by James Axler
Hammerhand grinned. “Mebbe you can take measurements from a distance, or something.”
“You misunderstand, mighty Hammerhand,” Trager said, pouring on the oil to his most obsequious manner. “I’m here to, you might say, sweeten the pot.”
“Oh?”
Trager dug into the messenger pouch he carried. Hammerhand wasn’t concerned he’d come up with a weapon.
Until he did: a handblaster. But not like any blaster Hammerhand had ever seen. It looked as if it were made of plastic, with a dull not-quite-white finish. It looked streamlined, rather than blocky the way a blaster usually did.
He did not let his sudden spike of concern show in his face or his posture. If you think you’re going to jack me at blasterpoint, little man, he thought, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. An even more unpleasant one.
And if he chilled Hammerhand—well, not everybody would be sorry to see that happen, even in the New Blood Nation. But even the least sorry to see the head man go would be among the most eager to punish the man who murdered him, undoubtedly in creative ways.
“What’s that?” he asked. “A toy ray gun?”
Trager smirked. He could tell he had made an impression.
“You’re almost right, mighty Hammerhand.”
He half turned, raised the handblaster, aimed it and squeezed a stud on the front of the grip. A bright red line appeared between its muzzle and a humped gray boulder the size of a yearling buffalo calf.
Sizzling and popping sounds broke from the stone, then it split. It looked as if a gouge many times larger than the beam had eaten through it. It seemed to have turned a volume of the hard rock to dust.
“Okay, now that’s seriously cool,” Hammerhand said, impressed despite himself. “What is it?”
“A laser pistol,” Trager said proudly. “Just the down payment on what we’re willing to give you in exchange for the girl. Think of what you could do with a hundred of these things.”
Hammerhand nodded thoughtfully. “Can I see?” he asked, holding out his hand.
“Of course, of course.”
The whitecoat handed over the weapon. Hammerhand turned it in his hands. It was surprisingly lightweight for the punch it packed. But it still had enough heft to feel like a weapon, not a toy.
He aimed it at a ponderosa pine and pressed the trigger stud. The beam lanced into the reddish bark.
The tree trunk exploded. The upper part tipped over and fell down the slope with a rustling crash, leaving a smoking stump.
“The beam flash-heats the sap,” Trager said, “causing a steam explosion.”
Hammerhand nodded.
“I do appreciate the offer,” he said. “But it still looks to me as if I’ve got all the power I need to do all the conquering I can handle with the help of Mariah. So you can keep your fancy blasters. Because I’m keeping her.”
“But with this pistol you can blast through a boulder!”
“So? With her, I can blast through mountains.”
Trager began to sputter furiously. Hammerhand held up a palm.
“Save it,” he said. “Now that I’ve got her, I don’t reckon as to how I need you at all anymore. Or your scaly whitecoat ‘associates.’”
“You mean you’re just casting me aside?” the little man shrieked, spraying spittle from his stubble-surrounded mouth.
“Looks like it, old hoss.”
“This isn’t over!” Trager shouted, shaking his fist at the Blood leader.
Hammerhand was turning the laser pistol over admiringly in his hands. He looked up.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “it is.”
He shot the whitecoat through the beady left eye. The balding head behind split along the seams that held the cranial cap to the rest of the skull as flash-boiled steam blew holes in the scalp. Trager fell, flopping.
Hammerhand looked down at the blaster. “Cool.”
He tucked the weapon into his belt and took off down the hill at a swinging lope. This day was shaping up to be a good one, he decided.
* * *
“WHAT THE NUKE happened here?”
The wind moaned as though mourning for the torn and devastated land.
“Don’t you know, Ryan?” Krysty asked him. She felt a numbness in her soul that seemed to radiate throughout her body. “She happened.”
He grunted. “Yeah.”
The plains in this area showed more relief than in a lot of other places here, the hills a touch steeper, the valleys lower. They were strewed with chills and gangs of crows and ravens squabbling with the battalion of vultures that swooped down to avail themselves of the all-you-can-eat buffet of carnage.
That wasn’t what frightened her, indeed shook her to her core. That was just the aftermath of battle. And if it had clearly been a big one, by Deathlands standards, it still was nothing she hadn’t seen before. She’d seen worse. They all had.
What scared her were the gouges dug in the flesh of Mother Earth, too deep, regular sided and raw with relative newness to be the work of any manner of natural erosion. And some of them were a good fifty yards wide.
“Who were these people?” Mildred asked.
“Somebody who pissed off Hammerhand way past nuke red, I’d say,” J.B. stated. They had stopped the wag near a creek at the southern fringes of the carrion field and stood beside it in the slanting afternoon light.
“Wow,” Ricky said. “Look at that ridge. It’s like it just stops all of a sudden. Mariah must have eaten the whole end at a bite with that cloud of hers.”
“Does she really have that kind of power?” Mildred asked. “That’s got to be thousands of tons of earth. Just gone like that.”
“You saw what she did to Lone Calf,” Ryan replied. “What do you think?”
“I should have seen this coming,” Krysty said, “from the way she gouged and devastated the Earth when we cleared the muties out of that field.” The realization sickened her to her soul.
“She was giving us a hand,” Ryan said. “I didn’t think anything about it beyond that at the time. I wouldn’t go blaming yourself for not doing so, Krysty.”
She just shook her head. How could I be so blind? she thought.
She knew the answer, though: Just like Ryan said—she helped us in our need. That was all that mattered to me, too.
“Survivor,” Jak called.
They all looked around. Jak had his handblaster out and was crouched a hundred feet or so east of the others. He seemed intent on a low mound topped with yard-high grass.
“Check it,” Ryan said. “Everybody else, blasters up, eyes skinned.”
Jak circled to the south, then cautiously approached the rise.
“No danger,” he called after a moment. He tucked the Python away beneath his jacket. “Come see.”
A man lay on his back on top of the mound. The grass had hidden him from view. He was a tall man, brown skinned, with black hair tied behind his head, and he wore a deerskin vest and canvas pants. From his hips down he was horribly mangled, as if something had crushed him. Flies buzzed in a thick cloud of decaying-blood stench. The gore that had stained the grass and ground around him had turned almost black.
“Water,” he croaked.
Mildred approached and gave him her canteen. As he drank greedily, Adam’s apple bobbing, the physician turned to her companions and shook her head slightly. There was nothing she could do for him.
“That’s not Mariah’s work,” J.B. said.
“Wag rolled,” the man said, letting the hands clutching the water bottle drop to his breastbone. “Got me. Never...stood a chance...anyway.”
“Who were you?” Ryan asked.
“Káínawa.”
“Blood band of the Blackfoot Confederacy,” J.B. said. “Origi
nal Bloods, I guess, as opposed to Hammerhand’s bunch.”
At the mention of the name the mortally wounded warrior turned his head and spit bloody saliva into the crushed-down grass. “Renegade,” he croaked. “Monster. Of-offended Council. Came to...reclaim...our name.”
“What happened?” Ryan said.
“The witch...girl. Black...tornado. Ate the Earth. Ate...us. Will eat...the whole...world...”
His eyes closed and his head lolled to one side. For a moment Krysty thought he had died. Then she saw that his chest was still heaving.
“We know,” Ryan said quietly.
The eyelids fluttered, then opened wide. Dark eyes looked beseechingly from one of them to another.
“Please,” he whispered. “Warrior’s...dea—”
The crack of Ryan’s handblaster cut him off. The strong-featured face sagged to the side again. The eye that hadn’t been imploded by a 9 mm bullet seemed to show a look of peace, not pain or fear.
“Right,” Ryan said.
He holstered the weapon and cast his eye over the slaughter grounds.
“I was wrong,” he said.
“About running?” Mildred asked. “Because something tells me we should be running right about now.”
“You heard the man, Mildred,” Krysty said. “The black whirlwind will eat the Earth someday if Mariah isn’t stopped.”
“That’s what I was wrong about,” Ryan said. “I let myself hope it wouldn’t come to this. Reckoned she’d fight Hammerhand until she got chilled.”
“How could anybody chill her?” Mildred asked. “That black dust devil eats bullets as easily as it eats everything else.”
“She doesn’t have a black cloud to protect her,” J.B. said. “She’ll die just like anyone.”
“What do you intend to do, Ryan?” Doc asked.
“Settle this ourselves,” he said.
“But that means going up against the whole, what, fake–Blood Nation even to get to her!” Ricky exclaimed. “What chance do we have of pulling that off?”
Ryan fixed him with his lone blue eye. It looked as bleak as Krysty had ever seen it in all their years together.
“Slim chance is better than none,” he said. “Let’s ride.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Krysty lay on her belly on the east side of the low ridge’s crest, then crawled forward the last couple feet to the top.
“There he is,” Ryan said. He handed her the binos. The afternoon sun beat hot on her back.
“What’s he doing?” she asked.
“Haranguing.”
The others crept up, keeping low in cover and mostly silent. Jak was nowhere to be seen, but that was to be expected.
Below them the Blood forces and their tents filled up a broad bowl of a valley. “It’s like there’s ten thousand of them!” Ricky said.
“Their numbers are certainly intimidating,” Doc said. “How might he summon a force so immense out of the sparsely populated Deathlands, even after all he’s done and won? Far less feed for them.”
“I wonder that, too,” Ricky said.
“A mess of them are gathered to hear whatever he has to say,” Mildred remarked. Krysty handed her the glasses.
Recruits continued to flow to the charismatic leader in his current camp in a broad valley among the painted mesas and wind-swept gorges of the Badlands. Especially now that he had hold of a power that made him unbeatable, or seemingly so. The companions had infiltrated most of the way here by masquerading as followers.
The more distinctive of them—Ryan, Jak and Krysty—had disguised themselves with hats and dark glasses, plus clothing with a distinctly different look from what they usually wore. Feeling left out, Doc, Mildred and Ricky had dolled themselves up like landlocked pirates with colorful bandannas tied around their heads.
Even J.B. got into the spirit of things by swapping his trademark battered fedora for a somewhat less battered felt cowboy hat. Temporarily.
Ryan had judged their wag was not unusual enough to merit trying to disguise it or swap it for a different ride. And so it had proved. They had rolled within a few miles of the mustering point where Hammerhand rallied his growing clan to face his even-more-rapidly growing enemies with scarcely a look cast their way.
And the enemies definitely gathered, and big-time, if the rumors that flew among the prospective Blood recruits were even half-true. The Oglala out of Pine Ridge had raised much of the large and powerful Lakota Nation to strike down the upstart Hammerhand. Equally alarmed, the Cheyenne and Arapaho were said to be mustering against the renegade Bloods from the northwest. And some even claimed the coldheart bands of the farther eastern Plains, many fleeing the worsening conditions in the heartland, were forming an unlikely and undoubtedly unstable alliance to deal with the new threat growing east of the Black Hills.
Of course, with Mariah on his side, Hammerhand had little to fear, even from a number of potential foes that dwarfed anything likely seen in the Deathlands in recent times. That was why she and her friends had embarked on this desperate last-ditch mission.
It was Krysty who told the others that if Mariah’s power kept growing, as it obviously was, it could potentially cause as much destruction—or more—than skydark. Her heart had dropped at just how much traffic was heading the same way they were—people in wags, on horseback, even on foot. Ryan had said nothing about the numbers of coldhearts, adventurers and refugees with no place better to go who were flocking to Hammerhand’s side. But he did seem to hold his jaw more set than usual driving among them.
When they got closer, though, they slipped away into the wooded hills under cover of night. They ditched their disguises and cached the wag under dead brush that had collected in a narrow draw. Ryan intended to slip in on foot, to reconnoiter the camp and see the lay of the land.
He intended for them not just to do the necessary job, but to get out alive. Krysty prayed to Gaia that might be possible, but she had her doubts. It seemed to her that they were embarked on a suicide mission.
But there were no doubts that the job they meant to do needed doing.
Now they were no more than two hundred and fifty yards from the heart of the encampment. Krysty couldn’t hear Hammerhand’s oration, but every time he scored a point, the enthusiastic crowd’s response beat at them like surf.
“How could we get so close without getting spotted by patrols or sentries?” Ricky asked. “I mean, they know this terrain. It’s their home turf.”
“Not necessarily,” J.B. said. He took off his wire-rim spectacles, held them up to the bright blue sky and squinted critically at them before polishing the lenses with a handkerchief and sticking the glasses back on his nose. “Most of them are not from around here, most like.”
“Hammerhand, it is said, was born into the Blood branch of the Blackfoot Confederacy, in what once was Canada,” Doc said.
“A camp this size usually gets sloppier about security than a smaller one anyway,” Ryan said. “Numbers kind of go to their heads.”
“There she is!” Mildred exclaimed, peering through the big binocs.
Krysty looked down at the distant platform, which seemed to be made up of planks laid over a foundation of big rocks, where Hammerhand held forth, and her heart sank.
“You sure that’s her?” Ricky asked, squinting.
“It is,” Krysty said. “I don’t need the glasses to tell.”
Even at two to three hundred yards, there was something unmistakable about the short, slight form. Maybe it was the way it held itself, at once fragile and defiant. The way the girl who had appeared to be dwarfed by Hammerhand’s massive frame was dressed could hardly have been more different from the way they’d always seen her. She wore a white dress with some kind of colored figuring on it, and her raven-wing hair hung unbound across her
shoulders. It contrasted all the more sharply with the pallor of her face.
“She’s got a lot more hair than I ever would have thought,” Mildred said. “But yeah. That’s Mariah.”
Ryan peered through the telescopic sight of his Steyr Scout. “This is going to be easier than I thought.”
He snugged the forestock of the longblaster down in a clump of grass for stability and began adjusting his position as if getting ready to take a long shot.
“What are you doing?” Krysty asked in alarm.
“Getting ready to end this.”
“Hammerhand or Mariah?” J.B. asked.
“Mariah,” Ryan said. “Got no particular problem with Hammerhand.”
“He may have one after this,” J.B. said.
“We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it. Now, everybody get ready to power out of here.”
Tears filled Krysty’s eyes. She blinked them clear. She would not look away. Is there a better way than to kill a little girl? she thought. Someone I was close to? Someone who trusted me?
If there is, why can’t I see it?
But she knew that Ryan, as hard as he could be, would never do such a thing himself unless it was a matter of life and death. She saw him inhale deeply, then release half the breath and hold it. Her own breath caught. She knew what came next.
“Up there!” Ricky cried as Ryan’s finger tightened deliberately on the blaster’s trigger.
Krysty looked up to see a red dot, bright even in the daylight, arc across the sky right over their heads.
* * *
RYAN KNEW IT had all gone to hell even before the bullet left his weapon.
The shot was easier than the one he’d taken at Hammerhand at Lone Calf to bring an end to the chances the inhabitants would hand over Mariah to him. He didn’t bother wondering how much misery and trouble everyone would have been saved had they actually just gone ahead and done so; that was passed. He had lined up the reticule, adjusted for range and wind on the girl’s chest and fired.