Doc tried this time, the LeMat roaring louder than a cannon. Some birds rose into the sky, but most roosted on the top of the wall, settling in to simply wait until it was safe to return.
“Never leave,” Jak stated, leaning forward slightly so that his white hair cascaded down to cover his face. “Too much food, not enough us.” The position was a combat stance, something he did unconsciously to hide his eyes and thus mask what direction he would attack.
“When the belly speaks,” Mildred growled, “the ears become deaf.”
“Indeed, madam.” Doc arched an eyebrow. “Buddha?”
“Who else?”
Looking over the aced ville, Ryan scowled deeply. This was no place to make camp. The smell of the dead was attracting swarms of dragonflies, which had discovered the companions as a new source of nourishment. J.B. hauled a Molotov cocktail from his munitions bag, and the group passed around the bottle of fuel, rubbing small amounts on their exposed skin. The flies departed immediately, but they knew the bugs would return once the gas vapors had dissipated.
“Okay, we do a fast recce,” Ryan stated, hoisting his longblaster. “In pairs only. Stay alert, watch for traps. Check for any boats, or even canoes we might use. Krysty, with me. J.B. stay with Mildred. Dean with Jak. Doc, you’re the anchor.”
“Once more, I am Balador at the gate, my dear Ryan,” the old man said, thrusting his stick into the ground and drawing the monstrous LeMat. “None shall pass without a greeting from my trusty Mjolnir!”
“Crazy old coot,” Mildred grumbled. “Everybody in your time period talk like that?”
Doc smiled. “Only the educated, madam.”
As the others spread out to follow the wall, Krysty and Ryan cut directly through the middle of the settlement. The corpses carpeted the ground, and more than once they were forced to tread on the dead to keep going straight.
In the center of the ville, they found a huge cooking pit, now converted into a pyre. Bodies and cords of wood were mixed together, waiting for a lit match. The stench was unimaginable.
“Gaia! They tossed the poor bastards in, dead or alive,” Krysty said.
The man merely grunted in reply. He’d seen folks do a lot worse than that to stay alive. Ryan was no stranger to the savagery of man.
“Let’s try over there,” he said, indicating a box with iron bars over the windows. It was the only such cargo container with anything added to the Spartan exterior.
“Must be the baron’s home,” she guessed.
“Makes sense,” he agreed.
But as they started to leave, a whispery voice spoke from out of nowhere. “H-help…me…”
The man and woman swung about in a crouch, their blasters sweeping the nearby corpses for any hostile signs. But nothing was stirring, except the swarms of fat flies feeding on the festering dead. Then the voice came again.
“Ryan…” the voice called from the depths of the reeking pit. “For God’s sake, Ryan. It’s…me…”
Chapter Six
With white-knuckled hands, Henry Glassman grimly held on to the control board of the pitching PT boat. The spray whipped back his hair and stung his eyes as it came howling over the cracked windshield of the open cabin at the front of the craft. Its speed was phenomenal, and the huge steam engine aft of the vessel thumped louder than a cannon. The crew said that was normal, and he wondered if it was true.
Glassman still couldn’t believe this PT boat and its sec men were his to command. The healer had played for as much time as possible with Kinnison, praying his family would escape the clutches of the lord baron. But Kinnison had outmaneuvered him once more, and with his family under guard back on Maturo Island, Glassman had no choice but to do the baron’s dirty work yet again.
He had no idea why he was chosen for this task. The healer knew next to nothing about the sea, and even less about the steam-powered boats called peteys by the sec men who rode them, and PT boats by everybody else. Rebuilt from the wreckage of some predark navy, the craft moved faster than arrows and carried enough weaponry and blasters to level a small ville. No pirate ship would dare to approach one of the deadly boats, even the huge four-masted windjammers that carried dozens of black powder cannons.