by James Axler
The cavalcade rumbled into motion again, right for the companions. “I don’t know about you,” J.B. said, “but I got a bad feeling about this.”
“Get into the wag,” Ryan called down the open hatch. “Get ready to roll.”
“Where to?” Mildred called up.
“Away.”
The truck with the big Browning stayed where it was to provide a fire base, Ryan noted glumly. Its thumb-thick bullets would punch through the Hummer like handblaster slugs through wet paper. The foot soldiers came trotting down the street and took up positions across from the garage, covering the double doors with their longblasters. A BAR-man was winged out to either side on his belly with his weapon’s bipod down.
J.B. whistled. “Them suckers’re toting FN FALs and M-1 Garands. And they pack a punch.”
“Then there’s that wrist laser,” Ryan muttered.
The strapping young warrior in the feathered headdress had been holding back, waiting for his minions to get into position. Then he gunned his V-twin engine with a blat like a submachine gun burst, streaked forward down the street, threw the bike into a dust-raising sidewise skid that brought it to a perfect halt facing the garage doors. He gazed up with a haughty expression on his aquiline features and barked something.
“What’s he say?” Ryan asked.
“Beats me,” J.B. said. “Sure sounds like he means it, though.”
“I say, Ryan,” Doc’s voice wafted up from below, “but yonder fine young bravo has just called upon us to—”
“Throw out your weapons,” the warrior called, “and give up at once!”
“English?” Ryan asked. The Armorer shrugged.
Ryan let his Steyr sling-strap slide off his shoulder, laid the rifle carefully on the rooftop. Then he stood. Two dozen rifle barrels tracked him.
“We’re peaceful travelers,” he called. “Traders. We’re not looking for trouble. We just got caught here by the raiders.”
“If you wish no trouble,” the warrior said, “then surrender now before I lose patience.”
“Who are you?”
“I am Two Arrow of the Eagle Knights. I serve Don Hector, ruler of the valley of the Anáhuac.”
“Sec men,” J.B. muttered bitterly. “Fancy drag, fancy blasters. Just lousy sec men.”
“Why do you wish to make us prisoners?” Ryan called. “All we want to do is trade. Or barring that, be on our way.”
“You travel these lands without permission. How do we know you are who you say? Now, throw your weapons out quickly. Or we will come and take them!”
Ryan held up his hand. “I have to talk to my people. Just give me a moment, please.”
Before the warrior in the gaudy headdress could refuse, Ryan hunkered out of sight. “What do you say, J.B.?”
The Armorer hoisted his fedora and scratched at his scalp. “I don’t trust these bastards far as I can pitch that wag with the M-2.”
“That’s two of us. But what are our options?”
“Well, way I see it, we’re outmanned and definitely outgunned. So our choices would seem to be surrender and take our chances with these sweethearts, fight until they blast us down, or—”
A whistling cut across the cloudless sky. Explosions blossomed white among the deserted huts.
* * *
Chapter Nine
“Or, I was gonna say, divine intervention,” J. B. said. “’Cept, unbeliever that I am, I didn’t expect it to actually happen.”
More whistles, more blasts. Ryan peered over the parapet. The street below had emptied miraculously. Apparently not even the haughty Two Arrow was above scooting for cover with rockets dropping at random into the ville.
“Hatch!” Ryan yelled, snatching up his Steyr. “Move!”
“I’m way ahead of you,” J.B. called back. And he was, scuttling for the open hatch in a high-speed duck-walk, clamping his fedora onto his head with one hand. He dived down the hole into darkness.
Ryan followed.
The Armorer was perched on the Hummer’s rear bumper. Ryan dropped down beside him. There were faces full of almost comical surprise turned back toward them.
“Ryan, what—?”
“Just drive, Millie! Out the doors and cut it left.”
Mildred asked no more questions. With the two men clinging to the rear of the wag like baby opossums, she slammed the accelerator home. Juice from the nuke battery surged into the engine. The big Hummer shot forward as if launched from a crossbow, smashed the doors out of its way with a screeching of splintering wood. Thick wood claws raked Ryan and J.B. but they held on grimly.
No sooner had the wag cleared the garage than Mildred turned hard left. The Hummer heeled over on its suspension. It fishtailed, slamming its right rear bumper against the house opposite. J.B. yelled as his hands were torn from their purchase on the Hummer’s rear hatch. Ryan caught him by the back of his leather jacket. Then the wag’s cleated tires grabbed the rutted road and it lurched forward.
The Browning machine gunner had abandoned his pintle mount when the first rockets slammed in, not wanting to be caught on top of a firebomb if the truck took a hit. With no more rockets coming in and the quarry escaping, he remembered his duty—or decided he was more scared of the feathered warrior than blazing death. He sprinted back to the truck from the shelter of a house, swarmed up the side of the cobbled-together mount, grabbed the Browning’s spade grips and punched the butterfly trigger with his thumb. The big machine gun bucked and roared, pushing the heavy truck back to squat on its rear suspension. The 700-grain .50-caliber bullets sprayed the street at random, knocking lose vast chunks of facades, turning whole adobe bricks into gouts of khaki powder.
Mildred didn’t need the splitting-earth roar of the big .50-caliber weapon to remind her of the fix they were in. At the first opening she thought possibly wide enough to pass the Hummer, she cranked left again between blocky houses. The wag fishtailed right, then left, banging off the mud-brick buildings in showers of chips and dust and making J.B.—who now had both hands holding on again—and Ryan wave from side to side with their feet streaming out like pennons in the wag’s wake.
A wall in the way was bulldozed into dust and flying chunks. Then the Hummer was clear, jouncing across a field of half-ripened beans as first J.B. and then Ryan scaled the back and clambered monkey fashion across the torn-up roof to drop down the pintle mount hole into the passenger seat. Nobody pursued them from the village.
“WELL, WASN’T THAT an amusing little damned adventure,” J.B. declared, doffing his fedora to wipe sweat from his head. With Mildred still at the wheel the Hummer was making its way toward the big lake and the ruined city in its midst, mainly for want of a better destination. “We come into what we think is Happy Valley and the next thing we know we’re caught in a war between cannibal muties and sec men with enough firepower to knock over a good-size barony by their lonesomes. Led by a sec man on a big bike wearing a rag and a feather duster. Gee, why don’t we settle down right now and start raisin’ families.”
Mildred, who had been loudest arguing for the peace and prosperity of the valley, shot him a glare. “Look, buster, you just don’t get a village like that happening without a long spell of stability allowing people to better themselves and their surroundings. It just doesn’t happen.”
“She’s right,” Ryan said from the back seat. His single eye was tracking relentlessly over the landscape, which continued to consist of rocky hills and ridges and lava flows interspersed with patches of green grass. “The people who built that village had the means to do it right and keep it up. That means they weren’t stretched across the knife edge of survival and weren’t in the middle of any kind of war.”
“Before,” Jak said from the rear.
“Yeah, yeah, I know,” J.B. said, thoughtfully settling his hat back on his head. “Sorry for playing designated killjoy again, Millie. I hate to admit it, but even a crusty, cynical old bastard like me allowed himself a spell of wishful thinking.”
“It’s a good thing you apologized,” Mildred said. “I’d hate to have to cut you off. Especially after such a close brush with death.”
“Yeah, that old life-affirming thing.”
“It seems apparent the occupants of the village we were so unceremoniously forced to decamp enjoyed a lengthy halcyon time—”
J.B. shook his head in half-feigned admiration. “‘Halcyon.’ Now there’s a hell of a word, Doc, even comin’ out of your mouth. What’s it mean?”
“Kingfisher,” Jak announced.
Everybody turned to look at the slight albino youth. Wise as he was in all phases of the brutal fight for survival, he was as illiterate as a rock and not widely known for intellectual curiosity.
“And just exactly how do you know something like that?” J.B. demanded.
“Doc tell me,” the boy said, dropping his eyes. He didn’t particularly enjoy being a center of attention, even among his friends.
“Lot kingfishers on bayou,” he added by way of explanation.
“It is good to see the seeds of knowledge may find purchase and bloom even on the most barren and unpromising ground,” Doc said before anyone thought to ask what a fish-eating bird might have to do with peace. “Now, as I was saying, the unhappy villagers unquestionably enjoyed a long spell of comparative peace and plenty. But just as manifestly those days have, quite recently, ended in massacre.”
“Not massacre,” Jak said, half under his breath. “Not enough chills. People ran.”
Ryan nodded. “True. But to pack it all into a shell casing, times have been good, back in that ville, but the good times just ended.”
“Which means,” Mildred said, “our timing sucks. Again.”
“So what now, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
The one-eyed man shrugged. “Krysty needs a safe place to shelter until she can fight her infection. Bad trouble’s hit the first ville we found, but that doesn’t mean it’s taken over the whole valley.”
“But from the way you told us the sec men acted,” Mildred said, “they don’t exactly seem like prizes, either. I’m glad you opted to run from them.”
“Something about those sec boys,” J.B. said. “Just here in my gut it hits me that they acted a whole lot more like some kind of conquerin’ army than people coming back to their homes. Even coming to take their homes back by force.”
“The people in that ville were never that well armed,” Ryan said. “Or they wouldn’t’ve been killed or driven off in the first place. The muties outnumbered the sec men we saw four, mebbe five, to one or more. But they didn’t hang around once that patrol hit town.”
“And they were smart to hit the road, given how heavy the biker boy and his little pals were packing.” The Armorer got that cagey gleam in his eye and rubbed the grizzled stubble beginning to sprout on his chin. “But y’know, Ryan, if those muties—”
“Not just muties,” Mildred corrected.
“Right, hon. If those raiders’d been at all comfortable in a ville, they could have still laid the original world of hurt on that sec patrol. Even stones and sticks can do some damage against machine guns and fancy laser blasters. Street fighting’s like that.”
“Which only goes to support what we have already surmised,” Doc said, “that the marauders are functionally nomadic and have but recently arrived in the valley, or at least this part of it. What I find intriguing, John Barrymore, is our deliverance from the dubious mercies of that security patrol, through the agency of a mysterious barrage of missiles. Who loosed those projectiles in so timely a way?’Twas as dramatic as the lightnings of Zeus, and every bit as unlikely.”
“Well, gents,” Mildred said, “we may be about to find out.”
The wag was slowing. A man had stepped out from a toothy black jut of lava boulders into their path. As most of the humans and muties they’d seen this day, he was short and dark, with a shock of hair as glossy black as volcanic glass. It was held out of his eyes by a green rag tied around his temples for a headband. He wore a short-sleeved shirt mottled in dark brown and green camou, olive-drab pants and sandals. Aside from a knife in a scabbard on his belt, he showed no weapons. His hands were raised in the universal no-threat sign.
J.B. stood up through the gunner’s hole in the roof, covering the man with his Uzi. The man’s grin never wavered. He was clearly no fool, and wasn’t taking them for fools, either. Anybody confronted with a person or persons appearing out of nowhere covered them at once with whatever weapons were to hand as a matter of course, it was clear, here no less than up north.
At the same time Ryan felt his companions’ tension, chose not to voice what was, after all, obvious: the man was choosing to expose himself to risk as a sign of willingness to parlay, showing himself unarmed to emphasize that he intended no harm. But that didn’t mean he didn’t expect any harm done him to be avenged in one hell of a hurry.
They were being watched. Weps were sighted-in on them right now. Given what they’d seen in the alley so far, that could be pretty serious indeed.
Doc opened his door and stepped out into the hot sun. “¿Qué tal, amigo?” he called.
“Fireblast, Doc,” Ryan hissed under his breath. “What the hell’s he think he’s—”
Mildred held a palm up to him. “Ease off the trigger, Ryan. He’s nuts but he isn’t stupid.”
“Doc speaks Mex-talk, remember,” J.B. called down softly.
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Keep both eyes open anyway.”
“Oh, I already spotted a few beady eyeballs around us already,” the Armorer said in a cheerily conversational voice. “Peeping at us over the sights of longblasters, of course. If these people wanted anything but to palaver, they’d already be dragging us out leaking like the legendary Bonnie and Clyde.”
“It’s all right,” Doc called. “This young gentleman’s name is Five Ax. It is a very traditional sort of name hereabouts, dating from pre-Columbian times. He is, he tells me, a Jaguar Knight from the City in the Lake. He leads a party of scouts. He claims, and I incline to credit this, that they saved our collective bacon from what he terms Baron Hector’s men.”
Ryan shrugged, set the Steyr’s butt down on the floor with its long barrel pointing toward the Hummer’s roof, got out himself.
“And how exactly did they accomplish that?”
Five Ax’s grin widened. He held his left palm up, skimmed his right across it and thrust his right hand forward into the air. “Whoosh, whoosh,” he said. “Rockets.”
Ryan glanced up at J.B. One shoulder of the Armorer’s jacket hiked up in an almost-imperceptible shrug.
“Rockets it was,” he said. He strode forward and thrust out his hand. “I’m Ryan.”
Five Ax took Ryan’s hand, looked him in the eye and spoke.
“He says he’s pleased and honored to meet such a great warrior chief from the north,” Doc said.
“Spun him a real line of it, did you, Doc?”
“I told him no more than the truth,” the old man said loftily. “Of course the proper presentation did your repute no harm.”
“Well, tell him I’m also honored to meet such a brave warrior. Thank him for saving our asses, while you’re at it. Lay it on thick as you like.”
“Already done, friend Ryan. Still, a trifle more effusiveness can scarcely go amiss…”
He conversed for several moments with Five Ax. The Jaguar Knight was young, not much more than Jak’s age, though considerably thicker through shoulder and chest. He carried himself with the easy assurance of a veteran; for all the fancy-pants title, he seemed much business and little bullshit.
“He’s offering to guide us to the City in the Lake and his baron, Don Tenorio,” Doc said at length. “He seems altogether confident he can get us both past Don Hector’s sec patrols and the marauders, whom he terms Chichimecs.”
“Is everybody here named Don?” J.B. demanded.
“It’s a title, silly,” Mildred said. “Like ‘mister.’”
“Thank him for saving us f
rom this Baron Hector’s patrol. And try to work out some kind of diplomatic way of asking why. Are his people at war with Hector’s?”
Doc spoke to the young warrior. Five Ax responded with laughter. “He says they are not at war with Don Hector, but that relations are not the best between them, either. One derives the distinct impression our new friends are not exactly dismayed that we presented them an opportunity to take one of Hector’s patrols down a peg, especially one led by one of his Eagle Knights.”
“Eagle Knights, Jaguar Knights,” J.B. called. “Seems like a lotta knights.”
“It would appear they are roughly equivalent,” Doc said. “Comprising the elite of both baron’s sec men, and also their personal bodyguards.”
“Elite, hmm?” Ryan looked over their self-proclaimed rescuer appraisingly. Two Arrow the Eagle Knight had been maybe as tall as Ryan himself, muscled like an old-time statue of a god, and acted as if he thought he were one to boot, swanking around on his hog-zapping hapless muties with his wrist laser and chopping parts off helpless captives.
Jaguar Knight Five Ax—odd names, oddly similar—was a scrubby little guy who however looked as if he could run up one side of Mount Popocatépetl and down the other without breathing heavy, and also as if he’d crawl through a mile of sewage to jump out of your crapper and slit your throat, should that happen to be his duty.
It might not be so easy to pick one over the other as a pure man chiller.
“What do you think, J.B.? Anybody?” Ryan asked over his shoulder.
“Let me put it to you this way, Ryan,” called Mildred, who had her head out the window but was remaining in the driver’s seat in case a quick getaway should be called for. “We all know appearances can be deceiving. But this bunch we don’t know for a fact are murderous assholes.”
“And there you have it,” J.B. said.
* * *
Chapter Ten
“Chichimecs,” Five Ax said quietly.
“Chichimecs, huh,” Ryan agreed. They were bellydown on the crest of a serpentine cooled-lava flow, watching a party of maybe twenty of the mixed norm and mutie marauders pass by below. Ryan was looking through one side of Five Ax’s pair of binoculars.