“You’ve broken our deal!” Dr. Trager said accusingly.
“I don’t see it that way,” Hammerhand said calmly. He stood with legs braced and arms crossed over his chest.
They stood in a clearing on the side of a small forested mountain in the Black Hills. The New Blood Nation was currently camped in the next valley.
After a lull, its numbers had begun to increase again, once Hammerhand had demonstrated Mariah’s terrible power against a notorious baron who had defied him. There had been few survivors from the ville, a necessity that Hammerhand regretted. But the point had been made.
Apparently, it hadn’t been lost on Trager’s pals either. Not that Hammerhand expected them to give up.
“You agreed to work with us in exchange for our help,” Trager explained carefully, as if Hammerhand hadn’t been there. “We have given you a great deal of help.”
“And?”
“We tasked you to get the girl for us. You contrived to secure her, for which, believe me, I and my associates admire you. But you refuse to hand her over.”
“And?”
“This is clearly unacceptable! And I’m afraid I must demand that you honor your agreement with us.”
“You do, do you? Look, I know your friends are triple powerful. Not just from the stuff they’ve given us or done for us, and yeah, all that’s been a huge help. But the way they faked that vision I had on my little quest, that prophesied your coming. Come to that, I reckon they must’ve bribed that Lakota shaman to steer me up Rocky Top in the first place. Word is, neither she nor her daughter have been seen since not long after I consulted her. Funny coincidence, huh?”
“I fail to see what any of this has to do—”
“For all your power,” Hammerhand said, “you need me. That’s why you went through all that happy horseshit to rope me in. You want me to conquer? I’m doing that now. And that creepy little girl is definitely making it easier.
“And speaking of which, she told me some whitecoats tried to grab her and carry her into some kind of weird magic-mirror thing. That didn’t turn out so well, I hear. So if you’re thinking of puffing out your chest and trying to bluster me into giving her over, save us both the time. She’s with me, and I’ve got use for her. So she stays.”
Hammerhand grinned. “Mebbe you can take measurements from a distance, or something.”
“You misunderstand, mighty Hammerhand,” Trager said, pouring on the oil to his most obsequious manner. “I’m here to, you might say, sweeten the pot.”
“Oh?”
Trager dug into the messenger pouch he carried. Hammerhand wasn’t concerned he’d come up with a weapon.
Until he did: a handblaster. But not like any blaster Hammerhand had ever seen. It looked as if it were made of plastic, with a dull not-quite-white finish. It looked streamlined, rather than blocky the way a blaster usually did.
He did not let his sudden spike of concern show in his face or his posture. If you think you’re going to jack me at blasterpoint, little man, he thought, you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. An even more unpleasant one.
And if he chilled Hammerhand—well, not everybody would be sorry to see that happen, even in the New Blood Nation. But even the least sorry to see the head man go would be among the most eager to punish the man who murdered him, undoubtedly in creative ways.
“What’s that?” he asked. “A toy ray gun?”
Trager smirked. He could tell he had made an impression.
“You’re almost right, mighty Hammerhand.”
He half turned, raised the handblaster, aimed it and squeezed a stud on the front of the grip. A bright red line appeared between its muzzle and a humped gray boulder the size of a yearling buffalo calf.
Sizzling and popping sounds broke from the stone, then it split. It looked as if a gouge many times larger than the beam had eaten through it. It seemed to have turned a volume of the hard rock to dust.
“Okay, now that’s seriously cool,” Hammerhand said, impressed despite himself. “What is it?”
“A laser pistol,” Trager said proudly. “Just the down payment on what we’re willing to give you in exchange for the girl. Think of what you could do with a hundred of these things.”
Hammerhand nodded thoughtfully. “Can I see?” he asked, holding out his hand.
“Of course, of course.”
The whitecoat handed over the weapon. Hammerhand turned it in his hands. It was surprisingly lightweight for the punch it packed. But it still had enough heft to feel like a weapon, not a toy.
He aimed it at a ponderosa pine and pressed the trigger stud. The beam lanced into the reddish bark.
The tree trunk exploded. The upper part tipped over and fell down the slope with a rustling crash, leaving a smoking stump.
“The beam flash-heats the sap,” Trager said, “causing a steam explosion.”
Hammerhand nodded.
“I do appreciate the offer,” he said. “But it still looks to me as if I’ve got all the power I need to do all the conquering I can handle with the help of Mariah. So you can keep your fancy blasters. Because I’m keeping her.”
“But with this pistol you can blast through a boulder!”
“So? With her, I can blast through mountains.”
Trager began to sputter furiously. Hammerhand held up a palm.
“Save it,” he said. “Now that I’ve got her, I don’t reckon as to how I need you at all anymore. Or your scaly whitecoat ‘associates.’”
“You mean you’re just casting me aside?” the little man shrieked, spraying spittle from his stubble-surrounded mouth.
“Looks like it, old hoss.”
“This isn’t over!” Trager shouted, shaking his fist at the Blood leader.
Hammerhand was turning the laser pistol over admiringly in his hands. He looked up.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “it is.”
He shot the whitecoat through the beady left eye. The balding head behind split along the seams that held the cranial cap to the rest of the skull as flash-boiled steam blew holes in the scalp. Trager fell, flopping.
Hammerhand looked down at the blaster. “Cool.”
He tucked the weapon into his belt and took off down the hill at a swinging lope. This day was shaping up to be a good one, he decided.
* * *
“WHAT THE NUKE happened here?”
The wind moaned as though mourning for the torn and devastated land.
“Don’t you know, Ryan?” Krysty asked him. She felt a numbness in her soul that seemed to radiate throughout her body. “She happened.”
He grunted. “Yeah.”
The plains in this area showed more relief than in a lot of other places here, the hills a touch steeper, the valleys lower. They were strewed with chills and gangs of crows and ravens squabbling with the battalion of vultures that swooped down to avail themselves of the all-you-can-eat buffet of carnage.
That wasn’t what frightened her, indeed shook her to her core. That was just the aftermath of battle. And if it had clearly been a big one, by Deathlands standards, it still was nothing she hadn’t seen before. She’d seen worse. They all had.
What scared her were the gouges dug in the flesh of Mother Earth, too deep, regular sided and raw with relative newness to be the work of any manner of natural erosion. And some of them were a good fifty yards wide.
“Who were these people?” Mildred asked.
“Somebody who pissed off Hammerhand way past nuke red, I’d say,” J.B. stated. They had stopped the wag near a creek at the southern fringes of the carrion field and stood beside it in the slanting afternoon light.
“Wow,” Ricky said. “Look at that ridge. It’s like it just stops all of a sudden. Mariah must have eaten the whole end at a bite with that cloud of hers.”
“Does she really have that kind of power?” Mildred asked. “That’s got to be thousands of tons of earth. Just gone like that.”
“You saw what she did to Lone Calf,” Ryan replied. “What do you think?”
“I should have seen this coming,” Krysty said, “from the way she gouged and devastated the Earth when we cleared the muties out of that field.” The realization sickened her to her soul.
“She was giving us a hand,” Ryan said. “I didn’t think anything about it beyond that at the time. I wouldn’t go blaming yourself for not doing so, Krysty.”
She just shook her head. How could I be so blind? she thought.
She knew the answer, though: Just like Ryan said—she helped us in our need. That was all that mattered to me, too.
“Survivor,” Jak called.
They all looked around. Jak had his handblaster out and was crouched a hundred feet or so east of the others. He seemed intent on a low mound topped with yard-high grass.
“Check it,” Ryan said. “Everybody else, blasters up, eyes skinned.”
Jak circled to the south, then cautiously approached the rise.
“No danger,” he called after a moment. He tucked the Python away beneath his jacket. “Come see.”
A man lay on his back on top of the mound. The grass had hidden him from view. He was a tall man, brown skinned, with black hair tied behind his head, and he wore a deerskin vest and canvas pants. From his hips down he was horribly mangled, as if something had crushed him. Flies buzzed in a thick cloud of decaying-blood stench. The gore that had stained the grass and ground around him had turned almost black.
“Water,” he croaked.
Mildred approached and gave him her canteen. As he drank greedily, Adam’s apple bobbing, the physician turned to her companions and shook her head slightly. There was nothing she could do for him.
“That’s not Mariah’s work,” J.B. said.
“Wag rolled,” the man said, letting the hands clutching the water bottle drop to his breastbone. “Got me. Never...stood a chance...anyway.”
“Who were you?” Ryan asked.
“Káínawa.”
“Blood band of the Blackfoot Confederacy,” J.B. said. “Original Bloods, I guess, as opposed to Hammerhand’s bunch.”
At the mention of the name the mortally wounded warrior turned his head and spit bloody saliva into the crushed-down grass. “Renegade,” he croaked. “Monster. Of-offended Council. Came to...reclaim...our name.”
“What happened?” Ryan said.
“The witch...girl. Black...tornado. Ate the Earth. Ate...us. Will eat...the whole...world...”
His eyes closed and his head lolled to one side. For a moment Krysty thought he had died. Then she saw that his chest was still heaving.
“We know,” Ryan said quietly.
The eyelids fluttered, then opened wide. Dark eyes looked beseechingly from one of them to another.
“Please,” he whispered. “Warrior’s...dea—”
The crack of Ryan’s handblaster cut him off. The strong-featured face sagged to the side again. The eye that hadn’t been imploded by a 9 mm bullet seemed to show a look of peace, not pain or fear.
“Right,” Ryan said.
He holstered the weapon and cast his eye over the slaughter grounds.
“I was wrong,” he said.
“About running?” Mildred asked. “Because something tells me we should be running right about now.”
“You heard the man, Mildred,” Krysty said. “The black whirlwind will eat the Earth someday if Mariah isn’t stopped.”
“That’s what I was wrong about,” Ryan said. “I let myself hope it wouldn’t come to this. Reckoned she’d fight Hammerhand until she got chilled.”
“How could anybody chill her?” Mildred asked. “That black dust devil eats bullets as easily as it eats everything else.”
“She doesn’t have a black cloud to protect her,” J.B. said. “She’ll die just like anyone.”
“What do you intend to do, Ryan?” Doc asked.
“Settle this ourselves,” he said.
“But that means going up against the whole, what, fake–Blood Nation even to get to her!” Ricky exclaimed. “What chance do we have of pulling that off?”
Ryan fixed him with his lone blue eye. It looked as bleak as Krysty had ever seen it in all their years together.
“Slim chance is better than none,” he said. “Let’s ride.”