LITMIR.BIZ

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boy was terrified, Krysty Wroth realized. But not of us.

      “Go fetch your sec chief,” the redhead demanded, her long hair moving gently around her shoulders as if stirred by secret winds.

      There was a bloody bandage on her left cheek and another on her wrist from the recent fighting down in Two-Son. The woman was riding a roan-colored mare. A bearskin coat hung across the saddlebags. A predark MP-5 rapidfire was draped across the pommel of the saddle, and a weird-looking wheelgun rode in a leather holster at her shapely hip. The cowboy boots in the stirrups were decorated with the silver embroidery of falcons, and the toes were steel, although at the present the metal was caked with gray dust.

      The guard frowned at the sight. The redhead was better armed than any sec man. The loops of her gunbelt were filled with live brass, more than the teen had seen in his entire life.

      “Ain’t got a chief. He’s…” The teen shut his mouth tightly and hunched his shoulders.

      “He was one of the people killed—excuse me—chilled, by the strangers,” Doc Tanner rumbled. “Thank you, that explains everything.”

      Dressed as if from another century, Doc was in frilly white shirt, with a frock coat that spread behind him across the horse like an opera cape. A mixed pair of big-bore handblasters rode in a gunbelt made of closed ammo pouches, and an ebony walking stick with a silver lion’s-head handle jutted from his backpack like a tribal totem.

      “By the Three Kennedys, sir,” Doc said, turning to address Ryan, “we must be hot on the trail of the coldhearts if the locals haven’t even replaced their sec chief yet!”

      “That’s an ace on the line,” Ryan drawled, rubbing his unshaven chin. Surreptitiously, he shifted the reins from his left hand to his right. The one-eyed man was naturally right-handed, but he’d been hurt in a fight a short while ago and his shooting arm wasn’t completely healed yet.

      Just then, the blaster hatches closed and there came the sound of heavy bolts being slid aside. With creaking hinges, the thick gate was pushed open and five armed sec men walked out of the ville, the ground crunching under their boots. As the portal closed again, Ryan and the others saw a dozen more men inside the ville, positioned behind a sandbag wall, working the bolts on longblasters and notching arrows into homie crossbows. These people were ready for a war.

      “Guess I’m the new chief sec man,” the oldest man stated gruffly, hitching up a gunbelt. He was dressed in ragged clothing, his predark motorcycle boots patched with duct tape, but his blasters shone with fresh oil. “And yeah, Baron Harrison was aced, along with Chief Rajavur.”

      “You guess?” Mildred Wyeth asked, brushing a plait of beaded hair back off her dusty face. Riding an appaloosa mare, the physician was armed with an MP-5 rapidfire and a wheelgun rested in her belt. At her side hung a predark canvas bag.

      Touching a freshly stitched scar on his chest, the sec chief shrugged. “Ain’t nobody alive to tell me no,” he stated honestly.

      “Who aced baron?” Jak Lauren asked, leaning forward in his saddle. The palomino mare under the albino teen obediently altered her stance to accommodate his new position, and snorted softly with impatience.

      The albino teenager riding the beast had a huge handblaster in his gunbelt and an MP-5 rapidfire in the longblaster holster set alongside the saddle.

      The chief sec man shrugged. “Damned if we know who aced him.”

      “Where are the bodies, then?” Ryan demanded, glancing up at the clouds overhead. He carefully noted that none of the stars was being eclipsed by anybody walking along the top of the wall around the ville. Good. The locals weren’t friendly, but neither were they trying to jack the companions.

      “Hell’s bells, just follow the birds, you can’t miss them,” a sec man growled. A couple the armed men standing behind him nodded in agreement.

      “Nuking hell, it was awful, like something from a nightmare!” the young guard muttered, shaking his head as if trying to dislodge the memories of the sight.

      “Shut up,” the sec chief barked at the lad. Then he turned to face the companions. “All right, rist, you asked some questions and got some answers. Normally, we’re always interested in trading, even better is getting news from across the Zone, but not tonight. Now get moving, or we start blasting.”

      In the flickering light of the torches, Ryan saw more blaster hatches swing open, and realized the new sec chief meant every word. There was nothing more to learn here. The answers they sought were back in the desert. Follow the birds, eh?

      “Let’s go,” Ryan ordered, shaking the reins and starting his mount into a slow walk. The rest of the companions were close behind.

      “Friendly folks,” J.B. commented as the companions rode away. Judiciously, the Armorer eased off the safety of the 9 mm Uzi in his lap. “Never seen people so rattled before. So their sec chief got himself aced. Big deal. That’s no reason for the whole ville to go triple red.”

      Squinting into the distance, Ryan saw a flock of birds circling a distant hill. Smoke was rising from a small campfire, but that was all he could see from this angle.

      “Let’s go see if there was a reason,” he growled, kicking his mount into a full gallop.

      Chapter Two

      A couple hundred miles away, a pale man walked slowly through the cold rubble of the burned-down building. He was tall and slim, almost skeletal, his face so smooth that it seemed as if the man had never needed to shave. His blond hair was slicked back tightly to his head and a tiny silver stud twinkled in his left earlobe. His pants and vest, more practical than the robe he usually wore, were cream-colored, spotless and perfect. Not even the dust raised by his walking through the ash seemed able to adhere to the odd fabric. Instead of boots, he wore sliver slippers, the woven material strangely luminescent. But even more bizarre was the fact that the man carried no visible wep of any kind. No blaster, ax, crossbow, knife or even a simple club.

      In utter horror, Delphi stared at the decomposing bodies of the men and the muties mingling together on the ground, bits of white bone and golden brass glittering from the gray ashes like broken promises.

      “Dead, they’re all dead,” Delphi whispered, gently kicking aside the distorted skull of a stickie. The operative of Department Coldfire couldn’t believe his eyes. This was impossible!

      Moving listlessly among the wreckage, Delphi found more and more of the bodies everywhere, the death toll incredible, and every one of the muties had been shot through the head, even when there was only a head remaining with no torso attached. The surviving sec men had shot the dead stickies, just to make sure the muties really were deceased. That was ruthless efficiency he could appreciate. In spite of all his arduous work, and endless planning, slaving over every little detail, the hidden nest of stickies in Two-Son had been utterly destroyed in a single night. One night! Then the locals had done everything but sow salt into the land to make sure the stickies would never return.

      “My precious little ones,” Delphi moaned, bending to pick up the blackened skull of a stickie. A cooked eye fell out as Delphi raised the skull high in his palm, wondering if he had known this particular mutant. Then Delphi had a sudden flash in his mind of Hamlet doing the exact same thing, and he cast the grisly remnant aside. It sailed across the smoky destruction to crash against the side of a marble staircase that rose high into the empty air and abruptly ended at nothing. The smashed bones went flying everywhere.

      Bowing his head, Delphi tightened his fists, attempting to control his growling rage over the slaughter. How long he held that position, Delphi had no idea, but his somber reverie was disrupted at sound of hooves beating on sand.

      Quickly looking up, Delphi scanned the nearby predark city until locating a man on a horse coming this way through the crumbling ruins.

      “Hey, rist!” the rider called, tightening his grip on the reins and bringing the stallion to

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