this level of sarcasm would fly straight over Buckley’s head—and the heads of the assembled ville dwellers.
Buckley’s blank expression only confirmed this view. “Hell, yeah—whatever the fuck y’all just said,” he mumbled.
At his direction, the ville war party climbed into the wag, followed by Ryan, Mildred and Jak. As the door of the wag closed on those in the front, Ryan was aware of the stench emanating from the Nagasaki fighters. It was going to be a long, hard ride. Before they even got the chance to fight, he would have to work at keeping his stomach.
“C’mon, Ryan boy,” Buckley urged. “Fire her up.”
Ryan looked at the chief in amazement. “You mean you don’t know how to drive one of these?”
Buckley shook his head and leered good-humoredly. “Think that was one of the reasons we needed y’all, Ryan.”
Shaking his head in disbelief, the one-eyed man fired up the wag’s engine and steered the vehicle on the track that led out of Nagasaki. The wag’s suspension hadn’t fared well with the rough terrain leading to the ville, and as it bumped and groaned across the wastelands, Mildred and Jak—seated in the rear of the vehicle—wondered what the hell they were doing there, and if they’d survive the journey in one piece.
The ville dwellers were excited, chattering and fingering their weapons with impatience, spirits high.
“What’s the plan, then?” Ryan questioned. “Do we wait for the convoy or do we track them for some distance? And how the fuck do you propose that we tag on the end without them spotting we’re there?” he continued, failing to keep the frustration from his voice.
Buckley shrugged. “Hell, like I knows. We’s just see what happens, yeah?”
DOC AND KRYSTY HAD BEEN put to work cleaning out an area of the old ranch house to store the imagined riches that would be looted in the raid. Both worked carefully, keeping a close eye on each other in mutual defense. There was something about the way in which their appointed guardians were staring at them that suggested they would be in serious trouble if the rogue wag didn’t return home in good time.
As darkness began to fall—this being Buckley’s only weapon in avoiding detection as they attached themselves to the convoy—so both sets of the companions pondered their fate. Doc and Krysty wondered if they could keep their alleged protectors at bay until the others returned; Mildred, Jak and Ryan wondered if they could get out of this debacle in one piece and get back to Doc and Krysty.
Ryan’s reveries was broken as the old blacktop came into view, running across the expanse of wasteland ahead of them.
“Slow down there, Ryan boy,” Buckley said excitedly. “There they are.”
Ryan’s eye followed the line of Buckley’s pointing finger. Coming toward them, likely to cross their path in ten minutes, was the convoy. There were five wags and seven outriders on bikes.
If Ryan had stopped to think—hadn’t had Buckley breathing excitedly down his neck, urging him both to hurry and also to take care in virtually the same breath—he would have wondered at that. Why an uneven number of bikers?
The convoy passed. Although it was dark, the land was flat and without any camouflaging features, and Ryan was sure that the stationary wag stood out against the flat horizon. Nonetheless, the convoy proceeded without any indication that it had noticed the wag waiting to move smoothly into position at the rear of the procession.
Ryan slid the wag into gear, drove it onto the blacktop and slipped in at the rear of the convoy, marveling at the apparent stupidity of the trader in charge, trying to ignore the delighted whoops of the chief.
At the front of the convoy, Malloy rode next to his driver. He had stared at the wag standing on the shoulder of the road with barely concealed amusement as they passed, then followed its progress in his side mirror as his wag drew farther away. The darkness, broken only by the headlights of the wags and bikes behind, prevented him from seeing the point at which the rogue wag slipped into place. However, a series of signals from the headlights of the vehicles behind told him that it had taken up position.
Malloy shook his head in amazement and looked at the road ahead, the lights of Duma visible ahead, standing out like a beacon in the wastes.
“Shit crazy fuckers. Let Xander deal with them.”
THE BIKER SENT AHEAD by Malloy had told his story three times before eventually getting to relay it directly to Baron Xander. He had endured ridicule and disdain from the sec guards on the first set of barriers, then more barracking from a second set of guards and a face-to-face with Sec Chief Hammick before being told to wait in the chief’s office.
Grant was in the med lab when Hammick walked in.
“Don’t see you around this way often,” Grant said with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, well, got a weird one, and I wanted to run it by you first,” Hammick replied, rubbing his chin. Grant had trained him when he first joined the sec guard, and although Grant had long since been seconded to med, Hammick still thought of him as the more experienced of the two. Besides which, Grant was close to Xander, and Hammick didn’t relish the idea of going to the baron with something as plain strange as this.
Grant listened while Hammick outlined the biker’s story, barely able to keep a smirk from his face. “Well,” he said finally, “I always thought those inbreeds would keep themselves to themselves. All these years they’ve been no bother. But I guess the insanity in their tiny gene pool has finally got to them.”
“Yeah, but it’s not them that I’m really worried about,” Hammick replied. “It’s who they’ve got with them.”
“What—a bunch of captives who have to fight or be chilled? What’s to worry about?”
Hammick stared at Grant. “Weren’t you listening? A one-eyed man? When we’ve got—”
&
nbsp; “Xander doesn’t have to know every detail,” Grant interrupted. “Do we know this man?”
“Who?”
“The biker with the story,” Grant snapped, exasperated. “Is he known to us?”
“Oh yeah, he’s one of Malloy’s all right. And a wild one last time he was here,” Hammick added with a grin.
“Good,” Grant said decisively. “Then we have something we can use to persuade him that there are a few—shall we say—unimportant points to his story. Wouldn’t you agree? After all, we can’t have Xander sidetracked by a legend and soft-pedalling at the expense of our reputation for coming down hard.”
Hammick thought about this. “You’re right. Come and talk to this rider for me, Grant.”
“It’ll be a pleasure,” Grant concurred.
And so, when the outrider from Malloy’s convoy got to retell his story for the fourth time, standing in front of an amused Xander, there were certain elements that he omitted.
Xander waved him away when he had finished and Hammick handed him over to a sec guard on the door.
“Take him away and get him out of his tiny little mind until this is all over,” he murmured to the sec guard, knowing that the biker would be the last to object to such a course of action.
Walking back to where Grant was conferring with Xander, he caught the end of their conversation.
“I think we should allow them in as far as the wag station, and then surround them.”
“Why let them get that far?” Xander countered. “Our first post could knock them out, with no danger to surrounding buildings. Think how much jack they could take to rebuild.”
“I understand your point, Baron, but I would argue thus. With a wider expanse of land in which to make good an escape and with only the outer post forces against them, they could elude complete destruction. How would this seem to Malloy? One show of weakness and word will soon spread. This could be the first crack in what has otherwise been an impeccable reputation.”
“But what if these outlanders they have with them increase their efficiency and firepower? How would that look?”
Grant gave Hammick the briefest of glances before continuing. “You heard the messenger, Baron. These outlanders are probably wounded, tired and being forced against their will. I can’t see that they would be much of a threat, can you? This way, we draw them into a safe, enclosed space and then wipe them out in front of Malloy and his crew. Thus we negate the threat from the inbreeds and also hammer home a message to any who would seek to come up against us.”
Hammick looked from one to the other while Xander pondered that. Making the biker leave out any reference to a one-eyed man made it that much easier for Grant to persuade Xander that his tactical plan was the best. But as sec chief, Hammick would feel the baron’s wrath if things went wrong. He hoped to hell that Grant was making the right call.
Finally, Xander looked up, his eyes going from Hammick to Grant, and he nodded. “Okay, let’s do it your way. Alert the sec force and get the armory onto this.”
J.B. AND OLLY HAD FINISHED priming the blaster section of the armory when the call came. J.B. was explaining the action of a Weatherby rifle to the younger man, outlining optimum use, when Esquivel found them.
“Yo, J.B., dude, there’s something big going down. This is where we get to see some action.” With which he gestured for the two men to follow.
J.B. raised an inquisitory eyebrow at Olly; the Armorer had been enjoying himself, having not seen a Weatherby—as far as he could recall—for many years. Olly responded immediately.
“Xander likes us to reequip the sec depending on what the task is, and he also likes us to be on hand when there’s a firefight—kind of like we should be there in case something fucks up with the ordnance, kind of that any armorer worth his jack should be able to hold his own in a firefight.” The young man tapered off, but J.B. knew what was unspoken: if he really was the J. B. Dix that Xander spoke of, then he should be a good fighter.
Weird thing was, he really didn’t know what he was like in combat, but he guessed he was about to find out.
The two men hurried down to the lobby of the armory building. As they did so, J.B. queried, “All three of us going?”
Olly shook his head. “Not dad. Xander thinks he’s too old now. And mebbe he’s right—Dad makes a lot of noise about it, but I figure he’s slowing up a bit.”
“Mebbe that’s why he’s not happy about me coming in,” J.B. mused, broaching the unspoken subject. A sharp look from Olly prompted him to continue. “Listen, he knows this armory better than any man. No matter what Xander says, you or me couldn’t do the job without his advice.”
“Mebbe you should tell him that,” Olly murmured in an undertone as they arrived in the packed lobby.
“If he gives me a chance to say more than two words, I will,” J.B. replied.
The lobby was already filling up with uniformed sec. A force of about twenty was being deployed in the action. Some of them J.B. recognized, but others were strangers to him. He saw Esquivel work his way through, the sec man detailed to him being looser of limb and gait than any of the others.
“What’s happening, Es?” Olly asked.
“Some weird shit thing, far as I can make out. Something and nothing, but Xander’s turning it into a show of strength. Guess that thing with Simms rattled him.”
Olly looked blank, but J.B. understood. He murmured, “Any baron who gets screwed over has to clamp down hard, show anyone else with ideas that they’re on a one-way ticket to the farm. First opportunity they get.”
“Heads up, guys—it’s my boss,” Esquivel muttered, indicating Hammick as he came through the main doors.
A hush fell over the assembled throng and for the next ten minutes the sec chief proceeded to outline what the outrider sent in by Malloy had told him and what Grant and Xander had decided as a course of action; except that he sold the course of action as his own and said nothing about a one-eyed man in the opposition wag.
The notion that they would let the convoy, with the rogue wag in tow, into the ville caused a ripple of bemusement. But when Hammick told them it was a chance to make a show of authority to let the traders know who they could rely upon, Olly looked across at J.B. with a wry grin and a slow nod. The lad was learning some important lessons, ones that would mean a lot if he did eventually become armorer of Duma.
J.B.’s attention strayed for a second as he realized that thinking in such terms meant that he had the notion to move on, though how he could escape from a shelter that may turn into a prison was something he’d have to consider when there was time.
Right now, there was none. Hammick snapped positional tactics and orders at groups of the uniformed men and told J.B. and Olly the kinds of extra ordnance he wanted doled out. The AK-47s the sec carried as standard were fine for everyday use and show, but in order to neutralize this threat with prejudice he wanted them equipped with SMGs and grens, as well as several of the M-16/M-203 combos that J.B. had noted earlier in one of the blaster racks.
The gren launcher section of the combo needed handling with care, and from what Olly had told him, they were rarely used. There could be some interesting—not to mention dangerous—fireworks if the heavy-duty blasters were put in the hands of sec men who had little or no training in how to use them. He exchanged a questioning glance with Olly, who shrugged.
Nothing for it but to hope that these guys had been trained. Not so reassuring when you were in the firing line, though. As Hammick outlined the plan of attack, once they had cornered the wag and isolated it from the rest of the convoy, it became clear that J.B. and Olly would be almost in the front line, providing ordnance support and fighting.
Dismissing his men to get equipped and into position—current reports gave them half an hour until arrival, as an outlying sec post had sighted the convoy—Hammick left them in charge of Olly and J.B.
Making sure that the SMGs and M-16/M-203s went out with full checks and good supplies of ammo kept
J.B. busy, while Olly dealt with the distribution of grens both for hand use, and also for use with the combo. It wasn’t until they were on their way to the wag park being used for ambush that J.B. had a chance to question Olly and Esquivel about the rogue wag.
“No one knows that much about this bunch of inbreeds, just that they’ve been out there since the nukecaust and they’ve never really bothered us before. They like to keep themselves to themselves, if you know what I’m saying,” Olly told him.
“Nasty fuckers, though,” Esquivel added. “You hang out with trade crews, you get to hear shit. They’ve been scavenging for years, mebbe trying to snatch the odd wag here and there. Sometimes they succeed. No one ever sees those crews again…I don’t even want to think about it.”
“So why are they still there?” J.B. asked.
Esquivel shrugged. “Are they a threat to Xander if they do that? No, they’re only a threat to the traders, and even then only if the traders’ own sec are shit. They don’t come near us, we don’t waste time and jack on running them down. Except now they have—”
“Thing is,” Olly interjected, “why are they doing this now, when they’ve had all that time and never tried anything like it?”
“That, my friend, is a very good question. One that Xander would do well to ask of Hammick,” Esquivel said softly. “But somehow, I don’t think he has.”
“So we’d better watch ourselves,” J.B. said to the young armorer. “They don’t sound like they’d get this brave unless they had some new trick in their own armory.”
It became difficult to continue the conversation, as they arrived at the wag park and took up positions. Any words overheard that criticized the baron could cause them problems. The time for addressing these issues would be later.
Now they could only wait for the convoy to arrive.
BOSS BUCKLEY CACKLED with glee as the convoy swept unopposed through the roadblocks leading into Duma.
“Shit, if I’s a’ever thought that they was this stupe, we’s had ourselves a little raid like this years ago.”
