by James Axler
From somewhere in the long line behind him he heard somebody curse. At least the stupe bastard muffled it. Cutter Dan had his detachment moving in single file in order to hug the cliff as tightly as possible. He wanted to maximize their cover and minimize their chance of being spotted in case the coldhearts had set a scout out this way. The footing was irregular and treacherous, especially in the dark. But his men would have to suck it up and deal with it.
Cawdor was not going to cheat Cutter Dan again.
Down in the thicket, he knew, the greater part of his force waited, quivering with eagerness for the attack like hounds on a leash. He had alerted them to be ready to move on their enemies by having one of his men wave a torch around from their camp by the cliffs. Yonas’s men down in the weeds had acknowledged with three flashes of a bull’s-eye lantern. All according to plan.
Cutter Dan hadn’t lied to Cawdor about the bounty Santee and his rich toadies had offered. He just hadn’t bothered mentioning the other part: that Santee was getting tired of waiting and had also sent word relaxing his insistence that the fugitives be taken alive.
Of course, Cutter Dan hadn’t shared the contents of that sealed dispatch with his men, either. He wanted their quarry alive and didn’t want anybody tempted to take the easy route.
Especially since he’d eked out his force with scarcely vetted volunteers from the Wild villes, farms and encampments beyond Second Chance, not all of them absorbed into Santee’s redo of the United States. Yet. And, most of all, because of how many mercies he’d been forced to take on to make sure his prey didn’t get away again.
Like the trio who’d come down from Esperance, east past the Wall’s end, a day or so ago. And that was a cesspit that was due to get cleaned out pronto, just as soon as this nasty business with the coldhearts who’d dared steal a prisoner off the Judge’s own gallows, right under the Judge’s own nose, was all wrapped up.
They were bounty hunters, the leader claimed—Dyson, his name was. Or, at least, that was the name he gave Cutter Dan, who was in no position to care. He was almost sure he had paper on one or more of those three, most likely on Dyson himself. But Santee had long ago authorized amnesty for those who signed on with his marshals, once Cutter Dan had convinced the old man that they were going to need a lot more warm bodies for his ambitious campaign of conquest than were liable to find in Second Chance alone.
The chief marshal had sent those particular three warm bodies on as an advance party, fifty yards or so ahead of the main column led by Cutter Dan. The only ones out ahead of them were Old Pete and Mort. In case the coldhearts had an ambush laid, Cutter Dan figured the Indians could take care of themselves. They were good at that.
And if Dyson and his stonehearts couldn’t, well, like Cutter Dan’s favorite uncle used to tell him, “a good scout is a dead scout.” Better they get blasted than the sec boss or his actual, sworn-in sec men.
Plus then he wouldn’t have to pay them, of course.
He glanced back. Scovul was following close behind, a Marlin lever longblaster in his hands and a look of intense concentration on his dark, mustached face. Behind him came the rest of the platoon, winding its way along the cliff base, looking in the starlight like some kind of giant sinuous multilegged creature—like one of those awful giant centipedes from the Wild, but a thousand times bigger.
Cutter Dan heard a sound from ahead like a night bird call. He stopped and raised a hand to halt the column behind him.
Old Pete rushed toward him, longblaster in hand, jogging at a pretty good clip for such an oldie. He seemed to have a lot less trouble negotiating the uneven ground and random vegetation underfoot than the sec men did.
The oldie halted about ten feet away. “Smell,” he said.
“What?”
“Smell,” the oldie commanded.
Scowling, Cutter Dan raised his head. He sniffed the air, then he sucked down a deep breath.
He almost busted out coughing. “Smoke,” he said. “What the fuck? Are they piling brush on the campfire? Do they think they can get away from us using a smokescreen? Or are they trying to smoke us out?”
Old Pete shook his head. His long, white hair wagged emphatically beneath his turban.
“Not campfire,” he declared.
“What is it, then?” Scovul asked.
The Choctaw scout turned and gestured to the west with an open hand.
“The Wild burns.”
Chapter Thirty-One
“Nuking night shit!” Cutter Dan exclaimed. “Send up the attack signal! Now!”
Scovul reached to his belt and pulled out a flare pistol. Raring back, he fired it up and away from the Wall.
“I go,” Old Pete said. “Sister’s son needs me.” He turned and ran back the way he’d come, faster than before, vaulting the clumps of brush like a pronghorn.
The flare cast a weird pink glare up the face of the Wall and across the Wild as it soared like a red rocket. Instantly, a quarter mile of the mutie thicket’s hedgelike northern border flashed alive with strobing blaster flames.
Cutter Dan’s plan had been to work his unit into position close to Cawdor’s camp. Then he would signal his men down in the Wild to open fire, to get the enemies’ heads down and serve as diversion. At which point he’d make his move. He’d hoped for a quick, clean capture, or kill if it had to be that way.
Of course, he was too smart to count on that, but it didn’t cost anything to hope. Didn’t cost him, anyway.
But now that plan was blown sky-high. His favorite uncle also used to say that no plan survived first contact with the enemy. Fine. Cutter Dan knew how to improvise with the best of them.
As the crackle of dozens of blasters began to punch at the chief marshal’s eardrums, he saw the source of the smell Old Pete had come back to tell him about. It was as if a gray curtain had descended in the west to the Wild itself. It seemed to stretch back into the thicket for hundreds of yards.
“Look, C.D.,” a sec man called from behind Scovul. “You can see the flames.”
“Holy shit,” Scovul breathed.
The curtain hadn’t descended, of course. It was rising, and now Cutter Dan saw what it was rising from: a ragged orange crescent of flames, arcing far back into the dense mutie growth. Even as he watched, some of the flames leaped up into the air about ten or twenty feet.
“Oh, fuck me,” Cutter Dan whispered.
He turned and shouted and waved his arm, although nobody could really see the gesture from more than mebbe thirty feet away. “Follow me! Charge!”
He turned and set off running as fast as he dared toward the fugitive encampment.
* * *
BEHIND HIS SCOUT longblaster, Ryan waited.
He had left his companions dug in near their cave to await the inevitable attack by the stoneheart bastards who were more interested in collecting their bounty than escaping being burned alive. Doc and J.B. both had longblasters looted from chilled Second Chance marshals. As marksmen, they were plenty good enough to take a toll on any sec men who showed aggressive intentions.
Jak was the one who’d started the fires. He’d come up with some new way to make the sec men’s lives miserable, now that he’d done that.
As Ryan knew all too well, if there was one thing the wiry albino was good at—after sneaking and scouting—it was guerilla warfare.
Ryan had his own job to do. He had set up on a red clay buttress wide enough to lie on at an angle, protecting his body from blasterfire, and it had a tuft of some kind of weed on top that added cover. He had his Steyr Scout longblaster propped on his rolled-up coat. With his naked eye he was scanning the trail along the base of the cliffs to where it undulated out of view, a hundred yards east.
They’d noted that spot for future reference while doing the recce a couple days back that led to the discovery that Cutter Dan
had blocked their escape that way.
Now, Ryan knew, that blocking force had shifted to a strike team. Even if the chief marshal hadn’t chosen to jump his deadline by an hour—and Ryan was double sure he had—the fact that his men stationed in the Wild had opened fire would bring him rushing this way to attack his prey.
Sure enough, two figures came into view. Ryan shifted to his glass, which was set to its lowest magnification.
It wouldn’t have made any difference had he stayed with open sights. First one shape then the other flitted through his field of vision and simply vanished in the scrub beside the trail, too fast for even his lightning reflexes to sight in and fire.
In the vague, predawn light seeping up the western sky, he did catch an impression of dark faces and a feather bobbing in a hatband. Indians from a nation in the area. Trackers.
That’s one of the ways they’ve been able to stick on us so tight, Ryan realized. He had taken ir for granted that Cutter Dan would secure the services of guides who knew the Wild, or this stretch of it, by payment or intimidation or whatever combination the sec boss thought was called for. But they wouldn’t necessarily have the skills to follow the trail of their elusive targets.
He sighed. Yeah. So they had their own equivalents of Jak Lauren. And we had none.
Ryan didn’t slack either his attention or his readiness. He was so alert, and so confident in his sniper skills, that he didn’t automatically trigger a shot when another figure appeared around the bend in the cliff face.
It lumbered clumsily by comparison to the fleeting shapes: a big guy, shaved head gleaming pale in the scope, all duded up in dark leather with a longblaster’s butt jutting from behind his left shoulder. The man wasn’t wearing a marshal armband, so this was one of the mercies Cutter Dan had hired.
He had two other similarly equipped men following. Too close. One good burst from a machine gun or even an automatic longblaster would’ve taken them all out.
Ryan waited to see if they were the head of the enemy column or just scouts. He reminded himself that there were a pair of much more skillful, lethal foes approaching him rapidly—and unseen. He was acutely conscious of the sniper’s most deadly danger—getting lost in the glass, which was particularly acute when you had but one eye. Although, by sheer luck, the eye that was missing was on the side next to the cliff.
What he needed was what a sniper usually had: a spotter who could double as sec when the shooter was focused on his target. But the three companions he’d left behind to hold back sec men from the thicket weren’t enough as it was, even helped out by a few dozen rounds of ammunition Jak had scored somewhere during his solo adventures.
The shaved-headed stoneheart and his pals continued down the trail toward Ryan. No one else appeared behind them right away. Scouts, then.
He centered the reticule on the shaved head’s brow, pulled in a deep breath, let some out, caught it. Squeezed.
He was aware of the tall man raising his face slightly even as the blaster roared and kicked upward. When it came back down, fresh cartridge duly chambered, he could see the man falling forward. The whole upper half of his head was missing.
The smart thing for someone under fire to do was to dive for cover. But like so many coldhearts, naturally including the breed called sec men, they were mainly bullies, used to preying on the weak. The remaining pair initially froze in place.
The man who’d been walking closer to the leader and behind his right shoulder had dark hair and a beard. Ryan put his second shot right between them. He went down.
The third man had a sort of short landing-strip Mohawk shaved onto the top of his head. He regained his senses and turned to run. Ryan had to snap off his third shot without proper aim.
But his bullet hit home. Lower right back, Ryan reckoned. The mercie rolled down into the brush and set to squalling like a treed catamount.
Three down, Ryan thought with satisfaction. Nothing took the starch out of enemies’ peckers like the sound of one of their own shrieking in agony. Occasionally it backfired and turned them berserk; Judge Santee’s bullyboys hadn’t shown Ryan that kind of mettle.
The one-eyed man eased back from the scope. He turned his head to take in as much of the surroundings to his open right side as he could while keeping alert for more sec men appearing along the cliff-base trail. Those two trackers were out there, and if they weren’t actively stalking him right at that second, it was because they were advancing far more slowly than they had been.
They’d be here, sooner or later. And not triple much later.
But that wasn’t really what he was waiting for.
* * *
“WHAT’S THAT SMELL?” Doogle asked. He was one of the new guys, a fresh marshal recruit out of Sour Springs, southeast of Second Chance.
There was a lull in the shooting to either side of Edwards as men reloaded. They were firing all but blind at a partially obscured cave near the base of the Red Wall that Yonas and their noncoms had tried to point out as the target. Edwards wasn’t sure all the sec men were actually firing at the right cave.
Nuke withered, he wasn’t sure he was.
“Smoke,” Edwards said.
He was stuffing .30-30 cartridges into the loading gate of his Winchester lever-action longblaster. The enemy camp was a good two hundred yards away from his position, near the west end of the Second Chance line. It was a questionable shot at that range over iron sights even in broad daylight. At night, the people he was shooting at had about the same chance of being hit by a shooting star as one of his bullets.
Or anybody else’s, likely. Edwards was a farm boy, country bred and raised. Not one of these high and mighty ville types. And screw-up though he might have generally been—this whole discipline and regimentation thing turned out to be alien to his nature—he knew blasters, and he knew how to shoot.
But that was part of being disciplined and regimented: you did what you were told. Or triple-bad shit happened to you. And as long as Cutter Dan and his crazy Judge were buying the ammo, Edwards reckoned he might as well burn it up blowing holes in the night.
But that smell bothered him. A lot.
“What’s burning?” he asked.
“Those bastard deathbirds are roasting a wild hog for breakfast,” growled Sawtell, the mercie from back east across the Sippi. “Who gives a shit?”
“Nobody’s cooking nothin’,” Edwards said. “I’d smell a thing like hog for breakfast, for sure. Trust me. Especially after this many days of cold beans and hardtack. With only mutie piss water to drink.”
“Less jawing, more blasting,” Yonas rapped out, walking up behind them.
“I smell pork cooking,” Doogle said. “Makes me hungry.”
“What the nuke—”
“Fire!” somebody shouted.
Somebody else shrieked, “Glowing bastard night shit! I’m on fire!”
Edwards snapped his head left. “Blind NORAD,” he breathed.
An orange wall of fire jumped up not fifty yards to the west of them. The flames were higher than a tall man’s head, and he could see at a glance that the blaze extended well back into the thicket.
A whole bunch of hollering came from the men stationed that way. Some of it was the mindless keening of men in intolerable agony.
“What’s burning?” Sawtell yelled. “This shit’s all green!”
“Dead growth, you stupe,” Edwards said. “The stuff’s triple thick in all that tangle, triple dry with this wind.”
This west wind. Blowing right at them and getting brisker by the second with the dawn. He felt the heat now and smelled the acrid stench of burning hair, along with blazing dry vegetation and the barbecue smell of burning human flesh.
Edwards saw frantic action through the screen vines, silhouetted against the orange hell-glow. “Oh, rads, it’s moving t
oo fast!”
Men flung themselves into the vine course that separated them from the group around Edwards, heedless of the thorns that plunged deep into limbs and bodies and faces. That pain meant nothing compared to the hideous pain of the fire.
Edwards saw a sec man thrashing at the twining briars some twenty yards away. It was Bennett, his eyes as wild as his brown hair and extravagant mustache.
His yells turned to shrill screams as a gust of wind caused the fire to billow into him. Horrified, Edwards saw Bennett’s hair became a blazing halo. His mustache caught fire and burned like a wick.
Then the dried-out undergrowth around him and in front of him took light. He bellowed in despair and torment as the flames gushed up to envelop him completely. And then the fire moved onward, leaving him a frantic, wailing shadow in the inferno. Then only screams, joined with the dying screams of his comrades. Then silence.
“Nuke this!” Sawtell yelled. He bolted straight south, into the depths of the Wild.
“Come back, you damn stupe!” Edwards yelled after him. “You’ll burn!”
Doogle set off at a run to the east. He got hung up in a course of the briars and began to thrash and wail, alternately cursing and begging for help.
Yonas’s handblaster cracked. Doogle grunted and then hung limp, crucified backward on thorns.
“Only one thing to do now, men!” the one-eyed sec leader said, raising his voice to be heard down the line. It had a lot of competition from the roar of the flames and the screaming of its victims, though these were dying out. But the wildfire was moving inexorably onward as if hungry for more.
Yonas had holstered his handblaster and unslung his M16. He swung it downward, held one-handed by the pistol grip.
“Charge!” he bellowed.
Never thought I’d be glad to hear that order, Edwards thought, as he headed out, sprinting toward the still-unseen enemy strongpoint.
* * *
GOT SOFT, JAK thought, hunkered down just inside the outer skein of vines. He had actually been breathing hard when he reached the northern edge of the mutie thicket.