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  Or else you prefer to strike from behind, Ryan thought to himself.

  “Sounds good,” J.B. admitted, rubbing his mouth on the back of a hand. “How about we go to your ville and talk. Any chance you got water to trade? We have a few spare blasters that are better for acing a Drinker than those pig-stickers you’re carrying.”

  “Ville?” Alar muttered, crouching so that he rested on his heels. “We have no stone place. The desert itself is our home. We live in the sand, on the sand. We are of the sand!”

  The entire crowd of masked people shouted a word in an unknown language.

  Doc, Mildred and Krysty exchanged glances. They didn’t know the language, but the tone was familiar. The Core was chanting like a choir in a church. This Alar was more than their leader; he was probably also the local high priest.

  “However, we can offer you drink and food,” Alar said, gesturing at the crowd.

  Scurrying to obey, another being stepped forward to hand Ryan a clear plastic jug. The fluid inside was blue in color, almost a topaz.

  “Doesn’t look like water,” Ryan said suspiciously.

  “There is no water here,” a tall member of the Core announced sternly, thumping his spear twice on the ground at the word. “We drink jinkaja.”

  “Drink,” Alar said in a friendly tone. “Drink and live forever!”

  That stopped Ryan cold. “What do you mean, forever?” he demanded hostilely.

  Still holding the spear, Alar spread his bandaged hands wide. “We do not die with the passing of the decades like you norms. The members of the Core are as ageless as the sands!”

  “Right,” Mildred said slowly, taking the container from Ryan. The physician didn’t know whether that was a sales pitch, but either way she wanted no part of this jinkaja stuff.

  While the others waited, Mildred inspected the blue fluid carefully. It was thick with a high viscosity, almost like a British beer. Removing the cap, she took a careful sniff. The smell was very pleasant, slightly citrus in nature.

  “How is it made?” Dean asked, copying the squatting position of the Core leader.

  “From the essence of the Holy Ones,” Alar said, bowing his head. “Once consumed you can take no other nourishment, not animal flesh or water. But you live forever!”

  “As long as we keep drinking it,” Ryan said, feeling his temper rise like a red madness. With a major effort of will, he forced it under control for the moment.

  Since Alar was covered in the cloth rags, it was impossible to read his facial expressions, but his body language was that of a parent explaining something very basic to a child. “Of course. To live forever you must drink forever. It is the way of the Core.”

  Pale red ants had discovered the dead mutie and were now covering its remains, carrying away tiny pieces of its flesh. Then a scorpion appeared and began to feast upon the ants using both pincers. In a flash of movement, a Core member thrust out a spear and impaled the scorpion, lifting it high for the others to see until the mortally wounded creature went limp. Now he lowered the spear and shook off the tiny corpse so that it fell amid the ants. Without hesitation, the bugs swarmed over their dead enemy and began tearing it apart along with the mutie.

  “Made from Drinker?” Jak asked scowling. “That Holy One?”

  Throwing back his head, Alar actually laughed. “No, top-walker, it is made from the essence of the night-walkers, whose numbers are greater than their legs. Greater than the grains of sand!”

  So the Holy Ones had a lot of legs, eh? Suddenly, Krysty recalled where she had seen blood almost the exact same color as this jinkaja.

  “Millipedes,” she said in disgust. “It’s made from triple-cursed millipede blood.”

  The crowd of masked people began to mutter at that, and more than one shifted their grip on a weapon.

  “How dare the filthy top-walkers to defile the Holy Ones!” the tall Core member shouted. “Punishment!”

  For a moment the world seemed to spin, and Ryan felt nauseous as if he had just emerged from a bad jump. As his vision cleared, he could see the others were also reeling slightly, Dean and Doc having both dropped their blasters onto the burning-hot salt. Only Krysty seemed unaffected, but her hair was writhing like he had never seen before.

  “Stop!” Alar shouted, and the word seemed to resonate in both mind and ears.

  Instantly, the queasy feelings were gone as if they had never existed and Ryan pulled out the SIG-Sauer again, the handle slick with the sweat from his shaking hand. The damn Core was ruled by doomies of some sort! Muties with mental powers. Mildred sometimes argued that they weren’t actually muties, but the next step in evolution unlocked by the cataclysm of skydark.

  “Silence, Kalr,” the leader demanded. “It is not for you to decide.”

  “It is the law!” Kalr shouted. “All drink or they must die!”

  Doc and Dean bent to recover their weapons, but the rest of the Core seemed to be paying no attention to the outlanders. The group was splitting apart into two groups of about the same size.

  “The law says they must drink or leave,” Alar corrected sternly as he pressed the shaft of his spear. With a metallic sound, razor-sharp blades snapped out along the entire length. The mirror-bright steel reflected the harsh sunlight like tortured rainbows. “And I have given my personal word they have until the next moon!”

  “Useless! Pointless!” Kalr shot back, his own staff blossoming with similar razors. “They drink or die!”

  “That is not what the law says.”

  “Then the law is wrong!”

  “You challenge the law!” Alar said in a flat tone, the crowd of beings behind the leader muttering angrily as more shafts snapped out blades.

  Moving as carefully as if in a mine field, the companions were edging closer to their horses. This had every mark of a civil war, and those staffs could tear a norm apart with their razor teeth. On top of which a fight of doomies was something nobody wanted to be near.

  “I challenge you!” Kalr shouted, throwing his staff into the ground.

  A dry breeze blew over the rocks as Alar stared at the younger being, then with slow calculated care, the leader raised his staff high and also plunged it deep into the ground.

  “Accepted!” he roared.

  Now the rest of the Core moved away from the combatants, and the horses started nickering in fear. Without comment, the companions retreated from the two beings only seconds before the whole world seem to whirl once more, and the companions fell helpless to the ground, their minds exploding with visions of violent death and chaotic madness.

  Chapter Four

  Rockpoint was melting.

  Holding a large duffel bag in both arms, Alexander Hawk struggled through the waist-deep water. The man was wide with muscle, not fat, his features oddly flat as if there were a lot of Oriental or American Indian blood in his heritage, or just a touch of mutie. His long black hair was held back in a ponytail with a ornately tied length of rawhide, his boots were some kind of lizard skin and a brace of pistols rode protectively behind the buckle of his gun belt, the handles turned out for a fast draw. The blue head of a scorpion tattoo peeked from under his shirt, and the scars marring his body were too numerous to count.

  Towering high above the ville was the water spout rising from the destroyed temple of the Scorpion God. Scowling at the sight, Hawk sloshed around a corner of a sagging building as he headed for the front gate. As the chief sec man of the ville, Hawk had known the water shortage was a lie concocted by Baron Gaza to control the ville’s population. They had to obey his every command, or else he cut off their water ration. The plan was brilliant, simple and brutal. It had worked for years and would have for a lot more.

  Then those damn outlanders came riding into town and blew the temple, cracking open some sort of a preDark pip large enough to drive a truck into! Now the entire ville was flooded, the houses and buildings and barracks made of sun-dried adobe brick were literally dissolving under the never-ending rain fro
m the gushing water column in the center of the ville. Most of the people had already fled into the desert, but the ocean of water was right behind them, pouring like a river through the gaping hole in the ville wall, and spreading out across the Great Salt in every direction. Rivulets of trickling water were becoming shallow creeks, and several nearby depressions had filled into small ponds. Hawk had no idea when the torrent rising from the temple would stop, mebbe never. Mebbe the preDark river was connected to some freshwater sea and would continue pouring into the Great Salt until it was an inland ocean again the way the wrinkles said it had once been in ancient times, millions of years before skydark.

  Tripping over something unseen below the muddy surface, Hawk almost dropped his bundle and tightened his hold on the heavy bag. The clouded water was filled with loose floating items from the disintegrating ville—straw, wooden spoons, some bits and pieces of preDark plastic and a lot of drowned scorpions. The little bodies bobbed about like veggies in a soup, and it broke the man’s heart to see so many of his beloved servants lifeless in the swirling muck.

  Then he saw a large black scorpion perched precariously on a dead child. With a shout of delight, he scooped up the tiny desert dweller and it instantly stung him, the barbed tail struck deep into his hand. Hawk grunted at the pain and put the creature on a shoulder for safekeeping. The scorpion dug in its legs and grabbed his shirt collar in self-preservation.

  Ever since he was a child, Hawk knew he was different from most folks, maybe a mutie of some kind, because he was completely immune to most poisons. He used this ability to make others fear him by always carrying around a lethal black scorpion, the giants of the desert who were five times bigger than their little red cousins. More than once that had saved his life, and it was how he became the sec boss in Rockpoint. People were terrified of a man who got stung a dozen times and it didn’t even faze him. As always, fear meant power, and now that the baron had fled, he had been their first choice to be the new baron.

  It was a bitter victory, though, since soon there would be nothing to rule. Not here anyway, but he would find another ville, and with the bundle in his arms and his few remaining sec men, Hawk would rule as baron yet! Then someday he would find former Baron Gaza and chill the man with a knife, twisting it slowly in his guts until he begged for death, then twist some more.

  With a groan, another building tilted sideways, and Hawk splashed hurriedly out of the way as the gaudy house fell apart, the crashing wall forming a wave that pushed the sec boss helplessly along until he slammed into the base of the keep. The impact knocked the breath from the man, and a sharp stabbing pain pierced through his shoulder, the bandaged wound in his chest suddenly leaking red blood.

  Struggling to stay erect, Hawk lurched away from the keep, still holding on to the heavy bag. Made of preDark brick and cinder blocks, not dried mud, the keep was the only structure still standing undamaged. It also used to be the home of the baron and was armed with a 25 mm cannon in perfect working condition. Not even the Trader in his armored war wags wanted to face the Scorpion’s Sting, as Hawk liked to call the gun. It tracked fast and could chew through any mobile armor, treads or tires. Once a war wag was motionless, it could be easily covered with loose tree branches, or anything else that burned, and set on fire. The crew would cook alive if they stayed, or be shot the moment they crawled outside. Either way meant death.

  Recalling the last time he had been inside the keep, hot rage flared in Hawk. Gaza had betrayed him, gunning down his sec boss because Hawk discovered that the baron was really a coward. Unfortunately for Hawk, he was a coward with a very fast gun and got the drop on the sec boss, but failed to finish the job properly. Now Hawk was back and hungry for revenge.

  Reaching the area near the front gates, Hawk found the rest of his sec men sitting on their horses and kicking away the occasional person who begged for a ride, or for food. One man tried to take a longblaster from the boot alongside a saddle of a riderless horse, but another sec man caught the motion and fired from the hip. The would-be thief staggered backward to flop limply into the dark waters, and his companions descended upon the dying man to yank off his boots, knife and other possessions.

  Since they were robbing a thief, Hawk paid no attention to them and splashed directly to the empty horse and carefully placed his bundle across the saddle. The horse whinnied at the tremendous weight and shuffled its hooves about unhappily, while Hawk lashed the bag firmly in place with lengths of rope and a few leather belts.

  “All set,” Hawk declared, hurrying to a second horse and climbing into the saddle.

  Twelve other horses stood before the open gate of the ville, and a small wooden cart. Eight men and two women were in the saddles, all of them heavily armed with blasters from the former baron’s private arsenal, the woman also carrying bulky packs of food and assorted supplies. Everything was soaking wet from the constant rain of the water plume, the roar muted to a low rumble.

  “Black dust, I can’t believe you got it,” a sec man said, shaking his head.

  “Gonna need it when we face the Trader,” Hawk growled, pulling a longblaster from the boot and checking the load. “Did you get the stand?”

  A burly man with a full beard grunted in assent. “Yes, sir. It was bitch and a half to drag through the mud, but we got her here.”

  “Good job, Mikel,” Hawk said bluntly. Always compliment your troops on a tough job. It only made them work harder on the next task. Gaza was a fool. Dogs and sluts should be whipped until they obeyed, not valuable property like horses and men.

  Hawk had gone after the 25 mm cannon from the keep himself. He couldn’t trust anybody else not to run away with the blaster. A man could almost buy a ville with a weapon like that. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be fired by hand. The recoil would have torn off a person’s arms, but there was a tripod from a .50-cal that had been altered by a blacksmith. Mebbe that would work, mebbe not, but it was the only hope of controlling the monster rapid-fire.

  Hawk sheathed the longblaster. “Ammo?”

  “In the cart,” one of the women said, jerking a thumb. “Got all we can carry from the junkyard without busting an axle. Almost a thousand rounds.”

  “Well done. Let’s ride,” Hawk said, shaking the reins. “We got some chilling to do.”

  “Gaza?” Wall Sergeant Henny asked, shaking the water from his face.

  “For starters,” Hawk growled.

  As the armed sec men splashed through the sagging front gate of the dying ville, they entered a shimmering saltwater plain that spread to the distant dunes, the searing heat of the sun causing it to steam into mists as if this were the birth of a new world.

  Even more than Hawk wanted Gaza screaming under his knife, the new baron needed to meet up with that black bitch who traveled with the outlanders. He had felt she was going to be trouble the moment they entered the ville, and he’d been right. Now the ville was gone, and while Ryan may have pulled the trigger, it was that bitch Mildred who loaded the blaster. Hawk planned on keeping her alive for a lot longer than Gaza, and in a lot more pain. He had once heard about some old sec men called Nazis, real preDark hardcases with some twisted ideas about revenge. Hawk liked their style and remembered some of the really good parts. Yeah, trees would grow, fed by the blood and screams of the hated woman before he finally let her go into death.

  SLUGGISHLY, the companions awoke in cool shadow with a steady wind howling in their ears. Blinking at the darkness, Ryan realized it wasn’t shade, but night. Craning his neck, the man saw a scattering of stars peeking through the roiling clouds of tox chems high overhead. Fireblast, how long had they been unconscious?

  From what he could see, the companions were sprawled in the corner of a piece of building, the brick wall forming a triangle, with the desert wind howling around the sides. They had been moved from the dead Drinker and could be anywhere by now. Reaching for his blaster, Ryan was consoled to find the weapon still at his hip, his Steyr SSG-70 stuck through the lashings of his ba
ckpack, the saddle nearby. However, there were no signs of the horses.

  Squinting against the windblown sand, Ryan could vaguely see that ahead of them lay more pieces of preDark building, the smashed windows looking across the desert like the eyes of a corpse. A thick layer of sand covered the paved street, and no structure rose more than a few stories until abruptly ending in ragged destruction. Beyond these few tattered remnants of the lost civilization, only a flat, endless desert stretched to the distant horizon.

  Forcing himself to stand, Ryan shuffled over to the other companions and shook each one to rouse them from sleep. Everybody stirred easily enough, and once figuring out where they were located, immediately ran a check on their possessions. To Ryan’s eye, it seemed as if their packs and bags hadn’t been touched. Even the water bags were present, including the poisoned leather pouch from Rockpoint.

  The wind kicked up sand and salt, and it howled straight through one open window. Going to the empty window frame, Jak took one of the plastic shower curtains they had salvaged from the Texas redoubt as a makeshift rain poncho and used four knives to tack it in place, covering the opening. The force of the wind lessened noticeably, and the companions could fully open their eyes now without salt being blown into them.

  “A plastic shower curtain is the most massively useful thing a hitchhiker can carry,” Doc rumbled in amusement, deliberately misquoting an ancient novel.

  “Check your things,” Ryan demanded, his words making him wince. Once, very long ago, he and Finn had been involved in a drinking contest that stopped only when the ville bar ran out of shine. The next day Ryan was so sick he thought death was near and welcomed it with open arms. This was worse.

  “Looks like everything is okay,” Dean whispered, running his hands over a backpack. Checking his blaster, the boy used a bowie knife to open a round and inspect the greasy cordite inside. Nope, the blasters hadn’t been tampered with and the ammo was live.