No Man's Land (5 page)

As it turned out, they’d only needed makeshift bridles for Mildred and Ricky himself. The rest of the crew felt comfortable as they were, steering the animals with knee pressure and tugs on their manes. Ryan was grateful the Protector pony soldiers didn’t roach off their mounts’ manes triple-short the way some outfits did.

Despite his qualified approval the fresh-faced young officer frowned. “I think we do need a little bit more by way of bona fides before we completely trust you people,” he said. “Baron Jed’s a cagey bastard. He might be willing to give up a few ponies—”

“Trojan horses,” said Sergeant Koslowski, who was clearly not a man who let go of much of anything readily.

“Take us back under guard if you care to,” Ryan said. “Be the smart thing to do, in your boots—”

Before he could say he’d likely do as much himself, something moaned past his ear like the world’s biggest bumblebee with a rocket up its butt. A horse shied and bucked away from a solid thump in the ground right ahead of it.

A couple heartbeats later the crack of a black-powder weapon going off rolled down from the south.

“Shit!” Lieutenant Owens exclaimed.

“Troop, spread out!” the sergeant barked. “Dismount. Form firing line.”

He didn’t yell, but he sure talked emphatically, like a man who knew his business, Ryan thought—briefly, since his own business right now was trying to calculate how to get out of line of their pursuers’ fire without their new acquaintances chilling them on general principles.

As the patrol began to fan out in obedience of J.B.’s voice, calm yet as authoritative as the sergeant’s knuckles-on-oak rap had been, spoke up.

“Might not wanna do that, boys,” he said. “You’ll empty a fair number of saddles, sure. Then the rest’ll ride you into orange mush.”

The pony soldiers were moving to obey their sergeant. The lieutenant gave the Armorer a hard look.

“Why do you say that, outlander?”

More blastershots banged out from the night behind, a couple hundred yards off yet, to Ryan’s seasoned ear. The Protectors had to be panic-firing in hopes of preventing their quarry from getting away.

“Because likely as not, Baron Jed has every ass that can keep a saddle riding right on our tails,” J.B. said, as cool as if he were discussing whether to have cold beans or reheated for dinner. “Seeing as we sort of left his son and heir to bleed out when we left.”

The lieutenant’s eyes flew wide, but he recovered quickly. “Ace,” he said. “Protectors shooting at you bona fides enough for me. Troop, get ready to ride fast back to camp!”

“What about the prisoners?” Koslowski asked.

“Detail men to keep an eye on them. Now move!”

Chapter Six

Big Erl Kendry sat back against the cushions piled on his chair in his tent, luxuriating in the feel of the hot cloth in his face. He was waiting for his servants to give him his morning shave.

He always enjoyed these peaceful times. Never more so than today. Baron Jed was raging like a jolt-walker about his son Buddy’s unfortunate demise. He was going to be a mighty handful.

Not that the baron was a patient man at the best of times. Still, Big Erl could understand the frustrations of the born leader of men if anybody could. He experienced the ingratitude of his own tenants on a daily basis.

Except when he was out here in the field protecting them, of course. Then at least he got respite from their ceaseless bitching.

He began to shift his considerable bulk in the chair. He wondered just where his shiftless servant had wandered off to. As precious as this break was, he was mindful that if he dragged his ass into the HQ tent too late, Baron Jed would give it a thorough chewing. His teeth were sharp this day, and he hungered for blood.

Not that Erl feared Jed’s shedding of his own blood would be anything but metaphorical. Aside from being a member of the baron’s staff, Big Erl was an important man in his own right—a landowner with substantial holdings...and substantial influence.

Still, Jed had a way of making things mighty uncomfortable on a body, whether he got to chill you in the process or not. And the towel on Erl’s big face softening his beard for the razor was getting lukewarm.

“Watkuns!” he bellowed. “Watkuns, get your lazy ass in here now! Or I’ll have the hide whipped right off it, you hear?”

It worked. Of course, the lower orders were lazy by nature. But they understood two things: threats and volume. Erl heard the canvas tent flap rustle and his servant scurry in to get about his damned business.

“That’s more like it,” he grumped, as he heard his servant’s shuffling step. The man had a bad hip; broke it years back when a horse kicked him. His fault for not getting his lazy ass out of the way, of course. Erl Kendry was no man to let that give him license to slack off.

He heard the familiar scritch of the straight razor being trued up on the leather strop and settled deeper into the cushions with a satisfied sigh. He kept his eyes closed. He had a hard road of a day ahead, and Erl intended to take it easy while he could.

“Not that I’m all that all-fired eager to come into the presence of our esteemed commander,” he admitted. “That sawed-off little bastrich is gonna be hopping around like a toad frog on a hot griddle all day.”

He spoke frankly to his manservant of many years. He needed somebody he could unburden himself of his many cares and concerns that as a man of power and influence—not as much as he deserved, mind you, nor yet as much as he intended to have—he naturally accrued. He certainly didn’t dare to speak frankly to any of his peers on the Protective Association army’s general staff. Nor needless to say any of his lessers. They were nothing but a pack of ravening mutie coyotes, eager to tear him down to build themselves up. So he let it all hang loose where his servant was concerned.

The gimpy old fuck knew what’d happen to him if he dared run his face, anyway, Erl thoughts.

“Not that I blame poor Jed,” he admitted, as the towel was lifted from his face. Erl kept his eyes closed as Watkuns brushed warm lather on his cheeks and chin.

It was his usual habit. Why did he have to watch? And he was going to trust the man with a razor-sharp blade—being as it was a razor and all—right up against his throat. Of course, Watkuns had a family—a couple daughters, some grand-brats; who had time to keep track? He also knew what would happen to
them,
while he watched, should his hand chance to slip.

“I mean, what’s a man supposed to feel in his position? His own son and heir left to bleed out like a strung-up hog by those bitches from that gang of coldhearts the patrol trolled in last night. Be enough to break the heart of a cee-ment statue.”

Erl started to shake his head. Then he chuckled—as the keen straight edge began to scrape at the dark-and-light bristles that sprouted overnight on his considerable jowls. Triple-stupe move I almost made there, he thought.

“Before he let us all finally go the hell to bed last night—this morning, more like—he was offering the sun, the moon and the stars to anybody who ran them coldheart fuckers down and dragged them back. Dead or alive. Not gonna happen. They’ve hightailed it all the way to the Red River by now. Along with thirty head of prize cavalry mounts.”

“Interesting,” a voice said by his ear.

Erl felt his brows crease in a scowl. It wasn’t like Watkuns to comment on things his master said. It wasn’t his place.

Then it hit him: the soft, sibilant hiss wasn’t anything like his long-time servant’s half-simp drawl, either.

Erl’s eyes flew open. The face close to his was as narrow and hard as a bowie blade and had a yellow cast to it. There was a shiny black patch over one eye, and a hint of fine scales at the edges of the lean jaw and around the eyes, and colorless, almost invisibly thin lips. It was as unlike Watkuns’s saggy old face as night from day.

The big man went rigid with terror. His hands gripped the arms of his comfy chair fit to pop the tendons. For a moment his mind went white in sheer panic. A stranger with a razor to his neck!

Then he relaxed. He recognized the stoneheart he himself had hired a week or two back to transact certain...business for him.

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at, you mutie bastard!” Erl yelled, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to startle the man, to call him that, as a body probably oughtn’t, taint that he was.

The thin lips smiled. “Ease your mind, Mr. Kendry,” he said. “I just wanted to report the successful completion of my mission. And receive my payment due, of course.”

He continued to shave Big Erl’s cheek with a steadier hand and smoother motion than his servant managed after almost two decades’ practice.

“But—Watkuns—my servant...”

“Don’t worry,” Snake Eye said.

That was the chiller’s name. Erl remembered it now. A notorious man. A man who always fulfilled a contract.

That was why Erl hired him. That old sag-bellied bastard Earnie had a way of slipping out of the tightest places. For various reasons connected to his important position in the community Erl couldn’t act against his former partner directly. And none of the men he’d paid to chill Earnie before had come through. Erl reckoned the bastard had bought them off.

“I persuaded your servant to let me take his place this morning,” the assassin went on, as easily as if he was discussing a fair day’s weather.

Erl scowled deeper. He was going to need to have words with Watkuns over this. More than just words, mebbe.

“Tell me about it,” he said, anger and residual fear making his voice husky.

Snake Eye briefly tipped his head in what Erl took for a form of shrug. The chiller had on a black hat and a white shirt with a black velvet vest over it. He and the clothes smelled clean, not of days, if not weeks, of accumulated sweat. That was an unusual thing in itself, and Erl chastised himself for not noticing the man who shaved him smelled differently than his servant before now.

“He was in the shop he ran,” Snake Eye said. “Cowering in the basement. Not that I blamed him overmuch. Both your army and your opponents were busy shelling the stuffing out of the place. I found him there. He tried to buy me off. I reminded him of my invariant policy and dealt with him accordingly.”

Erl had to restrain himself forcibly from nodding in eager satisfaction. “Ace!” he exclaimed.

“And now,” the mercie said, “there’s the issue of my compensation. Don’t get up—just direct me to where I may find my payment for successful completion of my contract.”

“In the lockbox by the foot of my cot,” Erl said, rolling his eyes toward the objects in question. “There’s a velvet pouch. Royal blue.”

“Tasteful,” Snake Eye said with a nod.

“It’s right on top, now,” Erl said. “Don’t go grubbing around in there.”

“Tut tut, Mr. Kendry. Surely you don’t mean to impugn my professionalism.”

The yellowish, dry-backed hand paused briefly with the razor edge close to Erl’s mostly shaved right cheek. Erl’s blood cooled down many degrees in a hurry.

“No,” he admitted, “I surely don’t.”

Inwardly he seethed. I don’t care what it costs me, he thought. I’ll make this mutie bastard pay for this! I’ll have his scaly yellow hide stripped off and have him kept alive to watch it made into a pair of boots!

“I thought not.” Snake Eye resumed his expert shaving. “I charge premium prices for my services. And as you know, I am most exact in delivering them. As indeed I have.”

“Yeah” was all Erl could manage to say to that.

“There is one thing, Mr. Kendry.”

The coldheart finished shaving Erl’s right side and moved with silky smoothness to the left. Now that he wasn’t mimicking Watkuns’s lame-legged gait he made no more noise than the thoughts in his servant’s narrow hairless skull.

“Before his demise, Earnie told a most diverting story,” Snake Eye said. “A tale of a hidden underground bunker filled with marvelous treasure. Old-days tech, abundant and beyond compare. A trove he and a certain erstwhile partner stumbled across in their younger, more...congenial days.”

Erl’s mind was still stumbling around the word
erstwhile
when the import of the rest of the mutie’s statement hit him. He went dead still. If his blood had gone cold before, it was a wonder it didn’t freeze solid enough to break.

“Now, circumstances prevented him—and you—from exploiting your discovery, he said,” Snake Eye continued. “Then or later. But he attempted to use its location to buy his life.”

“Well,” Erl said weakly, “isn’t just that cowardly, greasy old weasel all over?”

The blade had moved down to Erl’s neck. “He failed, of course. When he wouldn’t divulge the actual location, I went ahead and finished the job.

“But he’d said too much. They always do.”

“He was weak,” Erl said, none too strongly himself. “He was always weak. That’s why he tried to get me chilled, in the bushwhacking that cost me my son! My boy. Poor Fank.”

He felt his eyes fill with tears. His vision blurred. Not solely out of grief.

The edge of the razor tapped against his Adam’s apple. “But you know the whereabouts of the entrance to this wondrous store of scabbie,” Snake Eye said. “Don’t you, Mr. Kendry?”

Erl’s main reaction to that was actually outrage; he felt momentary pride in the fact.

“You—you’re trying to put the arm on me!” he sputtered. “After all this fine talk about professionalism! It was all a bushel of bullshit.”

“Not at all, Mr. Kendry,” the chiller said calmly. “You see, before he died, Earnie also offered me a contract.”

Tap-tap
against Erl’s throat. He felt his eyes go wide.

“Against me?”

“Who else? I told him who sent me, after all. It was the courteous thing to do. Not to mention the fact that you specified he would know why he was being chilled, and who was responsible.”

“But...but—that’s ridiculous!”

“How so? I place my services on the market for anyone to purchase, so long as they have the wherewithal to pay. As Earnie did have.”

Erl’s thoughts flew like bats caught in a Deathlands twister. He tried to will them into some kind of plan. Some kind of way out.

“I can pay you to cancel the contract!” he blurted. “Pay double! Triple.”

Snake Eye reached up and twitched the patch onto his forehead. Erl froze in shock.

The eye that was revealed was fully intact. And fully inhuman. Perfectly circular, staring and lidless, it was a blazing yellow with a black slit pupil.

A rattlesnake’s eye.

Snake Eye smiled regretfully and continued to tap the cold, thin steel edge against Erl’s quavering, helpless throat.

The last of Erl’s resistance evaporated.

“Listen, I can take you to the place! The hidden treasure! It’s not twenty miles from here.”

“Is that so?” The blade was withdrawn.

Erl almost melted in relief. His thoughts, contrarily, suddenly came together.

“You’ll never find it without me,” he said in firmer tones.

He felt a sudden sting across the front of his neck. It wasn’t until a red mist of his own blood sprayed out before his horrified eyes that he realized Snake Eye had slashed his throat with a single rattlesnake slash.

“Why?” his lips said. All that came out was air gurgling from a cut windpipe, bubbling through blood.

“I beg to differ, Mr. Kendry,” said the chiller, who had stepped neatly aside, out of the way of the pulsing blood. It was already dwindling before Erl’s eyes as he gagged and fought for breath. “If two idiots such as you could find the treasure once, I can find it now. And I’m sure I can track down other rumors about it to narrow the location further.”

Erl’s vision was fading. He saw the hateful face of his killer smile.

“As I said, Mr. Kendry—” the stoneheart’s words came as if shouted down a well that was somehow growing deeper as he spoke “—they always say too much.

“And last of all—you should take with you, wherever you’re bound, the fact that I always, always keep my contracts.”