by James Axler
Next day, they had Jak riding scout with Besup. And when they spoke to him or of him they used an old familiar name—White Wolf.
Burning Man waved a NOMEX-clad arm out the driver’s window of the lead wag. The signal quickly passed back through the ranks and the convoy slowed to a crawl. Behind Jak and Besop’s lead, the entire procession turned onto the shoulder, then rattled and rumbled off the interstate, heading overland, in the direction of a pair of barren, rounded hilltops about a quarter mile away.
They stopped in the saddle between the twin hills and began to set up camp for the night, tethering horses and war dogs, hiding the wags and carts under camouflaged tarp shelters.
Ryan and his companions, grim-faced and caked with dirt, bent over their weapons, cleaning them and checking their readiness while it was still light enough to see. As they worked over their gear, warriors came around carrying jugs of water. Ryan used his first sip to wash the grit out of his mouth. He spit pale brown onto the ground, took another mouthful and rinsed again before gulping a drink.
Unlike the night before, no one was building camp-fires—not now that they were within range of a high-altitude night recon by the she-hes’ gyroplane. There was none of the singing and chanting of the previous night, either. The war dogs didn’t bark; the horses didn’t whinny or nicker. Sound carried a long way in the high desert.
When the grub was distributed, the companions ate their antelope jerky and cold beans in silence. While they were chewing and chewing, trying to soften the hard, stringy meat so it could be swallowed, Burning Man stepped over to them.
“To keep down the dust we’re going to have to go much slower tomorrow,” he said. “Don’t want the gyroplane to catch us stretched out on the plain and give it an easy daylight shot.”
“What about an infrared scan?” Mildred said. “We know the battlesuits have that capability, so the aircraft has got to have it, too. Even if we’re not raising dust, we’re throwing off a heat signature.”
“Temperatures midday should mask that,” the baron said. “Besides, I can’t see our enemies burning fuel on unnecessary, long-distance surveillance with their one and only gyro. Sitting in the middle of the massif, they’ve got to believe they’re safe. They know the sorry state of any military gear in these parts. The reason they’re camped at Ground Zero isn’t because of outside threats from the likes of us, it’s to speed up the repowering of their batteries. As soon as they have enough stored fuel to run their wags and power their weapons, they can get on with their conquest. Come morning, we’ll cut across country to reach the ruins at Slake City. We should be at the southern edge of the glacier by tomorrow evening.”
“But you told us there’s nothing left of the old she-he base there,” Ryan said. “If that’s the case, why are we swinging so far south? It’s got to add an extra half day to the trip. We could save a lot of time if we started across the massif sooner.”
“That’s not an option,” Burning Man said. “There’s only one road cut through to Ground Zero, and we’ve got to use it. Even the ghost warriors can’t break trail on the nukeglass at night.”
“We’re making the assault at night?” J.B. said in disbelief. “By rad-blasted starlight? Over that terrain?”
“Crossing the glacier on that road is wicked dangerous even in daytime,” Mildred chimed in. “We know because we’ve gone that route. The road bed isn’t just crudely cut, it’s unstable. The ground opens up in cracks without warning. Some of the cracks are big enough to swallow the entire convoy. We’ve seen whole sections of road slough off into deep chasms. And there are landslides of razor-edged boulders. They either crush you flat or cut you in two.”
“To get into position to attack the site we have to cover eight miles of dead zone,” Burning Man countered. “We have to do it at night, and on foot. We can’t use wags because the engine noise would give us away, and the weight would increase the danger of road cave-ins. For the same reasons, we’re leaving the horses and the carts behind. We’ll take along the pack of war dogs, of course. And we’ll be carrying all the ammunition and explosives on our backs.”
J.B. shook his head. “We don’t have night-vision gear. If we had a full moon overhead, it might just be doable, but without a moon…”
“I don’t see that we really have a choice here,” Ryan said grimly. “We can’t count on the slaves at Ground Zero to fight on our side. This time they might decide to run and hide to save their skins. If we don’t do something unexpected, if we don’t take the she-hes by surprise, they will chill us all, and in short order.”
“He’s right,” Krysty said to J.B. “Surprise is our only advantage. Without it, we don’t stand a chance.”
“What chance are we going to have if the road opens up under us in the dark or we slide off it into a bottomless pit?” J.B. said. “One wrong step and we’ll lose most of our fighters before we get anywhere near Ground Zero.”
“You’re underestimating the ghost warriors,” Burning Man said. “Believe me, you haven’t seen the half of what they can do.”
J.B.’s persistent scowl told Ryan that his old friend wasn’t convinced, and he had good reason to be skeptical. They didn’t know much of anything about the men they were going to be fighting alongside, and on whose skills their lives were going to depend. It was a state of affairs that needed to be rectified, and at once.
“You never told us what happened to you after you left Moonboy,” Ryan reminded the baron. “How did all this come about—you, the Bannock-Shoshone, the face paint? If it wasn’t nuked, what happened to Rupertville?”
“It’s a long story,” Burning Man said. “Too long to tell standing up.” He took a seat cross-legged on the ground and gestured for the others to sit down as well.
“As I said before,” he said after they had all gathered around him, “the predark ville on the other side of the river missed the worst effects of the nukecaust. Its isolation and distance from any high-value targets are what saved it from firestorm, shock waves and heavy fallout. Sometime after nukeday, the survivor families of Rupertville banded together. Organized in a loose, paramilitary fashion, they started taking and keeping slaves to work their crops to maximize agricultural production in a world where fuel was suddenly scarce.
“At first they went after members of the Bannock-Shoshone tribe, primarily because they were close by, and didn’t have the means to repell well-armed attacks or rescue their loved ones after they were taken. The militiamen bred field slaves in fenced prison compounds on the edge of the ville—and not just for their own use. They sold and traded off the excess laborers, mostly to the eastern baronies. Their biggest profit was in selling people, not tomatoes and peppers.
“About seventy-five years ago, they began using tribal prisoners to scout out and hunt down human trade goods, new slaves for their masters. Anybody and everybody passing through the territory was fair game. Back in those days the warriors had to obey because their families were held hostage, under threat of death in the Rupertville slave pens. The Bannock-Shoshone raiding parties traveled south and east, and they sometimes even stole back the slaves that had just been sold to the barons.
“When I showed up at the foot of the Highway 84 bridge, fresh out of Moonboy, some of the militia were waiting on horseback behind the roadblock to greet me. They all had their blasters leveled. The head man was there, too. They didn’t refer to him as baron. He was called General Tidwell. I assume the title was a carryover from the militia’s early days. He was a tall, stringy bastard with scarred knuckles, close-set black eyes, weather-seamed, grizzle-stubbled cheeks, and what few teeth he had were streaked and stained brown.
“Old Tidwell’s eyes lit up when he saw my tribarrel blaster and ATV. Right away, he wanted to know where he could get his hands on more of the same, said he had plenty of slaves and joy juice to trade. When I told him there weren’t any more weapons or ATVs, he invited me to cross the bridge free of charge and offered me his ville’s hospitality, which I guessed i
ncluded taking my gear and dumping my corpse in the river. There were a dozen militiamen spread out behind the barricade with rifles aimed, and I wasn’t wearing my battle armor. Even with the tribarrel, I couldn’t stand and fight them and hope to win. And they would have had me cold if I’d tried to turn a one-eighty with the ATV and make a run for it. Since I had no choice, I played along. I even thanked the general for his kindness.
“After we crossed the bridge—them on their horses, me on the ATV—and we entered the ville, the whole entourage made a right turn toward the central square. Figuring it was my chance, I broke away from them, throttle pinned. I thought I was going to make it free and clear, but a volley of rifle shots rained down from behind and blew out the back tires on the ATV. I crashed it hard and flipped it, which put me on foot against men on horses, with no cover from the hail of their rifle fire.
“Long story short, they chased me through the streets, between houses, over fences, down alleys, firing away at will. It was like a game to them, especially because I couldn’t slow down to return fire without getting hit. I ended up on the front lawn of a tiny predark house beside the slave pens. As I ran inside, the slaves were all ducking for cover behind the perimeter wire. With bullets shattering the windows and splintering the door I crawled on my belly, trying to find a bearing wall for cover. General Tidwell and his militiamen had me dead to rights. Surrounded. Backed into a corner.”
The baron paused for breath, and instead of picking the story right up again, he let the silence drag on.
And on.
Ryan caught himself leaning forward. He could see he wasn’t alone. His companions were leaning forward, too. Even J.B. seemed transfixed by the drama of the tale.
“Old Tidwell,” Burning Man finally resumed, “was the original Rupertville pyro-fucking-maniac. He collected predark glass bottles that he liked to make into wag-fuel bombs. I guess you could say it was his hobby. Wag fuel was one of the things they got from the east in trade for human beings. Since the general knew he had me trapped, he ordered his men to stop shooting and start throwing fire bombs through the windows and onto the roof. The place was ablaze in a couple of minutes. To escape the flames and smoke I cut a hole in the floor with my laser rifle and dropped down into the dirt crawl space, which was only about two feet high and twenty-by-twenty feet across.
“Over the crackling and hissing of the fire, I could hear Tidwell and his men laughing and yelling taunts at me. Smoke and burning fuel poured into the crawlspace through the gaps in the floor planking, and fire was already curling around some of the joists. Then a fuel bomb must have shattered on the floor right above me, because liquid fire rained down on my head. As I rolled around in the dirt trying to put it out, more bombs exploded, more fire rained down. I heard someone screaming their lungs out—then I realized it was me and I was pissing myself. I could smell my own flesh burning.”
The baron paused again, only this time not for breath. He seemed momentarily frozen, caught up in the memory. His eyes suddenly lost the spark of life. Ryan recognized that flat effect, that thousand-yard stare: Burning Man was reliving in excruciating detail the horror that had melted half of his face. Then the instant passed, and the cruel light winked back on in his eyes.
“Something very strange happened to me in the crawl space,” he confessed. “I guess you could say my brain overloaded and short-circuited. Rolling around down there in the dirt, I was struck by the fact that I was about to die for a couple of pieces of battle gear, one of which was already wrecked, and the other soon to run out of power. After leaping universes, I was going to die a totally pointless death. That realization and the agony from flames I couldn’t smother sent me into a blind rage. Suddenly the pain was gone. All I felt was the driving need to get some payback.
“I kicked out a screen foundation vent and came out from under that burning shack with my hair and head still on fire. I caught the militiamen flatfooted, with their weapons either holstered or lowered, and bunched up like sheep in the middle of the street. Before they could react, I green-lighted the bastards. With one sweep of the tribarrel, I cut every one of them in two, and dropped them, legless, armless, thrashing and screaming into the road. Then I stepped up close and slow-motion lasered off the top of Tidwell’s head just above the eyebrows. By the time I was done sawing up the rest of his sec men, the tribarrel’s power cell was empty. That’s when I let the slaves out of the pens. From the looks on their faces as I stepped up to the wire, they must have thought the devil himself had come to claim them. I guess I was still smoking like a chimney.
“Right after that, I collapsed from my burns and went into a coma. I found out later that the slaves went berserk after I let them loose. Seeing their opportunity for some retribution at long last, they went through Rupertville, torching it street by street, burned it to the ground, and sent the villefolk running for the horizon with whatever they could carry. The freed slaves chased them down and slaughtered them all. Nothing I could do to stop it, even if I’d wanted to. I was in a coma for more than a month. When I came out of it with their help, everything had changed. There was a new settlement under construction on the other side of the river. Most of the slaves who weren’t Bannock-Shoshone had already gone back to wherever they were stolen from. And I was a celebrity.
“After I’d recovered, they made me their leader and gave me the name ‘Burning Man.’ I tried to make the most of it. That’s why I put together the flamethrower. There’s nothing like a signature weapon and a half-melted face to strike unreasoning fear into your enemies. Fairly simple piece of machinery to assemble—nozzle, igniter, storage tanks—although pressurizing the wag fuel can be a bit dicey.”
“And the white paint?” Krysty asked.
“That was the Bannock-Shoshones’ idea. I had nothing to do with it. The way they tell it, the paint signifies their spiritual connection to ancestors who suffered and died under the Rupertville militia, and to those who died long before nukeday, the victims of other invading oppressors. Those who survived the slave camps see themselves as living ghosts who walk this world and the next simultaneously, whose spirits abide in both realms. They attribute the skills they’ve acquired in the process of hunting humans for three-quarters of a century—moving unseen, without sound, tracking their quarry through the darkest night—to this spiritual relationship, which they believe was born out of their agony and their triumph. I’m the religion’s poster boy, having ‘died’ before their eyes, and then returned to life while they watched.”
“Given the characteristically pale skins of Western Europeans, there’s a certain irony to the facial decoration,” Doc said.
“If not an outright mockery,” Mildred said. “Are they aware of that?”
Burning Man smiled with the functional side of his face. “The Bannock-Shoshone are a subtle people with a finely honed sense of humor,” he said. “After the overthrow of the militia, they shifted the focus of the local economy from slave trade to self-sustaining agriculture. We’re no longer dependent on outsiders for anything except wag fuel. And that’s the way we like it. Because our nearest neighbors are so far away, we’ve only had to fight off the odd scouting party. Barons east of us want no part of us because of the distances involved—it’s too difficult and too costly to resupply their forces—and because they know our reputation for fieldcraft, night-fighting and short tempers.”
The baron rose to his feet and stretched his arms and legs. “Try to get some rest while you can,” he told them. “For sure there won’t be any sleeping tomorrow night.” Then he turned and left them to get on with it.
Ryan didn’t ask J.B. if Burning Man’s story had made him feel any better about the attack plan. He could see from the unhappy expression it hadn’t. That didn’t stop his old friend from speaking his mind after Burning Man was out of earshot.
“Ghosts walking the earth?” J.B. scoffed. “Spirit powers? I know a load of bullshit when I smell it.”
“That’s just the only way they have t
o explain what’s happened to them,” Mildred assured him. “They’re trying to make sense of gifts they don’t understand. It’s much more likely that the night sight, superhearing and other acute senses are the result of a unique mutation brought on by nukeday, and refined over generations of the militia’s selective breeding program.”
“So far it’s all talk, isn’t it?” J.B. said. “And from a droolie I wouldn’t trust to shell peas. Once we get out in the middle of the glacier, in the pitch-dark, it’ll be too late to take any of it back.”
“Not all talk,” Jak insisted. “Seen it. Warriors move like shadows. Follow trail where no sign.”
J.B. folded his arms across his chest and shrugged.
Ryan wondered if his old friend was still miffed because the warriors had taken him by surprise. J.B. wasn’t used to being so thoroughly bested by anyone.
If pride was the problem, he had about twenty-four hours to get over it.
In the failing light and gathering chill, Ryan and the companions spread out their bedrolls on the ground. Below them, the saddle between the hills was already dotted with curled-up bodies.
A RUSH OF COLD AIR against his back jarred Ryan awake. He turned and opened his eye. Krysty was sitting up. In the process she had lifted the edge of their shared bedroll, letting in the night chill. He guessed it was still four hours until dawn.
“What’s wrong?” he asked her gently.
“Can’t sleep, lover,” Krysty replied.
“Is it what J.B. said? Is that what’s worrying you? I don’t know why but a very large bug seems to have crawled up his butt.”
“Of course I’m worried,” she told him. “But thinking about crossing the nukeglass tomorrow isn’t what’s keeping me up—it’s that queen bitch, Dredda Otis Trask.”
“What about her?” Ryan asked, somewhat at a loss.
“I’ve tried to forget what she did to me at Slake City,” Krysty said. “Because she was so far out of reach, with no hope of her ever coming back, remembering how she violated me seemed pointless. But now there’s a chance—maybe even a good chance—she might have returned to Ground Zero.”
