THE PLAGUE VILLAGE

CHAPTER 4

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I

—

What’s this? A roadblock?” Juke said from the driver’s seat, seeing men on the road about sixty feet ahead.

The men were most definitely armed, and there was a barricade behind them, made of wood and wire fencing, that crossed the road.

The group had left the waterfall behind them, and it was now late in the afternoon. The road they were on would bring them to their next destination—the village of Hardue—in about twenty minutes.

The sky bore clouds even heavier than those of the day before. Not a beam of sunlight deigned to grace the road.

Once the transporters had stopped about thirty feet away, two of the five men came over to them. They carried pneumatic guns pointed toward the sky. Of course, if the situation called for it, they were ready to point them at the group and open fire in a heartbeat, so it hardly proved them harmless. Bandit groups would use every trick in the book.

The men gave the names of two different villages about twenty miles south and told them the reason the road had been blockaded.

“An epidemic?”

“Yep. It’s the fountain plague.”

Both Juke and Gordo, who was on the roof, were speechless.

It was one of the worst diseases of all the contagions on the Frontier, and it’d wiped out more villages than anyone could count. Whenever even a single person came down with it, surrounding villages would join forces to seal off the infected village and wait for the disease to pass. In most cases, that would be when the entire population had died out.

“If it’s fountain plague, we can fix them,” Juke said, but his words only put a grimmer look in the men’s eyes. “Seriously. See, a hospital in the Capital has developed a special medicine for it. And we’re scheduled to deliver it to Hardue. They’re signed up for any new medicines.”

What villages on the Frontier needed more than anything was new drugs from the Capital. Ageless and immortal, the Nobility weren’t particularly intent on developing new medical treatments for themselves, but for the humans on whom they subsisted, they used their scientific prowess to develop drugs and build hospitals. It was something like the love an owner shows for his pet dog, only a bit more twisted. Even after the Nobility had vanished into obscurity, humans were left to run the medical facilities they’d left behind, and though they couldn’t comprehend some of the equipment or the theories behind it, they somehow managed to produce results. Frontier villages that were especially rich made arrangements with transport services like Juke’s so that new drugs and medical equipment would be delivered as soon as they were developed, no questions asked. And the village of Hardue was one such place.

“We can’t trust these guys,” one of the men said to the other in a doubtful tone. Tension raced through the group by the barricade. “Fountain plague breaks out in the village, and the very next day someone comes along with a special medicine for it. It’s all a little too neat.”

“What would we stand to gain by lying? If the symptoms showed up yesterday, there’s still time to treat them. The victims could get better.”

“And what happens if they don’t get better?” the other man asked. “What are you gonna do if all of you come down with it, too? We don’t want any more trouble than we’ve already got here. So either turn back or take a detour.”

“Don’t you get it? We’ve got medicine. If we inject them with this, it’ll cure them of the fountain plague.”

The two men looked at each other. With a despicable smile on his face, the first one to address them said, “And if that special medicine doesn’t work, we’ll have to keep you locked in Hardue. But there’s no way we could stop this big ol’ wagon of yours from busting through our barricade. We couldn’t have you bringing any more weapons into Hardue with you, either. Leave your wagon here and go in unarmed, and we’ll allow it.”

“That’s complete bullshit!” Juke said, his eyes bulging. “It’d take another twenty minutes to reach Hardue in this wagon. On foot, that’d be six hours. You think we could spend that long walking a road crawling with monsters without a single weapon?”

“In that case, we can’t let you go.”

The two men took a step back, and the group at the barricade leveled their guns at the transporters. At the same time, Sergei was up on the roof taking aim at the two men with a gunpowder firearm.

Grinning thinly, the second man pointed toward the barricade and said, “Give it a rest. That thing over there’s a portable missile launcher. Seems folks in the Capital call it ‘Rodan.’ You can shoot us, but that wagon of yours will get blown to smithereens. That the sort of thing a transporter would want?”

A pained expression stole onto Juke’s face. A transporter’s cargo was as important as his life or his honor.

The two men laughed mockingly, and then one of them said, “Now, about the toll—what do you say we make it half your merchandise?”

A shadow fell across the men, for another figure had come into view—the shadowy form of a guard who’d been behind the wagon and out of their sight until now.

“D,” Juke murmured.

“D?”

Whatever that name called to mind, the pair looked up at the rider with fear on their faces as the figure in black grabbed them both by the collar and lifted them into the air, before they could say another word. Even Juke and the other transporters found it strange how the two men were as motionless as corpses.

“Stop it. We’ll do whatever you say!” said one.

“Please don’t kill us,” the other pleaded feebly. They seemed quite terrified of D.

“Set the two of them down!” a man at the barricade shouted, one hand cupped by the side of his mouth. To his left, “Rodan” was taking aim. Its base was huge, but the tube housing its black missile was long and thin.

“What do you want to do?” D asked Juke.

“Go, of course. That’s our job.”

“Stick with me,” D told them, and then he started to ride toward the barricade.

The men manning it were shaken as well. D and his compatriots were traveling in the path of their missile. But what disturbed them more than anything was the beauty of the young rider. It was unearthly.

“Halt!” someone shouted. “Halt. If you don’t, we’ll blow you away!”

But they knew they couldn’t. He was too close, and one of those missiles cost as much as fifty head of cattle; they couldn’t very well use it to settle their own personal quarrels.

The air whistled, and the person manning the launcher felt a slight tremor coming down the tube that discharged the missile.

D returned his blade to its sheath.

The men stood stock still and forgot all about shooting them, probably robbed of their souls more by D’s looks than by his unearthly air. D passed them without uttering a word. He was followed by the wagon carrying Juke and Gordo, both of whom were grinning as if to say, This time, it’s our turn to laugh.

As they started to disappear down the road, someone far behind them growled, “Dirty bastards!”

But when the missile was brought to bear on the transport party, the man on the launcher learned what that earlier tremor had been. The front half of the firing tube had just fallen to the ground noisily. The tube was made of an alloy that was said to be able to withstand a one-ton impact. In the faint gloom, the piece rolling across the ground showed a nice, smooth cut.

—

As they approached the entrance to the village, the pair of men the Hunter held up in the air began to display a different kind of fear.

“Please, just set us down already. If we get any closer, we’ll get infected!”

“For the love of heaven, spare us, please. I don’t wanna catch the stinkin’ fountain plague!”

The two men moved their arms and legs frantically. Even though D was holding up around three hundred fifty pounds with that one arm, it didn’t move in the least.

But even Juke seemed to feel sorry for the pair, saying, “You can let ’em go now.”

“They’ll just do the same thing again,” D replied, silencing the transporter. After all, these men had demanded half their merchandise. “They’ve probably made similar demands of those trying to get out of the village. That way, they could just take their money and finish them off.”

Judging from the way the pair stopped struggling and averted their gazes, the Hunter’s remarks were probably right on the mark.

“You sons of bitches . . . You didn’t!” Gordo groaned angrily up on the roof, but just then Juke’s form tensed in the driver’s seat.

“Someone’s coming!” he cried, pointing straight ahead.

About a hundred feet away, a couple had appeared where the road detoured to the right: a boy and girl who looked to be around ten years old. They seemed to be a couple because the hands at the end of their wire-thin arms were clasped. For some reason, they were as red as if they’d been brushed with paint from the tops of their heads to the tips of their sandaled toes.