He seemed to have fixed on the unmoving glow east up the road from the ville. With his unaided eye Ricky could see there were a couple wags parked with their headlights on, aimed toward Amity Springs. He saw dark figures moving around the vehicles; they were smart enough to stay out of the lights.
“Why haven’t the ville people shot out the headlights?” Ricky asked.
“Long shot,” Mildred said.
“Likely they’re just as happy for the coldhearts to keep silhouetting themselves against them,” Ryan said.
A number of bikes and open-topped wags were driving between the parked wags and the ville. Counting multiple occupants in the wags, Ricky guessed there had to be at least a hundred of the coldhearts. At first he thought they were burning gas and rubber to no purpose, then he picked out the pattern.
They kept moving to make themselves harder targets. Every once in a while one or a group would make a run right at the ville. They’d open up and then turn away and scoot back from the inevitable return fire.
“What do you see, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
“The bastards are playing it cagey,” he said. “But I reckon Diego isn’t missing this little party. And if he’s anywhere, he’s there.”
He passed the Navy longeye to J.B. and unslung his longblaster.
“And if I chill him,” Ryan said, “could be the Crazy Dogs might have a change of heart about messing with the people of Nukem Flats, and move on in search of greener pastures.”
“Seems like a long shot,” Mildred said. “You’re not usually guilty of wishful thinking, Ryan.”
J.B. chuckled. “Nor is he now. If nothing else it’ll disorganize the bastards plenty.”
Ryan popped off the caps that protected the lenses at both ends of his longeye-relief Leupold scope and stashed them in a pocket. Then he raised the longblaster, turned the handle and opened the bolt just enough to confirm the chamber was loaded.
“Anything gives us an edge,” he said, closing the bolt and locking it again, “I like. So here’s how—”
“Ryan,” Krysty said, her voice urgent and low.
She pointed toward the ville. A mixed group of bikes and wags, about half a dozen in all, had converged on a point on the road perhaps fifty yards from the town. Yet no shots were being fired at them.
Their behavior reminded Ricky, unpleasantly, of swarming wasps.
And then a single headlight, mounted on a bike like a giant staring eye, swept across a solitary female figure, walking the road toward the parked coldheart wags.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Isn’t that Lucy from the Library Lounge?” Mildred asked. She was peering through Ryan’s longeye.
Kneeling, Ryan shouldered the Steyr and swung it south. “Fireblast!” he exclaimed.
It was Lucy. She still wore her finery from the Library Lounge: tight bodice and short flouncy skirt. With his scope dialed up to full power, it still didn’t give triple-good detail at his range, which he estimated as 250 to 300 yards. Had it not been for the shine of the parked wags, and the headlight glow from the wags and bikes full of jeering Crazy Dogs orbiting her, he wouldn’t have been able to identify Dark Lady’s star entertainer.
The gaudy slut walked with head down and shoulders slumped, ignoring the jeers of the coldhearts. Her feet were bare, or perhaps in stockings, which would’ve been well-ruined at this point. She seemed determined to walk that road, no matter what.
A bike swerved close to her. Either its fat gas tank or the rider’s knee brushed her hip. She stumbled.
“Back off, dickholes!”
Ryan swung his scope back around to focus on the parked wags. A man stood there with a microphone to his face. Ryan reckoned sound gear in one of the wags had amplified and broadcast the command in his harsh whiskey baritone. Far enough, no doubt, to be heard by the defenders in Amity Springs. If not clear to the Library Lounge.
The vehicles sheered away from the lone walking woman. They continued to dart at her, and their occupants kept jeering and shrieking obscene abuse.
“Take the shot, Ryan!” Mildred hissed. “Blast the bastard! What’re you waiting for?”
“I want to see what the nuke this is all about,” Ryan said. “Could be important.”
He focused his scope on the man. He could make out a tall, powerful frame dressed all in black, with wide shoulders and a visible paunch lopping over the belt of his tight black pants. He had a rough-hewn handsomeness to him: a brutal long-rectangle of a face, well-busted hawk nose, and bushy black brows over squinty eyes. His mustache swept down either side of his mouth onto his jut of a chin. His hairline receded to a black brush on top; the sides and presumably the back hung to the shoulders of his black leather jacket.
“A mullet?” Mildred murmured. “Jeez, I hate that that shit came back.”
He was flanked by a pair of big guys, a man with a fist of a face and a shock of brown hair, and on the far side, his left, by a bald man with an impressive reddish beard spreading over an even more imposing belly. The nearer wag was parked so that its front end obscured the lower bodies of the coldheart chieftain and his companions.
“So what’s the deal, Lucy?” Diego demanded in his booming god-voice. “Or did you forget we had one?”
She had made it halfway between the outskirts and the parked wags. Turning his blaster west to look at her, Ryan was impressed with her fortitude and courage, if not her sense.
“Yes,” she screamed. “We had a deal! You said nobody would get hurt!”
“We lied,” Diego said. “It’s just politics. You make a piss-poor omelet if you don’t break the bastard eggs.”
“What about my daughter! Give her back to me! You said you would if I did what you told me!”
“Well, see, there’s a problem with that. She’s dead. Had a bout of cholera come through. She wasn’t tough enough for the Deathlands. Sorry. That’s just Darwin, you know? But mebbe if you ask double nice I’ll help you get started in on cooking up a new one.”
“You bastard! I’ll see you in Hell!” Her face twisting in rage, she began to run forward, heedless of the vehicles circling her like sharks in bloody water.
“Mebbe,” Diego said, “but you’ll get there first. Such a waste.”
He had to have made some signal. Ryan saw something flicker from a bike that passed close behind the running Lucy. Something thin passed in front of her face, then she was yanked backward off her feet as the motorcycle wheeled and accelerated back toward Amity Springs.
A lariat, he realized.
“Right,” he said, not bothering to keep his voice down for the noise. “Spread out either side of me. I’ll start the show.”
“What’s your plan, lover?” Krysty asked, her voice curdled with rage.
“We’re going to beat the bastards so hard they leave. Keep them off me, and stay alive. Jak, you guard my back.”
He had taken his face away from the scope to look at the others as he gave his instructions. Jak flourished his paired leaf-bladed knives and grinned. The others slipped into position lying prone in the brush to Ryan’s left and right.
“Here we go,” Ryan said.
He put his eye behind the glass and lined up on Diego. He aimed for the chest. The head was too dicey a target. It moved around too much, especially since the bastard kept turning left and right to joke with his crew. If the coldheart’s arm got in the way, the jacketed 7.62 mm slug wouldn’t much mind, as long as it hit a bone that would flatten it or make it tumble. And that’d just blast a bigger wound channel through his body.
Ryan breathed in deeply, let half the breath go, caught it. His finger squeezed the trigger. The Scout roared and bucked.
Even before recoil kicked the scope upward, Ryan knew he’d missed the shot. For some triple-bad luck reason the coldheart boss had leaned back, twisting his head to talk to somebody behind him even as the trigger broke.
He still followed through properly, throwing the bolt even as the carbine’s rise peaked, riding the recoil and expertly bringing the longblaster and scope down to almost precisely where they’d been when he’d taken the shot.
The red-bearded bull of a man was still in the act of crumpling against the pickup truck to his left. Diego had his head turned toward him. His right arm reached to his waist, undoubtedly to draw a blaster. Much good that’d do him at this range.
Ryan fired again. This time the guard to Diego’s left turned to face Ryan, bringing up a handblaster of his own. Diego was already throwing himself back. No doubt the sound of the first shot had just reached his ears. The second bullet hit the lesser Crazy Dog in the left shoulder, staggering him.
Mostly out of frustration, Ryan lined up and shot again. The brown-haired top of the man’s head blew off. Behind him the red-bearded guy threw up both hands and sank out of sight. Apparently the blow-through nailed him a second time.
Of Diego there was no sign. Ryan carefully scanned the two wags. The Crazy Dogs’ boss was still the ace target.
Headlights played across Ryan’s face. He ignored them, as he did the sounds of engines getting louder and higher.
Around him he heard his friends begin to fire as the parked wags’ lights went out.
* * *
A
RAGGED
SKIRMISH
line of bikes and one wag rolled toward the party. Krysty held her Smith & Wesson 640 straight out in front of her in both hands, cursing the fact the snub-nosed .38 didn’t have much range.
At the far left end of the line, where Ricky had taken up position beyond Mildred, a biker abruptly slid from the saddle of his machine. It veered promptly to the left, causing another to have to swerve violently to avoid being taken down by the unpiloted machine. Krysty had heard no shot from her vicinity. That meant Ricky had blasted the coldheart with his whisper-silent carbine.
To her right J.B. reared up on his knees. He cut loose with the Uzi held by his side. He ripped off three short but brutal bursts, two to four shots—Krysty couldn’t be sure.
Two bikers went down. One was enveloped immediately in a yellow flower of flame not forty yards from Ryan’s firing line. The other bikers faltered and turned away from the unexpected firepower of their still-hidden opposition. A couple turned back.
“What the nuke do you think you’re doing?” Krysty heard Diego roar. “Get back after them, you chicken guts! Or you’ll wish you’d taken a burst in your bellies when I’m peeling off your yellow hides in inch-wide strips!”
The wag, which was stripped down to frame and roll-bar with engine exposed, kept onward. It had followed the first line of bikes by about twenty yards. A man stood beside the driver with long hair streaming, firing a small semiauto longblaster with sharp reports over the raggedly padded bar.
Suddenly the goggled driver’s head lolled aside. In front of it a starred hole had appeared in the windshield. The wag slowed to a stop as the dead coldheart’s foot slid off the gas pedal.
The shooter looked down in consternation. Then he howled and doubled up in response to a sharp blast from Ryan’s left. Krysty realized Mildred, the crack handblaster shot, had expressed her opinion of these Crazy Dogs by shooting the rifleman squarely in the nuts.
Whipped by their leader’s chilling words, the other fifteen or so riders turned and accelerated toward Ryan and the companions once more. Krysty held down on the closest and waited for the Mohawked woman leaning her goggled face low over her handlebars to get in range.
Krysty felt no more compunction about blasting a female enemy than Ryan or J.B. did. Only Ricky seemed still to hesitate. Even Doc, raised to the mores of a more courtly day, had gotten used to the bitter reality of chill or be chilled.
Krysty had heard the force of personality in Diego’s voice, and, in a way, could understand how Lucy had become caught up in all of this. She realized that no one went to work on her back without being broken in some pretty basic ways.
Lucy was a lost soul, lost by Deathlands standards. She had little to rely on but her looks and wits. She knew that one was a wasting asset and the other an uncertain shield against the brute force of a face punch by a man with greater strength than her body could support. To survive for her meant cultivating a powerful will to believe—and a sense of denial.
The former had actually served her well when she happened to end up at the Library Lounge. She’d bought in to Dark Lady’s vision and found shelter and redemption. But that very willingness coupled with denial had already betrayed Lucy, it seemed. It was clear as new ice to Krysty that the woman had been sent as a spy into Amity Springs not by Baron Sand, but by the force-of-nature bravo who ruled the Crazy Dogs.
She became aware that Ryan was shooting toward the parked wags again. He fire-aimed measured shots, trusting his companions to shield him from the Dogs as he was lost in the glass, as he sometimes put it. She fervently hoped his bullets would find and chill Diego. But she doubted they would. For all of Ryan’s skill, at this point the coldheart boss held all the cards: distance, night and cover. And clearly he had a coyote’s gift of sheer survival.
The attack in front of Krysty had slowed like an old-days vid. The angry snarl of engines rose around her as if out of the Earth herself. The biker woman’s face grew large over the nubbed front sight of Krysty’s 640. She squeezed the trigger.
She saw blood spray out behind the hair-crested head. The front tire turned sideways and the motorcycle somersaulted. The rider was flipped, limbs sprawling, end over end through the air to land not ten feet in front of Krysty.
She winced in unwilling sympathy as the woman’s body hit. She was already seeking other targets, blasting at roaring, moving shadows. She heard J.B.’s machine pistol shredding the air, saw falling tangles of limbs and hair and mechanism. Another bonfire burst to life not twenty feet from their position, with at its core a flailing figure, pinned under a burning motorcycle’s weight, which flailed and shrieked intolerably until a stray bullet ended the suffering.
The bikes were almost on top of them. Krysty blasted a shaved-headed male rider in the chest, then ducked as his riderless machine roared past. Her piece empty, she hugged the ground and reached into a pocket for a speed-loader.
She saw a rider with upraised hatchet ride down on Ryan, who still ignored the near anger for far targets with a courageous resolve that even in this heart-crushing crisis thrilled Krysty with pride. J.B., his Uzi’s 30-round magazine exhausted, grabbed up his M-4000 and blasted the hatchet man, whose blaster arm exploded away from his shoulder in a black splash of blood. He shrieked and rolled through the line, steering his heavy machine with his remaining hand by sheer reflex, as the life pumped out of his body from severed arteries.
Another bike, coming at high speed from behind to join the attackers, hit a clump in the mostly flat ground off to Krysty’s left and soared into the air. Its engine rose in pitch as the driving rear tire free-wheeled.
Krysty heard what she had learned to recognize as the bang of Ricky’s antique Webley handblaster, which fired the same .45 slugs as his DeLisle. The flying motorcycle suddenly burst into flames.
The rider let go of the handlebars to bat at the flames as his ride flew over Ricky’s ducking head, but his leather-jacketed arms were already wings of searing orange flame. The bike’s front dropped before it hit ground. It slammed its several hundred pounds of metal mass right down onto the burning man before bouncing away, drawing crazy trails of firelight in the night.
Its rider didn’t flop and scream the way the first man did. In Krysty’s peripheral vision blasterfire flashed off to the west, toward the ville. As the distinctive sound of fully automatic weapons as well as the booms of single shots reached her ears, she realized some of the Amity Springs defenders had to be skirmishing forward to take advantage of the surprise flank attack by Ryan and the others.
She had no time to think about that, far less to confirm her flash impression. A wave of noise enveloped her. A hunchbacked, malevolent shadow grew huge, right in front of her face, which hung just above the sweet-smelling soil.
A motorcycle rushed by Krysty to the right, so close she had to roll to her left to avoid its flesh-ripping tires. It immediately slewed broadside, expertly halted by its rider as its big tires dug deep into soft soil. The Crazy Dog, grinning beneath goggles and a topknot hanging over the left side of his face, raised a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun to point at Krysty.
“You lose,” he said.
But with presence of mind even Ryan couldn’t better, Krysty had slammed the snub-nosed revolver’s cylinder shut on a fresh load of five .38 Special cartridges even as she dodged the burly bike. From her back she held both arms out straight and blasted all five rounds into the coldheart.