by James Axler
Jak picked up the pace and Ryan and the others matched it. The desert hardpan was much easier to run on than soft, cultivated earth. A warm tailwind, now driving and steady, pushed against their backs.
The albino led them down into a shallow gully and they followed it, running as low to the ground as they could. The ditch wasn’t deep enough to completely conceal them, but the chaparral and scrub along its lip broke up and blurred their silhouettes. They drew no sniper fire from the ville, either because they hadn’t been seen or because they were already out of range.
The discomforts of the forced march were all too familiar to them—the bonfires burning in lungs and legs, the jarring impacts on hip joints and knees, the rhythmic rasp of breath in the ears. The two swineherds had managed to keep up so far. Bezoar hip-hopped along, red-faced, his hair matted with sweat, arms flailing for balance. Barefooted Young Crad moved easily beside him with a powerful, lumbering gait.
Fourteen hours ago, on the previous evening, the companions had arrived in Redbone after a long trek south. They had planned on trading part of their stock of centerfire bullets for food and water this morning; instead they had had to expend them making their escape. The breakout was nothing Ryan and the others were ashamed of. Hard-bitten realists, they knew there were things they could fight and things they could not.
None of them had any firsthand knowledge of Baron Malosh. What little information they possessed came from tales they’d heard in gaudy houses and around communal campfires along their route. In Deathlands, stories of barbarism and savagery were taken in along with mother’s milk, this to prepare the young for the inescapable facts of life. Exaggerations, misconceptions, distortions and outright lies were expected—even honored—in a dark, misbegotten place where ignorance and chaos ruled. If a tenth of the gossip the companions had heard about Malosh was true, he was an utterly ruthless marauder, and a formidable adversary.
It was said that he had carved a kingdom out of nothing. His own homeland was shit poor, with little water and fertile soil, barely able to support its population. He made up the difference with hit-and-run campaigns against the unprotected borders of richer neighboring barons. Malosh kept his ragtag army in constant motion, resupplying it through looting and pillage, replacing dead fighters with conscripts—norms and muties, male and female. He enforced military discipline with an iron hand. The only way a person left Malosh’s service was on the last train west. When he conquered a ville like Redbone, he took away most of the food and most of the able-bodied residents. According to the campfire tales, he always left behind a little to eat and a few breeders; and of course, the old folk and very young children useless in battle. He left sufficient living souls and resources for the ville to eventually recover, albeit with terrible hardship, this so he could prey on it again when the need arose.
The gully widened as it emptied into a much broader channel. The dry riverbed was cut with deep rills and dotted with scrub-covered islands. Jak took them along the near bank, an undercut bluff six feet high.
Ryan brought up the rear, running in grim silence, conserving his energy. Sweat peeled in a steady trickle down the middle of his back. He could sense the storm front rapidly overtaking them. The static charge in the air made the hair on his arms and neck stand erect, the smell of ozone grew thicker and thicker. They were about a mile from the ville when he shouted to Jak, calling a halt to the column’s advance.
The company stopped, but Bezoar was the only one to actually sit down, and he did so hard, on top of a boulder.
“Time for a quick recce to check for pursuit,” Ryan said. He waved for J.B. to follow, then started to climb up the side of the bluff, using exposed roots and embedded rocks as hand-and footholds.
“Mebbe they won’t come after us?” Bezoar suggested.
“If they saw us running away, they’re coming,” Krysty told him. “Eight live recruits are worth plenty to Malosh. Not to mention him wanting payback for the men we chilled.”
As Ryan and J.B. topped the bluff, puffs of dust started kicking up around them. Not from incoming longblaster bullets. From a spitting, widely spaced rain. The drops falling on Ryan’s face and hands felt tepid and slightly greasy, but they didn’t burn like holy nukefire. It wasn’t the caustic, flesh-melting variety of chem rain.
J.B. pulled out a battered pair of compact binocs and looked back toward Redbone. “Men on horseback, coming down the cliff trail,” he said. “Pack of dogs running with them.”
“Let me have a look-see,” Ryan said, taking the binocs.
“I counted a half-dozen horsemen,” the Armorer told the others.
“There’s twice that many dogs,” Ryan said. “Damned big ones.”
“By the Three Kennedys, it’s a foxhunt!” Doc exclaimed. “The dogs will pick up our scent and the horses will run us to ground in no time.”
Ryan turned the binocs to the northwest horizon, where chain lightning flashed again and again through a curtain of black. Below the cloud bank, a torrential downpour obscured his view of the plain.
“Bastard heavy rain is bearing down,” he said. “It’ll cover our footprints and wash away our scent.”
“Baron’s men can see that, too,” Krysty said. “They’re going to come at a dead gallop.”
“We’re in a flood plain here,” Mildred reminded everyone. “We need to find ourselves some higher ground.”
As Ryan and J.B. scrambled from the bluff, Jak waved the others after him and headed down-channel.
Bezoar was the only one who didn’t move to follow. The old swineherd sat slumped on the rock, his bad leg sticking out straight, his face still beet-red. Young Crad turned back to help him get to his feet.
“It’s no use, boy,” Bezoar said, impatiently waving him off. “This old gimp can’t run anymore. You go on without me, boy. Save yourself.”
Young Crad wouldn’t hear of it. “I go, you go,” he said. He bent and picked up his comrade, piggyback. Then, as if the added burden was nothing, he broke into a trot, chasing after Jak.
“That one’s something special,” Mildred commented as she, too, started to jog.
“Short on words and brains mebbe, but long on heart,” Krysty said.
“Droolie sure can run,” J.B. admitted.
“Better catch them,” Ryan said, again bringing up the rear.
As the companions tightened ranks, winding past a maze of dry channel braids, the raindrops got bigger and closer together. The wind whipped the branches of the scrub brush and sent chest-high tumbleweeds bounding and rolling down the riverbed past them. No matter how hard the rain came down, Ryan knew they couldn’t stop to wait out the storm, even if the trail they left behind was obscured. The only thing that was going to save them from the pursuit was distance. Only if the dogs and horses couldn’t recover the lost trail were they home free.
In a couple of minutes Ryan’s clothes were completely soaked through. Falling raindrops hit the earth with such force that they jumped two feet in the air. Daylight began to fade. He looked over his shoulder, squinting into the wind and the looming darkness. In a strobe flash of lightning he saw the approaching squall line, like a vast waterfall stretching across the plain from edge to edge. Amid the wind’s howl and the thunder’s boom, he could hear dogs baying, not far behind.
As the storm closed on them, it rained even harder. So hard it came down in rattling roar. So hard that it hurt as it hammered upon unprotected heads and shoulders. So hard it was difficult to breathe with all the water vapor in the air. The parched desert earth couldn’t soak it up. The ground turned to cooked oatmeal underfoot, boot prints filled with water as fast as they were made. A section of saturated bluff to their right collapsed, sliding partway across the channel. Ryan veered and jumped the barrier, splashing down knee-deep in a muddy, coffee-and-cream-colored pool. The runoff was funneling from high ground to low. Ahead, shallow stream channels filled and overflowed, coalescing into broad stretches of shin-high rapids.
The muffled baying grew suddenly l
ouder. When Ryan looked back again, through the shifting downpour, he saw the dogs—drop-jawed, with lolling tongues, legs driving, splashing through the stream. Behind the hellhounds, torrents of water sheeted over the backs of charging horses and riders.
“Up!” he bellowed at Jak through a cupped hand.
The albino was already doing just that. Because the crumbling bank on the right would never have held the companions’ weight, he led them in the opposite direction, to the crest of a teardrop-shaped, scrub-covered island, high ground where they could make a stand.
As Ryan high-stepped through the boot-sucking muck of the island’s beach, he heard a growing rumble like an earthquake and half turned. Surging up behind the dogs and horses was a foaming wall of milky-brown water ten feet high.
“Hang on to something!” Krysty cried out to him.
As Ryan grabbed hold of the branches of a low bush, the flash flood slammed into the mounted pursuit. The force of the wave and its load of debris bowled over the horses and riders. It swept away the dogs in an instant. For a split second Ryan glimpsed the head of a horse as it bobbed up, rushing past, its eyes wild with fear, then it disappeared under the churning surface.
The one-eyed man used the scrub limbs to pull himself to higher ground where his companions stood braced, their legs sinking deep into the soggy soil, their miserable, streaming faces lit by lightning. Ryan jammed his boots against the roots of the brush to help hold his position.
“What happened to the pursuit?” Krysty asked.
“Long gone,” Ryan told her.
“The water level is still rising,” Doc said. “It appears we’ve departed the frying pan only to land squarely in the fire.”
There was no doubt about that. Their little mound of safety was growing smaller and smaller by the minute; the river flowed around their knees. Ryan could feel the ground eroding from underfoot.
“What are we going to do?” Mildred said.
Krysty looked across the mocha-colored river. “Too strong a current to swim through,” she said. “We’d never make it to the bank.”
“Only thing we can do is wait it out,” Ryan said. “Hang on and hope we don’t get washed loose before the river starts to fall.”
After a while the torrential rain stopped, but the river continued to come up; soon it even submerged most of the brush on the island’s crest. Clustered together, the companions grasped the ends of the branches, half swimming at times, their legs dangling back in the flow.
It was looking worse and worse.
When Jak shouted a warning, Ryan looked up to see a row of weak yellow lights bobbing toward them along the bank.
“Surrender or be swept away!” someone shouted over the roar of the torrent.
There was little question who had come to their rescue.
And under the circumstances, the companions couldn’t reach for or raise their weapons.
“We could let the current take us downstream,” Krysty said. “Mebbe get past them.”
“The odds of running those rapids and surviving to tell the tale are slim at best, my dear,” Doc said.
“Too many downed trees in the flow,” Ryan said. “We’d get snagged and never come up.”
“Drowning doesn’t suit me,” J.B. said.
“J.B., you’re half drowned already,” Mildred said.
“That’s how I know.”
“We can die now, without firing a shot,” Ryan said, “or we can try to live long enough to fight at a time and place of our choosing.”
“Proposed in that way, it is an easy decision to make,” Doc said. “There is only one acceptable course of action.”
Ryan looked from face to face. “Are we all agreed, then? Is anyone opposed?”
But for the sounds of the river, there was silence.
“We give up!” Ryan bellowed, though this genuine surrender stuck mightily in his craw.
“We’ll throw you a rope,” someone shouted back. “Make it fast at your end.”
J.B. managed to trap and tie off the line, lashing it around the submerged trunk of a stunted but sturdily rooted tree. One by one the companions used the rope to pull themselves, hand over hand, through the chest-high current to the light of the lanterns.
Ryan was the last to ford the swollen river. As he climbed out of the water, a horseman approached. Black-gloved hands held the reins of the towering chestnut stallion. The rider was dressed in a gleaming black rain cape. Covering the lower half of his face, nose to chin, cheek to cheek, was a matching leather mask. An oval of metal mesh in front of his mouth allowed him to speak unmuffled. There were angry boils and sores on his high, pale forehead. The eyes above the mask were black and wide-set; his shoulder-length, wavy black hair lay plastered to his head by the rain.
There was no mistaking who it was.
Malosh the Impaler.
Chapter Two
A tall, broad figure in an olive-drab trench coat and size-14 patched tennis shoes climbed the steep, barren approach to the base of the Rabbit Ear Spires. The gusting wind beat his BDU pants hard against his legs. His head was shaved except for a fringe of dirty blond hair that fell from the back of his neck to between his shoulder blades. A wide, black-tattooed garland encircled his deeply suntanned skull.
The permanent crown symbolized his authority.
Kendrick Haldane had been declared baron-for-life by a grateful populace.
At a switchback halfway up the trail of loose volcanic scree, Haldane paused to catch his breath. In the valley far below, the Grandee glistened in the slanting sun like a fat green snake. The world-shattering, nuclear exchange of 2001 had freed the great river. Shock waves from ground-burst missile strikes had ruptured the Elephant Butte Reservoir dam some fifty miles upstream, spilling three hundred billion gallons of water and a vast, scouring sediment load into the ancient riverbed. Like falling dominoes, the Caballo, Percha and Leasburg dams had given way under the power of the unleashed torrent.
The once again wild Grandee was the lifeline of Haldane’s small, prosperous fiefdom; and not just because of the water it supplied for agriculture and livestock. Old Interstate Highway 25, which paralleled the river and connected the cities of Albuquerque and El Paso, was also a casualty of Armageddon. Most of its overpasses and bridges had collapsed, many of its roadbeds either washed away by nukeday’s flood or eroded to sand by decades of chem rain. With the highway mostly gone, the river had become the prime north-south trade route. It was also a defensive barrier to attack from the west.
Between the still-lethal ground zeros of Albuquerque and El Paso, a narrow habitable strip along the Grandee supported a dozen thriving villes. Baron Haldane controlled nearly one hundred miles of riverbank with watchtowers and small fortifications set on cliffs above the stream, and from bankside caves. Based in these strategic squeeze points, his sec men intercepted and dispatched coldheart robbers and bands of marauding muties. In return for a guarantee of safety, every farmer, every traveler, every trader paid the baron a fair toll, either in jack or in a percentage of goods.
Haldane’s seat of baronial power lay beside the river in the valley below him. It had been built on the ruins of the city of Las Cruces, north and west of the El Paso–Fort Bliss nukeglass crater, about forty miles north of what once was the New Mexico–Chihuahua-Mexico border. Earth-shaker warheads had rubbleized the predark town; cataclysmic dam failures had swept away most of the debris. Its university, museums, shopping centers and the grid work of residential streets were gone. On the outskirts of the redrawn flood plain, a few of the original industrial sites and warehouses still stood, but they were skeletal relics, with sagging roofs and breached walls. Nueva Las Cruces, or Nuevaville for short, had been constructed well back from the Grandee’s new shoreline. Amid groves of trees and green cultivated fields were clusters of immobile mobile homes, dilapidated RVs propped on cinder blocks, and tractor trailers with crude windows cut in their sheet-metal sides. Scattered among the predark-vintage structures were one-story h
uts and longhouses built with recycled materials, walls made of piled chunks of broken concrete, and of dried river mud reinforced with mats of willow sticks.
Two-thirds of the barony’s population tilled the land, processed surplus food for storage and sale, or worked on a fleet of transport barges. The rest of Haldane’s subjects were full-time men-at-arms. From the towering height of the Rabbit Ear Plateau, his capital looked bucolic and peaceful, as if time had been reversed. As if Armageddon had never happened.
It was an illusion, he knew.
In the hellscape, safety and stability were the products of a bloody endless fight. Deathland’s hardship and brutality reduced everything to the lowest common denominator: simple survival.
Us versus them.
Played out over and over again.
A war of attrition, until there was no “us” or “them” left, and the last, faint hope of humanity’s rising from the ashes of Armageddon winked out forever.
As Haldane resumed the climb, struggling up a slope that constantly shifted underfoot, he leaned into the wind. From the belly of a line of black clouds to the northwest, lightning licked down at distant mountaintops. Thunder rumbled. In perhaps two hours, three at most, the storm would be hard upon them, turning Nuevaville’s dirt roads to mire and spilling the river over its banks.
Looming above him were the snaggle-tooth pinnacles of the Organ Mountains. With the wind to his back, he followed a well-worn path along the base of the spires. It led to a broad cave in the bedrock, about ten feet high at its tallest, and five times that wide across. Inside the low opening were crude structures built of mud-and-straw bricks. From glassless windows and doorless doorways, rows of faces peered out at him, luminously pale, as round as full moons. He smelled burning excrement, which the cave dwellers dried and used as fuel for heat and for cooking. The filthy hands of three generations of inbred doomies directed him toward the stone hut that stood a few hundred feet down-slope.
As was the custom, Baron Haldane left his blaster outside the rude sanctuary. He unslung his Remington Model 1100 12-gauge autoloader. Its barrel and magazine were chopped down to the end of the forestock, its rearstock cut off behind the pistol grip. After he carefully set the truncated, hellacious scattergun on the ground, he pushed aside the brown polyester blanket that covered the hut’s doorway, ducking his head to enter. As he did, he was greeted by an explosion of snorting laughter.