Motherlode

by James Axler

  “And when she says no,” Trumbo said, “then we smash the ville, right?”

  “No.” Sand’s head sank into her double chin in a defeated slump. “Then we look for—something else. Because it is a bluff, in the end. I’m bad to the bone. But not bad in that way.”

  “The whitecoats won’t like that,” Trumbo said.

  Sand laughed with a wild bitter skirl. “Nuke them. They have to deal with one of us, Dark Lady or me. They’ll find I am the easier to deal with. But I don’t have round heels when it comes to intimidation, any more than that sexually repressed little ferret Dark Lady does!”

  “Donaldson,” Trumbo called.

  “Boss.” With a clatter of the beaded curtain that covered the door to the dining hall, a sandy-bearded, older sec man came in, blinking behind round glasses that most poignantly reminded Doc of his friend J.B.

  “You got this. Drive the machine.... Martin. Andrews.”

  Another pair of sec men entered behind Donaldson.

  “You lead the blasters. Take half the boys with you. The rest’ll stay here with me. You know the job.”

  The newcomers smiled and nodded.

  Sand turned in her chair, whose festoons seemed unusually tawdry in the turned-down lamp glow, with the first tentative dawn light just beginning to stain the curtains gray. She crossed one purple-velvet-clad leg over the other.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I told you to lead this mission, Trumbo. What’s all this talk?”

  “Change of plans, Baron,” Trumbo said with a wide, greasy smile. He pushed his big shoulders off the stuccoed wall.

  “By whose authority, little man?” Sand demanded imperiously.

  In the past when the tall blonde who liked to play at being a man—while still being, as Doc could well attest, altogether a woman—had taken that tone, her sec boss had cringed like a whipped dog.

  Now his smile broadened.

  At the window to the front door’s left, the feathered mutie cocked his narrow smooth-sided head to one side. With his gaunt cheeks and bony nose he really did resemble some kind of giant bird, albeit a most lamentably bald one.

  “I hear engines,” he said. “Many, many engines!”

  The windows commenced to rattle to a rising many-throated snarl of mechanism.

  “Whose authority?” Trumbo asked.

  His eyes bulged from their sockets in what Doc took for unholy glee. He laughed.

  “My own!”

  * * *

  LIKE A SHADOW mountain it squatted, perhaps three hundred yards from the improvised barricade to the main street of Amity Springs.

  “That has got to be the biggest bulldozer I’ve laid my eye on in my entire life,” Ryan said. He stood upright behind where the wag-tongues crossed in the middle of the street. “That’s got to be a Komatsu D575A-3 Super Dozer,” J.B. said in tones of open admiration. The little man stood at Ryan’s side as gray light filled the world around them. “I’ve seen pictures of them before. One hundred, sixty-eight tons. Biggest production bulldozer ever.”

  “Where the nuke—” Ryan’s tone grated “—did it come from?”

  Dark Lady laughed bitterly—and a bit wildly, Ryan thought. She had stepped around and out in front of the makeshift barrier.

  “Where else?” she cried. “Sandy—Sand herself said we weren’t the only ones who could find scavvy of the old research facility in Santana Basin. We got their trash—and their armory. She got that!”

  “Tell me you got a wag-chiller missile or two out of the arsenal,” Mildred pleaded.

  Dark Lady shook her head. “No. Explosives, small arms. Even Mr. Sinclair’s BAR. Nothing heavier than that, I fear.”

  “You there, Dark Lady?” a voice demanded. It was electronically amplified, the way Diego’s voice had been when his Crazy Dogs had attacked the ville.

  “Trumbo?” Krysty asked. She had come to stand on Ryan’s other side.

  “Sounds like,” Mildred said.

  Ryan raised the longeye.

  “Fireblast,” he said. “That beast’s so huge it has a safety rail around what looks like the deck over the engine compartment. That’s Trumbo standing there on it in front of the rail, sure as glowing nukeshit.”

  “You got an answer for us?” the Joker Creek sec boss demanded.

  Dark Lady stepped forward alone.

  “Be careful, there, hon!” Mildred called. The gaudy owner ignored her.

  She cupped her hands in front of her face. “Do you hear me?” she shouted. For such a small and quiet person she had a pretty loud voice when she wanted to.

  “I hear you,” Trumbo said. “Loud and clear. We got a paraholic mike here and everything.”

  “Parabolic, dimwit,” Mildred said.

  “I heard that!”

  Mildred raised a hand and shot him the bird.

  “So what’s it to be, Dark Lady?” Trumbo said in his artificial demigod voice. “You sell out? Or do we get to smash the whole shit-pot of a ville around your ears, including that gaudy of yours?”

  “Dark Lady,” Sinclair said, sounding worried. “Mebbe we should consider this a little more—”

  “Come and try,” Dark Lady shouted. She spun on her heel and stalked back around the barricade.

  “Right,” Ryan said. He dropped the longeye and picked up his Scout carbine from where he had it leaning against the hitch pole of the wag to his right.

  When he shouldered the longblaster and looked through the scope, the deck was empty. “Bastard ducked right off,” he said. “Not that stupe.”

  He couldn’t make out a driver through the smoked glass of the cab, which was probably doubly roomy despite looking tiny, perched way back there past a blade as broad as the street and an engine housing the size of a house. But he reckoned if he even put one close to the operator, the Joker Creek sec man might start having second thoughts about how ace an idea this whole thing was.

  He fired.

  When he brought the scope back in line with his eye with a fresh round chambered, he saw nothing different. No surprise. In this light, at this distance, he couldn’t make out enough detail to see if he’d punched a hole in the windshield, even if he starred the whole bastard thing. He sighted in, let out half a breath and squeezed the trigger again.

  With a rumble and a gout of black smoke rising into the paling western sky, the mountainous machine started forward.

  “I don’t think you’re getting through to him, Ryan,” J.B. said.

  “Fireblast!” Ryan slung the weapon and took up the longeye again.

  Even in this light and at this range he could instantly see that the cab’s windshield was completely intact and unholed.

  “I know I hit,” Ryan said with the simple certainly of a triple-skilled marksman. “Both shots, clean.”

  “I wonder if a Lexan windshield came standard on those puppies,” J.B. said. He sounded more interested than alarmed—though even Ryan’s hard heart was beating a touch faster at the approach of that metal monster, slow as it was. “Reckon the old-days whitecoats had their reasons for springing for one, if it didn’t.”

  “Men come,” Jak said. He seemed to be vibrating like a hunting dog that smelled the quarry. He was a close-in fighter; he hated having to wait to get to grips with an enemy like this like poison.

  “Not just men,” Krysty said. “Wags. And—motorcycles.”

  She turned to Ryan with wide eyes. “Ryan, it must be the Crazy Dogs!”

  “Well, that just made our whole day,” Mildred said. “Sand sold us all to that bastard Diego.”

  “No,” Dark Lady said.

  Everybody looked at her. She stood near Ryan, staring into the scrub. Her face was paler than usual, and her fists were knotted at her sides.

  “Sand would never do
that. She knows what it would mean for her people. For her. She’d no more submit to an animal like Diego than would I. She’s been betrayed herself.”

  “None of that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. He lowered the longeye again and took up his longblaster. “These bastards aren’t bulletproof.”

  He raised the Steyr and began to scan for targets. Men strode on foot to either side of the massive dozer. They trotted, their weapons across their chests. The machine itself moved at no more than a few miles an hour.

  Before he could pick a target, a yellow flare flickered.

  Wood splintered to thudding impacts. Somebody screamed.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Baron Sand shot to her feet.

  “What in the name of sweet, sweaty fuck are you talking about?”

  “See, Baron,” Trumbo said with a triumphant smirk, “there’s been a slight change in administration of this barony. Grab her, boys!”

  Andrews and Donaldson grabbed Doc by the arms. Lobo came away from his station by the painting. He moved with alacrity surprising for his mass of bone and brawn. He seized Baron Sand from her chair and picked her up as if she were a four-year-old girl.

  “No!” Mystery screamed. He launched himself at the stolid giant, fingers clawed as if to gouge out his dark Indian eyes.

  A shattering blast erupted from the side door. The retainer spun, a look of surprise in his wide kohl-rimmed eyes. Then he slumped to the floor. His blood added a new, darker stain to the hues of an ancient throw rug already discolored by various exudations.

  Another of Sand’s courtiers, a frail woman with short black hair named Gayle, fell to the floor flopping and shrieking behind Mystery.

  An immense handblaster, glinting chrome, protruded through the beaded strands that covered the side door. A thread of blue smoke trailed upward from its muzzle. It pushed through, followed by a man so tall he had to bend to clear the arched top with the brush of thick black hair atop his head.

  To the sides of his dark face the hair hung like glossy raven-wing curtains to broad shoulders. He grinned with rotten teeth through an extravagant handlebar mustache.

  “Diego!” Baron Sand exclaimed.

  “Right in one,” the Crazy Dog chieftain said. “Did you miss me?”

  “I haven’t shot at you yet,” Sand said frostily. “An oversight I will certainly correct.”

  “Yeah,” Diego said with a laugh. “Hold that thought. And you—”

  The last was an aside to one of several sec men who had entered the room when Lobo grabbed the baron.

  “Shut her up.”

  The man looked at Trumbo. Trumbo flicked his eyes at Diego. He licked his fat lips, then nodded.

  The man withdrew a handblaster and shot the woman, who lay on her side curled up in a knot of pain around her stomach or possibly pelvis, in the side of the head. The flash briefly filled the room, along with a shattering noise that seemed to make the windows bulge outward. The air, which was already thick with musk and hemp and incense smoke, took on a ripe reek of spilled bowels.

  Trumbo stared at the chill for a moment. A trickle of sweat ran down his fat face from his receding hairline.

  Sand tossed her short hair back from her face.

  “So the worm turns,” she said, sneering. “How could you do this to me, Trumbo?”

  He covered his face in his meaty hands. “I did it all for love of you, my lady!” he sobbed.

  “Really?” She cocked an arch brow. “Well, that’s rather sweet. If cloyingly sentimental and somewhat trite.”

  “No,” Trumbo said, raising his face and grinning. His eyes and cheeks were dry and showed no sign of weeping. “I’m lying. I hate you. And I want to watch you die!

  “But first, I want you to suffer. I’m going to make you watch while I torture, defile and break all your pretty play toys.”

  She yawned ostentatiously. “Be my guest,” she said. “I’ve grown bored with them, anyway.”

  Some of her retainers, pressed against the walls in fright, registered shock at the baron’s attitude. Especially with Mystery lying dead or dying heroically, if not effectually, at her very feet.

  “No time now,” Trumbo said, rubbing a cheek and glancing at Diego.

  The coldheart lord stood by watching silently and sneering. The sounds of his followers’ rides was very loud. Doc, who had been yanked rudely to his feet next to the baron, reckoned Diego had to be bringing his whole force into Joker Creek.

  “Now’s the time to go put wood to that tight-ass Dark Lady,” Trumbo said. “If she survives long enough to get hauled back here, mebbe her ass won’t be so tight anymore. Leastways, not when me and the boys are done with it. And you—”

  He shot Doc a bloodshot glare of hate.

  “I owe your friends, too. Not forgetting about them.”

  He signaled some of his men. “Donaldson. Andrews. Like I told you, lead the group to the Springs with the chill dozer. Time for me and my man Diego to start consolidating our hold here.”

  “No,” Diego said.

  Trumbo gaped at him. “Huh?”

  “You go,” Diego said. “Take who you want. I’ll send some of my wags along—the sound setup and the dozer should come in double handy.”

  “What about Joker Creek?”

  “I can take care of the situation here.”

  Trumbo went red. He tried to cover his apparent shock and dismay with bluster. “What are you trying to pull? We had a deal—”

  The room was full of Trumbo’s blasters. Diego was here on his lonesome. But the tall, powerfully built coldheart was on the sec boss in a long-legged stride and grabbing him by the throat with one hand.

  “Yeah,” he said. “The deal was, you got to run this place. But I run the whole nuking Basin. When it comes to Nukem Flats, I am the President-King-God-Emperor. So you’ll do what I tell you to and never talk back again. Ace?”

  “Ace,” Trumbo croaked.

  “Fine.” Diego let go of Trumbo and turned to face his sec men.

  “Anybody got questions about the chain of command?” he asked.

  He gestured with the immense shiny silver handblaster in his left hand. Doc thought he recognized a Desert Eagle, a late-twentieth-century semiautomatic blaster designed to fire cartridges normally too powerful for such actions, such as .357 and .44 Magnum and something called .50 AE. Doc had run across a few of them before. The Armorer said they were good pieces, well-designed and solidly made. But he’d also said they were so heavy only a stupe would carry one, when for only a trifle more weight one could pack a lightweight carbine like the M-4.

  Doc suspected Diego didn’t do a lot of long hiking. And that he was mindful of making a strong first impression. He certainly had on Doc.

  “Enough bullshit,” Diego said. “Get the dozer and get your ass gone.”

  Trumbo went out the side door with the sec men he’d called out trooping after. Lobo handed the baron off to a couple of others and walked after his boss.

  “What will you do now?” Sand demanded.

  Diego gave her a raised eyebrow. For a moment Doc feared he meant to strike her.

  Then he grinned. From the way Sand blanched, Doc suspected she actually would’ve preferred the blow.

  “I’m gonna tell my boys and girls what someone told me the great conqueror Genghis Khan once said, ‘The hay is cut; give your horses fodder.’”

  He laughed at the unalloyed horror of her reaction.

  “See, we’ve been working a long, hard time trying to pry out a toehold in this valley,” he said. “I reckon everybody has worked up quite a head of steam to blow off. Plus it should serve to cut the ice, you know? Get everyone acquainted double-good. And get your people so they know their rad-blasted place.”

  He waved the blas
ter. “You heard the fat man,” he snarled at the remaining sec men. “Get the bitch and the beanpole out of here. We’ll sort their asses out later. After we get done with the prime stuff!”

  * * *

  WHEN THE DOOR to Sand’s bedroom was locked from the outside, the baron turned to Doc and collapsed in his arms. For all his wiry strength, which had surprised so many others—some lethally—he barely managed to avoid collapsing under her not inconsiderable weight. As it was, he sagged lamentably at the knees and felt something twinge in his back.

  “I’m so sorry!” She wept into his shoulder. “I tried to save you. I tried to save everybody. And instead I just got poor Mystery and Gayle killed!”

  He got her turned so he could brace his back against the door to help hold them up. As he did, he felt her straighten her knees, taking up her own weight again. Still she clung to him and wept inconsolably while he stroked her short hair and wondered what to do.

  “Now it’s all gone to pieces,” she moaned.

  “Still,” he said, “we live. And where life is, is also hope.”

  She pulled back and smiled at him faintly from a puffy tear-sheened face.

  “Really? That’s pretty trite too. Yet there’s a certain daffy sincerity when you say it.”

  “Believe me, dear lady, it is based upon experience,” he said.

  She took in a deep breath and sighed.

  “Well,” she said. “Nothing we can do now.”

  She turned away from him and rested the back of her head against the door.

  “We’ll just have to wait our chance.”

  * * *

  “MACHINE GUN!” J.B. shouted. “Get to cover!”

  Crouched behind the wag to the right, and hoping the kegs inside it were full of nails or something else that would slow a machine-gun bullet, Ryan looked left. A townie lay in the dirt past the other wag’s far end, kicking and clutching himself and howling. A couple of people dragged him back into cover of the wag.

  Mildred crouched behind the wag, over the prone body of a young woman in a flannel shirt and jeans. The woman had her face turned toward Ryan. He recognized Ruby, one of the handfuls of Dark Lady’s employees whose name he’d retained.