No Man's Land

“Ringo, Scalzi, Tayler, Rollin,” Drake said. “Shake them down and tie them up. And I better not see anything accidentally fall into one of your sorry drag-tail pockets. Baron’s given strict orders all spoils of war go to him for distribution. Do you hear me, maggots?”

“Sergeant!” the four named sec men sang out in a ragged chorus as they dismounted.

They came forward to their tasks. Ryan saw they were dressed in a random assortment of work clothes, but with rags no doubt the same color as Stone’s and Drake’s uniforms tied around their biceps. They all had carbines slung across their backs.

“Secure the women with wrists behind their backs,” the captain called out in his high, nervous-sounding voice. It seemed to bug his horse. The animal rolled its eyes and sidestepped every time the captain opened his mouth. “They will ride pillion behind two troopers.”

“And if I see any sorry sod-buster so much as try to feel the merchandise...” the sergeant roared. “I got my eye on you, Scalzi, then you best be ready to ride and fight with all the fingers on that hand broke!”

“The men will have hands tied before them,” Stone directed. Despite his heftiness and general ferocious appearance Ryan realized he had the voice and manner of some kind of fussy schoolteacher. “They’ll run behind the horses.”

“We have an old man with us!” Krysty said fearlessly, shaking back her long red hair. It also had the effect, Ryan couldn’t help noticing—even now, his single eye missed nuked little—of hiding the nervous motion of the sentient strands. “Surely you can’t expect him to run!”

A pair of troopers patted her down gingerly. They seemed to pay a lot more attention to rolling their eyes back around to their sergeant to read the weather report on his face than doing a solid job. So much the better, Ryan thought.

The captain showed her an unpleasant grin. It was made no more appealing by the fact the teeth were discolored and all leaning into each other at crazy angles, like an earthquake or nuke-strike had shaken up a block of concrete buildings in some predark ville, but not quite knocked them down.

“Then he won’t pass muster as a conscript in the heroic army of the Association, will he?” Stone said. “Or Baron Jed will be spared the trouble of hanging him as a spy, depending.”

“You can’t expect us to keep up with running horses on foot,” J.B. said calmly, as if he was discussing timing on a wheelgun’s cylinder with a fellow armorer. Because while, yeah, in the long term a man could outrun a horse, he’d never make it past the short term alive.

“Quit your bitching,” the sergeant said. “It’s only three, four miles back to headquarters, and we’ll keep to a trot.” He smiled grimly. “Unless you fall, that is,” he said. “Then we’ll drag you at a full gallop until you stop screaming. That should inspire the others to keep up.”

* * *

IT WAS A BRUTAL JOURNEY, running up and down ridges and splashing through creeks. The buckskin Ryan was tethered to farted incessantly, but at least it wasn’t as surly as the roan Jak ran behind. That one kept its ears pinned back what seemed every step of the nightmare run, and tried every time its rider’s attention seemed to waver to pause its trot long enough to try to kick the albino youth in the face.

To no particular surprise to Ryan, Doc had little problem keeping up. He had the longest legs of any of them, and despite his feeble appearance he’d hiked all across the Deathlands with the rest of them. After all, he looked decades older than he really was, in terms of his time awake and on his pins; he might be mentally vague on occasion, but he had the endurance of a fairly fit man in his prime.

The person who struggled the most was Ricky. The new kid had traveled around what outlanders called Monster Island each year with his father’s trading caravan. And given how their roads always took them up and down the steep mountains of the Puerto Rican interior, he was strong and not by any means out of shape. But he spent most of his time in his little ville of Nuestra Señora on the island’s south coast, working as apprentice in his uncle’s armory and mechanic shop. It had been a peaceful, pleasant existence, as well as a mostly sedentary one—until the army of the self-styled leader, El Guapo, trashed the ville, chilled his mother and father before his eyes, gunned down his uncle and kidnapped his sister Yamile. That turned out to be the same day Ryan Cawdor and his companions made landfall at the ville in a stolen pirate yacht, hotly pursued by the pirates they’d stolen it from....

But Ricky Morales had the resilience of youth, and he had a core as tough as boot leather. If he hadn’t shown that, along with an acute resourcefulness, courage and loyalty to his friends—more than they showed him, to start with—they would have left him behind to his fate when they jumped out of the redoubt in the monster-swarming mountains.

So he sucked it up and ran.

When they hit the road Ryan’s tongue was all but hanging out, and coated with the dust the horse’s hooves kicked up. It was a constant struggle to blink the grit out of his eye, although that had the helpful side effect of distracting him, however briefly, from the fire in his calves, the exhaustion he carried on his shoulders like a backpack stuffed with lead and the ache in his shoulders from when he went a little too slow or the buckskin’s rider went a little too fast, and his arms got wrenched cruelly halfway from their sockets.

His first reaction when they hit the road was that now the troop would pick up the pace and they were all screwed. But the cavalrymen were well trained and kept good order. They didn’t speed up or slow down a flicker, Ryan could tell, and he was tuned in to little details like that pretty tight by now.

The road was actually decent. Mostly it was what remained of a predark road that Ryan reckoned had once upon a time been two lanes wide. Though cracked here and heaved there, the asphalt surface was mostly flat. It had eroded around the edges, bringing it down to a single lane at best much of the way, so that their actual course tended to meander slightly to follow the surviving pavement, where it had washed out it had been filled in with some kind of fine, hard-packed gravel.

After they’d been on the road awhile, Krysty, riding a couple places ahead of him in the single file, shook her hair back again. She used that as an excuse to glance over her shoulder. Her eyes caught Ryan’s and she gave him just a flash of a smile.

It warmed him like the sunlight. That was conspicuously absent out there in the wind, where it had gotten noticeably chilly. He wasn’t a mind reader, but he still knew Krysty’s thoughts as plain as if she’d yelled them through a loudspeaker: hold on, lover. We’ll get out of this one free and clear. Just the way we always had before.

He sucked in a deep breath, squared his shoulders and carried on.

Chapter Three

The size of the Protectors’ camp took Ryan by surprise. About a hundred tents of various sizes and shapes were laid out with mathematical precision in a square grid of “streets.”

In the center was a cleared space with a big tent at one end of it. Actually it was a cluster of bigger-than-average tents, clumped around one with a large room and what seemed like several lesser wings to it. The troop stopped in front of this one and dismounted.

Though it was very early in the morning, Captain Stone sent a rider galloping ahead to bring word to the baron that they were bringing in some captives. Which in turn was evidently an event of some note, since not only did the commander haul his butt out of a warm bedroll, but when the captives were prodded into the biggest tent at bayonet-point he also had a cluster of what had to be his senior officers gathered around him.

Lanterns filled the big canvas-walled room with yellow glow and the tang of kerosene. One man was seated, while the others stood around him, their eyes baggy and bleary from getting roused from their own bunks.

“Kneel before Baron Jed Kylie of Hugoville,” a sergeant barked. This was a new one, blond and fresh-faced, who seemed to have charge of a small bodyguard detail. Their uniforms, which in the light Ryan could make out now were blue, looked fancier than the ones on the patrol that captured them, somehow. “Glorious general and commander in chief of the ever-victorious Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association!”

Good thing they cut short the title some, Ryan thought. Otherwise we’d be here all night before they stopped walking all around the muzzle of the blaster and got to the damned trigger.

He was tired, and whether he was going to sleep on the ground as a prisoner, or lie cooling in the open air staring up at the stars, he and his friends were going to rest soon. He wanted to get right to that, whichever way it came.

The one-eyed man knelt right away. It didn’t even jog his pride. They’d done worse to survive.

They had survived. And the smile he’d gotten from Krysty had reminded him that they would this time, too.

Jak, of course, had to make trouble about it. The bodyguards looked outraged by his refusal to bend his knee. But the trooper from Stone’s patrol who herded him in gave him a quick disinterested jab of his carbine-butt in the kidney, and down Jak went, gasping and glaring, with his hair hanging in his furious face like bleached seaweed.

“So,” Baron Jed said, leaning forward in his folding camp chair and squinting. Or Ryan thought he was squinting, anyway. His face was such a mass of seams and wrinkles it was hard enough to see his brown eyes to begin with. “What have we here.”

“Trespassers, Baron General,” announced the familiar brass notes of Stone’s voice. “We caught them in the hills by where Dirty Leg Creek crosses the Corn Mill Road.”

“Ah.” Baron Jed sat upright again. He was a skinny little specimen, although the way his blue tunic was tailored couldn’t hide the fact he had more than a bit of a kettle belly hanging off the front of his wiry frame. His head started wide with a shock of sandy-colored hair and tapered steadily to a long chin that looked like you could use it as the thin end of a wedge to split rails with. His nose was long and thin, the mouth a bloodless slash.

“They got women, Dad,” a big blocky redheaded kid who stood behind the baron’s right shoulder said. “I like them.”

“At ease, Buddy,” Jed said, irritation briefly twisting his face even tighter. “We got business to attend to.”

The youth looked eighteen, with a broad freckled face and mean brown eyes. He had a saber with a bucket hilt buckled to one hip and some kind of handblaster in a flapped holster on the other. Whether he could use either one was a question Ryan reckoned remained open. He had yellow metal bars on his collar; if the Protectors’ army followed the conventions of the long-dead U.S. Army—and from what Ryan had seen so far, they did—that made him a captain.

He let the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile that would almost be perceptible from the other side of it. He had to be stupe, mebbe even a simp, Ryan thought. Otherwise Buddy would be a full colonel, at least.

“So,” Jed said, “One-Eye. You’re the leader. You talk. Explain your presence on the holy soil of the Protectors’ Association.”

The lie was so well practiced Ryan could have recited it in his sleep. Most of it wasn’t even a lie; that made it all easier, of course.

“We’re just travelers, Baron,” he said. “We come down the ’Sippi to Nubuque and are headed west looking for work.”

“You lie,” said the officer who stood to the baron’s left. He was a dried-up specimen even smaller than Jed himself. His skin seemed to have shrunk right down onto the skull protruding above his high uniform collar. All the color seemed to have been bleached out of him as well, except for the vivid blue of the scar that ran down the right side of his face, and the blue eyes that stared like inmates from some kind of crazy-hatch windows. He slapped a pair of gloves from one white hand into the other as he spoke in clipped, vicious words.

“Relax, Colonel Toth,” Jed said. Ryan knew the man for what he was: a sec boss, and a triple-nasty specimen. “Let’s let them have their say.”

He frowned at Ryan.

“But west lie hard-core Deathlands,” he said. “The worst hot spots and thorium swamps in the whole Midwest. If not the continent. Why would you be going that way? Hey?”

“Reckon there’ll be less competition for gigs, anyway,” J.B. said.