J.B. put a foot into a patch of poorly dried guano and sank. He stumbled and began to pitch forward onto his face.
Once down, he’d never rise before the little monsters swarmed him.
Mildred and Jak caught J.B. under the arms before he could fall. With frantic strength they yanked him out of the deep muck that had tripped him. He got boots beneath him on more solid footing and staggered onward, coughing as though his lungs would burst.
Ryan feared they might do just that. But he had no attention to waste on that. The giant screamwing hovered directly above the opening in the gable roof, screaming. The sound was driving the lesser screamwings to suicidal fury. They dived in again and again. Each time a few got close enough to slash at the interloping humans with needle-toothed beaks.
Ryan stuck his P-226, its slide still locked back over an empty mag, back in its holster and drew his panga. The big blade whistled a figure eight of death in the air before him. J.B. blasted his M-4000 empty, then reversed the weapon and, holding it by a barrel that had to be scorching fingers and palms, swatted and broke furry bodies that dared wing too close.
Krysty and Mildred had put away their empty blasters, too. Handblasters weren’t ideal for dealing with the fast-moving, swarming monstrosities. Instead they used knives and bare hands, grabbing and snapping fragile wing bones or crushing throats, slashing at eyes and bellies.
At least these muties weren’t as tough to chill as some breeds of screamwings they’d encountered. But what they
lacked in hardiness they more than made up in numbers—and ferocity.
Despite the giant screamwing’s shrieking rage, the friends all reached the door alive. Doc’s short-barreled shotgun slung beneath the primary barrel of his LeMat blew apart a last diving screamwing. Ryan turned and again held the thrumming device up before him like a talisman as the others dived to safety inside.
Apparently the little monsters weren’t as proprietary about the area around the concrete blockhouse that enclosed the stairwell. Or maybe, despite their monarch’s rage, they were getting wary. Scores of torn and broken bodies littered the guano-mat floor, some thrashing and squalling, others moving and croaking feebly, and most just lying there cooling. The last pursuers turned away as Ryan thrust the repeller at them. They flew across the roof near Jak’s former hideout and, landing, began to tear at the fallen bodies of their less fortunate brethren.
“Get inside,” Doc was roaring. He gestured with the fat-cylindered handblaster, while flourishing his black sword stick in the reeking air to discourage any particularly plucky pursuers. None came close, though.
When everybody else was inside, Ryan shouted to Doc to go into the stairwell, too.
A great shadow descended. King Screamwing had at last decided to join the fray.
Ryan jumped backward. His boot soles were slick with gelatinous screamwing shit—he slid out of control. Mildred caught him, kept him from going down the stairs or tumbling over the rail to plunge almost six hundred feet to make a wide stain on the concrete floor. Krysty slammed the door shut.
A darkness blocked the window. For a moment the right eye of the giant screamwing glared yellow hate at them.
Then the great crested head went away. Ryan felt the boom of the sky monarch’s wings even through the steel door.
“He’s perched up on the girder again,” Krysty reported. “He’s preening. The others have lost interest in us completely.”
Ryan and the others had collapsed onto the floor of the landing. The concrete felt wonderfully cool to Ryan’s spent and battered body. After two beatings in twenty-four hours the companions had been near the ragged edge of exhaustion before ever setting out from Soulardville. Now, without the immediate threat of being ripped to pieces to keep them going at any cost, fatigue landed on all of them like an asteroid from space.
Vaguely Ryan was aware of Jak, squatting and panting like a wolf, describing breathlessly how he survived. “Possumed when big fucker lifted me up. Didn’t want fall. Then came here. Took hider knife, stabbed fucker triple-good in leg. Dropped me. Saw hidey-hole, got in before little screamers got me. Then held off till sun went down, monsters got sleepy.”
Ryan shook his head and struggled to his feet. “All right,” he said. “A few more steps and we’re done.” It was metaphor rather than truth. But it seemed to get them all moving, however painfully.
A violent pounding came from the door. Heads snapped that way.
Brother Joseph stared in the little window at them. His eyes showed white all around.
“For the love of mercy!” the preacher shouted, “Please, let me in!”
“After that dirty trick you played with the screamwing device, Brother Joseph?” Mildred asked.
“Ryan would’ve done the same! All’s fair in love and war!”
“Mebbe,” Ryan said.
“You can’t leave me for these monsters!”
“Watch me,” Jak said.
“We had a deal!” the fallen spiritual leader screamed. “I bring you here, and you’d let me go when you got your friend back. Well, you’ve got him. And he’s even alive! A miracle! You talk a lot about keeping bargains, Ryan. Keep the deal you made with me.”
“Sure,” Ryan said. He turned the sunburst on the device all the way clockwise.
“What did you do?” Brother Joseph shrieked immediately. “They’re looking at me! Oh, sweet mother of mercy, no!”
Ryan pushed past the others and yanked the door open.
Brother Joseph stood staring with round eyes. Behind him the lesser screamwings had taken flight and were circling once more in obvious agitation. King Screamwing slowly extended his mighty wings and looked down toward the source of the most intriguing noise.
“Oh, thank you, Ryan, thank you, I’ll—”
Whatever else Brother Joseph was going to babble came out in a wordless whoosh of air as Ryan brought up his knee and thrust-kicked the man in the gut with the shit-coated sole of his right boot. Brother Joseph reeled back five steps before doing a comic pratfall. Guano squelched beneath him.
“What are you doing?” he howled. “We had a deal!”
“Yeah,” Ryan said. “And I just kept it. You’re free to go, Bro Joe. Anywhere you please.”
The literally fallen spiritual leader and man-who-would-be baron gathered himself to leap for the sweet tempting shelter offered by the open door. Ryan brought his hand down and back and lobbed the fast-vibrating
device in a low arc above Brother Joseph’s head. It landed with a soft plop fifteen feet behind him, bouncing to rest against the base of the pyramid of discarded bones beneath the king’s wicker-and-bone nest.
“Right now I’d try to go switch that thing to repel, if I were you,” Ryan said. “Glad I’m not.”
Brother Joseph turned and scrabbled on all fours after the device. Though his hands sank into shit to the elbow and came out dripping white custardy foul ooze, he drove himself forward by sheer will until he was almost in reach of the device, sending out its siren song, inaudible to all but Jak. Several hundred screamwings who were taking an ever more lively interest orbited closer and closer like a flapping, chittering tornado.
But in its nest, high above a great city’s rubble, there was only one screamwing that mattered.
As he stretched a clawing desperate hand for the mutie attractor a moon shadow fell across Brother Joseph’s face. He looked up.
And screamed at the point of King Screamwing’s beak, poised a handspan from his face.
The huge crested head darted down. Like a spear the monster’s beak struck between Brother Joseph’s shoulder blades, pinning him facedown to the mat of pliant, fermenting shit.
Then a new color overwhelmed the sunburst pattern tie-dyed on the back of Brother Joseph’s T-shirt: solid scarlet, gleaming and fast-spreading.
Ryan backed into the housing and shut the door on his screams.
“Okay, I’ll hold here. You all go do what needs to be done. When you’re clear, give a shout and I’ll follow. But don’t wait for me. Get out of this hellhole as fast as you can. Hear me?”
“No,” Jak said.
Ryan stared at him. In his current state he literally had trouble conjuring what the single emphatic syllable even meant.
“Now, hold on just a—”
“Said no. Meant no. I faster best times. Fastest. You all beat. Had better day, me.”
“Well,” Doc said, “it’s true the lad didn’t have to walk here, Ryan. And he got one fewer thrashing.”
Krysty laid a hand on Ryan’s arm. “Surely you don’t think you have to prove anything, Ryan? He’s right, you know,” she added.
Ryan slumped. Krysty tightened her grip on his forearm. It was enough. He forced himself to stand upright.
It took about the same effort it had to climb forty-three flights of steam bath stairs.
“You got it, then, Jak,” he said. “But when we give the word, you throw open that door and move like hell’s on your tail.
“’Cause it sure as shit will be!”
W
HEN EVERYBODY
but Jak, keeping guard above, had cleared out of the forty-second floor and down to the landing below, Ryan cocked back and hurled the makeshift Molotov.
It struck the upper edge of a stainless-steel counter and shattered. Instantly blue flames, stinking of fish, spread out.
Then the mixture of fuel and fish oil they’d splashed so liberally around the kitchen before climbing up to the roof took fire with a giant
whomp.
The fires they had already set, out of sight at north and south ends of the level, burned with a deep crackling roar, devouring fuel-soaked furni
ture, paper and deep drifts of mostly dried screamwing guano.
Ryan thought he was prepared for the result. He wasn’t. A blue wave of flame rushed at him. He turned and rolled down the stairs, coming to rest one flight down with his eyebrows crisped.
Fire jetted out the door. The others were already hollering at the tops of their lungs for Jak to jump.
A human shape dropped through the howling, billowing flame. For a moment fire wreathed the slight figure. As he fell clear, Jak unfolded the arms he’d had crossed to protect his face. His sleeves smoked. His strong white hands caught the top steel railing at the forty-first floor landing. He even got a foot up in time to save himself from falling face-first into a lower rail.
Then the others were hauling him up over the rail, laughing, clapping him on the back.
As Ryan picked himself up from his graceless huddle at the foot of the flight of stairs, Jak gave him a twisted grin.
“Lessee you do
that,
Ryan!”
Slowly Ryan shook his head. “Not if I’ve got anything to say about it.”
“W
ELL, WHAT HAVE
we here?” Ryan asked as they emerged to the street. They were sweat-soaked and staggering from their trip down the giant tower, even though the fire at the very top was sucking air up from the ground into a very respectable breeze blowing up into their faces the whole time.
What they had was Tully and twenty men of the ville, armed to the eyeballs with the usual Soulardville assortment of crossbows and black-powder blasters. Garish
orange flame-light from above cast sharp shadows on pavement and mounded brown rubble behind them.
“You just cause immense amounts of shit wherever you go, don’t you, Ryan?” the ginger-haired patrol leader said.
“Heard it said,” the one-eyed man said, “once or twice. What happened to the cannies? That big old mound of shit there seems to be their own special little ville.”
“It is,” Tully said. “Got burrows all through it like rad-blasted ants. But they had a disagreement with a bunch of jolt-fused scavvies
and
who knows how many stickies. By the time we got here, everybody’d just about decided they had a bellyful and it was time to head home.”
He showed teeth. “We shot a few, just to make sure they kept heading in the right direction. Cannies went right to ground in their ant heap here. After the first two heads that got poked up came back within a crossbow quarrel through ’em, they haven’t seemed much inclined to curiosity anymore.”
“So are we prisoners again?” Krysty asked wearily. She sat on the curb.
“I’d say you’re guests of Baron Emerald.”
“But not guests who are at liberty to decline the good baron’s hospitality, I presume?” Doc asked.
“You presume right, old man.”
Disgustedly Mildred shook her head, her beaded plaits making faint tinkling sounds.
“I hope you don’t mind carrying us,” she said. “We had a hell of a night. I don’t think any of us is in anything near shape to hike back to the ville. Except maybe Jak. He flew here.”
Some of the patrol members goggled at the albino youth, who showed them a feral grin.
“All you got to do is hoof it back to 55,” Tully said.
“We’ve got a horse-drawn wag you can ride the rest of the way.”
“Thought you folks were afraid of the highway?” Ryan said.
“We got safety in numbers tonight,” Tully said. “Now we’d best move on before you people keel over.”
Wearily, the party hoisted themselves to their feet. J.B. shrugged off Mildred’s assistance to rise, but she had to catch him to keep him from going right over again.
As they began hiking east down the wide, mostly clear avenue between the great rubble mound and the woods, a great cawing shriek made everybody stop and turn to stare upward.
King Screamwing rose from the pyre of his domain. In his claws wriggled a frantic human shape.
Both were aflame. The king made three mighty beats of his vast pinions, spewing sparks. Then he and his final prey crashed back into the inferno that crowned the dark tower.
Orange flames rose up like an eruption to mark their fall.
For a moment nobody spoke or moved.
“You know, Ryan, I was wrong,” Mildred said. “Bringing Brother Joseph along was totally worth it.”
The stern-mounted paddlewheel splashed rhythmically through the brownish-green water. The thud-thud-thud of the
Daisy Belle
’s steam engine vibrated up through the wooden deck and the soles of Ryan’s boots, as well as his bare forearms where he leaned on the wooden rail, which was heated near stinging hot by the midmorning sun.
It was fine with him. He was glad the wind was out of the west, so that it blew the black smoke plume from the single stack away toward the wooded bluffs, and away from him.
He felt a familiar presence at his side. An arm slipped around his waist.
“Cartridge for your thoughts, lover,” Krysty said.
“I’m thinking how glad I am to be shaking the dust of this whole damn shithole off my boots,” he said, “and us all more or less intact.”
He shook his head. “Still have a hard time believing it.”
She tipped her red head against his shoulder. “This was tough. We could’ve bought it.”
He sighed. “Well, everybody pulled together. We’re an ace crew. The best.”
“W
HAT HAVE YOU
to say for yourself, Ryan?” Baron Emerald demanded from her throne of sorts.
Ryan blinked his eye.
This shit’s getting old,
he thought.
Although the morning sun had barely started climbing up the sky behind them, the glare that splashed off the pavement of the Soulardville main plaza and the big tilted concrete slab with the dark stains on it was painful anyway.
“You got all the blasters, Baron,” he said, “so you hold all the cards.”
True to his word, Tully had brought along a wag drawn by a pair of sturdy horses. Ryan wasn’t sure about his friends, but he knew he had slept like the dead on the ride back to Soulardville.
Their captors were remarkably considerate, considering. The wag had clip-clopped and creaked through the front gate and right up to the door of that same familiar gray-brick house with the black iron on the windows and doors. They’d been given water and some kind of vegetable stew, with rough brown bread, which they’d wolfed down. Then it had been all they could do to reach their pallets before passing out again.
Unfortunately they hadn’t gotten but more than four hours of sleep before Garrison’s ham hand rousted them out again, hammering yet again on the front-door frame. And here they were. They weren’t shackled or bound in any way, but they were disarmed, and a crowd of both ville patrol men and sec men surrounded them. And beyond them a throng of Soulardites, who, Ryan knew, had a definite taste for a little blood sacrifice.
Emerald smiled. She was wearing a loose purple kaftan and sitting on a big heavy chair carved out of dark-stained oak. It had been set out in the plaza just west of the sacrificial slab, with a huge green parasol with yellow tassel fringe set up to shade it.
“No excuses?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“Pleas for mercy?”
Ryan shrugged.
“With all respect, Baron,” Krysty said, “we’ve seen and heard plenty of pleas for mercy in our time. What we haven’t seen is them do a spent round’s worth of good.”
The girl sat and studied them. For all her youth she looked every inch a baron, Ryan had to admit.
He was halfway sorry he wouldn’t be here to watch what happened to anybody who calculated to take advantage of her based on the fact she was a young woman with a pretty face and a body worth killing for.
“I notice you got your former holy Joe’s altar uncovered today,” he said.
“I’m thinking of having Brother Joseph’s surviving acolytes break it apart with sledgehammers,” Emerald said. “Then…mebbe have them beat each other to death with those sledgehammers and decapitate the last one. What do you think, Ryan?”
“Well, that’s harsh but…harsh.”
“No,” she said. “Harsh would be making them suffer a similar amount to what the people they helped sacrifice suffered. Something along the lines of skinning alive. Over days.”
“Remind me never to get on your bad side, Baron.”
“Too late,” the girl said. “I’m having a hard time forgetting you kidnapped me from my friends and dragged me here to suffer that very same fate.”
The goateed man who stood next to her throne said, “Emerald…Baron—”
She waved a hand at him. “I know, Dan. We’ve been all around that warehouse. You wouldn’t expect the man whose hospitality you violated to speak up on your behalf, would you, Ryan?”
She grinned. “I think he respects you because you got the better of him. Not many can say that.”
“Didn’t think of it as getting the better of anybody,” Ryan said. “We had a job to do. That was all.”
“Yes. And you did your job. And then you did your employer a pretty nasty turn.”
“He ripped us off on payment,” Mildred said, “not to mention sentenced us to death, and gave Jak up to that devil-bird of his. I’d say any contract he had with us, he broke.”
Slowly Emerald nodded. “I agree,” she said. “My only regret is that I wasn’t there to see what happened to him at the end. You people don’t do things by half nukin’ measures, do you?”
That got a chuckle from Tully and the patrol members who had witnessed Brother Joseph’s fiery end.
“That’s just Ryan,” J.B. said. “He’s got him a certain style, y’know?”
“I see,” the baron said. “When you were bringing me back you talked a lot about keeping deals, Ryan. Whatever it cost you—or anybody else.”
“That’s the law I came up to live by,” he said.
“And you did keep your deals. Plus there’s the little matter that by bringing me back to Brother Joseph, and then when you were shut of that obligation, managing to get me set free to reclaim my rightful throne here as baron of Soulardville, you did me a pretty major service. Even if—Never mind.”
Ryan suspected that what she wanted them never to mind was whatever she had gone through at Brother Joseph’s hands her first night back in his clutches. He doubted she’d much enjoyed it.
“So. You were promised payment for bringing me back, then Brother Joseph stiffed you when you delivered. Well,
if a bunch of outlanders straggling in out of the wastelands can keep their contracts no matter what, the ville of Soulard can do no less.”
Emerald gestured. Their refilled backpacks and weapons were brought and laid at their feet.
“For let’s call ’em additional services rendered, I’ve doubled what Brother Joseph promised you in food, ammo and meds.”
Ryan’s eyebrows rose. “You’re letting us go?”
The girl laughed. “I’m insisting on it.”
She stood and stepped into the sunlight. It glanced blindingly off the huge pendant she wore, which bore the letter
S
in a circle.
“Ryan, Krysty, J.B., Mildred, Doc and Jak, I thank you all. Your service has earned you the gratitude of the people and baron of Soulardville.
“Now take your shit and go. You have until sunset to get out of St. Lou. And if we ever catch you this side of the river again, I’ll feed you to the stickies myself!”
T
HE STUBBY LITTLE
riverboat was just abreast of the northern perimeter of Soulardville, well out in the deep channel and making good progress with the current’s help. As far as Ryan could tell, it had been built since the big nuke, cobbled together out of salvaged parts. He hoped the boiler didn’t blow and cook them all.
“What kind of baron do you think she’ll make?” Krysty asked.
“Better than most,” he said. “Which isn’t to say I’m all broke up about not having the option of staying and being one of her subjects. I don’t think she’s the sort to go in for having little kids beat to death to show the people how much she loves them. But I don’t think she’d be an easy boss, somehow.”
“No,” Krysty said. “Probably not.”
Dan E. and his crew had given them a lift back across the Sippi to Eastleville in their boat. Not only were there no hard feelings, the scavvie boss and his crew seemed full of admiration for Ryan’s bunch and their audacious exploit in hooking the princess right out from under their noses. Dan had even invited the companions to sign up. Plenty of good salvage left, in the deserted suburbs east of the river, he said.
The friends had declined as vigorously as they could and stay on the friendly side of polite. It wasn’t, as J.B. said later, when they were settling down for the night in the Platinum Club’s best room-to-let, that it was a bad offer.
“We’ve had worse invites,” the Armorer said. “Most of them, truth be told. But I’d wake up every morning wondering if Princess Emerald had decided we were still too close to Soulardville for comfort, and reckoned mebbe we needed to meet some stickies up close and personal.”
That had been on the others’ minds, too, the two days it took to wangle passage south on the
Daisy Belle
.
So Ryan and the goateed scavvie chieftain had gripped each other arm-to-arm in farewell. Then the crew hit the trail back north to their abandoned-factory fortress.
The boat came abreast of the Soulardville front gate, up on its bluff above the wide river. A work crew moved around the makeshift rivermen’s dock down at the water-side. At Baron Emerald’s decree they were surveying how best to expand it to a full-blown trading port.
A figure turned and, spotting them, waved. Ryan thought he recognized Tully’s narrow head and ginger hair.
Krysty waved back enthusiastically. When she elbowed Ryan in the side, he raised his hand, too.
“Don’t brood, lover,” Krysty said. “We’ll find a place for us all, someday. Find a safe haven that’s real.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Sure we will.”
The paddlewheel steamer chugged down the mighty river, and they stood together at the rail until Soulardville and the ruins of St. Lou disappeared behind them.