“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.”
* * *
“FIREBLAST!” RYAN 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.