by James Axler
“Ugly design,” Dean said, frowning. “Who the frag wants to eat off a bug?”
Doc started to speak, and Mildred rested a hand on his arm, shaking her head. He grimaced, then shrugged. The scholar had tried to explain many times that scorpions weren’t insects, but an arachnid, an entirely different species like spiders. But nobody seemed to care. If it had more than four legs it was a bug. Ipso facto. Case closed.
“Could be the baron’s crest,” his father answered, shifting gears.
“See those slits in the ville roof?” Krysty said, pointing above the potter. “This deep in the desert, there would be no easy supply of charcoal for a kiln. So everything has to be sundried.”
“Lemons and lemonade,” Doc commented wryly. “They turned a problem into an asset.”
“Nuking hot enough be kiln,” Jak said, shaking to the motion of the wag over the uneven cobblestones. “Even with roof.”
“Black dust, I don’t like this,” J.B. muttered, adjusting his glasses. “Not one damn bit.”
“What?” Krysty asked. “Something wrong? The ville looks peaceful enough.”
“That’s the bastard problem,” he said, gesturing broadly. “No gallows.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Ryan muttered, glancing down cross streets and into alleys. In almost every ville, there was an execution area near the front gate to warn outlanders to behave or else. But not here. No gallows, chopping blocks, cages, or pits. However, there were always people to chill—thieves, traitors, murderers, whatever. So where did they ace people?
Mildred brushed back her beaded hair. “If the job isn’t being done in public, then it’s being done somewhere hidden. We better make sure none of us get detained by the sec men.”
“Just here to buy water,” Ryan reminded bluntly, but keeping his voice low so the sec men couldn’t hear. “Not interested in local troubles. If the people ain’t happy with the present baron, that’s their business, not ours.”
“‘Aren’t’ happy,” Krysty corrected him.
Just then, there came the sound of a whip cracking, closely followed by dull grunts of pain.
“Spoke too soon,” Krysty said, a hand instinctively resting on her gun belt.
The noise grew as the sec men and companions entered a small courtyard, where the cloth roof was gone and the sun blazed down in all its fury.
Set apart from every other tan adobe building in the ville, this structure was made of red brick and looked as strong as a bunker. It was two stories tall, yet oddly without windows, and a set of wide granite steps led to a bronze door green with age. Armed guards stood on either side of the door, routinely checking through the clothing of the people waiting in line to enter, and then again as they came out clutching small clay pots that loudly sloshed.
“I see that water is tightly rationed here,” Ryan said casually out the window. “That the ville well?”
“Our temple,” Hawk replied with a dark scowl. “You won’t be seeing inside there.”
The whip sounded again as the horses and wag went around the temple bringing into view a skinny man wearing rags, his hands tied to iron rings set into the brick wall, legs covered with rivulets of blood. A shirt hung in filthy strips from his back, and a large sec man was whipping him with a length of smooth leather.
“Nineteen!” the sec man cried and let the whip fly. The leather cracked as it touched the prisoner’s skin, making another section of clothing drop fluttering to the ground.
The prisoner hardily flinched as a red welt rose on his bony shoulders, an old scar splitting open and fresh blood trickling down his trembling torso. While the sec man reclaimed the whip, the prisoner wheezed for breath through his nose, a wad of dark leather held in his mouth.
“Padding to keep from breaking his teeth,” Doc scowled, twisting his hand on the silver lion’s head of the swordstick. “Barbaric!”
A sec man jerked his head toward the wag at that, and Krysty jabbed the scholar with a hard elbow to the ribs. Scowling darkly, Doc clamped his mouth shut with a clear effort of willpower.
“So what was his crime?” Ryan asked, as the group passed by the sight, the whip rising and falling in the background.
“Water thief,” Hawk said gruffly, shaking the reins to keep his horse abreast of the wag. The animal didn’t like to be near the noisy wag with its exhaust fumes and kept shying away. “Remember that sight, or else it could be you. Always need more sacrifices for the Scorpion God.”
“No blood, no water,” a sec man said in a solemn manner, bobbing his head slightly in a small bow. The rest of the sec men repeated the phrase along with every person in the crowd.
Turning his head that way, Ryan meet the gaze of the sec man who had spoken and was surprised to see the guard who had first met them outside the ville. The two exchanged hostile glares for a moment, then the guard rode onward.
“We’re going to have trouble with him,” Ryan stated under his breath.
“Heads up,” Dean said softly, glancing to the side.
Following the direction, Ryan saw a redbrick building rising above the tan adobe structures. Some sort of a keep, a fort within the walled ville. The windows had thick wood shutters and iron bars, blaster slots were everywhere, and a blue flag bearing the golden outline of a scorpion fluttered from a bare metal pole on the roof.
Standing at a corner of the roof with the afternoon sun at his back, was a man, hands clasped behind him, a double rig carrying a blaster under each arm, a thin trail of smoke rising from the slim cigar in his unseen mouth. Yet Ryan had no doubt that was the baron. As if sensing the attention, the baron turned to look down at the vehicle passing the keep, then he turned to walk inside the fortress, a phalanx of bodyguards staying close with weapons in hand.
“That where we’re going?” Ryan asked, keeping his voice neutral. “To see the baron?”
“No need,” Hawk replied, gesturing with a finger. “You’ll be staying a few blocks over that way, at the motel.”
“Motel?” Mildred repeated in surprise. That was a word she hadn’t heard in a long while.
Hawk slowed his horse to speak to the woman in the rear of the vehicle. His frank disapproval broke her reverie and sent a shiver down her spine that the woman tried to hide. Then Mildred noticed him looking at her satchel, which bore a red cross. Oh, he had something against healers. That explained it. It wasn’t the color of her skin, or her sex, but that she was a healer, a scientist. Odd, but some people still harboured that hatred.
“Motel is what we call the inn where outlanders stay there until it’s time to go,” Hawk said in disdain. “That is, until they cause trouble and go to the temple.”
“No blood, no water,” Ryan said without inflection, watching the dashboard gauges start to climb once more.
For a moment, Hawk glared at the man, unsure of how to react to that, then he kicked the flanks of his mount and rode on ahead of the others.
“A genuine, old-fashioned, water monopoly,” Doc murmured. “Fascinating. Control the people by controlling the water.”
Mildred added, “Rather similar to how the Aztecs maintained population control by pretending to need human hearts to make the sun rise.”
“Quite so, dear lady.”
Holding on to a rib of the awning, Dean glanced back toward the red brick building. The crowd was carrying away a body, blood dripping off the form to show he was still alive, although just barely.
“Or do you think they got some kind big mutie in there?” the boy asked nervously. “Could be it drinks blood and pisses water, or something like that.”
“Some cave bats drink blood and piss ammonia,” J.B. said, removing his fedora to wipe the sweatband with a handkerchief. Then he tucked it back on. “And we can cook that into a kind of explos, so who knows?”
“Changing blood into explosives,” Doc boomed, shaking his head sadly. “Never have I heard a better paradigm for existing in this wretched land.”
Following the mounted guards past a
slaughterhouse and a reeking row of public shitters, Ryan steered the vehicle away from the protected section of the ville and into a wide open area exposed to the raw sun. It was like entering an oven. There was nobody on the streets, not even a dog or lizard, the adobe buildings spaced far apart so that it was possible to see the high wall surrounding the ville a hundred feet away.
Their goal appeared to be a predark motel situated between a roofless adobe ruin, and a garbage dump buzzing with flies. The original neon sign on the cinder-block wall was only a stain, the name long gone and replaced with a poorly drawn cartoon of a bed and a spoon on a faded wooden placard. That was necessary these dark days for the many folks who couldn’t read.
“Pretty clever,” J.B. muttered. “Having outlanders living without a roof, must cut their stay short.”
“Make buy more water, too,” Jak added, rubbing a hand across his dry mouth. The canteen hung heavy at his side, but he was holding off until they were some place out of the direct sun.
“Okay, this is the place,” Hawk announced, reining his stallion to a halt and walking it around. “You can put the wag in the barn over there. We have no other outlanders staying here, so you won’t be bothering any horses.”
“Fair enough. Any laws we should know about?” Ryan asked, turning on the heater to keep the heating engine operating. As a wave of hot air rushed from the vents, the temperature gauge needle flickered and began to move away from the red line in a pulsating motion.
“Yeah, there are. You can leave Rockpoint anytime you want during the day, but not at night,” Hawk said, leaning forward in the saddle, both hands crossed over the pommel. “Disobey a sec man, ten lashes. Steal water, thirty lashes. Hurt a horse, a hundred lashes. Go anywhere near the temple, death. Say anything treasonous against the baron, you get into the temple. Permanently. You leave at dawn in three days.”
With that done, the big man shook the bridle to start the stallion trotting away. The rest of the sec men rode around the sputtering wag with hands on blasters once in a patent display of firepower, then followed their chief back into the coolness of the covered ville.
“Mother Gaia, I wonder why they let us come inside,” Krysty said. “They sure as hell don’t seem to want any visitors.”
“Only way to get any news about what’s happening outside the walls,” Ryan explained, turning the wheel to head for the adobe barn. “New plagues, new muties, and such. If they stay too isolated, something big could come their way and they wouldn’t be ready to fight, or run.”
“Simple self-preservation,” Mildred said in agreement. “Nothing more. Walls this thick were built to keep something out.”
“Or in,” Doc added cryptically.
Rolling the wag into the barn, Ryan made a wide arc and managed to turn it around to park facing the exit. It would be ready to charge and smash through the door in case they had to leave in a hurry. Ryan turned off the engine, and he and J.B. both stayed in the vehicle, listening carefully as it sputtered and backfired to finally go still.
“Intake is clogged with salt dust,” J.B. said with a frown. “Tricky to fix that.”
Setting the handbrake, Ryan added, “And we got to remove that thermostat.”
“Damn straight we do. My legs are feeling like they’ve been dipped in acid rain.”
“At least we got the spare juice to flush the manifold,” Ryan told him, reaching under the dashboard and pulling a handful of fuses. “But that’s for tomorrow, after we rest and eat.”
“Good,” Jak said eagerly, lowering the canteen and smacking his lips. “Starving.”
Tucking the fuses into a pocket, Ryan climbed down from the cab and walked to the rear of the wag to claim his backpack. A slanted shadow cut across the interior of the barn from the setting sun, but if there was a difference in temperature it wasn’t readily noticeable. Why anybody would build a ville here in the first place was a puzzle. Then again, maybe it was started by folks fleeing across the salty desert and they found water.
“Dean takes first watch,” Ryan directed, checking his wrist chron. “Doc next, then Jak, J.B. and me. We switch every two hours.”
“No prob,” the boy said, lifting a nukelamp and checking to make sure the device still worked. Even in the daylight, the brilliant beam was clearly visible. Turning it off, he placed the lamp on the ground in the far corner where the beam could shine in the open doorway. Hidden in the shadows behind the light, he would be a hard target to shoot.
Gathering their backpacks, Mildred and Krysty said nothing about being left out of the rotation schedule. They knew that a woman standing guard alone at night would only be an open invitation for serious trouble. They’d do a turn during the day, or by a campfire once the group was far from the ville.
Lifting the hood, J.B. pulled an ignition wire and coiled it into a bundle before tucking it into his munitions bag. Too many folks seemed to know how to jump a fuse these days, so he decided to take some extra insurance. Unless a hijacker had exactly the correct replacement for the same make and model wag, the vehicle wasn’t going to move an inch. The rope, shovels and other small items they could safely leave behind. There was only the single entrance, and Dean was a good shot.
“Don’t lose that, John,” Mildred joked, slinging her own backpack onto a shoulder. “We really don’t want to stay here for any longer than necessary.”
“Got that right,” the Armorer replied, as he slipped the S&W M-4000 off his back and offered it to Dean.
“How about some company?”
“Thanks,” Dean replied, accepting the shotgun and resting it on a shoulder. “You hear this, you better come running.”
“Or sound the horn,” Ryan instructed, checking over the arrangement inside the barn with approval. The site was tight. “See you in two hours.”
“No problem,” the boy said, racking the weapon.
As the rest of the companions walked from the barn, Dean followed them to the doorway. Watching them head for the ramshackle motel, he noticed a young girl across the street just standing there, her slim arms holding a clay water jug. She was about his own age, just starting to fill her raggedy dress with the shape of a woman. She was so beautiful it was like something from a predark vid, and on impulse he gave a brief wave. Shyly, the girl smiled and that was when he noticed her topaz eyes, bluer than the sky after a storm. Dean started forward, but then stopped, knowing that he couldn’t leave the wag unattended. Frantically, he tried to think of something to call out to her, but nothing came to mind. After waiting a minute, the girl shrugged in resignation and padded around a corner with her water jug. Dean followed her progress until she was gone from sight.
“Mebbe this place isn’t so bad,” he said softly, and settled down into a comfortable position against the wall to watch the street in the hope that she might return.
CROSSING THE CRACKED asphalt of what once had been the parking lot for the motel, Ryan found the way into the building blocked by a mangy dog laying in front of the door, its pale tongue lolling from the heat. Nudging gently with a combat boot, Ryan got the dog to move and walked into the building.
As the one-eyed man pushed aside the door, the rusty hinges creaked, and the cracked glass wobbled loosely in the frame. Waiting a moment for his vision to adjust to the darkness, he then stepped out of the afternoon sun into the lobby of the predark motel. It was somewhat cooler, although the air reeked of sour sweat and rancid cooking grease.
Across the lobby, a stack of sandbags formed a sort of front desk, flat stones on top serving as a counter. Sitting behind that was a fat man wearing a moth-eaten cowboy hat and no shirt, picking his teeth with a thumbnail. Hanging on the nearby wall was a baseball bat spiked with nails in the manner of a medieval flail. Obviously a peacemaker to deter any troublesome guests.
In the middle of the lobby was a fancy stone fountain, the rocks bone dry and the drain clogged with dust. A Dutch door marked Office was set alongside a row of the empty phone booths, and broken frames on the walls
held only tatters of colored posters that once would have boasted about local attractions.
Two sets of concrete stairs led to the second floor, where dirty laundry was hanging over the iron lace railing. From somewhere deeper in the motel came the sound of soft snoring, along with the wet smack of flesh on flesh. But it was impossible to tell if it was folks having sex or a fistfight. In the corner, a dog looked up from gnawing on a bone, only long enough to growl at the companions.
Prying a bit of food from between his stained teeth, the fat man behind the sandbags inspected the morsel and popped it back into his mouth to chew and swallow. His splotchy face was marred with acne scarring, and his fingernails were shockingly long, with unidentifiable filth embedded underneath.
“We’re not eating anything served here,” Krysty stated flatly. “Even if it comes in a sealed can.”
“I want to boil the air,” Mildred added.
Scowling darkly, Ryan started for the desk. If this was where guests of the baron stayed, he wondered what the jail looked like. “You in charge?” he said gruffly.
“Yep, and you’re the outies I heard about,” the man drawled. “I’m Sparrow, and welcome to my place.”
“Sparrow,” Mildred repeated in disbelief.
“That’s me!” He laughed, then paused to belch and scratch under an arm. “Shoot, and seven of ya at once! Never had the place so full. An’ I see ya got your own sluts. Mind if I ride one when yer done? Might try the redhead myself. House rules, ya know. He-he. Sparrow rides free, ya know.”
In cold fury, Ryan started for his blaster, but Krysty stepped in close to shove the snub-nosed S&W Model 640 under his chin and forced his head back until he looking at the ceiling.
“Want to try that again?” she demanded, grinding the muzzle into his flesh. “And get it right this time, feeb!”
“W-welcome t-to Rockpoint, madam,” Sparrow stuttered, his greasy face damp with sweat. “Hey, I didn’t mean nothing, just talking.”
“Then shut your stinking mouth,” Krysty ordered, removing the blaster and tucking it away. “Say anything like that again and the dogs will be chewing your bones.”