Prodigal's Return

When they reached the elevator, the one-eyed man pressed the call button. It took two tries. “If there’s anybody else in the redoubt, they would have heard the siren and shown up by now.”

“True enough,” Jak said. Then purely on impulse, he went to a nearby stack of fifty-five-gallon drums and clumsily rolled one over in front of the door as a crude stop. It never hurt to plan for the unlikely. Mildred had an old word for that, paranoia. But to him it was just plain common sense.

The companions had to wait only a few minutes, checking their meager assortment of weapons as they did so, before there was a musical ding and the elevator doors opened. Sprawled on the floor inside were Doc and Krysty. She was missing the belt from her pants. It was cinched around Doc’s wounded arm as a makeshift tourniquet, a blood-streaked handkerchief sticking out the sides.

“Damn, you’re fast,” J.B. said with a strong note of pride in his voice.

“Had to be,” Mildred replied, kneeling to check her patients. Each was fine, just so deeply unconscious she felt she could have safely performed major surgery on them without the benefit of anesthesia.

As Jak and J.B. got comfortable on the hard metal floor, Ryan went to the controls and sent the elevator down again, but after only a few seconds of operation, flipped the emergency button, stopping them between floors. The alarm started to ring, and he disabled it with a thrust and twist of the panga into the controls. Done and done. Now if anybody wanted to reach the sleepers, they’d have to pry open the steel doors, or else come through the roof hatch. Either of which would make more than enough noise to wake the companions. He admitted this wasn’t a perfect bolthole, merely the best available at the moment. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.

As sleep began to claim him, Ryan remembered learning that sage bit of wisdom from his father, Baron Titus Cawdor, and then teaching it to his own son, Dean. He wondered if the boy was still alive. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think about his son, or wonder why he’d run off with Sharona after all they’d been through together. He hadn’t even said goodbye. It had been about three years since he last saw Dean.

A boy could change a lot in that span of time, Ryan thought muzzily, sleep dragging him down into a warm darkness.

Moments later, the elevator was filled with the rhythmic noise of exhausted people snoring, then only the hushed sounds of gentle breathing.

Chapter Three

Dropping the Molotov off the ville wall, Dean Cawdor saw the glass bottle full of shine shatter on a steel hinge and splatter liquid fire across the complex array of ropes and pulleys used to haul the mammoth front gate closed. In only a few seconds, the burning ropes began to snap apart and the pulleys sagged, the main locking bar sliding away from the stout iron hoops set into the gate.

“Angels!” Dean bellowed through cupped hands. Then he quickly dropped flat as a hail of blasterfire tore through the empty space he had just occupied.

While a squad of sec men charged along the top of the wide stone wall, Dean rolled over to fire his Browning Hi-Power a fast five times. Four of the guards jerked, brains exploding out of the back of their skulls as the steel-jacketed .38 rounds cored through. The fifth guard staggered about blindly, a bloody furrow along her temple. As the unlucky woman started to walk off the wall, Dean shot her in the heart to mercifully prevent the her from getting gangbanged to death by the invading cadre of coldhearts.

From outside the ville, a sizzling red flare arched into the sky and gently exploded in a pyrotechnic display of colors.

A moment later, the unlocked wooden gate of Alpharetta ville violently exploded as the rapidly accelerating steam truck, Atomsmasher, crashed through, its chugging engine visibly radiating waves of heat, the steam whistle screaming loudly.

“Angels!” Camarillo bellowed from inside the small control room, both hands operating the mechanisms.

Chorusing the rally cry, fifty armed coldhearts on horseback galloped through the splintery breech, their bodies lumpy from heavy canvas jackets lined with slabs of green wood.

Caught directly in the path of the huge steam truck, a dozen of the ville sec men went under the razor-sharp blades attached to the double row of thirty iron wheels, their high-pitched shrieks of unimaginable agony cut short.

Huffing and puffing, the Atomsmasher continued onward, crunching a muzzle-loading cannon, along with the group of sec men trying to aim the weapon. The brass barrel of the cannon visibly bent as it went under the colossal invading machine, the horrified people torn to pieces from the terrible spinning blades.

Reloading his blaster, Dean tried not to cringe at the horrible sight. They were falling like wheat before a crimson sickle.

Charging out of the stables, another crowd of people saw what happened, turned and fled, dropping their own crossbows, spears and zip guns.

Running along the wall, Dean turned his eyes away from the oncoming slaughter. Supposedly working as an advance spy for the Stone Angels, he had attempted to warn the locals of the coming attack. But the baron and sec chief hadn’t believed the teenage outlander. The damn fools never did. They were always positive it was just some sort of trick to extract free brass from the ville arsenal.

Stupe bastards. I try to help every ville the Angels attack! Dean raged, reluctantly chilling a sec man struggling to load a crossbow. Why don’t the triple-stupe barons ever listen to reason? If the locals could ace the gang, or at least Camarillo, then he would be free from the gang’s odious control.

Dean had been riding with the Stone Angels for several months. He had hoped to slip away and head out on his own, but he had made a mistake—he had stopped Hannigan from cutting the throat of a newborn child that wouldn’t stop crying. It was just bad luck that Camarillo had noticed the act of kindness. The coldheart boss had kept an eye on the youth from that point on. The prospects of getting away from the gang were greatly diminished. And Dean knew that should he escape, the brutal Camarillo would take it out on the slaves.

Dean was now as much a prisoner of the coldhearts as any of the slaves toiling in the camp’s kitchens, chopping firewood or cleaning the outhouses. Unwillingly, he had been forced to help the coldhearts build Camarillo a massive war wag from the assorted wrecks found in the junkyard of some predark ruins. A combination of several Mack trucks, two bulldozers and an antique steam locomotive, the Atomsmasher was an iron-plated juggernaught of unbelievably destructive power.

Trying to make amends for his act of kindness, Dean had managed to earn some small degree of freedom from Camarillo by offering to work as the advance spy for the coldhearts. The chief of the Stone Angels had been suspicious at first, but now seemed to think that Dean was finally becoming one of them. In truth, his hatred of Camarillo grew every day, and the last thing Dean planned to do before escaping would be to ace the coldheart leader by cutting out the heart of the brutal bastard.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen today, Dean sourly noted, discharging the stolen crossbow at a snarling sec man charging his way with a swinging ax. The arrow missed, so Dean used another precious .38 round in the Browning. Dropping the ax, the sec man clutched at his red belly and groaned into oblivion.

With its steam whistle keening, the Atomsmasher crashed through a crowd of people foolishly trying to surrender. Laughing inside the control room, Camarillo wiped the spray of warm blood off his face and blew the whistle again. The strident keening noise terrified the horses of the sec men, making the animals throw their riders to the ground. However, the terrible sound had no effect whatsoever on the horses of the coldhearts, who had grown accustomed to it.

Running along the wall, a platoon of Alpharetta sec men fired nonstop at the colossal Atomsmasher, and the galloping coldhearts shot back with black powder scatterguns that boomed louder than grens. The sec men were aced, their chests blown open, guts flying to the wind, as they tumbled off the wall.

Suddenly, a sec woman wearing sergeant stripes appeared carrying a pipe bomb, the fuse sputtering away. A dozen coldhearts trained their blasters on her, but all of them missed.

“Alpharetta!” the sec woman yelled, hauling back an arm to throw the bomb.

Snarling in rage, Camarillo thrust the barrel of an AK-47 through the iron bars covering the windows of the Atomsmasher and cut loose with a long burst, the hail of 7.62 mm hardball rounds stitching the sec woman from groin to throat. Gushing life from a score of wounds, she collapsed, and a few seconds later a thunderous explosion rocked the wall, a section of the stonework crumbling away as her tattered body went sailing into the distance.

“Damn, so close,” Dean muttered in frustration, taking a flintlock from a hand lying on the wall, the arm no longer attached to a body. Nearby lay a bag of powder and shot, the leather splattered with glistening brains. Grimly, he checked to make sure the weapon was properly loaded, then ran for the stairs leading down to the ville. Things were about to get nasty.

As the Atomsmasher reached the center of the ville, it was met by the baron of Alpharetta, sitting astride a black stallion. A burly man sporting an enormous beard, he cradled a Thompson .45-caliber rapidfire. As the steam truck turn toward him, the baron cut loose with the weapon, but the soft-lead rounds ricocheted harmlessly off the heavy armor of the converted steam truck, leaving behind only a dabbling of gray smears.

Laughing, Camarillo pulled some levers, and the Atomsmasher lurched into motion.

Frantically kicking his horse into a full gallop, the baron tried to escape by going around a building. However, Camarillo drove the vehicle straight into the tavern, coming out the other side in an explosion of smashed adobe bricks. The baron and his horse were hit broadside. Both man and beast were sent flying by the brutal impact, smacking into a nearby tannery. As they slid off the bricks to the cobblestone street, the Atomsmasher rolled over their bodies, audibly crushing them flat.

“The baron is dead!” Camarillo bellowed joyously. “The ville is ours!”

Shouting in victory, the Stone Angels climbed off their horses and started running into buildings, shooting anybody they found carrying a weapon—blaster, knife, hammer or pitchfork. Man, woman or child, it made no difference. If the people resisted, they were aced.

“I surrender!” a wrinklie shouted, raising both arms high. “Please, I surrender!”

“What’s your job?” a bald coldheart demanded, walking closer, a brace of blasters balanced in his hands.

“Sir, I’m a blacksmith, sir,” the old man replied, as respectfully as possible.

“Sorry, already got us one of those.” The coldheart sneered, discharging both weapons. The head of the old man exploded, chunks of bone and brain spraying to the littered streets.

“We got a blacksmith?” Dean asked, feeling sick to his stomach.

“Nope!” The coldheart grinned, sauntering away in search of other prey.

Just then, a screaming woman charged out of an open doorway with three coldhearts close behind.

“Gotcha!” one of them yelled in triumph, grabbing her by the ponytail and pulling downward.

With a cry, she crashed to the ground, and two coldhearts pounced, ripping off her skirt, then grabbed her legs and pulled them apart. Grinning fiendishly, the first coldheart started to unbuckle his pants.

“Better leave this one alone,” Dean said quickly. “She’s the ville healer. The boss will want her at camp.”

Muttering curses, they did as he requested and released the woman, to go back into the building.

“I…I ain’t no healer, mister, just a gaudy slut,” she stuttered in a whisper, her face tight with fear. “Don’t know nothing about healing and such.”