Short Fiction by Mack Reynolds (ready to read books .TXT) 📕

eyes wide in disbelief. As her companion went down, the side of her face and her scalp welling blood, the Horse at first brought up her rifle and then, in despair, tried to reverse it to use its butt as a club.

She was stumbling backward, trying to get out of the way of his improvised weapon, when her heel caught on the body of one of the fallen Wolf sentries. She tried to catch herself, her eyes still staring horrified disbelief, even as he caught her over the head, and then once again. He beat her, beat her hysterically, until he knew she must be dead.

He worked now in a mental vacuum, all but unconsciously. He ran to the stair bottom and called, “Come down,” his voice was shrill. “Alice, Tommy, all of you.”

They came, hesitantly, and when they saw the shambles of the room stared at him with as much disbelief as had the enemy women. He pointed a finger at the oldest of the girls. “Alice,” he said, “you’ve been given instruction by the warriors. How is the Bren gun fired?”

The eleven year old bug eyed at him. “But you’re a husband, Alan.⁠ ⁠…”

“How is it fired?” he shrilled. “Unless you tell me, there will be no Wolf clan left!”

He lugged the heavy gun to the window, mounted it there as he had seen the women do in practice.

“Tommy,” he said to a thirteen-year-old boy. “Quick, get me a pan of ammunition.”

“I can’t,” Tommy all but wailed.

“Get it!”

“I can’t. It’s⁠ ⁠… it’s unmanly!” Tommy melted into a sea of tears, utterly confused.

“Maureen,” Alan snapped, cooler now. “Get me a pan of ammunition for the Bren gun. Quickly. Alice, show me how the gun is charged.”

Alice was at his side, trying to explain. He would have let her take over had she been larger, but he knew she couldn’t handle the bucking of the weapon. Maureen had returned with the ammunition, slipped it expertly into place. She too had had instructions in the gun’s operation.

Alan ran his eyes down the arroyo. There were possibly forty of them, Horses and Crows⁠—well armed, he could see. Less than a quarter of them had the new muzzle loaders being resorted to by many as ammunition stocks for the old arms became increasingly rare. The others had ancient arms, rifles, both military and sport, one or two tommy guns.

He waited another three or four minutes, one eye cocked on the progress of the running battle below. Vivian, the scout chief, had dropped back to take over command of the younger warriors. She was probably beginning to smell a rat. The intensity of fire wasn’t such as to suggest a large body of enemy.

The women in the arroyo were placed now as he wanted them. He forced himself to keep his eyes open as he pressed the trigger.

Blat, blat, blat.

The gun spoke, kicking high the dust and gravel before the Horse and Crow warriors advancing up the arroyo.

They stopped, startled. The citadel was supposedly in their hands.

They reversed themselves and scurried back to get out of their exposed position.

He touched the trigger again. Blat, blat, blat. The heavy slugs tore up the arroyo wall behind them, they could retreat no further without running into his fire.

They stopped, confused.

Alan said, “Maureen, get another pan of ammunition. I’ll have to hold them there until Vivian comes up. Alice, run down to the matriarch and tell her about the warriors in the arroyo. Quickly, now.”

Little Alice said sourly, “A husband shouldn’t interfere in warrior affairs,” but she went.

When Vivian strode into the citadel she had her sniper rifle slung over her back and was admiring a tommy gun she had taken from one of the captured Horses. “Perfect,” she said, stroking the stock. “Perfect shape. And they seem to have worlds of ammunition too. Must have made some kind of deal with the Denver clans.”

Her eyes swept the room and her mouth turned down in sour amusement. The Horse woman was dead and the Crow had by now been marched off to take her place with the other prisoners who were being held in the stone corral.

“What warriors,” she said contemptuously. “A man overcomes two of them. Two of them, mind you.” She looked at Alan, the reaction was upon him now and he was white-faced and couldn’t keep his hands from trembling. “What a cutie you turned out to be. Who ever heard of such a thing?”

Alan said, defensively, “They didn’t expect it. I took them unawares.”

Vivian laughed aloud, her even white teeth sparkling in the redness of her lips. She was tall, shapely, a twenty-five-year-old goddess in her Wolf clan kilts. “I’ll bet you did, sweetie.”

One of the other warriors entered from behind Vivian, looked at the dead Horse woman and shuddered. “What a way to die, not even able to defend yourself.” She said to Vivian worriedly, “They’ve got an awful lot of equipment, chief.”

Vivian said, “Well, what’re you worrying about, Jean? We have it now.”

The girl said, “They have three tommy guns, four automatic rifles, twenty grenades and forty sticks of dynamite.”

Vivian was impatient. “They had them, now they’re ours. It’s good, not bad.”

Jean said doggedly, “These raids are coming more and more often. We’ve lost ten fighters in less than a year. And each time they come at us they’re better equipped and there’re more of them.” She looked over at Alan. “If it hadn’t been for this⁠ ⁠… this queer way things worked out, they’d have our husband now and we’d be done for.”

“Well, it didn’t happen that way,” Vivian said abruptly, “and we still have our husband and we’re going to keep him. This wasn’t a bad action at all. They killed three of us, we’ve got more than forty of them.”

“Not three, eight,” Jean said. “You forget the five girls. In another couple of years they’d have been warriors. And besides, what difference does it make if we’ve got forty of them? There’re always more of them where they came from. There