No Man's Land

He proceeded through a door behind the wooden counter and into the narrow confines of a storeroom even closer packed with canned goods and unique items than the shelves outside. Snake Eye found what he expected: a wooden hatch in the floor. Squatting well to the side, he grabbed the brass ring and yanked it open.

A flash and a boom erupted from the hole. A charge of buckshot shattered a Mason jar full of prenuke glass eyeballs on a shelf six feet away from where Snake Eye sat on his haunches. Allowing himself the briefest of smiles—he liked being right, even if he almost always was—he jumped right through the hole.

The storm cellar beneath was full of stacked burlap bags, eye-watering gunpowder smoke and one terrified fat man huddled by a cot in one corner pointing a long double-barreled shotgun in Snake Eye’s general direction.

“Don’t come a step closer,” he said in a quavering voice. “I’ll blast you soon as look at you. Sooner, you damned mutie chiller!”

Suddenly Snake Eye had skipped the several paces across the hard-packed dirt floor, grabbed the double barrels and twitched the blaster out of Ragged Earnie’s grip.

“So you recognize me, do you?” Snake Eye asked.

“Everybody knows you!” the shopkeeper said. “The coldest-hearted blaster that ever blasted his own mother for pay!”

“I’ll take that as an endorsement of my marketing techniques,” Snake Eye said, grinning. “Even though I barely got more than a crust of dry bread for wasting the bitch who pupped me. Still, it’s the principle of the thing. And speaking of principles, since you know me, you must know I haven’t come to pay a purely social call, any more than I have come to make a purchase at this fine, fine emporium.”

He drew one of his matte-black Swiss-made blasters and aimed it at Earnie’s face.

The old man promptly averted his gaze, closing both eyes tight and throwing up both hands in a ridiculous gesture at self-protection. Snake Eye’s human eye, the left one, which missed damned little, noted a darkness that spread across the brown dirt floor around the seat of Earnie’s baggy coveralls, glistening slightly in the low light of the hurricane lantern on the floor nearby.

After a moment Earnie pried open his nearer eye. It was a startling blue. It reminded Snake Eye of the eye of the sergeant he had just chilled down the street outside: bright, sharp and as clear as a midwinter morning sky.

He liked to remember such details and cherish them in his memories as trophies of his chills. Even the ones he didn’t get paid for.

“Well,” the merchant demanded.

“Well, what?”

“Why aren’t you getting on with it? Why ain’t you blasted me yet and had done with it? You trying to torture me, you triple-rad-blasted taint?”

Under the circumstances Snake Eye found the slur amusing, the more so for its apparently unconscious resonance.

“Are you in a hurry, old man?” he asked.

“Well, why didn’t you shoot me yet?”

Snake Eye shrugged. “Professional courtesy. It’s so important in my business. More so, since it’s so rare in the world today. I find subjects often like to say a few words before I finish the assignment. Unburden their souls, if you will. It seems only decent of me to allow them their final say. So long as they don’t take too long.”

The old man dropped his hands and turned his face back toward Snake Eye. His other eye opened. Into both came a calculating look.

Somehow, that didn’t surprise Snake Eye.

“What’s Big Erl paying?” Earnie asked. “I’ll double it.”

“You know better,” Snake Eye said, “if you know who I am. I always carry out a contract. Integrity is my hallmark. Another rarity in these degraded times.”

“I’ll pay what I owe!”

“Sorry,” Snake Eye said. “It’s too late for that. I made a deal. Besides, you must realize you’ve got more than jack or treasure against your account with Mr. Kendry, now.”

Earnie blew out his gristly gray-pink lips in a sigh. His drooping liver-spotted cheeks were fuzzed with patchy gray stubble.

“It was a mistake setting up Big Erl for the Uplander to ambush,” he said. “I admit it. But it seemed like the best idea at the time. I owed him money. Times turned hard, with the war back on. I couldn’t pay. He was fixing to bring the full entire wrath of his buddy Baron Jed of Hugoville and the Protective Association Army down on my poor chapped old ass. What else could I do?”

“First off, do a better job,” Snake Eye said. “Setting up a rich and powerful landowner like Erl Kendry is one thing. Doing it so shoddily enough that he didn’t die is another. And getting his son and heir Fank iced in the process?” He shook his head. “That, my friend, qualifies as a mistake.”

His finger tightened on the trigger. Earnie flung up his hands again.

“Wait!”

Snake Eye considered the request a moment, then lowered the piece.

“I’m waiting.”

He reached into the watch pocket of the lean-cut black jeans he always wore and flipped open the face of an antique fob watch.

“Fifteen seconds, to be precise,” he said.

To his credit the merchant didn’t piss away any time protesting. “I know something,” he said. “There’s a great, big fortress hidden nearby—somewhere. The kinda place the whitecoats built back in the old days, back before the Big Nuke and the long winter, so they’d have a place to ride the shitstorm out. It’s packed to the rafters with primest scabbie—weps, ammo, commo equipment, meds that would make your eyes pop. Sorry—eye.”

“I have two,” Snake Eye said equably. “The patch notwithstanding. It’s not a sensitive subject.”

The allotted time had ticked past on his watch. Ragged Earnie had engaged his interest, though. Still, he ticked a black-taloned thumb against the scratched crystal face to indicate the merchant shouldn’t dawdle.

“Some even say it has this magic room, makes you fly from one place to another,” Earnie said. “I don’t put no stock in that nonsense, of course. But I know it’s true. I talked to a man saw it with his own eyes. It’s within twenty mile of where we sit now, I can tell you that much.”

“So tell me where exactly.”

“Nope,” Earnie said. “Then I wouldn’t be no more use to you, now, would I? What do you got to say to that, Mr. Triple-Smart Mercie? But somebody else who knows the secret—that’d be Big Erl. We were partnered-up about it, but sadly matters took a turn southward between us.

“So now, all that’s standing in the way of you and me joining up and getting rich as barons ourselves is Erl his own blubber-ass self! So let’s just say we negotiate a deal, you and me? You chill Erl and I’ll let you in on half!”

“Done,” Snake Eye said. And he brought up the blaster and shot Earnie right out from behind his own triumphant grin.

He stood a moment, the handblaster held down by his side, shaking his head at his slumped victim.

“The poor fools,” he said, “always say too much and hear what they want to hear. And now I’ll take it all, thank you kindly.”

He slid the piece back in its tooled-leather holster.

“See, old man,” he said, “it’s as I told you. I always keep a contract.”

Chapter One

“Well,” Mildred Wyeth said, staring into the low, pallid blue and yellow flames of their campfire, “this sucks.”

They had pitched camp in a low patch of the rolling countryside that, according to the sighting J. B. Dix had taken on his minisextant before the sun went down, had to be part of what in her day they called southeastern Iowa. They liked low ground because it kept them from being silhouetted to prying eyes. Even sometimes allowed them to build a small fire without much concern the light would betray them.

The fuel didn’t produce much light nor heat. Nor did the dried cow flop impart a flavor Mildred found pleasing to the brace of prairie dogs Jak Lauren had roasted over the fire while his new best friend Ricky Morales kept watch.