“What’s wrong with him?” Ryan demanded

Mildred didn’t answer. She turned away and rammed two stiff fingers down her throat, trying to induce vomiting. It took Ryan only an instant to understand. With a curse he tossed away the canteen. Poisoned. The whole bastard lake was poisoned!

Dropping the Steyr, the man clumsily cut his arm with the panga, hoping the pain would keep him awake as his world started to go dark. But Ryan barely felt the passage of steel through his skin and knew that it was already too late.

Enraged over his failure to recognize the trap, Ryan felt an adrenaline surge course through his body. But the brief respite vanished quickly, and, still fighting to remain conscious, the one-eyed man slumped to the ground and went still. The rest of the companions joined him moments later.

Soon, there was no movement at the crystal lake other than the steady rush of the waterfall and the bright sunlight reflecting off the gentle waves.

Tainted Cascade

Death Lands®

James Axler

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Slavery as an institution that degraded man to a thing has never died out. In some periods of history it has flourished: many civilizations have climbed to power and glory on the backs of slaves. In other times slaves have dwindled in number and economic importance. But never has slavery disappeared.

—Milton Meltzer

1915–2009

Slavery: A World History

THE DEATHLANDS SAGA

This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.

There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.

But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.

Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.

Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.

J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.

Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.

Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.

Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.

Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.

In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Epilogue

Chapter One

Moving low and fast, the six sweaty horses galloped across the blazing plain of the Great Salt desert, the grim-faced riders hunkered low in the saddles, their hands desperately reloading weapons.

“We’re not gonna make it!” J. B. Dix shouted, glancing over a shoulder.

“Yes, we are!” Ryan Cawdor yelled back, pointing straight ahead with his bolt-action longblaster.

Squinting hard against the wind and the airborne granules, the six riders could only make out a blur in the distance. Then as they crested a low sand dune, an oasis came into view, a tiny patch of blue water smack in the middle of the scorched hell of the vast salt desert. A few palm trees grew alongside the shimmering pool of water, their abnormally long fronds bending all the way down to hesitantly touch the surface as if trying to sneak tiny sips when nobody was watching. Bizarrely, a predark mailbox jutted from the damp sand alongside the pool, the metal sandblasted to a mirror-like sheen over the long decades, but the shape was unmistakable.

“Thank Gaia!” Krysty Wroth exhaled with a grin, reining in her mount.

In the far distance, a large black cloud crested the horizon. Skimming low and fast over the salty sand, the cloud moved with singular purpose, heading straight for the six companions, as unswerving as a laser beam.

“Here they come!” Mildred Wyeth yelled, bringing her horse to an abrupt halt alongside the pool.

“Into the water!” Ryan commanded, sliding off his stallion and dropping into the water. The man grunted with annoyance as the water only reached the top of his combat boots. Fireblast, he thought, this wasn’t going to offer us any useful cover. No other choice, then.

“Ace the horses!” Ryan shouted, firing a single 9-mm round into the left eye of his mount. The horse recoiled from the trip-hammer blow of the copper-jacketed lead and reared high on its hind legs, whinnying loudly. The big brown eyes stared accusingly at the man, then the horse collapsed onto the damp sand, twitched and went still.

With grim expressions, the rest of the companions followed suit, arranging the bodies in a crude barricade around the small pool. Wary of where they put their boots in the shallow water, the companions put their backs toward one another to stand in a defensive circle. Now, they were covered up to their chests, which gave them a fighting chance for survival. That still wasn’t much protection, but it was better than nothing.

Reaching out, Mildred took J.B.’s hand, and he squeezed back, the couple savoring the touch for a single precious moment, the gesture saying in volumes what no words ever could. Breaking free, J.B. slid the S&W M-4000 shotgun off his shoulder and passed it to the woman. Mildred nodded her thanks, removed a fat red cartridge from one of the loops sewn into the strap and slid it into the belly of the scattergun.

“Never heard of stingwings hunting in a pack before,” J.B. stated, working the arming bolt on his Uzi machine gun. Short and wiry, the man was wearing a battered old leather jacket and a fedora that had seen better days. Wire-rimmed glasses were firmly tucked into place on his nose, at his side hung a leather satchel, home to various bits and pieces of munitions in addition to several sticks of dynamite.

“If this is our last day, so be it, my friends!” Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner stated in a deep stentorian bass, cocking back the hammer on his massive LeMat revolver.

Dressed as if he came from another century, which he had, Doc wore a long frock, a frilly white shirt and cracked knee boots. His hair was a silvery white, but his thin face was lined.

“Not dead yet,” Jak Lauren drawled in forced calm, a Colt .357 Magnum blaster clutched in his right hand, the left fist holding two throwing knives by the blades. A true albino, his hair was the color of fresh snow and his eyes as red as rubies. Sweat poured off his face to disappear into the collar of his camo jacket. More knives were sheathed on his gun belt, and the handle of a stiletto jutted from his left combat boot.

“Too true, Mr. Lauren. Vini, vidi, vici!” Doc declared boldly, even while trying to control his pounding heart. Moving with exaggerated grace, as if he had all the time in the world, the old scholar tucked the blaster into his gun belt and drew his ebony walking stick. Twisting the lion head of the stick, Doc pulled out a long steel sword, the razor edge glinting in the harsh desert sunlight. He drew the blaster again and stood ready, his shoulders hunched, his eyes riveted onto the ever-approaching cloud.

“Stuff it, ya old coot,” Mildred growled, hefting the shotgun along with a Czech-made ZKR target pistol. Short and stocky, the predark physician was wearing a red flannel shirt, blue jeans and a U.S. Army jacket and combat boots. Slung across her back was a patched canvas satchel bearing the faded lettering M*A*S*H. Fear was a metallic taste in her mouth, and Mildred tried to spit it out. Then the physician recoiled at the sight of the blood from the chilled horses oozing off the bank to spread out in a crimson cloud across the pool. She prayed to heaven the sight was not prophetic.

“Must have gotten thirty or forty of the bastards,” Krysty said, replacing the round in her S&W Model 640 revolver spent acing the horses. Her animated red hair flexed and curled around her face in response to her heightened emotional state. A truly beautiful woman, the redhead was nearly as tall as Ryan with a well-proportioned figure. Krysty was dressed in a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off and patched denim pants that were tucked into the top of her blue cowboy boots.

The cloud was noticeably closer now, and the companions could once again hear the flapping of the leathery wings of the muties. There were so many of them that the flock of stingwings was as black as pitch, a patch of midnight flying fast through the noontime sky. The companions had escaped once before, but their horses soon became exhausted, forcing the companions to make a last-ditch stand.

“Let’s see what I can do about thinning them out,” Ryan stated, lifting his Steyr longblaster and working the bolt to chamber a fresh round. Tall and leanly muscled, the man radiated a sense of raw physical strength that was almost palpable. His long black hair was tied off his face with a rawhide thong, a leather patch covering what had once been his left eye. Ryan was wearing a ripped denim shirt, military camo-colored pants and combat boots. A SIG-Sauer pistol was holstered at his hip and a curved knife known as a panga was sheathed on the other.

Ryan held the Steyr in both hands and looked carefully through the cracked telescopic sight, delicately adjusting the focus. It took the one-eyed man a moment to locate the roiling flock of muties, then he chose the biggest creature leading the flock and gently squeezed the trigger. The 7.62-mm copper-jacked hollowpoint round plowed into the head of the hideous mutie and came out its rear, carrying along a wealth of blood and organs. As it fell, several of the other muties dived to the ground to start feasting on their fallen member, but the rest kept coming, as unstoppable as the tide.

Again and again, Ryan carefully aimed and fired, slamming home rotary clip after another, trying to chill as many of the winged monsters as he could before they arrived in force.

“Not bad, old buddy,” J.B. growled, releasing the Uzi to hang by its canvas strap while he rummaged about his munitions bag. “But watch this!” A moment later, the Armorer unearthed a pipe bomb and a precious butane lighter.

Flicking the flame to life, he lit the fuse until it began to sizzle. Tucking the lighter into a pocket, J.B. then whipped the pipe bomb forward at the end of a rope. Soon, the man had the explosive charge spinning around his head in a blur, steadily building speed as the fuse burned down quickly. When it had almost reached the bomb, J.B. released the rope, and the pipe bomb sailed high to gently curve back to the ground and violently detonated in the air.

Half of the flock vanished in the fireball, several more dropping from the sky, their leathery bodies riddled with shrapnel.

“Well done, John Barrymore!” Doc boomed, slapping the man on the back. “Once more, sir, and with vigor!”

“Can’t, no more rope,” J.B. said, swinging up the Uzi again, his fist tightening around the pistol grip.

Instantly, Jak turned to the nearest horses and started cutting off the reins.

“Too late. Here they come!” Ryan growled, louder than he expected, triggering the Steyr twice more, then shouldering the longblaster to draw the SIG-Sauer from his gun belt and jack the slide.

Screaming their wild keen, the stingwings spiraled down from the sky toward the huddled companions. Instantly, J.B. and Mildred aimed skyward and cut loose with their weapons, the Uzi and S&W shotgun blasting a huge hole in the flock. But the rest of them kept coming, the inhuman faces distorted in a feral rictus of savage hunger.

Then the smell of fresh blood reached the stingwings, and the slavering muties flowed away from the huddle of people to attack the dead horses, plunging in their needle-sharp beaks and nosily slurping the warm blood, their wings beating so fast that the air hummed. Taking advantage of the brief distraction, the companions ruthlessly gunned down as many of the muties as they could, firing and reloading with frantic speed.

Nothing stopped a stingwing but death, so the huddled people made every bullet count, taking an extra half second to aim and placing their shots with desperate accuracy.

Unable to reach a horse through the feasting of its brethren, a young stingwing dived for the nearest companion. Firing from the hip, Ryan blew off a wing, and as the mutie tumbled, he swung out the panga. The long curved blade neatly severed the mutie’s head, pale blood gushing out to sprinkle into the salty pool.

But at the death cry of the nestling, the rest of the muties turned their deadly attentions from the cooling mounds of flesh to the living, breathing companions. Screaming, the stingwings surged forward, eyes as bright as diamonds, mouths full of needle-sharp teeth.

In a ragged cacophony, the companions cut loose with every blaster, mowing down the first wave of the muties, the riddled bodies splashing into the pool, their lifeblood tainting the water a cloudy pink.

Triggering the second barrel of the massive LeMat, Doc annihilated four of the muties with a shotgun blast from the oddball weapon. The gun smoke was still pouring from the barrel when Doc started to move the selector pin to fire the main cylinder. He caught a blur of motion out of the corner of his sight. Cowardly dastard! Smacking the Civil War blaster across the head of the inhuman thing, Doc heard the breaking of bones, but unsatisfied, he slashed out with his sword, the razor-sharp steel removing the head of the creature like blowing the foam off a beer.

Blaster and knife moving in determined patterns, Jak wailed at the air, pale mutie blood sprinkling the teenager constantly. One stingwing landed on his collar to try for the albino youth’s vulnerable neck, then the mutie shrieked as its legs came off, severed by the cluster of razor blades hidden along the collar.

Kneeling down to reload the shotgun, Mildred heard a flutter of wings from behind and shoved the buttstock backward as hard as she could. There came a satisfying crunch of bones, and she rose, firing the weapon just in time to annihilate another stingwing, its deadly claws just missing her face by the thickness of a prayer.

Triggering her blaster several times in rapid succession, Krysty heard a creature scream in rage, and jerked to the side just as a mutie dived straight for her back. Smacking the blaster across the back of the mutie, Mildred sent it spinning away, then blew it apart with a perfectly aimed discharge.

“Flare!” Ryan bellowed, dropping the spent clip from his blaster and shoving in a fresh one.

Still firing the Uzi, J.B. reached into his munitions bag and unearthed a waxy cylinder. Thumping the bottom of the military flare on a raised knee, he saw the top erupt into a hissing rush of magnesium flame. Instinctively, the stingwings moved away from the fire, and J.B. waved the flare about, the sizzling stiletto of chemical flame clearing a good yard of space above the pool. The companions reloaded fast, trying not to think about how little brass was left in their pockets.

Unexpectedly, the flare sputtered and died. Casting it away with a curse, J.B. rummaged for a replacement. A small stingwing streaked low across the still water, coming in at groin level. Dropping the flare, J.B. swung up the Uzi, knowing he was a nanosecond too slow, when the scattergun roared. The muzzle-blast pounded his eardrums and almost dislodged his glasses. But the stingwing was blown into its component parts, blood gobbets soaring everywhere.

“Thanks!” J.B. shouted, over the stuttering machine gun.

“Anytime!” Mildred replied, unleashing hot lead death.

Firing the SIG-Sauer nonstop until its clip was empty, Ryan holstered the blaster while he swung up the deadly panga. The wicked blade took the creatures apart, removing wings, legs and heads with ruthless efficiency. Pale blood splattered everywhere, and soon the man’s clothing was soaked. A gush of intestines caught him full in the face, blocking his sight. Fireblast! Taking a deep breath, Ryan threw himself into the shallow pool, the salty water stinging every cut and abrasion on his body. Rising from the water, rivulets streaming down his face, Ryan braced for a new attack, but the stingwings now arched around the man as if he were invisible.

“Get underwater!” Ryan yelled on impulse, sheathing the panga and quickly thumbing loose brass into the empty clip for the SIG-Sauer in case the ploy faded. “Do it now!”

Although they had no idea what he was planning, the others trusted the man with their lives, and Krysty went first, then Jak and Doc, closely followed by J.B. and finally Mildred. Surrounded by a screaming cloud of the deadly muties, Ryan tried to watch for an attack from every side, but the creatures were no longer interested in him. In fact, several of the winged muties landed brazenly on the dead horses and noisily began to feed once more, ripping away chunks of the warm flesh to reach the juicy morsels deeper inside.

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 dripping 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 War–era 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 time—Canadian folklore—but 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 die….

Chapter Two

“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 gallows—if 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 Heaven—the 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.

“Short barrels mean a big spray,” Thal stated. “And watch for the kick. That scattergun is gonna rise up hard. A lot more than your crossbow.”

“Just cause there wasn’t any iron on my hip doesn’t mean I’m a fragging virgin,” Rose answered curtly, tucking her thumbs into the gun belt. Then she smiled up at the giant. “But thanks for the advice anyway, Bear.”

Unsuccessfully, the colossus tried to hide a grin at the use of his private name. They had been bed partners for years, and it amused the other two men to pretend that they didn’t know about the raucous nightly coupling.

“Pity the outlander didn’t have a horse,” Petrov said, turning away from the body to head back into the tavern. “We could have sold it for a week of hot food and clean beds here at Heaven, or just slaughtered the beast and lived off the jerky for a good month.”

“Fragging son of a bitch cost us a fortune in brass,” Charlie muttered angrily. “The shine and blaster help, but we’re still coming in low on this.”

“Mebbe we could go check the traps,” Rose suggested, pausing at the open doorway. At her appearance, a cheer came from the patrons and staff.

“This soon?” Petrov said with a scowl, scratching the back of his head. “Only been a week or so.”

“Mebbe we’ll get lucky,” Thal rumbled, patting the new cartridges for his blaster. “It feels like a lucky day.”

“More lucky for some than others.” Rose laughed.

Hitching up his gun belt, Charlie frowned. “Think Big Joe will mind us…?” He left the sentence hanging.

“What he doesn’t know won’t kill him,” Petrov said, smirking, and he walked into the cool darkness.

TRODDING UNDER the merciless sun, time seemed to stand still for the companions, the hot day lasting impossibly long. Or so it seemed, anyway. A dozen times over the past few miles, they passed more of the shallow saltwater ponds, the sight of the water a growing ache in their throats and bellies.

Pausing to take a tiny sip of warm water, Ryan sloshed it around in his mouth before swallowing. The urge to take a big gulp was strong, but he knew the foolishness of that. Drink too fast when you’re that hot, and it could come right back up. And that was moisture he couldn’t afford to waste.

“What’s that sound?” Krysty asked, glancing around, a hand going to her blaster.

Immediately alert, the rest of the companions drew weapons and scanned the vicinity. But there was nothing in sight except the endless shifting dunes and the sparkling vista of dried salt.

“What did you hear?” Ryan asked, then paused as he caught a faint whisper over the desert wind. It was gone in a heartbeat, but just for a split second, it sure as nuking hell had sounded just like a—

“Waterfall!” J.B. shouted, pointing a trembling hand straight ahead.

Hesitantly taking a step forward, Ryan scowled at the vague sight of something blue in the distance. It seemed to be coming right out of the side of a rocky escarpment that rose from the baked sand like an island in the sea. There was even some ragged green tufts of grass on top, a tiny touch of life almost lost amid the rolling sand dunes and windswept salt.

“Is…it…a mirage?” Doc asked, his normally booming voice reduced to a hoarse whisper.

“No, I smell water. Clean water!” Jak croaked, rushing forward, only to stop after a few yards.

“Good place for ambush,” the albino teenager added, drawing the Colt and thumbing back the hammer. The metal was so hot under the sun, he thought it would burn his finger, but he pushed aside that minor consideration. Better pain today, than death forever.

“Standard formation, on me,” Ryan muttered, swinging down the Steyr and working the bolt. “And watch your bastard flanks!”

Moving in a tight combat formation, Ryan and the others advanced upon the waterfall. Gushing from the side of a small hill, the clear water pooled around the turbulent base to flow off toward the east, directly away from the sizzling desert. The delicious smell of fresh water filled the air like a healing balm, easing their itchy eyes and the pain in their throats.

Doing a complete circle of the escarpment, Ryan and the companions looked hard for any signs of tracks or spoor, but the ground was smooth and undisturbed, pristine and perfect.

“Okay, we’re alone,” Ryan said, holstering his blaster. “I’ll take the first watch, and—”

Whooping in delight, Jak rushed forward to dive bodily into the water. He came up a few seconds later sputtering and grinning. “Cold!” he shouted, waving an arm. “No salt!”

“I should think so,” Mildred muttered, going to the edge of the small lake. Sitting, she eased off her boots and dangled her bare feet in cool water, washing away the sweat, and then proceeded to wash the salt and sweat from her boots.

Wading into the water, Doc cupped his hands to daintily wash his face and neck. Then on impulse, the man ducked below the surface and came up laughing. “Never before have I extracted so much joy from simply not being thirsty!” he boomed, his words echoing slightly along the outcropping.

Krysty walked into the shallows, then dived under the water. She stayed submerged for a long time, then rose again like a modern-day Venus. Her soaked clothing clung enticingly to her figure, and her hair spread out in a wild corona as the living filaments tried to dry themselves.

“Thank Gaia, I needed that!” She laughed, opening the canteen at her side. Filling the container, she tossed it to Ryan. He made the catch with one hand, the other filled with the Steyr. The man used his teeth to twist off the cap again, then liberally poured the water over his head and face before taking a small sip, then a much larger swallow.

“Thanks!” He exhaled. “I needed that bad.”

“Anytime, lover!” Krysty called back, starting to remove her clothing.

“Madam, please!” Doc gasped, turning away quickly.

“You can wait until we’re done,” J.B. said, easing off his munitions bag. “But we’re going to be swimming here for quite a while.”

“But…b-but…”

“Go ahead, Doc, I got your six,” Ryan said, sitting on a flat-top rock and taking another long swig.

“I see.” Pursing his lips, Doc acquiesced to the logic of the matter and stripped to his underwear, which was as far as decorum would allow the man to go with ladies present.

“Crazy old coot. We’ve all seen each other without clothes before.” But in deference to Doc’s modesty, every one left on their undergarments.

“Indeed, madam, but not in quite such intimate proximity!” Doc countered.

In short order, the companions were swimming around the pool. J.B. still wore his glasses and fedora.

“You’re going to wash that, too, I hope?” Mildred asked, sidling closer to the wiry man.

Smiling wide, J.B. started to answer when a strange expression swept across his face, and he started to hack and cough.

Stumbling to the shoreline, J.B. almost didn’t make it out of the lake when Ryan grabbed him under the arms and hauled the unconscious man onto the dry ground. Only steps behind, Mildred scrambled out of the water and rushed to his side. Looking inside his mouth for any obstructions, the physician quickly checked his pulse and removed his glasses to look into his eyes. No, it couldn’t be! she thought.

“Son of a bitch!” Mildred gasped in horror. “Everybody, get the fuck out of the water!”

Startled by her tone, the rest of the companions needed no further prompting to slosh out of the lake as fast as they could.

“What’s wrong with him?” Ryan demanded, every instinct honed in a thousand battles suddenly alert.

But Mildred didn’t answer. Instead, she turned away from everybody and rammed two stiff fingers down her throat, trying to induce vomiting. It took Ryan an instant to understand, then he threw away the canteen with a curse. Poisoned. The whole bastard lake was poisoned!

While the rest of the companions frantically tried to do the same thing, they noticed the waterfall was starting to sound muted, as if in the distance, and soon their movements took on a vague dreamlike quality.

With his own vision failing, Ryan tried to help, but having drunk so much water, the effect seemed to be hitting him the hardest. The world was already going dark, his strength dwindling fast. Dropping the Steyr, the man clumsily drew the panga and cut his arm, hoping the pain would help him stay awake. But Ryan barely felt the passage of the steel through his skin and knew that it was already too late. Enraged over the failure to recognize the trap, Ryan felt an adrenaline surge course through his body. But the brief respite vanished almost as quickly as it had come, and, still fighting to remain conscious, Ryan slumped to the ground and went still. The rest of the companions followed suit only a few seconds later.

Soon, there was no movement at the crystal lake, aside from the steady rush of the waterfall and the bright sunlight reflecting off the gentle waves.

Chapter Three

Lost in a dreamy world of muzzy thoughts and sensations for an unknown length of time, Ryan awoke sluggishly, feeling as if he was going to be sick. His stomach ached fiercely, and the world was rocking back and forth. Dimly, the man wondered if he was inside a redoubt suffering through a bout of jump sickness, which always hit the companions after using the mat-trans unit.

The redoubts were the greatest secret of the predark world, and even more so now. Built before skydark, they were military underground bunkers, constructed to withstand a direct hit by a thermonuclear weapon. The secret bases were safe havens of clean water and sterilized air, equipped with hot showers, washing machines, storerooms full of food, medicine, vehicles and weapons of every type imaginable. At least, they were originally. Sometime after the atomic holocaust, all of the military personnel assigned to the redoubts left, taking most of the supplies with them. Nowadays, the companions considered themselves lucky to find a single dented can of stew forgotten in the kitchen, or to scavenge a handful of live bullets that had rolled under a shelf. But sometimes they hit the jackpot.

Much more important were the mat-trans units. These fantastic machines were able to transmit the companions from one redoubt to another in a few seconds. Unfortunately, the knowledge of how to control a jump had been lost over time, so every journey through the machines was now blind chance. Even then, the redoubts and the mat-trans unit gave the companions a chilling superiority to everybody else in the world—mobility.

It was a fact that Ryan was starting to appreciate more as he slowly began to notice the splintery wood under his cheek. The floor of a mat-trans was smoother than silk. So, where the frag am I? he wondered.

Suddenly, the events at the waterfall came rushing back, and Ryan sat up, clawing for the blaster at his hip. But the weapon was gone, along with everything else he owned, including his outer clothing. Even his eye patch was missing.

Trying to focus his good eye against the constant bouncing, Ryan glanced around to see that he was inside some sort of a wooden cage. The floor was covered with dirty hay, the bars were thicker than his wrist and the door was set into the ceiling a good ten feet high. The man had to grunt at that. Smart. It would be triple-hard for any prisoner to escape when they couldn’t even reach the bastard door.

Outside the cage, a rolling grassland stretched to the horizon. A few trees were scattered around, along with the occasional stand of cacti and bushes, but the grass itself was a deep emerald-green. There was no smell of salt in the air. Wherever this was, they were a long way from the desert. Just how long have I been out, Ryan wondered, rubbing the stubble on his chin.

Scattered around the squalid cage were the rest of the companions, clad only in their undergarments and clutching their heads as if in pain. The bouncing came from the fact that the cage was in the back of a large buckboard wag. Ryan could dimly see the two drivers sitting in the front seat, one of them holding a crossbow, and the other man working a set of reins. As he gave them a shake, several horses whinnied and the bouncing got worse.

Slavers. Ryan cursed quietly. The sons of bitches had to have dosed the water and then simply sat back to wait for parched fools to come racing out of the Great Salt and straight into their waiting chains. The man felt like a feeb, but pushed those thoughts aside to concentrate on how to escape.

There came a rustle from the largest pile of hay.

“You okay, lover?” Krysty whispered from inside the pile of loose material. Both shapely legs stuck out from the green hay, her full breasts just barely concealed. Her face was calm, but her hair flexed wildly, showing that she was furious.

“More importantly, are you?” Ryan countered, studying her for any sign that she’d been raped while they’d been unconscious.

“Nobody rode me,” Krysty answered softly, casting a glance at the fat men in the front of the wag. “Nor Mildred, either. But I don’t think we’re likely to stay that way for long.”

“Not likely,” Ryan agreed grimly, rubbing his unshaved jaw. There were two other wags in the convoy, the cages in the back jammed full of scrawny people. However, Krysty and Mildred were the only adult females with some flesh on their bones, and all of the slavers were men, not a single woman among their ranks. Yeah, come nightfall, things would get ugly.

“I am glad to see you back, my dear Ryan,” Doc rumbled, wiping his mouth on the back of a hand. “I had feared that your consumption of the tainted water may have taken you across the River Styx.”

“Not aced yet,” Ryan stated, flexing his hands, feeling the strength slowly return.

“Got a plan yet, buddy?” J.B. asked, reaching up to adjust his glasses. With a start, the man frowned when his fingers only touched bare skin. Dark night! the Armorer thought. Without those I’m nearsighted to the point of being blind! About as useful as a dick on a cactus.

“Working on it,” Ryan murmured, studying the cage and wag.

“Work faster,” Jak whispered, picking up an old piece of string and using it to tie back his long hair. Although only a teenager, the albino youth was covered with a wide assortment of scars forming a rippled pattern caused by being caught in acid rain, knife cuts, laser burns and the circles showing a healed bullet wound.

Deep in thought, Ryan merely grunted in reply. If this had been an iron cage that would have been another matter. But these wooden cages were generally the providence of slavers. Cannibals used iron cages because they didn’t really care if the prisoners banged their heads against the bars and took their own lives. They were going into the cooking pot either way, and beating themselves up only made the meat more tender. However, slavers used wood, sometimes with canvas padding wrapped around the bars, because they needed the merchandise alive and relatively undamaged.

Carefully, Ryan studied the other two wags, noting their positions in the caravan, then he turned his full attention to the two men in the front of their wag. Both were fat, but with broad shoulders and wide hands, suggesting that some of their girth came from being large men. The driver had a mustache, the gunner was bald, and each was armed with a machete, a club and a bullwhip—but not any of the blasters taken from the companions. Fireblast! He had been counting on the slavers carrying the weapons on them.

Unfortunately, aside from the green hay, bits of string and some old yellow straw, there was nothing else in the cage but the companions. Slowly, a plan began to unfold in his mind, and Ryan briefly told the others. They nodded and moved to the appropriate positions. They would only get one chance, and failure meant worse than death.

Briefly, there was a tickling sound along with the smell of fresh urine.

Abruptly rising from the hay, Krysty and Mildred loudly yawned and scratched themselves, the women spreading their arms to display their figures to the fullest advantage.

“Well, well, looks like we got a couple of gaudy sluts this time.” The gunner leered, glancing over a shoulder. “Keep it up, sluts! I likes me a good show!”

“Then how about some dinner theater?” Mildred snarled, throwing forward a gob of newly moistened dung. The drek hit the wooden bars and splattered across both of the slavers.

“Stupe move, bitch,” the driver snarled, the back of his shirt speckled with the material.

“Yeah, tonight we’re gonna make you eat that.” The gunner smiled, rubbing his crotch. “Along with some other stuff, too!”

“Without first having dessert?” Krysty asked, and flung a second wad. The dripping drek sailed through the bars to smack directly into the gunner’s face, catching him in the middle of a chuckle.

Hacking and choking, the fat man bent over the side of the wag to loudly wretch, while the driver howled with laughter.

“She got you good, Billy!” The man guffawed, slapping a knee.

“Shut up, Henry,” the gunner panted, using a sleeve to wipe the bile and drek from his face. Pursing his lips, the man spit filth from his mouth, then stood to uncoil the bullwhip at his side. “Fuck the bounty! I’m gonna skin that bitch alive!”

“How very odd,” Doc said in a cultured tone of voice, sitting upright amid the hay. “Because that was exactly what I said to your mother before I raped her.”

“Wh-what did he say?” Henry gasped in genuine shock, almost dropping the reins.

“My, my, you should have heard how she squealed like a little piggy.” Doc grinned amiably. “It was most amusing. I bet that you can squeal like a piggy, too, if you try. Come on, squeal, my fat little piggy. Squeal for Daddy!”

Sputtering obscenities, Billy turned a bright red in the face and lashed out with his bullwhip.

Expertly, the knotted length shot between the bars to score a bloody furrow across the old man’s chest.

Gushing crimson, Doc was thrown backward from the brutal strike, but Jak and Ryan dived on the whip and pulled with all of their strength. Caught off balance, Billy was hauled forward to smack his face hard against the wooden cage. Rising from the hay, J.B. thrust his hands through the bars to grab the slaver by the ears and bang the man’s head repeatedly against the cage until blood poured from his slack mouth and his eyes rolled back into death.

“Son of a bitch!” Henry yelled, and clawed for a wooden whistle tucked into his belt. But before the slaver could sound the alarm, another gob of dung hit the whistle, and it tumbled out of sight.

“Mutie fuckers!” Henry snarled, reaching for his machete.

Moving fast, Ryan lashed out with his stolen whip, slicing open the slaver’s forehead. Blinded by the flow of blood from the minor wound, the driver flailed about with the machete, hitting nothing. Ryan rushed to the front of the cage and shoved his arm through to lash the whip out sideways. The knotted length coiled around the slaver’s throat, and Ryan yanked back with all of his strength. There was an audible snap of bone as Henry flew out of the seat to crash into the bars. Gurgling horribly, the man could only feebly twitch as Krysty held him hard by the hair, and Mildred grabbed the machete to chop down twice and end his misery.

Freeing the whip, Ryan tried to get the reins and failed, the leather straps having fallen over the side of the wag in the tussle. Knowing that time was short, the companions dragged both of the corpses closer and looted them of anything that could be used as a weapon: both machetes, the other whip, a massive flintlock blaster with a barrel large enough to serve as a gren launcher, a canvas pouch filled with black powder, shot and cloth wadding. Plus a big iron key.

Using the long handle of a whip to snatch the reins, J.B. shook them gently and whispered soft words to the team of horses, making them maintain an even speed. If this wag fell behind, or the companions tried to make a break, they would be spotted instantly, and the other slavers would slaughter them with those longblasters. Meanwhile, hauling the dead men up against the cage, Krysty and Jak held them in place to make it look as if they were still alive. The trick wouldn’t fool anybody paying close attention, but all they needed was a few minutes. Speed was their best chance at survival now. Speed, and some triple-savage chilling.

Still bleeding, Doc passed the flintlock and ammo pouch to Mildred, and she started to quickly reload. The physician longed to help the wounded man, but this wasn’t the time or the place.

Going to the middle of the cage, Ryan went down on his hands and knees. As the strongest person there, he would be the foundation. Climbing barefoot on top of him, Doc reached up high and just barely managed to ease a hand around the bars to start fiddling with the key in the lock.

“John Barrymore, it will not fit!” Doc whispered, his legs trembling from the effort of standing. His face was pale and sweaty, the blood still flowing freely from the deep laceration across his torso.

“Probably just rusty!” J.B. whispered back tersely, furious over not being able to do the job himself. “Lube it up!”

“With what?”

“Piss, blood, spit—anything ya got!”

Having no other source of lubrication, Doc spit on the key and tried again, with an equal lack of success. Suddenly, raised voices came from the other wags, and a shot rang out, the wood near his fumbling hand sprouting jagged splinters. Jerking back in surprise, Doc cursed as the key went flying to clatter off the bars and land in the hay below.

“Here they come!” Krysty shouted, releasing the corpse.

“Yee-haw!” J.B. bellowed, shaking the reins hard, and the horses obediently took off to a full gallop. But even pressing himself against the bars, the man could just barely make out the grassland before the animals and had to rely upon the innate good sense of the horses.

Letting go of his own corpse, Jak dived for the key just as the racing buckboard jounced through a dried gully, and the key jumped into the pile of hay.

“Krysty, Mildred, cover fire!” Ryan shouted, rocking to the wild motions of the rattling transport.

Going to the side of the cage, Krysty grabbed a bar tight and leaned far to the left. Resting the long barrel of the flintlock handblaster on the stable platform of the other woman’s arm, Mildred clicked back the hammer, gauging for wind and droppage.

Clawing the green hay aside, Jak revealed the old straw and the key sticking out of a small pile of drek. Without hesitation, the albino teen grabbed the key and spit on it twice before wiping it clean and passing it up to Doc.

Holding her breath, Mildred braced for the recoil and gently squeezed the trigger. The hammer moved downward, scraping the flint along a worn piece of steel throwing off bright sparks that ignited the loose powder in the flashpan. There was a brief hiss, then the primitive blaster roared so loud that Mildred thought it had exploded in her hands. Then the physician saw with cold satisfaction the driver of the second wag fly off the buckboard to be trampled under the pounding hooves of the horses pulling the third wag.

“Hell of a shot,” Krysty grunted, shaking her hair to ease the sting from the fiery discharge of the weapon.

“I was going for the horses,” Mildred growled, already starting the laborious process of reloading the big bore blaster.

Shots rang out from the third wag, several of them smacking into the wooden bars of the cage with remarkable accuracy. Krysty grunted at that. Clearly, somebody over there really knew how to shoot. With no choice, the redheaded woman stepped in front of the frantically busy physician to offer what protection her body could.

Steering around what sort of looked like a pile of boulders, J.B. grimaced to see it had actually just been a stand of cacti. Dark night, he thought, I’m going to get everybody aced unless I get this nuking thing under control!

A flurry of gunshots rang out from the second wag, and Krysty flinched as a miniball scored a hot line across her thigh. Jak was thrown backward into the loose pile of hay, his arm gushing blood.

Trying the key once more, Doc was delighted when the spit proved sufficient lubrication and the lock clicked open easily. But the hatch was incredibly heavy, and try as he might, Doc couldn’t get it to budge an inch.

Shaking the reins for more speed, J.B. could see a couple of longblasters tucked into a gun boot along the side of the buckboard. But trapped inside the cage, those were completely unreachable at the moment, so he simply concentrated on trying to control the horses. Dodging the cacti was easy, as the horses knew better than to run through it. But there was a forest coming up fast, and J.B. would soon have to turn left or right. That would slow the wag, making them an excellent target for the furious slavers. It all depended on whether the slavers wanted to try to recapture them alive or wanted to chill the companions to recover the stolen wag. Either option wasn’t very good. Nearly naked and trapped in a cage was not the way to survive a fight. Especially if you only had a single working blaster.

Rising again, Mildred placed the flintlock on Krysty’s strong arm, the other woman’s animated hair coiling away from the expected pain of the muzzle-blast. Aiming through the roiling dust clouds, Mildred lost sight of her target for a moment, but as the horses charged back into view she instantly fired. The lead horse of the third wag screamed as the soft lead plowed into its neck, crimson squirting out in a high arch. The other horses in the team reared in fear at the terrible smell, almost tearing loose from the wooden yoke beween them. The buckboard wag shook hard from their reaction, and the gunner went off the side to land in the stand of cacti, his high-pitched wails of agony cutting through the rattling wags, clattering wheels, pounding hooves and blasterfire.

Suspiciously fingering the jamb of the hatch, Doc gave a humorless smile when he found a second bolt. Clever bastards! Tearing it aside, Doc then easily swung the hatch open and it hit the bars with a hard crash. Now holding on for dear life, Doc braced himself against the pain in his chest as Ryan moved out from under his feet and started climbing the old man like a ladder.

Finished reloading, Mildred began to aim when the wag jounced through a weedy gully and the entire supply of black powder and wadding went flying away, briefly forming a dark cloud in the air before vanishing behind the escaping prisoner.

“Last shot,” Mildred said in forced calm, commanding herself to be cool in spite of the situation. It was like performing emergency surgery on a friend.

Reaching the top of the cage, Ryan helped Doc over the jamb, and together they started to crawl along the cage.

“Easy does it,” Krysty said in a soothing voice. “There’s no rush. We have loads of time.”

Thankful for the calming lie, Mildred still had trouble aiming against the constant jerks of the wags, then a white hand grabbed the bottom of the flintlock in an iron grip.

“Nuke ’em,” Jak muttered, panting heavily.

With a grimace, Mildred wordlessly stroked the trigger, and the driver of the second wag threw back his head with most of his throat gone. Clutching his neck with both hands, the reins dropped and the gunner tried to make a save, when a slave poked a skinny leg through the wooden bars and kicked the man hard in the ass. Pitching forward, he landed on the yoke, struggling to hold on, but his fingers slipped and he went under the hooves of the horses and then the wheels of the wag. What was left behind in the dust could only barely be recognized as human anymore.

“Power to the people!” Mildred shouted, raising a clenched fist. Incredibly, the other slaves repeated the cry, now pelting the remaining slavers with wads of dung.

Reaching the front of the cage, Ryan and Doc dropped into the buckboard seat.

“Blasters to the right!” J.B. shouted, giving the reins to Doc.

There were two longblasters in the boot, crude flintlocks over a yard long and more suitable as clubs than firearms. Snatching up the first, Ryan was pleased to find it loaded and ready to use. Useless for dealing with prisoners in their own cage—the things were just too long—the long-range weapon was just what Ryan needed at the moment.

Speaking soft words to the horses, Doc began easing the wag to a gentle stop. Obviously realizing where this was heading, the two remaining slavers began to arch away from each other and head in different directions.

“If get away, back soon with friends!” Jak shouted, a pale hand tight over his wound.

“Not gonna happen!” Ryan bellowed, clicking back the colossal hammer. Standing, the man rested the flint lock rifle on top of the cage and pressed his body against the wooden bars for additional support. Then several pairs of arms wrapped around his legs and torso.

“Got your back, lover!” Krysty shouted.

Ryan took careful aim at one of the remaining slavers and fired. The blaster almost tore itself loose from his grip. With a strangled cry, the first slaver doubled over, clutching the red ruin of his flopping belly.

Switching longblasters, Ryan aimed once more, and the other slaver stupidly tried to put the cage full of slaves between himself and Ryan for protection. But the man angled the horses too sharply, and one of the animals tripped, then another. Suddenly, the entire team was entangled in the reins and yoke, flailing helplessly, their combined weight pulling the wag sideways. As the buckboard started to dangerously tilt, the driver tried to jump clear, when the dirty hands of a dozen slaves grabbed his clothing and held their former master firmly in place.

Pulling a knife, he wildly slashed at them when the wag passed the point of no return and thunderously slammed into the ground. Dirt and leaves exploded from the shattering wreckage as horses screamed and people shrieked in unimaginable agony.

Chapter Four

Walking through the predark ruins, the Pig Iron Gang kept in a tight group, their new blasters held up and ready.

The remains of the ville were mostly crumbling brick and cracked pavement, thickly covered with a lush blanket of foliage from the nearby jungle. Here and there, oak trees and birch were starting to appear among the banyan trees, the branches reaching out to mingle overhead, forming a sort of canopy over the ancient highway. Slowly, the jungle gave way to a proper forest, the creepers becoming ivy, and the Spanish moss replaced with mulberry bushes and laurel.

“I remember when this was a swamp,” Charlie said, adjusting his new glasses. The hammerless S&W Model 640 was tucked into the pocket of his bearskin coat, the Czech ZKR held tight in a fist. The man was delighted over the find of the wire-rimmed glasses. He had just assumed that everybody saw the world in a kind of foggy blur, but with these he could see things hundreds of feet away as if they were at arm’s reach. It was nuking amazing!

“Yeah? Well, my daddy said he was alive when it was a desert, and my granddaddy said he swam in it as a lake,” Rose retorted, hefting the compact Uzi rapid-fire. “That don’t mean drek to me or mine.”

A camouflage jacket hung loose on her shoulders, the collar heavily festooned with feathers and bits of metal, perfect for a nightcreep in the ruins. Rose had discovered the hidden razor blades just in time to keep from losing another finger, and now the woman slept in the jacket, she liked it so much. A minisextant dangled between her pert breasts, the purpose of the thing completely unknown. But Rose liked how it shone golden in the sunlight.

“It is good to know what has happened, so that we may prepare for what will occur,” Thal rumbled, shifting the med bag to a more comfortable position. A rad counter was clipped to a knife sheathed on the canvas gun belt of the huge man, and he was carrying a Colt Python .357 Magnum blaster in his right hand, a .44 LeMat in his left. His pockets bulged with spare brass, spare socks stuffed in there to keep the ammo from jingling when he walked.

“Shut up and watch for jumpers,” Petrov commanded, clicking off the safety on the Steyr longblaster.

A battered old fedora was perched on the back of his head, and fingerless gloves covered his hands. A frock coat swept out behind the man like soaring wings, the silver toes of his cowboy boots glinting in the cathedral light streaming in through the dense foliage overhead. The ebony cane was thrust into his gun belt on the side, and the S&W M-4000 shotgun was slung across his back.

The outlanders at the waterfall had been carrying a baron’s treasure of blasters, brass and tech, a lot of it unknown to his crew, but Petrov made them take it all anyway. The poisoned waterfall was one of Big Joe’s best traps. He had them laid out all over the countryside to gather in a steady supply of prisoners to sell to the slavers. Petrov and the others had been poaching the traps for years. They hit the traps every now and then, never very often, and only took the belongings of the unconscious victims, but otherwise leaving the people unharmed. They didn’t even rape the women because that would have lowered their value to Big Joe. Slavers liked fresh meat. Petrov knew that Big Joe wanted them aced something fierce, a man could load that into a blaster for damn sure. Nothing pissed off a thief more than getting robbed himself. But so far Big Joe and his bone troopers had never been able to find out who was jacking the traps, and so the Pig Iron Gang lived a comfortable life, stealing a little, staying low and staying off the radar. Ghosts in the fog. Masters of the nightcreep.

Reaching the outskirts of the ville, the gang found the roadway covered with leafy vines, which made them wary of a puppeteer hidden inside one of the buildings. But Charlie identified the plant as just a form of kudzu, and the gang happily plucked some leaves to chew upon and ease their thirst as they probed deeper into the ancient metropolis. There were plenty of pools of cool water among the trees, but the moss on the rocks tainted those, making it a hundred times more potent than shine, or even jolt. The mossy water was what Big Joe used to poison the waterfall near the Great Salt, and a score of artisan wells. In this part of the Deathlands, nobody sane drank water until it had been boiled for longer than a man could hold his breath, and most folks did it twice, just to make sure.

Rising no higher than five stories, the buildings were neatly sheered off at exactly the same height, a sure sign that a nukestorm had swept across the land, the flying bridges, and warships and megatons of debris simply annihilating anything they encountered. However, the town of Trevose had been built inside a sort of depression in the ground, not quite a valley, and not quite an arroyo. So the thundering maelstrom merely passed by overhead, cutting off anything that reached above the height of the surrounding hills.

“Do you really think that we can do this?” Rose asked, hefting the Uzi. “Hit at Big Joe on his home turf?” It had taken her hours to figure out there was no safety switch. The handle of the rapid-fire had a sort of lever along the back that was depressed when making a fist. When it clicked, you could shoot, but not before. It was the damnedest thing she had ever heard of.

“We’ve never had a better chance,” Petrov stated, working the bolt on his longblaster.

Turning a corner, the gang moved past a church covered with thick moss, and abruptly stopped in their tracks. Unexpectedly, the streets were clean of any ivy or kudzu, even the leaves had been swept away. The lush greenery on the sidewalks was chopped neatly off at the curb. A wide, smooth boulevard extended directly to a large brick building that dominated the rest of the ruins, even though it was only four stories tall.

Encircling the building were old, rusty pikes topped with the decaying heads of the people and muties who had been stupe enough to cross Big Joe and so had paid the ultimate price. The walls had been painstakingly patched with different color bricks from a hundred buildings until the outside was a strange mosaic of conflicting colors, and rumored to be thicker than the defensive wall around most villes. There were no windows. Those had also been bricked shut until there were tiny slots where the people inside could fire out with blasters and crossbows.

The only visible door was solid bronze, heavily deco rated with eagles, flags and other totems of power. The metal was covered with countless small dents from blasters. Flanking the door was a wooden catapult and an iron cannon so old that the metal had turned green in color.

However, the truly terrifying aspect was the intact USAF jet fighter perched on the rooftop. Angled downward, the sleek skykiller looked as if it was about to do a bombing run and unleash untold horror on the denizens of the Deathlands.

Easing back around the corner, Petrov and the others moved back into the shadowy foliage before daring to speak. The sight of the aircraft disturbed the four people more than they wished to admit.

“So, that’s the Boneyard, eh?” Charlie said in false bravado. “I’ve seen better.”

“In your dreams.” Petrov snorted. “That fragging—” he paused before saying the ultimate curse word “—that…that plane scares the ever-loving drek out of me.” The man tried not to shiver, and failed. Death from above. During the past nuclear war that had been more than just a colorful phrase: it was a painfully accurate description of how the world had ended.

“So, how are we going to handle this?” Thal rumbled quizzically. “Nobody’s ever gotten inside and out again alive. Except for Big Joe and his troops.”

“I have,” Petrov said unexpectedly.

At that, Rose gasped in shock. “You used to run with Big Joe?”

“No,” the man replied, turning away from the Boneyard to zigzag deeper into the greenery. “Now, here’s the plan…”

“WHOA, GIRLS! Whoa!” Doc commanded the team of horses in a gentle tone, loosening his grip on the reins to bring the rattling wag to a ragged halt. “Easy now, girls! Easy, there.”

As the exhausted horses stood sweaty and panting, Ryan quickly reloaded the stolen longblaster while the rest of the companions hurriedly climbed out of the cage.

Taking the other flintlock rifle, Jak loaded it with sure fingers, then hefted the bulky weapon, only to switch sides to his undamaged arm. The rifle was in poor shape, nowhere as clean as it should be, and there were notches cut into the stock to show the numbers of chills the previous owner had done. Jak scowled at that. Notches only damaged the wood, making it vulnerable to water damage. A wise man counted his friends, not his chills.

“I don’t see anybody moving,” Mildred said cautiously, ramming powder, ball and cloth wad down the muzzle of the flintlock handblaster. There was only the soft rustle of the wind through the trees and a distant rumble of thunder.

“Only one way to be sure,” Krysty growled, glancing upward. The clouds overhead were mostly orange and purple, which meant a storm was on the way. But there was no telltale reek of sulfur announcing an acid rain.

Crawling under the front seat, J.B. unearthed a pair of heavy crossbows and a quiver of arrows, the crude iron tips slightly rusty, but still lethally sharp. Without his glasses these were useless to him, so the man gave one to Krysty and the other to Doc. The arrows were shared equally. There were a lot more supplies tucked away in the shadows, including a rolled-up tent, blankets, pot and pans, bags of grain for the horses and what looked like a cardboard box of .22 cartridges coated in a thick layer of wax, but there were no predark blasters in sight.

“We must be a long way from their home to storage this sort of stuff,” Ryan noted, resting the heavy longblaster on his shoulder. The Steyr weighed only seven pounds, while the flintlock monster was about twenty pounds, if not more.

“At least it means there’ll be no more of the bastards,” Krysty replied, testing the balance on her new weapon. The wooden stock was expertly carved and well balanced, the bow made from the steel leaf-springs of a predark car. She had seen something similar many times before and knew the limitations of the homemade weapon. If blasters weren’t available, this was the standard weapon of the Deathlands.

“Better let the horses rest for a moment, then we’ll go over and do a recce,” Ryan stated gruffly. Common sense dictated that the companions grab some water and clothes if possible. Cutting a deal with the slaves over the horses and wags would be a lot easier to negotiate if the companions were armed and dressed.

Locating a couple of leather sacks slung underneath the wag, stashed there to keep them out of the sun, J.B. deduced one was a water skin and popped the top to take a long swig before passing it around to the others. It was gratefully accepted, especially by Krysty and Mildred, who wasted some by washing off their sticky gun hands.

The other bag was securely tied, and J.B. broke a fingernail in the process. Hoping for his glasses, the man was sorely disappointed to find only hard rolls of bread, a lot of smoked fish and a couple of plastic bottles of shine. But there was no sign of their blasters, med bag, grens or any other of their missing possessions.

Stripping the two corpses of their clothing, Doc found most of it too befouled to be of any use. So taking a knife from the belt of one of the fat men, he cut the man’s shirt and pants into ribbons. After tying one around his chest as a crude bandage, Doc handed another to Jak so that he could do the same. Krysty and Mildred declined the proffered strips.

Feeling ridiculous, Doc layered several strips around his loins as a crude kilt. Born and raised in a time where a man or a woman showing an inch of bare skin was considered the height of vulgarity, almost wanton, the scholar was horribly embarrassed to be nearly naked among his friends. He knew it was ridiculous, but the wisdom of childhood often formed the templates of adulthood.

Ryan and J.B. took the shoes of the dead men, but left behind the reeking socks. Personally, neither of them gave a nuking damn about being half-naked, as long as they had a blaster in their hand.

From the second buckboard, the wind began to carry over the shouts from the prisoners in the cage. Ryan couldn’t clearly hear any of the words, but guessed it was merely them begging to be set free. He would do that soon enough—after the companions had first searched the other wags for their missing belongings.

Slinging a bag of ammunition over a shoulder, Krysty jumped off the wag and did a little dance, allowing her bare feet to get used to the hot dirt under the grass. “Wish there was more cloth to make moccasins,” she growled.

“Lots of aced slavers over there,” J.B. said, jerking a thumb toward the toppled wreckage. “Should be enough to get all of us shoes and blasters.”

“Some pants would be nice, too,” Mildred said, tugging her bra to a more comfortable position. Then she frowned, catching a tiny piece of what the imprisoned slaves had been shouting for the past ten minutes.

“Outriders!” Krysty cursed, spinning fast to bring the crossbow up to her shoulder.

Just then, a group of large men on horseback galloped over the horizon, each of them carrying a longblaster, with a brace of blasters tucked into their belts.

Quickly, the companions moved behind the wag for some cover.

“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc cursed, hefting his own crossbow. “The dastards weren’t running for their ville, but to their compatriots! We should have known there would be more guards than these pitiful, plump patrons!”

“Let come,” Jak snarled, ramming a fresh load of powder down the hot barrel of a longblaster.

Wordlessly, J.B. scrambled up the side of the buckboard and took the reins in hand, ready to run or charge, whatever needed to be done. The other companions would have to do the chilling, but even blind he could plow the wag through the newcomers to break their charge. A disorganized enemy already had one boot in hell, as Trader always liked to say.

Lifting his flintlock, Ryan aimed between the wooden bar, sweeping the longblaster through the group of outriders for a target. A big man with a beard seemed to be shouting orders to the others, which marked him as the leader. Good enough.

Bracing against the numbing recoil, Ryan fired, and the discharge of gun smoke masked the results for a few seconds. When the breeze cleared the air, Ryan cursed to see he had missed. The damn flintlock was about as accurate as throwing dry leaves! Just for a microsecond, the one-eyed man wished the bolt-action Steyr was at his side. Then he shook off those kinds of thoughts and concentrated on the here and now. Six against six, with the newcomers mobile and the companions armed only with two longblasters, a handblaster and a couple of crossbows. He’d been in worse situations, but not by much.

Whooping like lunatics, the outriders charged over the lush grassland toward the companions, their weapons throwing smoke and flame.

“No way they can hit us at this range,” Mildred said, a hand blocking the sun from her eyes. “They must be trying to scare us into submission.” The flintlock pistol was in her other hand, the hammer cocked and ready.

“No nuking chance of that happening,” Krysty stated, lifting her crossbow high and releasing an arrow. It soared high to arch back down and slam into a juniper tree just behind the outriders.

Contemptuously, the outriders opened fire again, scoring more furrows along the side of the wags, smacking out a chunk of wood from the bars of the cage.

“What in the…the bastards aren’t going for us, they’re trying to ace the horses!” Mildred shouted in comprehension.

Using the nimrod to ram down a fresh load of powder, ball and wadding, Ryan cocked back the hammer and took aim. “Then we’ll just use theirs, instead,” he growled, and squeezed the trigger. The longblaster loudly discharged, a dark cloud of smoke gushing from the wide muzzle with a bright stiletto of flame extending through the center like a lightning strike in the night.

The hat flew off the head of the leader, and the other outriders openly laughed. Then red blood began to trickle from his hair, and the man limply toppled over sideways from the saddle to disappear in a clump of thorny bushes.

Shouting curses, the remaining riders bent low behind the heads of their mounts for protection and started wildly shooting their blasters. Then Jak fired, scoring one man along the leg and tearing off the blaster from his gun belt.

“Well done, lad!” Doc proclaimed, releasing an arrow. It flew straight, then a gust of wind made it veer off wildly and impale a tall cactus. Under his breath, the scholar muttered a word that normally he pretended didn’t exist.

Pressing the handblaster against the bars of the cage, Mildred triggered the weapon, the recoil almost knocking the flintlock out of her grip. Oddly, the blaster sounded louder than the rifles, and as expected, she hit nothing. The range was simply too great for the short-barreled weapon. But she dutifully tried again anyway, determined to go down fighting. If nothing else, she forced the outriders to divide their attention.

“Dark night, if only I had my bag,” J.B. muttered, rubbing his bare shoulder. Then the man grinned wide and dived under the buckboard seat to come out with the wax-covered box of .22 cartridges.

“What do?” Jak asked, quickly reloading.

“Watch and see.” J.B. laughed, emptying out the leather sack of smoked fish, then reaching through the bars to start packing it full of clean straw.

Meanwhile, Ryan and Jack alternated firing and reloading their weapons to maintain a steady barrage. However, they were going through the small reserves of black powder at a prodigious rate and would soon be unarmed.

Just then, the team of horses started kicking and bucking, becoming frightened by the approaching outriders. “Millie, keep them under control!” J.B. yelled, adding a handful of loose black powder to the straw.

Triggering the blaster one last time, Mildred then sprinted to the front of the wag and seized the reins to try to calm the frightened team. “Easy, boys! Easy, now.” The physician chucked gently, her heart hammering inside her chest. Out in the open, she was a sitting target for the outriders and was gambling they wouldn’t want to chill a woman unless absolutely necessary.

Using both hands to draw back the steel cable for her crossbow, Krysty nocked another arrow. This one was tipped with a wicked piece of black volcanic glass, the razor-sharp edge of the basalt glinting like polished death.

Ignoring the people, this time the woman aimed for the much larger horses. She fired again, and a black stallion reared high to paw the air, the tuft of fletching sticking out of its heaving chest. Somehow, the rider managed to stay in the saddle. However, as the other outriders charged past, his animal slowed to a halt and simply stood there, gasping for breath, reddish foam dripping from its slack mouth.

Whipping the animal, the rider dug in his spurs to try to get it moving again, to no effect. Slowly, the beast lay down and went still. Crawling off the horse, the outrider kicked the dying animal in the head with a boot, and it lashed out with a hoof, cracking open his skull like a rotten egg. His head stove in, the faceless rider staggered about for a moment, blood squirting from the pulped mess of teeth and eyes, then he toppled over alongside the horse and they died in unison.

Stuffing in the box of cartridges, J.B. lashed the bag closed with a knotted length of rope. Yanking out the cork with his teeth, he opened a plastic bottle of shine and liberally soaked the entire bag. “Who’s empty?” the man demanded urgently.

Quickly, Mildred tossed over her exhausted blaster, and J.B. awkwardly held the firing mechanism of the weapon close to the bag and pulled the trigger. The flint threw off a spray of sparks and the leather sack burst into flames.

The heavy miniballs of the outriders hummed past the wag. One lucky shot, or perhaps a superior marks-man, scored a furrow in the wood alongside Mildred, splinters flying out to pepper her face. Cursing, she knelt to try to clear her eyes.

With a snarl, J.B. swung the crude bomb around his head, building speed while estimating the range, then he let go. The flaming sack sailed away to land in a bush near the outriders. Immediately, they separated to ride around the smoldering greenery, when the box full of .22 cartridges started cooking off. Banging away, the tiny rounds went in every direction, kicking up loose leaves and knocking a bird’s nest out of a tree. Then a horse whinnied in pain, rearing high to dump its surprised rider, and another man clutched his face, blood gushing between his spasming fingers.

“Three down, three to go,” Mildred stated, hunkering down low in the front seat. Her lips were dry, and the leather reins were tight in her sweaty hands.

As if suddenly realizing that they were the last living members of the group, the remaining riders reined in their horses and forced them to lie down. Taking refuge behind the living barricade, the slavers hidden inside some bushes began steadily firing at the companions, the miniballs now slamming into the grass underneath the wag with noticeably better accuracy.

“Okay, this is our chance,” Ryan stated, yanking out the worn flint and shoving in his only spare piece. “Mildred, set the horses loose! Jak, set the straw on fire!”

That caught Mildred by surprise, but she reached down to yank out the kingpin holding the yoke to the crossbar. As it fell loose, she lashed the horses with a whip. “Yee-haw! Yee-haw!” Already fidgety, the nervous animals needed no further prompting to take off at a hard gallop, leaving the companions and wag behind.

Once the horses were safely away, Jak thrust his flint lock inside the cage and dry-fired the empty blaster, the spray of sparks from the flint setting the rest of the straw and hay ablaze. Soon, thick plumes of smoke rose from the conflagration, the breeze wafting the fumes directly toward the crouching outriders. No longer able to see the companions, the slavers slowed in their assault.

“Nice move, but it won’t last for long,” J.B. growled, opening and closing his empty hands.

Unfortunately, Ryan could see that was true. The fire was already starting to die in spots, the meager amount of bedding nearly half-consumed.

“What now, my dear Ryan? Are we to abscond?” Doc asked, a note of disbelief in his cultured voice.

“Not yet,” Ryan retorted, and took off at a full run toward the second wag. The rest of the companions stayed close behind, their movements covered by the billowing smoke.

The naked prisoners in the wooden cage stopped yelling advice as the companions came their way. But they promptly began again as Ryan and the others ignored the cage to rummage under the front seat for any stores of black powder and shot. There was plenty, along with a couple more flintlock handblasters, another crossbow, arrows and some boomerangs.

Grimly, Doc and Krysty grabbed blasters and ammo, while Jak took the boomerangs, as well as a small hatchet. The boomerangs had a rounded nose, with tufts of human hair embedded into the wood. Obviously, these were used to capture runaway slaves alive. But Jak had a very different use in mind.

“Don’t leave us!” a woman pleaded, reaching out with a dirty hand.

“Take us with you!” a scrawny man added. “We can help fight! Please!”

Wordlessly, Ryan tossed them the iron key from the pocket of a fat corpse. A woman made the catch, but a man tried to snatch it away and a fight started inside the cage, the naked prisoners yelling and punching one another like lunatics.

“Work together or you’ll get chilled!” Krysty yelled in annoyance, slashing the reins. But the caged slaves seemed to be beyond reason, scrambling and crawling over one another in a mad attempt to get the key first, or die trying.

Turning away from the growing madness, the companions each chose a horse, then cut it free from the brace and yoke.

“Stupidity is its own reward,” Doc growled in disgust, painfully climbing onto the back of a roan horse and kicking with his bare heels. Well trained, the horse immediately broke into a gallop, nearly tossing the scholar off its rear end. Grabbing a double fistful of mane, Doc held on for dear life and wrapped his pale legs around the mare’s powerful chest as best he could.

With Ryan and Krysty in the lead, the companions headed away from the battleground and toward the rocky hills. But when a rise in the grasslands took them out of sight, they immediately changed directions and headed toward the setting sun.

Splashing into a shallow river, Ryan saw streaks of glass ribbons in the mud, the marks of a nuke crater. Without thinking, he tried to listen to the clicks of his rad counter, then cursed himself for a fool. Gone. Every thing he had gathered so painfully over the long years was gone. A blind rage filled the man, and Ryan swore a blood oath to seek savage retribution on the cowardly thieves.

“We better get out of this triple-fast!” J.B. warned, the hooves of his mare throwing out a constant spray. More of the glass ribbons were coming into view, the risk of getting aced by rad poisoning rapidly escalating.

“Okay, back we go!” Ryan agreed, sending his stallion onto the grassland. He had hoped to get behind the last couple of outriders, but now that was impossible. There was no other choice but to charge at them headlong.

Returning to the second wag, the companions saw the fight was still raging inside the cage, and they rode past the fools at a full gallop. They were sickened by the stupe actions of the slaves. But then, most folks were dumber than muties. That was how the fragging world got destroyed in the first place, Ryan thought, greedy fools fighting over things they should have been smart enough to share.

Racing into the thinning smoke, the companions primed their weapons and waited for the first sight of the enemy. In spite of its grim purpose, there was an almost dreamlike quality in their charge, their speed through the billowing smoke softening the grassy landscape into a greenish blur.

At the sound of the approaching hooves, the slavers hidden in the bushes began to wildly fire their weapons into the smoke. Wisely, the companions spread out to avoid offering a group target. Then the smoke cleared, and there were the outriders, crouching low in the bushes, their longblasters sticking out like the quills of a porcupine. Instantly, everybody fired.

With a start, Ryan actually felt the passage of a miniball as it hummed past his head, and Jak was thrown off his mare as the animal unexpectedly bucked, blood erupting from her muscular neck. The teenager hit the ground hard, losing his longblaster, but he came up in a run, waving the hatchet and throwing the boomerang.

Spinning fast, the weapon skimmed across the bushes and slammed into the chest of a slaver, sending him toppling backward. Before the man could rise again, Jak arrived and whacked him with the hatchet, the blade rising and falling in crimson fury.

Bringing his stallion to a stop, Ryan slid off the back end and ran into the thorny bushes in a crouch, uncaring of the cuts and scrapes incurred. There was a rustle to his left, and Ryan almost fired when he spotted Krysty, racing low to the ground, her blaster and machete at the ready. Doc fired his longblaster into a tree, hitting nothing. Dropping the weapon, he swung around the crossbow and continued onward.

A stand of cacti bellowed thunder and dark smoke, a miniball just missing J.B. to ace the horse behind the man. Popping up into view, Jak threw another boomerang. Dodging to the left, Ryan fired his blaster, scoring a horrible shriek. Then the bushes exploded with activity, the cloud of smoke strobing with the muzzle-flashes of blasters shooting in every direction. The big miniballs hummed through the murky air. Horses screamed, men cursed and something exploded with stunning force, wildly shaking every bush, tree and cactus. Then there was only a ringing silence, and nothing moved for a very long time.

Chapter Five

Gradually, the smoke cleared, and the companions stiffly rose from the bushes, their bodies covered with dozens of tiny scratches from the thorns and brambles. Their weapons already reloaded, Ryan and the others carefully surveyed the field, dutifully counting the as sorted body parts until reaching the correct number. Six outriders, six heads. Check.

“That’s all of them,” Ryan declared, resting the heavy longblaster on a shoulder. That’s when he noticed the clusters of splinters sticking out of his arm, some shrapnel from the cage. Gingerly, he plucked out the slivers, then did the same to his hip. Fragging things were everywhere! Even his back itched something fierce.

“Hold still a sec, lover,” Krysty said, stepping behind the man. He did, and there came a sharp pain from between his shoulder blades, followed by blessed relief.

Grunting his thanks, Ryan motioned for the woman to turn around. She was free of slivers, just dirty, bruised and streaked with blood. Luckily, none of it from her.

Going to a corpse, Jak looked hard at the body, then smiled and pulled off the boots. Slipping them on, the teenager stomped the leather into place, then went after the rest of the clothing. His pale skin was already starting to get sunburned, and Jak needed some cover fast or else he’d be in real pain for the next week.

In short order, the companions looted the aced men, taking random items of clothing, gun belts, ammo pouches, flint, knives and everything else that was useful. The boots were old leather, but still very strong, while the oversize clothing reeked of sweat and other things the companions tried not to think about.

“Oh, great god Laundry Soap, where are you when I need you?” Mildred said to herself, fighting the urge to scratch everywhere.

Going to investigate the dead horses, Ryan and the others found a couple more flintlocks, a couple of .22 zipguns, plus a great deal more ammunition and food. But none of their missing belongings.

“Must be in one of the other wags,” Krysty said, not really believing the words. “Or on the horses that ran away?”

“Nuking hell,” Ryan growled. “The weapons are gone. If these fat fools had our rapid-fires they would have used them in the fight.” Brushing back his long hair with stiff fingers, Ryan exhaled deeply. “Somebody else has our things now.”

“The dastards who poisoned the water?” Doc postulated, draping a saddlebag of food over a shoulder.

“Now I’m sorry we aced all of the slavers,” J.B. said, slinging a pepperbox rifle across his chest. “I knew a nasty little trick I learned from a Hun once that would have gotten one of the bastards talking fast enough.” His new cumbersome weapon had a dozen small chambers that each had to be individually charged with powder and ball, but they fired together with the pull of one trigger. The combined effect was devastating to anybody standing within a couple of yards, and generally harmless to anything a yard past that. But still, it was better than nothing.

Tucking a zipgun into a holster designed for a much larger flintlock, Mildred frowned at the idea of torture, then suddenly went cold inside when she again remembered what was hidden inside her med bag. Oh, my dear God, she thought. We have to get my bag back at any cost! She started to tell the others, then paused, unsure of how to inform them about her colossal blunder.

“Mebbe slaves know,” Jak stated, sliding a knife into his new belt. “They probably see trade.”

“Let’s go ask,” Ryan stated, heading that way.

Along the walk, Mildred decide to keep quiet for the moment about the journal. If she got it back, or it was destroyed, no problem. She would only have to inform the others if the med bag became permanently lost, and she was a long way from that yet. Pushing the matter to the back of her mind, Mildred inspected the wounds on Doc and Jak, and decided they would also keep for the moment. Neither was particularly deep, and both men knew how to tie a field dressing almost as well as she did.

Going to the crashed wag, Ryan went to check the bodies of the slavers, while Krysty and Mildred went to free the prisoners. Meanwhile, Jak went to look for the weapons of the companions under the buckboard seat at the front of the wag, and Doc inspected the horses to see if any of them could still walk. Sadly, all of the animals were crippled, so he solemnly drew a knife and began to mercifully slit their throats.

Keeping a safe distance from the group, J.B. stood guard with the pepperbox, a hand curled around the huge hammer.

The body of the first slaver was in such ragged condition Ryan had no need to check for any sign of life. The man’s head had cracked open on a rock, and his brains were lying in the dirt, covered with scurrying ants. Upon closer inspection, the driver of the wag turned out to be a woman; she was so fat that her huge breasts sort of merged with her belly to round out her shape into a blob.

She also didn’t have any blood on her clothing, and Ryan kicked a stone in the dirt to send it tumbling into her side. Instantly, the fat woman rolled over and fired a hidden blaster. The miniball hummed past Ryan, punching through his hair it came so bastard close, and he shot back, blowing a ragged hole in her arm. They needed her alive.

Staggering back from the explosion of blood, the slaver turned and whipped out a boomerang. The spinning wood went straight for Ryan’s face, and he just barely managed to block it with his longblaster, the boomerang smashing into pieces on the iron barrel.

Snarling, she draw a hatchet and started lumbering forward when an arrow slammed into her leg. With a cry of pain, the fat slaver turned to stare in raw hatred at Doc, holding an empty crossbow. Low and fast, Jak was running closer, a boomerang held in a raised hand. Dropping the longblaster, Ryan pulled a flintlock handblaster and cocked back the hammer.

“Surrender!” J.B. shouted, aiming the massive pepperbox.

“Nuke you! Never gonna put me in chains!” she growled, and pulled a machete to hack again and again at her own neck. As crimson fluids gushed from the self-inflicted wounds, the companions could only watch as she slowly sagged to the ground and expired.

“Damn fool,” Doc muttered, nocking in another arrow. “She thought we would do to her what she had done to so many others.”

“Makes sense,” Jak said, tucking the boomerang into his belt. “Do unto others, all that.”

Never having heard the message of peace from the Bible twisted in such a manner, the old man gave no reply, not sure if he should be offended or bemused.

Just then, Krysty got the cage hatch unlocked and the prisoners crawled out of the box onto the soft green grass. Ten people exited the cage, with two more staying inside. It was readily apparent from the impossible positions of their bodies that the slaves’ dream of freedom had been granted early by the cruel gift of death.

“Thank you, mistress,” an old man croaked, holding an arm that was clearly broken in several places.

Leading the man to the front of the buckboard, Mildred got some supplies from under the seat and commenced washing the arm with water and shine.

“You a healer?” the wrinklie asked in wonder.

“The best in the world,” Mildred stated truthfully, wrapping the arm in a dirty shirt before lashing it tightly to a broken spoke from the busted wag wheel. “This’ll itch like crazy in a few days, but don’t take this off!”

“Pain is life,” the old man said as if he had heard the phrase often.

“For a couple of months, at least,” she answered back with a grin. Hesitantly, he smiled back, then inhaled sharply as she tightened the ropes even more.

The rest of the freed slaves remained standing in a loose group, looking greedily at the food and weapons at the front of the wag. Some of them started to move toward the aced slavers, but then glanced at the weapons held by the companions and nervously stayed where they were.

Frowning, Krysty looked over the forlorn people. Starved nearly to death and buck naked, they looked ready to keel over and buy the farm. What baron would ever want to buy a workforce like this?

Reloading the longblaster, Ryan ambled closer. “Any sign of our…boots?” he asked, stressing the last word.

“Not here,” Jak said meaningfully, looked sideways at the undamaged wag. The fighting in the cage had finally stopped, and several of the prisoners were stretching their arms between the bars to try to reach something on the ground. Obviously, during the ruckus, the key had accidentally dropped into the grass.

“Anybody see who sold us to the slavers?” Ryan asked in a loud, clear voice. Walking closer, the man lifted an ammo pouch from his belt, hefting it in a palm. “There’s a reward.”

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