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“Yes,” she replied simply.
“So that mule you mentioned, it was Digger’s,” he ventured.
Over by the stone well, a group of laughing sec men tossed a rope over a bare tree branch normally used for hanging outlanders, and hauled the dead mule into the air. Even before its hooves left the ground, a child slid a plastic basin underneath and big woman started skinning the beast with a sharp knife.
Smiling slightly, Sandra shrugged. “He didn’t need it anymore.”
So the trader was aced, eh? he thought.
“Were there any survivors?” the baron asked hopefully. “I know about the power of the Angel, but surely you could not have…I mean, an entire ville?”
She laughed, and he received his answer.
“It was them or us, dear Father.” Sandra chuckled. “There was no other way. One ville died, so another could live.”
“But you took all of their food.”
“All that I could find,” she corrected, clenching her teeth. “Some of it was…inaccessible.”
Slumping in his throne, the old baron tried to come to grips with the idea of jacking the dead. More, Jeffers had been a friend. Long ago, the two villes had fought together in the Mutie Wars. Was that bond of honor to be broken over loaves of bread?
For a time there was only the sound of the funeral pyre and the happy singing of the butcher doing her messy task. As the meat came away from the bones of the animal, children took the huge wet slabs and awkwardly carried them around the blockhouse to the cooking fire. Staying close by the littles, armed sec men guarded the food and carefully stayed between it and the starving crowd who watched the preparations with near madness in their gaunt faces.
Hitching up his loose pants, a burly sec man approached the dais and clumsily saluted, his right hand not quite touching his temple. “Baron?” he asked hesitantly.
Sandra frowned at the man, but the baron turned to look upon the man with patience. Gedore was a new sec man, recruited just before the crops failed. He was strong and obedient, but lacking in any imagination. A grunt, as the baron’s grandfather would have said. Just a blaster with feet.
“Yes, what is it?” Baron Tregart asked.
Gedore gestured to the chained men shivering near the funeral pyre. They kept casting furtive glances at the flames as if expecting to be tossed upon the conflagration at any moment. Plainly written on the faces of the sec men holding the chains of the two prisoners was their opinion that they would have heartily approved of such a command from their chief, or baron.
“What about the thieves?” Gedore asked.
Stroking the round of bread for a moment, Baron Tregart scowled at the two men in open hatred, his face contorting into a feral mask of fury. Releasing the bread, the old baron grabbed the blaster on the table and started loading the chambers.
“Bring them closer,” Baron Tregart whispered hoarsely, both hands busy with powder and shot. “I shall do this myself. Myself!”
“No, Father,” Lady Tregart interrupted, stepping in front of the elderly man.
Snapping up his head, the baron stared at her as his hands continued their work. After fifty years of being a baron, the man could load a weapon in the dark while drunk.
“They killed the son of the baron,” he reminded her, closing the cylinder with a satisfying click. “The punishment is death.”
“And why should we waste precious ammo on scum such as these?” Sandra asked soothingly, then smiled at the chained men. She could see a flicker of hope come into their faces.
“No,” the woman continued. “Don’t shoot them, Father, and there shall be no burning today to mar the funeral of my brother.”
“Thank you, lady!” one of the prisoners cried, dropping to his hands and raising both hands.
“Gedore!” Sandra said loudly, motioning him closer.
The big sec man rested a boot on the dais and leaned inward. She could see the folds of loose flesh around his neck and guessed he had been giving some of his rations away. A lover, perhaps? That would end today.
“Yes, ma’am?” Gedore asked.
“Cripple them, and throw them alive to the dogs,” Sandra said calmly, savoring the panic that grew in their eyes. Fools, did you think to ace a Tregart and live to tell the tale? “I see no reason to waste all of the meat. Today marks the passing of my brother, and the salvation of the ville! Everybody eats their fill!”
Her eyes sparkling with amusement, Sandra grinned at the stunned prisoners. “Even the dogs,” she added softly.
“No!” a prisoner screamed, shaking all over. “Mercy, mistress! Chill us, please! It was an accident! An accident! I swear!”
A guard cuffed the man silent, while the other prisoner slumped his shoulders and began to softly weep, his tears falling unnoticed onto the dusty ground.
“Take them away,” Sandra commanded with a flip of her hand. “Oh…and, Gedore?”
The sec man had already started across the courtyard, so he stopped to look over a shoulder. “Ma’am?” he responded.
“If I find them with cut throats, you will be next. They go into the pens alive.”
Turning slightly pale, Gedore nodded, and started directing the other guards to herd the shuffling along the street toward the dog pen near the front gate. As if sensing the coming meal, the dogs began to howl in eager anticipation.
“Justice must be swift,” the woman recited, “if it is to be fair.”
Looking up from the bread and the blaster in his lap, Baron Tregart tilted his head at the beautiful young woman.
“So you do remember the stories I used to tell you and Edmund at bedtime,” he muttered.
“Yes, I remember,” she said, facing the bonfire. The figure on top of the woodpile was reduced to only bones at this time, and as she watched even those crumbled away and the tongues of red fire lapped at the darkening sky. It was done. Edmund was gone.
“Now, there is only you, Daughter,” Hugh Tregart said softly.
“That was all you ever had, old man,” she whispered with a snarl. “Except that you were too drunk to notice before.”
But the desert wind carried away her dark words and nobody heard.
Chapter Three
Sucking in a lungful of warm air, Ryan struggled awake and looked around the mat-trans chamber. So soon after the first jump, the second one had hit them like a gren. He dimly remembered their arriving, and then nothing.
Shaking his head, the one-eyed man rose onto his hands and knees, shook his head to try to clear his mind. Fireblast! He had to get sharp. Had to make nuking sure they weren’t in the same redoubt again. Repeat jumps were rare, but they had happened before. Brushing back his wild mane of hair, Ryan focused his eye and grunted in relief at the sight of the chamber walls. They were a lime green with horizontal red stripes. It was a redoubt they had never been to before.
As the life support system sent a clean fresh breeze of sterilized air into the unit, painful groans started coming from the rest of the companions.
“Green walls,” Mildred said, fumbling to un-screw the cap off a canteen at her side. “At least we’re someplace new.” Letting the cap drop to the end of the little chain that attached it to the military canteen, the physician took a small drink from the contents. For quite sometime she had been trying to find an antidote to the jump sickness, but so far she had nothing more effective than a mix of coffee and whiskey.
Unfortunately, both of these items were few and far between. The current brew was an herbal tea laced with something called spike, a raw liquor distilled from cactus. The moonshine had a tremendous kick, but there was never a hangover the next day, and it was a wonderful neural inhibitor and painkiller. Mildred had traded a small fortune in .22 bullets for three precious bottles. This was the very last of the Spike.
Hesitantly, everybody took a sip of the brew, making sour faces. Giving back the empty canteen, Ryan started to speak when he saw Krysty staring behind him. Dropping the canteen, he spun in a crouch with his blaster out and ready.
That was when he saw the corpse.
Holstering his piece, Ryan shuffled over to the body leaning against the exit door, one of its desiccated arms parched on the lever that opened the oval portal. The corpse was dressed in a predark military uniform, the patches and medals meaning nothing to the Deathlands warrior. But the flap was open on the holster at its side, and the handblaster was gone.
Scowling, Ryan noticed that the corpse appeared to be blocking the door.
“Bastard died trying to hold the door closed,” Ryan muttered, glancing at the portal with growing unease. He wondered what was on the other side.
Staring at the closed door, Krysty rubbed her temples as if in pain.
Ryan noticed the gesture. “Got something?” he asked tightly.
The redhead paused, then shook her head.
That didn’t reassure the big man much. The woman’s psionic abilities were sometimes blocked.
Kneeling alongside the grinning corpse, Ryan checked the ammo pouch and found only one spare clip where there should have been three.
“Must have been a hell of a fight,” J.B. said, moving closer. The Armorer clicked the safety back on his Uzi machine pistol and let it drop at his side.
“We better take it slow, just in case of a booby,” Ryan warned, rubbing the scar on his cheek. He sure wasn’t ready to do another jump. “If this guy was trying to keep folks out, whatever was on the other side might have had the same idea.”
“Woman, not man,” Jak added, pointing. “Ears pierced.”
Tucking a strand of beaded hair behind an ear to get it out of the way, Mildred hid a smile. “That didn’t mean a thing in the modern American Army, my friend.”
Taking the corpse by the shoulders, Ryan gave a gentle tug and the withered arms broke off with a snap. They slid out of the loose sleeves and stayed attached to the rifle as he carried the body away.
Placing it against the wall, Ryan saw the identification tag on the chest. S. Jongersonsten. Damn name was too long for them to add the first. Mebbe it was a woman. No way to tell now.
Carefully breaking the fingers, Mildred got the ancient arms free and put them with the body.
Going to the door, J.B. pulled out some tools and checked for any traps. The rest of the companions formed a defensive arc behind the man, their weapons ready.
“It’s clean,” J.B. finally announced. He tried to move the lever. The mechanism worked smoothly as if freshly lubricated, the internal bolts disengaging with dull thuds.
“Ryan?” J.B. asked, tugging his fingerless gloves on tighter.
Working the bolt on his Steyr SSG-70 rifle, Ryan said, “Go ahead.”
The Armorer pulled the door aside on silent hinges. He stayed crouched behind the door to give his friends a clear field of fire, ready to throw his weight forward to close it again fast if something tried to come through. But there were no blaster shots, only mutters of surprise.
Swinging his Uzi machine pistol to the front, J.B. clicked off the safety and stepped around the door just as Ryan and Krysty walked through into the antechamber beyond.
Following close behind, Doc, Mildred and Jak blocked his view. But as the companions spread out, J.B. saw the place was full of corpses. Old corpses. Dozens of them. And the floor was covered with the empty brass casings of spent ammunition. Most of the bodies were in pieces, and there was a smudge on the inside of the vanadium steel door suggesting that a gren had been used to try to blow it open, resulting in a spectacular and deadly failure.
“What the fuck went on here?” Ryan growled, sweeping the room with a stern gaze. The body in the jump chamber had been desiccated to the point of mummification, but these looked as if they were only a few years old! The wrinkled skin resembled leather instead of ancient parchment.
Careful of where they stepped, the companions moved through the antechamber and entered the control room. There were more bodies here, all of them showing signs of death by violence. Bullet holes, knives in chests, and one poor bastard bent over the control console with a fire ax buried in his back.
“Check the comp!” J.B. ordered. “If that’s damaged, we’re not going anywhere.”
Holstering her weapon, Mildred went to the control board while Ryan stepped to the master computer. The lights still rippled across its face as always, but he found a line of dents across the front of the machine. Somebody had fired a full clip from a machine gun, but the rounds hadn’t gotten through the thick metal housing of the mil comp.
“The government really built these redoubts to last, that’s for damn sure,” Mildred whispered. “Well, the controls aren’t damaged, aside from a busted monitor.”
“Good show, madam, then we can still egress as desired,” Doc said, checking a corpse slumped in a chair. The colonel had stopped in the middle of reloading a shotgun, but the body seemed to be without damage. Then he spotted the thin line that went from ear to ear. Somebody had slit his throat from behind as he’d thumbed in spare cartridges. Ghastly.
“They killed each other,” Krysty said, walking among the slain soldiers. Every branch of the service was here, Army, Navy, Air Force, and a few that she couldn’t recognize. Delta Force. Who were they?
“And when the ammo ran out,” Ryan muttered, resting the stock of his rifle on a hip, “they kept fighting with whatever was available, handblasters, knives, table legs, bottles…”
Slowly turning in a circle, Jak frowned. “What cause?” he asked. “Mutiny?”
“Not on a U.S. base,” Mildred stated as a fact. “No, a war plague seems more likely. Yes, that could be it. I had heard of such things. Rumors only, of course. Biological agents that drove the enemy temporarily insane so that they would slaughter each other, then our troops could march into the territory without opposition.”
“Filthy way to fight a war,” Doc rumbled, easing down the hammer on his massive LeMat revolver. “Although Tennyson would have been darkly amused.”
“This is the way the world ends,” Ryan said softly. “Not with a bang, but with a whimper.”
Doc beamed at that. “You remember the poem!” he cried in delight.
“It’s about war,” Ryan countered gruffly. “And you sure as hell have repeated it often enough.” He nudged a corpse with his Army boot. The clothing rustled like old leaves, the dried body rocking from the impact as if weightless. “Mildred, why are the ones in here fresher than the husk in the jump chamber?”
“I have no idea,” the physician said, seemingly annoyed by the mystery. “The life support system keeps the redoubt constantly flushed with sterilized air. These bodies should be withered husks by now.”
Ryan scowled, but said nothing.
Kneeling next to a mutilated corpse with the glass fragments of a busted bottle embedded into his face, Jak eased the dead man’s service revolver from its holster and checked the load. Four spent shells, and one live round.
“Think safe stay?” Jak asked, pocketing the .38-caliber bullet. His Colt Python could use both .38 bullets and .357 Magnum rounds. Never made sense to him for anybody to carry a wep that only used one caliber of ammo.
“Yes, it’s safe,” Mildred said without hesitation. “There are no biological vectors that could survive exposure for a full week, much less a hundred years. But if anybody starts feeling dizzy, stop whatever you’re doing and sing out fast.”
“Fair enough,” J.B. said, pushing open the hallway door with the barrel of the Uzi.
A single corpse slumped against the wall in the corridor, an automatic pistol dangling from his raised hand, the wall on either side and the front of his uniform stitched with bullet holes from an automatic weapon.
“There’s a lot of lead to be salvaged here, if nothing else,” J.B. stated in hard practicality.
Kneeling by the body, Jak tried to free the blaster, but the hand was locked in a death grip. Pressing the ejector button, he dropped the clip and thumbed out the intact shells. There were four 9 mm rounds, but they were the wrong size for his Colt.
“Here,” the albino teenager said, passing J.B. two of the rounds for his Uzi, and giving the others to Ryan for his 9 mm SiG-Sauer. Everybody else used .38 rounds, except for Doc and his black powder Le Mat.
Pocketing the rounds, Ryan looked around for the body of the shooter, but the hallway was empty. There were no other corpses in sight, just the double line of doors leading to the elevator and stairs at the far end. There were no other signs of violence, no blast marks or spent casings on the floor.
Nobody cared about the hallway, Ryan realized. These soldiers fought for access to the mat-trans-mat. But that made no sense. The blast doors on the top level of the redoubt were large enough for a tank to drive through. A hundred men could have walked out that opening. So why fight over something that could only hold a limited number of people? Ryan scowled. Unless something was wrong with the blast doors.
Walking past the water fountain, Ryan found the usual framed map on the wall. Almost every redoubt was exactly the same, so the companions knew the bases intimately. This one seemed normal in every aspect.
