No Man's Land

by James Axler

  The lieutenant looked at her a moment with blue eyes wide, then he laughed.

  “Never thought of it that way before, Miz Wyeth,” he said. “That explains a lot, though, now that you mention it. Especially considering how peace was concluded just last autumn after six months of stalemate.”

  “How was that evidence of a long-simmering grudge, young man?” Doc wanted to know. He was focused and attentive. He saw the possible merit of this history lesson as clearly as J.B. did. Not too surprising, given his own training and history. It meant he was staying sharp and in the moment.

  “Well, when talks began, both sides agreed to pull back and leave a no-man’s-land. Snow was coming on, and that always makes campaigning hard. An agreement was reached.

  “But then at a midwinter gathering to celebrate the final signing of the treaty, Jessie Rae got in a screaming fight with Jed’s wife, and it was back on like donkey pong. Are you feeling distressed, Miz Wyeth? Should I call for an orderly to bring you water or something?”

  Mildred waved him off. Her expression suggested to Ryan she was trying to choke back laughter. “I’m fine,” she said. “I just don’t know which hurts worse—the way you mangle a phrase from my own time, or the realization it somehow survived.”

  He frowned his incomprehension. “Your time?”

  “Her childhood,” Krysty said brightly. “Mildred has a nostalgic streak, you see.”

  Mildred shot her friend a narrow-eyed look under lowered brows, then her face began to smooth as she realized she’d screwed up. The fact she was a freezie, born way back before the Big Nuke, wasn’t common knowledge, nor was it the sort of knowledge that would do her—or her friends—a bit of good. People feared and hated that which they didn’t understand.

  “Uh, yeah,” Mildred said. “I grew up...someplace pretty far from here. Remote, too. So it always kind of surprises me when I, you know, hear or see something that reminds me of my...homeland.”

  “Oh.” From his expression the lieutenant didn’t really catch what she was talking about. But he also pretty clearly decided it was his fault for not getting hold, and he’d rather plow on than look like more of a stupe, which suited Ryan down to the ground.

  “So...uh...one thing that sorta helps things along—and please don’t let on as to how I told you—the baron’s wife, Miz Jessie Rae, happens to be the younger sister of Joyleen Kylie.”

  Ryan sat back. He felt his eyebrows crawling up his forehead.

  “Wait,” Ricky said. “Isn’t that a security risk?”

  J.B. looked a bit stern at that—the kid was his protégé, after all, and his habit of blurting ran directly counter to the Armorer’s taciturn nature and instincts. For his point, Ryan thought it was a double-good question.

  But to his increased surprise the lieutenant burst out laughing.

  “Sorry, no way you’d know,” he said, reining himself back into businesslike-briefing mode, though not without a smile tugging mischievously at the corners of his mouth. “Two women hate each other like owls and crows. They can’t spend longer than mebbe ten minutes in a room without one flying right up into the other’s face, screeching and clawing. And so it proved to be the end of the peace celebration.”

  He sighed. “Also the peace.”

  “You are a likely young buck,” Doc said, “to say nothing of a cavalry officer, one whom we’ve seen display the customary élan of the breed. Yet you seem distressed at the resumption of that very war that brings you the prospect of glory.”

  Owens looked uncomfortable. “Well, glory has its place, I give you that, Professor,” he said. “But I’ve seen what war costs us. My family—all of the Uplanders. Nuke, I’ve seen what it does to the common folk in the Association, too. Most of them are just victims, got no more say in what their masters do than their dogs do. Less than some of the landowners’ favored hunting dogs, I’d say.

  “Plus, I’ve seen what it costs my men. Glory doesn’t look so glorious when some kid who you grew up friends with your whole life is rolling around in the grass kicking and clutching at a ball through the belly. Nor sound nor smell so triple-fine, either.”

  “Good for you, kid,” Ryan said. “Lots of people never notice that fact even when the blood and shit’s spattering the toes of their boots, which in the present case translates to you’re less likely to do something triple-ass stupe because it’ll make you feel like a big hero, and get us all chilled.

  “You gave us the background, and I admit I can see that might be of some use somewhere down the line. But now, how about we get to counting blasters? What do they have? What do we have?”

  Owens nodded. His smile quit trying to grab control of his face. He had no trouble going all-business now.

  “Fact is, Mr. Cawdor—” he began.

  “Rad-blast!” Ryan exclaimed. “J.B.’s right. That ‘mister’ shit just makes me feel old. Chill that, boy. Call me Ryan, if you feel moved to use a name.”

  “As you will, Mist— Uh, Ryan. The fact is, the Protectors got the edge on us in pretty near every way you might care to put a name to. They got more land, and are richer. Hence, more men, more blasters. More horses and cannon, and more fodder for the lot of them.”

  “But your people have managed to keep the war going since you won your independence from the lowland barons,” Krysty said.

  The lieutenant nodded. He scratched a pink cheek that Ryan doubted would muster anything rougher than peach fuzz for another few years yet. Should the youth live and all.

  “I guess that gets back to, uh, J.B.’s concern about how motivated we Uplanders are,” he said. “The fact is it’s only that we’re willing to fight like badgers for every inch of soil that keeps them from rolling us right down like a buffalo stampede. Sure, we have pretty fair defensive terrain. Fairly broken country, good cover readily available. As the Association found out when we booted their asses back to the lowlands.

  “But down here it’s just nothing but guts and mebbe being too triple-stupe to know when we’re beat that allows us to hang on to anything. We need this growing land to feed our people. But the open country that’s so fertile and all also allows their advantages in numbers to come into play.”

  He looked from one of their faces to the next. “Mebbe I’m about to speak out of turn, here,” he said, “seeing as you’re hired mercies and all, but Baron Al trusts a man with the job he gives him, even us junior officers. He told me to brief you straight, so straight is how I’ll give it to you.

  “It seems like only a matter of time until they bring us down, this go-round. Baron Al’s a shrewd old bast—baron. Oh, he may not look it or sound like it, and Jessie Rae and some of the better-polished officers like Colonel Turnbull are always on him to quit acting like such a hayseed. But he likes it that way, and not just ’cause it fits him like an old pair of shoes. It inclines people to underestimate him. He likes that.”

  “But even his cunning has its limits, am I correct?” Doc asked.

  “Baron Kylie doesn’t have triple-many flies on him, either,” Owens said. “I know he likely didn’t make the best impression on you-all, there at the outset. He’s got a short temper and isn’t a particularly kind man at the best of times. But he’s triple-smart, too. Got to be, to hang on to power in the lowlands like he does.

  “Association isn’t like us in the Alliance. Political power’s a big prize to them. They play the game for blood—win or die.”

  Ryan pressed his lips together. He wondered if in fact the Alliance was as immune to power games as young Owens so fondly believed. A baron’s son himself, he found himself inclined to doubt it. But seeing to that part of the youth’s education wasn’t part of his mission. Seeing to the welfare of his own was. Owens was a good kid, but he wasn’t an insider.

  “So you told us your commanding general will trust a man to do his assigned job,” he said, “no matter how low in rank. Question is whether Al will listen to a kid like you.”

  Owens frowned, considering. “Baron Al listens t
o anybody he thinks talks sense,” he said, “no matter how high or low. But he’ll help you if he thinks you aren’t talking sense. High or low.”

  Ryan nodded. That squared with his assessment of the man. But he hadn’t brought himself and his people this far taking anything for granted.

  “Here’s the deal,” he said. “What if we had an idea of how to speed things up, win the war for your Alliance? Mebbe not all time—wars don’t usually end for all time, unless everybody on one side’s chilled—but for the time being? I reckon that’s the sort of thing he’d best hear first from one of his own, instead of what you so rightly term mercies.”

  “Why would mercies want to speed up the end of a war?” Owens said. His face flushed beet-red. “Sorry, no disrespect. But I mean—”

  J.B. chuckled. “At ease, kid,” he said. “Natural you’d think we’d want to spin the gig out, as long as we could.”

  He paused to take off his glasses and wipe the lenses with his hankie.

  “Natural but wrong. In our case, anyway. We’re not too fond of the whole fighting thing ourselves. As far as mercie work’s concerned, getting paid to guard stuff or keep the peace is miles more comfortable. Also survivable.”

  “I calculate,” Ryan said, “if we can play a big enough role in bringing events to a satisfactory conclusion, a man like Baron Al might feel moved to generosity.”

  “You bet he would!” Owens exclaimed, visibly nonplussed. “The baron might even be able to find land for them to settle in. Give you-all status among us Uplanders. A permanent place and stake.”

  Not looking at Krysty, whose green eyes were on him big and as bright as beacons, Ryan slid past that comment by agreeing.

  “I think I see a way to get the Alliance an advantage,” he said, “and how we can help you do that thing. And as I say, I reckon it’s best if somebody on the inside broaches that notion to Al on our behalf.”

  “I’m listening,” Owens said, trying not to sound too eager—failing, but he was smart enough to try. Ryan reckoned he was a pretty good kid. Smart, committed to his cause. He might even live to a ripe old age. Not that the odds ever favored that outcome, in this here and now.

  “Then listen close,” Ryan said, not failing to note the way all his companions leaned in tight, if anything more eager to hear what he was about to say than the cavalry officer was. “I got a plan....”

  Chapter Twelve

  “We never had us a chance,” the man with the bandaged side was saying over his cracked mug of beer. “Not one fucking chance at all.”

  The beer looked like piss and no doubt tasted much like it. The gaudy around them was the sort of gaudy to serve beer like that.

  Which was to say, the Deathlands’ standard gaudy: dark, dank, low-ceilinged, reeking of spilled booze and vomit. It was the sort of place where one or two dozen lost souls gathered by the light of stinking lanterns fueled by river-fish oil or turpentine, and tossed back booze in hopes of getting drunk as quickly as possible.

  There was a reason why Snake Eye always paid the premium for booze from the bottle. He might not know where it really came from, but at least he could see what he was pouring in his shot glass.

  “You talking about life as a citizen in the Association,” Snake Eye said, sidling down the bar to where the man sat a little apart from what may have been companions, but were unlikely to be friends, “or did you have a specific incident in mind?”

  He was pretty sure he knew the answer to that question before he asked it. That was his favorite kind of question, of course. He had tracked several of the survivors of the ambushed convoy’s wag drivers here to this nameless dive, in an equally nameless settlement of rasty shacks tacked together from scabbie planks and sheet metal a dozen miles or so west of the ambush site.

  He doubted it would be far enough if the Association, or their individual masters, got it in their heads to hunt them down and punish them for desertion. Or for their carelessness in losing a whole convoy worth of luxury goods for the baron at Protector HQ. Their fear of punishment was likely why they’d simply deserted in the first place.

  Barons were all alike. They never took the blame for their own losses or failures. That’s what underlings were for.

  But Jed Kylie had some bigger fish to fry just now, not least being the almost-certain perpetrators of the raid. And if the baron in command of the Protector Army had more important things to do than hunt runaway wag drivers and outriders, his lesser barons did, too.

  “Ease up, there, Norvell,” said one of the men standing by the bar next to him. “It’s not good to talk to outlanders.”

  Snake Eye chuckled indulgently. “Ah, but I’m no outlander,” he said, sidling right up to the wounded man, who was visibly the most inebriated.

  His drunkenness suggested a pair of things to the mercie. One, that he might well prove easiest to get answers out of, although admittedly sense was a different thing altogether. And second, that he might well feel extra motivation besides the pain in his side for wanting to get more hammered than his buddies.

  “I’m a benefactor,” Snake Eye said. He pushed over a tumbler and poured a couple of fingers of murky brown liquid into it. “House’s best. Drink up.”

  Norvell grabbed the greasy tumbler with both hands, threw back his head and shot the drink straight back down his throat. As Norvell shuddered, Snake Eye reflected that he might have been offended at the treatment of the whiskey, but for the fact he had sampled it himself. He reckoned the less risk that any of it might splash on one’s taste buds, the better for all concerned.

  “Ah,” Norvell said, slamming the glass back down on the uneven bar with unnecessary force. Then he turned a bloodshot but cagey look on Snake Eye.

  “Look, mister, I don’t know what you want in return, but I got to tell you, I don’t swing that way.”

  Snake Eye laughed indulgently. Of course his life made normal men blanch, as Norvell’s reluctant companions did, which was fine with Snake Eye. He reckoned he had his mark.

  Norvell, of course, wasn’t a normal man. Norvell was a very drunk man.

  “Just answers to a few questions, my friend,” Snake Eye said. “That’s all I want from you. Such as how did you wind up here in the ass end of nowhere in the first place?”

  Norvell’s two buddies gave the mercie narrow-eye looks over that query. It wasn’t the sort of place you asked a question like that of a man. Not that the Deathlands offered many such places.

  The tiny settlement, hard even in today’s terms to dignify it with the name ville, lay out on the fringes of the no-man’s-land between the warring confederations. But not completely out of it, either. It was plain as day to a man with an eye much less keen than Snake Eye’s trademark yellow one that its sole reason for existence was to service the illicit trade that inevitably went on despite the generations-long conflict. It was too much trouble for either side to try to close down all such concerns. So they seldom tried at all. The fact was, both sides had reasons of their own for wanting such trade to continue.

  All the same, the sort of people you’d encounter in an illicit trading outpost would be even touchier than usual about questions regarding who they were and what they were doing here. For example the three young men glowering at Snake Eye from the darkest corner of the badly lit bar room would probably react poorly at the first syllable of any such question Snake Eye aimed their way. Deserters, he took them for. There was nothing uniform about their assorted duds, aside from general dirt, rumpledness and general raggedy-assedness. Not that they had any exclusive claim on those things. But for most soldiers of either Alliance or Association, shedding the “uniform” took no longer than stripping off the green or blue armband and chucking it in the weeds.

  To Snake Eye, they just had that look. Not that he cared. But he routinely sized up everyone he came into a room with. Just as he never entered a place without knowing a good and fast way out. It just made good sense.

  “Why do you...wanna know?” Norvell said. It reall
y had taken him the better part of a minute to frame the question. Snake Eye had practically heard the gears grinding in his head.

  “Friendly curiosity, partner,” Snake Eye said, reckoning the man was drunk enough to take that for the obvious lie it was. “I’m a businessman, independent entrepreneur. Always on the scout for a new opportunity.”

  Which, at least, was as true as Snake Eye’s heart was hard.

  “Well, I done fell on hard times,” Norvell said, “and that’s a fact.”

  He stopped, clearly waiting. After a moment he looked to his benefactor, wagged his eyebrows like caterpillars dry-humping a leaf. When that action didn’t make his meaning clear he rattled his now-empty glass on the bar.

  Laughing, Snake Eye poured him another. Given the liquor’s quality, it was better in every way that it went into Norvell’s gut than his.

  “Ambushed,” he said. “That’s what happened. T’me and my friends here.”

  “Include us out, Norvell,” said the younger and leaner of his companions. “Dammit.”

  “There we was, driving a convoy of luxury goods for the baron and his pals,” Norvell continued obliviously. “And outta nowhere—bang, bang, bang! Coldhearts ever’where, shooting our asses off. Escort troopers droppin’ like flies. And then this wild-ass mutie kid with white hair and red eyes—red fucking eyes—jumps up on the board next to me and starts stabbing the shit outta me.”

  He’s not a mutie, thought Snake Eye, who knew what an albino was, and also a thing or two about mutants. He said nothing. It wasn’t his business to correct Norvell’s inconsequential view of the world.

  Norvell held up forearms wrapped in bandages. “I fought him off best I could. But he was crazy like a catamount. I thought I was done for until his boss coldheart called him off. There was a scary dude, I tell you, and I never saw him lift a finger against nobody, although he was carrying a longblaster with a scope that looked like it had seen some recent use. Tall dude, lean as a wolf. Just one blue eye and a patch on t’other. Like yours, except ice-blue insteada yellow. Seemed to stab right through a body.”