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  “Scorpion is busy, One-Eye,” an unknown voice replied. “They all are. This is Blackbeard. I saw what you did before, and regret not being able to lend assistance. The events were…unforeseen.”

  The word sent a chill down Ryan’s spine. Roberto had a doomie? That explained how he knew how to find that weird blaster and where Cascade was located!

  “Well, here’s something else you might have missed,” the one-eyed man growled. “It looks like the food may be drugged. We go to sleep tonight and wake up tomorrow with red smiles! I’d guess the reason we never heard of this ville before is that nobody ever leaves. Especially not traders.”

  “This is not possible,” Yates muttered apprehensively.

  “Your throat, amigo,” Ryan snapped. “But we are not eating anything we didn’t bring here, and unless you’re feebs, you’ll do the same.”

  “But if this is a trap, then shouldn’t we simply leave right now…”

  “With half your crew scattered across the ville?” Ryan shot back furiously. “If we start rolling, they’ll be the first aced. Or worse, taken hostage. We can’t do squat until they come back.”

  “But with our weaponry…”

  “If these mutie-suckers have been jacking convoys for years, who knows how much major ordnance they have? Rockets, land mines, mebbe even a laser of their own.”

  “A laser!”

  “Not to mention all that guncotton,” J.B. guessed.

  “I—I shall tell Scorpion immediately.”

  “Damn right you should!”

  “However, it is my crew that is at risk,” Roberto said unexpectedly. “You folks are free to leave anytime.”

  “Mutie shit, we signed on as part of the convoy,” Ryan replied bluntly. “So we’re here to the end.”

  “Cascade or bust!” J.B. added from off-mike.

  There was a brief crackle of static.

  “It seems that Kathleen was right about you the whole time,” Roberto said, a new tone in his voice. “All right, we’ll take on these coldhearts together. How are you fixed?”

  “Never enough brass,” Ryan said, glancing at the fire-control panel for the Fifty. “But you can’t send any over or Baron Conway will know what we’re planning, and your folks’ll get taken as hostages.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. I meant chow.”

  “We’re chewing air. Got anything in storage?”

  “Not enough to reach Cascade. But that’s tomorrow’s problem. I’ll send over Shelly with a basket. Empty bellies make minds wander, and we gotta stay razor.”

  “Agreed. Gonna be a real bloodbath when they finally come.”

  “You can load that in a damn blaster! A lot of my crew will be groggy from drugged food when they return, so I’m going into this shorthanded.”

  “Pity your pet doomie didn’t see this coming.”

  “How did you…” Roberto started, then gave a hard laugh. “Frag it. Find me a doomie who never makes mistakes, and I’ll be in charge of the world by spring. They’re triple-special folks, but everybody drops a clip now and then.”

  “True enough,” Ryan agreed, studying the peaceful-appearing ville around the four wags. “Now, just in case these bastards have a working radio, this had better be our last transmission until the hammer falls. Too much chatter and they’ll get wise. When it’s time to roll, we will follow your lead.”

  “Confirm, One-Eye, Scorpion out.” The radio clicked off.

  “And now we wait,” Ryan said, hanging up the mike.

  “That hard part,” Jak drawled, smiling at a passing citizen. The man waved in greeting, and Jak waved back, feeling like a feeb.

  “Always is,” Ryan agreed, reaching for a canteen.

  “Now, what puzzles me,” J.B. said, turning his back to the windows, “is why Conway tried to ace you in broad daylight, if he was going to drug our food? Sounds like there are two different groups, each of them after the jack in our wags.”

  Washing the taste of the stew from his mouth, Ryan swallowed. “Then we’ll just have to chill ’em all,” he growled over the ache in his belly. “Every fragging one of them.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Night descended slowly over Newton, the streets gradually clearing of townsfolk and sec men. The crew of the convoy straggled back to the war wags.

  Slowly, a full moon rose in the sky and the ville became a flickering checkerboard of candles and cook fires. The sole exception being the mansion of the baron. It stood cold and dark, merely a black outline against the twinkling stars.

  “Think they’re watching us?” Mildred asked from inside her bedroll.

  “They would indeed be fools not to,” Doc replied from a jumpseat, a blanket draped over his shoulders, his head bowed as if in sleep.

  An arm resting on top of the steering wheel, Jak was slumped forward. Feigning sleep, the teen was watching the darkness near the ville wall. When trouble came, it would be from that direction.

  Just before dusk, a wrinklie had set fire to some pitch torches set into wall niches in the ville square, lighting the way to the well. But as the torches died away, the thick shadows came ever closer.

  The bargaining tables were gone, the flat expanse of ground around the parked wags totally empty. Earlier, Shelly had come over with a wicker basket of food: two cans of baked beans and some beef jerky that was damn near tough enough to use to patch holes in the tank armor. But it was food, and filled their bellies enough for combat. If you knew a fight was coming, nobody sane scarfed down a big meal. That only slowed your reflexes, and more often than not ended up on the ground, coming out one end or the other.

  “Brave girl,” Jak said, watching the young healer walk into the night and disappear, only to reappear in the running lights of War Wag One.

  “Kind of pretty, too,” Krysty said mischievously. “Well, if you like them skinny.”

  “What talk?” Jak replied hotly, rising to the bait. “She pretty!”

  “Oh, is she?” Krysty said, her voice smiling in the dark.

  The teenager felt himself blush. “Yeah.”

  “Well, let me tell you, healers make the best bed partners,” J.B. said from under his hat. “They know things about what men like.”

  “Take my word for it, amigo,” Ryan whispered, his chest slowly rising and falling. “All women know that secret. It’s why the human race still exists.”

  “Yeah, well, I just wish she’d stop looking at me as if I could turn rad pits into gardens.” Mildred sighed.

  Just then, an owl hooted from outside. The soft noise made everybody alert.

  J.B. forced himself to relax. Stay loose, stay calm, stay focused, he mentally commanded himself. Don’t waste energy worrying. When the chilling starts it won’t be with a murmur, but a shout.

  “Here come,” Jak whispered.

  Suddenly, dim figures were silhouetted by the silvery moonlight between the wags and the wall. Their faces were streaked with mud, their hands carrying knives, the steel blackened to near invisibility, and two of the sec men carried blasters, the barrels tipped with bulky, homemade silencers.

  Softly snoring, the companions did nothing as the coldhearts glided ever closer. The man in the lead seemed to be checking the ground for something, traps maybe. But after a moment he continued onward, the others close behind.

  As they eased past the windows, Ryan counted six of them. One for each companion. Smart move, he thought. Take out everybody at the same time and never give the victims a chance to fight back. He only hoped they could do the same to the invaders.

  Reaching the aft doors, the coldhearts scratched softly at the metal, and the unlocked doors swung aside on hinges dripping with fresh oil. Even as his hand slid to touch a weapon, J.B. had to admire their style. These bastards had done this sort of chilling a lot to get this fragging proficient. He had hated leaving the doors unlocked, but if they could not get in, the sec men might have planted a bomb under the wag that would have chilled a lot of people.

  As silent as gh
osts, the masked men oozed into the UCV, their swaddled boots softly padding on the cushioned floor. Each chose a companion and raised his knife to strike.

  Lunging forward, the companions attacked first, their knives burying deep in the groins of the coldhearts, severing the major artery in the thigh. Shrieking in pain, the thieves dropped their blasters and knives to claw at the hot blood gushing from between their legs. Then the companions slashed open their throats, ending the matter.

  Without turning on the engine, Jak flicked on the headlights, the brilliant beams catching twenty or so coldhearts crouched around the three war wags. As if waiting for that, weapons fired from every blasterport, and the coldhearts were ruthlessly slaughtered.

  Even as Jak turned on the big Detroit engine, J.B. grabbed the mike and threw the switch for the rooftop loudspeaker. “Triple red, invaders on the wall!” he said, the words blasting across the supposedly sleeping ville. “Invaders on the wall! All crewmen to their posts!”

  Going to a blasterport, Ryan looked along the barrel of the Steyr and waited for targets. The locals knew these were their fellow sec men, but pretending it was invading coldhearts gave them the perfect opportunity to swarm over the wags and force their way inside. Unless we drop the hammer, Ryan thought.

  Soon there were armed sec men running along the nearby wall. All of them facing inside the ville, and not the other side.

  Instantly the machine guns of the four war wags thundered into action, the barrage of hot lead sweeping the wall clear, the .308 rounds from the M-60, and the .50-caliber rounds from the heavy machine guns tearing the sec men apart, the pieces thrown out into the night. As broken longblasters and bloody clothing tumbled down onto the UCV, Jak threw the vehicle into reverse and stomped on the pedal.

  Surging with power, the war wag lurched backward, crashing through the split-rail fence and ramming into the sec men stationed at the cannons. They died shrieking under the spinning tires.

  Rumbling into life, the big diesel engines of the other three wags blew gouts of black smoke from louvered exhaust pipes, and the armored convoy vanished within a blinding nimbus of halogen headlamps and arc lights. The ville was coming alive with window lights, and a gong began to sound from one of the tall wooden guard towers.

  In a rush of smoky flame, a warbird launched from the pod on top of War Wag Two, and the stout log pillbox on top of the guard tower violently disintegrated, the blast illuminating the night and silencing the gong forever.

  Charging out of the corner tavern, a squad of sec men headed straight for the cannons, while every window in the second floor of the gaudy house flashed with the fiery flowers of muzzle blasts. The hail of lead ricocheted harmlessly off the UCV, and the companions gave a lethal response.

  “Here go!” Jak yelled, lowering the fork to the sound of thumping hydraulics. Then, shifting gears, he drove the steel tines under the cannons and flipped a switch.

  For a moment there were only the sounds of miscellaneous blasters, the tandem engines and pumping hydraulics. Then the cannons cracked free of their concrete beds and went tumbling through the darkness to land in the ville square with deafening clangs. Jumping out of hiding behind the well, a sec man tried to get away, but the cannons smacked into him with a sickening sound and he fell boneless to the brick roadway, dark fluids erupting from his slack mouth.

  A rain of hissing objects plummeted from the tops of the buildings across the street, the pipe bombs and predark grens detonating on the war wags and throwing out deadly halos of shrapnel. But the charges proved ineffective against the thick armor, and the machines rumbled into motion, their blasters spitting flames.

  Stepping out of a doorway, a sec man lit the rag fuse on a Molotov and prepared to throw.

  “Tempus fugit!” Doc bellowed in Latin, a chattering M-16 assault rifle tight in his grip. The rapidfire had much better range than the LeMat, and the discharge wouldn’t deafen everybody inside the wag like the Civil War handcannon.

  The sec man was stitched from knees to forehead, the perfectly imbalanced tumblers coming out of his body on random vectors. As what remained of the corpse fell back into the house, the Molotov fell to the floor and flames whooshed into existence.

  Grinding gears, War Wag Three charged down the street to ram headlong into the thick telephone-pole-size legs of the second guard tower. The wood shattered into splinters and the pillbox tilted, then hurtled down to crash alongside the armored vehicle. Callously, the driver sent the machine jouncing over the wreckage, the wounded sec men trapped among the timbers screaming briefly, then going silent.

  Dropping a clip to reload the M-16, Ryan saw a figure in an alleyway lift a long tube to his shoulder, then swing it toward the UCV. Shitfire, he thought, that was a bazooka! Releasing the empty rapidfire, the Deathlands warrior drew the SIG-Sauer and sent five fast rounds winging that way. Recoiling from the arrival of the subsonic lead, the sec man slumped, and the bazooka fired straight at the bricks below his boots. The street erupted with thunder and flame, a corona of broken bricks flying away to smack into doors, walls and windows.

  Driving the war wag onto the main street, Jak broke into ragged coughing. The inside of the UCV was starting to reek from the exhaust fumes of the blasters, and the bodily fluids of the aced sec men. But there was no time to dump the bodies. They had to keep this can sealed tight and keep fighting. That was the only way out of this trap. Chill tonight, breathe tomorrow, the teenager grimly promised himself.

  Just then, a second gong began to clang from the third guard tower. Now close enough, the crew of War Wag Two sent a burning stream of homemade chem arching out from the flamethrower. The support timbers ignited and started burning upward like old fuses. The sec men in the pillbox stopped ringing the alarm and began to fire down at the war wag, bullets and crossbow quarrels hitting the windshield with amazing accuracy, but failing to break through.

  As the flames reached the pillbox, one sec man tried to scramble down the ladder, and only served to set himself on fire, the human torch stubbornly climbing down another few rungs before falling away. Trapped, the rest of the sec men stayed put, shooting nonstop until the pillbox was engulfed and they could only shriek in agony.

  Resting a boot on the sec man sent to ace her, Krysty shoved the fluted barrel of an M-16 through a blasterport and hosed a long stream of 5.56 mm rounds at distant shapes running along the wall. One of them fell into the ville, going through the roof of a building, while the other tumbled over the wall. A split second later, there came a tremendous explosion from the other side, a writhing fireball rising upward resembling a miniature nuclear blast.

  “Dark night, that was guncotton!” J.B. cursed, triggering short bursts at a group of sec men running along the streets. “That would have opened us like a self-heat!” One of the armed thieves fell sprawling, but the other kept going and vanished around a corner.

  “Looks like the baron finally realized that the nightcreep failed, and is breaking out the real weapons,” Ryan snarled, taking out a sniper in a window. The sec man fell back, minus a face. “Ace anybody carrying a large sack or bag. It could be more guncotton, or worse, a C-4 satchel charge!”

  Stumbling out of an alley, a harried-looking sec man waved a white flag attached to a stick. Stopping himself just in time from chilling the man, Doc noticed that the flag was in remarkably good condition for something supposedly cobbled together in the middle of a battle. Feeling a surge of insane anger at the trick, the old man shot the limping norm in the belly. Losing the flag, the sec man doubled over, the sizzling pipe bomb in his other hand clattering to the ground and rolling away before detonating harmlessly near a water trough.

  “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” Mildred snarled, hastily reloading the Czech ZKR. The woman had to be very careful of where she stood. The floor was slippery with blood and spent brass.

  “Indubitably, madam,” Doc muttered, working the arming bolt on the rapidfire to clear a jam in the ejector port. “Or as the Scottish would say, fool
me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, go frag yourself!”

  “Amen to that, brother!”

  On a nearby roof, a sec man appeared with a pipe bomb and threw it at the urban combat vehicle. It hit the roof and bounced off to explode harmlessly in midair. Jerking the joystick, J.B. peppered the edge of the building with the Fifty, the rounds chewing a path of destruction along the brickwork and throwing off an opaque cloud of red dust, but there was no cry of pain or secondary explosion.

  “Fuckers getting smart,” Jak cursed, shifting gears. Hit-and-run tactics were the only sensible way to fight an armored wag. Aside from trapping one in a pit. After that, you simply built a bonfire and cooked the people inside like apples in pie. Now, the albino teenager closely watched the road ahead for suspicious shadows or unusual depressions.

  Suddenly there was a bright flash from the pillbox on top of the last guard tower. The radar started beeping as a streak of flame reached down to impact directly on the front of War Wag One. The entire vehicle disappeared inside the roiling fireball…only to reappear a few seconds later dripping flames. A tire was flat, flopping loosely on the spiked rim, and a side door was missing, a human arm dangling from a hinge, but the machine kept fighting. Roberto understood that this was no test of strength, but a full-blown Deathlands showdown. Winner takes all, loser gets buried. A lot of people were getting chilled this night, but that wasn’t the trader’s concern at the moment. Survival was. His crew was family, and kin protected kin. End of discussion.

  Another rocket streaked down to just miss War Wag One, the blast blowing a chunk out of the ville wall. Moving into the square, War Wag Three and the UCV both targeted the pillbox with their machine guns, doing minimal damage. Then War Wag One unlashed the laser again, the beam slicing across support beams. With a sound of splintering wood, the pillbox slid free to crash onto the hard street with grisly results.

  In the distance, the last guard tower was on fire, sec men jumping to their deaths rather than be burned alive. On the streets, townsfolk were dashing everywhere, drunken cobblers, naked gaudy sluts, wrinklies, a young couple cradling an infant. Again and again, Jak had to slow down to not slaughter the people. But each time, the sec men used the pause to retreat to better positions or unleash more rockets.