No Man's Land

In the center was a cleared space with a big tent at one end of it. Actually it was a cluster of bigger-than-average tents, clumped around one with a large room and what seemed like several lesser wings to it. The troop stopped in front of this one and dismounted.

Though it was very early in the morning, Captain Stone sent a rider galloping ahead to bring word to the baron that they were bringing in some captives. Which in turn was evidently an event of some note, since not only did the commander haul his butt out of a warm bedroll, but when the captives were prodded into the biggest tent at bayonet-point he also had a cluster of what had to be his senior officers gathered around him.

Lanterns filled the big canvas-walled room with yellow glow and the tang of kerosene. One man was seated, while the others stood around him, their eyes baggy and bleary from getting roused from their own bunks.

“Kneel before Baron Jed Kylie of Hugoville,” a sergeant barked. This was a new one, blond and fresh-faced, who seemed to have charge of a small bodyguard detail. Their uniforms, which in the light Ryan could make out now were blue, looked fancier than the ones on the patrol that captured them, somehow. “Glorious general and commander in chief of the ever-victorious Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association!”

Good thing they cut short the title some, Ryan thought. Otherwise we’d be here all night before they stopped walking all around the muzzle of the blaster and got to the damned trigger.

He was tired, and whether he was going to sleep on the ground as a prisoner, or lie cooling in the open air staring up at the stars, he and his friends were going to rest soon. He wanted to get right to that, whichever way it came.

The one-eyed man knelt right away. It didn’t even jog his pride. They’d done worse to survive.

They had survived. And the smile he’d gotten from Krysty had reminded him that they would this time, too.

Jak, of course, had to make trouble about it. The bodyguards looked outraged by his refusal to bend his knee. But the trooper from Stone’s patrol who herded him in gave him a quick disinterested jab of his carbine-butt in the kidney, and down Jak went, gasping and glaring, with his hair hanging in his furious face like bleached seaweed.

“So,” Baron Jed said, leaning forward in his folding camp chair and squinting. Or Ryan thought he was squinting, anyway. His face was such a mass of seams and wrinkles it was hard enough to see his brown eyes to begin with. “What have we here.”

“Trespassers, Baron General,” announced the familiar brass notes of Stone’s voice. “We caught them in the hills by where Dirty Leg Creek crosses the Corn Mill Road.”

“Ah.” Baron Jed sat upright again. He was a skinny little specimen, although the way his blue tunic was tailored couldn’t hide the fact he had more than a bit of a kettle belly hanging off the front of his wiry frame. His head started wide with a shock of sandy-colored hair and tapered steadily to a long chin that looked like you could use it as the thin end of a wedge to split rails with. His nose was long and thin, the mouth a bloodless slash.

“They got women, Dad,” a big blocky redheaded kid who stood behind the baron’s right shoulder said. “I like them.”

“At ease, Buddy,” Jed said, irritation briefly twisting his face even tighter. “We got business to attend to.”

The youth looked eighteen, with a broad freckled face and mean brown eyes. He had a saber with a bucket hilt buckled to one hip and some kind of handblaster in a flapped holster on the other. Whether he could use either one was a question Ryan reckoned remained open. He had yellow metal bars on his collar; if the Protectors’ army followed the conventions of the long-dead U.S. Army—and from what Ryan had seen so far, they did—that made him a captain.

He let the corners of his mouth twitch in a smile that would almost be perceptible from the other side of it. He had to be stupe, mebbe even a simp, Ryan thought. Otherwise Buddy would be a full colonel, at least.

“So,” Jed said, “One-Eye. You’re the leader. You talk. Explain your presence on the holy soil of the Protectors’ Association.”

The lie was so well practiced Ryan could have recited it in his sleep. Most of it wasn’t even a lie; that made it all easier, of course.

“We’re just travelers, Baron,” he said. “We come down the ’Sippi to Nubuque and are headed west looking for work.”

“You lie,” said the officer who stood to the baron’s left. He was a dried-up specimen even smaller than Jed himself. His skin seemed to have shrunk right down onto the skull protruding above his high uniform collar. All the color seemed to have been bleached out of him as well, except for the vivid blue of the scar that ran down the right side of his face, and the blue eyes that stared like inmates from some kind of crazy-hatch windows. He slapped a pair of gloves from one white hand into the other as he spoke in clipped, vicious words.

“Relax, Colonel Toth,” Jed said. Ryan knew the man for what he was: a sec boss, and a triple-nasty specimen. “Let’s let them have their say.”

He frowned at Ryan.

“But west lie hard-core Deathlands,” he said. “The worst hot spots and thorium swamps in the whole Midwest. If not the continent. Why would you be going that way? Hey?”

“Reckon there’ll be less competition for gigs, anyway,” J.B. said.

The blond sergeant—or guard—stepped forward and slapped the Armorer across the face.

“Speak when you’re spoken to, outlander,” he said.

J.B. gave his head a couple of upward nods to settle his glasses back on his nose. He blinked mildly through the circular lenses at the sergeant as the man stepped back to his place and said nothing.

The sergeant didn’t know he was a marked man. If anything, J. B. Dix had less bluster in him than Ryan did, and he was slowest to anger of any of the party. But if you did anger him, you were in trouble.

“It’s true, Baron,” Ryan said. “It may seem triple-stupe to you, but we have no choice in the matter. Especially since we had to relocate in something of a hurry.”

Which, of course, was true enough.

“So,” Toth hissed, “you admit you are fugitives from justice.”

Yep, Ryan thought. Sec boss.

Jed waved him off. “They’re not fugitives from my justice,” he pointed out. “Not yet, anyway. So, you’re not spies for that treacherous dog Baron Al, are you?”

“We never even heard of the man until you spoke the name, Baron,” Ryan said truthfully.

The baron sat forward and stared at him intently. His map of wrinkles got a marked furrow down the middle of the forehead region, suggesting careful thought or scrutiny.

“You don’t know, do you?” he said at last, leaning back in his chair again. “Al Siebert, baron of Siebert, so-called, is the vile, claim-jumping bastard in command of that band of land-stealing ruffians who call themselves the Uplands Alliance. And who are nothing but a bunch of dirty, low-down, mangy sheep herders.”

He said that as if it was the worst insult in the whole world. Ryan found that interesting, although he had no clue on Earth what use it could be.

I know a lot of people take stock in the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my rad-blasted friend, he thought. But the enemy my enemy hates that much might be eager for a little help in making himself a worse enemy. He thought he knew some people who might like to sign on for just that job, once they cleared up a certain current misunderstanding.

“They’re lying,” Toth said, though rather blandly this time. “You should let me torture them, Baron. I’d have the truth out of them in a flash!”

“You just like to torture people, Bismuth,” Jed said. “Which is fine. I like a man who enjoys his work. Keeps his mind serious. But would you say, Sergeant Drake, that these men are fit?”

“All ran all the way from where we caught them, General,” said the black sergeant from behind Ryan. He sounded...not awed of the baron or his officers, by any means, and that much less fearful, but as if he’d rather be almost anyplace else, right now.

“Even the white-hair?”

“Even him, sir. Ran like a damn deer, for all he looks like he couldn’t cross the room without going flat on his wrinkly old face.”

Ryan actually heard the sergeant brace even tighter behind him. “Sorry, sir!”

“Why?” the baron asked. “Very well. I need soldiers more than you need torture victims, Colonel. And these five men are obviously fit to fight, and have all their part, minus the eye from the crusty bastard here. Which I reckon he doesn’t miss the use of much. He’s a stoneheart if ever I saw one.”

He stood up. “Gentlemen—and I use the term loosely—I welcome you to the Grand Army of the Cattlemen’s Protective Association of blah-blah and so on. No, I can’t stand all those nuking titles, either, but they impress the troops and the citizenry. So, off you go to your new duties.”

“And our weapons, Baron?” Ryan asked. The latest twist of events hadn’t surprised him even a little. If Jed’s army had another serious army to fight, it needed fodder for the brass muzzle-loading cannon he’d seen lined neatly along one side of the parade ground.

Ryan could tell he smiled by the way he showed his teeth.

“Like your sorry asses, young man,” he said, “they now belong to me. You’ll be issued with whatever happens to be available, like any new recruits. Now, off with you! Sergeant Stone?”

“On your feet, ladies,” Stone rasped. Krysty and Mildred stood up, promptly if not looking too happy about it. “You others, on your feet, too!”

“Speaking of the womenfolk, Dad—” Captain Buddy began, licking his fat lips.

“They belong to me, too, son,” Jed said. And then to his guards, “Put them in the special annex. I’ll see to them later.”

Chapter Four

Like most of the companions, Krysty was capable of falling asleep given the slightest opportunity. Sleep was a commodity as precious as food or water, to anyone who wanted to stay breathing. Like everybody else, except Mildred, Krysty also slept lightly, and came awake at the slightest change in her surroundings.

She smelled him before she even heard the rustle of the tent flap, and the graceless heavy clump of his boots: Buddy, the baron’s redheaded son. He had an unclean scent to him that seemed to come from something more than the fact he didn’t bathe often. The fact he had drenched himself with some kind of awful predark perfume that smelled as if a skunk had been drowned in sugar-water only made it nastier.

She cast a quick look at Mildred, who lay near her in the small tent near the baron’s. Both women had been stripped with ruthless and probably fear-based impersonality by Baron Jed’s bodyguards, before being stuffed willy-nilly into frilly dresses over several layers of underclothing, which apparently their captors found far more suitable to females—even prisoners—than the masculine dress both women wore.

Krysty found it itchy and uncomfortable as well as impractical. Plus she was fairly sure the pink dress clashed with her hair, although the yellow really sort of flattered Mildred.

The unappealing smell of Buddy was followed at once by the apparition of the far less appealing Buddy himself. From up close Krysty could see that the tunic of his blue uniform was carefully tailored to hide more than a substantial start on a paunch.

She knew better than to let that lead her to underestimate the redheaded kid. He still had a chest and broad shoulders that owed precious little to his flab. Plus his square, loose-lipped face, juvenile and freckled though it was, seemed to just radiate malice.

“So,” he said, straightening to his full height as he stepped into the small tent where Krysty and Mildred had been thrown after they were tied up. “What do we have here?”

“Prisoners,” Mildred said sharply, sitting up. “And your daddy told you to keep your grubby hands off us!”

For a moment Buddy’s face fisted and ugly light glinted in his eyes, then he relaxed and laughed. He might not be the brightest candle in the box, but he knew he had the whip hand here, and Krysty could just tell he knew how to use it. Or better, abuse it.

He emitted a halfhearted chuckle. “Well, now, he surely didn’t mean me, his son and heir and all.”

He made a big show of peering left and right, as if the little tent, even with its crates, could hide anything bigger than a healthy rat.

“Anyways, I don’t see my daddy hiding nowheres around here. Do you, girls?”

“You’re about to make a terrible mistake, Buddy,” Mildred said.

He backhanded her, and she fell back on the ground.

Krysty gave him a flat gaze. “Don’t touch me.”

He brayed another laugh, much louder this time.

“What, bitch? Are you so stupe you don’t know your sweet round ass belongs to me right this very minute? In fact mebbe I’ll just give you a good old fuck in it right now and let you know how things stand around here, you red-haired gaudy slut!”

Leaning down, he enfolded the back of her head with a huge, clumsy paw and crushed his mouth to hers. His tongue pushed against her tight-sealed lips like an urgent worm. His breath smelled as if a mouse had crawled in his mouth and died there. Last week.

His other hand groped her crotch, though what he might actually feel down there through all the layers of heavy fabric his father’s goons had wrapped her lower reaches in she couldn’t even guess.

By way of response Krysty abruptly head-butted him. It squashed his nose. Blood squirted out his nostrils and down over his mouth as he stumbled backward into Mildred. She caught the still-stunned youth around the neck from behind with both legs. She squeezed her powerful thighs together until his face turned red.

Krysty writhed to her feet. The companions’ gear was stored at one side of the tent. The clothes she and Mildred had been wearing had been discarded beside them. She turned her back and knelt, while Buddy struggled futilely to escape Mildred’s grip.

Her fingers found what they were looking for. Deftly she manipulated the little hideout knife from her clothing to sever the cotton cord that held her wrists crossed behind her back.

She stood up, knife in hand. Buddy lay on his back, trying alternately to pry Mildred’s legs loose or hit her with his wildly flailing hands. She had a look of not altogether holy relish on her face as she fended off his efforts.

Krysty cut her friend’s hands free, then she stood up and began to slice her long skirt methodically into strips. It would do for tying and gagging the youth, she reckoned.

“You seem like someone who’s already got some experience at rape,” Krysty said, “along with the taste for it.”

“Bitches asked for—” Buddy began, then his eyes bugged out wider as he realized his admission. “No! Wait! I mean—I wouldn’t do that! I never—”

She frowned and shook her head.

Buddy wrenched free from Mildred’s leg hold and tried to retrieve the bowie knife sticking out the top of his boot.

“Sorry, Buddy,” Krysty said as she slashed his neck with her knife. “This is goodbye.”

Buddy didn’t make a sound as he collapsed to the floor and started to bleed out.

* * *

“BARON JED’S service is easy, maggots!” shouted the man in the black hat with the emblem pinned to the front. He had sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves of his blue tunic. “All you got to do is what you’re told, when you’re told, and you’ll be fine!”

Having been stripped of their weapons and thoroughly searched, as well as being relieved of all their belongings, Ryan, J.B., Doc, Jak and Ricky had been marched off to a little bonfire on the outskirts of the camp. Doc still had his ebony swordstick, which meant he had the sword concealed inside. Whether that would give Ryan and company the edge they needed to get clear somehow and get to the thorny problem of rescuing Krysty and Mildred was another thing entirely.

The sergeant, whose name was Bolton, had been told off to see to the formalities of inducting them officially into the Grand Army of the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, which, so far, consisted of yelling at them in a remarkably loud voice.

“Tell them the penalties, Sergeant,” said one of the two guards keeping the captives under control at the point of a musket. He wore pants as loose as his lower lip, held up by suspenders over an unbleached muslin shirt. The only signs of uniform to his person were the armband on his sleeve, closer to black than blue in the light of the cow-chip fire, and the kepi-style cap from which hair almost as white as Jak’s hung to his shoulders.

The other trooper had black skin and a more soldierly manner, which was to say, he looked bored to Ryan’s eye, but there was something about him that suggested he wouldn’t mind livening up his evening by using the butt of his longblaster on an unruly recruit. Or the other end either.

“Penalties are simple,” the sergeant bellowed. As far as Ryan could tell that was his sole level of volume: loud enough to wake the dead in the middle of a cloud-busting prairie thunderstorm. “First infraction—flogging! Second infraction—death by hanging! And none of this pussy neck-breaking shit, either. You swing and choke and kick until you just hang there and don’t move anymore. Baron Jed is a real man who wants his punishments to punish! Am I clear?”

His eyes grew wide, then they popped right out of their sockets to dangle like obscene white grapes by their optic nerves. The middle of Bolton’s forehead bulged outward. He dropped like an empty sack.

Already pretty sure he knew what fate had so quietly overtaken the noncom, and not wasting a blink thinking about it, Ryan was already in motion. He sprang from his crouch by the campfire, grabbing the musket behind the bayonet socket and thrusting it high in case it went off.

The kid opened his mouth to shout a warning. Ryan caught the longblaster with his other hand as well and used both, plus a powerful hip rotation, to piston the steel-shod musket butt right back at its former owner. Teeth exploded outward as if a gren had gone off in the soldier’s face. He fell down as limp and final-seeming as his sergeant had.

Quickly reversing his grip on the musket, Ryan looked to the burlier black guard. The soldier was trying to raise his own musket, but he was also dealing with the little problem of Jak not only having a hold of his arms, but also having the albino’s sharp white teeth latched on to his throat. Jak was hanging on like a weasel clamped to the neck of an eagle.

But even as Ryan looked, strength and sheer self-preservation and fury got the better of tenacity. The soldier managed to shove Jak off. Skin and a fair amount of blood from his neck followed the albino, but Ryan could clearly see there was nowhere near enough to show Jak had bitten through a jugular vein.

Apparently the albino had done the soldier enough hurt that he couldn’t yell; he made a weird rasping sound as he prepared to drive his bayonet into the slim body of the kid he’d just knocked to the ground.

Ryan realized the reason the soldier didn’t just shoot Jak was that the two soldiers probably weren’t being trusted with loaded weapons off the line of battle, which was also why Ryan couldn’t shoot down the soldier to save his young friend. He prepared to try throwing the musket like a spear. It was a shitty idea, but all he had.

Then he heard a wet punching-sliding sound. The soldier’s eyes bugged out. Dropping his musket, he threw both hands to his throat as, with a fruity sucking sound, the slim blade of Doc’s sword was withdrawn from the man’s neck. He went down gargling his own blood—flowing freely this time—and kicking the cool sod with his heels.

Mildred stepped out of the night. She carried two backpacks, giving her a silhouette like some kind of giant awful one-off mutie. She was looking very pleased with herself and working the bolt on a funny-looking longblaster with a short, wide barrel.

“You know,” she said, “I could get used to this DeLisle of Ricky’s.”

“Weren’t you used to it enough to shoot that other bastard sec man before he chilled Jak?” Ryan asked.

Looking sheepish, Mildred handed the carbine with its built-in silencer to its rightful owner, Ricky Morales, who was dancing as if he had to take a pee with the effort of holding in his desire to snatch his beloved weapon away from her.

“Sorry, Ryan,” she said. “I’m a handgun girl. I sort of forgot about working the bolt in the heat of the moment.”

“Don’t you mean to say, ‘Thank you for shooting the bad man, Mildred?” Krysty asked sweetly. She likewise had two backpacks.

Ryan exhaled between pursed lips. “Yeah,” he said. “Reckon I do. Thanks for shooting the bad man, Mildred. Thanks for rescuing our triple-stupe asses, both of you.”

“It would appear the pair of you have released yourselves on your own recognizance?” Doc asked.

“I’m the only other one here got the slightest clue what you’re talking about, you old coot,” Mildred said. “But, yeah. That happened.”

Krysty knelt, carefully depositing the pack she held in her right hand in front of Ryan. He saw that it was his own, with his Steyr Scout strapped to the back of it.

“You managed to liberate our weapons and gear, too?”

Krysty grinned. “And managed to drag them along. They thought it was an ace idea to stash them in the same tent where they stashed us. I guess they thought of us as just more sundry valuables, lover.”

“Seems like they also thought of us as the gentler sex,” Mildred said, gratefully unburdening herself of the weight of J.B.’s pack with Uzi and M-4000 shotgun strapped to it. “Wrong.”

“We should probably get out of here as fast as we can,” Krysty said.

Ryan searched the dead sergeant for anything useful and came up dry. “Don’t want to stay too long,” he said. “But seeing as how they stuck us out here away from the rest of the camp, probably to keep us from being a bad influence on the other grunts, we ought have a little breathing space. Especially seeing as Mildred used that whisper-quiet longblaster and—”

“No,” Mildred said, looking strained. “You don’t understand. Ah, we took care of Buddy before we left.”

From the center of camp they heard a marrow-chilling scream. It went on and on, rising higher and higher until Ryan actually saw sweat bead on Krysty’s taut pale face in the firelight.

The scream broke off.

“That wasn’t pain,” J.B. observed, picking up his fedora and dusting it off. “Leastwise, not the physical kind.”

“It was the cry of a man who just found his son dead,” Krysty said grimly. “Buddy attacked me, but I made sure he wouldn’t be raping any more women.”

“So which way do we go now, gentle friends?” Doc asked. “I perceive these environs are due to grow uncomfortably warm in the very near future.”

“West,” Jak said with certainty.

Everybody looked at the albino teen.

“Horse corrals that way,” he said. He didn’t have to explain the smell had told him. “Figure, better we ride, they don’t.”

“Two pronouns,” Mildred said in wonder, “in the same sentence? Jak, you’ve gone and used up your whole year’s allotment!”

“I do admire the way he thinks, though,” J.B. said.

“Yeah,” Ryan said, as lights flared up in the middle of camp and commotion began to grow. “So why are we still standing here jawing about it?”

Chapter Five

As silent as a panther, Jak crept through the night.

Since he approached with the wind in his front—to keep the horses from detecting him and showing nervousness—the equine smell was almost overpowering. He didn’t need it to track the sentry, whom he’d spotted standing bolt-upright in the open, a shadow-form in starlight.

Then Jak heard a snap, smelled sulfur, saw an orange firefly ember arcing tightly upward. Unbelievably, the sentry was lighting a smoke. Tobacco, by the acrid smell.

Apparently the Protectors had no fear that their enemies would try to raid this particular herd. It wasn’t an entirely stupe notion, Jak thought. They had cavalry pickets riding circuits of the camp pretty close in, as well as random-sweep patrols like the one that bagged Jak and his friends earlier that evening.