No Man's Land. James Axler

nodded. He had hunkered down now to gaze moodily into the dying fire.

      “We had allies back in Front Royal,” he said. “Not so many as enemies, of course. But yeah, it happens.”

      “We saw some pretty fair alliances in our travels with the Trader, didn’t we, Ryan?” J.B. said, putting his glasses back on. “One or two pretty brisk wars between them, too.”

      He chuckled. “And being the sorts of natural trouble magnets we all were,” he said, “didn’t we go and get mixed up in a few of them ourselves?”

      “Those were the days,” Ryan agreed with a grin.

      “So why don’t we see alliances springing up among the real hardscrabble villes, places where it’s more than a full-time job scraping together the food and water to get by every day?” Mildred asked. “You’d think it’d be more natural for them to band together. Pool their resources, you know?”

      “Barons like to keep a fist closed tightly on what they think of as theirs,” Krysty said. “The less they have, the harder they want to clutch, it seems like.”

      “Everyone feels that way, always,” Doc said. “The idea that poverty ennobles is a foolish conceit, but a very ancient one, possibly as ancient as civilization itself. Want makes all of us hoard whatever small scraps we may have. Only in times of relative plenty—even if it is still a most mean existence—are we free to think in terms of cooperation and sharing. Barons are people, too, after all.”

      “For a certain definition of ‘people,’” Mildred said.

      “It’s not as if we haven’t seen starving mothers offering their babies for food,” Krysty said.

      A sort of infinite sadness weighted her words. For all that she seemed actively callous to Mildred’s refined twentieth-century feelings sometimes, she in fact had the most nurturing nature of anyone Mildred had ever known; only nurses from back in her day came close. It was just that the standard of compassion a person could afford, and still keep their own body and soul together, had changed as harshly as the world.

      “So the very lushness of this country may conduce to baronial cooperation,” Doc said.

      “Got a point there, Doc,” J.B. said. “But there’s something more. Land this rich offers rich pickings. Like a newly dead buffalo cow draws wolves and coyotes and wild dogs, and rumor of a fresh redoubt being found draws scavengers of the two-legged kind. It’d bring the hungry and the hard.”

      “I wonder what they’re fighting about?” Ricky Morales asked. Jak had replaced him on sentry duty after wolfing his own portion of roast prairie dog.

      “What do people ever fight for, boy?” Doc asked. “Plunder, territory, power. And always, vanity. Vanitas, vanitas, omnia vanitas.”

      Hunkered down at Mildred’s side like a lean brown fox, J.B. chuckled. “Where barons are concerned, I reckon it’s usually that last thing,” he said. “That and plain cussedness. And, see, once you get barons starting to join up against outlanders, well, what’s more natural than they start looking to join up to grab what the other has?”

      Ryan slapped palms on his thighs.

      “Well,” he said, “good to get some idea what we’re up against. But going farther without more solid information—such as where the main armies are, and where they’re likely to be headed—won’t load any magazines for us.”

      “What do we do now, lover?” Krysty asked.

      “Right now,” Ryan said, “I’m going to sleep.”

      From his tone he meant just that. Mildred could sympathize. After their run, and the jump that preceded it, a good night’s rest was all she could handle right now herself.

      “I mean, after?” Krysty asked.

      “We need to get out of here!” Ricky said.

      Then his dark eyes got big, as he wondered if he’d screwed up by talking out of turn among the grown-ups. He was a kid, about sixteen years old, whom they’d picked up during an inadvertent jaunt to his monster-ridden home island of Puerto Rico. Unsurprisingly, he was considerably darker than Jak, and somewhat taller, which wasn’t hard for anyone to accomplish, since Jak Lauren was a slight albino with shoulder-length white hair and ruby eyes. Initially thrown together with the band by fate, Ricky had quickly made himself one of them, saving their lives individually and collectively at several turns before they managed to get to a gateway off Monster Island. He still pined for his adored older sister, Yamile, who’d been kidnapped by coldhearts and sold to mainland slavers, and still harbored hopes he’d cross her trail again someday.

      He’d fit in quickly and relatively smoothly, or he wouldn’t be with the companions now. A natural tinker by nature, weaponsmith by training and cunning trap-maker by inclination, he had almost instantly become doted on by J.B., whom he idolized—almost as much as he obviously did Ryan Cawdor.

      Jak had been prickly toward the newcomer at first, the adolescent-male hormones kicking him into reflex rivalry with another male a few years younger. But Ricky had proved his value to the exacting standards of Jak as well, and the natural affinity of a couple of youths roughly the same age amid a gaggle of grown-ups overcame testosterone poisoning.

      But in the small, relatively well-to-do and proper ville where Ricky came from, children were taught to be seen and not heard.

      So the thing about this group that made them so strong—made them family, so far as Mildred was concerned, and she knew she was not the only one—was that once you were accepted, your contributions were valued for what they were actually worth, not on any other basis. Each member brought a necessary part to the functioning—surviving—whole. If Ricky, or Jak, or any of them said something foolish, then they could expect the others to slap them down a notch.

      But the black-haired youth said only what Mildred suspected all the rest were thinking. She sure was.

      “We may be best served scouting tomorrow,” Doc said, “in order to locate the main armies.”

      “Don’t we want to go in the opposite direction, Doc?” Mildred asked.

      “And how else are we going to know what that is?” he asked blandly.

      “Could be tricky getting clear,” J.B. said. “If two armies are fighting over this patch of ground, likely means it’s in turn right between the places the armies come from. Country where passing strangers are likely to be looked at askance, if you know what I mean.”

      “I think there’s a redoubt around here,” Ryan said.

      “So close to the other?” Krysty asked.

      Ryan shrugged. “Who knows the mind of a whitecoat?”

      Doc laughed. It was a dry laugh, more than a little cracked. That was a wound that sometimes scabbed over, but would never fully heal.

      “They serve a multiplicity of functions, these agencies and departments,” he said. “Served? Our language does not support the traveling of time well as a concept. One redoubt might be built for one purpose in this place, another not a half day’s walk away, performing different abstruse—and need I add sinister?—tasks. Notwithstanding which they might yet be linked by the mat-trans gateways.”

      “Happened before,” J.B. agreed.

      Krysty stood up. She encircled Ryan’s narrow waist with her arms from behind and nestled her head on his shoulder. Though he was a tall man, she didn’t need to stretch up much to do it.

      “So why do you think that now, lover?” she asked.

      He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling. Something I heard, saw. Somewhere, sometime. Mebbe.”

      Detaching himself from Krysty’s embrace, he turned and bent to kiss her briefly on the lips.

      “Mebbe just wishful thinking,” he said. “Tomorrow