“Let me finish the little prick,” rumbled a voice that had to belong to the bear he’d been tormenting.
“No,” the shark-faced man said with finality. “He’s damaged goods and probably going to die, anyway. The fire’ll finish him if the head shot doesn’t. We have no time to waste, Mono. We still got to make sure what happens to these fuckers shows the whole fucking island what it means to dick with the Army of National Unity.”
Still struggling mentally to force his body to rise and fight, Ricky heard the coldhearts leave.
Then, the world went black.
Chapter Fifteen
“Nope,” Mildred said. She rocked back on her haunches and gratefully clicked off the flashlight. Pumping the flywheel that powered it made her hand cramp something fierce, but functioning batteries were scarcer than kind hearts these days. “No concussion. No sign of subdural hematoma, either, but then again, if your brain was bleeding, you’d be dead now, most likely. So you didn’t actually pass out, I’m betting. Did you?”
Ricky shook his head. “I lay stunned for a while. I felt sick and dizzy for a long time, and when I tried to get up the first few times, I fell right back down.” He sounded ashamed. “But then I smelled smoke and heard flames. The coldhearts had set the shop on fire, as Tiburón said they would. So I crawled first to my parents’ bodies, then out into the street.”
“What happened with you not being able to see, then?”
He laughed, half wild, half bitter. “That was blood in my eyes. When I rubbed my face, I could see again!”
He shook his head. “My family. My father was dead, rest his soul. So was my mother. My sister was gone. I failed. I was useless! But I will get her back. And I will chill the shark-toothed mutie, and that scar-faced bastard
El Guapo
.
I swear on my parents’ funeral pyre, which was our store, my home, which the monsters burned around them.”
“You have nothing to be ashamed of,” J.B. said. “You did all you could. More than a lot of grown men could have—or would have.”
“So what happened next?” Ryan said. “Where’d the fancy blasters come from?”
“I ran to my uncle’s shop, down by the waterfront. The streets were filled with blood and walled with fire. Having killed and burned as much as they could the invaders had moved on to a different part of the ville.
“The shop hadn’t burned. My uncle lay dead on the floor. I counted more than twenty bullet wounds without even moving his body.
“But he had sold his life expensively. Six coldhearts lay dead around him. He had continued to chill them even as they pumped him full of bullets. He only let himself die when the slide locked back on his
pistola
and his enemies were down!”
“So his shop wasn’t looted?”
The boy grinned. Even as she was getting up, Mildred recoiled a little from the look in his eye and the nature of his smile. The evil mutant sec boss wasn’t the only one around with a touch of the shark in him.
“Not then. Only later, at even greater cost. I retrieved Tío Benito’s Para-Ordnance, as you see, and scavenged such magazines and bullets as I could find. I found the beloved DeLisle longblaster he had made with his own two hands, untouched in its hiding place beneath a worktable. So I grabbed a backpack and threw what I could inside. There wasn’t much food. It doesn’t keep well in our climate.
“And then, before I left, I prepared some surprises. Because I knew that even though the coldhearts weren’t much interested in loot, they’d be bound to check my uncle’s shop to make sure they had grabbed up all the blasters and ammo it contained.”
“‘Surprises,’” J.B. echoed. His voice sounded eager as a little kid’s.
Ricky nodded. “I heard the explosions as I crept out of the ville, saw a yellow fireball roll up. I even heard the screams of some of those caught by the flames. The coldhearts were
very
surprised, my friends. Some, at least, for the very last time.”
The wicked light died out of his dark eyes. His thin shoulders slumped.
“But it was only the beginning of
mi venganza
. Many more must pay the price for what they did to my family, my friends, my ville. And I will free Yami, or die in the attempt!”
Ryan stood facing him with his hands on his hips, then he shook his head. “So, what do we do with you?”
“Chill!” an angry voice said from the darkness to the side of the hollow.
“Jak!” Ryan snapped. “You’re supposed to be on lookout. If you’re listening to this, you aren’t listening for trouble.”
“Okay,” Jak said. Ryan sensed motion. The boy was slinking away and wanted them all to know it. Otherwise he’d have moved as quietly as a cloud across the moon.
Of course nothing would keep him from slipping right back to eavesdrop. Ryan frowned furiously and felt his cheeks get hot.
“Back to the problem at hand. What about this kid?”
“Take me with you!” the boy piped up.
“Why would you want that?” Krysty asked. “You’re determined to find your sister. That’s not something we’re going to get involved in. You must know that.”
For a moment he sat huddled and frowning. “You’re going to help me find her, anyway,” he said at last.
“Meaning what?” Mildred asked.
J.B. chuckled. “Meaning a group as big and well armed as us is going to attract the attention of this Handsome guy’s coldhearts, sooner or later. Right, kid?”
Ricky nodded.
Mildred sensed there was more to it than that. There always was. She suspected the kid was shit-scared—he’d be crazy if he weren’t. He was out on his own in the big, bad world for the first time, thrown there in the most traumatic way possible. He might be handy with weapons and tools, but she didn’t see much evidence he had any skill at all at living off the land. Even a land as lush as this one.
In ways he was the anti-Jak. That made her smile. As fond as she was of the albino teen, that was not an altogether bad thing.
“So what do you bring to the deal?” Ryan asked.
The question caught Mildred off guard. He’s actually
considering
it, she thought. She’d taken for granted that he’d blow the kid off.
She watched as Ricky looked around at the circle of faces. With Jak’s lean white-wolf features absent, none of them was hostile. Hers wasn’t. Heck, she admired what the kid had done. He stood up for his family, and even if it wasn’t bright to fling himself at a bunch of big coldhearts bristling with blasters, it was the right thing to do.
Even in the Deathlands, there were things that trumped sheer survival. Sometimes.
“Well, you’re looking for something, right?” Ricky said.
Suddenly, the looks on the faces turned toward him got very intent.
“How do you mean, Ricky?” Krysty asked, delicately and clearly, before Ryan could get the notion of just booting the kid till he spat out where he’d learned that.
The boy shook his head and tipped it to the side, like a confused dog. “What else are you doing here? Why’d you come to the island if you weren’t looking for something?”
Mildred had to grin openly at that. In her day, of course, Puerto Rico, along with the rest of the Caribbean, had been a prime destination where tourists were looking for nothing but sun and sea and a good time. These days tourism was barely a word. Certainly not a thing.
“Fair enough,” J.B. said, rocking back. Of all of them, he seemed the most positively inclined toward the newcomer, which Mildred realized was only natural. With his fondness for weapons and tinkering—and lethal surprises—Ricky was cast from the same mold as the armorer himself.
“So what is it? Because I can help you find it.”
Everybody looked at Ryan. The redoubts’ existence was a vital secret, though at times not always much of one. The strongholds the government constructed before the Big Nuke were sometimes discovered and plundered. Usually when factors beyond the builders’ control or scope of planning had broken them open, during the war and the colossal earthquakes, or the turbulent decades following.
But their real value lay in their deep dark secret, the mat-trans gateways. Few people these days knew of their existence.
They were the companions’ ace in the hole. The fact that they could “jump” from one gateway to another in a different redoubt, was the only reason they’d escaped countless terrible situations with their hides still intact.
But to her surprise, even as Ryan frowned in consideration, it was Krysty who spoke up. “Why do you think you can help us find what we’re looking for, whatever it is?”
“I’ve been over lots of the island,” Ricky said. “This part of it, anyway. South-central. I know a lot of the people and villes. And many of the dangers, where the worst monsters are. I can help you get around. I can help you talk to people who know how to find what you’re looking for. Really, I can! Or, anyway, people who know people who can help you.”
He was clearly getting worked up by the prospect. Well, Mildred thought, he seemed like a pretty bright kid. And you’d have to be stupid not to see how hooking up with the companions could augment your odds of survival.
Ryan looked at the boy for a moment, his eye narrowed. Then he looked around at the others. Ryan was the unspoken leader and that was that. Nobody wanted it any different. But one thing that made him good at leading was that, when circumstances allowed, he gave everybody his or her say.
He was also sharp enough to realize that his companions were sharp, too, with different skill sets and knowledge and outlooks, and they could see things he couldn’t. Everybody pulled their weight. It was how they kept one another alive.
“It would appear the boy’s cooperation could facilitate our search,” Doc said, rubbing his chin.
“Can we trust him?” Mildred asked. “I mean, he
was
trying to steal our food.”
“It’s not like we haven’t stolen our share of grub,” J.B. said. “Dark night, Mildred, the kid’s hungry. You do what you can to survive.”
She shrugged. “True enough. Maybe I’m still the naive one in the bunch, but he doesn’t strike me the sort to stick a knife in our ribs while we sleep.”
Krysty smiled. “He knows better than to try,” she said. “Don’t you, Ricky?”
Ricky swallowed and nodded. “That white-haired kid would spit me like a wild pig if I tried anything.”
His eyes, already big, got larger. “In fact, he might do it, anyway!”
“If Ryan tells him to lay off,” J.B. said, stirring the dying fire with a stick, then tossing it into the rising yellow flames, “Jak’ll lay off.”
He looked up at his friend, who continued to stand with arms crossed over his chest. “How about it, Ryan? What do you say?”
“Haven’t heard from you yet, J.B.,” Ryan said with a thin smile. “Though I don’t suppose we need to. If you looked in the mirror twenty years ago, you’d see him. Except he’s twice as good-looking as you ever were.”
J.B. chuckled. “That’s a fact. Except about the looks. He’s
triple
better looking than I ever was.”
Mildred couldn’t resist patting his hard thigh and grinning. “I like you just fine the way you are, John,” she said. “Useful as opposed to ornamental.”
He blushed red to the roots of his hair, which, she had to admit to herself, was the reaction she’d hoped for.
“So everybody’s ace with letting the kid tag along?” Ryan asked.
“Except Jak,” Mildred said.
Ryan scratched an ear. “Can’t really argue his point. We’ll find what we’re looking for easier with help from somebody knows the land and the locals. And the sooner we do, the better I like it. So, yeah, kid. You can tag along. For now, anyway. Don’t fuck up.”
“Thanks,” the boy said. Suddenly he grinned. “Thanks! And, uh, can I have something to eat?”
When Krysty handed him a mango, he burst into tears. Everybody else pretended not to notice.
Mildred wondered how long the kid would be able to hold out. She hoped they wouldn’t live to regret the choice to let him join. Of course, there was no way to tell in advance. It had been no less true in the world she’d been born and raised in: the only certainty was that one day you’d wind up with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Nobody got out of this life alive.
But the Deathlands always found a way of reminding you of the fact. Good and hard, and often.
Chapter Sixteen
“No. I don’t know of any forbidden or secret places.”
The guy looked normal enough: tall, olive-skinned, black hair, rail-skinny. All except for the split tongue that darted in and out of his mouth and made him lisp.
The morning sunlight was breaking where it hit the shallow water of the rice paddy. Its splinters flew up with considerable force into Ryan’s eye.
The paddies lay in a broad, shallow valley, east along the coast and inland from the wreck of Nuestra Señora. Ryan wanted to keep clear of the actual coast. He couldn’t know all of their pursuers had gone up in the explosion of the
Wailer
. In fact he knew they all
didn’t,
given the encounter with Silver-Eye Chris and his two companions on the trail out of town. Where three had survived, more might. And there might be other ships with Sea Wasps on them who bore a grudge—or, for that matter, Monitors seeking the “official” vengeance of the Syndicate that ran Nueva Tortuga, and whose dick Ryan and friends had given an almighty tug.
Anyway, as a general rule, the redoubts seemed to be mostly inland. But this little ville, a huddle of grass huts upstream from the paddies, was handy, and had been on good terms with Nuestra Señora and Ricky’s father. So it made sense to start their quest for information here.
The spokesman looked thoughtful. Other workers were starting to wander over. Ryan guessed that rice farming was a pretty slow-paced affair, though the labor looked backbreaking. Everybody seemed eager for a break and the diversion the visitors represented.
“What do you seek?” asked a wrinkled, elderly woman with jumbled brown teeth showing in a face-splitting grin. “Treasure? So do we all!”
“If we knew where treasure was,” a slightly younger-looking man said, “would we be out here working in the sun and wading in shit all day?” And everybody laughed, including the taller, straighter spokesman, as if that was the best joke ever.
Ryan set his chin and made his mouth stretch slightly in what could pass for a smile. Mebbe. For a fact, even for him the stench of feces, so dense as to be almost visible, was nearly overpowering.
Human shit.
The organic fertilizer was why Mildred, still the most fastidious of the crew, stood carefully perched on one of the little soil ridges that divided the paddies. The rest, like Ryan, stood stoically in the midst of the stinking brown water, ignoring the clumps that occasionally nuzzled their ankles like frogs, carried by the flow from the irrigation ditches that led from the ville’s communal cesspool. Even Doc, with his gentle and almost aristocratic upbringing, paid the sewage no mind. But then, being forced to wallow in human shit was one of the less degrading things forced on him by the baron who had captured him after the whitecoats dumped him in the here and now.
“If I had to guess,” the spokesman lisped, rubbing his clean-shaved chin, “I’d say you should look up north in the mountains.”
“That’s right!” A chorus of agreement fluttered up like a flock of gulls. “The mountains are definitely where you should look.”
“It only stands to reason,” the elderly woman said, nodding sagely. “Odd things are always going on in the mountains. Mountains are full of secret places.”
Ryan cocked an eyebrow at Krysty, who stood beside him. She quirked a grin and a slight one-shoulder shrug back. It made a certain sense in Ryan’s gut. They often
did
find hidden things in the mountains, redoubts in particular.
“But there could be a problem with that,” the tall spokesman said thoughtfully.
“And what might that be, my good man?” Doc asked.
The man’s tongue slipped out to lick his lips. “Why, that’s where most of the monsters live, of course.”
* * *
“S
O
,
WHAT
USE
FANCY
GUN
, island boy?” Jak asked derisively.
“The DeLisle, you mean?” Ricky asked.
They were trudging into the foothills inland, per the advice of the folk in the nameless little rice-farming ville. They followed a narrow valley with frequent outcroppings of jagged black lava rock that climbed steeply from the alluvial plain. The walls were thickly furred in green brush. Birds called, quarreled and occasionally burst out in brightly colored flight.
“Yeah,” Jak said. “So, shoots quiet. So? Anyway, can shoot?”
Krysty hung near the two youths, who walked in front of the file, keeping an eye on the interaction between Jak and the newcomer. Ricky had, she knew, made a decent impression on Ryan during the meet with the farmers. He made introductions and then stood back, not trying to push himself forward and be the center of things, the way a kid his age might. His dad, she reckoned, had taught him well.
Of course, now it remained to see if he was
too
reticent. A person had to have some spice to keep upright in this world. Especially in a crew that led the sort of lives Ryan’s did.
Ricky turned his head to look at the white-haired youth. Krysty read the bafflement in his body language before she caught his uncomprehending frown. He hadn’t gotten used to Jak’s miserly ways with words yet.
But the way Jak’s ruby eyes were fixed on him brought the message home quick.
“I guess I can shoot some,” he said with a certain pride.
“Why not show us?” Ryan said, closing up to Krysty’s left from behind. “Up ahead there, where the granite juts out and the other valley flows into this one.”
“Those monkeys?” Mildred asked. She followed Ryan. Behind her walked Doc, smiling vaguely and humming to himself. J.B. brought up the rear, shotgun in hand and eyes well skinned for danger.
“Mutie monkeys,” Jak hissed, stopping short.
Halting, mainly so as not to walk into either of the two boys, Krysty peered up the path. They were headed pretty much north right now. She had to raise her left hand to shade her eyes from the sun. It was going to disappear behind the ridge to the west before two more hours passed, plunging the valley into early mountain twilight.
She’d noticed the monkey troop perching on the rugged gray boulders sticking out from the near side of the confluence of valleys. They were big ones, though not huge. Rhesus monkeys, she thought. Big enough, smart enough—mean enough—to threaten humans in a pack. There were perhaps twenty of them. Could be a problem, she acknowledged.
And looking closely through the glare, she saw Jak was right, as he usually was about the world of the senses. The creatures had what looked like yokes of spines bristling up from their shoulders and backs, reminiscent of porcupine quills. Even at this range, a good sixty or seventy yards, she could tell they were heavier than usual, and bleached white.
“Monkeys with bone spikes?” Mildred said. “You have
got
to be kidding me.”
“If those spikes are bone,” Doc said, “they cannot be firmly attached to the skeleton. Note how the beasts seemed to lower or erect them when interacting with one another.”
It was true, Krysty quickly saw. Though Doc’s blue eyes looked weak, they were still quite sharp, more befitting his actual age than his apparent one. And while he didn’t have Jak’s overwhelming intuition for the natural world—or at least the wild one, since so much of today’s world couldn’t be called remotely natural—he had an encyclopedic knowledge of it.
Usually Krysty felt far more in sympathy with Jak’s perspective. Sometimes she saw the use of Doc’s, though.
“Wonder if they can shoot those things,” J.B. said. “Like porky-pines do.”
“That’s just an old wives’ tale,” Mildred said promptly. “Porcupines can’t shoot their quills.”
Krysty looked back to see J.B. take off his glasses and polish them with a handkerchief. He showed her a bland smile. “You haven’t come up against the porcupines I have.”
Mildred blinked at him, then she scowled. “John,” she accused, “you’re making fun of me.”
The armorer put his specs back on and blinked at her through the round lenses, the very image of innocence.
“Why, Millie,” he said. “Would I do a thing like that?”
“Yes.”
“Normally I’d chase them off myself with this,” Ryan said, raising the Scout Tactical longblaster he carried. “But I’m interested to see what you and that Denial of yours can do.”
“DeLisle.” J.B. and Ricky corrected him in unison.
“Whatever,” Ryan said. “Show us, kid.”
Ricky took his time cinching up his left forearm in the carbine’s shooting sling. From his hesitant posture, Krysty guessed he was wondering whether to kneel or sit to get a more stable shooting platform. Then, straightening his back slightly, he brought the longblaster’s buttplate to his shoulder. It had adjustable iron sights, but the boy didn’t bother with them. One way or another it wasn’t a prohibitively difficult shot for a longblaster, even one as short as his. Although she wondered if the fact it shot a handblaster round made a difference.
Clearly—at least to her—Ricky guessed he was most likely to impress his audience if he took the shot standing up. Boys, she thought.
Then with a grin, she mentally amended that to men. They never grew out of it entirely. Not even Ryan, although he’d long since learned to rein in the urge to showboat. The one exception she could call to mind was J.B. He didn’t seem the show-off type. As fond as he was of Mildred—and the rest of them, of course—he was his most demanding audience. Nobody else would hold him to anywhere near the standards of skill he demanded of himself.
When Ricky fired the stubby carbine, it made a muted thump, like a fist hitting someone’s thigh. Krysty didn’t see how hard it kicked or how the boy handled it. She was focused on the mutant monkeys sitting and grooming one another downrange.
The biggest of them sat a bit above and apart from the rest, eyeing the landscape with stern grandeur. He was apparently somewhat myopic, since he gave no sign of spotting the humans yet. The wind blew down the valley, bringing the musky tang of the monkey tribe to Krysty’s nostrils, rather than human smell to him.
The troop leader’s body jerked as if a thought had struck him.
But it had been something a little harder than a thought, if perhaps not so fast. He pitched off his rock, to land on a flat granite ledge twelve feet below. The wind brought the plop a beat later. It was only a little quieter than the carbine had been.
The other monkeys sitting on the outcrop looked at one another, right through the space where the pack leader’s butt and shortish tail had been a breath before. They did an almost comical take of surprise before turning almost as one to stare down at the fallen alpha, lying on his face with his rump slightly elevated and clearly a chill.
Krysty heard the muties chitter to one another. One hopped down to sniff at the fallen leader.
The DeLisle thumped again. The inquisitive monkey flopped onto its far side. It beat the air with fists and feet for a moment, then went limp.
Krysty looked back to see that Ricky had the shrouded barrel of his piece back down online from the recoil. He was jacking the action to chamber a cartridge for the next shot.
“Okay,” Jak said a little glumly. “Not bad.”
Ricky shrugged and grinned shyly. “Thanks.”
“Not bad at all,” Ryan said.
Ricky looked at him, a little anxiously. “Is that, uh, enough?” he asked. “I don’t— I don’t want to shoot more than I have to.”
Even Krysty half expected Ryan to sneer at his softheartedness. Instead, he proved that you could never take the man for granted—and made her love him all over again.
“Only a mad thing chills more than he needs to,” he said. “And only a stupe wastes ammo.”
“Bastards’re still in our road, though, Ryan,” J.B. said.
Mildred laughed. “They don’t have any idea what happened to their friends,” she said. “Shit, they don’t even know we’re here yet.” Then she winced as a blaster shot cracked off nearby.
Krysty blinked as the side-blast from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer smacked the side of her face. He’d drawn his Steyr and fired a shot in the air.
As the echoes chased each other up and down the green-and-black valley walls, the monkeys turned to stare at the humans. With a swirl of tails they vanished, as if into the rocks.
“They
parlez-vous
blaster,” J.B. said in satisfaction.
“Most things do,” Ryan said, “that live.”
To Ricky, who was looking an obvious question at him, he said, “My nine ball’s easier to find than your .45. What’re we standing here for? Let’s move, people.”
He holstered the piece, grabbed the wrist of his longblaster stock and strode forward with long legs eating up the sloping trail. The two boys had to scamper to avoid him brushing them off the narrow path.
“Are those unsightly creatures edible, young man?” Doc asked.
“Huh? Yeah. Not bad. Mebbe a little gamier than, you know, normal monkey.”
“Muties!” Jak spit. “Not eat muties.
Tainted
.”
“That’s more for the rest of us, then,” J.B. said jovially. Coming up alongside Mildred he fetched her a comradely slap on the shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Millie?”
She blanched and swallowed hard. “Whatever you say, J.B.”
As they neared the juncture of the two valleys, Jak took off at an angle, up the slope to their right, vanishing briefly into the brush before reaching the top. He reappeared a moment later to wave an all clear before melting out of sight again.
As they came up on the dead monkeys, a chunk of dirt and dead grass flew up from right beside one of the little lifeless bodies.
A moment later the unmistakable crack of a big-bore longblaster reached Krysty’s ears.
Someone was shooting at them!