But that wasn’t the problem that occupied Elias Tulk. He actually didn’t care whether the girl—whose name he knew to be Ayesha—was raped and possibly chilled. Hutter wouldn’t be able to stop it on his own, even though he sat beside Tulk right now, with an Uzi across his lap and a Sharps slung across his back.
Elias Tulk was not a happy man because of the chem storm. The interference was so bad that he had been unable to contact Papa Joe and let him know that the convoy had left as planned, undeterred by the aftermath of the storm. The radio that Correll had given him when he had first been recruited by the Hellbenders was now lying in his bunk back in Summerfield. It was too risky to carry it with him, and it had proved useless earlier that morning, when he had made one last attempt at contact.
Tulk had been recruited by a recce mission, willing to change sides and act undercover because Hutter had taken Tulk’s wife for his own, simply because he took a fancy to her. But the woman had been unwilling, and for disloyalty to the baron, Hutter had made Tulk shoot her in the head. The memory of her eyes, staring imploringly into his own as he squeezed the trigger on the 9 mm Luger and blew her brains from the side of her head, still haunted him. He hated himself for not refusing the baron, and hated the baron for turning him into the kind of spineless automaton that would follow from fear. He didn’t care whether he bought the farm on this day, only that Hutter’s little empire should collapse.
Which was why he was fretting about not being able to contact the Hellbenders. He hoped that they would take the same chance as Hutter, and set off anyway.
The concern had to have shown on his face as he piloted the wag across the desert, for Hutter spoke.
“Elias, you look like something’s troubling you, boy. Why don’t you tell your old daddy what it is, now.”
“Nothing much, Baron,” Tulk replied, resenting the patrician attitude of Hutter, who thought of himself as the father of his people, and acted accordingly. That’s if you believed in the sort of father who raped and chilled his daughters at will, and delighted in setting man against man to divide and conquer any opposition against him in the ville. Tulk knew how much Hutter was anticipating the arrival of Ayesha, and had almost walked in on the baron masturbating while he repeated her name like a mantra.
Hutter looked patrician. A large man, standing over six feet with long gray hair and matching beard, and nursing a huge gut from over indulgence, he sat uneasily on the narrow wag seat, in direct contrast to Tulk, who was a few inches shorter and lean, with a sharply defined musculature that stood out well under his olive skin. His dark, saturnine brow remained fixed on the road ahead, not wishing to give anything away until the time he could gain his own personal vengeance.
Hutter wouldn’t accept Tulk’s answer. “Say, you ain’t actually afeared about what we’re gonna do, are you?” he asked with a sly sarcasm infusing his voice.
“Why would I be, Baron?” Tulk answered with as little expression in his voice as he could manage.
Hutter shrugged. “I dunno. Mebbe it’s just that you don’t have the balls for this sort of thing. Mebbe I should think about demoting you—but then again, if you ain’t worth where you are now, then why would you be worth anything in the sec force?”
Tulk sighed inwardly, but kept a stone face. This was one of Hutter’s irritating habits, part of his divide-and-rule philosophy with his sec force. If he set one against another, and kept petty rivalries and jealousies afloat, as well as threatening the position of his sec hierarchy, keeping them at one another’s throats, it was easier for him to keep control over them all, as none would ever form alliances to end his reign.
Except, of course, if they chose to align themselves with an outside force. Emboldened by this knowledge, Tulk did something that he had previously always been mindful of—he spoke back.