Playfair's Axiom

by James Axler

  “Yeah.” Ryan sat back in his seat. “So where do we find this McKinnick and his crew?”

  “Last reports we received, their main hideout is the old museum near the stumps of the Arch.”

  “Lotta cannies there,” Jak remarked.

  “Oh, yes. It’s what makes it profitable for Mr. McKinnick. He’s jealous of anybody poaching on what he considers his salvage grounds. The cannies do an admirable job of policing it for him. Of course, that’s not by intention on their part. They’d eat him as soon as anybody.”

  The brewmeister took a deep drink. “Ah. An especially fine batch. No doubt they’d eat him with extra relish, so to speak. McKinnick is not a lovable man.”

  “What about screamwings?” Ryan said. “Looks like you got a big colony of the bastards living up in that big old tower.”

  “Met One. Yes. Somehow it managed to survive both the blasts and the earthquakes largely intact. An impressive feat of engineering. What would you like to know about them?”

  “How to deal with them, mostly.”

  “As for that, all I can advise are keen senses and staying near overhead cover. They dislike going into restricted places. And luck. That never hurts, of course.”

  “Of course,” Krysty said. “Don’t they bother you here?”

  He laughed. “We—my ancestors, rather—were lucky enough to come into possession of a number of machine guns, including a .50-caliber Browning. I admit the smaller-caliber machine guns are more effective, with their higher rates of fire. But like everyone, the screamwings have a most healthy respect for a .50.”

  A crunch of footsteps on gravel made Ryan turn. Mildred and Doc were coming back through the gate into the little courtyard with their sec men escorts trooping after. Mildred’s face ran with sweat, but she looked calmer than she had since J.B. had been hit.

  “What?” demanded the baron with a hint of querulousness. “Was there something you needed to complete the operation?”

  “The appendectomy? No. That’s done. You think you could scare us up some chairs and some of whatever you’re drinking, Baron? Your sick-bay room is on the hot side.”

  “Seriously? You’ve finished already?”

  Mildred frowned. “I said I did, didn’t I?” She was still in full-on physician mode, meaning she brooked no shit from anybody.

  “Efficient, is our Mildred,” Doc said.

  The brewmeister clapped his hands. Servants appeared to pop out of the ground, bring chairs and mugs. Mildred and Doc took grateful places in the cool, sweet-smelling shade and drank deeply.

  The brewmeister smiled. “I’m impressed.”

  Mildred set her mug down. She had a foam mustache. After a moment’s hesitation she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. A hard thing for her to do, just coming out of the mind-set of a doctor trained in the late twentieth century, when sterility wasn’t just a principle but a religion.

  “It was an appendectomy,” she said. “Aside from the fact you’ve got to open the body wall, it’s about as simple an operation as there is. Your people had the stuff all ready. The girl was healthy enough, if a little undernourished, when the inflammation started. But your healer was right—the appendix hadn’t burst yet, so it was just knock her out, slice her open, find that bad boy and snip it off. Then a quick cleanup, sew her up, done.”

  “Of course I’m impressed at your manifest skill, Mildred,” the baron said. “What really impresses me, though, is how you tried neither to draw the procedure out nor to make it seem more involved than it really was.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  He laughed. “This is a treasure you have here, Mr. Cawdor,” he said. “A real gem. I’d be tempted to try to hire her out from under you if I didn’t know better.”

  “The girl’s doing all right, then, Mildred?” Krysty asked.

  She nodded. “Unless something unexpected happens, she’ll be fine.”

  “Excellent,” the brewmeister said. “You’ve abundantly paid me for the little information I was able to impart. I’ll consider that credit to your account. Will you stay for the night? We can offer excellent accommodations. On the house, completely.”

  Ryan didn’t even need to poll the others with his eye. “Thanks, Baron,” he said. “We want to move as quick as we can on this. From what you say, hunting this Emerald is going to take some doing.”

  “Indeed it shall,” the brewmeister said. “If I may offer a word of advice—don’t allow her so much as a whiff of suspicion that you are hunting her. Or she’ll vanish like a snuffed candle flame.”

  Ryan nodded. “We’ll keep that in mind.”

  The brewmeister tipped his head to one side. “If I might ask one favor of you,” he said.

  “Go ahead, Baron,” Krysty said, ever the diplomat.

  “If you find her alive, please tell Baron Savij I helped find his missing child. I reckon it’s time to reach out to Soulardville, warm up relations.”

  “You got it, Baron,” Ryan said. “No problem.”

  The aproned man smiled and nodded. “Splendid.”

  With a little grunt of effort he rose. Ryan and Krysty stood up. Mildred and Doc finished off their mugs and joined them a beat later. Jak sat gripping the white-painted metal arms of his chair and frowning up at the tower.

  “Clock,” he said. “Why hands don’t move, eh?”

  Ryan looked up. The tower clock said 12 straight up. He realized it had said the same when he first came close enough to make it out.

  The brewmeister chuckled. “It’s absolutely right twice a day,” he said. “What else do you know in this disordered world of ours that can offer such precision?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The enormous red-bearded man jumped to his feet as Krysty strolled through a gap in the rubble. The city wreckage here ran to chunks of stone and concrete as big as a compact predark car, all jumbled up as if they were toy blocks a giant child had petulantly kicked aside when through with them.

  About a dozen other scavvies sat around the fire in the middle of the bowl-like depression in the lumpy gray dust. She wondered why they bothered to start it so early. The sun was just approaching the jagged western horizon, a fat red face half obscured by the rampant fang of the tower that gave the screamwings their nesting place. The flames were still so pale in the slanting yellow-orange light as to be almost invisible. And the ruins didn’t need any more heat. In the unlikely event the air temperature dropped significantly after dark, the sun-warmed blocks would keep releasing their stored heat until the sun rolled back up over the forests and tall tangles of industrial wreckage across the river.

  “Don’t trouble getting up, gentlemen,” she said, smiling. “I just have a few questions.”

  “You!” the huge man bellowed. He had a nose like a mutie potato with an eye patch on one side of it. “I know you! You’re one of the coldhearts that cost me half my people!”

  “You shouldn’t be so hostile to strangers just passing through,” she said. “We weren’t bothering anyone. Except the cannies whose dinner we were busy trying not to be when you jumped us. You’re not worried about their tender feelings, are you?”

  “And your screamwings!” he shouted. “They scratched shit off my face. And look—” He held up a side of the befouled denim jacket he wore. “They tore my jacket.”

  “They weren’t our screamwings. Believe me. Now, this will all go much more smoothly if you all just sit down and take deep breaths and we discuss this calmly.”

  The man shot an arm in the air. It looked like a tree growing in fast motion in an ancient vid. “Take her! The train leaves the station tonight! And she’s a-pullin’ it!”

  But his men—Krysty didn’t see any for-sure females among the bunch, anyway—were smarter. They kept their seats.

  “Listen, McKinnick,” said a gaunt man with long stringy blond hair and a raw-looking gash down the right side of his dirty face. “You don’t think the bitch would just walk in here without backup, do you? Nobody’s th
at stupe. Unless you say triple-stupes and droolies coulda handed us our asses like she and her pals did a couple days ago?”

  McKinnick’s face crumpled like a fist. “You’re too smart an ass for your own good sometimes, Sanchez,” he said. But he studied the lone woman with a frown and his one good eye. As good as an eye that consisted of a yellow iris peering out of what seemed to be a pool of blood could be, anyway.

  “Yes, he is a smart man.” Doc’s educated tones echoed sourcelessly among the canted blocks and chunks of hot stone. “We have the drop on you gentlemen. So softly, softly!”

  “That’s right,” Krysty said. “So why don’t you keep your hammers lifted, boys? If we wanted to chill you, you’d all be staring at the sky this moment.”

  The giant scavvie leader grubbed in his dark tangle of beard at what Krysty guessed was probably his chin.

  “What about Louie?” he demanded suspiciously. “You chill him?”

  “Louie?” she asked. “Skinny kid, brown hair? He’s fine. Taking a little nap with his wrists and ankles trussed up.”

  “Sleeping on the job? The little fuck-snake. I’ll chill him myself!”

  “For shit’s sake, McKinnick,” Sanchez said. “She means they knocked him out and tied him.”

  “Damn,” McKinnick said. “What about that one-eyed fucker? Where’s he?”

  Krysty shook her head. Her hair had curled into tight ringlets that didn’t hang down to her shoulders.

  “He didn’t make it,” she said sadly. “We ran into some trouble on our way back up here.”

  “Why’d you come back up, anyway?” a black guy with a red handkerchief knotted around his head so the ends stuck up like little nub-ears to either side of his head said. “Couldn’t keep away from us?”

  “We got some questions, is all.”

  “Well, I got the answer to ’em right here,” McKinnick said, grabbing the permanently dark-stained crotch of his blue jeans.

  Krysty put her hands on her hips. “That’s not getting us anywhere. Why don’t you just sit down and—”

  With speed truly stunning for a man so huge the scavvie leader crossed the twenty-odd feet of uncertain footing between them in less time than it took an eye to blink. Krysty Wroth had superb reflexes, but the sudden move took her so off guard that she was unable to react before he had a huge arm wrapped under her right armpit and had her hoisted up so her head shielded his. She felt something sharp prick her neck and looked down to see he had the tip of a monstrous knife with a vicious saw back pressed under her jaw.

  “All right, you droolies out there!” he yelled. Even from behind the back-eddying carrion stench of his breath enwrapped her head, overpowering even the stink of his gross, unwashed body. “Throw down your blasters and step out where we can see you! Or I’ll cut the eyes out of this bitch’s red head and skull-fuck her to death.”

  “DAMMIT, KRYSTY,” Ryan said out loud, struggling to keep the big scavvie boss centered in his scope. He didn’t worry about the scavvies hearing. He was lying on his belly two hundred yards away, on the second story of what had been a parking garage that had had its higher floors planed right off. “I warned you not to get fancy!”

  McKinnick’s followers scattered like roaches. A yellow flash came from the right of their camp. A scavvie with a dark scalp lock suddenly arched his back like a cat hit by a speeding land wag and spun down to a cloud of dust with his yard-long braid flying up in an arc through the evening air. A boom reached Ryan’s ears. He recognized the sound of the short-barreled scattergun underneath the main barrel of Doc’s outsized monster handblaster.

  A brighter flash in the gathering twilight told Ryan that Mildred had weighed in with J.B.’s M-4000 shotgun. A Mex-looking scavvie trying to point a single-action revolver toward the hidden attackers suddenly had his face punched into a blood cave by an invisible fist. Having taken the whole double-00 shot column to the bridge of his nose, he folded like a suit of clothing slipping from a hangar.

  As the 12-gauge’s even more thunderous boom echoed through the ruins, in the midst of all the noise and dust and scrambling stood McKinnick, roaring, with his god-awful big blade shoved up against Krysty’s neck. By cunning or instinct, the scavvie chieftain had the struggling woman perfectly positioned so that Ryan, despite his height advantage, had no shot.

  Not even the sneaky expedient of a thigh shot. Hit the bone, he’d go down. Hit the big artery, and he’d bleed out in seconds. It was as certain a chill shot as a brain or heart hit, and almost nobody remembered or even knew to protect their thighs. But Krysty’s own long thrashing legs were in the way. Ryan didn’t dare break the trigger.

  “Krysty!”

  FOLLOWING ADVICE from the brewmeister, the companions had departed Breweryville afternoon before last by a western exit. They’d worked their way farther west among what had mostly been modest residential neighborhoods, once upon a time.

  Now the neat detached houses of yellow and tan brick stood long abandoned. Their windows were gaps as empty-black as skull eyes. Their doors were mostly missing, long-ago smashed in by scavvies, perhaps survivors of the first single great spasm of the big war.

  The houses had long since been gutted of everything. In the years following, the war survivors had ventured out of Breweryville and Soulard, daring the cold and the dark of the black-sky years, seeking canned foods, meds, weapons, ammo, usable clothing. After skydark ended, the looting had grown, extending even to the copper wires in the walls and the metal pipes and plumbing fixtures. Ryan guessed wars had been fought between the two neighboring villes, as well as freelance scavvies, over the loot in those thousands of formerly neat houses.

  Now the roofs were missing slates. Some sagged where rain had gotten in to eat out the rafters. The one where Ryan and company forted up for the night was in pretty good condition: no point risking their hides if another hellstorm blew in, or even getting wet and miserable when it rained, as it did for an hour around the middle of the night. There were dark stains on the floor, but the place just smelled of dust and wood rot. The blood or shit or piss that marked the hardwood floors had desiccated to nothing decades before and blown away on the winds that blew unimpeded through the gaps that had been doors and windows. There seemed to be some bats dwelling in the attic, but otherwise it looked as if even animals gave the place a pass these days.

  There was nothing for them. They’d even eaten the insulation in the attics, probably years before any of the party but Mildred and Doc had been born.

  Next day the companions had worked their way around Soulardville’s west side. They stayed on triple-red alert. They didn’t expect Soulardville patrols to be hunting them, especially not there. But they didn’t want to chance an encounter with them.

  Neither did they want to risk a run-in with any of the other two-legged predators that still infested the corpse of the dead city. Even if this area was thoroughly picked-over, hope springs eternal. Somebody desperate enough might decide there might be treasures somebody had missed in the blocks of nearly intact residences. And nobody knew what motivated muties. The particularly virulent breed of stickies that infested the St. Lou area liked to stick close to the Sippi and the flooded buildings that flanked it. But none of the companions was willing to risk getting pulled apart by suckered fingers and needle-toothed jaws by taking anything for granted.

  And always there was the threat of the screamwings that laired in the great tower.

  So the five friends worked their cautious way downtown. They moved carefully for fear of stirring up rad pockets. That danger was very real, as both the Soulard patrol that captured them and the brewmeister assured them, whether or not whatever had happened to Savij was any accident. And of course there were still the cannies and the well-armed, ruthless scavvie gangs vying for control of still relatively rich ruins.

  Now they ventured back into the hunting grounds of their former persecutors. But this time there were crucial differences. The companions, even one down, were well-fed, well-rested
and, perhaps most important, well-hydrated.

  And now they were on the hunt. Their ammo stocks had been restored. Evidently Bro Joe really wanted Emerald back. Their packs were stuffed with all the cartridges, shotgun shells, black powder and caps they could carry.

  McKinnick’s mob denned in the ruins of the old Expansion Memorial Museum, but scavenging parties were usually abroad. They worked the downtown rubble inland from the stubs of the blown-away Arch itself. It had been the companions’ bad luck that the cannies who first jumped them had chased them right through the heart of McKinnick’s hunting grounds.

  With the clues given to them by the Soulardites and some of the brewmeister’s sec men, the companions located the giant scavvie boss and a dozen of his people inside a day. Partly that was just luck. Partly it was the fact that McKinnick had gone out of his way to let the cannies know the high cost of fucking with his crew. Assorted rotting body parts had been impaled on jutting rebar or simply placed on rubble cairns. The presence of fresher heads, hands and, most revoltingly, boobs clued the searchers they were nearing their prey.

  In late afternoon they found the scavvie band. The companions held brief debate, huddled on the second floor of an office building. They’d picked a vantage point that offered a mostly intact overhead as well as view of the scavvies’ campsite.

  “Oughta sneak up and blast good,” Jak said.

  Ryan raised an eyebrow. When they’d found him, Jak had been a guerrilla leader of sorts, at the tender age of fourteen. He’d been quite a success. He was smart, keen as the blades he loved to carry, but he was still a youth despite lifelong seasoning as hunter of beasts, muties and men.

  And sometimes he reminded Ryan of the old saying Trader used to quote: When a man’s got a hammer, every problem looks like a nail to him.