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Mildred stepped forward. “Are you all right, girl? Is someone you know hurt?” Mildred looked confused. “What’s bang?”
“Gimme bang,” she said, turning to Mildred.
“I’m sorry, child, but I haven’t got any… And from the sounds of it, I don’t think I want any, either.”
“Gimme bang!” she demanded, louder this time.
“What’s wrong with you?”
The girl didn’t answer. Instead she ran toward Mildred and leaped into the air, a knife glinting in her hand.
But as the girl soared through the air, there was a sharp crack of a blaster and half of her head vanished in a spray of blood-red mist.
Mildred wiped a bit of the child’s blood and brain matter from her face. “Damn! Thanks, Jak.”
“Yes, well done, Master Lauren. Quick, decisive and an expert shot,” Doc said. “As always.”
“What did she want?” Krysty asked.
“Bang, whatever that is,” Mildred answered. “I don’t think she was hurting.” She knelt over the body and examined it. “Most of these scars have been healed over for weeks. The fresh ones look like she’d been picking at them.”
“Mebbe was crazy,” Jak said.
Mildred ignored the comment. “Well, whatever bang is, she wanted it pretty bad.”
“Think it’s a drug?” Ryan suggested.
“That would be a good guess.” Mildred got up from beside the body. “Can’t be sure, though.”
“Well, whatever it is, it’s a good bet that there are other people in the redoubt,” J.B. stated.
Ryan nodded. “Triple red, people.”
The chatter going on behind Ryan died down, and his companions followed him through the redoubt in silence.
As they moved up and down stairs, along corridors and through holes blasted in the walls, they could find nothing of value left inside the redoubt and no evidence of anyone else living inside it. Most items left behind had been destroyed, or had otherwise been rendered useless. Two sections of the redoubt that had been cleaned out were the medical lab and the kitchen. Everything inside those rooms had been carted away, with pipes and wires neatly cut from the walls rather than torn out in a hurry. Somebody was making use of the equipment, and likely using it for more than making meals and treating the sick.
They continued searching the redoubt for anything of value, and as they turned the corner at the end of a long corridor, Ryan saw a light in the distance.
It was a dimly reflected light, and had to be checked out.
“Jak,” Ryan said.
The albino teen moved to the front of the line and came up by Ryan’s side.
“See where that leads,” Ryan commanded.
Without a word, Jak headed down the corridor toward the light. The others had their blasters trained on the end of the hallway, covering him just in case.
They watched the teen’s body get smaller and smaller until all that could be seen was his stark white hair growing brighter the closer he got to the light source. And then, all of a sudden it was gone as he turned the corner into the light. Minutes later he reemerged, and when he neared, it was obvious that he had some good news.
“Outside,” he said, gesturing down the hall.
“People?” Ryan asked.
Jak shook his head. “No.”
“What’s out there, then?”
“Sky. Rolling fields. River.”
“Anything else?”
“What more want?”
Ryan and the others walked toward the light and exited the redoubt to a hot, sunny day, the sky tinged by a slight purple hue with streaks of green and orange throughout. The surrounding fields were barren, or else overgrown by weeds, but they seemed to roll with the irregular undulation of foothills, suggesting they might be somewhere in the Midwest.
Jak tapped Ryan on the shoulder and pointed to the south. “River, near trees.”
Ryan took out his marine telescope from a pocket in his coat, extended it to its full length and brought the lens up to his eye.
After making several adjustments to focus, he said, “About an hour away on foot. We can make camp there, mebbe catch something to eat in the river.”
“Sounds like a plan,” J.B. said.
And then, without another word, the friends were off, heading south in single file to cover their tracks in the earth, Ryan leading the way, J.B. bringing up the rear.
They didn’t know what to expect.
But together, they were ready for anything.
Chapter Two
When they got to the river’s edge, Mildred did a quick rudimentary test of the water to see if it might make them sick. “It’s pretty clean,” she said, holding up a test tube of the clear liquid.
Ryan nodded. “Let’s make camp, then. Krysty, Doc and Mildred set up a perimeter. Jak, you and J.B. see if you can catch us something to eat.”
In silence, the friends split up and took their positions.
Meanwhile, Ryan gathered a few dried branches and set them in a pile for a fire. He’d light it later, depending on how lucky J.B. and Jak were in the river. If not, they’d have to eat the last of their rations and hope to find something else to eat in the morning.
His stomach growled and churned at the thought of it.
“Help!”
It was a woman’s voice coming from somewhere downriver.
“J.B.?” Ryan called.
“Heard it. ’Bout a hundred yards south.”
“Let’s move.”
Almost as one, the friends picked up and headed south through the trees, always sticking close to the river’s edge. Ryan could barely see the others through the brush, but he instinctively knew that Jak and J.B. were to his right, spaced about ten yards apart, while his left was flanked by Doc, Mildred and Krysty, with one of them, maybe two, hanging back slightly to cover their rear.
Another scream came from up ahead.
It was a woman’s voice, but a different woman than before.
Jak, the best tracker in the group, stopped and signaled to J.B. and Ryan to do the same. Ryan sent the message along to the others and together the friends slowly closed in around a large clearing by the river.
Two women, naked. They were either swimming or just spending some time alone together by the water. One was young, tall and blond, her body lean, taut and muscular. The other was older and a bit shorter, with long dark hair that was streaked with gray. Her flesh sagged a bit, her belly distended slightly, but she was more mature and full figured than old and fat.
The two women were surrounded by four muties similar to the ones the friends had seen in the redoubt. They were dirty and scraggly, their bodies covered by the same sores the girl in the redoubt had.
“Bang,” one of the men said.
Another one lunged forward at the women, then stepped back in fear. “Gimme bang.”
“More crazies?” Krysty said under her breath.
“There are stranger things in the Deathlands,” Ryan answered evenly.
“Want jack.”
“Need smash.”
“What are they saying?” Krysty asked.
Ryan shook his head. “I’m not sure, but it sounded like jack…”
“And smash.”
“What happened to bang?” J.B. asked.
“We don’t have any to give you,” said the taller of the two women. “Check our clothes, and you’ll see it’s the truth.”
Two of the muties riffled through a small pile of clothes on the riverbank, then threw them to the ground in disgust when it was obvious that it was just the women’s clothes and no more. “Nothing.”
“There has to be something there, check the pockets again.”
“There’s nothing, I tell you!”
“What about blasters!” the leader demanded.
The two men began to search the ground around the clothes, then check under a pile of neatly stacked rocks. In no time, each was lifting what looked like decent-quality remade blasters. “Whoo-eee! Look what I found!”
All four of the muties were laughing now.
“These we can trade for bang!”
“You can have them,” the older woman said. “Just leave us alone.”
The leader stepped forward. “We’ll be taking them all right, but before we go, we’ll be wanting something else from the two of you…” He leered as he approached the smaller woman. One of the others put a remade in his free hand and he pointed it at the younger woman as the other mutie neared.
She trembled in fear and wanted to run away, but there was no place for her to go. They were surrounded.
“Should we do something?” Krysty asked.
“Not our fight,” Ryan answered.
“Yeah, but I don’t like the odds.”
After a moment’s silence, Ryan said, “Me neither.” He carefully leveled his SIG-Sauer at the leader, who was now gesturing to the others to help him.
“Hold her down so I can give her a—”
The man never finished his sentence. His last words died in his throat as a thundering round from Doc’s huge LeMat blaster took out the man’s neck and a large chunk of his shoulder.
The mutie holding one of the blasters turned and squeezed off a single round before he was cut down by blasterfire from Mildred Wyeth’s Czech-built ZKR 551. The onetime Olympic target shooter caught the vile man with a perfectly aimed round that hit him between the eyes and slightly above the eyebrows.
With two of their fellows down, the survivors looked scared and confused. They turned to run, but were torn apart by blasterfire from the rest of the friends. Jak’s powerful Colt Python struck one of them in the shoulder, sending him tumbling heels over head into the river. And the last mutie fell to a round from Ryan’s SIG-Sauer that caught him in the back of the neck. Although it was impossible to know if it was a round from Ryan’s blaster or Krysty’s Smith & Wesson .38 that actually took the sorry man’s life, one thing was for certain—he was chilled and on the last train west before he hit the ground.
In the moments after the volley of blasterfire, all that could be heard were the muted sobs of the two women, who had gone from nearly being raped and killed, to being rescued by a band of outlanders, all in a matter of seconds.
“Anybody hurt?” Ryan called out.
At first no one answered, and then, “Yes.”
Ryan looked at each of the friends, searching for the wounded one.
“It’s Jak,” Mildred said. “Caught him in the shoulder.”
Ryan ran to where Mildred was kneeling down beside the white-headed teenager. Even though Ryan could see Jak had suffered a wound in the shoulder that was leaking blood and causing him pain, he deferred to the doctor for a better assessment. “How bad?”
“Bad enough,” Jak answered.
Ryan waited to hear from Mildred.
“Bullet went through the shoulder and tore up the flesh pretty good. Can’t be sure if there’s any damage to the bones unless I get a proper look. I can close the wound easy enough, but there’s always a chance the flesh could turn.”
Ryan nodded.
“Be fine,” Jak said, grimacing in pain as Mildred began giving the wound a field dressing. “Not worry.”
Ryan turned toward the two women and saw Doc stepping into the clearing. “It is okay,” he said. “You two are going to be all right.”
The older of the two women picked up her clothes and covered herself in modesty.
