LITMIR.BIZ

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      “There,” he said, pointing at a small fourwing saltbush sprouting right on the verge of the empty streambed.

      Ryan, still unwilling to move forward and risk disturbing tracks that he couldn’t see but Jak perhaps could, hunkered down and looked hard at the bush.

      “What is it?” he asked.

      “Blood,” Jak said. “Fresh. Still shiny.”

      Then Ryan saw it: a few dark patches spattered on the branches and skinny little leaves. He could just make it out by a glint of starlight.

      “Some there.” Jak pointed to the grass across the bed. “Drops fell there.”

      He pointed at three randomly spaced depressions in the sand. They were smaller than even baby ant-lion larva traps. The albino’s red eyes hadn’t missed them—they didn’t miss much—but he had dismissed them as insignificant. Before he recognized blood spill.

      “Tiger blood?” Mildred asked.

      It was her turn to be on the receiving end of Jak’s furrowed-brow, tight-lipped glare.

      “We don’t have any way to know,” Krysty said, compassionately throwing herself on that hand grenade of pointing out the obvious for the sake of her best friend. “Seems like the best bet, though, doesn’t it?”

      “Could it be from a kill?” Ricky asked.

      Ryan grunted. “Could be.” He tended to take the kid for granted, even though he had proved his value to the group by saving everybody’s life several times over. It occurred to Ryan that he was the last stray orphan they’d come across. Before the strange girl.

      Doesn’t mean I’m not dropping her off at the next ville, he told himself sternly.

      “That’s a possibility, too,” he said. “But we need a clean sweep of the area to make sure the bastard’s gone. All together, vee formation. Me on point, Jak scouting up ahead so he won’t pout.”

      “And when we’re done, double watches the rest of the night.”

      Mildred scoffed.

      “Ryan,” she said, “after something like this, do you honestly expect any of us will sleep?”

Chapter Seven

      “Did you see the way I counted coup on that bastard coldheart?” Hammerhand was pumped and strutting back and forth between a pair of pickups parked twenty feet apart with their noses facing each other at the rendezvous spot. “I broke his nuking neck. Bang! Like that.”

      “Yeah, yeah,” Mindy Farseer, leaning against the other truck, said. She had boosted it and driven to this low mesa several miles from the Buffalo Mob’s camp. Two other stolen wags were already parked a little farther off. A fifth was just pulling up, a big cargo wag, well loaded from the way it rode low on its suspension. “We saw it, Randy Macho Savage.”

      “Uh, it was ‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage,” Joe Takes-Blasters said as he got out of the newly arrived wag and started walking over. He was literal minded and had a fondness for predark professional wrestling. He had the tattered remains of several wrestling magazines in his pack.

      “I meant what I said. Like I always do.”

      Hammerhand showed Mindy his teeth. “You could keep in mind the ‘Macho’ part and do something about the ‘Randy.’”

      His lieutenant gave him the finger. “In your dreams.”

      She was the only one who could get away with that. Just as she was the only one who could get away with calling him a “savage.” He knew she’d never put out for him, which was a slagging shame because she was a thermonuke fox. But he had to give her shit about it.

      That sort of thing could not be permitted to flow only one way.

      The other Blood raiders were acting more visibly excited, dancing in circles, whooping and high-fiving. Hammerhand joyously joined them.

      “How many more did we get away with?” Mindy asked Joe, louder than necessary and looking at Hammerhand. A couple more wags were just pulling in.

      “Not more than half,” Joe said. “Somebody blew our shit up.”

      “Us or them?” Hammerhand asked, suddenly interested in how it had happened.

      Joe shook his head.

      “I don’t know yet. But I hope we get more skinny when the others get here.”

      “If they get here,” Mindy added darkly.

      But as she spoke, several more wags arrived.

      “We’re it,” said a woman named Steeltongue, jumping from the bed of a Dodge Ram with several other raiders. It wasn’t exactly a traditional First Nation name, but the Bloods were all about the present. Anyway, not even Hammerhand’s home tribe, nor the rest of the Blackfoot Confederacy, really stuck to their own ancient traditions, and they hadn’t for generations.

      “That’s, what, ten wags?” Joe said.

      “Outstanding,” Hammerhand stated.

      “Not quite half,” Mindy said sourly.

      Hammerhand shrugged. “Everybody accounted for?”

      “We lost Cody Blackfeather,” said Lou Shine, a lanky, dark-skinned man with long, tightly curled hair.

      “How did it go down?” Hammerhand asked.

      “That’s what blew up the surprise,” Lou said. “Cody ran smack into pair of coldhearts slipping off to get it on in the bed of a pickup. Dude gave a warning shout before Cody blasted him. Then the woman gave him both barrels of a sawed-off in the gut.”

      “Ouch,” Joe said.

      “Where’s Cody, then?” Mindy asked.

      “He killed himself,” Lou told them.

      “Ace,” Hammerhand said. “He acted right. Like a Blood warrior!”

      Mindy wasn’t so sure. “If you say so.”

      Along with the ten wags, it turned out they’d come back with six longblasters, three full-auto—including the M16 Hammerhand had liberated himself—and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, all in good shape. The Buffalo Mob apparently tended to their weapons as scrupulously as they tended to their wags.

      That to Hammerhand justified his choice to move by the stealth route on this attack. He had wanted to rack up an easy strike, low casualty, for his own budding tribe, to build morale, esprit de corps, and reputation—though mostly he was concerned about the wags themselves not getting shot up.

      Warriors, he could replace. Even good ones. Wags, not so much.

      “This is ace on the line,” he said, walking back and forth amid his people and rubbing his hands in unaffected glee. “We win. We win!”

      “But they’ve still got eleven power wags,” Mindy pointed out. “And a mess of blasters.”

      “Why, then, we’ll just have to get our shit together and go back and grab the rest of the wags, won’t we?” he asked with big grin.

      “How?”

      “Strategy,” he said. His grin widened. “You’re good at that, right?”

      She frowned, then she nodded.

      “Reckon so.”

      “Ace. Then let’s saddle up and get back to camp. Reckon the rest of the Buffalo Mob is swarming out looking for us, hot past nuke red, like yellow jackets from a dug-open nest. Plus we got us a lot of celebrating to do. And we have to sing Cody Blackfeather’s spirit safely to the Other Side.”

      He pumped the M16

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