Eye dazzled, ears deafened by a ringing like gigantic temple bells, Ryan swayed. He barely felt whatever hard thing it was—rifle butt, table leg, or bat—that clubbed him down to the floor and pounded him mercilessly on the ribs. The panga was yanked out of his hand as more blows landed on his skull.
He was dazed, nauseated and tasting blood when he was dragged by a male and female pair of Bloods out into the hall. He saw several of his companions lying pinned beneath several coldhearts apiece, including J.B. and Krysty. Doc lay slumped against a wall with the visible side of his face a bruise. A Blood woman danced around swearing and flapping her gashed and bloody palm as a burly man hammered a laughing Jak to the floorboards with the butt of a Mossberg 500 pump shotgun.
All this Ryan made out through balloon-like purple patches floating in his vision. Gradually his eye cleared. The intolerable ringing dwindled to a sort of roar.
From the last bedroom on the west side, a large male Blood with black leather straps crossed over his hairy chest like fetish suspenders came out dragging Mariah by both pigtails clutched in a paw. He stopped and called something. Ryan heard blobs of sound but no words.
Mariah grabbed the Blood’s wrist with both hands. He ignored her, laughing. Somehow she twisted her head around and sank her teeth into the hand that held her hair.
Ryan heard the coldheart’s roar of surprised pain, although dimly, as though he had a blanket on his head. He yanked his hand away, then used it to backhand Mariah to the floor.
“Bad call,” Ryan heard himself say inside his own skull.
The girl instantly sat up. Blackness streamed from her eyes. It spun itself around the big Blood, who was so startled he froze.
In an eyeblink a cocoon of swirling blackness enveloped him. Bits of pale skin and swatches of blood whipped around the cloud.
Ryan’s hearing returned almost fully in time for him to hear the coldheart’s shriek of unendurable agony.
Two scraps of black leather, still joined by a steel buckle, bounced off one wall with a musical sound.
“Stay down!” Mariah shouted.
Ricky, who was being held up by a pair of Bloods while a third punched him in the stomach, sagged abruptly to his knees. The cloud jumped up, gouged through the ceiling into the attic and swept forward with its base at a height of five feet.
This time it cut all three coldhearts apart and dropped their lower halves intact to the floor. Ryan wondered if she meant to do that, or if it was even something in her control.
Both hands that had been holding Ricky’s wrists fell to the planking. The youth threw himself down on his face and covered his head with both hands.
The coldheart who sat astride Jak, pinning his arms to his sides with her leather-clad thighs and methodically punching his face, had turned her spike-haired head at the sound of her comrade’s dying scream. Now she saw the cloud plunging toward her face and opened her mouth for a scream of her own.
The cloud took her head first. Somehow it sucked her right up off the supine Jak, shredding her as it did.
“Mariah—” Ryan croaked.
She didn’t hear him, or if she did, she gave no sign. The girl was on her feet now, her right arm stretched out in front of her, controlling the devil vortex’s dance with a hand like a white spider. She had a feral light in her eyes and a slight, twisted smile set on her lips.
He rotated his head the other way. The coldhearts were beginning to galvanize to life. It was already too late. Ryan saw one man with long hair and an eagle feather at his nape jump off one of Krysty’s arms and bolt into the nearest bedroom. Ryan faintly heard glass shatter as he evidently flung himself right through the window.
The cloud expanded until it was as wide as the hall and swept down it to the stairs at waist height. A few legs and hands and weapons hit the warped planks. A chunk was gouged out of the west-side wall as Mariah stalked by Ryan. Then the cloud had shrunk down to scarcely larger than the girl herself. It passed over the rail, hovered briefly, then dropped out of sight as she began to walk down the stairs.
“Ryan!” he heard Krysty say. That restored energy to his limbs, if not stability to his gut, nor his brain inside his head. He staggered up and lumbered down the hall toward her like a grizzly bear loaded to the eyelids on speedballs.
She sprang up, too, and stumbled toward him. Their foreheads came together with a crack.
His head spun freshly and his stomach did a slow roll. Involuntary tears streamed from his eye as he hit his knees hard.
She was on her knees face-to-face with him. They leaned their foreheads together, more gently this time, and both began to laugh.
“Are you two good to go, or are you having a romantic moment?” he heard Mildred ask.
“I’d say neither,” Ryan said. “But I reckon we’ve got to go anyway.”
He was aware there had been screaming downstairs. Now that had stopped. Instead he heard wild shrieks pealing from the street to the east, a crash. A whoomp of igniting fuel.
“Fireblast!” he exclaimed. Krysty was already back on her feet. Well, she was younger than he was. She stretched down a hand and reminded him how strong she was by hauling him right up onto his pins as if he weighed no more than Mariah did.
“Here’s your blaster,” Ricky said shyly from behind. Ryan turned and the youth pressed the grips of the SIG into his palm. He closed his fingers around it. “Jak’s got your panga.”
“Thanks,” he said. “Now everybody grab what weapons you can, because we need to get downstairs in a hurry.”
* * *
“DARK NIGHT!” J.B. said.
They were in what had served for the lobby of the hostelry and the main trading-post floor.
It was now well on its way to being open air. The whole east wall was simply gone, along with some of the ceiling. The rest of the ceiling sagged alarmingly.
“I sure hope this whole place isn’t about to come down on our heads,” Mildred stated.
The ruined room was full of chills. Sadly Krysty recognized some of the Spotted Elk clan among the dead, although most were clearly coldhearts. Helga herself lay facedown across the counter, pinned there with a bayonet through her broad back.
The presence of several dismembered bodies suggested that the cloud had done its work before bursting through the wall.
“Clear,” Jak called, crouched just inside what remained of the wall to the street. Then, “Out here!”
Despite the possible danger, Krysty sprinted out. The sky had clotted with clouds, dark and convoluted and menacing. But they didn’t approach the darkness or the menace of the black funnel cloud, now as tall as the trading post itself, that was walking down the dirt street. It was sucking in the chills and debris as it went. In its wake the bottom half of a Blood wag burned with orange and blue fire. Its top had been sheered clean off, along with the top halves of several Bloods.
The girl followed her nightmare creation. She had her arms out to her sides and was skipping and dancing.
“Fireblast!” Ryan exclaimed. “She’s enjoying this!”
He shouldered his Steyr Scout. Krysty grabbed the short barrel and shoved it up. “Ryan, don’t!”
“Don’t tell me you’re still protecting her.”
“No.” She looked him in the eye. “You.”
He nodded, then lowered the longblaster.
The cloud clipped through the southern end of the gaudy, then cut through the storage area and yard behind the compound building.
“Our wags!” Ricky exclaimed. “They’re back there!”
“We can get new ones,” J.B. said. “Not so easy getting a new us.”
The girl vanished, dancing through the ruins. Krysty trotted after her. After a brief hesitation, she sensed her lover following her.
“Eyes peeled, everybody,” Ryan cautioned. “That cloud may be the worst threat in the ville, but it’s not the only one.”
Nevertheless they moved rapidly in the open to the end of the street and around the corner. They steered well clear of the half-eaten annex.
Not even Jak seemed eager to lope ahead as he usually did. He stayed just behind Ryan, alongside his friend Ricky.
The devil’s vortex stalked straight west through the ville, leaving a path cleared almost to the ground and on either side slumping ruin. Mariah skipped behind it, waving her hands gaily in the air.
“Where are the coldhearts?” Doc asked, blinking myopically in the morning sunlight, cloud filtered though it now was.
“Living ones?” Ryan asked. “It looks like they’re bugging out.”
Krysty could see wags driving west across the prairie in apparent panicked flight. What she could see of the mass of fighters, horses and machines beyond them had already started moving in the same direction.
Four people burst out of a collapsing house—a man, a woman with a baby in her arms and a little girl. Krysty could see their fear clearly.
Unfortunately they bolted directly into the path of the black whirlwind.
“Ahh, no!” Mildred cried out. “Those’re civilians.”
The cloud subsumed the fleeing family without slowing.
“What is she doing?” Ricky moaned, as childish but insane-sounding laughter pealed to the sky.
“I know what she’s doing,” Krysty said in a broken voice. “She’s hitting back. Making the whole world pay for every blow she’s taken, every groping at midnight or out behind the shed. Every contemptuous word. The being kept like a slave but treated with less love and respect. She’s trying to make everyone feel her pain.
“I know that feeling. Even if I’d never give in to it.”
Ryan came up and placed a gentle hand on her shoulder.
“Krysty...”
She turned and rested her head against his shoulder. “I know. And you’re right. But for Gaia’s sake, don’t try to chill her yourself. Promise me you won’t—and J.B. either.”
“Do I look triple stupe to you? J.B., mebbe.”
“Count me out. Got precious little hankering to see that cloud from the inside.”
“Oh, boy,” Mildred said gustily, shaking her head. “You guys. Joking at a time like this—”
“You know a better time, Mildred?” Ryan asked.
“I guess not.”
“Come on,” Ryan said. “We need to follow her. At a safe distance.”
“Can there truly be such a distance?” Doc asked.
“I don’t know. Let’s stay back fifty yards and hope for the best.”
He started forward. The others followed.
“Ryan,” Krysty asked, “what are we going to do?”
“Wait until she gets enough of it out of her system to settle down on her own, I guess. Unless you got a better idea?”
Krysty shook her head. Her sentient hair had uncurled itself from the tight cap of curls it usually formed around her head in times of immediate danger. But its tips lashed nervously across her shoulders, like agitated snakes.
“What if she doesn’t settle down,” Mildred asked, “and decides to make that ‘making the whole world pay’ thing all too literal by—I don’t know—having her cloud eat the whole damn planet?”
“Good question,” Ryan said.
He worked the action, opening the bolt far enough to catch a glimpse of dull yellow cartridge brass inside.
“At that point, I guess we do what we can. Because it won’t be like we got a lot left to lose.”