by James Axler
She lifted her head to stare at him with her emerald-green eyes. “For once I think we can take this at face value, and not have to worry about crazed villagers trying to kidnap one of us for sacrifice, or planning to force us to duel others—or each other—to the death for their twisted idea of entertainment. Just one time, I’d like to enjoy a day that doesn’t begin or end with someone dying, all right?”
“Fair enough.” Krysty moved off him and cuddled up under the blankets. Ryan curled a strong arm around her waist, holding his lover close until her breathing slowed to the gentle cadence of sleep.
Of course, as Ryan knew all too well, the night wouldn’t be peaceful. There had been too much commotion already. He slipped into a light doze, able to gain enough rest from it while his subconscious remained alert for any disturbance.
THE FIRST SIGN was so quiet Ryan almost missed it. His eye opened at the soft brush of light footsteps over the dewy grass. Lifting his head, the SIG-Sauer already filling his right hand, Ryan pushed back the tent flap to see a familiar shadow outside.
His bright-white hair tucked under the army cap he’d found, Jak stealthily crept past. Intent on his progress, he didn’t notice Ryan until the man cleared his throat. Jumping like he’d just been goosed by a stickie, Jak stood staring.
Jak had the grace to look somewhat abashed, although his guilty expression quickly turned to a frown as he leaned over. “S’posed be sleepin’,” the albino teen hissed.
“So are you.” The light dawned in Ryan’s head. After all, he’d done the same exact thing more than once when he was even younger than Jak. “Just be back by dawn. And you’re still taking your turn on the front blaster, too. I don’t care how tired you are tomorrow.”
Jak straightened, his dark expression turning to surprised relief at being let off with only a warning. “Thanks, Ryan.” Turning, the boy ghosted away so fast Ryan was almost convinced he’d dreamed the conversation.
IT SEEMED LIKE only minutes, but might have been hours, when Ryan’s eye opened again. This time the noise that had tripped his internal alarm was louder, the soft clink of glass on ceramic, followed by a stifled giggle.
Uncurling from Krysty’s side, Ryan slipped out of the tent and pulled on his pants. A rustle of fabric made him turn to see J.B.’s head poking out of his tent, eyebrows lifted in a silent question.
Intruders, Ryan signed. Two to four, on other side of wag. You take front, I take back.
With a nod, J.B. slipped out, mini-Uzi in his hands as he stalked silently toward the war wag’s nose. Just as quietly, Ryan padded around the back, homing in on the hushed voices conferring on the far side of the vehicle. As he drew closer, he saw several shadows near the back tire of the wag, and heard the clink of metal, tools, most likely.
A cold fire ignited in Ryan’s gut. It was one thing to try to impress your folks by walking tall in front of visitors, but sabotaging a vehicle—potentially leaving their group to die in the middle of nowhere—was something else entirely.
He eased around the cold, metal corner to see a cluster of four boys fiddling with the wheel hub, which came up to their chests. One of them giggled, only to be hushed by the ringleader.
“Hush, ya stupe! Don’t wake ’em! Hurry up with those bolts. Let’s see how the old fucker likes it when he tries to leave and the goddamn wheel falls off.” The kid raised a jar of mead to his lips, not even bothering with a glass.
In one fluid motion, Ryan rose and stepped over to Jabe, pressing the cold circle of his blaster’s muzzle into the back of the boy’s neck. “I can tell you the ‘old fucker’ wouldn’t like that one bit.”
Caught in midswallow, Jabe choked in surprise, spraying the mouthful of booze over his companions, all of whom looked up in shock. The one working on the wheel staggered backward, staring at the black-haired demon that had materialized out of thin air next to his buddy. His face contorting with fear, he turned to run toward the front of the war wag, but had only taken a single step when he collapsed to the ground, out cold.
Ryan glanced over to see J.B. step out from the wag’s shadow, his mini-Uzi leveled to cover the other three boys. Jabe’s two cohorts had fallen to their knees, mouths opening and closing soundlessly, too terrified to talk. Ryan heard a strange, hissing sound and realized one of the boys had pissed his pants.
“Fireblast! You just don’t know when to quit, do you, boy? Come here.” Using the pressure of his blaster as a prod, Ryan separated him from the other two. “Turn around.”
Jabe complied, his eyes widening as the barrel of the SIG-Sauer, only inches from his face, filled his vision.
“Raise your hands.”
He did so, one of them still holding the empty mead bottle. His eyes flicked to it in surprise, and Ryan read his mind as easily as if the kid had tried what he was thinking. “Twitch that bottle at me, and I’ll take every broken shard and shove them so far up your ass you’ll shit glass for a month.”
The boy’s fingers slowly opened, and the bottle rolled out of his hand to land in the grass at his feet. Ryan wasn’t through, however.
“Open your mouth.”
Jabe blinked in confusion, his eyebrows knotting in puzzlement.
“Open—your—mouth.” He pressed the end of the blaster into the kid’s teeth, forcing his jaw open, and inserting the barrel until it brushed the back of his throat. “Now, don’t move.”
The boy was as still as death itself. Reaching up with a thumb, Ryan cocked the hammer, the click ominously loud in the silence, broken only by the nervous breaths of Jabe and his two comrades.
“Answer me with your head only, and be careful, because my finger’s on the trigger. Answer too hard, your buddies’ll wear your brains. Ever been this close to death before?”
Jabe shook his head slightly, tears welling in his eyes.
“Ever been shot?”
Another shake.
“You taste the gun barrel in your mouth?”
A nod, the tears spilling down his cheeks winking silver in the moonlight.
“Taste good?”
Another head shake.
“What’s on your tongue right now is the second before a bullet carves through the back of your throat, right there—” Ryan pressed the barrel in until he hit the boy’s soft palate, making Jabe gag in terror “—and drills a tunnel through your brain before exploding out the back of your skull. Still with me?”
Another nod, accompanied by a now-familiar odor. Ryan glanced down to see Jabe’s pants darkening, as well.
“Good. Normally I don’t let folks in this situation walk free, which means the next thing for you would usually be a shallow grave. Hell, I’d probably just dump your body in the river and leave, letting your father wonder what might have happened to you for the rest of his life, and his imagination would play worse tricks than I ever could. However, and this is the only reason I haven’t pulled the trigger, I happen to like and respect the man. So from this moment on, every time you feel the urge to disobey him, or back talk, or bully strangers that stop by to trade with your ville, you remember that it was only by your father’s good graces that you’re still alive to see the sun rise every day. You got that?”
A final nod. Jabe sobbed silently, his tears mingling with the snot dripping from his nose. Ryan withdrew his blaster from the boy’s mouth and cleaned the glistening barrel on his homespun sleeve. “There’s steel in you, boy, I can see it. Mebbe you should dig down and find it yourself, become the leader your father wants you to be, instead of throwing your weight around like a spoiled baron’s brat. Think about it. Now get the fuck out of here, and take your bully boys with you.”
Wiping his nose on his sleeve, Jabe motioned to his friends, who scrambled to their feet, one almost falling over in his haste to put some distance between themselves and the two stone-cold chillers. Ryan let them get a few yards away before calling out again. “Jabe.”
The teen twitched like he had been shot, then, shoulders hunched, slowly turned. His two friends,
their already frayed nerves breaking, took off into the darkness. “Yes, sir?”
Ryan held up two fingers. “That’s twice now. There won’t be a third time. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.” Jabe stood there silently, waiting for something.
Ryan stared at him for a few seconds before realizing what the youth needed. He waved him off. “Get the hell out of here.”
Jabe whirled and shot off into the darkness like a terrified rabbit. Ryan turned and walked over to J.B., who stood over the unconscious fourth member of the group. “Sure you didn’t kill him?”
The Armorer leaned down and swiped at the kid’s mouth with his finger. “Drool’s still warm, so he’ll be okay. Have a bastard headache when he comes to. Some friends he’s got, runnin’ off and leavin’ him here. What do you want to do?”
“Better drop him off somewhere away from us, otherwise we might get blamed for this when all we did was try to instill a little backbone in Brend’s boy.”
They picked up the limp body and hauled him away from the war wag. Finding an alley between two houses on the outskirts of town, they set him down against one of the walls. A wooden barrel of water sat nearby, and Ryan sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t stagnant, then scooped up a handful and dashed it in the kid’s face. After the second splash, he started coming around, and that was the signal for Ryan and J.B. to depart.
Ryan caught J.B. regarding him out of the corner of his eye as they headed back. “What?”
J.B. shook his head. “Nothing.”
“Think I was too hard on him?”
“Too hard? A few years ago you probably would have kneecapped the kid just for looking at you wrong. And to find him touching the war wag… Yeah, that Ryan most likely would have put him in the ground just to make sure he didn’t come after you later.”
“Fireblast, J.B., that kid isn’t a threat.”
“No shit? If you let me finish, I already knew that. Now what the hell was my point? Oh yeah, what I was saying is that you did the right thing, that’s all. Black dust, if he don’t take that lesson to heart, boy’s too stupe to live much longer.”
Ryan nodded. “Good, for a second I was worried you thought I was getting soft.”
J.B. snorted quietly. “Not likely, I’ve seen Krysty’s satisfied expression when you two join us for breakfast lately.”
His head swiveling to stare at his friend, Ryan’s mouth gaped in shock. A joke from J.B. was as rare as an honest baron, and it literally made the tall man stop in his tracks. Not missing a beat, the Armorer slapped him on the shoulder. “I’m gettin’ to bed. Long day tomorrow.” Ambling back to his tent, he ducked under the flap, and vanished inside.
Ryan glanced around, hoping, praying for a witness to the miracle he had just witnessed. Of course, the area around the wag and tents was completely deserted. “Figures. No way anyone’ll believe me.” Shaking his head, Ryan slipped back into his tent and curled up next to Krysty. She stirred next to him, throwing her leg over his.
“That sly little son of a bitch.” Krysty’s low voice made Ryan smile in the darkness.
“You heard that?”
“Heard him? I was covering both of you from underneath the wag—just in case they decided to really get stupe. Why do you think my feet are cold?”
“No shit?” Ryan hadn’t even been aware of her presence during the confrontation. “Pretty sly yourself. J.B.’s comment bother you?”
“No, besides, I’ve seen Mildred’s lazy smile more than once in the recent mornings, as well. He just better be careful with what he says, or I might bring that up one of these days.”
“Then we’d see another rare sight—J.B. blushing.” Ryan’s snicker was contagious, and soon Krysty shook against him as she joined in his laughter.
When they stopped, she ran her fingers down his chest. “Well, I’m too awake to go back to sleep now.”
Ryan grinned as her hand drifted lower. “Why, Miss Krysty Wroth, whatever did you have in mind?”
In one fluid move, she rolled on top of him, nipping his lips with her teeth. “Me on top of you for a while, that’s what.”
Running his hands up her smooth sides, Ryan lay back as she kissed his chest, enjoying the feeling of her strong legs intertwining his. “One hell of a way to start the morning, that’s for sure.”
Chapter Nineteen
Despite the evening’s various activities, Ryan and Krysty managed to catch a few more winks before dawn. However, they were up soon after the first glimmers of light broke over the horizon, mostly due to the tantalizing aroma wafting into their tent.
“Damn, that smells delicious,” Ryan said as he pulled his boots on. “Wonder who’s cooking?”
A small wood fire burned inside a ring of stones a few yards away from the wag, the white smoke curling up into the dark purple sky. The clouds had turned during the night, and a front was rolling in, with fluffy, lime green cumulus clouds puffing several thousand feet into the air, darkening to the color of the Lantic Ocean at their center. Ryan sniffed the air, his nose wrinkling. “Smells like rain coming.”
“Breakfast is ready. Come on, get it while it’s hot.” Mildred waved at them from where she stood next to the fire.
Her smile was wide that morning, and Ryan nudged Krysty as they walked, earning an eye-roll in return. When they got closer, however, his attention was drawn to the food: slabs of batter-dipped bread browning in a large, cast-iron skillet, surrounded by thick strips of crackling bacon. A blue-enameled pot rattled and steamed as whatever was inside boiled. “Looks good. Uh, what is it?”
“Something I haven’t tasted in about a century, give or take—homemade French toast, with, get this, real butter and true maple syrup.” Mildred held up an ancient glass jar that was three-quarters full of dark brown semiliquid. “I was talking to some of the women and learned they had all the fixings, so I did a little trading last night to borrow all this. I, uh, also used a bit of the coffee. Hope you don’t mind, Ryan.”
He shrugged, getting a good look at the meal as his stomach growled. Although they usually traded coffee for more vital necessities, he wasn’t averse to enjoying a cup every now and then if available. “That’s all right. What it’s there for.”
“Anyway, J.B. was kind enough to build the fire this morning, and here we are. Grab a plate and dig in. You haven’t had anything until you’ve tried this.”
Mildred had gone whole hog. There was a stack of beaten-up tin plates next to a pile of ancient silverware and a half dozen enameled mugs. Ryan armed himself and used a fork to spear a steaming piece of bread out of the pan, along with some crisp bacon.
Turning the latest batch of sizzling toast, Mildred pointed to a small ceramic pot. “Some folks like butter with their syrup, but me, I just take it straight up.” Sitting on the ground, she doused her serving with a liberal helping of the brown stuff, then cut off a piece and ate, chewing slowly, her eyes closed.
Following suit, Ryan added the syrup, sawed off a chunk with his knife, and put it in his mouth. Crisp on the outside, tender on the inside, the bread’s pleasant sourdough tang was muted by the egg coating and the sweet syrup. Ryan didn’t waste any time, but devoured everything on his plate, washing it down with sips of strong coffee, and looked for more when he was done.
Mildred had also finished hers and was cooking up more, with another half a loaf sliced and ready to go. “Keep coming, there’s plenty more where that came from. Where’s Jak?”
Ryan swallowed and glanced around. “He’s not with Doc?”
J.B. had also joined them, his grease-smudged hands testifying to his work getting the wag ready to roll. “I woke Doc when I went over to check on him. He was all by his lonesome.”
Mildred and Krysty exchanged knowing glances.
“What was that?” Ryan asked, although he already knew.
“It was hard to miss that dark-haired girl—Jabe’s sweetheart, I learned—hanging all over him last night.”
“Oh, that one.” Ry
an suddenly busied himself with his breakfast. “Hadn’t noticed.”
Mildred frowned. “I hope he didn’t do anyth— Oh, hello, Jak.”
The teen joined them, his still-dripping wet hair sleeked back from a morning swim. Plopping down cross-legged on the ground, he snagged the syrup jar and looked at it for a second before tilting it up and pouring some down his throat.
“That’s not—” Mildred got out before being nudged into silence by J.B. just as the stream of sticky sweetness gushed into the young man’s mouth. Jak’s eyes bugged as the syrup overwhelmed his tongue. Swallowing as fast as he could, he tossed the bottle aside and looked for something else to drink. Seeing Ryan’s mug on the ground next to him, he grabbed it and raised it to his lips.
Even Ryan couldn’t let that go. “Wait, Jak, it’s—”
Too late. The albino teen took a huge gulp of the black liquid, then bellowed in pain, the coffee spraying out of his mouth and down his shirtfront as he leaped up and bolted for the river, where frantic splashing could be heard.
For a moment, silence reigned around the fire. Mildred was the first to break, her throaty chuckle rising to become high, loud laughter. Ryan was next—as much as he tried to hold it in, he couldn’t stop the helpless amusement, which spread to Krysty next. Even J.B. wore a wide smile as he sipped his coffee. The four of them were speechless for a minute as they tried to catch their breath before catching each other’s eye and collapsing in laughter again.
“Oh—oh shit, he’s coming back. Everyone shut up.” Mildred waved at them with one hand while hiding her smile behind the other.
Jak stalked back over, his face wet and lips red. Without a word, he grabbed a plate and scooped three pieces of toast and several strips of bacon onto his plate. Making a sandwich out of the whole mess, he began eating, blowing on his meal to cool it while trying to shove large bites into his sore mouth. The other four exchanged covert glances, but managed to hold their tongues.
