Devil's Vortex
Ryan crouched, handblaster at the ready. Beside him he saw Krysty and Ricky do likewise—the redhead with her full-auto capable 9 mm Glock 18C, the youth with his old Webley revolver, rechambered for .45 ACP.
Then Jak said, “Girl crying.”
Krysty’s pale and beautiful face, which had been an ice sculpture a moment before, softened. She straightened, lowering the boxy muzzle of her blaster.
“Don’t let your guard down, lover,” Ryan growled. “We don’t know it’s not a trap.”
She cocked an incredulous brow at him. “What? A stickie crying out in a little girl’s voice to lure us in?”
“Other muties have been known to do that trick,” J.B. reminded her. “Who knows what stickies might come up with. Some of them are bastard smart.”
Krysty’s other eyebrow arched up to match the first. She nodded. “Good point. But we still need to check. Just carefully.”
“It’s not our problem anyway,” Ryan said. He was talking to the woman’s back as she moved purposefully ahead among the eerie cluster of farm buildings. She had a mind of her own—it was one reason he loved her. And she had as keen a survival sense as he did. After all, she’d met the same brutal and deadly challenges he had across their years together on the Deathlands. Some he even hadn’t, when they were split by circumstance or necessity. She knew what she was doing.
But he also felt concern that her big, soft heart might dull the edge of her wits.
At this point the only thing to do was follow. He heard a rustle and glanced over his shoulder to see J.B. slide in behind him, his M-4000 riot scattergun held slantwise before his hips in patrol position. The little man flashed him a quick grin.
Getting my back, Ryan thought. Automatically. As usual. They were all sharp-eyed and sure shots, and none of them compared to Jak Lauren in the sensory-keenness department. But Ryan just felt better when it was his best friend and right-hand man in particular who was watching their asses. Especially going into an unknown situation.
He grinned to himself. Every situation in this life is unknown, he thought. And forgetting that little fact is one of the best and quickest ways to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes.
The main structure was one story, big—half a dozen rooms or more. It had a peaked roof to shed snow as it fell. Now the wind was spooling the powdery stuff off its battered galvanized and corrugated metal in swirls and skeins, flinging it at their eyes. A screen door, hanging open and sagging, banged against the frame periodically as it got kicked by vagaries of that killing wind.
But the sobbing was coming from a much smaller side building. Sounds like a kid, Mildred mouthed to Ryan. He nodded.
Jak crouched outside, covering the door with his Colt Python revolver. The albino loved knives and preferred them over blasters. But given what had happened to the farm folk here, if there was a nasty surprise waiting for him in that shed, he wanted to be able to answer it straightaway with a bigger, louder surprise of his own.
And shed it was, Ryan judged. His first glance suggested it might be an outhouse—the cold sucked his sense of smell away, and if the farmers had had sense to lime it, it probably didn’t give off an eye-watering, knee-buckling stink except on the hottest days of a Black Hills summer. But it was too big for a one-holer and not proportioned right for two or three. The structure had to be used for storage, he thought. Mebbe tools.
The door opened outward. It hung invitingly, just a hand span ajar. As he approached, J.B. slid past him, as smooth as an eel.
“Let me,” he said with an upward tip of his shotgun’s barrel.
“Go right ahead,” Ryan said. The 12-gauge was an even bigger surprise than Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster for lurking bad things. Lots of strange predators or scavengers could follow behind a marauding stickie clan. Some of them not even muties.
Standing well clear of the doorway proper, the Armorer reached forward, gingerly grabbed hold of the door, then whipped it open. Neither a lunging feral form nor a blast of blasterfire greeted the sudden movement. Holding the M-4000 leveled from his hip, he sidestepped quickly across the doorway, left to right, staying outside. He wanted to clear the fatal funnel of the door without plunging into a completely unknown environment.
“Easy, little lady,” Ryan heard him say. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
Cautiously Ryan joined his old friend. He saw that J.B. had been right not to do the usual room-clearing drill, stepping quickly inside and then immediately sidestepping left or right out of the doorway, to make a perfect target of himself for as short a time as possible. They were in a toolshed, and the tools were in some disarray, scattered here and there. Had the Armorer driven ahead, he might’ve tangled up his feet and pitched face-foremost onto the packed-dirt floor. Or worse.
A little girl huddled inside, just visible in the gloom of the far side of the crowded little room.
* * *
“HOW’D IT GO, BOSS?” Hammerhand’s chief lieutenant asked as he strode into camp. Joe Takes-Blasters’s big broad face showed a frown of concern. “Reckoned you’d stay at the Crow camp longer.”
“No need,” Hammerhand said.
“So, you decided you didn’t need to go chasing visions after all, eh?” Mindy Farseer asked with her usual half-mocking tone of voice and one eyebrow arched.
“No. I did. I got what I wanted.”
The Blood encampment was a collection of about one hundred “lodges,” tepees of hide or canvas, yurts standing up from carts. It was the standard dwellings of Great Plains nomads. The brutal wind had subsided to a breeze that came and went, snapping their flaps occasionally like little whips. A few skinny children chased one another, sending chickens squawking from their path.
A handful of assorted battered trucks, modified to burn alcohol as fuel, were parked in the center of the camp, along with a selection of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to powerful but stripped-down choppers. Most of their transport took the form of a substantial herd of horses.
Hammerhand thought that they looked like a sorry-ass bunch of draggle-tail coldhearts, not the kind of people with whom he could build an empire.
But he meant to do just that. With them. And this morning he had received a clear and compelling vision of how to accomplish that.
It was time to kick ass.
And whatever Power it was—he didn’t know or care because the fact that it was a big and badass Power was enough—had anointed him as the chosen one to do it.
Now he had concrete goals and the beginning of a plan.
“The Crow elders are still here,” Joe said. He sounded uneasy.
He pointed with a jerk of his chin toward the group of four who stood expectantly nearby, at camp’s edge. Three men and a woman, with gray in their long braids, were wrapped in colorful blankets against the wind’s chilling touch. Their weathered faces showed strong bone structures and jutting noses, with skins the color of old leather. No doubt as a reproach to the mixed-breed Hammerhand, the Council had sent four elders to speak to him and urge his return to the fold.
As if.
After the Big Nuke, most bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had taken in numerous refugees from fried-out cities, as had many of the First Nations groups that survived the war and skydark. And as most continued to do. The Blackfoot had thrived in doing so and now were preeminent north of what had once been the US-Canada border.
But while they had accepted their share of refugees, and continued to adopt new members regardless of heritage, the stiff-necked Blood people had chosen to maintain an unusual form of discrimination within the tribe—not against mutants, but ceding social standing on the basis of supposed purity of breeding. It was a policy they termed Traditionalism. And one that younger fire-bloods, many but not all mixed race like Hammerhand, disdained as “Trad.”
He looked at them now, standing there all mock humble but really demanding his submission—whether in renaming his band, or better, disbanding it and crawling back on his belly to beg the Council for forgiveness. Arrogant pricks.
He knew in his heart what the dazzling figure from the top of Harney Peak would tell him to do. And although obedience was not in his nature, no more to glowing, floating sky people than the grubbier terrestrial kind, he would follow its words. Because that was the vision he had sought and had gained. And because he knew in its heart it was righteous.
Black Bear, the shortest and stockiest but most senior member of the group, extended the ceremonial coup stick, hooked and feathered, toward Hammerhand.
“Return with us, and become once more one with our land and blood, young man,” he said.
“It’s not too late for you, boy,” said John Tall Person, who as might be expected, was the tallest of the group. Had his back still been straight he’d have been only an inch or three shorter than Hammerhand, which made him a tall man indeed.
Hammerhand’s anger at their arrogant imperiousness was beginning to smoke. “And if I don’t?”
Deer Woman scowled. “Then we shall make you! It will be war.”
“Your answer?” demanded Crow Legs, the final member of the group. His gray hair had been braided into a sort of unicorn horn jutting from the front of his head. Hammerhand thought it made him look comical.
“My answer?” Hammerhand gave them a long, hard look.
Then he turned to his lieutenant, Joe Takes-Blasters.
“For my answer, send their hides back to the Council,” he said. “Without them inside.”
Chapter Three
Krysty’s heart melted as a whimper escaped the form lying on its side in the fetal position on the dirt floor. She felt an overpowering impulse to run to the girl and hug her.
But she fought it down. She was a seasoned campaigner, almost as much as J.B. or Ryan. She knew the girl could be bait in a trap. Or even, unlikely as it seemed, a danger in herself.
She scanned the corners of the cluttered toolshed. There was little to see but shadows. The structure seemed sturdily made, with no cracks to let even the feeble light from outside leak in.
“No danger,” Jak said, then vanished from Krysty’s side into the blowing white clouds of snow. He knew his companions could handle whatever menace a sobbing, freaked-out girl with black pigtails might pose.
“Right,” Ryan said. “Let’s move on.”
“And just leave her?” Krysty demanded.
Ryan looked at her and shrugged. He was a hard man, because he usually needed to be.
Krysty usually did not try to temper that hardness, but when the time came, she reckoned it was part of her job.
But it was J.B. who spoke up first. “I’d like an account of what happened here,” he said. “Best way I know to have a shot at keeping it from happening to us.”
Ryan bared strong white teeth, but he nodded. The little man in the scuffed leather bomber jacket, fedora and round wire-rimmed specs was the ultimate technician of survival. He was even more purely practical than Ryan himself, and when he spoke, he spoke to the point.
Taking that as all the assent she needed, Krysty holstered her Glock 18C and picked her way quickly but carefully through the disarrayed tools. She hunkered down by the girl, who wore a simple black shift with long sleeves.
“What’s your name?” she asked gently. She mostly wanted to try to pierce the other’s veil of uncontrolled emotion before doing anything like touching her. Gentle tones and innocuous words seemed the quickest way.
The girl didn’t look at her. Her eyes were screwed so tightly shut in her snow-pale face that it almost seemed as if she was resisting attempts to pry them open. But her shivering began to slow. The rhythm of her heartbroken sobbing began to break up, like the steps of a runner slowing down.
“It’s all right,” Krysty said. “My name is Krysty and I want to help you.”
“Here, now,” Ryan protested from behind her. “Let’s not go overboard with this.”
“Out of the way, Captain Sensitivity,” Mildred said brusquely. “A healer needed here.”
“But—”
“Healer working here.”
Although Jak had butted heads with Ryan a few months back, that was all in the past now. The two had discovered the hard way how much they needed each other. Same as everybody in their little crew needed everybody else. Before, during and since that time, the other member of the group to challenge Ryan’s authority was Mildred. Krysty reckoned he endured it as much to help keep himself from getting too full of himself and thinking he was infallible—which was a sure recipe to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes, triple quick. But like every one of the companions, she had a specialty. And when she or anyone of them was engaged in his or her work, Ryan knew to back off.
The way, of course, they did with him. Mostly. Krysty had to grin to herself.
“My friend Mildred is coming to help you, too,” Krysty said—fortuitously a moment before she heard the clatter of a tool inadvertently kicked by one of Mildred’s combat boot, and a suppressed curse. “You’re safe now. Why don’t you talk to me? Tell me your name.”
An eye opened. It was brown. It looked startlingly dark in that bloodless face. Krysty had to hope that trauma and terror had drained color from her skin. Otherwise she could hardly be healthy.
The eye rolled, then fixed on Krysty. The sobbing dwindled to a sniffling.
“I—I’m Mariah,” she said.
“Are you hurt, Mariah?” Mildred asked briskly, kneeling next to Krysty. She subtly shouldered the redhead a bit to the side to make room. The two were best friends. As such, Krysty knew that when she was in full-on healer mode, Mildred was as bullheaded businesslike as her man, J. B. Dix, tinkering up a busted blaster—or using one to chill a room full of stonehearts.
“Any blood? Any broken bones? Any bad pains?”
“No,” Mariah said. She moistened her lips with a pale pink tongue. “Can I have some water?”
Mildred promptly pulled a canteen from her belt. With plenty of snow on the ground here near the Black Hills, fresh water wasn’t hard to come by. Fresh chow was another thing entirely.
“Come on,” she said. “Sit up to drink it.”
She let Krysty urge the girl to uncurl her arms from their death grip on her shins. Then Mildred firmly grasped her shoulders and pulled her up to a seated position. Krysty suspected that her friend’s bedside manner, as they would have called it in predark times, would have raised some eyebrows, but no matter how abrupt the dark, stocky woman with the beaded hair plaits might be, she treated her patients far more gently than a girl like this was likely used to. It was how the world was.
Mariah took the canteen and drank thirstily, her eyes squeezed shut. Krysty noticed that she didn’t spill a drop.
After a moment Mildred eased the canteen back from the girl’s lips. “Not too much at a time, or you’ll just throw it back up again. Breathe.”
For a moment Mariah clutched at the bottle like a nursing baby at the breast. Then she dropped her hand to her lap. Her eyes focused, first on Mildred, then Krysty again. Then they swept over Ryan, J.B., Ricky and Doc, looking in from the doorway.
Jak’s friends had put themselves in position to counter whatever threats may have lurked in the toolshed. He, of course, had moved on. His business now was to secure the rest of the small farm settlement and report back to the rest.
Mariah appeared to become more in control of herself. Some color was coming back to her cheeks. Krysty still reckoned she likely was as naturally pale as the redhead was herself.
“I’m Mariah,” she said again. “What do you want from me?”
“That’s a good question,” J.B. said, scratching his neck. Evidently deciding the scared child—she looked now to Krysty to be in her early teens—offered little immediate threat, he had tipped the barrel of his combat shotgun toward the slanted roof. “I can’t really think of a thing.”
“Information,” Ryan rasped. “What happened here? And who did it to whom?”
“What do you mean?” the girl asked.
“That’s Ryan,” Krysty said. “He’s the leader of this crew. Tact isn’t his strong suit.” She and Mildred hastily introduced the others. Mariah seemed to listen attentively, nodding shyly at each in turn.
“What our fearless leader was asking was two questions at once,” Mildred explained.
Krysty saw Ryan frown a bit at that, and she flashed him a grin.
“Why don’t you tell us what happened first?” Mildred asked.
Mariah moistened her lips, then she looked down at her hands, lying in her lap like crippled white birds.
“Stickies attacked us before dawn,” she said. “The, uh, Baylah family lived here. Actually, a few families did. They were all related to one another somehow, I reckon. I never did get it straight, and no one bothered explaining it to me. Paw and Maw Baylah owned the ’stead, though, and ran the show.
“Just all at once I woke up and there was screaming everywhere. Screams of people and animals in pain. And that awful screeching the muties make.”
“Ones with mouths anyway,” J.B. said, nodding.
“You were sleeping in your dress?” Mildred asked.
“I do a lot,” the girl explained. “In case somebody decides to rouse me out in the middle of the night to do chores.”
Krysty watched her closely. If those chores included the sort of sexual favors that were sometimes demanded as the price of boarding—even of children—she wasn’t giving the fact away in her face and manner any more than in her words.
If that sort of abuse had happened, the guilty had more than likely paid by now. For what that might be worth.
“You got away?” Ryan asked.
“I was sleeping in the pantry,” she said. “They didn’t find me. At first. But when I looked out the door to see what was happening, they spotted me. They were...feasting already and across the kitchen. I ran out the door and hid in the first place I hit.”
“This shed,” Krysty said.
She nodded. “I shut the door. They started hammering on it. Dust flew all off it—I could just see by dawn light seeping in through the little window. I hoped they would get tired and go away. But they knew I was there and didn’t give up. Then the door sprang open, and I curled up in a ball like the way that you found me, closed my eyes tight and started to scream.”
From the doorway, Ricky made a strangled sound.
“Relax, kid,” Mildred told him without looking around. “We know the stickies didn’t eat her.”
“Why not?” Ryan asked.
“Ryan,” Krysty said.
He raised his eyebrows at her. “What? It’s a fair question.”
Mariah just shook her head. She still didn’t look up.
“What happened to the stickies?” Ryan asked carefully, his lone blue eye on Krysty.
Mariah shook his head.
“I don’t know. The door burst open. The wind was howling. A big bunch of snow and dust blew in. And the stink—the stickie stink, and fresh blood. And worse—”
Worse likely meaning the reek of torn-open guts, Krysty knew. She was double glad the cold wind tended to carry off the charnel smell and deadened such scent as remained.
“But the stickies didn’t come in. I waited and waited to feel their...those awful sucker fingers on me. And those teeth. But it never happened. I still didn’t open my eyes because I didn’t want to see the world anymore.”
“Hard to blame you there,” Mildred said.
“Any idea what happened to the muties?” J.B. asked.
“Why?” Mariah sounded confused. “What did? I wondered if something scared them off.”
“Something chilled them,” Ryan said. “More than that—it was like they all got blown up or chopped to pieces.”
“Never seen anything like it,” J.B. added.
“And from this outlandish collection of humankind,” Doc remarked, “that is a remarkable statement indeed.”
Mariah continued to shake her head in what Krysty took for incomprehension.
“We found a man with an ax outside,” Mildred said. “We, uh, chilled him. We had to. He thought we were stickies and came rushing at us. We found stickie blood on his ax and stickie wounds on his body after we took him down.”
“That’d be Elias,” Mariah said. “He always did have a temper on him.”
“Enough to chill an entire pack of stickies?” Mildred asked. “Enough to wipe out the whole rest of the farm?”
Mariah just shook her head. “He was big and strong. And you know how men can get when the anger comes upon them.”
“Yeah,” Ryan said.
Jak called softly from the doorway, “All chills inside. Wind dying.” No one had heard him approach. His friend Ricky started at his sudden speech, banging his head on the top of the door frame.
Ryan had been hunkered down beside Mariah, his weapons sheathed or slung, hands on the thighs of his sun-faded jeans. Now he nodded decisively and stood.
“Right,” he said. “Well, thank you kindly. That’s all we needed to know. We’ll be leaving you to it, now.”
“Ryan, we can’t just leave her,” Krysty protested.
He looked at Krysty in what seemed genuine consternation.
“It’s time to go,” he aid. “Shake the dust of this place off our boot heels.”
“But what’ll happen to her?”
“She’ll find her way. Or she won’t. She made it this far, anyhow, and that’s a thing. It’s not our problem what happens to her now, though. One way or another.”
As Krysty scowled at him, the girl abruptly launched herself at her. Blasters whipped up, but instead of attacking her, Mariah was suddenly clinging to her and sobbing. Krysty judged herself lucky she’d been on her knees; otherwise the girl, slight as she was, might’ve bowled her over backward.
“Krysty’s right,” Mildred announced as the redhead began to stroke Mariah’s head and murmur soothingly to her. “We can’t just leave her out in the middle of this god-awful wasteland.”
“But she’s been living here just fine all along,” J.B. said.
“When she had a family and a working farm around her,” Mildred shot back. “What is wrong with you, John? Where’s your compassion?”
He blinked at her through the round lenses of his specs. “Compassion?” He sounded as if the word was unfamiliar to him.
“There’s food,” the girl said, still sobbing and her face pressed sideways to Krysty’s neck. “Supplies. Powder and shot.”
“Jak,” Ryan called out. “You still out there?”
“Yeah?”
“How trashed is the place?”
“Chills everywhere,” the albino said in his customary clipped and often cryptic speech. “Chill parts, too.”
“They get around to pissing down the well?” J.B. asked. “Or tossing any chills down it for poison?”
“No,” Jak said.
“So the mutant blackguards got no chance to indulge in an orgy of wanton stickies vandalism,” Doc said.
“Before Elias put the chop on ’em,” J.B. added.
“Sounds like,” Ryan said. “Thanks. We’ll make sure to leave plenty for you. And now—”
Krysty put her arms around the girl’s thin, shaking shoulders. She was actively shivering now, not just to the timing of her sobs.
“Ryan, no,” she said.
“You know as well as I do we can’t go picking up every stray we stumble across,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”
With a final sniffle, Mariah stopped weeping, or at least stopped weeping as vigorously. The trembling subsided, too, but did not stop.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
Ryan looked blank. “You mean stumbling around in the storm?” Mildred supplied helpfully.
Mariah nodded.
“Let’s say we’re new in the district,” Mildred said.
“Yeah,” Ryan said—grudgingly, because information was a trade good itself. But clearly he saw nothing to be lost by imparting a few morsels to the foundling.
“You looking for work?” Mariah asked.
“Well, yeah. Now that you mention it. We could use a gig.”
Their supplies had gotten low. The stocks of food and such the girl had mentioned—and fresh water from the well—would tide them over for a spell. But they were always looking for ways to sustain themselves, and mebbe get ahead, even, for the lean times that inevitably followed.