by James Axler
“Triple-stupe,” a sec man muttered, prodding the selected captives into the bed of a wag. “Ain’t figgered out what he was don’t mean shit to a tree, now.”
With surprising agility, Elliot rolled to his knees, clasped his hands prayerfully and commenced to plead. “No, you can’t do this! I can help your baron. I’m a man who unnerstands the way of the world!”
The raiders wordlessly began to line up behind the weeping, imploring rejects.
Elliot reached back and grabbed a nine-year-old girl by a bony grubby wrist, dragging her forward. She was clad in a torn smock that was all over stains in shades of yellow and brown.
“Take my little girl—do with her what you will,” he blubbered. “She’ll please you up right. Trained her proper, myself!”
One of the mothers of the other children spoke up. “They’re gonna take what they want anyway, Elliot, you damn fool,” she said bitterly. “They got the blasters. Now stop your sniveling and die like a man!”
“Wait! Amos, Bub! Help me! Ya gotta!”
His two heavyweight henchmen evaded his eyes as they took their places in the wags. Banner cuffed the politician on the side of his head. “Back in line, asshole. Make this messy for us, we shoot you in the belly and just leave you.”
“‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves…’” Doc began to recite loudly as the weeping would-be mayor crawled back into line. His eyes, aged beyond his years as much by the horrors of being snatched from his family and hurled through time as by the desperate sights they had witnessed in the Deathlands, had lost all hint of focus.
The commanding coldheart halted with one boot up in the cab of his wag. His men had already secured the travelers’ wags and begun firing up their engines. He turned his head and stared at Doc.
“What did you say?”
“‘All mimsy were the borogroves—’”
“‘And the mome raths outgrabe,’” the coldheart officer finished, striding back to him. “You know something of the classics, then, old man. Can you read?”
“Read, yes,” Doc responded, as though replaying to a voice from beyond the moon. “Read, breed, if you prick me do I not bleed?”
“Nuke-sucking oldie’s mad as Fire Day,” the sergeant said. “Do him with the others.”
“No, Sergeant Banner,” the sec chief said. “The General will want this one.”
The sergeant scowled. “It’s strong hands and backs we need to fix the track—”
The sec chief tossed him a single look. His eyes were pale brown and as clear as new glass.
“Yes, Captain Helton, sir,” the blocky sec man said briskly. He seized Doc’s arm and yanked him out of line. “Come on, then, you crazy old shit. General’s got his little hobbies.”
For a moment no one breathed. The coldhearts were clearly not used to anything but instant obedience to their commands, nor slow to let their blasters enforce them. Surely if Doc continued raving; the youthful captain would lose patience and allow Banner to ice him with the others who’d been deemed useless.
But since it no longer required the shelter of lunacy from the imminence of certain death, Doc’s rational mind reasserted itself. He lowered his hands—Banner’s finger never so much as twitched on the trigger—and shot his frayed cuffs. “Lead on, my good fellow,” he said to the sergeant.
As the old man was dragged toward the wags, Krysty felt tension flow out of her muscles. The future was a void a million times greater than all the Big Ditch and then some. But on some level below thought she wouldn’t watch another of her companions—the only family she had left to her—die before her eyes. Even if it meant her own death.
Of course, her future was empty without Ryan. But she had duties: as a friend, as mate to the companion’s fallen leader, she couldn’t allow herself to die.
Yet.
The children wailed and sobbed and clutched their mothers’ skirts. The mothers, Deathlands women, tousled their children’s hair, bit back their own tears and murmured reassurances they knew were lies. One little girl was trying to break from the line, screaming and crying and tugging at her mother’s hand. The sec chief frowned. He followed the direction her free hand was stretching in. He walked to where the small rag rabbit—or mutie—lay at the bash of a clump of salt-bush; picked it up, brought it to the little girl, knelt and handed it gravely to her. She took it, suddenly quiet, her grimy cheeks scoured by her tears. He smoothed the dark hair on her head, stood, pivoted on his heel and walked back to his wag.
As he passed Banner, he nodded once.
The sergeant barked a command. The machine gun that had killed Ryan and its mate on a second raider wag snarled. The bullets raked the line of rejects carefully between two and three feet off the ground, to take adults in legs or bellies and kids in heads and chests, anchoring all neatly in place. Most screaming and thrashing in agony, a fortunate few lifeless-limp, the unarmed travelers went down in the dust.
The firing stopped. Arcs of flying brass empties flashed in the sunlight to fall with an almost musical tinkle to the hardpan. The moaning of the wind was joined by the shrieks of the injured.
Banner spoke again. Again the machine guns ripped the bodies, those that stirred and those that didn’t. It seemed the marauders had bullets to burn. Finally the sergeant walked along the line of now-motionless travelers, firing a handful of single shots from his longblaster. Then he turned and joined his comrades in the wags.
One of the raiders who had come in the stakebed truck that now contained the caravan’s survivors took a frag gren from his web gear, pulled the pin and let the safety lever fly free, then tossed the bomb under the broken-down wag that had caused the caravan to halt. He turned and walked away without waiting to watch the result. The gren went off with a crack muffled by the wag’s bulk.
The sec man who’d thrown the gren joined his comrades who were crammed into the two travelers’ wags they had emptied. Engines growled. The convoy rolled off along the bare-earth track, to the west, raising roostertails of khaki dust.
The derelict wag’s gasoline tank, ruptured by the blast, caught fire with a whump and billow of yellow flames. The vehicle began to burn ferociously, puking black smoke into a sky that was already beginning to mask its clean blue face with clouds.
Krysty emerged from her hiding place. Her joints ached from maintaining the unnatural position she’d been forced to endure. Red ants had crawled up her legs inside her jumpsuit and bitten her shin and thigh. Their venom made the tiny wounds pang like stabs. She ignored all.
She walked with the deliberation of a drunk to the edge of the precipice, where Ryan had stood, where last she had seen her lover. Her beautiful high-cheekboned face was set like stone. She looked down, half fearing what she would see.
There was nothing. The slope angled sharply down for perhaps forty yards, pitched over a cluster of granite boulders, which resisted erosion better than the prevalent sandstone, and straight down in a sheer fall to the floor a mile below. Ryan’s body wasn’t in sight. Presumably it was way down at the bottom, hidden by sheer height.
She turned away, looking over the bodies of their former traveling companions: Kurtiz, Elane, Natty and the rest. The little girl Sallee lay facedown, with her toy inches from her outflung fingers, its grime glistening with her blood.
Moving as if through water and all her limbs were lead, Krysty picked through the items the coldhearts had so contemptuously pitched into heaps on the ground. She needed what supplies she could carry: food, water, meds. Even something extra for barter.
She wouldn’t just lie down and die. She would follow the men who had murdered Ryan and the travelers and kidnapped her friends. She would kill them all, and free her friends.
Of course, she was but one woman, alone in the wasteland, afoot in pursuit of wags. And all the supplies she could lift, as strong as she was, would be quickly exhausted in this waste. Particularly water.
It meant nothing to her. Nothing at all. She would follow her vengeance trail to the en
d, whatever it would take.
She set out along the track the wags had taken. She had no hope, but hate was enough. Concern for herself was no part of the picture.
She was dead already. Inside.
SOMEWHERE AT THE BOTTOM of a deep well of darkness and misery, Ryan stirred.
It felt to him as if the skin of his chest was a big bag wrapped around forty pounds of busted glass. With every laboring breath he drew, it felt as if a thousand jagged points stabbed and rasped at his raw nerve endings.
Worse, as he became aware again, was that he could hear his breathing. Not just the ragged in and out of exhalation that was always with you whether you paid it mind or not, but a nasty wet slurping noise combined with a hiss. And it was hard to breathe—bastard hard.
Sucking chest wound, he realized. So-called, one of his father’s healers had told him back home in Front Royal long ago, because it really sucked if you got one.
And unless you got pretty quick attention, so did your chances of living.
Krysty! The name went off like ten pounds of smokeless powder off a blasting cap in his mind. She and the companions hadn’t come to his aid, which meant they weren’t able to.
For a moment, in the damp, dark misery of his mind and body, he fought the clammy jaws of panic. He was hurt bad and alone.
He tried one of the deep-breathing exercises Krysty had taught him to calm himself and banish the terror that threatened to rob him of the last remnants of his selfhood, his manhood, and whatever he might laughingly call hope, sucking the air way down with his abdominal muscles.
It worked, too. Not because supercharging his system with oxygen had its usual soothing effect on the system. But because it felt as if some giant mutie bastard had plunged a twenty-inch saw into his flat belly and was sawing for all he was worth.
Whatever else you could say about it, it took his mind off feeling sorry for himself.
His eye opened. It was resisted by some kind of thick gumminess, but the jolt of white-hot agony that racked his being, as he breathed in, did the trick.
The first thing he saw was lots of nothing much: blue dimness as far as his eye could see. After a moment he noticed it deepened in the direction the not-so-gentle pull of gravity was telling him was downward, was banded in various shades and hues, was molded into cone and curtain shapes.
He was lying on the very lip of the Big Ditch itself, with his outflung right hand, fingers tingling as though with crawling fire as circulation restored by some unnoticed movement returned feeling to them, hanging over a mile of space.
He rolled his eye down. The right side of his face was pressed to a rough rock surface. The tarry looking pool spread around it tended to confirm his suspicion that what had glued his eyelid shut was his own blood, spilled in a copious quantity.
He rolled the eye up. A granite outcrop, almost black in the dusk, hunched over him like a leering gargoyle. He could only guess that after being shot—a remembered flash of pain in his chest, of spinning dizzily into blackness vaster by far than the Grand Canyon—he had tumbled down the steep, but not sheer, slope and bounced over that last humpback boulder to come flopping to a stop on a hard ledge of rock.
Needless to say, it had busted hell out of him. Needless to say, it was nothing compared to what would have happened had he actually gone over.
But it wasn’t going to matter a bent, spent shell case if he couldn’t do something for himself and fast. He’d suffocate if the wound wasn’t tended to. He knew what had to be done: apply what Mildred called an “occlusive dressing,” a sort of valve that would flap shut and seal the hole when he inhaled, but relax and expel air when he breathed out. It wasn’t all that complex an operation, and anything reasonably airtight would do for a patch. Nuke it, he even had the proper material for the job tucked away in one of his pockets.
The problem was, could he even get to it, or use it if he could?
Then he heard, above the mocking whistle of the wind and the thin shrill cry of a redtailed hawk on the hunt, the tiniest scrape of something moving on stone. And he realized that the injuries he already had might turn out to be the least of his problems.
He wasn’t alone.
Having another living being find you helpless in the Deathlands was an almost automatic death sentence. Even if that being walked on two legs like a human being. Mebbe worst if it was a human being. Ryan had known plenty humans, no few of them barons or their sec men, who gave away nothing to stickies when it came to rapacious cruelty.
He took stock of his resources. He still had all the weapons he could want. He could feel the familiar weight of the Steyr lying across his left leg, the big broad-bladed panga in its sheath on his hip. Even his SIG-Sauer with the built-in suppresser—he reckoned that was the hard object prodding a busted-end rib around in him every time he fought down a breath. He had feeling back in his right hand, even if it was feeling like it was being held in a fire, and could move his fingers.
But his left wasn’t responding. A node of unusually savage ache in the giant throb of pain that was his being suggested he might have a busted clavicle on that side. Which meant he could count that arm completely out. No force of his will would get the limb to so much as move. It just mechanically couldn’t happen, any more than the toughest man could walk with a broken pelvis.
He looked around, hoping his stalker would miss the motion of his eyeball in the gloom. Stalkers. That was the first thing he saw. Shapes, strangely hunched, gathered around him. He could make out no detail in the gloom. They were small, no more than three feet high, max. Not that it mattered. A three-legged coyote pup could put him on the last train west in his current condition.
A shape loomed over him. He could make out the glint of moisture on big staring nightmare eyes, big teeth gleaming pale behind animal lips. He tried to roll away. His body refused to obey. He tried to bring his right arm up to ward off the monster. It didn’t work. All he could do was turn his head frantically from side to side on his neck and make animal sounds, half-panic, half-defiant fury, deep in this throat.
A small paw stretched out over him.
Blackness took him.
Chapter Two
“Robbed!” howled the tall man with the painted ax-blade face. “Cheated! All our days of scouting and waiting gone for nothing.”
Red Wolf paused dramatically, glaring out from below the wolf’s head he wore like a cap over his own, with the rest of the pelt hanging down his broad bronze back. He was a onetime war leader of the Cheyenne from the Medicine Bow country. Or so he said. The multimegaton pasting that had taken out the Warren missile complex had left that very part of southern Wyoming and northern Colorado a howling wasteland as virulent as anything the Midwest boasted.
Not that anyone was going to go up there and check. He had proved time and again that his heart was as cold as the coldest, his case as hard as the hardest, and justified his role, not just as a member of Chato’s outlaw horde, but one of its leaders. If he wanted to dress in dead animal parts and various colors of paint, nobody was going to challenge him—who wasn’t ready to chill or be chilled on the spot, anyway. Chato himself was an Indian, though much smaller and with quieter tastes.
The problem with Red Wolf wasn’t what he claimed to be. The problem was that he was a bone outlaw, a seething vessel of barely repressed murder at the best of times, and he was taking the loss of the travelers even harder than the rest of what passed for Chato’s command council.
The other eight stared at him from the circle, where they squatted in the flickering feeble light from a fire of dried brush scraped together in the center of the cave. They looked lean, predatory and expectant. They also looked as if they were trying desperately not to bust down and cough their lights out. The cave etched into the sandstone bluff by wind and water and maybe, just maybe, improved by the hands of similar bands of desperados of ages past, was cool even in the heat of summer, which this wasn’t. But there was no smoke-hole, much less a chimney. Consequently a fogbank
of nasty sage-colored smoke that went up the nostrils and down the throat like prickleburrs hung from a height of two feet off the floor to somewhere near the irregular arch of ceiling above.
“Not much we can do about it, pinche,” muttered El Gancho, a bandit from northern Mex. He was a squat, leering man with a bad eye and a worse mustache.
“But we know who to blame,” the tall Indian chiller said, eyes glittering like obsidian chips. Chato felt what had seemed like a fluttering of butterflies in his belly turn into a minor temblor.
“Easy now, friend,” said ginger-bearded Ironhead Johnson. He was a woods-running coldheart originally from up on the Musselshell, and more recently from Taos and parts south, who had headed west and hooked up with Chato’s growing band when the upper Grandee valley got too hot for him. He had been shot in the head on at least four occasions, with no more effect than minor deteriorations of personality and impulse control, neither of which had been notable before. One bullet scar was a white pucker over the inside end of his right eyebrow, like an off-center third eye. “Spilled blood can’t go back in the body.”
“No?” Red Wolf smiled like his namesake. “At least we can spill the blood of the one who is responsible. The one who brought us together, the one who held us back from raiding ranches and villes. The one who said there was no point alerting potential targets before we’d got at least one fat score.”
He was glaring straight at Chato now. Chato felt sweat run down his face. The yellow headband that restrained his own heavy black hair was already soaked.
“Who?” Red Wolf demanded, voice rising, with a crazy edge to it. “Who? I know who. I’ll tell you who. I’ll—”
The crash of a shotgun blast in the close confines seemed to implode Chato’s head even as the flash from a cutdown muzzle dazzled his eyes. Red Wolf staggered back as a buck-and-ball load—four chunks of double-ought buck and a .72-caliber lead ball—took him about the short ribs on the right side. Blood, flesh and chunks of yellow-gleaming bone were blasted free.