by James Axler
The sky was clouding over again. From old books Ryan had learned that in olden times the weather was often the same for days on end. Bright and sunny through the summers, clear and crisply cold through the winter. That was hard to imagine. Ever since his youth at his father's ville of Front Royal back in Virginia, he'd known the weather only to change rapidly, within hours, perhaps a dozen times in a single day. A sunny sky would be soon overtaken with chem clouds, and violent storms would soon erupt, quickly flooding rivers and canals. In parts of the Deathlands, the winds and acid rain could strip the skin from a person in minutes. There might be snow in July in what had been called Arizona, and blistering heat around the sculpted peak of Mount Washton, in the far north, on a January morning.
Here, deep in the South, humidity and a clinging, sweating heat seemed the order on most days. Fortunately, it was cooler inside the motel. Looking out the window, Ryan saw huge insects, wings iridescent, dart over the warm streams. Far to the north, there was the familiar jagged lace of purple lightning. The rumble of thunder never reached him.
Realizing that the double-paned windows might also prevent him from hearing warning shots from Krysty and the others, he moved quickly to the main entrance, pushed open the stiff glass doors and emerged into the warm damp morning. Immediately he heard the harsh sound of swampwag engines. It came from the suburb of West Lowellton, not too far away, where his three companions had gone scavenging.
He spun on his heel, sprinted into the echoing lobby and shouted for J.B. and Doc. Returning to the arched entrance, he flattened himself against the red brick wall.
"What is it? Shots?"
"No. Listen."
"Wags. Those swamp buggies. Real close. Half mile, mebbe less."
Doc Tanner approached briskly, his cane clicking on the stone floor. His Le Mat pistol was tucked into his belt in a piratical manner, and his hat was at a rakish angle.
"I fear I slumbered, and…I can hear engines. It sounds like those—"
"Swampwags, Doc. Yeah."
"Go or stay?" snapped the Armorer tersely.
"Stay," was Ryan's immediate response. "It figures they're mebbe searching for us. With six of us running round, they double their chances of getting us."
"And halves the odds," said J.B.
"Yeah, it does. But we stay."
"Should we not be looking for a defensive position?" asked Doc. "In the event of their coming here?"
It was a difficult decision. Judging by the noise of the engines, there were at least a half dozen of the floundering buggies in the vicinity. That could mean thirty or forty men, maybe more. It didn't much matter if they were Cajuns or the baron's sec guards. A firefight out in the open would have only one ending. But if they waited in the motel, they could cause untold havoc among any attackers, perhaps stand a better chance.
Overlaying the rumbling of the swampwags was the noise of gunfire. It sounded like thin material ripping as the high velocity bullets exploded in short bursts. J.B. looked at Ryan.
"If they got 'em cold, they're chilled by now. If not, they'll make it out of there. Best we can do is wait and see."
"That's how I see it, too."
Doc Tanner pounded the stone wall. "Those young girls! Stouthearted Finnegan! By the three Kennedys, gentlemen! Can we stand here and allow them to be slaughtered?"
"Yeah, Doc, we can," replied J.B.
"Yeah, Doc, we can," repeated Ryan. "We go after them, and we're there with too little, too fucking late. Don't think I don't care about Lori or that fat tub of guts Finnegan. And you know how much I care 'bout Krysty Wroth. But in this life there's only one real certainty. Fuck up and you lose."
"But they may have died."
"We all do, Doc," said J.B. quietly.
GUNFIRE CRACKLED for about two and a half minutes. Then came the unmistakable sharp cracks of a couple of stun grens, then more gunfire for around a half minute.
Then just the swampwags throaty roar and the shouting of a confusion of orders.
"Best find a place where we can blast 'em if'n they come this way," suggested Ryan.
"You think they might have been…killed, Ryan? Or taken?"
"Yeah. Mebbe they'll take what they got and pull out. Mebbe not. All we can do is listen and wait. If they aren't here in an hour, then I guess it means they're not coming. Not yet, anyway."
RYAN CHOSE THE KENNELS. Partly outside, they were connected to the motel and also gave them access to some low scrub that concealed a dry river bed stretching southwest. The three of them went there, waiting and listening, their blasters cocked and ready.
There was no further shooting, and the shouting faded. Soon the buggies could be heard drifting away, seemingly toward the main part of the swamps.
Within half an hour, the natural sounds of insects and the wind in the live oaks had resumed. The clouds that had threatened rain earlier in the morning had broken up, leaving only a veil of high thin mist that filtered the sun into an orange blur.
"Ryan? Let's go see what happened."
"Wait, Doc. Keep quiet and wait. Don't move or speak till I say so."
Time crawled by. Ryan tried to keep his mind off Krysty Wroth. Her face, voice, body. The only woman who'd ever meant more than a fleeting fuck to him. Common sense told him that along with Lori and Finn, she had probably been chilled. The sec men of the baron, with their superior firepower, had sent them all to buy the farm.
Unless…
"Unless he wanted prisoners," he muttered to himself, hardly aware he'd spoken at all.
It was a hope. Best he'd got.
IT WAS SEVEN MINUTES past noon, by his wrist-chron. At twelve he and the others had decided to go and find out what had gone down on the edges of West Lowellton. And to bury their dead.
If Krysty, Lori and Finn had been taken, it wasn't going to do them any good to rush in like a blinded steer charging into the shambles.
It was still seven minutes off noon, by his wrist-chron, when he caught the whisper of stealthy movement somewhere behind them, inside the motel.
He shrank back into the narrow stone kennel, fingering the trigger of the Heckler & Koch. The noise sounded like the plastic end of a blind-pull, tapping on glass in the wind. But the wind had fallen, and the air was still.
The tapping came again. Three, spaced out, then two, closer together. Then more tapping, repeating the same pattern.
"It's Finn," Ryan whispered, warning Doc and the Armorer. "Cover me, J.B., while I make a run for the door. Then Doc, then you."
In thirty seconds they were all safe inside the motel, the security door locked behind them, the steel bolt thrown across it.
"Finn!" called Ryan. "Finnegan, we're here."
They heard footsteps, dragging a little, moving slowly toward them along the corridor, from the direction of the games room and the main entrance.
"That you, Finn?" There was a note of tension in Ryan's voice. "Speak up."
"It's me." The words sounded as if they'd been uttered by someone who had witnessed an unspeakable horror. At Ryan's side, Doc shuddered convulsively. "Yeah, it's me. Only me."
FINNEGAN WAS ONE of the toughest of all of the Trader's longtime blasters. He'd been in more firefights than he'd spent night in beds. He drained most of a quart of Jim Beam, spitting on the floor, wiping the back of a bloodstained hand across his mouth.
"Now?" asked Ryan.
"Sure. Heard 'em coming. Krysty heard 'em first. But there was a lot of the fuckers. Ten or more of those fat-tired mothers. Looked like someone seen us. Told the baron. Sent out the sec men. We holed up in a square of houses. Pretty little places, I guess. If you like fucking pretty. Lot of bones round there. We'd got us some tins and packets of freeze-dries. Real nice. Shrimps and sauce and all."
He took another swig from the bottle. Doc looked as though he was going to interrupt him, then changed his mind and reached out for the bottle to take a pull on it himself. He passed it on to Ryan, who shook his head, and J.B. took a single mouthful, rin
sed it around and spat it out.
"I took the front, Krysty on the flank. Put little Lori safe as I could round the back." He glanced at Doc. "Best as I fucking could."
"How many men? What blasters they carry?" Finn sighed, looking at J.B. through narrowed eyes. It was obvious he was ragged, near exhaustion. "Some of the swampwags were bigger. I guess mebbe fifty or more of the fuckers. Most got old M-16s. Carbines. Some got Browning pistols. Nothing big. Two of the buggies had gren launchers. They were good. Smart fucker in a white suit giving the orders. Had a couple of shots at him. Made him duck. Got mud an' shit all over him."
"Go on," said Ryan.
"Not much to tell. Too many of 'em. Figure I chilled seven or eight. Not great at street firefighting. Kept moving. They made a rush, got between me and the girls. No way I could get back. No way."
"No way, Jose," muttered Doc mysteriously.
"Dead or taken?" That was the big question. Would there be burying and revenge, or rescue?
"I figure taken. You hear a couple of stun grens go off?"
"Yeah," said Ryan,
"That was it. I went in the front and out the side of a house, doubled back to kill whatever moved. Fucking weird. Put out a triple burst from the old H&K here." He patted the silenced gray submachine gun on his lap. "All hit him in the throat. Fucking head fell right off. Never seen that before. Clean as a big axe. Rolled round my fucking feet and fucking near tripped me over. That was when I heard the stuns. Ran up into the loft of an old frame house. Looked down. They were loading the girls into one of the wags. I had a go, but it wasn't no good. Near got caught. I tried."
"Sure. Never thought any different, Finn. You couldn't save 'em, then no man could."
Finn nodded, taking another long, bubbling draw at the bottle, draining it dry, then let it drop from his hand with a dull clunk.
The room was silent. Ryan wondered when the sec men might be back, guessing that they'd be reporting to the sinister Baron Tourment with their prizes. They'd interrogate Krysty and Lori to find out all they could about how many there were, about arms, strength. And if the girls didn't cooperate, they'd use stronger measures.
"Time's wasting," said Ryan. "They'll guess we might come in after them. Be ready."
Never for a moment did Ryan, J.B. or Doc consider just walking away. It would have been easy to head for the gateway and shut the door. Move somewhere else. And with the unreliability and random quality of the mat-trans systems, there was no way they'd ever come back to Louisiana. It wasn't like it used to be with the Trader.
Back then, with a small army traveling together, if you got left, then you got left. It was the survival of the mostest that counted. That was the rule, and every man and woman with the warwags knew that. You lived and you died by those rules.
Now there were just the six of them, moving together through an alien land where hostility was the norm and friendship was suspect. That meant you went out on the edge for one of the others.
One of the codes was a man didn't just close his eyes and ride around.
The three men looked at each other in the dusty, dimly lit room, each absorbed with his own private thoughts.
The stranger's voice, coming out of the darkness by the door, made them all jump.
"You 'gainst Baron?"
Ryan answered. "Well, we ain't fucking for him."
"Then we ought talk."
In the dim light, the newcomer's white hair flared like a vivid magnesium torch.
Chapter Sixteen
MEPHISTO WAS THOROUGHLY pissed off with what had happened.
His best ivory suit-was ruined. Soaked in salt water, sodden with orange-gray mud, and liberally smeared with gator shit.
Baron Tourment wasn't that concerned for the health and well-being of his sec men. But to have eight corpses to dump into the bayous in a single day couldn't just be overlooked—and there were four more men with serious gunshot wounds to tend.
All that lay on the crimson debit side of the day's accounting. But there was an entry to be made on the credit side.
He had two prisoners, both fairly unhurt. And as a bonus, both were female, and both young and attractive.
They had a few cuts, bruises and scratches, nothing worse. Except that the stun grens always left victims partly deaf for a couple of hours, often caused a little bleeding from the ears and nose and mouth, and frequently burst tiny capillaries in the eyes, making them pink and sore.
Mepbisto was in the storage room in the basement of the old Best Western Snowy Egret Inn, only a few miles away from the Holiday Inn in West Lowellton. Half a dozen of his best men were stationed in the corridor, and the guards around the perimeter had been doubled. The Cajuns had spoken of six people: four men and two women. Mephisto had very nearly gotten himself chilled by a fat man in what looked like a dark blue uniform. The zipping burst of lead had missed him only by a fraction of an inch and had actually torn a hole through the padded left shoulder of his suit.
It was rare that his verbal exchanges with Baron Tourment involved any humor. Even grim humor. But after he had made his initial report, the baron had looked at the state of his beloved suit.
"It looks to me, Mephisto, like you got yourself elected out there."
He'd replied, "No, baron, but I surely got nominated real good."
His lips curled into a smile at the memory. The deaths of the men had creased Tourment's heavy brow, but the news that two women were bound and unconscious in the basement had brought a flash of white from his excellent teeth.
Now Mephisto waited for his lord and master to arrive to inspect the prisoners.
The rooms had two tables; the tops were scored and scarred, even scorched in places. The floor was bloodstained. Being questioned by Baron Tourment was not a gentle experience.
One table held the blonde. A tasty dish for the baron. She was very tall—close to six feet was Mephisto's guess. Her long hair was the color of summer corn in the old vids, and her red skirt, topped by a red blouse, showed most of the smooth thighs. Boots in crimson leather reached way over her knees, with high heels that must have added five or six inches to her stature. The boots had tiny silver spurs that made a delicate tinkling sound as the girl struggled with her bonds, moaning and clawing her way back toward consciousness.
"Delicious," whispered the sec boss. But the other woman was even more amazing.
Though an inch or two shorter than the blonde, she was beautifully built, with firm thighs and fine, proud breasts. Mephisto glanced toward the door, wondering whether he dared risk being caught stripping either of the women for his own pleasure; he decided immediately that he didn't dare. This girl wore coveralls streaked with drying blood from when she'd taken the neck out of one of the sec men who tried to close in on her before they used the stun grens. She still had on the most amazing pair of boots that the sec boss had ever set eyes on. But it was the hair…
Hair that was brighter than any fire. Redder than a chem cloud sunset across the bayous. Long and thick tresses, clotted with mud, tumbled over the girl's shoulders. Mephisto moved closer, extended a hand tentatively to touch the hair,
"'Lord Jesus!"
He spun on his-heels, his eyes wide with panic, face pale with terror, afraid that his forbidden Christian oath might have been overheard. If it had, then he was a dead man. Although standing up and breathing, he'd be as dead as a pair of gator-skin boots.
But the hair. It had moved under his fingers. Moved and tangled itself around his palm with an infinitely gentle-slowness. The silken hairs had actually responded to his touch. Mephisto again looked over his shoulder and hastily crossed himself, whispering the words "Sweet Jesus."
These strangers weren't ordinary mercies, hired from some frontier ville farther west in Tex-Mex. They weren't drunken outlander pistoleers who'd slit a throat for a handful of jack and a gaudy whore. Then who were they?
Behind him the door swung silently open on its oiled hinges. Mephisto heard the creaking of the baron's leg-suppo
rts. His ears caught the rhythmic chunking of one of the ice-making machines out in the kitchen units beyond. "Are they awake, Mephisto?"
"Coming around."
"And we know nothing of them?"
"Nothing. Fine clothes and boots."
"Weapons?"
"Yeller hair had only a small pearl-handled PPK. Slut's blaster, .22. Nothing else."
"Red hair?"
"Pistol. But a man's gun. Real stopper. Name on it's Heckler & Koch. Real handsome pistol. Silvered finish. Holds thirteen rounds of nine mil."
"The fat man who clipped you?" Tourment loomed over the helpless women, his giant shadow stretching across the floor and onto the far wall of the underground chamber. He leaned forward, stumbling, steadying himself on the shoulder of his sec boss; he winced at the frightening power of the pincering hand.
"He… he had a sub, firing triple bursts. I guess a big handblaster as well. He was good. Most of the dead were on his sheet. But both of the women also blasted men forever into the dark night."
"The big, big question, Mephisto, is: who are they? And where do they come from? Are they friends come to aid our snow wolf? That most of all. Six was the word from the village?"
"One was shot. Six left."
"Where, then, are the other three?"
"In hiding. I figure that they're with the West Lowellton gangs."
Tourment laid a hand on the thigh of Lori Quint, just above the top of her high boots. She stirred but still didn't come round.
"I should have known, Mephisto, When my men didn't return… I should have known that this was bad."
"Shall I stay, while…?" He hesitated,, knowing what slippery ground this was.
"While I talk with these two little peaches? No. Go now. Wait, and I'll call you when I'm done, and you can come back and…" The sentence drifted away into a menacing silence. The sec boss left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him, glad of the chance to go to get washed and changed. He knew that Tourment wouldn't be wanting him for some time.
