by James Axler
Fillinger stood on the roof of the main building with Krysty in front of him. Her hands were bound behind her back, and he had a large blued blaster pressed to the side of her head.
“One-eye!” the sec chief called.
Ryan looked up but said nothing.
“I got something you want.”
Ryan said nothing to the man on the roof, but just under his breath he muttered to Mildred, “He’s too far for me to try with the SIG-Sauer.”
Mildred gauged the distance, wind, the slight movements of the target and shook her head. “He’s got Krysty too close. If I’m a fraction off, she’s on the last train west.”
“I want to make a deal,” the sec chief shouted.
The last thing Ryan wanted was to make a trade or strike some deal for the lives of his friends. Trading blasters and goods for food and shelter was one thing, but trading humans for those same items was just plain wrong. But this wasn’t just any human the sec chief was holding hostage; it was Krysty. His friend and lover. He’d listen to the man’s offer, and try to figure out some other solution in the meantime. “I’m listening.”
“You leave now and take your friends with you—the fish traders, the muties, all of them.”
There were a few moments of silence. So far the deal wasn’t sounding very good. “And?” Ryan asked.
“And Red won’t be chilled.”
“That’s not much of a deal,” Ryan said.
“Best one you get, One-eye.”
“Let her go and we’ll leave.”
The sec chief shook his head. “The baron wants her. We need to rebuild the breeding stock, and she’s just what we need.”
“You sure you can’t take him?” Ryan muttered.
Mildred made a second assessment. “Sorry, Ryan.”
“If you don’t let her go, there won’t be a piece of this farm left standing by the time I’m through with it.”
“I’ll take that chance,” Fillinger said.
“What are we going to do, Ryan?” Mildred asked.
“I don’t know.”
THE REICHEL VILLE raiders had made it all the way through the orchards and had taken a dozen slaves with them—nine of them women. The entire operation had gone easier than they’d expected, and they were about to leave with eight more than they arrived with.
The ville would survive and flourish.
As Rhonda led a party of six toward the large group of buildings at the far end of the complex, she was looking for something to give sec chief Ganley. He’d been a selfless leader to the raiders, and they had all expressed their wish to thank him in some way. A mate of his own would be a excellent show of gratitude, but what sort of woman would suit him?
They turned the corner on the cabins housing the men and women living on the farm, and Rhonda caught sight of a sec man standing on the roof of the biggest building on the farm. There was a woman with him, a woman with the most amazing red hair. He seemed to be shouting down at someone on the other side of the building.
“Dwayne,” she said.
“Yeah,” came the response from a middle-aged man as he came up behind her.
“That first night we camped out on the south shore of the lake, what did the sec chief say when we asked him what he’d like in a mate?”
Dwayne thought about it a moment. “Uh, he said she’d have to be healthy, and that he always liked red hair. Red hair, or dark skin, one or the other.”
“Look up there.” She gestured with a flick of her head.
“That’s red, all right.”
“Take two others up onto the roof. When we take the sec man out, you bring the redhead down to the staging area. We’ll cover your back along the way.”
“Right.”
“As soon as we’re on the other side of the fence, we’re outta here.”
“WELL, ONE-EYE!” sec chief Fillinger said. “I don’t see you leaving.”
“Can’t leave her behind,” Ryan said.
“Sorry to hear that.”
“You chill her, there won’t be a farm left to rebuild.”
“It’s already gone to shit.”
“Let her go!” Ryan shouted, then turned to Mildred and whispered. “Take your best shot.”
Mildred raised her target pistol slowly, knowing that once the sec chief saw the blaster she’d only have a split second to take the shot.
But then the sec chief’s body suddenly jerked to the right. The man let go of Krysty and stumbled to keep his balance.
With several feet of darkness between the sec chief and Krysty, Mildred had no trouble marking the target. She raised her ZKR and fired off two rounds, catching the sec chief first in the chest and then in the head.
But he didn’t fall.
Instead he turned away from Krysty and in the dim glow of the auxiliary lights, the arrow that had pierced his neck and shattered his throat became visible to the friends on the ground.
“Let’s get up there and grab Krysty,” Ryan said, already running toward the main building.
Mildred followed him, five steps behind all the way through the building and finally up the ladder that brought them to the roof.
But when they got there, all they found was a dead sec chief.
Krysty was gone.
Chapter Forty-One
J.B., Doc and Dean had taken up a position outside the barn where they’d been told the baron kept a LAV and a few transport wags. They had considered storming the barn and capturing one of the wags, but a dozen or more sec men had already gone inside and following them in would have brought on a firefight.
So instead they parked the wag about a hundred yards from the barn doors with the cannon loaded and the .50 calibers aimed at the open door.
“How many shells left, Doc?” J.B. asked.
“Six,” Doc answered. “Of differing quality from good to questionable.”
“How about the fifties?”
“Six feet of belt on the back,” Dean reported. “Four and a half on the front.”
A noise came from the inside of the barn.
“Hear that?” J.B. asked.
“If I am not mistaken,” Doc said, “that’s the rattle and thrum of a diesel engine, most likely made in the predark city of Detroit, or perhaps one of the smaller villes such as Flint or Pontiac.”
“Diesel, all right. Get ready.”
Doc and Dean manned the fifties. J.B. tightened his grip on the cannon’s trigger.
All at once the door to the barn was filled by a black LAV. It had four large wheels, a small compartment for a crew and a single blaster mounted on a pivot at the top of a conically shaped turret. It weapon was smaller than the 37 mm, and it was also pointed in the wrong direction.
J.B. held back on firing until the LAV approached his line of fire. Leading the target by about a yard, he pulled the trigger and the front wheels of the vehicle were blown off their mounts. The LAV foundered, falling forward like a horse that just had its front legs pulled out from under it. The blaster began to swivel in their direction, but the LAV had come to a stop directly in J.B.’s line of fire. Still, the Armorer turned the wheel of the wag to the left and backed it up about two feet, bringing the LAV’s turret directly in line with the cannon’s barrel.
“Doc, is it loaded?”
In the back of the wag, Doc was busily making sure that the gun was loaded and wouldn’t jam on the next round.
“Doc?”
“Do not wait for me, John Barrymore.”
J.B. pulled the trigger and the cannon thudded again, this time hitting the LAV’s turret and shattering its blaster into a pile of hot steel.
The top of the LAV popped open and sec men began to scramble out. Dean peppered them with .50-caliber fire, chilling two and sending the other running unarmed and empty-handed out of the complex.
“Hot pipe!” Dean exclaimed.
THE DUNGEON was little more than a damp, dark and musty basement. It housed water heaters, and electric heaters to keep the farm buildin
gs warm through the winter, as well as filters and a few tables with seedlings being cultivated under banks of fluorescent lights.
And six women were chained to the cinder-block wall behind them. All appeared to be in their third trimester and ready to give birth at any time.
But unlike the well-kept plants being cultivated under the lights, these women had been abandoned in the dark. Jak found a light switch that turned on a single bulb in an old ceiling fixture, and the women cringed under the dim light of the low-wattage light. The floor was cold and wet, stinking of feces and urine, and crawling with bugs that seemed to roam over the women’s bodies with a purpose—as if the living beings were simply part of the terrain.
Not surprising, the bodies of the women were covered with sores and scabs. Their flesh was pale white and pasty in texture, like the skin Jak had seen on hundreds of muties over the years.
And then there were their eyes…
They were full of fear, terrified that they’d be beaten, raped or otherwise abused. If the baron had brought women down to this place to break their spirit and obliterate their will to resist him, he had succeeded magnificently.
These women were waiting to die as much as they were waiting to give birth.
“Which one your sister?” Jak asked.
Clarissa stared at the six women with a confused look on her face. “I’m not sure,” she said, sounding afraid and just a little bit desperate.
Jak wasn’t surprised. These women barely looked human.
“Melanie?”
Jak didn’t wait for one of them to answer. He began unlocking all the women.
“Is that you, Clarissa?” the second woman from the end called out.
“What’s going on?” another woman asked.
“What has happened?”
“Who are you?”
Clarissa lifted her sister off the damp and dirty floor. Her sister, Melanie, was unable to stand straight after months of crouching on the cold hard floor, but Clarissa bent to put her arms around her.
“You came back,” Melanie said.
“I never left.” Clarissa was near tears.
“What?”
“I stayed outside the farm, waiting for the chance to rescue you.”
“Who is he?” Melanie asked. By now the other five women were on their shaky feet, as well, and they all seemed to want to know the answer to that question, too.
“This is Jak Lauren,” Clarissa explained, drying her sister’s eyes.
Jak gave them a slight wave.
“He and his friends have freed the slaves.”
“Free?” one of the women asked.
Jak nodded. He pointed to the stairs leading out of the dungeon and then out of the building. “This way.”
THE MORNING SUN WAS just beginning to peek over the eastern horizon. It felt warm and comforting after a long, dark night full of chilling.
In the growing light, Ryan and Mildred ran to the back of the building and could see several people running into the orchard, heading for the far corner of the fence.
Most of them were out of range by now, but a few stragglers were still within their reach.
“Can you take him down without killing him?” Ryan asked Mildred.
Mildred took her shooter’s stance and followed the running man’s route closely. And then she fired a shot.
The man stumbled, pitched forward, and then rolled up against an apple tree.
He didn’t get up.
Mildred and Ryan ran to catch up to him.
When they arrived, the man was backed up against the stump. Mildred’s shot had torn up his left calf and broke a bone or two, but the wound wasn’t fatal.
“Who are you people?” Ryan asked. “Where do you come from?”
The man didn’t seem interested in answering.
Mildred pointed her ZKR at the man’s head, but that didn’t seem to make any difference.
“We’re not sec men,” Ryan said. “We’ve been fighting on the same side, against the baron.”
That seemed to catch the man’s interest, but Ryan didn’t have time to slowly win him over. He reared back and hit him square in the jaw with the back of his SIG-Sauer. “Your party captured one of our group. I want her back.”
The man was slow to answer, so Ryan prepared to give him another blow.
“Wait,” he said.
“I’m waiting.”
“We’re from Reichel ville. We needed breeders, new blood for the survival of the ville.”
“Where is Reichel ville?”
“On Erie Lake. We’ve camped on the north shore of the lake, at Fort Erie. That’s where the others are headed now.”
“How long ago?”
“A few minutes, maybe more. I don’t know. I got separated. They left without me.”
Ryan looked up at Mildred. “I’m going after them.”
“We could all go together,” Mildred offered.
“No time,” Ryan said. “We have to go now.”
“Then I’m going with you, but we need to let the others know where we’ve gone.”
Ryan looked at the wounded raider. “I need you to do something for me.”
“A favor?” the man asked, through swollen lips.
“Yes. I need you to let the others know where we’ve gone.”
“What if I do?”
“Then you can tell them that Ryan Cawdor said they have to take you with them, to meet up with the others from your ville.”
“How do I know they’ll do that?”
“If you give them my name, they’ll do it.”
Mildred nodded.
“All right.”
Ryan and Mildred were gone without another word.
WHEN JAK and the women reached the top of the stairs and stepped through the door leading out of the dungeon, the freed women took cautious steps into the hallway, as if they didn’t believe they’d actually been emancipated.
“You’re free to go,” Clarissa explained.
“Where’s the baron?” her sister asked.
“Missing right now,” Clarissa said.
“We can’t be free if he’s still alive.”
“We’re going to look for him.”
“Chill when find,” Jak added.
“I know where he’s hiding,” Clarissa’s sister, Melanie, said. “There’s a bunker at the end of this hallway. I heard someone go down that way a few hours ago. It has to be him.”
“Take me there,” Jak said.
The other women suddenly began moving in the other direction, not wanting any part of the baron, not even to see him get chilled.
“Follow me,” Melanie said.
Chapter Forty-Two
Ryan and Mildred jumped the fence and were on the raiders’ trail, but weren’t any closer to rescuing Krysty.
Every mile or so, a straggler would fall behind the main group, fire several shots in their general direction and then disappear into the underbrush. The guerrilla tactics didn’t give Ryan and Mildred the time or chance to fight, but were slowing their progress enough to let the group, and Krysty, slip farther and farther away.
Currently they were pinned down behind an outcrop between two stands of trees. The trail wound to the left slightly, and the shots were coming from somewhere to the right.
Ryan took his brass naval telescope from his coat and scanned the terrain in front of him, but he couldn’t pick the shooter out of the shadows.
“We know his general area,” Mildred stated. “Let me see if I can come around from behind and flush him out.”
“Have to hurry,” Ryan said.
Mildred started to move, but Ryan held her back.
“No, I’m going,” he said. “You stay here and try to keep him pinned down.”
Mildred nodded.
Ryan left without another word.
He moved quickly through the trees and waist-high weeds, making sure to keep some cover between himself and the direction the shots had come from, while always on the lookout
for movement in the surrounding underbrush.
Ryan raised the SIG-Sauer as he neared the spot where he judged the shots to be coming from.
Mildred had been firing, as well, throwing a well-spaced sequence of rounds at the shooter to keep him from moving off.
When Mildred had fired her last shot and had to reload, Ryan focused on the forest before him, looking for any movement.
As he’d expected, the shooter used the respite to return fire in Mildred’s direction, and the blast from the muzzle of his weapon allowed Ryan to spot him. It was a young man, a kid really, not much older than Jak. It was a shame to chill the teenager, but Ryan had no choice. The shooter was keeping him from rescuing Krysty and had to be eliminated.
Ryan squeezed off two shots from the SIG-Sauer, the first shot hitting the shooter in the shoulder, the second putting a tiny black spot in his left ear and blowing out a huge hole on the right side of his head.
After several minutes of blasterfire, the area was filled with an odd silence. Mildred came over the top of the outcrop and approached Ryan in a more direct route than the one he’d taken to get to the shooter.
“We’ve lost a few minutes,” Ryan said.
“Then let’s not lose any more.”
They turned and ran along the trail. Ryan wasn’t as good a tracker as Jak, but there seemed to be enough freshly trampled grass and weeds to indicate that the raiders had been through here recently.
He hoped he was right.
“THIS DOOR LEADS into the bunker,” Melanie said.
Clarissa checked it. “Locked.”
“Stand back,” Jak told them.
As the women complied, the albino teenager raised the guard’s pump-action blaster and leveled it on the door’s locking mechanism.
The first shot mangled the door’s handle.
Jak pumped another round into the blaster’s chamber and fired again. This time the lock was pushed inward, twisting it inside the door and away from the frame. Jak lowered the blaster and gave the door a push with his finger.
It opened.
He shouldered the longblaster and led the two women inside, his Colt Python at the ready.
Stairs led down to a second, much heavier, door. They tried this one, and it was unlocked.
Opening the door slowly, and silently, they stepped into a dimly lit room.