Chapter Eight

« ^ »

DESPITE ORDERS, you kept to the shadows. The deep shadows. The deeper the better.

You kept to the shadows despite orders, despite doomy warnings from your unit leaders, despite hideously snarled threats of disembowelment or being flayed alive or having your hands nailed to the wall. Despite all these and more, you kept to the shadows because you were beginning to get… cautious.

A sec man’s life in the old days used to be different. It used to be fun, used to be a laff riot. It meant you were top of the pile, king of the ville. Meant you could do what you wanted, when you wanted, for as long as you wanted, and free. Mocsin was open city for the sec men, and you could tool along its streets and whatever you saw was yours. Not for the asking—you didn’t need to ask for anything. It was all yours for the taking. Yours by right of conquest. Didn’t matter what it was, you had an open license on it. Food, booze, men, women. Whatever was your fancy, it was yours.

And sure, on the surface the situation hadn’t changed. On the surface it was still the sec men’s paradise. On the surface everything was as it was, as it had always been, since Jordan Teague first hijacked the burg way back when most of today’s sec men were brawling brats.

On the surface.

But underneath, paradise was maybe not quite what it appeared to be. There was a tension in the air—something you could almost feel, almost gnaw at—that none of the old-timers had ever known. A population that had once been like rabbits, cowed and submissive, seemed to have changed, seemed to have become insolent. They always seemed to be watching you, except when you looked straight at them and then they weren’t watching you at all. Except you always caught that twitch of the face, that nervous flicker of the eyes, that meant they had been watching you. And they always seemed to be whispering about you behind your back, except when you swung around and they weren’t whispering at all, their lips were closed. Except you knew they’d been whispering about you, insulting you. And you got so mad at this sometimes that you took a whole bunch of them—men, women, brats—and herded them into the trucks and took them back to the Cellars and you stopped them watching you out of the corners of their eyes by taking their eyes out. And you stopped them talking about you behind your back by sewing their lips together.

But the funny thing was, it didn’t seem to do the trick, didn’t seem to stop the watching and the whispering. And you couldn’t herd the whole town into the Cellars.

And then there was the sniping. You’d be in a jeep and heading to the mines or coming back from them, in the line of duty, and suddenly one of the guys with you would keel over, one side of his head blown away, his soft nose and blood and brains splashed everywhere. First time this had happened everyone had thought it was a marauder attack, although marauders around this neck of the woods were in fact very scarce; they’d been dealt with savagely years back and now didn’t come around anymore because of Mocsin’s heavy rep. But it wasn’t a marauder attack.

There were no damned marauders in the near vicinity or the far vicinity, and you couldn’t figure out who it was. And then it happened again. And again. And again. And it got to be a regular occurrence, although randomly timed and in different places, different stretches of the road. And so all the open jeeps were laid off and mine patrols only worked from secure buggies and land wags. And now, over the past couple of months, three buggies had been blown to scrap by mines, their occupants so much torn and bloody meat.

And then there were the disappearances. Every so often a buddy would fail to return to barracks. At first this was thought to have been due to drunkenness, perhaps. In the old days there’d been a great deal of drunkenness, but then it was realized that although everything in town was yours, and free, there had to be some discipline in the force, and you only got seriously juiced in off periods, when it didn’t matter. But then it was thought that maybe it wasn’t the booze because none of those guys ever came back, and at last count, over the past two months or so, there were about twenty guys gone and it was as though they’d never existed in the first place.

And the worrying thing was, no one at the top seemed to be taking much notice of any of this, despite the rumbles of discontent from the lower ranks. And when you put forward the theory to your unit leaders that maybe something ought to be done about this, and it seemed to you that all of these weird occurrences were maybe somehow linked, and it was just possible that there was some kind of underground cell in town intent on sabotage and murder, all that happened was you got bawled out and told to mean up your act, boy, or you’ll be on hog duty in short order.

So you shut up.

Of course, you appreciated that the guys up top had their own problems and plenty of them. You couldn’t help but notice these things. Power shortages, food shortages, sewer-disposal problems—even the johns in the barracks were beginning to stink up, and no one seemed able to unblock the crappers. And all these epidemics didn’t help matters.

And now these miners. It was unbelievable. How in hell had they been able to fix things the way they’d been fixed? Someone wasn’t running a very tight ship out there. Some very red faces would be around when it was all sorted out. Not to mention a few summary executions. Probably more than a few, come to think of it, and it was a relief to realize that you hadn’t been involved in mine duty for a good four months. So they couldn’t blame you.

Best thing to do under the circumstances was keep your head down; don’t make waves, don’t attract attention. Let the upper echelons sort the mess out. Just do your job and don’t talk back and don’t come up with wildies about criminal elements in town being behind all this because those at the top knew what they were about, and if they dumped on such theories the reason had to be because they had the matter well in hand.

That had to be it.

Nevertheless, it was wise to take precautions. Even out here, in the north end of town, outside the Big Man’s mansion—outside this sprawling, many-roomed pre-Nuke dwelling place that had once belonged, or so you’d heard, to some guy called Bank Manager, whatever that meant—it was wise to be wary.

You always had to stand, when you were on guard duty, out in the light, out in the glare of the spotlights that lit up the area around the house, the lawns, the driveway. That was where you had to be. You had to show yourself, holding your piece, so that any guy who got past the electrified fencing and then the outer ring of sentry-hides would see you and shit himself. That was the theory, and as a theory it was fine, although of course the mere idea of anyone getting up this far was ludicrous. Laughable. The last time anyone had tried to ice the Big Man was—well hell, it had to be all of a dozen years ago, and he’d been crazy, and in any case what had happened to him had been so bad that anyone trying the same trick would have to be triple crazy. As far as you could remember—and you’d only been eight or nine at the time—they’d kept the sucker alive for two whole weeks out in the center of town so everyone could see, on a specially constructed platform, and for the last ten days of that two weeks he was screaming to die, begging for it. How the hell they’d managed to keep him alive, with not much skin on him, and things sticking into him and out of him and up him and all, was beyond you. Unreal. Those guys—hell, they’d been real clever, real talented. It was one of the reasons that made you want to be a sec man when you grew up.

So no way was any guy going to be smart enough or brave enough or even stupid enough to get this close to the Big House, and really what you were was a kind of honor guard, and there was no danger whatsoever and it didn’t really matter if you stood in the light at all.

In any case, these days the lights weren’t so damned bright as they used to be and even here, even outside the residence of the Big Man, there were obviously power supply problems, screwed-up generators and the like. You couldn’t help but notice that a couple of the pylons this side of the house were in an alarming state of disrepair, and one of them kept on flickering, which was a nuisance, irritating to the eyes.

It felt safer in the shadows, the deep shadows, where no one could see you—not that there was anyone out there to see you except your opposite number on the other side of the house. You got to see each other every now and again because you arranged it with each other so that that was what happened; so he’d know you were here and you’d know he was there and everything was jake. That way everyone was happy—although, come to think of it, you hadn’t seen him for a while now, the creep. He’d probably edged right back to the road and was having a cigarette on the sly, or a woman. And that was exactly what you felt like right now, only this near the House it really wasn’t too damned smart, and there go the bastard lights again, right off this time, blackout, and hell, maybe the dark didn’t really feel all that safe with no moon in the sky, only the chem clouds shifting in from the west, and here we go again, lighting-up time, flicker-flicker-flicker so it hurt your eyes trying to see across the blasted grass—it made it seem as if there were things out there that couldn’t possibly be because your opposite number wouldn’t have let them through, and dammit, they really ought to get some sucker to do a job on this system; it was really sloppy, a proper job and no argument. Tell them they’d get their balls bitten off by the dogs if they didn’t wire the bastard up the way it should be wired and—shit, that hurt—what the hell is this? Some clown’s pissing around, got a knee in your back and a hand over your mouth and you can’t yell and your head’s being dragged back so you feel your back’s going to break any moment and all you can see is this grinning face above you, upside down, staring right at you eyeball to eyeball and then all you can see is some fat blade stroking right into you except you can’t see where it’s gone, only feel it like an electric kiss on your throat and a sudden shaft of agony that lances straight through you, transforming every single nerve end in your body into an internal live wire, and now the blade’s gone and you’re sinking backward and there’s no hand over your mouth and you want to yell but you can’t, you really can’t, nothing’ll come out and everything’s loose and you’ve shit yourself and there’s nothing there, nothing at all, just blackness.

 

UPSIDE DOWN, in the jittery light from the arcs, the face looked hideous, as though it was grinning up at him with two mouths, one of which had far too much lipstick around it. Ryan knelt, wiped his gloved hands and then the panga on the grass, and thrust the thick-bladed weapon back into its sheath. He glanced around.

Hunaker sidled up and took the guard’s legs and they lifted the body and heaved it into the thick shadows at the base of the building’s wall, shoving it into the heart of a struggling bush. They crouched beside the bush, waiting, patient.

Out here it was quiet. It was almost as if the rest of the town did not exist. There were trees and lawns and gardens. The gardens were mostly overgrown, a wild and junglelike tangle, although here, around Teague’s mansion, some effort had been made to keep the place neatened up, to create not only a setting worthy of Mocsin’s lord and master, but also to carve out a loose kind of security zone around the house. There had been other large houses in this part of town, but in the neighborhood of Teague’s place they had either been demolished or turned into pens for sec men, so that a weaponed-up enclave surrounded the mansion, small forts around the big one.

That was the theory, and a brief smile twisted Ryan’s lips as he thought about it. Actually it was pathetic. Actually security was so damned lax that a single man could have invaded Jordan Teague’s sacred precincts with no trouble at all. Sure, there was an electric fence, but the power was on the fritz, as evidenced by the flickering lights, and in any case trees had been allowed to grow over parts of the fence, and it had been a simple matter to swing over. They’d made a few kills, but there were guys out there that they hadn’t needed to ice, they were so doped up. In one of the houses every sec man they could see was higher than a bird on happyweed. So high, in fact, that the girls who were also there were utterly redundant, were playing cards and drinking to while away the time.

Decay, thought Ryan moodily, his silenced SIG-Sauer now grip-held in his right hand. The decay of empire. Look back through history and there it was, clearly to be seen. Yet no one seemed to see it. It happened time and time again. Yet nobody ever seemed to learn the lesson. And the chilling thought was that it could happen even to the Trader and his empire, such as it was. All that had to happen was to say the hell with it once in a while, ease up. That was all it needed,

Hunaker muttered in his ear, “Why don’t we just take out the light system altogether? Be easier for us.”

“Too risky.”

“Hell, Ryan, no one’d ever know. It’s shot to hell already. Way those damned arcs’re blinking on and off…”

“Too risky.”

“You’re the boss.”

Ryan checked his watch. Roughly three hours forty minutes to go. It seemed a lot but wasn’t. Not if they got caught up in something, met stiff opposition and had to shoot their way out. It wasn’t very long at all.

There was one barrier to success. It was known—it must be known by now—that their little group was outside the net. The guys on the barriers at the edge of town would surely have reported back to Teague or Strasser—probably the latter—that Ryan’s buggy had entered Mocsin, unless communications were very sloppy and the guy hadn’t bothered to report in. But no, thought Ryan, he must discount that, work on the assumption that right now the alarm was out and Strasser’s goons were searching for them. Speed was therefore of the essence. And not only for him but for Strasser, too.

Strasser would need time to think, to plan. A couple of miles outside Mocsin he had a dozen vehicles in a circle—two war wags and land wags, trucks, container rigs—full of stiffs, full of hardware and weaponry and food and all kinds of trade goods, and he couldn’t touch them. He had them in his hand, they were his, but they might just as well be on the moon. The only way he was going to be able to get inside them was if someone gave him the key, someone told him how to bypass the boobies and render them harmless. Without the key, the poor fucker was basically up the creek.

Except that he also had the Trader. That was a powerful card. Everyone knew that the Trader’s men were fiercely loyal to the Old Man. Strasser’s idea would be either to break him or torture him so that someone else would break to save the Trader. What Strasser didn’t know was that the intense loyalty of those who worked with the Trader extended into virtually a vow of silence if anything ever went badly wrong. It was impressed into every man and woman never to blab, about anything. Sure, there were probably weak links in the chain—in any large organization there were bound to be—but Ryan, running through those who were now spark-out in the miniconvoy, couldn’t think of any.

And the Trader himself wouldn’t talk. He was one tough old buzzard. The Trader wouldn’t talk even if devils from Hell were peeling his skin off inch by inch, layer by layer. As he’d always said, “If they get me, forget me.” That applied to any situation.

Strasser didn’t know any of that, of course, and even if he did he would never credit it, would never be able to understand it.

Bastard was in for a shock.

Bastard was gonna pay for so casually destroying so many lives, exterminating without a thought so many good men and women.

And as he thought that, his face bleak, his mouth a thin, tight line, Ryan saw images of the girl, Krysty, in his mind and bared his teeth in a soundless snarl.

Images of her in the mutie-camp barn, smoke smudged, disheveled, her clothes just rags on her, driven by a dynamism he admired in any woman or man; then, having done what had to be done, utterly weary, almost defenseless. And then in the war wag, by turns argumentative, amused, angry, sardonic, sorrowing: so many emotions, so many different facets. A complex and fascinating woman. It had been a case of instant attraction, he had to admit, although that was no big deal in itself. So often it happened, and you took what was offered—if it was offered—and a course was then run to a terminal point beyond which there was nothing else, and that was that. But with Krysty there had been more, far more, even though he had only known her for—what? A couple of hours? Not longer than that. There had been a promise there, a promise of depths he could only guess at, of aggression, submission, self-possession, great intelligence and a deep sensuality that proclaimed itself quietly, with no unnecessary fanfare, in her eyes. Her fathomless eyes.

Well, he thought angrily, the hell with that. The hell with it all. Forget it. Put her out of your mind.

Hunaker whispered, “Here comes J.B., Mr. War Chief Buddy.”

Ryan noted grimly that Hunaker was still her usual bouncy, caustic self. She’d said nothing about the massacre, nothing about the loss of one who was to all intents and purposes close to her. But then they’d all lost comrades of one kind or another, and this was not the first time a disaster had occurred, although never on such a scale. Still, he thought, it boded ill for any of league’s and Strasser’s goons who got in her way in this town. And that was fine by him.

He turned on the crouch, saw three figures threading through the gloom toward them, coming around the side of the house.

J.B. eased close, the tall, blond Koll and Samantha the Panther in tow.

Ryan said, “We can either blitz in fast or do it quiet. If we do it quiet, at some point we’re gonna hit opposition and we’re gonna kill. And although we’re using suppressors, they’re not. There could be plenty of bang-bang, and even those dummies in town’ll get to thinking there’s something up when that happens.”

“I go for initially quiet,” said J.B.

“Same here. Once we have Teague, fuck it. Doesn’t matter. Make as much noise as we like. The louder the better because I want Strasser up here and talking.”

Built on a knoll, the house was big, rambling. The man who’d owned it so many years before must have been prosperous, a power in the town. In the windows, lamplight could be seen through chinks in the closed shutters beyond the glass, but there was no sound of revelry or celebration. Jordan Teague was having a quiet evening at home. Probably among his loved ones, although that wouldn’t include such mundane items as wife and kids. Word was, the Baron was barren.

J.B. said, “Outhouses at the rear and a lot of old garbage. There’s two side doors but they ain’t been opened in a hundred years. Rear door opens, passageway to it. There were two guys.” He didn’t bother to mention that the two guys who’d been muttering to each other and smoking beside the rear door were now shapeless bundles among the garbage.

“Main door’s not locked,” said Ryan. “You go in the back, head upstairs, check that out and hold the upper story. We’ll go in the front, wait for you. Two minutes. Any goons, kill ‘em quick.”

“Women?”

Ryan shrugged.

“If they pull on you, sure. If not, disable ‘em, tie ‘em up, whatever. We’re not animals.” He turned to the tall blonde. “Koll, you stay with me.”

Most of this, he knew, was unnecessary. All his combatants were highly trained, knew how to act in a crisis or a battle situation. It was simply a matter of working out the approach and after that they were on their own. He’d never yet, in ten years, had one of his men ice another by accident in kill chaos.

He gave J.B. his two minutes, then turned to the porch. As he’d said, the door was unlocked. Hunaker had already checked that out. The door handle was big and round. He turned it, pushed, went through fast, the silenced SIG in his right hand, Hunaker behind him, Koll at the rear.

They saw a large hallway, wide stairs facing them, a passageway to the left diving to the rear of the house. There were closed doors right and left. The hallway was unlit except for chinks of light below the doors.

There was a strong stink of incense mixed in with the burned straw smell of happy weed. Ryan could hear the mutter of conversation from the door on his left. Muted laughter, nothing else. J.B. materialized, moving quickly but silently up the passageway toward him, followed by Rintoul and Sam. Hennings was therefore out back. Good. A murderous bastard at the best of times who stood no nonsense from antagonists.

J.B. and the other two turned to the stairs, raced silently up them, keeping to the side. They fanned out on the landing above and disappeared. Ryan nodded to Hunaker, then gestured at the door on the left. She now held a squat Ingram MAC-11 LISP, a classic weapon. Koll stood by the now-closed main door, a little to one side, a LAPA in his hands.

Ryan moved to the left-hand door, Hunaker at his side. Without hesitation he twisted the handle and shoved the door inward. They both jumped into the room, taking in everything in a split second.

Seven men, black jacketed or in shirt-sleeves. Five sitting at a round table in the center playing cards, one standing beside the table, smoking and holding a bottle, one in the act of walking unhurriedly down the room toward another door at the far end. There were three kerosene lamps, one hanging from a hook on the ceiling. Many candles. The sudden opening of the door caused the flames to sway and gutter, a ripple effect that threw shadows crazily across the room. It also caused the seven men, as one, to gape in stunned amazement.

As Ryan pushed home the door, two of the men at the table sprang up, shoving their chairs back, pulling at shoulder-rigged pieces. It was enough. Hunaker, her body taut, her eyes narrowed, a feral growl at her lips, squeezed off her mag with about as much noise as a dozen guys having a spitting contest all at once might make. A long-drawn-out Phyyytt-t-t-t’t‘t. As she fired she tight-arced the thrust-out gun, casings spraying. The three seated men were punched backward in their chairs, arms flailing, thudding to the carpeted floor. Of the two who’d reached their feet, the nearest was slammed into the other and both seemed to be glued together as they spun across the room, gasping, scarlet holes magically appearing in their chests. Then their feet tangled together and they toppled, crashing to the floor.

As Hunaker had begun her squeeze, Ryan had thrown up his SIG. His prime target was the man at the end of the room, the man near the far door. Ryan bent at the knees and sent two rounds at him. Both hit, the first slamming through the spinal column as he half turned away and punching out the sternum in a wild spray of blood, the second going higher, shattering the collarbone from the side, almost taking the guy’s head off on its way out.

Without pause, Ryan swung to the right and heart-shot the man with the bottle. The man choked out an “Uggh!” quietly and hit the wall behind him, slid down it, arms wide, coat riding up to his shoulders as he sank. The bottle had already left his nerveless fingers and now lay on the floor, its contents soaking into the worn carpet.

Her right hand remagging the MAC, Hunaker sprinted across the room, silently hurdling the bodies. She reached the end door with Ryan at her heels. Again he gripped the handle, twisted, this time pulling it open. Hunaker sprang through the gap before it was fully opened, Ryan jumping through after her, his SIG left-handed now.

A passage, short, one door at the end half open and light streaming through the gap, though mostly blocked off by a man standing in the opening holding a tray with bottles on it.

Ryan snarled, “Shit!” and two-rounded him. It was the only thing he could do. The guy flew backward through the door and the tray crashed to the floor, glass shattering. There was a shout from the room beyond, more of surprise then alarm, but already Hun was flying down the passage, her boots almost not touching down, her short loose coat billowing out behind her like bat’s wings. She leaped into the room on the turn and the MAC-11 was spitting even as her feet hit carpet. Ryan, pounding after her, heard glass smash, metal clang and whine, and a sound like someone coughing loudly and very fast.

He reached the doorway, saw Hunaker lowering the machine pistol, a savage expression on her face.

She said “Damn” in self-disgust and turned away from him.

The room was a kitchen. The only guy there had been butchering meat on a block in the center of the room with a cleaver. He’d taken most of the MAC’s mag, had been powered back into a table with glassware and copper pans and skillets on it, and now sagged backward, feet in the air, arms hanging, most of his chest blown out and blood splashed over floor and walls.

Hunaker was muttering curses in a harsh undertone. Ryan knew she was cursing herself as much for butchering one single guy who hadn’t even been truly armed as for making such a row.

“You had to do it blind,” he snapped. “Could’ve been a garrison in here.”

The room stank of powder and blood. It smelled like a slaughterhouse. Ryan touched the young woman on the arm, then clasped her to him, his eye taking in the fact that the windows all were shuttered and there were three doors off to one side. He could feel her trembling slightly.

Hunaker said in a tight voice, “Shit, she was such a sweet kid, Ryan. I’ll miss her, dammit. You dunno what it’s like.”

“No. Probably not.”

She shook herself, clenched her eyes, then opened them again and said, “Okay, let’s go. I’ll get us all killed at this rate.” Her smile was terrible to behold.

Ryan checked out the three doors. Storerooms. Nothing there. They went back along the passage, through the big room, still smelling strongly of cordite, warily out into the hallway. Koll gave them the thumb.

Ryan muttered, “You hear anything?”

“What’s to hear?” The tall blonde gestured at the door through which they’d just come. “Good paneling there, Ryan. Thick as hell. You make any noise, then?”

“Clearly not so’s you’d notice.”

He glanced up, saw J.B. at the head of the stairs, alone, holding up his left hand, four fingers extended. His expression was deadpan.

Four kills. Everything jake.

Ryan shot a look at Hunaker and discovered that she was staring straight at him. He inclined his head toward the right-hand door under which no light could be seen and raised an eyebrow. Hunaker nodded almost eagerly as she slipped a third mag into the guts of the MAC-11.

Ryan said, “You sure?”

Hunaker hissed, “For Christ’s sake, Ryan!”

He shrugged. It amused him how people still invoked the name of a deity, or, as he understood it from his reading way back in… well, when he was reading, some kind of secondary deity who seemed to be a son of the primary deity. But he did it himself, when cussing or expressing shock or anger, often using words that had no meaning for him whatsoever, although that of course was a legacy from his father who’d done exactly the same, and probably his father before him, and so on back to pre-Nuke.

For a second, as he thought like this, the image of his father began to form in his mind. But he blocked it off quickly, the hand that held the SIG clenching involuntarily, so that he nearly squeezed off a round into the floor. He shook his head to clear the image finally, shake the memories away. These days it was easier, thank God.

A brief smile twitched his lips as he caught that. There you are, he thought—thank God!

He stepped to the right-hand door, thought about powering in as before but something—he didn’t quite know what—stopped him. His gloved hand took hold of the knoblike handle, twisted it firmly, though tugging at it so that no hint of a sound came from the movement. He gently eased the door open slightly. Two inches. There was only darkness beyond. The smell of incense was much stronger here, a positive assault on the senses. He could hear the faint murmur of someone talking, but as if from afar. He pushed the door more, slipped through. He sensed that Hunaker was behind him and half turning his head he muttered, “Close it, but not tight.”

He stared at the warm blackness, half closing his eye, then opening it again, wide. Over on his left, in front, was a narrow smear of murky light in the air, which at first he could make no sense of. The light danced, a flickering glow. Then gradually he began to sort out details of the room.

Or half room. It was big, high ceilinged. There was no furniture, but the floor was carpeted. Across the room, from wall to wall, hung some kind of thick curtain. Two curtains, actually, pulled together. Hence that chink of light in the center where the inner folds of the two draperies didn’t quite meet.

He slid the SIG back down into its belt rig and reached for the LAPA, holding it one-handed as he silently stepped across the room toward the curtain. There was no point now in using a silenced piece. He’d reached his goal. The voice he could hear beyond the thick draperies belonged to Jordan Teague.

He reached the gap in the curtain. It couldn’t have been positioned better if some guy had actually set it up for him. Eye high. Breathing through his mouth, the LAPA held down at his side, he peered through.

One bizarre scene.

One bizarre goddamned scene.

There were candles everywhere, their flames fluttering and guttering in the drafts. It seemed as if there were a thousand candles at first, ten thousand, seemed as though the room itself was vast, extending way beyond the bounds of sanity. But of course it was a mirror effect. Long mirrors on all the walls, to the front of him and to the sides, even fixed down over the closed shutters of the windows on the right-hand wall. Ryan glanced up, his eye widening. Even covering the ceiling.

For the rest, there was not much furniture in the room although the place could not be said to be bare. On the floor were thick rugs, all sizes, all shapes and patterns and colors or combinations of colors. There were two potbellied stoves on the right, doors wide, heat belching out; pipes from the top of each rose into the air, sagging drunkenly in badly welded sections, disappearing into the mirrored ceiling. A couple of small tables, both of which seemed to Ryan’s mildly discriminating eye to be more than just well-carved—really old period pieces, probably—stood toward the center, smoke rising from large bowls on them. He couldn’t see what was burning, but it was sure as hell the source of the rich, cloying stink that permeated the room.

It was what reared up high, center stage but toward the far end, that dragged the word “bizarre” into his mind. A kind of stepped pyramid, twice the height of a man, maybe more, and flat on top. Ryan couldn’t see how it was constructed because it was covered with a piece of rich red material, tacked in so that the step treads were tight and thus climbable without getting his boots tangled up in the folds. Atop it, a wide, high-backed wing chair, plain wood from what he could see, although that wasn’t much, because of its occupant and the fact that it was partially covered in more material that, as he stared at it, became vaguely familiar, then all at once, after a few seconds searching his memory, became entirely recognizable. He could just make out white stars on a patch of blue, vivid red bars on white. A real relic from pre-Nuke days: a huge version of what they’d called the national flag of this land when it had been a unified country, a power in the world.

Ryan stared at the figure sprawled grossly and grotesquely in the chair, seeming to fill it to overflowing, one foot on the platform, the knee bent back, the other leg hanging over the top step. Except for black knee-length riding boots, worn and dulled, he was evidently naked under what looked to be some kind of fantastic robe, blue in color, thickly lined with soiled white fur, and open at the front. His massive belly bulged in folds, lapping at his thighs. His flesh was pinkish, his face red, the cheeks sagging around a small thick-lipped mouth around which was a fringe of white stubble. The eyes were tiny flesh-choked beads. His head was flung back so that he was gazing up at the mirrored ceiling as he talked, his image gazing back down at him. In his right pudgy hand he held a thick cigar, which, from the look of it, consisted entirely of dry-cured happyweed leaves, rolled tight.

Jordan Teague. Baron of Mocsin.

Ryan almost couldn’t believe his eyes, for a moment convinced that the incense that clogged the air was some kind of drug and that what he was seeing was a weird, outrageous vision.

But it was real enough. Two years had clearly made a hell of a difference. Teague had been fat, sure, but this was way different. The guy looked as if he’d need help walking. Or maybe he stayed up there the whole time? There’d been nothing remotely like this in the old days. Teague had gotten around town, done his business, kept a firm hand on things.

In many ways, as Ryan remembered it from the Trader, who knew the background, Jordan Teague had been a typical Baron. He’d come up the hard way. Father and mother had he none—that he knew of, anyhow. He’d cut his own path in one of the southern Baronies and discovered that, as long as he was paid for it—in food, creds or women—he didn’t mind killing for his living. Didn’t mind at all. He became head blaster for a small-time Baron, supplanted him in a bloody coup and was then, after some years, himself ousted by his own head blaster. There is very often such a symmetry in these matters, although Teague broke the pattern by being slightly quicker on the uptake than his predecessor and escaping with his life. He drifted into the central Deathlands, took up with a band of mutie marauders who had a rather more liberal attitude toward norms than most—that is, they accepted him, instead of spit-roasting him over a slow fire and eating him—and they had a good two years looting, pillaging and raping before the band hit what on the surface appeared to be a sleepy but fairly prosperous settlement ripe for slaughter and rape some distance south of the ruins of the old St. Louis, but which in fact turned out to be a setup by the angry inhabitants of the entire area, who were, after two years of hell, not unnaturally pissed off with the marauders’ continual depredations and red-hot for vengeance.

The marauders broke up. Literally. As they drove in they hit a wall of firepower—much of it having been hoarded for years—which destroyed them, their trucks, their jeeps, their women, their bags and traps. Teague, a man of violence but no great brain, for once in his life acted smart by mingling with the normals in the subsequent massacre and distinguished himself by gunning down, with a close-range burst from a hand-held MG, the mutie leader, a guy with a curious piglike snout and the manners to go with it. Actually Teague didn’t merely gun him down but cut him in two—it was that close a range. And then blew his head off. Just to be sure. Some days later some busybody with a sharp memory accused him of being one of the band. There was an altercation that Teague won by the simple expedient of icing his opponent with a pump-action. He said it was in righteous rage at such a calumny, but there were those who thought he’d been suspiciously overzealous in pulling his piece and began to get sulky with him. Teague wisely beat it, drifted northwest, landed up in Mocsin. It was ripe for a takeover by someone, and he figured he fitted the bill.

Just about then he bumped into the Trader, who’d recently fallen across his first Stockpile, together with his buddy Marsh Folsom, and had a raft of factory-fresh fowling pieces and mucho ammo to match. Teague had no jack whatsoever, but he did have an astounding stroke of luck. He came across a guy who’d been mooching about in the hills to the southwest of Mocsin and discovered seams of yellow in the rocks. Someone later figured out that the gold had been uncovered by the last rippling tremors from the West Coast cataclysm, when Sov “earthshaker” bombs and missiles back in the Nuke had carved out a new coastline, taking out half of Washington state, Oregon and California, and the whole of Baja, California. But such geological pedantry was of no interest to Jordan Teague, who simply deep-sixed the sucker and grabbed his nuggets. With these he bought a passel of 5.56 mm M-16A1s modified to handle the M-203 grenade launcher, crates of mags, plus boxes—assorted—of 40 mm rounds for the grenade launchers, including HE, frag and M-576 buck. Teague being Teague, he would have liked to have had free what he had to pay for, and pay for highly. But even then, word had gotten around that you didn’t fuck with the Trader, and in any case Teague had the location of the strike—unwisely, the panhandler had made a map—and it was more than likely that there was more where the first haul had come from.

There was, indeed, as Teague discovered after he and an assorted bunch of murderous trash had subdued Mocsin and set up there in style. In short order he began to mine the yellow stuff and ship it out East. Slowly at first, but in the past decade more and more successfully. Jordan Teague was now an exceedingly rich man although, as Ryan knew damned well, as anyone knew, none of this wealth had ever rubbed off on Mocsin.

All in all, a pretty inglorious and unedifying career that, did he but know it, thought Ryan bleakly, was moving swiftly to its close.

Ryan still found it barely credible that Teague should end up like this. He recalled what Fishmouth Charlie and said about Teague’s not knowing what the goddamned time was these days. Damned right. He looked to be brain-blasted on booze and happyweed, stuffed to the gullet and beyond with food. A gross mountain of flab, fit for nothing but the boneyard.

Ryan almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

There were others in the room. Two women were whispering together at the foot of the pyramid structure, sitting on the lowest step. One was naked, wide hipped with pendulous breasts. Ryan judged her to be well on the other side of thirty. The other was younger; oddly, she wore a top but no bottom, no skirt or pants. They looked bored as they chewed the fat, dispirited. It occurred to Ryan that trying to jolly Teague into raising his flagpole these days must be a full-time occupation, and wearing on the nerves.

Slumped at Teague’s feet was a man, a strange and wild-looking guy, at this distance elderly, though Ryan could not be sure. He looked to be medium height though very thin. Sprawled as he was, it was difficult to tell exactly. He was clad all in rusty black except for an off-white shirt. His hair was long and lank and gray. Ryan couldn’t see his face clearly because the guy’s head was in his hands. He seemed to be crying. Certainly his shoulders were shaking as though he was in the grip of a fit of the ague, although no sounds came from him. Could be he was laughing, but Ryan doubted it.

Hunaker whispered impatiently behind him, “C’mon, Ryan. Let’s hit ‘em.”

“Wait.”

His ears were only just beginning to adjust to the wheezy rumble of Teague’s voice. He seemed to be talking to himself, with the odd sentence directed down at the crazed old guy at his feet, who took no notice.

Suddenly Teague lashed out with his foot, the tip of his boot catching the old man at the side of his head and toppling him. With a blubbering wail the man tumbled down the steps, a wild sprawl of arms and legs. The younger woman jumped out of the way as he banged past her, landing in a heap on the rugs. Agonized sounds came from him. The girl didn’t even turn his way but went around the other side of her companion and the muttered conversation continued as though it had never stopped.

“I told ya!” wheezed Teague. “You listen ta me, Doc, when I’m talkin to ya. An’ get up off ya tush.”

The man called Doc struggled to his feet, stood with his back to the curtain, his shoulders bowed. He was still trembling.

“Well?” barked Teague.

Though shaky, the old man’s voice was rich, deep-timbred.

“I, uh, I fear I, uh, did not hear you, Mr. Teague.”

“Don’t listen—that’s your damned trouble.”

“You are, uh, perfectly correct, sir. It is indeed a failing of mine.” His voice dropped, as though he wasn’t speaking to Teague at all. “I live in the mind, sir. As you know, there is another country there. In the mind. Memories of a better life, a richer existence by far.”

“Lotta crap you talk, Doc.”

“Indeed, sir. Yes, indeed. Indubitably. I, uh…” His voice trailed off.

“Dunno where you fuckin’ are, Doc, that’s what’s wrong with you.”

The old man’s head came up, his voice stronger.

“Oh, no, sir. Believe me, I know where I am. Indeed I do, sir. I am in Hell. I have often thought it. It is the only explanation.”

“Yeah.” Teague chuckled throatily, his cheeks quivering. He was still looking up at the ceiling, had not even shifted his gaze even when lashing out at the old man, but now he dropped his head, stared down. “You ‘n’ me both, Doc,” he said. There was a grotesque smile on his face. “Hear Cort had you down in the pens again, ha?”

“Th-that is so.”

“Get it up, did ya?”

The old man shuddered but did not answer.

“I said, get it up did ya?” said Teague dangerously.

The lank hair shook slightly as the old guy nodded.

“Well, more’n I can do, Doc,” Teague said affably. “Fuck knows when I last got it up. Just lost the inclination. Too much like hard work, know what I mean?”

The old man did not reply.

Teague suddenly barked, “Hey you, bitch!”

Neither of the women took a blind bit of notice.

Teague, grunting and gasping, gripped the chair arms, heaved himself forward. He screamed, “Bitch!”

The younger of the two women got up unconcernedly and mounted the pyramid toward him. At the top she stood beside the chair, gazing blankly out across the room as Teague reached out a flabby hand and fondled her buttocks, his fingers disappearing from sight. Grunting, he heaved himself around and thrust the fingers of his other hand up inside her top, began groping at her hidden breasts. Still the woman said nothing, did nothing, her face expressionless. Teague suddenly sank back into the chair with an angry croak, flapped a hand irritably at her. She turned, descended the steps, pulling her top down. She sat on the bottom step and took up the conversation again with her companion.

“Y’know, Cort’s gonna kill ya one of these days, Doc.”

The old man’s hands rose, palms up.

“I am dead already, sir. It is the only explanation.”

“He don’t like ya, Doc. S’why he likes to humiliate ya. Wasn’t for me, you’d be stiff.”

“I was taught, sir, that theories must always fit the facts, not facts theories. It is a basic tenet of any academic discipline. And the facts are simple. This is Hell. Therefore, quod erat demonstrandum, I am dead. I have been dead, sir, since… since, ah… ah, dead… since…”

His voice had become hoarse and he began to tremble again, a terrible feverish shiver that took hold of his entire bony frame, as though invisible hands had gripped him and were shaking him violently. Slowly he sank to his knees, his head held in his hands, his shoulders quaking. Gusty sobs erupted from him.

Teague sucked at his cigar, as though oblivious of what was happening below.

He said, “No way out for ya, Doc. Cort ain’t just gonna put ya to the hogs one of these days, he’s gonna feed ya to them.”

“No. That is where you are wrong,” The voice had suddenly become crisper in tone. His head jerked up, dropped to one side, like a bird’s. “The locational progressions are simple. There is no problem there. From A to B to C and onward. Or from P to Q and then back to, let us say, G. So you see, there is indeed a way out. Or I should say, many ways out. But finding them, my dear sir, that is altogether a different matter. The Redoubts are there, in situ. Many of them. But—and I put it to you—where is ‘there’?”

“Shit,” muttered Teague.

“This is the point. And I fear I have to say the answer is for the moment lost.” He was talking more quickly now, the words spilling out, a curious excitement in his voice, in his whole bearing. His right hand was raised, the forefinger wagging up at Jordan Teague as though in admonishment. As though the losing of the “answer” was all the gross man’s fault. “No doubt it will reveal itself. No doubt they will reveal themselves. At times the fog clears…”

He stood up suddenly, began to prowl in front of the pyramid, his hands clasped behind him. Backward and forward, backward and forward. His voice dropped to a dreamy murmur that Ryan could only just make out.

“The fog. Sometimes, if let loose, it’s quite powerful. Feedback effect, as I recall, though difficult to explain. And quite arbitrary. Of course, they had no real conception of its power. They said they had, but they lied. They lied much of the time.” He thumped his right fist into the palm of his left hand, his voice rising to an outraged cry. “They treated me like an animal! It was disgraceful! As though I were a puppet! They had no right to do what they did and I informed them of that fact. And for all their honeyed words I was nothing to them, less then nothing. A subject. An interesting experiment. It was wicked, wicked! God should have struck them dead!” He swung around on Teague, pointed up at him, laughing, his voice cracked, pitching up to a falsetto. “But through the fog, my dear sir! From A to B! And then to R or M or anywhere! Find the fog, sir! There is your solution! Your way out! So many possibilities!”

Hunaker whispered, “Shit, Ryan, we’re wasting time. Let’s do it!”

Ryan said “Wait, dammit. There’s something…” Then he said, “Lucky we didn’t!” as Teague bawled, “Jauncy! Hackutt!” and one of the mirrors on the other side of the pyramid swung open and two goons came through at the run. They had slung M-16s and they went separate ways around the pyramid, right and left, and converged on the wild-eyed old man. They were both grinning death’s-head grins.

The old man stopped pacing, seemed to shrivel into himself, his face gray.

Teague said, “Fucker’s off again. Take his toys from him.”

“No!”

The man called Doc screamed the word. His hands went up toward Teague in an imploratory gesture, silently entreating him not to do what was to be done, and what had been done, probably, on many occasions in the past.

“C’mon, c’mon!” snapped one of the goons. “Take ‘em out. Hand ‘em over.”

Doc stared wildly around, as though looking for some means of escape. Then he swallowed hard, his shoulders slumping. He reached slowly into a pocket of his filthy black coat, then held out his hand. Ryan peered up at the ceiling, the only way he could see what was there: two gray spheroids.

He muttered, “All right, but don’t hit the old guy.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not sure, but don’t. I want him.”

“You’re the boss.”

They slammed through the curtain, Ryan to the left, Hunaker on his right, one target apiece. Simple.

Except that the two women shrieked and bolted. Their ideal course of escape would be off to the side, out of any line of fire. Instead blind panic turned them both into something akin to chickens with their heads lopped off. They dived in front of the two sec men, yelling in a frenzy. One tripped on a rug, the other tumbled over her. Ryan swore and dived to one side as a sec man, quick off the mark, unslung his piece and fired what must have been half a mag in his direction, the rounds flaying the thick curtains behind into wildly flapping cloth shreds. Ryan was firing the LAPA, its butt smacking into his pelvis, but his aim was wild and rounds hammered into the mirrors behind the pyramid, the glass exploding into a million flying shards.

Hunaker hadn’t fired at all. She was rolling across the floor toward the wall in a desperate scramble as bullets from the second guy tore air above her head. She was now regretting that she hadn’t jumped into this one with a piece—engineered, as this particular piece was, so it fired only in the fully automatic mode—that did not have the ferocious blast power of the MAC, which was fine for blazing out whole groups of targets with a light squeeze of the trigger but lousy when it came to the one-man job, and especially lousy when that one man was surrounded by others you did not want to hit. Sometimes, she thought as she let the machine-pistol go and dragged an H&K P-7 from inside her jacket, you could be over overconfident.

She rolled fast and scrambled around onto her stomach, fast-sighting as her head rose from the rug, and the compact snug-gripped P-7 barked twice, the first round missing her man by mere centimeters, the second, because of hand quiver on the roll, whipping at his coat. He yelped, jumped to his left, stumbled and fell, a third bullet from the P-7 tearing air where he’d just been. He rolled, too, and took a dive like a sprinter off the block into the comparatively calmer waters on the other side of the pyramid, joined a half second later by his companion, who’d had the same idea.

That idea was not to face up to Ryan and Hunaker at all but get the hell out of the room in one piece by diving through the still-open mirror door through which they’d arrived.

Except Ryan was ahead of them. Where he was he could not hit them, either of them, but the door itself was another matter. He sent three rounds into it, smashing the glass into a wild kaleidoscope of candle-reflected glitter and punching the door into its frame.

It was a standoff. Neither Ryan nor Hunaker had a direct bead on the two goons, who were now crouched behind the pyramid. On the other hand Ryan, from where he was positioned, could destroy anyone who tried to make for that doorway. The two goons were in a slightly better state, although only very slightly. They at least could snipe if they’d a mind to, or poke their pieces up and over the nearest step treads and blaze off in the general direction of their targets. And by doing that they could at least stop Ryan and Hunaker rushing them from the other side.

Ryan bared his teeth in an icy grin as he stared at the reflection of the two men, one of whom was staring back. Their eyes met. The goon wasn’t grinning. He looked as though his bowels were about ready to go. That did not, however, make him any less dangerous.

Ryan’s gaze roved. The two women were now trying to burrow under the rugs, shrieking and yelling in total-flap hysteria. The old guy called Doc seemed to have disappeared. Ryan couldn’t see him anywhere, had not caught his bolt route. Probably he’d managed to flee through that door. Pity. Ryan would like to have talked to him. He’d seemed a wreck—not surprising if, as it appeared, he was some kind of… well, court jester or scapegoat for Teague and Strasser—but he had not seemed completely off his head, which made all that stuff he’d been gabbling about mildly attention grabbing. Or perhaps rather more than mildly attention grabbing. Where had Teague picked him up? He’d not been around two years back. He talked funny, and what was all that shit about “the fog”? The guy called Kurt, back at Charlie’s, had—from what Charlie herself had said—rambled on about fog. Ryan didn’t trust coincidences, even in this random, arbitrary and seemingly totally haphazard life. His psyche nudged him, whispered that there might be something odd here, something worth following up. The old coot hadn’t just been talking about any old fog, and if Charlie was to be believed neither had the guy called Kurt. Common sense, however, informed him that there were ten thousand natural fogs in the Deathlands per week, somewhere or other, and probably this Kurt bird was vision-ridden from fever—a fog with claws? Come on!—and probably this old coot here was crazed from having been forced into performing grisly and unnatural acts for the delight of that sadistic bastard Strasser. Still, from A to B to C, his mind mused—and what were the “possibilities”… and who were “they” and what had “they” done to him and what was a “Redoubt” and why did he talk so weird?

The explanation for all this was probably worth much less than a half pinch of nukeshit, thought Ryan, and right now there were other problems on the agenda, which needed to be solved urgently.

He stared up at Jordan Teague, atop his pyramid, cringing into the wingback chair with a mad and pop-eyed look about him.

“R-Ryan…?”

The word came out as a hoarse raven’s croak.

“Teague, you fat bastard! You’re the best target I’ve seen in years! Even a blind man could take you out!”

“Ryan! Jesus! What’re ya doin? What is this? W-we gotta talk, fer Chrissake!” The bulk blubber of him was quaking like a jelly in a high wind. “Th-this ain’t the way to do business!”

“You’re in deep shit, Teague. I swear I’m gonna give you to the cannies. Bunch of them could live off you for a month.”

“M-my God, Ryan! Ya gotta tell me…I’ll do anything…gotta tell me what ya want! I’ll do it…I’ll do it!”

Ryan was disgusted. However many faults Teague had—about a zillion, if one were to count—however many monstrous deeds could be laid at his door, at least there’d been a time when he’d been in control, at least there’d been a time when he’d commanded a certain amount of respect as a hard man who’d carved himself a niche in the Deathlands and stayed put where others had fallen. This abject caterwauling and cringing in ludicrous terror was appalling, made him simply a bladder of lard worth nothing. Less then nothing.

Ryan put up the LAPA and pumped three rounds into the top step of the pyramid, just below Teague’s twitching boots. Teague yelled, tried to turn himself into a fat ball, as the bullets smashed straight through the construction, bursting more glass the other side.

Ryan laughed as he realized the pyramid wasn’t solid.

“Hun! The base! Flay it!”

Hunaker caught on. She reached for the MAC-11, rolled onto her stomach again, aimed for the second-from-bottom step and squeezed off a withering blast of rounds that turned her immediate target into an explosive spray of blown-out wood chips before powering subsonically through the hollow interior and ripping out the other side, only slowing marginally as they zip-drilled the flesh, sinew and bones of the man crouched there. The guy was shoved over bodily by the punishing impact, most of the MAC’s mag transforming him into a mere torso from which blood sprayed.

The second man, yelling in panic as he, too, cottoned on, jumped from cover, M-16 hammering wildly in Ryan’s direction. But Ryan was on full-auto now, and his fire line caught the man and followed him, slamming him back against the mirror wall in a twisted body tangle, unstitching him, opening him up as he smashed into the glass, soft pointed bullets and glass shards erupting him into a red rag doll.

There was a microsecond’s silence and then Ryan was on his feet and sprinting back to the curtain, throwing it aside and bawling for Koll. Koll came running, his own LAPA held out.

Pointing, Ryan snapped, “There’s a door back there—check it out. Look for an old guy. Long hair, black gear. Nail any goons, but don’t nail him.”

He turned, brandishing his piece at Teague.

“Down, and make it snappy, fat man.” He said to Hunaker, “And for fuck’s sake do something about those goddamned women. Anything!”

He watched as Jordan Teague clambered down the steps of the pyramid. As he reached the floor he pulled the blue robe around him defensively. It didn’t meet in the middle. Ryan went close, poked at the sagging gut with the LAPA’s barrel. Teague’s beady little eyes shone with fear.

“You fat double-crossing bastard,” Ryan hissed. “I oughta take you apart.”

Teague wheezed, “I ain’t done nothin’, Ryan.”

“That,” said Ryan icily, “as someone said to me not too damned long ago…someone who’s now dead!” And he spat the word at Teague, who waddled back two steps at the violence of the sound, “is a double fucking negative.”

“I… I dunno watcha mean, Ryan!” Teague squeaked.

“It means, fat man, you have done something!”

“Please, Ryan…” The man’s voice was a pleading whisper, and there were tears rolling and bouncing down his cheeks. “Tell me.”

“You had our train nerved out, and you’ve got the Trader. And now I have you!”

Teague’s face shook, triple jowls quivering like a turkey’s wattles. He muttered, “Uh…yeah. Cort did… say…” Then he croaked, “But I was against the idea, Ryan, against it. Ya gotta believe me.”

“You wanted the train for nothing—you simply iced the whole…” A wildfire of fury boiled through him suddenly and he rammed the LAPA barrel into Teague’s stomach, yanked it back, flipped it and smashed the butt into the throat of the tottering, gobbling figure. Teague fell back with a strangled shriek, sprawled ludicrously half on, half off the bottom step of his pyramid throne, clutching at his neck, his face scarlet. Ryan flipped the gun again and held it down at Teague, aiming at his gut, his finger tight on the trigger, his face squeezed into a frozen mask.

From across the room, though it seemed like much farther, he heard Hunaker say softly, “Ryan.”

He breathed out slowly, lowered his piece. He said tightly, “When this is over, Teague, you and Strasser…” He sniffed air into his lungs, threw his head back, breathed again, this time gustily. He said, his voice less taut, “Who’s the old man?”

“Old man?” Teague’s voice was a broken gargle.

“Old man, old man!” snarled Ryan. “The old buzzard you called Doc.”

Teague shook his head feebly.

“I dunno, Ryan. He just… appeared. One day. Came into town. Year back, maybe longer.”

“Who is he, what’s he do, where’s he from?”

“Dunno. Dunno nothin’.” The words came out fast, a panic-stricken stream. “I thought it’d be a laugh, you know, to have him around. Cort don’t like him, makes him…do things. Said he was a doctor, acted real strange. Still does, goes off in a fuckin’ dream, talks…I dunno, ‘nother language. Long words. Some guys did somethin’ to him, took him off from someplace. But he never said where, when, why. Can’t understand the guy sometimes, talks to ya like he’s talkin’ to a buncha kids. Shit, I dunno, Ryan—that’s it.”

“What about this fog?”

“Oh, yeah. He’s lookin’ for a fog.” Teague tried laughing, but then thought better of the idea. “Thass what he says, lookin’ for a fog, special kind of fog. I dunno what the hell he means, Ryan. He says that on the other side life’s better. He’s burned out. Rads’ve eaten his brain away.”

“Didn’t look like he had the Plague to me, Teague.”

“No, no. He’s fit enough, yeah. Brain-fucked is all.”

“Those two balls. Eggs.”

“S’all he had with him, Ryan, when he came into town. Y’gotta believe me. Didn’t have nothin’ else. Some kind of metal, goes crazy when you take ‘em off him. Cort gets off on doin’ that, takin’ ‘em away from him. Guy has a fuckin’ fit.”

Koll suddenly reappeared. His face was set.

“Nothing out back, but there are lights heading up this way.”

Samantha the Panther came through the curtains.

“J.B. says…”

“Lights. Yeah.” Ryan gestured at Teague. “Take him out front, where we came in.”

He ran back to the entrance hallway, then up the stairs to the second story. Rintoul emerged from the shadows and pointed to a room. Ryan padded across to where J.B. was hunched against a window frame.

“Two trucks and a buggy. Could be Strasser.”

Ryan peered out. The arcs were still flickering, but in their nervous illumination Ryan could see what J.B. had seen. The trucks had reached the front of the house below and were stopping, the buggy sweeping in from behind. A tall, gauntly built man, bareheaded and black garbed, emerged from the front of the buggy, followed by two sec men.

“Yeah.”

Strasser was staring around, peering to the left and right as though looking for someone.

“And they don’t know we’re here. He’s looking for the guards we iced.”

Ryan rerigged the LAPA and brought out his SIG-Sauer. He sighted on the roof-mounted spotlight of the buggy and put a round into it. There was a crash of glass, a sharp metallic clang and the light went dead. Strasser jumped, his head jerking up as his hand reached at his coat.

Ryan shouted, “You’re dead first, Strasser. Whatever happens.”

Strasser stared upward, his skull-like face expressionless.

“Ryan. Might’ve guessed you’d still be loose. But what can you expect when you employ imbeciles.”

J.B. muttered, “I’ll go down. Get Henn and the rest. Get the door open.”

Ryan called out, “You killed a lot of our people, Strasser.”

The bony man shrugged but said nothing.

“Tell the trucks to beat it, and tell them not to mess up when we come out. Get your men out of the buggy.”

“Why should I do that, Ryan?” Strasser’s voice, like his face, was expressionless.

“We got Teague.”

Strasser pursed his lips, then shrugged again and nodded slowly. He began to turn away.

“And don’t move from that spot, shithead.”

Strasser stood still, pointed at the trucks, began talking quickly to the two men with him. One of them went to the buggy, his voice a mutter of sound. Ryan watched as goons began climbing out of the buggy, five in all. The trucks revved up, backed off from the house and turned, disappearing down the driveway into the darkness beyond the arc lights’ beams. Ryan could see their headlamps cutting into the blackness. The men who had come from the buggy began to back away from the vehicle onto the grass.

“J.B.!”

Below him he saw light spill out from the opening door and he turned and raced back across the room, into the corridor, down the stairs, the SIG still clutched in his right hand.

“Let’s go.”

He shoved the SIG at Teague’s head, and Teague whimpered as they moved out of the house toward Strasser and the buggy.

“We go to where the Trader is, we go to where the train is, and then we go.”

Strasser said, “Fortunes of war, Ryan,” His hands came out in a wide-armed shrug. “So near, and yet so far. Ah, well…”

There was something wrong here, but Ryan couldn’t figure out what it was. He knew Strasser. Strasser was too cool—far too cool. Then in the same moment that he saw muzzle-flash from the buggy interior, Teague’s head exploded like an overripe fruit, spraying him with blood, brains and homogenized bone. The double crack of the shots came a microsecond later. Teague lurched, collapsed into him soundlessly, and the dead bulk of the man shoved him groundward, knocking the SIG from his grasp. There was another, longer, burst of fire and a crazed yell from behind, then Strasser was screaming, “Hold it!”

Ryan heaved at Teague, rolled him off, as icy phantom fingers insinuated themselves into his stomach. What a jerk-off, he thought disgustedly. Then Strasser was above him, a handgun gripped in his gloved hand, its barrel inches from Ryan Cawdor’s good eye.

“Don’t twitch. Shithead!” The gaunt man’s voice was a crow of delight and malevolent triumph. “Thought you had an ace, hmm? Tough titty. Now you’re going to be telling me about all those ingenious boobies you have.” He laughed softly. Chillingly. “Jordan was redundant, Ryan. So are you.”

 

Chapter Nine

« ^ »

THEY HADN’T BOTHERED to take his watch, and the thought pounded his brain like hammer blows that time was running out… running out… running out.

But they’d take the SIG, the LAPA, his grenades, the contents of his belt pouches and the four sticks for the LAPA. All the obvious stuff. And although they’d left him his belt, they’d checked it thoroughly.

But they had not checked his boots, his thick-soled combat boots, and they had not checked his long fur-lined coat. Oh, sure, they’d gone through the pockets, all of them, the obvious places, but once they’d finished that task, under Cort Strasser’s gimlet gaze, they had handed it back to him.

“Where you’re going, Ryan, you might get cold. And we wouldn’t want that.”

Very funny.

And they had not checked his scarf, the white scarf of thick silk he’d found in a trunk in an attic in an old abandoned house on the borders of the Swamplands down south. It was a fine scarf, an elegant scarf, a scarf that had once surely belonged to a man of substance who had used it for those very special occasions in the old days. Those way back, pre-Nuke days. The silk was so smooth and so thick and so heavy. Especially so heavy. Especially now.

But they had left him that, probably because it had no meaning to his searchers, since the concept of “dressing up” for those very special occasions was utterly alien to them, something that had no meaning whatsoever. The way they stank, it was clear these guys hadn’t washed in years, let alone dressed up.

They had not taken J.B.’s hat, either, an error they might come to regret. While they were being searched—upstairs, here in what once had been the Mocsin City Bank and Loan Facility Corporation building—J.B. had obligingly taken off his old, wide-brimmed fedora, held it upside down, the crown gripped in his left hand, and inserted the fingers of his right hand to flick up the sweatband, just to show there was nothing concealed behind it. The guy pulling weaponry off and out of him, denuding his pouches, groping at the lining of his brown leather jacket, now ran a finger around the inside of the hat suspiciously, peering intently at it, staring up at J.B.’s impassive, bespectacled face, a face made all the more funny looking because the specs had been salvaged from some surviving product dump years ago and distorted J.B.’s features. And shrugged. And watched J.B. press down the sweatband again and plop the hat back on his head. And returned to the far more important business of searching him for concealed cannon, bazookas, a howitzer stuffed down his pants. Shit like that.

Foolish man.

Strictly an amateur.

Even so, even allowing for the stupidity of Strasser’s goons, the blinkered comprehension of Strasser himself, Ryan had to admit that this spot was a tight one, and it would need more than merely a modicum of luck and a good stiff breeze to get them out of it.

His ranks now were drastically depleted. That treacherous burst of fire from the concealed marksman in the buggy had left him J.B,, Hunaker, Koll and Sam. And as a wild card, Hovac, waiting at Charlie’s—though a pretty damned useless one, all things considered, as Hovac had no means of knowing where they were, what had occurred, and in any case was hardly in a position, even if he did discover their whereabouts, to rescue them. All he would know was that they were late for the rendezvous and time was ticking away.

Time.

Ryan had no intention of checking his watch because that would give Strasser the idea that there was some kind of time factor here, some kind of cutoff Ryan knew about that he didn’t. But at a rough calculation Ryan figured that maybe two hours had passed since Hunaker had entered Charlie’s with the grim news.

And that in turn meant they had roughly two hours to get their shit together and out. Say one and a half, in case of accidents. Not a lot. Not one hell of a lot.

Easing away from the wall he was lounging against, Ryan said, “You know, we can still come to some kind of deal on all this.”

Cort Strasser laughed.

“You’re in no position to bargain, Ryan. You’re mine. So is your train. All mine.”

“You got us, but you don’t have the train. Touch the train and you lose it. You lose the lot, Strasser. You think we wire up the odd booby here and there to keep off predators? The old spark bomb to give a guy a shock? If you want the truth, every damned vehicle in that train is set to blow if you so much as breathe on it. I tell you, it’s like a house of cards. Tamper with one vehicle and the whole lot goes. It’ll be the biggest blowout since the Nuke.”

Strasser laughed again, but the laugh was far too loud, far too bouncy.

“What a talent for exaggeration you have, Ryan.”

“Try it.”

“But you are going to tell me how to render your clever traps useless, Ryan.”

“Not me, pal.”

Strasser said, “Pain can make a man change his mind.”

“Some men. But with me you’re gonna have to work at it. And there comes a point with some guys where pain suddenly doesn’t matter.”

Strasser’s skull-like face twisted up into a rictus of anger so swiftly and so suddenly that it almost seemed his dry, parchmentlike skin might tear. He thrust his head toward Ryan.

“Bravado, Ryan! Sheer fucking bravado! You’re no different from anyone else.”

Ryan said, “Suck it and see.”

Strasser was probably correct. Maybe he was no different from anyone else. But in his past, the memory of it always kept deep in the lower layers of his consciousness, only surfacing rarely these days—always at night’s end, when he would sometimes erupt out of his bunk yelling at the black horror of it—was an experience of pain and betrayal so terrible, so soaked in blood and despair that it had seared both his body and his soul. And in the searing—like red-hot steel thrust into the ironsmith’s water-barrel—it had tempered him, hardened him maybe beyond the normal human limit.

“Perhaps,” said Strasser silkily, “we ought to take your other eye out.”

For a second, skeletal fingers of fear enclosed Ryan’s heart in a steel-strong grip, clutching, squeezing tight, sending ice through his veins. It was the ultimate terror, maybe his one single most vulnerable spot, the one threat that mocked all his courage and turned cool objectivity into gut-churning panic.

Fighting to keep his face swept of all but the most neutral of expressions, he thought, can he patch into my psyche? Is he some kind of weirdo mutie precog, a mind reader?

He rejected the thought almost at the same instant as it flared up in his mind. Strasser was as superficial in his thought processes as his men were in their search for concealed weaponry. Inside trial skull was a warped and twisted brain that simply homed in on and struck at the most obvious chink in a man’s or woman’s armor.

A guy had one eye? Threaten to rip out the other.

It was as simple as that.

Ryan said in a voice stripped of emotion, “That won’t do you a hell of a lot of good, Strasser. Frankly, once you’d achieved that you’ve achieved all.”

“Give the sucker to me. Let me work on him. He’ll squeal.”

Ryan’s glance flicked to his right. The room they were in was, he guessed, the lower-level annex, a part of the old bank vault system, although little remained to show it. The concrete walls had been stripped and were untidily whitewashed. In the center of the room was a block of wood, coffin-sized. Straps attached to rings set into it hung down almost to the concrete floor. Ryan could not tell what kind of wood the block was made of because of the discoloration, the reddish brown staining that was a crusted veneer on the flat surface, a rusty seepage down the sides. So much blood had drenched that block over the years that it had soaked deep into the wood’s heart.

On metal hooks around the walls hung an assortment of implements: knives, saws, meat spikes, a number of what looked like old cattle prods. In one corner, near where stairs disappeared down to what was almost certainly the main vault itself, stood a small generator, a jumble of wires piled near it. Ryan saw there were electric wall sockets at intervals around the lower part of the walls; hence the hand-cranked generator, he supposed: if the mains were acting up, they could always switch to that.

More stairs were beyond the wood block, linking the room to the street-level floor above. There were five sec men by the stairs. The man who had spoken was one of these: a squat, barrel-chested guy with fingers like sausages, a bulbous nose that contained more than its fair share of destroyed blood vessels and heavy-lidded eyes. He was licking his lips, looking at the two girls. That one gets off on agony, Ryan thought bleakly.

But Strasser flicked a hand at him, an irritable motion. He turned to Ryan.

“So what is this deal? It seems to me, Ryan, you’ve lost your bargaining position.”

“You don’t have the train,” Ryan repeated calmly. “I have the train. Sure it won’t nuke up, but she’ll blow. Nice firework display and you’re gonna have your work cut out sifting through the wreckage for anything worthwhile.”

“But you I have, and the Trader I have.” Strasser showed his teeth in a wolfish grin.

“No,” said Ryan. “You don’t have the Trader, either. You put ‘em all to sleep, right? When are they gonna wake up?”

Strasser opened his mouth, shut it again. He rubbed his nose gently with a bony finger.

Ryan said, “What are you gonna do when they do wake up? Keep putting ‘em back to sleep again? How are you gonna know when they wake up, anyway? You got guys peering through the windows at them, waiting for the first twitch? Listen, when those guys wake up they’re gonna be mad, they’re gonna start doing bad things. How many men do you have out there, Strasser? Not a regiment, I’d guess.” He added, “Maybe you have too many guys out at the mines.”

“You’ve been busy,” said Strasser softly.

“Shit, you can’t keep something like that under wraps,” scoffed Ryan.

“It’s nothing that can’t be coped with. A minor disturbance.”

“Crap! This place is falling apart, Strasser. Too many years under one owner. The longer I’m here, the more the smell of rot and decay is stinking up my nostrils. Teague’s been pushing stuff out east, hasn’t he?”

It was not in fact a question. Strasser knew exactly what Ryan was saying, and his eyes darted nervously to his men at the bottom of the stairs.

He muttered through his teeth, “You’re digging yourself deep, Ryan. Way deep. Deeper by the second.”

To Ryan everything had become crystal clear. Strasser was getting out. The revolt at the mines had been the final straw. He’d probably been waiting to get rid of Jordan Teague for months, maybe years.

Strasser was standing beside the blood-soaked block. He was running a hand thoughtfully across its surface, backward and forward, staring down at the motion of his hand, his thin lips pursed. An altar, thought Ryan suddenly. An altar devoted to Strasser’s own particular god of pain and torment.

He doubted that many of Strasser’s sec men knew their leader’s plans. An inner circle, perhaps, but not these suckers here. Maybe the guy with the red nose and the sausage fingers. He looked to be a kindred spirit.

Ryan said, “No deeper than I have to. I told you we can still deal.”

The squat guy said, “Lemme have him. I tell ya—”

Strasser swung around on him, face contorted.

“Silence!”

Ryan leaned back against the whitewashed wall, folding his arms.

Suddenly Strasser pointed at two of the guards. “Downstairs. Go fetch…” He didn’t finish the sentence but just jabbed a finger at the steps that led downward. The two guards grinned at each other as they clumped across the room and disappeared, their boots echoing off bare concrete.

J.B. glanced at Ryan, raising an eyebrow. Ryan shrugged. He looked at the two girls and Koll. All three expressionless, waiting, biding their time. He was glad that these three were left. He knew their worth.

He said, more to keep the pot boiling than for any other reason, “How long you been waiting to give Teague the heave-off?”

Strasser chuckled.

“Ever since he did the same to Dolfo Kaler. Did you ever hear of Dolfo Kaler?”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Before your time, Ryan.” Suddenly Strasser was almost chatty. He had the air of one who was prepared to chew the fat for a while. Ryan wasn’t sure he liked that. The guy was pleased about something. “Kaler had a stake in Mocsin. He wasn’t as big as Jordan, but he had power, contacts with the East. In the early days. But he had this thing about the Darks. He thought there was something up there.” Strasser lifted his arms in a shrug. “Maybe there is. A lot of people seem to believe so. Maybe one of these fine days I should take a look around. Kaler didn’t find it, whatever it was. Crawled back with nothing and got his head blown off for his pains. Jordan Teague made out that Kaler had the Plague and just blew him out. That’s when Jordan took over completely. It’s long been in my mind to…”

But what was in Cort Strasser’s mind was lost as the sound of booted feet once more rang out, metal studs thudding on concrete out of view below. Strasser had half turned as the noise started up. Now he swung around again on Ryan, fingering the black silk stock at his scrawny throat.

He said, “It has already occurred to me, Ryan, that it will take time to squeeze you dry, and I’m aware that your close colleague Dix doesn’t gab much. Therefore I thought of turning my attention to your three companions, the ladies especially.” His voice had become syrupy. “And then I thought, no, you’re all the same. Closemouthed. Stupidly loyal. Stupidly stubborn. The women might well take less time to crack, but even so I’m not in the mood to linger. And then I set to wondering how, uh…” He frowned slightly, tapping the tabletop with his fingers. “Well, let me see—how detached you were, Ryan, how, uh…indifferent you could be to the sufferings of an entirely neutral party. The thought fascinated me, Ryan. After all—” his tone was now pensive, even mildly quizzical, as though he were pondering some minor domestic problem that still needed handling with a certain amount of care “—we live in violent and selfish times. Every man for himself and the hell with the rest. That surely is the philosophy of anyone faced with an unpleasant and painful situation. Even so, it did occur to me to wonder if the age of, uh… of—what’s the word I’m seeking?” He snapped his fingers a couple of times, frowning down at the tabletop, then glanced up at Ryan, his eyebrows raised. “Gallantry? Yeah, that’ll do. Gallantry. Excellent word. Nicely old-fashioned. Yes, I did wonder if the age of gallantry was not entirely buried beneath the ashes of the Nuke. It seemed a good opportunity to try a small experiment.”

He glanced to his right, toward the doorway that led to the vaults. When he looked back at Ryan, his expression and tone of voice were almost apologetic. “It won’t take long. Ten minutes at the most, I should imagine, once we’re under way. And of course I may be making a stupid mistake, a wild error of judgment. I may well be wasting your time and mine. We shall see.”

The two guards appeared, hustling a third person up to the top of the stairs and out into the room, each holding an arm.

The shock of recognition was for Ryan far greater than the panic burn that had flared through him when Strasser had glibly talked of taking his good eye out. But the jolt he felt inside him only made itself manifest by a slight quiver of his eyes, plus the freezing into stunned immobility of his features for maybe a half-second.

But it was enough for Strasser. Unholy delight glowed in his eyes. His thin lips split into a reptilian grin.

“You know her, Ryan! A friend of yours!” His voice was thick with gleeful malevolence. “Well, that does make it easier.”

It was the flame-haired girl, Krysty Wroth.

 

RYAN THOUGHT, How did he know? How did the bastard know! And then he thought, know what, for Christ’s sake? Looked at objectively, she’s nothing to me. Less than nothing. I don’t even know her. Up until this morning I wasn’t even aware she existed. So okay, he’s all set to torture and humiliate her, probably—knowing Strasser—in the most gross and obscene and bloody way, but so what? So fucking what?

Angry, his face set, feeling strangely betrayed, he stared at the scene in front of him. Strasser grinned like a malignant ape, the guards gazed lustfully at the girl, and the girl herself, a gag in her mouth, her rich red hair scraped back into a tightly knotted pony-tail, tensed her body against the two-handed grip of her captors. Her face, Ryan noted automatically, was expressionless. There was no way of telling what she was thinking either from her features or from her eyes. It looked as if she had somehow blanked herself out, consciously wiped herself clean of all emotion. If this was so, he wondered how long it would last.

He was attracted to her, deeply attracted. There were depths to her he had rarely seen in other women, a fact that had been clear to him in the few hours they’d been together and had talked. There’d been a possibility that she was worth pursuing. That had ended when he’d learned the shattering news that most of the Trader’s people on this trip were dead, nerved out, her among them. And that had been that. What did they used to say? “Ships that pass in the night”—yeah. No big deal. No heavy stuff. Nothing. Forget it. It had not only never gotten anywhere, it had never even started.

The momentary ache had been for something that might have been, and that was only maybe, anyway. So forget it.

And now here she was, alive.

He was aware that the squat man with the red nose had been saying something to Strasser, something about him, his face alive with ghoulish glee.

Strasser chuckled. “Never mind Ryan. He’s in a dream. This one’ll soon wake him up. The way she’ll be screaming will be enough to waken a dead man. Strip her.”

Ryan watched, blank faced, as the squat man said, “With pleasure!” and walked toward the girl. He placed both hands on her breasts and began clutching at them, squeezing them roughly. Anger and loathing flared in Krysty’s eyes.

Strasser said severely, “No time for that, Keiber. I promised Ryan this would not take long.”

Keiber said, “Shit, sir. Won’t be nothin’ left to have fun with once we’re finished with the bitch, reamed her out.”

“Alas, no,” said Strasser. “It does seem a shame, all things considered. She’s certainly a delightful creature. But you are so right, Keiber, there will not be much left in the, ah… organic sense once we’re done. But what must be must be.”

“Couldn’t we just use the prod?” said Keiber. “You know I’m good with the prod, sir. Got it down to a real fine art. You know I can make her jump, and it won’t damage the merchandise.” As an afterthought he said, “Well, not too much, anyway.”

“No prod, Keiber,” said Strasser, wagging a bony finger at him as though at a naughty child who must be indulged only up to a certain point. “I know you’re a devil with the prod, Keiber. But no prod.”

Ryan discovered his mouth was dry and he swallowed, tried to bring spit up into his throat. All this was solely for his benefit, he knew; a cruel and ghastly jest. A sickening parody of polite and civilized behavior that only someone like Strasser would get off on.

Keiber went quickly to work, himself clearly bored with all this funning around that his master enjoyed. He pulled off her boots, unzipped the green jump, and, while the two guards held her, stripped it off. By this time Krysty was kicking, struggling. But the two guards were beefy. They merely held her all the tighter, laughing at her struggles.

Kelber unzipped the one-piece body sheath underneath and peeled it slowly downward, first revealing her breasts, full yet firm, hanging free, then her taut stomach and the softly swelling roundness of her lower belly, the titian triangle of hair at her thighs sharply etched against the whiteness of her skin. He dragged the body sheath off finally and tossed it aside.

“Such a pity,” murmured Strasser. “All things considered. Tie her down.”

The sec man turned her and shoved her facedown toward the block, then pulled her forward along it so that her breasts were squashed under her weight against the rusty wood, her wrists thrust forward and shackled by the straps, her pelvis jammed down just above the end of the table, on the lip, so that her legs dangled over the side. Or at least would have dangled if she had only been quiet. But she was kicking wildly, violently, the heel of one foot clubbing up into the jaw of the guard who was trying to grab it. He yelled, clutched at his mouth, tears of pain suddenly running down his face, blood spraying out from between his lips. It looked as if he’d sunk his teeth into his tongue. Strasser angrily gestured at the rear straps and the two guards sprang forward from the front and controlled her, yanking her legs apart so that her buttocks involuntarily arched, rising into the air, exposing the cleft between the legs. The guards finished strapping her into position, and the guy who had been kicked breathed hard, sniffing explosively, glaring at the twitching figure of the young woman.

Okay, Ryan thought, whatever is going to happen I can’t let happen. Who she is, what she is, none of this matters, none of it applies. It’s no good saying so fucking what if she gets it, because I don’t mean it, and I wouldn’t mean it even if it was someone else strapped to that bloody altar.

He took a step forward and instantly the guard beside the doorway swung his M-16 up, his finger tight on the trigger.

Strasser said, “Ah, Ryan,” as though meeting him casually on the street. “Yes?”

“Look, I dunno what all the fuss is about, Strasser. Sure I know her. She was on the train. We picked her up: she was having trouble with some muties. Other than that…” He shrugged.

Strasser said, “How interesting,” and turned away.

Ryan turned to glance at J.B. It seemed to him that J.B.’s face was blanker than he’d ever seen it. He turned back. Only Strasser and Kelber were near the block now. The guards, including the one with the blood-smeared mouth, were fanned out around the room, rifle-ready. He could not have reached any of them before; now it was the same situation in spades.

Pay your debts, said the Trader. Always pay your debts.

To repay the vast, the immense, debt he owed the Trader, Ryan often thought that he would have to be in a position to give the Trader his life back, would have needed to say to him, “You’re dying, for God’s sake. Probably some kind of rad cancer that’s eating away your gut, your bones, everything. But something can be done, and something’s gotta be done.” The Trader would have said, “Fuck it, I ain’t going to no quack, Ryan,” and that would have been that. And now he was spark-out in War Wag One, maybe slumped in a chair, maybe sprawled out on the metal floor, and wholly at the mercy, whichever way you cut it, of Cort Strasser.

And what did Ryan owe Krysty? He owed her his life. Simple as that. He could suddenly feel the sticky’s slimy pads on his face, the immense sucking power causing his cheeks to expand away from his own bones. Could actually feel it, a tactile rerun, as though hundreds of tiny needles were stabbing and slashing around inside his cheeks, his mouth, his jaw, a fierce agony that would not cease until the flesh was ripped off of his skull leaving a scarlet ruin of dripping bloody pulp.

He felt himself trembling. He leaned back against the wall. Sweat was oozing out of his pores.

Strasser snapped his fingers. Kelber patted a breast pocket of his black jacket, inserted a hand, fished out a small box. At the same time the guard by the upper doorway turned and disappeared the steps to the floor above.

“Now pay attention, Ryan.”

Strasser took the box from Kelber and held it to his ear, shook it gently. What he heard seemed to please him. He looked around as the sec men’s boots hammered on the steps above and the guy reentered the room. He was holding a tall drinking glass. Strasser nodded to Kelber, who took the glass, then carefully opened the box. He tipped the contents into the glass. From where he stood Ryan saw a flutter of something small and dark, heard a faint clatter as whatever it was hit the bottom of the glass. Strasser took the glass and gazed at it critically, holding it up to the naked light set into the ceiling above him. A satisfied smile slithered across his face. He turned to Ryan and stepped toward him, still holding the glass up. Ryan caught a flicker of frenzied movement at the bottom.

“Fascinating insect mutie,” he said. “Some kind of cross between a borer beetle and a termite. Much the same, I suppose, but this little beauty has certain characteristics you don’t find in either.”

Ryan stared at the glass. The thing was bigger than he’d thought, maybe as big as a human thumb, streamlined. He saw a black and shiny carapaced back, and four horned antennae quivering at the front. The insect scrabbled around in the glass, its six legs slipping on the smooth surface. It stopped suddenly, facing him. He peered closer, aware that the nearest guard had thrust the barrel of his M-16 almost to his left temple. He saw that the labrum flap over the insect’s mouth hardly concealed mandibles that seemed grotesquely out of proportion to its size: huge sickle-shaped tusks, almost like horns. The compound eyes, small though they were, seemed to glitter in the light, their honeycomb of lenses directed at him.

The insect was quivering gently. Ryan couldn’t get it out of his mind that he was being studied, noted, categorized. It turned suddenly, rushed at the opposite side of the glass, launched itself at the transparent walls of its prison. And fell back, its legs waving wildly. It landed on its shiny back, rolled on the instant, and became mobile once more.

“Ugly little brute,” murmured Strasser, taking the glass away and staring at it affectionately. “But… fascinating. Doesn’t like wood at all. Meat eater. But it doesn’t like dead meat, Ryan. Fastidious. Likes its food in the hoof, you might say. But the really curious thing is it seems to have a positive yen for human flesh. We discovered this quite by chance when we popped one into the mouth of someone who had… displeased me. The insect ate its way out of the stomach. Right through the entrails. You probably noted its somewhat overlarge mandibles. Remarkable, don’t you think?”

With a yell Ryan flung himself at the gaunt man, his hands outstretched to claw and tear and rend at whatever he could grasp.

And the world blazed up in a brilliant flash of light that seared his eye, exploded through his head, fierce agony lancing through his brain. He reeled, smashed to the concrete floor by the M-16 barrel rammed into the side of his head.

Something heavy landed on him. He sought to fling it off but a booted foot slammed into his head and more pain flooded through him, slashing at his nerve ends. He found that his arms were suddenly twisted behind him, his legs held to the floor under some heavy weight. Through a haze of pain and fury and disgust he heard Strasser’s voice.

“Take the gag out of her mouth and stuff it into Ryan’s.”

His head was wrenched back by the hair and he tried to grit his teeth together but someone pinched his nostrils tight and involuntarily he gasped open his mouth. The gag filled it and he dry-heaved, his senses screaming that he had to have air. He could hear snorted squealing sounds and could only suppose they emanated from him. The fingers unclasped.

His head throbbed agonizingly. It was as if someone plunged a knife rhythmically and repeatedly into the soft core of his brain. Suddenly he was lurching forward, being shoved and dragged toward the wooden block until he was staring wildly, frantically, up into the rear of the girl.

Strasser was standing near him, beside the girl, one hand holding the glass, the other pushing one of the smooth white globes of her buttocks.

He said thoughtfully, “Now which shall it be, anal or vaginal passage? Difficult to choose. If the former it will at least mean that Kelber’s animal lusts will not remain entirely unsatisfied, if for only a short, time. Kelber has often been known to make the best of a bad job, Ryan. He is, I fear, not very discriminating in his tastes. If the latter, of course, I doubt that even Kelber would care to try his luck where something as voracious as this little brute has already been.” He inclined his head, looked down at Ryan. “What d’you say, Ryan? Back or front, hmm? No answer? How very churlish.” He licked his lips. “Front, I think.”

He placed the lip of the glass against the broad full cheeks, and began to push it under the girl toward the dark cleft, tipping it gently upward as he did so.

Ryan struggled like one possessed of many devils. His head jerked back, his chest bulged. He could feel the tendons and veins on his arms spring out like corded cables. He was screaming, shrieking, but no sound came out of his mouth.

Strasser glanced down at him, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes, and tipped the glass up some more. It was now almost horizontal. The beetle began to scurry along the smooth curved path until it had about reached its goal. It stopped, antennae quivering. Then it scurried on remorselessly, at last reaching flesh, a portion of buttock fringed by coarse red hair, short and curly, just glimpsed. The antennae extended toward the white skin as though testing the air. Presumably satisfied with the intelligence it had gathered, the insect began to move slowly, inexorably, out of Ryan’s sight.

Squealing, frantically nodding his head, adrenaline flooding through him like liquid fire, Ryan managed to inch himself forward, heaving those guards atop along by the sheer strength of his frenzy.

Strasser looked down at him again, regarded him thoughtfully, coolly, gauging his surrender—then rammed the glass hard into the girl’s rear, at the same time flipping its mouth slightly upward, the sudden movement catching the beetle, the lip of the glass tossing it into the air. It curved high, legs scrabbling at nothing, and for a split second seemed to hang, weightless, at the peak of its parabola. Then gravity took over and it dropped. Strasser neatly caught it in the glass and beamed in triumph, as though he had just performed a particularly knotty conjuring trick. He gave the glass and the box to Kelber.

He said, “Excellent. Take him out to one of the trucks. The girl, too. Dress her. These…” He waved an arm at J.B. and the others, then frowned in thought. “I was going to say, kill them. But no. Take them downstairs. One of the cells. I’ll deal with them personally when we return.”

Ryan felt himself gripped under the armpits and dragged to his feet. He needed that. Right now he felt incapable of supporting himself on his own. Strasser caught up with them. The gaunt man with the skull face reached out and grasped at the gag in his mouth and tore it out. Ryan gasped, swallowed, grunted, spat out bits of rag that still clung to his teeth and his tongue and his lips. He gazed up at Strasser, his chest heaving, his eyes blurred.

He cracked, “You’re dead, Strasser… dead…”

“No, no, no,” said Strasser, leaning forward and tapping him lightly on the chest with a bony finger, his tone mildly amused as though he were speaking to a fractious child, “you’re dead.”

 

THE HEAVY STEEL DOOR THUDDED into place. The face of the man Krysty Wroth had booted, still blood-smeared around the mouth, appeared in the barred opening, another of the guards behind him.

“Think I’ll have me the slinky black bitch, Ferd,” said the man with the bloody mouth. “Ain’t had black meat in awhile.”

“Y’know,” said Hunaker to Samantha, “I bet that dick’s prick when it’s hard is about as big as my pinkie. I betcha.”

The gloating expression vanished from the sec man’s face as though wiped off with a rag.

He screamed, “You’ll find out how big it is, bitch! Get the fuckin’ prod! Time I’m finished with ya, yer cunt’ll be green as well as yer hair!”

“Cute,” said Hunaker. She said to Sam, “Hey, you think he knows where a girl’s whoopee actually is?”

J.B. muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “Shut it.”

Hunaker shut it, and shrugged. She turned away from the door with an exaggerated yawn. The man, his face suffused with rage, disappeared from the opening, clattering off up the passageway with the other guard.

“Too mouthy,” said J.B.

“Fuck it. The wimp got up my nose.”

“You just pray he doesn’t stick the prod up your nose,” advised Koll.

Hunaker snorted with laughter. She was irrepressible. She started gurgling and shaking and had to lean up against Koll to keep her balance. J.B. shot her a stony look.

“Aw, come on, J.B. Ain’t the end of the world. We’ll get outta this one.”

“If we’re lucky. Doesn’t help when you feel the spike of that guy. You’re gonna have to make up to him, or one of them.”

“Oh, crap,” said Hunaker. “Does that mean I have to promise ‘em all they can manage? Like that?”

“I want at least two in the corridor.”

“Why does it have to be me?”

“Preferably both of you.”

“Well, okay, but it’s bad theater, J.B.,” said Hunaker. “I mean, I like ol’ Kollinsen here, but I don’t fancy him. Something about that mustache of his. You won’t get a performance from the heart, know what I mean?”

“Thanks for nothing,” muttered Koll.

J.B. said, “I didn’t mean Koll.”

“Oh, yeah? Me and Sam?” She turned on the black girl, nudged her in the ribs. “Hey-y-y! How did you know, J.B.? Been trying for a date for a hog’s age.”

“Jesus.” Samantha the Panther’s voice was a husky plaint. “Look, J.B., I got no intention of showing off my box to those bastards.”

J.B. stared at her through his steel-rimmed spectacles, his face expressionless.

“Sure. Let’s hope the situation doesn’t arise.”

His voice was as toneless as his face.

The room went quiet. Into both young women’s an image of the bloodstained block slid like a poisonous snake.

J.B. sat down on the concrete floor and began to unlace his right combat boot.

“Just put on a show is all. Ain’t worth shit. You know it, I know it.”

“Fuck it,” complained Hunaker. “Just ‘cause we got tits and all. I mean, why don’t you guys stand there, wave your dongs around?”

“Ain’t gonna do much to these guys,” J.B. pointed out.

Koll said, “You speak for yourself, buster,” in hurt tones.

Hunaker said, her voice low-key, harsher in tone, “You really think… the train? Gone?”

J.B. tugged his boot, pulled it off.

“You were there. You heard what Cohn said, what the other guy said.”

He put a hand inside his boot and began working at the inner sole with his fingers.

“You think we got a chance?”

J.B. stopped working at his boot, sat back and frowned slightly.

He said, “Maybe sixty-forty.”

“Yeah?” Hunaker’s eyes widened. The odds were better than she’d imagined.

“To them,” J.B. said.

“Fireblasted nukeshit!”

A bleak smile flickered across J.B.’s sallow face.

“Just wave those tits around. I’ll give you better odds.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Fifty-five-forty-five. Still to them.”

“Thanks a bunch, big boy,” said Hunaker. She suddenly spat out, her voice squeezed tight with fury, “Just as long as some of ‘em die nasty.”

Sam was now beside the door, peering out through the bars at the empty corridor. Koll had joined J.B. on the floor and was pulling his own boots off. Hunaker unfastened the belt she was wearing and began to rip out the false bottoms of all her empty ammo pouches. She unhooked her water bottle, uncapped it, wiped it with her sleeve and took a swig. Then she eased the webbing around it, slid the flask out, began peeling off wafer-thin strips of a grayish and doughy-looking substance wound around it.

Plastique. Some things just never change.

She said, “How we gonna do it?”

J.B. nodded at the door.

“Blow it. Door doesn’t quite fit. Opens outward, too. Makes it easier.”

“Old Eagle-eye,” said Hunaker to Koll.

J.B. smiled faintly. He did not mind being teased by people he trusted, and he trusted these people and knew that they trusted him and relied on him. That was all that mattered.

He stopped what he was doing—which was peeling back the inner sole of her boot to reveal a hollow cavity, long and narrow, carved out of the specially built-up thick-soled footwear—and gazed around the room.

As he understood it, this lower level of the bank building had once contained the main vault and safe-deposit rooms. In their stead, thick-walled cells had been erected, all with steel doors containing glassless but steel-barred viewing windows. The doors were not as thick as the walls but were solid enough, although the whole construction had been done by builders who had clearly skimped and saved, probably in a hurry, probably with Jordan Teague’s goons cracking the whip over them.

This cell was an end room, one of a number in a long corridor that led back to the stairway. That was useful, being at the end of the passage, the farthest from the stairs. Nevertheless, sound carried. J.B. was going to have to be careful, was going to have to judge this one to a nicety, as accurately as possible.

The room was bare walled and bare floored, an oblong roughly one and a half times square. There was no furniture of any kind, no bunks, tables, chairs, anything. It was a cold concrete box, lit by a low-watt bulb high out of reach in the ceiling. The door was at one end of a long wall. That, too, was useful. It meant that when J.B. blew the door, none of them need be directly opposite it. It was good that the door opened outward, though lousy planning for what was supposed to be a secure cell. With a door that opened outward there was always the chance, during that brief time when the door was being opened and the opener was not sighting the entire cell, that the occupant might be able to jump his warder. But then, J.B. suspected, most of the prisoners held down here by Strasser’s sec men would probably be in no fit state to jump a mouse.

He began picking out from his boot equipment what looked like tools for a dollhouse: match-stick detonators, plastic wafers no bigger than a fingernail, miniscule screws, a tiny screwdriver. He sat cross-legged and began humming softly and tunelessly to himself as he opened his brown leather jacket and slid down the lining with his thumbnail beside the zipper tracks on the left. Sewn inside the lining was a long leather pouch, very slightly fatter than the average cheroot. J.B. extracted and emptied it. The contents were long rods of cobweb-thin wire. He selected more bits and pieces from his other boot and settled down to work.

Hunaker stepped over to the door and peered at it.

“Hmm. See what you mean. We can stuff a hell of a lot of explosive down along here. Shit, in some places the door doesn’t even touch the frame. Great workmanship!”

“Not too much explosive,” said J.B., not looking up, his lean fingers dexterously coiling wire, fitting the tiny screws to the power pack he was creating. “Too much plastique, we get too much noise. Could damage us, too.”

“Yeah,” said Koll dryly, “and too little and all we get’s a big spark and a fart and the door stays put.”

Hunaker began to roll the plastic explosive into stringy tails between her hands. She held one piece up.

“Too fat?”

J.B. stared at it critically, looked at the door, made some mental calculations.

“Roll it some more, then slap it in.”

When Hunaker started to stuff the material down the right-hand side of the door, thumbing it down, then along the lintel at the top, J.B. got up and jabbed a finger at a spot about halfway down the door.

“More in there. Three times what you have already. That’s where the locking device is.”

He went back to the center of the room, sat down cross-legged again and continued his construction work. There was a long silence while Koll tossed plastique from his own boots to Hunaker and Hunaker molded the doughy substance around the match-stick detonators, squashing the strips into cracks and crevices, lacing it around the doorframe, all the time trying to avoid Sam’s sight line to the corridor outside.

“What d’you reckon about Ryan?” she said suddenly.

J.B. bit a filament of wire in two. He didn’t look up.

“What about him?”

“He blew out up there.”

“It happens.” The wiry little man’s tone was unconcerned.

“You think he’s got the hots for the Wroth woman?”

“Probably.”

“You think we’ll see him again?”

“Knowing Ryan, yeah.”

“He’s been in a few tight ones, hasn’t he? I mean, with you and all.”

“That he has.”

“Y’know where he came from originally?”

“Out east, I think.”

Hunaker said, “ ‘I think’? How long have you known Ryan? Must be ten years at least. And you don’t even know where his kin are? I bet you don’t even know his other name.”

“Is this some kind of precombat intelligence test?” Koll said with a frown. He was replacing strips of unwanted plastique in his boots.

“Well?” said Hunaker. “Do you?”

“No.”

“Does anyone?”

“Trader, maybe.”

“Rumor is, he was a Runner from somewhere.”

“Only muties are Runners,” said Koll knowledgeably. “Muties and blacks and yallers and a few other colors, depending on where they’re running from. If Ryan’s a mutie, he keeps it close to his chest.”

“I didn’t say he was a mutie. I don’t believe he is a mutie.”

“Can’t tell these days,” said Koll. “What’s the big interest in Ryan all of a sudden, anyhow?”

“I felt sorry for him.”

“Feel sorry for Strasser,” said J.B. “Otherwise, shut it.”

In front of him, as though magicked there, was a tiny sliver of plastique on which was a spiderweb cross-hatching of fine wire connected to a couple of chip housings, plus a keying device about the size of a quarter thumbnail. J.B. stared at it, his thin lips very slightly curved.

“Christ, J.B.,” said Koll, lacing up his boots, “you look almost cheerful.”

“The miracles of pre-Nuke science,” said J.B.

“You sure it’ll work?”

J.B. stared at him blankly, then wrinkled his brow.

“Is that a joke?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Uh…no, J.B.” Then Koll said hurriedly, “I mean, yeah.” He tittered nervously.

“They were very sophisticated in the 1990s,” said J.B. seriously. “This is a neat little number. The detonators are tuned to it. All I have to do is build it, key it, blow it.” He coughed, said vaguely, “I did throw in a couple of extras…”

He began packing away his bits and pieces, pulled on and laced up his boots and got to his feet. He said, suddenly brisk, “Here it is. I want two guys down here, at least. That gives us two auto-rifles plus any handguns they have. Could make do with one, but pray for two. They gotta be looking through the window. Doesn’t matter if they don’t come in. Don’t want ‘em in. Just need ‘em looking for a couple of sec men and we got ‘em. After that we move fast. If we can reach street level we’ve got a chance.” He pointed at Hunaker. “You and me first. Grab the pieces and go.” He turned to the other two. “Pick over the bodies. Spare mags, grenades, knives—anything.”

Hunaker sighed exaggeratedly, then zipped down her jump jacket to open it. Underneath she wore two sweat shirts, which she tugged up for a second, exposing her breasts. They were small but full and round. A fine sheen of sweat glistened on her skin. Koll stared at her and swallowed.

Hunaker snapped, “That’s about all you’ll ever get, a sighting.” She pulled the two sweat shirts some more, loosening them, then covered herself again. “Okay, ready for the off.”

J.B. said, “Don’t forget your ears.”

Hunaker said, “You’re as bad as the Old Man.”

She went to the door and began to bawl out the barred window. She knew she had to play this one carefully, not overdo it. It would be easy to throw out the come-hither in a cutesy-pie voice, but that, right now, was not going to work. Instead she yelled, “Hey! There’s anyone up there, I wanna talk! Ryan’s got a booby on him, ready to blow!”

Koll muttered, “It’s original.”

There was silence. Koll licked his lips, stared at the back of Hunaker’s head, at the green hair cropped short and tight. He glanced at Samantha, locked eyes with the black girl for a couple of seconds, raised an eyebrow. Sam leaned back against the wall and clasped her hands together in front of her. Koll noticed that she began twining her fingers restlessly. J.B. stared at the opposite wall. As usual, it was impossible to tell what he was thinking.

“Hey!” yelled Hunaker. “This is for real!”

More silence, then Samantha nodded and said, “Yeah, they’re coming.”

To Koll and the others there was more silence, then at last they heard bootsteps ringing hollowly far off.

A voice shouted, “Shut the fuck up, bitch, or you get hurt bad!”

Shaking his head, Koll murmured, “Uninspired. We already know that.”

Hunaker said loudly, “I got something on Ryan. Strasser don’t know it.”

They could hear voices raised in argument, but there was no definition to the sound. Then the ringing of boots came closer, two sets, clattering down the concrete steps. Hunaker moved away from the bars. The sec man came nearer. The man called Ferd was in front, and behind him the guy Krysty had kicked, who had not had a wash and brush-up in the interim.

He was saying, “If there’s some kind of fuck-up and Strasser finds out we knew about it all along he’ll have us eaten.”

Ferd said coldly, “You just be ready ta shoot the shit outta these monkeys. I don’t trust ‘em.”

The man with the red-smeared mouth cautiously peered into the cell from the side. He gulped, moved around so he could get a better view, his eyes flickering to the right and taking in the slumped figures on the floor. In the split second he took in this part of the scene, he noted that although he could see both the blond guy’s hands, he couldn’t see those of the man called Dix, who appeared to be lying on them in a hunched kind of way. But this didn’t seem to be in any way significant, so his gaze whipped back to where the green-haired young woman was lounging against the wall, her head back, her eyes half closed, her lips parted. She was breathing heavily. One hand held her shirt up and the man with the bloody mouth could see her right breast. The other breast was half hidden beneath the busy lips of the black girl who was leaning across her from the side.

The sec man swallowed again. Ferd shoved him aside and snapped, “Lemme see.” He, too, stared in, but his face was darkening as he watched. He was marginally less stupid than the man with the bloody mouth and tended not to take everything at face value.

He snarled, “It’s crap. There’s something up.” He shouted, “Hey, you!”

Hunaker dropped her head, smiled sweetly and said, “I can’t hear you very well. I’m wearing earplugs.”

This was so bizarre that Ferd’s mouth dropped open and he said, “I don’t…”

But that was all he did say that was understandable because a vicious cracking blast drowned him out. For a microsecond the steel door was haloed in orange flash fire before it erupted outward, slamming the two men back as it bowled across the passageway, clanging against the opposite wall. The man with the red mouth was punched against the wall, the back of his head cracking open like an egg, his brains spilling out like yolk down the concrete. The man called Ferd was dead already, the steel door having pulverized his face into a scarlet pulp as it smashed into him, and such was the force of the blast that he sailed backward with the door as though he were glued to it. His skull, too, hammered against the wall and fractured at the top, so that blood and brain fluid geysered in a pinkish spout. Bones in both men’s bodies split and shattered as they were hurled against the concrete. The door banged down onto the floor, half covering their remains.

Inside the cell, J.B. and Koll sprang to their feet. Hunaker and Sam were already tearing cotton wool out of their ears.

J.B. dived across the cell and out through the now empty door space. Smoke and concrete dust rose like a fog in the narrow area beyond, but his eyes took in an M-16 lying some distance away and he grabbed it and began automatically checking it as he galloped along the passage, closely pursued by Hunaker.

Hunaker, too, was now armed, with the other man’s auto-rifle, another M-16. She, too, was galloping. She, too, was spidering her fingers along her piece, tugging out the mag, glancing at it, ramming it back up again.

As they neared the bottom of the steps, two men appeared at the top, in the room with the bloodstained block in it. J.B. mentally crossed his fingers, uttered a brief prayer to the only two gods he worshiped, the god of good fortune and the god of ingenuity, and squeezed off a controlled burst on the sprint.

The M-16 functioned. Devastatingly. Rounds pounded at the two sec men at the top of the stairs, punched them back out of sight, their limbs going into spasm.

“Behind me! Hit the upper steps!”

J.B. jumped ahead of the girl as he snapped out the command and sprang up the steps, keeping tight to the left-hand wall. He squeezed the trigger and used up his entire mag, firing up and over the top of the steps at the ceiling, then dropping his angle of fire as he reached the room. He sprayed death around it. He dived at the floor, and Hunaker, behind him, suddenly had three perfect targets on the top set of steps—three sec men, fleeing in panic, lunging for an escape route. Her fire line caught them as they bunched in the narrow stairway, scrambling to get out. Rounds zip-stitched three broad backs, erupting kidneys, shattering lumbar vertebrae, transforming them into bloody dolls.

Apart from the two guys that J.B. had shot from below, there were two more stiffs in the room who’d caught his bullets, one on the floor, the other sprawled drunkenly across the wood block, new blood from him sluggishly pooling out and soaking into the old.

J.B.’s eyes darted around the room. He swore as he spotted an auto-rifle lying inches from the outstretched fingers of the man lying on the floor. A stubby Steyr AUG with the long barrel.

He said, “The nukeshitter had my piece!” in horrified tones.

He swiped it up and began to check it out feverishly as Hunaker threw down the M-16 she’d been holding and picked up another. She ran to the bottom of the upper steps, squeezed off a 3-round burst around the wall angle and risked a look up. No one at the top, but she could hear a babble of voices from the huge upper room and then she had to duck back as rounds flayed the stairwell above, spraying brick and concrete shards on her.

“Hell, we could’ve worked ourselves into a corner here, J.B.”

J.B. was too busy field-stripping the AUG and muttering blackly.

“Shit, fucker only had it an hour. See that dent?” He angrily jabbed a finger at the Steyr’s stock. “See that? Fucker only had it an hour!”

“Uhh…J.B.”

“Yeah!” the wiry little man snarled through his teeth.

“Could be we’re stuck down here, J.B.”

“Grenade the bastards out!” he snapped viciously. “Fucking vandals.”

“J.B., it’s only a dent…”

He glared at her murderously, his eyes simmering behind his adopted steel-rimmed glasses.

Hunaker turned away from him. Sam was stuffing herself with hardware while Koll collected spare mags for an M-16 he’d picked up. He tossed a couple of HEs in her direction and said, “Hey, J.B., let’s get outta here, like Hun says. You can polish yer butt later, man.”

J.B. shot him a dark look but nodded.

Suddenly Sam’s head jerked up. She rose from where she’d been squatting beside one of the stiffs on the floor. Her eyes widened, the whites contrasting starkly with her velvety black skin.

She said huskily, “I heard a bang.”

No one made a joke, even under the present circumstances. Even when, a second later, another burst of firing clattered out from above and they had to duck to one side as lead ricocheted around the room. When Samantha the Panther said she’d heard something no one else had, it was advisable not to laugh it off.

J.B. slid a 30-round mag up into the Steyr and said, “What kind of bang?”

“Big one, and a rumble. You didn’t feel it?”

Hunaker shook her head. She said uneasily, “C’mon, J.B. I don’t wanna hang around down here if they got something nasty waiting up there.”

There was silence. The sub gunner had ceased firing. Not even the sec men themselves could be heard. Nothing could be heard. Nothing at all.

Sam said, “And another.”

“Okay, let’s beat it,” said J.B.

He took a grenade from Hunaker, saying, “Cover us.”

Koll slid to the corner angle of the steps, poked his M-16 around and fired a long burst, and as he did so, Sam sprang to the other side of the stairway and fired, too, straight up, her body hunched, the rifle spitting lead, the sound racketing shockingly around the echo chamber of the stairwell.

J.B. and Hunaker unpinned the eggs, counted, darted forward and, almost as one, hurled the grenades upward. The two eggs sailed high and disappeared from view beyond the top step. There was a frenzied yell, a howl of terror, then light blazed down the stairwell and there was a fierce cracking double blast, followed by the sound of glass shattering, metal clanging against metal, a rumbling roar.

J.B. hurled himself up the steps as dust and smoke billowed at him, roiling around the stairwell. He hit the top and sprayed lead into the fog with the Steyr, Hunaker behind him, her own auto-rifle chattering in a wide sweep.

The room was long and wide, formerly the high-ceilinged entrance lobby to the bank. At the far end were two massive doors, each one a wood sandwich enclosed by pierced steel planking, triple thickness. The counter of the bank remained, but nothing else. Strasser’s sec men had turned the place into a recreation room, with chairs, tables, closets stuffed with weapons. Now the furniture was blasted apart by the HEs. Bodies lay around, either slumped like piles of old clothes, or in contorted heaps. Long windows to the left had all blown out, the glass and the steel shuttering together.

“Holy shit!” muttered Hunaker.

She pointed at the windows. Instead of darkness, a lurid and vibrant light throbbed redly. But this was no Deathlands sky effect caused by the rich chemical mix in the atmosphere, which often transformed night into bizarre day with a glow that made the northern aurora look off color.

“That’s a fire.”

Then she cried out, her yell lost in a thunder of earsplitting sound. She felt herself lifted from the floor by a shock wave that slammed into her sickeningly. For a second she felt almost weightless as she flew backward through the air and then she saw, as though in a dream, the two vast doors splitting apart and bowling toward her across the room in an orange eruption. She thought they looked like cardboard doors. Then she thudded back against something hard and blacked out.

 

Chapter Ten

« ^ »

THERE WAS SOME IDIOT using a mallet inside his skull, and it was as if he was fixing fence posts. Every few seconds, whomp! There were also various sets of crazed characters having a tug-of-war with the muscles of his arms and legs, and there was a cretin who seemed to be marching around his body, or maybe swimming along his arteries, jabbing a knife into various key places, though mainly his ribs, as and when it suited him. Not to mention that some clown seemed to be eating into the small of his back.

“Apart from that,” muttered Ryan, his voice like the sound of a rusty rasp, “I’m fine.”

“Check,” came Krysty’s reply in the darkness of the speeding truck.

Ryan froze—physically not a difficult operation because he was hog-tied anyhow, lying on his left side like a strained bow, his wrist and ankles tightly laced together behind him. But it was more a mental shock, a freezing of the mind. What he’d just croaked out had been involuntary. He hadn’t realized he was speaking aloud. He hadn’t even realized the girl was awake.

He said tentatively, “I, uh… thought they cracked you over the skull when we got outside.”

That had been when she’d suddenly, outside the bank building and in the harsh glare of the floods, managed to back-heel the groin of one of the sec men holding her. She was pretty good with her heels, he thought wryly. The guy had yowled, let her go and she’d twisted away from the second man and started sprinting across the open space toward the three black vans parked near the barbed wire. Strasser had yelled a warning, and three guys had emerged from behind the trucks and clobbered her. Ryan and Krysty had been left on the ground for maybe a half hour, Ryan getting more and more chilled by the minute, not to mention more and more panicky about the time factor that only he knew about. Then they’d been flung into the rear of one of the trucks and the doors had banged. No need for guards, Strasser had said. Waste of manpower. They weren’t going to be able to free themselves to go anywhere.

“They did hit me over the head,” Krysty Wroth said. “But I have great powers of recuperation.”

Though it hurt him, Ryan laughed. It was kind of a choked grunt, sounding to his ears like the noise a guy made when someone poked him in the ribs. It felt like it, too.

She said, “Anyhow, thanks.”

“Thanks?”

“For getting my…” She paused. “I was going to say, for getting my head off the block, but maybe for getting my ass off the block is more to the point.”

Her tone was dry and sardonic. Ryan knew it was the humor of gritted teeth. You made a joke of the intolerable or else you went under.

He didn’t know what to say. “Look, I should have stopped those bastards before things got too rough,” he tried. “I could have. There were…other considerations… I’m sorry.”

She said, “I know. It doesn’t matter. Forget it. Life’s too short.”

He thought back to when she had actually been tied down to that foul block. She had not struggled, had not screamed or even whimpered. He was surprised, contemplating this, to realize that there had been a degree of serenity about her at that terrible time, as now. It was a strange yet oddly comforting aura of calm that seemed to surround her like a cloak. He hadn’t analyzed it then—too many other things to worry about!—but he recognized it now as he reran the scene in his mind.

Such serenity at such a time seemed to him almost supernatural.

“You, uh… didn’t seem too worried back there.”

She said simply, “I knew Earth Mother was watching over me.”

“I guess you realize your Earth Mother isn’t going to save you every time.”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s not a question of ‘saving.’ Earth Mother is not a physical presence. She doesn’t appear in a flash of light—” she chuckled, and there was irony in her voice “—brandishing an M-16. She just is. At times that’s comforting. There had been occasions when I’ve been stark crazy with fear and panic. Other times when it feels okay, feels right, feels like it’s not going to work out too bad. That’s how I felt then.”

“How’s it feel now?” said Ryan dryly. “I could do with some reassurance.”

“Oh, I’d think we’ll make out, don’t you?”

He had to laugh again, and the minor convulsions trembled across his rib cage where Strasser’s goons had put more than one boot in.

“Don’t make me laugh. Please.”

The truck lurched over something in the road—a rock or a pothole or maybe a small animal—and Ryan cursed vitriolically as he went up in the air and down again, landing on his wrists. Shafts of agony lanced up his arms. His shoulder blade felt seriously out of kilter for a second.

He muttered through clenched teeth, “Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if your Earth Mother did appear waving a piece, because unless they untie me I think we’re in deep shit. I hadn’t counted on the bastards lacing us up. Didn’t seem necessary. Thought they were just gonna shove us in with a bunch of armed goons.”

He didn’t tell her that, hog-tied as they were, he thought their chances of surviving were precisely nil. Untied he had options. Like this he might as well be a fish in a barrel.

She said calmly, “I think I can get my wrists free.” Her voice was oddly neutral. She said, “Where are they taking us exactly?”

“To the Trader first. I guess Strasser wants to get him out of the way before moving onto the train. Always a chance our guys may wake up, and if he gets inside the war wag and trucks before that happens, he’s laughing. But no way is that talking skull gonna hijack all that matériel. Right about now, J.B. should be blasting his way out of the bank, unless the goons tied him and Hun and the others up, which I doubt.”

“Blasting?” she said incredulously.

“Yeah. Strict policy. All of us, since way back, are stuffed to the gills with explosives, or at least the means of creating explosives. An idea I had years ago, worked it out with J.B. Just in case we get caught by bad guys, we have all kinds of shit concealed in our clothes, our boots, our webbing. The bad guys take our pieces off us, grenades, knives, all that. The obvious. They don’t bother to look at our boots for false inner soles, or check every stitch, every button. Some of us have big plastique-cored buttons on our long coats, others have wiring sewn into special pouches. You can’t even feel it. Don’t worry about J.B. He’ll make out.”

“Now I know why your bunch is talked about like it is,” she said. “As special people. Sure is forward planning!”

“It’s no big deal. It’s called survival. These days you need all the help you can think up.”

“Right. In this wonderful country where you could probably live your entire life without getting raped, abducted, murdered, eaten…without seeing a—what did you call it? Plague pit?”

His mind flew back to the scene in War Wag One, her angry face as she argued with him. It all seemed centuries ago.

“Great memory you’ve got,” he growled. “In any case, it’s still true. But when you’re in our kind of business, even when you have a fierce rep, doesn’t do any harm to take precautions.” He muttered, “And all this crap just proves my point.” His mind shot back again to the war wag, which triggered off another thought. “How the hell did Strasser manage to get his hands on you, anyway?”

“I didn’t keep taking the tablets. Your medic kept giving me tabs, said they’d calm me. I didn’t want to be calmed, so I didn’t take them. She kept saying it was crazy to think of heading on for the Darks. How was I going to do it, how was I going to travel? All that. So when she breezed off I snuck out and hitched a lift.”

“You what!”

“You had two container rigs, arctic. I climbed aboard of one of them. It was getting dark, so no one spotted me. When the convoy parked I slipped off into some bushes. I watched you drive out in the buggy, thought of hitching onto that but there aren’t too many hand holds. So I walked to Mocsin. Had to keep in cover because a lot of buggies started passing me, heading out of town, back the way I’d come…”

Ryan thought, his stomach suddenly souring, Yeah, backup for the guys Strasser already had watching the train, the guys watching us. Probably what she saw was the bunch that actually tranked the Trader.

“Then I bumped into some kind of patrol on the outskirts. They were all right at first. Oafish, but all right. I could handle them. What they couldn’t figure out was where I’d sprung from, so I told them I was with the Trader, with you. I mean, I figured that was okay. But then they started getting heavy, pushing me around. I told ‘em that if they didn’t quit pissing me off they were going to be in deep with the Trader.”

Ryan heard her voice change, heard a slight catch in it.

“And that was when it hit me,” she said, “that maybe I hadn’t been so smart. They started laughing, told me to forget about the Trader. He was finished. Everyone with him was kaput. No more Trader. I got a touch of the horrors then because they seemed so sure of themselves—”

“They took you to Strasser?”

“Yeah. He’s…” There was a definite change in her voice. Now it was almost a whisper. He had to strain to catch what she said over the truck’s engine rumble. “Ryan, he gives me a chill. Maybe I was stupid. I didn’t really take in what you said about him, all that shit about getting off on pain, humiliation, perversion. But it’s in his eyes. At times they’re like, I dunno… No feeling, no emotion. Like pebbles on a beach. He said—well, among a lot of other things he said I’d be a fine taster before the main course.” She laughed suddenly. It sounded like a nervous hiccup. “I guess I must’ve panicked because I didn’t feel the presence of Earth Mother right then and there. Not at all. Not for one damned second. He had a bag with him, with…shit, really weird gear in it. Nozzles, rubber tubes, plastic spatulas, shit like that. But before he could really get busy, some guy rushed in and gave him a message. Then he said maybe I’d be more useful for the moment… unblemished.”

“Must’ve been when they told him I was on the loose somewhere,” muttered Ryan.

“Whatever. After that, it was okay. I got my head together. Sometimes I can cut off. That helps.” She said, faint bitterness coloring her voice, “I guess you think that was all pretty dumb…”

“On the contrary,” Ryan replied. “If it wasn’t for the fact that we’re shackled up like this, it could have been the smartest thing you’ve ever done.”

“I don’t get you.”

It hit Ryan that she really didn’t know. Of course she didn’t know.

She didn’t know that Strasser had destroyed every single human being on the land wag train. That they were all, without exception, dead meat, and that but for the grace of some god or other—presumably, he thought, her Earth Mother—she’d have been wiped with them.

Not that that made much difference to their current lousy predicament.

“Strasser gassed the train. Leastways, that’s what he says, and I see no reason to disbelieve him. We’re all that’s left. You and me for sure. J.B. and the rest, probably. And the Trader and the other guys on the convoy. They’ve been tranquilized, but I don’t know for how long. And their survival is entirely dependent on me getting my blasted hands free, and even then it’s gonna be touch and go because—”

The truck lurched to a halt, engine throbbing.

Krysty said, “Oh, hell!” fiercely, although Ryan couldn’t figure out why she said it in quite the tone she did. After maybe a half minute the rear doors of the truck were unhitched and flung open.

“Out!” said Kelber. Then he guffawed harshly, and this made him cough, and he choked for a while. “C’mon, c’mon!” he managed. “Hurry up outta there!” He erupted in another paroxysm of hoarse, wheezing laughter. Now he couldn’t speak properly—it was too hilarious for him, so he jabbed at them with one hand and two sec men vaulted up into the truck and proceeded to roll Ryan and Krysty out.

Ryan forced himself to relax as much as possible—which wasn’t a lot in the time he had, about a half second—and as he hit the ground he managed to shove himself with his boots so that for a second he hopped on them before keeling over sideways. That broke his fall. What terrified him was landing hard on a shoulder or arm and cracking it. That would truly write finis, as the Lost Language said, across any possibility of ultimate survival.

Talking to Krysty, though bruised and battered and wrench-tied as he was, had had the effect of soothing him, calming him when he needed calm most. Now he felt not too bad. Not too bad at all. At least the idiot who’d been using his brain as an anvil seemed to be tiring of the sport.

Above him was a pale red moon, not full but nearly so. Up there, so he’d heard and read, somewhere, were orbital stations careering endlessly around the world. Full of old bones now, their crews long, long dead. They might hurtle like that forever, until the universe contracted. Or maybe they were sinking all the time, orbiting lower and lower as each century passed, and at a certain time would all at once be gripped by the planet’s gravitational pull and would bucket down through the layers of atmosphere exploding into fireballs, raining death and destruction on a world that was choked already with death and destruction.

It was chilly. Far away, high and to his right, he caught a glitter of fire in the sky and thought: Look at that! Whatever I think comes to pass!

But it was only a chem cloud, spontaneously combusting. More clouds gathered, cloaking the moon. An eerie scarlet glow illuminated the land. Green wildfires crackled and hissed high above. A warm rain began to fall.

Strasser appeared above him, looming tall, a gaunt skeleton in a long coat with skirts flapping in the breeze.

“Unhobble them.”

Someone leaned down and across and Ryan glimpsed a blade, felt his bonds being tugged at.

Then his legs were free and he groaned aloud as they straightened out in an automatic jerk and his circulation began to shift into high once more. Hands gripped his arms, his shoulders, heaved him. He staggered to his feet, wincing at the shafts of agony that flared up and down his legs.

“Pain cleans you, Ryan. Flushes you out. Renews you. That’s long been a theory of mine.”

Strasser stared at him from under hooded eyes. Ryan stared back, thinking, the sequence of events will be as follows. First the main train, then the convoy. I can now do nothing whatsoever about the train. Too much time had elapsed. But in my heart of hearts I knew this was how it was going to be, and this was how I wanted it. I knew that whatever happened the train must go. Better this way. Yes. But the convoy is next and that too will go. Or most of it. Because there is no way that I can do what needs to be done all at once. And the time element is so tight, so bloody tight, that there is more than a possibility that we, Krysty and I, will—

Strasser said, “I still have the box, Ryan, and we can still use what’s inside it, right here and now. It makes no difference to me.”

“What the hell do I get out of this, Strasser? My life?”

Strasser laughed softly.

“Hardly.”

“So?”

The gaunt man shrugged.

“A bullet in the back of the skull is a far more pleasant method of dying than any number of ways that I could think of. A quick and happy release from the cares and worries of this world rather than an extremely slow, extremely lingering and extremely unhappy one.”

“That’s not a great deal of choice you’re offering.”

“No choice at all,” said Strasser, “but still worth a good deal, Ryan, believe me.”

The rain was getting to be slightly heavier, very large water droplets that thudded down on Ryan’s unprotected head, though it was not yet a downpour.

This was scrubby terrain for the most part, although across the road were trees, a sprawling coppice that offered shelter if only he could reach it. But to get there he would have to sprint all out with only a few bushes between it and at least fifteen guys, all weaponed up, all kill ready. It could be done, especially in this light, but not with hands secured behind his back. Not even a charge of adrenaline surging through him could boost him for that length of run while his balance was shot to hell.

Strasser’s truck was parked on the road, near two other trucks and three buggies. Presumably these were the vehicles that had passed Krysty earlier. The convoy was behind him. War Wag One, two container rigs and an armored truck were parked back to back in a circle, facing outward. War Wag One faced the road, which was handy. If all went well.

Beside the war wag stood another of Strasser’s trucks, close to the huge vehicle. Although Ryan couldn’t see it, he knew there were men inside peering in at the war wag’s cab, watching for any sign of life from those inside, any twitch or jerk that would signal an awakening.

He glanced to the east. A few klicks up the road was the land wag train. Those on it would never waken.

He said, “Tell me one thing, Strasser. Where’d you get the nerve gas?”

The gaunt man gestured irritably.

“Don’t piss around, Ryan. You’re in no position.”

“No, really. It’s been bothering me. It isn’t going to hurt you to tell me.”

“The weirdo with the steel eye,” snapped Strasser. “Now move it!”

The weirdo with the steel eye.

Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.

The shadowy figure who was akin to the bogeyman mothers warned their kids about. The guy very few people had ever seen. The guy who sometimes called himself the Warlock, sometimes the Magus. The guy who was said to be able to appear in two places at once. The guy who had a liking, once in a blue moon, for suddenly appearing in far-flung locales, handing out fantastic, sometimes wildly grotesque, trade goods that no one could ever figure out how to use, and then disappearing as mysteriously as he’d come. The guy the Trader said had to be sitting on a major Stockpile, although the way he actually used whatever he was sitting on seemed to be a strong argument for saying he was off his goddamned head.

So he had nerve gas. It figured. It also figured that he should have presented it to Jordan Teague, probably on a plate. He seemed to take a positive delight in creating mischief, usually of the more malevolent kind.

“Ryan…” said Strasser dangerously.

Ryan’s eyes took in Krysty, her face set, her long hair flicking at her shoulders in the light wind, both arms gripped by two heavies. There was something odd about her but he couldn’t think what it was.

“What about the girl?”

“What about her?”

“What does she get?”

Strasser frowned, his eyes narrowed to slits.

He said softly, “Ryan, why are you wasting time like this? Can it be that you know something I don’t?”

Ryan knew that it was time. Now. Only three or four minutes had elapsed since he and Krysty had been rolled out of the truck, but all at once he knew that he had to get free, and fast.

“Okay,” he said resignedly, “let’s do it.”

“Well?”

“My hands,” said Ryan pointedly.

“Just tell us what to press, Ryan,” hissed Strasser, his face now uglier than ever in the murky crimson light. “What to pull, what to touch, what not to touch. You just tell us.”

“Not as easy as that. One mistake and you’re dead. We’re all dead.”

He could see Strasser mentally wrestling with the notion of having him walking loose with his hands free.

The gaunt man thrust his parchment-colored face close, his eyes blazing. His whisper was malignant.

“The girl suffers, Ryan, if you do anything stupid. I promise you. I’ll keep the bitch alive for a year.” He turned, nodded to one of his minions. “Cut ‘em.”

Ryan winced as a blade began scraping away at his bound wrists. The guy didn’t seem to give a damn where he cut.

There was a muffled grunt of pain. Ryan jerked his head up as Strasser whipped around an oath. The sec men holding Krysty were holding her no longer. Instead one was on the ground, groaning, the other clutching his groin, his mouth sagging, nothing coming out of it but a prolonged croaking. The thought shot through Ryan’s brain that she sure knew where to hurt a guy and then he realized she was free.

Not only free but deadly. She’d snatched an auto-rifle and was dancing away, firing at sec men who sought to grab her, sec men who jerked backward in sequence as lead hammered them away from her. Three down and her way was clear.

Strasser snarled an obscenity, dragging out the automatic pistol at his belt. In the bad light it looked to be vintage Colt .454CP. He squeezed off two shots, and the second whanged off the front offside wheel hub of one of the trucks as Krysty dived out of sight around its fender, still firing short bursts.

“Maim her!” yelled Strasser. “Don’t kill her! I want her alive!”

Ryan couldn’t locate her but knew she was on the far side, somewhere, of the line of Strasser’s vehicles parked by the road. Then four men running for the rear end of the line were bowled over by a burst of fire at ground level. She was shooting low, from beneath one of the trucks. It was as though the men had been scythed.

Ryan strained at the cords gripping his wrists as Strasser began to run, and then everything stopped dead as the murky darkness of the east burst apart with a terrible fire, a vast wash of fierce eyeball-searing light, orange cored. Sprays of scarlet jetted high into the sky, great tongues of flame that smeared the dazzling illumination. The dull roar of the explosion, long drawn out, was followed by a thudding reverberation and the distinct sound of rounds popping in a frenzied and continuous stammering rattle. More explosions. More eruptions of scarlet fire boiling up into the night. A kaleidoscope of colors as different kinds of illue rounds rocketed high, spraying the sky green, red, white. The noise went on and on.

Ryan back-heeled viciously at the guy behind him and his boot cracked bone. The man’s cry was lost in the thunder of sound that crashed around their ears. There was a lot of good shit aboard that train, Ryan thought. He felt within him almost a kind of pride.

He raced for the war wag. Light from afar danced on its side.

The rain was heavier now, but Ryan knew it would have no effect whatsoever. The land wags and the other vehicles in that rain would continue to self-destruct until all that was left was glowing scrap metal.

He heard a shriek behind him, a howl of fury, and the crack of shots, three in all, and he began dodging, weaving, as best he could, at the same time desperately trying to keep himself upright. His arms were still wrenched behind him and there seemed no damned give whatever to his wrist cords. Then his boot caught in an animal hole and he was flying through the air, cursing. He rolled as he landed, automatically, and cursed some more as his roll took him onto his back, crushing his arms beneath him. He rolled on, hit the huge near side front wheel of the war wag and struggled to his feet. A round thudded into the ground next to him and he dived around the side of the big MCP.

The priority was getting into the war wag, and that could only be achieved by canceling the boobies, and that in turn could only be achieved by accomplishing a feat that was damned near impossible in his present state.

But not entirely.

He scrambled alongside the looming vehicle, now with mud splashing up into his face. The heavy dabs of rain had been transformed into a smashing downpour of water almost at the bat of an eye. Here, at the rear, were heavy caterpillar tracks. At the front of these, under the chassis, was a covered switch. The cutoff. Once thrown, the circuit that commanded the boobies was dead, and he could climb aboard. But first he had to throw the blasted thing, had to ram his shoulders against the side of the MCP and reach backward with twisted-up arms and scrabble blindly for the unseen switch casing, pull it down with fingers that were nearly dead, then grasp the switch, then push it over, then stagger to the main door at the side, do likewise with the hidden lock underneath the war wag’s body, then jump inside and slam the door closed, then…

Not entirely impossible—as long as he had about fifteen spare minutes, in daylight, and no one trying to kill him.

He backed into the bulk of the war wag and bent over, bowing his back. His arms rose behind him and his fingers thrust through all the mud and muck and filth that had accumulated there, on the vehicle’s underside, and finally caught hold of the casing, hearing, as he did so, bursts of fire from Krysty battling it out with the sec men. Keep it up, he thought in anguish, his fingers tearing at hard gobs of dried mud. He unlatched the casing, felt inside every nerve in him screaming, his head to the right, expecting any second to see some kill-crazy guy storming around from the war wag’s front, auto-rifle flaming. Instead, all he saw through the now bucketing rain was the sky still flaring up in bursts of shocking light, his ears taking in the almost continual rumble of distant detonations.

He shoved the switch, cursing fiercely until he grunted in triumph as he felt it smoothly slot into Off. It was a system that worked outside or inside—it didn’t matter. That was the simple beauty of it.

But there was still the problem of getting into the war wag. Still one last switch to be thrown inside… that had to be thrown within minutes. Within five minutes, or maybe less than five—gotta be. Two minutes? Three? No more than three, he thought, and I can fall into all kinds of crap in three lousy minutes.

Already he was staggering back the way he’d come, toward the front. Again he bent over, eyes still glued to his right, and again his fingers felt for the switch housing. Damned thing wouldn’t budge, wouldn’t fall open. He wrenched it, his heart pounding, his breathing tortured into ugly grunts. He knew his fingers were by now slick with blood, though he could feel no pain. He could feel almost nothing in them at all. The casing suddenly flicked down and he jabbed at the switch inside…

And reeled sideways, a hoarse racking howl ripped from him as something solid smashed into the side of his skull. His arms scraped along rough metal as he crashed to the ground.

Shit, he thought, they came around the back.

He lay in the mud, breathing hoarsely, his body twisted, grimacing with the pain that was daggering through his head, slowly opening his one eye and making out two figures looming over him in the downpour. Strasser. Kelber.

Both had pieces, handguns jabbed down at him, at his face. He spat mud and water out and thought, Finis.

Strasser was screaming at him, shrieking insanely, beside himself with rage. Ryan got up, he couldn’t make out what he was saying, and probably Strasser didn’t know himself. Then Kelber was dragging him to his feet, smashing a hand repeatedly across his face.

Strasser howled, “You think you’re smart, Ryan, but you’re shit, you’re shit, and you’re going to die like shit!”

Kelber kicked his legs and Ryan staggered, toppled, collapsed to the ground, spraying mud and slop into the air. He lashed out, too, savagely, but there was no target and Strasser lunged at him, falling across one of his legs, jamming an outspread hand into his face. Ryan kept kicking, flailing around with his other foot, but it was difficult to do anything destructive with his hands still tied.

Strasser was yelling, “The box, the box! Get it out, you cretin!” He glared down at Ryan, and to Ryan the scene took on a nightmarish quality as water sluiced across the gaunt man’s skull-like battered face, a bucketing deluge of hot rain hammering down on him with punishing force.

Ryan saw Kelber with the box in his hands, his fat sausage fingers ripped at the lid and not getting it right, the box becoming a live thing in his hands so that he was suddenly juggling with it, Strasser yelling frenziedly.

Strasser caught it and opened it. And Strasser thrust a fist down into Ryan’s mouth, uncaring whether Ryan bit him or not, both hands now brought into play, fingers gripping his jaw, clenching his teeth, yanking Ryan’s mouth open. Kelber leaned over, suddenly laughing like a madman, the box in his hands starting to tip up.

With an almost superhuman strength jolting through him like an electric charge, Ryan heaved himself from under Strasser’s knees in a desperate scrabbling roll, and as he did so he felt the cords at his wrist tear and snap. He wrenched his arms around, pain blazing up from his wrists, and caught Strasser’s open coat, clutched it, heaved, the panic and terror that was flooding through his system at the thought of that insect more than enough to send the gaunt man crashing into Kelber’s legs. Kelber disappeared from view and Ryan smashed a fist into Strasser’s gut, deep, powering it in, before pulling himself away and staggering to his feet. Only a grab away from him, a handgun lay in the mud. As he reached for it and held it, the thought flared through his brain that there was probably mud up the blasted barrel, but he was past caring.

He swiveled, firing at Strasser as he swung, and Strasser was flung back, winged, the bullet skinning one shoulder. He hit the mud, slid, scrabbled sideways on his knees and one arm like some ungainly spider that had lost some of its legs. He was soaked to the skin, filthy with mud. His teeth were bared, his eyes blazing with hate and fury at what he’d lost.

Ryan advanced two steps, the automatic in his right hand, his body aching and his head throbbing. His teeth, too, were bared, but in a terrible grin of triumph.

Strasser croaked, “Bastard! All that hardware! You must be insane!”

“Just wary of crazies like you, Strasser,” Ryan said, his voice icy. “There are self-destruct mechanisms throughout the fleet. In every truck and land wag and buggy, automatically running if a switch is not thrown every hour, or as soon as a vehicle is safety locked from the inside on a four-hour fuse. If there’s no one there to throw that switch—or if there is, but they’re all dead—bang!”

He was aware of Kelber close to him on his left. He seemed to be having difficulty getting up, or so it appeared. He was on his knees, both hands to his throat, making ghastly gobbling noises. One hand went out to Strasser. It looked as though he was pleading, begging Strasser for mercy. His eyes were almost popping out of his head and Ryan could see the whites of them clearly.

The beetle, he thought—what the hell happened to the beetle when I banged Strasser into him?

And then he laughed out loud, a harsh and chilling sound even to him. So perish the wicked, he thought.

“Your friend. I think he swallowed the beetle.”

Kelber, still on his knees, scrambled toward Strasser, pleading, imploring. Ryan couldn’t imagine why—Kelber ought to know by now there was no help there, no pity in the gaunt man—but he could imagine those tusklike mandibles sinking into gullet flesh so determinedly that no amount of hawking and gagging would clear the filthy little bastard out. The hell with the pair of them, he thought, and fired at Strasser.

No sound but a metallic click.

No round.

He realized it was Strasser’s gun and the eight-clip had been all used up. He hurled the weapon at Strasser, and the heavy automatic struck the gaunt man full in the mouth. Strasser squealed, fell back, spitting blood and bits of tooth. Ryan made to jump for him but Strasser was back on his feet again, sprinting away, clutching his shoulder, his long legs stabbing at the ground, boots splashing into puddles.

At that moment Kelber gave forth a high-pitched bubbling wail of pain and terror and stark, beyond-the-last-ditch horror. He pitched sideways, still screaming, and Ryan saw black blood welling up out of his mouth like dark chocolate. Kelber lay on his back, his body twisting and writhing, his legs kicking in the air. His screams died sloppily as he began to drown in his own blood.

Ryan flung himself around and jumped for the short ladder to the door, knowing that the seconds were clicking away, nearer and nearer to a total wipeout. He wrenched open the door and fell inside. There was a faint and musty smell to the interior. He felt a prickling at the back of his throat, but nothing more. He yanked the door shut, on personal full-auto now, sheer survival the only consideration. It was too late for the rest of the convoy. It would have been physically impossible to make safe the other vehicles. The explosions to the east had ceased, only fire consuming what remained lit the sky now, an angry orange dancing against the deeper red of the night.

He knew that the Trader would have automatically thrown the On as soon as he heard the train had been nerved out and as soon as he realized he was surrounded. And the captains of the other vehicles would have done the same. It would have been a reflex action. Therefore, the convoy was set to blow only minutes after the land wag train.

He shoved Conn unceremoniously out of his radio chair, felt for the box under the table, snapped over the lever there. Then he dived for the ladder up to the machine gun blister in the roof. O’Mara was still in his seat, slumped forward, dead to the world. Ryan reached past him for the MG grips, canted the weapon, opened up and proceeded to flay the truck parked beside the war wag at almost point-blank range. Blazing tracers ripped into the back of the truck’s cab, opening it up, chewing it apart, and Ryan could hear nothing but the terrible chatter of the gun, could see nothing but the devastation it created.

He jumped back down to the main cabin and dived for the drive seat. Ches was lying on the floor beside it, and Ryan stepped over him and sat down. He began to play the console, feeling a stupendous relief flooding through him as the engine bellowed into life. He glanced to his right, saw flames in the cab of the parked truck, a guy silently screaming and haloed in fire as he struggled to claw himself out the open window—then that scene was wiped as the huge MCP lurched forward, gathering speed. He flicked the spotlight on, and the gloom became bright day in an instant. He saw fireflies all around him, red muzzle-flash winking in the dark beyond the spotlight’s beam, and could hear the rattle of rounds on the sides of the cab. They could still kill him. All it needed was tracer at the front and the temporary screen would blow apart and him with it. He jabbed one of the firing buttons on the console and cannon fire hammered out its death song from below, pounding a buggy in front that suddenly ripped apart in a gout of white fire as its gas tank erupted. Figures fled away from his spot beam; any one of them could have been Strasser.

To one side another buggy lurched into life, and Ryan savagely swung the wheel to send the war wag barreling into it. The smaller vehicle was smashed sideways, and Ryan felt the MCP rise and yaw, crunching through a sudden tangle of steel, twisting and crushing the other vehicle beneath its ponderous weight. He swung the wheel again and felt the rear tracks ride over what was left.

Where the hell was Krysty?

He saw her, a fleet figure sprinting into his beam along the road. He sent the war wag crashing up and onto the blacktop, aimed it for Mocsin and geared it into full-auto mode. Then he scrambled over Ches and moved fast across the cabin area to the door to unfasten it. The war wag ground on along the road, medium fast, and the young woman appeared in the doorway, running alongside before grabbing Ryan’s outstretched hand. He hauled her in as more bright light tore the night apart and the war wag shuddered. Ryan slammed the door shut, cutting off the worst of the thunderous explosions that were now ripping through the convoy.

“Co-driver’s seat,” he yelled, hurdling sprawled bodies and diving back into the chair, snapping the brute vehicle out of auto and wrenching the wheel as another shock wave from the self-destructing convoy hammered at them.

Krysty collapsed into the seat beside him, wiping an arm across her mud- and sweat-stained face.

She gasped, “Is life with the Trader always like this?”