Black Harvest

by James Axler

  “Go on,” Sec chiefViviani told him. “Get out of here!”

  “But the baron will kill me the moment I step out of the box,” Des said, crouched in a corner and cowering in fear.

  The sec men laughed.

  “What…what is it?” Des asked.

  “The baron don’t give a fuck about your scabby little ass!”

  “But he’ll kill me—make me an example for skimming jack off the top of the operation.”

  “That’s history now, asshole,” Viviani said. “There’s a new baron in town now.”

  The others brought Robards into the box.

  “And she’s got someone else to use as an example to the rest of the ville.”

  Robards was shoved up against the wall, striking his head hard against the steel.

  “Sec chief Robards?” Des said in amazement.

  “He ain’t even a sec man anymore,” Viviani said as the others began to chain Robards to the wall. “Think of him now as Sack of Shit Robards.”

  The sec men laughed.

  Des, beginning to realize what was going on, began to laugh, too, leaving Robards as the only one in the steel box who wasn’t wearing a smile.

  And then the laughter suddenly stopped as the sec men slapped and punched Robards about the head and body, drawing blood and causing him to vomit a string of pale yellow bile onto his chest.

  Des stared at the former sec chief in wide-eyed amazement, wondering how so much could have changed in just a couple of days.

  “Now get lost,” Viviani said. “And tell everybody you meet what you saw in here. And tell them to come by and take a look if they don’t believe you. I’m sure there are a few in this ville who wouldn’t mind taking a free shot at the former sec chief.”

  “Yeah, all right, I’ll do that.” Des walked awkwardly out of the box, his legs and arms not working very well after being chained to the wall for days.

  “Why don’t you just kill me?” Robards said through cracked and bloodied lips.

  “That would be too easy. You’re more valuable to us alive, so we’re going to keep your heart beating as long as we can…to remind people that the old way of doing things is gone, and now it’s our way or the hard way.”

  Robards spit at Viviani, but his mouth was too dry to do much damage.

  The sec man replied with a punch that cracked Robards’s jaw and knocked loose three of his teeth.

  “See you around,” Viviani said, spitting a gob of phlegm into Robards’s eye.

  “WHAT KIND of friend?” Ryan asked the darkness. “Do I know you?”

  “No, I never met you,” the voice said, “but I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

  Ryan tried to recall the voice, but he couldn’t place it in his travels. “Step forward so I can see you, so we can talk face-to-face.”

  “You tell your friends to put their weapons down, and I’ll tell my family to do the same.”

  Ryan thought about it. If the man had wanted to harm them, he could have done it easily by now. He called himself a friend and he was willing to talk, and that was enough for Ryan to listen to what he had to say.

  “Put your weapons down,” Ryan ordered.

  The friends lowered their weapons, then a shrill whistle sounded in the darkness, followed by the sound of blasters being holstered.

  “Will I have to speak to the dark all night,” Ryan said, “or are you going to show your face?”

  Footsteps sounded in the darkness and a moment later an elderly man, bald on top with white hair banding his head around the back from ear to ear, stepped into the clearing in front of Ryan.

  “Name’s Bennett Johnson,” the man said. He carried a nicely preserved Winchester Model 12 scattergun, a dangerous weapon at close range.

  Ryan could see his face clearly in the dim light, but didn’t recognize him. “Do I know you?” he asked again.

  “No reason you should.”

  “Then why do you call me friend?”

  “You saved my wife from getting chilled in Spearpoint. Mebbe you remember her. She was dancing in a gaudy house there, going by the name Big Dumpling.”

  “I think I remember her,” J.B. said. “We were with Hun and Poet back then.”

  Ryan nodded, remembering it as well.

  “She was about to be done in by members of Levi Shabazz’s crew and you people stopped them. When the whole place was blown to hell, me and Dumpling left Spearpoint with a bunch of others to start a sort of family together, so I’m sorta grateful to you. In your debt, you might say.”

  Ryan breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Incredible,” Krysty said. “We were almost chilled by a couple of barons because two of their family members were on the wrong side of a firefight years ago, and now we’re going to be helped by a man who says you saved his wife’s life.”

  “Not so incredible, my young red flame,” Doc said, stepping forward to join Ryan, J.B. and Krysty. “I have been traveling with Ryan, J.B. and various others for some time, and I have seen them chill many people. But as a wise man once said, for every action there is also a reaction, so for every detestable, abhorrent and despicable sec man that Ryan chills during the course of a battle, there is also someone whose life is saved, either directly or through some trickle-down effect. It is simple mathematics, actually.”

  Ryan listened to what Doc had to say, but he was more interested in the old man and specifically why he happened to be here, outside of the ville and by the river in the middle of a hell-dark night.

  “I’m happy to meet you, Bennett Johnson,” Ryan said, “but I’m curious why our paths happen to cross here and now.”

  “No mystery,” Johnson answered. “The word came out of the ville that they’d caught the one-eyed man who chilled the baron’s brother at Spearpoint. Well, when I heard that I had a feeling that you were also the one-eyed man who saved my Big Dumpling’s life, so I was actually on my way to helping you get out of the ville.” He paused a minute looking over the wag. “But I can see you people did fine all by yourselves.”

  Slowly the rest of the man’s family began coming forward and out of the darkness. There had to be a dozen or more of them, all sporting blasters.

  Ryan looked back at the wag to check on Jak. “We managed to get out of the ville, but not all of us made it out all right.”

  “What is it?”

  “The baron got a member of our group addicted to some drug.”

  The old man shook his head. “Probably bang. That’s a real bad one. Doesn’t take much to get hooked, and it eats away at your brain in no time.”

  “You’ve had experience with it, then?”

  “Got me eight who I call my children, fourteen who are grandchildren. A couple of them ventured into the ville over the years, tried all sorts of things before coming back with their tails between their legs.”

  “Do you know how to get someone through the withdrawal?” Mildred had come to join them.

  “How many hits did they give him?” Johnson asked.

  Mildred shrugged. “I don’t know. It can’t be more than one or two.”

  “He’s lucky then. Any more and it might take months to get him back to normal. If what you say is true, it won’t take him more than a few days to get over it, but of course there’s a good chance he could end up mad.”

  “Mad!” Mildred exclaimed. “Eleander never told me he could go insane.”

  Johnson shook his head. “People in the ville have never seen anyone quit bang cold turkey. Inside the ville they either keep taking the drug, get some help getting off it, or get killed trying to get more of it. But any way you do it, it’s not a pretty sight.”

  Ryan stepped forward. “You said people in the ville can get help getting off it. What kind of help?”

  “Best way is to slowly reduce the amount of the drug taken, but I don’t think you’re the type that want to give your friend any more drugs than he’s already had.”

  Ryan nodded in agreement.

  “You got that ri
ght,” Mildred said.

  “Then antibodies would be your best bet.”

  Ryan looked to Mildred for an explanation.

  “Antibodies either bind foreign agents that invade the body by tagging them for destruction by the body’s own white blood cells, or they activate chemical systems in the body that render the foreign agents harmless.”

  “All right,” Ryan said. “Where do we get these antibodies?”

  Johnson flicked his head in the direction of DeMannville. “Inside the ville.”

  Doc opened his mouth in disbelief. “But, if there are such things, why didn’t Eleander provide us with some, or at least tells us that they existed?”

  The friends all looked at Johnson.

  “This Eleander, she work for the baron?”

  Doc nodded. “She showed me where they make insulin and penicillin, but she told me she made other kinds of drugs as well.”

  “Like bang or smash, most likely. She probably don’t know about the antibodies being made by a small cell inside the ville working to overthrow the baron. They’ve been trying the antibodies on addicts for months now, working toward creating a small army of people who want to overthrow the baron, get rid of the sec chief and stop the production of the junk drugs coming out of the ville.”

  “Well, as far as we can tell, Baron DeMann is dead and most likely Sec chief Robards is too.”

  “Then who’s running the ville?”

  “Another baron. A woman named Schini.”

  “Oh, I know her. She’s a bad one, but I imagine with all the confusion going on inside right about now, there might be a revolt coming any day.”

  “Not our problem,” J.B. said.

  “He’s right,” Ryan agreed. “We don’t care who controls the ville. We just want the antibodies for our friend Jak. Do you know where they’re kept?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you take us inside to get some?”

  “I was on my way to the ville anyway.” Johnson nodded, then looked around at the group surrounding him. “Besides, one way or another, all these people owe their lives to you, Ryan Cawdor. Of course I’ll help you. It’s the least I can do.”

  Ryan nodded. “Right, when do you want to move?”

  “Darkness has just settled in, so we have many hours before morning. Let’s get your friend to a comfortable place and put some food inside your bellies. Then we’ll talk about getting inside the ville.”

  “A wise preparation,” Doc said, rubbing his empty, growling stomach.

  “And you might be needing ammunition for your blasters. If so, we have some to share.”

  It was J.B.’s turn to nod. “We’re all runnin’pretty low.”

  “Good,” Johnson said. “Replenish yourselves, stock up on ammunition and we’ll be inside the ville within two hours. If all goes well, your friend will wake up with the sun and not even be aware that any of this ever happened.”

  Behind them, Jak screamed in agony and thrashed against his bindings.

  “Let’s move,” Ryan said.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The knock on the door consisted of two sharp taps followed by three more, spaced further apart.

  The sec man on the inside of the door turned the handle and slowly opened it. “Anyone with you?”

  The man in the doorway shook his head.

  “Anyone follow you?”

  Again he shook his head.

  The man inside stepped back to let the other pass. Then he stuck his head out the door and looked up and down the alley to make sure the man hadn’t been followed. There were no signs of anyone lurking in the darkness. He closed the door, locked it and put up a chain.

  “All right then, we’re all here,” said a sec man in the middle of the room named Lowachee, who had been a squad leader under Sec chief Robards. He passed around hits of jolt to the men in the room. Some took them and immediately cracked open the vials, some pocketed the drug for later use, or sale, and some refused the offer outright.

  “Baron Schini is in control at the moment, and she’s got a good part of her sec force with her,” Lowachee said. “That’ll make it bastard tough to take her down, but not impossible.”

  “But we’re all that’s left,” said a voice in the corner. “There can’t be more than ten of us still alive. What are we going to do against Baron Schini’s force?”

  “Yeah,” said another voice that was quickly joined by others. “We’ll get chilled before we raise a blaster.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Too many of them.”

  “Suicide to take them on.”

  Lowachee let the men’s rumblings run their course. “Too many of them, eh?” He shook his head. “And it only took six outlanders to turn this whole ville upside down. We got nearly twice that number, and we know this ville like the backs of our hands. We can take out Schini’s forces, one at a time if we have to. What we can’t do is nothing.”

  “Why not?”

  Lowachee looked around the room in search of the one who had said that, but no one would admit to it.

  “I’ll tell you why. Because there’s no guarantee Schini is going to let us stay sec men. Come morning, she might have us all give up our blasters, our ranks, everything. Then it’ll be working in the labs or factories, and there’ll be plenty of citizens who’ll remember us as sec men, and won’t be afraid of taking us on now that we’re all on equal footing.”

  Lowachee let that last bit of wisdom sink in. He knew every sec man in the room had roughed up more than his fair share of citizens over the years, for no other reason than because they’d been sec men and they could get away with it. Without the title, and without the blaster that went with it, some of them wouldn’t last a day among the general population.

  “I’m with you,” the voice in the corner said.

  “Me, too,” another said.

  And soon they all joined in, preferring to fight the new baron than risk the wrath of the citizens of the ville.

  “What about Sec chief Robards?” someone asked.

  “What about him?” Lowachee replied.

  “I heard that the baron chained him up in the box. We could bust him out, so he could lead us in the fight.”

  Lowachee said nothing for several long seconds. “Fuck Robards! He’s the rat bastard that got us into this rad-blasted pile of shit. The last thing we need is to give him a chance to make it any worse for us than it already is.”

  The men seemed unconvinced.

  “We’ll all fight together as equals. And when we win…” A pause. “And when we win, we’ll elect a baron from among ourselves in this room.”

  “What about the rest of us?”

  Lowachee sighed. They already wanted to know how the ville would be split up even before they began the fight. It wasn’t a good sign, but he had to give them an answer. “We’ll all be members of a security council and we’ll each have control over a certain aspect of the ville, with the baron overseeing the entire operation like the chairman of the board.”

  That seemed to do the trick, judging by the smiles on most of the men.

  Lowachee knew that ten or more members of a security council would be unwieldy, but he wasn’t counting on more than six or eight of them to live through their little revolt. And even if it didn’t work, he could always switch his allegiance to Baron Schini before it was over, and then direct her men in executing the traitors.

  “All right,” Lowachee said. “This is what we need to do.”

  BARON SCHINI walked slowly through the rooms on the top floor of the baron’s residence. Baron DeMann had filled each room with beautiful pieces of furniture, black velvet artwork, picture books and all sorts of electronic equipment, even though he would never have wasted what little electricity the ville generated on such luxuries. Still, it was nice to have tape players, and record players and assorted games. They were a symbol of status, of success, and now they were Baron Schini’s to do with what she pleased.

  “The former
baron lived well.”

  “Yes, he did, Baron,” Viviani said.

  She opened a humidor with not only a selection of cheroots, but two actual cigars. She sniffed one of the cigars and put it into the corner of her mouth.

  Viviani offered a flame from his lighter a moment later.

  “And now I will live well, with two villes under my command.”

  Viviani cringed slightly. “I think it’s necessary to remind you that we don’t have control of the ville yet. The citizens might cower under our thumb, but the surviving sec men might not be brought in line so easily.”

  “Then wipe them out.”

  “What?”

  “Wipe them out. Chill them on sight. They’re all stoned on jolt anyway. No good to us.”

  The sec chief paused to choose his words carefully. “We might get rid of a few that way, but stoned or not, once they know they’ll be chilled the moment they’re found out, I suspect the rest will either slip into the population and be a thorn in our side forever, or they might band together and fight us.”

  “Then handle it however you see fit. Just take care of the problem and quickly. I want to start enjoying my new acquisitions, and I want this ville back to normal operations and making jack within a couple of days.” She puffed on her cigar, nearly choking on the high-quality tobacco. “Understood?”

  “Yes, Baron. Understood.”

  BENNETT JOHNSON and his family lived in an underground enclave by the river. It was virtually invisible to the eye until they were less than twenty yards from its main entrance, and it was only visible to them because the front door was open and there was someone standing in the doorway waiting for them.

  “Is that the famed Ms. Dumpling?” Doc asked as they neared.

  “No, that’s one of my grandchildren,” Johnson said.

  “Big Dumpling, bless her heart, died two years ago after giving birth to my youngest.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Doc said. “Please allow me to offer my condolences.”

  Johnson shook his head. “Don’t need no charity. We got a good-sized family here, and we make do with what we can trade, find or borrow from the ville.”