by James Axler
“This right direction?” Jak asked, squinting at the ragged mountains in the murky distance.
“Dark night, no,” J.B. replied honestly. “But we’re heading for where the SEAL base used to be located, and that’s the best place to start the search for the part we need to fix that engine.”
“If not there?”
“Then we carve oars from planks and row off this bastard rock,” Ryan growled, swatting at a mosquito on his neck. For some damn reason, his new eyepatch seemed to be attracting the damn bugs, and he alone was bearing the full fury of their bloodthirsty attacks.
“Here, smear this on your skin,” Krysty said, passing over a small bottle.
“Shine?” Ryan asked, removing the top. He caught a familiar smell. “Diesel fuel?”
“It works fine. Just don’t trigger a blaster too close to your face.”
Hesitantly, the itchy man applied the oily fluid and was surprised that it did work. Then Ryan spent the next hour wiping his gun hand clean on leaves in case there was any trouble.
Following the creek, the companions were pleased when it joined another at a muddy delta to form a shallow river. Soon more tributaries fed into the waterway and it became a proper river. The water was only about a yard deep, just enough to swim in, but there were a lot of colorful fish darting through the reeds and the small stands of bamboo growing alongside a small sandbar located only a few yards off the muddy shore.
“This is a good place to break for the day,” Ryan announced, looking over a small clearing. “We push the horses any farther, and they’ll get sick.”
“No damn flapjacks in the area,” J.B. said, noting the presence of bird nests in the trees. “And no ruins for stickies to hide in.”
“We are avoiding the small predark ruins to head for much larger predark ruins of an entire city,” Doc said, brushing back his silvery hair. “Good Lord, how the universe does love its irony.”
“But none here, which fine by me,” Jak stated, dropping his backpack, then hanging the reins of his horse over a thorny bush. The animal shuffled its hooves until the pine tree branch was removed from the saddle, then it shook all over and visibly relaxed.
“I will gather firewood, if somebody else will rustle up some lunch,” Doc offered, lashing his reins to a splintery tree stump. Immediately the horse began chomping on the thick growth of green grass nearby.
“Done and done,” Krysty announced, going to the stand of bamboo.
Cutting a length, the woman trimmed a point onto the end, then carved a small notch just above that. Stepping into the reeds, Krysty squinted, then stabbed down with the spear. As she pulled up the bamboo, there was a wiggling trout impaled on the notch. With a flick of the wrist, she sent the fish sailing into the clearing, then turned to stab into the water again. In only a few minutes Krysty had a small pile of flopping fish on the ground. One of them had crude wings and another possessed a third eye on a flexible stalk. Those were thrown back into the river, but the rest seemed normal.
“I clean.” Pulling a thin knife from his belt, Jak started cleaning the fish, deftly removing the guts and scales, but leaving on the heads.
“Would you please remove those?” Mildred asked hopefully.
“Best flavor,” the teen replied, his hands busy.
“My dear Jak,” Doc gasped, dropping an armload of dry wood. “Do you really plan on eating those heads after what we saw in the cannie ville?”
“Fish not screamer,” Jak stated, then looked questioningly at Mildred.
“Eat all you want.” Mildred sighed. “Fish don’t have enough brain tissue to matter. Besides, they would have needed to be eating their own kind for years. Trout only eating trout, bass only bass, and so on. I doubt very highly that could happen in an aquatic environment.”
“Most animals have a natural reluctance to eating their own kind,” Ryan said, pitting another nectarine to feed to his horse. “Sort of a built-in safety factor.”
“Quite true!” Doc grinned, dusting off his hands. “Besides which…” His voice trailed off just then, and the man stood tall, delicately sniffing the air. “Is…is that cornbread?”
“And bacon,” Jak growled, wiping the blade clean before shoving it back into the sheath. “We got company.”
Immediately everybody pulled out weapons and clicked off the safeties.
With blaster in hand, Ryan nodded at Krysty, then the horses. She gave a nod in reply, and went to stand guard while the rest of the companions assumed a combat formation and swept forward into the forest, using the rocks and trees as cover.
Less than a thousand feet away, the forest ended at another clearing. There was a bubbling spring situated near a crackling campfire, a battered iron frying pan sizzling softly above the flames and giving off the most wonderful aromas. Several logs had been dragged from the forest to form a crude square around the blaze to reflect back the heat at night to keep the campers warm. There were some patched canvas duffel bags hanging from a tree branch where the bugs couldn’t reach them, but aside from that, there were no other signs of people. No wags, horses, cigs, drek or brass.
“Don’t like this,” Ryan whispered, checking for snipers in the treetops.
“Agreed,” J.B. muttered, slipping a hand into his munitions bags. Effortlessly he found a pipe bomb wrapped with duct tape holding a row of nails in place. This was what he called a junk bomb. Toss the stick into a campfire and half a heartbeat later everybody not safely behind a rock was going to be picking rusty steel out of their guts and generally bleeding to death in nine different ways.
“Shitfire, ground swept,” Jak said in a terse warning.
With a snarl, Ryan spun and raced back toward their own campsite. The only reason for anybody to sweep the clearing would be to hide their numbers. Which meant the cooking food had to be the bait in a trap to lure the companions away from the river so that…
Suddenly a horse loudly whinnied and there came the bellowing roar of a black-powder blaster closely followed by the yammering rattle of an M-16 rapidfire.
Sprinting back to the river, Ryan and the others burst out of the greenery, their blasters sweeping for targets. Black smoke was rising from the campfire where the fish had fallen into the flames. The horses were whinnying in fright, their great eyes showing white all around. Hunkered down behind the tree stump, Krysty was sending off short bursts from the M-16. Dotting the clearing, five people in tan clothing were moving low through the weeds, firing their blasters in return, but clearly more interested in reaching the tethered horses than in acing the woman.
In unison, the companions cut loose with their blasters, Jak and Mildred moving to the trees on the left, with J.B. and Doc going to the right, so as to not offer a group target. Ryan stayed where he was in the bushes as the anchor man for the flanking maneuver. The barrage cut the tops off some weeds and blew apart a shaft of bamboo, but that was it. The angle of attack was bad, so Ryan and the others shot high to try to drive the strangers out of hiding and not risk hitting Krysty.
Startled curses answered the blasterfire, and the attackers circling the horses stopped moving and hugged the ground to send back a flurry of hot lead from an assortment of blasters.
“Everybody freeze or I’ll ace the horses!” Ryan boomed in his loudest voice. J.B. put a burst from the Uzi into the air, while Doc triggered both of his handblasters.
There was no reply, and for a long minute the only sounds were of the frightened horses, the campfire and the gentle murmur of the rushing river.
“Ace the horses, and we’ll chill the slut!” a fat woman bellowed in return, shifting her position amid the bushes.
“Do that, and gut slow!” Jak snarled. “Take days chill!”
“She’ll still be chilled!” a skinny man replied from the trees across the river.
“And so will you!” Doc added, a tinge of madness creeping into his normally cultured tones.
“Leave and live, or stay and die!” Ryan yelled, then lowered his voice to co
nversational level. “Your choice.”
The confident change in tone clearly bothered the strangers, as the Deathlands warrior had expected it to, and another minute passed in tense silence.
“How about we cut a deal?” the fat woman said, slowly rising from concealment. The blaster in her grip was pointed at the ground, but with a finger still on the trigger.
The woman was wide and heavily muscled, the knuckles of both hands covered with a lot of small scars. Her hair was cut short in a mil buzz, and there was a coiled bullwhip at her hip, the tip glittering with a steel hook. The burly woman wore a tan uniform with a single red stripe on the sleeve. That marked her as a corporal in a ville sec force. Not very surprisingly, the companions recognized her uniform as the same worn by the chilled sec men in the abandoned ville.
“A deal? We got nothing to talk about, except where to bury you,” Ryan answered from the bushes, needlessly working the arming bolt on the Steyr. The metallic noise seemed supernaturally loud.
Nervously, the sec woman shifted her stance, as if un sure whether to dive for cover or to keep talking.
“Look, all we want is our horses back!” a man shout ed from the weeds. His face was covered by the waving plants, but his greasy hair was visible. It stuck out in every direction as if he had recently been struck by lightning.
“Your horses? How do you figure that?” Mildred asked scornfully from behind a thick oak tree. The bark was rough against her back, the shade deliciously cool.
“We’re from Nimitz ville, and those animals bear the brand of our baron!” the fat woman answered defiantly. “I don’t know how you managed to jack them, but—”
“Deserted!” Ryan interrupted.
“Eh? What the frag does that mean?” she demanded suspiciously.
“The ville is deserted, everybody’s aced and the gate is wide open,” Ryan continued. “That makes anything inside fair game to scav.”
“They belong to us!” the man across the river retorted hotly.
“Not anymore,” J.B. answered from the shadows.
“Hold on now, let’s try to be reasonable about this,” the corporal said, using her left hand to put a homemade cigar into her mouth and lighting it with a match. Her other hand still held the .22-caliber blaster, cocked and ready to fire.
As she exhaled, Ryan recognized the smell as zoom, a mix of tobacco, marijuana and wolfweed. It was potent stuff, and he guessed she was calming her nerves to get ready for a suicide charge. In the back of his mind, the man wondered why the armed sec men were so desperate to get hold of the horses. Then he shoved that question aside for later. Gotta stay on target. Protect Krysty, save the horses, ace these sons of bitches, and in that order, he thought.
“Who the frag are you, anyway?” Ryan demanded, a plan already forming.
“Corporal Moore, Janet Moore. You got a name?”
“Cawdor,” Ryan replied. “What are you offering?”
The woman took a long drag on the cigar, filling her lungs with the dark smoke, then letting it trickle out of her nose in twin streams. “Okay, Cawdor, how about we—”
“Sniper!” Doc snarled, firing both of his blasters into the trees.
From amid the leafy greenery there came a cry of pain, and a norm tumbled out to hit the ground in a hard thump, a longblaster slipping from his twitching hands. Startled by his appearance, the skittish horses reared in terror, then jerked their tethers free and started to run away.
Instantly wild blasterfire filled the clearing, lead flying in every direction.
“Nuking hell, I told ya to wait for my signal!” Corporal Moore yelled, shooting into the bushes.
Even as he heard the twang of the .22-caliber round ricochet off a rock several yards away, Ryan triggered the Steyr and shot the sec woman in the throat, the slug exploding out the back of her neck in a bloody geyser.
Caught in a fair fight, the ville sec men were mercilessly slaughtered by the companions, the furious battle over almost as soon as it had begun.
“We…was…still talking…” Moore wheezed, red fluids dribbling from her slack mouth to dribble down her double chins.
“No, you were trying to get us into the open so the sniper could chill us easier,” Ryan said, bending to take the tiny revolver and tuck it into his gunbelt. “We just didn’t fall for the same trick twice.”
“T-twice?”
Callously, the Deathlands warrior started checking the dying woman for any spare brass. “The bacon and cornbread. That was triple smart. Damn near worked, too.”
“Always did…before,” Moore whispered, a hand clutching her ruined throat to hold in the escaping life.
Tucking the loose rounds into a pocket, Ryan spotted the dropped cigar and crushed it under a boot. “Mebbe against ville people, and pilgrims, but not us.”
“You…s-sec…men?”
“We used to run with the Trader,” Ryan stated coldly.
Her eyes went wide at the startling pronouncement, then they began to fog over as death approached. “N-never…stood chance…then..”
“Not really, no.”
“S-shoulda known…not t-trust…Carlton,” she gurgled, then coughed hard, a wellspring of blood gushing between her fingers. “He…s-said I’d be new baron…”
“Yeah, and who is Carlton?” Ryan asked with a scowl.
“Why…sh-should I tell a-anything t-to…a dead man?” Moore groaned with a guttural laugh. Releasing her throat, the fat sec woman grabbed something from her shirt pocket and jammed it into her mouth to blow so hard that both cheeks puffed out.
Jerking aside, Ryan half expected to be hit by a dart from the miniature blowpipe. But nothing seemed to happen, and after a few seconds the obese woman slumped into death, a strange smile playing on her stained lips as if she had just won the battle.
Chapter Fourteen
Streaming contrails of oily blue smoke, the gang of motorcycle riders plowed through the jungle vines, the iron cages around them crushing aside the lush greenery. Monkeys in the treetops screeched their disapproval of the machines, and fat snakes slithered quickly away from their rumbling approach.
The cage of metal bars welded to the frame of each bike completely surrounded the rider, offering safety from rollovers and some small degree of security from the dreaded jumpers. At the front of the gang, the cage of the point rider was thickly festooned with bits of leafy vines and the occasional spiderflower. Violently torn from its web, the thing was still horribly twitching, and even as it died, the mutie plant hissed softly at the sec man. However, he turned away just in time, and the cloud of hallucinogenic pollen dissipated harmlessly on the wind. When he was sure that it was safe, the sec man ripped the flower off the bars and crushed it into pulp before throwing it away. Then he wiped his hands clean on a rag tied to his gunbelt for just such a purpose.
“Better a spider than a jumper, eh, Corporal?” Baron Jones shouted over the combined roar of the engines.
“If you say so, Baron,” the sec man growled in reply, revving the flathead engine of his bike to force a path through the giant ferns and hanging moss.
As the riders crested a low hillock, Baron Carson Jones called a halt and throttled down the ancient two-wheelers to checked the gauges before turning off the knucklehead engine. Reaching into a saddlebag draped over the rear fender, the baron extracted a pair of binocs and looked down into the valley at the base of the hill. Slowly, the baron gave a cold smile.
“Find something, dear?” Lady Veronica asked, stopping her bike alongside. Her long black hair was tied off her face with a silk scarf, and the checkered grips of her blasters jutted up from a wide gunbelt like samurai swords. The Plexiglas windshield was covered with a juicy splattering of winged bugs, and a longblaster was tucked into a leather scabbard alongside the hot engine. As she forced down the kickstand, the spurs on her half-boots jingled softly.
“Look down there,” the baron commanded, passing over a pair of bincos.
Accepting the device, Lady Veronica
did as requested. “That’s Nimitz ville, sure enough,” she said hesitantly. “But it seems to be deserted.” The woman dialed for greater clarity. “No, by the coast gods, there’s spent brass all over the place! There was some sort of an invasion, or rebellion!”
“Has to be Carlton,” the baron said with absolute conviction. Taking a canteen off the handlebars, the man took a long swig, sloshing the brew in his mouth before swallowing. Jungle Tea tasted nothing like predark coffee, but it had just as powerful a kick and helped keep his mind sharp.
“And by that, you mean the dirty traitor Digger,” Lady Veronica replied with an expression of pure hatred, her hands tightening on the binocs.
“Pardon my asking, Baron,” a sec man said respectfully, “but if Digger now works for Carlton, why is he heading inland and not to sea?”
“What better place to have a secret harbor for your oceangoing war ships than a mountain lake connected to the Cific by a river?” Lady Veronica answered, her hair stirring angrily.
The idea startled the sec man. Captain Carlton hid his fleet in the foothills? Damn, that was triple clever!
“Wonder where he got the cannon to knock open the front gate?” Baron Jones asked nobody in particular, capping the canteen.
“That’s not cannon damage,” Lady Veronica replied curtly. “Look at those depressions in the ground. The ville was attacked by a thunder king.”
The baron frowned. “So the little bastard can summon a king, eh?”
“So it would appear, my love,” Lady Veronica growled, her pretty face distorting into a feral grimace. When she was only a child, a herd of the muties had taken both of her parents, leaving her an orphan of the street. Her detest of the things was only equaled by her raw hatred for the mutie master, Captain Carlton.
Taking back the binocs, the baron checked for any signs of life in the ville. But it was completely abandoned, even the front gate was open. A couple of stickies wandered around the huts and buildings searching for anything edible. With delighted hoots, the things converged upon the smoldering corpse in the corral and started to rip off chunks of the burned flesh with their suckered-covered hands.
