“Sand would never do that. She knows what it would mean for her people. For
her
. She’d no more submit to an animal like Diego than would I. She’s been betrayed herself.”
“None of that loads any blasters for us,” Ryan said. He lowered the longeye again and took up his longblaster. “These bastards aren’t bulletproof.”
He raised the Steyr and began to scan for targets. Men strode on foot to either side of the massive dozer. They trotted, their weapons across their chests. The machine itself moved at no more than a few miles an hour.
Before he could pick a target, a yellow flare flickered.
Wood splintered to thudding impacts. Somebody screamed.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Baron Sand shot to her feet.
“What in the name of sweet, sweaty
fuck
are you talking about?”
“See, Baron,” Trumbo said with a triumphant smirk, “there’s been a slight change in administration of this barony. Grab her, boys!”
Andrews and Donaldson grabbed Doc by the arms. Lobo came away from his station by the painting. He moved with alacrity surprising for his mass of bone and brawn. He seized Baron Sand from her chair and picked her up as if she were a four-year-old girl.
“No!”
Mystery screamed. He launched himself at the stolid giant, fingers clawed as if to gouge out his dark Indian eyes.
A shattering blast erupted from the side door. The retainer spun, a look of surprise in his wide kohl-rimmed eyes. Then he slumped to the floor. His blood added a new, darker stain to the hues of an ancient throw rug already discolored by various exudations.
Another of Sand’s courtiers, a frail woman with short black hair named Gayle, fell to the floor flopping and shrieking behind Mystery.
An immense handblaster, glinting chrome, protruded through the beaded strands that covered the side door. A thread of blue smoke trailed upward from its muzzle. It pushed through, followed by a man so tall he had to bend to clear the arched top with the brush of thick black hair atop his head.
To the sides of his dark face the hair hung like glossy raven-wing curtains to broad shoulders. He grinned with rotten teeth through an extravagant handlebar mustache.
“Diego!” Baron Sand exclaimed.
“Right in one,” the Crazy Dog chieftain said. “Did you miss me?”
“I haven’t shot at you yet,” Sand said frostily. “An oversight I will certainly correct.”
“Yeah,” Diego said with a laugh. “Hold that thought. And you—”
The last was an aside to one of several sec men who had entered the room when Lobo grabbed the baron.
“Shut her up.”
The man looked at Trumbo. Trumbo flicked his eyes at Diego. He licked his fat lips, then nodded.
The man withdrew a handblaster and shot the woman, who lay on her side curled up in a knot of pain around her stomach or possibly pelvis, in the side of the head. The flash briefly filled the room, along with a shattering noise that seemed to make the windows bulge outward. The air, which was already thick with musk and hemp and incense smoke, took on a ripe reek of spilled bowels.
Trumbo stared at the chill for a moment. A trickle of sweat ran down his fat face from his receding hairline.
Sand tossed her short hair back from her face.
“So the worm turns,” she said, sneering. “How could you do this to me, Trumbo?”
He covered his face in his meaty hands. “I did it all for love of you, my lady!” he sobbed.
“Really?” She cocked an arch brow. “Well, that’s rather sweet. If cloyingly sentimental and somewhat trite.”
“No,” Trumbo said, raising his face and grinning. His eyes and cheeks were dry and showed no sign of weeping. “I’m lying. I hate you. And I want to watch you die!
“But first, I want you to
suffer
. I’m going to make you watch while I torture, defile and break all your pretty play toys.”
She yawned ostentatiously. “Be my guest,” she said. “I’ve grown bored with them, anyway.”
Some of her retainers, pressed against the walls in fright, registered shock at the baron’s attitude. Especially with Mystery lying dead or dying heroically, if not effectually, at her very feet.
“No time now,” Trumbo said, rubbing a cheek and glancing at Diego.
The coldheart lord stood by watching silently and sneering. The sounds of his followers’ rides was very loud. Doc, who had been yanked rudely to his feet next to the baron, reckoned Diego had to be bringing his whole force into Joker Creek.
“Now’s the time to go put wood to that tight-ass Dark Lady,” Trumbo said. “If she survives long enough to get hauled back here, mebbe her ass won’t be so tight anymore. Leastways, not when me and the boys are done with it. And you—”
He shot Doc a bloodshot glare of hate.
“I owe your friends, too. Not forgetting about them.”
He signaled some of his men. “Donaldson. Andrews. Like I told you, lead the group to the Springs with the chill dozer. Time for me and my man Diego to start consolidating our hold here.”
“No,” Diego said.
Trumbo gaped at him. “Huh?”
“You go,” Diego said. “Take who you want. I’ll send some of my wags along—the sound setup and the dozer should come in double handy.”
“What about Joker Creek?”
“I can take care of the situation here.”
Trumbo went red. He tried to cover his apparent shock and dismay with bluster. “What are you trying to pull? We had a deal—”
The room was full of Trumbo’s blasters. Diego was here on his lonesome. But the tall, powerfully built coldheart was on the sec boss in a long-legged stride and grabbing him by the throat with one hand.
“Yeah,” he said. “The deal was, you got to run this place. But I run the whole nuking Basin. When it comes to Nukem Flats, I am the President-King-God-Emperor. So you’ll do what I tell you to and never talk back again. Ace?”
“Ace,” Trumbo croaked.
“Fine.” Diego let go of Trumbo and turned to face his sec men.
“Anybody got questions about the chain of command?” he asked.
He gestured with the immense shiny silver handblaster in his left hand. Doc thought he recognized a Desert Eagle, a late-twentieth-century semiautomatic blaster designed to fire cartridges normally too powerful for such actions, such as .357 and .44 Magnum and something called .50 AE. Doc had run across a few of them before. The Armorer said they were good pieces, well-designed and solidly made. But he’d also said they were so heavy only a stupe would carry one, when for only a trifle more weight one could pack a lightweight carbine like the M-4.
Doc suspected Diego didn’t do a lot of long hiking. And that he was mindful of making a strong first impression. He certainly had on Doc.
“Enough bullshit,” Diego said. “Get the dozer and get your ass gone.”
Trumbo went out the side door with the sec men he’d called out trooping after. Lobo handed the baron off to a couple of others and walked after his boss.
“What will you do now?” Sand demanded.
Diego gave her a raised eyebrow. For a moment Doc feared he meant to strike her.
Then he grinned. From the way Sand blanched, Doc suspected she actually would’ve preferred the blow.
“I’m gonna tell my boys and girls what someone told me the great conqueror Genghis Khan once said, ‘The hay is cut; give your horses fodder.’”
He laughed at the unalloyed horror of her reaction.
“See, we’ve been working a long, hard time trying to pry out a toehold in this valley,” he said. “I reckon everybody has worked up quite a head of steam to blow off. Plus it should serve to cut the ice, you know? Get everyone acquainted double-good. And get your people so they know their rad-blasted
place
.”
He waved the blaster. “You heard the fat man,” he snarled at the remaining sec men. “Get the bitch and the beanpole out of here. We’ll sort their asses out later. After we get done with the prime stuff!”
* * *
W
HEN
THE
DOOR
to Sand’s bedroom was locked from the outside, the baron turned to Doc and collapsed in his arms. For all his wiry strength, which had surprised so many others—some lethally—he barely managed to avoid collapsing under her not inconsiderable weight. As it was, he sagged lamentably at the knees and felt something twinge in his back.
“I’m so sorry!” She wept into his shoulder. “I tried to save you. I tried to save everybody. And instead I just got poor Mystery and Gayle killed!”
He got her turned so he could brace his back against the door to help hold them up. As he did, he felt her straighten her knees, taking up her own weight again. Still she clung to him and wept inconsolably while he stroked her short hair and wondered what to do.
“Now it’s all gone to pieces,” she moaned.
“Still,” he said, “we live. And where life is, is also hope.”
She pulled back and smiled at him faintly from a puffy tear-sheened face.
“Really? That’s pretty trite too. Yet there’s a certain daffy sincerity when you say it.”
“Believe me, dear lady, it is based upon experience,” he said.
She took in a deep breath and sighed.
“Well,” she said. “Nothing we can do now.”
She turned away from him and rested the back of her head against the door.
“We’ll just have to wait our chance.”
* * *
“M
ACHINE
GUN
!”
J.B. shouted. “Get to cover!”
Crouched behind the wag to the right, and hoping the kegs inside it were full of nails or something else that would slow a machine-gun bullet, Ryan looked left. A townie lay in the dirt past the other wag’s far end, kicking and clutching himself and howling. A couple of people dragged him back into cover of the wag.
Mildred crouched behind the wag, over the prone body of a young woman in a flannel shirt and jeans. The woman had her face turned toward Ryan. He recognized Ruby, one of the handfuls of Dark Lady’s employees whose name he’d retained.
Her amber eyes stared at him. From the small dark spot above her right one he reckoned she didn’t see him. Mildred glanced at him and shook her head sadly.
Another burst rocked the wag. Ryan clenched his jaw as a bullet cracked right over his head.
When it cut off, he came back over the top and leveled his longblaster. He got a flash sight through the scope on the blaster wag, and fired. He missed, but as he brought the weapon back down he saw the gunner duck behind the tailgate.
It wouldn’t stop one of Ryan’s 7.62 mm slugs. But he didn’t dare waste a shot on a target he couldn’t see. Instead, having bought himself a few heartbeats to aim with, he shifted the field of view to his left.
The loader had also flinched from the bullet, wherever it hit. But he hadn’t hidden fully the way the gunner had. Ryan lined up a shot on the dark blur of his head as somewhere to his left Sinclair let loose a burst from his BAR.
Even as he triggered the shot Ryan saw the gunner start to rise. With machine precision he jacked the action and brought the Scout back down onto line.
The loader was falling, shooting a fan of dark spray from what had to be a blown-out carotid. But at the edge of his circle of vision Ryan also saw the gunner hunched behind the butt-stock of his M-60.
There was no time to line up another shot. Even as he ducked behind the rear wheel of his sheltering wag, his glass lit with the garish yellow flame of the big blaster.
The Crazy Dog kept spraying until Ryan reckoned he meant to just saw right in through to him. Fortunately what was weighting down the wag bed did stop the bullets. Most of them—at least the ones that would’ve hit Ryan, although he did wince a bit as one ripped out through wood about eight inches to the left of his head.
“Keep it up, prick,” he muttered. “Burn out that barrel.” Even if the Dogs had a spare it would take several minutes to change. That was one of many flaws of the M-60 design; it lacked a true quick-change barrel.
The bullet stream cut off.
“Burned the barrel,” Ryan heard J.B. call in satisfaction. “Stupe.”
Ryan moved to the end of the wag before poking his blaster back around. As he did, he swapped in a new 10-round mag. The old one still had two cartridges left, if he counted true. But experience had taught him even the coolest head didn’t always count straight when the bullets were flying—and never to pass up a chance to reload.
He saw the gunner hammering in rage on his piece even before he got the scope to his eye. Unfortunately the bulk of the slowly advancing bulldozer promptly blocked his view.
Ryan glanced around. A kid had just rolled up a wheelbarrow from somewhere. Defenders were wrestling the still-thrashing wounded man onto it. With nothing better to do, Mildred was overseeing.
“Dark Lady,” Sinclair called as he swapped mags in his big automatic longblaster. “Are you sure you want to do this? Can’t we at least talk to them?”
Behind the other wag Dark Lady stood looking grim. “No,” she said.
She gestured toward the screaming man. “Bring him,” she said, turning to walk back up the street toward the center of the ville and the Lounge.
“Wait,” Sinclair called. “Where the nuke do you think you’re going? You running out on us?”
The half light streaming up the street silhouetted her slim shape. Ryan saw her shoulders twitch as if she’d taken a bullet. She stopped.
“You won’t stop them,” Dark Lady said flatly, turning. A burly male entertainer from the Lounge continued wheeling the barrow, while a sturdy townswoman walked alongside trying to keep the still-thrashing and wailing occupant from turning it over. “Not even the highly resourceful Mr. Cawdor and friends. You won’t even hold them long. I’m going to go prepare the inner defenses.”
“What good will that do, if we can’t slow them down?” Mildred demanded.
Dark Lady showed the ghost of a smile.
“I believe I have a few surprises for our enemies,” she said. “Perhaps Mr. Dix and young Mr. Morales might accompany me? I have some items they may find useful.”
“She’s right,” J.B. said. He hefted his Uzi. “We might as well be waving our di— That is, might as well be chucking rocks at that big bastard.”
He nodded toward the bulldozer, still several hundred yards off but inexorably advancing. The Crazy Dogs and their Joker Creek sec men allies were sheltering behind it.
“Then go,” Ryan ordered.
“Ryan,” Mildred said, “do you trust her?”
“You got a better idea? No? Then shut it.”
“Here they come!” screamed the boy who’d brought the wheelbarrow.
Ryan looked back around the end of the wag.
A dozen motorcycles and at least three wags had appeared to the left and right of the monster machine. Winging out to either side, they accelerated toward Amity Springs.
Yellow flames danced in the mouths of coldheart blasters.