Devil's Vortex (12 page)

It was a bright and beautiful morning, with only a few feather clouds visible up beyond the tall treetops. The Armorer frowned as if having trouble fitting his head around his lady love’s arguments. He was neither stupe nor slow—the opposite of each, in fact—but he was so intensely practical that he found it difficult, sometimes, to come to terms with abstract arguments.

Especially where people were concerned, with their messy, irregular, tangled-up balls of emotion. So different from the well-ordered and basically predictable machines he loved to tinker with.

“Well, she did say she was fine with it when her Maw Dombrowski paid us to deliver her to this Borodin dude.”

“What else did you expect her to say?”

“No?”

“Maybe she didn’t feel as if she could. Her mother’s a pretty formidable type. Wealthy and powerful, even if she does call herself a rancher and not a baron.”

“If this Pearl is a slave, why doesn’t she try to run away?”

“She’s afraid we’ll track her down and return her.”

J.B. shook his head doubtfully. “Any case, while I’m not exactly known for being particular in the looks department where it comes to women, she does have a face on her kind of like the south end of a northbound mule.”

Mildred fixed him with a withering glare. When he failed to wither, she sighed theatrically.

“John,” she said. “You are
so
tone-deaf.”

He looked at her in confusion. “What?”

By now she knew his apparent confusion was genuine. He honestly had no clue he’d as good as called Mildred homely. Not that she considered herself in the same category as Krysty—because she wasn’t totally unrealistic. But she also had
some
vanity.

She opted to let it go. For now.

“What’s that got to do with her being a slave or not?”

“Well, I mean, this Borodin fella, he’s supposed to be pretty well-off himself, with his logging and his mill. Wouldn’t he go for something a mite prettier if he was able to
buy
a wife?”

“Why would he go for her, then?”

“You’ll have to ask him. Ryan tells about how arranged marriages are common among baron families back East, though. Way to cement alliances, even resolve disputes. That kind of thing. Nothing tends to draw rival clans closer quicker than having a common grandkid or two, I guess.”

“It didn’t seem to work that way for my married friends’ in-laws,” she said. “But I suppose barons are different.”

“You can say that again.”

Chapter Thirteen

“So, Trager,” Hammerhand said, “did you get what you wanted?”

He deliberately didn’t say the title
Doctor
, because omitting it visibly needled the whitecoat.

The little man looked thoughtful and fingered his patchy-bearded chin. Hammerhand thought that up close the man looked mostly like a big old black rat with the mange, dressed up in a predark lab coat.

“While it was regrettably short on concrete details,” he said, “I believe so. At least a relatively consistent account of what happened emerged. That should be of use to my associates.”

“Ace,” Hammerhand said.

It was noon. The sky had mostly cleared, although the wind had risen and was whistling over rolling land just showing spots of green. The new recruits, which was most of the captured Buffalo Mob, had all been duly sworn in as members of the New Blood Nation, as Hammerhand had taken to calling his outfit. He had ordered their weapons returned, which got him disapproving looks from both his lieutenants. But because the prisoners signed on of their own free will, he took them at their word. And if any were trying to pull a fast one, Hammerhand would be happy to make an example of them.

That worked, too.

Now the wags that had dropped Hammerhand’s assault teams a mile from the camp the previous night had driven up to collect the new recruits. The freshly minted Bloods were stowing their own equipment plus everybody else’s into their former transport.

Joe Takes-Blasters frowned at Trager, but more in confusion than anger.

Unperturbed by the scrutiny, the whitecoat took a fresh red apple from a pocket of his coat and bit into it. Hammerhand had no clue where he’d gotten it. Or rather, where his associates had. He’d also given one to Hammerhand, so the Blood boss took no offense now.

“You gave us some straight skinny on that Buffalo camp,” Joe said to the little man.

“Of course I did,” Trager replied, unconcerned by chunks of pale yellow apple flesh falling from his lips.

He seemed to be waiting for the rest of it. Joe just stood there and looked at him. Hammerhand understood that, having said his piece, his lieutenant was done speaking. He was a man who preferred to let his fists, his blasters and his one-piece steel hatchets do his talking for him.

The youngster Little Wolf trotted to his side. “Aunt—I mean, Shyanna—says to tell you we’re ready to roll, boss!”

“Thanks,” Hammerhand said. The kid went bouncing off like a pup who’d just been petted.

“What about the holdouts?” Mindy asked. Ten or twelve of the intact Buffalo prisoners had refused to swear allegiance to Hammerhand and his cause. So had several of the wounded ones. Additionally there were some Buffalo wounded who didn’t seem likely to recover. They had been too wrapped up in their own misery to say yes or no.

“Chill them.”

Mindy raised an eyebrow. “You sure? That doesn’t sound like the deal you offered.”

“But it was,” he said. “Did you hear me say anything about what would happen if they didn’t join? No, you didn’t, because I never did say that. I wanted actual, willing volunteers. Okay, mostly willing. And I wanted to show how generous I was to those who earned it. The rest—”

He shrugged. Trager, paying the whole exchange no mind, took another noisy bite from his apple.

“Let’s just say I also want to show the world that those who stand against me fall. They had their chance. They made their choice. That ends it. And them.”

Joe’s heavy brow furrowed more deeply. “How do you want it done, boss?”

He didn’t care for torture. No more than Mindy did. But he was loyal as a dog, both to his old friend and to his sworn chieftain. He would do as he was told, like it or not.

“Quick and clean,” Hammerhand said. “I want them killed, not hurt.”

Trager scoffed.

“I hadn’t expected you to be so sentimental.”

Hammerhand frowned. At some point there would have to be an adjustment of the terms between him and this disgusting little man, prophesied guide or not, and a reckoning. But for now, he was useful, as even Mindy had been forced to acknowledge, still skeptical though she was.

“I’m not a sadist,” he said. “I’ll hurt you. Make no mistake about that. Hurt you bad. But only if you give me good reason to. An honest enemy gets an honorable death. That’s part of the message, too. You wouldn’t understand.”

* * *

“F
IREBLAST
!” R
YAN
 
EXCLAIMED
 
as the brake lights lit up on the wag ahead of his and Mildred waved her hand out the passenger window to signal trouble ahead.

Krysty, behind the wheel of the pickup in whose bed he rode, had already stopped the wag.

Despite her lightning reflexes, and the slow speed at which they were grinding up the twisty road, the trailing wag almost rode up onto the leading vehicle’s bumper before it stopped. That was far enough for Ryan to catch a glimpse of what the problem was: a makeshift barrier of gray boulders and dead trees blocking their advance. Bearded faces and longblaster barrels were visible behind it between bare skeletal branches.

“Roadblock!” he shouted to the open driver’s window. “Back it up, Krysty!”

Even as he shouted Ryan felt the wag jolt into reverse motion. She was ahead of him.

He turned to look back the way they were going as his lover stuck her head out the window to better see to steer. He knelt for stability, holding an M16 they’d kept out of their coldheart trove. In case of ambush, putting a lot of lead in the air in a hurry could actually be a help instead of just a way to waste ammo, shooting holes in the air. The longblaster’s full-auto capacity had a way of being useful in such circumstances.

With a terrible grinding sound and slapping of boughs, a hundred-foot ponderosa pine toppled downward from among the trees upslope to crash across the road behind them. It had obviously been cut or weakened in advance.

They were truly caught in a well-prepared ambush. The only question now was their ambushers’ intent.

“Give us the girl an’ we’ll let you off with your lives!” a voice bellowed from behind the front roadblock.

Ryan had already guessed the intent was to get hold of their apparently valuable cargo, alive and unpunctured—by virtue of the fact they weren’t all dead already. They had gotten caught in the killing zone of a classic fire-sack ambush. A hail of bullets would have ended them at once, but nothing more than rocks, big and small, rolled down on them from above would have been enough to lay them all staring at the sky. Just in a slower, more agonizing fashion.

So their attackers’ lack of desire to chill them—at least, before they got what they wanted—was obvious. And so was the response.

“Forward or back?” Jak yelled from the vehicle’s bed.

“¡Adelante!”
Ryan responded. He was betting ambushers in these parts would not likely understand the Spanish word.

But he knew Jak did. Ryan had barely started to blow the word out of his mouth before the young albino leaped out of the pickup bed and raced into the scrub to the left, uphill side of the road. He vanished at once, with scarcely a disturbance of the branches.

“Ricky!” Ryan yelled. “Get the package down! Krysty, cover behind.” Then he also sprang from the back of the trapped wag as Ricky piled over the back of his seat to shove a very surprised Pearl Dombrowski to the backseat floorboards.

The one-eyed man made his way up the steep hill, with considerably less grace and a lot more noise than Jak had. It didn’t matter under the circumstances. Things were about to get a lot louder.

Behind him he heard Krysty open and slam her vehicle’s driver’s door as the redhead obeyed his order. He hated putting her in the more exposed bed of the pickup truck, but it was only slightly less safe than the cab. If the thin-gauge metal of the tailgate would do little to stop high-velocity fire, adding the equally paltry protection of the bed’s front and cabin’s rear would do little more than slow the bullets a bit. Only the big four-cylinder block of the 150-horsepower 2.7-liter engine would stand up against those. The soft lead slugs belched out by most black-powder blasters could be warded off more easily, but Ryan wasn’t going to bank on them being lucky enough to be facing those.

He and his companions, well-practiced—and seasoned—in ambush busting, didn’t plan on giving the coldhearts first crack. J.B.’s Mini UZI began chattering from the lead wag’s driver’s-side rear window, followed a heartbeat later by bursts from Doc’s longblaster, an M4 carbine with a fore pistol grip, also on full-auto. At the same instant Krysty opened up, blazing bursts at the ambushers with her Glock 18.

Ryan half expected to be met with a withering volley from the scrub as he headed upslope. If the ambushers had a party placed in cover there, they could pour flanking fire on the wags stalled on the road and wipe out their occupants. But nothing happened. Indeed it took a handful of seconds before shots began to crack from both barriers. They sounded to Ryan like black-powder weapons, not the higher, sharper reports of smokeless cartridges.

Meeting no opposition nor any sign at all of the enemy, he curved to his left, hoping that his path would take him to a point overlooking the ambushers behind the rear barricade.

Chapter Fourteen

Huddled behind their crude but effective roadblocks, the dozen ambushers were popping up between reloads to fire away with mostly single-shot black-powder weapons. When they shot, the barrels of their longblasters were unmistakably pointed high. They weren’t actively aiming to hit the two-wag convoy they had so neatly trapped.

Jak was not surprised. It was clear they’d expected their targets to surrender meekly when they so totally and unexpectedly got the drop on them and that they still didn’t want to damage the merchandise, in the form of Pearl Dombrowski. They intended to intimidate.

Exactly what made the young woman such precious cargo, Jak had no idea. He cared less. All that mattered was his job.

He licked his lips as he leveled his Colt Python between the budding branches of a holly bush, snuggled close along the hip of a granite outcrop. He was barely ten yards from the nearest ambusher, not more than twenty-five from the farthest. They were a scabby-assed lot, he thought, even by the standards of someone who grew up waging a guerrilla war in the Gulf Coast bayous. They wore rags and scraps of poorly made homespun clothes, which seemed to be held together mostly by man grease and filth, as their heads seemed mostly held together by matted hair and beards. The albino could still smell their body funk over the rampaging sulfurous stink of their blaster powder.

Two of them looked a bit less scabrous and rat-chewed than the rest: a tall man in a mostly intact green plaid shirt and jeans, who was blasting away sporadically with a mismatched pair of black-powder cartridge revolvers, and a shorter, wider black man with a lever-action carbine. Along with their better weapons, both of them had clearly visible features instead of masks of fur and filth.

They were obviously the command element, which the brown-bearded tall dude confirmed when, during a break where his accomplices were reloading, shouted, “You all best surrender now, while you got the chance! We still promise we won’t hurt you!”

Right, Jak thought. His mind made up, he thumb-cocked his big blaster, took care along its vented rib and squeezed the trigger.

Although Jak’s first love was knives, he could shoot a blaster well, especially at short range. The high-velocity .357 Magnum hollow-point round planted itself in the long semigroomed brown hair behind partially visible hair.

The two-blaster shooter’s head came apart as if hit with a twelve-pound sledgehammer.

For a heartbeat or two no one on the barricade even noticed. Their attention was focused on their targets, who continued to pump brisk fire in their direction. Then the stocky guy with the lever-blaster jumped and turned his head when his apparent boss’s half-decapitated body brushed against his shoulder on its slump to the ground. He turned, his body language shouting confusion.

One thing Jak had learned fighting his bayou guerrilla war was to cut off the head first. He sighted on the black guy and fired his second shot. He aimed for the head, but an unpredictable hitch in his target’s motion sent the slug blasting through his right shoulder instead. Over the lingering echoes of his own blaster shot, Jak could hear the coldheart squall as a spray of flesh and blood was knocked out the exit wound.

This time that triple-loud noise of .357 Magnum handblaster going off caught the ambushers’ attention. Heads turned toward Jak’s hiding place.

He had already left it, sprinting down the short distance to the road, still using the concealment offered by dense brush and straight tree boles. As he ran, he drew his trench knife with his left hand.

Though freshly reloaded longblasters, as well as astonished if grubby faces, were turning his way, Jak was grinning ear to ear as he burst into the open behind the barrier.

It was time for some fun.

* * *

L
OOKING
 
FOR
 
IT
, with a rough notion of where it would come from, J.B. saw the yellow muzzle flash from Jak’s Colt Python as the albino fired his first shot from concealment above and behind the ambushers.

Even as the report slapped his ears, he stuck his head out the wag’s driver’s window. “Hang on, Doc!” he shouted.

He floored it even as he called his warning.

“Wait!” Mildred exclaimed as the big pickup truck shot forward—right toward the barricade. “What are you—”

The heavy pipe-work cage covering the wag’s nose hit the barrier. The dead trees were backed by enough heavy boulders not to budge far. The coldhearts had to have worked like jolt-walking beavers to build the thing. J.B., who admired little more than a job well done, would have to tip his fedora to them...after he took care of business.

He put the wag into Neutral, pressed his hat firmly onto his head, let go of the Mini UZI and yanked the door open. As he stepped out of the cab, his heavy machine pistol fell to the extent of the sling looped across his shoulder. He pulled his M-4000 shotgun out of the foot well and pumped it open enough of a crack to confirm it had a 12-gauge shell with tarnished brass base and red plastic hull nicely chambered.

Then in his standard manner—not visibly hurrying, yet moving with enough purpose that it worked out to be fast after all—he clambered up on the hood of the stopped wag.

Jak had fallen upon the ambushers from behind their backs like a white wolf on a fold of sheep. J.B. saw eight or ten defenders looking around in apparent confusion as the albino charged. He slashed a man a head taller across a bearded face—or what the Armorer presumed was a face, though he saw more hair and dirt than skin—and as that man fell over, clutching at a fount of spurting blood, Jak unloaded a round from his handblaster into the rib cage of a second coldheart as that one turned to try to aim a muzzle-loading longblaster at him.

From behind, J.B. heard the boom of Ryan’s Scout longblaster echo away between the steep, short hills. The Armorer had not worried about getting back-shot by the ambushers behind the pine they’d felled, but that was mostly because he never saw any amount of worry keep a bullet out of anybody’s hide. He’d be lying if he said the fact that his friend was giving that gang of bastards something else to put their minds to gave him no comfort, though.

Almost in front of J.B.’s perch, a wide-shouldered black man was trying to raise a replica Winchester 1873 carbine to take Jak down. Most of what J.B. could make out behind the chunk of granite he sheltered behind was his head. So the Armorer took quick aim and blew it mushy with a tight column of Number 4 buckshot.

Another coldheart, this one to J.B.’s right, swung a single-shot shotgun toward him. The Armorer loosed another roaring blast from his Smith & Wesson scattergun. The charge cut through a bushy gray-shot beard to take the bandit where his gullet met his upper chest.

As the ambusher toppled backward in an arterial spray of gore, J.B. raised his bespectacled eyes to look for more targets. And found none. He saw nothing but backsides and elbows as the surviving ambushers rabbited away up the narrow dirt road or bounced and tumbled down the slope to the rocky creek bed like so many spastic jackrabbits.

His pounce reflex engaged by the sight of fleeing prey, Jak stuck his Python back in its holster and started hounding after the fleeing coldhearts. J.B.’s shrill whistle brought the albino up short.

“Don’t chase them,” he called. “We need you close. Might be more.”

He felt a certain apprehension that Jak wouldn’t listen. The small, pale scout was as much wolf as man. He didn’t yield readily to authority at the best of times, especially when authority’s voice was delivered by someone other than Ryan. He did respect the Armorer, as a comrade and a killer, but that didn’t mean he felt any compulsion to obey him on nothing more than J.B.’s say-so.

But Jak’s overriding compulsion was to keep the others safe. By framing his words as the voice of reason rather than command, J.B. won a quick nod, accompanied by free-flying long white hair, and then compliance, in the form of Jak vanishing into the scrub to the left of the road, as swiftly as if he’d teleported out of there via mat-trans.

“Ace on the line,” J.B. said as he heard Ryan’s longblaster speak again. He knew Ryan was likely outnumbered worse than Jak, and the Armorer had been taking on the front ambush. But even though he didn’t have a lot of insight about what made people tick, J.B. had ground into him years ago that the easiest and best thing to attack in any fight was your enemy’s morale. Once you convinced him he couldn’t win—he couldn’t. And very little convinced anyone of that as quickly and effectively as a sudden attack from behind. That was what had sent this bunch skedaddling.

The group behind the second barrier would have been confident that even if their intended victims didn’t roll over and show their throats when they found themselves stuck in the coldhearts’ trap, they were still safe and secure—and it was their targets who were caught between two fires. To be met first by Krysty and Ricky opening up on them, and then finding themselves sniped by Ryan—who knew how to take his shot and shift to a new location without being spotted almost as skillfully as Jak could—would turn that confidence with its bare ass in the air.

But just to be sure, he jumped back down to the roadside before he started stuffing fresh shells in his scattergun.