by James Axler
Mace glanced at his pride and joy, and the key to the whole venture.
There were actually two pride and joys and one weak sister, but they had done yeoman’s work. He gazed upon a pair of gleaming white MD 950 sanitation service trucks. Mace had found them in one of the northernmost abandoned villes. They had been abandoned during the first great southern exodus out of Canada during skydark and the nuclear winter. To Mace’s great amusement, Tag had explained that in predark times people paid to have their shit sucked up and wagged away. To Mace’s even greater amusement Tag told him they had been called “honey trucks.” It pleased Mace immensely that the rad-blasted bastards who had cracked the world had a sense of humor. The Ford F550 Super Duty trucks were four-wheel drive with 3,600-liter tanks in their beds. The men who had abandoned them had put them up on blocks to spare their tires, and there were spare tires in the warehouse, as well. They had to have thought after the world died there would be a renewed need for shit haulers.
They were Mace’s honey wags now.
He had forced his men to boil the tanks clean and now rather than shit or honey they were filled with 106 octane, double-distilled alcohol from beet sugar he demanded as tribute from one of the southernmost villes in his sphere. Men, women and children had broken their backs from spring to fall and starved in the snow after harvest to fill his tanks with go juice.
The weak sister was a battered panel van with a smaller 1,500-liter tank from the same ancient warehouse bolted into the interior. It was having a hard time keeping up and had broken down numerous times, but the van and its crew kept arriving. Sometimes days late. In a strange sense Mace didn’t like seeing his tankers. He liked them on back roads rather than in camp with the firelight playing on them. On the other hand they gave him a sense of security. Even with Thorpe’s pirates festooning every wag his force was lean and tight. He had enough juice to follow Yoann Toulalan as well as Six and that one-eyed chiller from Deathlands. He would follow them to the Cific if need be. He would follow them until skydark came along again. In the end. He would have them. He’d have a black ear, a cold blue eye, Cyrielle Toulalan and Val-d’Or. Everyone else of use would swear fealty. Anyone who didn’t would burn in his fires while his men danced jigs and reels till dawn. Mace played his future victories in his mind over and over in ever glowing detail.
He heard squelching in the mud and knew Tag was deliberately making noise so that he wouldn’t get blasted by mistake. “Any word on the radio?”
“No, Mace. They know they have traitors among them. If I had to bet, One-Eye has collected all the com units and given them out only to people he trusts.”
Mace smiled grimly in the dark. “And how many do you think he can trust?”
Mace could almost hear Tag smiling back. The mutie loved strategy the same way Shorty loved violence. “Precious few, Mace. You’ve seen to that.”
“Think it’s enough?”
Tag considered the cards they had played. “Yoann is worm-bit, and by all accounts a step away from being worm food. No one trusts Six. One-Eye is a mutie-lover. The French love Cyrielle, but not as a war leader. One more nudge and they’ll break apart.”
“So, let’s say you’re One-Eye,” Mace posed. “What would you do?”
“Easy answer is to head for that bunker. Burrow in like a tick. We back off or end up freezing.”
“But he knows he’s got a traitors among ’em. He knows someone might just open a door or a hatch one dark night for us.”
“True enough.”
“And I didn’t ask what the easy answer was, Tag. I asked you what you’d do.”
Tag had a ready answer. “Something desperate, something dangerous, something unexpected.”
“You’d counterattack.” Mace nodded. “It’s what he would do, as well.”
“Would if I could, Mace, but we got pickets and scouts out klicks in all directions, and we got reinforced scouting parties having a look both west and south. No way they can sneak one of those big iron battle wags past us, even if they did, we got Nolan on the recoilless to answer.”
“They’re nightcreeping us,” Mace said. “I feel it.”
“Don’t see how—”
Both men started at the sound of the blaster shot. Mace recognized the sound of a black-powder blaster report. Mace dropped to a knee and slapped out the folding stock on his blaster. “Who fired? Who fired?”
“Mace!” One of the twins, Butch or Heath, he couldn’t tell by the firelight, was waving his arms and screaming hysterically. “Mace!” The other twin was hopping up and down like a castrated ape and pointing. “Mace!”
Mace looked.
One of his honey wags had sprung a leak and was squirting an alarming stream of octane out of a blackened hole in its side. The stream was splashing and puddling dangerously near the campfire. “Move the wag! Move the wag!” A second blaster shot rang out, and Mace saw a strange flash of orange fire almost like an explosion against the tank much lower down. A second stream flowed beneath the first and the stream suddenly seemed to catch fire from behind and lit its predecessor. Mace’s stomach dropped. “Get out there!”
The honey wag went up in a rupturing, uncoiling pulse of fire and took one of the twins and several pirates with it.
“Bastards! I’ll—” Mace swung his blaster around as he caught a bit of spark and muzzle-flash out in the rain two hundred yards away. A red line streaked across the night and slammed into his second honey wag. Mace burned a mag in the shooter’s general direction and roared at his men. “There! There! There! On the knoll!”
TAMARA TOSSED her blaster and dropped flat as bullets cracked by overhead. “Oh, he’s mad!” She clapped her hands, as happy as a girl. “Give me another!” Jak passed her another rifle. Ryan aimed. He was tempted to go for Mace or Tag. In the gray-green world of his night-vision goggles, the baron and his right-hand man had been but two more hunched figures out in the rain and dark in oilskins, but they were running targets at night in the rain at over two hundred yards. Ryan kept his eye on the objective. Hitting a fuel tank at two hundred yards was child’s play. He took up the slack in the trigger and squeezed.
Cap and ball blasters weren’t as bad as flintlocks for fire and smoke, but they were bad enough. The cap sparked and black powder was black powder. Regular powder burned very fast to release its expanding propellant gas. Black powder exploded. Ryan’s hammer slammed a cap cut from an ancient Canadian nickel and black powder detonated in the .64-caliber buffalo blaster. J.B.’s high-explosive ball flew like a tiny meteor low into the bowels of the second tank and fuel spurted. Ryan dropped the spent blaster. “Jak.” The albino teen passed Ryan a third rifle from the pile.
Tamara took a bead on the bleeding fuel tank.
“Aim low,” Ryan advised.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever, sex machine.” Nevertheless Tamara lowered her sights a hair and her bullet slammed with a bright flash into the side of the tank in line with Ryan’s. The campsite was bedlam. Men ran for wags and bikes. Some of those with more sense were obeying Mace’s orders and began to lay blasterfire on the knoll.
Jak passed Ryan another longblaster. Six stood below holding the horses. The knoll was barely a ripple in the landscape and he and the horse’s head nearly topped it from below. Out in the darkness around them the pickets were shouting in alarm. Motorcycle engines snarled into life in camp and out beyond them.
“It is starting to get hot....” Six commented
“About to get hotter.” Ryan squeezed his trigger and the longblaster bucked against his shoulder. The second tanker made a deep thump noise and went sky-high. Tamara yowled like a victorious puma. Ryan tossed aside the spent, smoking blaster. “We’re out of here.”
He vaulted onto the back of his horse. Six and Jak were already in the saddle. Tamara hauled herself up. She wasn’t the equ
estrian she had claimed, but she could make a horse stop, go and move right or left. She also had the advantage that her horse appeared to love her. “Don’t wait on me!”
“Give Six your goggles.” Tamara passed them over and Ryan nodded as Six turned his bug-eyed gaze upon him. “You lead.”
Six took the lead line in hand and led the horses into a plunging charge through the dark. Ryan took the tail end of the war party. Men in camp were plunging torches into the fires and mounting up. The pickets had lit their own torches and were converging. Mace’s voice boomed in godlike fury. “The Trans! They’re headed for the Trans!”
Mace was right. They were well out of worm territory and they had made friends with a horse lord, but the story was that a person didn’t want to get caught out in the long grass, particularly at night. They flew for the clean path of the Trans-Canada. Just as easily as they had penetrated Mace’s widespread perimeter they galloped out of it, but the roar of engines followed them and a torch-lit line of coldhearts formed a swiftly closing fire worm in the dark behind them. Ryan felt his horse’s hooves hit the ancient highway. He reached back for the rip cords Mildred had sewn into his jingling saddlebags. A bullet cracked by Ryan’s ear, but he waited until he knew his enemies could see him. He heard the whoops of bloodlust as his enemies caught sight of him.
Ryan pulled his rip cord.
A stream of nails poured out behind him. Jak had bent and welded the ten-penny trade nails together in formations of three so that no matter how they dropped one pointed end stood upright. Ryan waited a few seconds and pulled his second rip cord. Caltrops fell jingling down in the war party’s wake; but they went unheard beneath the roar of the motorcycles and gray and unseen by torchlight.
A motorcycle tire blew like a blaster shot and the rider skidded out in the mud. The rider screamed as the coldheart behind him couldn’t stop and ran him over. Another rider went wide around the pileup. He crashed as both tires popped as he hit Ryan’s minefield of sharpened iron. The one-eyed man threw a quick glance back at the sound of three quick blaster shots. The coldheart called Shorty had stopped his ride in front of the wreckage and called a halt to the chase. A few riders overshot and a few more tires blew. Ryan rode on. They would drop the remaining two bags of caltrops at one-mile intervals they had marked on the map. They would be a pain in the ass to clean up on the return trip, but Mace would have to leave the Trans or slow his convoy to a crawl to sweep the path clean before them.
Ryan rode to the front to take lead, and he and his war party galloped hard for home.
MACE STOOD on the knoll and surveyed the chaos. Something dangerous, something desperate, something unexpected. That’s what Tag had said, and it had come as though he’d whistled it out of the rain. The one bright spot was that their attackers had failed to recognize the van as a tanker. Mace had enough juice to make a careful decision or two rather than a desperate retreat back to the Lakes discarding motorcycles, wags and men on the way. He handled one of the discarded blasters. “Tracers?”
“Explosive,” Tag said, “and incendiary. Word is they got a crackerjack armorer.”
Shorty rode up on his motorcycle. He stuck his torch in the ground and held out his hand, revealing the wicked caltrops. “Scattered these behind ’em. Tire-killers.”
“Caltrops,” Tag corrected.
Mace took one and pricked his thumb against a hand-sharpened point. This was One-Eye’s work. He’d bet his balls on it. “Vinny and One-Eye?”
Shorty cocked his head. “Yeah, Baron?”
“Don’t know which one I hate more.”
Shorty pondered this declaration for long moments. You could almost hear the gears grinding. “Both need chilling,” he finally replied.
“That they do! We gotta step up our game plan.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Mildred stared down at Sebastien. His two usual accomplices, Michel and Roland, slouched behind him in their ponchos. Mildred had bound up the bullet crease on Sebastien’s arm, but she remembered just enough of her high-school French to have had a gutful of the trash he’d been talking about Krysty and the state of her DNA. Mildred went clinical. “Your arm hurting?”
Sebastien lifted his arm with a shrug. “No, it is good, Mildred. Merci, merci beaucoup.”
Mildred wasn’t having it. She gave Sebastien the evil eye. “What do you want?”
Sebastien scowled back. “I have traded watches with Hunk. He wanted me to ask of Miss Krysty. I did not wish to, but I owe him my life after the Soo Locks. She is—” the lean, wolflike, Quebecer sought for a word “—in better spirits? And if so…” The man looked down at his muddy boots. “Perhaps I should apologize.”
Mildred made a noise at the contrite Canadian but looked back at Krysty. Krysty had dealt with the combination of Ryan’s absence and her untouchable status by drinking more hawberry brandy than was good for her and passing out in the sleeper cab beneath a bearskin. “She’s all right. You can tell her tomorrow at dawn, but you might want to wait until she’s had breakfast, she’s— Oh you motherfucker.” Mildred found herself staring down the barrel of nickel-plated, single-action .44 missing most of its nickel. A thick, moist wad of cotton was wrapped around its muzzle and cylinder to muffle its report. “Step down, please.”
“You aren’t going to shoot me.”
Sebastien lowered his aim. “You can still stitch up a wound without knees.”
“Listen, you—”
Sebastien seized Mildred’s wrist and yanked her out of the cab. Michel and Roland laughed as Mildred fell face-first in a splash and ate mud. “Her, too!” Michel rasped avidly. “I say we do both of them!”
“No,” Sebastien said. “Leave the black. Six is fond of her. The mutie? He does not care so much about.”
Sebastien climbed up into the cab for Krysty. Mildred did a push up out of the mud with one hand and reached for her revolver with the other. It was bad. Krysty had deliberately parked a bit away from the main convoy, and the ugly event that was transpiring was facing out into the night. Jak was out scouting the perimeter and J.B. was in the LAV in the center of camp. “Sons of—”
Roland put his boot between Mildred’s shoulder blades and shoved her back down. He stripped away her revolver and her knife. He leaned in to his compatriot and whispered harsh and low in French. “Michel, when Sebastien closes the door and is pleasuring the red? We take the black.” Roland slammed a fist across Mildred’s kidney that left her paralyzed and sucking mud.
“Oui.” Michel had been shaking with the wet and cold, now lust shook and warmed him. “Her black ass is—”
“Cretinous sons of Cupid!” Doc’s swordstick was a blur in the rain. Michel screamed as it cut across his mouth and sent teeth flying in a spray of blood. “You besmirch Miss Wroth’s genetics while at the same time shake and slobber like dogs in your concupiscence for what those very genes produced!” Roland raised his blaster and dropped it as he took a brutal thrust to the bladder that dropped him to his knees. Doc was a vengeful tower of moral outrage.
“Dear Mildred has salved a hundred wounds for you and yours, and this is how you repay her?” Doc gave Roland a lash across the kidneys for good measure that left him vomiting in the mud. “Your loins betray you!”
Sebastien swung out of the cab. He leaned out hanging on by one hand while his .44 made a click-click-clack as he thumbed back the hammer. “You should have a blaster in your hand if you want to beat on my friends, whitehair.”
“I shall beat you like a rug, you cur!”
“Gaia…Earth Mother, aid me in my time of need.” Krysty’s voice spoke quietly from the sleeper cab. “Give me all the power…let me strive for life…”
Sebastien’s blaster never wavered, but he looked back into the cab. “Mutie bitch! What are you babbling about— Mon Dieu!”
K
rysty’s hand shot forth and grabbed Sebastien’s wrist in a viselike grip. He screamed as she squeezed. His scream cut off in a sharp yelp as he was bodily yanked back into the cab. Doc started at an unmistakable, wet tearing sound. Sebastien’s screaming and yelping turned into a keening shriek like a rabbit being killed. Doc considered the young man’s advice and drew his LeMat.
“My dear Mildred!” He helped her to her feet, raising his revolver as Sebastien reappeared in the door. In the yellow glare of the cab’s dome light his face was ghostly pale. His jaws worked but no sound came out. His left arm was missing at the socket. Sebastien gasped and fell out of the cab.
Krysty appeared in the door, her power upon her.
Her beautifully turned form was bathed in Sebastien’s arterial blood. Her titian tresses writhed and snapped around her head in snakelike tendrils. The look on her face was one of a rage that had nearly transformed itself into serenity. Doc felt it had to be a trick of the light and the rain, but it was almost as if she levitated down out of the cab. Krysty’s mother had taught her the ways of Gaia, the Earth Mother, and at times of need, the red-haired woman could call upon the Earth Mother for help, and was given immense physical power. Doc didn’t believe in gods; he believed Gaia was something she clothed her power with, her focus for channeling it, but looking at her Doc realized that while Gaia was believed to be the Earth Mother and the source of life, she also had her terrible aspect of wind and fire, the shaking torn earth and the tidal wave. Carnivorous feeding, territoriality, and lust were also her purviews, and if she existed, Doc firmly believed she was as angry, wrathful goddess who when it came to vengeance could put the Old Testament of his upbringing to shame.
Krysty held Sebastien’s avulsed arm in her hand and began beating Michel and Roland to death with it while Sebastien bled out into the mud and rain. Doc and Mildred both knew not to get in her way. Doc turned his head away; Mildred watched with clinical horror.