by James Axler
Muttering softly, Mildred rolled over, placing her head behind Jak’s boots. J.B. angled away slightly, and the woman stretched her neck forward to start chewing on the leather strap between Doc’s hands.
“Hey! I think one of the prisoners just moved!” a sec man shouted, swinging up a double-barreled flintlock. The reddish firelight made the weapon appear to be made out of solidified blood.
“Who nuking cares?” a sec woman replied, her voice thick with disdain as she continued to strop the panga on a rock. “Nobody escapes from my knots!”
“Better check it anyway,” the major commanded, jerking his thumb. “Dog, Harrison, Omar, on the hump! Then go relieve the guards on the perimeter.”
Grumbling in compliance, three sec men rose from the ground and trundled toward the cage. As they eclipsed the campfires, their elongated shadows hid the companions, and Mildred quickly resumed her earlier position.
As the firelight returned, Ryan noted that the three sec men were carrying several of the companions’ possessions. A fat sec man had the Webley sheathed in a leather shoulder holster, the tall one carried his own SIG-Sauer, and a bald sec man was holding Doc’s ebony sword stick, twirling it around like a baron walking along the parapets of a castle. The three men still had flintlocks slung across their backs, a powder horn at their sides bouncing with every step.
“Wish we could have taken their boots,” the fat sec man muttered, shuffling his left boot. The sole flapped as he walked, making an oddly comical noise.
“Shut up, Dog.”
“Just saying...”
“We gotta stay in uniform,” the tall sec man muttered, hitching up his gunbelt. “King’s commands!”
“Omar, we ain’t got no king.”
“Then Queen’s commands,” Omar snarled, stopping some distance from the cage. “There gotta be laws, or else we’re just stickies in boots.”
“Whatever you say,” Dog said dismissively.
“Damn right!” Omar said, drawing the SIG-Sauer and working the slide to chamber a round.
Slowing his breathing, Ryan tried to appear unconscious. It was an unpleasant experience facing down his own SIG-Sauer in the hands of another man, and in spite of his best effort something of it had to have shown on his face.
“Hey, One-Eye is up,” Harrison said, coming to an abrupt halt.
“Told you he’d live.” Dog chortled. “You owe me a new flint!”
Digging in a pocket, Omar produced a shiny rock and tossed it over. “Check the ropes,” he snarled.
Staying a safe distance from the bars, Harrison tugged on the coils of rope at each corner.
“They’re fine,” he announced, looking down at Krysty. “Blind Norad, I wish we could have rode these sluts. I got a real thing for redheads, ya know? She really shoves a brass up my breech!”
Omar grinned. “You can load that into a blaster, sure enough. She looks hotter than Washington Hole!”
As the two sec men laughed, Dog said nothing, but his gaze shifted to Ricky lying prone on the wooden bars.
Ryan felt his stomach turn at the sight.
“You know, mebbe if we stayed real quiet,” Harrison said, glancing back at the other sec men sitting around the four campfires.
“Can’t touch ’em,” Omar muttered, rubbing the back of a hand across his mouth. “At least, not till we reach home. The queen will want these people alive, and unharmed.”
“Unharmed?”
“Completely unharmed,” Omar snarled, hitching up his gunbelt. “She loved that big bastard like a druggie does jolt, so she’ll want them screaming for weeks.”
Softly muttering as if she was still unconscious, Krysty rolled over allowing her shirt to fall open to expose her breasts.
“Nuke me...” Harrison said in a throaty whisper. “Mebbe...are you sure we checked them everywhere for hidden knives?”
“Only one way to be sure,” Dog muttered, eagerly stretching a hand forward.
Angrily, Omar slapped it away. “Idiot! If they’re awake, you’ll lose a finger,” he stated, swinging up the ebony swordstick and slipping it through the wooden bars to poke Krysty.
Instantly snapping apart his weakened bonds, Doc grabbed the swordstick with both hands. Yanking and rotating at the same time, he pulled off the ebony sheath to expose the slim steel sword hidden inside.
Before the startled sec man could react, Doc lunged forward with the sheath to ram the tip into Omar’s belly. As the air exploded from his lungs, the sec man dropped the sword.
Snatching it out of the air, Ryan rammed the blade deep into the sec man’s throat, then yanked it free and tossed the sword to Mildred at the other end of the cage. She made the catch and turned toward the two sec men even as they clawed for their weapons.
With surgical precision, Mildred stabbed them both in the heart. The sec men went motionless, galvanized from the incalculable pain, and dark red stains appeared on their shirts to quickly spread outward.
“Hey, what are you assheads doing over there?” a sec woman shouted from the nearest campfire.
As the three dying men started to fall forward, Krysty, Jak and J.B. grabbed them by the collars, and hauled the twitching bodies against the bars to keep them upright.
“Help...” Omar whispered, blood bubbling from his slack mouth. “Prisoners...”
Coldly, Mildred stabbed all three of them again in major organs to prevent any further outcries, then the corpses were stripped of every weapon.
“What now?” Ricky asked, holding out his arms.
Mildred slashed the leather straps with a purloined knife, then did the same to everybody else.
“We chill them,” Ryan stated, wiping some blood off the SIG-Sauer.
“Might not escape be a better plan?” Doc asked urgently. “There are fifty of them to the seven of us.”
“If I have to, I can smash open the cage,” Krysty offered, buttoning her shirt closed.
Ryan knew it was true. Krysty could call on her Gaia power when necessary, more than enough to break the wooden cage open. However, afterward she be weaker than a kitten, and escape was only part of his plan for survival.
By now, several of the sec men had started walking toward the cage.
“Thanks, but we need this thing intact,” Ryan said, dropping the clip from the SIG-Sauer to check the bullets inside.
“For what, my dear Ryan?’ Doc asked, clearly confused.
“Protection!” J.B. replied, pulling one of the corpses tighter against the bars. “Everybody keep your mouths open to equalize the pressure!”
Nodding, Ryan eased the magazine back into the handblaster. Looking past the five sec men heading his way, the one-eyed man aimed at an older sec man carrying a battered leather bag. Smoothly, Ryan stroked the trigger and the silenced weapon gave a hard cough.
Two hundred feet away, the sec man cried out as his right knee exploded and he tumbled sideways into the campfire. Screaming, the man tried desperately to roll out of the flames, but Ryan kept shooting, the hard slap of the 9 mm Parabellum rounds forcing the hapless man back into the fire again.
The combined blast of all of the predark military explosives in J.B.’s munitions bag seemed to shatter the universe, and a staggering fireball enveloped the entire campsite.
A hellish corona of broken men, rocks, blasters, cooking pots and assorted pieces of equipment went flying in every direction.
Hunkering behind the three corpses, the companions braced themselves for the coming onslaught, and a split second later the shield of dead men jerked wildly as they were hammered with a barrage of debris and junk. A flintlock stabbed straight through one of the bodies, and Jak cried out as the red-hot barrel scored a bloody path across his right cheek.
Then the companions shook as the shock wave of the blast brutally sh
oved the cage away from the campsite. The crude log rails scraped up mounds of dirt as the companions traveled sideways into the nearby bushes and then onward into the trees. Just for a moment, it seemed like they might escape unscratched. Then the cage snagged on an exposed network of roots and completely flipped over.
Tumbling out of control, the companions let go of the bedraggled corpses to frantically grab on to the wooden bars as the cage jounced along the uneven ground, crashing through saplings, weeds and decaying logs.
A large tree loomed directly in front of them. An instant later the cage smashed into the trunk with a resounding crash.
Chapter Three
Loose leaves were still falling from the shaking tree when Ryan roused himself into motion and started clawing his way toward freedom. The cage was completely gone, reduced to a loose collection of broken branches and frayed piles of loose rope.
“Nuking ears are ringing,” Ricky muttered, shaking his head.
“Easy, boy. That’s concussion damage,” Ryan said, then repeated himself much louder. “It will go away in a few minutes!”
“You sure?” Ricky asked hopefully.
“This isn’t our first escape!” Krysty replied, removing a smashed bird’s nest from her tightly coiled hair.
“Everybody okay?” Mildred asked, struggling to sit upright. “Anybody have blurred vision or a clear nosebleed?”
Ricky scowled. “Clear?”
“That would mean a skull crack and internal damage from the concussion,” she explained, looking over the other companions. “No, we’re fine. Just got the shit kicked out of us by that explosion. No permanent damage.”
“I have no broken bones that I can see,” Doc said, wiping the blood off his face. “Although every inch of me... Good Lord!” Covering his face, he turned abruptly away.
“What’s wrong?” Mildred demanded, a hand automatically going for the medical kit normally hanging at her side. “Is there something in your eyes? Don’t rub!”
“Fine, I’m fine!” he said. “But...madam, your clothing is in disarray.”
Looking down at herself, Mildred snorted. “Jeez, Doc. We’ve all seen ourselves naked before.” She chuckled, trying to close her shirt. However, most of the buttons were gone, so she simply tied the loose ends under her breasts.
“Not under these circumstances!” he replied, stoically facing the opposite direction.
“Prude!”
“Gentleman, actually!”
Chuckling, Mildred glanced at J.B. for confirmation. In silent agreement, the man tilted his head toward Doc. Then looked at her new outfit with such frank appreciation that she was forced to blush.
“Behave yourself...” Mildred told him, putting a wealth of meaning into the words.
Trying not to smile, J.B. winked in reply.
Fighting their way clear of the tangle of assorted wreckage, the companions dutifully searched the area for any of their belongings, then began painfully trudging back toward the campsite. The crude tunnel of their passage through the forest was littered with small items, and the companions constantly paused to recover a dropped weapon.
In the distance, many of the taller trees were still swaying from the aftereffects of the powerful concussion, and a thick column of smoke rose high into the polluted sky, the dark gray eventually merging with the roiling expanse of purple and orange storm clouds.
“Fireblast, that smoke is going to attract norm and mutie for miles,” Ryan stated, stepping over a human leg. Steam rose from the ragged end, but the buckskin boot was still firmly tied in place over the foot.
“Don’t hear anything coming,” Krysty said hesitantly, cupping a hand to an ear. Then she scowled. “As if I could hear a gren exploding behind my back at the moment!”
“Work your jaw, as if chewing gum,” Mildred said, “That’ll help.”
“Really?”
“Not much, but some.”
“Here,” Jak said, offering a precious pack of gum.
“Why didn’t they take that?” Krysty asked in surprise.
Jak shrugged. “Got pockets in my pockets.”
Gratefully, everybody took a stick from Jac’s pack and started to chew as they quickly retraced their journey through the forest until reaching their original location. Peeking through a lilac bush, Ryan noted the perfume of the tiny purple flowers was almost overpowering this close. It was one of the few plants to still have any vegetation after that staggering detonation.
Warily, Ryan studied the swirling smoke for any recent disturbances. A person walking through live smoke left a kind of contrail in his or her wake. It was subtle, and difficult to spot, unless you knew exactly what to look for.
“Clear,” Ryan announced, pushing aside the colorful branches. As he did, dozens of the flowers dropped their petals, and the perfume in the air drastically increased.
“Smells like a shopping mall on Mother’s Day,” Mildred said, plucking one of the purple flowers.
“That a ville?” Ricky asked tersely, eyes sweeping the area.
“In a way,” she replied, tucking a lilac into her tangled hair.
Advancing toward the Granite campsite, the companions had to be careful where they stepped. The ground was littered with slippery pieces of disemboweled people, most of them still issuing tiny tendrils of pungent smoke.
Nudging aside an eerily staring eyeball with the toe of his shoe, Doc recovered an intact flintlock handblaster and stuffed it into his waistband, along with a buckskin bag of black powder, miniballs and spare flints. Jak and J.B. did the same, and the men reloaded the weapons as they walked.
Holding the SIG-Sauer at his hip, Ryan stopped at the edge of a ragged blast crater. The majority of the Granite campsite had been obliterated by the multiple explosions, the central area void of anything but churned earth.
However, numerous objects were scattered along the perimeter of the blast zone, and the companions needed no prompting to start the grisly job of looking for anything useful among the ghastly corona of trash, filth and corpses.
Almost immediately, each of them paused to tie a cloth across their face to hold back the pungent smells. The smoky air was thick with the delicious aroma of the roasted elk, but there was also a faint stink of cooked pork coming from the burned pieces of the dead sec men. Their stomachs almost rebelled at the foul combination. Only Ryan and J.B. seemed immune to the stench.
“Something’s wrong here,” Krysty stated, lifting the Steyr from the bloody ground. “I can’t see the blond major anywhere.”
“Destroyed by blast?” Jak asked, pulling one of their backpacks out from under a headless torso.
Krysty shook the longblaster. “The Steyr is intact,” she stated simply.
“Then we better keep a watch for survivors,” Ryan said, yanking Mildred’s canvas medical bag from under a smoldering horse saddle.
“Guards were supposed to be walking the perimeter,” Ricky said nervously, looking expectantly toward the nearby forest. Most of the trees had their bark removed on this side, the pale exposed wood peppered with pieces of flintlocks, miniballs, splintery bones and loose gravel.
“Even if they survived the shrapnel, the sheer force of a blast this strong would have knocked them unconscious,” Mildred stated, lifting a dented canteen from inside an empty boot. “John, what exactly was in your damn bag anyway?”
“Just the usual, black powder, some detcord, homie fuses, a road flare, jar of fireworks and such,” J.B. replied, prying a disembodied hand from the stock of the DeLisle. “Along with a pipe bomb, two grens and those three sticks of TNT that I found in that rock quarry last month.”
“Three sticks?”
“Bet your ass.”
“Good Lord, I am surprised that we survived such a Herculean rift at all,” Doc rumbled, gingerly pok
ing among gory debris with the tip of his ebony stick.
“The dead make good shields,” Ricky muttered, then dived forward with a cry. Rummaging amid a steaming pile of entrails, he then stood with Krysty’s gunbelt in his dirty fist, the Model 640 revolver still tucked into the dripping holster.
“Merciful Gaia!” Krysty said with a smile. “Is there any brass?”
“Lots.”
“Even better. Thank you, Ricardo.”
“Sure, no prob,” the boy replied, trying not to preen under Krysty’s praise.
Just then something lurched out of the bushes.
Instantly, the companions spun around with their weapons ready. But they lowered the blasters slightly at the sight of the sec man stumbling closer. His entire body was bristly with splinters, his clothing soaked with blood, and most of his face was missing, broken teeth jutting through the horrid remains of his nose and forehead.
“Help...me...” he croaked, the words almost too soft to hear. “Please...”
Pulling the sword from inside the swordstick, Doc marched closer and ruthlessly stabbed the dying man in the heart. Clawing blindly at the empty air, the sec man shuddered as if hit with lightning. With a flourish, Doc yanked out the blade, and the sec man dropped face-first onto the ground.
“And so all are paid the wages of sin,” Doc stated, wiping the bloody blade clean on the tattered shirt of the corpse before easing the sword back into the ebony sheath.
“Sometimes, Doc, you are one savage son of a bitch,” Mildred said, slinging her medical kit over a shoulder.
“When in Rome, it is sometimes wise to be a Roman candle,” Doc replied in a cold voice, devoid of any emotion.
“Check his pockets,” Ryan said, kneeling to sort through a pile of bloody bedrolls.
It took only a few minutes for the companions to recover most of their stolen possessions, as well as a lot of other small items from the dead carpeting the ground. Grinning happily, J.B. stuffed a couple of powder horns and a butane lighter into a battered leather satchel slung over his shoulder.