Sunspot

Soon to end.

“I reckon it’s their choice where they want to die,” Cawdor said.

Jak, Krysty and Doc waited at the far end of the lane. The Redbone folk they’d rescued were already manning the barricade, covering their rear with the captured predark assault rifles.

The other hovels were deserted. Mebbe the residents had made it out. Mebbe not. Just beyond the last of the tumbledown dwellings, the alley ended abruptly at the edge of a nearly sheer, three-hundred-foot cliff. Redbone ville was laid out like a medieval castle town. The ville’s buildings clung to and jutted up from the hilltop, extensions of the vertical bedrock. From the alley’s terminus, a rough zigzag path led down the cliff face to the gridwork of cultivated fields below—beyond them a bleak desert panorama stretched to the blue mountains on the horizon. There was no sign of a rear guard on the plain. Malosh had apparently committed his entire force to a surprise attack.

Krysty took in the unarmed swineherds, then looked at Ryan with concern. Her prehensile mutie hair had already drawn into tight curls, an automatic response to the mortal danger they faced.

He anticipated her question. “They know they’re excess baggage,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

Jak jumped onto the trail and led the rapid descent. As the companions skidded single file to the bottom, thunder rumbled in the distance. Bolts of lightning shot through the northwestern sky that had turned black as night. It was at least twenty degrees warmer down on the plain, and the wind had acquired a strange, unpleasantly humid edge.

“Could be a chem storm,” Krysty said. “A bad one.”

“It’s going to come down on us hard,” Mildred said.

“And shortly, it would appear…” Doc added. “Perhaps we should consider seeking shelter until it passes?”

“No time for that, now,” Ryan said. “We have to get out of longblaster range before the baron’s men spot us and pin us down. You take the point, Jak. Cut through the fields, then follow cover to the southeast, away from the storm front. Double-time it. No stops.”

With the albino wild child in the lead, they broke from the base of the hill and ran into the rows of Cradding cabbages and knee-high potato plants. There were no farmers’ bodies lying about. Malosh’s army had closed in during the night and had attacked at first light.

As they neared the edge of the fields, autofire roared from the hilltop behind them. The mad clattering sawed back and forth. It sounded as though the folks manning the barrier were giving as good as they were getting.

The companions were about seven hundred yards from the base of the hill when they heard a string of sharp booms—multiple gren detonations, not thunderclaps. As the echoes of the explosions faded, blasterfire ceased.

The barricaded alley had fallen, and with it, Redbone ville.

Jak picked up the pace and Ryan and the others matched it. The desert hardpan was much easier to run on than soft, cultivated earth. A warm tailwind, now driving and steady, pushed against their backs.

The albino led them down into a shallow gully and they followed it, running as low to the ground as they could. The ditch wasn’t deep enough to completely conceal them, but the chaparral and scrub along its lip broke up and blurred their silhouettes. They drew no sniper fire from the ville, either because they hadn’t been seen or because they were already out of range.

The discomforts of the forced march were all too familiar to them—the bonfires burning in lungs and legs, the jarring impacts on hip joints and knees, the rhythmic rasp of breath in the ears. The two swineherds had managed to keep up so far. Bezoar hip-hopped along, red-faced, his hair matted with sweat, arms flailing for balance. Barefooted Young Crad moved easily beside him with a powerful, lumbering gait.

Fourteen hours ago, on the previous evening, the companions had arrived in Redbone after a long trek south. They had planned on trading part of their stock of centerfire bullets for food and water this morning; instead they had had to expend them making their escape. The breakout was nothing Ryan and the others were ashamed of. Hard-bitten realists, they knew there were things they could fight and things they could not.

None of them had any firsthand knowledge of Baron Malosh. What little information they possessed came from tales they’d heard in gaudy houses and around communal campfires along their route. In Deathlands, stories of barbarism and savagery were taken in along with mother’s milk, this to prepare the young for the inescapable facts of life. Exaggerations, misconceptions, distortions and outright lies were expected—even honored—in a dark, misbegotten place where ignorance and chaos ruled. If a tenth of the gossip the companions had heard about Malosh was true, he was an utterly ruthless marauder, and a formidable adversary.

It was said that he had carved a kingdom out of nothing. His own homeland was shit poor, with little water and fertile soil, barely able to support its population. He made up the difference with hit-and-run campaigns against the unprotected borders of richer neighboring barons. Malosh kept his ragtag army in constant motion, resupplying it through looting and pillage, replacing dead fighters with conscripts—norms and muties, male and female. He enforced military discipline with an iron hand. The only way a person left Malosh’s service was on the last train west. When he conquered a ville like Redbone, he took away most of the food and most of the able-bodied residents. According to the campfire tales, he always left behind a little to eat and a few breeders; and of course, the old folk and very young children useless in battle. He left sufficient living souls and resources for the ville to eventually recover, albeit with terrible hardship, this so he could prey on it again when the need arose.

The gully widened as it emptied into a much broader channel. The dry riverbed was cut with deep rills and dotted with scrub-covered islands. Jak took them along the near bank, an undercut bluff six feet high.

Ryan brought up the rear, running in grim silence, conserving his energy. Sweat peeled in a steady trickle down the middle of his back. He could sense the storm front rapidly overtaking them. The static charge in the air made the hair on his arms and neck stand erect, the smell of ozone grew thicker and thicker. They were about a mile from the ville when he shouted to Jak, calling a halt to the column’s advance.

The company stopped, but Bezoar was the only one to actually sit down, and he did so hard, on top of a boulder.

“Time for a quick recce to check for pursuit,” Ryan said. He waved for J.B. to follow, then started to climb up the side of the bluff, using exposed roots and embedded rocks as hand-and footholds.

“Mebbe they won’t come after us?” Bezoar suggested.

“If they saw us running away, they’re coming,” Krysty told him. “Eight live recruits are worth plenty to Malosh. Not to mention him wanting payback for the men we chilled.”

As Ryan and J.B. topped the bluff, puffs of dust started kicking up around them. Not from incoming longblaster bullets. From a spitting, widely spaced rain. The drops falling on Ryan’s face and hands felt tepid and slightly greasy, but they didn’t burn like holy nukefire. It wasn’t the caustic, flesh-melting variety of chem rain.

J.B. pulled out a battered pair of compact binocs and looked back toward Redbone. “Men on horseback, coming down the cliff trail,” he said. “Pack of dogs running with them.”

“Let me have a look-see,” Ryan said, taking the binocs.

“I counted a half-dozen horsemen,” the Armorer told the others.

“There’s twice that many dogs,” Ryan said. “Damned big ones.”

“By the Three Kennedys, it’s a foxhunt!” Doc exclaimed. “The dogs will pick up our scent and the horses will run us to ground in no time.”

Ryan turned the binocs to the northwest horizon, where chain lightning flashed again and again through a curtain of black. Below the cloud bank, a torrential downpour obscured his view of the plain.

“Bastard heavy rain is bearing down,” he said. “It’ll cover our footprints and wash away our scent.”

“Baron’s men can see that, too,” Krysty said. “They’re going to come at a dead gallop.”

“We’re in a flood plain here,” Mildred reminded everyone. “We need to find ourselves some higher ground.”

As Ryan and J.B. scrambled from the bluff, Jak waved the others after him and headed down-channel.

Bezoar was the only one who didn’t move to follow. The old swineherd sat slumped on the rock, his bad leg sticking out straight, his face still beet-red. Young Crad turned back to help him get to his feet.

“It’s no use, boy,” Bezoar said, impatiently waving him off. “This old gimp can’t run anymore. You go on without me, boy. Save yourself.”

Young Crad wouldn’t hear of it. “I go, you go,” he said. He bent and picked up his comrade, piggyback. Then, as if the added burden was nothing, he broke into a trot, chasing after Jak.

“That one’s something special,” Mildred commented as she, too, started to jog.

“Short on words and brains mebbe, but long on heart,” Krysty said.

“Droolie sure can run,” J.B. admitted.

“Better catch them,” Ryan said, again bringing up the rear.

As the companions tightened ranks, winding past a maze of dry channel braids, the raindrops got bigger and closer together. The wind whipped the branches of the scrub brush and sent chest-high tumbleweeds bounding and rolling down the riverbed past them. No matter how hard the rain came down, Ryan knew they couldn’t stop to wait out the storm, even if the trail they left behind was obscured. The only thing that was going to save them from the pursuit was distance. Only if the dogs and horses couldn’t recover the lost trail were they home free.

In a couple of minutes Ryan’s clothes were completely soaked through. Falling raindrops hit the earth with such force that they jumped two feet in the air. Daylight began to fade. He looked over his shoulder, squinting into the wind and the looming darkness. In a strobe flash of lightning he saw the approaching squall line, like a vast waterfall stretching across the plain from edge to edge. Amid the wind’s howl and the thunder’s boom, he could hear dogs baying, not far behind.

As the storm closed on them, it rained even harder. So hard it came down in rattling roar. So hard that it hurt as it hammered upon unprotected heads and shoulders. So hard it was difficult to breathe with all the water vapor in the air. The parched desert earth couldn’t soak it up. The ground turned to cooked oatmeal underfoot, boot prints filled with water as fast as they were made. A section of saturated bluff to their right collapsed, sliding partway across the channel. Ryan veered and jumped the barrier, splashing down knee-deep in a muddy, coffee-and-cream-colored pool. The runoff was funneling from high ground to low. Ahead, shallow stream channels filled and overflowed, coalescing into broad stretches of shin-high rapids.

The muffled baying grew suddenly louder. When Ryan looked back again, through the shifting downpour, he saw the dogs—drop-jawed, with lolling tongues, legs driving, splashing through the stream. Behind the hellhounds, torrents of water sheeted over the backs of charging horses and riders.

“Up!” he bellowed at Jak through a cupped hand.