No Man's Land

by James Axler

  Not that Erl feared Jed’s shedding of his own blood would be anything but metaphorical. Aside from being a member of the baron’s staff, Big Erl was an important man in his own right—a landowner with substantial holdings...and substantial influence.

  Still, Jed had a way of making things mighty uncomfortable on a body, whether he got to chill you in the process or not. And the towel on Erl’s big face softening his beard for the razor was getting lukewarm.

  “Watkuns!” he bellowed. “Watkuns, get your lazy ass in here now! Or I’ll have the hide whipped right off it, you hear?”

  It worked. Of course, the lower orders were lazy by nature. But they understood two things: threats and volume. Erl heard the canvas tent flap rustle and his servant scurry in to get about his damned business.

  “That’s more like it,” he grumped, as he heard his servant’s shuffling step. The man had a bad hip; broke it years back when a horse kicked him. His fault for not getting his lazy ass out of the way, of course. Erl Kendry was no man to let that give him license to slack off.

  He heard the familiar scritch of the straight razor being trued up on the leather strop and settled deeper into the cushions with a satisfied sigh. He kept his eyes closed. He had a hard road of a day ahead, and Erl intended to take it easy while he could.

  “Not that I’m all that all-fired eager to come into the presence of our esteemed commander,” he admitted. “That sawed-off little bastrich is gonna be hopping around like a toad frog on a hot griddle all day.”

  He spoke frankly to his manservant of many years. He needed somebody he could unburden himself of his many cares and concerns that as a man of power and influence—not as much as he deserved, mind you, nor yet as much as he intended to have—he naturally accrued. He certainly didn’t dare to speak frankly to any of his peers on the Protective Association army’s general staff. Nor needless to say any of his lessers. They were nothing but a pack of ravening mutie coyotes, eager to tear him down to build themselves up. So he let it all hang loose where his servant was concerned.

  The gimpy old fuck knew what’d happen to him if he dared run his face, anyway, Erl thoughts.

  “Not that I blame poor Jed,” he admitted, as the towel was lifted from his face. Erl kept his eyes closed as Watkuns brushed warm lather on his cheeks and chin.

  It was his usual habit. Why did he have to watch? And he was going to trust the man with a razor-sharp blade—being as it was a razor and all—right up against his throat. Of course, Watkuns had a family—a couple daughters, some grand-brats; who had time to keep track? He also knew what would happen to them, while he watched, should his hand chance to slip.

  “I mean, what’s a man supposed to feel in his position? His own son and heir left to bleed out like a strung-up hog by those bitches from that gang of coldhearts the patrol trolled in last night. Be enough to break the heart of a cee-ment statue.”

  Erl started to shake his head. Then he chuckled—as the keen straight edge began to scrape at the dark-and-light bristles that sprouted overnight on his considerable jowls. Triple-stupe move I almost made there, he thought.

  “Before he let us all finally go the hell to bed last night—this morning, more like—he was offering the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who ran them coldheart fuckers down and dragged them back. Dead or alive. Not gonna happen. They’ve hightailed it all the way to the Red River by now. Along with thirty head of prize cavalry mounts.”

  “Interesting,” a voice said by his ear.

  Erl felt his brows crease in a scowl. It wasn’t like Watkuns to comment on things his master said. It wasn’t his place.

  Then it hit him: the soft, sibilant hiss wasn’t anything like his long-time servant’s half-simp drawl, either.

  Erl’s eyes flew open. The face close to his was as narrow and hard as a bowie blade and had a yellow cast to it. There was a shiny black patch over one eye, and a hint of fine scales at the edges of the lean jaw and around the eyes, and colorless, almost invisibly thin lips. It was as unlike Watkuns’s saggy old face as night from day.

  The big man went rigid with terror. His hands gripped the arms of his comfy chair fit to pop the tendons. For a moment his mind went white in sheer panic. A stranger with a razor to his neck!

  Then he relaxed. He recognized the stoneheart he himself had hired a week or two back to transact certain...business for him.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you mutie bastard!” Erl yelled, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to startle the man, to call him that, as a body probably oughtn’t, taint that he was.

  The thin lips smiled. “Ease your mind, Mr. Kendry,” he said. “I just wanted to report the successful completion of my mission. And receive my payment due, of course.”

  He continued to shave Big Erl’s cheek with a steadier hand and smoother motion than his servant managed after almost two decades’ practice.

  “But—Watkuns—my servant...”

  “Don’t worry,” Snake Eye said.

  That was the chiller’s name. Erl remembered it now. A notorious man. A man who always fulfilled a contract.

  That was why Erl hired him. That old sag-bellied bastard Earnie had a way of slipping out of the tightest places. For various reasons connected to his important position in the community Erl couldn’t act against his former partner directly. And none of the men he’d paid to chill Earnie before had come through. Erl reckoned the bastard had bought them off.

  “I persuaded your servant to let me take his place this morning,” the assassin went on, as easily as if he was discussing a fair day’s weather.

  Erl scowled deeper. He was going to need to have words with Watkuns over this. More than just words, mebbe.

  “Tell me about it,” he said, anger and residual fear making his voice husky.

  Snake Eye briefly tipped his head in what Erl took for a form of shrug. The chiller had on a black hat and a white shirt with a black velvet vest over it. He and the clothes smelled clean, not of days, if not weeks, of accumulated sweat. That was an unusual thing in itself, and Erl chastised himself for not noticing the man who shaved him smelled differently than his servant before now.

  “He was in the shop he ran,” Snake Eye said. “Cowering in the basement. Not that I blamed him overmuch. Both your army and your opponents were busy shelling the stuffing out of the place. I found him there. He tried to buy me off. I reminded him of my invariant policy and dealt with him accordingly.”

  Erl had to restrain himself forcibly from nodding in eager satisfaction. “Ace!” he exclaimed.

  “And now,” the mercie said, “there’s the issue of my compensation. Don’t get up—just direct me to where I may find my payment for successful completion of my contract.”

  “In the lockbox by the foot of my cot,” Erl said, rolling his eyes toward the objects in question. “There’s a velvet pouch. Royal blue.”

  “Tasteful,” Snake Eye said with a nod.

  “It’s right on top, now,” Erl said. “Don’t go grubbing around in there.”

  “Tut tut, Mr. Kendry. Surely you don’t mean to impugn my professionalism.”

  The yellowish, dry-backed hand paused briefly with the razor edge close to Erl’s mostly shaved right cheek. Erl’s blood cooled down many degrees in a hurry.

  “No,” he admitted, “I surely don’t.”

  Inwardly he seethed. I don’t care what it costs me, he thought. I’ll make this mutie bastard pay for this! I’ll have his scaly yellow hide stripped off and have him kept alive to watch it made into a pair of boots!

  “I thought not.” Snake Eye resumed his expert shaving. “I charge premium prices for my services. And as you know, I am most exact in delivering them. As indeed I have.”

  “Yeah” was all Erl could manage to say to that.

  “There is one thing, Mr. Kendry.”

  The coldheart finished shaving Erl’s right side and moved with silky smoothness to the left. Now that he wasn’t mimicking Watkuns’s l
ame-legged gait he made no more noise than the thoughts in his servant’s narrow hairless skull.

  “Before his demise, Earnie told a most diverting story,” Snake Eye said. “A tale of a hidden underground bunker filled with marvelous treasure. Old-days tech, abundant and beyond compare. A trove he and a certain erstwhile partner stumbled across in their younger, more...congenial days.”

  Erl’s mind was still stumbling around the word erstwhile when the import of the rest of the mutie’s statement hit him. He went dead still. If his blood had gone cold before, it was a wonder it didn’t freeze solid enough to break.

  “Now, circumstances prevented him—and you—from exploiting your discovery, he said,” Snake Eye continued. “Then or later. But he attempted to use its location to buy his life.”

  “Well,” Erl said weakly, “isn’t just that cowardly, greasy old weasel all over?”

  The blade had moved down to Erl’s neck. “He failed, of course. When he wouldn’t divulge the actual location, I went ahead and finished the job.

  “But he’d said too much. They always do.”

  “He was weak,” Erl said, none too strongly himself. “He was always weak. That’s why he tried to get me chilled, in the bushwhacking that cost me my son! My boy. Poor Fank.”

  He felt his eyes fill with tears. His vision blurred. Not solely out of grief.

  The edge of the razor tapped against his Adam’s apple. “But you know the whereabouts of the entrance to this wondrous store of scabbie,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t you, Mr. Kendry?”

  Erl’s main reaction to that was actually outrage; he felt momentary pride in the fact.

  “You—you’re trying to put the arm on me!” he sputtered. “After all this fine talk about professionalism! It was all a bushel of bullshit.”

  “Not at all, Mr. Kendry,” the chiller said calmly. “You see, before he died, Earnie also offered me a contract.”

  Tap-tap against Erl’s throat. He felt his eyes go wide.

  “Against me?”

  “Who else? I told him who sent me, after all. It was the courteous thing to do. Not to mention the fact that you specified he would know why he was being chilled, and who was responsible.”

  “But...but—that’s ridiculous!”

  “How so? I place my services on the market for anyone to purchase, so long as they have the wherewithal to pay. As Earnie did have.”

  Erl’s thoughts flew like bats caught in a Deathlands twister. He tried to will them into some kind of plan. Some kind of way out.

  “I can pay you to cancel the contract!” he blurted. “Pay double! Triple.”

  Snake Eye reached up and twitched the patch onto his forehead. Erl froze in shock.

  The eye that was revealed was fully intact. And fully inhuman. Perfectly circular, staring and lidless, it was a blazing yellow with a black slit pupil.

  A rattlesnake’s eye.

  Snake Eye smiled regretfully and continued to tap the cold, thin steel edge against Erl’s quavering, helpless throat.

  The last of Erl’s resistance evaporated.

  “Listen, I can take you to the place! The hidden treasure! It’s not twenty miles from here.”

  “Is that so?” The blade was withdrawn.

  Erl almost melted in relief. His thoughts, contrarily, suddenly came together.

  “You’ll never find it without me,” he said in firmer tones.

  He felt a sudden sting across the front of his neck. It wasn’t until a red mist of his own blood sprayed out before his horrified eyes that he realized Snake Eye had slashed his throat with a single rattlesnake slash.

  “Why?” his lips said. All that came out was air gurgling from a cut windpipe, bubbling through blood.

  “I beg to differ, Mr. Kendry,” said the chiller, who had stepped neatly aside, out of the way of the pulsing blood. It was already dwindling before Erl’s eyes as he gagged and fought for breath. “If two idiots such as you could find the treasure once, I can find it now. And I’m sure I can track down other rumors about it to narrow the location further.”

  Erl’s vision was fading. He saw the hateful face of his killer smile.

  “As I said, Mr. Kendry—” the stoneheart’s words came as if shouted down a well that was somehow growing deeper as he spoke “—they always say too much.

  “And last of all—you should take with you, wherever you’re bound, the fact that I always, always keep my contracts.”

  Chapter Seven

  Baron Al Siebert of Siebertville, commander in chief of the Uplands Alliance Army, was a man as big as his blood-foe Baron Jed was small, Ryan saw as the companions were ushered into the command tent under guard. Baron Al was also as unkempt as the rival general was fussily neat. He wore canvas trousers with the fly unbuttoned, held up—if barely—by suspenders stretched over a big gut. They looked as if the Baron had slept in them, and his wiry black beard and the hair around his gleaming sunburned skull were wild.

  The troopers with the companions were casual. They kept their carbines slung. Though their longblasters were stashed with their packs in the tent where they’d spent the night after Lieutenant Tillman Owens’s patrol had brought the companions inside the lines, they still openly wore such sidearms. And accordingly they hadn’t been frisked at all, to say nothing of the half-assed job Jed’s sec men had done earlier in the evening. Both the fresh-faced young lieutenant and whatever superiors he reported to had accepted the newcomers as what they purported—truthfully enough—to be: mercies seeking gainful employment with the Uplander Army.

  Now the sun stood high over a surprisingly clear sky. A good breakfast, hot and plentiful and with lots of chicory in lieu of the hard-to-come-by coffee, still warmed Ryan’s gut. And by the looks of it, the Uplander general had only just recently hauled his mass up off his cot.

  Baron Al was bent frowning over a map spread on a low table. Old and faded though it was, Ryan recognized a U.S.G.S. contour map, no doubt of the terrain he and the Protectors were currently facing each other across. He didn’t look up as they entered.

  Several men were clustered around the map table. In the daylight Ryan had noticed that the Uplanders seemed more casual in their approach to uniforms than their opposite numbers. Most of the troops he’d seen obviously wore whatever they left home in, with a green armband, often nothing more than a random handkerchief or scrap of cloth, tied around one biceps to denote affiliation. At most, some of the officers and the odd noncom wore a green uniform blouse or tunic, although these were of a sufficient variety of patterns that “uniform-like” would probably hit closer to the bull’s-eye. The baron himself wore not a scrap of green, evidently trusting his substantial height and distinctive appearance to identify his own allegiance.

  Unlike their boss, the obvious junior officers—aides and subcommanders, or so Ryan reckoned—who studied the table with Al did wear uniform uppers, tailored-looking and even reasonably clean. Only the man who hovered at the baron’s right elbow wore a complete set: spotless green tunic with a double row of double-shiny brass buttons, crisp green trousers with yellow stripes down the sides, brown boots polished like mirrors.

  “You overslept again, General,” the fashion plate was saying in a prissy tone of voice. He was good-looking enough, if a person went for that type: fine features, long nose, keen brown eyes, black hair. The only thing that spoiled his handsomeness was the fact that, though clearly Al’s junior by a decade or two, the man had a bald spot on his narrow head almost as big as the one the baron sported. “Are you sure that’s the example you want to set your men?”

  “Who gives a rat’s ass what kind of example I set, Cody?” Al rumbled, running a stubby forefinger along a terrain contour. “The men know why we fight. Better for them if I get enough sleep so I can think straight. It’s not as if our pickets wouldn’t warn us if Jed tried a sneak attack. Not that he’d take the ramrod out of his skinny ass long enough to try any such unorthodox maneuver.”

  He raised his head, lacking only a set
of short horns to look like an old, if admittedly pattern-balding, bison bull. “Dammit, where’s my chicory?”

  A young man in a gray shirt and baggy pants rushed into the tent bearing a big mug of white-speckled blue steel with steam coming off the top.

  “Sorry, General!” the youngster said as he bustled up to Al. “Cookie wanted to make sure you got first mug from a fresh pot of coffee!”

  “Chicory, son,” Al corrected without heat. “Call a thing what it is.”

  He offered thanks as he accepted the mug, though. He took a sip and grimaced as the youngster retreated from the tent with evident relief.

  “Brr,” Al said, shaking his big head, this time like a dog trying to dry his ears. “Tastes like cat piss, and I’m sure it’s got no more go-juice to it. But I can’t think straight in the morning until I got a gulp or two in this big old belly of mine.”

  The fussy-looking specimen called Cody pinched his mouth like an asshole and squeezed his fine brows together. It looked like a well-practiced expression to Ryan.

  “You really could drink real coffee, General,” he said. “You are the commander in chief, after all.”

  Al took another hearty slug with more urgency than enjoyment. Then he wiped his bearded lips with the back of his hand.

  “If it’s good enough for the men, it’s good enough for their commander,” he growled. “You nag me as bad as Jessie Rae does, Colonel Turnbull. And about the same rad-blasted things, too—commonly my late rising habits and my refusal to act according to my pree-rog-uh-tives—” he drew the word out to contemptuous length “—of rank. And my slovenly habits of dress, as I’m sure you won’t omit to get to shortly.”

  Turnbull’s narrow cheeks flushed pink. “Appearances are important, General!”

  “Obviously you think so.” He looked for the first time at the newcomers, then turned to Lieutenant Owens. “So what have you brought me today, Tillman Norbert?”