by James Axler
“Haven’t eaten yet,” Ryan said honestly. “Wanted to check the horses first.”
“Fair enough,” the sec chief responded, hitching up his gunbelt. “Well, we’re going that way. Keep ya company.”
Under guard, was more like it, Ryan realized as the combined group started walking along the street. What the nuking hell was going on here?
“So, hot enough for ya?” a fat sec man asked sourly, walking alongside the companions.
“It’s not the heat, it’s the humanity,” Doc replied in sullen disharmony, resting his ebony walking stick on a shoulder.
“Huh? Now, what’s that supposed to mean?” another sec man demanded angrily.
“Just a bit of simplistic jocularity,” Doc replied with a big smile. “Nothing more. Merely a touch of jocundity. A spritely jape.”
“Yeah, sure, I knew that,” the fat sec man muttered, furrowing his brow in confusion.
“You’ll get us all aced showing off like that,” Mildred said softly, brushing back her explosion of beaded hair. “There are still places in the world where smart equals dead.”
“Really now, madam, just because I once read a dictionary—”
“Got what in air?” Jak asked in a shocked tone. Then he spoiled the effect by grinning.
The rest of the companions shared a laugh, and even Bateman gave a little smirk of amusement.
“Crazy young coot.” Mildred snorted in disdain. “At least you didn’t talk about your thesaurus.” But then she noticed that the sec men were relaxing some after the friendly banter. She guessed it was difficult to be suspicious of folks who were joking and laughing. Glancing sideways, the physician saw that Doc and Jak were studiously not looking at each other and realized the exchange had been deliberately staged. Smart, very smart.
Passing through a courtyard dotted with the shade from woven awnings, the companions saw it was filled with exhausted people fanning themselves, sipping gourds of water, and trying very hard not to move. The exhausted people smiled and waved as the companions and the sec men passed.
Which meant they didn’t know what was going on, Ryan rationalized. So it was only the sec men who were worried. Which translated that the baron had done something, or said something, that made the guards nervous. But not enough for them to come charging in with blasters firing.
“How’s the baron?” Krysty asked, obviously following a similar train of thought. She had her shirt unbuttoned about halfway from the stifling heat of the desert sun, and the swell of her breasts glistened with beads of sweat.
“He’s sleeping, thank the gods,” Bateman replied curtly, spreading the lapels of his own shirt collar. There were more tattoos under his clothing, some of them quite lewd. “And we have standing orders never to disturb him when he’s doing something as important as that. Blind norad, knows Baron Harmond gets little enough sack time as it is, what with all of those headaches, and stuff.”
“Didn’t the aspirins help?” Mildred asked in concern.
The sec chief grunted. “Hell’s bells yes! But—”
“Excuse me, healer?” a wrinklie called, hurrying toward the group from an alleyway between two tall buildings.
The sec men and the companions both stopped to meet the old man. Only Bateman and Ryan checked behind to see if this was a diversion to make them look in the wrong direction, but the alleyway across the street was clear, nobody was hiding behind the water trough or hitching post. However, the two men caught each other doing the recce and shared a smile. Then the moment passed and the unease returned like a cold wind in the night.
“Please, can you help me?” the wrinklie pleaded, rocking a bundle of rags in her arms. The collection of cloth wiggled and started to cry.
As the mother spoke softly to the baby, Mildred could see the woman wasn’t really old, just worn down from a hard life.
“What’s wrong with your child?” Mildred asked gently. The sun was blistering and she was starving, but this was her calling, the reason behind everything she did. Healer. The word meant so much more these days than the title of doctor.
“I…” The woman paused, then tried again, the words rushing out. “I heard what you did for the baron. Blessings be on ya for that.”
“Thank you.”
“And?” Bateman snapped impatiently. “Get on with it, Lucinda!”
The woman recoiled slightly at the outburst, then summoned her courage and rallied once more. “Can you fix my little one?” she finished with a nervous flutter, as if half expecting a blow.
“Show me,” Mildred said, extending a hand.
But Bateman stepped between them and pulled back the blanket to scowl at the baby inside.
“Shitfire, Lucinda, you whelped another damn mutie,” the sec chief growled, flicking the blanket back over the infant to take it from his sight. “Curse your guts, you know this was supposed to be chilled at birth.”
The sec man had moved quickly to hide the offense, but Mildred had seen enough. “Good God, sir, its lip is merely a bit malformed. It’s not a mutant!” the physician raged. “That is just a harelip, nothing more. It’s trivial.”
“Mebbe, but it is not a norm,” Bateman said sternly. “So the mother is supposed to ace it. Or the father. Know who the father is this time, Lucinda?”
The woman said nothing, and looked uncomfortably at the brick street below her tattered sneakers.
“Yeah, I thought as much,” the sec chief growled, rubbing his jaw. “Stop wasting our time, and bash in its mutie head.”
Shaking all over, Lucinda burst into tears.
“It is not a mutation, Chief, and I won’t allow you to harm a child!” Mildred stated, stepping between the sec man and the weeping mother.
Bateman glowered at the healer, his jaw working on the matter. Suddenly the fat sec man lashed out with a longblaster. The wooden stock hit Mildred in the mouth and she toppled to the bricks with blood on her face.
“Obey the chief!” he snarled, reversing the longblaster and working the bolt to chamber a round.
Sputtering in rage, J.B. started to charge, but Ryan drew his SIG-Sauer. “Freeze, lard ass!” he demanded. But then a shot rang out and the blaster went flying to land yards away with a clatter.
“Nobody move!” Bateman commanded, gesturing with his smoking revolver. “Back off, Ryan, this is not your concern.”
Suddenly alert, Jak made a gesture and a knife dropped into his palm, but Doc moved first by simply dropping his ebony stick. As it hit the street, everybody flicked their eyes that way, and when the sec men looked back, Ryan was pulling the pin from a gren. The sec chief gasped as Ryan flipped it away and the pin hit the ground with a musical tingling.
“Your move,” Ryan snarled as J.B. worked the bolt on the Uzi rapidfire.
Grimly, Bateman leveled his blaster as the rest of the companions drew weapons and the sec men brought up their assortment of crossbows and scatterguns. In the background, Lucinda slipped way from the heavily armed people.
“The thing is a mutie, so who gives a drek if it lives?” Bateman demanded hotly. Was this what the baron had foreseen? Was this the betrayal?
“We do,” Krysty replied, the MP-5 held tight in both slim hands.
“And your guy started this, not us,” J.B. added tersely.
“Nukeshit! Why—”
“Sir, it’s true,” a young sec man stated, a black-powder revolver tight in his fist. “Fats did strike the healer first.”
Although the teen’s blaster was rock-steady, the hammer wasn’t cocked, and the barrel was noticeably not pointing anywhere near the companions. If anything, it was closer to Fats, who was sweating profusely. His longblaster was still pointed at Mildred, but her Czech ZKR target pistol was aimed right back at him, her finger already putting pressure on the trigger.
A long minute passed with nobody moving or talking, the tension in the air thick enough to patch a breached ville wall. Thankfully, the baby had stopped crying and the only sound was the soft weeping of Lucind
a, which only seemed to heighten the awkward silence.
“Yeah, so he did,” Bateman finally relented, seeming almost disappointed. Slowly, he eased down the hammer on his piece. “Must be this fragging heat. This time of day, the sun can fry a man’s brain. Makes folks do all sorts of stupe stuff. You gotta stay inside when there are no clouds. Just too damn hot.”
Scowling, Ryan said nothing, the gren tight in his fist.
“All right, stand down, boys,” Bateman said, holstering his blaster. “Put those hoglegs away.”
Relaxing their postures, the sec men did as they were ordered, and the companions lowered their own weps. After a few seconds, Ryan knelt to get the pin, carefully disarmed the explos charge, and tucked it into a pocket once more. Everybody sighed in relief at the sight of that.
“As for Fats,” Bateman said, staring at the over-weight sec man. “You’re on shitter duty for a week. Get going, and start digging.”
“But, sir…!” the sec man began askance.
“Move that lard, feeb!” the sec chief bellowed, brandishing a fist. “Or I’ll make that fifty lashes, and an entire moon digging new holes for the shitters!”
Going pale, the sec man hurriedly tucked his blaster into a holster, almost dropping it in the process.
“Well done, sir,” Doc said, retrieving his stick.
Complacently, Bateman gave a shrug. Everybody screwed up now and then. The trick was learning how to keep sucking air afterward.
Going after his blaster, Ryan found the weapon alongside an adobe wall. The soft lead ball from the black-powder blaster had not done any damage to the steel frame of the predark autoloader, aside from leaving a small gray streak where it ricocheted off.
Working the slide a few times to check the action, Ryan tucked the handblaster away when he was satisfied that it was in working condition. Privately, he was impressed, and annoyed. Nobody had ever outdrawn him before. It was a disturbing event. It was the wound in his arm that was still slowing him down. If things ever went bad in the ville, Ryan couldn’t take a chance facing down the sec chief in a fair fight. He’d have to ace the big man on sight, hopefully from a distance. Even better, in the back.
“Okay, healer, go fix the brat.” Bateman sighed, removing his hat to wipe down the inside, then tuck it back into place once more. “If you can, that is. We’ll wait.”
Correct a harelip on a street corner?
“Whoa there, Chief!” Mildred said, holding up a restraining hand. “I can do the surgery, but not until the baby is older.”
“Fair enough, how much older?” he replied grumpily. “Couple weeks?”
“A couple winters is more like it. Mebbe more.”
“More?”
“Don’t concern yourself over the matter anymore,” Krysty whispered, closing her eyes. “The matter has been closed.”
“Now what the nuking hell does that mean?” Bateman demanded, resting a fist on his hip.
“Oh, no,” Doc whispered.
Feeling as if the world were slowing down, Mildred turned to see Lucinda kneeling alongside the water trough. Her hands were dripping wet, and the bundle of rags was nowhere in sight.
“Sweet Jesus!” Mildred screamed, rushing to the horse trough.
Pushing Lucinda aside, the physician saw the cloth bundle lying unnaturally still on the bottom, a tiny pink fist showing from within the soaked cloth. Giving an inarticulate cry, Mildred yanked the swaddling mass out of the shallow water and tore the cloth apart, exposing the still form of the aced child. But as she frantically tried to do CPR on the body, Mildred realized that it was much too late.
“You heartless bitch,” Mildred breathed, barely able to control her emotions as she folded the blanket over the tiny corpse. Then jerking her head up, the physician stared in feral hatred at the frightened woman. “Why? Why in the name of God, did you chill your own child?”
“But he said to,” Lucinda stated, pointing a trembling finger at the crowd of armed people standing in the sunny street.
“Idiot!” Bateman roared furiously. “No decision had been made yet!”
Confused and terrified, Lucinda raised her hands as if in prayer. “Forgive me, sir! I only wanted to obey the law!”
“Liar!” Bateman barked, the word echoing along the street like the crack of a whip. “You only wanted to escape from being punished for breaking the law and not chilling it in the first place!”
“Sir, I—”
“Silence! I should send you to the post for this!” Bateman stormed. “But since you took a life, you owe a life.”
“Sir?”
Bateman turned on a boot heel. “You there! Healer! The one called Mildred!”
“Yeah?” Mildred answered listlessly. Every emotion seemed to have drained out of the physician. She wasn’t angry anymore, or sickened, or anything. She felt numb, as if something had died inside her along with the baby.
“This woman is now your property,” the sec chief declared in a loud voice. “Do with her as you please.”
Caught by surprise, Ryan scowled at the pronouncement as if not sure that he had heard it correctly.
“Eh? What was that again, sir?” Doc demanded.
“I thought there were no slaves in this ville,” J.B. added with a frown, a hand resting on the Uzi.
“There aren’t,” Bateman agreed. “This is a punishment detail. The healer can do anything she likes to the gaudy slut.”
“A rose by any other name, sir!” Doc retorted hotly.
“Stuff a sock in it, Doc,” Mildred snapped. “Okay, just to make sure that I have this right, Lucinda is mine. I have total control.”
“Within reason,” Bateman added grudgingly.
“Meaning?” Ryan asked, crossing his arms.
“Mildred can’t chill her, or make her act against the baron, or the ville.”
“Okay, it’s a deal.”
Standing erect, Mildred offered a hand to Lucinda and hauled the woman to her feet. “Then go home. I set you free.”
As the ville sec men gasped, Lucinda threw off the helping hand as if it were covered with suckers.
“Now just wait a nuke-sucking tick,” a sec man said, starting closer. But Ryan and J.B. got in the way, and the man stopped uneasily, not sure of what to do. The companions and the sec men started glaring at each other again, and it was clear that a confrontation was only heartbeats away from erupting into bloodshed.
“Well, Chief, is she mine, or not?” Mildred demanded.
“She is yours,” Bateman admitted reluctantly. “Although why you would do such a thing I have no idea.”
“Didn’t think you would,” Mildred said. Picking up the soggy bundle of rags, she thrust it back at the startled woman. “Here! Go home and bury your son properly. You’ve suffered enough today. I set you free.”
Hesitantly accepting the bundle, Lucinda ran away to disappear around a corner, all the while sobbing hysterically.
“Poor thing.” Mildred sighed. “Maybe she’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“She’ll be on the last train west by tomorrow,” Bateman stated, viewing the water trough in stern disapproval. “Come on, let’s see to those horses.”
“The last train…You think she’ll ace herself?” Mildred demanded in astonishment. She took a step after the fleeing woman. “Maybe I can help.”
“Already done enough,” Ryan chided sternly. “More than enough. You didn’t mean to, but that’s no help now. Let her buy the farm in peace.”
“The blessings of Gaia upon her soul,” Krysty said softly.
“Amen,” Doc whispered, bowing his head.
Totally confused, Mildred looked around. “But…”
“You shamed her publicly,” a large bald sec man related, using a forearm to wipe the sweat from his face. “It was bad enough she gave birth to a mutie, that happens sometimes. But then a rist refused to even have her as a slave?” He shrugged. “That was too much for anybody to stomach.”
“And you think that she’
ll…but I didn’t want a slave!” Mildred exclaimed, spreading her arms wide. “You of all the people here should understand that!”
The bald sec man furrowed his black face. “Why is that?” he asked, puzzled, extending an arm to show there were no scars on his wrist. “I’ve never worn iron.”
As the others started to walk away, Mildred opened her mouth to try to explain, but then saw the hopelessness of the situation. How could she possibly explain the eighteenth-century slave trade to a free man born in the Deathlands? Nobody treated blacks like second-class citizens anyway. Racism had died in the nuke war. Yet, ironically, Mildred felt that some small part of her heritage was also gone forever, and she wasn’t quite sure how to feel about that yet. People were just people these days. Most folks didn’t care about skin color or religion. Only muties were despised and shot on sight.
“Better get moving or they’ll be serving dinner by the time we’re done with the horses,” Ryan said as the combined group started along the street once more.
A sec man stooped over to retrieve the single brass shell lying on the street, leaving nothing behind but an emptiness in the air and a few damp spots on the ground that were already drying from the searing rays of the relentless sun. Soon there wouldn’t be any signs of the event remaining.
“Damn, it’s hot today,” Bateman commented as they turned a corner.
Ryan didn’t reply, but kept a hand near his blaster until the stables came into view. He felt as though he were in the crosshairs of a longblaster, but couldn’t quite figure out whose hand was on the trigger.
HIGH ON A NEARBY ROOFTOP, the man lowered the longblaster and moved away from the edge in frustration. There had been too many sec men below for him to try a shot. But soon now. Very soon…
Chapter Eight
At the stables, Bateman and the other sec man left the companions and set off to resume a security sweep of the ville.