“Ville!” J.B. said, squinting to the north.
Shifting gears, Ryan headed in that direction and soon there rose from the sands a ville of tan bricks. The high walls weren’t straight, but extended to points like a star, forming deep passages between each section. Ryan approved. Those were murder alleys, where the ville sec men could concentrate their blasterfire to cut down invaders. The lower bricks were shiny with pieces of broken glass studding the surface, and along the palisade were firing slots and some rusty metal frames dangling with nests of rope that he instinctively knew was a lift of some sort for bringing folks in and out of the ville without opening the gate. This was a real hard-site, safe from any army of coldhearts. Unless somebody had a functioning tank, or a working plane, which was about as unlikely as drinkable rain falling from the tortured sky in this desolate part of the Deathlands.
As they got closer, Ryan couldn’t see a door or a gate in the walls, and drove around the ville in a wide arc until locating first one, then another door, separated by a starpoint wall. The large doors were both wooden and strapped with metal. The one-eyed man was willing to bet a live round of ammo that only one of those actually opened into the ville. The other would be a sham, a thick door placed in front of a solid wall to make attackers waste time and men by dividing their forces to hit a useless target. Smart. The baron here was no fool.
“Dark night,” J.B. whispered, shoving his hat back on and pulling the arming bolt of the Uzi.
“I see it,” Ryan growled, grinding the damaged clutch as he brought the wag to a halt in the open sand.
Directly in front of the wag was a low adobe brick wall only about a foot high that seemed to circle the entire ville at about four hundred feet of distance. Old weathered crosses jutted from the ground, and at one point the skeleton of a man was staked spread-eagle near the little wall, iron spikes driven through the empty sockets of both eyes. The message was clear—cross this line and die.
“In a world of illiterates, this is an easily understandable denouncement,” Doc rumbled, using a strip of canvas to tie his silvery hair off his neck. “Most elucidating.”
“A simple skull and crossbones would have sufficed,” Mildred told him, using the barrel of her Czech-made ZKR target pistol to push aside the tattered canvas awning to peek out from the rear of the vehicle.
“Over there,” Dean said, jerking a thumb to the left.
His pale skin painfully flushed from the sunlight, Jak took a tiny sip from his canteen, sloshing the water around in his mouth before swallowing, still hoarding the precious fluid even with a ville only minutes away. Mebbe it was empty, or full of muties. Life had taught him that until it was in your pocket, you didn’t have anything for sure.
“Must have a lot of coldhearts in the area for them to go to this much bother,” Krysty suggested, her hair coiling tightly to her head. She was getting a very bad feeling about this ville, not a sense of direct danger as if a sniper had them in the crosshairs, but more a sensation of betrayal. Then it was gone, the ghostly impression vanished like a dream in the night.
“Or one big enemy,” J.B. guessed. “Might be both.”
Turning off the engine, Ryan pushed aside the blankets and stepped out of the vehicle, enjoying the sensation of the desert wind blowing over his sweat-damp clothes. When nothing happened after a few minutes, he pulled a small plastic mirror from his shirt pocket and reflected the bright sunlight along the top of the wall. That should get somebody’s attention soon enough.
Almost immediately, there was an answering flash, and the huge metal framework loudly creaked as it rotated out over the wall and slowly began to lower something to the sandy ground.
“It’s a man,” Krysty said, her eyes picking out the details of the lone sec man. “Blaster, no grens in sight.”