Rising from the bloody water, the other companions shook their faces clear and watched for the next rush. But the stingwings were paying them no attention, almost as if the companions weren't there.
“It's the blood,” Krysty whispered in astonishment. “There's so much of their blood in the water they can no longer smell us!”
“Not smell, not find,” Jak stated confidently, brushing back his sodden hair. “How long last?”
“Probably until the first time we sweat,” Mildred muttered, as if the volume of her voice could reveal their presence to the feasting creatures. “Only primates have isotonic traces of ammonia in their sweat. They must zero in on that.”
“Good,” Ryan grunted, and ducked under the water once more and came up sopping wet. “Then chill them all!” he growled, and started firing, carefully putting a single round into the gore-streaked heads.
Using blades only to minimize the noise, the companions slashed a bloody path of destruction through the feasting muties, until every one was gone, and the salt water swirled thickly with their life fluids.
“Any more?” J.B. asked, adjusting his glasses to scan the dunes on the horizon. The lenses were drip
ping with pale blood, his shirt and pants drenched to the skin.
“That last,” Jak stated with a somber note of pride, swishing his blades in the filthy pond to clean the steel.
“Thank Gaia,” Krysty added, her soaked hair flexing limply under the accumulated weight of the blood and gore. “We haven't been this close to getting chilled since the Anthill!”
At the mention of the nightmarish military base, every body grimaced, then continued with their crude ablutions.
“Okay, anybody hurt?” Mildred demanded, looking over the assemblage. Everybody had been slashed a dozen times by the talons of the deadly little muties, but they all appeared to be only surface cuts, nothing deep or dangerous, and there was no telltale flow of red human blood.
“Fine, just low on brass,” Jak complained, emptying the spent brass cartridges from his blaster and thumbing five fresh rounds into the 6-shot cylinder. If the fight had gone on for only a few more minutes, they all would have ended up inside a stingwing, looking out.
“Alas, I have plenty of ammunition,” Doc rumbled, looking forlornly at his Civil Warâera blaster. Black powder was dribbling out the side of the massive cylinder from the constant dunking. “But I fear my LeMat will not be useful until thoroughly cleaned and dried.”
“Can't leave you naked. Here, take this,” Ryan said, passing over the SIG-Sauer and a handful of loose rounds.
Eagerly, Doc accepted the weapon and worked the
slide, keeping a suspicious watch on the dead muties. If life had taught the time traveler anything, it was to always be prepared for betrayal.
Going over to her horse, Krysty used her knife to flick aside a couple of tattered stingwings and inspected the chewed remains of the beast. Sweetcheeks had been a fine horse, not particularly intelligent, but bridle-wise, trail-smart and very strong. The woman silently said a prayer to Gaia to treat her friend well in the next casement of existence. Death was merely a part of the cycle of life, neither the beginning nor the end.
Ryan finished reloading a spare clip for the longblaster, slung the weapon and reached into a pocket to withdraw a squat black object about the size and shape of a soup can. With a snap, he extended the antique Navy telescope to its full length and swept the horizon in every direction.
“Nothing coming our way yet,” Ryan told them, lowering the optical device and compacting it back down again. “But with this much blasterfire and fresh blood in the air, you can bet your nuking ass we'll soon have lots of company. Tanglers, stickies, hellhounds, you name it.”
“Maybe even some of those big wendies we've heard about that have invaded the desert from the far north,” Krysty added grimly.
“Wendigos,” Mildred corrected. “They were just a myth in my timeâCanadian folkloreâbut they're sure as hell real enough now. The bastard things patrol along the border of the desert to attack anybody coming out.”
“Picking off the weak and tired,” J.B. said, tilting back his dripping-wet fedora. “Pretty smart.”
“Pretty deadly,” Ryan stated.
“And, alas, we shall be walking thirsty from this point onward,” Doc rumbled, scowling in displeasure at the sight of the ruined water bags draped over the saddle of his own deceased mare, Buttercup. Most, if not all, of their leather water bags had been savaged by the stingwings and torn to shreds, the precious contents soaked into the bastard mixture of sand and salt crystals. Their U.S. Army canteens were dented, but still intact. However, the adjective
great
hadn't been a misnomer in conjunction with the dreaded noun
salt.
The scorched desert was large and arid.
“How far away from clean water are we?” Mildred asked, squeezing the excess brine from her beaded plaits. Hanging at her side, the canvas med bag sloshed and felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds. All of her primitive medical supplies were safely sealed inside plastic bags, and the canvas satchel itself was waterproof. Which made it a perfect catch basin for the contents of the brackish pond.
“Tell you in a tick.” Using the minisextant hanging around his neck, J.B. checked the position of the sun and did some fast mental calculations.
“Any chance we're near Two-Son ville?” Mildred asked hopefully, tilting the med bag to pour out volumes of excess water.
“No, that's a thousand miles to the south. Unfortunately, we're close to the eastern edge,” J.B. said glumly, tucking the sextant away again under his shirt. “So we've got about a gazillion little salt ponds like this straight ahead of us for a good forty miles before reaching Clearwater Springs.”
“Forty miles?” Jak frowned.
“As the stingwing flies,” J.B. added, trying to smile at the weak joke, but could see that his words had fallen hard on the others. Forty miles through the searing, nuke-blasted heart of the desert on foot. That was tantamount to a death sentence.
Sloshing through the bobbing swamp of bodies, Ryan climbed onto the muddy shore and stomped his combat boots to dislodge some sticky entrails. “Okay, take only the essentials,” he directed, tugging a water bag free from the pommel of his nameless stallion. “Water, food and brass. Leave everything else.”
“Even the cyclo?” Jak asked with a scowl.
Strapped to the rear of three of the horses were bulky objects securely wrapped in heavy canvas. The companions had journeyed long and far to find an undamaged library and recover an encyclopedia. That had been Doc's idea to give the books to Front Royal in Virginia and help them with the rebuilding of civilization. Front Royal was one of the very few well-run baronies on the East Coast. The ville was still a long way from reclaiming predark technology. The encyclopedia could provide invaluable information.
“Indeed, it seems that we must, my young friend,” Doc muttered, drying the sword on a sleeve before sliding it back into the ebony stick. “For while knowledge is indeed power, in this particular case it is only a millstone about our all-too-frail necks.” The blade locked into place with a hard click.
High overhead, a lone vulture was starting to circle the killing field. The first of the scavengers to arrive.
“Might as well start walking,” Krysty stated, pulling
a candle from her pocket and rubbing the wax with a finger before applying it to her lips. The old trick eased thirst and could help keep a person alive for a full extra day.
“I'll fill a spare canteen with dirty water in case any more stingwings come hunting for us,” Mildred said, removing the cap and plunging the container into the reeking pool.
“A hellish perfume, indeed, madam,” Doc said, sniffing in disdain. “But then, it is always advisable to use a long spoon when supping with the devil.”
Washing as much gore as possible out of their hair and clothing, the companions then plunged some rags into the relatively clean mud along the banks, getting the cloths nicely damp before tying them over their heads as crude protection from the sun. Rummaging through the saddlebags, they took everything useful and left the rest of the supplies behind to start walking in a single file with Ryan in the lead.
Saving their strength, the companions didn't talk as they marched through the shifting sand, each lost in his or her own private thoughts. They were fighters, survivors, victors in a hundred battles, but the Great Salt took its toll. In many villes, the name of the desert was a euphemism for death.
Slowly, the long miles passed under the monotonous trudge of their heavy boots. The sun beat down on the companions without mercy, and the hot air stole every drop of moisture from their parched mouths. Using more wax on their lips, the companions licked the sweat from their arms to help stave off dehydration and wondered if this was the day that they would dieâ¦.
“I said, out!” McGinty roared, throwing the outlander through the Heaven's doorway.
Tumbling across the wooden porch, the man hit the brick street and his head cracked loudly on the stone-work. With a low groan, the outlander went limp, and the giggling children descended upon the unconscious norm to rifle his pockets and carry away anything small of value. The knife and shotgun holstered at his side they avoided like a rad pit. Stealing a weapon was a hanging offence in the ville, even for children.
“Anybody else wanna try to buy a drink with brass filled with dirt instead of powder?” McGinty snarled, tapping a lead pipe into his palm. But the challenge from the barkeep went unanswered in the tavern, and everybody studiously turned their attentions to drinking or gambling.
After a moment, McGinty grunted in satisfaction and went back behind the counter to continue serving drinks and swapping lies with the regular patrons.
“Should have aced the bastard and taken his boots,” Petrov Cordalane muttered, taking a sip of the shine in his cracked mug. Waste not, want not, his mother always used to say. A trader visiting Delta had suggested that his ancestors were probably Russkies. Born and raised in Deathlands, the man took that as an insult
and slit the outlander's throat with a broken bottle. Then Petrov took his belt knife and zipgun. It had been his first chilling, and the weight of the blade made him see the common sense of acing folks only for a profit.
Nowadays, Petrov owned two knives and a working handblaster called a Webley .44, with fifteen live rounds. His mother would have been pleased to see how far her son had gone from such a simple beginning. What his father thought about the matter Petrov neither knew nor cared.
“Boots and gun belt. That's what I would have taken,” Rose DeSilva said with a sneer, chewing on a hard piece of waxy cheese rind.
The slim woman had yellowish-blond hair, the bouncy curls almost childlike. Rose was covered with scars and missing the pinkie on her left hand from tangling with a stickie in her teen years. The woman had aced the mutie with a rock, but it took her finger first. Afterward, Rose had left the stickie alive while she tied it to a tree, and built a huge stack of dry branches around the creature. The fire had lasted long into the night, and she still remembered the agonized hooting with great pleasure. The big crossbow hanging from the back of her chair had been carved from that same tree, her first crude arrows glued together with the sticky resin harvested from the aced mutie.
Drinking shine, Thal Dagstrom merely grunted in agreement. Whenever possible, the huge man preferred not to speak. A hulking giant, Thal was a good foot taller than anybody else in the tavern and heavily muscled to the point that some folks thought there had to be a little mutie blood in his veins. But nobody was
stupe enough to ever ask. His entire body was bear-like, covered with thick black hair. Only his head was naturally bald. His hair had started thinning when Thal was a teenager. These days, he wore a black wool cap, no matter the temperature outside. A tiny Remington .22 automatic blaster was tucked into his rope belt, the worn silvery finish carefully blackened with a pumice stone. The clip held only four live rounds, two of them homemade varieties of unknown quality, but at his side hung a stout wood club, the tip bristling with rusty nails. In close quarters, it was a formidable chilling machine.
“Soft, the locals are soft,” Charlie Bernstein added, using a piece of bread to mop up the last vestiges of gravy from his bowl of gopher stew.
His appetite was legendary, and the angular face of the gaunt man showed the starvation of his childhood, but his arms were thickly cabled with muscle. His clothing seemed to be composed more of patches than original material, but the overall effect was a sort of camo pattern that allowed him to disappear in a forest. Even his boots were pieced together from an assortment of other shoes and such, mostly to hide the short nails sticking out of the toes. More than once, Charlie had kicked a man to death while hooting and laughing. For some reason, he enjoyed pain, giving and receiving, and sometimes, in the deep of the night, Charlie wondered if he was insane.
The big bore blaster holstered at his side was homemade, just a hunk of steel bathroom pipe reinforced with coils of iron wire. The wire was applied red-hot, and when it cooled, the coils tightened, reinforcing the
old pipe enough for it to take the blast of a 12-gauge cartridge. The wooden stock was carved from an apple tree and bore the crude design of a naked woman, the notches along the top showing the number of chills he had done. The actual number was only half as many, but it still represented a lot of folks on board the last train west.
“Delta is an odd town, that's for sure,” Petrov countered, taking out a worn deck of playing cards and beginning to shuffle. “But that's why I like the place. Strange suits me fine.”
The rest of the crew could find no fault with that. Delta ville sat alongside the Whitewater River that flowed out of the Great Salt like a slashed artery of blue life. The muddy banks were lined with reeds, bam boo, flowering bushes and even a couple of stunted trees bearing tiny bitter-tasting apples. But the farther the river got from the desert, the more the greenery expanded until only a day's ride away the plants spread across the landscape in a true forest of real trees, bushes and green grass. The ville did all of its hunting and farming out there, both groups accompanied by heavily armed squads of sec men as much-needed protection against the muties that lived in the trees and, sometimes, under the ground.
However, never in the history of the ville had a single mutie gotten past the front gate. The defensive wall around Delta was huge, made of rocks hauled out of the river by decades of slave labor, the mortar between the layers said to be liberally mixed with blood, sweat and tears. It was probably true, but old Baron Cranston had died a long time ago, and his wife, who'd
succeeded him, hadn't tolerated such brutality. Nor did her son. If you were caught stealing food, a person got twenty-five lashes at the post, every time, no favors or leniency. Rape a woman or a child and that got you beaten by the women in the ville with clubs, whipped by the men and then sent to the gallowsâif you were still sucking air. The only crime that got a person sent to the wall was disobeying the orders of the baron. That put you in chains to work and labor on the ville wall, expanding the barrier, making it higher and thicker until a full moon had passed, then you were set free and tossed outside the ville gates. Alone and weaponless, the person would be easy prey for slavers or muties, but at least still alive.
Most of the old folks considered the baron too damn soft on coldhearts, especially those operating a salve trade out in the Boneyard, but they never said it out loud. Only Petrov Cordalane knew the truth of the matter, and since he lived in Delta, the man said nothing about it to anybody, not even his gang. Secrets held power.
Besides, Petrov had a good thing going here in Delta, and he wouldn't ruin it. Heaven was the main tavern in the ville, boasting food, drinks, an actual working piano for Sunday, a gaudy house upstairs and a still out back. The local brew was made out of rotting fish guts, an acquired taste, to say the least, and it was also burned in lanterns to make light and to degrease machine parts. But the locals sang its praise, claiming that the river juice would cure all manner of ills, from the black cough to the shakes, along with a dozen other ailments that had once ravaged the world since skydark.
Petrov liked the food in the tavern, so he didn't do biz in the ville. This was his haven, a safe place to run if trouble came snapping at the heels of his crew, the Pig Iron Gang.
It was cool inside Heavenâthe walls were made of stone. The rafters in the ceiling were black with age and the smell of the accumulated fumes of the fish-oil lanterns was reminiscent of a smokehouse.
Over by the window, a young woman was sitting at a battered piano playing remarkably well, a large group of outlanders and travelers listening with rapt attention. Some of them had never heard of such a thing as a piano before. Dozens of other folks were eating fish stew, gambling or drinking shine. A few of the ville oldsters were caging smokes from travelers in exchange for fantastic stories about the muties in the woods, or even better, the hot sluts upstairs. Those were always popular, and the more details, the better.
Positioned near the wooden stairs leading to the second floor, five gaudy sluts were eating bread and smoking cigs. Their assorted dresses were some velvety material cut and stitched together from the safety curtains of a ruined movie theater; the material couldn't be set on fire. Amazing stuff. The low-cut blouses and short skirts displayed an amazing amount of flesh, and on a regular basis, a man would shuffle over to talk some biz. Then the man and woman would go upstairs for fifteen minutes or so and come back down. Smiling wide, the man would be buckling his belt.
One large gaudy slut named Post seemed to be a particular favorite this night and was constantly chosen by customers to go upstairs.
“How does she know what they want?” Rose asked in idle curiosity. “Isn't she deaf?”
“Bitch can read lips,” Petrov answered, then added, “She also has the best tits I ever seen.”
Across the tavern, Post smiled at the compliment, then pulled down her blouse for a moment to flash the man a peek at both of her highly prized assets.
“Pretty nuking good,” Charlie agreed, gnawing on a heel of stale bread. But nobody was sure if he meant the slut or the food.
Most of the bottles along the wall behind the counter were made of plastic and filled with water. After one too many bar fights, McGinty had decided not to risk his stock by putting it on display. The real shine was kept safe under the counter, right alongside a working predark scattergun, a pump-action monster called a Neostead that held eight fat cartridges. All of them were homemade these days, the black powder purchased from a traveling trader, and then the base was packed with bits of broken glass, small rocks and bent nails. The combination opened the belly of a person like stomping on a fish.
“Another round!” Petrov bellowed, waving his empty plastic tumbler.
An old woman wearing an apron shuffled out from behind the bar, carrying a clay jug with a cork in the top. The waitress was an oldster, barely able to walk anymore because of the misery called the bends, her back hunching over to make her almost appear to be a mutie. But she was a gene-pure norm and once had sold a night in her bed for a round of live brass. Now, the former beauty ferried dirty dishes and slept in the
corner near the fireplace, kept warm by the glowing embers and her lost dreams of youth.
“I hear tell you're called the Pig Iron Gang,” the waitress said, pouring drinks into the glasses and mugs. “How come?”
“Shut up,” Petrov snarled, not willing to admit that he had no idea what pig iron was, he just liked the sound.
With a shrug, the waitress turned and went away, looking for more empty glasses to fill, her long day only just starting.
“Enjoy the shine, this is the last round,” Petrov said, sipping the acidic brew. “And we'll be sleeping outside the wall tonight, so try and steal some blankets.”
“We broke already?” Rose said out of the corner of her mouth, dealing a new hand of cards.
“Shitfire, that seems to happen faster every month,” Charlie mumbled, watching the deal as he picked his teeth with a sliver of wood. He found something interesting and chewed the unidentified morsel briefly before swallowing.
“You eat too much,” Thal rumbled in a surprisingly gentle voice. Then the giant scowled and clawed for his Remington.
“Fragging, mutie-loving bastards!” the outlander snarled, staggering back through the doorway. There was blood dripping from the back of his head, chilling in his blurry eyes and a scattergun held in his shaking hands. “Gonna ace ya all!”
Instantly, Petrov and his people cut loose with their assorted weapons, the barrage of arrows and lead blowing the outlander off the floor and sending him sailing back into the street.
“Nuking hell, you boys are fast!” a sec man gasped, his own blaster only halfway out of his holster.
“The way that idjit was waving his blaster around it was him or us,” Petrov said, the smoking Webley still tight in his fist.
“Well, you boys got yourself a free round on me,” the sec man stated, slapping the other man on the back. “And feel free to take anything that outlander owns.”
“That include his blaster?” Rose asked, nocking a fresh arrow into her crossbow.
“Yep, the scattergun is yours now.”
“What about his horse?”
“That too, if he had one.” The sec man nodded. “Now I know that seems kinda hard, so I'll tell you what. Baron Cranston gets half of any brass recovered from a fight, that's the law.” Then the man paused. “But I won't be counting it very closely. Savvy?”
“Yeah, we savvy,” Charlie replied, already cutting a fresh notch into the stock of his own blaster.
Gathering the loose cards, Rose stuffed them into a shirt pocket. Only a feeb left their belongings unguarded in Heaven. Rising from the table, Petrov walked outside and found a crowd gathered around the body, but nobody was closer than a few yards. The accuracy and speed of his gang were well-known in the ville and much respected.
Rifling through the warm, bloody clothing, Petrov unearthed a dozen rounds for the scattergun and passed three of them to the waiting sec man, then one more. Pocketing that extra round, the sec man gave the gang a brief salute and walked off toward the brick house on top of the hill in the center of the ville, a former
National Guard armory that was now the castle of the baron and what remained of the Cranston family.
Divvying up the rest of the belongings with his crew, Petrov gave the gun belt and scattergun to Rose. She beamed in delight over finally owning a blaster and tested the action on the weapon several times before loading in two live cartridges. The weight perfectly balanced her crossbow and made the diminutive woman feel more dangerous than a shithouse rat.