by James Axler
Dark Lady’s stock of plunder from the buried whitecoat lab included enough C-4 and blasting caps left over from the cutting charges J.B. and Ricky had used to immobilize the monster dozer to make up two satchel charges. One lay next to Ryan, the other between J.B. and Ricky. Each carried easily enough plas-ex to blow a man-size hole through even a wall as heroic as the playhouse’s.
The problem was getting close enough to deliver them. The distance was too much for even Mikey-Bob to hurl one and get it close enough to do any good. As big as they were, the charges needed to be lying hard against the thick adobe, or they’d waste too much energy pushing empty air to do the deed.
And with the large number of blastermen holed up inside the main house, and especially giving flanking fire from the outbuildings to both sides, trying to dart across the nearly fifty yards of open ground to the playhouse was a sheer self-chill.
Ryan went to a knee, then leaned out around the side of the farmhouse. He saw a blaster-flash from the window to his right of the front door. He got a flash picture through his scope on its lower setting of two-power: a dark, mustached face grimacing over a longblaster. He triggered a quick compressed surprised break. Letting recoil help spin him back under cover, he wasn’t sure if he’d hit or not.
As he slammed a fresh 7.62 mm cartridge into the Scout’s receiver and locked the bolt, he saw a figure running toward him. It was female, trimly but amply curved, and had a head of blazing red hair.
She threw her back against the sun-heated wall beside him.
“Bad news,” she said. “Kris says her lookouts report spotting a party of bikers down the road. Mebbe a quarter mile out. No more than five or six, and they seem to be coming cautiously. But who knows how many they’re scouting for?”
“Yeah,” Ryan grunted.
It was triple-bad news—the worst, short of spotting a no-shit relief force of dozens of the bastards bearing down on them. As it was, he couldn’t be sure that wouldn’t follow.
He gestured Dark Lady over. A couple of her people took up her place hopping and popping from cover as she ran up.
Her dark eyes widened as he gave her the bad news.
“We’ve got to get into the big house and triple fast,” he told her. “They jump us from behind, we’re chilled.”
“That’s it,” she said, slinging the Browning Automatic Rifle. “I’ll carry a satchel charge myself.”
“No, you won’t.”
Her eyes blazed.
“Normally it’d peel no skin off my ass if you got your stupe self chilled,” he said. “But we need every blaster we’ve got, especially if we have to fort up inside the playhouse and stand off a bunch of new coldhearts. And your chances of making it close enough to blow the wall range from jack to shit.”
For a moment she stared at him with a wild fury that set him back on his heels. Her face, already pale, had gone a paper-white as pure as Jak’s, meaning she’d gotten an adrenaline dump that usually presaged an attack right now. He braced to cold-cock her—if you could do that to a woman—with a steel butt plate across the jaw.
But then she frowned and sucked in a deep breath. Spots of color returned to her cheeks as she controlled her rage.
“You’re right,” she said in a voice that was almost calm. “I let my feelings get the better of me.”
Ryan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Which leaves us the problem of—”
“Dark Lady!” called one of the two shooters who had taken her place at the far end of the farmhouse, a tow-headed kid named Buck. “Come look!”
Dark Lady ran that way. After a quick shared glance, Ryan and Krysty followed.
They joined the gaudy owner and peered around the corner of the house. Though the sound of blasterfire from the defenders had increased, Ryan didn’t hear the crack of bullets passing nearby, nor the whine of tumbling ricochets.
He and Krysty stood behind the shorter woman to lean around themselves. At first he saw nothing of interest from the sturdy adobe sheds between the house and the creek, then noticed an absence of coldhearts popping out to shoot at them.
Then motion took his eye up the Joker Creek arroyo that cut the face of the bluffs that walled the north side of the valley. A lone figure was scrambling up the dirt road, just wide enough to let one wag pass, that ran alongside the creek to the top of the cliffs.
From its size and shape, and the short yellow hair, there was no mistaking Baron Sand herself. She was making heavy going of it, stumbling on the steep road, catching herself with her left hand. The reason wasn’t double hard to make out: the right sleeve of her white shirt was bright red with clearly still fresh blood, as was the bandage he could just make out tied around her biceps.
Bullets kicked up dust around her. She continued a tripod scrabble to the top with desperate determination.
From the back of the house Diego’s voice roared, belling with fury. “Cease fire, you mutie-lovers! I want her alive! Chill her and I’ll peel the hide off you and let you watch me run it up a flagpole before I let your miserable ass die!”
The blasters stopped. Instead a handful of sec men started up from behind the outbuildings in pursuit. Ryan heard engines snarl to life from behind the main house, and then half a dozen Crazy Dogs’ bikers joined them.
The traitor sec men blocked the road. On such a steep slope, not even big V-twin engines could accelerate the heavy sleds fast enough to bull them out of the way.
But Sand was clearly doomed. Exhausted, she flopped to the road, turning to land on her well-cushioned rump still a dozen feet from the top.
She kicked herself to the roadside, into a shallow space overhung by sandstone cap-rock.
“All right, you coldheart pricks!” she cried. “Come and get me, and be damned to you!”
They did. Gunning their engines impatiently, seeming to be as much pushing their bikes with their boots as riding them, the Crazy Dogs followed the sec men up to seize her.
As the first got within ten feet of her, Sand raised her left hand. It clearly clutched something small and solid.
She raised her middle finger. It seemed to Ryan she clenched her thumb and other fingers in the same moment, though as far distant as she was, he wasn’t sure what gave him that impression.
Both walls of the cut erupted in dust and smoke, and a thunderclap rolled down past the houses and out across Baron Sand’s domain. Ryan saw big chunks of rock tumble into the cloud.
It began to settle almost at once. Where Baron Sand and her pursuers had been was now a mound of khaki earth and jumbled sandstone blocks. The rear tire of a single motorcycle stuck out the lower end of it, still spinning.
“Cassandra!” Dark Lady screamed. She darted from cover to run up the road toward the baron’s rocky bier.
But her giant shadow was right behind her. With a long-legged step, Mikey-Bob caught her from behind before she’d gotten ten feet. His massive arms unfolded her and picked her easily right off the ground. She kicked furiously and tried to slam the back of her head into one of his, but to no avail.
Blasterfire burst angrily from the playhouse and its satellite structures. Ryan jerked back behind cover, pulling Krysty with him as bullets cracked by.
He saw Mikey’s black-haired head jerk, then it lolled lifelessly down the slope of his shoulder.
Making tough going of it, the giant carried Dark Lady back behind the farmhouse.
“Here,” Bob said. He thrust Dark Lady toward Ryan. He caught her as well as he could with his left arm.
“Mikey!” she cried. Ryan saw that the left-hand head had taken a slug through the left eye. Blood and aqueous humor streamed from it like tears.
Dark Lady writhed free and threw herself against the giant’s chest. He patted her clumsily with his right hand.
“Got
ta...go,” Bob said. His speech was slurred as if his tongue had swollen to fill his mouth. “Love...you.”
He kissed her upturned forehead, then he pushed her toward Krysty, who holstered her handblaster and grabbed Dark Lady in a bear hug from behind. Dark Lady did not fight her.
“I love you, too!” she cried through a torrent of tears.
Dragging his left leg, Bob limped along the back of the house to where a satchel charge lay. It had been assembled in a scavvy backpack, incongruously bright and cheerful blue and yellow. He scooped it up and held it to his chest.
“Take care of her,” Bob said to Ryan and Krysty.
“Are you going to do anything stupe if I let you go?” Krysty asked.
Dark Lady slumped. “No. We always knew one could never survive without the other.”
Ryan followed him as far as the street end of the house. Suddenly seeming to grab complete control of his massive, failing body, Bob pulled himself up and rounded the corner with a defiant roar.
“I’m on my way to Hell! Who’s coming with me?”
Ryan wheeled around the corner, longblaster shouldered. The playhouse’s front windows flickered with fire. Some of the shots had to be hitting the charging giant.
He ignored them. Laughing, he ran at a lumbering, inexorable pace. Ryan shot a man in the window left of the door; he was leveling a 12-gauge. Then he ducked hastily back, slinging the Scout, as Bob ran full-tilt into the closed door.
The satchel charge went off with a thunderous blast. A cloud of dust and debris shot down the road past Ryan’s sheltering corner. He imagined he saw a tree-trunk-size leg spin end over end through the rolling explosion.
Then he was around the corner and sprinting toward the playhouse. He pulled his SIG in his right hand and his panga in his left.
J.B. appeared at his right side, running as fast as his shorter legs could carry him, blasting from his slung Uzi with his right hand, clamping his fedora to his head with his left.
From the far end of the farmhouse Ryan heard Dark Lady ripping bursts from the BAR and keeping them short with expert precision. Clearly, she was not one to allow her loved ones to die in vain.
Or unavenged.
As he neared the big house, Ryan saw that the doorway had been blown out to about three times its original width. A figure appeared in the midst of it, coughing and waving at the smoke. Ryan gave it a quick double-tap from his handblaster and it fell.
He charged into the late baron’s front room. It was still full of smoke and dust and the eye-searing fumes of detonated plas-ex. He saw shadowy figures and fired into them.
The fog thinned enough to allow him the beginnings of vision of his surroundings. The spiderweb swaths of cloth had been torn down; the outsize satin cushions shoved to the walls. Some of these smoldered, adding to the choking, obscuring smoke.
A figure loomed to his left. He slashed toward the shadow bulb of the head with his panga. He felt it contact bone, felt bone crunch. The figure grunted and fell.
“Ryan?” he heard J.B. call from behind him.
Before he could answer, another shadow flew out of the still-thick smoke swirled toward the rear of the house. It caught him by the upper body and slammed him to the floor. His right elbow struck the tile on the funny bone. His blaster popped out of briefly flaccid fingers and clattered away.
Foul, stinking breath filled his nostrils.
“Cawdor!” he heard Diego snarl from inches away, even as his dark hate-twisted face resolved from the gloom. “Now I chill your sorry ass!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Kneeling with the tip of his sword stuck into the closet lock, holding it gingerly with fingertips of both hands to avoid cutting himself, Doc felt and heard the tumbler disengage. Holding the blade in place with his right hand, he turned the knob with his left.
He let out a long sigh of relief. He had had his concentration well and truly shattered by the earth-breaking concussion of a few moments before. But somehow he had pulled his scattered wits together quickly and actually completed his task.
The door began to open. It admitted the sound of shots and screams from the front of the house, and also a welcome draft of fresh air.
He pulled the door in just far enough to make sure the catch wouldn’t reengage. Then he struggled to his feet. His knees creaked. He had had one propped awkwardly on the prostrate body of Trumbo. The stink of the man’s excrement was so thick he could almost see it. It made his head swim and his stomach churn.
A few moments before the explosion, Diego’s bull-bellow of rage had alerted him to Sand’s escape. Through the small window he had witnessed the poor woman’s last instant of life before she blew a section of the bluff down on her—and her pursuers.
I wish that I had never doubted her, he thought, finally straightening. He thrust the ebony sheath of his sword through his belt and withdrew his LeMat.
Before undertaking to pick the lock, he had closed the secret compartment again. There was no reason to make plundering the baron’s wealth easy on the villains, should they bring him down, as by all odds they would.
He extended the second and third fingers of his sword hand to grasp the door by the open end. Then he stepped back and to the side, pulling it open as far as Trumbo’s corpse would allow.
And found himself staring into the black eyes of Trumbo’s lieutenant, Lobo.
For some reason Doc did not fire at once into the huge, dark face. “Stand back, my man,” he said instead.
The black eyes flicked past him to Trumbo’s bulk.
“No trouble, man,” the immense Indian said in a voice like a cannon ball rolling downhill in a wooden barrel. “My debt’s paid. Not my fight now. I’m out.”
He hawked and spit carefully past Doc. The glob landed with laudable precision on the back of Trumbo’s round, balding head.
He stepped out of the way and gestured with a dinner-plate hand for Doc to pass. Nodding politely, Doc stepped past him and headed toward the sound and smoke of the fray.
* * *
FROM THE VIOLENT motion of the right side of the coldheart lord’s body, Ryan guessed Diego was about to stab him.
He rolled hard to his own right, managing to twist in Diego’s one-armed embrace.
The point of his knife slammed into the synthetic butt stock of Ryan’s longblaster. He felt the weapon bounce against his back.
“Squirm,” Diego snarled. “I like it better that way!”
Ryan flung his head back hard. He felt Diego’s nose squash between the back of his skull and the coldheart’s face. Blood squirted down the back of his neck.
Likely the Dog had had his nose broken before, but Ryan’s reverse head butt made his grip slacken slightly. The one-eyed man twisted free, rolled clear and sprang to his feet.
Around him figures were struggling in the murk. There was still too much smoke and dust in the air for anyone to be able to shoot for fear of hitting a friend.
Diego scrambled up. He laughed at Ryan. Blood had given him a red beard dripping from his big chin.
“That the best you got?” he taunted.
“Talk big, chill small,” Ryan said. He transferred the panga to his right hand.
Diego swept his big bowie knife back and forth between them. Ryan simply knocked it aside with his heavier blade. As he rolled his wrist over for a backhand strike at Diego’s neck, the Crazy Dogs’ leader grabbed his forearm with his left hand.
Ryan pivoted his hips to the right, yanking his arm out of his enemy’s grasp while powering a straight right fist into Diego’s face. The coldheart’s head snapped back.
Ryan kept after him, bringing the panga up and around for an overhand stroke. As quick as a striking sidewinder, Diego whipped up his knife to parry high with a ring of steel on steel.
The on
e-eyed man pressed forward. He fired a left uppercut into Diego’s gut. He felt a bit of softness, then muscle as hard as an oak plank. But Diego lost some air and leaned forward. The biker boss grabbed Ryan’s knife arm as it relentlessly pressed the broad machete-like blade toward his forehead.
Ryan fired three quick shovel hooks into Diego’s short ribs. He felt bone break; Diego grunted.
And brought his right knee pounding up into Ryan’s groin.
There were men who could absorb a full-on shot to the nuts and keep on coming without batting an eye. Ryan had delivered ball-mashing blows to a few of them—and been lucky to escape with his life. Especially the first time, when he was totally shocked that his opponent kept coming.
Ryan was not one of those men. It felt as if his lungs and his guts were suddenly trying to come out his nose. He doubled over and dropped to his knees.
“Ace,” Diego said. “You got something for me to cut off.”
He aimed a savage backhand slash for Ryan’s face. The blade whipped toward his one good eye.
Ryan couldn’t breathe, but his will, as tough and hard as vanadium steel, saved him—along with the hard-wired human reflex to protect the eyes.
His right hand flew up and across the body. He managed to control the instinctive strike a last fraction of a second, turning what would have been an attempt to knock Diego’s knife arm aside with his own to a crosswise cut with the panga.
What slashed across Ryan’s face was hot blood, not cold steel, as Diego’s hand was severed just above the wrist.
Diego followed through with the blow, but his eyes got wide and locked in shock and horror on Ryan’s.
But the biker chief was no soft touch. He sprang back as Ryan thrust himself to his feet, jumping back from a disemboweling slash.
Then his left hand came out from the small of his back holding a small hidie semiauto handblaster. With a wordless hawk-scream of triumph, he thrust it toward Ryan’s face.
The Deathlands warrior hacked that hand off.