Bloodfire

Leaning forward, Ryan scowled from his horse. “He died fighting,” he said slowly. “Must have been an animal, something too big to reach him behind the cactus needles.”

“Why an animal and not a person?” Mildred asked, then she answered herself. “Of course. Because a man would have taken the rounds afterward. Check.”

“Doesn’t really matter, chilled is chilled,” Ryan stated pragmatically. “More importantly, those rounds look intact to me. Might be live.”

“Any chance they’re .44 calibers?” Doc asked hopefully. He was well stocked with black powder and miniballs for the LeMat, but he was dangerously low on bullets for the Webley.

J.B. adjusted his glasses. “I’d say those were .45. Sorry, Doc.”

The old man shrugged in resignation.

As J.B. started divesting himself of bags and weapons, Mildred walked over to the plants.

“Don’t bother, John,” Mildred said, starting to reach between the cactus, “I’ll get them.”

But as she knelt in the sand, there was a whispery sound and the companions turned to see an incredibly thin figure rise from the desert sand and lurch forward to hurl a spear directly at Mildred!

Caught by surprise, the woman didn’t react in time and the metal rod went straight past her, coming so close she could feel the wind of its passage. Then she dived aside and rolled over, drawing her .38 ZKR when there came a high-pitched keen and the cactus burst apart, writhing green tendrils streaming into view from inside the plant. Moving like uncoiling snakes, the tendrils stabbed for Mildred, and she cut loose with her blaster just as the rest of the companions did the same.

The Devil’s Fork screamed even louder as the hail of lead punched a dozen holes through its stalks and branches, one of the tendrils getting blown off the main trunk. Thin pink “blood” gushed from the wounds, and the mutie went wild, every tendril thrashing about and grabbing for the nearby norms.

A horse was caught in the throat by a tendril, its barbed needles embedding deep in the flesh like fish-hooks and dragging the screaming animal closer. Doc slashed out with his sword and cut through the ropy tendril, a well of pink ichor gushing from the wound. Another grabbed Jak around the neck, but as it tightened its grip, the tendril fell apart, severed by the razor blades hidden in the camou covering of the teenager’s jacket.

J.B. aimed and fired his shotgun as the companions moved away from the bizarre killer, the keening plant jerking as it was hit by another barrage of lead. Then a deafening report split the day and the main trunk erupted at ground level, the booming echo of the explosion rolling along the dunes like imprisoned thunder.

Lowering the smoking barrel of the Holland & Holland Nitro .475 Express, Krysty broke the breech, the two spent shells popping out to fall away as she thumbed in two more.

Revealed amid the smashed skeleton and torn pieces of the cactus was a pulsating wound of exposed organs, ligaments and tendons. Ryan fired two more rounds from his SIG-Sauer directly down the gullet of the creature and it went still, the pumping ichor slowing to a mere trickle and then stopping completely.

“Another mutie plant.” Dean scowled, dropping the spent clip from his blaster and slipping in a fresh one.

“Animal, not plant!” Jak cursed, using a knife to pry away the needle covered bits of the creature still clinging to his jacket. Oddly, it reminded him of the hellish ivy-covered town in Ohio where they nearly lost Krysty.

“Damn good camouflage,” Mildred said, shakily reloading her blaster and pocketing the empty brass for later reloading. “Certainly fooled me into thinking it was merely a plant.”

“But he knew,” Ryan said, the barrel of his blaster now aimed rock steady at the stranger wrapped in rags.

Doc swung the LeMat’s barrel in the same direction. The skinny person said nothing at those actions, simply standing there in silence, the dry wind tugging at the tattered ends of its wrappings.

“He saved Millie’s life with that spear,” J.B. said, racking the pump on his shotgun to chamber a fresh round.

“Unless he meant to ace her and that was a miss,” Ryan pointed out.

“Until proved otherwise,” Doc pronounced, “the enemy of my enemy is still my goddamn enemy.”

Thumbing back the hammer on her .38 ZKR target pistol, Mildred briefly gave the old man a puzzled look, then returned to the matter at hand. This wasn’t the time and place to find out where that paranoid quote had come from.

Just then the horse attacked by the underground mutie fell to its knees and started to shake. Ryan never took his eye off the stranger, but since it was his horse Doc rushed over to see what was the problem. As he got close, the scholar could see that the needles of the mutie were still sunk deep into the throat of the horse, red blood flowing from the severed end of the tendril. By the Three Kennedys, he thought, the piece of the dead mutie was acting like a tap and draining all of the blood from the horse!

Whipping out his eating knife, Doc tried to figure out where to begin trying to remove the needles in the horse’s throat when the animal gently lowered its head to the sandy ground as if it were going to sleep, then simply stopped breathing. Almost immediately, the blood ceased to flow on to the salty ground.

Standing helpless near the dead beast, Doc blinked moist eyes at the sight for a moment, then drew in a sharp breath and turned away.

“I am impressed. Drinkers are very hard to kill,” the stranger spoke unexpectedly, his words dry and raspy as if spoken through a long tunnel. “If I had known your iron weapons worked, I would not have revealed myself.”

“So it could drag us all down for dinner?” Ryan growled in a voice like granite. “It lived underground, and so do you. This seems pretty straightforward to me. So what was the deal? It hauls us down and you share in the food?”

The being tilted his head. “You walk the surface,” he said. “Does that make you friends of the rattler and the stickie?”

“Fair enough,” Ryan said, easing his stance but not turning away the blaster. “So who are you?”

As if in reply, a thrilling whistle came from the stranger, and the sand behind him shifted as more of the beings rose into view from belowground. Even as the companions aimed their collection of blasters at the newcomers, dozens more of the wrapped people came from the sand, then even more on both sides. Turning about slowly, Ryan and the others saw they were now surrounded by an army of the beings, every one of them armed with a needle-tipped metal spear or sicklelike longknifes. The ebony blades were worn from constant use, the handles stained with dried blood.

The figures stood at average height, sporting two legs, two arms and head, but each was so heavily wrapped in strips of loose cloth it was impossible to tell if they were men or women, even if they were norms or muties.

“I am Alar,” the first stranger said, “the leader of the Core.”

Even through the thick wrappings, Ryan could hear the capital letter being used. The Core, eh? That could mean anything. But there was something oddly familiar about how the being held the short spears in his bandaged hands, and Ryan grunted softly as he recognized the military postures from the guards at the Anthill. These were the descendants of army troops, copying the port arms and such of drilling troops. Only they were armed with spears instead of longblasters. The Core as in U.S. Marine Corps, or a nuclear core? Could be either way, and there was no way of telling.

“I’m Ryan,” he said gruffly, then introduced the rest of the companions.

Alar bowed to each, the rest of the Core copying the gesture. At the end, the masked people put away their weapons, and the companions hesitantly did the same. Since they were outnumbered by a fifty-to-one ratio, it seemed prudent to stay on smooth terms with these…people?

“Here you go,” Dean said, walking up with the spear from the Drinker and offering it to the Core leader.

Nodding his head, Alar took the weapon and stabbed it twice into the ground to clean the tip of the sticky pink blood.

“Thank you, small one. A weapon returned is a bond of peace with my people. I grant you free passage through our desert until the next moon.”

“The blessings of Gaia upon you, great leader,” Krysty said, making a gesture in the air too quick to be described.

With a scowl, Ryan asked, “And what happens if we’re still here by the next moon?”

Alar shrugged. “Then you must leave or join the Core forever.”

“Yeah? Nothing more?”

A warm breeze tasting of salt blew over the crowd, making the horses shift about to hide their faces.

“No, Ryan of the horse riders,” Alar said calmly, the sand dancing at his feet. “We are a peaceful people with only one enemy. We welcome all to join the Core.”

Or else you prefer to strike from behind, Ryan thought to himself.

“Sounds good,” J.B. admitted, rubbing his mouth on the back of a hand. “How about we go to your ville and talk. Any chance you got water to trade? We have a few spare blasters that are better for acing a Drinker than those pig-stickers you’re carrying.”

“Ville?” Alar muttered, crouching so that he rested on his heels. “We have no stone place. The desert itself is our home. We live in the sand, on the sand. We are of the sand!”

The entire crowd of masked people shouted a word in an unknown language.