by James Axler
In an eyeblink a cocoon of swirling blackness enveloped him. Bits of pale skin and swatches of blood whipped around the cloud.
Ryan’s hearing returned almost fully in time for him to hear the coldheart’s shriek of unendurable agony.
Two scraps of black leather, still joined by a steel buckle, bounced off one wall with a musical sound.
“Stay down!” Mariah shouted.
Ricky, who was being held up by a pair of Bloods while a third punched him in the stomach, sagged abruptly to his knees. The cloud jumped up, gouged through the ceiling into the attic and swept forward with its base at a height of five feet.
This time it cut all three coldhearts apart and dropped their lower halves intact to the floor. Ryan wondered if she meant to do that, or if it was even something in her control.
Both hands that had been holding Ricky’s wrists fell to the planking. The youth threw himself down on his face and covered his head with both hands.
The coldheart who sat astride Jak, pinning his arms to his sides with her leather-clad thighs and methodically punching his face, had turned her spike-haired head at the sound of her comrade’s dying scream. Now she saw the cloud plunging toward her face and opened her mouth for a scream of her own.
The cloud took her head first. Somehow it sucked her right up off the supine Jak, shredding her as it did.
“Mariah—” Ryan croaked.
She didn’t hear him, or if she did, she gave no sign. The girl was on her feet now, her right arm stretched out in front of her, controlling the devil vortex’s dance with a hand like a white spider. She had a feral light in her eyes and a slight, twisted smile set on her lips.
He rotated his head the other way. The coldhearts were beginning to galvanize to life. It was already too late. Ryan saw one man with long hair and an eagle feather at his nape jump off one of Krysty’s arms and bolt into the nearest bedroom. Ryan faintly heard glass shatter as he evidently flung himself right through the window.
The cloud expanded until it was as wide as the hall and swept down it to the stairs at waist height. A few legs and hands and weapons hit the warped planks. A chunk was gouged out of the west-side wall as Mariah stalked by Ryan. Then the cloud had shrunk down to scarcely larger than the girl herself. It passed over the rail, hovered briefly, then dropped out of sight as she began to walk down the stairs.
“Ryan!” he heard Krysty say. That restored energy to his limbs, if not stability to his gut, nor his brain inside his head. He staggered up and lumbered down the hall toward her like a grizzly bear loaded to the eyelids on speedballs.
She sprang up, too, and stumbled toward him. Their foreheads came together with a crack.
His head spun freshly and his stomach did a slow roll. Involuntary tears streamed from his eye as he hit his knees hard.
She was on her knees face-to-face with him. They leaned their foreheads together, more gently this time, and both began to laugh.
“Are you two good to go, or are you having a romantic moment?” he heard Mildred ask.
“I’d say neither,” Ryan said. “But I reckon we’ve got to go anyway.”
He was aware there had been screaming downstairs. Now that had stopped. Instead he heard wild shrieks pealing from the street to the east, a crash. A whoomp of igniting fuel.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. Krysty was already back on her feet. Well, she was younger than he was. She stretched down a hand and reminded him how strong she was by hauling him right up onto his pins as if he weighed no more than Mariah did.
“Here’s your blaster,” Ricky said shyly from behind. Ryan turned and the youth pressed the grips of the SIG into his palm. He closed his fingers around it. “Jak’s got your panga.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Now everybody grab what weapons you can, because we need to get downstairs in a hurry.”
* * *
“DARK NIGHT!” J.B. said.
They were in what had served for the lobby of the hostelry and the main trading-post floor.
It was now well on its way to being open air. The whole east wall was simply gone, along with some of the ceiling. The rest of the ceiling sagged alarmingly.
“I sure hope this whole place isn’t about to come down on our heads,” Mildred stated.
The ruined room was full of chills. Sadly Krysty recognized some of the Spotted Elk clan among the dead, although most were clearly coldhearts. Helga herself lay facedown across the counter, pinned there with a bayonet through her broad back.
The presence of several dismembered bodies suggested that the cloud had done its work before bursting through the wall.
“Clear,” Jak called, crouched just inside what remained of the wall to the street. Then, “Out here!”
Despite the possible danger, Krysty sprinted out. The sky had clotted with clouds, dark and convoluted and menacing. But they didn’t approach the darkness or the menace of the black funnel cloud, now as tall as the trading post itself, that was walking down the dirt street. It was sucking in the chills and debris as it went. In its wake the bottom half of a Blood wag burned with orange and blue fire. Its top had been sheered clean off, along with the top halves of several Bloods.
The girl followed her nightmare creation. She had her arms out to her sides and was skipping and dancing.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “She’s enjoying this!”
He shouldered his Steyr Scout. Krysty grabbed the short barrel and shoved it up. “Ryan, don’t!”
“Don’t tell me you’re still protecting her.”
“No.” She looked him in the eye. “You.”
He nodded, then lowered the longblaster.
The cloud clipped through the southern end of the gaudy, then cut through the storage area and yard behind the compound building.
“Our wags!” Ricky exclaimed. “They’re back there!”
“We can get new ones,” J.B. said. “Not so easy getting a new us.”
The girl vanished, dancing through the ruins. Krysty trotted after her. After a brief hesitation, she sensed her lover following her.
“Eyes peeled, everybody,” Ryan cautioned. “That cloud may be the worst threat in the ville, but it’s not the only one.”
Nevertheless they moved rapidly in the open to the end of the street and around the corner. They steered well clear of the half-eaten annex.
Not even Jak seemed eager to lope ahead as he usually did. He stayed just behind Ryan, alongside his friend Ricky.
The devil’s vortex stalked straight west through the ville, leaving a path cleared almost to the ground and on either side slumping ruin. Mariah skipped behind it, waving her hands gaily in the air.
“Where are the coldhearts?” Doc asked, blinking myopically in the morning sunlight, cloud filtered though it now was.
“Living ones?” Ryan asked. “It looks like they’re bugging out.”
Krysty could see wags driving west across the prairie in apparent panicked flight. What she could see of the mass of fighters, horses and machines beyond them had already started moving in the same direction.
Four people burst out of a collapsing house—a man, a woman with a baby in her arms and a little girl. Krysty could see their fear clearly.
Unfortunately they bolted directly into the path of the black whirlwind.
“Ahh, no!” Mildred cried out. “Those’re civilians.”
The cloud subsumed the fleeing family without slowing.
“What is she doing?” Ricky moaned, as childish but insane-sounding laughter pealed to the sky.
“I know what she’s doing,” Krysty said in a broken voice. “She’s hitting back. Making the whole world pay for every blow she’s taken, every groping at midnight or out behind the shed. Every contemptuous word. The being kept like a slave but treated with less love and
respect. She’s trying to make everyone feel her pain.
“I know that feeling. Even if I’d never give in to it.”
Ryan came up and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Krysty...”
She turned and rested her head against his shoulder. “I know. And you’re right. But for Gaia’s sake, don’t try to chill her yourself. Promise me you won’t—and J.B. either.”
“Do I look triple stupe to you? J.B., mebbe.”
“Count me out. Got precious little hankering to see that cloud from the inside.”
“Oh, boy,” Mildred said gustily, shaking her head. “You guys. Joking at a time like this—”
“You know a better time, Mildred?” Ryan asked.
“I guess not.”
“Come on,” Ryan said. “We need to follow her. At a safe distance.”
“Can there truly be such a distance?” Doc asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s stay back fifty yards and hope for the best.”
He started forward. The others followed.
“Ryan,” Krysty asked, “what are we going to do?”
“Wait until she gets enough of it out of her system to settle down on her own, I guess. Unless you got a better idea?”
Krysty shook her head. Her sentient hair had uncurled itself from the tight cap of curls it usually formed around her head in times of immediate danger. But its tips lashed nervously across her shoulders, like agitated snakes.
“What if she doesn’t settle down,” Mildred asked, “and decides to make that ‘making the whole world pay’ thing all too literal by—I don’t know—having her cloud eat the whole damn planet?”
“Good question,” Ryan said.
He worked the action, opening the bolt far enough to catch a glimpse of dull yellow cartridge brass inside.
“At that point, I guess we do what we can. Because it won’t be like we got a lot left to lose.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Hammerhand looked from the line of wags streaming away from the ville, and the fat four-story black tornado that seemed to be devouring it behind them, to the youth dying on a tarp on the hill near the settlement where his command wag sat parked.
Mindy Farseer crouched beside him. She looked up at Hammerhand and shook her head.
“Says Joe didn’t make it,” she said.
“The cloud?”
She shook her head.
“One-eyed man...chilled him,” Little Wolf moaned. He had his head on a rolled-up wolf pelt. His chin, neck and the front of his skinny bare chest were coated in blood. “Fought him...faceup.”
“Sounds like Joe,” Mindy said.
“Yeah. This one-eyed man must be a stud to beat Joe at his own game.” Hammerhand shook his head. “I’ll mourn later.”
He saw a wag powering toward him between a couple of sorry-ass lean-tos. Bloods appeared from somewhere and flung themselves at it, desperately trying to grab a handhold as the black death-cloud bore down on them. Although the open cab and bed of the truck were so overstuffed with fugitives, it looked like a big troop of monkeys gathered on a small rock, the occupants reached out to them.
The whirlwind of Void caught the vehicle from behind. It seemed to stop. Bloods turned and threw up their hands in futile fear as the swirling shadow swallowed them.
The fuel tank blew. Red and blue flames briefly whirled about the black cloud, then they, too, were gone.
“Fuck,” Mindy Farseer said.
Hammerhand braced in case the monstrous thing came on. Instead it turned and spiraled back through the little ville. Buildings that it struck disappeared. Those it merely brushed against collapsed.
“Send up red flares,” he said.
“How many?” Mindy asked.
“All of them.” He looked around at the small headquarters staff he had on the low hilltop with him. “Everybody else, start saddling up to ride out of here.”
“Do we need that?” Mindy asked. Red flares were the retreat signal. “Looks as if everybody’s bugging out already.”
“I don’t want any more of my people than necessary eaten by that thing,” he said. “It’s time to cut stick and go.” He was glad he’d only sent a small fraction of his total force into the place.
“You can’t!” exclaimed Dr. Trager, who had been hovering nearby like a pesky, lumpy bird. “You can’t just run away!”
“Watch me.”
“But the girl—she’s within your grasp!”
“If you want to run up and try grasping that black whirlwind, knock yourself out. I’d love to see it, actually.”
He turned his face abruptly from the annoying little whitecoat. “What about the kid?”
“He’s boned,” Mindy said. “Not just that both femurs are smashed. But it seems like at least one of them got rammed clean up through his hipbone into his belly. He’s pulped and bleeding out inside.”
She shook her head. “Must have landed triple bad. I didn’t think a couple-story drop would even do that to a person.”
“Give me...blaster...please,” Little Wolf croaked. Every word bubbled out through fresh gut blood. It was painful to see and hear. “Die...with weapon...in hand.”
“Right. Lend him yours, Farseer.”
“Why me?”
“You’re handy.”
Shaking her head and muttering, she drew her Beretta 92, checked the chamber, put it back on safety and passed the 9 mm blaster to Little Wolf.
He had trouble grasping it. With another peevish look at Hammerhand over her shoulder, Mindy folded his fingers about it until he took hold. He nodded his thanks.
“Hammerhand, you’ve got to listen to me—” Trager pleaded. He actually reached out as if to grab the chieftain’s arm, but his grubby fingers stopped short and trembled.
“Tell...my aunt... I died a...warrior.”
Hammerhand heard the slight but unmistakable click of a safety lever being switched off. From the corner of his eye he saw Little Wolf raising Mindy’s handblaster to aim at himself. Or trying to. His arm wavered wildly. Smoothly Hammerhand drew his Smith & Wesson M29. The revolver belched orange flame and noise. A .44 Magnum bullet hit the kid at the inner corner of his right eye and blew the back of his skull and most of what it had been holding in all over the wolf pelt.
Mindy jumped to her feet. “What the fuck?”
“You can take your blaster back now,” Hammerhand told her.
“Did you know he was going to do that?”
“Of course. Have him wrapped up and loaded on a wag. The kid’s earned a warrior’s send-off.”
She knelt and recovered the Beretta. “He wasn’t a bad kid,” she said, shaking her head and wiping away the blood his gory hands had gotten all over it with a torn-up hank of grass so it wouldn’t ruin the bluing. “But busting your own ass all to nuke jumping out a window to escape doesn’t strike me as a double-heroic end.”
“I’d say it was triple smart,” Hammerhand said. “You of all people know a real warrior picks his battles. Or hers.”
“But—”
“The fall didn’t kill him. He died at the hands of a chief. Right?”
Mindy uttered a short, sharp sigh. “Yeah.” She stood. “Leo, Red Sky, you heard the man. Wrap the kid up and get him in a wag. Might as well use that wolf skin, because it’s not good for much else now.”
“You have to get her!” Trager shouted. Hammerhand felt spittle on the side of his face and had to fight down the urge to choke the life from the vile little creature.
“Enough,” he said sternly. “I had four members of my birth tribe’s Council killed, skinned, salted and sent back to the rest as a hint to my family to get back out of my face. One of them was my own uncle. So if I’d do that to my own blood, what do you th
ink I’ll do to a random whitecoat who stumbled out of the wilderness for not being able to take a nuking hint?”
Dr. Trager’s face went satisfactorily pale behind its perpetual coat of grime and hoary stubble. But he did have something resembling balls, Hammerhand had to admit. He pointed back at Lone Calf, where the black monster wind seemed to be trashing the pathetic buildings on the far side of the main Bodacious Creek Trading Post.
Hammerhand was pleased to see the wags he’d sent to patrol the far side of the settlement were powering back across the prairie swells, too.
“That power!” the whitecoat cried. “It’s like nothing on Earth. It’s like nothing ever! You can’t let that slip through your fingers!”
“Believe me, little man, I know. And I don’t intend to. But doing it your way will only get us all eaten by that black, swirling devil.”
“What other way is there?”
“I’ll come up with something. All right, Bloods, let’s ride!”
* * *
THEY FOUND HER sitting on the road just past the outskirts of what had been a thriving if crudely cobbled-together ville, on her knees. She was drawing pictures in the dust and humming to herself.
The black devil’s vortex had gone—wherever it went.
The humming had a tune, Ryan realized. But he didn’t recognize it. He signaled for the companions to spread out left and right. Just in case.
Gotta leave some of us alive if it all goes sideways here, Ryan thought.
Survival, no matter what, was just that deeply ingrained in him.
“I know,” she said without turning her head or even looking up as they cautiously approached. “I have to go away now.”
Ryan looked at Krysty. A tear ran from her green left eye down her pale-pink and perfect cheek. But her head was high, her jaw resolutely set.
“Yes, Mariah,” she said. “You do.”
The girl nodded. She stood up, turned and marched up to Krysty. She threw her arms around her and hugged her fiercely. Krysty hugged her back. But as strong and as loving as the red-haired woman was, she couldn’t muster more than a stilted, awkward effort. The girl let her go, turned right about and walked directly away from them.