by James Axler
“Got it,” Ryan shouted.
He turned and hunkered down behind the wall, placing the Steyr’s forestock into a sort of notch in the solid masonry of the broken wall. As Ryan searched the ruins behind for targets he wondered why the scavvies were pressing them so hard. The scavvies kept dogging the companions despite losses, and were willing to burn way too much ammo to do it. Even if they were cartridge-flush from trade or finding caches, it didn’t make sense to burn so many bullets just for the fugitives’ own handful of blasters and the contents of their backpacks, whatever those may hold.
Must be Krysty they really want, he thought grimly. And Mildred, too.
Krysty was a beauty with the stopping power of a 12-gauge slug, even by the standards of the glossy mags and vids that survived skyfall. Mildred—Dr. Wyeth—wasn’t to Ryan’s taste, frankly, a little too stocky. But she was still far better-looking than most women in Deathlands.
What drove them so hard, likely, was pure lust: for the use they’d get out of the women themselves, and then for the jack or barter they’d reap from selling them in what would still be considered prime condition, even if they wound up badly bruised and shy a tooth or two. Selling a pair the likes of Krysty and Mildred would bring them more than two months’ good scavenge, if the going rate in St. Lou was comparable to other places Ryan had known.
The one-eyed man heard and felt Krysty and Doc peel away from either side of him. Then there came the crack of a bullet passing fast, followed by thump and a grunt of surprise as much as pain.
And then Mildred’s piercing scream.
Chapter Three
“J.B., no!” Mildred cried. The despairing echo chased itself mockingly around the circular ruins.
Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.
The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see where a few threads of his leather jacket had been pushed out a fraction of an inch behind him by the heavy-caliber bullet that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.
Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into round red droplets as it distanced itself from him. With a roaring silence in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, his best friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a pup, spin and topple to lie on his back in the dust with his glasses disks of emptiness, reflecting the troubled yellow sky above.
Mildred scrambled toward the fallen Armorer. Though tears dug gullies through the dust on her cheeks, her professional training and experience had taken over. She was kneeling over J.B., checking his vital signs even before Ryan snapped out of it.
“He’s still alive!” she called. “Missed the heart.” She shrugged frantically out of the straps of her backpack.
Ryan’s attention snapped back into focus. The blood pennon had streamed away east toward the great river. That meant the shot had come from the west. Bringing the Steyr to his shoulder, Ryan turned his blue eye that way.
Fifty or sixty yards away what looked like a parking structure had pancaked, creating a stratified slab a story or so high. At least half a dozen people in scraps and oddments of salvaged clothing advanced across a broad area overgrown with green weeds to their knees, pausing to shoot then charging on. Four were men. Two looked to be women.
As Ryan watched, one man rocked back to the recoil of what he reckoned to be a battered Springfield M-1A, the semiauto-only civvie version of the old M-14 battle rifle. The same caliber as Ryan’s Steyr, it was a weapon well prized in the Deathlands. It was likely, Ryan thought, this was the bastard who shot J.B.
But he wasn’t shooting at Ryan. Instead he aimed north toward the rubble of the westward-fallen building that the companions had bypassed. The scavvies who had been chasing them appeared to be taking cover there.
Rival bands? Ryan wondered as he lined up his scope on the center of the rifleman’s chest.
He fired. The enemy rifleman jerked as the steel-jacketed slug punched through his ribs and transversed through his heart. Gray dust puffed from his gray, black and white camo blouse, confirming Ryan had hit his mark.
The scavvie collapsed bonelessly. The heavy rifle was dropping from his fingers even before recoil kicked Ryan’s field of view up over the man’s head. A chill, sure, he thought.
The other five dropped into the weeds, vanishing instantly from sight. From the top of the dumped structure behind them more blasters opened up to cover them, producing the vast grayish smoke clouds characteristic of black-powder blasters.
Ryan ducked out of the line of fire, popping the magazine from the well of his own rifle to stick in a fresh box. It was his next to last, another worry he couldn’t allow to distract him now.
Krysty and Mildred knelt, flanking the supine J.B. Krysty was furiously ripping open the plastic wrapping of an ancient package of fuzzy white scavenged Sno Balls that was among the last of their remaining edibles.
“I know you’re the expert,” Ryan said, with more of a rasp to his voice than usual, “but are you sure what J.B. needs is a quick dose of century-old snack food?”
“Sucking chest wound,” Mildred snapped without looking up. “I need to cover the holes before his lung collapses.”
Ryan nodded, then turned back to the rubble-parapet.
The two sets of attackers were keeping their heads low now. Ryan positioned himself at the northwest side, where he could keep an eye on both. The heat beat him into the ruins with increasing anger as the sun rolled up the sky, a patch of brightness in the roiling mustard-colored clouds that now stretched horizon to horizon.
They don’t have to make a move on us, he thought. Just wait for us to run out of water. Or for the acid rain to start scouring the flesh from our bones. Whichever comes first.
With quick glimpses over his shoulder, Ryan kept track of what his friends were doing. Jak lay by the gap at the stone circle’s south side with his .357 Magnum Colt Python propped on his pack in front of him, covering the curved structure that led from it. Doc kept watch to the west, cautiously peering up over the low wall for brief periods, then ducking and shifting left or right unpredictably. For all that he acted sometimes like a half-crazed old man, he was cunning as well as intelligent. And he very seldomly lost focus in a combat situation.
Another look out over the wrecked cityscape. No movement.
The river smell was thick here. The humidity felt as if it were climbing right up out of the ground around them. A stench of old corruption and decaying flesh likewise began to rise. It told Ryan that plenty still lived here in this cubicle concrete wasteland. The last decay byproducts of a million or so chills in the big nuke had burned away long since, he knew. Any decomposing organics were recent.
Where there’s life there’s death, he thought, with a certain bitterly appreciative humor.
From somewhere far off came a rumble of thunder, rolling around among the surviving structures. “Storm’s coming on,” he said.
He glanced back. The women had J.B.’s jacket and shirt off. He was propped up against Krysty as Mildred wound duct tape tightly around the makeshift patches of plastic wrapper that covered the holes in his chest and back, and the pads of relatively clean spare clothing folded up for bandages. Ryan winced.
“That tape’s gonna sting when it comes off,” he said. “I don’t envy J.B.”
“I’ll settle for being alive to feel the sting, Ryan,” J.B. said weakly. He had a bit of a wheeze to his voice. Ryan glanced back at him, startled. The wiry man gave him a thin smile.
“You hush up, now,” Mildred said sternly. “Save your breath. We’ve gone to a lot a trouble to keep it from leaking out.”
Ryan’s lips twisted in a brief smile as he looked to the north again. This time he glimpsed a flicker of motion, left to right, behind heaps of rubble on the street’s far side. He started to raise his rifle, then halted the motion and regretfully lowered the longblaster.
>
No target, he thought. He didn’t have a single round to waste on shadows.
“The nuke-suckers are starting to get restless,” he said. “Make a move soon, mebbe.”
“Okay, I’ve got it from here, Krysty,” Mildred said. “Why don’t you take J.B.’s scattergun and help watch our little friends out there.”
“Good idea, Mildred.” Ryan heard the crunching of footfalls on dust-covered rubble as the redhead took up position between him and Doc.
Time passed. The day got hotter. The clouds grew thicker, more clotted, more orange and threatening. Occasionally one of the other set of besiegers would pop off a shot as if to remind the companions they were still out there. None of Ryan’s crew was stupe enough to shoot back.
At a soft-voiced request from Mildred, Doc helped her shift J.B. up close to the short wall on the west side, where there was some shade. Doc had a surprising wiry strength to him. The Armorer had lapsed into unconsciousness again. Mildred poured water on a hankie from her canteen and bathed his face.
“How’s it look?” Ryan asked her.
He could feel her shrug. “I’ve done all I can do. Doesn’t seem to be much internal bleeding, thank God. He’s tough, but I don’t give him even odds of living to nightfall if we can’t get him some kind of better care by then.”
“Dear lady,” Doc said softly, “do I understand you give any of us even odds of living until nightfall?”
“You got me, Doc,” Mildred said. She was too depressed and worried even to rise to the bait. Under normal circumstances she and Doc spent plenty of time sniping good-naturedly at each other.
“You know,” Doc said, “one would certainly think the base of the elevator shaft and the stumps of the structural members in these collapsed buildings should have survived the blasts. Yet many have become little more than mounds.”
“Elevator probably went to a basement level,” Mildred said.
“But structural members usually survived at least partially, even near ground zero,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen pillar stumps standing right next to craters.”
Ryan bit down on a caustic remark about wasting air on speculation that wouldn’t load bullets in a blaster. Under the circumstances idle chatter was far preferable to thinking too deeply about their situation.
“Why don’t you take over the scattergun, Mildred?” Krysty asked. “You’re more comfortable with it.”
The physician shrugged. “Sure.” Krysty passed the weapon, then drew her more-familiar Smith & Wesson 640.
As she did, a storm of blasterfire erupted from the north. Bullets struck sprays of concrete powder off the top of the low circular wall and whined mournfully overhead as they tumbled through the thick, hot air. A short burst from an M-16 snapped over Ryan’s head like a sail in a brisk wind.
“Get ready for it,” he said during a lull in the shooting. “They’re nerving themselves to make their move.”
“No doubt they sense the immediacy of the impending storm,” Doc said. “I can smell the rain and sulfur already.”
“Hear that?” Jak called from the south wall.
“Hear what?” Krysty asked.
Ryan was switching his vision back and forth between the scavvies lying up in the weed-grown field to their west and the forted attackers to the north. Though the western bunch weren’t firing, he was pretty sure they weren’t sharp enough to have backed off and left without him or one of his sharp-eyed friends spotting them. Apparently they were biding their time and awaiting events.
“Whine,” Jak said. “Triple high. Like giant mosquitoes, you know?” He winced and shook his head. “Not like.”
“I can’t hear it,” Krysty said.
Mildred and Doc said they heard nothing out of the way, either. Of course with the blasters cracking off from not so far away that was perhaps not so surprising—the wonder being Jak could. But he had the sense of hearing of a white-tailed deer.
Ryan heard a loud rattle from his left. He risked sticking his head up to scope it out. Flashes and billows of smoke were coming from the pancaked structure.
“Black-powder blasters,” Ryan said. A ball sailed over his head. “Shooting at us.”
“They want to help the other bunch crack us,” Krysty said. “Then roll in, take them down, get all the swag themselves.”
“But why, dear lady, would they act now? Why not let us and our pursuers settle things and then eliminate the victor—in accordance with the ancient Oriental adage that when two tigers fight, one dies, the other is wounded?”
Mildred had turned away to check J.B. His cheeks were pale, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Now meeting Doc’s eye, she jerked a thumb upward.
“That’s why.”
Thunder split the sky. Something wet struck the back of Ryan’s left hand. It stung like an ant bite.
He looked up. “Shit.”
A blue-white crack appeared in the roiling orange and black clouds above, jagged and blinding. It pulsated three times. A sound like a colossal explosion beat down on them, a sound so loud Ryan could feel it.
“Acid gully washer on way,” Jak called.
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Mildred said, hastily moving to shield the wounded Armorer’s face with his hat. No other raindrops fell in the vicinity. But none of the companions doubted it was only a question of time.
“Here they come!” Krysty called.
Ryan raised his Steyr again. An acid downpour was no joke; it could bubble unprotected skin in minutes, sizzle muscle away to leave yellow bone in a shockingly short time, depending on the strength and length of the downpour. But the really virulent falls tended not to last long.
Ryan laid the rifle’s iron battle sights on a goggled figure who had sprung up from a clump of brush that had grown around an old fire hydrant and was charging forward, holding a beat-up semiautomatic longblaster diagonally across his chest. He squeezed off a quick shot and saw the man jerk as the bullet took him in the left shoulder.
The attacker kept coming. Ryan cursed and dropped his aim. His second shot punched the man in the gut right above his web belt. He fell, rolling and squalling like a catamount.
The Armorer going down had rattled even the hard-core Ryan more than he realized. Until now. He’d just forgotten one of the prime rules of combat: the chest was mostly air, the very fact J.B. owed his survival to—for however long it lasted.
A man well-wired on jolt or just adrenaline overdrive could keep motoring on even with a collapsed lung, and the fact he might die horribly in a matter of minutes wouldn’t hold him back from busting your head open with a club before collapsing. The heart, like the head, was a tricky target actually to hit. And even a clean heart shot didn’t always drop a man, or big animal, that was already in furious motion. The working of his limbs could keep his blood circulating long enough to inflict a chilling wound on you. The best target for stopping a man was from the ribs down.
“The miscreants to the west of us are advancing as well,” Doc reported. He was reserving his own fire until the enemy gave him closer targets. It took a long time to reload his own black-powder revolver.
The M-4000 shotgun bellowed. Ryan heard Mildred grunt as the 12-gauge’s heavy recoil punished her shoulder. She was running rifled slugs through the blaster against targets too far away for buckshot to be effective. She knew to snug the steel butt-plate hard against her shoulder. But it was a painful weapon even for a man as big as Ryan or as battle-hardened as the stricken J.B. to shoot in sustained fire.
“Jak!” Ryan called, racking his bolt and slamming it shut on a fresh cartridge, one of his rapidly dwindling store. He wasn’t sure whether his last shot had hit the red-bearded scavvie he had targeted or if the man had dived to cover. They were under fifty yards away now. It would seem to be a walkaway for a precision-sniping piece like the Steyr, in the hands of an expert marksman such as Ryan, to take down targets that close at hand. And it would have been—had he been shooting at pebbles on fenceposts.
; It wasn’t quite so simple when the targets were running, ducking and weaving. And shooting back. The heavy bolt-action rifle was never meant for close-in combat: it was meant to reach out and touch enemies hundreds of yards distant, a slow, measured, precise form of warfare. Nothing at all like close combat, which was crude and dirty and above all fast.
Ryan was just wondering if it was time to forget the longblaster and try to get his SIG handblaster into play when a figure loomed up right in front of him with a terrible screech.
Chapter Four
Desperately Ryan rolled back onto his butt, away from the low wall. He flung up the Steyr crosswise just in time to catch the haft of a rusty-headed tomahawk descending toward his face.
Heat stung his left cheek as Krysty shot the scavvie in the face with her short-barreled handblaster. Ryan sensed minute bits of unburned propellant clacking against the patch that covered that eye. Though the short barrel of the little .38 produced a shattering muzzle-blast that close up, he never heard it. His ears already rang from repeated booms from his big 7.62 longblaster.
He threw himself forward and up, rolling to his feet in time to buttstroke another screaming scavvie across the face. He felt a yielding instant and then a crunch as a cheekbone gave way. The scavenger staggered back, dropping a big 1911-style semiauto handblaster to clutch at its stove-in face.
Her face, Ryan realized. It meant no more to him than what species of bug he’d just crunched beneath his boot heel. Running with the Trader, he’d long ago learned the brutal lesson that those who came to chill you had no sex or age. They had to die if you wanted to live.
Quickly Ryan stooped to prop the Steyr against the wall. Even in emergencies you didn’t want to go dropping precision optics on the ground. Using the longblaster as a club was bad enough.
As he put down the rifle with his left hand he drew the big fat-bladed panga from its sheath with the right. The wounded woman, screaming like a stuck steam whistle with fury and agony, yanked a blade from her own belt and lunged toward him for payback.
