Authors: James Axler
The sec man’s partner stared at the gap, then at him with increasing annoyance. “Buffoon! What did you just do?”
Before the first man could reply, Ryan sent a single bullet through his forehead from his position flat against the large wooden door. Behind Ryan, Doc was working his sharp sword across the slight gap that had been created between the door and outside. He ran the blade along the top edge, left and right, until he snagged the rope that operated the cantilever that, in turn, worked the door.
As the first sec man dropped to the ground, a perfect red circle in the center of his forehead, the cell door swung back and Ryan and Doc emerged. The remaining sec man turned, drawing his holstered blaster. Ryan took a pace forward and shot the man in the head, an explosion of blood and brains bursting across the back wall in a terrible instant.
Ryan leaned down and snatched up the second man’s blaster—a 9-shot Stechkin pistol—from his dead hand, passing it back to Doc. “Keep close,” Ryan instructed. Already, they could hear the shouts of other sec men and locals responding to the sounds of blasterfire.
Automatically Doc checked the new weapon, slipping off the safety. The blaster was finished in matte black and fitted with a suppressor that stuck out from it like a snout, adding considerably to the eight-and-three-quarter-inch barrel. Blaster in one hand and swordstick in the other, Doc followed Ryan through the narrow, icy tunnels as more figures began to emerge into the light.
* * *
K
RYSTY
’
S
GUESS
WAS
RIGHT
on the button. The door rolled back to reveal two men with long dark hair and squashed, ugly features on their weather-beaten faces. Even this early in the day, the two men stank of rotgut and had the leer of the oversexed. They were men used to taking whatever they wanted, and the captive women had suffered their depredations before.
“Bascha,” one of the women gasped.
Bascha—a dim-witted slob with more interest in women’s shoes than in their intellect—laughed, rubbing at his crotch with one meat-stained hand. “Get me some livin’ bird,” he growled around the charred drumstick of a gull, “to go with the dead one.”
Beside him, Bascha’s partner, a similarly repellent piece of human detritus called Serb, laughed with all the comprehension of a rotten tree. “Bird,” he said with a throaty chuckle.
They had been celebrating during the gladiatorial tournament, their shift over, and right now all they wanted was easy sex, the kind that confirmed their imagined superiority. In their ardor, neither man had noticed Krysty and Mildred standing as they were flush to the wall. And neither man realized what was happening when Krysty and Mildred launched their attack.
Mildred ducked low and swept one leg out to trip Serb, the shorter of the two, hooking his feet out from under him. He slapped against the floor like a discarded rag. He was fast, though...the alcohol burning in him and fuelling that bubbling rage he always had buzzing through his head. He turned, flipping Mildred off his back as she struggled to hold him down.
Beside her, Krysty booted Bascha in the groin with such force that he felt something rupture. He sagged to the floor on his knees, the whites of his eyes turning pink. Krysty kicked him again, driving the heel of her cowboy boot into his jaw. Bascha crumpled backward, lolling out the open door of the cell, his flabby arms sprawled out at his sides. Krysty stood over him, a steely look in her eye.
“Anything to say for yourself, rapist?” she demanded.
Bascha tried to focus his eyes on the voluptuous redhead, such was the agony he was feeling from her attack. All he could think was how nice her boots looked with their silver falcon design on each side.
Krysty drove her heel into the man’s throat in a savage strike, held it there and pushed as he hacked against the pain.
Behind her, Mildred had outmatched her dim-witted opponent, who was under the mistaken belief that every woman in the Deathlands was inferior. As he swooped his hairy arms around her and hugged her close to him, Mildred proved him wrong, driving the blade of her scalpel through his neck and into his windpipe, slashing the flesh there in a bloody stripe of red.
Mildred stepped away as the ville man’s grip weakened, his hands reaching up for his ruined throat. He looked at her, distraught, his eyes pleading as he tried to speak through the blood pooling in his windpipe. Mildred fixed him with a no-nonsense stare. “Don’t know, don’t care,” she told him. She had long ago accepted that despite being a healer, she would have to take life in order to survive.
His voice quieted forever, Serb sank to the floor in a bloody ruin of red. Ignoring the choking sounds he made, Mildred checked over the dying man’s body, searching for weapons. She came up empty and, over by the doorway, Krysty found the same with her own opponent. Evidently, neither man had come to the cell armed; probably a standard precaution to prevent the women getting their hands on a weapon.
Mildred hurried over to join Krysty where she crouched over the fallen body of the other man at the door. Kneeling, Krysty was warily checking the corridor beyond, scouring for possible sources of trouble. It was almost empty now, just a single figure visible in the distance, but she knew that couldn’t last long.
“Come on,” Krysty whispered. “While it’s quiet. Help J.B., find Ryan.”
Mildred looked up the empty tunnel, its ice walls glittering in the flicker of the gas lanterns poised down low to the floor. “It’s too dangerous out there,” she said. “We need to get our weapons back. And fast.”
Behind the two women, Nyarla had prowled across the room to join them. “I know where men keep blasters,” she said in her thickly accented voice. “I show you, you keep me safe. Yes?”
Mildred eyed the young woman. “Find us our weapons,” she said, “and we’ll do whatever we can.”
* * *
I
N
THE
ARENA
, J.B. weaved out of the path of the roaring chain saw, his eyes fixed on its rotating blade. He wasn’t the fastest of Ryan’s group of companions, certainly not the most agile, but he could hold his own in hand-to-hand combat.
He held his attention firmly on his opponent, watching the way he was wielding the chain saw. The man used it like a sword, although judging by its heft the thing was heavy and didn’t lend itself easily to that use. The device smelled of alcohol where a valve at the side of the handle coughed out clouds of dark smoke. Gasoline driven, J.B. knew.
And gasoline was flammable.
He leaped away as the chain saw cut the air by his left flank again, booted feet skimming across the icy ground. That was the third time that his opponent had come at him from the left, J.B. realized. That meant something—that he was trying to get him to a certain spot. The bloody spot in front of the baron, most likely, J.B. surmised, even as his heel touched down on that scarlet stain.
Chapter Thirteen
Somewhere within that rat-run of ice tunnels that made up the ville, Ryan was making a swift check around him while Doc covered them. Hurst was watching them both from the now-open doorway to his cell, his mouth gaping open. He had lived as a prisoner here for a long time, and while he had witnessed a few attempted escapes, he had never seen such a bold prison break. These two newcomers were either extremely brave or really stupid—and if it turned out to be the latter, Hurst decided, then he would rather be found waiting obediently in his cell than running loose like a gaudy slut on jolt. That was a sure way to a chilling.
Ryan and Doc moved on, leaving the indoctrinated prisoner to his fate. They had met too many like Hurst over the course of their travels, people who had given up all hope. It was as if they wanted to be treated like dirt, to be abused by power-hungry barons who understood nothing of compassion.
The narrow tunnel they traveled had solid ice walls. Several windows were carved indelicately along one wall. Ryan peered through one and saw the pen that held the mutie caribou out front of the ville itself. Identifying this as the exterior wall, Ryan told Doc that they would follow it for it gave the best odds of finding egress from the claustrophobic tunnels.
The tunnel gently sloped, too, just like the cell he and Doc had been locked within. Ryan figured going downslope was his better option. There was just one problem—figures were hovering there in the shadows, and a heated discussion could be heard echoing down the tunnel.
“I heard a blaster, something’s happened.”
“Tinck ain’t at his post, must be something going on.”
“We should go check.”
“Yeah, maybe it’s one of the cells. Damn these bastards, where did they find them anyway?”
Ryan listened silently, discerning at least three voices. Getting Doc’s attention, he indicated ahead and showed three fingers. Doc understood.
An instant later, two people emerged into the soft glow of the floor lamp. They were armed, one with a club, the other a scarred blaster as long as his forearm, and both men had impressive beards that brushed against their dried-skin clothing. Ryan didn’t hesitate. Already he had the Smith & Wesson raised, and he snapped off a shot at the blaster bearer.
The man slumped back as half his head exploded in a bloody splash. Ryan was already moving, bringing his blaster around as the second man spotted him. There were more of them behind, Ryan saw now, hemmed in by the narrow confines of the tunnel, unable to attack in force. That might help, if he and Doc could avoid getting shot anyway.
Ryan brought the heavy weight of his blaster around to pistol-whip the second man—no use wasting bullets where he didn’t need to. As Ryan waded into the next sec man, he trusted Doc had his back.
Doc had spotted the men scurrying along the corridor that Ryan had seen, and he targeted them with the long barrel of the Stechkin. As he did so, another figure emerged from behind him, hurrying downslope and bringing his own blaster to bear in a burst of fire.
Doc ducked as a bullet whizzed past his shoulder, spun and fired, whipping off a hip shot from the Stechkin. Unsurprisingly, the shot went wild, missing its target entirely and instead burying itself in an icy wall. But it made the rear attacker halt in his tracks, sending him scurrying for cover.
Doc blasted again, this time targeting the individual with more care and drilling a slug into the man’s back. The man went down like a house of cards, collapsing to the floor with a cry. As he writhed there, Doc fired again, sending a second shot straight into the man’s spine, chilling him instantly.
Then Doc turned to face the remaining attackers as they amassed in the narrow confines of the ice tunnel.
Beside him, Ryan had just delivered the deathblow to the other sec man, snapping his neck before dropping him to the icy floor. Doc smiled grimly. “We are rather outnumbered,” he observed.
“We’ve never let that stop us before, Doc,” Ryan said, bringing up the Smith & Wesson revolver and sending a bullet through the head of their next attacker before he could get close.
The two men hurried on, making their way through the ice tunnels.
* * *
K
RYSTY
, M
ILDRED
and Nyarla hurried along a frozen corridor, hunting for a stairwell that the young woman remembered from when she had first been brought to the ville.
“The men brought my sister, Papa and me here two weeks ago,” she said. “We had come over the ice strait searching for food. My brother was with us then, too, but he...didn’t survive the crossing.”
“You came a long way for a meal,” Krysty said. Her mind, though, was on the claustrophobic tunnels ahead of them, searching for possible ambush. They were higher in the ville than they had been, and the walls here, though coated with ice, were actually what appeared to be old housing from the predark. The ville had been constructed around an old housing or office project, and parts of that foundation remained quite clearly in place amid the icy warren of tunnels that made up the interior.
“
Yego Kraski Sada
got in the way,” Nyarla explained. “At first it had been interesting, almost beautiful to watch the patterns it cast across the sky. But after a while it started to grow, consuming our old fishing grounds and leaving my father with nowhere left to hunt.”
“This
Yego Kraski Sada,
” Mildred asked, “what is it exactly?”
“It is place where world ends,” Nyarla said in a voice filled with gravity. “Dangerous place, no one goes there anymore.”
She stopped then, indicating a sharp turn in the tunnel. “They took my father’s gun here when they brought us,” she explained. “They showed him how they would strip it down because they called it a piece of shit.”
“An armory like that will be guarded,” Mildred said, her voice low. Beside her, Krysty nodded.
Up ahead amid the soft gaslight illumination, Krysty could see shadows moving against the walls. They were man-shaped shadows and they held something in their hands. Silently, she ushered Mildred and Nyarla back, ordering them to wait.
Mildred still held a scalpel in her hand, and her thumb pressed against its rounded handle nervously. It was a poor weapon, cruel when it struck, but requiring such close quarters that it put its user in enormous danger. But it was all they had.
Ahead of Mildred, Krysty was prowling up the tunnel, her emerald eyes narrowed as she watched the shadows playing across the bend in the tunnel wall. There were two men there, she counted, holding either clubs or blasters. They didn’t seem to be aware of how close she was, standing just around a corner from them.
Krysty stepped around the corner in a semicrouch, appearing before the men without warning and leaping at the closest with a balled fist. She struck the man in the jaw, driving his teeth together in a snap that cut through the knuckle-like nub of cigarette he had been inhaling on. The man danced back, cursing, while his ally turned toward Krysty with surprise, bringing up the machete-style knife—so that’s what it was, Krysty thought—to strike her.
Krysty sidestepped the swishing blade, stepping inside the arc of the man’s swing and driving the heel of her hand into his face. The man’s nose erupted in a bloom of red, hot blood steaming in the air as it rushed down his face. He stumbled back, clutching at his broken nose, but Krysty didn’t let up. She came at the man again, kicking him hard in the gut with the silver-tipped toe of her cowboy boot, striking with such force that he doubled over as he slumped to the floor.
Swiftly, Krysty stamped on the hand holding the machete, driving the hard heel of her boot into the man’s fingers with an audible crunch.
His friend was just recovering from the surprise blow he had taken to the jaw. His eyes fixed on Krysty, still trying to process what had happened in the last five seconds. “Gaudies have escaped,” he shouted with obvious surprise.
Krysty gave the man credit for realizing what had happened so swiftly, not that it would do him any good. Her left fist was already swinging out and up in a vicious rabbit punch, striking her foe just below the ribs. He stumbled back, slamming his head against the low wall where it met the ceiling in a curve.
Krysty spun, working her momentum into a roundhouse kick that knocked the sec man against the wall with a loud crack. He sagged down to the floor, his eyes closed, blood dribbling between his teeth.
“Come on,” Krysty whispered, turning back to Mildred and their teenage charge.
The three women continued up the corridor and into the place that Nyarla had identified as the armory.
Mildred whistled as they entered the enclosed space that was used to store weapons. It was a chop shop with workbenches, vises and a small firing range—not long enough to improve one’s skills, but with enough space to test a weapon. The walls were lined with various blasters and boxes upon boxes of ammunition. “J.B. sure would love this,” she muttered.
A man was standing before one of the workbenches, filing down the muzzle of a chopped-together shotgun. He looked up at the entry of the newcomers. “What...? Who are you?” he sputtered, reaching for the shotgun.
“Is that loaded?” Krysty asked as the man trained the weapon warily on them.
The man fixed her gaze for a moment before lowering the weapon. Only an idiot would work on a loaded gun like that, and everyone in the room knew it.
“We’re here to pick up our stuff,” Mildred commanded, stepping closer to the man at the vise and showing him the glinting scalpel blade. “That’s not going to be a problem now, is it?”
The man eyed the blade, processed Mildred and Krysty’s no-nonsense looks and shook his head.
Three minutes later, Mildred, Krysty and Nyarla were making their way out of the ville, their weapons back in place and the weapons of their companions distributed between them. Mildred had also had the good sense to grab several extra boxes of ammunition, which she stuffed into her satchel where it sat incongruous among the medical supplies.
* * *
I
N
THE
FROZEN
ARENA
, J.B. glanced back, eyeing the spot where the baron and his lackeys watched with studied disinterest. The ground was darkened with blood there, the decapitated body of the previous fighter still slumped where he had fallen.
So, he was being maneuvered. What good did that knowledge do him when he was facing a man who was using a chain saw like a broadsword? J.B. wondered.
As the chain saw cut the air again, J.B. turned to his right, dipping his body low so that the whirring blade clipped less than a foot over his head. J.B.’s hat went flying and he plucked it up before it could hit the floor. The falling hat gave him an idea—if he could just get enough space to try it.
Then suddenly J.B. realized where he was standing. His feet were placed in the dark wound on the ground, where the blood of dozens of victims had been shed. Behind him was the wall and the theater box-style area where the baron resided, watching the battle. This was it, this was where he got on the last train to the coast, single seat, headless commuter. Nothing like knowing you were about to die to get the blood pumping, J.B. realized as a wave of warmth seemed to ripple through his body.
The whirring blade of the chain saw swung toward the Armorer’s head again, and the crowd booed as J.B. ducked. His battered fedora still in his hand, J.B. skipped it across the ground as he ducked, using it to scoop up a little dusting of the ice-flecked soil. Then, as the horned gladiator loomed over him, J.B. tossed the hat and its contents at the man’s face, showering him with sharp flecks of ice.
The man in the helmet growled as ice and dust caught in his eyes, distracting his vision for just a single heartbeat. But it was enough. Still crouched low, J.B. powered his body at his towering opponent, head down, driving his shoulders and the back of his head into the man’s gut.
J.B.’s attacker didn’t fall with the blow, but he did skid back on the ground, his arms windmilling as he tried to keep his balance. In his right hand, the snarling chain saw swung wildly, cutting backward into one of the barrels that lined the arena, spitting a shower of sparks as it sliced through the metal drum.
An instant later the man had recovered. He held the chain saw steady in one powerful hand, the engine bucking in his grasp as he used his free hand to wipe grime from his face. J.B. saw the man’s ugly grin appear amid the narrow lines of his helmet, saw that his front teeth were rotted stumps or missing entirely. But J.B. saw something else, too—where the chain saw had cut into the shell of the fuel drum, a dark liquid was spilling loose, forming an expanding puddle on the floor at his opponent’s feet. J.B.’s nose wrinkled as he smelled the liquid’s scent—a cloying greasy stench: cooking fat.
J.B. was a weaponsmith by training, but that didn’t mean he was helpless without a blaster. Rather, he could see the ideal use of weapons in any situation, enough that he could employ whatever was around him to his advantage. It was something he resorted to when ammo was low. So when the situation called for it, when he had his back to the wall, metaphorically, John Barrymore Dix could make a weapon out of just about anything that came to hand. Right now, he had opted to use one of man’s most ancient weapons—fire.
As the horned warrior recovered, J.B.’s busy hands had already reached into his jacket, pulling out the little lighter he had stolen from the sec man. His thumb worked the wheel once, twice, trying to get the spark to catch. Towering over him, J.B.’s opponent had recovered and swung the chain saw once again, thrusting downward in a vicious strike as the crowd cheered.
“Third time’s the charm,” J.B. muttered as the flame finally fluttered to life.
The Armorer dived out from the wall, rolling across the ground and reaching out with the lighter to touch the tip of the flame to the spilled contents of the barrel. An instant later, the liquid came to life in a whoosh of blue-gold flame as J.B. continued rolling over and over, generating as much distance as he could from those fearsome flames.