Nemesis

by James Axler

  She was sitting between their host and Bass Croom. Kit Raker sat at Ryan’s left, across from her husband. Whenever her husband wasn’t looking, she kept shooting Ryan burning-coal looks and twisting in her chair to give him ample opportunity to look down the chasm of milk-white cleavage left bare by her maroon silk gown. Ryan tried not to look, despite the fact she kept showing herself off a lot, owing to the fact that her husband in turn mostly had eyes for Krysty.

  Dace Cable, Morty Croom and Croom himself also sat at the head table, along with a shrimpy little bald guy in rimless glasses whose head sprouted like some kind of colorless tuber from what Ryan could only think of as an undertaker’s suit. He’d been introduced as Raker’s top aide. Mildred said he looked like an accountant. Ryan, who had rare experience with the breed himself, tended to agree.

  He glanced around at the next table down, where J.B. was peering at each spoonful as if curious about what sort of multilegged thing might be swimming in it, and Doc was holding forth in grand manner. Though sometimes when he got going he could bore a person to tears, he could also be an entertaining, even funny storyteller when the mood hit him. As evidently it had, from the reactions of the mix of convoy crew and Raker’s people who sat at the much larger table. Several other tables were also arranged down the mess hall.

  At first Ryan had resisted the idea of breaking up his companions. He disliked it as a rule, no less with it already broken up because of the unexplained tardiness of Ricky and Jak. Plus he hated to be put above his group in any way. He was their nominal leader, but they were still all friends, and what was good for one was good for all.

  Bass had asked, politely but urgently. Ryan had gotten the nod from Krysty, who at least intuited no danger from the arrangement. And so he’d reluctantly agreed.

  Maybe she sensed no additional danger. Something kept crawling up Ryan’s back. Something he still couldn’t pin down. He could only put it off to a mixture of annoyance and concern that the youngest members hadn’t made it back hours since.

  “Don’t you find it so, Mr. Cawdor?” asked Kit Raker, turning toward him again and leaning in as a silent servant poured her cut-crystal goblet full of red wine. The wine was good, too; Ryan drank but sparingly of it and hoped his companions did, too.

  He discovered that he’d spaced out and had no idea what the woman had said previously. “As a general thing, Mrs. Raker,” he said, “I find I got a full enough plate just keeping me and my friends alive without poking into things that don’t concern me.”

  He saw her brow furrow. She did it prettily enough: she was a gorgeous woman, no mistake. But he also was beginning to size her up as trouble, leaving aside the fact her husband was basically the baron of what was in effect a sizable ville. There was something dark and stormy about her that hadn’t really appealed to him since he was young, single and triple foolish. If he put her shapely nose out of joint, maybe she’d at least leave him alone!

  It also occurred to him that what he said may just have been such a thundering non sequitur that she was entirely confused. Good enough.

  The main course was brought in: an entire roasted elk carcass, smoking grandly on some kind of wheeled cart covered in a tablecloth bleached well enough that the faint stains still visible could likely be forgiven. Ryan couldn’t stop from cracking a smile as Mildred sang out, “Who even has a stove big enough to cook something like that?”

  As the monster roast was carved up by a sweaty dude in a tall white mushroom hat, Ryan found himself listening to the talk Raker and Croom were conducting basically over Krysty’s bosom. Raker was amplifying again on the theme that times had been hard. He quoted drought to the east, volcanic eruptions west across the Rockies, and general strife and disorder everywhere.

  Ryan caught Krysty’s green gaze again as a big sturdy ceramic plate was clunked down in front of him. It had to be sturdy to support the weight of roast elk meat weighing it down. Despite the fact he’d been hitting the soup and the bread rolls hard his stomach rumbled at the aroma.

  She winked at him; he smiled back. He knew her thoughts. Just the same as things always are.

  So the meal went: with course after savory course, for which Ryan seemed miraculously to find room. He’d be surprised if he wasn’t bloated at the end of it all. But he found himself hungry, and realized how seldom, in the course of his adult life, he’d felt anything but hunger in one degree or another.

  Despite his sipping sparingly, he also put down a decent quality of Raker’s wine. Wines—all of which were of good quality. Not even a baron of the reasonably prosperous eastern barony like Ryan’s ancestral home of Front Royal could always be that picky about what he served, either by way of food or drink. But Baron Titus always knew good wine from bad, and made sure his offspring did, too.

  Too bad he wasn’t as good at telling the good from the bad where his own seed was concerned. The ancient knife scar down the left side of his face panged at the brief memory. His traitor brother Harvey had put it there, cost him his eye and his birthright and doomed him to a life of rootless wandering.

  By the time some kind of chocolate cake was served, Ryan could no longer muster even the pretense of eating for the sake of politeness, though for a fact it looked good. As everything had been. He was starting to feel as if his belt had shrunk a notch and was hoping Krysty wouldn’t feel too frisky tonight.

  Which, come to think of it, was as rare a thing as him turning down food.

  Bry Raker rose, tinkling a spoon against a glass for attention. “Ladies, gentlemen, beloved employees and honored guests, please permit me to propose a toast.”

  Fresh wine was poured. More than a little reluctantly, Ryan picked up his glass. At this stage he was glad he knew the trick of just wetting his lips while pretending to drink.

  As he picked up the goblet, he found Katherine Raker staring at him again. This time it was a flat hot stare, and the color was completely gone from her normally pallid cheeks. She clearly disapproved of something, but he was skinned if he had the least inkling what.

  “If my guests will rise,” Raker said in his loud tenor. With a certain shuffling and scuffling of chairs, Croom and his people pushed back from the table and stood.

  “Thank you. So now I propose a toast. To Bastion Croom, merchant prince and bold adventurer, and the brave souls who have dared to cross the worst of the Deathlands under his command—my sincere congratulations and admiration!”

  He drank deeply. When he had drained his goblet of blood-red wine, Raker threw it to the plank floor, where it shattered.

  “And also my sincere apologies, because you are all now my prisoners!”

  And then the walls seemed to sprout sec men with orange armbands, blasters leveled at Ryan, Croom and all their companions.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sun had yet to set behind the Rockies as Ricky found himself and his companions gazing down on the rest stop, but it was working on it.

  It was an impressive sight, he had to admit.

  “Okay, neat,” he said. “Now we’ve got to go. We’re late enough as it is.”

  “No,” Olympia said.

  Ricky and Jak turned to stare at her. She had joined them on the crest. The ground coming up had been rocky and broken-up enough that they hadn’t had to stop every so often and wait for her to catch up on her human-powered ride.

  “You mustn’t.”

  Jak frowned. “Shit,” he said. “Going.”

  He gunned his engine.

  “You’ll die,” Olympia said.

  Her voice wasn’t loud, exactly, but somehow it cracked like a whip. Ricky had heard Ryan use the same voice. Well, it was completely different—he was a man, with a rough voice. But still the same. Somehow.

  It commanded attention; it commanded Jak’s. His engine eased back to idle as he turned a blank red stare on her.
r />   “Your friends will die, too,” she said.

  “Can’t know!”

  “Yes,” she said calmly, “I can. I’m a doomie. I can see pathways into the future.”

  “Talk,” he said.

  “That’s it,” she said. “I can see a short ways down different roads into the future. I see where the one your friends have chosen leads.”

  “Where’s that?” Ricky asked. His throat was dry, and it wasn’t just from eating the trail dust thrown up by Jak’s bike all afternoon.

  “Betrayal.”

  * * *

  SOMEWHERE A CLOCK gonged midnight. Bry Raker, that coldhearted piece of shit, Ryan thought, liked to keep a regular compound. He stirred. His lone eye was swollen half shut. His head rang like a gong, and from far more than the wine he’d taken aboard.

  He felt a strong grip on his arm. J.B. helped him stand. Actually, the Armorer dragged Ryan’s still reluctant body clean onto his feet.

  “You look like you’ve been used to hammer in half a dozen tents pegs,” J.B. remarked, steadying his friend with a hand on the biceps.

  “I feel that way,” Ryan mumbled.

  He felt his aching jaw. His tongue probed the inside of his mouth. Nothing seemed broken and he still had all his teeth.

  He pried his eye open. “You don’t look triple good yourself.”

  Both of J.B.’s eyes were black, but the round lenses of the steel-rimmed glasses perched in front of them were intact. The Armorer had made sure to slip them into his pocket before turning and making his attempt to fight free of their treacherous captors at dinner.

  He’d known he’d lose the battle, as had Ryan, but they’d both made the attempt anyway. And not because of stiff-necked pride. Trader always called a man who’d die for mere pride just another dead stupe, and they still marked his words well after all these years.

  “After the beat-down you two took,” called a voice from the next cell, “it’s a wonder you’re still alive.”

  Ryan recognized the voice of Dan Hogue, Bass Croom’s wrench. Before Butler, Raker’s giant shave-headed meatwad of a sec boss, had personally clubbed him down with the butt of what looked like an M-1 Garand, Ryan had seen the little bearded mechanic try to swarm the coldhearts behind him.

  Ryan looked at J.B., who shrugged. Dan was the one who was lucky to be alive.

  “We’ve been there before, son,” J.B. said. “We know how to make a show of getting beat down without getting hurt triple bad.”

  “Brag,” Morty said. The sullen young man was sporting a shiner of his own. He might not be worth much, but he wasn’t worth nothing, it turned out. He’d fought back, too, and given the sec man who was holding down on his big brother a pretty good sock on the jaw before another laid him out with a buttstroke. “You two look like hammered dog shit.”

  “Thank you so much,” J.B. said.

  “Didn’t say it doesn’t hurt,” Ryan said. “Only that we know how not to get busted up too bad.”

  “Not like him,” J.B. added with a nod toward Cable. The blond-goateed sec boss for the convoy lay stretched out on the straw scattered across the packed-dirt floor of the adobe-walled cell. He only seemed now to be twitching and groaning his way back to life.

  Huddled in the corner of the cell, which was about twelve feet by twelve, like a terminally depressed bear, Bass Croom stirred himself. He alone of the handful of men in this cell bore no bruises or scuffs. Even Doc was disheveled and the right side of his face was bruised from getting punched as he’d fought back.

  But when Bry Raker, their host, announced his treachery, the master trader had frozen. He’d just stood staring like a jacklit deer as his hands were yanked behind him and bound.

  Ryan didn’t blame him a speck of dried owl shit. He knew Croom didn’t have a yellow bone in his body. On the road so far he’d had plenty of opportunity to turn away from danger and never did. From his years on the road, he had to have some notion how dangerous this journey would be. Even if he couldn’t really know how deadly it could turn.

  As it had. With that smug declaration of betrayal by the man who had taken them in, taken his jack and his trade goods, and gone back on the whole notion of a trade convoy rest stop, Croom had seen himself losing everything: his goods, the people he cared about so much, his beloved little brother. His own life, though that seemed not to matter much to him now.

  But his friend and sec boss, Cable, returning to consciousness, or at least some facsimile of it, roused Bass from his sunk-in despair. He rose and lumbered over to kneel beside his wounded friend and cradle his head in his lap.

  “Water,” the merchant said.

  “Left us a bucket and a ladle,” J.B. said. “Just to show they weren’t total barbarians. Just back-stabbing shitbags.”

  Morty carried the bucket over to his big brother. The merchant ladled some over Cable’s lips. They had to work a moment to break the seal of dried blood that held them together. The sec man moved his head side to side a little, but didn’t open his eyes.

  Croom looked up at Ryan, who nodded.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “We won’t be needing much.”

  Without showing signs of wondering at Ryan’s words, Bass dashed a whole ladle of the brackish water in Cable’s battered face. The sec man moaned, coughed. Then his eyes opened and he tried to sit up.

  “Easy,” Croom said, holding him down with a huge hand to the breastbone.

  “Check his eyes,” Ryan suggested.

  “I can see fine,” Cable croaked.

  “Concussion,” J.B. said.

  “Oh. Right,” Bass said. He fumbled in a pocket for a moment, then produced a previous match, which he flicked alive with a thumbnail. Then he bent over to thumb back Cable’s eyelids, one at a time, with a facility that told Ryan he was no stranger to the procedure.

  “No dilation, same size,” the master merchant said.

  “Check for broken bones,” Ryan directed. He reckoned Croom knew that. But he wasn’t sure how well the trader was functioning yet, so he didn’t consider them wasted words. “Doc, how about you?”

  “Never better, my dear Ryan,” he declared, then winced.

  “Very well—that’s a lie. But you and J.B. aren’t the only ones who have mastered the art of rolling with a blow.”

  “You’re kidding,” Morty said. “You didn’t deliberately get beat down.”

  “Indeed we did, lad,” Doc replied.

  In spite of his bruises—and his age, which his body felt even if it didn’t reflect the years he had lived through—he did seem to be enjoying himself, for a fact. Action made it possible for him to forget all that he had lost, at least for a brief span.

  “We had to put up a good show, you see,” the old man said. “Otherwise they’d be on their guard.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against what’s coming,” Ryan said. He moved to the door. It was solid wood. Even though there were no trees larger than scrub cedar on the hills anywhere around the compound they had seen, the rest stop made liberal use of timber for construction. Not all of it was scavvy. Ryan reckoned Raker did a lot of trade with logging operations in the Rockies, still about a day’s drive west, if the roads held halfway decent.

  There was a peephole-like opening covered with heavy metal mesh. The same covered the one window set high up on the bare mud-brick wall, through which the light of a swelling moon provided the sole illumination.

  The corridor outside was lit by the faint orange glow of a lamp somewhere. A similar hefty door stood across it. There was no sign Ryan could detect of any guard in the hallway, though he couldn’t see far.

  “How about in there, Dan?” he called softly. “Anybody crippled up too bad to move?”

  “Only if you count depression,” the wrench said. “Some of the boys are ta
king it pretty hard.”

  “Where are the women?” Ryan asked.

  “They stuck them someplace else,” Morty said. Ryan noticed he wasn’t whining even a little. Apparently when the shit hammer came down, he tightened up with the rest of them.

  “This was all a spur-of-the-moment plan,” Bass said. His voice still was clotted by grief and despair. “Raker told me himself before he had us dragged out of the mess hall. He still hadn’t made up his mind what to do with us, which was why he didn’t just chill us all and have done with it.”

  “Would have been the smart thing to do,” J.B. agreed. “Too late now.”

  Bass actually reacted to that enough to give him a look of disbelief. “He mentioned slavery,” he said. “Apparently that’s a trade to which he’s been no stranger the last few years.”

  The merchant shook his big shaggy head.

  “Fool that I was, I offered to bribe our way clear. Anything he asked. Of course, he responded that he already had everything I possessed anyway.”

  Ryan turned from the door to give him a hard look.

  “Listen,” he said. “You feel triple-bad. You’re the man in charge. I know the feeling.

  “Well, face it. We’re all fucked. Didn’t any of us see this coming. We walked into a trap with our eyes open.”

  “But it’s my fault,” Bass said.

  “It’s Raker’s fault,” Ryan replied. “Anyway, a fired bullet doesn’t go back in the blaster. What’s done, is. The key thing is, we’re fixing to walk out of this trap. But it’ll take everything everybody’s got to pull it off. You most of all.”

  Bass stared at him, his mouth hanging open.

  “You’re crazy, Cawdor,” Cable croaked in a raven’s caw. He forced himself to a sitting position despite Bass’s reflex effort to hold him down. “Unless you can walk right through that locked solid door.”

  “He can,” J.B. said from beside the door, where he sat on the floor with his right boot off. “And he will.”