No Man's Land (11 page)

Several minutes later Snake Eye stepped out of the alley. He was alone.

The cut-up wag driver had had little more to tell him. Mostly it served to confirm the late Erl Kendry’s assertion that the lost redoubt entrance was located in the environs, and a hint that it was underground. Which was hardly surprising, really.

Still, it was a lead. Most important to Snake Eye’s mind was that Norvell had mentioned it to Cawdor and his bunch. They also showed a keen interest in the lost old-days facilities. That was something he’d learned tracking down the rumors about them. It seemed to go deeper than a yen for scabbie, although Snake Eye wasn’t sure what else they might be seeking.

Norvell’s buddies hadn’t thought the ambushers were interested in Norvell’s wild tale. Snake Eye thought otherwise.

“Hey, you,” a voice called quietly from behind. “Turn around. Triple slow. Keep them hands where we can see them.”

A hairless eyebrow shot up. Feeling a smile he refused to show on his thin lips, Snake Eye complied.

It was the three deserters from the gaudy. One man held a scattergun with both barrels and butt sawed off short. It had to hurt like a bitch when it went off; Snake Eye wondered if the sheer intimidation factor meant the man didn’t have to shoot it often.

His two pals had revolvers leveled from their waists to Snake Eye’s.

“You friends of Norvell’s, too?” he asked.

“Huh?” said the central member of the trio, a tall man with long hair spilling lankly from around a dark slouch hat.

“I suppose not.” It was a far-fetched surmise, of course. Still, that others might have been concerned with the driver’s fate was pardonably on his mind at the moment.

Norvell had been so remarkably guileless. Like a child. And as easy to distract, simply by looking past his shoulder at the alley mouth and saying, “What’s that?”

Obediently, Norvell had turned and looked. And hadn’t even had time to react when Snake Eye seized his neck from behind and expertly broke it.

For a further moment Snake Eye wondered if they might be following some triple-stupe quixotic notion of avenging the putative honor of the gaudy slut.

Then the swag-bellied man made a prodding motion of his short-barreled double gun. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Your valuables, mister. Hand them over. Start by undoing that fancy-ass gun belt of yours and handing it over. Nice and slow.”

“Very well,” Snake Eye said. “I’m lowering my hands now.”

“See what I did there?” the paunchy scattergunner said to his friends. “I get him to give us his most valuable traps, and disarm himself. All at once!”

Of course, had he handed over the exquisitely sewn and hand-tooled leather belt with the matched pair of Sphinx blasters in the holsters, Snake Eye wouldn’t have been disarmed. Not in any sense, although as he liked to put it, even naked on an ice floe he wouldn’t really and truly be
unarmed
.

But of course, all that assumed he really planned to comply. As these three stupes manifestly did.

When the shotgun man turned his beard-stubbled jowls back to bear on Snake Eye, his pig eyes shot wide. It was a half a heartbeat before the orange flash of the blaster that had appeared in Snake Eye’s left hand was reflected in them.

Even before the muzzle-flare erupted Snake Eye saw the dark hole appear between the would-be mugger’s eyes. Before the man started to fold like an empty grain bag the right-hand gun went off and the tall man in the middle staggered back, his own blaster dropping from suddenly unresponsive fingers.

The third deserter was faster than Snake Eye anticipated. He fired.

But not quicker than Snake Eye was prepared for.

And not faster than Snake Eye. Nobody was.

The mercie pivoted clockwise on the heel of his left boot. The dragon’s breath of the charge of black powder exploding out the revolver’s barrel passed him by without doing more than giving him a warm air-puff to the face. So did the bullet riding invisibly in front of the rush of rapidly expanding gas and smoke.

Even as he turned, Snake Eye was raising the Sphinx in his left hand. As if he had all the time in the world, he thrust out his arm so that the square muzzle almost touched that deserter between the eyes. They widened rapidly in horrified astonishment before muzzle-flame hid his face, and the 9 mm bullet blew out the back of his head.

He fell, reeking of scorched hair and flash-fried skin and eyeball.

Snake Eye had both blasters holstered before the last coldheart hit the rutty street. Without a backward glance he turned and walked away, not hurrying but neither dawdling, out of the tiny settlement and into the dark, where he’d left his horse hobbled in a dry gulley.

He reckoned he’d used up his welcome in this place. Then again, so far as he was concerned, he’d used up this place, too.

His business—and his pleasure—now lay elsewhere.

Chapter Thirteen

“Yes, Master Thom,” the gaunt, white-haired wrinklie in the balding felt vest said. “It shall be as you direct.”

He obeyed the landowner’s spoiled and cruel son without the least reaction, inside no more than out. Even the resentment had been whipped from his bony frame, decades before. All he had was his servitude to Colonel Ramie Clark and his family. They were more dirt farmers than cattle ranchers, and seemed all the more touchy about their importance and prerogatives over what their peers among the wealthy of the Association considered a severe social defect.

But she’s your only granddaughter, a voice inside his narrow, half-hairless skull cried in a degree of anguish the rest of him wouldn’t let himself feel. She’s so young, so innocent.

The realistic part of Jabez Hawshawe thought without any kind of passion at all that sooner or later, she had to learn the reality of life as a tenant of a Protector baron. Might as well be this night as the next one.

The front door blew open, or so he thought at first. He cringed a little, knowing eighteen-year-old Thom Clark would have him flogged for his carelessness if he hadn’t closed it tight enough. Or might just beat him half to death with a silver-knobbed cane from the stand by the door.

Or not even stop at the midpoint. Jabez had seen that happen, too.

But instead of a wind what came in the door was a stranger. And strange he was: tall and rangy in a coat that flapped around the calves of his blue jeans. He had a single blue eye that burned like a beacon in the light of the oil lanterns hung in the hallway, and a patch over the other.

“Everybody out!” he ordered, waving the barrel of his cocked blaster toward the door. “Take everybody with you that you don’t hate bad.”

“What are you talking about?” Thom demanded. “What do you think you’re doing here.”

“Burning this house to the ground,” the intruder said. “Who’re you? Baron’s puppy?”

“I am the heir to Baron Ramie Clark!” the young man screamed, his normally sallow face now bone-white. “My father will burn you, when he catches you!”

And he grabbed for the shotgun hung in brackets by the wall.

The flash of the big handblaster was as dazzling as its report was deafening, as the ringing in his ears didn’t manage to drown out the panic-hammering of his pulse. Jabez saw the young master take a step back, grease-smeared velvet vest smoldering and stinking. His eyes were wide. Sweat poured down his narrow face.

“You—” He coughed, felt his chest, then looked down at his hand.

Thom looked up in amazement from the blood that stained his palm. More ran out the corner of his mouth.

“How dare you!” he screamed, and threw himself forward.

The stranger’s second shot caught him in the throat. He fell, kicking, thrashing, strangling on blood.

“Any other baron spawn here?” the intruder asked Jabez. “Any sec men?”

Wordlessly, Jabez shook his head. At last he managed to reply, “Only myself, my granddaughter and some tenant servants.”

A woman with red hair spilling out from beneath her slouch hat stuck her head in the doorway. Despite his years, Jabez’s heart actually picked up the beat at the glimpse he caught of her lush-bodied form, out in the darkness of the stoop.

“Perimeter’s secured, Ryan,” she said. “No resistance, no guards. Just a lot of frightened tenants.”

“Anybody liable to show up with blasters in the near future?” the man asked.

“N-no, sir.” He hated himself for calling this coldheart
“sir.”
But the whipped-in habit of utter obedience to authority kicked in. And this tall stranger exuded authority, even without the big handblaster and his demonstrated willingness to use it.

“Okay,” the woman said, and ducked back out.

“Then get your possessions out,” the man said to Jabez. “You and the rest of the servants.” He grinned. The expression chilled Jabez’s blood. “Rad-blast it, take anything you want. Anything that’s ever caught your eye! We’re not carrying it away with us. And fifteen minutes from now this whole place goes up in a blaze of glory.”

Jabez heard scuttling sounds from behind him, then excited whispers. Some rose to moans.

He glanced back. Fat Hattie the cook and Larry the handyman were there, along with a couple Hattie’s kids who helped out. They were all staring in wide-eyed fascination from the body of the Clark heir, lying there with his eyes staring at the wall and his blood soaking into the carpet, and the man who put him there.

“Mister,” Jabez said, “Baron Ramie ain’t what you’d call an understanding man. He’ll have us all pulled apart by horses when he gets back and finds what you did.”

“Then you all better pack plenty of food and water,” the stranger said. “The baron must have some wags here and horses to pull them.”

Overcome, Jabez nodded. It felt strangely light, as if it might lift his frail old body up and carry it away like a balloon from this unbelievable scene. Was this a nightmare, or a dream come true.

“Then hitch them up, load them up and head out fast as the horses’ll pull,” the coldheart said. “Me, I wouldn’t so much as slow down until I’d shaken the dust of the Association and this rat-hole little war all the way off my horses’ hooves. Take everybody with you with sense enough to go.”

He shook his head, looking around the foyer with some emotion Jabez couldn’t so much as guess at.

“Can’t promise you a better life,” he said, “but looking at you and the rest—and based on my own experience with the Cattlemen’s Protective Association—I reckon there’s a chance of you managing to do better than this. Understand me?”

“Y-yes, sir,” he said. Somehow he no longer begrudged the use of the title. “Yes,
sir!
”

“Then move!”

* * *

“Y
OU
SEEM
TO
HAVE
an unfortunate habit of killing sons and heirs of the ruling class, Mr. Cawdor,” Colonel Cody Turnbull said. Mildred thought he looked worried as he poured himself a glass of some dark beverage.

“I didn’t see that I had much of a choice,” Ryan said. “Come to that, don’t really think Mildred and Krysty did with Buddy Kylie, either. The Clark kid wouldn’t stop coming at me—I’d give him credit for balls, but what I really think is, he was just too arrogant to believe anyone would dare lift a finger against him.”

He shook his head. “Not that I see either him or Buddy as a tragic loss.”

“I notice you don’t mention they were both enemies of ours, Mr. Cawdor,” said Al, sitting slouched on his chair.

Ryan shrugged. “Truth to tell, Baron,” he said, “that didn’t have a lot to do with either chill. It just seemed a matter of doing what was needed at the time.”

“Chilling enemies is one thing,” J.B. said from just behind Ryan. “Chilling mad dogs is another.”

Cody’s handsome, aristocratic face twisted in brief pain. He didn’t seem to care to hear members of his class characterized that way. Especially not by a passel of blasters for hire.

The companions were gathered in the parlor of Baron Al’s big house. It belonged to a middle-aged pair named the Lenkmans, who apparently had been roughly treated by the Protectors before the Uplanders recaptured their estate. Now they stayed on, insisting on acting as servants to the baron and his army staff.

No matter how genteel, the room smelled mostly of unwashed bodies and clothes stiff with dried, stale sweat. It still managed a Victorian stuffiness that reminded Mildred of old ladies who were too fond of tea, lavender and cats. The baron’s chair even had a lacy antimacassar, mostly white, thrown over the back of it. If Mildred remembered the word right.

Also the house smelled of cinnamon, for some unknown reason.

Though Ryan, who was of a generally restless nature, preferred to stand, most of the group was seated, either on the sofa, chairs, or in Ricky’s and Jak’s case, perched on an ottoman.

Cody and a small and ever-shifting swarm of staff officers and aides came in and out of the sitting room. Fortunately it was spacious, what Mildred thought was called a great room, open for two stories up to a pitched roof, with a gallery for the second floor over one end.

“Tell me again,” Cody said, “what exactly was the purpose of burning the Clark house in the first place.”

Mrs. Lenkman ghosted in, wearing an apron and carrying a plate of cookies. “Here,” she said listlessly, “I made these for you.”

“Thanks, Maisie,” Al said. “Put ’em anyplace. The boys—and, uh, girls—will help themselves.”

She smiled wanly at him and went out again. From her funereal silence and the fact her worn long black skirt hid the motions of her feet she appeared to travel by levitating and gliding above the polished wood floors and threadbare throw rugs.

“Sad case,” Al said, shaking his head when the lady of the house went out.

Cody nodded. “That it is.”

He looked sharply at Ryan. “You were saying?”

“Wasn’t,” Ryan said, “but I will. The Protectors got it all over you in manpower, firepower, pretty much any kind of numbers you want to put a name to. You’ve managed to hold them off, somehow, which is to your credit. But they’ve got to know that if they only play a waiting game, they can just wear you down.”

Al rumbled deep in his chest, a sound like distant thunder. “They can’t afford this damned war to go on perpetually, no more than we can. And we’re just up against flat busted.”

He shook his head. “Ah, if only those damned fool women...”

He let his voice trail off without, so far as Mildred could tell, seeing the way Cody Turnbull’s face stiffened and went pale.

“What we’re saying, Baron,” said J.B., perched on a wooden chair, “is that the Protectors have been just too nuke-blasted comfortable. They’ve got the edge, and their brass in particular haven’t faced any consequences. If anybody eats in their army, it’s them. Anybody goes hungry, it isn’t.”

Cody looked puzzled. “Isn’t that the normal order of things?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said. “That’s why we want to sting the barons—the landowning higher-ups—where it hurts. After what happened to their pal Clark they’re all going to have half a mind on their homes and the holdings they left behind, which up until now’ve been safe.”

“What purpose does this serve, Mr. Cawdor?” Cody asked.

The way Mildred had the man sized up, he was far from stupid. He seemed to be pretty knowledgeable about military business, and cared for his men, even if he was pretty uptight about maintaining the distinction between the grunts and their betters. But he wasn’t the most mentally agile monkey in the troop, either. He had habits of thinking and found it hard to shift outside them.

“Well, anything they’re thinking about that isn’t a way to screw us over helps, Cody.”

This time the baron, who was looking at his officer, did see his face turn red. He waved a big hand. “Relax, Cody. I’m not busting your chops. The fact is, if we make Kylie’s commanders nervous, looking over their shoulders, they’ll be distracted. If nothing else, that’ll distract Jed. Cloud his thinking.”

Cody shook his head. “And I’m not trying to be stubborn, General. But I don’t see any substantial way in which this helps us.”

“Call it stage one,” J.B. said, sitting back down after helping himself to a cookie. “Early days yet. We got a few tricks to pull before you start seeing benefits.”

Cody frowned. “I thought it was a primary principle of strategy never to engage in any action that doesn’t potentially lead to winning the war.”

“Not so easy for a group as small as we are to pull off, Colonel,” Krysty said. “Unless we assassinate Baron Jed directly, and since that would be a suicide mission, it would be hard for you to pay us enough to do that.”

Al and some of his aides laughed. Cody looked pained.

“So what—”

“Like J.B. said, Colonel,” Ryan said, “it’s a process. We get them off balance, get them angry. Get them stupe. Then they’re prime for you to hit them.”

“So you have a graduated plan of action mapped out,” Cody said, with just a hint of sarcasm. “I presume you plan to involve us at some point.”

“That’d be the general idea, yes,” Ryan said, refusing to be baited.

“Very well,” he said. “What’s your next move? Captain Muller, why don’t you set out a map and our friends can show us where they mean to sting our enemies next.”

A slightly plump officer with curly blond hair, who always seemed to hang around on Al’s staff but never spoke up much, moved to unroll a map on the gate-leg table by one side of the room. Mildred wondered at that; the baron tended to rotate his staff officers in and out of the field. Maybe Captain Muller wasn’t any great shakes as a field commander, and his baron felt safer with him on-staff all the time. Or maybe he was just a wizard at paperwork.

“Now,” Cody said, smiling at the companions over the U.S.G.S. contour map, “if you’ll point us to your next target so we can have some idea what to expect—”

“Isn’t that a bad idea?”

Everybody turned to stare at Ricky Morales. His olive-skinned face went dark with embarrassment.

“I mean, isn’t that a security breach or something?”

“Ricky,” J.B. said, “pipe down.”

“He’s got a point, J.B.,” Ryan stated.

“Oh, come now,” Cody said. “We want to have some idea whether the Uplands Alliance is getting its jack’s worth from you. We’re your employers. It isn’t so much to ask.”

“To tell the truth,” Baron Al said, rubbing his big powerful hands together, “I just plain want to know. I feel like a schoolboy at my birthday all over again.”

Though Ryan’s face never changed expression, Mildred could tell he wasn’t happy. But as a baron’s son himself, he knew that barons—even a baron as sharp and basically decent as Al had shown himself to be—had a will of iron.

“All right,” he said, sauntering over to the map.

As it happened, they’d already discussed the plan—the whole thing, not just the next stage. Ryan and J.B., who were the strategists of the bunch, had dreamed up the broad outlines, then the rest of them had helped flesh it out and mold it into shape.

It was a crazy plan. What else was new? Mildred decided to give in and have herself a cookie.