Shatter Zone Page 18
“Got that right,” J.B. added, taking out a butane lighter. He applied the flame to the end of the cigar stub in his mouth, puffing it cherry-red, and exhaled a long rich stream.
“Got another of those?” a sec man asked hopefully, sniffing at the pungent fumes. “I’ll trade ya fair for it.”
“Sorry, last one,” J.B. said, pulling out the cigar. Then he caught Mildred trying to hide her usual disapproving expression. The Armorer chuckled. Aw, what the hell.
“Want this one?” J.B. asked, holding out the smoldering stub.
“Thanks!” The sec man grinned and took the stub to start puffing away contentedly. “Nuke me, it’s been a long time since I tasted tobacco. What do you want in trade? I got a good knife and some honeycomb.”
“The’ comb will do fine.”
“Deal!” And the exchange was made.
As the group proceed through the sandy city, the Metro took a slow turn around a corner and the sec men on top cut loose with a flurry of arrows at the sky. They were notching replacement arrows when a large bird fell to the ground in a feathery thump.
A young sec man darted forward to grab the chilled bird and scurry back to the wag. The older men complimented the speed of the teenager as the side door of the wag hissed open and he climbed inside with the prize. The door promptly slammed shut in his wake.
“Not very trusting,” Krysty stated, pausing to take a sip from her canteen.
Keeping his voice casual, Ryan asked, “Would you be, with outlanders armed like us around?”
Capping the water container, the redhead took a minute before smiling. “No,” she admitted honestly. “Not really.”
Angling around two more corners, Gill shifted gears until the wag reached a section of street that was relatively clear of sand. The potholes in the asphalt were poorly patched in some spots, but much better in others, which seemed to indicate a learning process. The locals were doing repairs on the ruined city. This was something the companions had never encountered before in all of their travels. Just who was the baron here?
Reaching relatively smooth pavement, the wag picked up speed, while Stirling and the sec men began to look noticeably less anxious.
“We’re close to their ville,” Ryan stated.
“But they’re not heading into the desert,” J.B. said, shifting the Uzi slung on his shoulder.
Removing a spare clip from his jacket pocket, Ryan then worked the bolt to eject the partially spent rotary clip, then inserted the fresh 5-shot cluster. Satisfied for the moment, Ryan glanced at the ruined downtown skyscraper, trying to guess their location from the sloped angle of the building. “We seem to be going deeper into Tucson,” he decided.
“Ville inside ruins,” Jak said with a frown, stepping around a fresh pothole full of prickly cactus plants.
“Never did like those,” Krysty added, gently massaging her cheek to try to soothe her sore gums. From the mad brother and sister of Nova ville to the redheaded monster in that nameless town they had nicknamed Zero City, villes inside ruins had always been trouble for the companions. When civilization fell, everybody smart fled the coming food riots. Only feebs and crazies stayed behind, many of them turning into cannies. Gaia, was this why they were being greeted so warmly? They were being led to the cooking pot?
Surreptitiously, the woman slipped a hand into her pants’ pocket and checked the gren. If worse came to worst, she’d take a lot of cannies with her before they tasted meat.
“There!” a sec man cried, pointing in the weeds.
Going into a crouch, Stirling spun and fired his blaster at a dark recess under a loose pile of broken bricks. A high-pitched squeal rang out and a tan-colored rabbit bolted from the opening and raced away. Starting to reload, an angry Stirling cursed at the miss, and several of the sec men risked a brief smile behind his back.
“Damn wind must have taken my shot,” the sec chief growled to nobody in particular.
Tactfully, nobody disagreed.
The Metro turned at the next corner, and the companions now saw only a vast open space that stretched for a good half mile. The concrete paths of ancient sidewalks were still in place, but the buildings that had been inside those cracked borders were gone, the smooth ground evenly packed with rubble and loose sand.
This is a shatter zone, Ryan realized. An open field with no place for attackers to hide. There had to have been some rough fighting here once for the locals to do all of this work.
In the midst of the wide expanse stood a formidable wall, the imposing barrier composed of everything imaginable: concrete sidewalks slabs, marble cornerstones, bricks, cinder blocks and rusty steel beams. The debris of a dozen buildings had been compiled to erect a massive fortification around a small section of the predark city.
Rising high behind the impressive shield were three old buildings, the glass in the windows just as milkywhite as those in the ruins, but a few of them flashed mirror-bright. Ryan made a mental note on the location of those. That had to be the home of the baron.
Even from this distance, the companions could see guards walking along the top of the wall, and more of them standing on the roofs of the three buildings. The sec men on the wall appeared to be carrying crossbows, but the ones on the buildings held longblasters. Mildred noted with some satisfaction that women were also walking the wall. She was starting to like this new baron more and more.
“This is why the stores were cleaned out,” J.B. said, breaking off a small piece of the honeycomb and tucking it inside a cheek like a chaw of tobacco. “A ville this size needs a lot of different stuff to keep working. Barracks, taverns, armory, stables…”
“Prisons, torture chambers, dungeons, slave pits,” Doc added darkly in a whisper.
Sucking on the sweet honey, J.B. had no response to that because it was often true. He passed around the remaining comb to the rest of the companions. Everybody took a sticky piece until there was nothing remaining.
As Gill steered the Metro across the broken field, Ryan noticed that there was a second wall set about fifty feet outside the main barrier. It was only about three feet tall, and made of some sort of upright concrete.
“I don’t understand this,” Mildred said out of the corner of her mouth. “Those are K-rails, a kind of portable divider that repair crews used on highways during construction. But why are there two walls?”
“It’s a buffer,” Ryan answered bluntly. “Set to break the charge of coldhearts on foot or to slow down a rushing war wag.”
Mildred pointed. “But they left a couple of gaps.”
“Chill zones,” J.B. answered, licking his sticky lips. “The sec men can concentrate all of their blasters on the gaps when the outlanders rush through and cut ’em down in droves.”
“A killing field,” Doc added, using a term he had once read in the newspaper about a battlefield tactic used in the Civil War. Then he frowned. A civil war. Bah, as if such a thing were possible!
“Good design,” Jak admitted, kicking a stone out of his way. “Be bitch to get out.”
“Think we’re walking into a trap?” Krysty asked in concern, casting a sideways glance at Stirling and his sec men. The men were smiling broadly now that they were within sight of the ville, their hushed voices rising in volume.
“Not think so,” Jak stated hesitantly. “But wrong before.”
Nodding at that, Krysty surreptitiously checked the antipers gren in her pants’ pocket. There was another in her bearskin coat, and more in the backpack, but this was the only gren she could reach with any speed. She wasn’t getting any feeling of danger from the sec men or the ville. But as Jak said, they had been wrong before.
Shifting the weps in their hands, the figures of the guards on the wall watched closely as the war wag and the companions slowly approached. Clearly visible behind the barrier were a couple of angled wooden beams festooned with ropes and baskets at the end.
“Catapults,” Mildred announced. “Just like the small one on top of the wag.”
“Good Lord, how should I know?” the scholar replied curtly. “I taught literature, not history. In my day, the Army of the Potomac used cannons, not siege engines.”
“What talk?” Jak said with a scowl. “Just ropes and weights, no engine.”
“A siege engine is another term for a catapult,” Mildred explained. “Actually, it means any large device used to forcibly enter a castle.”
The teen snorted at that. What a bunch of mutie drek. Predark whitecoats were crazy, and that was all there was to it.
The front gate of Two-Son ville proved to be a double set of metal panels that rose almost to the top of the masonry wall where a steel I-beam packed with adobe bricks bridged the sections. Rusty barbed wire covered the bridge and there were a few scraps of cloth, along with what appeared to be scalps, fluttering in the breeze from amid the endless coils—the grim remnants of an obviously failed attempt to gain entry.
A small door was set into the left side of the double panel, and for some unknown reason a band of corrugated iron ran along the bottom. The two sections of the gate itself were covered with multiple sheets of steel, iron, tin and aluminum, each riveted over the other in a crazy patchwork-quilt pattern.
Slowing their advance, Ryan and J.B. shared a glance. Those were obvious repairs done to the portal over the years. Two-Son ville had seen some hard battles in the past, and there was no way of knowing if the present inhabitants had been the defenders or the invaders.
Applying the squeaking brakes, Gill eased the wag to a rocking halt and sounded the horn four times, then three, then once.
That was clearly a code of some kind, Ryan realized, tensing slightly. But what was the message?
In response, a flap made of riveted steel fell forward to expose the car tires set along the bottom of the front gate. With ponderous creaking, the right side of the gate started to swing outward, the inflated tire crunching on the loose pebbles covering the ground as they rolled along.
The gate hit the wall with a resounding crash, and the Metro rolled on through, the sec men on top of the war wag having to duck behind the sandbags because the fit was so tight.
Instantly, Ryan could see why the gate needed a row of tires to move—it was over a yard thick and composed of three layers of telephone poles arranged in a staggered pattern, the first row set vertical, the second sideways and the third vertical again. The gate was well over a yard thick and had to have weighed a couple of tons.
“Need an implo gren to get through that,” J.B. whispered, forcing himself to appear calm. “I’m not sure that even a LAW rocket launcher or an Armbrust could dent this thing.”
Merely grunting in reply, Ryan flicked a finger and clicked the safety off the loaded Steyr.
Blowing dark fumes from the tailpipe, the battered Metro angled away from the gate and turned to go around a squat brick wall set directly in front of the entrance to the ville.
Damn, it’s another a firing wall, Ryan noted. A place for the ville defenders to stand behind and shoot over the top at anything that managed to get through the colossal gate. Whoever designed this place really knew how to fight, that was for sure.
Beyond the firing wall, Krysty could see crowds of civies freely moving about, talking, laughing and shouting. There were rows of houses, huts and hovels mixed together with taverns, a horse stable and a tanner. Past those rose the slanted-glass roofs of a greenhouse, the three predark buildings towering above everything.
Greenhouses! Krysty felt a shiver run down her back. The rest of the companions clearly shared her feelings on the matter.
“All right, get moving,” Stirling said, waving the sec men onward. “Clean up the Metro, and get her ready for another run tomorrow. I’m gonna intro our guests to the baron.”
“What about the prisoner?” Porter asked with a sneer, running dirty fingers through his greasy blond hair.
The sec chief made a face as if he had just bitten into an apple and found half a mutie worm inside. “Yeah, bring him, too,” Stirling ordered.
Prisoner? Ryan glanced at Mildred, who shrugged.
“At least it’s not us,” Krysty stated softly.
“So far,” Doc whispered ominously.
Walking through the gateway, Ryan noted the solid construction of the gate and wall. From this angle he could see that the second door was a fake. It was backed by the concrete bulk of the main wall and was totally immobile. The door was merely a decoration to trick invaders into wasting time and effort to gain entry through something that couldn’t be made to open.
“Okay, I’m impressed,” Mildred admitted.
“Wonder which first,” Jak added under his breath. “Smart stickies, or good wall?”
As the companions started around the firing wall, a shadow swept across them. They turned to see the gate closing. The locking mechanism was made of wrought iron, with only a few shiny steel parts. With a metallic clang, the exterior skirt was raised back into position to hide the tires, then was also locked into place.
“I love that sound,” Stirling said, exhaling. “Always feels good to be safe at home.”
“All right, drop those blasters,” a stern feminine voice commanded.
Two sec men rose from behind the firing wall, each bearing homie scatterguns. A fat woman armed with an old Browning Automatic Rifle joined them. Mildred knew the blaster well. It had been an antique in her day, but these days the clip-fed, bolt-action weapon was a deadly marvel of mil tech.
“Not going to happen,” Ryan said, keeping his hand relaxed on the stock of the Steyr. This whole thing didn’t feel like a jack. There was the distinct reek of stupidity about the fat woman. He’d stay sharp, but let this play out before spraying lead.
“That was an order, not a request, rist,” the corpulent sec woman snarled, working the bolt on her weapon. “Don’t you worry, sir, I have the prisoners under control.”
With that pronouncement, Stirling raised both eyebrows. “Prisoners? Did you say prisoners?” the sec chief bellowed, stepping in front of the companions. “Corporal, you’re either drunk on duty, or a nukesucking feeb!”
“Sir?” the female guard asked in confusion. The two sec men behind her began to lower their weps, clearly telling which way the wind was blowing on this situation. Each of the men looked as if they would rather be swimming naked in a lake of rad water than involved in this present conversation.
Striding to the firing wall, Stirling slapped the longblaster aside. “The prisoner has been taken to the Square, as per my orders,” he shouted into her face. “These people are guests of the baron! Honored guests, I might fragging add, under my fragging personal protection!”
“Sir?” she repeated.
His burned face grim, Stirling leaned closer. “Besides, do you truly think that I would willingly let armed prisoners into the ville? Do you?”
Breaking into a sweat, the pudgy sec woman hugged the wep to her ample chest and forced a smile. “Ah, well, sir, I… That is…you…”
“Shut up, before I take that Browning and stuff it where the sun don’t shine!” the sec chief roared, towering over the quaking guard. “These people,” he said, stressing the word, “saved the life of the baron’s son and are guests.”
“Guests?” she asked, as if never hearing the word before.
“That’s right! Now salute them in greeting, or I’ll have your tits on toast for my breakfast!”
“Sir, yes, sir!” she replied, standing stiffly at attention and jerking the longblaster to her shoulder. “Hail, honored guests to Two-Son!”
The companions gave no response, but eased their fingers off the triggers of their assorted weaponry. Fools were like shitters, every ville had at least one.
“Sorry about that,” Stirling apologized, hitching up his gunbelt. “The gate gang is always a bit twitchy. The stickies sometimes get inside, and they’re the first one
s to get aced.”
“No prob,” Ryan growled, feeling the fury pound inside him like the pistons of an engine. He knew it was a bad move, but he had no choice. Ryan tossed the Steyr to J.B., who made the catch and slung the rifle over a shoulder with his scattergun. He had been expecting something like this from Ryan after the fat bitch had drawn a weapon on him.
“All right, fatty, you want to try that longblaster again?” Ryan said to the guard, a hand resting on the holstered SIG-Sauer.
“Sir?” she asked hesitantly, sweat forming on her brow.
“You heard me. Want to try to aim and fire that BAR before I draw this handcannon and blow your brains out the back of your nuking skull?”
Startled, the sec woman tightened her grip on her blaster. “Are you challenging me to a duel, One-eye?” she demanded in a cool voice, working the arming bolt.
“No, he is not! There will be no dueling in my ville,” a deep voice boomed in command. “Put down those blasters!”
Pivoting, Stirling lifted the hand off his gunbelt and snapped a salute at the approaching group of people. Turning, the three guards behind the firing wall went pale.
The blood still pounding in his temples, Ryan forced himself to ease a hand off the SIG-Sauer and appraise the newcomers. Yeah, this was the baron. No doubt about that.
Surrounded by a cadre of armed guards, the tall, lean man was wearing old boots that were highly polished. His clothes were spotless, without a single patch, and the blue-steel blaster at his right hip was a Glock autoloader. The left sleeve of his jacket was pinned to his shoulder, the arm missing completely. A screaming blue eagle tattoo was on the side of his neck, talons splayed as it dived to attack.
Briefly, Ryan recalled the earlier comment on how fast the baron was supposed to be with a blaster. With only one arm? Interesting. If it was true.
Her long red hair waving about as if stirred by a breeze, Krysty studied the tattoo. The same design was embroidered on Stirling’s jacket, and it was vaguely similar to the stitching on her boots. Luckily her pants were hanging on the outside, covering them at the moment. But from things Doc and Mildred once talked about, she knew that the eagle was the talisman of old America. But did it mean the same thing here, or something else entirely?