by James Axler
“Guessing,” Jak said.
“An ace guess,” Ryan replied.
“No guess,” Ricky said, straightening. “Triple-sure.”
He held something out to Ryan. Frowning, the one-eyed man took it.
“Cigar butt,” he said. “End still wet. So?”
“So, it is a cigarro cubano, my friend,” Ricky said. “The Cuban barons grow prime tobacco in their villes, and have their slaves roll the cigars by hand. They are prized throughout the islands. And among the whole Army of National Unity, El Guapo alone has the privilege of smoking them.”
Ryan grunted. He and his companions stopped in front of an X of big wood beams in front of the burned-out ruin of the ville chief’s house. Apparently the coldhearts had yanked it out of the ville’s only permanent structure before giving it the torch and put it to distinctive use.
Scalies died hard. The ville had died hard. And the ville boss had died hardest of all, to judge by the big nails, apparently scavvied from his burned-down home, that held palms and feet to the rude timber cross. Or the way his belly had been carved laboriously open and his guts unwound.
And then all cooked in a big bonfire, the remnants of which mingled with the overdone sausage links of scalie intestines at the foot of the cross.
“Bad,” Jak breathed.
“Triple-bad,” Ricky said.
“We’ve got to shake this ville’s dust off our boots and triple-fast,” Ryan said through a throat that seemed seared. “Before worse lands on us.”
* * *
“SO EL GUAPO’S HOT ON our heels,” J.B. said. “Dark night! That’s all we need.”
“He seems to have a positive taste for disembowelment,” Doc said thoughtfully.
“He likes to make real vivid examples,” Ricky said. “At least, that’s what the people who took his side in Nuestra Señora used to say back—back before he made an example of them. Me, I think he just gets off on hurting people.”
“Lots of barons do both,” Ryan said. “Sec bosses still more.”
Krysty frowned. It was late afternoon. They marched on looking for a spot to hole up for the night.
Her belly churned inside her. It took a lot to make her feel sick that way. She was Deathlands born and bred, after all, not some innocent plucked out of her own time and dumped in the nuke-waste like Doc and Mildred.
“He’s been following us all along, hasn’t he?” she asked. Her throat was dry, though the air along the mountain forest trail was humid.
“Since that little run-in we had with the EUN back in the valley,” Ryan said, “yeah. I reckon he has.”
“So we’ve brought the same horror down on everyone we talked to?” Krysty asked.
Ryan was walking by her side as he and Ricky told their story. Jak, who wasn’t long on talking, had prowled off into the brush to ghost along beside them and try to protect them against surprises. The trail was relatively wide, probably an old service road of some kind.
Possibly it had been paved once, which didn’t mean that much. Even though they weren’t in a rain forest and jungle setting up here, closer to the high rocky spine of the island, growth as vigorous as the trees and scrub around them would have broken up the asphalt in a couple of generations and effectively swallowed it back into Gaia. Krysty reckoned the only reason the trail still existed so distinctly was that people made regular use of it, though settlements seemed few and far between on the steep up-and-down ground. Mebbe this was a pass-through route from here to there.
Like the ones Ricky, who trotted behind them with a distinct green pallor to his skin, would’ve traveled with his father’s trade caravans.
Ryan laid a hand on her shoulder. “Regret won’t load any blasters,” he said.
His voice was gruff, but the look in his blue eye told Krysty that the brutality in the nameless little ville had hit him where he lived.
Something tickled the edge of her peripheral vision. She whipped her head around, felt her sentient hair curl up tight against her scalp as the skin tingled.
“Ryan,” she said under her breath. “Something just moved in the brush there. It didn’t make any sound but I saw it. Like a shadow.”
She felt chagrin at responding so overtly, but she was upset by the story Ryan and Ricky had just told them. It set her nerves so far on edge they acted like trip wires.
“Yeah,” he replied, as if she had just told him it was a pretty day, which it was, with a few fluffy clouds drifting aimlessly across a brilliant blue Carib sky. “We noticed something shadowing us on the way in. Even in the scrub and rocks of the hillside, not even Jak could get a square look at them.”
“Chupacabras!” Ricky blurted.
“No way,” Mildred said. “It’s daytime. They’re stealth hunters. They’re nocturnal.”
“But the people back at that one ville said that when they got upset enough, they come out in the day,” J.B. observed. He was walking the trail with his shotgun in his hands and a thoughtful look behind the round lenses of his glasses.
“What would they be that upset about?”
“If strangers were coming into their home territory,” Ryan said, “that’d probably rile them up.”
“You think they really do live, uh, where we’re going?” Mildred demanded.
Ryan shrugged.
“Evidence is looking strong that that’s the case, Millie,” J.B. said.
“Whatever they are, there’s a bunch of them,” Ryan said. “And they’re working together pretty tight, keeping close tabs on us, but not so close Jak can get a clear look at one of them.”
“That sounds like intelligent behavior,” Mildred protested. “They’re just animals.”
“Clever animals, dear lady,” Doc said from behind her.
Beaded plaits swinging, Mildred turned her head to give him what Krysty thought of as the fish eye. “Doc,” she said, “you can accuse me of being many things. But ‘dear’ isn’t one of them. Not in that sense, anyway.”
He drew himself up to his full gawky height. “It is a figure of speech,” he said in tones of injured dignity.
“Wolf and dog packs manage to communicate pretty well, coordinate their stalking and attacks,” Krysty pointed out. “As the scorpion dogs did with us. And when we ran up against them before, the chupacabras showed some pretty unsettling signs they might be smarter than regular animals.”
“Why aren’t they attacking us, then?” Mildred asked.
“If they get hungry enough,” he said, “or pissed enough, they will.”
“If I may be forgiven for speaking bluntly,” Doc announced, “do we not find ourselves in danger of ignoring the rhinoceros in the sitting room?”
“Speak plainly, old man,” Mildred said, annoyed.
“I shall endeavor to do so, then. Must we not assume that El Guapo now operates with as much knowledge of our destination as we ourselves have?”
“Well,” Mildred said, “he can’t know what we’re looking for.”
“He’ll figure it out,” Ricky said, then added almost cheerfully, “I have!”
Everybody looked at him. His eyes got wide.
“How do you mean, boy?” J.B. asked in a deceptively gentle voice. Krysty knew he was never more dangerous than when he spoke softly. And no poisonous snake was more lethal than J. B. Dix when he figured there was chilling to be done.
“Well,” Ricky said, drawing the word out. Clearly he sensed he was in a very narrow place here. “It’s like this—you want off the island, right?”
“Yeah.” Ryan clipped the word off.
“So, what do you need? You lost your ride when you got here. Señor Dix blew it up with all the pirates aboard in his wonderful trap.”
“Well, not quite all of them,” J.B. said. But he looked pleased nevertheless.
“You need treasure!” Ricky caroled. “You got to buy passage to the mainland. Or mebbe even buy a boat. You need jack and trade goods. Valuable stuff, not bulky.
“So, where can you find such a t
reasure, of portable yet precious items, all gathered together? Where but in a cache of predark goods, which the Old Guys hid when they saw the end was coming? And now I know what brought you here. Clearly you learned of this treasure, and that it was worth taking fearful risks to possess it.”
Ryan turned his face forward, sweeping his blue eye across Krysty’s emerald gaze as he did. She thought the hint of a smile quirked up the edges of his lips.
“You read us like a book, kid,” he said. “What now?”
“Well,” Ricky said, puffing out his chest. “I hope I have served my new friends well enough you’ll think me worthy to share in the treasure that you find. If you can take it from El Guapo, of course!”
“Big ‘if,’” Mildred muttered.
“You’ve earned consideration, yeah,” Ryan said. “Tell you what. Any plunder we find, we’ll let you grab a share right off the top.”
Krysty looked at him with relief flooding like sunlight into her body. If they found treasure—and there could be an abundance of scavvy in the redoubt, guarded by secrecy as well as the chupacabras who seemed to nest there—Ryan would be willing to let the kid have all of it. If they could just get to the mat-trans unit and jump out while he was filling his pack and pockets with the loot.
Then he could think whatever the nuke he wanted to. But he wouldn’t have any inkling of where his new friends had gone off to so suddenly.
She felt a bit of a pang over that. He’d saved their lives a couple of times over. It would be hard to abandon him.
“But first,” Ricky said gravely, “you must take it from El Guapo.”
“That’s if the ville boss talked,” Mildred said.
“Wouldn’t you?” the boy asked.
She widened her eyes and tipped her head to the side. But she said stubbornly, “Scalies are tough. We know that as well as anybody.”
“Somebody would’ve talked before they got chilled,” Ryan said. “Seems to me like this Handsome dude likes to torture friends and family as a way of getting to the holdouts.”
Ricky nodded. “He has that reputation, sí.”
“We got to assume the worst, in a case like this.” J.B. shook his head gravely. “That’s just plain sense.”
“You’re right, J.B.,” Ryan said. “El Guapo’s going to stop at nothing to get his hands on loot like this. He’s a man with big dreams. However many soldiers he’s got, he’s going to need more. And that takes jack to buy them, and gear to outfit them.”
“Is your sense, then, that he’s going to follow us to the, ah, the treasure trove, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked.
Ryan shook his head. “No. He doesn’t strike me as the type to bide his time when he doesn’t have to. He’s an action guy.”
Which was, Krysty knew, an assessment Ryan was as well qualified as anyone to make. He was a man who preferred action to waiting, and was good at taking action.
“Anyway,” Ryan said, “what does he need to follow us for now? Like J.B. says, we got to assume he knows what we know. And it’s not like he won’t have people who know the ground. At least as well as our guide here does.”
Ricky set his lips briefly before admitting, “My father and I never came this far into the mountains of the interior together. I know nothing more about the area than you do.”
“You’ve been a big help to us, though,” Krysty said, “helping us get this far, and getting folks to open up to us.”
The boy beamed at that.
“How do we handle it from here, Ryan?” J.B. asked. “Fast? Or cautious?”
An eruption of blasterfire, so loud it sounded as if it came from everywhere at once, answered the armorer’s question.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“That answers that,” J.B. muttered as they broke for cover to both sides of the trail.
Ryan dived to the left. He hauled out his SIG-Sauer handblaster in midleap and was shooting when he crashed into a bush covered in waxy oval leaves.
He hated to fire blind. That was the same as wasting ammo—most times.
But he heard Trader talking to him in his mind, clearly as if his mentor were standing right beside him and shaking his head. You walk into an ambush, boy, your survival depends on your ambushers not being competent. Since they were smart enough to mousetrap you in the first place, you can work out the rest yourself.
As, indeed, Ryan had. And what he’d worked out—before he and Trader parted ways, in fact—was that when the enemy had you locked up in his sights, anything you could give him to think about other than chilling your stupe ass worked on your side. And not getting his own hide punctured was a thing that might tend to distract an ambusher.
Ryan had no idea if he hit anything but trees before he was getting whipped by skinny branches and falling hard on a ground just barely cushioned by a mulch of rotting leaves and twigs. Odds were better than good he hadn’t. He did see a couple of muzzle flashes blazing from a place where the road turned right to pass around a hill about twenty yards ahead. He thought the shooters might be sheltering behind a fallen log. One flare was the unmistakable flicker of a full-auto blaster, some kind of AK by the deep, choppy roar.
He heard cracks from across the trail and behind as his friends opened up. He hoped they’d all gotten clear. There was no time to check.
Something had made the ambushers jump the gun and open up before the group walked right up to their concealed blaster muzzles, where even half-assed peasant conscripts could barely miss them. And he suspected this bunch was a higher cut of coldheart beef than that.
He rolled away from the trail. Jamming his handblaster back in its holster he squirmed his longblaster off his shoulder and into a firing position. He could just see where the blasters’ flashes continued to blossom ahead through the leaves.
Ryan tried to sight on one through the ghost ring. Of course, when he fired he’d give his own position away, but if he could cut their odds by even one shooter, that’d be worth the risk.
From somewhere ahead and off to the left he heard the sharp bark of a .357 handblaster. He actually saw some of the flash past a rough-barked tree bole. Somebody screamed and thrashed behind the moss-grown log.
Another figure reared up, swinging a remade Kalashnikov right, to bear on the sudden flank attack. Ryan twitched his sight onto the shape and fired. The figure fell away out of sight. The one-eyed man thought the longblaster dropped from his victim’s hands, but couldn’t be sure.
A person ran up the road, yelling. A blast of full-auto fire drowned the wordless battle cry. It was from J.B.’s Uzi machine pistol, which he was shooting from the hip in ripsaw bursts.
Then Jak launched a sudden attack on the ambushers’ right flank and changed the game completely. From having the hammer hand, the coldhearts were suddenly caught in a crack themselves. Ryan knew from his own brutal experience there was no nastier kick in the balls than that reversal.
The ambushers may have been more than grunts dragged out of the cane fields and bean farms a couple of days ago by EUN “recruiters,” but they’d had balls of vanadium steel not to flee from a madman with an autoblaster and an unexpected assailant who fired up their asses from a totally unexpected direction.
Ryan stayed where he was, looking for targets of opportunity to help his friends. As crazy and fast as J.B.’s move was, Ryan knew his friend and right-hand man seldom did anything without careful calculation. J.B.’s keen tactical eye and quick insight had told him this was the best shot they had.
He’d been right. An ambusher leaped up without a weapon in hand, and raced away in pure panic. Ryan swung his longblaster right to take him down, but another three-round burst ripped out from J.B.’s stubby machine pistol. Ryan saw dust fly from the back of the guy’s shirt. He screamed as dark blotches appeared on the fabric, clutched at his kidneys and fell.
Jak ran up to the log where the ambushers had lain in wait. Fire blossomed from the barrel of his big stainless-steel Python, straight down.
Voices began calling from off
to the west, from behind where Jak had crept up on the ambushers. They sounded pissed.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “Time to power out of here! Head east, everybody, now!”
Ryan saw that Doc, Mildred, the new kid and Krysty were all fit to fight and had a head start on him.
He didn’t look left at Jak and J.B. He knew what they were doing.
Same thing he was: running for their lives.
* * *
“SO,” RYAN SAID. “Burnin’ ammo to chill the wounded?”
Lying nearby him between some purplish head-sized lava rocks that sprouted bushes like bad hair plugs, Mildred frowned. She was squinting at the far slope, west across the heavily wooded valley. As if her unassisted eyes were going to spot anything Ryan’s big longeyes wouldn’t.
They had fled east, away from the second force of ambushers. That was predictable, but necessary. But, contrary to Mildred’s intuition, rather than doing the sensible thing and heading north toward where their goal allegedly lay, Ryan had headed the party south, adding perhaps a half mile to their total journey. But in a race against the EUN, and adding in a delay to shake off pursuit, that could make all the difference in whether they reached the lost redoubt first, or El Guapo did.
“Didn’t want any of them coming back to life suddenly,” the armorer said, “and blasting us in the back. I didn’t have time to check them close, so I figured I’d just make sure. Reckon Jak saw things the same way—passing up a chance to finish off a coldheart with his blade, like he did.”
“Shame.” Jak’s voice floated down from above, as soft and colorless as ash.
“So why didn’t we head north while we put distance between us and the bad guys?” Mildred demanded, unable to keep it in anymore. “Why did we wind up going the wrong damn way?”
“You may not believe this, Mildred,” Ryan said, “but I thought of that, too. Right off the mark. We could use the opportunity to slip at least a hair closer to our target. Simple. Easy. Obvious.”
