by James Axler
Meeting no opposition nor any sign at all of the enemy, he curved to his left, hoping that his path would take him to a point overlooking the ambushers behind the rear barricade.
Chapter Fourteen
Huddled behind their crude but effective roadblocks, the dozen ambushers were popping up between reloads to fire away with mostly single-shot black-powder weapons. When they shot, the barrels of their longblasters were unmistakably pointed high. They weren’t actively aiming to hit the two-wag convoy they had so neatly trapped.
Jak was not surprised. It was clear they’d expected their targets to surrender meekly when they so totally and unexpectedly got the drop on them and that they still didn’t want to damage the merchandise, in the form of Pearl Dombrowski. They intended to intimidate.
Exactly what made the young woman such precious cargo, Jak had no idea. He cared less. All that mattered was his job.
He licked his lips as he leveled his Colt Python between the budding branches of a holly bush, snuggled close along the hip of a granite outcrop. He was barely ten yards from the nearest ambusher, not more than twenty-five from the farthest. They were a scabby-assed lot, he thought, even by the standards of someone who grew up waging a guerrilla war in the Gulf Coast bayous. They wore rags and scraps of poorly made homespun clothes, which seemed to be held together mostly by man grease and filth, as their heads seemed mostly held together by matted hair and beards. The albino could still smell their body funk over the rampaging sulfurous stink of their blaster powder.
Two of them looked a bit less scabrous and rat-chewed than the rest: a tall man in a mostly intact green plaid shirt and jeans, who was blasting away sporadically with a mismatched pair of black-powder cartridge revolvers, and a shorter, wider black man with a lever-action carbine. Along with their better weapons, both of them had clearly visible features instead of masks of fur and filth.
They were obviously the command element, which the brown-bearded tall dude confirmed when, during a break where his accomplices were reloading, shouted, “You all best surrender now, while you got the chance! We still promise we won’t hurt you!”
Right, Jak thought. His mind made up, he thumb-cocked his big blaster, took care along its vented rib and squeezed the trigger.
Although Jak’s first love was knives, he could shoot a blaster well, especially at short range. The high-velocity .357 Magnum hollow-point round planted itself in the long semigroomed brown hair behind partially visible hair.
The two-blaster shooter’s head came apart as if hit with a twelve-pound sledgehammer.
For a heartbeat or two no one on the barricade even noticed. Their attention was focused on their targets, who continued to pump brisk fire in their direction. Then the stocky guy with the lever-blaster jumped and turned his head when his apparent boss’s half-decapitated body brushed against his shoulder on its slump to the ground. He turned, his body language shouting confusion.
One thing Jak had learned fighting his bayou guerrilla war was to cut off the head first. He sighted on the black guy and fired his second shot. He aimed for the head, but an unpredictable hitch in his target’s motion sent the slug blasting through his right shoulder instead. Over the lingering echoes of his own blaster shot, Jak could hear the coldheart squall as a spray of flesh and blood was knocked out the exit wound.
This time that triple-loud noise of .357 Magnum handblaster going off caught the ambushers’ attention. Heads turned toward Jak’s hiding place.
He had already left it, sprinting down the short distance to the road, still using the concealment offered by dense brush and straight tree boles. As he ran, he drew his trench knife with his left hand.
Though freshly reloaded longblasters, as well as astonished if grubby faces, were turning his way, Jak was grinning ear to ear as he burst into the open behind the barrier.
It was time for some fun.
* * *
LOOKING FOR IT, with a rough notion of where it would come from, J.B. saw the yellow muzzle flash from Jak’s Colt Python as the albino fired his first shot from concealment above and behind the ambushers.
Even as the report slapped his ears, he stuck his head out the wag’s driver’s window. “Hang on, Doc!” he shouted.
He floored it even as he called his warning.
“Wait!” Mildred exclaimed as the big pickup truck shot forward—right toward the barricade. “What are you—”
The heavy pipe-work cage covering the wag’s nose hit the barrier. The dead trees were backed by enough heavy boulders not to budge far. The coldhearts had to have worked like jolt-walking beavers to build the thing. J.B., who admired little more than a job well done, would have to tip his fedora to them...after he took care of business.
He put the wag into Neutral, pressed his hat firmly onto his head, let go of the Mini UZI and yanked the door open. As he stepped out of the cab, his heavy machine pistol fell to the extent of the sling looped across his shoulder. He pulled his M-4000 shotgun out of the foot well and pumped it open enough of a crack to confirm it had a 12-gauge shell with tarnished brass base and red plastic hull nicely chambered.
Then in his standard manner—not visibly hurrying, yet moving with enough purpose that it worked out to be fast after all—he clambered up on the hood of the stopped wag.
Jak had fallen upon the ambushers from behind their backs like a white wolf on a fold of sheep. J.B. saw eight or ten defenders looking around in apparent confusion as the albino charged. He slashed a man a head taller across a bearded face—or what the Armorer presumed was a face, though he saw more hair and dirt than skin—and as that man fell over, clutching at a fount of spurting blood, Jak unloaded a round from his handblaster into the rib cage of a second coldheart as that one turned to try to aim a muzzle-loading longblaster at him.
From behind, J.B. heard the boom of Ryan’s Scout longblaster echo away between the steep, short hills. The Armorer had not worried about getting back-shot by the ambushers behind the pine they’d felled, but that was mostly because he never saw any amount of worry keep a bullet out of anybody’s hide. He’d be lying if he said the fact that his friend was giving that gang of bastards something else to put their minds to gave him no comfort, though.
Almost in front of J.B.’s perch, a wide-shouldered black man was trying to raise a replica Winchester 1873 carbine to take Jak down. Most of what J.B. could make out behind the chunk of granite he sheltered behind was his head. So the Armorer took quick aim and blew it mushy with a tight column of Number 4 buckshot.
Another coldheart, this one to J.B.’s right, swung a single-shot shotgun toward him. The Armorer loosed another roaring blast from his Smith & Wesson scattergun. The charge cut through a bushy gray-shot beard to take the bandit where his gullet met his upper chest.
As the ambusher toppled backward in an arterial spray of gore, J.B. raised his bespectacled eyes to look for more targets. And found none. He saw nothing but backsides and elbows as the surviving ambushers rabbited away up the narrow dirt road or bounced and tumbled down the slope to the rocky creek bed like so many spastic jackrabbits.
His pounce reflex engaged by the sight of fleeing prey, Jak stuck his Python back in its holster and started hounding after the fleeing coldhearts. J.B.’s shrill whistle brought the albino up short.
“Don’t chase them,” he called. “We need you close. Might be more.”
He felt a certain apprehension that Jak wouldn’t listen. The small, pale scout was as much wolf as man. He didn’t yield readily to authority at the best of times, especially when authority’s voice was delivered by someone other than Ryan. He did respect the Armorer, as a comrade and a killer, but that didn’t mean he felt any compulsion to obey him on nothing more than J.B.’s say-so.
But Jak’s overriding compulsion was to keep the others safe. By framing his words as the voice of reason rather than command, J.
B. won a quick nod, accompanied by free-flying long white hair, and then compliance, in the form of Jak vanishing into the scrub to the left of the road, as swiftly as if he’d teleported out of there via mat-trans.
“Ace on the line,” J.B. said as he heard Ryan’s longblaster speak again. He knew Ryan was likely outnumbered worse than Jak, and the Armorer had been taking on the front ambush. But even though he didn’t have a lot of insight about what made people tick, J.B. had ground into him years ago that the easiest and best thing to attack in any fight was your enemy’s morale. Once you convinced him he couldn’t win—he couldn’t. And very little convinced anyone of that as quickly and effectively as a sudden attack from behind. That was what had sent this bunch skedaddling.
The group behind the second barrier would have been confident that even if their intended victims didn’t roll over and show their throats when they found themselves stuck in the coldhearts’ trap, they were still safe and secure—and it was their targets who were caught between two fires. To be met first by Krysty and Ricky opening up on them, and then finding themselves sniped by Ryan—who knew how to take his shot and shift to a new location without being spotted almost as skillfully as Jak could—would turn that confidence with its bare ass in the air.
But just to be sure, he jumped back down to the roadside before he started stuffing fresh shells in his scattergun.
Chapter Fifteen
Ryan felt a thrill of cruel amusement at the jacklit-deer expressions of the ten ambushers crouching behind the brown branches of the rear barricade as they tried to process the spectacle of one of their number thrashed on the dusty brown ruts with the back of his head blasted clean off.
But the one-eyed man did not hang around to congratulate himself. While the sound of his first shot was still reverberating in the little valley, he was already shifting to a new vantage point. Because there was a kind of granite-knee outcrop a hundred feet or so up the slope from the road, offering a number of ideal points to snipe at the road from excellent cover, he had picked a less advantageous hide in some scrub twenty feet away from it, in the direction they had been traveling, for his first shot.
Now he shifted to the closest niche among the folds and bulges of the hard, rough rock. He had to expose himself to view, briefly crossing an open patch of slope. But the ambushers were still looking around in consternation, trying to figure out where the chill-shot had come from.
As usual, folks had a tendency to look anywhere but up.
The one-eyed man lined up another target, a scrawny guy with a blond neck beard. But either something made the coldheart duck, or one of his buddies jostled him. Ryan saw the matted head vanish clean out of his scope’s field of vision at the exact instant the trigger broke to the gentle, inexorable pressure of his finger.
After he’d ridden out the recoil and let the Steyr fall back online with a fresh 7.62 mm cartridge chambered, Ryan tracked along the fallen tree that blocked the road. He saw a face mostly covered by a black beard that seemed to sprout from directly under the eyes, which, like the mouth, were black circles of surprise and looked right at Ryan, staring up from between the dry triple clusters of long, curved pine needles.
He shot the bandit right through the shouting mouth. A dark cloud with wet red highlights glinting in the sun fanned out behind the bushy head, and he collapsed.
As Ryan pulled back to shift to another firing point, a little higher up and ten feet to his right, he saw the blond guy with the neck beard sprinting straight back down the road.
A couple of the ambushers popped off shots at Ryan as he moved; none came close. And then as some scattered cheers from the small but enthusiastic contingent of Ryan’s companions announced that the coldhearts manning the front barricade had been routed, the surviving attackers gave it up and lit out, following the man Ryan had missed.
Though they were currently pretty flush with ammo, with plenty of the stuff recovered from their erstwhile Buffalo Mob captors still stowed in the wags, Ryan had a deeply ground-in prejudice against wasting his relatively rare and expensive longblaster cartridges. Instead he drew the SIG and sent a few quick 9 mm shots after the running bandits to keep them headed the right way.
When the last man was out of sight, still running strong, Ryan holstered the handblaster and made his way quickly down the slope. Rather than fight his way through the prickly dead branches of the ponderosa pine, he moved back around the hill as he descended so he could come out on the road next to Krysty’s wag.
“Great job,” he called to Krysty and Ricky. “Krysty, you get back in the wag and keep tabs on our passenger. Ricky—”
“We’re fine.” Mariah’s voice came out of the cab. She’d started sounding a lot more self-assured since it had become clear in the wake of the brush with the Buffaloes that her companions didn’t mean to run her off anytime soon. What with her saving all their asses and all.
Ryan for his part was only willing to let gratitude carry him so far when it came to those outside their tight little circle. But she had proved useful, no doubt about it.
“I can look out for Pearl,” Mariah said.
Ryan looked at Krysty, who gave him back a cool green gaze, apparently neutral. But he knew her well enough to know that she wanted to go where the action was, or might be—and that she trusted her new little friend with the black pigtails to do what she said she’d do. And truth to tell, he’d rather have her along. Ricky would have served as well to ride herd on their cargo, but Ryan had other needs for him.
“Ace,” he called back to Mariah. “You do that. Krysty, come with me. Ricky, I want you on the other side of that tree, keeping careful watch down the road. Stay in cover, and sing out if you see anything you don’t like.”
“Right!” the kid answered. Slinging his DeLisle carbine, he slipped down the lower slope far enough to work his way below the jutting dead crown of the big tree.
“Shouldn’t we try clearing that?” Krysty asked with a wave at the pine.
“That’s a negative,” Ryan said. “If something comes up that road that might not like us, I’d rather have it between them and us.”
She nodded, then accompanied him in a swinging, long-legged walk to where the other wag was nosed up against the first barrier. J.B., Doc and Mildred were gathered on this side of the roadblock, looking it over with weapons slung or holstered. Jak was nowhere to be seen, which was no surprise. He was somewhere past the barrier, keeping a lookout. Ryan and company would never spot him unless he meant them to, but neither would the bad guys.
“Can we bulldoze it out of the way?” Ryan asked.
“Don’t reckon so,” J.B. said. “Unless you’re willing to risk messing up the wag.”
“No.”
J.B. sighed, pushed his hat up on his head and mopped his brow with an olive-drab handkerchief.
“Then we’re going to have to clear a bunch of it by hand, although we can probably rig some ropes and drag some of this deadwood at least mostly out of the way with the wag. It’ll take time, though.”
Ryan looked at the sky. It wasn’t even noon yet.
“We’re not on a tight schedule here,” he said. “So let’s get to doing it.”
They had barely begun to work on tying a thick rope around one of the dead trees’ boles when Ricky came running up the road behind them.
“Wags coming!” he shouted. “And there’s at least thirty men with blasters with them!”
* * *
“CALM DOWN, SON,” J.B. said, straightening from the roadblock and pushing his hat back on his head. “Just tell us what you saw.”
“Three wags, coming up the road slow,” Ricky said. His temples seemed to be about to burst. “They’re full of coldhearts with blasters. Plus more walking beside them.”
“Do you think they’re coming after us?” Mildred asked. Her brown face was sheened
with sweat from exertion, although the day wasn’t hot.
“I don’t want to bet my life they aren’t,” Ryan said grimly.
“Are you certain about the numbers?” Doc asked. He had taken off his long black frock coat and rolled up his shirtsleeves to work.
“I couldn’t tell exactly how many there are,” Ricky said. “Lot more than twenty. I counted that many and then decided I couldn’t hang around any longer.”
“That’s probably a wise choice, Ricky,” Krysty said.
“How long do you reckon we’ve got?” Ryan asked.
“Mebbe ten minutes if we’re lucky,” Ricky said. “If we aren’t—five.”
Ryan grunted. He looked to J.B.
“Even using both trucks together, we couldn’t bull a way through the roadblock by then,” the Armorer said matter-of-factly. “Bastards did a good job. I’ll give them that.”
“What about ambushing them?”
Ricky bit his lip. He knew how deadly his friends could be. But some odds were just too great. Even for the likes of Ryan and his hard-core crew.
But he also found he couldn’t say that. Not to Ryan’s face and one bleak blue eye.
The one-eyed man nodded abruptly, once.
“Right. Look on your face tells me everything I need to know.”
J.B. clapped his young apprentice on the shoulder. “Friendly advice? Stay away from the poker table.”
“So what now?” Ryan asked. He was always the man in charge, and though he seldom pressed the point, there was never any doubt of that. But he was also not afraid to ask his companions for suggestions or advice.