by James Axler
“Just as you’ve heard it said, Baron,” Bass said. “I mean to pull up stakes and head West. Find some promising place to settle down.”
“Risky.”
Bass laughed. He had a deep, rich laugh, and he only laughed when he meant it.
“Life’s risky, Baron,” he said. “As who knows better than you? Neither of us can stop these rad-blasted muties from picking off my convoys, and no hiding from it. I’d just as soon take a different set of risks.”
He shrugged. “Also, truth to tell, I’m feeling a bit of the wandering itch. I made my fortune, such as it is, as much on the road as here in my store in Menaville. But in recent times it’s been all the latter and none of the former. I want to roll down some new roads before I find dirt hitting me in the eyes.”
And every word of that is true as cold steel, Bass thought. And little as I care for it, I’m lying like a bastard by omission.
He had lived the last two decades driven on by a golden dream, as much as he was haunted by the guilt of the price he’d pay to steal that dream. And that, too, was a part of the cost.
He was not going to allow either the death of his nameless companion in the Mine Shaft, or the nightmares that crime had brought Bass since in spite of all his efforts to expiate it, to go to waste. He had that map to the Promised Land, and now he meant to follow it.
Of course Baron Billy couldn’t know that, or there was no limit to what he’d hold Bass up for as a price for allowing him to pursue that promise. He might cut himself in for a hefty share. Almost would, in fact.
But as shrewd as he was, Baron Billy couldn’t see past the sudden glowing vista of having his greatest rival suddenly removed. And more.
“Your funeral, son,” he said, sitting back with a look of triumph plain on his badlands face. “Now the time has come to talk turkey. What’s in it for me?”
* * *
“BASS,” HIS YOUNGER brother, Morty, said as Bass came in the front door of his General Store in the center of Menaville, “we’re outta eggs.”
Closing the door on the chill, Bass took off his hat and hung it from a peg nearby.
“Why not go buy some?” he asked.
His brother was standing between shelves of dry goods with a canvas apron strapped to the front of his gangly frame and leaning on a push broom. By the looks of the floor, the broom hadn’t recently seen much use as anything but an architectural support. Morty was ten years younger than Bass and appeared younger still, with a sort of goofy-kid good looks and a mop of straw-colored hair that just naturally tended to make people like him. Especially women.
“You get mad at me if I leave the store.”
“Fair enough,” Bass said. “How about sending one of the clerks?”
“They say it’s not their job.”
Bass laughed. “Their job is to do what we pay them to do.”
What I pay them to do, he thought. It wasn’t as if Mortaugh Croom had a penny to his name. Ever had, or ever would.
Bass frowned as he shrugged out of his wolfskin coat. No call to go thinking that way, Bass, he told himself sternly. He’s a good boy, your baby brother. He just...has problems looking out for himself. Just the way he’s made, that’s all.
As she lay on her deathbed, their mother had Bass swear to take care of his younger sibling, come what may, and he had done so. He’d always loved Morty.
Morty could make that difficult sometimes, admittedly.
“Where’d you run off to, anyway, Bass?” Morty asked. “You’re always running off without telling me.”
Bass was unstrapping the shoulder rig that held his blaster under his left armpit, counterbalanced by a case holding two 14-round double-stacked magazines of ammo on the right. He grunted in relief as it came away. He found a shoulder holster uncomfortable at the best of times; in summer heat, or even a room as well heated as his store was by a wood-burning stove in the corner, it made him sweat and chafed something fierce. Baron Billy didn’t allow his citizens to carry weapons in the ville—one of the more major areas of disagreement between him and Bass—and while he thought it was only proper a citizen as leading and important as Bass should enjoy the privilege of bearing arms, he still thought it was a bad example to do so openly.
Bass went behind the counter. He unhitched holster from harness, hung the one from a set of elk antlers mounted on the wall behind him, and slid the handblaster in its holster into a cubby underneath the spot on the counter where the abacus was. Should anyone have entered the store with evil intent and weapons to back it up, an ancient Winchester Model 1897 shotgun, lovingly maintained by Bass’s personal sec chief, Dace Cable, hung on brackets behind the wooden counter.
In the nearly two decades Bass had run Menaville’s general store it had come out only twice. The first time two chills had been carried out, the second time one. And in going on thirteen years no one had tried again.
The bloodstains could still be seen on the usually swept-clean floorboards, despite frequent attempts to sand them away. Still, even in a settled and respectable ville like Menaville, not many customers tended to be actively squeamish unless they were actively slipping in the fresh stuff, or breathing the reek of congealed blood rotting. Neither of which a man as particular as Bass would ever permit.
“Made my deal with Baron Billy,” he said, shifting his weight with a sigh onto the high stool. His feet were more grateful for the break than he was happy with. “The baron’s price was steep indeed. But almost to the grain of flour what I reckoned it would be.”
Morty made a face. “Yeah. You always do well for yourself. But what about me?”
“Well...” Bass began, somewhat nonplussed. “We’re good to go. No worries about Billy making trouble. I’ll be happy to get back on the road again, mebbe work some of this flab off the frame that years of easy living has packed onto it.”
He finished off slapping the belly that overhung his big belt buckle.
“Do we have to go running clear off across the country?” Morty asked. “We’re comfortable here.”
“Well, I tell you. I’m fixing to sell the store and what goods we can’t take in the wag convoy to Baron Billy. Separate deal from the bribe I’m paying for him to let me walk away free and clear. But I tell you what—I could give you the store. Also free and clear. Then you could live out your days here in comfort as a respected and necessary member of the community.”
He shook his head. “Truth to tell, the stickies’re only likely to be a minor problem. Stick with basics, buy off the big caravans that come through at wholesale prices, you won’t ever have to sweat ’em. And I doubt the stickies’re going to get strong enough to make any real problem for the ville. Not in our lifetimes, anyway.”
Morty lowered his head and glowered at him suspiciously through lank bangs. “You’re just trying to get rid of me, Bastion,” he said sullenly. “Go off and leave me behind.”
“No, Morty,” Bass said, shaking his head firmly. “You know I’d never do that. I love you. You’re my brother, and I promised Maw I’d always look out for you. Just reckoned...being the only general storekeeper in a town as big and prosperous as Menaville would set up a man for life even without his having to bust his hump from dawn till dusk.”
“You’re not leaving me behind,” Morty said.
Bass shrugged. “Then you’re coming with me to the Northwest.”
His sibling looked as if he had more to say on the subject. Before he could, the rear door to the sales floor pushed open. A skinny specimen in a heavily patched hunting jacket poked his head inside the store.
“Mr. Bass,” the newcomer said. “Mr. Cable wants to talk to you, if you got a minute.”
Bass grabbed his hat and crammed it on his head. “Coming, Dan.”
The fact was, he wasn’t disappointed to end this little chat with Morty.
DACE CABLE SLAPPED the cab of the big pickup truck.
“All ready to roll,” he said. “Gonna be quite the parade there, Chief. A dozen wags. Couple light motorcycles for scouting work. And, uh, two mountain bikes.”
The tall athletically built man with the shaved head, the ring in his ear, the trim blond goatee and the devil’s grin sounded dubious about the last item.
Bass laughed and clapped his hard shoulder. “Those things’ll be worth their weight in meds and more. Believe me. They can go places even the trail bikes can’t. And sometimes it’s good to be able to move places fast but quiet-like.”
“If you say so,” Cable said. He sounded doubtful still. But Bass was the boss, and his sec chief knew he was talking from trading convoy experience stretching back before Cable’s own birth.
They stood in a huge predark prefab building in the big yard behind Bass’s store. The yard occupied a major chunk of what was considered prize real estate in downtown Menaville. But Bass had staked it out when he’d moved here nigh unto two decades earlier. As the ville had grown, it had had to grow around the big yard, no matter how much others might complain and rival merchants might enviously eye all that space. Then again, Menaville was free to grow along its cozy wooded valley. For all his caprice and harsh ways, Baron Billy didn’t believe in penning his subjects inside a razor-wire perimeter. Not like that triple bastard to the north.
And after all, the fact that Menaville grew at all, much less as strong and fast as it had, owed at least as much to Bastion Croom as it did to Billy Howe, and Baron Billy knew it.
“This is the pride of the fleet,” Cable said, beaming up at the black Dodge Ram that was in fair condition. “That .50-caliber blaster will lay serious hurt on anything short of a tank that tries to mess with us.”
Bass smiled. He preferred to settle things in a peaceful manner whenever possible. When it wasn’t possible, he preferred to settle things decisively and in a hell of a hurry. It had cost him a mass of jack to buy and equip the vehicles for this convoy. And even more to equip the two blaster wags to escort them through the perils of the Deathlands.
The battered Browning M-2 heavy-barreled .50-caliber machine gun was mounted by a pintle to the top of a steel column, in turn fixed to a pedestal bolted firmly to the bed of the burly pickup truck. It could swivel to dispense its stream of thumb-size slugs in all directions. Those slugs were hard to come by, but enough trade goods could buy about anything.
Behind it, the more modest Toyota mounting a remade M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon seemed tiny and insignificant. While the lesser wag and weapon were more than capable of dealing rapid-fire death at decent range to most things that walked, or crawled, the .50 was Bass’s potential ace in almost every hole.
Good thing Morty didn’t take up my offer to stay behind and own the store, he thought. We’ll need every scrap of jack and gram of trade goods we can muster to make it to the Promised Land, despite the supplies we’re lugging along.
He did wonder, a little guiltily, if he had subconsciously manipulated his little brother into going along. Morty could be a handful—he had to admit that to himself—but Bass needed the trade value Billy would give him for the store, even at the rock-bottom price the baron knew he could get away with paying.
I did tell Maw I’d look out for him, Bass told himself.
Cable, who knew his boss had moments of silent introspection and knew to respect them, was engaged in a quiet conversation with one of his ten subordinate sec men. When he saw Bass lift his head and look around, returning visibly to the chilly here and now, he waved off his man and turned back to the merchant.
He led the way back through the structure, past the half dozen panel wags that carried the trade goods wherewith Bass intended to launch his new enterprise—his new life, for him and Morty and their loyal crew—in the Promised Land, including the one that carried most of their personal gear and road supplies—out the back door in the hardscrabble dirt yard proper.
The empty space, surrounded by work and storage sheds within a three-yard-high link fence screen with faded green-metal slats, remained big despite being dominated by the immense wag barn. It also served Menaville as caravan yard for visiting trade convoys. That was one way Billy had justified the way Bass locked up so much valuable land in the ville to the other influential men—because inevitably Bass wasn’t the only other man or woman of influence in the town who wasn’t Baron Billy. Billy liked that fact even less than how he had to accommodate his biggest potential rival in Bass, but he bowed to it. As he did to the need, at least occasionally, to explain himself to them.
It didn’t sit well with Bass that Billy had stuck him with the monopoly privilege of serving the ville in that capacity. But of course Bass, too, had made his compromises in the partnership and reminded himself, as he did many times, that a baron could be way worse than Billy Howe.
One wag was parked out back. The impressive number of tarps that protected if from the unkind Ouachitas winter had been pulled off to reveal a battered school bus, more visibly ancient even than most motor wags. Its paint was many colors, but faded to pastel ghosts and grays and dirty white. Someone had refreshed the scrawl “The Magic Bus” on the side. Apparently it had been named for the predark folk song long and long ago. Otherwise Bass hadn’t been able to see his way clear to shelling out to repaint it, much as he preferred everything in his control to look as sharp and squared-away as possible.
The costs of this expedition, notwithstanding that it was the main thing he had built and saved for throughout his long and fruitful career, imposed their own stern limits on possibility.
“You sure about this, boss?” Cable asked. “Putting all our eggs in one basket, like. Might not be our best tactic.”
“Objection noted,” Bass said. He didn’t bother trying to stifle a smile at how his sec chief had reminded him in an almost-subtle way that tactics were what Bass paid Cable to know about and handle. Twenty years on hard trade roads had taught Bass Croom more than a thing or two about tactics.
“We should be fine with the off-duty sec and other crew riding in there,” he said.
Cable’s wide shoulders heaved in a sigh.
“You still look troubled,” his boss said, though he knew why.
“Yeah,” Cable said with a characteristic dip and turn of his head. “And you know why. You know what really worries me, Chief.”
“Yes,” Bass said, letting off a sigh of his own. “I do. And it concerns me, too.”
“We got a good crew of sec,” Cable said. “None better. They can handle themselves in any tight place, and know their way around a blaster.
“But there aren’t enough of them. Not for a trip this long nor a convoy a dozen strong. And there’s nobody else within a good day’s drive of the ville I’d trust across the street. Much less across the entire continent.”
“Me neither,” Bass agreed.
He laid a big hand on Cable’s shoulder.
“But we’ll find a way, Dace,” he said. “There’s always a way, and we’re just the men to find it!”
Chapter Five
“Stickies from trees,” Jak muttered. “How know?”
Even as the horrid muties were dropping from the trees around them on the narrow trail by a stream running through the Ouachitas, Mildred had time to marvel that Jak had actually uttered a preposition. Normally he hoarded words like a miser.
But that doubtless had to do with his distress that his usually infallible scouting had failed to alert his friends to the deadly ambush they’d just sprung.
With a savage buttstroke from his Scout longblaster Ryan knocked a stickie sprawling into some scrub oak by the trail. Mildred had an impression that the dozens of muties hemming them in like hairless mottled-green monkeys were small, none taller than four feet high, but otherwise chara
cteristic of their breed.
She recoiled, grabbing for her ZKR revolver holstered at her hip, as a stickie made a clumsy swipe at her face with its suckered hand. Her skin crawled. She knew the adhesive goo the pads that tipped the spatulate fingers secreted, which gave the monsters their name, could clamp to the skin and tear it clean off the bone. A rope of mucus-thickened yellow saliva trailed from its gaping mouth.
Noise exploded from just behind Mildred’s left ear. Hot air slapped the back of her head. The stickie’s left eye exploded in a spray of black fluids and gunk. It reeled back squealing.
“Thanks, Krysty!” she shouted without even glancing back, a potential lethal move with an opponent still on its feet in front of her: stickies took a lot of killing. She didn’t need to look anyway. A well-trained and experienced shot long before she entered cold-sleep—she had won silver in free shooting for the last ever U.S. Olympic team in 1996—she recognized the sound of her flame-haired friend’s piece. Though it fired the same .38 Special round as her own ZKR 551, Krysty’s Smith & Wesson 640 made a far louder sound, thanks to its short barrel.
She got the ZKR out. Straightening her right arm, she triggered another shot with the muzzle about two inches from the stickie’s face. More black stuff splashed back. The stickie went over backward to fall in the trickle of icy water over rocks and lie thrashing and moaning.
Other shots crashed out around and behind her. Ricky had been bringing up the rear of the single-file procession, right behind J.B., who in turn followed Mildred. He was shooting his big Webley handblaster. She also caught the boom of Doc’s stub shotgun barrel slung beneath the main barrel of his replica LeMat revolver, and the crack-of-doom explosion of Jak’s Python.
“Gren duel!” she heard Ryan roar. “Everybody down!”
In normal circumstances Mildred was by far the most inclined to question their nominal leader, and give him backchat. Now she flopped straight on her belly on last fall’s oak leaves.