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  “No. I’m saying I’ll chill people for jacking me around. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve already heard some triple-crazy-sounding tales about what went down.”

  And so he had. Trager had asked—in a way that made it clear it was really a demand—that they go check out something that happened at Duganville. The demand part didn’t please Hammerhand, but he was starting to see how the country lay in his relationship with the “prophesied” wanderer from the wastelands. And since the whitecoat had come across with some heavyweight goodies, he was willing to suck down his pride and play along.

  For now.

  So he and Mindy, the sharpest-witted Blood after Hammerhand himself, had paid a visit quite openly to the distillers’ ville. Dependent as his wealth and power were on trade, Baron Dugan welcomed people of reasonably honest intent. Or at least those who weren’t stupe enough to show their ill intent. And who were pretty utterly outnumbered.

  He had quickly learned that whatever happened had started with their old friends, the Buffalo Mob, making an appearance that pretty much pinned the needle on the gauge on the stupe side. The baron had made enough jack to acquire an actual machine gun, an M248 whose crew could swiftly run up the watchtower that gave the best field of fire on any kind of threat. What the Buffalo Mob would really have gotten if they pressed the attack was their wags and themselves shot to shit with powerful 7.62 mm rounds before they got in a good handblaster shot of the wire.

  Hammerhand was glad they hadn’t done so, since that fact had sweetened his haul of plundered wags today. But what interested him was why they hadn’t.

  The problem was, the details he got were as muddy as spring runoff creek water, and even contradictory. All that was plain was that the Buffalo raiding party got chewed up bad, leaving the seemingly normal if well-armed pack of outlanders they’d messed with in possession not only of some of their lives but with half their rad-blasted vehicles. They had promptly driven back to the ville and sold two, a working truck and a broke-ass one, plus a load of plunder, to the ville folk for a stiff price.

  Which they got, he and his lieutenant gathered, not so much out of gratitude at running off a major coldheart attack, as severe disinclination to piss off the outlanders, married to a desire to see the last of them as rapidly as was decently possible. And once they loaded themselves and their new-bought supplies aboard the pair of wags they were keeping for themselves, the mysterious outlanders obliged that desire.

  What had happened in between and put such a scare up the ville rats? Well, Trager had mentioned that his whitecoat “associates” had told him via their secret commo technique that they wanted an “anomaly” checked out, and they had not steered him wrong that an anomaly there had been.

  “I know that plenty of people who were there survived,” Hammerhand now told his captive audience. “So I reckon either that’s some of you, or that some of you heard the stories. So now tell me. And while I give my word I won’t chill you just because you tell me something hard to believe, if I catch you lying—”

  He held the handblaster briefly side-on to his audience, as if he were explaining to children what it was.

  The dude with the badlands face nodded. “I was there. And I didn’t cotton to what was going on.”

  “I don’t care about that part,” Hammerhand said. “Just tell me straight.”

  “Yeah. We were gonna hit Duganville. It’s a rich target. but it turned out to be better defended than we heard. Before we even got there, we ran up against this bunch of people leaving the ville, and they laid some serious hurt on us as we ran down on them.

  “Well, Sully—he was straw-bossing the raid—he wasn’t gonna take that drek. Would’ve been bad for our rep, you know? We outnumbered them a power, and we managed to take them down even though it cost us plenty. Ace so far?”

  “Ace. Keep talking.”

  “So Sully got the notion to make an example of them. Try to put a scare up the people in the ville. A negotiating tactic, you know? We was half a mile out, but we reckoned they had binocs on us. So he decided we’d gang-fuck them and then give them an extrahard send-off.”

  “Women and men?” Hammerhand asked. “Never mind. What happened next?”

  The rugged-featured man looked doubtful, but he went on.

  “All of a sudden there was this, like, black dust devil. Dunno what else to call it. Never seen nothing like it. It tore people apart and ate them right down like some kind of big mutie animal!”

  “It was just mutie monsters, like as not,” a female voice growled from behind the speaker.

  “Interesting,” Hammerhand said, ignoring the interjection. “Anybody else see that black dust-devil thing?”

  After a moment of hesitation, a hand went up from among the huddled prisoners. Then two more. Hammerhand interrogated them, too. They backed up the first Buffalo’s tale, although nobody could provide any further detail.

  Three others who had been on that ill-fated raid agreed with the skeptical woman that it had to have been an animal of some kind. Just one that was black and that nobody got a double-good look at.

  Because all that agreed, roughly, with what the people of Duganville had told him they saw through their field glasses, he did not reward any of the speakers with extra holes in their body. Everybody seemed to be telling him the truth. Just the truth the way they saw it.

  “Now,” he said, “see how easy that was? If anybody remembers anything more they want to tell me about that little adventure, you come talk to me in private later.

  “In the meantime—as it happens, I am recruiting. So let’s see a show of hands. Who wants to join a winner?”

  * * *

  “I STILL SAY it smacks of slavery,” Mildred said, pulling her head back inside the wag.

  “How you reckon that, Millie?” J.B. asked. He was driving the black pickup wag up a dirt road winding into the Black Hills, west of the hot-spot Rapid City ruins. The hills here weren’t high, but they were surprisingly steep in this section. Right now the track ran around the side of an inclined slope with exposed granite standing out here and there among the tall spruce and ponderosa pines on the left, with another fairly steep drop to a stream thirty or so feet below on the right. It was slow going for the two-wag convoy, more because of concern about getting into trouble too fast than about road conditions.

  “We’re delivering a young woman to marry some older dude, whom she’s never laid eyes on her whole life,” she said. “All arranged long distance. She’s a mail-order bride! Bought and paid for.”

  It was a bright and beautiful morning, with only a few feather clouds visible up beyond the tall treetops. The Armorer frowned as if having trouble fitting his head around his lady love’s arguments. He was neither stupe nor slow—the opposite of each, in fact—but he was so intensely practical that he found it difficult, sometimes, to come to terms with abstract arguments.

  Especially where people were concerned, with their messy, irregular, tangled-up balls of emotion. So different from the well-ordered and basically predictable machines he loved to tinker with.

  “Well, she did say she was fine with it when her Maw Dombrowski paid us to deliver her to this Borodin dude.”

  “What else did you expect her to say?”

  “No?”

  “Maybe she didn’t feel as if she could. Her mother’s a pretty formidable type. Wealthy and powerful, even if she does call herself a rancher and not a baron.”

  “If this Pearl is a slave, why doesn’t she try to run away?”

  “She’s afraid we’ll track her down and return her.”

  J.B. shook his head doubtfully. “Any case, while I’m not exactly known for being particular in the looks department where it comes to women, she does have a face on her kind of like the south end of a northbound mule.”

  Mildred fixed him wit
h a withering glare. When he failed to wither, she sighed theatrically.

  “John,” she said. “You are so tone-deaf.”

  He looked at her in confusion. “What?”

  By now she knew his apparent confusion was genuine. He honestly had no clue he’d as good as called Mildred homely. Not that she considered herself in the same category as Krysty—because she wasn’t totally unrealistic. But she also had some vanity.

  She opted to let it go. For now.

  “What’s that got to do with her being a slave or not?”

  “Well, I mean, this Borodin fella, he’s supposed to be pretty well-off himself, with his logging and his mill. Wouldn’t he go for something a mite prettier if he was able to buy a wife?”

  “Why would he go for her, then?”

  “You’ll have to ask him. Ryan tells about how arranged marriages are common among baron families back East, though. Way to cement alliances, even resolve disputes. That kind of thing. Nothing tends to draw rival clans closer quicker than having a common grandkid or two, I guess.”

  “It didn’t seem to work that way for my married friends’ in-laws,” she said. “But I suppose barons are different.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  “So, Trager,” Hammerhand said, “did you get what you wanted?”

  He deliberately didn’t say the title Doctor, because omitting it visibly needled the whitecoat.

  The little man looked thoughtful and fingered his patchy-bearded chin. Hammerhand thought that up close the man looked mostly like a big old black rat with the mange, dressed up in a predark lab coat.

  “While it was regrettably short on concrete details,” he said, “I believe so. At least a relatively consistent account of what happened emerged. That should be of use to my associates.”

  “Ace,” Hammerhand said.

  It was noon. The sky had mostly cleared, although the wind had risen and was whistling over rolling land just showing spots of green. The new recruits, which was most of the captured Buffalo Mob, had all been duly sworn in as members of the New Blood Nation, as Hammerhand had taken to calling his outfit. He had ordered their weapons returned, which got him disapproving looks from both his lieutenants. But because the prisoners signed on of their own free will, he took them at their word. And if any were trying to pull a fast one, Hammerhand would be happy to make an example of them.

  That worked, too.

  Now the wags that had dropped Hammerhand’s assault teams a mile from the camp the previous night had driven up to collect the new recruits. The freshly minted Bloods were stowing their own equipment plus everybody else’s into their former transport.

  Joe Takes-Blasters frowned at Trager, but more in confusion than anger.

  Unperturbed by the scrutiny, the whitecoat took a fresh red apple from a pocket of his coat and bit into it. Hammerhand had no clue where he’d gotten it. Or rather, where his associates had. He’d also given one to Hammerhand, so the Blood boss took no offense now.

  “You gave us some straight skinny on that Buffalo camp,” Joe said to the little man.

  “Of course I did,” Trager replied, unconcerned by chunks of pale yellow apple flesh falling from his lips.

  He seemed to be waiting for the rest of it. Joe just stood there and looked at him. Hammerhand understood that, having said his piece, his lieutenant was done speaking. He was a man who preferred to let his fists, his blasters and his one-piece steel hatchets do his talking for him.

  The youngster Little Wolf trotted to his side. “Aunt—I mean, Shyanna—says to tell you we’re ready to roll, boss!”

  “Thanks,” Hammerhand said. The kid went bouncing off like a pup who’d just been petted.

  “What about the holdouts?” Mindy asked. Ten or twelve of the intact Buffalo prisoners had refused to swear allegiance to Hammerhand and his cause. So had several of the wounded ones. Additionally there were some Buffalo wounded who didn’t seem likely to recover. They had been too wrapped up in their own misery to say yes or no.

  “Chill them.”

  Mindy raised an eyebrow. “You sure? That doesn’t sound like the deal you offered.”

  “But it was,” he said. “Did you hear me say anything about what would happen if they didn’t join? No, you didn’t, because I never did say that. I wanted actual, willing volunteers. Okay, mostly willing. And I wanted to show how generous I was to those who earned it. The rest—”

  He shrugged. Trager, paying the whole exchange no mind, took another noisy bite from his apple.

  “Let’s just say I also want to show the world that those who stand against me fall. They had their chance. They made their choice. That ends it. And them.”

  Joe’s heavy brow furrowed more deeply. “How do you want it done, boss?”

  He didn’t care for torture. No more than Mindy did. But he was loyal as a dog, both to his old friend and to his sworn chieftain. He would do as he was told, like it or not.

  “Quick and clean,” Hammerhand said. “I want them killed, not hurt.”

  Trager scoffed.

  “I hadn’t expected you to be so sentimental.”

  Hammerhand frowned. At some point there would have to be an adjustment of the terms between him and this disgusting little man, prophesied guide or not, and a reckoning. But for now, he was useful, as even Mindy had been forced to acknowledge, still skeptical though she was.

  “I’m not a sadist,” he said. “I’ll hurt you. Make no mistake about that. Hurt you bad. But only if you give me good reason to. An honest enemy gets an honorable death. That’s part of the message, too. You wouldn’t understand.”

  * * *

  “FIREBLAST!” RYAN EXCLAIMED as the brake lights lit up on the wag ahead of his and Mildred waved her hand out the passenger window to signal trouble ahead.

  Krysty, behind the wheel of the pickup in whose bed he rode, had already stopped the wag.

  Despite her lightning reflexes, and the slow speed at which they were grinding up the twisty road, the trailing wag almost rode up onto the leading vehicle’s bumper before it stopped. That was far enough for Ryan to catch a glimpse of what the problem was: a makeshift barrier of gray boulders and dead trees blocking their advance. Bearded faces and longblaster barrels were visible behind it between bare skeletal branches.

  “Roadblock!” he shouted to the open driver’s window. “Back it up, Krysty!”

  Even as he shouted Ryan felt the wag jolt into reverse motion. She was ahead of him.

  He turned to look back the way they were going as his lover stuck her head out the window to better see to steer. He knelt for stability, holding an M16 they’d kept out of their coldheart trove. In case of ambush, putting a lot of lead in the air in a hurry could actually be a help instead of just a way to waste ammo, shooting holes in the air. The longblaster’s full-auto capacity had a way of being useful in such circumstances.

  With a terrible grinding sound and slapping of boughs, a hundred-foot ponderosa pine toppled downward from among the trees upslope to crash across the road behind them. It had obviously been cut or weakened in advance.

  They were truly caught in a well-prepared ambush. The only question now was their ambushers’ intent.

  “Give us the girl an’ we’ll let you off with your lives!” a voice bellowed from behind the front roadblock.

  Ryan had already guessed the intent was to get hold of their apparently valuable cargo, alive and unpunctured—by virtue of the fact they weren’t all dead already. They had gotten caught in the killing zone of a classic fire-sack ambush. A hail of bullets would have ended them at once, but nothing more than rocks, big and small, rolled down on them from above would have been enough to lay them all staring at the sky. Just in a slower, more agonizing fashion.

  So their atta
ckers’ lack of desire to chill them—at least, before they got what they wanted—was obvious. And so was the response.

  “Forward or back?” Jak yelled from the vehicle’s bed.

  “¡Adelante!” Ryan responded. He was betting ambushers in these parts would not likely understand the Spanish word.

  But he knew Jak did. Ryan had barely started to blow the word out of his mouth before the young albino leaped out of the pickup bed and raced into the scrub to the left, uphill side of the road. He vanished at once, with scarcely a disturbance of the branches.

  “Ricky!” Ryan yelled. “Get the package down! Krysty, cover behind.” Then he also sprang from the back of the trapped wag as Ricky piled over the back of his seat to shove a very surprised Pearl Dombrowski to the backseat floorboards.

  The one-eyed man made his way up the steep hill, with considerably less grace and a lot more noise than Jak had. It didn’t matter under the circumstances. Things were about to get a lot louder.

  Behind him he heard Krysty open and slam her vehicle’s driver’s door as the redhead obeyed his order. He hated putting her in the more exposed bed of the pickup truck, but it was only slightly less safe than the cab. If the thin-gauge metal of the tailgate would do little to stop high-velocity fire, adding the equally paltry protection of the bed’s front and cabin’s rear would do little more than slow the bullets a bit. Only the big four-cylinder block of the 150-horsepower 2.7-liter engine would stand up against those. The soft lead slugs belched out by most black-powder blasters could be warded off more easily, but Ryan wasn’t going to bank on them being lucky enough to be facing those.

  He and his companions, well-practiced—and seasoned—in ambush busting, didn’t plan on giving the coldhearts first crack. J.B.’s Mini UZI began chattering from the lead wag’s driver’s-side rear window, followed a heartbeat later by bursts from Doc’s longblaster, an M4 carbine with a fore pistol grip, also on full-auto. At the same instant Krysty opened up, blazing bursts at the ambushers with her Glock 18.

  Ryan half expected to be met with a withering volley from the scrub as he headed upslope. If the ambushers had a party placed in cover there, they could pour flanking fire on the wags stalled on the road and wipe out their occupants. But nothing happened. Indeed it took a handful of seconds before shots began to crack from both barriers. They sounded to Ryan like black-powder weapons, not the higher, sharper reports of smokeless cartridges.