Chapter Twenty-Six

 

 

Dean continued to stare across the length of the shotgun at Baron Vinge Connrad, not letting himself feel anything. Several of the baron's sec men started forward, drawing their weapons. He ignored them; they would all be too late.

 

"Stay back!" Connrad ordered.

 

The men froze at once.

 

"What are you going to do, kid?" the baron asked.

 

"Depends."

 

"On what?" Connrad didn't seem afraid at all. The pistol stayed on target, not moving.

 

"Whether you're a slaver," Dean replied, struggling to keep his voice from breaking. "I got no wish to be a slave. Rather die. Guess we could find out who's faster."

 

"You'd be dead."

 

"And free."

 

"If you believe in any kind of life after this one," Connrad said. "Do you?"

 

"Don't know. Mebbe if I'm fast enough, we could go see together." Dean forced himself to keep from shaking. His finger stayed away from the trigger.

 

Connrad laughed. "God, but you're a mean kid. I could have sired you myself. I'm no slaver. Got some chilling work for you to do. After that you go free. My word on it."

 

"If I told you to open this door, would you?" Dean asked.

 

Connrad shook his head. "No. I didn't get where I am giving in to other people."

 

Dean nodded. "Didn't think so. But I wanted to make my point." He shifted the shotgun back to cover the phys-ed teacher. "Move your man back. Way you got this barrel chopped off, spread's going to get him, too."

 

Connrad waved Saunders off. The sec man stepped backward, but kept his pistol lined up on the phys-ed teacher's head.

 

Pulling the metal stock into his shoulder and thrusting the abbreviated muzzle through the bars, Dean covered Solomon. There was still some question whether the weapon was actually loaded. It might all be a setup to scare the phys-ed teacher. Dean prepared himself all the same, knowing he was willing to take the man's life for how he'd betrayed them.

 

He curled his finger around the trigger.

 

Solomon broke and tried to run.

 

Dean squeezed the trigger, riding out the recoil. The double-aught buckshot erupted from the muzzle and caught the man in midstride, knocking him flat at once, ripping his flesh to shreds.

 

"You killed him!" Ethan Perry screamed as Solomon kicked out his final few seconds of life. "You crazy bastard!"

 

Still in motion, Dean swung the shotgun on Connrad, catching the man by surprise. He squeezed the trigger, aiming directly at the man's head. The hammer fell with a click.

 

Connrad didn't even flinch. "Empty."

 

"See that," Dean said.

 

"Even if there'd been a shell in the chamber, you wouldn't have gotten out of the cage alive."

 

Dean made himself smile. "You said there was only one round. Had to find out if your word is worth anything. If it wasn't, better to get the dying over with now."

 

Connrad shook his head and laughed. "You got balls, kid, I'll give you that. You and me are going to do just fine." He held out a hand for the shotgun.

 

Dean passed it across, glancing briefly at Solomon's corpse. He felt something, but he didn't let the feeling grow. He was going to have to stay hard, mean, if he wanted to live.

 

"You other boys," the baron said, "listen up."

 

Perry kept screaming angry curses.

 

"Shut up," Connrad ordered, "or I'm going to blast you through the mouth, see if that don't cut down on the noise."

 

Shooting Dean angry looks Perry quieted.

 

"Better," Connrad said. "Got an announcement I want to make before we leave here." He pointed at Dean. "Anybody so much as lays a hand on this boy, that person's going to answer to me. Then that person's going to die. That's a promise. Any questions?"

 

There were none.

 

"Saunders, shut up this wag and make sure everything's secure." Connrad stepped off the platform behind the cage, already thumbing loads into the Mossberg.

 

Once the flaps had been dropped to cover the bars, Dean sank to his haunches and tried not to be sick. It was one thing to kill a man or mutie that was trying to kill him, or kill an animal for food, but it was another to shoot a man just standing there looking at him. His stomach rolled threateningly. His dad would have done it, though, and for just the same reasons he had.

 

"You feel better, you bastard?" Perry demanded. "Does killing an unarmed man get you off?"

 

Dean poked his fingers through the bars, finally able to get his whole hand through. He reached for the edge of the tarp covering the cage, trying to separate it.

 

"Ease off on him," Louis McKenzie warned.

 

"Fuck you, too," Perry said. "If they put a gun in that bastard's hand and told him to chill us, what do you think he's going to do?"

 

"What the hell's wrong with you, Ethan?" Bobby Handley asked. "You have a soft spot for old Solomon? Seems you always was his favorite, and he liked looking at you in the shower."

 

Perry lunged up, hands reaching for Handley's throat. Several boys worked together to put Perry down, piling on top of him.

 

"That it, Ethan?" Jordie Ferguson asked. He was blond and blue eyed, his long hair spilling down his back. "Old Solomon feeding you sausage in the can?"

 

A cry of inarticulate rage split Perry's lips.

 

"Mebbe you already forgot how Solomon sold us out," Chanz Montoya said. "Me, I wasn't going to forget. Ever. If Dean hadn't killed Solomon, mebbe that man would have never got caught. Wouldn't have wanted to see that happen."

 

"I'd have killed him," Enrique Green stated.

 

Perry calmed down. "Dammit, let me go."

 

Louis fixed him with a hard gaze that Dean could read even in the darkness. "Word to the wise, Perrydon't try that again. Not to Bobby, not to Dean, not to any of us."

 

"And if I do?" Perry growled.

 

"Then we'll chill you ourselves," Louis stated.

 

Perry looked around the group. "You think you're talking for all of them?"

 

"Yeah."

 

His fingers on the edge of the tarp, Dean hesitated. Boots still showed at the back of the wag. He waited, not wanting to risk getting caught and catching someone's wrath. He turned his attention to the boys at the other end of the wag, watching the shift of power from Perry to Louis.

 

"He is," Moxen declared, quickly followed by the other boys.

 

Dean was surprised. Louis had always been the quietest and most pleasant of Perry's group. He hadn't seemed like leadership material.

 

"You okay with that, Dean?" Louis asked, not breaking eye contact with Perry.

 

"Yeah," Dean answered.

 

"I put this group together," Perry argued. "You're not going to just push me out like that."

 

"Solomon put this group together," Louis corrected, "and he named you leader." He gestured at the cage bars around them. "I, for one, am not too happy with where that has taken us."

 

"You're going to give me grief," Perry said in a disbelieving voice, "and Dean just chilled Solomon?"

 

"I did it for a reason," Dean said, feeling pressure to have his say. Some of it was so he could hear himself, maybe even convince himself.

 

"Why?" Perry demanded. "Revenge?"

 

"Works for me," Moxen said. Green echoed the sentiment.

 

"They took us down with those trank guns," Dean argued, "and didn't make any sound that carried. A shotgun blast might have been heard back at the school. Especially if Jake or Joel was on duty. Thought mebbe they might come looking."

 

"Then you should have missed Solomon," Perry snarled.

 

Dean gave him a cold look. "I didn't want to. Mebbe we aren't coming back from wherever they're taking us. I didn't want Solomon getting away with chilling all of us." He paused. "I had another reason, too. We're going to be noticed missing in the morning. Somebody'll come looking for us. If Connrad and his people leave Solomon's body where it is, it'll give whoever comes looking a chance to start searching in the right direction."

 

Louis looked at Dean, a slight grin on his lips. "Slick. I wouldn't have thought about that."

 

Dean parted the tarp after the boots moved away. All the boys except Perry crowded around him, peering through the tarp, as well.

 

Outside, a sec man held a lantern while two others lifted Solomon's body and threw it onto the wag.

 

"Guess they thought about it, too," Conor said glumly.

 

Dean let the tarp drop. "Mebbe. But there's the blood. Be harder to see, but they can't clean it all up. Not after what that shotgun did."

 

The wag lurched forward, banging the boys around. They spread out, everybody staying away from Perry.

 

Settling back against the side of the wag and getting as comfortable as he could, Dean forced himself to relax and not think about chilling Solomon.

 

"You think Brody'll send somebody?" Moxen asked Dean.

 

"I don't know. If Brody gets word to my dad," Dean said, "I know he'll be there as soon as he can be." And he hung on to that thought for comfort, not daring ask himself how far away his dad might be at that moment.

 

 

 

"WHAT ABOUT DEAN?" Krysty asked. She sat astride her lover on the riverbank behind a copse of trees, within shouting distance of the other companions as dawn colored the eastern sky rose and gold. Neither of them had any clothes on, pressing flesh against flesh, a blanket beneath them. Their weapons were within easy reach.

 

Ryan looked up at her, his hands kneading her full breasts, tweaking her nipples until they stood fully erect. "Can't lead these people to him. And that's assuming LeMarck doesn't overtake us. It's in our best interest to change courses."

 

While they'd been up on higher ground, he and Jak had spotted LeMarck. The seven villes sec commander had linked up with more troops.

 

Krysty loved the feel of her lover's hands on her, hot and insistent. She ran her own hands against his chest, pushing to roll her hips against his. His hard erection lay between the lips of her sex, not yet penetrating her. She had to make herself think, to keep the thread of conversation.

 

"I had a vision about Dean last night," she said, staring into Ryan's cobalt blue eye. It was red and bloodshot, mute testimony that he hadn't been getting enough rest. None of them had.

 

Ryan paused, waiting.

 

"In that vision Dean looked sick, out somewhere in the open so he couldn't be protected."

 

"Was he still at the school?"

 

"I don't know. Couldn't see that. I'm worried about him, though."

 

Ryan pulled her down to him and kissed her tenderly, then held her tight against him. "We'll get to him, Krysty. That's what we're all out here for. Just can't see a way clear to do it yet. The river goes on another fifteen, twenty miles before it switches back to the north and joins up with the Humboldt River according to Hoyle. It might take us the wrong direction, way the hell off the route we want to go."

 

"I know. I looked at the map, too, when you and J.B. were going over things. We could hole up somewhere and hope LeMarck and his baron miss us."

 

"We could," Ryan agreed. "But if we get caught out here, there's no defensible place we could hope to hold. Our best bet is movement. We'll catch a few hours' sleep here, then push on before noon. Hoyle says the impact area where the space station is coming down is about fifteen miles from here, according to J.B.'s minisextant. We can make that by nightfall, mebbe set up camp, see what we're left with next morning. Chron's ticking against Hardcoe and LeMarck. They got to be getting on to this Big Game of theirs. Once they do, we'll be left alone."

 

"We could be late getting to Dean," Krysty protested.

 

"I know." She saw the fear in him, then, and knew that no matter what he did, even though it looked as if he were directing the companions on a course that would take them far from his son, Ryan cared deeply about Dean. "But it's all I can think of to do."

 

She kissed him, feeling warmer toward him because of the softness she knew lurked in his savage heart. Ryan Cawdor was a true product of the Deathlands hard, unrelenting and willing to spill any blood that wasn't his own or that he didn't want to look out for. But he intended to save Dean.

 

And that's all she could expect of him.

 

"To get to him any sooner without getting captured," Ryan said, "we'd need a mat-trans."

 

"I know." Krysty started moving on top of him, rubbing her slick sex back and forth across his erection, finally drawing it into herself with her vaginal muscles. She pushed all the insecurity and fear that the visions had seeded within her out of her mind, concentrating on the pleasure she was giving and receiving.

 

She felt Ryan hard and deep within her, his erection stabbing up into her belly, stretching her tight and making her feel so full. She pressed herself up again into a seated position, her hands shoving against his chest as she lifted her hips and slammed them back onto him, taking him even deeper.

 

His fingers burned hotly across her bare flesh as he seized her ass and cupped her into him, meeting her stroke for stroke. She let herself go with the pleasure, waves of it cresting inside her, building to something even bigger. She concentrated on the here and now, not thinking about the dangers that still faced them.