Nemesis

by James Axler

  “Ace on the line,” Ryan replied.

  The trader roused himself as if from a standing sleep. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Bass Croom, straw boss of this traveling circus. What there’s left of it.”

  On that note he seemed to deflate a little. Ryan felt his jaw tighten. The Stones by reputation weren’t coldhearts by any stretch. But you did not want to show weakness in front of them.

  But Speaker grinned. He had a handsome face that looked years younger than Ryan reckoned it could be, a sort of reddish tan, with a straight nose, flashing black eyes and startlingly white teeth.

  He stepped forward to embrace Bass with arms twined with spiky tattoos and braided bracelets.

  “I heard what you and your crew did to that snake Bry Raker,” he said.

  “You did?” Bass asked, sounding as surprised as Ryan felt.

  Speaker laughed. He seemed good at that.

  “News travels triple-fast out here in the West,” he said. “Stones do, too. I’ll give you a big discount on passing through our lands and water rights for chilling that slaving bastard.”

  He turned to the others. “These are my family. This is Morning Glory, my right hand.”

  One of the tallest women Ryan had ever seen stepped up beside her chief. She was about six-eight, dark-skinned, with jet hair that hung in braids in front of her burly shoulders, and halfway down her imposing frontage, across a gorge made of some sort of skinny bleached bones. She wore an eagle feather at her nape, and was built to match her height. Not fat by any means, but wide. She had a face like a slab of beef, a nose like an eagle’s beak. Her eyes were like black diamond drill bits.

  Ryan wouldn’t like to face her in a fight.

  “And Pit Bull, my left.”

  The man who stepped up to that side of the Stone boss looked to be a handful, too, but less formidable in Ryan’s seasoned estimation. He was an inch or two shorter than Ryan, built broad, with a short patch of scalp-lock dyed magenta on top of his shaved skull, a matching soul patch under his outthrust underlip, and tattoos of skulls and dragons and hatchets all down the huge arms he obviously left bare to show off. The hatchets were much like the four he had hanging from his vest and belt, all predark steel models, forged of a single piece for strength. His eyes were blue and glared at the newcomers as if daring any to meet their furious gaze.

  Ryan did. The man’s jaw set and his neck muscles visibly swelled, but he did nothing. He wouldn’t, with Speaker right there; that was clear.

  At the same time, clearly Speaker was making a point by having him there.

  Pit Bull could be a handful. Ryan sized him up as more dangerous than the giant Plains Indian woman, but not more formidable. More dangerous in the way a yellow jacket was more dangerous than a diamondback, but less formidable. The wasp looked for an excuse to tangle. The rattler didn’t, but would chill you fast if you forced the issue.

  Bass introduced Cable. Speaker gripped him forearm to forearm, then he turned to Ryan and his gaze grew calculating.

  “This one yours?” he said past Ryan. From the flicker of his gaze Ryan knew he was talking to Krysty, who had taken up her customary position at her man’s right elbow, a half step back.

  “Yes,” she answered. “I’m Krysty Wroth.”

  Speaker nodded. “You, big fella?”

  “Ryan Cawdor.”

  “Pleased to meet you! May your shadow never diminish.”

  Instead of the forearm to forearm thing he gripped Ryan hand to hand. Ryan wasn’t much surprised the Stone Nation boss failed to try the crushing game. He had already sized Ryan up, and he had nothing at all to prove to anybody.

  Ryan was just as glad he didn’t try to squash his paw. The man had a grip like a vise.

  “Welcome, Ryan Cawdor, and welcome Krysty Wroth!”

  He stepped to shake Krysty’s hand, then turned it and kissed its pale back.

  “Always nice to meet a real gentleman,” Krysty said. Ryan tried not to roll his eye.

  “If you want to trade this one to us, we can give you plenty bucks in exchange,” Speaker said with a broad wink as he straightened. “If all parties agree, of course. We don’t hold by slavery.”

  “I’ll think over your generous offer,” she said, “after I size up the merchandise.”

  Speaker’s eyes widened, then he laughed. He was a handsome devil, she thought, and charismatic.

  He looked at Ryan with new respect. “You’re either the unluckiest hombre on legs,” he declared, “or the luckiest. Haven’t yet made up my mind, to talk straight.”

  “I’m the luckiest,” Ryan said.

  Speaker laughed again, then moved on while Bass, who had automatically shifted to merchant mode introduced his brother and the rest of the crew.

  As he did, Ryan sized up those who had accompanied Speaker. They either stayed astride their rides or leaned against them. They were a colorful bunch, sporting lots of tattoos, face paint, feathers and what were clearly strands of scalps. Most of those seemed to hang from Morning Glory’s belt. The ride she’d dismounted sported plenty, too, dangling from the handlebars. Pit Bull had at least half a dozen.

  Speaker displayed none of the grisly trophies, but not, Ryan reckoned, because he had no kills to his name. He wore a simple double-action revolver in a flapped holster on his left hip, a Bowie knife in beaded scabbard counterbalancing it on the right. Their wood grips looked well worn.

  They had weapons, too, everything from AK-style longblasters to swords and spears, which might be useful against a foe on foot if you were riding down on him on a powerful bike.

  Bass introduced his people in the order in which they happened to be standing near him, closest first, which meant it took him a few to get to Morty. His blond younger brother was scowling and stepping from one foot to another when Bass introduced him.

  For once Bass gave his junior sibling a hard eye, with his face turned where Speaker couldn’t see. Morty’s eyes went wide at his brother’s expression. They flickered left and right, to see Ryan giving him a cold stare, too, as did Cable, both from the sides just within his field of vision when he glanced around.

  Morty swallowed, mumbled something and meekly shook hands. Likely getting a gander at the Stone Nation boss up close settled him down some. It would be easy at first glance to dismiss Speaker as a pretty boy. He was pretty, almost to the edge of feminine. But even Morty could see, if not the steel and flint behind the ready smile, then the sort of hard-asses who acknowledged him their leader. And whatever Mortaugh Croom was, he wasn’t stupid.

  Still, Ryan allowed a twist or two of the tension in his gut to unwind. When the convoy first stopped, Morty actually agitated to dust the Stones off the ridges with the .50, which they could’ve done. After waiting a beat for Bass to say something, Cable pointed out that the survivors, including however many might be hanging back out of sight, would be on them like angry hornets. And they knew the country.

  The sec boss had actually deferred the issue to Ryan, who agreed, since Cable only spoke straight fact.

  As Speaker and Bass stepped a bit apart to commence their palaver, Ryan still felt nagged by unease, like a rat gnawing at his belly lining from the inside. He understood the Stones plenty well. While they seemed inclined to friendliness—and they had a reputation as honest but tough traders—they also had a savage name when crossed.

  Plus they were volatile. Ryan knew them for the breed that could flash over into not just chilling fury but an outright sadism inferno in the last beat of a heart. And he wondered if Morty, who’d been acting increasingly erratic with Bass having pretty much abdicated all responsibility, really, since their betrayal and escape, might do or say something to strike a spark.

  That was out of Ryan’s hands for now. All he could do was stay loose and ready to jump whichever way he had to, to protect himself and h
is friends—and his employer and his people and his wags, sure.

  But for now it was all smiles.

  “So,” Speaker said to the master trader, “once more, I bid you welcome to the Stone Nation. As I believe I mentioned before, naturally there are a few fees to discuss.”

  “Naturally.” Bass Croom actually grinned. “So let’s talk turkey.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  “Isn’t she cold?” Ricky asked.

  “Hush up now, boy,” Mildred muttered.

  “But she’s—she keeps losing her clothes,” he protested. “She’s lost...most of them already. Um.”

  In fact in the process of dancing around the big “council fire” in the center of an octagon made of long folding tables where the dinner feast was being served, the young woman with the night-black hair falling free clear to the tattoo at the small of her back had lost everything but a pair of silver-studded black boots with matching spurs, a black leather sort of bikini bottom, and various trinkets scattered about her tanned but generally well-put together person. The knife scar down her right cheek gave her a bit of a rough look, though.

  But Ricky wasn’t looking there anyway, and his throat had suddenly gotten too dry to pass any more words.

  “Pipe down,” J.B. said. As usual he didn’t raise his voice.

  Ricky deflated like a shot tire and sank in on himself, almost dragging his chin in the remnants of the last course cooling on the chipped pottery plate on the folding feast table in front of him. Off to the left where another table was set at right angle to this one he saw Dezzy’s inscrutable black eyes on him.

  He sank his head even farther between his forward-hunched shoulders.

  Some of the bikers watching from the far side of the fire were hooting and cheering the unsettlingly revealed dancer. Not all were men.

  Most listened as Speaker did what his name implied: animatedly told Bass—and by extension his companions—the story of the Stone nation.

  “It all began centuries ago,” the handsome chieftan said, “in the bombed-out, burned-out rubble of Chi-town. There a great, great man named Ranger gathered up the survivors under the banner of what was then known as the Almighty Black P. Stone Nation. He accepted everyone who was willing, the stoned and the straight alike. For he knew their travels would be long, their travails many, and their suffering would outlive many if not all of those who dared follow.”

  Speaker’s gestures, Ricky noted, swept left and right and up and down as if molding the figures, the very history of what he described, out of clay. He was a good storyteller; his telling entranced Ricky, though not so much that he failed to notice that even the bikers, who had to have heard the story a hundred times before and had a nearly naked dancing girl to look at besides, fell silent. Indeed the dancer stopped, bowed to Speaker—who acknowledged her with a grin and nod—and taking up her things retreated into the night that had gathered around the sprawling Stone Nation encampment.

  “For many suns’ journey Ranger led the people west. Many moons’, too, for they all felt the urgency that burned within him. And soon they knew the cause, for along with the shaking of the tortured Earth the skies grew black with clouds that didn’t disperse.”

  Sitting at the pack leader’s right, Bass Croom listened as if entranced. He looked livelier than Ricky had seen him in days, since the horror at Raker’s Rest, in fact.

  Though he complained loudly about how much Speaker was gouging him for passage and water rights, Ricky, who knew a thing or two about negotiation despite his tender age, thought the master trader sounded gratified. His gray eyes positively sparkled.

  Though their mannerisms were different as moon from sun, the big, bluff, bearded gabacho and Ricky’s own late father—small, soft-spoken, deferential in manner—had a common core. They were good at driving good deals, each in his own way. And they loved doing so, perhaps, as much as any actual profit they made from their transactions.

  “Eventually the refugees, haggard, exhausted, cold, their numbers depleted by plague and fire and enemy attacks, stumbled in among the Plains people—the Lakota and their allies like the Sutaio, and the Kaui-gu and their brothers the Numunu. Those whom you white-eyes still know as Sioux, Cheyenne, the Kiowa and Comanche. They considered themselves free from the white man’s oppression by the war.

  “Though they were hard, those free-riding Indian men and women, their hearts were not made of stone. They were filled with admiration for the Stones, their suffering, and their endurance. And their leader.

  “Not at first. First the invaders had to prove their mettle, to be worthy of friendship. That entailed plenty of chilling and dying on both sides. But once their cred was established the Plains folk adopted them and their magnificent leader, Ranger.”

  He paused to drink from a mug of dark, frothy beer. If it could be called a mug. It was made out of a short, massive buffalo horn. Jak, sitting down the table from Ricky, drank despite occasional warning glances from Mildred and Krysty. But sparingly, Ricky noted. They didn’t want Ricky drinking beer, which was fine with him, since he didn’t really like the taste.

  As he listened he took stock of the Stones themselves. They were a scary bunch, and no mistake. But some of the things that frightened Ricky most at first, the bizarre haircuts, the gaudy, glittery decorations, the face-painting and the tattoos, began to exert a fascination on him as the evening wore on. Some of them were really impressively well done, when Ricky looked at them closely—or as closely as he could at the other tables. The beadwork on scabbards and clothing particularly impressed him, as did the tattoos, which could either be stark and bold, like the rearing, highly stylized dragon on Morning Glory’s left biceps, to patterns as intricate as clockwork.

  Their weapons were often decorated, as well. Some had painted furniture, or carved bone grips. Some of the lever-action carbines stacked next to their owners showed engraving on the receivers, though Ricky was too far away to make out detail.

  Ricky felt ambivalent about that. On the one hand he didn’t hold with tarting up a good weapon, a good machine of any sort. On the other hand, like his uncle before him and his new mentor and idol, J. B. Dix, Ricky was a sucker for good workmanship, wherever and however encountered. Also, none of the embellishments looked to interfere with the weapons’ utilization.

  He wasn’t that happy about the bikers keeping their weapons on them or close to hand. Even he, who didn’t consider himself at all good with people, could sense undercurrents of latent violence beneath the hearty joviality of the bikers. That some of them were hitting the brews pretty hard concerned him.

  Then again, none of the Stones seemed to be getting as drunk as hard and fast as Morty Croom. He sat at the table directly to the left around the octagon from Ricky’s, where Speaker was holding court to Bass and Cable, Ryan and Krysty, and Sandra Watson. For his part the Stone Nation chief had Morning Glory and Pit Bull at his side, as well as a mousy little guy with a pot belly, goatee and wire-rimmed specs not too different from J.B.’s. who seemed to be called Running Shits, for some reason Ricky couldn’t fathom and wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  Despite Speaker’s great skill at yarn-spinning, Morty didn’t seem to be paying attention to him. Instead he seemed to be staring fixedly at a Stone Nation girl at the next table left. It was the slight woman with the skinny dark-blonde braid hanging by one side of her pretty, pouty face. She had on a black-and-white vest that seemed to be made from the hide of a pinto pony, and it seemed like nothing much beneath. She was talking rather languidly with the bikers around her. Ricky noticed she was occasionally catching Morty’s eye and even throwing a smile back his way.

  Ricky worried Morty might do something to cause a scene. He figured that would cause the violence he sensed flowing under the surface of the festivities to erupt full-on. Still, he was at least halfway glad Morty was so keen on the nomad girl. Mebbe sh
e’ll distract him from Olympia, he thought. Stop his buzzing around her like a horsefly.

  Even Ricky, who knew he knew nothing about women, could see the younger Croom would never get anywhere with their mysterious passenger. In fact Morty had been caught spying on Olympia when she was bathing in a stream, the woman completely heedless of the frigid temperatures. His older brother yelled at him, though Bass lapsed quickly back into his depths of funk. And Morty went right on being Morty.

  Ricky wasn’t sure how Morty even had the nerve to keep trying his luck with Olympia, much less spy on her naked. She scared Ricky spitless, and she had always been friendly to him, in her distant, distracted-seeming way. They were comrades in arms, they had fought together. And she still terrified him.

  The youth was only surprised Morty hadn’t made a real scene yet, the way he’d been getting drunk and carrying on in camp. Others in the convoy were starting to grumble, as well. Why didn’t the master merchant put his younger brother firmly in line, especially since despite his depression he was growing visibly more anxious to get wherever they were going.

  Ricky saw Dezzy, who was sitting with big blonde Randi, her boss Dan and Little Feather, looking straight at him with her big black eyes. He swallowed and stared down at his plate just as it was whisked away, to be replaced by, of all things, some kind of yellow curry with vegetables and some slightly stringy meat in it. When he tasted it he found surprisingly good, though the curry made his tongue sting so that he gulped from his ceramic cup of water.

  “The Stones and the Plains people rode out the cold, long night together,” Speaker was declaiming. “And over the harsh decades the two groups grew together.

  “Ranger grew old and died. The sky cleared. The Plains tribes, with the Stone Nation now an accepted member of their alliance, rode forth to claim the Plains once more. If sometimes the acid rain chilled them, and horrible muties, the buffalo had sprung back, allowing the nations to feed and grow big and strong.