“That’s enough, both of you!” he shouted, giving the smaller woman a stiff kick in the legs.
“Hey,” Ryan called out, jumping down from the tree.
“You stay out of this, One-eye.”
He gave each of the women another kick in the legs, and they finally stopped clawing at each other.
Ryan wasn’t impressed.
He was a big man, well muscled with a body covered with scars, including several around his neck. There were leathery stripes of healed over flesh down and across his back, likely the result of dozens, maybe even hundreds of lashes inflicted by sec men over the years. He had short cropped hair and a full beard, and in many ways he reminded Ryan a bit of Major Gregori Zimyanin, which gave Ryan all the more reason to stop the man from beating the two women.
“Your next kick will be your last,” Ryan said calmly, his fists clenched by his side.
The big man ignored Ryan’s comment and pulled the two women apart.
The women were done fighting, but still eyed each other warily.
“Beth,” he said to the older woman, “you know you can’t rut until you’ve birthed the child. If you need to rut, it can be arranged. I could even see to it personally.” He helped her off the ground and sent her on her way.
Then he turned to the other woman. “And I swear, if you had hurt Beth’s offspring in any way, you wouldn’t have been rutting with anybody, not the one-eye, and not anybody for a long, long time.”
“But I wanted him tonight, Andy,” she said, looking up at Ryan with something like fire in her eyes.
“There’ll be plenty of time to rut with the one-eyed dog later,” Andy said. “He’s not going anywhere.”
The young woman still didn’t seem satisfied, but she stomped off without further protest.
When she was gone, Andy turned to face Ryan. “This is my work detail, One-eye. I keep the peace here any way I see fit, including giving breeders a kick when they got it coming.”
“What are the sec men for?”
“To make sure no one tries to escape. As long as our group makes our quotas, they don’t give a shit what goes on between us.”
Ryan stepped forward, halving the distance between them. “Including when one of you gets chilled?”
Without warning, Andy threw a punch at Ryan’s head. He dodged the blow and struck Andy’s head with his left elbow. There was a definite crack of bone on impact, and Andy fell to the ground, dazed and unable to get up.
Ryan broke a branch off a nearby tree and was about to run the jagged edge of it through Andy’s ribs, when a sec man fired a round at Ryan. The bullet zinged past the one-eyed man’s head and slammed into the peach tree behind him, sending splinters in every direction.
“Leave him alone!” a sec man shouted as he walked over to where Ryan stood over the prone Andy. “Get back to work!”
Ryan tossed aside the branch and stepped away from the still groaning Andy.
The sec man helped Andy to his feet, and although the big man didn’t say anything, the look in his eyes told Ryan that it wasn’t over between them.
Only beginning.
Chapter Fifteen
“What’s your name?” J.B. asked the young woman Jak had brought out of the weeds.
“Clarissa,” she answered.
She was probably in her early twenties and had dirty blond hair that was all in a tangle. Her clothes were pretty worn-out, with large tears in both her T-shirt and pants. And although dirty, her skin was clean of any signs of rad sickness. She looked pretty much like a norm, but one could never tell in the Deathlands.
“Why were you throwing rocks at us?”
“It wasn’t just me throwing rocks,” she stated. “There were muties out there, too, you know.”
“All right, then, why were you and the muties throwing rocks?”
“To get your food.”
“But we don’t have any food,” Dean said.
“You’ve got more than we have, and that’s enough. We watched you eat and wanted some of your food.”
“And you were going to get it by throwing rocks?”