No Man's Land (23 page)

Krysty threw the weapon away. She’d be relying on a black powder Peacemaker now, with her little Smith & Wesson 640 blaster as backup.

At her side Ricky was sorting through his preloaded mags and loose cartridges, looking as if he’d bitten into a burrito to find a fresh dog turd.

“Leave that for when it’ll do the most good, son,” J.B. told him. “Use this while it lasts.”

He handed the boy a scabbied Smith & Wesson Model 3 reproduction revolver chambered to shoot .44-40 cartridges, like Krysty’s Winchester repeater. Of course, the six in the cylinder were all it had.

“Why don’t they just rush us en masse and be done with it?” asked Mildred, who was also using a Peacemaker to conserve their store of .38 ammo hers and Krysty’s handblasters both used. She wasn’t happy about it—her ZKR 551 target pistol was a tool tailored specifically toward her needs, and what she was used to using. The Peacemaker was heavy and balanced differently, along with being single-action, meaning Mildred needed to cock it manually for every shot.

J.B. laughed. “Fear,” he said. “They want to commit minimal men to taking us down, ’cause they’re afraid if they send too many troops against us, the other army’ll take advantage of the split to jump them. Same reason they don’t just say, nuke it, and all charge headlong into the ville at once. There’s no knowing how that kinda goat-screw would shake out. And neither baron intends to come away empty-handed. Or chilled.”

He glanced from one enemy camp to the other. They weren’t hard to see. They had built campfires, presumably to feed as many troops as they could while the waiting game played out.

“Then again, the bastards know they don’t need to send a big force against us,” he said. “All they have to do is keep pecking at us. Sooner or later, they’ll get unlucky.”

Jak whistled softly and touched Krysty’s arm from behind. She looked up to see a new force riding out from the Protector encampment.

“Could be now,” J.B. said.

“So let’s take as many of them as we can,” Krysty said, as thirty enemy horsemen charged their tiny clump of shielding hills.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Ryan stalked through the surrealistic angles and blackness of the abandoned ville. His senses, especially his hearing, were tuned as sharp as he could get them. His passage made no more noise than his own shadow, cast irregularly by the rising half-moon.

He was doing the unexpected.

It wasn’t as if being on the short end of the odds was anything new to him, and what he’d learned long ago was that when the smart odds said you were chilled, the triple-crazy thing was the way to go.

Of course, it had to be the
right
triple-crazy thing.

The smart thing to do would have been to try to keep as much distance between himself and the inhumanly efficient killer as possible. But what good would that do? Even if Ryan could somehow find the redoubt entrance and fort himself up inside so well Snake Eye couldn’t get at him, the mercie could just pick off Ryan’s companions when they tried to join him. Which eventually they would do, to find and help Ryan—if they weren’t overwhelmed by the tiny little fact they were facing not one but two entire armies bent on seeing the color of their insides.

The smart thing, maybe, was to blow this whole ville, forget about the redoubt and try to escape overland. The companions had already rejected that option as a bad play.

And anyway, Ryan saw Snake Eye as a problem that needed solving now. His obsession with Ryan and company wasn’t altogether sane, and that was the root of the thing. He knew too much about them. While the Deathlands were large, and the companions could pop up in any part of them at any time, Snake Eye had a feel for the kind of situations they tended to find themselves in, as he’d shown over and over already during their brief acquaintance. There was a chance they would cross paths with the reptilian mutie mercie again. And next time he might go directly for the kill, rather than dick around for his amusement as he was doing now.

Snake Eye had set the terms out plain as the hand at the end of Ryan’s arm: the only way this ended,
truly
ended, was with either him or Ryan Cawdor staring up at the sky.

So Ryan meant to settle it, here and now, whichever way it shook out.

He was circling back toward where they’d had their first encounter. He was sure Snake Eye had moved on from there. He also suspected the mercie thought Ryan would move away from him, best he could.

It was the smart thing to do. The only sane thing to do.

Ryan was staking his life on the fact that the mutie wouldn’t be able to hear him coming, and that sooner or later Ryan would hear
him
. It wasn’t much of an edge, but it was the only one he had.

He moved in short, swift rushes, cover to cover, mindful of silhouetting himself in the open. It was something he couldn’t avoid, but could minimize by carefully picking his route. He would have had more and better options had he been willing to scale ancient fences or random stacks of trash that had accreted in the narrow streets and narrower alleys, but he couldn’t do that without unacceptable risk of making noise. So he went around; and if he couldn’t go around, he went elsewhere, and when he went through a building he moved very deliberately and stayed near the walls where the floor was less likely to creak and betray him.

The ville wasn’t large, but it was still a daunting maze in the moonlight, offering a bewildering variety of hidden ways—and hiding places.

By moving to the outskirts, Ryan got around behind where the shots had come from. Now he was working his careful way inward, following the same path he’d taken before.

As he paused at the exit of another junk-jumbled alley he heard a whisper, as of a hip brushing a chunk of half-rotted timber.

While his hearing wasn’t any more precisely directional than any other normal human’s, Ryan had a good notion where the noise came from: down the street to his left. Strain as he might, he saw no movement that way.

Another sound—the crunch of something beneath a boot heel. Snake Eye might not even be aware he was making those noises. They were the kind of noises only an expert could avoid in a setting such as this.

An expert like Ryan Cawdor.

He slipped around the corner of a building and into the street, then crossed quickly. Keeping to the shadows, he moved as quickly as stealth allowed toward the building with the fallen-in roof at the block’s end.

If he’s doing this to sucker me, Ryan thought with a certain grim amusement, it’s working. But this was his only high card, so he was going all-in with it.

Ryan reached the corner. He could smell a trace of ancient charring. The frame of the window he’d just past had been turned to charcoal by a fire that had somehow left the outer walls mostly intact. He paused, drew a deep breath. Extending the blaster in his left hand, he leaned around the corner.

A shadowy form of a tall, lean figure in a long frock coat stood not thirty feet away, bolt upright, his back to him.

Ryan took a flash sight on the center of that back and triggered a double-tap.

Impossibly the tall shadow was already moving. It ducked and whirled into a doorway, out of the line of fire.

Ryan threw himself backward as two lightning shots blasted back at him. He landed on his butt, then scrambled to his feet. He heard the crunch of boots walking on the hardscrabble street with no effort at keeping quiet.

“I have you now, Cawdor,” Snake Eye said. “If you stand and face me, I’ll make it quick. My word of honor.”

Fuck that, Ryan thought. The crazy thing was, he reckoned the mercie meant it.

Not that he intended to do what he was told and find out. He turned and raced back along the street, ducking into a doorway just ahead of another gunshot. This one missed by so little he felt its hot breath on the back of his neck.

* * *

L
OOKING
CAUTIOUSLY
AROUND
a corner, Snake Eye glimpsed a tall shape in a long coat duck into yet another doorway. He laughed quietly to himself.

“Enough fun,” he said softly. “Time to end this charade.”

He walked openly down the street. He was unconcerned that his enemy might pop up and shoot him. He knew for a warm certainty now that he could blast first, before even Ryan Cawdor could loose a round.

Because he was Snake Eye, and he truly was the best.

“Let me sweeten the pot, Cawdor,” he called as he strolled slowly toward the doorway into which his quarry had vanished. The buildings on this street block were one-story structures, with flat roofs. He kept alert to the chance his prey might manage to scramble up and pop a shot from a rooftop.

It wouldn’t make any difference. He held a blaster in either black-taloned hand, and was equally proficient with both.

“If you stop running and stand and face me, I’ll make it quick for your friends, too,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t think I forgot about your sweet-cheeked little redhead bitch and the rest. I took a contract on all of you, and I always fulfill a contract.”

He came to the door. “Ready or not...” he began.

And stepped around into the doorway.

By the faint moonlight filtering in through door and window he made out the gleam of an eyeball, the curve of a scuffed boot toe. He even could make out the shape of a tall man.

Unbelievably, his victim was sitting in a chair passively awaiting him. Snake Eye didn’t know whether to be disappointed or impressed: pathetic resignation, or final act of supreme bravado?

That didn’t matter, either. He didn’t even bother ducking out of the doorway’s fatal funnel. He had tested his opponent’s metal, and was supremely confident he could spot any motion—and blast first.

“I don’t know what your game is, Ryan Cawdor,” he said, “but it ends now. Stand up on your two feet and face me like a man.”

Instead the man illuminated his own face with a small flashlight. His face was gaunt and wrinkled. His two eyes were blue, but not the winter-sky blue of Ryan Cawdor’s single orb.

“Tanner?” Snake Eye said incredulously. “What are you doing here, old man?”

“Sitting in a chair facing you.”

Snake Eye laughed incredulously. “Cawdor can’t beat me. Surely
you
don’t think you’re faster than I am?”

“Nooo,” Doc said, drawing the word out long. “But that bullet is.”

Knowledge struck Snake Eye like a hammer made of ice.

“Shit,” he said, and started to spin.

Doc was right. Something that seemed to be the size of the Earth slammed into Snake Eye’s back. His vision flamed briefly red.

Then faded to black.

* * *

B
Y
WELL
-
TRAINED
HABIT
Ryan worked the bolt action of his Steyr Scout as he rode the recoil. The empty brass bounced with a chiming note on the attic floorboards as he brought his scope back online.

A good marksman knew when he’d made a good shot. Ryan felt that now.

He saw what he knew he’d see: a body sprawled in the doorway of the abandoned shop Doc had lured the mercie into.

It hadn’t been a challenging shot for Ryan. Even with a bum right shoulder that hurt like fire from the recoil of a powerful 7.62 mm cartridge in a light weapon. It had been more of a challenge making his way to this attic above the second floor of a narrow frame house without breaking his neck. But he made it, and gained an unobstructed shot across the low flat roof of a neighboring building to the doorway a street over.

Yellow light blew out the vacant doorway and empty windows in a quick flash. The supine body jerked. Doc was doing the wise thing: making sure with a shot from his LeMat.

Ryan grinned. He felt cold bleakness all the way through to his marrow.

“You might have been better than me,” he said softly to his definitely chilled enemy. “But definitely not smarter than me.”

* * *

I
T
TOOK
BUT
A
MATTER
of minutes for Doc and Ryan to find the entry to the hidden redoubt. Snake Eye had thoughtfully left the corpse of one of the greencoat sentries sprawled before the entry to the storehouse he’d been guarding.

Those few short minutes seemed endless to Ryan. He could hear the crackle of blasterfire from just outside the ville, knew that his lover and his companions were sorely pressed. Could they possibly hold out long enough?

They’d have to. Just as he had to do what remained to be done. Just like they always did.

Doc’s flashlight showed an open trapdoor with another chill lying beside it. He looked at Ryan and raised a brow.

“We need to know,” Ryan said.

“Indeed,” Doc agreed.

Moving past him, Ryan flicked on a flashlight of his own. The beam shone on a concrete floor a story down and revealed a rectangle of darkness to one side—darkness rimmed by the glimmer of vanadium steel. They had found the redoubt, no question.

But have we found a way out, Ryan wondered, or just a well-stocked rattrap? Maybe it was only a predark stockpile and not a redoubt at all.

As he’d told Doc, they had to know.

He descended into the cold and waiting earth.

Chapter Thirty-Three

A rider aimed a sawed-off shotgun at Krysty from the back of his rearing horse. She stuck her left hand out and blasted two quick shots from her Smith & Wesson 640. It was a terrible position to shoot from, but the muzzle of the handblaster’s abbreviated barrel was no more than a foot from its target.

The man bellowed in gut-shot agony. His scattergun emptied both barrels at the sky. He fell over as his horse bolted.

The Uplander cavalry was all over their little position in their nest of hills like soldier ants. She spotted another Uplander cavalryman leveling a revolver at one of her friends from about thirty feet away. Aiming her Peacemaker hastily with her right hand she fired at him. The heavy soft-lead .45-caliber slug smashed his bearded lower jaw.

His screams turned to gurgles as blood flooded his throat. He dropped his handblaster to clutch his face with both hands, his horse carrying him away.

A heavy thud from behind drew Krysty’s attention. Looking over her shoulder as she turned, she saw another soldier looming over her, his cavalry saber upraised. She had no chance to defend against or escape the blow. The keen curved blade swept for her face.

Something whirred past the left side of Krysty’s face, then something long swung into her field of vision, meeting the saber with a clack and throwing her attacker’s arm out wide. She flung out her left hand and blasted off the three shots remaining in her .38.

Two shots missed. The third bullet hit his sword shoulder as he fought to recover from having his weapon batted hard.

The object that had saved her from the sword flashed back into view. She recognized her discarded Winchester longblaster, held by the barrel, as its butt-stock shattered against the soldier’s forehead.

As he fell away. Krysty waved her arm, deflecting his eye-rolling chestnut from trampling her as it fled.

Jak, his white hair dyed pink with blood, leaped on the fallen greencoat with a knife, held ice-pick-style, in one hand. With rattlesnake speed it pumped up and down four or five times as he stabbed the supine man.

She heard the roar of J.B.’s shotgun somewhere close at hand, saw Mildred go down beneath the flailing hooves of a cavalry horse. Impossibly, she rolled to the side and relative safety before the hooves came hammering down where she had fallen.

The M-4000 bellowed again. The right side of the rider’s green-plaid flannel erupted into shreds and red spray. He swayed but somehow kept his seat as his horse, too, took off back toward the Uplander Army.

Krysty had her Peacemaker leveled, hammer cocked, swinging this way and that, seeking targets. Impossibly, she found none. Did we win again? she wondered wildly. Somehow?

“Aww,
shit
.”

She looked around to see Mildred on her knees, clutching a bleeding upper left arm with a hand that still held her ZKR blaster. She was looking south.

Following her gaze, Krysty realized that all they had won was another few heartbeats of life, because a fresh group of bluecoats was just hitting the bottom of their clump of hills from the south.

A blaster cracked, its loud authority proclaiming it to be a high-powered modern longblaster.

Krysty’s heart jumped into her throat. She recognized that weapon, as she did the voice of the man who had just fired it in the air for everybody’s attention.

“Listen up, everybody!” Ryan shouted. “All of you—both sides.”

“Ryan?” Mildred said. “Are you out of your mind?”

By the moonlight he was plainly visible, a few steps south of the dilapidated huddle of Heartbreak, waving his Steyr Scout over his head with both hands in lieu of a white flag.

“We found the redoubt,” he shouted. “It’s right here. The thing you’re looking for.”

“Ryan!” Krysty yelled. “Don’t tell them!”

“Find anyway,” Jak said. He stood at her side looking as if somebody had dumped a bucket of blood over his head.

“It’s what you care about, right? Not us. But you can waste time trying to chill us while the other side goes for the loot! Make your choice.”

“He is,” Mildred said. “He is out of his mind.”

“Crazy like a fox, girl,” J.B. said. He had his pack on his back and a huge grin on his face as he handed Mildred her own backpack. “Get ready to move.”

The bluecoat cavalry was milling around at the foot of the hill, looking from the companions, to their own lines, and back again in confusion.

Somebody handed her her own backpack. She shouldered it without looking around.

“It’s all just waiting for you,” Ryan called to the rival armies. “Are you going to grab it? Or let the other side have it?”

“Kill the outlanders!” a voice roared from the Uplander camp.

Krysty looked east. The new Alliance Army commander, Colonel Turnbull, was rearing his horse out in front of his own lines and waving his sword. “I command you, take the hill!”

She saw his body jerk. He swayed, then he slumped to the grass as the sound of three quick blaster shots reached her ears.

“Seize the treasure, you fools!” a woman yelled.

In the front of the Uplander lines, Krysty saw Jessie Rae Siebert, her pertly pretty face distorted by passion. At her side stood a greencoat officer with long pale locks and a goatee, holding his own blaster muzzle-high in the air.

“For the Alliance, and you Baron!” the blond man roared. “Go!”

“Run for it!” another voice cried.

Ryan
.

“We’re good,” Krysty heard J.B. say. “Go.”

Cheering hoarsely the two armies surged toward each other as Krysty joined her companions scrambling down the hill toward Ryan. He had his longblaster held across his chest, now, ready to respond to threats, but not threatening anybody.

Shots popped as they reached the flat. Krysty’s teeth clenched, and she anticipated the slam of bullets at any second. Or the sight of one of her friends going down—especially J.B. and Mildred, laboring under the weight of double packs.

But no shots seemed to come their way. No bullets moaned past or kicked up divots of turf as they pounded toward the ruined ville, though screams and shouts had joined the deafening thunder of blasterfire.

The two armies had thoughts only for the hidden treasure, and the only thing that really stood between them and it.

Their lifelong blood enemies.

Krysty glanced back once over her shoulder as she approached Ryan, who continued to wait alertly, just in time to see the two masses of men and horses crash into each other behind her and begin to fight like packs of rabid dogs.

* * *

R
YAN
STOOD
outside the mat-trans unit with his backpack riding his shoulders, ignoring the pain that caused him. His longblaster was still ready. He would be the last inside, wouldn’t budge until all of his companions were safely ready to jump.

And miraculously, they all were, though they were dinged, gashed and battered.

J.B. flashed him a fast grin as he limped past. “We beat the Devil at his own game again, didn’t we, Ryan?”

“That we did, my friend,” he said. “That we did.”

Ricky and Jak went in just ahead of Ryan. Holding himself upright by the sheer iron of his will, he joined his companions.

“So,” Ricky Morales said, his eyes huge in a face that was scarcely recognizable behind a mask of grime and blood, “who do you think’ll win up there?”

“Who cares?” Ryan grunted, as he closed the door to the mat-trans unit and hurried to sit beside Krysty.

As the disks in the floor began to glow and a fine mist started to envelop his companions, Ryan realized that they had barely cheated death this time.

He hoped that they’d jump to somewhere peaceful, somewhere they could bide awhile.

Ryan figured it was time they caught a break.

* * * * *