Chapter Six
At the top of the sand dune, Hawk plunged his hand into the pile of dried horse shit and fingered the crumbling material. It was stiff, but moist inside, and live with the tiny red ants that were everywhere in the Deathlands. His father had called them the only winners of skydark, and Hawk agreed.
“Ryan and the others were here less than twelve hours ago,” Hawk announced, casting the dung away and glancing out across the shimmering expanse of the hot desert. “No more than a day max.”
“Think the Core got them?” Mikel said, opening a canteen to pour some water on his head and down his neck. The day was hotter than a gun barrel, but they had plenty of water. Hell, there was still some sloshing about in his boot from the ville.
Wiping his hands clean in the sand, Hawk stood slowly, the scorpion perched on his shoulder scuttling around to keep its balance. He had simply put the creature there to get it away from the water. Scorpions drowned easily. But it seemed to like the high vantage point, and Hawk was pleased with the unnerving looks he got from the sec men. Fear was always the cornerstone of obedience.
“Mebbe,” Hawk admitted, scowling at the bare skeleton lying in the sand. The bones were scraped with some sort of curved blade, very similar to those razor sickles used by the Core. If the sand muties had harvested a dead horse to feed their bugs, then the outlanders might be prisoners, or even already converted. One sip of the bug juice and a man was perm addicted. A traveler had tried a sip once and then escaped. The next day he was burning hot with fever, covered with blisters, vomiting and crapping blood and screaming the craziest things. Never liking to waste ammo, Gaza had used an ax to chill the poor bastard, but then the pigs refused to eat the corpse as if the madness had remained inside the flesh. Triple weird. Rumor said that only long cooking purged the taint of the bug juice from food, but that wasn’t something Hawk wanted to put to the trigger. Whatever the bug juice did to a person was something just this side of Hell.
“Well, nukeshit,” a sec man drawled, hunching his shoulders. “Know what I think, Chief?”
“What?” Hawk demanded, squinting into the bright sunlight.
The man opened his mouth to speak, but never spoke. Then he violently threw himself off the horse to the ground.
Turning at the waist, Hawk scowled as the sec man landed in a tangle of loose limbs, with one of his boots coming off. That’s when the baron noticed the gaping hole in the man’s chest. A split second later, the muted boom of a high-power longblaster rolled from the desert.
“Ambush!” Hawk cried, hitting the ground and pulling out his handcannon.
The rest of his troops did the same and hauled out their weapons. However, there was nobody else in sight, the bare ground clear for miles in every direction.
Since the body had fallen to the east, Hawk studied the west, trying to find some movement in the sand from the hidden sniper. At any range it was a hell of a shot and the coldheart had to have a scope. Probably expected the rest of them to run away in panic so he could jack the goods left behind. But that scam wouldn’t work today. Soon, he would be wearing their guns in his belt.
“Jones, gimme a recce!” Hawk ordered, sweeping the sand with the barrel of his gun.
Rising up on his elbows to peer down the slope of the dune, Jones jerked backward as his throat exploded and his head came off. A grisly spray of dark blood gushing from the ragged stump of his neck. Fingers twitching, body wiggling, the deader seemed to still be alive as the echoing blast of the big bore sniper rifle washed over the high dune once more.
Now the sec men opened fire randomly, shooting at anything that moved. The sergeant lit the fuse of a black powder gren and heaved it far and high toward the west. Seconds later, the bomb detonated in a thunderclap and hot shrapnel rained upon the desert.