DARK EVOLUTION

There’s little to remember about life before the Big Nuke, but there’s plenty to scavenge in the tainted wreckage of the post-apocalyptic frontier. The barbaric code of survival of the fittest, meanest or dirtiest makes for hard living and easy death. But Ryan Cawdor and his friends have stayed alive by holding on to their humanity—playing fair...and chilling only when they’ve got no choice.

GRIM PASSAGE

A civil war raging in the Des Moines River valley forces Ryan and his companions to take sides, or die. Because somewhere in the middle of the generations-old conflict is a lost redoubt. But Snake Eye, the deadliest gunslinger in Deathlands, stands between them and the way out. And the mutie contract chiller won’t step aside until he has Ryan’s head.

In Deathlands, there’s nothing but rock and a hard place....

“Help me up!”

Somebody did, and—while he managed to solidify his perch by hanging on to the saddle horn like the rankest newbie—Ryan realized that the same someone had also relieved him of the SIG-Sauer, then stuffed it back in his holster.

Then they were riding out through the open gates of the barbed-wire compound, across the starlit prairie.

From behind, he heard the shouted challenge, “Run, little rabbits!” The voice, heard only recently for the first time, was already unmistakable to Ryan. And hated.

“Damn,” Mildred swore. “I thought we killed that mother.”

“Run far, run fast, little rabbits,” Snake Eye called again. “Run and hide! But you’ll only die tired!”

No Man's Land

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

—Jimmy Carter

Nobel Lecture,

Dec. 10, 2002

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope....

Contents

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Prologue

With a whistling scream the cannonball arced across the clear blue sky.

Snake Eye could probably have seen it had he looked. The things were often visible in flight, and his human eye was very keen.

So was the other eye, hidden behind a black enameled-leather patch.

He didn’t bother, any more than he bothered to duck when the explosive charge went off a street over in the small, deserted ville called Taint. It was well named. Not much to look at, much less visit, even by modern-day standards, Taint was a cluster of a few dozen ramshackle structures of sun-warped, rotting planks, scabbied brick-and-concrete chunks, and even sod, piled together without much thought, much less upkeep, on a stream that ran through a wide, flat valley on its way to the Des Moines River. At the moment, it happened to lie right between the armies of the Uplands Alliance and the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, who were coming together in the latest installment of their generations-long war.

Snake Eye was the perfect mercie. He was good at his job, faster than any normal human, and his heart was cold beyond stone. He always fulfilled a contract and took pride in the fact.

As he did in every aspect of his job. A happy mutie was Snake Eye.

If a person despised him because he was a mutie—and never troubled to hide it—that wasn’t his problem. He couldn’t be bothered to care. If a person tried to give him trouble for being a mutie, that wasn’t his problem, either.

He stood in the mouth of a narrow alleyway that stank of piss and rot, where he could have some cover as he glanced up and down the street with his one exposed eye. Because he was confident in his abilities didn’t mean he was cocky; it was his heart that was stone, not his narrow, hairless head. He knew that a random piece of shrapnel or a slug could chill him as readily as any dirt-grubber or sheep farmer caught up in events beyond his control and forced to play soldier.

Snake Eye adjusted his slouch hat and moved off with purpose down the narrow rutted street. He had a pretty fair idea where he would find his subject this fine April morning. A ville currently being contested via black powder cannon being fired from outside by two full-on warring baronial armies seemed a pretty unlikely hiding place for a man who was never known for being long on courage.

But the merchant Ragged Earnie was also a noted homebody, and he had more than one reason for sticking tight to the little store where he lived, aside from a desire not to leave his precious goods untended where stragglers might get an urge to loot them—not that he’d confront an armed sec man if one did, of course. Taint prospered, to the extent it did, from lying in essentially neutral ground in the conflict between cattle barons of the river valley and the sheepmen of the higher country above the bluffs to the north. Earnie had prospered, too, if much better than the ville at large, speaking proportionally. Now he might hope to cut a deal with the winner, provided he survived the barrage.

And that was no blue-sky prospect, either: these were the Deathlands, where not even the prospect that the sky would turn a weird venomous yellow and send tornadoes to smash you with debris or suck you up to your doom was as terrifying as when the sky turned orange and tortured and rained down Hell. Naturally his subject had a storm cellar, and shells and solid iron balls raining down from the sky were a pretty fair excuse for taking shelter there, too.

Or just staying out of the way of random bullets and other trouble. A few sec men from both sides had had the poor luck, or worse judgment, to wander into Taint. Now, as Snake Eye left his brief shelter and turned onto the block where his subject had his store, a pair of them were carrying on their own miniature war right in the damn street where Snake Eye needed to go.

Actually, the kid in the hayseed canvas shirt and trousers, with a green Uplander armband tied around an arm, was an obvious conscript who might as well still have sheep feces on the heels of his boots. He was lying prostrate in the street, and the man standing above him getting ready to shove a bayonet into his belly was obviously a veteran. The guy’s status as a sergeant was made obvious by the fact that he wore an actual uniform, if of blue-dyed homespun rather than pricier scabbie.

The long, narrow blade made a wet sound going in. Walking calmly down the street toward the little drama, Snake Eye heard the bayonet grate on the hapless kid’s spine. The Uplander let loose a gagging, strangling, squealing scream and thrashed wildly.

The Protector leaned on the rifle, driving the bayonet deep. Even without currently being able to see the bearded face, Snake Eye knew he wore a big old grin beneath that blue kepi-style cap. The bluecoat’s posture made it clear how much he was getting off on his victim’s unbearable agony, as a red stain spread across the kid’s shirt.

Smiling, Snake Eye reached up and flicked his eyepatch onto his forehead with a thumb.

The sergeant heard the crunch of boots in the mostly dry mud behind him and looked over his shoulder. Blue eyes went white in a face that showed hard years and harder mileage, even through the wiry black beard and the grime and soot caked onto it.

He looked Snake Eye in his hidden eye and screamed.

Frantically the soldier began to tug on his weapon. He assumed anyone who looked like that, much less a man who would so boldly approach a sadistic murder being carried out under the guise of warfare on an open street in the middle of the day, could mean no good.

And rightly so. But in his sadistic glee he’d plunged his bayonet all the way through the howling boy’s skinny body and deep into the mud below. It was hard enough getting a blade out of flesh; that was a big reason Snake Eye preferred a blaster. Now the sergeant’s main weapon was well and truly stuck.

Snake Eye was always fast on the draw, but he never rushed. That was part of what made him the deadliest blaster in the Deathlands.

The faster-than-human speed and reflexes didn’t hurt, either.

He pulled his right-hand Sphinx autoblaster from below the black duster he always wore, brought the weapon to eye level and shot the sergeant through the face. He smiled, slightly, as he saw the man’s eyes go wide and then start from their sockets to either side of a black hole that appeared between them. A divot of skull, like sod with black grass, flew out behind in a spray of blood and brain matter.

The Protector fell right down across the body of his victim, who continued to struggle and screech.

Snake Eye slipped the patch back into place over his right eye.

That kind of moaning scream came from deep down in a man’s bones. It hit other humans the same way. It was designed to be heard and responded to, even above other noise—even the sound of a cannonade and the boom of shells.

And as such the horrific scream would draw other humans like flies, that inhuman, keening wail that barely seemed to pause for breath.

As Snake Eye swung by, his long legs never breaking stride, he drew his left-hand blaster and without even glancing around put a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson bullet into the kid’s right eye. The mercie didn’t need anybody else horning in. He had a job to do, and the dust of a ville that’d been snakebit in the dick even before two armies started to bash the hell out of it to shake off his boot heels.

He was a successful chiller. The best. And as such he had a schedule to keep.

* * *

A CANNONBALL HAD created an impromptu skylight in a corner of Ragged Earnie’s cramped and crowded little general store. It was either an iron round or another shell that never went off, as was none too uncommon for the state of modern artillery a couple centuries after the skydark. When it existed at all. It had smashed the glass of a display counter to glittering snow on the plank floor, bounced through a shelf of sundries, leaving cloth bales, hammers and broken-open bags of meal from some baron’s mill strewed everywhere.

Snake Eye trod on a baby doll from the counter that lay on its back staring toward the sky with blank blue eyes. It was predark itself, high-class scabbie and hence expensive. The plastic body was brittle and readily cracked, but the little voice box still managed to croak “Ma-ma” before he crushed it.

He proceeded through a door behind the wooden counter and into the narrow confines of a storeroom even closer packed with canned goods and unique items than the shelves outside. Snake Eye found what he expected: a wooden hatch in the floor. Squatting well to the side, he grabbed the brass ring and yanked it open.

A flash and a boom erupted from the hole. A charge of buckshot shattered a Mason jar full of prenuke glass eyeballs on a shelf six feet away from where Snake Eye sat on his haunches. Allowing himself the briefest of smiles—he liked being right, even if he almost always was—he jumped right through the hole.

The storm cellar beneath was full of stacked burlap bags, eye-watering gunpowder smoke and one terrified fat man huddled by a cot in one corner pointing a long double-barreled shotgun in Snake Eye’s general direction.

“Don’t come a step closer,” he said in a quavering voice. “I’ll blast you soon as look at you. Sooner, you damned mutie chiller!”

Suddenly Snake Eye had skipped the several paces across the hard-packed dirt floor, grabbed the double barrels and twitched the blaster out of Ragged Earnie’s grip.

“So you recognize me, do you?” Snake Eye asked.

“Everybody knows you!” the shopkeeper said. “The coldest-hearted blaster that ever blasted his own mother for pay!”

“I’ll take that as an endorsement of my marketing techniques,” Snake Eye said, grinning. “Even though I barely got more than a crust of dry bread for wasting the bitch who pupped me. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. And speaking of principles, since you know me, you must know I haven’t come to pay a purely social call, any more than I have come to make a purchase at this fine, fine emporium.”

He drew one of his matte-black Swiss-made blasters and aimed it at Earnie’s face.

The old man promptly averted his gaze, closing both eyes tight and throwing up both hands in a ridiculous gesture at self-protection. Snake Eye’s human eye, the left one, which missed damned little, noted a darkness that spread across the brown dirt floor around the seat of Earnie’s baggy coveralls, glistening slightly in the low light of the hurricane lantern on the floor nearby.

After a moment Earnie pried open his nearer eye. It was a startling blue. It reminded Snake Eye of the eye of the sergeant he had just chilled down the street outside: bright, sharp and as clear as a midwinter morning sky.

He liked to remember such details and cherish them in his memories as trophies of his chills. Even the ones he didn’t get paid for.

“Well,” the merchant demanded.

“Well, what?”

“Why aren’t you getting on with it? Why ain’t you blasted me yet and had done with it? You trying to torture me, you triple-rad-blasted taint?”

Under the circumstances Snake Eye found the slur amusing, the more so for its apparently unconscious resonance.

“Are you in a hurry, old man?” he asked.

“Well, why didn’t you shoot me yet?”

Snake Eye shrugged. “Professional courtesy. It’s so important in my business. More so, since it’s so rare in the world today. I find subjects often like to say a few words before I finish the assignment. Unburden their souls, if you will. It seems only decent of me to allow them their final say. So long as they don’t take too long.”

The old man dropped his hands and turned his face back toward Snake Eye. His other eye opened. Into both came a calculating look.

Somehow, that didn’t surprise Snake Eye.

“What’s Big Erl paying?” Earnie asked. “I’ll double it.”

“You know better,” Snake Eye said, “if you know who I am. I always carry out a contract. Integrity is my hallmark. Another rarity in these degraded times.”

“I’ll pay what I owe!”

“Sorry,” Snake Eye said. “It’s too late for that. I made a deal. Besides, you must realize you’ve got more than jack or treasure against your account with Mr. Kendry, now.”

Earnie blew out his gristly gray-pink lips in a sigh. His drooping liver-spotted cheeks were fuzzed with patchy gray stubble.

“It was a mistake setting up Big Erl for the Uplander to ambush,” he said. “I admit it. But it seemed like the best idea at the time. I owed him money. Times turned hard, with the war back on. I couldn’t pay. He was fixing to bring the full entire wrath of his buddy Baron Jed of Hugoville and the Protective Association Army down on my poor chapped old ass. What else could I do?”

“First off, do a better job,” Snake Eye said. “Setting up a rich and powerful landowner like Erl Kendry is one thing. Doing it so shoddily enough that he didn’t die is another. And getting his son and heir Fank iced in the process?” He shook his head. “That, my friend, qualifies as a mistake.”

His finger tightened on the trigger. Earnie flung up his hands again.

“Wait!”

Snake Eye considered the request a moment, then lowered the piece.

“I’m waiting.”

He reached into the watch pocket of the lean-cut black jeans he always wore and flipped open the face of an antique fob watch.

“Fifteen seconds, to be precise,” he said.

To his credit the merchant didn’t piss away any time protesting. “I know something,” he said. “There’s a great, big fortress hidden nearby—somewhere. The kinda place the whitecoats built back in the old days, back before the Big Nuke and the long winter, so they’d have a place to ride the shitstorm out. It’s packed to the rafters with primest scabbie—weps, ammo, commo equipment, meds that would make your eyes pop. Sorry—eye.”

“I have two,” Snake Eye said equably. “The patch notwithstanding. It’s not a sensitive subject.”

The allotted time had ticked past on his watch. Ragged Earnie had engaged his interest, though. Still, he ticked a black-taloned thumb against the scratched crystal face to indicate the merchant shouldn’t dawdle.

“Some even say it has this magic room, makes you fly from one place to another,” Earnie said. “I don’t put no stock in that nonsense, of course. But I know it’s true. I talked to a man saw it with his own eyes. It’s within twenty mile of where we sit now, I can tell you that much.”

“So tell me where exactly.”

“Nope,” Earnie said. “Then I wouldn’t be no more use to you, now, would I? What do you got to say to that, Mr. Triple-Smart Mercie? But somebody else who knows the secret—that’d be Big Erl. We were partnered-up about it, but sadly matters took a turn southward between us.

“So now, all that’s standing in the way of you and me joining up and getting rich as barons ourselves is Erl his own blubber-ass self! So let’s just say we negotiate a deal, you and me? You chill Erl and I’ll let you in on half!”

“Done,” Snake Eye said. And he brought up the blaster and shot Earnie right out from behind his own triumphant grin.

He stood a moment, the handblaster held down by his side, shaking his head at his slumped victim.

“The poor fools,” he said, “always say too much and hear what they want to hear. And now I’ll take it all, thank you kindly.”

He slid the piece back in its tooled-leather holster.

“See, old man,” he said, “it’s as I told you. I always keep a contract.”

Chapter One

“Well,” Mildred Wyeth said, staring into the low, pallid blue and yellow flames of their campfire, “this sucks.”

They had pitched camp in a low patch of the rolling countryside that, according to the sighting J. B. Dix had taken on his minisextant before the sun went down, had to be part of what in her day they called southeastern Iowa. They liked low ground because it kept them from being silhouetted to prying eyes. Even sometimes allowed them to build a small fire without much concern the light would betray them.

The fuel didn’t produce much light nor heat. Nor did the dried cow flop impart a flavor Mildred found pleasing to the brace of prairie dogs Jak Lauren had roasted over the fire while his new best friend Ricky Morales kept watch.

Her companions scarfed them down, of course, as if they were slices of predark chocolate cake slathered with thick icing. Mildred had to admit that she had eaten worse, so she helped herself to the stringy, shit-smoked rat meat.

“Why, my dear Dr. Wyeth,” Doc said, “we have found ourselves in much more pressing straits, as surely you recall.”

Doc Tanner had an excuse for talking like a professor out of the history books: he was one. He was even older than she was, chronologically, although in years actually lived through, awake and aware, not so much, though she looked to be in her late thirties and he seemed to be crowding seventy. She had been put into experimental cryogenic sleep when something went wrong during exploratory abdominal surgery—right before the U.S. and the Soviet Union had at last gone to war. Doc had been trolled from his happy family in the 1890s by a cadre of scientists from Mildred’s own day, and cynically dumped into the future when he proved to be a difficult subject.

“More urgent, yeah,” she said. “But it’s the irony that’s pissing me off.”

“What irony’s that, Mildred?” Krysty Wroth asked. The redhead had her long, strong, shapely legs bent beneath her in what Mildred could clearly see was far too graceful to go by the name of a squat. Her green eyes took in the dingy light of the flames and cast them back as glints of emerald radiance. Her long red hair stirred about her shoulders in a way that bore no relationship to the restlessness of the spring night air.

The night was cool to the crisp edge of chilly. The breeze that stirred the low dim flames like a ladle stirring flavorless gruel would bite deep and hard if it came any fresher. The night insects hadn’t found their voices yet. Some cows lowed off in the distance.

“This broken world can hardly muster a ville bigger than a hundred people,” she said, “much less a good, solid war. And here we’ve gone and landed ourselves right smack-dab in the middle of the real deal.”

“Shit happens,” Ryan Cawdor said.

The tall, rangy man stood with his back to the fire, the breeze flapping his shaggy black hair, and his coattails around his calves. His lone eye, she knew, was gazing off across the rolling countryside. He wasn’t comfortable with their setting and circumstances, either. Not that anyplace in the here and now could be called reassuring for a man or woman born into the times, any more than relative newcomers like Mildred and Doc.

She did reflect, bitterly, on how it was just her luck that one of the lamer catchphrases from her own day would survive the intervening century.

“Sometimes it happens to us.”

They had jumped into a redoubt that afternoon from Puerto Rico, courtesy of the mysterious mat-trans network. They and only a few others knew of the device’s existence. Mildred had long since decided not to cling to those memories. They were nothing she cared to cherish. And there were so many of them...

The redoubt had been thoroughly gutted. Like some, it didn’t seem to have successfully weathered the storm that had blown away the world Mildred had known. What had left it with its door jammed open she couldn’t guess; the only nuke hot spot she knew of in the vicinity was near what had been Des Moines, miles in the northwest. There didn’t seem to have been a lot of other nukes going off in the immediate vicinity. The colossal earthquakes that accompanied the missiles’ fall might have done the trick.

Some animals had ventured inside. Small skeletons lay among scattered debris that had long since itself decayed to a sort of compost in the echoing, sterile concrete corridors. Soil and rock slipping from the hillside beneath which the redoubt was buried had covered the entrance long ago. They’d had a hard job working with knives and a folding Swiss-made entrenching tool J.B. carried strapped to his pack before digging their way out into what remained of the day’s light.

They’d been rewarded by the sounds of shots and shouts and screams coming their way, fast.

By running flat-out they’d made it to the shelter of a stand of saplings by a small stream that meandered through a valley amid low round hills. Fortunately the spring bloom had leafed out the brush that was clumped around and between the skinny trees enough to offer concealment for the companions.

The two men who were carrying on a running fight on horseback raced over a nearby ridge. From the thick green-gray smoke cloud that traveled along with the skirmish, the companions could tell they were firing black-powder blasters, something prevalent in parts of the Deathlands where stocks of predark ammunition were starting to run dry. About twenty other riders seemed to be trying to kill one another, as well.

The fighters had managed to do little apparent damage to one another before their running fight headed up the far slope of the little valley and away out of sight. Still they left a couple of men lying on the ground behind them. One lay stone-still. The other moved and moaned.

The key thing was, one was dressed all in green, and the other all in blue, as were some of the riders who’d made it past, if not intact, then fit enough to stay in the saddles of their sweat-lathered mounts. The rest, Mildred had seen as they splashed through the stream not forty yards away, all wore cloths of either blue or green tied around their upper arms.

When the last horse’s tail vanished over the green grassy rise, Ryan led his companions from their cover. They sprinted along the stream, at right angles, more or less, to the skirmishers’ axis of travel. It was neither the way the combatants had come from, nor where they were going.

None had spared so much as a thought to giving some kind of help to the wounded man. To her shame, even Mildred—a physician born in the twentieth century gave it no more than a flicker of a thought before joining the others in a run. Now was not the time; giving aid might jeopardize her friends.

She’d get used to it all. Someday. She hoped.

* * *

THE SUN WAS ALREADY sinking into blood and fire to the west when Ryan selected the campsite. They were as far away from where they’d encountered the cavalry battle as they could take themselves before they had to stop for the night. Whether it was far enough—only time and fate would tell.

Somewhere out in the night a fox barked to his mate. Mildred stiffened; it wasn’t a call Jak used with them—they favored bird calls for those undecipherable warnings and signals—but it didn’t mean some other party might not. And even if they weren’t in a war zone, “outlander” these days was just another word for danger.

But the others showed no sign of tension. So Mildred, with a sigh, let go of her own. Sometimes a fox was just a fox, she reassured herself. They’d probably be nursing cubs in their den now, she knew.

“How the hell can they even field a whole army, anyway?” she asked when conversation turned to the battle. “Much less two?”

“This is rich country,” Krysty said. “Lush and vibrant.”

“But most villes we’ve visited, even the better-off ones, can barely muster enough sec men for one of those patrols we avoided today,” Mildred said. “And something tells me that little set-to was just a sideshow to the main attraction.”

“The uniforms,” Doc said, “and their arms suggest both are part of far larger organizations.”

“Don’t get stuck thinking in terms of just one ville, either, Mildred,” J.B. said. He took off his wire-rimmed specs and polished them with a clean rag from his shirt pocket. “Could be there’s an alliance. Couple alliances, one against the other, by what we saw today.”

Ryan nodded. He had hunkered down now to gaze moodily into the dying fire.

“We had allies back in Front Royal,” he said. “Not so many as enemies, of course. But yeah, it happens.”

“We saw some pretty fair alliances in our travels with the Trader, didn’t we, Ryan?” J.B. said, putting his glasses back on. “One or two pretty brisk wars between them, too.”

He chuckled. “And being the sorts of natural trouble magnets we all were,” he said, “didn’t we go and get mixed up in a few of them ourselves?”

“Those were the days,” Ryan agreed with a grin.

“So why don’t we see alliances springing up among the real hardscrabble villes, places where it’s more than a full-time job scraping together the food and water to get by every day?” Mildred asked. “You’d think it’d be more natural for them to band together. Pool their resources, you know?”

“Barons like to keep a fist closed tightly on what they think of as theirs,” Krysty said. “The less they have, the harder they want to clutch, it seems like.”

“Everyone feels that way, always,” Doc said. “The idea that poverty ennobles is a foolish conceit, but a very ancient one, possibly as ancient as civilization itself. Want makes all of us hoard whatever small scraps we may have. Only in times of relative plenty—even if it is still a most mean existence—are we free to think in terms of cooperation and sharing. Barons are people, too, after all.”

“For a certain definition of ‘people,’” Mildred said.

“It’s not as if we haven’t seen starving mothers offering their babies for food,” Krysty said.

A sort of infinite sadness weighted her words. For all that she seemed actively callous to Mildred’s refined twentieth-century feelings sometimes, she in fact had the most nurturing nature of anyone Mildred had ever known; only nurses from back in her day came close. It was just that the standard of compassion a person could afford, and still keep their own body and soul together, had changed as harshly as the world.

“So the very lushness of this country may conduce to baronial cooperation,” Doc said.

“Got a point there, Doc,” J.B. said. “But there’s something more. Land this rich offers rich pickings. Like a newly dead buffalo cow draws wolves and coyotes and wild dogs, and rumor of a fresh redoubt being found draws scavengers of the two-legged kind. It’d bring the hungry and the hard.”

“I wonder what they’re fighting about?” Ricky Morales asked. Jak had replaced him on sentry duty after wolfing his own portion of roast prairie dog.

“What do people ever fight for, boy?” Doc asked. “Plunder, territory, power. And always, vanity. Vanitas, vanitas, omnia vanitas.”

Hunkered down at Mildred’s side like a lean brown fox, J.B. chuckled. “Where barons are concerned, I reckon it’s usually that last thing,” he said. “That and plain cussedness. And, see, once you get barons starting to join up against outlanders, well, what’s more natural than they start looking to join up to grab what the other has?”

Ryan slapped palms on his thighs.

“Well,” he said, “good to get some idea what we’re up against. But going farther without more solid information—such as where the main armies are, and where they’re likely to be headed—won’t load any magazines for us.”

“What do we do now, lover?” Krysty asked.

“Right now,” Ryan said, “I’m going to sleep.”

From his tone he meant just that. Mildred could sympathize. After their run, and the jump that preceded it, a good night’s rest was all she could handle right now herself.

“I mean, after?” Krysty asked.

“We need to get out of here!” Ricky said.

Then his dark eyes got big, as he wondered if he’d screwed up by talking out of turn among the grown-ups. He was a kid, about sixteen years old, whom they’d picked up during an inadvertent jaunt to his monster-ridden home island of Puerto Rico. Unsurprisingly, he was considerably darker than Jak, and somewhat taller, which wasn’t hard for anyone to accomplish, since Jak Lauren was a slight albino with shoulder-length white hair and ruby eyes. Initially thrown together with the band by fate, Ricky had quickly made himself one of them, saving their lives individually and collectively at several turns before they managed to get to a gateway off Monster Island. He still pined for his adored older sister, Yamile, who’d been kidnapped by coldhearts and sold to mainland slavers, and still harbored hopes he’d cross her trail again someday.

He’d fit in quickly and relatively smoothly, or he wouldn’t be with the companions now. A natural tinker by nature, weaponsmith by training and cunning trap-maker by inclination, he had almost instantly become doted on by J.B., whom he idolized—almost as much as he obviously did Ryan Cawdor.

Jak had been prickly toward the newcomer at first, the adolescent-male hormones kicking him into reflex rivalry with another male a few years younger. But Ricky had proved his value to the exacting standards of Jak as well, and the natural affinity of a couple of youths roughly the same age amid a gaggle of grown-ups overcame testosterone poisoning.

But in the small, relatively well-to-do and proper ville where Ricky came from, children were taught to be seen and not heard.

So the thing about this group that made them so strong—made them family, so far as Mildred was concerned, and she knew she was not the only one—was that once you were accepted, your contributions were valued for what they were actually worth, not on any other basis. Each member brought a necessary part to the functioning—surviving—whole. If Ricky, or Jak, or any of them said something foolish, then they could expect the others to slap them down a notch.

But the black-haired youth said only what Mildred suspected all the rest were thinking. She sure was.

“We may be best served scouting tomorrow,” Doc said, “in order to locate the main armies.”

“Don’t we want to go in the opposite direction, Doc?” Mildred asked.

“And how else are we going to know what that is?” he asked blandly.

“Could be tricky getting clear,” J.B. said. “If two armies are fighting over this patch of ground, likely means it’s in turn right between the places the armies come from. Country where passing strangers are likely to be looked at askance, if you know what I mean.”

“I think there’s a redoubt around here,” Ryan said.

“So close to the other?” Krysty asked.

Ryan shrugged. “Who knows the mind of a whitecoat?”

Doc laughed. It was a dry laugh, more than a little cracked. That was a wound that sometimes scabbed over, but would never fully heal.

“They serve a multiplicity of functions, these agencies and departments,” he said. “Served? Our language does not support the traveling of time well as a concept. One redoubt might be built for one purpose in this place, another not a half day’s walk away, performing different abstruse—and need I add sinister?—tasks. Notwithstanding which they might yet be linked by the mat-trans gateways.”

“Happened before,” J.B. agreed.

Krysty stood up. She encircled Ryan’s narrow waist with her arms from behind and nestled her head on his shoulder. Though he was a tall man, she didn’t need to stretch up much to do it.

“So why do you think that now, lover?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Something I heard, saw. Somewhere, sometime. Mebbe.”

Detaching himself from Krysty’s embrace, he turned and bent to kiss her briefly on the lips.

“Mebbe just wishful thinking,” he said. “Tomorrow we’ll see what we see. Now I’m getting some shut-eye.”

* * *

IT SEEMED TO Mildred that she had barely closed her eyes, lying on her side near the banked fire with the warm and comforting solidity of J.B. spooning her from behind, when a sudden commotion shocked her awake.

It was Jak, pounding up on the camp out of the night like a buffalo herd. The youth could move, and usually did, with no more noise than a shadow. The fact he wasn’t trying to be quiet was as alarming as anything he could say.

Or so Mildred thought.

“Horses,” he said. “Many. Coming upwind. Fast!”

Chapter Two

Ryan had his Steyr Scout Tactical longblaster in his hands when he jumped to his feet, wide awake and ready for action.

It was already too late.

Likely it was just rad-blasted luck, triple-bad, that brought the cavalry patrol right on top of them—up the wind, where Jak’s wild-animal keen nose wouldn’t catch their scent, nor his ears hear them until he literally felt their hooves’ drumming through the ground beneath his feet.

Or perhaps they managed to scout them out first. Jak wasn’t the only person in the Deathlands who could move as quietly as a panther. And the locals would know the terrain better than the youth from the bayous of the Gulf Coast possibly could.

Either way, by the time Jak ran in to give his warning they were already had. Ryan saw dark forms looming inhumanly high on three sides of them already. Starlight glinted on eyeballs in human faces and horse heads, and on leveled blaster barrels and long blades.

They still could have bolted northeast, back the way Jak had come. But while a fit man could run a horse into the ground over the long haul—Ryan had done the thing himself, not with notable enjoyment—in the sprint a horse would ride the fastest of them down inside fifty yards. Or bring its rider in range of a cut or thrust with one of their wicked curved sabers.

A man wearing a dark uniform and a slouch hat rode up on a big chestnut with high-stepping white-stockinged feet. The horse’s coat glistened in the starlight. The man glowered down at Ryan between bushy brows and a bristling dark beard. He wore a saber on a baldric over one epauletted shoulder.

He leveled a weapon at Ryan’s chest. While most of the blasters the one-eyed man could see as the cavalry closed in around his little party were black-powder burners, the one the obvious officer was aiming at him was an unmistakable Mini-14, a combat model in stainless steel with black synthetic stock.

“I’m Captain Stone. Surrender, spies, in the name of the noble Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association and our glorious commander, Baron Jed Kylie of Hugoville!” he declared in a buglelike voice. It was a bit in the high range, but Ryan wasn’t inclined to make fun of it.

Ryan stooped to lay the Scout at his feet, then straightened slowly and obediently raised his hands. His companions did likewise. They knew the drill. These pony-troopers had the drop on them and no mistake. They were also clearly wired up with the excitement of their catch, eager to blast—or cut with those giant-ass mutie-stickers they toted. Any show of resistance—anything but instant meek compliance—would get the bunch of them chilled on the spot.

“We surrender,” he said. “But we’re not spies. We’re just travelers, passing through this country. I’m Ryan Cawdor.”

“Chill them now, Captain!” a voice said from somewhere behind the front rank. There’s always one, Ryan thought glumly.

He just hoped this wouldn’t be the time that one got listened to.

The captain shook his head. His hat had some kind of big puffy plume on it, light-colored. Ryan had no idea what it had come from or where it had come from.

“Baron Jed has given strict orders all trespassers should be brought to him immediately for questioning and disposition,” he replied. “Sergeant Drake!”

“Sir!”

“See to the securing of the prisoners,” he said. “And their belongings.”

“All right, you slackers,” the sergeant rasped. “Listen up and listen close!”

Ryan wouldn’t have needed the captain to say his rank, nor to see the chevrons sewn on the sleeves of his uniform tunic, to know he was a noncom of some sort. When he rode up on his big Roman-nosed black gelding to where Ryan could get a look at him, he could see he was a black guy, probably medium height, double-wide across the shoulders. His face, clean-shaved, looked as if it had been used to hammer railroad iron.

“Ringo, Scalzi, Tayler, Rollin,” Drake said. “Shake them down and tie them up. And I better not see anything accidentally fall into one of your sorry drag-tail pockets. Baron’s given strict orders all spoils of war go to him for distribution. Do you hear me, maggots?”

“Sergeant!” the four named sec men sang out in a ragged chorus as they dismounted.

They came forward to their tasks. Ryan saw they were dressed in a random assortment of work clothes, but with rags no doubt the same color as Stone’s and Drake’s uniforms tied around their biceps. They all had carbines slung across their backs.

“Secure the women with wrists behind their backs,” the captain called out in his high, nervous-sounding voice. It seemed to bug his horse. The animal rolled its eyes and sidestepped every time the captain opened his mouth. “They will ride pillion behind two troopers.”

“And if I see any sorry sod-buster so much as try to feel the merchandise...” the sergeant roared. “I got my eye on you, Scalzi, then you best be ready to ride and fight with all the fingers on that hand broke!”

“The men will have hands tied before them,” Stone directed. Despite his heftiness and general ferocious appearance Ryan realized he had the voice and manner of some kind of fussy schoolteacher. “They’ll run behind the horses.”

“We have an old man with us!” Krysty said fearlessly, shaking back her long red hair. It also had the effect, Ryan couldn’t help noticing—even now, his single eye missed nuked little—of hiding the nervous motion of the sentient strands. “Surely you can’t expect him to run!”

A pair of troopers patted her down gingerly. They seemed to pay a lot more attention to rolling their eyes back around to their sergeant to read the weather report on his face than doing a solid job. So much the better, Ryan thought.

The captain showed her an unpleasant grin. It was made no more appealing by the fact the teeth were discolored and all leaning into each other at crazy angles, like an earthquake or nuke-strike had shaken up a block of concrete buildings in some predark ville, but not quite knocked them down.

“Then he won’t pass muster as a conscript in the heroic army of the Association, will he?” Stone said. “Or Baron Jed will be spared the trouble of hanging him as a spy, depending.”

“You can’t expect us to keep up with running horses on foot,” J.B. said calmly, as if he was discussing timing on a wheelgun’s cylinder with a fellow armorer. Because while, yeah, in the long term a man could outrun a horse, he’d never make it past the short term alive.

“Quit your bitching,” the sergeant said. “It’s only three, four miles back to headquarters, and we’ll keep to a trot.” He smiled grimly. “Unless you fall, that is,” he said. “Then we’ll drag you at a full gallop until you stop screaming. That should inspire the others to keep up.”

* * *

IT WAS A BRUTAL JOURNEY, running up and down ridges and splashing through creeks. The buckskin Ryan was tethered to farted incessantly, but at least it wasn’t as surly as the roan Jak ran behind. That one kept its ears pinned back what seemed every step of the nightmare run, and tried every time its rider’s attention seemed to waver to pause its trot long enough to try to kick the albino youth in the face.

To no particular surprise to Ryan, Doc had little problem keeping up. He had the longest legs of any of them, and despite his feeble appearance he’d hiked all across the Deathlands with the rest of them. After all, he looked decades older than he really was, in terms of his time awake and on his pins; he might be mentally vague on occasion, but he had the endurance of a fairly fit man in his prime.

The person who struggled the most was Ricky. The new kid had traveled around what outlanders called Monster Island each year with his father’s trading caravan. And given how their roads always took them up and down the steep mountains of the Puerto Rican interior, he was strong and not by any means out of shape. But he spent most of his time in his little ville of Nuestra Señora on the island’s south coast, working as apprentice in his uncle’s armory and mechanic shop. It had been a peaceful, pleasant existence, as well as a mostly sedentary one—until the army of the self-styled leader, El Guapo, trashed the ville, chilled his mother and father before his eyes, gunned down his uncle and kidnapped his sister Yamile. That turned out to be the same day Ryan Cawdor and his companions made landfall at the ville in a stolen pirate yacht, hotly pursued by the pirates they’d stolen it from....

But Ricky Morales had the resilience of youth, and he had a core as tough as boot leather. If he hadn’t shown that, along with an acute resourcefulness, courage and loyalty to his friends—more than they showed him, to start with—they would have left him behind to his fate when they jumped out of the redoubt in the monster-swarming mountains.

So he sucked it up and ran.

When they hit the road Ryan’s tongue was all but hanging out, and coated with the dust the horse’s hooves kicked up. It was a constant struggle to blink the grit out of his eye, although that had the helpful side effect of distracting him, however briefly, from the fire in his calves, the exhaustion he carried on his shoulders like a backpack stuffed with lead and the ache in his shoulders from when he went a little too slow or the buckskin’s rider went a little too fast, and his arms got wrenched cruelly halfway from their sockets.

His first reaction when they hit the road was that now the troop would pick up the pace and they were all screwed. But the cavalrymen were well trained and kept good order. They didn’t speed up or slow down a flicker, Ryan could tell, and he was tuned in to little details like that pretty tight by now.

The road was actually decent. Mostly it was what remained of a predark road that Ryan reckoned had once upon a time been two lanes wide. Though cracked here and heaved there, the asphalt surface was mostly flat. It had eroded around the edges, bringing it down to a single lane at best much of the way, so that their actual course tended to meander slightly to follow the surviving pavement, where it had washed out it had been filled in with some kind of fine, hard-packed gravel.

After they’d been on the road awhile, Krysty, riding a couple places ahead of him in the single file, shook her hair back again. She used that as an excuse to glance over her shoulder. Her eyes caught Ryan’s and she gave him just a flash of a smile.

It warmed him like the sunlight. That was conspicuously absent out there in the wind, where it had gotten noticeably chilly. He wasn’t a mind reader, but he still knew Krysty’s thoughts as plain as if she’d yelled them through a loudspeaker: hold on, lover. We’ll get out of this one free and clear. Just the way we always had before.

He sucked in a deep breath, squared his shoulders and carried on.

Chapter Three

The size of the Protectors’ camp took Ryan by surprise. About a hundred tents of various sizes and shapes were laid out with mathematical precision in a square grid of “streets.”

In the center was a cleared space with a big tent at one end of it. Actually it was a cluster of bigger-than-average tents, clumped around one with a large room and what seemed like several lesser wings to it. The troop stopped in front of this one and dismounted.

Though it was very early in the morning, Captain Stone sent a rider galloping ahead to bring word to the baron that they were bringing in some captives. Which in turn was evidently an event of some note, since not only did the commander haul his butt out of a warm bedroll, but when the captives were prodded into the biggest tent at bayonet-point he also had a cluster of what had to be his senior officers gathered around him.

Lanterns filled the big canvas-walled room with yellow glow and the tang of kerosene. One man was seated, while the others stood around him, their eyes baggy and bleary from getting roused from their own bunks.

“Kneel before Baron Jed Kylie of Hugoville,” a sergeant barked. This was a new one, blond and fresh-faced, who seemed to have charge of a small bodyguard detail. Their uniforms, which in the light Ryan could make out now were blue, looked fancier than the ones on the patrol that captured them, somehow. “Glorious general and commander in chief of the ever-victorious Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association!”

Good thing they cut short the title some, Ryan thought. Otherwise we’d be here all night before they stopped walking all around the muzzle of the blaster and got to the damned trigger.

He was tired, and whether he was going to sleep on the ground as a prisoner, or lie cooling in the open air staring up at the stars, he and his friends were going to rest soon. He wanted to get right to that, whichever way it came.

The one-eyed man knelt right away. It didn’t even jog his pride. They’d done worse to survive.

They had survived. And the smile he’d gotten from Krysty had reminded him that they would this time, too.

Jak, of course, had to make trouble about it. The bodyguards looked outraged by his refusal to bend his knee. But the trooper from Stone’s patrol who herded him in gave him a quick disinterested jab of his carbine-butt in the kidney, and down Jak went, gasping and glaring, with his hair hanging in his furious face like bleached seaweed.

“So,” Baron Jed said, leaning forward in his folding camp chair and squinting. Or Ryan thought he was squinting, anyway. His face was such a mass of seams and wrinkles it was hard enough to see his brown eyes to begin with. “What have we here.”

“Trespassers, Baron General,” announced the familiar brass notes of Stone’s voice. “We caught them in the hills by where Dirty Leg Creek crosses the Corn Mill Road.”

“Ah.” Baron Jed sat upright again. He was a skinny little specimen, although the way his blue tunic was tailored couldn’t hide the fact he had more than a bit of a kettle belly hanging off the front of his wiry frame. His head started wide with a shock of sandy-colored hair and tapered steadily to a long chin that looked like you could use it as the thin end of a wedge to split rails with. His nose was long and thin, the mouth a bloodless slash.

“They got women, Dad,” a big blocky redheaded kid who stood behind the baron’s right shoulder said. “I like them.”

“At ease, Buddy,” Jed said, irritation briefly twisting his face even tighter. “We got business to attend to.”

The youth looked eighteen, with a broad freckled face and mean brown eyes. He had a saber with a bucket hilt buckled to one hip and some kind of handblaster in a flapped holster on the other. Whether he could use either one was a question Ryan reckoned remained open. He had yellow metal bars on his collar; if the Protectors’ army followed the conventions of the long-dead U.S. Army—and from what Ryan had seen so far, they did—that made him a captain.

He let the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile that would almost be perceptible from the other side of it. He had to be stupe, mebbe even a simp, Ryan thought. Otherwise Buddy would be a full colonel, at least.

“So,” Jed said, “One-Eye. You’re the leader. You talk. Explain your presence on the holy soil of the Protectors’ Association.”

The lie was so well practiced Ryan could have recited it in his sleep. Most of it wasn’t even a lie; that made it all easier, of course.

“We’re just travelers, Baron,” he said. “We come down the ’Sippi to Nubuque and are headed west looking for work.”

“You lie,” said the officer who stood to the baron’s left. He was a dried-up specimen even smaller than Jed himself. His skin seemed to have shrunk right down onto the skull protruding above his high uniform collar. All the color seemed to have been bleached out of him as well, except for the vivid blue of the scar that ran down the right side of his face, and the blue eyes that stared like inmates from some kind of crazy-hatch windows. He slapped a pair of gloves from one white hand into the other as he spoke in clipped, vicious words.

“Relax, Colonel Toth,” Jed said. Ryan knew the man for what he was: a sec boss, and a triple-nasty specimen. “Let’s let them have their say.”

He frowned at Ryan.

“But west lie hard-core Deathlands,” he said. “The worst hot spots and thorium swamps in the whole Midwest. If not the continent. Why would you be going that way? Hey?”

“Reckon there’ll be less competition for gigs, anyway,” J.B. said.

The blond sergeant—or guard—stepped forward and slapped the Armorer across the face.

“Speak when you’re spoken to, outlander,” he said.

J.B. gave his head a couple of upward nods to settle his glasses back on his nose. He blinked mildly through the circular lenses at the sergeant as the man stepped back to his place and said nothing.

The sergeant didn’t know he was a marked man. If anything, J. B. Dix had less bluster in him than Ryan did, and he was slowest to anger of any of the party. But if you did anger him, you were in trouble.

“It’s true, Baron,” Ryan said. “It may seem triple-stupe to you, but we have no choice in the matter. Especially since we had to relocate in something of a hurry.”

Which, of course, was true enough.

“So,” Toth hissed, “you admit you are fugitives from justice.”

Yep, Ryan thought. Sec boss.

Jed waved him off. “They’re not fugitives from my justice,” he pointed out. “Not yet, anyway. So, you’re not spies for that treacherous dog Baron Al, are you?”

“We never even heard of the man until you spoke the name, Baron,” Ryan said truthfully.

The baron sat forward and stared at him intently. His map of wrinkles got a marked furrow down the middle of the forehead region, suggesting careful thought or scrutiny.

“You don’t know, do you?” he said at last, leaning back in his chair again. “Al Siebert, baron of Siebert, so-called, is the vile, claim-jumping bastard in command of that band of land-stealing ruffians who call themselves the Uplands Alliance. And who are nothing but a bunch of dirty, low-down, mangy sheep herders.”

He said that as if it was the worst insult in the whole world. Ryan found that interesting, although he had no clue on Earth what use it could be.

I know a lot of people take stock in the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my rad-blasted friend, he thought. But the enemy my enemy hates that much might be eager for a little help in making himself a worse enemy. He thought he knew some people who might like to sign on for just that job, once they cleared up a certain current misunderstanding.

“They’re lying,” Toth said, though rather blandly this time. “You should let me torture them, Baron. I’d have the truth out of them in a flash!”

“You just like to torture people, Bismuth,” Jed said. “Which is fine. I like a man who enjoys his work. Keeps his mind serious. But would you say, Sergeant Drake, that these men are fit?”

“All ran all the way from where we caught them, General,” said the black sergeant from behind Ryan. He sounded...not awed of the baron or his officers, by any means, and that much less fearful, but as if he’d rather be almost anyplace else, right now.

“Even the white-hair?”

“Even him, sir. Ran like a damn deer, for all he looks like he couldn’t cross the room without going flat on his wrinkly old face.”

Ryan actually heard the sergeant brace even tighter behind him. “Sorry, sir!”

“Why?” the baron asked. “Very well. I need soldiers more than you need torture victims, Colonel. And these five men are obviously fit to fight, and have all their part, minus the eye from the crusty bastard here. Which I reckon he doesn’t miss the use of much. He’s a stoneheart if ever I saw one.”

He stood up. “Gentlemen—and I use the term loosely—I welcome you to the Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association of blah-blah and so on. No, I can’t stand all those nuking titles, either, but they impress the troops and the citizenry. So, off you go to your new duties.”

“And our weapons, Baron?” Ryan asked. The latest twist of events hadn’t surprised him even a little. If Jed’s army had another serious army to fight, it needed fodder for the brass muzzle-loading cannon he’d seen lined neatly along one side of the parade ground.

Ryan could tell he smiled by the way he showed his teeth.

“Like your sorry asses, young man,” he said, “they now belong to me. You’ll be issued with whatever happens to be available, like any new recruits. Now, off with you! Sergeant Stone?”

“On your feet, ladies,” Stone rasped. Krysty and Mildred stood up, promptly if not looking too happy about it. “You others, on your feet, too!”

“Speaking of the womenfolk, Dad—” Captain Buddy began, licking his fat lips.

“They belong to me, too, son,” Jed said. And then to his guards, “Put them in the special annex. I’ll see to them later.”

Chapter Four

Like most of the companions, Krysty was capable of falling asleep given the slightest opportunity. Sleep was a commodity as precious as food or water, to anyone who wanted to stay breathing. Like everybody else, except Mildred, Krysty also slept lightly, and came awake at the slightest change in her surroundings.

She smelled him before she even heard the rustle of the tent flap, and the graceless heavy clump of his boots: Buddy, the baron’s redheaded son. He had an unclean scent to him that seemed to come from something more than the fact he didn’t bathe often. The fact he had drenched himself with some kind of awful predark perfume that smelled as if a skunk had been drowned in sugar-water only made it nastier.

She cast a quick look at Mildred, who lay near her in the small tent near the baron’s. Both women had been stripped with ruthless and probably fear-based impersonality by Baron Jed’s bodyguards, before being stuffed willy-nilly into frilly dresses over several layers of underclothing, which apparently their captors found far more suitable to females—even prisoners—than the masculine dress both women wore.

Krysty found it itchy and uncomfortable as well as impractical. Plus she was fairly sure the pink dress clashed with her hair, although the yellow really sort of flattered Mildred.

The unappealing smell of Buddy was followed at once by the apparition of the far less appealing Buddy himself. From up close Krysty could see that the tunic of his blue uniform was carefully tailored to hide more than a substantial start on a paunch.

She knew better than to let that lead her to underestimate the redheaded kid. He still had a chest and broad shoulders that owed precious little to his flab. Plus his square, loose-lipped face, juvenile and freckled though it was, seemed to just radiate malice.

“So,” he said, straightening to his full height as he stepped into the small tent where Krysty and Mildred had been thrown after they were tied up. “What do we have here?”

“Prisoners,” Mildred said sharply, sitting up. “And your daddy told you to keep your grubby hands off us!”

For a moment Buddy’s face fisted and ugly light glinted in his eyes, then he relaxed and laughed. He might not be the brightest candle in the box, but he knew he had the whip hand here, and Krysty could just tell he knew how to use it. Or better, abuse it.

He emitted a halfhearted chuckle. “Well, now, he surely didn’t mean me, his son and heir and all.”

He made a big show of peering left and right, as if the little tent, even with its crates, could hide anything bigger than a healthy rat.

“Anyways, I don’t see my daddy hiding nowheres around here. Do you, girls?”

“You’re about to make a terrible mistake, Buddy,” Mildred said.

He backhanded her, and she fell back on the ground.

Krysty gave him a flat gaze. “Don’t touch me.”

He brayed another laugh, much louder this time.

“What, bitch? Are you so stupe you don’t know your sweet round ass belongs to me right this very minute? In fact mebbe I’ll just give you a good old fuck in it right now and let you know how things stand around here, you red-haired gaudy slut!”

Leaning down, he enfolded the back of her head with a huge, clumsy paw and crushed his mouth to hers. His tongue pushed against her tight-sealed lips like an urgent worm. His breath smelled as if a mouse had crawled in his mouth and died there. Last week.

His other hand groped her crotch, though what he might actually feel down there through all the layers of heavy fabric his father’s goons had wrapped her lower reaches in she couldn’t even guess.

By way of response Krysty abruptly head-butted him. It squashed his nose. Blood squirted out his nostrils and down over his mouth as he stumbled backward into Mildred. She caught the still-stunned youth around the neck from behind with both legs. She squeezed her powerful thighs together until his face turned red.

Krysty writhed to her feet. The companions’ gear was stored at one side of the tent. The clothes she and Mildred had been wearing had been discarded beside them. She turned her back and knelt, while Buddy struggled futilely to escape Mildred’s grip.

Her fingers found what they were looking for. Deftly she manipulated the little hideout knife from her clothing to sever the cotton cord that held her wrists crossed behind her back.

She stood up, knife in hand. Buddy lay on his back, trying alternately to pry Mildred’s legs loose or hit her with his wildly flailing hands. She had a look of not altogether holy relish on her face as she fended off his efforts.

Krysty cut her friend’s hands free, then she stood up and began to slice her long skirt methodically into strips. It would do for tying and gagging the youth, she reckoned.

“You seem like someone who’s already got some experience at rape,” Krysty said, “along with the taste for it.”

“Bitches asked for—” Buddy began, then his eyes bugged out wider as he realized his admission. “No! Wait! I mean—I wouldn’t do that! I never—”

She frowned and shook her head.

Buddy wrenched free from Mildred’s leg hold and tried to retrieve the bowie knife sticking out the top of his boot.

“Sorry, Buddy,” Krysty said as she slashed his neck with her knife. “This is goodbye.”

Buddy didn’t make a sound as he collapsed to the floor and started to bleed out.

* * *

“BARON JED’S service is easy, maggots!” shouted the man in the black hat with the emblem pinned to the front. He had sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves of his blue tunic. “All you got to do is what you’re told, when you’re told, and you’ll be fine!”

Having been stripped of their weapons and thoroughly searched, as well as being relieved of all their belongings, Ryan, J.B., Doc, Jak and Ricky had been marched off to a little bonfire on the outskirts of the camp. Doc still had his ebony swordstick, which meant he had the sword concealed inside. Whether that would give Ryan and company the edge they needed to get clear somehow and get to the thorny problem of rescuing Krysty and Mildred was another thing entirely.

The sergeant, whose name was Bolton, had been told off to see to the formalities of inducting them officially into the Grand Army of the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, which, so far, consisted of yelling at them in a remarkably loud voice.

“Tell them the penalties, Sergeant,” said one of the two guards keeping the captives under control at the point of a musket. He wore pants as loose as his lower lip, held up by suspenders over an unbleached muslin shirt. The only signs of uniform to his person were the armband on his sleeve, closer to black than blue in the light of the cow-chip fire, and the kepi-style cap from which hair almost as white as Jak’s hung to his shoulders.

The other trooper had black skin and a more soldierly manner, which was to say, he looked bored to Ryan’s eye, but there was something about him that suggested he wouldn’t mind livening up his evening by using the butt of his longblaster on an unruly recruit. Or the other end either.

“Penalties are simple,” the sergeant bellowed. As far as Ryan could tell that was his sole level of volume: loud enough to wake the dead in the middle of a cloud-busting prairie thunderstorm. “First infraction—flogging! Second infraction—death by hanging! And none of this pussy neck-breaking shit, either. You swing and choke and kick until you just hang there and don’t move anymore. Baron Jed is a real man who wants his punishments to punish! Am I clear?”

His eyes grew wide, then they popped right out of their sockets to dangle like obscene white grapes by their optic nerves. The middle of Bolton’s forehead bulged outward. He dropped like an empty sack.

Already pretty sure he knew what fate had so quietly overtaken the noncom, and not wasting a blink thinking about it, Ryan was already in motion. He sprang from his crouch by the campfire, grabbing the musket behind the bayonet socket and thrusting it high in case it went off.

The kid opened his mouth to shout a warning. Ryan caught the longblaster with his other hand as well and used both, plus a powerful hip rotation, to piston the steel-shod musket butt right back at its former owner. Teeth exploded outward as if a gren had gone off in the soldier’s face. He fell down as limp and final-seeming as his sergeant had.

Quickly reversing his grip on the musket, Ryan looked to the burlier black guard. The soldier was trying to raise his own musket, but he was also dealing with the little problem of Jak not only having a hold of his arms, but also having the albino’s sharp white teeth latched on to his throat. Jak was hanging on like a weasel clamped to the neck of an eagle.

But even as Ryan looked, strength and sheer self-preservation and fury got the better of tenacity. The soldier managed to shove Jak off. Skin and a fair amount of blood from his neck followed the albino, but Ryan could clearly see there was nowhere near enough to show Jak had bitten through a jugular vein.

Apparently the albino had done the soldier enough hurt that he couldn’t yell; he made a weird rasping sound as he prepared to drive his bayonet into the slim body of the kid he’d just knocked to the ground.

Ryan realized the reason the soldier didn’t just shoot Jak was that the two soldiers probably weren’t being trusted with loaded weapons off the line of battle, which was also why Ryan couldn’t shoot down the soldier to save his young friend. He prepared to try throwing the musket like a spear. It was a shitty idea, but all he had.

Then he heard a wet punching-sliding sound. The soldier’s eyes bugged out. Dropping his musket, he threw both hands to his throat as, with a fruity sucking sound, the slim blade of Doc’s sword was withdrawn from the man’s neck. He went down gargling his own blood—flowing freely this time—and kicking the cool sod with his heels.

Mildred stepped out of the night. She carried two backpacks, giving her a silhouette like some kind of giant awful one-off mutie. She was looking very pleased with herself and working the bolt on a funny-looking longblaster with a short, wide barrel.

“You know,” she said, “I could get used to this DeLisle of Ricky’s.”

“Weren’t you used to it enough to shoot that other bastard sec man before he chilled Jak?” Ryan asked.

Looking sheepish, Mildred handed the carbine with its built-in silencer to its rightful owner, Ricky Morales, who was dancing as if he had to take a pee with the effort of holding in his desire to snatch his beloved weapon away from her.

“Sorry, Ryan,” she said. “I’m a handgun girl. I sort of forgot about working the bolt in the heat of the moment.”

“Don’t you mean to say, ‘Thank you for shooting the bad man, Mildred?” Krysty asked sweetly. She likewise had two backpacks.

Ryan exhaled between pursed lips. “Yeah,” he said. “Reckon I do. Thanks for shooting the bad man, Mildred. Thanks for rescuing our triple-stupe asses, both of you.”

“It would appear the pair of you have released yourselves on your own recognizance?” Doc asked.

“I’m the only other one here got the slightest clue what you’re talking about, you old coot,” Mildred said. “But, yeah. That happened.”

Krysty knelt, carefully depositing the pack she held in her right hand in front of Ryan. He saw that it was his own, with his Steyr Scout strapped to the back of it.

“You managed to liberate our weapons and gear, too?”

Krysty grinned. “And managed to drag them along. They thought it was an ace idea to stash them in the same tent where they stashed us. I guess they thought of us as just more sundry valuables, lover.”

“Seems like they also thought of us as the gentler sex,” Mildred said, gratefully unburdening herself of the weight of J.B.’s pack with Uzi and M-4000 shotgun strapped to it. “Wrong.”

“We should probably get out of here as fast as we can,” Krysty said.

Ryan searched the dead sergeant for anything useful and came up dry. “Don’t want to stay too long,” he said. “But seeing as how they stuck us out here away from the rest of the camp, probably to keep us from being a bad influence on the other grunts, we ought have a little breathing space. Especially seeing as Mildred used that whisper-quiet longblaster and—”

“No,” Mildred said, looking strained. “You don’t understand. Ah, we took care of Buddy before we left.”

From the center of camp they heard a marrow-chilling scream. It went on and on, rising higher and higher until Ryan actually saw sweat bead on Krysty’s taut pale face in the firelight.

The scream broke off.

“That wasn’t pain,” J.B. observed, picking up his fedora and dusting it off. “Leastwise, not the physical kind.”

“It was the cry of a man who just found his son dead,” Krysty said grimly. “Buddy attacked me, but I made sure he wouldn’t be raping any more women.”

“So which way do we go now, gentle friends?” Doc asked. “I perceive these environs are due to grow uncomfortably warm in the very near future.”

“West,” Jak said with certainty.

Everybody looked at the albino teen.

“Horse corrals that way,” he said. He didn’t have to explain the smell had told him. “Figure, better we ride, they don’t.”

“Two pronouns,” Mildred said in wonder, “in the same sentence? Jak, you’ve gone and used up your whole year’s allotment!”

“I do admire the way he thinks, though,” J.B. said.

“Yeah,” Ryan said, as lights flared up in the middle of camp and commotion began to grow. “So why are we still standing here jawing about it?”

Chapter Five

As silent as a panther, Jak crept through the night.

Since he approached with the wind in his front—to keep the horses from detecting him and showing nervousness—the equine smell was almost overpowering. He didn’t need it to track the sentry, whom he’d spotted standing bolt-upright in the open, a shadow-form in starlight.

Then Jak heard a snap, smelled sulfur, saw an orange firefly ember arcing tightly upward. Unbelievably, the sentry was lighting a smoke. Tobacco, by the acrid smell.

Apparently the Protectors had no fear that their enemies would try to raid this particular herd. It wasn’t an entirely stupe notion, Jak thought. They had cavalry pickets riding circuits of the camp pretty close in, as well as random-sweep patrols like the one that bagged Jak and his friends earlier that evening.

They were about to learn that they had just made a whole new set of enemies. As far as Jak was concerned, his bunch was a bigger threat than the whole army of sheepmen coming any day of the week.

The breeze had freshened, bending the spring-green grass. It also covered the sound of Jak’s passage over it...had he made any.

Puffing on his stinking smoke, the guard swung around toward Jak just as the youth gathered himself to spring. The glow of his cigarette underlit an expression of utter shock.

The man wasn’t shocked enough not to try to swing up his bayonet-tipped musket, which he had leaned against his side as he’d rolled and lit his cigarette.

Rattlesnake-fast, Jak grabbed the rising barrel with his left hand. His right slashed his big bowie knife across the man’s throat.

Then he pivoted briskly to the side to avoid the gusher of blood, black in the starlight, from the man’s severed throat.

The sentry tried to scream, but all that came out was gagging and gargling as blood filled his throat and fouled his windpipe. Clutching his neck futilely with both hands, he fell into the grass to thrash away the miserable, brief remainder of his life.

“Frank?” a voice called tentatively from behind Jak’s new position. “Frank, what’s goin’ on?”

Jak whirled. His left hand was already grabbing for the grip of his Colt Python handblaster.

A man was emerging from a brushy little draw, pulling the strings that held the fly of his baggy canvas trousers. He had a bayoneted musket tucked under one arm. His eyes widened as he saw Jak standing above the still-flailing, still-spurting form of his partner, Frank.

He began a mad effort to get a grip on his longblaster so he could shoot the pale intruder. At the same time he opened his mouth to cry a warning.

Jak already knew he could blast the man before the man could blast him. But what he could not do was prevent the alarm from being given. Whether the man shouted out loud or Jak shot him—and Jak’s .357 Magnum revolver was probably as loud as that smoke-pole the guy was juggling, with a sharper report that carried farther in the night air—the whole damned army would be alerted. Including the mounted pickets that still lay between Ryan’s companions and the open prairie.

Standing off a good distance, Ryan, who was never one to waste ammo on something like mercy for strangers, had finished both off with head shots from the sniper longblaster he carried before he got his new, handier Steyr.

Thanks to Krysty’s killing Baron Jed’s son and heir, the camp was already pretty much on full-alert. Alerting the vengeful baron and his hundreds of uniformed sec men to exactly where they were wouldn’t end well.

Even as he turned and grabbed for his own blaster, Jak cocked back his right arm to throw the bowie. He knew his chances of doing enough damage fast enough to the sentry to keep him from raising the alarm were about the same as the chances of riding a motorcycle naked through an acid-rain cloudburst. But even the skinniest-ass chance was better than the stone certainty they were all triple-fucked.

Suddenly the lower half of the sentry’s face erupted in a black cloud. He staggered. The musket fell to the turf as he clutched at his face. His head jerking to the side, he dropped straight down in that boneless way that told Jak he was an instant chill.

From the darkness stepped Ricky Morales, jacking the bolt of his funny, short longblaster with the sausage-fat barrel. Jak grinned and nodded his thanks.

When the kid first joined up, more or less by accident, Jak didn’t see the point of him. He sure did now. Also, it was kind of nice having somebody pretty much his own age...younger, even. Ryan, Krysty and the others were family, but they were still a great deal older.

Actually, until just about exactly now, Jak hadn’t really seen the point of having the Puerto Rican kid back his play, either. He’d basically humored Ricky, on condition the newbie hang back and not spook the game.

Jak made a peet-peet-peet sound, like a killdeer flying in the night. An owl hoot answered. The rest of the group was hustling up to secure their four-footed transport pool, which hadn’t even been spooked by the commotion, since Ricky’s funny blaster made so little noise, and the smell of blood was also carried away from the herd by the stiff breeze.

“How so quiet, blaster?” Jak nodded to the carbine as his friend drew near.

“Bolt action’s tight, so no gas gets out of the breech. Also no sound of the weapon cycling like with a semiauto. And the bullet goes slower than sound, so no little sonic boom. That’s why my uncle was always so obsessed with making a DeLisle like this one in his shop.”

Jak looked away so as not to embarrass his new friend by noticing the glimmer of moisture in his eyes. His uncle, his parents and the rest of the seaside ville of Nuestra Señora—where he’d grown up—had been chilled by another army of coldhearts, on the same day Jak and his companions had arrived in the little harbor on a stolen yacht, closely pursued by the pissed-off pirates who were its rightful owners. Or anyway its most recent ones. The loss still smarted like a fresh wound—as did the fact his adored older sister Yamile had not only been kidnapped by the coldhearts, but also sold to slavers, who took her to the mainland where Ricky had no hope of finding her trail. He still liked to imagine he’d get wind of her someday.

“Don’t just stand there beating your gums,” Ryan said gruffly, loping past them. “We need to move with a rad-blasted purpose.”

* * *

“WHOA,” RYAN SAID, tugging the dark mane of the chestnut gelding he rode. The animal bounced its head, eager to follow the rest of its fellows thundering on ahead along the sandy soil of the dry creek. But the Protectors trained their cavalry mounts well; it obeyed.

Looking around, Ryan saw his companions weren’t all enjoying the same easy success he had. But they got it sorted out fine, once J.B. ran down Mildred’s recalcitrant mare on his stubby little paint pony and got her turned back where she was supposed to be.

Ryan had seen the party mounted, not all of them comfortably, especially since they had neither saddles nor bridles, but had to ride bareback and do their best to steer by tugging on the horses’ manes and sheer force of personality.

Their task wasn’t made easier by Ryan’s insistence that they not only stampede the enemy’s mounts, as a reflex precaution, but also actually drive the herd before them, west, and almost at right angles to the direction to the main body of the Uplander Army, which from conversation they had overheard lay camped a dozen miles north.

“Why stop?” Jak called. He was up ahead with Ryan and J.B. chasing the stolen herd, about sixty head, before them.

“Reckon we still got a lead, J.B.?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah,” J.B. replied. “Even as riled up as they were, it would take them time to organize pursuit. Not that they had much trouble finding our tracks once they did, of course. We probably have half an hour. I’d give it fifteen, if I was a cautious man.”

Ryan grinned. “Okay. Ricky, you still got that rope you liberated from that redoubt in Rico?”

“Yeah,” the kid called back. He was having almost as much trouble as Mildred in controlling his mount. While he had told his new companions he was used to dealing with donkeys, traveling with his father on his annual trading trips around south and central Puerto Rico, Ricky Morales had little experience with horses. And none riding them.

“J.B., grab the rope and start divvying it up for leads. I want everybody to lead a remount when we shake the dust of this gully off the horses’ hooves. Jak and I’ll cut them for you before we chase the rest of this bunch off north along the arroyo here.”

J.B. nodded. “Ground’s hard here,” he said, “with lots of thick grass. Pursuers’ll likely follow the easy trail of the rest of the herd up the soft sandy bottom.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Ryan said. “If you can rig some kind of makeshift bridles so we’re not clutching mane and hollering to get the beasts to do what we want, do it.”

“You looking at riding a long ways, lover?” Krysty asked.

Ryan shook his head. “Reckon the best way to approach a new baron is to bring the man presents. Especially seeing how we got off on the wrong foot with that last one, and all.”

“You speak of Baron Al Siebert?” Doc asked. “But why, Ryan? Why not simply ride west until we lose them?”

Ryan glanced toward Mildred, who had gotten her mare stopped and was tentatively patting the beast’s neck in a placatory way. The horse had her facedown in a green clump of bush and was chomping away at it, paying its rider no mind.

“Speaking of presents, given the kind of farewell gift Mildred and Krysty left for that sawed-off little bastard Jed,” he said, “I kind of reckon he’ll be liberal about spending his sec men’s time, effort and horses running us down wherever we go. Not even those stupes are going to take forever catching up with their stolen herd. Plus we’re a long shot from out of the woods right here. There’s always a chance of running smack-dab into some random Protector patrol anyplace inside mebbe a hundred miles of here. And I’ll remind everybody we’re running more than a bit light on the supplies.”

“Thinking big, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“Yeah.”

The Armorer rode his horse up alongside Ricky’s. The beasts were used to being in each other’s company, though Ryan knew full well horses had their own likes and dislikes.

“I’ll get right on those leads,” J.B. said.

“Okay,” Ryan said. “And get them done in ten!”

* * *

“HALT, IN THE NAME of the Uplands Alliance!”

As if rising straight up out of the Earth, a party of eight or ten mounted men appeared before the companions. Ryan reckoned that was just about the way of it, too. He gathered they’d come out of a draw hidden at the foot of the long, slow decline the fugitives had ridden down. There was a stand of brush growing there, a shroud of leaves black in the starlight, that might have masked it.

The new set of riders held remade carbines and short double-barreled scatterguns leveled on Ryan and his friends. Still holding the rope by which he led his chestnut gelding, Ryan raised his hands. His companions did likewise.

“State your names and your business,” the man who’d first challenged them said. Like most of his men he wore a wide-brimmed hat with the front pinned up by a badge of some sort, presumably the insignia of the Uplands Alliance. He had on what looked like a uniform shirt, with a double row of buttons at the front, that was probably part of the Uplands Alliance uniform, although he wore baggy pale canvas pants. He toted a pair of revolvers in flap-cover holsters, and a saber hung in its scabbard from his saddle. His gloved hands were empty.

“I’m Ryan Cawdor,” Ryan called out. “These are my friends. Our current business is running away from the Protectors. Though we’re looking to sign on to do some contract sec work for your baron.”

“Baron Al?” the young lieutenant asked.

“He’s not our baron,” snapped a rider with a lever-action carbine aimed at J.B. “He’s commander of the army, yeah. But he’s just baron over Siebertville, not the rest of us.”

“Yeah, yeah, Starbuck,” the lieutenant said, waving a hand. “Whatever.”

“We still thought he might appreciate these horses we brought him as a present,” Ryan said. “Sort of sweeten the deal.”

“Don’t trust ’em, Lieutenant Owens,” said another rider, a middle-height man in his forties. Ryan didn’t need to see the chevrons on the sleeve of his shirt to know he’d answer to “sergeant.” “Could be a trap. Remember about Greeks bearing gifts and that.”

“Those are just old stories, Koslowski,” Owens said. “Doesn’t mean they’re all true. Anyway this dude isn’t speaking Greek, and these horses aren’t wood. Fact is, they do look pretty handsome, though this isn’t the sort of lighting conditions I’d care to pay for horseflesh in.”

The fact was they were some pretty prime rides Ryan and friends had trolled along. As a baron’s son, Ryan had grown up knowing not just how to ride, but how to judge horseflesh with the eye of someone who might have to buy riding stock for himself, his family and their sec men. Rolling for years with the Trader had taught him a different appreciation for the beasts—Trader being a man who preferred wags with engines to those drawn by livestock, and better yet armed to the eyeballs, but overall he preferred turning a handsome profit where one could be secured. Which sometimes meant leaving the gas-burners behind for locations only grass-burners could reach.

Jak had helped. His brief stint as a rancher in the Southwest had given him both an eye for horses and better skills at cutting them out of the herd and driving them where he needed to go than Ryan had. Between them they’d secured seven nice-looking animals. Although the fact was none of them were broken-down plugs; from their cursory acquaintance he didn’t judge too many Protector heads were in danger of exploding from an overload of brains, but to give the bastards their due credit, they did know how to lay their hands on some mighty fine horses, and care for them properly.

Even on short notice J.B. had parceled out rope leads and even rigged some nooselike bridles that’d fit over a horse’s snout and provide steerage pressure without pinching off their ability to breathe. He’d had a good deal of help from young Ricky, which should have surprised Ryan less than it did. The kid was scarcely less handy than the Armorer himself; and while, of course, his actual knowledge wasn’t a patch on the ass of what J.B. knew, he had a good grounding and learned like lightning. No wonder J.B. had taken such a strong and early shine to the kid.

As it turned out, they’d only needed makeshift bridles for Mildred and Ricky himself. The rest of the crew felt comfortable as they were, steering the animals with knee pressure and tugs on their manes. Ryan was grateful the Protector pony soldiers didn’t roach off their mounts’ manes triple-short the way some outfits did.

Despite his qualified approval the fresh-faced young officer frowned. “I think we do need a little bit more by way of bona fides before we completely trust you people,” he said. “Baron Jed’s a cagey bastard. He might be willing to give up a few ponies—”

“Trojan horses,” said Sergeant Koslowski, who was clearly not a man who let go of much of anything readily.

“Take us back under guard if you care to,” Ryan said. “Be the smart thing to do, in your boots—”

Before he could say he’d likely do as much himself, something moaned past his ear like the world’s biggest bumblebee with a rocket up its butt. A horse shied and bucked away from a solid thump in the ground right ahead of it.

A couple heartbeats later the crack of a black-powder weapon going off rolled down from the south.

“Shit!” Lieutenant Owens exclaimed.

“Troop, spread out!” the sergeant barked. “Dismount. Form firing line.”

He didn’t yell, but he sure talked emphatically, like a man who knew his business, Ryan thought—briefly, since his own business right now was trying to calculate how to get out of line of their pursuers’ fire without their new acquaintances chilling them on general principles.

As the patrol began to fan out in obedience of J.B.’s voice, calm yet as authoritative as the sergeant’s knuckles-on-oak rap had been, spoke up.

“Might not wanna do that, boys,” he said. “You’ll empty a fair number of saddles, sure. Then the rest’ll ride you into orange mush.”

The pony soldiers were moving to obey their sergeant. The lieutenant gave the Armorer a hard look.

“Why do you say that, outlander?”

More blastershots banged out from the night behind, a couple hundred yards off yet, to Ryan’s seasoned ear. The Protectors had to be panic-firing in hopes of preventing their quarry from getting away.

“Because likely as not, Baron Jed has every ass that can keep a saddle riding right on our tails,” J.B. said, as cool as if he were discussing whether to have cold beans or reheated for dinner. “Seeing as we sort of left his son and heir to bleed out when we left.”

The lieutenant’s eyes flew wide, but he recovered quickly. “Ace,” he said. “Protectors shooting at you bona fides enough for me. Troop, get ready to ride fast back to camp!”

“What about the prisoners?” Koslowski asked.

“Detail men to keep an eye on them. Now move!”

Chapter Six

Big Erl Kendry sat back against the cushions piled on his chair in his tent, luxuriating in the feel of the hot cloth in his face. He was waiting for his servants to give him his morning shave.

He always enjoyed these peaceful times. Never more so than today. Baron Jed was raging like a jolt-walker about his son Buddy’s unfortunate demise. He was going to be a mighty handful.

Not that the baron was a patient man at the best of times. Still, Big Erl could understand the frustrations of the born leader of men if anybody could. He experienced the ingratitude of his own tenants on a daily basis.

Except when he was out here in the field protecting them, of course. Then at least he got respite from their ceaseless bitching.

He began to shift his considerable bulk in the chair. He wondered just where his shiftless servant had wandered off to. As precious as this break was, he was mindful that if he dragged his ass into the HQ tent too late, Baron Jed would give it a thorough chewing. His teeth were sharp this day, and he hungered for blood.

Not that Erl feared Jed’s shedding of his own blood would be anything but metaphorical. Aside from being a member of the baron’s staff, Big Erl was an important man in his own right—a landowner with substantial holdings...and substantial influence.

Still, Jed had a way of making things mighty uncomfortable on a body, whether he got to chill you in the process or not. And the towel on Erl’s big face softening his beard for the razor was getting lukewarm.

“Watkuns!” he bellowed. “Watkuns, get your lazy ass in here now! Or I’ll have the hide whipped right off it, you hear?”

It worked. Of course, the lower orders were lazy by nature. But they understood two things: threats and volume. Erl heard the canvas tent flap rustle and his servant scurry in to get about his damned business.

“That’s more like it,” he grumped, as he heard his servant’s shuffling step. The man had a bad hip; broke it years back when a horse kicked him. His fault for not getting his lazy ass out of the way, of course. Erl Kendry was no man to let that give him license to slack off.

He heard the familiar scritch of the straight razor being trued up on the leather strop and settled deeper into the cushions with a satisfied sigh. He kept his eyes closed. He had a hard road of a day ahead, and Erl intended to take it easy while he could.

“Not that I’m all that all-fired eager to come into the presence of our esteemed commander,” he admitted. “That sawed-off little bastrich is gonna be hopping around like a toad frog on a hot griddle all day.”

He spoke frankly to his manservant of many years. He needed somebody he could unburden himself of his many cares and concerns that as a man of power and influence—not as much as he deserved, mind you, nor yet as much as he intended to have—he naturally accrued. He certainly didn’t dare to speak frankly to any of his peers on the Protective Association army’s general staff. Nor needless to say any of his lessers. They were nothing but a pack of ravening mutie coyotes, eager to tear him down to build themselves up. So he let it all hang loose where his servant was concerned.

The gimpy old fuck knew what’d happen to him if he dared run his face, anyway, Erl thoughts.

“Not that I blame poor Jed,” he admitted, as the towel was lifted from his face. Erl kept his eyes closed as Watkuns brushed warm lather on his cheeks and chin.

It was his usual habit. Why did he have to watch? And he was going to trust the man with a razor-sharp blade—being as it was a razor and all—right up against his throat. Of course, Watkuns had a family—a couple daughters, some grand-brats; who had time to keep track? He also knew what would happen to them, while he watched, should his hand chance to slip.

“I mean, what’s a man supposed to feel in his position? His own son and heir left to bleed out like a strung-up hog by those bitches from that gang of coldhearts the patrol trolled in last night. Be enough to break the heart of a cee-ment statue.”

Erl started to shake his head. Then he chuckled—as the keen straight edge began to scrape at the dark-and-light bristles that sprouted overnight on his considerable jowls. Triple-stupe move I almost made there, he thought.

“Before he let us all finally go the hell to bed last night—this morning, more like—he was offering the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who ran them coldheart fuckers down and dragged them back. Dead or alive. Not gonna happen. They’ve hightailed it all the way to the Red River by now. Along with thirty head of prize cavalry mounts.”

“Interesting,” a voice said by his ear.

Erl felt his brows crease in a scowl. It wasn’t like Watkuns to comment on things his master said. It wasn’t his place.

Then it hit him: the soft, sibilant hiss wasn’t anything like his long-time servant’s half-simp drawl, either.

Erl’s eyes flew open. The face close to his was as narrow and hard as a bowie blade and had a yellow cast to it. There was a shiny black patch over one eye, and a hint of fine scales at the edges of the lean jaw and around the eyes, and colorless, almost invisibly thin lips. It was as unlike Watkuns’s saggy old face as night from day.

The big man went rigid with terror. His hands gripped the arms of his comfy chair fit to pop the tendons. For a moment his mind went white in sheer panic. A stranger with a razor to his neck!

Then he relaxed. He recognized the stoneheart he himself had hired a week or two back to transact certain...business for him.

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you mutie bastard!” Erl yelled, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to startle the man, to call him that, as a body probably oughtn’t, taint that he was.

The thin lips smiled. “Ease your mind, Mr. Kendry,” he said. “I just wanted to report the successful completion of my mission. And receive my payment due, of course.”

He continued to shave Big Erl’s cheek with a steadier hand and smoother motion than his servant managed after almost two decades’ practice.

“But—Watkuns—my servant...”

“Don’t worry,” Snake Eye said.

That was the chiller’s name. Erl remembered it now. A notorious man. A man who always fulfilled a contract.

That was why Erl hired him. That old sag-bellied bastard Earnie had a way of slipping out of the tightest places. For various reasons connected to his important position in the community Erl couldn’t act against his former partner directly. And none of the men he’d paid to chill Earnie before had come through. Erl reckoned the bastard had bought them off.

“I persuaded your servant to let me take his place this morning,” the assassin went on, as easily as if he was discussing a fair day’s weather.

Erl scowled deeper. He was going to need to have words with Watkuns over this. More than just words, mebbe.

“Tell me about it,” he said, anger and residual fear making his voice husky.

Snake Eye briefly tipped his head in what Erl took for a form of shrug. The chiller had on a black hat and a white shirt with a black velvet vest over it. He and the clothes smelled clean, not of days, if not weeks, of accumulated sweat. That was an unusual thing in itself, and Erl chastised himself for not noticing the man who shaved him smelled differently than his servant before now.

“He was in the shop he ran,” Snake Eye said. “Cowering in the basement. Not that I blamed him overmuch. Both your army and your opponents were busy shelling the stuffing out of the place. I found him there. He tried to buy me off. I reminded him of my invariant policy and dealt with him accordingly.”

Erl had to restrain himself forcibly from nodding in eager satisfaction. “Ace!” he exclaimed.

“And now,” the mercie said, “there’s the issue of my compensation. Don’t get up—just direct me to where I may find my payment for successful completion of my contract.”

“In the lockbox by the foot of my cot,” Erl said, rolling his eyes toward the objects in question. “There’s a velvet pouch. Royal blue.”

“Tasteful,” Snake Eye said with a nod.

“It’s right on top, now,” Erl said. “Don’t go grubbing around in there.”

“Tut tut, Mr. Kendry. Surely you don’t mean to impugn my professionalism.”

The yellowish, dry-backed hand paused briefly with the razor edge close to Erl’s mostly shaved right cheek. Erl’s blood cooled down many degrees in a hurry.

“No,” he admitted, “I surely don’t.”

Inwardly he seethed. I don’t care what it costs me, he thought. I’ll make this mutie bastard pay for this! I’ll have his scaly yellow hide stripped off and have him kept alive to watch it made into a pair of boots!

“I thought not.” Snake Eye resumed his expert shaving. “I charge premium prices for my services. And as you know, I am most exact in delivering them. As indeed I have.”

“Yeah” was all Erl could manage to say to that.

“There is one thing, Mr. Kendry.”

The coldheart finished shaving Erl’s right side and moved with silky smoothness to the left. Now that he wasn’t mimicking Watkuns’s lame-legged gait he made no more noise than the thoughts in his servant’s narrow hairless skull.

“Before his demise, Earnie told a most diverting story,” Snake Eye said. “A tale of a hidden underground bunker filled with marvelous treasure. Old-days tech, abundant and beyond compare. A trove he and a certain erstwhile partner stumbled across in their younger, more...congenial days.”

Erl’s mind was still stumbling around the word erstwhile when the import of the rest of the mutie’s statement hit him. He went dead still. If his blood had gone cold before, it was a wonder it didn’t freeze solid enough to break.

“Now, circumstances prevented him—and you—from exploiting your discovery, he said,” Snake Eye continued. “Then or later. But he attempted to use its location to buy his life.”

“Well,” Erl said weakly, “isn’t just that cowardly, greasy old weasel all over?”

The blade had moved down to Erl’s neck. “He failed, of course. When he wouldn’t divulge the actual location, I went ahead and finished the job.

“But he’d said too much. They always do.”

“He was weak,” Erl said, none too strongly himself. “He was always weak. That’s why he tried to get me chilled, in the bushwhacking that cost me my son! My boy. Poor Fank.”

He felt his eyes fill with tears. His vision blurred. Not solely out of grief.

The edge of the razor tapped against his Adam’s apple. “But you know the whereabouts of the entrance to this wondrous store of scabbie,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t you, Mr. Kendry?”

Erl’s main reaction to that was actually outrage; he felt momentary pride in the fact.

“You—you’re trying to put the arm on me!” he sputtered. “After all this fine talk about professionalism! It was all a bushel of bullshit.”

“Not at all, Mr. Kendry,” the chiller said calmly. “You see, before he died, Earnie also offered me a contract.”

Tap-tap against Erl’s throat. He felt his eyes go wide.

“Against me?”

“Who else? I told him who sent me, after all. It was the courteous thing to do. Not to mention the fact that you specified he would know why he was being chilled, and who was responsible.”

“But...but—that’s ridiculous!”

“How so? I place my services on the market for anyone to purchase, so long as they have the wherewithal to pay. As Earnie did have.”

Erl’s thoughts flew like bats caught in a Deathlands twister. He tried to will them into some kind of plan. Some kind of way out.

“I can pay you to cancel the contract!” he blurted. “Pay double! Triple.”

Snake Eye reached up and twitched the patch onto his forehead. Erl froze in shock.

The eye that was revealed was fully intact. And fully inhuman. Perfectly circular, staring and lidless, it was a blazing yellow with a black slit pupil.

A rattlesnake’s eye.

Snake Eye smiled regretfully and continued to tap the cold, thin steel edge against Erl’s quavering, helpless throat.

The last of Erl’s resistance evaporated.

“Listen, I can take you to the place! The hidden treasure! It’s not twenty miles from here.”

“Is that so?” The blade was withdrawn.

Erl almost melted in relief. His thoughts, contrarily, suddenly came together.

“You’ll never find it without me,” he said in firmer tones.

He felt a sudden sting across the front of his neck. It wasn’t until a red mist of his own blood sprayed out before his horrified eyes that he realized Snake Eye had slashed his throat with a single rattlesnake slash.

“Why?” his lips said. All that came out was air gurgling from a cut windpipe, bubbling through blood.

“I beg to differ, Mr. Kendry,” said the chiller, who had stepped neatly aside, out of the way of the pulsing blood. It was already dwindling before Erl’s eyes as he gagged and fought for breath. “If two idiots such as you could find the treasure once, I can find it now. And I’m sure I can track down other rumors about it to narrow the location further.”

Erl’s vision was fading. He saw the hateful face of his killer smile.

“As I said, Mr. Kendry—” the stoneheart’s words came as if shouted down a well that was somehow growing deeper as he spoke “—they always say too much.

“And last of all—you should take with you, wherever you’re bound, the fact that I always, always keep my contracts.”

Chapter Seven

Baron Al Siebert of Siebertville, commander in chief of the Uplands Alliance Army, was a man as big as his blood-foe Baron Jed was small, Ryan saw as the companions were ushered into the command tent under guard. Baron Al was also as unkempt as the rival general was fussily neat. He wore canvas trousers with the fly unbuttoned, held up—if barely—by suspenders stretched over a big gut. They looked as if the Baron had slept in them, and his wiry black beard and the hair around his gleaming sunburned skull were wild.

The troopers with the companions were casual. They kept their carbines slung. Though their longblasters were stashed with their packs in the tent where they’d spent the night after Lieutenant Tillman Owens’s patrol had brought the companions inside the lines, they still openly wore such sidearms. And accordingly they hadn’t been frisked at all, to say nothing of the half-assed job Jed’s sec men had done earlier in the evening. Both the fresh-faced young lieutenant and whatever superiors he reported to had accepted the newcomers as what they purported—truthfully enough—to be: mercies seeking gainful employment with the Uplander Army.

Now the sun stood high over a surprisingly clear sky. A good breakfast, hot and plentiful and with lots of chicory in lieu of the hard-to-come-by coffee, still warmed Ryan’s gut. And by the looks of it, the Uplander general had only just recently hauled his mass up off his cot.

Baron Al was bent frowning over a map spread on a low table. Old and faded though it was, Ryan recognized a U.S.G.S. contour map, no doubt of the terrain he and the Protectors were currently facing each other across. He didn’t look up as they entered.

Several men were clustered around the map table. In the daylight Ryan had noticed that the Uplanders seemed more casual in their approach to uniforms than their opposite numbers. Most of the troops he’d seen obviously wore whatever they left home in, with a green armband, often nothing more than a random handkerchief or scrap of cloth, tied around one biceps to denote affiliation. At most, some of the officers and the odd noncom wore a green uniform blouse or tunic, although these were of a sufficient variety of patterns that “uniform-like” would probably hit closer to the bull’s-eye. The baron himself wore not a scrap of green, evidently trusting his substantial height and distinctive appearance to identify his own allegiance.

Unlike their boss, the obvious junior officers—aides and subcommanders, or so Ryan reckoned—who studied the table with Al did wear uniform uppers, tailored-looking and even reasonably clean. Only the man who hovered at the baron’s right elbow wore a complete set: spotless green tunic with a double row of double-shiny brass buttons, crisp green trousers with yellow stripes down the sides, brown boots polished like mirrors.

“You overslept again, General,” the fashion plate was saying in a prissy tone of voice. He was good-looking enough, if a person went for that type: fine features, long nose, keen brown eyes, black hair. The only thing that spoiled his handsomeness was the fact that, though clearly Al’s junior by a decade or two, the man had a bald spot on his narrow head almost as big as the one the baron sported. “Are you sure that’s the example you want to set your men?”

“Who gives a rat’s ass what kind of example I set, Cody?” Al rumbled, running a stubby forefinger along a terrain contour. “The men know why we fight. Better for them if I get enough sleep so I can think straight. It’s not as if our pickets wouldn’t warn us if Jed tried a sneak attack. Not that he’d take the ramrod out of his skinny ass long enough to try any such unorthodox maneuver.”

He raised his head, lacking only a set of short horns to look like an old, if admittedly pattern-balding, bison bull. “Dammit, where’s my chicory?”

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