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  “Yeah. That don’t mean he ain’t in a coma.”

  From his belt Carlson drew a long, skinny blade like a filleting knife. Bending over, he plunged its tip an inch deep in the muscle of Ryan’s right thigh.

  “See,” he said, pulling the blade. “Nary a twitch.”

  “For nuke’s sake, Carlson,” another raider grumbled. “Let it go.”

  “Quit screwing around,” Sully said. “Don’t go finishing him off trying to make a point. If he does wake up, I want him able to holler nice and loud, help us show those ville rats what’s in store for them if they don’t open up the gates and let us in to take what we want.”

  He turned to stare in the direction of Duganville, half a mile or so distant.

  “Time to show these yokels the Buffalo Mob means business,” he growled. “Otherwise we’ll have every punk this side of the Platte thinking they can get lucky with us the way that taint Hammerhand did.”

  That roused a grumble of agreement that passed among many of the group surrounding Krysty and her friends. Evidently Sully had poked a still-raw wound to their egos.

  The keenly analytical part of her mind—of course she had one, much as she preferred to rely on intuition—wondered what hurt this coldheart boss Hammerhand had managed to inflict on such a well-equipped crew. Especially since she gathered from scraps of conversation overheard as they were all dragged here and dumped that this was only a part of their total numbers. They’d heard rumors that he was a rising force in the North Plains.

  Hands on hips, Sully surveyed the captives. He wasn’t bad looking, but Krysty had learned long ago that beauty could be skin-deep at best. Even if ugliness sometimes went right down to the core.

  “Ladies first,” he declared, stepping up to Krysty and Mildred, who were kneeling in the middle of the line. “We’ll have the boys show you a good time.”

  “What about us women?” a slight and unusually scruffy-looking black-haired woman asked.

  “Well, Marcuse, I tell you what. You think you can get a rise out of any of these limp-dick-lookin’ motherfuckers, knock yourself right on out. And when we’re done havin’ fun, we can make a nice bonfire out of all of them, right out here in the open. The way the wind’s blowing, it should carry their howls all the way to the ville plain as day. That should make these kettle-boilers get their minds right.”

  He hunkered down in front of Krysty, grabbed the front of her red-plaid men’s shirt and ripped it open.

  “Nice rack,” he said. “Let’s see all the goods.”

  He drew a hunting knife from a beaded doeskin sheath. Its blade glinted in the sunlight as he brushed the red bangs away from Krysty’s eyes.

  She did not look up at him. She didn’t want to concede that much.

  With a grunt, he plunged the knife downward inside her scavvied purple sports bra, blade out. The tip raked a line of pain down her sternum as it cut her white skin.

  Her breasts popped out.

  “Nice,” he said, straightening and putting the knife away. “Grab her arms and spread her out.”

  He began fumbling at the button-up fly of his canvas pants. “Rank has its privileges,” he murmured.

  “You leave her alone!”

  The cry had come from the end of the line of captives to Krysty’s left. Without turning her head, she glanced that way to see that Mariah had jumped to her feet and stood with fists clenched at the ends of arms stiffened down her sides. Her face was paler than normal from rage. It was almost as white as Jak’s.

  Sully continued to unfasten his trousers as a quartet of Buffaloes moved in to grab Krysty, first by the arms.

  “Get away from her!” Mariah screamed.

  “Somebody shut that skinny little bitch up,” Sully said. “Rest of you snap it up.”

  Despite her own plight, Krysty couldn’t help watching Mariah, even as she sagged her not-inconsiderable weight to make it harder for her captors to manhandle her to their leader’s specifications. A chunky woman with a red cloth band wrapped around a shock of pale orange hair and a neon-green band wound around small breasts beneath a pair of dirty coveralls stepped up and slammed Mariah to the plowed ground with the steel-shod butt of her Marlin lever-action longblaster.

  “Can we have a crack at her, too, Sully?” a man asked.

  “Do what you bastards please! She’s going on the fire with the rest of these taints. Now get some air on that fire-crotch triple-quick, you lazy mutie-suckers, or I’ll start letting some air into you!”

  Krysty was dragged onto her back. Rough hands grabbed her ankles and tried to pry her legs apart. Other than resisting with all her strength, frustrating their efforts if only for the moment, she did not overtly fight back.

  She knew what the others were thinking. The same thing she was. The Buffalo Mob boss had made a triple-bad mistake in letting his captives know the hideous fate he had planned for them up front.

  They knew they had nothing to lose, which meant that when the moment arrived—and it would soon—they would commence the serious business of chilling and mangling coldhearts until sheer self-preservation forced them into finishing them off, double-quick and on their feet. Krysty would not allow herself to be raped. She would call on Gaia and exact a terrible toll for the attempt.

  A strange sound drew her eyes back to her left as hands fumbled at the fly of her jeans. It was half a shrill keening, half a guttural growl. And although it sounded like nothing human, it was clearly coming from where Mariah lay huddled on the busted-up ground.

  The orange-haired coldheart took a look back. She turned her face toward her leader in apparent confused consternation. Her skin had a green tint beneath her pale freckles.

  Sully had his dick in hand, but he was looking at the source of the weird noise, too. Krysty heard him choke out, “What the nuke?”

  Krysty saw blackness gather above the fallen girl, like deep shadow—but in midair. She couldn’t figure out where it came from, but it seemed to her almost as if it were being drawn out of Mariah. As if it were all the blackness in her tortured young soul.

  For a moment she wondered it her adrenaline-pumped mind was playing tricks on her. Or even if she were perceiving something real but with some mutie sense the norms didn’t share.

  But the orange-haired woman was clearly seeing it, too. She gave a strangled cry of fear, falling back a step, almost stumbling on the yielding, uncertain surface. She raised her longblaster, not as if she meant to shoot the rapidly expanding shadow, but as if to ward it off.

  The blackness was unquestionably spinning, though Krysty would be hard-pressed to say how she knew that. It began to drift away from Mariah toward the woman who had clubbed her down.

  “Get away!” she screamed at it. “Back off.”

  “Knock that nonsense off, Patience,” Sully said. His hard-on was starting to soften. The coldhearts who had been trying to strip Krysty were as frozen as the rest of them, watching the inexplicable drama unfold. “We got business here.”

  The cloud seemed to whirl faster. Patience jabbed at it with the butt of her longblaster.

  The stock sank into the cloud and was suddenly yanked into it. The butt shattered, pieces whirling briefly in the cloud before seeming to dissolve.

  Patience let go the weapon, but not before her right hand was drawn into the whirlwind of shadow.

  She screamed. Krysty saw blood spray, caught in the cloud like water swirling down a drain, and pink shreds of skin.

  Then the blackness sucked the coldheart woman in, tore her to pieces as she screamed, and consumed the fragments.

  * * *

  THOUGH HE HAD no idea why everybody was looking at Mariah, Ryan acted. He’d been playing possum and biding his time, and all that time he had kept his attention riveted on Krysty.

  He launched himself at the coldheart
boss who stood there with his prick in his hand, even as the man stared past him in something like horror. Not even the demonic shrieking could break Ryan’s all-encompassing focus on his target. He planned to break that brown-haired bastard’s neck, and if that meant he died with his fingers on his throat, well, he’d always known he wouldn’t die in his sleep.

  But something could break his concentration on rescue, or revenge, whichever it wound up being. Something heavy hit him behind the knees as he began his rush, wrapped itself around his legs and planted him on the ground so hard the breath was knocked out of him.

  Fortunately the relative softness of the plowed-up earth meant he didn’t bust his jaw or his neck. Or even concuss himself again.

  “Ryan! No!”

  To his amazement, he recognized the voice of the person who’d brought him down twenty feet short of Krysty, his goal. It belonged to none other than Mildred Wyeth.

  But then he focused his eyes on the marauder chieftain once more, and his growl of rage at Mildred’s betrayal died as stillborn as his determination to break free.

  Something moved past him. He didn’t see it. He didn’t hear it. He didn’t even smell it. But he felt it in his skin, which suddenly seemed to be trying to crawl off his body and escape in all directions. He felt it in the hair standing up on his nape and limbs and body.

  It was a feeling of wrongness. Like something that didn’t belong here. In this world.

  From the corner of his eye he saw what looked like a black whirlwind half the size of one of the bandit wags spin past him. It was making a beeline for the Buffalo Mob boss.

  Sully’s brown eyes were standing out of his fear-bleached and strained face. But he stood his ground and fought. He whipped out the Ruger Blackhawk holstered at his side and began to fan it like somebody who’d watched too many cowboy vids.

  Except unlike everyone Ryan had ever seen try that triple-stupe trick, he controlled the handblaster. Six shots cracked out with the head-splitting sharpness of full-on .357 Magnum loads that Ryan and the others knew so well from Jak’s double-action Python.

  He might as well have had his now-flaccid but still fully exposed dick in hand, pissing into the black cloud. The slugs vanished without a trace.

  And then it took him. He shrieked as he was torn apart and sucked in. Or away. To somewhere.

  Coldhearts scattered in all directions, like a big covey of quail that had just had a lynx drop from a tree branch right in its midst. But the black cloud caught the man who had stood closest to the now-vanished leader even as he turned to flee. His screams echoed his boss’s.

  Ryan felt Mildred roll off. He would thank her later for saving his life. Now he sprang back into action.

  Somebody raced by on his right. Or tried to. Ryan pivoted clockwise, mostly on reflex, and flung out his arm.

  It was pure luck that his forearm clotheslined Carlson, the coldheart who had stabbed him in his thigh to see if he was faking, right across the windpipe. The cartilage of his larynx imploded with a crackling pop. He fell down gagging and clutching at his throat. His face was already purple behind his handlebar mustache.

  Dropping bloody unconsumed chunks of the coldheart it had swallowed, the terrible black whirlwind reversed course instantaneously. One of the four Buffaloes who had been holding Krysty spread-eagle on the ground ran into it full speed. He barely had a chance to shriek before he was ripped to pieces with such violence that blood exploded from his shredding body faster than the blackness could suck it down.

  Ryan saw Jak land like a catamount on the back of a fleeing Buffalo built to justify the name. He plunged not one but two daggers into the coldheart’s bull neck from either side. He had to have hit the carotid arteries on both sides, because blood shot out in violent sprays. The coldheart dropped to one knee and his momentum took him straight forward onto his face as Jak leaped nimbly free.

  It didn’t much surprise Ryan that the coldhearts hadn’t found the knives. They had stripped off Jak’s jacket with the razor-sharp shards of metal and busted glass sewn onto the collar and shoulders and tossed it with the rest of their captives’ gear piled next to a blue pickup.

  That was his target. The ratty woman he’d heard Sully call Marcuse was sprinting for the wag as fast as her legs could carry her. Unfortunately for her, her legs were short and Ryan’s were long. Just as she reached out a clawed hand for the door handle, he caught her tangle of black hair from behind and yanked hard, back and sideways, as momentum carried him past her.

  Her neck snapped with a sound like a blaster shot.

  As she convulsed in her death throes, Ryan pulled near enough to jerk the handblaster out of her holster. It was a Glock, which turned out to have a round chambered, as he immediately found out when he turned to fire it into the face of a blocky Buffalo who was about to blunder full-speed into him, bawling like a frightened calf. Ryan wasn’t even sure the man knew he was there.

  Behind him he saw Ricky hit a blond, bearded coldheart in the knees from the left as Doc threw a body block into his torso from the right. Ryan heard at least one of the knees give way, and the three went down into a squalling, clawing tangle like a ball of angry alley cats.

  Ryan didn’t see what happened next because by reflex he looked to find his lover. The redhead was standing about where she had knelt, holding one of her former captors by the right arm and leg. Mildred had him by the left set of limbs, face downward. The two women pendulumed the coldheart to and fro three times as he howled and struggled to no avail.

  Then they pitched him face-first right into the hungry black cloud that was advancing to claim him. His last screech seemed to linger on the air after the bloody rags of his body had disappeared.

  Ryan held up the Glock in both hands. It was hefty—a .45 ACP Glock 30. He looked around for targets.

  Several of the wags were peeling out of there as the whirlwind devoured another one of Krysty’s former captors, who was rolling around on the ground clutching at a broken elbow. To Ryan’s right, J.B. ducked a vicious attempt at buttstroking him in the head with a Mini-14. He pistoned a right hard into the coldheart’s lean gut. Then he straightened, wrested the weapon from the taller man’s hands and slammed him in the side of the head with the buttstock edge-on like an oiled-wood machete.

  The Buffalo fighter fell onto the corrugated ground, cradling his split-open and blood-spurting head. J.B. shouldered the carbine, pointed it down at the man’s face and pulled the trigger. The Ruger’s blast was double-loud, as a short-barreled .223 longblaster always was.

  The coldheart kicked once at the dirt with the heels of his pointy-toed cowboy boots. Then he went limp.

  J.B. nodded in satisfaction and, like Ryan, looked around for targets.

  There were none. The Buffalo Mob raiding party was dead or running away as fast as the wags they’d managed to make off with would carry them. Only the stocky man Doc and Ricky wrestled with remained. And not even marksmen as triple keen of eye and steady of aim as Ryan and J.B. were willing to risk a shot under those circumstances.

  Anyway, Ryan reckoned his two friends had control of the situation. Until both of them jumped away, Doc springing back like a startled heron on his long legs and Ricky rolling rapidly away in the other direction, bouncing off the low, mounded ridges to the field.

  The coldheart was instantly on his bandy legs. His broad face was mostly hidden by a mask of blood and mud, except for wildly staring eyes and a mouth twisted in rage.

  “Which one of you rad-suckers wants some?” he yelled. His long black pigtail whipped about his wide shoulders as he snapped his head left and right to look from one of his antagonists to the other. He held a knife with a short, triangular blade in one hand.

  The black whirlwind came for him, skimming a foot above the furrows. Somehow he sensed the awful doom barreling down on him from behind. He spun, knife at the ready.
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  He screamed shrilly, then he slashed at the cloud of blackness with his knife.

  He made contact. Whatever force lay within the swirl of shadow seized his knife and hand and tore off the front half of his forearm. His shrieks rose an octave, and he tried frantically to pull free.

  But the cloud had him. It drew him in and whipped him into ragged shreds and threads of red fluid, which quickly disappeared into the shadow-swirl.

  For a moment the cloud hung there. It seemed to Ryan to be waiting, searching.

  No coldhearts remained. Was it their turn now? Ryan wondered.

  The black cloud seemed to collapse in on itself. Ryan caught a fleeting impression of a few night-black strands, scarcely more than threads, flying back toward Mariah, who still stood staring with eyes like two holes pissed in snow and her fists clenched by her sides so hard, her rigid arms trembled. But that might have been his imagination, which was in high gear now and powering right along after the events of the last half hour or so.

  As the perhaps-imaginary threads seemed to vanish into Mariah’s body, she swayed slightly, as if dealt a blow.

  Then she dropped to the tilled soil like an empty suit of clothes.

  Ricky accepted the offer of Doc’s extended hand to help him off the ground. He was pale and a bit green in the face.

  “Now that’s something you don’t see every day.”

  Chapter Ten

  “Stranger inbound!”

  Hammerhand had just emerged, stretching and yawning, from his lodge when the cry went up. It was repeated by several voices among the other Bloods already awake to greet the gray dawn slowly spilling out across the scrub-dotted surge of the Plains.

  He sipped his chicory, which he’d grown up with and enjoyed. He was not much concerned. He had well over a hundred effectives in his band now, with a dozen more coming aboard in the wake of the Buffalo Mob wag-raid’s success of a week earlier. Had any serious threat been perceived, the message would have said so, and it would’ve been a lot louder.