Devil's Vortex Read online

  “Mebbe there are more of them,” she said. Her pigtails bobbed across Krysty’s arm as she turned her head to nod at the middle of the bean field. “Let me get them for you.”

  * * *

  RYAN RUBBED HIS chin bristles meditatively.

  “You dig with that power of yours?”

  The bean field around them was littered with the chills of blue-green muties. As the party had approached the mound where they had first seen the monsters, cautiously following a dozen paces behind Mariah and her deadly vortex, they had come erupting out from between the furrows in such numbers that the companions had been forced to blast them. If nothing else, to avoid being trampled beneath the muties’ talons in their frenzy to get at the girl.

  Mariah looked at him. She swayed.

  Krysty rushed to her side and put an arm around her thin shoulders. “It’s all right,” she told the girl. “You’ve done enough.”

  But Mariah shook her head and smilingly pushed off from the tall redhead. “No, thank you, Krysty. I’m fine. Really.”

  Despite the fatigue that clearly dragged at every word as it left her mouth, there was a force to her voice Ryan hadn’t heard there before.

  Reluctantly, Krysty stepped back.

  “I can try, Mr. Cawdor,” Mariah said. “Tell me where you want it.”

  Mr. Cawdor? he thought. It’s Krysty, but Mr. Cawdor.

  Aloud, he said, “How about right down that oversized anthill there?”

  “Okay.”

  She held out her hands as if sowing seeds. Shadow unfurled from her palms and knit itself into a spinning skein of blackness. She gestured as if urging it to go, palms up. Obediently it moved forward, mounting to the top of the low dirt mound.

  “I’d be lyin’ if I said that didn’t give me a touch of the willies,” J.B. said softly.

  “You and me both,” Ryan agreed.

  The rest of the group was spread in a rough semicircle twenty yards to the ditch side of the mound. They had blasters in their hands but not pointed. Just in case.

  Once at the top of the mound, the whirlwind promptly began to settle down into it. “It’s like a screw going into wood!” Ricky said.

  “Yeah,” Ryan stated. “What do you say we don’t startle her, just in case?”

  But Mariah had her face set in white concentration, willing the apparition into the earth. Without sound or apparent resistance, it settled down and out of sight.

  Mariah tramped up the brief slope to peer down. Following Ryan’s lead, the others joined her.

  The cloud was whirling a couple feet beneath the rim of the hole it had made. Expanded, really, Ryan reckoned, because the muties had already had a hole they were using to go in and out of. Mariah looked at Krysty, who looked to Ryan.

  He nodded. The girl made patting-down motions. The whirlwind began to drill deeper.

  He saw the mouths of other tunnels laid visible to his eye. The cloud continued to bore downward. The girl had to have limits to her ability to project the vortex and control it. But she hadn’t reached them yet.

  Suddenly around the cloud he saw the surrounding walls open out.

  “Can you cut that off for a moment?” he asked Mariah. He remembered that she’d said it hurt her to unleash the phenomenon. But then, she hadn’t seemed reluctant to trot it out here today. He needed to be sure he was seeing what he thought he’d seen around the fringes of the black mandala.

  The cloud winked out. “Are those rocks of some kind?” Ricky asked.

  Ryan saw them, too. They were hard to miss; they were strewed, huddled against each other, all across an area of earthen floor the whirlwind bore had revealed, which lay a good dozen feet below the deepest point the cloud had yet penetrated. Green ovals, about a foot long and six inches wide.

  “Eggs,” J.B. said.

  It was true. Not just because some lay split open, with some pale yellowish-green ooze slopping out if the fragments, but because he could see at least four tiny gray squirming figures. Even without the blue-green spines, those weird tube snouts made it clear what they were.

  “Baby monsters,” Mildred said. “Doesn’t that beat all to shit?”

  “I never would have guessed such beings were oviparous,” Doc said. “Perhaps they are some variety of monotreme, akin to the duck-billed platypus.”

  “Well,” Ryan said, “we’ve found what the muties were so rad-blasted set on protecting. Can you clean them out, Mariah?”

  “Are you sure, Ryan?” Mildred protested. “They’re just babies.”

  “Baby monsters. I hate to say ‘nits make lice,’ because that’s just a bullshit excuse barons trot out to justify acting more like coldheart pricks than usual, but it applies.”

  “But what if they’re, like, some kind of endangered species?”

  “Fireblast, Mildred! Can you hear yourself? I only hope we’re endangering them enough.”

  “These are no natural creatures,” Krysty said in a somewhat hollow voice. “Expunging them would be doing the Earth a favor.”

  Ryan guessed she was treading on uncertain ground, emotionally speaking. She felt a connection to the Earth and to nature—almost to an obsessive degree, with how she personified the Earth as Gaia and all. At the same time, as a mutie of bizarre and unprecedented powers, her little friend Mariah wasn’t truly of nature.

  And Krysty wasn’t either.

  “I wouldn’t lose sleep over cleaning out a nest of baby stickies,” Ryan said, “if we ever came across any. Anyway, our job was to clean out this field. That’s what I mean to do.”

  He looked to Mariah. Krysty was hovering over her like a mama bear, which was nothing new although still far from his favorite thing to see, considering. Mariah was standing upright, held her head high, and looked fit to fight. Fit as he’d ever recalled seeing.

  Doing this black dust-devil stuff might hurt her, but it sure did seem to agree with her.

  “How about rubbing out those eggs?” he asked her. “Do you feel up to it?”

  She nodded vigorously.

  “Okay. Go to it.”

  She leaned over the widened hole her cloud had made and held her arms down into it. Blackness streamed from her palms. The vortex took form again at the bottom of the egg chamber. Like earth or stone or metal, the eggs and larvae vanished with neither sound nor trace.

  “Good,” Ryan said. “Now can you, say, root around? Clear out a wide enough space to make sure we got all the little monsters?”

  She looked at him. In the corner of his eye he thought to see the whirlwind waver as her concentration split, but it didn’t vanish.

  After a moment, she nodded.

  “Ryan—” Krysty began.

  “I can do it,” Mariah said. “I can!” And the whirlwind came climbing back up the bore again.

  She backed away from it. So did Ryan and the rest. Useful as it was—lifesaving, even—nobody was triple eager to get any closer to the terrible, all-consuming funnel of blackness than necessary.

  When it reached the top of the hole, Mariah backed away a few steps. The cloud obediently followed, eating a line through the mound.

  “How far?” she asked.

  “Ten feet or so,” Ryan said. “That will do for a start.”

  She stopped at about that limit, then ran the cloud back toward the first hole to begin spiraling it around and around outward from the center, widening the hole from the top slowly down.

  “Wow,” Ricky said. “It’s like she’s routing it out.”

  “So it is,” J.B. agreed.

  “Old lady Dominguez and her kin aren’t likely to be thrilled with what we’re doing to her bean field,” Mildred said.

  “Nuke them,” Ryan said. “We’re doing what they hired us to do. If they don’t want to pay, I’ll tell th
em we’ll just put the boogers back in their bean fields. Or mebbe their backyards.”

  “But we can’t—”

  Ryan gave her a look.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A yellow light winked from the top of the next low mesa south of where Hammerhand crouched with most of his war band beneath the pale arch of the Milky Way.

  “Here they come,” Hammerhand murmured in satisfaction to Eagle Claw. “Right on schedule. Right into our laps.”

  He felt additionally gratified that his people had done this all on their own, without the help of any of Trager’s whitecoat magic, although now more of the whitecoat’s high-tech gifts would be brought into play.

  “Be ready,” he said softly. Eagle Claw passed the word.

  The twisty intertwining gulleys weren’t deep in this part of the Badlands, maybe ten, fifteen feet, nor were their sides steep, which was strike.

  Then again, thanks to the good scouting his people had put in this night, they’d had some leeway to pick their engagement ground. Hammerhand knew from experience, both his own and that of warriors who, when they talked, he listened to. He might have had trouble as a kid listening to his elders and his parents, but then, they so seldom said stuff he wanted to hear...

  He pulled the pin from the gren he held in his right hand.

  “Got your piece ready?” he asked Eagle Claw.

  “Yes.”

  The first horse came into view. It was ridden by a bare-chested young man, who carried a spear hung with eagle feathers that bobbed to his mount’s trotting gait. Like most Plains ponies, these were unshod. Shoes were unnecessary on this soft sand anyway.

  The warrior had dark streaks painted down his cheeks like tear tracks from his eyes. That signified aggression. So did the butt of what looked to Hammerhand to be a lever-action longblaster jutting over his right shoulder for easy access. There were some dark patterns painted on his buckskin, as well, but the raiding party was down where even the starlight had trouble reaching, and Hammerhand could make none out.

  A second horse, dark in color, trotted behind his. The seventeen young men and a few women who followed him, single file toward Hammerhand’s hidden vantage point, all led a single remount. The single-file thing meant they’d paid some attention in warrior class; it was intended to make it hard for even a skilled tracker to figure out their actual numbers. And from what little Hammerhand could see from the darkness and the angle, none sported a hand painted on their face to signify they’d beaten a foe in melee combat. Or wanted to claim such.

  It might have had any number of explanations, but it suggested strongly to Hammerhand that they were all good little traditionalist weenies, eager to show their allegiance to the ancient ways, even those that dated years before skydark.

  Yeah, he thought. The Oglala elders don’t know about this raid.

  That made things tricky. But then, Hammerhand was triple tricky himself.

  The silent procession approached the mesa on which Hammerhand and his main group waited. The enemy showed no sign of seeing anything amiss. They’d have had to have an eye in the sky to have much chance of doing so, because only Hammerhand was even the least bit visible from below, and that was only as much of his head as he had to poke up to watch them come through a long clump of grass. The leader moved to his left, indicating they intended to pass that way when the gulleys forked around Hammerhand’s minimesa.

  But they weren’t going to pass. Not if he and his Bloods had anything to say about it.

  “Fire,” he ordered without turning his head.

  He heard the pop and waited until the red flare reached the height of its arc, almost directly above the little marauder column. Then he pitched the gren right in front of the lead rider.

  The flare’s red glare illuminated surprised, upturned faces. And then the horses began to rear and whinny in fear as grens rained down from the surrounding heights, to both sides of them, as well as directly behind.

  It was already too late for them.

  * * *

  “MAY I TALK with you for a bit, Mariah?”

  The girl put down the bundle of dried scrub brush she had gathered for the morning cook-fire. “Sure, Krysty,” she said. “What about?”

  The redhead glanced at the others. They sat around the bonfire conversing in low voices. They had bought some fine smoked-elk haunch that afternoon with the grudging yet complete payment they got for purging the bean field of monsters—if purging it of many bean plants, as well. For people who lived as they did, a fine, full meal was a celebration—and something to celebrate.

  She reached for Mariah’s hand. “Walk with me a bit.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Mariah put her hand in Krysty’s. It was cool and dry.

  “Where to?” the girl asked.

  “Outside camp a ways.” Krysty laughed softly. “I guess we don’t have much to be afraid of, do we?”

  “We’ve got Jak on guard,” Mariah said seriously.

  “That’s true.”

  They were camped out in a low draw near a streambed, with cottonwood trees on both banks. It had rained in the afternoon, after they’d finished their unexpectedly bizarre extermination job. Now the air was fresh and cool, the grass was damp slick underfoot and the sky had begun to show patches of stars, bright through cloud.

  A wolf howled. Other voices joined it. From somewhere down the small stream rose a derisive chorus of coyote yips, as if challenging their bigger, more formidable cousins.

  Krysty led the girl to the top of a low rise and sat on a fallen tree. The branches were bare and the dirt and clumps of sod had fallen away from the roots, leaving them bare, like a frozen tangle of worms. She patted the bole. Mariah sat beside her.

  “Thank you for what you did today,” Krysty said, measuring her words as if they were a handful of flour from an almost-empty bin. “You were a big help to us. We wouldn’t have been able to clear out that nest without you doing what you did.”

  Even in the darkness it seemed the girl’s eyes gleamed with happy excitement. She nodded vigorously, making her pigtails bob.

  “I’m so happy I can help,” she said.

  “I’m surprised, though. I thought you were reluctant to use your power. That it hurt to do so.”

  Ryan had not put her up to this. She was asking out of her own genuine concern for the girl. She cared about Mariah...more than was probably good for her. But she had seen the troubled way her mate had looked at Mariah, off and on since the bean-field fight.

  Krysty’s lover was a man who seldom felt conflicted. To him, survival was both an imperative and its own justification. At least in most ways. And Mariah had greatly enhanced his and his companions’ chances of survival on several occasions during their brief time together, when she hadn’t outright saved their lives.

  Mariah bit her lip thoughtfully. “Well, yeah. I was. I didn’t like it. It scared me...that I scared other people. And it still hurts.

  “But then I was able to help you. And I felt better about using it, in spite of the pain. It made me feel good. It made me feel as if I was worth something.”

  “I see.”

  “But it isn’t just that. When I was able to burst through that roadblock, I felt powerful. It was the first time in my life that I felt anything like it. I wasn’t hurting anybody with my power, or even anything. But then today—”

  She sighed and shuddered. “It felt wonderful to do that. Even though I was chilling creatures. Even babies. They were wrong, just like you said. They don’t belong here. And mebbe that’s not their fault. But they had to go.”

  “That’s how I size it up, too.”

  “So are you scared of me?”

  “A little.”

  Instead of looking downcast the girl smiled and hugged her. “I like you, Krysty. You�
�re always honest with me.”

  “I try to be.”

  “So tell me something else. Honest.”

  “You sure you want to ask it?” Krysty asked.

  For a moment her smooth brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Oh. You’re thinking I won’t like the answer. But I want to hear it anyway. I promise I’ve heard worse.”

  Krysty had to smile. “Fair enough. Ask away.”

  “Why do you want me with you? Why are you so nice to me? I mean, the others aren’t mean. Even the ones who still think I may be a danger to you, like Mr. Dix and Jak. They don’t call me bad names and try to hurt me. So that’s better than most people. But you—you seem to really like me.”

  “I do, Mariah.” She reached up to stroke the girl’s hair. Her heart broke at the way she at first flinched.

  “So, why?”

  “Well, first, I like you because you’re, well, likable, I guess. You have a good heart despite your hard life. I admire you for that.”

  But still, I wonder—does the dark cloud reflect something within your soul? But not even a person as open as Krysty thought being honest was the same as saying everything she thought.

  “But it’s as if I look at you and see hope. It’s your innocence. If you can keep that in spite of everything—well, mebbe it means the world isn’t doomed to just sink deeper and deeper into ruin and misery until it just dies. And mebbe there’s hope for us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes I feel as if we’re just doomed to wander aimlessly forever, doing whatever it takes to survive.”

  “But you do a lot of good! You help people. You helped me.”

  Krysty exhaled, making a sound that was half sigh, half moan. “It’s largely by accident. I have to be honest. I guess that by not deliberately preying on people, we wind up...kind of better than average for the Deathlands.”

  Smiling, Mariah shook her head. Krysty found the girl’s shift from her former perpetual gloom almost disconcerting.

  “Well, we’d better get back to the others,” Mariah said, hopping to her feet. “We don’t want them to freak out when they find out we’re gone.”