by James Axler
One terrible eye stared from the round black-and-red mask of Papa Bear’s face. The shriveled remnants of beard and hair wreathed his partly melted face in smoke like wisps of morning fog.
“Chill you,” he growled in a voice compounded of rage and agony, both intolerable, as he dragged his tremendous bulk forward on fingerless stumps of arms. “Chill...you...all!”
A shattering noise overwhelmed even the roar of the flames. A flash came from Ryan’s left.
That single staring eye exploded. Papa Bear’s head jerked back.
Krysty’s .38 handblaster exploded again. The second bullet caught the cannie at the bridge of his nose.
The brain inside the brutally burned face destroyed, the head fell forward, lifeless.
“Nice group, Krysty,” Mildred said, reholstering her own half-drawn revolver.
“Why waste a cartridge?” Ryan asked. “He’d never have reached us. Even if any of us was triple-stupe enough to stand here and wait for him.”
Krysty smiled at him as she cracked open the cylinder of her short-barreled Smith & Wesson.
“Never hurts to make sure,” she said, pulling out the two empties, dumping them in a pocket and reloading the chambers. “You told me so yourself. If I happen to put him out of his misery in the process, is it so wrong?”
Ryan growled.
“You know what he intended to subject us to,” Mildred said. “Yet you did him that favor.”
Krysty shrugged. “You’d have done the same if I hadn’t beaten you to it.”
Mildred scowled even more thunderously. “Yeah.”
“You’re a better person than me, Krysty,” Ryan said huskily. “Hope it doesn’t get you chilled.”
She went to him, slid her arm around his waist and turned her face up to kiss his stubbled cheek.
“You just summed up perfectly why we need each other, lover,” she said.
The rest of the roof caved in with a crackle and a voiceless roar. She put her head on his shoulder.
“There go our nice, warm beds.”
He slipped his un-seared arm around her waist.
“Well, at least we got a nice fire to keep us warm till morning,” he said.
Chapter Seventeen
“J. B. Dix,” a voice said from the warm darkness ahead of him. The convoy was parked among low rolling hills.
J.B. was returning to the area where the wrenches hung out, down closer to the Ohio in a stand of black walnut and river birch trees. He was bone tired and ass dragging. He’d worked doing mechanical repairs and maintenance all day, then helped Ace strip, inspect and clean the armament on War Wag Two that evening. He loved that part of it, but a double shift was a double shift. Crickets were trilling. A night bird let out weird hoots at random individuals from down by the slow-rolling water, whose smell reached back here to join that of dark rich soil and trees.
“Yeah, Rance,” he said in a leaden voice. “What is it? Don’t tell me that damned Chrysler’s gearbox is breaking down again. I got to sleep or I won’t be worth a toad run over by War Wag One.”
The convoy had swung northeast. It had stopped for a couple days—at least—to do business at Dombrowski’s End, the major trading post in this part of the Ohio River Valley. It lay a few miles upstream of the ruins of Evansville. The town had taken a two-megaton nuke pretty much dead center, for no reason anybody nowadays could guess at but sheer meanness, which J.B. knew was the go-to answer as to why the old-days folk did much of anything. More than likely, though, the missile had been a stray.
“I want to talk to you,” Rance said.
J.B. thought it odd to hear such unaccustomed softness in her usually brash and brassy voice.
“All right,” he said.
The rad levels in Evansville had only died back to even marginally survivable levels the last ten years or so, which meant it was a mother lode for scavvies willing to brave the numerous still-lethal hot pockets and deposits of heavy metals. Some of the hot heavy metals would chill you quick, like plutonium, others slow, like cesium. Neither would chill you in a way you liked worth a damn.
Dombrowski’s End was where much of the plunder ended up. The Lin clan that owned it was triple-rich—barons in all but name of this stretch of fertile river valley. Who Dombrowski was J.B. didn’t know or much care. He reckoned the place name was descriptive, instead of any flight of bullshit fancy.
It would have been a prime destination for Trader’s unique wag train in any event. And it was, as he had learned from coworkers who had started to treat him not just with newfound respect but something tinged with awe for his skills and ice-cold resourcefulness. But it was a double-ace destination because of the Toyota plant that’d been there, leading to abundant availability of replacement parts.
“Go get yourself cleaned up,” she said. He could see her now, with his glasses, as something more than a vague human-shaped blur in the early darkness. She stood with hands on hips and her short-haired head canted to one side, as if she was studying him. “Then we talk.”
He nodded. He was clean by nature. Even somewhat fastidious, at least by Deathlands standards. He wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and was proud as any wrench or ’smith of the permanent grease stains on his hands and under his kept-short nails. Neither was he a picky eater—if he had been, he simply wouldn’t have made it as long as he had. But he had an orderly nature, as befit the intricate nature of the work he loved most to do. Excess dirt was disorderly. And it fucked up machines, especially blasters, which ran directly contrary to his nature and inclination.
He went back to where he’d set out his bedroll on soil fragrant and springy with leaf mold, and collected his second set of underwear, a scrub brush, his towel and a bar of harsh lye soap. Towel over his shoulder, he trooped down to the river and bathed in a designated spot. There was a pair of guards with longblasters nearby, keeping watch—especially since stickies had been reported in the area in recent weeks. The guards ignored his skinny pale ass and he ignored them.
For most of his crew, the trading post, which was the size of a substantial ville, provided much-needed R & R, with some of the best gaudies in the Midwest. Meanwhile Trader was paying primo prices for the meds that were also in abundant supply in the fairly virgin ruin—and which he would turn around and sell for a double-primo profit.
But there was little rest for Rance and her crew of wrenches. Even though Trader had a whole truck converted into a rolling machine shop, there was a limit to the repairs or remanufacture or making from scrap they could do on parts for his hard-driven wags. The ready supply of wag parts—not just for Toyotas, though about half Trader’s cargo fleet were those—meant it was an opportunity to turn the spit-and-baling-wire repairs into proper fixes. Plus the duties J.B. had taken on working as an armorer under Ace. And part of the scavvy up for sale were replacements and upgrades for weapons—even for the heavy blasters on his two big, armored war wags. So J.B. was extremely busy on the second job, as well.
He was thriving on it. He loved working with his hands—and his mind. He was having to learn all kinds of new stuff: electronics, communications, even optics. And he ate it up and hungered for more.
But it did take a toll on his slight frame, as durable as it was.
He was happy to be finally working as a weaponsmith—his destiny, as he’d always seen it from early days. J.B. knew a lot about his craft, but he was intelligent enough to know there was always more to learn. Ace was a good teacher, patient—more so than Rance, despite the fact that J.B. had announced himself as a potential rival from day one. But much as he enjoyed working with the weapons master, he hadn’t asked to be transferred. He liked the wrench work too—more, now that he could scratch the itch to work with blasters pretty much every day.
But there was more to it, he realized. Rance Weeden was a hard boss but a fair one—a triple-good one, really—who, when he was honest with himself, taught him as much as Ace did. And she stood up for him. Not many had done that.
Bathed and dresse
d, he trudged back up to the wrenches’ camp. He found Rance sitting on a rock on the outskirts, away from everybody.
She rose as he approached. “Come with me,” she said.
He sighed. His body longed for sleep. He reckoned it would put him horizontal any minute now whether he wanted it to or not.
“Why?” he asked. “Because you’re the boss?” That was a common answer of hers when he asked one more question than her patience abided.
But she shook her head. She wasn’t wearing her customary do-rag. Her short brush of rust-colored hair looked softer somehow. As did her usually stern hazel eyes.
“No. Because I asked you to.”
He caught himself before he could utter another dramatic sigh. He didn’t care much for dramatics, least of all in himself. He liked to stay more in control.
Which was one reason, it struck him, he disliked dealing with other people. Because so often they put him in a position where he had to flash over into anger to survive. He never totally lost it—giving in to the fight/flight/freeze reflex was a stone guaranteed way to get chilled, as he had learned young and hard—but he still had to let the brakes go and let his rage drive him. Because berserk yet directed fury was the one way he’d found to stay alive when hard up against it.
“Sure, Rance,” he said. “Anything you say.”
She smiled at him. Instantly he became wary.
“Hold that thought,” she said, and turned away.
She led him about fifty yards up into the hills, away from the Ohio’s slow roll. A blanket lay on the ground in the middle of a little clearing among some scrub oak. Dark trees constrained the stars to a rough circle overhead.
She went to the blanket, stopped, then turned back to him.
With a shock he realized her shirt was open and that she wasn’t wearing a bra beneath it.
“What...” he managed to say.
She came to him and put an arm on his shoulder.
“You got little knowledge of women,” she said.
“That’s not true! I—”
She kissed him. He stood there with his eyes half-closed, staring at her face in the light of stars and a crescent moon.
Then her tongue pressed between his lips and seemed to wedge his teeth apart. And was tangling his, hot and strong and urgent.
Her face seemed to soften and fill out before his amazed eyes. He grabbed her arms and kissed her back, his movements slow and languid.
He could feel the heat of her skin, smell the fragrance of her body, which she kept as clean as he did, for the same reasons.
Rance reached down and stroked him through the front of his trousers.
“Nice,” she said, pulling her mouth back from his and squeezing his raging hard-on. “You’re not all a runt, are you?”
His mind locked up. He couldn’t find one thing to say.
Her strong, nimble fingers unfastened the buttons on his fly. She kissed him again as she reached inside the front of his boxers. Her fingers were cool on his erect manhood. Yet somehow they seemed to burn the sensitive skin.
He moaned as she ran her closed hand up and down his shaft. Then she removed her hand and stepped aside, kissing the tip of his nose. Then Rance stepped back and shed her shirt. Her nipples were pale; he could tell that even in the faint light. They were also hard and sticking out from her small breasts like the tips of little fingers.
She undid her own cargo pants and skinned them down her strong, smooth legs. He realized when she kicked out of them, held them up and folded them before setting them neatly down on the leaf mold, that she had been barefoot the whole time.
“You still have clothes on,” she said reprovingly as she straightened again. She was wearing only dark panties now.
His usually reliable fingers betrayed him as he tried to fix that. He was fairly sure he popped off at least one shirt button. Then he lost his balance and fell on his rear while trying to take his pants off without taking off his boots first.
She laughed at him. It was a hearty laugh—she didn’t laugh by half measures, any more than she did anything else. But he didn’t feel put down by it.
Maybe it was because it was true what he’d always heard: a stiff dick had no morals. And he was hard, all right.
Rance nodded and stripped off her panties. She had a surprisingly small, soft-looking bush.
“Nice,” she said. “Now shift over onto the blanket.”
He did.
She stepped to stand astride him. He stared up at her in disbelief. He’d had only a couple of partners in the past, but he was always the one on top.
She knelt and folded onto his manhood, and J.B. thought Rance was hot and wet and tight and wonderful.
As they made love in the starlight, J.B. felt a stab of pain in his chest. His body went rigid. Rance didn’t seem to notice. She just kept pumping her round rump up and down, sliding her smooth slick tightness up and down his rigid shaft.
The pain hit again. Worse. Like being shot. Or the way he imagined being shot would feel.
J.B. gasped. He was finding it hard to breathe.
He gripped her arms tight, but he couldn’t hold on. He began to slide away from her into blackness.
* * *
“HE’S STARTING TO come out, Healer,” Donal said.
Lindy Rao frowned at her assistant. His face, even darker than hers, looked concerned behind his gauze mask. His apron was dotted with drying blood, as she knew her’s was.
She glanced down at the man she’d just operated on. Fortunately he hadn’t lost enough blood to require a transfusion. She felt fatigue weighing her down. But also satisfaction. She loved her work and took pride in it.
“He should pull through fine now,” she said, picking up a fresh needle strung with surgical thread from a tray. “He’s strong. But we’ll need to keep him under, and not just while I finish sewing him back up all the way. I don’t want him straining the incisions any sooner than necessary.”
“Right, Healer,” Donal said. He reached for the chloroform.
He was an excellent assistant, and would make a fine healer himself someday. She felt mixed emotions regarding the fact that she would soon recommend to Baron Frost that he send the young black man away for advanced training. On the one hand, she was pleased and proud for Donal. On the other—she would miss him sorely.
Baron Ivan Frost and his wife were rarities: intelligent rulers, who cared for their people. They honestly seemed to regard the folk of Stormbreak as their family.
Rather than livestock.
“It seems a shame to patch them up only to send them out to get cut up or punctured again,” Donal said.
“This one has seen his share of it before, by his scars,” she said. “And, yes. That is the healer’s curse. Yet, realistically, all we can ever do is stave off the inevitable. Even during the fabled time of plenty before skydark, people died eventually.”
She shook her head. “And much as I hate it, I hope his friends are good at killing. As good as they seemed to be. Because poor Milya doesn’t deserve what’s happened to her. Nor do the baron and baroness. And should she not return—” Lindy shook her head “—I fear for what it may do to Lady Katerina. I’m frankly frightened by the way she looks lately. As if her physical condition is deteriorating along with her mental and emotional conditions.”
Donal just nodded. Despite her concern, she smiled her approval. He showed the proper attitude for a healer: gentle concern, but no false soothing.
“I’m putting him back down deeper, Healer,” he said.
“Good,” she said, and came back to finish her repairs.
* * *
RANCE’S FACE HUNG smiling over J.B’s. She held herself up with her hands braced on the blanket to either side of him.
He felt a vague recollection of pain. But the pleasure washed it out of him.
Her face was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen: full, soft, feminine, yet strong, too. Her breasts swung back and forth, the nipples teasing across th
e skin of his belly.
It’s just like a dream, he thought, feeling the urgency bunch and gather itself within him like a big cat about to spring.
But better.
And he wished it could last forever.
Chapter Eighteen
The liberated slaves stared at Ryan with a mixture of apprehension and cautious elation. He gazed back calmly.
The day was bright, though the sun wasn’t warm enough to threaten the general snow cover that enveloped the now-silent woods, the clearing that surrounded the burned-out shell of the house and the rutted roadway. But icicles dripped from the eaves of the outbuildings, shed, barn and shitter, though their shake roofs showed some scorch marks from the previous night’s burning,
By the house’s stone back stoop, intact though partly burned, Alysa Korn washed her saber in the water from the hand pump.
Here and there, depressions in the snow were stained red, fading to pink toward the edges, in irregular patches. A couple still had bodies lying in them. Right where the road emerged from the brush, the leader of the party of four slavers lay on his back with arms outflung. His eyes stared from his bearded face at the cold blue sky.
“What about the wounded one?” asked the Stormbreaker woman.
“He croaked, too.”
The slavers had led their party of a dozen captives, roped together in a shuffling, miserable coffle, down the road from the east and into the open with utter arrogant assurance. They were struck by surprise when they saw their objective burned to charred posts, heat-cracked stone wall-stubs and ashes.
Which was nothing to how surprised they were a moment later when the ambush sprang. They never had a chance.
Granted, the tail-end Charlie had been alert and fleet enough to escape the fire-sack formed by two longblasters aimed from good cover and aided by a quartet of handblasters. Alysa had been waiting on her blood bay, hidden in the brush not far from the road. She had taken him out.
Alysa shook water from the blade with a flick of her wrist and looked at Ryan in puzzlement. “Didn’t we need at least the one alive for information?”