by James Axler
Turning away from the window and stepping back to avoid chance discovery by the guard, although the man seemed preoccupied by the firefight raging on the building’s far side, Doc shook his head.
“How can you think of wordplay in such a situation as this?”
“What better time?” she asked in a tone of manic flippancy. “If we cannot play, how can we truly be said to live? Now, do be a dear, and help me.”
He had dressed, as well, in his usual clothes. The baron went to kneel beside her big bed. He hunkered down beside her as she began rummaging beneath.
“Here,” she said, handing something back to him.
To his surprise it was a slim length of steel, like a fencing epee without the bell guard, and with the tip filed to a lethal point. As he took it and experimentally hefted it, he realized that was precisely what it was.
“And here,” Sand said with satisfaction. She pulled back and reared up, brandishing—
“The key to the lock that keeps us pent in,” she declared. “They were fools to think they could restrain me that easily. But of course, that’s our gain, is it not?”
Her eyes were bright. Her cheeks were flushed. Under most circumstances those signs would have presaged another bout of wild rapacious sex. Instead she contented herself with standing and kissing him quickly but hard on the lips.
“Do you trust me?” she asked.
“Absolutely not.”
“Smart man,” she said. “But I knew that. And in this case, you can trust me. Although I’ll not ask you to take it on faith. Rather, let that fine brain of yours calculate how rare the ways are in which I could gain from betraying you, under such circumstances as we find ourselves in.”
He nodded. It already had. If anything, the baron was showing a lack of wisdom in trusting him.
“No hidden blasters?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Never really got along with them.”
“But don’t you want a weapon, as well?”
She smiled and handed him the key. “Oh, I’ll have one.”
The one she chose made his eyes widen.
She took up station beside the door.
“Key in lock,” she directed softly. He obeyed.
“On three, unlock and throw the door open fast.”
He was puzzled, but he understood the instructions and nodded to indicate so. He went ahead and thrust the sharpened epee into his belt to use both hands.
“One, two—three.”
The key turned. He turned the latch and flung the door outward as fast as he could.
“Hey!” the sec man on guard exclaimed.
Doc followed Sand closely as she stepped quickly into the hall and turned toward the sec man. He was young, unshaved, and as Doc saw in a flash, bleary-eyed. He appeared to have been leaning against the wall taking a nap when the door was so rudely flung open.
Now he gaped at the baron and reached for the long-barreled shotgun leaning against the wall beside him.
In her hands Sand carried a chamber pot. It held the various wastes they’d excreted during the course of a day or night; the sec men swapped it out with a similar one once every morning. It was white with blue figures of Rococo gentlemen and ladies in wigs disporting themselves. Its lid fit well enough to contain the more mephitic vapors. At least until it was inevitably opened, in the course of its intended employment.
Now Sand upended it neatly over the guard’s head. It actually came down over his eyes like a helmet.
As he choked and gagged, she deftly plucked the shotgun away from him and stepped back.
“Stab him,” she said.
Doc did. He thrust the hapless young man as justly through the heart as he could. He was rewarded with the man folding promptly.
The pot hit the floor with a clatter. It didn’t break. By that time somebody was firing shots from a handblaster out a front window, while the shooting outside had grown to a veritable storm. Nobody seemed likely to hear that additional slight noise above everything else.
“Follow me,” she said. He noticed she had managed not to get a drop of the chamber pot’s contents on her. Fortunately, neither had he.
She led him swiftly down the hall away from the front room. And then to his amazement, stopped at the door of what he knew to be a storage closet.
* * *
A WEIGHT CAUGHT Krysty in the midriff and flung her bodily right over the side of the pickup’s bed as the wag picked up speed.
She landed on her back. The air exploded out of her as the weight landed full on her.
Right beside where the sec man had stepped out with his AK, the truck nosed into the ditch on the opposite side. It whoomped into a ball of yellow flame.
“I’m sorry, dear,” the weight atop her said. “I hope you’re all right.”
“Can’t...breathe.”
“Oh. Right.”
Kris sat up, still straddling Krysty’s hips. But without her substantial weight pressing down on her, Krysty’s lungs began to work again. She sucked down deep breaths as the woman adjusted her bandanna atop her short red hair, dusted herself off and stood.
“Let me help you, dearie,” she said, extending a hand down. “It’s the least I can do, since I threw you there and fell on top of you.”
Krysty took her hand. It was strong and callused. Though Krysty was tall for a woman and exceptionally well-muscled, the sturdy shopkeeper simply pulled her to her feet with a single grunt of effort.
Despite their situation, and the death of poor Stuart, Krysty couldn’t help but laugh. “Thanks. But I’d say saving my life made up for everything just fine!”
Kris looked down the road. The Amity Springs’ people seemed to have taken up positions behind the buildings nearest the big house. Return fire was coming from the playhouse’s outbuildings, including the barn, as well as the giant structure that Krysty realized had to have concealed Sand’s monstrous bulldozer.
Her heart soared as she saw Ryan lean around the corner of a stout adobe home and fire a shot at the main house.
“I suppose we’d best get going and join them,” Kris said, “before they have all the fun without us.”
Kris scuttled quickly off the road to the right, to get out of line of the fire coming from the baron’s house. As bullets cracked over Krysty’s head, she hastened to join her.
“I need a weapon,” she said, crouching by the body of the man who had blasted Stuart and their truck. “I’ll take his. He’s not using it. And he has spare magazines.”
Krysty pulled her own handblaster and came up to crouch behind the same shed that had concealed the sec man.
“Do you know how—” she began.
Straightening with the assault blaster in her right hand, Kristen ejected the magazine, slammed home a new one and racked the slide to chamber a round.
“You were asking?”
“Never mind,” Krysty said.
* * *
A SMALL WINDOW—too small even for his spare frame to wriggle through, Doc noted with regret—let shade-dimmed afternoon light into the closet. It was stuffy and crowded with mops, brooms and shelves with dusty containers and bolts of brightly colored cloth. A tang of cedar used against moths tended to make the atmosphere more oppressive, rather than feel fresher.
At the rear of the closet Sand had her back turned to Doc and was bent over. Her shoulders worked.
He heard a click. Sand stepped back, raising what he had taken to be somewhat roughly finished dark wood paneling. Instead it was a hidden hatch.
“A secret compartment?” he said, amused.
She turned and gave him a smile and a shrug. “Of course.”
“Of course,” he said. “What is in there?”
“Your personal gear,” she said, turning and pr
esenting him with his LeMat in its holster. He accepted and donned it. She laid his swordstick across her palm, handle toward him, and bowed.
“I thank you, madam,” he said, bowing back. He picked it up.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “And don’t call me madam. That’s my opposite number’s job. And what is also in here—” she stepped to one side and gestured into the hidden hutch with both hands “—is my store of the ready.”
He was about to ask what that meant, then he saw: stacks of notes, clearly the jack of the area. Metal boxes. A few small items, clearly scavvied late-twentieth-century technology whose purpose even he could not divine.
“Why are you showing me this?”
She shrugged. “You know what they say—you can’t take it with you.”
He turned to her in horrified surprise. Notwithstanding the fact she had been first his opponent, and then his captor, he had come to harbor...positive feelings for her. For her lively intelligence, her wit, her remarkable insight and remarkably insouciant view of life as much for her enthusiastic and skillful sexual charms.
And now, of course, they were allies. Although he realized she had as much as told him she was not to be trusted, and that could change at any time.
Still, he didn’t like the import of her words.
“Surely you are not planning to—”
The closet door opened behind them.
“I thought I heard talking in here,” a squat familiar figure said.
“Son of a bitch!” With the startling alacrity of which she was capable despite her size, Sand sprang past Doc, grabbing at the dead door guard’s break-action single-shot scattergun leaned against a set of shelves.
Trumbo’s blaster sounded like Thor’s hammer striking the Anvil of the Gods in the tight closet. A flash filled the room. Sand screamed and grabbed her arm and fell against the wall.
“Quit sniveling,” the turncoat sec boss said. “I just winged you. You’ve been a naughty girl, Baron. Diego is gonna want to punish you. For that you gotta be alive.”
He looked past her at Doc, who stood with swordstick in hand.
“I got a score to settle with you, you oldie nuke-sucker,” Trumbo said. “But I don’t reckon I’m gonna get a chance to pay you back proper. So I guess I can settle for shooting you in your skinny old belly.”
He extended the handblaster toward Doc, who prepared to spring at the sec boss. Death meant less to him than the bitter disappointment that it came at the hands of such a man.
The beefy hand that held the blaster down on Doc exploded amid a roar that made the early shot sound like a baby’s wet fart. Trumbo shrieked insanely and held up what now looked like a bundle of bloody, twisted sticks. Blood sprayed from a severed artery.
Doc whipped the blade free of its ebony sheath. He launched himself into perhaps the finest balestra-and-lunge of his life.
The tip of his sword entered Trumbo’s screaming mouth. The steel encountered brief resistance from his soft palate, and then more pronounced but equally brief resistance from bone before it punched into the cranium and skewered the medulla oblongata.
The scream shut off as the traitor lost control of the muscles of his larynx and his breathing. His heart shut down. His eyes rolled into his head. He dropped straight down amid a cloud of stench as his loosening bowels filled his pants.
Sand dropped the empty blaster with a clatter. “Justly struck, dear heart. Help me up.”
Doc did. Despite the blood beginning to drench the right sleeve of her shirt from the upper arm down, she required little assistance to regain her feet. She swayed once, and leaned back against the shelves.
“Oh, no,” she said, fending him off with her left hand. “I can meet my fate on my own two legs. Rad-blast, I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to be shot. Not an acquaintance I’m eager to renew.”
She glanced down at her wounded arm. “Seems to’ve missed the bone. I suppose I should feel gratitude when life serves me a fresh cherry tomato atop the latest shit sandwich.”
She knelt by the reeking corpse of Trumbo, which lay on its face mostly on the floorboards inside the closet.
“Your wound—” Doc began.
“Help me get this befouled husk out of sight first,” she said. “Or worse than he will follow.”
Doc did. With three hands and much grunting, the man’s deadweight was dragged into the storage closet. Fortunately the blood that had leaked from him had all fallen inside the door.
When it was closed, the small already-close space filled immediately with the ripe reek of his voided bowels. Doc set his jaw against the stench and reminded himself he had known worse. Much worse.
Sand leaned back against a shelf and closed her eyes.
“You’ll find linen bandages on the third shelf of the hutch, my dear,” she said. “Please help me bind the wound. Quickly. We haven’t much time.”
Fussing like an old hen, to his own distress, Doc complied. Sand bore the wound and his binding of it, which of necessity was rough and ready, with a stoicism that surprised him. Although by now, he thought, why should anything about this woman surprise me? Whatever else she is, she truly is remarkable.
He straightened. “Had we met under other circumstances,” he said, “I think you might have made a boon companion for Ryan Cawdor’s merry band.”
She laughed lightly. “I suspect that’s as great a compliment as I’ve ever received. Thank you, though you must believe me—it isn’t true.”
She grabbed him, kissed him deeply, then broke away. Sand looked at him with pale-green eyes moist and shining.
“One thing you must remember,” she said, laying her left hand over his heart.
“Yes?”
“Dark Lady is my sole heir and successor. I hate to inflict such a curse on poor, dear Eleanor, but she must bear it with her usual stoic bravery.”
“Whatever do you mean, Baron?” he asked.
Through the closed door he heard a fresh spate of blasterfire erupt from the front of the house. A group of men ran past the small window shouting instructions to one another.
“I mean—”
She thrust hard against his sternum. Taken totally off his guard, Doc went flying back to sit hard inside the secret compartment. The shelves dug into his back.
“Farewell, you lovely man! You should be able to release yourself in a matter of minutes.”
Before he could sort out the feelings that boiled within him—of betrayal, of concern—and give them voice, she slammed the door.
He heard the sound of the lock being turned.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Ryan ducked back around the wall of the farmhouse nearest the playhouse. Bullets cracked through the air that his head, shoulders and Steyr Scout had recently occupied.
He’d seen his target go down—a man firing a bolt-action hunting rifle from the corner of the big building where Sand had kept her gigantic yellow ace up her sleeve. Now he was just glad the farmers of Joker Creek tended to build their dwellings to the same sturdy standards as their baron’s more pretentious place.
He glanced across the road to where J.B. leaned out and loosed a 3-round burst from his Uzi toward the house. The Armorer ducked back into cover as more bullets sought him.
He looked over, caught Ryan’s eye and shook his head.
From the other end of the house where Ryan sheltered came a roar of a powerful automatic blaster. Dark Lady pivoted back around to safety, holding Sinclair’s big BAR up in front of her. She had stripped off her black sweater to reveal the black sleeveless garment, probably a T-shirt with its sleeves cut off, she had worn beneath. A thin, gray trail of smoke wisped from the Browning’s muzzle toward the clear afternoon sky.
She showed Ryan a grin. “Bonnie Parker was said to be a skilled hand with o
ne of these,” she called. “She was a small woman like me. I take inspiration where I can find it, Mr. Cawdor.”
“Bonnie Parker?” Mikey asked. The giant stood next to her. While both twins refused to use a blaster, their enormous shared body had willingly carried a whole mule-load of fresh magazines and boxed cartridges for their comrades.
“The twentieth-century outlaw,” his brother said, sneering. “Of Bonnie and Clyde fame. Don’t you read?”
“Same as you,” the better-looking but grumpier head conceded. “I just don’t like to clutter my head with every scrap of useless trivia that happens to leak in through my eyes.”
From behind came sporadic blaster shots—and the occasional scream. Though less well equipped than the Amity Springers with blasters and bullets, Sand’s subjects had already demonstrated that they had them. They were certainly more than amply supplied with shovels, axes, hoes, rakes and other farm and labor implements that would serve as brutal, effective weapons when applied to the human form with sufficient fury. The sec men and Crazy Dogs who had been busily brutalizing the peasants when the rescue column arrived were finding that out much to their sorrow as they were hunted down one by one.
Ryan wasn’t triple thrilled to have armed foes on the loose behind his back when he was fighting, but it wasn’t as if they had any choice. They all knew it was just a matter of time before some of the brother coldhearts Diego the Dog had summoned to join his nascent empire would arrive. And if they caught Ryan, his companions and Dark Lady’s contingent between hammer and anvil—well, they’d get pounded to purple mush about that fast.
He heard the vicious crack of Jak’s Colt Python handblaster echo down the road. He was leading the clean-up of stray Dogs. That reassured Ryan that the odds of taking a slug in the spine were as low as possible. Nobody loved the sport of hunting more than Jak, and few did it better.
J.B. fired another burst at the big house, then ducked back to reload his machine pistol. Ryan saw Ricky duck around the other end of that house from loosing a shot from his fat-barreled DeLisle blaster.
The Armorer shook his head. “No way this works,” he said. “We’re just burning ammo. We’ve got to blow the wall.”
