Chapter One
“We’re here to bring order to this here lawless valley,” the rangy man with the greasy blue bandanna tied around his head declared. “We’re here to save you from the prevailing anarchy.”
“Nice work,” J. B. Dix said.
Ignoring the drama playing out not fifty yards from Ryan Cawdor and his companions, he nodded and waved the apple he’d just taken out of his pack at the covered wag stopped at the crude barricade across the dirt road. It was little more than a pair of ruts, cut by wag wheels and deepened by wind and occasional rains.
Very
occasional, if Ryan was any judge.
“Looks like they scavvied motor wag springs for the suspension,” the Armorer went on. He was a slight man who always wore a scuffed and battered brown leather jacket, along with the hat and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles.
The occupants of the wag had dismounted onto the road to stand facing the four coldhearts, except for the driver, who still sat in the box behind the four-mule team that pulled it. He was a Mex-looking kid, not too unlike Ricky, and seemingly much younger than the rest despite the fact he wore a spade beard the way the other two males did.
The one confronting the coldhearts with hands on broad apron and long-skirt-covered hips was a matronly woman with a scarf tied over her head. Ryan couldn’t see her hair color from behind, as he led his small group trooping along the road behind the stopped wag. But from her sturdy build, her voice, and her manner, he guessed she was well into middle age.
“What do you mean by blocking our progress, young man?” the woman demanded.
“It costs to bring the power of government to do good to this benighted Basin,” the blue bandanna man declared. “So we’ll need to know whatcha got in the wag so’s we can assess the proper fees.”
Ryan steered left around the stoppage. The road led down between dwindling hills from bare mountains to the east. A stream ran down the right side. It apparently provided irrigation for a number of farms, since Ryan’s one blue eye could make out broad green swatches against the tan of the broad, flat, hill-ringed Basin below and in front of them.
By habit the companions spread out into a loose vee formation when they left the road, such as it was. J. B. Dix and Doc Tanner walked behind Ryan, then Krysty Wroth and Mildred Wyeth. Bringing up the rear came Jak Lauren and the newest member of the crew, Ricky Morales. None of them had weapons in their hands. Yet.
But as they started over the dusty clumps of bunch-grass beside the road, one of the three coldhearts standing behind the barricade while their leader argued with the matron spotted them.
“Hey!” he shouted. “What the nuke do you think you’re doing?”
“Walking,” Ryan replied. “Minding our own business.”
Blue Bandanna fixed a furious glare on them. He had a bristling red beard and an often-broken nose. He put fists on hips and made no move for his holstered handblaster.
His three pals promptly aimed their longblasters at Ryan.
“That’s not neighborly, pointing those things like that,” he said calmly. “A move like that’s liable to be taken as unfriendly.”
He kept walking as if nothing was happening, crossing the clumpy ground to pass wide of the barrier, which consisted mostly of a wood beam like an old telephone pole propped across some obviously weighted-down oil drums. The three coldhearts tracked them with their remade blasters.
“In the name of Diego and the Crazy Dogs, I’m placing you under arrest!” Blue Bandanna yelled. And Ryan could just envision spittle flying from his mouth.
“Your funeral,” Ryan said.
He sensed quick motion from behind and to his right. Something arced against the painfully blue sky, heading toward the roadblock.
“Down!”
he shouted.
Following his own command, Ryan threw himself forward with his face in a clump of grama. His well-stuffed backpack landed on his back like a full-grown man. He had already been hauling up his Steyr Scout longblaster, which rode his back barrel-down on its sling.
The wag driver screeched, “Gren!” and cowered on the driver’s box. The quartet of coldhearts stared up at the round, dark object descending toward them with terrible purpose.
Then they scattered as if a bomb had already burst among them.
Ryan was watching over the ghost ring sights of his carbine, beneath the longeye-relief Leupold Scout scope when what the dark-skinned kid had called out as a gren bounced once off the hard-packed road dirt and rolled out of sight.
The three spade-bearded men from the wag had also bit the dust. Only the stout woman stood, her hands on double-wide hips, shaking her head at these goings-on.
“Come up with your hands empty and in the air and we’ll all walk away from this nonsense without any more holes in our carcasses,” Ryan called.
“Fuck you, nuke-suckers!” screamed the coldheart leader. He reared up with a battered .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson blaster in hand.
Ryan’s longblaster roared and kicked his shoulder with its butt. When he brought the weapon back online from the recoil, the action was jacked and a fresh 7.62 mm cartridge from the 10-round detachable box magazine was locked up tight in the chamber. He saw a deeper red patch dead center of the boss coldheart’s sun-faded red plaid shirt. A cloud of red spray hung in the air behind him. He sort of folded back into it, lying back on his own calves. His heavy blaster dropped from lifeless fingers.
A second coldheart, the bearded, hang-bellied one who’d spotted them, came up roaring and blasting shots from a lever-action carbine at his waist. How he expected to hit anything like that, a good twenty-five yards from his nearest target who was lying in cover and was in fact Ryan, was a mystery to the one-eyed man. He shifted his body to twist his aim onto the Crazy Dog to take him down before he got lucky.
Then the man’s head jerked back. He had a new dark eye over his right one. Another dark cloud appeared behind him. He seemed to melt straight to the grass as if his skeleton had dissolved instantaneously.
The other two coldhearts had leaped to their feet, as well. But they were rabbiting off across the lumpy grassland as fast as their boots would carry them.
“Show off, Mildred,” Ryan said. He got to his feet, still holding the Scout to his shoulder and pointed more or less at the fleeing Crazy Dogs. There was a chance, however hair-slim, one of them would suddenly change his mind and want to turn and fight.
Ryan had not kept dirt from hitting him in the eye, nor kept his motley band of friends from such a fate, by taking chances. Even slim ones. When they were avoidable, anyway.
“It worked,” Mildred said.
The coldhearts were already bounding dots in the distance, like fleas on a bunched-up blanket. Ryan lowered his Scout but didn’t sling it as he walked up to the wag.
The menfolk were picking themselves up off the ruts, dusting off their homespun shirts and canvas pants, retrieving their hats and trying not to look sheepish. They failed miserably.
The matron watched Ryan approach without favor.
“Menfolk,” she declared. She didn’t spit, but she might as well have.
“You’re welcome, ma’am,” Ryan said. “What’s your story?”
“Those ruffians were trying to hold us up!” stated the tallest of the menfolk. He was a spindly sort, with a thin nose and long upper lip over a sand-colored beard, and a pair of round glasses perched in front of squinty blue eyes. “They were pretending to be the duly constituted authorities. An outrage.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “I kind of gathered that.”
He turned his own single blue eye to the woman. He calculated she was the one in charge. She certainly showed the most presence of mind, if not the most ace sort of judgment.
“We were perfectly capable of handling the situation on our own, young man,” she said. She had round cheeks reddened by weather, and small, hard brown eyes. He couldn’t see her hair for the scarf; her brows were brown. “I was preparing to reason with those people.”
“Coldhearts behind leveled blasters don’t see much need for reason,” J.B. said from behind the barricade. He had his backpack off, his M-4000 shotgun slung, and his Uzi in one hand.
He stopped and with his free hand picked up the apple, still unbitten, which he had hurled at the coldhearts. Straightening, he examined it through his glasses, dusted it off on his shirt and bit into it with a crunch.
“That’s the way it is,” Ryan agreed.
“And what are your intentions?” Hands on hips, fierce brows furrowed, she swept the gathered group with an almost tangible glare of disapproval. “Do
you
plan to rob us? Or worse? I warn you, I shall sell my chastity dearly.”
“We intend no harm to you, madam,” said Doc, whose courtly nineteenth-century manners seemed to defrost the stout woman’s expression by half a degree or so.
“Your appearance is certainly not reassuring,” she said. “An assemblage of scruffy ruffians, old men, a mutie, women who seem to be no better than they need to be, and a beardless boy, all apparently led by a starved-looking wolf of a man with a most unholy gleam in his one good eye.”
“Well,” Mildred said from behind Ryan, “you can’t really argue with her assessment.”
Ryan smiled. They were a double-strange looking lot, even for the Deathlands: a twentieth-century physician, who was a sturdily built black woman with her hair worked in beaded plaits; a knockout redhead; a seeming doddering wrinklie; a little, deceptively harmless-looking dude in a hat and a battered jacket; and a round-faced Latino kid. He was glad Jak was hanging back and keeping his blood-colored eyes skinned for more trouble—not really listening to the exchange, for such didn’t interest him. He was an albino, and tended to take vehement exception to being called a mutie. Ryan didn’t contradict the woman, though. They did have a mutie in the bunch. It just wasn’t the one any outsider would think.
And he himself, he knew, was a somewhat daunting specimen: tall and lean in his faded jeans and long coat, with a shag of curly hair as shiny black as a raven’s wing, and one keen blue eye set deep in a craggy face with a black patch over the left eye socket and a brow-to-jaw scar that ran across it.
He also knew that, in all honesty, he was as scary as he looked. But he truly meant this group of people no harm.
“What do you know about this bunch?” he asked with a sideways nod at the two coldhearts who were currently cooling to ambient temperature.
“I believe they identified themselves in your hearing as Crazy Dogs,” the woman said. “They have recently moved into the area from parts West, which I gather had grown uncomfortably hot for them. They have found a relatively prosperous region to infest, here in the Río Piojo Basin. But the baronies within the valley proper are too powerful to trifle with directly, and the farmers and settlers stick together to defend themselves.”
“Amity Springs isn’t rightly a barony, Maw,” a stout, red-bearded man said. “They claim not to be, anyways. Call themselves a free ville.”
“Well,
that
woman is certainly their baron, regardless what she chooses to call herself,” the woman said. “Indeed, both main baronies are run by women.”
“You come from a ville up in the mountains?” asked Krysty, walking up. She nodded her flame-haired head at the bare, jagged range to the east, which she and the rest had come from as well by a different path.
The woman’s brows lowered suspiciously, but she answered civilly enough. “Yes. New Zion. We are Latter Day Saints. I have come to Amity Springs with my husbands to sell items we have made in our shops.”
“‘Husbands’?” queried Mildred, who’d come up with the others.
“Why, yes,” the woman said. “I told you, we are Mormons.”
“Well, I knew Mormons used to practice polygamy,” Mildred said. “But, see, I thought—”
“You think too much, Mildred,” Ryan said. “What can you tell us about this Amity Springs? You say they don’t have a baron?”
“They claim not,” the woman from the wag said. “But the town is dominated by the Dark Lady, the proprietor of the Library Lounge.”
“We should pay the place a visit, Maw,” said the third of the men afoot. He was a gangly young man with a weedy blond beard and an excess of forehead.
“You are
not
entering that den of iniquity, Nephi!”
“But, Maw! I only want to—”
“I know what you want to do, young man!” She sniffed and turned back to Ryan.
“If you’ve no further reason to detain us with your questions, we are burning the good Lord’s daylight, with miles yet to travel.”
“Just one more question,” Ryan said. “You know if this...non-baron is looking to hire steady blasters? To deal with the coldheart problem, say.”
“I’m sure
I
don’t know what goes on in the mind of such a person. But the ville of Amity Springs is known for sheltering all manner of vagabonds and outlanders. You and your friends should fit in quite nicely there.”
Chapter Two
“Welcome to Amity Springs, my friends!”
Ryan turned his eye to the man who had hailed them as he came bustling forward. He was somewhat baggy and built low to the ground, like a badger. He wore shabby clothes, not very clean, and had a multi-day growth of beard on his round face. His black hair was unkempt and looked as if he simply grabbed a chunk when he thought it got too long and sawed it off with a pocketknife. As he approached, Ryan saw he had dark-olive skin and black Asian eyes.
Fists on her generous hips, Mildred said, “This doesn’t look like that prosperous a ville to
me
.”
She turned her scowl on the man. “Case in point.”
The speed of the man’s approach and his body language gave Ryan no sense of alarm. Nonetheless he kept his hand convenient to the butt of his 9 mm SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster, because he generally did.
“The place doesn’t live up to the billing that Mormon lady gave it, for a fact,” he said.
They had walked a few blocks between sagging ramshackle buildings, built not so much of scavvy as planks probably rough-hewn from timber from the mountains that seemed to surround the large Basin. Most of the buildings they had seen, except for obvious shacks, sheds and outbuildings, were two stories at least. Some stood three, none too securely, to Ryan’s eye. Board sidewalks fronted many of the structures, at least on the main street that the track they’d followed from the eastern hills had turned into.
Now they stood at the edge of a public square. The buildings here were a bit more pretentious: larger and a little less precarious-looking. A fair number of people were around, pushing carts of tools, pulling carts of goods. Down a side street somebody on a ladder was hammering at a façade, the woodpecker tapping reaching Ryan’s ears a heartbeat after the actual strokes.
“Curious,” Doc said, mopping his face with a grubby handkerchief from an inside pocket of his long black frock coat. “One would think that Latter Day Saint lady would have been at few pains to compliment the town, given her evident disapproval of its having a woman at the helm.”
He was tall and skinny, his eyes as pale blue as Ryan’s. He looked every second of sixty-five. Yet his actual age, in terms of years he’d lived through, wasn’t that much greater than Ryan, who was approaching forty.
“I hope you enjoy your stay in our fair ville,” the local said, half stumbling up. As he got close, Ryan realized that wasn’t because he was drunk, as he’d first thought, but because the guy was lame.
“I’m Coffin. Perhaps I can interest you in my wares?”
“What are they?” Krysty asked.
“Coffins!” he said proudly.
“Not in the market,” Ryan replied. “Anyway, I don’t care much what happens to chills. Even my own.
Especially
my own, come to think.”
“We’re not reckoning on dying here, any too soon,” J.B. stated.
Unfazed, Coffin turned to Krysty. “What of you, ma’am? Surely you’re more concerned with the eventual repose of your mate.”
“Why would I want to prevent my lover’s body from once more becoming one with Mother Gaia?” she asked.
“Ah. You are cultists! Well, all are welcome here in Amity Springs. We have learned to be most tolerant of everyone, since the Dark Lady has come among us.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Well. About that—we hear she runs this ville.”
Coffin cocked his head to one side, which made him look mostly as if he were trying to drain water surreptitiously out of one ear.
“Well, she doesn’t exactly run Amity Springs,” he said. “And then again, she doesn’t exactly
not
.”
“Great,” Mildred said. “Just our luck. The first person we meet is the village idiot.”
“Can it, Mildred,” Ryan growled. “This Dark Lady’s the person we need to see. How do we get to the Library Lounge?”
Coffin turned and flung out an arm. “It’s right before you, the grandest structure in all Amity Springs!”
Ryan frowned. It was grander than most, he acknowledged: three broad stories with what looked like an attic beneath a pitched metal roof. A one-story annex winged off from one side. The front was painted white, well weathered, with lamps hanging from ornate black iron holders to either side of a large door with a lot of colored-glass inserts. A pair of life-size lions, probably concrete casts, incongruously flanked the entryway.
It was impressive, in its way. It just didn’t look a lot less sorry-ass than the rest of the place.
“Right,” he said to Coffin. “We’ll take it from here. Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” he said. “I reckon you’ll be good for business.”
Beside the door was a placard reading Welcome to the Library Lounge, Amity Springs’ Finest Entertainment Establishment. Beneath it was a smaller sign, neatly hand-lettered, that read Please Ring Bell for Admittance. Since that was five words more than most people in the Deathlands could read, fifteen if you counted both, Ryan reckoned that at least folks in the ville had more education than was common. Or at least liked to pretend as much.
The bell in question was small, brass, and dangled from a bracket right over the sign. Ryan gave it a good ring.
The door opened fast. An angry two-headed giant filled the doorway, holding a normal-looking man in the air with one hand.
* * *
“L
EMME
GO
!”
the captive yelled. He kicked his cracked and dusty cowboy boots frantically. The heels swung a good six inches off the bottom of the doorframe. The giant held him out at the length of one inhumanly long arm—holding him by a bunch of the back of his shirt, Krysty saw—so that he couldn’t kick the monster, by accident or design.
Ricky Morales’s round olive face went ashy-pale, and he swung up his DeLisle carbine with the barrel fattened by its built-in noise suppressor.
“Blaster down,” Ryan ordered sternly.
Ricky turned wide black eyes to him. “But—”
“You heard me.”
J.B. stepped up beside the kid and gently pressed the barrel down with two fingers. Ricky didn’t resist. Perceiving in the crew’s newest member a fellow born tinkerer, with a shared love of weapons and fiendish booby traps, J.B. had taken the youth under his wing as more or less his protégé.
For his part Ricky idolized the Armorer. Almost as much as he did Ryan.
“I said let me go, you rad-blasted mutie!” the man screamed, spittle flying from his fury-reddened face. He looked young, not much older than Ricky—a year or two older than Jak, say.
The mutie shook him up and down furiously. “I’m not a mutie, you diseased buffalo sphincter!” roared the right-hand head in a voice of thunder. It was the better-looking of the two, if such a term was applicable. It had a broad jaw and a shock of black hair.
“He displays a highly unusual combination of erudition and vulgarity,” Doc said. “Admirable, in its way.”
“We’re conjoined twins,” the other head said calmly. “It’s a common error. Don’t blame my brother Michael too much. He has a sensitive soul, especially on that subject.”
That
head was much the less presentable, with a balding pate that seemed to come to a point, a furrowed brow and snaggled teeth. Yet its voice was soft.
“I don’t give a shit, you freak! You got no right to lay your nuking hands on me!”
The giant carried his uselessly struggling burden into the street. Krysty saw he had apparently done so to give way to a second figure, considerably smaller but possessed of undeniable presence.
“You violated the rules of my establishment, Chad,” a woman said with a languid wave of her long slim cigarette holder, which Krysty observed held a long, thin black cigarillo. “Actions have consequences. You need to learn that.”
“What? That gaudy slut had it coming! She talked back to me!”
The woman’s face, its pallor already marked and accentuated by the chin-length black hair that framed it, went as white as Jak’s.
“You do not call
my
people that!” she said.
Chad had some comeback to that, but it got lost in the general sputtering and gobbling as the giant shook him up and down again, much harder.
“Nor do you lay hands on them if they tell you not to,” the woman said. She was dressed all in black, from the bow in her hair, down to her pinafore-like dress, elbow-length fingerless lace gauntlets, knee-high stockings and shoes. “That is what you’re being ejected for. The abusive term merely compounds your offense.”
Chad’s eyes bugged out and he flailed his arms in a hopeless attempt to get at the hand that was shaking him. Finally he managed to choke out, “P-please, sto-oo-oo-p!”
“Do you promise to behave yourself?” the woman said.
“Y-y-yes-ss, mumm-umm-am!”
The balding head had turned to keep one eye on the gaudy owner. The other, Krysty noted, was still positioned to keep watch on the band of newcomers. The better-looking head continued to admire the giant’s handiwork in shaking Chad.
“You may stop, Mikey-Bob,” the woman said.
“Mikey-Bob?” Mildred repeated incredulously but quietly.
Chad hung from the giant’s fist like an unconscious puppy. His jaw hung slack, his tongue lolled out and his eyes had rolled up in his head.
The woman in black put her hands on her hips. “Well, young man? I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”
Chad raised his head. He managed to twist his mouth into a leering smile.
“Why don’t you suck my dick, you bi— Uh! Uh!”
Mikey-Bob had started shaking him again. This time the giant’s efforts made his earlier exertions seem like playful fooling around. Krysty actually wondered if the unruly customer’s neck might snap.
“Is it time to smack him, D.L.?” asked the sparse-haired, homelier head.
“I believe that it is, Bob,” she said.
With surprising coordination for a guy with two heads, Mikey-Bob let Chad’s shirt go with his right hand while fetching a straight-armed slap to the side of his head with the other. Chad sailed fifteen feet into the middle of the street and landed hard, in a crumple. He had his ass in the air and his face pressed to the hard-packed yellowish dirt, as if he were trying to imitate a plow.
With an air of immense satisfaction, Mikey-Bob dusted equally immense hands together. “Good riddance,” Mikey said.
“—to bad rubbish,” Bob finished.
“Regular stand-up comedian, these two,” Mildred muttered.
The woman turned her attention to Ryan.
“You look interesting,” she said, leaning a hip against the door and kind of slouching into it. “Who might you be?”
“Ryan Cawdor,” he replied.
He quickly introduced the others, finishing with Jak, who stood a little apart from the others, in part watching out for the approach of possible danger, in part watching the shenanigans with obvious amusement.
As he did, Krysty became aware of a muted bubble of conversation coming out the open door past the woman, and the sound of a piano being played. It wasn’t the usual off-key clinking you heard from a gaudy. It was smooth and well-modulated. Classical music, she thought in surprise.
“And you’re the one they call the Dark Lady?” Ryan asked.
“Indeed they do,” she said.
“We heard tell you might be looking to hire a crew of blasters,” Ryan said.
She smiled. She had high cheekbones, a thin nose, and big black eyes outlined in kohl. Her right eye was accentuated even more by looking out of a painted-on black Eye of Horus. She was quite a strikingly lovely young woman, Krysty saw. Though she seemed to be careful to smile with her black-painted lips pressed firmly together.
“I am,” she said.
“Come into my parlor.”