first. She nodded. “Good point. But we still need to check. Just carefully.”
“It’s not our problem anyway,” Ryan said. He was talking to the woman’s back as she moved purposefully ahead among the eerie cluster of farm buildings. She had a mind of her own—it was one reason he loved her. And she had as keen a survival sense as he did. After all, she’d met the same brutal and deadly challenges he had across their years together on the Deathlands. Some he even hadn’t, when they were split by circumstance or necessity. She knew what she was doing.
But he also felt concern that her big, soft heart might dull the edge of her wits.
At this point the only thing to do was follow. He heard a rustle and glanced over his shoulder to see J.B. slide in behind him, his M-4000 riot scattergun held slantwise before his hips in patrol position. The little man flashed him a quick grin.
Getting my back, Ryan thought. Automatically. As usual. They were all sharp-eyed and sure shots, and none of them compared to Jak Lauren in the sensory-keenness department. But Ryan just felt better when it was his best friend and right-hand man in particular who was watching their asses. Especially going into an unknown situation.
He grinned to himself. Every situation in this life is unknown, he thought. And forgetting that little fact is one of the best and quickest ways to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes.
The main structure was one story, big—half a dozen rooms or more. It had a peaked roof to shed snow as it fell. Now the wind was spooling the powdery stuff off its battered galvanized and corrugated metal in swirls and skeins, flinging it at their eyes. A screen door, hanging open and sagging, banged against the frame periodically as it got kicked by vagaries of that killing wind.
But the sobbing was coming from a much smaller side building. Sounds like a kid, Mildred mouthed to Ryan. He nodded.
Jak crouched outside, covering the door with his Colt Python revolver. The albino loved knives and preferred them over blasters. But given what had happened to the farm folk here, if there was a nasty surprise waiting for him in that shed, he wanted to be able to answer it straightaway with a bigger, louder surprise of his own.
And shed it was, Ryan judged. His first glance suggested it might be an outhouse—the cold sucked his sense of smell away, and if the farmers had had sense to lime it, it probably didn’t give off an eye-watering, knee-buckling stink except on the hottest days of a Black Hills summer. But it was too big for a one-holer and not proportioned right for two or three. The structure had to be used for storage, he thought. Mebbe tools.
The door opened outward. It hung invitingly, just a hand span ajar. As he approached, J.B. slid past him, as smooth as an eel.
“Let me,” he said with an upward tip of his shotgun’s barrel.
“Go right ahead,” Ryan said. The 12-gauge was an even bigger surprise than Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster for lurking bad things. Lots of strange predators or scavengers could follow behind a marauding stickie clan. Some of them not even muties.
Standing well clear of the doorway proper, the Armorer reached forward, gingerly grabbed hold of the door, then whipped it open. Neither a lunging feral form nor a blast of blasterfire greeted the sudden movement. Holding the M-4000 leveled from his hip, he sidestepped quickly across the doorway, left to right, staying outside. He wanted to clear the fatal funnel of the door without plunging into a completely unknown environment.
“Easy, little lady,” Ryan heard him say. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
Cautiously Ryan joined his old friend. He saw that J.B. had been right not to do the usual room-clearing drill, stepping quickly inside and then immediately sidestepping left or right out of the doorway, to make a perfect target of himself for as short a time as possible. They were in a toolshed, and the tools were in some disarray, scattered here and there. Had the Armorer driven ahead, he might’ve tangled up his feet and pitched face-foremost onto the packed-dirt floor. Or worse.
A little girl huddled inside, just visible in the gloom of the far side of the crowded little room.
* * *
“HOW’D IT GO, BOSS?” Hammerhand’s chief lieutenant asked as he strode into camp. Joe Takes-Blasters’s big broad face showed a frown of concern. “Reckoned you’d stay at the Crow camp longer.”
“No need,” Hammerhand said.
“So, you decided you didn’t need to go chasing visions after all, eh?” Mindy Farseer asked with her usual half-mocking tone of voice and one eyebrow arched.
“No. I did. I got what I wanted.”
The Blood encampment was a collection of about one hundred “lodges,” tepees of hide or canvas, yurts standing up from carts. It was the standard dwellings of Great Plains nomads. The brutal wind had subsided to a breeze that came and went, snapping their flaps occasionally like little whips. A few skinny children chased one another, sending chickens squawking from their path.
A handful of assorted battered trucks, modified to burn alcohol as fuel, were parked in the center of the camp, along with a selection of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to powerful but stripped-down choppers. Most of their transport took the form of a substantial herd of horses.
Hammerhand thought that they looked like a sorry-ass bunch of draggle-tail coldhearts, not the kind of people with whom he could build an empire.
But he meant to do just that. With them. And this morning he had received a clear and compelling vision of how to accomplish that.
It was time to kick ass.
And whatever Power it was—he didn’t know or care because the fact that it was a big and badass Power was enough—had anointed him as the chosen one to do it.
Now he had concrete goals and the beginning of a plan.
“The Crow elders are still here,” Joe said. He sounded uneasy.
He pointed with a jerk of his chin toward the group of four who stood expectantly nearby, at camp’s edge. Three men and a woman, with gray in their long braids, were wrapped in colorful blankets against the wind’s chilling touch. Their weathered faces showed strong bone structures and jutting noses, with skins the color of old leather. No doubt as a reproach to the mixed-breed Hammerhand, the Council had sent four elders to speak to him and urge his return to the fold.
As if.
After the Big Nuke, most bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had taken in numerous refugees from fried-out cities, as had many of the First Nations groups that survived the war and skydark. And as most continued to do. The Blackfoot had thrived in doing so and now were preeminent north of what had once been the US-Canada border.
But while they had accepted their share of refugees, and continued to adopt new members regardless of heritage, the stiff-necked Blood people had chosen to maintain an unusual form of discrimination within the tribe—not against mutants, but ceding social standing on the basis of supposed purity of breeding. It was a policy they termed Traditionalism. And one that younger fire-bloods, many but not all mixed race like Hammerhand, disdained as “Trad.”
He looked at them now, standing there all mock humble but really demanding his submission—whether in renaming his band, or better, disbanding it and crawling back on his belly to beg the Council for forgiveness. Arrogant pricks.
He
