by Alex Wells
“Shit,” Lykaios said.
“Y’all from Ludlow?” Hob already knew the answer.
The oldest of the kids, a rail-thin girl with her dark brown hair puffed out in an afro, nodded. “Mag’s been teachin’ us what to do, if somethin’ bad happened. Makin’ us practice. So we grabbed the babies and run.”
Hob felt like a hand squeezed her heart, with fingers made of fear and pride. “Then you done right and good. You hunker down in this here gully and stay quiet.”
“Yessir,” the girl said.
“You know how to shoot?”
“A little,” the girl said.
Hob reached back into the holster on her motorcycle and pulled out the sawed-off shotgun and held it out. “Seen one of these?”
The girl hesitated, then took it. She looked at it like it might bite her. “Somethin’ like.”
“Never aim it near someone you ain’t gonna shoot. Keep it pointed at the ground. But you see a greenbelly comin’, you shoot ’em. You understand me?”
The girl’s expression twisted, firmed. She nodded. “Yessir.”
“Stay outta sight. We’ll come back for ya when it’s safe.” Keenly aware of the childrens’ eyes on all three of them, Hob found the steep path down into the gully. They stowed the motorcycles down there. “Keep your helmets on. For the radio.” Hob saw wide eyes in small faces from dark to pale watch as they armed themselves, especially Lykaios and Diablo with their hammer and hand ax respectively. It was a relief to get into the tunnel, away from the kids.
“What’re we gonna do?” Lykaios whispered as they followed the narrow tunnel.
“Dunno,” Hob said. “See what’ll be most useful when we get there.” Without knowing how bad things were in the walls, planning any further ahead seemed pointless.
The tunnel popped them out in a warehouse, far enough from the walls that they only smelled the smoke and chemical stink, enough to make them a little dizzy, but not enough to knock them over. “Fuckin’ nox gas. Ain’t smelled that in years,” Lykaios said.
“Means they ain’t tryin’ to kill anyone outright,” Diablo pointed out.
Hob led them around the side of the warehouse, then stopped them with a movement of her hand. The general roar of chaos was loud, but she thought she heard something closer. She ducked her head around the corner to see a group of four greenbellies clashing with three miners. One of the greenbellies had captain’s chevrons on his sleeves, and he had a spring-loaded baton in one hand, a clear shield around the other, bashing at a miner who had three light-reflecting stripes on their helmet instead of one – a crew leader.
Hob stepped back and held out her hand for Diablo’s ax. She drew one of her revolvers with the other hand and crept around the corner–
–in time to see the greenbelly captain drop the baton and snatch a pistol out of his belt as the miners tried to run. Even with the chaos echoing through the town, the snap of those shots was loud. The miner in the crew leader helmet went down in a limp tumble.
Cursing into her helmet, Hob snapped off a shot, not taking the time to aim. The greenbelly captain jerked, stumbled, but she saw it hadn’t gotten through his armor, just given him a kick in the shoulder. She kept rushing in to swing the ax at the hand holding the pistol. She felt it bite, and grate, heard a muffled scream. Lykaios came around her side, hammer coming around to slam into the head of the second greenbelly. His helmet shattered and he went reeling, still on his feet. Diablo had the third, coming in with his own shotgun.
The fourth, Hob turned to shoot, yanking on the ax as she did to try to free it. By some miracle, her hasty aim got her lined up with the guard’s neck, the only weak point she ever counted on in armor. The bullet sliced between breastplate and helmet, and the guard dropped, gurgling.
And the other two miners, who had slowed when their leader got shot, charged back in. One whirled a pickax over their head, narrowly missing hitting Lykaios to bury it in the back of the reeling security man.
Outnumbered, the greenbelly captain, blood running dark from his wrist, ran.
Hob emptied the revolver after him, but didn’t chase. After an abortive jerk of a step, Diablo and Lykaios didn’t either. They fell back to the remaining two miners, who knelt over their fallen comrade.
“He gone?” Hob asked, even as she knelt to yank the helmet off the guard she’d shot in the neck.
The miner looked up and pulled the breather mask off the fallen man. Hob recognized him instantly: Clarence Vigil, the man who’d taken in Mag.
“Fuck.” It felt a little like getting the wind kicked out of her, but there wasn’t time for that, and she was here for a reason. “Mag?”
The miner finally spoke, in a high, muffled voice. “Ain’t seen her. We got separated every which way when we fell back.”
“We better fall back too,” Lykaios said. “We got more coming.” There was a rumble coming down the street, formless light in the smoke and gas fog getting a lot more focused. The ground trembled under their feet.
The two miners started to pick up Clarence’s body. Hob shouted, “Stop! Ain’t got time for the dead. Go!” She gave them a firm yank up for good measure, and got them stumbling down the street. They needed to find the rest of the miners, and fast, if they wanted a chance in hell to defend.
The fallback point was the church; they’d blocked off the streets with furniture and boards, and there were several greenbellies dead on their faces nearby. The rest of the security men were back a respectful distance, though Hob doubted that would hold long.
A tall, gawky man Hob didn’t recognize – not that she could tell a damn one of them apart in their helmets and breather masks – met them in the press behind the barricades. “Where’re the rest of you?”
“Outside the walls.” Hob checked her pocket watch. “And we got ten minutes till they come in and make as big a stink as they can.” She looked at the people around her, the smoke-smudged faces showing over rock dust-black breathers. “Y’all ready to make a push?”
“They got Clarence, Omar,” the miner who’d been leading said. “Longbridge shot him in the back.”
“They ain’t been shootin’ much with real bullets,” Omar said. “Been takin’ people off, instead.”
“They made an exception for him,” Hob said. There wasn’t any time for this. “Where’s Mag?”
“Don’t know.”
Didn’t mean anything, she reassured herself. Shit like this got dicey. “Then guess you’re in charge. You ready?”
Omar seemed to give himself a shake, a full body shudder to try to work the world back into some kind of sense. “Ain’t got a choice.” But his eyes were almost pleading as he looked at her. Hell, for all his size, Hob would have bet he wasn’t even as old as her and Mag.
“Y’all got any fireworks or anythin’ you can fish up?”
Omar squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Wait. We got the company store now. We can make… bombs with alcohol.”
Alcohol wouldn’t burn hot on its own, but it’d be a good distraction – and Hob could see about giving the fire more ferocity. They didn’t have time to mix up anything fancier. “Grab it all, now.”
Heads ducked low to keep safe behind the barricades, with the guards firing shots still and winging in gas grenades that the miners quickly threw back, they passed out every bottle of spirits they’d been able to grab from the company store. The miners stuffed dirty handkerchiefs down the necks to start soaking up the alcohol, though Hob caught more than a few prying up their masks to take a swig for fortification first.
Hob traded out her helmet for the Mariposa one she’d stolen – if the Wolves could manage a radio channel, she was damn sure the greenbellies would too. The helmet smelled like mint and garlic, but she did her best to ignore the sick tickle in the back of her throat as she tried to make sense of the chatter. She knew the minute Dambala, Freki, and Geri had started their part of the attack. One of the floodlights on a guard tower they could see blew out in a shower of b
right sparks. And over the channel, she heard men shouting, “Lights, we have lights.” “Reinforcements?” “It’s bandits. Fucking bandits!”
“Lightin’ ’em up,” Hob said. She held her hand out, and flame popped onto the ends of those handkerchiefs in a wave. A few of the miners yelped, but they’d been warned. They held onto their bottles.
“Throw ’em!” Omar shouted, surging up over the barricade to sling the bottle at the momentarily confused security men. The bottle of cheap whiskey, its top flaming, shattered on the street. Glass and alcohol sprayed on the surrounding greenbellies, and there was enough spark left from the rag that the fumes caught in a rush. More bottles shattered on the street as the volley continued.
Hob closed her eyes, feeling all those cool little alcohol fires. It was too hard for her to make big fires out of nothing, but once the fire was already burning? She felt it in her blood. She fed it strength and pushed it, hotter and whiter, so it could burn more than just alcohol.
Security guards started screaming, the smarter ones dropping to the street to try to roll the flames out, as the miners poured over the barricade. Rather than waste limited bullets against heavy body armor, they attacked with their pickaxes and hammers, focusing on battering the guards down and yanking their helmets and breather masks off.
And Hob, standing on the barricade so she could see, her one eye squinted down to a slit, kept the fires burning hot, yanking them away from Diablo, Lykaios, and the miners, and fanning them onto the guards.
Between that and the howling confusion happening over the Mariposa shortwave channel, within minutes the greenbellies were into full retreat. They dragged their downed men, a few with shields bringing them together in the front to protect themselves from more thrown bottles, small hand hammers, chisels, and rocks. Hob kept the fire leaping from one guard to the next, her head swimming with the effort.
Diablo popped out of the crowd and scrambled up the barricade next to her. “Trucks are pullin’ back. Bala asks pursue, yes or no?”
Hob read the surging mass of miners like a book. They could push, but they weren’t an army. If they cornered the greenbellies, things would get a lot uglier a lot faster. She didn’t know why the security men had been softhandling things, but if their escape got cut off in the face of a riot, they’d go full lethal. Even as she watched, a few of the guards abandoned their shotguns and pulled their service revolvers. Miners dropped on the street in dark pools of blood.
“No pursuit,” Hob said, though it burned her. She still didn’t know where Mag was. And if something had happened to her, there wasn’t a hell deep enough for these greenbellies to hide in. Wolves were made to hunt. She’d get them later. “We got cleanup to do here.”
10 Days
Once the greenbellies were driven off proper – and Freki’s crew followed them, lights doused, for a good twenty kilometers to make sure – Ludlow’s quiet weather witch, one of her teeth missing and her lip split, shifted the winds again to clear out the smoke and gas. Diablo went to bring the children back in and almost got shot for his trouble. And free of their masks, the miners took stock of the damage and started counting the bodies.
The Wolves, mercifully all of them who’d ridden in, if plus a few wounds that needed stitching or setting, did their best to help. Diablo, with Lykaios’s steady hands, got the Wolves doctored and waded right into the crowd of wounded miners. Dambala put himself in charge of getting sentry posts set up, and clearing out the guard houses – when the trucks had fled, the rest of the garrison had gone with them. Lobo mustered as many able bodies as he could and they soaked up every bit of spilled water they could find at the miners’ supply caches – somehow the company had known about these new ones and torn them apart. Geri set himself to getting the wall as rebuilt as it could be with the materials at hand, and he had plenty of eager workers for all everyone dragged with exhaustion. And Freki parked himself with Hob, helping the crew sorting and hauling the bodies.
Seven security guards dead, most of them by the church barricade, their heads beaten in. Twenty-two miners, including Clarence Vigil, were laid out with care on the church pews where their loved ones could find them and wash their faces. But more worrisome were the missing – at least forty by the rough count of the crew leaders, scrambling to check all their people off on their lists.
And Mag, Freki found facedown near the broken wall. He yelled for Hob and she came running. She saw him turn Mag over in his arms, her head lolling limply, and thought she’d never breathe again around the rock her heart suddenly became. Then Freki looked up and said, “She’s alive.”
One side of Mag’s face was a massive bruise, though when Diablo checked her over, he said her skull wasn’t cracked, and that was a goddamn miracle and a half. She’d probably just gotten dosed good by the nox gas Mariposa had been slinging over the wall.
Hob carried Mag back to Clarence’s… to Mag’s house and settled her into bed, then parked herself in the chair next to it. And fuck, she didn’t care any more that everyone hated her filthy habit. She opened the window and started smoking her way through cigarette after cigarette. Considering the air from outside, still stinking of chemicals and burning, her cigarettes didn’t smell so bad after all.
After an eternity contained in three cigarettes, Mag stirred. Hob flicked the half-finished butt of her fourth out the window. “Mag?”
“Hob?” Mag’s voice was a whisper of sand and gravel. “My… head.”
“Looks like you got hit real good with somethin’,” Hob said. “Still didn’t crack that damned thick skull of yours though.”
Somehow, Mag managed a smile, though it had to hurt like hell around all those bruises. “You ain’t one to talk.” Suddenly her right eye – her left was too swollen to do much of anything – opened wide. “Where’s Anabi?”
It wasn’t that Hob had forgotten the woman, so much as she hadn’t had room in her head for anything but Mag. She had to think a moment. “She weren’t among the dead that I saw,” Hob said. “Might be out there, helpin’ out. Everyone’s workin’ ’cept for slackers like you.”
Mag struggled to sit up. “No, I need to know – she’d be here, Hob.”
Hob leaned forward to put her hand on Mag’s chest. “Diablo said no fannin’ around. You bide.” She waited for Mag to nod and still. And, hell, she might as well break the other news now. “Clarence Vigil is dead. Greenbelly captain shot him in the back in the street. Weren’t nothin’ I could do.”
Mag went silent and still, and for a horrible moment Hob wondered if she hadn’t heard, if she’d have to repeat that news. She almost missed Mag cussing her out like she had when she’d broken the news of Phil’s death. At this rate, she might as well be the angel of death, and she suddenly hated it. But Mag took in a shaky breath. “I’ll see to him, then. He didn’t have no family.”
“He’s gettin’ his feet washed like one of them martyrs by the preacher man,” Hob said. “You worry about yourself, ’cause you’re still livin’. I’ll go ask after Anabi.” She headed back out into the street. Took her more time than she liked to hunt down the miner with the lists. She liked the news he gave her even less – Anabi was definitely one of the missing.
By the time she got back to the house, Mag had somehow crawled her stupid ass down to the kitchen and got a glass of water, though she didn’t seem to have the strength to do more than sit at the table and clutch it. She took one look at Hob’s expression and the color drained out of her skin, making the red of her new bruises as vivid as a burn. “Is she…”
“Not dead. But taken. We think. There’s some forty-three people confirmed missing now. Bala said he saw them puttin’ people in the trucks. At the time, he thought it was injured guards. Didn’t get a good look, ya ken. But might have been…”
Mag let out a low, despairing moan. “He warned me. He tried to warn me. But…”
“Who? Tried to warn you about what?”
“He said they have a new site. That they were going to move
us there, by force if they had to. He–”
“Mag,” Hob interrupted. “Who?”
“Oh… Coyote’s brother,” she said. “The government man.”
Hob sat down very carefully. “He was here?”
“Sittin’ where you are now.”
“How ’bout you tell me the whole thing.”
Mag’s story was stumbling and halting, but Hob got the gist of it at least. And then she fetched the copy of the coordinates that Mag had made so she could look at them herself, comparing them to the map she had. “I don’t…”
“Get one of the big maps from the mine office. It’s gotta be the standard stuff they use.”
Mag didn’t move in the short time it took Hob to run that errand. She spread the map over the table and looked it over, muttering to herself. Mag, who had her eyes closed, didn’t seem to hear. Finally, she found the point, hell and gone away from Newcastle, in the middle of a great stretch of saltpan marked as an extinct ocean. “Fuck,” she whispered as she measured the distance with her fingers. The already impossible distance Geri had estimated had been bad enough, and it looked like their assumptions had been wrong. Their Well was almost ten thousand kilometers away, over a week of solid riding into unknown territory.
“That good, huh?” Mag said, without humor.
Hob sat, rubbing at her face with one hand. Hopeless frustration welled up, threatened to choke her if she didn’t scream it out. “That man’s fuckin’ crazy. We ain’t got the resources to get that far out. Can’t carry enough fuckin’ water, for one. We–”
Mag slammed her hand down on the map, her palm covering the point that Hob had marked with grease pencil. “Yes, you fuckin’ can,” she said, her open eye blazing. She sounded so like Old Nick that it made Hob’s blood run cold. Then Mag lunged across the table and grabbed Hob’s hands, her fingers hot and strong as iron. “They took my girl, and they’re gonna work her to death out there so the bosses can talk about how much fuckin’ money they made. So you fuckin’ will. You tell me why.”