Jed has given strict orders all trespassers should be brought to him immediately for questioning and disposition,” he replied. “Sergeant Drake!”
“Sir!”
“See to the securing of the prisoners,” he said. “And their belongings.”
“All right, you slackers,” the sergeant rasped. “Listen up and listen close!”
Ryan wouldn’t have needed the captain to say his rank, nor to see the chevrons sewn on the sleeves of his uniform tunic, to know he was a noncom of some sort. When he rode up on his big Roman-nosed black gelding to where Ryan could get a look at him, he could see he was a black guy, probably medium height, double-wide across the shoulders. His face, clean-shaved, looked as if it had been used to hammer railroad iron.
“Ringo, Scalzi, Tayler, Rollin,” Drake said. “Shake them down and tie them up. And I better not see anything accidentally fall into one of your sorry drag-tail pockets. Baron’s given strict orders all spoils of war go to him for distribution. Do you hear me, maggots?”
“Sergeant!” the four named sec men sang out in a ragged chorus as they dismounted.
They came forward to their tasks. Ryan saw they were dressed in a random assortment of work clothes, but with rags no doubt the same color as Stone’s and Drake’s uniforms tied around their biceps. They all had carbines slung across their backs.
“Secure the women with wrists behind their backs,” the captain called out in his high, nervous-sounding voice. It seemed to bug his horse. The animal rolled its eyes and sidestepped every time the captain opened his mouth. “They will ride pillion behind two troopers.”
“And if I see any sorry sod-buster so much as try to feel the merchandise...” the sergeant roared. “I got my eye on you, Scalzi, then you best be ready to ride and fight with all the fingers on that hand broke!”
“The men will have hands tied before them,” Stone directed. Despite his heftiness and general ferocious appearance Ryan realized he had the voice and manner of some kind of fussy schoolteacher. “They’ll run behind the horses.”
“We have an old man with us!” Krysty said fearlessly, shaking back her long red hair. It also had the effect, Ryan couldn’t help noticing—even now, his single eye missed nuked little—of hiding the nervous motion of the sentient strands. “Surely you can’t expect him to run!”
A pair of troopers patted her down gingerly. They seemed to pay a lot more attention to rolling their eyes back around to their sergeant to read the weather report on his face than doing a solid job. So much the better, Ryan thought.
The captain showed her an unpleasant grin. It was made no more appealing by the fact the teeth were discolored and all leaning into each other at crazy angles, like an earthquake or nuke-strike had shaken up a block of concrete buildings in some predark ville, but not quite knocked them down.
“Then he won’t pass muster as a conscript in the heroic army of the Association, will he?” Stone said. “Or Baron Jed will be spared the trouble of hanging him as a spy, depending.”
“You can’t expect us to keep up with running horses on foot,” J.B. said calmly, as if he was discussing timing on a wheelgun’s cylinder with a fellow armorer. Because while, yeah, in the long term a man could outrun a horse, he’d never make it past the short term alive.
“Quit your bitching,” the sergeant said. “It’s only three, four miles back to headquarters, and we’ll keep to a trot.” He smiled grimly. “Unless you fall, that is,” he said. “Then we’ll drag you at a full gallop until you stop screaming. That should inspire the others to keep up.”
* * *
IT WAS A BRUTAL JOURNEY, running up and down ridges and splashing through creeks. The buckskin Ryan was tethered to farted incessantly, but at least it wasn’t as surly as the roan Jak ran behind. That one kept its ears pinned back what seemed every step of the nightmare run, and tried every time its rider’s attention seemed to waver to pause its trot long enough to try to kick the albino youth in the face.
To no particular surprise to Ryan, Doc had little problem keeping up. He had the longest legs of any of them, and despite his feeble appearance he’d hiked all across the Deathlands with the rest of them. After all, he looked decades older than he really was, in terms of his time awake and on his pins; he might be mentally vague on occasion, but he had the endurance of a fairly fit man in his prime.
The person who struggled the most was Ricky. The new kid had traveled around what outlanders called Monster Island each year with his father’s trading caravan. And given how their roads always took them up and down the steep mountains of the Puerto Rican interior, he was strong and not by any means out of shape. But he spent most of his time in his little ville of Nuestra Señora on the island’s south coast, working as apprentice in his uncle’s armory and mechanic shop. It had been a peaceful, pleasant existence, as well as a mostly sedentary one—until the army of the self-styled leader, El Guapo, trashed the ville, chilled his mother and father before his eyes, gunned down his uncle and kidnapped his sister Yamile. That turned out to be the same day Ryan Cawdor and his companions made landfall at the ville in a stolen pirate yacht, hotly pursued by the pirates they’d stolen it from....
But Ricky Morales had the resilience of youth, and he had a core as tough as boot leather. If he hadn’t shown that, along with an acute resourcefulness, courage and loyalty to his friends—more than they showed him, to start with—they would have left him behind to his fate when they jumped out of the redoubt in the monster-swarming mountains.
So he sucked it up and ran.
When they hit the road Ryan’s tongue was all but hanging out, and coated with the dust the horse’s hooves kicked up. It was a constant struggle to blink the grit out of his eye, although that had the helpful side effect of distracting him, however briefly, from the fire in his calves, the exhaustion he carried on his shoulders like a backpack stuffed with lead and the ache in his shoulders from when he went a little too slow or the buckskin’s rider went a little too fast, and his arms got wrenched cruelly halfway from their sockets.
His first reaction when they hit the road was that now the troop would pick up the pace and they were all screwed. But the cavalrymen were well trained and kept good order. They didn’t speed up or slow down a flicker, Ryan could tell, and he was tuned in to little details like that pretty tight by now.
The road was actually decent. Mostly it was what remained of a predark road that Ryan reckoned had once upon a time been two lanes wide. Though cracked here and heaved there, the asphalt surface was mostly flat. It had eroded around the edges, bringing it down to a single lane at best much of the way, so that their actual course tended to meander slightly to follow the surviving pavement, where it had washed out it had been filled in with some kind of fine, hard-packed gravel.
After they’d been on the road awhile, Krysty, riding a couple places ahead of him in the single file, shook her hair back again. She used that as an excuse to glance over her shoulder. Her eyes caught Ryan’s and she gave him just a flash of a smile.
It warmed him like the sunlight. That was conspicuously absent out there in the wind, where it had gotten noticeably chilly. He wasn’t a mind reader, but he still knew Krysty’s thoughts as plain as if she’d yelled them through a loudspeaker: hold on, lover. We’ll get out of this one free and clear. Just the way we always had before.
He sucked in a deep breath, squared his shoulders and carried on.
