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  “Ditch the wags and press on afoot?”

  “If they’ve got too many people for us to take on,” Krysty asked, “won’t they mebbe be able to clear a path through the roadblock double fast? And then they’ll still have wags, and we’ll be walking.”

  “That’s true,” Ryan said.

  “What I cannot fathom,” Doc stated, “is why, if they commanded such numbers and resources, they did not bring them to bear upon us from the very outset.”

  Ryan shook his head in disgust. “Who knows how coldhearts’ minds work? Much less these crazy coldhearts. Anyway, knowing won’t load us any blasters, to say nothing of giving us twice as many hands to shoot them.”

  He looked back at the big dropped tree still blocking the way behind the wag. Ricky knew full well it would provide far less of a hindrance to the pursuit he had seen coming up the track after them than the prepared roadblock would.

  “We can head up the hill,” Ryan said. “We know where we’re going. Mebbe we can slip them that way.”

  “But the wags, Ryan!” Krysty protested.

  He shook his head. “Not worth dying for. Grab your gear, everybody. We’ve got climbing to do.”

  “I can do it,” a quiet voice said.

  Though there was nothing sinister in her voice, the girl’s words iced Ricky’s blood.

  “Mariah,” Krysty said, half-hushed. Her face was even paler than normal beneath its sheen of sweat. Her sentient hair had coiled into a tight red cap of curls of its own accord to help the slight mountain breeze cool her sun-heated skin.

  “I can,” Mariah said in a tone that suggested she needed to affirm it to someone. “You need me to. I need to.”

  Krysty cut her eyes to her lover. “Ryan—”

  “Do it,” he told the girl. “Ricky, get our guest to safety.”

  “Why me?” he started to ask. Fortunately he choked it back. Leaving aside the possibly compelling reasons, and the this and the that, the real reason was because Ryan said to.

  “Yes, sir,” he said as he grabbed Pearl by the shoulder and hustled her to the still-open passenger door of the wag.

  “Wait,” she said. She resisted slightly, briefly, but gave in to Ricky’s insistence. “But I want to s—”

  “Sorry!” He pushed her headfirst into the foot well as politely as he could.

  Or he hoped it was polite. There was no time for more. Even as she squawked like a chicken with a thunder mug dumped on her head, he piled right in and sat on top of her.

  “Sorry!”

  He of course stayed sitting upright. He swiveled his head forward as soon as he could without risking breaking his ankle or her neck. He wasn’t about to miss this, sphincter-clenching terror notwithstanding.

  This time the cloud seemed to unreel right out of the slight, black-clad body like black spider silk. As it did, it spun into a blacker and blacker cloud, like a dust devil in a coal-dust heap.

  “Getting close!”

  It was Jak. Ricky knew, or anyway had guessed, that he was keeping watch on the road ahead, which led toward their destination—and their payday. But his urgent cry now came from behind them.

  The approach of known, definite danger had clearly overridden the press of potential danger in his albino friend’s mind.

  “We’ve got it,” Ryan called back. “If they get too close, discourage them. Everybody else, keep clear!”

  “Like you need to tell us,” Mildred replied. She had scuttled around to put the snout of the wag, which J.B. had backed away from the barricade to allow his companions to work, between her and the eerie girl.

  The cloud had become a swirling shadow so dark it almost concealed her. Then it swept forward, away from her, toward the heavy logs and heavier granite chunks piled behind them.

  To Ricky it seemed the whirlwind paused ever so slightly, as if reluctant to break contact with its creator. He thought it had to be his imagination.

  Then the cloud swept straight toward the roadblock. And into it. It simply dug in a good six inches without any sign it was meeting resistance.

  Suddenly long splinters and yellow dust were whipped around the cloud, followed quickly by chunks of rough gray rock. It all frayed into threads, then nothing as he watched.

  It was quickly replaced by more scraps of debris as the cloud swept left along the length of the barrier. It disintegrated wood and stone in a stretch several feet wider than the wags.

  Then the black whirlwind simply winked out, if it had never been.

  “Lemme up!” The muffled command came from beneath Ricky’s buttocks. He more sensed the request by its buzzing through his skeleton than actually heard it.

  “Oh! Sorry,” he said to Pearl. He jumped back out of the open door. The young woman popped up like a prairie dog.

  And gasped. Directly in front of the wag, a major portion of the roadblock was gone. Vanished.

  “Ace on the line,” Ryan said, sounding unimpressed. “Mount up and ride, people! Time really is blood here. Let’s get Pearl to where she needs to be.”

  Mariah’s eyes closed, then she slumped. Krysty, standing right behind her, caught her under the arms. The girl’s face and hands—all the skin her severe garments left visible—were paler than usual. But unfamiliar pink spots glowed on her paper-white cheeks, and it seemed to Ricky that her mouth was set in an equally unfamiliar, if slight, smile.

  But Krysty’s brows were pressed together in a look of almost painful concern.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “But you have to!” Trager exclaimed. “My associates demand it of you!”

  Rage burst like a bomb, red and black behind Hammerhand’s eyes. How dare the cretin order me around! he thought. This whitecoat dog lacks respect.

  The two of them stood on a lone low mesa, west of the bigger one his contingent had camped on for the night, with their wags laagered on the gentle slope surrounding it, above the reach of flash floods. The sun had almost dropped behind the Black Hills, miles away to the west. The evening wind whispered and moaned between the low badlands buttes that surrounded them.

  Hammerhand stood with his arms folded across his bare chest, gazing south toward the Pine Ridge country. Lakota lands.

  He kept his hand from his hatchet and forced the bile back down his throat. He knew how Trager dared: the power of his vision and the Glowing Man. And the power shown by Trager’s “associates” in all the gifts they had granted, information and material alike. Hammerhand understood what that giving implied: the power to produce or even possess such marvels in such abundance as to pass them out. The power to withhold that generosity. And, no doubt, great power to compel.

  He had made a bargain with himself, once Trager had appeared, as promised, out of the wasteland, and their relationship had taken form. He needed Trager and what his associates could provide. But they needed him, too. So he would take what was available and give in return no more than he felt he had to. And only so long as he saw the benefit to himself and his people.

  “What I have to do,” he made himself say calmly, “remains for us to see.”

  “My associates—”

  “Aren’t here.” So far as I know, Hammerhand thought, and so far as Dr. Trager feels compelled to at least pretend.

  To his satisfaction he saw the whitecoat’s face pale slightly in the golden slanting light, even behind its perpetual coat of grime. Whitecoat or not, crazed monk of lost world-burning science or...something even more sinister, or not, he could see a threat if it were veiled thinly enough.

  “But, Hammerhand,” Trager said as the strain showed in his voice and in the depth of the lines on his perpetually stubbled face, “be reasonable. We have done much for you. And we ask but little.”

  So far, Hammerhand thought again.

  “What you’re asking for
now isn’t little,” he said.

  “A simple reconnaissance. No more. A mere investigation.”

  “You’re asking me to invade the turf of a bunch of surly inbreds. On ground where we’d give up almost every advantage we have as riders and raiders, while they’d have all of theirs. No, thanks.”

  “But you got information out of Duganville easily enough, just by asking for it diplomatically. No threats or violence involved.”

  “Barons like Dugan are plump and bourgeois, bound to their prosperity. They’ve got to keep up appearances, if nothing else. Back in the Black Hills, the barons don’t have those kinds of limits. So the difference between them and coldhearts isn’t always easy to see. I’m not sticking my dick in that scorpion nest just on your say-so.”

  “Are you afraid, then?”

  Hammerhand let his voice drop dangerously low. “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “No! Never, mighty Hammerhand! I wouldn’t dare even think such a thing!”

  “Thought not. Then again, I’m not stupe enough to risk getting this nation I’ve been working so hard to build—this nation that’s so important to you that you’re helping me build it—busted up bad on a bullshit high-risk, low-reward gig like this.”

  “But something big is happening,” Trager said, openly pleading now. “Something important. It’s already happened at least twice that we know of. We don’t know what it is, and it is vital that we understand it. It could be a far bigger threat to you than to us.”

  “Mebbe. But if it’s happened twice that your tribe noticed, it’ll happen again. Mebbe this time it’ll happen some place it makes sense for me to take a look. Not to pull back from the middle of doing a job you yourself advised us to do.”

  * * *

  HAMMERHAND’S ORIGINAL VISION had been conquest, pure and simple. He and his roaring men and women would by fire and blood force the North Plains to their will, which was of course his will.

  But Trager had planted different seeds in his mind. Or just cultivated them, helped them germinate and grow. Not even Hammerhand himself knew which it was. And that fact made him wary.

  Hammerhand’s grandma, Doe Legs, had been his sole ally in his birth-band, after his mother, Ranita, was killed in a freak giant hailstorm, and his father, Thunder Face, turned his even-more-angry eyes away from his oldest son to pursue greater rank within the clan and nation.

  Doe Legs had a saying: “You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” He’d dismissed that as just more oldie-traditionalist crap, ritual gibberish she said because her mother and grandmother and so on back to skydark had said it. Another incantation that meant nothing—brought no rain, nor game, nor warded off mutie attacks or wildfire.

  After she died in her sleep he had been all alone, rejected by his father and his father’s relatives. And that had sent him on the path that led to hatred and exile from his birth people. He never had taken that saying seriously.

  Until Mindy Farseer had strode boldly with him into Duganville. Posing as traveling traders, who were common as dirt in the turpentine-stinking ville, they had readily learned how the wanderers who had chilled a number of their Buffalo Mob captors and driven off the rest in pants-shitting terror had gotten the best of the ville’s shrewd inhabitants when it came time to sell their plunder. Even Baron Dugan, who prided himself on driving hard bargains, gave up too much jack and goods.

  The ville rats seemed proud of the fact they’d let themselves be fleeced. In their eyes, the nameless wanderers, the lean and dangerous one-eyed man, his flame-haired woman, and the rest were stone heroes. They had thwarted a raid, which, even if it had never been double likely to penetrate Duganville’s razor-wire perimeter, would at the very least have been bad for commerce.

  And, maybe, a worse precedent. Successive assaults of drought and acid rain had turned the Central Plains, which like these lands seemed to be recovering at last, back toward its old, desperate state as hard-core Deathlands. Life was getting hard—harder than it usually was—for the sod-busters and ville rats and for the coldhearts who preyed on them. The Buffaloes weren’t the first nor the biggest nomad band to decide to try its luck in the literally greener pastures of the Northern Plains.

  They weren’t even the worst. Refugees were streaming north and west, too, not always to the happiness of those already there. And some of the fleeing coldheart bands took preying on the weak literally and turned cannie.

  So Duganville had gone so weak-kneed in relief at their deliverance that they paid the outlanders top jack for their wags and other loot and hardly overcharged them at all for the additional supplies they’d stocked up on and loaded into the pair of wags they kept.

  That got Hammerhand to remembering his grandma’s words. And then Trager began to suggest that, rather than having to batter the whole Plains into submission, he could actually get large swathes of it to submit to him not just voluntarily, but eagerly. Just by offering the promise of safety.

  There would still be a lot of fighting to do, the whitecoat explained, enough for him and the hottest blooded of his Bloods, and then some. Especially with the original holders of that name sure to take the warpath against him, to wreak vengeance for his humiliating murder of some of their elders. Although, of course, being traditionalist to the bone, they were still endlessly debating their campaign against him around the council fires.

  So now, with Trager’s guidance, Hammerhand was putting himself in position to be perceived, not as a scourge, but as a savior.

  * * *

  “BOSS,” A MAN’S VOICE came from behind. Twenty or more feet behind. No one wanted to be accused of trying to sneak up on their warlord. And much less wanted to pay the price of a hunter’s defensive reflex should they somehow actually succeed in doing so.

  “You bring me news, Eagle Claw?” Hammerhand asked without turning.

  Like Hammerhand, his two main lieutenants, Mindy and Joe Takes-Blasters, had charge of chunks of his ever-growing band, spread out north of the Pine Ridge country.

  “Scouts just brought word,” his current second-in-command told him. “Party of Lakota warriors are heading north through the Badlands. Twenty or so, riding horses with remounts.”

  “Horses,” Hammerhand said. “How quaint.”

  Then he laughed. It hadn’t been so long that horses were pretty much the only option he and his little band of straggly tailed outcasts could muster for transport—aside from walking, which was almost as distasteful to the Plains nomad way of looking at life as going off to take a wage-slave job in a Duganville turpentine still. And even now what the whitecoat would term his “human assets”—showing that for Trager, being a whitecoat wasn’t something that he took off the way he could the actual lab garment—were growing faster than the number of wags and motorcycles they had to ride. Plenty of his Bloods still rode horseback.

  “Right,” Hammerhand said. “Have scouts shadow them while you start getting the clan ready to roll.”

  “What about the other bands?”

  Hammerhand faced him. Eagle Claw Bateman was a skinny kid with black hair tied up in a complicated braid with an eagle feather stuck at the nape. He looked painfully young, although his age was actually just a few months shy of Hammerhand’s own. An Oglala of the very band of the far-flung Great Sioux Nation they were all here to keep an eye on now, Eagle Claw might very well have been one of the supposed strays they were about to hunt, had he not gotten caught painting satirical caricatures on the tepee of a particularly moss-backed clan elder a couple seasons back.

  While Eagle Claw was promising enough on his own, Hammerhand had chosen to keep him close in part to see if he would decide to revert to his blood ties. But he seemed to accept the Bloods wholeheartedly as his new kin, as well as nation. Now he was coming off mostly as excited on the verge of hyper. And if some of his former playmates happened to wind up on the wron
g side of his blaster sights—well, that was just the game they all played.

  “Leave them lie for now. If the Lakota got wind that we’re up here somehow, this could be a feint. Send messengers to bring them up to speed, and tell them to stay where they are and keep their eyes peeled.”

  And we will all pray to the Spirits that this is yet another “unofficial” raid by unblooded youngsters looking to count coup off some unlucky trade caravan, he thought, and not a sign their elders have decided to make a hard move north.

  This particular branch of the Lakota was frankly more than he cared to take on as a whole. That was why he had kept his people firmly on their side of the line, rather than boldly rolling into the Pine Ridge territory to put a more direct stop to the raids that had been increasing while the Oglala elders looked the other way.

  “You don’t want reinforcements?” Trager asked.

  Hammerhand laughed. It wasn’t forced or faked. “The Lakota are some hard motherfuckers,” he said. “But the day I need more than eighty of my Bloods to take down twenty of their teenyboppers will be a good day to die. And you’re still here, Eagle Claw?”

  The young man gulped, turned around and hustled back toward camp.

  “One job at a time, whitecoat,” Hammerhand told Trager without glancing his way. “We’re going to take care of this one now. Then we’ll wait and see where this ‘anomaly’ of yours crops up next, if it does. And if it doesn’t, it wasn’t that important, was it?”

  He turned and started walking at a leisurely pace toward the sound of revving engines.

  “And believe me. If this ‘anomaly’ of yours has anything to do with those outlanders turning the tables on a whole Buffalo raiding party that had them on their knees, I want a piece of it every bit as bad as you do!”

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I got to say,” J.B. stated as he squinted through Ryan’s big binocs and fiddled with the focus, “these are not exactly the farm pests I pictured in my mind when we hired on with those sod-busters.”