Devil's Vortex. James Axler

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      “Mebbe that’s the point,” Hamar said. “Rumor says these new Bloods’ boss man is a Blood renegade, a young firebrand who calls himself Hammerhand.”

      “You can just tell he’s a people person,” Mildred said under her breath. J.B. started to frown at that, but then Krysty gave a half-stifled snicker.

      Ryan showed no sign he’d even heard her, although J.B. didn’t doubt he had.

      “They give you any trouble yet?”

      “No. It is just a matter of time, I’m sure. But we weathered such storms before. No, they haven’t even been reported within three days’ ride of here. But they’re starting to hit trade harder and harder.”

      “So where do we come in?” Ryan asked.

      “Do you want us to help guard your caravans as part of your sec force?” Krysty asked.

      “Oh, no,” the baron said. “It’s not goods I want to deliver. It’s information!”

Chapter Six

      In a single panther-like leap, Hammerhand sprang into the bed of the rebuilt pickup truck. For all his bulk he landed lightly enough that the Buffalo Mob sentry, leaning over the roll bar onto the Tacoma’s cab roof to enjoy a smoke under the cold, starry sky, was only alerted to danger when he felt the vehicle rock on its spring beneath his feet.

      By then it was too late to dodge. Or even to scream.

      Hammerhand felt the man’s bearded chin dig into his biceps as he wrapped an arm around the coldheart’s throat. He snatched hold of that chin with his free hand and violently torqued the sentry’s head to the right.

      His thick neck snapped with a sound loud enough to turn even Hammerhand’s bowels briefly to ice water. He froze as he felt the dying bandit convulse and his nostrils filled with the rich, wet reek of his sphincter letting go in his camo pants.

      Inside the circle formed by the score of power wags parked on the nighttime prairie, the Buffalo Mob’s rowdy reverie continued unabated around a dozen or so campfires. The woman playing on a harmonica with surprising skill never missed a beat. Neither did the pair of women dancing drunkenly to the tune.

      Hammerhand had spent an hour crouched in the scrub nearby, scoping out his target. So had twenty of his best Bloods, split up into three teams led by himself, Joe Takes-Blasters and Mindy Farseer. It was a risk taking the whole top leadership to a single raid, but this was all a high-risk gamble for high stakes.

      That was the point. Not just to score a number of power wags and start a serious upgrade on the mobility of his insurgent Plains nation, but also to do so with sufficient demon style to act as a beacon to the bold and ambitious by its very own self.

      That had been part of what the Glowing Man told him. Not giving him the idea. Far from it. Telling him that the idea he had was righteous, as was his dream of establishing a Plains empire in blood and fire, and that he was destined to go for it.

      And succeed.

      When Hammerhand was certain no one had heard him inside the camp of more than a hundred coldhearts, not even the sentries posted in the other circled wags, he slowly lowered the chill to the pickup’s bed. As he did, he eased the slung M16 off the dead man’s back. A quick check showed a round in the chamber and a full magazine of 5.56 mm ammo in the well.

      After another look toward the campfires, Hammerhand gave the corpse a quick toss, relieving him of a crumpled-up, greasy wad of local jack and a nice Cold Steel lock-back folding knife. Then he stooped, grabbed and, with a muffled grunt of effort, deadlifted the considerable weight high enough to roll over the wag bed’s wall on the dark side. Then he hunkered down again.

      The Buffalo Mob, as they called themselves, had certainly been exercising diligence in securing their wags and their scarcely more valuable own personal asses. Every other wag had a guard in it, constantly casting watching eyes across the surrounding grassland for just this kind of sneak attack. At least theoretically. The chill’s slackness—going so far as to actually smoke on sentry duty, spotlighting him to any sharp-eyed watcher within hundreds of yards and any decent nose downwind—showed how little the Buffalo Mob’s sentries regarded the possibility that any prairie pirates would be bold and skillful enough to try creeping on them and seizing the precious vehicles by stealth.

      But bold and skillful were the criteria Hammerhand used to pick his Bloods, even in those rough first days when he, an outcast without a clan and without a reputation, had been struggling to get by with whatever he could scrape together. He had always been picky about who he chose to ride with him—at least as picky as he could afford to be.

      Of course, crazy was another trait he selected for. But that kind of fell into the general territory of bold, to his way of thinking.

      And of course, those without the proper mix of boldness and skill tended to get winnowed out of the band fast. With mebbe a bit of a push from Hammerhand’s own hands. He hadn’t had to chill any of his own for stepping out of line, past the occasional feeb who turned up thinking he might challenge the big man for the role of boss cock. But before he’d got his size and strength in the middle of his teens, he’d had to rely on his wits to get his ass out of the cracks his rough, rebellious nature and smart mouth got it stuck in. Early on he’d figured out how to talk the overly bold into throwing their own stupe lives away and even how to goad the overly cautious into taking fatal risks.

      And when it came to fatal risks, apparently the invading coldheart mob never reckoned on a local gang with the patience to spend ten days shadowing them and scoping out their ways and numbers before making a move.

      From his left he heard a strange, soft, gobbling cry. He grinned. Joe Takes-Blasters did a piss-poor impression of a prairie grouse. Not that these tenderfeet would know the difference. Or even notice over their own noise.

      The Buffalo Mob ran somewhere north of a hundred strong. Well armed, well mounted and surprisingly well fed, they had in recent weeks made a move into the North Plains west of the Misery River, seeking richer pickings than what was offered by the deeper Deathlands to the east and south, where the land was parched and pocked with deposits of still-lethal rad-dust.

      But they weren’t looking to live by hunting the herds of bison that roved the prairie. Life wasn’t easy for those who lived out here—settlers, traders or nomads alike. But by the standards of the day they did pretty well.

      Nor did it matter a bent shell casing to Hammerhand what their business was. They were outlanders—interlopers. Meaning they had no family or other allies in the area to concern him. More to the point: they had something he wanted.

      Needed.

      He slipped over the side of the wag bed, carefully holding the plundered longblaster so that neither it nor the plastic buckles on the sling would clack against the wag. Then, quietly, he opened the cab door and slipped in.

      At least the Buffaloes had the sense to park their wags in a counterclockwise nose-to-circle tail, meaning the driver’s-side doors faced inward toward their fires.

      A quick check by feel revealed the dangling wire bundle of the ignition. Like most wags left over from skydark these hadn’t come with keys. So the owners had set them up for quick, efficient hot-wiring.

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