Wearing only a long white T-shirt bearing the name and likeness of some long-dead pop star of the days before the skydark, Krysty sat with her white but hardmuscled legs dangling over the side of the cot she’d been laid on. It sat in an office off the main floor of the cafeteria, which had been commandeered as a receiving ward for wounded from the battle. Her sentient red hair hung lank around her shoulders.
The redhead nodded. Mildred glanced around the makeshift ward. For the moment the situation appeared to be under control. While there were no medical doctors trained as she had been among the scavvies—nor much of anyplace in the world, for that matter—there were people who had read extensively of scavenged medical literature, and some who possessed pretty comprehensive rough-and-ready knowledge. Emergency surgery wasn’t really that rare in a community devoted to foraging through half-destroyed and half-tumbled buildings in an incredibly active seismic zone. She had numerous assistants, including friends and family of the injured, many of whom had some idea what they were doing. It was an asset at least as valuable as the relative abundance of med supplies the settlers had scavenged.
Mildred went to Krysty and began inspecting her with professional dispatch. “So that Gaia-powered immune system of yours shook off the infection, finally?” she asked, peeling back an eyelid and shining a light in one blue eye.
“Not infection,” Krysty stated flatly. “Drugs. Some kind of plant poisons. Maybe several different ones blended to produce nausea, fatigue and fever.”
She tried moistening cracked lips with her tongue and asked for water. Mildred made a sipping gesture. A scavvie girl of ten or eleven named Juliana, with big shiny black eyes and ears whose prepubescent prominence was emphasized to an almost comical degree by the painful tautness with which her long black hair was drawn back in two braids. The girl, who spoke some halting English and professed her intention of becoming a healer herself someday, was serving as gofer. She came bouncing up carrying a plastic sippy bottle. Mildred smiled and thanked her. The girl nodded gravely.
Krysty drank greedily. “Thank you,” she said to Mildred and, “Gracias,” to the girl.
“You recognize the agents involved?” Mildred asked. Alongside her self-healing powers Krysty was an herbalist of great skill.
Krysty shook her head, drank again, handed the bottle back to Juliana with a radiant smile. “No. The effects on my body—they didn’t have the harshness of man-made or mineral poisons, I guess is the best way to put it. They lacked some kind of edge.”
“But not potency.”
“Not potency. Somebody intended to put me out for a while.”
“Not kill you?”
“No.” Krysty frowned. “There was something else…maybe it didn’t really mean anything.”
“Let me at least hear about it so I can pass judgment.”
“Nothing medical. At least I don’t think so. Several times when I was slipping between a fitful doze and a deep sleep, it seemed to me that I saw a woman standing near me.”
“A woman? You mean, like, in your room?”
“No. Not in the room. In the world behind the world. She looked like the pictures we saw. Of the Lady of the Valley.”
“I see,” said Mildred, who didn’t really. Juliana, who had started to lope away with the now-drained bottle stopped and turned back. “You’re not going all mystical on me now, are you, honey?”
Krysty shook her head. “I think she was my own doomie power talking to me. She told me…confirmed for me, I had been dosed with a herbal poison. And she told me I would confront some great dark power and I must risk everything to save myself and those I loved.” She looked up at Mildred. “To save my soul,” she said.
“¡La Dama!” Juliana exclaimed, and rushed away to speak excitedly to the other helpers.
“Probably just a dream induced by your fever,” Mildred said, without much hope of convincing her friend. “Probably doesn’t mean anything.”
Krysty just smiled knowingly at her. The other assistants were all looking their way now. Several of them crossed themselves, a gesture Mildred hadn’t seen much for, well, over a century.
“Girl, this is way over my head.” She checked her wrist chron. “Well, Osberto should be about ready for me to try stitching his gut back together. I’m glad to see you come out of it, but now you should try to rest—”
From the doorway came a shattering burst of noise.
“OW! NUKESHIT!”
Ryan heard himself yelp the words. Then he realized he was alive.
Something tinkled almost musically. “For the moment, Barnabas, my friend. Here, hold still.”
Ryan blinked his eye. He was having trouble focusing. It was dark all around, except for a blinding white full moon. The moon seemed to move around slightly; his vision must still be swimming from whatever happened. There was nothing wrong with his ears, though.
“Doc?” he croaked.
“One and the same. Hold still, I say!”
Then something crossed the moon, causing it to move even more. The object glinted dull silver. Ryan realized it was some kind of multitool pliers. And the moon was a small intense flashlight.
He felt the pliers grasp…something. Something that almost felt as if it was part of his head but wasn’t. Something embedded in his head.
“What in the name of glowing night shit—ow. Fireblast!” Doc had pulled whatever it was out with a twist of his bony wrist, pale in the artificial light.
“You bore your suffering with much more stoic silence when you were passed out, Barnabas.”
Barnabas? Whatever. Doc seemed to be mildly phased out of reality. It didn’t seem to be impairing his ability to treat Ryan’s wounds, so under the circumstances it was far less pressing than other concerns. Such as…
“I was out. Serious out. Does that mean I’ve got a bleeder in my skull that’s going to implode my brain?”
“I believe you lost consciousness due to wound shock. You had one of those barbaric obsidian-edged clubs buried in your cranium. Some of the stone shards are still stuck in there.”
Back into the light swam the pliers. This time they held a wafer of black glass. It had dark clotted stuff stuck to it and a few curly dark hairs.
“Fireblast,” Ryan said again.
The tinkle again. Doc was tossing the fragments of volcanic glass from the broken macahuitl into a coffee can. “A painful wound and a shockingly bloody one. But superficial for all that. Still, you can be grateful for it.”
“Why the hell is that?”
“You’re still alive because of it. Or at least free. Your would-be captors thought they had killed you. As they did for our noble red friend Five Ax, there.”
He twitched the flashlight. Five Ax lay sprawled by the fire. His own macahuitl, busted off near the hilt, lay near his hand. His body had been gashed and gored horribly. At least three other bodies lay near him—small, dark, almost naked. Chichimecs.
“I…saw him get his throat cut,” Ryan said. His throat felt as if somebody had been down it with a giant wood rasp. “Or did I imagine that?”
“No. Though his wound was mortal, he fought fiercely. And slew his foes, until he bled out and fell. An epic scene, I should imagine.”
“What about J.B. and Jak?”
“They are gone. Marched into captivity. One does not like to think of their fate.”
“We’ll get them back. Is there any more of that crap stuck in my head?”
“One more piece, which I will attend to, once you cease fidgeting.”
Ryan held himself stock-still.
“Very well.” Doc plucked the last fragment from Ryan’s head and dropped it meticulously in the can. Then he tore open a scavenged packet, poured antibiotic powder into the wound and bandaged it with more supplies from the medical kit the scavvies had provided them for the fight, taking great twists of tape around Ryan’s head. “That’s the best I can do for you now. It will pull your hair most cruelly when the tape is removed.”
“Fine. How about the wag?”
“What do you think it is you’re leaning against?”
“Oh.”
With Doc’s help, Ryan got to his feet. He examined the wag quickly by the shine of the small flash. The machine gun was gone and the tires were slashed. The microphone for the radio had been ripped away; the cord dangled out the open door like a curiously coiled umbilicus.
“Wonder why they didn’t burn it,” Ryan muttered.
“That would ill have accorded with the stealth that was needful, to commit murder and kidnap under the noses of a sleeping army.”
“A sleeping, dead-exhausted, largely drunk army,” Ryan said. “But yeah, a blazing wag would have been a little conspicuous.”
He half turned and fell into the driver’s seat. He started the engine. Reaching down, he found by feel and pulled a lever. A hissing sound came from under the chassis. The Hummer slowly began to rise from the ground.
“Our friends did their savage best to incapacitate our vehicle quickly and quietly,” Doc said. “Sadly for them, they failed to reckon with that apex of technology that was attained in the late twentieth century, shortly before everything blew up, of course.”
The Hummer’s tires, which were run-flats to begin with, were resealing themselves with a quick-hardening compound and reinflating automatically by means of a compressor powered by the nuke battery that ran the wag itself.
“So how did you come to be wandering around out here to stumble across me, instead of being back safe and sound in the city with Tenorio and the rest?”
“As we made preparation to pull out, I decided my place was with my comrades, after all. I suppose that I felt guilty for not having shared your danger. So I begged leave of Don Tenorio to remain behind, which he graciously extended. Then I found myself walking in the moonlight, regarding the battlefield and regarding the fugacity of life, rather than proceeding here straightaway. With the result that I did not arrive until shortly after the villains decamped with our comrades. At which point I knelt to examine what I sorrowfully took to be your corpse, and the rest, as they say, is history.”
“I’m glad I’m not.”
He patted himself down. “They left me my SIGSauer and my panga.”
“They got the other weapons, including the BAR that our hosts lent to John Barrymore.” The Armorer had left his pet Uzi and shotgun safely back in the city. “I believe your splendid rifle, as well.”
Ryan shrugged. The Steyr was a fine blaster for a fact, but it was just a blaster; if he lost it, he lost it. He didn’t feel the same about his friends.
“You still got your swordstick and that giant old horse pistol, don’t you?”
“Most assuredly.”
Ryan nodded. “We got all we need and mebbe a hair more. Let’s go.”
“To the rescue of our compatriots?”
Ryan had drawn his handblaster, pinched back the slide to check for a chambered cartridge. Brass gleamed yellow in the moonlight.
“Damn straight.”
SCREAMS. Mildred and Krysty looked out of the cubicle. Two men in dark green camou flanked the door, their faces painted in black-green gray. One held a 9 mm Colt Commando carbine, the other an MP-5.
Between them, dressed the same but with face unpainted, stood Felicidad Mendoza. She was holding up a short-barreled AK-74 Sov-made assault blaster from which she’d just fired a burst into the acoustic-tiled ceiling. Little wisps and dust particles were floating down around her.
A scavvie whose leg Mildred had set and splinted after a Chichimec had broken it for him with a three-foot-long pipe came up to a sitting position on one of the tables with a Beretta in hand. Smiling tightly, Felicidad snapped down the blaster and shot him with a burst of 5.45 mm before he could get off a shot. Then pivoting slightly to her right she began to spray the room from side to side with an ear-imploding roar.
Mildred threw herself over Krysty, expecting to feel the sledgehammer impacts of bullets burrowing into her broad back. None came. The chattering roar stopped for an instant, then commenced again.
When it ended, Mildred dared to look up. The copper-haired woman was feeding a fresh red plastic banana magazine into the well of her weapon. Moans and the stink of burned lubricant and propellant and spilled blood and guts filled the room. At least half a dozen scavvies, wounded or healers, had been hit. Little Juliana stood by one wall with blood spraying in a wide pink fan from a severed carotid artery. She pressed one small hand to the side of her neck and collapsed.
“You psycho bitch,” Mildred raged, “what the fuck do you want?”
Felicidad smiled. “You,” she said. “And even more, that red-haired bitch behind you.”
More of Hector’s sec men, painted up and armed to the gills, had crowded in behind her. “Take them,” she ordered, nodding at the two outland women. “If they resist, shoot them in the legs. But don’t kill them.
“Their deaths will greatly please the gods—but not now.”
“DOC,” RYAN SAID gently as he drove through the darkness, “who am I?”
The older man blinked at him. “Why, you are Ryan Cawdor, our fearless leader and faithful friend.”
“Who did you think I was back there when you were pulling obsidian splinters out of my head, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Why, whatever do you mean?”
“You called me ‘Barnabas.’ I don’t know any Barnabas. Friend of yours from the old days?”
Doc drew himself up as best he could sitting down. “I fear your injury impaired your perceptions. I wasn’t calling you Barnabas. I was merely recalling—out loud, as sometimes I do—a favorite television show from my sojourn in the twentieth century.”
“Television show?”
Doc nodded. “‘Dark Shadows.’”
Doc turned ostentatiously to peer out the windows. “At least your attackers were considerate enough to leave a few traces to track them by.”
The Chichimec trail was anything but hard to follow. The bright moonlight was a pure luxury. Hundreds of bare horny feet had trampled the grass in a swath a hundred yards wide. Here and there the bodies of stragglers lay, dark and still.
“They say the Chichimecs eat their dead, which to them apparently includes those too badly wounded to fight or keep up,” Doc said.
“Reckon they got all the meat they can carry as it is,” Ryan said grimly. He was behind the wheel, periodically poking his head out the window to make sure of the trail and terrain. They didn’t dare use headlights, which the Chichimecs would spot miles off, so the moonlight was useful in helping him pick a safe path without bogging the wag or dumping it into an arroyo even it couldn’t negotiate. The Hummer was equipped with infrared headlights, but unfortunately not with IR goggles, so they were useless.
“You seem confident that our boon companions are not to be found among the sad relics lying by the way.”
“Yep. Unless they were bad hurt they’d keep up with a bunch of raiders worn out from marching and fighting all day. And I got a definite hunch the Chichimecs mean to keep them alive. For now. After all, they went to considerable effort to target us, cut us out from the rest. If they’d wanted J.B. and Jak dead, they’d have left them there in their blood the way they did me.”
Gingerly he fingered the bandages wrapped around his head with his free hand. To Doc’s horror he had insisted on rubbing dirt onto them to darken them up some. He was damned if he was going to try to sneak up on a campful of cannies with a pristine-white bandage shining on his head.
“Their behavior suggests you were specifically targeted. Which suggests knowledge on the raiders’ part. Which in turn suggests we’ve been betrayed. And why then does the name ‘Don Hector’ spring so readily to mind?”
“Not proved,” Ryan said. “Although, truth to tell, if the crazy son of a bitch was to cross my sights right now, I’d hammer down on him, just on principle. But who and why don’t matter right now. Getting our friends back does.”
“And what of Krysty and Dr. Wyeth, back in the City in the Lake?”
His guts gave a jerk. He ignored it. “I don’t reckon Hector will make his play for the city just yet. He might’ve seen an opportunity to get us in particular out of the picture and jumped on it. But a move on the city means war. And while we laid some savage hurt on the Chichimecs this afternoon, we got no reason to believe they’re out of the picture.”
He shook his head. “He’s nuts. But he’s not so nuts I can see him picking a fight with the city before the invaders’ asses are kicked out of the valley for good and all.”
“I certainly hope that you are right.”
“If not,” Ryan said, “we’re going to want J.B. and Jak with us when we go to spring Krysty and Mildred, anyway.”
An hour and several miles later, Doc sat with his head lolled back and his mouth open, snoring gently. “Doc,” Ryan said.
No response. “Doc,” he said again. When the old man failed to respond, he reached out to shake him gently by the shoulder.
“Not the sows,” Doc moaned. “Please don’t put me in with the sows again.”
“I don’t know about the sows, but the people who used to put you in with them are all worm food, long since. Time to wake up and join us in the present.”
Doc raised his head and stared wildly around at the night. “Where are we?”
Ryan nodded at a yellow glow in the sky above the rise ahead. “We’re there. That’s the Chichimec camp. Grab your swordstick, Doc, ’cause we shag it from here.”
HAVING OVERSEEN the wounded being unloaded and carried into the makeshift infirmary, Don Tenorio had retired to his office. He sat writing by the light of a kerosene lamp when the door opened. He looked up mildly.
“Ah, María,” he said. “What is it?”
“Someone to see you, alcade,” the diminutive woman said.
The baron stiffened as a tall, cloaked figure strolled through the door.
“Good evening,” Don Hector said.
Tenorio tensed to spring up. Then he relaxed, accepting the inevitable, as four Eagle Knights strode in, each wearing a laser armlet, and fanned out to either side of their baron. He rose deliberately, stood straight.
“Whatever your plan, it won’t work,” he said calmly. “My people will never submit to your rule. Kill me if you will, but they still won’t yield.”
Hector nodded, smiling. “Kill you I shall, Tenorio, my old friend. But for now you shall serve as a hostage against the behavior of your subjects. And so shall your wounded and medical personnel, whom we have secured.”
“You seem to be overlooking my allies from el norte.”
Hector shook his head. “Not at all. I have captured the witch-woman with the red hair and the black woman. The Chichimecs have taken your allies, I fear, and will sacrifice them to their own barbaric gods. A sad waste, I agree. They are heroes, to be sure, worthy of the flowery death as sacrifices to my own lord, Huitzilopochtli. Still, the Hummingbird on the Left should be well pleased with the hearts I give him at the apex of his pyramid tomorrow.”
“My people will resist you,” Tenorio said. But he spoke without complete confidence.
Hector picked up the polished stone globe of the Earth from Tenorio’s mahogany desk, turned it over in his big scarred hand, then tossed it up in the air and caught it.
“They will die like rats if they do,” he said. “The survivors will eventually learn to be grateful for the discipline I teach them. And they shall know glory. For once I have become immortal, I shall lead the peoples of this valley on a campaign of conquest the likes of which the world has never seen, combining the technology of the predark days with the spiritual powers of our ancestors.”
Tenorio cocked an eyebrow. “Immortality? You really believe so?”
“I know so. And you will know the folly of having turned your face from our gods, the true gods, when you behold your own heart, smoking, cut from your chest and held up in offering to Huitzilopochtli.”
THE WAG ROLLED west along the causeway from the city. From the south came a low mutter, angry and growing. In the sky above the volcanoes, a red glow had begun to spread like a bloodstain.
A crew of three occupied the strongpoint guarding the landward entry to the causeway. Two of them emerged from the small tower as the wag slowed to a stop in front of the mobile barrier.
“What a glorious evening, no?” one called cheerfully to the driver.
“The only thing wrong is we have to wait for our relief at midnight before we can celebrate properly,” the other said. “Unless of course you boys are truly friends, and thought to bring us a bottle or two?”
“I fear not,” the driver said. He put his left arm out the window. It was encased in a bulky plastic molding.
An almost-white lance of brilliance flashed from the armlet to the sentry’s chest. Ruby glare underlit an expression of uncomprehending astonishment as the laser flash-boiled the fluid in his lungs, causing his chest to explode.
As the crack of air rushing back into the vacuum created by the laser beam’s intolerable heat echoed out across the black uneasy waters of the lake, the other sentry turned to run back into the tower. A second Eagle Knight stepped out of the cab, raising his own arm. A second ruby spear struck the sentry in the back, split him open, sent his corpse skidding along the gravel with his clothing in flames.
The man still in the tower was of sterner stuff. The machine-gun mount was never made to bear back along the causeway toward the city. But he was trying to wrestle the wep around when the second Eagle Knight took aim. The sentry’s head exploded at the touch of a laser finger.
As the dismounted Eagle Knight removed the barrier from the roadway, the driver flashed the wag’s headlights: once, twice, three times.
A dozen sets of headlights sprang to life in the darkness of the shore. With a rumbling of engines, the force of sec men and Eagle Knights rolled down to the nowundefended causeway.