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  Even as the longblaster kicked up with recoil he saw the black cloud form instantaneously around both her and Hammerhand. She’d been practicing.

  As he brought the longblaster back down with a fresh cartridge chambered he broke focus enough to look for what had excited Ricky—and alerted Mariah to the presence of danger.

  “Fireblast!” He saw the red flare burning down the sky toward the near outskirts of the Blood encampment.

  “Behind!” Jak called from down the slope from them.

  “Cover!” Ryan ordered by reflex. He already had a good guess as to what had happened.

  He spun. A mesa with steeper sides rose behind the ridge they had found for a vantage point. He knew at once that a Blood patrol had spotted them from there and fired the signal.

  Lying on his back, he raised the longblaster as confused shouting broke out from the Blood camp. He swung the scope to bear on the mesa. It was slightly lower than their ridge and, by luck, had fewer rocks for cover.

  A party of four warriors was hunched down. Ryan saw a lever-action longblaster in one man’s hands, a man with long unbound hair, a blue shirt and bare legs. Ryan quickly targeted him and fired.

  The man jerked as dark spray flew out the back of his chest.

  “Mildred, Ricky,” Ryan called, naming the two best distance shooters, “get fire on those bastards. Everybody else, form a perimeter, find the best cover you can and dig in.”

  He followed his own orders. Thirty feet to his left a cluster of reddish rocks lay just shy of the ridge’s crest line. He dived into it, and laying down his blaster, began gouging at the ground with his panga.

  As he did, he heard fire outgoing from the ridge, and the many-throated roar of warriors charging toward them from the massive Blood encampment.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Ricky knelt behind an outcrop slightly larger than he was about forty feet down from the ridgeline. He had the long-range sight flipped up on his reconstructed DeLisle longblaster. It was mostly for lateral aiming; its elevation was still calibrated for the relatively high-powered .303 cartridge the original weapon was chambered for, not the slow, fat .45 ACP pistol round it shot now. His tío Benito had always talked about making a new flip-up sight. But the coldhearts had chilled him first, along with Ricky’s family and most of his home village of Nuestra Señora, and carried his adored older sister, Yamile, off to slavery.

  Luckily, Ricky had a fair amount of practice shooting the longblaster at distance—so long as the “distance” was no greater than 200 yards, or preferably one hundred and 150. After that he might as well have been chucking rocks. And even at those ranges the 230-grain bullets had a very similar trajectory. Luckily, the small mesa they had been spotted from was little more than sixty yards from his lie-up.

  A dark figure was sprawled in the yellow dirt. Another person knelt nearby and started firing a Mini-14 toward the ridge and Ricky’s scrambling companions even as he watched.

  That made him Ricky’s target. He set the elevation slider for the distance appropriate to his weapon’s ballistics, lined up the iron sight on the riflewoman and fired.

  She jerked. From her reaction he gathered the slug had taken her high in the right chest, right below where her arm was angled as she blazed away. She let go of the wrist of her 5.56 mm longblaster’s stock to clutch at herself, experimentally almost, as if she wasn’t sure what had happened to her.

  From his right Ricky heard the blasts of another weapon discharging, shatteringly loud. Mildred had hefted an M16 and fired controlled 3-round bursts at the coldhearts below.

  A third crouching scout, who aimed what looked like a cowboy-style single-action handblaster, went down writhing and moaning. By that time Ricky had a fresh round chambered and was switching his aim to the fourth, a man with short red hair and a beard.

  One thing his DeLisle wasn’t suited for was suppressive fire. It was functionally silent at this range or anything close to it, but the combination of seeing a comrade hit plus Mildred’s loud longblaster made more than enough impression on the survivors. The woman Ricky had shot turned to flee. Her comrade grabbed her by the back of her patched army jacket to help.

  Ricky still might have brought one down, though moving targets were obviously trickier than stationary ones, but he wasn’t naturally bloodthirsty. They were, as his idol and mentor, J. B. Dix, would have put it, “heading in the right direction.” And Ricky already had a sinking sensation of certainty that he was likely to find himself faced with more bad guys than he had bullets before the day was out.

  He started to rise as he heard Ryan’s longblaster bark toward the hordes onrushing from the Blood camp.

  * * *

  “STAY WHERE YOU ARE, kid!” J.B. called. Ricky froze, then obediently tucked himself prone behind the cover of his rocks.

  The Blood camp lay due west. They’d been spotted from a height to the east. Krysty lay behind the crest five yards to Ryan’s right. The Armorer had stationed himself ten yards or so to Ryan’s left and down seven or eight from the ridge crest, set to cover the south flank. Ricky lay twenty feet or so downslope. North of Ricky, Jak crouched behind a scrubby juniper. Upslope and north of him lay Mildred with her M16. Doc had taken position with his M4 carbine covering the south flank, about midway between Mildred and the top of the ridge.

  It was far from an ideal situation. With seasoned skill, all seven had found hard cover—rocks or the ridge itself—to shield them from the direction they were covering. They had also placed their packs near them, both for additional shielding and easy access to ammo and other supplies. It was a reasonably tight, efficient perimeter and secured the high ground. The craftsman in J.B. approved.

  What made it less than ideal was the fact that they faced somewhere between five hundred and one thousand enemy fighters, by J.B.’s calculation. Those were worse odds than they’d been up against in Lone Calf, at least after Ryan’s cynical ploy forced the inhabitants onto their side. And that was leaving aside the nightmare scenario: that Hammerhand had possession of a weapon that quite conceivably could end up dwarfing the whole nuclear arsenal that had scorched the world and brought on skydark, to judge by the damage Mariah’s power had done against the original Blood band.

  J.B. put that out of his mind. There was a lot of fighting to do between now and then, whenever then happened to be. He focused his whole being on that and keeping himself and his friends alive.

  As long as he could anyway. But that was the deal everybody woke up to every day.

  * * *

  THE BLOODS ROLLED up and over the lower mesa that stood between the companions and the camp like a wave of angry human flesh.

  They’re like an army of soldier ants, Krysty thought. And they’re not even the biggest threat we face.

  She heard Ryan’s blaster roar from her left. She sighted in on the front ranks and began to rip at them with 3-round bursts.

  Bloods fell, rolled, died. Survivors thrashed their arms and legs in pain. Others came, flowing around the wounded rather than simply trampling over them.

  Krysty was a seasoned warrior—as seasoned as any of them, except for Ryan and J.B. She knew from experience that meant the Bloods weren’t fully committed to this attack. They were eager but not full of the single-minded fanatical zeal that would have led them to stamp their own brothers and sisters into red paste in the fury of their assault.

  It was their numbers, she reckoned. They knew as well as their enemies did that they could eventually prevail. Why throw your life away when the odds were stacked so heavily on your side?

  She heard the snarl of a full-auto 9 mm weapon as J.B. shifted up to the ridgeline to add the fire of his Mini UZI to her M16 and Ryan’s Scout longblaster. With so many targets, they inflicted brutal losses with just three weapons.

  And sure enough, that wave of flesh faltered. It
stopped and receded over the rise, leaving a good twenty dead and wounded behind.

  But some of them continued down to take cover in the brush and the rocks between the high spots. J.B. yelled a warning, calling her attention to others slipping around the south end of the mesa.

  “Flanking!” he shouted before slipping back down to his original lie-up.

  “Everybody else, brace yourselves,” Ryan called. “They’re going to surround us before they try again!”

  * * *

  THE FIRST VISIBLE attacker crept down a nearly dry streambed that ran around the back side of the ridge. He was a young man with long black hair, bound only by an Apache-style headband. He was bare-chested and crouched low over a remade Remington 870 pump shotgun.

  His head exploded and he dropped to the ground. Chunks of brain like curiously formed dough slopped into the streambed as red stained the whisper of water.

  Blasterfire answered furiously from a stand of willow saplings ten feet behind the scout. Jak was already in motion, soundless and unseen, making for a fresh hidey-spot he’d picked out in advance.

  He was grinning. They might lose this fight, but he planned to enjoy it as long as he could.

  * * *

  “HAVE AT YOU, caitiff rogues!” Doc roared as he stood to his full height from beside a big rock and blazed 3-round bursts into the coldhearts advancing up from the eastern end of the ridge.

  Three of them went down. He could see eight or ten others promptly turn around and dive for the cover of rocks and brush.

  One of the fallen Bloods raised a handblaster and aimed at him. Doc shot her once through the head. He did so without a heartbeat’s hesitation and only a twinge of regret as he ducked into cover to reload.

  At most times chivalry was dead in this poor, tormented world. He had learned that with brutal clarity within hours of being dumped into it by the vile predark whitecoats.

  “That was foolish, Theo,” he said to himself as he rammed home a fresh magazine and, by habit, tucked the partially depleted one in his pack. “Exposing yourself like that.”

  Still, he felt mostly exhilaration and only partly because of the still largely unaccustomed thrill of firing a fully automatic weapon. The likes of which had barely come into existence when he was snatched from the bosom of his family.

  Oddly, the sky was clear blue and free of the usual colorful chem clouds. The sun was warm. His nostrils were full of the scents of moist growing grass and blooming wildflowers.

  What was it the Indians had said, back when he was young? “Today is a good day to die.”

  He felt that now. He was at peace with it.

  What hope he had was that his friends might somehow pull through against all probability, as they had done before often enough.

  And, even less likely, accomplish their terrible but oh-so-necessary task.

  The coldhearts began to shoot blindly in his general direction. He started to peek around the flank of his rock to look for targets to shoot back at.

  And his blood was turned to ice streams in his veins by the sound of an electro-amplified voice booming out from beyond the ridge’s bulk, “Bottle them up, Bloods, and hold your ground. No point wasting your lives. The Black Wind Walking will take care of them for you!”

  * * *

  “FIREBLAST!” RYAN EXCLAIMED.

  The voice was coming loud and clear from beyond the mesa, well out of his line of fire. Hammerhand had learned his lesson at Lone Calf, it appeared.

  “This is a bad bunch, Bloods,” the voice said, half-banteringly. “Lethal as a ball of rattlers on a hot day. We’ve rumbled with them before. We know you, Ryan Cawdor. Oh, yes, we do!”

  “You don’t know what you’re messing with, Hammerhand!” he shouted back. He stayed low, well aware a group of Blood blasters was dug in at the foot of the ridge.

  “Oh, but I do. The power to change the world. Make it a better place. Don’t you want that?”

  “Make it better,” Ryan called, “or destroy it.”

  Hammerhand laughed.

  “Whichever. Doesn’t it take the power to do one to pull off the other? But I’m not here to jaw about ethics. There’s somebody here with a bone to pick with you and your crew. A chilling bone. Mariah, honey? Time to do that voodoo that you do.”

  Deliberately, almost as slowly as the setting sun, the black cloud rose into view beyond the mesa top.

  Ryan found himself terrified at the sight, but not frozen nor panicked enough to bolt or flail wildly instead of actually fighting. He’d learned years ago to ride out the adrenaline jolt of awful and immediate danger and the fight-flight-freeze reflex it tried to trigger in the brain. He could almost view the fear like a detached third party.

  Except he still felt it.

  The black whirlwind began to move across the mesa toward them, slowly and inexorably, almost at a walking pace, it seemed to Ryan.

  “Mariah,” Krysty called out. “Are you sure you want to do this? We were friends. We took you in.”

  “You were friends,” the unseen Hammerhand taunted. “Until you threw her out to die alone in the wasteland. That kind of ended the whole ‘friendship’ thing.

  “But tell us, Mariah. How do you feel about the people who betrayed you?”

  “I hate them.”

  The chilling words pealed out in a high, girlish voice.

  What made them a hundred times more chilling was that they clearly came from within the cloud. Mariah was walking in the eye of her black cyclone of total devastation.

  She clearly meant to do the job of vengeance up close and personal.

  “Why not come out and face me yourself, Hammerhand?” Ryan yelled.

  “Are you triple stupe, Cawdor? I know what a longblaster is. I’m not some ignorant stone-age savage. I know you’re a crack shot, and I know that I can’t slap a 7.62 mm round out of the air with my dick.”

  “I’m calling you out, then. Just you and me. Mano a mano.”

  “Oh, nuke no. That’s what I have an army for, friend. And even better, that’s what I’ve got the greatest hammer in the history of the whole entire world for. Which my little sister is fixing to drop square on top of you.”

  The whirling cloud crossed the hill, then inexorably descended. Bloods jumped up from cover and fled to either side of its path.

  “Ryan?” Krysty asked.

  “They’re not the threat now. Save your ammo.”

  He was glad she didn’t ask what she should save it for. But then again, always before, there had been a what.

  “Stay clear of that thing, people,” Hammerhand said to his warriors. “Just keep them bottled in up there. Hold your fire unless they try to escape. Let the girl have her revenge for her broken heart.”

  The black whirlwind advanced across the little valley. It began to climb the ridge toward Ryan and his companions.

  He felt no fear now, only sickness and rage at his complete and utter helplessness.

  “Mariah,” Krysty called, “please don’t do this to us. We’re sorry we hurt you.”

  “You did hurt me!” the cloud screamed at them, wild with rage. The whirlwind grew taller and broader. And faster. “I trusted you! I thought I’d found a family at last. And—and you rejected me! I’m going to kill you all for it!”

  Krysty stood.

  “No,” she said. “I won’t let you hurt my friends.”

  “Krysty!” Ryan shouted desperately. “What the fuck are you doing?”

  To his horror he saw her march purposefully downslope.

  Directly toward the cloud of complete oblivion.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Terror greater than any she had ever known filled Krysty to the point it felt as if she were about to explode.

  She held out her arms
to the sides. “Gaia! Earth Mother! Hear my prayer!” she cried. “I beg of you—lend me your strength!” Krysty urgently repeated her plea, and then the power of the Earth Mother flooded her being.

  The unstoppable force of Gaia pushed out the fear. It was soothing in a way, yet Krysty also sensed rage smoldering within, as if Gaia knew this was one of the greatest threats the Earth Mother had ever faced.

  “Krysty!” Mariah screamed. For the first time she sounded like herself instead of a teenaged Fury. “Get back! I—I’ll chill you last!”

  “You won’t chill any of us,” Krysty declared. Her voice boomed with an unfamiliar menace.

  But then, it wasn’t really her own voice anymore.

  “I won’t stop! I’m warning you!”

  The blackness was swirling mere feet ahead of Krysty now. She could feel it. Not hot, not cold. Not even the wind of its violent spinning. But a sense of nothingness. Of negation. Not merely nothingness, but...antisomething.

  Uncreation.

  Without the least hesitation she walked into the black cloud.

  It hurt. It felt the way she imagined being burned alive had to hurt. The pain seared her skin, her eyes. It permeated her flesh, her bones. Her being.

  And yet—she remained. She was not destroyed. She felt Gaia’s strength, Gaia’s will, opposing the force of uncreation.

  She was aware that she slowed. It was like wading through molasses over her head—molasses that still burned like furnace flame. It took all of her strength joined to that of the whole world to continue.

  But she did. One foot after another.

  She felt her strength began to fail. Her body wasn’t being torn apart—not yet. Nor did the strength of the Earth Mother fade. But she was a frail vessel still—and channeling Gaia drained her energy in a way nothing else did. She felt her physical strength failing.

  Another few heartbeats and I will fall. And die. And then my friends will die.

  And then the world will die.

  I—will—not fall.