Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass

by James Axler

  “But couldn’t they see we had blasters?” Burny asked. “Don’t take me wrong, Wymie, I ain’t doubtin’. They was out there—I saw ’em movin’ too, though I never got a good look at the taints through the berry bushes. But why’d they try us on in the first place, even? Couldn’t they see we have blasters? Don’t nobody want to get shot.”

  That caused the rage to come boiling up her throat in a scalding-hot column.

  “Nuke it!” Wymie yelled in frustration. “They’re tauntin’ us, is what they’re doin’! Those stonehearts think they can just—just play with us.”

  She raised her strong hands before the others and clenched them into fists.

  “That does it! Mathus Conn can’t catfish on us anymore. After what they did today, he’ll have to own up that I was right, and he was wrong!”

  “Dead wrong,” Vin said, then cackled wildly.

  * * *

  Chapter Seven

  A chalk-white face, with bloodred eyes beneath lank white hair, appeared out of the brush ahead.

  “Found.”

  Walking second in line behind Ryan, Krysty recoiled slightly, then she felt shame. Her hand came away from the square butt and extended magazine of her Glock, holstered by her right hip.

  But it was true what that unfortunate young black-haired woman said: he did look like the strange creatures who flitted around like pale shadows, the ones Abe Tomoyama said once were called coamers, but who apparently had been largely forgotten by the locals, at least here in the western Pennyrile near Sinkhole.

  They and Abe had parted ways a few hours earlier.

  “Found what?” Mildred said grumpily. She was footsore and tired of tramping around the hills and flats, on a search for what, no one could even rightly say. Now they were back in a region of limestone ridges clad with more scrub than forest, as the hot, damp day wore on. “When will you start using nouns? You spend words like drops of freaking blood.”

  Jak showed his white teeth in a quick grin. It wasn’t as if he wasn’t fully aware his clipped pattern of speech frequently aggravated his companions, Krysty knew, and sometimes baffled them.

  “Come see,” he said, then vanished.

  Ryan glanced back at Krysty. His craggy features looked as impassive as they usually did—if you weren’t his life-mate and longtime companion. Krysty knew the minute furrowing of his brow meant he was more than a little annoyed at Jak’s uninformative ways, himself.

  She grinned.

  He grinned back, then shook his head ruefully.

  “It’s not like he doesn’t tell us what we need to know when we really need it,” he said, which was true.

  “I guess he didn’t spot an ambush, then?” Ricky called out. He was walking last but for his idol and mentor, J.B., who as usual liked to pull tail-end security for the party. They switched off sometimes, of course. Everybody could do every job in a pinch; Ryan insisted on that. They even sometimes substituted Ryan, J.B., or Krysty for Jak as scout, much as he chafed when that happened.

  But when things were tense they tended to keep to the roles they fit best in.

  “Smart-ass,” Mildred grumbled.

  They followed the vanished scout. When Krysty passed through the clump of brush he’d called to them from, she found herself at the end of the ridge they’d been following. It fell away to what looked like a creek running through a stretch of flats about a hundred feet wide that wound among the ridges. He was hunkered down in plain sight next to what looked like a random jumble of small boulders sprouting weeds and scraggly brush like hairs from a mole on an oldie’s face. He had his head up, watching them, though it scanned from side to side. Always on guard.

  They joined him. When Krysty saw Ryan draw his SIG handblaster, she did the same. She knew from Jak’s posture and manner there was no immediate threat, but something was making the short hairs rise on his nape, as well as making the longer strands of sentient red hair on her head start to curl up on themselves.

  “What have you got?” J.B. asked. He had unslung his Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun and held it in his left hand. He and Ryan came up flanking the scout to either side. The others followed, spreading out in a cautious semicircle.

  Jak pointed two fingers at the ground. There was a gap among the boulders on the side closer to the stream. It was mostly hidden by the tall grass, but there was a bare patch of pale soil to one side of it.

  In that bare soil was an impression. It wasn’t clear, at least not to Krysty’s eye. But she could make out an unmistakable partial footprint, ball and the dot-marks left by some toes, in dirt still pliable from one of the frequent showers.

  “Human or mutie?” Ryan asked.

  Jak shrugged. “Looks human,” he said, in a sidelong way that indicated he wasn’t staking his life on that particular identification.

  “It’s not as if every mutie’s got clawed feet and sucker fingers like a stickie,” the Armorer stated.

  “So what is it?” Ricky asked eagerly. He was dancing around the rear of the group holding his DeLisle longblaster in both hands. He was dying to see but didn’t want to jostle his friends to get a closer look. And he was also, even in his convulsion of curiosity, swiveling his head constantly on his neck, looking out for danger. He took his duties no less seriously than Jak or J.B. did, which was one of the reasons why Ryan had allowed him to become one of his companions, despite his sometime puppy-dog fumbling.

  That and the fact he was a good shot, either with the silenced carbine or his Webley handblaster. And when it came to protecting his friends—the only family he had, since stonehearts had slaughtered his own back in Puerto Rico and stolen away his adored older sister, Yamile, to sell to mainland slavers—he could be as cold-blooded as J.B. ever was.

  “Burrow,” Ryan said. “Or bolt-hole.”

  He looked at Jak, who shook his head. “Not know.”

  “So, there’s no telling if this leads to the den, or a network of tunnels,” J.B. observed.

  He tipped his battered hat farther up his retreating hairline to scratch beneath where the sweatband had been riding.

  “The way these bastards pop up like prairie dogs, and disappear as if they dropped off the surface of the Earth, leads me to suspect the latter,” the Armorer continued.

  “Been reckoning that myself,” Ryan said.

  “So,” Ricky said, “are we going in?’

  They all turned to look at him.

  “You first, kid,” Mildred said.

  Ricky blushed.

  “Whether it’s a den or it leads to a whole underground city,” Ryan stated, “it’s certain-sure that if these cannies do live down there, they know it a lot better than we do, and know how to fight triple better than us down there.”

  “This whole district is underlain by a substantial network of caverns, I do believe,” Doc told them.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “And if that really is where these things live, I for one am not eager to go in after them.”

  “It would appear suicidal on the face of it,” Doc agreed.

  “What are we going to do, then?” Krysty asked.

  Ryan briefly clenched his jaw. She knew he sometimes did that when he didn’t much like the taste of the words he was about to say.

  “Keep looking,” he said. “Keep on hunting for something we can take back and clear our names with before that crazy girl brings the whole nuking Pennyrile down on our necks. And we know one thing, sure.”

  He pointed at the footprint.

  “No matter how good these nuke-suckers are at hiding out and covering their tracks, they do screw up. Sometimes.”

  “They’re only human,” Ricky said.

  Everybody gave him another look.

  “That still seems largely conjectural, young man,” Doc said mildly.

  “Well, I meant like—not ghosts or anything.”

  “Ghosts don’t chuck sticks and stones at people.”

  “People still sometimes talk about poltergeists,” Mildred pointed out. “They
used to, at least. I never used to believe in the supernatural, but then some of my perspectives have shifted a touch, you know, these past few years.”

  “I heard about them, too,” Ricky said. “Back home on the island.”

  Ryan stood up.

  “Ghosts don’t bite kids’ faces off,” he said. “All right. Enough talk. Time to get back to it. We’re bleeding daylight here, people.”

  * * *

  “NO MORE EXCUSES, Mathus Conn,” Wymie hollered as she walked through the door. A passel of her followers jostled one another trying to crowd in behind her. “You got to quit standin’ up for these outlander baby-chillers and help us now!”

  Conn looked up from behind the bar, where he was polishing a mug and trying to calculate whether the rim was chipped badly enough it might gash a patron’s lip. While many of his customers spent much of their time in Stenson’s Creek gaudy in no condition to notice whether they’d nicked their mouths or not, he generally made it a policy that people not leave his establishment with blood on their faces. It was bad for business.

  “Good to see you, too, Wymie,” he said. “Why don’t you and your friends sit down and take a load off?”

  Tarley Gaines was chewing the fat with his old friend Conn, while a pair of younger members of the clan sat in respectful silence. A couple of other idlers from Sinkhole were all the rest of the gaudy occupants. It was a slow start to a night, but Conn reckoned it’d pick up.

  He hadn’t reckoned on this, though.

  Wymie wasn’t to be deflected so easily, much less mollified, as he’d expected. But as his granny always told him, you didn’t hit what you didn’t aim at.

  “What happened?” Conn asked resignedly.

  “They attacked us!” Wymie declared.

  “The outlanders?”

  “Who else would it have been?”

  “Did any of you actually see any of them?”

  “I did!” Lou said and Edmun chimed in, “Me, too!” a beat later.

  Nancy had come in from the kitchen when she heard the fuss. She stood with her plain face set in a look of determined skepticism.

  “Were you two together?” she asked.

  “Nope,” Lou said. “I was walkin’ point. Edmun was pullin’ drag.”

  “How could you both have seen the same person, then?”

  “We went through this!” Wymie yelled. Nancy’s frown deepened.

  Conn was grimly amused. His cousin and chief aide was the one who had taken him to task for not going along with Wymie’s somewhat crazy agenda from the first moment, for the sake of peace with neighbors and customers. Now her own reflex practicality had led her afoul of the young woman’s overamped sense of vengeance.

  The furrowed-brow look Nancy shot Conn indicated she wasn’t really buying they both had seen the same man at more or less the same time, though Conn didn’t judge Nancy to be passionate enough about truth in the abstract to kick up a fuss about it. She just didn’t suffer fools gladly, was all. Nor foolishness.

  “Not here, we didn’t,” Conn said, pitching his voice to carry without overtly raising it. It was a knack he’d developed years ago. It turned out to be useful to a gaudy owner. Folks around here tended to be laid-back and peaceful, of course. He just intended to keep them that way when alcohol began loosening their tongues and the dampers on their emotions.

  “How many casualties?” That should be a safe diversion from what was plainly an explosive subject, though he wondered the same as his cousin had.

  “Burny like to got his hand blowed off!” Lou said. Burny held up a hand crudely bandaged in a handkerchief that looked as if it hadn’t started the day particularly clean to begin with. No blood had seeped through.

  Vin, who had crowded in with a dozen or so others, cackled wildly. “Triple-stupe bastard was too lazy to stuff the ends of his chambers with lard, once he loaded ’em up,” he declared, with the obvious pleasure known only to a man who was able to say I told you so. “The grasshopper spends the summer dancing, and when winter comes must beg the ant for a crumb to eat.”

  Several people, including Wymie, stared at him, stupefied. Conn, who’d been listening to the old man’s platitudes his whole life, merely smiled.

  “Leavin’ the chamber mouths open means when you fire one, the flash can spread to all the others,” Vin explained. He was always readier to lecture on blasters than he was to try to explain his frequently indecipherable pronouncements. It was one of the few things that made him tolerable, or at least his company. “It’s called a gang-fire. As you reap, so you sow.”

  “Sure,” Conn said. “So Burny blew his own hand off.”

  “It ain’t that badly hurt,” Lou said. “Just mostly scorched, and sprained to the wrist and trigger finger.”

  Burny clutched his forearm above his bandaged wrist and looked reproachful at his comment.

  “So was anybody hurt by the actual attackers?” Conn went on, only a bit more pointedly.

  “Angus got his face laid open,” she said, pointing to a small cut on the carpenter’s cheek. It had clearly long since stopped bleeding on its own, and been cleaned up. Or off, since it had likely been done with somebody’s spit.

  Conn was something of a student of ancient history, and so he knew that those among humanity who were most susceptible to disease or infection had died off in the plagues that followed the Big Nuke, and the decades of skydark that followed before the sun came back. But you could still press your luck and end up dying of infection or gangrene. It was why he insisted on hygiene inside his establishment, and did what he could—with at least some success—to encourage its use among his neighbors and patrons outside his establishment.

  He reluctantly refrained from pointing out what a poor idea a spit-cleanse was for a face wound. He had long since also learned to pick his battles.

  “How’d that happen?” he asked.

  “Coldheart threw a rock.”

  “A rock.” He looked at her and drummed his fingers on the bar. “A rock? Does that strike you as somethin’ baby-killin’ coldhearts would do? Throw rocks?”

  “Coulda chilled me!” Angus said plaintively.

  “Sure.”

  “But don’t you see?” Wymie cried. She held out her hands to the sides and turned about, clearly playing to the idlers, in hopes of enlisting their sympathy and support, and she certainly had their undivided attention.

  Conn judged that had mostly to do with the amount of imposing white bosom revealed by her red plaid shirt, which she’d left unbuttoned almost to the breastbone against the heat of the day and her exertions.

  “This settles it? Doesn’t it? They know we’re gettin’ close, and they’re tryin’ to scare us off!”

  “Why’d they bother?” Tarley asked, blowing foam from a stoneware mug of Conn’s famous house brew. “They got modern blasters. Plenty firepower to chill you and your friends. Or enough to make the rest lose interest in anythin’ but runnin’. Why would they screw around throwin’ trash at you?”

  “Mebbe they’re short on ammo,” Vin suggested.

  Tarley raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Good point. But that doesn’t answer my question. Not really. They could bushwhack you a lot more convincin’ly than that without shootin’ at you. Especially if they’re such masters of stealth that you never catch a glimpse of any of them, except flashes of the albino one. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why would anyone throw rocks at us, if they were chillers?” Dorden asked. “Not that I’m doubtin’ you, Wymie. It’s hard to see why anybody’d do that.”

  “I don’t pretend to know how baby-chillers think,” Conn said evenly.

  “Nor I,” Tarley said. “But I got to tell you plain, Wymie, that I ain’t buyin’ it. You always been a good girl, hard worker, with a good head on your shoulders. And I understand you’re hurt and angry, surely I do. I’d feel the same if that horrible thing happened to any of my kin. But I’m not about to go on any blood-hunts without knowin’ for a fact I’m huntin’ th
e right prey.”

  Conn saw Wymie set her jaw and grind it. Her big, strong hands were clenched into fists at her sides. Her big breasts rose and fell in an eye-catching way as she sucked in deep breaths and blew them out.

  “Tarley Gaines,” she said, “just you watch yourself! Time has passed for sittin’ on a fence. You’re either with us or against us.”

  Tarley shook his head and set down his mug with a deliberate thump.

  “You need to back off the trigger of that blaster straightaway, Wymea Berdone,” he said. He rose, and his junior clansfolk rose with him. “We’re headed back to Gaines Hill, and there I reckon we’ll stay until this fuss blows over. As a man who means you nothin’ but goodwill, I tell you steer clear of there, or you’ll find out just what it means to step to the Gaines clan.”

  He tossed a handful of jack on the table.

  “Obliged to you, Mathus,” he said. “Best take care.”

  Conn nodded. “I always do.”

  The three left.

  Wymie turned a glare on Conn that, if he judged the intent right, should have reduced him instantly to a pile of smoldering ash.

  “What about you?”

  Conn flicked his gaze aside at Nancy. His cousin was frowning at him. He suspected she was back to her position of go along to get along, despite her earlier common-sense-based outburst.

  He reckoned life had been too easy too long there in the western Pennyrile, but he meant to hold on to what he could. He sighed.

  “I’m not against you, Wymie,” Conn said evenly, “however you may think. But I mean to see the peace kept. Bring me evidence—actual evidence, not just rock-throwin’ phantoms that don’t sound like anything at all, much less these outlanders you’re so stuck on—and I’ll do everything in my power to back you. Short of that, I have my responsibilities.”

  She glared at him even hotter, if that was possible. Chad and Tony had come out of their dorm rooms to take up their duties for the evening, and now stood quietly with burly arms crossed over broad chests. Wymie’s posse stood behind her—outside the baleful sweep of her vision—shifting uncomfortably and passing around uncertain glances.