by James Axler
“Which don’t concern us,” Ryan said.
Doc nodded. “Quite so. The fourth floor is mostly vacant, although they store less valuable items up there. The ground floor is rather heavily fortified, with sandbag emplacements, makeshift ramparts of brick and concrete and coils of the ubiquitous razor wire.”
He looked grandly around. He seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.
“In sum, my friends, they would appear to be a most difficult nut to crack.”
“But they sloppy,” Jak commented, crunching into a preserved carrot from Soulardville.
“Always happens,” Ryan said. It gave him a pang: it was just the sort of pithy and pertinent observation the few-spoken Armorer would pipe up to make. Ryan was pleased to have come up with it on his own, not that it was any earth-shattering revelation. He was good and knew it. And his other companions were triple-sharp, too.
He just wondered what his eye was missing that J.B.’s eyes wouldn’t.
“No matter how keen you are or think you are,” he said, “enough time without anybody making a serious play for you, it all starts to get routine. You get bored, complacent. Your guard comes down.”
“Did that happen when you and J.B. were with the Trader?” Mildred asked.
Ryan chuckled. “Didn’t have enough downtime between people and muties making plays for us to ever get slack.”
“In this case I suspect this particular band’s rather formidable reputation works against them as well as for them,” Doc offered. “Coldhearts are less likely to attempt to avail themselves of the fruits of their labor by force because they know they will be competently and fiercely resisted. Because people seldom prove willing to take the risks, the scavvies are not kept as alert as your Trader’s caravan was.”
“Don’t think anybody ever accused Trader’s crew of being slack in the self-defense department,” Krysty said with a twinkle in her eye.
“Nope,” Ryan said. “Trader just had kind of a knack for pissing people off. Drew trouble like flies to shit, basically.”
“So we’ve talked out a plan, the last couple days,” Krysty said. “Do we run with it?”
“Seems complicated,” Jak said.
“Straightforward don’t seem likely to work with these people, does it?” Ryan asked. “Much less a cagey little critter like Emerald. Anyway, it’s as simple as I can see us making it.”
“Only question now is, will it work?” Mildred said.
Doc slapped his skinny thighs and laughed and laughed. Ryan feared the oldie was losing it again.
“Oh, it will work, my dear!” Doc exclaimed. “The real question is, at which point will it run off the rails?”
AS SILENT AS THOUGHT, Jak slid down the rope in blackness.
His long white hair was wrapped in a dark bandanna. His hands, neck, face and feet were carefully blackened with charcoal. His wolf-keen senses were stretched to their fullest.
He heard the sounds of human habitation. Far off, a hum of earnest conversation, indistinct, came from behind some kind of screen illuminated by low lantern-light, away at the far end of the factory’s third floor. Nearer, he heard snoring in several voices, echoing ever so slightly between the concrete floor and ceiling. And almost directly below came the rhythmic soft sound of a person of middle size sleeping. A young girl, by the sound.
Somewhere down on the ground floor a pair were having sex. They were trying to keep the noise down out of consideration to their fellows. Their success was indifferent. Jak suspected the others were accustomed to tuning out such sounds. Just like the snoring.
Their noise was unlikely to help him. From his own experience, and observing his companions, he guessed any out-of-place sound louder than a fart would bring scavvies instantly awake. With, it hardly needed saying, weapons in hand.
But he excelled at stealth. He’d been inside the dead factory by night before. Then, as this night, he had scaled the outer brick wall like a gecko, although that first time he hadn’t carried a coil of light, strong nylon rope about his narrow waist, as he did now. The climb itself wasn’t as triple-tough as his friends made it out to be, not much of a thing at all to the albino teen. The ancient walls still stood mostly strong and firm despite the wag-size holes yawning in them. But lots of mortar had fallen out from between bricks over decades of neglect and weather, not to mention the odd earthquake and thermonuclear blast in the vicinity. He found plenty of grips for fingers and toes.
Double-easy. A breeze.
It was during the previous night, that first recce, when he’d found the hole in the floor of the fourth story that let down within a dozen feet of where Princess Emerald slept soundly on her pallet, hidden from the rest behind a scavenged silken screen.
The scavvies had a weakness. No surprise: every defense did. As smart and tough and resourceful as Dan E.’s crew was, there were too few of them to secure the whole structure completely. What they overlooked was what most people did: the possibility that somebody might try coming at them from above.
Well, that and one other thing. They did, after all, split their people both above and below their treasure storeroom. The thing they totally never reckoned on was that they might face intruders who didn’t give a spent brass for even their most precious salvage.
The rhythm of the girl’s breathing was interrupted. Jak froze. She produced a soft snort, a rustle and her regular breathing began again. Watching carefully in the starlight filtering in the open wall, he saw her turn over and settle back in.
He let out his own breath. Double-close, he thought, willing his heartbeat to settle down. Too close.
He slipped the rest of the way to the bottom of where a loop of rope he held on to hung and swung an inch above the bare concrete floor. The end was tied on his waist to keep it from dragging and possibly making noise. It poised a certain fouling danger, if you were clumsy. Jak was as graceful as a cat.
He set both bare feet flat on the floor simultaneously. They made no sound at all. Here, near the floor, the air was thick with the smells of bodies, smoke, some kind of incense or herbs, as well as the dense, moist vegetation outside. Close up the strongest scent was girl sweat.
Princess Emerald slept naked. She was astonishingly beautiful lying there on her side with her head pillowed on her arm, the soft dark contours of her firm young body outlined by fugitive light from stars. Her privacy screen now masked the far lantern glow from Jak’s sight. Jak was a healthy young male; he felt himself getting hard inside his jeans.
Noiselessly he walked up behind the sleeping girl. As he did he wadded a handkerchief in the palm of his right hand. Kneeling carefully, he reached out and stuffed the balled cloth in her mouth, covering it with his hand. At the same time he slipped his left arm under her neck, then grabbed his own right wrist.
Instantly she tensed and tried to fight. Instead of her first instinct being to scream she tried to bite his hand. He admired her fighting spirit for that, but it wasn’t the best response from a survival standpoint. That would’ve been the scream, despite the makeshift gag.
He’d suggested holding a knife to her throat to discourage her making noise. The others nixed that at once. Emerald had a habit of reacting badly to that sort of thing, and just because she slept nude didn’t mean she didn’t have her favorite nasty little hideout knife concealed in her bedding where she could get at it double-quick.
Instead he applied strong pressure to her carotid artery with his forearm, just as he’d been drilled by Mildred. The cloth handkerchief muffled the noises she made struggling with him. Keeping his right hand slightly cupped prevented her getting a grip on his palm with her teeth. He really didn’t want that to happen.
Just as he had done when Ryan demonstrated the sleeper hold on him, the girl suddenly slumped into the limpness of unconsciousness. Not trusting her deep cunning—another thing he admired about her—he kept up the hold for a slow count of ten after she went under.
Pulling another handkerchief from inside his shirt, Jak quick
ly folded it thin, looped it over her mouth and tied it at her nape. He took a black cloth bag from his belt and pulled it over her head, cinching it around her throat and tying it off just enough so it wouldn’t come up over her strong chin, not tight enough to interfere with her breathing. He was glad her coarse, slightly kinked black hair was tied back; otherwise he’d have had a triple-bad time trying to corral it. He drew her limp arms behind her, fastened her wrists together with a noose of triple-strong predark nylon fishing line and tied that off.
His first thought, as he jumped to his feet, was to hope she hadn’t noticed his boner pressing against her bare back through the fabric of his fly. The very thought embarrassed him ridiculously.
The way her large breasts lolled on her rib cage when he pulled her onto her back didn’t help any. Steeling himself, he undid the tail end of the rope from around his waist, made a quick loop of it beneath her arms and her breasts, then putting hands under her armpits, dragged her over beneath the hole.
He tugged the rope three times, hard. In a moment it tautened. The princess was drawn slowly up through the hole in the roof.
He didn’t even try to stop himself staring at her nude, limp body as Ryan and Krysty, waiting overhead, hoisted her up. Some things were just too much to ask of a man.
For an eternity he waited while his friends untied the climbing rope from the hopefully still-unconscious captive and made sure she was securely bound and gagged for extraction.
He heard them come back to the hole above. He crouched by the pallet, looking up in anticipation of seeing the end of his lifeline snake back down toward him.
And from just the other side of the screen a young male voice said, “Em? You asleep? There’s something Lana and I’d like you to take a look at.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jak froze. Without a whisper of sound he drew his big trench knife with the studded knuckle bow. If he could cut the newcomer’s throat with one swift stroke, then hold him tight enough to keep him from breaking away or noisily kicking over stuff as he bled to death, there was a chance they might still get out of here alive and with their captive without the alarm being raised. Sure, it was the same chance as a moth caught in the middle of a forest fire, or close. But a chance.
He heard the scuffle of leather on concrete as the man approached the end of the two-sectioned privacy screen. Six heartbeats more and he’d peek around and see Jak.
“Em? You there?”
The guy was clueless. Jak gathered himself to strike. Any instant…
Away off in the night a woman’s shrill voice screamed, “Stickies! Help! Stickies got me!”
Jak just had time and presence of mind to flatten himself behind the princess’s now considerably disordered pile of bedclothes. He blanked his mind and tried to think himself part of the floor. It was an old hunter’s trick. He’d known it to work, too. Not just on animals or even muties. Men, too.
Jak made himself relax. He believed an enemy could feel his tension that close up, if not smell fear. But he was ready to snap into action at the first sign of discovery. Chilling or running like hot nuke death was after him, whichever.
Instead he heard a gasp. Then, “Shit! She’s gone!”
“That must be her!” another male voice asked, as the terrified woman screamed again, wordlessly this time, rising and falling and quivering with terror.
Footfalls pounded away from Jak. Men and women shouted. He heard clacks and clatters as scavvies snatched up blasters and checked for chambered rounds.
Jak didn’t wait around, nor did his two friends, who were crouching on the vacant floor above. The rope came wriggling down. He leaped and caught it. Rather than have them haul him up he scaled it like a squirrel up a beech tree.
Just before he vanished up through the hole he saw scavvies clutching blasters running toward a stairwell at the far end of the floor. The screen that had stood between him and the lit lantern was down. He saw the scavvies wore whatever they slept in, from fully dressed to T-shirts and skivvies to skin. He noticed one girl with ash-blond hair hanging to the small of her back and carrying a lever-action carbine, who had a triple-nice rear.
“No time to sightsee,” Krysty said from right over his head, her voice low.
Without comment Jak scrambled up to the fourth floor.
GRUNTING, Ryan paid out line.
“This girl’s been eating regular, anyway,” he muttered. Even with Jak’s and Krysty’s aid, lowering her deadweight the thirty-some feet to the ground was a challenge. “Ought to call her Princess Lead-Butt.”
“Shh,” Krysty said.
The line went slack. Ryan held up. A tug, and he let out more of the rope. A brief delay, then three sharp tugs on the rope. With a sigh of relief he felt the rope go completely loose.
Peering over, he saw Doc’s scarecrow figure kneeling to lower the nude and still-unmoving form of Princess Emerald to the gravel of the yard against the foot of the factory wall. Along with darkening his face, Doc had chosen to apply lamp-black to his silver-white hair as well. It made it stick out in weird random spikes, as if his head were some kind of glistening mutie burr.
From just a few feet away it wasn’t easy to make out even that little detail. They’d waited for the moon to set and the night was cave-dark. Also clouds had started to roll in from the east as the companions watched Jak do his human-fly routine up the blank wall.
Though Ryan didn’t much care for doing it that way, Krysty and Jak belayed for him while he slid down the rope. He was heaviest, and it was best to have both the others on the line, even if it was tied off to a pipe coming up through the floor that had somehow escaped the ravages of over a century of scavvies. Possibly because cast iron was such a triple-bitch to cut.
Next came Krysty, dropping the last few feet like a leopard. Then Jak rappelled down, having quickly untied the rope and looped it around the pipe so it could support his weight on the way down.
As he let go one end and pulled the line down after him rain suddenly dumped on their heads.
“It will help cover our egress,” Doc said helpfully.
“Still sucks rads.” Ryan stooped, folded the still-unconscious captive over his shoulder and set off running. Wet gravel squeaked beneath his boots. The raindrops looked like little artillery shells going off when they hit the ground.
“But the plan…” Krysty called softly, running up alongside him. He heard both Jak and Doc thudding after him. Jak could actually have bounded past like a deer had he cared to; he guessed the kid was taking it on himself to pull rear guard.
The original plan was for two of them to carry the captive. While certain other things were supposed to happen that were now unlikely.
“It’s shot in the head,” he said. “We go to Plan B.”
“There’s a Plan B?” Krysty asked.
“Run for the boat,” he said, “and hope like hell Mildred doesn’t dawdle!”
“FUCK,” THEY HEARD, muffled but unmistakably by the brush and the rain. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Actually, it’s a sort of pleasant accompaniment to the rain,” Krysty said. She was kneeling with her not inconsiderable weight on the small of Emerald’s back, pinning her bare belly on the now slimy mud and grass a few feet from the river.
With a splash Ryan, Jak and Doc finished manhandling the whaleboat back into the water.
Mildred emerged from the brush. She was soaked, as they all were. Her plaits stuck out. It looked as if somebody had been slapping her in the face with branches. Which, Ryan reckoned, had more or less been the way of it.
“Fuck,” she said a final time. “So much for getting them to waste a bunch of time tramping through the woods. When I couldn’t light the bonfire, they figured out they’d been jobbed right away. They’re heading straight here.”
“They spotted you?” Krysty asked.
“No.”
“The river!” Doc exclaimed with a snap of his long, bony figures. “If they suspect a raid of some sort, the natural
escape route lies…right here, actually.”
“Sound like buffalo herd stampeding,” Jak said critically. As if the boat going in the Sippi hadn’t been even louder than the racket Mildred made approaching their rendezvous point.
“It’s nothing compared to the noise the scavvies’re making,” she said, stopping to bend over, brace herself and wheeze. “They couldn’t hear an elephant stampede with a brass band playing on their backs. They make me look like Jak in the woods.”
“Hey, now,” Jak said.
“Relax, Mildred,” Krysty said. “Not your fault it decided to piss down rain.”
The plan had called for Mildred to augment her phony screams for help with a big fire set out in the woods, to put visions of stickie kidnappings in the heads of Dan E.’s scavvies. Fortunately she’d screamed convincingly enough to get much of the crew to turn out and cover her friends getting clear of the derelict factory with their prize. Less fortunately the sudden downpour had trashed all hopes of starting a good fire.
“Help me get the girl in the boat,” Ryan told Doc. “You settle down now, Princess. You try to kick me again, I’ll put a shotgun butt up behind your ear in a none-too-gentle manner.”
“I’m impressed you managed to find your way here so quickly,” Krysty said, enfolding the panting physician in a quick fervent hug. “I admit I was worried.”
“At least it’s not raining so hard I didn’t have the lights of Soulardville to home in on,” she said. “Never thought I’d be glad to see sign of that shithole.”
Emerald emitted a squeal of outrage. By way of retribution Ryan let her drop double-hard on her tailbone in the boat.
The companions got in cautiously after. The most experienced small-boat handler among them, Jak took the stern. He started to rev up the little motor.