“And that is?”
She shrugged. “You remind me of someone. We were happy once. But he was like you. The only thing that mattered was what he did for the baron. Took up all his time, all his attention. Truth is that after a while I might as well have not been there.”
“That’s hard to believe,” J.B. said softly.
“Yeah, you say that now. But it’ll come down to that in the end. It always does.”
“So what does he do that keeps him away from you?”
“Aw, hon, we don’t want to talk about that,” she said gently, squeezing him under the sheet. “We got better things to do.”
HE CONTINUED TO SEE her every day. Before Laurel, his life had been orderly. Work was everything. And since they had been in Hollowstar, his friendship with Luke had been equally as important. But now he found himself juggling time that he didn’t have. He still wanted to get the work done, and spend time with the taciturn weapons master of the ville. Then again, he burned every time he thought of Laurel. Moreover, he had to keep his liaison with her secret. So he had to act normally and not call attention to himself while making time for her.
J. B. Dix was not a naturally devious man. It took Hunn no time at all to spot that something was amiss.
“Your trouble, John Barrymore, is that you’re incapable of lying,” she told him. And, when he demurred, she qualified, “Okay, so mebbe if it was life or death you could do it, and if it was a one-off. But a sustained lie is a harder thing to keep going. Sneaking around just isn’t you. Me?
I dunno if I could do it, either. But I don’t put myself in that position. And you have. And man, do you suck at it.”
It made him a little more wary, but it did nothing to deter him. He was willing to take any amount of risks for her in a way that he had never considered before. J. B. Dix was a man who had weighed the odds on everything, and had never put himself or others at risk unless it was strictly necessary. Hunn had been telling him that this was now exactly what he was doing. The bizarre thing—the thing that he found it the hardest to assimilate in so many ways—was that the liberation it gave him to be acting in this way was more exhilarating that anything he had ever known.
Which was dangerous. It made him careless.
He would go about his everyday business as though in a trance. Things got done; conversations were held; the world of Hollowstar passed by his eyes. But it was all flat, in black and white. Even the heated conversations with Luke over the qualities of blasters and explosives no longer held the sparkle and fire that they had on the first meeting.
Despite that, even J.B. was living enough in the real world to realize that it wasn’t one-sided. After they had been standing side by side in silence for some time, J.B. watching Luke reconvert a recovered MP-5 from gas to real ordnance, the Armorer decided to broach new territory.
“You’re quiet.”
“I’m always quiet. It’s what I’m known for.”
“Yeah, but that’s with those stupes who know nothing about ordnance. Never heard you this quiet since I got here.”
Luke shrugged. “Mebbe I’ve got things on my mind.”
“Things that have nothing to do with blasters?”
“Life would be simpler if there was nothing but that. But there isn’t. That’s where it gets difficult.”
J.B., thinking of his recent complex life, could only agree. But he said nothing of this, only, “Any shit you want to talk about?”
Luke looked at him, puzzled. “J.B., do I strike you as the kind that likes to share shit?”
The Armorer shook his head. “No, but it’s what people are supposed to ask their friends, right?”
Luke’s face creased into something between a smile and a frown. “Appreciate that. But it don’t do no good. Not in the long run. Only action counts.”
“Guess you’re right there,” J.B. replied at length.
The two men lapsed into silence once more, with Luke working assiduously, until J.B. checked his wrist chron.
“Shit—Trader wanted me, and I’m late.”
“Never keep the boss man waiting, J.B. I’ll be seeing you,” Luke murmured without looking up.
J.B. nodded—to himself as Luke was still looking down—and made his way out of the workshop, past the cluster of old guys who were still in the storefront, playing cards in a concentrated silence.
When he got out onto the covered sidewalk, he didn’t turn and head for the area where Trader’s convoy was sequestered. He turned the opposite way, and set off for the far end of the ville. Between the goods spilling out of the storefronts, and the cluster of people going about their business, he saw her. She was standing at the farthest reach of the covered sidewalk, and it seemed to him that the crowds parted so that he could see her. Her hair blew out
behind her in the breeze, dark curls tossed in the currents. A flicker of a smile played across her full lips, and her dark eyes met his with a playful sparkle.
It didn’t look exactly like that to the two people who were watching J.B. as he headed toward her. What they saw was more prosaic—Laurel leaning against a stanchion, pushing the hair from her eyes as the breeze blew it across her face, a pout on her face at not looking her best as her current squeeze hurried toward her. They saw J.B. push past people, step over goods and produce, without seeming to even notice they were there. Nothing could stay him from his destination; indeed, he seemed to speed up as he approached her.
The watchers saw him lean into her, as if to kiss her. They saw her pull back and mouth something—“not here,” words to that effect, it was hard to lip-read at such a distance—and then pull him down a side street on the way to wherever their assignation was to be on this day.
J.B. thought he was being discreet. He was anything but. And the woman? Who knew what was going through Laurel’s head, but for one of the watchers it was obvious that this wasn’t the first time she had done this. Was the other watcher aware of that, also?
The two of them remained in position for some moments after J.B. and Laurel had gone. One watcher still had their attention fixed on the empty space where the Armorer and the woman had been but a short while before. The other had switched attention from J.B. to their counterpart. Reactions would be paramount, the second watcher figured.
Luke sighed, wiped his hands on his oily apron, shook
his head and turned back to his storefront. He took a step toward the door, then paused and looked back toward his last point of observation. He paused, his face stoic and impossible to read, before seeming to make a decision, and taking a step into the shadows of the storefront, melting out of sight.
Hunn watched him go. Then she looked back to where she had seen J.B. under the spell of the woman from the bar. A few questions over the preceding days had soon settled what had been bothering her, and she had been watching the Armorer of her own volition. Now she whistled softly to herself.
“Aw fuck. If I had a fan, man, would I be throwing shit at it right now….”
Chapter Eleven
The Present
Even before the twilight had closed upon them any further, the convoy had regrouped and set on its way once more. The bikes were secured, one each, to the back of the second wag and the one that brought up the rear. For reasons of space, LaGuerre informed them, it would be necessary for the two riders to be split up. So Ryan was deputed to travel with Doc in the rear wag, while Jak had to travel with Cody and the crew of the second wag. It struck Ryan that LaGuerre’s tactic was to split the two of them so that no wag contained more than two of the friends. He’d obviously decided that to separate the two riders was his best option here.
He’d got it wrong on two counts. First, he’d underestimated Doc. He appeared to figure that Tanner was just an old crazie, so it didn’t matter if one of them was in a wag with him. And it was true. There were times when Doc lost it, and really was as mad as he appeared. But only those who had stood shoulder to shoulder with Doc in time of adversity would realize the mettle of the man who lay hidden beneath a sometimes fragile state.
Second mistake—putting Ryan in with Doc, instead of
Jak. The one-eyed man wasn’t certain, but he was assuming that LaGuerre assessed Jak as a greater threat, even though he wasn’t the nominal leader. Okay, he was right in that, as Jak was a chilling machine. But Jak, even though he and Doc had a relationship that was built on the surprising comradeship that diversity could bring, was not a talker. Ryan was. Doc certainly was. Even under the listening ears of Raven and Ramona, it was possible for the two of them to discuss their situation. Albeit in an elliptic manner. It was something Jak would have found impossible, as he had little time for such language skills.
So, obviously LaGuerre liked to think of himself as a schemer and thinker. Trouble for him was that he wasn’t as smart as he would have liked to think. Double trouble for him was that he assumed Raven and Ramona would keep their ears open. He liked to think his crew was as sharp and devious as himself.
Another misjudgment, as Ryan found out within a short time of being aboard their wag. Shortly after the convoy began to roll, the one-eyed man crashed out on the bunk, exhausted by his time on the bike. But his rest was disturbed, either by the adrenaline coursing through his veins that had kept him from nodding out on the blacktop, or else from the noise within the wag, which seemed to be only marginally quieter than when he was in its wake.
He opened his eye to find Ramona staring down at him. Her face loomed at him, a tight smile on her lips. Her eyes were dark and brown, drinking him in. Her hair, long and ringleted despite its close consistency to Mildred’s plaits, was unnaturally stiff around her head. Altogether, it gave her something of a predatory air.
“It’s okay, sugar,” she said sibilantly, catching his off-guard look of surprise, “I wasn’t gonna bite. Not unless you want me to.”
“Ramona, leave the poor man alone. He ain’t gonna be no good to you unless he’s had some rest,” Raven called from the driver’s seat.
“Yeah, and you telling me that you wouldn’t be doing exactly the same thing if you wasn’t sitting where I am?” Ramona countered, without taking her eyes from Ryan’s face.
“That ain’t the point, babe,” Raven answered, laughing so hard that she began to cough, her voice rasping.
Ryan, still partly in the throes of a disturbed sleep, was having some trouble assimilating what the two women meant. That wasn’t helped when Doc’s face loomed into vision. The old man’s smile was strong and brilliant, his eyes sparkling. His words held an undertone that, even in his still befuddled state, Ryan was able to grasp.
“You must excuse Ramona, and indeed Raven, my dear Ryan. They mean no harm, but I fear that being so long on the road with little in the way of male company to keep them warm on a long, cold night has made them a little overkeen to assess any passing male as though he were little more than prey. They are, perhaps, the sexual equivalent of Jak when he wishes to hunt. We can only hope that such dedication to the pursuit of the priapic does not deter or distract them from their other tasks.”
At this last, the old man’s eyes seemed to sparkle even more brightly, and Ryan caught his meaning. The women’s almost single-minded devotion to the sexual would blind them to anything else discussed, as long as it was approached in an elliptic manner.
Ryan decided to test the waters.
“Lady, you’re wasting your time looking at me like that. The way I feel now, I couldn’t raise it with the best gaudy on the western seaboard. Besides, I may be needed for other things.”
Ramona looked him up and down, her tongue flicking over her lips—consciously or not, he couldn’t tell.
“Honey,” she said huskily, “there ain’t much else I’d think was worth wasting you on.”
“But I’m supposed to be running sec,” Ryan replied, “so I’m going to need all the rest and all the strength I can.”
Ramona shook her head, a laugh escaping her lips. “Honey, running sec for Armand is a shortcut to getting chilled. Make the most of things while you can.”
“What do you mean?” the one-eyed man asked, propping himself up on one elbow and deciding that it was time to eschew the oblique and go for the direct approach.
“This is a run to nowhere, sugar. Some shithouse place called Jenningsville offered Armand big jack to do a run that no one else will go near. A run that we needed specialist equipment for. A run that means there are several other traders who want his ass in a sling. A run that saw most of our old sec buying the farm before we even started out. A straight run across land that most convoys would think more than twice before starting. Honey, you think any of us really has any chance of getting across here in one piece? Especially when the pack come calling?”
Ryan took this in. The woman was certainly less than guarded, and her words confirmed his earlier suspicions about LaGuerre’s methods of obtaining the refrigerated wags, and the true manner in which his convoy had been reduced.
Doc was looking over her shoulder. His expression confirmed for Ryan that he had been right in his assumptions. But overriding all was something that Ramona had said at the end of her litany.
“What the fuck is the pack?” Ryan asked. “And why the fuck is it going to be so triple bad?”
Ramona sucked in her breath. “Uh-huh. So Armand never said anything about that, eh?” The look on Ryan’s face confirmed this for her. She continued. “Shithead probably thought you wouldn’t join up if you knew. How can you be good sec if you don’t know what’s ahead, though?”
“Fireblast and fuck. I’m glad you can see that, even if LaGuerre can’t,” Ryan murmured, his voice heavy with irony.
He was about to ask once more about “the pack,” but something else superseded the need to know.
C ODY COULDN’T WORK OUT Jak, try as he might. The thin, cynical convoy man thought he had seen everything since he had traveled with LaGuerre. The albino youth who lay sleeping on the bunk in the wag was something new to him. Jak had taken to being thrust upon Cody and his crew with ill-disguised bad grace.
“Tired. Let me sleep or regret,” was all he had said when Cody had tried to introduce the albino to the other two members of the wag crew. Jed was the driver at present, a tall, bulky man whose muscle was turning to fat, and who spilled over the edges of the driving seat as he was beginning to spill out of his clothes. His gray hair was cropped close to his head, and the road map of scars on his skull from numerous fights shone through. Raf, who was off-
duty and who had been sleeping in the bunk, was taller and rangier, his coal-black skin highlighted by pink combat scars, a shock of white in the black forest of dreads that tumbled down his shoulders giving him an immediately recognizable mien. Neither man looked like the type of road warrior that you would wish to antagonize—indeed, Cody had known them long enough to recognize that they were both more dangerous than even their looks would suggest—and yet the albino had ignored their presence as though they weren’t even there.
Cody had figured that Jak was fearless, either from stupidity or because he knew that he could outfight anyone. On balance, Cody reckoned it was the latter, if only from the way that Raf seemed to sense the coiled spring of Jak’s aggression, and had gladly given up the bunk to the exhausted albino, despite that fact that Jak seemed to be only half the size of the dreadlocked giant.
Jak had fallen asleep almost as soon as his head had hit the bunk, exhaustion seeming to claim him. There was much that Cody wanted to ask him, as much to satisfy his own curiosity as to dig for the nuggets of information he knew LaGuerre would expect him to mine. The convoy man had dropped in the pecking order since Eula had joined, and like most of the others in the convoy he found her attitude and the seeming fascination that she held for LaGuerre divisive to a degree that could easily become dangerous. Since her arrival, there seemed to be an agenda that LaGuerre kept from the rest of the wag crews. It was the cause of a slow but sure growth of discontent. Cody knew from his own experience on convoys he had served before joining LaGuerre how poisonous and ultimately
destructive this could be. He didn’t want it all turning to shit while they were stuck in the middle of this dustbowl hell, where there was no way out. And he figured that the albino and the people he traveled with held the key to what was really on LaGuerre’s mind. Maybe he was wrong, but when he thought about how much that Eula had wanted these coldhearts to join them, he couldn’t help but see it any other way.
So he wanted to question Jak. In truth, he wanted to reach across and shake the albino awake.
What was stopping him? The fact that Jed and Raf had deferred to Jak. The fact that, even in the depths of slumber, the small frame held a menace that made him think more than twice. And the fact that, even in that brief period that he had been conscious, Jak had seemed to be a long way from being the talkative type.
So Cody sat and watched as the skies darkened to night and the convoy rolled on, wondering what would happen when Jak awoke. Would he then get the chance to probe? Or would he find Jak an immovable force?
ALTHOUGH J AK WAS STILL and silent on the bunk, inside his head the dreams and nightmares raged. Things that had happened to him in recent times were always merged with the one thing that still haunted him—the chilling of his wife and daughter. Even though he had hunted down the coldhearts who had perpetrated the deed and made them pay at length before they, too, bought the farm, still his family came back to accuse him every time he closed his eyes. Why wasn’t he at the ranch when the coldhearts showed up? Jak, the great hunter, the great protector, had failed in his task.
Now they were being pursued by wags like those he and Ryan had engaged with just a few hours before. They were running across the hardpacked ground, his wife almost dragging the crying child in her haste to remove her from danger. The wags toyed with them, circling, coming in close to taunt and tease before pulling away again. The men in the wags leered and laughed, their faces twisted from human into grotesque mutie shapes that echoed animals.
And where was he when this was happening? Nowhere and everywhere. He could see what was happening from every angle, could see the expressions of fear and of cruel relish; could see from close or from far away. Yet despite this he could take no action, as if there was a wall between him and what was going on.
Finally, his wife could run no longer. Her ankle caught on a rut in the hardened dirt, she tumbled and fell, dragging the child with her. The circle of wags closed in on her.
And then they were no longer wags. The metal twisted and distorted like the faces, becoming flesh-covered in hide that was dark, short fur pockmarked by open sores. Faces and heads became completely animal, with dark eyes the color of congealed blood. Exultant voices yelping human glee and lust became coarsened even more, turning from words to incoherent yowls and barks of bloodlust and hunger.
Skeletal mutie cattle and dogs, what little muscle there was clearly visible beneath almost translucently thin hide, heads raised in victory cries before those heads were lowered to feast with wet, tearing sounds as flesh was rendered from bone. Heads raised again, jaws dripping with fresh blood. The barks and yowls almost—but not quite—loud
enough to hide the sounds of crying and squealing pain from the two carcasses of skin and bone that had once been human, and were now nothing more than sentient feed for the creatures that revelled in their pain.
There was something in this nightmare that was different to those that had come before. Something that, deep within the parts of Jak’s unconscious that were tortured every day by his perceived failure to protect his family, began to make those nerve-endings that were powered by his instinct begin to twitch.
“S HIT!” C ODY ALMOST FELL off his chair. He had been leaning over the albino, studying him hard as though the inert form would somehow yield clues as to the man. Jak had been so still, breathing so shallowly, as to be almost lifeless. The last thing the convoy man had expected was for the white face to twitch violently, the road map of pale scars writhing, as the albino’s bright red eyes opened and fixed him with a stare that seemed to go right through him.
Cody’s heart pounded as he leaned back, his hand involuntarily going for his blaster. He wasn’t even aware of his instinct to draw and fire until he felt Raf’s hand on his.