Part 7 (1/2)
”Wanted to see what?” Petor questioned, puzzled by the suddenly flat tone in Tammy's voice.
”It doesn't matter, stupidworks,” she answered bitterly, watching as Margia left the armory and headed toward the contest, smiling coldly at Tammy as she pa.s.sed her.
By the time both Margia and Tammy had arrived back at the contest, most of the shooting had taken place. The contest wasn't in itself a compet.i.tion. It was just something that the Amazon warriors used to spice up the otherwise dull target practice. There was an air of good humor about the shooting, and J.B. found the different stances and shooting styles of the contestants fascinating. So much so that he hadn't even noticed that Mildred had refrained from talking to him. But even the laconic armorer noticed the change in atmosphere when Margia returned. She headed straight for Mildred.
”What do you shoot with?” she asked casually.
”ZKR 551, Czech made.”
Margia raised an eyebrow. ”I don't think I've ever come across one of those,” she
said easily. ”What caliber?”
”It's a .38,” Mildred answered.
Margia held out her hand. ”Can I see?”
Mildred shrugged. Standing right in front of her, and in front of the others, there was nothing that the blonde could do to Mildred's blaster.
But Margia had timed her question carefully.
”Your turn,” Jess said to them.
Mildred went to take back her blaster, but Margia had produced her own from the sheathed holster in the small of her back. ”Mind if I shoot with yours? It'll be fair if I give you mine, 'cause we'll both have unfamiliar blasters.” Mildred wavered for a second. She knew this was a trick of some kind, but couldn't for the life of her work out what Margia was pulling. To refuse and cause a scene would mean loss of face in front of J.B. and the other members of the Gate. J.B. she could put in the picture later, but the Gate...
”Okay,” Mildred a.s.sented with a deceptively casual shrug. ”And G.o.d help you if you're setting me up, lady,” she muttered to herself.
They walked to the line in the earth from where the target practice would begin. Margia took position first, and sighting carefully along the barrel of the ZKR, rattled off five shots in quick succession. From their position on the sheet covering the target, it could clearly be seen that the shots had cl.u.s.tered around the center.
”You now,” Margia said with a smirk that made Mildred's spine crawl.
She sighted along the blaster Margia had given her, a Kimber .45 ACP pistol. The compact blaster had a barrel that located directly into the slide, and it held seven rounds. Mildred loosed them in a smooth repeating squeeze of her trigger finger, but even as the first round left the barrel she knew that something was wrong. The weight of the blaster felt wrong, as though something had somehow thrown it out of alignment. The discharged rounds kicked back in an asymmetric manner, causing the spread of hits to be wider than Margia's by no small degree. Even without looking, Mildred knew that her performance had been the worst of the contest, and even as she seethed at the deception of the blond armorer, so a part of her kept cool and looked at the blaster, searching for the cause of the problem.
”Not quite what I expected,” Margia said quietly, keeping the exaltation out of her voice. She looked over to J.B., and said, ”Mebbe you'd better think of joining up with us on a regular basis, if this is the best you can do.”
Mildred looked across at the Armorer. He was phased by Mildred's poor show. She knew that the last thing he would do was blame her, but that didn't alter the fact that she had let her friends down-albeit by a treacherous hand. Her gaze returned to the blaster in her hand.
”Don't blame the tools, sweetie,” Margia said in an acid tone, swiftly removing the Kimber from Mildred's grasp and replacing it with the ZKR.
Margia left Mildred impotent with rage and humiliation, left to questioning stares from Tammy and Krysty and left the others reflecting on the poor performance of the much-vaunted sharpshooter.
Left with the Kimber nestling against the small of her back, holding fast its little secret-the delicate work on the barrel that threw its alignment and made it Margia's secret weapon for anyone in the tribe, or out of the tribe, who might cross her.
Chapter Eight.
The period of peaceful travel was coming to an end. It was inevitable that this would happen, but the manner in which it occurred was something that couldn't have been predicted, for all things seemed to coincide and began not with an infringement from outside, but from within.
They spent three more days traveling. The climate was still warm, but there were occasional bursts of rain that fell warm upon them from the heavy chem-stained clouds that hung overhead. It wasn't the scarring acid rain of farther south, but still had a tinge of chem that made their skin soapy if they stayed in it too long, the top layers of the epidermis softening like a clay putty as the rain soaked in. When the showers. .h.i.t, it was hard to find cover and the Gate would gather into a protective circle, with the men using plastic sheeting and tarpaulins hauled from the wagons to cover the tribe as a whole.
They were having trouble finding cover because the terrain was changing around them. The vast plains with the crops of trees glading them had gradually lessened, the foliage and plant life spreading out into the gra.s.sland, the gra.s.ses encroaching onto the wooded areas, until there was no longer any clear delineation. The trees that still dotted the landscape were smaller. No longer the twisted descendant of redwoods, they were now smaller, like stunted beech and silver oak, with gnarled trunks that harbored small mammals and nests of birds.
In some areas, the foliage would grow thick, with twisting plant stems and root systems for the trees that would make progress difficult. Instead of the steady pace they had previously maintained, it was now a question of hacking a path through territory that was virgin to travel on foot. At the head of the tribe, Gloria would hack her way through, her flames of hair swaying to the easy rhythm of her movements, still gentle and unhurried even in these circ.u.mstances, like the movement of a coiled spring that was deceptively easy yet carried with it an immense energy. Ryan joined her at the front, his panga swinging in time to hers, his muscles rippling under the effort and glistening with sweat under the humidity of the rainy heat.
Margia had kept up her campaign of sly sideswipes at Mildred, saying nothing and everything by the tone of her voice, constantly referring to Mildred's failure in the shooting compet.i.tion-c.u.m-practice, but always in a conciliatory tone. She was deliberate in not being openly antagonistic, not wanting J.B. to notice any hostility on her part.
Mildred was having trouble keeping her temper. J.B.'s att.i.tude to her hadn't changed, but she did notice other members of the Gate looking at her as though she had somehow failed a test. Whether this was because of her failure against Margia as a marksman or because she wouldn't rise to the obvious bait the blond armorer was laying before her, Mildred couldn't be sure. But of one thing she could be sure: her patience was thin and stretched beyond the point where she could back down. It was only a matter of time before she snapped.
PREPARING CAMP WAS harder now, as the Gate and Ryan's people had to hack back swathes of foliage to clear s.p.a.ce for the campfire and for the tents. The baffling that had served so well in wooded glades had to be more securely planted in the earth to prevent the cold night winds from driving it down, and it was harder for the guards to keep hidden in the lack of cover during the still watches. Despite this, they were still able to set up a reasonable resting post on each night.
On the third night, as darkness fell, Ryan and Doc conversed with the Gate queen.
”I would hazard a guess that we are headed toward the area where the old capital was once located,” Doc said, studying both the map he had taken from the redoubt and the faded parchment that Gloria carried. He indicated a location on both, each in turn, with a long, bony finger that trembled slightly in the cold night air, despite their closeness to the main fire.
”That's where the main nukes would have hit,” Ryan said quietly. ”It's still a complete no-go area, what little of it is left. Trader had never seen it, but like he used to say, 'You don't have to see the s.h.i.+t to know that it smells.'”
”Picturesquely put, my dear boy,” Doc murmured with a wry grin of amus.e.m.e.nt, ”and probably just about accurate. There was the strong smell of corruption stinking out those corridors, the corruption-of-power madness, the insanity of pointless violence and the acquisition of power for the sake of it, with no goal or reason other than to glory in the utter futility of being master of the void.”
Gloria cast a puzzled glance at Ryan. ”Is he always like this? I'm sorry, honey, but I can't understand a word you say,” she added to Doc.
He gave a look of infinite sadness. ”Madam, if you had seen the void, you would understand. I could see it in those whitecoat eyes. If nothing else happened in the days of skydark that was good, then at least it cleaned out the canker eating at their souls.”
”Doc,” Ryan said, trying to bring the old man back on track, ”if we're not going to the old capital, then where are we headed?”
Doc looked blankly at the one-eyed warrior, for a short moment lost somewhere inside the h.e.l.l that he carried within him, the things that he knew but would rather had never crossed his consciousness.
”To oblivion, dear boy,” he said softly. Then, in a stronger voice, ”Inevitably, as must all men. But right now I would say we were going to scout around to the northwest of the continent. Strange, is it not, how everything seems to pull us this way. I remember a story from the whitecoats, a rumor only half-heard through an office door, but nonetheless...”
Doc, however, was not to repeat the rumor right then. There was a more pressing problem, as evinced by the sudden sounds of argument that cut him off and caused them to look around.
”Mildred...” Ryan whispered.
”Margia...” Gloria replied in a resigned tone.
”IT'S ABOUT TIME you came out with what you meant, lady, 'cause I'll tell you one thing-you wind a spring too far and it snaps. You pull that elastic too taut and it snaps. And that's me, girl.”
Mildred squared up to the blond armorer, shrugging off Krysty's hand as she tried to restrain the angry woman. Margia had finally taken that one step over the line. And it was the simplest trigger of all: Mildred's color.
Mildred Wyeth had encountered race hatred and discrimination all her life. Her father had been burned to death in his chapel, a victim of racism. Racism hampered her career as a doctor, despite her success. In the days before skydark, she often wondered if she would have achieved greater success if she had been white. Waking up from her freezie state to an alien world, it might have been an unreasonable dream, but not beyond the bounds of probability, that the harsh demands of a postholocaust world would cause the survivors to forget about race and band together to try to survive. Instead, she found merely that survival increased the tribalism and hatred.
Margia had drawn this inference from J.B.'s oblique answers to her questions about Mildred. And having judged that now was the right moment, she chose to bring this card into play. Pa.s.sing Mildred where she sat with Krysty and Tammy, the blonde paused to mutter a comment about Mildred sitting too close to the fire, in case she got burned, like her father, adding, ”but then, I suppose J.B. likes burned meat.”
It was at the same time both ba.n.a.l and vile, and it certainly had the intended effect. Like the last straw on the cliched camel's back, it broke the line of resistance that Mildred had kept up for days. The reference to her father, along with the racial slur, was well timed by the blonde.
And now they stood face-to-face, Mildred seething with anger, Margia retaining a detached and almost ironic calm.
”What do I mean?” she said with a deceptive sweetness. ”Why, Mildred, I don't bother to hide things.”