Playfair's Axiom by James Axler Read Free Book Online

have noticed the fact he’d stuck it through his belt to help carry J.B.
    So we’re not completely disarmed after all, Ryanthought 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!” Jak shouted, spittle flying from his pale lips.
    “He’s an albino,” Ryan said. “It’s a natural condition, if a rare one. He’s no mutie.”
    “Bullshit,” Lonny said. Jak’s red eyes flamed. He looked likely to spring for Lonny’s throat, despite the huge disparity in size.
    “Lonny!” The patrol leader didn’t stir, but his voice cracked like a whip. “Back off. We need to talk to thesepeople. Brother Joseph will figure out what to do with them.”
    Lonny spit in the pale grass that grew in the shade of the overpass. “Brother Joseph.”
    “Enough, Lonny. We don’t need to be airing our dirty laundry in front of strangers, either.”
    But Jak’s hot blood was up. “How we know they not cannies?”
    “Lord, lad,” Doc murmured. “Let it go.”
    “Look at them,” Mildred said. “Ever see cannies look that healthy?”
    Jak frowned. His white teeth made paler dimples in his lower lip. “No,” he admitted after a moment.
    “Me neither, now that she mentions