Motherlode (23 page)

Dark Lady came up alongside the vehicle. Mikey-Bob came with her like a vast, dumpy shadow.

“Good placement,” the gaudy owner said with a brief approving nod. “You can support us from here.”

Krysty grinned. “And the defenders forted up in the house will have a hard time hitting us at this range.”

Plus she thought the machine-gun barrel could use some time to cool off, even though she’d been quite careful to keep her bursts brief. They had found no further spare barrels, either in the Crazy Dogs’ wag or in Dark Lady’s recovered arsenal. Not that Krysty had the first notion how to change barrels if she
had
a replacement.

Dark Lady nodded. She signaled for her followers to spread out and advance to either side of the road. They set out, working from cover to cover.

Both heads of Mikey-Bob met Krysty’s eyes and nodded, as well. Then the two-headed giant was off, sticking with his mistress like a dog.

Krysty kept her eyes peeled for targets. Kris worked as loader as if she’d trained for the job, keeping the belts of linked ammunition from kinking as she fed them to Krysty, inserting new ones in the loading tray when the big blaster ran dry. She did her tasks with a calm and stolid determination, plus a set expression that might be mistaken for a smile. At a distance.

One thing they had was ample ammunition. Linked cartridges in the appropriate caliber were something Dark Lady had found in the lost lab’s armory, though Krysty’s reluctance to risk overheating the blaster kept her expenditures frugal regardless. She heard shooting from the ragged bunch of Amity Springers as they skirmished forward. Some of them showed a tendency to clump together, at which point she saw either Dark Lady or Mikey-Bob, who had taken opposite sides of the road, would hurriedly get them to break it up.

“Uh, Krysty?” It was Stuart, their driver. He had his head out his window and turned to look back at her.

“Yes, Stuart—?” she began.

From the right-hand corner of her eye she saw a form step out from behind a lean-to-style shed, just twenty yards down the road on the right.

An AK-47 bellowed on full automatic.

The truck quivered to ringing impacts. The near side of Stuart’s head erupted in gore even as he tried to yank it back inside.

He seemed to melt into the cab. The wag started moving forward, picking up speed.

The sec man continued to blast his whole 30-round magazine into the wag. A bullet smashed a fist-wide chunk out of the rear window and whined past Krysty’s left hip.

The redhead started holding down the big blaster’s trigger even before its muzzle brake swung to bear on the blaster man.

He did a brief dance of death as a volley of rounds sleeted through him, scarcely slowed by flesh or bone.

As he fell, a familiar, terrifying tang went up Krysty’s nostrils and seemed to clutch at sinuses, palate and throat with taloned fingers.
Gasoline!

“We’re on fire!” she heard Kris scream.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“So it begins,” Baron Sand said, with a single crisp nod. “Is there still a guard on the window, dear heart?”

The baron was dressed in a loose white shirt, khaki cargo pants, and moccasins with thick leather soles. Given her flamboyant nature, Doc was mildly surprised she possessed an outfit more practical. Nonetheless, if he had learned one thing from his forced—if far from fully onerous—association with the Baron of Joker Creek, it was indeed to expect the unexpected.

“There is, regrettably,” he reported.

“Very well,” she said. She uttered a short laugh. “Riskier this way, but I admit I prefer it. I hate to bore, but if I must, I prefer to bore from within!”

Turning away from the window and stepping back to avoid chance discovery by the guard, although the man seemed preoccupied by the firefight raging on the building’s far side, Doc shook his head.

“How can you think of wordplay in such a situation as this?”

“What better time?” she asked in a tone of manic flippancy. “If we cannot play, how can we truly be said to live? Now, do be a dear, and help me.”

He had dressed, as well, in his usual clothes. The baron went to kneel beside her big bed. He hunkered down beside her as she began rummaging beneath.

“Here,” she said, handing something back to him.

To his surprise it was a slim length of steel, like a fencing epee without the bell guard, and with the tip filed to a lethal point. As he took it and experimentally hefted it, he realized that was precisely what it was.

“And here,” Sand said with satisfaction. She pulled back and reared up, brandishing—

“The key to the lock that keeps us pent in,” she declared. “They were fools to think they could restrain me that easily. But of course, that’s our gain, is it not?”

Her eyes were bright. Her cheeks were flushed. Under most circumstances those signs would have presaged another bout of wild rapacious sex. Instead she contented herself with standing and kissing him quickly but hard on the lips.

“Do you trust me?” she asked.

“Absolutely not.”

“Smart man,” she said. “But I knew that. And in this case, you
can
trust me. Although I’ll not ask you to take it on faith. Rather, let that fine brain of yours calculate how rare the ways are in which I could gain from betraying you, under such circumstances as we find ourselves in.”

He nodded. It already had. If anything, the baron was showing a lack of wisdom in trusting
him
.

“No hidden blasters?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Never really got along with them.”

“But don’t you want a weapon, as well?”

She smiled and handed him the key. “Oh, I’ll have one.”

The one she chose made his eyes widen.

She took up station beside the door.

“Key in lock,” she directed softly. He obeyed.

“On three, unlock and throw the door open
fast
.”

He was puzzled, but he understood the instructions and nodded to indicate so. He went ahead and thrust the sharpened epee into his belt to use both hands.

“One, two—
three
.”

The key turned. He turned the latch and flung the door outward as fast as he could.

“Hey!” the sec man on guard exclaimed.

Doc followed Sand closely as she stepped quickly into the hall and turned toward the sec man. He was young, unshaved, and as Doc saw in a flash, bleary-eyed. He appeared to have been leaning against the wall taking a nap when the door was so rudely flung open.

Now he gaped at the baron and reached for the long-barreled shotgun leaning against the wall beside him.

In her hands Sand carried a chamber pot. It held the various wastes they’d excreted during the course of a day or night; the sec men swapped it out with a similar one once every morning. It was white with blue figures of Rococo gentlemen and ladies in wigs disporting themselves. Its lid fit well enough to contain the more mephitic vapors. At least until it was inevitably opened, in the course of its intended employment.

Now Sand upended it neatly over the guard’s head. It actually came down over his eyes like a helmet.

As he choked and gagged, she deftly plucked the shotgun away from him and stepped back.

“Stab him,” she said.

Doc did. He thrust the hapless young man as justly through the heart as he could. He was rewarded with the man folding promptly.

The pot hit the floor with a clatter. It didn’t break. By that time somebody was firing shots from a handblaster out a front window, while the shooting outside had grown to a veritable storm. Nobody seemed likely to hear that additional slight noise above everything else.

“Follow me,” she said. He noticed she had managed not to get a drop of the chamber pot’s contents on her. Fortunately, neither had he.

She led him swiftly down the hall away from the front room. And then to his amazement, stopped at the door of what he knew to be a storage closet.

* * *

A
WEIGHT
CAUGHT
Krysty in the midriff and flung her bodily right over the side of the pickup’s bed as the wag picked up speed.

She landed on her back. The air exploded out of her as the weight landed full on her.

Right beside where the sec man had stepped out with his AK, the truck nosed into the ditch on the opposite side. It whoomped into a ball of yellow flame.

“I’m sorry, dear,” the weight atop her said. “I hope you’re all right.”

“Can’t...breathe.”

“Oh. Right.”

Kris sat up, still straddling Krysty’s hips. But without her substantial weight pressing down on her, Krysty’s lungs began to work again. She sucked down deep breaths as the woman adjusted her bandanna atop her short red hair, dusted herself off and stood.

“Let me help you, dearie,” she said, extending a hand down. “It’s the least I can do, since I threw you there and fell on top of you.”

Krysty took her hand. It was strong and callused. Though Krysty was tall for a woman and exceptionally well-muscled, the sturdy shopkeeper simply pulled her to her feet with a single grunt of effort.

Despite their situation, and the death of poor Stuart, Krysty couldn’t help but laugh. “Thanks. But I’d say saving my life made up for everything just fine!”

Kris looked down the road. The Amity Springs’ people seemed to have taken up positions behind the buildings nearest the big house. Return fire was coming from the playhouse’s outbuildings, including the barn, as well as the giant structure that Krysty realized had to have concealed Sand’s monstrous bulldozer.

Her heart soared as she saw Ryan lean around the corner of a stout adobe home and fire a shot at the main house.

“I suppose we’d best get going and join them,” Kris said, “before they have all the fun without us.”

Kris scuttled quickly off the road to the right, to get out of line of the fire coming from the baron’s house. As bullets cracked over Krysty’s head, she hastened to join her.

“I need a weapon,” she said, crouching by the body of the man who had blasted Stuart and their truck. “I’ll take his. He’s not using it. And he has spare magazines.”

Krysty pulled her own handblaster and came up to crouch behind the same shed that had concealed the sec man.

“Do you know how—” she began.

Straightening with the assault blaster in her right hand, Kristen ejected the magazine, slammed home a new one and racked the slide to chamber a round.

“You were asking?”

“Never mind,” Krysty said.

* * *

A
SMALL
WINDOW
—too small even for his spare frame to wriggle through, Doc noted with regret—let shade-dimmed afternoon light into the closet. It was stuffy and crowded with mops, brooms and shelves with dusty containers and bolts of brightly colored cloth. A tang of cedar used against moths tended to make the atmosphere more oppressive, rather than feel fresher.

At the rear of the closet Sand had her back turned to Doc and was bent over. Her shoulders worked.

He heard a click. Sand stepped back, raising what he had taken to be somewhat roughly finished dark wood paneling. Instead it was a hidden hatch.

“A secret compartment?” he said, amused.

She turned and gave him a smile and a shrug. “Of course.”

“Of course,” he said. “What is in there?”

“Your personal gear,” she said, turning and presenting him with his LeMat in its holster. He accepted and donned it. She laid his swordstick across her palm, handle toward him, and bowed.

“I thank you, madam,” he said, bowing back. He picked it up.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “And don’t call me madam. That’s my opposite number’s job. And what is also in here—” she stepped to one side and gestured into the hidden hutch with both hands “—is my store of the ready.”

He was about to ask what that meant, then he saw: stacks of notes, clearly the jack of the area. Metal boxes. A few small items, clearly scavvied late-twentieth-century technology whose purpose even he could not divine.

“Why are you showing me this?”

She shrugged. “You know what they say—you can’t take it with you.”

He turned to her in horrified surprise. Notwithstanding the fact she had been first his opponent, and then his captor, he had come to harbor...positive feelings for her. For her lively intelligence, her wit, her remarkable insight and remarkably insouciant view of life as much for her enthusiastic and skillful sexual charms.

And now, of course, they were allies. Although he realized she had as much as told him she was not to be trusted, and that could change at any time.

Still, he didn’t like the import of her words.

“Surely you are not planning to—”

The closet door opened behind them.

“I thought I heard talking in here,” a squat familiar figure said.

“Son of a bitch!” With the startling alacrity of which she was capable despite her size, Sand sprang past Doc, grabbing at the dead door guard’s break-action single-shot scattergun leaned against a set of shelves.

Trumbo’s blaster sounded like Thor’s hammer striking the Anvil of the Gods in the tight closet. A flash filled the room. Sand screamed and grabbed her arm and fell against the wall.

“Quit sniveling,” the turncoat sec boss said. “I just winged you. You’ve been a naughty girl, Baron. Diego is gonna want to punish you. For that you gotta be alive.”

He looked past her at Doc, who stood with swordstick in hand.

“I got a score to settle with you, you oldie nuke-sucker,” Trumbo said. “But I don’t reckon I’m gonna get a chance to pay you back proper. So I guess I can settle for shooting you in your skinny old belly.”

He extended the handblaster toward Doc, who prepared to spring at the sec boss. Death meant less to him than the bitter disappointment that it came at the hands of such a man.

The beefy hand that held the blaster down on Doc exploded amid a roar that made the early shot sound like a baby’s wet fart. Trumbo shrieked insanely and held up what now looked like a bundle of bloody, twisted sticks. Blood sprayed from a severed artery.

Doc whipped the blade free of its ebony sheath. He launched himself into perhaps the finest balestra-and-lunge of his life.

The tip of his sword entered Trumbo’s screaming mouth. The steel encountered brief resistance from his soft palate, and then more pronounced but equally brief resistance from bone before it punched into the cranium and skewered the medulla oblongata.

The scream shut off as the traitor lost control of the muscles of his larynx and his breathing. His heart shut down. His eyes rolled into his head. He dropped straight down amid a cloud of stench as his loosening bowels filled his pants.

Sand dropped the empty blaster with a clatter. “Justly struck, dear heart. Help me up.”

Doc did. Despite the blood beginning to drench the right sleeve of her shirt from the upper arm down, she required little assistance to regain her feet. She swayed once, and leaned back against the shelves.

“Oh, no,” she said, fending him off with her left hand. “I can meet my fate on my own two legs. Rad-blast, I’ve almost forgotten what it feels like to be shot. Not an acquaintance I’m eager to renew.”

She glanced down at her wounded arm. “Seems to’ve missed the bone. I suppose I should feel gratitude when life serves me a fresh cherry tomato atop the latest shit sandwich.”

She knelt by the reeking corpse of Trumbo, which lay on its face mostly on the floorboards inside the closet.

“Your wound—” Doc began.

“Help me get this befouled husk out of sight first,” she said. “Or worse than he will follow.”

Doc did. With three hands and much grunting, the man’s deadweight was dragged into the storage closet. Fortunately the blood that had leaked from him had all fallen inside the door.

When it was closed, the small already-close space filled immediately with the ripe reek of his voided bowels. Doc set his jaw against the stench and reminded himself he had known worse.
Much
worse.

Sand leaned back against a shelf and closed her eyes.

“You’ll find linen bandages on the third shelf of the hutch, my dear,” she said. “Please help me bind the wound. Quickly. We haven’t much time.”

Fussing like an old hen, to his own distress, Doc complied. Sand bore the wound and his binding of it, which of necessity was rough and ready, with a stoicism that surprised him. Although by now, he thought, why should anything about this woman surprise me? Whatever else she is, she truly is remarkable.

He straightened. “Had we met under other circumstances,” he said, “I think you might have made a boon companion for Ryan Cawdor’s merry band.”

She laughed lightly. “I suspect that’s as great a compliment as I’ve ever received. Thank you, though you must believe me—it isn’t true.”

She grabbed him, kissed him deeply, then broke away. Sand looked at him with pale-green eyes moist and shining.

“One thing you must remember,” she said, laying her left hand over his heart.

“Yes?”

“Dark Lady is my sole heir and successor. I hate to inflict such a curse on poor, dear Eleanor, but she must bear it with her usual stoic bravery.”