Motherlode (25 page)

Authors: James Axler

Tags: #Fiction, #Action & Adventure

A figure loomed to his left. He slashed toward the shadow bulb of the head with his panga. He felt it contact bone, felt bone crunch. The figure grunted and fell.

“Ryan?” he heard J.B. call from behind him.

Before he could answer, another shadow flew out of the still-thick smoke swirled toward the rear of the house. It caught him by the upper body and slammed him to the floor. His right elbow struck the tile on the funny bone. His blaster popped out of briefly flaccid fingers and clattered away.

Foul, stinking breath filled his nostrils.

“Cawdor!” he heard Diego snarl from inches away, even as his dark hate-twisted face resolved from the gloom. “Now I chill your sorry ass!”

Chapter Thirty-Six

Kneeling with the tip of his sword stuck into the closet lock, holding it gingerly with fingertips of both hands to avoid cutting himself, Doc felt and heard the tumbler disengage. Holding the blade in place with his right hand, he turned the knob with his left.

He let out a long sigh of relief. He had had his concentration well and truly shattered by the earth-breaking concussion of a few moments before. But somehow he had pulled his scattered wits together quickly and actually completed his task.

The door began to open. It admitted the sound of shots and screams from the front of the house, and also a welcome draft of fresh air.

He pulled the door in just far enough to make sure the catch wouldn’t reengage. Then he struggled to his feet. His knees creaked. He had had one propped awkwardly on the prostrate body of Trumbo. The stink of the man’s excrement was so thick he could almost see it. It made his head swim and his stomach churn.

A few moments before the explosion, Diego’s bull-bellow of rage had alerted him to Sand’s escape. Through the small window he had witnessed the poor woman’s last instant of life before she blew a section of the bluff down on her—and her pursuers.

I wish that I had never doubted her, he thought, finally straightening. He thrust the ebony sheath of his sword through his belt and withdrew his LeMat.

Before undertaking to pick the lock, he had closed the secret compartment again. There was no reason to make plundering the baron’s wealth easy on the villains, should they bring him down, as by all odds they would.

He extended the second and third fingers of his sword hand to grasp the door by the open end. Then he stepped back and to the side, pulling it open as far as Trumbo’s corpse would allow.

And found himself staring into the black eyes of Trumbo’s lieutenant, Lobo.

For some reason Doc did not fire at once into the huge, dark face. “Stand back, my man,” he said instead.

The black eyes flicked past him to Trumbo’s bulk.

“No trouble, man,” the immense Indian said in a voice like a cannon ball rolling downhill in a wooden barrel. “My debt’s paid. Not my fight now. I’m out.”

He hawked and spit carefully past Doc. The glob landed with laudable precision on the back of Trumbo’s round, balding head.

He stepped out of the way and gestured with a dinner-plate hand for Doc to pass. Nodding politely, Doc stepped past him and headed toward the sound and smoke of the fray.

* * *

F
ROM
THE
VIOLENT
motion of the right side of the coldheart lord’s body, Ryan guessed Diego was about to stab him.

He rolled hard to his own right, managing to twist in Diego’s one-armed embrace.

The point of his knife slammed into the synthetic butt stock of Ryan’s longblaster. He felt the weapon bounce against his back.

“Squirm,” Diego snarled. “I like it better that way!”

Ryan flung his head back hard. He felt Diego’s nose squash between the back of his skull and the coldheart’s face. Blood squirted down the back of his neck.

Likely the Dog had had his nose broken before, but Ryan’s reverse head butt made his grip slacken slightly. The one-eyed man twisted free, rolled clear and sprang to his feet.

Around him figures were struggling in the murk. There was still too much smoke and dust in the air for anyone to be able to shoot for fear of hitting a friend.

Diego scrambled up. He laughed at Ryan. Blood had given him a red beard dripping from his big chin.

“That the best you got?” he taunted.

“Talk big, chill small,” Ryan said. He transferred the panga to his right hand.

Diego swept his big bowie knife back and forth between them. Ryan simply knocked it aside with his heavier blade. As he rolled his wrist over for a backhand strike at Diego’s neck, the Crazy Dogs’ leader grabbed his forearm with his left hand.

Ryan pivoted his hips to the right, yanking his arm out of his enemy’s grasp while powering a straight right fist into Diego’s face. The coldheart’s head snapped back.

Ryan kept after him, bringing the panga up and around for an overhand stroke. As quick as a striking sidewinder, Diego whipped up his knife to parry high with a ring of steel on steel.

The one-eyed man pressed forward. He fired a left uppercut into Diego’s gut. He felt a bit of softness, then muscle as hard as an oak plank. But Diego lost some air and leaned forward. The biker boss grabbed Ryan’s knife arm as it relentlessly pressed the broad machete-like blade toward his forehead.

Ryan fired three quick shovel hooks into Diego’s short ribs. He felt bone break; Diego grunted.

And brought his right knee pounding up into Ryan’s groin.

There were men who could absorb a full-on shot to the nuts and keep on coming without batting an eye. Ryan had delivered ball-mashing blows to a few of them—and been lucky to escape with his life. Especially the first time, when he was totally shocked that his opponent kept coming.

Ryan was not one of those men. It felt as if his lungs and his guts were suddenly trying to come out his nose. He doubled over and dropped to his knees.

“Ace,” Diego said. “You got something for me to cut off.”

He aimed a savage backhand slash for Ryan’s face. The blade whipped toward his one good eye.

Ryan couldn’t breathe, but his will, as tough and hard as vanadium steel, saved him—along with the hard-wired human reflex to protect the eyes.

His right hand flew up and across the body. He managed to control the instinctive strike a last fraction of a second, turning what would have been an attempt to knock Diego’s knife arm aside with his own to a crosswise cut with the panga.

What slashed across Ryan’s face was hot blood, not cold steel, as Diego’s hand was severed just above the wrist.

Diego followed through with the blow, but his eyes got wide and locked in shock and horror on Ryan’s.

But the biker chief was no soft touch. He sprang back as Ryan thrust himself to his feet, jumping back from a disemboweling slash.

Then his left hand came out from the small of his back holding a small hidie semiauto handblaster. With a wordless hawk-scream of triumph, he thrust it toward Ryan’s face.

The Deathlands warrior hacked that hand off.

Diego reeled back toward the hole where the door had been. Right outside the blown-out front wall a motorcycle snarled to a stop, a dozen feet behind the Crazy Dogs’ chieftain. The coldheart didn’t glance back.

“What are you gonna do now, One-Eye, chill me?” Diego demanded. He held up his spurting stumps. “I’m unarmed. Get it? Unarmed?”

Something dark and thin flew through the gap above his head to drop down in front of his face and settle around his upper arms and chest.

“Uh-oh,” he said.

In the yellowing afternoon light starting to slant in between the farmhouses of Joker Creek, Ryan saw a slim, black-clad figure with bare pale arms forking a Crazy Dogs’ bike. Then with a roar of a powerful engine and a squeal of tires on hard-packed earth, the motorcycle spun and sped back down the road.

Diego bellowed as the lariat jerked him backward out the gap. He hit hard on his back and his booted heels flew up. And then he was being dragged, by one of his own gang’s bikes, bouncing, rolling and howling, through the ville he had thought to conquer.

* * *

W
HOEVER
THE
SCOUTING
party of half a dozen motorcyclists was, the sound of the firefight in Joker Creek had made them cautious.

Perhaps more to the point, they weren’t stupe enough to have been lulled into a false sense of security by the sudden cessation of the shooting. Or most of it, at least.

They came cautiously, in a loose vee, spread out across the road into the ditch on both sides.

Among the fields and houses ahead of them, nothing stirred.

The leader, a big guy with a face full of seams and a grizzled pale beard, stopped his Harley a few feet shy of a dark form sprawled on the dirt track in front of him. He signed the others to a halt. Dropping his kickstand, he swung a boot off and walked up to examine the vaguely manlike figure.

He stuck out a boot and prodded one end with his toe. It was the head, lying facedown. It rolled to one side.

Dark Lady hadn’t dragged the Crazy Dogs’ boss far behind the Crazy Dog motorcycle she had commandeered. But she had made it count, zigzagging the stolen bike to bounce him off the maximum number of hard adobe corners on the way to the ville’s outskirts.

And even then, he might have bled to death before he felt every one.

Watching through his Leupold glass at the maximum magnification, Ryan could tell from the dismounted biker’s body language that he recognized what Dark Lady’s vengeance had left of Diego the Dog. He turned his head to shout something to his men.

That was all Ryan saw of the scene for an instant, as the Steyr kicked his shoulder. The sound of its blast was loud in the front room of the ville, even though he was sitting in the darkness just inside the gaping hole.

When the longblaster descended again, Ryan saw the grizzle-bearded man toppling backward with blood spurting from his blown-out throat.

From the right window Dark Lady fired a full magazine of rounds from Sinclair’s borrowed BAR. None of them struck any of the surviving riders as they hastily turned their bikes and rode back the way they had come as fast as they could go.

“
Nuestra Señora
, I hope they weren’t just innocent travelers,” Ricky said from somewhere right behind Ryan.

“Me, too, kid,” Ryan said. “Hate to waste a bullet.”

* * *

F
OR
THE
EIGHTEENTH
time Ricky Morales, bringing up the rear of the trudging party with his friend Jak, turned to walk backward.

A mile west down the road toward its meeting with the Río Piojo, and eventually the ville of that name at the Basin’s west end, the glow of the lights still burning in Amity Springs in the small hours wasn’t bright. But it was still clearly visible.

The folk back there were busy: tending the wounded, saying goodbye to their dead, and figuring out how to rebuild their shattered ville. Not just one but two: the people of Joker Creek had added their voices to Doc’s account of Baron Sand’s last oral testament, to request that Dark Lady should rule them, too.

Mebbe the not-baron of Amity Springs will call herself the not-baron of Joker Creek, too, Ricky thought.

“I still don’t understand,” he muttered resentfully, turning his face forward again, “why we had to get out of bed in the middle of the night and go running off across the desert.”

“You know what they say about a baron’s loyalty, kid,” Mildred called back.

She walked just ahead of Doc. The old man walked in front of Ricky and Jak. From the curious slump to his shoulders and the way he walked with his head down, Ricky guessed his mind was wandering through the mists that sometimes filled it, to the exclusion of the outside world.

“Still,” Mildred said, shaking her head, “I got to admit it strikes me as a little raw, running out on Dark Lady like this without even saying good-bye. I judged her all wrong. I feel like I never got a chance to make amends.”

“Deal with it,” Ryan called.

He strode in the lead with his head up despite what had to be a major case of the wearies and his longblaster in his hands. There had been no further sign of Diego’s promised reinforcements since the battle of what was now the day before. But Ricky knew what their one-eyed leader would say if asked about his current state of high alert; he hadn’t lived this long taking things for granted.

“Anyway,” Ryan said, “what makes you think she expected anything else?”

“What do you mean, lover?” Krysty asked. She walked a step behind him on his right. “She did ask us to stay and help rebuild the two villes. Or help defend them, at least.”

J.B. chuckled. He walked right behind the lead pair, cradling his Uzi in his hands.

“She paid us,” he said.

“Why not stay for a while and do that, Ryan?” Mildred asked.

“Like Trumbo’s big Indian told Doc back in the playhouse,” Ryan said. “It’s done. Not our fight. And we have a redoubt to find.”

A sick sense of dread crept into Ricky’s belly. He glanced back at the lights of Amity Springs. Their amber glow had grown perceptibly fainter, or so he thought. It seemed in danger of flickering out forever.

“You don’t think they have a chance to hold out against what’s coming, do you?” he said.

He wasn’t sure he spoke loudly enough to be heard from the front of the procession, really, but he should have known better. “As long as they got somebody like Dark Lady on their side,” Ryan said, “sure. They got a chance.”

“But a good one?”

He shrugged. And, never looking back, kept on walking.

* * * * *