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  "Throw yore blasters out, and you mebbe get t'live some!"

  Not even triple-stupe muties wanted to get chilled if they could avoid it. Ryan knew well enough what the shouted promise was worth.

  "Let's go do it, people," he said, leading the way into the bright sunlight, unable to restrain himself from a wincing expectation of being torn apart by a hail of .50-caliber bullets.

  "Here's the blasters!" he yelled. He'd emerged with hands held low, and he chucked the remains of an electric iron on the tiled yard, where it rang with a satisfying and, he hoped, convincing sound.

  The others jostled around him, all heaving out bits of old domestic tools, doing it so fast that it would be hard for the muties to be sure what they'd done.

  "Get your hands up," he prompted.

  The waiting was the worst.

  He didn't check his wrist-chron, but Ryan's realistic guess was that only a couple of minutes crawled by while they waited, in full view of at least a dozen blasters, grabbing air.

  "They're not going to buy it," Lox whispered, her voice cracking with the tension.

  "If they was going to chill us from cover, they'd have done it by now," Ray said.

  That was also Ryan's hope, though he didn't say anything.

  "There," Hun breathed with an excited anticipation that verged on the erotic. She enjoyed killing more than most anyone Ryan Cawdor had ever met.

  They could all see them.

  There were sixteen in all, and if Ryan had been in command of the attackers he'd have sent only a couple of his best men to check. The whole group had wandered out from cover and was picking its way through the brush, up the slope toward the five defenders.

  One of them appeared from their side of the valley, holding a long-muzzled musket, which Ryan figured was the weapon that had blown Walt's brains all over him.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Ryan saw that Lox was shuffling her feet, and was just beginning to lower her arms.

  "Not yet," he warned.

  Slipping in the loose stones in their haste, the jubilant muties closed in on their victims. As they drew nearer, Ryan recognized the typical stigmata of the scabbie.

  They maintained genetic malformations from the nuking of their ancestors, which manifested itself in appalling skin diseases. Ryan had once come across a crude book that dealt with the range of disorders that ravaged scabbies: dermoid cysts, rodent ulcers, keloids, lipomata, epitheliomata, acne, psoriasis and all manner of unnamed rashes.

  Many scabbies went naked through life, unable to bear the discomfort of clothes against their weeping raw skin. Ryan had seen a scabbie, shot in a firefight, tugging off a loose cotton shirt to try to examine the wound. Half the flaking skin was pulled off his chest and back in his clumsy haste.

  The leader was a tall man, carrying an Armalite rifle that was even more battered than the one that the Trader hefted. He was bearded, as most of the males of the group were. Scabbies found shaving wasn't all that easy as there was a tendency to remove part of the face along with the stubble.

  There were four women in the group, all with hideously blotched and peeling skin. One was scratching at her breasts as she walked up the hill, leaving bloody furrows in the ulcerous flesh.

  Ryan spoke without moving his lips. "Wait, wait, wait."

  To be sure of total victory, each of them had to take out at least three of the mutie band.

  Judgment was critical. The moment would come when the first of the muties would reach the crest of the hill and be able to see clear across the patio—and would be able to see the pile of scrap that had passed for blasters.

  The hammer would fall at that moment.

  "We gonna social some with your buddies in them ol' wags in the holler, boy," the leader of the scabbies called with a cheerful, toothless grin at Ryan.

  In another ten yards they'd be in a position to see over the low wall around the yard, but they were still too scattered for an ideal slaughter. The steepness of the hill had strung them out more than Ryan had hoped,

  But it wasn't going to be a situation with a second chance built in.

  He watched the seamed, pocked face of the chief of the pack of muties, trying to read his eyes, watching for the second of shock when the man would realize that he'd been fooled.

  "Right glad that—" The words disappeared as the scabbie caught on.

  "Now," Ryan said in a calm, conversational tone, buying an extra fragment of splintered time by not shouting and warning the rest of the muties.

  He reached behind himself and drew the long-barreled revolver, leveling it and squeezing the trigger in a single fluid movement. Ryan had cocked his blaster before concealing it, giving himself another moment of advantage.

  That first shot signaled the beginning of three minutes of screaming chaos.

  Chapter Nine

  THE FIREFIGHT started badly. Just as Ryan fired at the leader of the scabbies, the man slipped and fell on hands and knees. The bullet sliced through the air over his head, missing him by eighteen inches.

  If the mutie had called his forces back, they would quickly have been beyond effective range, and the balance of power would have remained with them.

  Scabbies weren't great tacticians.

  "Fuckin' kill 'em!" the leader screamed, firing a burst from the hip with his Armalite.

  Hun, Lox, Ben and Ray all had their blasters drawn, pouring lead at the straggling wave of yelling attackers. Ryan aimed and fired off four careful rounds. He had the satisfaction of seeing four scabbies go down, each hit with a killing shot either through the head or upper chest.

  Ryan saw Hun put down three with her first two shots, bracing the sawed-off shotgun against her hip. She quickly broke the gun and flicked out the two empty, smoking cartridges, then thumbed in two more rounds. The gun continued to boom its starred hail of death.

  Ray, Ben and Lox were also issuing tickets for the last train to the coast. Wreathed in powder smoke, the tiny girl stood between the two taller men, her handmade .38 thundering.

  In the first half minute, Ryan reckoned they chilled ten or eleven of the scabbies. Then the muties were over the low wall and on top of them, screeching and firing their blasters, dropping empty guns and attacking with a variety of knives and cleavers.

  One of the mutie women, bleeding from a shotgun wound, dived toward Lox, whose pistol was also empty. Ryan swung around and snapped off his last shot at the scabbie, but the bullet only nicked her ribs, making her stagger but not putting her down.

  The butcher knife she wielded opened up Lox's throat, almost severing her neck. Blood jetted out like an arterial fountain, and Ryan knew at that second that the war wags would be measuring for a new shortest crew member.

  Ray spun to his left and fired at the scabbie, the bullet exiting between her shoulders in a gout of shredded flesh. At the same moment a round from the scabbie leader's Armalite hit him in the thigh and he went down, cursing.

  Hun's scattergun roared again, and Ryan saw two of the surviving muties vanish in a welter of smoke and crimson spray. Ben was backing into the house, followed by a tall, naked man.

  The Uzi chattered, and the scabbie came staggering out, his body jerking under the impact of the bullets.

  "Ryan!" Hun yelled, pointing behind him.

  He turned to confront the scabbies' leader. The Armalite was no longer in his hand, and blood ran down his left arm. In his right hand he held a murderous ice pick.

  Ryan threw his empty pistol at him, but the mutie's reflexes were quick, and he ducked under it. Ryan, stumbling over the junk on the patio, suddenly remembered Walt's bell-mouthed blaster and ran for the doorway.

  He saw Ben and shouted at him to get out of the way. The floor was slick with spilled blood, and the one-eyed man nearly fell. In a moment he turned like a cornered wolf and snatched up the gun.

  The butt was sticky to the touch, and Ryan fumbled for the unfamiliar trigger, heaved the hammer back and locked it. There was no way of knowing in advance if the heavy
blaster was charged or not.

  "Kill yer, outlander fuckhead!" the scabbie raged as he burst in through the doorway, the sunlight glinting off the needle tip of the ice pick.

  The trigger was so stiff with caked grease and dirt that Ryan had to jerk on it twice, feeling his heart almost stop at the first failure.

  The mutie was in midair when the blunderbuss finally fired.

  It felt like there was a couple of cans of black powder rammed down the barrel as well as ten pounds of assorted nails and chunks of iron and steel.

  The explosion was deafening, and the stock kicked back against Ryan so hard that he fell to the floor. He saw the flash and smelled the bitter smoke, but he couldn't see the effect of the blaster. All he knew was that the scabbie was suddenly on top of him, fighting, kicking and roaring in an odd, bubbling voice.

  Ryan's face was flooded with blood. In the confusion of the fight and his head hitting the floor, he couldn't be sure whose blood it was. The antique blaster rolled against his leg, and he kicked it out of the way. His hands were locked tight around the suppurating, pustulant neck of the mutie, throttling him into submission. He felt the struggling body grow limp, but the one-eyed man wasn't taking any chances. He hung on until he felt a sharp kick on the hip,

  "It's done, Ryan." The voice belonged to Hunaker. "It's over. You nearly blew the mutie fucker clean in half with that cannon."

  Someone yanked the corpse off and helped Ryan to his feet. He wiped the stickiness from his face for the second time in the past hour.

  "Over? "he asked.

  "Yeah," Hun replied, managing a cold smile that never got close to her eyes. "It's over."

  "Lox?"

  A shake of the head. "Bought the farm. Bitch slit her throat like a pig in the slaughterhouse. Poor kid never had a chance."

  "Ray's wounded," Ben said. "Bullet in the top of the leg. Went in and out, clean. He's binding himself now and reckons he can walk back to the wags."

  "Survivors?"

  Hun answered. "One. An older woman. Turned on her heel and legged it down the hill. Ben tried a shot, but she was gone. Rest are chilled."

  Ryan looked down at the body on the tiled floor of the shack. The charge of the blunderbuss had hit the scabbie just below the belt buckle. At point-blank range it had, as Hun had said, nearly blown him in two.

  "Fireblast! Look at my pants and shirt. Got half his guts all over me, and most of Walt's brains as well. I can sure use a bath."

  "Best get back, Ryan." Hun glanced down at her own chron. "Trader'll be sending out a relief patrol in a half hour or so."

  "Yeah. How's the ammo situation?"

  "Enough," Hun said.

  "Me too," Ben agreed. "Ray's low. Never carries enough, the stupe."

  "Could be none of us had enough," Ryan said quietly, looking around at the scene of carnage. "Just didn't expect there to be this many of the bastards out on the hunt."

  In the end they left Lox's pale corpse up on the hillside. Ryan and Ben carried it inside out of the sun and covered it with the cleanest dirty sheet. It was one of the Trader's cardinal rules that dead members of the war wags were to be retrieved from firefights—as long as it didn't needlessly hazard anyone else's life.

  Ryan led the way down the valley. Ray was limping along, helped by Ben and Hun. They didn't see or hear any sign of more scabbies.

  "Yo, the camp!" shouted one of the scouts from the main trail. "Four coming in!"

  The Trader broke away from a discussion with a couple of the mechanics near the main drive axle of War Wag One and strode across the camp to greet them.

  "Lox chilled?"

  "Yeah. Scabbies."

  "Many?"

  "Close on twenty. We chilled them all but one. Ray got a bullet clean through his leg."

  The Trader looked around, catching the eye of Otis, the quartermaster. He beckoned to him. "Burial party. Six plus another six support."

  "Lox?"

  Ryan nodded. "Scabbie bitch cut her neck open. We took her in the highest building up the steep vee ahead over the ridge. Covered her in a sheet. There's plenty of scabbie corpses up there, and an old man with his head blown apart."

  "Just Lox," the Trader ordered. "We'll bury her this evening by the river. She'd have liked that."

  The sun was sinking beyond the snowcapped mountains to the west. The sky was a cloudless gray-purple, and the shadows from the trees lay across the racing waters of the foaming river.

  With the exception of four quadrant guards, everyone from War Wags One and Two were there, standing in a loose semicircle around the rectangular hole that a working party had dug during the afternoon. Ryan, standing next to the Trader with Hun at his shoulder, could taste the tang of freshly turned earth.

  The pathetically small body, shrouded in a layer of stout canvas, had already been laid in the grave. Rodge and Matt stood ready with shovels, waiting for the Trader to say a few words.

  "Lox was a good mechanic. Given a few more months of riding with us, she could have become a great mechanic. Might not have been the tallest lady ever rode with us, but it didn't stop her doing her duty. And now she's gone. Don't know much about her. Don't know about her folks. But they could be proud of her. I know I'm damned proud of her, and we'll all miss her. Guess that's all. Just let's remember this moment and her grave. Any of you pass this way again years to come, put a fresh sprig of something green down for Lox. One verse of the hymn."

  Ryan had seen enough funerals with the Trader to know what he meant by "the hymn." For the Trader there was only one hymn.

  The peaceful valley rang with the mix of male and female voices, the old words rising to the evening sky.

  "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound…" The Trader turned and whispered to Ryan. "Forgot to ask you. See any sign of a redoubt up that way?"

  "Nope. Nothing."

  RYAN SAT WITH his back against a towering sycamore tree, hugging a tin mug of coffee-sub. Once the sun was down, the night became cold. The camp was subdued after the burial, with none of the usual laughter and bantering. Dexter's guitar remained in its case, and many of the crew had already gone to bed.

  Hun strolled by, huddled inside a fur-lined jacket. She smiled down at Ryan and ruffled his hair. "You okay?"

  "Sure. Happens. Her turn today. Mebbe my turn tomorrow."

  "Least we had a good quickie, huh?" He managed a smile. "Sure. Just got it in before the chilling started."

  "Time we managed to fit in a slowie, Ryan?"

  "Not tonight, Hun."

  She nodded and walked away, her stocky body silhouetted against the crackling flames of one of the sentinel fires.

  The Trader materialized out of the darkness like a wraith of the night, squatting next to Ryan with creaking knees.

  "Dark night! Wish my joints worked a mite more quietly."

  "Want me to get you some coffee-sub?"

  "No, thanks, Ryan."

  A few minutes later, he said, "Should have kept better watch, Ryan."

  "I know it."

  The Trader turned to look at him. "Figured you did. Just felt it needed saying."

  "Sure."

  The Trader sighed and stood again. "Changing plans. Not going farther north. Cutting east. Been hearing about a new ville with stocks of gas and ammo. Thought we'd go take us a look."

  "Yeah. Why not?"

  Chapter Ten

  RAIN GLISTENED on the undulating blacktop ahead of War Wag One like a length of velvet ribbon. The trail east wound its way along the sides of valleys, plunging between sheer walls of quartz-speckled rocks, close by turbulent water. In the three days that they'd been traveling since the firefight, they hadn't passed a single other vehicle.

  Twice they drove past fortified farms, built like medieval settlements, with a number of houses within a high stockade. Ryan had seen vids of the days of the old West, and recognized the pattern from cavalry forts. The small convoy didn't stop. Frontier people were likely to be fast on the trigger, and there was no point in risking
lives.

  The road was often broken, either by the effects of the old nukings, or by a hundred years of bad weather. They had to stop once, while a fallen tree was cleared off the blacktop. The Trader immediately put both crews on full red alert. It was one of the most common tricks in Deathlands for muties to fell a tree and wait to see who they caught.

  It was a heavily wooded area, coming across to what had once been New Mexico. Ryan sat by one of the general crew, a man with a heavy beard and who had a passionate interest in trees and flowers. Whenever the wags hit a new ville he'd go around to the junk stores, looking for old books on his favorite subject. His name was Nick.

  "Place like this, I could count off twenty different kinds trees in two miles."

  "Twenty?"

  "Sure."

  Several of the others in the warm main cabin of War Wag One overheard the conversation, and there was an immediate surge of betting.

  "How much jack says you're bullshitting us?" asked July from her position by the portside M-16A1.

  Ryan was about the only one who didn't get suckered into the noisy gambling fever. Within a couple of minutes Nick had accepted enough bets to risk a month's basic pay.

  Hun was at the wheel of War Wag One and she turned round in her seat, making sure that she also had a piece of the action.

  "Twenty different kinds of trees in two straight miles?"

  "Sure," Nick agreed confidently.

  Otis pressed him. "You can say anything, my man. And we don't know trees from buffalo shit. You might lie to us."

  Nick stood and faced the tall quartermaster. "Listen, Otis. I might lie about women, or blasters, or drugs, or jack, or women."

  "You said women," Ryan pointed out.

  "Sure. But I don't lie about important things like trees or plants. All right, Otis? All right?"

  "All right. Hun, give us a count on a zero mile t'start."

  "Coming up. Ready, Nick?"

  "Sure."

  "Then… go!"

  The bearded man moved to the starboard ob-slit and began to recite names.

  "Aspen. Cottonwoods. Elm. Red oak. Live oak. Silver maple."