Devil's Vortex

“I meant what I said. Like I always do.”

Hammerhand showed Mindy his teeth. “You could keep in mind the ‘Macho’ part and do something about the ‘Randy.’”

His lieutenant gave him the finger. “In your dreams.”

She was the only one who could get away with that. Just as she was the only one who could get away with calling him a “savage.” He knew she’d never put out for him, which was a slagging shame because she was a thermonuke fox. But he had to give her shit about it.

That sort of thing could not be permitted to flow only one way.

The other Blood raiders were acting more visibly excited, dancing in circles, whooping and high-fiving. Hammerhand joyously joined them.

“How many more did we get away with?” Mindy asked Joe, louder than necessary and looking at Hammerhand. A couple more wags were just pulling in.

“Not more than half,” Joe said. “Somebody blew our shit up.”

“Us or them?” Hammerhand asked, suddenly interested in how it had happened.

Joe shook his head.

“I don’t know yet. But I hope we get more skinny when the others get here.”

“If they get here,” Mindy added darkly.

But as she spoke, several more wags arrived.

“We’re it,” said a woman named Steeltongue, jumping from the bed of a Dodge Ram with several other raiders. It wasn’t exactly a traditional First Nation name, but the Bloods were all about the present. Anyway, not even Hammerhand’s home tribe, nor the rest of the Blackfoot Confederacy, really stuck to their own ancient traditions, and they hadn’t for generations.

“That’s, what, ten wags?” Joe said.

“Outstanding,” Hammerhand stated.

“Not quite half,” Mindy said sourly.

Hammerhand shrugged. “Everybody accounted for?”

“We lost Cody Blackfeather,” said Lou Shine, a lanky, dark-skinned man with long, tightly curled hair.

“How did it go down?” Hammerhand asked.

“That’s what blew up the surprise,” Lou said. “Cody ran smack into pair of coldhearts slipping off to get it on in the bed of a pickup. Dude gave a warning shout before Cody blasted him. Then the woman gave him both barrels of a sawed-off in the gut.”

“Ouch,” Joe said.

“Where’s Cody, then?” Mindy asked.

“He killed himself,” Lou told them.

“Ace,” Hammerhand said. “He acted right. Like a Blood warrior!”

Mindy wasn’t so sure. “If you say so.”

Along with the ten wags, it turned out they’d come back with six longblasters, three full-auto—including the M16 Hammerhand had liberated himself—and a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolver, all in good shape. The Buffalo Mob apparently tended to their weapons as scrupulously as they tended to their wags.

That to Hammerhand justified his choice to move by the stealth route on this attack. He had wanted to rack up an easy strike, low casualty, for his own budding tribe, to build morale, esprit de corps, and reputation—though mostly he was concerned about the wags themselves not getting shot up.

Warriors, he could replace. Even good ones. Wags, not so much.

“This is ace on the line,” he said, walking back and forth amid his people and rubbing his hands in unaffected glee. “We win. We win!”

“But they’ve still got eleven power wags,” Mindy pointed out. “And a mess of blasters.”

“Why, then, we’ll just have to get our shit together and go back and grab the rest of the wags, won’t we?” he asked with big grin.

“How?”

“Strategy,” he said. His grin widened. “You’re good at that, right?”

She frowned, then she nodded.

“Reckon so.”

“Ace. Then let’s saddle up and get back to camp. Reckon the rest of the Buffalo Mob is swarming out looking for us, hot past nuke red, like yellow jackets from a dug-open nest. Plus we got us a lot of celebrating to do. And we have to sing Cody Blackfeather’s spirit safely to the Other Side.”

He pumped the M16 over his head and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Bloods ride!”

* * *

“WHY ARE YOU so set against her staying with us, Ryan?” Krysty asked.

“We’re not a walking orphanage,” Ryan rasped in answer to her question. He’d indulged in a shot of the baron’s personal brand of whiskey. It had roughened his voice up some, so Krysty judged it hadn’t been exactly smooth. “We’ve dropped off kids at worse places than this and never looked back.”

The bar in the Brews’n’Booze, the Duganville gaudy house owned and operated by Baron Budo Dugan, was hopping that evening. Duganville was a small ville in a low, wide, fertile valley, protected by a fence made mostly of crude planks and topped with coils of razor tape. As Hamarville had, it smelled of the product that brought it its fame, and a comfortable enough measure of prosperity to make it worthwhile guarding with that kind of a barrier, and that kind of a hard-eyed sec force mounted in watchtowers at all four corners.

But in this case it was hard liquor they made in their cookers and pipe contraptions from grain grown in the surrounding fields. As well, beer was brewed by several leading families, including the baron’s. Ricky claimed the smell made him nauseated, but even he decided it was better to spend the night beneath a roof than outside the wire with the stars, the wildlife and the ever-present possibility of coldhearts.

An old woman was banging enthusiastically on a dilapidated piano with enough verve and skill to make up for the decades that had passed since it had seen a tuning. Mostly. People were drinking and joking in a mostly good-natured way. A pair of sturdy sec officers, a shaven-headed man and a woman with a black-dyed Mohawk, standing at either end of the saloon with muscle-thick arms crossed over their chests, may have had something to do with that.

The bar was made of long planks laid across the tops of stout barrels. The tables and chairs were made of decommissioned kegs and barrels, as well. Mildred had remarked that the place reminded her of what she called a “fern bar” from her own time, but Krysty thought the reason for the furnishings was simple thrift. The rest of the party sat together at a long table, eating a not-bad meal of buffalo stew and various vegetables, with chunks of coarse bread on the side.

Mariah was sitting at the table with the others, staring into her plate as if it were a working vid screen, and ignoring Ricky’s earnest efforts to talk to her.

“Is she slowing us down that much?” Krysty challenged.

“Not a bit,” Ryan admitted.

“Is she pulling her weight?”

Ryan squinted his good eye and scratched the back of his neck beneath his shaggy black hair.