Storm Breakers (15 page)

Ricky seemed to deflate.

“Thank you,” he said, sounding as if he had a bellyful of broken glass.

“Okay, people,” Ryan called. “Time to saddle the horses and get going. How far away’s this Tavern Bay again?”

Their Stormbreaker escort had recovered her composure and detached herself from Krysty. Now she came back to the conversation. Ryan noticed her eyes were red. But dry.

“We can make it by tomorrow afternoon,” she said, then frowned. “It is not a good place.”

“How so, Alysa?” Krysty asked.

“They have a dark history. The town was built by slavers—long ago, many centuries, when such things were legal. When that was banned, it was said they turned to smuggling and another form of buying and selling human souls—kidnapping men and selling them to sailing ships in need of crew.”

Mildred had started looking pretty thunderous at the mention of old-days slavery. Now, she shook it off like a buffalo trying to shed a horsefly.

“That was a long time ago,” she said. “Even by my— That is, it’s ancient history. What about now?”

“The people there...are strange,” the blonde woman said. “They still have a reputation for sharp practice. People still talk about hidden ways and hint at midnight disappearances.”

“Sounds like any ville with a gaudy,” Ryan said, rubbing his cheek with a gloved hand and hearing the bristles rasp the tough fabric. “Or with a baron, for that matter.”

“And some say certain of the people of Tavern Bay conduct strange rituals.”

“Great,” Mildred said. “Cultists. The way our luck has run lately, they’ll probably be cannies, too. Like our late hosts from last night.”

Alysa shook her head urgently. “No, you must not think that! There are good people there. Very good. Our baroness herself comes from one of the ville’s leading families. She is beyond reproach. Others, though—”

“Ryan’s right,” Krysty said. “That sounds like anyplace.”

“Not that
that’s
encouraging,” Mildred said.

“So we’ll be pushing off,” Ryan told the freed captives.

“Thank you,” Narda said.

“What do we eat?” Husker said.

“There’s a root cellar next to where the house was,” Krysty said. “We replenished our food stocks. There’s plenty left. They did well by themselves. Bread, vegetables, dried fruit, cheese, smoked fish.”

“Don’t recommend you go for any of the meat, though,” Mildred said. “You never know who it’s been.”

Chapter Nineteen

By the blue-white light of a spotlight powered by a growling portable generator, J.B. squinted down into the tray of parts on the folding table and frowned. We’ve got a problem here, he thought.

“Trader,” he said. “You need to come look at this.”

Part of him, not too deep down, either, felt a thrill to be talking to the great man that way. Then again, that was implicit in the thrill of being put in a position, too.

Trader stood at one end of the table talking to the representative of the Science Brothers, who through some perverseness that bothered J.B.’s sense of rightness, was a woman. Her two companions, like the other Science Brothers who could properly be called
Brothers,
had shaved their heads egg-bald and wore round wire-rimmed specs whether they needed them or not.

The woman had hair. And not just hair—hair piled up on her head in a sort of swirl with what was probably a dyed-in white streak running up from the left side of her forehead. She also had outrageously made-up eyes and dark lipstick that might have been black. Or it may’ve been green, as the odd highlight struck off her hair suggested her’s was.

She scowled dangerously at his interruption, but Trader came right over.

J.B. was doing the very job Trader had brought him along for, which was why he was so swelled-up with pride it felt as if his chest and gut would just burst.

His skills and his resourcefulness at employing them—whether in improvising repairs and replacement parts out of damn near nothing or his diabolical booby traps—had won the respect of most of Trader’s hard-bitten, cynical crew. And even the cautiously qualified approval from The Man himself.

He was doing. That was the key thing. He always felt good when he
did
things—made things, fixed things.

Even better—he was
learning
. Though a stern taskmistress, Rance Weeden was an excellent teacher, always willing to show J.B. where he’d gone wrong—and give him just enough information to figure out the
right
way to do something on his own.

And Ace DeGuello also proved a master worthy of following. After actually working under the man on the long and winding run across the Deathlands, J.B. had abandoned thoughts of supplanting Trader’s weapons master. At least, anytime soon. More patient than Rance, Ace showed a breadth and depth of knowledge of metalworking and just plain weapons that made J.B.’s breath run short just to think about. And he treated J.B. as a sort of prize pupil.

To cap it off, tonight Ace had suggested J.B. go in his place to meet with the Science Brothers and evaluate their offerings as pertained to blasters and rocket launchers. Ace himself was tied up putting the last touches on Trader’s new pet 20 mm quick-firer, the recently installed hardpoint atop the prow of War Wag One.

And Trader had agreed without a pause. So here he was, glasses pushed in tight over his eyes and his heart in his throat, conscious that he held the literal future of Trader, his convoy and his people in his hands.

J.B. held a thin dark-silver metal object up to the light. Everyone looked at him, including Marsh Folsom, who was inspecting the high-value wares the Brothers and Sister had set on the folding table.

“It’s supposed to be a triple-fancy titanium firing pin for the Oerlikon 20 mm autocannon you just bought,” J.B. said.

Trader nodded. “What about it?”

J.B. turned it. “It’s not titanium. It’s cheap electroplated junk.”

Trader frowned as he saw the long scratch down the side where the shiny metal had been scratched to reveal duller gray beneath.

He turned back. “What’s this, Vespa?” he asked the Science Sister.

“That’s bullshit!” squealed the shorter of her male companions. “What does this fucking kid know?”

The Science Brothers were a group of about a hundred members who operated out of a hidden HQ somewhere in the Midwest. They liked people to think it was some kind of lost predark research facility, but nobody knew. Outsiders never got in to see.
What
they were was an open question. Some said they were no better than a coldheart gang with fancy trappings—certainly, their reputation for arrogance and truculence did little to dispel that, though J.B. wasn’t sure if that might just be because they defended themselves when people messed with them.

That happened frequently. In a time when scientists, or as they were usually called, whitecoats, were nearly as universally distrusted and despised as muties, the Science Brothers openly professed not just an open admiration for science, but attempted to practice the ways of twentieth-century science—the thing that had caused, or at least enabled, the destruction of the world.

How successful they were was another open question. Marsh Folsom, who knew things—book things—called them a “cargo cult,” claiming that they mostly acted as if they’d gain the secrets of the near-mystical powers of science if they could just imitate the old-days whitecoats closely enough.

Seeing them here and now, at this remote site where they’d insisted on meeting with Trader and a small party in the middle of the damn night, J.B. was ready to believe they were coldhearts, right enough. After getting a close look at them he thought he might sign off on the “cult” thing, too.

“I’ll show you,” he said to the man who had challenged his knowledge. He picked another pin out of the tray set out among other displays of parts and components, mostly pretty high-tech, that they were trying to sell Trader. He examined it by the light, hefted it. Then he held it up.

“Looks like titanium, too,” he said. “But check this out.”

He flicked open his knife and carefully scratched down the side of the pin.

“Hey!” the Science Brother, who had by now moved obnoxiously close, shouted. “That’s valuable merchandise you’re damaging!”

He tried to snatch the pin. J.B. pivoted neatly away and never stopped working.

He was able after a moment’s effort to dislodge a thin shard of what appeared to be titanium plating.

“See?” he said, holding his prize out so both Trader and the Science Brother could see it. “It’s just a thin coating of titanium with monkey metal inside.”

He tossed it back in the bin. “These parts’ll last just long enough for us to be a hundred miles away from these bastard scammers before they bust. Probably in the middle of a firefight.”

He looked at Trader, who did not look pleased. “I’m no big judge of the electronics. But I bet the same applies to everything they’re trying to peddle.”

The Science Brother turned to Trader. “Are you going let this little sawed-off shit queer the deal? He’s trying to pretend he knows stuff to make himself look like a big man.”

J.B. sucker-punched the back of the guy’s bald head, hard enough to make the knuckles of his right hand sting. The man lurched forward.

J.B. jumped on his back, pummeling him.

“Take them out!” he heard the woman named Vespa scream.

Suddenly the scene flooded with dazzling white light.

And Trader said, softly, “Oh, shit.”

* * *

“N
OT
MUCH
OF
a tourist attraction,” Mildred remarked.

She was not in the best of moods. Worry for J.B. ate at her guts like an ulcer. But she doubted it was
just
her disposition souring her view of their destination.

Tavern Bay lay where a gorge through hilly, heavily forested highlands suddenly opened into a wide valley that gave onto the sea. The cliffs wrapped around to the north and south to form headlands that protected the anchorage, which was a wide, placid extent of water that looked gray-green. A pair of dumpy fishing trawlers headed back toward the ville, drawing narrow V-shaped wakes behind them. A triangular white sail stuck up from the water like a shark’s fin, way out where the haze ate the horizon. The sun was already threatening to fall out of sight beyond the heights behind them.

From the landward side the ville was surrounded by a broad, flat expanse of salt marsh. Big straw-colored patches of various aquatic reeds and weeds—Mildred wasn’t a botanist—were interspersed with swatches of murky-looking water. She could smell the brackishness from where she stood, along with a glum, stomach-dragging hint of decaying sea life.

The ville looked like a collection of wooden structures, some just shacks and shanties, toward the outskirts, others bigger if not always less dilapidated. Toward the center of the ville, down toward the waterfront, the buildings turned more to brick, bluish-gray or a kind of grime-encrusted red, and grimy gray granite. Most of the buildings were two or three stories tall and narrow to the point of attenuation. The streets had to have been narrow, too, Mildred reckoned; that would account for the cramped, crabbed look to the place.

Though the afternoon was starting to turn ashy-yellow and dark, no lights showed from the ville.

“Does anybody even live here?” Mildred demanded.

“It’s the most populous ville in this area,” Alysa said. “It didn’t suffer much damage from the war. The population came back fairly quickly after skydark. But it seemed to peak and began to dwindle perhaps fifty years ago, or so we’re told. It still holds perhaps a few hundred souls.”

Once more, Mildred wondered at the girl’s odd turns of speech, many of which would have been archaic in Mildred’s own time, over a century ago, before the Big Nuke. Then again, the phrase
it takes all kinds
was even more applicable to the world today than before she had gone into cryosleep—and with a fraction of the population to make up all those kinds.

She shrugged. Compared to the people where we picked up the new kid, she reminded herself, Alysa’s mundane to the point of boring.

The human denizens of Monster Island lived in perfect amity alongside all manner of muties, including stickies, notorious for their vicious sadism and homicidal proclivities.

“We’re not here to sightsee,” Ryan said. “Let’s get a move on.”

“The road we’re on,” Alysa said, referring to the pair of parallel ruts through sandy soil clumped with sparse, knee-high yellow grass on which they had halted their horses, “meets up with the causeway into Tavern Bay.”

“I don’t like this,” Mildred said.

“Not like, either,” Jak said from the back of his penny-colored mare.

Krysty had ridden up alongside Ryan. They had used some of the jack they had taken off the slavers they ambushed, who had no further need of it, to buy her a new ride from a logging camp about ten miles from the Bear-clan cabin. This was a gray mare, a bit undersize to carry a woman of Krysty’s size, and undernourished and depressive to start with. Or so Mildred judged, though she wasn’t a vet, either.

The beast had both filled out and brightened up in the day and a half since they got it. Krysty just naturally got on with animals. As of course she would; she had the sort of nature that was strong enough to be kind in a blighted world like this one.

She laughed. “Would you rather spend the night out here?”

The breeze off the sea was warm. Ish. The day was cold, but by comparison to the brutal bitterness of the week and change since they’d jumped into the former Maine—Mildred still wasn’t sure why anybody would stick a secret facility way up here in frozen-ass Stephen King country—almost comfortable. But the failing light was dialing down the celestial thermometer, turning down the heat as it went. And the wind was rising.

For answer, Ryan nudged the flanks of his notch-eared, black-and-white-splotched beast to get it walking down the track. He did it firmly, and without unnecessary force, Mildred couldn’t help noticing. She couldn’t call their one-eyed leader kind, really. She’d seen him do some harsh things, even by the tough standards of the here and now. But never any more forceful, or any crueler, than he deemed necessary to survive.

And it’s kept us alive, she thought. So far.

And she clamped down hard on the cold, dark place where she kept fear for her own love.

Mildred hauled her mule’s big, ugly head up from where it had its snout buried in a clump of grass.

“It’s not just a life, it’s an adventure,” she muttered, and fell into line behind the shiny black rump of Doc’s gelding.