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“Quite so, madam,” Doc whispered hoarsely. “Quite so.” The jumps through the mat-trans units always hit Doc and Jak Lauren the hardest. For Doc, it was probably because of the horrible experiments performed by Operation Chronos.
Fumbling to locate his ebony swordstick on the floor, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner wrapped both hands around the silver lion’s-head crest and levered himself erect. Dressed as if he were from the nineteenth century, the scholar wore a gentleman’s frilled shirt and a long frock coat that had seen better days. But there was also a huge LeMat .44 pistol at his side, the grip of the massive double-barrel revolver worn from constant use.
“You okay, Jak?” Mildred Wyeth asked, swinging her med kit around to her front for easy access. Short and stocky, the black woman had once been a twentieth-century physician. During a relatively simple operation, something had gone wrong, and Mildred had been cryogenically frozen, only to be revived a hundred years later by Ryan and the companions. She had been traveling with them ever since.
In the savage wastelands of the early twenty-second century, her skills as a trained physician were beyond price, even though Mildred had virtually no instruments or medicine. The med kit hanging over her shoulder was merely a patched canvas bag salvaged from a U.S. Army M*A*S*H unit. The bag was filled with strips of boiled cloth to be used as bandages, a small plastic bottle of homemade liquor called “shine” for disinfectant, a pack of razor blades found in a bombed-out supermarket for her scalpels, and similar crude items. She sometimes felt like a photographer without a camera. Dr. Mildred Wyeth had the skill to save lives, but the tools of her craft were only items of legend in these dark days.
“F-feel fine.” Jak Lauren spit, using the back of a hand to wipe the drool from his mouth.
Turning away from the wall where he had just been sick, Jak stood carefully, as if afraid his thin body might break from the effort. He was trying to keep it hidden from the others, but their travels through the mat-trans had been hitting the teenager hard lately, and it was taking longer and longer for him to get back on his feet after each jump. It was a strange condition for the albino teen, because he was normally as strong as a horse.
As he checked over his .357 Magnum Colt Python revolver, Jak privately wondered if maybe the effects of the hundreds of jumps they had made were wearing him down. That would be bad news if true. The mat-trans units in the redoubts were the only safe way to traverse the burning deserts and rad-blasted hellzones of the Deathlands. It would be a triple-damn shame if he had to abandon using that method of transportation. Worse—he’d have to quit traveling with his companions.
“By the Three Kennedys!” Doc roared, pulling at the lion head of his cane to extract a shining steel rapier from the ebony shaft. “Dean! Where is Dean!”
The rest of the companions paused at that, and exchanged sad glances.
“Sharona took him. He’s no longer with us,” Ryan said quietly. “Remember, Doc?”
The time traveler arched both eyebrows in indignation, then slowly his features softened as he recalled the events of the past.
“Ah, yes, my condolences, my dear Ryan,” Doc muttered in embarrassment, sheathing the blade once more and locking it tight with a twist of the handle. “I had forgotten. The jump, you know….”
“Hey, anybody see my hat?” J.B. asked, running stiff fingers through his sparse hair.
Ryan kicked the battered fedora across the chilly floor and J.B. scooped it up and tucked it back in place in a single move.
“I could use one of those myself,” Mildred said, buttoning the collar of her denim shirt. “Damn, it really is cold in here.”
“Mebbe everybody died leaving the air conditioner on,” Ryan said in a touch of rare humor as he went to the wall and placed a hand on the vent.
“No, it’s working,” he reported, thoughtfully straightening the patch covering the ruin of his left eye. “And it’s warm, too.”
“Warm?” Jak said, frowning as he tucked away the Colt Python. “Colder than doomie’s tit in here.” Shivering slightly, the teenager zipped up the front of his jacket. The garment was covered with bits of metal and mirrors, as well as razor blades. Razor blades also lined the collar. If anybody was foolish enough to try to grab the teen around the throat, the person might lose a few fingers.
His combat instincts instantly alert, Ryan pulled out his SiG-Sauer and racked the slide to chamber a round.
“J.B., check the door,” he ordered brusquely. “Everybody else, back into the mat-trans unit!”
Quickly the others did as ordered.
Gingerly touching the door, J.B. hissed with shock and pulled his hand back to suck on his fingertips.
“Dark night! The bastard thing is freezing!” he mumbled around the fingers.
Rotating the cylinder of her Czech ZKR .38 revolver as a prelude to possible battle, Mildred snapped her head around at that comment. “Impossible,” she said, starting forward. “The reactors in the basement of a redoubt should keep the base warm even if it was at the North Pole! And the only thing colder than that would be…” Her eyes went wide. “Ryan, check for a draft!”
Frowning darkly, Ryan paused, then holstered his blaster. Walking over to join his friend, he pulled out a candle, and very carefully lit the wick with a predark butane lighter. Manufactured by the millions before skydark destroyed the world, the lighters were now worth more than a man’s life in trade. The only thing more valuable was a loaded blaster. The friends had found several in the past.
As Ryan moved the candle along the frame of the oval doorway, J.B. reached into the munitions bag at his side and unearthed a bit of a candle and a butane lighter from the array of homemade explosives and predark grens.
Slowly, the two men moved the flickering flames along the edge of the jam of the burnished steel door. The flames stayed steady until nearing the concealed hinges of the portal, then both wavered and went out.
“Fireblast, there are holes in the seal,” Ryan said, tucking the spent candle away. “Some sort of draft sucking out all the warm air.”
Doing the same with his candle, J.B. glowered at the door as if it were a ticking mine. “Gotta be one hell of vacuum on the other side,” he said, pushing back his hat. “Think we’re in space again?”
“Mebbe,” Ryan returned. The companions had once found themselves in a “redoubt” that was orbiting the moon. They had been forced to leave almost immediately, but that redoubt had been safe and warm. If this one was in orbit and leaking air, then their wisest move would be to leave.
“Let’s go,” Ryan stated, turning for the mat-trans unit. “No way we’re going to chance opening the door.”
Hunching his shoulders, Jak muttered a curse. Another jump so soon wasn’t something any of them wanted to do.
Going to join the others, Krysty moved past the vent and paused. The breeze was gone. Spinning, she placed a hand on the disguised vent and said a quick prayer to Gaia when she felt warm air, just a lot weaker than before. The life support of the redoubt had to have started working once they arrived, but was now running out of power. Soon, there might not be enough to operate the mat-trans!
“Into the unit!” Krysty commanded, starting to run across the chamber. “Now! We jump right fucking now!”
Not wasting a second, the rest of the companions jammed into the small chamber and as Krysty squeezed in with them, Ryan hit the LD button.
Nothing happened.
Fireblast! he raged silently. They had to have been here too long! The Last Destination option lasted for only thirty minutes! The LD button was no longer active and couldn’t send them back to the Arizona redoubt they had just left.
With no other choice, Ryan hit the jump buttons hoping he’d randomly key a sequence that would take them somewhere. Almost instantly a new chill seeped into their living bones that had nothing to do with the vacuum of space. A swirling white mist rose from the solid floor and ceiling to fill the chamber, then lighting crackled in silent fury and the floor seemed to disappear as they all began falling into the artificial void that stretched from unit to unit across the planet, and beyond…
RISING STIFFLY from his throne, the old baron limped across the dais in front of the blockhouse.
The entire population of the ville filled the courtyard, as Baron Hugh Tregart hobbled down a short flight of stairs and headed for the pyre.
Reaching twice the height of a man, the stack of wood was bound together with strong rope that had been carefully dampened to prevent it from burning through too quickly and disturbing the pyre, and its sole occupant. Wrapped in stiff canvas, the body lay on top of the flammable mound, a few relics from childhood placed alongside the trophies of manhood. The hide of the first griz bear he had ever killed, his gunbelt. Only the precious blaster was missing.
Accepting a crackling torch from a sec man, the baron shuffled closer and blinked away some tears as he touched the pyre as if bestowing a benediction. Soaked with shine, oil, grease and even a few precious ounces of condensed fuel, the wood caught instantly, and the flames made a low roar as they spread over the pyre, meeting on the other side and then rising to the crest to engulf the still body of his son.
A dark plume of roiling smoke soon rose to hide the corpse of Edmund Tregart, and all across the courtyard people began to openly weep or to bow their heads and mutter prayers as the flames began to consume the young man.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Baron Tregart said in a loud, clear voice, tossing the torch onto the growing bonfire. Tears were on his cheeks, but his face was as impassive as stone. Only the whiteness of his hand grasping the walking stick showed his inner emotions.
“It is done,” the baron said, turning to face the crowd of ville folk and sec men. “My son is gone. Now, bring forth the killers!”
There was a commotion at the rear of the crowd, and the people angrily parted to allow a group of grim sec men through with their two prisoners. Wrapped in chains, the captives were wearing only bloody rags, their exposed skin covered with red welts from endless whippings. One man had a badly broken nose, the other had an eye swollen shut and bulging with contained fluids.
The ville folk cursed at the prisoners as they passed, several spit at the men, and a few raised sharp pieces of stone to throw. But the sec men got in the way, and the stones were reluctantly dropped to the dusty yard.
In the background, armed guards walked along the top of the wall around Thunder ville, and while the men desperately wanted to watch the coming execution, they forced themselves to face outward. Funerals, weddings, births, any major event involving the baron was a good time for enemies to attack. The sec men clenched their fists in frustration and kept watch on the desert river outside the ville. The muddy waters of the Ohi helped to keep the ville alive, but the river also brought outlanders from the distant mountains, and those were always trouble.
Returning to his throne, Baron Tregart sat heavily and cast a furtive gaze at the chair alongside. His wife, Hannah, was dying of the black cough, and now this. For a moment the old man thought his heart would break from the weight of his sorrow, then he inhaled slow and sat upright. A baron could never show weakness to his people, his father had always warned. Nor grant favors to an enemy. If he followed those two rules, his ville would prosper.
But it had been a lie. Thunder ville was dying. Food was so scarce that the women couldn’t produce enough milk for their babies, and many of them “accidentally” dropped newborn infants on to stones to save the poor things from the endless days of painful starvation until sweet death finally set them free.
The crops were dying, and the stores of predark cans all gone. Many of his people were eating cactus from the desert, or the little green lizards that came out at night. One lad had even somehow caught a stingwing and eaten it alive. He died soon afterward, but the act itself had been incredible. Stingwings moved faster than arrows. That a starving child caught one alive was seen by many as an omen. The question was whether it was a good omen because he caught the food, or a bad one because he died afterward. Some had tried hunting, but any portable wildlife was too far outside the small ville for the starving, weak hunters to carry back. Even in pieces. And the scavs would have quickly devoured the carcass left behind.
A breeze shifted the smoke from the pyre and the baron flinched slightly from the smell of his burning son. Edmund had been on a scav run in the distance ruins, and miraculously found a cache of predark canned goods. The cans that bulged from internal pressure they didn’t touch, experience teaching them that those were deadly to eat for man, beast and mutie. But there had been many more in good condition, fifty cans of food! Fifty! A bounty beyond imagination.
The cans had all been mixed with clean water, and then boiled for the length of a new candle to kill any rust-formed poisons. When done, the contents would have made enough soup for the whole ville. In this time of famine it was a godsend, his son hailed as a savior by the famished people.
“Then you tried to steal some!” Baron Tregart roared, standing and shaking a fist at the trembling prisoner. “You stole soup and spilled the rest! All of it!”
“Mercy!” a thief cried, raising his bloody hands.
A sec man alongside the prisoner thrust down his longblaster, the wooden stock ramming into the man’s face, the bones audibly cracking. His chains rattling, the criminal fell to his knees, a thin arm thrown across his face as protection. Blood flowed down his cheek and dribbled onto his filthy clothing. The other thief burst into hysterical tears, a mad laughter mixing with the sobs into an unnerving noise.
“Make soup of them!” a thin woman screamed from the crowd. “Cook the fools over the young baron!”
Others in the crowd took up the cry, and Baron Tregart frowned until they raggedly ceased. Had they come to that at last? To eat their own dead to stay alive?
Once more, the baron stared in open hatred at the cringing thieves. He wasn’t a brutal ruler, and might have forgiven them taking the food, but they had clubbed a sec man to do it. The sec man on guard that night was his own son, standing in for a childhood friend who was too weak to be near the food, the smell of the cooking soup making him too dizzy to stand.
All through last night, Edmund had burned with fever, the ville healer doing what she could, but even her herbs and poultices had been consumed during the famine. His daughter had cut her wrist and tried to feed her dying brother some of her own blood to give him strength. But in his delirium, the man refused. By dawn, Edmund was dead.
The child had foretold of this, Baron Tregart remembered bitterly. Food would destroy the ville. He had thought the doomie was talking about poisoned food, but apparently not. Just starvation. The one enemy the sec men couldn’t stop with a million blasters.
“Captain Zane?” the baron said, turning to the side.
Looking up at the throne, Zane Dolbert gave a salute. “Yes, Baron?” he asked in a deep baritone.
“After the funeral, kill Edmund’s dogs,” Baron Tregart said softly.
“Baron?” the sec chief whispered in shock.
“You heard me, Zane,” the baron repeated more forcefully. “Kill the guard dogs. There is no other food.”
“I…” Zane swallowed, and tried again. “Most of my men will refuse.”
“You will not kill them?” the baron began in a low voice, his eyes flashing with the force that had made him baron in the time of chaos.
“No! Of course, not that, my lord,” Zane decried, vehemently shaking his head. “If you order it, Baron, I’ll ace the dogs myself. But my men will not eat them. The dogs are looked upon as fellow sec men. They stood by our sides against muties and coldhearts, and even the machines that came in from the high desert. The animals are buried in the Iron Yard with the sec men who have died in battle.”
“Then let them refuse, and there will be more soup for the ville folk,” Baron Tregart said softly. “But save half of the broth. Your men will eat when they get hungry enough.”
“That won’t be necessary, Father!” a voice called out loudly from the rear of the crowd.
As the people quickly moved aside, a young woman strode forward to stop at the bottom of the stairs leading to the dais. She would have been beautiful, but her cold eyes ruined the effect of her flawless skin and sensuous mouth. A cascade of long blond hair fell to her waist, bound by a rawhide net into a thick ponytail. As she opened her ancient leather jacket, a gunbelt was exposed with a shiny blaster riding at her hip.
The baron blinked at the sight. A blaster? Where had Sandra found a blaster?
“You’re late, Daughter,” he said in stern disapproval. Sandra Tregart looked at the raging bonfire across the courtyard for only a moment, then faced her father once more.
“There was business to do,” she replied curtly, loosening the blue scarf around her neck.
“What kind of business is more important than this?” the baron demanded, gesturing at the crackling pyre.
“See for yourself!” she shouted. Pulling off a glove, she put two fingers into her mouth and shrilly whistled.
Suddenly there was a commotion at the back of the crowd, and people began to gasp, then cheer as a line of men marched into view carrying bundles and baskets.
“I have gotten us twenty dead horses, one mule and fourteen dogs,” Sandra Tregart shouted. “All butchered and ready to be cooked into jerky. Plus, a hundred pounds of flour, fifty pounds of dried vegetables, thirty of rice, twenty loaves of bread, ten cans of fruit, and enough corn seed to plant half our cropland!”
Food! The cry went through the crowd like a shotgun blast, some of the wrinklies falling to their knees and openly weeping in relief. Baron Tregart could only gape at the sight of the baskets being placed at the foot of the dais. Food, endless food, spread in front of him, the salty smell of the fresh meat driving a knife of hunger into his empty belly.
Sandra took a small round of bread from a basket and tossed it to her father. He made the catch and stared at the golden-brown crust cradled in his bony hand as if it were the first bread ever made in the history of the world.
“There are also twenty bottles of shine,” she said brusquely, as if throwing challenge at her father. “I claim all of it for myself, and the Angel. Agreed?”
“Yes, yes, of course, whatever you want!” Baron Tregart panted, waving the trivial matter aside, the other hand still holding the wondrous bread. “Zane! Get ten strong men and gather all of the wood you can find!” the baron ordered. “Build a cooking fire on the other side of the ville. Far away from here.”
Looking at the towering flames of the pyre, the sec chief frowned. “Upwind from here, you mean, Baron,” he corrected.
Slowly placing the round of bread into his lap, Baron Tregart nodded in assent. “Yes, good thinking. Use an entire horse, and twenty pounds of vegetables for soup. Then get five women to start making bread. Use half of the flour, the rest goes into the armory for safekeeping.”
“Have the guards make sure that everybody drinks a bowl of thin broth before getting any meat,” Sandra commanded sharply. “Or else they’ll just vomit it back up. Whip the first person to get sick, and the rest will eat slower. That is all the food there is. We make it last, or we die this winterfall.”
“Yes, my lady,” Zane muttered, the sec chief placing a fist to his heart.
Both the baron and Sandra raised an eyebrow at that. Such a salute was reserved only for the baron and his wife. Sandra held the sec man’s gaze for a long moment, then regally nodded. Turning, Zane started shouting orders, and people rushed to obey. The line of men picked up the baskets from the dais and started marching around the blockhouse. An old woman burst into tears of happiness, and from somewhere a man started to sing a working song.
“So it appears you are finally in charge, dear Daughter,” Baron Tregart said slowly, leaning back in his throne. “Your brother still burns, and he has already been replaced.”
The woman said nothing, her thoughts dark and private.
“Shall I jump onto the funeral pyre next?” the baron asked, lifting the round of bread and shaking it at her. “Or do you wish that pleasure for yourself, Baron?”
“I do not want to rule,” Sandra said slowly. “I never have. You know what I desire.”
“Bah, foolish dreams.” The baron snarled. Unable to restrain himself any longer, the old man chewed off a small piece of the bread. The first swallow was without taste, and the baron had to command himself to stop to let the yawning pit of his belly accept the food before swallowing any more. His gut roiled at the invasion, then finally settled down, and he tried another small piece, and then another.
As his hunger slackened, the baron found he could now taste the bread. By the blood of his fathers, it was delicious! Sweetened with something, honey perhaps, or maybe a pinch of predark sugar. Food fit for a baron’s table, and not the sort of thing that was traded away for a few live rounds of ammunition.
“All this food. There’s too much. It is the wealth of an entire ville,” the baron said, masticating each bite to make the food last. “Jeffers would never give so much for what we had to offer in trade.”
Taking a round of bread from the basket, Sandra pulled out a knife and cut off a slice. “Oh, but he did,” she said with a private smile.
Scowling, the baron lowered his repast. “Did you bed him for this wealth? Did you trade your honor to save the ville?”
“There are blasters, too, Father,” she said, tossing the bread back into the basket. Reaching into a pocket of her leather jacket, Sandra pulled out a wad of gray cloth. Walking up the stairs, she placed it on the arm of the throne with a muffled thud.
Taking one more bite of the bread in his hand, the baron placed it aside and chewed thoughtfully as he folded back the oily cloth to expose a wheelgun. The metal was unblemished, without any sign of rust, and the barrel shone with a blue tint like winter ice. Now, Sandra pulled out a fat leather pouch and laid it next to the blaster. With trembling fingers, the baron pulled open the top and saw it was filled with lead shot and a clear plastic jar of black powder.
“So, you did it,” the baron accused in a hollow voice.
