by James Axler
“Buffort, who? Who hurt you?”
“White,” he groaned. “White face, white hair. Red…eyes!”
He sat up, causing unpleasant squelching sounds to come from his big ripped-open belly. He screamed, his breath stinking in Wymie’s face. Then his good eye rolled up in his head and she felt him die.
She let him go and jumped up, banging her head on the caved-in roof as he flopped back like a dead fish.
Without even knowing how she found herself in the yard outside, hands on knees, panting for breath like a hound that had just helped tree a ’coon. Even the smells of turpentine, outhouses whose contents had long since got the better of the lime poured into them, and the guts and gore splashed everywhere smelled pure and fresh after what was inside.
“Wymie?” Mance asked. “Are you all right?”
“That’s a stupe question, son.” It was Dorden. She made herself straighten as the portly man approached.
“This is terrible,” he said. “We have to do somethin’ now.”
“Now we got ’em,” she said, her triumph rising above even nausea and anger. She looked around at Angus, Lou, Mance and the half-dozen others who had crowded around the shed entrance when she went inside. “You all heard him—he saw the albino!”
They exchanged uneasy glances. Then Mance piped up, “You betcha, Wymie! We heard, all right.”
She gazed around at the rest of her posse, who had given up whatever they were doing to converge on her outside the shed of death.
“Time to end this,” she said. “Mebbe the Sumzes wasn’t the most popular folks in the Pennyrile, but they didn’t deserve this.”
“Wymie?”
It was Burny’s voice, even more tentative than usual, from the back of the crowd. He had a wild-eyed girl with him, gawky and just a few years younger than Wymie herself. Wymie knew her. Her name was Aggie Coal. Her people lived north of here, right on the Mother Road that ran through the region from east to west.
“Aggie says she may know where the outlanders are,” Burny said. “At least in a general sort of way.”
* * *
Chapter Fourteen
“On three,” Ryan said. “One, two—three!”
He and J.B. straightened simultaneously. The rope harness they’d rigged around their shoulders cut into Ryan’s.
In between the cannie lay, wrapped in a blanket too old and smelly for even them to continue to use any longer. Plus it was starting to be more hole than cloth. Wrapped around the chill a couple times, though, it would be strong enough to hold.
It wasn’t that long a trip to Stenson’s Creek, anyway, and they could use the Mother Road most of the way.
“Ready, partner?” Ryan asked. He and the Armorer had decided that, as first and second in command, they should lead by being first to tote the dead cannie, which was in pretty good shape, considering, having been taken out by two rounds from Ryan’s 9 mm blaster right through the breastbone and the cold, black heart beneath. They might not even need to hand off the macabre burden, although neither of them would hesitate to do so if he felt the need. Being tough was one thing; tiring themselves out enough to slow their reflexes if it came to a fight was begging to join the supposed “coamer” in death.
J.B. nodded. Jak did too. He turned and started up the loose-dirt slope of the cave-in.
“Does Jak even need to scout ahead?” Mildred asked. “The cannies don’t do much by daylight, and if any of that crazy chick’s mob of peasants with pitchforks find us, the dude there should show them we’re not who they’re looking for.”
“How were you planning on stopping him, Mildred?” J.B. asked mildly.
“Cannies didn’t attack us outright, either,” Ryan said, grunting as he adjusted his grip on the load. It wasn’t heavy—the cannies weren’t big, though they were wiry. “Until they did. When did we start taking our safety for granted, Mildred?”
He sighed and shook his head. “Truth to tell, I did, last night. I reckoned they’d only do the usual, snipe at us with rocks and sticks, and mebbe give us a chance to chill one and claim the body. And so when they hit us for real they near as rad death overran us. If it wasn’t for Jak making a big show of attacking them from behind, we’d be on the last train west right now. Or inside their bellies, more like.”
Krysty placed a hand on his arm. “That’s in the past, lover,” she said. “We need to do what we always do—walk on.”
“Literally,” he said with a grin. “Right. Time to shake the dust of this place off our heels and go clear our names!”
* * *
“IT WAS LAST NIGHT, ’long about sunset,” Aggie Coal said. She had a mop of tangled brown hair that currently had a bunch of grass and leaves stuck in it from sneaking through the brambles. “Just as it started to come down dark for real. Donny saw a light, off to east of us. Pa came out and we heard blasterfire.”
Wymie had led the group a couple hundred yards up the road that led from the Sumz location to join with the Mother Road, a mile or so away. The girl had been visibly upset by being surrounded by all that blood and death, and Wymie made a mental note to yell at Burny later for bringing her smack into the middle of it. Wymie wasn’t double comfortable in that mess, either, truth to tell.
“Did you go and investigate, child?” Dorden asked gently.
Aggie shook her head vigorously. “No, sir! We been seein’…things in the twilight. Flittin’ about the house and spookin’ the animals and all. Sometimes the dogs been barkin’ and the horses get to neighin’ and tossin’ their heads in the black of night, same as they did earlier when were seein’ the shadows move about. Weren’t nobody going out by night without more reason than curiosity.”
“Curiosity killed the cat,” Vin said, and cackled as if that were the funniest thing ever.
Wymie tamped down her flash of irritation hard. She had a feeling in her gut they were going to be sorely needing the oldie’s talents with a handblaster, and sooner rather than later. She could almost taste how close they were to real action—and vengeance.
“So you don’t know for sure what happened?” Wymie asked.
“No, ma’am. But we reckoned ’twarn’t none of it good.”
“You really think it was the outlanders?” Dorden asked Wymie.
“Who else could it be? You saw how many blasters they were flashin’ around Conn’s.”
“No sign of any blasters used at the Sumz place,” Angus said. “Except one or two by the Sumzes themselves. And one of those had the barrel blown up and peeled back like a steel flower.”
“Are you sure, Wymie?” Mance asked. “I mean, from what we found at the Sumz main house, the outlanders hit ’em ’round about suppertime. Could they also have been in a firefight a couple miles to the northeast and then got here while the Sumzes were still eatin’?”
“Whose side are you on, Mance Kobelin?” Wymie flared, letting him have the full burst of her sense of righteous betrayal.
“Them Sumzes could do a power of eatin’,” Angus said. “Might have been about it awhile.”
“See?” she said.
Mance went pale. He dropped his eyes from hers.
“What do you want to do, Wymie?” Dorden asked with gentle firmness.
“Go find them,” she said with venomous conviction. “Find them and chill them.”
“How’re we gonna do that, Wymie?” Angus asked.
“Search the woods and the hills!” she yelled. “Didn’t you just listen? We know where they are!”
“We couldn’t make out for sure,” Aggie said. Then she sidled behind Mance as if afraid of Wymie’s reaction.
Dorden pursed his lips and blew out a long breath as he shook his head.
“Don’t take this wrong, Wymie,” he said. “We’re with you—we’re all with you. Especially after what we just saw. You’ll have the whole county with you, sure. But that is a power of country to search. Could take some time, yet.”
She sighed. “You’re right,” she said, her shoulders
sagging. She felt tired. Though her purpose—and her rage—never faltered, she was suddenly filled with a sense of the hopelessness of it all.
“But what else can we do but search?”
“You set up base camp at the road, that’s what you do,” old Vin said. Though still cracked, his voice and blue eyes were unusually clear. “Send out your searchers from there, but keep the road blocked. They’ll come that way, sooner or later!”
“He’s right,” Dorden said. He looked at the oldie in something like amazement, and something like admiration. “They’ll want to trade their latest scavvy at Stenson’s Creek. To be honest, I didn’t think you had it in you, Vin.”
“Even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes!” Vin exclaimed. He seemed fully the senile old wrinklie again.
“Wymie!”
The shout came from up the side road to the main thoroughfare. Everybody looked that way. Edmun jogged toward them with a couple kids from Sinkhole in tow, his usual dishwater-dull manner replaced by swaggering self-importance. He got that way, sometimes, on those rare occasions when he thought he might be doing something grand.
“What is it?” she called back. She felt annoyed at him strutting in like this, right on the cusp of her own triumph. “We’re busy here.”
“Not too busy for this. You know how you sent Gator, Lem Sharkey and his brother, Ike, into the ville last night to round up reinforcements?”
“I do. I wondered what became of him. Until we found…what we did at the Sumz place.”
“Well, what he did was find one of his pals, Tupa Mafolo.”
Dorden shook his head disapprovingly. “He’s nothing but trouble, that one. Heck, Lem and his crowd are trouble.”
“Not anymore!” Edmun declared, practically bursting with significance. “Four of ’em went to put the hard arm on old Mathus Conn. Leaned so hard they chilled his cousin Nancy flat dead, messed up one of his bodyguards pretty bad. Then who should come strollin’ in behind them but that big, fat Potar Baggart his own bad self. He and Mathus chilled the four, between the two of them.”
“That’s a lie!” Mance shouted.
Edmun smirked and shook his head. “Carlos, Marky here and Missus Haymuss were arrivin’ to start their workday and saw it all. It’s true. It’s all over the whole entire ville now.”
Dorden grunted unhappily. “I believe it,” he said carefully. “Lem’s always been triple eager to shed blood when he thought he could get away with it, and Ike Sharkey would follow his brother into a live blast furnace.”
Wymie moistened her lips. “You’re right,” she said. “It was my fault for trustin’ Lem with somethin’ he might’ve took for power. But we got no time for this now. We got work to do. We’re finally in sight of avengin’ poor Blinda!”
“What about Conn?” Mance asked.
“If he wants to take his vengeance for his own kin on me,” Wymie said, “I won’t resist. Otherwise, it’s the same as it always was.
“Whether you’re Mathus Conn or anybody else, if they’re not with us on this, they’re with the baby-killing cannies!”
* * *
JAK WAS SLIPPING through brush—noiselessly as the pale ghosts who so unnervingly resembled him—when he smelled them.
Not coamers. Not the distinctive reek of cannies—whose man-eating ways manifested not just through their rotting-meat carnivore breath, but through the very pores of their skins in the form of sweat and body oils—but the locals, rural laborers and ville-rats alike.
They didn’t smell any sweeter to Jak’s well-tuned nostrils, but were at least unmistakably different.
He froze. The breeze was light, but enough to carry the smells to him from the west. They were in the woods and the scrub on the south side of the major road that transversed the area locals knew as the Pennyrile. The same side he was on.
He held his breath for a moment. Sure enough, he heard them: rattling brush, crushing fallen vegetation beneath their boots, even a gut rumbling, presumably longing for a missed breakfast.
They were soft sounds. The sounds of people who were trying to be sneaky, but weren’t particularly good at it.
Through a screen of bayberry branches just beginning to fruit out, he dared a glance west along the road, to where the Stenson’s Creek gaudy house lay, and beyond it the ville of Sinkhole. Sure enough, nobody was there.
They were hiding. He couldn’t know for sure why. But then again, when somebody lay in wait hidden by a well-traveled path, when did they ever mean someone good?
He grinned a feral wolf grin. Not when he did it, that was for sure.
His grin widened. He smelled the sharp stink of tobacco burning. Somebody was actually smoking a cigarette, and to go along with that, the hiss of whispering.
There was no question now: he’d just blown an ambush, and the ambushers were making every stupe mistake in the book.
Now to get back to report to the others. Ryan would know best how to handle it. Somehow Jak had the unmistakable crawling sensation in the pit of his lean belly that the people to be ambushed were him and his friends. He had no evidence of that, but he had learned to heed his gut—and so had Ryan and the rest.
As he started to turn back, he heard someone whisper from not twenty feet farther along the way he’d been headed. “Nuke this. I need to piss right now or I’m gonna burst.”
Before Jak could slip deeper into the scrub, a man appeared through a screen of brush. The only thing between them was some lower bushes. Jak was as plainly visible to him as he would have been on a predark pool table in a high-price gaudy house.
The man stopped. He was obviously a local, a ville dweller by his scavvied pants and jacket, which most of the local farmers and other country types might have reserved for special occasions. He also had a longblaster in hand, which he whipped up to aim at Jak. Even with his wiry catamount strength and reflexes to match, Jak knew he didn’t have time to whip a throwing knife from his sleeve and drill the local with the blade before the man raised the alarm. Most likely Jak would run right into the full blast of whatever was stuffed in the weapon’s lone, long barrel. Instead he dived out of the line of fire, drawing his Magnum revolver as the longlaster barked.
The .357 Magnum discharged its head-shattering roar and puked yellow fire, the barrel riding up. Because he was no quick-shot artist like Ryan or J.B., Jak triggered off a second round the instant he acquired the falling target.
Even though the big revolver promptly kicked up again, Jak saw the upper right—his left—corner of the man’s head fly right off, accompanied by a spurt of pink. The man was already folding to the ground, suggesting Jak had already chilled him or the guy had croaked on his own of a heart attack.
Cries erupted farther up the road, from both sides. “There they are! We got ’em now, boys!”
Crouching in the brush with his handblaster at the ready, Jak yelled, “Ambush!”
He realized his friends knew that already. He just wanted them to know he was fit to fight.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
By the time she heard Jak yell, “Ambush!” even Mildred—who didn’t fancy herself the keenest tactical mind in the bunch—knew already that’s what was happening. The gunshots and cries of what she reckoned were going to turn out to be premature triumph had told her as much.
“Ditch the chill and take cover,” Ryan yelled. “Defensive positions—cover the road.”
Obediently, Mildred shrugged out of the front end of the rope harness and dropped the dead cannie in its blanket shroud on the rutted roadway. She had been cursing herself for her eagerness to show that she could pull her own weight, which led her to volunteer to take over for Ryan when they were barely out of sight of the dig.
Ricky, who had volunteered to help her, continued to stand there, bent forward under the not-enormous weight of the corpse pulling on his own shoulders.
“But what if it gets lost?” he asked plaintively. “How will we prove our innocence?”
The yel
ls from ahead were getting closer fast.
“Son,” J.B. said, “from the way they’re all screaming ‘chill the baby-chillers,’ don’t you kind of reckon we’re past that point?”
* * *
AT THE SHOTS, Wymie straightened behind her clump of scrub oak. As usual, she wasn’t carrying any weapons herself. It just seemed unnecessary, surrounded as she was by dudes with blasters and an evident hankering to use them.
As the second shot still reverberated through the woods, Dorden and Mance both looked at her.
“Well?” she demanded furiously. “What are you waitin’ for?”
The two looked at each other, then back to her.
“The ambush, Wymie,” her cousin said. “Isn’t it, well, kinda blown?”
“We got to strike while the iron is hot,” Vin said.
“For once I agree with the crazy old coot,” Wymie said. “We finally got my sister’s coldheart killers where we want them!”
She stood upright, waved her hands, and at the top of her lungs, screamed, “Let’s get ’em, everybody! Chill the baby-chillers!”
With a cheer her whole posse, its numbers swelled to at least fifty from new volunteers streaming in as word of the Sumz horror filtered through Sinkhole and the surrounding countryside, roared to their feet and out of cover to attack straight down the road at their enemies.
* * *
I CAN’T BELIEVE IT, Ryan thought. They’re running right down the road at us.
He had gotten his people into the best available hasty defensive positions on both sides of the dirt road. One thing he knew for sure: they were smart and seasoned enough not to cross fire each other. It was one of the edges they had over most opponents.
Then he started wondering what was taking the ambushers so long to attack. From all their hollering it was pretty clear they weren’t planning on bailing and trying their luck at a different time and place.
Yet here they came: a mob dozens strong, waving weapons from a Mini-14 blaster to a leaf rake, running toward them in the open around a bend. All of them were screaming for blood at the top of their triple-simp lungs.
