Prodigal's Return

by James Axler

As Dean approached, a coldheart walked out with a skinny, bucktoothed young woman. She was dressed in rags, most of her body fully exposed and covered with dark bruises.

  “Hey, Tiger, done found me a virgie!” The coldheart laughed. “That be a first.”

  “Good work, Natters!” Dean complimented the man, feeling sick to his stomach for the woman. Her shoulders kept moving as if she was crying, but there were no tears on her cheeks. “You done in there?”

  “All yours, brother!” Natters laughed, leading his captive away like a dog on a leash.

  Going inside, Dean checked over the house. It was small, with just one room and a single door, no windows. Perfect. Closing and locking the door, he sighed in relief. “Okay, this buys us some time,” he said. “Wish I could help your people more, but I’ve been treading water with these bastards for a while, and they still don’t completely trust me yet.”

  Silently, the woman stared at him, not sure what to do.

  “Come on, scream,” Dean ordered, taking a chair and sitting. “If somebody passes by, it has to sound like you’re fighting for your bastard life, or we both get aced. Savvy?”

  “You…a roughrider?” she asked hesitantly, clutching the front of her ripped shirt.

  Though he’d never heard the slang word before, Dean could make an educated guess to the meaning. “No, I like women in my bed,” he said honestly, and then for some unknown reason felt compelled to add, “Not that I’ve had that many.”

  That comment caught her totally by surprise. Suddenly, she decided to trust the handsome stranger.

  Taking in a deep breath, she cut loose with a blood-curdling shriek.

  Startled, Dean blinked from the sheer ferocity of the cry, then smiled as he heard a couple of coldhearts laugh outside, and somebody thump the locked door.

  “Not so hard, Tiger!” a voice called. “Let her breathe some, unless you like riding the peach off a corpse!”

  “Shut up, I’m busy!” Dean shouted back, punctuating each word with a grunt.

  Chuckling, the coldhearts walked away, singing and firing their blasters.

  “I’m Althea,” she said. “Althea Stone.”

  “Dean Cawdor.”

  “Tiger?”

  “Just a nickname,” he said with a scowl.

  “What should we do?” Althea asked, sitting on the bed.

  “Better rip those clothes some,” Dean replied, pulling out a knife and tossing it over. “Then cut me on the cheek. Gotta make this look real.”

  Making the catch, Althea tested the balance of the blade, then slashed out, her hand a blur.

  Caught completely off guard, Dean jerked at the stinging touch of steel, then used fingertips to check his face. There was a shallow cut along his jawline. Damn, she was quick!

  Flipping the knife over, Althea slashed at her clothing, then added a few cuts to her legs. Dean was impressed. The blood would make folks think he had been her first, which would prevent most of the other coldhearts from bothering her, acknowledging an unspoken rule that she was his. He would have to keep a watch out for Hannigan. Someday soon, he would have to chill the man.

  Finished, Althea threw the knife back. It thudded onto the floorboards between his boots. “Can’t let them find me with a weapon,” she said, starting to remove her clothing.

  “Hey now, that’s not necessary,” Dean said, raising a palm.

  “Gotta make this look real if somebody checks,” she replied, letting the tattered garment flutter to the floor.

  As she finished disrobing, Dean said nothing, transfixed by the unbelievable beauty of the young woman. She had scars, of course—everybody alive did—but her skin was beautiful anyway, glowing with health. Her breasts were pert and firm, her stomach flat, and the delta between her legs was completely hairless.

  “You shave down there?” he asked, his throat oddly tight.

  “Never had no hair there,” Althea replied, sitting on the bed, which squeaked slightly. “Guess mebbe I got a little mutie blood in me. Most of the people in this ville do. We had a former baron who… Well, to say that he was crazy as a shithouse rat wouldn’t half load the blaster on that story.”

  “Reckon so,” Dean said, crossing his legs. The little cabin felt uncomfortably warm.

  “Now what?” she asked, pulling a blanket to cover herself. She wondered how it was possible that she was feeling an attraction to the coldheart. He had a kind face and intelligent eyes, but he was still an invader destroying her home and everybody she loved. Yet he had gentle ways, and the mixed messages confused her greatly.

  “Now we wait for the chilling to stop. That should be sometime around dawn,” Dean said, removing his gun belt and laying it on a rickety table mostly held together with duct tape. Then he hesitated, not really wanting to take off his shirt or his pants, although for vastly different reasons. Choosing the lesser of two evils, he pulled off the buckskin shirt.

  Inhaling sharply, Althea felt a visceral surge at the sight of his powerful chest and broad shoulders. Dean had the muscles of a blacksmith, and his wide chest was thickly matted with black curly hair, except for three white strips that looked like old knife wounds.

  “I can see why they call you Tiger,” Althea said, starting to reach for the scars, then stopping herself. She was inexplicably drawn to the gentle killer.

  “Anything’s better than Mud Puppy,” Dean snorted.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Spent brass.” Turning away, he took off his combat boots and pants, then paused again, unwilling to turn around in his turgid state.

  Guessing the cause of his unease, Althea turned down the oil lantern.

  Relaxing slightly in the darkness, Dean padded barefoot across the cabin to sit in the wooden chair alongside the little bed.

  “Mebbe you should join me under the covers,” Althea suggested.

  Finding it difficult to think, Dean cleared his throat, trying to choose the correct words and not offend. He felt dizzy, almost drunk, and his heart was pounding.

  Moving onto the bed, he sank into the ancient mattress as he lay next to the young woman. He could feel the heat coming off her naked body.

  After drawing up the covers, he didn’t move for a long time. Then Althea whispered his name, and he pulled her close. Hugging each other tightly, they both tried to ignore the pitiful screams and wails coming from outside. Unexpectedly, there was a prolonged chatter of blasterfire, followed by an ominous silence that was infinitely more disturbing than the previous shrieks of terror.

  Chapter Four

  Groggily coming awake, Krysty started to reach for her blaster, then saw where she was and gradually relaxed. They’d spent the night inside the elevator? That was clever!

  With her prehensile hair flexing and moving, she checked for any damage from the fight, but found only some bruises and scrapes, nothing serious. Her belly was empty and audibly demanding food, but aside from that she felt just fine, and not in the least bit tired from the previous day’s exertions.

  With a snort, Ryan came awake, his good eye snapping open, then narrowing as he looked about, making sure the companions were alone.

  “Morning, lover,” Krysty said, reaching out to straighten his leather eye patch. “I take it the howler didn’t get inside.”

  “Not for long, anyway,” he replied, giving a half smile. Then he frowned. “Fireblast, what’s that awful mucking smell?”

  “Me, I think,” Krysty said hesitantly, taking a sniff of her soiled shirt and grimacing. “Yes, it’s me. Probably Doc and Mildred, too. How did you and the others get so clean?”

  As he briefly explained, the rest of the companions began to stir, yawning and stretching, then immediately checking their blasters.

  Levering himself erect, Ryan checked to make sure the access panel in the ceiling hadn’t been disturbed while they slept. Meanwhile, J.B. did the same thing to the elevator doors and control panel.

  “Clear,” Ryan announced.

  “Same here,” J.B. replie
d, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.

  Holstering the blaster, Ryan grunted. “Okay, our first task will be to recce the redoubt. We need to make sure that bastard howler is still outside, and that there is nobody else inside the base with us.”

  “Then food,” Jak declared. “Feel like been drinking acid rain belly so empty.”

  “Indeed, my dear Jak. I heartily concur,” Doc stated, moving his tongue around the inside of his mouth with a dour expression. “Although I would think anything we consume to break our morning fast would taste infinitely better if the ladies, and myself, took a quick trip to the showers.”

  “Smell like bayou,” Jak admitted honestly.

  “Hey, Doc, I’ll scrub your back if you scrub mine,” Mildred said with a straight face. Then she burst into laughter at the scholar’s shocked expression. “Silly old coot, you fall for that joke every time!”

  “That is because, madam, I am always terrified that someday you may actually carry through with the vile threat,” Doc replied haughtily, retrieving his sword stick from the floor. Twisting the handle, he inspected the blade. There were some minor stains on the steel, but otherwise the sword was in fine shape. Especially considering the situation.

  The companions waited patiently a few minutes for Doc to reload the LeMat, then dutifully returned to the garage level. Warily advancing along the access tunnel, they were greatly relieved to see that the blast doors were tightly closed, and there was no fresh dampness on the walls to show that the howler had gotten inside again, only to be repelled by the auto-defense systems.

  “The big ugly bastard might very well be standing right on the other side of this,” J.B. said, thumping the black metal door with a fist.

  “Good,” Ryan stated bluntly, over a low rumble from his stomach. “Let it rot out there. Come on, let’s finish the sweep, then have some food.”

  “How are our supplies, madam?” Doc asked with intense eagerness.

  “We lost a lot of stuff in our mad dash across the state,” Mildred said with a sigh, pulling out an ancient yellow notepad. She kept track of the supplies these days, even though everybody carried some of the foodstuffs. That way if one backpack was lost, the entire group didn’t go hungry. There was a lot of wisdom in not putting all your eggs in one basket.

  “And?” Ryan prompted impatiently.

  “And we should still have two cans of beans, four self-heats and nine MREs. That’s three days’ worth, five if we stretch it.”

  “We’re a lot lower in brass,” Krysty said, opening her blaster to check the cylinder. “I’ve got three live rounds left, and a pocketful of spent brass for reloading.”

  “Got nothing,” Jak snorted. “And down five knives.”

  “Well, my Uzi is out, and the scattergun has one, count it, one remaining 12-gauge cartridge,” J.B. added glumly.

  “The Steyr is empty, and I’m down to six rounds in the SIG-Sauer,” Ryan said, not bothering to check. He would have to be aced and buried for at least a week before he didn’t know the exact amount of live brass he was carrying.

  “Two live rounds,” Mildred said, hefting the target pistol. “That’s why I came running with the crowbar.”

  It had been a very long time since the ZKR was this light, and Mildred hated the feeling of vulnerability. Safety meant a loaded blaster in your hand, with good friends standing alongside.

  “Alas, I am also down to only two rounds,” Doc stated, displaying the massive LeMat. “I have lots of lead miniballs, primers and cloth wadding, but most of my black powder seems to be missing. Lost in our hasty egress across the desert.” He paused. “But I do still have my sword stick.”

  “Okay, we’re going to eat before anything else. Empty bellies make for weak arms. Then we scav for anything usable as a weapon, before checking the armory down on the third level.”

  Everybody nodded in agreement.

  “At least here in the tunnel we know one direction we won’t be attacked from,” Krysty said, glancing at the huge blast doors. “That’s something, anyway.”

  “Prefer more brass,” Jak countered, hunkering down to rip open an MRE pack. He passed around the cheese and crackers to give everybody a taste, then split the envelope of beef stew with Doc. Ryan did the same thing with Krysty, and Mildred shared an MRE of spaghetti and meatballs with J.B.

  The food was cold but filling, and tasted absolutely wonderful, especially after their last few meals consumed on the run.

  The companions made their way to the service bays and checked the abandoned vehicles. They located no weapons inside the trucks, which was rather odd, since most predark soldiers kept some sort of a handgun in their vehicle. J.B. found a box holding a dozen road flares behind a front seat. Eight of them were useless, split open from internal corrosion, but the remaining four seemed in decent condition.

  “Better than nothing,” he said glumly, tucking them into his munitions bag. “But not by much.”

  Turning their attention to the workbenches, Doc stood guard with the LeMat and his sword while the rest of the companions carefully chose some of the larger wrenches and pry bars. Several acetylene welding torches still held a small amount of charge, but the tanks were prohibitively heavy, and while the flame was lethally hot, the range was pitifully short.

  “Lots of juice in the gas pumps,” Ryan said, checking a pressure gauge. “But without any glass bottles, we can’t make Molotovs.”

  Tightening the jaws on a massive Stillson wrench, Jak scowled. “This mil base. No beer in fridge?”

  “Sure, lots of it. In cans.”

  “Damn!”

  “We’ll find some whiskey bottles in the CO’s office,” J.B. stated confidently. “Never yet found a commanding officer who didn’t have a private bar hidden somewhere.”

  “Rank doth have its little privileges,” Mildred stated.

  “Speaking of rank,” Doc said, lifting a small plastic envelope from a box on the workbench. Using his teeth, he opened it and extracted a scented pine tree, which he hung off a button of his shirt. “Until we hit the showers,” he explained unnecessarily.

  Everybody smiled at that, and even Ryan almost grinned.

  “We don’t smell that bad,” Krysty scoffed, crossing her arms.

  “Yeah, do,” Jak stated honestly, looking apologetic.

  Fed and somewhat better armed, the companions took the stairs down to the third level, pausing several times along the way to try to hear if anybody else was moving around in the redoubt. But aside from the gentle murmur of the air vents, the base was quite literally as quiet as a grave.

  On the third floor, the main corridor was lined with doors. Each office was full of furniture and not much else, aside from stacks of government forms, the ancient paper much too scratchy to even use in the bathroom. Then Krysty smiled, remembering how once a desperate Dean had tried using carbon paper as toilet paper, the results of which had been with him for almost a full week.

  At the end of the corridor, the hulking steel door to the base arsenal was ajar, which was almost always a bad sign. Sure enough, the cavernous room proved to be empty, the shelves and gun racks containing nothing but a thin layer of dust, the scuffed floor littered with empty mylar bags and mounds of excelsior stuffing.

  “Okay, five minute recce, then we move on,” Ryan said, pulling out the SIG-Sauer and taking a guard position near the open door.

  As the rest of the companions spread out, J.B. headed straight for a repair station in the corner. There was nothing usable in sight, all of the reloading machinery empty of anything being processed. Then he spied a plastic box marked R&R. Inside the “repair or reject” container, he found a pile of ammunition magazines with busted springs. Sure enough, several of them had a round jammed inside. Using a screwdriver, he gently forced out the live brass, and soon had a small pile of 9 mm rounds. Sorting out the bullets too badly corroded with age to risk using left him ten good brass. Since the SIG-Sauer and the Uzi took the same caliber, J.B. split the find with Ryan, both
men dutifully reloading their weapons with the meager supply.

  Probing with his sword into the mounds of foam peanuts, Doc located an unopened crate of M-60 machine guns. The weapons were thickly coated with Cosmoline protective gel and in perfect condition. Unfortunately, there were no belts or ammo boxes or even loose brass, so Doc turned his back on the stash of deadly man-portable rapidfires. A blaster without brass was only deadweight.

  Sighing in disappointment, Mildred closed the door on a first-aid cabinet. Aside from a box of elastic bandages, which she took, everything else on the shelves was over a century old and couldn’t be safely used, even in an emergency.

  J.B. opened a cupboard and removed a couple glass bottles of vinegar from a shelf. “These will do fine for Molotovs!”

  “Why do they store that in here?” Mildred asked, clearly puzzled.

  “Nothing cleans off Cosmoline better than vinegar,” J.B. stated, already turning away to continue the search.

  Deciding to check the drawers of the wooden desk, Krysty found a metal box bolted into place inside. Now, that was curious. The box was locked, but as a small child she had learned how to open such things with only a knife and a slim piece of wire. The trick didn’t always work, but this time it did, and inside the lockbox were a pile of laminated security passes, a dusty S&W .38 revolver and a plastic-wrapped cardboard box marked Remington.

  Eagerly, she removed the airtight plastic to find the box full of rounds.

  “Over here!” she called, waving an arm. “Fifty live rounds!”

  “What caliber?” Jak asked hopefully, looking up from a trash barrel.

  “Thirty-eights.”

  “Hot damn, back in biz!” he exclaimed, turning and pulling out his .357 Magnum Colt Python. The cylinder could accommodate both standard .38 bullets and the much more powerful .357 Magnum rounds. Firepower was good, but versatility was even better.

  Eagerly, Krysty, Mildred and Jak divided the contents of the cardboard box, each of them promptly reloading their blasters. Since she had found the stash, Krysty got the extra few rounds, then Jak checked the revolver in the drawer to find six more live brass. He started to remove them, then paused with a frown.