Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
“Wait—there has been a slaughter here!”
A scarf muffled Doc Tanner’s words. Each of his companions had one wrapped around his or her face to give what protection the garment could from the powder snow and dust whipped at them by the unforgiving North Plains late-winter wind.
The seven friends staggered across a bright desert of white. Ryan Cawdor had to lean hard into the bone-cutting wind to keep it from pushing him upright. The snow wasn’t falling, so far as he could tell. The mat-trans jump had delivered them to the rolling prairie of the eastern Badlands of what had been South Dakota, near the border with the former Nebraska, as near as they had been able to tell from J. B. Dix’s minisextant and Doc’s calculations.
Ryan drew his SIG Sauer P226. Doc’s warning cry had indicated no present danger. Had the old man detected an immediate threat, he would have called it out. Doc had been trawled from his time in the 1880s to the 1990s by the whitecoats of Operation Chronos. Doc had proved to be an uncooperative test subject, so he had been thrust one hundred years into the future to what was now known as the Deathlands. The multiple time jumps had addled his brain, and sometimes he wandered in a fog that filled his brain.
But when it came to danger to himself and his friends, he snapped back to the here and now. He had spoken very clearly in the past tense—but Ryan was not put at ease.
If people had been slaughtered, that meant coldhearts, and they might still be in the area.
“Weapons out, people,” the one-eyed man called. He knew that his companions would most likely have their blasters in hand, but he had to be sure. They were all seasoned Deathlands travelers and fighters, but everybody made mistakes. And they were all worn down by hunger, fatigue and the biting cold.
He had his six companions winged out in a vee formation: his lover, Krysty Wroth, to his right; then Ricky Morales; then J. B. Dix, the Armorer. To the left walked Doc, Mildred Wyeth and Jak Lauren. They were spread out far enough they could just keep each other in sight in the storm.
Jak, a slight, skinny albino youth, normally walked, not point, but ranging in advance of the others to scout out danger. Not today. In this nasty storm, which was worse than a thick fog because the wind-blown dust and ice particles stung the eyes and constantly threatened to clog them, Ryan wanted J.B.’s judgment and skill with a blaster, and Jak’s hunting-tiger senses guarding the rear.
That accounted for why the least likely of them all, Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, had spotted something first. Although Doc looked to be pushing seventy hard—if not powering right by—in fact he was roughly the same age as Ryan in terms of years actually lived. It was his time jumps and the abuse he had suffered at the hands of twentieth-century whitecoats that had prematurely aged him and addled his mind.
“Swing left, everybody,” Ryan called. “We need to see what we might be up against—”
A man suddenly appeared, stumbling toward them blindly in the hard driving snow.
“Black cloud,” Ryan heard him mumbling. “The black cloud!”
The one-eyed man raised his handblaster. The man showed no sign of even seeing the companions, even though he was about to blunder right between him and Doc. Ryan had not kept himself alive—to say nothing of his companions—across the length and breadth of the Deathlands by taking anything for granted.
And then the shambling man clearly did see them. Ryan could actually make out his eyes going wide in the gore and filthy mask of his face.
“You mutie bastards!” he screamed. Suddenly he was raising an ax above his head with both hands. “You won’t take me alive!”
He charged.
* * *
THE GOGGLE-LIKE SHADES, with slits of polarized glass, protected Hammerhand’s eyes from the wind-lashed snow, dust and grit as he scaled the peak the Plains folk called Gray Top.
Nothing protected the rest of his massive frame. His muscle-packed six-foot-six-inch body was nude from the black topknot surmounting his side-shaved head to the soles of his feet. Susan Crain, the Crow Nation healer and medicine woman he had sought for counsel, had told him that he had to be naked to complete the vision quest.
The rugged granite rock cut into his palms and feet, but he ignored the discomfort. He was inured to hardship, from the abuse and poverty his tribe and own family had inflicted on him, growing up among the Káína people of the great Blackfoot Confederacy of the short grass plains to the north.
Of course, the nuking mushrooms I ate might be helping with that, he thought. The magic mushrooms made him hyperaware, his senses unnaturally keen. Yet they made him somehow less vulnerable to those sensations.
They also deadened fear. But he was used to fighting down the terrors that beset him. He’d done that all his life, as well.
The mountain, which took its name from the gray granite cap rock that rose above its pine-clad slopes and the surrounding Black Hills, stood near the Dead White Man Faces Mountain. It was the tallest in the Hills. It was held to possess great power.
It seemed as good a place as any to find the key to his destiny.
Hammerhand wasn’t sure he believed in all this mystic shit. Then again, he wasn’t sure he didn’t. For nuking sure he’d had to put up with the taunts and barbs of those smug bastard Absarokas in order to consult their well-known shaman.
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