CHILD OF DARKNESS

An orphaned teen with the ability to transform into a vicious whirlwind latches on to Ryan and the companions as they travel through former North Dakota. Her deadly power seems like a boon at first, until it starts to control her. When threatened, she destroys everything in her path...including those she loves. Then a group of outcast fighters kidnaps the young woman and manipulates her—and her terrifying mutation—for their own destructive agenda. With the vortex unleashed, the companions face a tough decision: chill the orphan or perish in her violent wake.

AMERICAN NIGHTMARE

Since the nukecaust, the American dream has been reduced to a daily fight for survival. In the hellish landscape of Deathlands, few dare to dream of a better tomorrow. But Ryan Cawdor and his companions press on, driven by the need for a future less treacherous than the present.

Krysty saw blackness gather above the fallen girl

She couldn’t say where it came from. But it seemed almost as if it were being drawn out of Mariah. Like all the blackness in her tortured young soul.

Krysty wondered if her adrenaline-pumped mind was playing tricks on her, but the orange-haired coldheart standing nearby was clearly seeing it, too. She gave a strangled cry of fear, stumbling back a step. She raised her longblaster as if to ward it off.

The blackness was unquestionably spinning, though Krysty would be hard-pressed to say how she knew that. It began to drift away from Mariah toward the woman who had clubbed her down.

“Get away!” the coldheart yelled. “Back off.”

The cloud seemed to whirl faster. The woman jabbed at it with her rifle butt.

The stock sank into the cloud. And was suddenly yanked into it. The butt shattered, pieces whirling briefly in the cloud before seeming to dissolve.

The coldheart let go of the weapon. But not before her right hand was drawn into the whirlwind of shadow. She screamed.

Krysty saw blood spray, caught in the cloud like water swirling down a drain, and pink shreds of skin. The blackness sucked the coldheart woman in, tore her to pieces and consumed the fragments.

Devil’s Vortex

James Axler

It is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake.

—Frederick Douglass, 1818–1895

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 pre-dark 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

Cover

Back Cover Text

Introduction

Title Page

Quote

Legend

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 Thirty-Four

Copyright

Chapter One

“Wait—there has been a slaughter here!”

A scarf muffled Doc Tanner’s words. Each of his companions had one wrapped around his or her face to give what protection the garment could from the powder snow and dust whipped at them by the unforgiving North Plains late-winter wind.

The seven friends staggered across a bright desert of white. Ryan Cawdor had to lean hard into the bone-cutting wind to keep it from pushing him upright. The snow wasn’t falling, so far as he could tell. The mat-trans jump had delivered them to the rolling prairie of the eastern Badlands of what had been South Dakota, near the border with the former Nebraska, as near as they had been able to tell from J. B. Dix’s minisextant and Doc’s calculations.

Ryan drew his SIG Sauer P226. Doc’s warning cry had indicated no present danger. Had the old man detected an immediate threat, he would have called it out. Doc had been trawled from his time in the 1880s to the 1990s by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Doc had proved to be an uncooperative test subject, so he had been thrust one hundred years into the future to what was now known as the Deathlands. The multiple time jumps had addled his brain, and sometimes he wandered in a fog that filled his brain.

But when it came to danger to himself and his friends, he snapped back to the here and now. He had spoken very clearly in the past tense—but Ryan was not put at ease.

If people had been slaughtered, that meant coldhearts, and they might still be in the area.

“Weapons out, people,” the one-eyed man called. He knew that his companions would most likely have their blasters in hand, but he had to be sure. They were all seasoned Deathlands travelers and fighters, but everybody made mistakes. And they were all worn down by hunger, fatigue and the biting cold.

He had his six companions winged out in a vee formation: his lover, Krysty Wroth, to his right; then Ricky Morales; then J. B. Dix, the Armorer. To the left walked Doc, Mildred Wyeth and Jak Lauren. They were spread out far enough they could just keep each other in sight in the storm.

Jak, a slight, skinny albino youth, normally walked, not point, but ranging in advance of the others to scout out danger. Not today. In this nasty storm, which was worse than a thick fog because the wind-blown dust and ice particles stung the eyes and constantly threatened to clog them, Ryan wanted J.B.’s judgment and skill with a blaster, and Jak’s hunting-tiger senses guarding the rear.

That accounted for why the least likely of them all, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, had spotted something first. Although Doc looked to be pushing seventy hard—if not powering right by—in fact he was roughly the same age as Ryan in terms of years actually lived. It was his time jumps and the abuse he had suffered at the hands of twentieth-century whitecoats that had prematurely aged him and addled his mind.

“Swing left, everybody,” Ryan called. “We need to see what we might be up against—”

A man suddenly appeared, stumbling toward them blindly in the hard driving snow.

“Black cloud,” Ryan heard him mumbling. “The black cloud!”

The one-eyed man raised his handblaster. The man showed no sign of even seeing the companions, even though he was about to blunder right between him and Doc. Ryan had not kept himself alive—to say nothing of his companions—across the length and breadth of the Deathlands by taking anything for granted.

And then the shambling man clearly did see them. Ryan could actually make out his eyes going wide in the gore and filthy mask of his face.

“You mutie bastards!” he screamed. Suddenly he was raising an ax above his head with both hands. “You won’t take me alive!”

He charged.

* * *

THE GOGGLE-LIKE SHADES, with slits of polarized glass, protected Hammerhand’s eyes from the wind-lashed snow, dust and grit as he scaled the peak the Plains folk called Gray Top.

Nothing protected the rest of his massive frame. His muscle-packed six-foot-six-inch body was nude from the black topknot surmounting his side-shaved head to the soles of his feet. Susan Crain, the Crow Nation healer and medicine woman he had sought for counsel, had told him that he had to be naked to complete the vision quest.

The rugged granite rock cut into his palms and feet, but he ignored the discomfort. He was inured to hardship, from the abuse and poverty his tribe and own family had inflicted on him, growing up among the Káína people of the great Blackfoot Confederacy of the short grass plains to the north.

Of course, the nuking mushrooms I ate might be helping with that, he thought. The magic mushrooms made him hyperaware, his senses unnaturally keen. Yet they made him somehow less vulnerable to those sensations.

They also deadened fear. But he was used to fighting down the terrors that beset him. He’d done that all his life, as well.

The mountain, which took its name from the gray granite cap rock that rose above its pine-clad slopes and the surrounding Black Hills, stood near the Dead White Man Faces Mountain. It was the tallest in the Hills. It was held to possess great power.

It seemed as good a place as any to find the key to his destiny.

Hammerhand wasn’t sure he believed in all this mystic shit. Then again, he wasn’t sure he didn’t. For nuking sure he’d had to put up with the taunts and barbs of those smug bastard Absarokas in order to consult their well-known shaman.

After a generation or two of peace, the two nations, his Blackfoot Confederacy and the Crow, were back to an on-again, off-again war of mutual raiding and occasional battles. The only reason they hadn’t shot him on sight was that he was a known exile from his native Blood band, a wild child whose wickedness and ambition alike were too great to be constrained by tradition and stick-up-their-butts elders. But his judgment wasn’t trusted widely enough, even by other adolescent warriors, for him to raise his own war band and probe his inner self in any kind of way anyone on the Plains would pay attention to.

Painfully and painstakingly he made his way to the top. That had always been his strength, he reckoned: that he could act with precision or passion, as the need of the moment required. Mebbe both.

It was why he knew himself fit to rule.

The question was how.

And mebbe who. Those questions were what had brought him here: blasted out of his mind, freezing to his marrow and a hundred feet in the air up a cliff of granite made slick by blowing snow, cold enough to dangerously numb the fingers and toes that scrabbled and fought for holds every inch of the tortuous way up.

But Hammerhand persevered. He was good at that, too. That was another way he reckoned he was superior to the people who’d given him life: although they could endure almost anything, and had wizard survival skills, they had a tendency to fly off the handle at random moments. Not at something that required persistence in a physical craft—like skinning a chilled elk or even curing its hide for use in making clothing and lodges—but at anything abstract.

They didn’t have what it took to envision Empire and make it happen. They didn’t have the horizon.

Hammerhand did. That part of the vision he had. But he knew he was missing key pieces.

He could see barely past his fingertips when his arms were fully stretched out. For a moment, when through the whirling whiteness he glimpsed rugged gray with only more white beyond—just above his reach—his brain, altered as it was, couldn’t process what its eyes were showing it.

His body came to the rescue. Locked in “climb” mode, it commenced to haul his mass up the cliff again, fingers and toes seeking cracks and jutting icy gray stone. The image of the lip of the cliff resolved itself into his brain: the top!

Seeing a bright line of red and yellow halation following the outline of the rock-sky interface, Hammerhand let his mind ride shotgun as his body pulled itself onto the angled and uneven upper surface. Exercising the power of suggestion as much as his powerful will, he stood upright, bracing slightly against a wind, fierce now that it was unrestrained, that sought to bash him right back over the cliff to oblivion.

“I’m here,” he called into the storm. It seemed he could hear the individual impact of each tiny particle of snow, ice and grit as it banged against the lenses of his glasses.

He looked around and could scarcely see more than ten feet from the tip of his nose. The hilly, wooded country surrounding the peak was invisible.

And then, suddenly, it was before him: a masculine figure, as nude as he was and at least twice as tall, floating six feet above the wind-swept granite. Its every muscle was seemingly molded with great precision out of white light. The brightness of the faceless figure didn’t hurt his eyes. But the golden radiance that surrounded it dazzled him through his shades, making him blink and try to turn away.

He found that he could not.

“Hammerhand,” a voice said like thunder. “Kneel before me.”

“Who are you?” he demanded. He was determined not to let the...thing...see his fear. Even though he had the drug to deaden it, his knees were so loose he was only keeping himself upright by the force of his will.

“I am your destiny. Kneel before me.”

“I’d rather die standing!”

“It is not permitted,” the voice boomed. “Nor is disobedience. I am Fate.”

The willpower that held his knees locked shattered like glass struck with a hammer. His legs folded abruptly beneath him. It was all he could do to keep from going over backward on his buttocks.

Then, irresistibly, he felt his torso being winched upward, until he sat up straight. He could feel his muscles doing it, but not by his will, nor under his control.

“You see that resistance is futile, Hammerhand.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Only to give you that which you most desire, what you have come here to obtain, naked, freezing and electric.

“Now, hear me...”

Chapter Two

The boom of the stubby shotgun barrel beneath the longer main barrel of Doc’s gigantic LeMat revolver beat the blast of Ryan’s SIG Sauer P226 by half a heartbeat. The man was already staggered by the charge of buckshot when Ryan double-tapped him at the center of mass, which was still more shadow than apparent substance.

The .44-caliber upper barrel of Doc’s revolver spit yellow flame and crashing noise. The man’s head snapped back and he crumpled into the snow.

“Offer accepted,” Ryan said, lowering his weapon.

“Maybe we should’ve tried to keep him alive,” Mildred said as Ryan cautiously approached the fallen man. She wasn’t doing it just to be contrary—although she was perfectly capable of that. She, like Doc, had been taken out of her own time in the distant past by science. But in her case the motivation was the opposite of Doc’s: doctors had put Mildred into cryosleep when a routine abdominal operation had gone terribly wrong, hoping that she could be cured sometime in the future.

“It might have been helpful if he could’ve told us what happened here,” she continued. “And who did it.”

Ryan began to see signs of what had inspired Doc’s original call-out: ruined buildings and scattered trash on the ground beyond the man they’d chilled. Some of that trash, he saw, was bodies. Much of it appeared to be body parts.

Ryan grunted. “Abstract knowledge doesn’t load many magazines,” he said.

“I’m a big fan of not getting my skull split by an ax,” J.B. commented.

Then he frowned and stepped up to kneel by the chill, pointing the muzzle of his M-4000 shotgun skyward.

“Look at this,” he said, while Jak, who had appeared at the fringes of visibility when the blasterfire erupted, vanished back into the blowing snow. Ryan thought about warning him not to get too far from the group lest he lose sight of the rest. But then he knew how ridiculous that was. The albino would find a way to track them through a sealed-up cavern at midnight. As long as Jak lived, his companions would never have to worry about finding him. He’d find them.

Also, Ryan knew the danger in giving orders he knew might not be obeyed. The albino accepted Ryan’s leadership. But he had his own notions of how to do his job as scout. And since he was the best there was, Ryan had learned to give him his head in such matters.

Instead he allowed himself to take his eye off the surroundings, where he saw little but still-vague shapes in the blown snow anyway, to look at the man. As expected, he was dead. His remaining eye, bright blue, glared at the keening white void above.

His other, his right, was a bloody socket rimmed with semiliquid aqueous humor. He’d suffered its loss recently, along with the other wounds visible on his face and chest through his ripped-open plaid flannel shirt.

The Armorer pointed to, without touching, red-rimmed rings on his cheek and jaw. Sucker marks.

“Stickie,” Ryan muttered. “Ace on the line.”

He looked up and around. What little he could make out through the wind-blown snow and grit suggested structures that had never been much to start with but were probably worse now.

“Eyes skinned,” he commanded, straightening. “We don’t know if the muties are still around.”

“Some are,” Mildred observed, sounding grim. “The bodies I can see from here are stickies. Or stickie parts, mostly. They’re everywhere.”

“It looks as if a bomb went off in a stickie colony,” Krysty stated.

Ryan moved on from the chill. Almost at once he came close to stumbling over a lump that he quickly realized was a green stickie torso—headless, limbless, about the size of a ten-year-old norm’s body. It was partly covered with drifted powdery snow.

“Could they have been fighting?” Ricky asked warily. He’d had to make some adjustments to his outlook on muties when joining up with Ryan and his group. His homeland, Puerto Rico, was called Monster Island, not just because it was overrun with savage monsters—it was—but also because large colonies of humanoid muties, including stickies, lived side by side with the human majority in perfect amity. Whereas on the mainland mutation was considered a taint—such that even the gorgeous Krysty Wroth faced discrimination or even violence whenever it was found out that she was, though nearly perfect in face and form, a mutie.

Of course, on the mainland, stickies had earned their reputation as monsters a thousand times over.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said.

He was starting to wonder himself. Abstract knowledge might not load many blasters, it was true. Which was why he’d long since learned—the hard way—to suppress his own lively natural lust for knowledge for its own sake. Staying alive took all the brain power even a man the likes of Ryan Cawdor could bring to bear.

But this was shaping up into a mystery whose answer might well affect their survival.

“Or maybe that dude we chilled killed them all with his ax?” Mildred suggested.

Ryan grunted. “Mebbe,” he said.

“That’d be an irony,” Mildred stated pointedly. “If that guy’s reward for heroically taking out a whole colony full of stickies was for us to blast him out of his socks.”

“Spilled blood won’t go back in the body, Mildred,” Ryan said. “You of all people should know that. Anyway, you might remember he thought we were stickies and was fixing to proceed accordingly.”

“True,” she said.

As Ryan cautiously advanced among the scattered stickie bits with his blaster ready, details of the handful of buildings became apparent. Clearly this had been a farm. Like so many others, buildings seemed to have been thrown together and rudely nailed in place from whatever could be scavvied, traded for or stolen. Planks. Timber scraps. Flattened tin cans. Cracked and sun-discolored plastic sheeting. A few rare chunks of corrugated metal. Sad and sagging but no more than most to be encountered in the Deathlands. And the farm had to have been relatively prosperous, judging by the number of structures.

Ironically, their number and size suggested that this had been a prosperous location. Relatively. A marginally better style of hardscrabble life.

“Looks like a sizable group lived here,” Mildred said. “Normal people, that is.” Stickie colonies could take numerous forms—like the rubbery-skinned little humanoids themselves—from massive piles of rubbish to what looked like outsized wasps’ nests. But never as orderly as this place was.

Even now.

“Might’ve been an extended clan,” Krysty said.

Ryan had seen no sign of norms other than the man he’d helped chill. But as Krysty spoke he saw a little girl lying facedown on the ground. Snow had already half drifted over her. She was clearly dead.

Neither Ryan nor any of the others made a move to examine her more closely. Her rough smock was torn and bloodied on the back. That she’d died by violence told them what they needed to know. And despite all being hardened survivors of years in the Deathlands, none of them wanted to see more horror than they had to. Not even Ryan, and he was reckoned a hard man.

They came across other chills, adults, both men and women. All bore the telltale sign of stickie violence: the red sucker imprints on their flesh left by mutie fingertips that could peel skin from muscle and muscle from bone with their terrible adhesive power. Some bore bite wounds, as well, divots scooped from sides or limbs, throats torn out. Some varieties of stickies lacked external mouths. Others had mouths filled with needle fangs.

These were that second kind. Or had been. Ryan saw a couple more or less intact stickie chills, one with a lower face and throat obliterated by what had to have been a point-blank shotgun blast, another with an ax still embedded in its round head.

“Blasters up, and stay ready, people,” Ryan called softly to his comrades.

A beat later Jak called out from somewhere, lost in the snow-swirl, “Hear something.”

Ryan crouched, handblaster at the ready. Beside him he saw Krysty and Ricky do likewise—the redhead with her full-auto capable 9 mm Glock 18C, the youth with his old Webley revolver, rechambered for .45 ACP.

Then Jak said, “Girl crying.”

Krysty’s pale and beautiful face, which had been an ice sculpture a moment before, softened. She straightened, lowering the boxy muzzle of her blaster.

“Don’t let your guard down, lover,” Ryan growled. “We don’t know it’s not a trap.”

She cocked an incredulous brow at him. “What? A stickie crying out in a little girl’s voice to lure us in?”

“Other muties have been known to do that trick,” J.B. reminded her. “Who knows what stickies might come up with. Some of them are bastard smart.”

Krysty’s other eyebrow arched up to match the first. She nodded. “Good point. But we still need to check. Just carefully.”

“It’s not our problem anyway,” Ryan said. He was talking to the woman’s back as she moved purposefully ahead among the eerie cluster of farm buildings. She had a mind of her own—it was one reason he loved her. And she had as keen a survival sense as he did. After all, she’d met the same brutal and deadly challenges he had across their years together on the Deathlands. Some he even hadn’t, when they were split by circumstance or necessity. She knew what she was doing.

But he also felt concern that her big, soft heart might dull the edge of her wits.

At this point the only thing to do was follow. He heard a rustle and glanced over his shoulder to see J.B. slide in behind him, his M-4000 riot scattergun held slantwise before his hips in patrol position. The little man flashed him a quick grin.

Getting my back, Ryan thought. Automatically. As usual. They were all sharp-eyed and sure shots, and none of them compared to Jak Lauren in the sensory-keenness department. But Ryan just felt better when it was his best friend and right-hand man in particular who was watching their asses. Especially going into an unknown situation.

He grinned to himself. Every situation in this life is unknown, he thought. And forgetting that little fact is one of the best and quickest ways to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes.

The main structure was one story, big—half a dozen rooms or more. It had a peaked roof to shed snow as it fell. Now the wind was spooling the powdery stuff off its battered galvanized and corrugated metal in swirls and skeins, flinging it at their eyes. A screen door, hanging open and sagging, banged against the frame periodically as it got kicked by vagaries of that killing wind.

But the sobbing was coming from a much smaller side building. Sounds like a kid, Mildred mouthed to Ryan. He nodded.

Jak crouched outside, covering the door with his Colt Python revolver. The albino loved knives and preferred them over blasters. But given what had happened to the farm folk here, if there was a nasty surprise waiting for him in that shed, he wanted to be able to answer it straightaway with a bigger, louder surprise of his own.

And shed it was, Ryan judged. His first glance suggested it might be an outhouse—the cold sucked his sense of smell away, and if the farmers had had sense to lime it, it probably didn’t give off an eye-watering, knee-buckling stink except on the hottest days of a Black Hills summer. But it was too big for a one-holer and not proportioned right for two or three. The structure had to be used for storage, he thought. Mebbe tools.

The door opened outward. It hung invitingly, just a hand span ajar. As he approached, J.B. slid past him, as smooth as an eel.

“Let me,” he said with an upward tip of his shotgun’s barrel.

“Go right ahead,” Ryan said. The 12-gauge was an even bigger surprise than Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster for lurking bad things. Lots of strange predators or scavengers could follow behind a marauding stickie clan. Some of them not even muties.

Standing well clear of the doorway proper, the Armorer reached forward, gingerly grabbed hold of the door, then whipped it open. Neither a lunging feral form nor a blast of blasterfire greeted the sudden movement. Holding the M-4000 leveled from his hip, he sidestepped quickly across the doorway, left to right, staying outside. He wanted to clear the fatal funnel of the door without plunging into a completely unknown environment.

“Easy, little lady,” Ryan heard him say. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

Cautiously Ryan joined his old friend. He saw that J.B. had been right not to do the usual room-clearing drill, stepping quickly inside and then immediately sidestepping left or right out of the doorway, to make a perfect target of himself for as short a time as possible. They were in a toolshed, and the tools were in some disarray, scattered here and there. Had the Armorer driven ahead, he might’ve tangled up his feet and pitched face-foremost onto the packed-dirt floor. Or worse.

A little girl huddled inside, just visible in the gloom of the far side of the crowded little room.

* * *

“HOW’D IT GO, BOSS?” Hammerhand’s chief lieutenant asked as he strode into camp. Joe Takes-Blasters’s big broad face showed a frown of concern. “Reckoned you’d stay at the Crow camp longer.”

“No need,” Hammerhand said.

“So, you decided you didn’t need to go chasing visions after all, eh?” Mindy Farseer asked with her usual half-mocking tone of voice and one eyebrow arched.

“No. I did. I got what I wanted.”

The Blood encampment was a collection of about one hundred “lodges,” tepees of hide or canvas, yurts standing up from carts. It was the standard dwellings of Great Plains nomads. The brutal wind had subsided to a breeze that came and went, snapping their flaps occasionally like little whips. A few skinny children chased one another, sending chickens squawking from their path.

A handful of assorted battered trucks, modified to burn alcohol as fuel, were parked in the center of the camp, along with a selection of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to powerful but stripped-down choppers. Most of their transport took the form of a substantial herd of horses.

Hammerhand thought that they looked like a sorry-ass bunch of draggle-tail coldhearts, not the kind of people with whom he could build an empire.

But he meant to do just that. With them. And this morning he had received a clear and compelling vision of how to accomplish that.

It was time to kick ass.

And whatever Power it was—he didn’t know or care because the fact that it was a big and badass Power was enough—had anointed him as the chosen one to do it.

Now he had concrete goals and the beginning of a plan.

“The Crow elders are still here,” Joe said. He sounded uneasy.

He pointed with a jerk of his chin toward the group of four who stood expectantly nearby, at camp’s edge. Three men and a woman, with gray in their long braids, were wrapped in colorful blankets against the wind’s chilling touch. Their weathered faces showed strong bone structures and jutting noses, with skins the color of old leather. No doubt as a reproach to the mixed-breed Hammerhand, the Council had sent four elders to speak to him and urge his return to the fold.

As if.

After the Big Nuke, most bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had taken in numerous refugees from fried-out cities, as had many of the First Nations groups that survived the war and skydark. And as most continued to do. The Blackfoot had thrived in doing so and now were preeminent north of what had once been the US-Canada border.

But while they had accepted their share of refugees, and continued to adopt new members regardless of heritage, the stiff-necked Blood people had chosen to maintain an unusual form of discrimination within the tribe—not against mutants, but ceding social standing on the basis of supposed purity of breeding. It was a policy they termed Traditionalism. And one that younger fire-bloods, many but not all mixed race like Hammerhand, disdained as “Trad.”

He looked at them now, standing there all mock humble but really demanding his submission—whether in renaming his band, or better, disbanding it and crawling back on his belly to beg the Council for forgiveness. Arrogant pricks.

He knew in his heart what the dazzling figure from the top of Harney Peak would tell him to do. And although obedience was not in his nature, no more to glowing, floating sky people than the grubbier terrestrial kind, he would follow its words. Because that was the vision he had sought and had gained. And because he knew in its heart it was righteous.

Black Bear, the shortest and stockiest but most senior member of the group, extended the ceremonial coup stick, hooked and feathered, toward Hammerhand.

“Return with us, and become once more one with our land and blood, young man,” he said.

“It’s not too late for you, boy,” said John Tall Person, who as might be expected, was the tallest of the group. Had his back still been straight he’d have been only an inch or three shorter than Hammerhand, which made him a tall man indeed.

Hammerhand’s anger at their arrogant imperiousness was beginning to smoke. “And if I don’t?”

Deer Woman scowled. “Then we shall make you! It will be war.”

“Your answer?” demanded Crow Legs, the final member of the group. His gray hair had been braided into a sort of unicorn horn jutting from the front of his head. Hammerhand thought it made him look comical.

“My answer?” Hammerhand gave them a long, hard look.

Then he turned to his lieutenant, Joe Takes-Blasters.

“For my answer, send their hides back to the Council,” he said. “Without them inside.”

Chapter Three

Krysty’s heart melted as a whimper escaped the form lying on its side in the fetal position on the dirt floor. She felt an overpowering impulse to run to the girl and hug her.

But she fought it down. She was a seasoned campaigner, almost as much as J.B. or Ryan. She knew the girl could be bait in a trap. Or even, unlikely as it seemed, a danger in herself.

She scanned the corners of the cluttered toolshed. There was little to see but shadows. The structure seemed sturdily made, with no cracks to let even the feeble light from outside leak in.

“No danger,” Jak said, then vanished from Krysty’s side into the blowing white clouds of snow. He knew his companions could handle whatever menace a sobbing, freaked-out girl with black pigtails might pose.

“Right,” Ryan said. “Let’s move on.”

“And just leave her?” Krysty demanded.

Ryan looked at her and shrugged. He was a hard man, because he usually needed to be.

Krysty usually did not try to temper that hardness, but when the time came, she reckoned it was part of her job.

But it was J.B. who spoke up first. “I’d like an account of what happened here,” he said. “Best way I know to have a shot at keeping it from happening to us.”

Ryan bared strong white teeth, but he nodded. The little man in the scuffed leather bomber jacket, fedora and round wire-rimmed specs was the ultimate technician of survival. He was even more purely practical than Ryan himself, and when he spoke, he spoke to the point.

Taking that as all the assent she needed, Krysty holstered her Glock 18C and picked her way quickly but carefully through the disarrayed tools. She hunkered down by the girl, who wore a simple black shift with long sleeves.

“What’s your name?” she asked gently. She mostly wanted to try to pierce the other’s veil of uncontrolled emotion before doing anything like touching her. Gentle tones and innocuous words seemed the quickest way.

The girl didn’t look at her. Her eyes were screwed so tightly shut in her snow-pale face that it almost seemed as if she was resisting attempts to pry them open. But her shivering began to slow. The rhythm of her heartbroken sobbing began to break up, like the steps of a runner slowing down.

“It’s all right,” Krysty said. “My name is Krysty and I want to help you.”

“Here, now,” Ryan protested from behind her. “Let’s not go overboard with this.”

“Out of the way, Captain Sensitivity,” Mildred said brusquely. “A healer needed here.”

“But—”

“Healer working here.”

Although Jak had butted heads with Ryan a few months back, that was all in the past now. The two had discovered the hard way how much they needed each other. Same as everybody in their little crew needed everybody else. Before, during and since that time, the other member of the group to challenge Ryan’s authority was Mildred. Krysty reckoned he endured it as much to help keep himself from getting too full of himself and thinking he was infallible—which was a sure recipe to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes, triple quick. But like every one of the companions, she had a specialty. And when she or anyone of them was engaged in his or her work, Ryan knew to back off.

The way, of course, they did with him. Mostly. Krysty had to grin to herself.

“My friend Mildred is coming to help you, too,” Krysty said—fortuitously a moment before she heard the clatter of a tool inadvertently kicked by one of Mildred’s combat boot, and a suppressed curse. “You’re safe now. Why don’t you talk to me? Tell me your name.”

An eye opened. It was brown. It looked startlingly dark in that bloodless face. Krysty had to hope that trauma and terror had drained color from her skin. Otherwise she could hardly be healthy.

The eye rolled, then fixed on Krysty. The sobbing dwindled to a sniffling.

“I—I’m Mariah,” she said.

“Are you hurt, Mariah?” Mildred asked briskly, kneeling next to Krysty. She subtly shouldered the redhead a bit to the side to make room. The two were best friends. As such, Krysty knew that when she was in full-on healer mode, Mildred was as bullheaded businesslike as her man, J. B. Dix, tinkering up a busted blaster—or using one to chill a room full of stonehearts.

“Any blood? Any broken bones? Any bad pains?”

“No,” Mariah said. She moistened her lips with a pale pink tongue. “Can I have some water?”

Mildred promptly pulled a canteen from her belt. With plenty of snow on the ground here near the Black Hills, fresh water wasn’t hard to come by. Fresh chow was another thing entirely.

“Come on,” she said. “Sit up to drink it.”

She let Krysty urge the girl to uncurl her arms from their death grip on her shins. Then Mildred firmly grasped her shoulders and pulled her up to a seated position. Krysty suspected that her friend’s bedside manner, as they would have called it in predark times, would have raised some eyebrows, but no matter how abrupt the dark, stocky woman with the beaded hair plaits might be, she treated her patients far more gently than a girl like this was likely used to. It was how the world was.

Mariah took the canteen and drank thirstily, her eyes squeezed shut. Krysty noticed that she didn’t spill a drop.

After a moment Mildred eased the canteen back from the girl’s lips. “Not too much at a time, or you’ll just throw it back up again. Breathe.”

For a moment Mariah clutched at the bottle like a nursing baby at the breast. Then she dropped her hand to her lap. Her eyes focused, first on Mildred, then Krysty again. Then they swept over Ryan, J.B., Ricky and Doc, looking in from the doorway.

Jak’s friends had put themselves in position to counter whatever threats may have lurked in the toolshed. He, of course, had moved on. His business now was to secure the rest of the small farm settlement and report back to the rest.

Mariah appeared to become more in control of herself. Some color was coming back to her cheeks. Krysty still reckoned she likely was as naturally pale as the redhead was herself.

“I’m Mariah,” she said again. “What do you want from me?”

“That’s a good question,” J.B. said, scratching his neck. Evidently deciding the scared child—she looked now to Krysty to be in her early teens—offered little immediate threat, he had tipped the barrel of his combat shotgun toward the slanted roof. “I can’t really think of a thing.”

“Information,” Ryan rasped. “What happened here? And who did it to whom?”

“What do you mean?” the girl asked.

“That’s Ryan,” Krysty said. “He’s the leader of this crew. Tact isn’t his strong suit.” She and Mildred hastily introduced the others. Mariah seemed to listen attentively, nodding shyly at each in turn.

“What our fearless leader was asking was two questions at once,” Mildred explained.

Krysty saw Ryan frown a bit at that, and she flashed him a grin.

“Why don’t you tell us what happened first?” Mildred asked.

Mariah moistened her lips, then she looked down at her hands, lying in her lap like crippled white birds.

“Stickies attacked us before dawn,” she said. “The, uh, Baylah family lived here. Actually, a few families did. They were all related to one another somehow, I reckon. I never did get it straight, and no one bothered explaining it to me. Paw and Maw Baylah owned the ’stead, though, and ran the show.

“Just all at once I woke up and there was screaming everywhere. Screams of people and animals in pain. And that awful screeching the muties make.”

“Ones with mouths anyway,” J.B. said, nodding.

“You were sleeping in your dress?” Mildred asked.

“I do a lot,” the girl explained. “In case somebody decides to rouse me out in the middle of the night to do chores.”

Krysty watched her closely. If those chores included the sort of sexual favors that were sometimes demanded as the price of boarding—even of children—she wasn’t giving the fact away in her face and manner any more than in her words.

If that sort of abuse had happened, the guilty had more than likely paid by now. For what that might be worth.

“You got away?” Ryan asked.

“I was sleeping in the pantry,” she said. “They didn’t find me. At first. But when I looked out the door to see what was happening, they spotted me. They were...feasting already and across the kitchen. I ran out the door and hid in the first place I hit.”

“This shed,” Krysty said.

She nodded. “I shut the door. They started hammering on it. Dust flew all off it—I could just see by dawn light seeping in through the little window. I hoped they would get tired and go away. But they knew I was there and didn’t give up. Then the door sprang open, and I curled up in a ball like the way that you found me, closed my eyes tight and started to scream.”

From the doorway, Ricky made a strangled sound.

“Relax, kid,” Mildred told him without looking around. “We know the stickies didn’t eat her.”

“Why not?” Ryan asked.

“Ryan,” Krysty said.

He raised his eyebrows at her. “What? It’s a fair question.”

Mariah just shook her head. She still didn’t look up.

“What happened to the stickies?” Ryan asked carefully, his lone blue eye on Krysty.

Mariah shook his head.

“I don’t know. The door burst open. The wind was howling. A big bunch of snow and dust blew in. And the stink—the stickie stink, and fresh blood. And worse—”

Worse likely meaning the reek of torn-open guts, Krysty knew. She was double glad the cold wind tended to carry off the charnel smell and deadened such scent as remained.

“But the stickies didn’t come in. I waited and waited to feel their...those awful sucker fingers on me. And those teeth. But it never happened. I still didn’t open my eyes because I didn’t want to see the world anymore.”

“Hard to blame you there,” Mildred said.

“Any idea what happened to the muties?” J.B. asked.

“Why?” Mariah sounded confused. “What did? I wondered if something scared them off.”

“Something chilled them,” Ryan said. “More than that—it was like they all got blown up or chopped to pieces.”

“Never seen anything like it,” J.B. added.

“And from this outlandish collection of humankind,” Doc remarked, “that is a remarkable statement indeed.”

Mariah continued to shake her head in what Krysty took for incomprehension.

“We found a man with an ax outside,” Mildred said. “We, uh, chilled him. We had to. He thought we were stickies and came rushing at us. We found stickie blood on his ax and stickie wounds on his body after we took him down.”

“That’d be Elias,” Mariah said. “He always did have a temper on him.”

“Enough to chill an entire pack of stickies?” Mildred asked. “Enough to wipe out the whole rest of the farm?”

Mariah just shook her head. “He was big and strong. And you know how men can get when the anger comes upon them.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said.

Jak called softly from the doorway, “All chills inside. Wind dying.” No one had heard him approach. His friend Ricky started at his sudden speech, banging his head on the top of the door frame.

Ryan had been hunkered down beside Mariah, his weapons sheathed or slung, hands on the thighs of his sun-faded jeans. Now he nodded decisively and stood.

“Right,” he said. “Well, thank you kindly. That’s all we needed to know. We’ll be leaving you to it, now.”

“Ryan, we can’t just leave her,” Krysty protested.

He looked at Krysty in what seemed genuine consternation.

“It’s time to go,” he aid. “Shake the dust of this place off our boot heels.”

“But what’ll happen to her?”

“She’ll find her way. Or she won’t. She made it this far, anyhow, and that’s a thing. It’s not our problem what happens to her now, though. One way or another.”

As Krysty scowled at him, the girl abruptly launched herself at her. Blasters whipped up, but instead of attacking her, Mariah was suddenly clinging to her and sobbing. Krysty judged herself lucky she’d been on her knees; otherwise the girl, slight as she was, might’ve bowled her over backward.

“Krysty’s right,” Mildred announced as the redhead began to stroke Mariah’s head and murmur soothingly to her. “We can’t just leave her out in the middle of this god-awful wasteland.”

“But she’s been living here just fine all along,” J.B. said.

“When she had a family and a working farm around her,” Mildred shot back. “What is wrong with you, John? Where’s your compassion?”

He blinked at her through the round lenses of his specs. “Compassion?” He sounded as if the word was unfamiliar to him.

“There’s food,” the girl said, still sobbing and her face pressed sideways to Krysty’s neck. “Supplies. Powder and shot.”

“Jak,” Ryan called out. “You still out there?”

“Yeah?”

“How trashed is the place?”

“Chills everywhere,” the albino said in his customary clipped and often cryptic speech. “Chill parts, too.”

“They get around to pissing down the well?” J.B. asked. “Or tossing any chills down it for poison?”

“No,” Jak said.

“So the mutant blackguards got no chance to indulge in an orgy of wanton stickies vandalism,” Doc said.

“Before Elias put the chop on ’em,” J.B. added.

“Sounds like,” Ryan said. “Thanks. We’ll make sure to leave plenty for you. And now—”

Krysty put her arms around the girl’s thin, shaking shoulders. She was actively shivering now, not just to the timing of her sobs.

“Ryan, no,” she said.

“You know as well as I do we can’t go picking up every stray we stumble across,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”

With a final sniffle, Mariah stopped weeping, or at least stopped weeping as vigorously. The trembling subsided, too, but did not stop.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Ryan looked blank. “You mean stumbling around in the storm?” Mildred supplied helpfully.

Mariah nodded.

“Let’s say we’re new in the district,” Mildred said.

“Yeah,” Ryan said—grudgingly, because information was a trade good itself. But clearly he saw nothing to be lost by imparting a few morsels to the foundling.

“You looking for work?” Mariah asked.

“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. We could use a gig.”

Their supplies had gotten low. The stocks of food and such the girl had mentioned—and fresh water from the well—would tide them over for a spell. But they were always looking for ways to sustain themselves, and mebbe get ahead, even, for the lean times that inevitably followed.

“I know a place,” Mariah said. “A ville nearby. The baron’s always looking for help, and he ain’t triple bad, as barons go.”

“We don’t hire on as mercies,” Ryan said.

“No. Not that.” Mariah paused. “I—I can take you there.”

Ryan sighed. “We’re outvoted, J.B.,” he said. “Even if it’s just Mildred and Krysty against the rest of us.”

“I don’t mind her coming along,” Ricky said.

“Put a sock in it,” Ryan replied without heat.

“I have no objection to it,” Doc put in. “Perhaps performing the occasional humane gesture might remind us of our own humanity.”

“I don’t see how that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. “But you can come with us as far as this ville.”

Mariah let go of Krysty to spring for Ryan. She caught him around the waist in a powerful hug and pressed her cheek against his breastbone.

“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. “You can come as long as you don’t hug me anymore, understand?”

Chapter Four

“Please,” the painfully gaunt blonde woman said, falling to her knees on the short, winter-scorched Badlands grass before two glowing avatars. “I did what you told me. Now let me have my daughter back. I beg you!”

“What wretches these people are,” Dr. Oates said to Dr. Sandler over the suppressed channel. “Hardly worth the trouble to rule.”

He might have reminded his colleague that they could just as well speak aloud in this vile, cowering being’s presence for all the difference it would make. But he did not. Habit was key to discipline, in communications as in every area of life. Discipline was a goal in itself.

Especially when one’s collective goal was full-spectrum dominance over this entire timeline.

By the same mode he told her, “They can be shaped into useful vessels, into which to pour our leadership and enlightened thinking.”

“Of course, Doctor.”

Aloud he said to his supplicant, “What have you done? Report, that we may judge your performance.”

“I told him to go up Harney Peak to seek a vision. I told him to eat the magic mushrooms to put himself in the proper receptive state. I betrayed my people, because you told me that’s what I needed to do. Isn’t that enough for you?” the blonde woman asked.

“How did you betray your people?” Dr. Oates asked. “Inasmuch as your people are Absaroka, and Hammerhand a Blackfoot—and a coldheart outcast at that?”

The woman wrung her hands. “Because their trust in me encompasses the sanctity of my visions! If it were known I gave...false advice to Hammerhand, we would suffer disgrace, loss of standing in councils and even mebbe war!”

“The advice we told you to give was not false,” Dr. Sandler said. “The subject climbed the peak as you instructed him to. And there he received the vision he desired. What falsehood was there?”

“But the vision wasn’t real. It was an illusion you created. Wasn’t it?”

“What a pathetic beast,” Dr. Oates said inaudibly to the wretch. “To imagine there can be any such thing as a ‘real’ vision.”

“The credulity of our two-legged cattle has long been a mainstay of our power, Dr. Oates. Do not forget the fact.”

“I apologize, Doctor.”

“Who are you to say our powers are not those of the gods or spirits?” Dr. Sandler asked the woman. “Have we not amply displayed them to you? Did not Hammerhand experience them, for that matter?”

“If I may ask, why do you bother justifying yourself to this belly crawler, Dr. Sandler?”

He deigned to answer. “Because I cannot abide this creature not understanding her inferior status, however transient that misapprehension proves.”

And if Dr. Oates takes such sentiment as evidence of weakness on my part, he thought, that error will prove her own unfitness to serve Overproject Whisper. And be a self-correcting problem.

His colleague, wisely, chose to say no more.

Meanwhile, the woman had gone back to groveling and whining. “Please. You promised.”

“We did,” Dr. Sandler declared. “You have done as we instructed. And as we promised, we release your daughter to you now.”

On cue the silent white-coated lab techs removed the duct tape from the child’s mouth and pushed her through the portal into her cold and desolate space-time.

Dr. Sandler’s viscera twisted in disgust at the sight of the girl, with her mud-colored hair and dust-colored skin. The feeling did not come from any superstition as vulgar and ignorant as racial prejudice, but from the clear evidence it gave of the unrestricted breeding, without regard for genetics, that prevailed in the Deathlands.

The groveling woman reared back on her knees. Her green eyes went wide, then she spread her arms wide.

“Mommy!” the girl cried. She ran to her mother and threw her arms around her.

“Thank you,” Susan Crain sobbed into the juncture of her daughter’s neck and shoulder. “Thank you, thank you.”

“Go now,” he said.

“We are finished with you,” Dr. Oates added.

“I’m free?”

“Yes,” Dr. Sandler said.

Hastily the woman detached herself from her offspring enough to stand. Taking the child by the hand, she hurried down the slope of the mesa on which she had met the doctors.

Waiting until she was thoroughly out of sight, and thus splatter range, Dr. Sandler made a certain gesture. Thus activated, the bomb that had been implanted in the child’s stomach while she was under sedation went off with sufficient force to blow her mother, as well as her to bits.

“Was that truly necessary, Dr. Sandler?”

“Sentiment, Dr. Oates?”

“Not at all. Rather, practicality. Might the shaman have been of further use to us?”

“No such prospect presented itself, Doctor. Her people belong to the past now. They are retrogressive. They will join the new order our subject will establish, under our guidance and control. Or it shall exterminate them.”

“I see.”

“And now we have further duties to attend to,” Dr. Sandler said and closed the portal that opened between worlds.

* * *

“I DON’T KNOW where I was born,” Mariah said as they trudged along what looked like some kind of game path trodden by the hooves of deer and elk. The sun had come out that day long enough to melt off much of the snow on the ground. “I don’t know who my mother and father were. I don’t remember anything but a life of wandering.”

Krysty walked beside the girl. Mildred trudged behind the pair. Flat prairie stretched to her left. About half a mile to the right the land rose into badlands, rocky heights, wind-carved and striated in shades of brown and yellow. Ahead of them the Black Hills were visible as dark serrations on the horizon.

“What did you do for the Baylahs?” Mildred asked.

The girl shrugged. “Chores around the ’stead. Chopping wood, cleaning, cooking. The same as I’ve done my whole life.”

“How did they treat you?” Krysty asked.

Another shrug. “Like I was disposable, mostly. Not bad. But mostly like they couldn’t be bothered to be mean to me. Also the same as my whole life, mostly.”

She seemed to think about it a moment. She was a mighty serious-seeming little girl, Mildred thought. Even though “little” mostly meant “skinny.” Mariah seemed maybe thirteen or fourteen and wasn’t more than an inch or two shorter than Mildred, who, granted, wasn’t a tall woman.

“Not that the Baylahs were mean,” Mariah said. “Not like some. I mean, they fed me all right and didn’t hit me too much. Didn’t...try other stuff.”

Mildred grunted, softly enough that the girl couldn’t hear. She hoped. Sexual abuse of minors wasn’t all that unusual in the here and now.

Not that the life Mariah described, of being a poorly regarded and poorly compensated servant, sounded a whole lot better. Then again, it beat being an outright slave. On the other hand, keeping an extra mouth to feed could only be justified if it freed up enough time and energy among the other members of the group to generate the wherewithal to keep feeding the extra person while feeding themselves just a little bit better.

They didn’t call the country Deathlands for nothing, Mildred thought.

The girl had made herself useful in camp the previous night, gathering relatively dry brush and even making a fire without being asked. She had taken over cooking the brace of rabbits Jak had hunted and chilled with his special leaf-shaped throwing knives. She’d done a pretty good job, too.

Enough that Ryan stopped grumbling about letting her tag along.

“So you don’t know how old you are?” Ricky asked from behind Mildred.

“Not really,” Mariah said. “Like I said, I don’t remember much. Wandering. Working.”

“Don’t you get lonely?” Krysty asked.

“Compared to what?”

Mildred laughed, but then she realized the girl had spoken in her usual flat-serious tone. Maybe she hadn’t intended a joke. Maybe she was asking seriously.

Mildred felt guilty.

“Know where those stickies came from?” J.B. called to her from the tail end of their procession.

“No. I heard rumors about them around the farm. Stories about people disappearing—travelers, folks out working alone late at night or hunting. Even once or twice about them attacking a few isolated places north of there. Everybody’s scared of them—”

“Highly sensible,” Doc said from his own position behind Ricky and Ryan in front of the girl. As usual Jak was scouting the terrain ahead.

“But nobody took them none too serious as a threat to them, you know?”

“I wonder why they chose to attack when they did,” Doc asked, “and in such force?”

“Who knows why stickies do what they do?” Mildred queried.

“Nevertheless,” he said, unfazed, “it might benefit the chances of our own survival if we could obtain some insight into the workings of their minds. Dark and twisted though they are.”

“I agree with you, Doc,” Ryan said. He was carrying his Steyr Scout cradled in arms crossed across his chest. “Knowing how your enemy thinks can be half the battle or more.”

“I wish I could help you.” Mariah almost mumbled the words. She seemed to be, on the one hand, desperate to justify her accompanying the others in any way she could and, on the other, terrified by Ryan.

“Don’t mind our esteemed leader, Mr. Gruff,” Mildred told the girl. “He’s always that way before he gets his morning coffee.”

That got Mildred a glance and a perplexed look over Mariah’s shoulder, which turned to a look of near panic when the others burst out laughing. Even Ryan mustered a brief chuckle.

“When’s the last time we had real coffee, do you reckon, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

Ryan rubbed his chin.

“A few weeks for sure, the time we traded a homie blaster for a dozen old MRE packs.”

“She did report stickie attacks coming out of somewhere north of where we found her,” J.B. said. “Reckon that’s a good clue.”

“Of somewhere to stay away from,” Mildred said.

“That’s the truth,” Krysty stated.

“So you’re sure you got no idea why they attacked the Baylah farm?” Ryan asked. “Or why they wound up leaving you alone?”

“No, sir,” Mariah said.

He sighed, looking skeptical.

“If that man we shot went berserk with his ax and chilled all the stickies,” Krysty said, “that would explain why Mariah was left unharmed.”

Ryan frowned but said nothing. He grunted and turned away.

For her part, Mildred was far from sure that one man with an ax, no matter how strong and crazy he might be, could do the kind of damage and sheer amount of it they’d seen.

But she was in no mood to gratify Ryan by feeding his paranoia just now. She focused on putting one boot in front of the other.

Chapter Five

Hamarsville was a curious sight: a log palisade made out of straight, peeled tree trunks, sticking up out of a meadow nestled among pine-wooded heights on the northeast fringes of the Black Hills. The most prominent features inside the expansive wall, visible to Ryan from the brush on a ridgetop to the south and east from which the companions were scoping the ville, included a watchtower, a lot of bark-shingled roofs and prominent clouds of white steam and darker smoke arising from various chimneys.

What they were making in that stockade was apparent by a light westerly undulating breeze over the low mountain range.

“Turpentiners,” Mildred said from Ryan’s side, sniffing at the air.

“That’s right,” Mariah stated. She sounded almost eager, which even Ryan acknowledged was more emotion than she’d showed over the three days since they’d picked her up at the massacre site. “Mostly distill pine oil. Old Paw Baylah said they been at it a couple generations.”

“It is a sizable settlement,” Doc observed. “And just from what these old eyes can observe at this remove, a relatively prosperous one.”

“Yeah,” J.B. said, pushing his fedora back on his head. He was hunkered down to Ryan’s right. “Looks like it must run two hundred people. Mebbe more.”

Ryan raised his recently acquired World War II–era field glasses to his eye. It was something of an affectation for him to carry them, big and rather bulky as they were, and built specifically for the one thing he didn’t have—binocular vision—but they had triple-good optics. Besides, using the low-powered Leopold sight on his Scout longblaster to scope a place out was considered a mighty unfriendly act.

Although they were well concealed up here in the scrub—and Ryan had known better than to let sunlight reflect off the object lens of a scope to heliograph his position to potential enemies since he was a sprat—he avoided doing it on principle when there was reason to suspect the people under observation weren’t hostile.

Ryan heard a rustling sound from his left as he focused the binocs. It was Jak. The fact Ryan or any of them had heard the albino meant he had deliberately made the noise so as not to startle his friends when they were already on yellow alert, which they customarily were this close to a settlement.

“Wag coming,” the scout announced softly. “Ox-drawn. Driver and lever-gun guard.”

It was a long speech for the slight young man and one that came perilously close to delivering a second full sentence on top of his opening statement. But it was all potentially important information.

“Ace,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”

He didn’t need to be told that Jak assessed the approaching wag as posing little threat any more than he had to be told that Jak, having delivered his information, had faded instantly back into the wilds around them. Had he detected even a whiff of danger he would have said that straight off. Ryan had spent years in the employ of the enigmatic man known as the Trader, in whose company he had met J.B. He knew full well that the last thing a pair of wag drivers would be doing would be looking to start trouble. Their livelihoods—and lives—depended on avoiding as much of that commodity as they could.

The road ran to their right, along the stream that passed directly through the ville and out under the log-fort walls. The wag in question not being visible yet, Ryan went ahead and took a leisurely look over the ville.

It confirmed Doc’s and J.B.’s assessments, as well as his own: a big place, with sturdy defenses and well-built structures. It was the kind of place to attract plenty of unfriendly attention. And because it had clearly been there a spell, just the way Mariah had said, the inhabitants knew how to repel unwanted attention. When he raised his glasses to the watchtower, he saw a sentry, clearly female despite the shade the roof gave from the afternoon sun, leveling a scoped longblaster and pointing it at the approaching wag. The wagoneers likely recognized that having a bead drawn on them was just a necessary precaution.

The vehicle appeared, rolling in ruts worn in the hard earth by years of previous traffic. With less interest in commerce than he had in the back side of the moon, Jak had neglected to mention whether it was laden or not. But in fact it carried a load of crates and bags woven of some rough fabric, likely hemp, the sorts of things traders might be expected to carry.

The gate, which was also constructed of peeled logs like the surrounding walls, was drawn to the right to open the way for the wag. It rolled inside the stockade without apparent challenge or formality.

“How do they take to strangers showing up on their doorstep?” Ryan asked Mariah as he handed the binocs to J.B.

“It happens all the time,” the girl said. “Don’t cause them any fuss at all. They take in a lot of jack through their gaudy, which Baron Hamar owns, and the boarding house, which is run by his sister, Agnes.”

“What happens if their visitors misbehave?” Ryan asked.

“They usually leave their chills strung up outside the walls,” Mariah said without inflection. “As a warning to others. Till they start to smell bad anyway. Leastways, that’s what Chad Baylah said. He was the youngest, a few years older than me, and not much given to fibbing, for fear of his maw.”

J.B. halted in the act of raising the binocs to his face. He looked at Ryan, who shrugged.

“Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go see a man about a job.”

* * *

“YOU GOT PLENTY of blasters,” Baron Hamar said, running his pale blue eyes up and down the newcomers in the dusty street in front of his establishment. “Do you know how to use them?”

Though J.B. was a man not much given to trying to puzzle out another person’s feelings, he had learned across the span of his long and eventful life to pay attention to certain basics. It was hard to make it out of boyhood still breathing, especially when you were as skinny a little runt as J.B. had been, without noticing whether a person was obviously hostile.

This stocky baron did not sound overtly angry or suspicious. As for the niceties, such as how likely he was to be dissembling, J.B. left that to the others—to Ryan, who did pay more attention to that sort of thing, because he paid attention to anything that might affect their chances of survival, and to Krysty. The redhead disavowed any suggestion that her mutie powers gave her any sort of psychic insight as to what other people were thinking and feeling, but she was good at sniffing out their emotions.

“We had occasion to put them to use a few times,” Ryan said. J.B. had done his time with Trader, too, longer than Ryan had, in fact. He knew from observation that what his friend was engaging in was not self-deprecation. Rather, in the Deathlands, where swaggering braggarts were plentiful, that kind of understatement was just a good sales pitch.

Baron Hamar clearly took it as such. “Good,” he said, emphatically nodding his square head. He had close-cropped bronze hair and a well-tended beard, both liberally streaked with white. He wore a soiled apron over a simple flannel shirt and denim pants, with a blaster belt strapped over it and a Model 1911 handblaster riding in the holster, hammer back and held in by a thumb strap.

“Got use for men and women who know how to handle themselves in a fight,” he said, “you betcha.”

“We don’t do mercie work, Baron,” Ryan said. “Got to make that clear up front.”

“Oh, no, no. I’ve got a sec team, and my people can fight, too, if anyone makes trouble for us. We do business. We do not look for trouble.”

“Ace on the line,” Ryan said. “What do you need, then?”

“Come, my friends,” Hamar said. “Walk with me.”

He turned and nodded pointedly to what J.B. took to be a handful of his staff and a couple of young, gaudy sluts standing on the elevated plank walkway in front of the gaudy house. It was called Sailor’s Rest, according to a weathered board sign, obviously hand painted with some care and skill. What a sailor might find to be doing here in this thoroughly landlocked part of the world, J.B. had not a clue. He suspected resting was a good bet, though, since according to Doc they weren’t far from the spot farthest from any coast in all of North America.

The employees took their boss’s hint and vanished back inside. Hamar guided the companions west at a brisk walk along the main street toward what was clearly the turpentine distillery, from its size and appearance. Not to mention its ever-increasing smell.

“Hard times have come to this part of the Plains,” Hamar said.

“That’s not exactly breaking news,” Mildred muttered.

Ryan turned his head back toward her, ever so slightly. “Shutting up now,” Mildred said.

J.B. loved the woman, but she did have a tendency to run her mouth. It was a good thing Baron Hamar had a solid rep for being as easygoing as his manner suggested, or almost. Mariah told them that the patriarch of the Baylah clan considered it a scandal just how liberal he was. But the calluses on Baron Hamar’s strong square hands made it clear that, baron or not, he was no stranger to doing hard work.

And the condition of his knuckles told J.B. loud and clear that Hamar was also no stranger to bouncing them off the odd skull, which might have just been how he delivered gentle warnings to gaudy patrons as the step before hanging their hides out on his stockade wall to dry. Whatever the case was, even the most scandalously liberal-minded baron was still a baron and unlikely to be well disposed to getting back talk.

“We’ve got coldhearts,” Hamar said. “Of course we do. Every five, ten years, they’ve got to make a run at us. Just to learn.”

J.B. saw Ryan nod appreciatively. They had to teach some pretty tough lessons in that subject hereabouts, if the learning lasted that long among the Plains bandit bands.

The Armorer kept his eyes roving from side to side, taking in the surroundings—and the onlookers. Jak, as always when he found himself surrounded by anything that might even attract the accusation of being civilization, walked as warily as an old trading-post tomcat who stumbled into a coyote conclave.

“But we’ve got a new bunch moving in,” the baron said. “Muscling in on the other gangs. Getting bigger, stronger. Even enough to start worrying the Plains nations.”

That got J.B.’s attention. From what he knew of the area, the Native Americans could be spiky to deal with on their own. Though they generally gave grief to each other more than to any outlanders, depending on who was allied with whom and who was currently blood-feuding, none of them were the sort of people a man would care to rub the wrong way.

“Heard they roughed up Red Knife’s Arapaho crew pretty good on the Mussleshell two or three weeks ago. No pushovers, that bunch.”

They reached the end of the street. J.B. would not have minded an invitation to inspect the turpentine-distilling equipment, fragrant as it was. It looked mostly like a random collection of pipes and boilers. But it was still something that had been built and fixed with a person’s hands. As such, it caught J.B.’s interest.

But apparently Baron Hamar had just felt like stretching his legs. He stopped in front of the operation, far enough away not to interfere with workers wheeling barrows of wood chips from the water-wheel-powered grinder and such to the hoppers.

“Not just bold for coldhearts, but genuinely badass, then,” Ryan said. “Have they got a name?”

“Bloods, they call themselves.”

“Fireblast! You mean, the Blackfeet are doing this?”

That signaled that it would be an ace time for them all to turn right around and shake the dust of the whole district from their heels triple-fast. The Confederation was one of the biggest and strongest tribes. If they were making a hard move south, it meant that this whole part of the Plains was on the verge of bursting into a wildfire that could easily consume Ryan and his companions. The companions knew the area. The bands that already roved here, such as the Absaroka and the Lakota, would be looking to teach the invaders some hard lessons.

“Not the Confederacy, no,” Hamar said. “Nor the actual Blood band. Freelancers who are using the name.”

“Black dust!” J.B. was moved to say. “Real Bloods aren’t likely to cotton to that.”

“Mebbe that’s the point,” Hamar said. “Rumor says these new Bloods’ boss man is a Blood renegade, a young firebrand who calls himself Hammerhand.”

“You can just tell he’s a people person,” Mildred said under her breath. J.B. started to frown at that, but then Krysty gave a half-stifled snicker.

Ryan showed no sign he’d even heard her, although J.B. didn’t doubt he had.

“They give you any trouble yet?”

“No. It is just a matter of time, I’m sure. But we weathered such storms before. No, they haven’t even been reported within three days’ ride of here. But they’re starting to hit trade harder and harder.”

“So where do we come in?” Ryan asked.

“Do you want us to help guard your caravans as part of your sec force?” Krysty asked.

“Oh, no,” the baron said. “It’s not goods I want to deliver. It’s information!”

Chapter Six

In a single panther-like leap, Hammerhand sprang into the bed of the rebuilt pickup truck. For all his bulk he landed lightly enough that the Buffalo Mob sentry, leaning over the roll bar onto the Tacoma’s cab roof to enjoy a smoke under the cold, starry sky, was only alerted to danger when he felt the vehicle rock on its spring beneath his feet.

By then it was too late to dodge. Or even to scream.

Hammerhand felt the man’s bearded chin dig into his biceps as he wrapped an arm around the coldheart’s throat. He snatched hold of that chin with his free hand and violently torqued the sentry’s head to the right.

His thick neck snapped with a sound loud enough to turn even Hammerhand’s bowels briefly to ice water. He froze as he felt the dying bandit convulse and his nostrils filled with the rich, wet reek of his sphincter letting go in his camo pants.

Inside the circle formed by the score of power wags parked on the nighttime prairie, the Buffalo Mob’s rowdy reverie continued unabated around a dozen or so campfires. The woman playing on a harmonica with surprising skill never missed a beat. Neither did the pair of women dancing drunkenly to the tune.

Hammerhand had spent an hour crouched in the scrub nearby, scoping out his target. So had twenty of his best Bloods, split up into three teams led by himself, Joe Takes-Blasters and Mindy Farseer. It was a risk taking the whole top leadership to a single raid, but this was all a high-risk gamble for high stakes.

That was the point. Not just to score a number of power wags and start a serious upgrade on the mobility of his insurgent Plains nation, but also to do so with sufficient demon style to act as a beacon to the bold and ambitious by its very own self.

That had been part of what the Glowing Man told him. Not giving him the idea. Far from it. Telling him that the idea he had was righteous, as was his dream of establishing a Plains empire in blood and fire, and that he was destined to go for it.

And succeed.

When Hammerhand was certain no one had heard him inside the camp of more than a hundred coldhearts, not even the sentries posted in the other circled wags, he slowly lowered the chill to the pickup’s bed. As he did, he eased the slung M16 off the dead man’s back. A quick check showed a round in the chamber and a full magazine of 5.56 mm ammo in the well.

After another look toward the campfires, Hammerhand gave the corpse a quick toss, relieving him of a crumpled-up, greasy wad of local jack and a nice Cold Steel lock-back folding knife. Then he stooped, grabbed and, with a muffled grunt of effort, deadlifted the considerable weight high enough to roll over the wag bed’s wall on the dark side. Then he hunkered down again.

The Buffalo Mob, as they called themselves, had certainly been exercising diligence in securing their wags and their scarcely more valuable own personal asses. Every other wag had a guard in it, constantly casting watching eyes across the surrounding grassland for just this kind of sneak attack. At least theoretically. The chill’s slackness—going so far as to actually smoke on sentry duty, spotlighting him to any sharp-eyed watcher within hundreds of yards and any decent nose downwind—showed how little the Buffalo Mob’s sentries regarded the possibility that any prairie pirates would be bold and skillful enough to try creeping on them and seizing the precious vehicles by stealth.

But bold and skillful were the criteria Hammerhand used to pick his Bloods, even in those rough first days when he, an outcast without a clan and without a reputation, had been struggling to get by with whatever he could scrape together. He had always been picky about who he chose to ride with him—at least as picky as he could afford to be.

Of course, crazy was another trait he selected for. But that kind of fell into the general territory of bold, to his way of thinking.

And of course, those without the proper mix of boldness and skill tended to get winnowed out of the band fast. With mebbe a bit of a push from Hammerhand’s own hands. He hadn’t had to chill any of his own for stepping out of line, past the occasional feeb who turned up thinking he might challenge the big man for the role of boss cock. But before he’d got his size and strength in the middle of his teens, he’d had to rely on his wits to get his ass out of the cracks his rough, rebellious nature and smart mouth got it stuck in. Early on he’d figured out how to talk the overly bold into throwing their own stupe lives away and even how to goad the overly cautious into taking fatal risks.

And when it came to fatal risks, apparently the invading coldheart mob never reckoned on a local gang with the patience to spend ten days shadowing them and scoping out their ways and numbers before making a move.

From his left he heard a strange, soft, gobbling cry. He grinned. Joe Takes-Blasters did a piss-poor impression of a prairie grouse. Not that these tenderfeet would know the difference. Or even notice over their own noise.

The Buffalo Mob ran somewhere north of a hundred strong. Well armed, well mounted and surprisingly well fed, they had in recent weeks made a move into the North Plains west of the Misery River, seeking richer pickings than what was offered by the deeper Deathlands to the east and south, where the land was parched and pocked with deposits of still-lethal rad-dust.

But they weren’t looking to live by hunting the herds of bison that roved the prairie. Life wasn’t easy for those who lived out here—settlers, traders or nomads alike. But by the standards of the day they did pretty well.

Nor did it matter a bent shell casing to Hammerhand what their business was. They were outlanders—interlopers. Meaning they had no family or other allies in the area to concern him. More to the point: they had something he wanted.

Needed.

He slipped over the side of the wag bed, carefully holding the plundered longblaster so that neither it nor the plastic buckles on the sling would clack against the wag. Then, quietly, he opened the cab door and slipped in.

At least the Buffaloes had the sense to park their wags in a counterclockwise nose-to-circle tail, meaning the driver’s-side doors faced inward toward their fires.

A quick check by feel revealed the dangling wire bundle of the ignition. Like most wags left over from skydark these hadn’t come with keys. So the owners had set them up for quick, efficient hot-wiring.

He rolled down the left-hand window and leaned the M16 against the driver’s door with its muzzle brake pointed up. Then he settled in to wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. From the far side of the coldheart camp he heard a sudden shout of alarm cut short by a blaster shot. One or more of his raiding party had been detected. Bad luck, sure, but it was nothing that he, and his plan, hadn’t counted on. They had hoped to get away with every last wheel of the Buffalo Mob’s rolling stock in one stroke. But they were prepared to take what they could.

He quickly fired up the engine, which started right away. At least the Buffalo Mob had competent wrenches and kept their fleet ready to go.

As soon as the engine caught, he picked up the longblaster by the pistol grip, shoved it out the open window with its nylon forestock resting on the sill and triggered a burst.

He aimed deliberately low, so as not to endanger his own people on the other side of the circle. The point wasn’t to hit anybody anyway. It was to panic the coldhearts, to encourage them to keep their heads down while he and his band made their getaway with whatever wags they’d managed to snag.

Firing another short burst into the grass, he gave the pickup some gas, or at least the alcohol fuel the vehicle had been modified to run on. The wag’s deep-cleated tires dug into the grass and the vehicle started to roll. Muzzle flashes flared orange from the camp itself and points along the perimeter of parked wags. One bullet cracked through the planking fixed crudely over the busted-out rear window on Hammerhand’s side, to add a second star to the glass on the passenger side.

“That best not have been one of mine,” he said aloud.

He triggered another burst. “Eat that, you mutie fuckers!” he screamed joyously.

Behind him he was pleased to see several other wags pulling out of the circle behind him. Like him, the Blood drivers were leaving their lights off. They knew the surrounding land well enough not to need them. Or he’d know the reason why.

Laughing aloud in sheer exhilaration, he drove toward the rendezvous spot at reckless speed. Mere unseen obstacles meant nothing.

He had Destiny on his side. And more, he had a Vision.

* * *

A TERRIBLE, RINGING scream ripped Ryan Cawdor awake.

He snapped at once into full consciousness and was already in the act of rolling from his bedroll and reaching for his longblaster, which lay on a drop cloth beside it. Whatever had made that sound wasn’t human.

But it was at least as big. A 9 mm handblaster wasn’t going to be enough to deal with it.

It was their last night on the road to Duganville. Baron Hamar was paying a good amount of jack and supplies in exchange for them delivering a wax-sealed pack of documents to the baron. Both J.B. and his hero-worshipping apprentice, Ricky Morales, had begged to be allowed to winkle the papers out, claiming they could do so without breaking the seal or leaving any sign Baron Dugan or his wiliest sec men could detect. Ryan had told them no. It wouldn’t load any blasters for them that he could see. Whereas if they screwed up—unlikely as he had to admit that was, as skillful, meticulous and sneaky as the two of them were—they could get stiffed of their pay. Or worse. He had no fear they’d use those traits to try it anyway. When his word was freely given, the Armorer kept it. And the kid was too in awe of his mentor—not to mention stone terrified of Ryan—to try to pull anything on his own.

Aware and alert, Ryan rose to one knee. By habit he wrapped the loop of the sling around his left forearm to give added stability to any shooting stance he may need to assume, however rapid and ad hoc. The night was dark and clear, the sky infested with stars. The low, brushy hills they’d chosen to camp among for security, rather than the mostly flat surrounding lands, brooded dark and silent.

Dead silent. The usual night sounds, of birds and early insects, had been cut off by that scream. Even the breeze seemed to be holding its breath, and his friends, awake, alert and armed around him, made no more noise.

Beside Ryan, Krysty gave him a quick squeeze on the arm with her left hand to reassure him that she was unharmed. Her other hand held her Glock 18. But Ryan heard Mildred mutter softly, “Ricky! The kid’s on watch.”

He could hear the consternation in her outburst—soft-voiced instead of whispered, since whispers carried as well as conversation at least and attracted double the suspicion when detected. As much as Ricky exasperated her at times, he was part of this group, this family, and she cared for him.

Jak sprang up and went bounding off into the night, clutching his trench knife. He hated leaving his self-appointed duty of watching over the others at night, but Ricky was his close comrade, as the only member of the group younger than Jak.

But here, through the middle of the camp, vaulting the carefully buried remnants of their campfire, came Ricky. He clutched his Webley handblaster in one hand and his dark eyes were wide and wild. He was racing from what Ryan realized was the opposite direction the scream came from.

“Where’s Mariah?” Krysty asked softly, despite the boy’s noise.

Ryan shrugged. He wasn’t sure why the girl was still with them. It had been his full intent to drop her off at Hamarville. But somehow she was still tagging along, keeping the pace, keeping her mouth shut unless spoken to and taking on the bulk of the camp chores.

Plus Krysty seemed to be growing attached to her. Mebbe too attached. Ryan would have to speak to his flame-haired mate, who had already set off in Ricky’s noisy wake. The youthful sentry had jumped over a low bush and disappeared. Ryan could only grunt and follow her, aware that J.B. was right behind with his M-4000 ready, and Mildred and Doc were following the Armorer.

Past the bush, as Ryan knew from giving their environs a thorough recce before settling down for the night, the ground sloped quickly to a shallow, sandy-bottomed dry wash, winding down through the hills to the cultivated fields Mariah had told them they’d find near Duganville. The girl herself stood in the gully, arms held rigidly down by her sides, fists clenched.

Jak was crouched on the bank, gazing intently at the sandy bottom. As the others came down the slope, he held up a white palm to them, to stop them from coming any closer.

Krysty ran to Mariah’s side. “Are you all right, sweetie?”

Sweetie? Ryan’s mind echoed. This has definitely gone too far. Krysty had a huge heart, and he loved her for it.

But if this weird inward kid was starting to make her maternal instincts get the better of her survival ones—that could be a problem for all of them.

“I’m fine,” he heard Mariah say as he pulled up alongside her and began to scan the night and darkened landscape beneath with his lone eye.

He could not help but feel a thrill of alarm that with them all gathered there in the arroyo they were making themselves ace targets for anyone or anything ill-intentioned that happened to pop up on top of its banks. Then he spotted J.B. standing guard from atop the slope the rest of them had just rushed down like triple stupes and felt reassured. If not less stupe.

“What was it?” Mildred asked.

“A tiger,” Mariah said. She never looked up, nor did she change the near-flat, quiet tone of her voice. She might as well have been remarking that the water for their chicory-and-tree-bark coffee sub was commencing to boil.

“A tigre?” Ricky asked. He stood just up the bank from her, where his buddy Jak had stopped his forward progress. “You mean, like a mountain lion?” In American Spanish, tigre—tiger—could mean any kind of big cat, including a cougar or a jaguar, although it was way too cold up here this time of year for the latter.

“No,” she said. “Tiger tiger. Big, stripes.”

“Bengal,” Jak said. “Real tiger. See prints?”

At that positive verbal outpouring from the reticent and cryptically spoken young albino, Ryan squinted his eye harder at the sand above which Jak was hunkered. He saw them then, plain enough: tracks as big as hands with fingers splayed.

“Fireblast,” he said.

The others muttered surprised concern. He felt the tension rise as they all looked harder at their surroundings, lest the giant bastard come springing down on them. Descendants of zoo beasts released by compassionate, or perhaps foolhardy, humans in the wake of the Big Nuke, some breeding populations of big exotic cats like leopards, lions and tigers, had taken root in various parts of the Deathlands. They were nowhere common, but where they ranged, they were nowhere rare enough—the big cats were not hesitant to snack on human flesh.

“But where did the brute go?” Doc inquired. He had both his swordstick and his outsized LeMat drawn and ready. Ryan reckoned all of the companions might just be enough to heat a leaping tiger past nuke red by the time its five hundred pounds landed on one of them.

Mariah shrugged as if the question bored her. “Away.”

“‘Away’?” Mildred echoed in alarm. “Just ‘away’? Where ‘away’?” She started whipping her head left and right.

The girl just shook her head.

“Nowhere,” Jak said.

Everybody looked at him.

“You care to be more specific?” Ryan said.

Jak stared at him if he were a complete feeb, which was how Ryan had commenced to feel the moment the question left his lips. What could be more specific than “nowhere”?

Not that “nowhere” made a lick of sense.

“Mebbe you could explain that a bit more to us mere mortals, Jak,” J.B. suggested.

“Tracks come. Don’t leave.” A white hand waved his Python handblaster in a semicircle. “No tiger.”

“By the Three Kennedys, he is right,” Doc said. “An impeccable syllogism, as well.”

“Congratulations,” Mildred murmured. “You win a cookie.”

“So where did it go?” Krysty asked Mariah.

“He was just there,” the girl said. “Then he wasn’t. I don’t know where he went. He just did.”

Ryan let go of a breath he wasn’t even aware he’d been holding in a long, exasperated sigh.

“This would have to make triple more sense than it does,” he said, “to make none at all. Jak, don’t you have anything?”

“No.”

“You don’t see any sign of where it disappeared to? Mebbe like it jumped off into the bushes out of sight?”

“Looked.”

“Look again.” Ryan was on the verge of telling everybody else to keep their eyes skinned and their blasters up. Then he realized that’d be a waste of words.

Frowning resentfully at the imputation he might have missed something—especially something as large as tracks made by a leaping tiger—Jak started to turn away to make another circuit of the area where the prints led and stopped. Then he froze and looked back to the bottom of the bank. His white features were still knotted around the brows and tight round the mouth, but it was no longer a frown of anger.

It was plain puzzlement.

“There,” he said, pointing at a small fourwing saltbush sprouting right on the verge of the empty streambed.

Ryan, still unwilling to move forward and risk disturbing tracks that he couldn’t see but Jak perhaps could, hunkered down and looked hard at the bush.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Blood,” Jak said. “Fresh. Still shiny.”

Then Ryan saw it: a few dark patches spattered on the branches and skinny little leaves. He could just make it out by a glint of starlight.

“Some there.” Jak pointed to the grass across the bed. “Drops fell there.”

He pointed at three randomly spaced depressions in the sand. They were smaller than even baby ant-lion larva traps. The albino’s red eyes hadn’t missed them—they didn’t miss much—but he had dismissed them as insignificant. Before he recognized blood spill.

“Tiger blood?” Mildred asked.

It was her turn to be on the receiving end of Jak’s furrowed-brow, tight-lipped glare.

“We don’t have any way to know,” Krysty said, compassionately throwing herself on that hand grenade of pointing out the obvious for the sake of her best friend. “Seems like the best bet, though, doesn’t it?”

“Could it be from a kill?” Ricky asked.

Ryan grunted. “Could be.” He tended to take the kid for granted, even though he had proved his value to the group by saving everybody’s life several times over. It occurred to Ryan that he was the last stray orphan they’d come across. Before the strange girl.

Doesn’t mean I’m not dropping her off at the next ville, he told himself sternly.

“That’s a possibility, too,” he said. “But we need a clean sweep of the area to make sure the bastard’s gone. All together, vee formation. Me on point, Jak scouting up ahead so he won’t pout.”

“And when we’re done, double watches the rest of the night.”

Mildred scoffed.

“Ryan,” she said, “after something like this, do you honestly expect any of us will sleep?”

Chapter Seven

“Did you see the way I counted coup on that bastard coldheart?” Hammerhand was pumped and strutting back and forth between a pair of pickups parked twenty feet apart with their noses facing each other at the rendezvous spot. “I broke his nuking neck. Bang! Like that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Mindy Farseer, leaning against the other truck, said. She had boosted it and driven to this low mesa several miles from the Buffalo Mob’s camp. Two other stolen wags were already parked a little farther off. A fifth was just pulling up, a big cargo wag, well loaded from the way it rode low on its suspension. “We saw it, Randy Macho Savage.”

“Uh, it was ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage,” Joe Takes-Blasters said as he got out of the newly arrived wag and started walking over. He was literal minded and had a fondness for predark professional wrestling. He had the tattered remains of several wrestling magazines in his pack.

“I meant what I said. Like I always do.”

Hammerhand showed Mindy his teeth. “You could keep in mind the ‘Macho’ part and do something about the ‘Randy.’”

His lieutenant gave him the finger. “In your dreams.”

She was the only one who could get away with that. Just as she was the only one who could get away with calling him a “savage.” He knew she’d never put out for him, which was a slagging shame because she was a thermonuke fox. But he had to give her shit about it.

That sort of thing could not be permitted to flow only one way.

The other Blood raiders were acting more visibly excited, dancing in circles, whooping and high-fiving. Hammerhand joyously joined them.

“How many more did we get away with?” Mindy asked Joe, louder than necessary and looking at Hammerhand. A couple more wags were just pulling in.

“Not more than half,” Joe said. “Somebody blew our shit up.”

“Us or them?” Hammerhand asked, suddenly interested in how it had happened.

Joe shook his head.

“I don’t know yet. But I hope we get more skinny when the others get here.”

“If they get here,” Mindy added darkly.

But as she spoke, several more wags arrived.

“We’re it,” said a woman named Steeltongue, jumping from the bed of a Dodge Ram with several other raiders. It wasn’t exactly a traditional First Nation name, but the Bloods were all about the present. Anyway, not even Hammerhand’s home tribe, nor the rest of the Blackfoot Confederacy, really stuck to their own ancient traditions, and they hadn’t for generations.

“That’s, what, ten wags?” Joe said.

“Outstanding,” Hammerhand stated.

“Not quite half,” Mindy said sourly.

Hammerhand shrugged. “Everybody accounted for?”

“We lost Cody Blackfeather,” said Lou Shine, a lanky, dark-skinned man with long, tightly curled hair.

“How did it go down?” Hammerhand asked.

“That’s what blew up the surprise,” Lou said. “Cody ran smack into pair of coldhearts slipping off to get it on in the bed of a pickup. Dude gave a warning shout before Cody blasted him. Then the woman gave him both barrels of a sawed-off in the gut.”

“Ouch,” Joe said.

“Where’s Cody, then?” Mindy asked.

“He killed himself,” Lou told them.

“Ace,” Hammerhand said. “He acted right. Like a Blood warrior!”

Mindy wasn’t so sure. “If you say so.”

Along with the ten wags, it turned out they’d come back with six longblasters, three full-auto—including the M16 Hammerhand had liberated himself—and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, all in good shape. The Buffalo Mob apparently tended to their weapons as scrupulously as they tended to their wags.

That to Hammerhand justified his choice to move by the stealth route on this attack. He had wanted to rack up an easy strike, low casualty, for his own budding tribe, to build morale, esprit de corps, and reputation—though mostly he was concerned about the wags themselves not getting shot up.

Warriors, he could replace. Even good ones. Wags, not so much.

“This is ace on the line,” he said, walking back and forth amid his people and rubbing his hands in unaffected glee. “We win. We win!”

“But they’ve still got eleven power wags,” Mindy pointed out. “And a mess of blasters.”

“Why, then, we’ll just have to get our shit together and go back and grab the rest of the wags, won’t we?” he asked with big grin.

“How?”

“Strategy,” he said. His grin widened. “You’re good at that, right?”

She frowned, then she nodded.

“Reckon so.”

“Ace. Then let’s saddle up and get back to camp. Reckon the rest of the Buffalo Mob is swarming out looking for us, hot past nuke red, like yellow jackets from a dug-open nest. Plus we got us a lot of celebrating to do. And we have to sing Cody Blackfeather’s spirit safely to the Other Side.”

He pumped the M16 over his head and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Bloods ride!”

* * *

“WHY ARE YOU so set against her staying with us, Ryan?” Krysty asked.

“We’re not a walking orphanage,” Ryan rasped in answer to her question. He’d indulged in a shot of the baron’s personal brand of whiskey. It had roughened his voice up some, so Krysty judged it hadn’t been exactly smooth. “We’ve dropped off kids at worse places than this and never looked back.”

The bar in the Brews’n’Booze, the Duganville gaudy house owned and operated by Baron Budo Dugan, was hopping that evening. Duganville was a small ville in a low, wide, fertile valley, protected by a fence made mostly of crude planks and topped with coils of razor tape. As Hamarville had, it smelled of the product that brought it its fame, and a comfortable enough measure of prosperity to make it worthwhile guarding with that kind of a barrier, and that kind of a hard-eyed sec force mounted in watchtowers at all four corners.

But in this case it was hard liquor they made in their cookers and pipe contraptions from grain grown in the surrounding fields. As well, beer was brewed by several leading families, including the baron’s. Ricky claimed the smell made him nauseated, but even he decided it was better to spend the night beneath a roof than outside the wire with the stars, the wildlife and the ever-present possibility of coldhearts.

An old woman was banging enthusiastically on a dilapidated piano with enough verve and skill to make up for the decades that had passed since it had seen a tuning. Mostly. People were drinking and joking in a mostly good-natured way. A pair of sturdy sec officers, a shaven-headed man and a woman with a black-dyed Mohawk, standing at either end of the saloon with muscle-thick arms crossed over their chests, may have had something to do with that.

The bar was made of long planks laid across the tops of stout barrels. The tables and chairs were made of decommissioned kegs and barrels, as well. Mildred had remarked that the place reminded her of what she called a “fern bar” from her own time, but Krysty thought the reason for the furnishings was simple thrift. The rest of the party sat together at a long table, eating a not-bad meal of buffalo stew and various vegetables, with chunks of coarse bread on the side.

Mariah was sitting at the table with the others, staring into her plate as if it were a working vid screen, and ignoring Ricky’s earnest efforts to talk to her.

“Is she slowing us down that much?” Krysty challenged.

“Not a bit,” Ryan admitted.

“Is she pulling her weight?”

Ryan squinted his good eye and scratched the back of his neck beneath his shaggy black hair.

“And then some, mebbe.”

“You looking for a good time, handsome?” The gaudy slut who appeared out of nowhere to rub her hip all over Ryan’s right shoulder wasn’t bad looking. Blonde, if not naturally so, faded blue eyes and full breasts only nominally concealed by a low red bodice. She was probably just shy of thirty years but looked as if she was a decently preserved forty.

The slight slurring of her words showed she’d already been dosing herself against the hardships of her nightly shift. Krysty had to give her credit for boldness, no question. Even if her courage was the kind Baron Dugan was famous for distilling and selling.

Ryan shook his head. “I’m pretty well set up in that department,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”

The blonde made a kissy mouth at Krysty. “I see,” she said. “She’s a real firecracker, isn’t she?”

“You noticed,” Ryan said.

“How about it, Red? You good to go?”

“Thank you for the offer,” Krysty said sweetly, “but I’m well set up, too.” There was nothing insincere in her tone. She felt sympathy for the woman, who was just scrabbling to get by, like anyone in the Deathlands. And she certainly didn’t feel threatened by her.

“Both of you at once, mebbe?” the woman asked with desperation just starting to tinge her voice. “You’re both good looking. Better than my usual run of customer by a long shot. Give you a two-for-one special?”

“Sorry,” Krysty said. “But we’ve got business to attend to right now. So, if you’ll excuse us—”

Still the woman didn’t move off. Krysty twitched her red hair, which was hanging unbound to her shoulders. Just a little.

The woman blinked, flashed a nervous smile and quickly left.

Ryan raised an eyebrow. Krysty read his thoughts loud and clear: Aren’t you running a risk, flashing your mutie hair like that?

She smiled sadly and shook her head. “She’s tipsy enough to doubt her own eyes,” she said. “And she knows nobody would believe her anyway.”

It was a harsh reality that Krysty was none too enamored of. But she was alive precisely because she always made a point to recognize reality and adjust her wishes and desires accordingly. And this wasn’t the first time she’d made use of a tool she’d been born with.

“So what’s the problem with letting Mariah come along?” she asked him.

“Why do you care so much about her?”

“Honestly? I don’t rightly know. I could say she reminds me of me, somehow. But that’d be double strange, since just to start with, I was never that shy or quiet.”

“You can say that again.”

She arched a brow at him. “If you want to spend some quality time with that blonde woman, all you have to do is ask.”

“Ouch. I deserved that.”

“You did. So what’s wrong with Mariah accompanying us?”

“It’s not safe for her to be with us.”

“Where is?”

He sighed. “Come on, Krysty. You’re being obtuse. Our lifestyle leads us into more killing scrapes in a month than the average sodbuster out on the Plains sees in a hard lifetime.”

“You might underestimate the dangers of farm life.”

“Mebbe. Point still stands.”

“It does.”

She thought about it a moment. She hated being at odds with her life mate. Especially since, in the end, she willingly placed her life and survival in his hands on a daily basis.

But if he’d wanted a meek and mild little helpmate, their track was littered with potential applicants for the job. He’d picked her, which meant he wanted what she had to give. Her fire and her honesty were two of those things.

“As I say, I can’t fully account for why I feel so drawn to her. Mebbe it’s my maternal instincts kicking in late. Mebbe it’s just that...it takes a toll, you know? Having to abandon innocence to its fate time and again. When we don’t go and trash it ourselves. Because it means surviving for another day of—surviving.”

“I know that. I wish I had more to offer you. And the others. But the best I’ve got is, if we don’t survive the next minute, the next hour doesn’t matter a spent shell casing. When you’re on the last train west, all bets are off.”

For a moment they sat in silence. Something about their manner kept the rest of the gaudy-house staff and patrons steering well clear of them. Even the freckle-faced boy who’d brought them their now-neglected drinks.

She reached out and patted his hand.

“I know you do your best, lover,” she said. “And no one else could do half as well. Just promise me that we’re looking for something better.”

His winter-sky eye fixed unwaveringly on hers.

“You know I can’t promise happily-ever-after, Krysty.”

“You can’t promise a comet won’t land on top of us either. Promise me that we’re still looking.”

He sighed again.

“There’s got to be more than this, Krysty, something better that’s staying just out of reach. If it comes our way, I wouldn’t say no.”

“Why are you really so reluctant to let her come along with us, lover?”

Ryan rubbed his chin. Even over the tinkling piano and loud gaudy joviality, she could hear the bristles rasp.

“I can’t really put my finger on it,” he said. “There’s just something...weird about her, you know?”

For a moment she gazed at him with her emerald eyes. She knew what kind of a bewitching effect they had on him.

She gave her hair another twitch. Ever so slightly.

He laughed. “Point taken. I should know better than to try to get one past you, Krysty.”

“You know,” she said, sipping her beer, “you really should.”

Ryan looked around. Their friends seemed occupied and as safe here and now as they ever were anywhere.

“You know,” he said, “with what we got paid for that job from Hamarville, and what Baron Dugan’s giving us for this next gig, we could spring for a private room, just for you and me. What do you say we go check it out?”

A third of her beer remained in her mug. She tossed it back in a single swallow. Then she wiped her mouth, smiled and set the mug down with a decisive thump.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said, rising to her feet.

Chapter Eight

The companions hadn’t traveled more than half a mile down the road that led east from Duganville, between broad fields with workers steering mule-drawn plows, before Krysty stopped dead and said, “Something very bad is about to begin.”

The words sent a jolt of alarm blasting through Ryan’s guts and tingling down the nerves of his arms and legs. None of his people were prone to crying wolf; Krysty had an advantage.

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