“Of course they have uniforms, Ryan,” Krysty stated.
Silence. Mildred glanced across the shallow ravine. J.B. and Ricky were still busy.
Still exposed to danger.
“What are you talking about?” Ryan asked. For the first time he sounded less annoyed and more honestly confused.
“Think about the ones we’ve taken on,” Mildred said. “The Penobscot Punks right when we came popping out of that redoubt like so many corks from a bunch of bottles of shit. The Angels and their colors. The Dragons with their tacky Chinese dragon badges. The Felonious Monks. Those assholes with their lame face paint and Mad Max spikes and hockey pads.”
“The Gentleman Junkies,” Krysty recited. “The Cubbies.”
“Yeah. Who even puts on crappy homemade baseball jerseys and goes to battle with bats? And why the Cubbies? They weren’t even an American League team.”
Ryan’s eye narrowed dangerously.
“Okay,” Mildred said. “Point made.”
“That being—?”
“They, well, have uniforms.”
“Mebbe not what you’d consider uniforms,” Krysty said. “Not like DPD. Except for the Monks. But still, they all had distinctive looks.”
“Perhaps that is the object,” Doc said thoughtfully. He had decided to return to the present after several hours of wandering the corridors of time and memory inside his abused mind. “After all, is that not the purpose of wearing uniforms? To differentiate one’s comrades from one’s enemies in the heat of action?”
“I see that,” Ryan said. “What I don’t see is what that has to do with the price of ammunition.”
“So wouldn’t a gang called the Jokers have their own trademark style, too?” Krysty asked.
“And wouldn’t that most likely be something that differentiated them from common laborers as well as rival gangs?” Mildred said. “I mean, I’d expect the Jokers to pick something stylish. It’s not like they call themselves the Red Guards or anything proletarian like that.”
Ryan sighed.
“Ace. So mebbe those weren’t Jokers. So?”
“Well, why wouldn’t the Jokers be guarding the vital water tank? If anything happens to it, they’re all in deep rad dust and in pretty short order.”
“Such guard duty is boring and not widely desired,” Doc said. “Perhaps they delegated it to menials.”
“If they’re such downtrodden menials,” Mildred said, “would the Jokers give them guns?”
Ryan held up his hand.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Nobody knows. But the only thing that matters right now is that we’ve got a job to do.”
A rustling in the brush in the arroyo drew everybody’s attention that way.
“And speaking of which—” Ryan said.
Ricky raced out of the gully. At least the kid had sense to stay bent over to minimize the chance he’d be spotted. Especially from below, silhouetted against the stars.
“Slow down there, Snowball,” Mildred said. It was another reference Ryan didn’t catch, but he didn’t care to bother asking for an explanation. The stocky healer seemed in a nostalgic frame of mind these days.
A beat later J.B. followed. Though he was hunched over, too, he moved as casually as if he were walking through a well-secured campsite. Ryan was fairly sure that the Armorer was engaging in a touch of theater. He had presumably hustled through the cut. And he sure had hustled away after he and his apprentice had fixed their charges to the tank.
At least part of the way J.B. had been carefully unrolling the safety fuse behind him. He’d just taken care quickly.
He and Ricky took their places lying alongside their comrades, except for Jak, who was on the prowl, making sure nobody was creeping up on them.
J.B. snipped the fuse with his folding knife and tossed the roll to Ricky. He put the knife away and dug out an old-fashioned fuel-and-friction lighter. He offered it to Ryan.
“You light them off,” J.B. said. “It’s time you got to share in the fun.”
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed.
He took up the safety fuse with about a foot sticking out of his hand, struck a flame and applied it. He opened his hand hastily to drop the line as a glowing spot raced away along it, hissing and throwing off sparks. The flame vanished into the gully.
An eyeblink later it appeared on the far bank and streaked to the underside of the tank.
Ryan knew that J.B. and Ricky had set several charges of the moldable plas ex, sticking it to the metal at the base of the tank and squeezing it under it where possible. He never even saw the fire split into several parts before a giant white flash blanked out the whole scene.
The high-explosive detonation of about a pound of C-4 at a range of a mere forty yards or so was impressive. The rolling overpressure struck Ryan in the face like a two-by-four, and the sound was like a chop from his panga directly to his eardrums.
But even before the sound crossed that small distance his eye was able to make out water jetting out under pressure from the breaches the charges had torn in the thin-gauge steel. The floating purple blobs of dazzle afterimage made details hard to get, though.
“Well done,” he said, although only he could hear his approving words.
He doubted anyone else was hearing any better than he was over the ringing in their ears, so he turned to J.B. and Ricky and gave them a wolf’s grin and a thumbs-up. Ricky blushed—there was enough gray dawn light now for Ryan to make that out. J.B. just nodded. But his slight smile was the equivalent of another man’s fist pump of triumph.
“Ryan,” Krysty called softly but with enough of an edge to add urgency. “Down there!”
Her lover took his gaze away from the torrent of water gushing from the stricken tank and sending a substantial flood downslope to the Joker settlement to look where Krysty pointed.
Down where the foot of the butte flowed into the gentle rise from the river northwest, a pair of headlights had just glowed into life on the street that led up toward the Jokers ville several hundred yards away. The growl of a diesel engine throttling up from low idle reached their ears.
It was as if the blast that took out the water-storage tank had been a signal. A
lot
like that.
“Hizzoner’s sec men,” Jak pronounced.
“What’s this?” Ryan asked. He looked toward J.B. as he said it but was basically asking it of the world in general.
J.B. just shrugged.
The headlights began to advance at a walking pace upslope. Two other sets of headlights blinked open after it. They followed.
DPD had turned out in force, and they weren’t making any bones about it after a surprisingly stealthy approach, given how loud their armored cars tended to be. But neither were they acting as if they intended to have to storm the ville.
“Let’s swing east of the ville but get down there as fast as we can while staying low,” Ryan said. “I want to find out what the story is here.”
“And what if battle is joined?” Doc asked.
“One thing at a time, Doc,” Ryan said.
They started to scramble down the hill but froze when lights started coming on in the ville. Between the huts Ryan could see people running to and fro, raising splashes from the ankle-deep water flowing through the settlement.
Jak, who had taken point, turned back to look at his halted friends in impatience.
“Not looking,” he said.
“Reckon I wouldn’t be looking anywhere but at those lights and the loud wags either, if I was them,” J.B. said. “Which I am starting to be almighty glad I’m not.”
The companions didn’t abandon caution, but they picked up the pace. Ryan saw the lead lights come to a halt about thirty yards shy of the ville. By their backscatter and the gradually brightening dawn, Ryan could make out the distinctive humped outlines of DPD’s V-100 Commando—their big armored vehicle, mounting their potent 7.62 mm M240 machine gun. Their other armored wags were a Lenco BearCat, basically an outsize, armored SUV, and two or three war wags improvised by bolting makeshift armor onto actual SUVs.
“This is Captain Morgan, Detroit Police Department SWAT,” an electronically amplified voice boomed out. “We’re taking over here. Start throwing your weps in the street, or you’re all gonna start getting thirsty about noon.”
“Ryan,” Krysty said, “this isn’t right.”
“No,” he replied. “It’s not. Let’s go.”
* * *
W
HEN THEY CAME
out of some ruins east of the ville, across the now wider and shallower gully, a bearded man dressed in the same sort of laborer’s clothes the chilled guards wore stood midway between the first hut and the sharply angled snout of the DPD armored car.
Ryan had to admit to himself that Mildred and Krysty had a point. He didn’t find it easy to envision the boss of a gang called the Jokers dressed like that. To say nothing of being barefoot, which he was, even if he’d gotten hauled out of a warm bed at the crack of sunup. And C-4.
“—have no choice,” he was saying sadly. Behind him glum men and women were bringing blasters, knives and even swords out of their shanties and placing them on the street. Not one of them was wearing a scrap of anything that looked like gang colors. They all looked like people who worked hard all the time, went to bed dog tired and woke up only somewhat less tired. The kids looking fearfully out the doors or windows of some of the improvised dwellings were skinny and ragged.
“But I ask that you treat us humanely,” the bearded man said. “As you see, we are complying with your demands.”
“As you can feel from the mud under your dirty bare feet,” Captain Morgan said in an overloud, bullying voice, “you don’t have a choice.”
He sat in the cupola on top of the Commando. He wore a helmet with built-in ear protection, and he seemed to be swaggering without even moving.
Ryan found himself striding openly from the ruins, right toward the riot-armored SWAT troopers debarking the two canvas-back trucks that sat behind the Commando. “What’s going on here?” Ryan demanded.
Morgan turned his way. In the half light Ryan saw teeth shown in a mirthless grin.
“So it’s our pet mercies,” Morgan said. “Well, you did a good job. You’ll be paid like we agreed. So why’re you hanging around here? We got this.”
“Mercies? We do what we have to when a blaster’s to our heads,” Ryan said through gritted teeth. He stopped. His friends had emerged from cover behind him and were coming up on both sides of him. “And just what have you got?”
Morgan laughed. “This ville.”
Black armored officers carrying truncheons trotted past the V-100 and the sad, bewildered, bearded man and into the ville. They began bullying the ville folk into gathering the weapons that had been placed on the ground.
A woman said something to a SWAT trooper. She didn’t seem heated or disrespectful, though she was too far away for Ryan to hear over the grumble of the now idling Commando. The black-armored man struck her backhanded across the face with his truncheon. She fell down like an empty sack.
Krysty uttered a little moan.
“Where are the Jokers?” Mildred asked. She sounded pissed. Ryan hoped she’d keep control of herself. He didn’t want to have to rein her in. He was having a hard enough time keeping his own temper in check. But he was well aware that if shit started, he and his friends would be the ones taken out.
“Jokers?” the spokesman said, clearly confused. “What about the Jokers? Their turf is west of here. They don’t mess with us.”
He straightened slightly.
“We’ve taught them better.”
“You can see these people have loads of weps,” Morgan said to Ryan. “Dangerous weps civilians shouldn’t be allowed to keep. And they’re way too ready to use them to defend this piss-pot ville and their fields. Fact is, they’ve put a scare up the actual gangs hereabouts.
“Not that they’d be more than a speed bump to us, with the wag and our SWAT boys. But we’re looking to own the ville and the labor. Not trash the one and chill the other.”
“So you had us take their water supply,” J.B. said.
“Hey—we’re benevolently gonna provide them water. So long as they know who’s in charge.”
“Why here and now?” Doc asked. “The whole city knows you are prepared for a final showdown with the Desolation Angels. How can this possibly serve Mayor Michaud’s ends?”
“Who said anything about Michaud?” Morgan said. “Hizzoner’s had his eye on expanding this way for a long time. But these yokels stood in the way. He promised me that if I could take the ville without wasting a lot of manpower and valuable gear, he’d give it to me as my very own personal fiefdom. For me to be baron over. Subject to the mayor, of course. So I reckoned I’d show some initiative, go ahead and grab the place before the balloon goes up, give my shock troops a little warm-up exercise. After you folks did the heavy lifting, of course.”
“That was what this was really about?” Ryan said in disbelief. “Making you a baron?”
“Of course. And it worked ace on the line. Which reminds me—”
He drew a handblaster from a shoulder rig strapped over his bulky body armor. It was a SIG Sauer P226 like Ryan’s.
“Since this ville has a new baron, there’s no need to keep you around anymore.”
That was said to the bearded spokesman. He looked up at Morgan, not understanding.
The captain shot him in the face.
“Now that’s not good,” J.B. stated.
“You lied to us,” Ryan said as the shot echoed down the hill. He didn’t say it loud. He didn’t have to.
Morgan just laughed. “Yeah, so I did. Rank hath its privileges and all that shit. I didn’t want you getting slack thinking you were going up against a bunch of helpless scrubby-ass ville rats. You mighta screwed up.”
“I don’t like being lied to,” Ryan said.
“Who gives a rat’s ass? You’re hired hands. Nothing more. Don’t start getting ahead of yourselves. Unless you want to be paid in lead, instead of jack.”
He shook his helmeted head.
“Walk away and I’ll just forget this little incident. I can see how you might feel trust hasn’t been a two-way street here. No reason to let that fuck up what’s been a real ace working relationship, though. Not if you don’t push it.”
Ryan stared at him a moment longer. Then he turned and started to walk down the road, away from the ville and the evil bastard into whose gauntleted hands he and his friends had just delivered it, gift wrapped.