by James Axler
“If I may ask, why do you bother justifying yourself to this belly crawler, Dr. Sandler?”
He deigned to answer. “Because I cannot abide this creature not understanding her inferior status, however transient that misapprehension proves.”
And if Dr. Oates takes such sentiment as evidence of weakness on my part, he thought, that error will prove her own unfitness to serve Overproject Whisper. And be a self-correcting problem.
His colleague, wisely, chose to say no more.
Meanwhile, the woman had gone back to groveling and whining. “Please. You promised.”
“We did,” Dr. Sandler declared. “You have done as we instructed. And as we promised, we release your daughter to you now.”
On cue the silent white-coated lab techs removed the duct tape from the child’s mouth and pushed her through the portal into her cold and desolate space-time.
Dr. Sandler’s viscera twisted in disgust at the sight of the girl, with her mud-colored hair and dust-colored skin. The feeling did not come from any superstition as vulgar and ignorant as racial prejudice, but from the clear evidence it gave of the unrestricted breeding, without regard for genetics, that prevailed in the Deathlands.
The groveling woman reared back on her knees. Her green eyes went wide, then she spread her arms wide.
“Mommy!” the girl cried. She ran to her mother and threw her arms around her.
“Thank you,” Susan Crain sobbed into the juncture of her daughter’s neck and shoulder. “Thank you, thank you.”
“Go now,” he said.
“We are finished with you,” Dr. Oates added.
“I’m free?”
“Yes,” Dr. Sandler said.
Hastily the woman detached herself from her offspring enough to stand. Taking the child by the hand, she hurried down the slope of the mesa on which she had met the doctors.
Waiting until she was thoroughly out of sight, and thus splatter range, Dr. Sandler made a certain gesture. Thus activated, the bomb that had been implanted in the child’s stomach while she was under sedation went off with sufficient force to blow her mother, as well as her to bits.
“Was that truly necessary, Dr. Sandler?”
“Sentiment, Dr. Oates?”
“Not at all. Rather, practicality. Might the shaman have been of further use to us?”
“No such prospect presented itself, Doctor. Her people belong to the past now. They are retrogressive. They will join the new order our subject will establish, under our guidance and control. Or it shall exterminate them.”
“I see.”
“And now we have further duties to attend to,” Dr. Sandler said and closed the portal that opened between worlds.
* * *
“I DON’T KNOW where I was born,” Mariah said as they trudged along what looked like some kind of game path trodden by the hooves of deer and elk. The sun had come out that day long enough to melt off much of the snow on the ground. “I don’t know who my mother and father were. I don’t remember anything but a life of wandering.”
Krysty walked beside the girl. Mildred trudged behind the pair. Flat prairie stretched to her left. About half a mile to the right the land rose into badlands, rocky heights, wind-carved and striated in shades of brown and yellow. Ahead of them the Black Hills were visible as dark serrations on the horizon.
“What did you do for the Baylahs?” Mildred asked.
The girl shrugged. “Chores around the ’stead. Chopping wood, cleaning, cooking. The same as I’ve done my whole life.”
“How did they treat you?” Krysty asked.
Another shrug. “Like I was disposable, mostly. Not bad. But mostly like they couldn’t be bothered to be mean to me. Also the same as my whole life, mostly.”
She seemed to think about it a moment. She was a mighty serious-seeming little girl, Mildred thought. Even though “little” mostly meant “skinny.” Mariah seemed maybe thirteen or fourteen and wasn’t more than an inch or two shorter than Mildred, who, granted, wasn’t a tall woman.
“Not that the Baylahs were mean,” Mariah said. “Not like some. I mean, they fed me all right and didn’t hit me too much. Didn’t...try other stuff.”
Mildred grunted, softly enough that the girl couldn’t hear. She hoped. Sexual abuse of minors wasn’t all that unusual in the here and now.
Not that the life Mariah described, of being a poorly regarded and poorly compensated servant, sounded a whole lot better. Then again, it beat being an outright slave. On the other hand, keeping an extra mouth to feed could only be justified if it freed up enough time and energy among the other members of the group to generate the wherewithal to keep feeding the extra person while feeding themselves just a little bit better.
They didn’t call the country Deathlands for nothing, Mildred thought.
The girl had made herself useful in camp the previous night, gathering relatively dry brush and even making a fire without being asked. She had taken over cooking the brace of rabbits Jak had hunted and chilled with his special leaf-shaped throwing knives. She’d done a pretty good job, too.
Enough that Ryan stopped grumbling about letting her tag along.
“So you don’t know how old you are?” Ricky asked from behind Mildred.
“Not really,” Mariah said. “Like I said, I don’t remember much. Wandering. Working.”
“Don’t you get lonely?” Krysty asked.
“Compared to what?”
Mildred laughed, but then she realized the girl had spoken in her usual flat-serious tone. Maybe she hadn’t intended a joke. Maybe she was asking seriously.
Mildred felt guilty.
“Know where those stickies came from?” J.B. called to her from the tail end of their procession.
“No. I heard rumors about them around the farm. Stories about people disappearing—travelers, folks out working alone late at night or hunting. Even once or twice about them attacking a few isolated places north of there. Everybody’s scared of them—”
“Highly sensible,” Doc said from his own position behind Ricky and Ryan in front of the girl. As usual Jak was scouting the terrain ahead.
“But nobody took them none too serious as a threat to them, you know?”
“I wonder why they chose to attack when they did,” Doc asked, “and in such force?”
“Who knows why stickies do what they do?” Mildred queried.
“Nevertheless,” he said, unfazed, “it might benefit the chances of our own survival if we could obtain some insight into the workings of their minds. Dark and twisted though they are.”
“I agree with you, Doc,” Ryan said. He was carrying his Steyr Scout cradled in arms crossed across his chest. “Knowing how your enemy thinks can be half the battle or more.”
“I wish I could help you.” Mariah almost mumbled the words. She seemed to be, on the one hand, desperate to justify her accompanying the others in any way she could and, on the other, terrified by Ryan.
“Don’t mind our esteemed leader, Mr. Gruff,” Mildred told the girl. “He’s always that way before he gets his morning coffee.”
That got Mildred a glance and a perplexed look over Mariah’s shoulder, which turned to a look of near panic when the others burst out laughing. Even Ryan mustered a brief chuckle.
“When’s the last time we had real coffee, do you reckon, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
Ryan rubbed his chin.
“A few weeks for sure, the time we traded a homie blaster for a dozen old MRE packs.”
“She did report stickie attacks coming out of somewhere north of where we found her,” J.B. said. “Reckon that’s a good clue.”
“Of somewhere to stay away from,” Mildred said.
“That’s the truth,” Krysty stated.
“So you’re s
ure you got no idea why they attacked the Baylah farm?” Ryan asked. “Or why they wound up leaving you alone?”
“No, sir,” Mariah said.
He sighed, looking skeptical.
“If that man we shot went berserk with his ax and chilled all the stickies,” Krysty said, “that would explain why Mariah was left unharmed.”
Ryan frowned but said nothing. He grunted and turned away.
For her part, Mildred was far from sure that one man with an ax, no matter how strong and crazy he might be, could do the kind of damage and sheer amount of it they’d seen.
But she was in no mood to gratify Ryan by feeding his paranoia just now. She focused on putting one boot in front of the other.
Chapter Five
Hamarsville was a curious sight: a log palisade made out of straight, peeled tree trunks, sticking up out of a meadow nestled among pine-wooded heights on the northeast fringes of the Black Hills. The most prominent features inside the expansive wall, visible to Ryan from the brush on a ridgetop to the south and east from which the companions were scoping the ville, included a watchtower, a lot of bark-shingled roofs and prominent clouds of white steam and darker smoke arising from various chimneys.
What they were making in that stockade was apparent by a light westerly undulating breeze over the low mountain range.
“Turpentiners,” Mildred said from Ryan’s side, sniffing at the air.
“That’s right,” Mariah stated. She sounded almost eager, which even Ryan acknowledged was more emotion than she’d showed over the three days since they’d picked her up at the massacre site. “Mostly distill pine oil. Old Paw Baylah said they been at it a couple generations.”
“It is a sizable settlement,” Doc observed. “And just from what these old eyes can observe at this remove, a relatively prosperous one.”
“Yeah,” J.B. said, pushing his fedora back on his head. He was hunkered down to Ryan’s right. “Looks like it must run two hundred people. Mebbe more.”
Ryan raised his recently acquired World War II–era field glasses to his eye. It was something of an affectation for him to carry them, big and rather bulky as they were, and built specifically for the one thing he didn’t have—binocular vision—but they had triple-good optics. Besides, using the low-powered Leopold sight on his Scout longblaster to scope a place out was considered a mighty unfriendly act.
Although they were well concealed up here in the scrub—and Ryan had known better than to let sunlight reflect off the object lens of a scope to heliograph his position to potential enemies since he was a sprat—he avoided doing it on principle when there was reason to suspect the people under observation weren’t hostile.
Ryan heard a rustling sound from his left as he focused the binocs. It was Jak. The fact Ryan or any of them had heard the albino meant he had deliberately made the noise so as not to startle his friends when they were already on yellow alert, which they customarily were this close to a settlement.
“Wag coming,” the scout announced softly. “Ox-drawn. Driver and lever-gun guard.”
It was a long speech for the slight young man and one that came perilously close to delivering a second full sentence on top of his opening statement. But it was all potentially important information.
“Ace,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”
He didn’t need to be told that Jak assessed the approaching wag as posing little threat any more than he had to be told that Jak, having delivered his information, had faded instantly back into the wilds around them. Had he detected even a whiff of danger he would have said that straight off. Ryan had spent years in the employ of the enigmatic man known as the Trader, in whose company he had met J.B. He knew full well that the last thing a pair of wag drivers would be doing would be looking to start trouble. Their livelihoods—and lives—depended on avoiding as much of that commodity as they could.
The road ran to their right, along the stream that passed directly through the ville and out under the log-fort walls. The wag in question not being visible yet, Ryan went ahead and took a leisurely look over the ville.
It confirmed Doc’s and J.B.’s assessments, as well as his own: a big place, with sturdy defenses and well-built structures. It was the kind of place to attract plenty of unfriendly attention. And because it had clearly been there a spell, just the way Mariah had said, the inhabitants knew how to repel unwanted attention. When he raised his glasses to the watchtower, he saw a sentry, clearly female despite the shade the roof gave from the afternoon sun, leveling a scoped longblaster and pointing it at the approaching wag. The wagoneers likely recognized that having a bead drawn on them was just a necessary precaution.
The vehicle appeared, rolling in ruts worn in the hard earth by years of previous traffic. With less interest in commerce than he had in the back side of the moon, Jak had neglected to mention whether it was laden or not. But in fact it carried a load of crates and bags woven of some rough fabric, likely hemp, the sorts of things traders might be expected to carry.
The gate, which was also constructed of peeled logs like the surrounding walls, was drawn to the right to open the way for the wag. It rolled inside the stockade without apparent challenge or formality.
“How do they take to strangers showing up on their doorstep?” Ryan asked Mariah as he handed the binocs to J.B.
“It happens all the time,” the girl said. “Don’t cause them any fuss at all. They take in a lot of jack through their gaudy, which Baron Hamar owns, and the boarding house, which is run by his sister, Agnes.”
“What happens if their visitors misbehave?” Ryan asked.
“They usually leave their chills strung up outside the walls,” Mariah said without inflection. “As a warning to others. Till they start to smell bad anyway. Leastways, that’s what Chad Baylah said. He was the youngest, a few years older than me, and not much given to fibbing, for fear of his maw.”
J.B. halted in the act of raising the binocs to his face. He looked at Ryan, who shrugged.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go see a man about a job.”
* * *
“YOU GOT PLENTY of blasters,” Baron Hamar said, running his pale blue eyes up and down the newcomers in the dusty street in front of his establishment. “Do you know how to use them?”
Though J.B. was a man not much given to trying to puzzle out another person’s feelings, he had learned across the span of his long and eventful life to pay attention to certain basics. It was hard to make it out of boyhood still breathing, especially when you were as skinny a little runt as J.B. had been, without noticing whether a person was obviously hostile.
This stocky baron did not sound overtly angry or suspicious. As for the niceties, such as how likely he was to be dissembling, J.B. left that to the others—to Ryan, who did pay more attention to that sort of thing, because he paid attention to anything that might affect their chances of survival, and to Krysty. The redhead disavowed any suggestion that her mutie powers gave her any sort of psychic insight as to what other people were thinking and feeling, but she was good at sniffing out their emotions.
“We had occasion to put them to use a few times,” Ryan said. J.B. had done his time with Trader, too, longer than Ryan had, in fact. He knew from observation that what his friend was engaging in was not self-deprecation. Rather, in the Deathlands, where swaggering braggarts were plentiful, that kind of understatement was just a good sales pitch.
Baron Hamar clearly took it as such. “Good,” he said, emphatically nodding his square head. He had close-cropped bronze hair and a well-tended beard, both liberally streaked with white. He wore a soiled apron over a simple flannel shirt and denim pants, with a blaster belt strapped over it and a Model 1911 handblaster riding in the holster, hammer back and held in by a thumb strap.
“Got use for men and women who know how to handle themselves in a fight
,” he said, “you betcha.”
“We don’t do mercie work, Baron,” Ryan said. “Got to make that clear up front.”
“Oh, no, no. I’ve got a sec team, and my people can fight, too, if anyone makes trouble for us. We do business. We do not look for trouble.”
“Ace on the line,” Ryan said. “What do you need, then?”
“Come, my friends,” Hamar said. “Walk with me.”
He turned and nodded pointedly to what J.B. took to be a handful of his staff and a couple of young, gaudy sluts standing on the elevated plank walkway in front of the gaudy house. It was called Sailor’s Rest, according to a weathered board sign, obviously hand painted with some care and skill. What a sailor might find to be doing here in this thoroughly landlocked part of the world, J.B. had not a clue. He suspected resting was a good bet, though, since according to Doc they weren’t far from the spot farthest from any coast in all of North America.
The employees took their boss’s hint and vanished back inside. Hamar guided the companions west at a brisk walk along the main street toward what was clearly the turpentine distillery, from its size and appearance. Not to mention its ever-increasing smell.
“Hard times have come to this part of the Plains,” Hamar said.
“That’s not exactly breaking news,” Mildred muttered.
Ryan turned his head back toward her, ever so slightly. “Shutting up now,” Mildred said.
J.B. loved the woman, but she did have a tendency to run her mouth. It was a good thing Baron Hamar had a solid rep for being as easygoing as his manner suggested, or almost. Mariah told them that the patriarch of the Baylah clan considered it a scandal just how liberal he was. But the calluses on Baron Hamar’s strong square hands made it clear that, baron or not, he was no stranger to doing hard work.
And the condition of his knuckles told J.B. loud and clear that Hamar was also no stranger to bouncing them off the odd skull, which might have just been how he delivered gentle warnings to gaudy patrons as the step before hanging their hides out on his stockade wall to dry. Whatever the case was, even the most scandalously liberal-minded baron was still a baron and unlikely to be well disposed to getting back talk.