Playfair's Axiom. James Axler

      Chapter Five

      They traveled south. Tully led them out of the ruined building into the street, which was relatively unobstructed there. They made for the shelter of an intact section of overpass. It should protect them from the acid rain, if the wind didn’t blow too hard.

      The Armorer was a small man and not carrying any excess flesh. He was all bone and wiry muscle. Ryan was surprised by how heavy his friend actually was.

      Their captors had shouldered the companions’ packs. Ryan guessed that had more to do with preventing them from whipping out any nasty hidden surprises than a desire to lighten the loads of four people carrying their wounded friend.

      He felt impacts on the back of his shirt and head. He heard a frying-egg sound and smelled a nasty stench like burning hair as the concentrated acid in the rain dissolved its proteins.

      J.B.’s head hung between Ryan and Krysty. He moaned as an acid drop hit his cheek, clinging and burning like napalm.

      “Run!” Ryan shouted. He didn’t care what their captors had to say about it. If they decided their prisoners were making a break for it and chilled them, it was an easier death than acid.

      But the dozen or so locals were concentrating on not getting dissolved themselves. Those who could held bits of clothing over their heads for cover, or yanked their shirts over their heads. The angry welts some of them sported on their backs showed they’d made this particular unpleasant choice before.

      The four friends carrying J.B. were already straining. But as the rain began to sting like wasps they accelerated anyway. They were used to walking and even running long distances. But each of them, Ryan realized, had been holding back out of concern for jostling J.B.

      Now that was forgotten. As always, the demands of survival overrode everything else. They ran flat out, and the rain hissed in the white-gray dust that lay on the frost-heaved asphalt beneath their feet.

      Toughened as they were, their chests were working like bellows when the section of highway a hundred feet over their heads cut off the rain as if flipping a switch.

      They staggered a few paces and then laid J.B. beside a thick concrete support pillar as near the middle of the span as possible. Then they collapsed around him, gasping like so many beached Sippi giant catfish.

      Around them their captors took up a defensive perimeter. Some splashed water from canteens on their comrades to wash away acid. The rain pattered hard on the blacktop around them and the overhead pass. It raised a stinging stink that made Ryan’s eye water.

      A couple of blocks north the wounded scavvies who’d been left behind by their bugging-out pals were screaming. It was surprisingly loud at this distance. Or maybe, not so surprising.

      Ryan tuned it out. He’d heard people dying in unspeakable agony before. It wasn’t as if he liked those bastards melting alive out there.

      Mildred was on her knees cradling J.B.’s head on her thigh. She was still a pro; though she stroked his wispy brown hair tenderly she didn’t waste breath begging him to speak to her.

      “How’s he look?” Ryan asked, taking a pull from the canteen at his waist.

      She shook her head. “Not good,” she said. “But if he’s got internal bleeding he’s not showing any sign it’s gotten worse from being jogged around like a bag of mail.”

      “Not bubbling out nose or mouth,” said Jak, who squatted nearby, panting like the bipedal white wolf he resembled. “Good sign.”

      The skin went tight at the corners of Mildred’s eyes and mouth. Then she forced herself to relax. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it is.”

      “So who are you?” Ryan said as the tall patrol leader approached. It suddenly struck him: what he’d taken for unhealthy pallor was clean skin. These folk were well-scrubbed by usual ville standards, even after however many hours on patrol.

      “Aren’t you getting things backward?” Tully said. “We got the blasters. Who the hell are you?”

      Ryan shook his head. “Just folks passing through,” he said with unfeigned weariness. “My name’s Ryan. The woman here’s Krysty. The other’s our healer, Mildred. The sawed-off runt she’s tending to’s named J.B. Old guy’s Doc and the teenager’s Jak.”

      “Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, at your service,” Doc said. He managed to make his introduction sound grand despite the fact he was sitting on his bony old ass on an ancient weed-cracked highway. He gestured with his ebony walking stick. Ryan was startled to see their captors had allowed him to keep it, apparently presuming he needed it to walk. None of them seemed to have noticed the fact he’d stuck it through his belt to help carry J.B.

      So we’re not completely disarmed after all, Ryan thought with a slight smile. Not as if it does us any damn good. The fact that only a few of the patrol carried modern blasters didn’t fool him. A black-powder blaster would chill a person dead as any machine gun. And so would a crossbow bolt.

      “Where’d you come from?” the tall ginger-haired man asked, putting his back to a support pillar and sliding to sit. “’Cross the river?”

      Ryan shook his head. “North,” he said. It was true, as far as it went. That was the easiest lie—true but for the bits it left out.

      Tully raised a brow. “That’s a triple-hard road, friend,” he said. “Leads right through cannies and coldhearts swarming like angry wasps.”

      “We noticed,” Mildred said.

      “Now would you mind telling us who you are?” Ryan said.

      “Shouldn’t we make ’em stop talking, Tully?” a black kid with a single-shot black-powder longblaster asked. He looked to be no more than twelve and his eyes were saucer-large with excitement.

      “Why’d we want to do a thing like that, McCoy?” the leader asked laconically.

      “Well. Um.” Evidently McCoy hadn’t thought that far ahead. But he was game, and resourceful. “Mebbe they’ll plot their escape.”

      “Why, then, you’ll just shoot them dead with that big scary blaster of yours, won’t you, McCoy?” Tully said. “Speaking of which, you did remember to reload that smokepole, right?”

      The youngster puffed himself up. “O’ course! What do you think I am?”

      “A greenie on your first patrol outside the wire,” Tully said. “You put a fresh cap on, too?”

      “Well, don’t be a—Oh. Um, wait.” He fumbled at a pouch at his waist. “Wait one.”

      Turning his head so the kid wouldn’t see him smile, the patrol leader turned back to Ryan. “To answer your question, we come from a ville called Soulard. A mile or so south of here, along the old highway. Peaceful place.”

      “Why did you kidnap us, then?” Krysty asked.

      He smiled. “Looks to me like we rescued you.”

      “Looks to me like you captured us,” Ryan said. “Saving us for the stewpot?”

      “What, you think we’re fuckin’ cannies?” shouted the man who’d mishandled Ryan’s longblaster earlier. He wore a T-shirt with even the brief arms torn off to reveal bulky biceps and triceps. Though he looked barely in his twenties, he was a big old slab of beef, with a blunt face fronted by a mashed tuber of a nose and a couple of brown eyes narrowed with angry suspicion. The sides and back of his head were shaved up to a clump of brown hair that stirred in the acid-tangy breeze.

      “Ease off, Lonny,” the ginger-haired man said coolly. “They got a right to be a bit testy. I would be, in their circumstances.”

      “But they run with a mutie!” He waved a hamhock of a hand toward Jak. “Look at him, white as clean snow and rat-red eyes!”

      “I’m no mutie!”