by James Axler
Diego reeled back toward the hole where the door had been. Right outside the blown-out front wall a motorcycle snarled to a stop, a dozen feet behind the Crazy Dogs’ chieftain. The coldheart didn’t glance back.
“What are you gonna do now, One-Eye, chill me?” Diego demanded. He held up his spurting stumps. “I’m unarmed. Get it? Unarmed?”
Something dark and thin flew through the gap above his head to drop down in front of his face and settle around his upper arms and chest.
“Uh-oh,” he said.
In the yellowing afternoon light starting to slant in between the farmhouses of Joker Creek, Ryan saw a slim, black-clad figure with bare pale arms forking a Crazy Dogs’ bike. Then with a roar of a powerful engine and a squeal of tires on hard-packed earth, the motorcycle spun and sped back down the road.
Diego bellowed as the lariat jerked him backward out the gap. He hit hard on his back and his booted heels flew up. And then he was being dragged, by one of his own gang’s bikes, bouncing, rolling and howling, through the ville he had thought to conquer.
* * *
WHOEVER THE SCOUTING party of half a dozen motorcyclists was, the sound of the firefight in Joker Creek had made them cautious.
Perhaps more to the point, they weren’t stupe enough to have been lulled into a false sense of security by the sudden cessation of the shooting. Or most of it, at least.
They came cautiously, in a loose vee, spread out across the road into the ditch on both sides.
Among the fields and houses ahead of them, nothing stirred.
The leader, a big guy with a face full of seams and a grizzled pale beard, stopped his Harley a few feet shy of a dark form sprawled on the dirt track in front of him. He signed the others to a halt. Dropping his kickstand, he swung a boot off and walked up to examine the vaguely manlike figure.
He stuck out a boot and prodded one end with his toe. It was the head, lying facedown. It rolled to one side.
Dark Lady hadn’t dragged the Crazy Dogs’ boss far behind the Crazy Dog motorcycle she had commandeered. But she had made it count, zigzagging the stolen bike to bounce him off the maximum number of hard adobe corners on the way to the ville’s outskirts.
And even then, he might have bled to death before he felt every one.
Watching through his Leupold glass at the maximum magnification, Ryan could tell from the dismounted biker’s body language that he recognized what Dark Lady’s vengeance had left of Diego the Dog. He turned his head to shout something to his men.
That was all Ryan saw of the scene for an instant, as the Steyr kicked his shoulder. The sound of its blast was loud in the front room of the ville, even though he was sitting in the darkness just inside the gaping hole.
When the longblaster descended again, Ryan saw the grizzle-bearded man toppling backward with blood spurting from his blown-out throat.
From the right window Dark Lady fired a full magazine of rounds from Sinclair’s borrowed BAR. None of them struck any of the surviving riders as they hastily turned their bikes and rode back the way they had come as fast as they could go.
“Nuestra Señora, I hope they weren’t just innocent travelers,” Ricky said from somewhere right behind Ryan.
“Me, too, kid,” Ryan said. “Hate to waste a bullet.”
* * *
FOR THE EIGHTEENTH time Ricky Morales, bringing up the rear of the trudging party with his friend Jak, turned to walk backward.
A mile west down the road toward its meeting with the Río Piojo, and eventually the ville of that name at the Basin’s west end, the glow of the lights still burning in Amity Springs in the small hours wasn’t bright. But it was still clearly visible.
The folk back there were busy: tending the wounded, saying goodbye to their dead, and figuring out how to rebuild their shattered ville. Not just one but two: the people of Joker Creek had added their voices to Doc’s account of Baron Sand’s last oral testament, to request that Dark Lady should rule them, too.
Mebbe the not-baron of Amity Springs will call herself the not-baron of Joker Creek, too, Ricky thought.
“I still don’t understand,” he muttered resentfully, turning his face forward again, “why we had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and go running off across the desert.”
“You know what they say about a baron’s loyalty, kid,” Mildred called back.
She walked just ahead of Doc. The old man walked in front of Ricky and Jak. From the curious slump to his shoulders and the way he walked with his head down, Ricky guessed his mind was wandering through the mists that sometimes filled it, to the exclusion of the outside world.
“Still,” Mildred said, shaking her head, “I got to admit it strikes me as a little raw, running out on Dark Lady like this without even saying good-bye. I judged her all wrong. I feel like I never got a chance to make amends.”
“Deal with it,” Ryan called.
He strode in the lead with his head up despite what had to be a major case of the wearies and his longblaster in his hands. There had been no further sign of Diego’s promised reinforcements since the battle of what was now the day before. But Ricky knew what their one-eyed leader would say if asked about his current state of high alert; he hadn’t lived this long taking things for granted.
“Anyway,” Ryan said, “what makes you think she expected anything else?”
“What do you mean, lover?” Krysty asked. She walked a step behind him on his right. “She did ask us to stay and help rebuild the two villes. Or help defend them, at least.”
J.B. chuckled. He walked right behind the lead pair, cradling his Uzi in his hands.
“She paid us,” he said.
“Why not stay for a while and do that, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“Like Trumbo’s big Indian told Doc back in the playhouse,” Ryan said. “It’s done. Not our fight. And we have a redoubt to find.”
A sick sense of dread crept into Ricky’s belly. He glanced back at the lights of Amity Springs. Their amber glow had grown perceptibly fainter, or so he thought. It seemed in danger of flickering out forever.
“You don’t think they have a chance to hold out against what’s coming, do you?” he said.
He wasn’t sure he spoke loudly enough to be heard from the front of the procession, really, but he should have known better. “As long as they got somebody like Dark Lady on their side,” Ryan said, “sure. They got a chance.”
“But a good one?”
He shrugged. And, never looking back, kept on walking.
* * * * *
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ISBN-13: 9781460321713
First edition November 2013
MOTHERLODE
Copyright © 2013 by Worldwide Library
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