Playfair's Axiom

He felt his mouth struggling to smile. He still had to say, “Always works. Till it don’t.”

“‘Doesn’t,’” she corrected him.

She had a temper on her, this redheaded beauty. But her mutie hair, sentient and prehensile, lay still across her shoulders. She just smiled more at him and wouldn’t be drawn.

“Nothing here but misery,” J.B. stated simply. “Why don’t we go back?”

“Back where?” Ryan asked.

“To the redoubt.”

“Not remember?” Jak said. “Nothing there, either. No ammo, no water, no self-heats.”

Mildred mopped her forehead with the hem of her shirt. “Never thought I’d see a day when meals refused by Ethiopians tasted like ambrosia.”

“I mean, try the luck of the jump,” J.B. said.

“If we find a place with steak bushes and beer springs,” Ryan said, “it’ll be guarded by ten thousand coldhearts, sure as a dead man cools.”

J.B. gestured around at the jumbled edges and angles and dust-softened mounds of the urban deathscape. “Don’t know if you noticed, Ryan, but every square inch of this place is guarded by muties as crazy as nuked yellowjackets, and it ain’t nothing but hammered dogshit.”

“Boys,” Krysty said softly but firmly, “step back. Fighting among ourselves won’t fill our bottles or our bellies. Makes us more likely to fill cannie bellies instead.”

“At times like this,” Doc said with a grand sweep of his arm, “I find it helps to seek the consolations of philosophy.”

Everyone looked at him. He sat blinking vaguely.

“Why are you all staring at me?” he asked.

“Well,” J.B. said, “out with it.”

“Out with what?”

“The consultations of philosophy or whatever you were talking about.”

Doc blinked in amiable puzzlement. “What?”

For his part Ryan was taking note of how unusually talkative the Armorer was. Normally J.B. said just a little more than an old hickory stump, although when he spoke it was usually to the point and dead-on accurate.

“What’s eating on you, J.B.?” he asked. “You don’t normally say so much in a whole month.”

J.B. slapped his thigh. “Everything, Ryan. I just got bad feelings creeping up on me from every side.”

Mildred frowned. “You wouldn’t think there’d be many people here. The place is a mess, even for taking a nuke west of here.”

“Plenty to scavenge in the area,” Ryan said.

“Those people who jumped us didn’t look like they’d bothered much with that. They barely had loincloths.”

“I surmise they were cannibals,” Doc said, sighting along the barrel of his blaster to make sure the bore was clear before snapping the weapon closed. “When we parted company with them, the other side of these woods, I thought I saw them begin tearing at their fallen kin.”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “Chasing us probably worked up a double-big appetite.”

“Muties,” Jak said.

“No,” Mildred said, shaking her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Not see? No chins, plus fingers.”

“Typical symptoms of inbreeding, lad,” Doc said.

“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. He’d seen it not far from his birthplace of Front Royal.

“They have to have something to eat besides each other,” Mildred said.

“They probably prey on scavvies,” Krysty said. “Cities usually draw those like flies to jam. Especially as the rads die down.”

“But what do they eat?”

“Game,” Jak said. “Plenty here.”

“In a city?”

He shrugged. “Always.” Then he nodded his pale, pointed chin back the way they had come.

“Forest.”

It was indeed. It wasn’t wide but it was significant. A lush and densely undergrown stand of trees ran in a broad strip from near the river toward the nuke strike a couple miles west.

“Evidently this vicinity receives a great deal of rainfall of the nontainted variety,” Doc said.

“Well, that’s another reason to be on the move,” Ryan said, looking at the clotting clouds rushing and swirling overhead. They had gone the color of mustard, with alarming orange highlights. “Looks like some of the ‘burn the hide off you’ kind is on the way. We need to get under cover triple fast.”

“Trouble,” Jak said, turning suddenly.

A bullet cracked off the top of the heap of rubble where Jak had lain, and his eyes skinned toward the woods for sign of pursuit. The shot-sound that followed a heartbeat later seemed to have come from the northwest, although the way everything echoed around these ruins made it hard to tell. Ryan turned to scramble up to the top of the heaped stone and concrete dust and flopped down behind his Steyr.

Having only one eye was something the black-haired man had adjusted to years ago. Sometimes it was a drawback, but there was nothing he could do about it. Now he had to hold his good eye away from the scope initially to look for targets.

And targets there were. If the gunshot hadn’t been a major clue, the way this new set of attackers was dressed showed they were a whole different breed compared to the crazy group that had jumped them. They wore real clothing, no dirtier and in no worse repair than what Ryan and friends themselves wore. Camo in various patterns was a consistent theme, as were predark cartridge blasters: rifles, shotguns, handguns.

Scavvies, Ryan thought. Well-equipped ones, too. He cursed under his breath. At least half a dozen of them, advancing quickly but cautiously through rubble just north of the stadium. Like it or not there were others: he glimpsed them through big gaps in the walls of the building.

The most dangerous attacker Ryan could see carried a remade M-16, with the nontapered A-2 foregrip. He swung the Steyr to cover the scavvie, then put his good eye behind the eyepiece of the SSG-70. His skill was such that, though the coldheart wasn’t dead-centered in the view-field, he was just a twitch away.

Drawing a breath as he centered the single post reticule on the man’s chest, Ryan exhaled half as he gently squeezed the trigger. The 7.62 mm cartridge lit off, kicking his shoulder with the steel buttplate. Ryan reflexively worked the bolt, reloading for a follow-up shot.

The M-16 man was in the process of folding onto his face. Ryan thought he saw a trace of pink mist hanging in the air behind him. It rapidly vanished. The scavvie’s buddies dropped, seeking immediate cover.

Muzzle-flashes winked at Ryan, pale in cloud-filtered daylight. These new attackers were no cowards. They also weren’t stupe enough to just keep walking up on someone who had them in the sights of a big-bore longblaster from good cover.

Instead of pulling off another shot, Ryan slid back down the brief slope. He felt the hard hot chunks of rock and debris roll against the hard muscles of his gut. His right hip throbbed where a hard corner had caught him when he went to his belly. He barely noticed. It was just pain. And for Ryan Cawdor, pain was just a reminder he wasn’t yet chilled.

The gray-white concrete dust that rose up to invade his nose and mouth and turn the inside of his eyelid into sandpaper as it scraped across the vulnerable cornea was a greater problem. He blinked furiously as he rose to a crouch and ran south after his companions.

They stumbled through a nightmare of urban devastation. The concrete dust, which seemed to dry quickly despite frequent rains in the valley of the great river, sucked down their boots, and concealed pockets and loosened blocks that could snap an ankle like a dry twig. So they couldn’t run very fast. And no matter how desperate their need they had to pay attention to where they put their feet, slowing them even further.

At the edge of a relatively clear stretch of street Ryan stopped, spun and knelt to cover their backtrail with his longblaster. A bearded head appeared above a heap of gray rubble. Ryan lowered his head behind the scope, carefully maintaining a distance between his eye and the lip of the telescope eyepiece that protected the lens. Otherwise the sharp recoil of a 7.62 mm NATO cartridge lighting off would die-stamp the eyepiece housing right into socket, giving him a nasty half-raccoon mask of purple bruise or even cutting a ring in his flesh.

His target hadn’t learned the real danger in pursuing armed prey. Unfortunately for him. Ryan held the reticule centered on his forehead, and he could see the sweat etching rivulets in the black grime that covered the man’s face, see his lips working inside his rat’s-nest beard as he cursed the effort of climbing up the low but treacherous slope. He was carrying a rusty double-barreled shotgun in one hand and using the other to climb with.

At the top of the heap he paused. For the first time he raised his eyes to scope the longer distance before him.

That pause was what Ryan waited for, knowing it would come. It wasn’t that a head was a hard target; the target was barely fifty yards off, an easy shot for a marksman like Ryan over open sights. What made it a challenge was the way the target tended to move around.

As the grubby hair-fringed face came up, Ryan was releasing half of a held-in breath. The trigger cracked; the rifle bucked and roared. Ryan jacked the bolt as the weapon rode up and then settled back down.

The scavvie lay slumped with his face in the dust. The back of his head was a steaming mess.

Though his ears rang from the shot, Ryan heard the man’s buddies curse in guttural fury. One stuck a remade M-16 up over the top of a low stub of yellow-brick wall and triggered a random burst.

Even though Ryan had pulled his eye back from the scope so he could cover a field of vision wider than the tiny little circle the glass gave him, he couldn’t see where the shots hit. He didn’t even hear the secondary cracks when the needlelike .223 bullets passed.

He turned and sprinted across a mostly level stretch, covered in what looked like a mix of river silt and concrete dust. To his right, a building appeared to have fallen mostly west. He raced for the far more promising cover of the ruin in front of him. At one time it had been a circular tower. Now all that remained was a chest-high ring of white masonry.

Ryan vaulted the remnants of a broken wall. Mildred and J.B. knelt inside the rubble, covering the one-eyed man’s dash for cover. J.B. had his shotgun shouldered, while Mildred had her blocky ZKR 551 target pistol in a two-handed Weaver grip, left hand folded over right, elbow bent down to provide stabilizing tension against the almost-straight gun arm. Ahead Ryan could see Jak cautiously scoping the remains of a low-curved structure, at least half-intact, that led from the first ruin circle toward a much broader tower a hundred yards south. Krysty and Doc knelt to cover the albino teen.

“Got it,” Ryan shouted.

He turned and hunkered down behind the wall, placing the Steyr’s forestock into a sort of notch in the solid masonry of the broken wall. As Ryan searched the ruins behind for targets he wondered why the scavvies were pressing them so hard. The scavvies kept dogging the companions despite losses, and were willing to burn way too much ammo to do it. Even if they were cartridge-flush from trade or finding caches, it didn’t make sense to burn so many bullets just for the fugitives’ own handful of blasters and the contents of their backpacks, whatever those may hold.

Must be Krysty they really want, he thought grimly. And Mildred, too.

Krysty was a beauty with the stopping power of a 12-gauge slug, even by the standards of the glossy mags and vids that survived skyfall. Mildred—Dr. Wyeth—wasn’t to Ryan’s taste, frankly, a little too stocky. But she was still far better-looking than most women in Deathlands.

What drove them so hard, likely, was pure lust: for the use they’d get out of the women themselves, and then for the jack or barter they’d reap from selling them in what would still be considered prime condition, even if they wound up badly bruised and shy a tooth or two. Selling a pair the likes of Krysty and Mildred would bring them more than two months’ good scavenge, if the going rate in St. Lou was comparable to other places Ryan had known.

The one-eyed man heard and felt Krysty and Doc peel away from either side of him. Then there came the crack of a bullet passing fast, followed by thump and a grunt of surprise as much as pain.

And then Mildred’s piercing scream.

Chapter Three

“J.B., no!” Mildred cried. The despairing echo chased itself mockingly around the circular ruins.

Ryan’s heart seemed to seize in his chest. He ducked behind the wall and turned.

The Armorer stood as if rooted in place. Ryan could clearly see where a few threads of his leather jacket had been pushed out a fraction of an inch behind him by the heavy-caliber bullet that had blown right through the small man’s chest, front to back.

Time froze. A thin streamer of blood hung in the air behind J.B.’s back, fractionating into round red droplets as it distanced itself from him. With a roaring silence in his ears and an abyss of emptiness opening in his gut, Ryan watched his oldest living friend, his best friend, the man who’d had his back since he was a pup, spin and topple to lie on his back in the dust with his glasses disks of emptiness, reflecting the troubled yellow sky above.

Mildred scrambled toward the fallen Armorer. Though tears dug gullies through the dust on her cheeks, her professional training and experience had taken over. She was kneeling over J.B., checking his vital signs even before Ryan snapped out of it.

“He’s still alive!” she called. “Missed the heart.” She shrugged frantically out of the straps of her backpack.

Ryan’s attention snapped back into focus. The blood pennon had streamed away east toward the great river. That meant the shot had come from the west. Bringing the Steyr to his shoulder, Ryan turned his blue eye that way.

Fifty or sixty yards away what looked like a parking structure had pancaked, creating a stratified slab a story or so high. At least half a dozen people in scraps and oddments of salvaged clothing advanced across a broad area overgrown with green weeds to their knees, pausing to shoot then charging on. Four were men. Two looked to be women.

As Ryan watched, one man rocked back to the recoil of what he reckoned to be a battered Springfield M-1A, the semiauto-only civvie version of the old M-14 battle rifle. The same caliber as Ryan’s Steyr, it was a weapon well prized in the Deathlands. It was likely, Ryan thought, this was the bastard who shot J.B.

But he wasn’t shooting at Ryan. Instead he aimed north toward the rubble of the westward-fallen building that the companions had bypassed. The scavvies who had been chasing them appeared to be taking cover there.

Rival bands? Ryan wondered as he lined up his scope on the center of the rifleman’s chest.

He fired. The enemy rifleman jerked as the steel-jacketed slug punched through his ribs and transversed through his heart. Gray dust puffed from his gray, black and white camo blouse, confirming Ryan had hit his mark.

The scavvie collapsed bonelessly. The heavy rifle was dropping from his fingers even before recoil kicked Ryan’s field of view up over the man’s head. A chill, sure, he thought.

The other five dropped into the weeds, vanishing instantly from sight. From the top of the dumped structure behind them more blasters opened up to cover them, producing the vast grayish smoke clouds characteristic of black-powder blasters.

Ryan ducked out of the line of fire, popping the magazine from the well of his own rifle to stick in a fresh box. It was his next to last, another worry he couldn’t allow to distract him now.

Krysty and Mildred knelt, flanking the supine J.B. Krysty was furiously ripping open the plastic wrapping of an ancient package of fuzzy white scavenged Sno Balls that was among the last of their remaining edibles.

“I know you’re the expert,” Ryan said, with more of a rasp to his voice than usual, “but are you sure what J.B. needs is a quick dose of century-old snack food?”

“Sucking chest wound,” Mildred snapped without looking up. “I need to cover the holes before his lung collapses.”

Ryan nodded, then turned back to the rubble-parapet.

The two sets of attackers were keeping their heads low now. Ryan positioned himself at the northwest side, where he could keep an eye on both. The heat beat him into the ruins with increasing anger as the sun rolled up the sky, a patch of brightness in the roiling mustard-colored clouds that now stretched horizon to horizon.

They don’t have to make a move on us, he thought. Just wait for us to run out of water. Or for the acid rain to start scouring the flesh from our bones. Whichever comes first.

With quick glimpses over his shoulder, Ryan kept track of what his friends were doing. Jak lay by the gap at the stone circle’s south side with his .357 Magnum Colt Python propped on his pack in front of him, covering the curved structure that led from it. Doc kept watch to the west, cautiously peering up over the low wall for brief periods, then ducking and shifting left or right unpredictably. For all that he acted sometimes like a half-crazed old man, he was cunning as well as intelligent. And he very seldomly lost focus in a combat situation.

Another look out over the wrecked cityscape. No movement.

The river smell was thick here. The humidity felt as if it were climbing right up out of the ground around them. A stench of old corruption and decaying flesh likewise began to rise. It told Ryan that plenty still lived here in this cubicle concrete wasteland. The last decay byproducts of a million or so chills in the big nuke had burned away long since, he knew. Any decomposing organics were recent.

Where there’s life there’s death, he thought, with a certain bitterly appreciative humor.

From somewhere far off came a rumble of thunder, rolling around among the surviving structures. “Storm’s coming on,” he said.

He glanced back. The women had J.B.’s jacket and shirt off. He was propped up against Krysty as Mildred wound duct tape tightly around the makeshift patches of plastic wrapper that covered the holes in his chest and back, and the pads of relatively clean spare clothing folded up for bandages. Ryan winced.

“That tape’s gonna sting when it comes off,” he said. “I don’t envy J.B.”

“I’ll settle for being alive to feel the sting, Ryan,” J.B. said weakly. He had a bit of a wheeze to his voice. Ryan glanced back at him, startled. The wiry man gave him a thin smile.

“You hush up, now,” Mildred said sternly. “Save your breath. We’ve gone to a lot a trouble to keep it from leaking out.”

Ryan’s lips twisted in a brief smile as he looked to the north again. This time he glimpsed a flicker of motion, left to right, behind heaps of rubble on the street’s far side. He started to raise his rifle, then halted the motion and regretfully lowered the longblaster.

No target, he thought. He didn’t have a single round to waste on shadows.

“The nuke-suckers are starting to get restless,” he said. “Make a move soon, mebbe.”

“Okay, I’ve got it from here, Krysty,” Mildred said. “Why don’t you take J.B.’s scattergun and help watch our little friends out there.”

“Good idea, Mildred.” Ryan heard the crunching of footfalls on dust-covered rubble as the redhead took up position between him and Doc.

Time passed. The day got hotter. The clouds grew thicker, more clotted, more orange and threatening. Occasionally one of the other set of besiegers would pop off a shot as if to remind the companions they were still out there. None of Ryan’s crew was stupe enough to shoot back.

At a soft-voiced request from Mildred, Doc helped her shift J.B. up close to the short wall on the west side, where there was some shade. Doc had a surprising wiry strength to him. The Armorer had lapsed into unconsciousness again. Mildred poured water on a hankie from her canteen and bathed his face.

“How’s it look?” Ryan asked her.

He could feel her shrug. “I’ve done all I can do. Doesn’t seem to be much internal bleeding, thank God. He’s tough, but I don’t give him even odds of living to nightfall if we can’t get him some kind of better care by then.”

“Dear lady,” Doc said softly, “do I understand you give any of us even odds of living until nightfall?”

“You got me, Doc,” Mildred said. She was too depressed and worried even to rise to the bait. Under normal circumstances she and Doc spent plenty of time sniping good-naturedly at each other.

“You know,” Doc said, “one would certainly think the base of the elevator shaft and the stumps of the structural members in these collapsed buildings should have survived the blasts. Yet many have become little more than mounds.”

“Elevator probably went to a basement level,” Mildred said.

“But structural members usually survived at least partially, even near ground zero,” Krysty said. “I’ve seen pillar stumps standing right next to craters.”

Ryan bit down on a caustic remark about wasting air on speculation that wouldn’t load bullets in a blaster. Under the circumstances idle chatter was far preferable to thinking too deeply about their situation.

“Why don’t you take over the scattergun, Mildred?” Krysty asked. “You’re more comfortable with it.”

The physician shrugged. “Sure.” Krysty passed the weapon, then drew her more-familiar Smith & Wesson 640.

As she did, a storm of blasterfire erupted from the north. Bullets struck sprays of concrete powder off the top of the low circular wall and whined mournfully overhead as they tumbled through the thick, hot air. A short burst from an M-16 snapped over Ryan’s head like a sail in a brisk wind.

“Get ready for it,” he said during a lull in the shooting. “They’re nerving themselves to make their move.”

“No doubt they sense the immediacy of the impending storm,” Doc said. “I can smell the rain and sulfur already.”

“Hear that?” Jak called from the south wall.

“Hear what?” Krysty asked.

Ryan was switching his vision back and forth between the scavvies lying up in the weed-grown field to their west and the forted attackers to the north. Though the western bunch weren’t firing, he was pretty sure they weren’t sharp enough to have backed off and left without him or one of his sharp-eyed friends spotting them. Apparently they were biding their time and awaiting events.

“Whine,” Jak said. “Triple high. Like giant mosquitoes, you know?” He winced and shook his head. “Not like.”

“I can’t hear it,” Krysty said.

Mildred and Doc said they heard nothing out of the way, either. Of course with the blasters cracking off from not so far away that was perhaps not so surprising—the wonder being Jak could. But he had the sense of hearing of a white-tailed deer.

Ryan heard a loud rattle from his left. He risked sticking his head up to scope it out. Flashes and billows of smoke were coming from the pancaked structure.

“Black-powder blasters,” Ryan said. A ball sailed over his head. “Shooting at us.”

“They want to help the other bunch crack us,” Krysty said. “Then roll in, take them down, get all the swag themselves.”

“But why, dear lady, would they act now? Why not let us and our pursuers settle things and then eliminate the victor—in accordance with the ancient Oriental adage that when two tigers fight, one dies, the other is wounded?”

Mildred had turned away to check J.B. His cheeks were pale, his eyes closed, his breathing shallow. Now meeting Doc’s eye, she jerked a thumb upward.

“That’s why.”

Thunder split the sky. Something wet struck the back of Ryan’s left hand. It stung like an ant bite.

He looked up. “Shit.”

A blue-white crack appeared in the roiling orange and black clouds above, jagged and blinding. It pulsated three times. A sound like a colossal explosion beat down on them, a sound so loud Ryan could feel it.

“Acid gully washer on way,” Jak called.

“Tell us something we don’t know,” Mildred said, hastily moving to shield the wounded Armorer’s face with his hat. No other raindrops fell in the vicinity. But none of the companions doubted it was only a question of time.