“You bastard! You’ve set us up!”
But the words died on his lips. He could see beyond Baron Al that a similar situation was occurring at the rear of the Charity convoy. Jourgensen’s eyes met those of Hutter across the dust storm wastes, each ready to accuse the other but stopped dead by the bewilderment on the other’s face.
“You?” Jourgensen yelled.
Hutter shook his head. “Ambush,” he screamed. “Get back, for fuck’s sake, get into defensive positions,” he yelled at his men as he turned and headed back to the lead wag on the Summerfield convoy.
Jourgensen, too, had decided that the best course of action was to ignore his opposing baron and concentrate on the menace that was now threatening. There would be time enough for Summerfield after this was sorted out. He slipped back into his wag, and picked up the handset, yelling, “Defensive now—watch the rear, turn the wags.”
In the confusion, seed crops and supplies were left scattered across the center of the arena as the sec men headed back to the safety of their wags and the machine blasters and mounted flamethrowers, which would now prove to be of use in a way that Hutter couldn’t have predicted.
Which actions also left the women, seemingly shackled together and guarded by two sec men, standing in the middle of the arena, with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
Which wasn’t quite the case.
Ayesha and Claudette had both recognized the sound of the wags beneath the storm, and had been looking out for them. Now that the only sec man paying them any attention were those with empty blasters, it was the time to act.
“Okay, let’s try and head back to the wag,” Ayesha screamed above the noise of the storm.
“Good move,” Claudette yelled back, her plaits whipping around her head in the howling storm. “At least we can get a defensive position better there than out here in the open.”
“What about the sec men?” one of the women asked. “Won’t they think it’s suspicious if we go back to the wag?”
“Not if these stupes take us back,” Claudette replied, indicating the two sec men who had been acting as their unwilling cover.
“You’ve got to be joking,” the sec man with the empty Uzi said with venom, throwing his useless blaster down to the desert floor and turning to run. “Baron!” he yelled, but was cut short by a burst of blasterfire from Claudette, who figured that all pretense was now blown and that they had been forced into the open. Before he had the chance to advance more than a few yards, the words were chilled on his lips as blood flooded into his lungs and bubbled up his throat from the immense internal injuries he received as a result of Claudette’s Uzi slugs hitting home.
The sec driver turned to Ayesha, all his nerves now, ironically, quelled by a terror greater than any he had ever known before.
“You bitch, this is all your doing,” he yelled, flinging himself toward her.
The girl stepped back, slipping off her shackles and bringing the knife up so that it was blade upward in her palm. As he lunged, she stepped calmly to one side and slashed at him, catching him across the side of his face. As he stumbled and fell, his hand came up to his face, leaving his ribs open at the side. She slashed under the rib cage, the razor-honed blade cutting through his clothes and scoring through flesh, fat and muscle. He howled in pain and doubled up on the floor of the arena, no longer an immediate threat.
“Drop the shackles and run like hell,” Claudette yelled, hanging back to marshal the women along to the wag while Ayesha dealt with the driver. When the girl joined her, Claudette looked around to see that Anita was the only one of the women who hadn’t run directly to the wag. In the confusion, no shots had been fired on them, and frankly it was unlikely that it had even been noticed that they were unshackled—until Anita had chosen to draw attention to this.
The blowsy blonde was hammering on the window of Baron Al’s wag, screaming at him to let her in and save her, and she would do anything for him, and she wasn’t to blame, it was his good-for-nothing daughter who had sold them down the river to something called the Hellbenders.