Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass

by James Axler

  “Sorry,” Mildred said. “But it’s not like we haven’t known he was alive the whole time.”

  The sun was just beginning to rise above the eastern lip of the cave-in, breaking into sharp spears among the branches of a berry bush.

  “Why’re we here?”

  “You mean, ‘Thanks for saving my life and bringing me to a safe place, and why are we here?’ right?” Mildred asked sweetly. She was squatting by a fire turning what looked to be squirrel carcasses on a spit.

  Ryan waved a hand at her. “Yeah, yeah. I was getting to that. Now answer the fire-blasted question.”

  Krysty gave him a big smile. “You already provided a pretty good synopsis yourself as to ‘why,’ lover,” she said.

  She turned away from chopping up some kind of herbs on one of their sorting tables, by the smell that came to him, and tilted her face to kiss his cheek.

  “This place is way more defensible than our old campsite,” Ricky said. He and Doc were squatting by a second fire set on the other side of the entry to the sunken facility in which Ryan had awakened. So, to Ryan’s mild surprise, was Jak, pouring himself a blue steel mug full of something aromatic from the coffeepot that had been suspended over the low fire. From the smell it was that awful chicory they made do with around here, and pretended to like.

  Suddenly, Ryan realized he was ravenously hungry. I must be, if that stuff smells good, he thought over the sudden rumbling of his stomach.

  “What’re you doing here, Jak?” he asked. “Did Krysty drag you down here by the ear again to make you eat something?”

  The albino grinned. “J.B. spelling,” he said, which made sense; Jak only really trusted the Armorer and Ryan himself to keep watch on the group in place of him, and then not overly much. He sometimes forgot to do basic stuff like eat and sleep in his protective zeal.

  “Okay, ace,” Ryan said, accepting a mug of steaming coffee sub from a grinning Krysty. “So it made sense you brought me here. Now how the nuke long was I out?”

  Krysty and Mildred exchanged glances. “Two days,” Krysty said.

  “Two days? Fireblast! And what are we still doing here, with the whole district no doubt up in arms and looking for us now?”

  “No better sanctuary seemed to offer itself,” Doc said.

  “We weren’t going to drag your dead-to-the-world ass clear out of the Pennyrile,” Mildred stated. Her usually smooth forehead was creased in a frown.

  “She was really worried about you,” Krysty said. “Didn’t like that a blow to the head put you under for so long. I told her you were too mean to die of something that didn’t chill you straight off.”

  Mildred let out a long sigh. “Finally I figured it out,” she said. “Your body kept you under that long because you needed rest. Even after a comparatively quiet spell, we’re all running on empty.”

  He sipped the chicory. Nuke, but it tasted good. That showed how deprived his body was.

  “Why didn’t you just leave me?” he demanded.

  Krysty looked shocked. Mildred eyed him narrowly.

  “Are you still concussed? Beause you’re raving.”

  “You’d have done the same for us!” Ricky chirped. Ryan knew the boy was trying to be helpful, but he was so cheery this morning Ryan kind of wanted to strangle him.

  More than usual, even.

  “What? Left you behind?” Doc emitted a bark of uncharacteristic laughter. “Come now, Ryan!” he said. “After you have saved all our lives a hundredfold? You expect us to believe you would abandon one of us, if we were temporarily incapacitated?”

  “Keep telling yourself that,” Ryan grumbled.

  He heard the cry of a red-tailed hawk. The big bastards were everywhere, and they, like most birds of prey, had almost comically thin, piping voices.

  But there was no wide-winged shape visible circling against the low-hanging clouds. He’d known there wouldn’t be.

  “Nuke shit,” he said, but softly. “Where’s my blasters?”

  The others had gone tense as well and were all staring up and around at the brushy lip of the cave-in.

  “Inside the first room, to the right,” Mildred said without looking at him.

  Jak flung his coffee on the ground with a curse and stuck the mug in a pocket of his jacket.

  With scarcely a rustle of vegetation, J.B. appeared and began sliding down the loose-earth slope toward his friends. One hand held his shotgun, the other clamped his fedora to his head.

  “Armed men,” he said, “a lot of them. And they’re all around us!”

  * * *

  I’M SORRY, MY FRIENDS, Mathus Conn thought. But as poor, demented Wymie says, after all, in the end you’re only outlanders. Sometimes sacrifices must be made. For the greater good, of course.

  And better you than any of us. Though, realistically, he already knew how inevitably it would come to that. But he would hold out as long as he could. Just as he was going to stay the course, whatever it cost, and do whatever it took. Because it was much too late to back out and have a hope of continuing to breathe.

  Around him the camp of his nascent army was already fully alive before the sun was doing more than silhouetting the boles of the trees on a ridge to the east with precursor light. The scouts he’d sent to the area around where Wymie’s informants had seen the lights and heard the blasterfire had reported back with their quarry’s location. It wasn’t even a mile from Conn’s current bivouac, off to the southeast. Now the forces were mustering to move out.

  Putting his hands on his overall-covered thighs, Conn stood up from the folding camp stool in his tent. I’ve let myself get fat, soft and old, he thought. Going on campaign like this should go a ways toward fixing at least two of those things.

  He did not anticipate the effort to purge the Pennyrile of ruthless cannie coldheart killers would be short, even as his army, with at least a hundred fifty armed men and women and growing almost by the hour, closed in for the kill of the seven outlanders.

  Because, of course, he knew they weren’t guilty.

  Outside the tent, a bull throat cleared itself loudly.

  “Mr. Conn,” he heard Potar Baggart call. “It’s time.”

  “I’m comin’,” he said.

  He picked up his hat and went to the tent entrance. He carried no weapons. Wymie hadn’t since launching her crusade, and didn’t. He thought that was a useful example: allowing the willing to bear arms on his behalf, while keeping his hands clean.

  It had served her, initially—until her apparent lack of a clue had gotten a dozen locals killed in a massacre almost of the scale of the destruction of the Sumz clan.

  “Boss,” Potar said respectfully as he stepped outside.

  Conn nodded at him. The morning air was rich with the smell of a stand of loblolly pines. They set off toward the enemy camp. The bulk of his force had moved out already, leaving a contingent of Potar’s sec men behind to stand guard on the camp.

  “Any more trouble?” Conn asked.

  Potar smiled and made hur-hur noises deep in his thick throat. “Oh, yeah,” he said with relish.

  Conn had moved quickly since Wymie ceded control of her mob to him. As promised, he’d sent out emissaries the length and breadth of the Pennyrile, spreading alarm—and the warning, if you’re not with us, you’re against us.

  Plenty of people laughed off the threats—both of them—especially farther away, such as away in the hollow to the east. But that was ace with Conn, for now. Plenty had responded to his call, and more kept coming in.

  And of course, even some close to hand were reluctant to see the light. Some, like Tarley Gaines and his clan, were too powerful to mess with for the foreseeable future. Others—well, Potar and the crew of like-minded bullies he had gathered around him as sec men had already proved their worth several times over. They hadn’t even had to chill anybody—that Conn was aware of.

  Excited scouts met them when they were still a hundred yards of brush interspersed with stands of hardwood trees from
their goal. “Mr. Conn! Come lookit what we found!”

  “Show me what you’ve found, Sairey,” Conn said to the young woman who had spoken. She was a skinny little ferret with brown hair sticking straight above her sharp face. Conn wondered how she could see with the camo bandanna she wore tied around her forehead seemingly half covering her dark brown eyes, but the Maccum Corners teen was acknowledged as the best scout and tracker in these parts, even by local Lou Eddars.

  Lou himself was standing by a patch of open ground, still muddy-tacky from some overnight rain. He was standing stock-still, but his whole manner bespoke quivering alertness, like a hound that had just fetched the fresh trail of a bear. A handful of other scouts clustered around, squatting and standing, pointing to the ground and jabbering in soft voices among themselves.

  “Quietly,” Conn said softly. “We don’t want to tip the coldhearts off now, do we?”

  They shut up instantly. From the gleams of still-faint dawn light on their eyeballs, it seemed they were looking more at the mobile mountain of Potar Baggart behind him than at him.

  “Tell me what you have.”

  “Check these out,” Sairey said. She squatted and pointed.

  Putting his hands on his thighs, Conn leaned over and peered at the ground. For a moment he wondered if he was missing what he was supposed to see in the poor light.

  “What other than bare feet?” he asked.

  “That’s it!” Sairey said excitedly. “Them outlanders all wear shoes.”

  “And there’s a power of prints around here,” Lou added.

  Conn straightened and scratched at his beard thoughtfully.

  “Coamers,” he heard someone say in hushed tones.

  “Ain’t no such thing,” Wymie said from behind Conn. She at least had the sense to keep her own voice low, crazy girl or not.

  Conn turned. She was walking up the same path he and the rest had taken, with only a couple of her hangers-on for company.

  “That’s just an old myth, the coamers,” she went on. “Just a boogeyman story made to scare kids who ain’t actin’ right.”

  “Stories say they eat people, too,” Sairey said thoughtfully.

  Wymie rounded on her, black hair flying and sapphire eyes blazing. “I saw what I saw!” she hissed. “It was them outlanders!”

  “Easy,” Conn said, with as much urgency as he could muster and still keep his own voice low. “We don’t want to spook the outlanders, now, do we? Not after you went through so much work and heartache to track them down and bring them to justice, Wymie.”

  “It’s just some barefoot hillbillies, turned to help them,” she insisted. “Bad sort of people. Like—”

  For a moment Conn was sure she was going to blurt out, “Mord Pascoe, my stepdad!” Instead she turned and walked away, her retinue of two casting uneasy glances back over their shoulders as they followed.

  “How fresh are the tracks?” Conn asked his scouts.

  “Not very,” Sairey replied. “Made around midnight latest, mebbe.”

  Conn nodded. “Right. Well, thanks. We’ll follow this up later. Right now—you all don’t want to miss out on the fun, do you?”

  Despite the butchery of Wymie’s crew by their intended targets just a few days before, the scouts grinned like hunting dogs and set off for the objective, which Conn had been told was a spot where a sinkhole had caved in.

  He hung back and watched them go. Potar stayed with him. He seemed to sense the real action was always going to be at Conn’s side.

  “Want me to do somethin’ about her, boss?” the big man rumbled.

  Conn knew he wasn’t talking about Sairey. “No.”

  He shook his head and reached to the waistband of his pants for a flare gun.

  “Not yet. But mebbe later—for the greater good.”

  From the cave-in came a muffled shout, followed by cries of triumph and rage.

  He touched the big man on the arm. It was like touching a tree trunk.

  “Time to go. We have the advantage of complete surprise. Our bunch should be able to overwhelm them easily. Let’s go watch the kill. I think we’ve earned it.”

  He drew the flare gun and shot the round in a high arc over the hole.

  * * *

  Chapter Eighteen

  Krysty’s heart sank as she watched the pink comet of a flare rise up into the low-hanging clouds.

  In answer to the question Krysty suspected was yammering in everybody else’s mind along with hers, J.B. was as word-stingy as Jak at his best.

  “Blasters!” he hollered.

  He stopped where the slope leveled out into a shallow bowl at the bottom. He turned, bringing up the Uzi with both hands. Then he started pulsing short, loud bursts into the bushes at the top of the cave-in, turning as he did so. He carefully broke off fire and elevated the short barrel as he came to each of his companions.

  “Everybody get in farther!” Ryan yelled.

  Blue-tinged gray smoke billowed from the brush surrounding the pit. Half an eyeblink later the noise of a black-powder blaster, duller than the crack of the modern cartridges the companions fired, hit Krysty in the ears.

  She hesitated. Other smoke puffs blossomed despite the recent raking of the vegetation by J.B.’s full-auto fire. Slow-moving bullets—relative to their own—went past her with weet sounds, to splat off the exposed masonry of the mostly sunken structure, or toss up pinches of yellow dirt.

  Long habit took over. Ryan had barked a command. When he did that, those with him obeyed instantly, without question. Not because they were subordinates, but because he was right, far more often than not.

  Krysty, not a follower by nature, had those thoughts flash through her mind as she whirled. She felt her long red hair contracting toward her scalp even as it spun about like a flag being twirled above her shoulders. Ryan’s companions chose him to lead them because, even though he was human and fallible, his survival knowledge and instinct was unmatched. And his will was as hard and durable as the vanadium-steel walls of a predark redoubt, cutting through the perils and hardships of the Deathlands like a blade.

  J.B. fired the last of his magazine toward the bush where the first shot had come from, eliciting a cry of pain audible even over the rattling of old-time blasterfire. Krysty heard Ricky cry out and saw him stumble as he started to go through a crazily tilted door of the excavated office structure, clutching the back of his right buttock. He lost his balance and slammed his head against the steel frame, then slumped.

  Mildred, who’d gotten in a step ahead of him, and his buddy Jak, right on his heels, grabbed the stunned and wounded youth by either arm and bundled him bodily into darkness.

  * * *

  THE BURLY 12-GAUGE boom of J.B.’s Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun sounded oddly muffled, and echoed strangely in Ricky’s ears, away down here in the deepest, darkest point they’d excavated in the sunken office complex.

  The complex, to call it that, wasn’t large, though what they had discovered of it so far was surprisingly big, given the top of the hole it had mostly vanished into was twenty or twenty-five yards across maximum. It had apparently consisted of an indeterminate number of modular steel structures, connected by corridors made, obviously on-site, of metal-roofed wood frame. J.B. had opined that it had grown over whatever period of months or years it had seen use.

  Doc, in his turn, had pronounced that whatever had caused the earth to swallow it had not been a natural event. Or at least not a normal one. Though the Pennyrile was a veritable Land of the Sinkholes, this clearly wasn’t one. Or at least not in his judgment, which while not as rock-solid as Ryan’s tactical insight, nor the Armorer on blasters, was generally reliable and in any event greater than anyone else’s.

  The sound of Jak’s big Python going off from the entrance still carried enough of the characteristic nasty hypersonic harmonics of a .357 Magnum handblaster going off to set Ricky’s teeth ever so slightly on edge.

  The shot that had struck Ricky had likely been a ball
to begin with—a true old-fashioned soft-lead sphere, not an extended slug like the so-called Minié ball, much less the modern jacketed military hand or longblaster bullet that was also inexplicably called ball. And it had ricocheted off something before hitting him, soaking off most of its kinetic killing energy. It had not even penetrated the tough denim of his jeans, nor busted his femur beneath, which was fortunate.

  It still left a bruise that had already been turning a mottled rainbow of dull colors when he, red-faced, had to skin down his pants for a quick exam by Mildred by the light of a stinking turpentine-oil lamp. And he was still going to have to endure the ribbing of Jak and the others about having gotten himself shot in the butt—at least until the next big catastrophic turn in everybody’s lives took their minds away from him and his embarrassing plight, or until they were all staring sightlessly up at the office’s canted ceiling, which was how they’d end up and in a hurry if the mob of attackers had their way. From the conversations of his comrades as they fended off the occasional probe, it seemed as if the whole Pennyrile was up in arms and hungering for their blood.

  Feeling morose, Ricky sat with his back to the cool jumble of dirt and rock at the end of the corridor where they’d packed him off to recuperate. Desperate as their straits were, they didn’t actually need him. The threat was not immediate. And as Ryan had shown a pair of locals who had been brave but unlucky enough to try to force entry by dropping in from above, a single determined fighter with a good edged blade—in this case, the one-eyed man and his panga—could hold the narrow door indefinitely by himself, without even wasting a cartridge.

  Fact was, Ricky would get in the way. The rest were mostly occupied with either hunkering down waiting for the call to action if—when—the mob nerved itself to try a mass concerted rush, or rummaging through the hitherto-unsorted scavvy and checking the opened chambers for supplies to stuff into their packs. Because it was plenty clear that, if by some miracle they escaped, they’d need to travel far and fast to have a chance of staying in their skins.

  Fortunately, they still had a good supply of ammo.

  Ricky heard J.B. exclaim from the top of the complex, “Dark night, they’re throwing burning green-brush bundles!”