Bloodfire

Since they were robbing a thief, Hawk paid no attention to them and splashed directly to the empty horse and carefully placed his bundle across the saddle. The horse whinnied at the tremendous weight and shuffled its hooves about unhappily, while Hawk lashed the bag firmly in place with lengths of rope and a few leather belts.

“All set,” Hawk declared, hurrying to a second horse and climbing into the saddle.

Twelve other horses stood before the open gate of the ville, and a small wooden cart. Eight men and two women were in the saddles, all of them heavily armed with blasters from the former baron’s private arsenal, the woman also carrying bulky packs of food and assorted supplies. Everything was soaking wet from the constant rain of the water plume, the roar muted to a low rumble.

“Black dust, I can’t believe you got it,” a sec man said, shaking his head.

“Gonna need it when we face the Trader,” Hawk growled, pulling a longblaster from the boot and checking the load. “Did you get the stand?”

A burly man with a full beard grunted in assent. “Yes, sir. It was bitch and a half to drag through the mud, but we got her here.”

“Good job, Mikel,” Hawk said bluntly. Always compliment your troops on a tough job. It only made them work harder on the next task. Gaza was a fool. Dogs and sluts should be whipped until they obeyed, not valuable property like horses and men.

Hawk had gone after the 25 mm cannon from the keep himself. He couldn’t trust anybody else not to run away with the blaster. A man could almost buy a ville with a weapon like that. Unfortunately, it couldn’t be fired by hand. The recoil would have torn off a person’s arms, but there was a tripod from a .50-cal that had been altered by a blacksmith. Mebbe that would work, mebbe not, but it was the only hope of controlling the monster rapid-fire.

Hawk sheathed the longblaster. “Ammo?”

“In the cart,” one of the women said, jerking a thumb. “Got all we can carry from the junkyard without busting an axle. Almost a thousand rounds.”

“Well done. Let’s ride,” Hawk said, shaking the reins. “We got some chilling to do.”

“Gaza?” Wall Sergeant Henny asked, shaking the water from his face.

“For starters,” Hawk growled.

As the armed sec men splashed through the sagging front gate of the dying ville, they entered a shimmering saltwater plain that spread to the distant dunes, the searing heat of the sun causing it to steam into mists as if this were the birth of a new world.

Even more than Hawk wanted Gaza screaming under his knife, the new baron needed to meet up with that black bitch who traveled with the outlanders. He had felt she was going to be trouble the moment they entered the ville, and he’d been right. Now the ville was gone, and while Ryan may have pulled the trigger, it was that bitch Mildred who loaded the blaster. Hawk planned on keeping her alive for a lot longer than Gaza, and in a lot more pain. He had once heard about some old sec men called Nazis, real preDark hardcases with some twisted ideas about revenge. Hawk liked their style and remembered some of the really good parts. Yeah, trees would grow, fed by the blood and screams of the hated woman before he finally let her go into death.

SLUGGISHLY, the companions awoke in cool shadow with a steady wind howling in their ears. Blinking at the darkness, Ryan realized it wasn’t shade, but night. Craning his neck, the man saw a scattering of stars peeking through the roiling clouds of tox chems high overhead. Fireblast, how long had they been unconscious?

From what he could see, the companions were sprawled in the corner of a piece of building, the brick wall forming a triangle, with the desert wind howling around the sides. They had been moved from the dead Drinker and could be anywhere by now. Reaching for his blaster, Ryan was consoled to find the weapon still at his hip, his Steyr SSG-70 stuck through the lashings of his backpack, the saddle nearby. However, there were no signs of the horses.

Squinting against the windblown sand, Ryan could vaguely see that ahead of them lay more pieces of preDark building, the smashed windows looking across the desert like the eyes of a corpse. A thick layer of sand covered the paved street, and no structure rose more than a few stories until abruptly ending in ragged destruction. Beyond these few tattered remnants of the lost civilization, only a flat, endless desert stretched to the distant horizon.

Forcing himself to stand, Ryan shuffled over to the other companions and shook each one to rouse them from sleep. Everybody stirred easily enough, and once figuring out where they were located, immediately ran a check on their possessions. To Ryan’s eye, it seemed as if their packs and bags hadn’t been touched. Even the water bags were present, including the poisoned leather pouch from Rockpoint.

The wind kicked up sand and salt, and it howled straight through one open window. Going to the empty window frame, Jak took one of the plastic shower curtains they had salvaged from the Texas redoubt as a makeshift rain poncho and used four knives to tack it in place, covering the opening. The force of the wind lessened noticeably, and the companions could fully open their eyes now without salt being blown into them.

“A plastic shower curtain is the most massively useful thing a hitchhiker can carry,” Doc rumbled in amusement, deliberately misquoting an ancient novel.

“Check your things,” Ryan demanded, his words making him wince. Once, very long ago, he and Finn had been involved in a drinking contest that stopped only when the ville bar ran out of shine. The next day Ryan was so sick he thought death was near and welcomed it with open arms. This was worse.

“Looks like everything is okay,” Dean whispered, running his hands over a backpack. Checking his blaster, the boy used a bowie knife to open a round and inspect the greasy cordite inside. Nope, the blasters hadn’t been tampered with and the ammo was live.

“Why did they take the horses?” Doc queried. “If it was to keep us here, then surely they could have bound us prisoners instead.”

“Mebbe got do by choice,” Jak muttered, using his good arm to run stiff fingers through his unruly mane of snowy hair. “Why do hard way, when got no choice?”

“That makes chilling sense, Mr. Lauren.”

The teenager shrugged as he made sure his collection of knives was intact hidden in his clothing. His wounded arm had come out of its sling, but was still otherwise okay.

“Passive-aggressive recruitment techniques.” Mildred snorted in disdain, fingering a rip in her flannel shirt where a button had come off somewhere. Probably while they were being transported to this place. “Well, that’s a new one on me.”

“Shh, not so loud,” J.B. said, holding his glasses in one hand while massaging the side of his face. Then he noticed Krysty sitting quietly by herself. “How you doing, Krysty? You don’t look so good.”

Hunched over, Krysty said nothing in reply, her limp hair moving freely in the wind.

“You okay, lover?” Ryan asked gently, kneeling by her side. “I’m surprised you didn’t pass out before the rest of us, since you have some mental abilities.”

She glumly nodded, moving as if every atom of her body was in agonizing pain. “Worse,” the redhead muttered, hanging her head.

“What do you mean?”

“I stayed awake,” Krysty said woodenly. “I…saw everything. They fought each other with nightmares, demons in the mind. Alar aced Kalr with visions that drove him insane and cracked his mind until he died.”

She looked up with tears streaming down her face. “Gaia, help me, I saw it all! Everything! The things they did to each other…the…I…”

The woman began to shake violently and Ryan comforted her in his powerful arms, rocking slightly as if she were a child while the woman wept unashamedly on his chest.

“I got a pint of shine,” J.B. said quietly.

“Get it,” Ryan ordered softly.

“Just a minute,” Mildred countered and, rummaging through her satchel, Mildred dug out a battered tin canteen and passed it around to the others. Doing a jump through a mat-trans unit always made them ill—headaches, nausea, muscle cramps, which she attributed to a disruption of the human nervous system for that split nanosecond they were pure energy being shifted from one redoubt to another. The physician had been working a cure to counter the jump sickness using alcohol, herbs and what painkiller she could scrounge in the ruins or trade spare ammo for from other healers.

The companions relaxed and slumped gratefully against the brick walls. Mildred hadn’t found a potion that worked yet, but this batch seemed to be effective in countering the aftereffects of surviving a death battle between two mutie telepaths.

“Good batch, Millie,” J.B. said, passing her back the canteen.

“Thanks,” she replied, screwing the cap back on the empty container. “I grabbed some things back at Rockpoint to use at the Grandee redoubt. Came in useful sooner than expected.”

Ryan agreed, and the brew had to have even worked on Krysty as her hair started to revive, and soon the woman was limp against him breathing deep and regularly.

“She should be okay,” Mildred said. “Just let her sleep for as long as she wants.”

“Then we get fuck out,” Jak snarled, fixing the sling on his arm.

Ryan fixed the teenager with his one eye. “That loads my blaster,” he agreed. “The sooner we leave the better. Don’t know if I could take surviving another of their mind fights.”

“I wonder if the only reason we’re in this good a condition is because of the hundreds of jumps we’ve made,” Dean said, leaning his back against the brick wall. “Sort of hardened us to getting our brains scrambled.”

“Excuse me,” a new voice said. “What a redoubt?”

Caught by surprise by her sudden appearance, the companions said nothing to the member of the Core standing in the doorway, holding a sagging bundle of horsehide. For a brief moment, Ryan debated chilling the masked girl, but where could they hide the body from people who traveled underground? But something had to be done and quickly. The existence of the redoubts was the greatest secret of the preDark world, and they had no intention of sharing it with anybody.

“This is a redoubt,” Mildred said with a smile. “It means a fort, or a protected place, and this brick wall protects us from the wind.”