Devil's Vortex (9 page)

Behind him he saw Ricky hit a blond, bearded coldheart in the knees from the left as Doc threw a body block into his torso from the right. Ryan heard at least one of the knees give way, and the three went down into a squalling, clawing tangle like a ball of angry alley cats.

Ryan didn’t see what happened next because by reflex he looked to find his lover. The redhead was standing about where she had knelt, holding one of her former captors by the right arm and leg. Mildred had him by the left set of limbs, face downward. The two women pendulumed the coldheart to and fro three times as he howled and struggled to no avail.

Then they pitched him face-first right into the hungry black cloud that was advancing to claim him. His last screech seemed to linger on the air after the bloody rags of his body had disappeared.

Ryan held up the Glock in both hands. It was hefty—a .45 ACP Glock 30. He looked around for targets.

Several of the wags were peeling out of there as the whirlwind devoured another one of Krysty’s former captors, who was rolling around on the ground clutching at a broken elbow. To Ryan’s right, J.B. ducked a vicious attempt at buttstroking him in the head with a Mini-14. He pistoned a right hard into the coldheart’s lean gut. Then he straightened, wrested the weapon from the taller man’s hands and slammed him in the side of the head with the buttstock edge-on like an oiled-wood machete.

The Buffalo fighter fell onto the corrugated ground, cradling his split-open and blood-spurting head. J.B. shouldered the carbine, pointed it down at the man’s face and pulled the trigger. The Ruger’s blast was double-loud, as a short-barreled .223 longblaster always was.

The coldheart kicked once at the dirt with the heels of his pointy-toed cowboy boots. Then he went limp.

J.B. nodded in satisfaction and, like Ryan, looked around for targets.

There were none. The Buffalo Mob raiding party was dead or running away as fast as the wags they’d managed to make off with would carry them. Only the stocky man Doc and Ricky wrestled with remained. And not even marksmen as triple keen of eye and steady of aim as Ryan and J.B. were willing to risk a shot under those circumstances.

Anyway, Ryan reckoned his two friends had control of the situation. Until both of them jumped away, Doc springing back like a startled heron on his long legs and Ricky rolling rapidly away in the other direction, bouncing off the low, mounded ridges to the field.

The coldheart was instantly on his bandy legs. His broad face was mostly hidden by a mask of blood and mud, except for wildly staring eyes and a mouth twisted in rage.

“Which one of you rad-suckers wants some?” he yelled. His long black pigtail whipped about his wide shoulders as he snapped his head left and right to look from one of his antagonists to the other. He held a knife with a short, triangular blade in one hand.

The black whirlwind came for him, skimming a foot above the furrows. Somehow he sensed the awful doom barreling down on him from behind. He spun, knife at the ready.

He screamed shrilly, then he slashed at the cloud of blackness with his knife.

He made contact. Whatever force lay within the swirl of shadow seized his knife and hand and tore off the front half of his forearm. His shrieks rose an octave, and he tried frantically to pull free.

But the cloud had him. It drew him in and whipped him into ragged shreds and threads of red fluid, which quickly disappeared into the shadow-swirl.

For a moment the cloud hung there. It seemed to Ryan to be waiting, searching.

No coldhearts remained. Was it their turn now? Ryan wondered.

The black cloud seemed to collapse in on itself. Ryan caught a fleeting impression of a few night-black strands, scarcely more than threads, flying back toward Mariah, who still stood staring with eyes like two holes pissed in snow and her fists clenched by her sides so hard, her rigid arms trembled. But that might have been his imagination, which was in high gear now and powering right along after the events of the last half hour or so.

As the perhaps-imaginary threads seemed to vanish into Mariah’s body, she swayed slightly, as if dealt a blow.

Then she dropped to the tilled soil like an empty suit of clothes.

Ricky accepted the offer of Doc’s extended hand to help him off the ground. He was pale and a bit green in the face.

“Now that’s something you don’t see every day.”

Chapter Ten

“Stranger inbound!”

Hammerhand had just emerged, stretching and yawning, from his lodge when the cry went up. It was repeated by several voices among the other Bloods already awake to greet the gray dawn slowly spilling out across the scrub-dotted surge of the Plains.

He sipped his chicory, which he’d grown up with and enjoyed. He was not much concerned. He had well over a hundred effectives in his band now, with a dozen more coming aboard in the wake of the Buffalo Mob wag-raid’s success of a week earlier. Had any serious threat been perceived, the message would have said so, and it would’ve been a lot louder.

Had his scouts and sentries missed a significant threat approaching, somebody was going to wind up staked out over an anthill before the sun now rising set. Hammerhand believed in being openhanded with his rewards and tightfisted with his punishments. But when he had to make a statement, he made it.

He had slept well. The lodge was a traditional tepee, like about half the several dozen lodges in camp, made up of tanned bison hides and long lodge poles—in his case four, in the traditional Blackfoot style, as opposed to three, as most of them had. Aside from the fact he’d also grown up in one, he found them most practical: warm in winter, cool in summer and dry when it rained, along with being easy to lug along, assemble and take apart. Some of his growing tribe preferred white man–style tents, scavvied synthetic or present-day oiled canvas.

It was their choice; he insisted on loyalty, bravery and skill from his people. It wasn’t his lookout to run their nuking lives.

“What’ve we got?” Mindy Farseer asked, walking up beside him.

As usual, he thought, she looked indecently chipper at this hour of the morning, not a hair, or a feather wound into it, out of place. She carried a Savage 110 bolt longblaster action in .270 Winchester, a common cartridge on the Plains, esteemed for its combination of good hitting power with long range and flat trajectory. The piece was mounted with a Swift variable power scope. She was lethal with it out to a thousand yards. She wasn’t called
Farseer
for nothing.

“Intruder alert,” he stated.

“Far out,” she said, dialing the telescopic sight up to its full 12-power magnification. She wasn’t bloodthirsty, but she did love to use her skills.

Hammerhand called for his own telescope to be brought to him. The tepee flap opened, and Maia, one of his love partners from the night before, came padding out carrying his old-school folding spyglass in its blue velvet bag. She was buck naked as she approached Hammerhand, opened the drawstring, removed the telescope from the bag and handed both to her lover. Then with a cool smile to Mindy’s disapproving glower, she turned and walked back. Hammerhand watched her briefly, appreciating the added swing she gave her hips and buttocks.

“Let’s go check it out,” he said, striding forward as he expanded the scope.

* * *

A
KNOT
 
OF
B
LOODS
gathered on the eastern edge of the low hill they’d made camp on outside the laagered wags. They had added several to the stock they’d taken off the Buffalo Mob’s hands, although Hammerhand had found other things that needed doing and had yet to go back and collect the rest of the Buffaloes’ rolling stock.

The Bloods were pointing down the slope to a figure about a quarter mile off, stumbling through the knee-high grass toward them. The dishing of the land meant it was clearly visible, not whited out in the dazzle of the rising sun. But details weren’t easy to come by with the naked eye.

That was why Hammerhand had his spyglass. He held it up to his eye and adjusted the focus. Mindy unsnapped the lens covers from her own scope and shouldered her blaster.

He heard her suck in a sharp breath. “Whitecoat,” she whispered. “Can I drop the hammer on the nuke-sucker?”

“No,” Hammerhand said, studying the ragged figure. The man seemed to be on his last legs but still found the energy to adjust his eyeglasses at every single step. “It’s a whitecoat.”

“That’s why,” she said.

“Whitecoats’re evil,” Joe Takes-Blasters said between yawns as he walked up scratching the back of his neck.

“Whitecoats are frauds,” Mindy said. “Rad-dust-eating, crazy cultists pretending to know the ancient ‘wisdom’ that burned the world, which I judge makes them evil, too, now I think on it. Say the word and he’s history.”

“The word is, ‘no.’”

“What?” his two lieutenants exclaimed, half a beat apart.

“Boss, it’s a whitecoat,” Joe said, as if he thought mebbe Hammerhand had missed that part. Then, with a noticeably brighter tone he went on, “Unless you wanna save him for something special?”

“We don’t do that,” Hammerhand said. “Without good reason.”

“And being a whitecoat isn’t?” Mindy asked. That showed how powerful her loathing—or fear—for them was. As a rule, she was strongly opposed to any death that was dealt out any way but swiftly with minimal suffering. Especially when
she
dealt it out by blowing apart somebody’s head at a couple hundred yards.

“I had a vision,” Hammerhand reminded them in tones of rapidly tiring patience. “In it I was told that a mystic adviser would stagger out of the wastelands to guide me. This was foretold. He lives.”

He folded up the spyglass.

“Go fetch him. Alive and uninjured. You, Joe. Take whatever backup you need.”

Joe looked doubtful. “Backup? For one scrawny, tore-up-ass-looking whitecoat?”

“Take two Bloods with you, just in case,” Hammerhand directed. His aide had a tendency to overestimate his own abilities, considerable as they were. Especially when brute force was concerned. He didn’t assess the whitecoat as posing any more threat than Joe did—on the surface. But he was a man who kept his eye on the fine and wavering line between triple bold and triple stupe.

Joe nodded. “What if he resists?”

“Then thump him some and restrain him. But nothing broken. No internal bleeding. Understood?”

“Understood.” Joe set off bawling at the others—who were mostly sipping chicory and waiting for their breakfast stew of beans and Pronghorn to get hot—for one of them to volunteer.

Half a dozen hands shot up. When he explained no chilling or hurting would be involved, the number of hands went abruptly down to two.

“That’s the problem with us,” Hammerhand said. “We’re still not motherfucking subtle.”

“I don’t like it,” Mindy told him, as Joe and his helpers, one male, one female, went trotting down the slope toward the figure. The intruder had collapsed and was crawling toward the camp on hands and knees.

“I don’t like it,” Mindy said.

“That’s your job,” Hammerhand stated. “Not to like shit. Noted. Now your job is not to say any more about it.”

“I hear ya,” she said grumpily. But she did not sling her Savage longblaster.

Hammerhand took up his spyglass and watched as the trio fanned out to approach the crawling man. He paid no attention to them, even as they surrounded him with handblasters drawn.

“Keep your fingers off the nuke-withered triggers,” he murmured to his distant warriors. “You, too, Mindy.”

“Rad-blast.”

Joe had to have said something to the man, because he looked up. He had a dark beard and eyeglasses with heavy, dark frames, along with the whitecoat, which looked as if he’d wrestled a bobcat in it and lost.

Whatever he said either satisfied Joe or got his mind right about his own boss’s firm commands. He and his helpers holstered their weapons, then Joe and the woman, Serena, who was powerfully built, hauled him to his feet.

“Pat him down, Joe,” Hammerhand said. Of course the burly man couldn’t hear him at that distance. But saying the words made him feel better. “Just because he ain’t much of a snake, don’t mean he’s not packing venom.”

To his relief his lieutenant did so, running his big hands up and down the whitecoat’s body and limbs to look for unpleasant surprises. To Hammerhand’s surprise, he came up dry.

Joe handed the man off to Red-Eye, the male Blood, and he and Serena marched the captive toward the camp, although they seemed to be aiding the whitecoat rather than dragging him. Joe followed close behind, fingering the hatchet holstered at his side in a way that Hammerhand did not favor, under the circumstances. Orders or not, his lieutenant was a man who greatly preferred splitting skulls to splitting hairs.

Hammerhand folded the scope, stuck it back in its bag and hung it from his web belt.

The group of Bloods standing around watching the little drama unfold had grown to twenty or so. Hammerhand heard a joint intake of breath as they saw the intruder was indeed a hated whitecoat. As he was half carried up to where Hammerhand stood waiting, blasters left holsters and longblasters were unslung.

“Back up off the triggers, everybody,” Hammerhand said almost conversationally. “If any one of you really believes a lone whitecoat, let alone one who looks like it’d be all he could do to crawl into his own open grave without help, can take your leader down, feel free to walk away now. No comebacks.”

He meant it, too. When he gave his word, he stood by it, no matter what. Of course, there were times when, if a body
thought
he was giving his word—well, that was his or her own lookout. He was a leader, after all, and that implied things.

“Okay, boss?” Joe asked as Serena and Red-Eye brought the man staggering to a stop in front of Hammerhand. “I didn’t need any thumping at all.”

“Good job. And try not to sound so disappointed. Can you stand on your own, whitecoat?”

The man straightened his glasses on his nose and nodded. Then he straightened the specs again.

“I—can,” he said in a voice that sounded like a rusty hinge. “W-water?”

“Water,” Hammerhand commanded. A kid named Little Wolf obliged, holding up a skin bag for the stranger. He was too small a fry for Hammerhand to consider accepting into the band under usual circumstances, but the boy’s aunt, Shyanna, had vouched for him, and she was a warrior of merit.

At a nod from Hammerhand, the two Bloods released the whitecoat’s arms. He lurched but managed to keep to his feet—barely. He seized on the uncapped bag with both hands and upended it. His Adam’s apple, covered with a thinner layer of dark stubble than his chin and cheeks, bobbed up and down.

Water overflowed his mouth and ran down the sides of his face. Hammerhand made no comment. Water, clean water, was plentiful here. It was why they’d picked the site to bivouac in for a spell.

At last the stranger finished. He handed the bag, now mostly empty, back to Little Wolf. Then he adjusted his eyeglasses again and peered through them with dark eyes at Hammerhand.

“Are you—” He coughed into his grimy fist. “Are you Hammerhand?”

“I am. Who the nuke are you?”

“I am Dr. Alvin Trager,” the whitecoat said.

“You got business with the boss?” Mindy asked. “Why were you sneaking up on our camp?”

“I was not...sneaking. I was making my way here as best I could. I met with...mishaps on the way.”

“Looks like it,” Joe muttered. The man wore filthy rags of a once-white shirt and black pants beneath the white coat. They were in better condition than the lab coat but still in sorry shape. There were red streaks of scabbed-over cuts visible through some of those tears.

“What is that business?” Hammerhand asked. “Time’s blood. By which I mean, yours.”

“Yes.” Trager nodded, then fiddled with the glasses again.

If Hammerhand didn’t chill the bastard, he was either going to have to get used to that tic, or Trager was going to have to get that hand lopped off.

“I was sent here to offer my assistance to the mighty Hammerhand.”

“Glowing night shit,” Mindy said. “Who sent you?”

“I have...associates,” Trager said. “Others like me. We keep alive the old-days science.”

“So mebbe if you tell us where to find this nest of rattlers so we can rub it out, we’ll feel a mite better about letting you live,” Mindy said.

“But—but we offer you our help! We can be of great service to you. It’s why I was sent.”

“Before we talk about the service your buddies can do for us,” Hammerhand said, “first you gotta show us you can be more use to us breathing than with dirt hitting you in the eyes. Just because I’m not gonna let Mindy or anybody else chill you right now doesn’t mean the sun has set on that idea.
Comprende?
”

The man nodded so vigorously he almost nodded his glasses off his nose. “Oh, yes. Oh, yes, indeed.”

“So what’s this about these other whitecoats ‘sending’ you?” Mindy asked.

“They—we—know that Hammerhand is destined for greatness,” he said. “His is the strong hand that can unite the Plains. And perhaps the Deathlands.”

“Whitecoats? Don’t tell me they had a vision, too,” Mindy said.

Hammerhand frowned at her. Don’t talk about that outside the family, he signed to her. Though the signs were widely understood across the Plains, and not just by Indians, he felt fairly confident a whitecoat out of some weird hermit lab wouldn’t know them. And the beady eyes never flickered away from his face, behind the thick lenses that magnified and distorted them.

Mindy’s eyes widened, and her face went slightly pale. She nodded.

“Don’t think you can flatter me either,” Hammerhand told Trager, although the whitecoat had, and Hammerhand did not feel bad about it. “What good are you to me? To us?”

“I can tell you things.”

“Things are good,” Hammerhand said. He clapped a hand on the man’s stooped shoulder. Even though it was a light touch, the whitecoat almost collapsed beneath it.

“Come back with me to my lodge and you can be a little bit more specific about ‘things.’”