by James Axler
“What do you mean, ‘she-hes’?” the baron asked, a frown twisting the mobile side of his face.
“Genetically enhanced females,” Mildred told him. “Your home planet’s superwarriors.”
Burning Man seemed taken aback. After a pause he said, “Years ago, just before my expedition jumped to Deathlands, I heard rumors about ongoing research programs. The speculation was that the CEOs of the ruling conglomerate each had launched their own, ultrasecret lines of inquiry. Only a handful of the top corporate whitecoats knew any of the details, but the general idea was to create a new human subspecies that maximized biological potential—ultimate soldiers who could overwhelm and destroy the armies of the conglomerate’s competing members, and who stood a better chance of conquering and colonizing parallel Earths. As far as I know, the programs were still in the experimental stage when we left.”
“The experiment worked,” Mildred said flatly.
Ryan nodded toward Big Mike. “According to him,” he said, “the she-hes have returned to Slake City and are taking another shot at conquest.”
“When I got a look at all the clean, fresh stumps on those sniveling cowards,” Burning Man said, “the first thing I thought was, more invaders. I saw thousands of wounds just like them on my Earth. The laser cuffs were developed in the run-up to the Consumer Rebellion, a devastating weapon, psychologically and physiologically. The Population Control Service ordered us to use the technology on our own citizens to put down the Gloomtown riots. Not the proudest moment in my military career.”
Blocky Head set one of the packs at the baron’s feet and whispered something into his ear.
J.B. shot Ryan a look. The one-eyed man knew they were both thinking the same thing: so the bastards can talk after all.
The baron knelt and opened the pack. He lifted out a gallon-sized, plastic bag filled with shiny 7.62 mm NATO rounds. “These will definitely come in handy,” he said, waving the bag at Ryan.
“If we’re all on the same team now,” Ryan said as warriors picked up and shouldered all the ammo packs, “how about giving back our blasters and blades?”
“That can wait,” Burning Man said. “You’re not in any danger here, I assure you of that. My apologies for the rough treatment, but I certainly wasn’t expecting you to turn up in these parts. The warriors assumed you were part of the fat coward’s crew, and acted accordingly. You must all be tired as well as hungry and thirsty. Please follow me and we’ll see to your needs.”
As Burning Man turned toward the barricade, he pointed a finger at Big Mike and addressed Blocky Head. “Besup,” he said, “bring that one along, too. Take him to the stockade. He and I have matters to discuss in private.”
Two beaming, whitefaced women picked up the flamethrower by the shoulder straps, hoisting it between them, holding it high overhead, like a trophy. A gang of gleeful children squabbled and scuffled over who got to carry the silver gauntlets and hood.
Ryan and the companions followed the baron through the toll gate. Behind them trouped the rest of the ville. The gate opening was steeply angled, so no one could run or drive straight through it. Foot, horse and wag traffic had to slow to a crawl and present itself broadside to the barricade’s hardened firing ports.
The whitefaced kids sitting atop the tier of tractor tires looked healthy and well fed. For that matter, everyone on the bridge did. That was unusual in the hellscape, where bloated bellies, stick arms and legs and weeping sores were more often the tragic rule than the exception.
At the far end of the bridge, ahead on the river flood plain, they got their first glimpse of Burning Man’s ville. It was a typical Deathlands defensive compound. The perimeter consisted of a ten-foot-high berm made of pounded dirt and big boulders of river rock. It was topped by crosses of metal I-beams and scavenged wood that held coils of barbed wire in place. A crude roadway of crushed black rock led to the fortified entrance, a steel-plate barrier mounted on a set of wag wheels and frame that could be pulled out of the way by horse or manpower. Three-story-high guard towers overlooked the approaches from the river and from the plain behind the ville, to the southeast. It was as secure a stronghold against conventional weaponry that Ryan had come across.
As they stepped through the gate, they were greeted by a pack of twenty or more snarling dogs. The big-headed hundred-pounders threw themselves at the heavy wire mesh enclosure that kept them penned just inside the berm’s entrance. All of them were stamped from the same mongrel mold: short hair in a variety of mixed colors, short curly tails, short powerful legs and muscular bodies. They bared their fangs, drooling, their yellow eyes full of blind rage. Their combined weight bulged the wire alarmingly, but the deeply buried fenceposts held.
War dogs, Ryan thought.
Bred to chill.
Trained to target any scent that did not belong to their owner-handlers. Turned loose on the battlefield, they were silent stalkers and savagely efficient hunters. In the Mutie Wars, similar critters had been used—roaming packs that infiltrated and routed the misbegotten enemy from its hardsites and sniper outposts. Ryan had seen war dogs follow a kill scent for miles through a sewer pipe two feet across.
“Enough!” Burning Man shouted at the animals. And as if he’d flicked a switch, the show of aggression shut off. Ears pricked up, the monsters wagged their curly tails and panted through broadly smiling mouths.
Ahead were rows of closely set, single-story hovels cobbled together with found items—sheet metal, scraps of plywood, concrete block. With no fresh materials to work with, the individual dwellings had a familiar, Deathlands’ look to them. But this wasn’t the typical, slapdash shantytown. The ville’s layout was much better organized: the lanes between huts, although narrow, were set out in straight lines, the paths made of crushed stones and bordered with functional drainage ditches, and they ended, like the spokes of a wheel, in the enclosure’s central hub.
At the end of the lane Ryan could see into the wide patch of open ground. Its main feature was a circular building, broad, low to the ground, with scrap plywood walls and a shallowly pitched roof made of limbs, logs, and heaped dirt. A kiva, a communal meeting house. The central plaza was dotted with a few semitrailers sitting on bare rims. Ryan figured they were storehouses. Pigs and goats had their own fenced pens. Chickens ran wild and free. There was also a rock-and-mortar structure that Ryan guessed had to be a well or cistern. The ville had its own protected water supply, which was a strategic plus in case of a siege.
As they headed for the kiva’s entrance, Besup led Big Mike around the cistern toward the rear of one of the semitrailers. Women and children followed close behind the huckster-on-horseback, yelling insults at him and throwing not just rocks, but handfuls of horse and goat dung.
“Big Mike really made an impression on them,” Mildred said.
“Do not fret an instant over the fate of that wretched bastard,” Doc said. “Whatever he gets, you can be confident he has more than earned.”
“Believe me,” Mildred said, “I’m not worried about him. I just wondered what he did to piss them off so much.”
“This way,” Burning Man said, waving them through the kiva’s entrance, down a flight of steps into the wide, relatively cool room. Sun streamed in through skylights made of scavenged, double-hung windows, and through the building’s central smoke vent, which stood above a large firepit. The openings in the roof created brilliant pools of light on the packed dirt floor of the otherwise darkened room. The place reeked of ancient wood smoke—sweet and at the same time sour.
Burning Man gestured for them to sit at the benches that bracketed a long, crude, plank table.
Three gleeful, plump women entered the kiva, bearing jugs of water, which they handed to each of the companions.
Jak tipped back his jug, glugging hard, spilling a cascade of water down his chin and chest.
“Not too fast,” Mildred warned him. “Sip it. Pace yourself. Or you’ll just puke it back up.”
The water tasted
real good to Ryan, too. He had to fight the urge to gulp it all down without pausing for breath.
“The food will be along shortly,” Burning Man said as the women scurried back up the steps.
After his immediate thirst was satisfied, Ryan set down the jug. Like Mildred, he was puzzled by the ville’s reaction to Big Mike’s return. The level of hostility didn’t fit the story the huckster had told.
“If you really figured the amputees were the victims of a new wave of invaders,” Ryan said to the baron, “why did you cook them to cinders on the bridge deck? They were on your side, too.”
“And why do you keep calling them cowards?” Mildred added. “Because they ran from the she-hes?”
“They were worse than cowards,” Burning Man said. “They were Deathlands scum. They showed up at the ville gate around midday, half-starved, dehydrated and missing their hands.”
“The fat one told us you wanted a toll to let them cross the bridge,” Ryan said. “He said they didn’t have anything of value and that’s why you started chilling them. Out of sheer spite.”
“If he told you that, he lied to you,” Burning Man said. “The amputees came up from the south, from Slake City. They didn’t try to cross the Snake River bridge, they came to the ville gate first, begging to come inside for food, water and protection. It was plain from looking at them they had nothing worthwhile to trade. I offered them help because I wanted information about how they got those injuries. Besides, they were in a bad way and it seemed like the proper thing to do. Right after we let them through the gate, the bastards grabbed some of the littlest children as hostages. Toddlers. They did it all at once, on a signal—clearly their plan from the start. While they held blades at the children’s throats, the fat one with the artificial hand said they wanted our food, blasters, ammo and horses in exchange for the lives of the babies.”
“Dark night!” J.B. spit.
“My sentiments, exactly,” the baron said. “Turned out they were nothing but a pack of thieving coldhearts. And from the looks on their faces, after they used our children as shields for their escape, when the babies were no longer of any use, it was clear they were going to get rid of them. Leave ’em in the road to starve or chill ’em straightaway. If the bastards had known anything about recent history in these parts, they would have thought twice about trying a kidnapping. The local folks don’t take kindly to the idea of their own being captured and held hostage. Everybody in the Snake River valley knows the rules we live by. Women, children, it doesn’t matter who’s been taken. We never negotiate for human lives. We chill the hostage takers and bury our dead.”
“But you didn’t fight them here, in the ville?” Ryan said.
“No sense in shooting up our own home,” Burning Man said. “We let them take their hostages as far as the bridge and the north side of the toll booth before we sprung the trap. When the cowards realized the fix they were in, that it was over, that they were going to die on the bridge span, no matter what they did, they panicked, let the children go and turned to run. That’s when I cut loose on them with the flamethrower.”
“But you didn’t get them all,” Krysty said.
“I did that on purpose,” the baron assured her. “I let a pair of them get away, and then called off the pursuit. One of the two, the fat loudmouth back there, was the ringleader. I figured it was only fair that he and the other coward spent some quality time out on the lava field before the warriors dragged them back here.”
“The other one got eaten alive by mutie coyotes,” Krysty said.
“That’s what I mean by ‘quality time,’” Burning Man said.
The baron smiled with the uninjured half of his face, but the light that flashed in his eyes was no joke. It was like the dropping of a veil, or like turning over a slab of rock and finding something coiled and venomous-deadly beneath.
Something all too familiar.
Ryan had seen that same look of delight countless times before, on the faces of other Deathlands’ barons, of its coldhearts, of its chiller muties. And he wasn’t surprised to see it now. After all, what kind of human being routinely cooked other people, guilty or not, in their own juices instead of blowing out their brains with a single blaster shot, or hanging them from the nearest tree limb? What kind of human being chased other people across a hellish wasteland for the sole purpose of prolonging their suffering?
Burning Man’s disfigurement went far deeper than skin and muscle.
His acts of cruelty weren’t just calculations, entertainments for the villefolk, a way to instill fear and therefore obedience. Ryan knew his injuries were of the inner kind as well, grievous wounds of the soul. Whatever terrible things had been done to Captain Connors after his departure from Moonboy, the recovery of his sense of safety and power had been translated into outdoing his torturers, into returning the pain he had suffered, and was probably still suffering, a hundredfold and at every opportunity. Under the facade of a generous, caring leader, beneath Burning Man’s flaking white face paint, lurked something unpredictable and dangerous.
“What was the local history you mentioned?” Doc asked the baron.
The old man’s question appeared to break Burning Man’s train of thought. The rock slab slammed back down; the light winked out.
“And what happened to the predark town on the other side of the river?” Mildred added. “Was it destroyed in the nukecaust?”
At that moment the women returned; this time they carried steaming bowls, big metal spoons and stacks of small, woven-reed baskets. As the food was laid out on the table before them, the baron answered one of the companions’ questions. “Rupertville survived nukeday without a scratch,” he said. “What happened over there is a long, ugly story, and I don’t want to put you off your meal.”
“Not much chance of that,” Ryan said after he took a whiff of the meat stew. His mouth immediately started to water.
The big chunks of meat were goat, chicken and pork—infused with cumin and cilantro. The thick, red sauce was made of crushed tomatoes and hot peppers, with shelled corn and pinto beans mixed in. A pungent, white soft cheese had been sprinkled and melted on top. The woven baskets held piles of hot, freshly made corn tortillas.
“Please, eat,” the baron said. “While you’re doing that, I’ll go and have a word with the fat coward. If you need more helpings of stew, just ask these ladies, and they’ll refill your bowls.”
After he left, J.B. hissed to the others, “That’s one crazy, hair-trigger son of a bitch.”
“That’s my diagnosis, too,” Mildred said. “Do we really want to throw our lot in with his?”
“Can’t trust,” Jak agreed.
“We need him,” Ryan countered. “There’s no way around it. He has trained fighters, transport, weapons and food. And he knows the technology we’re up against far better than we do. Without him, our odds go down big-time.”
“He could turn on us in a second,” Krysty said.
“If that happens, we’ll just have to be ready to deal with it,” Ryan said.
“This stew smells absolutely wonderful,” Doc interrupted. “I suggest we eat it while it is still hot.”
The companions ate without speaking, fixated on shoveling down the food. The only sounds in the kiva were groans of pleasure, and occasional belches to make room for more. They were wiping their twice-refilled bowls clean with scraps of tortilla when Burning Man returned.
“Without a doubt that was the finest repast we have had in months,” Doc told him. “Most kind of you, sir, and most appreciated.”
The baron acknowledged the compliment.
“What did Big Mike tell you about Slake City?” Ryan asked him.
“The coward said the number of she-hes is small,” Burning Man replied. “Maybe a dozen of them, in all. They’ve got a couple of all-terrain wags. And a single gyroplane. He said the old site is now just a staging area where they assemble the newly gathered slaves. They’ve moved their main operation from the edge of the n
ukeglass massif to its center, to the mines at Slake City’s Ground Zero.”
“Funny, he didn’t mention the move to us,” Ryan said.
“Did you threaten to let a war dog castrate him?”
“We didn’t figure he had anything down there to lose,” Krysty said.
“The she-hes’ high-tech armor and weapons more than make up for our eight-to-one force advantage,” the baron went on.
“So, you’re saying you’re not going to go after them?” Ryan said.
From outside the kiva came the sounds of wag engines roaring to life and excited voices.
“We move out tomorrow at first light,” Burning Man told him. “It’s about 150 miles to Slake City. That will require two full days traveling if we take old Highway 84 to Interstate 15. The road bed is completely gone in many places. No problem for the horses, but it means a lot of detours for the wags. Flash floods have cut some deep gullys through the plain, making for some wicked tricky traverses.”
“Even so, two days seems like a long time to get there,” Ryan said.
“We’ll have to slow down and take extra precautions when we get close to the nukeglass,” the baron said. “We don’t want to be spotted from the air. If that gyro locates our column, it has the firepower to kill us all.”
“What about our weapons?” Doc said.
“You’ll get them back tomorrow, before we leave,” Burning Man said. “Now, if you’re all finished eating, let’s find you a quiet, shady place to get some rest.”
Ryan and the others followed the baron out of the kiva.
In the central plaza, the preparations for the Slake City campaign were already well underway. A caravan of wags had been assembled in front of the semitrailers. The vehicles were a motley assortment of battered SUVs, all-terrain scout cars and flatbed pickup trucks, all crudely armored with scavenged sections of steel plate. A human chain of men, women and children loaded the flat beds with boxes of gear, food and containers of water. The men carefully rolled fifty-five-gallon drums of wag fuel up plank ramps.