Death Hunt

Figuring it was safe to drink—or at least, as safe as any water—he poured some into one of the cups and drank deeply. His mouth felt as though someone had held a jolt party in there; it was thick and dry. The water eased it.

Jak put down the cup and turned as he heard stirring from behind him. Ryan was starting to come around, raising himself.

“What the fuck happened?” the one-eyed man asked slowly, looking around him and taking in his surroundings.

“Guess were more tired than thought.” Jak shrugged. “Water,” he added, pouring another cup.

Ryan got up from his bed and walked slowly to Jak, taking the cup from him. “Thanks,” he said after drinking deeply. “So this is Pleasantville. I see they’ve left us all our stuff,” he continued, indicating the packs that had been stowed by their bedsides. “Mighty nice of them. A bit too nice,” he added, exchanging a look with Jak. The albino youth nodded.

“Yeah. Triple-red on that,” he said simply.

By this time their lowered voices had penetrated the consciousness of the others and they were all beginning to stir. Krysty and J.B. were next up and they shared Jak and Ryan’s caution. Mildred pulled herself out of bed, but didn’t immediately go to the others. She knelt beside Doc’s bed and checked him.

“Old buzzard was hallucinating out there,” she said over her shoulder to the others. “Just want to see that he’s okay.”

Doc opened one eye and fixed her with a baleful glare. “My dear Dr. Wyeth, pray tell me what is hallucination and what is not, when all—either concrete or fancy—seems so tangible that you can reach out and touch it. Whether or not ’tis there, does that make the emotion it causes any the less real?”

“Yeah, you’re okay,” Mildred muttered. “Now get the hell up and drink something before you dehydrate.”

When all six companions were up and clustered around the table, the door on the far side of the room opened and Horse stepped through. The tall, gaunt sec chief eyed them, then nodded in some private satisfaction.

“So you’re all still here and all awake. Good. Ethan wants to see you. Now.”

Chapter Four

With some hesitation, the companions followed the sec chief, leaving their weapons and supplies by the sides of their beds. To attempt to retrieve any of them could easily be construed as hostile action and, until they knew what they were up against, it was best to maintain innocence. Besides, the sec party could easily have taken their weapons away while they’d been unconscious and not have treated them with such respect.

It wasn’t as if they were exactly unarmed now. They might not have their blasters, but Ryan still had the panga sheathed at his thigh, and his scarf—a deadly weapon in experienced hands with the lead weights sewn into the ends that turned it into a bolo—around his neck. Doc carried his swordstick with the silver lion’s-head, and J.B. was equipped with his Tekna hunting knife. As for Jak, it would have been interesting to see if anyone could have found the number of leaf-bladed throwing knives secreted on his person.

So, if Ethan, baron of Pleasantville, and his sec chief trusted them enough not to do a body search, to take away Jak’s jacket and Doc’s cane, and to leave their weapons by their bedsides, then why should they feel any suspicion? Not for any reason that could be rationalized. Just their instincts telling them that people in the Deathlands—particularly barons—were never normally this friendly.

Horse led them along a maze of corridors lined with windows that showed that they were moving through more than one building. Some of the old suburban sprawl of houses that constituted part of Pleasantville had been joined together by stucco-and-brick corridors that made several houses and shacks into one single building. It would be possible to travel almost an entire circuit of the ville without actually setting foot outside into the elements.

It would also make finding the way around more difficult if you weren’t familiar with the ville. This was something that always set alarm bells ringing loudly in Ryan’s head, and they were certainly deafening right now.

“Why does Ethan want to see us?” he asked the sec chief in as neutral a tone as possible. It was the first time any of them had spoken since leaving their dormitory, and Ryan felt his voice sound unnatural and loud in the quiet corridor. They had passed no one on their journey, and although they could see people outside and through the windows of other buildings, it was almost as though they had been purposely isolated from the ville inhabitants until they had seen the baron. It didn’t help their sense of paranoia.

The sec chief seemed to take a long time to answer, leading them through another corridor, not looking back. For a moment, Ryan thought it possible that the man hadn’t heard his question, and started to speak again. But Horse finally broke the silence, looking back over his shoulder. His dark skin and sharp features accented his hooded eyes, which stared coldly from under his nest of dreadlocks.

“Ethan just wants to get to know you better, see where you’re from, where you reckon to be going. It’s not a problem, is it?”

The wording of the second sentence was innocuous enough, but it was the tone of his voice—it carried an undertone of menace, as though he were daring them to say that it was.

Or was it just that customs and manners were different here and the mix of races and accents that had gathered over the generations had produced a strange speech pattern? Certainly, they had heard so many different modes of speech over the years.

Ryan looked over his shoulder at Krysty. She was his barometer of mood—her mutie doomie sense was liable to pick up the slightest tremors, even if she had no conscious idea herself. Her Titian mane was flowing, not tight and coiled, but there was some agitated movement from the strands around her neck.

She noticed Ryan staring at her and gave him a puzzled look. The sense of danger—no, not even that, but rather of caution—was so slight that she wasn’t aware of it herself. The one-eyed man returned her look with a slight, crooked grin and turned back to the sec chief.

“No, it’s not a problem. Not unless you want it to be. Not at all,” Ryan replied.

So there may be no problem right now, but it was a time to be triple-red. That was okay—he could tell from his brief glimpse of the others that they felt entirely the same way, without needing to be told.

Finally they seemed to reach the end of their journey. The corridors, which had been sparse up to now, were becoming more and more decorated. Animal heads mounted on wood, paintings that looked both new and scavenged from predark times and tapestries of bright colors were hung from the walls in an organized fashion, as though someone had applied some thought to their placement. That little fact alone gave Ryan a clue as to the man they were about to meet properly for the first time.

A pair of white-painted double doors—modest but tellingly clean—marked the end of the corridor. Horse stopped in front of them and knocked twice, standing back to wait for a response.

“Come,” a voice intoned from the other side, loud enough to be heard, but calm and unhurried.

The sec chief put a hand on each door and opened them. They were on the verge of the baron’s lair and each of the companions felt a tightening in the gut. Now they would find out if this was going to be friendly, or if they would have to fight.

They followed Horse into the baronial chamber. Like the corridors outside, it was decorated in a combination of paintings, animal heads and tapestries, tastefully arranged against a brilliant white wall. The floor was polished wood, shiny and slippery underfoot. The furnishings were sparse but comfortable: two sofas and three high chairs covered in a multicolor tapestried material that matched some of those on the walls; two long tables against the walls, with books and papers neatly arranged on the top, along with a wooden bowl of fruit and a pitcher of—presumably—water, and an old, mid-twentieth-century desk in a dark wood, polished and cared for, restored to its original sheen. Behind the desk was a late-twentieth-century swivel chair, carefully restored with animal hide, dyed and colored to resemble the original black leather or PVC covering.

Ethan was standing behind the desk, leaning forward and supporting himself on his knuckles, resting lightly while he perused a document unfurled on the desktop. Behind him, a window onto the outside framed him in a halo of light. If this was the effect he wanted, then it succeeded. It painted him as a man caught in the middle of a busy day running a ville, a man looked up to with a godlike status. If it was chance, then he was lucky. If it was deliberate, then he was a clever manipulator.

Which one was it?

Ethan looked up. “Ah, good,” he said lightly, folding the document so that its contents would be concealed before coming round his desk and striding across the room to Ryan, taking the one-eyed man’s hand and forearm in his own and grasping them firmly. “You are, I trust, well rested after the rigors of yesterday?”

“It was good of you to look after us,” he answered evenly.

Ethan gave a crooked grin. “Not at all, not at all. The pleasure is entirely mine, I assure you. As you may recall, I described you as ‘interesting,’ and I haven’t changed that opinion in the slightest. You fascinate me, and if you wish, you can look on my hospitality as a way of satisfying my own curiosity. Now come, sit down.”

Ethan led Ryan toward the sitting area, Horse indicating to the other companions that they should follow. They sat, following Ryan’s lead as he and Ethan reached the sofas. They were soft and yielding. Ryan felt a twinge of concern, as they were so soft that springing from them if attacked would be difficult. But why be too concerned when there was only Ethan and Horse in the room, and the baron’s attitude was distinctly nonthreatening?

When they were settled, the baron lifted one of the high chairs and placed it so that he was positioned in the middle of the two sofas, able to see all parties. He sat, leaning forward with one elbow on his knee, fist under his chin, the very model of attentiveness.

“You can go, Horse. I’ll summon you when I need you,” he said to his sec chief without looking up. The dreadlocked sec boss nodded almost imperceptibly and withdrew, closing the doors behind him.

“So,” Ethan began when it was certain that they were alone, “I’m thinking that you have a tale to tell. You see, we have regular patrols around the territory, as we have to protect the trade routes to and from this ville. We have a thriving economy from our trade, and we live better than many baronies. But vigilance is the price we pay. You see my drift?”

“I’m not sure,” Ryan said guardedly. He was all too aware of what Ethan was saying, but wanted the baron to come out with it himself. Unfortunately, Doc still wasn’t as sharp as at his best and took Ryan’s words at face value.

“My dear boy, I feel sure that our kind host here means to ascertain how we came to be in his lands without seeming to have passed any of his patrols.”

Ethan smiled, noting the flicker of exasperation that flared briefly in Ryan’s eye. “Precisely,” he said levelly. “I’ve never known anyone to get past our lines without warning.”

“What about stickies?” Jak asked.

Ethan’s face darkened and something hard and cold shone through. “We thought they would be no problem, just pass through and then go without even bothering us. Whatever stirred them up, it’s an error we won’t make again.”

It was a plausible enough explanation, but there was a darker undertone to the baron’s voice that suggested this wasn’t the entire answer. It served to remind them to keep on guard, especially as Ethan picked up his subject again without hesitation.

“Point is, we knew they were coming, as we left them. We didn’t know you were here until we stumbled on you and damn near chilled you along with the stickies. Now how does that happen?”

“To tell you the truth, we don’t really know. We came from the northeast, across the dry plain. We should have been visible enough,” Ryan stated. He would let Ethan work it out from there. He wasn’t going to explain anything beyond that.

“My people avoid the plain. Nothing can really live on that shit, and I’m mightily impressed that you got across it. But we circle it with our patrols and we should have sighted you before you hit there. It’s not that big a place and there’s nothing to conceal you if you’re observed from the surrounding territory. My guess is that you’re not telling me the whole story, here,” he added, eyeing Ryan carefully.