No Man's Land Read online

  Jed Kylie showed him a wearily cynical blue eye. “You again? How in the name of glowing night shit do you manage to keep materializing out of nowhere like that?”

  “You impudent beast!” Colonel Toth hissed from the baron’s other side. “How dare you show your scaly yellow face around here! I’ll have that hide off you in a—”

  “Pipe down, Bismuth,” Jed said, turning his face forward. “If the bastard wanted to chill me, I’d already be staring at the sky, and there’s nothing you or your boys could have done about it.”

  “Precisely!” Snake Eye said heartily. “You’re a wise one, Baron.

  “And the answer to your question is ‘proper reconnaissance.’” He looked past Kylie to Toth, who continued to glare blazing death at him.

  “I recommend it to the attention of you and your men. It’s a trifle too late, alas, to do anything about the disaster the want of proper reconnaissance brought on your army a few days past. But in five years or so when you’re ready to resume your campaign, it could come in handy.”

  Snake Eye expected more rage from the little baron. Instead the creases in Jed Kylie’s face grew deeper until his eyes vanished into slits. But his teeth showed yellow in a grin of sorts.

  “If you’re gonna come here and rub my nose in my biggest failure,” he said, “I hope for your sake you bring me news of your own success.”

  He spoke with a certain mordant humor. Snake Eye smiled, mentally noting not ever to underestimate the banty-cock baron. As famous as his tantrums were, he evidently never lost control so far he couldn’t reel it right back when he needed to. That suggested to Snake Eye that the rage fits were an indulgence Baron Jed was doubtless not above using purely to calculated effect.

  “Neither,” Snake Eye said with equanimity.

  He couldn’t see Kylie’s eyes, but he could see his face harden. “Then give me one reason I shouldn’t let Colonel Toth loose his dogs on you. And don’t bother threatening my life. It’s not quite as damn dear to me as it might be, just now.”

  “Because I bring you something that will prove of far greater value to you than vengeance.”

  “What could possibly interest me more than hearing you’ve skinned those child-murdering bastards alive and are bringing me their dripping hides in a wagon I ain’t seen yet?”

  Snake Eye laughed. “Not yet, Baron,” he said, “although I assure you that’s coming—for as everybody knows, I always fulfill a contract. But what I bring is something unlooked-for—information.”

  “He’s lying,” Toth hissed.

  “In turn, Colonel,” Snake Eye said, “I might remind you that my reputation is a commodity of great value to me. Without my hard-earned name for probity I’d starve. I mention this purely for informational purposes, but a word to the wise, eh?”

  “It better be information,” Jed rasped, “that can help me turn the tables on these Uplander sheepfuckers and in the process, get my own honor back.”

  “It is, Baron,” Snake Eye said. “Oh, it most certainly is.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Snake Eye was riding a high-class slut when the bedroom door opened. Without pausing, he grabbed his handblaster off the table by the bed and leveled it. The intruder’s eyes flew wide as a scaled, black-taloned thumb clicked back the hammer.

  The slut, sensing something other than her own distress, looked toward the door. She moved as if trying to escape. Without glancing away from his three-dot sights, Snake Eye grabbed her offside cheek with his free hand, digging in his claws until she squealed in pain.

  He recognized the intruder. It was the gaudy-owner’s youngest son, Micah Savage, his naturally somewhat pendulous underlip quivering and his face blank beneath a mop of brown hair.

  “What is it?” Snake Eye demanded. He kept the handblaster leveled between the boy’s wide brown eyes.

  “There’re...people,” the boy said. “Like—like what you told us to be on the lookout for.”

  “Five men, two women,” Snake Eye said, “led by a tall man with one blue eye, a patch like mine, shaggy black hair and a scar down the side of his face?”

  The boy swallowed and nodded. “’Cept one of ’em’s a boy, more correct. Mebbe two, though t’other’s a mutie, with skin and hair white as snow.” He moistened his lips with a pink tongue. “They say he has bloodred eyes!”

  “He does,” Snake Eye said. “But he’s no mutant. I’m a mutie. He’s an albino.”

  “Yuh-yuh-yessir,” the boy stammered.

  “What are they doing?” Snake Eye demanded.

  “Got lodgings for the night,” the boy said. “They’re in the main room, now.”

  His eyes had wandered to the naked woman sweating on the bed, her fists knotted in the sheets, her fine features partially obscured by strands of black hair that had escaped the elaborate bun her employer insisted she bedizen herself with to make her more alluring to the customers. Snake Eye was no expert in juvenile psychology, but it seemed to him the kid was on the young side to be hypnotized by the heavy, swaying breasts. But they were definitely preferable to looking down the 9 mm maw of death.

  Snake Eye tipped the muzzle toward the room’s low ceiling and engaged the safety with a clawed thumb.

  “Go back and keep an eye on them, boy,” Snake Eye said.

  The boy stared at the naked woman for a few more moments, then he vanished like a rabbit down his hole.

  And now, to the business at hand. Snake Eye carefully replaced his handblaster on the nightstand, then reached for the gaudy slut.

  * * *

  “ALL RIGHT, RYAN,” J.B. said, coming in with Ricky, Mildred and Doc. Jak and Krysty already sat with Ryan at a table near the gaudy’s long, polished-hardwood bar. “We’ve got the gear stowed in our room.”

  Holding both hands on the knife-scarred wood tabletop, Ryan twitched his left forefinger. J.B. instantly clammed up and sat down.

  “It’ll sure be good to sleep with a roof over our heads for once,” Ricky said cheerfully. “I won’t mind a break from those hit-and-run raids, either.”

  “Hush up now, boy,” J.B. said under his voice. He nodded at Ryan’s hand. “Next time, know the sign.”

  Ricky’s olive face went white, but he shut his mouth and sat down. Sitting on Ryan’s left, Jak gave his buddy a quick grin, half gloating, half commiseration.

  “So this old beezer told you what?” demanded one of the wag drivers as he bellied up to the bar. There were four of them, three men and a woman. Their clothes were rough and smelled of dust and old sweat of men and animals. Their hair was shaggy, their faces as coarse and weathered as their voices.

  “Triple-damnedest thing I ever heard,” the woman said in a gravel-crusher voice. “Said he’d found this secret underground place, all stuffed to the rafters with the choicest scabbie! Weps, ammo, self-heats, meds, fancy-ass old-days tech.”

  “Just a buncha oldie B.S.,” said a balding man with a black billygoat beard. “They stay out in the sun long enough, makes ’em crazy as a stickie with a bag full of lighters.”

  Doc’s blue eyes, which had been looking rheumier and dreamier than usual as the fatigue of a few weeks dragged his lids lower and lower, suddenly went wide. He sat up straighter in his rickety wood chair.

  “Oh,” he said softly.

  “Damn straight—oh,” Mildred said.

  The female wag driver was shaking her head. “Not this time, Leo,” she said. “Least, that ain’t how I read it. Oh, sure, the old guy was crazy enough, and not just on the rotgut he’d been sucking down. It was like he was talking to someone who wasn’t even there.”

  The woman paused to down a rotgut shot of her own. Even as she shivered in reaction, she went on, her voice a couple degrees raspier. “When he snapped out of it, he admitted he’d been out robbing the chills from that last big battle between the sheep boys and the cow-people.”

  The black man she’d called Leo hunched farther over the bar and the shot glass enfolded in his own big hand.

 
“Don’t remind me of that, Cissy,” he said. “That sawed-off little fuck Jed’s been on a tear ever since. Bad enough for us trader types. He’s been having those tenant drivers the Grand Army uses for their organic transport whipped bloody on the slightest excuse.”

  He shot back his own drink. “Or just whipped to death, when he’s feelin’ triple-cussed. Most days, actually.”

  A shape loomed up on Ryan’s left. By the gust of eye-watering smell that had blown in before the approaching figure, Ryan already made it for the gaudy owner. The scent, which she may have bathed in—possibly instead of water—had that unique combination of throat-clogging sweetness and eyeball-stinging rancidity of scabbied predark perfume that had gone off over the intervening decades.

  “So, name your poisons, people!” she said in a bellow Ryan judged was supposed to be hearty. He didn’t look her way as the newcomers gave their drink orders.

  They were in Wolf Trap Creek, which was the first stream of any size west of the Des Moines. The Association capital of Hugoville had been built where it met the main flow. As such, the gaudy built on a ford that gave it half its name of Storm Crossing served as a major watering hole for trade flowing between the rival river-valley powers and points west, and for trade between them, whether legal or, as more commonly, otherwise.

  The other half, of course, came from the owner-operator, Storm Savage, whom Ryan felt no need to look at now because once was enough. It was possible, he supposed, that if you subtracted the extra beef that showed in the vast jowls that flowed down pretty much uninterrupted to an even vaster bosom squeezed horrifyingly into—and out of—a tight black corset, and the child-bearing hips, plus the garish red paint on the lips and the raccoon-smears of kohl around beady eyes and the brown and ash roots of the unnaturally bright red hair piled atop a beer-keg head, she might not have been hard to look at in her younger days. If you squinted. And the light was bad. And also you were drunk.

  “Anything not on the menu,” she added, “is negotiable.”

  Meaning mostly the gaudy sluts she ran, as a normal part of such operations. They had a reputation for being top-notch, as such went; and from the glimpses Ryan had caught of various items of what seemed to be the stock in that part of the trade, by and large didn’t seem to require much by way of low light and strong drink not to scorch the eyeballs.

  Then a bovine elbow-nudge to Ryan’s right biceps forced him to look up. “That goes double for you, handsome,” she said. “You got a right dangerous look to you.”

  He reached ostentatiously to pat Krysty’s right hand, which happened to rest on the table. “This one here gives me all I can handle,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Well,” the proprietor sniffed, “when you decide you’re man enough for a real woman’s curves, you know where to find me.”

  “Nose in feed trough,” Jak said, deadpan, when the gaudy-keeper had waddled far enough away into the barroom clamor to be beyond hearing.

  J.B. raised an eyebrow. “Did you just make a joke?”

  Jak blinked red eyes at him innocently. Ricky snickered.

  Ryan held up a finger, reckoning the new kid would spot that. The wag drivers had finally quit carping about the various inconveniences peace had imposed on independent contractors in the region and returned to the subject of the oldie’s lost trove.

  “Anyways,” Cissy said, “when he came back to the present time and noticed we was all staring at him, the old bastard as much as told us he’d been looting the battlefield. Said he’d let the drink get the better of him, and all he could see was the swole-up faces of all them poor young dead boys. Explained to them he had to do what he was doin’, and hoped they didn’t mind, but that this was the last time he’d have to, because what with the fighting all wound down now and all it was safe for the first time for him to make his big score.”

  The fourth member of the group shook an upended mug over his upended mouth to get the last few drops of beer. Apparently because he’d paid for it, or so Ryan thought. Sometimes these random gaudies homebrewed real top-quality stuff; from the sample Ryan had tried, Storm Crossing was clearly not one of them.

  “Nuke shit, Cis,” he said. Nobody’d mentioned his name. He was a morose fat man in suspenders, with sandy hair that was still squashed down on top and kind of flared out to the sides from wearing the slouch hat he’d set on the bar.

  “Now, why you got to go and say a thing like that, Gus Tarmac?”

  “You just said he was rambling on like a man got a whiff of gas. He was just another stone-crazy old coot. Kind likes to build castles in the air, then live in ’em.”

  Mildred snorted at that for some reason. Ryan gave her a look. If nothing else, it was poor policy to let people in a gaudy like this know you were eavesdropping on their conversations, even when they weren’t exactly making an effort to be covert about it. She stifled, but her chocolate eyes still danced; some old-days joke of hers or another, he decided.

  But the wag drivers were paying no mind to any business but their own. “You sure about that, Gus?” the goateed man said. “When I left the new Uplander camp just before noon today there was some kind of ruction. Nobody’d tell me what it was, and I reckoned when a buncha men with blasters start to get excited, the prudent place for an outsider to be is elsewhere, double-fast.”

  “Now ain’t nobody can argue with ya there, Cal,” Leo said. “Them Uplanders may not be suffering the perpetual red-ass quite as nuke-hot as the Protectors, but it doesn’t mean they won’t look at you and realize how much use their little army could get out of your trap, your team and your own personal ass than you could on your lonesome.”

  “So I wonder if that might’ve been that news hitting their camp,” Cal went on. “It’d get me going.”

  Cissy downed another shot, then pounded her shot glass on the bar with such loud conviction that even as stoutly built as it was, Ryan was surprised it didn’t at least crack.

  “All I know is what I saw and heard,” she said. “And that was like one of them deathbed confessions. Plus his oldie eyes were clear when he ’fessed up to the rest of us. I think he told it to us straight, and like it really happened, not like he imagined. But that’s just me.”

  “So,” the black guy said, “will it get you going, Cal? You gonna go off in search of buried treasure so’s you can retire? Provide you get to it before that loco old bastard does.”

  “Damned right it will,” Cal said, jutting his bearded chin. “Get me going clean outta the territory, fast as I can deadhead my rig. They say three people can keep a secret if one of them’s a chill. In this oldie’s case, even one knowing the secret wound up being way too much in the end.”

  “If he’s telling the truth,” Gus said.

  Cal shook his head. “Makes me no nevermind. You all do what you will. But I reckon, if anything’s gonna get both rad-blasted armies out in the field again, full-force and loaded for bear, it’s a tale like the one we all just heard. True or not don’t enter into it, any more’n it ever does in politics.”

  And taking up his own black hat from the bar, he stuffed it authoritatively on his balding head and swaggered from the gaudy.

  The others watched him go, then turned back to mutter with their heads together over the bar.

  Ryan looked around at his friends. It seemed to him Doc summed the whole thing up best with an eloquent shrug.

  “So, Ryan Cawdor,” a voice said from the shadows in the nearest corner of the bar, “what about you? Will you and your friends go off in search of this fairy gold? Or should I say, this lost redoubt?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The whole gaudy went dead still. Not more still than Ryan himself, though.

  Slowly he turned his head. A shadowed figure sat alone with a bottle at a table beneath a particularly low-hanging garland of age-tarnished tinsel.

  As Ryan turned, the figure stood up and stepped into the light. Ryan heard a hissing intake of breath, possibly from one of his friends.

  T
he man was tall and lean. His head seemed oddly short and wide beneath the black Stetson. A black patch covered his right eye.

  But that wasn’t what probably startled the onlookers. The tall, thin stranger’s face was yellow. It had a hard, waxy cast and the slightest suggestion of...scales.

  His hands, their thumbs hooked to either side of a silver belt buckle cast in the shape of a diamondback with wide-open fanged mouth, showed black talons in place of nails.

  The stranger was a mutie, and made no attempt to hide the fact.

  Ryan immediately took note of the fact he was allowed inside the gaudy. A lot of gaudy owners wouldn’t allow even a suspected mutie through the door, which sometimes provoked unpleasant and sometimes volatile incidents concerning Jak. Storm Crossing had either an unusually lenient policy on muties, or its proprietor and this particular mutie had an understanding.

  “You seem to know me,” Ryan said, “but I don’t know you.”

  “Perhaps you’ve heard of my work,” the stranger said. He had a pleasant voice, baritone and well modulated, and spoke in as educated a way as a big East Coast baron’s son, that Ryan, who was a big East Coast baron’s son, was well-equipped to recognize. “I’ve certainly heard of yours. They call me Snake Eye.”

  He looked around the group. His visible eye was light brown and unexceptional. Ryan wondered what injury mandated the patch over the other. Unlike Ryan, Snake Eye’s face showed no visible scar to go along with the blinding.

  “Krysty Wroth,” he said. “Your beauty is as luscious as all the stories make it out to be. J. B. Dix, often called the Armorer. Dr. Theophilus Tanner—good to meet a man of education. As an autodidact, I still admire your academic achievement.”

  “A what?” Ricky asked.

  “Hush, son,” J.B. said. “Doc’ll explain it later.” His tone suggested, there might not be a later. Ryan could tell at first glance this mutie was bad, bad news even if he hadn’t worn two blasters at his hips. J.B. was at least as sharp that way as he.