No Man's Land

by James Axler

  But Ricky was a good shot. His fear was forgotten now and he acted without hesitation. It was what he had always been like, turned into a skill by his uncle’s teaching and stern supervision: a craftsman who poured his whole being into anything he did with his hands.

  Even taking the lives of other men.

  His second shot hit nearer the exact aim-point than the first and shorter one had. Ricky actually saw blood squirt from the young rider’s suddenly violated earhole as the bullet bored through his head. The kid didn’t even lose his hat until he tumbled off the far side of his shiny, dark brown mount.

  But the rear right flank rider, much nearer to Ricky now, happened by triple-bad luck to be looking right over at his opposite number. Whatever words he’d been about to call to the other young trooper turned into a cry of alarm.

  “Herb! What the nuke?”

  The other far-side outrider, ten or fifteen yards ahead of the late and now lamented Herb, called out, “Attack! Bandits!”

  Well trained by his uncle, Ricky was automatically jacking the bolt action again. The riders still had no way of knowing where he was hidden, and he could thin their ranks by at least one more before they could find him and close in for the kill.

  And that was the exact moment when a fire ant bit him smack on the head of his dick.

  * * *

  THE LEAD ESCORT had just ridden past J.B.’s hideout when the Armorer saw the trail guy fall out of his saddle. He allowed himself to feel satisfaction in what the youth he had taken under his wing was accomplishing for his friends. Kid comes through for us again, he thought.

  His face and body remained immobile as he kneeled behind a low, humped mound that was almost certainly some predark car, stranded by an EMP trashing its electrical or just running out of fuel. Most likely it had been drifted over by blown dirt, then overgrown with grass and weeds.

  His location was a calculated risk. The buried long-derelict automobile was a fairly obvious hideout spot, a bushwhacker, of course. But even if it was just dirt under there, it would give cover as well as concealment—maybe better than the old wag body, if it was of cheap late-1990s construction, as was most likely. But J.B., like Ryan, had reckoned that for all their firepower and display neither escorts nor wag-drivers would actually expect trouble, back here well behind their own lines.

  The Des Moines River flowed past the Association’s capital of Hugoville as well as, further upstream, the leading Uplander settlement of Siebertville. Though wide, it also ran shallow, too shallow to allow passage by much more than canoes and flatboats, which could not be heavily weighted-down. So most of the resupply for both armies happened overland.

  The small size of the wag convoy and the relatively large size of its escort indicated relatively high-value cargo, which was why after a couple of days scouting, the companions had targeted this convoy.

  A handful of heartbeats later, the rear-left member of the pair of flankers went down. Most of the ambush group was sited on that flank—in order to minimize the risk of crossfiring one another.

  Obscured by one of the wags, a right-side flanker shouted a warning. For some unknown reason, Ricky jumped to his feet and started yelling.

  The lead escort was turning his horse when J.B. loosed his first buckshot blast from his M-4000 scattergun. The shot missed, but the guy stiffened as a handblaster cracked off a round.

  It was Mildred. The Armorer knew the way the thud of a .38 round differed from the big boom of Doc’s LeMat replica and its .44 cartridges.

  The fight was on. The shotgun guard on the lead wag raised his double-barrel, looking around for targets. Then he jerked back against the backboard as two shatteringly loud reports exploded.

  Jak, J.B. thought, swinging his scattergun to track the front-left flanker, who was spurring back toward where Ricky was hollering and dancing like a mad thing. That chromed Python made an almighty racket lighting off those .357 Magnum rounds. The weapon had a nastier report and worse side-blast than any handblasters the Armorer knew, and he knew most.

  The driver of the lead covered wag had two clear choices. Well, three—freezing in panic when the shit-hammer fell unexpectedly was always an option, and a not uncommon one, even though it was almost always the worst. But the wag driver picked the one that wasn’t jumping off the buckboard he shared with the dying trooper and bounding off over the weeds like a jackrabbit. He started fumbling over the back of the box in the canvas-covered wag box behind, obviously seeking some weapon of his own.

  J.B. felt mild surprise. Their new employers had told them that, unlike most of the Uplander transport, Protector wags and teams weren’t owned by the same folks who drove them. Instead of contractors, they were just more people from the landowners’ estates; their rides and draft animals belonged to their barons and bosses. So they didn’t feel as driven to defend their wags as if their livelihoods depended on them.

  But perhaps the thought of the flogging his master would give him for giving up the goods without a fight inspired the man. Perhaps the driver, a burly middle-aged guy with a paunch and a salt-and-pepper bush of beard, was the hero type. Or maybe it was just the first member of the fight-flight-freeze trinity of hardwired reactions to sudden danger kicking in.

  Whatever it was, it brought Jak onto the buckboard with him in a wild panther leap, white hair flying like a cavalry pennon and a bowie-bladed combat knife in his alabaster grip. The albino teen scrambled right over the guard, who was wheezing his last breaths as much through the holes in his chest as his bearded mouth, to grapple the driver.

  J.B. took all this in as he lined up and loosed another blast at the lead outrider. But at just that instant the man ducked his horse between the lead and second wags. J.B.’s shot blew holes in the front of the wag’s canopy, right over the head of that vehicle’s guard, who ducked so hard he almost dropped his long-barreled single-shot scattergun.

  Before he could recover, Doc’s LeMat boomed out and he jerked. J.B. swung his blaster, looking for more targets to take down.

  So far it was a picture-perfect ambush.

  Except for poor Ricky’s unexplained dancing act.

  Ah, well. The kid had potential, to J.B.’s way of thinking.

  Too bad he was clearly about to die.

  Chapter Nine

  The pain was like nothing Ricky had ever experienced. It was like nothing he ever imagined. He had always been afraid of being burned alive, and tried to imagine how awful that would feel.

  Now he couldn’t imagine it could be worse than this.

  The sensation was on the whole probably not that different than being on fire, but he felt the special strange throb of a poison sting. Plus the awful knowledge that he had foreign toxins running through his blood.

  For a moment all he could do was jump around and yell. There was just no controlling the reaction. That it happened to one of the most sensitive spots on his entire body—one very special and dear to him, as an adolescent boy—didn’t help.

  The flash of a longblaster going off right at him, the bang of the shot and the crack of the ball going past his ear faster than sound snapped his self-control back in place in a hell of a hurry.

  Two riders were bearing down on him, one winging out to his left, one to his right. Rather than doing the smart thing—dismounting and taking a shot from a steady platform—they had chosen to blaze away at the gallop.

  The man to Ricky’s right had fired a carbine that looked like some kind of Civil War replica—his uncle had taught him history along with weaponsmithing; the two just went hand in hand, he explained. The rider approaching from the left fired a lever-action longblaster, one-handed. The shot went so high the blast noise didn’t hit Ricky nearly as bad as the first shot’s had.

  Unable to manage recocking their weapons singlehanded, both riders stuck them back in saddle scabbards by their legs. The man on Ricky’s left drew some kind of steel-head hatchet or tomahawk. The one to the right produced a full-cavalry saber. Whooping like sailors on a three
-day bender, they spurred right at the boy.

  His wits back, and his blaster as well, Ricky had a cold choice to make. He could shoot one. The other—well, if he missed his cut, his scary-huge horse would simply smash the life out of him with those pounding iron-shod hooves.

  The man with the swinging sword scared Ricky more. He got a flash sight picture on the rider’s center of mass, between the rows of shiny brass buttons, and squeezed the trigger.

  As he did, the man’s black horse took a little bit of a bound to clear some irregularity in the rapidly diminishing stretch of ground between it and Ricky. The bullet smacked into the man’s lower left side. He reeled. The saber fell from his hand, and the horse veered aside.

  His partner loomed over Ricky, blotting the sun with a monstrous shadow. The tomahawk swung high. Seeing the flash of grinning teeth in the shadowed face, Ricky threw his blaster upward in what he knew was a futile attempt to ward off the deathblow.

  The man stiffened. A black plume burst from his shadowed chest, turning red when it hit the sunlight. It splashed hot across Ricky’s face.

  This horse shied away too as the distinctive sound of Ryan’s Tactical longblaster reached the ears of the boy whose life he’d just saved.

  * * *

  KRYSTY HELD her Smith & Wesson 640 on the trio of drivers her friends had captured alive. One had gotten away. Another had pulled out a single-shot flintlock handblaster and tried to shoot Doc. A bullet from Ryan’s rifle had ended that plan.

  At least one of the outriders had escaped wounded but alive. Possibly he’d stay that way, if Ricky’s shot hadn’t pierced his stomach wall—or if his higher-ups had antibiotics they were willing to share with a common trooper, and one who, moreover, had failed to safeguard their precious wag train.

  Krysty hadn’t taken part in the ambush. She’d been tending and guarding their horses, as well as the mules they’d led to carry away any particularly valuable, and portable, scabbie from the convoy. She was the logical choice. Though she was a good shot, her snub-barreled handblaster was the least useful of all in a full-on firefight.

  Of course, she was used to pitching in and fighting side by side with the others, bravely, skillfully and to excellent effect. She would have been more outraged than anyone at the very idea that Ryan was trying to shield her from danger.

  Not that he would dare dream up any such a stupe notion. Their was little on the ravaged Earth, burrowing beneath its soil, or flying in the sky above it, that Ryan Cawdor feared. But he would like to avoid the righteous wrath of his flame-haired life mate.

  Anyway, it hadn’t been such a big risk—this time. It had gone incredibly smoothly for such things. She knew well they’d gotten lucky in that, and their targets were arrogant and thus sloppy. They wouldn’t get such an easy crack at their foes again.

  The only thing resembling a real wound any of them had gotten had been incurred by their newest member, Ricky Morales. And as painful as that was, she suspected the most lasting blow he’d taken was to his pride.

  He stood to one side now, his trousers pooled around his shins. Mildred squatted before him, scowling professionally at him. His face, which he kept carefully averted from the rest of the party, was as bright red as she guessed his wounded penis had to be.

  “No permanent damage,” Mildred said. “You aren’t allergic to fire-ant bites. Or you’d be dead by now. Other than washing your penis, and giving you some aspirin for the pain and inflammation, there’s not a lot to be done for you.”

  “Wondered why the boy jumped up and started yowling like a panther with its tail stepped on like that,” Ryan said. “Got to say I kind of understand it now.”

  “Too bad the villain young Ricky shot managed to get away,” Doc said. He had stuffed his LeMat back in the shoulder rig he wore under his coat, and was now brandishing the slim sword he’d drawn from his ebony swordstick, for no particular reason Krysty could discern. Since he wasn’t brandishing it at them—Theophilus Tanner was a peaceful soul by nature; that was part of his problem—even the captives ignored him.

  “Don’t hurt us,” the wounded driver was saying, over and over. He was cradling his arms against his chest. That was mostly where he’d been cut by Jak’s big knife in their brief scuffle before he’d given up trying to grab a weapon and surrendered.

  Krysty was rather surprised Jak had let him live. While few of the group had any compunction about finishing off anybody who might later come back and threaten them again, even Krysty, or Mildred with her antique predark qualms, the wag drivers were unlikely to pose the least danger to her and her friends. In the unlikely event they ever crossed paths again.

  “I know something,” he said. “I got a secret. Don’t chill us, and I’ll tell you.”

  Since no one was actually threatening them—Krysty was more holding the handblasters and looking purposefully at them than covering them, herself—she wondered if he might be going a little shocky from pain and blood loss. Mildred had promised to patch him up after she’d tended to Ricky.

  The other drivers looked at him in disgust. “That crazy yarn again, Norvell,” said the older one, a stumpy brown-haired guy of about thirty. “Give it up.”

  “It’s true, I tell ya,” Norvell said. “There’s a place buried not far from here. Some kinda secret. All filled with cement metal walls and old-days stuff!”

  “Where might that be, friend?” asked Doc, looking at him with sudden interest.

  He wasn’t the only one whose ears had perked up. Ryan had mentioned thinking there was a redoubt in the vicinity. If it had a working mat-trans, it might enable them to leave the Des Moines River Valley and its bizarre war far behind.

  “Nowhere,” said the other driver. This one was a young woman with greasy black hair sticking out from under a black hat. “Just in his addled head.”

  “I tell you it’s true!” he insisted. “My Aunt Goosy saw it when she was just a kid. She found it poking around, back when the Uplanders still paid tribute to the Association. She even brought out a souvenir, a wondrous thing, she said, gleaming black plastic with colored lights that still came on and everything!”

  “And where might that have gotten to, Norvell?” Krysty asked in her most soothing voice.

  Norvell shook his head sadly. “Away. She was on her way back to the farm when some coldheart took a potshot at her. Hit her in the head. Din’t kill her, but knocked her stone out for a night and a day. When she come to, her fabulous thingamajig was gone. Her clothes, too—the story gets pretty fuzzy, at that point.”

  “So I take it your Aunt Goosy never recollected exactly where she found this underground treasure house,” Ryan said.

  He stood on the buckboard of the third in line while Jak rummaged around inside. The oxen had been unharnessed and driven off with swats to their broad rumps. They had gone about thirty yards and begun to crop the grass in a small, contented herd.

  Norvell shook his head. “Her wits was always somewhat scrambled after the event,” he admitted. “But it was somewheres north, that I know. Out right around where the Uplander Army is right now, I reckon. Say, could somebody give me hand, patch me up here? Or mebbe at least let me make a bandage to cut down the bleeding? Getting a little light in the head here.”

  “You was always light in the head, Norvell,” one of his comrades said. “Your crazy Aunt Goosy, too.”

  “Pull your pants up, young man,” Mildred said to Ricky, as she stood. “You’re as patched as modern medicine can make you. And by modern I naturally mean over a century after the end of actual civilization.”

  She turned to Norvell. “Okay, buddy, your turn. And stop whining. I’ve been cut like that, and I’ve been bitten by fire ants, too. Given where this poor kid got his, it hurts way worse. And I am not in the mood.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Obeying Mildred’s command, Ricky turned and buttoned his fly. His smooth, young olive-skinned face creased into worried lines as he looked at the captive drivers.

  �
�We gonna chill them?” he asked.

  Norvell, already wilting under Mildred’s professional scrutiny, emitted a whimper. The others just looked bored. Or resigned. They were used to having their fates decided by others, Krysty knew. Armed others, who thereby held the power of life and death over the common folk.

  “Dark night!” J.B. said. “Why in the name of glowing night shit would we go and do a thing like that, boy?”

  Ricky looked even more miserable. He idolized J.B.

  “They, uh, they can identify us!”

  Ryan laughed. “What’s wrong with that, kid? I want that treacherous bastard Jed to know who stung his dick the way that ant did you.”

  Ricky turned beet-red. Nonetheless Krysty saw his worry smooth into relief.

  “I’m not usually willing to cross the road for vengeance,” Ryan said, “for less than bloodshed. Bad business and it doesn’t load me any blasters. But after what Jed did to us, I’m pleased to take such vengeance as opportunity offers.”

  “Anything of interest in that wag, Jak?” J.B. called out. He had replaced his shotgun with his Uzi machine pistol and was standing on top of the odd humped hummock he’d hidden behind prior to the ambush. The highest spot in the immediate vicinity, it gave the best lookout against approaching strangers. Such as a Protector cavalry patrol.

  Jak came out holding his arms up to the sides. One fist held a yellow dress. The other held something black and lacy.

  “More lady things,” he called out. “Don’t understand. Why bother?” His expression was about the same as if he were toting week-dead prairie-dog carcasses.

  Ryan shook his head. “We did get some good stuff,” he said. “Some meds. Some black powder and caps, which will make a nice boom when we burn what we can’t carry off. But mostly it seems like booze and this stuff. Why would they bother shipping all that to an army camp.”