Playfair's Axiom

“Here they come!” Krysty called.

Ryan raised his Steyr again. An acid downpour was no joke; it could bubble unprotected skin in minutes, sizzle muscle away to leave yellow bone in a shockingly short time, depending on the strength and length of the downpour. But the really virulent falls tended not to last long.

Ryan laid the rifle’s iron battle sights on a goggled figure who had sprung up from a clump of brush that had grown around an old fire hydrant and was charging forward, holding a beat-up semiautomatic longblaster diagonally across his chest. He squeezed off a quick shot and saw the man jerk as the bullet took him in the left shoulder.

The attacker kept coming. Ryan cursed and dropped his aim. His second shot punched the man in the gut right above his web belt. He fell, rolling and squalling like a catamount.

The Armorer going down had rattled even the hard-core Ryan more than he realized. Until now. He’d just forgotten one of the prime rules of combat: the chest was mostly air, the very fact J.B. owed his survival to—for however long it lasted.

A man well-wired on jolt or just adrenaline overdrive could keep motoring on even with a collapsed lung, and the fact he might die horribly in a matter of minutes wouldn’t hold him back from busting your head open with a club before collapsing. The heart, like the head, was a tricky target actually to hit. And even a clean heart shot didn’t always drop a man, or big animal, that was already in furious motion. The working of his limbs could keep his blood circulating long enough to inflict a chilling wound on you. The best target for stopping a man was from the ribs down.

“The miscreants to the west of us are advancing as well,” Doc reported. He was reserving his own fire until the enemy gave him closer targets. It took a long time to reload his own black-powder revolver.

The M-4000 shotgun bellowed. Ryan heard Mildred grunt as the 12-gauge’s heavy recoil punished her shoulder. She was running rifled slugs through the blaster against targets too far away for buckshot to be effective. She knew to snug the steel butt-plate hard against her shoulder. But it was a painful weapon even for a man as big as Ryan or as battle-hardened as the stricken J.B. to shoot in sustained fire.

“Jak!” Ryan called, racking his bolt and slamming it shut on a fresh cartridge, one of his rapidly dwindling store. He wasn’t sure whether his last shot had hit the red-bearded scavvie he had targeted or if the man had dived to cover. They were under fifty yards away now. It would seem to be a walkaway for a precision-sniping piece like the Steyr, in the hands of an expert marksman such as Ryan, to take down targets that close at hand. And it would have been—had he been shooting at pebbles on fenceposts.

It wasn’t quite so simple when the targets were running, ducking and weaving. And shooting back. The heavy bolt-action rifle was never meant for close-in combat: it was meant to reach out and touch enemies hundreds of yards distant, a slow, measured, precise form of warfare. Nothing at all like close combat, which was crude and dirty and above all fast.

Ryan was just wondering if it was time to forget the longblaster and try to get his SIG handblaster into play when a figure loomed up right in front of him with a terrible screech.

Chapter Four

Desperately Ryan rolled back onto his butt, away from the low wall. He flung up the Steyr crosswise just in time to catch the haft of a rusty-headed tomahawk descending toward his face.

Heat stung his left cheek as Krysty shot the scavvie in the face with her short-barreled handblaster. Ryan sensed minute bits of unburned propellant clacking against the patch that covered that eye. Though the short barrel of the little .38 produced a shattering muzzle-blast that close up, he never heard it. His ears already rang from repeated booms from his big 7.62 longblaster.

He threw himself forward and up, rolling to his feet in time to buttstroke another screaming scavvie across the face. He felt a yielding instant and then a crunch as a cheekbone gave way. The scavenger staggered back, dropping a big 1911-style semiauto handblaster to clutch at its stove-in face.

Her face, Ryan realized. It meant no more to him than what species of bug he’d just crunched beneath his boot heel. Running with the Trader, he’d long ago learned the brutal lesson that those who came to chill you had no sex or age. They had to die if you wanted to live.

Quickly Ryan stooped to prop the Steyr against the wall. Even in emergencies you didn’t want to go dropping precision optics on the ground. Using the longblaster as a club was bad enough.

As he put down the rifle with his left hand he drew the big fat-bladed panga from its sheath with the right. The wounded woman, screaming like a stuck steam whistle with fury and agony, yanked a blade from her own belt and lunged toward him for payback.

Krysty’s S&W 640 boomed again. She either missed the knife-wielding woman or aimed at someone else. Ryan sensed other figures closing in. He slashed the scavvie rushing him slantwise across a trim belly left bare between a stained tank top and filth-crusted baggy camo pants. The wound was a rising, drawing cut that drew a red line across sunburned flesh. It opened like a red-lipped mutie mouth, spilling gray and purple loops of guts. They tripped the woman up and she went down howling.

Jak’s .357 Python ripped out three fast characteristic barks, sizzling with high-energy harmonics. “West! They coming!” the teen shouted. “We triple-screwed!”

Ryan yanked out his SIG, then ducked as a scavvie twenty yards to the north dropped to a knee to spray the defenders with full-auto grief from an M-4. As Ryan dropped he pushed Krysty’s right hip hard with the heel of his hand. Adrenaline boosted his own wiry strength enough to tumble the woman right over…and save her life as a burst of .223 bullets ripped the air where she’d stood a moment before.

With the ringing in his ears amped double by the fierce muzzle-blast of the short-barreled carbine, it took Ryan a beat to realize that he was hearing wild screaming from the other side of the wall. In two different voices, or rather, kinds of voices. One was human, uttering throat-tearing shrieks of wild fear and intolerable agony.

The other set came from something not even remotely human.

He risked a fast peek over the parapet.

“Screamwings!” Krysty exclaimed from his side. As resilient as a hard rubber ball, she’d bounced right back up and into the fight from her tumble, even though both landing on the sharp-cornered rubble and the punch Ryan had given her would have left deep bruises.

They watched wide-eyed as a chicken-size screamwing sank its talons into the blond dreadlocked sides of a goggled scavvie’s head so deeply that blood spurted. The screamwing struck like a snake at his face with its toothed beak. The goggles protected the man’s eyes—until the ravening flying mutie ripped them off and tossed them away with a screech of triumph.

And then the man cried out much louder than the mutant bird.

A flock of the winged horrors had descended as if from the churning orange-and-yellow clouds. After unleashing a few stinging droplets, the clouds had held off spewing lethal acid. But this fall of flesh and feathers and claws wasn’t much improvement.

For the scavvies, anyway. The monsters seemed attracted by the movement of the attackers charging the ring-shaped ruin. Ryan saw at least a dozen. Some battled as futilely as the blond-dreaded man who was sinking to his knees as the horror clutching his head ate his face. Others ran for all they were worth back the way they had come.

It usually meant they died tired as well as screaming. No matter how inspired they were to run, the screamwings flew faster.

And wheeling above, a black crucifix against the mustard clouds, was a shape that seemed as big as a predark light plane.

Not all the screamwings found prey. Some helped their comrades swarm the scavvies. Others turned their attention toward the defenders in the circular ruin. One uttered a squawk and swooped down from twenty yards up.

A blast of .33-caliber double-00 balls from J.B.’s shotgun caught it square and ripped it apart in midair.

The muties turned and flew away. Even the ones sitting and ripping strips of skin and flesh from fallen quarry, some of which still writhed and hollered, snapped open their wings and took off. They flew not in pursuit of the scavvie survivors, now in full retreat, but northwest, toward the top of the tall, dark tower. The ones chasing the scavvies sheered off to join them, uttering hoarse cries.

“Wow,” Mildred said. “I know I busted that one like a blood piñata. But I never knew screamwings to let a little thing like that discourage them so easy before.”

“Hey!” Jak called. “Other coldhearts run, too!”

The words hit Ryan like a fist to the gut. So remarkable, not to mention horrific, had the sudden screamwing attack been that it had all but hypnotized him. He’d stone forgotten they were being hit in a flank attack by what was apparently a second set of enemies.

His eye caught Krysty’s emerald gaze in passing as they both cranked their heads west. Pink spots glowed on her cheeks. She’d got caught up in their unlikely rescue-by-monster, too. And that kind of thing could get you chilled.

Ryan looked toward the flattened building and the stadium looming beyond to see a scavvie stagger and slap his hand to his neck. A short thick feathered shaft transfixed the man’s neck right to left. Ryan knew a crossbow quarrel when he saw one.

The boom of black-powder weapons echoed through the ruins, shot through with the sharp crackle of a full-auto smokeless blaster. Another of the west-side attacker fell. This bunch looked more clean-cut and less grubby than the others. The others turned to race back toward the cover of the collapsed parking structure, some loosing quick shots toward the south, others just beating feet.

“Uh-oh,” Ryan heard J.B. croak. “We got company.”

Something buzzed between Ryan and Krysty to strike off the stub wall with a crack and a little spray of concrete grit. Both tracked the crossbow quarrel as it fell to the mounded dust and broken masonry.

Then both turned as one to look toward the gap in the south portion of the ring that led to the ruined walkway-curved building. A half-dozen men and women stood or knelt there, leveling crossbows and longblasters at them.

Jak already had his hands hoisted over his head. He was normally as bitter-end a fighter as any of them. But a skinny kid in a T-shirt and shorts had appeared right across the ring-wall from him and held the twin muzzles of a long black-powder scattergun a handspan away from Jak’s pale right ear.

Ryan glanced at Krysty, who turned to stand by his side. She shrugged.

“Reckon you got the better of us,” he called.

“Reckon we do,” said a tall, lanky man with a fair complexion, a sort of narrow carrot head topped by a tangle of ginger hair. He wore loose khaki cargo pants and a green T-shirt, both too new-looking to be anything but salvage recently unwrapped from the original plastic. His voice was soft, and he looked a bit unhealthy to Ryan. But he carried the M-4 as if he knew which end the bullets came out of, and he showed no hesitancy in voice or posture.

Ryan dropped his panga beside him. “Do what you gotta do.”

Men armed with crossbows disarmed the companions. Like their leader, they were dressed in crisp predark clothing that mostly fit them. One of the benefits of living in or near a nuked-out city was the ability to reap its bounty.

One of their captors, a burly young man with brown hair, scraped the housing of the Steyr’s scope against the concrete wall.

“Careful with that, son,” Ryan rasped. “That’s delicate precision optics you’re dealin’ with, there.”

“Show some respect, Lonny,” the man with the M-4 said long-sufferingly.

“Aw, Tully,” Lonny said. “They’re just coldhearts.”

“They were fighting coldhearts,” Tully said. “So do we. That don’t make us coldhearts.”

“Indeed,” Doc said. “So why not leave us our weapons and gear and let us go our merry way? We will not cause you a bit of fuss.”

“Remains to be seen. Now if you like keeping your skins on you better get ready to hustle. Acid rain’s coming. Smells like a bad one.”

As if in response, raindrops pattered off the top of the wall and dug little craters in the gray dust. Ryan felt his facial muscles wince tightly in anticipation of the pain of an acid strike on exposed skin. But the drops that struck the hands held over his head and his cheek were just normal rain. Fat and somewhat greasy, but not corrosive.

Not yet. This was merely a little harmless foreplay.

“What about J.B.?” Mildred demanded. “We’ve got a wounded man. You don’t propose we just leave him here to die?”

“No,” Tully said. “But if he can’t walk you’ll have to carry him. Now get moving, or we’ll leave you all to sizzle!”

“But he needs a stretcher!”

“Woman, do we look like we’re carrying a stretcher with us? Pick him up and carry him, or leave him, but get moving right now.”

“Easy, lover,” Krysty murmured. “He’s right.”

“Yeah.” Ryan forced himself to unwind a notch as he unlinked his hands atop his head. When no one shouted or shot at him he hunkered down and grabbed J.B. by the shoulders. “Being ordered around by strangers goes straight up my back.”

Krysty moved to Ryan’s side to help. He didn’t worry about her carrying her share of the load. She was a strong woman. He flashed a narrow-eyed look at Mildred.

“You gonna help or let us drag his feet through the rubble?” he asked.

Tears ran down Mildred’s cheeks. “It might kill him, just carrying him like this for any distance!”

“You think the acid won’t? Jak, help her get his legs. Hang on, J.B. This is gonna hurt.”

“Don’t be a stupe,” J.B. croaked. “Just leave me.” His eyes rolled up in his head and he passed out again.

“Not gonna happen,” Ryan said. “Nobody gets left behind.”

Shooting a final ruby glare at the captors to either side of him, Jak moved toward the wounded Armorer. Doc moved forward.

“Allow me, lad,” Doc said, stooping beside Mildred. He grabbed one of J.B.’s boots and stood with his three companions.

“Now, as I heard it said—let’s make tracks!”

Chapter Five

They traveled south. Tully led them out of the ruined building into the street, which was relatively unobstructed there. They made for the shelter of an intact section of overpass. It should protect them from the acid rain, if the wind didn’t blow too hard.

The Armorer was a small man and not carrying any excess flesh. He was all bone and wiry muscle. Ryan was surprised by how heavy his friend actually was.

Their captors had shouldered the companions’ packs. Ryan guessed that had more to do with preventing them from whipping out any nasty hidden surprises than a desire to lighten the loads of four people carrying their wounded friend.

He felt impacts on the back of his shirt and head. He heard a frying-egg sound and smelled a nasty stench like burning hair as the concentrated acid in the rain dissolved its proteins.

J.B.’s head hung between Ryan and Krysty. He moaned as an acid drop hit his cheek, clinging and burning like napalm.

“Run!” Ryan shouted. He didn’t care what their captors had to say about it. If they decided their prisoners were making a break for it and chilled them, it was an easier death than acid.

But the dozen or so locals were concentrating on not getting dissolved themselves. Those who could held bits of clothing over their heads for cover, or yanked their shirts over their heads. The angry welts some of them sported on their backs showed they’d made this particular unpleasant choice before.

The four friends carrying J.B. were already straining. But as the rain began to sting like wasps they accelerated anyway. They were used to walking and even running long distances. But each of them, Ryan realized, had been holding back out of concern for jostling J.B.

Now that was forgotten. As always, the demands of survival overrode everything else. They ran flat out, and the rain hissed in the white-gray dust that lay on the frost-heaved asphalt beneath their feet.

Toughened as they were, their chests were working like bellows when the section of highway a hundred feet over their heads cut off the rain as if flipping a switch.

They staggered a few paces and then laid J.B. beside a thick concrete support pillar as near the middle of the span as possible. Then they collapsed around him, gasping like so many beached Sippi giant catfish.

Around them their captors took up a defensive perimeter. Some splashed water from canteens on their comrades to wash away acid. The rain pattered hard on the blacktop around them and the overhead pass. It raised a stinging stink that made Ryan’s eye water.

A couple of blocks north the wounded scavvies who’d been left behind by their bugging-out pals were screaming. It was surprisingly loud at this distance. Or maybe, not so surprising.

Ryan tuned it out. He’d heard people dying in unspeakable agony before. It wasn’t as if he liked those bastards melting alive out there.

Mildred was on her knees cradling J.B.’s head on her thigh. She was still a pro; though she stroked his wispy brown hair tenderly she didn’t waste breath begging him to speak to her.

“How’s he look?” Ryan asked, taking a pull from the canteen at his waist.

She shook her head. “Not good,” she said. “But if he’s got internal bleeding he’s not showing any sign it’s gotten worse from being jogged around like a bag of mail.”

“Not bubbling out nose or mouth,” said Jak, who squatted nearby, panting like the bipedal white wolf he resembled. “Good sign.”

The skin went tight at the corners of Mildred’s eyes and mouth. Then she forced herself to relax. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”

“So who are you?” Ryan said as the tall patrol leader approached. It suddenly struck him: what he’d taken for unhealthy pallor was clean skin. These folk were well-scrubbed by usual ville standards, even after however many hours on patrol.

“Aren’t you getting things backward?” Tully said. “We got the blasters. Who the hell are you?”

Ryan shook his head. “Just folks passing through,” he said with unfeigned weariness. “My name’s Ryan. The woman here’s Krysty. The other’s our healer, Mildred. The sawed-off runt she’s tending to’s named J.B. Old guy’s Doc and the teenager’s Jak.”

“Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your service,” Doc said. He managed to make his introduction sound grand despite the fact he was sitting on his bony old ass on an ancient weed-cracked highway. He gestured with his ebony walking stick. Ryan was startled to see their captors had allowed him to keep it, apparently presuming he needed it to walk. None of them seemed to have noticed the fact he’d stuck it through his belt to help carry J.B.

So we’re not completely disarmed after all, Ryan thought with a slight smile. Not as if it does us any damn good. The fact that only a few of the patrol carried modern blasters didn’t fool him. A black-powder blaster would chill a person dead as any machine gun. And so would a crossbow bolt.

“Where’d you come from?” the tall ginger-haired man asked, putting his back to a support pillar and sliding to sit. “’Cross the river?”

Ryan shook his head. “North,” he said. It was true, as far as it went. That was the easiest lie—true but for the bits it left out.

Tully raised a brow. “That’s a triple-hard road, friend,” he said. “Leads right through cannies and coldhearts swarming like angry wasps.”

“We noticed,” Mildred said.

“Now would you mind telling us who you are?” Ryan said.

“Shouldn’t we make ’em stop talking, Tully?” a black kid with a single-shot black-powder longblaster asked. He looked to be no more than twelve and his eyes were saucer-large with excitement.

“Why’d we want to do a thing like that, McCoy?” the leader asked laconically.

“Well. Um.” Evidently McCoy hadn’t thought that far ahead. But he was game, and resourceful. “Mebbe they’ll plot their escape.”

“Why, then, you’ll just shoot them dead with that big scary blaster of yours, won’t you, McCoy?” Tully said. “Speaking of which, you did remember to reload that smokepole, right?”

The youngster puffed himself up. “O’ course! What do you think I am?”

“A greenie on your first patrol outside the wire,” Tully said. “You put a fresh cap on, too?”

“Well, don’t be a—Oh. Um, wait.” He fumbled at a pouch at his waist. “Wait one.”

Turning his head so the kid wouldn’t see him smile, the patrol leader turned back to Ryan. “To answer your question, we come from a ville called Soulard. A mile or so south of here, along the old highway. Peaceful place.”

“Why did you kidnap us, then?” Krysty asked.

He smiled. “Looks to me like we rescued you.”

“Looks to me like you captured us,” Ryan said. “Saving us for the stewpot?”

“What, you think we’re fuckin’ cannies?” shouted the man who’d mishandled Ryan’s longblaster earlier. He wore a T-shirt with even the brief arms torn off to reveal bulky biceps and triceps. Though he looked barely in his twenties, he was a big old slab of beef, with a blunt face fronted by a mashed tuber of a nose and a couple of brown eyes narrowed with angry suspicion. The sides and back of his head were shaved up to a clump of brown hair that stirred in the acid-tangy breeze.

“Ease off, Lonny,” the ginger-haired man said coolly. “They got a right to be a bit testy. I would be, in their circumstances.”

“But they run with a mutie!” He waved a hamhock of a hand toward Jak. “Look at him, white as clean snow and rat-red eyes!”

“I’m no mutie!” Jak shouted, spittle flying from his pale lips.

“He’s an albino,” Ryan said. “It’s a natural condition, if a rare one. He’s no mutie.”

“Bullshit,” Lonny said. Jak’s red eyes flamed. He looked likely to spring for Lonny’s throat, despite the huge disparity in size.

“Lonny!” The patrol leader didn’t stir, but his voice cracked like a whip. “Back off. We need to talk to these people. Brother Joseph will figure out what to do with them.”

Lonny spit in the pale grass that grew in the shade of the overpass. “Brother Joseph.”

“Enough, Lonny. We don’t need to be airing our dirty laundry in front of strangers, either.”

But Jak’s hot blood was up. “How we know they not cannies?”

“Lord, lad,” Doc murmured. “Let it go.”

“Look at them,” Mildred said. “Ever see cannies look that healthy?”

Jak frowned. His white teeth made paler dimples in his lower lip. “No,” he admitted after a moment.

“Me neither, now that she mentions it,” Ryan said. “All right. Truce. We might as well go along with these people, even laying aside they got the drop on us. We already know this ain’t a healthy vicinity to wander at random.”

“No kidding,” McCoy said. “You’re triple-lucky you didn’t stir up a pocket of serious rad-death emitters. That’s worse than getting eaten by cannies, any day! The baron, he—”

“McCoy,” Tully said sharply, but nowhere near as sharply as he’d spoken to the beefy Lonny. The black kid shut his mouth and swallowed hard. Tully looked back to Ryan.

“Let’s just say you seem a bit too dangerous to allow to wander around freely kicking over hornets’ nests. We have to live here.”

“What if we tell you we don’t mean you any harm or trouble?”

“I’d say evidence suggests otherwise. Least so far as trouble’s concerned. And I can tell you plain, you’ll have every chance to state your case once we get back safe to our ville. Which is far from certain yet, so less talking, please. None of us wants to draw more hassles.”

“People want avoid trouble bad,” Jak grumbled, indicating their captors with a nod of his head.

“If we tried a little harder to skip trouble,” Krysty said, “we might be a whole lot happier.”