“I’d rather die than tell you anything!” the captured Buffalo Mob underboss exclaimed. Spittle flew from his bearded mouth, striking Hammerhand’s buckskin pants.
“Suit yourself,” Hammerhand said. He pointed his .44 Magnum Smith & Wesson Model 29 blaster point-blank at the coldheart’s head and fired.
The blaster had heavy recoil and a wicked muzzle blast. But Hammerhand had strong wrists, and he liked a weapon that could make a statement.
The captive’s head split down the middle, like a melon hit by a machete. Handfuls of gray brains slopped out, and his right eyeball burst from the socket to flap from the nerve as he fell forward.
“Right,” Hammerhand said, tipping the revolver’s muzzle to the sky. It was still barely stained with pink in the west, the attack had happened so quickly. “Anybody else want to go in for any macho posturing? You might’ve noticed I’m in a literal frame of mind today.”
He was walking in front of their fifty-odd Buffalo Mob captives. Most knelt in the long grass of what had been until a very few minutes ago their camp. Others tended to the dozen or so wounded, all under the blasters of their watchful Blood captors.
Their fifteen chills still lay where they had fallen—except for the ones being unceremoniously dumped out of their wags by Bloods instructed to secure the rolling booty and make sure they were all ready to shift out of there at Hammerhand’s command.
“That detailed information you gave us on the Buffalo encampment was spot-on,” he said over his shoulder to Trager, who followed a pace or two behind.
The scruffy little whitecoat had not taken part in the attack but had waited behind with a small sec team until Hammerhand sent for him. The leader of the Bloods did not want his magical-mystical superadviser getting in the line of fire. If he came across—and so far, he sure had—then his value was beyond price. If he didn’t in future, Hammerhand favored chilling the man himself for wasting his nuking time and making him look like a dick.
“Our powers are great,” Trager said smugly.
“Better than average, certainly.”
Hammerhand stopped and turned to face the prisoners. He struck a contemplative pose, with his blaster hand tipped back almost to his shoulder. Then, as if coming to some decision, he lowered his arm. At the same time he rolled the weapon in his hand, cocking it with his thumb as he returned it to a firing grip.
It wasn’t necessary. He was an ace shot, his aim hardly less true when he fired the revolver double action despite the far lighter and quicker trigger-pull needed to shoot single-action. But the distinctive metallic clacking, he had noticed, tended to make an impression.
“So,” he said, pointing the handblaster first at one and then another prisoner at random, “who wants to talk to me about what happened outside Duganville last week, where you got your asses handed to you by half a dozen ragged-ass outlanders you had the drop on?”
“That’s it?” demanded a brown-haired woman with a dirty green bandanna tied at a slant around her head to bandage a scalp cut. “That’s why you took us down? To ask us some nuking questions?”
The blaster shot was very loud. It echoed among the low grassy ridges surrounding the one, slightly higher and flatter than its kin, the late Buffalo Mob supremo Bull had picked for his bivouac. Long before the reverberations had chased each other away down the shallow draws, the woman was lying on her back, folded straight back with her knees still on the ground and her eyes staring at the sky. A darker, wetter stain was spreading across the sternum of her faded black cotton T-shirt, in the hollow between her breasts.
“My tribal elders always taught me there were no such thing as stupe questions,” Hammerhand said, rolling the blaster back in his hand again. “They were wrong again, as you can see. They knew nothing of the real world, really, obsessed instead with maintaining some kind of pure Plains tradition, when not one of our band has as much as half the old Blackfoot blood rolling in our veins. Including me.
“So, some ground rules before we continue. You can answer a question with a question if, and only if, you really do need more info before you can give me a proper nuke-sucking answer. Everybody got that? I have a lesson plan all prepped for slow learners.”
Heads nodded vigorously.
Using the info Trager had supplied, courtesy of his shadowy “associates,” Hammerhand had carefully mapped out his predawn attack to complete his destruction of the Buffalo Mob. The Buffaloes had about eighty souls in their camp and six wags, three of which were big cargo trucks.
To ensure victory, Hammerhand had brought more than twice their number. Heroic battles against desperate odds were all good and well—warriors loved to sing about them, especially around the campfires late at night when the Towse Lightning flowed like the blood that all too likely would soon follow. But he had early learned that in the real world, if there was one thing warriors loved, it was a winner.
His scouts had watched the camp all night and done reconnaissance right up to the now-thinner line of wags they surrounded themselves with. The Buffaloes still weren’t up to spotting skilled Plains sneakers. They had confirmed that the info Trager gave Hammerhand about their dispositions and security was righteous.
Then it was time to use some of the other gifts Trager had given them: four modified M4 carbines with sound suppressors and third-generation night-vision scopes. In the hands of four of the best Blood longblaster shots, naturally including Mindy Farseer, they had taken down four key armed and alert sentries spaced around the perimeter.
Meanwhile Hammerhand and Joe Takes-Blasters had led two forces of Blood warriors creeping up on two sides of the camp—not opposite, but about sixty degrees apart.
The reason they had picked the last half hour before dawn to make their final stealthy advance and then attack was that the human body hit a lower ebb at about that time—and visibility was especially tricky. Though Joe led sixty fighters, and Hammerhand almost a hundred, they had achieved their objectives unseen.
Night-bird calls from the snipers confirmed they had downed their targets. Joe had the honor of leading the first attack, suddenly jumping up screaming and opening fire from close range on the sleeping camp.
It had not—quite—been a feint. When the Buffalo Mob began to fight back, fixing their attention on the yelling, blasting assault, Hammerhand had led his unit in from the flank.
Being caught from their left-hand rear utterly demoralized the Buffaloes. Such resistance as they offered was quickly blasted or hacked down. A few escaped into the weeds; Hammerhand was content to let them go. Most of the opposition surrendered within minutes.
The cost to the Bloods had been three chilled and five wounded. Only two of the wounded were badly hurt and they were expected to get better. Especially if Trager delivered on his promise of unknown med tech, which was more valuable than any amount of scavvy.
Now, still elated by his one-sided triumph on what was still a powerful and formidable foe—even if one outgunned and outfought—Hammerhand was working on doing the thing Trager had asked of him. As well as satisfying his own growing curiosity.
“Do I need to shoot somebody else, just to get the ball rolling?” he asked. “Do you really want to take it there?”
“You’re not gonna believe it,” said an older Buffalo, a man with straw-blond hair and a face that looked to consist mainly of seams. “We’re afraid you’ll chill us for lying.”
Then he set and jutted his jaw. “You gonna chill me for saying that?”
“No. I’m saying I’ll chill people for jacking me around. But I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’ve already heard some triple-crazy-sounding tales about what went down.”
And so he had. Trager had asked—in a way that made it clear it was really a demand—that they go check out something that happened at Duganville. The demand part didn’t please Hammerhand, but he was starting to see how the country lay in his relationship with the “prophesied” wanderer from the wastelands. And since the whitecoat had come across with some heavyweight goodies, he was willing to suck down his pride and play along.
For now.
So he and Mindy, the sharpest-witted Blood after Hammerhand himself, had paid a visit quite openly to the distillers’ ville. Dependent as his wealth and power were on trade, Baron Dugan welcomed people of reasonably honest intent. Or at least those who weren’t stupe enough to show their ill intent. And who were pretty utterly outnumbered.
He had quickly learned that whatever happened had started with their old friends, the Buffalo Mob, making an appearance that pretty much pinned the needle on the gauge on the stupe side. The baron had made enough jack to acquire an actual machine gun, an M248 whose crew could swiftly run up the watchtower that gave the best field of fire on any kind of threat. What the Buffalo Mob would really have gotten if they pressed the attack was their wags and themselves shot to shit with powerful 7.62 mm rounds before they got in a good handblaster shot of the wire.
Hammerhand was glad they hadn’t done so, since that fact had sweetened his haul of plundered wags today. But what interested him was why they hadn’t.
The problem was, the details he got were as muddy as spring runoff creek water, and even contradictory. All that was plain was that the Buffalo raiding party got chewed up bad, leaving the seemingly normal if well-armed pack of outlanders they’d messed with in possession not only of some of their lives but with half their rad-blasted vehicles. They had promptly driven back to the ville and sold two, a working truck and a broke-ass one, plus a load of plunder, to the ville folk for a stiff price.
Which they got, he and his lieutenant gathered, not so much out of gratitude at running off a major coldheart attack, as severe disinclination to piss off the outlanders, married to a desire to see the last of them as rapidly as was decently possible. And once they loaded themselves and their new-bought supplies aboard the pair of wags they were keeping for themselves, the mysterious outlanders obliged that desire.
What had happened in between and put such a scare up the ville rats? Well, Trager had mentioned that his whitecoat “associates” had told him via their secret commo technique that they wanted an “anomaly” checked out, and they had not steered him wrong that an anomaly there had been.
“I know that plenty of people who were there survived,” Hammerhand now told his captive audience. “So I reckon either that’s some of you, or that some of you heard the stories. So now tell me. And while I give my word I won’t chill you just because you tell me something hard to believe, if I catch you lying—”
He held the handblaster briefly side-on to his audience, as if he were explaining to children what it was.
The dude with the badlands face nodded. “I was there. And I didn’t cotton to what was going on.”
“I don’t care about that part,” Hammerhand said. “Just tell me straight.”
“Yeah. We were gonna hit Duganville. It’s a rich target. but it turned out to be better defended than we heard. Before we even got there, we ran up against this bunch of people leaving the ville, and they laid some serious hurt on us as we ran down on them.
“Well, Sully—he was straw-bossing the raid—he wasn’t gonna take that drek. Would’ve been bad for our rep, you know? We outnumbered them a power, and we managed to take them down even though it cost us plenty. Ace so far?”
“Ace. Keep talking.”
“So Sully got the notion to make an example of them. Try to put a scare up the people in the ville. A negotiating tactic, you know? We was half a mile out, but we reckoned they had binocs on us. So he decided we’d gang-fuck them and then give them an extrahard send-off.”
“Women and men?” Hammerhand asked. “Never mind. What happened next?”
The rugged-featured man looked doubtful, but he went on.
“All of a sudden there was this, like, black dust devil. Dunno what else to call it. Never seen nothing like it. It tore people apart and ate them right down like some kind of big mutie animal!”
“It was just mutie monsters, like as not,” a female voice growled from behind the speaker.
“Interesting,” Hammerhand said, ignoring the interjection. “Anybody else see that black dust-devil thing?”
After a moment of hesitation, a hand went up from among the huddled prisoners. Then two more. Hammerhand interrogated them, too. They backed up the first Buffalo’s tale, although nobody could provide any further detail.
Three others who had been on that ill-fated raid agreed with the skeptical woman that it had to have been an animal of some kind. Just one that was black and that nobody got a double-good look at.
Because all that agreed, roughly, with what the people of Duganville had told him they saw through their field glasses, he did not reward any of the speakers with extra holes in their body. Everybody seemed to be telling him the truth. Just the truth the way they saw it.
“Now,” he said, “see how easy that was? If anybody remembers anything more they want to tell me about that little adventure, you come talk to me in private later.
“In the meantime—as it happens, I am recruiting. So let’s see a show of hands. Who wants to join a winner?”
* * *
“I STILL SAY it smacks of slavery,” Mildred said, pulling her head back inside the wag.
“How you reckon that, Millie?” J.B. asked. He was driving the black pickup wag up a dirt road winding into the Black Hills, west of the hot-spot Rapid City ruins. The hills here weren’t high, but they were surprisingly steep in this section. Right now the track ran around the side of an inclined slope with exposed granite standing out here and there among the tall spruce and ponderosa pines on the left, with another fairly steep drop to a stream thirty or so feet below on the right. It was slow going for the two-wag convoy, more because of concern about getting into trouble too fast than about road conditions.
“We’re delivering a young woman to marry some older dude, whom she’s never laid eyes on her whole life,” she said. “All arranged long distance. She’s a mail-order bride! Bought and paid for.”
It was a bright and beautiful morning, with only a few feather clouds visible up beyond the tall treetops. The Armorer frowned as if having trouble fitting his head around his lady love’s arguments. He was neither stupe nor slow—the opposite of each, in fact—but he was so intensely practical that he found it difficult, sometimes, to come to terms with abstract arguments.
Especially where people were concerned, with their messy, irregular, tangled-up balls of emotion. So different from the well-ordered and basically predictable machines he loved to tinker with.
“Well, she did say she was fine with it when her Maw Dombrowski paid us to deliver her to this Borodin dude.”
“What else did you expect her to say?”
“No?”
“Maybe she didn’t feel as if she could. Her mother’s a pretty formidable type. Wealthy and powerful, even if she does call herself a rancher and not a baron.”
“If this Pearl is a slave, why doesn’t she try to run away?”
“She’s afraid we’ll track her down and return her.”
J.B. shook his head doubtfully. “Any case, while I’m not exactly known for being particular in the looks department where it comes to women, she does have a face on her kind of like the south end of a northbound mule.”
Mildred fixed him with a withering glare. When he failed to wither, she sighed theatrically.
“John,” she said. “You are so tone-deaf.”
He looked at her in confusion. “What?”
By now she knew his apparent confusion was genuine. He honestly had no clue he’d as good as called Mildred homely. Not that she considered herself in the same category as Krysty—because she wasn’t totally unrealistic. But she also had some vanity.
She opted to let it go. For now.
“What’s that got to do with her being a slave or not?”
“Well, I mean, this Borodin fella, he’s supposed to be pretty well-off himself, with his logging and his mill. Wouldn’t he go for something a mite prettier if he was able to buy a wife?”
“Why would he go for her, then?”
“You’ll have to ask him. Ryan tells about how arranged marriages are common among baron families back East, though. Way to cement alliances, even resolve disputes. That kind of thing. Nothing tends to draw rival clans closer quicker than having a common grandkid or two, I guess.”
“It didn’t seem to work that way for my married friends’ in-laws,” she said. “But I suppose barons are different.”
“You can say that again.”