M-4000 leveled from his hip, he sidestepped quickly across the doorway, left to right, staying outside. He wanted to clear the fatal funnel of the door without plunging into a completely unknown environment.
“Easy, little lady,” Ryan heard him say. “We’re not here to hurt you.”
Cautiously Ryan joined his old friend. He saw that J.B. had been right not to do the usual room-clearing drill, stepping quickly inside and then immediately sidestepping left or right out of the doorway, to make a perfect target of himself for as short a time as possible. They were in a toolshed, and the tools were in some disarray, scattered here and there. Had the Armorer driven ahead, he might’ve tangled up his feet and pitched face-foremost onto the packed-dirt floor. Or worse.
A little girl huddled inside, just visible in the gloom of the far side of the crowded little room.
* * *
“HOW’D IT GO, BOSS?” Hammerhand’s chief lieutenant asked as he strode into camp. Joe Takes-Blasters’s big broad face showed a frown of concern. “Reckoned you’d stay at the Crow camp longer.”
“No need,” Hammerhand said.
“So, you decided you didn’t need to go chasing visions after all, eh?” Mindy Farseer asked with her usual half-mocking tone of voice and one eyebrow arched.
“No. I did. I got what I wanted.”
The Blood encampment was a collection of about one hundred “lodges,” tepees of hide or canvas, yurts standing up from carts. It was the standard dwellings of Great Plains nomads. The brutal wind had subsided to a breeze that came and went, snapping their flaps occasionally like little whips. A few skinny children chased one another, sending chickens squawking from their path.
A handful of assorted battered trucks, modified to burn alcohol as fuel, were parked in the center of the camp, along with a selection of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to powerful but stripped-down choppers. Most of their transport took the form of a substantial herd of horses.
Hammerhand thought that they looked like a sorry-ass bunch of draggle-tail coldhearts, not the kind of people with whom he could build an empire.
But he meant to do just that. With them. And this morning he had received a clear and compelling vision of how to accomplish that.
It was time to kick ass.
And whatever Power it was—he didn’t know or care because the fact that it was a big and badass Power was enough—had anointed him as the chosen one to do it.
Now he had concrete goals and the beginning of a plan.
“The Crow elders are still here,” Joe said. He sounded uneasy.
He pointed with a jerk of his chin toward the group of four who stood expectantly nearby, at camp’s edge. Three men and a woman, with gray in their long braids, were wrapped in colorful blankets against the wind’s chilling touch. Their weathered faces showed strong bone structures and jutting noses, with skins the color of old leather. No doubt as a reproach to the mixed-breed Hammerhand, the Council had sent four elders to speak to him and urge his return to the fold.
As if.
After the Big Nuke, most bands of the Blackfoot Confederacy had taken in numerous refugees from fried-out cities, as had many of the First Nations groups that survived the war and skydark. And as most continued to do. The Blackfoot had thrived in doing so and now were preeminent north of what had once been the US-Canada border.
But while they had accepted their share of refugees, and continued to adopt new members regardless of heritage, the stiff-necked Blood people had chosen to maintain an unusual form of discrimination within the tribe—not against mutants, but ceding social standing on the basis of supposed purity of breeding. It was a policy they termed Traditionalism. And one that younger fire-bloods, many but not all mixed race like Hammerhand, disdained as “Trad.”
He looked at them now, standing there all mock humble but really demanding his submission—whether in renaming his band, or better, disbanding it and crawling back on his belly to beg the Council for forgiveness. Arrogant pricks.
He knew in his heart what the dazzling figure from the top of Harney Peak would tell him to do. And although obedience was not in his nature, no more to glowing, floating sky people than the grubbier terrestrial kind, he would follow its words. Because that was the vision he had sought and had gained. And because he knew in its heart it was righteous.
Black Bear, the shortest and stockiest but most senior member of the group, extended the ceremonial coup stick, hooked and feathered, toward Hammerhand.
“Return with us, and become once more one with our land and blood, young man,” he said.
“It’s not too late for you, boy,” said John Tall Person, who as might be expected, was the tallest of the group. Had his back still been straight he’d have been only an inch or three shorter than Hammerhand, which made him a tall man indeed.
Hammerhand’s anger at their arrogant imperiousness was beginning to smoke. “And if I don’t?”
Deer Woman scowled. “Then we shall make you! It will be war.”
“Your answer?” demanded Crow Legs, the final member of the group. His gray hair had been braided into a sort of unicorn horn jutting from the front of his head. Hammerhand thought it made him look comical.
“My answer?” Hammerhand gave them a long, hard look.
Then he turned to his lieutenant, Joe Takes-Blasters.
“For my answer, send their hides back to the Council,” he said. “Without them inside.”
Krysty’s heart melted as a whimper escaped the form lying on its side in the fetal position on the dirt floor. She felt an overpowering impulse to run to the girl and hug her.
But she fought it down. She was a seasoned campaigner, almost as much as J.B. or Ryan. She knew the girl could be bait in a trap. Or even, unlikely as it seemed, a danger in herself.
She scanned the corners of the cluttered toolshed. There was little to see but shadows. The structure seemed sturdily made, with no cracks to let even the feeble light from outside leak in.
“No danger,” Jak said, then vanished from Krysty’s side into the blowing white clouds of snow. He knew his companions could handle whatever menace a sobbing, freaked-out girl with black pigtails might pose.
“Right,” Ryan said. “Let’s move on.”
“And just leave her?” Krysty demanded.
Ryan looked at her and shrugged. He was a hard man, because he usually needed to be.
Krysty usually did not try to temper that hardness, but when the time came, she reckoned it was part of her job.
But it was J.B. who spoke up first. “I’d like an account of what happened here,” he said. “Best way I know to have a shot at keeping it from happening to us.”
Ryan bared strong white teeth, but he nodded. The little man in the scuffed leather bomber jacket, fedora and round wire-rimmed specs was the ultimate technician of survival. He was even more purely practical than Ryan himself, and when he spoke, he spoke to the point.
Taking that as all the assent she needed, Krysty holstered her Glock 18C and picked her way quickly but carefully through the disarrayed tools. She hunkered down by the girl, who wore a simple black shift with long sleeves.
“What’s your name?” she asked gently. She mostly wanted to try to pierce the other’s veil of uncontrolled emotion before doing anything like touching her. Gentle tones and innocuous words seemed the quickest way.
The girl didn’t look at her. Her eyes were screwed so tightly shut in her snow-pale face that it almost seemed as if she was resisting attempts