Authors: James Axler
Chapter Twenty
J.B. froze in the act of pummeling the bald-headed Science Brother, and his adversary froze. As if their heads were fixed to the same transfer rod, they swiveled to look toward the source of the brilliant light.
The meeting place of Trader’s group and the Science Brothers was a scrap of grassy shelf between a steep raw-dirt bluff and a wide valley belonging to a tributary of the upper Wabash River. A new sun had appeared at the bluff’s top. It was a compound sun, made of a pair of square bluish headlights and multiple spots.
It was War Wag One, rolling into place just behind the line of sight. At some signal from Trader—even J.B. didn’t know what it was—it had rolled forward to the edge of the bluff and hit all the lights at once.
Even as reflex cranked his neck that way, J.B. knew what he’d see. He’d been in on that much of the plan, anyway. Trader had not got where he was, or even stayed on his pins, by being overly trusting. And a powerful, arrogant bunch like the Science Brothers he didn’t trust at all.
At least he had sense to wind his eyelids down to slits to save some of his night vision.
J.B. didn’t need night vision, truth to tell, when he looked back down the shallow slope to see what had disturbed Trader.
It turned out Trader’s mistrust of the Science Brothers was justified. In spades. The valley below swarmed with wags and bikes and dudes on foot, all bristling with weapons.
An evil grin winching across his face, the Science Brother whose back J.B. straddled turned his face back toward him. J.B. met him with a right-hand punch to the jaw. This time he remembered to clench his hand tight and land with the last three knuckles of his fist lined up with the bones of his arm for maximum structural strength—and damage, the way he’d been taught by Abe, who knew old-days boxing.
As intended, the properly delivered punch didn’t much hurt his hand. It also had the intended effect. The Brother’s visible eye rolled up in its socket and his knees buckled.
The other Science Brother had launched himself at Trader, who lunged at him in turn, catching him by surprise and shattering his nose with a brutal head-butt.
As J.B. dismounted his own collapsing opponent, giving him a brisk knee to the side of his head as he sagged downward from his knees, Trader caught that Brother with a shin-kick to the balls. As that man folded, Trader put right palm on left fist and pile-drove his elbow into the back of his victim’s unprotected neck.
A shockingly loud noise hit J.B.’s ear from the right, followed quickly by two more. Marsh Folsom was standing behind the table with his hideout .38 snubby blaster held in both hands in an isosceles stance. And Vespa was wheeling to the ground with some kind of semiauto blaster dropping from her hand.
Then dirt began to kick up all around them as the Science Brothers waiting in ambush below opened fire.
J.B. dived for the cover afforded by the fact that the coldhearts were shooting upward past a shelf. As he did, he snagged the SKS he’d left propped by a rock.
Trader and Marsh both hit the dirt. An M-4 carbine came cartwheeling over the table of dreck wares to be snagged by a now-prone Trader with one hand. Marsh had scooped it up and tossed it to his partner.
Somewhere below a machine gun began to rip. It sounded like a 5.56 mm, probably an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon. J.B. fast-crawled on his elbows forward to where he could return fire with some cover by the edge. Since it was mostly sod, basically, it wouldn’t afford that much cover. But he knew shooting at an upward angle gave the blaster a disadvantage, and he was never one to hang back from a fight.
Especially one, he realized with a rush of adreneline to his heart, that he had started himself.
Crackling thunder came from above. Ace was cutting loose with the new 20 mm blaster in its armored mount atop the front section of War Wag One. From the green tracer lines streaking overhead, he was shooting at the M-249.
The first thing J.B. saw when he hit the edge of the cliff made his nutsack try to crawl up into his skinny belly and hide. It was the firefly flicker of a couple of dozen muzzle-flashes flaming his way. It was the giant yellow-white fire-blossom from below and left, and the blue spark streaking upward from it, that scared him to his core.
J.B. was never much for reading. Not for its own sake, though he knew how to do it. But one thing he did read was books about weapons—especially predark tech manuals.
He had never seen one before, but he knew instantly with no possible leeway for doubt that he’d just witnessed the launch of a BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile that would burn through even War Wag One’s stout front armor and blow the command section apart like a firecracker in an apple.
TOW stood for Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-command guided missile. The big tank-killer needed an operator to guide it to its target.
All that flashed through J.B.’s mind as fast as a high-speed rifle round. He knew there was just one chance to save War Wag One.
He snugged the SKS butt to his shoulder and started squeezing off rounds at the spot where he’d seen the first flash of launching. He wasn’t much of a longblaster man, not with his vision. Nor was the SKS especially accurate. But the missileer was about 150 yards away, and J.B. was ice-cold now, not even tempted to crank shots off wildly.
He fired until a flash lit the sky from above and behind.
He looked back to see brilliant sparks and smoke explode away from War Wag One’s cab.
But not the compartment. Rather the missile had deflected upward—slightly. It had hit the front glacis of the 20 mm blaster’s improvised-armor shield.
From way off to the right, well past the now-silent SAW, more bluish glare flooded a narrower valley running down to join the one where the Science Brothers had laid in wait.
War Wag Two had joined the fray, swinging down around the right flank of Trader’s people, emplaced on the bluff, to take the Science Brothers on the left.
Or even more likely, J.B. realized, to do just what it had just done: provide a nasty surprise to a troop of Science Brothers blaster wags and bikes, clearly driving up the tributary valley to try to outflank the convoy on that side.
He tried not to think about the fate of the 20 mm blaster, and Ace and his crew, and the rest of the butcher’s bill he’d run up by losing his self-control, and began picking out muzzle-flashes to shoot at. Because right now, he had a job to do, and that was always the best refuge.
* * *
“I
HOPE
THEY
can give us information here that will allow us to recover the baron’s daughter quickly,” Alysa Korn said as the seven of them walked through the slanting yellow light that couldn’t quite bring color to the gray and washed-out streets of Tavern Bay. “It is so urgent to bring her back home safely.”
“Yeah,” said Mildred, walking a few steps behind the sec woman. “The sooner we give Frost back his daughter, the sooner I get J.B. back.”
If he’s even still alive. Krysty didn’t need to be telepathic to know that her friend was thinking that. The sturdy woman with the beaded plaits might as well have shouted it.
Alysa’s shoulders hunched briefly beneath her bulky coat. Mildred blew out an exasperated breath.
“Sorry, kid,” she said. “I didn’t mean that as harsh as it sounded. We all want to get your girl back safe. Even Ryan, no matter how much he likes to play the hard-ass.”
Swinging along at Krysty’s side, Ryan scowled briefly. She suppressed a giggle.
The pair brought up the rear. Jak, restless at having been encumbered—as he thought of it—by a horse, was walking point with his pal Ricky, who clutched his blaster with both hands, trying to look alert as well as important.
Horses were not permitted in Tavern Bay, the middle-aged man and teenage boy who guarded the bridge that seemed to provide the only land route into the ville had told them. For an extortionate amount of jack they had stabled their mounts in a ramshackle structure on the ville-ward side. It was no more than a mile to the ville’s center, anyway. They had been instructed to seek out the ville mayor. There had been an ominous tone in the older gatekeeper’s voice when he’d said that, suggesting dire penalties if they disobeyed.
But lacking any better plan once they got to the ville, Ryan had decided the mayor was just the man they needed to see anyway.
“Where is everybody?” Ricky asked. “This is spooky. It’s supposed to be a well-off ville.”
Up close the place had a decaying look. Many roofs showed great gaping patches open to the long lead-and-rose clouds streaked across the near-sunset sky. Windows and doors gaped like the eyes and mouths of skulls. Even many of the buildings that showed signs of recent use and occupancy looked as if they were just waiting for the next strong wind as an excuse to lie down and give up.
“Plus I guess you’re pretty broken up about what happened to Milya’s maid,” Mildred said. “Uh, Darya. So she was a pretty good friend of yours?”
To Krysty’s surprise Alysa shook her head, making her pale yellow hair fly across the shoulders of her greatcoat.
“I barely knew her. She was a sweet girl. As Milya is, down inside her show of rebellion. I’m not close to the baron’s family, really. Only the baron.”
They walked a few paces down what seemed to be the main drag of Tavern Bay. Ahead of them several blocks opened a square, around which were set the biggest and most pretentious-looking buildings. According to the instructions reluctantly doled out by the older bridge guard, that was indeed where they’d find the ville’s town hall and whatever help or otherwise the ville could offer them.
Krysty reached out, found Ryan’s hand and squeezed it. It wasn’t just to reassure herself; he did need it sometimes, which would surprise most of their companions, let alone the rest of the Deathlands that had One Eye Chill’s boot-prints on it. But while she doubted there was anything here to make Ryan more than normally wary, she also felt curiously on edge at how deserted the streets were during the waning daylight.
Apparently Tavern Bay had resisted the wave of modernization that had risen and spread throughout the twentieth century. The main street of the ville was only two lanes wide, though generous for that. Some of the side streets, even narrower with buildings that seemed to lean together conspiratorially over them, looked like cobblestone.
They were in mostly good repair, better than many of the buildings. Also the streets were mostly cleared of snow, though gray slush gathered in the gutters and the alleyways and on the sidewalks, which were less well tended. Krysty smelled the snow and the slush, cold wet concrete and stone, mildew and rot, and fish, the seemingly inevitable stink of decaying sea life.
Though the air was quiet here at street level, a wind seemed to whistle among the peaked roofs. She heard random creaks from the structures that they passed, and groans, as if the ville itself felt disquiet in its guts and in its bones.
Krysty was not as allergic to urban settings as Jak was—especially not as allergic as he pretended to be. Still, she preferred the direct sense of connection to Gaia that even the roughest sketch of civilization seemed to impair. And here in a ville that seemed to have escaped the ravages of the war, less those of time and neglect, the disconnect was especially strong. But the unease she felt now, like small animals running along her nerve on tiny clawed toes, was more than that.
She glanced up at Ryan again. Though he frowned, that was a common expression. They were headed toward something unknown, and that always meant danger.
And so did the known, as a general thing. She smiled and inwardly laughed at herself. Where isn’t a certain amount of apprehension the appropriate thing to feel? she asked herself.
“You see,” their guide said, speaking with her head down and not looking at the others, “when I was a small girl, my family...did not treat me well. I don’t even know if they were my real family. They told me a dozen different stories. All I know is that the adults, my supposed parents and a few uncles, or so they called them, who drifted in and out of our shack, treated me as a slave from the time of my first memory. As they did my brothers and sisters, who also seemed to come and go mysteriously—and those who went were usually never heard from again.
“The man who called himself my father...used me. Again, from the time I was very small. He didn’t even bother to hide the fact from the woman, or anybody else. He didn’t have to. When I cried, the woman beat me with a heavy wooden ladle and withheld my food, calling me an ingrate and a whiny brat.”
“That’s awful,” Mildred said quietly.
Krysty glanced at Ryan. His rugged face was unreadable behind the stubble, dusted with gray, that darkened his jaws. It wasn’t exactly the norm in the Deathlands, that sort of thing. But it was common enough. And Krysty had to agree with Mildred’s twentieth-century scruples: it
was
awful.
“When I was perhaps twelve—for I never knew my real age, either—a patrol attacked the shack. Apparently my so-called father and ‘uncles’ were bandits. I heard later they robbed a farmhouse a couple of miles down the road, killed four people and left a fifth for dead. She was found beside the burning house, and before she died she told the baron’s men who had committed the crime.
“The baron himself led the assault. My father and two of my uncles were caught and hanged from trees nearby. My mother cut the throats of one of my brothers and one of my sisters. She had me with the kitchen knife at my throat, blade still running with the blood of Natasha and Jack, when the baron himself strode into the house. He called to her to let me go. She laughed. The blade bit my neck—”
She touched her throat, drawing down the wolf-fur collar aside far enough for Krysty to see a thread-thin white scar she hadn’t noticed before.
“And then there was a blinding flash and deafening noise. The blade fell from my throat. I heard something heavy hit the planks of the floor. Then I was being cradled in the strong arms of the baron.”
She sighed.
“When I turned and saw the woman who said she was my mother lying right beside me with the right side of her head blown off by Baron Frost’s pistol shot, I felt nothing at all. Not triumph. Not relief. Certainly not sadness.