Squinting into the distance, Ryan saw a flock of birds circling a distant hill. Smoke was rising from a small campfire, but that was all he could see from this angle.
“Let’s go see if there was a reason,” he growled, kicking his mount into a full gallop.
Chapter Two
A couple hundred miles away, a pale man walked slowly through the cold rubble of the burned-down building. He was tall and slim, almost skeletal, his face so smooth that it seemed as if the man had never needed to shave. His blond hair was slicked back tightly to his head and a tiny silver stud twinkled in his left earlobe. His pants and vest, more practical than the robe he usually wore, were cream-colored, spotless and perfect. Not even the dust raised by his walking through the ash seemed able to adhere to the odd fabric. Instead of boots, he wore sliver slippers, the woven material strangely luminescent. But even more bizarre was the fact that the man carried no visible wep of any kind. No blaster, ax, crossbow, knife or even a simple club.
In utter horror, Delphi stared at the decomposing bodies of the men and the muties mingling together on the ground, bits of white bone and golden brass glittering from the gray ashes like broken promises.
“Dead, they’re all dead,” Delphi whispered, gently kicking aside the distorted skull of a stickie. The operative of Department Coldfire couldn’t believe his eyes. This was impossible!
Moving listlessly among the wreckage, Delphi found more and more of the bodies everywhere, the death toll incredible, and every one of the muties had been shot through the head, even when there was only a head remaining with no torso attached. The surviving sec men had shot the dead stickies, just to make sure the muties really were deceased. That was ruthless efficiency he could appreciate. In spite of all his arduous work, and endless planning, slaving over every little detail, the hidden nest of stickies in Two-Son had been utterly destroyed in a single night. One night! Then the locals had done everything but sow salt into the land to make sure the stickies would never return.
“My precious little ones,” Delphi moaned, bending to pick up the blackened skull of a stickie. A cooked eye fell out as Delphi raised the skull high in his palm, wondering if he had known this particular mutant. Then Delphi had a sudden flash in his mind of Hamlet doing the exact same thing, and he cast the grisly remnant aside. It sailed across the smoky destruction to crash against the side of a marble staircase that rose high into the empty air and abruptly ended at nothing. The smashed bones went flying everywhere.
Bowing his head, Delphi tightened his fists, attempting to control his growling rage over the slaughter. How long he held that position, Delphi had no idea, but his somber reverie was disrupted at sound of hooves beating on sand.
Quickly looking up, Delphi scanned the nearby predark city until locating a man on a horse coming this way through the crumbling ruins.
“Hey, rist!” the rider called, tightening his grip on the reins and bringing the stallion to a halt on the cracked sidewalk. “Get the nuking hell out of there! The foundation is weak and could collapse at any second!”
His face an inert mask, Delphi walked across the debris and onto the sandy street. A soft breeze was blowing, mixing sand with the ashes of the obliterated stickie nest.
“Rist?” Delphi said curiously, tucking his hands into his sleeves.
The sec man grinned in embarrassment. “Sorry, Baron O’Connor told us to stop using that word. It means outlander or stranger.”
“Does it now? Well, I am a stranger,” Delphi muttered, his eyes narrowing. “And from those black-powder weapons, you must be a sec man from Two-Son ville. That’s only a klick away, correct?”
His instincts flaring at the tone of the question, the rider let an arm drop so that his fingers rested on the checkered grip of the handblaster resting in the holster at his side.
“Ain’t no other ville for a hundred klicks in any direction,” the sec man stated, tightening the reins as the horse shifted its hooves in the hot sand. “Now what’s your biz here?”
“My biz?”
“What do ya want?” The sec man leaned over the pommel of his saddle and scowled. “Are you a lost pilgrim, or a trader?”
“Ah, an intelligent question at last,” Delphi said, slowly smiling. “Most astute. What I want at the moment is your prompt death.”
Recoiling at that statement, the sec man drew his blaster and fired. But in spite of the fact that the pale outlander was only a few yards away, he somehow missed. Quickly, the sec man fired twice more. The black-powder charges threw out great volumes of dark smoke, and he had to wait for the desert wind to clear the air so that he could see the chilled body.
But the outlander was still standing, unfazed and untouched, without a single wound to be seen.
Snarling obscenities, the sec man fired again and this time actually saw the soft lead ball slam into the man’s face. No, wait. The lead had stopped in midair, flattened into a misshapen lump as if it impacted a sheet of predark mil armor. But there was only air between the two of them! How was this possible?
Throwing back his head, Delphi began to laugh as the cooling sphere of lead fell impotently to the sandy street.
Fear swept over the sec man and he briefly debated galloping away. But the very idea of retreat made him snarl in suppressed fury, and the sec man quickly fired the last two rounds in the handblaster. This time, he saw the billowing clouds of gunsmoke form a halo around the rist, revealing a sort of ball, or sphere, as if the man were a bug in a jar. An invisible glass ball that could stop blasters?
As the sweating sec man hastily went for the knife in his boot, Delphi extracted a crystalline rod from within his left sleeve, and pointed it at the horse. With a snort, the animal went absolutely still, then toppled to the street like so much cooked meat. Wisps of steam rose from the nostrils and ears.
Unable to leap from the saddle fast enough, the sec man hit the asphalt hard, the impact making him drop the knife. Then he heard the bones in his leg snap loudly under the deadweight of the horse. Son of a bitch! A split second later, the pain arrived, and he screamed curses. But then he stopped abruptly as thick blood began to flow from the slack mouth of the deceased horse, as if its internal organs had been liquefied. The sight galvanized the sec man into action, and he desperately clawed for the scattergun hidden in the saddlebags.
As Delphi approached, the sec man yanked the wep clear.
“Eat this, mutie lover!” the sec man snarled, swinging up the scattergun to fire both barrels at point-blank range.
Flame and thunder filled the street as the hellstorm of lead ricocheted off the defensive forcefield that surrounded Delphi. The mix of buckshot and bent nails sprayed randomly to strike the nearby buildings. Predark glass shattered and a rusted wag shook from the barrage, but that was all that happened.
No longer chuckling, Delphi approached the trapped man and stopped just out of reach as the sec man swung the smoking scattergun at his leg, trying to smash a kneecap.
“Do you know how long it took me to make those stickies smart? To raise their baseline intelligence above that of a slavering beast?” Delphi whispered, his hand ever-so-slowly lowering the crystal rod. “To teach them how to sharpen sticks into spears. How to hide and ambush an enemy? Do you?
