Chapter Three

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RYAN STOOD LOOKING AT THE OBJECT clinging to the outside of the windshield for only as long as it took to blink an eye, but thought and images torrented through his mind.

The window was a goner; nothing could be done about it. If he had armor-piercing rounds in his mag he could blast the window, punch the bomb away. But that would still open them up to the outside, and in any case he didn’t have APs up the spout and by the time he banged a fresh mag in, that limpet would have blown and they’d be holed anyhow.

He wondered for an instant whether Ches, one of the newer drivers, only recruited in the past twelve months and lacking the experience of some of the older guys, had, as soon as the alarm had erupted, stabbed a forefinger at one very special button on his console beneath the war wag’s massive wheel—and then he bawled, “Back!”

The Trader plunged past him, Ches and Cohn tumbling after. Ryan’s men were already diving for cover. Ryan jumped for the bunk room passage, hit the deck, found himself lying beside Ches.

“The E-button!” he shouted—but the driver’s reply was lost in the roar of sound from up front. Flame bloomed, the shock wave sending debris hurtling through the air.

Ryan brushed glass shards off himself as he scrambled to his feet and ran for the front of the cabin.

The screen was out except for thick, jagged ridges of glass poking up through swirling black smoke. The metal surround near where the limpet had been placed was sagging up top, buckled below. Two of the team began spraying foam at the flames, killing them, and Cohn was already at his radio again, throat mike in place, his fingers working switches.

“She’s okay. We’re still on line, still connected.”

Ryan crouched in the dying smoke, squeezing short lead-bursts out into the night and downward, at a high angle, trying to clean off any stickies that might still be hanging to the war wag’s snout, although he guessed that whoever was hitting them would almost certainly be back underneath, clinging on, waiting to make the next move.

“Get the gas masks ready, but don’t put ‘em on.”

The smoke was clearing fast, the flames dead. Ches was back at the wheel again, body armor now buckled over his chest. The spotlights still lit up the road ahead, and now Ryan could see what looked like fireflies dancing up in the rocks to each side—snipers homing in on them. Above, O’Mara’s MG began stuttering, trying to keep the bastards’ heads down.

Ches said calmly, “I’ve been meaning to tidy up that shelf below the window. It was getting clogged up with all kinds of crap. Those guys did a sweet job.”

“You hit the button?”

“Sure I hit the button—and we’re still in business. Far as I can tell the worst damage is to the glass and frame.”

“That figures.”

“Yeah, well you’d better pray it ain’t gonna snow, Ryan, because I don’t like driving in a blizzard, specially if that blizzard’s coming in at me.” He glanced around, and Ryan could tell that although the kid had shifted the vehicle into automatic, he was still putting on a show. “Do I clean ‘em off now? Fry them out?”

“No. Not yet. Wait.”

The E-button. A nifty device dreamed up by J.B. Dix for just such an emergency as this. Plate-metal strips around each war wag, topside and underside, were connected to the powerful generators at the rear but insulated from the rest of the chassis and frame. The E-button was a failsafe. Now all it needed was the tug of a lever and anyone or any thing touching those innocent looking rods got instant heartburn. Not to mention everything-else burn.

But Ryan did not want to blow that one until they had reached a last-ditch situation. It used up far too much power.

He could hear bangs and cracks outside, short rattling bursts of auto-fire, the hammer effect of rounds pounding the exterior. It wasn’t exactly a standoff, but he figured their attackers were conferring somewhere, probably in the tunnels below the road. He idly wondered if they were new tunnels or old tunnels, tunnels maybe dug out by the guys who’d built the Stockpiles. They were more likely new ones, excavated for just such ambushes as this. He half turned, snapping his black-gloved fingers.

“C’mon, c’mon!” His voice was laced with urgency.

Two men shoved past him holding a wood frame that enclosed a crisscross of fine steel mesh. They leaned over Ches, ramming it into place over the buckled screen frame, and clipped it.

“Now let ‘em try lobbing a gas can in.”

Everything was smooth, thought Ryan, relaxing slightly. He checked his watch, noted that there still remained two and a half minutes to go before the booby in Four blew.

“Lint. Hooley. Up top.”

The two men who had carried the wire barrier followed him at the run down the cabin. They threaded into the bunk room passage, waited while Ryan slid open a side door into a ladder well. Ryan mounted the ladder fast but silently, checked out the view ports at the top. Nothing. He began flicking at well-oiled bolt levers in the darkness, slicking them back. Then he slid the hatch sideways softly on its specially fixed runners until it would go no farther, and stuck his head out into the cool air.

Far to the east the gray twilight was gradually easing into milky dawn, but here a wash of flame from the now fiercely burning truck was the only light that mattered, casting a lurid glare over the scene, causing shadow dances on the blacktop, highlighting lurking figures among the roadside rocks and boulders,

There was a gap in the convoy. It was now split into two distinct sections fore and aft of the blazing truck. Ryan’s war wag had pulled well forward, and Trucks One, Two and Three had followed. Far down the road Ryan could see the snub-nosed bulk of the second war wag, with the rest of the convoy trailing behind it.

Auto-rifle fire rattled, weaving its high-pitched chatter around single-shot cracks and the roar of the flames. Ryan focused his one eye on the roof of Three and saw that it was clear. Either the guys from Four had managed to tumble down through the truck’s roof hatch into comparative safety, or they were dead meat on the road. He could see no one on the other trucks, but that didn’t mean there weren’t stickies clinging to the sides.

He crawled out into the roof gully, which ran the length of the vehicle, front to rear, wide enough for two men to lie side by side and be hidden from view except from above. Another idea of Dix’s: it enabled a war wag commander under ground attack to slide men up unseen into sniping positions. On each side of the roof, maybe less than a meter in from the edge, were clamped two long metal rods running the length of the vehicle—on the face of it a stupid piece of construction since it allowed attackers climbing up the sides an easy handhold to enable them to pull themselves on to the roof, where a surprise awaited them.

Ryan crawled to the rear, hearing Hooley follow him. Lint would stay in the ladder well, rifle ready.

He reached the end of the roof and stared down at Truck One below him.

Truck One was a big trailer rig, its rear end converted in a very special, but unobtrusive, way. Truck One always followed the Trader’s war wag in convoy: Strict Rule A. Strict Rule B was that it closed up tight to the war wag whenever the convoy stopped anywhere. Real tight. Strict Rule C was that Truck Two always pulled well back from One, giving it plenty of space at the rear.

Just in case…

Ryan grinned a feral grin. The jump from here was an easy one, no more than a couple of steps. And once he’d landed it would not take two seconds before he’d be sliding through the instantly opened hatch above the rig’s cab to drop into the interior.

Still smiling, Ryan edged himself over the lip of the gully and began to crawl across the flat roof toward the port side of the vehicle. He wanted to get a better look at the roadside, see if there was much congregating going on below. He had an idea there probably was. He half turned his head to check back on Hooley, but the guy was still in the gully.

He looked back front again—and the smile froze on his face as a head popped into view only meters away.

A head out of a nightmare.

Huge eyes, two tiny nostrils in a moist, flabby flesh, no mouth, no ears. Hairless.

Four fleshy suckers slapped suddenly onto the roof edge, squishing tight. A squealing snort of rage erupted from the nostrils. Another suckered hand whipped up and around, shot toward Ryan’s face with the velocity of a striking snake.

A sticky.

A severely mutated being with sucker pads for fingers and toes with which it could cling to any surface like a leech so tenaciously that it required main force to pull them off; even in death there was little relaxation. Once those fingers smacked onto flesh and exuded their glutinous ooze there was little chance of being able to tear them off.

Ryan had once seen a man attacked by a sticky. The guy hadn’t known what hit him. The creature had kneed him, clutched him around the throat left-handed, grabbed his face with the right. The finger pads had slapped home, then retracted, taking the man’s face with them, the flesh literally suctioned off the bone in bloody, doughy strips as though the sticky was tugging his hand out of red molasses. Eyeballs had popped. Faceless, the man had collapsed shrieking to the ground.

Bullets hurt them, a heart or head shot could finish them, a razor-keen blade could sure mess them around more than somewhat, but otherwise their wet, rubbery flesh seemed able to absorb the heaviest punishment. And in a battle situation they were like beings possessed.

No one seemed to know where the hell they came from, how they’d mutated. No one could even figure out quite what bizarre combination of genetic malfunctions had created them in the first place. The first sticky that Ryan had seen, a couple of years back, had been in a traveling carny, a weird and horrifying collection of freaks and savagely mutated beings that rode around the Deathlands ramrodded by a fat ringmaster called Gert Wolfram, something of a freak himself as he weighed well over one hundred and fifty kilos and had to be carried everywhere in a special construction chair born by six giants. The sticky’s act had consisted of walking up and down high walls, no hands, and pulling the heads off dogs and wolves. Literally pulling them off.

When asked where he’d found the creature, Wolfram had zipped his lip, become extremely edgy. Not long after, sticky sightings came in from all over. Soon they became accepted; hell, a mutie was a mutie. Still, how they ate, for instance, was just one of the many mysteries about them discussed by Deathlanders with nothing else of importance to chew the fat over on an evening when the chem clouds were low and it looked as if the acids were about ready to drop.

Right now, however, the manner in which stickies ate held no interest for Ryan at all. All he could think of, as he rolled desperately to one side, was the incredible sucking power of those oozing pads lunging for his face.

He rolled so fast, so unthinkingly, that before he knew it he was on his back and lying atop his rifle as the hand squelched down on the roof surface inches from him.

That didn’t panic him. Already his right hand was at his belt, grabbing for the hilt of the deadly panga sheathed there at his waist. Smoothly the blade came out and just as smoothly, just as fast, he was rolling back to his original position, the panga gripped tight then stabbing outward in a savage, power-packed lunge. The blade thudded into the creature’s throat, just above the clavicle, or what passed for a collarbone in the rubbery body. It jammed, which was exactly what Ryan wanted.

Still holding the hilt of the wickedly sharp half sword, he jerked himself to his knees. Two-handed, his muscles cording into cables along his arms, he tugged at the wriggling, squealing creature. Brute force, it was the only answer. With a sloppy, plopping sound one hand came loose from the war wag’s roof, then the other. Ryan scrambled to his feet, heaved at the sticky, pulled him over the metal rod, booted the creature in the side of the head.

The sticky was trying to grab for him, its squeal something like a butchered hog’s, but unheard by anyone below because of the chatter of auto-fire. Ryan used all his strength to slam the creature down on the roof. He smashed his boot onto its chest and tugged at the blade. Dark red ichor was squeezing out of the rubbery folds of its flesh, and the panga came out soggily. Ryan danced backward as the beast fluted its fury, its wide blank eyes red rimmed. It sprang at him.

Ryan swung the panga two-fisted, felt it bite satisfyingly into oleaginous flesh, watched grimly as the head flew off like a kicked ball, sailing away into the surrounding gloom.

The torso sagged on suddenly limp legs. It collapsed sideways and rolled across the roof before finally slumping against the rail.

Ryan turned to jump back from the roof gully and cursed savagely. More stickies were hauling themselves up and over the other side of the war wag’s roof. A brief glance at his right showed shadowy forms crowding onto the nearest trucks in fluid, rippling waves, arm over arm, seemingly inexorably.

Hooley, in the gully, was already throwing up his rifle, and flame was stabbing from it in short bursts. A stammer of fire from the ladder well told him that Lint, too, had opened up.

Ryan scabbarded the panga, then unslung his own piece. No point in silent killing now. He let rip a long jolting burst, left to right, at the bobbing line of heads that had suddenly appeared to his right, over the rear end of the war wag, watching dispassionately as they burst apart like so much rotten fruit. Then he leaped for the gully as more squealing figures came over the side behind him like an ugly tide.

He thought, this is going to be close. It flickered through his brain that no way was he going to be able to make it to the hatch before he was overwhelmed by the monsters.

He opened his mouth to scream at Lint, and then a vast, soaring gout of flame fireballed high into the sky to his right and a tremendous cracking roar, half deafening him. The shock wave of the explosion blew him over, sent him tumbling into the gully where he slammed into Hooley, already a sprawled and dazed figure.

“Number Four!” Ryan gasped. “Hellfire, I forgot how much bang-bang we piled into that one! Must’ve been most of the dynamite for the trip!” Groggily, his ears ringing, he got to his knees and bawled at Lint, half seen in the hatchway, “Tell ‘em now! Now!”

Lint’s head disappeared. Ryan clambered to his feet. The stickies had come to a halt, were gawping back down along the convoy at what was left of the once blazing truck, now only bits of burning debris scattered about among the rocks and boulders. There was a crater where the vehicle had once stood.

“Even more reason for that bastard Teague to send his road gangs out now,” Ryan muttered. Hooley gaped at him as though the massive explosion had turned his brain to jelly.

“Never mind,” snapped Ryan, then growled, “If that was a four-minute fuse I’m a dogface.”

The stickies had come out of their daze. They were advancing over the edge of the roof again, squealing in rage and triumphant anticipation. Ryan counted at least twenty of the brutes with almost certainly more on the way. And that was just on this war wag.

But it didn’t matter now. The beasts were all so much dead meat.

Calmly he watched as the roof-long rods suddenly glowed into life, triggered by Ches in the war wag’s cabin below. In a second the entire picture was transformed into one of utter carnage as several thousand volts flowed into the roof rails, along the metal strips that lined the vehicle’s side panels and hung along the length of the war wag’s underside.

Seared flesh smoked and blackened. Shrieking figures were jolted into the air.

Ryan turned his eye to look along the length of the convoy, seeing the side panels of each war wag, land wag and truck glow eerily white, almost in sequence as, in each cab, a lever was thrown, power was generated, death created.

He saw bodies flung away from the parked vehicles, others adhering to side panels, scorched dark brown and then black. He saw bright, vivid flashes of light. He heard the sizzling, crackling stutter of electrical power jolting flesh, and the squeals, now no longer furious but tormented, agonized, of stickies that were mere microseconds from heart stoppage.

The air held a solid reek of cordite, smoke and something akin to roast pork, stomach-churningly strong.

All along the convoy the panel glow faded, to die as abruptly as it had come to life. Blackened bodies, glued to panels, now fell to the ground like overripe fruit from a tree, littering the roadside in jumbled heaps of starkly, stiffened limbs.

There were survivors, those who had not been swarming over the vehicle, those who had not been in contact with plates or rods. But they could be mopped up easily enough. And quickly enough. Right now, in fact.

Ryan gestured to Hooley. “Tell ‘em I’m off on a buggy ride.”

He ran to the rear of the roof and jumped for the cab of the closely parked truck behind.

 

THE MAN CALLED SCALE watched the carnage from the shelter of a small cave overlooking the road. His face registered no emotion—it rarely did—but his mouth was dry. He could not believe what he was seeing. The stickies had been the mainspring of his great plan. Now that plan had collapsed like a house of cards. No one had even hinted that the Trader had electrified his war wags and rigs. And the power! The power they must have used up in maybe fifteen, twenty secs would have been colossal. How could they afford to waste so much? It was like pissing it away.

That weirdo prick, the Warlock, was not going to be pleased when told that all his stickies had been grilled to a crisp, were just so many lumps of fried bacon lying around on an old wrecked blacktop. Not pleased at all. In fact, thought Scale, it might be wiser not to tell him. All things considered, it might be a hell of a lot wiser not to go within a thousand miles of him ever again, avoid him like the plague.

“Scale.”

So much for Fat Harry and all his shit about the Trader’s winding his operation down. Scale had a good mind to drive to the tubby bastard’s trading post and do extremely unpleasant things to him. Like, for instance, flay the skin off him, a layer at a time, then salt the nukeshitting piece of human-shaped garbage down. There was so much flesh on the bastard that it might take some sweet time. And maybe he’d salt him after every crapping layer.

“Scale. Listen!”

And if it wasn’t for the fact that right now he didn’t have enough gas to make such a visit possible, and in any case that sneaky fat man had built his trading post like a fortress and regularly cleared scrub, shrub and bush from all around him so he could always see who was coming, and had ass-licked the muties who lived in the region so they were all well disposed toward him, Scale reckoned he fire-blasted well would go take a trip and sort the fat lying sweaty hog out. As it was…

“Scale!”

Scale swung around savagely, one arm extended like a steel rod. It hit the man with the long arms on the side of the throat and slammed him over sideways, making him gag and splutter. The long-armed man felt gingerly at his throat as he scrambled to his feet.

“No need for that, Scale.”

“Every need.”

“Scale, we gotta get outta here. Damned fast.”

“Yeah.”

“Maybe we could regroup, huh, Scale? Hit these bastards when they least expect us!”

Scale stared at him, no expression on his face but cold fury in his eyes.

“I ought to kill you. Kill you now.” His voice was an icy whisper.

Scale would do no such thing for the simple reason that big as he was, powerful as he was, kingpin of his own group of mutants as he certainly was, by force of personality and force of arms, he could not drive a powered vehicle, and the long-armed man was his personal wheelman. Scale had simply never bothered to learn the mechanics of driving. From the time he was a child, Scale had always been able to make others do his chores for him, and driving was something he left to the long-armed man.

Scale stared down at the scene below.

Mouth gaping, the long-armed man watched, too—watched as the high back of the big trailer rig behind the leading war wag suddenly swung away and down, crashing to the road and forming a long ramp down which surged a small armed personnel buggy.

A second buggy roared down the ramp after the first. Then a third. The rig was a massive buggy pen.

Not for the first time in the past quarter hour, the long-armed man cursed the crassness of Scale, the vaulting ambition that had driven him to take on the Trader. The Trader and his men were legends in the Deathlands. Attacking them had been an act of sheer madness from first to last.

The long-armed man knew what was at the heart of it, and who was at the heart of it. The strange and sinister being who sometimes called himself the Warlock, sometimes the Sorcerer, sometimes the Magus, who made fleeting visits to the Deathlands bearing weird old-world artifacts: sometimes weapons, sometimes gadgets whose exact purpose often took a long time to explain. The long-armed man was afraid of the Warlock, with his terrifying half face and his steel eye, and his two tightly leashed companions.

It was the Warlock who had let loose the stickies, maybe three, four winters back. He had brought a couple to a small township to the west, suddenly appearing one day in his armored truck with them in tow. One had died—had suddenly sickened, just wasted away, much to the Warlock’s displeasure—but Wolfram the carny man had taken the other, taught it tricks, carried it off. Free, of course; the Warlock did not take coin or cred for any of the merchandise he brought to the Deathlands, possibly because most of it was of no use to man or beast. Even so, the Warlock gave away everything, useless or not. The long-armed man could never figure out how the Warlock existed, or even where he existed. Some had tried to discover that, but they’d never come back with a location. In fact they’d never come back, period.

And then, the long-armed man recalled, maybe a year after they’d first appeared there suddenly seemed to be stickies everywhere. Some said the Warlock had created them, but that was just foolishness. No one could create men. Except God. And it was well-known that God did not exist. You only had to look around you to see that.

Whatever, a small army of stickies had come out of the northwest and that was it. Most had attached themselves to Scale’s troop of marauders, and the long-armed man was dead certain that was entirely because of the Warlock. There was the time Scale had ordered him to drive over two hundred klicks to a tiny hamlet in the foothills of the Darks. The long-armed man had been told to stay put, sit in the land wag for as long as it took for Scale to conduct his business, ostensibly a visit to this real high-class cathouse the ville boasted. But two hundred klicks for a screw? Hell, Scale must’ve thought his brains were addled. The man with the long arms had never discovered the real reason for that somewhat clandestine visit, but shortly thereafter the stickies had appeared, and you didn’t have to be a genius to connect the two events.

So, he thought now, the Warlock was sure as hell behind the stickies and now this particular bunch of stickies was no more, were just lumps of fried meat, and the Warlock, if the long-armed man was correct in his assumptions, was gonna be oh so pissed.

The Trader’s buggies were converted panel trucks, drastically converted. The lead buggy seemed to bristle with weaponry. There was an MG-slit for the front passenger seat, another MG rear-mounted in the roof. Two stubby barrels jutting out of the front looked like cannon. Poking out of the enclosed rear was what seemed at a distance suspiciously like a mortar barrel, and running along the driver’s side, underneath the door, was a long tube.

The long-armed man watched gloomily as the buggy hurtled along the narrow space between trucks and roadside, its front-MG sputtering flame. Rounds flayed a bunch of semi-fried stickies trying to regroup beside the huge bulk of the war wag in the center of the convoy. Stickies seemed able to take handgun bullets, even automatic rifle fire, but they didn’t have a hope against the jolting velocity, the flesh-rupturing force, of nearly point-blank MG tracers. The buggy cleared a path, jolting on its shocks as it careered along the rutted road, its bulk smashing into dazed survivors, hurling them to one side.

The three buggies raced and weaved around the parked trucks as a murky Deathlands dawn crept up from the east, sharpening the picture, turning the shadows of tall rocks into pointing, accusatory fingers. Men were now disgorging from the trucks, heavily armed and grim visaged. Pockets of resistance were being mopped up swiftly and professionally, and the long-armed man knew that time was running out, that any moment now the Trader’s death-dealing squads, angry and vengeful, would be opening up the tunnel under the road, scouring the rocks for snipers.

And heading up here.

“Scale! We gotta blow!”

Parked in the cave behind the two muties was a jeep and two small trucks, and what remained of Scale’s force, tense and nervous, knowing that everything had gone disastrously wrong, that it was a shuttleup of the first magnitude. A narrow rocky track ran from the cave mouth, dived through wind-sculpted boulders, paralleled the blacktop far below before curving around to the south and slicing through the hills down toward the ugly seared plain and their campsite, maybe five klicks away. Once there…

“Scale!” The long-armed man’s voice was high pitched with panic.

“Quit yappin’. Let’s go.”

Scale swung around and headed for one of the trucks. A man with deep, hollow eyes and a nose that drooped to his upper lip, joining with it in a flabby mass of graying skin, said in surprise, “You not takin’ your jeep, Scale?”

Scale shook his head.

“You take it, Burt. You and Koll. Get outta here fast and warn the camp we’re shiftin’. We’ll hold the norms off and kill those buggy riders.”

The man with the drooping nose made an O with his forefinger and thumb.

“Yeah, Scale. You get us some fresh norm meat, huh?”

“I’ll get us some fresh norm meat,” muttered Scale, his tone colorless, his eyes unblinking.

He jammed open the passenger door of the nearest truck and climbed in. The man with the long arms jumped into the driver’s seat, sweating, not looking at his leader. He said in a low voice, “Smart, Scale. Take the heat off us.”

Scale did not bother to reply as the jeep in front started up, revved hard, roared away in a swirl of dust, its sound like a heavy MG jabbering, its muffler long gone. The long-armed man eased the panel truck slowly toward the cave entrance. He braked just inside the opening, then jumped out and ran to the boulder-screened edge of the track.

In the distance the jeep was already at the bottom of the short hill and was now bumping and jouncing along the track at high speed. Farther on was a bend to the right, into the hills. That was where another track, from the road below, joined it. The long-armed man watched as the jeep powered along the straight to hit the bend at speed. It screeched out of sight. The long-armed man turned his eyes to the road below, and for the first time in a long while a gap-toothed smile creased his face.

The lead buggy had clearly spotted the jeep. It was way beyond the feeder track, but suddenly its driver threw her into reverse and stormed back along the road. Then the driver hit the brakes and dust clouded. He geared up, yanked hard at the wheel, trod on the gas again and the buggy, engine howling, roared up the high-incline track.

The long-armed man dodged back into boulder cover as the little vehicle appeared at the top of the track and hurtled out of sight after the jeep. Another buggy followed. The long-armed man frowned: one was okay, two was not so hot. He kept his eyes on the track but no more buggies appeared. He couldn’t hear any more engine roar through the heavy chatter of MG- and auto-fire still ripping out below.

He plodded back to the truck, hauled himself in.

“Two of them ‘stead of one.”

“We can hit ‘em.”

Scale sounded supremely confident, utterly sure of himself, and the long-armed man shuddered silently. He drove fast but warily. While on the parallel track he kept glancing to his left, down to the road below, to see if he could catch any sign that someone down there had spotted them. But it looked as if luck—or some damn thing—was on their side. Someone down there had let off a smoke grenade and that, together with all the dust and shit that was still being kicked up, had dragged an obscuring pall over the proceedings.

He swung right, checked out the rearview mirror. The second truck was on their tail but not too close. He began to feel relief seeping through him. Maybe they were going to make it, out of this one alive, after all.

His thoughts turned suddenly to the red-haired girl. She was certainly one sweet receptacle for his meat! After Scale was done with her, of course. Always after Scale. The long-armed man felt no resentment toward his leader in this or any other matter. Scale was one strong hombre and he went first in all things, and the long-armed man was perfectly content to remain in his shadow. He was not ambitious.

He flicked back to Red Hair. Man, that was going to be something—He felt himself stiffen as he thought about her. He wondered idly why there’d been no other women on that two-wag train—the one they’d hit and mauled the crap out of yesterday. Kind of weird, that was; he couldn’t figure it out at all. Young, too, and that was weird as well, because all the others had been oldies. Dead meat now. And useless. Tough and stringy. Took days to boil up an oldy for soup. No good at all unless you were starving and it was the only meat around. And with Scale you were never starving. Smart shit, was Scale.

Except when it came to thinking he could take the Trader.

As the long-armed man slowed to take a bend he felt a couple of thumps on the side of the truck, tremoring through. He glanced at the rearview mirror, saw nothing out of line his side, then noticed the driver of the following truck had an arm poked out his window, was waving frantically.

He said, “Anythin’ your side, Scale? We hit somethin’?”

Scale shrugged, heaved down the window, stuck his head out.

Then yanked it back in again with a yell, jammed the window up.

“Stickies!” he snapped. “Two of ‘em. Must’ve beat it back here, waited for us—I dunno.”

“Shit, Scale, they’re with us. Let ‘em in.”

“They don’t look too fuckin’ happy.”

Hands gripping the battered wheel, the long-armed man glanced at his leader, saw that Scale didn’t look any too happy, either.

“You can talk to ‘em, Scale. About the only one that can.”

Talking to stickies was a tiring business. They understood words but you had to yell at them, enunciate each sentence, each word, each separate syllable, extremely clearly. Some kind of lip-reading process, as far as the long-armed man understood it. Once you’d got it into their noodles what you wished them to do, you let them get on with it, let them create the mayhem you wanted. They were very good at creating mayhem.

Scale eased the window down halfway. He pushed his head out and began screaming at the top of his voice. The words were lost in the roar of the truck’s engine. Then his head whacked back inside the cab again, and he thrust the window up. A microsecond later a suctioned hand thudded against the glass, spread out, glued itself on. A hideous face suddenly appeared, eyes in frenzy. The glass shook as the sticky jerked at it furiously, one-handed.

Scale yelled at the men crouching in the rear of the bouncing vehicle.

“Blast the fuckers off! Through the panels!”

The long-armed man felt sweat begin to soak his face. He squawked, “Nuke that idea, Scale. We get slugs zippin’ around in this space, we’re gonna get scalped if nothin’ else!”

“Do it!” snarled Scale.

More thuds, sounding like kicks delivered with strength. The sticky at the window had disappeared. One of the men in the back said, “They’s on the roof, Scale, an’ we ain’t all that tight up there.”

Part of the roof had been pierced at some point during the truck’s history. Wooden panels had been fixed over the gaps.

Scale grabbed for his rifle, squirmed around in his seat and sprayed at the roof, the sound deafening in the confined space. Yelling, the long-armed man ducked as hot brass flew past his head. Angry ricochets burned the air, snarling around his ears,

Scale fought with the wheel, boot-jabbing at the brake as the truck careered down the sloping track. In front, a misty panorama revealed itself. An angry sun endeavoring to pierce the thickening chem clouds shot scarlet light lances through the murk. A seared and dreadful landscape beckoned, stretching into the unseen, unfathomed distance, dotted with stunted trees, their foliage a sickly yellow.

A short distance away, three clouds of dust choked the already turbid air. Ahead, the buggies were chasing the jeep sure enough.

Scale blazed more lead up at the roof and ricochets whined and buzzed.

“Scale!” screamed a man at the back, blood dripping from his face where something sharp had sliced him—a ricochet or a shard of metal. “You’re opening the roof up! Bastards’ll get in through the hole!”

Scale had indeed opened up most of the wooden panels, had shattered them with ripping auto-fire. A face appeared in the torn space, greasy skinned, with angry eyes glaring downward. It whipped back out of sight as Scale fired again.

A bulky man grabbed at the rifle, roaring, “You’ll kill us all, you shitstick!” and tried to drag the weapon away from the demented mutie leader. Scale triggered a burst at him, point-blank, and slugs chewed him apart, punched him away in a spray of scarlet that paint-licked the walls and most of those in the immediate vicinity.

They flung themselves to the floor of the truck, hands over heads, yelling and screaming curses. In the front, the long-armed man prayed and wondered what would happen if he just jammed open his door and threw himself out of this madhouse. But they were going too fast, and the faster he went and the more he swung the wheel right and left, the greater the possibility that the stickies would not be able to batter their way in.

Ahead the dust had cleared. The speeding vehicles had hit a stony patch of ground. Now the buggies could clearly see their prey, and those in the jeep must know that they were doomed.

The lead buggy was firing. Tracers from its passenger seat MG flamed at the bouncing jeep. Rounds hammered at the jeep’s rear.

The tires exploded. The buggy hurtled past at a wide angle, raking the bucking vehicle fore and aft. A line of fire caught the jeep’s passenger and the long-armed man saw the guy’s head burst open, the driver ducking under the hail of lead. The jeep swerved toward the nearest buggy, hit its rear, caromed away but stayed on an even keel. The long-armed man could almost hear the tortured clang and scrape of metal on metal, the boosting roar of acceleration as the jeep plowed on.

But it could not last, and it did not last. The buggies were coming at the jeep from two different directions, MG fire from both converging. Blazing fire lines met, crossing on the ancient, crudely armored jeep. Metal struts flew away, the front tires were shredded to rubber strips, and the hood blew up and sailed high into the sky. The driver was caught by two sets of fire lines and they tore him apart bloodily, throwing chunks of him up into the muggy air. Tracers sought the juice tank, soon found it. Fire bloomed, punching the jeep spectacularly apart, sending it cartwheeling in all directions.

“Holy nukeshit,” muttered the man with long arms. The Trader’s men had used nothing but MGs for their kill. They hadn’t even started on the twin cannon, mortars and rocket tubes yet.

He wrenched the wheel, pulled the speeding, bucking truck onto a side track that dropped away from the track he’d been on. They entered a narrow, gloomy canyon, high cliffed, stretching away from them, undeviating, straight as an arrow before it rose again to trees, vegetation and less dust.

The long-armed man shot a glance at Scale, who was still twisted around in his seat, his gun pointing up at the roof. In the back huddled the others, four of them now. The fifth lay in a widening pool of gore.

The stickies seemed to have calmed down somewhat, maybe mesmerized by the explosion of the jeep. Stickies liked explosions—the bigger, the more eruptive, the better; they liked looking at the flames. But the bastards never gave in. They’d be up there now, waiting their chance, waiting to create more mayhem. He glanced at his rearview mirror, saw the other truck still clinging to his tail, but his own and its dust obscured the entrance to the canyon. He couldn’t tell if the two buggies were coming up behind.

The truck hurtled along the flat of the canyon, swooped up and out of it into a grove of trees that drooped with dirty yellow foliage. They were in a wide natural valley, a part of the mountain’s foothills, and the camp was almost dead center, a small hamlet of old huts and cabins clustered along one end of what had once been a huge lake but was now only a dirty little pond of muddy, brackish, just about drinkable water. In the distant past it had been a thriving community, a summer resort for wealthy people who came there to fish the lake and climb the mountains for fun. But of course the long-armed man knew only rumors of such things, was in fact puzzled by the notion that people once crawled up steep precipices as an enjoyable relaxation.

He said, “What we gonna do, Scale?”

Scale, still gripping his piece, muttered, “Gonna fuck me the red-hair.”

The long-armed man shot a startled glance at his leader. Had he heard right? The noise and clatter of the speeding truck was not good for conversation but the long-armed man could usually get the gist of something that was not yelled at him. He could have sworn that Scale had said something about fucking the red-haired girl. But that couldn’t be right. There were priorities, for God’s sake.

“Scale?”

“Uh?”

“What we gonna do? Them buggies bound to find us. They’re gonna cream us.”

Scale’s head jerked around, his thick-lipped mouth gaping, his eyes wide and crazy, the gun in his hands suddenly jammed into the side of the long-armed man’s head.

He shouted, “So you do what you wanna do! I’m gonna get me the red-haired bitch!”

The long-armed man slewed the truck to the right and into a narrow bush-lined tunnel. The vegetation all around them was parched, but it was still alive; it seemed able to survive, just, in this hostile environment, fed perhaps by the tiny trickles of water that still infiltrated the earth from off the hills. There were no birds in the valley and the long-armed man had never seen any animals. Anything on four legs automatically got eaten. Just about anything on two, as well.

The truck shot out of the tree-lined avenue and the long-armed man swung the wheel and skidded around into what had once been a blacktopped parking lot next to a ruined building that, a century ago, had been a shop selling guns and fishing tackle. A weather-faded signboard was fixed to the facing wall on which the words McPartland Brothers could just be discerned, if there had been anybody there who could actually have read them.

But this was a decaying ville; the art of reading had long departed it. The roofs of cabins were holed, although that didn’t matter much since rain was no problem in this part of the Deathlands. Walls of some of the shacks sagged, unmended. Others had no walls at all, were simply wood frames with rotting bits of blanket draped around them, or tarps, or old animal hides brought from elsewhere when Scale had discovered the place and moved his band in. Maybe a few human hides, too. Smoke drifted from some of the chimneys.

The lake lay a few hundred meters to the north, most of it parched, just cracked mud now, the dark water far away toward the center. Across the other side the hills rose up sheer, a frowning, gloomy mass of peaks that brooded over the valley.

Sluttish women in filthy robes wandered toward the truck, most of them at some stage of pregnancy or other, although childbirth here was even less of a problem than the rain. Most of the babies were stillborn. Those that survived were usually sickly and weak, with a variety of ugly ailments and, often, limbs where no limbs were supposed to be. There were some healthier-looking children but these, without exception, were what remained from various land wag trains once the adults had been massacred. Scale saved the females, if they were young and looked strong, kept them as a kind of harem until he grew tired of them, when he tossed them to the men. And if the women thought they got it bad from Scale, they got it a hundred times worse from the men—usually a hundred times at a time.

The long-armed man brought the truck to a halt and shivered. Most of those hundred men were dead now, those in the two trucks probably all that were left. Maybe a dozen men, unless there were a few stragglers in the tunnels still, or hiding out in the rocks above the highway. Hellblast it, he thought, the women outnumber us.

He said, “The stickies, Scale. What we gonna…”

Scale jabbed at him with the automatic rifle.

“Scale!”

“Out.”

“Scale, I’m your wheelman! They’ll kill me, they’ll suck me apart.”

Scale was smirking, licking his rubbery lips.

“I’ll get me another wheelman. Out.”

Completely over the edge, thought the long-armed man wildly. He was suddenly dying to urinate.

He jammed down the door handle, smacked the door open and flung himself out of the cab, diving to the parched and sparsely grassed earth. He hit the ground, somersaulted, was up on his two legs and running, charging through a group of women who were staring at the truck with lackluster eyes. His breath coming in great wheezing gulps, he came to a stop and swung around.

Nothing. The stickies were no longer on the truck’s roof nor clinging to the sides nor, as far as he could see, underneath either. He stared at the other truck, which was braking in a cloud of dust behind the first. Nothing there. Maybe, he thought, they’d hopped off as the trucks were speeding through the trees. In which case they were still around. He glanced fearfully at the wooded area they had come through, but he could see no unnatural movement in the trees. Maybe they’d simply beat it, got disgusted with the whole jig and cleared out. Hah! he said out loud. No way. No way, my friend. Stickies had one-track minds.

And what about the Trader’s buggies? Where in hell’s name had they got to? No sign of them. No sound of them, either. Had they just given up the chase, turned around and headed back the way they’d come, to the road, satisfied after their single kill?

But that didn’t seem too likely. In one respect the Trader’s warriors were akin to the stickies: they had one-track minds.

 

RYAN’S NOSE WRINKLED. The stench from the camp below was like a fist between the eyes. Months, maybe years, of rot contributed to that smell: bad food, excrement, urine, dead bodies flung anywhere to decay. A stomach-churning stink, a monstrous miasma that, he thought grimly, if you could distill it and bottle it, would probably be as efficient in destruction as strong poison. Not that those who existed down there would notice anything. They were surely used to it by now, and worse.

“Hell, Ryan, we’re gonna need masks to go down there.”

“Yeah, pretty ripe.”

“Ripe ain’t the word.”

“Don’t worry, Abe. Couple of mortars should do it. We don’t need to go in blazing.”

They were crouched on a low, bush-topped bluff that overlooked the pest hole of a camp from the south. Ryan had spotted the two trucks while dealing with the jeep, but then held back from following them too closely. It was easy enough to watch where they had gone, even more simple to follow at a distance and hide the two buggies in the trees that grew this side of the canyon.

“See.” Ryan pointed down at the cluster of buildings, to one building in particular, larger than the rest and built away from the center. “That one. Seems to be in better shape than the others, and it’s bigger. Old storehouse probably. That’ll be where the honcho hangs out, and that’ll be where the weaponry and fuel will be stored. And the explosives. The honcho’d want to keep an eye on all that valuable shit. Hit that and we solve the problem.”

“What about all those guys? We let ‘em live?”

“They aren’t going to be zipping around attacking land wag trains now. They’ll be lucky to survive out the year. Winter comes, no food…” He snapped his black-gloved fingers.

Abe, a tall, lanky individual with a thick mustache and long, flowing hair tied up in a knot at the back of his head, nodded. He knew Ryan’s rules. The Trader’s rules, really. No killing for the sake of it. No killing unless you or your buddies were in danger, or unless other, innocent, folk were in danger.

“We can back one of the buggies up here fast, before they catch on to the noise, and just take out that storehouse,” Ryan was saying. “If I’m wrong she won’t go up like a firework display and we’ll maybe have to think again, because they must have matériel somewhere, and that’s what we have to destroy. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

“Could use a rocket.”

“Waste of a rocket. We got plenty of mortar shells.”

“Hmm. Okay.”

Abe half rose and turned when Ryan suddenly swore. The tall man stooped, turned back.

“Gimme the glasses.”

Abe handed over his binoculars, saw what Ryan had spotted. Ryan saw the scene below spring into hi-mag definition through his one remaining eye. The man with the faintly scaly skin, whom he’d already tagged as the leader, was emerging from one of the cabins dragging a woman. But this was not, by any stretch of the imagination, one of the mutie women. This one was dressed in a clean, pouched combat suit with good boots. She was long limbed, full breasted, with a high-boned face. Her most startling feature was her hair: rich, deep magenta in hue, a thick mass of it, flowing over her shoulders and halfway down her back. The mutie leader was dragging her by it, two fists deep in its chunky mass, pulling her along the ground. Her hands were tied behind her and her legs were hobbled at the ankles. Even so she was putting up a struggle, jerking and squirming as she was tugged toward the large storehouse.

Ryan put the glasses down, shot a bleak look at his companion.

He said, “They got prisoners. We go in.”

 

Chapter Four

« ^ »

KRYSTY WROTH WINCED HER EYES CLOSED and pushed her face deeper into the filthy blanket on which she was huddled. All of her body ached, her arms most of all because they were wrenched behind her, tied tightly at the wrists. Her head felt as though someone with abnormally callused hands had reached inside her skull and was clutching at her brain, squeezing it tight then letting it go; squeezing, letting go. Waves of pain washed over her and receded, then surged and fell away again. Her breasts hurt, her nipples hurt. Her ribs and kidneys throbbed where the man with the faintly scaled skin had kicked her viciously, not once but three times, in swift succession. At the moment she was trying desperately not to be sick because in her present position, if she were sick she had no means of avoiding her own vomit, and this would add enormously to her misery, her feelings of mental despair and physical wretchedness.

The sickness slowly receded, leaving her with sweat dewing her skin, her brow clammily cold. She fluttered open her eyes, eased her head sideways, her left cheek away from the verminous blanket. The sudden itchiness she was now experiencing all over her body she could cope with. The odd flea here and there had very little relevance to her present stark situation or the outrage that threatened her, the gross invasion of her body.

She closed her eyes again, breathing out slowly and silently as another, subtly different ache spread through the pit of her stomach, a soft sharpness that was at the same time a feeling incorporeal, a shift in the mind as much as in the body. She winced again, but this time her grimace was halfway an exhausted smile tinged with resignation, as she felt her blood flowing gently out of her, the cyclical clock in her body insistent, relentless, even at such a time, in such a place, at such a dreadful pass.

She almost felt like laughing. Really, it was so absurd. Of course she knew almost to the minute when she was due, had always known, since menarche. Her periods were as regular as night falling, day dawning. And of course she had been aware that she was due, as ever; but the events of the past twenty-four hours—by turns confused, horrifying, violent, ghastly—had torn her own reality apart, had indeed almost shattered it. And now, so near the onrushing moment of terror, of violation, her body had shown her that, blind to all externalities, the secret rhythm of life continued its perpetual motion undisturbed.

Into her mind there flashed again that sickening scene after the ambush, when the two burning land wags had lain drunkenly at the side of the pitted highway and the mutants had been at their bloody work, slaughtering and raping the two old ladies from Harmony, dear Uncle Tyas, Peter Maritza and the rest of the passengers. She heard again thunderous shotgun blasts and the hideous ripping chatter of automatic rifles and shrill, agonized screams. Then the ultimate degradation: the hacking off of the heads, the shoving and kicking and the heaving of the twisted torsos into a tangled heap at the side of the road, fodder for the birds and strange beasts, or perhaps worse, any human carrion that might happen by.

That she had been spared offered no comfort. She knew precisely why she had not been subjected to physical abuse and assault. She saw again, in her mind, the mad eyes of the man the others called Scale as he stared at her in hideous appreciation, literally licking his lips, one hand slowly and obscenely rubbing his crotch. She had surrendered to an engulfing wave of blind panic that threatened her sanity.

Yet even then she’d still had the psychic strength to pull herself away from the black abyss on the edge of which, for a microsecond, she teetered. The mental discipline that had been her mother’s strongest bequest came to her aid just when she most needed it. She had divided off her terror and revulsion, forced an almost alien calm to take their place. “Strive for life” her mother had dinned into her at an age when she had not even known what the words meant, and Sonja Wroth had never stopped repeating that blessed motto. It had become a part of Krysty’s psyche.

As now, she thought. Uncle Tyas, old Peter and the rest of them were dead. The fantastic dream they had been pursuing had died with them. Only she was left, faced with a lingering horror—a weary death in life, here in this plague pit of slavery and torment and monstrous pain.

Calm. She must become calm, must strive for a measure of tranquility. Only when she was calm, even if only for a few seconds, was she fully in command, mistress of herself. Of her body. Of, most important of all, her mind.

She knew, now that she was at last alone with a single opponent, that she had a chance, slim as it might be. She could escape from her bonds; she could destroy the man called Scale. And after that there was the means here, in this huge storehouse converted into an armory, for her to explode out of the building, guns blazing, if that was the way she wanted it. And on reflection, maybe it was: maybe she should exact a devastating revenge upon these animals.

Krysty felt her blood weeping out of her, felt the warm flow of it between her legs, and this heartened her. It signified an untapped energy of vast potency.

Slowly, warily, she swiveled her head to peer across the huge room. This part of it had been transformed into crude living quarters. The wide double bed she was lying on—in fact an old bed frame with a filthy, torn mattress covered by the blanket—filled the angle of one corner. There was a table nearby littered with candle stubs and loose rounds of ammunition. There were a few broken-backed chairs. Opposite her was a grimy window through which nothing could be seen, then a wide planked door, now closed, then another window as filthy as the first. The ceiling was high, high above her. It was dark up there.

Arranged around the walls, jammed down over angled hooks, was a grisly assortment of heads, male and female, hundreds of them, young and old, some fairly fresh, others in the final stages of decay. Sightless eyes gazed vacantly upward at nothing.

The heads of those slaughtered yesterday had not yet been trophied. Krysty did not know where they had been stored, and did not want to know. Their spirits had departed. In her mind she had said prayers for them to the Earth Mother, although Uncle Tyas had not believed in any gods at all, only science. Gods, he’d said, were capricious, whereas science was fixed and immutable. To the old argument that it was science that had virtually wiped out the world a century ago, he had testily pointed out that it was not science at all but people. People misusing science, using it for their own ends, to further their own greedy or stupid or insane ambitions. Krysty was with him in that, at least.

Her eyes moved on.

The rest of the storehouse had been divided at some time into two separate stories, but some of the floor of the upper chamber had long since rotted away. The partition, too, that had once separated the main two-level store from the living area had disappeared. Only a few planks here and there showed that a wall had ever existed.

On the lower level, the ground floor section, she could see Scale’s armory and store. Guns were everywhere, some in piles, some stacked against the outer wall: MGs, rifles, shotguns. Some of the weaponry she could identify. There were rows of crates, mostly still sealed, stacked along the inner wall, three or four deep, five or six high. Many, she knew, contained canned food looted from land wag trains. There were other boxes she recognized. A crate of grenades, open, its top wrenched off, stood near the door. She had noted that one almost at once. She knew very well how to use a grenade. She knew very well how to handle an automatic rifle, too. In this, as in so much else, Uncle Tyas had been more than thorough when he took her in after her mother’s death.

From where she lay, Krysty could not see the very farthest part of the building. That was where the man called Scale was. She could hear him muttering to himself as he kicked things over, wrenched at cardboard boxes, seeking something.

She wondered how much time she had.

She tried to relax. Forced herself to relax. To do what must be done required calmness, peace of mind. Not for long, however. Only as long as it took for her to be at peace with herself, and at one with herself. Under the circumstances, not easy. But she had to become like the invisible clock in her body, blind to everything but herself.

She closed her eyes, drifted. She felt as though she was on the edge of… what? Difficult to say. She tried to imagine a huge soft mattress, of the kind owned by wealthy folk in the East, one of the symbols of their status. Very thick and very, very soft. And she was lying atop it. What she must do was sink into it. But at the moment it was nothing but unyielding, as firm and obdurate as a tabletop.

Or… maybe not quite as hard as that. Not quite…

She could feel a yielding.

She blocked off all noise, all outside sounds, everything that was not a part of her.

And in her mind, she smiled…

And began to sink into the feathery, cotton-wool softness.

And as she began to sink, so she could feel, within her, a… stirring.

 

SCALE MARCHED BACK DOWN the long room, smacking the coiled bullwhip against the side of his leg. The feel of it was reassuring, as though it was a trade-off for the power he had so swiftly, so devastatingly, lost less than an hour ago. He would do her now, do everything to her he could think of. Then having assuaged the raging fire in his loins he would flay her, destroy her with the whip. Then he would leave. That was it. He had no idea where he would go, what he would do, because he was not thinking that far ahead. In his mind was a confusion of images—fireballing explosions, red hair, stabbing rifle-flashes, white flesh, soaring tracers, skin that was slick with blood. He marched like a robot, cackling to himself, muttering disjointedly, not even knowing himself what he was saying. Smacking the whip against his leg.

He strode out from under the sagging beams that supported rotting planks and headed for the bed. He did not see the woman as a woman, as a flesh-and-blood human being. Merely as a shape. He threw the whip down on the trash-strewn floor and grabbed at the shape, his hands fumbling, then yanking the loose clothing, ripping it, tearing off long strips of it, clenching fingers at her panties and pulling. He reached for the knife at his belt, sliced the cords that bound those limbs, wrenched them apart, heard the shape screaming… screaming…

 

SCREAMING! It was as though someone had thrust a spear deep into her soul. Such agony! The psychic shock exploded through her, jolting every nerve end in her body.

She came alive. Her eyes burst open. She saw Scale looming over her, staring down at her, his mouth wide, his jaw spittle flecked.

He whispered “Blood.” His voice was thick, the sound coming from the back of his throat. He said, “Bleedin’. Ya bitch. Y’evil fuckin’ slut. Ya bleedin’.”

His eyes slowly focused on her face and locked on to her eyes. He was breathing stertorously, his brutish frame trembling. Then a frown spread slowly across his scaled face, a frown half of bewilderment, half something else. Half…recognition. Krysty shivered uncontrollably at that look. She knew it for what it was.

He suddenly thrust his face down at her and his foul breath gusted over her face. His left hand shot out, clutched her throat, pulled her half up from the bed. She gagged in pain and terror. He started to smile as he peered into her eyes. Then he began to chuckle, a harsh, rasping sound, the ugliest sound.

“Yeah,” he breathed slowly. “I know you, ya bitch.” Triumph suddenly flooded into his voice. “I know you!” He unclasped his fingers, shoved her back against the bed, his body shaking as the huge storehouse echoed to the harsh, jarring, malevolent noise of his cackling.

He flicked open his belt, kicked off his boots. He unzipped his pants, thrust them down. Still laughing, he exposed himself, his penis thick and erect. He stroked it, held it firmly, his eyes suddenly narrowing as he stared at her, a crafty expression sliding across his face.

“Yeah. I know you. I got who you are. Hell of a thing, huh? You know—” his tone had become bizarrely conversational, “—I was gonna kill ya. But not now. Oh, no, not now. Gonna keep ya all for myself!”

He stepped forward, his tongue dragging across his thick lips.

Krysty thought, I was just on the point of it; I was nearly there, so nearly there. Then she thought, I can still do it. All I need is just a little more time. Once he’s inside me, then I can do it. It’s the only way. It’s the only blasted way…

Then she saw his attention had been caught by something else, something above her. He was staring upward at the ceiling, at the gloom high in the rafters, his mouth gaping ludicrously, his features frozen into an expression of stunned shock.

She wrenched her head back, her eyes penetrating the shadows, felt horror and loathing flood through her as she glimpsed what he was looking at. A glimpse was all she needed, all she wanted. Clinging to a beam by one suckered hand, its twin free, the suckers writhing as they groped for the wall, was something she had never seen before, only heard about.

A sticky.

Scale jumped back frantically, his face livid, his arms swinging wildly. He shrieked curses as he turned and dashed for the door.

And howled with frenzied fury as another sticky dropped from the shadows above.

At any other time the sight of this half-naked man in a state of near terminal panic, with his rapidly softening erection, would have been comical. Hilarious. But Scale was throwing off psychic waves of unadulterated terror. Krysty could feel it as though it was something physical. He saw death and agony clawing at him and he wanted neither.

Scale sprang toward the crates, grabbed the nearest weapon to hand, a .45 automatic. The gun stabbed flame, the thunder of the shots filling the barn. He emptied the mag into the sticky by the door and the sticky took every round, was thumped back against the wall with their jarring impact.

Krysty saw, with fright-flecked eyes, the slugs slam into greasy flesh around stomach and thighs. Then saw the creature stagger to its feet, red stuff oozing from wounds that were not gaping holes but mere liplike slits, already closing as though sucking the bullets in. The sticky squealed with rage, snorting its fury down its half-formed nostrils, and lunged at Scale, its sucker hands outstretched.

Scale tore a box from one of the piles and heaved it at the thing. The creature’s fingers caught the heavy object and held it, almost as though the box had suddenly become a part of it, a clublike extension of its arms. It swung the box and smashed it into Scale, slamming him over into a stack of crates, which swayed, teetered, crashed to the ground.

That saved Scale. The crates rolled and tumbled, some splitting open and sending cans of food spraying out. The sticky blundered into the avalanche and was hammered off balance, going down under what for a normal being would have been a bone-crushing weight of tins. Scale scrambled up and darted to one side, then disappeared down the long storehouse toward the far end.

Krysty, her mouth dry with fear, risked another glance upward. Another sticky was bounding along the wall, high up, like a crazed spider, hand over hand, its long arms supporting its weight with only an occasional kick with its suckered toes to keep balance. Both creatures were naked save for tattered pants. The sticky made it to the upper chamber and vanished into the gloom.

Breathing a prayer, the red-haired young woman closed her eyes again. Concentrating, she let her mind do the work, let it dive into itself so that the light within increased even as her focus became smaller and smaller. Her ankles were now free from her outstanding new strength, her magic, and she could run for it, but her wrists were still tied and without the use of these she might just as well be hobbled again. All she wanted were a few seconds, just a few. She felt the familiar lightness in her head, a feeling like that of bare electric wires of almost no voltage brushing her wrists.

This was power. Woman power in earth: the mind as place. This was strength over material things, a power so strong and so centered in one place that it commanded all it touched. But she wanted desperately to open her eyes, to check for new threats, new horrors that might even now be looming over her. It seemed to her, in the power state, that she had been in a totally vulnerable position for literally minutes on end.

Then she got up, her hands free though her wrists throbbed, the torn cords falling away, her eyes darting to the pyramid of cans so very close to her.

Nothing stirred. She could hear no sounds from the other side of the barn. She put her legs over the side of the bed and sat on the edge for a few seconds breathing in deeply, oblivious of the general stench of the place. She got to her feet, shakily. She was still wearing her boots but her jump suit was in shreds, ripped and torn from breasts to knees. It looked like an animal had been at it, which was pretty much the truth. Glancing down, she saw streaks of blood staining the insides of her thighs and was aware of the dull ache in her womb. She gathered up what remained of her panties—flimsy shreds of cotton—and screwed up one strip. Squatting, she inserted it deftly into herself as a makeshift tampon. Then, still breathing quickly and managing to control the shivering fit that threatened, she hurried across the room to the open box of grenades.

She grabbed four, stuffing three of them into various untorn pockets, keeping the fourth in one hand. She backtracked to where five automatic rifles leaned against the outer wall, and selected one. No mag. She cursed, picked up another. Same again. Desperately she picked up the remaining three. None had mags. She stared around. This was insane. There was an MG lying on the floor, but she wasn’t sure she’d be able to control the kickback on that. There were many more rifles but she could see now that all were empty. Then she noticed that one of the crates had burst open, revealing mags aplenty. They didn’t seem to be greased and factory fresh, but had been piled in willy-nilly, all kinds, all types, straight, banana, long curve, short curve. More loot from a land wag train. Her eyes flicked at the leaning row of rifles and SMGs and she picked out a Heckler & Koch 9 mm. Good weight, short, a nice death-dealing compactness. She took it up, checked it, went back to the box and tensely fingered through the jumbled mass of sticks, clattering them aside until she found two 30-slug curved mags. One she stuffed into a back pocket, the other she held against the gun while she began cramming the fourth grenade into an already overstuffed pocket over her right breast.

The pile of cans burst apart in a wild spray of tin. The sticky, squealing viciously, had erupted from the ground.

Krysty gasped. Her heart felt as if someone had just kicked it.

She sprang back, dropping the grenade. She also dropped the second mag. The sticky came at her like a flying fury, and she had to dance away and flee back to the living area of the barn, her right hand fumbling at the remaining mag jammed into her back pocket. It wouldn’t come out, had somehow gotten entangled with the pocket lip. She felt as if she could scream, but didn’t. Instead she turned for the door, but the creature was already there, its eyes almost popping with rage and blood lust.

Krysty yanked the mag and it came out, tearing the pocket open at one side. But now she was all fingers and thumbs and the mag would not slot in. The sticky, hooting nasal fury, jumped for her and she felt its wind as she stumbled aside, saw the sucker pads of its right hand lunging at her. She raced away across the room, still trying to shove the mag into the SMG but in her desperation only jamming it. Her heart was pounding like a trip hammer and sweat was coming off her like glistening pearls. Adrenaline boosted her body and desperation boosted her brain.

In a microsecond she took in the fact that one of the pillar supports that held up the upper chamber had heavy nails sticking out of it. Thrusting the mag between her teeth, she grabbed hold of one of the higher nails and thrust a foot at a lower one—the H&K stuffed under her left arm and held tight to her body—and she began to pull herself upward. The nail heads were sharp; they tore at her flesh. She didn’t give a damn, didn’t even think about it. The fact that her fingers began to bleed and the nail heads became suddenly slippery merely acted as a further booster. She reached the second floor and rolled over onto what remained of the floor planks just as the kill-crazy creature slammed into the pillar.

She stared down at its fearsome, horrific ugliness as it, too, began to climb, hissing and snorting through its nose. She pushed herself up into a kneeling position and once more endeavored to cram the curved mag up into the SMG, but in her terrified haste she fumbled more than before and the mag suddenly became a living thing in her hand, flying out of her grasp. The sticky’s head rose above the floor and blindly she smashed the useless gun into its face, crashing the snub-nosed barrel repeatedly into one of its eyes and transforming it into a crimson jelly before the creature was jolted off its perch, tumbling back to the ground. Panic rose like nausea within her, and without thinking she clutched at one of her grenades, yanking the pin and screaming, “Fuck you!” as the sticky, shrilling its pain and rage, leaped for the pillar again. She dropped the grenade on it and flung herself backward, scrambling as if demented away from the floor edge.

The roar of the detonation nearly deafened her, and all at once the floor was rocking then bursting apart and she was sliding toward the edge and tumbling over. She fell, still clinging to the H&K, and hit the ground, automatically rolling on the trash-choked floor. Beams and planks thudded down and dust rose chokingly. She staggered to her feet, her ears ringing, her eyes prickling and smarting.

Miraculously the whole barn had not collapsed, and after a moment she could see why. The sticky had taken most of the blast. Unaccountably it had fallen across the grenade, hunched over it, acting almost like a sandbag. Except a sandbag would not have hurled gobbets of flesh and bloody entrails all over the place.

The pillar she’d squirreled up had gone and that part of the upper chamber’s floor now sagged drunkenly to the floor, unsupported. Other pillars nearby looked about ready to collapse, and she glanced up at the roof fearfully; it seemed safe enough from what she could see through the dust and the gloom. Steel splinters from the blast had flayed the surrounding area, scoring the wooden walls, tearing the table apart. Heads now lay about the floor in macabre confusion. Miraculously, none of the windows had blown.

She thought, I’ve got to get out, got to get out.

She wondered why no one had burst in on her from outside after the explosion. Where in nukeshit were Scale and the second sticky?

Among the mess she spotted the first mag, the one she’d dropped, and hastily bent to pick it up. As she did so she was dimly aware of sounds from outside: the muffled roar of engines, accelerating; the stammer of automatic fire and the heavier punch of MGs; shrill cries of panic. Suddenly she could smell smoke.

Confused, she stood up and glanced to her right and saw that something was burning under the sagging floor of the upper chamber. Delayed action from the grenade blast. Had to be. Even as she watched, a tongue of flame caught a rotten plank and leaped up it, gathering strength as it gathered height. In two seconds or less, the single flame had become a leaping wash of fire, greedily engulfing the tinder-dry beams, soaring toward the roof. Dense, white smoke, caught by drafts, billowed around, mushrooming upward. Shadows trembled, became distorted by the lurid glare of the flames. The smoke caught her and buried her in a swirling fog, the acrid fumes choking her.

She bent again, groping for the mag, her right hand that held the SMG thrusting outward as she stooped. She grasped the curved shape of the magazine, but the H&K 9 mm was snatched from her hand.

She sprang upright, swung around.

Screamed.

The second sticky was only a rancid breath away from her, starkly outlined against the blaze, its eyes glittering.

She flung the mag at its face, sobbing with terror.

And the door to the barn burst open with a thunderous crash.

Krysty caught sight of a tall man, black garbed, dark haired, an autorifle in his hands. The man had stormed through the doorway and now the sticky turned and moved with astonishing, horrifying speed, dropping the H&K and leaping for the newcomer.

The man fired a 3-round burst, but was off balance from the follow-through jump after kicking in the door. The slugs burned air, hammered the wall opposite. The sticky flew at him, enveloped him, both figures crashing to the floor close to the blaze that had volcanoed monstrously from the open door’s in-draft.

Blazing timbers crashed down to the garbage-strewn floor, which caught in seconds, flames leaking everywhere. The heat was corrosive, clawing at exposed skin.

For what seemed long moments Krysty stood like a statue, her green eyes taking in the struggling figures as they rolled and jerked on the floor. The sticky had suckers to the tall man’s face, was pulling its arm back, the face seeming almost to expand outward. Hoarse cries mingled with the thunder of the flames as they eagerly devoured the timber beams and tarred roof.

Krysty came out of her trance and grabbed up the fallen mag and the dropped SMG. She felt calm now, completely in control of herself. Perfectly in control of events. She slipped the mag up into the Heckler & Koch and moved across the struggling pair, her hands working the gun.

She went around to one side, deliberately pushed the stubby barrel of the SMG toward the mouthless face of the sticky and squeezed off a controlled 3-round burst. The slugs tore through flesh and bone, smacking the head sideways even as they punched it apart in a greasy explosion of brains and glutinous blood. She fired another burst at the neck, this time uncontrolled, and the bullets tore through ligaments, cartilage and the cervical vertebrae, taking what was left of the head off the trunk in an eruptive, scarlet spray.

The creature slumped off the tall man, the complete disruption of its central nervous system causing it to loosen its gluelike grip. It fell away, sideways, a lump of unmotivated meat.

The man shoved the body away from him, breathing harshly. He got to his feet, Krysty saw by the glaring light of the fire that over his left eye was a black eye patch. A long scar throbbed whitely from the corner of his right eye to his mouth. Two red patches on his cheeks glistened where the mutated being’s finger pads had slapped home, exerting their tremendous sucking power. His hair was raven black, thickly curled.

He stared at her, suddenly grinned.

“Timely. Thanks.”

She held the SMG limply in her right hand, feeling utterly drained. She couldn’t say a word, felt as though anything she did say would come out as an incoherent gabble. Every dull ache in her body became a throb; her limbs, her head, her womb, her chest. The man’s face blurred, and it seemed to be falling toward her. Or was she falling toward it?

Strong hands caught her, held her gently.

He said, “You don’t look as though you’ve been having a very good time.”

She found herself with her face buried in the exposed fur lining of his black parka, where it was open at the zipper. It was warm and soft, its odor not unpleasant. She felt she could stay there for quite a while, and then thought, Oh, Mother-god!

She jerked her head away.

“The fire. Explosives. This place. Armory.”

The tall man looked startled. He grabbed an arm, pulled her into the cooler air outside. Her eyes took in two small armored buggies, one of which was firing indiscriminately at cabins and huts. The nearest buggy had a side door open and the tall, dark-haired man hustled her toward it. Faces peered out at her, and she was suddenly aware that she was half-naked. The tall man had picked up his weapon and was holding it one-handed, butt into the side of his gut, his other arm around her shoulders. As they neared the buggy he lifted the rifle and waved it, and the farther buggy ceased firing.

He said to her, “We couldn’t find anyone else, although we could’ve missed…”

“I’m the only one,” she said. “The only one left.”

“Okay. Up with you.”

He pushed her inside the door and as she ducked her head, she heard the other buggy roar into a tire-shredding turn before hurtling off toward the outskirts of the camp. The man banged the door shut.

“Abe!” he yelled. “Get us out of here! That barn’s full of explosives.”

It was cramped. The rear of the buggy seemed packed with armed men, and there was a strong smell of sweat and hot oil. There were two steps up to the narrow doorway that led out to the driver’s area, which looked to be equally cramped. The driver revved the bus, swung the wheel. Krysty glimpsed the storehouse with flames roaring around the roof, sparks jetting high.

“Trade this for one of your grenades…?”

A fat man with a stubbled face was grinning at her, holding out a flask. She was conscious that the weight of the grenade in the upper pocket of her jump suit had caused the torn material to sag away, exposing her right breast. She closed her eyes, chuckled tiredly, then thought about which was the priority, thirst or modesty? She took the flask, put the neck to her teeth and took a hefty slug. Neat brandy. She spluttered, most of the raw spirit sluicing down her throat and warming and fortifying her. She took another slug of the brandy and handed it and the grenade to the fat man, smiling gratefully. Then she pulled her jump suit together.

“Always the loser, Finnegan!” shouted someone from the rear.

The fat man grinned like a kid and shrugged, then nearly fell off his seat as the buggy bucked forward, jolting along on its shocks as though smacked by a giant hand.

“No more barn!” yelled the driver.

The tall dark-haired man squatted in front of Krysty, clinging on to a metal projection to hold his balance as the buggy accelerated, jouncing over potholes on the rough track.

“You’re safe now. We’re the Trader’s men. I’m Ryan. I look after things for him. Who are you?” His voice was deep and warm, immensely reassuring.

She leaned back wearily against the two steps. Not even the sharpness of their edges could make her feel uncomfortable.

“My name’s Krysty,” she said. “Krysty Wroth.”

 

Chapter Five

« ^ »

IT’S A MYTH,” said Ryan. “Will-o’-the-wisp.”

“A land of lost happiness,” said Krysty.

“Crap. Ain’t no such thing.”

“That’s what Uncle Tyas used to call a double negative. What you just said is, There is not no such thing. And that means, there is such a thing.”

Ryan leaned back in the swivel chair, his fingers frozen in the act of lining tobacco along a paper, and gazed at the young woman seated opposite him. Almost unconsciously he let his single eye drift across her eyes—large, profoundly green, slightly almond shaped—down to high cheekbones that curved softly around to a firm chin, the nose long, the mouth full-lipped and generous. There were laugh lines there, an imp dancing in those emerald eyes. He thought it would be delightful to dive into their depths, sink slowly down, drift. Still staring, he slicked his tongue the length of the paper and deftly twirled the result.

“Finished?” There was a definitely a sardonic edge to her voice.

“Yeah.” He firmed up the cigarette, the best he could do with such crude materials long ago dug up from a buried warehouse site, though the packages had at least been airtight, and he tapped an end against his thumbnail, then fished around in a top pocket, pulled out a lighter tube and flicked it. A flame sprang up, quivering slightly in the draft. Ryan grinned and pointed at the lighter. “A miracle. You know, we got maybe about a million of these little bastards. A billion. Maybe—what’s the next one up?—trillion? Found ‘em in a military dump down south. Crates and crates and crates of the suckers. Guys who found ‘em didn’t know what the hell they were to begin with, couldn’t figure out how to use ‘em. Thought they were antipersonnel booby bombs.” He grinned again, shot a glance across the war wag’s swaying cabin at J.B. Dix, who was busy greasing one of his pieces—one of his many pieces. “That’s not to say that some of them aren’t booby bombs,” he added. “The ingenuity of man in the causing of destruction to his fellows is boundless. I read that somewhere, or something akin to it. Education, you see. Like you. Dub-ull neg-a-tive.” He rolled the words out slowly, frowning mildly as though judging them. “Yeah, that surely is education. It’s still a crock of shit, though, this land of lost, happiness.”

“A paradise beyond the Deathlands,” said Krysty. She was rolling her own cigarette from the tobacco supply, her long fingers dealing nimbly with its creation. She was so fast that they seemed almost to flicker. Ryan watched, fascinated.

She had cleaned herself up, now wore a green jump suit taken from Stores. It fitted her in all the right places yet was loose and comfortable looking. She had even polished her boots; the interior lights reflected off the buffed leather. Her hair was just as lustrous, a shining flame-red cascade over her shoulders and halfway down her back. To Ryan, when she moved her head, even if gently, her hair seemed to be wildly alive, to shimmer with a restless motion.

“There is no paradise beyond the Deathlands,” he intoned mock-judiciously, sucking smoke. The ancient, preserved tobacco was faintly sweet-smelling as it burned. He wasn’t entirely sure what it was, although it wasn’t a relaxant like happyweed. Ryan left that kind of thing for off-duty periods. “Only death. This is a world of death. There is no other world.”

“Too pessimistic,” she said.

“I’m a realist. It’s the way it is, the way it’ll always be. There’s no escape. They screwed us a century ago, and we’re left with the pieces. That’s it. You make the best of what you’ve got.”

“But wouldn’t you like to escape?”

He stared at her, smoke from the cigarette drifting across his blind eye so it did not cause him discomfort, and he thought to himself, very odd question.

“Escape what?” he said. “What else is there? We know a little of what’s going on—” he made a vague gesture that took in the entire world, “—though not that much, communications being what they are. Even so, it seems that out there is much the same as it is around here. Pretty shitty. Listen.” He leaned forward, jabbing the tip of his cigarette in her direction. “I’ll tell you. A person gets around with the Trader. I’ve been with him for maybe ten years, and we’ve been all over. We’ve been as far west as you can get without falling off the edge, up through the mountains and down to the Hot Seas. There used to be a wide coastal plain there—cities, highways, millions of people, but it sank. Plain sank. Seems there was a fault or something in the earth and it was a number-one target and they hit it and it just tore the earth’s crust apart and the whole deal just slid into the sea. Goodbye, that particular part of civilization.”

She said, “California. That’s what it was, that’s what they called it.”

“Well, there’s no such place anymore. Hasn’t been for a hundred years or more. Not since the Nuke. We thought of trying to salvage something from the seabed—there must be riches down there! A lost world! But it’s too far and we don’t have the gear. And the sea is hot and bubbling and scummy, and there’s things down there only a crazy man would dream up.”

“You could say that about everywhere.”

“Sure. Doesn’t alter my argument, though. Which is—the West? Forget it. Okay—” he warmed to his theme, “—the Southwest. Maybe you know this, maybe you don’t. There used to be desert down there, out of everyone’s way. They were doing things they didn’t want people to know about. Only snag was, the other side did know about it—they must have known about it because they pounded it, flattened it. Took it out. There’s only the wind there now, and sometimes that just literally sears what’s left. And where there’s no wind, there’s nuclear garbage floating in the sky in great clouds as thick as mountains. Sometimes it flares up and sets the night on fire. I’ve seen it. The sky burns.” His voice was softer now, his eye unfocused. “Burns for days and nights on end. And then—” he snapped his fingers, “—it stops. Just like that. You don’t know why, and you’ll never know why. But it just stops, the fire dies, and all you have left is floating nuclear junk.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You figure that’s paradise?”

“No, that’s not what I’m—”

“So what about the North? It’s cold up there. Hellish cold. There’s guys up there, they don’t take their furs off more than once a year. If that. Didn’t used to be so all-fired warm before, so it’s said, except for plains where wheat grew, but it’s cold all over now. It could be that the ice from the far north has shifted south, and maybe it’s still on the move, maybe it won’t stop until the whole world is covered with it—a new ice age. Not in our lifetime, I guess. But it’s a frozen hell up there, believe me. I’ve seen it, I’ve tried to trek through it. The guys who live there, the Franchies, they’d love to trade, but we don’t have the means, the proper equipment. You go up there and your gas freezes in the tanks and gets like jelly.”

“So let’s try South. I’m easy. Like this, just you and me, we can go anywhere. So—South. Deep down south.” His tone darkened. “Now that’s a place, let me tell you. A dark locale. Far as I can tell it used to be an area of mainly grasslands, woodlands, all over. But now it’s jungle, swamp and rot. There’s more mutants per acre down there than any place I’ve seen. I don’t know why. Maybe the chem stuff got out of hand, maybe the opposition went over the top, dumped too many toxins down there. Or maybe it just got hotter anyhow, the climate—something to do with the sea. Who the nuke knows. All I can tell you is that it’s a poisoned land and I can do without it. Paradise it ain’t.”

“Hey, now. You don’t seem to—”

“And then we shift to the East. Well, sure. That’s civilized, I guess. Parts of it.” He paused, took a final drag on the cigarette, butted it. “I guess it’s civilized because everyone there says it is. And sure, they got industry of a kind, and they know how to produce electric power better than anywhere else I know, and they got lines of communication that don’t break down every three hours, and they can grow their own food, and they read and write, and…” He stopped, stared down at the floor as though a memory had twitched at the outer edges of his mind. He looked up again, his one eye suddenly bleak. “But it’s uncoordinated, lady. And beneath a thin skin of culture it’s as much of a hell as it is out here. There’s maybe a dozen families in the Southern Enclave in an uneasy truce, all secretly lusting after what the others have got, all about ready to swoop in and grab any territory that looks to be weaker than they are.”

“I read once about a country out there,” he continued, almost wistfully. “Hundreds of years ago. It was a large slice of land split up into little territories, all ruled over by individual princes and barons or dukes or whatever. All feuding with one another, greedy for land. Everyone else’s land. And if they weren’t fighting one another, they were figuring out how to stab one another in the back in the smartest way possible so some other guy would get the blame. And at the same time as all this is going on, they’re busy inventing and creating and painting pictures and writing books and fashioning crazy models or castles out of pure gold with all the towers and turrets and drawbridges and even arrow slits in the walls, all in proportion, and when you lifted the roof of the tallest tower, inside was a little glass jar for putting the salt in. Now that was civilization. Sure, I guess the peasants were treated like shit on the rich man’s boots, but even so it was a busy time, everything going on, an upward surge. They had ambition. There was always something beyond the next horizon, and the next, and the next.”

She said, “Italy.”

He laughed. “You did read books!”

“My mother. She made sure I knew as much as there was to know, as much as she could cram into me. She said it was important.”

“She was a wise woman.”

Krysty nodded slowly, her head bowed. “Yes,” she said.

Ryan did not pursue that. It was not the time. He kept his eyes on the scarlet glory of her hair, watched as she brought her head back up again so that they were once more face-to-face. The imp had gone from her eyes; now they held only grief, a sense of profound loss.

Ryan said, “Well, anyhow, the East Coast has nothing I want. It’s an armed camp of greedy madmen. The muties are the peasants and no one is creating paintings that will last for half a millennium and the only gold that’s coming in is from that fat rat Jordan Teague, and sure as nukeshit no one’s making salt containers out of it.”

“If it’s an armed camp,” Krysty said, “who armed it?” She stared at him clear-eyed.

Ryan held her gaze for maybe six seconds, then looked away, shrugged.

“Yeah. Okay. Point. Maybe we all realize now that our trade routes have been built on orders we should maybe never have delivered.”

“Maybe?”

“Okay. We should never have delivered.” He stopped, stretched, sat back down again. His hands plucked at the crimson scarf tied around his throat and he loosened it. The ends hung heavily down to his waist. “One doesn’t always think ahead. You don’t plan for the future, figure out the pros and cons of what you’re doing. The present is all, lady. The here and now. It’s the only thing you have to wrestle with. And that in fact is the history of the human race. Always too frantic worrying about what was happening in the here and how. We forgot that the future is created in the present, that whatever is done in the here and now has an influence on the years to come.” His voice drifted low as he stared at his boots. “Too late, lady. Too late…”

Krysty said accusingly, “You could make a start by not delivering all this heavy shit to Mocsin.” She didn’t know anything about the load they were carrying, but she knew all about Jordan Teague and his miniempire out near the Darks.

Ryan grinned sourly.

“Funny thing,” he said, “Teague ain’t gonna be—and you can take that as a nondouble negative that’s a great big positive—he ain’t gonna be too fireblasted pleased about this load.”

“That’s funny?”

“Well, you see, it just so happens that most of Teague’s consignment went up when Truck Four blew. Boom!” He spread his arms high. “All those grenades, all that high explosive, all those old armor-piercing shells. Sent most of his delivery to glory in a great big blaze-out. Lucky for us, though, because that’s what creamed most of the stickies and other mad muties that had us in a terrible, terrible fix. And that means that Teague’s gonna be getting short supplies. Pity.”

“And did it?”

“Did it what?”

“All go up.”

Ryan chuckled.

“As it happens, no, of course it didn’t. But Teague’s not to know that. It’s the perfect scam. You may not believe this, but we do have a code. Of sorts. I mean, listen—we don’t spend sleepless nights gnawing away at the problem, it’s too late for that, way too late. The Old Man did it to survive.”

Krysty wrinkled her nose. What Ryan had said sounded to her like special pleading. “You still didn’t answer the question,” she said. “Would you like to escape?”

Ryan shook his head helplessly.

“To what? There is no escape from the Deathlands.”

“Uncle Tyas thought there was.”

“You mean, get a boat, take a trip, sail across the ocean? You don’t know what’s out there or under the waves, just waiting for you. You don’t know what’s waiting for you on the other side, either. Could be worse than here, though that’s hard to imagine.”

“No, he didn’t mean that.”

Ryan pointed up at the dull metal ceiling of the swaying war wag.

“You mean up there? How? Why? All there is up there is free-floating garbage. We know the old guys had, I dunno—” he groped for words, “—kind of settlements out in space, huge constructions with their own air supplies. That kind of thing. But how the hell d’you get to them? All the places where they had vehicles, aircraft, what have you, were blitzed in the Nuke. We’ve stumbled across launching grounds with wrecked machinery, incredible rusting hulks lying around, chunks of dead metal. But there’s no way you can get this shit off the ground, believe me. No way at all.”

“No, that’s not what I mean, either. Uncle Tyas knew. He’d found something out. But he wouldn’t tell me. He and old Peter…”

“Who?”

“Peter Maritza, his buddy. His close buddy. They did just about everything together. They were always poking into old books… and papers…” Her voice drifted off.

“And?” he prompted her.

“I remember when it happened,” she said. “But I was only a kid at the time—maybe fourteen or fifteen, that kind of age.”

 

EVEN AS SHE SPOKE Krysty could see the scene in the candlelit, tightly caulked log cabin that stood at the edge of their hamlet, hidden deep in the rolling hills and forests of the Sanctuary.

She saw again the hawk-faced man, with the deep-set, piercing eyes, then only in his early fifties, striding around the main room muttering to himself as she sat beside the fire quietly watching him with solemn, uncomprehending eyes.

She was still a little afraid of him. His tone was harsh, his manner abrupt. She had not as yet been allowed to plumb the depths of kindliness and generosity that were essential parts of his character. You had to know Tyas McCann a long time before you could get past his guard, the steely barrier of his ingrained reserve and suspicion. And to young Krysty Wroth, then, he was still an unknown quantity, for she had only lived with him since Sonja had died and that was less than eighteen months before. Sometimes she still cried at nights, the image of her mother wasted by the sickness for which there was no cure, from which there was no escape, etched into her mind. And she was lonely—soul-achingly lonely. Her mother had been everything to her, and her mother’s brother could never take her place.

Now of course she knew better. Now she knew that it was not a question of Uncle Tyas taking Sonja’s place in her love and affection. Uncle Tyas supplied what Sonja had not supplied, and would not have supplied even if she had lived. They were two different branches of the same tree. Her mother had taught her to keep the Secrets; her uncle, how to use them. Her mother taught her knowledge of the Earth Mother; her uncle had expanded and extended this knowledge dramatically, to include just about all he knew about the real world outside, and all he had learned about the catastrophe that had overtaken it: what had happened, how it had happened and why it had happened—though there were more theories than hard facts on that.

And he had taught her how to survive in a world that had been insane for a century. Her mother would never have taught her how to use a firearm. Uncle Tyas had taught her just that.

She could see him now, outside the large, airy, seven-roomed cabin, holding a squat and ugly-looking metallic shape in both hands—she realized now that it must have been the Detonics Pocket 9; it was the smallest handgun Uncle Tyas had in a wide-ranging collection gathered over the years—and saying, “This is a bad thing, little one, but you have to know about it and you have to be able to use it one day, because there are worse things waiting out beyond the Forest, and you have to sometimes use bad things to deal with worse things, worse situations.” Krysty was fourteen when she’d heard this.

Almost as soon as she had come to stay with him he had begun his instruction, not only in the use of all kinds of weaponry, but in unarmed combat, as well.

There had been two of them, she and young Carl Lanning, at fifteen the eldest son of Herb Lanning, Harmony’s ironsmith. Herb was a big, potbellied, gruff man who had taken over the forge and ironsmith’s shop built by his father forty or so years back. He did odd jobs for Uncle Tyas, made strange-looking metal artifacts that Uncle Tyas created on his drawing board from books in his vast library, objects that sometimes worked as Uncle Tyas said they would, and sometimes didn’t. And when they didn’t, Uncle Tyas would rant and cuss and call Herb the biggest blockhead in the entire Deathlands, say that he couldn’t construct a simple metal object when it was handed to him on a set of detailed and meticulously finished drawings. And Big Herb would grin good-naturedly and point out that everything he’d done was from the drawings, and if the thing didn’t work it was because the guy who drew it up hadn’t got it right in the first place. They used to argue for hours, Uncle Tyas raging, Big Herb smiling complacently, filling a rocking chair with his bulk, both hands clasped across his gut. It had to be said that more often than not Big Herb was right. More often than not, there had been a slight error in transcription from book example to drawing board, because Uncle Tyas worked fast, too fast, often in a white heat of creation, his eager brain far ahead of his fingers, nimble though the latter were. The trouble was, Uncle Tyas invariably wanted things done about half an hour before he thought of them.

Big Herb’s eldest boy, Carl, helped him in the iron-smith’s shop. He was a tall, lanky kid with a shock of black hair, an explosion of freckles on his face, an inquiring mind, but a gentle nature. That was why Uncle Tyas had chosen him to partner Krysty in his unarmed combat lessons. Krysty remembered overhearing Uncle Tyas talking enthusiastically to Peter Maritza—not “old” Peter Maritza then; by no means “old,” even though he was a good ten years ahead of Uncle Tyas—out on the porch one night when she’d been preparing dinner, his voice an excited hiss, a new idea clamoring in his brain.

“You get it, Peter? There’s Krysty—she’s a girl.”

“Tyas, I’m not an imbecile. I know she’s a blasted girl.”

“Okay, okay. But she’s a girl, right? Weaker sex, right?”

“Not around here, buddy. Not in Harmony. Talk like that’ll get you strung up from the—”

“All right! In general, Peter! Generally speaking! Weaker sex in quotes, right? Then there’s young Carl—”

“You saying he’s weak? You saying he’s some kind of milksop? Why, I’ve seen him at the forge—”

“Peter, will you listen to me! Okay, he beats the shit out of all that red-hot metal in his daddy’s ironshop, but he’s no great shakes when it comes to anything else, right? Sure he’s no weakling, but he’s not what you or I’d call positive, you get me? Got no drive in him. Just like his father. He’s faced with a raving canny, y’know what would happen? He’d just let himself get eaten up, sure as hell. Well, I aim to change all that. Change ‘em both. Damn right.”

And he had. Changed them both. Especially Krysty. At the age of fourteen she’d learned how to throw a guy to the ground in one second flat, how to disable an adversary with a single one-handed squeeze, how to cripple a man for life with one well-directed punch.

She found that wrestling with Carl in a rough-and-tumble scrimmage was sexually arousing. That in close-quarters proximity to him, in a situation in which both were trying their damnedest to conquer the other, in a fierce and breathless and sweaty scuffle on the ground, rolling over and over each other, first one on top, then the other, each desperate to out-tussle the other, she experienced a sudden and overpowering awareness of his maleness, a sharply felt urge to surrender to him yet also a scary and delicious sense of power over him that had nothing at all to do with winning the bout. And the knowledge came to her as, for a split second, they ceased their struggle and stared half fearfully, half defiantly into each other’s eyes, that he felt the same. It was partly emotional, she recognized, partly physical. She had never experienced such feelings before.

At fourteen Krysty Wroth knew all there was to know about physical sex—the full details from ovulation to conception through pregnancy and into childbirth itself. But Sonja had also taught her from an early age that sex was not merely an act of procreation but a powerful experience, an expression of heady passion. It could also, if you were lucky enough to find the right partner, be fun. But you had to look after yourself because if you didn’t have the luck to find the right partner, you could land yourself in all kinds of unnecessary trouble.

Sonja had also told her that years ago, before the Nuke, there had been religions that preached childbirth almost as a necessity, despite the fact that the world was overloaded with people, a good proportion of whom lived in abject misery and squalor. Those old religions had largely disappeared. Only in the Baronies was religion, in one form or another, used as it had been in the bad old days, as a means of keeping the populace quiet and as a means of keeping the populace growing in number. Down there, you bred for the Barons. Boy children were sent by God; girl children were a damned nuisance, fit only to skivvy and breed—breed more and more boy children: the warrior syndrome.

Contraception was actually banned in certain of the Baronies where the old, ugly Islamic and Judeo-Christian fundamentalist creeds were strong—that women were basically cattle; that they were not only created solely for man’s benefit and pleasure but were also inherently sly, lewd and evil creatures and must be kept in a state of subjugation. Although that was not to say that contraception wasn’t available. On the contrary, the rich and the powerful could afford the secret and highly expensive prophylactics that did a roaring trade on the various black markets. The poor, as usual, were not so lucky. They had to rely on ill-understood natural methods, altogether a chancy business.

Those who followed the wisdom of the Earth Mother, which was more a free celebration of natural forces than a sharply defined and disciplined religion—an understanding, brought about to a great degree by the often strange effects of genetic and physical mutation over the years, that the power of the mind and the power of nature had rarely been used to their fullest extent—were more fortunate. They had the benefit of knowledge passed down from mother to daughter of medicaments that had been known to a few long before the Nuke—natural specifics, natural ointments, natural oils and unguents, all derived from a variety of roots, tree barks, mashed-up leaves and berries. Now, three generations after the disaster, this information could be said to have become the solid bedrock upon which the slowly expanding worship of the Earth Mother rested.

So Krysty theoretically knew all about sex. It was a natural function and a natural pleasure. And she knew, too, exactly how not to get pregnant. The only thing that remained to be conquered was the act itself, the physical and emotional experience firsthand.

Thinking about her feelings as she’d wrestled with young Carl, and mulling over what her mother had often talked about when she was alive, how if there was any first-time-ever obstacle at all, it was only an insignificant wafer-thin tissue of membrane and it was better to get it out of the way sooner rather than later and when the time came she’d know about it and know what to do, Krysty weighed things up as coolly and calmly as any post-Nuke fourteen-year-old could have and figured that the time had indeed come. She knew what to do, and she did it. Or, rather, she and Carl did it together, and it wasn’t the most sensational experience she had ever had, but on the other hand it wasn’t half bad, not half bad at all.

It was only years later—maybe seven or even eight, when she returned to Harmony after one of her bouts of wanderlust—that she discovered, to her amusement, that Uncle Tyas had been deliberate in instigating that, as he was deliberate in most things. That he’d purposely thrown her and Carl together, hoping they’d like each other, because he’d figured Carl for an essentially good, honest, caring kid.

Krysty’s amusement at this discovery, which was let drop, again deliberately, by Uncle Tyas, was tinged with mild annoyance. No one likes to find out that someone else has been pulling her strings.

“That was gross interference, Uncle Tyas. What if I hadn’t liked him?”

“You did like him,” he pointed out, arms wide, an innocent expression on his hawklike face.

“Yeah, but…”

She could find no words of condemnation because none applied.

“Better to let it go to someone you like than by force to a stranger or someone you hate,” Uncle Tyas continued. “Virginity means nothing. It’s a moralistic ideal from an age that in a certain way was darker and more twisted than our own. But that first time, the way it happens, Krysty, maybe influences your whole life.”

Which was true.

The thought and memories and emotions tumbled and shifted around in Krysty’s mind as the war wag, like some primeval brute animal, bucked and shook along the blacktop. The images sharpened, then defocused. Became clear again, then vague.

Now Uncle Tyas was dead, he and all his companions on that strange pilgrimage. Rest in peace, she thought.

 

“YOU WERE REMEMBERING,” said Ryan.

He had watched her as she’d stared blank-eyed at the floor. The pause had drifted on for maybe thirty heartbeats, and it was clear from her face, from the shadows that flickered across those drawn features, that memories were flooding into her mind, memories of those now dead. She seemed to him to be a strong person, a woman of courage, a woman who could cope with disaster, yet even the toughest individuals had their limits.

“Yeah, I was.” Her voice was low. “There’s so much I recall.” She gazed at Ryan now, as if deciding whether to tell him one thing more.

“Later, when I was older,” she said, “I came back to the house in the afternoon, and Uncle Tyas—I’ll never forget it—he yelled something at me as I went in the door. He said, ‘They’re there! I know it! I can feel it in my bones! It’s not a joke! Bastards didn’t have a sense of humor!’ ”

“Which particular bastards?” queried Ryan patiently.

“Scientists is what he meant. Old-time technics. Uncle Tyas was certain they all had no sense of humor. He claimed that was why the world blew up, because the scientists had had no sense of humor, that they were all cold fish without a joke among them.”

“Maybe he had a point.”

Ryan did not mind her talking on like this, although he doubted very much that there was anything to be gained from her story. He had an idea what the punch line was going to be. He’d heard it, in one form or another, before. Many times. But that didn’t matter in the least. It was therapy, he knew—a torrent of words pouring out of her, some kind of emotional release. It was all to the good if it somehow flushed her system of the horror of the past couple of days.

Ryan said gently, “Okay, so what was he talking about?”

She took a breath, bit her lower lip and said, “A couple of months ago I got back to the Forest. I’d been away for a year or more. I’ve been doing a great deal of moving around myself. Things happen. Change.” She shrugged. “I got back and Uncle Tyas opened the door to me. He didn’t know I was coming, but as soon as he saw me he said, ‘My God, Krysty, I had it all the time and I never knew.” He was shaken, totally shaken. And drawn, too, and ill. He said there was a ‘land of lost happiness.’ Those were his words. A land of milk and honey beyond the Deathlands. And he’d found the gateway to it, and he knew how to open it.

Ryan thought about what she was saying. He had heard stories like this before, although only stories. Hints, rumors, whispers. A land of lost contentment. No one, to his knowledge, had ever tried to do something about finding the place. Which, in any case, wasn’t to be found. It was a myth, a dream. Something to compensate for the horrors of Deathlands existence. Sometimes the stories told of a fabulous treasure hidden somewhere—significantly, always in the most wild and inaccessible places: the Hot-lands in the southwest, the icy regions to the north, those mysterious and plague-stricken swamps that glowed in the dark down in the south. Or across the simmering seas to the west. Or even, he’d once heard, up in the sky.

And that was it. Pie in the sky. Heaven. Somewhere—anywhere—other than this hell on earth known as the Deathlands.

On the other hand—“more hidden underground than had ever been discovered…” Sure, he thought, that was true enough. He and the Trader and J.B. Dix knew very well that it was so, that there were far more Stockpiles hidden away in man-made caverns than they had stumbled across thus far. That had to be admitted. But strange weaponry? Bizarre secrets? Just a dream. The only bizarre shit they’d ever uncovered was a sea of nerve gas in the hills of old Kentucky, and they’d reburied it in very short order. For the rest—although a manufacturing industry was alive in the Baronies, creakingly primitive as it was for the most part—people were still living with mainly late-twentieth-century artifacts and weapons, and if they were creating new matériel it was based on the old. There were no new kinds of weapons in the here and now. None whatsoever.

“Look,” he said gently, “I have to tell you that there is no land of lost happiness. Your Uncle Tyas really was chasing a rainbow, and there’s no crock of gold at the end of it because there is no end.”

Her head jerked up. She said almost defiantly, “He wasn’t a fool and he wasn’t crazy. Whatever else he was, Uncle Tyas wasn’t crazy.”

“I didn’t say—”

“He did find something! I know it. It was something important and it was something… outrageous, something completely wild… something that no one’s ever discovered before. He wasn’t simply some crazy old fucker obsessed with a phantom!”

“Sure.”

“And don’t ‘sure’ me, asshole.”

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry.”

The anger went out of her eyes, the granite hardness from her face. Her body, suddenly tense, relaxed. She breathed in and said “Okay” while breathing out again. “I’m sorry. Hell, you saved my life.” All at once she grinned. “You can’t be a complete asshole.”

Ryan glanced sideways, saw that up front the Trader was watching him, eyebrows raised. Through the steel mesh that covered the blown windshield he could just make out that they were heading through trees, an overlush forest that a century ago had probably simply been pine but was now a moist tangle of humid undergrowth and purplish topgrowth. He remembered the area. They were about five miles out of Mocsin. Talk about bizarre, he brooded. There was enough that was bizarre in the Deathlands without adding to it with all these dreams of fantastic weaponry and who knows what all else. This forest alone was bizarre. How it had grown was beyond him: a random gift from the Nuke. On the other side of Mocsin it was mostly scrub desert to the foothills of the Darks, no purple forest at all.

He suddenly thought, the Darks.

He said, “You were heading for the Darks. Was that where this wild blue yonder all started?”

She scowled at him.

“Still heading,” she said.

“You’re what!”

“Still heading. Still heading for the Darks.”

Ryan said, “Come on!”

“Don’t patronize me,” she said through her teeth, the angry look back in wide green eyes.

Ryan held up his hands in mock surrender.

“I’m not patronizing. I’m trying to be realistic. You got any idea what’s in between Mocsin and the hills? One hundred klicks of wilderness is what. You gonna walk it?”

“I’ll get a buggy.”

“How? You got any creds?”

“I’ll sell my body.”

“As to that,” said Ryan, “there’s quite a bit of competition in Mocsin. And it’s regulated. And the pay’s piss poor. And it’s a hell of a life. And…”

She shot him a withering look.

“You don’t maybe consider I have a touch more class than the majority of my working sisters?”

Ryan tapped his teeth with a fingernail and looked her over with amusement.

“Here it is,” he said, his eyes locking on to hers. “You have more class than I’ve seen in five years.”

“Only five years? How blasted gallant.” Her tone was sardonic. “Don’t bother with the honey talk. I can get by.”

Ryan stood up and leaned against the steel-faced wall. He went on as though she hadn’t said a word. “But that of course only makes it worse. You wouldn’t start out in the back-street sleaze pits, you’d go straight to the top. And that means you’d start off with Jordan Teague, the fattest hog in the territory. You’d not only supplant all his harem, which means they’d be gunning for you the whole time, but you’d have to put up with his personal habits and sexual demands, which are by no means couth.”

“ ‘Couth!’ ” She laughed suddenly. “That I like!”

“When Teague’s finished with you—only take a month at the most, he has a low boredom threshold—you get passed down to his chief of police, Cort Strasser. Teague’s just gross, raunchy. Strasser on the other hand has very strange and violent tastes. Whips, torture, humiliation. I don’t believe Strasser likes women very much.”

“Okay, okay.” Her voice was tight. She said quietly, “Is it any wonder people want to escape…”

“If you’ve been around,” Ryan said, “you know very well that not every city, town or hamlet is the same as Mocsin. Sure there are plague pits all over the place, but you could probably live your entire life out without seeing one.”

Krysty stood up, faced him, her deep green eyes diamond hard, defiant. She swept a swath of scarlet hair from her face and it tumbled back over her shoulders. Ryan felt sudden and intense desire for her.

She looked at him and said, “I’m going on to the Darks.”

 

Chapter Six

« ^ »

AND CHECK YOUR BOOTS,” said the Trader through his cigar smoke. He waved the cigar at J.B. Dix. “See they do it, J.B.”

“Don’t worry. They always do.”

“You, as well.”

J.B. didn’t say anything. He glanced at Ryan, a pissed-off expression on his thin face.

“And don’t look like that!” barked the Trader. “I know what I’m talking about! It’s the little details. You forget the little details, you might as well be dead. Hell, you forget ‘em and you will be dead!”

Ryan reflected that it was ever thus when they were approaching what the Trader invariably referred to as a “pest hole”—town or area controlled not by men and women with a certain standard of civilized behavior, but by men and women for whom there was no law but their own, no rules but those that they invented on the spur of the moment to satisfy some passing whim or desire. Mocsin was just such a place. It was not the worst, but it was well up—or, depending on how you looked at it, down—the scale.

Back a hundred years or so it had been typical small-town America. A long main street with cross streets cutting it into blocks. A movie house, a bank, a couple of realtors, ice cream and pizza parlors, supermarkets, drugstores, bars, a half dozen greasy spoons, a couple of upmarket but still essentially tacky restaurants, a Lutheran church, a sheriff’s office with a small jail facility for drunks to dry out in, two motels. The edge-of-town streets had trees on them, well-shaved lawns in front of medium-sized dwelling places for the moderately well-off. There was a small industrial complex: a machine-tool plant, a couple of lots where electrical components were stamped, a coast-to-coast shipping warehouse, a small plastics factory. Near the industrial part of town the homes were drabber, the streets grimier, the bars grubbier, the nightlife darker.

Mocsin dwellers of the past, had they been able to skip a hundred years into the future, would have both recognized the old hometown and not recognized the old hometown. The outline was there. The bank was there, the church, the movie house: everything was still in its place. The Nuke had not hit Mocsin, just the aftereffects.

The bank wasn’t a bank anymore, the church wasn’t a church, the movie house wasn’t a movie house. There were places where you could eat, places where you could sleep, places where you could buy food, but in no sense of the words were these places restaurants, hotels, stores. All were more or less rat pits. What flourished in Mocsin were the bars and the gambling houses and the whorehouses. Perhaps “flourished” was not quite the word: there wasn’t a hell of a lot of bartering strength in Mocsin, except at the top.

The top was represented by Jordan Teague, who certainly had his fair share of flesh; and his so-called chief of police, Cort Strasser, somewhat less well endowed in body, though not in brain.

Strasser, nowadays, ran things. Teague still gave the orders, was still very firmly in charge, but Cort Strasser kept the show on the road, did all the hard graft necessary to keep things from falling apart completely. Largely this meant cracking down viciously on anyone or anything that looked as if he, she or it might buck the system, a system that had grown up over a period of twenty years, based on Teague’s highly dubious claim but iron grip on the gold mines to the southwest of town.

The road through Mocsin was the main route to the northwest and the north. Travelers, heading into the Rockies in the hopes that there they would find fresh fields, had to pass through Mocsin and consequently had to pay for the privilege, either in creds or in kind. For that reason not a lot of travelers actually made it through the town, the toll being hair-raisingly high. If you argued the toss, you ended up six feet under and your goods and chattels, which included both kith and kin, went straight into Jordan Teague’s treasury. If you paid up, it usually broke you, and you either signed on as a miner so that you could earn back what you’d paid out in toll—a laughable ambition—or you simply parked your steam truck and van where a few hundred other hopefuls had parked theirs and tried to find some kind of honest employment in the district. There was now a vast shantytown of rusting trailers, buggies and rigs sprawling out of the south end of town.

Those who resided in the town and its environs did not so much live as exist, and it was a miserable and squalid existence at that. Most took refuge in booze or happyweed, sometimes both, and brought up their children in wretched circumstances with the ever present fear that one day Strasser’s talent spotters would home in on them. Pretty young girls and pretty young boys were always needed for the recreational activities of Strasser’s security goons. Then, once the bloom had gone from them, the kids were consigned to the various gaudy houses that lined the streets in the center of town.

Sure, commercial life, of a kind, went on. People made clothes and mended boots and shoes; people reared hogs and horses, built timber-frame houses, had small farmsteads outside of the peripheries where root vegetables, corn and wheat were grown. The mech trade was the real thriver: mechanics, welders, machine repairmen were all highly prized. Men and women who were skilled mechs could command ace jack. Even Jordan Teague had to pay for skill. He had to keep up his fleet of land wags and trucks. Maneuverability was essential in the Deathlands.

“You’re not listening to me, Ryan.”

“True. I was thinking about Mocsin.”

“Don’t waste your brain,” growled the Trader. “We wanna be in and out of there, smooth and fast.”

Ryan laughed.

“Fat chance! Bastard could keep us hanging around for days. Then we finally get the ‘audience’ with the great man. Then we have to point out that he’s only getting less than half because we got hit by marauders. Then he gets mad and stalks out on us. Then we wait around for—”

“Yeah, yeah,” the Trader muttered. “I know all that.” His face suddenly twisted, his mouth snapping shut like a steel trap as he snorted explosively through his nose. His right hand slid inside his worn leather zip-up and clutched his gut. “Nukeblast this… indigestion.”

Ryan stared at him. “See the medics about it,” he said.

“Damned warlocks, that’s all they are,” the Trader grunted. “Piss-artists. The day I let some no-good incompetent get his mitts into me’ll be the day after I’ve kicked it.” He wiped an arm across his brow, leaving a smear of grime from the soiled jacket sleeve. “Indigestion is all. Bastard cook. Poisoning me. Needs changing.” He gestured at Ryan. “Do something about Loz, Ryan. Get a new cookie. That’ll cure me.”

Night was falling. Deathlands night. The sky was a lowering bottle green greased with angry flame-red streaks. Dark clouds were boiling up behind them, though it was doubtful that they were rain clouds. In front of them, the mountains were picked out in an extraordinary diamond hard and brilliant radiance, strange luminance backlighting the sharp-toothed serrations of their peaks. A bitter breeze whipped the dust at his feet.

Ryan shivered, closed his long fleece-lined coat, stamped his boots. He said to the Trader, “We still heading south after this number?”

“Yeah.”

“Great. It’s too near to the Icelands up here. At night you start to breathe sleet chips.”

The Trader laughed raucously.

“You’re getting soft, Ryan. When you’ve had twenty years or more of this crap, you don’t notice it.”

Ryan watched the busy scene below. The land wags, trucks and two of the war wags were parked in a wide circle off the road. Fires were being built outside the vehicles’ perimeter, massive constructions of logs and thorn and brush scrub and chunks of long-burning hardwood carried especially for the purpose in one of the trucks. Fires, as such, did not particularly deter marauders or strange animals that sometimes came shuffling around, sniffing for easy kills—dogs as big as steers with tusks a foot long, roaming in packs, bred in secret, truly carnivorous; or hideous, unknown beasts of great bulk that left wide trails of yellow slime behind them—but flames would give light when you didn’t want to waste the generators, and psychologically, they were good for the men. What did deter was the immense amount of firepower concentrated in that circle of travel-worn and travel-stained vehicles.

There was enough blast power there to shred anything that might dare to take on the land wag train.

On the road itself, maybe forty meters from the bottom of the hillock on which he and the Trader stood, was the lead war wag, two big container rigs and an armored truck on Ryan’s buggy. Men were milling around there; Ryan could see J.B. giving terse orders, checking things out. He yawned, turned, took in the dreary terrain.

This was basically flatland, desert scrub. Behind lay the purple forest, a dark mass only just glimpsed beyond the rises of the semi-ruined blacktop. To Ryan’s right, more forest. To his left, low hills, dun colored, sparsely vegetated with brush and trees picked as clean as ancient animal bones. In front of him, far distant, the foothills leading up to the towering tors and peaks that marched across the dying sun. And between them and Ryan was the road, more woodland and, beyond, out of sight, the mess that was Mocsin.

He glanced northwest. There the hills were significantly darker, blacker. Hence “the Darks.” Once, he believed, they had been known by some other name, but what it was he could not say. The Darks suited them: black, brooding mountains, slashed by hideously deep ravines, with a climate and an ugly mythology all their own.

There… lay Paradise?

The Trader said, “How’s the girl?”

“Great minds think alike.”

The Trader glanced at his tall war captain. “Getting yourself in there, huh?” He chuckled. “You young dogs. Make me feel like a real cripple, real old fart.”

“I was thinking about what she said. The Darks.”

“Most unpleasant locale. Never penetrated it. Nothing for us there, boy. At least nothing marked on old Marsh’s plans.”

“Doesn’t mean to say they’re empty.”

The Trader laughed.

Had they not once made the long haul through the mountain chain maybe four hundred klicks south of there, and stood looking out over the seething Pacific Ocean, watching it roil and bubble and steam?

Had they not actually managed to sail around the lagoons that lay over what on the old maps once been called “the Black Rock Desert”?

Had they not found a vast inland sea where once had been a lake? Had they not penetrated the peripheries of that dread land of fire and howling wind that lay far to the south of them now, where terrifying gale-force gusts tore across the parched landscape, transforming the world into a hell of dust and whirling grit that shredded bare skin to the bone?

All in search of Stockpiles. All in search of…

Suddenly he stopped laughing, whipped his head around, stared at the tree line toward Mocsin.

“I think I caught a flash.” He had turned to the west, one arm flung over his eyes.

“A flash? In this light? What kind of flash?”

“Light on metal. I could be wrong.” The Trader shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me if that fat bastard had guys on lookout for us. But so what? They won’t try anything, you bet your life. They’d be outta their skulls. They’d need a few major field pieces to blow our snot away, and Teague’s got none.”

“That we know of.”

Again the Trader’s shoulders moved, and he turned full on to Ryan. “Where is the girl, anyhow?”

“Asleep. War Wag Two. She wanted to come with us but I got Kathy to feed her some caps. She’s out. She’ll stay out for hours.”

“And then? Can’t keep her on the train if she don’t wanna stay, Ryan.”

“Kathy’ll talk to her, try and persuade her to stay clear of Mocsin and out of the Darks. It’s an insane idea to head up there alone. She wouldn’t stand a dog’s chance.”

“Looks a tough cookie to me.”

“Not the point.”

The Trader pushed a hand back through his grizzled hair, sniffed and spat. He jammed the cigar, now dead, back into his mouth.

“Up to you.”

Below, J.B. was climbing the hillock followed by the lanky, long-haired Abe. J.B. stared up at Ryan through his steel-rimmed glasses.

“See the flash?”

The Trader grunted.

“What say we give ‘em a little present?” said Abe. “What say a rocket up the ass? Huh? Huh?”

“It’s not them I’m worried about,” said J.B. darkly.

Ryan caught his eye.

“What’s the problem?”

The thin little guy stared at the ground, then glanced to the east where darkness was reaching out toward them.

“Should’ve made sure of that mutie bunch.”

“Man, we destroyed ‘em!”

“Could’ve been more in the rocks. Could’ve cleared out long before we started looking.”

“We were there most of the day, J.B.”

Dix’s shoulders twitched. “Don’t like it. Should’ve sanitized the place. Scorched earth.”

Abe looked uneasy. Ryan felt uneasy. The Trader’s face was blank. J.B. looked up, his sallow face coloring slightly.

“Okay. We don’t kill for the kill. Even so. Guy who ramrodded that band had brains. Thought he could nail us, which was stupid. But he went about it the right way. That’s what counts.”

“He’s dead,” said Ryan. “Gotta be. The girl, Krysty, said a sticky chased him. The sticky came back but the scaly guy didn’t. What more d’you want?”

J.B. said, “His head.” He added, “I just got a feeling.”

Ryan felt he’d known J.B. Dix for a long, long time: an age, a lifetime. He had joined the Trader’s band only a year or so after Ryan himself had signed up, and had proved himself utterly indispensable as the Trader’s weapons master. Thin and intense, slightly melancholic, he rarely said much; what he did say was short and to the point. Whereas others might yell and rage to push their argument, J.B. just got gruffer, his sentences more clipped. Ryan respected this incisiveness, his singular mind.

Even so…

“Ah, come on!” Ryan punched him on the shoulder lightly. “If that mutie can take the train solo, he can have it. He’ll have earned it. We oughta sign the bastard on!”

They began to move off down the slope, Abe veering left, the others heading for the small convoy on the road.

The Trader yelled, “Don’t forget. Every hour, on the hour.”

Abe waved. “We’ll be there.”

The Trader said, “Hey, J.B., you tell the guys to check their boots?”

Dix didn’t reply.

 

IN A HUGE, HIGH-CEILINGED ROOM with a gallery running around its walls midway up, and tall windows now cloaked with rich, wine-red velvet hangings, and a door at the far ead similarly masked, lit by light lancing down in an intense cone from a single spot concealed in one of the corner angles high above, a man of indeterminate age, clad in a faded and filthy black coat that reached to his thin shanks, and black pants, cracked knee-length boots, a shirt that perhaps centuries ago might have been white but now was a mottled brownish-yellow, and with a tall hat on his head, the brim chipped and worn, the crown sagging sideways as though it had half-snapped off, capered and danced and recited in a cracked tenor:

The shades of night were falling fast,

As through an, ah… something, ah, ah, Alpine—yes!

Alpine village passed

A youth who bore, ah, ah… something-ice,

A banner with a—no, the… the strange device,

Excelsior!

He skipped a couple of steps, jerked off his hat so that greasy locks trumbled over the back of his neck, and waved it. Then he jammed the hat back on, took it off again and bowed away from the door, facing into the spotlight’s glare, sweeping the hat around with a flourish. He straightened slowly, a nervous smile on his stubbly face. His lips came back, revealing unexpectedly white teeth. His eyes were narrowed against the light.

“Come on, come on. That ain’t the end!”

The voice came from the darkness, impenetrable to the man in the ragged black clothes, somewhere under the spotlight.

“No, indeed. By, ah…no means.” The old man’s voice was now richer, deeper, more of a baritone. It was clear that the cracked and reedy tenor was reserved for abnormal rather than normal speech.

“Get to the bits about her tits!” bawled another voice. There was a rustle of subdued laughter.

“The, ah…tits. Yes.” The man in the black clothes pondered this, a hand to his brow. Close-up, he could be seen to be sweating, the rivulets of perspiration cutting shallow channels through a good deal of grime. “Yes. It is… somewhere… somewhere here. Up in the, ah… cerebrum…” he laughed, somewhat apologetically. “One forgets, my dear sirs. One forgets so easily.”

“Get on!”

“Yes. Yes, by all means. Was it not… the girl? The girl warning him? Warning the traveler? Ahh…” He held one hand in the air, forefinger upstretched, pointing toward the ceiling. On his face was a singular expression, the eyes now bulging, a terrible frown concentrated on his brow. He intoned,

Beware the pine tree’s withered, ah… branch!

Beware the, ah… awful avalanche!

Beware…

He paused, squeezed his eyes suddenly shut. His hand dropped to his brow, the fingers digging into the flesh as though trying to claw their way into his brain. He was shaking, shuddering as though in the grip of an ague. His left hand now shot up from his side to his head, the fingers clamping themselves around the hand already there. A sound like a steam whistle came from his mouth.

Near the spotlight muzzle-flashes flared twice. The roar of a handgun crashed through the room, reverberated around it, the sound of the two shots running together. The rounds smacked into the floor inches from the man, whined off into the darkness beyond the light’s penumbra. There was a wild yell from the side.

“Nukesucker! Watch what ya doin’!”

At the sound of the shots the man in the ragged black clothes came alive again and skipped backward. It was as if he had been expecting something of the sort, as if the experience was by no means a new one.

“I have it! I have it!” he cried. “The maiden is warning him, warning him of the fearful disasters that may befall a lone traveler amid those eternal Alpinic snows!” Again the hand shot up, forefinger quivering.

“O stay,” the maiden said, “and rest

Thy weary head upon… my breast!”

There was a howl of laughter and a roar of obscenities from the hidden watchers around the huge room.

Which suddenly died to silence as another man strode into the spotlight.

Tall and gaunt, he, too, was dressed in black, though his clothes were not shabby but clean and pressed, his black riding boots sending off a sparkle of highlights from their polished surfaces. His head had a fringe of dark hair at the back but was otherwise bald except for a line of mustache on his upper lip. His skin was yellowish, the flesh drawn over the bones of his face like thin parchment. His eyes were narrowed slits; his lips were drawn back into a grin that held no humor whatsoever.

Reaching the center of the room he halted. The man in the ragged clothes watched him warily, licking his lips.

“Pathetic!” spat out the man with the skull-like face. “You’ve got it wrong again, you old fool.”

The other shook his head, a look of abject terror now sliding across his grimy features.

“No, sir. No, Mr. Strasser, I… I don’t believe so.” His voice was pitching higher even as he spoke. “I… I may misremember the odd word, sir. Here and there. Now and then. But I don’t believe I—”

Strasser lashed out suddenly with his right foot, the toe of his boot cracking into the other’s right knee. The man screamed, staggered, collapsed on the floor and clutched his knee in agony.

Strasser bent over him, hissed at him, “We shall have to put you in with the sows again, Doc.”

The man on the floor cringed away from his tormentor, his voice a whimper of mingled horror and revulsion. “Please. Not that, Mr. Strasser. Please just tell me, tell me where I went wrong.”

Strasser stood and stared down with a cold smile on his face.

“The maiden,” he said softly. “You always get it wrong, Doc. The maiden implores the lone traveler—not to put his head on her breast, but his hand.”

The man called Doc blinked up at him, still clasping his knee with one hand, a puzzled expression creasing his face.

“Are… are you sure, Mr. Strasser?”

“Positive! The maiden wants the lone traveler to squeeze her breast. Both breasts, in fact. With both hands. She is yearning for this, you old fool. Her entire body is quivering with lust for him. She tells him that she is wet for him, that only his lips, his tongue, can assuage her desire.” He paused, pursed his lips thoughtfully. He said quite pleasantly, “You do remember this, don’t you, Doc?”

“Why, yes…yes.” The man on the floor swallowed a couple of times, licking his thin lips again, his brow corrugating into a frown. “Yes, I…I do believe you’re right, Mr. Strasser. Curious that I should forget Longfellow’s immortal lines. So stupid of me…”

“Pathetic.”

“Indeed,” the man replied, gulping. “Pathetic. Indeed, sir.”

“We shall still have to put you in with the sows, Doc.”

The man on the floor began swallowing hard. It was clear he was on the verge of tears.

“Please, not that again, don’t make me do that again, I implore…” The words came out in a ghastly, whining torrent.

“We shall have to strip you, Doc, and throw you in with the sows. Only when you’ve done your duty will you be allowed to leave.”

Suddenly tears were streaming down the man’s face, and his body shuddered convulsively. He began to bang his head on the floor, great choking sobs racking him. He had released his knee and now started beating his clenched fists against the floor in time with his head. He began to howl.

Strasser turned from him, his gaunt face masklike. He snapped his fingers once and two men emerged from the shadows. They bent over the man called Doc and picked him up as though he were garbage.

Strasser said, “Take him to the pigpens. You know what to do.”

They dragged him, screaming and howling and kicking, into the darkness.

Strasser watched them go, watched them disappear from sight, heard a door open, clang shut. He turned and stepped from the light into the gloom.

 

Chapter Seven

« ^ »

JUNKED CARS LINED THE ROUTE into town: rotting, rusting, gutted hulks stripped of every mechanical and non-mechanical item that might be of the slightest use to anyone, fit for nothing but the scrapyard. To Ryan, driving his buggy, his one eye nervously scanning left to right as he lightly gripped the wheel with black-gloved hands, the whole ville seemed like a scrapyard. A gigantic, sprawling and malodorous scrapyard.

Piles of refuse edged into the road, narrowing the way. It would be difficult for two buggies to pass each other without hitting old crates and boxes and rotting garbage in and out of bags; it would be impossible for two land wags.

The buggy went slowly. It was necessary. They passed a narrow street that had clearly been abandoned forever. Garbage filled it from side to side to maybe second-story level and probably from end to end, as well. A street of garbage. Hunaker, who was manning the forward M-60, muttered, “This is nukehell.” She stared at the street as they cruised by.

She said to Ryan, “There was a rumor Mocsin was sliding, but it looks to me like it’s running out of control.”

Ryan reached down with his left hand, felt the reassuring bullpup shape of the LAPA 5.56 mm he’d picked out of the war wag’s armory before leaving the Trader and the rest of the convoy on the edge of town. It was thirty inches of compact firepower with a 55-capacity stick mag. They’d found four crates of these in a Stockpile they’d discovered in the foothills of the Ozarks. That had been a very hairy mission: the indigenous population had been distinctly unfriendly, kept to themselves, seemed to be not at all interested in trading of any kind but only in killing anyone who entered their enclave. They’d also found three more crates back in the Apps. The LAPA had excellent performance, and Ryan preferred it to any of the longer autorifles that because of their length were more unwieldy in an urban situation. He carried the LAPA in a looped rig inside his long coat and could pull it fast.

On his right hip was a SIG-Sauer P-226 9 mm, the automatic he preferred even over the ubiquitous Browning Hi-Power that J.B. in particular swore by. Both had considerable punch over a long distance; both were immensely reliable. But in a hot situation Ryan had once had a Hi-Power MK-2 jam on him. That had not been the gun’s fault as such, but to Ryan—a mild believer in signals, psychic hints—that was a distinct nudge in the ribs from whatever gods watched over him, and he forswore the Browning and took up the SIG, which had proved to be an eminently satisfactory man-, woman- and mutie-stopper right when it counted. It also, usefully, loaded two extra rounds over the Hi-Power, although J.B. argued that what you could do with fifteen slugs you could just as easily do with thirteen. The logic of this was by no means impeccable, but Ryan knew what the tense, wiry weapons master—a superb marksman—meant. Despite his criticism, Dix had machined one or two extra features on to Ryan’s SIG, including a fully adjustable sight.

On his left hip was the panga scabbard, the panga itself now holstered within easy reach on the buggy’s door. From his belt hung four grenades—frag—and three mag pouches for the SIG. Inside his long coat, two each side, were four sticks for the LAPA.

Behind the drive seat was an Ithaca 37 pump S-shot with pistol grip and stock and a Mossberg 12-gauge bullpup 8-shot with sights fore and aft and compacted stock. Canvas panniers on both doors sagged with cartridges.

The buggy itself, like all the buggies run by the Trader, bristled with external and internal weaponry: cannon at the front and a fixed mortar, and two M-60s, one poking out from behind an armored shield at the front, and the other rear-mounted through a roof blister with a wide traverse. Pierced steel planking, double thickness, had been fixed to the buggy’s exterior.

In firepower at least Ryan felt reasonably safe, reasonably secure; that was the most you could feel in a hostile situation. And this was most definitely a hostile situation.

The fronts of most of the shops and bars here had been boarded over, glass clearly being in short supply. Where doors were left open, light from kerosene lamps and candles spilled out onto filthy sidewalks strewn with trash. Men stood in the open doorways, staring out at them, faces bleak and cold, uncompromising. He saw a couple of guys spit in their direction as the buggy edged its way along.

There was both tension and hatred here that he could feel even through the pierced steel planking. It was something palpable. He’d had no idea Mocsin had reached such a state, such a grim pitch. He’d been under the impression, if he’d thought about it at all, that Jordan Teague’s grip on the town was steel strong, that any hint of opposition to his rule had been squashed flat over the years by Strasser’s security force. Now, tooling along this garbage-and car-strewn street, he was not so damned sure.

Hovak, the kid who manned the mortar but who was now squatting behind Hunaker’s seat, gazing over her shoulder, said, “Why d’you say that, Hun?”

“Say what?”

“Running out of control.”

“Hell! All this crap on the road, on the sidewalks, dummy. Guy like Teague oughta know by now, after twenty years or whatever, you don’t let all this shit pile up like this. Asking for trouble. Perfect sniping positions. You wanna hold a town, you have nice wide roads, nice clean thoroughfares so the opposition can’t hide.”

She reached inside her jump jacket and took out a pack of ready rolled. She offered one to Ryan who grunted and shook his head. She poked one in her mouth and lit it, then pushed a hand through her bright green hair. She said, “Am I right?”

Ryan said, “Yeah, as always.”

He liked Hunaker—she was smart and she was tough and she was an excellent shot, especially with the MG—although there was nothing between them and never had been and never was likely to be. It was unnecessary. In any case Hunaker was bi, although she had a leaning toward her own sex. At the moment a particular favorite was a girl called Ange who held the radio op’s chair in War Wag Three.

From the back of the buggy, where he was sitting with his feet up on an ammo box, J.B. said, “Oughta have a better intelligence net.”

Ryan said, “Who? Them or us?”

“Them. Us. Both. But us particularly. Tighter. Been meaning to talk to the Old Man about it.”

“You’ll be wanting a secret police net next.”

J.B. snickered.

Ryan flicked the wheel a fraction to avoid a mangy-looking dog, then righted the buggy.

They relied for intelligence on live-in friendlies in all of the areas they visited—towns, cities, hamlets, trading posts—and on scuttlebutt that drifted like the wind across the length and breadth of the Deathlands. Often they knew the bad news—massacres, atmospheric devastation, heavy marauder presence—long before those who lived near where it had occurred. Just as often, however, the first evidence of a tragedy was when one of their land wag trains stumbled across it: a ville, maybe, that was a ville no longer, merely a desolation of blackened piles of rubble and a hell of a lot of ash, with a population that consisted mainly of rotting corpses, often savagely mutilated or lacking heads or arms or legs or sexual organs. Or all of these items.

Ryan swung the wheel as something crashed from a mountain of trash ahead of them, picked out by his roof spotlight. “Guns!” he snapped.

The something was a large box. It hit the road, bounced across the road, slammed into the piles of garbage opposite. There was a minor avalanche of muck as its impact vibrated through the pile. The road was now even narrower.

Ryan glimpsed a black shape scuttling along the right-hand garbage line and relaxed. It was a rat, a mutie rat at that, big as a full-grown dog.

“Forget it. A rat.”

“Great,” said Hunaker, her eyes still narrowed as she glared through the sighting screen. “We eat tonight!” She turned and yelled back to Hovak. “See what I mean? At least there were no mutie rats in Mocsin a couple of years back. Four-legged variety, anyhow.”

“Keep by your pieces,” said Ryan. “I got a bad feeling about this place.”

It was in his mind to turn back right now, get out of town, gather up the rest of the convoy and head out to where the main train was and then beat it.

Ryan took a right after the block where Mocsin’s main bank had once stood. Still stood, actually, although now it functioned as a center-of-town HQ for Strasser’s security goons. Ryan didn’t like to think about what at times went on in the bank’s former vaults. It was better not to think about it. Or rather, he thought grimly, more cowardly.

Here the place was a blaze of light from brilliant spots up on the roof. He noted the heavy coils of barbed wire that fenced the area off from the rest of the street. Here at least the garbage had been cleared away. There were three black vans parked inside the barbed-wire perimeters, but Ryan could see no sign of human presence. The windows of the building were all heavily barricaded.

He turned into a side street where there was more light, much less trash. Here was the gaudy house area. Here were the gambling and drinking bars where groups of miners were let loose, in turn, once every six weeks. They came into town in Teague’s convoys with jack in their pockets, the younger ones with hope in their hearts, determined to pay off what they owed to the city of Mocsin’s tax and toll coffers. Somehow no one ever did pay off what was on the debit side of the ledger. Some went straight to where their wives and loved ones had shacked up, only to find them gone. Vanished. Disappeared. No one knew where. No one cared where. Some might be found in the gaudy houses. It was often the case that a dispirited miner, after a week-long search of the town, in his misery, his need for some kind of affection, even if high priced, would turn to the brothels and discover his missing wife there, all dressed up and no place else to go. Some really had vanished, possibly into Strasser’s dungeons, possibly into his perverted half world where they became tormented playthings in the strange and vicious “games” he and his goons initiated. Faced with this kind of horror on top of everything else, the miner would drink himself into insensibility and continue thus until it was time to hop aboard the convoy and head back to the mines once more, care of Jordan Teague. Some went on a smash, a bender, a rampage, and that was as good as committing suicide. And for those who survived, after one bout of heartache and horror, after one “rest period” in which you discovered that your entire world had been destroyed, nothing much signified—so you went back to the mines, worked like a dog for six weeks and returned to Mocsin for another two-week furlough. Only this time you didn’t piss around trying to find your nonexistent wife and kids, you went straight to the brothels or the bars or the gambling houses. And that was that.

Yet Ryan frowned as he took the buggy down the long street. He was suddenly aware of J.B. breathing heavily almost into his right ear,

“Funny,” J.B. said. Then he said, “Worrying.”

The gaudy stretch of lights, both sides, that they both remembered from the last visit was distinctly far apart. Most of the places here had run on generators, and as the street was one long procession of bars and gaudy houses, there had been no night here at all during the hours of darkness, only brilliant illumination, false day.

But now most of the bars were dark, boarded up, and what lights there were that shone on the road were flickering candles or hissing kerosene lamps. Ryan judged that maybe one in three bars remained open.

“They running out of booze or something?” said Hunaker, brushing a hand through her hair again. The other hand firmly held one of the M-60 grips. She said with a chuckle, “Rot-gut shit, anyway. I had the runs forever last time I was in this toilet of a town,” but the chuckle was halfhearted.

“You see Charlie’s?” said J.B., craning his neck.

“That’s what I’m looking for,” grunted Ryan. Then he said, “Yeah. Still there.”

Charlie’s was on the left, way down. In between it and its nearest lighted neighbor up the street were maybe seven closed and boarded-up bars. The next one down the street was near the end of the block. The two wide windows, on each side of the entrance to Charlie’s, were tightly shuttered. Above the closed door was a long panel window, and behind the glass was neon strip lettering spelling out the words Charlie’s Bar. The neon was dead. The lettering was lit by five guttering candles, one of which was a mere stub on the point of extinction,

“Hell,” muttered Hunaker. “What we gonna find in there?”

“You’re not going to find anything in there,” said Ryan, pulling over to the sidewalk beside an old rusted post on which was sat something, as he’d discovered some years back somewhere else, that had once been known as a parking meter. A coin in its mouth gave you an hour of parking. Absurd and redundant. “You’re sitting here, looking after the store.”

“Hellfire,” complained Hunaker. “I never get to have any fun when I’m out with you, Ryan.”

“You keep your eyes skinned,” advised Ryan. “I have a feeling we might be in for plenty of fun before the night’s out.”

“Do I get to kill one of Teague’s sec men? Aw, nuke-blast it, Ryan, please tell me I can do that.”

Ryan braked, shifted in his seat. He turned and stared around. There was Hovac, Rintoul—whose boots could be seen but nothing else because he was up in the roof blister—and the three spares: Koll, a tall, bony blonde with an oddly thick mustache; Hennings, a big black with a lacerating sense of humor; and Samantha the Panther, black, too, and a mutant who could see in the dark and had exceptional powers of hearing.

Ryan said, “Rint and Sam. Henn, you take the roof.”

He checked his mirrors while the crew made their adjustments, then opened the door and stepped out. J.B. followed him, gripping a Steyr AUG 5.56 mm as though it were a part of him, an extension of his own right hand. Ryan popped his LAPA inside his coat, thought about taking the panga then decided not. He automatically checked the SIG, holstered it, ran his fingers over his belt pouches, feeling their weight, checking their contents; he knew they were all full but did it, anyway. Better to be one hundred percent sure than one hundred percent dead.

“Okay.”

He slammed the door, O-ed his fingers to Hunaker through the glass. J.B.’s Steyr was now inside the long coat he, too, wore. The bullpups of the other two had similarly vanished from sight.

A couple of blocks up the street two lurched together, went into a complicated dance routine, arms around each other, to stop themselves from falling over. Or that’s what it looked like. Maybe, thought Ryan, they just liked each other. Or maybe they felt lonely in this desolate street. A wind had sprang up, whipping at his hair. He could hear the sound of fiddle music, muted, coming from somewhere.

He turned to the door of Charlie’s Bar, shoved down on the handle, walked in.

 

CHARLIE’S BAR WAS LIKE just about every other bar in the street, just about every other bar in Mocsin, just about every other bar in the whole of the Deathlands. It was a place whose entire reason for existence was booze. It was a place where you went to drink yourself into a stupor, a place where you drank to forget.

The bar itself ran down most of one wall with barrels atop it, strategically placed every three or four meters along, bottles on shelves behind. Tall mirrors hung behind the bar. These aided the lighting by reflecting what was already there. Even so, the long room was murky, a place of dancing shadows, with only three or four lamps and not a hell of lot of candles flickering in the many drafts that struck through uncaulked cracks and crevices in doors and window shutters. It was low ceilinged, drab walled, stale smelling, greasy atmosphered. Smoke hung heavily in the air, a thick miasma that the guttering candles did little to cut through.

Opposite the bar were curtained booths. Small round tables were scattered down the room. The seats were covered in plush that was a century old and looking it. There was chrome everywhere, but it was rusty, tarnished. The booth curtains, threadbare velvet, had once had tassels hanging from them. Early in the reign of Fishmouth Charlie, the current owner, there had been a time when certain captains of Jordan Teague’s sec men had taken to wearing fancy epaulettes on the shoulders of their black leather jackets. It was noted by the more sharp-eyed of Mocsin’s citizenry that these epaulettes bore a remarkable resemblance to the curtain tassels from Charlie’s. Charlie had not made a fuss. Charlie had always had a wise and circumspect nature.

The bar was nearly empty; maybe fifteen or twenty people sitting in the booths or at the center tables, drinking steadily. One or two were eating something that smelled like regular meat stew, and probably was. Charlie had a good rep where food was concerned; you had no worries about suddenly discovering you were gorging yourself on roach mince or putrid hog or prime cut of human when you dined at Charlie’s. Many of the drinkers were muties, which, considering the owner, was not surprising.

Ryan went to the bar. He nodded to the woman behind the bar and the woman behind the bar nodded back. Nothing could be gauged from her features. Only her protuberant eyes were at all expressive. From below her eyes, her face bulged out to her mouth, a tiny, thin-lipped orifice like the spout of a volcano. There seemed to be no jawline whatsoever. Although her hair was thick and curly, her eyebrows were nonexistent. She was short, her arms plump, her fingers spatulate. She wore a drab brown-colored shift that had clearly seen better days, yet was clean and well pressed.

Ryan said, “Miss Charlene.”

A flicker of amusement darted across the woman’s eyes.

She said, “Ryan. Always the gentleman.” The voice that emanated from that tiny mouth was surprisingly deep. She said, “What d’you fancy?”

Ryan said, “What else but you?” He put his hands on the bar top and said, “Okay, Charlie, now we got the civilities out of the way, how about a pitcher of wine?” He glanced around, recognized a few faces he knew—Blue Bennett, Stax with his pointy ears, The Lizard, Hal Prescott, Chewy the Chase, one-time ace wheelman with a bunch of hog-riders out East and now retired since some joker had blown both his legs off, and Ole One-Eye, grizzled veteran of the short-lived but bloody mutie War of ‘68, which had flared in what had once been Kentucky. Ryan noted that none looked at all pleased to see him. One or two indeed looked positively murderous. “Then you can explain what’s going on, why there were guys spitting at us as we went past, and how come Ole One-Eye there looks like he’d like to pluck out mine to add to his.”

Charlie drew the cork on a liter bottle of red and pushed glasses across the bar.

“No one wants you here, Ryan. No one wants the Trader. You tell him to fuck off outta here, get back the hell where he came from.”

Ryan poured himself a glass of wine, then shoved the bottle toward J.B. “You say the friendliest things.” He sipped some of the liquid, rolled it around his mouth, savored the nutty taste of it. “Tell me more.”

“You got weapons, right?”

“Sure. Some.”

“Spike ‘em.”

“As bad as that?”

“The men blew two of the mines three days back.”

“They what!”

“I said, the men—”

“Yeah, yeah. I heard you. Deliberate?”

Charlie’s tiny mouth closed, then opened. It was her way of smiling.

“Sure, deliberate. They’d have blown the other two, but something went wrong. Fuses, timers—I dunno. So they barricaded themselves in down there.”

J.B. Dix’s eyelids fluttered. It was his way of expressing astonishment. He said, “I take it you’re sure about this?”

“As I am that you’re drinking my wine and not paying for it.”

“Oh. Yeah.” Ryan reached into a back pocket and pulled out some tin. He said, “How blown?”

“Roof rockfalls. Teague’s two main sources are now blocked to hell. The other two mines are smaller, easier to defend.”

“Defend? They have pieces?”

“They killed a whole squadron of Strasser’s sec men. Tore ‘em apart barehanded. As you’re probably aware—” the deep tones were thick with irony “—Teague’s police are well weaponed up. Handguns, auto-rifles, MGs. And plenty of ammo.”

“Gas would clear ‘em,” J.B. pointed out.

Charlie shook her head, black curls dancing.

“Miners have blocked off the entrance to both mines, and the old ventilation system.”

“So they just die of no air?”

“Uh-uh. They’ve been drilling their own air holes. It’d take Strasser’s men days, weeks, to find them. Months, maybe.”

“Food?”

“Sure.”

“Water?”

“Plenty. Pure, too. Can’t be got at from outside.”

“I suddenly have the feeling,” said Sam dryly, “that this one’s been a long time in the planning.”

Charlie’s tone was equally dry. “Right.”

Ryan said, “What we have for that fat bastard won’t make a piece of spit’s worth of difference, Charlie. One, it wasn’t a mighty load to begin with. Two, owing to circumstances not entirely beyond our control, the load is damned near halved, anyway.”

Charlie shrugged and said, “Makes no odds. You trading with Teague makes you the enemy, places you on his side of the fence. Firmly, buddy. Story goes you helped set the bastard up, anyway.”

“Shit!” exploded Ryan in exasperation. “That was twenty years ago!”

A tingle of alarm ran up his spine. There was, it occurred to him, another angle to all this. If Teague was desperate…

He turned to Samantha. “Radio the Old Man. Tell him what’s up. Find out if the main train’s still checking in on the hour, and tell him to switch to every fifteen minutes.”

Sam gulped her wine and made for the door. Rintoul, a stocky, chubby-faced kid, whispered “Shit!” His pudgy fingers clasped at his belt as he glanced around the bar nervously. Charlie made a dry, choking sound through her mouth. Laughter.

“Teague’s no fool,” said J.B.

“Ten years ago he wasn’t,” agreed Charlie. “Five years ago he maybe wasn’t. But only maybe. Now times have changed. He’s sucked this place dry for too long, put nothing back in its place. Maybe the blood was rich twenty years ago, but it’s thin as whey now. The assets are stripped. Cupboard’s bare. There’s nothing left. Teague don’t know what’s going down half the time. Strasser’s king of the shit pile, and he’s insane. All he cares about is watching kids killing kids, male and female. You get the message?” She glared at Ryan accusingly.

Ryan drank some more of the wine. Stasis he understood, the stagnation of empire. Evil and greedy men flogging a horse to death but not realizing, not understanding when it was dead, when extinction had been reached, and continuing to beat it and beat it and beat it.

“You telling me the deadline’s been reached? Mocsin’s ready to blow?”

Fishmouth Charlie stared at him for some seconds, her bulging eyes fixed on his, then she looked down at the bar top, spreading her hands on its shiny, highly polished surface.

“Not as easy as that, Ryan.” Her voice seemed, if anything, deeper, certainly gruffer. “Couple of months back we had some kind of epidemic run through the gaudies on the Strip. Real bad. Something internal, rotted ‘em out. Teague’s medics couldn’t cope, so they killed ‘em, killed ‘em all, girls and boys. First off they needled ‘em, but that was too damned slow, so one night they came and took ‘em away in vans. Machine-gunned ‘em and burned the bodies. Out in the desert. So all the gaudy houses had empty rooms and Strasser blitzed the place, went through Shantytown dragging out just about anyone under the age of twenty, took ‘em off. They had to have something to keep the miners quiet, but some of the men cut up more than usual. There was a riot, lotta guys shot. The sec men contained it, put the clamp on, but maybe that was the final straw.” She shrugged, gestured around. “You can see how it is. Place is falling apart. Generators going bust and there’s nothing to mend ‘em with. Lack of parts, lack of interest. Everything in this town is too old, too damned worn out. Unrepairable. Any case, you force a guy to use his wrenches at the point of a gun, he ain’t gonna do a prime job. He’s gonna do just what’s necessary to stop himself getting his head holed and that’s all. He’s not gonna sweat for you, now is he? So things just get worse. And worse.”

Ryan nodded. He said, “But the miners. Stockpiling food, drilling new vents that the overseers don’t know about. Shit, Charlie, like Sam said, all that takes time, not to mention a hell of a lot of effort, planning, thought.”

Charlie shrugged.

“Who knows? I ain’t privy to everything that goes down in this shithole, Ryan. All I know is that Mocsin’s on the edge. It’s like there’s a button somewhere and there’s a finger hovering over it. And once the finger jabs down, once the button’s pressed—Blooey!”

Rintoul, still casting glances at the hostile faces of the drinkers staring at them, said, “Yer’d think the place’d be an armed camp if all this shit is going on. Patrols in the street, curfew, shoot to kill. Like that.”

“We got a lot of crap at the entrance to town,” said Ryan, “and they were nervous, but they didn’t seem to be pissing in their pants.”

Charlie reached under the bar and pulled out a cigar. She warmed it over a candle before sucking flame into its end.

“It’s like I said, Teague’s lost his grip and Strasser doesn’t seem to care. I guess they just don’t understand after twenty years of tight control. They’re blind. It happens.”

Ryan acknowledged the truth of this. All he knew of history told him that often those who had been firmly in control of a potentially dangerous situation for years gradually lost their objectivity. In their rigid and unshakable belief in their own strength, their own power to keep the lid down hard, they were blind to all else, even the most disturbing and concrete evidence of disaffection.

Sure it happened.

And sure it was time Mocsin boiled over. You couldn’t beat an entire town into subjection forever.

He took his wine and strode over to the table where Ole One-Eye and Chewy the Chase—that terrible man crudely named after a suburb of what was once a Washington suburb, according to some ancient map—were seated, Chewy crouched deep in his mobile chair.

Ryan said, “Look, count me out of this.”

There was silence for a moment, then Chewy snickered and said, “Hey, ya know what? They’re crackin’ down on muties now.”

Ole One-Eye turned on him and rasped, “Don’t use that word! How many times I gotta tell you! I don’t call you a crapping norm, do I?”

Chewy said, “How many norms you seen walkin’ around on no legs, huh? You hideous apology for a human being.”

“Pity they didn’t blow yer vocals out when they blew yer legs! The shit I hafta put up with!”

The nature of Ole One-Eye’s particular mutation was more than merely dramatic. It was clear at once to any observer that at least one side of his bloodline had gotten savagely zapped three generations back by a rabid breed of rad bug. Maybe both sides of his bloodline. That would certainly account for the top of his pate being flat and hairless and made up of flabby, spongy ridges of flesh, and his having only one eye, one glistening ocular orb, dead center of his forehead. From his nose downward, beyond the mouth and the stubbly beard shot with gray, he seemed perfectly normal, though a little on the squat side and with arms maybe a fraction longer than the average. But only a fraction.

It was not known exactly what part he’d played in the Mutie War of 2068. He didn’t talk about it much. Mutants escaping serfdom in the Baronies of the East had fled West and gravitated by degrees to the area around old Louisville and built up their own short-lived homeland over a period of four or five years. But there had been too much tension. The people around there, the normals, had grown discontented at what they saw as an invasion of their territory, their “clean” territory, by whole families of those whose indebtedness to the Nuke, genetically speaking, was blazingly obvious. They wanted the muties out. The mutant families, having finally escaped from conditions in which they’d been treated worse than animals, refused to shift. They had built houses, farms, repair shops, set up trade lines. The move toward outright war had a blind and fearsome inevitability about it.

A norm farmer whose steam truck’s boiler had burst near a mutie ville had forced a couple of mechs to fix a running repair, then casually shot them both when they’d asked for payment. If the farmer gained any gratification from this act of gratuitous violence, he didn’t have it for long. He was followed to his own town and shot outside his home. What followed lasted maybe ten months, during which time hundreds of mutants were massacred, whole villes burned and steam-dozered. They gave as good as they got, but there were too few of them, too many normals who, in any case, called to certain of the East Coast Barons for arms and heavy hardware and reinforcements. The upshot was that in the late fall of ‘68 the muties had moved out, headed farther into the Central Deathlands, dispersed. Ole One-Eye had turned up in Mocsin and settled there.

Chewy the Chase grinned toothily, scratching his head. He said to Ryan, “The old bastud’s insults are losin’ their kick. Time was he could be a mean-assed son of a bitch. Maybe I’m gettin’ used to him. Whattya say, Ryan?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said,

“Say one thing for this craphole of a town,” Chewy said. “That fat hog of a Teague never used to give a shit if you had one head or two, one prick or three. Know what I mean? But now, hell! Them sec men of his are startin’ to beat up on the armless, earless and noseless. They’ll be puttin’ ‘em up agin a wall next, you mark my words.” He turned to Ole One-Eye. “They say they aim for the heart, but with you I reckon it’ll be someplace else.” He cackled, raised his glass of beer. “The perfect target. Here’s lead in yer eye, pal.”

Ryan said, uneasily, “Look…”

Ole One-Eye made a dismissive gesture with his right hand, drank with his left. He said quietly, “Shut it, Chev,” then looked up at Ryan. “Don’t mind him. Wind’s in the wrong direction. His legs’ve been giving him shit for days.”

Chewy drank more beer, stared down at what was not there and had not been there for some years. He said, his voice suddenly a hoarse whisper, “Nukeblasted right.”

Ole One-Eye smiled gently, gazing up at Ryan. His eye was white irised, pinkish around the edges.

“Speaking as one one-eye to another,” he said softly, “I’d say ya better figure out fast which way ya gonna jump, boy. All hell gonna break out soon, and that’s a realer feelin’ than when young Chev here gets aches in his hocks. Ya gotta choose, boy. Choose damned soon.”

Ryan stared down at the guttering flames reflected from the candles in the pools of spilled beer on the tabletop, aware that the buzz of conversation in the bar, muted and desultory as it had been, had suddenly ceased altogether. Even Rintoul, a mouthy kid at the best of times, though a good shot and loyal, had shut up. He could see Ole One-Eye’s face, upside down, hideously distorted, in the liquid, could even see that single eye fixed on his. All at once stories he’d often heard on his travels slid into his mind, stories of mutants with the “blazing” eye, the eye that, blasted you with a look, the eye that killed. Couldn’t be true, of course. Foolish talk. Yet why not? There were sensers, weren’t there? Sensers who sniffed out danger, danger that was to come, danger that was just around the corner, short-term, within the hour. And there were those who had an even rarer and more terrifying power; the doomseers: precogs who had sharply defined visions of the future, what was to happen in the longer term. So why not the Eye? Why not a look that could burn your mind out.

He shook his head, looked up suddenly at the reality rather than the strange mirror image. Ole One-Eye’s single eye shifted up, too, to follow him. Ryan drank what remained in his glass.

“You’re probably right,” he muttered.

The other chuckled quietly. “That’s m’boy,” he said. “One thing about you, Ryan, you’re dependable. Known for it.”

Ryan rubbed at his face, at the stubble growing on his chin. Weirdly, he felt that he’d just made an important decision, a vital decision, although he was not aware that his conscious mind had done so, and the reply he’d just given had been little more than noncommittal.

He said, “You old bastard, I think you’ve been trying to hypnotize me.”

This time Old One-Eye’s chuckle became a wheeze, full of genuine amusement.

“I don’t have the Devil’s Eye, son, just one good optic that’s seen me through a mess of years but it’s as straight as yours.”

“Yeah. Well. Good luck.”

Ryan turned on his heel and made for the bar again. He glanced to his right as the door to the place banged open, but it was not Samantha the Panther. He saw a man whose clothes seemed too big for him, as though he’d shrunk in a shower of rad rain, been not quite eaten up by the acids. He face was gaunt, hollow eyed. His skin was burned nearly black and looked to be so thin that you could poke your pinky through. He shoved the door closed again, his whole body trembling. He seemed to be in a state of near-terminal flap.

Charlie, behind the bar, glared at him.

“Kurt! What the hell you doing out?”

The man said hoarsely, “I had to get out, Charlie. Up in the roof I was going goddamned crazy. The walls were closing in on me. Had to get out. I had to.”

Charlie snorted, began rubbing a cloth vigorously over the bar. It was clear she was angry.

“You get back upstairs again, ya stupe. Blast it, I don’t know why the hell I bother!”

The man called Kurt staggered toward the bar. He seemed at the end of his tether.

“I met him, Charlie, across the street. Bastard recognized me.” His piercing eyes were alive with terror. “Charlie, what am I gonna do?”

“This is all I need.” Charlie jabbed the cloth toward the far end of the room. “Beat it. Get back upstairs. Don’t make a sound.” She snapped, “Move!”

The man pushed past them, ran stumblingly along the side of the bar and into the thicker shadows at the end of the room. Ryan heard the rustle of a curtain, a door bang.

J.B. nudged him.

“Let’s move. We got the picture.”

“Yeah, okay.” He turned to Charlie. “What was all that about?”

Charlie nodded in the direction the man had gone. She said, “My lodger.” Her mouth opened and shut a couple of times. “I’m looking after the guy.”

Ryan knew it would be demeaning to Charlie, whom he liked, but he suddenly had an urge to burst out laughing. He fought to keep the urge down.

“Actually, he’s in deep shit. I’m gonna have to sneak him out of town sometime. Got in bad with one of Strasser’s gorillas and disappeared. About five, six months back. Then he reappeared about a month ago, looking like he’d been whipped up in a twister, spread all over the landscape then stuck back together again the wrong way. Seems he’d walked back to Mocsin from the Darks.”

“The Darks?” Hardin frowned at her.

“Yeah. You remember a head case called McCandless?”

“Sure.”

“Ryan.” J.B. tapped him on the shoulder.

“Okay, okay. Wait.”

“McCandless took off to the Darks with a party of guys including Kurt, who’d signed up on the spur to get out from under the gorilla. The old story. They were looking for the treasure, har har. Only Kurt got back. And he’d stopped one in the shoulder. Had fever, delirium, you name it. Difficult to figure out what was real, what was nightmare. Kept on yelling about a fog with claws, fog with feet.”

“Fog?”

“ ‘S what he said.”

“Ryan!” J.B.’s voice was urgent.

“Wait, blast it!”

A fog with claws? He’d never heard that one before. That was a wild one. He tried to picture it in his mind but it came out silly. Fever did strange things to your brain, of course…

“Too late,” muttered J.B.

The door crashed open once more. Black-leather-jacketed men boiled into the room. Six of them. No, seven including the leader, a beefy guy with a wall eye. Ryan recognized his face about the same time the man recognized him. Guy called Hagic, one of Cort Strasser’s upper echelon sec men. A mean bastard, he recalled, although one with no great brain. He hoped there wasn’t going to be any trouble, because he was now convinced that beating a hasty retreat out of Mocsin was the only sensible course of action to take, and the quicker the better.

Hagic’s men were all armed with auto-rifles, M-16s mostly, which looked to be in reasonable repair. They were shifting themselves into and around the door end of the room, rifles ready, blank faced. Most of them were young, early twenties, raised against a background of violence so that they had become violent themselves, insensible to all but the lowest emotions, icy hearted. Violence was the only way of life they knew.

Hagic stalked down the room, ignoring Ryan completely, even though Ryan knew he’d been recognized as soon as the man had entered the bar.

J.B., next to Ryan, had shifted into his “yawning” mode, a sure sign that he was all too aware that danger loomed. J.B. leaned back against the bar top, yawning a second time, patted his mouth, sniffed as though to clear his nose. J.B. was gearing himself to kill.

Hagic said, “Where is he?” His voice low.

Charlie looked up at him. She had a jug in one hand and was filling it from the nearest barrel.

“Where’s who?”

“Don’t fuck around, mutie bitch. Where is he?”

Hagic had an H&K 5.56 mm. He was holding it downward, by its pistol grip. Ryan thought he was either very sure of himself or very foolish. More likely the latter.

Charlie repeated, “Where’s who?” She sounded genuinely baffled. “Ya looking for someone, we’re all here.” She gestured around the room at her patrons, all of whom were staring at the sec men with ill-concealed malevolence.

“Listen, mutie bitch,” Hagic snarled. “A guy dived in here moments ago. I want him, want him bad. I don’t get him, I’ll fire this place and you in it. All of you.” He didn’t look at Ryan. Hagic clearly didn’t give a quarter-credsworth of shit if he was nice to the Trader’s men or not.

“Whyn’t ya say so in the first place?” muttered Charlie. “The Liz, he just came in. Didn’t ya, Liz?”

The Lizard, a tall thin mutie with a long nose and bluish squamous skin, stood up at his table. He looked puzzled.

“Sure, M-miss Charlie. Wh-what’s ya p-problem, Ca-ca-ca-captain?” The Lizard’s speech impediment made it sound as if he was saying “caca” deliberately, and, knowing his sense of humor, he probably was.

Hagic looked murderous. He began to swing the H&K up, and Ryan thought this whole business had gone on long enough.

Ryan said, “You mean the wimpy little fucker who galloped through here just now?”

Hagic paused before turning to face him. Ryan could almost hear the pinwheels of his tiny brain creaking slowly into action. Hagic knew something; more to the point, he knew something was up, was going on—possibly right now, at this very moment. But Hagic was a stupe of the first water. A smile darted across his sallow features. It was probably meant to be friendly but it simply made him look sly. His squint didn’t help.

“Ryan. Good to, uh, see ya.” He switched his wall-eyed stare to the rear of the room. “You, uh, say you see a guy…”

“Guy come in here, like there were rad rats chewing his ass? Sure. C’mon. Show you where he went.”

As he said this he turned away from Hagic, began striding down the room, aware of Charlie’s pop-eyed gaze on his right, but also aware, just, of a flicker of dark amusement fleeing across the ugly features of Ole One-Eye down the room.

“Shifty little bastard he looked to me.”

Out of the corner of his eye he could see the mirrors, could see Hagic following, three men in tow. And as he was speaking, his back to Hagic, his open coat cloaking his movements, his left hand was smoothly cross-drawing the SIG-Sauer, his right feeling his belt, fingers unpopping a pouch, drawing from it a stubby little suppressor, screwing it into the SIG’s barrel.

“Door here. Yeah, curtain.”

That was a pisser. He couldn’t not draw the curtain back, leave it closed. Even Hagic would smell a rat. As he slid the heavy material to one side he heard Ole One-Eye berating Chewy the Chase in a loud voice, Chev’s angry tones replying. Good. Even some noise was useful, attention grabbing just when it was needed. He wondered what the hell was beyond the door. He wondered how he would play what now had to be played.

Sometimes a response had to be purely automatic; you had to work blind and the nature of the killing ground was in the lap of the gods. The suppressor was tight. He carefully pushed the gun inside his pants but with plenty of grip available for instant draw.

A door faced him. It opened inward, toward him. That was a bonus. He pulled it open, smiled. He was in a small lobby. To one side, carpeted wooden stairs rose to a narrow landing before doubling back. He could see the upper portion of the staircase through its banister posts. A lamp hung low on a chain from the lobby’s ceiling.

“Stay here,” Hagic’s voice sounded in Ryan’s ear.

Magic’s three sec men pushed past him and began to mount the first flight of stairs.

“Bad character, huh?” murmured Ryan.

Hagic moved closer, inclined his head toward Ryan’s. His chin was stuck out and there was a ratty grin on his face. In the light from the lamp it looked like a devil’s mask, and Ryan thought the sooner it was destroyed the better for all.

His right hand shot up, hard, the heel of it smashing up into the underside of Hagic’s jaw so eruptively that the jawbone cracked, blood vessels in his neck exploded and ligaments tore. Hagic’s head rocked back, a gargled grunt bursting out of his mouth in a fine spray of blood, and Ryan’s left hand, fist balled, rocked into his stomach with the force of a pile driver. Hagic jackknifed, dry heaving, and Ryan reached past him and pulled the door shut, his left hand yanking up the SIG-Sauer.

He spun around and the SIG spat three times, fwip-fwip-fwip.

The first round hit the last man on the stairs in the back, torpedoed him through the rear of his rib cage; it plowed up into his heart and opened his chest in a bloody volcano.

The second round hit the next in line, a head shot that spray painted the wall beyond. The guy spun into the third man, throwing him sideways, his gun thumping down onto the carpet. The third man, too, fell onto his rifle. Ryan’s slug smashed into the wall above his head, gnawing plaster.

For a second there was stillness, Ryan gazing up at the third man, who gaped down at him in shock through the banister. The guy clambered to his feet, not yelling, too stunned even to scream, but dragging at his M-16 as a reflex action.

Ryan smacked his right hand into the SIG’s butt, switched fingers, hit him with two shots in the chest, banging him back against the wall in the shadows.

Even as this happened, Ryan was leaping up the first flight, booting down on the prone body of the first man and clutching at the corner pole of the banister, yanking himself up and around and grabbing the third man as he tottered forward on the rebound from the wall. He was just in time. Another couple of seconds and the guy would have slammed into the supports and either up-and-overed, crashing down to the lobby below with a hell of a racket, or plowed straight through the posts, making even more of a row.

Ryan pushed him onto the stairs, a slumped heap, then stood up and peered down at Hagic on the floor below. He could see the wall-eyed man glaring upward, clutching his gut, still unable to speak or yell or scream, only wheeze and vomit. Ryan leaned over the banister and shot him, fwip, the round powering through his chest and heart, expending itself into the carpeted floor.

Ryan cocked an ear for any untoward sounds from below but could hear nothing through the closed door. He moved lightly downstairs, on the balls of his feet, still on adrenaline burn, the screen of his memory playing over the scene back in the bar. Unless they’d all moved around some, there was a guy standing in front of the entrance door at the far end of the room, and he had to be nailed first and foremost.

He could do it slowly or he could do it fast. If he did it slowly—if he opened the door, wandered casually into the bar, his piece hidden behind his back, and then threw a round at the guy by the outside door (or at least the guy who should be by the outside door)—there was always the chance of something going wrong, possibly badly wrong.

Those goons out there were young, undoubtedly nervy in a situation like this. Just Ryan walking out from the rear and no one else might spook them, then trigger them. There was always that chance.

If he did it fast, on the other hand—erupted into the room and hit at least one of them—the shock factor would be enormous, he knew. The remaining two goons would be thrown off balance. They’d be totally unnerved, ripe for slaughter.

If only he knew what the hell was going on in the bar. And the longer he waited in this lobby, the more twitchy those guys would get. By now they’d be thinking they ought to be hearing bangs and yells and shots.

He bent, peered at the door. But the keyhole was blocked on the other side. His lips came back in a feral snarl. He was still high on adrenaline. He held the gun in his left hand and threw himself at the door.

He hit the wood, the door slammed open, he brought his right hand around to the SIG’s grip, slapping it tight, his eye taking in the scene even as he squeezed off.

No one had moved. The man he’d remembered as standing beside the entrance door was still there, his M-16 held in both hands, aimed to his left, at the room in general. Ryan’s shot changed all that. It hit the man in the chest and punched him backward, mouth gaping, so that he collapsed against the wall, slumping and leaving a thick red smear as he sank to the floor.

Ryan watched in admiration as J.B., still leaning with his back to the bar, his coat open, his right hand resting on his belt, drew the Browning with shocking speed. His arm jerked up and the Hi-Power barked and spat, its bullet slamming one of the other black jackets over into a table. The table splintered under his weight and the violent impact of his flailing body. His M-16 clattered to the floor.

That was what saved the last man, who was close to the table and to his heart-shot companion. The last man jumped away from the collapsing table and stumbled, dropped his piece, then with a wild yell leaped for the door.

Ryan hammered a round at him but missed by an inch. Or less. In adrenaline-boosted terror, the guy yanked the door and dived through it, the door swinging shut behind him.

J.B. jumped toward the door. Ryan, running to him, yelled, “No bangs in the street!”

J.B. stopped dead, as though mesmerized by a vision only he could see. Ryan, running up the room full pelt, slowed to a halt, SIG raised.

The door had creaked open; in fact, the guy was pushing it inward with his body. The guy staggered in the doorway as the door swung away from him. He teetered on his heels, his arms half raised, his hands clawing feebly at nothing. He fell backward and crashed to the carpeted floor.

Another figure appeared in the doorway. It was Sam, holding a silenced Walther PP Super in her right hand. She stepped over the body, bent and heaved it away from the door. She slammed the door, kept hold of the Walther.

She said, her voice husky but not panicky, “Main train’s gone off the air. We were rapping with Cohn in War Wag One when he suddenly reported the convoy was surrounded. Voice came on the net, demanded to talk to the Old Man. Then there was a lot of interference. We relocated, heard this other guy say they’d nerved the main train, they were all dead, finished, kaput, and unless the Old Man threw in, the convoy’d get blitzed, too. Then there was more interference and they cut out.”

She stopped, impassive.

“Dead line?”

“Dead as this goon here.” She gestured at the man on the floor. “We tried everything. They’re off the air.”

J.B. shot a look at Ryan and Ryan sucked in air through his teeth, an icy feeling running up his spine like electricity.

Had Teague copped nerve gas? But where from? Then Ryan thought, if we found some, why not someone else, somewhere else?

Or was it maybe bluff? Had they merely axed the radio link somehow? But how would they have done that? They could certainly throw in interference fuzz, but not kill it dead unless…

Unless those in the main train really were dead.

And what about the Old Man? Was he dead and those with him, too? On reflection, almost certainly not, and for one excellent reason.

J.B. lit up one of his thin black cheroots, his eyes behind his steel-rimmed glasses narrowed in thought.

Ryan turned to the bar and said, “Do us a favor, Charlie. Get these stiffs outta the way.”

“Just like that? I’ll wave my wand, Ryan.” Then she sighed and said, “Okay, don’t panic. We’ll fix it. I take it there’s more on the stairs?”

“You take it correct.”

Charlie’s tiny mouth opened and closed.

“You’re a real hothead, Ryan.” She added, “What if they came in a vehicle?”

“He said he saw them in the street. Across the street.”

“Oh, right. Good memory.”

Ryan watched as half the bar patrons began dragging bodies toward the far end of the room. J.B. sucked on his cheroot, blew smoke out in a thin plume. He said, “Listen. They used gas on the train. Why didn’t they use it on the Old Man?”

“That’s a rhetorical question, J.B. You know the answer.”

“Hmm. They mortared gas canisters in.” He clicked his tongue irritably. “Something we didn’t make allowances for. Gas gets in through cracks and tiny holes. So all our people are dead. Nothing we can do there. Say it’s a short-term agent. After dispersal they now have to open up all those land wags and trucks and the two war wags. But they can’t, because they know that every damned vehicle owned by us is packed with boobies. Everybody knows that. And if they start smashing out window glass or blowing in doors, the whole caboodle could go up and they lose everything. So they’re stuck.” A dark smile of satisfaction fled across the thin man’s sallow features. “They’re well and truly stuck.”

“So they have to parley with the Old Man,” said Ryan. “So they have to take him alive.”

“Nontoxic agent.”

“Nothing else’d do.”

“Yeah.”

“So that means,” continued Ryan, “the Old Man’s out. But he’d have made sure all the vehicles were tight. So that means Teague’s goons have got more vehicles on their hands they can’t touch, move or do any thing at all with.”

“Yeah.”

J.B. blew a smoke ring. It sailed up toward the ceiling, shimmying, expanding, drifting out from the center, breaking up.

“And that means,” said Ryan, “we’re the only free agents in town.”

“Yeah.”

“But they don’t know what we know. No one knows that.”

J.B. murmured, “That little extra.” He glanced at Ryan. “How long we got?” Ryan checked his watch. “Rough timing, I’d say about four hours.”

“Gotta work fast. What’s your plan, war chief?” The room was now clear of stiffs. Incredibly those who remained in the bar were drinking and talking as though nothing had happened at all in the past ten minutes or so. He caught Ole One-Eye’s single orb, pink rimmed, the eyelid fluttering in a macabre and sardonic wink. He stared at Sam, Rintoul, finally at J.B. He thought of those on the main train, maybe a couple of hundred souls all told. All loyal comrades; some, indeed, close friends who’d shared with him a thousand experiences, a thousand dangers, a thousand joys and carousals. He thought of the flame-haired girl, Krysty, with the deep, the luminous green eyes. Extinguished. Snuffed out. Rage was like a sudden eruption of fierce white flame that licked through his entire system.

He said, his voice taut, “We take the war to the enemy. We pay a visit to Jordan Teague.”