They’d been waiting by the ruins of some predark building.
Abe struggled for the memory, a sign that he’d spotted. “Hotel,” he mumbled.
They’d greeted the hapless, soaked, breathless figure of the gunner. “Blood for blood, you bastard,” one of them said. “You’re a fucking dead man.”
Abe hadn’t bothered to try to draw his Colt Python. There were eight blasters cocked and aimed at him, from less than twenty feet.
It seemed like they’d tied him up and then started the brutal battering. But there might have been some punches and kicks even before the rawhide cord was knotted viciously tight around wrists and ankles, then looped around the rusting iron bars that protruded from a massive block of fallen concrete. A fourth piece of cord ran from his neck to a tumbled fence behind him, holding him stretched out and helpless.
Abe sniffed, spitting out a lump of congealed blood, feeling that there was more trickling down his throat from his gums and torn lips. It made him feel sick, adding to the nausea from the boots to his groin.
Now he remembered a little more.
The beating had definitely commenced as soon as they had him in their power, once they’d taken away the blaster, before and during the tying up.
It had still been light then, because Abe could recall the milling figures, jostling around him. He’d gone down quickly, and the silhouettes had loomed over him, pushing and screaming at one another as they fought to get at him.
They’d cursed and threatened, reminding him of the deaths on his hands, asking what had happened to his companion, the old fucker. Where had he gone? Did they have a camp nearby?
Did they?
“No,” Abe breathed.
No, they didn’t.
IT WAS ALARMING the way that he kept drifting in and out of consciousness.
When you’d been tied by a vengeful enemy, unable to move more than an inch or so in any direction, without garroting yourself, then it was difficult to try to carry out a check on how badly you were injured.
But Abe did his best.
Trader used to give occasional talks to all of the crews of the two war wags, picking a wide variety of relevant topics, almost all of them based on his own experiences. Or sometimes asking J. B. Dix to lecture on certain types of weaponry, or Ryan Cawdor on back-country survival.
Abe remembered that one of them had been centered on the idea of self-diagnosis of injuries and wounds. Where precisely had you been shot? What blaster? Had the bullet penetrated clean through or lodged somewhere? Broken any bones? Sliced into lungs or any other vital organs?
Same with knife or spear injuries. Burns and scalds. Drowning and hanging.
And beating.
Trader had given some excellent advice on what to do if you were recovering from a good kicking. The only trouble was that the kicking he’d received had driven all of it clean out of Abe’s befuddled skull.
But he did recall that it was important to try to deduce how badly you’d been hurt.
Just that would do for a starter.
“Head?”
Some teeth damaged and cuts inside his cheeks and lips. He very slowly moved his jaw, wincing at the stabbing pain beneath the right ear. Could be that the bone there was cracked. Abe couldn’t feel his nose at all, but he had been in enough gaudy brawls to be fairly certain that it would definitely have been one of the first things to get pulped.
Still, it wasn’t the first time.
And it probably wouldn’t be the last.
He shrugged. Collarbones were also vulnerable. Abe had lost count of the times he’d had one or the otheror bothbroken. His fingers were still and numb, but that could be the tightness of the cords that held him helpless.
As soon as the fists and boots began to thud in, Abe had gone down and curled himself up into the approved fetal position, knees up to save his genitals, elbows pressed in tight over his stomach and groin. Face buried in his hands.
He’d screamed a lot.
That had been one of the tips that Trader had passed along to them.