Moonfeast

“I’d be happy to have him dance in the air for ya, but the outlander ain’t done anything wrong in Hobart,” Joe answered truthfully. “So if you shoot him cold, then I gotta take you in. The baron won’t stand for it.” Then he smiled coldly. “Unless it’s a fair fight, of course.”

“Understood,” Mark stated, dropping the primed weapon and immediately going for the small blaster holstered behind his back.

Instantly, Brinkman went for the blasters on his hips, then both men drew and fired in unison. The double explosion of the black-powder weapons filled the smoky tavern with dark fumes so thick that it was nearly impossible to see what had happened.

Chapter Two

A cold breeze wafted through the shattered door, thinning the acrid gunsmoke in the tavern until the air was relatively clear. With a low moan of pain, Brinkman crumpled to the floor, the twin Colt .45 blasters tumbling from his limp hands to clatter on the wooden floor.

Standing behind the counter, Mark looked down at the red stain spreading across the sleeve of his shirt and grunted. “Crate! I need you to take over the bar!” he shouted, shifting the smoking S&W .38 revolver to his left hand and awkwardly tucking it back into the holster. “I gotta go see the healer!”

“No prob!” she called back, stepping out of the kitchen, sliding a .22 zipgun into the pocket of her patched dress. “And the name is now Catherine.”

Clutching the bloody wound in his arm, Mark merely raised an eyebrow at that, then shrugged in acceptance and shuffled away through the muttering crowd.

“All right, boys, divvy up his possession,” Joe commanded, holstering his weapons. “The baron gets any live brass, I want his knife, and you can keep everything else.”

“Then find something to block that damn door,” Catherine added tying on an apron, “and get that garbage out of here!”

Grinning in avarice, the sec men abandoned their game of dominoes and pushed their way to the corpse to start stripping off his weapons and boots.

“That was a nuke of a good shot, old buddy,” Joe said, sitting.

“Nothing to do with me,” Ryan muttered, putting away the warm SIG-Sauer.

Fanning himself with his derby, Joe smiled tolerantly. “Now that’s funny, because Mark couldn’t hit the ground if he fell off a mountain. That’s why Crate…er, Catherine, bought him that scattergun last winter.”

Taking a sip of his warm beer, Ryan said nothing, waiting to see where this line of questioning would eventually end.

“How much do you want to gamble that if I was to dig the slug out of that coldheart,” Joe continued, “it would be a nine, the exact same caliber of your blaster?”

“Lots of 9 mms in the world,” Ryan said, lowering his arm so that his hand rested on the checkered grip of the blaster. “Think that’s gonna happen?”

“Nope,” Joe said amiably, laying the hat on the table. “But it’s just another good reason to get you the frag out of my ville.” Fumbling inside the hatband, he removed a small piece of folded paper and passed it over. “Okay, you saved me from stickies when Trader passed through Broken Neck, and now we’re even. That pass is good until nightfall. So, use it right quick. Because I’m suppose to arrest you at midnight.”

“Arrest me for what exactly?” Ryan asked, tucking away the paper.

The sec boss scowled. “For using too much air. Spitting on the sidewalk. Treason, murder, the charge doesn’t matter, Ryan. Hell’s bells, Baron Harrison wants your fancy blaster more than a jolt addict wants another fix!” he stated forcibly. “So go far, and fast, old friend. I swore an oath to obey my baron, and if he sends me after you, I’ll have to hunt you down.” He frowned. “I won’t like it, but I’ll put you on the last train west.”

“You can try,” Ryan answered coldly, pushing back the chair to slowly stand. “For old times’ sake, it was good to see you again, Joe.”

“Same here.” The man sighed, wiping the inside sweatband of his hat with a cloth. “Now make sure it never happens again.”

Since there was nothing more to add, Ryan simply grunted in reply and strode from the tavern. But the man somehow felt that he was leaving behind more than just a friendship. A small piece of his life with the Trader had just died, and that disturbed him more than expected.

Stepping onto the brick sidewalk, Ryan looked around the busy ville and soon found three of his friends across the street leaning against a battered old school bus that had been converted into a crude war wag. Cobbled together from a dozen other wags, it was a formidable little brute. Barbed wire covered the roof and sides, spikes lined the bumpers, and steel plates had been welded over the tires to protect them from bullets or arrows. The glass was gone from the windows, replaced with louvered shutters that protected the passengers from attacking muties, while still letting them shoot at any coldhearts who attacked. The bus was short, but looked more than ready to handle anything the Deathlands threw its way. The sec men and civies passing by gave the group of heavily armed outlanders a wide berth, some of the wiser people actually crossing the street to stay as far away as possible. He headed that way.

Built from the ruins of a mining town, Hobart had paved streets, although the roads were now so heavily patched it was damn near impossible to tell which sections were the original pavement and which were the replacement. Ryan had heard that the baron sometimes sent out gangs of slaves to rip up other roads and bring back the slabs of asphalt to use in his town. That sounded like mighty hard work for a pretty small return, but then, Ryan had met several barons who had more than a touch of madness.

“Hey, lover, how did it go?” Krysty Wroth asked, her arms casually crossed with hands on her elbows.

“I got the pass,” Ryan replied

She smiled. “Thank Gaia.” Almost as tall as the one-eyed man, Krysty possessed an abundant wealth of flame-red hair that oddly seemed to always be stirring by an unfelt wind, almost as if the filaments were alive. She was dressed in an old olive-drab jumpsuit and a bearskin coat. A canvas gunbelt was slung low across her hips, a S&W .38 revolver holstered in the front for easy access. A knife was strapped to one of her shapely thighs.

“How long got?” Jak Lauren drawled, a touch of his bayou ancestry softening the words.

“It expires at dark,” Ryan said, glancing at the darkening sky. “So we better haul ass.”

“Good, I don’t like this place,” Krysty said, openly scowling in distaste at a group of armed sec men walking by with a prisoner in chains. The old man had been badly beaten and he was dragging a twisted leg that would probably never work correctly again.

“Damn straight,” Jak agreed, both hands resting on his belt buckle to stay close to his blaster. A true albino, the lean teenager was pinkish-white, as if the savage Deathlands sun never reached his pale skin. His long hair was the color of fresh snow, his eyes as red as the dawn after a storm. A pair of sunglasses poked out of his shirt pocket for when needed, the bridge repaired with a piece of duct tape. A knife was sheathed at his side, another at the small of his back, and a third jutted from the top of his left boot. Several others were hidden all over his body. A big-bore Colt Python .357 Magnum blaster rode in a leather holster at his side, the brass in his gunbelt an odd combination of both .38 short rounds and the slightly larger .357 Magnum Express rounds.

“Then let us make haste, Hermes, and outrace the golden apple of yore!” Doc Tanner rumbled in a deep bass.

“Come again?” Jak asked, blinking.

“Let’s blow this pest hole before nightfall,” Ryan said by way of translation.

The albino teen smiled. “Fucking A.”

“Quite so, my young friend. Quite so,” Doc stated in agreement, dourly watching the sec men shove the prisoner into a tan brick building. The faded lettering on the side proclaimed that the place had once been the Hobart Public Library, but now it served as the city jail, an internment facility from which few, if any, ever departed still requiring air to breathe.

Tall and slim, Theophilus Algernon Tanner was neatly dressed in clothing from another era: a frilly white shirt with a black string tie, and a swallowtail frock coat. Everything he wore was patched, but clean, and his fingernails were neatly trimmed, which set him apart from most people in Deathlands. His long face was heavily lined, but not from age, and his luxuriously thick hair was a deep silver in color. A massive Civil War blaster called a LeMat rode on his hip, the pouches of his gunbelt bulging with black powder and other items needed to feed the monstrous handcannon. A small eating knife was sheathed behind the revolver, and an ebony stick with a silver lion’s head was thrust into the gunbelt like a Japanese war sword.

Born in the nineteenth century, Dr. Theophilus Tanner had been an unwilling participant in a time-trawling experiment. Ripped from the bosom of his family into the late twentieth century, Doc had been deemed too difficult a subject and was sent one hundred years into the future to what had become Deathlands. Alone and confused, Doc had nearly gone insane struggling to survive in the savage reality of the shockscape until Ryan rescued him from the slave pit of a sadistic sec chief named Cort Strasser. Sometimes, Doc’s mind slipped a little, and he briefly imagined that he was safely back home in the loving embrace of his wife, but he always rose to the occasion if there was trouble. Doc was a valuable member of the group with his mental encyclopedia of arcane knowledge, and a deadly fighter. However, the companions knew for a fact that the man would abandon them in a heartbeat if he ever got a chance to go back home to his children and beloved wife, Emily.

Going to the folding door of the bus, Ryan yanked it open and climbed inside. The wag was empty. “Where are J.B. and Mildred?” he growled, sliding into the driver’s seat. The man had fully expected them to be asleep in the back.

“Just down the street,” Krysty replied, slipping into the gunner seat opposite the man. “There was a commotion down at the local healer’s, so Mildred wanted to see if there was anything she could do to help.”

“And J.B. went along to guard her six.”

“Exactly, my dear Ryan,” Doc stated, taking a place alongside Jak. “He is the Daemon to her Pythius.”

Understanding the obscure literary reference only because the time traveler had used it many times before, a brief flood of anger filled Ryan, then he forced it aside and accepted the simple bad timing. There was nothing else to do in the matter. Dr. Mildred Weyth, a freezie from the twentieth century, had her own set of priorities, and helping folks in need of medical attention was at the top of that list.

“All right, let’s find them fast, then roll,” Ryan said, pulling the lever to close the door. It cycled shut with a hiss of working hydraulics.

“No prob,” Jak said confidently, cracking open the cylinder of his Colt Python to start removing the .38 rounds and replace them with the much more deadly hollowpoint .357 Magnum cartridges. One reason the teenager carried this particular model blaster was that it could use both size brass, a unique feature that had saved his life many times.

Working the throttle and gas, Ryan fought the old diesel engine into life, then rumbled away from the curb and started down the middle of the road. Kids and barking dogs scattering at the advance of the rattling vehicle while adults went to hide inside homes and stores, and mounted sec men fought to control their frightened horses at the sound of the sputtering engine.

“Rad-blasted bastards,” Krysty muttered, reading the lips of a passing guard. “These local boys really hate us.”

“We not slaves. Of course hate,” Jak stated, closing his blaster. “They try capture, we fight. Easier ace drunks and crips.”

“How true, lad,” Doc agreed, thumbing back the hammer on the single-action LeMat. “Too long have these cowardly poltroons feasted upon the flesh of the weak, and the taste of an honest fight fills their bowels with Hobbesian turpulence.”