James Axler – Shadowfall

“Want to go back to the ville, Ryan?” Trader asked. “We’ll bring Dean out.”

“Sure you will. But I sort of want to be around when you do it.”

Jamie was sitting silently beside the grizzled figure of the Trader, holding the reins of his pony, listening to the discussion of what to do.

“I say we leave the sec men here with the horses and go in on foot,” Trader said.

“What?” Ryan couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You mean just the sec men? Out here on their own in the fireblasted mist? Come on, Trader!”

“Whats your problem, Ryan? Don’t like taking orders anymore? That it?”

” ‘Course not. From what I’ve seen and heard about Straub, I reckon he’s dangerous. If he’s placed distant pickets, they might already know we’re here.”

“All the more reason for the rest of us to go direct into the camp, blasters blazing, without wasting any more time on arguing.”

This was the old Trader, from the early days when Ryan and J.B. had first joined him, stone-certain in his thinking, inflexible, resisting any argument.

Later he’d been content to listen and take advice from them on tactical matters. Now, all of that seemed to have been thrown clean out of the door.

Ryan tried again. “Look, there’s all sorts of things wrong with this.”

Trader was deliberately ignoring him, shading his eyes as he stared ahead into the bank of roiling fog.

J.B. added his weight. “Jak’s the best stalker we got. Ryan’s second. They’re both carrying injuries that would make it suicide to go creepy-crawling in. I can just about manage to shoot one-handed. Just about. Leaves Abe, Doc, Krysty and Mildred. None of them are that able in hand-to-hand chilling.”

Trader turned slowly. “My memory’s turning into gruel. I thought you said I was in charge here. Must be I was wrong about that.”

Ryan closed his eye. He could feel the livid scar that seamed across the right side of his face beginning to throb with anger. Unless he kept his temper on the tightest of reins, he was capable of sliding helplessly into a crevasse of blind rage, where he had the potential of saying anything, doing anything.

J.B. tried once more. “Fog like this, we can’t charge in. Finish up shooting each other. Go in slow and careful and clear them a tent at a time. All of us.”

But Trader was insistent, refusing to listen to any kind of reasoned argument. “We leave the sec men here. Rest of us go in, and when the shooting starts they can follow and pick off any brushwood stragglers.”

Ryan patted his horse on the side of the neck, trying to relieve his own tension. “What if Straub has men around us now? Those crossbows only give one chance to the sec men. Could get chilled. And once you run in out of the fog, blaster blazing, the first thing they might do is open up my son from throat to groin.” The anger was almost beyond control. “If that happens, then the first person I waste is you, Trader.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The SIG-Sauer was somehow out and cocked in his hands, and the Armalite had moved around with the lazy ease of a snake, covering him.

Krysty came out of nowhere, forcing her mount in between the men. Her emerald eyes were wide and staring, green fire in the moonlight.

“Gaia! You’d rather murder each other and ruin the attack than back off and admit that either of you could be wrong.” Her finger pointed at Ryan. “Back off, lover. You know how to do it.”

“Trader’s dog-brained wrong,” he grated.

“It was agreed that I run this mission. If we were still with the war wags, Ryan, then I’d have had you held down and shot through the back of the neck for mutiny.”

“You used to do the shooting yourself,” Abe interrupted. “Seen you do it.”

“That’s right enough.” J.B. let the Uzi ease down again, as the tension slithered away.

“We do it the way I said.”

Ryan looked at him, breathing slowly, feeling the butchering rage passing. He had been within a ragged moment of putting a 9 mm round between Trader’s eyesassuming that the old man’s AR-16 hadn’t chilled him first.