by James Axler
Ryan breathed in deeply, let half the breath go, caught it. His finger squeezed the trigger. The Scout roared and bucked.
Even before recoil kicked the scope upward, Ryan knew he’d missed the shot. For some triple-bad luck reason the coldheart boss had leaned back, twisting his head to talk to somebody behind him even as the trigger broke.
He still followed through properly, throwing the bolt even as the carbine’s rise peaked, riding the recoil and expertly bringing the longblaster and scope down to almost precisely where they’d been when he’d taken the shot.
The red-bearded bull of a man was still in the act of crumpling against the pickup truck to his left. Diego had his head turned toward him. His right arm reached to his waist, undoubtedly to draw a blaster. Much good that’d do him at this range.
Ryan fired again. This time the guard to Diego’s left turned to face Ryan, bringing up a handblaster of his own. Diego was already throwing himself back. No doubt the sound of the first shot had just reached his ears. The second bullet hit the lesser Crazy Dog in the left shoulder, staggering him.
Mostly out of frustration, Ryan lined up and shot again. The brown-haired top of the man’s head blew off. Behind him the red-bearded guy threw up both hands and sank out of sight. Apparently the blow-through nailed him a second time.
Of Diego there was no sign. Ryan carefully scanned the two wags. The Crazy Dogs’ boss was still the ace target.
Headlights played across Ryan’s face. He ignored them, as he did the sounds of engines getting louder and higher.
Around him he heard his friends begin to fire as the parked wags’ lights went out.
* * *
A RAGGED SKIRMISH line of bikes and one wag rolled toward the party. Krysty held her Smith & Wesson 640 straight out in front of her in both hands, cursing the fact the snub-nosed .38 didn’t have much range.
At the far left end of the line, where Ricky had taken up position beyond Mildred, a biker abruptly slid from the saddle of his machine. It veered promptly to the left, causing another to have to swerve violently to avoid being taken down by the unpiloted machine. Krysty had heard no shot from her vicinity. That meant Ricky had blasted the coldheart with his whisper-silent carbine.
To her right J.B. reared up on his knees. He cut loose with the Uzi held by his side. He ripped off three short but brutal bursts, two to four shots—Krysty couldn’t be sure.
Two bikers went down. One was enveloped immediately in a yellow flower of flame not forty yards from Ryan’s firing line. The other bikers faltered and turned away from the unexpected firepower of their still-hidden opposition. A couple turned back.
“What the nuke do you think you’re doing?” Krysty heard Diego roar. “Get back after them, you chicken guts! Or you’ll wish you’d taken a burst in your bellies when I’m peeling off your yellow hides in inch-wide strips!”
The wag, which was stripped down to frame and roll-bar with engine exposed, kept onward. It had followed the first line of bikes by about twenty yards. A man stood beside the driver with long hair streaming, firing a small semiauto longblaster with sharp reports over the raggedly padded bar.
Suddenly the goggled driver’s head lolled aside. In front of it a starred hole had appeared in the windshield. The wag slowed to a stop as the dead coldheart’s foot slid off the gas pedal.
The shooter looked down in consternation. Then he howled and doubled up in response to a sharp blast from Ryan’s left. Krysty realized Mildred, the crack handblaster shot, had expressed her opinion of these Crazy Dogs by shooting the rifleman squarely in the nuts.
Whipped by their leader’s chilling words, the other fifteen or so riders turned and accelerated toward Ryan and the companions once more. Krysty held down on the closest and waited for the Mohawked woman leaning her goggled face low over her handlebars to get in range.
Krysty felt no more compunction about blasting a female enemy than Ryan or J.B. did. Only Ricky seemed still to hesitate. Even Doc, raised to the mores of a more courtly day, had gotten used to the bitter reality of chill or be chilled.
Krysty had heard the force of personality in Diego’s voice, and, in a way, could understand how Lucy had become caught up in all of this. She realized that no one went to work on her back without being broken in some pretty basic ways.
Lucy was a lost soul, lost by Deathlands standards. She had little to rely on but her looks and wits. She knew that one was a wasting asset and the other an uncertain shield against the brute force of a face punch by a man with greater strength than her body could support. To survive for her meant cultivating a powerful will to believe—and a sense of denial.
The former had actually served her well when she happened to end up at the Library Lounge. She’d bought in to Dark Lady’s vision and found shelter and redemption. But that very willingness coupled with denial had already betrayed Lucy, it seemed. It was clear as new ice to Krysty that the woman had been sent as a spy into Amity Springs not by Baron Sand, but by the force-of-nature bravo who ruled the Crazy Dogs.
She became aware that Ryan was shooting toward the parked wags again. He fire-aimed measured shots, trusting his companions to shield him from the Dogs as he was lost in the glass, as he sometimes put it. She fervently hoped his bullets would find and chill Diego. But she doubted they would. For all of Ryan’s skill, at this point the coldheart boss held all the cards: distance, night and cover. And clearly he had a coyote’s gift of sheer survival.
The attack in front of Krysty had slowed like an old-days vid. The angry snarl of engines rose around her as if out of the Earth herself. The biker woman’s face grew large over the nubbed front sight of Krysty’s 640. She squeezed the trigger.
She saw blood spray out behind the hair-crested head. The front tire turned sideways and the motorcycle somersaulted. The rider was flipped, limbs sprawling, end over end through the air to land not ten feet in front of Krysty.
She winced in unwilling sympathy as the woman’s body hit. She was already seeking other targets, blasting at roaring, moving shadows. She heard J.B.’s machine pistol shredding the air, saw falling tangles of limbs and hair and mechanism. Another bonfire burst to life not twenty feet from their position, with at its core a flailing figure, pinned under a burning motorcycle’s weight, which flailed and shrieked intolerably until a stray bullet ended the suffering.
The bikes were almost on top of them. Krysty blasted a shaved-headed male rider in the chest, then ducked as his riderless machine roared past. Her piece empty, she hugged the ground and reached into a pocket for a speed-loader.
She saw a rider with upraised hatchet ride down on Ryan, who still ignored the near anger for far targets with a courageous resolve that even in this heart-crushing crisis thrilled Krysty with pride. J.B., his Uzi’s 30-round magazine exhausted, grabbed up his M-4000 and blasted the hatchet man, whose blaster arm exploded away from his shoulder in a black splash of blood. He shrieked and rolled through the line, steering his heavy machine with his remaining hand by sheer reflex, as the life pumped out of his body from severed arteries.
Another bike, coming at high speed from behind to join the attackers, hit a clump in the mostly flat ground off to Krysty’s left and soared into the air. Its engine rose in pitch as the driving rear tire free-wheeled.
Krysty heard what she had learned to recognize as the bang of Ricky’s antique Webley handblaster, which fired the same .45 slugs as his DeLisle. The flying motorcycle suddenly burst into flames.
The rider let go of the handlebars to bat at the flames as his ride flew over Ricky’s ducking head, but his leather-jacketed arms were already wings of searing orange flame. The bike’s front dropped before it hit ground. It slammed its several hundred pounds of metal mass right down onto the burning man before bouncing away, drawing crazy trails of firelight in the night.
Its rider didn’t flop and scream the way the
first man did. In Krysty’s peripheral vision blasterfire flashed off to the west, toward the ville. As the distinctive sound of fully automatic weapons as well as the booms of single shots reached her ears, she realized some of the Amity Springs defenders had to be skirmishing forward to take advantage of the surprise flank attack by Ryan and the others.
She had no time to think about that, far less to confirm her flash impression. A wave of noise enveloped her. A hunchbacked, malevolent shadow grew huge, right in front of her face, which hung just above the sweet-smelling soil.
A motorcycle rushed by Krysty to the right, so close she had to roll to her left to avoid its flesh-ripping tires. It immediately slewed broadside, expertly halted by its rider as its big tires dug deep into soft soil. The Crazy Dog, grinning beneath goggles and a topknot hanging over the left side of his face, raised a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun to point at Krysty.
“You lose,” he said.
But with presence of mind even Ryan couldn’t better, Krysty had slammed the snub-nosed revolver’s cylinder shut on a fresh load of five .38 Special cartridges even as she dodged the burly bike. From her back she held both arms out straight and blasted all five rounds into the coldheart.
Both barrels of his scattergun vomited fire and noise, but it was at the stars. He toppled backward, mortally struck by Krysty’s fusillade.
With her handblaster empty and useless again, she saw a sight that gripped her heart like a fist. Another motorcycle had skidded to a sideways stop right behind where Ryan lay, still single-mindedly focused on his sniping and completely vulnerable.
In an ecstasy of terror Krysty fumbled for a fresh reloader. The others on the firing line were still engaging the attackers. They couldn’t help her doomed mate, either.
The Crazy Dog turned his bike to line up right between the prone Ryan’s outstretched legs. Grinning diabolically through his beard, the shaved-headed man gunned the engine to alert his prey as to the awful fate that awaited: having his bones and flesh pulped and ground beneath tires of seven hundred pounds of malice.
Then a slight figure with streaming white hair appeared astride the bike behind the hunched-over figure. Two hands as pale as the stars themselves crossed beneath the driver’s chin. Slim shards of steel flickered outward. The biker’s head snapped back in a gargling scream as blood geysered from a throat doubly severed to the neck bone.
Jak jumped lithely clear as the bike fell onto its side well behind its intended target. Its rear tire spun futilely as its former driver attempted to breathe through a clean-cut airway. The engine died away with no hand on its throttle.
Down on the road the nearer of the parked wags suddenly blew up in a yellow ball. Ryan had pierced its gas tank and then managed to light the spilled fuel fumes.
But the pickup was already peeling away into the darkness. “Pull out, boys and girls,” Diego shouted into the night. “We’ll let these ville rats and their shitbag mercies broil in their own fear of when we’ll come back to pay them off—and where!”
Ryan was up on his knees, cursing. He had just fired his current 10-round detachable mag dry. As fast as he could reload the Scout, there was no chance of getting another shot off before night and distance swallowed the biker chieftain.
“Well,” Mildred said, standing.
Five feet from her a figure lying on its face in the grass started to rise, a cowboy-style six-shooter in a fingerless-gloved hand. Barely looking, the stocky black woman shot the Crazy Dog in the head.
“I guess that means we’re off his Christmas list.”
“We wish,” Ryan growled.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Poor Lucy,” Dark Lady said. She had her head down with her black bangs hanging in front of a face that looked paler than usual in the turned-down lamplight of her office. Behind her Mikey-Bob loomed outside the lamp glow like a shadow colossus.
The Great Whatsit in its box had been duly delivered and paid for. Dark Lady proved as good as her word. For all his mistrust of barons—which Dark Lady was to his mind, regardless of what she or the Amity Springers might say—he wasn’t surprised.
Neither Ryan nor J.B., who had naturally stopped on the way back to Amity Springs to pick the box’s lock and peer inside, had the remotest clue what the Whatsit or its nature might be. Ryan’s rad counter showed it was only slightly hotter than background, which settled their only practical concern.
And practical was commonly all Ryan concerned himself with.
“She betrayed you,” Mildred said. “Why waste your tears?”
The giant rumbled deep in his outsize chest. Ryan wasn’t sure which head was responsible. Both, likely enough.
“I long suspected she was spying for Sand,” she said. “I never could have imagined she was also working for the Crazy Dogs.”
She raised her head to look at Mildred, calm despite the tear trails glimmering on her cheeks.
“I care about my people,” she said. “Because the rivalry between myself and Baron Sand has not descended to killing—so far—I believed that her spy’s motivation, whoever he or she might be, would be non-malicious. But to learn that she also served Diego—and the reason why...it breaks my heart.”
“But how do you know Sand and Diego weren’t together on this spying thing?” Mildred asked.
“Aside from the fact she offered to pay us to chill Dogs?” Ryan asked. “Plus paid us when we did?”
Dark Lady was shaking her head.
“For all her flaws,” she said, “Sand would never be in league with the likes of the Crazy Dogs.”
“You seem unusually charitable toward your main rival,” Krysty said.
“I stand for truth,” Dark Lady said. “I strive to be honest, with myself or others, which is one way Baron Sand and I differ.”
“She does seem to have a double-loose notion of where other people’s stuff ends and hers begins,” Ryan said.
With visible effort the gaudy owner pulled herself together.
“Right now I’m more concerned at the risks Jim Sinclair led the others into,” she said. “He was a fool to risk leaving the cover of the ville and going out in the open against a mobile foe. If the Crazy Dogs had rallied, he and the rest would have been cut to pieces.”
“That little move did help save our asses,” Ryan reminded her. “Just as we helped save yours.”
He couldn’t help recalling Mildred’s misgivings about the wag yard owner, though. Sure, he helped them then. But he was no supporter of Dark Lady’s. Might he be playing a double game, too?
Dark Lady sighed. “Much as I have grown to admire you and your companions, Mr. Cawdor,” she said, “I must admit my overwhelming imperative is to protect Amity Springs and its people. Not you and yours.”
Ryan laughed. “Understood,” he said. “I do the same sort of arithmetic. I throw that little reminder in for free.”
“That’s triple generous of you, mercie,” growled Mikey.
“Don’t mind him,” his brother said wearily. “He’s just bitched because Lucy got chilled.”
“She was one of us,” the black-haired head said sullenly. “She always treated us decent. Instead of as some two-headed monster.”
“We are a two-headed monster, dimwit. In the end she sold out Dark Lady. And that means all of us.”
“She didn’t realize the full import of what she was doing,” Mikey said. “Anyway, she didn’t have much choice.”
“There’s always a choice,” Bob said, starting to heat up.
Dark Lady held up a slender hand. It looked so frail and tiny against the shadowed bulk of her helper and friend—and whatever else. But both heads immediately shut up.
“The other people may need to be reassured after all that’s gone on,” she said. “Go and make sure they’re all right, won’t you, Mikey-Bob?”
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The giant sighed volcanically through both throats. “Of course, Dark Lady,” Bob said.
As Mikey-Bob lumbered past, she grabbed his left hand with her right and squeezed it briefly. He paused a step and then went out, with Mikey sweeping Ryan and his band with a final resentful glare.
“What I’m wondering,” Mildred said when the door shut, “is how Lucy was able to get to Joker Creek to tell Sand we were coming, then get back here so fast.”
“No mystery there,” Dark Lady said. “Sand used a system I myself use—and may have taught her. Thinking about it, Diego may also have employed the same technique.”
“How do you mean?” Ryan asked.
“People come and go freely from Amity Springs,” Dark Lady said, “as you have seen. People regularly travel between Joker Creek and here. Sand makes no effort to stop such traffic, any more than I do. Trade between the villes benefits us all, which she may not like but accepts.
“People carry messages to and fro all the time. Lucy probably found someone headed that way and gave them a letter for someone in Sand’s domain. That person would have been instructed to pass the message along to the baron.”
“You mean you have other spies here?” Mildred asked in alarm.
Dark Lady smiled. “No doubt we do,” she said. “But that’s supposition. This system requires no collusion between the intermediaries and the opposition. Lucy’s messenger need have no idea what he or she carried, nor its import. And when instructions or other communications came back for her, they would be delivered to a third party on whom Lucy would call to pick them up.”
“Again, you seem very trusting.”
“Not at all. It’s simple security. The fewer people who know a secret, the likelier it is to stay secret.”