Hellbenders Page 19

  The wag turned sharply on the rock plateau, gravel and loose shale moving under the large, heavy-tread tires and shooting over the edge of the rock table, down to the base of the outcrop. It was a sharp turn to maneuver the large wags on the relatively small space and take them down onto the road that wound around the far side of the outcrop.

  In the second wag, J.B. gritted his teeth as he swung the steering wheel, the wheels locking as the wag spun on the loose surface. He righted it, hoping that the rear tires would hold on the shale, and followed Correll’s lead. Already clouds of loose earth and dust were being thrown up by the motion of the wags, and it crossed the Armorer’s mind that the wags that came at the very rear of the procession were in danger of being blinded by the opaque clouds that were being raised.

  Correll had already hit the road that wound down the far side of the rocks. It looked a steep and narrow path, and he took it at a speed that—to Ryan—verged on the suicidal. The wheels locked on the angles of the road, the rear of the wag sliding across toward the edge of the precipice, back end of the wag waving wildly into space.

  “The one problem with being so secure is that it makes it a bastard to get down again,” Correll said with a humorless grin that spread across his thin, drawn face.

  “As long as we get down the right way, and not the quickest,” Ryan returned.

  Correll laughed harshly but said nothing.

  The convoy of wags from the redoubt spread out down the mountain track, other drivers following J.B.’s lead in hanging back from the wag in front, allowing the dust some time to settle before they hit the lowering clouds. It also stopped the spray of loose shale and stone from battering the windshield of each preceding wag. Although the shields were of a material that could not be broken by the missiles, they could nonetheless obscure the driver’s view with their constant hammering.

  In the leading wag, Ryan and Krysty both breathed a sigh of relief when Correll took the wag onto the flat of the desert floor, coming out of the final turn and gunning the engine as he hit a straight trail, intending to eat up as much ground as possible with the minimum of delay. Correll himself, and Cy and Travis, seemed not to have noticed the perils of the descent. Each was in his own little world, focusing on the firefight to come.

  J.B., sweat glistening on his forehead, spectacles slipping down his nose, took the final turn with a feeling of relief. After that descent, at that speed, any kind of firefight would be by way of light relief. Able at last to take one hand from the wheel, he pushed his glasses back up his nose and gunned his engine, changing gears and increasing speed to try to make up the rapidly widening distance between himself and Correll. He breathed out heavily through his mouth, sparing a moment for a swift glance at Mildred.

  The woman pulled her plaits tight behind her, rolling her eyes at the Armorer in a gesture that spoke of relief.

  Jenny watched them both, then said, “That ain’t scared you already, has it?”

  J.B. grimaced. “Given the choice between a shoot-out with a bunch of coldheart mercies on one side and ravenous stickies on the other, and taking that road again, I’d choose the firefight. Know better what I’m doing then.”

  The Native American nodded. “You’ll soon get a chance to prove that, I’m thinking.”

  A similar conversation took place in the third wag, driven by Lonnie. Catherine and Danny made up the numbers, along with Dean and Jak.

  “Hot pipe, anything’s got to be better than that!” Dean exclaimed.

  “You’re not going pussy on me, are you?” Lonnie asked without humor. His close-cropped head was rigidly set on the road ahead, and his eyes stared with a dark intensity at the wag in front. He put his foot down, gaining ground on J.B. as the Armorer increased his own speed to catch up with the leading wag.

  “Not a matter of that,” Dean replied sharply. “Shit like that is stupe—get us chilled before we even get a chance to fight.”

  “We don’t pull out of anything,” Catherine snapped. “If you go, then you go big.”

  “Bit stupe to go before you get to the enemy, though,” Danny said quietly.

  “Whose side you on, son?” Lonnie barked without looking away from the road.

  “It’s not a question of sides,” Danny replied, keeping his voice level. “It’s a question of meeting the objective. Isn’t that what Papa Joe has always said?”

  “Just mind you remember all that Papa Joe says,” Lonnie returned. “Make up your mind where you stand, boy.”

  Dean and Jak exchanged glances. Would they have to start watching their backs against the Hellbenders, as well as the convoys from Summerfield and Charity?

  Convoys that they could only hope had actually left their respective villes.

  ELIAS TULK WAS A FAR from happy man. As a sec man for Baron Tad Hutter, he had been selected to ride shotgun on the leading wag to leave Summerfield, laden with food supplies and seed crops, headed for the rendezvous point. He wasn’t anticipating much trouble from the sec forces accompanying the convoy from Charity. They’d be too busy trying to stop any of the women they were trading from stepping out of line. What’s more, the device Hutter had his men rig on each wag would more than dissuade them. For, on each of the wags carrying a crop or supplies, a very obvious primitive flamethrower had been erected, pointing down toward the merchandise loaded on the wag. One wrong move, and everything they wanted and needed so desperately would be torched.

  So the problems wouldn’t come from that quarter. There were more likely to be problems with the rest of the Summerfield sec wanting to stop and screw all the women they were trading before the convoy reached base again. That wouldn’t go down well with Hutter, as the women were to be saved for breeding stock, and they weren’t to be touched or damaged in any way. The women in the ville had proved barren for some time, and new blood was necessary if the ville was to survive. However, all the reasons in the world wouldn’t stop some of the sec men going on the rampage if the rumors proved true, and the daughter of Baron Al Jourgensen was part of the trade. Not yet sixteen, still a virgin and supposed to be a looker. Unless strict discipline was maintained, she would be fucked ragged and left for dead by the entire sec force before they reached Summerfield.

  But that wasn’t the problem that occupied Elias Tulk. He actually didn’t care whether the girl—whose name he knew to be Ayesha—was raped and possibly chilled. Hutter wouldn’t be able to stop it on his own, even though he sat beside Tulk right now, with an Uzi across his lap and a Sharps slung across his back.

  Elias Tulk was not a happy man because of the chem storm. The interference was so bad that he had been unable to contact Papa Joe and let him know that the convoy had left as planned, undeterred by the aftermath of the storm. The radio that Correll had given him when he had first been recruited by the Hellbenders was now lying in his bunk back in Summerfield. It was too risky to carry it with him, and it had proved useless earlier that morning, when he had made one last attempt at contact.

  Tulk had been recruited by a recce mission, willing to change sides and act undercover because Hutter had taken Tulk’s wife for his own, simply because he took a fancy to her. But the woman had been unwilling, and for disloyalty to the baron, Hutter had made Tulk shoot her in the head. The memory of her eyes, staring imploringly into his own as he squeezed the trigger on the 9 mm Luger and blew her brains from the side of her head, still haunted him. He hated himself for not refusing the baron, and hated the baron for turning him into the kind of spineless automaton that would follow from fear. He didn’t care whether he bought the farm on this day, only that Hutter’s little empire should collapse.

  Which was why he was fretting about not being able to contact the Hellbenders. He hoped that they would take the same chance as Hutter, and set off anyway.

  The concern had to have shown on his face as he piloted the wag across the desert, for Hutter spoke.

  “Elias, you look like something’s troubling you, boy. Why don’t you tell your old daddy what it i
s, now.”

  “Nothing much, Baron,” Tulk replied, resenting the patrician attitude of Hutter, who thought of himself as the father of his people, and acted accordingly. That’s if you believed in the sort of father who raped and chilled his daughters at will, and delighted in setting man against man to divide and conquer any opposition against him in the ville. Tulk knew how much Hutter was anticipating the arrival of Ayesha, and had almost walked in on the baron masturbating while he repeated her name like a mantra.

  Hutter looked patrician. A large man, standing over six feet with long gray hair and matching beard, and nursing a huge gut from overindulgence, he sat uneasily on the narrow wag seat, in direct contrast to Tulk, who was a few inches shorter and lean, with a sharply defined musculature that stood out well under his olive skin. His dark, saturnine brow remained fixed on the road ahead, not wishing to give anything away until the time he could gain his own personal vengeance.

  Hutter wouldn’t accept Tulk’s answer. “Say, you ain’t actually afeared about what we’re gonna do, are you?” he asked with a sly sarcasm infusing his voice.

  “Why would I be, Baron?” Tulk answered with as little expression in his voice as he could manage.

  Hutter shrugged. “I dunno. Mebbe it’s just that you don’t have the balls for this sort of thing. Mebbe I should think about demoting you—but then again, if you ain’t worth where you are now, then why would you be worth anything in the sec force?”

  Tulk sighed inwardly, but kept a stone face. This was one of Hutter’s irritating habits, part of his divide-and-rule philosophy with his sec force. If he set one against another, and kept petty rivalries and jealousies afloat, as well as threatening the position of his sec hierarchy, keeping them at one another’s throats, it was easier for him to keep control over them all, as none would ever form alliances to end his reign.

  Except, of course, if they chose to align themselves with an outside force. Emboldened by this knowledge, Tulk did something that he had previously always been mindful of—he spoke back.

  “Mebbe I’m not worth anything, Baron, but just mebbe no one else is, either, because we’ve never had the chance to be a proper sec force.”

  Hutter was silent for a moment. Confusion crowded his brow. The one thing that had never occurred to him was that one of his sec crew may actually talk back to him. Confusion gave way to anger, and his hands tightened around the Uzi he cradled in his lap. From the corner of his eye, Tulk saw that, and allowed the ghost of a triumphant smile to flicker across his face.

  “I wouldn’t think about that, Baron,” he said mildly. “You chill me now, and who’s going to drive the wag? You certainly can’t, and besides, by the time you clean the wag out and throw my body out, plus get it back on the track after my chilling body has thrown it off course, you’ll be late. And then you’d lose face. And we can’t have that, can we?”

  “No, we can’t,” Hutter replied in a low, flat tone that was so quiet it was almost lost under the roar of the wag engine. His eyes bored into Tulk, and there was nothing in them except the cold flint of hatred and finality. Elias Tulk wouldn’t be going back to Summerfield.

  Tulk ignored the baron, and tried to keep the smile from his face, although inside he felt more elation and freedom than he had for, well, for probably all his life, but certainly for the past few years. He, too, knew that he wouldn’t be going back to Summerfield—at least, not with Baron Tad Hutter. But the men had entirely different reasons for thinking this.

  Tulk drove on, with Hutter beside him, sunk into a brooding and heavy silence. Toward the rear of the wag sat two other sec men, who had listened in bewilderment to the exchange that had just taken place. Neither would ever risk what they called their lives by talking to Hutter in such a manner, knowing that there were always other sec men willing to avenge petty rivalries by doing the baron’s bidding and assisting them to buy the farm. So the fact that Tulk had just committed suicide—as good as—in front of them made them both feel uneasy about the mission ahead.

  They weren’t the only ones to be feeling ill at ease.

  AYESHA SHIFTED uncomfortably on her seat. It wasn’t the wooden bench, hard and unwelcoming as the wag bumped over the rutted road surface, that made her squirm uneasily. Rather, it was the closed flick knife that she had concealed about her person before the women had been gathered and put into the wag, where they now sat huddled and crammed together, ten on each side of the armored wag, with three sec men on hand—one to drive, one to ride shotgun and one to man the machine blasters that were mounted through slots in the side of the armored wag.

  It was stiflingly hot, as the wag offered no protection from the beating sun, the heat gathering and collecting on the bare metal of the roof and sides, turning the interior into an oven. The women sat in mostly sullen silence, with only the odd complaint, slapped down hard by the sec men, sometimes with a word, sometimes with the back of the hand. It was also dark in the enclosed wag, and in the poor light Ayesha could study the downturned and trammeled faces of the women, and the anxiety on the face of the sec man who sat with them in the rear of the vehicle. Because of the gloom she could do this without being observed too closely.

  Baron Al had trusted none of the women, or their men. Many of them had husbands and lovers who had been unwilling to let the women go. They had been “persuaded” by force or threats to let their women go, but as the women themselves were also unwilling—incredibly so, in the eyes of Baron Al—it was more than possible that, starving as they were, the men and women involved would hatch some kind of plan for escape, or at least an attempt at it. So he ordered that each of the women be strip-searched before she got on board the wag.

  In the middle of the old sports arena where the wags had been prepared, the women were gathered and then stripped naked, their ragged clothes examined for any weapons they may conceal. The sec men conducted the cavity searches, Baron Al joining in this part of the search, which he saw as a bit of extra fun for him and his men.

  Except when it came to Ayesha. She was stripped like the others, but because she was Baron Al’s daughter, and the prize of the merchandise because of her virginity, none of the sec men assembled were willing to conduct the cavity searches, particularly in front of Baron Al himself. One wrong word, one wrong move—the slightest touch of blood proving that she had been despoiled, and thus taking the prize cachet away, and the sec men knew that Baron Al was likely to come down hard on them. So when it was her turn to be searched bodily, Baron Al stepped forward himself.

  Knowing that Hutter would test her immediately by screwing her as the exchange took place, Jourgensen was aware that no blood coming from the sexual encounter would convince Hutter that she was no virgin, and the deal would be off. So Baron Al trod carefully.

  “You better not be trying to shit me, girl,” he whispered as he approached her.

  “Why would I do that?” she answered, barely able to keep the contempt from her voice.

  “You know,” he said simply. “I’m just gonna have to trust that you’ve got nothing up your pussy—or that you never have,” he added. “But I can still see.”

  And before the girl had a chance to move, he bent her over and thrust his fingers up her anal passage, probing as his sec men had with the other women to see if there were any weapons concealed.

  Although she was empty in that orifice, Ayesha clenched the muscles in her pelvic floor and prayed that he wouldn’t be able to feel the knife she had concealed in herself before leaving his palace. It was a slim, mother-of-pearl-handled knife with a rapier thin blade that she had honed until it drew blood from her fingertips with the slightest of pressure. It would be a formidable weapon in an enclosed space, where the sec men would be unwilling to use their blasters. The only thing she had to worry about was whether it would open involuntarily before she could remove it. With an air of resignation, it dawned on her that even if it did open, the internal hemorrhaging would probably cause her to buy the farm, so she wouldn’t have much to w
orry about in that event.

  Baron Al had withdrawn his fingers. “I dunno whether or not to be disappointed in you,” he said softly. “You ain’t causing trouble, but I’d expect it from any daughter of mine.”

  “Glad I let you down, then,” she said with a sneer, not betraying her triumph at deceiving him. She’d keep that pleasure to herself.

  And now she was aboard the wag as it rolled across the rutted, churned-up desert, shifting ever more uncomfortably on the bench seat, and hoping that the motion of the wag wouldn’t cause the knife to open. She had to get it out soon, but quite how was another matter.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” the sec man on the machine blaster snapped with irritation, watching her move.

  “I need to piss,” she snapped back.

  “Shit, you pick your fucking moments, don’t you?” the sec man replied with exasperation. “We’re not going to stop the wag and let you out behind a rock, no matter who you are,” he continued with more than a hint of sarcasm in his voice. “You’ll have to do it as best you can in the corner.” He pointed to a slops bucket in the corner of the wag, near the bolted rear doors. He felt safe offering her this, as the wag was in the middle of the convoy, and even if she felt inclined to try to risk her luck diving out of the rear door, there would be a wag on their tail that would pick her up—if it didn’t chill her first by running her over.

  Ayesha stood unsteadily, her legs numb from the journey, and her balance unsure as the wag swung across the rutted desert. As she steadied herself, she took the opportunity to look around at the other women in the wag. Most of them looked as though they were already beaten and defeated before any fight had even begun. One she recognized, and this woman was typical of them all. A tall, broad woman with a large bust and wide hips, her sharp-nosed face and prominent teeth were framed by a shock of blond hair that fell in a mane over her shoulders and down her back. Despite the lack of food that had plagued Charity, she had still kept a lot of meat on her bones, and the same basic shape that she had always had. And yet, if you looked closely, you could see the folds of loose skin beginning around her neck and shoulders, and the sag of her bosom where the flesh was falling off, leaving baggy, empty skin behind. She was looking down—had been for most of the journey—and only looked up on hearing Ayesha move.