by James Axler
Sand put her hands on her generous hips. “You presume much, Cawdor.”
“Always.”
For a moment she glowered down at him, then she seemed to deflate.
“For such short acquaintance, you know me too well. Very well. You win this round. Your friend will be safe—but he’s staying here with me.”
“What are you talking about?” Trumbo demanded hoarsely. “This old taint chilled some of my best men!”
Sand took a pinch of his cheek. “I pay your men handsomely to get thrown away,” she said. “I pay you even more handsomely to throw them away. And also—” she released his face, leaving him rubbing his cheek as if afraid she’d left marks “—I’ll thank you to watch throwing around those anti-mutant slurs. Some of my nearest and dearest might take offense.”
“This isn’t over, Cawdor!” Trumbo shouted down from the cliff.
“For once I agree with you,” Sand said.
“You’re both right,” Ryan called back calmly. “It isn’t.”
He turned away and led his friends off into the night.
* * *
“THEY HAD TO have been warned, Ryan,” Mildred said. She was up front, though as usual Jak roved out on point, invisible now in the scrub. “They were all over us like white on rice the moment I threw the firefight simulator. We never had a chance.”
“We would’ve been overwhelmed,” Krysty agreed, “if Doc hadn’t told us to run while he stayed behind to hold them off.”
“We should never have run away,” Ricky said miserably.
Ryan frowned. He carried the metal box on his shoulder. It was heavy, and the edges dug into him uncomfortably.
Somehow he reckoned he didn’t have anything to complain about.
“Sure you should,” he said. “You did the right thing.”
“But...but Doc’s one of us!”
“And he still is, son,” J.B. said. He was walking alongside his protégé. “But you heard Baron Sand say she was going to treat him right.”
“And I believe she will,” Ryan stated.
“Seriously, Ryan?” Mildred asked in disbelief. “You, of all people—trusting a baron?”
“Ryan trusts barons to act according to their nature,” Krysty said.
“Right.”
“But isn’t it the nature of barons to be rapacious, sadistic and just plain evil?” Mildred demanded.
“Usually,” Ryan said.
His throat rasped. He took a canteen from his hip with his free hand. Krysty promptly took it out of his hand, unscrewed the cap and handed it back. He drank deeply with a grunt of gratitude.
“It’s not like I think Sand is straight,” he said. “Not at all. Just don’t reckon she’s bent that way.”
“Anyway,” J.B. said, “she can always chill Doc later if she changes her mind. What? Why are you looking at me like that, Mildred?”
“Stop reassuring us,” Mildred said.
“I think he means that’s actually a reason to take her at her word,” Krysty told her. “She always has that out in her mind. And, anyway, I agree with Ryan. I don’t think Sand’s a good person. But I don’t see her as that kind of bad.”
“Trumbo, though,” Mildred said, “is bad clean through.”
“Sand’s got him on a tight leash,” Ryan stated. “For now.”
“But what happens if he decides to chew through the damn leash? What if this is the final straw?”
“Isn’t that mixing metaphors?” Krysty asked.
“Got no more reason to presume it’ll happen this time than any other time before,” Ryan said. “Looked like that was an old familiar game for Sand and her sec boss. Anyway, I’m not talking about leaving Doc back there for a month-long vacation. We get back, get paid, take stock of the situation. Work out a plan to get the old man back.”
“A better plan,” J.B. suggested.
Ryan uttered a noise halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Better be, yeah.”
They walked along in silence except for the crunching of sandy soil under their boots. The breeze pushed gently at their backs.
“Anyway,” Ryan said eventually, “we’ve got a more immediate problem, the way I see it. Dark Lady has—”
Jak suddenly materialized out of the night, standing stock-still in front of them with a white hand upraised. He looked like a warning ghost.
“Listen,” he said in a soft voice.
J.B. and Ryan exchanged looks.
“Dark Lady has trouble, is what she got,” J.B. said. “That’s blasterfire.”
Ryan held up a hand for a halt. He could already tell J.B. had called it right.
The noise was like a woodpecker working up a far-off tree trunk. A lot of woodpeckers.
The lights of Amity Springs were plainly visible here. Ryan reckoned they were no more than a quarter mile from the wag yard on the west edge of the ville.
The shooting, he could tell now, came from the east.
“That’s the other side of town,” J.B. said, frowning in concentration. He took off his glasses and began to polish them.
Ryan thought he could see lights flash between buildings on the ville’s far side. And from the flats father along, the faint flicker of incoming fire.
“What now, lover?” Krysty asked.
“We earn ourselves a nice fat bonus,” Ryan said. “Come on.”
* * *
RICKY RAN HUNCHED over. He clutched the fat barrel of his DeLisle with its built-in suppressor, which was slung muzzle-down across his back for quick access into firing position. He’d learned the trick from watching Ryan, to keep it from prodding his kidney painfully as he ran.
That did nothing to stop his lungs from feeling as if they were being torn out of his chest by handfuls with every gasping breath he heaved. After walking in Deathlands for months, he figured he should have been in better shape. To their south the Flats flashed and crackled and boomed like a fireworks display. From the snarling of engines there were both motorcycles and motor wags in play. Evidently the Crazy Dogs were a well-equipped gang, which they surely hadn’t seen evidence of at that roadblock on their way into the Basin.
“You think...these are...the Crazy Dogs?” Ricky panted in rhythm to his slogging footsteps. They were traveling through some soft sand right now, which made it at least triple hard. Ricky hated walking in soft dust or sand. But it wasn’t as if the others loved it, either, so he’d learned to stop whining about it.
“Are you stupe, kid?” demanded Ryan, still churning in the rear. “Who else would it be, the Cub Scouts?”
Ricky didn’t get the reference, but the rebuke made his eyes sting almost as bad as his lungs did.
“I hope we’re in time,” Krysty said. She was running elbow-to-elbow with Ryan, and seemingly having no trouble with the footing at all.
“Fire’s going both ways,” J.B. said.
He was just moving along at his usual dog trot, as if nothing bothered him or ever would. His main concession was to hold his hat on his head with his left hand. The right held his Uzi by the pistol grip; apparently the M-4000 bouncing around on his back didn’t bother him.
“Ville folks seem to be giving good as they’re getting. And then some, mebbe.”
Strain as he could, Ricky couldn’t tell which way the fire was going by listening. All he could hear was that there was blasting—hard to miss unless you were deaf or dead.
“What’s the plan?” Mildred huffed.
Ryan raised his hand for the group to slow up.
Gratefully, Ricky did. He fought the urge to bend over and just stand there sucking wind.
“Automatic fire,” Mildred remarked at a sharp snarl. “These are some well-heeled coldhearts.”
“Full-auto’s not going all one way,” J.
B. said. “Ryan?”
Ryan scratched his head and surveyed the scene to the south of them. To Ricky’s eyes it was confused. Mostly he saw lights moving left and right and getting brighter and fainter east of the ville, as if the machines that carried the Crazy Dogs were maneuvering. There was a stationary pool of brightness some distance away from Amity Springs.
“Wish we had something like cover here,” Ryan said. “As it is, we’re going to need to get closer through this scrub before we can calculate what to do. Or even whether to do anything.”
“Is it really our fight?” Mildred asked.
“After that little scene in the gaudy,” J.B. said, “looks like it’s ours whether we want it or not. Unless we just shake the dust of this whole Basin off our boot heels.”
“We’ll see,” Ryan said. “Follow me. Best to hunker down somewhere. It’s unlikely anybody’ll be looking this way, or even see much if they do. But it’s triple-stupe to take extra chances with that much lead in the air.”
He led them forward several hundred yards, then held up his hand in the signal to stop. Next was a signal for his companions to come up alongside him and go to ground. But not spread out.
Ricky was almost sure. The hand signals the group used for silent comms were simple and straightforward. Still, he was deathly afraid of screwing up and endangering his new family.
Holding his carbine unslung in front of him, he duck-walked forward to join the group nucleated on Ryan. The tall curly haired man had his single eye pressed to the eyepiece of his Navy longeye.
Ricky could make out the gist of what was going on. For whatever reason the scrub petered out a couple hundred yards from the road, both to the north and south.
From Amity Springs in the west flickered the flames of a number of blasters. They were widely spaced in a ville that looked darker than usual. The shots came sparsely now, although he did see a brief burst of automatic-weapon fire. A moment later the reports hit his ears with surprising force.
That’s at least a .308 there, he thought in surprise.
“I’d say our friends in Amity Springs are the ones who are surprisingly well-heeled,” Krysty remarked, squatting at Ryan’s side.
She had her right hand on the cool ground, her fingers splayed, as if to support herself. Ricky knew she had perfect balance; it was a gesture he’d seen her use frequently, though. As if she liked or even needed to reaffirm her connection with the Earth, to which she felt a mystic affinity.
“I seem to recall hearing something about them finding the armory for the predark lab they built on,” J.B. said.
“Plus this may be where a lot of the proceeds of selling their scavvy goes,” Ryan said without looking away from his target.
He seemed to have fixed on the unmoving glow east up the road from the ville. With his unaided eye Ricky could see there were a couple wags parked with their headlights on, aimed toward Amity Springs. He saw dark figures moving around the vehicles; they were smart enough to stay out of the lights.
“Why haven’t the ville people shot out the headlights?” Ricky asked.
“Long shot,” Mildred said.
“Likely they’re just as happy for the coldhearts to keep silhouetting themselves against them,” Ryan said.
A number of bikes and open-topped wags were driving between the parked wags and the ville. Counting multiple occupants in the wags, Ricky guessed there had to be at least a hundred of the coldhearts. At first he thought they were burning gas and rubber to no purpose, then he picked out the pattern.
They kept moving to make themselves harder targets. Every once in a while one or a group would make a run right at the ville. They’d open up and then turn away and scoot back from the inevitable return fire.
“What do you see, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“The bastards are playing it cagey,” he said. “But I reckon Diego isn’t missing this little party. And if he’s anywhere, he’s there.”
He passed the Navy longeye to J.B. and unslung his longblaster.
“And if I chill him,” Ryan said, “could be the Crazy Dogs might have a change of heart about messing with the people of Nukem Flats, and move on in search of greener pastures.”
“Seems like a long shot,” Mildred said. “You’re not usually guilty of wishful thinking, Ryan.”
J.B. chuckled. “Nor is he now. If nothing else it’ll disorganize the bastards plenty.”
Ryan popped off the caps that protected the lenses at both ends of his longeye-relief Leupold scope and stashed them in a pocket. Then he raised the longblaster, turned the handle and opened the bolt just enough to confirm the chamber was loaded.
“Anything gives us an edge,” he said, closing the bolt and locking it again, “I like. So here’s how—”
“Ryan,” Krysty said, her voice urgent and low.
She pointed toward the ville. A mixed group of bikes and wags, about half a dozen in all, had converged on a point on the road perhaps fifty yards from the town. Yet no shots were being fired at them.
Their behavior reminded Ricky, unpleasantly, of swarming wasps.
And then a single headlight, mounted on a bike like a giant staring eye, swept across a solitary female figure, walking the road toward the parked coldheart wags.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Isn’t that Lucy from the Library Lounge?” Mildred asked. She was peering through Ryan’s longeye.
Kneeling, Ryan shouldered the Steyr and swung it south. “Fireblast!” he exclaimed.
It was Lucy. She still wore her finery from the Library Lounge: tight bodice and short flouncy skirt. With his scope dialed up to full power, it still didn’t give triple-good detail at his range, which he estimated as 250 to 300 yards. Had it not been for the shine of the parked wags, and the headlight glow from the wags and bikes full of jeering Crazy Dogs orbiting her, he wouldn’t have been able to identify Dark Lady’s star entertainer.
The gaudy slut walked with head down and shoulders slumped, ignoring the jeers of the coldhearts. Her feet were bare, or perhaps in stockings, which would’ve been well-ruined at this point. She seemed determined to walk that road, no matter what.
A bike swerved close to her. Either its fat gas tank or the rider’s knee brushed her hip. She stumbled.
“Back off, dickholes!”
Ryan swung his scope back around to focus on the parked wags. A man stood there with a microphone to his face. Ryan reckoned sound gear in one of the wags had amplified and broadcast the command in his harsh whiskey baritone. Far enough, no doubt, to be heard by the defenders in Amity Springs. If not clear to the Library Lounge.
The vehicles sheered away from the lone walking woman. They continued to dart at her, and their occupants kept jeering and shrieking obscene abuse.
“Take the shot, Ryan!” Mildred hissed. “Blast the bastard! What’re you waiting for?”
“I want to see what the nuke this is all about,” Ryan said. “Could be important.”
He focused his scope on the man. He could make out a tall, powerful frame dressed all in black, with wide shoulders and a visible paunch lopping over the belt of his tight black pants. He had a rough-hewn handsomeness to him: a brutal long-rectangle of a face, well-busted hawk nose, and bushy black brows over squinty eyes. His mustache swept down either side of his mouth onto his jut of a chin. His hairline receded to a black brush on top; the sides and presumably the back hung to the shoulders of his black leather jacket.
“A mullet?” Mildred murmured. “Jeez, I hate that that shit came back.”
He was flanked by a pair of big guys, a man with a fist of a face and a shock of brown hair, and on the far side, his left, by a bald man with an impressive reddish beard spreading over an even more imposing belly. The nearer wag was parked so that its front end obscured the lower bodies of the coldheart chieftain an
d his companions.
“So what’s the deal, Lucy?” Diego demanded in his booming god-voice. “Or did you forget we had one?”
She had made it halfway between the outskirts and the parked wags. Turning his blaster west to look at her, Ryan was impressed with her fortitude and courage, if not her sense.
“Yes,” she screamed. “We had a deal! You said nobody would get hurt!”
“We lied,” Diego said. “It’s just politics. You make a piss-poor omelet if you don’t break the bastard eggs.”
“What about my daughter! Give her back to me! You said you would if I did what you told me!”
“Well, see, there’s a problem with that. She’s dead. Had a bout of cholera come through. She wasn’t tough enough for the Deathlands. Sorry. That’s just Darwin, you know? But mebbe if you ask double nice I’ll help you get started in on cooking up a new one.”
“You bastard! I’ll see you in Hell!” Her face twisting in rage, she began to run forward, heedless of the vehicles circling her like sharks in bloody water.
“Mebbe,” Diego said, “but you’ll get there first. Such a waste.”
He had to have made some signal. Ryan saw something flicker from a bike that passed close behind the running Lucy. Something thin passed in front of her face, then she was yanked backward off her feet as the motorcycle wheeled and accelerated back toward Amity Springs.
A lariat, he realized.
“Right,” he said, not bothering to keep his voice down for the noise. “Spread out either side of me. I’ll start the show.”
“What’s your plan, lover?” Krysty asked, her voice curdled with rage.
“We’re going to beat the bastards so hard they leave. Keep them off me, and stay alive. Jak, you guard my back.”
He had taken his face away from the scope to look at the others as he gave his instructions. Jak flourished his paired leaf-bladed knives and grinned. The others slipped into position lying prone in the brush to Ryan’s left and right.
“Here we go,” Ryan said.
He put his eye behind the glass and lined up on Diego. He aimed for the chest. The head was too dicey a target. It moved around too much, especially since the bastard kept turning left and right to joke with his crew. If the coldheart’s arm got in the way, the jacketed 7.62 mm slug wouldn’t much mind, as long as it hit a bone that would flatten it or make it tumble. And that’d just blast a bigger wound channel through his body.
