LITMIR.BIZ

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that was part of the shrubs’ purpose. Glimpses through gaps suggested that south of the garden sheds lay a cultivated field, a block north to south and at least three blocks east-west. Then the perimeter turned mostly to the fronts of what seemed to have been houses and small businesses, their doors and ground-floor windows bricked up. Razor-wire coils spiraled along roof-lines. The streets between were blocked off by piles of big rubble chunks as well as the fence.

      “That’s a pretty fine defensive perimeter,” Ryan said. Talking was hard, but it took his mind off the ache in his shoulders and lower back from lugging J.B.’s deadweight.

      Tully chuckled. “Have to be triple-stupe not to be able to fortify out of the bones and guts of a dead city.”

      “That’s true.”

      They passed a still-intact church whose white spire showed flaking remains of paint bubbling from the nuke strike’s thermal flash on its north side. East of the street lay a wide expanse of grass, green but yellow-spotted from the acid rains. Farther along stood more ruins.

      From just ahead came a shout. Square three-story-tall towers made of different colored bricks flanked a wide street leading into the ville. The black snouts of longblasters poked out from underneath peaked roofs. A couple were trained right on Ryan and his little party.

      “Almost over, people,” Tully told Ryan and his friends.

      “We’re at the gates.”

      Chapter Seven

      The Soulardville gate was a stout, barred construction, topped with the ubiquitous razor-wire coils. It ran on a metal-lined track cut into the asphalt of the street.

      The gate opened with a squeal of bearings as runners ran down the track. Inside waited a quartet of men in armless black jerseys holding longblasters. Long wooden truncheons hung from their belts. Sec men, Ryan thought.

      The patrol headed inside. Big trees shaded the gate area, and Ryan was grateful for that.

      As their escorts spread out around them, calling greetings to bystanders, the one-eyed man took stock of their surroundings. The church to the right of the gate seemed to have been taken over as a sec-man headquarters, or at least station. To the left lay an open area, with tables under canopies: a market or trading station, mildly busy today, with men unloading goods to a table from a light wooden land wag while others admired heaps of produce.

      McCoy approached them, leading a stocky woman wearing overalls, with a gray braid wound around her head. Right behind came a wooden cart with steel-tired wood wheels. As the sec men covered the captives with their blasters, the woman bustled up.

      “I’m Strode, the ville healer,” she said. “We’ll take over from here.”

      The bevy of assistants who had pushed the cart trotted around to ease J.B.’s limp form away from Ryan and his friends. Predictably, Mildred bridled.

      “What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice rasped from dryness in her throat; she hadn’t been following her own advice about keeping hydrated while carrying her wounded lover.

      The Armorer had already been laid on a pad on the bed of the cart. Strode leaned over him. “Hmm,” she said. “Competent job of field dressing.”

      “‘Competent’!”

      Strode looked up directly at the twentieth-century physician. “You did well by your friend, given the circumstances,” she said firmly. “We have him now. We’ve got a clean infirmary and scavenged meds as well as herbs.”

      “Herbs!” Mildred sounded as outraged as if the gray-haired, red-faced woman had suggested using vodoun.

      For a moment electricity seemed to crackle between the two female healers. Strode fixed Mildred with a piercing blue gaze. Mildred tensed as if about to go for the older woman’s throat.

      Krysty laid a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “Mildred,” she said gently, “let it go. We’re not completely ignorant savages. This woman obviously knows what she’s doing.”

      Mildred set her strong jaw rebelliously. A pair of sec men stepped up to bar her way as Strode gestured. The acolytes set off both pulling and pushing the cart at a trot down the broad street that led into the fortified ville. The healer walked alongside at a brisk pace.

      Tears welled in Mildred’s eyes then coursed down her cheeks.

      They were still hemmed in by a combination of their original captors and sec men, who weren’t exactly wearing uniforms but all seemed to wear mostly black. Some of the men were relieving the patrol of their weapons and toting them into the old church. The patrol members surrendered their blasters and crossbows without protest.

      Interesting, Ryan thought.

      Krysty met his eye over Mildred’s shoulder, gave him a quick smile and nod to show she was doing fine. He doubted that. But it was part of the reason he loved her: her fortitude and courage were the equal of any man’s he’d known. She’d keep going and do what needed to be done until her strength failed her. Her heart never would.

      A pair of sec men pointed their blasters—an M-16 and a Remington pump scattergun—at Ryan as he reached to his belt. With a sardonic smile on his chapped lips, he saluted them with his canteen, then took a long drink. The water was hot and brackish but refreshed him.

      Doc had plopped himself down on his butt on the blacktop in the shade of a sycamore and sat with his knees wide apart and his sword stick beside him. Jak squatted beside him and panted like a wolf. Their captors had relieved him of the throwing knives with which he festooned himself, but Ryan would’ve bet his last swig of water the albino youth had a couple holdouts hidden on him. Again, it wasn’t likely to help much, especially with J.B. trundled off to his friends had no idea where, but completely in the power of their captors. Even if they could break out, they weren’t going to do so without the Armorer.

      “We don’t want to rush into anything anyway,” Krysty said to him. Ryan jerked slightly. As often the case, the full-bodied redhead seemed to be reading his mind. “We don’t know what’s here.”

      “They could have treated us far worse, to be sure,” Doc said, taking a swig from his own canteen and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

      “Yeah,” Ryan said. “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

      Patrol leader Tully, now disarmed, stood to one side talking with a man a finger shorter than his own gangly height. The man wore a black vest open over a bare chest deep-tanned as leather, beneath a thick pelt of red-brown hair, black jeans over black boots, a gunbelt with a Ruger Security Six .357 Magnum in good condition at his left hip. He had a long deeply seamed face as tan as his chest, with a well-broken nose. Close-clipped reddish-brown hair was in full retreat from a freckled forehead. Mild-seeming brown eyes looked out from beneath eyebrows like smears of black paint. He wasn’t so much wider than Tully, as he just seemed more solid.

      A chiller for true, Ryan thought.

      Tully walked over with the black-clad man beside him. “This is Garrison,” he told Ryan. “He’s sec chief for Soulardville.”

      Neither party to the introduction offered to shake hands. “Get your people together and follow me,” Garrison said.

      His voice was quiet but not soft. Neither his tone nor the sec boss’s posture threatened. Ryan sized the man up as the kind who wouldn’t bother with threats. Seen up close, he looked as unyielding and hard as a cypress knee.

      Ryan nodded. No point butting heads when he’d only lose. “Let’s go,” he told the others.

      “Where?” Jak asked. He showed no sign of standing.

      “Where I take you,” Garrison said. His tone remained matter-of-fact. The look he gave the albino youth was another matter altogether.

      One time during his road-dog days with Trader, Ryan had seen an Ozark mule skinner give a chronically balky mule that

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