Chapter Five
As Ryan and the others walked through the shantytown on their way to the gaudy strip, they drew a small crowd of children. Half-naked and caked with filth, the young of Virtue Lake pressed in around them. The expressions on their tear-streaked faces were heartrending. Each held one hand open and outstretched, and with the other pointed desperately at his or her open mouth.
Ryan caught one kid trying to steal his panga, but not before the light-fingered little crook had it pulled halfway out of its leg sheath. “Wait a minute!” he said, catching the boy by the wrist and giving it a firm squeeze. “You don’t want to be touching that unless I say so.”
“Gimme food,” the boy demanded, making the dirty fingers-to-mouth gesture. The look in his eyes was as hard as flint. He was no more than ten or eleven.
“Got no food,” Ryan told him.
“Gimme token, then.”
J.B. laughed out loud. “What can a snot-nose squirt like you do with a gaudy token?” he said.
“Same as you, Goggle Eyes. Brew and screw.”
The companions exchanged dark looks.
“Catch us on the way out of the ville,” Ryan told the boy. “We’ll have some food for you and your friends.”
The child studied his face. “You’re just tryin’ to get rid of us so you can go get shit-faced.”
“Yeah, that’s right, but I’m not kidding about the food. I wouldn’t joke about something like that.”
After a brief conference, the pack of children parted and let them pass.
“For a coldheart mean son of a bitch,” Hun said as they walked on, “you got a hell of a soft streak, Ryan.”
“He’s a regular Santy Claus,” Sam said with a giggle.
As they neared the double row of gaudies, Ryan tossed the bag of tokens in the air and caught it with the same hand. “We might as well start at this end of the line and work our way to the other,” he said. Then he looked at Trader’s war captain and added, “That is, unless Poet’s worked up a safer strategy for tackling the sluts of Virtue Lake.”
The older man was used to Ryan riding him hard at every opportunity, so he didn’t stiffen at the gibe, but his eyes flashed a warning. As Poet opened his mouth to reply in kind, a flurry of blasterfire broke out from the mall to their left. Two heavy-caliber shots rang out, followed by four lighter-sounding cracks. The crowd milling in front of the strip mall immediately took to its heels, spreading out over the parking lot.
Ryan saw two guys facing each other on their knees under the facade’s long portico. Their blasters hung limply in their fingers. Both, it seemed, had been mortally wounded in the close-range exchange. After a few seconds of hard breathing, and hard bleeding, they slumped over onto their sides on the concrete. Someone cheered, then the crowd swarmed in, stripping the still-kicking corpses of their few valuables.
“Stick together,” Poet reminded the others as they crossed to the other side of the street. “And watch each other’s backs.”
Under the circumstances, Ryan considered the warning unnecessary and annoying.
Four RVs were parked in front of the row of gaudies, all of them painted bright pink, all of them without tires and wheels, sitting on the asphalt on their bare axles. They were immobile mobile whorehouses. Through the uncurtained side windows, Ryan could see a few naked sluts parading back and forth, offering the same delights as the permanent establishments, but at cut-rate prices.
One of the women turned her bare backside to him, pressed it to the inside of the windowpane and bent over.
“Would you look at that!” Hun said as she paused to take in the goods on display. “Hey, Sam, I think I’m in love.”
“You don’t want to go in there, pilgrims,” said a sallow-faced hawker standing twenty feet away, in front of the open door to the Very Best Dry Cleaners. He was dressed in a long khaki duster and holed sneakers.
“And why’s that?” Hun asked him.
“For one thing, them cheapish sluts’ll rob you blind. For another, they’ll put an itch on you that won’t never go away. But the real reason to give them a miss is they got no floor show.”
Raucous live music blared from the open entry way, which was blocked, as were the windows, by heavy black fabric curtains. Peals of coarse male laughter erupted from inside.
“Come on in, pilgrims. There’s no cover charge and no minimum. You’ll have the time of your lives, I guar-an-tee it!”
Just then a customer of the gaudy came stumbling out from between the velvet curtains. Gasping for breath, eyes as big as saucers, a frozen grin on face, he was clearly stoned on jolt. He lurched for the nearest concrete pillar, then wrapped his arms around it like it was a life preserver.
“See what I mean?” the hawker said. “Nothing but fun, fun, fun.”
“Got to admit,” J.B. said to Ryan, “I’m curious about the entertainment.”
So was Ryan. He brushed the curtain aside and entered. He was struck at once by the acrid smell of spilled liquor and old cigar butts. The clusters of tables and chairs were deserted, except for a dozen or so bored-looking sluts dressed in tattered and grease-stained negligees. All of the paying customers were packed in close to the stage at the far end of the room.
The band consisted of a snare drum and trumpet, played by bare-breasted female musicians. They kept repeating the same syncopated two-bar riff while on the stage, a grossly fat woman danced naked in the light of gas lanterns suspended from the ceiling. She had a gargantuan belly, huge, pendulous breasts and enormous buttocks and thighs. Her body was covered, head to foot, with a fine white powder that looked like bread flour. She wore the long coils of her thick brown hair piled up on top of her head, but a few stray wisps had fallen loose. As she stomped and shimmied along the front edge of the stage, her mounds of flesh shuddered, and the white powder drifted onto the mirrored floor beneath her feet.
“Dark night!” J.B. breathed.
“Whole lot of woman there,” Hun said.
“Enough to make three, mebbe four normal-sized girls,” Samantha agreed.
The drunken, all-male crowd cheered and catcalled as the dancer did a hip-rolling 360-degree turn that showed off everything she had.
“Come on, Big Dumpling,” one of the men shouted, “you know what we want.”
“Yeah,” someone else called out, “give it up, Big Dumpling.”
There were more cheers and whistles.
Holding her arms out wide, her elbows draped with sagging masses of fat, the entertainer threw back her head and let loose with a strong, throaty tenor. “I’m so light and fluffy,” she sang to the snare drum’s beat, “so tender, tasty sweet, that you’ll praise the Lord Bejesus, there’s lots of me to eat
” Facing front again, she gripped her doughy right breast and lifted it to her mouth. Sweat was starting to wash away the dusting of flour in places. From under her raised breast, rivulets ran down over the vastness of her belly. As she continued to dance, she began to kiss and lick her own nipple. Which, as the flour disappeared under the lashing of her tongue, appeared as an enormous, carmine red bull’s-eye.
The crowd went wild.
“Talented lady,” was Hun’s dead serious comment. “Wonder what else she can do?”
“I think we’re about to find out,” Sam said.
The entertainer stepped down from the stage and started wending her way through the whooping, hollering audience. The spectators soon had their hands and faces dusted with white as, one by one, the dancer gripped their ears and pulled their heads into her bosom and thighs. The men emerged from the brief embrace gasping for breath and blinking flour.
“These guys are either deprived, depraved or delirious,” Poet stated.
“I’ve seen enough,” Ryan said. “I need a drink. Let’s sit down.”
They took a table against the wall. A pair of sluts trooped over at once, and began throwing out their best lewd poses in the hopes of drumming up some business.
“Just bring us three jugs of your best ‘shine,” J.B. told them.
“And a gallon of suds for chasers.” Hun added.
“That’ll be fourteen zealies,” the taller of the two sluts said. “Up front.”
Ryan spilled the metal tokens onto the tabletop. The bar girls snatched them up, then scuttled over to the service window set in the wall. They passed the tokens through the window’s barred grate and waited there for the barman to fill the order.
Meanwhile, the crowd was getting wilder and wilder, chanting “Dumpling! Dumpling!” to the insistent beat of snare and trumpet. A bunch of the drunks hoisted the huge woman into the air and started passing her around the room over their heads while she squealed and kicked.
When the bar girls returned with their refreshments, Sam asked the tall one, “Do they ever drop her?”
“Yeah, sometimes they do,” the gaudy said. “But she usually falls on top of them. Customers the only ones get hurt.”
Then the bar girl looked at each of the men in turn, one hand resting on a cocked hip, the fingers of the other one dipping so far down into the front of her Gstring that it looked like she was trying to scratch the small of her back. “Get you boys anything else?” she asked.
Poet shook his head emphatically.
“Forget it,” J.B. said.
“Then how about the girls?”
“Mebbe later,” Hun said, shooing her out of the way. Big Dumpling was trapped in the grasp of a group of ten men, obviously a crew from the practiced way they worked together. The men held Big Dumpling up over their heads, but they didn’t pass her on. They were led by a tall coldheart with a shaved skull. He had a coiled snake, a cobra with its hood spread, branded into back of his head. The red, raised, permanent welt was a popular method of tattooing in Deathlands.
“Let’s splat the hog bitch,” the tall one said. “Come on! One, two, three!”
With a tremendous grunt, all ten of them tossed her up in the air, trying to hit the ceiling with her.
The huge, doughy body flew up, and with a resounding thud smacked the sprayed-on predark ceiling, then dropped back. The men caught her, staggering under the falling weight.
“Stop! Stop!” Big Dumpling moaned.
When a few customers who were standing close to the action tried to make the men do just that, a pair of the crew stepped out and made motions as if to draw their handblasters. The customers backed up in a hurry, their own hands raised, apologizing.
“Again, harder!” the tattooed man said. “Mebbe we can make her stick up there. Like a big white loogee.”
“No, please!” Big Dumpling cried as the men prepared to launch her.
“One, two, three!”
Big Dumpling smashed into the ceiling. The impact shook the whole room, and there was blood on her face, her knees, her elbows, as she dropped into their waiting arms.
“Where’s a fucking sec man when you need one?” Sam complained.
“Probably sleepin’ in some parked wag,” Hun said.
“What’s the big deal?” J.B. asked.
“If they keep that up, they’re going to chill her,” Hun said.
“So what’s your point?” J.B. followed a swig of white lightning with a long swallow of room-temperature beer from a plastic jug.
“So, I liked her singing,” Hun said, “and I ain’t going to let her die for nothing.”
Before Ryan could stop her, the green-haired woman rose from her seat, swept up her 10-gauge double-barreled shotgun from against the wall and fired once from the hip. A tongue of flame a yard long roared from the muzzle. Double-aught buckshot ripped a jagged, two-foot-wide hole in the wall opposite. The blast’s concussion made bits of ceiling rain to the floor.
At the warning shot, everything stoppedthe music, the yelling, the fat woman-tossing.
Big Dumpling slipped out of the grasp of the crew and landed on the floor with a soft thud.
There was nothing left to do but back Hun’s play. Ryan’s Blackhawk cleared hip leather in a blur, and as it did, he thumbed back the single-action hammer. Likewise, J.B.’s Browning Hi-Power Mark 2 came up, as did Poet’s CAR-15 and Sam’s 9 mm H & K P-7.
The branded man was irate at the interruption, practically spitting mad. “Are you bastards triplecrazy ? All we was doin’ was just havin’ a l’il fun
” When his eyes locked on to Ryan’s face, they widened in recognition.
Ryan had crossed paths with this man before, before the shaved head, before the snake tattoo. Ryan knew him as a crew leader for Levi Shabazz, a trader of deservedly poor reputation.
“I really like your new snake brand, Vernel,” Ryan said. “But you should have put it on the front side of your head. It would’ve improved your looks.”
A smile spread over the cobra man’s lips. “No call for you to haul out all them blasters,” he said to Ryan, showing off his empty hands. He wore a blue-steel autoblaster in a cross-draw rig on his left hip. The hammer was locked back in ready-to-fire position.
The others in his crew raised their hands, as well. “We don’t want no trouble,” Vernel said. “No real harm been done here. Just funnin’ with the lady. All part of the show, and the show’s over. No need to do any more shootin’.”
Ryan didn’t like the look in the man’s eyes. A laughing look. As he sized Vernel up, he saw similar branding marks on both his arms, matching snake bodies wriggling down from his elbows, hooded heads fanned out on the backs of his hands. Ryan had the bastard dead to rights. He knew he’d be doing the world a favor by pumping a Magnum slug into Vernel’s guts, then pulling up a chair to watch him die. But Trader had said to play it close to the vest. No chilling unless lives were at stake. And Trader was the boss. Ryan dropped the Ruger’s hammer to half-cock.
“If you don’t want trouble, you and your crew better leave now,” Cawdor said.
“That’s fine with me,” Vernel said with a shrug. “We’re going.”
Ryan and the others tracked the men with their blasters until they’d all slipped out through the curtained doorway.
Over by the stage, Big Dumpling required assistance from members of the audience to regain her feet. The blasterfire and subsequent standoff had cast a pall over the gaudy’s festivities. The drummer and trumpet player started up the music again, but their enthusiasm was gone. Instead of resuming her act, Big Dumpling limped over to the table where Ryan and the others stood. She didn’t bother to conceal her nakedness.
“I ‘predate what you just did for me,” she said. Trickles of blood from a lip cut dripped over her numerous chins. “Those men of Shabazz’s are triple mean, and they don’t like being whupped in public. I’m afraid you all put yourselves in a world of danger on account of me. If there’s anything I can ever do to repay you,” she said, looking meaningfully at Ryan with huge doe eyes, “anything at all
“
“Thanks for the offer,” he replied, “but we’ve got to be on our way.”
J.B., Sam and Hun picked up the ‘shine bottles and the beer jug.
“Y’all come back,” Big Dumpling said to their backs. “Come back real soon, now.”
“What’s wrong?” the hawker asked as they filed out through the doorway, blasters at the ready. He stood well to one side of the entrance, out of the potential line of fire.
“Floor show got a little heavy for us,” J.B. said.
“Didn’t you like Big Dumpling? Everybody likes Big Dumpling.”
“You mean, everybody licks Big Dumpling,” Hun said.
“She’s very generous with her person,” the hawker agreed.
“Uh, Poet, Ryan
” J.B. said.
“I see them.” Ryan answered.
The tattooed man and his pals were loitering around the front of the next gaudy. A couple of them already had their blasters out, holding them half-hidden along the outside of their thighs. The crew leader looked over and gave Ryan that nasty smirk again.
“Too late to cross the street,” Poet said.
“Not unless we want to get shot up the backside,” Ryan stated.
“They’ve regrouped out here,” the war captain said. “You can bet they have a plan by now. Going to try and chill us for sure.”
“We got to face them down, or blow them down.” Hun said, the centers of her cheeks starting to flush with excitement. She cracked the breech of shotgun, pried out the empty hull with her thumbnail and inserted another high-brass-buckshot load. As she snapped the action shut, she added, “Me, I vote for blow them down.”
Which was no surprise to anybody. Hunaker always voted that way. Sometimes Ryan thought the chilling got her off. Poet turned to Ryan, but he didn’t speak. The look on his weather-seamed face said it all. It said, “You’re faster, you’re stronger. This one’s yours to call.” Ryan cracked big smile and nodded.
“Then, let’s fucking well do it,” he said.
As they advanced, the refinery workers standing under the portico sensed the impending butting of heads and scooted out of the way. Those turned to statuary by drink and jolt were helped to one side by friends who could still move.
Ryan stopped about ten feet from Vernel. “You’re in my way,” he said.
“Yeah, I suppose I am.”
“Move your ass, or lose it.”
The tattooed man shifted his weight to the balls of his feet. His right hand didn’t move for the pistol butt, but his fingertips lightly brushed together, as he anticipated the grab.
“Don’t think I like your tone of voice,” Vernel said. “Seems kind of unfriendly.”
“Then I guess you aren’t near as triple dim as you look.”
J.B., Poet, Sam and Hun fanned out on either side of Ryan, giving themselves clear firing lanes.
“Mebbe you can’t count, One-Eye,” Vernel taunted. “We got ten blasters to your five.”
Ryan scanned the other man’s crew. Because they thought they had the odds on their side, they were all itching for a fight. The one-eyed man laughed out loud, an unpleasant, grating sound. “Take a closer look,” he told the tattooed man. “Half your people don’t figure in. They’re pissing themselves already. They know they’re going to die hard. They’re thinking about turning tail.”
When Vernel took a half step closer, Ryan saw the wrinkles etched deeply in his forehead. Wrinkles that hadn’t been there a second ago. And he knew he had gotten to the bastard. The muscles of the human face were the ultimate tell, the true indicator of an opponent’s state of mind and heart. And like Trader always said, “The man with a frown can be taken down.”
“I’ll bet that smart mouth of yours is what cost you your eyeball,” Vernel wisecracked. “You must be a triple stupe, Ryan, because it didn’t teach you nothing at all. How’s about I take that other peeper of yours for a prize? Leave you alive, stumbling around with a tin cup the rest of your days.”
The rest of Shabazz’s crew smiled and nodded. The two men with blasters already drawn seemed to relax. Their shoulders slumped ever so slightly. They weren’t fooling anybody. Ryan knew they were going to open fire as soon as their leader took another step closer. Another step would bring Vernel well within arm’s reach and allow him to block or deflect Ryan’s draw.
The one-eyed man didn’t wait for that to happen. As he sidestepped the tattooed guy, the Blackhawk was already coming up in his hand. Its long barrel was slow on the swing, or he wouldn’t have had to move to make his play.
At the same instant the Blackhawk’s hammer locked back, Ryan heard the hard whack of a 9mm round and felt the bullet whiz past his ear. Then he acquired the target, and the big Ruger boomed and bucked in his grip. The Magnum slug hit the shooter in the left leg well above the knee, shattering four inches of thighbone. It exited the other side and passed through the fleshy part of his right thigh, as well. The crewman dropped his blaster and spun to the ground, eyes bulging, mouth gaping in a silent, breathless scream.
Ryan grabbed Vernel by the shoulder and turned him, locking a forearm across the front of his throat. Flesh sizzled as he jammed the blazing-hot muzzle of the Blackhawk against the man’s temple and recocked the hammer.
Vernel’s crew went for their blasters as Poet, Sam, Hun and J.B. swung up their weapons. It was a standoff.
“Tell your boys to back down,” Ryan ordered the tattooed man, “or I’m going to turn your skull into a soup bowl.”
Vernel opened his mouth, but before he could speak there was a screech of brakes as a familiar-looking wag skidded into the parking lot, further scattering the crowd of spectators. The fat sec man pulled himself out of the driver’s seat. Three more sec men exited the wag and, with their handblasters drawn, took up firing positions behind the wag’s fenders and hood.
“You with the eye patch,” the fat sec man said over the wag’s roof, his KG-99 braced in both hands, “let Vernel go, or we’ll chill you dead.”
“Looks like I’m rescued, Ryan,” the tattooed man said over his shoulder, “and your ass is nuked.”
A lesser man might have tried to explain the circumstances to the rightful authorities, might have claimed that the other group had drawn and fired first, that the shooting had been in self defense. Ryan was no whiner. When someone pushed him, he pushed back, harder.
“It figures that you sec men would side with these scum-suckers,” Ryan growled as he swung around the Blackhawk’s muzzle and took careful aim at the fat man’s forehead. “If you think that sheet metal is going to stop a steel-jacketed .357 Mag, you got a big surprise coming.”
“I’m not going to tell you again,” the fat man warned him. “Put down your blasters and step back.”
“No,” Ryan said. “You put down yours.”
Over the sights of the Ruger, he could see the sweat popping out on the sides of the sec man’s face, rolling like raindrops down his steeply sloping cheeks. “I’m going to count to five,” Ryan said in a voice without emotion, “then I’m going to open fire.” He paused for a beat, then said, “One
“
Actually Ryan intended to start shooting on the count of two. His finger was already tightening on the trigger, taking up the scant bit of slack to the break point. He knew his companions were doing the same thing. It was a trick Poet had come up with for head-to-head situations just like this. Nobody expected the blasting to start on two.
Maybe on three or four, but never on two.
“Hold it!” a familiar gruff voice shouted.
Trader burst through the edge of the crowd, the pistol grip of his Armalite in his right fist, its barrel leveled at waist height. “Everybody, hold your fire!” he told the sec men. “You know god damned well me and my crew’s got business here. Important business with the baron.”
Out of fear, or stubbornness, or some of both, the fat man held his position behind the wag.
Trader shouted at the back of his head. “If you want to cost Zeal some biggish profits, go ahead and start shooting. Otherwise, put away the blasters.”
The sec men glanced at one another, then at their chief. Finally the fat man relented. “Vernel, call off your rad-blasted dogs,” he said as he lowered his weapon. “I mean right now. If Trader decides to call off the deal on account of this, Zeal will nail my head to his chimney. He’ll do the same for you, too.”
Over Vernel’s shoulder, Ryan could see the look on Trader’s face as he stared down the tattooed man. Reading the murderous intent in his boss’s eyes, and not wanting to get tagged by a through-and-through 5.56 mm tumbler, Ryan abruptly shoved Vernel away from him.
But as much as he seemed to want to, Trader didn’t open fire. There was still a profit to be made.
Vernel straightened and in a slightly shaken voice told the others, “The fun’s over, put away your blasters.”
Trader pointed at the wounded man on the ground with his Armalite. “Best get tourniquets on those legs or he’s going to bleed out on you.”
“Yeah, see to it,” Vernel said to his men.
Then to Ryan, he added, “Some other time, One-Eye
“
“Sooner the better.”
Vernel snorted, then pushed past his crew and vanished into the milling crowd.
Trader and the others didn’t stick around.
As they backed away from the scene, J.B. said, “We cut that pretty fine.”
“Too damned fine,” Poet grumbled.
“Man!” Hun exclaimed, her eyes wide with excitement, nostrils dilated, full-blown roses in her cheeks. “Was I ever pumped to cut loose on those thieving, dickless bastards! Kaaaa-boom! Kaaaa-boom! Check this out
” She held up her trigger hand for them all to see. It was trembling violently.
“Better start breathing through your nose,” Trader advised her. He nodded for J.B. to pass her the ‘shine. They stopped while she took a long pull on the jug.
Ryan angled his body so Poet couldn’t hear what he had to say to Trader. “Levi Shabazz must be somewhere close by,” he said. “He never travels without his crew. Not a good sign for us.”
“Definitely not a good sign,” Trader agreed. “I didn’t catch sight of Shabazz up at Zeal’s compound.” The tiniest flicker of a smile crossed his battle-hardened face. “But then again, I wasn’t turning over any rocks.”