by James Axler
Now he was hiding in some weeds near the water with as good a lookout on the supply base’s waterfront as J.B. had thought decent to give him. He was out of sight of both J.B. and Jak, but ready to give support while his two companions did the necessary.
The wag blowing up was the signal to commence. J.B. hoped the blast had killed enough of the troops hiding out to await the raiders—just as Ryan had predicted—and discombobulated the survivors enough Ryan could slip away safely into the night to where Krysty, Mildred and Doc waited with their horses. He had reckoned it was worth the risk to fire at least one shot from his longblaster to make sure the Protectors lying in ambush opened up first and asked questions...never, as it turned out.
But it was Ryan’s plan, all the way. And even if J.B. had been a man inclined to worry, worrying about the one-eyed man was the last way he’d waste his valuable time. The man just had a way of surviving, no matter what.
Now it was up to J.B. and Jak. The Armorer checked the load in his Smith & Wesson M-4000 scattergun. Although to save their relatively rare and valuable smokeless ammo, they all were using scabbied black powder weapons as much as possible. Jak was toting a Schofield double-action replica revolver in place of his favored Python handblaster, which mattered little to him since he planned on blade-work alone this night. Where needed, they were still willing to burn up their more modern cartridges and shells.
“Let’s go,” J.B. said softly.
Just like that, they vanished into the darkness.
* * *
ALTHOUGH HE WAS pretty much the width of the whole sprawling supply depot away from the explosion, it stunned Private Reiser. No doubt it was the sheer sudden shock of the event, as well as the head-smashing noise that left his ears ringing and the flash that had left giant purple balloons drifting across his vision.
He was walking the usual beat around the wooden and concrete docks where the supplies were offloaded and the various empties were put back on the shallow-draft barges, pushed upstream by small steam tugs, for the much easier trip back down the Des Moines to Hugoville. They kept to the lantern-lit area between the docks and the warehouses. The perimeter extended much farther to the riverbank, for reasons nobody ever bothered to explain to Reiser. But the higher-ups didn’t deem it worth anybody’s trouble to patrol the empty grass and weeds along the bank, when all anybody would care about was the storage areas or maybe the shops where tugs in need of repair got fixed.
His partner this night was Haldeman. Smart-ass though he was, Haldeman was a pretty clever soldier. He’d seen combat in the Grand Army’s infantry before a muzzle-loader ball glancing off his hip relegated him to light duty.
But as he thought about it, there was probably no better man in the Fort Thor sec-man contingent to have at your back when the shit-hammer actually fell. And for the first time in his stint there, Private Reiser found himself thinking about it, as he tried to gather his reeling senses.
At his side Haldeman was snapping into action despite the blood that trickled from his left ear beneath his kepi-style cap, the one nearer to his partner. He had his own Spencer in his hands—a personal blaster that he’d brought with him to Fort Thor, having somehow managed to keep it from being stolen by orderlies at the field hospital after he got blasted at Third Greasy Creek—and was looking toward the flames brightening up the sky above the roofs of the buildings between them and the camp entrance, looking for attackers.
Suddenly his head snapped forward. He sprawled on his face on the camp road, which fairly constant resurfacing with gravel couldn’t keep the far more constant wag wheels from wearing ruts into. He fell gracelessly atop his blaster and lay still.
For a moment Private Reiser just stared down at his buddy with his mouth hanging open. Even without the stupefying shock of the bomb blast to knock him double-stupe, he would’ve had a hard time assimilating that twist of events. For all the carillon going off yet in his ears, he knew he’d have heard a blaster going off nearby.
Haldeman’s kepi had fallen off, and in the lantern light there was no missing the big round hole, dark and oozing darkly shining fluid, in the back of the veteran’s close-cropped head.
Reiser wasn’t that stunned. Whether he’d heard it or not, somebody’d just blasted his buddy in the brainpan. He ran, stumbling, down the short block to the corner of a dark warehouse, around into the narrow space between it and a carriage shop. A terrible sight stopped him dead.
A ghost stood there—or somebody as white as one, with white hair hanging almost to the shoulders of a jacket that glittered strangely in the flame light. Somebody small enough to be taken for a kid stared at Reiser with eyes that showed unmistakably the color of blood.
His eyes traveled down and they took in the big bowie knife jutting from a chalk-white hand, its deep-belled blade dripping blood, and the body lying facedown by the intruder’s feet.
They looked at each other.
“Run,” the stranger ordered.
Reiser ran.
Chapter Fifteen
Baron Al staggered into his quarters upstairs at the Lenkmans’ house. He was way more intoxicated by fatigue than he was the booze he’d taken on board during the course of the evening—even the extra bottle of what claimed to be scabbied Jack Daniel’s Black he’d sucked down after another screaming fight with Jessie Rae at dinner led to her storming out to spend the night with some of her officers’-wives pals camped under canvas on the house’s grounds.
So he was expecting to be alone when he entered his bedroom. It wasn’t that unusual an experience, anyway. Jessie Rae didn’t much care to pass the night in the same bed with her husband these days. Said his snoring and tossing and turning made it hard to sleep.
Come to that, she didn’t spend much time in his bed with him for other purposes, either. But that was a situation that would have to wait for peace to get addressed. Like so many others.
It took him three tries to light the kerosene lamp on the chest of drawers just inside the bedroom door with his pocket striker. He scorched his right thumb in the process. Jessie Rae would have scolded him. He had orderlies to do such menial tasks for him, to say nothing of the Lenkmans. But he thought damned little of a grown man who couldn’t tuck his own broad ass away to sleep at night. How could he manage a ville, much less an army, if he couldn’t keep his own house in order?
Of course, that thought might raise certain questions in relation to his wife, which he would try to keep from his mind this night, thank you very much. He needed to sleep so he could address what seemed like the whole new world of problems the morning would dump on his doorstep.
He turned...and stopped dead, his blood temperature dropping like a stone.
It took him a moment to recognize the lone intruder sitting in his chair as the one-eyed boss of the gang of mercies he’d hired on to do commando-style dirty work against the Protectors. When it did, the fact little reassured him. The man was clearly a coldheart.
And the very nature of mercies was that their loyalty—and their blasters—were available to hire.
“Back away off the trigger, Baron,” Ryan said quietly. “You and me need to talk. Man-to-man—and in private.”
* * *
“RAD-BLAST IT!” Baron Jed screamed. “Rad-blast all of them. And rad-blast all of you triple-stupe bastards for letting them make idiots of us time and again!”
At some level Jed Kylie knew he was out of control, but he’d been working up a good head of rage recently. The fact that this night’s vigil had been a time of growing anticipation of the best of news—not just that the marauders who’d been such a burr in the bunghole of his Grand Army had at last been zeroed out, but that the murderers of his poor dear boy had been brought to justice.
If he struck real luck, some of them would even be captured alive, and dragged back here to face the most protracted and painful retribution his fevered yet fertile mind could devise.
Instead it had all turned into a chamber pot full of fermenting shit. As their
spy in Baron Al’s camp reported, the raiders had struck Fort Thor, their key transhipment point for supplies dragged up the river from Hugoville. Only the reported infiltration attack hadn’t been a Trojan horse—that, they expected—but a trap of a different sort.
The hijacked wag had contained full barrels of powder, cunningly covered in percussion caps, apparently held to the outsides of staves with windings of cloth, so that incoming bullets would set the whole thing off in one gigantic blast. It had wiped out a quarter of the elite cavalry troop he’d had waiting to ambush the raiders.
Worse, because he could get more men to fire blasters for him far more easily than he could the powder to make them blast, the concealed bomb had served as a diversion. While all eyes were on the front of the camp, a handful of coldhearts had slipped in the back, chilled the sec men who got in the way and blown up a whole warehouse full of gunpowder. A couple nearby warehouses had been flattened in the process, torching or scattering everything from replacement uniforms to a week’s supply of hardtack.
The glorious anticipated success had turned into the worst setback yet. Worse than the whole Uplander Army had managed to hand the Association in open battle in a generation, in ways.
Hours after receiving the news, and the sun not yet daring to show its red eye on the baron’s righteous wrath, Jed was still pacing his headquarters tent raging at subordinates. His fury wasn’t near played out yet.
The only reason he wasn’t having somebody tortured to death in front of him for allowing this whole colossal screw-up to happen was that he couldn’t settle on who he blamed most. Though Jed was sorely tempted to hang the collar on that pallid scar-faced sec boss of his. Colonel Toth was looking even paler than usual, his seam scar nearly blue-white, and he kept half murmuring, half hissing excuses that masqueraded as factual observations in a way that was actually stoking his baron’s nuke-red anger.
But the bloodless sec boss was useful. Not even in the throes of his tantrum did Jed lose sight of that. And also both the sec boss and his master had taken certain measures to secure themselves against each other. It was a sort of mutual assured destruction arrangement. Even though Jed Kylie wasn’t a man to accumulate useless knowledge for its own sake, he was well aware how that turned out for the U.S. and its rival, the Soviets, back in the day.
“I’ve dispatched men to detain the commander of Fort Thor,” Toth said. “Perhaps when he arrives you can find...satisfaction grilling him.”
Jed’s brows pressed down so hard in a frown he was hardly able to see out his own eyes, which he was well aware were on the squinting side to begin with. Major Gray Linds was the officer commanding Fort Thor. He was also a major Association landowner, a baron in his own right and one of Jed’s key supporters. It was why he’d pulled such an ace billet.
What Jed wanted to do was turn around and rip his sec boss a new one for suggesting Jed scapegoat a man he could no more afford to alienate than he could Cody himself, a fact the too-elegant colonel was well aware of. But no matter how tempestuous his nature Jed Kylie never quite let himself lose control of it altogether. That part of him that kept him alive in spite of the inevitable intrigue among the wealthy and powerful Association—the landowners, rich merchants and arguable barons being the only ones who counted a spent, bent casing, after all—reminded him now he couldn’t really afford to blurt anything about his reasons for not stepping too hard on Lind’s neck, either.
Toth was far from imperceptive. His own watery blue eyes widened slightly at the laserlike focus of his baron’s fury. Impossibly his face got even whiter.
Then a junior officer appeared at his elbow. He whispered something into the colonel’s ear.
Jed prepared to unload the full force of his fury on this subordinate. The protection Toth had secured for himself didn’t extend to his flunkies. And Jed, whose sec staff wasn’t so vast he didn’t know at least a bit about all its members, was aware this particular man came from a very modest family of little consequence—scarcely better than a tenant himself. There was very little downside to scapegoating him.
But even as he pried open his trapdoor lips to pronounce doom on the junior officer, Jed noticed some color had returned to Toth’s gaunt cheeks. That checked him at least momentarily.
Which was enough for the colonel, now smooth as oil on raw sewage, to say in a much more assertive tone than he’d been using previously, “Baron, I’ve been informed we have a visitor from the Uplanders’ camp. I think you’ll want to hear what he has to say at once.”
For a moment Jed glowered at his subordinate. He twitched the hot glare briefly to the junior officer, who gratifyingly seemed on the verge of bursting into flame from sheer horror. Then he fixed it rigidly on Toth, who bore up unwilting; he was used to it.
What are you trying to pull now, you sneaky little shit? Jed thought. But he said, “Bring him on.”
Even in advance of Toth’s imperious wave the subordinate scampered out. An eyeblink later he came back squiring a plump brown-bearded figure wearing a uniform turned inside out.
Baron Jed couldn’t help it. He burst into laughter. He knew why his spy had done it—to prevent any random Protector patrols he encountered in no-man’s-land from blasting him on sight, to say nothing of main camp guards whose trigger fingers were understandably most itchy after the night’s escapades. But the fact he had literally turned his coat was just too much for the baron to keep his composure.
If he couldn’t find outlet for his rage any other way, he’d laugh his fool head off like a hyena. He was the nuking baron, after all.
The major was a man who managed to appear mousy despite his portliness, a chubby mouse, mebbe. His brown eyes widened at his baron’s outburst.
But Toth, having given his master a few moments until the edge of hysteria came off his laughter, smiled thinly.
“You might wish to wait to laugh until you hear what our Major Bear has to say, General,” he said.
Jed choked the laughter right off. “Tell me,” he snapped, all business.
Bear’s Adam’s apple rode up and down beneath his beard in a convulsive swallow. He nodded.
“It’s Baron Al,” he said. “He’s...out of it.”
“Wait,” Jed said. “What? What do you mean ‘out of it’?”
“Incapacitated,” the spy said. “Mebbe dead, even. Nobody knows. It’s all rumor now.”
“What do you actually know, then, Major?” Jed asked, in tones that could have left the spy, already quaking, in no doubt that he was on thin ice.
“What I saw with my own eyes, Baron,” Bear said. “When Cawdor and the others got back from their raid on Fort Thor, he got to partying hearty. You know how Al is, Baron. He started whooping and hollering and slamming the booze straight from the bottle.
“Until he stiffened like he got a ’lectric shock. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he fell straight down like he’d taken a ball to the back of the head. Was all thrashing and foaming in his beard when a bunch of staff monkeys carried him out. And since then the whole command structure of the Uplander Army’s gone to shit.
“Nobody knows which end is up or who’s in charge. It’s total chaos, Baron. Total chaos!”
Jed stared at him for a moment, then looked around at the cloud of anxious officers hovering around him.
“Mobilize the army,” he said. “Get everyone who can hoist a blaster up on his pins and be ready to march. Get the artillery and the supply wags hitched up and rolling north. Get the cavalry out screening them. The foot sloggers can march past them if they get rolling first.”
“What are you doing, Baron?” Toth demanded in something like alarm.
“Putting an end to this war once and for fucking all,” he said. “We’ll smash the Uplanders so bad we can reclaim what the bastards stole from my granddaddy.
“Action this day, gentlemen! We march to final victory.”
Chapter Sixteen
“Quo vadis, domine?”
Jed Kylie looked in frank irrit
ation at Snake Eye, who had without ceremony—much less permission—just taken his place riding his gleaming black gelding flank-to-flank with the baron’s chestnut stallion in the very midst of his cortege. The baron of Hugoville rode at the head of the Grand Army of the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, although he had a cavalry troop out scouting the way ahead.
“I’m not even gonna ask how you managed to get past all the aides and sec men who are supposed to keep the rabble away from my skinny august ass,” Kylie said. “But I will ask what the glowing night shit that was you asked me?”
“It meant, ‘Whither goest thou, Lord,’” Snake Eye said. “A classical allusion. A weakness of mine.”
“I’m guessing you’re not just along to help me enjoy the morning sunshine,” the baron said.
“No, indeed. Although it is a fine, fair morning.”
It was. The sky was blue and brushed with fluffy horsetails of cloud. The only off note was a line of cloud above the Western horizon, black with an ominous orange tint that the sun was just too high in the sky to explain away as dawn light. It might be that the valley was due for a thunderstorm, if not one of its infrequent acid-rain storms.
“Well?” Cody snapped from the baron’s other elbow—his left.
He was visibly not pleased by Snake Eye’s sudden appearance out of nowhere. Although Snake Eye found it hardly mysterious, to his own private amusement. The aides and sec men all knew the tall, lean man with the black hat, the yellowish cast to his skin and the black eye patch was the baron’s personal hired assassin.
And there was that in Snake Eye’s manner that didn’t encourage forwardness of any sort in those whom he encountered.
“I came to ask a question,” Snake Eye said. “Which I have duly asked.”
“Let me ask a question,” Jed said sternly. “Why haven’t you chilled that bastard coldheart Cawdor and his murdering friends yet?”
