Deathlands 122: Forbidden Trespass (12 page)

“I hope it’s not catching,” Mildred said. Jak laughed, once, briefly. J.B. knew he was best friends with the Armorer’s young apprentice—they were by far the closest in age to each other. But that never seemed to stop the albino from enjoying the occasional joke at his buddy’s expense.

“You’re right, Krysty,” Ryan said. “The one time they came after us with what seemed like serious intent was a couple days back, at the dig.”

“So?” Mildred asked. She was hot, she was tired and she was grumpy.

“So mebbe,” Krysty said patiently, “we need to be looking for them there.”

“I admit to perplexity, dear lady,” Doc said. “If we cannot find our quarry by hunting for them accurately, how might we find them by waiting passively at one point?”

“We’d get more digging done, anyway,” Mildred said. “We’re just getting down to where the good scavvy likely waits. We might as well go for that, instead of wearing ourselves out tramping up and down these bastard hills all day and night while the cannies laugh at us.”

“Not just waiting,” Ryan said. “Baiting.”

Everybody looked at him, except Krysty, who was nodding with a slight smile. Even Ricky was coming up blank.

After a moment J.B. chuckled. “Dark night!” he said. “That might be our best trick, at that.”

“So enlighten the slow section of the class,” Mildred said.

“Out here roaming the woods—‘tramping up and down the bastard hills,’ and I quote—they either ignore us or shadow us for a spell and then go off to wherever it is they go,” Ryan said.

J.B. knew that Jak was frustrated at not having been able to turn up a hint as to where that was, although
underground
seemed the most likely bet. Unless they took to the trees.

“The once place we know they came after us hard was the dig. So let’s spend a day or two there and see if we can lure one close enough to grab us a chill after we blast them.”

“While that might well work,” Mildred admitted, “I’m not really keen on us just putting ourselves dead in the X-ring as targets for these white-haired freaks. Uh, no offense, Jak.”

“Not mutie,” Jak said. “Not cannie, neither.”

“Point taken,” Mildred said.

“I’m not in love with that part, either,” Ryan said. “You got a better idea, Mildred? The night is young, so there’s a lot of darkness left if you love walking up and down hills so nuking much.”

“You know what?” Mildred asked. “I love this plan. Let’s go back and sit in the dig pit and paint big red targets on our foreheads.”

“Don’t reckon we need to go that far, Mildred,” J.B. said.

She looked at him intently.

“What?” he asked.

* * *

M
ATHUS
C
ONN HAD
just awakened from a sound sleep when he heard shouting from the taproom.

His room lay to the east of the bar, on the right as a person came in the door. That wing was the shorter, with the slut cribs and guest rooms to the west, and the kitchens and storage rooms on the north side. The only other occupants of the short hallway were his chief aide and cousin, Nancy, and his bouncers, currently Tony and Chad.

It was male voices doing the hollering. He didn’t recognize them right away. From the light seeping in through drawn scavvied venetian blinds, it had to be late afternoon.

Time I was getting up and getting to work anyway, he thought. Normally he’d leave the matter to Nancy and the bouncers. It was their job; and loudly irate customers weren’t exactly rare in Stenson’s Creek. He rose, pulled on his clothes and shoes, and padded out the door.

He was yawning as he turned into the short corridor, shutting the door behind him and locking it with his key.

The shouting continued and got louder as he approached the open entryway to the central room. He recognized the main shouter, and scowled.

“Lem Sharkey,” he said, striding through the entry, “I thought I told you you weren’t welcome here anymore.”

Then he stopped.

The tableau in his barroom burned itself indelibly into his mind, and flooded his gut like acid. On his right, Nancy and his two bouncers stood in front of the bar with their hands held up by their shoulders, palms forward. Arranged facing them from ten feet away in a rough semicircle were Lem, his younger, stockier brother, Ike,
and his rad-scum pals Tupa and Gator. Ike carried an ax handle. Gator held an actual ax. Tupa stood, turning a big beer stein he’d picked up off a table over and over in hands that made it seem teacup-sized as if he’d never seen one before.

Lem was holding a double-barrel black-powder shotgun by his hip, the hammers pulled pack and the muzzles pointing toward Conn’s people.

Chapter Nine

“Yeah,” Lem said, sneering. “Don’t sound so nukin’ high and mighty now, do you, Mr. Conn? Don’t try no shit with me, or I let ’em have it!”

“What do you actually want?” Conn asked. Despite the circumstances, he made no effort to keep his annoyance out of his voice. He knew the wiry, wound-tight youngster could be volatile—that was why he’d been banned in the first place. But Conn suspected
submission
would have the same effect on him as a jolt on a jolt-walker.

“Wymie sent us to take care of you,” Gator said, showing some of his too-many, too-jagged teeth in a smirk.

“‘Take care’ of us?” Conn demanded. “What in the name of glowin’ nuke shit is that supposed to mean?”

“You been shelterin’ them murderin’ coldheart outlanders,” Lem said. “We’re here to stop that. One way or another.”

“What does that mean?” Nancy asked.

Conn’s jaw tightened. She didn’t suffer fools gladly, and apparently the fact one had a scattergun pointed at her vitals only made her less inclined to suffer him.

“Time to get with the program,” Gator said. “Stop gettin’ in our way.”

“I’m not in your way,” Conn stated, in as patient and calm a tone as he could muster. He didn’t try sidling
toward the front door, not edging back the way he’d come, even though he had a Winchester carbine loaded and waiting in his room, for serious emergencies. Lem gripped that blaster so hard it quivered like a leaf in a hailstorm. The slightest extra pressure would set it off for sure.

“Not in Wymie’s way, either. I just haven’t agreed to go along with her.”

He noticed Tupa was screwing up his enormous face in a funny way. Tough guy though he was—lead rival to Potar Baggart, both as ville bully and at the limestone quarry where both of them worked—he was prone to allergies. And in a place like Sinkhole and its environs, this time of year something was always blooming. Under the circumstances it registered on Conn as nothing more than a minor, passing detail.

“She said, you’re with us or against us!” Lem barked. “You don’t join up, you’re standin’ in our way!”

“Here, now,” Conn said, “that’s no-how reasonable. How does it matter a whit whether I—”

Tupa sneezed.

Lem jumped and jerked. His reflex action yanked the twin barrels of his blaster up and to his left. At the same time his finger tightened convulsively on the trigger. The scattergun went off with a head-shattering roar, blasting both its charges into Conn’s ceiling.

Lem fell right straight on his skinny rear end.

Nancy started to dive behind the bar. Conn knew at once she was going for the 10-gauge scattergun, likewise double-barrel, Conn kept there.

“Nancy, no!” he shouted. His own reflex was—now that Lem’s once triple-lethal blaster was no more than a not very effective club—to try to defuse the situation.
Talk everyone down and ease these bad boys out of here with nothing more getting broken.

Apparently Ike realized what she was doing, as well. He lunged for Conn’s assistant, grabbed the back of her shirt and flung her back bodily toward the center of the room. At the same time Gator swung his ax in a whistling horizontal arc, stopping both Chad and Tony, who’d started to make their own moves, dead in their tracks.

Flailing her arms for balance, Nancy teetered in a half circle. It brought her almost face-to-face with the looming Tupa.

He was rubbing his nose with the back of his left hand. With his right he backhanded the woman across the face with the stoneware stein, almost casually.

Her head whipped around with unnatural speed. She fell straight to the floor in a loose-limbed, random heap.

For a moment everybody froze in place: Lem, still clutching his empty blaster, halfway through scrambling back to his feet; Gator and the two bouncers he was menacing with his ax; Ike standing big-eyed by the bar with his ax handle in his hand. And most of all, Tupa staring blankly down at the body sprawled by his booted feet.

Mathus Conn didn’t know why it had happened, but he knew what had happened.

“You fat coldheart bastard!” he shouted. “You chilled her!” And just like that, abandoning years of carefully maintained level-headed self-control, he launched himself at the big quarryman.

Still clearly stunned by the results of his blow, Tupa just managed to get his hands up to fend off Conn. The gaudy owner had been a brawler of sorts in his time, and a noted wrestler in friendly contests, and some not-so-friendly ones. But it had been years since he had practiced
any of those skills. He found a calm manner and polite yet businesslike speech, combined with a willingness to pay fair value for what he got, tended to get him anything he really wanted with much less wear and tear than
fighting
did.

But now he had lost control. He flailed his arms. A forearm caught Tupa across the nose. Conn felt it break, just as he was starting to come out of his fury-fugue.

Roaring, Tupa slammed his cannonball dome forward and head butted his attacker. Conn’s skull filled with sudden swirling darkness, shot through with lightning. He dropped, stunned.

Through eyes that had gone blurry except for a circle of clarity in the center of his vision, he saw Chad and Tony spring forward at the four invaders. Through the roaring in his ears, he heard one of the bouncers bellowing anger.

As if it were happening to someone else, somewhere in the middle distance, Conn saw Gator slam his ax down into the front of blond Chad’s chest, just to the right of his neck. The burly bouncer sank to his knees with a groan. Blood fountained, splashing across Gator’s shirt and lumpy face.

Tony got close enough to Tupa to rock his head back with an overhand right. Tupa lashed out with the mug with which he’d inadvertently chilled Nancy. Ike landed on Tony’s back. He tried to grapple with the black bouncer, hampered by the ax handle he was still holding in one hand. He seemed as if he’d forgotten all about it.

Tupa brought his ham-hock-sized left hand up in an uppercut into Tony’s downturned face. The bouncer’s knees bucked. He toppled backward onto his ass on the floor. Ike scrambled to jump free.

Off to one side, Conn became aware of Lem Sharkey sitting up with his shotgun cracked open. He was muttering to himself as he fumbled in his pockets, apparently for fresh shells to load into the wep.

Tupa, his brown eyes bloodshot, wagged his head from side to side like a bull cornered by a pack of wolves. He noticed Conn lying almost at his feet, still dazed. He reached down, grabbed a handful of the front of Conn’s shirt, and hauled him up bodily back to his feet as if he weighed no more than a rag doll.

“Wait,” Conn tried to say, “can’t we talk about it?” But a fist like a dark moon eclipsed his vision and slammed into his face. It struck just a glancing blow, but it was enough to send fresh sparks shooting behind Conn’s eyes, and his stomach sloshing to a fresh wave of nausea.

Suddenly an arm like a pale tree trunk coiled around Tupa’s enormous neck from behind. The huge fist cocked back for a second try at caving in Conn’s face instead grabbed for the forearm. The other let go of Conn’s shirt and dropped him back to the floor.

The sharp crack on his tailbone roused Conn from his fog. A second hand, no smaller than Tupa’s own, appeared around the round head from the other side, grasped the man’s jaw and yanked it hard to the left.

The bull neck snapped with the sound of a dry hickory branch broken over someone’s knee.

The smell of fresh, wet shit hit Conn like another, invisible fist as the huge man’s bowels voided. The arm released his neck. He slumped into an oddly shapeless heap.

“That’ll teach you, you taint,” Potar Baggart snarled. “Where you get off, laying hands on Mr. Conn?”

Mathus Conn was more astonished than relieved, but
as his scattered wits pulled themselves back together, he realized Lem Sharkey was crawling, open-breeched blaster in hand, across the floor toward a pair of brown waxed-paper/black-powder shotgun shells that had rolled away from him.

Urgency filled the gaudy owner. He rolled onto his own hands and knees. As he did, his vision swept the sprawled body of his assistant.

Her blue eyes were open, and staring right into his.
Nancy
…

Through his mind flashed an image of them standing by a stream—Stenson’s Creek—when she was eight and he was mebbe ten, watching her swing back and forth on a sling made from a length of scrap deer hide from her father’s tannery, watching her long blond hair stream out behind her as she flew against the clear sky, to splash down into the brown-green water. How the droplets turned into a spray of tiny rainbows…

Then he saw Chad, still on his knees, with the ax embedded in his shoulder, clutching at it with his right hand. His square-jawed jock face slumped forward, eyes wide and blanked with pain. The skin had grayed and hung on his face like an old man’s.

No blood on his mouth, the cooler part of Conn’s mind said. No froth from his nostrils. Lung isn’t hit. Likely he’ll live.

But he didn’t indulge himself wallowing in that thought, either. He scrambled toward the gap past the end of the hickory bar that led to the doors to the kitchen annex out back—and to the back of the bar. As he moved, he willed himself to push up off the floor. His brain was still spinning, his stomach seethed with nausea, and his
limbs seemed made of lead and connected loosely with wet bar rags.

But though he was no man of action, Conn had dedicated his whole life to doing what needed to be done. And now, despite the unlikely and timely intervention of Conn’s near-nemesis, Potar Baggart, in taking down the monstrous attacker, the odds were nowhere near even yet. He knew they were fixing to get worse once that little snake Lem got his scattergun recharged.