by James Axler
She shifted around the tree, finding a new position that offered a less constricted view of the clearing below. They were down to all or nothing.
RYAN SHOVED HIMSELF to his feet as the tree trunk suspended from steel cables swung back in its trajectory. The huge block of wood slammed into two other men who'd been missed the first time. They flew almost thirty feet with the impact, and didn't move again after that.
Doc came up with the Le Mat blaster and fired a round of scattergun pellets that knocked a handful of men reeling. Then he went to cover.
On the second time through, the trailing coils of steel cable caught more hands and arms. It also smashed into the converted horse-drawn wag. A horse whinnied in pain and terror as it struggled to get up.
Standing beside a tree, Ryan picked his targets coolly and fired with rapid accuracy, choosing the biggest part of the men's bodies to hit. The gang members went down in succession.
When he'd fired the Steyr empty, Ryan left it by the tree. If he survived, he could get the long blaster later. He drew the SIG-Sauer P-226 and rushed forward, gaining ground and assuming a new position that caught the gang unaware.
Rising to one knee, he fired three times and cut a man down in midstride. His combat senses caught some movement to his left. He pulled around as a line of bullets chopped into the ground where he had been.
Liberty stood beside a tree and levered another shell, then fired again. "You're a dead man, One-Eye!"
Ryan shoved the SIG-Sauer forward, facing the .3O-.3O's barrel as it swung toward him. There was no time to move, and he knew Liberty had him dead in his sights. He squeezed the trigger, expecting to feel a bullet hit him in the next heartbeat.
Instead, Liberty's head snapped back, his skull opening up and loosing brain matter over the trees behind him. The corpse dropped in an uncoordinated tangle of limbs.
Turning back to the clearing, Ryan saw one of the gang members spin away from Doc. A load of buckshot had taken the man's face from him, along with his life.
Nothing moved out in the clearing.
Ryan lifted his voice. "Jak!"
"Done," the albino called back, letting them know the three men who had disappeared from sight no longer mattered.
"J.B.?" Ryan wiped perspiration from his forehead before it had a chance to drip down into the open socket behind the eye patch and burn.
"I think we got them all," the Armorer replied.
Ryan took a fresh magazine for the SIG-Sauer and changed it with the partially depleted one. "Cover me."
"Give me plenty of room to shoot around."
Ryan stood and moved from behind concealment. He kept the 9 mm blaster in front of him and moved slowly. The muzzle tracked across the scattered dead men, looking for signs of life among the mangled bodies.
Ryan only found two men alive. One of them still had the breath to beg for his life. Ryan didn't waste a bullet on either of them, instead taking a knife from a nearby corpse and slitting their throats. He intended to take his group into Hazard, and he didn't mean to leave a chance of any vengeance coming up from behind them.
The converted wag rattled from a faint movement. At first Ryan thought it was the only surviving horse feebly kicking out its life. The wag had turned over, coming to a rest across the horse's legs. But when he looked into the horse's eyes and saw only death reflected there, he knew something else caused the motion.
"I got somebody still alive in the wag," Ryan called back to J.B.
"I can put a few rounds into it," the Armorer offered.
Ryan directed his voice at the wag. "Is that what it's going to take?"
"Don't kill me," a voice said. "Mebbe I can help you."
"Looking around at things," Ryan replied, "I don't get the feeling we're in a spot to need a lot of help."
"Are you planning on going into Hazard?"
Ryan crouched and looked under the overturned wag. The dwarf, Albert, stared back at him, eyes wide and frightened. "And if we are?" Ryan asked.
"The folks in the ville are going to wonder what happened to Liberty and his bunch. They might not like it if you just come strolling into the ville. But if I go with you, I can tell them Liberty said it was okay."
"The way I hear it," Ryan said, "the people of Hazard have been letting Liberty do their chilling for a while now. Could be there's not many in the ville who'd care to stand up against us."
The dwarf licked his lips, laying his final ace on the line where they could both get a good look at it. "You want to take that chance when you could take me with you and be sure?"
Ryan grinned in spite of the situation. The little man had a lot of nerve. "How do I know you and Liberty weren't related or something? Mebbe you'll try to stick a knife in my guts as soon as you get the chance."
"Me and Liberty related?" The dwarf had to strain to make a rude noise, but he succeeded after a dry-lipped moment. "And I got all the looks. He kept me around to torment, mister. A few miles to the north, there was another ville just setting up. I was part of that ville. Some of us had a disagreement with a local baron, so we pulled up stakes and tried to make it on our own. Except we hadn't counted on Hazard being so territorial. Twenty miles away, we were, and the ville elders decided we were still too close. They were afraid we were going to overhunt the game in this area."
Ryan knew that was a serious worry for a ville like Hazard, which was still living off the land.
"They warned us to move away last year, but by then winter was coming on," the dwarf continued. "We asked them to give us till the spring. Instead, they sent Liberty and his bunch of coldhearts to burn down our tents and the two permanent buildings we'd started before we talked to them. When they rode out of the ville, not many people were left alive. I don't think the ones that escaped survived. Winter hit the next week, and the land around here can be bastard inhospitable during those times. Thirty-seven people, and all of them wiped out. No, sir, I don't have any love for the folk of that ville."
Ryan stood, not presenting his back to the dwarf in case Albert tried for a last-minute escape. He spotted Krysty coming down from the hill.
"I believe him, lover," she said.
Ryan nodded. "Might be an idea to have a guide in the ville." He took the panga from her. "Least until we get situated and figure out where we're going from here."
"Personally, my dear Ryan," Doc said as he walked over and dusted off the tails of his frock coat, "I think we could all enjoy a few hours respite after our trip to North Carolina."
"Yeah." The one-eyed man turned to the upended wag. "Come on out of there."
After a brief hesitation, Albert clambered out from under the wag. He made certain to keep his hands in view, his stubby arms not allowing him to shove his fingertips much up past his head. "You won't regret this."
"I don't have much in the way of regrets," Ryan said. "And I aim to keep it that way." He scanned the corpses. "Okay, let's see what we can salvage."
Chapter Three
The companions took their time, and the warm air in the clearing filled with the stench of the corpses. J.B. and Jak set up security along the perimeter on Ryan's orders.
When it came to scavenging, Albert proved invaluable. The little man had ridden with the gang long enough that he knew the hiding places most of the dead men had in their clothing.
Albert paused beside a fat man with half his face missing. "This is Gustuvson," the dwarf said, grimacing. "I know for a fact he keeps a pouch with gold teeth shoved up his ass. He steals them from corpses they've found in areas around Hazard. Liberty was always one to poke and prod in new areas, and they found a few places back up in some caves that nobody's been to before."
"How do you know about the pouch?" Dean asked. The boy's dark hair and burning blue gaze clearly marked him as Ryan's son. He ran his hands along the dead man he was searching, his nimble fingers plucking away loose cartridges, as well as an oilskin containing tobacco leaves.
"I was with Liberty's group a couple months back when
they found a new pocket in the mountains they were searching," Albert replied. "Quakes run through this area pretty regularly, and they shove up new stuff to the surface all the time. He took a couple teeth from a dead woman in that building, knocked them out with a rock because he was in a hurry, and stuck them in that pouch he's so proud of. What he didn't know was there was some residual radiation in that gold. By the time he found out, he had running sores in his asshole. He didn't get any slack from the rest of the group for being so stupe."
Dean grinned, thinking how stupe the man had really been. Nobody with any sense at all had anything to do with metals in a rad-hot area because they picked up radiation first and held on to it longest. Especially the precious metals, like gold. "Hey, Dad."
Ryan looked up from the man he searched. "Yeah."
"Do you think Albert ought to cut those gold teeth out of that dead man's ass?" Dean opened the oilskin of tobacco and inhaled the deep, heady scent of it.
"No."
The dwarf sighed in relief, then released the fat man. He pushed up, then walked to the next corpse.
"Doc," Dean called, "I got some tobacco here."
"Ah, lad, you are a prince," the old man replied.
Dean tossed the oilskin to him, then turned his attention back to the man, who had carried a nearly full box of 9 mm shells that Dean knew would fit his father's pistol, J.B.'s Uzi and his own Browning Hi-Power. It wasn't enough, but it was a start. He kept searching.
RYAN SURVEYED the gear they'd taken from the corpses. Spread out on the blanket Doc had used, it didn't look like much. But Ryan knew they were in a lot better shape than they'd been in after returning to the mat-trans unit under the hospital in North Carolina.
"Didn't get any shells for the M-4000," J.B. announced. He squatted next to Ryan with the shotgun across his knees. He was a wiry man scarcely more than five and a half feet tall. He kept his hair cut short and wore a battered fedora.
"They didn't seem to favor shotguns," Ryan said.
"Our bad luck." J.B. removed his steel-rimmed glasses and wiped them clean on his shirt. "Hey, Albert."
The dwarf looked up, still nervous in spite of the fact that the companions had let him live for the past forty minutes. "Yeah."
"Hazard got anything in the way of an armory?" J.B. asked.
"They got Tinker Phillips and his boys," Albert replied.
"What kind of hardware do they deal in?"
"He kept Liberty and his group supplied. Tinker's pretty good with most weapons. He's got a shop hooked up next to the blacksmith's. His brother runs that, but they share the forge. Out here in this country, a man needs a blaster and a horse."
Ryan silently agreed with that. He'd watched over the nearby surroundings since the ambush and had seen no signs of any interest.
"We can go back to the redoubt, lover," Krysty said. She stood on the other side of Ryan. Dean and Mildred were taking care of security for the moment. "Mebbe make another jump and take our chances there. Or we can avoid Hazard altogether and live off the land."
"With either of those choices," Ryan said, "we need to be better equipped than we are now to handle ourselves. The ville's the only sure way to get the things we need to restock. We're almost flat out of self-heats and ring-pulls, and if we can't eat and drink when we need to travel light and quiet for a while, we're in trouble."
"I know."
"Ville's best bet," Jak agreed. He sifted through the assortment of knives the gang had carried. Most he threw away, but some of them he saved.
Ryan knew from experience that the albino was interested only in the blades he could break apart and use to make more of the leaf-bladed throwing knives he'd lost in North Carolina. There wasn't always time to recover them during the heat of battle.
He pushed himself to his feet as a dark shadow skated across the ground in front of him. When he looked up, he saw another crow had joined the ones that patiently waited in the trees above.
He checked the sun. After the jump into Kentucky, he'd adjusted his chron according to darkfall the first night, but he didn't know how accurate the time was. "Let's finish it, get something to eat and get on the road."
He raised his voice. "Albert."
"Yeah," the dwarf replied.
"The way I got it figured, the ville's about a couple hours away on foot."
"Mebbe a little less if you really stretch your legs."
"How do they feel about people coming into the ville at night?"
"As long as you're with me," the little man said, "I reckon you'll be fine."
"Then that's what we'll do." Ryan took up a portion of the gear they'd salvaged and hid it away in his clothing. He'd filled his extra magazines with the 9 mm ammo they'd found, as had Dean and the Armorer. The .38 Special ammo used in Krysty's and Mildred's weapons had proved plentiful, and J.B. had been the first to point out the cartridges had been reloads. Even before Albert had told them about the gunshop in the ville, they'd had an idea. There hadn't been too many .357 cartridges for Jak's blaster, but the cylinder easily accepted the .38 cartridges. They just packed less bite for the change.
They left the dead where they lay and went up on the hill. Crows dropped on the bodies before the companions even made it out of the clearing.
"Sure made a hell of a mess in these trees," J.B. commented as they hunkered down at the crest. He gazed at the broken branches left by the tree trunk they'd hidden for their trap.
Ryan sat on his haunches and took a ring-pull from his pack. He pulled it open and drank half the contents, then passed it over to Krysty. "Main thing is it worked."
At the foot of the hill, scattered around the huge tree trunk that had killed a number of the enemy, the bodies resembled dolls—until the crows climbed on them and began their work.
DOC SHOULDERED his pack and easily matched the stride set by the others. He'd filled his pipe with the wondrous blend of tobacco Dean had found, and his head was wreathed with smoke.
Jak and Dean ran point up ahead as they followed along the faint trail that wound through the hilly country back to Hazard. Or from Hazard, Doc reflected, depending on one's perspective. J.B. covered the back with Mildred to keep him company. Ahead, Ryan walked with Krysty, and they talked quietly among themselves.
A feeling of contentment filled Doc. He breathed expansively, the morning's killing already fading in his mind.
"You enjoy that pipe," Albert said at his side. Doc looked down at the dwarf. Ryan had given the little man a pair of snub-nosed .38s that had been reclaimed from the gang. Albert had displayed a flair for working with leather and had arranged a pair of holsters for himself to carry the weapons. Even though they were short barreled, the blasters still ran down his thighs nearly to his knees.
"Yes," Doc said. "Yes, I do." He found an odd quote floating around in his head.
"Tobacco, divine, rare, superexcellent tobacco, which goes far beyond all the panaceas, potable gold, and philosophers' stones, a sovereign remedy to all diseases…"
He stopped, not quite able to remember the rest of it.
The dwarf was slightly out of breath from trying to keep up with the companions. His legs weren't made for rapid movement, and stride for stride, he definitely came up short. "That's quoted from something?"
"A work by Robert Burton, unless I misremember."
"If you'll pardon my saying so, you seem very well educated to be traveling with your current company."
"Well," Doc said with a smile, "I guess that depends on one's line of thinking. Myself I consider to be almost vastly undereducated when it comes to the art of survival. But that man up there that I consider to be a friend, is a true artiste. Until today you evidently thought no one could destroy the men you traveled with."
"That was not by choice."
"And my statement was not an accusation," Doc returned gently.
The dwarf was silent for a time. "His name is Ryan."
"Yes."
"Does he have a last name?"
"Ca
wdor."
Albert looked up, eyes widening in surprise. "That Ryan Cawdor? The one whose father was a baron in the Shens? The Ryan Cawdor who rode with the Trader on War Wag One?"
"Yes," Doc said. "I see you have heard of him."
"In this part of Deathlands, who hasn't?" Albert stared at Ryan with increased curiosity. "I thought somehow he would be bigger."
"Any man would be hard-pressed to fill that man's boots," Doc replied.
"If you have time in Hazard," the dwarf said, "I'd like to stand you to a drink at Cobb's. He's got a line of homemade wines that are among the best I've ever had the chance to sample."
"Well, my small friend, an opportunity to lose one's melancholy in a bit of the grape is always a fine thing."
"Cobb's doesn't just serve liquor," Albert stated. "There's books there. Dozens of them. I'd like to hear what you have to say about them. And I know Cobb would, too."
"I shall look forward to that." Doc glanced at the dwarf again. "I have a suggestion to make, if I might."
"What?"
"Mayhap I could give you a few moments of respite by offering you my back for a time." Doc hurried on before the little man could object. "In return for the consideration you'll be showing me."
The dwarf looked away, mopping at his sweating forehead with a handkerchief. "I don't like feeling I owe anyone."
"Nonsense. You are going to be showing me an establishment that I might not find on my own."
Albert was silent, then said, "Cobb's can be hard to find if you don't know what you're looking for."
"Then I take it we have a deal?" Doc stopped and thrust out his hand.
Hesitantly the little man put his hand out, as well. Doc knelt in front of him and let him climb on. With his short arms, Albert had difficulty holding on. Finally Doc shoved him up onto his shoulders, and Albert sat there like a child.
The comparison cut Doc through to the quick. A memory, blunt as a ghost in a Shakespearean play and as cutting as ridicule in Louis XIV's courts, drifted into his mind. He had carried another small person like this in the past. A name filtered through to his mind. "Rachel," he groaned, almost seeing the little girl in his mind. Emily and Jolyon were there as well. In that moment, Doc's heart turned to lead, weighing him down.
