had a name, there was no one left alive to reveal it. What had been done there made the hellscape’s standard inbred chillers, coldheart robbers and insane barons seem like dimmies playing in a very small sandbox.
This wasn’t like the legendary massacre at Virtue Lake, where it was said even the flies on the dog shit were dead. Despite the campfire tales that painted Trader and his cohorts, Ryan Cawdor included, as senseless, murdering monsters, Virtue Lake had no perpetrators, only victims; it was the result of an unfortunate coalescence of events. A bad hand of cards.
The luck of the draw had nothing to do with what had happened high on the mountain. Beyond excessive, as pointless as a cataclysmic act of nature, it bore the unmistakable signature of its creator. The companions had not only viewed this grandiose handiwork before, they had almost been made part of it more than once. There was just one such artist in all the hellscape—an artist who mimicked a wrathful, mindless god.
Magus.
Ryan coasted the bike down the side of a shallow gully, then powered over the soft sand of the wash, building speed to climb the opposite bank. Krysty’s arms tightened around his waist as the bike went momentarily airborne, crow-hopping over the lip.
The suffering of the innocent and the weak in Deathlands was a given, as were the angry forces of nature unleashed by the apocalypse more than a century before. Drought, pestilence, fire, earthquake, eruption, storm, flood, famine were things the companions were powerless in the face of. But the cyclone that was Magus, that cut a path of destruction and horror across the Deathlands, could be halted with bullet and blade, and for the sake of their own continued survival, had to be stopped.
They had fought Steel Eyes before, never losing but never completely winning, either. The monster always seemed to find a way to slip from their grasp at the last second, leaving a stalemate and the threat of doom still hanging over their heads. What they were about to do this night, they were doing for themselves. Avenging the slaughter of the helpless, and the misery left in its wake, was the icing on the cake.
Despite the kerchief covering his lower face, grit crunched between Ryan’s back molars. He would have spit it out, but he was already losing too much moisture. Sweat peeled down the sides of his face, down his spine and rib cage. The bike wasn’t moving fast enough to cool him down. Riding in slow motion, with the taste of mud in his mouth, time dragged on and the exertion was constant. The convoy’s dust cloud was too far away to see; besides, he had to focus on what was directly in front of him. Strain built up in his arms and lower back, even in his fingers, as they gripped the handlebars and feathered throttle and brakes.
Gradually, the eastern hills grew larger until they towered above. The chain of peaks was about four hundred feet high, with saddles between the rounded summits. They were glowing an even warmer shade of red as the sun began to set. When Ryan glanced down at the fuel gauge, the needle was bouncing on empty. If he was running on fumes, they were all running on fumes.
A dirt bike appeared out of the heat waves in the near distance, coming toward them at a leisurely pace, Ryan signaled for the others to stop and shut down their bikes at once. By the time the albino rode up, they had dismounted and were stretching out sore muscles.
“Well?” Ryan said as Jak dumped his bike onto the sand.
“Stopped base of hill, mile ahead. Circled wags, make camp.”
“We’ll hide the bikes here and go the rest of the way on foot,” Ryan said. “We’ve got to take control of the high ground above them. Me and Ricky will circle around behind the hill and come down over the crest. When we attack, we attack from all sides at once. Everyone has to be in position before we lose the light. We have to be able to see these bastards. We can’t have them coming at us out of the dark. If there’s no wind, belly crawl in, close enough to pitch the grens into the middle of the camp. If there’s any breeze, come at them from downwind so the enforcers don’t sniff us out.”
“If we’re that spread out, how will we know when to attack?” Mildred asked.
“You’ll be in position long before we will,” Ryan said. “Watch the hillside above the camp. I’ll blink my flash once. Wait a count of twenty so Ricky and I can close in from above, then let it nukin’ rip.”
Krysty stepped up to him, slipped her arms around his neck and pulled him down for a long, lingering kiss. “That’s not a goodbye,” she said as she drew back a little. “That’s a see-you-later, lover.”
He looked into her emerald eyes and saw concern in their depths. It was mirrored by her mutie hair, which had contracted into a mass of tight curls. For sure, it was the last night on earth for somebody—at this point it was a coin toss who or what that somebody was going to be, them or Magus.
“It’s never goodbye,” he told her, gently brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers.
Waving for Ricky to follow, Ryan turned for the hills and didn’t look back. They set off at a brisk pace, beelining across the plain to the foot of the nearest saddle. With Ryan in the lead, they climbed the crumbling slope using scrub and boulders for handholds. As evening fell, the sweet scent of the sage seemed to grow stronger and stronger. The scattered saguaros cast long, skinny shadows across the slope, and the air temperature began to drop.
At the base of a giant cactus, a mutie jackrabbit with a hairless face as pink as a newborn baby stared at them, its body frozen like a statue. Its foot-and-a-half-long ears stood erect.
“Muy sabroso,” Ricky hissed through clenched teeth, drawing a slim throwing knife from his sleeve. Arm cocked back, eyes locked on his target, he held the blade by the tip.
The teenaged boy seemed to be growing bigger by the day, and he was always hungry, always thinking about his next meal. “Not now,” Ryan said in a low tone. “Jackrabbits scream. Focus. Tune out distractions.”
Once they had crossed over the saddle and began to traverse the shadowed far side of the mountains, he stopped worrying about noise giving away their approach. The view east under a cloudless sky was of another, even wider stretch of desert plain, which ended at the horizon in staggered rows of desolate, ruddy hills.
That they had ended up here—bodies sun-blasted, throats parched, with sand in their boots, on the verge of closing the book on Magus—was the result of a singular chain of coincidence. It had started in the relatively fertile valley on the other side of the eight-thousand-foot mountain. Steel Eyes’s handful of human sec men had slipped away from their camp for some recreation and joy juice in the nearby ville’s tiny gaudy house. They had gotten so drunk while waiting in line to be serviced by a lone slut, who was puffing away like the little engine that could, that they’d blathered on about their employer, the convoy and the direction they were all headed next. A day later, when the companions showed up at the gaudy house en route to points north, the sec men were long gone and the slut so sky-high on jolt she was talking nonstop and tap-dancing in a puddle of her own piss.
After verifying her Magus story—the gaudy master had overheard it, too—the companions traded an assortment of extra gear, including one fully functional, single-shot 12 gauge with a broken buttstock, for six skinny swaybacked horses. They picked up the convoy’s trail just outside the ville and followed it up a steep, winding, predark mountain road. The going was slow because they had to stop often to let the horses rest. They spent one sleepless night beside the disintegrating tarmac.
By Ryan’s reckoning, they were two full days behind Magus when they reached the edge of a broad meadow bordered by tall pines and a small stream. According to the gaudy master, Magus’s likely next landing spot was just the other side of it.
