by James Axler
Eventually Ricky’s propensity for trouble caught up with him. José and María Elena despaired. They were trying to raise a good boy. They had taught him to read and reckon, and to know right from wrong. Why did he treat them that way?
His uncle, María Elena’s brother Benito, intervened. An oddly built man, with a round balding head, a squat body, bowed legs and long arms, Benito was the town mechanic and smith. María Elena loved her brother, and her husband liked him and had a fair regard for him as an honest dealer. But they, like many people in the town, seemed to find Tío Benito less than completely respectable. Some of it was that he liked to drink a bit more rum or palm wine than was sometimes good for him. But largely because he was so obsessed about doing things with his hands, always making or repairing machines of all kinds. Though he held with reading, and reckoning, too, he didn’t hold much with people who thought and talked all the time instead of doing.
And the things he did seemed to smack of the preoccupation with science and technology that characterized the old days, the predark days: the very things that burned the world, and brought on the Long Winter and the terrible years that followed.
But Benito was necessary and valued. And although he could be cranky he was generally well liked.
Benito volunteered to teach the errant Ricky. He’d noticed the boy’s handiness. He reckoned he could find ways to put all that energy to use that didn’t involve him getting into trouble and bringing shame upon his oh-so-respectable family.
Ricky’s parents hesitated. That wasn’t the life they intended for their only son.
They argued late into the night. It seemed to Ricky, lying in a side room on a pallet next to his softly snoring older sister and not even trying not to overhear, that they swapped sides with a certain regularity.
But he had a knack for the sort of thing his Tío Benito did. They couldn’t deny that. He had no inclination to follow his mother and father as shopkeepers, though he did enjoy the yearly trade expeditions his father had taken him on every year since he was ten. But he was more interested in talking to new people and hearing their stories, in listening to the hired sec men tell tales of their rougher, readier lives, than he was in actually doing any kind of business.
It wasn’t as if they didn’t have a child ready and willing to take over the shop when it came time. Yamile seemed to thrive on the very things that stultified her brother. She loved the buying and selling and calculating. She was sharp, and learned fast and eagerly. She could trade tough when she needed to. Her sweet smile and blossoming beauty tended to lull even those who knew the family into underestimating her, either her keenness or her toughness. Which never worked out well for them.
She never cheated anyone. Their parents raised them better than that. But driving a hard bargain was a virtue, not a sin. And they taught her to give value for value, always. Anything else was the code of the coldheart, and to be shunned.
So it was decided. Ricky would still study and do certain chores at home and in the shop. But he would become his uncle’s apprentice.
He took to it like a monkey to climbing. He loved machines, too, the way they worked, the marvelous way, almost a miracle, that disparate parts came together to function, to do things. Not just mechanical pieces, either. His uncle had a windmill, which sometimes ran noisily and annoyed the neighbors. But it fed a generator and recharged various batteries he’d collected. He taught Ricky about electricity and circuits. Not just to understand old-days electrical equipment, and repair it with existing parts when they were available—and improvise some substitute when they weren’t—but to build circuits of his own. Ricky loved that, too. He soaked up knowledge and manual skills like a sponge.
And best of all—and to the despair of his parents, who after a while gave up complaining and simply chose to ignore—were the weapons. Benito taught him to hone blades, and to forge and temper them, as well. Better still, he taught him how blasters worked. And how they didn’t, and what to do when they didn’t. How to cut and file steel, and case-harden it, to make replacement hammers and ejectors. To wind and temper springs. To bore and cut to spec, to cut threads and tap holes for bolts. To measure, precisely and carefully.
This last didn’t come naturally to Ricky, but Benito, though he never raised a hand any more than Ricky’s parents had, had a tongue that cut deeper faster than any well-honed tool in the shop. Ricky learned that to enjoy the pleasure of making things—things that worked as they were supposed to; otherwise, what was the point?—he had to also learn and perform the tedious parts, without shirking or slacking.
Eventually Ricky came to understand why he needed to study boring things, too. He burned with desire to make things, to make broken things work. And the only way to learn how was to go through steps he didn’t find so enjoyable. His adored yet thoroughly boring parents had been right all along.
Not that he would ever master the skills of bookkeeping.
His uncle also saw that he learned to use what he made: especially weapons. Of his many aptitudes, mechanical and electrical, the boy’s greatest knack was for weaponsmithing. Tío Benito had some skill, especially with a skinning knife. He was a fair hand with blasters, too. He taught the boy what he could.
All the men and women of the ville who dealt with weapons dealt with Benito. No matter how José and María Elena felt, to keep the ville law-abiding and peaceful, the pirates had to be kept at bay. He encouraged his friends and customers to teach the boy how to handle arms—and hand-to-hand combat.
On the side, Ricky found his newfound skills useful for concocting new and marvelous traps. Not that he had much occasion to use them. He was getting bigger. And, while his fighting skills were definitely a work in progress, the local bullies had long since lost any joy in tormenting him.
Besides, the new traps he was inventing were of an exceedingly deadly nature.
He never got any chance to use any of the more lethal skills Benito’s cronies and customers had imparted, but he still went out regularly on expeditions with his father and loved them more than ever. Especially when he got to talk technique with local smiths and tinkers.
His father grudgingly allowed him to handle and assess weapons he was intending to purchase. Ricky often helped him pick up broken or badly cared for weapons for little more than the cost of a fresh coconut or a mango. With Benito’s skill, or increasingly even his own, these could be transformed into perfectly usable—hence salable—firearms.
But José Morales never allowed his boy to carry arms in the field. Not even a knife, beyond a Swiss Army pocketknife that had come through the shop by way of a seaborne trader. And there was seldom much actual excitement on their trips. Most of the people in this part of the island led settled lives.
The occasional fight the expeditions faced was almost always against animals of some sort, ranging from tigers to the bizarre and awful creatures that had resulted in the nickname “Monster Island.” Although Ricky’s mother had sadly explained that that was as much because people like his friend Ivan and his family lived in peace alongside more usual-looking folk than because of the abundance and variety of lethal mutant animals that haunted the forests, and occasionally raided farms or even the ville’s fringes.
So Ricky grew up. Peaceably, prosperously, by the standards of the time, for neither he nor his family nor anyone in the ville went hungry. And, after he found his way to his uncle’s shop, quite happily.
Until that morning.
Chapter Fourteen
J.B., Ryan noted with wry amusement, was staring at the boy across the fire as if he’d invented him.
“You’re handy with boobies, are you?” Ryan asked.
Ricky’s eyes got wide. At some point Ryan had stopped thinking of him as the captive, or even just the boy. He drank eagerly from a tin cup of water Mildred had handed him. Somewhere in there Ryan had also allowed Krysty to cut the kid’s hands free, too, although he remained hobbled.
The fact was, Ryan saw no reason to doubt his story. He reckoned Ric
ky might be holding something back. But then, he would have, and he judged this boy was a sight more scrupulous and less case-hardened than he’d been at the age. He’d been a year younger, truth to tell, when an older brother’s terrible treachery had cost him his eye, his family and the life he’d known as Baron Titus’s privileged—if never pampered—youngest son.
“Boobies?” Ricky asked doubtfully.
“He means booby traps,” Mildred said, taking back the cup with a slight twisted smile. “The kind you like to set for people chasing you. Not the other kind of boobies.”
“The birds?” Ricky asked, his big eyes round and seemingly honestly confused. Doc guffawed and slapped his thigh.
“An innocent!” he declared. “That’s a rare and wondrous thing in this age. Perhaps in any, and for a fact, he would have been so even in my far more constrained and circumspect time.”
“He didn’t grow up during the Summer of Love, that’s for sure,” Mildred said, her smile turning a bit wistful.
“So, yeah,” Ricky said. He was plainly adrift in their conversation, and clutching for the last solid plank that had floated by. “I guess. I did get pretty good with traps.”
His face knotted like a gaudy barkeep’s rag. “Not that I ever got a chance to try them out. Until today.”
* * *
OVER THE PAST YEAR OR TWO, news had come that disturbed the still waters of Nuestra Señora. A leader was rising in the hills to the northwest. A man who called himself El Guapo, “The Handsome,” and styled himself grandiosely as general. Once a simple bloody-handed bandit, he had managed to amass a large and growing force.
Now he claimed he was on a mission: to unite the island and save the people from the anarchy they suffered under.
Ricky had first heard about him about sixteen months previously, when José Morales’s mule train reached a tiny ville in the foothills. They learned of an exceptionally large gang of coldhearts, bad enough and bold enough to attack and overrun smaller villes with ease.
From then on, news of El Guapo’s conquests—and brutality—began pouring in, first from other contacts along the trade route José followed, then into Nuestra Señora itself from travelers and traders.
A few months back a handful of men and women had arrived, following the coast on a raft. Even Ricky, who didn’t know much about the sea despite living beside it, in a ville that drew much of its sustenance from it, understood that was a triple-dangerous way to travel.
The new arrivals spoke English with a funny accent that Ricky said put him in mind of Jak’s. They said El Guapo’s men had given them an ultimatum: surrender to his “government” or die. The people chose resistance.
The coldhearts had hit them in the middle of the night, torching their ville and boats and massacring them. As far as they knew, the five or six of them on the raft were the only survivors.
Although a big storm was approaching, the refugees had chosen to move on after only a couple of days. Soon, El Guapo and his sec boss, Tiburón, had come after them. And there was no withstanding their numbers, their firepower or their callous cruelty.
* * *
AS THE BOY PAUSED to gulp down a fresh cup of water, Ryan looked around at his companions. J.B. frowned slightly. Doc had his head tipped to one side. Krysty’s lips were pressed tight and colorless; her eyes were bleak. Mildred’s eyes were all big and round like a startled cat’s.
“So what happened next?” Ryan asked when the kid had oiled up his throat once more.
* * *
RICKY STATED THAT a couple of weeks ago a single-masted skiff had sailed into Nuestra Señora’s neat little anchorage. On board was a terrified tillerman, two sec men and El Guapo himself.
Ricky had seen them bracing the mayor in the ville’s plaza. He had run some cookware his uncle had mended to the García family, and was returning to the shop with a nice fresh-caught red snapper, like the ones his captors were consuming, as payment.
The crowd gathering had attracted his attention, so he hovered on the fringe to see what was going on.
Mayor Parrilla stood facing the group. The way he was sweating was unusual even for him in the midday tropical sun, and Ricky could just make out the way his eyes slid around to look everywhere but at his visitors. He was anything but happy about the confrontation.
From the mutters of adults around him, Ricky quickly understood who the visitors were. The man speaking was El Guapo’s notorious sec boss, Tiburón. One glimpse and Ricky had no question where his name, Spanish for shark, came from: his oddly shiny gray face thrust forward into some kind of muzzle that came to a point in place of a nose. When he spoke, the words came out in a strange but carrying sibilant lisp, past what looked like rows of curved yellow teeth. He was immense, over six feet tall, bare arms fat with muscle. His sloping head was either shaved clean or naturally hairless.
He recited a list of demands in Spanish: that the ville immediately and unconditionally accept the authority of something calling itself Ejército de la Unidad Nacional—EUN for short—the Army of National Unity. That they agree to trade only with communities and individuals who had likewise sworn allegiance to El Guapo, and pay a tariff on every commercial transaction plus such other taxes as deemed necessary. That they give up their arms. And that they send regular drafts of young men and women to serve the army.
That made Mayor Parrilla sweat so furiously that it visibly weighed down his famed mustache. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his fat gullet, and his eyes swept furiously right and left.
He clearly wanted to cave in. Though Ricky’s parents were avid supporters of the mayor, and his uncle disdainfully refused to discuss or even consider politics of any sort, most people, when they spoke of the mayor at all, did so in anything but flattering terms.
The band of eight leading citizens, men and women, who stood right behind the mayor fairly bristled with the weapons El Guapo wanted them to give up. Ricky decided they had to be there, not to guard against Handsome’s bandits—if they started any violence, such a small group would stand no chance of getting back to their boat alive—but to put some much-needed steel in Parrilla’s spine.
But Parrilla gathered up his nerve, puffed himself up to full height and announced in a ringing voice that he had to unconditionally refuse such outrageous demands. Nuestra Señora would never surrender to coldhearts.
At his words, El Guapo’s face had turned first maroon, then white. Laying eyes on the bandit chief for the first time, Ricky couldn’t understand why he was called the Handsome One. He was anything but. His features were distorted horribly into unnatural grooves and ridges, and he seemed to have no nose but rather a hole in his face. But even at this distance Ricky could tell that, unlike his congenitally grinning sec boss, he wasn’t a mutant. His disfigurement wasn’t the result of birth, but of some prolonged work by someone with a blade and maybe something very hot. It was scar tissue, nothing less.
Tiburón never raised that deceptively gentle voice of his. “Forever is a long time, Señor Mayor,” he said. “But it is something those who oppose us get to experience, quite soon. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”
Parrilla turned to look openly at the citizen delegation standing behind him. If they were afraid of the bandit lord and his mutie henchman they showed it by jutting their jaws and holding their blasters even higher.
“I will not,” Parrilla said to the coldhearts, in the voice of a man sentencing himself to death.
“So be it,” El Guapo declared in a ringing baritone. His voice, at least, really was handsome. He turned and stalked toward the harbor. Tiburón and the two unspeaking bodyguards followed.
When an excited Ricky brought the news to his uncle, the man’s response astonished him.
“They should have chilled them all when they had the chance,” he spat. “El Guapo and his vermin. That misguided act of mercy will come back to bite them on their asses. Bite us all on the asses. Mark my words, boy. Mark them well.”
Ricky had been too dum
bfounded to respond. In learning to fight he had wandered pretty far astray from his parents’ path of nonviolence. But they had imbued their gentle values in him. The idea of killing anyone in cold blood sickened him to the core. Even a notorious coldheart leader and his right-hand man, both of whose hands were drenched in the blood of hundreds, if the stories were halfway true.
But, despite the sensation the incident caused over the next few days with the debate whispered in workrooms and shouted in the cantina, once the coldhearts had returned to their boat and sailed back the way they came, lots of nothing happened. After a week the incident was forgotten.
* * *
THE FIRST THING that penetrated Ricky’s brain was his father’s pleading voice. “Please, take whatever you want. But spare my family, at least!”
Sitting bolt upright in the next room, the little space he shared with his sister, Ricky realized that he’d been awakened by a gunshot when others popped in quick but ragged succession from several different directions.
People screamed.
He heard strange, quiet laughter, like a snake among leaves. “We’ll take what we want no matter what, little man. But we came for your miserable lives. You dared to defy El Guapo and now must serve as lesson for everyone.”
Ricky heard his mother’s voice rise in a scream. It was cut off abruptly with a meaty, moist thud.
He flung himself up from his woven-straw pallet. As he ran for the warped plywood door, he heard a strange drawn-out gurgle. And then the unmistakable shrieks of his adored sister, Yamile.
He burst into the store’s main room. A horrific tableau froze him in his tracks. Ricky’s mother lay sprawled facedown on the planks in a pool of blood. By the front door, two bearded men held his father’s arms as the huge shark-headed mutie, Tiburón, slowly shoved a machete into his belly.
Yamile writhed in the grip of another big intruder, holding her off the floor in a bear hug from behind. A fifth man was falling with one hand clapped to a pair of scissors buried to the grips at the junction of neck and chest. A pulsing red rope of blood arched between his futile fingers.
