Deathlands 117: Desolation Angels (11 page)

“Those’d be ours,” Ryan said. “Also the weps.” He grinned. “Some of them, anyway.”

The lieutenant stuck his Mauser C96 in a cross-draw holster in front of the clasp of his web gear. Ryan wondered if those were fashionable in the Detroit rubble, too, or it was just another coincidence.

The mounted officer pointed to several of the infantrymen in turn. “Go secure the weapons and gear,” he said. “Load them in the Commando.”

That had to be where the Diesel growl came from and no doubt the heavy MG fire, too. The V-100 Commando was a burly four-wheeled armored car made by Cadillac Gage, which if Ryan could trust his ancient history, had once been a proud Detroit company.

“I’m Lieutenant Mahome,” the officer said, turning back to the captives.

“I’m Ryan Cawdor.” Ryan named the others off in turn.

“What are you doing here?” Mahome asked. “Apart from walking into the Cobo Center and kicking the whole Angels hornet nest right the nuke over?”

“Was that their headquarters?” Ryan asked. “Cobo Center?”

“Not exactly. It’s their stronghold, where a lot of their fighters and workers bunk. They actually farm the old show floor with the roof gone and all. Protects the crops from the wind.”

“We saw,” Ryan said.

“But their real fortress is the Joe. Old hockey stadium right near it. That’s where their boss, Red Wings, hangs his hat. Vicious, crazy old bastard that he is.”

“That used to be the name of the hockey team in Detroit,” Mildred said.

“Is that so? Anyway, Mr. Cawdor, you were about to explain how you happened to stroll in there.”

“We just arrived in the ville,” Ryan said. “We’re looking for work. Don’t know the place, so we just started walking.”

“Come across from the Windsor rubble, did you? Don’t blame you for clearing out of there. Stuff happens down there that’d gag a stickie.”

“Funny you should mention that, Lieutenant—”

“Oh, you ran into them, too? They got into that old parking structure right across from the Center ten years or so back. Angels get their asses handed to them whenever they try to clear them out. Makes them hotter than nuke red.”

“Easy with those weps, son,” J.B. called to a cop emerging from the building carrying his M4000 in one hand and Ryan’s Scout longblaster in the other. “We’ll be wanting those back.”

“No fucking way, coldheart,” Kurtiz barked. “We’re confiscating them.”

“Not necessarily,” Mahome said.

The sergeant snapped his head around. Ryan was surprised he even could, given how little he showed by way of a neck.

“What do you mean, Lieutenant? We can’t let a bunch of random assholes out of the Deathlands wander around our city! What happened to restoring law and order?”

“That remains to be seen,” Mahome said evenly, “until we get them back to headquarters. Where their fates will be decided by people above your pay grade or mine.”

He looked back to the prisoners. “You can put your arms down.”

“Yeah!” Kurtiz shouted. For once he sounded approving, though still shouting every syllable. “That way we can secure their wrists!”

“No,” Mahome said. “I don’t think there’s a need for that. They’re disarmed and we outnumber them. And I don’t think they pose much flight risk, now that we have all their stuff. Do you, Mr. Cawdor?”

“Depends,” Ryan answered. “If you’re just taking us back so your bosses can chill us, I’d rather we take our chances here and now.”

“We don’t play that way,” Mahome said. Ignoring that Kurtiz muttered “
I
would” under his breath, the lieutenant went on loudly, “As the sergeant rightly reminded us, we’re the forces of law and order. We’re the good guys. Anyway—” he grinned “—anybody who can make the Angels that mad, and kick their teeth in that hard, could be a useful asset. I’m not making any promises here. Because, don’t get me wrong, I can’t. But if you’re looking for work, it just may be that the Angels’ paranoid notion of you being mercies working for us might turn out to be prophetic after all.”

“I don’t like it, Lieutenant,” Kurtiz said.

“You never do, Sergeant.”

“My job.”

A breeze was rising. It shifted to blow from east to west. Mahome suddenly frowned.

“What the nuke?” he demanded, sniffing hard, then making an awful face. He stared at the captives. “Did you—did you all wade in sewage?”

“Well, yes, Lieutenant, sir,” Mildred said. “But it was an accident.”

Farting and snorting like a rhinoceros who’d eaten more fiber than it was used to, the armored car pulled around the rubble mound to park closer to the building so the cops would be able to load the equipment recovered from the restaurant more easily. Sure enough, it was a V-100, night-black with a disk-headed battering ram sticking out from its sharply angled snout. And sure enough, it sported a mounted 7.62 mm M240 machine gun in its turret.

“Cool!” Ricky exclaimed. “Can we ride in it?”

Mahome sniffed again.

“No.”

Chapter Eleven

“A remarkable story, gentlemen...ladies,” His Honor Claude Michaud, mayor of Detroit, said, nodding. His hair was gleaming white, and even the retreat it was beating from his high black dome of his skull was dignified. “Don’t you think so, Chief Bone?”

The tall man looming at the mayor’s side at the front of the big room looked doubtful and disapproving. He was well equipped to do that, Krysty thought, and just as well named. He wore a black police uniform closely tailored to a frame that was gaunt almost to the point of skeletal. And the long, clean-shaven face looked like a bleached skull above the midnight outfit, with its flaring cheekbones, hollow cheeks and dark eyes sunk into sepulchral pits. His head was shaved up to a patch of short, ice-white hair standing up from the top.

Krysty and her companions sat in the front row of heavy pews in what had once been a chapel. Like the building itself, it was still in good shape, all golden tan and dark brown, with its round-vaulted ceiling and arched arcades down either side. It even sported second-story boxes down both sides like some kind of theater, the dark hardwood gleaming from recent oiling.

The lingering scents of mold and unwashed bodies and an indefinable smell of rot undermined the overall impressive effect of the place. She was able to notice that because Lieutenant Mahome had allowed them to change into different clothes from their packs before locking up their gear in a separate closet and sending what they had been wearing off with a distinctly unhappy-looking patrol officer to be washed. He’d been quite insistent on the point.

“If they’re telling the truth, Your Honor,” the sec boss said. “It’s a far-fetched story, if you ask me.”

“You’re too cynical by far, Chief,” Hizzoner said. “Your young Lieutenant Mahome vouches for the veracity of their account. Or at least its gory aftermath. And you assure me he’s a reliable officer, do you not?”

The skull visage nodded. “He is. But naive.”

Michaud chuckled indulgently. “He’ll learn.”

“I guarantee it.”

* * *

M
AYOR
M
ICHAUD’S CITY HALL
may have been provisional, but it was certainly impressive, even though Krysty had so far seen no sign it was anything but the headquarters for the self-proclaimed Detroit Police Department.

It lay a surprisingly, and blessedly, short walk from the gutted restaurant where they’d made their final stand against the Angels. Krysty judged it to be no more than a half mile, if that.

Mahome had had the column assemble on the street that ran past the derelict restaurant to the east. Ryan had pointed up to the three-story red-stone building across from it.

“So how come the Angels didn’t climb high up there and shoot us to pieces?” he asked one of the foot patrolmen who’d hemmed them warily in. “I kept thinking they were going to do that. We would have been cold meat.”

The officer, a slight black man, laughed incredulously. “That’s Rock City turf. Not even the Angels want to mess with
them.
”

They set out along the street to the northwest. Though Mahome claimed not to regard them as either threats or flight risks, he did make sure the seven outlanders were surrounded by his forces. His ten mounted officers, two of whom turned out to be women, rode in the lead. Then Krysty, Ryan and the others followed, with the lieutenant riding alongside and chatting amiably with them. The couple dozen regular patrolmen walked flanking the companions. Twenty sec men in full riot gear followed them, and bringing up the rear rumbled the armored car, its turret turned so that its powerful automatic blaster could cover their back trail.

“How’d you happen along when you did?” Ryan asked the young officer. “Got to say it was pretty lucky, your turning up right about then. We were in deep rad dust.”

Krysty walked alongside Ryan, holding his hand. They were passing through the mostly clear area Ryan had spoken of when they were considering their options to escape. To their right were extensive fields, and off to the northeast, a stand of forest, all interspersed with the occasional ruined building. To the left lay industrial-looking buildings, some mostly intact, interspersed with wide, weed-choked rubble fields.

She reckoned Ryan was right. They never would have reached the more substantial standing structure before the Angels ran them down. Or just ran out of patience and blasted them.

“We got reports of a big commotion going on south of the Seven-Five,” the young officer said. “The brass thought the Angels might be staging a raid. So they threw together a scratch force to come down and see what was what, and if it turned out the Angels had gotten big ideas, to beat them out of them.”

“This is a scratch force?” J.B. asked from right behind.

Mahome laughed. “We have a lot of officers,” he said, “but we also have a triple-big amount of ground to cover. And we still don’t hold much beyond the south end of Midtown. Though Hizzoner hopes to change that soon.”

“Don’t give ’em all our secrets,” Kurtiz growled.

The burly sergeant was trudging behind Krysty’s group. He actually had a baton, which he beat disconsolately against his palm. He seemed to be doing a slow burn.

It seemed insubordinate to Krysty, who admittedly didn’t have a good feel for the ways of authority. But the young officer—who was quite handsome in a juvenile sort of way, she had to admit—just laughed again.

“Don’t mind the sergeant,” he said. “He’s a good man. Just case-hardened by a long life on the streets.”

Krysty frowned. To her he was just another sec man, a bully with a bludgeon and a blaster and license to use both liberally. The fact they wore uniforms and called themselves “police” didn’t change what they were.

As always, there were exceptions. Lieutenant Mahome seemed unusually humane for a sec man. He even laughed a lot.

They crossed a broad freeway that was surprisingly intact. It looked as if the wreckage of the collapsed overpasses in view to the east and west had been cleared enough to offer passage for two-way wag traffic. No one was moving along it at the moment.

The area on the far side was also a mix of buildings and open spaces, some cultivated, some riotously overgrown. These buildings were mostly of a more modest scale than skyscraper-heavy downtown, which might have had something to do with the fact that they remained more intact, and only one or two they passed had completely collapsed.

Then they came upon a structure that was anything but modest: a big tan limestone building with what looked like a medieval French cathedral at one end of it. From all the black uniforms going in and out of it—and the young phalanx of riot-armored sec men standing guard—it had to be their destination.

The horse riders veered off to the left—all except Lieutenant Mahome, who dismounted and handed his bay off to a female trooper to lead. He ordered a pair of the infantrymen to escort him and the strangers, then dismissed the rest. He also had a thoroughly grumpy-looking Sergeant Kurtiz accompany them, possibly as a conciliatory gesture. The bulldog sergeant looked as if he was scandalized past the point of words.

“Where’d all the ace weps come from?” J.B. asked as Mahome headed them up broad steps to the arched entrance of the cathedral-type place.

“Same place the snappy uniforms did,” the lieutenant said with a broad smile. “And the armored car. We found an armory a couple years back.”

J.B. looked at Ryan, then nodded and whistled approvingly.

“Now that’s some scavvy,” he said.

* * *

“
S
O,”
M
AYOR
M
ICHAUD SAID
, pacing at the head of the converted chapel. “You made the Desolation Angels look like monkeys. Just the seven of you.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Ryan said in what Krysty realized was his best studiedly neutral voice. He sat next to her with his long legs crossed. He might have been the third son of a baron before he was half blinded and chased into exile by a brother’s treachery, but growing up he’d learned a few things about diplomacy and negotiation.

And a lot more since.

“They’re a determined bunch,” he said. “We hit them hard and they just kept coming. And they do have skills.”

“Then why are you still alive?” Chief Bone asked.

Ryan looked him in the eye. “We have more.”

“They once were a great deal more formidable,” Michaud said. “Time was, they were the biggest power not just in downtown, but in all Detroit. And it looked as if they’d manage to get their boots on the neck of the whole rubble, from the Detroit River to 8 Mile Road. They were still just a gang of common coldhearts, you understand. Criminal scum to the core. But a mighty gang.”

“What happened?” Krysty asked.

She wasn’t sure how they’d wound up here, sitting comfortably in this elegant place, instead of being thrown into a jail cell. But however temporary it was likely to be, she was fine with it.

And although Ryan did have definite diplomatic skills, they weren’t the ones he exercised most frequently. She figured he might find a little of her help useful here. And the fact that he didn’t instantly snap at her to shut it bore her out.