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  “Why are you really so reluctant to let her come along with us, lover?”

  Ryan rubbed his chin. Even over the tinkling piano and loud gaudy joviality, she could hear the bristles rasp.

  “I can’t really put my finger on it,” he said. “There’s just something...weird about her, you know?”

  For a moment she gazed at him with her emerald eyes. She knew what kind of a bewitching effect they had on him.

  She gave her hair another twitch. Ever so slightly.

  He laughed. “Point taken. I should know better than to try to get one past you, Krysty.”

  “You know,” she said, sipping her beer, “you really should.”

  Ryan looked around. Their friends seemed occupied and as safe here and now as they ever were anywhere.

  “You know,” he said, “with what we got paid for that job from Hamarville, and what Baron Dugan’s giving us for this next gig, we could spring for a private room, just for you and me. What do you say we go check it out?”

  A third of her beer remained in her mug. She tossed it back in a single swallow. Then she wiped her mouth, smiled and set the mug down with a decisive thump.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she said, rising to her feet.

  Chapter Eight

  The companions hadn’t traveled more than half a mile down the road that led east from Duganville, between broad fields with workers steering mule-drawn plows, before Krysty stopped dead and said, “Something very bad is about to begin.”

  The words sent a jolt of alarm blasting through Ryan’s guts and tingling down the nerves of his arms and legs. None of his people were prone to crying wolf; Krysty had an advantage.

  The flame-haired beauty had a touch of a psychic mutation that gave her a limited ability to snatch glimpses of the future. Almost invariably bad ones.

  She rarely got those flashes of vision, but Ryan had no doubt she’d just had one of her bad premonitions.

  Walking point, forty yards ahead down the crude but often-dragged road, Jak whirled with his white hair flying in the morning sun.

  “Wags!” he shouted. “Coming fast!”

  “Off the road!” Ryan rapped.

  For just a moment, he thought about splitting the group out to either side of the road to prep an ambush, just in case. But he could hear the engine sounds now. There were a lot of them, mebbe not just four or five.

  “Left! Into the field. Hit the ditch and get down fast.”

  Sweetwater Creek was the lifeblood of Duganville, as well as its economy. It provided a reliable supply of water, enough for the ville’s population of several hundred and for hundreds of acres of croplands stretching up and down the valley. A system of irrigation ditches conveyed it to their crops. The nearest happened to be the one that ran north of the track.

  That was fortunate, because the mostly flat valley bottom didn’t offer much else in the way of cover and concealment.

  “What about those trees there?” Mildred called as they began to race for the nearest ditch. A couple hundred yards ahead and to the left rose a small stand of trees, an orchard.

  “No time!” Ryan shouted back. His boots thudded on freshly plowed furrows. It was bad terrain to run on, soft and uneven, but he and his friends had motivation.

  He heard whistles blowing. At first that surprised him, then he saw people racing west toward the shelter of the ville’s walls, others unhitching their beasts from the plows before driving them in the same direction. He realized the whistling was a signal system among the various Duganville workers laboring to get their crops in the ground, now that the frosts were done for the year, telling them to run for cover.

  Jak reached the nearest ditch that ran parallel to the road and plunged in, raising a splash of brown water. He had his Colt Python out and was aiming it back toward the east, along the ditch.

  His Scout longblaster already in hand, Ryan jumped in after him. The water was almost knee-deep. He reckoned they were lucky it wasn’t much deeper.

  Ryan could see the approaching wags now, appearing out of an apparent depression at the edge of the fields half a mile or so farther on. If he’d had any doubts about the wisdom of treating the high-speed approach of a number of wags as hostile action, they were dispelled immediately.

  There might be honest explanations for why a friendly caravan might be driving balls out for the ville, but there was no good reason for eight pickup wags to suddenly fan out left and right, leaving only one on the road, while the rest took off straightaway across the field. That made hostile intent plain even before Ryan made out that their beds were stuffed full of people. And blasters.

  “Make yourself small, everybody,” he barked. “Our best shot is if they cruise on by without noticing us. But have blasters up and ready to rock in case they do.”

  “Maybe they’re not looking for trouble with us,” Mildred said optimistically.

  “Then they are intent on attacking the ville,” Doc stated, “and likely to regard us as associated with them, hence foes.”

  “I’m not willing to take the risk they’re all that picky about the people they chill,” Ryan said. “You?”

  “They do have the look of coldhearts,” Krysty agreed. She was behind Ryan, since he’d made a point of steering to interpose himself between her and danger. She had her Glock blaster in one hand and another arm around a cowering Mariah.

  Several laborers, caught by surprise at the far eastern fringe of the fields, were racing as fast as their bare sun-brown legs could carry them back, high stepping with vigor despite the difficulty of running on turned earth. One of the wags veered at speed to Ryan’s right. It rolled right over one of the fleeing workers, male or female, Ryan couldn’t tell at this range.

  “I’d say that’s a ‘yes’ on coldhearts,” J.B. remarked.

  The wag driver had veered so suddenly that the rear wheels broke loose. Plowing up tan soil, the wag careened clockwise. When it was broadside on to its original line of travel, it rolled.

  Coldhearts dove out of the bed in all directions as the vehicle began to topple.

  “Did Baron Dugan shoot their dog?” Ricky wondered. He was hunkered down a little closer to the wags than Ryan, huddled against the other ditch bank. “They seem triple pissed off.”

  “Maybe just psycho high spirits,” Mildred suggested from behind Ryan.

  “I think the kid’s right,” the one-eyed man said. “They’re acting like something’s stuck up their butts crosswise.”

  Coldhearts were bouncing up off the tilled dirt like predark rubber toys. Amazingly, they all seemed to have bailed out successfully, and the softened surface had cushioned their falls. Hooting audibly even over the multithroated engine roar, they ran back to the wag and, half a dozen or more strong, promptly rolled it over onto its wheels. If they left any of their number on the ground chilled or wounded, Ryan couldn’t see them.

  Even before the coldhearts clambered back in the bed, the driver collected his wits enough to start it rolling again, in an arc that would head it back for the ville.

  The other wags had pulled way out ahead. They had halved the distance between them and Ryan’s friends already.

  “Dark night!” J.B. said. “They’re not going to miss us.”

  It was true, Ryan saw. One wag, a sun-faded rebuilt red Ford by the look of it, was practically riding the southern bank of the ditch—the side Ryan was on, nearer the Duganville road. It had pulled a couple lengths ahead of the other six vehicles that were charging full ahead without waiting for the last one to catch up.

  “Stay low,” Ryan commanded the others as he shouldered the Steyr. “I’m going to try to even the odds.”

  He half expected Mildred to offer some back talk about how they still didn’t know for sure the onrushing intruders were hostile to them. She did not. A
fter they’d gone out of their way to run down and chill some random, unarmed grain-grubber who was bent on nothing but getting the nuke away, it was hard to maintain any illusions about the general nature of their ill will.

  Ryan pointed the longblaster along the ditch and right at the nearest wag. He had his eye well behind the Leupold scope, which was mounted deliberately far forward on the receiver to eliminate the risk of recoil blacking the shooter’s eye. Not that Ryan had made that mistake since he was a youngster.

  He laid the reticule on the Ford’s front grille, then fired. The longblaster bucked and roared. Ryan worked the bolt as recoil kicked its short barrel up.

  When Ryan had the sights on the wag again, he saw a cloud of steam shooting from under the hood. He’d holed the radiator, but the wag kept coming.

  He aimed for the driver next. He couldn’t make out any details through the windshield, even whether it was male or female. It might have been a stickie or a caribou, for all it mattered to Ryan. He let out half a deep breath, held it, then squeezed the trigger.

  He’d tried to take into consideration the jouncing of the truck as it traveled along the plowed field. He’d aimed for the driver’s head because it was the clearest target, small as it was.

  The wag hit the crest of another furrow and jounced up. By sheer luck, Ryan’s full-metal jacket 7.62 mm slug skimmed low across the hood, missed the rising dash, passed through the open space in the steering wheel and took out the driver. Ryan knew it as soon as he brought the weapon back to level. He could see the bullet hole in the windshield through his scope and the driver’s head lolling on a dead neck as the wag slewed to his right.

  He saw the coldheart in the passenger seat grabbing frantically at the wheel. Ryan lined up the sights quickly again and fired once more. Whether he hit that one he couldn’t tell. When he recovered from the shot’s recoil, the truck had gone full broadside to him and was rapidly slowing to a stop, bogged by the turned earth. He couldn’t see movement or silhouettes through the passenger-side window, though whether it was because he’d dropped his second target, too, or just spooked that person into ducking, he had no way to know.

  “Get down!” he heard J.B. yell. The fact the little man actually raised his voice would have clued him in to the immediacy of the danger even if the words hadn’t. J.B. rarely shouted.

  Ryan ducked promptly behind the ditch’s bank. Cool water splashed him as several of his companions dove for the same side.

  He heard a snarl of several blasters on full-auto. Bullets kicked up dirt along the top of the bank and thudded into the bare dirt of the far side. An engine whined by, no more than twenty yards away.

  “Take care of that one!” J.B. cried. “I’ve got the rest!”

  Holding on to his Steyr’s forestock with his left hand, Ryan let go with the right and quick-drew his SIG Sauer P226. As he did, he heard the roar of J.B.’s Mini Uzi, also full-auto, from his left. The Armorer was standing up, blasting at unseen bandit wags.

  The wag that had performed the strafing run down the ditch apparently swung toward it, not far past Ryan’s group. The black nose of a rugged pickup suddenly appeared, bouncing to a stop with its odd doubled headlights hanging perilously out over the water and clumps of dirt falling away from the tires.

  Ryan wasn’t clear about what the driver thought he was accomplishing by the stunt—likely trying to catch the embattled group in enfilade. He couldn’t have expected what he got. Unless he was sick of breathing.

  At once J.B. pivoted and fired two quick, short bursts at the newcomer. Ryan saw the near front tire burst, causing the wag’s snout to sag. The second spray was followed by the sound of shattering glass. Nine millimeter slugs had knocked out the right side of the windshield and the passenger window.

  The passenger door opened. A coldheart in a black vest with colorful bandannas tied around both arms tried to dive out. Krysty, closer to the wag than Ryan, stood and fired a burst from her Glock, holding the blaster in a two-hand combat grip. The coldheart yowled like a startled bobcat, fell to the ground and began rolling away from the ditch.

  Mildred and Doc, strung farther down the ditch, also rose to open fire. Mariah cowered beside Krysty, sunk so far the water covered most of her, holding her hands over her ears. Ricky and Jak, on Ryan’s eastern side, simultaneously started shooting across the ditch at a wag swinging in on the north side.

  A female coldheart with black hair stood in the pickup’s bed and was pointing an M16 at Krysty, who was just ducking into cover. These were some seriously heeled coldhearts, Ryan thought as he lined up the sights of his SIG on the black-haired woman’s shirt and double-tapped her right below the grip of her longblaster. She folded out of sight into the wag bed. The longblaster toppled over the side, out of sight onto the ground.

  Six—no seven—other wags were cruising up and down on both sides of the ditch. Ryan’s heart sank as he saw their beds were filled with coldhearts waving blasters. There had to be thirty or even forty of them.

  “Right,” he called to his companions, firing a couple shots toward the cab of a passing truck and hunkering down. “Our one chance is to grab that wag with its nose hanging over the ditch and try to power out of here.

  “First reload, then pop up and back the bastards off!”

  He followed his own advice, gave a three count, then shouted, “Go!”

  Ryan rose to find himself facing what looked like a field of bright yellow wildflowers, if viewed from above.

  “Down!” he roared, following his own command as a lead shitstorm broke out right over his head.

  The coldhearts already had backed up all on their lonesomes. Their wags now sat parked among the furrows, none closer than forty yards away. At the appearance of Ryan and his companions, or at least their heads and blasters, dozens of the bastards opened up with longblasters from the beds of the trucks.

  Apparently the idea of establishing fire superiority was a triple-good one, he thought as he glanced around quickly to confirm that his companions had ducked, too. Too bad the coldhearts thought of it first. And have five times our firepower.

  The one lucky thing was that, having apparently decided to put themselves out of ready handblaster range before stopping to provide more stable firing platforms for their blasters, the coldhearts had also moved out well past the point where they could angle shots down into the ditch low enough to endanger any of their intended targets.

  “What now, lover?” Krysty yelled, leaning close to Ryan’s ear to make herself heard above the thunder of blasters.

  “Get ready to cover me when they all run dry.”

  Without even confirming that she’d heard and understood—trusting that she had, because she was Krysty—he scuttled up the ditch to the point where the blunt nose of the wag hung over the dirty water.

  Not for these coldhearts were the more primitive, usually single-shot black-powder weapons that increasingly served the Deathlands’ everyday population. They all seemed to have magazine-fed longblasters shooting smokeless powder—what Ryan and his friends thought of as “modern,” even though the “modern” era that had produced them was itself well past a century dead.

  But while they were showing surprising tactical shrewdness and discipline in acting together, the coldhearts were still a bandit gang. And fire discipline was one area they weren’t ace in. If the sound was any judge.

  Even as Ryan got in position, the storm of blasterfire began to let up as those magazines ran dry.

  “Now! Cover me!” Ryan shouted.

  He sprang up onto the bank. As expected, he saw no one inside the truck’s cab, from which most of the glass had been blasted out. The driver’s door was open.

  As his friends opened fire to either side of him, he also saw at least a dozen of the coldhearts rise from among the furrows between the ditch and their wags, longblasters in hand. They’d d
ismounted and begun creeping forward to storm the ditch under their own side’s covering fire.

  He saw a couple falter and go down. Though he still held his SIG, he didn’t fire. He was focused on moving fast, getting into the cab—and jacking them all a ride to safety.

  It wasn’t a triple-good shot, but it was the best one he could see. They couldn’t withstand this kind of odds from a half-assed defensive position like an irrigation ditch. Not when they could be outflanked so easily.

  He dove into the truck—to see a bearded face flashing yellow teeth in an evil grin at him from below the level of the dashboard.

  Then the steel-shod butt of a longblaster filled his vision.

  Red stars appeared, then blackness.

  Chapter Nine

  “I don’t think this’un’s ever gonna wake up, Sully,” said the tall, gangly coldheart kneeling over Ryan’s supine body.

  Krysty, on her knees with her hands behind her neck, surreptitiously watched him from beneath her scarlet bangs. The coldhearts had dragged Ryan, half his face a bruise, into the middle of the field. His companions, themselves sporting considerably more lumps and facial discoloration than they had woken up with, were on their knees in a line beside him. Several dozen coldhearts ringed them, with longblasters trained on them.

  “He’s just out cold,” the chief raider said.

  Or faking, Krysty thought. Please, Gaia, let him be faking. Or, at worst, out cold.

  Her mate had unquestionably been knocked unconscious by a longblaster butt to the face moments before dismounted coldhearts had swarmed into the ditch and overpowered the rest. She knew with chilling certainty that that might mean he’d sustained a brain bleed, which would chill him just as well as having his head blown clean off. It would just take more time to do it.

  “I dunno,” the first man said, straightening. “He looks pretty far gone to me.”

  “He’s breathing, Carlson,” the leader said in exasperation. He was another tall man, and the wind was whipping his long brown hair around broad shoulders left bare by his black shirt with torn-off sleeves.