Chapter Ten

"Step him back," Ryan said, gazing at the baron's man waving a piece of white rag from a wag antenna. "Gets close enough, he could heave a gren through the window if he's got one."

J.B. rattled off a quick 3-round burst that ripped through the acid-laced mud at the man's feet and threw clods back in the direction he'd come from.

Thinking he'd been shot, the man hurled himself to the side, dropping the makeshift white flag and himself into the mud. He started flopping and screaming at once as the acid residue from the chem storm ate into his flesh.

"Come get him if you want him alive," Ryan yelled out.

"How do I know you won't shoot them?" a man roared back.

"If I wanted you to think that," Ryan growled, "I'd have shot this poor stupe bastard. Didn't think he'd be fool enough to throw himself into the mud like that. And you're only risking two men."

"I got two men coming out," the man replied.

"I see any more than that moving," Ryan warned, "I'll chill every one I see."

Two men bolted from hiding among the wrecked wags. Neither carried weapons except for side arms. Both, however, had canteens. Cursing the man on the ground, they emptied their canteens over his face and hands. His skin pinked up from the caustic acidity left trapped in the ground. Once the man had control over himself, his two companions dragged him back to shelter. He never quit moaning.

"You cost me some water," the man yelled to Ryan.

"If we were on more friendly terms," Ryan said, "mebbe I'd feel bad about that. But it isn't anywhere close to that."

The man laughed, his voice sounding confident and loud in the canyons between the mounds of wrecked wags. "The way you sound, you'd think it was me between a rock and a hard place instead of you."

"I'm in here," Ryan said. "You're out there with the coldhearts and the dogs. Mebbe another chem storm the way the sky looks."

"Man can starve to death in there."

"Not with the rations we found," Ryan lied. "Figure we can wait in here, see whether we have to take on you or the coldhearts. Doesn't matter to us." His words drifted away into the ensuing silence.

"Ryan," Mildred called.

Glancing over his shoulder, Ryan watched as Krysty opened her eyes and looked around.

"HOW ARE YOU FEELING?"

Krysty looked up into Ryan's ice-blue eye, noting the worry that was in it. Her hand and arm felt as if it weighed a hundred pounds as she lifted it. She touched his face, dragging her fingertips across his mouth, across the scar that covered half his face. "Like I was hit by a wag," she said.

Ryan took her hand in his. "What about Phlorin?"

Krysty shook her head and regretted it immediately. "Don't know, lover. Mind's all a jumble right now." Inwardly she was cold, and she didn't know if that really was the answer or if Phlorin's presence was making her say that. Was the woman really dead and gone, or was she somehow still around? Krysty hated not knowing. The thing that Ryan had always had with her was trust—even when things were at their worst.

"We'll worry about that soon enough," Ryan told her. "Soon as we get out of here."

"When's that going to be?" Krysty wanted nothing more than to put the ville behind them. Then a meal from a self-heat and a night sleeping in Ryan's arms.

"Working on it now," Ryan told her.

A man called for attention from outside.

"Got to go," Ryan said.

Krysty nodded, then gazed around the room, seeing everybody that she'd seen earlier when Ryan had killed Phlorin. She didn't know how they'd come to be inside the building, or even where it was, and that inability to remember scared her. She trusted Ryan and the other companions, but she needed to be independent, too. Lying there like an invalid wasn't helping. She tried to sit up, but her stomach turned sick on her, revolving in wicked flips. She groaned.

Mildred put her arms around Krysty, helping her get steady. "Easy does it," the black woman said. "You've been through a lot. Don't rush it."

"Water," Krysty gasped, wanting to get rid of the sick taste in her mouth.

Mildred brought up a ring-pull and popped the top. She held the container as Krysty drank. "Go easy with that. Too much and you might make yourself sick."

Krysty sipped the contents, then settled back into the woman's arms. She glanced at Dean, who was lying with one ear pressed to the ground for some reason. She thought she'd ask him, but she didn't have the strength.

"WHAT'S YOUR NAME?"

"Cawdor," Ryan answered. "And yourself?"

"My name's Naylor."

Ryan scanned the terrain, watching the baron's men slither between the stacks of dead wags. Maybe Naylor was giving the appearance of stepping down his hostile actions, but he wasn't wasting any time in shoring up his position. The man had experience. "You a baron's man, Naylor?"

"Yeah. Working as sec chief for Baron Curtis Shaker."

"Don't know him," Ryan called back.

"Got a ville down south. Mebbe two weeks ride from here as the crow flies."

"You got a reason for being in Idaho Falls?"

"I was sent here to find somebody."

"Can't be me," Ryan replied, looking back over the men and women assembled inside the building.

"Man I'm looking for owes the baron some blood," Naylor said. "If you stand in the way of me getting it back, there's going to be trouble."

"I don't like getting threatened," Ryan growled, but he cut his eye over the four men in the room. He automatically discounted Clete, the husband. If Naylor had been looking for a man with a wife, the sec chief would have said so.

"I'm not threatening, Cawdor," Naylor said. "Just laying the ace on the line so we all know what we're looking at."

Ryan kept his gaze on Elmore and the two other suspect men. "How do you know the man you're looking for was here?"

"Trailed him," Naylor replied. "Got a man here with me who knows him by sight."

"You don't?"

"No."

"How do you know you can trust him?" Ryan asked.

"I choose to," Naylor replied. "And me trusting him, that's pretty much my own lookout now, isn't it?"

"He's right about that," J.B. said quietly. The Armorer gave the appearance of being relaxed, but Ryan knew his friend was as tight as a bowstring, able to move faster than an eye blink.

"You don't owe them people in there anything," Naylor pointed out.

"No," Ryan replied, "you're right about that. But I gave them my word if they threw in with us, I'd see their way clear of this bastard situation."

"You're drawing to a hard hand if you think you can live up to that," Naylor said. "Fuck, I don't think you're going to get past those coldhearts. And I saw the woman you carried in myself. Been a stranger, you wouldn't have done that. Means you got one of your own wounded. Hate to see you hard up against it like that after all the chilling you did against these coldhearts."

"I usually do what I say I'll do," Ryan said.

"Mebbe we can cut a deal," Naylor said, "because I don't set too well with losing any more of my people, either."

Ryan kept watching the three men. "I'm listening."

DEAN LAY QUIET and still on the ground. He heard his father's voice and the exchange with the sec chief outside, but he also thought he heard something moving around inside the ground below the building.

At first, he'd thought it was just a vibration, maybe something settling outside after all the rain. Then, when it had kept up, he thought it could be something else.

He kept the Browning Hi-Power in his fist, and took out his turquoise-handled throwing knife. Holding it butt down, he slammed the heel of his hand against the ground. The knife's hilt plunged into the packed earth again and again, making him doubt what he'd heard.

Then the next blow he struck brought the hollow sound he'd been expecting to hear.

Rising to his knees, his heart thumping faster, Dean plunged the knife blade into the ground, searching.

"My dear boy," Doc said, his attention diverted for a moment from the three men he was watching, "whatever are you doing?"

"Hollow space under the ground, Doc," Dean said. "It's not natural." The knife blade slid deep without warning, running along the ground in a straight line for an instant. The knife's passing left a thin groove cut into the earth. As Dean watched, small bits of dirt fell into the groove and disappeared.

The vibration he'd been feeling grew stronger as he hooked the fingers of his free hand into the groove.

"GIVE ME THE MAN I'm looking for, and I'll provide you safe passage out of this ville."

Ryan gazed across the intervening space, aware that the sec chiefs men were still moving. "Calls for an awful lot of trust on my part."

"Don't see any other way you're getting out of here alive."

"Who are you looking for?" Ryan asked.

"A man calls himself Ethridge."

"You want him alive or dead?"

"Living would suit the baron better. Don't want to have to explain how that man got himself chilled."

Ryan swept the three suspect men with his gaze, waiting to see which of them broke eye contact first. "Anybody want to step up and claim this one?" he asked.

None of them answered.

"Can you give me something more to go on?" Ryan asked. "None of the guys I've got in here appear to willing to fess up."

"Man's got a tattoo," Naylor called back. "On the inside of his forearm you'll find a big blue dot with lighter blue rings around it. Then there's two twisted lines of orange running through it."

The one-eyed man lifted the SIG-Sauer to point in the general direction of Elmore and the two other men. "One of you is lying, and I intend to have the man who is. Bastard quick."

Before anyone could reply, the ground under Dean seemed to erupt, and Ryan got a real good look at the maw full of fangs that lunged at his son's throat. "Dean! Get back!" Ryan brought his blaster around, knowing in his heart he was already too late.