by James Axler
“The erstwhile White Wolf, Jak Lauren. Mildred Wyeth, noted crack shot and healer. I have often wondered, do you ever patch up the victims of your marksmanship?”
“If I shoot them,” Mildred said grimly, “they don’t usually need patching.”
He smiled. His teeth were clean and white. It came as almost a shock to Ryan that he had normal eyeteeth instead of fold-out rattler fangs.
“Point taken. And you, young man, I gather you must be the newest member of this illustrious troop. Still a new enough phenomenon to remain a mystery, aside from being wrapped in the enigma of the group as a whole.”
“You used a word a moment back, Mr. Eye,” J.B. said.
“Snake Eye is fine,” the stranger said. “Which word?”
“I think you know the one he means, mister,” Ryan said. He wasn’t too eager to have the word tossed about like a ball among ville kids. It was too much to hope for that the whole damned gaudy, including the sluts and their customers hadn’t heard about what the wag drivers were not so secretly jawing about at the bar. That bullet wasn’t going back in the blaster anytime soon. But the fewer specifics about the real nature of the so-called trove that came to light, the better.
“‘Redoubt’?” Snake Eye asked. “Ah, yes. That’s what’s being discussed, isn’t it? And after all, you and your illustrious crew are known to have something of a fascination with them. As well as a remarkable, if hard to credit, propensity for being reported in widely spaced parts of the continent at close to one and the same time.”
Ryan felt as if the mutie had driven a black-clawed fist with pile-driver force into his gut. Could the bastard be on to their deepest secret, the existence of the mat-trans network and their ability to use it?
It was possible.
“How do you come to know so much about us?” Krysty asked. Her natural manner was friendly and disarming, and she wasn’t above using that to advantage when her or her friends’ survival might be at stake.
Snake Eye raised a hairless brow. “Why, I should think it plain as day. I’ve made a study of you,” he said. “Quite lengthy and comprehensive, you’ll agree.”
“Why would you do a thing like that?” Ricky blurted.
Snake Eye smiled again. “Because we’re in the same profession, you and I,” he said. “Most especially, your distinguished leader and myself.”
“What profession might that be?” Ryan asked.
“Chilling men,” Snake Eye said. “Me for pay, but always for advantage. Even if it’s only continued survival.”
“Plenty of folks do that,” J.B. said, scratching the back of his neck. Without making a show of it he had stood up. He had leaned his M-4000 scattergun against the table when he sat; fortunately Storm Crossing wasn’t one of those places where the proprietor had a hair up her butt about the customers carrying weapons. “Dark night, plenty get paid for it, too.”
“Ah,” Snake Eye said, “but very few do so at a level at which they might arguably be called the best. And that’s the reputation you possess, my friends. It’s what caught my attention years ago. It’s the very reason I began to study you assiduously—to actively seek out and collect as much information on you. Even the wildest gossip, which perhaps unsurprisingly, overwhelmingly predominates provable fact.”
“All right,” Mildred said suspiciously. “Why?”
“I wanted to study your methods,” he said. “You’re artisans—craftsmen and -women. As am I. He or she who would be a master takes teaching where it’s to be found. Don’t you find that so?”
“I’m not accepting any pupils,” Ryan said, “if that’s what you’re aiming at.”
“Oh, no, Ryan Cawdor. You misunderstand. I have already learned from you. And learned quite well, I will add, since false humility befits a would-be master as poorly as bravado. No, it has to do more with the nature of the concept of...the best. As a vid from long ago puts it so very well, there can be only one.”
And he raised his right hand to the patch over his right eye.
Ryan was already in motion, flinging himself left, away from the table and from his friends, most of all Krysty. His own hand was drawing his SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster with puma speed.
The clawed thumb whipped up the black patch. The eye revealed was a rattlesnake’s eye in all truth: yellow, round and glaring, with an evil slit pupil.
Ryan noticed that only out at the edge of things. His vision was focused on the black vest buttoned over a gleaming white shirt, where the center of mass—and best handblaster target—could be found. And far more than the terrible staring inhuman eye he was aware of the left hand drawing a black semiauto handblaster faster than Ryan had ever seen a man move in his life.
Ryan was fast on the draw, but even so, Snake Eye cleared leather and fired before Ryan even had his blaster out.
A hammer hit Ryan in the upper right chest. He didn’t feel much pain—not then—but the impact itself seemed to momentarily red out his vision.
Shit happened.
Shit happened, as shit so often did, shit-fast.
As Ryan’s left shoulder hit the boards, he heard the roar of J.B.’s scattergun. He rolled, and even the numbness that often followed a significant wound didn’t stop his chest from hurting like blazing nuke death. He heard more shots and shouts, saw flashes of flame in the gloom.
He fetched up against the bar, unarmed. The downside of dodging to his left was that it made more of a target of his gun arm. The bullet shock had caused his hand to lose his grip on the P-226, and he wasn’t sure where it had wound up.
He heard scraping sounds as his companions pushed their chairs back from the table across the sawdust-covered floor, then a scrape of shoe leather and a creaking of floorboards under major weight. He looked up into the cavernous barrels of a sawed-off side-by-side shotgun, and right behind it, Storm Savage’s fat, painted face staring down at him like an unlovely moon. Her plump finger was in the guard. So apparently she decided to side with the snake boy.
Pap! Pap! Pap! Ryan heard the loud but somehow peevish-sounding reports of Krysty’s snub-nosed .38-caliber handblaster going off right nearby. Through the ringing the blasts left in his ears he heard her yell, “Get away from him, bitch!”
And Storm Savage was going away, but it wasn’t like she had much choice. Blinking his good eye, Ryan saw red spray from her capacious boobs, fat neck and heavily rouged cheek as a result of shots fired upward from Krysty’s blaster.
The smoothbore scattergun let go as reflex convulsed Storm’s finger on the triggers, both barrels, but not directly into Ryan’s helpless, upturned face.
Instead, as its wielder fell away, the shotgun had swung up. It discharged its lethal load at random into the gaudy. The huge flare and roar left Ryan dazzled, half-deaf and his face feeling sunburned. Unburned powder stung his chin and neck like tiny pissed-off bees.
Through the ringing in his ears he heard screams, hoping none came from his friends.
But there was nothing he could do about that, but plenty he had to do, and in a hurry. Despite the flash-bang stunning effect of the blaster going off about a foot from his face, Ryan was recovering from the initial physical reaction to getting hit.
He forced himself to roll onto his belly. From the sloshing behind his washboard abs, it felt as if his stomach was a half roll behind. But he’d been wounded enough in the past to expect that. Nausea wouldn’t chill him. As for the bullet that had hit him, that hadn’t done the job yet, either.
Ryan began to crawl toward where he thought his SIG-Sauer had flown when he lost his grip on it. He found right off the bat that his right arm wasn’t much use, but he made do anyway.
Down in the sawdust, the stench of the vomit and spilled brew it was meant to soak up was nearly overwhelming, but he was able to ignore it after a first whiff or two came back double-strength. It didn’t do his stomach any good. Shots flash-cracking from nearby were enough to keep him focused regardless.
His head and vision had mostly cleared
when his stretched-out left fingers touched cold steel. He made himself lunge forward despite the pain shooting through the comforting numbness of his right shoulder and chest. His fingers closed around the grips.
Blaster now in hand, Ryan rolled onto his back to perceive a vision out of old-days stories of hell: a haze of greenish black-powder smoke, already dense filled the room, turning all shapes to phantoms, shadowed and indistinct, lit in patches by the already inadequate yellow glow of kerosene lanterns and stabbed randomly through by orange muzzle-flares.
Movement drew Ryan’s eye down the bar, past his scuffed and upturned boot toes, to where a burly young man with long brown hair, dressed in a foully stained apron over a T-shirt and jeans, stepped out and raised a double-barreled scattergun.
Ryan had already formed a flash impression of the tactical situation: his friends, crouched behind two overturned tables in the middle of the gaudy floor and shooting toward the end of the room that was now behind his head. He had no time to puzzle over the wood plank top that was somehow providing them actual shelter against the bullets that slammed into it in return. The key fact that exploded into his shock-clouded brain: the newcomer was about to blast his friends from behind.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ryan had already pushed his arm straight out along his body, pointing above and between his boots. Though he got the briefest picture of the new shooter in soft-focus blur above the front sight, it was mostly point-shooting when he started cracking off rounds. Skilled and seasoned a blaster-handler though he was, it took an active force of will to squeeze off the shots rather than just yank the trigger in frantic desperation to save his lover. That would have scattered the slugs all over the hell’s fractional acre the barroom had become, and only stopped the threat by sheerest strike accident.
After the third yellow bloom of fire from the P-226’s muzzle, the indistinct figure of the burly youth fell away. By sheer momentum—and to make sure—Ryan blasted off two more shots. Modern ammunition might be as precious as blood and as scarce as antibiotics, but there was a time to conserve ammo, and there was now.
A big ball of fire appeared from the farther of the two tables. From the shape of it, the shot was directed in Ryan’s general direction; from the sound it was a big-bore handblaster, either Doc’s .44 LeMat replica or the Webley double-action revolver Ricky toted, cylinder rebored to take the same .45 ACP cartridges as his DeLisle.
Ryan’s first thought was that whoever it was had popped a shot at someone threatening to shoot from behind the bar. Then he heard the tinkling of broken glass—and the whoomp of some kind of spilled accelerant catching fire. Even as those facts registered, the same handblaster flared off toward the end of the room past prone Ryan’s head, where most of the hostile fire was coming from. A second lantern exploded, drooling yellow flame that quickly became a pool that spread and danced with blue and yellow light.
“Dark night!” Ryan heard J.B. roar. “What’d you want to do that for, kid? You set the place on fire with us pinned in it!”
A figure loomed up in the fog bank right over Ryan’s supine body. He started to swing his handblaster to bear, but at the last instant he somehow recognized the presence, possibly by smell. A strong yet unmistakably nonmasculine hand gripped his wrist.
“Krysty,” he croaked.
“Let me help you up, lover,” she said.
“I won’t say no.”
As she draped his gun arm around her shoulders, he was aware of having heard Doc bellow out, “The boy gave us cover, by the Three Kennedys!” Followed by the boom of the stubby shotgun tube slung beneath the barrel of his enormous LeMat handblaster.
On shaky legs Ryan tottered alongside his lover, as she steered straight for the gaudy’s front door. He had the impression of movement around them, shouting as well as shooting. Then Jak appeared at his right, firing his big Colt Python back toward the entry into the main room from the back. The potent muzzle-blast of the .357 Magnum wheelgun was near enough to make Ryan wince.
Mildred was at his left, on the other side of Krysty, popping shots from an unfamiliar-sounding handblaster—probably one she’d scooped up off the floor—from her left hand. Jak, now walking backward, fired two more shots toward the rear.
The door stood open, casting a rectangle of orange torchlight from the yard outside in the clotted gloom within. Ryan caught a whiff of fresh air that smelled like honey, then coughed in reflex. He realized how much stinging smoke he’d sucked down without being aware of the fact.
Suddenly a shadow intruded into the oblong of relative brightness. Ryan saw a big figure, a hint of wild beard topped by wilder eyes. A right hand was cocked back over one wide shoulder ready to smash something down on Ryan—or one of his friends. The newcomer was probably just reacting in blind panic rather than being deliberately hostile. But it didn’t matter.
In dire need Ryan found the strength to launch his right leg in a stiff-legged kick. It had to have been fair strength, since the impact of shinbone into crotch lifted the bearded man up onto his toes. He dropped whatever it was he was wielding and bent over to clutch his violated balls as Ryan sagged in Krysty’s firm grasp.
Krysty half dragged Ryan outside. Five paces from the door she let him drop, almost gently, to catch himself as best he could while she wheeled to cover with her .38 handblaster against possible attack.
“Sorry, lover,” she murmured.
Ryan shook his head. He’d caught himself on his knees and a stiffened left arm. He’d had sense to take his finger off the trigger of the P-226, though his weight squashed his thumb uncomfortably on the hardpan beneath the blaster’s grip.
“Don’t be,” he rasped.
Once they’d gotten outside the gaudy everyone seemed to lose interest in attacking them. For the moment, anyway.
Mildred knelt by his side. “Let me give you a hand.”
He shook his head. “I can stand on my own, so rad-blast it, I will.” He thrust himself to his feet, then staggered and almost vomited. Mildred grabbed him around the waist. She may not have been as strong as Krysty, but the stocky black woman was anything but weak herself.
He pretended not to hear her muttered, “Macho son of a bitch.”
Ryan steadied himself, then, although he didn’t pull away from the physician’s support. He glanced back over his shoulder.
“Where’s J.B.?” he asked in a voice that sounded as if he’d been gargling lye. He meant to ask about Doc and Ricky, too, but had trouble forming more words.
“Here, Ryan,” the Armorer said. “Doc and I got our traps. Ricky and Jak went to the stables to round up our rides.” Grunting with relief, he dumped a pair of heavily stuffed backpacks on the ground.
“Stay here,” Krysty said. “I’ll help the boys.”
“Move me away from in front the door,” Ryan directed.
“What?” Mildred said. “Oh, yeah.” She helped him shuffle several steps to his left, out of the direct line of stray shots coming through the door—or right in front of the blaster of anybody coming out.
J.B. took a position near the door with his shotgun. He let several fugitives, two men and a woman, stumble out although the woman clutched a cap-lock revolver in her hand. She wasn’t looking to use it, as J.B. correctly read in a flash. He had that much faith in his own judgment, and reflexes, and as usual was right.
When another figure loomed out of the smoke, J.B. let loose a head-splitting blast. The figure fell back inside to become visible only as a pair of worn-through boot soles, drumming on the door stoop.
Ryan didn’t ask, he didn’t need to.
He felt strong enough at last to pull away from Mildred. She held on briefly, then let go. He wobbled a bit, swayed some, then managed to stand upright. Or close enough.
Ryan was still better than halfway out of it. It seemed a moment when Krysty appeared on her mare right in front of him, leading his horse by the reins. “Can you ride alone?” she asked.
“Help me up,” he said. Somebody di
d, he didn’t register who. He realized someone had relieved him of the SIG-Sauer and stuffed it back in its holster as he managed to more or less solidify his perch by hanging on to the saddle horn like the rankest greenhorn.
Then they were riding out through the open gates of the barbed-wire compound, across the starlit prairie. The wind felt as cold as winter and bracing as a shot of good shine.
From behind came a shouted challenge: “Run, little rabbits!”
The voice, heard only recently for the first time, had already become unmistakable. And hated.
“Shit,” Mildred said in grunts between strides of her horse. “I’d hoped we’d chilled that motherfucker.”
“Run far, run fast, little rabbits!” Snake Eye called. “Run and hide! But you’ll only die tired!”
* * *
STANDING IN THE DOORWAY with the blaze of the gaudy heating the back of his black duster through the doorway like an open furnace, Snake Eye laughed a loud and melodramatic laugh.
His quarry vanished into a fold of the deceptively flat-appearing land.
“I wonder,” he said aloud, “if I may have overacted, just a trifle?”
He decided it didn’t much matter. “It’s not as if they were in any frame of mind to critique my performance, after all.”
He stepped out of the doorway and began walking toward the stables. It was time to reclaim his own mount and follow—at a discreet distance, of course.
Now I’ve put double pressure on them, he thought. Lots, if those fool Uplanders take the bait and begin to hunt the hidden redoubt, as well.
Ryan Cawdor and his friends would have little choice: either lose the redoubt to others, or give over everything in a single-minded pursuit of finding it before whole armies of eager searchers did. For all his research, Snake Eye didn’t know just why the band valued the ancient facilities so highly, although he entertained a surmise or two. That they did was an unmistakable thread running through the whole patchwork narrative of their joint careers he had contrived to stitch together.
