Devil's Vortex

That to Hammerhand justified his choice to move by the stealth route on this attack. He had wanted to rack up an easy strike, low casualty, for his own budding tribe, to build morale, esprit de corps, and reputation—though mostly he was concerned about the wags themselves not getting shot up.

Warriors, he could replace. Even good ones. Wags, not so much.

“This is ace on the line,” he said, walking back and forth amid his people and rubbing his hands in unaffected glee. “We win. We win!”

“But they’ve still got eleven power wags,” Mindy pointed out. “And a mess of blasters.”

“Why, then, we’ll just have to get our shit together and go back and grab the rest of the wags, won’t we?” he asked with big grin.

“How?”

“Strategy,” he said. His grin widened. “You’re good at that, right?”

She frowned, then she nodded.

“Reckon so.”

“Ace. Then let’s saddle up and get back to camp. Reckon the rest of the Buffalo Mob is swarming out looking for us, hot past nuke red, like yellow jackets from a dug-open nest. Plus we got us a lot of celebrating to do. And we have to sing Cody Blackfeather’s spirit safely to the Other Side.”

He pumped the M16 over his head and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Bloods ride!”

* * *

“WHY ARE YOU so set against her staying with us, Ryan?” Krysty asked.

“We’re not a walking orphanage,” Ryan rasped in answer to her question. He’d indulged in a shot of the baron’s personal brand of whiskey. It had roughened his voice up some, so Krysty judged it hadn’t been exactly smooth. “We’ve dropped off kids at worse places than this and never looked back.”

The bar in the Brews’n’Booze, the Duganville gaudy house owned and operated by Baron Budo Dugan, was hopping that evening. Duganville was a small ville in a low, wide, fertile valley, protected by a fence made mostly of crude planks and topped with coils of razor tape. As Hamarville had, it smelled of the product that brought it its fame, and a comfortable enough measure of prosperity to make it worthwhile guarding with that kind of a barrier, and that kind of a hard-eyed sec force mounted in watchtowers at all four corners.

But in this case it was hard liquor they made in their cookers and pipe contraptions from grain grown in the surrounding fields. As well, beer was brewed by several leading families, including the baron’s. Ricky claimed the smell made him nauseated, but even he decided it was better to spend the night beneath a roof than outside the wire with the stars, the wildlife and the ever-present possibility of coldhearts.

An old woman was banging enthusiastically on a dilapidated piano with enough verve and skill to make up for the decades that had passed since it had seen a tuning. Mostly. People were drinking and joking in a mostly good-natured way. A pair of sturdy sec officers, a shaven-headed man and a woman with a black-dyed Mohawk, standing at either end of the saloon with muscle-thick arms crossed over their chests, may have had something to do with that.

The bar was made of long planks laid across the tops of stout barrels. The tables and chairs were made of decommissioned kegs and barrels, as well. Mildred had remarked that the place reminded her of what she called a “fern bar” from her own time, but Krysty thought the reason for the furnishings was simple thrift. The rest of the party sat together at a long table, eating a not-bad meal of buffalo stew and various vegetables, with chunks of coarse bread on the side.

Mariah was sitting at the table with the others, staring into her plate as if it were a working vid screen, and ignoring Ricky’s earnest efforts to talk to her.

“Is she slowing us down that much?” Krysty challenged.

“Not a bit,” Ryan admitted.

“Is she pulling her weight?”

Ryan squinted his good eye and scratched the back of his neck beneath his shaggy black hair.

“And then some, mebbe.”

“You looking for a good time, handsome?” The gaudy slut who appeared out of nowhere to rub her hip all over Ryan’s right shoulder wasn’t bad looking. Blonde, if not naturally so, faded blue eyes and full breasts only nominally concealed by a low red bodice. She was probably just shy of thirty years but looked as if she was a decently preserved forty.

The slight slurring of her words showed she’d already been dosing herself against the hardships of her nightly shift. Krysty had to give her credit for boldness, no question. Even if her courage was the kind Baron Dugan was famous for distilling and selling.

Ryan shook his head. “I’m pretty well set up in that department,” he said. “Thanks anyway.”

The blonde made a kissy mouth at Krysty. “I see,” she said. “She’s a real firecracker, isn’t she?”

“You noticed,” Ryan said.

“How about it, Red? You good to go?”

“Thank you for the offer,” Krysty said sweetly, “but I’m well set up, too.” There was nothing insincere in her tone. She felt sympathy for the woman, who was just scrabbling to get by, like anyone in the Deathlands. And she certainly didn’t feel threatened by her.

“Both of you at once, mebbe?” the woman asked with desperation just starting to tinge her voice. “You’re both good looking. Better than my usual run of customer by a long shot. Give you a two-for-one special?”

“Sorry,” Krysty said. “But we’ve got business to attend to right now. So, if you’ll excuse us—”

Still the woman didn’t move off. Krysty twitched her red hair, which was hanging unbound to her shoulders. Just a little.

The woman blinked, flashed a nervous smile and quickly left.

Ryan raised an eyebrow. Krysty read his thoughts loud and clear: Aren’t you running a risk, flashing your mutie hair like that?

She smiled sadly and shook her head. “She’s tipsy enough to doubt her own eyes,” she said. “And she knows nobody would believe her anyway.”

It was a harsh reality that Krysty was none too enamored of. But she was alive precisely because she always made a point to recognize reality and adjust her wishes and desires accordingly. And this wasn’t the first time she’d made use of a tool she’d been born with.

“So what’s the problem with letting Mariah come along?” she asked him.

“Why do you care so much about her?”

“Honestly? I don’t rightly know. I could say she reminds me of me, somehow. But that’d be double strange, since just to start with, I was never that shy or quiet.”

“You can say that again.”

She arched a brow at him. “If you want to spend some quality time with that blonde woman, all you have to do is ask.”

“Ouch. I deserved that.”

“You did. So what’s wrong with Mariah accompanying us?”

“It’s not safe for her to be with us.”

“Where is?”

He sighed. “Come on, Krysty. You’re being obtuse. Our lifestyle leads us into more killing scrapes in a month than the average sodbuster out on the Plains sees in a hard lifetime.”

“You might underestimate the dangers of farm life.”

“Mebbe. Point still stands.”

“It does.”

She thought about it a moment. She hated being at odds with her life mate. Especially since, in the end, she willingly placed her life and survival in his hands on a daily basis.

But if he’d wanted a meek and mild little helpmate, their track was littered with potential applicants for the job. He’d picked her, which meant he wanted what she had to give. Her fire and her honesty were two of those things.

“As I say, I can’t fully account for why I feel so drawn to her. Mebbe it’s my maternal instincts kicking in late. Mebbe it’s just that...it takes a toll, you know? Having to abandon innocence to its fate time and again. When we don’t go and trash it ourselves. Because it means surviving for another day of—surviving.”

“I know that. I wish I had more to offer you. And the others. But the best I’ve got is, if we don’t survive the next minute, the next hour doesn’t matter a spent shell casing. When you’re on the last train west, all bets are off.”

For a moment they sat in silence. Something about their manner kept the rest of the gaudy-house staff and patrons steering well clear of them. Even the freckle-faced boy who’d brought them their now-neglected drinks.

She reached out and patted his hand.

“I know you do your best, lover,” she said. “And no one else could do half as well. Just promise me that we’re looking for something better.”

His winter-sky eye fixed unwaveringly on hers.

“You know I can’t promise happily-ever-after, Krysty.”

“You can’t promise a comet won’t land on top of us either. Promise me that we’re still looking.”

He sighed again.

“There’s got to be more than this, Krysty, something better that’s staying just out of reach. If it comes our way, I wouldn’t say no.”

“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.

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