James Axler – Shadowfall

“You could beat him, Dad,” Dean said enthusiastically. “No worries.”

“Think so?” Ryan ruffled the mat of curly hair.

“Sure. You’re old, but he’s even older.”

THEY REACHED THE VILLE, exhausted, drained of fire and hope, a little after the middle of the day, to be greeted by a burst of weeping and anger, once their dire news had been passed on.

They held a council of war within the hour, prompted by J.B. and Krysty. Baron Weyman attended, along with his son and Bill Rainey.

Trader sat at the end of the big refectory table, blaster across his lap, staring up at the ceiling.

“We have to go back and find Ryan and Dean,” J.B. insisted.

Rainey shook his head. “Don’t have enough men left for that. I’ll tell you straight, outlander, that I doubt we even have enough to defend the ville against an out-and-out attack. They can get up and over the walls, and we don’t have the sec men to cover the defensive perimeter.”

Baron Weyman was rubbing a finger along the angle of his jaw, as if he were trying to decide whether he needed to have a shave.

“In that case, I can see little point in waiting to have our throats cut by these lice-ridden mongrels. We will stand against them.”

Jamie clapped his hands, leaping to his feet to declaim, “Then, Father, I will stand at your right hand and keep the bridge with you.”

Despite the tenseness of the situation, Doc smiled. “You’re familiar with the holding of the bridge over the Tiber, against the forces of Lars Porsena of Clusium. ‘By the nine gods he swore, that the proud house of Tarquin should suffer wrong no more.’ If my memory has it properly remembered. I am delighted to see that learning is not yet quite gone from Deathlands and all judgment is not yet fled to brutish beasts.”

He looked around to see everyone staring at him. “My apologies, friends. But it is those same brutish beasts that confront us now. I would say only that Ryan’s instructions were to wait here for him. I think that we should do that.”

“What do we do if those brushwood bastards come, Doc?” Trader said, sneering. “Ask them to just wait awhile until Ryan gets back here?”

J.B. answered him. “They won’t attack until dusk. But Doc’s right. We should do what Ryan said. We can still cover our asses. My plan is to set out a watch on the trails from the west and north. Only way they can come at us. Soon as we get a warning, we go out and ambush them. We passed some good places for that within the last quarter mile. They won’t expect that and we can use our firepower to cut them apart.”

Trader patted the table approvingly. “I’ll be hung, quartered and dried for the crows! You did learn something all those years, John Dix. Good plan.”

RYAN HOPED THAT HIS PLAN was a good one.

Like a lot of plans, it seemed fine when you sat down and thought about it. When you came to try it out on the ground, you started to worry about all of the imponderables. One small slip, and the scheme was in tatters.

He adjusted the white silk scarf, with its weighted ends, around his neck. Ryan sat by the great heap of brushwood that he and Dean had dragged together. The boy would be doing the same, out in the narrow neck of the trail east, toward the ville, ready to light the wood on the signal and block off that way of escape.

Ryan’s fire should panic the mutie pigs and send them stampeding out of the box canyon with only one way to go, west toward the vulnerable camp of the brushwooders.

This was one of the key moments of the plan.

If it worked, the men, women and children would totally freak when they saw what was charging at them. They had only one way to escapeback west, along the treacherous trail toward the land of the scabbies, then out into the bubbling death trap of the sulfur swamps.

Ryan’s profound hope was that the terror of finding themselves in the path of the killer stampede would lead to the brushwooders fleeing, hopefully to their deaths.