by James Axler
“I hope you will not find it inconvenient if we make a detour rather than return directly to my quarters.”
Ryan looked around. “We don’t exactly have plans for the rest of the evening,” Krysty said, summing up the group’s sentiment.
Tenorio nodded, uncharacteristically brisk and silent.
“What’s going on?” Ryan asked.
“I prefer to show you, if you will bear with me.”
The big, white water wag worked its way to the north edge of the drowned downtown, detouring only around blocked avenues or known hidden snags. The pilot was giving it as much throttle as he dared, relying on his knowledge of the dangers and the blue-white glare of a spotlight mounted alongside the .50-caliber. As always the blaster was manned by a Jaguar Knight.
Fallen buildings obscured their view until they entered the final block that led to the city’s northern edge. Then they could see columns of smoke rising pale against the star-shot black sky, lit from their bases with flickering glares of yellow and orange, for all the world like miniature volcanoes.
“Smokies?” Jak asked.
“Villes,” Krysty answered grimly. “Those are houses burning.”
Tenorio nodded.
“A display of petulance by our friend Don Hector?” Doc wondered.
“Chichimecs,” the alcade said. “Their whole army is on the march south. Advance patrols are setting light to villages before them.”
“I thought they didn’t burn the villes they captured,” Ryan said, “since they’re looking to move in and stay.”
“It seems they now choose to announce their presence in a very graphic way. I believe it is a challenge.”
Ernesto emerged from the red-lit cabin to murmur to his boss. Tenorio listened, frowning slightly.
“And now it seems we have received an emissary from Don Hector bearing a profuse apology,” Tenorio told the companions. “Also a parcel.”
“A parcel?” Ryan asked.
The baron nodded.
IT SEEMED the smokies had decided to yield stage to the burning villes. Their eruptions had died back to sullen furnace glow on the overcast above Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl, and the occasional deep-throat grumble echoing across the oil-dark water.
Ryan again stood alone with Don Tenorio on the terrace of his headquarters. This time instead of refreshments there were two containers on the table. Ryan avoided looking at them.
“Here is the favor I would beg of you, Ryan Cawdor,” Don Tenorio said. “I would ask you to aid me as my war chief, commander of my forces.”
Ryan looked at him, his gaze bleak. It took him a moment to register what the small, slight baron had said, and not simply because it had come right out of the blue. Krysty had taken sick immediately after dinner; she’d eaten with her customary appetite, then promptly thrown it up. Mildred suspected she hadn’t recovered fully from her infection, even though the wound itself was healed, or possibly that her immune system had directed its efforts so totally to healing the injury and fighting off the infection from the dung-smeared crossbow bolt that a secondary infection might have gotten a foothold in her stomach. Mildred was tending her now in the spare but comfortable quarters Tenorio had provided Ryan and Krysty. The physician had urged him not to worry about Krysty.
“Come again, Baron?” he said. He couldn’t believe the message his ears belatedly got through to his brain.
“I asked if you would take command of the city’s defense forces.”
Ryan rubbed his jaw. It had grown stubbly, though he had shaved his chin clean that morning, as he did when he had luxury of time and water.
“With due respect, Don Tenorio, I walked away from being a baron, so I’m not likely to agree to be sec boss for any man. I’m sorry.”
Tenorio shook his head. “You misunderstand, my friend. I was planning to ask this of you before poor Colonel Solano was murdered this afternoon. I can find another sec chief. He had a few able lieutenants. What we lack is war leadership. From your tales of past deeds I perceive you have ample experience in war. You are clearly a leader of great ability, to hold your group together on such a long and perilous journey—of which I gather this is only your latest. And the resourcefulness and resolution and ability to command—not just men but situations—which you have displayed impressed me deeply.”
“But you have warriors, too. What about Five Ax and your other Jaguar Knights?”
“They are brave and skillful, indeed. But they are also young and…how would you say? Limited by their lack of experience. Five Ax is a superb commando and small unit leader. Perhaps some day he will mature into a strategist, as well. But that time remains in the future. In the meantime we must go to war against the Chichimecs—now, tomorrow. And we must march alongside the forces of Don Hector, while always looking over our shoulders at them. I despair at that necessity, but necessity it is. The Chichimecs have forced our hand. For all his courage and even his intelligence, young Five Ax is not the equal to that task.”
“I’m not sure any man is,” Ryan said.
“As it happens, Five Ax himself believes you are. He nominated you for war leader, although the notion had occurred to me before he spoke.”
“It’s a pretty huge responsibility you’re asking me to take on, Don Tenorio. Your people don’t know me.”
“You are far too modest. Everyone in the valley knows of the intrepid band of traders from el norte. Including, I have no doubt, the Chichimecs. Nezahualcoyótl has astonishingly good intelligence sources among Hector’s people and even here in the city.”
Ryan suspected that was a good indication Tenorio needed a sharper, more active sec boss than the unfortunate colonel had been. Since he was dead set in not considering that position, whatever else went down, he kept his peace on the subject.
“You can’t expect too much from us. You can’t expect wonders. We’ll help you against the Chichimecs. I’ve spoken with the others and we’re agreed on that. But for anything beyond that…we’re just people.”
“All heroes are ‘just people.’ All villains, too.”
“Mebbe you’re right. Reckon you are. But I don’t know enough about your forces. Don’t even know how many fighters you got.”
“We can certainly provide for you all the information you need.”
“Not hardly. Not overnight. I can’t just waltz in here and have any idea what I’m trying to do.”
The alcade’s shoulders slumped. “Yet we must go to battle soon. And I can’t leave my fighters at the mercy of Don Hector.”
“I sure was wrong about that one,” Ryan admitted. “He can’t be trusted, no matter what he does to try to convince you.”
At that both men turned and looked at the objects resting on the table. The emissary who had crossed the causeway under a white truce flag had been insistent on the cacique’s behalf that the attack that afternoon had been carried out against Don Hector’s wishes and against his express orders. His sec boss, Mendoza, had performed the treachery on his own initiative.
To demonstrate his good faith, and sincere contrition for the treacherous assault, Don Hector had sent Mendoza’s head in a clear glass jug. His eyes and mouth were wide open in a look of agony and horror. Next to the jug rested a largish earthenware pot with a lid. This contained what was purported to be the sec boss’s heart. Tenorio had told the companions he presumed it had been carved from Mendoza’s chest while he was still living, in the traditional manner.
“Poor Mendoza,” Don Tenorio said. “He really wasn’t a bad sort. Not truly cut out for secret police work. Which is no doubt why it’s his head in the jar.”
“I tell you what. I’ll go out with your people, do what I can to help in the upcoming battle. It’ll give me a chance to learn about them. Then if there has to be a continuing campaign—and sure enough there’s going to be—these Chichimecs’ll just pull back to come at you later if they start getting the worst of things, and I doubt you and Hector together have enough people to bag them all, keep
them from getting away—if the war goes on, we’ll see what I can do for you.”
“But who will command my forces? I can’t just turn them over to Hector.”
“No. You can’t. You’ve got to lead them.”
“But what am I to do? I have no idea how to command troops in battle.”
“You read a lot of history, don’t you?” Ryan didn’t bother to specify predark history; that went without saying. Here, as up north in the Deathlands, what was known of the years since the Big Nuke wasn’t written down. It was passed along in oral traditions, spotty and more than half mythologized when there was any truth to the tales at all. Or when people even bothered. What a lot of people felt, even if most couldn’t articulate it, was, Ryan knew, The past? Look what it’s done for us. Fuck it.
“I have, yes.” Tenorio said.
“Military history?”
The alcade smiled. “I remember an impressive list of names—of battles and who won them. I know when they happened and where. As to what actually happened and why—”
He spread his hands. “I might say I know enough to be dangerous. This would not be true. I don’t even know enough to delude myself I know anything of use.”
Ryan nodded decisively. “Tell you what, then. Let me leave Doc back with you while the rest of us go out with your troops. He’s a big student of history. Might even say he was part of history himself. He knows his way around a fight from firsthand experience as well as reading about it. He can advise you, at least keep Don Hector from leading you down any slaughterhouse chutes. Beyond that, you got good judgment and sense. You’ll just have to rely on them.”
“So it must be, I suppose.”
Ryan looked back to the grisly trophies on the table. “I gotta admit I’d feel better about this,” he said, “if it was a red-haired woman’s head in that fireblasted jar.”
* * *
Chapter Nineteen
“Now this,” J.B. said, affectionately patting the dark-blue steel receiver of the Browning automatic rifle cradled across his lap, “is what going to war is all about.”
It was a high, wide day, bright blue above with just a few fluffy clouds rolling along, mostly green around them, although the southern sky was smudged with a nasty pall of smoke. They didn’t look that way much, being as they were headed north toward the invading human-mutant horde. They had a dirt road to drive, and it had been several days since rain, which meant the valley’s mostly foot-slogging defenders were at least spared the infantryman’s ancient nemesis, mud.
Three of the companions shared the big wag with the nuke battery. Ryan drove. Jak rode shotgun in the machine-gun mount—which now mounted an actual machine gun, an M-60 7.62 mm blaster lent them by Don Tenorio out of the FJP armory—and J.B. was sprawled in the back seat chortling over his own loaner autoblaster. Krysty was sick with her relapse, delirious with fever. Ryan had left her back in the city in Mildred’s capable, and at least confident-seeming, hands and tried to shut a door on all thought of her and lock it down tight for the duration of the fight; a man who headed into a major blood-spilling with a divided mind was asking to wind up at air temperature. Doc, per Ryan’s suggestions, remained back at the joint command post with Don Tenorio, advising him on tactics and generally keeping an eye on him, with the help of half a dozen Jaguar Knights, who while upset about missing out on the fight understood the need to discourage any further lapses of judgment on the part of Hector’s underlings.
Upset at missing out on a fight. Ryan shook his head. What a concept.
Ryan had the wag crawling along beside a marching column of two-hundred-odd city troops. Well, armed scavvies, at any rate; aside from the handful of so-called Jaguar Knights, who had chosen to train themselves into pretty good facsimiles of old-time commandos, they didn’t seem to have much notion of a military way of doing things. Still, their spirits were high and they seemed ready to fight. Most of them had fought, against the various deadly dangers lurking in the city if nothing else.
Ryan knew that was the biggest factor in determining how people did in combat. If you’d been shot at before, or even had to struggle for your life against some kind of immediate danger, you were that much less likely to break, to lose your head and get yourself or your buddies chilled. Seeing the elephant, Doc called it.
Also, at least all the scavvies had weapons, even if half of them carried no more than handblasters. That was an edge they had over Don Hector’s motley bunch. Ryan had been surprised and even a little disappointed on first getting a look at the vaunted valley army. There were about thirty Eagle Knights, including five or six of the laser-armed officers mounted on motorcycles. There were maybe fifty generic sec men in scavenged khaki uniforms, not always complete and not all identical—apparently it was the thought that counted. They were fairly well armed, with at least longblasters. The Eagle Knights carried submachine guns, FN FALs, a couple of BARs. The sec men’s pieces ranged from FNs and Garands down through bolt guns—some ancient military Springfields and Enfields, some sporting rifles—to shotguns and lever-action rifles. A very heavily armed force, by postdark standards, mounting pretty serious firepower.
Not so the three or four hundred hapless valley peons who made up the bulk of Hector’s army. These had apparently been conscripted right out of the villes and fields. A fair number of these had seen the elephant themselves, in Don Hector’s various little wars and police actions as he’d sought to bring the valley under control, or in patrols and skirmishes against the Chichimecs. They’d fight.
But most were green as budding apples. They’d been trained to march, and been taught discipline—or at least been trained to fear their commanders, which Ryan knew some thought was the same thing. But they were visibly terrified, rolling their eyes in anticipation of contact with the enemy.
No more than half of them armed with blasters. Such blasters as they had did tend to be higher tech and quality than what the Chichimecs carried. The lucky ones got bolt-action rifles or even one of a few Garands. The others who actually carried guns had to make do with weapons all the way down the firepower food chain to single-shot shotguns and even a couple of little skinny break-action rifles that J.B. swore had to fire .22 Long Rifle—a round that would kill you just as dead as any other, and indeed could cause insidious internal bleeding that was hard to detect or treat, but that wouldn’t be anybody sane’s first choice as a battle rifle. Of the other half of the troops, some carried machetes or cane cutters, which were essentially machetes with long handles, some long enough to qualify as pole weapons. Others just had clubs, and some…well, maybe they had pocket knives tucked away somewhere.
“The real stickie in the swimming hole in all of this,” J.B. said, “is ammunition.” He was examining his own stock that had come with the Browning, .30-06 rounds loaded into 20-round magazines, plus a couple cases of cartridges in boxes, in the optimistic hope that he might have a chance to recharge his mags.
With a whine of a 250 cc engine, Five Ax came rocketing up to them on a Honda dirt bike, back along the column from scouting up ahead. That was the bitch about being separated from Doc and Mildred: they were the ones who spoke, and more importantly understood, Spanish. Fortunately, a decent minority of the scavvies could communicate passably in English. So for that matter could most of Hector’s officers—caste distinctions being the sort of thing he liked to encourage. But where Five Ax was concerned, he and Ryan had never from the outset had much trouble talking to each other even though Ryan knew no Spanish whatever and the Jaguar Knight spoke no English. They just naturally seemed to share a commo channel.
“Chokepoint ahead looks clear,” the Jaguar Knight got across, “but I don’t like it.”
“I hear you.” Ryan already knew what he was talking about. Starting just a couple hundred yards ahead of them now the road ran along a hogsback ridge on the left-hand side for perhaps a quarter mile, while on the right, paralleling it no more than a hundred yards away, ran a lower but still elevated spline of weed-grown lav
a flow. Ambush heaven.
“Aw, now,” J.B. said, tongue firmly in cheek, “what are we getting all spooky about? Don Hector promised us there’s no Chichimecs nearer than two, three miles from where we are now.”
“Yeah, right,” Ryan said mirthlessly. They were working to a timetable, which meant that they couldn’t do a halfway decent job scouting the heights; real recon meant going on foot, quiet and methodical, not roaring around in a wag or on a bike, which Five Ax well knew. The necessity of joining up with Hector’s forces in time to deploy properly also meant they couldn’t jump off the road and drive cross-country around one or another jaw of the potential trap.
He stopped the wag, got out. Taking his lead, the column came to a halt, fell out for a smoke and a swallow of water from their bottles. To keep up appearances, there was a city man named Obiedo in charge of the force, but Tenorio had passed the word that any suggestions Ryan might see fit to make were to be treated as commands.
Jak stayed snuggled up to the receiver of his machine gun. It wasn’t just that he enjoyed the potential power riding around in the thing. He was staring at the pass up ahead as if invisible laser beams from his ruby eyes might spring out and melt away concealment from around any ambushers. He knew they were headed straight into potential death ground as well as anybody.
There were two other wags with the column, carrying extra water and ammo, each mounting a .308-caliber MG, one an M-60 like the one mounted on the Hummer, the other an FN MAG-58. They stopped, one halfway back the column, the other pulling rear guard. Their gunners were likewise alert behind their mounted blasters.
Ryan made use of a gift from Don Tenorio, a little low-power Simmons monocular—a baby eight-power telescope that would ride in a pocket, which they’d scavenged out of the drowned city. Not the finest precision optics, but very handy, and just the ticket for a one-eyed man.
