mission,” Mildred said as he lowered the longblaster.
“Didn’t want to abandon their kill,” Ryan told her. “Fresh meat has got to be hard to come by around here.”
“It appears we have more than enough, now,” Doc said. He jabbed at the remains of the animal smoldering beside his boot with the tip of his walking stick, then added, “Such as it is.”
“Nearly blew off your own foot, didn’t you, Doc?” J.B. said. “How many times do I have to tell you, single actions suck.”
“I’m alive,” Doc said. He gave the corpse another poke. “And that hideous thing is not.” From the side pocket of his frock coat, he pulled out the leather pouch that held his black powder reloading gear. He then sat himself down on a nearby rock and with a quick, deft hand began charging and recapping each of the revolver’s chambers.
J.B. looked over at Ryan and shook his head.
The one-eyed warrior shrugged. At times, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner could be infuriatingly stubborn and cantankerous. And there was nothing they or anybody else could do about it. The twentieth century whitecoats who had time-trawled him away from the bosom of his family in the late eighteen hundreds, his beloved Emily and his two young children, had gotten so fed up with his contrariness that just to be rid of him, they’d sent him forward in time, to Deathlands. Despite the considerable downsides to the 250-year-old sidearm Doc carried, the truth was, only if and when the LeMat blew up in his hand would he ever consider replacing it.
As Krysty and Jak were finishing off the wounded animals with close-range head shots, a muffled voice called to them. “Is it safe to come out now?”
Ryan and the companions swung up their hand-blasters, searching for the source of the sound with gunsights.
“Help me, puleeeeeeze!”
It was a man. Very close.
“Are they all dead?” came an even louder holler. “Make sure they’re all dead!”
“Keep your pants on,” Ryan shouted back.
“I do believe I recognize that voice,” Doc told the others.
“How is that possible?” Krysty said.
“More ghosts from your past?” Mildred asked. “An Oxford don circa 1882? Is your merry old brain vapor-locking again, Doc?”
“Neither a supernatural occurrence, nor a mental aberration,” Doc said, refusing to rise to the bait, “but certainly a coincidence of note.”
“Help me! Puleeeeeeze, help me! I swear I won’t run off again.”
“‘Run off again’?” Krysty said. “He thinks we’re somebody else.”
“Somebody he’s scared to death of,” J.B. said, “or he’d have shown his rad-blasted face by now.”
Jak moved quickly and quietly toward a vertical fissure in the bedrock about forty feet away, his .357 Magnum ready to rip. Like a bird dog, he stood there on-point. Ryan and the others slipped into position on either side of him, in front of the narrow cave’s entrance.
“Come on out,” J.B. said. “Now.”
“Leave your blaster behind,” Ryan said.
“Coming out, got no blaster.”
The pancaked crown of a waxed-canvas fedora appeared in the crack in the rock, then a prosthetic right hand—ivory-colored, it had articulated fingers and a big knob on the back of the wrist for tightening them into a fist. The man whimpered mightily as he tried to squeeze his big body sideways through the gap.
He was halfway in, halfway out of the cleft when J.B. said, “Well, I’ll be nuked!” and drew a tight bead on him with the M-4000.
“Are you back for another trouncing, you traitorous dog?” Doc demanded, stepping forward and brandishing his ebony cane.
When the wedged-in man looked up and saw who his rescuers were, his jaw dropped. Grunting from the effort, he quickly retreated, squirming back into the fissure, out of sight.
“I told you I recognized that voice,” Doc said to Mildred.
Ryan recognized him, too. The man in the hole was none other than Big Mike, also known as Mike the Drunkard, and the “Tour Guide from Hell,” a turncoat huckster who had sold his services to the she-hes, the would-be colonizers from Shadow Earth. Riding around in a gaudily painted bus, he had conned gullible villefolk with free joy juice, free jolt, free sex and promises of a much easier life in Slake City. It was a nonstop rolling party until they arrived at the site, then the awful truth was revealed: they had been gathered up to slave until death in the nuke mines.
Ryan, his son Dean and the companions had themselves toiled in the sweltering, poisonous shafts at Ground Zero. Although they had eventually fought their way free, they had been unable to stop the she-hes from escaping this reality and Deathlands’ brand of justice. They had, however, waylaid and beaten one of the invaders’ vilest puppets to within an inch of his life.
That puppet was Big Mike.
They had decided to let him live because he was already an amputee. He had only the one hand, which made his surviving in the hellscape a constant, and ultimately losing battle. After all the pain and suffering he’d inflicted on innocent folk, simply chilling him would have been too much of a kindness. Ryan was surprised he’d lasted so long.
“Come on out,” the one-eyed warrior said. “We’re not going to beat you again.”
“Swear to it?”
“Come out now, you tub of shit,” J.B. ordered, “or we’re going to leave you here to rot. Put your hands up and keep them up.”
Big Mike obeyed, moaning as he forced himself out of the cave, holding his arms above his head.
“You seem to have lost something else since we last crossed paths,” Ryan said, gesturing with the muzzle of the SIG.
Big Mike glanced up at his left arm, which now ended in a stump. It was cut through clean, like it had been sliced off with a bandsaw.
And recently.
The massive scab was black and the skin around it an angry red.
“In a place as hard as Deathlands,” Krysty said, “a man who’s missing all you’re missing is in one hell of a pickle.”
“Hell, pickle ain’t the half of it,” Big Mike said. “Lookee here.” He held out his artificial hand. “Only way I can grip down on something is if I use my teeth on the fucking knob.”
“What happened to the other one?” Ryan asked. “From the looks of that stump, it wasn’t mutie coyotes who took it.”
“You must’ve really pissed somebody off,” J.B. said, making no attempt to conceal his amusement.
“My former bosses, the cockroaches from alternate Earth,” Big Mike replied. “The bastards are back at Slake City, working the mines again, only this time they’ve
