Kitabı oku: «Perdition Valley»
“You do not belong here.”
The shaman turned her head to stare, the solid-white orbs of blind eyes pinpointing Doc. “Nature has been violated by your passage. The balance is disturbed, all things tremble.”
“They took me,” Doc said firmly. “This is not my doing. I only want to go back home!”
“To your family,” the women said in unison.
“Yes!”
The drums beat faster, and the fumes from the fire rose darker, thicker, sweeter, until the air in the lodge was murky with swirling fog. Doc blinked hard. No, the air was clear. His mind was filled with a mist. Was he being drugged? Or was this it, was he finally going insane?
Other titles in the Deathlands saga:
Northstar Rising
Time Nomads
Latitude Zero
Seedling
Dark Carnival
Chill Factor
Moon Fate
Fury’s Pilgrims
Shockscape
Deep Empire
Cold Asylum
Twilight Children
Rider, Reaper
Road Wars
Trader Redux
Genesis Echo
Shadowfall
Ground Zero
Emerald Fire
Bloodlines
Crossways
Keepers of the Sun
Circle Thrice
Eclipse at Noon
Stoneface
Bitter Fruit
Skydark
Demons of Eden
The Mars Arena
Watersleep
Nightmare Passage
Freedom Lost
Way of the Wolf
Dark Emblem
Crucible of Time
Starfall
Encounter: Collector’s Edition
Gemini Rising
Gaia’s Demise
Dark Reckoning
Shadow World
Pandora’s Redoubt
Rat King
Zero City
Savage Armada
Judas Strike
Shadow Fortress
Sunchild
Breakthrough
Salvation Road
Amazon Gate
Destiny’s Truth
Skydark Spawn
Damnation Road Show
Devil Riders
Bloodfire
Hellbenders
Separation
Death Hunt
Shaking Earth
Black Harvest
Vengeance Trail
Ritual Chill
Atlantis Reprise
Labyrinth
Strontium Swamp
Shatter Zone
Perdition Valley
James Axler
For Melissa, as always
Our worst enemies here are not the ignorant and the simple, however cruel; our worst enemies are the intelligent and the corrupt.
—Graham Greene,
The Human Factor, 1978
THE DEATHLANDS SAGA
This world is their legacy, a world born in the violent nuclear spasm of 2001 that was the bitter outcome of a struggle for global dominance.
There is no real escape from this shockscape where life always hangs in the balance, vulnerable to newly demonic nature, barbarism, lawlessness.
But they are the warrior survivalists, and they endure—in the way of the lion, the hawk and the tiger, true to nature’s heart despite its ruination.
Ryan Cawdor: The privileged son of an East Coast baron. Acquainted with betrayal from a tender age, he is a master of the hard realities.
Krysty Wroth: Harmony ville’s own Titian-haired beauty, a woman with the strength of tempered steel. Her premonitions and Gaia powers have been fostered by her Mother Sonja.
J. B. Dix, the Armorer: Weapons master and Ryan’s close ally, he, too, honed his skills traversing the Deathlands with the legendary Trader.
Doctor Theophilus Tanner: Torn from his family and a gentler life in 1896, Doc has been thrown into a future he couldn’t have imagined.
Dr. Mildred Wyeth: Her father was killed by the Ku Klux Klan, but her fate is not much lighter. Restored from predark cryogenic suspension, she brings twentieth-century healing skills to a nightmare.
Jak Lauren: A true child of the wastelands, reared on adversity, loss and danger, the albino teenager is a fierce fighter and loyal friend.
Dean Cawdor: Ryan’s young son by Sharona accepts the only world he knows, and yet he is the seedling bearing the promise of tomorrow.
In a world where all was lost, they are humanity’s last hope….
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Chapter One
Moaning softly, the child baron hugged himself tightly and began to rock in the wooden chair. The motion made it creak slightly and he shuddered at the noise.
Tightening the grips on their longblasters, the two sec men in the throne room of Broke Neck ville exchanged nervous glances.
“Baron?” the corporal ventured, advancing a step. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Drooling slightly, the youth looked at the guard with unseeing eyes. “He has the secret,” Baron Harmond whispered, the words slurred slightly. “But he doesn’t know it. Not yet!”
“Secret, sir?” a sec man dared to ask, tilting his head. “Who has what secret?”
“Vermont!” Harmond screamed, grabbing his temples as blood began to trickle from his nose. “He’s here, but also back there! I can see him in a hundred places! A hundred times! But Tanner has stayed too long! There is a new future! A different casement! The universe is ripping apart! Time is healing itself!”
Worried, the corporal looked at the window, but could see nothing wrong with either the sill or the concrete casement. What was the doomie baron talking about? Harmond had accurately predicted future events a dozen times before, and saved countless lives, both civie and sec men. But had the young baron finally crossed the line of sanity?
“Should I fetch a healer, Baron?” the sec man asked, starting for the doorway.
“Too late!” Harmond screamed, both of his hands clawing at the empty air. “He is the disease and the cure!”
“Sir?” a sec man asked, puzzled, starting to sweat. An insane baron. He knew of villes with those, and it was never good.
“Cold, so cold,” Harmond whispered, hugging himself tightly.
“Would you like a blanket, Baron?” the corporal asked. “Or we could make a fire.”
“Yes, cold…fire,” the baron wheezed, fighting for air. “The cold…is a fire…consume us all…” Lurching to his feet, he stared at the open window and pointed a shaking finger at the empty air of the north.
“Coldfire is here!” the baron shrieked, then shook all over and collapsed to the floor.
Rushing to his side, the guards turned the child over and pressed fingers to his throat to see if their baron still lived. Or if this was the long-ago prophesized day of death and the second end of the world had finally begun.
“Y-YOU HEARD ME, outlander,” growled the young sec man standing in front of the ville gate. With a double click, the guard cocked both hammers of the homie shotgun. “All of you, j-just move along now, and there won’t be no t-trouble.”
Masked by the night, the six people on horseback gave no reply to the warning. There was only the low moan of the desert breeze mixing with the sound of the panting horses and the jingling of the metal rings in the reins and stirrups.
Looking down at the nervous teenager from the back of his stallion, Ryan Cawdor tried to control his growing temper. Dark clouds covered the moon, so the only light came from the sputtering torches set on either side of the wooden gate. However, Ryan could still see that the huge wep held by the sec man was obviously not scavenged from predark days, but a homie, built from iron pipes reinforced with layers of steel wiring wrapped around each barrel. The wooden stock was hand-carved and the firing mechanism seemed to be taken from another blaster, perhaps a handblaster. Yet the double barrels of the scattergun were worn from constant use, plainly stating the wep was in good working condition and had seen plenty of action.
Even if the guard hadn’t, Ryan decided. There was dried blood on the sec man’s clothing, but none of it was his, and his face lacked the hard expression of a person who had taken the life of another. There was determination, and even bravery, but not the slightest sign of combat experience. For all Ryan knew, this was the teenager’s first shift of standing guard at the ville gate.
“Now, look, friend…” Ryan began impatiently.
“I said, keep moving!” the teenager ordered, grimly leveling the deadly blaster. “We don’t want your kind around here!”
“And what kind is that?” Ryan asked gruffly, leaning over slightly in his saddle to pat the neck of his horse.
The sweaty chestnut stallion nickered at the touch and shuffled its unshod hooves in the dry sand. Heavy saddlebags were draped across the muscular animal’s withers, and on its flanks was the brand of Two-Son ville, a lightning bolt set inside a circle. Even though covered with dust from the long ride, Ryan was well-dressed, wore good boots, pants without any patches and a heavy coat trimmed with fur. A shiny longblaster was hung across his shoulders and a slim handblaster rested in the holster of a predark gunbelt. A bandolier of ammo clips crossed his chest, and at his side was a large knife of unknown design.
Licking dry lips, the guard gave no reply. But he kept stealing glances at the left side of Ryan’s face.
Touching his leather eye patch, Ryan grunted in understanding. Yeah, he thought so.
It had been a week since the companions had left Two-Son ville in the south and charged across the Zone, going from ville to ville, chasing down the rumors of the chillings of one-eyed men. But they were always one day behind the ruthless coldhearts who jacked everybody with silver hair like Doc’s, and chilled any man with only one eye like Ryan’s. Left or right eye, it made no dif.
It had been three long days of finding nothing but death and dust, until now. So Ryan as sure as nuking hell wasn’t going to be turned away from a ville where the chillings were so fresh that a green sec man still had dried blood on his clothing.
“Move along, rist,” the guard said, tightening his grip on the scattergun. Behind the teen, two small hatches in the thick wooden gate swung open and dark metal glistened in the dim torchlight.
In spite of the poor lighting, Ryan caught the subtle motion with his good eye and shifted his position to get a clear shot with his handblaster at whoever was standing at the hatch. If trouble came, it would be from the snipes hiding behind the gate, and not this nervous kid.
“And how do you know we’re not the ones doing all of the chilling?” J. B. Dix asked, adjusting his wire-rimmed glasses.
Sitting astride a chestnut stallion, the short, wiry man was dressed in loose denim blue jeans, a T-shirt and a heavy leather jacket. A pump-action scattergun was strapped across his back, a 9 mm Uzi rapidfire rested on his thigh and at his side hung a large canvas bag bulging with lumpy objects.
“W-we don’t want no more trouble,” the teenager stated roughly, stepping away from the gate to give a clearer field of fire for the folks at the blaster hatches. “So just git. And I m-mean now!”
This boy was terrified, Krysty Wroth realized. But not of us.
“Go fetch your sec chief,” the redhead demanded, her long hair moving gently around her shoulders as if stirred by secret winds.
There was a bloody bandage on her left cheek and another on her wrist from the recent fighting down in Two-Son. The woman was riding a roan-colored mare. A bearskin coat hung across the saddlebags. A predark MP-5 rapidfire was draped across the pommel of the saddle, and a weird-looking wheelgun rode in a leather holster at her shapely hip. The cowboy boots in the stirrups were decorated with the silver embroidery of falcons, and the toes were steel, although at the present the metal was caked with gray dust.
The guard frowned at the sight. The redhead was better armed than any sec man. The loops of her gunbelt were filled with live brass, more than the teen had seen in his entire life.
“Ain’t got a chief. He’s…” The teen shut his mouth tightly and hunched his shoulders.
“He was one of the people killed—excuse me—chilled, by the strangers,” Doc Tanner rumbled. “Thank you, that explains everything.”
Dressed as if from another century, Doc was in frilly white shirt, with a frock coat that spread behind him across the horse like an opera cape. A mixed pair of big-bore handblasters rode in a gunbelt made of closed ammo pouches, and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s-head handle jutted from his backpack like a tribal totem.
“By the Three Kennedys, sir,” Doc said, turning to address Ryan, “we must be hot on the trail of the coldhearts if the locals haven’t even replaced their sec chief yet!”
“That’s an ace on the line,” Ryan drawled, rubbing his unshaven chin. Surreptitiously, he shifted the reins from his left hand to his right. The one-eyed man was naturally right-handed, but he’d been hurt in a fight a short while ago and his shooting arm wasn’t completely healed yet.
Just then, the blaster hatches closed and there came the sound of heavy bolts being slid aside. With creaking hinges, the thick gate was pushed open and five armed sec men walked out of the ville, the ground crunching under their boots. As the portal closed again, Ryan and the others saw a dozen more men inside the ville, positioned behind a sandbag wall, working the bolts on longblasters and notching arrows into homie crossbows. These people were ready for a war.
“Guess I’m the new chief sec man,” the oldest man stated gruffly, hitching up a gunbelt. He was dressed in ragged clothing, his predark motorcycle boots patched with duct tape, but his blasters shone with fresh oil. “And yeah, Baron Harrison was aced, along with Chief Rajavur.”
“You guess?” Mildred Wyeth asked, brushing a plait of beaded hair back off her dusty face. Riding an appaloosa mare, the physician was armed with an MP-5 rapidfire and a wheelgun rested in her belt. At her side hung a predark canvas bag.
Touching a freshly stitched scar on his chest, the sec chief shrugged. “Ain’t nobody alive to tell me no,” he stated honestly.
“Who aced baron?” Jak Lauren asked, leaning forward in his saddle. The palomino mare under the albino teen obediently altered her stance to accommodate his new position, and snorted softly with impatience.
The albino teenager riding the beast had a huge handblaster in his gunbelt and an MP-5 rapidfire in the longblaster holster set alongside the saddle.
The chief sec man shrugged. “Damned if we know who aced him.”
“Where are the bodies, then?” Ryan demanded, glancing up at the clouds overhead. He carefully noted that none of the stars was being eclipsed by anybody walking along the top of the wall around the ville. Good. The locals weren’t friendly, but neither were they trying to jack the companions.
“Hell’s bells, just follow the birds, you can’t miss them,” a sec man growled. A couple the armed men standing behind him nodded in agreement.
“Nuking hell, it was awful, like something from a nightmare!” the young guard muttered, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge the memories of the sight.
“Shut up,” the sec chief barked at the lad. Then he turned to face the companions. “All right, rist, you asked some questions and got some answers. Normally, we’re always interested in trading, even better is getting news from across the Zone, but not tonight. Now get moving, or we start blasting.”
In the flickering light of the torches, Ryan saw more blaster hatches swing open, and realized the new sec chief meant every word. There was nothing more to learn here. The answers they sought were back in the desert. Follow the birds, eh?
“Let’s go,” Ryan ordered, shaking the reins and starting his mount into a slow walk. The rest of the companions were close behind.
“Friendly folks,” J.B. commented as the companions rode away. Judiciously, the Armorer eased off the safety of the 9 mm Uzi in his lap. “Never seen people so rattled before. So their sec chief got himself aced. Big deal. That’s no reason for the whole ville to go triple red.”
Squinting into the distance, Ryan saw a flock of birds circling a distant hill. Smoke was rising from a small campfire, but that was all he could see from this angle.
“Let’s go see if there was a reason,” he growled, kicking his mount into a full gallop.
Chapter Two
A couple hundred miles away, a pale man walked slowly through the cold rubble of the burned-down building. He was tall and slim, almost skeletal, his face so smooth that it seemed as if the man had never needed to shave. His blond hair was slicked back tightly to his head and a tiny silver stud twinkled in his left earlobe. His pants and vest, more practical than the robe he usually wore, were cream-colored, spotless and perfect. Not even the dust raised by his walking through the ash seemed able to adhere to the odd fabric. Instead of boots, he wore sliver slippers, the woven material strangely luminescent. But even more bizarre was the fact that the man carried no visible wep of any kind. No blaster, ax, crossbow, knife or even a simple club.
In utter horror, Delphi stared at the decomposing bodies of the men and the muties mingling together on the ground, bits of white bone and golden brass glittering from the gray ashes like broken promises.
“Dead, they’re all dead,” Delphi whispered, gently kicking aside the distorted skull of a stickie. The operative of Department Coldfire couldn’t believe his eyes. This was impossible!
Moving listlessly among the wreckage, Delphi found more and more of the bodies everywhere, the death toll incredible, and every one of the muties had been shot through the head, even when there was only a head remaining with no torso attached. The surviving sec men had shot the dead stickies, just to make sure the muties really were deceased. That was ruthless efficiency he could appreciate. In spite of all his arduous work, and endless planning, slaving over every little detail, the hidden nest of stickies in Two-Son had been utterly destroyed in a single night. One night! Then the locals had done everything but sow salt into the land to make sure the stickies would never return.
“My precious little ones,” Delphi moaned, bending to pick up the blackened skull of a stickie. A cooked eye fell out as Delphi raised the skull high in his palm, wondering if he had known this particular mutant. Then Delphi had a sudden flash in his mind of Hamlet doing the exact same thing, and he cast the grisly remnant aside. It sailed across the smoky destruction to crash against the side of a marble staircase that rose high into the empty air and abruptly ended at nothing. The smashed bones went flying everywhere.
Bowing his head, Delphi tightened his fists, attempting to control his growling rage over the slaughter. How long he held that position, Delphi had no idea, but his somber reverie was disrupted at sound of hooves beating on sand.
Quickly looking up, Delphi scanned the nearby predark city until locating a man on a horse coming this way through the crumbling ruins.
“Hey, rist!” the rider called, tightening his grip on the reins and bringing the stallion to a halt on the cracked sidewalk. “Get the nuking hell out of there! The foundation is weak and could collapse at any second!”
His face an inert mask, Delphi walked across the debris and onto the sandy street. A soft breeze was blowing, mixing sand with the ashes of the obliterated stickie nest.
“Rist?” Delphi said curiously, tucking his hands into his sleeves.
The sec man grinned in embarrassment. “Sorry, Baron O’Connor told us to stop using that word. It means outlander or stranger.”
“Does it now? Well, I am a stranger,” Delphi muttered, his eyes narrowing. “And from those black-powder weapons, you must be a sec man from Two-Son ville. That’s only a klick away, correct?”
His instincts flaring at the tone of the question, the rider let an arm drop so that his fingers rested on the checkered grip of the handblaster resting in the holster at his side.
“Ain’t no other ville for a hundred klicks in any direction,” the sec man stated, tightening the reins as the horse shifted its hooves in the hot sand. “Now what’s your biz here?”
“My biz?”
“What do ya want?” The sec man leaned over the pommel of his saddle and scowled. “Are you a lost pilgrim, or a trader?”
“Ah, an intelligent question at last,” Delphi said, slowly smiling. “Most astute. What I want at the moment is your prompt death.”
Recoiling at that statement, the sec man drew his blaster and fired. But in spite of the fact that the pale outlander was only a few yards away, he somehow missed. Quickly, the sec man fired twice more. The black-powder charges threw out great volumes of dark smoke, and he had to wait for the desert wind to clear the air so that he could see the chilled body.
But the outlander was still standing, unfazed and untouched, without a single wound to be seen.
Snarling obscenities, the sec man fired again and this time actually saw the soft lead ball slam into the man’s face. No, wait. The lead had stopped in midair, flattened into a misshapen lump as if it impacted a sheet of predark mil armor. But there was only air between the two of them! How was this possible?
Throwing back his head, Delphi began to laugh as the cooling sphere of lead fell impotently to the sandy street.
Fear swept over the sec man and he briefly debated galloping away. But the very idea of retreat made him snarl in suppressed fury, and the sec man quickly fired the last two rounds in the handblaster. This time, he saw the billowing clouds of gunsmoke form a halo around the rist, revealing a sort of ball, or sphere, as if the man were a bug in a jar. An invisible glass ball that could stop blasters?
As the sweating sec man hastily went for the knife in his boot, Delphi extracted a crystalline rod from within his left sleeve, and pointed it at the horse. With a snort, the animal went absolutely still, then toppled to the street like so much cooked meat. Wisps of steam rose from the nostrils and ears.
Unable to leap from the saddle fast enough, the sec man hit the asphalt hard, the impact making him drop the knife. Then he heard the bones in his leg snap loudly under the deadweight of the horse. Son of a bitch! A split second later, the pain arrived, and he screamed curses. But then he stopped abruptly as thick blood began to flow from the slack mouth of the deceased horse, as if its internal organs had been liquefied. The sight galvanized the sec man into action, and he desperately clawed for the scattergun hidden in the saddlebags.
As Delphi approached, the sec man yanked the wep clear.
“Eat this, mutie lover!” the sec man snarled, swinging up the scattergun to fire both barrels at point-blank range.
Flame and thunder filled the street as the hellstorm of lead ricocheted off the defensive forcefield that surrounded Delphi. The mix of buckshot and bent nails sprayed randomly to strike the nearby buildings. Predark glass shattered and a rusted wag shook from the barrage, but that was all that happened.
No longer chuckling, Delphi approached the trapped man and stopped just out of reach as the sec man swung the smoking scattergun at his leg, trying to smash a kneecap.
“Do you know how long it took me to make those stickies smart? To raise their baseline intelligence above that of a slavering beast?” Delphi whispered, his hand ever-so-slowly lowering the crystal rod. “To teach them how to sharpen sticks into spears. How to hide and ambush an enemy? Do you? Do you have any idea of the effort I invested into this project?” His hand began to shake slightly, as his voice took on a hysterical tone.
“Now I have to start from scratch again somewhere else!” Delphi bellowed. “More of my precious time wasted! More inefficiency!”
“What are you, a feeb? The muties were chilling us!” the sec man panted, his shaking fingers fumbling to shove a fresh load of black powder and nails into the chamber of the weapon. “The triple-damn stickies were eating our kids! They would have wiped out the whole ville in another few months! We had to ace them. We had to!”
“Cretinous fool, that was the idea!” Delphi yelled, waving the wand.
There was a flash of blue sparks, and a powerful hum filled the air. The partially loaded blaster suddenly turned red-hot, then white-hot, and the sec man threw it away just as it detonated. The blast ripped the scattergun apart, and blew off both of the sec man’s hands. Now shrieking in pain, the mortally wounded man raised his arms to stare at the ragged stumps spurting bright coppery blood.
Delphi gestured again, and the tattered strips of flesh dangling off the ruptured arms glowed with a terrible cold fire, and the gaping wounds closed, as if the limbs had been thrust into a raging furnace and cauterized. The sobbing sec man couldn’t believe it. The bleeding had stopped, but there had been no pain. No pain at all!
“Fool. You’re not going to die that quickly,” Delphi said in a flat monotone. “First, you must pay for your crimes. Only then can I leave to find Ryan and his crew.”
Ryan?
“Wait! I can help! I know Cawdor!” the sec man whimpered, trying to hide behind his half arms. “He trusts me! I can find him for you!”
“Oh, my hunters already know where he is,” Delphi said, his merciless eyes starting to twinkle. “Besides, I never deal with traitors. Tsk, tsk, turning on the man who saved your ville. How sad. Now your death will be much more…unpleasant.”
The crystal wand flashed again.
RIDING UP THE SIDE of the hill, Ryan and the companions spread out slightly so that they didn’t offer a group target to anybody hidden in the thick cactus growing on the sandy dune. There was no sign of anybody, but only a feeb took chances.
Cresting the top, the companions stopped as they saw the row of bloody crosses sticking out of the damp soil. There were the tattered remains of people nailed onto the wood, the bodies hanging limply with their stomachs slit open, the distended bowels hanging down into bowls on the ground. The prisoners had been opened wide, and their intestines removed, but left connected. Alive, but disassembled. There was a growing smell in the air of blood and nightsoil, a foulness so thick that the companions could almost taste the hellish reek.
Leaning over sideways in her saddle, Mildred began to noisily lose her breakfast, and Krysty closed her eyes to mutter a prayer of forgiveness to the Earth Mother Gaia.
Leveling their blasters, Ryan and J.B. checked for traps as they started toward the horribly mangled bodies. Neither of the warriors had ever seen anything quite like this before, which disturbed them greatly. Bits and pieces of the prisoners were tossed around, the ground alive with insects and green lizards. Scorpions battled over a split tongue, while a swarm of beetles hurriedly consumed something too obscene to be closely identified.
“Remember the craz eunuch from Nova ville?” J.B. asked out of the corner of his mouth.
“Eugene,” Ryan replied. “Yeah, I would have sworn this was his work, if Shard hadn’t aced the bastard right in front of us.”
“There were students, folks he was teaching his techniques at the ville. Mebbe…” J.B. left the sentence unfinished.
Ryan clicked off the safety on his 9 mm SIG-Sauer blaster. “Yeah, mebbe.”
Just then a soft moan sounded from among the sagging figures on the crosses, and Ryan inhaled in shock as a woman opened her eyelids to expose raw empty sockets.
“Ace…me…” she hoarsely whispered, the words almost lost on the dessert breeze. “Whoever ya are…please…”
Without hesitation, Ryan swung his blaster up and fired. The woman jerked back as a black hole appeared on her temple and the back of her head exploded in a grisly pinkish spray across the filthy wood beams.
As the body went limp, Ryan started to ride along the row of crosses, putting a slug into the face of every prisoner, Usually they wouldn’t waste the ammo, but mercy was demanded here. Soon, the other companions followed suit until the dark hilltop rang with the sweet release of death.
“Triple-crazy shit,” Jak said. “Like predark coldhearts Mildred told about. Natzies?”
“Nazis,” Mildred stated, wiping her mouth clean on a handkerchief. “They were called Nazis, and yes, this is exactly the sort of torture they did to enemies of the state.” Then she added, “Not exactly my time, I wasn’t born yet when the Allies took down Adolph Hitler and his mad followers.”
“That’s the baron who tried to take over the world?” Krysty asked, tucking away her S&W Model 640 revolver.
Glumly, Mildred nodded. “Close enough, yes.”
Muttering something in Latin, Doc closed the cylinder of his Ruger .44. The predark revolver was a recent acquisition from Blaster Base One, a redoubt the companions had discovered filled with military supplies. The old man still carried the LeMat at his side, but the black-powder weapon from the Civil War took a long time to reload, while the Ruger took bullets and could be reloaded in a matter of only moments.
Whinnying softly, the horses were clearly nervous among all the carnage, and even Doc had to admit to a certain queasiness in his stomach. This hadn’t been the work of sane minds.
“Well, I’ll be nuked,” J.B. said, walking his mount around in a circle. “Anybody notice something odd about the placement of these crosses?”
“They’re not facing each other,” Krysty said, brushing back her hair. The copper-colored lengths caressed her fingers for a moment before letting go and moving back into place. “The logical thing would be to arrange them in a circle so that all of your prisoners could watch the others being taken apart.”
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