by James Axler
“Fireblast,” he said.
The others muttered surprised concern. He felt the tension rise as they all looked harder at their surroundings, lest the giant bastard come springing down on them. Descendants of zoo beasts released by compassionate, or perhaps foolhardy, humans in the wake of the Big Nuke, some breeding populations of big exotic cats like leopards, lions and tigers, had taken root in various parts of the Deathlands. They were nowhere common, but where they ranged, they were nowhere rare enough—the big cats were not hesitant to snack on human flesh.
“But where did the brute go?” Doc inquired. He had both his swordstick and his outsized LeMat drawn and ready. Ryan reckoned all of the companions might just be enough to heat a leaping tiger past nuke red by the time its five hundred pounds landed on one of them.
Mariah shrugged as if the question bored her. “Away.”
“‘Away’?” Mildred echoed in alarm. “Just ‘away’? Where ‘away’?” She started whipping her head left and right.
The girl just shook her head.
“Nowhere,” Jak said.
Everybody looked at him.
“You care to be more specific?” Ryan said.
Jak stared at him if he were a complete feeb, which was how Ryan had commenced to feel the moment the question left his lips. What could be more specific than “nowhere”?
Not that “nowhere” made a lick of sense.
“Mebbe you could explain that a bit more to us mere mortals, Jak,” J.B. suggested.
“Tracks come. Don’t leave.” A white hand waved his Python handblaster in a semicircle. “No tiger.”
“By the Three Kennedys, he is right,” Doc said. “An impeccable syllogism, as well.”
“Congratulations,” Mildred murmured. “You win a cookie.”
“So where did it go?” Krysty asked Mariah.
“He was just there,” the girl said. “Then he wasn’t. I don’t know where he went. He just did.”
Ryan let go of a breath he wasn’t even aware he’d been holding in a long, exasperated sigh.
“This would have to make triple more sense than it does,” he said, “to make none at all. Jak, don’t you have anything?”
“No.”
“You don’t see any sign of where it disappeared to? Mebbe like it jumped off into the bushes out of sight?”
“Looked.”
“Look again.” Ryan was on the verge of telling everybody else to keep their eyes skinned and their blasters up. Then he realized that’d be a waste of words.
Frowning resentfully at the imputation he might have missed something—especially something as large as tracks made by a leaping tiger—Jak started to turn away to make another circuit of the area where the prints led and stopped. Then he froze and looked back to the bottom of the bank. His white features were still knotted around the brows and tight round the mouth, but it was no longer a frown of anger.
It was plain puzzlement.
“There,” he said, pointing at a small fourwing saltbush sprouting right on the verge of the empty streambed.
Ryan, still unwilling to move forward and risk disturbing tracks that he couldn’t see but Jak perhaps could, hunkered down and looked hard at the bush.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Blood,” Jak said. “Fresh. Still shiny.”
Then Ryan saw it: a few dark patches spattered on the branches and skinny little leaves. He could just make it out by a glint of starlight.
“Some there.” Jak pointed to the grass across the bed. “Drops fell there.”
He pointed at three randomly spaced depressions in the sand. They were smaller than even baby ant-lion larva traps. The albino’s red eyes hadn’t missed them—they didn’t miss much—but he had dismissed them as insignificant. Before he recognized blood spill.
“Tiger blood?” Mildred asked.
It was her turn to be on the receiving end of Jak’s furrowed-brow, tight-lipped glare.
“We don’t have any way to know,” Krysty said, compassionately throwing herself on that hand grenade of pointing out the obvious for the sake of her best friend. “Seems like the best bet, though, doesn’t it?”
“Could it be from a kill?” Ricky asked.
Ryan grunted. “Could be.” He tended to take the kid for granted, even though he had proved his value to the group by saving everybody’s life several times over. It occurred to Ryan that he was the last stray orphan they’d come across. Before the strange girl.
Doesn’t mean I’m not dropping her off at the next ville, he told himself sternly.
“That’s a possibility, too,” he said. “But we need a clean sweep of the area to make sure the bastard’s gone. All together, vee formation. Me on point, Jak scouting up ahead so he won’t pout.”
“And when we’re done, double watches the rest of the night.”
Mildred scoffed.
“Ryan,” she said, “after something like this, do you honestly expect any of us will sleep?”
Chapter Seven
“Did you see the way I counted coup on that bastard coldheart?” Hammerhand was pumped and strutting back and forth between a pair of pickups parked twenty feet apart with their noses facing each other at the rendezvous spot. “I broke his nuking neck. Bang! Like that.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mindy Farseer, leaning against the other truck, said. She had boosted it and driven to this low mesa several miles from the Buffalo Mob’s camp. Two other stolen wags were already parked a little farther off. A fifth was just pulling up, a big cargo wag, well loaded from the way it rode low on its suspension. “We saw it, Randy Macho Savage.”
“Uh, it was ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage,” Joe Takes-Blasters said as he got out of the newly arrived wag and started walking over. He was literal minded and had a fondness for predark professional wrestling. He had the tattered remains of several wrestling magazines in his pack.
“I meant what I said. Like I always do.”
Hammerhand showed Mindy his teeth. “You could keep in mind the ‘Macho’ part and do something about the ‘Randy.’”
His lieutenant gave him the finger. “In your dreams.”
She was the only one who could get away with that. Just as she was the only one who could get away with calling him a “savage.” He knew she’d never put out for him, which was a slagging shame because she was a thermonuke fox. But he had to give her shit about it.
That sort of thing could not be permitted to flow only one way.
The other Blood raiders were acting more visibly excited, dancing in circles, whooping and high-fiving. Hammerhand joyously joined them.
“How many more did we get away with?” Mindy asked Joe, louder than necessary and looking at Hammerhand. A couple more wags were just pulling in.
“Not more than half,” Joe said. “Somebody blew our shit up.”
“Us or them?” Hammerhand asked, suddenly interested in how it had happened.
Joe shook his head.
“I don’t know yet. But I hope we get more skinny when the others get here.”
“If they get here,” Mindy added darkly.
But as she spoke, several more wags arrived.
“We’re it,” said a woman named Steeltongue, jumping from the bed of a Dodge Ram with several other raiders. It wasn’t exactly a traditional First Nation name, but the Bloods were all about the present. Anyway, not even Hammerhand’s home tribe, nor the rest of the Blackfoot Confederacy, really stuck to their own ancient traditions, and they hadn’t for generations.
“That’s, what, ten wags?” Joe said.
“Outstanding,” Hammerhand stated.
“Not quite half,” Mindy said sourly.
Hammerhand shrugged. “Everybody accounted for?”
“We lo
st Cody Blackfeather,” said Lou Shine, a lanky, dark-skinned man with long, tightly curled hair.
“How did it go down?” Hammerhand asked.
“That’s what blew up the surprise,” Lou said. “Cody ran smack into pair of coldhearts slipping off to get it on in the bed of a pickup. Dude gave a warning shout before Cody blasted him. Then the woman gave him both barrels of a sawed-off in the gut.”
“Ouch,” Joe said.
“Where’s Cody, then?” Mindy asked.
“He killed himself,” Lou told them.
“Ace,” Hammerhand said. “He acted right. Like a Blood warrior!”
Mindy wasn’t so sure. “If you say so.”
Along with the ten wags, it turned out they’d come back with six longblasters, three full-auto—including the M16 Hammerhand had liberated himself—and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, all in good shape. The Buffalo Mob apparently tended to their weapons as scrupulously as they tended to their wags.
That to Hammerhand justified his choice to move by the stealth route on this attack. He had wanted to rack up an easy strike, low casualty, for his own budding tribe, to build morale, esprit de corps, and reputation—though mostly he was concerned about the wags themselves not getting shot up.
Warriors, he could replace. Even good ones. Wags, not so much.
“This is ace on the line,” he said, walking back and forth amid his people and rubbing his hands in unaffected glee. “We win. We win!”
“But they’ve still got eleven power wags,” Mindy pointed out. “And a mess of blasters.”
“Why, then, we’ll just have to get our shit together and go back and grab the rest of the wags, won’t we?” he asked with big grin.
“How?”
“Strategy,” he said. His grin widened. “You’re good at that, right?”
She frowned, then she nodded.
“Reckon so.”
“Ace. Then let’s saddle up and get back to camp. Reckon the rest of the Buffalo Mob is swarming out looking for us, hot past nuke red, like yellow jackets from a dug-open nest. Plus we got us a lot of celebrating to do. And we have to sing Cody Blackfeather’s spirit safely to the Other Side.”
He pumped the M16 over his head and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Bloods ride!”
* * *
“WHY ARE YOU so set against her staying with us, Ryan?” Krysty asked.
“We’re not a walking orphanage,” Ryan rasped in answer to her question. He’d indulged in a shot of the baron’s personal brand of whiskey. It had roughened his voice up some, so Krysty judged it hadn’t been exactly smooth. “We’ve dropped off kids at worse places than this and never looked back.”
The bar in the Brews’n’Booze, the Duganville gaudy house owned and operated by Baron Budo Dugan, was hopping that evening. Duganville was a small ville in a low, wide, fertile valley, protected by a fence made mostly of crude planks and topped with coils of razor tape. As Hamarville had, it smelled of the product that brought it its fame, and a comfortable enough measure of prosperity to make it worthwhile guarding with that kind of a barrier, and that kind of a hard-eyed sec force mounted in watchtowers at all four corners.
But in this case it was hard liquor they made in their cookers and pipe contraptions from grain grown in the surrounding fields. As well, beer was brewed by several leading families, including the baron’s. Ricky claimed the smell made him nauseated, but even he decided it was better to spend the night beneath a roof than outside the wire with the stars, the wildlife and the ever-present possibility of coldhearts.
An old woman was banging enthusiastically on a dilapidated piano with enough verve and skill to make up for the decades that had passed since it had seen a tuning. Mostly. People were drinking and joking in a mostly good-natured way. A pair of sturdy sec officers, a shaven-headed man and a woman with a black-dyed Mohawk, standing at either end of the saloon with muscle-thick arms crossed over their chests, may have had something to do with that.
The bar was made of long planks laid across the tops of stout barrels. The tables and chairs were made of decommissioned kegs and barrels, as well. Mildred had remarked that the place reminded her of what she called a “fern bar” from her own time, but Krysty thought the reason for the furnishings was simple thrift. The rest of the party sat together at a long table, eating a not-bad meal of buffalo stew and various vegetables, with chunks of coarse bread on the side.
Mariah was sitting at the table with the others, staring into her plate as if it were a working vid screen, and ignoring Ricky’s earnest efforts to talk to her.
“Is she slowing us down that much?” Krysty challenged.
“Not a bit,” Ryan admitted.
“Is she pulling her weight?”
Ryan squinted his good eye and scratched the back of his neck beneath his shaggy black hair.
“And then some, mebbe.”
“You looking for a good time, handsome?” The gaudy slut who appeared out of nowhere to rub her hip all over Ryan’s right shoulder wasn’t bad looking. Blonde, if not naturally so, faded blue eyes and full breasts only nominally concealed by a low red bodice. She was probably just shy of thirty years but looked as if she was a decently preserved forty.
The slight slurring of her words showed she’d already been dosing herself against the hardships of her nightly shift. Krysty had to give her credit for boldness, no question. Even if her courage was the kind Baron Dugan was famous for distilling and selling.
Ryan shook his head. “I’m pretty well set up in that department,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”
The blonde made a kissy mouth at Krysty. “I see,” she said. “She’s a real firecracker, isn’t she?”
“You noticed,” Ryan said.
“How about it, Red? You good to go?”
“Thank you for the offer,” Krysty said sweetly, “but I’m well set up, too.” There was nothing insincere in her tone. She felt sympathy for the woman, who was just scrabbling to get by, like anyone in the Deathlands. And she certainly didn’t feel threatened by her.
“Both of you at once, mebbe?” the woman asked with desperation just starting to tinge her voice. “You’re both good looking. Better than my usual run of customer by a long shot. Give you a two-for-one special?”
“Sorry,” Krysty said. “But we’ve got business to attend to right now. So, if you’ll excuse us—”
Still the woman didn’t move off. Krysty twitched her red hair, which was hanging unbound to her shoulders. Just a little.
The woman blinked, flashed a nervous smile and quickly left.
Ryan raised an eyebrow. Krysty read his thoughts loud and clear: Aren’t you running a risk, flashing your mutie hair like that?
She smiled sadly and shook her head. “She’s tipsy enough to doubt her own eyes,” she said. “And she knows nobody would believe her anyway.”
It was a harsh reality that Krysty was none too enamored of. But she was alive precisely because she always made a point to recognize reality and adjust her wishes and desires accordingly. And this wasn’t the first time she’d made use of a tool she’d been born with.
“So what’s the problem with letting Mariah come along?” she asked him.
“Why do you care so much about her?”
“Honestly? I don’t rightly know. I could say she reminds me of me, somehow. But that’d be double strange, since just to start with, I was never that shy or quiet.”
“You can say that again.”
She arched a brow at him. “If you want to spend some quality time with that blonde woman, all you have to do is ask.”
“Ouch. I deserved that.”
“You did. So what’s wrong with Mariah accompanying us?”
“It’s not safe for her to be with us.”
“Where is?”
<
br /> He sighed. “Come on, Krysty. You’re being obtuse. Our lifestyle leads us into more killing scrapes in a month than the average sodbuster out on the Plains sees in a hard lifetime.”
“You might underestimate the dangers of farm life.”
“Mebbe. Point still stands.”
“It does.”
She thought about it a moment. She hated being at odds with her life mate. Especially since, in the end, she willingly placed her life and survival in his hands on a daily basis.
But if he’d wanted a meek and mild little helpmate, their track was littered with potential applicants for the job. He’d picked her, which meant he wanted what she had to give. Her fire and her honesty were two of those things.
“As I say, I can’t fully account for why I feel so drawn to her. Mebbe it’s my maternal instincts kicking in late. Mebbe it’s just that...it takes a toll, you know? Having to abandon innocence to its fate time and again. When we don’t go and trash it ourselves. Because it means surviving for another day of—surviving.”
“I know that. I wish I had more to offer you. And the others. But the best I’ve got is, if we don’t survive the next minute, the next hour doesn’t matter a spent shell casing. When you’re on the last train west, all bets are off.”
For a moment they sat in silence. Something about their manner kept the rest of the gaudy-house staff and patrons steering well clear of them. Even the freckle-faced boy who’d brought them their now-neglected drinks.
She reached out and patted his hand.
“I know you do your best, lover,” she said. “And no one else could do half as well. Just promise me that we’re looking for something better.”
His winter-sky eye fixed unwaveringly on hers.
“You know I can’t promise happily-ever-after, Krysty.”
“You can’t promise a comet won’t land on top of us either. Promise me that we’re still looking.”
He sighed again.
“There’s got to be more than this, Krysty, something better that’s staying just out of reach. If it comes our way, I wouldn’t say no.”