by James Axler
When he arrived at the armory, he found that the small group of men and women who acted as Armorers were hard at work. There were five of them, two men and three women. The men were stacking small piles of plas-ex and grens to be distributed, while a selection of handblasters, semiautomatics, machine guns and rifles were neatly laid against the wall, the women working their way through the task of cleaning them with as much rapidity and accuracy as they could muster.
J.B. was pleased to see that everyone seemed to have checked their blasters in for maintenance. He recognized Downey's Sharps rifle, which stood out as it was the only Sharps in the armory. The two shotguns belonging to the dreadlocked twins, Ant and Dee, stood to one side, their appalling condition causing the Armorers to set them aside, perhaps for special treatment, perhaps because of a fear that their dirt and poor condition may spread to the other blasters. He recognized Blake's 9 mm Walther PPK by the nicks on the walnut stock. They formed a starlike pattern that was distinctive and obviously of meaning to the sec man.
On his previous visits, he had been treated distantly but politely, even though his vast knowledge had been recognized.
"Welcome, friend," one of the female Armorers greeted him, looking up briefly from the blaster she was greasing. She was small and rotund, with apple cheeks that should have marked her down as a cook rather than the mechanic she undoubtedly was. "Have you come to aid us in this preparation?"
"If you want," J.B. replied in a laconic tone. "You didn't seem too keen when I came around before."
"Nothing personal," she replied warmly, "just as we like to keep to our own tasks is all. But if you know your business, then we can use you now."
"Be glad to help."
She held up the stripped blaster she was holding. "Just as a matter of interest, what would this be?"
J.B. eyed the blaster before replying. It was a large weapon, of the type used for static positions rather than carrying in combat. Just from that, the Armorer was able to guess part of Harvey's tactic for the raid. But that was for another time. For now… J.B. grinned.
"That's light machine—RPK, drum fed. Supposed to go on a tripod, which I guess you've got stacked somewhere. Shit useless on the run, but okay if you mount it somewhere to provide cover. Course, it's supposed to do 660 rounds in a minute, but it never works that way 'cause the stupe bastards who designed it didn't figure on how hot the barrel would get. You do too much and the mother heats up the ammo in the drum and sets it off. Then you can't stop it firing, no matter what—and you got no control over it."
The fat woman whistled. "You sit your ass down here and start helping, son."
J.B.'s wry grin broke into a smile as he joined her. He felt confident that no matter what the state of the people in the raiding party, the blasters and grens wouldn't let them down.
IN A FEW SHORT HOURS, the party was ready to leave. The previous day's party of twenty sec men had assembled, minus the injured man who was still unconscious in the hospital unit. Alien headed the nineteen, bringing them to twenty. With Ryan's party, minus the missing Dean, they numbered twenty-six.
Added to this were thirty men and women from Raw, all taken from their regular tasks in order to augment the raiding party, and give strength in numbers to the attack on Samtvogel.
"Sure all know what doing?" Jak whispered to Ryan as they assembled in the main hall for a briefing from the baron.
The one-eyed warrior replied softly. "If they match Alien for courage, even if not for fighting skill, then they'll be hard enough to chill. What we've got to think about is the strengths of Samtvogel."
While they exchanged these comments, Krysty was looking around the hall for Jenna. The baron's wife was nowhere to be seen, which wasn't what Krysty would have expected from her on the verge of such a battle. But then again, that completely summed up Jenna's attitude to her husband and to her people.
All the same, the flame-haired woman would have liked to have had Jenna where she could see her for as long as possible, for she was sure that the baron's wife was holding Dean captive, and she wanted Jenna to have as little time as possible with the boy until they were able to find him.
Mildred, too, was unhappy about unfinished business. Standing beside J.B., she murmured, "John, do you think it would be possible for one of us to stay behind and look for Dean?"
The Armorer tried to hide his surprise. "How the fireblasted hell would we work that?"
"I don't know, but if only Jenna and Harvey know what's happened to Dean, they couldn't say much about another one of us going missing without giving themselves away."
"I suppose so," the Armorer muttered in reply, polishing his spectacles before placing them back on the bridge of his tanned and scarred nose. "But with all these people around, you've left it a bit late to just slip away. We're going to have to roll with this."
Meanwhile, Alien was outlining the situation to his people, skimming over the potential destructiveness of the nuke in favor of the advantages of getting it away from the muties. He then had Harvey outline the plan of attack—two scouting parties would go in advance of the main group, in order to prevent any outriding parties from Samtvogel spying the main party and taking advance warning back to the ville. Once at the valley, they would surround and attack as soon as they could get in position, using the RPKs and grens to blow an advance path for the first warriors down the slopes and into the heart of the ville. It all seemed straightforward enough, but relied heavily on surprise and not allowing the Sunchildren time to defend their ville. If Harvey had a contingency, then he was keeping it to himself for now…which, to Ryan's mind, was a bad idea. Any force could only be effective if it had a clear idea of what it was doing.
Then again, it did cross the one-eyed warrior's mind that this would be the perfect opportunity to "accidentally" get rid of Alien if Harvey and Jenna had any notions of ridding themselves of the baron. Finally, Alien mentioned the disappearance of Dean, asking if anyone had seen the boy since the night before. From the muttered conversations, Ryan and his people gathered that few had any clear recollections at all of the previous night, let alone if they had seen a lad they barely knew.
It was unsatisfactory to leave the situation like that, but Ryan and his companions were forced to let the matter rest. At least, for now…
Chapter Thirteen
It was daylight aboveground. The forest was lit with a radiant, twilight glow that was as bright as the day would ever be. The humidity was intense, and Doc could almost feel the drops of moisture in the air, causing him to wipe his face every few minutes. Moreover, as he breathed, the air seemed to scald his lungs, making him cough. He could almost see the droplets as a fine, drizzling rain around him.
Mildred had hung back to keep an eye on Doc, wary of how the trek would affect him, hitting such humidity so soon after so much alcohol, lack of rest and the psychological stress he had endured when remembering the nuke. Doc was incredibly strong, but had moments of contrasting fragility that meant he always walked a tightrope, balancing precariously. The last thing Mildred wanted was for Doc to fall off the rope at that moment.
They were in the center of the group that marched through the forest, using the well-worn paths. They had already passed the area where the previous day's firefight had taken place, picking their way over the corpses that were still strewed across the path. The Sunchildren hadn't returned to claim their dead, and the corpses were already bloated and rotting in the heat, swollen with gases that emerged as moans when the dead meat was touched by a passing foot, making the ordinary ville dwellers jump with fright and the hardened sec men laugh. It helped to relieve the tension for the sec men, who in their view had a whole heap of inexperienced chill fodder to nursemaid, as well as attend to their own task.
The sickly sweet smell of death blended with the scents of the flowers, following them for some way down the path. Krysty had noticed how the creepers across the forest floor had already started to entwine around the corpses, preparing to bury them benea
th, turning them to a mulch that would fertilize the earth. How long, she wondered with a shudder, before the vines got greedy and started to ensnare the unwary and alive as they passed?
The party was large, and even moving in almost total silence made a considerable sound in the quiet forest. The creeping vines squealed in echoes as the footfalls of the war party crashed down time and again. The undergrowth on both sides of the narrow path was pushed back with a rustle as people passed, then sprang back for the next member of the war party passing to push it back once more, creating a continuous wave of sound.
That made Ryan uneasy. He looked back over his shoulder and caught J.B.'s eye. The Armorer made a small inclination of his head, a minute gesture that communicated his displeasure with the circumstances of their progress. The sounds of the creepers and of the moving undergrowth could mask any sounds made by an ambush party.
Ryan had mentioned that to Alien as they began their journey, but the baron had deferred the matter entirely to his sec chief. Harvey had listened to Ryan's concerns, then dismissed them out of hand. "Those fuckers'll be back in their shitpit still licking their wounds and asking their dumb god what the fuck to do, Cyclops. Trust me—I've been here all my life, and you ain't been here for shit."
There had been an implied threat and put-down in the words that Ryan noted but chose to ignore for now. At one time, his hot blood and temper would have pushed him into a fight with the sec man. But now there was too much at stake for a battle with an uneasy ally. Save that score for later.
So Ryan and his people concurred with Harvey, and joined the vast war party as it tramped through the forest. All the same, Ryan didn't have to tell any of them to be on triple red, just in case Sunchild wasn't as dumb as Harvey supposed. There was no way Ryan could call Sunchild using more stickies than his own people for the retaliatory raid a stupe move. Sunchild may well be an insane mutie, but that wasn't quite the same as being dumb.
The trees and shrubs closed in on them, seeming somehow to loom overhead with a hidden threat as the war party made its way through the forest. The flowers, with their heavy scent, swayed in the ripples of the massed movement, their heads bobbing as though to strike. The moving forest canopy overhead created a disorienting strobing of what little light could penetrate if you looked up too long; yet to look down you could see the creepers moving beneath your feet, bending and twisting under the heavy tramp of rough-shod feet.
The humidity seemed to wrap them in a blanket of damp mist, clinging to the pores of their skin and preventing them from sweating.
"There's too many of us in too small a space," Ryan said softly to Krysty, who was walking at his side. She had left her heavy coat back at the ville, knowing that it would be more of a hindrance than an aid. Her jumpsuit clung to her body, molded to her shape by the damp air and the sweat of exertion. Her titian hair was plastered to her head, the limp tendrils swirling against the skin of her throat and neck.
"Makes the forest heat worse," she agreed. "Trouble is, I can't say I'll be glad when we're out of here, 'cause it just goes from one set of problems to another."
Ryan nodded. "I'm not sure we should do this during the day. It'd be much cooler in the night, and offer us more cover."
"Night by the time we get there—mebbe that's what Harvey's figuring on," Krysty mused. "Mebbe he feels we'll all have cooled down by the time we get there. Except that we'll all be exhausted."
"Trouble with that coldheart is that every time he says something, you get the idea that there's a whole lot more he won't say," Ryan mused quietly, keeping his phrasing a touch cryptic in case he should be overheard too much.
Krysty silently agreed, a feeling of nausea sweeping across her when she considered Harvey and Jenna. What kind of a power base were they attempting to build, and would the sec chief use this attack as a means of getting rid of his baron? They continued in silence for some time. Gradually, the path grew wider, the shrubbery and undergrowth less dense. The ruins of the buildings that constituted this section of old Seattle became more and more visible. They were also more whole than the fragments that remained deeper into the forest.
The path widened into an old road, with the fragments of a sidewalk still barely visible through the creepers. Storefronts and apartment buildings became apparent, and once again the city took on the aspect of what, in the predark world, Mildred had heard of the remains of Angkor Wat, the Vietnamese city in the jungle. Vietnam had been a buzzword for the generation before her, and was now just a memory, but for Mildred as she looked around, she figured she had an idea of what the ruined city had to have looked like to U.S. Army units who had stumbled on it in the middle of war.
Except that Angkor Wat had taken thousands of years to evolve to the ghostly jungle city, whereas the nukes and rad mutation had achieved this in a fraction of the time.
In the silence of the march, J.B. had time to think. The difference between this section of old Seattle and the area where he and Ryan had met up with Trader and Abe again—it seemed like forever, though it couldn't have been that long—was immense. The way in which rad-ravaged nature set up areas of complete contrast was frightening. The way there had been dense forest on one side of the redoubt and virtual desert on the other when they had arrived…
The train of thought brought the Armorer back to the Illuminated Ones. He didn't entirely share Ryan's views on the remnants of the old secret society. Although the bizarrely clothed sec force they had encountered on the old blacktop had arrived in a working wag that sounded well tuned, and they had the laser blasters that worked okay, still it seemed to J.B. that they had been far too keen to firefight and ask questions later. They seemed to have the tech, while Alien's ancestors had kept the ideals. So even if there was a stockpile of old tech they were sitting on, even if their Erewhon was the promised land away from the struggle and shit of everyday Deathlands living, there was no guarantee they would want to share it. And if there were more of them, with those laser blasters, then it would be a very uneven firefight to get pulled into.
He knew Ryan better than almost anyone. He trusted him, both as a man and for his tactical judgment. But even so, the Armorer's more suspicious and cautious nature could see them getting themselves caught beyond a rock and a hard place.
His train of thought was lost as the war party, straggling slightly but still fairly compact, turned a corner and reached an old intersection he recognized too well.
On the left was the old apartment building where they had stood on an upper floor and observed the Sunchildren. Ahead of them stretched the road out of the old ville. The two-lane blacktop was about an hour's march away, and on the other side of it the ville of Samtvogel.
Say an hour and a half at their current pace. J.B. breathed in the hot air. It was less humid now and would soon become dry. The heat would also be direct as there would be no deflecting vegetation.
It was going to be tough. They would be exposed, and although there was no chance of their being ambushed, it did mean that they would have to stand and fight if a rival party advanced. There would be no cover.
Which was why an advance scouting party had been sent ahead.
J.B. wondered how they were faring. Obviously, there was no trouble as they hadn't doubled back with a warning. But they had been in the heat a whole lot longer.
"EASY ON THE WATER, Whitey. We need it a lot more than you."
"Why?"
" 'Cause there's a whole lot more of us."
Ant creased up with laughter, Dee cackling and shaking his head, dreadlocks flying in the arid air.
"Man, you are one stupe mother," he gasped between the laughter. "Any fool knows that us brothers got the skin for this rad-heat weather. Shit, we already got tans. That was Mama's gift to us."
"Will you two shut the fuck up?" Blake yelled. "We're supposed to be an advance scouting party, and here we are making enough fuckin' noise to drown out a gaudy house."
"So who's yelling, man?" Ant asked in a mocking soft tone.<
br />
Blake narrowed his eyes. "They should have left you guys back at Raw. You're still jolted out of your fuckin' skulls."
Dee smiled, his eyes sparkling with the chemical high. "True, my friend, true. But that's kind of good in a way, you know? It means we won't give a fuck if some mutie son of a bitch takes our legs away. Just keep fighting."
Jak sealed the canteen of water and returned it to the pouch that was slung around his waist. Despite the heat, he had kept on his camou jacket, protecting his white skin as much as possible from the searing sun. One of the problems of his albino heritage was that he burned easily, and in the cancerous sun of a postnuke atmosphere, he had to be careful. Sunstroke was a minor thing, but it could get you chilled if you weren't one hundred percent focused during a firefight. For the twins, it wasn't a problem. Their dark skins were better adapted than Jak's to the sun, the extra pigment giving them that fraction more protection. As for Blake, his wizened and weathered brown skin was a testament to the number of patrols he had undertaken in the sun.
The advance scouting party was four strong. Harvey had picked Ant and Dee because they survived better in the sun, and because they were junkheads who were still high on jolt. The powerful narcotic had a tendency to affect people in different ways, perhaps because of the different and minute mutations that had followed the period of skydark. In the case of the dreadlocked twins, it acted as a stimulant to their senses, and dulled their perception of danger. They were ready to fight.
Blake was one of Harvey's senior men. He had survived longer than anyone except the sec chief himself, and had spent a long time in the desert regions. He was the obvious party leader.
It was Blake who had insisted that Jak come with them. His admiration for Jak's fighting skills, and the bond that had formed, told the experienced sec man that Jak's instincts, along with his own experience, would act as a perfect foil for the twins' jolt-enduced recklessness. The albino, trusting the sec man's judgment, had agreed.