by James Axler
But even the lowliest sodbuster could chill you deader than dog dirt, if he blasted you from ambush with a shotgun, or caught you in the head with an ax. Ryan, J.B. and Jak just had to hope Sand’s subjects had the sense not to go sticking their heads out like triple stupes when blasters were barking nearby.
They made it away from the last huts into the fifty yards or so of cleared space between them and Sand’s Casa de Broma without being gunned down, having their heads split or actively chased by dogs. Nobody sounded any alarms, either.
Ryan and J.B. crossed the creek just short of the house. The water wasn’t deep but it was cold.
Jak waited for them around the nearest corner from the front. They joined him and pressed close against the house to minimize visibility, although there was nothing like cover here. The yard-thick walls were cool and smelled like cool earth.
“Out back,” the albino said as Ryan leaned close to hear above the noise. “Watching.”
By which Ryan understood him to mean some of the house’s occupants were behind the house gazing up at the heights. Great, he thought. The fewer people inside, the less chance of discovery. Or of serious resistance if they were discovered.
Of course they had no way of knowing whether Trumbo and his sec men had risen to the bait. But if they hadn’t gone charging out to engage an intruder making that much noise, how big a threat were they?
At least as far as Ryan could tell, no shots were coming from the house. If Trumbo or the baron had decided to hunker down and defend the place, that would likely be the case.
He looked at J.B. and gestured toward the front door. Then he signed for Jak to keep watch toward the rear of the house.
J.B. went to work on the lock on the massive front door. Ryan may have been the one to carry an emergency lock-pick kit in the heel of his boot, but it was J.B. who possessed true artistry with locks, as he did with most things intricate and mechanical.
Ryan stood beside the door, facing out. He had his Scout unslung and gripped in both hands now. With the light from the front windows, little dimmed by the filmy curtains that nonetheless made it impossible to see inside, he was as concerned with someone farther down the creek spotting and firing on them.
It took J.B. scarcely more time to open the lock than that taken by inserting his tools. He straightened and gave his friend a quick grin.
Ryan grinned back and nodded. J.B. put his lock-pick away and took up his shotgun.
The one-eyed man gestured Jak over. The albino was next to Ryan in an eye blink. Even if it hadn’t been for the Hell continuing to bust loose from above and echoing along the bluffs, Ryan knew he wouldn’t have heard him come.
“First?” Jak asked with ill-concealed eagerness.
“I go first,” Ryan said. “Then J.B. Watch our backs until we give you the sign to come in.”
Jak nodded.
Holding his Steyr by the pistol grip in his right hand, Ryan put his left on the door handle. J.B. asked a question with his cocked eyebrow: Why not your handblaster?
Ryan just grinned. After an instant J.B. gave the minutest of nods.
Gently, Ryan twisted the knob until he felt the latch disengage. Then he yanked it open and thrust himself into the front room, leading with his blaster barrel.
Chapter Nineteen
“Shit!”
Even under heavy fire Mildred felt a stab of annoyance at herself for losing track of how many shots she’d fired. She’d not only dropped the hammer on a spent cylinder, she’d pulled the double-action trigger of her Czech-made target revolver again in her frenzy, which was not the kind of shooter she was.
She ducked and popped open the cylinder. Fortunately, Krysty had picked out a spot with some rocks to offer some cover from which to launch their diversion. Even if it wasn’t enough cover for Mildred not to regret the flesh she continued to carry on her sturdy frame in spite of several years of long miles and lean rations.
She still had some speed loaders charged with fresh .38 Special rounds. She dropped the spent shells into her pocket by touch as she looked west to take stock of their situation.
Short form: it sucked. It sounded and looked as if the firefight simulator—long-since burned out—was still going. Except louder and brighter because it was all focused on them.
Her friends all had cover, too, and were popping up in the lulls to shoot back. From the occasional outcry she could tell they were scoring hits.
From the corner of her eye she caught a stab of muzzle-flare from Ricky’s DeLisle carbine. She saw a form straighten about thirty yards away, then keel over. Like the rest of them, the kid was shooting for muzzle-flashes.
Ricky promptly rolled to one side. No return fire came his way, so far as Mildred could tell before she snapped the cylinder shut and started looking for targets herself. But they were also lucky Trumbo’s sec men were too stupe to do what the boy did, and instead just stayed in place, advertising just exactly where that was every time they pulled a trigger.
The firestorm abruptly cut off. Mildred heard a high, commanding voice calling for a cease-fire. She was more impressed that it actually got one.
Sand does have a presence to her, she admitted.
She actually saw the large shadowed form stand bolt upright and brandish a cane.
“Surrender!” the baron called in a brassy voice. “We don’t want to have to hurt—urk!”
The last came out involuntarily as another, shorter, blockier form low-tackled her out of view.
Ricky’s blaster thumped.
Mildred thought she heard the boy mutter, “Motherfucker,” under his breath. Despite their desperate situation she almost laughed out loud. The kid was normally so pious.
Out of sight, Sand was squalling like an angry cougar.
“Pipe down!” Trumbo bellowed. “What were you thinking, making a target of yourself like that? That was triple stupe!”
Sand did pipe down, possibly because she was unaccustomed to her sec boss talking to her like that. Or anybody.
Illogically, Mildred felt pleased somehow that Ricky hadn’t chilled her. Despite, or maybe because of Sand’s unabashedly alternate lifestyle—by the standards of Doc’s, Mildred’s, this, or pretty much any day—she felt more affinity toward her than Dark Lady with her show of rectitude as a respectable community pillar and businesswoman.
But the other sec men promptly started up their barrage once more. Even after a couple went down to the companions’ blasterfire, there were at least a dozen of the sec men out there. And even if they couldn’t do much more than burn holes in the night with their bullets, so far, they sure seemed to have lots of bullets to burn.
“They are flanking us inland!” Doc cried out in alarm.
Mildred set her teeth in dismay. Sure enough, she saw shadowy shapes moving out to her right. She lined up a shot and fired. The figure went down, but she was sure she’d missed and the sec man was just ducking. Dire experience had taught her that, no matter how ace a shot you were, your unaided aim was lousy at night. And neither Mildred nor any of her friends had so much as luminous sights, much less night-vision equipment.
This blows, she thought. If the enemy started cross-firing them, they were as good as staring up at the stars already. Or at best captives—and while Mildred also caught no hint of actual sadism from the baron, as flamboyant as she was, she was no more sure of that ugly bulldog sec chief of hers than she was of Sand’s ability to keep him on his leash.
“Simulator,” Ricky shouted at her over the gun-storm.
She blinked at him.
“Throw it! To scare them back!”
She looked down at the remaining firefight simulators, sitting on the dirt beside her. “Oh.”
She stuffed her ZKR back in its holster and snatched one up. She yanked the string, hard, waited for the
fizz to indicate it had taken and pitched it.
A moment later, it appeared to the flanking quartet of sec men as if all the blasters in the world were firing at them from their other flank. They immediately made themselves one with the Earth.
“Good move,” Krysty called. “But that won’t keep them off us long.”
“Ladies,” Doc called.
They looked at him. He had the largest rock between him and the enemy, and had his back to it as he stuffed a fresh shell into the shotgun tube slung under the regular barrel of his commemorative LeMat handblaster.
“I shall hold them,” he called. “You rejoin the others.”
“But we don’t leave anybody behind—”
“Then live long enough to rescue me!” he called. “Go!”
Krysty looked at Mildred. Even in the dark Mildred saw tears glimmering in those huge emerald eyes.
The redhead nodded. “Right.”
“Okay, kid,” Mildred called to Ricky. “Time to go.”
“But—”
She grabbed his collar and hauled him around. When she saw the others moving, Krysty started crawling briskly away east on all fours.
“Come at me, you caitiff rogues!” Mildred heard Doc roar from behind as she, making sure Ricky stayed with her, followed her friend toward what they all hoped was safety.
Go with God, you crusty old bastard, she thought. And felt like the world’s worst coward.
* * *
A SEC MAN lounged in Baron Sand’s special chair, and at least a couple of her courtiers cowered in corners, apparently terrified of the racket outside. Smart move, Ryan thought as he sized up the room in one glance.
The sec man’s eyes got huge. He started out of the chair, grabbing at a holstered blaster.
Ryan skip-stepped across the room. A hanging swatch of some filmy cloth caught him around the face but gave way. He could still see through it well enough to butt-stroke the sec man across the chops with his Scout.
The longblaster’s synthetic furniture didn’t give it the heft of good old hardwood; that was the point, actually, to keep weight down, which most of the time was a good thing, as it meant less to carry.
But that didn’t matter much. Ryan gave it ample energy to sprawl the guy cock-eyed on the cushions. On his way down he got well and truly entangled in some strands of filmy lavender and dark green fabric. They pulled loose from whatever held them up and fell to swath him.
“Jak, secure the far door,” Ryan said, nodding toward the back of the house. “J.B., take the left.”
As they moved to comply, he looked menacingly from one retainer to the other. The woman was a not-bad-looking bottle blonde, although her eye makeup had begun to bleed down her clownishly pale-painted face from fear tears. A somewhat saggy breast hung out of a filmy negligée. Though she didn’t seem to have underpants on, she wore combat boots, for no known reason. The male wore a loose white shirt with lacy cuffs and knee britches over some kind of shiny stockings. He was a mutie, apparently, or wearing a triple-strange costume. Instead of hair he had a crest of yellow and pink feathers above a bony pallid face, and his eyebrows seemed to consist of the same.
“Over here, you two,” he said, gesturing with the longblaster. As he reckoned, they were too frightened to take note of the fact that if he blasted one, he’d have to cycle the bolt before he could shoot the other. Or at least to act on that knowledge if they had it. “Gag this bastard with some of this foofy stuff.”
As they hastened to obey, Ryan gave a quick eyeball to the sec man, who lay with eyes half closed, moaning and feebly stirring. He was probably concussed, though Ryan wasn’t about to rely on the fact.
J.B. and Jak reported the doors clear and no sign of life from elsewhere in the house. Given the noise outside and the absence of more visible sec men inside, Ryan was starting to feel concern over Krysty and the others. But he was committed now. What happened to the rest, happened, and they’d pick up the pieces afterward.
“Now,” he directed the fancifully dressed pair. “Tie his thumbs behind his back. Tight. If he gets loose, you’ll be the second and third chilled after him.”
They did that.
“Why not chill?” Jak said, turning briefly from the door to the rear of the house to nod at the three.
“No need. Now, you two, pick him up and drag him. You’re all coming with us.”
“What if we won’t comply?” demanded the feathered guy. Apparently that much exertion was one too many for him.
“Then there’s a need. Move.”
They moved.
* * *
“THINK THE LAST one’s a chill,” called the sec man as he advanced cautiously along the nighttime cliff top with a Ruger blaster clutched to his chest.
“Careful, there, Wiley,” called a voice from behind. “He was a tough one.”
“Ha,” Wiley said with a sneer. “He was just an oldie. You turds are just soft—”
Doc sat with his right knee beneath him, right ham on heel and his back to his sheltering boulder. He clutched the freshly reloaded LeMat in both hands and took a deep breath.
Then he pushed up from the cold, dusty ground, twisting in place with the knee still down. He thrust out the huge handblaster.
Wiley had just turned his dark-stubbled hatchet face forward. “Fuuu—” he began.
The shot column from the underbarrel shotgun tube tore his lower jaw clean off.
As he fell, strangling on his own gore, Doc heard curses from the darkness, scarcely twenty yards west by the sound. He lowered himself behind the rock, just peering around the edge of it. A risk, he knew.
But what of that? he thought. It is not as if I expected to survive the night when I volunteered to delay the pursuit.
Muzzle-flares blossomed, huge and bright, yellow with blue cores. Bullets passed over his head with wheet sounds. One, more rapid than the rest, cracked. Another struck fragments off the face of Doc’s rock and whined away tumbling into the night.
Bracing his revolver against the side of the rock, Doc switched the barrel to blaster shots, drew a bead on an enemy on a blaster-flash and fired. He heard a yelp, then a thrashing sound.
“Rad-blast it!” Doc heard the unmistakable bull-roar of an angry Trumbo from somewhere behind the shooters. “Wing out to the left and pin the prick against the cliff.”
So this is how the game ends, Doc thought, curiously without regret. I hope Krysty, Mildred and Ricky have made it to safety by now.
He heard rustling and pounding steps. Shots cracked.
Dearest Emily, Rachel and Jolyon, I am coming.
Doc fired at flitting shadows, ducking as best he could to keep cover between him and his enemies’ blasters as long as he could. His aim was uncertain in the dark. But he did see one shape drop, in a way that suggested it was not to rise again.
The hammer clicked on a spent chamber. And a figure sprang to the top of the rock he sheltered behind.
“Got you, old bastard!” a sec man whose face was fringed in unkempt hair and beard exclaimed in triumph. He raised a pump shotgun to aim at Doc’s face.
Doc had already dropped his empty handblaster and snatched up his swordstick. Now he swung it in a whistling arc. It cracked against the sec man’s left hand, on the blaster’s pump foregrip. Whether the hand was broken or not, it let go. Impact jarred the shotgun aside the instant before it roared and vomited a giant orange-and-yellow flame over Nukem Flats.
Because the shooter was unexpectedly holding on to the powerful blaster when it went off with only one hand, the weapon kicked its way out of his grip.
“You prick!” the sec man screamed in fury and probable pain. He grabbed the gleaming black cane.
Doc pulled back. The long, slim sword blade slid free of the ebony sheath. The sec man’s already wild ey
es grew round.
Then he shrieked as Doc thrust hard, punching the tip of his blade through his staring left eye and into his brain.
The man toppled. Doc stood. No point in cowering now. He would meet death as a man ought, on his feet and facing his foe with final defiance on his lips.
He flourished the sword with a snap of his wrist to clear blood and aqueous humor and brains from it.
“Who next wants to dance with Death, you rogues?” he cried.
Half a dozen blasters were pointed at him from almost close enough to reach out and touch. But something about his manner—most likely the manifest sheer madness of his bravado—stayed the sec men’s trigger fingers.
“What’s the holdup?” Trumbo demanded, walking up with jaw and torso thrust forward, as forcefully as if the night were a door and he meant to put his shoulder through it. “Blast the old bastard and then let’s go hunt down the others!”
“Wait!”
The voice was feminine, contralto, and trumpet-ringing with command. Trumbo’s bulldog face fisted in irritation and he turned.
“What is it?” he asked, going from anger to servility in the space of three syllables.
Baron Sand strode up as if the night were her personal possession that she deigned to let other people use. She was dressed in blouse, jacket and trousers of some dark stuff, possibly velvet, mannish in cut but closely tailored to her distinctly and amply feminine form. She flourished a walking stick of her own as she approached.
“Call your dogs back, Trumbo,” she said. “I’ll handle this.”
For a moment Doc thought her sec boss would defy her and order his men to blow Doc down where he stood. Then his puffed-out chest seemed slightly to deflate, and his head to hunch down on the neck it seemed to lack.
“All right,” he growled. “You heard the baron.”
Sand stepped into the open space on the far side of Doc’s rock. Realizing he had little to lose at this point, he rose, slowly, then stepped to his right around it.