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“Compared to what?”
Mildred laughed, but then she realized the girl had spoken in her usual flat-serious tone. Maybe she hadn’t intended a joke. Maybe she was asking seriously.
Mildred felt guilty.
“Know where those stickies came from?” J.B. called to her from the tail end of their procession.
“No. I heard rumors about them around the farm. Stories about people disappearing—travelers, folks out working alone late at night or hunting. Even once or twice about them attacking a few isolated places north of there. Everybody’s scared of them—”
“Highly sensible,” Doc said from his own position behind Ricky and Ryan in front of the girl. As usual Jak was scouting the terrain ahead.
“But nobody took them none too serious as a threat to them, you know?”
“I wonder why they chose to attack when they did,” Doc asked, “and in such force?”
“Who knows why stickies do what they do?” Mildred queried.
“Nevertheless,” he said, unfazed, “it might benefit the chances of our own survival if we could obtain some insight into the workings of their minds. Dark and twisted though they are.”
“I agree with you, Doc,” Ryan said. He was carrying his Steyr Scout cradled in arms crossed across his chest. “Knowing how your enemy thinks can be half the battle or more.”
“I wish I could help you.” Mariah almost mumbled the words. She seemed to be, on the one hand, desperate to justify her accompanying the others in any way she could and, on the other, terrified by Ryan.
“Don’t mind our esteemed leader, Mr. Gruff,” Mildred told the girl. “He’s always that way before he gets his morning coffee.”
That got Mildred a glance and a perplexed look over Mariah’s shoulder, which turned to a look of near panic when the others burst out laughing. Even Ryan mustered a brief chuckle.
“When’s the last time we had real coffee, do you reckon, Ryan?” J.B. asked.
Ryan rubbed his chin.
“A few weeks for sure, the time we traded a homie blaster for a dozen old MRE packs.”
“She did report stickie attacks coming out of somewhere north of where we found her,” J.B. said. “Reckon that’s a good clue.”
“Of somewhere to stay away from,” Mildred said.
“That’s the truth,” Krysty stated.
“So you’re sure you got no idea why they attacked the Baylah farm?” Ryan asked. “Or why they wound up leaving you alone?”
“No, sir,” Mariah said.
He sighed, looking skeptical.
“If that man we shot went berserk with his ax and chilled all the stickies,” Krysty said, “that would explain why Mariah was left unharmed.”
Ryan frowned but said nothing. He grunted and turned away.
For her part, Mildred was far from sure that one man with an ax, no matter how strong and crazy he might be, could do the kind of damage and sheer amount of it they’d seen.
But she was in no mood to gratify Ryan by feeding his paranoia just now. She focused on putting one boot in front of the other.
Chapter Five (#ulink_33676147-88e2-5efb-ad5e-53431f4dcd07)
Hamarsville was a curious sight: a log palisade made out of straight, peeled tree trunks, sticking up out of a meadow nestled among pine-wooded heights on the northeast fringes of the Black Hills. The most prominent features inside the expansive wall, visible to Ryan from the brush on a ridgetop to the south and east from which the companions were scoping the ville, included a watchtower, a lot of bark-shingled roofs and prominent clouds of white steam and darker smoke arising from various chimneys.
What they were making in that stockade was apparent by a light westerly undulating breeze over the low mountain range.
“Turpentiners,” Mildred said from Ryan’s side, sniffing at the air.
“That’s right,” Mariah stated. She sounded almost eager, which even Ryan acknowledged was more emotion than she’d showed over the three days since they’d picked her up at the massacre site. “Mostly distill pine oil. Old Paw Baylah said they been at it a couple generations.”
“It is a sizable settlement,” Doc observed. “And just from what these old eyes can observe at this remove, a relatively prosperous one.”
“Yeah,” J.B. said, pushing his fedora back on his head. He was hunkered down to Ryan’s right. “Looks like it must run two hundred people. Mebbe more.”
Ryan raised his recently acquired World War II–era field glasses to his eye. It was something of an affectation for him to carry them, big and rather bulky as they were, and built specifically for the one thing he didn’t have—binocular vision—but they had triple-good optics. Besides, using the low-powered Leopold sight on his Scout longblaster to scope a place out was considered a mighty unfriendly act.
Although they were well concealed up here in the scrub—and Ryan had known better than to let sunlight reflect off the object lens of a scope to heliograph his position to potential enemies since he was a sprat—he avoided doing it on principle when there was reason to suspect the people under observation weren’t hostile.
Ryan heard a rustling sound from his left as he focused the binocs. It was Jak. The fact Ryan or any of them had heard the albino meant he had deliberately made the noise so as not to startle his friends when they were already on yellow alert, which they customarily were this close to a settlement.
“Wag coming,” the scout announced softly. “Ox-drawn. Driver and lever-gun guard.”
It was a long speech for the slight young man and one that came perilously close to delivering a second full sentence on top of his opening statement. But it was all potentially important information.
“Ace,” Ryan said. “Thanks.”
He didn’t need to be told that Jak assessed the approaching wag as posing little threat any more than he had to be told that Jak, having delivered his information, had faded instantly back into the wilds around them. Had he detected even a whiff of danger he would have said that straight off. Ryan had spent years in the employ of the enigmatic man known as the Trader, in whose company he had met J.B. He knew full well that the last thing a pair of wag drivers would be doing would be looking to start trouble. Their livelihoods—and lives—depended on avoiding as much of that commodity as they could.
The road ran to their right, along the stream that passed directly through the ville and out under the log-fort walls. The wag in question not being visible yet, Ryan went ahead and took a leisurely look over the ville.
It confirmed Doc’s and J.B.’s assessments, as well as his own: a big place, with sturdy defenses and well-built structures. It was the kind of place to attract plenty of unfriendly attention. And because it had clearly been there a spell, just the way Mariah had said, the inhabitants knew how to repel unwanted attention. When he raised his glasses to the watchtower, he saw a sentry, clearly female despite the shade the roof gave from the afternoon sun, leveling a scoped longblaster and pointing it at the approaching wag. The wagoneers likely recognized that having a bead drawn on them was just a necessary precaution.
The vehicle appeared, rolling in ruts worn in the hard earth by years of previous traffic. With less interest in commerce than he had in the back side of the moon, Jak had neglected to mention whether it was laden or not. But in fact it carried a load of crates and bags woven of some rough fabric, likely hemp, the sorts of things traders might be expected to carry.
The gate, which was also constructed of peeled logs like the surrounding walls, was drawn to the right to open the way for the wag. It rolled inside the stockade without apparent challenge or formality.
“How do they take to strangers showing up on their doorstep?” Ryan asked Mariah as he handed the binocs to J.B.
“It happens all the time,” the girl said. “Don’t cause them any fuss at all. They take in a lot of jack through their gaudy, which Baron Hamar owns, and the boarding house, which is run by his sister, Agnes.”
“What happens if their visitors misbehave?” Ryan asked.
“They usually leave their chills strung up outside the walls,” Mariah said without inflection. “As a warning to others. Till they start to smell bad anyway. Leastways, that’s what Chad Baylah said. He was the youngest, a few years older than me, and not much given to fibbing, for fear of his maw.”
J.B. halted in the act of raising the binocs to his face. He looked at Ryan, who shrugged.
“Fair enough,” he said. “Let’s go see a man about a job.”
* * *
“YOU GOT PLENTY of blasters,” Baron Hamar said, running his pale blue eyes up and down the newcomers in the dusty street in front of his establishment. “Do you know how to use them?”
Though J.B. was a man not much given to trying to puzzle out another person’s feelings, he had learned across the span of his long and eventful life to pay attention to certain basics. It was hard to make it out of boyhood still breathing, especially when you were as skinny a little runt as J.B. had been, without noticing whether a person was obviously hostile.
This stocky baron did not sound overtly angry or suspicious. As for the niceties, such as how likely he was to be dissembling, J.B. left that to the others—to Ryan, who did pay more attention to that sort of thing, because he paid attention to anything that might affect their chances of survival, and to Krysty. The redhead disavowed any suggestion that her mutie powers gave her any sort of psychic insight as to what other people were thinking and feeling, but she was good at sniffing out their emotions.
“We had occasion to put them to use a few times,” Ryan said. J.B. had done his time with Trader, too, longer than Ryan had, in fact. He knew from observation that what his friend was engaging in was not self-deprecation. Rather, in the Deathlands, where swaggering braggarts were plentiful, that kind of understatement was just a good sales pitch.
Baron Hamar clearly took it as such. “Good,” he said, emphatically nodding his square head. He had close-cropped bronze hair and a well-tended beard, both liberally streaked with white. He wore a soiled apron over a simple flannel shirt and denim pants, with a blaster belt strapped over it and a Model 1911 handblaster riding in the holster, hammer back and held in by a thumb strap.
“Got use for men and women who know how to handle themselves in a fight,” he said, “you betcha.”
“We don’t do mercie work, Baron,” Ryan said. “Got to make that clear up front.”
“Oh, no, no. I’ve got a sec team, and my people can fight, too, if anyone makes trouble for us. We do business. We do not look for trouble.”
“Ace on the line,” Ryan said. “What do you need, then?”
“Come, my friends,” Hamar said. “Walk with me.”
He turned and nodded pointedly to what J.B. took to be a handful of his staff and a couple of young, gaudy sluts standing on the elevated plank walkway in front of the gaudy house. It was called Sailor’s Rest, according to a weathered board sign, obviously hand painted with some care and skill. What a sailor might find to be doing here in this thoroughly landlocked part of the world, J.B. had not a clue. He suspected resting was a good bet, though, since according to Doc they weren’t far from the spot farthest from any coast in all of North America.
The employees took their boss’s hint and vanished back inside. Hamar guided the companions west at a brisk walk along the main street toward what was clearly the turpentine distillery, from its size and appearance. Not to mention its ever-increasing smell.
“Hard times have come to this part of the Plains,” Hamar said.
“That’s not exactly breaking news,” Mildred muttered.
Ryan turned his head back toward her, ever so slightly. “Shutting up now,” Mildred said.
J.B. loved the woman, but she did have a tendency to run her mouth. It was a good thing Baron Hamar had a solid rep for being as easygoing as his manner suggested, or almost. Mariah told them that the patriarch of the Baylah clan considered it a scandal just how liberal he was. But the calluses on Baron Hamar’s strong square hands made it clear that, baron or not, he was no stranger to doing hard work.
And the condition of his knuckles told J.B. loud and clear that Hamar was also no stranger to bouncing them off the odd skull, which might have just been how he delivered gentle warnings to gaudy patrons as the step before hanging their hides out on his stockade wall to dry. Whatever the case was, even the most scandalously liberal-minded baron was still a baron and unlikely to be well disposed to getting back talk.
“We’ve got coldhearts,” Hamar said. “Of course we do. Every five, ten years, they’ve got to make a run at us. Just to learn.”
J.B. saw Ryan nod appreciatively. They had to teach some pretty tough lessons in that subject hereabouts, if the learning lasted that long among the Plains bandit bands.
The Armorer kept his eyes roving from side to side, taking in the surroundings—and the onlookers. Jak, as always when he found himself surrounded by anything that might even attract the accusation of being civilization, walked as warily as an old trading-post tomcat who stumbled into a coyote conclave.
“But we’ve got a new bunch moving in,” the baron said. “Muscling in on the other gangs. Getting bigger, stronger. Even enough to start worrying the Plains nations.”
That got J.B.’s attention. From what he knew of the area, the Native Americans could be spiky to deal with on their own. Though they generally gave grief to each other more than to any outlanders, depending on who was allied with whom and who was currently blood-feuding, none of them were the sort of people a man would care to rub the wrong way.
“Heard they roughed up Red Knife’s Arapaho crew pretty good on the Mussleshell two or three weeks ago. No pushovers, that bunch.”
They reached the end of the street. J.B. would not have minded an invitation to inspect the turpentine-distilling equipment, fragrant as it was. It looked mostly like a random collection of pipes and boilers. But it was still something that had been built and fixed with a person’s hands. As such, it caught J.B.’s interest.
But apparently Baron Hamar had just felt like stretching his legs. He stopped in front of the operation, far enough away not to interfere with workers wheeling barrows of wood chips from the water-wheel-powered grinder and such to the hoppers.
“Not just bold for coldhearts, but genuinely badass, then,” Ryan said. “Have they got a name?”
“Bloods, they call themselves.”
“Fireblast! You mean, the Blackfeet are doing this?”
That signaled that it would be an ace time for them all to turn right around and shake the dust of the whole district from their heels triple-fast. The Confederation was one of the biggest and strongest tribes. If they were making a hard move south, it meant that this whole part of the Plains was on the verge of bursting into a wildfire that could easily consume Ryan and his companions. The companions knew the area. The bands that already roved here, such as the Absaroka and the Lakota, would be looking to teach the invaders some hard lessons.
“Not the Confederacy, no,” Hamar said. “Nor the actual Blood band. Freelancers who are using the name.”
“Black dust!” J.B. was moved to say. “Real Bloods aren’t likely to cotton to that.”
“Mebbe that’s the point,” Hamar said. “Rumor says these new Bloods’ boss man is a Blood renegade, a young firebrand who calls himself Hammerhand.”
“You can just tell he’s a people person,” Mildred said under her breath. J.B. started to frown at that, but then Krysty gave a half-stifled snicker.
Ryan showed no sign he’d even heard her, although J.B. didn’t doubt he had.
“They give you any trouble yet?”
“No. It is just a matter of time, I’m sure. But we weathered such storms before. No, they haven’t even been reported within three days’ ride of here. But they’re starting to hit trade harder and harder.”
“So where do we come in?” Ryan asked.
“Do you want us to help guard your caravans as part of your sec force?” Krysty asked.
“Oh, no,” the baron said. “It’s not goods I want to deliver. It’s information!”
Chapter Six (#ulink_755004aa-4417-5b4c-964e-aa6f73d073e0)
In a single panther-like leap, Hammerhand sprang into the bed of the rebuilt pickup truck. For all his bulk he landed lightly enough that the Buffalo Mob sentry, leaning over the roll bar onto the Tacoma’s cab roof to enjoy a smoke under the cold, starry sky, was only alerted to danger when he felt the vehicle rock on its spring beneath his feet.
By then it was too late to dodge. Or even to scream.
Hammerhand felt the man’s bearded chin dig into his biceps as he wrapped an arm around the coldheart’s throat. He snatched hold of that chin with his free hand and violently torqued the sentry’s head to the right.
His thick neck snapped with a sound loud enough to turn even Hammerhand’s bowels briefly to ice water. He froze as he felt the dying bandit convulse and his nostrils filled with the rich, wet reek of his sphincter letting go in his camo pants.
Inside the circle formed by the score of power wags parked on the nighttime prairie, the Buffalo Mob’s rowdy reverie continued unabated around a dozen or so campfires. The woman playing on a harmonica with surprising skill never missed a beat. Neither did the pair of women dancing drunkenly to the tune.
Hammerhand had spent an hour crouched in the scrub nearby, scoping out his target. So had twenty of his best Bloods, split up into three teams led by himself, Joe Takes-Blasters and Mindy Farseer. It was a risk taking the whole top leadership to a single raid, but this was all a high-risk gamble for high stakes.
That was the point. Not just to score a number of power wags and start a serious upgrade on the mobility of his insurgent Plains nation, but also to do so with sufficient demon style to act as a beacon to the bold and ambitious by its very own self.
That had been part of what the Glowing Man told him. Not giving him the idea. Far from it. Telling him that the idea he had was righteous, as was his dream of establishing a Plains empire in blood and fire, and that he was destined to go for it.
