by James Axler
“Yeah…” the talkative sec man replied slowly. He wasn’t sure what his tattooed boss was talking about, but looking at the so-called hunters slung across the backs of their mounts, he could take a pretty good guess. “What d’you suggest, then?”
The tattooed man dismounted and walked back to the three hunters. “They don’t look like they’re gonna make a run for it, do they? We unshackle their legs so they can sit on the horses properly, we clean up the old guy, and we douse them down, try to wake them up a little. They’ve gotta look good, if nothing else.”
The rest of the sec party could only agree. None of them wished to incur the wrath of their baron, and so they all pitched in to help. The three companions were taken down from the horses, the chains to their legs unlocked and removed. All three of them found it difficult to stand at first, as their muscles were cramped and starved of oxygen and blood from their awkward positioning on their mounts. Doc was covered in caked vomit, which was already starting to harden and dry out under the chem-covered sun. He was doused in water and rubbed down with rags, his rambling ravings ignored as two sec men cleaned him up.
Ryan and Krysty seemed to see the world around them through a mist. They recognized each other, and they could see that Doc was being cleaned up, but what they couldn’t tell was why. There was only something in their heads that kept dragging their thoughts back to Jak, and how to chill him.
They stood, looking as though they were a million miles away, swaying slightly where their muscles were still returning to normal. Tracey looked at them and sucked in his breath. He’d better liven up the fuckers, and pretty damn quickly.
“We got spare water, other than their canteens?” he asked the assembled sec party. There was a general assent. “Douse them,” he ordered. “That might wake them up a bit.”
The shock of the cold water as it hit all three of the companions in their faces was as effective as the tattooed sec man had hoped. The mists seemed to clear before their eyes, and their senses were shocked into some kind of normality.
“Do that again, and I’ll drop you where you stand,” Ryan snarled at the sec man in front of him.
“Y’know something, One-eye? I’m actually kinda glad to hear you say that,” Tracey said with an audible relief. “You was all kinda out of it, there. You know why you’re here?”
“Of course we do,” Krysty snapped. “We’ve got to find that treacherous little fuck Jak, and make sure he buys the farm.”
The tattooed sec boss turned to his sec companions. “Yeah, it’s worked okay,” he said as an aside.
Turning back to the three companions, he continued. “Look, I’m real sorry if y’all kinda pissed at me for what’s just happened, but you were all a little bit—” he gestured to his head “—which I guess is that little shit’s fault. We’re taking you to where the hunt for him is taking place. Then you get to find the fucker. Sound good?”
“Lead us to him, dear boy, lead us to him,” Doc muttered, shaking his head to clear it further and sending a spray of water from his straggling mane of white hair.
Tracey smiled to himself. The other sec men looked at him in amazement. Considering how stupe he was, that was a pretty amazing story he’d just told the hunters. They weren’t to know that he had been briefed earlier by Horse, in case of such an eventuality. And no matter how dumb he was, he had a good memory, parroting the story he had been fed almost word for word.
The sec party remounted and led the hunters on toward the area where the baron and his paying guests were awaiting their arrival. The three companions, their clothes drying rapidly in the sun, were now erect and alert, ready to begin battle. They would arrive at the appointed spot looking lean, mean and ready to fight. Only their hands were chained, and these would be freed in front of the hunt party. Already they looked keen for action, the hatred blazing in their eyes.
The tattooed sec man breathed a mental sigh of relief. No one would know how they had traveled most of the distance, and no one in the forest had seen them dazed, confused and slung over the horses. Appearances were everything, Horse had drummed into him.
And they looked just fine…
JAK LAUREN HAD KNOWN that he had very little time when he had been set loose by Horse and Riley, in front of the coldheart bastards who were paying jack to pit him against his friends. What time there was, he had to use well. He didn’t want to chill Ryan, Doc and Krysty, but unless he could find some way of breaking the hold Ethan had over them, then that was the way it would have to be. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be a necessity.
But first, Jak felt compelled to try to make them see sense. And if he was going to do this, then he would have to use all the cunning and hunt skills that he possessed to trap them. While keeping this out of the view of the party who were paying to watch the hunt.
Ethan and his guests had assumed that Jak would make a straight run for it, to try to put distance between himself and his pursuers. They planned to follow the other three. As a result, they didn’t track his progress through the forest, and so were unaware of his actions.
On being set free, Jak had made a straight run until he was sure that he was out of earshot and out of view. Then he had stopped and climbed a tree overhanging the path he had taken. The foliage was less dense there and it would be an obvious route. He listened and waited for a short time, but there was no indication that he had been followed in any way.
He didn’t wait as long as he would have wanted. There wasn’t the time and he knew that any of his actions from now on would be compromised by the fact that he had to hurry. He was battling time as much as he was battling his erstwhile friends.
Jak slipped down the tree and doubled back, taking care not to tread exactly the same ground. He came within view of the hunt party, talking idly among themselves while they waited for the hunters to be delivered to them. They were placing bets on how long it would take him to be caught, and discussing with some animation the ways in which they thought he would be chilled. Jak smiled coldly, his hard eyes glittering. He’d remember some of the things they said, and just mebbe use them against these bastards if he got the chance.
They would be there for some time, and they seemed disinterested in what he was doing. Good. That gave him the freedom to put a few plans into operation.
Jak left them and moved silently back into the forest. He was aware of the smell of animal life all around him. Most of these were small birds and mammals that offered no threat, but he thought of the bald sec man’s warning about the mutie raccoons they had encountered before. If he could locate their dens, then he could use that to his advantage.
It wasn’t difficult for someone of Jak’s skills and instincts. The creatures were basically nocturnal, so they would be at rest in this heat. That would make them particularly bad-tempered when roused; it also made them easier to track right now. Following his senses, Jak headed for an area where the smell of the animals was strong and there were less traces of other birds and mammals. The raccoon muties would scare away any other life that came near, so the absence of any scent and noise other than the raccoon was a giveaway. Their dens were set into mounds of earth, burrowed deep beneath the shade of a crop of stunted trees. Jak smiled to himself, marking the spot mentally. He could lead his pursuers here, stir up the beasts and get behind the inevitable battle.
That was one trap. He would need more.
Jak moved in a semicircle around the area where the hunt party was waiting. He didn’t want to go too deep to give anyone too much room in which to lose themselves. They would expect this from him, but his plans ran to the contrary. He didn’t want to lose them, he wanted them all close, where he could track their movements. Rather than run, by waiting and planning, he was turning the hunt on its head—they may think that they were hunting him, but in truth the reverse was the case.
At an angle approximately three o’clock to where the hunting party waited unawares, and almost 120 degrees from where the mutie raccoons slept in the daylight,
Jak found a small hollow. It was a dip in the earth where the tree roots formed a web of potentially fatal consequences. Anyone tripping or getting caught in this web could seriously damage their leg or ankle, rendering them vulnerable to attack. The thing that stopped this hollow being a deadly trap was that the root systems were in full view to anyone approaching, being uncovered.
Jak had time to change that. As quietly as was possible, he ripped tree branches covered in leaves and armfuls of grasses from the surrounding area, covering the root system as best as possible. It wasn’t a perfect trap, but he didn’t have the time to perfect the camouflage. It was covered and the foliage overhead darkened the hollow. Someone chasing him at full speed wouldn’t hopefully have the time to think before charging straight into the trap. Even if they were suspicious, it would at least slow them.
Two traps laid, but three companions to stop. Jak’s brain worked feverishly. He needed at least one more trap, and quickly. The problem was that the woodland presented him with very little in the way of ready-made traps and he didn’t have the time to spend on constructing something a little more useful. Ideally, he would have liked to use one of the denser crops of trees to hide a net trap that he could lead one of the companions into, but that would necessitate the construction of a net, and although he could find the makings of one easily enough, he didn’t have the luxury of time necessary to make the net from these raw materials. He needed something in the natural landscape that he could turn to his advantage rapidly.
It was then that his heightened senses told him that the hunting party was being joined by others, which must mean his erstwhile friends who were now programmed to hunt him down.
Jak’s mind worked rapidly. The area of densely wooded forest where he would have built the net trap was also home to a sudden steep incline with loose shale and a treacherous path underfoot. He knew that from his recce; his enemies wouldn’t. Ryan or Krysty would be able to cope, Doc perhaps less so. So he would try to lead the older man into this section of the forest and use this trap on him. The tree roots would be good for snagging the Titian-haired woman, who always wore the silver-tipped cowboy boots that were usually good on rough terrain, but were spectacularly ill-suited to such a treacherous underfoot environment. And the mutie raccoons were something he would keep for Ryan. The one-eyed man was the strongest of the three, and as such would need the trap that sapped that strength the most, leaving him vulnerable.
Jak gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head, his stringy white hair, matted with sweat already, barely moving around his scarred white face. It didn’t make much sense to him to be thinking of taking out his old companions in this way, but he knew that it was a necessity. They would certainly be out for his blood.
He moved back toward the spot where the paying hunters were waiting for their sport to arrive. Without the benefit of Jak’s highly attuned senses, they were unaware that the second half of their entertainment was approaching until the sec men and the companions were almost upon them—by which time Jak had positioned himself so that he could observe their arrival, and take stock of what condition they were in. As far as he was concerned, the most important thing—in fact, that on which his success in staying alive depended—was to separate the companions almost from the off, so that he could take them in a series of one-on-ones. Mebbe that wouldn’t be possible. He hoped it would be, as it would make his task that much easier.
From his vantage point, he assumed an almost preternatural immobility to avoid detection, waiting until they came into view.
“AH! ABOUT TIME, TOO, but I think you’ll find it’s been worth the wait,” Ethan commented as Tracey led his small party into the clearing where the paying guests were waiting along with Horse and Riley.
The dreadlocked sec chief cast an eye over the three companions. They were erect in their saddles, their legs free but their arms chained. They looked alert, wide-eyed and ready to hunt. But the dreadlocked man smiled humorlessly as he noted that there were barely dried water stains on their clothes, and that Krysty’s mane of Titian-red hair was darker at the ends, a little matted where it had been wet, was still damp, and had tangled in the backdraft of their journey. He suspected that they had been in a less than presentable state until they had reached the edge of the forest, and that the stupe sec man had done the one thing he was good at—following orders carefully. Certainly, unless you looked hard, you couldn’t tell that they were anything less than a hundred percent fit and ready for action.
The sec chief wasn’t to know that Jak was hidden on the edge of the clearing, taking in everything that the sec chief had; noting the same thing, which gave him a little edge the hunting party would know nothing about.
Baron Ethan, on the other hand, was completely immune to these nuances and saw only what his customers saw: three bright-eyed hunters, ready to chill.
“As you can see, gentlemen, they’re in fine fettle, and I’m sure that you would all like to make private wagers on which one of them will take out the albino.”
“Wagers for which you will no doubt act as banker, Ethan—for a small charge,” one of the traders commented. The words caused the party of barons and traders to laugh uproariously. Ethan joined in, but with a self-deprecating air that paved the way for his next comment.
“Of course, you may have intended that in jest, Rowan,” he said to the stocky, tough-looking trader, “but you raise an important point. I will be taking no part in this hunt, and my jack is already secured for supplying the entertainment. If I did act as banker, then it would insure a certain impartiality, would it not?”
The trader he had addressed as Rowan gave him an astonished look that bloomed into a smile accompanied by a full-throated chuckle. “You old bastard! You’re right, of course. The last thing we want to do is fall out and fight among ourselves over a little jack. But it would take you to turn that to your advantage. Still,” he added, addressing the other barons and traders, “I figure that we wouldn’t be here without Ethan’s ingenuity, so if the dude wants to make a little more on the side, who are we to begrudge him?”
Laughingly, the others agreed and argued over who they would place their money upon to be the one to make the actual chill. Horse and Riley watched with a detachment that could only come from being outside the action.
“I don’t care about any of this, I only hope the little fucker gets the one-eyed bastard,” the blond sec man murmured in an undertone to his chief.
Horse bit his tongue to suppress his amusement. “C’mon, Riley, wouldn’t you rather that One-Eye makes it through in one piece so that you can have another go at him—or mebbe you don’t think that you could take him down?” he added after moment’s thought.
The blond glared at his chief through narrowed eyes. “You know I could, if I wasn’t taken by surprise. Anyway, are you telling me that no matter what happens we get to chill all the fuckers?”
“You don’t think that Ethan’s gonna turn them all loose after what’s been going down, do you? As soon as the hunt is over, we have to mop up whatever’s left—whether it’s Whitey or One-Eye or the woman or the old dude, or any combination of them. They’ve all bought the farm, it’s just that they don’t know it yet.”
“What about the black woman and the other guy?”
Horse smiled, but it stopped at the eyes, which were cold and hard. “I don’t think they’ve got anything to worry about anymore.”
Riley gave a low laugh. “I think I’m gonna enjoy this even more than I was before,” he muttered.
Neither man was to know that they were being observed. Jak was positioned in the foliage so that he could see and hear everything that was going on in the clearing, and this discussion had particularly attracted his attention.
There was nothing he could do about Mildred and J.B. They were on their own, and he trusted Mildred to be smart enough to have already worked out that something in Ethan’s plans had been a lie. If any one of them could haul J.B.’s ass out of trouble, and get him better
to fight against the enemy, then it was Mildred Wyeth.
No, Jak’s concerns were based solely around the hunting party in the clearing. The fact that it was no longer chill or be chilled, but all chilled whatever the outcome, changed everything. He would take out the friends turned against him if he had to in order to survive, but if he was going to buy the farm anyway, then his imperatives changed.
Jak wondered about the hypnosis. He had seen Ryan hypnotized before, by the beautiful Katya Beausoleil, who had wanted to take Ryan from his companions to use for her own pleasure. A similar thing had happened with the evil witch queen Jenna, wife of Baron Alien, when a rogue nuke had nearly ended their tenure on the earth. Each time, the one-eyed man had fought an internal battle that had ended with his true self eventually surfacing. Jak had no doubt this could happen again. The question was, would it take longer than Jak could afford?
Similarly, he and Krysty had fallen under the spell of a mutie leader who had wanted to unite all muties in the Deathlands against those who carried no mutated genes. For a while, they hadn’t been themselves, until they had broken free of the mind shackles. So he knew that Krysty had the strength to break out of a hypnotic hold. Once again, it was a matter of time.
As for Doc—The man wasn’t as old as he seemed, his apparent age caused by the stresses of being trawled twice through time by the whitecoats of the Chronos section of the Totality Concept. In the same way, his mind had been twisted and distorted in such a way that his grasp of the every day could sometimes be tenuous. So, once again, it seemed possible that the hypnosis may only have a tenuous hold. It came back to time, once again…
Meanwhile, Ethan was ordering Tracey to release the shackles on the three companions.
“We get to hunt yet?” Ryan asked as the chains were stripped from his wrists, much to the amusement of the assembled spectators.