by James Axler
Twisting out of the way, Jak then threw his knife, which missed. The pit bull lunged for him again, stopped when a lance of silver speared the beast in an eye, the needle tip of the Spanish blade coming out its mouth.
“And thou, wretched boy, shall with him hence!” Doc bellowed, twisting the sword before yanking it free.
Blood gushed from the enlarged holes, and the dog wobbled away, only to arc back, still trying to reach Jak, but barely able to stay erect.
Contemptuously, Jak grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and slit its throat from ear to ear, then shoved it aside. “Thanks,” he growled, flipping the blood from his blade.
“My pleasure,” Doc replied, doing the same thing with his sword. “Now, cry havoc, for these are the dogs of war!”
“Not anymore,” Ryan countered, setting a boot onto a dead pit bull to extract his panga. The blade came loose with a brittle sound, a piece of white bone stuck on the end.
“Any more of them?” Krysty demanded, her hair flexing wildly.
“This was the last,” Ryan said, knocking the bone off the blade with the SIG-Sauer.
“Are you sure?” J.B. asked, squinting into the night to see if there were more colossal beasts coming their way. But the landscape was as peaceful as before, with the nearby river rushing along, splashing and crashing.
“I counted nine earlier,” Mildred panted, holstering her blaster. “And we have that many bodies. Yeah, this is all of them.”
“Good to know,” J.B. said warily, not relinquishing his grip on the Webley handcannon as he got back into the saddle.
“Krysty, watch for anything else coming this way,” Ryan commanded, recovering the Steyr. Briefly, he inspected the longblaster, then slung it across his back.
“Got your back, lover,” Krysty replied, patting the neck of her horse as she stared into the night. The mare loudly chuffed in pleasure at that and stamped gory hooves.
“J.B., do a fast check on a couple of the longblasters. I’m out of brass again,” Ryan said gruffly, wiping the panga clean on a chilled dog, before sheathing it again. “Mildred, inspect the bodies. Jak and Doc, get some of those crossbows loaded and ready!”
As the men got busy, Mildred slid to the ground and warily walked over to the nearest pit bull. She had to be sure that the wounds had completely stopped bleeding before she knelt to cut open the belly and inspect the internal organs.
“This is just a dog!” she announced with a note of surprise. “No sign of any serious mutations.”
“Hot damn, steak for dinner!” Jak said with a grin, notching an arrow into a crossbow. The steel cross arms had been made from the leaf springs of a car, the bow made from a braided cable, and it took all his strength to load the weapon. It was crude, heavy, cumbersome, and would probably chill a bear at a hundred yards.
“Better make that breakfast,” J.B. countered, looking at the moon through the barrel of the Remington. Satisfied that it was safe, he began to reassemble the weapon.
“Yeah, agreed,” Ryan said, throwing a pit bull across his saddle. The stallion grunted from the impact. “It wouldn’t be wise to stop and light a fire until we are far away from here!”
“Very far away from here,” Krysty corrected, reaching out a hand in the windy night. “I think…I think the ville knows that we ambushed their men.”
“How can they?” Ryan demanded, climbing into the saddle. “They got a doomie?”
“Somebody does…?.” she whispered, the fleeting images in her mind fading away as fast as they had come.
She struggled to see more, to again push back the ethereal curtains of time and space, but it was a useless effort.
“What direction doomie?” Jak asked, slinging a quiver of arrows across his back.
Shaking herself, Krysty came out of the reverie. “To the south, toward Alton. But we should go east.”
“What for?” Mildred asked, looking in that direction. There were black mountains on the horizon, nothing more.
“Because the doomie doesn’t want us to,” Krysty replied, mounting her horse.
“Any idea why?” J.B. asked, working the bolt on the Remington.
She shrugged. “None whatsoever.”
“Forgive me, dear lady,” Doc said, shifting uneasily in his saddle. “But I feel compelled to remind everybody that the next redoubt is to the north. Due north.”
“What do you think, old buddy?” J.B. asked, resting the Remington longblaster on a shoulder. “The Trader always used to say that when you’re not sure what to do, at least make it something the enemy doesn’t like.”
“That loads my blaster,” Ryan stated, kicking the stallion into an easy gallop. “East it is!”
Chapter Ten
Standing near the open doorway of the noisy tavern, Sec Chief Ralhoun leaned on a wooden railing and sipped from a plastic mug full of frothy beer, her loose hair fluttering gently in the breeze. Soon enough, the ville would have a wag, a real working war wag! It was a day for celebrating, yet she felt oddly anxious, the same way she did when the acid rains came early.
Inside the Greasy Eagle, a party was in full swing, with the ville folk singing and dancing, putting on a real show for the sec men chowing down for dinner, while others were off celebrating upstairs with the gaudy sluts. Ralhoun had already sampled both pleasures, and now just wanted to relax with a mug of beer, icy cold and fresh from the root cellar. However, the back of her neck was starting to prickle every time she thought about the sec men doing the nightcreep.
She had given them some extra time to have a little fun with the female outlanders before returning with the war wag. That sort of thing was just one of the perks of being a sec man. But when they seemed to be taking too long, she had unleashed the bulls as backup, in case there had been any unforeseen trouble. The outlanders did have a lot of blasters, and that one-eyed bastard named Ryan looked meaner than a shit house rat. But still…
Caught in the act of taking a swallow, Ralhoun gagged on the beer and spit it out into the street. Her mouth was filled with the taste of blood. Something bad had just happened.
Lowering the mug, Ralhoun tried to listen to the wind for any blasterfire, explosions or howling, but could not hear a thing over the raucous music from the tavern.
“Everybody shut the fuck up!” she bellowed over a shoulder.
In ragged stages, the party inside the tavern grew quiet.
“What’s up, Chief?” a sec man asked, walking closer. A greasy napkin hung from his neck, and he held a partially eaten roasted lizard leg.
“There’s something wrong with the bulls,” Ralhoun said in a low, dangerous tone.
“Think they’re snacking on the outlanders?” he asked, taking another bite of the greasy meat.
“My dogs know better than to eat longpig,” Ralhoun muttered, setting down the mug. “No, the nightcreep must have gone sour. I can feel it in my bones.”
That gave the sec man pause. Everybody knew that the chief was the daughter of a doomie, and while she didn’t have the full powers of her deceased father, her gut feelings about things were almost always correct. That was how the ville had survived being betrayed by their former baron. He had secretly offered to trade everybody in Alton to a wandering band of cannies for some predark meds to cure his rad sickness. When she was just a lowly boot, Private Ralhoun had alerted the other sec men to the plan, the cannies got aced and the baron was chilled. Now Abigail Ralhoun was the sec chief, and the baron, although she only liked to be called chief.
Turning sharply, the sec man strode back into the tavern and cut loose with a long, loud whistle. “Get ready, people!” he bellowed. “The chief smells blood on the wind!”
Instantly, the party atmosphere was gone, and every sec man and woman in the place pushed aside their drinks or food to start checking their blasters.
“Hey, honey, we’re in the middle of a game,” a fat gaudy slut said, lowering a hand of cards. In the middle of the table was a large pile of cheap items, a plastic comb,
a bit of a mirror, a golf tee….
“Later, sweetcakes,” the sec man growled, holstering his remade Colt .45 blaster. “Biz, first.”
“Hey, Bobbie!” a sec woman yelled up a flight of stairs.
On the second level, a door slammed open. “What?” a man demanded. He was stark naked except for a gun belt cinched around his waist.
“Something is wrong! We’re gonna go check on the crew!”
“Shitfire…now?” He grimaced, glancing back at the slut behind him.
“Right bastard now!” Ralhoun insisted, reaching back to start tying her hair into a ponytail.
The sec man scowled, then sighed. “Okay, okay. I’ll be right down.” The door slammed shut.
“Schwartz, Faroot, Kleinova, saddle the horses!” Ralhoun ordered brusquely, pulling a strip of rawhide from her shirt pocket to lash her hair tight. “Muncy and Caramico, get the grens! All of them! I want a posse ready to go in five minutes!”
“We’ll ace those outlanders, Chief!” a sec woman boasted, brandishing her longblaster.
“Cut that crap! I want them to go to the lashing post alive and kicking!” Ralhoun growled, marching into the dark street. But almost instantly she paused, and looked to the east with a sick feeling in her stomach. Oh, no, anywhere but there…?.
BATHED IN MOONLIGHT, the companions rode on through the night, pausing only briefly to let their horses drink from a small pond, and feed on some apples in what had once been an orchard.
“Not too many,” Krysty warned, filling her canteen from the pond. “Horses get stomach cramps very easily.”
Wiping a finger behind his ear, Doc displayed it to the woman to show a complete lack of moisture.
Closing the canteen, Krysty chuckled in response.
“Smart-ass,” Mildred snorted, stepping away from a bush to wash her hands in the little creek trickling away from the pond.
“Better than being a dumb-ass, I suppose.” Doc grinned, stuffing some of the apples into his pockets for later. Delicious and nutritious, apples were food for both man and horse. The good Lord had done some mighty fine design work there.
“Here, this blaster is fine,” J.B. said, passing over a battered M-16.
“How’s the ammo?” Ryan asked, dropping the magazine, before sliding it back into the breech.
“Only two mags. So don’t go trigger happy.”
“Never have before.” Working the arming bolt, Ryan was careful not to catch a finger when it snapped into place. “Any shells?” he asked, scowling at the stubby gren launcher attached just below the main weapon.
“None in the saddlebags. They probably save those for emergencies,” J.B. replied, removing his glasses to clean them on a rag. “Thankfully, doing a nightcreep didn’t come under that particular criteria.”
“Criteria?”
“Criteria. Millie has been trying to improve my vocabulary.”
“Seems to be working, old friend,” Ryan said, giving a rare smile. “Trade you for the Remington? That’s more my speed.”
“Sure. I like rapidfires,” J.B. said, patting the Uzi hanging from the pommel of his saddle.
The exchanged was made.
“All right, mount up!” Ryan stated, climbing onto his horse. “There’s still plenty of night remaining.”
“Woods lovely, dark and deep,” Jak said, hoisting himself onto his stallion. “Have promises keep, and miles go before sleep.”
Everybody was a little startled at such a long speech from the normally taciturn albino teen.
“Well done, me dear Jak!” Doc said beaming a smile. “Where did you learn that poem? It is one of my favorites.”
“Learn from you,” Jak replied. “Say all time.”
“Do I really?” Doc asked softly, his voice starting to fade away.
Recognizing the telltale signs, Mildred spoke quickly. “Now, the first time I heard it was in a Charles Bronson movie. Telephone, telethon, something like that. You sure the poem wasn’t written by him?”
“An actor, madam?” Doc snapped furiously, the fog leaving his eyes. “It was penned by Robert Frost. One of the greatest poets of all time!”
“Better than Shakespeare?”
“Well, no, actually.” Doc relented. “But I did say he was merely one of the best, not the grand master.”
“In your opinion,” Mildred said, using both knees to nudge her horse into motion.
Riding alongside, J.B. gave a telling nod.
Feeling herself blush under his frank approval, Mildred merely shrugged in reply.
As the companions continued eastward, the land began to rise and fall in gentle swells, indications of a massive earthquake.
Slow miles passed as they endlessly traversed shallow rivers, or rode through vast fields of clattering bamboo. With each breeze, the tall stalks smacked into one another, making a deafening clatter.
“Sounds like a million wooden wind chimes,” Krysty yelled, maintaining a firm grip on her blaster.
“Or just one really big mutie crab,” Ryan shouted back, keeping a finger on the trigger of the rapidfire.
Just then, a frog leaped out of the muddy water to land on the dead pit bull lying across his saddle, and took a tiny bite. Annoyed, Ryan knocked it away, only to have dozens more come flying out of the darkness, croaking defiantly. Kicking their horses into a full gallop, the companions soon left the infested field of bamboo, and the leaping army of frogs disappeared in the distance.
Smiling broadly, Jak removed a large frog from his knife and stuffed the it into a pocket for later. Down in N’Orleans, frogs were a staple item on the dinner table, and he knew how to fry the tasty little legs to perfection. That was when he noticed that the frog had teeth, and eight legs. Mutie! With a frown, he tossed the body away. He had never been hungry enough to eat a mutie, and never would. Starvation would be preferable to an agonized death of screaming dementia and shitting blood.
With the coming of dawn, Ryan stopped the companions in a small glade in a hollow. The combination of empty stomachs and lack of sleep was finally starting to take its toll. There was plenty of dry branches around for a fire, but the hollow would help hide the blaze from sight.
While J.B. and Jak did a perimeter sweep for anything dangerous in the area, Doc gathered firewood and Ryan used his panga to butcher the dog. He took extra special care to remove the area bitten by the frog, just in case the little mutie had been poisonous.
Since it was their turn, Mildred and Krysty unloaded the saddlebags, then Krysty laid out the campsite while Mildred walked the horses to a nearby stand of green grass. As they settled in to eat their fill, she checked the animals and found several of them with scrapes and bruises from the fight with the dogs. She treated the minor injuries as best she could with sterilized water mixed with shine. It wasn’t much, but the best that she had. Her med kit hadn’t been this empty since she first found it.
When J.B. and Jak returned, Krysty started to cook breakfast. Soon their campsite was awash with the delicious smells of rice and beans, and roasting dog meat, flavored with apple slices.
Taking along the aced pitbull had been a smart move. The saddlebags held little food or water, and absolutely nothing for the horses, not even a salt lick. That really wasn’t surprising, since the sec men had fully expected to be safely back behind the ville walls within a few hours. This had only been a sortie, a smash and grab, as Mildred liked to call such things. But the companions had brought along all their bedrolls and other supplies from the Hercules, including the rice and honey from the redoubt.
“Nothing rare or medium, only well-done,” Mildred warned, wrapping a bandage around the fetlock of a palomino. “We can’t risk internal parasites.”
While Ryan washed up in a nearby creek, Jak went to help with the cooking, and Doc joined J.B. at the task of inspecting the newly acquired arsenal. Soon the men were busy disassembling blasters, oiling springs and making piles of brass.
Their earlier caution had been wise. Many of the sec men
had rigged their longblasters, leaving only their handblasters fully operational. However, the caked dirt jamming the barrels was easily removed, and soon the companions possessed a small arsenal: two M-16/M-203 combo rapidfires, a plain M-16, the Remington boltaction, a Winchester lever-action, a Jackhammer 12-gauge scattergun, and six handblasters with gun belts. There were four crossbows, a hundred arrows and more knives than they could ever possibly need. Brass was in short supply, but that was to be expected.
Since Ryan had the Remington, Jak took the battered M-16, Krysty and Doc each took an M-16/M-203 combo, Mildred choose the Winchester, and J.B. stayed with his Uzi, and S&W scattergun.
Unfortunately, the Jackhammer was in terrible shape, with the barrel slightly bent and the firing pin worn down to a nubbin. Extracting the cartridges, J.B. simply tossed the weapon away and slid the fresh rounds into the loops sewn along the strap of his own S&W M-4000.
“Waste not, live another day,” J.B. said with a grin, setting the scattergun aside. “At least if more dogs come our way, we’ll be ready.”
“Indeed we will, John Barrymore,” Doc said, lifting a familiar handcannon into view.
“Is that…that’s not your LeMat, is it?” J.B. asked.
“No, it is not,” Doc replied, turning over the massive handcannon. “Mine is on my hip.”
“Another bastard LeMat,” Ryan scoffed, drying his hands by shaking them in the air. “We have a hard enough time finding black powder and shot to keep that prehistoric hogleg you have loaded. Better just harvest the ammo, and toss it.”
“Oh, no, my dear Ryan,” Doc countered. “This is a twentieth century reproduction. An exact working duplicate of a LeMat from my time period, only this one uses bullets instead of black powder, miniballs and wadding. I had one before, if you recall, and I quite liked it.”
“You gonna upgrade?” Jak asked, using a green stick to stir the rice to keep it from burning on the bottom of the pan. “We find lot more .44 rounds than black powder!”
“I know that. But you see…” Doc paused to chew a lip, trying to find the correct way of saying what he had to say. “My LeMat was made in 1878, the time I originally came from. This is a physical part of my past. It is… I mean, to say…” He paused, frowning.
