and she still remembered the agonized hooting with great pleasure. The big crossbow hanging from the back of her chair had been carved from that same tree, her first crude arrows glued together with the sticky resin harvested from the aced mutie.
Drinking shine, Thal Dagstrom merely grunted in agreement. Whenever possible, the huge man preferred not to speak. A hulking giant, Thal was a good foot taller than anybody else in the tavern and heavily muscled to the point that some folks thought there had to be a little mutie blood in his veins. But nobody was stupe enough to ever ask. His entire body was bear-like, covered with thick black hair. Only his head was naturally bald. His hair had started thinning when Thal was a teenager. These days, he wore a black wool cap, no matter the temperature outside. A tiny Remington .22 automatic blaster was tucked into his rope belt, the worn silvery finish carefully blackened with a pumice stone. The clip held only four live rounds, two of them homemade varieties of unknown quality, but at his side hung a stout wood club, the tip bristling with rusty nails. In close quarters, it was a formidable chilling machine.
“Soft, the locals are soft,” Charlie Bernstein added, using a piece of bread to mop up the last vestiges of gravy from his bowl of gopher stew.
His appetite was legendary, and the angular face of the gaunt man showed the starvation of his childhood, but his arms were thickly cabled with muscle. His clothing seemed to be composed more of patches than original material, but the overall effect was a sort of camo pattern that allowed him to disappear in a forest. Even his boots were pieced together from an assortment of other shoes and such, mostly to hide the short nails sticking out of the toes. More than once, Charlie had kicked a man to death while hooting and laughing. For some reason, he enjoyed pain, giving and receiving, and sometimes, in the deep of the night, Charlie wondered if he was insane.
The big bore blaster holstered at his side was homemade, just a hunk of steel bathroom pipe reinforced with coils of iron wire. The wire was applied red-hot, and when it cooled, the coils tightened, reinforcing the old pipe enough for it to take the blast of a 12-gauge cartridge. The wooden stock was carved from an apple tree and bore the crude design of a naked woman, the notches along the top showing the number of chills he had done. The actual number was only half as many, but it still represented a lot of folks on board the last train west.
“Delta is an odd town, that’s for sure,” Petrov countered, taking out a worn deck of playing cards and beginning to shuffle. “But that’s why I like the place. Strange suits me fine.”
The rest of the crew could find no fault with that. Delta ville sat alongside the Whitewater River that flowed out of the Great Salt like a slashed artery of blue life. The muddy banks were lined with reeds, bam boo, flowering bushes and even a couple of stunted trees bearing tiny bitter-tasting apples. But the farther the river got from the desert, the more the greenery expanded until only a day’s ride away the plants spread across the landscape in a true forest of real trees, bushes and green grass. The ville did all of its hunting and farming out there, both groups accompanied by heavily armed squads of sec men as much-needed protection against the muties that lived in the trees and, sometimes, under the ground.
However, never in the history of the ville had a single mutie gotten past the front gate. The defensive wall around Delta was huge, made of rocks hauled out of the river by decades of slave labor, the mortar between the layers said to be liberally mixed with blood, sweat and tears. It was probably true, but old Baron Cranston had died a long time ago, and his wife, who’d succeeded him, hadn’t tolerated such brutality. Nor did her son. If you were caught stealing food, a person got twenty-five lashes at the post, every time, no favors or leniency. Rape a woman or a child and that got you beaten by the women in the ville with clubs, whipped by the men and then sent to the gallows—if you were still sucking air. The only crime that got a person sent to the wall was disobeying the orders of the baron. That put you in chains to work and labor on the ville wall, expanding the barrier, making it higher and thicker until a full moon had passed, then you were set free and tossed outside the ville gates. Alone and weaponless, the person would be easy prey for slavers or muties, but at least still alive.
Most of the old folks considered the baron too damn soft on coldhearts, especially those operating a salve trade out in the Boneyard, but they never said it out loud. Only Petrov Cordalane knew the truth of the matter, and since he lived in Delta, the man said nothing about it to anybody, not even his gang. Secrets held power.
Besides, Petrov had a good thing going here in Delta, and he wouldn’t ruin it. Heaven was the main tavern in the ville, boasting food, drinks, an actual working piano for Sunday, a gaudy house upstairs and a still out back. The local brew was made out of rotting fish guts, an acquired taste, to say the least, and it was also burned in lanterns to make light and to degrease machine parts. But the locals sang its praise, claiming that the river juice would cure all manner of ills, from the black cough to the shakes, along with a dozen other ailments that had once ravaged the world since skydark.
Petrov liked the food in the tavern, so he didn’t do biz in the ville. This was his haven, a safe place to run if trouble came snapping at the heels of his crew, the Pig Iron Gang.
It was cool inside Heaven—the walls were made of stone. The rafters in the ceiling were black with age and the smell of the accumulated fumes of the fish-oil lanterns was reminiscent of a smokehouse.
Over by the window, a young woman was sitting at a battered piano playing remarkably well, a large group of outlanders and travelers listening with rapt attention. Some of them had never heard of such a thing as a piano before. Dozens of other folks were eating fish stew, gambling or drinking shine. A few of the ville oldsters were caging smokes from travelers in exchange for fantastic stories about the muties in the woods, or even better, the hot sluts upstairs. Those were always popular, and the more details, the better.
Positioned near the wooden stairs leading to the second floor, five gaudy sluts were eating bread and smoking cigs. Their assorted dresses were some velvety material cut and stitched together from the safety curtains of a ruined movie theater; the material couldn’t be set on fire. Amazing stuff. The low-cut blouses and short skirts displayed an amazing amount of flesh, and on a regular basis, a man would shuffle over to talk some biz. Then the man and woman would go upstairs for fifteen minutes or so and come back down. Smiling wide, the man would be buckling his belt.
One large gaudy slut named Post seemed to be a particular favorite this night and was constantly chosen by customers to go upstairs.
“How does she know what they want?” Rose asked in idle curiosity. “Isn’t she deaf?”
“Bitch can read lips,” Petrov answered, then added, “She also has the best tits I ever seen.”
Across the tavern, Post smiled at the compliment, then pulled down her blouse for a moment to flash the man a peek at both of her highly prized assets.
“Pretty nuking good,” Charlie agreed, gnawing on a heel of stale bread. But nobody was sure if he meant the slut or the food.
Most of the bottles along the wall behind the counter were made of plastic and filled with water. After one too many bar fights, McGinty had decided not to risk his stock by putting it on display. The real shine was kept safe under the counter, right alongside a working predark scattergun, a pump-action monster called a Neostead that held eight fat cartridges. All of them were homemade these days, the black powder purchased from a traveling trader, and then the base was packed with bits of broken glass, small rocks and bent nails. The combination opened the belly of a person like stomping on a fish.
“Another round!” Petrov bellowed, waving his empty plastic tumbler.
An old woman wearing an apron shuffled out from behind the bar, carrying a clay jug with a cork in the top. The waitress was an oldster, barely able to walk anymore
