your names?” Mildred asked.
“He’s Young Crad and I’m called Bezoar.”
“This is going to be a foot race,” Ryan warned them. “No telling how far we’re going to have to run to get clear of Malosh. If you can’t keep up with us, you’ll get left behind. We won’t let you slow us down, and we won’t risk our lives to save yours. Do you understand?”
Bezoar nodded, grimacing at the news. Young Crad stared back. Not sullen. Not fearful. Not shell-shocked. If anything, he seemed mildly tickled by Ryan’s little speech. The grizzle-bearded man pushed his large friend out into the alley, ahead of Ryan and the others.
When Young Crad saw the dead black-and-white hog lying in the lane, he broke free of the smaller man’s grip. He raced to the side of the gutshot animal, dropped to his knees and unleashed a piercing cry of anguish.
Bezoar ran to catch him, limping hard on a right leg that didn’t bend at all at the knee. “She’s gone, boy,” he said. “It’s a nukin’ pity and a rad-blasted waste but there’s nothing more we can do for the old girl. Buck up, now, we’ve got to go…”
“Move!” J.B. growled.
Young Crad looked up, his eyes streaming tears. “Piggie dear, piggie dear,” he moaned. His chin quivered uncontrollably as he stroked the bullet-riddled hide.
Bezoar grabbed his friend by the shoulders and gently but firmly dragged him from the corpse and pulled him up the lane.
“A gimp and a triple-stupe droolie,” J.B. said, shaking his head. “They aren’t gonna last half a mile, Ryan.”
Such was the harsh reality of Deathlands. It was a place where the bloody bones of the weak nourished the strong. That these swineherds had lived as long as they had was a minor miracle.
Soon to end.
“I reckon it’s their choice where they want to die,” Cawdor said.
Jak, Krysty and Doc waited at the far end of the lane. The Redbone folk they’d rescued were already manning the barricade, covering their rear with the captured predark assault rifles.
The other hovels were deserted. Mebbe the residents had made it out. Mebbe not. Just beyond the last of the tumbledown dwellings, the alley ended abruptly at the edge of a nearly sheer, three-hundred-foot cliff. Redbone ville was laid out like a medieval castle town. The ville’s buildings clung to and jutted up from the hilltop, extensions of the vertical bedrock. From the alley’s terminus, a rough zigzag path led down the cliff face to the gridwork of cultivated fields below—beyond them a bleak desert panorama stretched to the blue mountains on the horizon. There was no sign of a rear guard on the plain. Malosh had apparently committed his entire force to a surprise attack.
Krysty took in the unarmed swineherds, then looked at Ryan with concern. Her prehensile mutie hair had already drawn into tight curls, an automatic response to the mortal danger they faced.
He anticipated her question. “They know they’re excess baggage,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Jak jumped onto the trail and led the rapid descent. As the companions skidded single file to the bottom, thunder rumbled in the distance. Bolts of lightning shot through the northwestern sky that had turned black as night. It was at least twenty degrees warmer down on the plain, and the wind had acquired a strange, unpleasantly humid edge.
“Could be a chem storm,” Krysty said. “A bad one.”
“It’s going to come down on us hard,” Mildred said.
“And shortly, it would appear…” Doc added. “Perhaps we should consider seeking shelter until it passes?”
“No time for that, now,” Ryan said. “We have to get out of longblaster range before the baron’s men spot us and pin us down. You take the point, Jak. Cut through the fields, then follow cover to the southeast, away from the storm front. Double-time it. No stops.”
With the albino wild child in the lead, they broke from the base of the hill and ran into the rows of Cradding cabbages and knee-high potato plants. There were no farmers’ bodies lying about. Malosh’s army had closed in during the night and had attacked at first light.
As they neared the edge of the fields, autofire roared from the hilltop behind them. The mad clattering sawed back and forth. It sounded as though the folks manning the barrier were giving as good as they were getting.
The companions were about seven hundred yards from the base of the hill when they heard a string of sharp booms—multiple gren detonations, not thunderclaps. As the echoes of the explosions faded, blasterfire ceased.
The barricaded alley had fallen, and with it, Redbone ville.
Jak picked up the pace and Ryan and the others matched it. The desert hardpan was much easier to run on than soft, cultivated earth. A warm tailwind, now driving and steady, pushed against their backs.
The albino led them down into a shallow gully and they followed it, running as low to the ground as they could. The ditch wasn’t deep enough to completely conceal them, but the chaparral and scrub along its lip broke up and blurred their silhouettes. They drew no sniper fire from the ville, either because they hadn’t been seen or because they were already out of range.
The discomforts of the forced march were all too familiar to them—the bonfires burning in lungs and legs, the jarring impacts on hip joints and knees, the rhythmic rasp of breath in the ears. The two swineherds had managed to keep up so far. Bezoar hip-hopped along, red-faced, his hair matted with sweat, arms flailing for balance. Barefooted Young Crad moved easily beside him with a powerful, lumbering gait.
Fourteen hours ago, on the previous evening, the companions had arrived in Redbone after a long trek south. They had planned on trading part of their stock of centerfire bullets for food and water this morning; instead they had had to expend them making their escape. The breakout was nothing Ryan and the others were ashamed of. Hard-bitten realists, they knew there were things they could fight and things they could not.
None of them had any firsthand knowledge of Baron Malosh. What little information they possessed came from tales they’d heard in gaudy houses and around communal campfires along their route. In Deathlands, stories of barbarism and savagery were taken in along with mother’s milk, this to prepare the young for the inescapable facts of life. Exaggerations, misconceptions, distortions and outright lies were expected—even honored—in a dark, misbegotten place where ignorance and chaos ruled. If a tenth of the gossip the companions had heard about Malosh was true, he was an utterly ruthless marauder, and a formidable adversary.
It was said that he had carved a kingdom out of nothing. His own homeland was shit poor, with little water and fertile soil, barely able to support its population. He made up the difference with hit-and-run campaigns against the unprotected borders of richer neighboring barons. Malosh kept his ragtag army in constant motion, resupplying it through looting and pillage, replacing dead fighters with conscripts—norms and muties, male and female. He enforced military discipline with an iron hand. The only way a person left Malosh’s service was on the last train west. When he conquered a ville like Redbone, he took away most of the food and most of the able-bodied residents. According to the campfire tales, he always left behind a little to eat and a few breeders; and of course, the old folk and very young children useless in battle. He left sufficient living souls and resources for the ville to eventually recover, albeit with terrible hardship,
