No Man's Land. James Axler

Buddy,” Mildred said.

      He backhanded her, and she fell back on the ground.

      Krysty gave him a flat gaze. “Don’t touch me.”

      He brayed another laugh, much louder this time.

      “What, bitch? Are you so stupe you don’t know your sweet round ass belongs to me right this very minute? In fact mebbe I’ll just give you a good old fuck in it right now and let you know how things stand around here, you red-haired gaudy slut!”

      Leaning down, he enfolded the back of her head with a huge, clumsy paw and crushed his mouth to hers. His tongue pushed against her tight-sealed lips like an urgent worm. His breath smelled as if a mouse had crawled in his mouth and died there. Last week.

      His other hand groped her crotch, though what he might actually feel down there through all the layers of heavy fabric his father’s goons had wrapped her lower reaches in she couldn’t even guess.

      By way of response Krysty abruptly head-butted him. It squashed his nose. Blood squirted out his nostrils and down over his mouth as he stumbled backward into Mildred. She caught the still-stunned youth around the neck from behind with both legs. She squeezed her powerful thighs together until his face turned red.

      Krysty writhed to her feet. The companions’ gear was stored at one side of the tent. The clothes she and Mildred had been wearing had been discarded beside them. She turned her back and knelt, while Buddy struggled futilely to escape Mildred’s grip.

      Her fingers found what they were looking for. Deftly she manipulated the little hideout knife from her clothing to sever the cotton cord that held her wrists crossed behind her back.

      She stood up, knife in hand. Buddy lay on his back, trying alternately to pry Mildred’s legs loose or hit her with his wildly flailing hands. She had a look of not altogether holy relish on her face as she fended off his efforts.

      Krysty cut her friend’s hands free, then she stood up and began to slice her long skirt methodically into strips. It would do for tying and gagging the youth, she reckoned.

      “You seem like someone who’s already got some experience at rape,” Krysty said, “along with the taste for it.”

      “Bitches asked for—” Buddy began, then his eyes bugged out wider as he realized his admission. “No! Wait! I mean—I wouldn’t do that! I never—”

      She frowned and shook her head.

      Buddy wrenched free from Mildred’s leg hold and tried to retrieve the bowie knife sticking out the top of his boot.

      “Sorry, Buddy,” Krysty said as she slashed his neck with her knife. “This is goodbye.”

      Buddy didn’t make a sound as he collapsed to the floor and started to bleed out.

      * * *

      “BARON JED’S service is easy, maggots!” shouted the man in the black hat with the emblem pinned to the front. He had sergeant’s chevrons on the sleeves of his blue tunic. “All you got to do is what you’re told, when you’re told, and you’ll be fine!”

      Having been stripped of their weapons and thoroughly searched, as well as being relieved of all their belongings, Ryan, J.B., Doc, Jak and Ricky had been marched off to a little bonfire on the outskirts of the camp. Doc still had his ebony swordstick, which meant he had the sword concealed inside. Whether that would give Ryan and company the edge they needed to get clear somehow and get to the thorny problem of rescuing Krysty and Mildred was another thing entirely.

      The sergeant, whose name was Bolton, had been told off to see to the formalities of inducting them officially into the Grand Army of the Des Moines River Valley Cattlemen’s Protective Association, which, so far, consisted of yelling at them in a remarkably loud voice.

      “Tell them the penalties, Sergeant,” said one of the two guards keeping the captives under control at the point of a musket. He wore pants as loose as his lower lip, held up by suspenders over an unbleached muslin shirt. The only signs of uniform to his person were the armband on his sleeve, closer to black than blue in the light of the cow-chip fire, and the kepi-style cap from which hair almost as white as Jak’s hung to his shoulders.

      The other trooper had black skin and a more soldierly manner, which was to say, he looked bored to Ryan’s eye, but there was something about him that suggested he wouldn’t mind livening up his evening by using the butt of his longblaster on an unruly recruit. Or the other end either.

      “Penalties are simple,” the sergeant bellowed. As far as Ryan could tell that was his sole level of volume: loud enough to wake the dead in the middle of a cloud-busting prairie thunderstorm. “First infraction—flogging! Second infraction—death by hanging! And none of this pussy neck-breaking shit, either. You swing and choke and kick until you just hang there and don’t move anymore. Baron Jed is a real man who wants his punishments to punish! Am I clear?”

      His eyes grew wide, then they popped right out of their sockets to dangle like obscene white grapes by their optic nerves. The middle of Bolton’s forehead bulged outward. He dropped like an empty sack.

      Already pretty sure he knew what fate had so quietly overtaken the noncom, and not wasting a blink thinking about it, Ryan was already in motion. He sprang from his crouch by the campfire, grabbing the musket behind the bayonet socket and thrusting it high in case it went off.

      The kid opened his mouth to shout a warning. Ryan caught the longblaster with his other hand as well and used both, plus a powerful hip rotation, to piston the steel-shod musket butt right back at its former owner. Teeth exploded outward as if a gren had gone off in the soldier’s face. He fell down as limp and final-seeming as his sergeant had.

      Quickly reversing his grip on the musket, Ryan looked to the burlier black guard. The soldier was trying to raise his own musket, but he was also dealing with the little problem of Jak not only having a hold of his arms, but also having the albino’s sharp white teeth latched on to his throat. Jak was hanging on like a weasel clamped to the neck of an eagle.

      But even as Ryan looked, strength and sheer self-preservation and fury got the better of tenacity. The soldier managed to shove Jak off. Skin and a fair amount of blood from his neck followed the albino, but Ryan could clearly see there was nowhere near enough to show Jak had bitten through a jugular vein.

      Apparently the albino had done the soldier enough hurt that he couldn’t yell; he made a weird rasping sound as he prepared to drive his bayonet into the slim body of the kid he’d just knocked to the ground.

      Ryan realized the reason the soldier didn’t just shoot Jak was that the two soldiers probably weren’t being trusted with loaded weapons off the line of battle, which was also why Ryan couldn’t shoot down the soldier to save his young friend. He prepared to try throwing the musket like a spear. It was a shitty idea, but all he had.

      Then he heard a wet punching-sliding sound. The soldier’s eyes bugged out. Dropping his musket, he threw both hands to his throat as, with a fruity sucking sound, the slim blade of Doc’s sword was withdrawn from the man’s neck. He went down gargling his own blood—flowing freely this time—and kicking the cool sod with his heels.

      Mildred stepped out of the night. She carried two backpacks, giving her a silhouette like some kind of giant awful one-off mutie. She was looking very pleased with herself and working the bolt on a funny-looking longblaster with a short, wide barrel.

      “You know,” she said, “I could get used to this DeLisle of Ricky’s.”

      “Weren’t you used to it enough to shoot that other bastard sec man before he chilled Jak?” Ryan asked.

      Looking sheepish, Mildred handed the carbine with its built-in silencer to its rightful owner, Ricky Morales, who was dancing as if he had to take a pee with the effort of holding in his desire to snatch his beloved weapon away from her.

      “Sorry, Ryan,” she said. “I’m a handgun girl. I sort of forgot about working the bolt in the heat of the moment.”

      “Don’t