Storm Breakers

by James Axler

  Alysa turned back. Her pale, strained young face looked a question.

  He nodded. She straightened in her saddle and nudged her bay toward the light.

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Mildred, clearly wide-awake now, asked from behind.

  Ryan actually chuckled.

  “You rather sleep out here in a snowbank, Mildred?” he asked softly. “And take your chances with what we know is wandering around out here? I’ll roll the dice on whoever’s inside, myself.”

  With gentle but firm pressure of his knees, he urged his horse to a walk in the wake of their guide.

  * * *

  “HEY, YOU THERE!” A VOICE called through the dusk.

  The convoy was laagered-up in a circle in a clearing on mostly level ground to recover from the attack. The surroundings here were fairly green, indicating that this microclimate got more water rain than acid rain. The sun was already sinking behind some jagged trees on a ridgeline to the west.

  J.B. sat on a patch of bare red dirt with his knees up and a canteen in his hand. Around him, people went about their business in a sort of controlled frenzy. Rance hadn’t come looking for him to lend a hand.

  He was glad. The only hand he could’ve offered shook like a leaf in a stiff wind. His skinny body was wrung out like a gaudy-bar rag from exertion in the heat—and complete concentration.

  But his mind was racing. Despite the exhaustion that weighed down his slight frame like an anvil strapped to his back, he felt elation, the satisfaction of a tough job well done.

  “Hey, you there,” the voice called again, closer this time. “You the kid who messed with my 60-blaster?”

  J.B. reckoned that meant him. He looked around.

  A man was striding toward him across the circle walled in by Trader’s wags. He was medium height, meaning a few inches taller than J.B., wider across chest and shoulders and double-wider across the gut. He had a mop of black hair, a mustache and beard stubble sprouting on round jowls and chins that was almost as dark. His face showed an olive strip across the eyes and monobrow. The rest was darker brown and looked a bit sunburned beneath. It wasn’t road-grime, but residue from being hunkered down over the receiver of a machine gun at close quarters, firing flat-out for an extended stay. J.B. knew that sort of thing.

  He jumped to his feet. The man was Ace DeGuello, Trader’s personal weapons master and chief armorer.

  “Yeah,” he said. He felt a roil of conflicting emotions in his belly that overrode the hunger that was starting to creep into the place where post-adrenaline-rush nausea had been for half an hour after they’d parked. There was his natural defiance, warring mano-a-mano with his desire to please the man he most wanted to work for.

  Well, and replace. But first things first.

  The boss armorer stuck out a hand. Though the belly straining the grease-and-sweat-mottled front of his generically dark T-shirt was soft, the hand was rock-hard from working on blasters and ineradicably stained with the grease and powder residue such work ground in over time.

  Numbly, Johnny took it. He managed to meet firm grasp with firm grasp. He was happy the Latino didn’t play the hand-crushing game. J.B.’s hands were big for his size, and strong. But DeGuello’s mitt was like a bear’s paw.

  “You worked a wonder out there, boy,” he said. “I don’t mind saying we’da all had our asses stuck in a crack if you hadn’t got that wep firing again when you did. We had a pair of the little fucks get into War Wag One as it was.”

  J.B. could only shake his head. He couldn’t put the words in order to explain that it hadn’t been that big a deal. The book remedy for a shell jammed in the chamber was a simple barrel change. The gunners just hadn’t known that. Or, more likely, forgotten under the mind-blanking stress of their powerful blaster’s sudden slam into uselessness and the sudden swarm of muties falling like razor-fanged rain on their heads. J.B.’s gyros were so tumbled by recent and current events, he couldn’t even muster a twitch of contempt at them for losing their heads.

  In fact, there was nothing wrong with the locked-up barrel. It’d take about ten minutes to chuck it up in a vice in one of Ace’s shops and work the headless case free. But that was nothing anybody could do in a firefight. Not Ace—and not J. B. Dix.

  “You’re one of Rance’s wrenches, right?” Ace asked, letting go of J.B.’s hand.

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Man. Your skinny gringo ass is wasted working on engines. You need to come work for me, my friend.”

  J.B. opened his mouth to say, “Dark night, yes!”

  A hand like a steel clamp locked down in his shoulder from behind. It seemed to trap the words right in his throat.

  “I’m not done with him yet, Ace,” Rance said.

  Ace frowned. “Listen, Rance, cut me some slack, here—”

  “Not this time.”

  J.B. turned to look at her. His heart had been soaring like a dove. Now it plummeted like that same dove after sucking in a charge of birdshot.

  The chief wrench wasn’t a bad boss, as bosses went. She as was hard as 304 stainless steel, but she was also straight-edge fair. That, he wasn’t used to.

  And she was...not hard on the eyes. Not a beauty by any means, with her long, worn, somewhat square-jawed face, the small breasts whose shape his mind had worked out with some precision despite the loose work shirts she always wore, and the fact that her waist wasn’t that much narrower than her shoulders or skinny hips. Still, Rance Weeden was a handsome woman.

  But he had to be an armorer. He had to show his real stuff to Trader.

  “Please” spilled out his mouth without his even meaning it to. Not that he could’ve stopped it, likely.

  A small frown furrowed her brow between her hazel eyes, which even in the sun’s last light showed a touch of green. His shot-down heart sank further. He was afraid she was about to rank him out in epic style, which he knew well she could do.

  She pushed her fedora up her brow. Her face had the odd raccoon-mask effect, too. Like him, she’d been sitting on top of a cargo wag fighting off muties until they won clear.

  Which hadn’t cost them that much, surprisingly. Just three chills, including Jody Marks, the 60-gunner on War Wag One who’d panicked and gotten pulled down. Five wounded, three walking, all expected to make full recovery. Trader had good healers—though he himself would never see one, famously mistrusting them all as quacks and witch-doctors.

  Even more surprisingly, they hadn’t lost a wag or a load. The last cargo wag in line had broken a front axle on a big rock thrown down by the muties. The convoy had halted for no more than two minutes while a tow cable was rigged to the wag ahead. Those were a hot two minutes, at least for J.B. and the female gunner whom he’d served as loader—especially since they didn’t dare shoot any more or more often than absolutely necessary, as they were already using the lone spare barrel. In the end, between the next-to-last wag pulling and the occasional push from the blunt snout of War Wag Two, they’d gotten the disabled vehicle moving again at little less speed than they’d managed before. And within half a mile they were clear of the canyon and the persistent and apparently limitless tribe of muties that had bushwhacked them.

  Now J.B. mostly wished he could die. He was stuck as a wrench. And he’d pissed off the boss.

  Rance sucked down a long breath, then let it out slowly.

  “I reckon I can lend him to you, Ace,” she said. “When I can spare him.”

  “Thanks, Rance,” DeGuello said. “I appreciate it.”

  J.B. stared at her with saucer eyes. “Really?”

  “Did I stutter?”

  She cuffed him on the side of the head, but lightly. Kind of.

  “But I can’t spare your lazy ass now, J. B. Dix. We got us an axle to fix by morning. So march!”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Here, Ryan,” said the plump, cheerful woman in the heavy maroon shawl and dark brown dress. Her face was red from working the hot s
tove in the kitchen in the back. Her bun of hair was as white as bleached bone. “Have some more spuds. Plenty more where those came from!”

  “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Ryan and his group were gathered around a big, crude but sturdy plank table loaded with food and drink. The inside of the house in the dark woods was cramped yet cozy, and warm from a giant fireplace roaring at one end of the main room. By the watery yellowish light of lanterns obviously fueled by fish oil, the walls seemed to be a semi-random mix of rough, dark-stained planks and granite chunks. But it wasn’t easy to tell from the jars and random bric-a-brac that crowded the many shelves on every wall. These held everything from crude ceramic vases and pots containing dried flowers, or what struck him as random sprays of weeds, to a few coverless books, to faded and cracked predark toys, to sealed glass jars containing vague hints of objects indiscernible for the murky fluid that filled them. Most were coated thickly with dust.

  He found it mildly disquieting, like the odd smell that pervaded the house. Even beneath the fishy smell.

  The visible patches of the wall, few and small as they were, were often marked by tufts of gray-green moss or seemingly random clumps of weeds stuffed in to stuff the chinks in the walls. It didn’t keep the occasional chill breath from wafting through the room and down his neck, but it was still better than being out in the frigid night.

  He accepted the heavy, cracked ceramic bowl from the woman’s hands, which were reddened and chapped from housework, much of which was no doubt conducted out in the cold. The bowl, like the plates and utensils he and his friends had loaded up with rabbit stew and boiled greens and beans, at least seemed clean. Mostly. Which was more than you could say for the floor.

  But squeamish folks tended to starve in the world they lived in. This was better than he generally got. He doled out a second helping, with bits of cut-up potato skins mashed in with them, onto his plate.

  “Eat up, everybody,” boomed the man at the head of the table. He had bushy brown hair streaked with gray and an enormous beard. It spread out over an even more enormous belly; the man had to be four hundred pounds easy, maybe five, stuffed into a red-and-black-plaid flannel shirt and canvas coveralls that his wife had to have cobbled together for him. Possibly out of predark tents. Ryan, who sat at his right hand, had mostly gotten used to the smell of sweat and grease wafting from him. “Plenty where that came from. Mama Bear hates to send anybody away hungry.”

  The woman bustled back in through the door from the kitchen in a wash of fragrant steam. She carried another bowl full of green peas in her hands. The dish was painted with a dull green stripe and a misshapen-looking yellow-gray pear, and it had a big crack running down the side.

  Seated toward the foot of the table with Ricky between him and Krysty, Jak was sniffing the air in the room. His nose wrinkled. He wasn’t fastidious, either—to say the least.

  “Smells like death,” he announced.

  “Jak!” Krysty exclaimed. “That’s rude.” She had sprung back remarkably fast from the usual exhaustion brought on by channeling Gaia into a burst of superhuman strength. Her eyes were a bit sunken, her cheeks more hollow than usual. But her eyes still sparkled like emeralds, and the smile she flashed Ryan when she glanced his way and caught his eye was like fingers tickling the underside of his cock.

  But Ryan frowned. Yeah. That’s it, he thought.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mama Bear. She pottered around the table to stand next to her husband.

  But Papa Bear chuckled indulgently and scratched his colossal belly.

  “Aw, it’s nothin’ but honesty, Mama Bear,” he said in a thunder-rumble voice. “Boy speaks his mind. Fact is, it’s a thing we’re well aware of and find highly regrettable. Seems like a rat musta crawled in the walls and died where we can’t find it, or such.”

  Unlike most of the people they’d encountered in Stormbreak—and Alysa—the pair spoke in a broad down-east Maine accent. With Mama Bear standing by her husband, Ryan was struck by the fact that, as hefty as she was, she seemed almost willow-slim by comparison. Ryan was also struck by how similar they looked other than bulk: pink cheeks, small, watery-blue eyes, noses that kind of splayed out at the nostrils and ends. Both exhibited the swollen forehead he associated with inbreeding. Mama Bear had the retreating lower jaw, too. Papa Bear’s imposing beard concealed what chin he had. Or didn’t have.

  “They call these the Deathlands for a reason,” Ryan said. He was inclined to accept the explanation of the smell. And also the fact that their host and hostess might’ve been related before they got married. Inbreds weren’t in any way uncommon in smaller villes.

  The big thing that concerned Ryan was that the food was hot and plentiful and kept coming. And that being inside these four walls, as grimy as they were, was better than being out in the wind and cold. He offered up a taut smile to Mama Bear as she spooned peas onto his plate.

  “How do you get all these greens here in the dead of winter?” Mildred asked. She sat at Ryan’s right. “Seem pretty fresh.”

  Ryan frowned slightly. The question sounded almost challenging, and there was no profit to be had in pissing off their hosts. He made himself take into account that she was on edge over J.B.’s state.

  Mama Bear dished out the peas and then perched on the end of her chair. She seemed to spend most of her time shuttling in and out of the kitchen. Ryan wondered when she’d eat. Obviously she did a fair amount of it.

  “Oh, a goodly number of folk hereabouts have learned how to grow food through the winter,” she said. “We trade. We get a fair number of visitors, despite being out here in the woods.”

  The house was an inn of sorts. For a reasonable amount of jack, Ryan’s group had secured lodging for the night in a mostly log annex heated by its own woodstove, as well as meals.

  “What brings you folks this way?” Papa Bear asked.

  He picked up his bowl of stew and tipped it toward his mouth. A fair amount ended up on his beard. As much food as he had to take in, the beard had to be well nourished, too, Ryan reckoned.

  Krysty looked at the one-eyed man. He shrugged. No point in not telling the truth. Or at least some of it.

  “Slavers kidnapped some people out east along the coast, in Stormbreak,” she said. “We’re looking to find them and rescue them.”

  Ryan glanced past Mildred and Doc, who was mumbling with his chin on his breastbone, to Alysa. The young woman had been eating dutifully with her eyes fixed on the table. Now she looked up sharply.

  “Slavers,” Papa Bear repeated. “Rad blast ’em. They’ve been a burden to us all the last few years. They been bringing their prisoners along the coast from the north and east. Seem to be taking them somewhere down past Tavern Bay.”

  “Tavern Bay?” Ryan asked.

  “A small port ville south of here, at the mouth of a river called the Tavern,” Mama Bear said. “They do lots of fishing, some trading. Even a little bit of manufacture.”

  “We know of it in Stormbreak,” Alysa said. “We trade with the people there. But do not trust them. Even though the baroness came from among them.”

  “Why not?” Mildred asked sharply.

  “Baroness Katerina is warm and kind. Not all the people there are so,” Alysa said.

  Papa Bear shrugged. “They’ve got a reputation for driving a hard bargain, that’s for sure.”

  “You have a good idea about the slavers’ movements in these parts?” Ryan asked, as Mama Bear got up to vanish into the kitchen again.

  “Middlin’,” Papa Bear said. “Like I said, we get a fair number of visitors. We get a pretty good idea of who goes where and does what around here.”

  Ryan saw Alysa giving him a pointed look. He wasn’t sure if she wanted—or wanted him—to ask if they knew anything specifically about Milya or not.

  He just nodded. Their hosts didn’t need to know the specific import of their mission. The slavers might well reckon on the baron sending somebody to try to fetch his girl back. It wouldn’
t help to have them make Ryan’s bunch as the people who were doing that.

  He heard Doc muttering over the brief lull as everybody gave their attention back to eating. He couldn’t quite make out the words, though the man sat just three feet away from him. He knew what he was saying, though: Emily, Rachel, Jolyon. The names of his wife, their daughter and their infant son, from whom he’d been snatched toward the end of the nineteenth century.

  A brilliant man, well-educated by the standards of an earlier time, vastly more learned than people today, what Theophilus Algernon Tanner was not, was old. In absolute terms, of course, he was beyond ancient—well upward of two centuries. In terms of the time he’d actually lived, he was, at most, middle-aged. Yet his experiences had aged him beyond his lived-in years, body and mind. And though he could well be the smartest of all of them, with quick wits and vast knowledge that had saved everybody’s lives a dozen times over, in times of stress or fatigue he could lapse into mental vagueness as his mind slipped its tether and wandered down the pathways of his long-lost past.

  This night, with a double burden of fatigue and the post-adrenaline letdown that followed deadly combat, was clearly one of those times.

  Well, Ryan thought, mebbe he won’t need to be sharp. Mebbe we’ll get the good and safe night’s sleep we paid for.

  Mama Bear emerged from the kitchen on a wave of steamy air that this time smelled of cinnamon. She carried a big green glass bowl filled with some lumpy pale substance triumphantly held up before her.

  “And now, for our special visitors, a special treat!” she exclaimed.

  Ryan noticed that despite her ceaseless smiling and giddy magpie chatter, she never showed her teeth. Nor had he seen her husband’s. That fact passed quickly from his awareness, leaving small impression; most people had bad teeth. Some were shy about the fact, for whatever reason.