Even as he said that, he saw it start to happen. The initial volley of blasterfire from his team, crouched in cover to either side of the thoroughfare, had dropped so many of the attackers they formed a living roadblock. Those behind, mad-eyed and baying for blood a heartbeat before, now faltered, seemingly as unwilling to trample their friends and kinfolk—some of whom were still kicking and screaming, none as loudly or enthusiastically as the man whose guts J.B. had pulped with his Uzi—as they were to continue to run into the flashing blaster-muzzles of their intended prey.
Long ago—back when he was a baron’s third son in Front Royal—Ryan had heard the phrase “he who hesitates is lost.” To that the ever-canny Trader had added:
nobody wants to get shot
. It took unthinking fury to
run into the face of heavy blasterfire. And this mob had clearly let self-preservation reassert itself in the face of their waning bloodlust.
They were done. It was all over but the fleeing.
None of the group, not even Ryan, could match the hunting-tiger sharpness of Jak’s senses. But in turn none of them, including Jak, came close to Ryan’s keenly honed sense of danger, the unconscious ability to flash sort through even the tiniest fugitive sensory inputs to identify the pattern that added up to
threat
.
That sense screamed a warning now. From the corner of his lone eye, Ryan saw a skinny old man, standing by the side of the road, leveling a single-action Peacemaker at Ryan’s head.
But just as Ryan’s sense of danger had its limitations, so did even his striking-rattler reflexes. He already knew he was nuked, even as his brain sent his body the impulse to dive aside.
The ancient blaster and its ancient shooter alike vanished in a giant yellow muzzle-flash. It instantly echoed in a blinding red flash inside Ryan’s skull.
Then blackness. Then nothing.
“They’re running!” Krysty heard Ricky shout.
His gleeful cry wasn’t needed. The locals’ resolve had withered in the face of the companions’ blasterfire. The front rank—the survivors, who hadn’t tripped or fallen over the dozen or so wounded or dead who had been the mob’s front—had turned and were pushing back into the faces of their fellow locals behind. But the rout fever had already taken root among them, and the men and a few women at the rear had already started running back out of sight around the bend in the road.
And at the rear of it all stood Wymie Berdone, head down, shoulders slumped in dejection. The fleeing crowd, growing larger by the heartbeat, split to flow around her to either side. Krysty wondered whether it was lucky that they failed to trample her—or if she’d be luckier if they had.
Ryan was right, she thought, pausing to swap magazines in her Glock. After an initial full-auto burst, just to get their enemies’ attention, she’d been firing single rounds.
No matter how hot the fire of vengeance-lust burned inside her, the black-haired woman’s days as a successful mob leader were through. Leaving her alive to spread defeat to her followers was the worst blow Ryan could strike against her.
The shooting from their side died away as it became clear the mob posed no further threat. As far as Krysty could tell, the attackers had fired no shots at them, though she had the impression a couple locals had discharged their blasters into the air, by accident or from overenthusiasm.
And then she saw an oldie, standing in weeds by the side of the road letting his panicked fellows flow past, drawing bead with an enormous blaster held steady in both wrinkled hands.
Before she—or Jak, or J.B., or even Ryan himself—could react, the blaster went off with a roar that seemed to consume Krysty’s world. She saw blood fly from her lover’s head, and he flopped bonelessly in the weeds.
Screaming with wordless rage, Krysty leveled her Glock and emptied the entire magazine into the oldie in a single, shuddering burst. The old man did a jittering death-dance as 9 mm copper-jacketed hardball slugs sleeted through his shriveled frame. It was as if Krysty’s stream of blasterfire was all that was holding him upright. Only when the slide locked back on her blocky handgun did she give him permission to lie down and die.
It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. She couldn’t kill him enough for what he had done to her lover.
Ever-alert and rapid to act, J.B. had sprung to Ryan’s side where he lay invisible in brush and grass across the road from Krysty. “He’s alive,” he called. “Bullet just clipped his head. Out cold, though.”
“Not good,” Mildred said grimly. “He’s concussed at the least.”
Krysty actually shrugged at that. “He’s alive,” she
said. “And one thing we know about my Ryan is, he’s ace at staying that way!”
Mildred had to smile. “He is that.”
The last of the crowd of locals disappeared around the bend, except for a few walking wounded, limping or helping each other along. A pair of husky farm lads grabbed Wymie by the arms and dragged her along with them out of sight. She wasn’t resisting. She just wasn’t doing anything on her own.
The nonwalking wounded scattered among all the chills in and by the road moaned. Except for the middle-aged balding man. He was screaming fit to make the woods ring.
Krysty dropped the heavy steel slide on a fresh magazine of 9 mm rounds. She straightened her arm, grasped her blaster hand with her left and pulled on it for stability, lined up the fat white dot of the front sight and squeezed the rather heavy trigger.
The blaster bucked to a single shot. The wounded man’s balding dome of a head jerked.
His screaming stopped. So did his thrashing around.
“Why did you do that, Krysty?” Ricky asked. By his tone the youth clearly wasn’t reproaching her, but genuinely wanted to know.
“Fight’s over, boy,” said J.B., as he dragged Ryan out of the brush by the armpits. “No need for him to go on carrying on like that.”
* * *
D
ESPITE HIS RESOLVE
, Mathus Conn’s heart lurched when he saw the firelight from what he’d been told was Wymie Berdone’s base camp through the trees ahead.
But what if I’m wrong? he thought.
He laughed, silently so the looming shadowy figure
of Potar Baggart, standing behind him on the forest path, wouldn’t ask what was funny. He didn’t feel like having to explain that, no, indeed, they didn’t call it the Deathlands for nothing. And that applied inside the Pennyrile as well as out. He suspected it always had.
And not just in the Pennyrile. Nor North America, either, for that matter. Old-days people sure weren’t immortal, to judge by the fact they called it the
Megacull
.
The fact was, Mathus Conn was a man who asked probing questions and thought things through. That had been the case long before his cousin Nancy had come to work for him, and would continue now that she was staring up at the unlit ceiling of Coffin-Maker Sam’s chill cellar. And after he’d failed to find Wymie the previous night, when he’d gone looking for her, he’d had a power of time to consider his course of action.
Which was pretty much what he’d started out intending to do, even before poor Nancy and her murderers got cold.
I’m right, he told himself. And if I’m not—well, no one leaves this world alive.
He raised his head, threw back his shoulders and strode forward as importantly as he could.
He could see maybe a dozen of them in the clearing, huddled around a dispirited-looking bonfire. A few pinewood torches burned around the perimeter. The yellow light made their sagging faces look jaundiced.
By survivors’ accounts, Wymie had had at least half a hundred eager mob members when she set them on the outlanders that morning.
In the midst of her sad remnant, Wymie knelt next to the bonfire, stroking the upturned face of Mance Kobelin. From the waxiness of his pallid complexion,
so like her own—not to mention the dancing gleam of firelight on unblinking eyeballs—he would have been able to tell at a glance the young man was dead. Even if he hadn’t heard enough reports of Mance’s demise to believe them.
When the first survivors straggled back to Sinkhole, stopping by way of Stenson’s Creek to wet their parched throats and restore their failed courage, he had learned what happened. And decided to let Wymie stew in her own juices for a spell.
Just that single glimpse told him all he needed to know about the current state of Wymie’s enterprise.
She had stewed more than enough.
He compressed his lips. He
had
made sure to send Coffin-Maker Sam on ahead. He had a job of work ahead of him. He wasn’t pleased to see poor dead Mance still here. A body commenced to stink mighty fast in these parts.
Mebbe Sam only had so much room in that old hay-wagon he uses, he thought. He doesn’t usually get so much custom all at one go. And Wymie no doubt had been reluctant to let go of her cousin.
If only I could be sure that this madness had ended, he thought. But the thing that caused it is getting worse, not better.
They all noticed him, or more likely his shadow Potar, at the same time. A dark-haired kid leaped up from where he’d been squatting on his skinny shanks near Wymie and raced at him.
“You bastard!” the kid hollered.
Conn recognized him as a boy from the ville named Danny. He was the sort who seemed to just drift, as if mebbe looking for a purpose to his life.
And now, from the fury that twisted the dark, lean and none-too-clean features beneath his hank of black hair, he seemed to have found one, despite the day’s earlier disaster. His very fury reinforced Conn’s resolve.
“This is all your fault! You—”
He broke off when Potar took a thick-legged stride past Conn to piston his palm heel into the charging boy’s breastbone. Danny went flying back with his feet kicking up higher than his head. He landed on his rump and skidded two more feet.
“Show more respect to Mr. Conn, you little bagworm,” Potar growled. He glared pugnaciously about at the rest of them. “Anybody else tries a stupe trick like that, I’ll twist his head around like he was a chicken!”
There were still plenty weapons in evidence, and not just farm tools and axes, but blasters. But nobody made a move for any of them. Maybe it was because the fight was already out of the rest of them—for the moment. But Conn reckoned his new self-appointed bodyguard was just that intimidating.
“Stand easy, everyone,” Wymie said. She stood up and walked forward, slowly, but without signs of hesitation. She did, however, keep her eyes on the ground before her feet.
“Reckon I know what you come for, Mathus Conn,” she said. “I never intended the wrong that got done to you and yours. I never intended to get a mess of people chilled, either. If you’re here to get your revenge, you can take my life and I won’t kick none.”
“No,” he said, “I know you didn’t tell that little coldheart Lem to do what he did.”
He looked around at the others then, and made his
voice ring without yelling, a useful skill for a gaudy-keeper to have.
“I’m here because I see now you were right.”
That got them. Before they’d been watching him blearily or not at all, slouched, listless. Now they all snapped to attention, and the eyes turned toward him were bright in their suddenly less-slack faces.
“I went to the Sumz location this morning,” he said, “after you were there. I saw the horrors these monsters committed, and I knew I had to face the fact—there is an evil abroad in our district that needs to be hunted down and destroyed, root and branch.
“I look at you, and know that it’s growin’. It’s not just these outlanders who shot you up so badly. They’ve got help.”
He looked at Wymie.
“So I’m here to help you. However I can.”
She spread her hands. She left her head hanging, though, and would not look at him.
“I thank you kindly,” she said. “But what can you do? What can I do? I got a power of my people killed today. And most of those who survived have given up and gone back home.”
“They’ll realize soon enough the danger they’re in,” Conn said. “As for what you can do—keep carryin’ the torch. People will come to you. New ones, as these terrible things keep happenin’ to their friends and neighbors and loved ones. And even the ones who have abandoned you, most of them will come back, if you just keep the faith. You’ll see.”
She raised her face and looked at him. Tears gleamed yellow and orange on her cheeks in the fire glow.
“As for what I can do,” he continued, “I can help make
sure your voice is heard across the width and breadth of the Pennyrile. It’s time everybody woke up to the threat we’re all livin’ under, and started bandin’ together to put an end to evil.
“Now is the time we stand together—or fall apart.”
Ryan opened his eye to darkness.
His first thought was that he was blind, and he had to fight down panic. How could he help his friends, his lover Krysty, stay alive and make their way in this coldheart world without even one good eye?
But he beat down the panic almost at once, even before he noticed a slight glow creeping in at one edge of his vision, and heard the murmur of voices from nearby.
Ryan made himself sit up. His hips felt like a rusty hinge. Dizziness rushed him. He swayed.
He forced himself to stand. He swayed again. He started to put out a hand to steady himself, but the light was too faint to give him an accurate picture of his surroundings.
Whatever’s wrong with me, it wouldn’t help to bust my arm flailing around in the dark like a feeb, he thought.
Somehow he managed to stay upright. After a moment the dizziness passed, mostly. He began to walk toward the light, tottering at first, and then growing more steady with every step. The floor was tilted at a funny angle beneath his feet, but not enough he couldn’t handle it.
It also told him where he was: stashed inside one of the outer rooms of the swallowed-up office complex they had been excavating the past couple weeks. Before everything went south.
Or, mebbe, returned to normal.
“Well, look at that,” he heard Mildred say as the sunlight, weak though it was, dazzled his eye. “The dead walk!”