No Man's Land (4 page)

Chapter Four

Like most of the companions, Krysty was capable of falling asleep given the slightest opportunity. Sleep was a commodity as precious as food or water, to anyone who wanted to stay breathing. Like everybody else, except Mildred, Krysty also slept lightly, and came awake at the slightest change in her surroundings.

She smelled him before she even heard the rustle of the tent flap, and the graceless heavy clump of his boots: Buddy, the baron’s redheaded son. He had an unclean scent to him that seemed to come from something more than the fact he didn’t bathe often. The fact he had drenched himself with some kind of awful predark perfume that smelled as if a skunk had been drowned in sugar-water only made it nastier.

She cast a quick look at Mildred, who lay near her in the small tent near the baron’s. Both women had been stripped with ruthless and probably fear-based impersonality by Baron Jed’s bodyguards, before being stuffed willy-nilly into frilly dresses over several layers of underclothing, which apparently their captors found far more suitable to females—even prisoners—than the masculine dress both women wore.

Krysty found it itchy and uncomfortable as well as impractical. Plus she was fairly sure the pink dress clashed with her hair, although the yellow really sort of flattered Mildred.

The unappealing smell of Buddy was followed at once by the apparition of the far less appealing Buddy himself. From up close Krysty could see that the tunic of his blue uniform was carefully tailored to hide more than a substantial start on a paunch.

She knew better than to let that lead her to underestimate the redheaded kid. He still had a chest and broad shoulders that owed precious little to his flab. Plus his square, loose-lipped face, juvenile and freckled though it was, seemed to just radiate malice.

“So,” he said, straightening to his full height as he stepped into the small tent where Krysty and Mildred had been thrown after they were tied up. “What do we have here?”

“Prisoners,” Mildred said sharply, sitting up. “And your daddy told you to keep your grubby hands off us!”

For a moment Buddy’s face fisted and ugly light glinted in his eyes, then he relaxed and laughed. He might not be the brightest candle in the box, but he knew he had the whip hand here, and Krysty could just tell he knew how to use it. Or better, abuse it.

He emitted a halfhearted chuckle. “Well, now, he surely didn’t mean me, his son and heir and all.”

He made a big show of peering left and right, as if the little tent, even with its crates, could hide anything bigger than a healthy rat.

“Anyways, I don’t see my daddy hiding nowheres around here. Do you, girls?”

“You’re about to make a terrible mistake, Buddy,” Mildred said.

He backhanded her, and she fell back on the ground.

Krysty gave him a flat gaze. “Don’t touch me.”

He brayed another laugh, much louder this time.

“What, bitch? Are you so stupe you don’t know your sweet round ass belongs to me right this very minute? In fact mebbe I’ll just give you a good old fuck in it right now and let you know how things stand around here, you red-haired gaudy slut!”

Leaning down, he enfolded the back of her head with a huge, clumsy paw and crushed his mouth to hers. His tongue pushed against her tight-sealed lips like an urgent worm. His breath smelled as if a mouse had crawled in his mouth and died there. Last week.

His other hand groped her crotch, though what he might actually feel down there through all the layers of heavy fabric his father’s goons had wrapped her lower reaches in she couldn’t even guess.

By way of response Krysty abruptly head-butted him. It squashed his nose. Blood squirted out his nostrils and down over his mouth as he stumbled backward into Mildred. She caught the still-stunned youth around the neck from behind with both legs. She squeezed her powerful thighs together until his face turned red.

Krysty writhed to her feet. The companions’ gear was stored at one side of the tent. The clothes she and Mildred had been wearing had been discarded beside them. She turned her back and knelt, while Buddy struggled futilely to escape Mildred’s grip.

Her fingers found what they were looking for. Deftly she manipulated the little hideout knife from her clothing to sever the cotton cord that held her wrists crossed behind her back.

She stood up, knife in hand. Buddy lay on his back, trying alternately to pry Mildred’s legs loose or hit her with his wildly flailing hands. She had a look of not altogether holy relish on her face as she fended off his efforts.

Krysty cut her friend’s hands free, then she stood up and began to slice her long skirt methodically into strips. It would do for tying and gagging the youth, she reckoned.

“You seem like someone who’s already got some experience at rape,” Krysty said, “along with the taste for it.”

“Bitches asked for—” Buddy began, then his eyes bugged out wider as he realized his admission. “No! Wait! I mean—I wouldn’t do that! I never—”

She frowned and shook her head.

Buddy wrenched free from Mildred’s leg hold and tried to retrieve the bowie knife sticking out the top of his boot.

“Sorry, Buddy,” Krysty said as she slashed his neck with her knife. “This is goodbye.”

Buddy didn’t make a sound as he collapsed to the floor and started to bleed out.

* * *

“B
ARON
J
ED
’
S
service is easy, maggots!” shouted the man in the black hat with the emblem pinned to the front. He had sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves of his blue tunic. “All you got to do is what you’re told, when you’re told, and you’ll be fine!”

Having been stripped of their weapons and thoroughly searched, as well as being relieved of all their belongings, Ryan, J.B., Doc, Jak and Ricky had been marched off to a little bonfire on the outskirts of the camp. Doc still had his ebony swordstick, which meant he had the sword concealed inside. Whether that would give Ryan and company the edge they needed to get clear somehow and get to the thorny problem of rescuing Krysty and Mildred was another thing entirely.

The sergeant, whose name was Bolton, had been told off to see to the formalities of inducting them officially into the Grand Army of the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, which, so far, consisted of yelling at them in a remarkably loud voice.

“Tell them the penalties, Sergeant,” said one of the two guards keeping the captives under control at the point of a musket. He wore pants as loose as his lower lip, held up by suspenders over an unbleached muslin shirt. The only signs of uniform to his person were the armband on his sleeve, closer to black than blue in the light of the cow-chip fire, and the kepi-style cap from which hair almost as white as Jak’s hung to his shoulders.

The other trooper had black skin and a more soldierly manner, which was to say, he looked bored to Ryan’s eye, but there was something about him that suggested he wouldn’t mind livening up his evening by using the butt of his longblaster on an unruly recruit. Or the other end either.

“Penalties are simple,” the sergeant bellowed. As far as Ryan could tell that was his sole level of volume: loud enough to wake the dead in the middle of a cloud-busting prairie thunderstorm. “First infraction—flogging! Second infraction—death by hanging! And none of this pussy neck-breaking shit, either. You swing and choke and kick until you just hang there and don’t move anymore. Baron Jed is a real man who wants his punishments to punish! Am I clear?”

His eyes grew wide, then they popped right out of their sockets to dangle like obscene white grapes by their optic nerves. The middle of Bolton’s forehead bulged outward. He dropped like an empty sack.

Already pretty sure he knew what fate had so quietly overtaken the noncom, and not wasting a blink thinking about it, Ryan was already in motion. He sprang from his crouch by the campfire, grabbing the musket behind the bayonet socket and thrusting it high in case it went off.

The kid opened his mouth to shout a warning. Ryan caught the longblaster with his other hand as well and used both, plus a powerful hip rotation, to piston the steel-shod musket butt right back at its former owner. Teeth exploded outward as if a gren had gone off in the soldier’s face. He fell down as limp and final-seeming as his sergeant had.

Quickly reversing his grip on the musket, Ryan looked to the burlier black guard. The soldier was trying to raise his own musket, but he was also dealing with the little problem of Jak not only having a hold of his arms, but also having the albino’s sharp white teeth latched on to his throat. Jak was hanging on like a weasel clamped to the neck of an eagle.

But even as Ryan looked, strength and sheer self-preservation and fury got the better of tenacity. The soldier managed to shove Jak off. Skin and a fair amount of blood from his neck followed the albino, but Ryan could clearly see there was nowhere near enough to show Jak had bitten through a jugular vein.

Apparently the albino had done the soldier enough hurt that he couldn’t yell; he made a weird rasping sound as he prepared to drive his bayonet into the slim body of the kid he’d just knocked to the ground.

Ryan realized the reason the soldier didn’t just shoot Jak was that the two soldiers probably weren’t being trusted with loaded weapons off the line of battle, which was also why Ryan couldn’t shoot down the soldier to save his young friend. He prepared to try throwing the musket like a spear. It was a shitty idea, but all he had.

Then he heard a wet punching-sliding sound. The soldier’s eyes bugged out. Dropping his musket, he threw both hands to his throat as, with a fruity sucking sound, the slim blade of Doc’s sword was withdrawn from the man’s neck. He went down gargling his own blood—flowing freely this time—and kicking the cool sod with his heels.

Mildred stepped out of the night. She carried two backpacks, giving her a silhouette like some kind of giant awful one-off mutie. She was looking very pleased with herself and working the bolt on a funny-looking longblaster with a short, wide barrel.

“You know,” she said, “I could get used to this DeLisle of Ricky’s.”

“Weren’t you used to it enough to shoot that other bastard sec man before he chilled Jak?” Ryan asked.

Looking sheepish, Mildred handed the carbine with its built-in silencer to its rightful owner, Ricky Morales, who was dancing as if he had to take a pee with the effort of holding in his desire to snatch his beloved weapon away from her.

“Sorry, Ryan,” she said. “I’m a handgun girl. I sort of forgot about working the bolt in the heat of the moment.”

“Don’t you mean to say, ‘Thank you for shooting the bad man, Mildred?” Krysty asked sweetly. She likewise had two backpacks.

Ryan exhaled between pursed lips. “Yeah,” he said. “Reckon I do. Thanks for shooting the bad man, Mildred. Thanks for rescuing our triple-stupe asses, both of you.”

“It would appear the pair of you have released yourselves on your own recognizance?” Doc asked.

“I’m the only other one here got the slightest clue what you’re talking about, you old coot,” Mildred said. “But, yeah. That happened.”

Krysty knelt, carefully depositing the pack she held in her right hand in front of Ryan. He saw that it was his own, with his Steyr Scout strapped to the back of it.

“You managed to liberate our weapons and gear, too?”

Krysty grinned. “And managed to drag them along. They thought it was an ace idea to stash them in the same tent where they stashed us. I guess they thought of us as just more sundry valuables, lover.”

“Seems like they also thought of us as the gentler sex,” Mildred said, gratefully unburdening herself of the weight of J.B.’s pack with Uzi and M-4000 shotgun strapped to it. “Wrong.”

“We should probably get out of here as fast as we can,” Krysty said.

Ryan searched the dead sergeant for anything useful and came up dry. “Don’t want to stay too long,” he said. “But seeing as how they stuck us out here away from the rest of the camp, probably to keep us from being a bad influence on the other grunts, we ought have a little breathing space. Especially seeing as Mildred used that whisper-quiet longblaster and—”

“No,” Mildred said, looking strained. “You don’t understand. Ah, we took care of Buddy before we left.”

From the center of camp they heard a marrow-chilling scream. It went on and on, rising higher and higher until Ryan actually saw sweat bead on Krysty’s taut pale face in the firelight.

The scream broke off.

“That wasn’t pain,” J.B. observed, picking up his fedora and dusting it off. “Leastwise, not the physical kind.”

“It was the cry of a man who just found his son dead,” Krysty said grimly. “Buddy attacked me, but I made sure he wouldn’t be raping any more women.”

“So which way do we go now, gentle friends?” Doc asked. “I perceive these environs are due to grow uncomfortably warm in the very near future.”

“West,” Jak said with certainty.

Everybody looked at the albino teen.

“Horse corrals that way,” he said. He didn’t have to explain the smell had told him. “Figure, better we ride, they don’t.”

“Two pronouns,” Mildred said in wonder, “in the same sentence? Jak, you’ve gone and used up your whole year’s allotment!”

“I do admire the way he thinks, though,” J.B. said.

“Yeah,” Ryan said, as lights flared up in the middle of camp and commotion began to grow. “So why are we still standing here jawing about it?”

Chapter Five

As silent as a panther, Jak crept through the night.

Since he approached with the wind in his front—to keep the horses from detecting him and showing nervousness—the equine smell was almost overpowering. He didn’t need it to track the sentry, whom he’d spotted standing bolt-upright in the open, a shadow-form in starlight.

Then Jak heard a snap, smelled sulfur, saw an orange firefly ember arcing tightly upward. Unbelievably, the sentry was lighting a smoke. Tobacco, by the acrid smell.

Apparently the Protectors had no fear that their enemies would try to raid this particular herd. It wasn’t an entirely stupe notion, Jak thought. They had cavalry pickets riding circuits of the camp pretty close in, as well as random-sweep patrols like the one that bagged Jak and his friends earlier that evening.

They were about to learn that they had just made a whole new set of enemies. As far as Jak was concerned, his bunch was a bigger threat than the whole army of sheepmen coming any day of the week.

The breeze had freshened, bending the spring-green grass. It also covered the sound of Jak’s passage over it...had he made any.

Puffing on his stinking smoke, the guard swung around toward Jak just as the youth gathered himself to spring. The glow of his cigarette underlit an expression of utter shock.

The man wasn’t shocked enough not to try to swing up his bayonet-tipped musket, which he had leaned against his side as he’d rolled and lit his cigarette.

Rattlesnake-fast, Jak grabbed the rising barrel with his left hand. His right slashed his big bowie knife across the man’s throat.

Then he pivoted briskly to the side to avoid the gusher of blood, black in the starlight, from the man’s severed throat.

The sentry tried to scream, but all that came out was gagging and gargling as blood filled his throat and fouled his windpipe. Clutching his neck futilely with both hands, he fell into the grass to thrash away the miserable, brief remainder of his life.

“Frank?” a voice called tentatively from behind Jak’s new position. “Frank, what’s goin’ on?”

Jak whirled. His left hand was already grabbing for the grip of his Colt Python handblaster.

A man was emerging from a brushy little draw, pulling the strings that held the fly of his baggy canvas trousers. He had a bayoneted musket tucked under one arm. His eyes widened as he saw Jak standing above the still-flailing, still-spurting form of his partner, Frank.

He began a mad effort to get a grip on his longblaster so he could shoot the pale intruder. At the same time he opened his mouth to cry a warning.

Jak already knew he could blast the man before the man could blast him. But what he could
not
do was prevent the alarm from being given. Whether the man shouted out loud or Jak shot him—and Jak’s .357 Magnum revolver was probably as loud as that smoke-pole the guy was juggling, with a sharper report that carried farther in the night air—the whole damned army would be alerted.
Including
the mounted pickets that still lay between Ryan’s companions and the open prairie.

Standing off a good distance, Ryan, who was never one to waste ammo on something like mercy for strangers, had finished both off with head shots from the sniper longblaster he carried before he got his new, handier Steyr.

Thanks to Krysty’s killing Baron Jed’s son and heir, the camp was already pretty much on full-alert. Alerting the vengeful baron and his hundreds of uniformed sec men to exactly where they
were
wouldn’t end well.

Even as he turned and grabbed for his own blaster, Jak cocked back his right arm to throw the bowie. He knew his chances of doing enough damage fast enough to the sentry to keep him from raising the alarm were about the same as the chances of riding a motorcycle naked through an acid-rain cloudburst. But even the skinniest-ass chance was better than the stone certainty they were all triple-fucked.

Suddenly the lower half of the sentry’s face erupted in a black cloud. He staggered. The musket fell to the turf as he clutched at his face. His head jerking to the side, he dropped straight down in that boneless way that told Jak he was an instant chill.

From the darkness stepped Ricky Morales, jacking the bolt of his funny, short longblaster with the sausage-fat barrel. Jak grinned and nodded his thanks.

When the kid first joined up, more or less by accident, Jak didn’t see the point of him. He sure did now. Also, it was kind of nice having somebody pretty much his own age...younger, even. Ryan, Krysty and the others were family, but they were still a great deal older.

Actually, until just about exactly now, Jak hadn’t really seen the point of having the Puerto Rican kid back his play, either. He’d basically humored Ricky, on condition the newbie hang back and not spook the game.

Jak made a
peet-peet-peet
sound, like a killdeer flying in the night. An owl hoot answered. The rest of the group was hustling up to secure their four-footed transport pool, which hadn’t even been spooked by the commotion, since Ricky’s funny blaster made so little noise, and the smell of blood was also carried away from the herd by the stiff breeze.

“How so quiet, blaster?” Jak nodded to the carbine as his friend drew near.

“Bolt action’s tight, so no gas gets out of the breech. Also no sound of the weapon cycling like with a semiauto. And the bullet goes slower than sound, so no little sonic boom. That’s why my uncle was always so obsessed with making a DeLisle like this one in his shop.”

Jak looked away so as not to embarrass his new friend by noticing the glimmer of moisture in his eyes. His uncle, his parents and the rest of the seaside ville of Nuestra Señora—where he’d grown up—had been chilled by another army of coldhearts, on the same day Jak and his companions had arrived in the little harbor on a stolen yacht, closely pursued by the pissed-off pirates who were its rightful owners. Or anyway its most recent ones. The loss still smarted like a fresh wound—as did the fact his adored older sister Yamile had not only been kidnapped by the coldhearts, but also sold to slavers, who took her to the mainland where Ricky had no hope of finding her trail. He still liked to imagine he’d get wind of her someday.

“Don’t just stand there beating your gums,” Ryan said gruffly, loping past them. “We need to move with a rad-blasted purpose.”

* * *

“W
HOA
,”
R
YAN
SAID
, tugging the dark mane of the chestnut gelding he rode. The animal bounced its head, eager to follow the rest of its fellows thundering on ahead along the sandy soil of the dry creek. But the Protectors trained their cavalry mounts well; it obeyed.

Looking around, Ryan saw his companions weren’t all enjoying the same easy success he had. But they got it sorted out fine, once J.B. ran down Mildred’s recalcitrant mare on his stubby little paint pony and got her turned back where she was supposed to be.

Ryan had seen the party mounted, not all of them comfortably, especially since they had neither saddles nor bridles, but had to ride bareback and do their best to steer by tugging on the horses’ manes and sheer force of personality.

Their task wasn’t made easier by Ryan’s insistence that they not only stampede the enemy’s mounts, as a reflex precaution, but also actually drive the herd before them, west, and almost at right angles to the direction to the main body of the Uplander Army, which from conversation they had overheard lay camped a dozen miles north.

“Why stop?” Jak called. He was up ahead with Ryan and J.B. chasing the stolen herd, about sixty head, before them.

“Reckon we still got a lead, J.B.?” Ryan asked.

“Yeah,” J.B. replied. “Even as riled up as they were, it would take them time to organize pursuit. Not that they had much trouble finding our tracks once they did, of course. We probably have half an hour. I’d give it fifteen, if I was a cautious man.”

Ryan grinned. “Okay. Ricky, you still got that rope you liberated from that redoubt in Rico?”

“Yeah,” the kid called back. He was having almost as much trouble as Mildred in controlling his mount. While he had told his new companions he was used to dealing with donkeys, traveling with his father on his annual trading trips around south and central Puerto Rico, Ricky Morales had little experience with horses. And none riding them.

“J.B., grab the rope and start divvying it up for leads. I want everybody to lead a remount when we shake the dust of this gully off the horses’ hooves. Jak and I’ll cut them for you before we chase the rest of this bunch off north along the arroyo here.”

J.B. nodded. “Ground’s hard here,” he said, “with lots of thick grass. Pursuers’ll likely follow the easy trail of the rest of the herd up the soft sandy bottom.”

“That’s what I’m thinking,” Ryan said. “If you can rig some kind of makeshift bridles so we’re not clutching mane and hollering to get the beasts to do what we want, do it.”

“You looking at riding a long ways, lover?” Krysty asked.

Ryan shook his head. “Reckon the best way to approach a new baron is to bring the man presents. Especially seeing how we got off on the wrong foot with that last one, and all.”

“You speak of Baron Al Siebert?” Doc asked. “But why, Ryan? Why not simply ride west until we lose them?”

Ryan glanced toward Mildred, who had gotten her mare stopped and was tentatively patting the beast’s neck in a placatory way. The horse had her facedown in a green clump of bush and was chomping away at it, paying its rider no mind.

“Speaking of
presents,
given the kind of farewell gift Mildred and Krysty left for that sawed-off little bastard Jed,” he said, “I kind of reckon he’ll be liberal about spending his sec men’s time, effort and horses running us down wherever we go. Not even those stupes are going to take forever catching up with their stolen herd. Plus we’re a long shot from out of the woods right here. There’s always a chance of running smack-dab into some random Protector patrol anyplace inside mebbe a hundred miles of here. And I’ll remind everybody we’re running more than a bit light on the supplies.”

“Thinking big, Ryan?” J.B. asked.

“Yeah.”

The Armorer rode his horse up alongside Ricky’s. The beasts were used to being in each other’s company, though Ryan knew full well horses had their own likes and dislikes.

“I’ll get right on those leads,” J.B. said.

“Okay,” Ryan said. “And get them done in ten!”

* * *

“H
ALT
,
IN
THE
NAME
of the Uplands Alliance!”

As if rising straight up out of the Earth, a party of eight or ten mounted men appeared before the companions. Ryan reckoned that was just about the way of it, too. He gathered they’d come out of a draw hidden at the foot of the long, slow decline the fugitives had ridden down. There was a stand of brush growing there, a shroud of leaves black in the starlight, that might have masked it.

The new set of riders held remade carbines and short double-barreled scatterguns leveled on Ryan and his friends. Still holding the rope by which he led his chestnut gelding, Ryan raised his hands. His companions did likewise.

“State your names and your business,” the man who’d first challenged them said. Like most of his men he wore a wide-brimmed hat with the front pinned up by a badge of some sort, presumably the insignia of the Uplands Alliance. He had on what looked like a uniform shirt, with a double row of buttons at the front, that was probably part of the Uplands Alliance uniform, although he wore baggy pale canvas pants. He toted a pair of revolvers in flap-cover holsters, and a saber hung in its scabbard from his saddle. His gloved hands were empty.

“I’m Ryan Cawdor,” Ryan called out. “These are my friends. Our current business is running away from the Protectors. Though we’re looking to sign on to do some contract sec work for your baron.”

“Baron Al?” the young lieutenant asked.

“He’s not our baron,” snapped a rider with a lever-action carbine aimed at J.B. “He’s commander of the army, yeah. But he’s just baron over Siebertville, not the rest of us.”

“Yeah, yeah, Starbuck,” the lieutenant said, waving a hand. “Whatever.”

“We still thought he might appreciate these horses we brought him as a present,” Ryan said. “Sort of sweeten the deal.”

“Don’t trust ’em, Lieutenant Owens,” said another rider, a middle-height man in his forties. Ryan didn’t need to see the chevrons on the sleeve of his shirt to know he’d answer to “sergeant.” “Could be a trap. Remember about Greeks bearing gifts and that.”

“Those are just old stories, Koslowski,” Owens said. “Doesn’t mean they’re all true. Anyway this dude isn’t speaking Greek, and these horses aren’t wood. Fact is, they do look pretty handsome, though this isn’t the sort of lighting conditions I’d care to pay for horseflesh in.”

The fact was they were some pretty prime rides Ryan and friends had trolled along. As a baron’s son, Ryan had grown up knowing not just how to ride, but how to judge horseflesh with the eye of someone who might have to buy riding stock for himself, his family and their sec men. Rolling for years with the Trader had taught him a different appreciation for the beasts—Trader being a man who preferred wags with engines to those drawn by livestock, and better yet armed to the eyeballs, but overall he preferred turning a handsome profit where one could be secured. Which sometimes meant leaving the gas-burners behind for locations only grass-burners could reach.

Jak had helped. His brief stint as a rancher in the Southwest had given him both an eye for horses and better skills at cutting them out of the herd and driving them where he needed to go than Ryan had. Between them they’d secured seven nice-looking animals. Although the fact was none of them were broken-down plugs; from their cursory acquaintance he didn’t judge too many Protector heads were in danger of exploding from an overload of brains, but to give the bastards their due credit, they did know how to lay their hands on some mighty fine horses, and care for them properly.

Even on short notice J.B. had parceled out rope leads and even rigged some nooselike bridles that’d fit over a horse’s snout and provide steerage pressure without pinching off their ability to breathe. He’d had a good deal of help from young Ricky, which should have surprised Ryan less than it did. The kid was scarcely less handy than the Armorer himself; and while, of course, his actual knowledge wasn’t a patch on the ass of what J.B. knew, he had a good grounding and learned like lightning. No wonder J.B. had taken such a strong and early shine to the kid.