Nemesis

by James Axler

  But a chill spent no jack, as trader used to say. Bass Croom had stocked up well for the coming voyage. All they could do now was to try not to waste bullets, and hope they had enough to make it all the way to the coast.

  The call passed back along the convoy: no one was hurt, no real damage done to wags or cargo. Ace. He was relieved that Krysty and the rest of his companions had once again escaped unharmed. He kept his gaze focused on the sides of the dirt track. Still plenty of cover out there, brush and dead ground, if the stickies for some reason wanted to try their luck again.

  “We’re ace back here,” J.B. called out as the blaster wag driver pulled the big pickup out of the ditch and back onto the road behind the fuel wag. Ryan called the acknowledgment back along the line. The one thing all Croom’s wealth and ingenuity hadn’t been able to secure for his convoy was reliable radio gear. That sort of thing was at a premium in the Deathlands.

  They’d drive on without it. Hardly anybody survived childhood in Deathlands without getting skilled at making do and getting by.

  He glanced at Olympia. The black-braided woman was sitting in her nest of sandbags reloading her six-gun. She had collapsed her steel baton and put it back in its hip holster. She reloaded by feel, not taking her dark eyes off the landscape rolling by.

  “Stickies must have a triple-huge colony,” he called out. He was recalling the hurt his friends had laid on the muties on their way into town. They’d chilled a good twenty of the bastards, and figured that would at the very least have taken a major bite out of the nest. But they had to have just been hit by ten times that number.

  “Lot smaller now,” Olympia called back. She turned her face toward him and gave him what might have been a brief smile, then went back to her vigil.

  Croom’s rolling out of Menaville at just the right time, Ryan thought. The stickies are closing in on it in big numbers.

  He shrugged. Not his ville. He had no people there, and all the friends they’d made during their brief stay in the ville were rolling with them. From what he’d seen of Boss Morgan and his coldhearts, and heard about Baron Billy Howe, he couldn’t say they and the stickies didn’t deserve one another.

  The ville folk stood to get screwed, but that was always how it went. It was why Ryan and his companions chose the life they led, with all its dangers: at least they carried their fates in their own hip pockets.

  He turned his lone eye to the surroundings and his thoughts to the road ahead.

  Part II:

  The Road

  Chapter Ten

  “Road gone ahead!”

  From her position behind the M-249 light machine gun mounted in the lead wag, Krysty could just make out Jak as he called over the snarl of his dirt bike.

  The white-haired young scout brought the little motorcycle to a halt in front of the lead blaster wag with a flourish, a quick turn and bow-wave of loose dirt from the dirt and debris that had wind-drifted across the cracked and heaved blacktop of I-40.

  Krysty braced one arm on the pintle mount to absorb the impact as the truck stopped to avoid squashing the reckless scout. She waved the other to the rest of the convoy behind so that they wouldn’t run into her. The lookouts atop the other wags passed the gesture back.

  “Earth crack,” Jak added as the rest of the convoy got stopped without mishap. “Highway broke.”

  Ricky brought his own scrambler bike to a far more cautious stop next to his friend.

  “Do they have a lot of earthquakes around here?” Ricky called out. “There’s like a ten-yard gap where it just like pulled apart. About twenty feet deep. We’re not getting across.”

  “Does that make you homesick, lad?” Doc asked, striding up with a smile. It was a fairly warm day when the wind wasn’t blowing, sunny with a few thin clouds high up. He had taken off his long coat and twirled his cane like a gent going out on the town.

  Ricky laughed. “That’s not part of Island life I miss that much, Doc,” he called back. Tremors—and volcanic eruptions—weren’t much less common than monsters on Puerto Rico, as the companions had learned during their involuntary stay there when they’d picked up Ricky.

  The youth kept trying not to look at Krysty, and failing. She’d gotten used to that. She didn’t like to think of herself as a vain person, but she’d have to be stupe not to notice the way men stared at her, and had since she was younger than Ricky. Though she tried not to let her kind and friendly nature encourage him too much, he tended to follow her around like a lost puppy.

  For his part Ryan ignored that behavior. He was gruff with the kid, but then he was gruff with everybody. He only dressed down the kid more than the rest because he was an adolescent and got out of line.

  Krysty wasn’t surprised by anything except perhaps how much Ryan had actually warmed to the boy during his brief time with them. Then again, if Ryan had been the sort of man to feel challenged by a somewhat goofy sixteen-year-old kid, he wouldn’t have been the man Krysty Wroth picked for a mate.

  The ancient I-40 was three lanes wide here. From the traces remaining, this had apparently been the westbound side of the full highway. The eastbound lanes were simply gone, mounded over by red dirt, visible only in cracked patches peeking out of the scrub.

  Bass Croom’s command was pulled up on the cracked blacktop alongside the lead blaster wag. The steel plates bolted to the sides of big Land Cruiser were spattered with red from a brief rain that had left muddy puddles of the windblown dirt a few miles back. The windshield showed pink streaks behind the heavy-gauge mesh bolted over it, and bolted over all the windows.

  As little attention as Krysty paid to machines in general, she had to admit it was a clever design. The plates and mesh wouldn’t keep out serious blasterfire but would still provide a lot of protection to the occupants. Clever little firing slits had been built in the doors—even the back hatch, though it was usually too blocked by baggage to let anybody shoot through it. They reminded Krysty of the old-days mail slots with hinged metal covers you still found in ancient doors, sometimes.

  She did wonder why a man who seemed as generally solid as Croom would want to go around forted up like that. Nobody else seemed to think anything amiss about it, though. Except Mildred, who tended to just sour on things from time to time.

  The doors opened. The merchant himself was driving. Cable unfolded himself from the passenger seat where he was riding shotgun, according to some complicated duty schedule Croom had drawn out. Following Ryan’s example, Krysty and the rest only paid attention to where they were supposed to be and when; it was so set up that folks stood four hours on, four hours off, four hours on for twelve hours, and then when the convoy halted for the night, no one stood watch more than two hours. Ryan and J.B. said it differed somewhat from what Trader had set up when they rolled with him, but seemed satisfied with it.

  She let the sec man from Cable’s crew help her down from the wag bed, where he was serving as her loader and general back-watcher. He was a young man with goggles pushed up on spiked blond hair and washboard ribs visible through the once-white wife-beater he wore under his black leather jacket. He called himself Solo, and while he wasn’t visibly much less impressed with Krysty’s looks than Ricky was, he seemed every bit as much terrified of her. She wasn’t sure whether that was on her own account, or Ryan’s, but he flushed deep pink to the roots of his hair when she smiled and thanked him for his help.

  By this time J.B. and Ryan had come walking up from their own duty spots, driving the bus and riding sec on the commissary van, respectively. Mildred followed, as did most of Croom’s drivers and Cable’s sec force. Krysty hoped the crew of the tail blaster wag were still keeping watch, at least. But given Ryan seemed unconcerned she reckoned they were.

  Bass looked up at Ryan and the Armorer’s approach and nodded to them.

  “I was just saying, your people can go one way a
long the break, and I can take my wag the other. Shouldn’t be too far until the crack ends.”

  Cable frowned. “Now, boss, you got no call to go running that kind of risks.”

  Bass laughed. “Hell, son. Why else do I have the thing all tarted up with steel plates and that shit? It’s not because I’m afraid of getting my wide old ass scratched with brambles.”

  “Not sure that Land Cruiser’s the best thing to take cross-country,” J.B. said. “Heavy.”

  As the four men discussed the merits of using the armored wag to scout, Krysty glanced toward Jak and Ricky, who sat on their light motorbikes waiting further orders. No one was suggesting splitting them up to scout north and south for a way forward, which was good—Ryan didn’t like his people going solo. Jak generally preferred rolling that way, but for now he seemed content to keep an eye on the new kid, whom he’d clearly taken under his wing as much as J.B. had.

  Ricky was looking along the road still, but now his black eyes were fixed intently past Krysty where she stood beside the truck. Curious, she turned to see where he was looking.

  A young woman stood beside the cargo wag right behind the lead vehicle. Krysty recognized one of Cable’s sec crew who went by the name Dezzy. She was a skinny girl, medium height, with a pale face, bobbed dyed-black hair, with her right bang dyed white. J.B. said it made her look as if a skunk had sat on her head slantwise. She wore a cracked and battered black leather jacket over threadbare black jeans, and fingerless leather gloves with a reinforcing strap set with metal studs over the knuckles. She had a lever-action longblaster with a sawed-off barrel in a leather holster strapped to her right thigh.

  She seemed to be looking back in Ricky’s direction with her own dark eyes when Krysty noticed her. He looked quickly off toward her boss and the group clustered around him.

  “—fine,” Bass was saying with a bit of a frown. “I’ll take Mr. Dix with me and we’ll scout for a route south. The boys can look to the north.”

  Cable looked dissatisfied at what Krysty guessed was some kind of compromise. Before anyone could say anything more a voice hailed them from the south.

  A ridge covered in some kind of waxy-leaved bushes reared maybe thirty feet, just south of the roadway. Perched atop it on an eighteen-speed mountain bike was Olympia.

  “Found a way,” she called.

  Bass guffawed. “See, Dace?” he said, slapping his sec boss on the shoulder. “Told you it wasn’t a waste, dragging that bicycle along.”

  “Do you trust her, Bass?” a new voice asked. Krysty saw that bass’s younger brother had joined the group by the armored command wag.

  “Is there a safe way for the vehicles to reach it, young lady?” Bass called through cupped hands.

  “Yes,” Olympia said. She pointed east to where the rise ended about forty yards behind. “That way. No track, but solid, and level enough.”

  Bass beamed. “Thank you!”

  Then turning back to the others, he said, “Surely you won’t object to my taking Mr. Dix to inspect the way for myself, Dace?”

  Cable scowled, then shrugged. “Suit yourself, boss.” Then added with a grin, “You always do.”

  He and J.B. moved to get back in the armored wag. Krysty caught Morty staring at her. When he saw her notice him he gave her a slow, wide smile.

  “Don’t even dream about it,” Mildred told him.

  Morty glared pure hate at the black woman, then looked at Ryan, turned white and walked hurriedly back to whatever wag he’d come from.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Sit here?”

  Sitting by himself by a secondary campfire, since the big main fire had all the adults crowded around already, Ricky looked up to the sound of a feminine voice. He looked up and his heart tried to jump up in his throat.

  Dezzy the sec woman stood by the fire, holding a tin mess kit with steam coming off the contents. She looked bored.

  “Sure! Go ahead.”

  She sat on a rock. He tried not to be disappointed it was across the low blue-and-yellow flames from him.

  For a few moments they ate in silence. “What’s this meat in the beans?” she asked after a while. “Rabbit?”

  “Yeah! You know Olympia? She shot it. Shot several of them with that crossbow of hers.”

  To Ricky’s delight, after she’d led the convoy to a way around the crack in the world this afternoon and Mr. Croom had called a halt for the day, she had taken a break-down crossbow from her pack. Assembling it without a word to the others, she had taken the mountain bike and ridden off into the brushy hills. She had returned as the sun set with four plump hares strapped to the rear rack.

  “Seriously? That funny old-timey wep?”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “It’s cool!”

  She shook her head. He liked the way her black bang and her white one swept back and forth across her pallid face.

  He was trying hard not to be entranced by her and failing miserably.

  “Tastes good,” she admitted as if grudgingly.

  Then she looked at him. His heart jumped again.

  “So why’s that lady who’s with you—Mildred—giggle every time somebody calls the cook Chef?”

  Chef was a big, burly black man with a square head and a beard who apparently had worked for Bass for years, both at home in Menaville and on the road. The merchant had helped him fix dinner this night, chopping up the rabbits and some onions to flavor the beans, which were good.

  “No idea,” Ricky said. “No lo sé.”

  “You know a lot of Mex talk?”

  He only just managed to turn his reflex laugh into a sort of half snort, half cough. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s Spanish. I’m from, uh, Puerto Rico. In the Carib, you know?”

  That made no visible impression on her. She addressed herself to her food. Ricky wondered if he’d pissed her off. He found his own appetite, made ravenous by the day’s exertion and excitement at being involved in so big and important a trade convoy, suddenly down to zero.

  Her spoon made scraping sounds as she tried to get up the last of the beans and rabbit, then she mopped up the remnants with the last of a chunk of hardtack. She put her plate aside and looked at him again.

  “That longblaster of yours,” she said. “That’s cool. What is it?”

  He had it laid on his pack behind where he sat. “It’s a DeLisle carbine,” he said.

  She cocked her head to one side. Taking that as being as good as a question, he told her about it. She actually seemed to listen.

  “Can I see it?” she asked.

  “Sure!” He almost dropped it, once picking it up, dropping the magazine, and then jacking the action to eject the loaded round. Then he was absurdly pleased to see her immediately crack the bolt action back open to confirm the weapon was unloaded when he handed it to her. That was what his Uncle Benito had taught him was the proper way to handle a blaster. J.B. Dix agreed, though Ricky noticed not everybody in the group was as scrupulous about handling weapons that way.

  Then she went and blew most of her cred by shouldering the longblaster and leveling it straight at the middle of the back of one of the drivers who was standing by another fire.

  To Ricky’s relief she lowered the blaster before anybody noticed and turned it over in her hands. “So it’s really that quiet?”

  He nodded.

  “Can I shoot it?”

  “Not now!” he said, shocked.

  “If it’s that quiet,” she said, “nobody’d know.”

  “You don’t know Mr. Cawdor and Mr. Dix,” he said. “They’d know.”

  For a moment she looked rebellious, and Ricky was glad he’d kept the ejected cartridge and full magazine at his side. Then she shoved the weapon back toward him.

  “Mebbe we can shoot it sometime,” he told
her.

  “Okay.”

  She gathered up her mess tin and rose.

  “Can I see you again?” he asked.

  “Mebbe sometime,” she said, and was gone.

  * * *

  “SO FAR,” Dace Cable said, wiping his mouth from a pull at the bottle of clear liquid his boss had just handed him, “these big, bad Deathlands you been talking up aren’t so much, Cawdor. Worst we’ve seen so far was the stickies that hit us right outside our own hometown.”

  Which you also said were bullshit, Ryan would have said, had he been looking to tangle with the convoy sec boss. He wasn’t, though he wasn’t sure how much longer them going around and around could be avoided.

  Instead Ryan said nothing.

  “We haven’t seen real Deathlands yet,” Mildred said, gazing into the flame dance of the big bonfire. “That would be what we, uh, what used to be called the Great Plain. They get going for real a ways north of here.”

  “Should reach them in a day or two if we keep making the kind of progress we have been,” J.B. added.

  Cable frowned briefly as he passed the bottle right around the main campfire to a couple of his sec crew, a man and a woman. They took hits from it, then passed it on to Krysty. She immediately passed it on to Mildred, who handed it to J.B., also without drinking.

  But rather than react to the contradiction, Cable continued to give Ryan the hard eye. He was making it clear he had no particular beef with the rest of Ryan’s crew.

  Just Ryan.

  Ryan accepted the bottle in his turn and drank. Just a sip. It was some kind of distillate, sure enough, but it didn’t threaten to shrivel his tongue, fry the lining of his throat and burst like a bomb in his belly. It was actually almost smooth, with a bit of a smoky flavor.

  Not too surprisingly, the merchant packed himself a better brand of alky than Towse Lightning, no matter what the stuff looked like.