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Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter One
Moaning softly, the child baron hugged himself tightly and began to rock in the wooden chair. The motion made it creak slightly and he shuddered at the noise.
Tightening the grips on their longblasters, the two sec men in the throne room of Broke Neck ville exchanged nervous glances.
“Baron?” the corporal ventured, advancing a step. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Drooling slightly, the youth looked at the guard with unseeing eyes. “He has the secret,” Baron Harmond whispered, the words slurred slightly. “But he doesn’t know it. Not yet!”
“Secret, sir?” a sec man dared to ask, tilting his head. “Who has what secret?”
“Vermont!” Harmond screamed, grabbing his temples as blood began to trickle from his nose. “He’s here, but also back there! I can see him in a hundred places! A hundred times! But Tanner has stayed too long! There is a new future! A different casement! The universe is ripping apart! Time is healing itself!”
Worried, the corporal looked at the window, but could see nothing wrong with either the sill or the concrete casement. What was the doomie baron talking about? Harmond had accurately predicted future events a dozen times before, and saved countless lives, both civie and sec men. But had the young baron finally crossed the line of sanity?
“Should I fetch a healer, Baron?” the sec man asked, starting for the doorway.
“Too late!” Harmond screamed, both of his hands clawing at the empty air. “He is the disease and the cure!”
“Sir?” a sec man asked, puzzled, starting to sweat. An insane baron. He knew of villes with those, and it was never good.
“Cold, so cold,” Harmond whispered, hugging himself tightly.
“Would you like a blanket, Baron?” the corporal asked. “Or we could make a fire.”
“Yes, cold…fire,” the baron wheezed, fighting for air. “The cold…is a fire…consume us all…” Lurching to his feet, he stared at the open window and pointed a shaking finger at the empty air of the north.
“Coldfire is here!” the baron shrieked, then shook all over and collapsed to the floor.
Rushing to his side, the guards turned the child over and pressed fingers to his throat to see if their baron still lived. Or if this was the long-ago prophesized day of death and the second end of the world had finally begun.
“Y-YOU HEARD ME, outlander,” growled the young sec man standing in front of the ville gate. With a double click, the guard cocked both hammers of the homie shotgun. “All of you, j-just move along now, and there won’t be no t-trouble.”
Masked by the night, the six people on horseback gave no reply to the warning. There was only the low moan of the desert breeze mixing with the sound of the panting horses and the jingling of the metal rings in the reins and stirrups.
Looking down at the nervous teenager from the back of his stallion, Ryan Cawdor tried to control his growing temper. Dark clouds covered the moon, so the only light came from the sputtering torches set on either side of the wooden gate. However, Ryan could still see that the huge wep held by the sec man was obviously not scavenged from predark days, but a homie, built from iron pipes reinforced with layers of steel wiring wrapped around each barrel. The wooden stock was hand-carved and the firing mechanism seemed to be taken from another blaster, perhaps a handblaster. Yet the double barrels of the scattergun were worn from constant use, plainly stating the wep was in good working condition and had seen plenty of action.
Even if the guard hadn’t, Ryan decided. There was dried blood on the sec man’s clothing, but none of it was his, and his face lacked the hard expression of a person who had taken the life of another. There was determination, and even bravery, but not the slightest sign of combat experience. For all Ryan knew, this was the teenager’s first shift of standing guard at the ville gate.
“Now, look, friend…” Ryan began impatiently.
“I said, keep moving!” the teenager ordered, grimly leveling the deadly blaster. “We don’t want your kind around here!”
“And what kind is that?” Ryan asked gruffly, leaning over slightly in his saddle to pat the neck of his horse.
The sweaty chestnut stallion nickered at the touch and shuffled its unshod hooves in the dry sand. Heavy saddlebags were draped across the muscular animal’s withers, and on its flanks was the brand of Two-Son ville, a lightning bolt set inside a circle. Even though covered with dust from the long ride, Ryan was well-dressed, wore good boots, pants without any patches and a heavy coat trimmed with fur. A shiny longblaster was hung across his shoulders and a slim handblaster rested in the holster of a predark gunbelt. A bandolier of ammo clips crossed his chest, and at his side was a large knife of unknown design.
Licking dry lips, the guard gave no reply. But he kept stealing glances at the left side of Ryan’s face.
Touching his leather eye patch, Ryan grunted in understanding. Yeah, he thought so.
It had been a week since the companions had left Two-Son ville in the south and charged across the Zone, going from ville to ville, chasing down the rumors of the chillings of one-eyed men. But they were always one day behind the ruthless coldhearts who jacked everybody with silver hair like Doc’s, and chilled any man with only one eye like Ryan’s. Left or right eye, it made no dif.
It had been three long days of finding nothing but death and dust, until now. So Ryan as sure as nuking hell wasn’t going to be turned away from a ville where the chillings were so fresh that a green sec man still had dried blood on his clothing.
“Move along, rist,” the guard said, tightening his grip on the scattergun. Behind the teen, two small hatches in the thick wooden gate swung open and dark metal glistened in the dim torchlight.
In spite of the poor lighting, Ryan caught the subtle motion with his good eye and shifted his position to get a clear shot with his handblaster at whoever was standing at the hatch. If trouble came, it would be from the snipes hiding behind the gate, and not this nervous kid.
“And how do you know we’re not the ones doing all of the chilling?” J. B. Dix asked, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.
Sitting astride a chestnut stallion, the short, wiry man was dressed in loose denim blue jeans, a T-shirt and a heavy leather jacket. A pump-action scattergun was strapped across his back, a 9 mm Uzi rapidfire rested on his thigh and at his side hung a large canvas bag bulging with lumpy objects.
“W-we don’t want no more trouble,” the teenager stated roughly, stepping away from the gate to give a clearer field of fire for the folks at the blaster hatches. “So just git. And I m-mean now!”
This boy was terrified, Krysty Wroth realized. But not of us.
“Go fetch your sec chief,” the redhead demanded, her long hair moving gently around her shoulders as if stirred by secret winds.
There was a bloody bandage on her left cheek and another on her wrist from the recent fighting down in Two-Son. The woman was riding a roan-colored mare. A bearskin coat hung across the saddlebags. A predark MP-5 rapidfire was draped across the pommel of the saddle, and a weird-looking wheelgun rode in a leather holster at her shapely hip. The cowboy boots in the stirrups were decorated with the silver embroidery of falcons, and the toes were steel, although at the present the metal was caked with gray dust.
The guard frowned at the sight. The redhead was better armed than any sec man. The loops of her gunbelt were filled with live brass, more than the teen had seen in his entire life.
“Ain’t got a chief. He’s…” The teen shut his mouth tightly and hunched his shoulders.
“He was one of the people killed—excuse me—chilled, by the strangers,” Doc Tanner rumbled. “Thank you, that explains everything.”
Dressed as if from another century, Doc was in frilly white shirt, with a frock coat that spread behind him across the horse like an opera cape. A mixed pair of big-bore handblasters rode in a gunbelt made of closed ammo pouches, and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s-head handle jutted from his backpack like a tribal totem.
“By the Three Kennedys, sir,” Doc said, turning to address Ryan, “we must be hot on the trail of the coldhearts if the locals haven’t even replaced their sec chief yet!”
“That’s an ace on the line,” Ryan drawled, rubbing his unshaven chin. Surreptitiously, he shifted the reins from his left hand to his right. The one-eyed man was naturally right-handed, but he’d been hurt in a fight a short while ago and his shooting arm wasn’t completely healed yet.
Just then, the blaster hatches closed and there came the sound of heavy bolts being slid aside. With creaking hinges, the thick gate was pushed open and five armed sec men walked out of the ville, the ground crunching under their boots. As the portal closed again, Ryan and the others saw a dozen more men inside the ville, positioned behind a sandbag wall, working the bolts on longblasters and notching arrows into homie crossbows. These people were ready for a war.
“Guess I’m the new chief sec man,” the oldest man stated gruffly, hitching up a gunbelt. He was dressed in ragged clothing, his predark motorcycle boots patched with duct tape, but his blasters shone with fresh oil. “And yeah, Baron Harrison was aced, along with Chief Rajavur.”
“You guess?” Mildred Wyeth asked, brushing a plait of beaded hair back off her dusty face. Riding an appaloosa mare, the physician was armed with an MP-5 rapidfire and a wheelgun rested in her belt. At her side hung a predark canvas bag.
Touching a freshly stitched scar on his chest, the sec chief shrugged. “Ain’t nobody alive to tell me no,” he stated honestly.
“Who aced baron?” Jak Lauren asked, leaning forward in his saddle. The palomino mare under the albino teen obediently altered her stance to accommodate his new position, and snorted softly with impatience.
The albino teenager riding the beast had a huge handblaster in his gunbelt and an MP-5 rapidfire in the longblaster holster set alongside the saddle.
The chief sec man shrugged. “Damned if we know who aced him.”
“Where are the bodies, then?” Ryan demanded, glancing up at the clouds overhead. He carefully noted that none of the stars was being eclipsed by anybody walking along the top of the wall around the ville. Good. The locals weren’t friendly, but neither were they trying to jack the companions.
“Hell’s bells, just follow the birds, you can’t miss them,” a sec man growled. A couple the armed men standing behind him nodded in agreement.
“Nuking hell, it was awful, like something from a nightmare!” the young guard muttered, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge the memories of the sight.
“Shut up,” the sec chief barked at the lad. Then he turned to face the companions. “All right, rist, you asked some questions and got some answers. Normally, we’re always interested in trading, even better is getting news from across the Zone, but not tonight. Now get moving, or we start blasting.”
In the flickering light of the torches, Ryan saw more blaster hatches swing open, and realized the new sec chief meant every word. There was nothing more to learn here. The answers they sought were back in the desert. Follow the birds, eh?
“Let’s go,” Ryan ordered, shaking the reins and starting his mount into a slow walk. The rest of the companions were close behind.
“Friendly folks,” J.B. commented as the companions rode away. Judiciously, the Armorer eased off the safety of the 9 mm Uzi in his lap. “Never seen people so rattled before. So their sec chief got himself aced. Big deal. That’s no reason for the whole ville to go triple red.”
Squinting into the distance, Ryan saw a flock of birds circling a distant hill. Smoke was rising from a small campfire, but that was all he could see from this angle.
“Let’s go see if there was a reason,” he growled, kicking his mount into a full gallop.
Chapter Two
A couple hundred miles away, a pale man walked slowly through the cold rubble of the burned-down building. He was tall and slim, almost skeletal, his face so smooth that it seemed as if the man had never needed to shave. His blond hair was slicked back tightly to his head and a tiny silver stud twinkled in his left earlobe. His pants and vest, more practical than the robe he usually wore, were cream-colored, spotless and perfect. Not even the dust raised by his walking through the ash seemed able to adhere to the odd fabric. Instead of boots, he wore sliver slippers, the woven material strangely luminescent. But even more bizarre was the fact that the man carried no visible wep of any kind. No blaster, ax, crossbow, knife or even a simple club.
In utter horror, Delphi stared at the decomposing bodies of the men and the muties mingling together on the ground, bits of white bone and golden brass glittering from the gray ashes like broken promises.
“Dead, they’re all dead,” Delphi whispered, gently kicking aside the distorted skull of a stickie. The operative of Department Coldfire couldn’t believe his eyes. This was impossible!
Moving listlessly among the wreckage, Delphi found more and more of the bodies everywhere, the death toll incredible, and every one of the muties had been shot through the head, even when there was only a head remaining with no torso attached. The surviving sec men had shot the dead stickies, just to make sure the muties really were deceased. That was ruthless efficiency he could appreciate. In spite of all his arduous work, and endless planning, slaving over every little detail, the hidden nest of stickies in Two-Son had been utterly destroyed in a single night. One night! Then the locals had done everything but sow salt into the land to make sure the stickies would never return.
“My precious little ones,” Delphi moaned, bending to pick up the blackened skull of a stickie. A cooked eye fell out as Delphi raised the skull high in his palm, wondering if he had known this particular mutant. Then Delphi had a sudden flash in his mind of Hamlet doing the exact same thing, and he cast the grisly remnant aside. It sailed across the smoky destruction to crash against the side of a marble staircase that rose high into the empty air and abruptly ended at nothing. The smashed bones went flying everywhere.
Bowing his head, Delphi tightened his fists, attempting to control his growling rage over the slaughter. How long he held that position, Delphi had no idea, but his somber reverie was disrupted at sound of hooves beating on sand.
Quickly looking up, Delphi scanned the nearby predark city until locating a man on a horse coming this way through the crumbling ruins.
“Hey, rist!” the rider called, tightening his grip on the reins and bringing the stallion to a halt on the cracked sidewalk. “Get the nuking hell out of there! The foundation is weak and could collapse at any second!”
His face an inert mask, Delphi walked across the debris and onto the sandy street. A soft breeze was blowing, mixing sand with the ashes of the obliterated stickie nest.
“Rist?” Delphi said curiously, tucking his hands into his sleeves.
The sec man grinned in embarrassment. “Sorry, Baron O’Connor told us to stop using that word. It means outlander or stranger.”
“Does it now? Well, I am a stranger,” Delphi muttered, his eyes narrowing. “And from those black-powder weapons, you must be a sec man from Two-Son ville. That’s only a klick away, correct?”
His instincts flaring at the tone of the question, the rider let an arm drop so that his fingers rested on the checkered grip of the handblaster resting in the holster at his side.
“Ain’t no other ville for a hundred klicks in any direction,” the sec man stated, tightening the reins as the horse shifted its hooves in the hot sand. “Now what’s your biz here?”
“My biz?”
“What do ya want?” The sec man leaned over the pommel of his saddle and scowled. “Are you a lost pilgrim, or a trader?”
“Ah, an intelligent question at last,” Delphi said, slowly smiling. “Most astute. What I want at the moment is your prompt death.”
Recoiling at that statement, the sec man drew his blaster and fired. But in spite of the fact that the pale outlander was only a few yards away, he somehow missed. Quickly, the sec man fired twice more. The black-powder charges threw out great volumes of dark smoke, and he had to wait for the desert wind to clear the air so that he could see the chilled body.
But the outlander was still standing, unfazed and untouched, without a single wound to be seen.
Snarling obscenities, the sec man fired again and this time actually saw the soft lead ball slam into the man’s face. No, wait. The lead had stopped in midair, flattened into a misshapen lump as if it impacted a sheet of predark mil armor. But there was only air between the two of them! How was this possible?
Throwing back his head, Delphi began to laugh as the cooling sphere of lead fell impotently to the sandy street.
Fear swept over the sec man and he briefly debated galloping away. But the very idea of retreat made him snarl in suppressed fury, and the sec man quickly fired the last two rounds in the handblaster. This time, he saw the billowing clouds of gunsmoke form a halo around the rist, revealing a sort of ball, or sphere, as if the man were a bug in a jar. An invisible glass ball that could stop blasters?
As the sweating sec man hastily went for the knife in his boot, Delphi extracted a crystalline rod from within his left sleeve, and pointed it at the horse. With a snort, the animal went absolutely still, then toppled to the street like so much cooked meat. Wisps of steam rose from the nostrils and ears.
Unable to leap from the saddle fast enough, the sec man hit the asphalt hard, the impact making him drop the knife. Then he heard the bones in his leg snap loudly under the deadweight of the horse. Son of a bitch! A split second later, the pain arrived, and he screamed curses. But then he stopped abruptly as thick blood began to flow from the slack mouth of the deceased horse, as if its internal organs had been liquefied. The sight galvanized the sec man into action, and he desperately clawed for the scattergun hidden in the saddlebags.
As Delphi approached, the sec man yanked the wep clear.
