Devil's Vortex

After a generation or two of peace, the two nations, his Blackfoot Confederacy and the Crow, were back to an on-again, off-again war of mutual raiding and occasional battles. The only reason they hadn’t shot him on sight was that he was a known exile from his native Blood band, a wild child whose wickedness and ambition alike were too great to be constrained by tradition and stick-up-their-butts elders. But his judgment wasn’t trusted widely enough, even by other adolescent warriors, for him to raise his own war band and probe his inner self in any kind of way anyone on the Plains would pay attention to.

Painfully and painstakingly he made his way to the top. That had always been his strength, he reckoned: that he could act with precision or passion, as the need of the moment required. Mebbe both.

It was why he knew himself fit to rule.

The question was how.

And mebbe who. Those questions were what had brought him here: blasted out of his mind, freezing to his marrow and a hundred feet in the air up a cliff of granite made slick by blowing snow, cold enough to dangerously numb the fingers and toes that scrabbled and fought for holds every inch of the tortuous way up.

But Hammerhand persevered. He was good at that, too. That was another way he reckoned he was superior to the people who’d given him life: although they could endure almost anything, and had wizard survival skills, they had a tendency to fly off the handle at random moments. Not at something that required persistence in a physical craft—like skinning a chilled elk or even curing its hide for use in making clothing and lodges—but at anything abstract.

They didn’t have what it took to envision Empire and make it happen. They didn’t have the horizon.

Hammerhand did. That part of the vision he had. But he knew he was missing key pieces.

He could see barely past his fingertips when his arms were fully stretched out. For a moment, when through the whirling whiteness he glimpsed rugged gray with only more white beyond—just above his reach—his brain, altered as it was, couldn’t process what its eyes were showing it.

His body came to the rescue. Locked in “climb” mode, it commenced to haul his mass up the cliff again, fingers and toes seeking cracks and jutting icy gray stone. The image of the lip of the cliff resolved itself into his brain: the top!

Seeing a bright line of red and yellow halation following the outline of the rock-sky interface, Hammerhand let his mind ride shotgun as his body pulled itself onto the angled and uneven upper surface. Exercising the power of suggestion as much as his powerful will, he stood upright, bracing slightly against a wind, fierce now that it was unrestrained, that sought to bash him right back over the cliff to oblivion.

“I’m here,” he called into the storm. It seemed he could hear the individual impact of each tiny particle of snow, ice and grit as it banged against the lenses of his glasses.

He looked around and could scarcely see more than ten feet from the tip of his nose. The hilly, wooded country surrounding the peak was invisible.

And then, suddenly, it was before him: a masculine figure, as nude as he was and at least twice as tall, floating six feet above the wind-swept granite. Its every muscle was seemingly molded with great precision out of white light. The brightness of the faceless figure didn’t hurt his eyes. But the golden radiance that surrounded it dazzled him through his shades, making him blink and try to turn away.

He found that he could not.

“Hammerhand,” a voice said like thunder. “Kneel before me.”

“Who are you?” he demanded. He was determined not to let the...thing...see his fear. Even though he had the drug to deaden it, his knees were so loose he was only keeping himself upright by the force of his will.

“I am your destiny. Kneel before me.”

“I’d rather die standing!”

“It is not permitted,” the voice boomed. “Nor is disobedience. I am Fate.”

The willpower that held his knees locked shattered like glass struck with a hammer. His legs folded abruptly beneath him. It was all he could do to keep from going over backward on his buttocks.

Then, irresistibly, he felt his torso being winched upward, until he sat up straight. He could feel his muscles doing it, but not by his will, nor under his control.

“You see that resistance is futile, Hammerhand.”

“What do you want from me?”

“Only to give you that which you most desire, what you have come here to obtain, naked, freezing and electric.

“Now, hear me...”

Chapter Two (#ulink_e1b9036e-8f97-525e-adef-57e97ceaa32d)

The boom of the stubby shotgun barrel beneath the longer main barrel of Doc’s gigantic LeMat revolver beat the blast of Ryan’s SIG Sauer P226 by half a heartbeat. The man was already staggered by the charge of buckshot when Ryan double-tapped him at the center of mass, which was still more shadow than apparent substance.

The .44-caliber upper barrel of Doc’s revolver spit yellow flame and crashing noise. The man’s head snapped back and he crumpled into the snow.

“Offer accepted,” Ryan said, lowering his weapon.

“Maybe we should’ve tried to keep him alive,” Mildred said as Ryan cautiously approached the fallen man. She wasn’t doing it just to be contrary—although she was perfectly capable of that. She, like Doc, had been taken out of her own time in the distant past by science. But in her case the motivation was the opposite of Doc’s: doctors had put Mildred into cryosleep when a routine abdominal operation had gone terribly wrong, hoping that she could be cured sometime in the future.

“It might have been helpful if he could’ve told us what happened here,” she continued. “And who did it.”

Ryan began to see signs of what had inspired Doc’s original call-out: ruined buildings and scattered trash on the ground beyond the man they’d chilled. Some of that trash, he saw, was bodies. Much of it appeared to be body parts.

Ryan grunted. “Abstract knowledge doesn’t load many magazines,” he said.

“I’m a big fan of not getting my skull split by an ax,” J.B. commented.

Then he frowned and stepped up to kneel by the chill, pointing the muzzle of his M-4000 shotgun skyward.

“Look at this,” he said, while Jak, who had appeared at the fringes of visibility when the blasterfire erupted, vanished back into the blowing snow. Ryan thought about warning him not to get too far from the group lest he lose sight of the rest. But then he knew how ridiculous that was. The albino would find a way to track them through a sealed-up cavern at midnight. As long as Jak lived, his companions would never have to worry about finding him. He’d find them.

Also, Ryan knew the danger in giving orders he knew might not be obeyed. The albino accepted Ryan’s leadership. But he had his own notions of how to do his job as scout. And since he was the best there was, Ryan had learned to give him his head in such matters.

Instead he allowed himself to take his eye off the surroundings, where he saw little but still-vague shapes in the blown snow anyway, to look at the man. As expected, he was dead. His remaining eye, bright blue, glared at the keening white void above.

His other, his right, was a bloody socket rimmed with semiliquid aqueous humor. He’d suffered its loss recently, along with the other wounds visible on his face and chest through his ripped-open plaid flannel shirt.

The Armorer pointed to, without touching, red-rimmed rings on his cheek and jaw. Sucker marks.

“Stickie,” Ryan muttered. “Ace on the line.”

He looked up and around. What little he could make out through the wind-blown snow and grit suggested structures that had never been much to start with but were probably worse now.

“Eyes skinned,” he commanded, straightening. “We don’t know if the muties are still around.”

“Some are,” Mildred observed, sounding grim. “The bodies I can see from here are stickies. Or stickie parts, mostly. They’re everywhere.”

“It looks as if a bomb went off in a stickie colony,” Krysty stated.

Ryan moved on from the chill. Almost at once he came close to stumbling over a lump that he quickly realized was a green stickie torso—headless, limbless, about the size of a ten-year-old norm’s body. It was partly covered with drifted powdery snow.

“Could they have been fighting?” Ricky asked warily. He’d had to make some adjustments to his outlook on muties when joining up with Ryan and his group. His homeland, Puerto Rico, was called Monster Island, not just because it was overrun with savage monsters—it was—but also because large colonies of humanoid muties, including stickies, lived side by side with the human majority in perfect amity. Whereas on the mainland mutation was considered a taint—such that even the gorgeous Krysty Wroth faced discrimination or even violence whenever it was found out that she was, though nearly perfect in face and form, a mutie.

Of course, on the mainland, stickies had earned their reputation as monsters a thousand times over.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said.