by James Axler
The explanation for all this was probably worth much less than a half pinch of nukeshit, thought Ryan, and right now there were other problems on the agenda, which needed to be solved urgently.
He stared up at Jordan Teague, atop his pyramid, cringing into the wingback chair with a mad and pop-eyed look about him.
"R-Ryan…?"
The word came out as a hoarse raven's croak.
"Teague, you fat bastard! You're the best target I've seen in years! Even a blind man could take you out!"
"Ryan! Jesus! What're ya doin? What is this? W-we gotta talk, fer Chrissake!" The bulk blubber of him was quaking like a jelly in a high wind. "Th-this ain't 'the way to do business!"
"You're in deep shit, Teague. I swear I'm gonna give you to the cannies. Bunch of them could live off you for a month."
"M-my God, Ryan! Ya gotta tell me…I'll do anything…gotta tell me what ya want! I'll do it…I'll do it!"
Ryan was disgusted. However many faults Teague had— about a zillion, if one were to count—however many monstrous deeds could be laid at his door, at least there'd been a time when he'd been in control, at least there'd been a time when he'd commanded a certain amount of respect as a hard man who'd carved himself a niche in the Deathlands and stayed put where others had fallen. This abject caterwauling and cringing in ludicrous terror was appalling, made him simply a bladder of lard worth nothing. Less then nothing.
Ryan put up the LAPA and pumped three rounds into the top step of the pyramid, just below Teague's twitching boots. Teague yelled, tried to turn himself into a fat ball, as the bullets smashed straight through the construction, bursting more glass the other side.
Ryan laughed as he realized the pyramid wasn't solid.
"Hun! The base! Flay it!"
Hunaker caught on. She reached for the MAC-11, rolled onto her stomach again, aimed for the second-from-bottom step and squeezed off a withering blast of rounds that turned her immediate target into an explosive spray of blown-out wood chips before powering subsonically through the hollow interior and ripping out the other side, only slowing marginally as they zip-drilled the flesh, sinew and bones of the man crouched there. The guy was shoved over bodily by the punishing impact, most of the MAC's mag transforming him into a mere torso from which blood sprayed.
The second man, yelling in panic as he, too, cottoned on, jumped from cover, M-16 hammering wildly in Ryan's direction. But Ryan was on full-auto now, and his fire line caught the man and followed him, slamming him back against the mirror wall in a twisted body tangle, unstitching him, opening him up as he smashed into the glass, soft pointed bullets and glass shards erupting him into a red rag doll.
There was a microsecond's silence and then Ryan was on his feet and sprinting back to the curtain, throwing it aside and bawling for Roll. Koll came running, his own LAPA held out.
Pointing, Ryan snapped, "There's a door back there-check it out. Look for an old guy. Long hair, black gear. Nail any goons, but don't nail him."
He turned, brandishing his piece at Teague.
"Down, and make it snappy, fat man." He said to Hunaker, "And for fuck's sake do something about those goddamned women. Anything!"
He watched as Jordan Teague clambered down the steps of the pyramid. As he reached the floor he pulled the blue robe around him defensively. It didn't meet in the middle. Ryan went close, poked at the sagging gut with the LAPA's barrel. Teague's beady little eyes shone with fear.
"You fat double-crossing bastard," Ryan hissed. "I oughta take you apart."
Teague wheezed, "I ain't done nothin', Ryan."
"That," said Ryan icily, "as someone said to me not too damned long ago…someone who's now dead!" And he spat the word at Teague, who waddled back two steps at the violence of the sound, "is a double fucking negative."
"I… I dunno watcha mean, Ryan!" Teague squeaked.
"It means, fat man, you have done something"
"Please, Ryan…" The man's voice was a pleading whisper, and there were tears rolling and bouncing down his cheeks. "Tell me."
"You had our train nerved out, and you've got the Trader. And now I have you!"
Teague's face shook, triple jowls quivering like a turkey's wattles. He muttered, "Uh…yeah. Cort did… say…" Then he croaked, "But I was against the idea, Ryan, against it. Ya gotta believe me."
"You wanted the train for nothing—you simply iced the whole…" A wildfire of fury boiled through him suddenly and he rammed the LAPA barrel into Teague's stomach, yanked it back, flipped it and smashed the butt into the throat of the tottering, gobbling figure. Teague fell back with a strangled shriek, sprawled ludicrously half on, half off the bottom step of his pyramid throne, clutching at his neck, his face scarlet. Ryan flipped the gun again and held it down at Teague, aiming at his gut, his finger tight on the trigger, his face squeezed into a frozen mask.
From across the room, though it seemed like much farther, he heard Hunaker say softly, "Ryan."
He breathed out slowly, lowered his piece. He said tightly, "When this is over, Teague, you and Strasser…" He sniffed air into his lungs, threw his head back, breathed again, this time gustily. He said, his voice less taut, "Who's the old man?"
"Old man?" Teague's voice was a broken gargle.
"Old man, old man!" snarled Ryan. "The old buzzard you called Doc."
Teague shook his head feebly.
"I dunno, Ryan. He just… appeared. One day. Came into town. Year back, maybe longer."
"Who is he, what's he do, where's he from?"
"Dunno. Dunno nothin'." The words came out fast, a panic-stricken stream. "I thought it'd be a laugh, you know, to have him around. Cort don't like him, makes him…do things. Said he was a doctor, acted real strange. Still does, goes off in a fuckin' dream, talks…I dunno, 'nother language. Long words. Some guys did somethin' to him, took him off from someplace. But he never said where, when, why. Can't understand the guy sometimes, talks to ya like he's talkin' to a buncha kids. Shit, I dunno, Ryan—that's it."
"What about this fog?"
"Oh, yeah. He's lookin' for a fog." Teague tried laughing, but then thought better of the idea. "Thass what he says, lookin' for a fog, special kind of fog. I dunno what the hell he means, Ryan. He says that on the other side life's better. He's burned out. Rads've eaten his brain away."
"Didn't look like he had the Plague to me, Teague."
"No, no. He's fit enough, yeah. Brain-fucked is all."
"Those two balls. Eggs."
"S'all he had with him, Ryan, when he came into town. Y'gotta believe me. Didn't have nothin’ else. Some kind of metal, goes crazy when you take 'em off him. Cort gets off on doin' that, takin' 'em away from him. Guy has a fuckin' fit."
Koll suddenly reappeared. His face was set.
"Nothing out back, but there are lights heading up this way."
Samantha the Panther came through the curtains.
"J.B. says…"
"Lights. Yeah." Ryan gestured at Teague. "Take him out front, where we came in."
He ran back to the entrance hallway, then up the stairs to the second story. Rintoul emerged from the shadows and pointed to a room. Ryan padded across to where J.B. was hunched against a window frame.
"Two trucks and a buggy. Could be Strasser."
Ryan peered out. The arcs were still flickering, but in their nervous illumination Ryan could see what J.B. had seen. The trucks had reached the front of the house below and were stopping, the buggy sweeping in from behind. A tall, gauntly built man, bareheaded and black garbed, emerged from the front of the buggy, followed by two sec men.
"Yeah."
Strasser was staring around, peering to the left and right as though looking for someone.
"And they don't know we're here. He's looking for the guards we iced."
Ryan rerigged the LAPA and brought out his SIG-Sauer. He sighted on the roof-mounted spotlight of the buggy and put a round into it. There was a crash of glass, a sharp metallic clang and the light went dead. S
trasser jumped, his head jerking up as his hand reached at his coat.
Ryan shouted, "You're dead first, Strasser. Whatever happens."
Strasser stared upward, his skull-like face expressionless.
"Ryan. Might've guessed you'd still be loose. But what can you expect when you employ imbeciles."
J.B. muttered, "I'll go down. Get Henn and the rest. Get the door open."
Ryan called out, "You killed a lot of our people, Strasser."
The bony man shrugged but said nothing.
"Tell the trucks to beat it, and tell them not to mess up when we come out. Get your men out of the buggy."
"Why should I do that, Ryan?" Strasser's voice, like his face, was expressionless.
"We got Teague."
Strasser pursed his lips, then shrugged again and nodded slowly. He began to turn away.
"And don't move from that spot, shithead."
Strasser stood still, pointed at the trucks, began talking quickly to the two men with him. One of them went to the buggy, his voice a mutter of sound. Ryan watched as goons began climbing out of the buggy, five in all. The trucks revved up, backed off from the house and turned, disappearing down the driveway into the darkness beyond the arc lights' beams. Ryan could see their headlamps cutting into the blackness. The men who had come from the buggy began to back away from the vehicle onto the grass.
"J.B.!"
Below him he saw light spill out from the opening door and he turned and raced back across the room, into the corridor, down the stairs, the SIG still clutched in his right hand.
"Let's go."
He shoved the SIG at Teague's head, and Teague whimpered as they moved out of the house toward Strasser and the buggy.
"We go to where the Trader is, we go to where the train is, and then we go."
Strasser said, "Fortunes of war, Ryan," His hands came out in a wide-armed shrug. "So near, and yet so far. Ah, well…"
There was something wrong here, but Ryan couldn't figure out what it was. He knew Strasser. Strasser was too cool—far too cool. Then in the same moment that he saw muzzle-flash from the buggy interior, Teague's head exploded like an overripe fruit, spraying him with blood, brains and homogenized bone. The double crack of the shots came a microsecond later. Teague lurched, collapsed into him soundlessly, and the dead bulk of the man shoved him groundward, knocking the SIG from his grasp. There was another, longer, burst of fire and a crazed yell from behind, then Strasser was screaming, "Hold it!"
Ryan heaved at Teague, rolled him off, as icy phantom fingers insinuated themselves into his stomach. What a jerk-off, he thought disgustedly. Then Strasser was above him, a handgun gripped in his gloved hand, its barrel inches from Ryan Cawdor's good eye.
"Don't twitch. Shithead!" The gaunt man's voice was a crow of delight and malevolent triumph. "Thought you had an ace, hmm? Tough titty. Now you're going to be telling me about all those ingenious boobies you have." He laughed softly. Chillingly. "Jordan was redundant, Ryan. So are you."
Chapter Nine
THEY HADN'T BOTHERED to take his watch, and the thought pounded his brain like hammer blows that time was running out… running out… running out.
But they'd take the SIG, the LAPA, his grenades, the contents of his belt pouches and the four sticks for the LAPA. All the obvious stuff. And although they'd left him his belt, they'd checked it thoroughly.
But they had not checked his boots, his thick-soled combat boots, and they had not checked his long fur-lined coat. Oh, sure, they'd gone through the pockets, all of them, the obvious places, but once they'd finished that task, under Cort Strasser's gimlet gaze, they had handed it back to him.
"Where you're going, Ryan, you might get cold. And we wouldn't want that."
Very funny.
And they had not checked his scarf, the white scarf of thick silk he'd found in a trunk in an attic in an old abandoned house on the borders of the Swamplands down south. It was a fine scarf, an elegant scarf, a scarf that had once surely belonged to a man of substance who had used it for those very special occasions in the old days. Those way back, pre-Nuke days. The silk was so smooth and so thick and so heavy. Especially so heavy. Especially now.
But they had left him that, probably because it had no meaning to his searchers, since the concept of "dressing up" for those very special occasions was utterly alien to them, something that had no meaning whatsoever. The way they stank, it was clear these guys hadn't washed in years, let alone dressed up.
They had not taken J.B.'s hat, either, an error they might come to regret. While they were being searched—upstairs, here in what once had been the Mocsin City Bank and Loan Facility Corporation building—J.B. had obligingly taken off his old, wide-brimmed fedora, held it upside down, the crown gripped in his left hand, and inserted the fingers of his right hand to flick up the sweatband, just to show there was nothing concealed behind it. The guy pulling weaponry off and out of him, denuding his pouches, groping at the lining of his brown leather jacket, now ran a finger around the inside of the hat suspiciously, peering intently at it, staring up at J.B.'s impassive, bespectacled face, a face made all the more funny looking because the specs had been salvaged from some surviving product dump years ago and distorted J.B.'s features. And shrugged. And watched J.B. press down the sweatband again and plop the hat back on his head. And returned to the far more important business of searching him for concealed cannon, bazookas, a howitzer stuffed down his pants. Shit like that.
Foolish man.
Strictly an amateur.
Even so, even allowing for the stupidity of Strasser's goons, the blinkered comprehension of Strasser himself, Ryan had to admit that this spot was a tight one, and it would need more than merely a modicum of luck and a good stiff breeze to get them out of it.
His ranks now were drastically depleted. That treacherous burst of fire from the concealed marksman in the buggy had left him J.B,, Hunaker, Koll and Sam. And as a wild card, Hovac, waiting at Charlie's—though a pretty damned useless one, all things considered, as Hovac had no means of knowing where they were, what had occurred, and in any case was hardly in a position, even if he did discover their whereabouts, to rescue them. All he would know was that they were late for the rendezvous and time was ticking away.
Time.
Ryan had no intention of checking his watch because that would give Strasser the idea that there was some kind of time factor here, some kind of cutoff Ryan knew about that he didn't. But at a rough calculation Ryan figured that maybe two hours had passed since Hunaker had entered Charlie's with the grim news.
And that in turn meant they had roughly two hours to get their shit together and out. Say one and a half, in case of accidents. Not a lot. Not one hell of a lot.
Easing away from the wall he was lounging against, Ryan said, "You know, we can still come to some kind of deal on all this."
Cort Strasser laughed.
"You're in no position to bargain, Ryan. You're mine. So is your train. All mine."
"You got us, but you don't have the train. Touch the train and you lose it. You lose the lot, Strasser. You think we wire up the odd booby here and there to keep off predators? The old spark bomb to give a guy a shock? If you want the truth, every damned vehicle in that train is set to blow if you so much as breathe on it. I tell you, it's like a house of cards. Tamper with one vehicle and the whole lot goes. It'll be the biggest blowout since the Nuke."
Strasser laughed again, but the laugh was far too loud, far too bouncy.
"What a talent for exaggeration you have, Ryan."
"Try it."
"But you are going to tell me how to render your clever traps useless, Ryan."
"Not me, pal."
Strasser said, "Pain can make a man change his mind."
"Some men. But with me you're gonna have to work at it. And there comes a point with some guys where pain suddenly doesn't matter."
Strasser's skull-like face twisted up into a rictus of anger so swiftly and so suddenly
that it almost seemed his dry, parchmentlike skin might tear. He thrust his head toward Ryan.
"Bravado, Ryan! Sheer fucking bravado! You're no different from anyone else."
Ryan said, "Suck it and see."
Strasser was probably correct. Maybe he was no different from anyone else. But in his past, the memory of it always kept deep in the lower layers of his consciousness, only surfacing rarely these days—always at night's end, when he would sometimes erupt out of his bunk yelling at the black horror of it—was an experience of pain and betrayal so terrible, so soaked in blood and despair that it had seared both his body and his soul. And in the searing—like red-hot steel thrust into the ironsmith's water-barrel—it had tempered him, hardened him maybe beyond the normal human limit.
"Perhaps," said Strasser silkily, "we ought to take your other eye out."
For a second, skeletal fingers of fear enclosed Ryan's heart in a steel-strong grip, clutching, squeezing tight, sending ice through his veins. It was the ultimate terror, maybe his one single most vulnerable spot, the one threat that mocked all his courage and turned cool objectivity into gut-churning panic.