Playfair's Axiom

by James Axler

  For a moment electricity seemed to crackle between the two female healers. Strode fixed Mildred with a piercing blue gaze. Mildred tensed as if about to go for the older woman’s throat.

  Krysty laid a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Mildred,” she said gently, “let it go. We’re not completely ignorant savages. This woman obviously knows what she’s doing.”

  Mildred set her strong jaw rebelliously. A pair of sec men stepped up to bar her way as Strode gestured. The acolytes set off both pulling and pushing the cart at a trot down the broad street that led into the fortified ville. The healer walked alongside at a brisk pace.

  Tears welled in Mildred’s eyes then coursed down her cheeks.

  They were still hemmed in by a combination of their original captors and sec men, who weren’t exactly wearing uniforms but all seemed to wear mostly black. Some of the men were relieving the patrol of their weapons and toting them into the old church. The patrol members surrendered their blasters and crossbows without protest.

  Interesting, Ryan thought.

  Krysty met his eye over Mildred’s shoulder, gave him a quick smile and nod to show she was doing fine. He doubted that. But it was part of the reason he loved her: her fortitude and courage were the equal of any man’s he’d known. She’d keep going and do what needed to be done until her strength failed her. Her heart never would.

  A pair of sec men pointed their blasters—an M-16 and a Remington pump scattergun—at Ryan as he reached to his belt. With a sardonic smile on his chapped lips, he saluted them with his canteen, then took a long drink. The water was hot and brackish but refreshed him.

  Doc had plopped himself down on his butt on the blacktop in the shade of a sycamore and sat with his knees wide apart and his sword stick beside him. Jak squatted beside him and panted like a wolf. Their captors had relieved him of the throwing knives with which he festooned himself, but Ryan would’ve bet his last swig of water the albino youth had a couple holdouts hidden on him. Again, it wasn’t likely to help much, especially with J.B. trundled off to his friends had no idea where, but completely in the power of their captors. Even if they could break out, they weren’t going to do so without the Armorer.

  “We don’t want to rush into anything anyway,” Krysty said to him. Ryan jerked slightly. As often the case, the full-bodied redhead seemed to be reading his mind. “We don’t know what’s here.”

  “They could have treated us far worse, to be sure,” Doc said, taking a swig from his own canteen and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

  Patrol leader Tully, now disarmed, stood to one side talking with a man a finger shorter than his own gangly height. The man wore a black vest open over a bare chest deep-tanned as leather, beneath a thick pelt of red-brown hair, black jeans over black boots, a gunbelt with a Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum in good condition at his left hip. He had a long deeply seamed face as tan as his chest, with a well-broken nose. Close-clipped reddish-brown hair was in full retreat from a freckled forehead. Mild-seeming brown eyes looked out from beneath eyebrows like smears of black paint. He wasn’t so much wider than Tully, as he just seemed more solid.

  A chiller for true, Ryan thought.

  Tully walked over with the black-clad man beside him. “This is Garrison,” he told Ryan. “He’s sec chief for Soulardville.”

  Neither party to the introduction offered to shake hands. “Get your people together and follow me,” Garrison said.

  His voice was quiet but not soft. Neither his tone nor the sec boss’s posture threatened. Ryan sized the man up as the kind who wouldn’t bother with threats. Seen up close, he looked as unyielding and hard as a cypress knee.

  Ryan nodded. No point butting heads when he’d only lose. “Let’s go,” he told the others.

  “Where?” Jak asked. He showed no sign of standing.

  “Where I take you,” Garrison said. His tone remained matter-of-fact. The look he gave the albino youth was another matter altogether.

  One time during his road-dog days with Trader, Ryan had seen an Ozark mule skinner give a chronically balky mule that look. The next time the mule acted up the skinner had shot it dead in its harness with a big old black-powder horse blaster he worse crosswise in his belt.

  “Jak,” Krysty called, “come give me a hand with Mildred, please. She’s had a hard time of it.”

  Mildred had already reclaimed her composure. She was painfully aware of her relatively coddled and sheltered upbringing. Never mind her father had been murdered by the Klan when she was a child. Compared to people Deathlands born and raised she’d spent her life before her cryogenic suspension on Easy Street. She hated to show weakness to her friends. She frowned and started to say something.

  Krysty held up a hand. “Save your breath,” she said. “Let Jak help you.”

  The albino teen had got up and hurried to Mildred’s side. Her eyes widened as she realized what the redhead was actually doing. Jak had followed her suggestion without the thought entering his head that she had given him an out from a no-win confrontation with the Soulardville sec boss without loss of face.

  The look on the sec boss’s sunburned face never wavered from…composed, Ryan reckoned the word was. But Ryan thought he’d caught just the slightest flicker of recognition in those dark eyes. Garrison looked to be shrewdly perceptive as well as in total command of himself and his surroundings. That made him triple-dangerous.

  They set off down the street at an easy walk. A quartet of sec men flanked and followed them. Garrison let Ryan walk shoulder-to-shoulder with him without comment.

  And that was the upside of dealing with a man like the sec boss. Ryan knew what he was. He knew at a glance what Ryan was. They understood each other perfectly with no need to jaw.

  Houses lined the street, mostly in brown or maroon or yellow-tan brick, neat beneath pitched roofs with scrolled wooden eaves. Raised-bed gardens had replaced long-dead lawns, and interspersed with the houses were garden plots growing a profusion of vegetables and herbs: tomatoes and beans climbing up frames, onions, carrots, lettuce just sprouting. Down one block to the south Ryan caught a glimpse of an orchard of trees just beginning to fruit out. Big trees dropped pools of shadow at irregular intervals on the asphalt.

  “My word,” Doc breathed. “It looks as if war has never brushed this place with its wings.”

  “Does if you’d seen it before,” Mildred said. “This is Russell Boulevard. Used to be a lot more buildings along here. Those gardens used to be houses.”

  “It’s so green,” Krysty said. “It’s like a drink of water after the ruins.”

  “Too neat,” Jak said. “Too crowded.”

  And in fact a fair number of people went about their business. Some carried crates or big ceramic jugs, or pushed loaded handcarts. Others walked briskly as if to appointments. Children played on stoops. Chickens scratched in front yards and cultivated patches. Pigeons cooed and bubbled from the eaves.

  “We been building this place up for a hundred years,” Garrison said with a note of pride in his voice.

  “You’ve done well,” Krysty said.

  Ryan was reserving judgment. Krysty sometimes teased him he couldn’t sniff a flower without suspecting there was a bee waiting inside to sting his nose. He reckoned that was about right.

  He also saw no reason to change.

  And speaking of flowers, they were there, too, purple and blue and yellow heads nodding from beds below windows and stout ceramic planters on porches. This place was easily as prosperous as Front Royal, where he’d grown up.

  “Barely an hour ago the acid rain was falling fit to bubble the skin straight off a man’s face,” he said. He gestured around with a hard hand. “How’d all this come through looking so pretty?”

  “Special-treated tarps and cloths,” Garrison said. “Special frames set out. The trees’re pretty resistant. We usually get plenty of warning when a hellstorm’s brewing.�
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  “What happens when you don’t?”

  Garrison chuckled. “Ever know a man to leave this world alive?”

  For a moment Ryan looked at him as they walked. Then he barked a short laugh. “No.”

  The street turned to what had been a commercial district. War’s legacy was much more visible here. While many houses had intact windows, the big commercial picture windows had been blown in and were covered with plywood sheets or planking. From neatly lettered signs above the doors Ryan gathered they were now small stores and workshops. He heard the tink-tink of a hammer on metal from one door left open to allow the sultry breeze admittance.

  The street widened out. “Lot of buildings here’ve been demolished,” Mildred murmured. “If I remember right, anyway.”

  For her, Ryan knew, the memory was just a few years old. But sometimes she still had trouble coping with the brutal contrast between the world she’d gone to sleep in and the nightmare she’d awakened to.

  Whatever had been before there was a wide square here now. Ryan saw that the extant pavement had been eked out with paths of crushed gravel, and mosaics of jagged, salvaged concrete slabs. It was handsome work, he had to admit.

  In the center of the plaza stood a low platform made of one big concrete slab laid with little regard for leveling: no finesse. It looked quite brutal by contrast to the almost unnatural primness of what they’d seen of the rest of the ville. A weather-stained tarp covered the slanted upper surface.

  Garrison said nothing about the slab. Ryan didn’t ask for an explanation. It didn’t seem to bear on their continued survival one way or another.

  Beyond it stood a sprawling two-story-tall block of pink brick, with a gabled slate roof and a brick chimney. It had a gaudily painted wooden entryway stuck onto the front, obviously a postdark addition. The garish gold and purple paint clashed with the ville’s overall reserve as harshly as the strange slab dais in the middle of the town square.

  “Baron’s palace,” Garrison said.

  “Never would have guessed,” Ryan commented.

  Garrison led them down a side street to a gray brick house just behind the “palace.” It was unremarkable except for black iron bars on the windows. Garrison unlocked an iron-and-mesh sec door and opened it. The barred door had a steel flap in the bottom section. A closed wooden door was inside.

  “In here,” he said.

  “How long?” Ryan asked.

  “Till you’re sent for.”

  Ryan turned the knob. The inner door was one of the old flimsy predark plywood-sandwich variety that kept the wind and some of the cold out but a sturdy child could put her fist through. Of course with the outer door that didn’t much matter.

  Inside was gloomy, musty and hot. Dust motes floated in the light through the open door. Some lumpy-looking pallets had been tossed around the wooden floor.

  “How about food and water?” he asked Garrison. “We haven’t eaten all day.”

  “You’ll be provided for,” Garrison said.

  Ryan went in, followed by the others. “You got the run of the place,” Garrison said, closing and locking the outer door. “You might want to open the windows. Get some air.”

  “Yeah,” Ryan said.

  “What now?” Mildred asked when the sec boss went away.

  “The usual. Scope out the house. See if there’s any way out.”

  “Think there will be?” Krysty asked.

  “Hell no. But we take nothing for granted.”

  They searched the house, quickly but cautiously. They weren’t going to take for granted there weren’t hidden dangers, either. Given the sort of things that wandered around a ruined city there might even be unpleasant surprises their hosts knew nothing about.

  But the place was as empty as an old skull.

  As they finished their quick but thorough recon, somebody rattled the sec door. They went down to find several locals carrying several gallon ceramic jugs as well as several large covered pots. Under the longblasters of a pair of hawk-eyed sec men they unlocked the outer door and passed in the jugs and jars.

  “Water,” Jak said, uncapping a jug and sniffing.

  “But these are empty,” Mildred said. She held up the lid of one of the squat pots as if to prove her point.

  Ryan just looked at her. “Oh,” she said, and replaced the lid with exaggerated care.

  “So what now?” Doc asked.

  “We wait.”

  “I’m worried about J.B.,” Mildred said.

  “Me, too,” Ryan said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. I’m going to sleep.”

  He stretched himself on a lumpy canvas mattress.

  A CLATTREING WOKE HIM. Burly Lonny stood outside, kicking the door with a boot. He held a large covered blue metal dish.

  “They sent me with some vegetable stew for you,” he said. He set the dish on the porch, then shoved a bag through the flap-covered metal hatch in the bottom. Krysty retrieved it, opened it.

  “Bowls and spoons,” she said.

  “Wood spoons,” Mildred said, sitting up and blinking muzzily. “So we don’t dig our way out, I guess. They’re right on top of things, these folks.”

  Lonny had stood up, still holding the dish. He had a strange and ominous look in his eyes.

  “You’re gonna hunt her,” he said. “They’ll offer you supplies and jack, and you’ll take it. Because you’re just coldhearts who’ll do anything for pay. I know your type!”

  “Hold on,” Ryan said, standing up. “Back up a couple steps. You lost me.”

  “The princess!” Lonny snapped. “You don’t care about her. What they’ll do to her. Your kind don’t care!”

  He snorted a deep breath through his lump of nose, drawing his head back on his thick neck. Opening the lid of the food dish he hawked and spit a big glistening green glob into the stew. Replacing the lid, he rocked the dish from side to side, to stir the mix up right. Then he bent down and shoved the dish through the hatch.

  “There you go, coldhearts,” he said. He turned and marched off.

  “What that about?” Jak asked.

  Ryan shook his head. “Slagger’s a few rounds short of a full mag.”

  He picked up a chipped bowl and a wood spoon from where Krysty had laid them out on the floor, went to the dish. Opening the cover, he spooned himself a bowl of stew.

  Mildred gagged. “You aren’t seriously going to eat that?”

  Ryan sat down cross-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, facing the door.

  “Had worse,” he said, and dug in.

  Chapter Eight

  From the heaviness of the fist banging on the steel outer door Ryan knew who he’d see when he opened his eye.

  “Garrison,” he said, sitting up. His body felt as if mules had been playing kickball with it.

  Around him the others roused themselves from sleep. Outside the shadows were lengthening toward afternoon. The light had gone mellow, softening the edges of things.

  “Baron wants to see you,” Garrison said.

  BARON SAVIJ WASN`T what any of them expected.

  His room made up pretty much a big chunk of the upper story of the baronial palace. The chamber was decorated lavishly. And also in what, even by Deathlands standard, was pretty dubious taste.

  The chamber was festooned with swatches and banners of purple and gold silk. Giant velvet paintings, of bare-breasted women, Elvis the King, African warriors and, in close-up, a snarling tiger’s face, hung from every wall. Candles and lanterns burned everywhere, hanging by chains from golden lamp-stands, on gold-painted stands by the walls, from a candelabrum overhead. Dominating all was a vast bed canopied in purple and gold and green satin, and hanging behind it, a giant tapestry—evidently also predark, since the figures were too precise and the colors too bright even after decades for handwork—of a black man with a ferocious Afro. He wore an abundance of gold jewelry and strode defiantly with an electric guitar in one hand and a panga not unlike Ryan’s in the othe
r, at the head of a retinue that consisted primarily of scowling, hypermuscular thugs with shaved heads, and beautiful women.

  The curtains of the big bed were parted to reveal the baron, lying with his head propped on a green satin pillow.

  He had been a big man. That was obvious from his frame beneath the purple satin coverlet. From the way his sallow, mottled cheeks had fallen in it was clear he’d suffered catastrophic weight loss. He turned his hairless head right to face the newcomers and blinked gum-encrusted eyes at them.

  The room stank of incense and stale piss and shit. It even made Ryan’s titanium-steel stomach restless.

  A young woman in a green smock dabbed at the baron’s eyes with a cloth soaked in some sort of a solution. He waved her away feebly.

  “Let me see these people,” he said in a slow, cracked voice.

  Garrison and Strode had escorted the companions to see the baron of Soulardville. He blinked at them slowly. Though his complexion was mottled with greenish and yellowish bruiselike marks, Ryan guessed he had been a medium dark-skinned black man. His eyes were a dark blue, which would probably have been startlingly intense had they not been clouded and dimmed by his condition.

  “You look…strong,” Baron Savij said. “Reckon…you’ll do.”

  Ryan just stared. Krysty said hastily, “Do for what, Baron?”

  “I want my baby back,” he said. A tear rolled down his right cheek to make a dark stain on the pillow. He stretched a clawed, discolored hand toward them. “Bring her to me. Please.”

  His eyelids fell shut, his arm dropped like a dead bird. His hand dangled off the edge of the bed, palm up. The female attendant hastened to ease it back onto the coverlet beside him.

  “He dead?” Jak asked. The words were horribly loud in the sudden deep silence.

  Krysty shushed him fiercely. “What I say?” he protested. Doc took him gently by the arm and led him aside.

  “You’d better go now,” Strode said. She looked no more than usually concerned for the health of her prize patient.