No Man's Land

by James Axler

  * * *

  A BEAT OR TWO after the thump of Ricky’s DeLisle longblaster, nothing happened. The boy said nothing. But lying beside him in a sort of hollow that overlooked Heartbreak’s nearest structures from no more than fifty yards away, Krysty could see his young pale face go dark in furious frustration.

  The bolt clattered as he threw it. Unlike most “silenced” weapons, the carbine he had lovingly helped his uncle craft over an ancient Ishapore-made Enfield rifle truly made next to no noise when fired. The locked bolt kept gas from escaping the breech, there was no associated clack of a semiautomatic action reciprocating to eject the spent casing and slam home a new cartridge, and the .45ACP projectile traveled slower than sound, meaning it never produced a loud crack when it passed some object in flight.

  He aimed over the iron sights, squeezed the trigger again. This time one of the riders approaching the ruined ville’s eastern outskirts threw up his hands and pitched from the saddle. The other five Uplander riders never glanced around.

  “They don’t even know it happened,” J.B. murmured from his position kneeling to Ricky’s right. “Couldn’t hear squat.”

  That was enough for Krysty. She grabbed the lever-action Winchester Model 73 replica that lay by her side. Pressing the steel butt-plate against her right shoulder she quickly took up aim from her prone position on the lead rider and shot.

  The black powder .44-40 cartridge produced a big red flame and a lot of noise. Nothing happened initially, but as Krysty levered a new cartridge from the tubular magazine slung beneath the twenty-four-inch barrel, the second rider in the loose formation reeled in the saddle, clutching his gut. She threw a second fast shot, scarcely bothering to aim.

  At this range, under feeble light cast down by the half-moon that had recently crept over the horizon, it would have been a tough shot even for Ryan the master marksman, with his scoped blaster. For Ricky to have scored two hits in however many shots—Krysty lost count what with the noise and flash of her own weapon—and over open sights was a testament to skill beyond his tender years. Or his triple-strike luck, which was almost as good.

  Now the Uplander troopers knew they were taking fire. They reined in their horses. Even at this range, their body language told Krysty they were feeling surprise and uncertainty.

  Naturally enough. They were expecting opposition to their dash into the ville to try to secure the hidden treasure trove to be opposed, if at all, by opposite numbers from the Protector army. Baron Jed’s men had hunkered down along a rutted wag-track several hundred yards south. The two forces had spotted each other, approaching the ville almost simultaneously, by the blood-colored light of the setting sun. The Uplanders had likewise halted a similar distance away. And in the hour or two since, each army had simply sat, doing nothing much the five companions could see at this range. Each was obviously waiting for the other to make the first move.

  Now the Uplanders had. Krysty blasted off a third shot. That one missed like the rest.

  But hitting anything wasn’t the point. Realizing that at least one “enemy sniper” had them under fire, they turned about and ran for the safety their own lines.

  “Whoever’s in charge over there,” Mildred muttered from right behind Krysty, “isn’t going to thank those boys for running.”

  J.B. chuckled softly. “Lot can happen in a face-off like the one they got with Baron Jed’s bunch. They’d rather take their chances with a pissed-off baron than face a shooter who’s already thinned them by a third.”

  He turned to look at Ricky. “That was some shooting, boy.”

  In the dim moonglow Krysty saw a hint of the dark color that had drained from Ricky’s face when he scored his first hit return to his cheek.

  Threat averted—for the moment—Krysty took a quick check of her little party, under cover in a sort of bowl nestled among the little hills. Ryan and J.B. thought that this little spur of rises, at least, was probably not natural. They, and perhaps the whole set of hills, probably came about when the ruins of some predark ville got covered over by dirt and vegetation in the course of a hundred-plus years.

  Jak hunkered right behind Krysty, his Python gripped in one hand. His foxlike jaw was clamped shut so tightly Krysty could practically hear his teeth creak against the anger of being denied the chance to perform his trademark creepy-crawling in the derelict ville to help Ryan. But the one-eyed man had expressly forbidden his companions from trying to rescue him no matter what the outcome of his crazy duel to the death with Snake Eye. And under his steely blue glare, each had sworn to do his will.

  He had left up to them the question of whether to hang on to their horses for an escape attempt in the event Ryan lost. They had instantly and unanimously agreed to unload the horses and set them free to shift for themselves. They were on a one-way mission into Heartbreak.

  It could only end, now, in a getaway by mat-trans jump or death.

  “So what happens now?” Mildred asked.

  “Same as we been doing,” J.B. answered. “Wait. Try not to die.”

  “And pray,” Mildred added.

  J.B. shrugged.

  Krysty said nothing. She didn’t need to. Her friends knew her well enough to know she’d been praying silently but ceaselessly since her Ryan had left them.

  As if to torment her she heard blasterfire from somewhere in the cluster of thirty-to-forty buildings, which the rising moon had turned into a horrific wasteland of jumbled, jagged shapes and threatening shadows.

  But she didn’t get long to dwell on what that might mean for Ryan, because Jak whistled low and pointed south.

  A group of cavalry was riding hell-for-leather from their own temporary positions to the south. At least a dozen troopers this time.

  And they were clearly not making a dash at the ville Krysty and the others guarded.

  They were riding straight at them.

  * * *

  IN THE CORNER of his eye Ryan caught a splinter of movement.

  To perceive was to react. He hurled himself to the left, smashing into a closed door. At the same time he flung out his right arm and fired two shots toward the motion, which had come from a darkened doorway half a short block ahead and to his right.

  For all his panther quickness, fire flared yellow before he got his first shot off.

  The door was largely dry-rotted. Instead of smashing his left shoulder it virtually exploded at the impact of his body. The instant before he vanished into the darkened building, his SIG-Sauer kicked his hand for the second time. At the same instant a second muzzle-flash bloomed.

  Ryan had no clue where the first bullet went, other than that it didn’t hit him, which was what really mattered. He heard the second shot punch into the door frame. Dropping his left shoulder to hit the floor first, then rolling with the impact to slide along the warped planks on his back, he actually saw shards of broken wood fly away from the impact.

  In a moment Ryan was on his feet, shifting left until his shoulder hit a wall. He sensed he was near the back of the room, well away from a spill of moonlight from a window from which the glass had long since all been broken out. If Snake Eye decided to follow up, he didn’t want to be an obvious target, nor yet in an obvious location, such as crouched beside the window.

  Ryan dropped to a knee to reduce the target he offered. Holding the SIG-Sauer out left-handed, he watched the blank blackness between the paler, differently shaped oblongs of window and door, ready to blast if a silhouette appeared. Not that he expected one. But he wasn’t going to miss a chance at an easy win because he overestimated his opponent, any more than he intended to let underestimation chill him.

  That was too nuking close, he decided. His own thoughts were scarcely audible above the pulse pounding in his ears. He drew deep breaths into the pit of his stomach, ignoring the smells of dust and mildew and rotting wood.

  He couldn’t help wondering just how seriously his enemy had been trying to nail him. Back off, he ordered himself. As seldom as he felt it, he still re
cognized the sense of helplessness and the dangerous sense of fatalism that could engender.

  When a handful of heartbeats had trip-hammered by, he got into a crouch. Ryan slid back until the wall touched his back, then shifted until his questing right hand felt an edge and then emptiness.

  He slipped into the back room. There didn’t seem to be any furniture in the building, which helped, since he wasn’t about to strike any kind of light to help him make his way.

  Moving quickly to clear the doorway, the one-eyed man turned and took stock. Faint light showed another doorway at the back of the room.

  He moved quickly to the wall to the right of the doorway. It proved to be the frame of an old screen door, with just a few pathetic rags of fine mesh still hanging around the edges.

  A quick look around the frame at waist-height showed an alley ten feet across with a heap of some kind of trash, indistinguishable in the darkness, between Ryan and the end of the alley toward where the shots had come from his left. He sprinted a few steps to the opposing wall and hunkered down, then looked left and right.

  From the left end of the block he heard the faintest scrape and swung the SIG-Sauer that way one-handed. He was saving the very limited strength of his right arm for when it would count. Not for steadying his aim at phantoms.

  After a long moment the noise wasn’t repeated. He doubted it would be. Snake Eye was careful, and knew how to move that way.

  In his mind’s eye Ryan formed a flash impression of the alley. Back behind him he’d spotted what looked like another open door on this side. He emerged from behind his mound of assorted decaying crap and moved toward it.

  Does the bastard have any external ears? he wondered. He hadn’t noticed any in the confrontation at the gaudy. Then again it had been brief, the light was poor, and Ryan had other things to think about.

  He also was a man who had trained himself to miss few details. He didn’t think Snake Eye had ears.

  That might mean he didn’t hear triple-good. Not like he saw, anyway. Ryan’s ears were exceptionally keen. And while Snake Eye was meticulous, Ryan was highly skilled in moving through built-up areas—or rubble, or any stage in-between—without making a sound.

  Ryan didn’t know how much of an edge that gave him over his chillingly efficient foe, but he was going to work it for all it was worth.

  Smiling slightly he ducked into the open doorway.

  * * *

  THE WINCHESTER ROARED, vomited fire and kicked Krysty hard in the shoulder with the butt-plate. Barely twenty yards away an Uplander trooper dropped the revolver from his hand and toppled backward over his horse’s rump.

  Light strobed to her left. J.B. ripped short bursts from his Uzi with head-splitting noise.

  The surviving greencoats had had enough. They turned and raced back toward their own army. It was the third probe the companions had fended off that night, yet none of her friends was seriously hurt. They’d gotten dings or scrapes; she had a cut on her cheek where a near miss had sent a flying rock chip her way. J.B. had had his hat shot off, although when that attack was driven off he’d imperturbably collected it, dusted it off and crammed it on his head again.

  And that couldn’t last.

  She jacked the action. The tubular mag was empty. The last of the captured black-powder .44-40 cartridges had dropped the soldier.

  Krysty threw the weapon away. She’d be relying on a black powder Peacemaker now, with her little Smith & Wesson 640 blaster as backup.

  At her side Ricky was sorting through his preloaded mags and loose cartridges, looking as if he’d bitten into a burrito to find a fresh dog turd.

  “Leave that for when it’ll do the most good, son,” J.B. told him. “Use this while it lasts.”

  He handed the boy a scabbied Smith & Wesson Model 3 reproduction revolver chambered to shoot .44-40 cartridges, like Krysty’s Winchester repeater. Of course, the six in the cylinder were all it had.

  “Why don’t they just rush us en masse and be done with it?” asked Mildred, who was also using a Peacemaker to conserve their store of .38 ammo hers and Krysty’s handblasters both used. She wasn’t happy about it—her ZKR 551 target pistol was a tool tailored specifically toward her needs, and what she was used to using. The Peacemaker was heavy and balanced differently, along with being single-action, meaning Mildred needed to cock it manually for every shot.

  J.B. laughed. “Fear,” he said. “They want to commit minimal men to taking us down, ’cause they’re afraid if they send too many troops against us, the other army’ll take advantage of the split to jump them. Same reason they don’t just say, nuke it, and all charge headlong into the ville at once. There’s no knowing how that kinda goat-screw would shake out. And neither baron intends to come away empty-handed. Or chilled.”

  He glanced from one enemy camp to the other. They weren’t hard to see. They had built campfires, presumably to feed as many troops as they could while the waiting game played out.

  “Then again, the bastards know they don’t need to send a big force against us,” he said. “All they have to do is keep pecking at us. Sooner or later, they’ll get unlucky.”

  Jak whistled softly and touched Krysty’s arm from behind. She looked up to see a new force riding out from the Protector encampment.

  “Could be now,” J.B. said.

  “So let’s take as many of them as we can,” Krysty said, as thirty enemy horsemen charged their tiny clump of shielding hills.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Ryan stalked through the surrealistic angles and blackness of the abandoned ville. His senses, especially his hearing, were tuned as sharp as he could get them. His passage made no more noise than his own shadow, cast irregularly by the rising half-moon.

  He was doing the unexpected.

  It wasn’t as if being on the short end of the odds was anything new to him, and what he’d learned long ago was that when the smart odds said you were chilled, the triple-crazy thing was the way to go.

  Of course, it had to be the right triple-crazy thing.

  The smart thing to do would have been to try to keep as much distance between himself and the inhumanly efficient killer as possible. But what good would that do? Even if Ryan could somehow find the redoubt entrance and fort himself up inside so well Snake Eye couldn’t get at him, the mercie could just pick off Ryan’s companions when they tried to join him. Which eventually they would do, to find and help Ryan—if they weren’t overwhelmed by the tiny little fact they were facing not one but two entire armies bent on seeing the color of their insides.

  The smart thing, maybe, was to blow this whole ville, forget about the redoubt and try to escape overland. The companions had already rejected that option as a bad play.

  And anyway, Ryan saw Snake Eye as a problem that needed solving now. His obsession with Ryan and company wasn’t altogether sane, and that was the root of the thing. He knew too much about them. While the Deathlands were large, and the companions could pop up in any part of them at any time, Snake Eye had a feel for the kind of situations they tended to find themselves in, as he’d shown over and over already during their brief acquaintance. There was a chance they would cross paths with the reptilian mutie mercie again. And next time he might go directly for the kill, rather than dick around for his amusement as he was doing now.

  Snake Eye had set the terms out plain as the hand at the end of Ryan’s arm: the only way this ended, truly ended, was with either him or Ryan Cawdor staring up at the sky.

  So Ryan meant to settle it, here and now, whichever way it shook out.

  He was circling back toward where they’d had their first encounter. He was sure Snake Eye had moved on from there. He also suspected the mercie thought Ryan would move away from him, best he could.

  It was the smart thing to do. The only sane thing to do.

  Ryan was staking his life on the fact that the mutie wouldn’t be able to hear him coming, and that sooner or later Ryan would hear him. It wasn’t much of an edge, but it was
the only one he had.

  He moved in short, swift rushes, cover to cover, mindful of silhouetting himself in the open. It was something he couldn’t avoid, but could minimize by carefully picking his route. He would have had more and better options had he been willing to scale ancient fences or random stacks of trash that had accreted in the narrow streets and narrower alleys, but he couldn’t do that without unacceptable risk of making noise. So he went around; and if he couldn’t go around, he went elsewhere, and when he went through a building he moved very deliberately and stayed near the walls where the floor was less likely to creak and betray him.

  The ville wasn’t large, but it was still a daunting maze in the moonlight, offering a bewildering variety of hidden ways—and hiding places.

  By moving to the outskirts, Ryan got around behind where the shots had come from. Now he was working his careful way inward, following the same path he’d taken before.

  As he paused at the exit of another junk-jumbled alley he heard a whisper, as of a hip brushing a chunk of half-rotted timber.

  While his hearing wasn’t any more precisely directional than any other normal human’s, Ryan had a good notion where the noise came from: down the street to his left. Strain as he might, he saw no movement that way.

  Another sound—the crunch of something beneath a boot heel. Snake Eye might not even be aware he was making those noises. They were the kind of noises only an expert could avoid in a setting such as this.

  An expert like Ryan Cawdor.

  He slipped around the corner of a building and into the street, then crossed quickly. Keeping to the shadows, he moved as quickly as stealth allowed toward the building with the fallen-in roof at the block’s end.

  If he’s doing this to sucker me, Ryan thought with a certain grim amusement, it’s working. But this was his only high card, so he was going all-in with it.

  Ryan reached the corner. He could smell a trace of ancient charring. The frame of the window he’d just past had been turned to charcoal by a fire that had somehow left the outer walls mostly intact. He paused, drew a deep breath. Extending the blaster in his left hand, he leaned around the corner.