Chapter Twenty-One
“Ryan!”
The one-eyed man turned. He and J.B. had just emerged from the front door, Jak having slipped out first to confirm the way was clear.
It was Krysty, flying out of the deeper shadow of the big, windowless building next to the barn from which he’d sniped the Crazy Dogs’ spotter. Mildred and Ricky trotted behind her.
“Where’s Doc?” he asked. He could see in the glow from the house that she was unhurt.
Krysty ran up and hugged him tight. The air oomphed out of him. In times of stress she forgot her own strength.
“Taken,” she said quietly.
“We got hit the second we launched the diversion,” Mildred said. “They were all over us. Caught us wholly unprepared.”
Ryan grunted.
Krysty pushed off and looked around.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“We’re fit to fight, yeah,” Ryan said. “Got what we came for.”
“Where is everybody?” Mildred asked. “I know where all the sec men are. Up there presumably dancing on poor Doc’s head. But how about the mobs of peasants with torches?”
“We best move and talk,” J.B. said. “Not give them a chance to form the idea, so to speak.”
Ryan led them away from the
Casa de Broma
toward the southeast, back toward Amity Springs pretty much on a line. It meant they slogged across furrows and trampled barely sprouting crops. Ryan wasn’t of the mind to care.
“Nobody’s come out to see what the ruckus is about,” Ryan said as Jak trotted past into the lead. “Reckon they’re more prudent than curious. I wasn’t exactly yearning to have to fight our way clear. Whether it was people sniping us from the shadows or the angry mob thing.”
“Ho, there!” a feminine voice, brassy and bold, rang out like mythical angels’ trumpets on high.
“Ryan Cawdor!”
“Don’t stop,” Mildred urged as the words echoed off the cliff face. Jak called the same warning, less grammatically.
Ryan stopped. He turned and gazed back at the bluffs behind the big house. They were about a hundred yards off at this point.
On the heights just east of the baron’s manor a rude dome of garish yellow light thrown by driftwood torches wavered against the black sky and banished the stars. In the middle of the glow stood the baron. Beside her stood Doc, his head thrown back defiantly, his gray-white hair wild. The squat form of Trumbo stood beside him, ostentatiously pointing a pump shotgun at the old man’s skull.
“Now that I’ve got your attention,” Sand called, “I’d wager you have a little something of mine. And it appears I have something of yours. I believe that forms the basis of a trade, wouldn’t you say?”
“Do not do it, Ryan!” Doc cried.
“You shut up!” Trumbo bellowed. He whacked Doc in the kidney with the butt of his scattergun.
Doc dropped to his knees with a groan Ryan could plainly hear.
“I meant to sacrifice myself that the others could escape,” Doc managed to say. “Leave me to my fate.”
“I’m not making any deals,” Ryan called back.
“Ryan!” Krysty exclaimed.
“What?” Baron Sand called out.
“It’s just a payday, Ryan!” Mildred exclaimed.
Ryan shook his head. “We worked hard for this,” he said. “And I don’t negotiate with hostage-takers.”
Krysty put a hand on his arm. “Ryan,” she said softly. Her eyes glinted with tears.
“Don’t worry, Krysty,” he said.
Then up at the cliffs he shouted, “I’m calling your bluff, Baron. You keep him awhile. I don’t reckon you’re the sort to chill for chilling’s sake. And you don’t strike me the sadistic type, either.”
Sand put her hands on her generous hips. “You presume much, Cawdor.”
“Always.”
For a moment she glowered down at him, then she seemed to deflate.
“For such short acquaintance, you know me too well. Very well. You win this round. Your friend will be safe—but he’s staying here with me.”
“What are you talking about?” Trumbo demanded hoarsely. “This old taint chilled some of my best men!”
Sand took a pinch of his cheek. “I pay your men handsomely to get thrown away,” she said. “I pay you even more handsomely to throw them away. And also—” she released his face, leaving him rubbing his cheek as if afraid she’d left marks “—I’ll thank you to watch throwing around those anti-mutant slurs. Some of my nearest and dearest might take offense.”
“This isn’t over, Cawdor!” Trumbo shouted down from the cliff.
“For once I agree with you,” Sand said.
“You’re both right,” Ryan called back calmly. “It isn’t.”
He turned away and led his friends off into the night.
* * *
“T
HEY
HAD
TO
have been warned, Ryan,” Mildred said. She was up front, though as usual Jak roved out on point, invisible now in the scrub. “They were all over us like white on rice the moment I threw the firefight simulator. We never had a chance.”
“We would’ve been overwhelmed,” Krysty agreed, “if Doc hadn’t told us to run while he stayed behind to hold them off.”
“We should never have run away,” Ricky said miserably.
Ryan frowned. He carried the metal box on his shoulder. It was heavy, and the edges dug into him uncomfortably.
Somehow he reckoned he didn’t have anything to complain about.
“Sure you should,” he said. “You did the right thing.”
“But...but Doc’s one of us!”
“And he still is, son,” J.B. said. He was walking alongside his protégé. “But you heard Baron Sand say she was going to treat him right.”
“And I believe she will,” Ryan stated.
“Seriously, Ryan?” Mildred asked in disbelief. “You, of all people—trusting a baron?”
“Ryan trusts barons to act according to their nature,” Krysty said.
“Right.”
“But isn’t it the nature of barons to be rapacious, sadistic and just plain evil?” Mildred demanded.
“Usually,” Ryan said.
His throat rasped. He took a canteen from his hip with his free hand. Krysty promptly took it out of his hand, unscrewed the cap and handed it back. He drank deeply with a grunt of gratitude.
“It’s not like I think Sand is straight,” he said. “Not at all. Just don’t reckon she’s bent that way.”
“Anyway,” J.B. said, “she can always chill Doc later if she changes her mind. What? Why are you looking at me like that, Mildred?”
“Stop reassuring us,” Mildred said.
“I think he means that’s actually a reason to take her at her word,” Krysty told her. “She always has that out in her mind. And, anyway, I agree with Ryan. I don’t think Sand’s a good person. But I don’t see her as that kind of bad.”
“Trumbo, though,” Mildred said, “is bad clean through.”
“Sand’s got him on a tight leash,” Ryan stated. “For now.”
“But what happens if he decides to chew through the damn leash? What if this is the final straw?”
“Isn’t that mixing metaphors?” Krysty asked.
“Got no more reason to presume it’ll happen this time than any other time before,” Ryan said. “Looked like that was an old familiar game for Sand and her sec boss. Anyway, I’m not talking about leaving Doc back there for a month-long vacation. We get back, get paid, take stock of the situation. Work out a plan to get the old man back.”
“A better plan,” J.B. suggested.
Ryan uttered a noise halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Better be, yeah.”
They walked along in silence except for the crunching of sandy soil under their boots. The breeze pushed gently at their backs.
“Anyway,” Ryan said eventually, “we’ve got a more immediate problem, the way I see it. Dark Lady has—”
Jak suddenly materialized out of the night, standing stock-still in front of them with a white hand upraised. He looked like a warning ghost.
“Listen,” he said in a soft voice.
J.B. and Ryan exchanged looks.
“Dark Lady has trouble, is what she got,” J.B. said. “That’s blasterfire.”
Ryan held up a hand for a halt. He could already tell J.B. had called it right.
The noise was like a woodpecker working up a far-off tree trunk. A
lot
of woodpeckers.
The lights of Amity Springs were plainly visible here. Ryan reckoned they were no more than a quarter mile from the wag yard on the west edge of the ville.
The shooting, he could tell now, came from the east.
“That’s the other side of town,” J.B. said, frowning in concentration. He took off his glasses and began to polish them.
Ryan thought he could see lights flash between buildings on the ville’s far side. And from the flats father along, the faint flicker of incoming fire.
“What now, lover?” Krysty asked.
“We earn ourselves a nice fat bonus,” Ryan said. “Come on.”
* * *
R
ICKY
RAN
HUNCHED
over. He clutched the fat barrel of his DeLisle with its built-in suppressor, which was slung muzzle-down across his back for quick access into firing position. He’d learned the trick from watching Ryan, to keep it from prodding his kidney painfully as he ran.
That did nothing to stop his lungs from feeling as if they were being torn out of his chest by handfuls with every gasping breath he heaved. After walking in Deathlands for months, he figured he should have been in better shape.
To their south the Flats flashed and crackled and boomed like a fireworks display. From the snarling of engines there were both motorcycles and motor wags in play. Evidently the Crazy Dogs were a well-equipped gang, which they surely hadn’t seen evidence of at that roadblock on their way into the Basin.
“You think...these are...the Crazy Dogs?” Ricky panted in rhythm to his slogging footsteps. They were traveling through some soft sand right now, which made it at least triple hard. Ricky hated walking in soft dust or sand. But it wasn’t as if the others loved it, either, so he’d learned to stop whining about it.
“Are you stupe, kid?” demanded Ryan, still churning in the rear. “Who else would it be, the Cub Scouts?”
Ricky didn’t get the reference, but the rebuke made his eyes sting almost as bad as his lungs did.
“I hope we’re in time,” Krysty said. She was running elbow-to-elbow with Ryan, and seemingly having no trouble with the footing at all.
“Fire’s going both ways,” J.B. said.
He was just moving along at his usual dog trot, as if nothing bothered him or ever would. His main concession was to hold his hat on his head with his left hand. The right held his Uzi by the pistol grip; apparently the M-4000 bouncing around on his back didn’t bother him.
“Ville folks seem to be giving good as they’re getting. And then some, mebbe.”
Strain as he could, Ricky couldn’t tell which way the fire was going by listening. All he could hear was that there was blasting—hard to miss unless you were deaf or dead.
“What’s the plan?” Mildred huffed.
Ryan raised his hand for the group to slow up.
Gratefully, Ricky did. He fought the urge to bend over and just stand there sucking wind.
“Automatic fire,” Mildred remarked at a sharp snarl. “These are some well-heeled coldhearts.”
“Full-auto’s not going all one way,” J.B. said. “Ryan?”
Ryan scratched his head and surveyed the scene to the south of them. To Ricky’s eyes it was confused. Mostly he saw lights moving left and right and getting brighter and fainter east of the ville, as if the machines that carried the Crazy Dogs were maneuvering. There was a stationary pool of brightness some distance away from Amity Springs.
“Wish we had something like cover here,” Ryan said. “As it is, we’re going to need to get closer through this scrub before we can calculate what to do. Or even whether to do anything.”
“Is it really our fight?” Mildred asked.
“After that little scene in the gaudy,” J.B. said, “looks like it’s ours whether we want it or not. Unless we just shake the dust of this whole Basin off our boot heels.”
“We’ll see,” Ryan said. “Follow me. Best to hunker down somewhere. It’s unlikely anybody’ll be looking this way, or even see much if they do. But it’s triple-stupe to take extra chances with that much lead in the air.”
He led them forward several hundred yards, then held up his hand in the signal to stop. Next was a signal for his companions to come up alongside him and go to ground. But not spread out.
Ricky was almost sure. The hand signals the group used for silent comms were simple and straightforward. Still, he was deathly afraid of screwing up and endangering his new family.
Holding his carbine unslung in front of him, he duck-walked forward to join the group nucleated on Ryan. The tall curly haired man had his single eye pressed to the eyepiece of his Navy longeye.
Ricky could make out the gist of what was going on. For whatever reason the scrub petered out a couple hundred yards from the road, both to the north and south.
From Amity Springs in the west flickered the flames of a number of blasters. They were widely spaced in a ville that looked darker than usual. The shots came sparsely now, although he did see a brief burst of automatic-weapon fire. A moment later the reports hit his ears with surprising force.
That’s at least a .308 there, he thought in surprise.
“I’d say our friends in Amity Springs are the ones who are surprisingly well-heeled,” Krysty remarked, squatting at Ryan’s side.
She had her right hand on the cool ground, her fingers splayed, as if to support herself. Ricky knew she had perfect balance; it was a gesture he’d seen her use frequently, though. As if she liked or even needed to reaffirm her connection with the Earth, to which she felt a mystic affinity.
“I seem to recall hearing something about them finding the armory for the predark lab they built on,” J.B. said.
“Plus this may be where a lot of the proceeds of selling their scavvy goes,” Ryan said without looking away from his target.