Mildred’s anguished cry echoed around the circular ruins

Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.

The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see the spot where a small portion of his leather jacket had been pushed aside a fraction of an inch by the heavy-caliber slug that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.

Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into red droplets as it distanced itself from him.

With a roaring in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a young pup, spin and topple into the dust.

Playfair’s Axiom
Death Lands®
James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

For the St. Louis Science Fiction Society

for years of friendship. Your lovely hometown

deserves better than it gets herein.

We do not so much need the help of our friends as the confidence of their help in need.

—Epicurus

3rd century BCE

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

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter One

“We followed!” Jak Lauren stated.

The long-haired albino teen had his pallid lips pressed so close to Ryan Cawdor’s ear that he could smell his funk, even though after days of harsh exertion in close unwashed company his nostrils had become inured to such. The fact that it was nuke hot and swamp humid close to the Sippi River didn’t much help.

“I know.” A canny fighter and consummate survivor, veteran of years of trekking across the hellscape of the Deathlands, Ryan reckoned that a low grunt of acknowledgment was less likely to alert their shadowers that they had been spotted than even the slightest nod of his head.

Picking his way over a mound of dust-covered rubble, Ryan swept the ruins with his lone blue eye. It was morning, bright and hot. They were in the midst of what had been a great city’s downtown. Now it looked as if it had been picked up about two hundred feet and dropped.

They’d left the gutted bunker an hour before and had seemingly made scarcely any progress at all clambering south through the urban devastation. Around them jumbles of busted-up masonry rose in heaps against the sides of mostly intact buildings, some as high as three or four stories. Behind them rose taller buildings, skyscrapers, some canted precariously, with windows blank of glass like blinded staring eyes. Not all of them had fallen the same way, although it was clear that a nuke-blast some distance to the west had done most of the damage.

To their right rear rose a vast mound, its white surface cracked like a colossal egg. Over everything a single dark skyscraper towered like a nail impaling a pale yellow sky. It dominated the devastated downtown. South of it a solitary flying creature kited on huge wings.

Sweat ran down Ryan’s face from the line of his long black curly hair. His mouth felt as if it had a prickly pear lobe lodged inside it. The long ragged scar that ran down the side of his face throbbed.

He ignored his discomfort. Minor pains meant nothing to Ryan Cawdor. A person could never tell from looking at him that he’d been raised in privilege and comparative luxury in the prosperous eastern barony of Front Royal. He was a creature of the Deathlands; and like the Deathlands everything had been stripped away from his six-two frame but the hard and the tough. He was the ultimate adapter. The ultimate survivor.

Perching on a tilted chunk of concrete with rebar protruding like twisted fangs, he halted to let his small party pass. Jak, taking a quick swig of water from a worn canteen, headed back out in the lead, skipping over the treacherous footing like rocks in a stream. Ryan used his brief halt to grab some relief from his own tearing thirst, swirling a tiny bit of water from his own canteen around his mouth and swallowing. It went down his throat as if it had knives in it.

At least we know where we are, he thought. J.B.’s sextant had identified the anonymous mass of cracked blocks and twisted steel as St. Louis, by the great river most people now called the Sippi.

He tried not to react to the furtive flickers of movement, visible through gaps in standing walls or past man-high heaps of debris that stank of concrete dust and rotting flesh. He waited until their rear guard, a short man with wire-rimmed spectacles and a fedora he used to cover the steady retreat of his hairline, came up to him.

“So you saw our little shadows,” John Barrymore Dix said as he approached. He carried his heavy 12-gauge Smith & Wesson M-4000 shotgun easily in front of his hips. There was a lot more strength in his wiry little frame than there looked to be.

Of course, that could be said for all of them. The truth was, no one looked tough enough to live through what they had.

“Jak’s got them,” Ryan said quietly.

“What do you reckon they want?”

Ryan’s mouth tensed up. “Hard call,” he said. “Can’t read much ’cause they haven’t hit us yet. May just be looking for the best spot to make their move.”

J.B. showed him a quick thin smile. “Chill or enslave, doesn’t matter much, does it?”

“Sure doesn’t,” Ryan said, lengthening his step to move up through the rest of the group.

He made no move for the P-226 blaster holstered on his right hip, or the big-bladed panga scabbarded on his left, or even the scoped, long-barreled bolt-action Steyr sniper rifle strapped on his back alongside his bulky backpack. He didn’t want to alert their shadows that he was onto them. He trusted his cougar-keen senses and rattlesnake reflexes to get a weapon into play in plenty of time when things went south.

Ignoring the increasing sense of unease crawling up his spine, Ryan drew alongside an apparently elderly man who walked with the aid of a gleaming ebony cane. The man resembled a bag of bones held together by a worn frock coat.

“Doc,” Ryan said conversationally, “how’s it swingin’?”

“As well as ever, my youthful friend.” Although he looked a hard-traveled sixty with his pale blue eyes sunk deep in a well-seamed face framed by long straggly silver-hair, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was chronologically in his thirties, a couple of years younger than Ryan.

Then again he looked pretty hale and hearty for a man who was well north of two hundred years old. Born in 1868, he had been trawled out of his own time by a late-twentieth-century secret experiment, then heartlessly dumped in a desolate future by the hard-hearted white-coats who had decided he was too difficult to handle.

“I take it you’re aware of our furtive friends?” Doc said, covering the question with a cough and a raised hand.

“Yeah,” Ryan grunted. He touched the old man briefly on the shoulder. He wouldn’t insult Doc or any of his people by telling him to be ready.

They were always ready. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t be alive. Ryan was utterly devoted to keeping his companions together and breathing, but they still had to do their parts…none of which was easy.

He moved up, falling into step alongside Mildred, a brown-skinned woman a head shorter than he was, with dark hair swinging and tinkling gently in skinny beaded plaits. She wore baggy cargo trousers, a green T-shirt and an overall sheen of sweat. Despite perpetual trudging on perpetual short rations, her figure remained on the stocky side. She carried a ZKR target pistol in a holster hung from her web belt.

“Got company,” Ryan said softly.

Her eyes got wide. “Really?”

“Easy,” he said. “Don’t let on we know—”

Jak darted to his left. His right arm struck like a snake. It came out holding the scruff of a flailing tangle of long matted hair and naked limbs turned almost uniform gray with concrete dust stuck to a long accretion of grease and grime. The figure wore a foul-looking loincloth and squalled like an angry bobcat.

Ryan saw sun flash on the blade of a hunting knife in Jak’s chalk-white hand and heard a clash of metal on something hard. The captive had stabbed Jak with a knife whose filth-crusted blade had been ground down to little more than a sliver. It had struck one of the random bits of glass Jak had sewn to his camou jacket.

Jak’s knife hand worked in a blur of speed, stabbing his wildly writhing captive twice in barely a second. Then he tossed the scrawny figure away.

A second creature, larger than the first but still stick-skinny and smeared with grease, launched itself at the albino teen’s unprotected back.

A boom crashed out from behind Ryan’s left shoulder. The noise was like a thumb gouging his eardrum, and the blast wave slapped the side of his head. It was J.B.’s big scattergun going off.

Even with the shot’s aftermath ringing in his ears Ryan heard a soggy, chunking sound as the charge of double-00 buck slammed home. Blood sprayed black in the sunlight. The figure fell short of its target, kicking the grit with bare heels and groaning.

Another sound of impact and a surprised grunt came from behind Ryan. More shots rang out from his right. Drawing his own handblaster, he looked that way.

A big-busted, slim-waisted woman with long slender legs knelt on a pile of busted brick and concrete, firing a snub-nosed hammerless revolver with two hands. Brilliant red hair was curled into a tight cap at her nape. When he’d glanced that way a few moments before it had hung past her shoulders.

J.B. was also on one knee, looking down at his fallen glasses. Nearby, his fedora lay upturned on a round-edge chunk of concrete. Behind him a nearly naked man with hair and beard fringing his face like a brown dandelion was spinning down in reaction to being hit by Krysty Wroth’s .38-caliber slugs. Apparently he’d just hit J.B. from behind with a thrown chunk of pavement.

Another figure reared up from behind a waist-high broken section of wall at the top of a slope of rubble. Ryan snapped a shot at him from his 9 mm Sig Sauer. The man’s head jerked as the bullet smashed the outside of his right cheekbone.

But he shook himself, shedding blood like a wet dog, then resettled his grip on the improvised spear he was about to hurl. Ryan shot him again. He went down out of sight with blood spurting in a red tubelike arc from his throat.

Ryan sprinted back the few paces to where J.B. was still on all fours shaking his head. He held the SIG out ready at arm’s length. Behind him he heard the boom of Doc’s big black-powder blaster, then the louder crash of the short-barreled shotgun mounted beneath the huge LeMat’s barrel. Somebody screamed.

It didn’t sound like anybody Ryan knew.

“Got move!” Jak shouted. “Rad suckers everywhere!”

“You all right?” Ryan shouted.

“Oh, yeah,” the Armorer muttered. “Just fine.”

“Then grab it and go!”

Ryan jammed J.B.’s hat onto his head. The man fumbled his glasses onto his face, then seized his fallen shotgun. He may have been dazed, but he had the presence of mind to jack a fresh shell into the chamber as Ryan hauled him to the feet by the collar of the bombardier jacket he never surrendered, even to the sweltering heat.

The sun-baked rubble mounds and wall stumps on all sides seemed to be lined with gibbering oddly shaped people.

A rock glanced off Ryan’s shoulder. On a concrete shelf at the base of a yellow brick wall he saw one of the skulkers bent over as if it had just thrown something. She, judging by the pendulous dugs that dangled in front of knobbly knees in her follow-through.

On the run Ryan shot at her twice. She screeched and fell onto her back. He couldn’t tell where he hit her, but she stopped moving at once.

“J.B., rearguard,” he shouted. “Mildred, you cover left.”

Krysty already covered the right, hastily opening the cylinder of her Smith & Wesson and reloading.

Having emptied both the fat cylinder of his big handblaster and the shotgun barrel, Doc had reholstered the antique weapon and drawn his sword from his silver lion-head walking stick. As Ryan glanced his way, sprinting past, he saw Doc fend off a thrown sharpened stick with the sword, then deftly stab an attacker lunging at Krysty’s blind side.

“We gotta keep moving!” Ryan ran for the front to support Jak. The best way to deal with an ambush, he knew, was assault into it and do your best to blast through. Since they were already surrounded, straight ahead looked like as good a way to go as any.

Jak’s .357 Magnum Colt Python boomed twice from where he stood on a low brick mound in a gap between walls. The painfully loud reports echoed throughout the area. Ryan accelerated his run as Jak smashed an attacker across the face with the ribbed six-inch barrel, hot from the friction of high-velocity 125-grain hollowpoint rounds. The wiry attacker sat down hard on a canted concrete block.

Jak shot him in the face. A saucer-size chunk of skull blew out of the back of his head, to the accompaniment of a bloody spray of gore.

Evidently they were moving through the ruins of some largely fallen building. Since leaving the mat-trans gateway, they had struggled across fields of rubble so random and comprehensive it was largely impossible to tell what had been street and what had been structure before the big nuke. They headed south simply because from Mildred’s recollection of late-twentieth-century St. Louis the densest concentration of big buildings had stood north of where they were. Where, indeed, a few surviving buildings still loomed or leaned against gathering clouds that began to move rapidly and take on an ominous orange tint.

Once they got clear of the rubble they could at least move faster and with less chance of turning an ankle in some hidden pocket of debris. They might even stand a chance of finding shelter against the likely coming of corrosive rains.

If they got clear. These scrubby, stinking ambushers didn’t seem inclined to let them do so.

Attackers sprang at Jak from either side even as he spun to face a third, whipping out a hunting knife. Ryan snapped a shot first at the right-hand assailant, then the one to his left. The right-hand ambusher went down. The one on the left, though, only went briefly to a bare bony knee. Then she stood up and with a screech attacked again, something slim and glittering jutting from the bottom of the fist she held over her head.

And the slide of Ryan’s SIG had locked back. Its high-capacity magazine was empty. He’d had to fire too many shots to keep attackers’ heads down. And now he had no time for a combat reload. Nor could he risk fumbling a magazine full of precious 9 mm cartridges away by trying to reload on the run.

Instead he whipped the panga free of its sheath with his left hand. He screamed like an eagle to attract the ambushers’ attention away from the slim white-haired teen.

The woman he’d shot looked his way, then she lunged for him. He saw that she held a simple sliver of broken glass with some kind of hide wrapped around one end to keep it from slicing her hand. It was primitive even by the standards of postdark improvised weapons, and liable to break on any kind of contact with a target. But it could kill you just as dead as a megaton nuke warhead.

Or just wound you badly enough to slow you down, which in an ambush like this was the same thing.

They both swung at the same time. Despite her wound, the woman had triple-crazy speed. But Ryan’s backhand cut was panther-fast and as precise as a needle. The panga hit the inside of the woman’s knife arm just beneath her wrist. Backed by the weapon’s considerable mass, the edge, which Ryan kept honed to razor keenness, parted tendon and bone almost as easily as skin. The hand spun away on a geyser of red, still clutching the crude glass shank.

Odds were she was out of this fight. Out of this life, if she didn’t get her arm bound before her adrenaline-frenzied heart pumped her lifeblood out the stump. Ryan hacked her across her twisted screaming face on the forearm return anyway. He couldn’t leave his own knife-arm swinging in the breeze. And he had learned as a mere stripling when he was running with trader’s crew that it never hurt to make sure.

Jak straightened from the body of the ambusher he’d just gutted with his big-bellied Bowie. “Clear,” he shouted as Ryan came up beside him. “Move!”

“Go!” Ryan said. He tracked his good eye left and right and saw no more figures emerging from the rubble. As Jak sprinted forward, the bits of sharp glass and metal he’d sewn to his camo jacket flashed in the sunlight.

Krysty came through the gap. Flashing an “I’m okay” smile at Ryan, she knelt to cover to the right. A moment later Mildred appeared, all but towing the scarecrow figure of Doc like a sturdy little tugboat. She let go and took up position to cover left.

Ryan reloaded the SIG handblaster, stuffing the empty magazine in a back pocket of his jeans. The mags were nearly as precious as cartridges. Without them a semiauto blaster was a single-shot weapon as slow and clumsy to reload as a crossbow.

With a parting boom of his shotgun J.B. passed through the gap as Ryan momentarily transferred the SIG to his left hand so he could properly sheath the panga with his right.

“Don’t hang around gawking, boy!” the Armorer shouted as he jacked the slide and turned to run. “This ain’t a vacation resort!”

Laughing a silent wolf’s laugh, Ryan took his SIG in his right hand and followed his companions at a slogging run.

Chapter Two

“One thing you gotta say for a ruined city,” J. B. Dix said. He had his hat lifted to mop his forehead with a dirty blue handkerchief. No sooner had he made a pass than more sweat sluiced down his sallow skin. “’Specially here hard by a big river. It sure does hold the heat in.”

“Wow,” Mildred said. Her words came out between heaving breaths. “Looks like Busch Stadium mostly survived.”

Without much interest Ryan looked at the stubby cylinder the freezie physician had pointed out. Several hundred yards to the west, it looked to be made up of tall, open arches supported by columns, and ramps that ran up behind them. He had unslung his longblaster and hunkered down, cradling it, hoping that if the hairy naked crazies chose to keep pursuing he’d get some shots into them at long range.

“Went to a game there once,” the stocky physician said. “Cards versus Cubs.”

She smiled with fleeting nostalgia. “That was a rivalry.”

“We don’t want to get too close to that thing,” J.B. said. “Who knows what’s nesting in there now?”

“Speaking of nesting,” Krysty said, “there seem to be a lot of flying things starting to swarm around the top of that really tall building.”

Jak turned his ruby eyes that way. It was easy to see which one she meant. It was easily the tallest standing as far as the eye could see. And Ryan saw twenty or more flyers orbiting high up.

“Screamwings,” he said.

“Never saw them big as that one before,” Ryan said. The giant flyer now orbited the tall ’scraper with the lesser ones surrounding it.

The albino youth just shrugged.

“Yeah,” Ryan said after a moment. “Don’t mean much, right? Always coming across something new.”

“Doesn’t mean much.” Krysty smiled as she corrected him.

“That’s what sucks about the modern world,” Mildred said, tipping a canteen to shake the last droplets of water into her mouth. “Well, part of a long, long list.”

They huddled in a bowl-shaped depression in yellowish-

gray rubble about forty feet wide and high enough at the sides to shield them from view from street level. Despite being in excellent shape from the never-ending trudge across the devastation wrought by the big nuke, all six were winded by their run. Except Jak; little seemed to bother him.

With little to weigh them down but grubby skins and a few crude weapons, their ambushers had chased them fast and hard. But they hadn’t chased them far.

“They gave up pretty quick,” Ryan said, squinting around at their surroundings, taking in the huge matched stumps of gleaming metal Mildred told him had once joined in an arch hundreds of feet above; the nearby huge building that once had to have been fronted entirely in glass was now a strange open-faced steel skeleton; the strip of dense east-west woods they had crossed to get here; the flooded waterfront district just east of them with ware-houses sticking up out of green-brown water; the intact section of highway overpass to the south.

“We inflicted grievous hurt on them,” Doc said. He was laboriously reloading his huge old handblaster, tamping down a bullet into a chamber over a fresh charge of gunpowder with a special rammer built into the LeMat. He was recovering with surprising quickness, given that he looked like Death got up for a last walk around. Times like these proved his claim that he was nowhere as old as he looked, biologically. “It must have been quite discouraging.”

“There’s that,” Krysty said. “But mebbe they were afraid of what was in the woods. Or this side of them.”

Ryan grunted. “Give us some good news for a change, why don’t you?”

Her smile was like the sun coming out from behind storm clouds. “We’re alive, lover. And we’ve got each other. It’s worked so far.”

He felt his mouth struggling to smile. He still had to say, “Always works. Till it don’t.”

“‘Doesn’t,’” she corrected him.

She had a temper on her, this redheaded beauty. But her mutie hair, sentient and prehensile, lay still across her shoulders. She just smiled more at him and wouldn’t be drawn.

“Nothing here but misery,” J.B. stated simply. “Why don’t we go back?”

“Back where?” Ryan asked.

“To the redoubt.”

“Not remember?” Jak said. “Nothing there, either. No ammo, no water, no self-heats.”

Mildred mopped her forehead with the hem of her shirt. “Never thought I’d see a day when meals refused by Ethiopians tasted like ambrosia.”

“I mean, try the luck of the jump,” J.B. said.

“If we find a place with steak bushes and beer springs,” Ryan said, “it’ll be guarded by ten thousand coldhearts, sure as a dead man cools.”

J.B. gestured around at the jumbled edges and angles and dust-softened mounds of the urban deathscape. “Don’t know if you noticed, Ryan, but every square inch of this place is guarded by muties as crazy as nuked yellowjackets, and it ain’t nothing but hammered dogshit.”

“Boys,” Krysty said softly but firmly, “step back. Fighting among ourselves won’t fill our bottles or our bellies. Makes us more likely to fill cannie bellies instead.”

“At times like this,” Doc said with a grand sweep of his arm, “I find it helps to seek the consolations of philosophy.”

Everyone looked at him. He sat blinking vaguely.

“Why are you all staring at me?” he asked.

“Well,” J.B. said, “out with it.”

“Out with what?”

“The consultations of philosophy or whatever you were talking about.”

Doc blinked in amiable puzzlement. “What?”

For his part Ryan was taking note of how unusually talkative the Armorer was. Normally J.B. said just a little more than an old hickory stump, although when he spoke it was usually to the point and dead-on accurate.

“What’s eating on you, J.B.?” he asked. “You don’t normally say so much in a whole month.”

J.B. slapped his thigh. “Everything, Ryan. I just got bad feelings creeping up on me from every side.”

Mildred frowned. “You wouldn’t think there’d be many people here. The place is a mess, even for taking a nuke west of here.”

“Plenty to scavenge in the area,” Ryan said.

“Those people who jumped us didn’t look like they’d bothered much with that. They barely had loincloths.”

“I surmise they were cannibals,” Doc said, sighting along the barrel of his blaster to make sure the bore was clear before snapping the weapon closed. “When we parted company with them, the other side of these woods, I thought I saw them begin tearing at their fallen kin.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Chasing us probably worked up a double-big appetite.”

“Muties,” Jak said.

“No,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Not see? No chins, plus fingers.”

“Typical symptoms of inbreeding, lad,” Doc said.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. He’d seen it not far from his birthplace of Front Royal.

“They have to have something to eat besides each other,” Mildred said.

“They probably prey on scavvies,” Krysty said. “Cities usually draw those like flies to jam. Especially as the rads die down.”

“But what do they eat?”

“Game,” Jak said. “Plenty here.”

“In a city?”

He shrugged. “Always.” Then he nodded his pale, pointed chin back the way they had come.

“Forest.”

It was indeed. It wasn’t wide but it was significant. A lush and densely undergrown stand of trees ran in a broad strip from near the river toward the nuke strike a couple miles west.

“Evidently this vicinity receives a great deal of rainfall of the nontainted variety,” Doc said.

“Well, that’s another reason to be on the move,” Ryan said, looking at the clotting clouds rushing and swirling overhead. They had gone the color of mustard, with alarming orange highlights. “Looks like some of the ‘burn the hide off you’ kind is on the way. We need to get under cover triple fast.”

“Trouble,” Jak said, turning suddenly.

A bullet cracked off the top of the heap of rubble where Jak had lain, and his eyes skinned toward the woods for sign of pursuit. The shot-sound that followed a heartbeat later seemed to have come from the northwest, although the way everything echoed around these ruins made it hard to tell. Ryan turned to scramble up to the top of the heaped stone and concrete dust and flopped down behind his Steyr.

Having only one eye was something the black-haired man had adjusted to years ago. Sometimes it was a drawback, but there was nothing he could do about it. Now he had to hold his good eye away from the scope initially to look for targets.

And targets there were. If the gunshot hadn’t been a major clue, the way this new set of attackers was dressed showed they were a whole different breed compared to the crazy group that had jumped them. They wore real clothing, no dirtier and in no worse repair than what Ryan and friends themselves wore. Camo in various patterns was a consistent theme, as were predark cartridge blasters: rifles, shotguns, handguns.

Scavvies, Ryan thought. Well-equipped ones, too. He cursed under his breath. At least half a dozen of them, advancing quickly but cautiously through rubble just north of the stadium. Like it or not there were others: he glimpsed them through big gaps in the walls of the building.

The most dangerous attacker Ryan could see carried a remade M-16, with the nontapered A-2 foregrip. He swung the Steyr to cover the scavvie, then put his good eye behind the eyepiece of the SSG-70. His skill was such that, though the coldheart wasn’t dead-centered in the view-field, he was just a twitch away.

Drawing a breath as he centered the single post reticule on the man’s chest, Ryan exhaled half as he gently squeezed the trigger. The 7.62 mm cartridge lit off, kicking his shoulder with the steel buttplate. Ryan reflexively worked the bolt, reloading for a follow-up shot.

The M-16 man was in the process of folding onto his face. Ryan thought he saw a trace of pink mist hanging in the air behind him. It rapidly vanished. The scavvie’s buddies dropped, seeking immediate cover.

Muzzle-flashes winked at Ryan, pale in cloud-filtered daylight. These new attackers were no cowards. They also weren’t stupe enough to just keep walking up on someone who had them in the sights of a big-bore longblaster from good cover.

Instead of pulling off another shot, Ryan slid back down the brief slope. He felt the hard hot chunks of rock and debris roll against the hard muscles of his gut. His right hip throbbed where a hard corner had caught him when he went to his belly. He barely noticed. It was just pain. And for Ryan Cawdor, pain was just a reminder he wasn’t yet chilled.

The gray-white concrete dust that rose up to invade his nose and mouth and turn the inside of his eyelid into sandpaper as it scraped across the vulnerable cornea was a greater problem. He blinked furiously as he rose to a crouch and ran south after his companions.

They stumbled through a nightmare of urban devastation. The concrete dust, which seemed to dry quickly despite frequent rains in the valley of the great river, sucked down their boots, and concealed pockets and loosened blocks that could snap an ankle like a dry twig. So they couldn’t run very fast. And no matter how desperate their need they had to pay attention to where they put their feet, slowing them even further.

At the edge of a relatively clear stretch of street Ryan stopped, spun and knelt to cover their backtrail with his longblaster. A bearded head appeared above a heap of gray rubble. Ryan lowered his head behind the scope, carefully maintaining a distance between his eye and the lip of the telescope eyepiece that protected the lens. Otherwise the sharp recoil of a 7.62 mm NATO cartridge lighting off would die-stamp the eyepiece housing right into socket, giving him a nasty half-raccoon mask of purple bruise or even cutting a ring in his flesh.

His target hadn’t learned the real danger in pursuing armed prey. Unfortunately for him. Ryan held the reticule centered on his forehead, and he could see the sweat etching rivulets in the black grime that covered the man’s face, see his lips working inside his rat’s-nest beard as he cursed the effort of climbing up the low but treacherous slope. He was carrying a rusty double-barreled shotgun in one hand and using the other to climb with.

At the top of the heap he paused. For the first time he raised his eyes to scope the longer distance before him.

That pause was what Ryan waited for, knowing it would come. It wasn’t that a head was a hard target; the target was barely fifty yards off, an easy shot for a marksman like Ryan over open sights. What made it a challenge was the way the target tended to move around.

As the grubby hair-fringed face came up, Ryan was releasing half of a held-in breath. The trigger cracked; the rifle bucked and roared. Ryan jacked the bolt as the weapon rode up and then settled back down.

The scavvie lay slumped with his face in the dust. The back of his head was a steaming mess.

Though his ears rang from the shot, Ryan heard the man’s buddies curse in guttural fury. One stuck a remade M-16 up over the top of a low stub of yellow-brick wall and triggered a random burst.

Even though Ryan had pulled his eye back from the scope so he could cover a field of vision wider than the tiny little circle the glass gave him, he couldn’t see where the shots hit. He didn’t even hear the secondary cracks when the needlelike .223 bullets passed.

He turned and sprinted across a mostly level stretch, covered in what looked like a mix of river silt and concrete dust. To his right, a building appeared to have fallen mostly west. He raced for the far more promising cover of the ruin in front of him. At one time it had been a circular tower. Now all that remained was a chest-high ring of white masonry.

Ryan vaulted the remnants of a broken wall. Mildred and J.B. knelt inside the rubble, covering the one-eyed man’s dash for cover. J.B. had his shotgun shouldered, while Mildred had her blocky ZKR 551 target pistol in a two-handed Weaver grip, left hand folded over right, elbow bent down to provide stabilizing tension against the almost-straight gun arm. Ahead Ryan could see Jak cautiously scoping the remains of a low-curved structure, at least half-intact, that led from the first ruin circle toward a much broader tower a hundred yards south. Krysty and Doc knelt to cover the albino teen.

“Got it,” Ryan shouted.

He turned and hunkered down behind the wall, placing the Steyr’s forestock into a sort of notch in the solid masonry of the broken wall. As Ryan searched the ruins behind for targets he wondered why the scavvies were pressing them so hard. The scavvies kept dogging the companions despite losses, and were willing to burn way too much ammo to do it. Even if they were cartridge-flush from trade or finding caches, it didn’t make sense to burn so many bullets just for the fugitives’ own handful of blasters and the contents of their backpacks, whatever those may hold.

Must be Krysty they really want, he thought grimly. And Mildred, too.

Krysty was a beauty with the stopping power of a 12-gauge slug, even by the standards of the glossy mags and vids that survived skyfall. Mildred—Dr. Wyeth—wasn’t to Ryan’s taste, frankly, a little too stocky. But she was still far better-looking than most women in Deathlands.

What drove them so hard, likely, was pure lust: for the use they’d get out of the women themselves, and then for the jack or barter they’d reap from selling them in what would still be considered prime condition, even if they wound up badly bruised and shy a tooth or two. Selling a pair the likes of Krysty and Mildred would bring them more than two months’ good scavenge, if the going rate in St. Lou was comparable to other places Ryan had known.

The one-eyed man heard and felt Krysty and Doc peel away from either side of him. Then there came the crack of a bullet passing fast, followed by thump and a grunt of surprise as much as pain.

And then Mildred’s piercing scream.

Chapter Three

“J.B., no!” Mildred cried. The despairing echo chased itself mockingly around the circular ruins.

Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.

The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see where a few threads of his leather jacket had been pushed out a fraction of an inch behind him by the heavy-caliber bullet that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.

Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into round red droplets as it distanced itself from him. With a roaring silence in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, his best friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a pup, spin and topple to lie on his back in the dust with his glasses disks of emptiness, reflecting the troubled yellow sky above.

Mildred scrambled toward the fallen Armorer. Though tears dug gullies through the dust on her cheeks, her professional training and experience had taken over. She was kneeling over J.B., checking his vital signs even before Ryan snapped out of it.

“He’s still alive!” she called. “Missed the heart.” She shrugged frantically out of the straps of her backpack.

Ryan’s attention snapped back into focus. The blood pennon had streamed away east toward the great river. That meant the shot had come from the west. Bringing the Steyr to his shoulder, Ryan turned his blue eye that way.

Fifty or sixty yards away what looked like a parking structure had pancaked, creating a stratified slab a story or so high. At least half a dozen people in scraps and oddments of salvaged clothing advanced across a broad area overgrown with green weeds to their knees, pausing to shoot then charging on. Four were men. Two looked to be women.

As Ryan watched, one man rocked back to the recoil of what he reckoned to be a battered Springfield M-1A, the semiauto-only civvie version of the old M-14 battle rifle. The same caliber as Ryan’s Steyr, it was a weapon well prized in the Deathlands. It was likely, Ryan thought, this was the bastard who shot J.B.

But he wasn’t shooting at Ryan. Instead he aimed north toward the rubble of the westward-fallen building that the companions had bypassed. The scavvies who had been chasing them appeared to be taking cover there.

Rival bands? Ryan wondered as he lined up his scope on the center of the rifleman’s chest.

He fired. The enemy rifleman jerked as the steel-jacketed slug punched through his ribs and transversed through his heart. Gray dust puffed from his gray, black and white camo blouse, confirming Ryan had hit his mark.

The scavvie collapsed bonelessly. The heavy rifle was dropping from his fingers even before recoil kicked Ryan’s field of view up over the man’s head. A chill, sure, he thought.

The other five dropped into the weeds, vanishing instantly from sight. From the top of the dumped structure behind them more blasters opened up to cover them, producing the vast grayish smoke clouds characteristic of black-powder blasters.

Ryan ducked out of the line of fire, popping the magazine from the well of his own rifle to stick in a fresh box. It was his next to last, another worry he couldn’t allow to distract him now.

Krysty and Mildred knelt, flanking the supine J.B. Krysty was furiously ripping open the plastic wrapping of an ancient package of fuzzy white scavenged Sno Balls that was among the last of their remaining edibles.

“I know you’re the expert,” Ryan said, with more of a rasp to his voice than usual, “but are you sure what J.B. needs is a quick dose of century-old snack food?”

“Sucking chest wound,” Mildred snapped without looking up. “I need to cover the holes before his lung collapses.”

Ryan nodded, then turned back to the rubble-parapet.

The two sets of attackers were keeping their heads low now. Ryan positioned himself at the northwest side, where he could keep an eye on both. The heat beat him into the ruins with increasing anger as the sun rolled up the sky, a patch of brightness in the roiling mustard-colored clouds that now stretched horizon to horizon.

They don’t have to make a move on us, he thought. Just wait for us to run out of water. Or for the acid rain to start scouring the flesh from our bones. Whichever comes first.

With quick glimpses over his shoulder, Ryan kept track of what his friends were doing. Jak lay by the gap at the stone circle’s south side with his .357 Magnum Colt Python propped on his pack in front of him, covering the curved structure that led from it. Doc kept watch to the west, cautiously peering up over the low wall for brief periods, then ducking and shifting left or right unpredictably. For all that he acted sometimes like a half-crazed old man, he was cunning as well as intelligent. And he very seldomly lost focus in a combat situation.

Another look out over the wrecked cityscape. No movement.

The river smell was thick here. The humidity felt as if it were climbing right up out of the ground around them. A stench of old corruption and decaying flesh likewise began to rise. It told Ryan that plenty still lived here in this cubicle concrete wasteland. The last decay byproducts of a million or so chills in the big nuke had burned away long since, he knew. Any decomposing organics were recent.

Where there’s life there’s death, he thought, with a certain bitterly appreciative humor.

From somewhere far off came a rumble of thunder, rolling around among the surviving structures. “Storm’s coming on,” he said.

He glanced back. The women had J.B.’s jacket and shirt off. He was propped up against Krysty as Mildred wound duct tape tightly around the makeshift patches of plastic wrapper that covered the holes in his chest and back, and the pads of relatively clean spare clothing folded up for bandages. Ryan winced.

“That tape’s gonna sting when it comes off,” he said. “I don’t envy J.B.”

“I’ll settle for being alive to feel the sting, Ryan,” J.B. said weakly. He had a bit of a wheeze to his voice. Ryan glanced back at him, startled. The wiry man gave him a thin smile.

“You hush up, now,” Mildred said sternly. “Save your breath. We’ve gone to a lot a trouble to keep it from leaking out.”

Ryan’s lips twisted in a brief smile as he looked to the north again. This time he glimpsed a flicker of motion, left to right, behind heaps of rubble on the street’s far side. He started to raise his rifle, then halted the motion and regretfully lowered the longblaster.

No target, he thought. He didn’t have a single round to waste on shadows.

“The nuke-suckers are starting to get restless,” he said. “Make a move soon, mebbe.”

“Okay, I’ve got it from here, Krysty,” Mildred said. “Why don’t you take J.B.’s scattergun and help watch our little friends out there.”

“Good idea, Mildred.” Ryan heard the crunching of footfalls on dust-covered rubble as the redhead took up position between him and Doc.

Time passed. The day got hotter. The clouds grew thicker, more clotted, more orange and threatening. Occasionally one of the other set of besiegers would pop off a shot as if to remind the companions they were still out there. None of Ryan’s crew was stupe enough to shoot back.

At a soft-voiced request from Mildred, Doc helped her shift J.B. up close to the short wall on the west side, where there was some shade. Doc had a surprising wiry strength to him. The Armorer had lapsed into unconsciousness again. Mildred poured water on a hankie from her canteen and bathed his face.

“How’s it look?” Ryan asked her.

He could feel her shrug. “I’ve done all I can do. Doesn’t seem to be much internal bleeding, thank God. He’s tough, but I don’t give him even odds of living to nightfall if we can’t get him some kind of better care by then.”

“Dear lady,” Doc said softly, “do I understand you give any of us even odds of living until nightfall?”

“You got me, Doc,” Mildred said. She was too depressed and worried even to rise to the bait. Under normal circumstances she and Doc spent plenty of time sniping good-naturedly at each other.

“You know,” Doc said, “one would certainly think the base of the elevator shaft and the stumps of the structural members in these collapsed buildings should have survived the blasts. Yet many have become little more than mounds.”

“Elevator probably went to a basement level,” Mildred said.

“But structural members usually survived at least partially, even near ground zero,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen pillar stumps standing right next to craters.”

Ryan bit down on a caustic remark about wasting air on speculation that wouldn’t load bullets in a blaster. Under the circumstances idle chatter was far preferable to thinking too deeply about their situation.

“Why don’t you take over the scattergun, Mildred?” Krysty asked. “You’re more comfortable with it.”

The physician shrugged. “Sure.” Krysty passed the weapon, then drew her more-familiar Smith & Wesson 640.

As she did, a storm of blasterfire erupted from the north. Bullets struck sprays of concrete powder off the top of the low circular wall and whined mournfully overhead as they tumbled through the thick, hot air. A short burst from an M-16 snapped over Ryan’s head like a sail in a brisk wind.

“Get ready for it,” he said during a lull in the shooting. “They’re nerving themselves to make their move.”

“No doubt they sense the immediacy of the impending storm,” Doc said. “I can smell the rain and sulfur already.”

“Hear that?” Jak called from the south wall.

“Hear what?” Krysty asked.

Ryan was switching his vision back and forth between the scavvies lying up in the weed-grown field to their west and the forted attackers to the north. Though the western bunch weren’t firing, he was pretty sure they weren’t sharp enough to have backed off and left without him or one of his sharp-eyed friends spotting them. Apparently they were biding their time and awaiting events.

“Whine,” Jak said. “Triple high. Like giant mosquitoes, you know?” He winced and shook his head. “Not like.”

“I can’t hear it,” Krysty said.

Mildred and Doc said they heard nothing out of the way, either. Of course with the blasters cracking off from not so far away that was perhaps not so surprising—the wonder being Jak could. But he had the sense of hearing of a white-tailed deer.

Ryan heard a loud rattle from his left. He risked sticking his head up to scope it out. Flashes and billows of smoke were coming from the pancaked structure.

“Black-powder blasters,” Ryan said. A ball sailed over his head. “Shooting at us.”

“They want to help the other bunch crack us,” Krysty said. “Then roll in, take them down, get all the swag themselves.”

“But why, dear lady, would they act now? Why not let us and our pursuers settle things and then eliminate the victor—in accordance with the ancient Oriental adage that when two tigers fight, one dies, the other is wounded?”

Mildred had turned away to check J.B. His cheeks were pale, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Now meeting Doc’s eye, she jerked a thumb upward.

“That’s why.”

Thunder split the sky. Something wet struck the back of Ryan’s left hand. It stung like an ant bite.

He looked up. “Shit.”

A blue-white crack appeared in the roiling orange and black clouds above, jagged and blinding. It pulsated three times. A sound like a colossal explosion beat down on them, a sound so loud Ryan could feel it.

“Acid gully washer on way,” Jak called.

“Tell us something we don’t know,” Mildred said, hastily moving to shield the wounded Armorer’s face with his hat. No other raindrops fell in the vicinity. But none of the companions doubted it was only a question of time.

“Here they come!” Krysty called.

Ryan raised his Steyr again. An acid downpour was no joke; it could bubble unprotected skin in minutes, sizzle muscle away to leave yellow bone in a shockingly short time, depending on the strength and length of the downpour. But the really virulent falls tended not to last long.

Ryan laid the rifle’s iron battle sights on a goggled figure who had sprung up from a clump of brush that had grown around an old fire hydrant and was charging forward, holding a beat-up semiautomatic longblaster diagonally across his chest. He squeezed off a quick shot and saw the man jerk as the bullet took him in the left shoulder.

The attacker kept coming. Ryan cursed and dropped his aim. His second shot punched the man in the gut right above his web belt. He fell, rolling and squalling like a catamount.

The Armorer going down had rattled even the hard-core Ryan more than he realized. Until now. He’d just forgotten one of the prime rules of combat: the chest was mostly air, the very fact J.B. owed his survival to—for however long it lasted.

A man well-wired on jolt or just adrenaline overdrive could keep motoring on even with a collapsed lung, and the fact he might die horribly in a matter of minutes wouldn’t hold him back from busting your head open with a club before collapsing. The heart, like the head, was a tricky target actually to hit. And even a clean heart shot didn’t always drop a man, or big animal, that was already in furious motion. The working of his limbs could keep his blood circulating long enough to inflict a chilling wound on you. The best target for stopping a man was from the ribs down.

“The miscreants to the west of us are advancing as well,” Doc reported. He was reserving his own fire until the enemy gave him closer targets. It took a long time to reload his own black-powder revolver.

The M-4000 shotgun bellowed. Ryan heard Mildred grunt as the 12-gauge’s heavy recoil punished her shoulder. She was running rifled slugs through the blaster against targets too far away for buckshot to be effective. She knew to snug the steel butt-plate hard against her shoulder. But it was a painful weapon even for a man as big as Ryan or as battle-hardened as the stricken J.B. to shoot in sustained fire.

“Jak!” Ryan called, racking his bolt and slamming it shut on a fresh cartridge, one of his rapidly dwindling store. He wasn’t sure whether his last shot had hit the red-bearded scavvie he had targeted or if the man had dived to cover. They were under fifty yards away now. It would seem to be a walkaway for a precision-sniping piece like the Steyr, in the hands of an expert marksman such as Ryan, to take down targets that close at hand. And it would have been—had he been shooting at pebbles on fenceposts.

It wasn’t quite so simple when the targets were running, ducking and weaving. And shooting back. The heavy bolt-action rifle was never meant for close-in combat: it was meant to reach out and touch enemies hundreds of yards distant, a slow, measured, precise form of warfare. Nothing at all like close combat, which was crude and dirty and above all fast.

Ryan was just wondering if it was time to forget the longblaster and try to get his SIG handblaster into play when a figure loomed up right in front of him with a terrible screech.

Chapter Four

Desperately Ryan rolled back onto his butt, away from the low wall. He flung up the Steyr crosswise just in time to catch the haft of a rusty-headed tomahawk descending toward his face.

Heat stung his left cheek as Krysty shot the scavvie in the face with her short-barreled handblaster. Ryan sensed minute bits of unburned propellant clacking against the patch that covered that eye. Though the short barrel of the little .38 produced a shattering muzzle-blast that close up, he never heard it. His ears already rang from repeated booms from his big 7.62 longblaster.

He threw himself forward and up, rolling to his feet in time to buttstroke another screaming scavvie across the face. He felt a yielding instant and then a crunch as a cheekbone gave way. The scavenger staggered back, dropping a big 1911-style semiauto handblaster to clutch at its stove-in face.

Her face, Ryan realized. It meant no more to him than what species of bug he’d just crunched beneath his boot heel. Running with the Trader, he’d long ago learned the brutal lesson that those who came to chill you had no sex or age. They had to die if you wanted to live.

Quickly Ryan stooped to prop the Steyr against the wall. Even in emergencies you didn’t want to go dropping precision optics on the ground. Using the longblaster as a club was bad enough.

As he put down the rifle with his left hand he drew the big fat-bladed panga from its sheath with the right. The wounded woman, screaming like a stuck steam whistle with fury and agony, yanked a blade from her own belt and lunged toward him for payback.

Krysty’s S&W 640 boomed again. She either missed the knife-wielding woman or aimed at someone else. Ryan sensed other figures closing in. He slashed the scavvie rushing him slantwise across a trim belly left bare between a stained tank top and filth-crusted baggy camo pants. The wound was a rising, drawing cut that drew a red line across sunburned flesh. It opened like a red-lipped mutie mouth, spilling gray and purple loops of guts. They tripped the woman up and she went down howling.

Jak’s .357 Python ripped out three fast characteristic barks, sizzling with high-energy harmonics. “West! They coming!” the teen shouted. “We triple-screwed!”

Ryan yanked out his SIG, then ducked as a scavvie twenty yards to the north dropped to a knee to spray the defenders with full-auto grief from an M-4. As Ryan dropped he pushed Krysty’s right hip hard with the heel of his hand. Adrenaline boosted his own wiry strength enough to tumble the woman right over…and save her life as a burst of .223 bullets ripped the air where she’d stood a moment before.

With the ringing in his ears amped double by the fierce muzzle-blast of the short-barreled carbine, it took Ryan a beat to realize that he was hearing wild screaming from the other side of the wall. In two different voices, or rather, kinds of voices. One was human, uttering throat-tearing shrieks of wild fear and intolerable agony.

The other set came from something not even remotely human.

He risked a fast peek over the parapet.

“Screamwings!” Krysty exclaimed from his side. As resilient as a hard rubber ball, she’d bounced right back up and into the fight from her tumble, even though both landing on the sharp-cornered rubble and the punch Ryan had given her would have left deep bruises.

They watched wide-eyed as a chicken-size screamwing sank its talons into the blond dreadlocked sides of a goggled scavvie’s head so deeply that blood spurted. The screamwing struck like a snake at his face with its toothed beak. The goggles protected the man’s eyes—until the ravening flying mutie ripped them off and tossed them away with a screech of triumph.

And then the man cried out much louder than the mutant bird.

A flock of the winged horrors had descended as if from the churning orange-and-yellow clouds. After unleashing a few stinging droplets, the clouds had held off spewing lethal acid. But this fall of flesh and feathers and claws wasn’t much improvement.

For the scavvies, anyway. The monsters seemed attracted by the movement of the attackers charging the ring-shaped ruin. Ryan saw at least a dozen. Some battled as futilely as the blond-dreaded man who was sinking to his knees as the horror clutching his head ate his face. Others ran for all they were worth back the way they had come.

It usually meant they died tired as well as screaming. No matter how inspired they were to run, the screamwings flew faster.

And wheeling above, a black crucifix against the mustard clouds, was a shape that seemed as big as a predark light plane.

Not all the screamwings found prey. Some helped their comrades swarm the scavvies. Others turned their attention toward the defenders in the circular ruin. One uttered a squawk and swooped down from twenty yards up.

A blast of .33-caliber double-00 balls from J.B.’s shotgun caught it square and ripped it apart in midair.

The muties turned and flew away. Even the ones sitting and ripping strips of skin and flesh from fallen quarry, some of which still writhed and hollered, snapped open their wings and took off. They flew not in pursuit of the scavvie survivors, now in full retreat, but northwest, toward the top of the tall, dark tower. The ones chasing the scavvies sheered off to join them, uttering hoarse cries.

“Wow,” Mildred said. “I know I busted that one like a blood piñata. But I never knew screamwings to let a little thing like that discourage them so easy before.”

“Hey!” Jak called. “Other coldhearts run, too!”

The words hit Ryan like a fist to the gut. So remarkable, not to mention horrific, had the sudden screamwing attack been that it had all but hypnotized him. He’d stone forgotten they were being hit in a flank attack by what was apparently a second set of enemies.

His eye caught Krysty’s emerald gaze in passing as they both cranked their heads west. Pink spots glowed on her cheeks. She’d got caught up in their unlikely rescue-by-monster, too. And that kind of thing could get you chilled.

Ryan looked toward the flattened building and the stadium looming beyond to see a scavvie stagger and slap his hand to his neck. A short thick feathered shaft transfixed the man’s neck right to left. Ryan knew a crossbow quarrel when he saw one.

The boom of black-powder weapons echoed through the ruins, shot through with the sharp crackle of a full-auto smokeless blaster. Another of the west-side attacker fell. This bunch looked more clean-cut and less grubby than the others. The others turned to race back toward the cover of the collapsed parking structure, some loosing quick shots toward the south, others just beating feet.

“Uh-oh,” Ryan heard J.B. croak. “We got company.”

Something buzzed between Ryan and Krysty to strike off the stub wall with a crack and a little spray of concrete grit. Both tracked the crossbow quarrel as it fell to the mounded dust and broken masonry.

Then both turned as one to look toward the gap in the south portion of the ring that led to the ruined walkway-curved building. A half-dozen men and women stood or knelt there, leveling crossbows and longblasters at them.

Jak already had his hands hoisted over his head. He was normally as bitter-end a fighter as any of them. But a skinny kid in a T-shirt and shorts had appeared right across the ring-wall from him and held the twin muzzles of a long black-powder scattergun a handspan away from Jak’s pale right ear.

Ryan glanced at Krysty, who turned to stand by his side. She shrugged.

“Reckon you got the better of us,” he called.

“Reckon we do,” said a tall, lanky man with a fair complexion, a sort of narrow carrot head topped by a tangle of ginger hair. He wore loose khaki cargo pants and a green T-shirt, both too new-looking to be anything but salvage recently unwrapped from the original plastic. His voice was soft, and he looked a bit unhealthy to Ryan. But he carried the M-4 as if he knew which end the bullets came out of, and he showed no hesitancy in voice or posture.

Ryan dropped his panga beside him. “Do what you gotta do.”

Men armed with crossbows disarmed the companions. Like their leader, they were dressed in crisp predark clothing that mostly fit them. One of the benefits of living in or near a nuked-out city was the ability to reap its bounty.

One of their captors, a burly young man with brown hair, scraped the housing of the Steyr’s scope against the concrete wall.

“Careful with that, son,” Ryan rasped. “That’s delicate precision optics you’re dealin’ with, there.”

“Show some respect, Lonny,” the man with the M-4 said long-sufferingly.

“Aw, Tully,” Lonny said. “They’re just coldhearts.”

“They were fighting coldhearts,” Tully said. “So do we. That don’t make us coldhearts.”

“Indeed,” Doc said. “So why not leave us our weapons and gear and let us go our merry way? We will not cause you a bit of fuss.”

“Remains to be seen. Now if you like keeping your skins on you better get ready to hustle. Acid rain’s coming. Smells like a bad one.”

As if in response, raindrops pattered off the top of the wall and dug little craters in the gray dust. Ryan felt his facial muscles wince tightly in anticipation of the pain of an acid strike on exposed skin. But the drops that struck the hands held over his head and his cheek were just normal rain. Fat and somewhat greasy, but not corrosive.

Not yet. This was merely a little harmless foreplay.

“What about J.B.?” Mildred demanded. “We’ve got a wounded man. You don’t propose we just leave him here to die?”

“No,” Tully said. “But if he can’t walk you’ll have to carry him. Now get moving, or we’ll leave you all to sizzle!”

“But he needs a stretcher!”

“Woman, do we look like we’re carrying a stretcher with us? Pick him up and carry him, or leave him, but get moving right now.”

“Easy, lover,” Krysty murmured. “He’s right.”

“Yeah.” Ryan forced himself to unwind a notch as he unlinked his hands atop his head. When no one shouted or shot at him he hunkered down and grabbed J.B. by the shoulders. “Being ordered around by strangers goes straight up my back.”

Krysty moved to Ryan’s side to help. He didn’t worry about her carrying her share of the load. She was a strong woman. He flashed a narrow-eyed look at Mildred.

“You gonna help or let us drag his feet through the rubble?” he asked.

Tears ran down Mildred’s cheeks. “It might kill him, just carrying him like this for any distance!”

“You think the acid won’t? Jak, help her get his legs. Hang on, J.B. This is gonna hurt.”

“Don’t be a stupe,” J.B. croaked. “Just leave me.” His eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out again.

“Not gonna happen,” Ryan said. “Nobody gets left behind.”

Shooting a final ruby glare at the captors to either side of him, Jak moved toward the wounded Armorer. Doc moved forward.

“Allow me, lad,” Doc said, stooping beside Mildred. He grabbed one of J.B.’s boots and stood with his three companions.

“Now, as I heard it said—let’s make tracks!”

Chapter Five

They traveled south. Tully led them out of the ruined building into the street, which was relatively unobstructed there. They made for the shelter of an intact section of overpass. It should protect them from the acid rain, if the wind didn’t blow too hard.

The Armorer was a small man and not carrying any excess flesh. He was all bone and wiry muscle. Ryan was surprised by how heavy his friend actually was.

Their captors had shouldered the companions’ packs. Ryan guessed that had more to do with preventing them from whipping out any nasty hidden surprises than a desire to lighten the loads of four people carrying their wounded friend.

He felt impacts on the back of his shirt and head. He heard a frying-egg sound and smelled a nasty stench like burning hair as the concentrated acid in the rain dissolved its proteins.

J.B.’s head hung between Ryan and Krysty. He moaned as an acid drop hit his cheek, clinging and burning like napalm.

“Run!” Ryan shouted. He didn’t care what their captors had to say about it. If they decided their prisoners were making a break for it and chilled them, it was an easier death than acid.

But the dozen or so locals were concentrating on not getting dissolved themselves. Those who could held bits of clothing over their heads for cover, or yanked their shirts over their heads. The angry welts some of them sported on their backs showed they’d made this particular unpleasant choice before.

The four friends carrying J.B. were already straining. But as the rain began to sting like wasps they accelerated anyway. They were used to walking and even running long distances. But each of them, Ryan realized, had been holding back out of concern for jostling J.B.

Now that was forgotten. As always, the demands of survival overrode everything else. They ran flat out, and the rain hissed in the white-gray dust that lay on the frost-heaved asphalt beneath their feet.

Toughened as they were, their chests were working like bellows when the section of highway a hundred feet over their heads cut off the rain as if flipping a switch.

They staggered a few paces and then laid J.B. beside a thick concrete support pillar as near the middle of the span as possible. Then they collapsed around him, gasping like so many beached Sippi giant catfish.

Around them their captors took up a defensive perimeter. Some splashed water from canteens on their comrades to wash away acid. The rain pattered hard on the blacktop around them and the overhead pass. It raised a stinging stink that made Ryan’s eye water.

A couple of blocks north the wounded scavvies who’d been left behind by their bugging-out pals were screaming. It was surprisingly loud at this distance. Or maybe, not so surprising.

Ryan tuned it out. He’d heard people dying in unspeakable agony before. It wasn’t as if he liked those bastards melting alive out there.

Mildred was on her knees cradling J.B.’s head on her thigh. She was still a pro; though she stroked his wispy brown hair tenderly she didn’t waste breath begging him to speak to her.

“How’s he look?” Ryan asked, taking a pull from the canteen at his waist.

She shook her head. “Not good,” she said. “But if he’s got internal bleeding he’s not showing any sign it’s gotten worse from being jogged around like a bag of mail.”

“Not bubbling out nose or mouth,” said Jak, who squatted nearby, panting like the bipedal white wolf he resembled. “Good sign.”

The skin went tight at the corners of Mildred’s eyes and mouth. Then she forced herself to relax. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”

“So who are you?” Ryan said as the tall patrol leader approached. It suddenly struck him: what he’d taken for unhealthy pallor was clean skin. These folk were well-scrubbed by usual ville standards, even after however many hours on patrol.

“Aren’t you getting things backward?” Tully said. “We got the blasters. Who the hell are you?”

Ryan shook his head. “Just folks passing through,” he said with unfeigned weariness. “My name’s Ryan. The woman here’s Krysty. The other’s our healer, Mildred. The sawed-off runt she’s tending to’s named J.B. Old guy’s Doc and the teenager’s Jak.”

“Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your service,” Doc said. He managed to make his introduction sound grand despite the fact he was sitting on his bony old ass on an ancient weed-cracked highway. He gestured with his ebony walking stick. Ryan was startled to see their captors had allowed him to keep it, apparently presuming he needed it to walk. None of them seemed to have noticed the fact he’d stuck it through his belt to help carry J.B.

So we’re not completely disarmed after all, Ryan thought with a slight smile. Not as if it does us any damn good. The fact that only a few of the patrol carried modern blasters didn’t fool him. A black-powder blaster would chill a person dead as any machine gun. And so would a crossbow bolt.

“Where’d you come from?” the tall ginger-haired man asked, putting his back to a support pillar and sliding to sit. “’Cross the river?”

Ryan shook his head. “North,” he said. It was true, as far as it went. That was the easiest lie—true but for the bits it left out.

Tully raised a brow. “That’s a triple-hard road, friend,” he said. “Leads right through cannies and coldhearts swarming like angry wasps.”

“We noticed,” Mildred said.

“Now would you mind telling us who you are?” Ryan said.

“Shouldn’t we make ’em stop talking, Tully?” a black kid with a single-shot black-powder longblaster asked. He looked to be no more than twelve and his eyes were saucer-large with excitement.

“Why’d we want to do a thing like that, McCoy?” the leader asked laconically.

“Well. Um.” Evidently McCoy hadn’t thought that far ahead. But he was game, and resourceful. “Mebbe they’ll plot their escape.”

“Why, then, you’ll just shoot them dead with that big scary blaster of yours, won’t you, McCoy?” Tully said. “Speaking of which, you did remember to reload that smokepole, right?”

The youngster puffed himself up. “O’ course! What do you think I am?”

“A greenie on your first patrol outside the wire,” Tully said. “You put a fresh cap on, too?”

“Well, don’t be a—Oh. Um, wait.” He fumbled at a pouch at his waist. “Wait one.”

Turning his head so the kid wouldn’t see him smile, the patrol leader turned back to Ryan. “To answer your question, we come from a ville called Soulard. A mile or so south of here, along the old highway. Peaceful place.”

“Why did you kidnap us, then?” Krysty asked.

He smiled. “Looks to me like we rescued you.”

“Looks to me like you captured us,” Ryan said. “Saving us for the stewpot?”

“What, you think we’re fuckin’ cannies?” shouted the man who’d mishandled Ryan’s longblaster earlier. He wore a T-shirt with even the brief arms torn off to reveal bulky biceps and triceps. Though he looked barely in his twenties, he was a big old slab of beef, with a blunt face fronted by a mashed tuber of a nose and a couple of brown eyes narrowed with angry suspicion. The sides and back of his head were shaved up to a clump of brown hair that stirred in the acid-tangy breeze.

“Ease off, Lonny,” the ginger-haired man said coolly. “They got a right to be a bit testy. I would be, in their circumstances.”

“But they run with a mutie!” He waved a hamhock of a hand toward Jak. “Look at him, white as clean snow and rat-red eyes!”

“I’m no mutie!” Jak shouted, spittle flying from his pale lips.

“He’s an albino,” Ryan said. “It’s a natural condition, if a rare one. He’s no mutie.”

“Bullshit,” Lonny said. Jak’s red eyes flamed. He looked likely to spring for Lonny’s throat, despite the huge disparity in size.

“Lonny!” The patrol leader didn’t stir, but his voice cracked like a whip. “Back off. We need to talk to these people. Brother Joseph will figure out what to do with them.”

Lonny spit in the pale grass that grew in the shade of the overpass. “Brother Joseph.”

“Enough, Lonny. We don’t need to be airing our dirty laundry in front of strangers, either.”

But Jak’s hot blood was up. “How we know they not cannies?”

“Lord, lad,” Doc murmured. “Let it go.”

“Look at them,” Mildred said. “Ever see cannies look that healthy?”

Jak frowned. His white teeth made paler dimples in his lower lip. “No,” he admitted after a moment.

“Me neither, now that she mentions it,” Ryan said. “All right. Truce. We might as well go along with these people, even laying aside they got the drop on us. We already know this ain’t a healthy vicinity to wander at random.”

“No kidding,” McCoy said. “You’re triple-lucky you didn’t stir up a pocket of serious rad-death emitters. That’s worse than getting eaten by cannies, any day! The baron, he—”

“McCoy,” Tully said sharply, but nowhere near as sharply as he’d spoken to the beefy Lonny. The black kid shut his mouth and swallowed hard. Tully looked back to Ryan.

“Let’s just say you seem a bit too dangerous to allow to wander around freely kicking over hornets’ nests. We have to live here.”

“What if we tell you we don’t mean you any harm or trouble?”

“I’d say evidence suggests otherwise. Least so far as trouble’s concerned. And I can tell you plain, you’ll have every chance to state your case once we get back safe to our ville. Which is far from certain yet, so less talking, please. None of us wants to draw more hassles.”

“People want avoid trouble bad,” Jak grumbled, indicating their captors with a nod of his head.

“If we tried a little harder to skip trouble,” Krysty said, “we might be a whole lot happier.”

“Only a droolie looks for more trouble than looks for him,” Ryan replied.

“What does that make us?” Mildred asked.

“People a triple load of trouble looks for. Now shut it.”

Mildred looked miffed, but she pressed her lips tight.

Tully slapped his hands on his lean thighs and stood. “That’s clean rain falling now,” he said. “We can move.”

Ryan’s nose had already told him that the lethal acid downpour had halted. The sound of drops falling on the asphalt-covered overpass and the cracked pavement beyond its shelter didn’t change.

“Are you quite certain about that, young man?” Doc asked. “A return of the acid precipitation could quite spoil one’s day, were one caught in the open.”

Tully frowned at him a moment as if sorting out his words. Ryan got the impression the lanky man was no stupe. He just wasn’t used to hearing that sort of talk.

Well, in the Deathlands, nobody was. It had taken Ryan some time to get used to Doc, too. And that was just in his lucid moments.

“That’s how it goes here,” Tully said. “Fresh rain always follows the acid. Dilutes it and washes it away. That’s one reason the settled villes survive.”

Ryan looked at Krysty. She had her limited doomie moments, but more important, she was better attuned to the natural elements than anybody Ryan had met. Whether it was her link to the Earth Mother, Gaia, or just a natural ability, he couldn’t say.

She nodded. “I feel he’s right.” Then she flashed him that smile of hers that always made him realize how lucky he was. Even in situations as tight as this one.

“Best pick up your pal,” Tully said. “We don’t have to run anymore. But it’s not healthy to hang around out here.”

“Mildred?” Ryan said.

The physician was already kneeling over J.B. He was unconscious. Sweat sheened his forehead, more than what was due to the humidity.

“I don’t like it,” she said. “But it doesn’t look like we’ve got much choice, do we?”

“No,” Ryan said. “We don’t. C’mon, people, let’s get him up. We got places to go and people to meet.”

Chapter Six

They continued south onto what looked like a largely intact highway that Mildred, who had spent some time in predark St. Louis, identified as Interstate 55, to make their way through a complicated tangle of broken concrete and twisted rail iron, fanged by nasty bent spikes of rust-red rebar. Evidently it was a collapsed bridge. A railroad-highway combo, by the looks.

No sooner were they past the collapsed ruins than Tully led the party down the brushy bank to the surface street that ran alongside the old highway. They jumped a little stream in the ditch at the bottom. Because there was just no way four people could cross it carrying the unconscious Armorer, and because the locals seemed uninclined to wade this soon after an acid downpour, Ryan draped J.B.’s limp form over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry.

Everybody else hopped easily across. Burdened as he was Ryan didn’t quite make it cleanly. The dirt gave way under his left foot. It slipped and went into the water to the ankle. Though he jumped clear as if J.B. suddenly weighed no more than dandelion fluff, Ryan felt a sting from the diluted acid in the little stream.

Krysty and Doc relieved Ryan of his burden. Tully tossed him a water bottle. “Best rinse that off before we go on,” he said. “Just in case.”

Ryan cocked a brow over his good eye. “Don’t sweat it,” Tully said. “We’re not far from the ville. If we’re not inside the perimeter inside half an hour, I likely won’t be needing the water anyhow.”

Ryan splashed water over his ankle and boot. It probably didn’t do much good. It made him feel better, though. He tossed the bottle back to the patrol leader, who caught it with a grin.

“Why not use highway?” Jak asked as they started moving west between a stand of woods along the partially elevated, partially fallen-in right of way.

“Too exposed,” Tully said. “Sometimes we get snipers in the rubble.”

“And there’s stickies, in those drowned warehouses and factories other side of the Interstate,” another man said.

“Highway does get used by people passing through, Randall,” Tully said. “Long-range traders and such.”

“Things travel that road no human should meet or get to know anything about,” a black-haired man with drawn gray-stubbled cheeks said.

“That’s only by night,” Tully said. “Anyway it’s all superstition. Probably.”

“I hear the screams, Tully. Can’t hardly sleep none, sometimes.”

“That’s just stickies roasting rivermen or scavvies they caught,” Randall said.

The companions found themselves toting the unconscious J.B. along a wide street. The rain, having seemingly washed away the remnants of the toxic rain, had stopped quickly. The air smelled fresh. Overhead the clouds had taken on the colors of an old bruise, gray and green and brown, an improvement over the tortured, boiling orange of not so many minutes before.

They passed beneath standing bridges where a railroad line swung in from the northwest to join a highway that crossed their route. A little farther south the highway they paralleled swung off west. Walking under an intact under-pass, their captors went on triple alert. The guy who didn’t sleep so well jumped when a pigeon boomed out from high up the embankment near the overhead and flapped out into the milky sunlight. His buddies laughed at him.

When the group emerged, the clouds were breaking up. Ryan blinked his good eye at the sight. As hot as it was, without clouds to filter the sun the day would only get hotter. And J.B. wasn’t getting any lighter.

“How are you holding up?” he asked the others.

“Don’t worry about us,” Krysty said. “We’ll do what we have to do.”

He ginned at her. “Like always.”

“Not much farther to go, anyway,” Tully said. “We’ll see about getting you some wheels for your friend when we reach the gates. We got people who can tend to him. Ace healer name of Strode.”

Lonny muttered something about mollycoddling no-account outlanders. His leader ignored him. Though Tully acted like a good guy—and Ryan knew too well it could all be an act—and seemed to have his shit pretty much in one sock as a leader, he also seemed to allow the bulky brown-haired man an unusual amount of slack. There had to be some link here Ryan didn’t see.

No way to scope it now, nor to know if the fact, if fact it was, had any use to him and his friends in their current predicament. Ryan filed it away and let it go.

Ryan saw Mildred’s shoulders and upper back tense. She was a physician, a fully qualified preskydark doctor who tended to think not too much of what passed for doctors these days. Truth be told, she had met several healers whom she had to admit were truly gifted.

But whether it was more prudence than the freezie woman usually showed, or simple fatigue, she didn’t make a point of the fact she could tend to J.B. as well as any and better than most. Besides which, if Soulard were the relatively large and prosperous ville a twelve-man patrol wearing reasonably clean outfits suggested, they probably had medical facilities better than the Deathlands standard.

Tully led them down the center of the wide street. His troops stayed crisply alert. Here, anyway, they seemed to be more worried about jump-out-from-cover attacks than coming under long-range aimed fire. More and more of the structures they passed were intact, which shortened potential fields of fire and favored blitz-style ambush.

“Wonder why these littler buildings held up so much better than the skyscrapers,” Mildred said. Ryan was mildly surprised she had breath to talk.

It was more of a surprise when Doc answered; even after all their association Ryan had a tendency to underestimate his physical hardiness.

“Smaller surface areas,” he said. “Being more compact, they proved more resistant to the blasts. The bigger buildings provided greater surfaces for the shock waves to push against.”

As they marched through the ruins between increasingly intact-appearing structures, in the growing sunlight Ryan realized the black kid, McCoy, was no longer with them. None of the others looked concerned—about the youth’s absence, anyway. Even here in what they evidently considered potentially hostile ground nobody seemed to assume he’d been snatched by someone. Or even wandered away into danger.

So Tully sent him ahead to spread the word they were coming, Ryan thought. He’d probably use some secret bolthole. Mebbe even one only a kid knew about, or could even get through. The patrol leader had to have spoken quietly to the kid when Ryan wasn’t looking, or even flashed him an arranged signal. Or, hell, for all he knew it was standard operating procedure.

They were working in a dangerous information vacuum here. The bitch was, even though their escorts were proving neither hostile nor closemouthed—except mebbe the lout, Lonny—they didn’t seem inclined to small talk right now. Ryan wasn’t about to distract them, if they thought there was something here to look out for.

And anyway, he wasn’t sure himself where Mildred and Doc found the energy for chitchat. He sure didn’t have much to spare, right now.

“Biggest danger here is stickies,” Randall said. “They infest the flooded warehouses and like to hunt up here from time to time. Plus sometimes scavvies think they can snag an easy score this close to a ville.”

“There’s also people from Breweryville,” said Dowd, the haunted-looking dude who couldn’t sleep. “They might attack us if they come upon us.”

“Oh, crap,” Randall said. “They can be dicks. But they’re not coldhearts.”

“Brother Joseph says they lack a true sense of community.”

“Look alive, guys,” Tully said hastily. “We don’t want to get too caught up talking and wind up crawling with stickies.”

That drove a shudder through everybody, companions and captors alike. There were numerous varieties of the needle-toothed mutants with the sucker pads on their hands and feet that could strip skin from meat and meat from bone. Most of them shared a love for human flesh, cruelty and fire, not necessarily in that order. Despite their pyrophilia they often colonized near bodies of water, and seemed to take to the water well.

Ryan couldn’t help noticing that the patrol leader had once again steered talk clear of the subject of Brother Joseph. Whomever he may be.

They came to a corner where a wire fence stretched down the street ahead of them and down the street west, backed by dense thorny hedges and topped with coils of razor wire that gleamed in the sun despite being pitted and stained by the acid rains.

“Soulardville,” Tully said with evident pride.

“Didn’t that used to be the farmers’ market?” Mildred asked. “Those long shedlike roofs inside the perimeter?”

“Uh-huh,” the patrol leader said, nodding his ginger head. “It’s a farming-and-gardening center now. Our market’s more centrally located.”

“What’d you say your ville’s name was again?” Ryan asked.

“Soulard,” Tully said.

Doc perked up. “‘Soulard,’” he said. “Why, bless my soul, but unless I misremember, that means ‘drunkard’ in French.”

Tully shrugged. “Mebbe so, some time past. Sure not now.”

“Bro Joe don’t allow drunkenness,” Dowd said gloomily. Perhaps he felt he’d sleep better for a good load on.

“Bro Joe?” Ryan asked.

“It’s still the baron who rules in Soulardville!” Lonny bellowed. Ryan thought he was going way too red for Dowd’s remark. Lonny turned an angry glare on Doc.

“What d’you mean by that, anyway, oldie?” he yelled.

“Back off the trigger there, fella,” Ryan said.

“Why, nothing, my boy,” Doc said. Though his forehead shone with sweat, he didn’t seem to be flagging under his burden. “Nothing at all. Just passing the time of this lovely day.”

Lonny gave him a narrow, suspicious glare. “You okay there, old-timer?” Tully asked. “You want mebbe to get the white-haired kid to swap with you?”

“Not at all, young man, thank you kindly. I have resources unlooked-for.”

They continued south along the fence. Ryan watched his people closely. There was nothing they could do for J.B. right now but shade his face with his hat, which they had. He was concerned about how the other three were holding up. Krysty’s sentient hair hung limp over her shoulders, a sure sign fatigue was getting the better of her. Mildred would, from time to time, start to slump, then straighten. Usually at such times she glanced back at the unconscious Armorer suspended among them. It was as if she renewed her strength, or at least resolve, by reminding herself J.B.’s health and very survival lay very much in question, and depended on her ability to keep on keeping on.

Ryan also monitored Jak. The teen was volatile and obviously smoldering at the fact they’d been taken captive. He wasn’t tracking too closely that their captors could’ve treated them far worse. In fact, under the circumstances, they could hardly have treated them better. Of course that could change at any instant; Ryan knew that as well as Jak did.

He just didn’t want Jak flying off and making the locals treat them more harshly.

Visibility through the hedge-covered fence wasn’t good. Ryan suspected that was part of the shrubs’ purpose. Glimpses through gaps suggested that south of the garden sheds lay a cultivated field, a block north to south and at least three blocks east-west. Then the perimeter turned mostly to the fronts of what seemed to have been houses and small businesses, their doors and ground-floor windows bricked up. Razor-wire coils spiraled along roof-lines. The streets between were blocked off by piles of big rubble chunks as well as the fence.

“That’s a pretty fine defensive perimeter,” Ryan said. Talking was hard, but it took his mind off the ache in his shoulders and lower back from lugging J.B.’s deadweight.

Tully chuckled. “Have to be triple-stupe not to be able to fortify out of the bones and guts of a dead city.”

“That’s true.”

They passed a still-intact church whose white spire showed flaking remains of paint bubbling from the nuke strike’s thermal flash on its north side. East of the street lay a wide expanse of grass, green but yellow-spotted from the acid rains. Farther along stood more ruins.

From just ahead came a shout. Square three-story-tall towers made of different colored bricks flanked a wide street leading into the ville. The black snouts of longblasters poked out from underneath peaked roofs. A couple were trained right on Ryan and his little party.

“Almost over, people,” Tully told Ryan and his friends.

“We’re at the gates.”

Chapter Seven

The Soulardville gate was a stout, barred construction, topped with the ubiquitous razor-wire coils. It ran on a metal-lined track cut into the asphalt of the street.

The gate opened with a squeal of bearings as runners ran down the track. Inside waited a quartet of men in armless black jerseys holding longblasters. Long wooden truncheons hung from their belts. Sec men, Ryan thought.

The patrol headed inside. Big trees shaded the gate area, and Ryan was grateful for that.

As their escorts spread out around them, calling greetings to bystanders, the one-eyed man took stock of their surroundings. The church to the right of the gate seemed to have been taken over as a sec-man headquarters, or at least station. To the left lay an open area, with tables under canopies: a market or trading station, mildly busy today, with men unloading goods to a table from a light wooden land wag while others admired heaps of produce.

McCoy approached them, leading a stocky woman wearing overalls, with a gray braid wound around her head. Right behind came a wooden cart with steel-tired wood wheels. As the sec men covered the captives with their blasters, the woman bustled up.

“I’m Strode, the ville healer,” she said. “We’ll take over from here.”

The bevy of assistants who had pushed the cart trotted around to ease J.B.’s limp form away from Ryan and his friends. Predictably, Mildred bridled.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice rasped from dryness in her throat; she hadn’t been following her own advice about keeping hydrated while carrying her wounded lover.

The Armorer had already been laid on a pad on the bed of the cart. Strode leaned over him. “Hmm,” she said. “Competent job of field dressing.”

“‘Competent’!”

Strode looked up directly at the twentieth-century physician. “You did well by your friend, given the circumstances,” she said firmly. “We have him now. We’ve got a clean infirmary and scavenged meds as well as herbs.”

“Herbs!” Mildred sounded as outraged as if the gray-haired, red-faced woman had suggested using vodoun.

For a moment electricity seemed to crackle between the two female healers. Strode fixed Mildred with a piercing blue gaze. Mildred tensed as if about to go for the older woman’s throat.

Krysty laid a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Mildred,” she said gently, “let it go. We’re not completely ignorant savages. This woman obviously knows what she’s doing.”

Mildred set her strong jaw rebelliously. A pair of sec men stepped up to bar her way as Strode gestured. The acolytes set off both pulling and pushing the cart at a trot down the broad street that led into the fortified ville. The healer walked alongside at a brisk pace.

Tears welled in Mildred’s eyes then coursed down her cheeks.

They were still hemmed in by a combination of their original captors and sec men, who weren’t exactly wearing uniforms but all seemed to wear mostly black. Some of the men were relieving the patrol of their weapons and toting them into the old church. The patrol members surrendered their blasters and crossbows without protest.

Interesting, Ryan thought.

Krysty met his eye over Mildred’s shoulder, gave him a quick smile and nod to show she was doing fine. He doubted that. But it was part of the reason he loved her: her fortitude and courage were the equal of any man’s he’d known. She’d keep going and do what needed to be done until her strength failed her. Her heart never would.

A pair of sec men pointed their blasters—an M-16 and a Remington pump scattergun—at Ryan as he reached to his belt. With a sardonic smile on his chapped lips, he saluted them with his canteen, then took a long drink. The water was hot and brackish but refreshed him.

Doc had plopped himself down on his butt on the blacktop in the shade of a sycamore and sat with his knees wide apart and his sword stick beside him. Jak squatted beside him and panted like a wolf. Their captors had relieved him of the throwing knives with which he festooned himself, but Ryan would’ve bet his last swig of water the albino youth had a couple holdouts hidden on him. Again, it wasn’t likely to help much, especially with J.B. trundled off to his friends had no idea where, but completely in the power of their captors. Even if they could break out, they weren’t going to do so without the Armorer.

“We don’t want to rush into anything anyway,” Krysty said to him. Ryan jerked slightly. As often the case, the full-bodied redhead seemed to be reading his mind. “We don’t know what’s here.”

“They could have treated us far worse, to be sure,” Doc said, taking a swig from his own canteen and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

Patrol leader Tully, now disarmed, stood to one side talking with a man a finger shorter than his own gangly height. The man wore a black vest open over a bare chest deep-tanned as leather, beneath a thick pelt of red-brown hair, black jeans over black boots, a gunbelt with a Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum in good condition at his left hip. He had a long deeply seamed face as tan as his chest, with a well-broken nose. Close-clipped reddish-brown hair was in full retreat from a freckled forehead. Mild-seeming brown eyes looked out from beneath eyebrows like smears of black paint. He wasn’t so much wider than Tully, as he just seemed more solid.

A chiller for true, Ryan thought.

Tully walked over with the black-clad man beside him. “This is Garrison,” he told Ryan. “He’s sec chief for Soulardville.”

Neither party to the introduction offered to shake hands. “Get your people together and follow me,” Garrison said.

His voice was quiet but not soft. Neither his tone nor the sec boss’s posture threatened. Ryan sized the man up as the kind who wouldn’t bother with threats. Seen up close, he looked as unyielding and hard as a cypress knee.

Ryan nodded. No point butting heads when he’d only lose. “Let’s go,” he told the others.

“Where?” Jak asked. He showed no sign of standing.

“Where I take you,” Garrison said. His tone remained matter-of-fact. The look he gave the albino youth was another matter altogether.

One time during his road-dog days with Trader, Ryan had seen an Ozark mule skinner give a chronically balky mule that look. The next time the mule acted up the skinner had shot it dead in its harness with a big old black-powder horse blaster he worse crosswise in his belt.

“Jak,” Krysty called, “come give me a hand with Mildred, please. She’s had a hard time of it.”

Mildred had already reclaimed her composure. She was painfully aware of her relatively coddled and sheltered upbringing. Never mind her father had been murdered by the Klan when she was a child. Compared to people Deathlands born and raised she’d spent her life before her cryogenic suspension on Easy Street. She hated to show weakness to her friends. She frowned and started to say something.

Krysty held up a hand. “Save your breath,” she said. “Let Jak help you.”

The albino teen had got up and hurried to Mildred’s side. Her eyes widened as she realized what the redhead was actually doing. Jak had followed her suggestion without the thought entering his head that she had given him an out from a no-win confrontation with the Soulardville sec boss without loss of face.

The look on the sec boss’s sunburned face never wavered from…composed, Ryan reckoned the word was. But Ryan thought he’d caught just the slightest flicker of recognition in those dark eyes. Garrison looked to be shrewdly perceptive as well as in total command of himself and his surroundings. That made him triple-dangerous.

They set off down the street at an easy walk. A quartet of sec men flanked and followed them. Garrison let Ryan walk shoulder-to-shoulder with him without comment.

And that was the upside of dealing with a man like the sec boss. Ryan knew what he was. He knew at a glance what Ryan was. They understood each other perfectly with no need to jaw.

Houses lined the street, mostly in brown or maroon or yellow-tan brick, neat beneath pitched roofs with scrolled wooden eaves. Raised-bed gardens had replaced long-dead lawns, and interspersed with the houses were garden plots growing a profusion of vegetables and herbs: tomatoes and beans climbing up frames, onions, carrots, lettuce just sprouting. Down one block to the south Ryan caught a glimpse of an orchard of trees just beginning to fruit out. Big trees dropped pools of shadow at irregular intervals on the asphalt.

“My word,” Doc breathed. “It looks as if war has never brushed this place with its wings.”

“Does if you’d seen it before,” Mildred said. “This is Russell Boulevard. Used to be a lot more buildings along here. Those gardens used to be houses.”

“It’s so green,” Krysty said. “It’s like a drink of water after the ruins.”

“Too neat,” Jak said. “Too crowded.”

And in fact a fair number of people went about their business. Some carried crates or big ceramic jugs, or pushed loaded handcarts. Others walked briskly as if to appointments. Children played on stoops. Chickens scratched in front yards and cultivated patches. Pigeons cooed and bubbled from the eaves.

“We been building this place up for a hundred years,” Garrison said with a note of pride in his voice.

“You’ve done well,” Krysty said.

Ryan was reserving judgment. Krysty sometimes teased him he couldn’t sniff a flower without suspecting there was a bee waiting inside to sting his nose. He reckoned that was about right.

He also saw no reason to change.

And speaking of flowers, they were there, too, purple and blue and yellow heads nodding from beds below windows and stout ceramic planters on porches. This place was easily as prosperous as Front Royal, where he’d grown up.

“Barely an hour ago the acid rain was falling fit to bubble the skin straight off a man’s face,” he said. He gestured around with a hard hand. “How’d all this come through looking so pretty?”

“Special-treated tarps and cloths,” Garrison said. “Special frames set out. The trees’re pretty resistant. We usually get plenty of warning when a hellstorm’s brewing.”

“What happens when you don’t?”

Garrison chuckled. “Ever know a man to leave this world alive?”

For a moment Ryan looked at him as they walked. Then he barked a short laugh. “No.”

The street turned to what had been a commercial district. War’s legacy was much more visible here. While many houses had intact windows, the big commercial picture windows had been blown in and were covered with plywood sheets or planking. From neatly lettered signs above the doors Ryan gathered they were now small stores and workshops. He heard the tink-tink of a hammer on metal from one door left open to allow the sultry breeze admittance.

The street widened out. “Lot of buildings here’ve been demolished,” Mildred murmured. “If I remember right, anyway.”

For her, Ryan knew, the memory was just a few years old. But sometimes she still had trouble coping with the brutal contrast between the world she’d gone to sleep in and the nightmare she’d awakened to.

Whatever had been before there was a wide square here now. Ryan saw that the extant pavement had been eked out with paths of crushed gravel, and mosaics of jagged, salvaged concrete slabs. It was handsome work, he had to admit.

In the center of the plaza stood a low platform made of one big concrete slab laid with little regard for leveling: no finesse. It looked quite brutal by contrast to the almost unnatural primness of what they’d seen of the rest of the ville. A weather-stained tarp covered the slanted upper surface.

Garrison said nothing about the slab. Ryan didn’t ask for an explanation. It didn’t seem to bear on their continued survival one way or another.

Beyond it stood a sprawling two-story-tall block of pink brick, with a gabled slate roof and a brick chimney. It had a gaudily painted wooden entryway stuck onto the front, obviously a postdark addition. The garish gold and purple paint clashed with the ville’s overall reserve as harshly as the strange slab dais in the middle of the town square.

“Baron’s palace,” Garrison said.

“Never would have guessed,” Ryan commented.

Garrison led them down a side street to a gray brick house just behind the “palace.” It was unremarkable except for black iron bars on the windows. Garrison unlocked an iron-and-mesh sec door and opened it. The barred door had a steel flap in the bottom section. A closed wooden door was inside.

“In here,” he said.

“How long?” Ryan asked.

“Till you’re sent for.”

Ryan turned the knob. The inner door was one of the old flimsy predark plywood-sandwich variety that kept the wind and some of the cold out but a sturdy child could put her fist through. Of course with the outer door that didn’t much matter.

Inside was gloomy, musty and hot. Dust motes floated in the light through the open door. Some lumpy-looking pallets had been tossed around the wooden floor.

“How about food and water?” he asked Garrison. “We haven’t eaten all day.”

“You’ll be provided for,” Garrison said.

Ryan went in, followed by the others. “You got the run of the place,” Garrison said, closing and locking the outer door. “You might want to open the windows. Get some air.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

“What now?” Mildred asked when the sec boss went away.

“The usual. Scope out the house. See if there’s any way out.”

“Think there will be?” Krysty asked.

“Hell no. But we take nothing for granted.”

They searched the house, quickly but cautiously. They weren’t going to take for granted there weren’t hidden dangers, either. Given the sort of things that wandered around a ruined city there might even be unpleasant surprises their hosts knew nothing about.

But the place was as empty as an old skull.

As they finished their quick but thorough recon, somebody rattled the sec door. They went down to find several locals carrying several gallon ceramic jugs as well as several large covered pots. Under the longblasters of a pair of hawk-eyed sec men they unlocked the outer door and passed in the jugs and jars.

“Water,” Jak said, uncapping a jug and sniffing.

“But these are empty,” Mildred said. She held up the lid of one of the squat pots as if to prove her point.

Ryan just looked at her. “Oh,” she said, and replaced the lid with exaggerated care.

“So what now?” Doc asked.

“We wait.”

“I’m worried about J.B.,” Mildred said.

“Me, too,” Ryan said. “But there’s nothing we can do about it now. I’m going to sleep.”

He stretched himself on a lumpy canvas mattress.

A CLATTREING WOKE HIM. Burly Lonny stood outside, kicking the door with a boot. He held a large covered blue metal dish.

“They sent me with some vegetable stew for you,” he said. He set the dish on the porch, then shoved a bag through the flap-covered metal hatch in the bottom. Krysty retrieved it, opened it.

“Bowls and spoons,” she said.

“Wood spoons,” Mildred said, sitting up and blinking muzzily. “So we don’t dig our way out, I guess. They’re right on top of things, these folks.”

Lonny had stood up, still holding the dish. He had a strange and ominous look in his eyes.

“You’re gonna hunt her,” he said. “They’ll offer you supplies and jack, and you’ll take it. Because you’re just coldhearts who’ll do anything for pay. I know your type!”

“Hold on,” Ryan said, standing up. “Back up a couple steps. You lost me.”

“The princess!” Lonny snapped. “You don’t care about her. What they’ll do to her. Your kind don’t care!”

He snorted a deep breath through his lump of nose, drawing his head back on his thick neck. Opening the lid of the food dish he hawked and spit a big glistening green glob into the stew. Replacing the lid, he rocked the dish from side to side, to stir the mix up right. Then he bent down and shoved the dish through the hatch.

“There you go, coldhearts,” he said. He turned and marched off.

“What that about?” Jak asked.

Ryan shook his head. “Slagger’s a few rounds short of a full mag.”

He picked up a chipped bowl and a wood spoon from where Krysty had laid them out on the floor, went to the dish. Opening the cover, he spooned himself a bowl of stew.

Mildred gagged. “You aren’t seriously going to eat that?”

Ryan sat down cross-legged on the floor with his back to the wall, facing the door.

“Had worse,” he said, and dug in.

Chapter Eight

From the heaviness of the fist banging on the steel outer door Ryan knew who he’d see when he opened his eye.

“Garrison,” he said, sitting up. His body felt as if mules had been playing kickball with it.

Around him the others roused themselves from sleep. Outside the shadows were lengthening toward afternoon. The light had gone mellow, softening the edges of things.

“Baron wants to see you,” Garrison said.

BARON SAVIJ WASN`T what any of them expected.

His room made up pretty much a big chunk of the upper story of the baronial palace. The chamber was decorated lavishly. And also in what, even by Deathlands standard, was pretty dubious taste.

The chamber was festooned with swatches and banners of purple and gold silk. Giant velvet paintings, of bare-breasted women, Elvis the King, African warriors and, in close-up, a snarling tiger’s face, hung from every wall. Candles and lanterns burned everywhere, hanging by chains from golden lamp-stands, on gold-painted stands by the walls, from a candelabrum overhead. Dominating all was a vast bed canopied in purple and gold and green satin, and hanging behind it, a giant tapestry—evidently also predark, since the figures were too precise and the colors too bright even after decades for handwork—of a black man with a ferocious Afro. He wore an abundance of gold jewelry and strode defiantly with an electric guitar in one hand and a panga not unlike Ryan’s in the other, at the head of a retinue that consisted primarily of scowling, hypermuscular thugs with shaved heads, and beautiful women.

The curtains of the big bed were parted to reveal the baron, lying with his head propped on a green satin pillow.

He had been a big man. That was obvious from his frame beneath the purple satin coverlet. From the way his sallow, mottled cheeks had fallen in it was clear he’d suffered catastrophic weight loss. He turned his hairless head right to face the newcomers and blinked gum-encrusted eyes at them.

The room stank of incense and stale piss and shit. It even made Ryan’s titanium-steel stomach restless.

A young woman in a green smock dabbed at the baron’s eyes with a cloth soaked in some sort of a solution. He waved her away feebly.

“Let me see these people,” he said in a slow, cracked voice.

Garrison and Strode had escorted the companions to see the baron of Soulardville. He blinked at them slowly. Though his complexion was mottled with greenish and yellowish bruiselike marks, Ryan guessed he had been a medium dark-skinned black man. His eyes were a dark blue, which would probably have been startlingly intense had they not been clouded and dimmed by his condition.

“You look…strong,” Baron Savij said. “Reckon…you’ll do.”

Ryan just stared. Krysty said hastily, “Do for what, Baron?”

“I want my baby back,” he said. A tear rolled down his right cheek to make a dark stain on the pillow. He stretched a clawed, discolored hand toward them. “Bring her to me. Please.”

His eyelids fell shut, his arm dropped like a dead bird. His hand dangled off the edge of the bed, palm up. The female attendant hastened to ease it back onto the coverlet beside him.

“He dead?” Jak asked. The words were horribly loud in the sudden deep silence.

Krysty shushed him fiercely. “What I say?” he protested. Doc took him gently by the arm and led him aside.

“You’d better go now,” Strode said. She looked no more than usually concerned for the health of her prize patient.

“Is he?” Ryan asked as she led them toward the stairs.

“Is he what?” the healer asked a bit impatiently.

“Dead.”

“No. Just exhausted.” She seemed minded to say more. Instead she flicked her eyes toward the sec boss, who stood gazing down at his baron with a thoughtful frown rumpling his face.

They started down heavy stairs of dark-stained wood. “Rad sickness?” Mildred asked quietly. The ville healer had assured her J.B. was resting well and she and the others would get to see him once the bosses were finished with them. Mildred seemed to have accepted the healer’s competence. She still was obviously none too pleased with their situation. But then, who was?

Lips pressed together, Strode nodded briskly. “Apparently he broke open a hidden rad pit while leading an expedition into ruins to the northwest of here. He took a substantial dose. Probably ingested some.”

“Lethal dose?” Mildred asked.

“Only time will tell. At this point some random disease could swoop in and carry him off opportunistically. Pneumonia’s a real threat. Even with scavenged antibiotics, there’s a limited amount we can do.”

“Rad death,” Jak said softly, and shivered. Not much scared Jak. But death by radiation exposure would frighten the balls off a brass statue.

“Hard way to go,” Ryan said.

“Know any good ones?” Garrison asked.

Ryan shrugged. “Easier ones and quicker ones, sure.”

“Wait,” Mildred said, stopping dead halfway down the steps. “I know the man in that tapestry. That’s Savij!”

“The first Baron Savij, yes,” Strode said. “He founded Soulardville in the days just after the bombs quit falling. He and his posse showed up one day armed to the teeth and took over.”

“I knew him,” Mildred said. “Knew of him, anyway. He was a famous gangster rapper. Unlike a lot of them he was the real deal. Authentic street thug, been shot half a dozen times, suspected in a dozen murders but somehow never convicted. Supposedly kept his posse supplied with cocaine, hookers, illegal automatic weapons, explosives and rocket launchers.”

“Sounds like our founder,” Strode said.

Frowning, Mildred shook her head. “I remember reading once that Soulard was a totally white-bread little suburb. How would a bad-ass black man like Savij take over a place like that?”

Garrison chuckled like gravel shaken in a gallon can. “Who was gonna stop him?”

They came out onto the ground floor. A young woman was lighting kerosene lanterns against evening’s impending arrival.

Two men stood on a dark brick floor near the landing. One was tall, erect in bearing, lean with just a hint of pot belly pushing out the front of a T-shirt tie-dyed in a red and orange and yellow sunburst, over which he wore an open sky-blue shirt. Sun-faded jeans and sandals completed the ensemble. He wore a three-lobed golden pendant, each lobe of which was engraved with a spiral.

Late-sun glow from the street gilded a round cheek and a head of neat dreadlocks just long enough to tie into a queue at the back of his neck. He was a middle-aged, relatively light-skinned black man with laughing eyes and a trim salt-and-pepper beard.

The shorter man was a little skinny white guy dressed in a red, green, black and gold T-shirt bearing an image of the original Savij. It had to be relatively recent scavenge by simple virtue of the fact it was intact. It was, however, filthy; Ryan, accustomed to the smells of himself and his friends after days of wandering in wilderness and ruin, felt a bit of a twinge at the sheer intensity of his body funk. He had a ratlike face, much of which was concealed, probably for the better, by big dark glasses. His hair hung over the shoulders of his shirt in tangled dreadlocks, so greasy they not only made it impossible to tell what color they might originally have been, but also actually left obvious stains when they brushed the already grimy fabric.

“I’m Brother Joseph,” the tall man said in a rich baritone voice that flowed like honey. “This is my associate, Booker.

“I am the spiritual guide of this community of seekers,” Joseph said. “I’m pleased to meet you all at last. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

“What would that be, Brother?” Krysty asked, putting some sugar in her voice. Men tended not to get suspicious when a question came out in that kind of tone from that kind of face and body. Krysty had a great many assets—mental, spiritual and physical—and she wasn’t shy about using any of them to help her friends survive.

In this case, Ryan knew, it could be important to know whether their reputations had preceded them. It happened. If they had, it might give them leverage they wouldn’t otherwise have. Conversely, if the saga of One-Eye Chills and his merry band wasn’t known here in the rotted-out corpse of St. Lou, it might just mean potential enemies could underestimate them. And whatever the sentiment of the ville as a whole, they had enemies here: burly Lonny’s bizarre behavior with their food demonstrated that.

“Why, your running battle and heroic last stand in the ruins of downtown,” Joseph said. “You would be Krysty, would you not? Our patrol’s reports scarcely do your beauty justice. Nor your obvious intelligence. And you, Mildred—”

He turned the considerable candlepower of his smile on Mildred. “Our own healer gives high marks to your field treatment of your wounded comrade. Had you not taken the actions you did, promptly and efficiently, we would not have had the opportunity to save his life.”

“Hmm,” Mildred said. But she didn’t seem quite so full of piss and vinegar as she had a moment before.

“And you are Jak, the valiant youth,” he said, turning and nodding. “And you, sir—Doc. I’m afraid our people made rather heavy weather of your full name.”

“Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, sir, at your service.”

“An honor to meet you, Doctor. You are clearly a man of education. And last, the hero-figure, the leader-from-the-wilderness. Ryan. You must be a most remarkable man.”

For once Ryan felt at a loss for words. He felt Krysty sidle against him and take his arm. “He is,” she said.

Brother Joseph beamed more brightly. “Indeed! You are all remarkable men and women. Every man and woman is a star, the oracle tells us. But now you’ll want to pay a visit to your fallen comrade. I trust you’ll forgive me this brief delay. After an afternoon of praying and meditating over what your advent might mean to this ville, I found myself dying to meet you. You’ll join us in an hour for supper, I hope?”

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