Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass

by James Axler

  “Thanks, boss,” both men said in unison.

  Frank nodded. “Excellent. Now—”

  He heard a footstep behind him and turned. “Back so soon—?” he began.

  Then he stopped. Instead of the sec man he expected to see, he was face-to-face with a black woman a head shorter than he, with her hair wound into beaded plaits. She stuck a blocky revolver almost up his left nostril and clicked back the hammer.

  “Think I found an important one,” she called without taking her brown eyes off his.

  “Ace on the line,” a male voice responded from outside. “Bring him.”

  “Come along, you.” She grabbed his arm and tugged him into motion. She was stronger than she looked.

  “Don’t hurt him,” one of the conscripts urged.

  “Yeah,” his partner said. “He’s a good one.” He turned his head and spit. “The only one.”

  There was a knot of people clustered in the corridor outside the annex. With a shock, Frank realized two things: they had emerged from the hole to the underworld, and they were the outlanders first Wymie and then Conn had been so hot to find.

  They bristled with weapons.

  “Who are you?” demanded the tall, rangy man with shaggy black hair, his left eye covered by a patch.

  “Frank Ramakrishnan.” He swallowed. “I’m chief adviser to Mathus Conn.”

  “Is he the one straw-bossing this outfit?” asked a short man in a battered fedora and a dusty leather jacket. He cradled a shotgun casually in his hands.

  Frank nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.

  “Hey!” a harsh voice demanded. It was Quint, the senior of his sec guards. “What’s goin’ on—”

  There was a flash and a tremendous explosion. By the light of the muzzle-flare Frank saw Quint’s throat explode as what had to have been a shotgun blast ripped into him at point-blank range.

  Silhouetted by the shot was a tall, stork-like man in a dark frock coat. He shifted the huge blaster in his hand and fired another shot. This one, though painfully loud, was not as world shattering as the first. Frank’s other guard, Ash, went down with a third eye in his forehead.

  Their pal, whose name Frank didn’t know, turned to run. The man, who looked to be an oldie, fired two shots with coldheart precision into his back from the revolver. The sec man pitched onto his face.

  The one-eyed man nodded. “Any more?” he asked Frank.

  “N-not so far as I know.”

  As silent as a moonbeam, a little albino in a camo jacket appeared among them. “Coming,” he said.

  “He means cannies,” the short man in the hat and jacket said. “Hundreds of them. All hot way beyond nuke red. We best get out of here in a hurry.”

  Ryan looked at his hostage and smiled. “Take us to your leader,” he said.

  * * *

  “—CONQUER MACCUM CORNERS, we shall punish them for their treasons!” Mathus Conn was ranting over a megaphone when they came in sight of his army camp. “And we shall reap the rewards of our labors, yes, we shall!”

  “What the hell?” Mildred demanded. “Maccum Corners what?”

  Ryan was no less surprised. He was as much startled that they could hear the gaudy owner so clearly at a couple hundreds yards’ distance, though he was obviously not using electro-amplification. Whoever his sec boss was, his men were doing an ace job keeping the crowd quiet while Conn was speaking.

  Or in this case, getting the crowd to pipe up only on cue. There was a sudden burst of cheering at the implicit promise of loot and presumably other dark treasures, then it cut off quickly as Conn began hollering again.

  He looked to their “hostage,” Frank. “It’s his new fixation,” he said, almost guiltily. “He claims to have evidence the people of Maccum Corners refuse to join his crusade because they have made a secret deal with the cannibals. With, uh, you.”

  “As you’ll have noticed, we’ve been otherwise occupied,” J.B. said.

  “With the real cannibals,” Mildred added pointedly.

  “What’s your role in this exactly, Frank?” Krysty asked. Her tone was pleasant, but Ryan knew her well enough to feel the steel in her words.

  “I do my best to talk Mr. Conn out of the…worst excesses.”

  “And how’s that going for you?” J.B. asked. The Armorer was unusually voluble this night. Ryan guessed he was pumped at having pulled off two incredibly demanding demo shots—both technically and tactically—with near-total success in less than forty-eight hours. Even a man as mechanically precise as J.B. had his professional pride.

  He thought he heard screams from the cave-in site behind.

  Either the workers didn’t clear out like we told them to, or they caught more sec men to leave to the coamers, he thought. Either way, time’s blood. In this case, pretty literally.

  “We have to shake it,” he said firmly, trying not to let his anxiety show.

  “That’s a big mob he’s got there,” Ricky said dubiously. “Really big.”

  “That is an army, lad,” Doc said. “In intent and size, if not in training.”

  “And we’re going to walk right into the middle of it?” Mildred demanded.

  “That’s the plan,” Ryan said.

  “Why, again?”

  He tamped down his irritation. This was not the best time to be questioning him. Then again Mildred wasn’t hanging back. They were on the verge of walking into the circle of light from a hundred fires, crossing the point of no return.

  “We’re caught whatever we do,” Krysty said. “There’re too many of them swarming around, and they know the ground too well. We could never hope to slip past.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Are you forgetting recent events, Millie?” J.B. asked blandly.

  “What? Oh.”

  “Put your hands back up, Frank,” J.B. said. “It makes it more convincing that way.”

  The tall man’s eyes darted left and right with surprise in his dark face. “Oh, yes. Sorry.” He obeyed.

  “Walk in side by side with me,” Ryan told him. “Blasters out, everybody.” He made a show of holding his SIG near Frank’s narrow face.

  He had to give it to Conn. The former gaudy proprietor—Ryan reckoned he’d gone into a new line of work now—could hold a crowd’s attention. Nobody had eyes out on the surrounding night. Of course part of that was plain overconfidence, that no one would dare to challenge such a huge force, for this peaceful region, directly.

  It was the second time in not much more than an hour that Ryan’s and his friends’ survival depended on somebody powerful’s blind overconfidence in that power.

  He narrowed his gaze at the sight of all the men and some women wearing red hankie armbands and carrying clubs or toting blasters, cruising through the crowd in twos and threes. Conn hadn’t just been busy recruiting warm bodies to his cause. In a short period, he had acquired a sec force that would do credit to any baron.

  But the sec teams were focused mostly on their big boss, looking for clues as to how to prompt the crowd. Instead it was some of the regular grunts who spotted the intruders, who after all were strolling almost casually among them, straight for Conn’s dais.

  “Hey, wait!” Ryan heard a man’s voice yell. The cry was echoed by several others.

  And then a woman’s scream: “Oh, blind NORAD, it’s the baby-chillers!”

  That got everybody’s attention. A nearby sec unit of two men and a crop-haired woman closed in.

  Suddenly the companions had blasters leveled in all directions. Krysty menaced the sec team with her Glock.

  “Full-auto, folks,” she said. “I’d take my hands away from those blasters.”

  Tied to mostly single-shot, antique-style weapons as they were, the people of the Pennyrile knew about automatic weapons, if mostly through awestruck legends that greatly amplified their power and effectiveness. Men and women of the sec force halted. They didn’t raise their hands, exactly, but they sure moved them away from their waists.
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br />   Ryan jammed the muzzle of his P226 under the angle of Frank’s jawline, with his finger outside the trigger guard. He knew nobody in the throng around him would notice, not even the sec men.

  He and his companions kept walking forward, aware of the terrible pressure of what was going to erupt out of their former dig site at any minute.

  When the hubbub around them grew loud enough, and the skin between his shoulder blades grew itchy enough about what those behind them might be getting up to, Ryan raised his face.

  “Conn!” he shouted.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Conn yelled at the disturbance. “Mr. Baggart, see to whoever’s disruptin’—”

  A gigantic figure who’d been standing near the log platform where his master stood turned and began to lumber toward the intruders.

  “The fat bully-boy’s his sec boss now?” J.B. asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Frank replied.

  “We’re disrupting your little tea party,” Ryan said. He didn’t shout, just put snap and volume in his words to make them carry about the murmur and occasional startled outcry from the mob. “We are not baby-chillers, and we’ve come to warn you. The real baby-chillers are following hot on our tails!”

  Conn laughed theatrically.

  The dude really has a gift for this, Ryan thought. I’ll give him that.

  “Lies! All lies! A pile of jack to whoever brings the murderers to me. Alive! We all know how to take care of the likes of these stoneheart taints, don’t we, boys and girls!”

  With at least fifty sec goons converging on the companions, there wasn’t anybody left to make sure the crowd responded on cue. Only a couple of gleeful shouts were raised in response.

  Frank cupped his hands around his mouth. “Please listen to them, Mathus! They tell the truth! It was the coamers all along, and they are after us! All of them!”

  “You, too, Frank?” Conn asked. He sounded sad, but he didn’t lower his volume any. “My friends, an additional award to whoever brings Mr. Ramakrishnan to me. The traitor’s head will suffice.”

  Ryan raised his handblaster and fired a shot in the air. Even among the rising tumult of the crowd, the shot rang clear through the night. Instant stillness ensued.

  The sec teams closing in on them seemed to really notice the imposing array of blasters being pointed outward by their intended victims. They froze.

  “Don’t be stupe, Conn,” Ryan declared. “You traded with us often enough. You know we deal straight. I don’t know what you’ve been telling these folks, but the truth is, the coamers are real. They took us captive, and we busted out. And now they’re on their way right here with bloodlust and fire in their bastard white bellies!”

  He wondered what had happened to Wymie, the black-haired girl who’d lost her sister and blamed them. Briefly. Ryan knew firsthand how the game of power was played full-contact. He had the eye patch and the scar down his face to show for it. Conn clearly not only knew how to play the game, but how to win it. But Conn’s run was about to come to an abrupt end. Ryan heard more screaming from the path they’d just walked to get here.

  “Time’s up, Conn,” he said, shouting this time, because it was true. “Forget about fighting us and join with us.”

  Conn laughed showily again. “Forget about fightin’ you?” he said cockily. “Or you’ll what? We hugely outnumber you.”

  “Not us,” Ryan answered. “Them.”

  The night exploded with screaming white bodies.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “I’d suggest you run, Frank,” Ryan said. “Fast as you can.”

  “Where?”

  “Away!” Mildred shouted. Her hands were trembling where they gripped her ZKR in isosceles combat-shooting stance. She kept a cool head under fire—they all did—but this situation was beyond extraordinary.

  “West,” J.B. said.

  With a spastic nod of thanks, Frank took off in that direction as fast as his long, thin legs could carry him. Nobody paid attention to him, not even the sec force who had largely ringed in the little group.

  The coamers had not appeared all around the army, but they were attacking in a white wave from at least a full quarter of the perimeter, all from the east.

  They were too enraged—and not bright at the best of times—to think tactically enough to spread out underground far enough west that they could surround the camp when they broke out into the night air. But they had sure started swarming out of other bolt-holes than the passage Ryan’s crew had unsealed at the bottom of the caved-in site.

  Blasters were booming all around. No shots headed the companions’ way. The rank and file had no trouble believing Ryan’s warning. At least not when the coamers were leaping on top of their friends and neighbors and crunching off their faces right before their eyes. “Git your worthless asses up on stage in front of Mr. Conn,” Potar bellowed to his sec team like an angered bull. “Or I’ll make you wish we’d hung you on a cross for the cannies!”

  This time Ryan had a clear shot at the commander of the enemy throng, but Ryan had no time to unslung his Steyr, much less take aim across a hundred yards or more, because he and his companions were abruptly fighting for their lives.

  He heard two shots erupt from Krysty’s Glock 18. It took skill to fire in such a controlled way, given the weapon’s high cyclic rate. He looked to see a sec woman falling backward with her hands coming up. Her double-barrel shotgun spewed its titanic smoky flame toward the handful of stars visible above the bonfire, torch and lantern light in the trampled-flat clearing.

  Whether driven by lust for Conn’s promised reward or simply fixated on the prey at hand, some members of the sec team attacked. Even as a double boom rang out, Krysty ripped off another two rounds, then a 3-round burst, crumpling the sec woman’s male companions.

  Drawing his panga, Ryan charged at a another knot of sec men, half a dozen strong, west, the way they’d sent their erstwhile captive. The screams, getting closer, showed the infuriated coamer horde was overrunning the army camp with shocking speed.

  Ryan double-tapped the sec man who raised a single-shot longblaster at him from twenty feet and closing. He took another one down with a left-handed transverse slash across the face with his panga, which left a spurting, bone-crunched ruin in its wake. The man dropped keening to his knees, clutching his smashed-in features with both hands. Blood squeezed between the fingers.

  Another sec man caught hold of Ryan’s right arm. The one-eyed man jammed the muzzle of his SIG into his adversary’s paunch and fired once. The man dropped with his cotton shirt smoking, howling in pain from being gut shot.

  Something hard and heavy clipped Ryan at the curve of his skull, above and behind his left ear. He stumbled, then went to his hands and knees. Stars went nova in his brain, red and white and actinic blue, and his stomach suddenly sloshed with nausea. He would have puked up everything he had eaten that day—if he had eaten that day; their rations had at last run out.

  Some combination of trouble-honed senses brought Ryan’s head left. That made it feel as if his brain had come loose and was spinning inside his cranium. He found himself looking up the bore of a black-powder longblaster. It looked as big around as that cave they’d dropped on the giant worm. Fuzzily beyond it he saw a demonically twisted face leering at him triumphantly over its cap-lock firing mechanism.

  “Say good-night, Gracie,” the sec man said.

  Something thunked hard at the juncture of his neck and his right shoulder. A black liquid sheet shot suddenly up to hide that side of his face. Ryan’s still-scrambled wits recognized arterial spray, even as they sent him half diving, half falling flat on the ground.

  Launched by the dying sec man’s reflex clench on the trigger, the black-powder blaster’s dragon breath felt nearly as hot as it blowtorched near his backside as the live lava had been.

  Krysty looked down at him as she yanked the sharpened blade of her Swiss e-tool out of the neck of the toppling man. She had holstered her h
andblaster, and stuck out her freed-up left hand to Ryan.

  “Shake it off, lover,” she said, keeping her humor even as literal hell broke loose around her, complete with flesh-eating, white-skinned devils. “You’re holding up the parade.”

  Thankfully, he held out his knife hand. She caught his wrist and pulled him to his feet as if he weighed no more than a child. Even without the help of her guiding spirit, Gaia, the redhead was strong.

  He swayed. The universe was still rotating rapidly around him, but at least his brain had decided to settle back into place.

  The other sec men weren’t idle, but neither were Ryan’s companions. In an instant he saw Doc backhand one man across the face with his LeMat, sending him sprawling. A bushy-bearded sec man twice Jak’s size grabbed him by his collar and started to spin him. Then he instantly yanked his hands away, screaming shrilly at the pain in his fingers and palms, which had been slashed by the razors Jak had sewn there to discourage just such familiarity. The albino had long since emptied his blaster and tucked it away, happy to be able to fight with some of his beloved knives. He drove the brass-knuckle hand guard of his World War I–style trench knife into the screaming bearded mouth in a rattler-quick overhand right.

  To Ryan’s left, Ricky doubled over another sec man with a piston drive of his fat longblaster barrel to his opponent’s solar plexus, then brought the steel-plated butt down hard on the man’s exposed nape to shatter his spine.

  Ryan recovered enough to shoot a man ten feet ahead who showed signs of aiming a handblaster. It was a sloppy shot, one-handed, without even a sight picture. Trader would have chewed his ass for hours for taking a rank-ass, triple-stupe amateur shot like that. But the 9 mm bullet hit somewhere, and he knew he hadn’t hit one of his companions.

  The sec man dropped his Peacemaker revolver, clutched his shattered shoulder with his left hand and turned and ran away, shrieking. The shrieks got louder when a hurtling white shape landed on his back. Then it cut off as doglike jaws crunched through the back of his skull. The sec man fell forward, still ridden by the coamer who’d killed him.