gamma world Sooner Dead Read online

  “There wasn’t much to give out. Stampede and I already had that figured.”

  “You’re very observant.”

  “Keeps us alive. So what can you do?”

  “Every now and again, I can see glimpses of the future. Sometimes those glimpses just surround an event. Other times they focus on an individual.” Colleen grimaced. “Unfortunately most of those glimpses are tainted with darkness and evil.”

  “You can also track ripples.”

  Colleen pressed her lips firmly together and looked even more stressed. “It might be a good idea not to let Dr. Pardot know you’re in possession of such knowledge.”

  “All right. But you can sense the ripples?” It was a lot for the woman to admit to. Such an ability would be highly prized by many people. Not for the first time, Hella wondered what the lab where the scientists came from was like.

  “Yes.”

  “Is that why you’re here in the Redblight? To track ripples?”

  “I’m afraid you’re way past anything I feel comfortable answering at this point.” Colleen glanced around at the security guards. “Dr. Pardot keeps a tight rein on things.”

  Stampede whispered into Hella’s mind. “Back off, Red. You’re not going to get anything more from her, and you don’t want her retreating to Pardot’s side after she’s been at least a little forthcoming with us.”

  Hella knew that was true, but she wished she could learn more. Everything they didn’t know threatened Stampede and her. “I understand. Thank you for telling me what you have.”

  Colleen hesitated. “I want you to know, Hella, that the reason we’re here is important. And not just to Dr. Pardot. Your efforts, and those of your partner, are deeply appreciated.”

  Hella glanced meaningfully at the eastern sky. “Not much time left before dawn. The morning’s going to come early. I’m going to try to get some sleep. You should probably do the same.”

  “I will. It’s been interesting talking to you, Hella.”

  “Thanks. I enjoyed it too.” Hella walked away and thought about Colleen having a daughter. That had truly surprised her. As cold and driven as the woman acted, Hella hadn’t expected that. The knowledge gave Colleen a more human aspect that Hella didn’t know if she was prepared to acknowledge.

  “Everybody’s hiding something.” Stampede snuffled, sounding on the edge of sleep.

  “I know but their secrets are dangerous to us too.”

  “Me and you, we’ve always lived on the edge, Red. Do you really want to change that now?”

  Hella smiled sourly. Even if there were a way, she couldn’t imagine any other life she’d want to live.

  CHAPTER 4

  Hold up.” Hella reined in Daisy, and the mountain boomer stopped immediately and went low to the ground. While astride her, Hella knew she was a tall target for enemy gunners. The tradeoff was that she could see a long distance and the lizard was incredibly fast.

  “What’s wrong?” Stampede spoke over the comm link. He’d have already pulled the expedition into safe positions.

  “There’s a smudge to the east.” Hella shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted against the misty brightness. Her eyes felt grainy and irritable from lack of sleep, and she hated the continued soaked feeling from the rain. “Do you see it?”

  More heavy rain still threatened from the low, gray clouds that scudded slowly across the sky. The air was thick and moist, and she felt the cycling heat and cold flashing through the air. With the way the weather was behaving, they could be in for a tornado. She’d heard that before the collider had exploded the Redblight had suffered seasonal storms that left great tracts of ruination. At least during that time the tornadoes were somewhat predictable. The weather in her time permitted tornadoes to form at nearly any time, even in the chill of winter.

  “I see it. Thought it was just a dust cloud.”

  “Too wet to have dust.”

  Stampede growled unhappily. “Wasn’t thinking.”

  “Deener’s Crossing lies out that way. This time of year, there’ll be a lot of caravanning, getting crops in and trying to turn a profit. That always draws the brigands.”

  Stampede heaved a curse. “Agreed. We can go around Deener’s Crossing.”

  “After that rain last night?” Hella studied the dark smudge threading through the sky. “Flatbottom Creek will be washed out and running white. It’ll be more like a river. We can’t cross that unless we travel ten miles north. I don’t think Pardot would be happy about that since he’s so dead set about going in this direction. Brigands will travel the creek too.”

  “All right. Let’s get these people situated; then you and I will ride up and take a look.”

  Despite the wind she saw bending the trees, the smudge remained consistent against the sky. Hella turned Daisy back toward the expedition.

  Klein Pardot was in another foul mood when Hella reached the expedition. Or maybe he was still in the same mood from the previous night. The little man slogged through the mud and struggled to keep his exo under control. “I don’t see why we’re supposed to stay here.”

  “Because you’ll be safe if something goes wrong.” Stampede talked slowly, as he would to a child.

  “I question your logic. We’d be just as safe if we rode with you.”

  Stampede gripped his big rifle and glared down at the professor. “You hired me because I’m good at what I do, Dr. Pardot. If I say that riding on without checking out that smoke is dangerous, then it’s dangerous. The last thing you want to do is get too sudden into a situation that can get you killed. Now if you don’t want to take my advice, you’re welcome to ride on ahead. But my partner and I won’t be riding with you.”

  Hella sat atop Daisy and watched the security men. If any of them tried to push on ahead, she’d let them go. But if any of them attempted to draw a weapon on Stampede, she would drop them.

  “Sir.” Riley’s voice was calm as he rode his ATV beside Pardot. “I don’t think that smudge is from a dust storm either. It looks like smoke.”

  “According to the maps—”

  Hella snorted in disgust at that. Maps were almost useless in the Redblight. Maps showed where things might be, where they should be, if they hadn’t been destroyed, but they didn’t keep up with all the things that could get a person killed.

  Pardot glared at Hella for interrupting him. “There’s a village ahead of us.” He sounded like a petulant child.

  “Not exactly a village, sir. It’s a trade camp. Deener’s Crossing. They’ve got supplies and goods to barter for there. That was one of our scheduled stops. But the place is also a target for roving marauders.” Riley looked at Stampede. “I think we need to do what he says.”

  Pardot grimaced as he swallowed a sharp retort. “Get it done quickly, Captain.”

  “Yes, sir.” Riley touched two fingers to his headgear in a small salute. The face shield winked shut. “We’ll be back soon as we can.”

  Or you won’t be back at all. Hella thought that but she stopped herself before she said it because she didn’t want to jinx them.

  Hella took the lead, riding low on Daisy as they followed the trade track worn through the thick trees and brush. Animal hooves as well as tire treads had left impressions on the soft ground, and the trail was concave from years of wear and tear.

  Instead of riding on the trail, though, Hella kept Daisy ten meters off to the left, following in tandem. Stampede and the security men followed a hundred meters back, and the silenced drives of the ATVs never reached her.

  She listened to the birds chirping around her, to the scurry of lizards, rabbits, and ground fowl cutting through the brush. If those noises hadn’t taken place around her, she would have known someone else was nearby. Riley and his men probably wouldn’t have known that. They were used to relying on night vision and thermal imaging systems built into the hardshells. Those were useful crutches for someone not born to the wilderness, but anyone not used to the forest was a cripple. Technology didn’t he
lp a neophyte understand the language of the feral world around them.

  When she’d been younger, Hella had been fascinated by tech, mostly because her body was full of nanobots that she didn’t understand. She’d fallen in love with the gadgets and gizmos hucksters had brought out for barter. Stampede had pointed out the inherent weaknesses in the systems, that circuitry could fail, power supplies could drain, and that she would lose the natural sense she had of the world. Reluctantly, then, Hella had bypassed the devices that had so amazed her.

  She sniffed the air too. Much of what happened in an area could be sensed on the breezes for someone who’d trained to notice such things. The odor of burned wood and fuel pinched her nostrils.

  Another eighty meters on, she urged Daisy up the incline toward the trail. A bridge spanned Flatbottom Creek there, one of those steel-and-concrete remnants from the old world that had somehow survived the past one hundred fifty years of strangeness. Bits and pieces of the old highway that had once led to the bridge shoved up through the earth in places.

  Hunkered in the lee side of a massive oak tree, Hella peered down the length of the bridge. It was almost a quarter-klick long. In a few places, holes gaped in the expanse. Still, it was navigable on horseback or by groundcrawlers such as the ATVs Riley and his men rode. Surplus steel had been taken by scavengers, and only the flat surface of the bridge remained.

  Hella took a pair of binocs from her chest pouch and held them to her eyes. The binocs whirred as the servos automatically adjusted the magnification and focus. Stampede wasn’t against all tech. Binocs and cutting-edge weapons were adopted with relish, but he haggled for them fiercely.

  Two corpses littered the bridge. Both men had been shot in the back, evidently while trying to flee, and had been picked over. No gear or firepower remained on them, and one man’s boots had been taken.

  On the other side of the creek, Deener’s Crossing sat in ruins. The whole trade camp had consisted of three permanent buildings. Two hundred years earlier, the place had been a farmhouse, barn, and an outbuilding, all made of cinderblock against the tornadoes. Transitory shelters, mostly tents, had filled in some of the empty places around those buildings, all of them paying rent to the merchant who ran the trade camp.

  The tents sat in pools of tattered ash, and the three buildings had all suffered severe damage. All of the structures had broken walls that had tumbled inward, and the barn lay in devastation like two halves of a broken egg.

  More bodies littered the cracked hardpan road that lay between the buildings. The road continued beyond Deener’s Crossing, but the forest had already reclaimed most of it. A larger city had once lain in that direction, but large cities had been the first to die when the food shortages and transportation problems started after the effects of the collider kicked in.

  Sickness twisted through Hella’s stomach as she put away the binocs. She’d known some of the people who had lived in Deener’s Crossing. Most had been good people, and even the worst among them hadn’t deserved what she saw.

  “Stampede.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t think there’s anyone left alive there.”

  Stampede didn’t answer right away. “Before we bring the others in, we need to know for certain. I don’t want to walk into an ambush.”

  “Okay.” Hella urged Daisy up onto the trail then across the bridge. The lizard’s claws scraped and skittered against the concrete.

  When they passed the first of the dead bodies, Hella glanced down at the corpse, wondering if she’d recognize the man. Thankfully she didn’t. The second was unknown to her as well. She hated crossing the bridge. It had been a long time since she’d felt that exposed. Constant awareness of what a sniper could do left a permanent chill threading through her spine.

  “Whoever it was slaughtered the whole trade camp.” Stampede pulled a dead man into the pile they’d made in the center of the area between the buildings. “With this much firepower backing them, I’d bet it’s a brigand gang that’s trying to stay together instead of splitting up.” He snarled in disgust and spit. “Idiots.”

  “What are you talking about?” Riley pushed a dead woman onto the pile.

  “The vermin that did this got too big.” Stampede glared at the collection of bodies. “As harsh as the world is these days, it’s hard for a city to survive. Gangs like this are better off staying to smaller numbers. They’re not farmers; they’re predators. A predator has to have a hunting ground that will support it. Otherwise it overhunts an area and runs out of prey, eventually starving out or cannibalizing itself. Brigand groups aren’t much above hunter-gatherer clans. If they get too large, they have to separate, find separate hunting territories.”

  “In order to survive, this group has to kill more people?”

  Hella dragged over the body she’d found. She tried not to look too closely at the face in case she recognized the woman. “They don’t have to kill more people. They have to take more supplies, more food and trade goods, clothing and ammunition. In order to do that, they generally take those things from people not willing to give them up. Killing people is just part of the process.”

  “Why didn’t the trade camp just give up their goods?”

  Anger stirred inside Hella. She wanted to know what Riley’s life in the lab had been like because he certainly had no clue what things were like in the Redblight. “Because out here the things these people had are hard to come by.” She knew her anger was audible in her tone, but she just didn’t care. They were burning children too. “Giving up those things meant they might not eat either. No one lives in the land of plenty out here. I don’t know how things are back where you came from.”

  Riley looked somber. “Where are the people that did this?”

  “Where are the monsters, you mean. People didn’t do this.” Hella turned her face up into the light rain and let it cleanse her. She shook her head. “They’re holed up somewhere. They’ll eat and drink what they’ve taken then stake out their next target and repeat this.”

  “Unless they’re stopped.” Stampede brought over a new body and heaved it onto the ground at Riley’s feet. “Not all of them got away.”

  The body on the ground looked humanoid, but genetically its ancestry could be tracked back to an armadillo. The creature had two arms and two legs, but it also had an abbreviated tail and a shell that shielded it from shoulders to mid thigh. Lizardlike hide, crusty and dense, covered the male from head to toe. The hide was dark brown and ochre, and the shell was slightly lighter and had a greenish cast. The broad face was too wide, and the mouth curved cruelly. Ill-fitting leather clothing covered it, pants, a vest, and wide boots.

  “What is that?” Riley unconsciously lifted his machine pistol in both hands.

  “Dead now.” Stampede kicked the corpse, which rolled loosely. “It’s a Sheldon.”

  “I don’t understand the reference.” The face shield hid Riley’s lack of understanding, but Hella heard the confusion in his amplified voice.

  “Maybe they were armadillos before the collider broke down and mutated them into something near human.” Stampede grabbed a fistful of the black leather vest and yanked the dead creature over onto its back. “Or maybe they stepped out of a ripple a hundred years ago and set up shop here. They’re strong-arms, sometimes hiring out to protect caravans, and they’re brigands, stealing from anyone weaker than themselves. They’re crafty and canny but not really intelligent. And they’re not loyal to anyone that isn’t one of them.”

  Hella knelt and went through the dead thing’s clothing. “They’re known locally as Sheldons.”

  “Because of the shell?” Riley leaned in for a closer look.

  “I don’t know.” Hella looked up at Stampede. “His clanmates took time to strip him before they left.”

  “Figured as much.” Stampede rolled the body over to expose the image on the back of the leather vest.

  Whoever had made the marking had spent time with it. The image of a rearing drago
n had been burned into the leather; then purple coloring had been rubbed into it. Scarlet trimmed the image, making it stand out in bold relief.

  “He was a Purple Dragon.” Stampede growled. “I’ve heard of them.”

  “I thought they were south of the Red River.” Hella stood.

  “Evidently they aren’t anymore.” Frowning, Stampede grabbed the dead Sheldon and heaved it on top of the pile of dead despite its bulk.

  Two more armadillos turned up in the woods outside the three buildings. One of Riley’s men also found three motorcycles in a ditch farther out.

  Hella surveyed the mishmash of tracks that tore up the ground. “Can’t make out how many riders there are.”

  Stampede nodded. “A lot.” He frowned at the surrounding woods. “We’ll do our best to stay away from them.”

  Taking Daisy’s reins, Hella stepped back into the stirrup and remounted. The mountain boomer was twitchy. Being around that much food—that was how she viewed the bodies of the slain—made her harder to control. Despite her above-average lizard intelligence, Hella hadn’t been able to convince Daisy that eating dead people was not all right. The tendency had put off a lot of clients in the past.

  “The clients needed the supplies they could have gotten here.” Swiveling in the saddle, Hella looked at the burned-out trade camp. Smoke from the pyre they’d made of the bodies to prevent a spread of sickness rose to stain the sky again.

  “We’ll head to Blossom Heat.” Stampede started back toward the bridge. “Riley, tell your people they can come on ahead.”

  Riley radioed his team and gave the instructions then powered his ATV to catch up to Stampede. “What’s Blossom Heat?”

  “Another trade camp. Bigger. They’ll have fuel for your vehicles. With an outlaw gang of Sheldons on the loose in the Redblight, I don’t want to take a chance on running out of fuel.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Klein Pardot stabbed an angry finger at the map image on his PDA. “Blossom Heat is ten miles out of our way. A half day’s travel. I don’t want to lose that kind of time. Perhaps I haven’t made myself clear.” He stood under the canopy in the center of the camp as darkness closed in around them.