by James Axler
“We’ve got coldhearts,” Hamar said. “Of course we do. Every five, ten years, they’ve got to make a run at us. Just to learn.”
J.B. saw Ryan nod appreciatively. They had to teach some pretty tough lessons in that subject hereabouts, if the learning lasted that long among the Plains bandit bands.
The Armorer kept his eyes roving from side to side, taking in the surroundings—and the onlookers. Jak, as always when he found himself surrounded by anything that might even attract the accusation of being civilization, walked as warily as an old trading-post tomcat who stumbled into a coyote conclave.
“But we’ve got a new bunch moving in,” the baron said. “Muscling in on the other gangs. Getting bigger, stronger. Even enough to start worrying the Plains nations.”
That got J.B.’s attention. From what he knew of the area, the Native Americans could be spiky to deal with on their own. Though they generally gave grief to each other more than to any outlanders, depending on who was allied with whom and who was currently blood-feuding, none of them were the sort of people a man would care to rub the wrong way.
“Heard they roughed up Red Knife’s Arapaho crew pretty good on the Mussleshell two or three weeks ago. No pushovers, that bunch.”
They reached the end of the street. J.B. would not have minded an invitation to inspect the turpentine-distilling equipment, fragrant as it was. It looked mostly like a random collection of pipes and boilers. But it was still something that had been built and fixed with a person’s hands. As such, it caught J.B.’s interest.
But apparently Baron Hamar had just felt like stretching his legs. He stopped in front of the operation, far enough away not to interfere with workers wheeling barrows of wood chips from the water-wheel-powered grinder and such to the hoppers.
“Not just bold for coldhearts, but genuinely badass, then,” Ryan said. “Have they got a name?”
“Bloods, they call themselves.”
“Fireblast! You mean, the Blackfeet are doing this?”
That signaled that it would be an ace time for them all to turn right around and shake the dust of the whole district from their heels triple-fast. The Confederation was one of the biggest and strongest tribes. If they were making a hard move south, it meant that this whole part of the Plains was on the verge of bursting into a wildfire that could easily consume Ryan and his companions. The companions knew the area. The bands that already roved here, such as the Absaroka and the Lakota, would be looking to teach the invaders some hard lessons.
“Not the Confederacy, no,” Hamar said. “Nor the actual Blood band. Freelancers who are using the name.”
“Black dust!” J.B. was moved to say. “Real Bloods aren’t likely to cotton to that.”
“Mebbe that’s the point,” Hamar said. “Rumor says these new Bloods’ boss man is a Blood renegade, a young firebrand who calls himself Hammerhand.”
“You can just tell he’s a people person,” Mildred said under her breath. J.B. started to frown at that, but then Krysty gave a half-stifled snicker.
Ryan showed no sign he’d even heard her, although J.B. didn’t doubt he had.
“They give you any trouble yet?”
“No. It is just a matter of time, I’m sure. But we weathered such storms before. No, they haven’t even been reported within three days’ ride of here. But they’re starting to hit trade harder and harder.”
“So where do we come in?” Ryan asked.
“Do you want us to help guard your caravans as part of your sec force?” Krysty asked.
“Oh, no,” the baron said. “It’s not goods I want to deliver. It’s information!”
Chapter Six
In a single panther-like leap, Hammerhand sprang into the bed of the rebuilt pickup truck. For all his bulk he landed lightly enough that the Buffalo Mob sentry, leaning over the roll bar onto the Tacoma’s cab roof to enjoy a smoke under the cold, starry sky, was only alerted to danger when he felt the vehicle rock on its spring beneath his feet.
By then it was too late to dodge. Or even to scream.
Hammerhand felt the man’s bearded chin dig into his biceps as he wrapped an arm around the coldheart’s throat. He snatched hold of that chin with his free hand and violently torqued the sentry’s head to the right.
His thick neck snapped with a sound loud enough to turn even Hammerhand’s bowels briefly to ice water. He froze as he felt the dying bandit convulse and his nostrils filled with the rich, wet reek of his sphincter letting go in his camo pants.
Inside the circle formed by the score of power wags parked on the nighttime prairie, the Buffalo Mob’s rowdy reverie continued unabated around a dozen or so campfires. The woman playing on a harmonica with surprising skill never missed a beat. Neither did the pair of women dancing drunkenly to the tune.
Hammerhand had spent an hour crouched in the scrub nearby, scoping out his target. So had twenty of his best Bloods, split up into three teams led by himself, Joe Takes-Blasters and Mindy Farseer. It was a risk taking the whole top leadership to a single raid, but this was all a high-risk gamble for high stakes.
That was the point. Not just to score a number of power wags and start a serious upgrade on the mobility of his insurgent Plains nation, but also to do so with sufficient demon style to act as a beacon to the bold and ambitious by its very own self.
That had been part of what the Glowing Man told him. Not giving him the idea. Far from it. Telling him that the idea he had was righteous, as was his dream of establishing a Plains empire in blood and fire, and that he was destined to go for it.
And succeed.
When Hammerhand was certain no one had heard him inside the camp of more than a hundred coldhearts, not even the sentries posted in the other circled wags, he slowly lowered the chill to the pickup’s bed. As he did, he eased the slung M16 off the dead man’s back. A quick check showed a round in the chamber and a full magazine of 5.56 mm ammo in the well.
After another look toward the campfires, Hammerhand gave the corpse a quick toss, relieving him of a crumpled-up, greasy wad of local jack and a nice Cold Steel lock-back folding knife. Then he stooped, grabbed and, with a muffled grunt of effort, deadlifted the considerable weight high enough to roll over the wag bed’s wall on the dark side. Then he hunkered down again.
The Buffalo Mob, as they called themselves, had certainly been exercising diligence in securing their wags and their scarcely more valuable own personal asses. Every other wag had a guard in it, constantly casting watching eyes across the surrounding grassland for just this kind of sneak attack. At least theoretically. The chill’s slackness—going so far as to actually smoke on sentry duty, spotlighting him to any sharp-eyed watcher within hundreds of yards and any decent nose downwind—showed how little the Buffalo Mob’s sentries regarded the possibility that any prairie pirates would be bold and skillful enough to try creeping on them and seizing the precious vehicles by stealth.
But bold and skillful were the criteria Hammerhand used to pick his Bloods, even in those rough first days when he, an outcast without a clan and without a reputation, had been struggling to get by with whatever he could scrape together. He had always been picky about who he chose to ride with him—at least as picky as he could afford to be.
Of course, crazy was another trait he selected for. But that kind of fell into the general territory of bold, to his way of thinking.
And of course, those without the proper mix of boldness and skill tended to get winnowed out of the band fast. With mebbe a bit of a push from Hammerhand’s own hands. He hadn’t had to chill any of his own for stepping out of line, past the occasional feeb who turned up thinking he might challenge the big man for the role of boss cock. But before he’d got his size and strength in the middle of his teens, he’d had to rely on his wits to get his ass out of the cracks his rough, rebellious nature and smart mouth
got it stuck in. Early on he’d figured out how to talk the overly bold into throwing their own stupe lives away and even how to goad the overly cautious into taking fatal risks.
And when it came to fatal risks, apparently the invading coldheart mob never reckoned on a local gang with the patience to spend ten days shadowing them and scoping out their ways and numbers before making a move.
From his left he heard a strange, soft, gobbling cry. He grinned. Joe Takes-Blasters did a piss-poor impression of a prairie grouse. Not that these tenderfeet would know the difference. Or even notice over their own noise.
The Buffalo Mob ran somewhere north of a hundred strong. Well armed, well mounted and surprisingly well fed, they had in recent weeks made a move into the North Plains west of the Misery River, seeking richer pickings than what was offered by the deeper Deathlands to the east and south, where the land was parched and pocked with deposits of still-lethal rad-dust.
But they weren’t looking to live by hunting the herds of bison that roved the prairie. Life wasn’t easy for those who lived out here—settlers, traders or nomads alike. But by the standards of the day they did pretty well.
Nor did it matter a bent shell casing to Hammerhand what their business was. They were outlanders—interlopers. Meaning they had no family or other allies in the area to concern him. More to the point: they had something he wanted.
Needed.
He slipped over the side of the wag bed, carefully holding the plundered longblaster so that neither it nor the plastic buckles on the sling would clack against the wag. Then, quietly, he opened the cab door and slipped in.
At least the Buffaloes had the sense to park their wags in a counterclockwise nose-to-circle tail, meaning the driver’s-side doors faced inward toward their fires.
A quick check by feel revealed the dangling wire bundle of the ignition. Like most wags left over from skydark these hadn’t come with keys. So the owners had set them up for quick, efficient hot-wiring.
He rolled down the left-hand window and leaned the M16 against the driver’s door with its muzzle brake pointed up. Then he settled in to wait.
He didn’t have to wait long. From the far side of the coldheart camp he heard a sudden shout of alarm cut short by a blaster shot. One or more of his raiding party had been detected. Bad luck, sure, but it was nothing that he, and his plan, hadn’t counted on. They had hoped to get away with every last wheel of the Buffalo Mob’s rolling stock in one stroke. But they were prepared to take what they could.
He quickly fired up the engine, which started right away. At least the Buffalo Mob had competent wrenches and kept their fleet ready to go.
As soon as the engine caught, he picked up the longblaster by the pistol grip, shoved it out the open window with its nylon forestock resting on the sill and triggered a burst.
He aimed deliberately low, so as not to endanger his own people on the other side of the circle. The point wasn’t to hit anybody anyway. It was to panic the coldhearts, to encourage them to keep their heads down while he and his band made their getaway with whatever wags they’d managed to snag.
Firing another short burst into the grass, he gave the pickup some gas, or at least the alcohol fuel the vehicle had been modified to run on. The wag’s deep-cleated tires dug into the grass and the vehicle started to roll. Muzzle flashes flared orange from the camp itself and points along the perimeter of parked wags. One bullet cracked through the planking fixed crudely over the busted-out rear window on Hammerhand’s side, to add a second star to the glass on the passenger side.
“That best not have been one of mine,” he said aloud.
He triggered another burst. “Eat that, you mutie fuckers!” he screamed joyously.
Behind him he was pleased to see several other wags pulling out of the circle behind him. Like him, the Blood drivers were leaving their lights off. They knew the surrounding land well enough not to need them. Or he’d know the reason why.
Laughing aloud in sheer exhilaration, he drove toward the rendezvous spot at reckless speed. Mere unseen obstacles meant nothing.
He had Destiny on his side. And more, he had a Vision.
* * *
A TERRIBLE, RINGING scream ripped Ryan Cawdor awake.
He snapped at once into full consciousness and was already in the act of rolling from his bedroll and reaching for his longblaster, which lay on a drop cloth beside it. Whatever had made that sound wasn’t human.
But it was at least as big. A 9 mm handblaster wasn’t going to be enough to deal with it.
It was their last night on the road to Duganville. Baron Hamar was paying a good amount of jack and supplies in exchange for them delivering a wax-sealed pack of documents to the baron. Both J.B. and his hero-worshipping apprentice, Ricky Morales, had begged to be allowed to winkle the papers out, claiming they could do so without breaking the seal or leaving any sign Baron Dugan or his wiliest sec men could detect. Ryan had told them no. It wouldn’t load any blasters for them that he could see. Whereas if they screwed up—unlikely as he had to admit that was, as skillful, meticulous and sneaky as the two of them were—they could get stiffed of their pay. Or worse. He had no fear they’d use those traits to try it anyway. When his word was freely given, the Armorer kept it. And the kid was too in awe of his mentor—not to mention stone terrified of Ryan—to try to pull anything on his own.
Aware and alert, Ryan rose to one knee. By habit he wrapped the loop of the sling around his left forearm to give added stability to any shooting stance he may need to assume, however rapid and ad hoc. The night was dark and clear, the sky infested with stars. The low, brushy hills they’d chosen to camp among for security, rather than the mostly flat surrounding lands, brooded dark and silent.
Dead silent. The usual night sounds, of birds and early insects, had been cut off by that scream. Even the breeze seemed to be holding its breath, and his friends, awake, alert and armed around him, made no more noise.
Beside Ryan, Krysty gave him a quick squeeze on the arm with her left hand to reassure him that she was unharmed. Her other hand held her Glock 18. But Ryan heard Mildred mutter softly, “Ricky! The kid’s on watch.”
He could hear the consternation in her outburst—soft-voiced instead of whispered, since whispers carried as well as conversation at least and attracted double the suspicion when detected. As much as Ricky exasperated her at times, he was part of this group, this family, and she cared for him.
Jak sprang up and went bounding off into the night, clutching his trench knife. He hated leaving his self-appointed duty of watching over the others at night, but Ricky was his close comrade, as the only member of the group younger than Jak.
But here, through the middle of the camp, vaulting the carefully buried remnants of their campfire, came Ricky. He clutched his Webley handblaster in one hand and his dark eyes were wide and wild. He was racing from what Ryan realized was the opposite direction the scream came from.
“Where’s Mariah?” Krysty asked softly, despite the boy’s noise.
Ryan shrugged. He wasn’t sure why the girl was still with them. It had been his full intent to drop her off at Hamarville. But somehow she was still tagging along, keeping the pace, keeping her mouth shut unless spoken to and taking on the bulk of the camp chores.
Plus Krysty seemed to be growing attached to her. Mebbe too attached. Ryan would have to speak to his flame-haired mate, who had already set off in Ricky’s noisy wake. The youthful sentry had jumped over a low bush and disappeared. Ryan could only grunt and follow her, aware that J.B. was right behind with his M-4000 ready, and Mildred and Doc were following the Armorer.
Past the bush, as Ryan knew from giving their environs a thorough recce before settling down for the night, the ground sloped quickly to a shallow, sandy-bottomed dry wash, winding down through the hills to the cultivated fields Mariah had told them they’d find
near Duganville. The girl herself stood in the gully, arms held rigidly down by her sides, fists clenched.
Jak was crouched on the bank, gazing intently at the sandy bottom. As the others came down the slope, he held up a white palm to them, to stop them from coming any closer.
Krysty ran to Mariah’s side. “Are you all right, sweetie?”
Sweetie? Ryan’s mind echoed. This has definitely gone too far. Krysty had a huge heart, and he loved her for it.
But if this weird inward kid was starting to make her maternal instincts get the better of her survival ones—that could be a problem for all of them.
“I’m fine,” he heard Mariah say as he pulled up alongside her and began to scan the night and darkened landscape beneath with his lone eye.
He could not help but feel a thrill of alarm that with them all gathered there in the arroyo they were making themselves ace targets for anyone or anything ill-intentioned that happened to pop up on top of its banks. Then he spotted J.B. standing guard from atop the slope the rest of them had just rushed down like triple stupes and felt reassured. If not less stupe.
“What was it?” Mildred asked.
“A tiger,” Mariah said. She never looked up, nor did she change the near-flat, quiet tone of her voice. She might as well have been remarking that the water for their chicory-and-tree-bark coffee sub was commencing to boil.
“A tigre?” Ricky asked. He stood just up the bank from her, where his buddy Jak had stopped his forward progress. “You mean, like a mountain lion?” In American Spanish, tigre—tiger—could mean any kind of big cat, including a cougar or a jaguar, although it was way too cold up here this time of year for the latter.
“No,” she said. “Tiger tiger. Big, stripes.”
“Bengal,” Jak said. “Real tiger. See prints?”
At that positive verbal outpouring from the reticent and cryptically spoken young albino, Ryan squinted his eye harder at the sand above which Jak was hunkered. He saw them then, plain enough: tracks as big as hands with fingers splayed.
