“You do not belong here.”

The shaman turned her head to stare, the solid-white orbs of blind eyes pinpointing Doc. “Nature has been violated by your passage. The balance is disturbed, all things tremble.”

“They took me,” Doc said firmly. “This is not my doing. I only want to go back home!”

“To your family,” the women said in unison.

“Yes!”

The drums beat faster, and the fumes from the fire rose darker, thicker, sweeter, until the air in the lodge was murky with swirling fog. Doc blinked hard. No, the air was clear. His mind was filled with a mist. Was he being drugged? Or was this it, was he finally going insane?

Other titles in the Deathlands saga:

Northstar Rising

Time Nomads

Latitude Zero

Seedling

Dark Carnival

Chill Factor

Moon Fate

Fury’s Pilgrims

Shockscape

Deep Empire

Cold Asylum

Twilight Children

Rider, Reaper

Road Wars

Trader Redux

Genesis Echo

Shadowfall

Ground Zero

Emerald Fire

Bloodlines

Crossways

Keepers of the Sun

Circle Thrice

Eclipse at Noon

Stoneface

Bitter Fruit

Skydark

Demons of Eden

The Mars Arena

Watersleep

Nightmare Passage

Freedom Lost

Way of the Wolf

Dark Emblem

Crucible of Time

Starfall

Encounter: Collector’s Edition

Gemini Rising

Gaia’s Demise

Dark Reckoning

Shadow World

Pandora’s Redoubt

Rat King

Zero City

Savage Armada

Judas Strike

Shadow Fortress

Sunchild

Breakthrough

Salvation Road

Amazon Gate

Destiny’s Truth

Skydark Spawn

Damnation Road Show

Devil Riders

Bloodfire

Hellbenders

Separation

Death Hunt

Shaking Earth

Black Harvest

Vengeance Trail

Ritual Chill

Atlantis Reprise

Labyrinth

Strontium Swamp

Shatter Zone

Perdition Valley

James Axler

For Melissa, as always

Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt.

—Graham Greene,

The Human Factor, 1978

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

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

Epilogue

Chapter One

Moaning softly, the child baron hugged himself tightly and began to rock in the wooden chair. The motion made it creak slightly and he shuddered at the noise.

Tightening the grips on their longblasters, the two sec men in the throne room of Broke Neck ville exchanged nervous glances.

“Baron?” the corporal ventured, advancing a step. “Is there anything we can do to help?”

Drooling slightly, the youth looked at the guard with unseeing eyes. “He has the secret,” Baron Harmond whispered, the words slurred slightly. “But he doesn’t know it. Not yet!”

“Secret, sir?” a sec man dared to ask, tilting his head. “Who has what secret?”

“Vermont!” Harmond screamed, grabbing his temples as blood began to trickle from his nose. “He’s here, but also back there! I can see him in a hundred places! A hundred times! But Tanner has stayed too long! There is a new future! A different casement! The universe is ripping apart! Time is healing itself!”

Worried, the corporal looked at the window, but could see nothing wrong with either the sill or the concrete casement. What was the doomie baron talking about? Harmond had accurately predicted future events a dozen times before, and saved countless lives, both civie and sec men. But had the young baron finally crossed the line of sanity?

“Should I fetch a healer, Baron?” the sec man asked, starting for the doorway.

“Too late!” Harmond screamed, both of his hands clawing at the empty air. “He is the disease and the cure!”

“Sir?” a sec man asked, puzzled, starting to sweat. An insane baron. He knew of villes with those, and it was never good.

“Cold, so cold,” Harmond whispered, hugging himself tightly.

“Would you like a blanket, Baron?” the corporal asked. “Or we could make a fire.”

“Yes, cold…fire,” the baron wheezed, fighting for air. “The cold…is a fire…consume us all…” Lurching to his feet, he stared at the open window and pointed a shaking finger at the empty air of the north.

“Coldfire is here!” the baron shrieked, then shook all over and collapsed to the floor.

Rushing to his side, the guards turned the child over and pressed fingers to his throat to see if their baron still lived. Or if this was the long-ago prophesized day of death and the second end of the world had finally begun.

“Y-YOU HEARD ME, outlander,” growled the young sec man standing in front of the ville gate. With a double click, the guard cocked both hammers of the homie shotgun. “All of you, j-just move along now, and there won’t be no t-trouble.”

Masked by the night, the six people on horseback gave no reply to the warning. There was only the low moan of the desert breeze mixing with the sound of the panting horses and the jingling of the metal rings in the reins and stirrups.

Looking down at the nervous teenager from the back of his stallion, Ryan Cawdor tried to control his growing temper. Dark clouds covered the moon, so the only light came from the sputtering torches set on either side of the wooden gate. However, Ryan could still see that the huge wep held by the sec man was obviously not scavenged from predark days, but a homie, built from iron pipes reinforced with layers of steel wiring wrapped around each barrel. The wooden stock was hand-carved and the firing mechanism seemed to be taken from another blaster, perhaps a handblaster. Yet the double barrels of the scattergun were worn from constant use, plainly stating the wep was in good working condition and had seen plenty of action.

Even if the guard hadn’t, Ryan decided. There was dried blood on the sec man’s clothing, but none of it was his, and his face lacked the hard expression of a person who had taken the life of another. There was determination, and even bravery, but not the slightest sign of combat experience. For all Ryan knew, this was the teenager’s first shift of standing guard at the ville gate.

“Now, look, friend…” Ryan began impatiently.

“I said, keep moving!” the teenager ordered, grimly leveling the deadly blaster. “We don’t want your kind around here!”

“And what kind is that?” Ryan asked gruffly, leaning over slightly in his saddle to pat the neck of his horse.

The sweaty chestnut stallion nickered at the touch and shuffled its unshod hooves in the dry sand. Heavy saddlebags were draped across the muscular animal’s withers, and on its flanks was the brand of Two-Son ville, a lightning bolt set inside a circle. Even though covered with dust from the long ride, Ryan was well-dressed, wore good boots, pants without any patches and a heavy coat trimmed with fur. A shiny longblaster was hung across his shoulders and a slim handblaster rested in the holster of a predark gunbelt. A bandolier of ammo clips crossed his chest, and at his side was a large knife of unknown design.

Licking dry lips, the guard gave no reply. But he kept stealing glances at the left side of Ryan’s face.

Touching his leather eye patch, Ryan grunted in understanding. Yeah, he thought so.

It had been a week since the companions had left Two-Son ville in the south and charged across the Zone, going from ville to ville, chasing down the rumors of the chillings of one-eyed men. But they were always one day behind the ruthless coldhearts who jacked everybody with silver hair like Doc’s, and chilled any man with only one eye like Ryan’s. Left or right eye, it made no dif.

It had been three long days of finding nothing but death and dust, until now. So Ryan as sure as nuking hell wasn’t going to be turned away from a ville where the chillings were so fresh that a green sec man still had dried blood on his clothing.

“Move along, rist,” the guard said, tightening his grip on the scattergun. Behind the teen, two small hatches in the thick wooden gate swung open and dark metal glistened in the dim torchlight.

In spite of the poor lighting, Ryan caught the subtle motion with his good eye and shifted his position to get a clear shot with his handblaster at whoever was standing at the hatch. If trouble came, it would be from the snipes hiding behind the gate, and not this nervous kid.

“And how do you know we’re not the ones doing all of the chilling?” J. B. Dix asked, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.

Sitting astride a chestnut stallion, the short, wiry man was dressed in loose denim blue jeans, a T-shirt and a heavy leather jacket. A pump-action scattergun was strapped across his back, a 9 mm Uzi rapidfire rested on his thigh and at his side hung a large canvas bag bulging with lumpy objects.

“W-we don’t want no more trouble,” the teenager stated roughly, stepping away from the gate to give a clearer field of fire for the folks at the blaster hatches. “So just git. And I m-mean now!”

This boy was terrified, Krysty Wroth realized. But not of us.

“Go fetch your sec chief,” the redhead demanded, her long hair moving gently around her shoulders as if stirred by secret winds.

There was a bloody bandage on her left cheek and another on her wrist from the recent fighting down in Two-Son. The woman was riding a roan-colored mare. A bearskin coat hung across the saddlebags. A predark MP-5 rapidfire was draped across the pommel of the saddle, and a weird-looking wheelgun rode in a leather holster at her shapely hip. The cowboy boots in the stirrups were decorated with the silver embroidery of falcons, and the toes were steel, although at the present the metal was caked with gray dust.

The guard frowned at the sight. The redhead was better armed than any sec man. The loops of her gunbelt were filled with live brass, more than the teen had seen in his entire life.

“Ain’t got a chief. He’s…” The teen shut his mouth tightly and hunched his shoulders.

“He was one of the people killed—excuse me—chilled, by the strangers,” Doc Tanner rumbled. “Thank you, that explains everything.”

Dressed as if from another century, Doc was in frilly white shirt, with a frock coat that spread behind him across the horse like an opera cape. A mixed pair of big-bore handblasters rode in a gunbelt made of closed ammo pouches, and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s-head handle jutted from his backpack like a tribal totem.

“By the Three Kennedys, sir,” Doc said, turning to address Ryan, “we must be hot on the trail of the coldhearts if the locals haven’t even replaced their sec chief yet!”

“That’s an ace on the line,” Ryan drawled, rubbing his unshaven chin. Surreptitiously, he shifted the reins from his left hand to his right. The one-eyed man was naturally right-handed, but he’d been hurt in a fight a short while ago and his shooting arm wasn’t completely healed yet.

Just then, the blaster hatches closed and there came the sound of heavy bolts being slid aside. With creaking hinges, the thick gate was pushed open and five armed sec men walked out of the ville, the ground crunching under their boots. As the portal closed again, Ryan and the others saw a dozen more men inside the ville, positioned behind a sandbag wall, working the bolts on longblasters and notching arrows into homie crossbows. These people were ready for a war.

“Guess I’m the new chief sec man,” the oldest man stated gruffly, hitching up a gunbelt. He was dressed in ragged clothing, his predark motorcycle boots patched with duct tape, but his blasters shone with fresh oil. “And yeah, Baron Harrison was aced, along with Chief Rajavur.”

“You guess?” Mildred Wyeth asked, brushing a plait of beaded hair back off her dusty face. Riding an appaloosa mare, the physician was armed with an MP-5 rapidfire and a wheelgun rested in her belt. At her side hung a predark canvas bag.

Touching a freshly stitched scar on his chest, the sec chief shrugged. “Ain’t nobody alive to tell me no,” he stated honestly.

“Who aced baron?” Jak Lauren asked, leaning forward in his saddle. The palomino mare under the albino teen obediently altered her stance to accommodate his new position, and snorted softly with impatience.

The albino teenager riding the beast had a huge handblaster in his gunbelt and an MP-5 rapidfire in the longblaster holster set alongside the saddle.

The chief sec man shrugged. “Damned if we know who aced him.”

“Where are the bodies, then?” Ryan demanded, glancing up at the clouds overhead. He carefully noted that none of the stars was being eclipsed by anybody walking along the top of the wall around the ville. Good. The locals weren’t friendly, but neither were they trying to jack the companions.

“Hell’s bells, just follow the birds, you can’t miss them,” a sec man growled. A couple the armed men standing behind him nodded in agreement.

“Nuking hell, it was awful, like something from a nightmare!” the young guard muttered, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge the memories of the sight.

“Shut up,” the sec chief barked at the lad. Then he turned to face the companions. “All right, rist, you asked some questions and got some answers. Normally, we’re always interested in trading, even better is getting news from across the Zone, but not tonight. Now get moving, or we start blasting.”

In the flickering light of the torches, Ryan saw more blaster hatches swing open, and realized the new sec chief meant every word. There was nothing more to learn here. The answers they sought were back in the desert. Follow the birds, eh?

“Let’s go,” Ryan ordered, shaking the reins and starting his mount into a slow walk. The rest of the companions were close behind.

“Friendly folks,” J.B. commented as the companions rode away. Judiciously, the Armorer eased off the safety of the 9 mm Uzi in his lap. “Never seen people so rattled before. So their sec chief got himself aced. Big deal. That’s no reason for the whole ville to go triple red.”

Squinting into the distance, Ryan saw a flock of birds circling a distant hill. Smoke was rising from a small campfire, but that was all he could see from this angle.

“Let’s go see if there was a reason,” he growled, kicking his mount into a full gallop.

Chapter Two

A couple hundred miles away, a pale man walked slowly through the cold rubble of the burned-down building. He was tall and slim, almost skeletal, his face so smooth that it seemed as if the man had never needed to shave. His blond hair was slicked back tightly to his head and a tiny silver stud twinkled in his left earlobe. His pants and vest, more practical than the robe he usually wore, were cream-colored, spotless and perfect. Not even the dust raised by his walking through the ash seemed able to adhere to the odd fabric. Instead of boots, he wore sliver slippers, the woven material strangely luminescent. But even more bizarre was the fact that the man carried no visible wep of any kind. No blaster, ax, crossbow, knife or even a simple club.

In utter horror, Delphi stared at the decomposing bodies of the men and the muties mingling together on the ground, bits of white bone and golden brass glittering from the gray ashes like broken promises.

“Dead, they’re all dead,” Delphi whispered, gently kicking aside the distorted skull of a stickie. The operative of Department Coldfire couldn’t believe his eyes. This was impossible!

Moving listlessly among the wreckage, Delphi found more and more of the bodies everywhere, the death toll incredible, and every one of the muties had been shot through the head, even when there was only a head remaining with no torso attached. The surviving sec men had shot the dead stickies, just to make sure the muties really were deceased. That was ruthless efficiency he could appreciate. In spite of all his arduous work, and endless planning, slaving over every little detail, the hidden nest of stickies in Two-Son had been utterly destroyed in a single night. One night! Then the locals had done everything but sow salt into the land to make sure the stickies would never return.

“My precious little ones,” Delphi moaned, bending to pick up the blackened skull of a stickie. A cooked eye fell out as Delphi raised the skull high in his palm, wondering if he had known this particular mutant. Then Delphi had a sudden flash in his mind of Hamlet doing the exact same thing, and he cast the grisly remnant aside. It sailed across the smoky destruction to crash against the side of a marble staircase that rose high into the empty air and abruptly ended at nothing. The smashed bones went flying everywhere.

Bowing his head, Delphi tightened his fists, attempting to control his growling rage over the slaughter. How long he held that position, Delphi had no idea, but his somber reverie was disrupted at sound of hooves beating on sand.

Quickly looking up, Delphi scanned the nearby predark city until locating a man on a horse coming this way through the crumbling ruins.

“Hey, rist!” the rider called, tightening his grip on the reins and bringing the stallion to a halt on the cracked sidewalk. “Get the nuking hell out of there! The foundation is weak and could collapse at any second!”

His face an inert mask, Delphi walked across the debris and onto the sandy street. A soft breeze was blowing, mixing sand with the ashes of the obliterated stickie nest.

“Rist?” Delphi said curiously, tucking his hands into his sleeves.

The sec man grinned in embarrassment. “Sorry, Baron O’Connor told us to stop using that word. It means outlander or stranger.”

“Does it now? Well, I am a stranger,” Delphi muttered, his eyes narrowing. “And from those black-powder weapons, you must be a sec man from Two-Son ville. That’s only a klick away, correct?”

His instincts flaring at the tone of the question, the rider let an arm drop so that his fingers rested on the checkered grip of the handblaster resting in the holster at his side.

“Ain’t no other ville for a hundred klicks in any direction,” the sec man stated, tightening the reins as the horse shifted its hooves in the hot sand. “Now what’s your biz here?”

“My biz?”

“What do ya want?” The sec man leaned over the pommel of his saddle and scowled. “Are you a lost pilgrim, or a trader?”

“Ah, an intelligent question at last,” Delphi said, slowly smiling. “Most astute. What I want at the moment is your prompt death.”

Recoiling at that statement, the sec man drew his blaster and fired. But in spite of the fact that the pale outlander was only a few yards away, he somehow missed. Quickly, the sec man fired twice more. The black-powder charges threw out great volumes of dark smoke, and he had to wait for the desert wind to clear the air so that he could see the chilled body.

But the outlander was still standing, unfazed and untouched, without a single wound to be seen.

Snarling obscenities, the sec man fired again and this time actually saw the soft lead ball slam into the man’s face. No, wait. The lead had stopped in midair, flattened into a misshapen lump as if it impacted a sheet of predark mil armor. But there was only air between the two of them! How was this possible?

Throwing back his head, Delphi began to laugh as the cooling sphere of lead fell impotently to the sandy street.

Fear swept over the sec man and he briefly debated galloping away. But the very idea of retreat made him snarl in suppressed fury, and the sec man quickly fired the last two rounds in the handblaster. This time, he saw the billowing clouds of gunsmoke form a halo around the rist, revealing a sort of ball, or sphere, as if the man were a bug in a jar. An invisible glass ball that could stop blasters?

As the sweating sec man hastily went for the knife in his boot, Delphi extracted a crystalline rod from within his left sleeve, and pointed it at the horse. With a snort, the animal went absolutely still, then toppled to the street like so much cooked meat. Wisps of steam rose from the nostrils and ears.

Unable to leap from the saddle fast enough, the sec man hit the asphalt hard, the impact making him drop the knife. Then he heard the bones in his leg snap loudly under the deadweight of the horse. Son of a bitch! A split second later, the pain arrived, and he screamed curses. But then he stopped abruptly as thick blood began to flow from the slack mouth of the deceased horse, as if its internal organs had been liquefied. The sight galvanized the sec man into action, and he desperately clawed for the scattergun hidden in the saddlebags.

As Delphi approached, the sec man yanked the wep clear.

“Eat this, mutie lover!” the sec man snarled, swinging up the scattergun to fire both barrels at point-blank range.

Flame and thunder filled the street as the hellstorm of lead ricocheted off the defensive forcefield that surrounded Delphi. The mix of buckshot and bent nails sprayed randomly to strike the nearby buildings. Predark glass shattered and a rusted wag shook from the barrage, but that was all that happened.

No longer chuckling, Delphi approached the trapped man and stopped just out of reach as the sec man swung the smoking scattergun at his leg, trying to smash a kneecap.

“Do you know how long it took me to make those stickies smart? To raise their baseline intelligence above that of a slavering beast?” Delphi whispered, his hand ever-so-slowly lowering the crystal rod. “To teach them how to sharpen sticks into spears. How to hide and ambush an enemy? Do you? Do you have any idea of the effort I invested into this project?” His hand began to shake slightly, as his voice took on a hysterical tone.

“Now I have to start from scratch again somewhere else!” Delphi bellowed. “More of my precious time wasted! More inefficiency!”

“What are you, a feeb? The muties were chilling us!” the sec man panted, his shaking fingers fumbling to shove a fresh load of black powder and nails into the chamber of the weapon. “The triple-damn stickies were eating our kids! They would have wiped out the whole ville in another few months! We had to ace them. We had to!”

“Cretinous fool, that was the idea!” Delphi yelled, waving the wand.

There was a flash of blue sparks, and a powerful hum filled the air. The partially loaded blaster suddenly turned red-hot, then white-hot, and the sec man threw it away just as it detonated. The blast ripped the scattergun apart, and blew off both of the sec man’s hands. Now shrieking in pain, the mortally wounded man raised his arms to stare at the ragged stumps spurting bright coppery blood.

Delphi gestured again, and the tattered strips of flesh dangling off the ruptured arms glowed with a terrible cold fire, and the gaping wounds closed, as if the limbs had been thrust into a raging furnace and cauterized. The sobbing sec man couldn’t believe it. The bleeding had stopped, but there had been no pain. No pain at all!

“Fool. You’re not going to die that quickly,” Delphi said in a flat monotone. “First, you must pay for your crimes. Only then can I leave to find Ryan and his crew.”

Ryan?

“Wait! I can help! I know Cawdor!” the sec man whimpered, trying to hide behind his half arms. “He trusts me! I can find him for you!”

“Oh, my hunters already know where he is,” Delphi said, his merciless eyes starting to twinkle. “Besides, I never deal with traitors. Tsk, tsk, turning on the man who saved your ville. How sad. Now your death will be much more…unpleasant.”

The crystal wand flashed again.

RIDING UP THE SIDE of the hill, Ryan and the companions spread out slightly so that they didn’t offer a group target to anybody hidden in the thick cactus growing on the sandy dune. There was no sign of anybody, but only a feeb took chances.

Cresting the top, the companions stopped as they saw the row of bloody crosses sticking out of the damp soil. There were the tattered remains of people nailed onto the wood, the bodies hanging limply with their stomachs slit open, the distended bowels hanging down into bowls on the ground. The prisoners had been opened wide, and their intestines removed, but left connected. Alive, but disassembled. There was a growing smell in the air of blood and nightsoil, a foulness so thick that the companions could almost taste the hellish reek.

Leaning over sideways in her saddle, Mildred began to noisily lose her breakfast, and Krysty closed her eyes to mutter a prayer of forgiveness to the Earth Mother Gaia.

Leveling their blasters, Ryan and J.B. checked for traps as they started toward the horribly mangled bodies. Neither of the warriors had ever seen anything quite like this before, which disturbed them greatly. Bits and pieces of the prisoners were tossed around, the ground alive with insects and green lizards. Scorpions battled over a split tongue, while a swarm of beetles hurriedly consumed something too obscene to be closely identified.

“Remember the craz eunuch from Nova ville?” J.B. asked out of the corner of his mouth.

“Eugene,” Ryan replied. “Yeah, I would have sworn this was his work, if Shard hadn’t aced the bastard right in front of us.”

“There were students, folks he was teaching his techniques at the ville. Mebbe…” J.B. left the sentence unfinished.

Ryan clicked off the safety on his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster. “Yeah, mebbe.”

Just then a soft moan sounded from among the sagging figures on the crosses, and Ryan inhaled in shock as a woman opened her eyelids to expose raw empty sockets.

“Ace…me…” she hoarsely whispered, the words almost lost on the dessert breeze. “Whoever ya are…please…”

Without hesitation, Ryan swung his blaster up and fired. The woman jerked back as a black hole appeared on her temple and the back of her head exploded in a grisly pinkish spray across the filthy wood beams.

As the body went limp, Ryan started to ride along the row of crosses, putting a slug into the face of every prisoner, Usually they wouldn’t waste the ammo, but mercy was demanded here. Soon, the other companions followed suit until the dark hilltop rang with the sweet release of death.

“Triple-crazy shit,” Jak said. “Like predark coldhearts Mildred told about. Natzies?”

“Nazis,” Mildred stated, wiping her mouth clean on a handkerchief. “They were called Nazis, and yes, this is exactly the sort of torture they did to enemies of the state.” Then she added, “Not exactly my time, I wasn’t born yet when the Allies took down Adolph Hitler and his mad followers.”

“That’s the baron who tried to take over the world?” Krysty asked, tucking away her S&W Model 640 revolver.

Glumly, Mildred nodded. “Close enough, yes.”

Muttering something in Latin, Doc closed the cylinder of his Ruger .44. The predark revolver was a recent acquisition from Blaster Base One, a redoubt the companions had discovered filled with military supplies. The old man still carried the LeMat at his side, but the black-powder weapon from the Civil War took a long time to reload, while the Ruger took bullets and could be reloaded in a matter of only moments.

Whinnying softly, the horses were clearly nervous among all the carnage, and even Doc had to admit to a certain queasiness in his stomach. This hadn’t been the work of sane minds.

“Well, I’ll be nuked,” J.B. said, walking his mount around in a circle. “Anybody notice something odd about the placement of these crosses?”

“They’re not facing each other,” Krysty said, brushing back her hair. The copper-colored lengths caressed her fingers for a moment before letting go and moving back into place. “The logical thing would be to arrange them in a circle so that all of your prisoners could watch the others being taken apart.”

“But these aren’t.”

“No.”

“They’re all facing north,” Ryan observed, shifting in his saddle. His horse whinnied nervously, and the one-eyed man gently stroked its neck to try to calm the animal. Even though these horses had been trained for war, this much death and bloodshed was making them apprehensive. Shitfire, it was making him apprehensive. He had witnessed cannies cut up their victims to make them sing “death songs”, the screams supposed to make the flesh taste sweeter. But that had been a clean chill compared to this form of butchery.

“This done for us,” Jak stated, as if there was no question in the matter. “Catch attention, make mad.”

“I am mad, sir!” Doc thundered, brandishing a fist. “I am absolutely acrimonious!”

“That not good,” the teen responded, scratching his mare behind an ear. “They want angry, you be calm. Not do expected.”

Breathing through clenched teeth, Doc radiated a fine fury for a few minutes, then relaxed his shoulders. “You are correct, of course,” the old man stated. “That is wisdom, indeed, my young friend. I shall endeavor to comply.”

Raising a hand to shield his face from the crackling campfire, J.B. studied the moon behind the clouds. The Armorer wore a sextant on a chain around his neck, which could pinpoint their exact position anywhere on the planet to within a few miles.

“Yeah, looks like the bodies are all facing north-by-northwest,” he reported, tucking the compass into a pocket. “In the direction of the Mohawk Mountains.”

“Isn’t there supposed to be another redoubt hidden among the peaks?” Krysty asked, brushing away flies. The cloud of buzzing insects was getting bigger with every passing minute. Soon the campsite wouldn’t be habitable by anybody with exposed skin.

“Somewhere, yeah,” Ryan answered, sliding the Steyr SSG-70 longblaster off his shoulder and checking the internal clip. The bolt-action held five rounds in a transparent clip, and Ryan wanted to make sure it was carrying predark brass taken from Blaster Base One, and not some of their hand loads. When he faced down the coldhearts who did this kind of chilling, he sure as hell didn’t want to chance a misfire. “Come on, let’s go find the bastards.”

As the companions began moving off the hilltop, Krysty slowed her mount until she was the last one remaining. Reaching into the saddlebags, she pulled out a mil canister, pulled the ring, flipped off the handle, then tossed the charge into the middle of the blood-soaked ground

Kicking her mount hard in the rump, Krysty started to gallop down the side of the dune. She had travelled only a few yards when the predark gren detonated. A sizzling white light shattered the night as the “willie peter” gren cut loose, the charge of white phosphorous washing over the hellish scene in a searing chem inferno.

As she rejoined the others, the top of the hill was alive with writhing flames, thick smoke rising into the starry sky.

“Why do?” Jak asked with a scowl, his white hair streaming out behind. “Waste gren.”

“They left a message for us,” Krysty said. “So I’m sending one right back!”

“Blood for blood,” Jak said with a nod. “Good think. Mebbe make them mad, eh?”

Stoically, Doc grunted in reply.

“We’re gonna chill these coldhearts on sight, then burn the bodies and piss on the ashes!” Ryan said in a low growl.

“Damn straight we will!” Mildred added savagely. Deep within the woman there was growing the heated rush to kill, an unusual sensation for the peaceful healer. But experience had taught her that some people had to be treated like cancer cells. You killed them to save the rest of the body. So be it. If these fools wanted a fight, then cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!

“Blood for blood,” J.B. agreed, his eyes glinting hard.

As the companions reached level ground, Ryan kicked the big stallion into a full gallop, and the companions urged their mounts to greater speeds across the sandy plain.

In the far distance, the Mohawk Mountains stood immutable on the darkling horizon, the jagged peaks rising like the teeth of some great slumbering beast waiting for its next kill.

Chapter Three

“Faster, you bitches. Faster!” Rolph Gunter cried, leaning dangerously forward in the wooden seat of the cargo wagon.

Holding the reins tight in one hand, the slaver lashed out with the whip in his other, forcing the team of horses on to greater speed. Run from me, will you?

In the rear of the heavy wagon, a dozen chained slaves desperately held on to the iron bars of their cage, as the wag bounced madly across the rough ground. The floor of their prison was covered with straw and windblown sand. The water bowls were empty, and the few insects stupid enough to wander into the cage were eagerly consumed by its starving occupants.

Behind the speeding wag rose a spreading cloud of dust from the wooden wheels crushing the loose soil. The cart was made of scrap lumber, but the cage itself had an iron floor and roof, with steel bars for walls. The only way inside was through a trapdoor in the ceiling, but the hatch was too high to reach, and firmly bolted closed. With iron on their ankles, and inside a steel cage, escape was considered impossible, although many tried. Tried and paid a terrible price under the brutal whip of the slaver.

“Crash, please crash and chill us all,” a woman whispered as the wag shook along the rocky path, the wheels leaving the soil as it hit a bump.

For a moment, the cart went airborne, then it crashed onto the ground again with Rolph nearly leaving his seat from the impact. The captives cried out as they tumbled in the cage, smashing into one another so that their chains became hopelessly entangled.

“Shut up, back there!” Rolph snarled, letting go of the reins with one hand to brandish the hated bullwhip. “Keep quiet, or I’ll skin you alive!”

“Do it!” a man spat back, pressing his face against the shaking bars. “Chill us, ya fat fool!”

Furious at the open sign of rebellion, Rolph lashed out with the whip, but the knotted length only smacked onto the bars and failed to reach the living cargo within.

“Mutie fucker!” the man screamed. “Drek-eating prick!”

The whip flew again, this time hitting the man across the face. But as he fell backward with a cry, another slave made a desperate grab for the whip, his fingers missing by only inches.

Flicking the whip forward to urge the horses on to greater speed, Rolph started to pepper the cage with short strokes from the whip, driving the slaves back to the rear of the cart. Stupid meat! Would they never learn to obey?

Suddenly alert, Rolph spotted a motion out of the corner of his eye in the dark desert sand. There they were! The pilgrims he had discovered walking along the Mohawk River! They had dropped their backpacks for better speed, but then left the hard dirt road to struggle across the loose sand of the dunes. That made no sense. Then he saw the reason why, as large murky shapes rose from the desert like square-cut mountains. Ruins!

Black dust, if the pilgrims get in there, I’ll never find them again! Rolph thought. And there was no way he would let all of those potential slaves escape, especially the two females. A fortune in brass was getting away from him. Okay, then, he had no choice.

Tying the reins to a wooden peg set in the middle of the seat, Rolph pulled out a heavy crossbow and worked the lever to pull back the drawstring, then notched in an arrow. Rocking to the motion of the bucking wag, the slaver targeted the three running people, adjusted for the wind and bucking cart, then pressed the release lever. The wooden shaft lanced through the darkness and slammed into the back of the child running between the two adults. She threw her arms wide and tumbled to the ground.

“NO!” SHARON SHOUTED, dropping the canteen to dart back to the sprawling girl.

Kneeling alongside the still form, the woman gently turned the child over and burst into tears of relief at the sight of the small chest rising and falling regularly. Alive, Manda was still alive!

“How bad is it?” David demanded, stepping breathless out of the darkness. Fumbling inside his clothing, he produced a rusty revolver and struggled to open the corroded cylinder. It was empty.

“She’s not too hurt,” Sharon replied, lifting the still form. “Look!”

Searching for any live brass in his pockets, David cursed at the sight of the blunt arrow. Filthy stinking slaver wanted them alive. “Can she run?” he snapped.

“I don’t think so,” Sharon muttered, nervously looking into the night. She could hear the rattle of the slave cart, but the desert wind made the noise seem to move about until she wasn’t sure which direction it was coming from. “The arrow broke some ribs.”

“Nuking hell,” David growled, sliding a single live brass round into the old revolver. Out of food, no water, and down to their last three rounds for the blaster, a piece of drek he won in a dice game the previous month. The cylinder wouldn’t rotate anymore, but the former owner swore that blaster could still shoot, as long as you took out the spent brass and inserted a new one into the same hole.

“Here, take this,” David ordered, yanking a bandanna from around his neck and tossing it to his wife. “Stuff this into her mouth and start running. I’ll try to ambush the slaver when he goes after you. Fems are always more valuable than men.”

No matter the age, he added grimly. Three rounds was all he had, one predark, and two hand loads of questionable reliability, but it was better than nothing. The slaver had chosen his targets well. Sharon and Manda knew enough to keep going if he fell, and he would have done the same if Sharon was taken, but neither of them could leave their only child behind alive.

“David, if…if he takes us,” Sharon started, and touched the knife on her hip, asking a silent question.

Forcing back the hammer on the patched blaster, the man gave a quick nod. It would be better to ace the girl rather than doom her to a life in a gaudy house to be the toy of drunken sec men and jolt addicts.

The clatter of the wooden cart was getting louder, and another arrow shot out of the gloom to hum between the two adults. Instantly, Sharon grabbed the little girl in both arms and took off into the dunes.

As the dry breeze blew across his face, David brushed away a tear, watching them disappear. Then he slipped into the scraggly weeds, the ancient revolver cradled to his chest for protection.

Another arrow shot through the night, and the rattling cart came into view. Blind norad, the back was full of people in an iron cage! The bastard had a full cargo, but he wanted more. With his heart pounding, David stayed low in the weeds and waited for a chance to strike back.

LOADING THE CROSSBOW again, Rolph cried out at the unexpected sight of a man rising from the weeds with a blaster in his hands. With no chance to aim properly, the slaver released the blunt arrow just as the revolver went off, throwing out a bright orange tongue of flame.

Something hot and hard slammed into Rolph’s hands and he was thrown backward from the cart. Falling to the ground, the slaver hit the sand hard and had the wind knocked out of him for a moment. Forcing himself to roll out of sight, Rolph moved among the weeds on the other side of the road. The lead had hit the crossbow! He was still alive and unharmed.

The slaves in the cage started cheering as the runaway cart vanished in the gloom, and from out of the swirling dust cloud filling the road came the man, the blaster swinging back and forth as he searched for a target.

Taking advantage of the masking dust, Rolph slipped along a rocky gully to pull a small handblaster out of his shirt. His grandie had called the thing a derringer, but nobody used that predark word anymore. The wep had two barrels, one trigger, and he had to rotate the barrels to use the second round. Bitch of a thing to reload, but it worked like a charm, and should do the job of finishing off this feeb once and for all. Then Rolph would get back on the cart, find the females and make them pay for losing a brass. Oh yes, they’d pay.

High in the sky, the moving clouds briefly parted to admit a wealth of silvery-blue moonlight. The two men jerked at the sight of each other only yards away. Moving fast, Rolph and David aimed their blasters and fired in unison, the double report filling the area with thick acrid smoke from the combined black-powder discharges.

“MORE,” John Rogan ordered, giving a soft burp.

Taking the big man’s dirty plate, Lily bent over the campfire and filled the hubcap with rabbit stew. The elder Rogan took the food without comment, and started eating again with a homemade wooden spoon.

The glen was quiet this night, the only sounds coming from the cook fire and the small waterfall that splashed from the side of a large boulder near a blockhouse. Tall trees and bushes completely encircled the field of green grass, the only break in the thick foliage sealed off with a crude gate of wood, broken glass and barbed wire.

Soon, the other Rogan brothers demanded refills. Lily hastily complied. Aside from being easily twice her size, the brothers were monstrously strong, and utterly ruthless. They gave her little food and beat her from time to time. The combination left the young woman too weak to protest their treatment, much less think about escape. Although she dreamed of it in her sleep. Freedom, sweet freedom, and of course, bloody revenge.

All of the Rogan brothers were dressed in predark combat boots and loose green mil fatigues, with blasters and ammo belts covering their bodies like primitive armor. At the moment, only three of the giants were sitting around the campfire. There was a fourth seat at the fire, but the wooden box was empty. Alan Rogan was off doing a recce for an outlander called Ryan. Lily’s brothers desperately wanted the man, but only because he traveled with some whitehair called Tanner. That was their real goal, and they needed Tanner alive for some reason. Lily could only assume it was for torture.

Oddly, in spite of their endless torments, the brothers had recently given their sister some predark clothing, much better than anything Lily had ever worn before. She had dark-green leather boots with good solid soles. The denim pants were without any patches, as was the camou-colored T-shirt. The thin material was no protection from the cold. She was fine during the day, but at night Lily had to stay close to the campfire or risk freezing.

The fact that Lily had to wash fresh blood from the clothing when it was offered was just something accepted as a hard fact of life. The brothers didn’t barter for goods. The coldhearts took whatever they wanted at the end of a blaster, and anybody who got in the way regretted it for the rest of their lives. Which usually lasted only a couple minutes. She could almost forgive them the mindless brutality. It was their unclean fascination with predark tech that repulsed the woman to the core of her being. Science had destroyed the world, slaughtering untold billions. How anybody could want electric lights or libraries again was beyond her understanding. It made her skin crawl to merely look at the electric motorcycles with their headlights and radios. The machines somehow drew power from the sun. Power from sunlight. What could possibly be more unnatural than that?

In the distance, there was a sharp noise audible above the crackle of the cook fire, closely followed by two more reports.

Lowering his spoon, John looked up from his plate of stew. “That’s blasterfire,” he said, scowling.

“Way out here?” Robert rasped in his horrible mockery of a human voice. Unconsciously he touched the bandanna that covered a wide puckered scar around his neck. “Somebody must be getting jacked out in the dunes. Mebbe a nice, juicy caravan, eh?”

“That means wounded to loot,” John said, almost smiling.

“Always are,” Edward added with a gruff laugh, working on his third plate of stew.

The barrel-chested man was huge, almost a giant, yet he had challenged his younger brother John for control of the group only once. That was a mistake he would never make again. Edward was the biggest, but not the meanest, or the most deadly. That honor went to John. It was the elder Rogan who had created the nightmare tortures they inflicted upon the people they captured, and he always had some new idea to try, each one worse than the last. There didn’t seem to be a limit to his brutality.

“Could be Ryan and his crew,” Robert warned, dropping his plate into the fire and licking his fingers clean. “Mebbe they’re trying to lure us out of the glen. Jack the jackers, so to speak.”

“A nightcreep?” Edward said, chewing the idea over.

“Sure. Why not?”

Tossing aside his own plate, John reached behind the box he was sitting on and lifted a gleaming M-16/M-203 rapidfire. The sleek combo wep was one of the many perks the brothers had gotten from the mysterious being who called himself Delphi. The double-barrel predark mil wep was in perfect condition, without a speck of rust or corrosion. The M-16 rapidfire on top had ammo clips that held thirty live rounds of shiny brass. It could vomit a hellstorm of lead that mowed down a roomful of people like wind bending the prairie grass. But underneath that barrel was the gaping maw of the M-203 gren launcher. The portable cannon fired only a single shell at a time, but the huge 40 mm gren could blow down a house or chill a dozen muties in a thundering blast of steel fléchettes.

Working the arming bolts, the three brothers stood and started across the glen. A few yards away, three black bikes rested on the cool green grass. Strapped across the rear fender of each were cargo pods, molded to the frame as if installed when the bikes were new. Inside the pods was a wealth of canned food, meds, clothing, grens and piles of ammo clips for the combo rapidfires. Advance payment for chilling Ryan and capturing the whitehair called Tanner. John flinched at the memory of Delphi forcibly reminding them not to hurt the wrinklie in any way. If they did, the punishment would be worse than anything the Rogans had done to their own victims. John was stubborn, but not feeb enough to doubt that the strange outlander meant every word of the dire threat.

“We take the bikes, but leave in pairs,” John commanded, checking the handblaster at his side, “each covering the other as we go. Ace anybody you see who doesn’t have white hair.”

“Sounds good, bro,” Robert stated, dropping the clip from his rapidfire to check the load. Satisfied, he shoved it back into the wep. “Let’s ride.”

Tucking the rapidfires into the cushioned holster sets along the front yoke of the sleek bikes, the two men climbed onto their two-wheelers and twisted the handgrips to bring the electric engines softly purring into life. The dashboard came alive with glowing green lights. But there was no sound from the vibrating engine between his legs, only a soft hum. The usual gear chain had been replaced with an enclosed transmission that connected the engine to the rear wheel. The effect was that the two-wheeler was as silent as a grave.

As the bikes came alive, Lily tried not to shudder in revulsion. Bastard tech-lovers, she thought hatefully.

While Robert and Edward opened the gate that closed off the gap in the bushes that surrounded the hidden glen, John rolled his bike over to Lily.

“Gimme,” he said bluntly, extending a hand.

With great reluctance, Lily removed her clothing and passed over the garments. Taking the bundle, John rode to the blockhouse and locked them behind the iron door. He thought his sister was a feeb slut, but not crazy enough to try running without a stitch to cover her ass.

Moving like ghosts, the three Rogan brothers drove through the bushes that surrounded the hidden glen, but paused to swing the gate shut and arm the explos boobies hidden in the greenery.

Sighing in resignation, the naked girl went back to her cooking, building up the fire to stave off the evening chill. Stirring the dented steel pot full of rabbit stew, Lily shivered involuntarily at the memory of the people who hadn’t been given the boon of a swift death. The men with only one eye, and the wrinklies who proved not to be the sought-after Tanner. Sometimes, Lily could still hear the screaming in her dreams at night. The poor bastards had been taken apart like a blaster, and left that way to slowly die, while bugs and muties gnawed on their guts. It was horrible beyond words. It seemed impossible that the same blood ran in her veins as in those chilling freaks. But they had all come from the same mother, even if each of them had a different father.

Kin was supposed to care for kin, but the Rogan brothers never obeyed anybody, and they seemed to take special delight in torturing their little sister. Someday, it would be her turn to taste the sharp steel of their horrible knives.

Unless she did something about it.

CRAWLING ON the ground, Rolph tried to ignore the burning sensation along his cheek where the pilgrim’s blaster had just missed removing his head. Rad-sucking mutie fucker! The slaver didn’t know if he had hit the bastard, but he did know for certain that blasters in the night would always attract the attention of any muties in the area. Time was against him now. Rolph had to find the crossbow, ace the man, capture the two women and get back to his cart as fast as possible.

Pausing in the darkness, the slaver listened for any sounds of folks moaning on the ground, but there was nothing. Only deep silence. There wasn’t even the chirping of the bugs in the weeds to be heard.

Starting onward again, Rolph froze as something moved on the sandy slope of a nearby dune, the shadows disguising the figure. Then the clouds broke and the cold moonlight revealed only footprints in the shifting sand. Damn! Was the pilgrim trying to get behind him, or was he running away?

Increasing the speed of his search, Rolph bite back a cry of joy as his hand closed around the wooden stock of the crossbow. Yes! Quickly, he pulled an arrow from the quiver on his back only to discover the shaft was broken in two from his fall off the cart. Cursing, he went through the arrows until finding one intact, and hurriedly notched the deadly shaft into place. Two brass, two arrows. He had to make every shot count.

Leaving the thick weeds, Rolph proceeded along the dirt road after the escaping family. The sandy ground rose to a small crest, then dropped away into a dark plain, jagged rocks rising around the area in a circular pattern. A blast crater!

Holding his breath, Rolph saw nothing glowing in the darkness and forced himself to relax. If it didn’t glow, the rads were gone and it was safe to go through. Well, most of the time, anyway, he thought unhappily.

Proceeding swiftly, the slaver found the ground softening and there was definitely the smell of water in the air. An oasis in a nuke crater? Mebbe this was what the pilgrims had been running toward, not the ruins. A hideyhole where they could get fresh water. Curling a lip in disgust, Rolph started toward the sound of water gently lapping onto a muddy bank. Bad move, pilgrim.

Staying low and moving quickly, Rolph found only a scrawny gopher licking at the wet shoreline. Angrily leveling his crossbow at the animal, Rolph raised it again, knowing its life had been his to take. That had been fun, but he had bigger prizes this night.

Just then, bright white lights split the night and big creatures came charging over the hill in the dirt road as if they owned the world. Already keyed for action, Rolph instinctually aimed the crossbow and fired. Anything new presented a threat, and it was always best to ace odd things on sight rather than to risk being attacked for something really dangerous.

The arrow vanished into the night. Somebody cried out from behind the lights, and the desert was filled with the sound of blasters. Hundreds of them!

As the slaver dived to the moist ground, Rolph heard another scream from the water of the crater oasis, and knew that the escaping pilgrim had just gotten onto the last train west. Excellent! One down, two to go.

But the chattering blasterfire went on and on, until Rolph thought he had to be hallucinating. Nuking hell, how many sec men were there? The blasters never seemed to stop! A burst raked the ground in front of the cringing slaver, the sand flying up in tiny puffs from the impact of each round.

Impossible! Rolph thought in growing terror. Nobody could shoot that close together in unison. These had to be—what was the word?—rapidfires! Working predark rapidfires, with more ammo than a dozen barons!

Capturing the mother and child no longer seemed important, and Rolph felt a rush of raw greed at the thought of the deadly barkers in his possession. Rapidfires! Just one of those and he could become a baron himself! Checking the knife in his belt, Rolph reloaded the handblaster with his last two rounds, and notched a fresh arrow into the crossbow. After that he was down to a knife, but there was nobody better than him at blade chilling in the Deathlands. Especially in a nightcreep.

Let them come! I’ll slit every throat before they even knew I’m here. Those fancy blasters are already mine!

Forcing himself to breathe slowly and calmly, Rolph dared to risk a look above the tall grass edging the road. Less than a stone’s throw away three machines were parked in a group, their headlights throwing blinding cones of white light. The figures sitting on the back of the two-wheelers each held a weird double-barreled longblaster of some kind. The machines didn’t seem to be working; they shook slightly, and he could see the waves of heat radiating from the compact engines.

Muttering something low and guttural, one of the men slid off his machine and fell to the ground. Instantly, the other climbed off their machine and went to aid their fallen comrade. For a second, their features were lit by the reflected shine of the lamps. Rolph saw they were big men with all sorts of mil stuff dripping off them, as if they were a group of sec men.

The man on the ground had an arrow sticking out of his chest, and he snarled as a barrel-chested man took hold of the shaft and slowly pulled it out. The wounded man grunted as it came free, then went limp. The big man tossed the shaft away, as another one opened the back of a black two-wheeler and pulled out some items. Kneeling on the ground, the tall man started to bandage the wound, while the barrel-chested man stood guard. Occasionally, he would trigger a burst from the rapidfire randomly into the darkness of the crater, the muzzle-flash resembling a fiery flower.

Med supplies, bikes and blasters? Who were these sec men? Wisdom said it was time for Rolph to leave, but lust for the blasters filled his heart, and the slaver stood to fire the handblaster at the two closer strangers.

Even before the smoke of the discharge cleared, the night was filled with chattering fire and something red-hot punched Rolph in the shoulder, belly and hip. He staggered from the multiple impacts and tried to run. But then the two rapidfires rang out in staccato destruction, and white hot knives stabbed him across the back, red blood blowing out from his shirt.

The world became chaos then, the pain blurring consciousness. Rolph tripped on a rock and went flying. He hit the ground hard, and the raw wounds flared with pain until he blacked out.

AN ETERNITY LATER Rolph sluggishly came awake. A pair of boots stood near his face, shiny new boots without patches. Worth a fortune! Then one of the boots kicked him hard in the side. Rolph wanted to play dead, but he couldn’t stop himself from grunting at the blow.

“Still sucking air, eh?” a voice snarled.

A knee dropped into view and somebody roughly grabbed his hair to painfully haul his face upward. Rolph found himself looking into a furious face. This was one of the bikers. Thick bandoliers criss-crossed his chest, full of little metal boxes stuffed with live brass. Clips. He had dozens of ammo clips. The wealth of an entire ville was on display only inches away. If only he could snatch one of those….

Angrily, Edward slapped away the bloody hand of the dying man. “Ya got balls, I’ll grant ya that,” he said grudgingly. “But it was a triple-stupe move to shoot at us. Ya hit my bro.”

“I th-thought…you were s-stickies…” Rolph panted, forcing out the words.

“Shut up,” Edward ordered, backhanding the wounded slaver. “You’re just lucky that Robert is gonna live, it was only a flesh wound. If you had aced him…”

Edward backhanded the slaver again, harder this time. “If he had been chilled, John and I would have done things to you that’d make a cannie vomit.” A knife came into view, the moonlight reflected off the razor-sharp edge. “But as it is, we’ve got friends coming. So we have to leave.”

Not sure that he wanted to know what was going to happen, Rolph tried to think of a bribe to offer for his life, when the big man reached out and slashed the laces of his boots. Then he yanked them off, leaving Rolph barefoot.

What the frag? Rolph tried to summon the strength to ask a question, when there came a terrible pain at his ankles, and warm trickle sensation could be felt. Bleeding, he was bleeding!

“I just cut your tendons,” Edward said with a chuckle, displaying the crimson-smeared blade. “Now ya can’t walk.”

“Please…” Rolph whispered, holding on to his aching chest. “I…have many…”

But the slaver was interrupted by a distant hoot. Everybody froze motionless. The cry was answered by another hoot, closely followed by several more.

“And here comes the welcoming committee,” Edward said with a chuckle, slowly standing. Wiping the blade clean, he tucked it away in a sheath on his belt. “My brother lived, so you live. Say hi to the muties for me, feeb.”

“No! Please…chill me…” Rolph begged, his throat constricted from the racking pain in his chest. Weakly, he tried to rise, but his feet merely flopped at the end of his legs like dead things.

Edward only laughed in reply.

“Don’t leave me like this,” the slaver whined, tears on his dirty face. “Please, I’ll be your slave! I’ll do anything you want. Anything!”

Sneering in disgust, Edward kicked the slaver in the ribs again, doubling him up with the pain. Then the big man pulled something from a pocket.

“Hurry along,” an inhuman voice called from the bikes. “The stickies are coming. We must get moving.”

“No prob.” Edward chuckled, twisting off the cap of a cylinder to scrape it across the nubbin that had been underneath.

With a sputtering rush, a reddish flame extended from the fat cylinder, and Edward stabbed it into the muddy ground. The bank of the little pond was now clearly revealed in the crimson glow as if painted in blood.

“Just so the stickies can find their meal,” Edward said, turning to leave. Then he stopped and looked over a broad shoulder. “Our name is Rogan,” he said clearly. “Remember that as they tear you apart, feeb. We’re the Rogan brothers!”

As the biker joined the others on their machines, Rolph felt a surge of blind panic. Flipping himself over, the slaver started to madly crawl for the pond, using his fingers and knees.

I can hide under water, he thought. Yes, that would work! The road flare was throwing out a lot of stinking smoke that should mask the smell of my blood from the mutie. I’m not aced yet! Get going, keep moving, crawl…

But Rolph made it only a few feet when the inhuman face of a stickie rose above the swaying weeds, and the mutie looked directly into his eyes. Starting to scream, Rolph clawed for the knife on his belt and drew it across his own throat. But he was too weak and only managed a shallow gash. There was no telltale spurting of a major artery being cut, followed by a quick and merciful ride on the last train west.

That was when the stickie grabbed Rolph’s stomach with its sucker-covered hands and started to pull open the wounds.

Shrieking, Rolph slashed at the mutie with the knife, but the blade went flying into the weeds and landed out of sight. More stickies arrived, and they converged on the struggling man, tearing off gobbets of living flesh and yanking out pulsating organs. As the orgy of feeding began, the pitiful shrieks of the dying slaver seemed to last forever.

AS THE THREE MOTORCYCLES disappeared into the distance, David rose from the far side of the pond, his old blaster dripping muddy water. Black dust, it had worked! When the outlanders started shooting, he screamed and hit the water, and they assumed he was chilled.

For a moment the drenched man watched in satisfaction as the stickies enjoyed their gory meal across the pond, then he turned and started to run into the desert. The sooner he got away from the muties the better. David still had his wife and child to find. If they were yet alive.

Chapter Four

Standing on the top of the sweeping hill, Sec Chief Steven Stirling of Two-Son ville scowled deeply at the grassy vista spreading to the horizon.

In every direction there was nothing but endless fields of waving grass. To the west, purple mountains rose into the cloudy sky. To the north were several copses, and that was everything. In spite of the lush green plants, the landscape was as barren as the Great Salt. There were no ruins, or villes, or blaster craters or anything. If Ryan and his people had ridden this way, there was no way of knowing.

“Nuke-blasting hell, we lost them,” Stirling muttered angrily, massaging the back of his neck. “I thought you were supposed to be the best tracker in the whole ville.”

“I am, sir,” Alton answered, pouring some water from a canteen into his palm.

Holding the hand out to his horse, Alton let the animal slurp the water, being careful that his fingers didn’t get in the way. Many a green rider offered a carrot to their horse, only to start screaming as they drew back a bloody stump.

When the stallion was done, Alton poured in some more. The ride had been long and dusty, and the animal was thirsty. So was he, but a good rider took care of his mount first.

Inside the ville, it was blaster and brass, but outside the walls, a horse saved your ass, Alton mentally recited the ancient poem. Learning that had been his first lesson as a sec man and never forgotten. His second lesson had been to not turn his back on a wounded enemy, even if his guts were on the ground alongside him. Alton flinched from the memory. He still walked with a slight limp in the winter, caused by the lead miniball lodged near his hip, fired from the hidden blaster of a dying mercie.

The horse nickered, so Alton gave the animal one more palmful. A short, wiry man with thinning hair, Alton had a lopsided grin that never went away, even when he was chilling a coldheart, or slaver. A remade Remington 30.06 bolt-action rode in a leather holster along the side of the animal, and the saddlebags bulged with supplies, most of them being homie pipe bombs.

“Well, then, which way did they go?” Stirling demanded, scowling. His own horse was similarly equipped with blasters and bombs. The Zone was a dangerous place and with only four sec men; Stirling wanted all the edge he could get. The pipe bombs were a very recent addition to the Two-Son ville armory. J. B. Dix had taught them the secret of making something called guncotton, which turned out to be ten times more powerful than plas.

“There isn’t much that I can do on solid rock,” Alton replied, continuing to water his horse. “We lost Ryan back on that stony plain near the desert, and no amount of yelling is going to make their hoofprints appear.”

Distant thunder rumbled in the cloudy sky, and the sec men sniffed hard for any trace of chems in the air. But the wind remained clear and crisp, without any trace of acid rain.

“What do we try next, Chief?” Renée Machtig asked, tying back her long hair with a strip of rawhide. The sec woman was dressed in loose tan clothing suitable for travel in the desert. A bandolier of ammo pouches was draped across her chest, and a big-bore longblaster hung off a slim shoulder. A crossbow jutted from one of the saddlebags on her horse, along with tufts of straw used as cushioning to protect the delicate glass bottles of a half dozen Molotovs.

Stirling knew that Renée had only come along to stay with Alton, but that was okay with him. She was one of the best shots in Two-Son ville with the BAR longblaster, and this part of the Zone in New Mex had way too many muties in his opinion. Must have been hit double-hard during skydark to yield such a bumper crop of the cursed things, he added sourly. After all, it’s not like somebody is making more of them!

“We could go back and try to find their trail again,” Nathan Machtig offered from atop his horse. Tall and lean, the bearded teenager was carrying an old M-16 rapidfire equipped with a wooden handle to operate the bolt action. The black-powder brass didn’t have the power to operate the rapidfire, but the mil wep still served just fine as a single shot. Nathan was the son of Renée, and in spite of his parent, the teen was without a doubt the worst shot in the ville, including the blind man who carved wooden bowls for the baron. On the other hand, the kid could throw a pipe bomb farther and straighter than anybody Stirling had ever seen. A hell of an arm. The clumsy longblaster was there just to give the teenager some measure of protection in case something attacked closer than the bombs could be used.

“That’s a lot of ground to cover,” Gill McGillian replied, biting off a piece of jerky. He chewed the resilient material for a few minutes before adding, “But I suppose we gotta. So, what the frag, eh?”

Gill was the former driver of the Metro, the flame wag Two-Son ville used to burn the streets of the predark ruins around the ville clean of muties. But the sec man had relinquished that vaunted position of honor to come along with Stirling. Gill was carrying a double-barreled scattergun, his shirt lined with cloth loops stuffed with 12-gauge cartridges for the wep. They were reloads, packed with rocks, glass and nails, but still deadly.

Sitting slumped on his horse, Taw Porter didn’t join the conversation, but merely watched the others through half-closed eyes. The man looked like he was falling asleep, but that was just his way of keeping folks from seeing exactly what he was paying close attention to at any moment. During the fight with the stickies, Porter had been slow to respond. Baron O’Connor had publicly ridiculed Taw for the matter, but then incredibly offered the sec man a chance to clear his rep by going along on this journey. That seemed fair enough. But as a further punishment, the baron had decreed that Porter was to be armed with only a crossbow.

“Well, no sign of any campfires that I can see,” Stirling declared unhappily. “Sure would have been nice of Ryan to light us a beacon.”

“Mebbe there are too many muties around,” Alton suggested, taking a swig from his canteen. “Stickies love fire.”

“Ain’t that the nuking truth,” Stirling growled. “But, no, I think he’s far away from here. Hell, we could be out of the Zone for all I know!”

Fine by me, Porter thought petulantly, brushing a fly off his neck. Let’s go back home. How can anybody feel safe without a stone wall around their ass?

“Chief, if Ryan is a good day ahead of us,” Gill said slowly, “then we may never find them.”

“Yeah, I know,” Stirling admitted. “That just means we have to ride faster.”

“Ride faster in which direction?”

“Give me a second,” the sec chief muttered. “I’m working on it.”

“Does anybody else think that there is something wrong here,” Renée asked, squinting at the horizon. “I mean, this field. This place feels odd. I can sense something wrong with it in my bones.”

“Odd place, I have to agree,” Alton grunted in reply. “Although I can’t tell you why. Mebbe we’re just used to having sand under our boot.”

“Rather than grass under our ass?” Gill added.

The sec men all chuckled at that, but Stirling felt his frown deepen. He had been thinking the same thing about this grassy knoll. Something wrong here, something unnatural. Then it hit him. No insects. With all this green, there wasn’t a single insect making noise in the field. That wasn’t a good sign. Hurriedly glancing around, Stirling saw a clump of tall grass and headed that way. Please let it be empty…

Although it couldn’t be seen from the top of the hillock, there was a body hidden among the grass. Or rather, what was left of one. The skeleton had been picked clean, the white bones still covered with straps of tattered clothing. With a sense of growing unease, Stirling studied the cloth until spotting numerous tiny holes in the material. Glancing at the boots, he saw the same thing. Holes neatly punched through the leather, including the wooden soles. Aw, hell.

“Drinker!” Stirling shouted in warning, pulling his handblaster and firing randomly at the ground. There was no point in being quiet now. If this was a drinker territory, the underground mutie already knew they were there.

Rallying at the cry, the other sec men started peppering the soil with blasterfire, while Nathan pulled out a pipe bomb and a cherished butane lighter. Holding them tight, he nervously looked around, watching the soil for any suspicious movements.

“Get on the horses!” Stirling ordered, backing away from the skeleton. “We ride north until reaching solid rock, and then—”

That was as far as he got when a section of grassland exploded into a wiggling pile of pale green tentacles that shot into the air and lashed about, searching for food. Human food.

“Nuke me!” Gill spit, firing both barrels of the scattergun.

The double charge blew off one of the thrashing limbs. But as the tentacle hit the ground it continued to flop wildly, and there was no sign of blood on the ragged end, only a thin greenish fluid resembling watery sap.

Flicking a butane lighter alive, Renée lit an oily rag fuse and threw a Molotov at the underground creature. The bottle hit with a crash, and flames erupted at that spot. As the fire grew, the plant quickly withdrew, but reappeared a few yards farther away.

“Frag me, there’s two of them!” Stirling cursed, spotting another set of waving tentacles.

Dodging around the thick grass, he tried to stay in the open field. The lush areas of growth were caused by the rotting corpses of the drinker’s victims. The greenery marked the lair of the mutie plant, even as it served to hide the old bones from casual sight. A mixed blessing then, and the sec chief cursed himself as the son of a feeb for not spotting it sooner. That’s why there were no tracks in the field. No animal or mutie would come this way. Even war wags avoid drinkers!

By now, the rest of the sec men were firing blasters at the ground or tossing bombs. The night shook with the explosions, and the two drinkers attacked the empty air around each strike, but not the blast hole itself. It was almost as if the drinkers understood that the bombs were being thrown.

Were the plants getting smarter, too? Stirling raged as he zigzagged across the ground. First the stickies of Two Son ville, and now this drek!

Holding on to the sec chief’s horse, Gill was waving around the scattergun, with two spare shells sticking out of his mouth for faster loading. The others were spreading out, trying to confuse the mutie, firing blasters at anything that moved. The light from the Molotovs helped them to see the deadly tentacles tunneling below the surface, and Renée cried out once as a failing limb whipped across her face, leaving a score of deep scratches from the thorny tip.

That was too damn close, Stirling realized, trying to catch his breath while perched on top of a rock. Then he scowled darkly at Porter. The coward was just sitting on his horse and doing nothing. Not a fragging thing to help. To hell with the baron’s orders, he was going to personally ace the yellow bastard as soon as they got out of this field alive.

But then the sec chief saw the problem. The horse had too many legs, there were six, not just four. Not legs, tentacles going straight up from the ground and into the belly of the beast! Sitting astride the animal, Taw Porter was sitting absolutely still and was even more pale than usual. Then Stirling saw the man’s clothing start to move as hundreds of tiny vines crawled out of the sec man’s body. One came out of his mouth to test the air, only to retreat again.

Shooting from the hip, Stirling blew off the back of the sec man’s head just to make sure the man was actually deceased. Pink and greenish fluids exploded out of smashed skull, then his hair came alive as tiny vines writhed from the ghastly wound and exited from his mouth, nose and ears. Only the dead eyes stayed intact to stare calmly into the starry heavens.

Suddenly, Renée’s horse screamed as a tentacle attacked, the curved thorns sinking deep into its legs. Then the vine began to pulsate as it started pumping out the rich red blood.

Waving her Browning longblaster, Renée could only curse and try to stay in the saddle. The angle made it impossible for her to get a shot at the subterranean monster.

“Cross fire!” Stirling shouted from the rock.

Working the bolt on his M-16, Nathan chambered a round and fired. The tentacle jerked from the arrival of the 5.56 mm hardball round, blood and sap gushing from the hole. Instantly, the tentacle released the horse’s leg and slid underground.

But as Nathan worked the bolt to chamber a fresh round, the used brass popped out and hit the soil. A split second later several tentacles exploded upward from that point, lashing madly with their deadly thorn-tipped vines.

Gill put both barrels of the scattergun into the monstrous thing, the wide spray of pellets doing the job proper, but also catching Nathan’s horse in the rump. The startled animal reared onto its hind legs, and Nathan had to drop the M-16 to grab the reins and stay in the saddle.

Deciding this was his best chance, Stirling bolted from the rock and raced across the flat ground, expecting to be aced at every step. The sec chief tightened his grip on the blaster as he crossed one yard, two, three…As his horse came into range, Stirling bodily threw himself across the saddle.

“Yee-ha!” Gill cried, kicking his own mount into motion, and dragging Stirling’s horse along by the reins.

Struggling clumsily, the sec chief grabbed the pommel with both hands and hauled himself upright to sit astride the saddle and take back the reins.

“Mother nuker!” he yelled in triumph. “Gotta move faster than that, you mutie bastard, to ace a Two-Son man!”

But a split second later, the ground around their former location started to move with vines and tentacles. As the questing limbs found nothing, a deep inhuman moan sounded from below the grass, the horrible noise echoing across the lush tundra and seeming to rattle the leaves on every bush.

“If you’re mad at us now, try this!” Renée snarled, flipping a pipe bomb at the thing.

“Scatter!” Stirling ordered, kicking his horse into a full gallop. The animal responded with adrenaline-fueled speed.

The sec men did as ordered and broke ranks to take off in different directions. A few heartbeats later, the bomb thunderously detonated, blowing a geyser of flame and vines into the air.

But then from the charred pit arose a…something. Only half seen in the cloudy night, it was huge with a lumpy skin that was constantly twitching. Looking around, the misshapen creation gave a low moan.

“Black dust, Buddha and drek, we got a drinker out of its burrow!” Gill cursed, looking over a shoulder. “We’re in for it now, amigos!”

“Shut up and move!” Stirling ordered, pulling a blaster from his holster. The sec chief fired two fast shots, and the others obeyed the signal to converge upon Stirling while still moving at a gallop.

Dimly lit by the dying flames of the Molotovs, the drinker was starting to crawl after the fleeing sec force. As it advanced, more and more of the animal-like plant came out of the smoking hole in the ground, oddly resembling a worm pulled out of its moist burrow. As it exited, the other drinker retreated. Then the end came out of the ground, looking exactly like the front.

“Son of a bitch, there isn’t two of them, just one biggun!” Nathan stormed, a fresh bomb tight in his hand. “How large do these fragging bastards get?”

“I say we keep running and don’t find out!” Alton added gruffly, frantically reloading the Remington.

Hunched low in the saddle, Stirling wanted to agree, but he could see white foam on the mouth of Renée’s animal. The wounded horse was doing its best, but would soon collapse and leave the woman behind to feed the giant mutie.

“Bomb count!” the sec chief shouted, moving to the rhythm of the horse as he reached into the rear saddlebags.

“Ten!”

“Six!

“Nine!”

“Four!”

“Use one each—no, two!” Stirling barked, casting a quick glance behind. The drinker was completely out of its hole, and still coming. It was as if the inside of a dark tunnel had come to life. Triple-damn thing was larger than the Metro, he thought. “Okay, we’ll take this thing the way we did that pack of wolves at Dead Man’s Gulch! Now, follow me!”

The others spread out behind the chief like a flock of birds racing from an aerial predator.

Retracing their route, Stirling slowed his mount as they reached a shallow ravine. Easing his horse over the edge and down the clay bank, Stirling sprinted across the small stream to hastily scramble up the other side again.

Reaching the top, the sec chief forced his panting animal to halt, and pulled out a pipe bomb and a knife. Cutting the fuse to a short length, Stirling impatiently waited for the others to join him just as the drinker arrived. Black dust, it was big! As the other sec men galloped across the ravine, the drinker was close behind, and almost stretched itself over the gully like some monstrous bridge, then down it went, the tentacles and vines lashing and whipping madly about in every direction.

“Light it up!” Stirling bellowed, dropping the knife to grab his butane lighter to start the fuse.

The moment it caught, he flipped the bomb over the edge into the ravine. The lead pipe hit the water with a splash, closely followed by four more bombs. Slowly rising upward, the drinker lifted its inhuman face above the rim and looked directly at the tiny norms with a face crawling with vines and roots. The eyes were strangely human, full of rage and hatred.

With their hearts pounding, the sec men threw another salvo of bombs and Molotovs just as the first charges detonated. The whole landscape seemed to shake from the force of the multiple explosions in the ravine. As writhing flames rose along its side, the drinker raised both eyes to the stars and keened in pain, the cry lost in the triphammer blasts of the other pipe bombs. A volcano of muddy water and tentacles flew into the air, shrapnel zinging everywhere, and the drinker bulged oddly, then seemed to come apart from the inside, gushing viscous fluids from every orifice.

Knowing what to expect, the sec men raced for cover as the grisly debris rained down, pulsating organs impacting the ground with wet smacks strangely reminiscent of a passionate kiss. As the reverberations died away, the drinker gave an eerily humanlike sigh and collapsed onto the clay bank of the shallow ravine, its split head only inches from the grass.

Sliding off his horse, Stirling passed the reins to Renée. Drawing his revolver, the sec chief warily proceeded to the crumbling edge of the smoke-filled ravine. There was only churning water below, mixed with bloody debris. A thorny tentacle lay twitching on a small boulder, and a single great eye rested in the shallow creek, staring up at eternity in soulful reproach.

“Everybody okay?” Stirling demanded, warily watching flesh and organs in the ravine for any unnatural motion. Only a feeb trusted a mutie, even a chilled one.

“No, Gill got hit!” Alton answered loudly.

Turning from the ravine, Stirling saw Gill holding a knife in his hand and poking at the piece of tentacle across his left arm.

“Can’t cut it off,” the sec man grunted as a trickle of blood appeared from the end of the plat. “Fragging thorns are in deep!”

“Put that blade away,” Stirling said, sliding the strap of his longblaster over a shoulder. “We gotta burn it off.”

“I…was hoping if I moved fast enough…” Gill panted, stabbing the knife under the throbbing length of plant once more. Then he sighed and dropped his shoulders. “But that was a stupe’s wish, eh, Chief?”

“Would have tried the same thing myself, Gill,” Stirling said soothingly. “Burning is no fun. Nathan!”

“Sir?” the teenager replied spinning about with a pipe bomb at the ready.

“You and Porter—” The chief stopped and started again. “You and Alton check the horses for damage. Renée, watch their backs. I’ll do Gill.”

“Shouldn’t we move away from here first?” Nathan asked, casting a glance at the body parts strewed about. “All this blood and meat is going to attract every pred for klicks.”

“Preds, rists and muties, ya mean,” Renée corrected grimly, reloading the BAR with sure fingers.

“No time,” Stirling growled, helping Gill off his horse and onto a nearby mound of dirt. “We do this fast, or Gill joins the sky choir.”

Sitting, the sweaty man watched as Stirling wrapped a cloth around the upper part of the wounded arm, then tied the rag into a tight tourniquet. The trickle of blood from the gaping end of the vine slowed, but not by much.

“Better find something to bite on,” Stirling warned as he pulled a bag of black powder from a pouch on his gunbelt.

“I got some shine in my bags,” Alton offered from among the horses. “That’ll help kill the pain.”

“And make me useless for the rest of the night,” Gill replied, pulling off his gunbelt. “Just do it, and be fast.”

Pouring the black powder along the spiky piece of vine, the sec chief said nothing, concentrating on the work. When the ammo bag was empty, Stirling passed it to Gill, who stuffed the leather into his mouth. Thumbing a butane lighter alive, the sec chief glanced at his friend. Gill gave a nod, and Stirling lit the powder.

There was a blinding flare and Gill gave a muffled scream, every muscle going rigid. He became lost in the searing glare, but as the harsh light died away, Stirling saw that the smoldering vine lay twitching on the ground. A neat line of holes went across the sec man’s arm, but the bleeding had already slowed to a trickle, then stopped completely.

“Bet you could use that drink now.” Stirling snorted, angrily stomping his boot to grind the charred vine into the ground. The smoking length crumbled apart with a crunchy noise, and finally ceased to move.

“Gill?” Stirling asked, raising his head.

But the sec man lay slumped over on the mound of earth.

Worried, Stirling checked the man’s pulse, but found it strong and steady. The sec man had just fallen unconscious from the pain. Gently rubbing the old wound on his shoulder, Stirling really couldn’t fault the man. He’d done the same thing himself once.

“Should we let him sleep?” Nathan asked, stepping closer to offer one of the new med kits. “We could build a fire, and there are plenty of blankets.” The kit was just a lumpy canvas bag with the letters M*A*S*H carefully stitched into the fabric. Mildred had showed the ville healers a lot of tricks for keeping people alive, shine to wash wounds, boiled white cloth for bandages, and such. These crude duplicates of her predark med kit were the result. With one of these, a sec man had a hundred times better chance of surviving a wound than ever before. Just another of the countless debts for which they could never completely repay the outlanders.

“Hell, no. We get moving,” Stirling declared, opening the canvas bag. “The smell of blood is in the wind, and soon this place is going to be overrun with animals and muties fighting over the scraps of the drinker.”

From high above there came a screamwing cry, and in the distance a stickie hooted.

“Mebbe even a second drinker,” Alton stated, checking the load in the scattergun. He closed the breech with a snap and set the lock. “We got enough bombs to stop another one, but not while we’re also fighting screamwings!”

A blaster shot sounded, then another, and Renée appeared, reloading her revolver.

“Okay, vines fell on two of the horses and I had to ace them,” the sec woman stated without emotion. “So we’ll have to double up, or drop supplies.”

“We drop nothing,” Stirling barked, pouring shine over the sec man’s arm. The raw alcohol washed the open wounds and became tinted with red. Gill gave no response. Satisfied, the sec chief put away the bottle of shine and started to wrap the forearm.

The cloth strips had been immersed in boiling water for as long as a man could hold his breath. Something about killing stuff called gems, or germs. Whatever. Mildred had taught them this. Tying off the bandage, Stirling packed the med supplies into the canvas bag. Everybody Mildred treated got better ten times faster than seemed possible, so mebbe she was right about germs. Chilling was his job, not putting folks back together afterward.

“Okay, we’re short on rides,” Stirling said, slinging the canvas bag over the pommel of his horse. The animal whinnied nervously at its master, and he tenderly scratched it behind the ears. “Divvy up the food, keep all of the ammo, and we’ll travel in pairs. Renée rides with me, Nathan with Gill, Alton gets all of the extra bombs and water.”

The hooting sounded again, closer this time, and down in the ravine something started savaging the tattered chunks of the dead mutie.

Without comment, the Two-Son ville sec men rushed to their assigned tasks and were soon galloping away from the ravine. Taking the lead, Stirling realized that he had lost all sense of direction fleeing from the drinker. Arbitrarily, he chose the largest object in sight to guide them through the night, and headed the group straight for the jagged peaks of the Mohawk Mountains.

There was a thick copse a few klicks away that they could bed down in for the night. The sec men should be safe enough there. Hopefully.

Chapter Five

The roiling clouds filled the sky as the companions raced across the New Mex desert. A dull glow emanated from above, but whether it was the full moon or airborne rads rich with hot isotopes was impossible to say. Then the moon broke through for a scant moment, bathing the world in cool silvery light before vanishing behind the curtain of polluted clouds once more.

Hours passed as the miles flew beneath the pounding hooves of their horses. Soon, the ground turned into a mix of sand and soil, then came irregularly spaced tufts of weeds and grass. Finally the companions galloped across a flat grassland. There was no reeking taint of acid rain on the wind, only the sweet smell of living plants, so the companions gave the animals their heads, and let them run free, stretching their muscles as the group moved swiftly across one of the small sections of the Zone that was still alive.

“Lovely,” Doc said, inhaling the clean breeze. “Just lovely.”

Scowling darkly, Ryan grunted at the pronouncement.

“Yeah, fragging swell,” J.B. added sarcastically, pulling an anti-pers gren from his munitions bag and checking the tape on the arming handle. “As long as we don’t run into any drinkers. Grass and sand are a bad mix.”

“Especially on the fairway near the sixth hole,” Mildred said in wry amusement to herself.

Her red hair streaming in the wind, Krysty shot the physician a strange look. Mildred could only shrug, unable to explain the golfing allusion. Then she gave a start. Just a minute, there was a water hole here, and copse of trees standing in the middle of nowhere, long stretches of flat grassland…They were riding across a golf course! Okay, one overrun with weeds and bushes, now mixing with the real desert, and slightly nuked a hundred years ago, but still easily identifiable as a golf course.

“You spotted the design, too, eh, madam?” Doc asked.

“Kind of hard to miss when you know what to look for,” Mildred answered, hunkering lower in her saddle. Surrounded by a slice of the past, the fairway only incurred uncomfortable memories for the woman, and she concentrated on riding. The game of golf was as far in the past to her now as a New Year’s Eve party. Long gone, and only dimly remembered.

Ryan’s rad counter suddenly started to click wildly, and he abruptly veered to the left, starting a long curving sweep across the flat landscape. The others had seen this sort of thing many times before, and stayed close. The one-eyed man couldn’t see any indications of a blast crater, there were no glowing pits or glass lakes. But he knew that could simply mean the area had been hit with one of those air-burst atomic bombs he’d read about. Mebbe one of those neutron things that killed folks, but didn’t harm the buildings or plants.

“Golf?” Jak asked, arching a snowy eyebrow. “Not see sign of ocean.”

“No, not a gulf, golf. It’s a game, you see, and…” Mildred started, then bit her tongue. “Never mind. Just old talk.”

Bent low over his mare, the teen accepted the answer with a shrug. He knew the physician had been born long before skydark and sometimes talked about things almost impossible to translate clearly. He never would have understood the notion of an elevator until taking a ride in one in the redoubts.

Keeping careful track of the rise and fall of the clicks of the rad counter, Ryan and J.B. directed the companions past the lingering death of the invisible rad zone. Once the clicks returned to the normal level of background rad, Ryan called a halt on the crest of a low sweeping hillock. The elevation gave them a commanding view of the landscape. Even in the dappled light from the moving clouds, they could see there was nobody around for miles in every direction.

With the butt of the Steyr resting on an outthrust hip, Ryan stood guard while the companions watered their tired horses. Rummaging in a pocket, J.B. pulled out his recently acquired compass and waited for the needle to settle down. But it kept spinning about madly, occasionally pausing to then start rotating in the reverse direction.

“Aw, to hell with it,” J.B. said in frustration, tucking the device away. “There’s just too much crap in the air from the clouds to get a clean mag reading.”

Spooning some spaghetti from a MRE pack, Mildred caught the motion, but said nothing. J.B. had been able to trade one off a baron’s brother in exchange for a gren. At the time, it seemed like a bargain, but now she could see in the Armorer’s face how much he wanted that gren back.

“Those really work?” Jak asked.

“Absolutely,” Mildred said, shoveling in another mouthful of pasta and sauce. “Oh, a Boy Scout compass, or something from the military would be a lot better,” she admitted, “but then, half the world was explored with a magnetic needle resting on a piece of cork that floated in a bowl of water.”

Rubbing the muscular neck of his beast, the teen made a face of total disbelief.

“It is true, Jak,” Doc added, lowering his canteen and wiping his mouth clean with a linen handkerchief that had seen better days. “In the Hung Dynasty of ancient China, a magnetic needle was worth the owner’s weight in gold. That would roughly translated today into, say, twice your bodyweight of live brass.”

“That much?” Krysty asked, watching something flying through the distant clouds to the west. Mother Gaia, that looked like a flock of screamwings! Thankfully, the deadly winged muties were heading in another direction. Had to be a fresh chill because they were moving even faster than usual.

“Trader always said that the only thing constant was change,” Ryan said, biting off a chunk of jerky from their Two-Son ville supplies. “Nowadays, a hammer is more valuable than one of those microscopes I read about.”

Noticing Krysty’s posture, J.B. pulled out his longeye. He had found the old Navy telescope in a pawn shop in the place they called Zero City, and it was in perfect condition. About the size of your fist, it extended to over a full yard in length, and was much better than even binocs. Pushing back his fedora, J.B. began to sweep the horizon, but all he could see was blackness. Wait a sec, what the frag was that? he thought.

“The center is chaos, the circle cannot hold,” Doc spoke softly in an odd singsong manner that meant he was quoting something. Using both hands, the time traveler unwrapped a package of cheese and crackers from the open MRE in the pocket of his frock coat. The cheese was a dull gray in color, but since that was its natural color he paid it no special attention. The predark military machine wanted the food for its troops to be nourishing, and long-lasting, but apparently nobody gave a damn if it was appetizing.

“Stop misquoting William Blake,” Mildred retorted, licking the spoon clean and then stuffing it into the empty pouch. “Besides, we have miles to go before we sleep.”

“And who is quoting whom now, madam?”

“Stuff it, ya old coot.”

“Heads up,” J.B. announced, collapsing the antique telescope down to its compact size. “We’re not alone. There’s a ville to the northwest of here, about forty miles away.”

Ripping off one last chew, Ryan stuffed the rest of the jerky into a shirt pocket. “Let’s go see if we can barter for a night under a roof. We have enough black powder to trade.”

Moving off the hillock, the companions started for the distant town, staying in a loose formation so that anything that attacked they would be able to strike all together.

THE CLOUDS WERE THINNING and the moon was starting to dip behind the curve of the world by the time the companions galloped over a swell in the ground and got a direct bead of the ville. It was a big place, with a yellowish glow of torches coming from behind a high wall built of huge rectangular blocks. The gate was small, but several guard towers were spaced evenly along the perimeter.

Easing on the reins, Ryan scowled. They had to have a lot of enemies to erect such a strong defense. Or else mebbe there were drinkers in the area. Either way, not very good news.

As the companions got closer, they found signs of crude farming in the surrounding land. But the crops were stunted and scraggly, clearly showing there was something wrong with the soil in spite of the lush grass spreading out in every direction.

“Lots of plants grow in places where food can’t,” Krysty said, riding with one hand on the reins. The other hand rested on the rapidfire lying across her lap. “Could be a mutie form of grass.”

“Also means this part of the Zone is a prime location for drinkers to hide under,” J.B. added, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses. “Stay razor for any large clumps of grass.”

“And if we encounter the infamous subterranean mutie?” Doc asked. “Or another of those triple cursed jellies?”

With a rude snort, Ryan answered. “Start throwing grens,” he said, “and run for your bastard life.”

As the companions approached the ville, they could see that cutting through the fields was the remains of a predark road that led directly to the front gate. The surface was cracked in spots, with a lot of potholes filled with loose stones as a makeshift repair. However, it was serviceable, and easy walking for the horses.

Staying alert, the companions kept off the road and rode their beasts along the berm. The uneven ground slowed them considerably, but bitter experience had taught them that anything that seemed too good to be true usually was. A repaired road often meant boobies hidden under the predark asphalt, dead falls, landmines or worse.

Reaching blaster range, the companions broke the canter of their horses into a trot, then proceeded along in a slow walk. But they always kept moving. A sitting target was just as bad as rushing headlong into the unknown.

Craning his neck, Ryan could see that the wall around the ville wasn’t made of stone blocks, but was a line of predark trucks. Or rather, just the trailers. The cabs that pulled the trailers were gone, but the huge metal boxes sat end-to-end to form an angular barrier. The metal sides were streaked with layers of old rust, the open area under the trailers packed solid with predark debris, broken sidewalk slabs, bricks, wag engines and similar trash. It was an imposing tonnage of debris that would be impossible to move without some major explos charges and an army of men with shovels.

As the companions got closer, there were unmistakable signs of old battles on the trailers: blaster holes, scorch marks from Molotovs, gray streaks from ricochets and such. Loose sand was trickling from a few of the small cracks in the trailers, while the larger rents had been patched with sheets of old iron.

Ryan and J.B. glanced at each other and nodded in appreciation. It was triple-smart for the locals to pack the trailers with sand from the nearby desert. The stuff was easy to obtain, there was a limitless supply, and the more the trailers weighed, the harder it would be for an invader to get through them.

“Good design,” Jak said in grudging admiration.

Checking the draw on his SIG-Sauer, Ryan was forced to agree. This wasn’t a ville, it was a fort, as big and well-protected as Front Royal, his home back in the east. Then the startling similarities of the towers behind the wall hit him hard. Fireblast, he thought, they were positioned in almost exactly the same formation as those back in Front Royal. How could that be?

“Ah, lover…?” Krysty said softly, putting a wealth of questions into the single word.

“Yeah, I noticed,” Ryan replied. “Might just be a coincidence. Most people made crossbows after skydark for the same reasons—they were easy to build, and you can use the arrows over and over again.”

“Great minds think alike, and all that,” J.B. added in agreement.

“Make that great mind, singular,” Doc rumbled in a somber tone.

For once, Mildred agreed with the old man. In her travels with the others, she had witnessed far too many examples of Carl Jung’s theory of the “group subconscious mind of humanity” for there to be any other explanation, in her opinion. All living things were bound together. It was only people who refused to accept the idea that life shared its dreams. Either that, or there was an unknown force in the world guiding everything and everybody along secret paths. Which was clearly ridiculous.

Easing their mounts to a stop just outside of arrow range, the companions let the animals catch their breaths for a few minutes. This also gave the sec men a chance to see them first, and spread the word. There was no reason to startle the guards and start a fight. Spilling blood wasn’t a good way to start negotiations with the local baron.

Walking their mounts closer, the companions studied the gate. It was very impressive. The broad gap between two of the trailers had been bridged by a concrete lintel to form an arch. Set below that was a formidable gate made of the doors taken off wags and welded together into a single homogenous slab. It was as lumpy as oatmeal, and looked as impregnable as a redoubt blast door.

“A door of doors,” Mildred muttered. “I wonder if their baron is a poet?”

Just then, a bright blue light of an alcohol lantern appeared, moving across the top of the wall and starting to come their way. To the east, dawn was rising. But the shadows were still thick across the world, and the bobbing lantern moved along like a lost star.

“We’ll soon find out,” Ryan replied, walking his horse a little bit closer.

Footsteps were heard, and a man carrying the lantern appeared at the edge of the metal wall. Wearing loose clothing and a leather vest, the sec man had a tremendous beard, pleated into two strands. As well as the lantern, he was also carrying a bolt-action longblaster, with a hand on the trigger.

Tromping over to the last trailer, the sec man stopped near a crude set of tremendous hinges that supported the colossal gate.

“Advance and give the password!” the sec man shouted down into the darkness.

“Sorry, don’t know it,” Ryan answered as his horse shifted its hooves on the ground. “We’re strangers, rists, looking for a place to stay tonight.”

“Yeah? What kind of jack ya got?”

“Brass, four rounds!”

“Packed with dirt, probably.” The guard sneered in disdain. “Useless as tits on a turd.”

In a smooth move, Ryan pulled the SIG-Sauer. “Be glad to show you,” he offered in a voice of stone.

Shaking the reins, Krysty walked her horse closer between the two men. “What is the name of this place?” she added loudly.

Slowly, both of the men eased their aggressive stances. But their hands didn’t stray far from their blasters.

“This be Broke Neck,” the sec man replied with a touch of pride. “And where you folks from?”

“All over,” Ryan answered truthfully. “Here and there, north and south.”

“Yeah? A real son of Trader, are ya?” the man said, chuckling.

“We traveled with him some,” J.B. replied over the nasal snorting of his horse.

There was a pause as a second guard appeared on top of the wall. The clean-shaven man was holding a loaded crossbow. The two sec men held a short conference.

“Now that might be flat-rock, or it could be a stretch,” the first sec man said, stroking his beard thoughtfully.

“Either way, that’s a lot of iron for a bunch of pilgrims,” the clean-shaven sec man said.

“That’s because we’re not pilgrims,” Ryan answered, slightly annoyed. “You folks interested in doing biz, or should we keep moving?”

The muffled footsteps on top of the trailer got louder as one of the sec men walked to the very edge and angled his lantern to make it shine on the companions. “Yeah, yeah, just keep your jets cool, rist,” the sec man said gruffly. “I was just…Black dust, ya only got one eye! Clem, look! One eye, by thunder!”

The second guard rushed over. “It’s Ryan!” he whispered in shock. “Gotta be! Look there, one of them is dark, another pale, she’s got red hair, and that guy is wearing glass on his face. Never did understand that part before.”

Already alert, the companions instantly drew their assortment of blasters, snapping off safeties and working bolts without the slightest regard of being seen. Instantly, both guards leveled their weps.

Then the man with the beard slowly lowered his rifle and placed it on the wall. “Easy there, folks, easy now. We don’t want any blood split between us.”

“And what if my name is Ryan?” the Deathlands warrior asked, the SIG-Sauer tight in his grip.

“Then the baron will wanna talk to you right away,” the other sec man replied, resting the crossbow on a shoulder. “We’ve been expecting ya for a long time, but thought you’d be coming from the south in the direction of the ocean gulf.”

Mildred lifted both eyebrows at that, but said nothing. The rest of the companions followed suit. What was going on here? There was only one possible answer that made any sense.

“Seems like your doomie made a mistake,” the physician stated.

The two sec men frowned at that. “Baron Harmond don’t make many bad calls,” he stated gruffly. “More likely you’re lying.”

“But even if ya are, don’t matter,” the other man added brusquely. “The baron wants to meet anybody with just one eye. If you’re Ryan, good. If not, we can offer ya haven from the coldhearts hunting folks like you.”

Haven. There was a word the companions hadn’t heard, or been offered, for a very long time. Aside from Two-Son ville to the south, their reception in the Zone had been poor at best.

“We accept your offer of haven,” Krysty said, her hair flexing gently around her shoulders. If there was any danger here, she couldn’t sense it. But then, when dealing with a doomie, anything was possible.

“No offense, but I have never heard of a doomie baron before,” Mildred shouted up to the guard.

“No offense taken. Baron Harmond is prob the only one around.” The bearded sec man advanced a step, then lowered the lantern for a better look. “Your name Doc?” he asked.

Puzzled at first, Mildred started to speak, then realized the connection. Doc… “Close enough,” she acknowledged warily. “But I prefer Mildred.”

“Fair enough,” the sec man muttered, looking her over closely. “Funny, you don’t seem frozen to me.”

That comment caught all of the companions by surprise. Way back in the twentieth century, Mildred had gone into the hospital for a simple operation, but there had been serious complications and the doctors had desperately attempted to save her life by using an experimental cryogenic freezer unit. The device had worked, and Mildred awoke a hundred years later, alive and healthy, but nearly a full century after the near-total destruction of civilization.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.