Motherlode (24 page)

“Whatever do you mean, Baron?” he asked.

Through the closed door he heard a fresh spate of blasterfire erupt from the front of the house. A group of men ran past the small window shouting instructions to one another.

“I mean—”

She thrust hard against his sternum. Taken totally off his guard, Doc went flying back to sit hard inside the secret compartment. The shelves dug into his back.

“Farewell, you lovely man! You should be able to release yourself in a matter of minutes.”

Before he could sort out the feelings that boiled within him—of betrayal, of concern—and give them voice, she slammed the door.

He heard the sound of the lock being turned.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Ryan ducked back around the wall of the farmhouse nearest the playhouse. Bullets cracked through the air that his head, shoulders and Steyr Scout had recently occupied.

He’d seen his target go down—a man firing a bolt-action hunting rifle from the corner of the big building where Sand had kept her gigantic yellow ace up her sleeve. Now he was just glad the farmers of Joker Creek tended to build their dwellings to the same sturdy standards as their baron’s more pretentious place.

He glanced across the road to where J.B. leaned out and loosed a 3-round burst from his Uzi toward the house. The Armorer ducked back into cover as more bullets sought him.

He looked over, caught Ryan’s eye and shook his head.

From the other end of the house where Ryan sheltered came a roar of a powerful automatic blaster. Dark Lady pivoted back around to safety, holding Sinclair’s big BAR up in front of her. She had stripped off her black sweater to reveal the black sleeveless garment, probably a T-shirt with its sleeves cut off, she had worn beneath. A thin, gray trail of smoke wisped from the Browning’s muzzle toward the clear afternoon sky.

She showed Ryan a grin. “Bonnie Parker was said to be a skilled hand with one of these,” she called. “She was a small woman like me. I take inspiration where I can find it, Mr. Cawdor.”

“Bonnie Parker?” Mikey asked. The giant stood next to her. While both twins refused to use a blaster, their enormous shared body had willingly carried a whole mule-load of fresh magazines and boxed cartridges for their comrades.

“The twentieth-century outlaw,” his brother said, sneering. “Of Bonnie and Clyde fame. Don’t you read?”

“Same as you,” the better-looking but grumpier head conceded. “I just don’t like to clutter my head with every scrap of useless trivia that happens to leak in through my eyes.”

From behind came sporadic blaster shots—and the occasional scream. Though less well equipped than the Amity Springers with blasters and bullets, Sand’s subjects had already demonstrated that they had them. They were certainly more than amply supplied with shovels, axes, hoes, rakes and other farm and labor implements that would serve as brutal, effective weapons when applied to the human form with sufficient fury. The sec men and Crazy Dogs who had been busily brutalizing the peasants when the rescue column arrived were finding that out much to their sorrow as they were hunted down one by one.

Ryan wasn’t triple thrilled to have armed foes on the loose behind his back when he was fighting, but it wasn’t as if they had any choice. They all knew it was just a matter of time before some of the brother coldhearts Diego the Dog had summoned to join his nascent empire would arrive. And if they caught Ryan, his companions and Dark Lady’s contingent between hammer and anvil—well, they’d get pounded to purple mush about that fast.

He heard the vicious crack of Jak’s Colt Python handblaster echo down the road. He was leading the clean-up of stray Dogs. That reassured Ryan that the odds of taking a slug in the spine were as low as possible. Nobody loved the sport of hunting more than Jak, and few did it better.

J.B. fired another burst at the big house, then ducked back to reload his machine pistol. Ryan saw Ricky duck around the other end of that house from loosing a shot from his fat-barreled DeLisle blaster.

The Armorer shook his head. “No way this works,” he said. “We’re just burning ammo. We’ve got to blow the wall.”

Dark Lady’s stock of plunder from the buried whitecoat lab included enough C-4 and blasting caps left over from the cutting charges J.B. and Ricky had used to immobilize the monster dozer to make up two satchel charges. One lay next to Ryan, the other between J.B. and Ricky. Each carried easily enough plas-ex to blow a man-size hole through even a wall as heroic as the playhouse’s.

The problem was getting close enough to deliver them. The distance was too much for even Mikey-Bob to hurl one and get it close enough to do any good. As big as they were, the charges needed to be lying hard against the thick adobe, or they’d waste too much energy pushing empty air to do the deed.

And with the large number of blastermen holed up inside the main house, and especially giving flanking fire from the outbuildings to both sides, trying to dart across the nearly fifty yards of open ground to the playhouse was a sheer self-chill.

Ryan went to a knee, then leaned out around the side of the farmhouse. He saw a blaster-flash from the window to his right of the front door. He got a flash picture through his scope on its lower setting of two-power: a dark, mustached face grimacing over a longblaster. He triggered a quick compressed surprised break. Letting recoil help spin him back under cover, he wasn’t sure if he’d hit or not.

As he slammed a fresh 7.62 mm cartridge into the Scout’s receiver and locked the bolt, he saw a figure running toward him. It was female, trimly but amply curved, and had a head of blazing red hair.

She threw her back against the sun-heated wall beside him.

“Bad news,” she said. “Kris says her lookouts report spotting a party of bikers down the road. Mebbe a quarter mile out. No more than five or six, and they seem to be coming cautiously. But who knows how many they’re scouting for?”

“Yeah,” Ryan grunted.

It was triple-bad news—the worst, short of spotting a no-shit relief force of dozens of the bastards bearing down on them. As it was, he couldn’t be sure that wouldn’t follow.

He gestured Dark Lady over. A couple of her people took up her place hopping and popping from cover as she ran up.

Her dark eyes widened as he gave her the bad news.

“We’ve got to get into the big house and triple fast,” he told her. “They jump us from behind, we’re chilled.”

“That’s it,” she said, slinging the Browning Automatic Rifle. “I’ll carry a satchel charge myself.”

“No, you won’t.”

Her eyes blazed.

“Normally it’d peel no skin off my ass if you got your stupe self chilled,” he said. “But we need every blaster we’ve got, especially if we have to fort up inside the playhouse and stand off a bunch of new coldhearts. And your chances of making it close enough to blow the wall range from
jack
to
shit
.”

For a moment she stared at him with a wild fury that set him back on his heels. Her face, already pale, had gone a paper-white as pure as Jak’s, meaning she’d gotten an adrenaline dump that usually presaged an attack
right now
. He braced to cold-cock her—if you could do that to a woman—with a steel butt plate across the jaw.

But then she frowned and sucked in a deep breath. Spots of color returned to her cheeks as she controlled her rage.

“You’re right,” she said in a voice that was almost calm. “I let my feelings get the better of me.”

Ryan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“Which leaves us the problem of—”

“Dark Lady!” called one of the two shooters who had taken her place at the far end of the farmhouse, a tow-headed kid named Buck. “Come look!”

Dark Lady ran that way. After a quick shared glance, Ryan and Krysty followed.

They joined the gaudy owner and peered around the corner of the house. Though the sound of blasterfire from the defenders had increased, Ryan didn’t hear the crack of bullets passing nearby, nor the whine of tumbling ricochets.

He and Krysty stood behind the shorter woman to lean around themselves. At first he saw nothing of interest from the sturdy adobe sheds between the house and the creek, then noticed an absence of coldhearts popping out to shoot at them.

Then motion took his eye up the Joker Creek arroyo that cut the face of the bluffs that walled the north side of the valley. A lone figure was scrambling up the dirt road, just wide enough to let one wag pass, that ran alongside the creek to the top of the cliffs.

From its size and shape, and the short yellow hair, there was no mistaking Baron Sand herself. She was making heavy going of it, stumbling on the steep road, catching herself with her left hand. The reason wasn’t double hard to make out: the right sleeve of her white shirt was bright red with clearly still fresh blood, as was the bandage he could just make out tied around her biceps.

Bullets kicked up dust around her. She continued a tripod scrabble to the top with desperate determination.

From the back of the house Diego’s voice roared, belling with fury. “Cease fire, you mutie-lovers! I want her alive! Chill her and I’ll peel the hide off you and let you watch me run it up a flagpole before I let your miserable ass die!”

The blasters stopped. Instead a handful of sec men started up from behind the outbuildings in pursuit. Ryan heard engines snarl to life from behind the main house, and then half a dozen Crazy Dogs’ bikers joined them.

The traitor sec men blocked the road. On such a steep slope, not even big V-twin engines could accelerate the heavy sleds fast enough to bull them out of the way.

But Sand was clearly doomed. Exhausted, she flopped to the road, turning to land on her well-cushioned rump still a dozen feet from the top.

She kicked herself to the roadside, into a shallow space overhung by sandstone cap-rock.

“All right, you coldheart pricks!” she cried. “Come and get me, and be damned to you!”

They did. Gunning their engines impatiently, seeming to be as much pushing their bikes with their boots as riding them, the Crazy Dogs followed the sec men up to seize her.

As the first got within ten feet of her, Sand raised her left hand. It clearly clutched something small and solid.

She raised her middle finger. It seemed to Ryan she clenched her thumb and other fingers in the same moment, though as far distant as she was, he wasn’t sure what gave him that impression.

Both walls of the cut erupted in dust and smoke, and a thunderclap rolled down past the houses and out across Baron Sand’s domain. Ryan saw big chunks of rock tumble into the cloud.

It began to settle almost at once. Where Baron Sand and her pursuers had been was now a mound of khaki earth and jumbled sandstone blocks. The rear tire of a single motorcycle stuck out the lower end of it, still spinning.

“Cassandra!”
Dark Lady screamed. She darted from cover to run up the road toward the baron’s rocky bier.

But her giant shadow was right behind her. With a long-legged step, Mikey-Bob caught her from behind before she’d gotten ten feet. His massive arms unfolded her and picked her easily right off the ground. She kicked furiously and tried to slam the back of her head into one of his, but to no avail.

Blasterfire burst angrily from the playhouse and its satellite structures. Ryan jerked back behind cover, pulling Krysty with him as bullets cracked by.

He saw Mikey’s black-haired head jerk, then it lolled lifelessly down the slope of his shoulder.

Making tough going of it, the giant carried Dark Lady back behind the farmhouse.

“Here,” Bob said. He thrust Dark Lady toward Ryan. He caught her as well as he could with his left arm.

“Mikey!” she cried. Ryan saw that the left-hand head had taken a slug through the left eye. Blood and aqueous humor streamed from it like tears.

Dark Lady writhed free and threw herself against the giant’s chest. He patted her clumsily with his right hand.

“Gotta...go,” Bob said. His speech was slurred as if his tongue had swollen to fill his mouth. “Love...you.”

He kissed her upturned forehead, then he pushed her toward Krysty, who holstered her handblaster and grabbed Dark Lady in a bear hug from behind. Dark Lady did not fight her.

“I love you, too!” she cried through a torrent of tears.

Dragging his left leg, Bob limped along the back of the house to where a satchel charge lay. It had been assembled in a scavvy backpack, incongruously bright and cheerful blue and yellow. He scooped it up and held it to his chest.

“Take care of her,” Bob said to Ryan and Krysty.

“Are you going to do anything stupe if I let you go?” Krysty asked.

Dark Lady slumped. “No. We always knew one could never survive without the other.”

Ryan followed him as far as the street end of the house. Suddenly seeming to grab complete control of his massive, failing body, Bob pulled himself up and rounded the corner with a defiant roar.

“I’m on my way to Hell!
Who’s coming with me?
”

Ryan wheeled around the corner, longblaster shouldered. The playhouse’s front windows flickered with fire. Some of the shots had to be hitting the charging giant.

He ignored them. Laughing, he ran at a lumbering, inexorable pace. Ryan shot a man in the window left of the door; he was leveling a 12-gauge. Then he ducked hastily back, slinging the Scout, as Bob ran full-tilt into the closed door.

The satchel charge went off with a thunderous blast. A cloud of dust and debris shot down the road past Ryan’s sheltering corner. He imagined he saw a tree-trunk-size leg spin end over end through the rolling explosion.

Then he was around the corner and sprinting toward the playhouse. He pulled his SIG in his right hand and his panga in his left.

J.B. appeared at his right side, running as fast as his shorter legs could carry him, blasting from his slung Uzi with his right hand, clamping his fedora to his head with his left.

From the far end of the farmhouse Ryan heard Dark Lady ripping bursts from the BAR and keeping them short with expert precision. Clearly, she was not one to allow her loved ones to die in vain.

Or unavenged.

As he neared the big house, Ryan saw that the doorway had been blown out to about three times its original width. A figure appeared in the midst of it, coughing and waving at the smoke. Ryan gave it a quick double-tap from his handblaster and it fell.

He charged into the late baron’s front room. It was still full of smoke and dust and the eye-searing fumes of detonated plas-ex. He saw shadowy figures and fired into them.

The fog thinned enough to allow him the beginnings of vision of his surroundings. The spiderweb swaths of cloth had been torn down; the outsize satin cushions shoved to the walls. Some of these smoldered, adding to the choking, obscuring smoke.