Authors: James Axler
“We don’t have a firm offer in hand, Cosgrove,” grumbled the mayor.
“Leave the negotiations to me, Your Worship,” the aide said. “No need to trouble yourself. I’m sure Baron Frost will be openhanded to any who help him recover his child. And certainly the slavers are disreputable types whom we owe few favors.”
The mayor uttered a rumbling sound. His jaw, which was visibly broad beneath the loose gray flesh of his face, sank toward the top of the vest he wore beneath his coat, as if fatigue was overcoming him.
In the stretching silence the ticks of the clock seemed to fall like hammers on Ryan’s heart. He wasn’t sure why he felt such tension. Worried about J.B
.
, he told himself. That’s all. Natural enough.
“See them off, Cosgrove. Give them what they want and send them on their way.”
“But it’s
cold
out there!” Mildred exclaimed.
The man’s big head snapped up, and his old eyes blazed with anger.
“What concern is that of mine?” the mayor snapped. “Tavern Bay is no place for strangers to spend the night. Be off with you!”
The ringing of the clock, startlingly loud in the large emptiness of the rotunda, seemed to chase them as Morlon Cosgrove led them out, mocking their hopes and dreams.
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Trader took his convoy up north to the ville of Erie, a port in Sandusky Bay at the southwest end of Lake Erie. It was uncomfortably close not just to the Toledo ruins, but to fallout footprint from the wrecked Davis-Besse nuke power plant in the uninhabitable ville of Oak Harbor. The rad detectors in Trader’s war wags registered radiation far higher than background. Strange things were said to happen around there. Marsh Folsom said the rad emissions likely played tricks on people’s eyes and even brains.
J.B. didn’t know if that was true, but he did understand the place was named for more than just the big-ass lake it was situated on.
J.B. rode in disgrace. He suffered in silence. He’d learned as a kid that complaining never did any good. If anybody even noticed, it was likely to bring you even less of what you wanted and more of what you didn’t.
He responded the only way he had, when fists and fury hadn’t served—he threw himself into work and learning. It was the best way to lose himself.
It was the best way to distract himself from the feelings that had betrayed him.
They’d always been uncomfortable companions, anyway.
But he still felt them. Too many. And bad ones.
Especially where Rance Weeden was concerned. As she promised, she had frozen him out completely—except for work, where she remained a good if now-distant boss.
But that distance ate at him. He’d been totally caught up in her—the torrid nightly sessions of lovemaking. Not enough to detract from his work, but enough to absorb him otherwise thinking of her when he wasn’t having sex with her.
Now, to be shut off from the vigorous, avid strength of her long taut body—even any sign that he was more to her than just another part, like a carburetor or manifold—ate at his belly like a mob of hungry rats.
He’d tried talking to her—even sweet-talking, though he knew he wasn’t any good at it. It didn’t matter. If it wasn’t work-related, she didn’t acknowledge his existence, much less his words.
Once, before they hit Erie, he decided to take the manly course and just grab her and make her kiss him.
The swelling in his jaw went down after a couple of days. He was able to eat food other than soup through a straw. But the hinges of his jaws still creaked when, a week after leaving the rad-ridden ville, they hit the Lantic coast in what had been Maine, to park the convoy to landward of the wide stinking salt marsh that guarded a seaport ville called Tavern Bay.
* * *
“W
E
SAW
SURPRISINGLY
few folk abroad on our way through your fair town,” Doc said. Mildred frowned. She was
not
in the mood for his archaic pomposities. “None, in fact.”
“People tend to keep indoors after dark here,” said Morlon Cosgrove, as he led them away from the rotunda down a corridor inadequately lit by candles flickering on pedestals that seemed to Mildred to be made of things like improvised hat-racks. “Especially in the depth of winter. Also, the people of the ville tend to be wary of strangers. They have reason, as you can certainly appreciate.”
“You have trouble with outlanders?” Ryan asked. “I’d judge you were pretty well protected, what with being surrounded on three sides by salt marsh and one way in from the mainland.”
The mayor’s aide laughed briefly, as if he paid for it by the heartbeat. “You of all people should realize how imperfect even the best defenses are.”
Mildred frowned again. Granted, she was doing that a lot lately. But this time it was because she was puzzled. She wasn’t the heavy tactical mind in the group—but not even she thought a makeshift barricade guarded by a fat middle-aged guy and a skinny adolescent boy would keep any even moderately determined malefactors out of Tavern Bay for long.
But what the oily aide said next drove thought of anything else right straight out of her brain.
“Remember, we do have to deal with the slavers passing by on a distressingly regular basis, which is why we have, in fact, heard about the baron’s abducted daughter.”
Her heart jumped up to her throat in excitement. J.B.! she thought. How I miss you.
“They’re reports,” he added. “Nothing more substantial than rumors, I must admit. But persistent ones.”
Which only threw a bit of cold water on Mildred’s flaring hopes. Half a bucket, say.
They came into the foyer. The cold now beat from the door; if the area was heated Mildred couldn’t feel it. To one side what had to have been the curving information desk moldered under dust. Mildred wouldn’t have been surprised had a security guard’s skeleton still sat behind it, cobwebbed in its final doze on the job.
“And now,” said Cosgrove, with something Mildred doubted even naive newbie Ricky would take for actual amiability, “it’s time to discuss the
quid
to the
pro quo
you mentioned.”
Mildred barely caught the reference. She hardly expected her companions to do so.
But Ryan nodded.
“Yeah. That’s how it works. Korn, I think you’re on.”
The platinum blonde and the smarmy factotum negotiated briefly and calmly. Mildred tried to rein in her distinctive distrust of the man. He seemed to be just professionally unctuous; there was no reason to suspect that covered anything more than concern for himself, and little for others, which was scarcely an uncommon trait.
In the Deathlands it was just closer to the surface than it had been in her time. The terrible truth was, the more hard lessons the savage present taught her, the better her own times looked in retrospect.
Mildred tuned out the actual terms. Her distaste for commercial transactions had faded since her reawakening. Or maybe just been pushed way into the background by lots of things that were lots more distasteful. But she still had little interest in them. The girl may have sometimes seemed to show the affect of a robot—not surprising to Mildred, now that she knew her to be an abuse survivor—but it did give her at least the appearance of calm strength here.
Though Mildred also knew that they didn’t really hold the hammer hand here, either. As close as she could reckon, though, Alysa managed to satisfy the oily little functionary without giving away the whole farm.
Alysa started to hand over the agreed-upon amount of jack to seal the deal. Mildred noticed it wasn’t all the amount Baron Frost had entrusted his sec woman with to procure assistance on their quest—explicitly including information. She had to nod. The girl’s not much more than a child, she thought, but damn, she can handle herself well. And not just with a horse, sword and blaster.
But Ryan held out his hand. “Right,” he told Cosgrove. “You got your terms. You’ve seen the color of our jack. Before we hand it over I think it’s time we got the
pro quo
.”
Cosgrove smiled thinly and it was quickly gone.
“You are clearly an educated man, Mr. Cawdor,” he said. “You also make a sound point. As I told you, we have received reports from several sources. While details inevitably differ, there are consistent strands. All suggest a young woman fitting the description you gave us was taken past here in the last week, headed for the slavers’ sea base.”
“Anything else?” Ryan asked.
“She was spotted in a wag that looked as if it was a predark. She was held under heavy guard and appeared the only captive being transported. She showed no sign of injury and appeared in good health, albeit unhappy, which is scarcely surprising, after all. At the very least, the slavers would seem to consider her extremely valuable merchandise.”
He looked at Alysa and performed a slight bow. Mildred couldn’t tell if it was mocking or not. Indeed, that summed up just about everything this dude did. Whatever else he may or may not have been, he was smarmy.
“I apologize if that sounds insensitive. But they are slavers. And the value they obviously put on her does suggest they have treated her well, and will continue to do so.”
Mildred and Krysty swapped looks. Yeah, the physician thought. At least until some major perv buys her for a ton of jack.
But they wouldn’t let it get to that point. Ryan was on the case. And his friends. Motley a crew as they were, they were good at tracking and chilling. And they were all acutely conscious J.B.’s life—or at least his freedom—lay at stake.
“Can you tell us where this slaver base is?” Ryan asked. “Where their big ship puts in?”
“Yes.” He looked at Alysa. “How well do you know this coast?”
“Not intimately,” the slim girl said. “I have served as onboard sec on trips by boat as far down as New Portsmouth. Additionally, I have maps.”
“You probably won’t need them. Are you familiar with the small sheltered anchorage about seven miles from here? A sort of nook or inlet among high granite cliffs?”
Her brow creased briefly. Then she nodded. “I remember our captain urging me to stay alert. Sometimes raiding ships lie in wait there, to rush out to attack passing vessels. No one molested us, though.”
“That’s the place,” Cosgrove said, nodding. “It’s called Smuggler’s Cove.”
“For crap’s sake,” Mildred said with a snort.
Cosgrove laughed. It seemed the most genuine thing he’d done. “The people of what once was Maine have long prided themselves on being blunt-spoken. Especially the coasters. Although others might as easily call them unsubtle.”
“You can find the place from here?” Ryan asked the sec woman.
“Yes.”
“Well, then, let’s save the discussion of quaint local customs for another time. Right now I reckon we need to shake the dust of this place off our boot heels in a hurry, so we have a chance of finding someplace to lie up the night without freezing solid.”
“May I suggest the Carcosa Arms? It’s our local hostelry. It lies right across the square from town hall. You passed it on your way in.”
“Your boss said we weren’t supposed to stay here,” Ryan said. “Why do you even have a hotel, if you don’t let outlanders stay the night?’
“We do entertain regular guests, usually merchants and commercial travelers of one sort or another. It is not that we are actively hostile, or even inhospitable. We do tend to be suspicious of outlanders, and for adequate reason. Far from everyone who visits Tavern Bay does so with benign intent.”
“Still,” Krysty said, “the Mayor seemed pretty emphatic we should go.”
Cosgrove laughed again. “His Worship is a man much weighed down by his concerns. He can sometimes seem abrupt in his judgments. It seems to me that in this occasion he was overhasty. Especially in the light of the benefits this transaction had brought us.”
“You’re sure?” Krysty asked.
“Not like,” Jak said.
“You never like,” Ryan said. “But I’m not sure we won’t be better off moving along. It’s not healthy to stay in a place where we aren’t wanted.”
“Ah, but I won’t hear of it!” Cosgrove said. “You are honored emissaries of a highly esteemed and powerful baron. We can do no less than provide our best accommodations—free of charge. Or shall we say, free of further charge?”
“Are you sure it won’t get you in trouble with Mayor Thrumbull?” Krysty asked.
“Our plainspoken common people have a saying— ‘what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Floorboards squeaked beneath J.B.’s boots as he walked back down the darkened corridor.
It was gut-deep night in the old hotel. Though the Northeast coast’s early-summer night wasn’t too hot, inside the Carcosa Arms Hotel it was stuffy and it didn’t seem as if any of the windows would open. It smelled musty and of old paint, and something else he couldn’t quite put a finger to, along with the inevitable smell of fish and rotting ocean creatures that pervaded the whole ville of Tavern Bay.
Still, the place had a functional lavatory here on the ground floor. J.B. was returning from the facilities to the room he shared with five of Trader’s people, having been roused from his bed by the need to pee.
He was not happy. Even being one of the team of ten Trader had hand-picked to follow him into the decaying old coastal ville and back him up on whatever secret business he meant to transact there didn’t much mollify him.
For one thing, he was among the group left behind in the ville proper while Trader took four of his top people with him, including Marsh Folsom. They were meant to back up Trader some way, somehow, when the deal was done. Whatever the nuke it was. The rest of the crew was laagered in with the wags on the solid ground where the valley started to widen out at the base of the ravine. In the meantime, all Trader’s second-string could do was hole up in the room they’d been given in the hotel across from the town hall and grab some shuteye so they’d be fresh when Trader’s call came.
For another thing, one of the men Trader had picked to accompany him, his top aide, and two of his ace sec men to his meet with his mystery trading partners was the man who’d taken Ace DeGuello’s job as chief armorer for Trader’s convoy. It was Tully, a rat-faced redheaded guy not much bigger than J.B., the guy who had straw-bossed the crew Rance had stopped in the middle of gang-stomping J.B. to lifeless mush.
As with the other armorers, Tully had accepted J.B. as a comrade once Ace recognized his skills. While he could nurse a grudge as well as any, J.B. had at least some idea of when to let bygones be that. Or, anyway, was glad enough to have his abilities acknowledged that he was willing to let some of the rage and resentment that smoldered in him go out.
And Tully was good enough at what he did. No question of that. One thing J.B. never had a problem with, temper or not, was summing up a ’smith’s skills and according him the respect those entitled him to.
But good wasn’t great. J.B. also knew he was better than Tully, who was near to twice his age. Which meant better than Tully would ever be.
In his mind he knew why things had happened as they had. Trader was not about to reward the person who’d gotten Ace DeGuello chilled by handing him the man’s job. Not when Ace had been doing his duty and double-well at the time. Johnny’s brain accepted that.
His balls didn’t. And like an alcohol-lamp, their heat kept the resentment in his gut at a constant simmer.
And the other thing was Trader apparently saw nothing wrong with sticking him in a room with his former lover, Rance. Yeah, there were four others bunking with them in the big dorm-style room, and one rotated out of the sack every couple of hours to keep watch. But that didn’t make young J.B. yearn less for the woman who had once been his bed partner.
He paused at the door to the room, down at the far end of the hallway near a window.
That had been perhaps the purest, most unalloyed pleasure of his life, the sex with his boss. At least, aside from when he was making something or fixing something with his hands, or figuring out a clever repair or fiendish booby. But Rance had shut him off cold and kept him in the cold.
He gritted his teeth and shook his head. He still wanted his gig with Trader. He needed more than ever to show everybody how good he really was. How
valuable
he really was.
Maybe then Rance would take him back.
He reached for the knob, which seemed outsized by way of layers of enamel painted on it over the years, the most recent coat being a white that was stained yellow as a smoker’s teeth by hand grease.
Funny, he thought. I don’t remember that fish smell so bastard strong.
The door opened.
Because there were two windows in the long room, the light was better there, though still dim. The first thing he saw by the star-glow, since he had his eyes down to the doorknob and hadn’t yet raised them, was a body sprawled facedown on the floor almost jamming the door. A flash glance registered that it was male, tall, pretty spare, with a bald spot in the middle of dark hair. That made him Joe Slammer, the ace driver who’d been standing sentry when Johnny left to hit the pisser.
The back of his head under the bald spot seemed kind of sunk-in and gleamed as if with moisture. A black pool spread out around his head like a halo in some predark religious print.
J.B. looked up, and his gut constricted to a fist.
There were
things
standing in the room. Hunching, more like. They weren’t much taller, if any, than he was, but much more massive, with giant deep chests and massive huge-jawed heads thrust forward from stooped shoulders without visible benefit of necks. Their legs were bowed but unnaturally muscled. Their eyes were huge and glittered like gelatin in the starlight.
Two stood by a hole gaping in the floorboards of the room. One was helping a third who had big clawed-flipper hands wrapped around Rance Weeden. One was clamped over her mouth. Her eyes rolled wildly as she struggled. But strong as she was, the mutie monster’s power was clearly too much for her.
The other beds lay empty. One was actually overturned. Everybody was gone, down that hole to horror.
Rance’s wild eyes lit on J.B. standing like a simp in the doorway. Somehow they got bigger. She managed to wrench half her mouth clear of the muffling claw.
“J.B., run!” she screamed. “Warn the others!”
That was the smart thing to do. No doubt about it. There was clearly no helping her otherwise—one lone kid against hulking, shambling monsters, with only a lock-back folder knife for a weapon.
Hollering, “Rance!” Johnny launched himself to the attack.
The nearer frog-shaped mutie met him with a brutal backhand sweep of his right flipper-hand. He didn’t even bother to look at the lunging youth.
The impact on the side of J.B.’s face caused his world to go darker and distant and blurry. He had the sense of floating backward.
Then his skull cracked hard against the doorpost, red lightning lanced through his brain and that was that.
* * *
R
ICKY
CAME
AWAKE
to a hand on his mouth.
“Rrmph!” he said urgently as his eyes snapped open to darkness. He tried to sit up on the bed in the room he shared with Jak and Doc.
A weight came down his chest. By the moonlight through the frost-furred window he made out a pale glow floating above his face.
Jak Lauren grinned at him.
Ricky rolled his eyes down over the snow-white hand muffling it. He squealed in outrage.
“Not talk,” Jak commanded firmly.
When Ricky nodded, Jak removed his hand.
“You’re
sitting
on me!” Ricky said in outrage.
“Stop jumping and acting like feeb,” Jak said.
Like the rest of them Ricky had gotten used to Jak’s bizarre shorthand speech. Or at least learned to extract meaning from it. It was still annoying to him sometimes.
The hand went away. So did Jak’s narrow jeans-clad ass. Ricky belatedly sat up.
He looked around. They were alone. The third bed lay empty.
“Doc on watch,” Jak said.
“And you’re waking me, why?”
Though they were alone now, Ricky kept his voice low. They were sandwiched between the room Ryan shared with Krysty and the one where Mildred and Alysa slept. From what Ricky had heard of Ryan and Krysty’s activities before he pulled his pillow over his head and sheer exhaustion finally pulled him down to sleep, the walls were not soundproof.
He still wasn’t sure where two people that old got that kind of energy.
Jak’s grin got wider. His white brow creased hard above eyes showing hints of ruby glint to the moonlight.
“Explored,” he said. “Found something.”
Instantly Ricky nodded. He knew whatever Jak had in mind was probably not a good idea. At least for Ricky, though the way Jak could move through any setting like the ghost he resembled meant he’d likely get away with whatever bad craziness he had in mind.
But even after weeks with the companions, Ricky was still thrilled that his pal Jak wanted to include him in his escapade. And despite growing up sheltered and pampered, as he now realized, in the little ville of Nuestra Señora—a seaport town much like this one, except neater, more lively and smelling much less nastily of must and decomposing mollusks—he found he had a taste for adventure.
Perhaps
because
of that sheltered life.
“What?” he asked quietly.
Jak held up Ricky’s utility belt, with his Webley handblaster hanging from it in its flap-covered holster, and Ricky’s silent-shooting DeLisle carbine.
“Follow, see,” the albino said.
* * *
“N
OW
,” J
AK
SAID
softly. He slipped out into the hall.
Walking as lightly as he could in his socks, with his boots slung around his neck by their tied-together laces, Ricky followed. He was almost trembling. He was so keyed up he forgot even to be cold.
He glanced right. A tall, narrow shadow was walking deliberately away down the threadbare runner carpet, silhouetted by moon-glow from the window at corridor’s end. Doc was pacing up and down the corridor, possibly to stay awake.
Ricky wasn’t sure how much difference that might even make. Doc had a tendency to wander off inside his own head when left alone. Who knew where he was now?
Still, Ryan let Doc take his turn on watch, as he was doing now. And they were all still alive. So Ricky wasn’t about to question his adored leader’s wisdom.
Jak, meanwhile, was creeping the other way, toward the T-juncture where another corridor crossed this one. In one direction it led to the door to the lobby at the front of the run-down hotel. In the other it headed to a door into a dining room that had probably been closed since before the Big Nuke, so far as Ricky could tell.
Jak went down to the very end, just before the cross-passage, and turned to his right. He disappeared inside a room.
Ricky followed.
“Shut door,” Jak commanded.
Ricky obeyed, as quietly as he could. He winced when the door mechanism engaged with an inevitable metallic clack.
Jak was hunkered in the middle of the floor. This was a two-bed room. Both beds were empty. The bureau and single chair weren’t deep in dust, so Ricky gathered it saw use fairly recently. Not this night, though.
“Smelled something funny,” Jak said. “Tried door. Then found.”
He tapped the floor. In the faint light from outside, Ricky, by straining, could make out a line along the floor. It was darker than the normal ones between the bare polished hardwood planks.
Then he made out a right angle in the black line. He was looking at a trapdoor improperly shut.
“Smell came out here,” Jak said. “Sea, dead sea stuff.”
Ricky couldn’t smell anything more than the usual nastiness of the ville itself, which at least was muted in here. Admittedly, it was muted by the hotel’s stuffiness, as well as the general smell of mildew, dust and age. But he trusted Jak’s nose. He had a wild animal’s keen senses.
Ricky came over to squat beside him, studying the trapdoor. “Shall we open it?” he asked.
Jak gave him a look.
“Okay,” Ricky said. “Dumb question.” He started feeling to see if he could start the trap open with his fingertips. Though his hands were still relatively soft, lots of detail work on metals had made them strong.
Jak stopped him with a couple of fingers on his forearm. “Boots first,” he said.
The albino youth already wore his customary sneakers. Johnny nodded. He sat down, pulled on his boots, quickly tightened the laces and tied them.
Then Jak helped him pry up the trapdoor. It made surprisingly little noise.
Even Ricky could smell the saltwater in the breath of air that rolled up from the blackness and hit him in the face. It felt so warm he thought they might have opened a passageway to a furnace, although there was none in evidence in the hotel. It didn’t even have radiators, those obviously having been salvaged for scrap decades before. Then Ricky realized the air was warmer because it was insulated by the Earth itself from the chill that made his nose numb and his breath mist white before his eager face.
He reached to his belt to unlimber the flywheel flashlight he carried in a small holster there. It had been made by hand by his Tío Benito, who sold them on the side to augment his income as armorer and general tinker.
“No,” Jak said. He nodded down the hole. “Light.”
Ricky frowned. Then his eyes picked up a faint glimmer of yellow.
“Follow,” Jak said, and eeled down into the hole.
Ricky followed. There was a wooden ladder there. He pulled the lid shut behind him, trying to make sure it seated properly this time, then he descended to stand beside his friend on a damp floor of cut stone.
He was able to see now, just a little. The tunnel, which was just high enough that the two not-very-tall young men could stand upright, obviously continued along parallel to the building front. That meant, he realized, that it ran
under
the other rooms on that side of the corridor.
“You mean
our
room—?” he asked in an alarmed whisper.
“Shut,” Jak said sternly.
Ricky shut. The glow came from the other direction. He realized that it had to intersect beneath the cross-passage, then open into a larger chamber directly underneath the lobby.
Jak stalked toward the light. He carried a hunting knife with a clipped point and a five-inch blade, not the trench knife or one of the butterfly knives he usually favored for battle—and, of course, not one of his specialized leaf-bladed throwing knives. Ricky had no idea where he carried all those damn knives, concealed on his wispy frame. He never quite got up the nerve to ask, either. It just seemed too personal.