Deathlands - Amazon Gate Part 7

"Wanted to see what?" Petor questioned, puzzled by the suddenly flat tone in Tammy's voice.

"It doesn't matter, stupidworks," she answered bitterly, watching as Margia left the armory and headed toward the contest, smiling coldly at Tammy as she pa.s.sed her.

By the time both Margia and Tammy had arrived back at the contest, most of the shooting had taken place. The contest wasn't in itself a compet.i.tion. It was just something that the Amazon warriors used to spice up the otherwise dull target practice. There was an air of good humor about the shooting, and J.B. found the different stances and shooting styles of the contestants fascinating. So much so that he hadn't even noticed that Mildred had refrained from talking to him. But even the laconic armorer noticed the change in atmosphere when Margia returned. She headed straight for Mildred.

"What do you shoot with?" she asked casually.

"ZKR 551, Czech made."

Margia raised an eyebrow. "I don't think I've ever come across one of those," she

said easily. "What caliber?"

"It's a .38," Mildred answered.

Margia held out her hand. "Can I see?"

Mildred shrugged. Standing right in front of her, and in front of the others, there was nothing that the blonde could do to Mildred's blaster.

But Margia had timed her question carefully.

"Your turn," Jess said to them.

Mildred went to take back her blaster, but Margia had produced her own from the sheathed holster in the small of her back. "Mind if I shoot with yours? It'll be fair if I give you mine, 'cause we'll both have unfamiliar blasters." Mildred wavered for a second. She knew this was a trick of some kind, but couldn't for the life of her work out what Margia was pulling. To refuse and cause a scene would mean loss of face in front of J.B. and the other members of the Gate. J.B. she could put in the picture later, but the Gate...

"Okay," Mildred a.s.sented with a deceptively casual shrug. "And G.o.d help you if you're setting me up, lady," she muttered to herself.

They walked to the line in the earth from where the target practice would begin. Margia took position first, and sighting carefully along the barrel of the ZKR, rattled off five shots in quick succession. From their position on the sheet covering the target, it could clearly be seen that the shots had cl.u.s.tered around the center.

"You now," Margia said with a smirk that made Mildred's spine crawl.

She sighted along the blaster Margia had given her, a Kimber .45 ACP pistol. The compact blaster had a barrel that located directly into the slide, and it held seven rounds. Mildred loosed them in a smooth repeating squeeze of her trigger finger, but even as the first round left the barrel she knew that something was wrong. The weight of the blaster felt wrong, as though something had somehow thrown it out of alignment. The discharged rounds kicked back in an asymmetric manner, causing the spread of hits to be wider than Margia's by no small degree. Even without looking, Mildred knew that her performance had been the worst of the contest, and even as she seethed at the deception of the blond armorer, so a part of her kept cool and looked at the blaster, searching for the cause of the problem.

"Not quite what I expected," Margia said quietly, keeping the exaltation out of her voice. She looked over to J.B., and said, "Mebbe you'd better think of joining up with us on a regular basis, if this is the best you can do."

Mildred looked across at the Armorer. He was phased by Mildred's poor show. She knew that the last thing he would do was blame her, but that didn't alter the fact that she had let her friends down-albeit by a treacherous hand. Her gaze returned to the blaster in her hand.

"Don't blame the tools, sweetie," Margia said in an acid tone, swiftly removing the Kimber from Mildred's grasp and replacing it with the ZKR.

Margia left Mildred impotent with rage and humiliation, left to questioning stares from Tammy and Krysty and left the others reflecting on the poor performance of the much-vaunted sharpshooter.

Left with the Kimber nestling against the small of her back, holding fast its little secret-the delicate work on the barrel that threw its alignment and made it Margia's secret weapon for anyone in the tribe, or out of the tribe, who might cross her.

Chapter Eight.

The period of peaceful travel was coming to an end. It was inevitable that this would happen, but the manner in which it occurred was something that couldn't have been predicted, for all things seemed to coincide and began not with an infringement from outside, but from within.

They spent three more days traveling. The climate was still warm, but there were occasional bursts of rain that fell warm upon them from the heavy chem-stained clouds that hung overhead. It wasn't the scarring acid rain of farther south, but still had a tinge of chem that made their skin soapy if they stayed in it too long, the top layers of the epidermis softening like a clay putty as the rain soaked in. When the showers. .h.i.t, it was hard to find cover and the Gate would gather into a protective circle, with the men using plastic sheeting and tarpaulins hauled from the wagons to cover the tribe as a whole.

They were having trouble finding cover because the terrain was changing around them. The vast plains with the crops of trees glading them had gradually lessened, the foliage and plant life spreading out into the gra.s.sland, the gra.s.ses encroaching onto the wooded areas, until there was no longer any clear delineation. The trees that still dotted the landscape were smaller. No longer the twisted descendant of redwoods, they were now smaller, like stunted beech and silver oak, with gnarled trunks that harbored small mammals and nests of birds.

In some areas, the foliage would grow thick, with twisting plant stems and root systems for the trees that would make progress difficult. Instead of the steady pace they had previously maintained, it was now a question of hacking a path through territory that was virgin to travel on foot. At the head of the tribe, Gloria would hack her way through, her flames of hair swaying to the easy rhythm of her movements, still gentle and unhurried even in these circ.u.mstances, like the movement of a coiled spring that was deceptively easy yet carried with it an immense energy. Ryan joined her at the front, his panga swinging in time to hers, his muscles rippling under the effort and glistening with sweat under the humidity of the rainy heat.

Margia had kept up her campaign of sly sideswipes at Mildred, saying nothing and everything by the tone of her voice, constantly referring to Mildred's failure in the shooting compet.i.tion-c.u.m-practice, but always in a conciliatory tone. She was deliberate in not being openly antagonistic, not wanting J.B. to notice any hostility on her part.

Mildred was having trouble keeping her temper. J.B.'s att.i.tude to her hadn't changed, but she did notice other members of the Gate looking at her as though she had somehow failed a test. Whether this was because of her failure against Margia as a marksman or because she wouldn't rise to the obvious bait the blond armorer was laying before her, Mildred couldn't be sure. But of one thing she could be sure: her patience was thin and stretched beyond the point where she could back down. It was only a matter of time before she snapped.

PREPARING CAMP WAS harder now, as the Gate and Ryan's people had to hack back swathes of foliage to clear s.p.a.ce for the campfire and for the tents. The baffling that had served so well in wooded glades had to be more securely planted in the earth to prevent the cold night winds from driving it down, and it was harder for the guards to keep hidden in the lack of cover during the still watches. Despite this, they were still able to set up a reasonable resting post on each night.

On the third night, as darkness fell, Ryan and Doc conversed with the Gate queen.

"I would hazard a guess that we are headed toward the area where the old capital was once located," Doc said, studying both the map he had taken from the redoubt and the faded parchment that Gloria carried. He indicated a location on both, each in turn, with a long, bony finger that trembled slightly in the cold night air, despite their closeness to the main fire.

"That's where the main nukes would have hit," Ryan said quietly. "It's still a complete no-go area, what little of it is left. Trader had never seen it, but like he used to say, 'You don't have to see the s.h.i.+t to know that it smells.'"

"Picturesquely put, my dear boy," Doc murmured with a wry grin of amus.e.m.e.nt, "and probably just about accurate. There was the strong smell of corruption stinking out those corridors, the corruption-of-power madness, the insanity of pointless violence and the acquisition of power for the sake of it, with no goal or reason other than to glory in the utter futility of being master of the void."

Gloria cast a puzzled glance at Ryan. "Is he always like this? I'm sorry, honey, but I can't understand a word you say," she added to Doc.

He gave a look of infinite sadness. "Madam, if you had seen the void, you would understand. I could see it in those whitecoat eyes. If nothing else happened in the days of skydark that was good, then at least it cleaned out the canker eating at their souls."

"Doc," Ryan said, trying to bring the old man back on track, "if we're not going to the old capital, then where are we headed?"

Doc looked blankly at the one-eyed warrior, for a short moment lost somewhere inside the h.e.l.l that he carried within him, the things that he knew but would rather had never crossed his consciousness.

"To oblivion, dear boy," he said softly. Then, in a stronger voice, "Inevitably, as must all men. But right now I would say we were going to scout around to the northwest of the continent. Strange, is it not, how everything seems to pull us this way. I remember a story from the whitecoats, a rumor only half-heard through an office door, but nonetheless..."

Doc, however, was not to repeat the rumor right then. There was a more pressing problem, as evinced by the sudden sounds of argument that cut him off and caused them to look around.

"Mildred..." Ryan whispered.

"Margia..." Gloria replied in a resigned tone.

"IT'S ABOUT TIME you came out with what you meant, lady, 'cause I'll tell you one thing-you wind a spring too far and it snaps. You pull that elastic too taut and it snaps. And that's me, girl."

Mildred squared up to the blond armorer, shrugging off Krysty's hand as she tried to restrain the angry woman. Margia had finally taken that one step over the line. And it was the simplest trigger of all: Mildred's color.

Mildred Wyeth had encountered race hatred and discrimination all her life. Her father had been burned to death in his chapel, a victim of racism. Racism hampered her career as a doctor, despite her success. In the days before skydark, she often wondered if she would have achieved greater success if she had been white. Waking up from her freezie state to an alien world, it might have been an unreasonable dream, but not beyond the bounds of probability, that the harsh demands of a postholocaust world would cause the survivors to forget about race and band together to try to survive. Instead, she found merely that survival increased the tribalism and hatred.

Margia had drawn this inference from J.B.'s oblique answers to her questions about Mildred. And having judged that now was the right moment, she chose to bring this card into play. Pa.s.sing Mildred where she sat with Krysty and Tammy, the blonde paused to mutter a comment about Mildred sitting too close to the fire, in case she got burned, like her father, adding, "but then, I suppose J.B. likes burned meat."

It was at the same time both ba.n.a.l and vile, and it certainly had the intended effect. Like the last straw on the cliched camel's back, it broke the line of resistance that Mildred had kept up for days. The reference to her father, along with the racial slur, was well timed by the blonde.

And now they stood face-to-face, Mildred seething with anger, Margia retaining a detached and almost ironic calm.

"What do I mean?" she said with a deceptive sweetness. "Why, Mildred, I don't bother to hide things."

"That's true," Mildred snapped. "I don't know exactly what you want-to make me look bad in front of John, in front of everyone. To take him for yourself in some way I don't understand...just to play some motherf.u.c.king stupid game for all I know. But you've gone too far now."

Margia had expected the strike, and was ready for it. Mildred jabbed with a straightened hand, fingers rigid, powering the blow from the elbow so as not to telegraph, aiming for just under the blonde's ribs with an upward thrust. If the blow had struck home, it would have driven the breath from her body and been a hammer blow to her heart, despite the hard muscle that ridged her torso.

But Margia was quicker, her antic.i.p.ation adding fire to her reflexes. Her right arm swept down, deflecting Mildred's arm by redirecting its own momentum, and she shot forward her left arm, with her hand turned palm up, driving it into Mildred's face.

Mildred snapped her head back before the full force of the blow could hit her, but still there was enough for her to see stars as the heel of Margia's hand brushed against her. Mildred toppled back, and knowing that she couldn't prevent her fall, she relaxed into it so that she would be floppy as she hit the earth, and would not jar or break anything. She hit the ground, tensing her calf and thigh muscles to propel herself back upward, but found that Margia had already antic.i.p.ated this move.

Instead of staying on her feet to deliver the next blow, as Mildred had expected, Margia had followed Mildred down, dropping to her knees so that she caught Mildred on the way up, her bony knees smas.h.i.+ng into Mildred's ribs, driving her back to the earth and pinning her there. The blonde's hands snaked out for Mildred's throat, and there was a gleam in her eyes that bespoke of blood l.u.s.t.

It was only because Mildred was a fraction quicker than Margia thought that she managed to prevent the grip taking hold on her throat. Mildred brought her hands up, pulling her arms together so that they wormed in between the blonde's. She pushed her arms out, taking Margia's forearms away from her p.r.o.ne body, and turning her hands so that her palms gripped around the blonde's forearms in a viselike grip that pinched the flesh and felt hard bone beneath. "You won't beat me," the blond armorer whispered, her voice husky with excitement. "You'll tire before I do."

And although she desperately refused to admit it to herself, as this would destroy her own fighting confidence, Mildred knew deep in her gut that Margia was right. Mildred was a good fighter, learning from her companions and adding this to her basic drive and determination, but for all that, she knew that she was ultimately no match for an Amazon warrior who had been born to the life and trained almost from birth. Margia would be stronger over the distance, have more stamina, and would have an almost genetic disposition to combat.

Mildred was in deep trouble, and she knew it.

By this time, members of the Gate had started to drift toward the fight. An internal skirmish of this sort was rare among the tribe, and rather than any sense of urgency there was an over whelming feeling of curiosity among the onlookers. Krysty desperately wanted to intervene, but a shake of the head from Tammy told her that it would be a breach of protocol that could endanger the status of their entire party.

Dean, Jon and Petor had also homed in on the fight, after hearing the initial argument.

"s.h.i.+t, Mildred doesn't stand a chance," Jon said matter-of-factly.

Dean shot him a sharp glance. "Mildred's a good fighter," he replied. "Margia's gonna have to be good to take her out."

Petor shook his head. "Doesn't matter how good a fighter she is. She sure as s.h.i.+t ain't el loco, and that's what Margia is."

Jon agreed. "That's the problem. She'll keep going until she wins, even if all the flesh is flayed from her hide. She just gets this wild fire in her. I've seen her before."

"Then why isn't anyone stopping her?" Dean asked, indicating the Gate members who were gathering around the fight.

"Two reasons," Jon said softly. "The first is that you never interfere with a fight between two women... not in this tribe. It's the worst breach of law you can think of."

"Hot pipe! I can't let that get in the way of stopping this," Dean said angrily, moving away from Jon and Petor and moving toward the fight. "I can't let Mildred get-"

Petor grabbed his arm. "Second reason, Dean- Margia is an evil b.i.t.c.h, and you know that she won't rest until she's either the victor or the vanquished. This'll run until she dies or emerges victorious, and believe me, my friend, if you get in the way she'll take you out, as well."

Dean made to pull away, but found Petor's grip was firm. Jon took Dean's other arm. "Believe him," Jon said simply. Dean looked on helplessly while Margia pummeled Mildred. She had beaten away Mildred's arms, loosened the grip that Mildred had on her forearms, and was swinging punches and chops at the p.r.o.ne woman. People were slow to make their way from the corners of the camp, or from over by the fire, and Ryan, Doc and Gloria were nowhere to be seen. Neither was J.B., who was at that moment in the armory tent, putting the finis.h.i.+ng touches to his Uzi, which he had lovingly stripped and cleaned.

But there was one man who was close enough to the fight to see almost immediately what was going on, and one man who had no one to tell him not to intervene.

Not that mere words could ever stop Jak Lauren when he was determined to see something through.

Jak had been outside the camp when the fight began, having just taken a walk in the surrounding scrub to feel the cold night air on him. He had sharpened his eyes and hearing in the gloom, taking in every movement in the undergrowth. Sharpened so much, in fact, that it went beyond the immediate area, and beyond the five senses into something that could reach out beyond. Almost as if he could scent trouble on the air.

Which is exactly what happened. Jak turned suddenly back toward the camp, sensing a change in atmosphere. For a fraction of a second, he paused, a.s.similating in his subconscious all that his senses were telling him. And then he began to run. Mildred was by now almost insensible. Margia had landed a chopping blow to the side of her neck that had made her see a whirl of colors in the night air, a thousand firecrackers exploding in her head. Despite all she had experienced over the years, Mildred had always firmly believed that the idea of exploding lights and fireworks in the head were a cliche. Now she knew that wasn't so, and knew at a moment when it was imperative that she remain alert.

But somehow she couldn't. The blow had stunned her severely, and caught a nerve cl.u.s.ter that spread a deadening effect up her face and into her head. It was almost as though her head were becoming disa.s.sociated from her body, and would no longer respond to her commands. She wanted to lift her arms and defend herself, but they stubbornly refused to obey. She was painfully aware that this left her completely open to attack, and Margia was keen to exploit that.

The blond armorer landed blow after blow, not in a hurry, but with the calm a.s.surance of one picking her spot. She had caught on quickly that Mildred was incapacitated, and that it was now merely a matter of taking her time and finis.h.i.+ng the job properly.

A chance that she wouldn't get because of her arrogance.

Jak came streaking through the crowd, white hair flowing out behind him, his face pale and ghostly in the distant light of the campfire. He shouldered aside the Gate members who blocked his path, unheeding of their dissent, and took in the situation at a glance.

He jumped, launching himself into a flying drop kick that hit Margia on the side as she was about to land another blow. Her arm was raised, and Jak's combat boots. .h.i.t her under the ribs and in the soft hollow of her armpit. The blonde grunted in shock and pain as she was driven sideways onto the ground, and off Mildred. Jak rolled beside her and got to his feet as she gathered herself and rose to attack the new threat.

"Fight one, fight all," Jak said simply, arms hanging loose by his side, weight balanced on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet, ready to fight but unwilling to give away anything by his stance.

Margia's eyes glittered with animal hatred and anger. "You little s.h.i.+t, you'll learn," she grated, launching herself at the albino.

Jak was ready for the a.s.sault and adjusted his balance so that he could take the brunt of her attack side on. In her sudden flaring anger, she had lost some of her cunning, but Jak was still calm and collected. He countered her blow and used her own force against her to drive her back to the ground. She snarled as she sprang to her feet once more, her hand snaking down her thigh to where she had her panga sheathed.

Jak was ahead of her. He moved into her with the speed and slither of a snake, palming one of his leaf-bladed knives and using a swift downward motion to cut through the straps that held the sheath to her thigh. The panga dropped away from her thigh before she had secured her grip on the hilt. While she tried to fasten her grip, tilting her body slightly to snake her hand farther down, Jak took advantage of this sudden s.h.i.+ft in balance to upset her totally, driving one combat boot outward so that it caught her bare ankle, barely protected by the simple thonged sandal. She yelped in involuntary pain as her ankle gave way beneath the driving force, and she crumpled to one side.

Jak followed her down, the knife in his palm. He secured her at the shoulders with his knees, locking his feet around her knees so that she couldn't kick at him from behind his head.

He held the knife to her throat. She was completely silent, although her eyes gleamed with a desire to kill him.

"Give one reason why not," Jak said softly.

"Because I say so," a voice answered from behind.

"Not enough," Jak said in a louder voice, over his shoulder.

Gloria stepped around until she was in his view. Ryan was with her. Jak knew that the one-eyed warrior would back him, as he would back any of his people, but he was also aware that Ryan would show deference to the Gate queen, as they were her guests. "Because she's my sister, and as much of a b.i.t.c.h as she can be, and as stupidworks as any man, she's still blood."

Gathered around the scene, both Dean and Krysty started when they heard that. Both, in their own ways, had wondered why Margia could get away with so much in a society that otherwise wouldn't have tolerated her att.i.tude. Now it was clear: she was under the queen's sufferance.

Jak looked Gloria squarely in the eye, leaf-bladed knife still at the blonde's throat. Then, with the barest of nods, he slipped the knife back into its secured hiding place and rose from the supine woman.

"Check Mildred," he said simply, turning to where his companion lay, starting to recover full consciousness while she was tended by J.B., who had ignored the continuing fight to come to her aid.

The encampment returned to normality quickly. Margia was led off by her sister, and the companions took Mildred back to their billet to tend to her. There was a subdued atmosphere, despite things continuing as on a normal night, and a gradual silence descended on the city of canvas and plastic. So it was with some surprise that Jak, not yet asleep, heard his name called softly from outside the tent. He looked at his companions. They were sleeping, and as usual Jak was the only one still to be awake. Sleeping was always hard, for when the dreams came they were violent and he was helpless as his wife and daughter were killed time and again in front of him.

So sometimes Jak didn't sleep, and was glad of distraction. He rose and went out of the tent.

Gloria stood before him, framed by the light of a still burning lamp.

"Thank you for not chilling my sister," she said simply.

"Your tribe-you deal." The albino shrugged.

Gloria didn't answer. Instead, she just smiled her lopsided smile and held out a hand. "Come on, honey," she said in a soft, sibilant tone, "come and join with me this night. I want you."