coldheart, but only managed to skin his knuckles against the battered armor. Thrusting upward, he then attempted to jam his fingers into an eye, but the slits were too narrow.
Chuckling, the Hilly tightened his hold, his thumbs crushing deep into the neck of the struggling man. “Time to die, ville boy,” the coldheart whispered.
Refusing to surrender, Donovan kept punching away even as his lungs began to ache then burn with their need for air. His heart was pounding in his chest and there was a growing ringing in his ears. Suddenly the world began to blur then spin out of control, black spots swimming in his sight, when the Hilly jerked and bizarrely released his grip.
Gasping for air, Donovan backed away and saw that an arrow was embedded in the Hilly’s helmet, blood trickling along the shaft.
Massaging his sore throat, Donovan looked up just as the treasure wag rolled into view out of the smoke, every sec man steadily firing flight after flight of half-arrows at the Hilly, the sec woman, Rosemary, triggering Donovan’s big crossbow.
Snarling in rage, the Hilly reached for a smoke bomb on his belt, and Rosemary fired, the heavy shaft pinning his bare hand to the wooden armor. The coldheart shrieked at the pain, then half-arrows slammed into his other hand, slicing off fingers.
Gibbering from the agony, the coldheart attempted to flee, clearly planning to simply throw himself off the cliff to escape his tormentors. But as he turned, a bald sec man threw a bolo. The stones tied to lengths of stout rawhide neatly spun across the intervening space and wrapped themselves tightly around the Hilly’s armored legs, trapping him in place.
Stopping the treasure wag, the sec men poured onto the road and swarmed the helpless coldheart, concentrating their half-arrows for the narrow eye slits in the wooden mask. The terrified mountain man raised his wounded arm as protection, and a flurry of half-arrows nailed it permanently in place.
“Pax! Pax!” the Hilly cried. “I surrender!”
“Tough,” Donovan croaked in a barely recognizable voice. He held out an empty hand, and somebody slapped an ax into his palm.
Tightening a fist around the fish-hide grip, the sec chief swung the weapon with all of his might and buried the polished granite blade deep into the back of the weeping coldheart. Then shouting curses, Donovan began hacking at the Hilly as if chopping down a tree. Chips flew off under the brutal impacts of the granite blade, then leather padding came into view and finally human skin….
When he was finished, Donovan wiped the cracked blade clean on his pants and returned the borrowed weapon to the bald sec man.
“Thanks,” Donovan whispered.
“Always got your back,” Hannigan said proudly, slinging the weapon over a shoulder. “Now we go after those others in the forest?”
In a rush of anger Donovan tried to speak, but could only cough for a few minutes. Akhmed passed over a gourd, and the sec chief pulled out the cork to pour the contents down his aching throat. The shine burned like fire, then the tenderness eased and he took his first deep breath for what seemed like an eternity.
“No,” the sec chief said, speaking almost normally. “There could be more tricks, more traps. We’re heading for home, and not stopping for anything until we have a wall around our asses again. Savvy?”
“No need to rush, Chief,” Gene said, both hands on the reins controlling the horses. “Whatever those things were in the forest, they skedaddled the minute that Hilly started eating dirt.”
“Hillies,” Rosemary snorted in contempt, resting a throwing ax on a shoulder. In spite of wearing the largest size of body armor available, her ample breasts were simply much too big, and deliciously muffined over the top. Every man privately enjoyed the delightful sight, but the sec woman’s dire expertise with a throwing ax kept them all respectful and courteous even when far away from the ville on patrol. “Think they knew what we’re carrying?” The woman glanced into the cart. Set among their piles of supplies, barrels of water and such was a wooden strongbox bolted to the floorboards. Without explosives, it would take a day to chop into the box, and the only way to steal it was to take the whole cart. This was the best the ville had, but what it contained was more valuable than black powder.
Making a face, Hannigan grunted. “Shitfire, if they knew what was in that box, the bastards would have sent a dozen coldhearts after us.”
“Can the chatter, and go collect your arrows,” Donovan ordered, passing the gourd back to Akhmed. “The damn things don’t grow on trees, ya know.”
Chuckling at the very old joke, the sec men dutifully retrieved the spent arrows, carefully pocketing the fletching and stone heads found with broken shafts. Sadly, quite a few of the half-arrows were gone, lost in the forest.
Reclaiming his crossbow, Donovan slung it over a shoulder, then hunted for the blaster. He found it in the bushes, undamaged, just smeared with blood and dirt.
“Here, I got the lead back for you, Chief,” MacDouglas said, proffering a small disfigured blob of gray metal.
“Thanks, Mack,” Donavan said, tucking the slug in a shirt pocket along with the spent brass.
“Excuse me, sir?” a bald sec man asked respectfully.
“What is it, Carson?”
“What should we do about the others?” the man asked, looking forlornly up the roadway. The herbal smoke was almost completely gone now, and the bodies of the fallen sec men could be clearly seen.
“We’re short on time,” the sec chief began, but then relented. “But we’ll wait. Take a shovel and bury your kin. Save their crossbows for the baron, but you can have everything else for their kin.”
“You want a hand?” Akhmed asked, tucking some loose fletching into a pocket.
Shaking his head, Carson got a shovel from the cart, then trundled off to drag a tattered corpse into the bushes and perform the odious task in private.
Shrugging his crossbow into a more comfortable position, Hannigan scowled at the aced Hilly lying mutilated in the churned dirt. “That was a hell of a scary mask,” he said, speaking as if the words had a bad taste. “Ya think the bastard based it upon a real mutie? Something from one of the outer islands? Those got hit a lot worse than us in the endwar.”
“Makes sense,” Akhmed replied, clearly unconvinced. “Unless the ocean currents have changed again. Remember when that mutie that looked like a man but was covered with suckers washed ashore from the mainland?”
“Oh, don’t be a feeb,” Gene snapped impatiently. “There ain’t no mainland anymore. The whole damn world got nuked during the Big Heat. There’s only this chain of islands, nothing more. Baron Griffin says so.”
The unflappable sec man shrugged in dismissal. “If you say so, cousin.” Thunder rumbled above and Donavan climbed into the back of the cart to drape a tarpaulin over the strongbox. It didn’t really need the additional protection, even if it was acid rain coming, but he felt it wise to be cautious with this cargo. A slave had found the treasure on the shore, of all places, and immediately turned it over to Baron Griffin for the promised reward of freedom. It was granted, the baron always kept his word. However, once the former slave was outside the ville where none of the civies could see, the sec men on the walls had shot him down in cold blood. Slaves were not allowed on the beach under
